Derek Thompson

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Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson

@DKThomp

Sign up for my new newsletter! (Link below) Also: Co-author of Abundance, host of Plain English, and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Washington, D.C. Bergabung Mayıs 2009
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
Some personal news. Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving my writing to Substack. It would be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement, to have a dramatic exit story: a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather-backed Thoreau volumes across the open-plan office. That is not the case here. I love The Atlantic, and I'll remain a contributing writer there. But after almost two decades at one publication, I wanted to write for myself. The things I've published that I'm most proud of—whether it was the original abundance agenda essay, or my piece on workism—emerged from a very personal expression of frustration, or confusion, or curiosity. I want to know what my thinking and writing is like if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life. That's brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. I'm excited to join their community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember: Derek Thompson. The newsletter will have three main pillars 1. Abundance 2. The frontier of science and technology—GLP1s, AI, biotech, energy breakthroughs—covered in a way that’s both curious and skeptical 3. The anti-social century & the social crises of anxiety and aloneness Thanks to The Atlantic for 16.8 incredible years and thanks to everybody who follows me across the river. - dt
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@econcallum just wrote about insull, fun to see him so high here (well, "fun." he was a crook.)
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Callum Williams
Callum Williams@econcallum·
My latest piece looks at the greatest tycoons of all time, trying to put the five biggest people in AI (Elon, Sam, Dario, Demis and Mark) into historical context. Elon comes top, though he is not the powerful tycoon in history by some distance. Henry Ford comes top
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
Not to push the analogy unreasonably far, but the Edmund Morris biography of Thomas Edison, which I read and reviewed several years ago for The Atlantic, had some wonderful parts with Edison behaving like a very 2020s sort of media prognosticator—not only nailing the future commercial applications of the technology but also warning about how the growth of electricity might strain and change the existing US energy system
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
In thinking about the right historical analogy for AI, I've become very interested in the early history of electricity in the early 1900s. With early 20th century electricity, you had: - famously feuding private inventors creating/scaling the early technology (Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse) - a set of de facto monopolies who insisted that their technology was different in kind from other products and required special levels of corporate concentration - a period of sluggish growth, followed by a surge in commercial demand that prevented the boom from falling into the classic definition of an infrastructure "bubble" - a financial mania around electricity—e.g., the holding companies of the early 1900s, many of which did blow up after the 1929 crash - an inevitable showdown with the federal government about regulation in the 1930s, which ultimately resulted in a lot of regulated monopolies If you think that the AI buildout might result in some companies crashing and burning, without the entire thing becoming a classic Carlota Perez-style capital bubble, and furthermore believe that we are on an inevitable path toward a new regulatory regime that treats the frontier labs as regulated monopolies, I think you should definitely get curious about the 100-year-old history of electricity. derekthompson.org/p/the-ai-vibe-…
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
New newsletter: AI’S TRIPLE VIBE SHIFT We’re passing into a new era of AI, thanks to several phase changes 1. From fears of a demand shortage (ie, a bubble) to the reality of a supply shortage (ie, not enough compute for current and projected levels of token demand) 2. From the frontier labs racing to put models in the hands of consumers as fast as possible to the same labs holding back powerful models for national security reasons 3. (Most speculatively) From today’s light-touch regulatory environment to what I consider the inevitability of national rules that treat the biggest AI companies as something more like regulated utility monopolies—less like car companies, more like the electricity of the 21st century open.substack.com/pub/derekthomp…
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Joe Weisenthal
Joe Weisenthal@TheStalwart·
"SpaceX, the Musk-led rocket and satellite maker, accounted for 1,279 — or more than 18% — of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US during the fourth quarter, according to registration data that S&P Global Mobility provided to Bloomberg News." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
Bubbles happen when supply runs ahead of demand. (eg dotcom infrastructure built before its ready to be used) Right now it looks like demand for AI is running ahead of supply. Not what a bubble typically looks like. AI is different.
Benny Eastside@BenJustJamin13

@DKThomp Can you re write this in layman’s terms for someone who loves your stuff but hasn’t kept up with all the AI stuff of yours lol

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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@PatrickHeizer Huh, I'm confused, or maybe just surprised. So when you QT'd my call for nuance in alcohol with what seemed like a snarky rhetorical question about "advocating for nuance around meth consumption?" you were ... actually calling for more nuance around meth consumption?
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Patrick Heizer
Patrick Heizer@PatrickHeizer·
@DKThomp No, as I support the legalization of recreational drugs and nuance around their consumption. But I don't think that is anywhere close to the median American's belief, and am highlighting the inconsistency.
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Patrick Heizer
Patrick Heizer@PatrickHeizer·
The "capture rate" is the percentage of people who try a substance that end up addicted. Alcohol, cocaine, and methamphetamine all have similar capture rates, with ~20% of users developing an addiction. Should we be advocating for nuance around cocaine and meth consumption?
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Derek Thompson@DKThomp

