Derek Thompson on why everything is becoming television, and whether democracy can survive it

24:38How does this thesis that everything is becoming TV kind of inform how people should think about the media business and how you're thinking about it? It's affecting me very directly because I don't want to turn my podcast into TV, but I probably will because it just seems from the numbers very clear that video podcasts are dramatically outperforming or dramatically outgrowing non-video podcasts. You're going to need like a better studio. I am going to need a better studio. But that was the next thing I was going to get to, which is that I've never been someone who cares very much about production value.

25:13I would say listeners of this show should recognize that Derek is just sitting against a gray felt wall, unlike Max and I, who have beautiful backdrops. But give Derek some credit here. First of all, he is not even close to the bottom in terms of people who we had on the show, in terms of the quality of their background. Wow, who's at the bottom? Ben, you, actually. When you did the podcast from a parking lot, you were backlit. It was horrible. But Derek does have one thing going for him, which is he is very handsome. This is perfect for television. I appreciate the count, though, Matt. I do think that there is something inchoate and maybe even ineffable about straight-to-camera performance.

25:49We're just days now after Zoran Mamdani went from polling at 0.5 % or whatever nine months ago to becoming now the mayor of New York City. He is clearly incredible at something. But, like, have you actually seen or read the definitive articulation of what Zoran Mamdani is so frigging good at? There's something that exists beyond easy description that we sometimes shorthand as authenticity, which is a word I fucking hate, because authenticity is always a performance of what we call authenticity rather than someone's actual self. Authenticity in short form video performance is like a ridiculous thing.

26:30It's not a matter of being authentic. It's about a matter of transmitting a sense of understanding an audience that the individual can't see because they're looking directly in a fucking camera. So how can they be authentic? This is not anyone's experience of normal life, going around to halal carts and looking at a camera to describe whatever it is, like permitting laws. In New York, he's a genius at something. But what is that something? What is it that Trump is a genius at that J.D. Vance is not? What is it that Barack Obama is a genius at that Kamala Harris is not? Like, you can answer these questions with words.

27:03This isn't the hardest question ever. This isn't like quantum physics. But there is something under theorized about what makes someone a genius at this skill. And I would love to have like a clearer sense of it. I'd love to write about it and talk to people about it because I do think it's becoming a much more important part of not only our political environment, but also our economic one. Again, Gen Z doesn't want to be astronauts anymore. They want to be influencers. So they better understand this as well. I'd love to turn it back to you. What do you think are the ingredients? Ben, Ben, we'll start with you.

27:33Sorry to completely invert the nature of the show. So what are the ingredients of straight-to-camera success in the 21st century? You know, it is funny because I do think, as you said, there's something that there's like a talent thing that I, for instance, think you and Max both have it. And I'm like, okay, but we'll never totally have it. That is my own theory. But also, I think actually there's a level of being native to the medium, which means you consume it a lot, which means you've been like FaceTiming with your mom for a long time, which means that it is just authentically the way you've presented yourself and all sorts of different things and the way you've understood other people for long enough that you don't think about it.

28:08Yeah, comfort. That's interesting. You're right. Yeah. In that sense, just it's generational. Then you can run a lot of politicians, many more than I have. But one thing I've noticed just in the few politicians that I've started to meet in the aftermath of abundance is that, and tell me if you disagree with this diagnosis, there's something that one could call television charisma, and there's something you could call room charisma and they're different. And that's interesting. There are some politicians that are absolutely dreadful on camera, like in a debate setting or in a stump speech setting.

28:42They're wooden and they're fake and you get them in a room and they kick their proverbial shoes off and they're just talking to you and a couple other reporters been around a table and they're luminous. They're beautiful and they're charismatic and their faces are big and they're taller than you think they would be. And they have a power at that table that completely disappears upon contact with a television camera. That's a very nice thing to say about Kristi Noem. I was thinking about the most recent Democratic candidate for president. I've heard that she's absolutely brilliant in a room with people, that there's a luminousness to her that's undeniable in some settings.

29:25And I think she was and remains a very, I don't want to say inauthentic, I want to say uncomfortable performer in front of a television in certain debate settings where there's a practicedness that you can see. It's like you can see the strings that are moving the various puppet parts. Whereas with someone who just has it, like Zoran or Trump or even Obama, the strings are invisible. They don't exist. Not to totally reiterate what Ben had to say, but I was having a conversation last week with another reporter, and we were marveling at the popularity of Tim Miller, the podcaster. He's been on our show.

