BIG INTV: Why Nicholas Thompson Made a Custom GPT to Run Faster

21:07Nicholas Thompson:And it was many years after my father had died. And another one of the college classmates turns out to be in the same dining hall. And so the person I'm going with brings me to that table. And the guy's name is Paul. He says, Paul. whose kid do you think this is and i'm 47 years old however old i am and he looks at me he goes that's scotty thompson's son right like there's something in me that is like him that reminds people of him you know and there's there's a lot that we have in common not just the schools we went to and weirdly we both like spent a lot of time in west africa right after college and we both have like similar personalities and similar personal um professional things that hold us back professionally and things that help us go forward professionally.

21:50Nicholas Thompson:There's like a lot we had in common. What do you think holds you back professionally? Well, so this is like what held him back professionally was an ability to really focus on a single thing, right? And that was my fundamental problem in my 20s. And, you know, in the book, one of the, so the book is like, it's not really a memoir because there's whole episodes in my life and jobs where you have no information because every scene that's in the book either connects to running or connects to my father's life and so there's i don't know there's probably like seven years of my life that are covered in a paragraph at one point um but in any case there's this important scene so my dad the first real critiques of him come from the deans at oxford who are like this guy can't focus weirdly they say he should be a journalist not an academic um you know and you have inexhaustible energy but he like incapable of really doing the work he needs to do and incapable of really staying still and staying on task.

22:47Nicholas Thompson:And so because they said that about him, I told the story about when I was hired at the New Yorker, where at first I'm rejected by the New Yorker as an editor. And then I go in and see David Remnick. And I'm like, you know, I have a, it was like three months later and I knew how close I'd come to getting hired. I was like, David, you know, I'm going to go work to a competitor unless you hire me now. He's like, well, here's the thing, Nick, I don't think you can stay on task, right? That's why we didn't hire you the first time, right? And like, you're too scattered, right? You want to have this TV career.

23:10Nicholas Thompson:You're doing like weird stuff in Hollywood, you have this like weird company called The Atavis. Like I have a job, but the job involves sitting in your chair and like getting stories and then making the stories better and then standing up your chair and giving them to the writer and then sitting back in your chair. And he's like, can you do that? And that was the same critique of my dad. And so it's something that I've thought a lot about that we're both blessed or cursed with this energy, which is good and fun, but it can also work. You know, you have to really stay focused. One of the prevailing themes that stood out to me in the book was addiction.

23:43And anecdotally, I would say I've observed that a lot of the people I know and love who run also struggled or do struggle with some kind of addiction. There seems to be a connection between running and sort of addictive personality types, if you will. I've always wondered, I haven't looked into it in depth, but I've always wondered whether running is sort of one side of that same coin, right? So someone channeling their addictive tendencies into the sport, right? That's like where they put it. Or whether people, many people find sort of salvation or recovery from addiction through running. Or maybe it's a little bit of both.

24:17How do you think about that? And I'm curious when you were researching the book, did anything sort of stand out to you about that dynamic?

24:26Nicholas Thompson:I don't think I understand that dynamic as well as I'd like to. Let me just tell a couple of stories, which I think will be helpful. Tell me some stories, yeah. So I have a running partner and one of the guys who I run most intensely with this guy named young cohen and we do lots of ultra races together and you know he had a chemical dependency in his 20s and 30s and he runs and he runs these ultra marathons and these you know the last race we ran was 100 kilometers in the you know in the woods in a race that took like 13 hours right like you're going up steep mountains and he's told me once that he runs because he wants to reach the level of pain that he had when he was an addict so that he remembers what it is and never feels it again, right?

25:11Nicholas Thompson:And that's like a way that you can use running to cope with an addiction. Another story is this guy, Tony Ruiz, who I write about at length in the book. I have a whole chapter on him. And he, you know, he's a elite runner who also, you know, when his career hits a setback and he can't go to the Olympics with the Puerto Rican team because of the boycott in Moscow, the Moscow Olympic Games because of the United States boycott, he falls into drug addiction. And he's able to kind of keep running as his life gets crazy crack addiction and he becomes suicidal. And then he comes clean. And running is a way for him to hold his life together as he comes clean.

