45: Nicholas Thompson - A Life of Long Form

If the writer can only jump over a 6-foot bar, your job is not to like try to get them over a 7-foot bar. Your job is to get them over that 6-foot bar. You've got to figure out what is the best version of the story given their skills, given the idea, given the time, and you got to get them there. Arrest the journalists, you like buy the publications, shut down the critical publications, right? Like that is part of the process of democracy to autocracy. I am going to fight that because I believe in democracy. Well, there's something nice in the continuum that The Atlantic has played this role. We were founded to help create conversations to help prevent a civil war, and Martin Luther King published a letter from a Birmingham jail. And like, there is something important about keeping this publication having Good, accurate journalism matter. You know, my goal is what is the thing that I can do that will increase the number of good stories? Because I think that's important.

I've had a few people ask me if I'm a journalist.

What do you say?

I usually say, like, I don't think so.

If your primary commitment is to your audience, you're a journalist, right? If your primary commitment is to the guest or to an advertiser, maybe you're not. It's been 33 years since, like, I actually cared even 1 millionth of 1% whether I was ahead or behind anybody in a race. This is one of the funnier things. I remember, I think it was Jeff Goldblatt, the editor-in-chief. He's like, you know what was really surprising about your book? Like, you've been this elite runner for like 30 years and you've won 3 races, right? I'm like, yeah, there are 40,000 people in a marathon. One wins, 39,999 don't, right?

There's a part where you're talking about a boat that never touched water, the little canoe that you run by. And this is also—

You're the first person to ask me about this. I like that detail matters so much to me and like no one has asked me about this thing. So thank you.

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 45 with Nicholas Thompson. Nick is the CEO of The Atlantic. Nick has spent his career focused on journalism in America. Obviously that is especially true today at The Atlantic. But that also includes extended time at Wired, where he was the editor-in-chief, as well as an editor in an earlier part of his career, and The New Yorker, where he was an editor and ran thenewyorker.com. Nick is also an incredibly serious runner. I discovered him in the fall when he published an excerpt from his most recent book, The Running Ground, about his relationship with his father and his relationship to running. But one of the things I most admire about Nick is the way he combines deep focus and consistency and discipline with just an unending curiosity about the world. He is an explorer in some ways and a machine in others. The latter obviously applies to his world-beating running. I hope you're inspired in some dimension, whether it be to take stories more seriously, to push yourself to do things that are really hard, or even to wonder about what other versions of you you haven't discovered yet. Before the conversation with Nick, I'd like to thank Notion. Notion is the presenting partner of Dialectic and a huge part of what makes the show possible. They recently launched a new campaign under the idea of thinking together, and I think that is so representative of what the product is. The goal is not to automate away people. The goal is to build amazing things together. And as AI increasingly moves into every crevice of how we work, being able to have a tool that from a principle standpoint is thinking about how AI can make us all better together. And that actually lives in the place where you do your work with your colleagues, whether that be writing, analyzing, developing, shipping, is remarkably powerful. For me, I think it's amazing to have a tool that, whether it be Notion AI or custom agents, that is built from the ground up to help you automate the busy work and spend more of your time on the work that deeply matters. If you haven't used Notion in a while, you can learn more at notion.com/dialectic. And if you're doing interesting things with Notion agents or otherwise, please share them with me. I would love to learn more. Thanks again to Notion. And here's my conversation with Nicholas Thompson. Nicholas Thompson, thank you for being here.

Thank you for inviting me on.

I wanna start, well, first I should say I ran my first New York City Marathon. First race, first marathon, first anything.

Wait, your first race was a marathon?

First race, New York City Marathon. And the night before I was listening to the first chapter of your book.

Amazing.

I wrote to you about— Amazing. That was great. Honorable. It was meaningful. So this is cool to do this.

You clearly weren't listening to the chapter on how to train for a marathon if you'd never run a race before, but whatever. Hey. I'm delighted you did it, that's all.

I run a lot, I just hadn't done a race.

Okay, that's fine actually.

Yeah, I wanna start somewhere else though, which is words.

Words, okay.

I think this is a topic that, I mean, like Neil Postman and Walter Ong and McLuhan and people were talking about years ago. You gave an interview recently, really lovely interview with Kaurav Ahuja for Timeless, written interview, and you said this about kind of the future of the Atlantic. You said, the big risks are real, Will AI search eat the web? Will Google stop sending people out? If so, what happens to us? What if we shift from screens to whatever Jony Ive is building? Wristbands with no screen, all audio. We don't have as an aggressive audio operation as we do text. There will still be people who read words, but you can imagine words becoming less and less of the world. And we're really good at words. You wrote a lovely book about running, mostly about running, and about what running has done for you.

Yeah.

I'm curious what writing has done for you.

What has writing done for me? So for me, writing is a way of thinking and processing, right? The transition of taking thoughts from inside your head and putting them into a page is, it's not just translation, it's bidirectional. And so you end up being able to, forcing yourself to write forces yourself to think more analytically and to like process complicated things. So I'll say many of the things I've written have been ways of getting clarity on the things I've thought. It has also been a sort of a format and a mechanism for like my most ambitious works, both the book I wrote 17 years ago about the Cold War, this book that I wrote about running were both seminal moments for me professionally, like how I decided to write them, how I decided to do them. And then also, as you know, you know from the book, I'm a journalist who wasn't really confident in his writing as a young person. You know, at grade school, I was a math kid, not a writing kid. And learning to become confident in my writing was a very hard process that taught me a lot that I can apply to other parts of my life.

What about reading?

Reading? I was a big reader as a child. I grew up in a family with books everywhere, bookshelves everywhere. If you had free time, you just read, right? And you would go out in the yard and you'd play, I'd toss the tennis ball up the air and hit it with the baseball bat, and then I'd go and I'd read. And I loved it, and my mother read to me. Much of the best information in the world is stored in books. And that, you know, if you enjoy reading and you can learn how to tell little stories in your head as you read, you can accumulate a lot of information. You can enter all kinds of different worlds. And I just think a lot of human knowledge can be passed down through books. I think one of the things that is most hardest for me to watch is the culture of reading going away. And observing young people traveling on the subway, traveling by train. I remember when I traveled by train when I was a young man, you just bring a book, right? You bring a paperback book, right? And I remember traveling through Africa and, you know, taking buses everywhere and trains. You just read everywhere. You stop on the side of the road and you read somewhere, and then you go to a new town, you try to find a bookstore, you swap your book with someone at a hostel. Like, it's just this wonderful exchange of information to see that dying because now everybody, you just use Instagram. And I can see it in myself where I'm pulled into work, I'm pulled into my phone. It's too bad, but it is what it is.

I think one implication maybe in the quote and one maybe counterargument, I don't know if it's a full counterargument to what you just said at least, would be that it's not that we inherently are losing depth of ideas. For example, we're doing a 2-hour podcast or lots of different formats. What specifically about the written word, text, whether it be writing or reading it, do you think, like, what is a society who has that, or young people who have that, what do they gain?

That's a great question. And I agree with you, right? I'm not one of those people who's like, oh my God, we're all getting dumb 'cause we don't read books. Like, if you look at the complexity of the art we create, you look at the complexity of, look at the complexity of the TV shows we create today versus 30 years ago, and tell me that they're not more sophisticated. And our ability to, you know, listen to books while we're walking, listen to podcasts while we're walking, right? So we have this incredible capacity. I just mean that the amount of time that people spend reading books, particularly younger generations, is significantly lower. And some of that time they substitute with really great stuff, right? Like listening to your podcast. Some of that stuff they substitute with useful social media stuff, right? Like watching YouTube videos that teach you how to like, bend a soccer kick so it curves into the corner of the goal, right? Like, there's amazing stuff, or like how to like fix your hair dryer, right? You know, YouTube's incredible.

Even amazing like video essays, like with incredible depth.

Right, or like here's how quantum computing works. Like some of it's just awesome. A lot of it's totally trivial, and a lot of it's negative, right? And so back to your question, I'm not sure, I mean, what's nice about reading, right? If you create a book, we create a magazine, you create, you can like, everybody can read the same thing, right? So it's sometimes, some ways a conversation is better in that I can react to you specifically. A book is better in the way that you can read a passage, I can read a passage, I can share it with you. You just gave me this book, "Not Fade Away," which you've read, right? It means something to you. And the words that I'll read when I read it are precisely the same as the words that you read, right? And it's a little different if you had said, hey, type in this series of AI queries, or here, like, I will get different words. And so the common ground we'll have, right? So this is an artifact right here, Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton, right? Never read, don't know anything about it, but I'll read it. You gave it to me and it's, it meant something to you. And so I trust that it will mean something to me. And it's this beautiful artifact that we can share. You know, we can annotate and there's maybe some value we can add to the page, but really it's like this thing that exists. And then I can tell somebody else and they can go and buy the exact same thing. And It's also, there's something wonderful about, you know, the image of like, you go for a walk and you put this in your bag and you stop and you sit on a bench and you read it and it's the same as it was in your bag, right? And it will be the same when you get back. And if you go and you walk and you have your phone, you have a couple things, right? The information is constantly changing and you're probably gonna get a bunch of notifications and the whole experience will be much more complicated. And it's also like, you take out your phone, right? And I go and I look up Peter Barton's book, right, on my phone here. But suddenly there's all this other stress that's attached to it, right? Because I know that elsewhere in this phone is my email, right? And my Signal and my WhatsApp. And, you know, there's just something beautiful about the purity of this and sitting down doing it. Now, it doesn't mean that I'm reading a book a day. Like, Lord, I wish I was. But, There's something great about the format, about the cultural history, and obviously they're gonna— we'll still be reading books in 50 years. I just don't know if we'll be reading as many as we are now.

It's a great answer. Maybe one last thread on this, which would be maybe a little closer to the work of The Atlantic. Words, written text, have become incredibly cheap.

Yeah.

Or if infinite. And there's a meta thing here, which is like, how much are we gonna care about who the words came from? And does it have to be Jackson plus AI, so on and so forth? But what remains scarce as you think maybe specifically about words and building an institution around words?

Yeah. Okay, so this is like one of the existentials at the core of my business problems, right? The things that we can do right now that are scarce, right, at The Atlantic, or ideally that I could do in The Running Ground, right, are write with a certain kind of style and flair that's individual, individualistic, and is tied to Nick, right? I write in a very specific way. I can't describe it, right? And if you fed all of my essays into an AI, it still can't mimic it in a way that seems right. It can, you know, maybe it was closer than it was a year ago, but it can't do it. You take someone who's an even better writer, Take John McPhee and ask AI to write like John McPhee. It doesn't sound anything like John McPhee, right? So there's a distinct element of style, right? AI moves to this kind of— it's a style that we like, obviously, but it's kind of homogenous, and it's different from the best writers who have very distinct styles, right? Like the writers I love, many of them sound very different, right? And I used to play a game when I was at The New Yorker. I would like try to read each Talk of the Town where the byline is at the end and try to guess who it was based on their style, right? And there, you know, some people, I just, I don't know if there's a single sentence I've written in my life that is as good as any sentence that Anthony Lane has written, right? Like there's just, there's a quality of writing that is distinct in that AI can't match. So if we can maintain that at The Atlantic, great.

Real quick, let's say I feel pretty confident that Claude 5.5 or whatever will be able to write John McPhee-like writing based on the corpus of current John McPhee. That doesn't mean it can do whatever John would write next.

Right.

But let's assume that's— maybe you disagree. My sense is that will probably— like, it will at the very least be able to write exactly how you write in The Running Ground.

