Plain English with Derek Thompson - Everything Is Television

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Sometimes, the perfect guest to discuss your own writing is ... you. On this special crossover episode, I am interviewed by Ben Smith and Max Tani of Semafor's Mixed Signals podcast about my recent essay, "Everything Is Television." During our conversation, which you can also find on the Mixed Signals feed, we discuss TV, politics, the definition of charisma, and much more. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Hosts: Ben Smith and Max Tani Guest: Derek Thompson Listen to my episode on the Mixed Signals feed HERE. You can find my essay "Everything is Television" HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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step of the way. Hello, everyone. Today's episode is a bit of a change of pace. 99 times out of 100, this podcast is me interviewing an expert about something. But today, I'm the one being interviewed. So several weeks ago, I published this essay I was really proud of on my substack called Everything is Television. And it's one of the most popular pieces that I published there. And I really thought it would make for a fantastic podcast episode. The problem was I couldn't think of how to get into this essay with a guest. This is something that I wrote. It's an essay about media and politics and culture.

It's a little bit of a weird essay. and the perfect guest didn't really materialize. And then last week, just as I was really struggling with how to turn that essay into the perfect podcast, I was saved, I suppose, because Ben Smith and Max Tanny, the hosts of the Mixed Signals podcast with Semaphore, they reached out to me and they said, we'd love to talk to you about this piece. And I thought, wait, this is perfect. What if we ran the interview that I do with Ben and Max on the plain English feed as well, so that two really smart people can interview me about what I think,

and then we can share those thoughts with the plain English audience. And so that's what today's episode is. And I think the way I'd like to do it is this. First, I want to read you a shortened, streamlined version of the essay. Everything is television. And then second, we will jump right into the conversation with Ben Smith and Max Taney. So first, this is everything is television. A spooky convergence is happening in media.

Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples. Number one, this summer we learned something important about META, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. In an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, META filed a legal brief on August 6th in which it made a startling claim. Meta cannot possibly be a social media monopoly, META said, because it's not really a social media company.

Only a small share of time spent on its social networking platforms is truly social networking. That is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80% of time spent on Facebook and more than 90% of time spent on Instagram is watching videos the company reported. And most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not even know. social media is turning into television. Number two, when I read the metafiling, I've been thinking about something very different,

the future of this podcast, plain English. When podcasts got started, they were radio for the internet. And this really appealed to me because when I started my show, I never really watched news on television, and I loved listening to podcasts while I made coffee and went on walks. I wanted to make the sort of media that I consume. But the most successful podcast these days are all becoming YouTube and Netflix shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing 20 times faster than audio-only podcasts,

and more than half of the world's top shows now release video versions. Podcasts are turning into television. Number three, several weeks ago, Meta introduced a product called Vibes, and opened AI announced another similar product called SORA 2. Both are AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. Some tech analysts predicted that these tools will lead to an efflorescence of creativity. But the internet's history suggests that if these products succeed, they will follow what Ben Thompson calls the 991 rule. 90% of users consume, 9% remix and distribute, and just 1% actually create.

In fact, as Scott Galloway has reported, 94% of YouTube views come from 4% of videos. Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who seem to imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, building God, are in fact busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don't even know. Even AI wants to be

become television. Whether the starting point is a student directory, like Facebook, radio, or an AI image generator, the endpoint seems to be the same, a river of short form video. In mathematics, the term attractor describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. So to take a classic example, drop a marble into a bowl, and it will trace several loops around the bowl's curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain.

Complex systems often settle into recurring forms if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media. By television, I'm referring to something bigger than broadcast TV or the cable bundle or Netflix. In his 1974 book, Television, Technology, and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams wrote that, quote, all communication systems before television, the essential items were discreet, end quote. That is, a book is bound and finite. A play is performed in a particular theater at a set hour. But Williams argued that television shifted culture from discrete and bounded products toward a continuous streaming sequence of images and sounds which he called flow.

When I say everything is turning into television, what I mean is that every single, everything is turning into the continuous flow of episodic video. By William's definition, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are an even more perfect expression of television than old-fashioned television. On NBC or HBO, one might tune in to watch a show that feels particular and essential. On TikTok, by contrast, nothing is essential. One Piece of content on TikTok is incidental. The platform's allure is the infinitude promised by its algorithm.