25:47Nicholas Thompson:And he runs not with the same intensity, but he runs with this sort of dedication and focus. And he becomes my coach. And I didn't know his story. He was my coach. He's Tony, right? And I didn't understand the meaning of it all. I mean, I knew a little bit about it, which is why I started talking to him. until we started spending many hours together for writing this book. And so I think there's a very complicated interplay. And then there's also this fact about running where it's like, if you are a runner, you feel like you're invincible. And so you do drink too much, right? And you think like the next day, I'll just go for a run.

26:18Run it off, yeah.

26:19Nicholas Thompson:And then, of course, it can work in the other direction where you're like, oh, my God, like right now, I feel fragile as a runner. I have a race coming up to the New York Marathon a little bit. I'm like, I'm not going to drink anything until the New York Marathon, right? Like you can go in the other direction too. So there's a very complicated interplay, but I think you're right. And if you look at the number of great ultra runners, like Rich Roll would be the canonical example, people who've come clean, restarted, found salvation through endurance sports as a way that somehow either taps into the same personality or displaces the thing that was being dealt with with alcohol.

26:53Nicholas Thompson:And I think you see that a lot with my father. He balanced some of his heaviest drinking with his heaviest running, which is not what you would imagine. And then, you know, I don't know whether later in life, like I was obsessed with trying to get him to stop drinking. I always thought if I could get him to run more, he would drink less. I don't know. One day I had the realization that they're like the opposite thing. Like drinking like makes you feel good and then you like regret it. Running makes you feel bad and then you're glad you did it. They're like the inverse to each other. I wish my dad had.

27:19Nicholas Thompson:I think if my dad had run more, he might have drunk less. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. There's a line in the book. I'm not going to give away the entire book, I promise. But there's like there's like a super surprise. and it's like a spoiler, right? I turned 50 and I sit down and do a podcast with Katie Drummond. That's the last episode. Don't tell people that. Maybe they'll think there's a crazy twist. Oh yeah, there's a crazy plot twist at the end. But there's a line in the book and maybe you thought a lot about this line, maybe you didn't, but it stood out to me, where you're writing about your dad and you say, you're talking about sort of everything that you took from him.

27:50And you say, I did not inherit his alcoholism, at least not yet.

27:54Nicholas Thompson:Yeah. You could have ended that sentence earlier. You didn't. There's a comma and then you say, at least not yet. It stood out to me just in the context of running an addiction, and I'm curious about whether you think about that on a personal level. Yeah, I mean, I did think a lot about that sentence. You spend five years on a book, and it's a short book. You spend a lot about it. Think about every sentence. God help me. I'm terrified of, like, falling. I'm not in all the same patterns, right? But my great-grandfather is an alcoholic, dies of a heart attack. My grandfather is an alcoholic, dies of a heart attack.

28:30Nicholas Thompson:My father's an alcoholic, dies of a heart attack, right? Like, what do you think I worry about, you know? And I, every time I have a drink, I have in the back of my mind that I don't want to become an alcoholic, right? Because I watched it. And it would have seemed, and like knowing how powerful alcohol is and like how it can control you, despite all your desires to control it, it would have been hubristic for me to say I did not inherit his alcoholism because I don't know like as of today I'm not an alcoholic barely had anything to drink this I mean I barely had any alcohol to drink in the last like I don't know however long he has been hydrating I do hydrate yeah but who knows right like yeah you can fall into it

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31:09Now I want to talk about a little performance science.

31:12Nicholas Thompson:Okay, great. Okay. So there's a chapter in the book where you talk about the training you did through a Nike program. And you actually wrote a story about this for Wired. I remember reading it when it came out. And they essentially paired, quote unquote, regular runners with elite coaches. Yeah. They're coming for you next, Katie. Well, they can. That would actually be amazing. But the training markedly improved your marathon time. I mean, you became a significantly better runner through that process. What were the biggest breakthroughs for you? Like, what did you learn from a scientific, from a performance point of view from that coaching?

