My guest this week is Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, one of the most iconic magazines in America.(...) Nick has an illustrious career as a journalist. Prior to leading The Atlantic, Nick was editor-in-chief for Wired and at a major news outlet, including CNN, Bloomberg, and The New Yorker.
He's written and edited many famous articles, including a piece in Wired magazine that was turned into the movie Argo starring Ben Affleck.(...) Nick is also a really fast marathon runner, a musician, and a tech entrepreneur. to have you on the show. You know it's you're one of the rare sort of individuals which has married technology and media. So what came first technology or media or.
(Silence) Oh that's that's that's fascinating and you know for all the guests that we've had you're unique in multiple ways but this is one question that I can't ask any of my other guests. How does it feel to be abducted? (Silence) (Laughter) (Silence) And on a scale of one to ten on just how scared you were was it terrifying? Oh wow what was it nine for nine yeah I would imagine it probably would have been sort of nine point nine but it's.
(Silence) Yeah the different era now I quite quite quite understand and you said that was one of the experiences that led you to journalism. Could we elaborate on that? (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) And were you fond of writing? Was that an expression of your emotions cathartic all that growing up school kid high school during those times?
(Silence) Fascinating and someone with such diverse interest I mean running the marathon in two hours 29 minutes Chicago at that and and you know acoustic guitar albums and you know entrepreneur and a journalist of the highest merit.(...) What does a human having diverse interest? How come you have those? What do they do for you? How are you just have this unsatiable appetite for just looking at the next greatest thing to to kind of wrap your hands around?
(Silence) (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) Do you also have 24 hours in the day like the rest of us?
(Silence) Now talking about journalism and AI I mean the other stuff that I'm fascinated by is speakeasy AI and and we should of course talk about it in person as well someday but if if I was to you know when I talk to a few other writers especially in Hollywood etc with all the strikes and all that going on it seems like AI and journalism have been at odds for some time now.(...) Yeah I understand that you know you can't truly celebrate something that you can't
quite understand and I like what you say don't don't be afraid of AI embrace it or I'm paraphrasing of course. You seem to be someone who's embraced AI and in doing so made journalism better if if the performance of Atlantic was anything to to go by. What are your views of the coexistence of AI and journalism and how do one make the other better? (Silence) AI. It's skeptical of AI because the media industry in general has had a rough relationship with platforms over the last
10 years. If this is the new platform, maybe the relationship will be rough. (...) There's lots of concerns that AI could be used to replace us. Then there's the very specific concern that many of these large language models were trained without giving compensation on data created by journalists. There's a lot of antipathy.(...) My view is that
none of those arguments is wrong. In fact, I'm deep in negotiations on the licensing question, the last question I raised.(...) My general view is, look, I don't know what AI is going to do to journalism. I don't know what it's going to do to media. I'm pretty confident it's going to do a bunch of bad things. I'm also pretty confident it's going to do a bunch of amazing things.
My role over the next few years, or one of the roles I'll play, is trying to help figure out how to get the most good from it, and the least bad, both for the Atlantic specifically and for the media industry in general. To do that, you can't run away from it. You have to run towards it. You have to learn how the tools work. You have to
experiment with them. You have to see how they can make you be better at your job within all (Silence) (Silence) Yeah and and and you think it plays out over the next six months, 18 months, three years, where do you think we get some sort of resolution that after that it's diminishing returns for both parties of sorts? in the next six months, we figure out some things. We'll figure out the licensing issue, for example. The New
York Times has sued OpenAI. Maybe that won't get settled in the next six months. Maybe it'll get settled in the next 12 months. But there will be that. The question of fair compensation for the media industry, that will be resolved. There's a lot of unknowns there. I think we'll also start to get the first truly useful tools in our industry.(...) Large language models have been around for a year and a half out from ChatGPT,
and there's very little. There aren't that many use cases that are really good. We use it to create audio on our stories. We're working on translation. I know the publications use translation. New York Magazine has a cool bot for helping you buy things. There's cool test use cases. But I think in the next year, we'll have some great use cases.(...) In the next three years, we'll probably get a better sense of what happens to search and what
happens to the internet. There's a situation where search goes away as we know it. There is no Google with 10 blue links, which is how most people find news organizations.(...) There's a possibility that actually we end up getting as much search referral traffic, but it just comes from new search engines, whether it's one run by Google, whether it's through Perplexity, whether it's through OpenAI. There's a report in recently in MIT Tech
Review about plans to that end. So maybe in the next two to three years, we'll get that. And then the next stage, I think you asked one year, three or five years, (...) then maybe after that, we start to get clarity on what is the competitive landscape? What is it-- right now, we compete with a relatively small subset of publications for attention for writers. You will probably compete with the same publications for writers, but where will
we compete for attention? Will there be new media ecosystems that are entirely algorithmically generated, which therefore have a very low cost basis against which we'll have to compete? That would be complicated. So we'll have a much better sense then about what exactly we're doing and how exactly we're going to compete. didn't you just write a book uh using AI a children's book is that true or yeah?