30:05I'm sure you've talked to him at some point. This reporter was talking about how Tim used to be a good source on things, and he would always have this great information that would make for really great stories and great content. And it dawned on me. It was something I was thinking. I was like, oftentimes my best sources are also people who would be amazing if they were on the other side of the camera or if they were great in media in some way. I think it's an understanding of a story and of narrative, I also think, that really helps people like Mom Donnie. Mom Donnie just understood, and we've talked about this on our podcast as well.

30:34Ben and I have talked about this. The halal cart video is something that maybe you would have made at BuzzFeed, right? Like it's a piece of content. Right, or Vox, exactly. It's a piece of content. Trump, it's not a surprise, right? He was a television programmer. He understood something about good content. Barack Obama, he had many skills, but he was a great consumer of media. He understood and enjoyed narrative. It's not a surprise that he, after leaving the presidency, got into making Netflix documentaries and is making podcasts. These are people who I do think understand compelling narratives and stories and understand the perfect meaning of that and the moment, right?

31:10That's my thesis. I think one thing that Mamdani has that a lot of Democrats, I'll have to say, especially centrist Democrats, don't have is he knows exactly what he wants to say. Freeze the rent. Lower the cost of permitting for these halal carts. His videos are very, very specific, and he goes to the very place where that specificity is in highest register. And when you know what you want to say, you will go anywhere. I mean, this is true of Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has had one message for, whatever, 35 years. So he's not afraid to go on Joe Rogan. Oh, what, Joe Rogan's going to expose that Bernie Sanders isn't actually a democratic socialist?

31:44Bernie is Bernie. He's going to be Bernie with Joe. He's going to be Bernie with like a far-left podcast. When you know what you want to say, you will go anywhere. I want to kind of change the subject here and want to pivot. Derek, you've gone really broad at a moment when the internet is kind of increasingly niche. You read about public policy. You read about media. You read about politics, technology, the NBA, sports. I'm curious, what ties your work together? and how do you keep your audience engaged when your work is all over the place? I just read about what I find interesting and I just hope and trust in my ability to make the mechanics of what I find interesting interesting to other people.

32:22If there's a formula for interestingness to me, it's novelty plus importance. Something that's important but old is not interesting. Something that's novel but not important is not interesting. I'm drawn to ideas that feel important and also new and I find that they're just everywhere. Like they're in politics and they're in economics and they're in culture. And almost by definition, like the fact that I'm a dilettante with a little bit of ADHD means that I don't like getting sucked into any one particular place for too long. One thing that I learned ironically after Abundance came out, and I don't know if this is confessing too much, is that I don't like politics that much.

33:00There was a period when Abundance came out where it felt like I had to honor the success of the book by writing almost exclusively and thinking almost exclusively about politics. And I hated it. Covering politics by just looking at politics is like just looking directly at the sun for too long. Like eventually, like it blinds you to what the sun actually is. And you have to like look around to really understand politics. I was thinking about this actually just before I was coming on the show. Imagine, Ben, that you hired someone to write about the 2025 off-year elections. And you hired them, let's say, six months ago.

33:36And the first article that they filed was about the University of Michigan Consumer Survey and about how consumer confidence in the economy is plummeting. You'd be like, no, no, no. Like, Derek, I hired you to write about the 2025 off-year elections. And then the next article that I publish is about the average age of first-time homeowners rising in the last decade from 32 to 40, the highest on record. And you said, no, Derek, you're a politics reporter. like please like report on politics and the next article that i wrote was about the vacancy rate of new york city apartments reaching a 30-year low you're like sorry derek you were hired to write about politics please please write a political story and of course i'm loading the deck here for the purpose of making this particular parable work i thought you were describing dave waggle but uh anyway but then after election like what is what is everyone talking about they're talking about affordability they're talking about the fact that young people can't buy houses.

34:29They're talking about the fact that the MAGA coalition of non-white voters is falling apart as affordability, which helped launch the Republican Party in 2024, is now exploding like a bomb strapped to the chest of the Republican Party in 2025. The fact that you have low vacancy rates in New York City leading to rising housing prices in that city, et cetera, et cetera. And so in a weird way, a smart way to cover politics is to not look directly at the sun, but to look around to the sun and look at the economy and consumer preferences and housing. And that's kind of my theory of everything. To understand any one thing, you have to look at the things around it.

