Episode 497: Nick Thompson: How Running 100 Miles Taught Him to Run a $13 Billion Media Empire

23:41And you can't unwind one thing. You can't ever unwind. Okay, so now back to you. I'm going to actually answer your question. Are you sure? I've now kind of failed twice. I've sort of half answered the second time. So part of it was, so initially I was running for part, I started running because it was a bond with my father. When I was 15 and I sort of discovered running for the second time, it was about self-confidence. And then I think in my 20s and 30s, right, when I started to really love it, it became a form of meditation, right? And it became a way of, it was like a connection to a different part of the world.

24:10So I started this very, I've worked very hard in these intense jobs in media in New York City, right? And I go in and I work and I work all day, right? And I work on hard stuff and it's stressful all the time. And the way I do it is I run in and then I run home. And so running became this way of like detaching, right? Even while you live in New York City, even while you have this intense to-do list, even though when you're working, you're getting up at 4 a.m. and working, you're working till late. Like running became this kind of release and this different way to recenter myself. So that's when I think I began to really love the sport.

24:42So how long were you running? Like how long did it take you to run to work and back? It's like, it depends on where my office has been. The longest it's ever been is eight and a half miles from my house. So then I would usually only run one direction. Most of the last 15 years, it's been about four to five miles from my house. And so it's 10 miles if you do it both ways. And do you like take a shower at the office or you don't care? You just like work? I worked at Condé Nast. Like I got to, I'm in the elevators with the editors of Vogue. Yeah, I was going to say, what are you doing then? You're all sweaty coming out, coming to the office.

25:12It's a little, it was a little awkward. I would shower at a gym nearby, right? But then you still have to change. You shower, you change back your running clothes, and then you keep your suit at the office. and then you change the bathroom at the office. You figure out how to do it. It's a little weird. It's a little awkward. But it works. It works. But also, were you doing it for a sense of stress release? You always have these big media jobs. Was it your outlet for just stress? Well, the outlet for stress, it's also quite efficient. It's the most efficient. Right? Because you've got to get to work somehow.

25:46It's not actually any slower than the subway. So no, but I just mean in general, like did you become addicted to running? I don't think I ever became addicted to running, but I did love it. Every time you ran, like you actually like the process of running? Oh yeah, I love the process of running. So I love the feeling after running. I don't love the running while I'm doing it. Oh, I love both, totally. Oh, you do? Absolutely. Okay, so again, what is your, how do you think running, What did running teach you that made you successful in other parts of your life? Ah, that's a hard question. And it's also interesting, the inverse of that.

26:25What did working hard teach me about running? I think the most important lesson is the sort of the benefit of like consistent daily practice. Because what you realize with running is that if you go every day and you run like you do, right? or you run like anybody and you run three miles every day or four miles every day, you get better, right? And you do see that. And because running, it's just you and the clock, you can actually see for sure that you're getting better, right? If you play tennis every day, you might not realize you're getting better. You probably do, but it's a little harder. It's very clear with running.

27:02And so you learn that consistent practice gets you better, right? And then you go through these periods where you run a marathon, you take some time to recover, you start up again, and you're like, oh my God, I'm never going to be fast again. Then you just go through the same process again and you realize, actually, I will be as fast again, right? And so you kind of learn the consistent practice. And then you learn, like consistent practice is actually hard because some days it's hot and some days it's cold and some days it's rainy and some days, you know, you don't have a lot of time and some days your foot kind of hurts and some days you're sick to your stomach and some days there's like a bee's nest, whatever, right?

27:35Like there's always a reason not to run. But once you commit to it, then you just learn to get past those reasons and you learn that you should just do it in the time available. And that's a really good habit for your job. And I'm not sure which I learned first, right? Like if you want to get something done at your job, you just have to do it right now, right? Or like the best time to do it is right now. Don't procrastinate, yeah. Right, and if you have to get something done in the next hour, like start now. Don't complain about how you only have an hour. Same thing with running. If you want to get your run in like and you have a window, you just go and do it.

28:07And so that's part of it. I also do think endurance translates. And that, you know, I do some things in my job where you do an all hands with the staff in a complicated situation. You have to be on and answering questions for two hours, right? And if you make a mistake, like, you know, it might be in the news. And like, how do you get good at that? Not that I'm as good as I could be. Probably helps to run marathons, right? Right. And doing that probably helps your marathoning, right? I do think the two things go back and forth. Like the ability to focus hard at a job, I think helps me focus in my training and the training helps me in the job.

28:42Now, they distract from each other too, right? Because sometimes I have a project and I go running, maybe I should work on the project. But probably the run afterwards probably made your brain way more sharp, way more focused, productive. like the benefits I think from the running will probably make you way more successful at your job because you're now like center it centers you probably too totally and I kind of have always worked like three shifts like I get up and I work and then I run and then I get my job and then I go home and I work right right in between I like now that kids I spend all that time playing with my kids but at some point they go to sleep right and then after they go to sleep I tend to work right And when I wake up early, I tend to work.

29:28So it's like, if I just work, work, work, subway, work, subway, work. Right. It breaks up your day. Yeah. It breaks up your day. Yeah. So I guess what would be your big message then for people listening to the podcast? Like what they can, why did you write the book in the first place? Just as a, so you like to run, right? Like, big deal. I like to run. But you know, what would, why did you write the book? I wrote the book to try to understand more about like why I run and what I get from it. And I also wrote, like the book has stories of different runners who have used running as a way to get through really complicated stuff.

30:04And it's people who enter my life at different points. So, you know, one of the characters is this guy, Tony Ruiz, who is my coach. And he used running as a way to sort of conquer his heroin addiction, right? Another is a guy named Michael Westfall who beat my dad in a race and then like was one place behind my son, right? And his story is the fastest runner run a marathon with Parkinson's. And so it's learning about how to cope with the physical decline caused by Parkinson's and how to use running to help with that. I tell the story of this woman, Super Beckford, who ran a store down the street from my dad.

30:39And for nine years in a row, she ran and she won the 3 ,100-mile race in Queens, where you run 3 ,000 miles around the same block. And so that's a story of using running as intense self-transcendence. This is what I love about it also. It's like, again, it's like to everybody, it's funny how running could transcend or transform people's lives in lots of different ways, right? And I see the evolution. I think what you said was very resonated. People start for one reason, for self-confidence, right? Or weight loss, right? And then it turns into meditation. It becomes like my meditation and how it helps people who get through really hard times in life.

31:29It's like there is something about running that is very different than any other, I don't know, modality out there. I think that's right. There are negative things that can make you self-centered, right? It can make you selfish. How? How, because you're saying it's a lot of solo time where you're doing a lot of like stuff for yourself and like, because people who are ultra marathoners, you're spending like hours a day running by yourself. What is a joke? How do you get, how do you find out how fast someone ran a marathon when you meet them at a dinner party? Don't worry. They'll tell you. Right.

