A (2:43)

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.

C (3:11)

I'm just visiting. This is mere tourism on my part. You'll have your lane all to yourself in just a few minutes.

A (3:15)

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 arguing that everything is TV now, which we both thought was excellent but 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 Mad Men 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?

C (3:51)

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 of people who want to watch us, I believe on Spotify or YouTube or on Semaphore.

B (4:08)

Like and subscribe.

C (4:09)

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, it seemed 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 to 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, that is not from a friend, and recommended by AI powered alpha 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, OpenAI, which is trying to be a thousand different things, is essentially putting an enormous amount of resources into building a kind of TikTok for AI. But 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.

B (6:51)

I think the metaphor you used was like the toilet bowl, everything kind of flows down in the end.

C (6:56)

There's this idea that I love, that also, I have to confess, I don't really understand. So I apologize to the mathematicians.

B (7:02)

It's a podcast.

C (7:04)

This is a podcast. Right, Exactly. We're all dilettantes here. But there's this idea that I think 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. 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, like, inherently interesting and weird.

A (7:51)

I think the thing that you get at in the piece that feels like the sharpest point to me is the fact that you're. 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 these 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.

C (8:43)

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 seemed 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 interesting 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.

B (10:28)

The word of the moment for what I'm about to describe is brainrot. 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, a return to orality would amount to the great cortical thinning of society. Truth in such a civilization would be more about mnemonics, what is emotionally memorable than empirics, what is true. So, I mean, just play this out for us.

C (11:05)

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, incredible piece of reporting about Netflix telling the folks writing Netflix shows that they have to make TV dumber and more self declaratory. 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 for them to focus on any one thing at one time. So the 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 burgling 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 at 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 and 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 in, I think you talked about it with Malcolm Gladwell. Joe Weisenthal 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 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 implic 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 on the left, Zoran 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, you know, important.

B (14:24)

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 just like 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 gonna watch 12 hour documentaries? Nobody has 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 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 than it was in, 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.

C (15:30)

There's 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 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, but we actually have evidence that students today score worse, right in the US 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 ft, 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 in 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 surpassed 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. Intelligence scores are declining. 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.

B (17:31)

I mean, maybe it's possible that you and Ezra Klein are just the smartest humans who have ever lived. I mean, that might be the logical conclusion of this argument.

C (17:38)

I'm definitely not going to take that bait. I mean that is bait very, very easily labeled. Do not pick up.

A (17:45)

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 hours and hours and hours which get into like 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?

C (18:43)

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 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's 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 Dwarkesh 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 about science and technology. And when you compare those shows to like 1970 conversations between Conservative and liberal intellectuals about the Vietnam War and Gore Vidal 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 Dwarkesh 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 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 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 a quite simplistic and maybe even ironically like post literate analysis of what's actually happening. What's really happening is something much fussier 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. It's more interesting and complicated than that.

A (21:30)

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.

B (21:43)

This week on our branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about how CMOs are using AI today. Josh, you spend a lot of time with CMOs. On a scale from 1 to 10, how are the CMOs doing in this AI era?

D (21:59)

So for most CMOs, I'd say it's an 8 for excitement, maybe a 3 for sleep. I can certainly relate to that last one. I do spend a lot of time with CMOs. I just came out of some AI labs that Google hosts with large groups of CMOs, three things really pop to mind for me. First, we might need to change the job title from Chief Marketing Officer to Change Manager Management Officer. Every CMO I speak to is dealing with so much change. The AI transformation, business transformation, audience transformation, it's just a lot. And so juggling their many hats, actually coping with that change is front and center, top of their minds. They're change management officers as much as Chief Marketing officers. Second, I'm seeing a lot of CMOs really talking about proving the value of all this AI that they've been adopting. They've been testing, they've been trialing, now they're scaling, but they need to show the value and impact of that AI. Third, for CMOs, engagement with the wider C suite has always been a massive important challenge for them. Making sure that everyone across the C suite gets the strategy, understands the marketing goals and objectives related to the business. And actually I generally feel that marketers haven't done a great job with that in relatively recent years. But with AI, with the transformation, our business is actually a real opportunity for CMOs to become growth agents, to actually help the businesses scale in much more interesting new and actually successful ways. So repositioning marketing as a growth agent for businesses is something that a lot of CMOs are thinking about, talking about and trying to engage with their stakeholders.

B (23:33)

And where can people go to find out more about how CMOs are thinking?

D (23:36)

As ever, head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com we publish all of our CMO insights there, interviews and a whole load of of other great content related to CMOs and what's on their mind.

B (23:46)

Thanks, Josh.

D (23:47)

Thanks, Ben.

B (23:59)

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?

C (24:08)

It's affecting me very directly because I, 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.

B (24:25)

You're gonna need like a better studio.

C (24:27)

I am gonna need a better studio. That was the next thing I was gonna get to, which is that I've never been someone who cares very much about production value.

B (24:33)

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.

A (24:41)

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. Ben was at the bottom. Ben Yu. 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.

C (25:00)

I appreciate the compliment. I do think that there is something inchoate and maybe even ineffable about straight to camera performance. We're just days now after Zoran Mandani 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 Ramdani 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 in 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? 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? 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 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, 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?