35:05And that's one reason why I find my attention can never really be fully sunk into one subject. To write about young people, you have to write about television. To write about science, you have to write about politics. To write about politics, you have to write about economics. And so I think that's my self-justification for why I find my attention flittering around rather than getting sunk into one thing. It's also what makes you so fun to read and listen to, so don't change. But I did want to talk a little about, I mean, I think, you know, as we talk about short attention spans and everything becoming television, I think you really had this remarkable experience this year with the opposite of that, which was a fairly dense, tightly argued book about policy that was the biggest hit of a book like that that honestly that I can remember in my lifetime.

35:48Can you tell us a little bit what that experience was like? How big was abundance from the inside of the abundance machine? It completely shocked me and Ezra, the response to the book. This was a 99.999 percentile outcome for what we optimistically discussed as being a possibility for the book. There's no question in my mind that the reception of the book was in part about the book itself. But I would argue the response to the book had more to do with the environment in which the book landed. The Democratic Party's brand bottomed out. There was that widely reported CNN poll that found that trust in the Democratic Party had plummeted to an all-time series low.

36:27There was this enormous vacuum for the Democratic Party should stand for. And that vacuum, I think, was particularly felt among people who had not already self-identified as socialists. Socialists know what they stand for. They're socialists. The far left knows what it stands for. I think there was an opening to define what maybe the center-left lane stood for. And how could that part of the party find an argument that was also a critique that had both a negative and a positive valence? We're for this, we're against this. And I think the book, in a way that wasn't accidental, but I think its reception was accidental in a way.

37:08The book answered that question. It gave a lot of people a sense of what had gone wrong in America, and it gave people a sense of how it could go right. And so I think that had a lot to do with the reception of the book. And then also I think that to the extent that cultural products need like a positive and negative identity, I think it's also important the book was so heavily criticized. I think that those critiques of the book, which really did not stop. I mean, like I found it as someone who's like pretty agreeable. I found it like quite difficult sometimes, like emotionally to like log in to Twitter without muting people.

37:44I'm not particularly used to being criticized with the level of personal attacks that I was. But also, the level of criticism I think objectively helped the book, which is kind of an unfortunate thing because I don't want to think that the success of any culture product, especially one of which I'm proud of, was helped by its negative reaction. But I think it probably was. And so in a way, I think it was this sort of weird, weird, perfect storm of many things. We worked really hard in the book, and I think the book was good and focused. It landed in a moment where it answered a need, and also it triggered antibodies within the left-of-center ecosystem that in a weird way created—and here the metaphor is going to fly off the handle—created a kind of inflammation, created a kind of inflammatory effect that led to the book becoming literally a bigger thing than we initially planned.

38:34And I'm not even sure that I have the right perspective and distance from the fact of it to give a perfect diagnosis of what happened. But I think it's something like that. Can we ask, like, how many copies did it end up selling? Obviously, I've seen the thousands of tweets. I've listened to a million podcast episodes with either you or Ezra or somebody talking about it in some sort of way. But how many, like, you know, this is we host a media show. What's the ballpark? I don't know slash remember the official answer. I know it's in the several hundreds of thousands. And I think it's also important to think about how small that number is.

39:07I mean, if a book sells a million copies in a year, it's the runaway nonfiction bestseller of the year, no question. If a movie sells a million movie tickets in a year at an average movie ticket price in America of about, I think,$10.50, it makes$10 million. And that's pathetic. We call that movie a bust. It's a total failure. And if a tweet only gets 10 million views, yeah. I mean, why even wake up? I don't even wake up in the morning. I don't have thoughts. We're going to get 10 million views. I think it goes to this point that like books are a really weird cultural product. I've said this before.

39:40They're a boulder dropped in a lake. And the product is not the boulder. The product is the ripples created by the boulder. You think of all the people who bought abundance and it's like this big. And you think about the number of people who actually like read the book and it's like this big. And I'm making like a smaller circle within the circle. I don't know why I'm doing concentric circles on a podcast and just hoping that people. Everything is circling the drain like what you're talking about. earlier. Let me try this again for the folks who are listening while making their coffee. The number of people who read Abundance All the Way are one circle.