One of the things I found really frustrating about public health guidance during the pandemic was that the public wasn't trusted with nuance, so the communication was often over-torqued. I think health communicators should trust their audiences with nuance. "Friends, stop drinking alcohol. Not cut back. Eliminate." isnt' really nuance. It's absolutism. You're offering a pragmatic defense of absolutism, and it's smart to be pragmatic, but I'd prefer we just be honest: Alcohol is a delicious bit of extremely mild cellular poison and having too much of it is really bad in the long run but having a little of it won't kill you. Everything in the realm of diet circles the issue of moderation. Chronic caloric surplus leads to obesity. Severe caloric deficit can lead to death. I'd prefer we attempt to articulate the principle of moderation in alcohol, too

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Liam P. Donovan
Liam P. Donovan@LPDonovan·
"In order to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense."- @PatrickRuffini
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
One of the things I found really frustrating about public health guidance during the pandemic was that the public wasn't trusted with nuance, so the communication was often over-torqued. I think health communicators should trust their audiences with nuance. "Friends, stop drinking alcohol. Not cut back. Eliminate." isnt' really nuance. It's absolutism. You're offering a pragmatic defense of absolutism, and it's smart to be pragmatic, but I'd prefer we just be honest: Alcohol is a delicious bit of extremely mild cellular poison and having too much of it is really bad in the long run but having a little of it won't kill you. Everything in the realm of diet circles the issue of moderation. Chronic caloric surplus leads to obesity. Severe caloric deficit can lead to death. I'd prefer we attempt to articulate the principle of moderation in alcohol, too
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Mike Solana
Mike Solana@micsolana·
@DKThomp @DrSamuelBHume agree w all of this but wonder if bryan is assuming ppl will in general be healthier eliminating completely vs. trying to time it correctly. I think there is also probably a lot of hard to measure risk in “1 turns into 3.” (fwiw I have not learned any of these lessons myself)
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
Interesting. The best thing Oura did for me is show me that if I have a glass of wine before 8pm, the effect on HRV/heart rate is undetectable, whereas after 9pm my sleep is completely and utterly wrecked. I think it's good to have nuance here between "you must abolish all alcohol" and "this is a very delicious mild poison whose joys are plentiful and whose harm in moderate doses can be minimized, if used the right way"
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Mike Solana
Mike Solana@micsolana·
@DKThomp @DrSamuelBHume bryan has spoken to the benefits of 1 drink a day himself, but avoids it because he doesn’t want to drink during work hours, and drinking anything at night has a noticeable (measured) impact on his sleep
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
"In the multibillion-dollar concert business, where Live Nation/Ticketmaster has been a colossus with no equal. Last year, the company put on 55,000 events and sold 646 million tickets around the world—*10 times* as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG." nytimes.com/2026/04/15/art…
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@awstar11 Cannot believe you didn't say "Does anybody know how to tax strawmen." That card was right there for the playing.
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Fusilli Spock
Fusilli Spock@awstar11·
This is literally a genocide against strawmen. Does anyone know how to file charges with the ICC?
Derek Thompson@DKThomp

The emerging American tax logic right now is something like: - we can’t tax the poor because they’re poor - we can’t tax the working class because they work - we can’t tax tips bc that’s just unfair - we can’t tax businesses because they create work - we can’t tax property bc homeowners have it hard enough - we can’t tax billionaires because their contributions are so precious and also they might move or get mad or give your primary opponent $10m - and we can’t tax pensioners because they’ve “earned it.” It’s like the accommodative parenting style of politics. Every group is so very special it needs a tax jubilee. I guess that leaves … tariffs?

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Tim Hirschel-Burns
Tim Hirschel-Burns@TimH_B·
However dumb you think the process for destroying USAID was, it was dumber. This is from Nicholas Enrich's new book Into the Wood Chipper, describing a meeting with Trump-appointed USAID leadership *after* they had largely gutted the agency
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
The emerging American tax logic right now is something like: - we can’t tax the poor because they’re poor - we can’t tax the working class because they work - we can’t tax tips bc that’s just unfair - we can’t tax businesses because they create work - we can’t tax property bc homeowners have it hard enough - we can’t tax billionaires because their contributions are so precious and also they might move or get mad or give your primary opponent $10m - and we can’t tax pensioners because they’ve “earned it.” It’s like the accommodative parenting style of politics. Every group is so very special it needs a tax jubilee. I guess that leaves … tariffs?
The White House@WhiteHouse

They earned it. They deserve it. NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY! The golden age for seniors' golden years. 🇺🇸

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Jelajahi

@TheZvi @econcallum @MattZirwas @aaronburnett @SpaceX @PatrickHeizer @PatrickRuffini @DrSamuelBHume