B (27:02)

You know, it is funny. Cause 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, like, 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.

C (27:29)

Yeah. Comfort. That's interesting. You're right.

B (27:31)

Yeah. In that sense, just.

C (27:33)

It's generational then you've been around 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 the television. Television camera.

B (28:31)

That's a very nice thing to say about Kristi Noem.

C (28:35)

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 it's undeniable in some settings. And I think she was and remains a very. I don't wanna say inauthentic. I wanna 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 stre 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.

A (29:14)

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. At the popularity of Tim Miller, the podcaster. He's been on our show. I'm sure he's. 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 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 Mamdani. Mamdani just understood. And we've talked about this on our podcast as well. Ben and I have talked about this. The halal cart video is something that we would have. That maybe you would have made at BuzzFeed feed. Right? Like it's a piece of content. Right.

B (30:02)

Or Vox.

A (30:02)

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 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 medium of. Of that and the moment. Right? That's my thesis.

C (30:32)

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 Ro. Oh, what? Joe Rogan's gonna expose that Bernie Sanders isn't actually a Democratic socialist. Bernie is Bernie. He's gonna be Bernie with Joe. He's gonna be Bernie, with like a far left podcast, when you know what you wanna say, you will go anywhere.

A (31:13)

I wanna kind of change the subject here and wanna pivot. Derek, you've gone really broad at a moment when the Internet is kind of increasingly niche. You write about public policy, you write about media, you write 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?

C (31:33)

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. If 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, 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. There was a period when Abundance came out where, 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. Eventually it blinds you to what the sun actually is. And you have to look around to really understand politics. I was thinking about this actually just before, 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 year election. 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, please 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.

B (33:40)

I thought you were describing Dave Waggle. But anyway.

C (33:44)

But then after the election, 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 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 sign, 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.

B (34:46)

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. Could you tell us a little what that experience was like? Like how big was abundance from the ins. The Abundance machine.

C (35:14)

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 lands 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. 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 it stands for. I think there was an opening to define what maybe the, 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 were 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, 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. 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. I'm just not, I'm. I'm not particularly used to being being like 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. Cause 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 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.

A (38:02)

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?

C (38:17)

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. I 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, $10.5, it makes $10 million, and that's pathetic. We call that movie a bust. It's a total failure.

B (38:49)

And if a Tweet only gets 10 million views. Yeah.

C (38:52)

I mean, why even wake up in the. I don't even wake up in the morning if I don't have thoughts that are gonna get 10 million views. I think it goes to this point that like. Like, books are a really weird cultural product. I've said this before. They'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.

A (39:20)

Everything is circling the drain like what you were talking about earlier.

C (39:23)

Let me try this again. For the people who are listening while making the call Coffee. The number of people who read Abundance all the way are one circle. The 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, 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, what 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 product of the book is the conversation around the book. And that's a weird thing that books do in a way that maybe other products don't like. There's no podcast that just talk about tweets.

A (40:28)

Yes, there is. It's called Mixed Signals. 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 gonna be in there. Now I don't need to.

C (40:54)

I can absolutely testify to. No. When people ask me now, they say, you know, what should 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 I'm allowed to say this. I don't think there's anything that came close to Fareed Zakaria's show when it came to immediately moving themselves.

B (41:19)

Good for Fareed.

C (41:20)

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 it 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. 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 bouche. You're not eating the whole steak. You're getting four minutes.

B (42:08)

It's a teaser.

C (42:09)

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's almost enervated by the optimal podcast, which is essentially going to give the audience the essence of the book.

B (42:29)

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 gonna 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?

C (43:00)

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 things. I got very lucky when I was 22 years old, 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. 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. So 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. 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 best sellers 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 art 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.

A (45:33)

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.

B (45:40)

Thank you, Derek.

C (45:41)

Thank you guys.

B (45:50)

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A (46:17)

So Ben, it's always a treat for us to be able to, you 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?

B (46:50)

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. And 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. 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 fact, 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, in McLuhan's words, that the medium is the message and that the core forces driving global politics are sort of centrally media forces. I 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. Time. I'm not sure we're. We're moving into the. 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?

A (48:02)

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. Of two days. But 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, 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, 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.

B (48:41)

I guess, in a sense, the question is, is it an age that's sort of where the conversation is centered on media and where media is a 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 de industrialization give us Trump? I suppose the answer is probably yes to all of those things.

A (49:03)

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? I think that mostly they're just charismatic people who people would like in any sort of context. Right.

B (49:19)

I think had Zoran Mamdani been doing Like Little Abundance videos. Sorry. Which, in fact, this very nice, charismatic young politician named Zilnor Myre was doing. Nobody would have cared.

A (49:30)

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. It was really fun to have Derek on with. What a treat. Thank you so much for listening to Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced this week by Josh Billenson and Manny Fadal. 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.

B (50:21)

Yeah. As Josh suggested, I'm sure Ezra has an abundance of notes. If 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.

A (50:40)

That's true. If people see a notable drop off in the show, it's because we've replaced Shino 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.