32:06Like, you know.

32:13That's hilarious. You know, there are ways that it can make you a little too focused on yourself. But I think for the most part... Why do you think that is, though? Well, because... I think that's an interesting take. Yeah, in part because, like, you're not part of a team, usually. It's you, right? It's just you. Like, part of what makes it such a good form of meditation and self-understanding is what makes you, like, potentially self-centered about it. So there's a trade-off. I guess that's kind of, you know, it's true, right? Because you're... Again, I always go back to the fact that you're alone.

32:43It's a one-man sport type of thing, right? Right. And I mean, if I were sitting here and I wanted to kind of like, if I would make the case against running, right, A, it can make you self-centered. And B, like, what is success? Like, all you're doing is pushing the other people back, right? Like, you know, you finish one place higher. Everybody else finishes one place lower, right? Like, you're actually, like, in a team, you're with a bunch of other people and you're competing against a bunch of other people. In a marathon, you're competing against everybody. Everybody, exactly. But how is that different than swimming?

33:19It's not. I mean, well, swimming, I guess, I mean, I don't know exactly how most swimming meets are scored, but - Well, no, but it's similar, right? It's similar. I mean, and swimming might be worse because you can go out and you can do it like four hours a day or five hours a day and turn everything else off in your life. Well, how do you use running? So part of the hard thing, one of the interesting and complex things in running, I guess we're going to go down the like what's hard about running bit for which is nice because you know like if my wife were here and you gave her truth serum right she would tell you that she's annoyed at my running sometimes like what the hell like you're like she came downstairs the other day like normally i get up right i make everybody breakfast right put the breakfast on the table and then like they come down and we all eat and the other day i went running because then i'll go run to work right but the other day i like went running she came downstairs i'm like where's nick And I kind of thought I'd be back before she woke up, but no.

34:12And that's a minor infraction. We have a very healthy marriage. We've been together forever. But there are times where I'll go for a long run and she'll be like, what is he doing? Why isn't he here? There's stuff going on. How many hours are we talking? Well, if I go for a long, I try to do it before everybody wakes up. So if I'm going to go run three hours, I'll go leave at six or I'll go leave at five. But by the way, that's actually quite thoughtful in a way. You're not running at like 10 o 'clock when everyone's running around looking for you. No, of course not. Nope. Don't be, don't say I would be divorced by that.

34:44I mean. Well, right. But I had, I've had a lot of people sit here with me who are big ultra marathoners and all the things. And the ones that like who check themselves, they're doing it. They're running at four o 'clock in the morning or they're doing all these things because of this reason. Right. So part of it is like running has never been the most important thing in my life. It's always been important, but it's never been. I mean, this was part of the problem at college. It wasn't the most important thing in my life, right? It's why I, at my age of peak physical fitness, I came in, I don't know, 200th place in a marathon where if I'd really focused, I could have come in significantly faster.

35:25It's always been something I've put a lot of time and effort into, but it's always had a place, right?

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36:45So again, so did you write the book to cut? What was the main message of the book, though, that you wanted to share with people? The main message of the book is that running can be a wonderful psychological force in your life. And it can be a way for you to understand yourself, to understand others around you, and to build habits that are great for the rest of your life. Okay, so that's the beginning. And then is it because you have a lot of time to think and it gives you a place where you can... Like that's, for me, I get my best ideas when I'm running, right? Like I don't like to do yoga, but I like to run because that's when I think of the best.

37:18Is that what you mean by that? It can be very meditative. It can bring up certain things that you, because it's kind of like you're bored. You're like alone in your thoughts for all these hours. That's when creativity lies. That's where thoughts come into your head. Is that what you mean? Like, are you a better CEO because you run? Definitely, definitely. It's a way of spurring a creative process in your head, right? So you have the possibility of thinking, right? And as you observe yourself as you run, and you think more deeply about yourself, and you think more deeply about your place in the world, which is why, like in the case of Tony, who I was just mentioning, like it was a very important factor in his ability to come back from, you know, debilitating drug addiction, right?

38:01It's a way to like stay centered and to think about who you are and what your place in the world is, right? And it's a way to just understand like complicated things in life. So my sense is that, now, running isn't the only way to do this stuff, right? Like my point is not, you know, run, don't bike or run, don't swim. Running is just the thing I know. Right. And so it was a way for me to write about the thing I know in the deepest way I could come up with. Right. So the first review of the book called it Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for Runners. Right. And so the idea there is like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a way of writing about bikes.

38:40Right. That would help you understand father son relationships kind of philosophy. Right. One of the books I read a lot was Barbarian Days. That's a way of writing about surfing as a way to understand father-son relationships, how a young man develops. So this is a way of writing about running as a way to try to get at some of the complicated things in life, including my relationship to my father, all of these different other runners coping with different barriers. Talk about the father relationship. What was the relationship? How did running help you cope with your relationship with your father?

39:14Yeah. So to get to there, so my father, I mentioned a little bit his like interesting, you know, childhood. And then... Is he alive right now? He passed away in 2017. But his life, so he comes out of the closet in the 1980s. He's working in the Reagan administration. And he's actually plays kind of an important civil rights role. Like he's a rare, outwardly gay Republican, right? And he has this position that being open about your sexuality, you know, the more people who know that gay people are everywhere, the more tolerance there will be in the world. Like I'm very, you know, I have a lot of admiration for that.

39:48But he's also kind of a maniac and he ends up in relationship after relationship, like hundreds of men a year who he's dating. He like proposes marriage and exchanges rings with like dozens of them. He ends up essentially running a male brothel in Southeast Asia, right? And so he has this, and he's, you know, he's run out of money. He's kind of a tax fugitive. He's like in all of these lawsuits with everybody. Like there's all of this like incredible tension and mayhem. He's calling me up and like threatening to kill himself if I don't send him$200 so he can pay off the prostitute he's just got.

40:22Like it's a mess, right? So he's a complicated guy. Like a guy who John F. Kennedy said was going to be president ends up in Southeast Asia like completely bankrupt with a harem, right? Like complicated stuff. So really this is a book about your dad, but you had to like – you had to kind of couch it as something beyond because nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows who he is. He's an amazing character, right? And he's a very complicated character. And I have to deal with him. And I stay weirdly to many people, I stay quite close to him his whole life, even as this is going on. Like, I love the guy deeply.

40:53We email back and forth every day, even while he's going through this. I'm kind of financially supporting him at the end, the last five or 10 years of his life. Even though he didn't raise you after five. Correct. And even though he was pretty hostile to my mother, yeah. I mean, he was a... You know, he did a lot of bad things, but he always loved me. Right? So that's like a very important part of it. He always wanted the best for me. He always like thought the world of me. He always supported me. He was always there for me. You know, he was never, he never didn't love me. And that's the first thing you should ask for from a parent.

