Derek Thompson writes and talks about a lot of things.
But some things pay better than others: “Dimes for analysis, dollars for facts, and Benjamins for facts about artificial intelligence,” he tells me.
Thompson, a longtime Atlantic writer who left to launch his own Substack in 2025, has an avid following — Barack Obama reportedly reads him to stay on top of AI developments.
That following also creates an inherent tension: If he only creates work he knows will have a big audience, it squeezes out other subjects he’s passionate about, like the way technology affects the media we consume. Or why he thinks Americans should embrace a pro-building mindset — the subject of “Abundance,” the recent book he co-wrote with Ezra Klein.
I talked to Thompson about AI — of course — along with some of his other passions, like why he thinks pro sports are a conspiracy that lets the richest people in the world turn “their already-elevated wealth into exospherically extreme wealth.” You can hear our entire conversation on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt:
Peter Kafka: Perhaps the only thing Americans agree on is data centers — they hate them, and don’t want them built in their communities. What is the “Abundance” view on data centers? Could you argue that building them is good for the country — just like building more housing is good?
Derek Thompson: I don’t see data centers and houses as being equivalent. I think data centers are houses for chips. Really, they’re igloos for chips because they’re very, very cold houses.
While I feel incredibly passionate about removing barriers to building housing where people want to live, I feel less passionate about saying we need to make sure that every AI company can site every data center wherever it wants to build it.
There are costs to an economic infrastructure project that leans so heavily into data centers that other modes of construction are being starved for resources. Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard, just published a graph showing that in the last year, while data center construction’s up by more than 60%, construction of hospitals is down, construction of offices is down, construction of housing is down, construction of just about everything else that you can name, including manufacturing facilities, is down because data centers are essentially eating the economy and crowding out a lot of other investment.
Am I anti-data centers in the extreme? No. Do I think data centers are just like houses? Absolutely not. I think houses for people are more important to emphasize as a matter of public policy than houses for chips.
Last year, you wrote this great piece about how “Everything is Television,” where you argue that it’s inevitable that all media becomes video. But you’ve also said that you’ve become a video podcaster because your podcast company nudged you to do that. How much of the video push is corporate incentive, and how much is what people want?
My theory is that it’s corporate incentives because it’s what people want.
Companies have attempted pivoting to video infinity times. But other pivots to video, especially in the last few years, have essentially become the norm. Everyone’s podcast goes to YouTube now, or Spotify or Netflix. That suggests to me that the instinct to pivot to video reflected a reasonable corporate interpretation of an underlying consumer reality: that, at the end of the day, what most people want to do with most of their time is sit on a comfortable couch or chair and look at moving images.
There does seem to be something spookily, biologically inherent about the degree to which we want to just watch moving images. Television went from zero to 50% adoption rate in a decade.
There is just something true, with a capital T, about the media success of a technology that allows us to do nothing but turn our minds into a receiver for moving images. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying that apparently is the situation.
How has going independent changed how you work and what you make?
When you go from being a salaried employee, where you make one amount of money all year, no matter what, to being self-employed, where the line goes up the harder you work, it’s very hard to ignore that signal and not work harder.
I feel more harried about work than I did. When that line doesn’t go up, when it starts to slip, when 12 months has elapsed since a big article I wrote last year, and because 10% to 20% of subscribers are gonna drop out of the list, it sucks to see any number go down. And then I start to think, “God, I gotta work harder. I gotta get that next article to make the revenue line go back up.”
Are you more inclined to think, “That story about sports billionaires did well, let’s do more of those,” in a way you might have been insulated from at The Atlantic?
Yeah, there’s no question. And again, this is not something I think is altogether good. I said one thing I’ve learned from a year on Substack is that it’s dimes for analysis, dollars for facts, and Benjamins for facts about artificial intelligence.
Recognizing that it’s dimes for social analysis and Benjamins for AI analysis, there is a part of the job that pulls me toward writing more about AI than I might …
Because the market wants it.
The market clearly wants it. That said, I do think artificial intelligence is not only the most important but also the most interesting story in the world. It’s an economic story. It’s a safety story. It’s a stock story.
I have this long list of essentially social essays that I want to write. Stuff like “Everything Is Television.” But I know that if I only write those essays for a month, if I only write those essays for a year, the line’s gonna go down.
And so I’m interested in AI, and fortunately, the AI stuff sells. The AI reporting that I do creates a zone of extraordinary comfort for me to spend time writing stories that I know won’t make money, but I think could be really, really broadly read as social analysis.
