Substack author. Plain English podcast host. Abundance co-author. Contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Washington, D.C.
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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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I'm going to become the joker with all of these conservatives discrediting liberal arguments about AI by spookily whispering that money might be involved.
The birth of the Tech Right involved the realization, in the 2020s, that conservative people in tech should use their money to do stuff in politics. The All In podcast hosts threw fundraisers for the president!
I don't know what the principle is at stake here other than "when conservative money seems like it'll get its way, we're a movement; but when liberal money seems like it'll get its way, it's a conspiracy." In 2024, when (per the Washington Post) about 80% of federal campaign spending by the 100 wealthiest Americans went to Republicans, you didn't hear a lot from the Tech Right back then about the danger of money in politics. But now that Trump is polling below the Mendoza Line and several upcoming IPOs will unlock billions of dollars of cash among Chamath's political enemies, these guys are suddenly Woodward and Bernstein, exposing the evils of rich ppl using their money to do stuff in politics.
Chamath on Obama’s AI Warning: Follow the Money
President Obama last week:
“If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI.
That's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing.”
@Chamath:
“This is a very important moment for a very simple reason, which is we, as in the world, are about to endow three, four, five, six companies with about $10T of wealth.
And what Obama knows very well is that most of those companies are overwhelmingly left-leaning. And what he also knows is that there is a huge portion of that money that will then get put into philanthropic and charitable causes that then he, and the people around him, will be beneficiaries of.
That is the truth. We already know this because we know that some of these frontier corporations actually ask you to stand up DAFs and have a portion of your stock that you're willing to pledge.
So this money is going to go to things other than consumption or savings. And so it's going to go into PACs, it's going to go into political movements, and (Democrats) stand to disproportionately benefit.
So this has nothing to do with prosperity. This is a very simple political calculus.
If you freeze frame the economy the way it is today, a handful of organizations that will disproportionately be able to affect the Democrats will win. They will capture the lion's share of the economic gains, and then they will help the Democrats win power.
That's all this is.”
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Silicon Valley folks who hate the labs and don't believe in x-risk keep uncovering the diabolical fact AI safety people use money and companies to get out their message, while the "just accelerate, it'll be fine crowd" involves such non-moneyed and anti-corporate interests as ... Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, and the pro-AI Leading the Future super PAC backed by tech executives.
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My position on this is not that Nvidia is inherently evil or AI safety is unquestionably prophetic, but rather that AI is literally the biggest private-sector industrial project in human history, so the idea that people in this space with strong beliefs aren't going to make use of money is just insane.
At some higher level of abstraction, I also think there's a story here about how, in "the uni-context" (cf, Callard 2026), one of the last virtues standing is that hypocrisy is bad, and so you have a lot of people trying to uncover the fact that the other side is hypocritical or self-interested rather than argue that the other side is wrong.
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awfully suspicious that matt and i both arrived at this conclusion, maybe some enterprising tech-right zine can uncover the secret money networks that are paying both of us to come up with otherwise impossible takes such as "i think nvidia might have a commercial interest in justifying the sale of chips"
nitter.net/mattyglesias/status/21…
It’s absurd that we have folks literally on the payroll of Meta and A16Z talking about how well-funded the AI safety community is while touting the obviously self-interested takes of NVIDIA’s CEO.
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Derek Thompson retweeted
The combined monthly global trading volume on #Kalshi and #Polymarket more than doubled in the span of two months. 📈
This increase was mostly due to a large uptick in sports trading, which is now the most-traded topic on both platforms.
Have you ever traded on a #PredictionMarket? ⬇️
ALT Line chart of combined trading volume on prediction markets. Text reads: Trading volume on prediction markets doubled between May and July
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Derek Thompson retweeted
As a diagnosis, this is broadly correct. And while I generally support what he’s done re: the Iranian regime (point 3), the short term political pain is undeniable & you’ve got to at least consistently and seriously explain the why and how to the public. That has been…spotty.
Unfortunately for Republicans, the situation is very easy to describe:
1. Trump won a cost-of-living election
2. Then he publicly announced a plan to raise the price of imports
3. Then he even-more-publicly started a war that raised the price of gas
4. Meanwhile, he got rich on crypto scams, while engaging in downright Pynchonian misadventures with the reflecting pool and ballroom, which sent the unmistakeable signal that "I care more about random bullshit than America's money problems ... and also I'm not even good at executing on the random bullshit"
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New pod: THE SINGLE SMARTEST CASE AGAINST THE AI SAFETY/X-RISK/DOOM ARGUMENT
My feed has become filled with people making the case for AI misalignment, the existential risk of RSI/ASI, and the case for doom. I take those arguments very seriously. But once these views reached saturation point on my feed, I wanted to find the best critic of that position—someone fair and brilliant, who wasn't commercially self-interested or blindly ideological about AI being worthless.
That's today's show: It's a long interview with the authors of "AI as a Normal Technology," Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) and Sayash Kapoor (@sayashk). "Normal Technology" is really intelligent and comprehensive framework for seeing AI as a powerful general purpose technology that is more like electricity than a machine god--meaning, it's going to change the world but slowly, and it's unlikely to escape human control, or develop true superintelligence, or lead to catastrophic outcomes up to and including the end of the human race.