41:28So I forgave him a lot. Did you have a time when you didn't forgive him? Was there ever a moment in time when there was like estrangement or? There's never estrangement. There was anger, but there's never estrangement. Yeah. He was estranged from my sisters. like he was they had a more complicated they had a harder relationship with him but he was I was never estranged from him it's funny even when you talk about your dad now you can you can see you're very emotional about him I know it's a little hard to yeah to talk about him you know many people who met him said they never met anybody quite like him like he was this just incredible like bundle of energy and excitement and interesting and he's like so smart and he'd be so fun to talk to if You met him and he was here for a party or dinner or cocktails and showed up.

42:12He'd like showed up and he'd probably like break something and he'd like spill wine on this nice chair and like be kind of impossible. And he'd probably like, you know, offensively hit on someone who might be straight, but he'd be convinced is gay. But he'd be awesome. Right. And you'd have like a lot of fun with him. Yeah. Like I kind of this is kind of like an homage to your dad, the book. It really is. A little bit. I mean, there's a lot like I don't know what he would think of it. Right. Right. He told me at one point, he said, like, you should write like a very candid memoir and you can say anything you want about me.

42:45I don't know. I'll be very interested when his friends read the book and their response to it. When you sold the book to your publisher, how did you sell it? Where did you say this was? You know, it's interesting. It's a different structure back then. I said, you know, I said it was a book about running. I said his book about my time in the sport. But the initial structure was that it would be like it would trace like the stages of a marathon. right? And we'll talk about the beginning of a marathon and what happened physiologically in the first five miles, the next five miles of the marathon. And that it would layer like my life story and running and my journey from being pretty good to being very good.

43:15And then that structure just didn't work, right? It wasn't, it was like a good, it was good for the proposal. Like it sounded cool. And you couldn't, I tried to write it that way and you couldn't read it. And so then it became a very different book. Well, you just said something though, that I find interesting, the psychological stages of what happens when you run that long, right? How do you keep yourself from not giving up and keep on going. Okay, so at what distance, at what race? Because there are different things that I've learned as I've shifted. You know, when I started writing the book, I was only a marathoner and I became an ultra marathoner during the process.

43:45Okay, even to go from marathoner to ultra marathoner. So this was really interesting for me. So I was a, most of my life I've been a marathoner, right? And when I'm a marathoner, I'm out there and I'm like trying to run a specific time and the window, like the band of possible finishing times is quite narrow, right? Like, you know, when you start that there's like a 95 % chance you run between like, I don't know, 235 and 245. Right. You said that. Yeah. You know? And so you like, when you run an ultra, you have no idea. Like I just ran this 100K up in the Finger Lakes where I just wanted to finish before the sun went down.

44:18Right. So you have like a totally different, you start at four in the morning and you know the sun's going to set at seven. So you kind of want to finish in 15 hours, but who the hell knows? Not to say that's only, but you're not even, that's not a hundred miles. No, it's just 100K. Not just 100K, but it's like 65 miles or so. Weirdly, 100K is 62 miles, but the race was like 66 because I don't really want to mess with us. Have you ever run 100 miles? No, I've never run 100 miles. But in a race like that, so I learned a lesson the first time I did it. The first time I ran it, this race called Twisted Branch.

44:52So this was last year. I've run it twice. And I had this very important moment where I was like 30 miles in and I've been running for like, I don't know, six hours because you're going up and down mountains. And I was like, my God, right? I've like run longer than I've ever run before. And I still have 30 miles to go. And I've got like my heart rate monitor on, like looking at my pace. I'm like checking all that. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to turn my watch off. I'm going to turn my heart rate monitor off. I'm going to like forget about all that stuff. And I'm just going to think I'm a kid running in the woods.

45:25Right. And I'm just going to enjoy where I am. Like I'm no longer racing. I'm no longer worried about the finish time. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not thinking about hydration. I'm not counting calories. I'm just a kid running in the woods. And this was something that had been taught to me by that woman I mentioned earlier, Super Bevector, who runs, you know, 3 ,000 miles on a block in Queens, right? Like just think you're a kid, right? And so I kind of turned the racing part of my brain off. And once I did that, I was great. I was just like galloping through the forests. Right. You see, mind tricks, basically.

45:55And then when I'm running, when I'm running a race, like I'm running a, I ran this 50 miler in Connecticut in April. And I was trying to set the American record, right? And so I knew exactly what I was trying to do. And, you know, I was on pace through like 43 miles, 44 miles. And, you know, the last five or six, I'm falling apart, right? And you can just like my body's in it. There's a photograph of me coming across the finish line. I just, tears are down my face. I just look totally deformed and wrecked. and you know at that point in a race right when you're trying for a time and your body's giving out then you're like just trying to sort of all right focus on a mantra like focus on i focus on a mantra where i go one two three one two three where it's right foot left foot right foot left foot right right foot right and it's a way of both getting myself balanced alexander technique right so you're not landing too hard on one side and the other and it's a way of just like really meditating and letting go of everything else so sometimes i'll do that if that starts to break down i'll be like okay i'm just gonna run to the next tree right let's see if i'll just like hold this pace to the next tree that's not working maybe i'll look like in that race you're lapping runners you're like seeing people in the distance okay i'm gonna i'm just gonna just i'm gonna run hard until i pass the person in blue right and you're playing like all these different mind games to stay in it right so you're like in the twisted branch race i'm dissociating right like i'm like stepping like i'm moving up to a cloud and like watching nick run through the forest right and in the Lake Warmog, that 50 miler where I'm like trying to stay on pace.

47:21I'm like locking into a very narrow version of myself. And both of those experiences, right? So when you're running a race like that 50 miler, you like lose all awareness, right? Of what's going on around you. It's this very interesting experience where it's almost like mind and matter are like one, like there is no external, there's no thought, right? Like if you were to have a videotape of what is going on in my brain, there is nothing, right? It is just like forward motion, right? Straight ahead, as opposed to this kind of like, you know, cinematic, wonderful thing that's happening when I'm dissociating.

47:56And so sometimes you're focusing and sometimes you're dissociating when you're in like in a tense and complicated race like that. So what, so, okay. What did you like, so how did you kind of train differently besides like the mind games? So in which period? For the like, when I started running ultras or when I like got fast in my 40s? I was gonna ask you on both. But really, I guess now that you say so, how did you become the fastest man in your 40s? Like, how did you train differently? What did you do differently? So that was like when I was 43, I met with these coaches. How old are you now? I'm 50.

48:35Okay, 50. So it was when I turned 43, it was a year after my father died, which I don't think is a coincidence. and they looked at my training. They looked at my old logs. They asked me how fast I thought I could go and I was like, well, 243, that's what I always run. I was like, I'd love to hold onto that. And they're like, yeah, okay. And so I set up a fairly specific routine where I would run seven days a week and then three days a week I would do something hard. So on Tuesdays, I would go and I would run basically stressing my VO2 max system. So I'd run like 400 meter repeats, like 12 400s or 1600 400s or eight 800s.