31:47Nicholas Thompson:Tons. So this is a very deep process. So it's about a year after I started as editor of Wired. And so I start working with these three people. Steve Finley, who's like my day-to-day coach. Brett Kirby, who's like the mad scientist genius in the Nike labs. And Joe Holder, who's a sort of a great whole body conditioner. And I talk to them about my goals. I say, like, I'd love to run another 243 marathon. At that point, I wanted to run two hours plus my age in minutes, which is pretty dorky. But I was 43. And they listen. And then they're like, okay, great. How much do you train? What do you do? And then they go have a conference call and they're like, this guy could go faster than 243.

32:22Nicholas Thompson:Like what the fuck's wrong with him? Of course you can. And so they, but they can't just say that to me. They can't just say you can go faster. You know, they have to sort of subtly trick me to believe I can go faster. And so there are all kinds of like very specific things that I do, right? I start to run more what are called VO2 max workouts, right? I start to run workouts where you're running like as hard as you can for five kilometers, but you're doing it for like a mile. and then you're resting for two minutes, you're doing for another mile because you can't run as hard as you would for five kilometers or five kilometers every day or you crash out.

32:53Nicholas Thompson:I'm doing these things you call lactate threshold runs where you're going out and you're running two miles. And I knew about these workouts and I'd done them in college, but I wasn't doing them as, in such a focused and deliberate way. So I start doing more of that. I'm spending more time running fast. They have me doing, like running a little bit more mileage. You know, they're starting to improve my diet. They like point out that you can drink beet juice. It increases the flow of nitric oxide in your body and that increases your like oxygen uptake, right? So you start to like pay more attention.

33:19Nicholas Thompson:I start to take L-citrulline supplements, right? And I do, oh, and here's the most important thing. Weirdly, I started to wear a heart rate monitor on my arm, right? I had worn a heart rate monitor on my wrist, like watches track heart rate, but it doesn't work, right? Because there's bone and your wrist moves, right? And so it's like, if it's measuring through this light and it's like bouncing around, it's wrong always. And getting bad data is not helpful. We put it on and like sort of the fattier, more stable tissue on your, you know, right below the elbow or up on your bicep, suddenly it works, right?

33:49Nicholas Thompson:And so you actually accurately know what your heart rate is while you run. And that's a super interesting indicator because you can go out. In fact, it's happening this morning. You would think at this point, I'd know. And I know what my maximum heart rate is, it's about 160. And I know that like when I'm running really hard, it's like 150. And if I'm doing a tempo workout where I'm going to like crash out, it's in the high 140s. And so - your resting heart rate it's like 42 right so it's like not that low it's low but it's not like crazy low um i'm old i'm older than you that's why my maximum heart rate is low well i think i think my resting heart rate is like 43 just yeah so there we are right that like nike katie drummond nike i'm available um and so i um you know when you start to realize that then you realize like oh you're gonna work out and your heart rate's like 135 oh i can push harder right or and then you can start to pace yourself better in a marathon like as with all data signals you know it's a useful indicate as long as you are getting true data and you are analyzing it in a smart and responsible way it is helpful and so now when i run a marathon a race or even a workout i'm tracking my time i'm tracking how i feel and i'm tracking my heart rate and then i also learned like a philosophy of running from brett kirby which was important which is you have all these systems that can fail.

35:04Nicholas Thompson:Like your quads can fail, right? You can overheat. You can, you know, your like, your toenails can get cut off, right? Your digestive system, like all these things can go wrong when you run. And the challenge is to kind of stress all those systems before a marathon or before an ultra more than they'll be stressed on race day. But you can't stress them all at the same time because then you'd have to run the race, right? So you stress your quads by like doing a hard run down a mountain, right? You stress your hydration by like going and running 18 miles while dehydrated, right? You stress your digestive system by eating too much and then going and running, right?

35:36Nicholas Thompson:And so I kind of developed this philosophy of training. And then the most important thing they did is they tricked me in that they recognized that I was scared of running a marathon at faster than six minutes per mile pace. And that in order to get me to be comfortable going faster than six minutes per mile, maybe they should like get me out on the track running faster than five minutes per mile. Like if I get used to looking at my watch and it's like 440 pace, maybe when I'm running down Prospect Park and running an eight-mile workout at 540 pace, then it won't feel so scary. Because pain, this is the key thing.