40:09The number of people who bought that book are a circle a little bit larger than that. But the number of people who are aware of the book or who have read enough reviews and critiques or listened to enough podcasts is a much bigger circle. And so in a very real way, the ultimate product of a book is not a book. The ultimate product of a book is a conversation about the book. And you know, Ben, like when you write a book. You talk about that book for hours and hours and hours and hours. And ultimately, many more people consume the content about the book than the book itself. And so in a very real way, when you're writing a book, what you're creating is not the final product.

40:46You're creating an object with which to move waves. You're creating a boulder that you hope to drop into water to create waves that flood the surrounding landscape. Books are not books. The ultimate product of the book is the conversation around the book. And that's a weird thing that books do in a way that maybe like other products don't. Like there's no podcast that just talk about tweets. Yes, there is. It's called Mixed Signals. Oh, excuse me. Right. We had Ezra on the show earlier this year. In some ways, you guys are a victim of your own success in the sense that you guys are across all of these different podcasts, media appearances, whatever.

41:22And Ezra was saying that podcasts don't actually move book sales that much because if somebody has spent an hour with you hearing about the ideas in the book, they kind of think, well, I pretty much got exactly what was going to be in there. Now I don't need to read books. I can absolutely testify to that. No, when people ask me now, they say, you know, what should my book's coming out? What should I do? I say, go on podcasts because in a way, those podcasts for many people will be more important than the book itself because that's where they're actually consuming your thoughts. But if you want to sell books, I think we're allowed to say this.

41:52I don't think there's anything that came close to Fareed Zakaria's show when it came to immediately moving book sales. Good for Fareed. That was certainly when Ezra and I were like checking the Amazon ranking of the book more frequently because it was right around when the book came out. I think we recorded the Sunday before the book came out. In my estimation, nothing came close to Fareed's show. And my theory is that podcasts in a weird way are too successful at unpacking books. If someone listens to me and Ezra talk about abundance for four hours on Lex Friedman, are they really going to buy eight hours worth of audio on the book, which is how long it takes me and Ezra to read the damn thing on Spotify or Audible?

42:35No, they're like, I already did four hours for you guys. I don't need 12. Whereas with Fareed and maybe with some of the other TV shows, Chris Hayes or things like that, it's an amuse-bouche. You're not eating the whole steak. You're getting four minutes. It's a teaser. And Fareed gets just enough out of us where people say, oh, this might be a book that's about the future Democratic Party. I might want to read that. And that actually moves them to go to Amazon and buy the book, which in a weird way, that motivation's almost enervated by the optimal podcast, which is essentially going to give the audience the essence of the book.

43:09It's a good thing that we haven't actually, I think, mentioned even like what Abundance was about on this podcast. So for the two remaining people unfamiliar with that, you're going to have to buy the book. But before we let you go, Derek, a final question about kind of your own career and your own choices. You know, you are among the high-profile journalists who recently left a cushy gig at a great publication, The Atlantic, to strike out on Substack and on your own. And I'm curious what you can do now that you couldn't do then. You know, why do you do that? I don't know. There's a whole lot that I can do now that The Atlantic wouldn't let me do, except write more.

43:47But I found a couple of things. I got very lucky when I was 22 years old and was hired as an intern at The Atlantic, which is an institution that I didn't leave for about 17 years. I felt at the age of 39, which is basically 40, which is basically 50, that I didn't want to spend my entire life doing one thing. I'd wake up every morning, and I'd have thoughts. And those thoughts would flow through a kind of internal algorithm of how do I make this thought an Atlantic column? And the writers that I most respect, not just in the nonfiction space, but in the fiction space, experimented with form. Folks like Philip Roth could have written the same book over and over and over again.

44:28And I don't know, maybe some critics think he did. I think he was highly experimental. And I think his genius came from giving himself the space to experiment. And I thought I would never really be able to fully experiment with thinking, right? Like with my own experience of like seeing an idea and processing it and working through making that idea an essay. I would never really enjoy the full experimentation process if I only got my W2 from one corporation for my entire life. And that was a huge motivation for leaving. On a more selfish point, it was just clear to me that it was the right time to make a jump.

45:04Abundance was a huge and shocking success. And it's absurd to think that anyone is going to have necessarily two number one New York Times bestsellers in their career. And so there was no better time for me to jump than at that moment. And I've been really impressed, I have to say. Substack does an extraordinary job building an ecosystem that allows writers to thrive very quickly. I found it really surprising in a wonderful way how quickly the audience for the average Substack article that I write has approached and surpassed in some ways the average audience for an Atlantic article that I write.

