Derek Thompson

And so you can't just say, oh, everything's getting worse, everything's getting better.

Everything's getting everything because there's so much stuff out there that it's very hard to pin it all with one brush.

I want to go back to one thing you said that just triggered a thought.

And when you were talking about you and Mike seeing a new piece of information and wondering, is this true?

That decline of instinctive trust in media.

On the one hand, you could argue that that's a bad sign because it suggests that our media diets, even when we try very hard to keep them clean, can still be encrusted with conspiratorial nonsense.

At the same time, a part of me thinks that decline of trust is a part of wisdom for consumers.

Like if you go back to, I was reading this interview that Jack Schaefer did for Harper's Magazine a few months ago.

Jack Schaefer, a great media critic.

He was talking about how in the 1950s, 1960s,

Newspapers didn't publish the news as we understood it.

Newspapers published what the government told them.

It was only the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, he said, when news developed a slightly more antagonistic relationship with government, where the news wasn't just the press secretary said X. It was the press secretary said X, but that's a lie.

And there's a way in which, obviously, we don't want an implosion of trust such that nobody believes anything that they see and we all live in this nihilistic world of nonsense.

But there's a way in which trusting our eyes and ears a little bit less, holding on to skepticism a little bit longer, it's not the worst way to be a modern news consumer.

I want to close on a topic that I know you care a lot about.

I care a lot about it, too, which is artificial intelligence.

I think the way that I want to do this, the way I want to get into this particular subject is to point out, and I'm riffing, I think, right now on my friend Kevin Roos' observation, that there's an enormous disconnect within the media, among journalists, about whether AI is...

essentially just a piece of hallucinating, copycatting, stochastic parrot, auto-complete, nonsense bullshit on the one hand, versus other people who I think are more enmeshed in the latest offerings from frontier models, who are playing with the very latest, most cutting-edge tools,

and are becoming like extremely AI pilled.