It might. I mean, it can't now, and it's not making as much progress as I would have thought. Okay. Right. Fair. But 5.5, who knows? So, okay, so number one is style, right? But you're right, that may go away. Second thing is reporting, right? So, with The Running Ground, or many people at this Atlantic, right? Like, I've, you know, take any one of these issues, right? And there are people who made phone calls and talked to people who didn't wanna talk to and doorstop people. And like, you know, I don't know, I'm sure that like Adam Serwer on the courts here, right? Has many times talked to people who have absolutely no interest and probably shouldn't be talking to Adam Serwer about the courts, but he has like somehow gotten them to talk to him and they've said interesting things that they're not going to say to Claude 5.5, even if it's got, you know, voice imitation. Um, so that's, that's an important skill. So that's, that's still scarce. And then there is People like to read other humans. They like to have a human connection. And so, you know, we put out this magazine here, we've just, this is the one that we've got stacked up, and we've got the names of 25 people, right? And each of them has this distinct personality, and you probably like some, you probably don't like some, you probably never heard of some, right? And some of them, like, I adore, and I'll read anything they write, and I have an intense emotional relationship, despite, even though those people work at The Atlantic, some I haven't met, right? And there's a humanness that is really important, which is why I think even Claude 15.5, there'll still be a demand for The Atlantic. Now, what I worry about is when there's Claude 15.5, it will be pretty easy to write a good essay from scratch for anybody, right? And not only that, at this point, there'll be avatars that have been created on— you'll have no idea what is real and what is false. You'll go on social media and you won't know whether anybody is human, right? It will be just this, and people like to say it will all be slop, but it won't be slop then, right? It might be slop now, but it's gonna be good.

It's gonna be amazing.

At least engaging. It's gonna be engaging. And so there are gonna be these infinitely beautiful people saying exactly what you want to say, right? And your social media feed is gonna be filled with them. And I'm gonna be competing with them with this print magazine, right? And that's the future. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, maybe even just to sort of go halfway, there is probably— maybe this is a good thing, but there are probably a whole bunch of people who currently, who have a lot of humanness or a lot of humanity, and maybe even have interesting stories but don't have the, uh, skill set or experience to write in the way that an Atlantic or a New Yorker writer might write. And it's possible that this harness or container might allow them to tell those human stories with a lot of AI help And maybe we land, it's hard to, the question is also like, what will people tolerate? Are we gonna need to know?

I mean, this is a really interesting question, 'cause what I haven't seen yet, right? And I love AI, I use it all the time. I've used, I don't know how many tokens I've spent today, but a lot of tokens, right? And I'm running agent farms and I'm asking queries and I'm working in different models. And I don't know what was, last thing I did, I have a race coming up on Saturday. I snapped a photograph of the menu and I asked like, based on what I ate for breakfast and based on what my nutritional needs are for Saturday, what should I order for lunch, right? That's awesome, right? Like, and that's silly and stupid, but like the agent farms are amazing. What I have not seen, and maybe it's 'cause I haven't, maybe 'cause it's just not visible, I have not seen a journalist whose work prior to 2023 or 2024 was mediocre produce exceptional work, right? I have yet to see someone, I've seen people who produced exceptional work use AI and produce exceptional work this year. I've seen people who produce bad work use AI and produce bad work, right? I haven't seen anybody—

Skip the jump.

And that, surely that moment will come and maybe that person is out there, right? But most of the stories you read about people using AI, they're producing kind of garbage stories, right? You hear about AI being useful for good journalists doing investigative journalism, like, oh, this AI helped us build this map, which helped us tell this story. But those are great journalists who are using the tools to further their great journalism. One of the most interesting moments for me will be when there's a mid journalist or a mid writer who produces exceptional work.

Yeah, who maybe could become a great journalist, but isn't a great writer.

Or the other way around, right? Is a great writer, but doesn't know how to write. Like, who knows? Like maybe there's someone who has, like most of the people here on this list, they have like all the skills or there are 10 things that make you, that maybe they got 8 of them, right? And maybe there's someone out there who has 6 and can use AI to fill the gaps. I just haven't seen it yet. And it will happen, I just haven't seen it. And you would have thought, given what you can code by now, right? And like, given like how powerful these tools are and how amazing they are, you would have thought it would have happened.

I agree. I wanna talk a little bit about maybe stories and then a bunch of the other kind of aspects of journalism and institutions. There's a quote from, I think the same interview, you're talking about, the rest of your career. You say there will, that, excuse me, that will be my North Star for the rest of my career. What is the thing I can do that will most increase good stories in the world? It's probably influenced by my grandfather. He spent his whole life trying to make America work. My role is to do that through journalism, right? Why do stories matter so much?

Well, I do think that having stories that people can agree and they can discuss is like one of the foundations of democracy, right? And that You know, we make decisions on who should govern and what rules they should pass once they govern and how we should treat each other, in part based on stories, right? We hear the story of what happened to Renee Goode, and like, it's very important to understand what actually happened to understand him. But this is like, this is why ICE was there. This is what ICE wants. This is what Renee wants. This is what her family— what her family wanted. This is what she was doing. Okay, now there's a contentious question of what happened on that road, and like What was she doing in the car, and what were her intentions, and did she actually hit the guy? And trying to get that right, right, and then trying to get it right, make it accurate, and then tell the story helps the world and helps America understand, like, what's happening in the country. And you can make a decision. Oh, okay, I've now read this, I understand this, everybody's talking about it, we'll have an argument, and I think there should be more ICE agents, or I think there should be fewer ICE agents, or I think the ICE agents should act differently. And so having accurate information having people agree at least that this is the information we should discuss helps make society function, right? And it also, you know, if there's no one to report on what happens to Renee Good and the benefits and the costs of having ICE in Minnesota, then there's no feedback to the government, right? And so what happened after that? Well, there was a story, there was an understanding, we realized what had happened, and even the Trump administration said, "Oh wait, we've gone too far," and changed the policies. And so having good, accurate journalism matters. So, you know, my goal is, you know, when I said that quote, I was describing a little bit of my career transition, which is I started as an editor and then I became a writer and then I was back an editor and then I was an editor-in-chief. And then I took this job as CEO and, the common thread was that at each moment I was making the choice. And in between, I also like, I ran the website for The New Yorker and then I ran the product and engineering team there. Each choice was like, what is the thing that I can do that will increase the number of good stories? 'Cause I think that's important. And I can write one good story every few weeks or months, right? I can edit 5 or I can build a business that allows us to publish hundreds, right? So that was sort of the fundamental logic in why I took this job at The Atlantic, which many people are like, why? You're a journalist, you're an artist. Why would you go be a capitalist and be the CEO? And it must just be 'cause you're paid more. Well, no, right? It's because, you know, if I'm good at it, and maybe I am, maybe I'm not, if you're good at it, you have this very positive effect on the amount of journalism in the world.

The word story is interesting here, which is, One of the things that has come up as I've been doing the podcast is I've had a few people ask me if I'm a journalist.

What do you say?

I usually say like, I don't think so. And I'm interested in, you also use the word reporting, which is like one end of the spectrum. Stories can mean a lot of things. Some of these amazing YouTube videos are amazing stories. Are they reporting? Like, I'm curious, I mean, maybe to be really specific, like what the role of journalism is. And what makes a journalist, but also more broadly, like, I would even assume some of the things that you guys have done over the years at all the publications, like, some skew more like journalism reporting in the way we were talking about with ICE or whatever. And some are like, this is a crazy, your colleague vanishing. Like, is that journalism? Like, I don't know.

Yeah, that's funny. I, you know, that, I don't quite know how to define it, and the lines are changing, and are you a journalist as someone who, You know, whoever first posted that video, again, like the Renée Goode video, are they a journalist? Is the first person who tweeted it or did a sophisticated Twitter thread? Is the first person who called two sources the journalist? Like, who is the first journalist? I don't know the answer to that. You know, know it when I see it, but have a hard time defining it. Let's go back to that story of the guy disappearing, 'cause I think it's a really, it's a fun story, and I think I can maybe answer your question through it. We're talking about the story that I did at Wired where I was an editor, and my colleague Evan Ratliff wrote a story about how people disappear, right? Like, fake their deaths and start their lives over. And he talked to a private investigator. And this is like 2012, maybe? No, it was earlier than that. Earlier. Okay. It's 2008 or '09. I think it was probably '09, right? It was early Twitter. When was Twitter founded? Like '07, '08? '07. '07, right? So it's '09, right? So it's early Twitter. And I think the first story runs in the spring and the second story runs in the summer. And the first story is like, this is how it can be done. And then after that story ran, we said, all right, now we're gonna run an experiment. Evan's going to go on the run. He's essentially gonna fake his death and go on the run. And I'm gonna serve as a private investigator and I'm gonna release all the information that a private investigator would have. Like, I'm gonna have access to his credit cards, I'm gonna have access to his like E-ZPass, I'm gonna be able to interview his family members.

By the way, this is a YouTube video. This is like a MrBeast video now.

Yeah, totally. And it was so fun. And then like, I'm gonna post those on Twitter and people are gonna hunt for him. And if anybody finds him in 30 days, they get $5,000. If he can last 30 days, he gets $5,000. And so then all these people start hunting and he makes a mistake. He, at one point, he, I can't remember what it is, but he was trying to use Tor and he like logged into the internet not using Tor. And then somehow he got tracked, but the person who tracked him didn't tip him off that he tracked him. So then they had an IP address, and then from the IP address, they were able to find his burner Twitter account, and then they followed his burner Twitter account. And one of his rules was that he was supposed to act like a person on the run, which is you don't go total cypher. You create a new identity and you start like posting and living as that person, right? 'Cause he could have just like gone and hiked Mount Rainier in a hut, right? And that's no fun, right? And so, He then, I think he followed the Twitter account as like a fembot so Evan wouldn't recognize it, and then Evan tweeted something about being in New Orleans, and so they then, I had put out that Evan was gluten-free, and so then they like talked to all the gluten-free pizzerias. Anyway, they track him down in New Orleans. It was one of the most amazing things. But the reason we did that story, A, it was fun, right? And Wired likes having fun, but two, there's this tension that we're trying to understand, which is the internet makes it easier to start over and it makes it easier to get tracked, right? Which is, it's still the tension, right? Same thing like AI, like you can create a new identity and create a new persona, but you're also walking down the street and there's a Ring camera everywhere and everybody's Tesla's tracking you too, right? And like your phone is giving off information, like your heartbeat might be giving off information that like some drone is collecting, like you don't know. And so we were trying to get at the, you know, you can just say, "Who knows? Privacy, we have more, we have less," right? Or you can say, "Here's the story," right? And so that was a story that was like fun and it was weird. It was also an interesting story about Twitter and how groups form. Like there were all these different interesting elements that were ways of looking at things in the world that matter. And so it was fun, but it was also, it probably shaped perceptions and conversations about stuff that matters.

Was it journalism?

Yeah, it was definitely journalism.

So am I a journalist? What do you think? I'll tell you why I think I'm not, is my entire goal is to, not in a, for lack of a better word, fake way, my goal is to make my guests shine in some way and help the world see what I think is really special about them.

Yeah.

I'm not trying to put a veneer on them. I'm not trying to like—

But are you trying to get the truth? Like if somebody was a jerk and like kind of a disreputable person, and you didn't realize that when you booked them, right? So you can't get out by saying, "I wouldn't book that person." But you realize that while you're interviewing them. Would you hide that or not?

I've run this, a variation of this thought experiment, which is like, people have asked me, like, "Would you interview Trump?" And one main reason I would be quite afraid to is I think he, probably in almost every environment, most people meet him, he probably charms their socks off, right? Um, so as a slight caveat, I really, I put a lot of scrutiny into who I talk to, and I try to talk to people who I think, um, truth for them or trueness for them is a way, is something I'm, I think is good or I'm attracted to or something. Yeah, it's a hard question. Um, and I think maybe I, at the very least, if I saw that there were dark parts of them and light parts or something like that, I would try to point at the thing that I thought was good in them.

But would you let them hide or would you, is your primary commitment to your audience or is your primary commitment to your guests? That's a great question.

I'm not sure I really have been forced to answer that question yet.

Yeah, all right, well, again, I don't know how the journalist, I don't know how to define a journalist, but, If your primary commitment is to your audience, you're a journalist, right? If your primary commitment is to the guest or to an advertiser, maybe you're not.

Food for thought. I like that a lot. Media institutions, first and foremost, maybe not a long answer, but why are they worth preserving? Why do they matter so much?

Media institutions?

