45: Nicholas Thompson - A Life of Long Form

[00:00] If the writer can only jump over a six-foot bar, your job is not to try to get them over a seven-foot bar. Your job is to get them over that six-foot bar. You've got to figure out what is the best version of the story, given their skills, given the idea, given the time, and you've got to get them there. Arrest the journalists. You buy the publications, shut down the critical publications, right? Like, that is part of the process of democracy to autocracy. I am going to fight that because I believe in democracy.

Well, there's something nice in the continuum that The Atlantic has played this role. We were founded to help create conversations to help prevent a civil war. And Martin Luther King published a letter from a Birmingham jail. [00:30] about keeping this publication. Having good, accurate journalism matters. You know, my goal is what is the thing that I can do that will increase the number of good stories? Because I think that's important. I've had a few people ask me if I'm a journalist. What do you say? I usually say, like, I don't think so.

If your primary commitment is to your audience, you're a journalist, right? If your primary commitment is to the guest or to an advertiser, maybe you're not. It's been 33 years since, like, I actually cared even one millionth of one percent, whether I was ahead or behind anybody in a race. This is one of the funniest. I remember, I think [01:00] your book like you've been this elite runner for like 30 years and you've won three races right i'm like yeah there are 40 000 people in a marathon one wins 39 999 don't right there's a part where you're talking about a boat that never touched water the little canoe that you run by and this is also the first person to ask me about this i like that detail matters so much to me and like no one has asked me about this thing so thank you [01:17] Welcome to Dialectic episode 45 with Nicholas Thompson.

Nick is the CEO of The Atlantic. Nick has spent his career focused on journalism in America. Obviously, that is especially true today at The Atlantic. [01:30] But... [01:30] That also includes extended time at Wired, where he was the editor-in-chief, as well as an editor in an earlier part of his career. [01:37] and The New Yorker, where he was an editor and ran com. Nick is also an incredibly serious runner. I discovered him in the fall when he published an excerpt from his most recent book, The Running Ground, about his relationship with his father and his relationship to running.

One of the things I most admire about Nick is the way he combines deep focus and consistency and discipline with just an kind of unending curiosity about the world. [02:07] and a machine in others. The latter obviously applies to his world-beating running. I hope you were inspired in some dimension, whether it be to take stories more seriously, to push yourself to do things that are really hard, or even to wonder about what other versions of you you haven't discovered yet. Before the conversation with Nick, I'd like to think Notion. [02:27] Notion is the presenting partner of Dialectic and a huge part of what makes the show possible.

They recently launched a new campaign under the idea of thinking together. And I think that is so representative of what the product is. The goal is not to automate away people. The goal is to build amazing things together. And as AI increasingly moves into every crevice of how we work, being able to have a tool that, from a principle standpoint, is thinking about how AI can make us all better together. [02:57] that actually lives in the place where you do your work with your colleagues, whether that be writing, analyzing, developing, shipping, is remarkably powerful.

For me, I think it's amazing to have a tool that, whether it be Notion AI or custom agents, that is built from the ground up to help you automate the busy work and spend more of your time on the work that deeply matters. If you haven't used Notion in a while, you can learn more at com slash dialectic. And if you're doing interesting things with Notion agents or otherwise, please share them with me. I would love to learn more. Thanks again to Notion. [03:27] And here's my conversation with Nicholas Thompson.

[03:30] Nicholas Thompson, thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me on. I want to start, well, first I should say, I ran my first podcast. [03:37] New York City Marathon. First race, first marathon, first anything. Wait, your first race was a marathon? First race. [03:42] New York City Marathon. And the night before, I was listening to the first chapter of your book. Amazing. Amazing. That was great. Honorable. It was meaningful. So this is cool to do this. You clearly weren't listening to the chapter on how to train for a marathon if you've never run a race before.

But whatever. I'm delighted you did it. That's all. I run a lot. I just hadn't run a race. Okay, that's fine, actually. [04:06] Words, okay. [04:06] Yeah. [04:08] I think this is a topic that, like, Neil Postman and Walter Ong and McLuhan and people were talking about years ago. You gave an interview recently, a really lovely interview with Kaurav Ahuja for Timeless, a written interview. And you said this about kind of the future of the Atlantic. You said, the big risks are real. Will AI search eat the web? Will Google stop sending people out?