49:10So Thursdays, I'd basically be working on my lactic threshold. So I'd run like four by two miles, three by two miles, two by three miles. And then Saturday or Sunday, I would run 20 miles, right? 22 miles. And I just kind of kept changing the goals in each of those workouts and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And through doing that, I both like improved physically and I like improved mentally and realized I could go faster than I thought I could go. Those coaches were kind of trick my mind to make myself think that I could go faster than 243 pace. So 243 pace is like 615 miles. And I was terrified of running a marathon at under six minute miles, which is 237 pace.

49:44And so they would have me run like workouts where I'd be doing short distances under five minutes in the hopes that it would reset my mind. So I'd be less scared of going under six minutes in a marathon. And so that eventually got me to run the 229 marathon, which is like, I don't know, 541 pace. Right. And so that was step one. That was how I got like fast at marathons. And then, of course, I ran the 229 in 2019. COVID hit. But then when it was training for ultras, which I've done maybe the last four years or so, it's similar. But obviously, I'm not running as many like 400-meter repeats on the track.

50:16But what other training do you do to kind of improve your endurance or stamina or your strength? Do you do any weightlifting? Well, I'm going to rephrase that. Do you do any kind of resistance work? Yeah, no, I do some weightlifting. And now I do it with my – okay, this is the funniest thing. or one of the revelations. I was talking to a physical therapist once and he asked me, when was the last time you got hurt? And I was like, oh, it's like 12 years ago. He's like, 12 years ago? I was like, yeah, that's the last time I missed a workout. And he's like, that's crazy. He's like, what do you do for strength training?

50:50I was like, oh, I don't do anything. He's like, what do you do for mobility? I was like, oh, I don't do anything. He's like, do you just run? I was like, yeah, I just run. And he's like, but do you ever move your body? I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. I play Nerf basketball with my kids and I wrestle with my kids. I play soccer with my kids. I play water wars with my kids. I do one-arm push-up contests with my kids. I do parkour with my kids. And he's like, well, that's why you don't get hurt, right? Right, you do all this cross-training. I do all this incredible cross-training because I have three sons who are active.

51:17How old are they? They're now 17, 15, and 11, right? But I play with them all the time, right? Wow. It was like that was my cross-training. And now they're a little older. I will go to the gym with them, and I'll weightlift with them. right? Like, and I was like, you're weightlifting. So like my, I was like, I was like supporting my 11 year old while he's bench pressing like 35 pounds the other day. So you're super active. So you know what, this is actually very, I'm a big believer in this too. You don't have to be going to an actual gym to get fit. You're doing all the cross training you need by doing all these, like you're playing with your kids, doing so much functional training also, right?

51:54Like holding this, doing that. So you do do a lot of stuff. Yeah, I do. I mean, and now, now that they're older, I do more stuff and I'll like, I also do like, and now I don't like, so we're talking on, it's, I think it's a Wednesday. And on Monday, my kids play for these, my two younger kids play for this great soccer team. It's a great club. And I will like do workouts with them. So I had a couple 11 year olds over and we were doing like glute work together. Right. Like what? Just like a leg lifts, leg drives, like squats, box jumps. Right. Yeah. And I'm like training them. That's all working out.

52:27Totally. Yeah. But I'm like training with 11 year olds. Right. I'm not like at a CrossFit gym. Right. But I think you're so conditioned, like especially with the cardiovascular and endurance and you're so like, you're very lean, you know, so it's easier for you to do other things. You know what I mean? Well, and here's the nice thing about training with an 11 year old, right? Like you're not going to do so many box jumps, you get hurt, right? Yeah, exactly. You're going to do like kind of the right amount of box jumps. Yeah, you're not doing like 500. Right.

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54:30So, okay, let's talk about being the CEO of Atlantic. Okay, so what do you do every day? Like, give me your habits. Like, I know you run, God knows. What do you eat? Are you eating? Are you a vegan? Are you, do you eat animal protein? I'm a pescatarian, so I do eat some animal protein. I'm like pretty strict on my diet. So I get up, I have a, I don't know, I usually have like oats mixed with like chia seeds, ground flax seed and a bunch of nuts. And then I add some fruit. I have that with coffee and green juice for breakfast. You know, at lunch, I'll try to have like salad, vegetables, add in a protein.

55:08And at dinner, you know, kind of similar, right? So lots of green vegetables, you know, lots of whole wheats, lots of nuts, lots of legumes. I do eat carbs. Good, you have to with that kind of running schedule. Also, carbs are delicious. Yeah, they are good. I agree. They're very good. But you eat pretty healthy. Okay, I want to talk about being the CEO. Okay, so there's very few publications that are relevant anymore, as I'm sure you know, right? Yours is probably one of the very few. How does the Atlantic keep its relevance? How many people are subscribed? I want to know the nitty-gritty now of the Atlantic.

55:40Sure. This is what I do for a living. I know. So we now have 1.35 million subscribers. We are up substantially. We were at maybe 800 ,000 a few years ago. So we've been skyrocketing. It's great. We've gone from losing lots of money to making a good bit of money, which is amazing. How is that? Through advertisers? It's actually most, I mean, advertising has grown. So I've been the CEO for four years and advertising has grown. And if you are an advertiser, a CMO listening to this podcast, please do advertise. But the principal growth has been through subscriptions. And so the way that the model has come to work is that we have been really focused on how to get someone to subscribe.

56:18And so there's a whole bunch of questions that come into that. So what does the subscription offer? What is the meter? What is the color of the background? If somebody comes in from Google, do you push them to subscribe? If they come in from Twitter, if they come in from a newsletter, okay, what are the places where people have real subscription propensities? So there's this giant math equation. And every time someone comes to the Atlantic.com, they're either a potential subscriber or they're not. And what you want to do is you want to put the paywall in front of the people who might subscribe and not in the ones who won't.

56:46And so if you can get better at that, marginally better at that every day, you make the product more successful. How can you do that? Well, you run a whole bunch of tests. You test what happens if we make the price$69? What happens if we make the price$79? Okay, what if we offer this? What if we put the gate, we allow people to read two stories a month before the gate. What if we make the gate so you can only read one story a month except on stories where there's a subscription propensity above X during the first 12 hours of the day, right? You run just all of these tests and you build models behind it.

57:18That's what we do, right? And so building that successfully and you get really good at running advertising. And so you put advertisements on Facebook and Google driving people to particular stories and you identify the stories that people are most likely to pay to read. and you run that over and over and over and over again and you look for what users want and you try to build that and magic, it's worked. What we have never done, like what's being also, I should also add, our journalists are amazing and they keep writing awesome content. So what we have done is we've taken what the journalists want to do and then we've built the business model based on that as opposed to what happens at a lot of media companies where they say, you know, there's a real opportunity for selling advertisements to electric car companies.

