AI & the future of media with The Atlantic CEO, Nicholas Thompson

25:56We're just seeing a market segment in different ways. And you're seeing a really interesting thing, which is true, I think, across all new media forums, which is, particularly in the case of Barry, where because traditional media, very much so in this country, has been quite liberal. right and the people who go into it come from a relatively liberal backgrounds and it's been relatively tricky for a conservative or someone not that conservative you know she had a hard time culturally at the new york times because of the you know sort of the accepted ideologies within the paper right story she's told many times what you've seen really interestingly is that smart conservative journalists have gone out and like why do conservative journalists dominate on youtube why do they dominate on substack why do they dominate all these new media forums, partly because they're innovative, creative, but also partly because they haven't been able, like they're not able to make their careers, the New York Times.

26:48And so that's a really interesting lesson for a place like the Atlantic where you have to, like we have a much broader spectrum of writers and staffers and certainly any other media place that I worked, any other place in New York media. But if you don't have a really broad spectrum for you welcome, well, then they're going to leave and then they're going to start competitors in new forums and you're going to be in trouble like Barry and Substack. Right. And, you know, I think the conservative commentators are incredibly strong on YouTube relative to progressive or liberal commentators. And I think within Substack, it's hard to know because algorithms hide the full spectrum of what's going on.

27:26One of the real powers of Substack has been that it drives subscribers to you. So I forget the number, but it's certainly a majority or if not a majority, approaching a majority of all of our new free and paid subscribers have already been on Substack and are already subscribed elsewhere. And I think that that's a really powerful engine and a discovery engine that exists within Substack. And people break out, they'll write a great essay, they'll have a thousand free subscribers, that essay will get 800 likes and reshares and they'll see themselves hit that 10 ,000 number very quickly. So there's something about the network effect than Substack, the discovery and its ability to drive traffic, which is something that media organizations used to provide writers.

28:15So why would you write for The Guardian or The Times? Well, you'd get a salary, but you'd also get read, or at least you'd get distributed. And I think it's quite impressive the way they have figured out how to get eyeballs in a way that doesn't feel like you're being algorithmically filtered to other writers, other essays. Yeah. I mean, that is one of the things that Substack has done most effectively. And I think they have benefited by the bifurcation of social media, right? As social media has collapsed, it has allowed the sort of the social network that Substack built underneath it, which seemed totally barren, right?

28:50Like the sort of the feed and the recommendation stuff a couple of years ago. Now it's thriving, right? And that's partly due to the bifurcation of social media. It's due to like, you know, the way Elon has changed Twitter. So that is all true. I will add, though, that traditional publications like you write for The Atlantic, we will take your essay and we will put it in a million four subscribers, 600 ,000 who get the print issue. We will like use the United States Postal Service to deliver people like there are still ways that you can get. You know, we do have social feeds. We do have websites like there's still many, many advantages of traditional media.

29:21But yes, the social underpinning. Again, back to the Medium example. I remember when Medium did that and they started creating like an internal recirculation mechanism. I thought it was brilliant. I don't know why it didn't work there and then why it's ended up working at Substack. There will be a business school case study on third-time successful founders getting into this business and competing against first-time founders, which some of the Substack people were. But I think there's something else that is going on, which is connected to the shift from institutional trust to personal connectedness.

29:54And I was talking to Jasmine's son, who was an early Substack product manager, and she's now gone off on her own. Absolutely brilliant. Stanford English undergraduate. So a character you would recognize yourself as well. And she said to me that something that was really prescient and insightful, rather insightful. I said, look, I've invested in lots of companies, lots of startups, about 40 of them. I will disclose when I've invested, but I think it's really high signal for my readers to know that I've enough conviction in this theme, in this team, in these founders, in the way they're going, that I'm putting, risking my family's capital in something like this.

30:34And she said, look, there's a distinction in the East Coast. In the East Coast, that's a conflict of interest. And on the West Coast, we start to see it as skin in the game, right? That it really, really doubles down on the authenticity of the message because you have taken some risk. And I think there is something about that shift in how people can relate to institutions with great mastheads compared to humans with eyes and eyebrows and sweat and nerves that actually feels like it's quite a difficult strategic challenge for businesses that have been built under a masthead. I mean, that's a really complicated one.