36:06Nicholas Thompson:This is one of the things that I believe most deeply. I didn't realize this until my 40s. Pain is like, it's not primarily physiological. It is mental, right? It is your body gets scared of losing homeostasis and it starts to send pain signals, right? And it's not that you're, it's partly why pain signals are so diffuse. Like, what was slowing you down this morning? I don't know, my legs felt heavy. Like, what does that mean? Right? There's nothing like, it's not like your muscles are failing because your legs are heavy. Lactic acid is building up. No, it's your lactic acid is not making your legs.

36:35Nicholas Thompson:So your legs feel heavy because your brain is like worried that you can't keep this pace because it's worried about homeostasis or your heart, you know, heart rate or your heart failing. And so it slows you down. And that's a pretty interesting, that's why I think the end of a marathon, you can run a marathon or an end of a workout. Right. And you've just feel this like weird pain. Like, oh, your shoulder hurts. Right. Like, why would my shoulder hurt? Right. Oh, my God, my quad hurts. My knees are killing me. Oh, wait, there's the finish line. And then you sprint and you're like, I feel great.

37:03Nicholas Thompson:Right. And then you have like actual muscle soreness. Then like real things happen. But what's going on during the race is all mental. And so you have to like once you know that, then you develop different strategies for coping with it. And that allows you to not like break through it all. Like because you could break through it all. Like, oh, you could run a one minute marathon. Right. There are real physiological limits. And those things exist for this. There's a funny study where these psychotic sports scientists give a bunch of bicyclists fentanyl and are like, OK, bike as hard as you can.

37:32Nicholas Thompson:And they're like, they don't feel pain. And so they bike like crazy and then they like ruin themselves and they can't walk. Right. So all these signals are there for a reason. But if you can learn to control them, then you can run a lot faster. And this is one of the places in the book where I started to get really stressed out, where I read about. No, where I read. No, no, no, it's fine. But you wrote about, you know, running down mountains to tear your quads up, running 20 miles without drinking water or eating breakfast, running when it's hot, when it's cold, when it's humid, when it's dark, when you're hungry, when you're full.

38:02So conventional wisdom, Nick, the wisdom of a conventional runner would be to do everything possible to make your run reasonably comfortable, right? So you're going out for 20 miles, you're eating an hour and a half before that, you're bringing water, you're bringing fuel, like, et cetera, et cetera. You're doing things to make that experience not one of, you know, extraordinary suffering. Running is already suffering in many senses, right? And you are essentially describing a training process that involves suffering more.

38:35Nicholas Thompson:Suffering differently. but suffering sure suffering differently but it sounds like what you're saying is that that was sort of the key for you to unlock a lot of progress yes absolutely that is unfortunate to hear and you know the funny thing about it is that i you know this whole thing like running out mountains running when you haven't had anything to drink running like running late at night running early in the morning i was doing that before the nike people i just didn't know why it was effective right i just I just did it because I was busy, right? And so I would run at like midnight, you know, when your digestive system's a mess, right?

39:09Nicholas Thompson:Because it was the only time to run in the day, like because you had to finish your work and the kids had to go to bed, right? Or I would run at four in the morning because it was the only time to work before the kids woke up, right? Or I would run after like eating way too much because I was at a work dinner, right? So like I had actually like weirdly kind of inculcated this training philosophy. So of all the research you've read, of sort of all of the work that you've put in in the last several decades, everything you've used in your own training, what stands out to you the most for a conventional runner?

39:39Let's say someone running 30 miles a week, they just want to finish a half marathon a little bit faster than they did last year.

39:44Nicholas Thompson:Yeah. What are the most important things for them to do as far as the science goes? The thing to do for the science is you have to just, like, you just have to run a little bit more and you have to learn how to suffer a little bit, right? And that will make you run faster. But what you really need to do is the opposite, which is you need to, I think the best advice I can give to someone who's just getting into the sport is to experiment with different kinds of presence when you run. Like, think about, like, next time you go for a run, Kate, I don't know if you do this, try to shut down your visual, your field of vision and just listen, right?

40:16Nicholas Thompson:And then try to shut down your auditory sensation and just watch, right? Or just smell, right? Or just feel. Like, just feel your feet on the ground, right? Or forget about all of that and just think about your heels, right? And like start turning running into this kind of this meditative process. And suddenly I think it starts to do things. It starts to open up your mind. It starts to lead to a little bit more body awareness, right? Or just there's so many things. Like think about your arm carriage and like think about the aerodynamics of your hands while you run and make him like torture yourself if you do that too much.