At least one like The Atlantic or The New Yorker, these things that have been around for a long time that could go the way of, ah, people aren't gonna read that much text.

Well, and some do, right? Some publications disappear, right? There are amazing publications that don't matter as much as they used to, right? And there are new publications that matter. I don't think there's anything, well, there's something nice in the continuum that The Atlantic has played this role, right? We're founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, right? Harriet Beecher Stowe, right? Like, you know, you look back and like Abraham Lincoln wrote for The Atlantic, right? And we were founded to help create conversations to help prevent a civil war. And like, you know, Martin Luther King published "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." And like, there is something important about keeping this publication going. And it's, you know, this long run of American history and issues where, for the most part, over time, we've been right, right? We've gotten things wrong. We've published things that, you know, I don't know. But for the most part, like, we've done things and we've helped, like, improved racial progress in America. We've improved intellectual progress in America. Like, we helped— I don't know, we wrote really smart stuff about the Iraq War. Like, we did a lot of stuff that we got right, and it's nice to be able to tie on to that history. So that's one reason, right? Very important institution. You'd like to preserve it. You'd like to keep it going forward. Secondly, it's just people who do good journalistic work, as we just talked about. I think there should be more of it. Increase the amount of truth increases the odds that you get democracy. One of the things that happens in dictatorships is they arrest the journalists or they buy the media publications or they shut down the media publications. And then the people in power say, "You gotta write what we want you to write." And that's one of the ways democracy dies. And if you study the way that autocracy comes about in many countries and you look at like what's happening in Hungary and look what's happening in Turkey, and you look at what happened in Russia, countries where they have less democracy, than they did 10 years ago, 15 years ago. What was part of the playbook that Erdoğan ran, that Viktor Orbán ran, that Putin ran? Arrest the journalists, you like buy the publications, shut down the critical publications, right? Like that is part of the process of democracy to autocracy. And so I would like to, I am going to fight that 'cause I believe in democracy, right? And I will do my best to fight it both by defending our rights court if I have to, or, you know, protecting our journalists. Or, you know, White House were to come and say, we're going to arrest your people, because of what they say, you fight it with everything I can. And but also to try to create a thriving business model so that we don't go out of business. And we don't— like, sometimes the good journalistic organizations go out of business not because the government tries to shut them down in the process of democracy, but because they manage their finances wrong, right? And they spend too much on holiday parties. And so Like, my goal is to make sure that we both fight the anti-democratic powers and that we stay as strong as possible to hire as many people as we can to do the best work we can.

You briefly hit on it. Why is Lorene enforcing a goal to profitability or sustainability actually a gift?

I think it's totally a gift, right? So Lorene Powell Jobs, very wealthy, obviously it's public knowledge, She cares a lot. And when I was hired, you know, the mandate was, we're losing money now and we're not gonna lose money. And her reasons for mandating that are her reasons. But I do think it's a gift because it forces a kind of discipline. And right, like excellence comes through discipline. And if you are forced to like make good decisions about, you know, how you run your business and what you pay for this and what you pay for that. And you know, how you run your subscription models and how you balance all these like complicated mathematical models that determine whether you're successful or not. I think that the discipline of being forced to make it profitable made it a better publication. And the fact that it's an excellent publication also of course made it possible to become profitable.

Good CEO so far, I think too.

Yes, to some degree. But like there's a lot that goes into this place's into this place of success. The most important thing, like the reason why— so a couple of things were important to our transition from losing a lot of money to making money. One is continued excellence of the reporting, which is top notch every single day and has been since I've been here. And then building a business model that is responsive to that and that is like downstream of that. And so instead of saying, we're gonna build a business model that depends on lots of output and depends on covering these particular topics where we think we can sell event sponsorships. Instead, it's like, okay, you guys do what you're best at and we'll try to figure out a business model around that, right? And sort of working backwards as opposed to, so one thing I tried at the beginning, I was like, when I was at Wired, we ran an affiliate revenue business. So we would review headphones, you buy headphones and we'd get a cut, right? It was great, right?

Probably a good fit for Wired.

Great, it was a great fit for Wired. And I was like, okay, Let's do that here. It's so good. Like, we'll do it on books, right? We'll like put in affiliate links and we'll like, maybe you could do it on movies, right? And so one of the first things I did was, all right, let's build out the mechanism so we can get affiliate revenue. Let's build out the dashboard so we can track how much affiliate revenue we're getting. Let's make sure we put in the tags. And then like, you know, we run it for a few months and like, I'm not even kidding you, like our affiliate revenue was like $400. And I was like, what are we doing?

Right?

And it just, it's like, this is not a publication that Yeah, I'd rather have $400 than $0. I'd rather put an affiliate link than an Amazon link without an affiliate link. But like, it was pretty clear that that was trying to latch a business model on The Atlantic that just didn't fit the Atlantic.

Yeah, it's business model product fit almost. Yeah.

Right. Hmm.

You, on the note of sort of the point you're making about, for lack of overly compressing it, like journalism defending democracy, I think there's a, Maybe I'm probably overweighted spending a lot of time in the tech world. And recently there's a view amongst a lot of capitalists that like journalists hate capitalists as much as they hate whatever fascists or do you use much more extreme language? One, do you think like this is a new phenomenon as it just kind of always has been there? And to what extent is it the journalist's job to also, I mean, you've done amazing work on Facebook among many other things. Is it also the role to check the increasingly powerful capitalists as much as it is the government?

Yeah, this is, this is a really big story in Silicon Valley, right? And you— and it's— there are a few things. So journalists are skeptical of power, right? It's part of the personality, right? And Silicon Valley people in Silicon Valley went from not having power to having power. So they went from being treated with less skepticism, being treated with more skepticism, right? And a journalist will look at Elon Musk when he's just like scrappy guy making Tesla differently from when he's the richest man in the world with an empire, right? And, you know, most of the coverage of him when he was a scrappy guy just starting Tesla, you know, had a different hinge. But he's also a different person and he acts in different ways.

He sees himself similarly though, which I think is the critical— one of the critical reasons he's so upset with all of this. He's like, why are you treating me so differently?

Right. And the answer would be You're different. Like, power changes people. You influence the world in different ways. But this was like, this was a constant conversation with Musk in particular when I was at Wired. So part of it is like, there is skepticism of power. You take an organization that goes from not being powerful to being powerful. Another thing that's interesting is that Silicon Valley in particular, like, it saw that it could counter journalism, right? And no longer needed it. And so it wasn't just that they, part of what happened is they felt like they could express feelings they may have bottled up before, right? So a tech leader in 2015 may not have yelled at the New York Times publicly, A, 'cause they didn't have a Twitter account with 100,000 followers, and B, because they wanted the New York Times coverage. But now they know that they can start a Substack, and so they feel like they can go around. So they may be expressing things that they felt before, right? So those are a couple of the factors that are at play. I think most of what's happened is— I mean, and there also is like, there is a certain amount of skepticism because of a lot of— there's this very important moment, like the key moment, and when I think that media and the tech industry diverge is after the election of Trump, where sort of this notion that technology tools would bring the world together, right? Make the world more open and connected, as Facebook said, right? Suddenly these technology tools have clearly been used to create a president who, or to help elect a president whose ideology you may like, you may not like, I try to be entirely nonpartisan, but whose ideology is certainly not make the world more open and connected, right? And so journalists look at that and they're like, wait, the tech industry is not what it says it was, right? And these things don't work the way We've been told they work. And we've got this person who most of the industry quite clearly was highly skeptical of for lots of reasons. And so I think that was a real turning point too.

I think there's an element too of—

Oh, can I say one other thing? Please, please. There's also this interesting thing where one of the things that Twitter did, so journalism is an interesting industry where it overindexes on influence versus its, like financial status in the world, right? Like, if you were to add up the market cap of all companies in journalism, it's like a fraction of one tech startup, right? But if you were to take the kind of the social influence that the journalists have in setting the agenda, and then like you take the influence they have on Twitter, it's massive, right? And so it's like 1/10 of 1% of the influ— financial influence in the world, and then like 7% of the influence on Twitter, right? So there's like just this Massive gap. So maybe that's a positive thing in some ways, right? It helps distribute stories. But then journalists start saying things on Twitter that are, you know, they criticize individual venture capitalists. They say things they wouldn't say inside of their institution, right? And so suddenly you have these people who have more attention than one might expect, and they're saying things that clash with the kind of overall views of their brand. And then because of the way Twitter works, the dumbest thing that anybody in any organization says is what gets seen, and it's seen as the stand-in for the whole thought of the organization, right? And so you can have a publication, I don't know, let's just take a random one, Politico, right? And Politico publishes all these stories and they're balanced and they're thoughtful and they're respectful, right? And then one person at Politico tweets one crazy thing and it goes viral, and then it's seen and it's shared by everybody. And then suddenly that becomes the stand-in for what Politico thinks, right? "Politico is balanced. They give equal attention to multiple sides. They write these really thoughtful stories." "No, they're crazy.

Did you see that tweet?" And the tweet is true.

The person did tweet that. And that happens to every organization where someone inside the organization, but it happened more to journalism than anybody else. And so the perception of the way journalists saw the world, we became seen as like, "Oh my gosh, they're actively trying to take down," Andreesen Horowitz. Well, no, just like one journalist at one publication tweeted this kind of dumb thing, and it's not really what— and so I do think that there was this imbalance. It doesn't explain it all. And, um, you know, there was this imbalance between the reality of journalism, which is a lot of really thoughtful people trying to do their best work to explain things, and then the perception, which was shaped by, to some degree, some dumb tweets. By people who probably shouldn't have been given access to their phones on those days. And it's not, I mean, and I don't want to overstate, like, it's not like that's all of it, but I think that's underappreciated. And it's particularly underappreciated because people don't recognize the sort of the delta between the influence on social media platforms versus, you know, power in the world.

It's really— I was going to bring up, there was a moment recently where, uh, Wired did a story on like the gay tech mafia or something in SF. And it was, my version of Twitter was like wild frustration. Wired used to be optimistic. It's an element of what you were just describing. I think there's also a thing that the technologist, the technology world who has recently come into a lot of power has a view, to go back to your Facebook thing, that like more technology is good. Technology is value neutral basically, and that more technology is good. And like, it seems that your root point around plurality makes sense in a vacuum, like, or even in reality. I think the challenge is like, how does speaking truth to power, you know, like, I even struggle, you brought up Elon, like, I really struggle with Elon because I have some people in my life who worship him and I have some people in my life who think like, the fact that you would drive a Tesla means you're evil. And I'm like, man, I don't know how to think about this guy is, This guy probably pulled us forward on EVs and space 5 to 10 years alone. And how does— and he clearly can't also sit with the fact that anyone is speaking truth to his power. Like, it doesn't seem that we're headed towards this getting better.

Well, I think that's true.

There's a lot there.

No, no, there's a lot. I mean, he's a great example, right? And like, If you look at Elon in totality, it's this combination of this amazing man, right? You listen to, like, sometimes you listen to a podcast with him, you listen, particularly if you listen to podcasts of old Elon. Yeah. Wow, right? Or even if you listen to, like, when he gave, he talked at Davos this year, right? It's incredible, right? He's so smart, he's so sensible, like climate change, right? Like, do I want to go to Mars? I don't want to go to Mars, but do I think humans should explore Mars? Sure. It's like SpaceX, an incredible company, is what he did with Tesla, absolutely amazing. You know, do I want solar walls? I do. Do I think that he maybe has done the right thing? Maybe not. But, you know, just this— both the intelligence, dream, and like generally pointed in the right direction on society's biggest challenges.

And he believes in something very clearly, which not every technologist does, right?