31:17And your distinction between East Coast and West Coast is an important one. I'm still more on the East Coast side of that debate. I mean, I do think disclosure is important. I do think it's really important for, you know, we at the Atlantic are trying to figure out how we can make partnerships, equity partnerships, like, and disclose them in proper ways. There are ways that you can go off the rails. And I think that we're, you know, some of the West Coast model, you can see that, right? So my favorite example is I had a reporter, maybe my previous job, I was the editor, Wired, had a reporter who was recruited by a venture capital firm.

31:49And they said, hey, come work for us. And she said, well, what will I be doing? And they said, well, mostly you'll be freelancing and you'll just be yourself. But maybe like 30 % of your stories will be positive stories of our portfolio companies and you won't disclose it, right? You'll just go out and you'll write stories about that. And that's corrupt, right? What gets to the mindset where that can happen, right? And there's a slippery slope, like there's a moment where it's like, you know, Nick or Azeem invests in an AI startup, mentions that in an essay, right? Like ProRata, right? We have a partnership with ProRata, right like the atlantic is like a partner parada i praise it to hell and i mentioned the partnership that's like totally fine right in the game you know there do have to be ethical lines and so my hope is that in the future i sometimes get a sense that the kind of the west coast idea takes pleasure in blowing through some of the rules of the east coast that are there for a reason.

32:43And what you want is you want innovation, ideas, but also to recognize that there's a reason why some of those rules about conflict of interest are there. I would agree that the rules really, really matter in certain classes of writing and analysis. And what's on Substack is not just journalism. I don't think I do any journalism. I do essays. I do think pieces. I do trends and forecasts. And there are people who do real journalism, but proper investigative journalism. There's a very, very well-regarded British journalist called Jim Watterson, who left his storied newspaper to set up a Substack just to write about London.

33:29And he's taken the tools of being a great investigative journalist to cover stories that were simply not being covered because Actually, before Substack, before AI, local media was struggling because Classified had gone onto eBay. So I think those people do exist. I'm trying to square Martin Guri's prescient essay, the notion of the revolt of the public in a world where there's so much information around that trust in institutions will start to decline. And I think the Edelman Trust Barometer, the Reuters Institute for Journalism, their trust numbers for media are declining, but they are also stabilizing in some sense.

34:13They're lower than they were 10, 15 years ago. So, yeah, but you can't find too much further. I mean, like, right. But, you know, is that, or how do you think about closing that challenge between increasing trust for better or for worse in talking heads and more skepticism about anyone with a masthead? I view it as a real challenge and that our position has to be, like, we have to fight to win and earn your trust every day. And then to also recognize that no matter how well we do and no matter how hard we fight and no matter how hard we try to be as honest as possible at everything and as truthful as possible about everything, that we will still lose in certain ways because of the forces that Gurry, you know, identified.

35:02The other thing that I think is important is that a lot of reason trust declined is because of the sort of the shift of the media ecosystem into filter bubbles, right? It happened because of sorting algorithms and for all kinds of reasons. And that doesn't just mean that you blame it. It means you also have to be self-aware. And so back when I was a journalist, whenever I wrote a story, right, I would either read it to someone who disagreed with the principles. Like, I'm going to read this story out loud to you. I know you disagree with it, but I want you just to challenge every assumption. Right.

35:33If it was a political story, I'd read it to a friend as a Republican, right? Like back in the days when Democrats had friends who were Republicans and Republicans had friends who are Democrats, which I think is not the world the US lives in today. Unfortunately, that's unfortunately true. Though, and this is actually something where, you know, again, I'm not a journalist anymore. I just do the money, as my kids say. But this is something where AI can be really useful, right? So if you take a piece and you say, hey, I actually have done this with my book, right? My book is about running. It comes out in October.

36:03But like, imagine that you are like totally skeptical of this person. imagine that you like want to find every area you can please read this essay and write kind of the like most obnoxious but intelligent thing you can right and then that gives you a guide to like oh wait let me harden this argument or let me rephrase it and it's super useful in politics right please read this story and identify like the six embedded assumptions that i don't even notice because i'm in some kind of a filter bubble that are going to trigger readers on the other side right and if you do that exercise, you realize that like, oh, that little throwaway comment about like Brendan Carr, right?