40:47Nicholas Thompson:But it's a way of just getting into your body in a way I think is can create these sort of beautiful psychological experiences. and that's partly why I don't listen to music. You asked that first question, don't listen to music. And when I'm running a real, you know, if I'm running a work, who cares? I'm running across Canal Street, I'll listen to podcasts, right? And catch up on the AI news, you know? But if I am like actually running in the woods, I'm trying to like cultivate a kind of awareness, both of myself and of my surroundings. It's a form of meditation. And I think when people can get to that, then they start to like fall in love with the sport and then that's what propels them forward.

41:20Nicholas Thompson:And that's what, if you're running 38 miles a week, you run a half marathon, you know, you can definitely run a faster half marathon. You can definitely train more. But there's also the possibility of like falling in love with the sport. And to fall in love with the sport, maybe this kind of awareness is a key. I like that. And what about, I'm curious what you think are the most sort of interesting or potentially consequential areas of research you want to see more from? Like what might we know about running and health, maybe the limits of our own bodies in five years or 10 years that we don't know now?

41:54Like what would you love to know more about?

41:56Nicholas Thompson:Yeah, that's a really interesting question. The science of what shoes do for you, right? The science of form. Like we don't know. Like most running coaches don't mess with your form, right? Like, oh, the body learns the most natural way to run. Is that right? Right. Like I don't think so, right? I certainly learned in my life that it was through paying attention to form that I was able to like cure a bunch of injuries. Right. And like thinking about how I sit, how I stand through this process called the Alexander technique and the way I run that had a profound effect on my run. So the science of form, I think, is totally an open question.

42:30Nicholas Thompson:Oh, I mean, the science right now that where people are pushing the science and the tech is basically nutritional intake. Right. And so there are ultra runners who you might. The conventional wisdom was you take like 100 calories of goo every 45 minutes. And that's what I did most of my marathons on. Now I kind of take in 200 calories of carbohydrates every hour, 250. But there are people like David Roach who are out there taking like 500. And that's kind of interesting. And then there's like, you know, people are now taking sodium bicarbonate. And they figured out ways that you can do it without having digestive explosions during a race, which is great.

43:02Nicholas Thompson:Because before, if you took it, you'd have a problem. So there's a lot of nutritional science that is interesting. It's an interesting question. No, it is an interesting question. Yeah. It's fun to think about. I want to ask you a little bit about the process of writing the book. We know that it took five years. Yeah. We've established that. But in particular, this being Wired and you being someone who has a lot of expertise in AI, I am curious sort of how you use that technology in the process, whether research, I assume certainly not, you know, the writing itself. It's very clearly Nick's words.

43:36But how did that make it maybe five years instead of nine years?

43:43Nicholas Thompson:or five years instead of four years, you know, because the tools are just coming out and sometimes you waste time on them. Sure. I used it in lots of ways. So I use it partly in my training and I will often like upload what I've eaten and ask, you know, what should I eat? I have a race in three weeks. You know, this is how I train. And, you know, I have like an AI coach. I have a custom GPT. You do. Did you make that? Yeah, I have a custom GPT. I've uploaded all my workouts. I've uploaded all my previous races. You know, I tried to upload all my Strava logs. You know, I've given it as much information as I can, and I will often ask it questions.

44:13Nicholas Thompson:You know, like, my hamstring is hurting after doing, you know, 6x800, right? Should I delay the five-mile workout to Thursday? And so, you know, I don't have a coach right now who I work with, so I have an AI coach. So that's kind of interesting. That's amazing. In the book itself, I use it all the time. And I used it for the most genuinely useful thing it was good for was analyzing years of notes. And so some of these characters, like Tony Ruiz, who I mentioned. So there are five characters in the book, and there are five discrete chapters where I take readers into the lives of runners who I've known, who I cross paths with, like Tony was my coach, who have really interesting stories to tell you about running.