57:59Like, why don't you write some stories about electric cars, right? And then you do that, and then the journalists either say, buzz off, or they write kind of bad stories about electric cars, right? What we say, hire the best journalists in the world. Here's a bunch of money to do that. Have them write the stories they think are the absolute best, and then we will try to get people to subscribe to read those stories. And that model has worked fantastically, at least for the last four years. Who knows what happens with AI? But for now, it's going gangbusters. So since you've been at the helm, the subscription have skyrocketed.

58:33Yes. Now, I wouldn't make, that might be correlation, not cause, but it is true. Well, what do you mean? It could be, but it is. Yeah. You were at Wired before. I was at Wired. We did great. We published all kinds of wonderful stories about tech. And then the big shift was shifting from being the editor-in-chief and being in charge of what stories you run and reporting and writing to being the CEO. though, we're in charge of the product decisions, the engineering decisions, the advertising calls. How did you go from editor-in-chief of Wired to the CEO of the Atlantic? I mean, why did they hire me?

59:03Yeah, because that's a different job. That's a creative job versus now you're in a business position. Yeah, so the Atlantic had a very particular need where they wanted someone who understood business and understood tech, but who also appreciated editorial. And so they couldn't have hired someone from a straight business background because the system would have kind of rejected it. So then I was actually a very rare candidate. When I had worked at the New Yorker, which was the job I had before Wired, I had been in charge of the website, I had been in charge of the iPhone app, and I'd actually been in charge of the product and engineering team, right?

59:38Because I was the only guy at the New Yorker who knew how to fix the printer, right? And could plug the keyboards in. I was put in charge of the tech team, right? And so I knew all this stuff. And I'd covered the tech industry. So I knew a lot about business and tech and engineering and product. And so I had a lot of the skills that kind of mapped onto the Atlantic CEO job. There's a lot of stuff in this job that I'd never done before. But I had managed teams. I knew how to, you know, I knew how to handle product managers. So I was a reasonable candidate. And then they kind of, I don't know, it took a long time for them to settle on me.

1:00:10Like it was kind of a hard call. Really? I mean, I don't know. You'd have to get, you know, Lorene Powell Jobs on the podcast. But yeah. No, it was a, the Atlantic's a sacred publication. Like it was found in 1857 to stop the American Civil War by people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like it is an important institution. It has an amazing editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg. And like getting the right CEO is kind of tricky. For sure it is. Well, it seemed to have worked out for you, but. Worked out for me and I think they're reasonably happy. And they're reasonably happy. But what have you seen has been an uptick?

1:00:45Like what do people care about the most? What gets the most traction in terms of content? You know, it's actually really wonderful where it's like stories that are deeply emotionally resonant and that people spend a lot of time working on. Readers love like readers love our best stuff. It's kind of wonderful. Right. So if you look at the stories that drove the most subscriptions, you know, it's this. Well, obviously, Jeff's story about Signal, right, where he was mistakenly included on the White House's, you know, secret chat that drove a lot of subscriptions. Wow, that was a big one. That was a big one, right?

1:01:18That drove a lot of subscriptions. But like, you know, from the previous year. How many subscriptions did that story, the signal story drive? Many tens of thousands, you know, lots of subscriptions. I don't know the exact number here. I bet you it put you on the map. I bet you a lot of people didn't even know what the Atlantic was. Yeah. And then they saw it in the news all the time because of that journalist from the Atlantic. Well, and he handled it exactly right. I mean, that was the beautiful thing about it where it wasn't like, Scoop kind of fell in his lap and he handled it perfectly, right?

1:01:46And that reflected well on the institution. Well, how did he handle it? I don't remember. I know he's had a lot of class with it though. He did. So what happened is he's mistakenly included on the chat, right? What a bunch of morons. How could that even happen? Do you want my theory? Yeah. Okay, so this is unclear, but like this is my theory. His name is Jeff Goldberg. Yeah. Initial's JG. He meets Michael Waltz at a party. We have photographs of him meeting Waltz, like Waltz's business card. Like they clearly meet. Waltz is the national security advisor. My theory is that Waltz puts Goldberg's number in his phone under JG, not under Jeff Goldberg, because he doesn't want his staff to know he's talking to a reporter.

1:02:22So he puts his name under JG. Then they're starting the Signal chat to like talk about bombing the Houthis. And he wants to add the trade representative because it involves the Straits Ramoos. And it's the trade representative is Jameson Greer. And so then he adds JG thinking it's Jameson Greer. That's my theory. And then in Signal, like when you look at who's in a group chat, if they're in your address book, they show up as how they are. So it shows up as JG on Mike Waltz's phone. And like Pete Hegseth doesn't have Goldberg's number, so it just shows up as 202, whatever his number is. Right. And so nobody realizes he's in there.

1:02:55That's my theory. So now there are other theories, like maybe someone stuck him on, maybe some fat fingers, maybe who knows. Any case, that's my working theory. He gets in the chat and he starts to see what's going on. He's like, what the hell, right? And then he stays in for a while because he thinks it might be a hoax. He sees what's happening. And then he leaves the chat when he realizes they're discussing classified information and he shouldn't be there, right? So that is actually the proper thing to do. He left the chat? He left the chat, right? Because, you know, clearly he shouldn't have been in it.

1:03:26True, but curiosity, you know, like, and just, you know, being a voyeur. Okay. Well, curiosity versus espionage act, right? I mean, you weigh these two things against each other. Okay, you're right. Espionage, curiosity, very similar, but different. So he leaves the chat and then, you know, he writes up a story because it is in the national interest to publish the story. But he's very careful to leave out like secret details and to leave out details of the specific raid and to leave out details of things they wrote. He writes the story. And then as a good reporter should, he calls the White House and says, hey, here's the story we're going to publish.

1:04:03Like, that's what you do. You call the person. You don't just publish it and blindside it. And you want it because you call them because you might have something wrong, right? Or there might be something where you need their opinion in. And then they say, oh yeah, that's true. Yep. Go ahead. You know, accurate. So then he writes the story, right? Everything done by the book, right? Like we've called our sources. We've handled it, you know, admirably. We've taken into account national security. Like Jeff's kid, like is in the military. Like Jeff cares a lot, you know, about the military, cares about national security.

1:04:30Like we were founded as a magazine to protect America. Like sometimes we don't agree with Donald Trump, but we are a magazine in favor of America. And so he does it. And then the White House at first is like, yep, it's true. And then for reasons that are beyond me, and again, I'm just the CEO, they start to say the story is not true. And like, ah, there's nothing classified in that chat. Like, we don't know what the Atlantic is talking about. Like they're making stuff up. Like there's nothing in the chat that was classified. Because remember, we haven't published the screenshots, right? So then they're like, wait, what?