It is the flow, not the content, that is primary. One implication of everything is becoming television is that there really is too much television, so much in fact that some TV is now made with the assumption that audiences are always already distracted doing something else. The writer Will Tavlin reported that several screenwriters who've worked for Netflix, say a common note from corporate executives is, quote, have this character announced what they're doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along, end quote. Critics who actually watch a great deal of streaming television for the purpose of appraising it these days

are kind of like children staring directly at the sun. You're not supposed to stare directly at it. You're not supposed to even watch it. The whole point is that it's supposed to just be there, glowing while you do something else. You might even see. say that much television is not even made to be watched at all these days. It is made to flow. The play button is the point. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television suddenly conquers the entire media landscape. In the last few weeks, I've been writing and podcasting a lot about two trends in American life that do not necessarily overlap. My work on the antisocial social socials.

century traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on, quote, the end of thinking follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these things is exclusively caused by television taking over all of media. That would be absurd. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it. Television's role in the rise of solitude cannot be overlooked. In Bowling alone, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam

wrote that between 1965 and 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. As I wrote, they could have used those additional 300 hours a year, 300 hours a year, to learn a new skill, or participate in their community, or have more kids.

Instead, the typical American funneled almost all of this extra time, almost 300 extra hours a year into just watching more TV. Digital media hasn't become the antidote to television. In fact, it's become super television, more images, more videos, and more isolation. Home alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we seem to be even more on our own.

In amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman wrote that, quote, each medium like language itself makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility, and quote. Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued.

When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television's values, immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs

and learns instead to think only in scenes. Does that sound familiar? Look at today's political protagonists. The right-wing president is a reality TV star. The most exciting new voice on the left, Zoran Mamdani, is a straight-to-camera savant. Mastering the grammar of television does not feel secondary to political success in America. It is political success in America. And in fact, maybe that last sentence is one word too long, and we could stand to lose the adjective political.

Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today's use. youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they want to be most when they grow up is an influencer. When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence, although that might be going to, but something harder to put into words and even harder to prove the value of. it's something like inwardness, the capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger. These values feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium,

and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television. I don't have the answers here, but we should figure it out soon. the marble is still spinning, but it is reaching the bottom of the bowl. That was everything is television, my essay, which you can find on my substack, Derek Thompson.org. And now without further ado, my interview with Ben Smith and Max Taney on the Mixed Signals podcast from Semaphore. We talk about TV, politics, the definition of charisma, and a whole lot more. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Derek, thank you so much for joining us.

We're really excited to talk to you about this. We wanted to start off by saying, first of all, that we're very upset that you are in our lane. You're supposed to be in everybody else's lane, but you're writing very deeply about media now, in addition to sports, politics, public policy, gambling, men, all these other things. We were kind of expecting and hoping that you would keep your thoughtful, insightful essays in one of those many other areas and not ours, but we'll let it slide for now. I promise I'm just visiting. This is mere tourism on my part.

You'll have your lane all to yourself and just. I feel like you're a returning visitor. You've got a few stamps on the passport. I've been looking at a lot of the stuff that you're writing and talking about. It seems very, very close and directly in ours. No, but we're really excited. And both Ben and I wanted to have you on because we both read your essay that you published last month, arguing that everything is TV now, which we both thought was excellent. But we're really curious and wanted to take a step back. When you say everything is TV, you're not talking about how everything is just the office or everybody's just watching madmen. constantly now. You're arguing something else. Can you explain a little bit about what you mean when you say everything is TV? What is that? Yeah, sure. I think maybe the best way to get into this is to tell you how the idea came to me. Ironically, it came to me having conversations about podcasting. We are talking on Riverside right now, making a podcast that is also going to be available to people who want to watch us, I believe, on Spotify or YouTube or on Semaphore. Like and subscribe. And I was having conversations with folks from the ringer about whether my