If so, what happens to us? What if we shift from screens to whatever Johnny Ive is building, wristbands with no screen, all audio? [04:38] There will still be people who read words, but you can imagine words becoming less and less of the world, and we're really good at words. [04:47] You wrote a lovely book about running, mostly about running, and about what running has done for you. Yeah. I'm curious what writing has done for you. [04:55] What has writing done for me? So for me... [04:58] Writing is a way of thinking and processing, right?

The transition of taking thoughts from inside your head and putting them into a page is... [05:07] It's not just translation, it's bi-directional. And so you end up being able to, forcing yourself to write forces yourself to think more analytically and to like... [05:16] process complicated things. So I'll say [05:21] Many of the things I've written... [05:24] have been ways of getting clarity on the things I thought. [05:28] It has also been... [05:31] sort of a format and a mechanism for like my most ambitious works, both the [05:37] book I wrote 17 years ago about the Cold War, this book that I wrote about running, were both [05:42] Seminal moments for me professionally, like how I decided to [05:46] write them how I decided to do them, [05:48] Um, [05:50] And then also, as you know from the book, [05:54] I'm a journalist who...

[05:57] wasn't really confident in his writing as a young person. [06:02] At grade school, I was a math kid, not a writing kid. And learning to become confident in my writing was a... [06:10] very hard process to [06:14] that [06:15] you know, taught me a lot that I can apply to other parts of my life. [06:20] What about reading? [06:21] Reading? [06:23] I was a big reader as a child. I grew up in a family with books everywhere, bookshelves everywhere. [06:29] If you had free time, you just read, right? And you would...

[06:32] uh, [06:33] You know, you would go out in the yard and you'd play, toss the tennis ball up the air and hit it with the baseball bat. And then I'd go and I'd read. And I loved it. My mother read to me. And much of the best information in the world is stored in books. And, you know, if you enjoy reading and you can learn how to tell little stories in your head as you read, you can accumulate a lot of information. You can enter all kinds of different worlds.

[06:57] and [07:00] I just think a lot of human knowledge can be passed down through books. I think one of the things that is most... [07:06] Hardest for me to watch is the culture of reading going away. And... [07:12] observing young people traveling on the subway, traveling by train. I remember when I traveled by train when I was a young man, you just bring a book, right? You bring a paperback book, right? And [07:20] I remember traveling through Africa and taking buses everywhere and trains. You just read everywhere. You stop on the side of the road and you read somewhere and then you go to a new town.

You try to find a bookstore. You swap your book with someone at a hostel. It's just this wonderful exchange of information. To see that [07:35] dying because now everybody, you just use Instagram. And I can see it in myself where [07:40] I'm pulled into work. I'm pulled into my phone. It's too bad, but it is what it is. I think one implication may be in the quote, and one maybe counterargument, I don't know if it's a full counterargument to what you just said at least, would be that... [07:55] It's not that we inherently are losing depth of ideas.

For example, we're doing a two-hour podcast or lots of different formats. What specifically about... [08:04] the written word, text, whether it be writing or reading it, do you think... [08:08] What is a society who has that [08:11] or young people who have that, what do they gain? [08:14] That's a great question, and I agree with you. I'm not one of those people who's like, "Oh my God, we're all getting dumb because we don't read books." If you look at the complexity of the art we create, you look at the complexity of [08:24] Look at the complexity of the TV shows we create today versus 30 years ago and tell me that they're not more sophisticated.

Right. Right. And our ability to... [08:33] you know, listen to books while we're walking, listen to podcasts while walking, right? So we have this incredible capacity. I just mean that. [08:40] the amount of time that people spend reading books, particularly younger generations, is significantly lower. And some of that time they substitute with really great stuff, right? Like... [08:50] Listen to your podcast. Some of that stuff they substitute with... [08:55] useful social media stuff, right? Like watching YouTube videos that teach you how to like... [08:59] bend a soccer kick so it curves into the corner of the goal, right?