1:05:03Why are they doing this? Normally what happens in journalism is someone denies the story and then eventually admits that it's true. Right. They don't do it the other way around. Admit that it's true and then like weirdly deny it, right? And so they're now denying the story, which is banana cakes. And so then like Jeff and Shane Harris, his co-writer, are like, well, I guess we're obligated to publish the whole thing. And so then we put all the transcripts online. We put the screenshots online afterwards, the second day. And so that's the story. At no point, right? And he's always checking. Everything is always 100 % accurate.

1:05:43Everything is to the book, calling your sources. Even if someone is denouncing you, and even if someone is lying about you, you still call them because you can't be wrong on your side. You have to be as accurate and honest as fact-checked as you can be. So he does everything exactly by the book. He does everything exactly the way a reporter is supposed to do it. And so the story ends up reflecting really well on us. So it's a benefit to the Atlantic. Like he gets, like the scoop falls out of the sky, right? Literally, yeah. Like literally falls out of the sky onto his phone while he's at like the Safeway parking lot.

1:06:14But, you know, like he handles it perfectly. So it reflects really well on the Atlantic. So who denied it? Was it that woman, the press, what's her name? The blonde lady. Yeah, she definitely, she definitely, Caroline Levitt. But she denied it and denounced us. I think she called us, you know, like a failing magazine. Maybe it was either her or Trump that says that we're like a failing magazine about to go to business, which we're clearly like I run the P &L. Like we're actually doing great, right? Like media is having a hard time. We might go out of business next year. But right now we are like crushing it financially.

1:06:48Like we're doing better than we've ever done. So they're making stuff up about our finances, which annoys me as the finance guy. Of course it does. But then like Hegsess is out there and Nikki Haley's out there saying there's nothing classified in it, which is nonsense. The whole thing is a total, how that even happened, I know that your hypothesis makes perfect sense, right? How that could have happened. In any case, why the hell are they on Signal talking about this stuff? It's so, like, A, they shouldn't be on Signal, right? Like they should be using like a skiff, right? Like they're government officials planning an attack.

1:07:19Like not on their phones, not on Signal. Duh. Two, even if they are on Signal or even if they're in a skiff, they shouldn't be like boasting and BSing about it. Like there are details that Hegseth is putting there that he has no need to. He's just trying to like impress the folks in the chat. It is beyond me. It was so weird. It's beyond. But this is just like a gaggle of clowns really who are doing all of this stuff. And then when the story broke, like when we published our first story, what they should have done is like, you know, this was a mistake. We've cleaned it up. We've made it so we won't do Signal, right?

1:07:52like, you know, what this showed is there was a good conversation, but yes, the Atlantic is correct. Instead of like making it so much worse by saying, well, there's no classified information lying about us lying about the conversation, right? Like they shot themselves in the foot there. Yeah, I would say so. Are you guys then not, this is obvious. Are you guys not allowed to be in the press room? In the White House press room? I actually don't know the exact policies right now. They have not come after us. Like Jeff went to the White House and interviewed Trump afterwards. Like, really? Yeah, I don't want to speak out of turn, because I don't manage the journalists.

1:08:25But we have like gone there. And like, Trump calls our reporter called our reporter, Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker at like two in the morning one night, like from his cell phone, like he still cares about the Atlantic. Well, listen, it's a very prestigious magazine. But why is he calling these people at two o 'clock in the morning from his cell phone? Does he think they're gonna answer the phone? Did they answer the phone? No, it was a voicemail. Or like, it was It's like a, just a missed call from, you know, you wake up and it's like, Donald Trump called you at 2am, right? Like he might be on the phone with Ashley Parker right now.

1:08:56I have no idea. Does he not sleep this man? He is. I think he sleeps different hours. Is he like a, you know, what are the, what are those, and those not Dracula, you know, vampires that they don't sleep during the day? Like it's, by the way, not for nothing, this man is like 80 something and the guy doesn't sleep. The guy has more energy. He eats McDonald's all day. Like, I think that I'm doing things wrong. I mean, I should have his energy and his stamina. Well, he has this theory, right, that I don't know whether you agree with it, but that I believe he stated this publicly multiple times, but that humans have a fixed number of heartbeats.

1:09:30And so the trick is to not use those heartbeats up. Like when you're born, there's a whole bunch of people who believe this, right? That like every animal has like a similar number of heartbeats, that if you look at the number of times an elephant's heartbeats, it kind of matches that of a mouse and that humans are kind of in the middle. And so if you use your heartbeat set, you're likely to die sooner. Now, I disagree with this hypothesis. Really? He has stated this. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting theory. You'll have to talk to a physiologist. He may have stated it like haphazardly. He may say that's not what he really believes in.

1:10:02I don't want to misquote the president of the United States of America, but like it is a theory that I've heard from multiple people. I don't think it's correct, to be honest. But he's doing, he's clearly vigorous. Clearly. So does that, by that hypothesis, does that mean if I work, you run and I run, we work out a lot, our hearts beat, our hearts are beating faster. Are we going to die faster? Okay. So this, okay. So now we'd have to pull out a calculator, but it's actually a pretty interesting calculation. And it depends, right? And because what happens when you exercise, your resting heart rate goes down.

1:10:35And so let's say your resting heart rate goes down 10 beats a minute, right? Because you exercise a lot. So it goes from say 55 to 45. So then 23 hours a day, you're saving 10 beats a minute, right? For one hour a day, you're going up, you know, a hundred beats a minute, right? So you have to do the math. Right. So like it's a, it's a deli, it's like a balancing. It's actually pretty close, right? I'm not sure whether, it depends on how much exercise reduces your resting heart rate and your sort of your average walking heart rate. And it depends how much your heart rate goes up when you exercise.

1:11:07I think probably like an hour a day of exercise is like the optimal amount if you want to like keep your total lifetime heartbeats, you know. That makes sense. So an hour a day. So someone like you or people who are doing ultras for 12 or 13 hours a day, the fact that you're even alive at 50, you should have been dead like at 37. Well, this gets to another really interesting debate, which is, is there a point at which too much exercise is bad for your heart, right? Like this is, so the heartbeat debate is kind of like a silly, fun one, but this one is a serious one, right? And there are very smart cardiologists who believe that there is a limit, right?

1:11:47And there are very smart cardiologists who believe that if you look at the data and you look at studies of like ultra endurance, finished skiers, the more exercise, the more time, the longer you live. It's clear that like exercise to the extent that I do it does some bad things. Like it increases my odds of atrial fibrillation, right? It does increase, it does some bad things to the heart, but it also does so many other good things that it may be a net benefit. Right, may balance itself up. Right, I kind of think it's a net benefit, but of course I think that because I love running, right? Right, well, you could justify, anyone can justify anything.

1:12:18But you could find some smart cardiologists to like scare the hell out of ultra runners if you wanted to. Yeah, I don't, I'm actually, I believe that though. That I can believe. I mean, there's a lot of people that I know who are like stupid fit. Like they play tennis five hours a day. Like perception, like kind of like from the outside. Like optics would say that they were really fit. And they drop dead of a heart attack when they're like 45. And maybe it's because of that whole thing that you just said, right? Like they've used up their tics or it's because it actually can be counterintuitive.