podcast plain English should also be a YouTube show, essentially, or a Netflix show, because some ringer shows are going to Netflix. And I was thinking, you know, initially I got into podcasting because I liked that it wasn't a visual medium. It was a purely auditory medium. It allowed me to multitask. I could make my coffee while listening to Ben and Max talk about the future of media. And now there was this pressure to essentially turn internet radio into television. It's a little bit annoying to me, but I understand the market case for it. I think there is one industry analysis that found that video podcasts are growing 20 times faster than audio podcasts. So anybody with any interest in growing their podcasting presence would or should automatically say, well,

yeah, I should make this product video as well. So podcasts seem to me were turning into television. And I was thinking about this when I came across an FTC filing by META, where META was trying to argue the federal government, that they couldn't possibly be a social media monopoly because they weren't a social media company. And they said in this FTC filing, quote, today only a fraction of time spent on meta-services, 7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook,

involves consuming content from online friends. A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are unconnected, i.e. not from a friend, and recommended by AI-powered algorithms, et cetera, et cetera. And I read this, and I thought, oh, my God, here you have meta. It's back against the wall trying to make an argument to the federal government, telling the federal government in a document that has to be true by law that social media has turned into television.

Social media isn't about being social with our friends. It's about watching short-form video from people who aren't your friends. Finally, when Sora came out and, you know, Open AI, which is trying to be a thousand different things, is essentially putting an enormous amount of resources into building a kind of time of TikTok for AI. Well, we all know what TikTok is. It's just something that's even more television than television. And now AI wants to build its own TikTok. I thought, well, now you have AI trying to become television as well. And when you put all those things together, you have a product that started off as radio for the internet, and it became television. And then a product that started off

as a college online directory, Facebook, that became television. And then a product that's trying to synthesize human knowledge and intelligence, which is AI, becoming television. And I thought it's like there's this attractor state in media where everything, no matter where it starts off, ends up as TV. And that was essentially the impetus for this piece. I think the metaphor you used was like the toilet bowl. Everything kind of flows down in the end. There's this idea that I love that also I have to confess, I don't really understand. So I apologize to the mathematicians. It's a podcast. This is a podcast, right. Exactly. We're all delicate. But there's this idea that I think comes from mathematics, which is called an attractor state, which essentially says that there's some dynamic systems that evolve toward a singular end.

So I think the classic example is like, if you drop a marble in a bowl, then it doesn't matter what shapes that marble takes. It will eventually reach the bottom of the bowl. Or like no matter how a toilet flushes, it will eventually create the same like spiral pattern of water as it like circles the drain. that's an attractor state. And television, I said, is like the attractor state of all media. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to start an online college directory or radio for the internet. You're eventually building something that will inevitably become television. And that just struck me as inherently interesting and weird.

I think the thing that you get at in the piece that feels like the sharpest point to me is the fact that when you're talking about everything becoming television, you basically said that television was the first medium that essentially never ended. Right. Before television, every single media form had a beginning and an end. You open the newspaper. You could read every article. It's over. You move on with your life, right? You see a play. It has beginning, middle, and end. You get up out of your seat, and then you go walk out into the night and do whatever you want. TV was the first medium that was just on constantly. And you draw this parallels between the meta feed and the Instagram Reels feed and TikTok feed, which you could consume content seemingly, if you wanted to, forever and never stop. And I thought that that was really sharp drawing the parallel between TikTok and even the news feed on Facebook and television in their kind of endlessness. Yeah, well, I really appreciate the compliment, and I want to defray it by saying that this is not my idea. There's a 1974 book called Television, Technology and Cultural Form by an author Raymond Williams, who I discovered in the process of reporting this piece.

My apologies, again, to folks who are masterful in the history of television analysis, who might have known Raymond Williams, I did not. It's amazing the degree to which the early analysts of television understood what it was immediately. Like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death, Raymond Williams, they all seem to understand modernity in the 1960s through 1980s, like better than some people that are trying to comment on it today. And what Williams observed is that, as you said,

in most communications forms before TV, they were discreet. They had beginnings and ends. You went to the opera to see, you know, Verdi or, you know, whatever, Puccini. You went to a theater to see Shakespeare. Maybe you even, you know, turned on the radio to listen to a particular radio program. But he was observing that people turned on television without really knowing what was on because they wanted to be lost in, and this was his word, the flow.