44:51Nicholas Thompson:And these are people I interviewed over the course of five years. And so you interview someone over the course of five years in this kind of episodic way, and you sort of forget what you talked about. Yep. And so like with each of those sections, I took what I had written and then I uploaded all of the transcripts of the conversations and I asked like, is what I've written totally true to what they said? Are there any quotes that I haven't used that would be super useful? Is there anything I've said that's like factually inaccurate? Is there anything thematically that they seem to focus on or care about that I haven't like emphasized?

45:20Nicholas Thompson:Right. And it was the kind of task that I could, I could have done it with Tony like 15 hours or I could have hired a research assistant and taken them 20 hours or you can have Claude do it. in one minute. So that was super helpful. I used it, I never used it to write a sentence both because I think it's unethical, it's a memoir and like those are legal issues because whose copyright is it then? And also their writing sucks, right? At least for now. So it doesn't, didn't write a word but I would often, like one of the things I tried really hard to do and for the staff writers at Wired who are listening, you'll remember this, like cut everything extraneous, right?

45:55And like the reader

45:57Nicholas Thompson:does not have a lot of time. Like this book book is 80 ,000 words long. I have a file of 60 ,000 words that I cut, right? So I wrote like 140 ,000, probably more. I probably wrote 200 ,000 words for this book. But each time I would edit it, I would go through and I would be like, does this sentence need to be here, right? And I would use AI sometimes for that, where I would feed in, like, I was like, does something feel slow in this section, right? Propose like three things that I could cut. And it's actually pretty good at that. And then there's this other thing that was, I'm writing this book over five years in like 30 minute intervals you know there's very few times where there's like four hours of focused time because that never exists in my life and so sometimes you'll go for a run and you'll have an interesting thought right and then you're like i had a file and it was like interesting thoughts to add to book but you don't want to just add them like where does this fit thematically and so sometimes like late in the process and the book is mostly done i still had like 20 interesting thoughts that i hadn't put in i'd be like where should i put this and it would be like well we You put it here, you could put it there, right?

46:58Nicholas Thompson:And it has instantaneous access to the whole thing. So that was really, really useful. That's very cool. Okay, I want to ask you a question that I've wanted to ask you for many years. But I finally have my chance because I can ask you whatever I want. So I want to know, Nick, how you manage your time. You have three kids. You're married. You're the CEO of The Atlantic. You run competitively. You do play the guitar, although apparently less now than you did. You write books. You give keynote speeches. You publish a new video on LinkedIn every day. I could go on. I think everyone gets the point.

47:29I am an extremely productive person. I know this about myself. You leaps and bounds in terms of productivity. Like, it's very impressive. And I've always wanted to ask you, what does a day in the life of Nick look like? How do you structure your time? How do you manage your schedule? How do you get all of this done at a high level?

47:51Nicholas Thompson:Well, I probably fall short on some of the stuff. you know the running i fit in like i try very hard to be as efficient as possible with the running right and so i run to the office i run home from the office i often listen to podcasts as i mentioned right i you know this morning i had to do a workout you know so i got up at six and did the workout before the kids woke up right because i like having breakfast with the kids um so there's a certain amount of like deliberate focus i also have over the years and this isn't a system that works for everybody but like if i were to show you my to-do list it's a pretty um focus set where it's a trello board and it's basically things i'm going to do right now things i'm going to do today other things i have to do pretty soon and so if i'm prioritizing that's really important right and then these are the people i'm going to call if there's any free time like and then it's sort of like in these sort of subcategories as you go down but the important part is the like every day going through what do I actually care about doing today?

48:47Nicholas Thompson:And by adjusting that, you're effectively adjusting everything else, right? And so you're setting what are the priorities you actually have for the day. And so then I'm like, when we finish this conversation and I'm back on the subway and I'm going back to the office, I'll pull up my to-do list and I'm going to move things around to what I'm going to do next, what I'm going to do in these next, do after that. So there's a certain efficiency in that. It's a pretty - No, I like this. It's a pretty detailed way of going through your day. And then this is also important, and it sounds a little cheesy, but I tend to like, like the things you mentioned are things that I love.