1:12:52Like sometimes like more, like more is not like, or whatever, like more is actually more is less, not more is more. Right. I mean, and there, you could, there are also a couple of other like additional hypotheses. So one, it's like all of that, like the heart's a muscle building the muscle. Like maybe that's not totally great in every way. Two, a lot of people, when they exercise a lot, they use that as a justification, right? Like I can have the fries, right? Because like engine burns hot, you can put anything in the engine, but that's not true at all. Right. Like, you know, I can have a drink because I exercise hard to have a second drink.

1:13:26I have a third drink. Right. I'll be able to run it off in the morning. Right. And so exercise can create good habits. I'm not going to drink at all because I have to run in the morning or can create bad habits. Right. I'm going to run in the morning so I can drink. Right. And so I think a lot of super fit people actually have a bunch of terrible habits. Like I was listening to your podcast with Lance Armstrong. Right. Right. And he was and you were talking about like he ate four hot dogs and he's like and I had a diet Coke. I was like, what the hell? Right. Totally. And he doesn't. He's a perfect example.

1:13:52of this, but I meet people like Lance a lot where a lot of my, a lot of friends of mine who are like super athletes, like Lance level, just not in, in, in biking. And I go out with them and they're not doing all these, the crazy stuff. They're not biohacking their lives to death. They're actually like, they're like eating kind of much more freely. They're like exercising, but not like, they're not like frantic and crazy about it. They're more balanced in their life. To be honest with you, what I want to say is that I actually think that's actually more healthy because I think anything extreme is what it does to your mental, the psychology that goes on in your brain is actually why it's detrimental, more so to your body.

1:14:36And over-exercising, how about this? Because I over-exercise for sure. I do it because if I didn't, I would be like a lunatic. But I've broken down my body. I have ankle problems. I have like a knee problem. You know what I mean? Like I have like probably like my cortisol is high versus people I know who don't really do much. And they're probably way healthier in the inside. I may look better like fitness. I may look more fit, but my insides are probably much more fucked up than somebody else's who kind of like casually does some walking and some yoga. You know what I mean? Totally. My, um, my grandfather, my, um, maternal grandfather lived to 97 and he, uh, he smoked a lot.

1:15:20He drank a lot. And his philosophy was this amazing philosophy, which is like, what you should do is never exercise except occasionally exercise like really hard, like play like tons of tennis or hike a really hard mountain or like go skiing like crazy. Right. Yeah. And so he lived this awesome life and he had so much fun and he like sport was this just source of joy for me. Mountaineered and never stressed about it. I'd like he wasn't taking his resting heart rate when he woke up in the morning. He had a very healthy relationship to it. Also, like there are genetic elements, right? Like I just had my blood work done and I have, there's a genetic component of heart disease risk, which is your life, your LPA, right?

1:15:56And mine is massive, right? It's like in the 99th percentile of bad, right? And so I have like a huge genetic risk of a heart attack, which I wouldn't have known and which could like wipe me out despite all of my running, you know, when I'm in my, a much younger age than you would expect. So there's all kinds of reasons that are like totally independent of how we train that could, you know, mean the end of us. I know what also I find interesting about the running part is the burning of all the lean muscle mass. Yeah. Right? Like I, you know, whenever I look at runners who are like crazy runners extreme, they never, they're like soft fat.

1:16:31You know what I mean? They don't have like tone in their body. Well, this, okay. So back to like, it's kind of fun talking about like some of the bad things about running. Like it can also like, you know, it can make you in a way anorexic, right? Yeah. You know, there's this coach. When I showed up at Stanford, right, to join the cross-country team, and I'm a pretty lean guy, he sends this thing, right? And it's like, you should weigh two pounds per inch, right? Sounds fine, right? And I was like, okay, cool, whatever. And I was like, okay, so I'm 6 '1", that's like 73 inches, so I should weigh 146 pounds.

1:17:01I weighed 165, right? So I was 19 pounds overweight, right? Skinny guy. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm 19 pounds overweight for the Stanford cross-country team. How much do you weigh right now, by the way? I'm like 155. So I'm still like nine pounds overweight. Wow. You're so skinny. Yeah. And like, but I'm like super overweight. Now he would never say that now because you're not allowed to. Only because it's not PC to say it. But he still thinks it, right? And everybody knows he thinks it, right? So Mark Wetmore, who was the coach of Colorado Buffaloes, won a bunch of national titles, told his runners that they should look like a skeleton with a condom on.

1:17:37Right? That's what he told the guys, right? That's not healthy. It's really not healthy for 18-year-old girls to be told that, right? Terrible. Right? And it's really psychologically unhealthy. And you get like, this is why women, so many of women runners have like all these broken bones and they don't have their period and all these horrible things happen, right? It can be a very destructive sport if you focus on the sort of the weight loss element. On the other hand, like my coach at Stanford has coached a ton of Olympians. Mark Wetmore coached a lot of winners. Like that is the thing they are doing.

1:18:10Like one of the ways that you can win is be phenomenally skinny, which is potentially unhealthy. Well, by the way, yes, exactly. So there's like that, it's like a very delicate balance, right? Because the truth is if you're coaching at such a high level, you obviously want the team to have every advantage to win, right? And I hate to say it, but for running, well, for a lot of things, like it does matter how much you weigh, right? Because if you are small and thin, you'll be faster. Yeah. Right. That's just, it's just, it's just physics. Yeah. Right. Like bio, it's bio, it's, it's, it's what it is.

1:18:48So like, you can't, you can't really like, you have to understand from the perspective of you're hiring someone to win a, win, win for you. Right. Or else you'd have a bunch of like body positive people there, like hiring whoever to do it and you will never win a thing. Right. It's, I mean, you do better at ultras, right? I remember my wife came to, a mountain race I did. At the end, she said the funniest thing. She watches the finish and at the end, she's like, you know, Nick, the people who beat you in this race, they look a lot more normal than the people who beat you in your other races. Really?

1:19:20Why is that? So this is a mountain race. To be a great mountain runner, you need a little extra muscle mass. Strength. You're literally pulling yourself up rocks. Well, it's different. For running, it makes sense why you have to be very thin and I was going to say frail looking, but I don't mean it that way. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I mean very like lean. But look at the people who win the 100 milers, right? They don't look like the winners of the marathon, right? And in fact, the women, right, the women who, women actually are better than men once you get up about like 200 miles, right?

1:19:52In part because they store extra fat and extra energy, you know, and genetically are set up to do that because, you know, childbirth is so hard and takes so long, right? That is one hypothesis. So women have an advantage when you get to really, really, really long races. Yeah, that's actually true. So they have a huge disadvantage in like the mile and the marathon for lots of reasons, like testosterone levels, body angles. I was going to say a lot of these hormones. Like this is why running is not a great sport for women though in general when you're doing this sprint, like the track because of the hormones.