45:40Not just because of the Atlantic's paywall, but also I think just because Substack has built this with their algorithms in particular, this incredible self-recommending way to fold audiences back and back and back into the ecosystem in a way that really drives audience in a beautiful way. So I've loved it. I've had a great time, but I don't want to represent the great time that I've had as being some kind of like fleeing the Atlantic because they wouldn't let me do X, Y, Z. This really was more a sense of like, I know how to write an Atlantic column. Do I know how to do anything else? I'm never going to know if I don't take this jump.

46:11And so I jumped. Well, that feels like a great place to end it. Derek, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really interesting conversation. We really appreciate it and congratulations on all your success. Thank you, Derek. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

47:07So, Ben, it's always a treat for us to be able to listen to someone who is just a significantly better podcaster than us and who has dipped into our lane of media thought leadership in a very effective and successful way. But I thought that was just the most fun and interesting conversation. And Derek is just thinking about all of these overlapping things that occasionally cross over into our world in really interesting ways. But what did you think of what he had to say about television and about his own recent experience at the center of a political media news cycle? Yeah, I mean, in a way, I think I see it almost in the opposite way, which is that the sense in which media is everything in this political and even economic landscape.

47:50And in a strange way that someone who is thinking so hard about politics and policy almost naturally comes back to media to try to understand it. But I do think this question of what is it that makes somebody good at this thing called short-form video, which is the dominant medium, I think if you listen back to this conversation in five years, like, oh, how do people get good at short-form? He cited all these great media theorists of the 20th century who really believe that, you know, in McLuhan's words, that the medium is the message and that the core forces driving global politics are sort of centrally media forces.

48:27I guess I'm a little skeptical of that in this moment. I tend to agree a bit more with Ken Burns that there's a kind of rolling panic about media and about young people in media that has us feeling very apocalyptic all the time. I'm not sure we're moving into the post-literate world. I don't know. It's like, I feel like there's something about this you sort of have to choose. Is this a fun short video app that serves me great Martin Wolf clips, or is this the apocalypse? Yeah, for me, I don't think I'm getting that much stupider if I've seen 700 snowboarding clips on TikTok over the course of two days.

49:00But I think to your point, it is really interesting. And it's something that I think you and I both have enjoyed as people who have written about media is that media reporting allows you to dip into all of these other things. You told me when I was getting started as a media reporter that the best media reporting was yoked to some other topic, whether it be media and it's really a politics story or media and it's really a finance story or media and it's really a sports story. I think that that's something that I've enjoyed that's allowed me to kind of mimic what Derek does, which is being a generalist in a particularly niche age.

49:32I guess in a sense the question is, is it an age where the conversation is centered on media and where media is sort of a powerful lens for us to see the world? Or is it really an age where these media decisions are driving everything? Did Facebook give us Trump? Did reality TV give us Trump? Or did globalization and post-deindustrialization give us Trump? I suppose the answer is probably yes to all of those things. Yeah, it's definitely us. I mean, that was the thing that I was thinking about as we were talking about Zoran Ramdani, Trump, and Obama, and why did these people win, and what did they understand about the mediums of the moment?

50:05I think that mostly they're just charismatic people who people would like in any sort of context, right? I think had Zoran Ramdani been doing like little abundance videos, sorry, which in fact this very nice charismatic young politician named Zilnour Meiri was doing, nobody would have cared. All of those people, in addition to being good at understanding media and sharp media observers, they're also just people who just have really smart and interesting political and unexpected political instincts. But anyway, this was a really great conversation, Ben. It was really fun to have Derek on. What a treat.

50:37Thank you so much for listening to Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced this week by Josh Billinson and Manny Fidel. We've doubled our production because we're just that difficult to work with. But thanks to Josh. Thanks to Manny. And special thanks to Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is Ezra Klein. Ezra, what did you think about this? We should have texted Ezra to ask him what questions to ask Derek. I think we did okay, though. Yeah, as Josh suggested, I'm sure Ezra has an abundance of notes.

51:15If you're enjoying Mixed Signals, please like us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I do want to add, just before we close it out, a special thanks to Shino Ozaki, who did such a fantastic job producing us and keeping us sane over the last year, and who's on to bigger and more narrative things. That's true. If people see a notable drop-off in the show, it's because we've replaced Chino with Manny. We'll see TBD on the outcome of that. But if you still want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night. Sorry, Manny.