36:40Like just to pick a random example, is going to just piss off all these people and you didn't even notice it. So take out that stupid little line about Brendan Carr, right? Like, and that is something that AI can be super helpful with. So this came to mind because, you know, I used to, one of my old projects, I was trying to create a alternative social media ecosystem called narwhal it was like this fun experiment we ended up selling it but one of the premises was like we were trying to build an ai model that would challenge all of your assumptions and all of your political assumptions so that before you would post it would say hey by the way here's a counter argument would kind of like sort of run the reddit change my view mechanism through everything you say we thought would be a great way to teach people and ended up we didn't get it off the ground but whatever but i do think it's a really useful exercise for journalists and writers and editors.

37:30I love that example of having a, you know, a critic, a helpful critic to challenge perspectives on a piece. And I think that's, I'm mentally logging that to think, you know, we don't write much around politics, but lots of issues today have those political undertones. I found it extremely difficult to find that balance because I think, as you know, you've read a few of my essays, I really endeavor to, of course, I'm involved and I have a position, but I endeavor to have a bit of dispassionate perspective on the left and the right, the up and the down. And one of the things I find really tricky is that if I am critical of something that Elon Musk might have done, the inbox fills up.

38:22And if I then write about something that I think he's done that's really impressive, SpaceX. The inbox fills up and it's not the same people and they're all cross. And so there are these hot buttons where one can't at the moment find a way of getting people to sit around the table and say, listen, we can accept that a person does something impressive here and they do something difficult here. And that's all within the capability of a single person, personality, character. And I just wonder, are there historical precedents for us going through these moments? And what are the things that we can learn that help us come back together, bring it back to, you know, to a sense of common understanding while still being able to disagree quite civilly.

39:04I don't know. I mean, yes, there have been like, you know, I don't know, you know, we used to have newspapers used to be, you know, much more toxic to each other. People used to like punch each other out in the United States Senate. So like there have been like really rough moments in American history. Part of what, you know, we had a period of more civil understanding during the Cold War, but that's because we had a massive external enemy. We were worried the Soviets were going to nuke us. And so, you know, you had people who, you know, I wrote about George Cannon and Paul Knitza, people who disagree with each other profoundly and like genuinely believe that the other's ideas will lead to nuclear obliteration, but can maintain a friendship.

39:38And part of what allows you to have that communication is the external enemy, right? And so if some people actually say this will happen with AI, what could possibly bridge not just American Republicans and American Democrats, but what could bridge the United States and China? Well, maybe if there's an external catastrophe coming from AI. But I also think there are mechanisms. This is something when I was in college, I started a newspaper with the head of the conservative paper. I just think that people, you can work at it and you can do it. Back to your Musk idea. when you were saying that i was wondering like i wonder if the next time azeem writes about musk you should like let's say you're you're writing about spacex like put the essay ask the ai bot imagine that you're somebody who hates elon musk right go through all of my assumptions and see whether there's anything i've made that will like trigger them and then do the reverse when you're writing about like ketamine right and um or when you're writing a regular essay like i don't write about ketamine that much i mean we've written about psilocybin we've written about glp1s but I mean, I love this idea.

40:42We do, I mean, we do use AI tools in that way. I mean, we use AI tools to challenge perspectives, to find weaknesses and arguments. By the way, I love your posts on how to use AI tools are always awesome. They're great. They're some of my favorite exponential view posts. Well, on Saturday, we've got a really interesting one that I think plays into the limits of AI. So earlier this week, I wrote something about Donald Trump and a senator, McCormick, putting something together to activate tens of billions of dollars in an industrial policy to generate more electricity. U.S. turning to industrial policy.

41:20And we describe McCormick as a Senate hopeful. He is a sitting senator since January. And human fact-checkers are there and there are LLM fact-checkers. And the LLM fact checker didn't spot it because it thought that the big piece was, you know, the$80 billion, which is true in some sense. One of our readers pointed this out. As we started to diagnose what went wrong, I put more and more sophisticated prompts into different LLMs, Grok, Perplexity, ChatGPT's O3. And after six iterations, it was still not spotting the mistake. Even though I was saying, check every job title, assume we have described every person wrongly, check every single one.