But he's also like weaponized a platform against civil discourse in America, right? He has made it almost impossible to have good conversations in the town square. He's He has totally polarized it politically. He has very little conception of what is true and what is not true. Like, he is the biggest spreader of misinformation on that platform. You have like this mess of Elon Musk, right? And everyone who knows him like says the same thing, which they're all like, "What do we do with this?" And part of the problem of why it's hard to like have a conversation, like you and I can have like a thoughtful conversation You can't do that on Musk's social media platform because it's been engineered for toxicity. And so part of the reason we can't have good conversations about Elon is 'cause what Elon did to the town square. Now, that's not the only reason. There's many other reasons, and there's partisanship in America, and like maybe television has pushed us into more partisan ways. And, you know, it's not like Blue Sky is this like site of like beautiful civil discourse where people like respectfully disagree with each other and, you know, go to consensus, right? But, you know, part of the reason it's hard to talk about Elon is because what Elon did. Why—

it's changing gears slightly, but still in the kind of broader bucket. Um, why should really talented writers want to join or remain part of an institution, uh, like this one?

Yeah, great. You mean, or why, why would they not go to Substack, right? Or So part of it is you get value from the institution, right? We edit, we copy edit, we fact check, we promote, we help put you on TV, right? We have the best editors in the world, right? They are amazing. If you've never gone through the process of working with a great editor, it's transformative, right? Because it's not just like a lot of, A lot of people listening to this don't understand exactly what an editor does. It's not just that they—

People haven't really been edited.

Right? It's not just that they make sure the apostrophe is in the right place in "it's." They are often a little bit like what I said about Elon, breaking things down to first principles and helping you resort them. And so you take this book. So I worked with a bunch of great editors on this book. Some of what they did is they changed sentences, some of which they changed emphasis, some of which they changed ideas. But they also, like, one of the notes that I think was so interesting, this book is mostly about my life, and it started, about my life and my father's life, and it started with, it's also about running. In the early versions, the first time I had a full draft, it started with, here's an introduction, these are the ideas of the book. Okay, now let's go back to the beginning. Here's my dad as a child. And somebody, one of the readers pointed out, you can't do that. Nobody cares about your dad as a child at this point, right? They just don't. And they don't care about you as a child. No one cares about anyone as a child until they have emotional relationship. And you're not famous enough, right? If you're Leonardo DiCaprio, start your book when you're a child because people buy the book and they care about Leonardo DiCaprio. Nobody cares about Nick Thompson, right? And you have to make them care about you. And you're not gonna be able to do that unless There's an incredible story from your childhood, but it's not. Your childhood is setting up the things that are interesting. Okay, so very good point, right? Okay, so now what do I do? Okay, well then let's have a chapter where you describe everything that happens in your mind while you run in a race, one race, beginning to end, right? And that will both explain what is most interesting about the book, which is the ability to sort of give the feeling of running, right? And the emotions of running and what it actually means to run while being aware of the world around you, while also allowing you to include little set pieces that explain your crazy father and your, you know, this story about cancer that is pivotal. And so that was an amazing edit. That was a great edit. Made the book much better, right? And that's what great editing does. They see, somebody sees like, here's the fundamental weakness in the thing you have written, right? This is the structural weakness. This is the chronological weakness. This is the character you need to add or the character you need to subtract. And great work doesn't happen without great editing. So what you get at The Atlantic, you may have a writer, hey, maybe I don't like their editor, maybe I'll go do it by myself, right? And I'll go to Substack and I'll just be me. And the work is much worse. Now, not true of everybody, but people who go to Substack, the work's great, right? But you get a lot of value being here from the institution. We also, we pay you a regular salary, you get a check every 2 weeks and you know what it is. The more you ask for more, and you know, there, there's value to being at a stable place with predictable income, great editing, good promotion. Now, for a certain class of writer, you know, they can get paid a lot more at Substack. They're far smaller reach, far smaller audience, but you can, you can make a lot more money. And maybe you can, if you have a huge enough audience, you can reach equal numbers of people, but because of the way the gating works and all those mechanisms, so We've lost— Derek Thompson went to Substack. You know, guy was amazing, but like, he can probably make— he was a number one bestselling author, and he's like friends with the folks who are the top people on Substack, which allows him to get in the recommendation engine, which allows him to build an audience.

Why would someone like Derek stay?

So someone like Derek would stay because you ideally get the best editing, the best editing, the best, like, ideas for your stories to the best copy editing, the best fact-checking, best social promotion. So you're getting all of that.

Do you think this model could work for media outside of writing?

I do, actually. I do. I've sometimes wondered whether we could build a network of like YouTubers who aren't famous enough to be making tons of money on their own, but are great, right? And we could like create a network of them. We have an awesome ad sales team. And so we said we can sell ads more efficiently than presumably they can as individuals, or we they can get more money if we sell their ads than if they just sell into the YouTube ad network. Like, we could create a bundle of YouTubers who are like on brand for The Atlantic, bring them in, and they make more money, they get more audience, we get more content out there. It's good for us. I just haven't figured out who they are or how the real economics would work.

I think there's an element— a lot of people do version of that. They're not a brand like The Atlantic. Yeah, but I almost wonder about— and you have I don't know, Cleo Abrams at Vox and she leaves, like that's also kind of the— in video as an example, overwhelmingly they start somewhere and then they leave. I'm almost more curious about like specifically the editor-writer relationship.

Right. Well, I— okay, so take, take Cleo, who works awesome, right? You can imagine if Cleo, I think, is probably so successful that she wouldn't need— like she probably makes more money than we could pay her. I don't know. Um, but you can imagine someone like her who's maybe a little less successful, but exceptionally good. And then you can imagine like a video producer who's incredible, right? And if we have an incredible video producer or incredible video editor, or someone who can like think through her next, okay, this is, when you're doing your next thing on quantum computing, you should do it this way, right?

The difference, by the way, I think now is they just go work for her.

Right.

And that there's for some, whatever, whereas fewer writers don't like writers don't hire editors. I guess you don't get to a level of scale. Yeah.

I mean, they're different. I like, I don't know the career path for great videographers. I I know the career path for great writing editors, and they tend to end up at places like The Atlantic, not working as individuals for folks on Substack. I mean, I think they sometimes go the other way. Like maybe they, you know, go out of a book company and then go work for people on Substack. I don't know.

What makes a really great editor?

Okay, so this is like, I spent a lot of time thinking about. So a couple things about a great editor. One, they understand what the writer is good at. And their job is not to— their job is to get the best out of the writer. And the fundamental mistake that many editors make is trying to make the story the best version of the story they want, not the best version of the story that the writer wants. And your job is to work with the writer and to figure out what they're good at, figure out what they're bad at, and support them in everything that they're bad at. And maybe they're a bad stylist. But they're a great thinker. And so your job is to help the writing, right? Maybe they're a great stylist but a bad thinker, so then your job is to help the structure and the thinking, right? And so you want to like understand— and maybe they're, maybe they're kind of person who needs to really be pushed. It's almost like you're a coach, right? Like maybe they need to be yelled at, maybe they need to be given a firm deadline, maybe they just need to be loved, right? And so like with each different writer, you need to develop a different kind of relationship, but you need to be there for them, right? And so when I was an editor, which I was for a long time, like the relationship with the writer was absolutely essential. I would like make sure that I always got back within like an hour, right? You know, no matter the situation, I'm gonna try to get back to you. And I'm gonna say, even if it's just, I've got your story, I'm thinking about it, right? Or I've got your story and I'll get back to you in 3 days. I've got your story, I'll get back to you in 4 hours, right? And like never disrespecting, always, always working with them and then always trying to like, always like tweeting out their story and trying to promote them, always trying to get read, always trying to like find the thing that you can do that's best for them. But the most important thing is like, help them do the best work that they can do. And also like, Remnick used to say this, you know, he would be, when I worked at The New Yorker, he would say like, your job isn't, if the writer can only jump over a 6-foot bar, Your job is not to like try to get them over a 7-foot bar. Your job is to get them over that 6-foot bar, right? And like, that's what the story is gonna be, and we're gonna get it done, and we're gonna get the best version of the story that we can. We're not gonna like make them feel bad for not getting over the 7-foot bar or like try to hold out this impossible standard. Like, you've gotta figure out what is the best version of the story given their skills, given the idea, given the time, and you gotta get them there. And that's the goal.

You talked about this, you brought up coaching. You talk about this in the book. And how I forget, you were working with other people and then you started working with Steve Finley.

Yeah.

And the way he was just so, as you kind of just described, like so fit to you.

Yeah.

And it sounds like a huge part of that was like he was really good at giving you a system that you could buy into. Are there like, is it, is that relationship like almost exactly the same? What, what is different, if anything?

Yes, they're pretty similar, right? So like what Finley did, like you can imagine a coach coming to me and I came to Finley when I was the editor of Wired, busy guy, and like Finley would give me the schedule. And he's like, "You know what? I don't care what you do on Monday, and I don't care what you do on Wednesday, and I don't care what you do on Friday, and I don't care what you do on Saturday, right? And in fact, here's a schedule, and on Monday it says run option. You can do whatever you want, right? Ideally, you'll run like 5, 6 miles. But I do care what you do on Tuesday, I do care what you do on Thursday, I do care what you do," right? So he would then give me very specific things to do a couple of times a week. And this is like a good schedule for a busy guy like Nick. Right. You can imagine another coach who's like, okay, on Monday, I want you to run 7 miles at 7:30 pace. And I want you to do, you know, 3 30-second hill sprints. And on Tuesday we'll do this. And I also want you to do a core workout and I want you to ride the bike. And like, you can imagine, like for other people, you can add way more structure and details. And Finley was like, nah, you know, you can't do that. Cause it's not going to fit with Nick's life and his other goals and ambitions and running is not the most important thing. And so Finley was doing kind of what I do with the writers, which is like, okay, Like, what is Nick's skill? What is Nick good at? What are Nick's weaknesses? Where can we improve him? And how can we do that without breaking him? And there's that similarity. So what is the difference? I mean, there's some differences in that there's way more back and forth with a writer. And so Finlay's kind of like, we were talking every 3 weeks, right? He's like, give me a goop.

How often are you running together?

Twice a year. Oh, wow. Yeah, I like literally would see him, like I would see him physically like 5 times a year, right? Like, you know, not that often, right? Whereas with the editor, you're on the phone with them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

6 times a day sometimes, right? So there's like a different—

How would you evaluate, maybe to expand it outside of the context of just a running coach or an editor, like you're looking for somebody to help you, a therapist or a coach of all, increasingly we have coach of like, How would you test for this thing you just described? Maybe on both ends, but especially on the person seeking the editor or the coach.

Well, I guess you ask them at the beginning and you hold this in your mind. Like, what do you think of this work that I've done? Like, how would you have changed this story, right? Like, you know, what do you think I could do differently? And really listening, but I think the only way you can tell is by working with them. Right? The only way you can— it's kind of like a job interview. You can get something from the job interview and— but not— you work with them for a little while and you get a lot more.

Maybe you can imagine you start working with an editor and they're like, they're not overly negative, so you don't have that problem. How do you know if they're a 6 out of 10, meaning they're like nice and like they give you some good notes versus in theory like a 10 out of 10? Or you think about collaboration in general, Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, like they're at a 10 out of 10. There's a level— I've never had a relationship with anyone like that. Yeah. And so I can't imagine what it would be like. How do you— maybe part of it is you have to go work at The Atlantic or The New Yorker and truly see a great editor, but—

Totally. Totally.

Or work with Steve Finley.

Yeah, it's true. It's like, because sometimes people who haven't had like great editing, you'll see like, oh my God, that was an amazing edit. Those are such notes. Like, I can't— that person's— and like, I know that person's not a good editor. Like, I've gone through the intensive process with them. I think you have to, you have to go through it. It's such an interesting question. And I didn't know what, I'd never been coached that intensively. Like I had been coached, you know, in high school by people who are wonderful, but they're coaching a whole team, right? And I was coached in college by a guy who was the most successful track and cross country coach, perhaps in American history, certainly in the conversation, who didn't know my name, right? Like still doesn't quite know who I am, but like, You know, so I wasn't getting a lot there, right? And then, you know, it took a long time until I realized, well, wait a second, Finley's actually like tapped into something to me that I didn't know was there.

Why do you love magazines?

Why do I love magazines? A, I think they are— okay, so there are a couple things, right? I don't think I could work in a publishing industry because it's just not enough, right? You know, you're publishing—

It's not a frequency or volume.