49:25Nicholas Thompson:And I'm very good at like getting two things out of one thing, right? So I do the most interesting thing in tech, right? I do this like daily video. And I started doing it when I was the editor of Wired. And why did I do it? I didn't do it because I thought it was going to be like a cool thing. I did it because I wanted to learn, right? It was fun, right? It was a forcing mechanism for learning and reading papers about tech and science. And then it also has the effect of making me a little better at public speaking and synthesizing information for TV. And then it has this side effect we've now realized that it's really good for Atlantic marketing.

49:54Nicholas Thompson:And so you try to figure out all these ways where you can be accomplishing two goals at the same time. The other secret, I think, is if you're like, ask my wife, there's a bunch of stuff that slips through the cracks, too. Okay, well, next week, next week on the show, Nick's wife will join me. That's the sequel. Okay, we're going to wrap up by playing one more game that we came up with. It's called Control-Alt-Delete.

50:24So it's like fuck, marry, kill for nerds. And it's going to be running themed this week. So I want to know what piece of running tech you would love to control, what piece you would alter or change, and what you would delete.

50:37Nicholas Thompson:what would you vanquish from the earth what would i control um the weather oh very good people underestimate like it matters so much for a race like training you want varied weather you know some of us do others not so much but for like the new york marathon i would like it to be 40 degrees to have very little wind overcast and to the extent there is wind i would like it to blow north until noon and then I would like it to blow south right because the first 23 miles of the course are north and the next one matters even more for Boston but it makes a huge difference and like I look at my times near marathon like 243 242 and the weather makes like a five minute difference right it just makes a huge difference to the weather okay that's a very ambitious answer what about altar I would like New York City to have an easier access to mountain running It's hard.

51:31Nicholas Thompson:Almost any other city in the world, like you can get to like real mountain running in like not that long. I would like to be able to leave my house on foot and get into the woods, right? I was just in Los Angeles. It's also a city. Yes, it is a large city. It's a large city. It's a dirty, messy, crazy city. Lots of people live there. It was like I was at a hotel that I hadn't selected for any particularly good reason. It was just a random hotel near wherever I was going. And like, boom, seven minutes, you're in a canyon, right? Previous time I was in Los Angeles. I was like, oh, look at that. There's a 10-mile run on a beach.

52:04Nicholas Thompson:You know, New York City, like Central Park's great. Prospect Park's great. I would like to get into the wilderness. I'd like to get into canyons. I want some canyons in New York City. So you would like to drastically alter the landscape and infrastructure of New York City to facilitate trail running. Correct. And what would you delete? From running? These are such ambitious answers. Yeah.

52:24Most running influencers, maybe?

52:27Nicholas Thompson:Most. Like not most, but like there's some who are amazing, right? Who really like, like Steve Magnus is awesome, right? Like, and what he understands about physiology is great, right? And he's like, you know, this is how it works. This is how you get better. This is how you don't get better. And then there's a whole bunch of people who are trying to like break through the algorithm. It's like, you could run a three-hour marathon if you could do 200 burpees. And you're just like, no, you can't run a three-hour marathon if you could do 200 burpees. Like, you know, running is this slow, patient, day-by-day process.

52:57Nicholas Thompson:and it's not, there are awesome running influencers. There are people who are out there. But you know the headline now is going to be Nick Thompson is at war with running influencers. Only the, I guess it's like the pseudoscience. It's not, running influence is the wrong phrase because running influencers like, like Des Linden, it just popped to mind, is like a running influence because she's an awesome runner, right? Like awesome runners are awesome. I mean like the pseudoscience. Delete the pseudoscience. Fair. That's what I want to get rid of. Fine. There you go. weather, geography, pseudoscience.

53:29Nicholas Thompson:Perfect. Thank you. Nick Thompson, thank you so much for being here. This was awesome. Katie Drummond, I'm so glad I hired you as an intern in 2008, and I'm so glad you didn't quit when I showed up in my running shorts, because that would have been terrible for Wired in the long run. It was a little unsettling. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

53:50This show is produced by Jessica Alpert with help from Adriana Tapia and Sam Egan. Sound design, mix, and original music by Pran Bandy. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Condé Nast head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director.

54:25Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the Global Fashion News and Features Director and co-host of Vogue's podcast, The Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, Chloe Mao, and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, Choma Nadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

55:03The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

55:18Thank you.