42:05And it was quite an interesting lesson to us actually about the limits of some of these tools, which we use really, really extensively. And we've, you know, we've learned a little bit from that. Yeah. But, you know, my sense is that it's quite hard to use AI well in research, in writing support, in steel manning and challenging ideas. But these tools are being used pretty extensively by writers of all types right now. Is that your sense as well? Yeah, so I've tried both for sort of professional reasons, because I want to know where this is going, and also because I've had this book. And my experience is that they're amazing for certain kinds of editing suggestions, right?

42:48Like, you know, this thousand word section feels a little bit slow, right? Please read the entire manuscript and help me understand, like, what are 150 words I could cut out to move the reader along, right? Like, here is a paragraph that I don't think fits here chronologically, but there's this one quote that's really important. Please identify another place in the book where this could go. Right. Like that kind of stuff. It's amazing. Fact checking a topeless. Right. In part like this date problem. Right. Because it doesn't understand. It has a hard time parsing. Like, yeah, McCormick was there more stories that were written about McCormick when he was a Senate candidate than he's a senator.

43:22He's kind of disappeared, but we cared a ton about his race. So like there's a bias in the training sample. like it'll probably be like 10 years before ai knows he's actually in the senate right because that race was so right so the fact checking stuff is useless the copy editing stuff is pretty useless right but the thought partner you know what my favorite thing i did with ai i mean i'm sure you've done this old hat to you but i went through and i had interviewed this woman for my book like seven times over the last six years and i input the maybe maybe there's 3 000 words on her in the book.

43:53I input those 3 ,000 words and then I input all the transcripts of all the interviews. And I said, you know, please make sure everything squares with all those interviews. Please identify any quotes that I haven't used that are thematically similar you can put in. Please identify any material that I've missed, right? It's just, it's so hard to like, like pull those old transcripts and go through them. And it's amazing, right? And AI does that instantaneously, right? It's like a brilliant researcher that does quickly. So, you know, I agree entirely with your example. And I also agree entirely that it's like one of the themes of exponential view is like use these tools constantly and learn both because it helps you and also because it helps you understand it.

44:28I think that your example is also speaks to the general barbelling of talent and the general barbelling of who is succeeding in media. So you have to be quite sophisticated to use the tools quite well. The very, very best substacks are doing a thousand times better than number 500. The media companies that are strong in this market, like the Financial Times or perhaps the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, have got very, very, very distinct, narrow focuses from which they are building. And those who sit in the middle, traditional media, right, from the Latin, in the middle are struggling because the seas are parting in some way.

45:17And I see this pattern recurring time and time again. And it's been a recurrent pattern from the days of the internet, you know, between the very big windows and small niches that are low cost and everyone in the middle struggling to make a dime. And if you're, you know, as you run the Atlantic, do you, if you see that, which you may not do, but if you see that, how do you think about where your position needs to be? Do you try to go big, Bloomberg style, or do you have to find a really, really clinical niche that you can own and live off? I mean, like, yeah, I'm terrified of being in the middle of the barbell.

45:55Like, I got to get to the right. I got to get to the big side, right? The Atlantic needs to... It's what we've been trying to do, right? We went from a couple hundred... You know, when I started, we were at 850 ,000, 800 ,000 subscribers an hour at 1.4. Like, we got to get to two, right? Like, we've got to be bigger. we've got to be successful, we've got to consolidate our wins, you know, because you're in the middle, you're toast. And so, totally, that's where I'm going for. But it's about the message. It's about the aboutness of the publication. So, I have a strong sense of the aboutness of the Financial Times, a strong sense of the aboutness of the Wall Street Journal.

46:28I have a strong sense of the aboutness of some of the best substacks, like Cynicism by Bill Bishop, or The Free Press, or Dylan Patel, who's moved off a substack with his semiconductor analysis, a lot of media companies had this odd aboutness. We are sort of about the North bit of Chicago. What is the core aboutness of the Atlantic in this world of declining trust and sovereign creators and content overload? That's a super good question, right? So we do have a disadvantage in that we've always been a general interest magazine, right? We were founded to be a general interest magazine, you know, politics, literature, and the arts, right?

