In an era where having accurate information is paramount, new tech innovations are reshaping how we perceive and consume news. How will AI influence and impact journalism and the media?
Join Raj in a captivating conversation with Nick Thompson – CEO of The Atlantic, author, entrepreneur and thought leader on all things tech – as they discuss how AI is revolutionizing the flow and dissemination of information.
Learn more about Nick’s perspective on the evolving landscape of technology and media, and the intricate challenges and opportunities the industry is facing with the rise of AI.
Links
Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasxthompson/
Visit Nick's website: https://www.nickthompson.com/
Visit the The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/
Connect with Raj: https://www.rajverma.com/
Visit SingleStore: https://www.singlestore.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(01:00:00):
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
(01:00:22):
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.
(01:00:44):
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.
(01:01:17):
(Silence)
(01:01:44):
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?
(01:02:14):
(Silence)
(Laughter)
(01:02:39):
(Silence) And on a scale of one to ten on
just how scared you
were was it terrifying?
(01:03:01):
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
(01:03:28):
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)
(01:03:58):
(Silence)
(01:04:35):
(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?
(01:05:41):
(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
(01:06:05):
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?
(01:06:52):
(Silence)
(Silence)
(01:07:30):
(Silence) (Silence)
Do you also have 24 hours in
the day like the rest of us?
(01:08:03):
(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
(01:08:24):
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
(01:08:44):
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
(01:09:07):
coexistence of AI and journalism and how
do one make the other better?
(Silence)
(01:09:30):
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
(01:09:54):
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.
(01:10:16):
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
(01:10:37):
experiment with them. You have to see how
they can make you be
better at your job within all
(Silence)
(01:11:11):
(Silence)
(01:11:40):
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
(01:12:01):
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
(01:12:23):
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
(01:12:45):
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
(01:13:07):
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
(01:13:28):
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.
(01:13:49):
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
(01:14:12):
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)
(01:14:43):
(Silence)
(01:15:10):
Oh that's that's fascinating and and the
and the was the was the output what
you're saying pretty damn good. (Silence)
(01:16:10):
(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
(01:16:30):
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)
(01:17:06):
(Silence)
(01:17:30):
(Laughter)
(01:18:36):
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
(01:18:57):
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,
(01:19:17):
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)
(01:19:38):
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?
(01:20:00):
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
(01:20:21):
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
(01:20:52):
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
(01:21:15):
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)
(01:21:57):
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)
(01:22:28):
(Silence)
(Silence) (Silence)
(01:23:07):
(...) (Silence) (Silence)
(01:23:29):
(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
(01:23:51):
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.
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
(01:00:22):
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.
(01:00:44):
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.
(01:01:17):
(Silence)
(01:01:44):
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?
(01:02:14):
(Silence)
(Laughter)
(01:02:39):
(Silence) And on a scale of one to ten on
just how scared you
were was it terrifying?
(01:03:01):
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
(01:03:28):
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)
(01:03:58):
(Silence)
(01:04:35):
(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?
(01:05:41):
(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
(01:06:05):
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?
(01:06:52):
(Silence)
(Silence)
(01:07:30):
(Silence) (Silence)
Do you also have 24 hours in
the day like the rest of us?
(01:08:03):
(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
(01:08:24):
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
(01:08:44):
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
(01:09:07):
coexistence of AI and journalism and how
do one make the other better?
(Silence)
(01:09:30):
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
(01:09:54):
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.
(01:10:16):
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
(01:10:37):
experiment with them. You have to see how
they can make you be
better at your job within all
(Silence)
(01:11:11):
(Silence)
(01:11:40):
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
(01:12:01):
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
(01:12:23):
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
(01:12:45):
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
(01:13:07):
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
(01:13:28):
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.
(01:13:49):
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
(01:14:12):
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)
(01:14:43):
(Silence)
(01:15:10):
Oh that's that's fascinating and and the
and the was the was the output what
you're saying pretty damn good. (Silence)
(01:16:10):
(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
(01:16:30):
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)
(01:17:06):
(Silence)
(01:17:30):
(Laughter)
(01:18:36):
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
(01:18:57):
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,
(01:19:17):
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)
(01:19:38):
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?
(01:20:00):
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
(01:20:21):
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
(01:20:52):
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
(01:21:15):
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)
(01:21:57):
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)
(01:22:28):
(Silence)
(Silence) (Silence)
(01:23:07):
(...) (Silence) (Silence)
(01:23:29):
(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
(01:23:51):
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.
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