And when you think about it, you know, 50 years later, TikTok is even more television than OG television, by his definition. Like, who opens up TikTok or Instagram in order to see, like, a particular video? That's crazy. You open up TikTok to get lost in the flow without knowing what you're going to see. So it was initially to me again

that this, like, original flow state that was initially prescribed as an analysis of television had now just come to conquer the entire grammar of all media. The word of the moment for what I'm about to describe is brain rat, But you sort of follow this thread to like the most dystopian possible conclusion, I would say, in your essay, which is that we're moving to sort of a civilization that among other things forgets how to read. And I just want to read this passage.

societies that write have many times the number of words as oral tribes. If literacy thickens the complexity of thought or return to orality, would amount to the great cortical thinning of society. Truth in such a civilization would be more about nemonics, what is emotionally memorable than empirics. What is true? So, I mean, just play this out for us. So why does this matter that everything's becoming TV?

Idea number one is that it doesn't matter. Many things are becoming short-form video, and that's just the way things go. That's possibly number one. Possibility number two is that it does matter for people who are making media. For people like you and me, my sister who works at Netflix, the many people who want to write fiction and nonfiction television, it matters because there's just too much television. And in fact, I came across this incredible piece of reporting about Netflix telling the folks writing Netflix shows that they have to make TV dumber and more self-declatory. characters have to announce their intentions

because there's this assumption that the audience isn't paying attention that while they're watching TV on Netflix they're also watching TV on TikTok and it's too hard from to focus on one thing at one time so that folks making the Netflix TV have to have characters who are like I'm about to walk into this house

because I think that there's the burglar who lives in this house that I'm trying to stop from burglying the next house like you have to essentially make your TV more declarative and it was interesting to me that like television as a medium has to adapt to a world in which there's too much TV. So there's another way

that maybe everything becoming television matters. But you're pointing to something else, which is like maybe it matters that everything is becoming television because it's creating a kind of national attention deficit disorder. It's thinning our ability

to pay attention to any one thing in any one time. And I believe that matters because when I observe my own mind, when I'm reading and in a mode of reading versus just watching TV and just paying attention to short form video on TikTok

and Instagram, that I lose, like, patience for ideas when my mind becomes more like marinated in television. Like, I can't sit with an idea to really reach the bottom of it. And I do think that there is something to, you know, Walter Ong thought. I know that you've talked about this another podcast. I think you talked about it with Malcolm Gladwell. Joe Wisenthal is all over this, the idea that we were an oral culture, then we became a literate culture, and now we're becoming a post-literate culture.

There's a lot of folks who are talking about this at the moment. And I think one implication of that is that it's harder for us to see. sit with big, complicated ideas to reach the bottom of them. And I do think that as a society, that could potentially make us dumber and more simple. And that's bad for a variety of reasons. I think there's a lot of wonderful things that come from the ability to think deeply. But then the one other, maybe the fourth implication that I'd love to talk to you guys about, because you think about this all the time, is that I think success in American life right now is increasingly tied to one's capacity to be a high-quality, short-form video performer.

the president is a reality TV star. The most exciting voice in the left, Zora and Mamdani, is an objective straight to camera savant. He's amazing at what he does. And if you ask members of Gen Z, what do they most want to be when they grow up? They say influencer. They say essentially a short form video performer.

So once again, within the theme of everything is becoming television, political success is becoming television, and even Gen Z's theory of economic success, outside of the realm of politics is becoming associated with essentially being good at TV. And that strikes me as mildly dystopian and

also just like important. I also sort of have the view that everybody's getting dumber and kids these days are terrible obviously. Before we move to those implications, let me at least throw at you the countervailing point of view, which actually I think our shared podcast guest Ken Burns

holds pretty strongly, which is, you know, we asked him like, are people really going to watch 12-hour documentaries, nobody is an attention span, TikTok, short form, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, he's 72. He's been hearing this exact strain of moral panic from middle-aged guys freaking out about their mortality for his entire career of making very, very complex long-form work. And in fact, you can go back certainly to like the advent of the novel, to have people panicking that media was broadly corrupting society, specifically shortening attention spans

for the youth, certainly radio, television. I mean, you know, we've been gone through so many cycles of this. Book sales, honestly, like, remain pretty constant. I'm not sure society's actually dumber and more violent that it was, you know, 1837. Are we sure this isn't just, like, the real constant? Is people our age freaking out about what 20-year-olds are doing with media? There is no question that there is a constant of people our age

freaking out with what young people are doing with media. That's a fact. Is it possible that this is, you know, just the boy who cries wolf? Yes. But also, at the end of that story, a wolf arrives. And my thesis is that there's a wolf here. Every generation worries that young people are getting dumber. Well, we actually have evidence that students today score worse.