1:20:22By the way, that's not even, it's not just running. It's like, look at gymnastics, right? Over-exercising, over-exerting yourself at like for hours and hours and hours a day is hormonally not great for you. Right, it totally screws up a lot of these women. And they become like, I tell the story of one of the runners I read about, like I read about five runners and I interviewed tons and tons of different runners. I chose five because they each tell something interesting. But one of them is this woman, Julia Lucas, who starts running in high school, realizes she's this incredible talent, goes to college, but just like she breaks her leg like seven times running in part because of like all of the pressure that's put on these women for the intensity they have to train while you're going through this period of growth.

1:21:05And I mostly tell her story, I tell her story for lots of reasons. One is like, she finishes college and it's so hard to make a living, but she's so focused. So she's actually homeless while she's like training as an elite runner. She lives in like Forest Park in Portland, right? And like brings her stuff when it rains, like puts her stuff in a bag and like rents a little locker at the train station, right? And so while she's training and she becomes an elite runner, she becomes the best miler in the country, right? By then she has a sponsor, but she has to go through this period of years where she's just injured all the time and her body's broken and she's homeless and goes through it.

1:21:39And then I tell the story of her, she comes as close as you can come to making an Olympic team without making it. She runs this race where she either has to come in the top three or have the third place finisher run slower than 1520. And she comes in fourth and pulls the third place finisher to a 1519.9. right like you cannot have a closer miss of the olympics serious it's like the most incredible race to watch like and she's just she's an awesome person and she's so smart and she's so reflective on this race but i love the story of like how and then she has this very like stoic amazing interview afterwards where she's like well i had no pain no pain at all and she's like this very deep philosophy about running and why she does and what she's trying for but she also the whole time is struggling with some of the questions we've been talking about about like how much do we run to like optimize ourselves and to like be the perfect machine and how much do we run for the spiritual release?

1:22:34And she has this constant tension between these two. So I tell her story for all those reasons. That's a great story. Yeah, it's really, she's an amazing, an amazing person. That's a good one to choose actually. Yeah. All right, my dear Nick, the book is called The Running Ground, Nicholas Thompson. Thank you for being on the show. That was so much fun to talk. We covered a lot of ground. Yeah, I did not think we were gonna get quite so deep into SignalGate, but I'm very happy that we did. Oh my God, I'm so happy we did too. I love that. I'm going to clip that. I think it's so interesting. Yeah.

1:23:02Are there any other like juicy little bits you want to tell us? I've worked on a lot of interesting stories in my life, like a lot of interesting reporting. What would be the, well, give me one story. What was the most interesting thing that you've ever worked on? I had a very long friendship with Stalin's daughter. I had a very long friendship with Stalin's daughter and for years we wrote letters and I couldn't publish it while she was alive, but it's a story of a woman who grows up in the Kremlin and he has this intense relationship with her father where her father sends her boyfriend to the gulag, right?

1:23:38Like a lot of people have like father issues where they don't like the boyfriend. They're normally not sent to the gulag by Stalin. Oh my God. So she has some problems with her father, but also loves him and it's like, he's devoted to her in a way. Her mother commits suicide because she's married to Stalin. So this woman grows up, And she's so smart. She's so interesting. And she's like so creative. She flees. She comes to America. It's a big sensation, right? And then she kind of disappears. And so when I discover her and find her and start writing her letters, she's living in this like old folk home anonymously in Wisconsin.

1:24:10And I, at the time, was writing a book about the Cold War. And I was writing about this character, George Kennan, who she had been friends with. And so she responds to me. She gets interview requests all the time because she's Stalin's daughter. But I write to her not to ask her about Stalin, but to ask her about George Kennan. And so she starts writing me back. And she's so smart. And she's observed, like, everything about Kennan. And she sees things that nobody else had seen. And so we become friends and we write these hundreds of letters. And then eventually she starts talking about her life and her loves and her ambitions and what she missed and her failures in life and her aspiration.

1:24:41She sometimes gets really mad at me, right? And she denounces me. And so she's never going to talk to me and then she'll start writing me letters again. And so the story of my friendship with her was one of the more fun things I've ever worked on. That is really interesting. It was a crazy story. I could only write it after she had died, but I published that in the New Yorker maybe 10 years ago. That's a great one too. Tell me one more. I wrote a really interesting story at the end of my time at Wired and I loved to hike and I had heard about a guy who had hiked on the Appalachian Trail and he had been hiking for months and he'd hiked from New York to Florida and then he'd been found dead in a tent right emaciated in a tent and no one knew who he was and so I wrote the first story and everybody in the trail knew his name was mostly harmless but he'd used cash when he'd bought things in the stores he'd never revealed his own name and so I published the story and I was like look this will be in Wired and like someone will know who he is.

1:25:35Like someone had called me because on the trail, he had said he was a coder, right? And he had told somebody he's an engineer and like all these people were looking for him. And so I published the story in Wired and millions of people read it and no one knows who he is and no one can figure it out. And so I start getting all these tips, these Facebook groups are formed and there's like hundreds of people going through every clue and like looking at photographs and like they do DNA analysis to try to trace his like, trace his relatives and like, can they figure out like where he's from? So then the DNA analysis reveals that he's like from a family in Louisiana.

1:26:07So I start buying ads on Facebook in Louisiana, driving to my story so that people will read it and identify who this guy might be. And then like finally, after like months of tips and red herrings and craziness and all these hunters, like someone is like, wait, that's my old friend Vance. And it turns out it's this guy named Vance Rodriguez, who had been estranged from his parents. So they weren't looking for him. Like no one was looking for him. He'd like been cruel. He's like kind of a bad guy. He'd like been cruel to his girlfriend. And so he had disappeared to start over and no one cared, right?

1:26:43No one was looking for him. It's like kind of a sad story. But then he turned himself into this like saintly character on the trail who everybody loves. So it's this like missed opportunity of total reinvention where this guy who is a dark force in life becomes this beloved character. This is why so many people are hunting for him because they're in love with him. He's like this very handsome, like wonderful guy. And then it's revealed that he like kind of beats up his girlfriends and is cruel. And so it's like this incredible, like cognitive dissonance that all these people have when they realize, wait, the guy they were hunting for isn't Prince Charming.

1:27:16And so I wrote the first story, it's called The Search for Mostly Harmless, and then the second story about his life. So those are two of the last stories I wrote at Wired. I think that's so exciting. I love that. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting tale. Yeah. I love this. Well, thank you for being, listen, I think this, I had a great time talking to you. So thank you. Oh, it's so much fun. It was amazing. It's great. So much fun. And good luck with this book. I'm sure it's a really nice read and you guys have to check it out, The Running Ground by Nicholas Thompson. Thank you so much.

1:27:45Thank you so much.