(Silence) (Laughter) (Silence) Oh that's that's fascinating and and the and the was the was the output what you're saying pretty damn good. (Silence) (Silence) Oh wow this is uh but you know I can almost bet you my bottom dollar that AI is not going to be able to write the next Argo a fascinating movie. I've been waiting to ask you this question how did you happen upon that uh that story and how yeah Argo uh and uh and how did what
did he feel of the end result? I thought it was awesome but for you who had the blueprint for it what was your sort of uh yeah. (Silence) (Silence) (Laughter) was like, "Everybody else, this idea is terrible." And Chris was like, "No, it's
great. We're doing it." And so despite the democracy being very much against this idea, it got assigned,(...) and then Josh did a great job, wrote a wonderful story.(...) We knew he wanted to sell it to Hollywood, and so the art was storyboarding, made it look, make it as easy as possible for Hollywood to see what it was. And then remarkably, it sold. And then even more remarkably, it
got made. And then, of course, the journalism, you have all these stories that get optioned, and they always get attached to people with big names, and you get really excited, and then nothing happens. But somehow, this story got made, and then amazingly,(...) it got made, and it was good. And then amazingly, it won an Academy Award. So I was, of course, thrilled. It was Josh's story. It's Josh did the hard work. Josh was involved with
the movie. I just watched it. But I Yeah that was fascinating fascinating. (Silence) Absolutely you should do that.(...) You're also a tech entrepreneur you know it's um so what as a tech entrepreneur what are your hopes expectations from AI and and what is it that you're probably apprehensive about in this entire AI world? I mean, I've been an entrepreneur twice.
I started a company called The Adivist, which was, you know, multimedia CMS.(...) It actually started as a magazine, right, and the way these things evolve, where we were like, let's make a magazine that's optimized for telling stories in multiple formats. As we started to make the magazine, we realized the tools to create it didn't exist. We built the tools, and we realized the tools were a lot more valuable than the stories. We licensed the tools, and then eventually we sold the company to
WordPress. And that was a couple years, ups and downs. You know, the final valuation was,(...) you know, entrepreneurs listening to this, a subset of them will understand, but the final sale price was somewhat slower So that was entrepreneur journey number one. And then the second was this company called SpeakEasy, which you mentioned briefly before, which we started, I started two years ago. And the idea, it was started like a little bit before chat
GPT, interestingly. And the goal was to try to build a platform on the Internet where conversations would lead to, you know, enlightenment, not hostility, right? Where they would, you know, people would feel like they'd learned something and not as though they'd been stuck in a filter bubble or,(...) and so we tried very hard with the nudges we had on the platform to nudge people to productive conversations. We built, (Silence) we had incredible conversations, maybe
500 beta conversations. And then we tried to productize it, and that was a lot harder. And finding business models a lot harder. And so we ended up selling the technology to Amplica Labs, and that closed a couple weeks ago. And so we, you know, as you may have noticed, BeakEasy did not displace (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) (...) (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) (Silence) Thanks Nick for the engaging insights
today. We've covered a lot but there's still much to unpack about the future of journalism and AI.(...) Join us in part two where we dive deeper into the ethical challenges and innovations shaping the media landscape. Don't miss it as we continue exploring these crucial topics. See you in the next episode.