It's not a frequency, it's not a volume, right? I'm like, I like the adrenaline, I like the speed. But I also like depth and I like complexity and I like, you know, I love, there's something about the format that's, you know, it's not a newspaper, so it's not just like fighting for your attention at the moment. You're not like, what is the thing that I can write so the person reads on the subway and like they have 4 minutes? You're writing, trying, you're like, this is the thing the person can spend a couple hours with, but there's enough of it. So I think that middle ground has been great for me. It also just, it happens to be where I started, you know, my first job. I didn't plan my career, like I stumbled through it like most of us. I didn't even plan to be a journalist, right? And I kind of stumbled into a magazine job and then, you know, you turn the ship 5 degrees in the harbor north, you turn the ship 5 degrees in the harbor south and you end up in like, you know, Greenland or South Africa. I guess that's not quite true, but like you end up in like, I don't know, Greenland or Spain. I don't quite know how you would turn the ship in the harbor.

How has, how maybe even the stories themselves changed, but the broader thing too, um, and to be clear, you guys still make amazing physical magazines and you ship a lot of them. Um, how has that changed, particularly you ran thenewyorker.com, basically took it from being totally not anything to being very substantial. And I don't know, I, I, I don't know the data, but I would guess that a whole bunch of people have no relationship with The Atlantic through anything physical anymore. How has that changed the, critically, this is also a container. It's a curation, it's a curatory container, and you know, now the stories live on their own, and I'm curious how that is. Maybe it also speaks to like the way the website can evolve over time, but.

It's one of the hardest things for us because you get an Atlantic, right? And you read, you open it up, You open it up here and we're like, okay, here we go. Women Will Be Targets by Sophie Gilbert, right? And your perception of this story and whether the story is good and whether you agree with it and whether, you know, what the quality of writing is, is shaped by the fact that it's inside of this thing, right? And it's shaped by the fact there's a Hauser Wirth ad on the back and you know this and you have an emotional relationship. And then you go to the website and you see the same story and you have no idea, you don't even know where you are, right? Maybe you do, because you've come in through the homepage, but probably you've come in through a link on social media. And we try to make it so you know where you are. We have a distinct font and coloring, and there's the red A, and like, we do all the things. And the, you know, good eye test, if you can like identify a website while you're on, across the room, it's been branded well. Right, right, right. We do all we can, but like, most people, they don't know where they are, right? And so you have this—

You know, read it later app. Like, it's a great story, but like, it's totally abstracted.

And people, like, You know, people are often like, I love that story in The Atlantic. And you're like, which story in The Atlantic? Sure. Thank you. Right. And so you lose a lot of the brand association. Now, the advantage you get is you have infinite distribution at zero marginal costs, right? Which is amazing. And so you just weigh those things against each other. But the challenge for the, you know, folks running the editorial operation of the website is how do you get the most brand value into those web views, right? And like, how do you How do you make it so that people who like the story develop a relationship and then they move down the funnel to become subscribers? And how do you make it so that people who you have no chance of ever seeing again at least maybe see an ad, right?

What makes a good cover?

Good cover. Something that kind of captures the spirit of the moment and the spirit of the story. Like this is, again, like here we are, we're just, this is, Little weird cover, right? There's nothing like, it's just a picture of, it's just a list of names for those of you just listening, right? It's a list of names, but it was an amazing cover. One of our most successful covers the last year because it like, it just conveyed the drama of the moment. This is what's gonna happen if Trump wins, right?

You know?

And so some, we're just, you know, we're conveying like these big ideas. This is an amazing cover too, Derek, again, the Anti-Social Century, like a beautiful gripping visual, but there's nothing, there's no like, it's not women in bikinis. It's not, I mean, we do put people on the COVID This, like, you know, um, Seamus Heaney right there.

Or maybe even like, um, sorry to interrupt you, like, uh, comparing it to New Yorker. New Yorker's famous for their covers. It's almost like an artifact now, more so even like— does it— like, I, I've had plenty of New Yorker covers stacked in my apartment before without ever opening them.

Yeah. Um, well, the New Yorker cover is so interesting because it's amazing for subscribers And it makes no sense on the newsstand, right? And so when the newsstand is important— like, the newsstand is less and less important every year, right? But we used to put that flap on it, right, where you at least list the names and the stories. You'd have some ideas. There'd be like a picture of a cat, you know, drawing graffiti or whatever the COVID is. It has nothing to do with anything. Um, and then you at least have a list of the people who are there. So a cover is a beautiful work of art. A cover signals a moment in time. A cover— like, in the, the A cover can sometimes convey the core of a story. So when I was at Wired, I wrote this very, with Fred Vogelstein, this very intense piece about Facebook and about like, this was the moment where Facebook was finally reckoning with its role in the world and was having a hard time and made a bunch of mistakes. And it's like all this reporting we'd spent months and months. And the picture was Mark Zuckerberg slightly bloodied, right? And there was no text on the COVID but it conveyed this incredibly important idea. It was a classic cover that people have remembered, even if they don't remember the details of that story. So when you get an art director, I remember when the art director, Thabo, came up with that, um, it's just like, wow, that's, that's it. That nailed it. Yeah.

There, uh, you, I think there's a line from you. You said you were, um, doing events in every state, having writers across every spectrum doing our best to be a magazine about America.

Yeah.

There's an idea that I like, which is sort of one thing that says a lot, and one thing that's really important is like what myth you believe about America.

Yeah.

Do you— is there anything that immediately comes to mind for you?

Myth? Myth is myth as an idea or myth as in falsehood?

Not as in falsehood. Falsehood, the opposite. Um, like a myth that would theoretically become true.

I mean, I think America is the— America, yes. America, unlike any other country, is built on an idea, right? And it's like, it's not— we're not a nationalist group that all speaks the same language. We're like people who came together and like, you know, freed ourselves from the colonialists, moved west, right? And then welcomed people from around the world. And so because of that, you have different cultures, you have different ideas, you have different language, you have different thoughts, you have different opinions, right? You have things that hold us together. And we all love Sunday afternoon football, and we all celebrate Fourth of July, right? But we don't have, like, we don't have, we don't have to rely on a sense of nationalism and in-groups and out-groups, right? And so the thing I'd like to believe about America is that it's a place where in any, one of the things I'd love to do is I'd love to run across America. It's one of my dreams, right? And partly 'cause I have this belief that you would find interesting people to talk to about big ideas. And like, you would learn things in every little town you would go to, and you would run 20 miles a day or whatever you'd run. And you'd run across the country in [redacted address], you'd find stories and you'd find people and you'd meet things and you'd learn things and you'd get little cultural tidbits because everybody comes from somewhere else and everybody comes from a different background and everybody has like a little thing they, you know, maybe that they have that nobody else in the country has. And I would love to do that. Now I gotta figure out when I'm gonna do that, but we'll see.

I've had a guest who's cycled across, a guy used to work for Chris Sacca, but running is a different level. You have the distance ability.

I mean, I—

It's a matter of making the time.

You know, I'll probably end up driving across, which is like less fun.

Let's talk a little about running. First, maybe to set the scene, a little excerpt from an old McPhee piece.

Oh, wow.

Travel by your canoe is not a necessity and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another, anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of openness with a certain terrain, or oneness, I should say, with a certain terrain, a diversion of the field, an act performed not because it is necessary, but because there is value in the act itself. And I know that was an important, the Barkanu piece was an important one for you, but I was reading that and it sounded a lot like running. As a very, very serious runner, I talked to a couple people that I'm doing this interview and I used the word freak runner because I don't know if I had a better language for it. And a serious racer, striver. How do you keep the kind of autotelic part of running in mind?

Tell me more what you mean by that.

Doing it for its own sake, kind of the language he's using, the value in the act itself.

Yeah, it's a hard balance because obviously I still strive, right? And I like, it's not just that I like enter races and try to win them. I like actually like sometimes check my Strava segments, right?

Like, so I'm not, You're also literally a world record holder in a 50-mile, I think, for your age group.

I'm an American record holder in the 50K. Okay, okay. I wish I was a world record holder. I was the top-ranked runner in the world in the 50-mile for most of last year, and then I lost it. Okay, Greek runner. But it's a real balance because in a way, I wish I was totally pure and I just ran for the joy and I didn't enter any races. And when I entered the races, I didn't care about my time, but I still ran fast, right? That would be like the ultimate state. I feel like that's kind of where Kilian Jornet is. He's the world's greatest mountain runner. And like people who race him hate it because they're always like, I'm trying to win and he's just having fun in the mountains, right? And then he wins. But I balance it in a couple of ways. I try not to focus too much on the goals. And I try not to, yeah, I'm running this big race on Saturday and I mentioned, last night that I needed to start carbo-loading. My wife was like, wait, you have a race coming up? Right? And like, so I at least was able to compartmentalize. Like, my wife doesn't know, either we have bad communication or I'm compartmentalizing pretty well, right? And, you know, I don't focus and obsess and like the, and if the race goes well, that's great. And if it goes badly, I'll move on the next day and I won't worry about it. But what I also do is I try to make sure that a lot of my running is, is kind of like spiritual and disconnected, right? And so I'll run in the mountains and I'll run and I don't listen to music and I just try to like meditate while I run and I'll try to like listen to the birds and like try to think this, you know, try to get as deep into the purity of the surroundings as I can, right? And I look forward to those runs. And if I'm going to a place where that's a possibility, I'll make sure that I have like time to do that and where I'm not like on the clock, where I'm not like "Only 40 minutes, okay." Or like, I drove to the mountain, I have to run up the mountain, down quickly. No, I'll make sure that I have like time to go and explore and to see and to feel. And so I do those runs. And then I also like sometimes when I'm running, even here in Brooklyn, I'm just like run across the Manhattan Bridge. I try to get into that deeper mental state. And so I'm constantly trying to use running as a form of, you know, reflection and spirituality as opposed to just, a mechanism for expressing ambition.

And then you, on race days, you show up and go.

On race days, I show up and I go really hard, and sometimes I do well and sometimes I do poorly, right? And I try to train as hard as I can, as methodically as I can, and I try to like optimize as best I can in the limited amount of time I have. Yeah.

What is the biggest difference between running often and running daily?

Well, so one of the things that's nice is there are physiological differences and there are benefits to running daily, but the main— there isn't actually, I don't know whether it's better to run 7 days a week than 6 days a week, but what's good is that if you set it as an automatic habit, then you don't have to think about whether today is an off day or an on day, right? You've like, it's the whole, like, if you can simplify the number of decisions you make in your life, then you make better. And so one decision I've made is that I run every day. Right? And like, I just don't do off days unless something's wrong or it's impossible because you have a 19-hour flight, right? Or whatever, right? So once you've decided you're gonna run, then it's simpler because you're gonna run. And mostly I just run to work, right? And like, there's no moment where I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna run to work today 'cause I'm tired. I'm not gonna run to work today. Or because it's rainy, I'm not gonna run to work today 'cause it's hot. No, just, I run to work, right? And then you've sort of simplified it again. Now you do have a second decision. If it's raining, you wear a rain jacket. If it's hot, you wear a thinner shirt, right? And you make decisions after that. But it's very helpful, I think, to have kind of like a Stoic philosophy of, I just go and do it and I do it every day. Usually I do it twice a day.

You have a line where you say, "That's the beautiful thing about a marathon. Any finishing time can be a tragedy or a triumph." Yeah, yeah. How do you remember to only compete with yourself?

You know, that line comes from this hilarious moment where I was running the Boston Marathon, it was 2005, and I'd really wanted to break 3 hours. And it was 2005, no, it was 2004. And I got sick before and I just fell apart and I just ran terribly. I ended up walking like 10 miles, right? And I come through, it's like 3 hours, 43 minutes, and I'm just like, With walking? Yeah, well, it's, it's not— I mean, you walk, you walk at a 12-minute mile pace, you walk. Yeah, let's say you're running at 7, that's 5 minutes extra per mile. So, you know, you run it for 9 miles, that's 45 minutes, whatever, right? You're 2:58, so you can do the math, it's not that hard. Um, anyway, and I crossed the finish line and I just look like death. And then there's a woman, maybe she was trying to break 3:45 and we ran 3:43, and she's like, right, right, right, right. And it's a great photograph.