In the U.S., there's a national report card that's published by the NAEP, which recently found that average reading scores in America hit a 32-year low, which is a troubling number because the data series only goes back. 32 years. John Byrne Murdoch, who's just a fabulous reporter at the F.T, we cover a lot of the same territory, has found that around the world in advanced countries, notably advanced countries with smartphones and therefore easy and ample access to short-form video, performance and reasoning and problem-solving tests is declining, not only among teenagers in science scores, reading scores, math scores, but also among adults. And the inflection point seems to be right

around 2010, 2012, which is a familiar inflection point for many people who look at these statistics. John Heights, ears are burning right now. This is just about when smartphone penetration in the Western world surpass 50%. So Ken Burns is a genius, and I am not prepared to, like, win an argument against Ken Burns on anything. What I am prepared to do is just tell you, just read the facts as they exist. Intelligent scores are declining. The Flynn effect. The Flynn effect. which is this general trend over the last few decades and even century of technological progress and scientific progress tending to lead to rising SAT scores throughout the developed world

are starting to invert. Performance in all sorts of tests are starting to go down. Maybe this is just a blip, or maybe there really is some kind of national attentional deficit that's worth our attention, that's worth our curiosity. Derek, I mean, maybe it's possible that you and S. or just the smartest humans who have ever lived. I mean, that might be the logical conclusion of this argument.

I'm definitely not going to take that bait. I mean, that is that is bait very, very easily labeled. Do not pick up. I'm really curious how you think about how the kind of long-form moment fits in here as well. Obviously, people are not reading as many long-form articles. You could argue about statistics about whether people are reading as many books or the quality of the books that they're reading. But I also think about the fact that there's been a rise in these extreme,

extreme long-form podcasts and TV-like programs which go on for hours and hours and hours, which get into really deep and complex and interesting subjects. I mean, some of this stuff is pretty silly. Like, I don't think that anybody thinks that like all three hours of Joe Rogan are really interesting and insightful. But some of the most popular media in America right now are these long-form shows hosted by these people who are ostensibly not natural television personalities that I wouldn't describe Lex Friedman as being like a traditionally charismatic television person. Are there any bright spots here? What do you make of the long-form moment that we're having in podcasting and YouTube? And do you see any actual bright spots in the changes

in media consumption in everything becoming television? I see a ton of bright spots. It would be easy for me as like a take artist in this context for every piece of the world to suddenly mold itself around every theory that I have. And for all of my things, theories to have like no exceptions and no wrinkles and no complications. But to your point, there are many exceptions and wrinkles and complications to the theory that everything is becoming television or that more specifically, everything's just getting dumber. Because everything is clearly not just getting dumber. You've had Cleo Abram on the show. I think she's an absolute genius. I think Drakash Patel is an absolute genius at what he does. Those shows are either some of

the most sophisticated television ever made about science and technology, or some of the nerdiest popular conversations held at science and technology. And you compare those shows to like 1970 conversations between, you know, conservative and liberal intellectuals about the Vietnam War and, you know, Gourvedal going off about whatever's happening in American politics, they hold up, right? So it's absolutely the case that in a weird way, what we're seeing now in media, is almost like a barbell effect. It's like the geniuses of short-form video are having extraordinary success

in politics and economics, financially, at making brilliant short-form video. And then there's folks, the Joe Rogans of the world and Lex and Dorcasch that are making four-hour content about the exquisite details of how large language models work and what they're teaching us

about what thinking is and consciousness is. Both those things are succeeding, right? The four-second video and the four-hour video. In a weird way, it's the middle that's being eroded. And I think that's like a very interesting thing that's happening. That's sort of barbell effect. It should be said that lots of people, I think, consume those long videos in short form, right? Like sometimes the thing that goes most viral from a Joe Rogan conversation that's four hours long is a 15 second moment.