Like there's amazing stuff or like how to like, [09:05] Fix your hairdryer, right? [09:07] YouTube is incredible. Even amazingly video essays with incredible depth. Right. Or here's how quantum computing works. Some of it's just... [09:14] Awesome. A lot of it's [09:16] totally trivial and a lot of it's negative right and so back to your question um [09:22] I'm not sure... [09:26] I mean, what's nice about reading, right? If you create a book, we create a magazine, you can like everybody can read the same thing. Right? So sometimes sometimes a conversation is better in that I can react to you specifically a book is better in the way that you can read a passage, I can read a passage, I can share it with you, you just gave me this book, not fade away, which you've read, right?

It means something to you. And the words that I'll read when I read it are precisely the same as the words that you read, right? And it's a little different. If you would say, hey, I'm not going to read it. [09:50] Type in this series of AI queries. I will get different words, and so the common ground will have. So this is an artifact right here, not Fade Away by Lawrence Shames and Peter Barton. Never read, don't know anything about it, but I'll read it. [10:00] You gave it to me, and it meant something to you, and so I trust that it will mean something to me.

[10:06] It's this beautiful artifact that we can share – [10:09] We can annotate and there's maybe some value we can add to the page, but really it's like this thing that exists and then I can tell somebody else and they can go and buy the exact same thing. [10:20] It's also there's something wonderful about... [10:24] You know the image of like [10:26] You go for a walk and you put this in your bag and you stop and you sit on a bench and you read it. And it's the same as it was in your bag.

[10:34] Right. And it will be the same when you get back. And if you go and you walk and you have your phone, you have a couple of things that the information is constantly changing and you're probably going to get a bunch of notifications and the whole experience will be much more complicated. And it's also like. [10:49] You take out your phone, right? And I go and I look up [10:53] Peter Barton's book, right, on my phone here. But suddenly there's all this other stress that's attached to it, right, because I know that elsewhere in this phone is my email, right, and my signal and my WhatsApp, right?

[11:02] and [11:04] There's just something beautiful about the purity of this and sitting down doing it. [11:08] It doesn't mean I'm reading a book a day. Like, Lord, I wish I was. [11:14] But... [11:16] There's something great about the format, about the cultural history, and obviously, they're going to... We'll still be reading books in 50 years. I just... [11:24] Don't know if we'll be reading as many as we are now. [11:27] It's a great answer. Maybe one last thread on this, which would be, [11:31] Maybe a little closer to the work of the Atlantic words, written text, [11:36] have become incredibly cheap.

Yeah. Or if infinite. And there's a meta thing here, which is like, [11:43] how much are we going to care about who the words came from? And does it have to be Jackson plus AI or so on and so forth? [11:51] What remains scarce, as you think maybe specifically about words and building an institution around words? [11:58] Okay, so this is like one of the existentials at the core of my... [12:03] business problems, right? [12:06] The things that we can do right now that are scarce at the Atlantic, or ideally that I could do in the running ground, right, are...

[12:14] write with a certain kind of style and flair that's individualistic and is tied to Nick. I write in a very specific way. I can't describe it. And if you fed all of my essays into an AI, it still can't mimic it in a way that seems right. [12:27] It can... [12:28] Maybe it was closer than it was a year ago, but it can't do it. You take someone who's an even better writer. [12:33] Thank you. [12:34] Take John McPhee and ask AI to write like John McPhee. It doesn't sound anything like John McPhee, right?

[12:39] So there's a distinct element of style, right? AI moves to this kind of... [12:44] It's a style that we like, obviously, but it's kind of homogenous, and it's different from... [12:52] the best writers who have very distinct styles, right? Like the writers I love are, [12:56] many of them sound very different. I used to play a game when I was at the New Yorker. I would try to read each talk of the town where the byline is at the end and try to guess who it was based on their style.

[13:08] I don't know if there's a single sentence I've written in my life that is as good as any sentence that Anthony Lane has written, right? Like, there's just... [13:14] There's a quality of writing that... [13:17] It is distinct in that AI can't match. So if we can maintain that at the Atlantic... [13:22] Great. Real quick. [13:24] I feel pretty confident that [13:27] Claude 5.5 or whatever will be able to write [13:31] John McPhee-like writing based on the corpus of current John McPhee. That doesn't mean it can do whatever John would write next.

