Afleveringen
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For years, scientists worried that medical progress was slowing down. Drug development became more expensive than ever with more complex clinical trials, and even then, many new treatments offered only modest gains. But over the past month, a series of breakthroughs has raised hopes that medicine may be entering a new era.
Researchers unveiled a massively promising new therapy for pancreatic cancer, a gene-editing treatment that could dramatically reduce the risk of heart disease, and an experimental obesity drug that not only produces unprecedented weight loss but also improves a huge range of related conditions. Cancer and heart disease are America’s two biggest killers, but if these treatments fulfill their promise, they could transform public health and extend millions of lives.
Today’s guest is Matthew Herper, senior writer at STAT News. We discuss this remarkable month in medicine, why so many advances are arriving at once, and what they could mean for the future of human health.
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Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Matthew HerperProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Prior to the 1930s, old age in America often meant poverty. But thanks to Social Security, Medicare, medical advances, and rising asset prices, over the past 90 years, older Americans have become one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful groups in the country.
In his new book, 'Gerontocracy in America,' Samuel Moyn argues that this success has created a dangerous imbalance. He says America isn't just facing oligarchy, or rule by the rich, but "Old-igarchy": a system in which wealth and power are increasingly concentrated among older generations, often at the expense of younger Americans.
Today, Derek talks with Moyn about the rise of gerontocracy in America, whether elderly power has become a problem, what reforms could rebalance the scales between generations, and whether this argument is a serious critique of American politics or simply ageist nonsense.
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Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Samuel MoynProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Humans are unusual dads. Across the animal kingdom, dads are often absent from child-rearing altogether. But among humans, fatherhood takes many forms, and in the last half century, it has changed dramatically. College-educated American fathers now spend nearly four times as much time caring for their children as they did in the 1960s.
And according to new research, this new type of fatherhood doesn't just change a man's schedule or priorities—it can literally change his brain.
Today, Derek talks with USC psychologist Darby Saxbe, author of 'Dad Brain,' about the science of modern fatherhood. They discuss how active parenting affects men's psychology and how changing expectations around fatherhood are reshaping families and men themselves.
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Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Darby SaxbeProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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For generations, we've defined creativity by its products: the novel, the painting, the song, the breakthrough idea. We look at the work, and from the work we see the creator as “creative.” But AI is getting remarkably good at producing creative work. In some cases, experts now prefer AI-generated writing to work created by humans and can't reliably tell the difference between the two. In fact, a major literary prize even recently honored a work that was largely written by AI.
It all raises a deeper question than whether or not AI can write well. It forces us to reconsider what creativity actually is.
Today, neuroscientist Adam Green joins the show to discuss how AI is changing the way we write, think, and generate ideas. His research finds that while AI can make our language more polished and sophisticated, it may also make our thinking more uniform. The sentences get sharper. The ideas get more predictable. And If creativity is no longer something we can recognize from the final product alone, we may need a new, more human definition.
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Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Dr. Adam GreenProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Modern loneliness is often treated as a simple problem: People are simply spending more time alone. But what if that's not the whole story? Over the last several years, Derek has written about workism, the rise of a culture that puts work at the center of our lives, and the "antisocial century," in which technology has made it easier than ever to avoid spending time with other people. The result is a world where many of us trade deep connection for convenience, productivity, and fleeting hits of entertainment.
Today, Derek talks with Yale psychology professor and Happiness Lab host Laurie Santos about the science of friendship, connection, and loneliness. What do we misunderstand about being alone? Why are male friendships harder to maintain? And how can we build stronger relationships in a world that seems designed to pull us apart?
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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The NBA’s vibes have been unusually awful recently. There has been widespread hand-wringing about the homogenization of modern offenses and the league’s notoriously weak regular-season TV ratings. A tanking crisis saw about a third of teams purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top pick in the 2026 draft. A barrage of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. And the playoffs have brought relentless complaining from fans about foul-baiting and flopping, tactics that have often been rewarded by the referees.At the center of this is Adam Silver, who was once the most popular and celebrated commissioner in all of sports. In recent years, though, his reputation has soured. Fans have begun to wonder: Why isn’t he addressing the problems that everyone else seems to see? Is the right guy running the league?In a profile of Silver for The Atlantic, the journalist Tim Alberta wrote, “Companies take on the personality of their leader.” Today, Alberta joins Derek to talk about the state of the modern NBA, whether the league has optimized the fun out of basketball, and what the impact is when a sport stops being treated like a game that exists to remind people that there is more to life than work and money.
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Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Tim AlbertaProducer: Chris SuttonAdditional Production Support: Ben GlicksmanLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Over the past century, attitudes about gender roles have become one of the clearest dividing lines in the country. Many Republicans, both men and women, say men are getting a raw deal in modern America. Many Democrats see that claim as completely off base.
So where does that split come from, and why has it become so central to politics?