These guys really, really brought their A game. I learned a lot.
piped.video/watch?v=8a-08uMl…
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RT @JulianGewirtz: Great piece from @DKThomp pushing to level up the conversation on China/AI, drawing on many of the most knowledgeable vo…
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This is interesting, via @NateSilver538:
In 2024, one takeaway was that the Red Wave was especially strong in blue cities. In 2026, the Blue Wave seems especially strong in red states.
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This is smart: Tariffs + Middle East wars are an excellent formula for turning off voters in the Midwest, which explains much of Trump's "blue wave in red states" problem
A lot of House and Senate races will be decided in the Midwest. Trump's trade war with Canada will hurt exports of farm equipment and other things, which are big in the region.
As Iowa Dem Senate candidate Josh Turek tells me, many see "betrayal." 2/
newrepublic.com/article/2146…
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Derek Thompson retweeted
We tracked 70K hours of conservative podcasts. They’re not talking about Trump anymore. (w @noslouch @sabrod123)
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Derek Thompson retweeted
Grateful to have a few thoughts included in Derek’s newsletter on China/AI alongside many folks whose insights on this subject I find invaluable.
New newsletter: WHY WE'RE WRONG ABOUT CHINA AND AI
America's frontier AI policy seems to hinge on China. But when you talk to people at or near the frontier, it's astonishing how little we seem to know about how China thinks about AI.
So, I talked to several experts—@jordanschneider, @kyleichan, @mattsheehan88, @RushDoshi, @ChorzempaMartin, @pstAsiatech and more—and pooled their most interesting comments under 7 big questions, inc:
- What don't the frontier labs understand about China?
- What would actually scare the CCP into taking AI safety as seriously as, say, Anthropic?
- Does China think our AI safety concerns are legitimate, or a conspiracy to keep them down?
- What should we actually do now?
derekthompson.org/p/how-chin…
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Derek Thompson retweeted
Great to be in this must read!
New newsletter: WHY WE'RE WRONG ABOUT CHINA AND AI
America's frontier AI policy seems to hinge on China. But when you talk to people at or near the frontier, it's astonishing how little we seem to know about how China thinks about AI.
So, I talked to several experts—@jordanschneider, @kyleichan, @mattsheehan88, @RushDoshi, @ChorzempaMartin, @pstAsiatech and more—and pooled their most interesting comments under 7 big questions, inc:
- What don't the frontier labs understand about China?
- What would actually scare the CCP into taking AI safety as seriously as, say, Anthropic?
- Does China think our AI safety concerns are legitimate, or a conspiracy to keep them down?
- What should we actually do now?
derekthompson.org/p/how-chin…
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... like, in all seriousness, yes ofc journalism should "explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it, and who could be affected by it." That's exactly what a passage describing collaborative and sacrificial behavior described within AI agents' chain of thought is doing.
Metaphors that are inexact but describe the experience of a system are fine. How did all of these people suddenly decide like 18 hours ago to make up a bunch of strict rules about the epistemology of analogy?
Did you know the Sun doesn't literally rise, it just sits in an empty darkness turning gently while the earth spins around it? "Avoid language that improperly describes the motion of celestial objects" is a stupid rule! So is this.
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Derek Thompson retweeted
Thanks for picking up my research!
New newsletter: WHY WE'RE WRONG ABOUT CHINA AND AI
America's frontier AI policy seems to hinge on China. But when you talk to people at or near the frontier, it's astonishing how little we seem to know about how China thinks about AI.
So, I talked to several experts—@jordanschneider, @kyleichan, @mattsheehan88, @RushDoshi, @ChorzempaMartin, @pstAsiatech and more—and pooled their most interesting comments under 7 big questions, inc:
- What don't the frontier labs understand about China?
- What would actually scare the CCP into taking AI safety as seriously as, say, Anthropic?
- Does China think our AI safety concerns are legitimate, or a conspiracy to keep them down?
- What should we actually do now?
derekthompson.org/p/how-chin…
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Derek Thompson retweeted
Great to talk with @DKThomp about this alongside many of my favorite China AI experts
New newsletter: WHY WE'RE WRONG ABOUT CHINA AND AI
America's frontier AI policy seems to hinge on China. But when you talk to people at or near the frontier, it's astonishing how little we seem to know about how China thinks about AI.
So, I talked to several experts—@jordanschneider, @kyleichan, @mattsheehan88, @RushDoshi, @ChorzempaMartin, @pstAsiatech and more—and pooled their most interesting comments under 7 big questions, inc:
- What don't the frontier labs understand about China?
- What would actually scare the CCP into taking AI safety as seriously as, say, Anthropic?
- Does China think our AI safety concerns are legitimate, or a conspiracy to keep them down?
- What should we actually do now?
derekthompson.org/p/how-chin…
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Derek Thompson retweeted
good piece on China and AI from @DKThomp
derekthompson.org/p/how-chin…
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Unfortunately for Republicans, the situation is very easy to describe:
1. Trump won a cost-of-living election
2. Then he publicly announced a plan to raise the price of imports
3. Then he even-more-publicly started a war that raised the price of gas
4. Meanwhile, he got rich on crypto scams, while engaging in downright Pynchonian misadventures with the reflecting pool and ballroom, which sent the unmistakeable signal that "I care more about random bullshit than America's money problems ... and also I'm not even good at executing on the random bullshit"
For the midterms, I think corruption/self-dealing is issue 1b behind cost of living as 1a.
It's not just that people feel things are unaffordable for themselves, they think those in power are helping rich friends get richer.
From our latest "America in Focus" focus group...
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