And so sometimes the cow of the Joe Rogan interview is essentially harvested for like the one like filet and mignon medallion that actually becomes the thing that everyone talks. about. I think to your point, clearly not the case that everything is just getting dumber. I think that would be actually quite simplistic and maybe even ironically, like, post-literate analysis of what's actually happening. What's really happening is something much fussy and more complicated because markets are complicated. And when one thing begins to succeed, its opposite can also succeed because there's an underserved demographic. So there are a lot of things happening. And in no way should the banner that someone puts over the entire media landscape just be, everything is getting dumber, period. more interesting and complicated than that.

Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Derek, but we have to take a short break, so we'll hear more from him right after this. How 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. I 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 councilman. I do think that there is something in Coet and maybe even ineffable about straight-to-camera performance.

We're just days now after Zoran Mundani 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, like, 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 and short form video performance is like a ridiculous thing. Like it'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 JD 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. And this 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 a clear 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 academic 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, we'll start with you. Sorry to completely invert the nature of the show. 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, 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 like it's, 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. Yeah, comfort.

That's interesting. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. In that sense, just it's generational. Then you've been up 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. They'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 Christy 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. And 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 Zoron 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. I'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 king. 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. Ben and I have talked about this. The Halal Kart video is something that we would have, 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 no, 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 a 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 meeting of that and the moment, right? That's my thesis.

I think one thing that Mamdani has is 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? Bernie 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 them a key.

of what I find interesting inchoing to other people. If there's a formula for innerchiness 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 it was by definition, like the fact that I'm a dilaton 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. There 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,

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. And 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 your election. And then the next article that I publish is about the average age,

a 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. And you're like, sorry, Derek, you were hired to write about politics. 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 Waggall. But anyway, yes. But then after election, like, what is everyone talking about? They're talking about affordability. They're talking about the fact that young people can't buy houses. They'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, 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 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. And 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, honestly, that I can remember in my lifetime. Can you just tell us a little 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 the book had more to do with the environment in which the book landed. The Democratic Party's brand bottomed out. There was that while the reported CNN poll that found that trust the Democratic Party had plummeted to an all-time series low, there 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 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 alance, were for this, we're against this? And I think the book, in a way, that wasn't accidental, but I think it's, it's a negative. its reception was accental in a way.

The 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 agree.

I found it like quite difficult sometimes, like emotionally, to like log in to Twitter without muting people. I'm just not, I'm not particularly used to being like criticized with the level of like 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 cultural 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, you know, fly off the handle, created a kind of inflammation, created a kind of like inflammatory effect that led to the book becoming like literally a bigger thing than we initially planned. And 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. 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 in the... I don't even wake up in the market. They don't have thoughts. We can 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. There are 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 read the book and it's like this big. 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 the people...

Everything is circling the drain, like what you're doing. 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. The number of people who bought that book or a circle a little bit large 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. Like, 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, where you're creating, is not the final product. You're creating an object with which to move waves. You're creating a boulder that you hope to drop into a water to create waves that flood the surrounding landscape. Books are not, books. The ultimate part 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. Uh, yes, there is. It's called mixed signals. Yeah. 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, you know, different podcast, media appearances, whatever. And 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. I can absolutely testify to that. No, when people ask me now, they say, you know, 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. I don't think there's anything that came close to Fried Zakaria's

show when it came to immediately moving book sales. Good for Farid. 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 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, unlike you.

Are they really going to buy eight hours worth of audio on the book, just how long it takes me in Ezra to read the damn thing on Spotify or Audible? No, they're like, I already did four hours for you guys. I don't need 12. Whereas with Freed and maybe with some of the other TV shows, Chris Hayes or things like that, it's an amuse bush. You're not eating the whole stage. You're getting four minutes.

It's a teaser. And Freed 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 is almost enervated by the optimal podcast, which is essentially going to give the audience the essence of the book. It'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 that. 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. But 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, and 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 W-2 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. Abundance 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, not 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 XYZ. 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, and 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.