47:03So we are supposed to be about a lot of things. And that is not like general interest publications time, Newsweek. A lot of them are kaput, right? And so we're not going to give that up. We're not going to specialize. We're not going to become just a political magazine or just a science and tech publication. We are going to stay true to our nature. We have to be what our founders said we should be. And we will be that as long as we can be that. So that said, you then have to figure out ways that you can really distinguish yourself. So we distinguish ourselves, we hope, by A, being a publication for the very best writers in the world, right?

47:37And we have a real diversity of writers. We let them take their own voice. We let them write their own thing, right? We also are a place for incredible investigative long stories, right? And so our hope is that we are known. What we want and what I want is I want someone to go to Atlantic.com or to pick up The Atlantic and to know that everything they read will be interesting and smart, that their assumptions will be challenged, that the writing will be beautiful, that they'll be taken to places in their mind they couldn't imagine. So we want this like constant process of discovery of awesome journalism.

48:08So we're trying to be the greatest writers collective in the world, right? That's the goal. And that in some ways is perpendicular to the goal of like being totally distinct, but in a way it's not because it is like trying to be something that nothing else is. So that's the goal. In a world where there's AI and automated content generation, having something that brings humans' abilities to imagine, extrapolate beyond what has been written previously and distilling it and supporting that feels like it's distinctive. You're in a world of manufactured cheese, artisanal cheese has all the value that we could ever, ever hope for.

48:48I know that we're at the top of the hour and we ran through the Four Horsemen, I feel like you have a lot on your plate to do that. But on the last note with your book, the book on running, you are a record holder in ultra long distance running. What is the one thing that you learned about yourself in writing this book? In some ways, it's the initial realization which triggered the book. It's going to take a minute to explain, but I think it's pretty interesting. So when I started running, tried to break a three-hour marathon. And when When I was 30, I ran a 243 marathon, which was like very cool, right?

49:25Right afterwards, like a week afterwards, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, right? And you can, you know, surgery, multiple surgeries later, hard time. Two years later, I come back and I run the New York City Marathon again. And I run it in exactly the same time, 243. Okay. Then the next 10 years for when I'm basically 33 to 43, every marathon is almost exactly the same. Like I literally go 243, 242, 243, 244, 245, 243. I have a like nickname, Mr. 243, which is a little annoying, but still kind of, it's cool. Like it's a good time, right? For runners out there, like that's a good time. And then when I'm in my mid forties, I start training differently and I run a 229, right?

50:08In one year and go down to 229. So suddenly I'm like, now I'm whatever I was second in the world in my age group, right? For the marathon. So then I started to think, well, how did that happen? Right? Like what happened? and I had this realization, which is what triggered the book. You know, I hadn't gone faster than 243 in my 30s, not because I didn't have the talent, but because in some deep level, I didn't want to, right? All I had wanted to do was to be as fast as I was before I got sick. And so for that reason, I had stayed at 243 forever, right? I had like a mental block or I like, it wasn't as though, I just, I never, it never occurred to me that I could go faster.

50:46I never set that goal because I just wanted to be who I was when I was 30. And so I broke through that. And so then what that made me realize is, okay, wait, the things that make you go fast, the things that make you go slow, they're buried deep inside, right? And they're buried deep in your psychology. And so that's what led me to start writing the book. And so then I started writing about other people and their journeys in running. I started writing about my father, my relationship to my father. But the opening point or the thing that inspired the book was this realization that because running is such a simple personal sport, right?

51:16It's just you, you're just out there. it's intimately tied up in human decline it is so personal and so intense that there's a lot there if you investigate so that's what triggered the book so it's called the running wall hunt and we'll see if it's any good it is it's a wonderful story and i'm looking forward to picking up a copy in october uh the runner formerly known as mr 243 currently the ceo of atlantic media nick thompson thank you so much for exploring this this we are going to see each other before the end of the year and if not in January, I'll definitely see you. I'll be at all kinds of conferences.

51:50I'll definitely see you at Web Summit. Who knows? I'll see you all kinds of places. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Catch you later. Cheers. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you want to know when the next conversation is released, just hit subscribe wherever you're listening. That's all for now. And I'll catch you next time.