Journalist Helen Lewis calls this emerging worldview “masculinism,” an ideology that pushes back against feminism and reflects a broader nostalgia for traditional gender roles. Today, Lewis joins Derek to talk about the rise of this phenomenon and what it reveals about the growing schism in American politics.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Helen Lewis
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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On his 40th birthday, Derek Thompson takes a step back and looks at how his thinking on the national debt has changed. Back when he first covered fiscal policy, concern about government borrowing was mostly a conservative position, with many liberals arguing it was overblown.
That’s starting to shift.
The U.S. now spends far more than it brings in, and the gap is still growing. For the first time, interest payments on the debt have surpassed military spending. And deficits that once rose during crises like the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic haven’t really come back down.
So what changed, and how worried should we be?
Derek is joined by economist Justin Wolfers to walk through the basics of the federal budget, the evolving debate around the national debt, and why more economists are starting to take persistent deficits seriously.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Justin Wolfers
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Fertility rates are collapsing around the world. In rich countries and poor ones, in secular societies and religious ones, people are having fewer children than ever before. Some explanations focus on economic factors like housing costs, childcare costs, and student debt. Others point to a harder-to-measure, broader sense of uncertainty about the future.
At the same time, economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde thinks we are underestimating how big a deal this really is. In his view, only two forces will truly shape the future of human history in this century: artificial intelligence and fertility, and changes are already underway.
Today, Fernández-Villaverde joins Derek to talk about the global fertility decline, why it is happening across so many different societies, and why he believes this shift could reshape economics, culture, and the future of civilization.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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For the past few years, Silicon Valley executives and economists have warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out millions of jobs. Some companies have even blamed AI for layoffs. But what if the AI job apocalypse isn’t actually happening?
Today, Derek talks to economist Alex Imas about the growing gap between the rhetoric around AI-related job loss and the facts. Despite widespread fears of mass unemployment, surveys show most executives expect AI to create jobs or have little impact on hiring. Even employment in software engineering (one of the fields thought to be most vulnerable to AI) continues to grow.
Derek and Alex discuss why automation fears persist despite contradictory evidence, the history of technological disruption, and why AI may not be destroying work as much as it is simply redirecting us toward entirely new industries and opportunities.
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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Alex Imas
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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America is richer than ever. Unemployment is low. Wages are high. According to traditional metrics, the economy looks strong. So why are Americans feeling so bad?
Today, Derek talks with bestselling author Morgan Housel and journalist David Wallace-Wells about what Derek calls the “Tragic Twenties”: the strange and sudden collapse in American happiness that began during COVID and never really stopped.
What's behind the country’s emotional downturn? Inflation and the lingering psychological effects of the pandemic are certainly part of the story. But so are collapsing trust in institutions, rising social isolation, the negativity feedback loop of social media, and the feeling that we’re living through one crisis after another. Derek, Morgan, and David unpack why the wealthiest society in history still feels deeply adrift and what this happiness recession says about the future of American life.
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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].
Host: Derek ThompsonGuests: Morgan Housel and Derek Wallace-WellsProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
Links: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so
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Hard to detect and almost impossible to treat, pancreatic cancer has long been one of medicine’s most ruthless killers. For decades, it’s been the cancer that science couldn’t crack. But that might be starting to change.
Recently, cancer researchers have announced a series of breakthroughs that, taken together, sound almost too good to be true: a drug that targets the “undruggable” gene behind most pancreatic tumors, a personalized mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize pancreatic cancer as an enemy, and, now, an AI program that can spot the elusive disease years before doctors typically find it.
So is this breakthrough a real turning point? Or another case of medical hype outrunning reality?
On today’s episode, Dr. Ajit Goenka of the Mayo Clinic joins Derek to walk through the science behind the latest advances in cancer detection and what they could mean for the future of health care. They discuss Dr. Goenka’s new research using artificial intelligence to detect pancreatic cancer earlier than ever before … and whether machines might soon see what doctors can’t.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Ajit Goenka
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Freedom is one of the few ideas everyone agrees on. Surely more choice and autonomy is a good thing, right? But what if our endless pursuit of freedom is actually making us more anxious, less creative, and holding us back from reaching our full potential?Today, Derek Thompson talks with bestselling author David Epstein about the surprising upside of constraints. After arguing for breadth in 'Range,' Epstein’s new book, 'Inside the Box,' makes the opposite case: that limits and rules can actually unlock creativity and satisfaction. They explore why more options don’t always make us happier, and how too many possibilities can lead to paralysis.As Søren Kierkegaard warned, anxiety may be the price of too much freedom. It’s the dizziness that comes from keeping every option open. So in a world obsessed with maximizing choice and opening doors, this episode makes the case for something radical: closing some.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Epstein
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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For nearly a decade, critics have predicted that this would be the moment Trumpism finally fractures - January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, endless internal feuds, even Trump’s online beef with Pope Leo. And yet the movement endures. Derek is joined by Ross Douthat to unpack the contradictory coalition Trump has built: Christian conservatives who overlook increasingly pagan behavior, anti-establishment populists who embrace strongman bullying, MAHA health obsessives that ignore their leader's diet of exclusively processed food … What holds this movement together and could the Iran War finally tear it apart?