It's beautiful.

And it's a good reminder because it's also the case that like, even when I ran my best marathon, I ran 2:29, there's probably a guy who finished right behind me or maybe right ahead of me who had wanted to run 2:15, right? And you don't know, right? And you're competing with all these people who maybe they care a lot, maybe they don't care a lot, maybe they're here for one reason, maybe they're here for another reason. And you really are just running for yourself. Now, it is useful sometimes to like, I try to catch that guy, right? 'Cause it can motivate you to go faster and go harder. And I like setting, I like looking at people in the distance and trying to figure out if I can catch up to them. And like, if I sprint at the end, can I get them? But in truth, I don't think it has mattered whether I finished ahead or behind of anybody in any sense whatsoever, in any race I've run since high school. Like it's been 33 years since like, I actually cared even 1 millionth of 1% whether I was ahead or behind anybody in a race. I guess maybe there were a couple races I've won. No, that's not quite true. There was like a 5-mile race I won in Northeast Harbor that I write about, where I was like glad I beat the kid behind me 'cause I wanted to win in front of my kids. But like almost always, this is one of the funnier things. I remember, I think it was Jeff Goldblatt, the editor-in-chief, he's like, "You know what was really surprising about your book? Like you've been this elite runner for like 30 years and you've won," 3 races, right? I'm like, yeah, you're like, you just usually you come in 7th or 8th, right? And like you sprint to the end, maybe you come in 6th, right? You just, you like, you don't, you don't win. Like there are 40,000 people in a marathon. One wins, 39,999 don't, right? And there's 500 people in the race in Prospect Park. One wins, 499 don't. Like your winning percentage is quite low.

A little bit on momentum. Um, you, in the book, you talk about your dad often talked about momentum in life. Sometimes you have it. Successes and losses compound. Use it when you have it and try to get it back. This idea that like it obviously goes in both directions.

Yeah.

And then specifically you say, every time we do something right, we create a tiny, imperceptible tailwind for the future. To have run during the day is to at least have done that. And then somewhere else you said, I had just done a hard thing of running up a mountain and it convinced me I could do a harder, much harder thing of betting on myself.

Yeah.

You are somebody who shows up. You clearly have internalized this momentum thing and you, you have a lot of tailwinds. Do you have any advice for obviously maybe for running, but more broadly for getting started or like getting things to turn in the right direction?

Yeah, you choose something simple that you can do right. Okay. And like I try to like when my kids are like in despair over their homework. Okay, well, let's like— and I can't just say this directly, but like I actually do this to myself sometimes where I'm like, what do I— what do I— wait, where am I? Like, what is going on right now? And I'm like, okay, hold on, I'm gonna spend the next 10 minutes and I'm gonna do whatever the hard thing is for the next 10 minutes, right? And like, that'll then set me up to do it for the rest. And like, just like, choose something that you can get right, but that's just to feel the positive momentum, to feel— you know what, do 10 push-ups, right? And like, just like, just like reset. And like, you'll be glad you did the 10 push-ups, And then like, now you can now maybe try something a little harder. Now, like, send that email you didn't wanna send. Okay, now you've done that. Okay, now write that thank you letter you didn't wanna write. Okay, now you've done that. Okay, now, like, go do that damn PowerPoint that you screwed up and your boss is mad about that has sent you spiraling. Figure out whatever the pattern is where you can just sort of, sometimes, like, I don't know, sometimes I'll do other things. Again, where I'm like, okay, wait, this thing's, what is going on? Okay, now I'm just gonna like take some time, I'm gonna reset, but I'm gonna do something useful. I'm gonna go water the plants and I'm gonna weed the plants, right? And I'm like, it's— Get a win. I'm just gonna do it for 5 minutes. I'm gonna get the W, right? And then I'm gonna go do this hard thing. I just think that's a useful tactic. Yeah.

You also talk a lot about how, or at least it's heavily implied that running is a form of sort of like anti-aging or life extension or something.

Yeah, might be, might not be.

You care a lot about being, and even for like being able to play soccer with your kids, whatever. How have you gotten better with age?

How do I improve as a runner? Like how I get faster?

Open-ended. Maybe specifically in the context of running. You certainly didn't peak, your peak marathon wasn't when you were 30.

No, it's when I'm 44, but I'm going the other way right now, clearly.

But yeah, more open. More open-ended, or how have you liked yourself more?

You know, I feel very similar to how I felt when I was 30. You know, there are things that are different, like you turn an ankle and it heals more slowly. It takes a lot longer to warm up. I've been very fortunate in that because I think because I've been very disciplined about both running and recovery and diet, I think the process Aging is not, it hasn't affected me in the same way I think I probably expected it to when I was 30. I feel like the same person. I kind of, I look pretty, I mean, I've got more wrinkles and gray hair and all that, but I feel fairly similar, right? And I can, my marathon is about the same and I can probably do the same number of pull-ups, right? I can still run fast and I still can't do a lot of pull-ups, right? So that, I'm very fortunate about that. And the reason why I've committed to that is, A, I wanna be there for my kids, right? And I've wanted to like be able to play games with them and I'm reaping the benefits, right? And I like, I run track workouts with my son, you know? And we just did on Saturday, we're talking on a Thursday, on Saturday, we were at a track running 800s together, right? Side by side. And that is a beautiful memory. And on my 50th birthday this past summer, he paced me to a sub-5-minute mile, right? That's incredible. And to be able to do that and to like, you know, he's soon gonna be significantly faster than me, the 15-year-old is. You know, on a Monday I went and I like coached my son's soccer team in running, right? I do like the fitness training for them after track, right? And like, it means that when I've, as I will inevitably and soon begin like declining physically, you know, they'll have these memories of me as a, you know, I have memories of my father from when I was 7, but they'll have like these very intense memories of like, What will my son Zachary, when he's 40, right? And maybe I'll be here, maybe I won't be. It's in 25 years, I'll be 75, I hope so, but who knows? What will he think about that day where we ran that 5-minute mile, right? When he was 15 and I was 50. Like, I think that will be an amazing memory. And so I'm very, I'm glad that I made this commitment to my physical, to trying to like sort of combat my physical decline that has benefited me for now. Professionally, like, yeah, I'm probably doing better, right? Like, maybe as with all people, you get more like, you kind of more crystallized intelligence, you have more knowledge, you've seen more stuff, you're probably better at pattern recognition and you're less creative. Like the way your brain changes. And I'm in a job where that stuff matters probably more, right? I'm not like, my job is to not figure out like the brilliant insight on this thing. It's to like systematically look at the strategic options for The Atlantic and choose one and make the right partnerships. So I think I'm in a job that, you know, matches where I am in my life and where in my cognitive decline. So I think that's, I think, and I didn't do that strategically, it just happened how it worked out. All right.

You mentioned your son. Obviously, this is also heavily a book about your dad.

Yeah.

A few quotes. First, you say, "You can always lose a best friend or a spouse." 'Your father will always be your father. This creates different obligations, frustrations, and kinds of love.' And then you separately say, 'One of my central goals in life is to break the long string of Thompson fathers who have caused deep psychic angst for their children.' Yeah. And finally, 'We give our children our genes and our love, and we don't have any idea what in the end they will do with them.' Do you think that we have a choice over what we inherit?

Yes, we do. We have a choice over what we inherit, and it's not a simple choice, and it's not an easy choice. Um, you know, I, I inherited a lot from my dad, right? And I, I inherited— I kind of look like him, right? You know, so physically, right? I, I am— my career has, like, I'm intellectually a lot like him, right? And he was, my strength, which is the ability to do lots of things at the same time, is also my weakness, which is, you know, the difficulty in doing one thing at any given time, right? And that was the same for him, right? And so we're, and there is a moment, I had a moment that pretty interesting where I was at lunch at a restaurant in San Francisco and I was having lunch with one of his college roommates. And another one of his college dormmates walks into the same restaurant, and his roommate brings me up to that guy and is like, "Hey, this kid here, you know, he's the son of one of our, somebody went to college with." And guy looks at me, he goes, "Scotty's son?" I was like, "Yeah, right?" And I'm so very much his son. And I've inherited, so there are lots of things that I've directly inherited, but I also like watched this man decline, and I watched him decline in part through a lack of discipline. And through, you know, susception to addiction, right, of different kinds, sexual addiction, alcohol addiction, right? And I committed, I didn't inherit that. I committed to not being that. And in fact, so I like almost like inherited the antithesis. And that was kind of a choice, right? And it was a choice and an awareness, right? You watch your dad struggle with alcoholism. You know that alcoholism is genetic. So you know that you're susceptible to alcoholism. And so you, in some ways, you can inherit the alcoholism, like you can fall into that trap, or you can fight it because you are scarred by having watched, right? And so to some degree, I obviously made choices over what I inherited, but to some degree, I, I didn't. Maybe that's the right way to answer that question.

Was there like a point where you were like, at least on some of this stuff, um, you alluded to it, your dad was somebody who succumbed to passion, basically.

Yeah.

And I want to talk a little bit more about this later, but you're someone who's like really consistent and disciplined, right? That maybe that just happened over time and it wasn't like a— it wasn't like a moment when you were 21, you were just like, I can't go this direction. But I am curious to what extent that was like a very conscious I have to build this up. So I— because I know exactly what that looks like and I could see it happening.

It was, it was a— it was— it's interesting. It was not a there was a degree of consciousness in the choice, but it didn't happen when I was 21 because I wasn't aware of it. Okay. It happened in my 30s, um, and I had watched him— this is post-cancer, it's post-cancer. Um, 3 things happen to me when I'm about 30, or 30, between 30 and 33. So one is I get cancer and I survive it. Right, which is very important for like changing your perspective on life, right? You like, you start to care about things more. You like, there's post-traumatic growth, right? It's a very important thing that happens. Secondly, I have children, right? I start having— I have my first son is born, and 3 boys are born, but the first is born when I'm 32. And you have a kid and you, you— life is totally different, right? Because like you used to, what you do matters so much more because they're gonna watch you, right? And you're either gonna be able to build a good world for them or not. And in fact, your obligation to the world outside of your life matters more because now you have someone you're attached to genetically, emotionally, in every other way who's gonna live in it, right? And now, like, you know, my last child born in 2014, maybe they'll live to 2114, right? Like the world to 2114 is like partly my responsibility. And so your whole responsibilities shift. And so that's the second thing that happens. And the third thing that happens is I actually, I was in a kind of a professional rut where I wasn't able to get hired in my 20s, right? And I just sort of like, you know, you could look from the outside and be like, and I've had people say like, Nick, what are you talking about? Like you wrote stories for the New York Times and you, But I was like a mid-tier freelancer, right? Um, which is fine and good, but it wasn't what I wanted, right? And I was, you know, I, I don't know, I probably applied for— I probably applied and was interviewed for 6 jobs at the New York Times at different times. I got zero, right? Like, you know, I just couldn't— I wasn't getting on track, right? And if you were to say like, what's like your career trajectory, and are you doing the things— not just the things you wanted, but the things that people in your early 20s that wanted to go into journalism— I wouldn't be close, right? And I had worked for this amazing man in New Haven, but I didn't wanna live in New Haven, right? And so I got hired into a first really good job, which was an editor at Wired when I was 30. So I go, yeah, it was right after I turned 30. It was like 6 months after that Boston Marathon race, right? And I guess the other thing that happened is I start running fast. So those 4 things all happen at about age 30, where I go from being a guy who can't break 3 hours to a guy who runs 2:43. So all those things happened in this very short period of time, and I wasn't quite aware of like all that was changing in my life. You know, I didn't know that when I got that wire job, it would be the beginning of like lots of great jobs where I was—

Kind of goes back to the momentum thing.

