Derek Thompson

Substack author. Plain English podcast host. Abundance co-author. Contributing writer at The Atlantic.

[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

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@BootjackRaoul @AlanMCole Damn sounds like we might have to agree about housing policy and disagree about Haley Stevens.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

i don't know anybody who hates conspiracy theories more than i hate conspiracy theories and even i think something's going on with haley stevens

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@BootjackRaoul @AlanMCole Interesting who am I

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Not liking somebody and wishing him ill is a v normal feeling, and I’m not suggesting that resentment is an unheard-of emotion in politics.

But honestly I do think that telling your staff and every elected you speak to that you’ll never endorse the Republican and then suddenly endorsing him 24 hours later (after half the state has already voted and your act of rebellion has a weak chance of working out for you) suggests a rare lack of impulse control at the very least

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@AlanMCole Eg

I don’t think this is a conspiracy theory in a “we don’t know how far up this goes1!!!” kind of way, just that i think an extremely bizarre kind of mental break or weirdly personal thing seems likely here

[Nicholas Wu @nicholaswu12]

new - A few of Haley Stevens' staff reached out to her earlier this week encouraging her not to endorse Mike Rogers, according to a source who worked on her race

She replied: “Omg why would you think I would do that?!!”

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@AlanMCole I think the fact that every Democratic elected around her is very confused is a sign that her specific motivations here are confusing!

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

https://t.co/ldxheNv262

[Adam Wren @adamwren]

Inside AOC’s 11th-hour efforts to pull Haley Stevens back from the brink.

W/ @wsteaks in @playbookdc

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

To address the reasonable charges of vagueposting:

- I think this endorsement is beyond fucking weird (and bad … and stupid!)

- nobody seems to have seen it coming

- most importantly, she’s had several opportunities to explain how this wasn’t just a case of her briefly losing her mind or making a deliberate decision to implode her career and she has not made much of those opportunities, which leaves (a) she’s having a regrettable personal moment, or (b) this is part of some larger personal/professional pivot that has nothing to do with the broader tensions between left and center in the party

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@Ike_Saul The country over party thing was at the press gaggle

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

No but seriously … what’s going on

[Shams Charania @ShamsCharania]

Oklahoma City Thunder's Chet Holmgren underwent treatment Friday to address a small patellar tendon tear and is expected to return to play in 8-to-10 weeks.

[Sam Hoppen @SamHoppen]

Good time to bring back the greatest chart of all time

[Jerusalem @JerusalemDemsas]

I quit The Atlantic having raised 0 dollars because I felt it was inappropriate to raise money while working for another magazine -- others have made different choices but that was mine.

Emergent Ventures, which is run by Tyler Cowen, exists to empower young people who think they can do big things. Tyler gave me a grant of $100,000 from this fund to build @TheArgumentMag.

I then raised $4 million from an array of investors with various backgrounds and interests to build a liberal magazine where people could debate big questions.

Zach, who has recieved direct or indirect funding from the founder of eBay, Charles Koch, Exxonmobil, Chevron, BP, JP Morgan Chase, AWS, Meta, and Google, is, I suppose, telling on himself about the nature and origin of his views.

Personally, I think Zach came by his flawed viewpoint honestly but if you follow his logic he's an agent of Big Oil and Big Tech.

I find it galling when those who have been funded by tech billionaires and the failsons of the wealthy have the temerity to cast stones at anyone else for trying to make something of themselves despite not having access to institutional wealth.

Perhaps if I had been born the daughter of a billionaire and devoted myself to the cause of making the left historically unpopular, I would have Zach's respect. Alas, I think I'll live without it.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@TheStalwart @KelseyTuoc If you want somebody to understand your mind, write a tweet; if you want to feel good about how you’re right and all your critics just didn’t engage with the underlying material, write hundreds of pages. One of the best reasons to write a book.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

New pod: THE NETFLIX CRISIS ISN'T WHAT IT SEEMS

I talked about the entertainment story of the moment with @MattBelloni

Take 1: Netflix is having a bad, bad year. The stock is down nearly 50 percent. The company has laid off more than a 1,000 people this year, including its chief content officer and its head of film.

Take 2: Wait. Actually, Netflix is objectively having its best year ever. It has decidedly won the streaming wars, it has a lower churn rate and higher LTV than any streaming competitor, global subscribers are growing, and its operating margin is higher than ever.

Take 3: Netflix won the last war. That is, it perfected a 20th century business model of making traditional video entertainment (docs, reality shows, TV series, film) and serving millions of at-home customers. But the final boss of video entertainment is not 20th-century TV but 21st-century TV—YouTube, TikTok, and infinite video scrolls, which are not only commanding more and more of our daily attention but also do so with significantly lower upfront production or licensing costs. As attention fractures, it becomes harder to create monocultural moments—what once went by the name "hits."

I, personally, think Netflix makes too much slop. But one household's slop is another household's 8pm downtime. The problem isn't quite that Netflix forgot how to make hits but rather than it's a hit-making enterprise in a world where monocultural moments are getting structurally harder to make with every passing decade.

https://t.co/rtRzdbK3nP

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

The rise of Google AI Mode (plus agents) will be a big economic shift for the web—but it's also a huge psychological shift in our relationship to other people on the web.

Right now, AI summaries of queries do not send our attention outward to links but rather answer our questions directly by summarizing the material they can consume faster than the user. This will change the economics of the internet because the machine has gone from hunting and gathering (ranking and displaying links to which they send traffic) to serving final meals (summarizing the results). We're seeing AI Mode affect Alphabet earnings, Reddit revenues, and search traffic for publishers. That's already a big story.

But I'm also watching now information consumers are being moved up the hierarchy of search:
- Bottom rung: Find links in response to search
- Next rung up: Generic summary of links (AI)
- Next: Encourage me to talk to the AI about the results rather than click any of the below links, so that the AI summary isn't generic but rather tailored to the user who did the search (personalized advanced AI)
- Next: Anticipate the next search/prompt and give me the information or product I need before I know I need it (Muse, Instinct, advanced agents)

With each rung, the human-to-human interaction of the web (eg, me reading an article by a person) is being intermediated and then finally replaced by a machine that anticipates what I wanted from that human-to-human interaction and serves it up to me, possibly even before I knew that I wanted it.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Reddit call was absolutely fascinating. Everyone should listen to it as a bellwether for where the internet is going
- AI Mode is increasingly default Google experience
- AI Mode provides rich info and data in line, less incentive to leave search
- AI Mose incentivizes dialog, Google wants to keep you engaged to serve more ads at each turn
- Google will milk search for as much revenue as possible as they transition from a search company to a cloud service and chip company
- As traffic from humans becomes more scarce this will put Google in an increasingly adversarial position to the rest of the internet
- This is a massive headwind to all media type companies who are not destinations
- This is a massive headwind to all content-driven go-to-market motions especially in the SMB. You have seen companies like HubSpot and https://t.co/VXqYR5hpCy get crushed by this funnel collapse

We are entering the end game - a knife fight for the remaining and dwindling volume of human traffic on the internet

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@jachiam0 Well put.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@MosesSternstein Fortunately for his tv career Adam Schefterms is not a very good or real reporter