Derek Thompson
Journalist and author who spent 17 years at The Atlantic before moving to independent writing on Substack, covering housing, energy, technology and changes in s...
“I thought, wow, like even the organization trying to build God is busying itself trying to build television.”
Recode Media · Media & Creator Economy · October 2026
Thompson was explaining how his "Everything Is Television" column came together. Three separate observations clicked into one idea: Spotify pushing his podcast to video, a Meta court filing saying most Instagram time is spent watching strangers' footage, and OpenAI launching a video app.
Transcript
…company. We can't be a social media monopoly because the vast majority of people on Instagram aren't connecting with friends. They're spending almost all their time watching footage from other people. So that's not social at all. And I thought, aha, Instagram, according to Instagram, is television.
Yes.
And then I think, I think it was OpenAI was like trying to launch, was it like Sora? It ended up not being much of anything. But then I thought, wow, like even the organization trying to build God is busying itself trying to build television. You know, sometimes I don't get it right. I read a lot of things where I look back a year later and I'm like, Jesus Christ, I hope the internet burns down and no one ever finds that article. I think I basically got this right, but I am open to the idea. If someone had a really, really good counterpoint, I'd be interested to hear it. This is
not a counterpoint, but it's a question. You sort of describe this as sort of like, this is the inexorable way that things evolve, the way you were just describing it. But you were also just saying, literally, one of the reasons I started becoming a video podcaster is my employer slash business…
My theory is that it's corporate incentives because it's what people want. Companies have attempted pivoting to video infinity times, and you understand the history of pivot to video better than I do. But certainly the fact that some pivots to video became a joke, like a literal laugh line in news…
mesmerized. Give me more.
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