Right, it's where the momentum shifts in Nick's life. And so the question is, why did the momentum shift, right? Did it shift 'cause I got that first great job, right? Did it shift because of post-traumatic growth after cancer? Did it shift because I had a, kind of a response to becoming a father? Did it shift because I understood that I had these capabilities as a runner that I didn't have? I don't know, right? And it's not like, it's not like I went and ran a 2:10 marathon. It's not like I got a Nobel Prize. Like, none of the stuff, like, I don't do that much, right? But like, the trajectory, if you had asked me at 29 where I would be at 50, I would like, this is probably better than what I expected, right? And like, in different, lots of different metrics.

There's a— I don't know if it was in the book or in an interview, but you were talking about how one of the kind of core curses of Scott's life was being so prodigious. Like JFK tells him you're gonna be president, all this stuff. Yeah. You were pretty— I don't know, you— I think you went to Stanford for running and then ultimately kind of stopped and like it wasn't all success, but like you were also like on track.

Yeah.

And so I'm curious, obviously against the backdrop of what you were just talking about, like how you didn't succumbed to the perils of being a prodigious person who like then kind of got off the rail. Like maybe that would be the difference is your dad, you were both really trending up and then you both kind of went off the rails a little bit, or at least stopped being on the ascent. And then your dad never.

Well, but no, this is maybe a very important difference. I'm like a star at Stanford and I'm vice president of the student government and I win all these awards. And then I get punched in the face when I'm 22. Right? And like, I like— the first job, I get fired from my first job. I get kidnapped after I go to Africa, right? I come back and I can't get hired as an intern, right? I apply to get like an internship at like 100 organizations. I can't get—

just get fully yanked back to earth.

I'm a subway musician, and like my first job, I like hunt for a year, and then I get hired as a short-term intern at the Environmental Defense Fund, which is cool, thank you, the EDF. But like, like my dad at that same age was a Rhodes Scholar, like traveling through the world on his way to being like a tenured professor at age 27, right? So like my dad didn't get punched in the mouth professionally until much later in life when he realized, wait, like what's happening? Like why, like why is, why are things so much harder? So he used to say, "He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make promising." And I think that his, like, I wonder, like you could run both things. Like what if I had won a Rhodes Scholarship and like, you know, had then been like, you know, and then not understood that life is hard until much later, right? Or what if he had not won a Rhodes Scholarship and like had understood that, and then had like kind of struggled, right? Who knows? But I do think that there is a real difference in that we were extraordinarily similar. The day we both graduated from Stanford, we were both extraordinarily similar. And then I think one of the big differences is that the day after, I like started like tumbling down a hill and like, Bleeding my lip. And he went to Oxford. Yeah. Hmm.

Yeah, I think in the acknowledgements you say, "This is a book about what I learned from him, Dad, but there is so much more that I learned from her, Mom." Yeah. What have you learned from your mom?

Well, I mean, my personality, like, you know, it is true. It's like one of the people who read the book carefully are like, notice this. And people who know me well, you know, I wrote a book on my dad because my dad's life is, Bonkers, right? You know, people, you know, can people ask you what do your parents do for a living? My mom is an art historian in Boston. My dad runs a male brothel in Bali, right? And so the narrative in the story, like, my dad has this crazy cinematic life, but my mom, you know, she in some ways is a different kind of movie character where she like carries the weight of the world with infinite love, right? And she, you know, I think I mentioned the book, she's like 20 godchildren, right? Like, all she has is just like love for people, right? And like the ability, just like, when I think of my mother, I think of her as just like carrying the 3 of us children at the same time, my sisters, my 2 sisters and me. And this intense intelligence, but also this patience and this kindness and this sense of like looking at somebody and not, my dad looked at somebody and like, can I sleep with this person? And is this person gonna be professionally interesting to me? And like, is this a person who can like advance these things? My mother looks at a person, it's like, is this person good or is this person bad? And like from a kind of an ethical Christian sense, you know? And I learned a lot from that. And I learned about patience and I learned about perseverance and I learned about morality. And like, I'm a pretty calm person, right? My dad was a madman, right? Like up and down and like, you know, just like spinning out of control. And my mom is, you know, just maybe to a fault, like, bears the sort of the burdens of the world. And like, you know, she's married to my dad who like comes out of the closet and then like sues her every year on her birthday, right? And like, you know, somehow shields her children from that and like raises us, you know, while dad is, you know, literally living with like psychotic people, right? And so, you know, I, I have, I, I, I, my sisters and I sometimes say, like, the odds that none of us is a serial killer after being raised by our father, you know, pretty remarkable what our mother did.

There's a thread that I think has run across a bunch of the stuff we talked about, which is you on one— there's these two kind of halves of you, at least by my reading, which is on one hand, you are, like, remarkably focused. Um, and put another way, you're like, with a lot of the running, like, you're like a machine. You're like super disciplined. You show up. I talked to Steve Finley and he's like, you did?

Yeah, it's like, great.

Steve's like, you give— he's like, Nick didn't have an execution problem. He just didn't have a great strategy. And I gave him a better strategy. He's the perfect person to coach. And yet you're also like super curious. Like, you're an amazing interviewer. You're like this explorer. You even talked about like not being able to stay in one place for that long. And those two things aren't inherently— they seem kind of at odds with them, with each other, and yet somehow you have harmonized them, or you've compartmentalized the focus, kind of consistency, deliberateness in one part. Like, one, does that resonate? And two, how— like, do they feel at odds? Do you harmonize them? Is it easy, or is it something you're kind of constantly thinking about?

It is something I'm constantly thinking about, which is like I try to figure out what are the things I want, how much time can I allocate, and then how do I be most efficient in that time? And that allows you to do a bunch of things. So you're moving from one thing to another, but also ideally performing at a high level on those things, right? So this, go back to Finley, it's not, I did have a strategy and the strategy was like, try to train as little as possible while being a top runner, right? But I didn't have a strategy of like, I didn't have a sort of a sub-strategy of like, how to maximize my lactate threshold, my VO2 max workouts, and I didn't have a belief that I could be faster than I was. And Finley, like, changed all that and, like, got me into a different trajectory. And so in a way, it's like, if I had been— I could have, I could have run a 2:20 marathon in my 30s for sure if I had been the kind of person who could singularly focus, and that was the thing I'd wanted to do. Right? And, but it was never the thing I wanted to do because I wanted to do a lot of things, right? And it was never more important than my work, was never more important than my family. And like for long periods of time, wasn't even more important than my guitar career, right? And so I never reached that. It was only when Finley helped me understand how to run a 2:20-something marathon in my 40s while balancing with the rest of my life. So there is a, You know, I think it's the case that maybe I could have, if I had focused on one thing or I'd focused on like a particular part of my job, or I just said like, I'm gonna be a writer, I could have been a much more successful writer than I was, or I could have been a better editor than I was. But, you know, I didn't, I kind of bounced between things and I got this mix, which I think it's worked out well. And it's, I found a niche in the world that fits my skills, right? And my niche is like, help run this media company where like there are a bunch of things that matter that make me, you know, better than average at the job. Run is like, you know, knowledge of the tech industry, which I got because I was like a tech reporter, right? It's like, and now the tech industry is like a hurricane blowing through my industry. So it's helpful that I've like reported on, read on it. And then like I can also talk about it, which helps our advertising business. Like have worked as a writer, have worked as an editor, right? That like helps you, right? Have the discipline from the running. Like there's this whole mix of things that have come together, right? Have a little bit of like the curiosity of my father and the patience of my mother. Like these skills, like they make this mix that is valuable in this job right now. And there are other things that I could do to be better at my job, but you know, it's okay.

I think we're all kind of searching for like the U-shaped mix hole in the world, right?

Totally, totally.

There's, I think, probably the most vulnerable part of the book, Obviously some of the stuff with your dad is really meaningful, but there's a part where you're talking about a boat that never touched water, the little canoe that you run by. Yeah. A few quotes. I mean, this is also—

You're the first person to ask me about this. I like that detail matters so much to me and like no one has asked me about this thing. So thank you. You know, I've done, I don't know, 100 interviews about the book, right? And every time someone asks about a passage or a sentence that like no one else has noticed, it makes me happy. So thank you for noticing that darn canoe.

There's a canoe that you suppose has probably never touched the water. Yeah. And it's in the context of finally reaching 2:29 and working with Steve. And there's one line where you just said the faster Nick had always been in there. And then there's a few excerpts that I really liked. First, you say, every year I could run that speed was another year that I knew I was still alive. The speed pre-cancer. This kept me going, but it also held me back. I had tried harder each year, but I only changed enough to keep everything the same. I hadn't been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn't wanted to. Or more precisely, I hadn't really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else. I thought about how long, excuse me, I thought about how long I had been satisfied to run 2:43 after 2:43 after 2:43. If I hadn't found Finley, I would never have figured that out. You refer to the boat that again, probably has never touched water, but might one day. And then you finally say, and this is the vulnerable part I think, is I wondered then as I wonder now, what other versions of me exist? There may no longer be time to find, right? Um, yeah. Do you have any theories? Do you have any lost dreams?

Well, first let me explain the boat, please. So I used to run every day, most— and I still do many days— across the Brooklyn Bridge. And when you go across the Brooklyn Bridge, there's an apartment building that you see as you start to descend. And it's a big apartment building, and it's like one of those buildings with, I don't know, maybe Couple thousand people live in it, and many of them have little decks, like short decks where you probably fit 2 chairs, and one of them had a yellow canoe. And for years, and I don't know whether anybody else running across the bridge noticed the yellow canoe sitting there, but I did every day. And every day I was like, "Goddammit, why is it still there?" And it was out there, and if you lived in that building and you're listening to this podcast right now, please send me an email, or if you know, if you lived in the building, it's like kind of a brown building. It's to the left when you're running down the Brooklyn Bridge. It would've been like—

It's not still there.

It's not still there. It's like 7/[redacted address] up. Someone had a yellow canoe or kayak, right? Just out on the porch by the two chairs. Please get in touch with Nicholas Thompson. And I was just fascinated by it, right? And like, surely some days they must go out for the weekend, but I run on the weekends. I mean, anyway, so, and then, I had like had a big insight into the book when I was running across and I sat down on a bench where I could see the canoe. To your question, you know, it's the truth of anybody with any, you know, what are the paths you could have taken, right? And I've been exceptionally fortunate with certain paths, right? You know, I got incredibly lucky in the woman I married, right?

Right, you're deep in the compounding with a few of these certain paths.

Yeah. Like in an amazing way. In an amazing way. Fell in love with a person who turns out to be a great match for me. And I fell in love in college, which means that like, I don't have to go through the heartbreak of like breakups and like the complexity of dating and then like choosing your life. Like we just, we made it, we've turned out to be a great couple and we're like really happy with each other and have been since we were 21 years old, right? Like pretty lucky, right? You know? So some things like really worked out and my, you know, my kids were born and they're like, they're healthy and they're, You know, they're good kids, right? And like, that has made life like much simpler, right? And so there are things that have just kind of worked out and compounded. But there are, of course, questions you wonder, right? And I do wonder this about running. Like, you run 2:29 at 44, obviously you could have run 2:29 at 43 or 42 or 41. There's nothing that make, there's no, everything is worse, like objectively, you know? Like, how fast could you run? It doesn't really matter. Like, maybe I could have run a 2:22, maybe I could have run 2:17. Who knows, right? It's not that important. But then you also wonder like, well, that's interesting, right? If I had like figured this thing out, I figured out in my 40s, I could have done this. Well, like maybe I could have been a great reporter. Maybe I could have like, you know, maybe I should have gone on a different career trajectory. Maybe this thing that I'm pretty good at, I should have like gone down that path. What about this like professional path that I missed, right? And they're like, there were some moments professionally that like would have opened up interesting doors, right? And that might've led to very interesting lives. Like, and you just don't know, like that's, You know, life can only live forwards and it can only be understood backwards. And, you know, I don't know what the— it's not like I wish I could go back and change something, right? It's not like I look back and I'm like, you know what, I wish I had gone through the red door and not the green door when I was 25. I don't know what those things are, but I do wonder a lot, like, in that, that experience of finding a version of myself and sort of stumbling into the fact that like, wow, 'cause what's interesting, okay, I'm gonna step back for a second. What is interesting about my running is not that I ran a 2:29 at 44. Like, that's not that interesting. That's very fast for a 44-year-old, but who cares? What's interesting is that I ran a 2:29 at 44, having trained like a maniac and like trained really hard through my 30s. And not getting close to that, right? And so the interesting thing is realizing that I had to like get through a conception of myself that I could only be this fast because I could not be faster than I had been before I had gotten cancer. Like that is an interesting revelation, right? Like mid-40s guy trains hard, runs fast, so what, right? Mid-40s guy trains fast and goes a lot faster than in his 30s 'cause he didn't understand the psychological effect of having gone through cancer at 29. Now that's an interesting insight. And so that was what propelled me to write the book. And it also led me to think about like, gosh, what are the other things out there?