[13:38] But let's assume that maybe you disagree. My sense is that we'll probably like it will at the very least be able to write exactly how you write in The Running Ground. It might. [13:48] I mean... [13:49] It can't now, and it's not making as much progress as I would have thought. Okay, fair. But 5.5%. [13:56] Who knows? So, okay, so number one is style, right? But you're right, that may... [14:00] That may go away. [14:03] Second thing is reporting, right? So with the running ground or, you know, many people at this Atlantic, right, like this –

[14:11] take any one of these issues, right? And there are people who made phone calls and talked to people who didn't want to talk to and doorstop people and like... [14:18] I'm sure that like Adam Serwer on the courts here, right? He has many times talked to people who have [14:25] Absolutely no interest and probably shouldn't be talking to Adam Serwer about the courts, but he has like somehow gotten them to talk to him. And they've said interesting things that – [14:34] They're not going to say the cloud 5.5, even if it's got, you know, voicemail invitation.

[14:41] That's an important skill. So that's still scarce. Agreed. [14:45] There is... [14:48] People like... [14:50] to read other humans. They like to have a human connection. And so, you know, we put out this magazine where just this is the one that we've got stacked up and we've got the names of 25 people, right? And each of them has a distinct personality. And you probably like some, you probably don't like some, you probably never heard of some, right? And some of them like I adore and I'll read anything they write and I have an intense emotional relationship despite even those people work at the Atlantic, some I haven't met, right?

And [15:13] There's a humanness that is really important, which is why I think even Claude 15.5, there'll still be a demand. [15:22] for the Atlantic. Now what I worry about is when there's Claude 15-5, [15:26] it would be pretty easy to write a good essay from scratch for anybody. Right. And not only that, at this point, [15:33] There'll be avatars that have been created on it. You'll have no idea what is real and what is false. You'll go on social media and you won't know whether anybody is human, right? [15:39] And, uh,

[15:41] It will be just this moment. [15:43] And people like to say it will all be slop, but it won't be slop then, right? No. It might be slop now, but it's going to be good. It's going to be amazing. Right? At least engaging. It's going to be engaging. And so they're going to be these infinitely beautiful people saying exactly what you want to say, right? And your social media feed is going to be filled with them. And I'm going to be competing with them with this print magazine, right? And that's… [16:05] That's the future.

[16:07] - Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe even to sort of go halfway, there is probably, maybe this is a good thing, but there are probably a whole bunch of people who currently, who have a lot of humanness, or a lot of humanity, [16:18] and maybe even have interesting stories, but don't have the, [16:22] skillset or experience to write in the way that an Atlantic or a New York writer might write. And it's possible that this harness or container might... [16:30] allow them to tell those human stories? Will a lot of AI help?

And maybe we land, it's hard to, the question is also like, what will people tolerate? Are we going to need to know? - I mean, this is a really interesting question, because what I haven't seen yet, right? And I love AI, I use it all the time. I've used, I don't know how many tokens I've spent today, but a lot of tokens, right? And I'm running agent farms and I'm asking queries and I'm working in different models. And, [16:55] The last thing I did, I have a race coming up on Saturday.

I snapped a photograph of the menu, and I asked, like, based on what I ate for breakfast and based on what my nutritional needs are for Saturday, what should I order for lunch, right? [17:05] That's awesome, right? And that's silly and stupid, but the agent farms are amazing. [17:10] What I have not seen... [17:12] Maybe it's because it's just not visible. I have not seen a journalist who's... [17:19] Work. [17:20] Prior to 2023 or 2024... [17:22] was mediocre? [17:24] Produce exceptional work, right? [17:27] I have yet to see someone – I've seen people who produce exceptional work use AI and produce exceptional work this year.

[17:32] Right? [17:33] I've seen people who produce bad work use AI and produce bad work, right? I haven't seen anybody change. Let's get the job. And surely that moment will come and maybe that person is out there, right? But most of the stories you read about people using AI, they're producing kind of [17:46] garbage stories, right? You hear about AI being useful for good journalists doing investigative journalism, like, oh, this AI helped us build this map, which helped us tell this story. But those are great journalists who are using the tools to further their great journalism.

But [17:58] One of the most interesting moments for me will be when there's a mid-journalist or a mid-writer who produces exceptional work. Yeah, who maybe could become a great journalist but isn't a great writer. Or the other way around, right? Is a great writer but doesn't know how to – like who knows? Like maybe there's someone who has – [18:14] Like most of the people here on this list, they have like all the skills or they're 10 things that make you that maybe they got eight of them. Right. And maybe there's someone out there who has six and can use AI to fill the gaps.