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ross Douthat
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Hollywood is in the middle of a triple crisis. You can measure it in tickets, jobs, and ideas.
Start with tickets. The best year for the movie business this century was 2002, when Americans and Canadians bought 1.6 billion tickets, or about five per person. Last year, Americans bought half that number. Eighty years ago, the typical American went to the movies twice a month. Now they go about twice a year.
Then there are the jobs. Studios are making fewer movies and shows than they did just a few years ago, and the projects they green-light are increasingly shot overseas, where governments hand out generous subsidies. According to The Wall Street Journal, employment in Hollywood has fallen 30 percent since 2022 across the hundreds of trades—actors, carpenters—that make film and television possible.
And then there's the creativity problem. It's not just that studios keep reheating 20th-century IP. The stars are getting older, too. Among the 14 most important movie stars of this decade, the average age is 57. Half are over 60. None is under 45. Even many of Gen Z's favorite movie stars—the Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington—had hit films before Gen Z was born.
Today's guest is Sean Fennessey, host of The Ringer's The Big Picture and author of the new Substack Projections. In an essay published this week, Sean argues that all the gloom is missing something real: Attendance is perking up, young stars are breaking through, and the auteurs we've followed for 20 years are ascending to the center of the culture. Today, Sean and Derek talk about the new rules of Hollywood and what they tell us about the changing winds of American culture.
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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Sean Fennessey
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced an AI model so capable and so dangerous that it decided not to release it to the public.
The model, codenamed Mythos, could autonomously infiltrate computer systems around the world, exploit security vulnerabilities, conceal its own reasoning, and fabricate false explanations for what it was doing. Anthropic instead shared it with a small consortium of companies to help them find their own cybersecurity flaws.
You could be forgiven for some skepticism. Is this a genuine safety call, or Anthropic’s way of marketing its own power? But independent benchmarks suggest Mythos is real: On the Epoch Capabilities Index, which aggregates 40 separate AI evaluations, it represents the biggest single leap in model performance in three years.
That story is one of two major phase shifts happening simultaneously in AI right now. The first: from racing to release, to treating your own product as too dangerous to publish. The second: from a story about demand scarcity—is anyone actually paying for this stuff?—to supply scarcity, where companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on AI agents and the hyperscalers still can’t keep up.
Today’s guest is New York Times columnist and Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose. We talk about Mythos, China, the road to AGI, and why the last few weeks might be the most consequential month in AI since the release of ChatGPT.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Kevin Roose
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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The two biggest stories in the world right now—the war involving Iran and the rise of artificial intelligence—are, at their core, the same story: energy. The Iran conflict has become a war of competing energy blockades, with Iran squeezing American allies and America squeezing Iran. And AI is its own energy arms race, with tech companies scrambling not just for customers but for supply—chips, electricity, and data center capacity. What does it mean when every major story leads back to energy? Derek talks with energy analyst Nat Bullard about a world where power, in every sense of the word, is the thing everyone is fighting over.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Nat Bullard
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Link: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
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Something weird is going on with the elevated unemployment rate for young people today, but no one knows what exactly it is.
For the last year, as the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has crept up ominously, one of the questions I’ve reported more deeply than any other is: Is AI replacing young workers’ jobs? To make a long story short: I initially thought yes, then some economists convinced me the answer was no, then some other economists convinced me the answer was yes, then some other people convinced me the answer was no. Clear as mud.
Today’s guest is Rogé Karma. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics. We talk about the labor market for new hires, why young college graduates are so miserable, and why economic vibes are worth paying attention to, even if the official statistics are pointing in another direction.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Rogé Karma
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Links:https://www.theatlantic.com/category/work-progress/ https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/04/job-market-artificial-intelligence/686659/
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Perhaps you’ve heard the news: The U.S. is experiencing a religious revival, and it’s concentrated among young people, who are flocking back to the fold. The Economist announced that “the West has stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post declared that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.”
This is shocking news. Since the 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has been skyrocketing. A reversal would be historic.
But today’s guest, Ryan Burge, tells us that the secular pause in America is much stranger than it looks. Ryan is the author of the sensational Substack Graphs About Religion, which is full of beautiful graphs about religion. So today’s episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify. You’ll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes that really hammer home his deepest conclusions.
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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ryan Burge
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Links: Practically this entire episode is inspired by the work on Ryan’s amazing Substack. You can subscribe here.
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The 1970s oil crisis changed the world in ways that many people forget today, from the transformation of American politics to the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. The Iran war of 2026 could have similarly global consequences, from the rise of China to changes in the future of war to the acceleration of the global renewables transition. Today, Australian investor and writer Alex Turnbull joins the show to discuss the most important and most surprising second-order effects of the war.
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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Alex Turnbull
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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