Yes. Yeah, that's, I'm not interested in what the alternative paths could have been. I'm interested in, have you ever read this guy named John W. Gardner who was like, worked in the government for a while and he wrote, he gave this speech to McKinsey and Company called "Personal Renewal." I feel like I've— He opens where he compares them to barnacles.

Yeah.

It's like, many of you are like barnacles, meaning, A barnacle attaches its head to a rock early in its life and then that's it, just stays there.

That's great.

And I think in general, most people succumb to inertia and inertia kind of, and they make a few choices and then they get carried on. Obviously you are an exceptional person in more ways than one. And yet even so, you're not, you're 50, by the way. Like, I don't think it's about the past alternative paths. I think it's, I'm more interested in looking ahead.

The future, yeah, that's interesting. And it's, One of the other, I'm going through this right now. My son, my eldest son is choosing colleges, right? He's got two choices, he loves them both. And he's like gonna have to decide on basically no information, right? I mean, like lots of information, but like he can't objectively choose. No. If you have no idea, like you're making a choice for your future self. And it's like, you know, I chose to go to Stanford, right? And because of that, like my life was shaped, right? Like my love of, probably my introduction to Silicon Valley, comes about from that. Like the fact that, you know, I adore the tech industry. I cover AI. I'm so fascinated by this. I have strong feelings about it. Like I was shaped by the like libertarian Linux, like open source, like the late '90s cyberpunks, like that, you know, came into me in a kind of a deep way, right? And my views about technology as a force that can bring back democracy, I wouldn't have gotten that if I'd gone to a school on the East Coast, right? And then I met the woman I ended up married, right? All these things happened that have profoundly shaped my life that I had no idea. I chose Stanford because they've got an elite cross-country team and an environmental science program, right? And I kind of liked the lemon trees, and my dad said I should go there, right? And my son, he's got the same choice now, right? He's literally choosing between the same two schools I did, right? And has no information about what he's going to— I mean, we just don't know. We have no idea. And he's like, it's a total draw, and he's going to make a choice. And it would massively affect his life. And then, okay, so then the interesting question is, okay, so what are those choices for me, right? Like, you know, there's not gonna be a, I don't know, there's not a single binary choice like that. And I have much more information about them. And I understand my future self better than he understands his future self. And my paths are narrower, right? Like, you know, you go through life and you, when you're 20, he's 18, you can go out like this very wide spectrum. And when you're 50, you go in a much narrower spectrum. You still have choices and doors, but like the paths are much narrower. And so you go through life, and then when you're 70, your choices are even—

I think they're less narrow than we think they are almost always though.

You think so? Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, there'll be a huge choice of retiring or not retiring at some point, right? Which won't be for a while. Um, but like, I, I will definitely— well, who knows, whatever, who knows. I don't know when the last time I had a big choice to make in my life was, and I don't know what the next time will be, but there will be a next time, and it won't be that far away.

What are you most glad you did?

Married Danielle Goldman. Start having children. I wish we had, I guess I regret, I wish we'd started having children sooner so we could have more children. Like, I kind of, I feel like Thanksgiving with 5 children would've been better than Thanksgiving with 3 children. I just love children. But, you know, it's— I was sick actually at 30, and so we didn't have kids until I was 32. So it's— we— I don't know how we could have— we'd have to start it before I was 30. So I don't know.

One of my favorite things you wrote is this crazy piece on your friendship with Sven Plana. I think my question on that, and we're almost out of time, but is what— one of the thoughts I had is like, what is he getting out of this? And I think I kind of concluded like, he doesn't need to be getting anything out of this. She's just crazy and weird and love— like, um, do you have any thoughts or advice on unlikely, strange, large age gap, etc., friendships?

Well, I don't know. I do think I got something out of her, right? I like— so, you know, I— when I was writing my book about the Cold War, I learned that George Kennan, one of the two characters, had a very close relationship with Svetlana Stalin. I found her Her name then was Lana Peters, and she was living in an old folks home in Wisconsin. And we started corresponding, and she spoke to me because I asked her about George Kennan, not about Joseph Stalin, you know. And she'd been approached over the years, and everybody wanted to know about her dad. And she was like, "I don't want to talk about my dad." So we started talking about George Kennan, then we started talking about her. She had this amazing life, and then she just became my pen pal, and we spent years corresponding. And bless her heart, um, I A, it was like, it was interesting and weird and peculiar, right? Like, I got another letter from Stalin's daughter. But also it wasn't just that. Like, I actually really liked her. What had drawn me to her was, you write a book about someone like George Kennan, and you start to interview people. And pretty soon you're like, you're like, you're on a merry-go-round. And you're hearing the same stories because everybody is telling you the stories that they read about in the books that everybody read and that were then reinforced in their memories and that they've told in other interviews, right?

Cashed, right?

It's cashed, right? And fresh memories are very hard to get. It's very hard to, like, crack people open because these are people in their 70s, and they're not lying to you. It's just like, literally the only thing they remember about George Kennan is the thing that was in Walter Isaacson's book. And they're going to tell you about that thing.

You need a special prompt to get something new.

Right. And so I, But then I write to Svetlana and it's like this just torrent of like, "What? Right, he had an affair with who? Right, like he believed what? This happened when?" And I was like, "Wow." Like, she's like, for whatever reason, because of her growing up, because she's been living in this old folks home in Wisconsin, because she's incredibly perceptive, has an incredibly high IQ, like she's just interesting, right? She's interesting on George Kennan, but she's interested on everything, right? And so I liked talking to her because it was different. And not just different because she'd, like, grown up in the Kremlin and knew about, like, Beria, right? It was just— I would've, like, I would've, like, I don't know, watched Jeopardy! with her and talked with her about, like, what happened in Jeopardy! She was just smart and surprising and weird. It was great.

Just two more things. What, maybe personally, and then also maybe generalize, what do you, how do you hope to be more like, and how do you hope maybe the world is more like Scott Thompson?

All right, so sometimes I think about this, right? So what Scott, so Scott Thompson, no one should be just like Scott Thompson, right? Like, you'll probably get arrested, you know? He— I say in the book, those traffic lights in his head were always green, right? Like, he loved life, right? And he, you know, he wanted to talk to people. He wanted to do things. He wanted to be more experienced. Like, and not just— I mean, he went and he, like, read books. He, like, he did. But he— so it wasn't just, like, out social all the time. He wasn't He just wanted life to be interesting. He hated boredom. He couldn't slow down. Like, he was always going out. He was always doing something. And he would always like, there's something I have to like get on a plane and go fly somewhere. I'm gonna go do it, right? I have to go to this thing and go do it. I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna drive there at 90 miles an hour, right? There's a party across town, I'm on my way, right? And like, I want, you know, and he was just, it was always fun. It was always interesting. You were never bored. Like, I have no memory of being at his house and being bored, right? And then he's like, "Let's watch a movie," right? And not in a kind of a forced way that I sometimes do it. It was just like this kinetic— Life is so rich. Life is so rich. Life is so interesting, right? And I love that about him and just this constant curiosity. And he could talk to anybody, right? And he would have an interesting, like people loved talking to him. My friends' memories of my dad are awesome. I hope my kids' memories of me are, my kids' friends' memories of me are like that. And you could talk to anybody, right? He could talk to, like, this is what part of what his sex addiction, maybe he would like talk to like a 17-year-old prostitute on the street and he could talk to the prime minister and he'd bring the 17-year-old prostitute to dinner with the prime minister. And sometimes the prime minister wouldn't wanna talk to the prostitute, but whatever, dad was there to like be the bridge. So he was, that I love, like the curiosity, You know, I'm gonna go anywhere. I wasn't afraid of anything, you know? Like, I say at the book, right, this is a kid who grew up in Bacon, Oklahoma, and like died near Lake Taal, Philippines, right? And like was everywhere in between, right? And I remember this, you know, if you put a hole in the center of the earth, would you end up right near Lake Taal? Like, not that far, right? And it was just, he like, is a remarkably, Passionate guy, love life.

One last thing. Yeah. In a LinkedIn thing at the end of the year, you shared a bunch of your favorite stuff.

Yeah.

And you shared, I think this was your favorite closing words.

I don't even remember.

Of anything you read. And it's from "Will the Humanity Survive Artificial Intelligence" by Graham Burnett in The Yorker. I wanted to read a little bit of it.

Yeah.

But we'll need vigilance and a fighting courage too, as we again take up this unending experience of coming into ourselves as free beings responsible for worldmaking. Because it is, of course, possible to turn the crank that instrumentalizes people, to brutalize them, to squeeze their humanity into a sickly green trickle called money and leave only a ruinous residue. The new machines are already pretty good at that. The algorithms that drive these systems are the same algorithms that drive the attention economy, remember? They will only get better. What it is like to be us in our full humanity— this isn't out there in the interwebs. It isn't stored in any archive. And the neural networks cannot be, cannot be inward with what it feels like to be you right now, looking at these words, looking away from these words to think about your life and our lives, turning from all this to your day and to what you will do in it with others or alone. That can only be lived. This remains to us. The machines can only ever approach it secondhand, but secondhand is precisely what being here isn't. The work of being here, of living, sensing, choosing, still awaits us, and there is plenty of it.

Yeah, that's a— that ties in so well with what I just said about my dad, doesn't it?

What makes you feel most alive?

Um, right, uh, being with my children, right? Like, I felt pretty alive leading track practice with my son on Monday, you know. I felt pretty alive running those 800s with my other son. I felt pretty alive, like, talking to my son about his the third son about his college choices, right? So being with kids, being outside, you know, I feel, yeah, it's actually, I feel like most alive I'm disconnected to my phone and I'm just, I'm like living and I'm outside, right? I feel less alive when I'm inside. And I've always felt this way. Like I slept on the roof of my dorm every night in college, right? I try to be outside as much as I can, right? I have like, there's certain like mantras I report in my head, but like if you can do something outside and you can do it inside, do it outside. You know, being outside with people I love, doing something interesting, being in motion. There you go.

Thank you.

All right.

Awesome.

Thanks so much.

You can find more about this episode at dialectic.fm/nick-thompson. And if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up, 5 stars, subscribe wherever you're listening. It really helps. I'd like to thank Notion one more time for presenting Dialectic. Fairly recently, Notion launched custom agents, which are basically little guys that live in your workspace and that you can rely on to automate away the busy work. This can be trivial little things or helping you get going on major projects. When I think about putting together a Dialectic episode, I'm trying to automate a lot of things that allow me to focus on the thing I really don't want to automate, which is immersing myself in the mind of the people I'm going to talk to, having an incredibly alive and rich conversation with them, and then spending a little time on the other side of that synthesizing, trying to identify what are the most important ideas, lessons in an individual episode or across them. And Notion AI is a way for me to have an extra set of eyes and being able to share it with the world. So once again, I'd like to thank Notion. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic and also link to the Thinking Together campaign that they put out. I, it was really special and I think the principles and the ideas behind the technology that we make really matter. And I am grateful to be working with a team in Notion and its founders that care about these things. When I think about the virtuous future of creativity and leverage and all the kinds of things that software and ultimately AI may enable. It's one where we are doing things, collaborating and thinking together with other humans, making things that we never thought would be possible. Thanks again for listening, and I will see you next time on Dialectic.