[18:25] I just haven't seen it yet. [18:27] And it will happen. I just haven't seen it. Yeah. And you would have thought, given what you can code by now, right, and, like, given, like, how powerful these tools are, how amazing they are, you would have thought it would have happened. Yeah. [18:38] I agree. Uh, [18:39] I want to talk a little bit about... [18:41] maybe stories and then a bunch of the other kind of aspects of journalism and institutions. Uh, [18:46] There's a quote from, I think, the same interview you're talking about.

[18:50] the rest of your career, you say, that will be my North Star for the rest of my career. What is the thing I can do that will most increase good stories in the world? It's probably influenced by my grandfather. He spent his whole life trying to make America work. My role is to do that through journalism, right? [19:06] Why do stories matter so much? Well, I do think that having stories that people can agree and they can discuss is like one of the foundations of democracy, right? [19:15] You know, we make decisions on who should govern and what rules they should pass once they govern and how we should treat each other in part based on stories.

Right. We hear the story of what happened of Renee Good and like it's very important to understand. [19:28] what actually happened to understanding but this is like this is why ice was there this is what ice wants this is what renee wants this is what her family what her family wanted this is what she was doing okay now there's a contentious question of what happened on that road and like [19:40] What was she doing in the car and what were her intentions? And did she actually hit the guy and trying to get that right?

[19:47] And then trying to get it right, make it accurate, and then tell the story helps the world and helps America understand what's happening in the country. And you can make a decision. [19:57] Okay, I've now read this. I understand this. Everybody's talking about it. We'll have an argument. And I think there should be more ICE agents, or I think there should be fewer ICE agents, or I think the ICE agents should act differently. And so having accurate information, having people agree at least that this is the information we should discuss, helps make...

[20:14] society function, right? And it also... [20:17] You know, if there's no one to report on what happens to Renee Good and the benefits and the costs of having ICE in Minnesota, then there's no feedback to the government. Right. And so what happened after that? Well, there is a story. There's an understanding. We realized what had happened. And even the Trump administration said, oh, wait, we've gone too far and changed the policies. And so having good, accurate journalism. [20:39] matters. [20:42] So [20:42] When I said that quote, I was describing a little bit of my career transition, which is I started as an editor.

[20:50] And then I became... [20:53] a writer and I was back an editor and then I was an editor-in-chief and then I took this job as CEO and I [21:01] you know, [21:02] The common thread was that at each moment I was making the choice. And in between, I also ran the website for the New Yorker and then I ran the product and engineering team there. Each choice was like... [21:13] What is the thing that I can do [21:15] that will increase the number of good stories because I think that's important and I can write [21:21] one good story every few weeks or months, right?

I can edit five, or I can build a business that allows us to publish hundreds, right? And so that was sort of the fundamental logic in why I took this job at the Atlantic, which many people are like, why? You're a journalist, you're an artist, why would you go be a capitalist and be the CEO? And must just be because you're paid more? No, right? It's because... [21:42] You know, if I'm good at it, and maybe I am, maybe I'm not, if you're good at it, you have this very positive effect on the amount of journalism in the world.

[21:51] Thank you. [21:52] The word story... [21:54] is interesting here, which is, [21:56] One of the things that has come up as I've been doing the podcast is I've had a few people ask me if I'm a journalist. [22:01] What do you say? [22:02] I usually say, like, I don't think so. [22:06] And I'm interested in, you also used the word reporting, which is like one end of the spectrum. [22:11] Stories can mean a lot of things. Some of these amazing YouTube videos are amazing stories. Are they reported? [22:17] I'm curious, maybe to be really specific, what the role of journalism is and what makes a journalist, but also more broadly, [22:25] I would even assume some of the things that you guys have done over the years...

[22:29] at all the publications, some skew more journalism reporting in the way we were talking about with us or whatever. And some are like, this is a crazy, your colleague vanishing. [22:39] Like, is that journalism? Like, I don't know. [22:43] Yeah, that's funny. I don't quite know how to define it, and the lines are changing, and are you a journalist as someone who – [22:50] Whoever first posted that video, again, like the Renee Good video, are they a journalist? Is the first person who tweeted it or did a sophisticated Twitter thread?

Is the first person who called two sources the journalist? Like, who was the first journalist? I don't know the answer to that. [23:03] Know it when I see it, but have a hard time defining it. [23:08] Let's go back to that story of the guy disappearing, because I think it's a fun story. [23:13] And I think I can maybe answer your question through it. So we're talking about the story that I did at Wired, where I was an editor. And my colleague, Evan Ratliff, wrote a story about how people disappear, right?

Like fake their deaths and start their lives over. And he talked to a private investigator. And this is like 2012, maybe? No, it was earlier than that. Earlier, okay. It was 2000 and either 8 or 9. I think it was probably 9, right? It was early Twitter. When was Twitter founded? Like 7, 8? 7, right? So it's 9, right? So it's early Twitter. And... [23:43] I think the first story runs in the spring and the second story runs in the summer. And the first story is like, this is how it can be done.

And then after that story ran, [23:52] We said, all right, now we're going to run an experiment. Evan's going to go on the run. He's essentially going to fake his death and go on the run. And I'm going to serve as a private investigator, and I'm going to release all the information that a private investigator would have. Like, I'm going to have access to his credit cards. I'm going to have access to his, like, EasyPass. I'm going to be able to interview his family members. By the way, this is a YouTube video.

This is like a Mr. Beast video now. Yeah, totally. And it was so fun. And then, like, I'm going to post those on Twitter, and people are going to hunt for him. Right. And if anybody finds him in 30 days, they get $5,000. If he can last 30 days, he gets $5,000. [24:22] All these people start hunting, and he makes a mistake. He, at one point, he, I can't remember what it is, but he was trying to use Tor, and he, like, logged into the internet, not using Tor. [24:35] somehow he got tracked, but the person who tracked him didn't, [24:39] David Morgan: Yeah.

[24:56] Because he could have just gone and hiked Mount Rainier in a hut, right? And that's no fun, right? And so he then... [25:04] I think he followed the Twitter account as like a fembot, so Evan wouldn't recognize it. And then Evan tweeted something about being in New Orleans. And so they then... I had put out that Evan was gluten-free. And so then they like talked to all the gluten-free pizzerias. Anyway, they track him down in New Orleans. It's one of the most amazing things. But the reason we did that story...

A, it was fun, right? And why are... [25:26] He likes to have fun. [25:30] there's this tension that we're trying to understand, which is the Internet... [25:34] makes it easier to start over and it makes it easier to get tracked, right? Which is still attention, right? Same thing like AI, like you can create a new identity and create a new persona online. [25:44] But you're also walking down the street and there's a ring camera everywhere and everybody's Tesla's tracking you too, right? And like your phone is giving off information. Like your heartbeat might be giving off information that like some drone is collecting.

Like you don't know. And so we were trying to get at the... [25:57] You know, you can just say, who knows? Privacy. We have more, we have less. Right. Or you can say, here's the story. Right. And so that was a story that was like fun and it was weird. It was also an interesting story about Twitter and how groups form. Like there was there were all these different interesting elements that. [26:13] were ways of looking at things in the world that matter. And so it was fun, but it was also...

[26:20] it probably shapes perceptions and conversations about stuff that matters. [26:24] Was it journalism? [26:26] Yeah, it's definitely journalism. So am I a journalist? What do you think? I'll tell you why I think I'm not. My entire goal is to... [26:35] Not in a, for lack of a better word, fake way. My goal is to make my guests shine in some way and help the world see what I think is really special about them. Yeah. I'm not trying to put a veneer on them. I'm not trying to like. But are you trying to get the truth?

[26:50] Like if somebody was a jerk and like kind of a disreputable person, and you didn't realize that when you booked them, right? So you can't get out by saying I wouldn't book that person. [26:59] But you realize that while you're interviewing them. [27:02] Would you hide that or not? [27:05] *pfff* [27:07] I have run this variation of this thought experiment, which is like people have asked me, like, would you interview Trump? And one main reason I would be quite afraid to is I think he... [27:16] Probably in almost every environment, most people who meet him, he probably charms their socks off.

[27:22] So, [27:23] As a slight caveat, I put a lot of scrutiny into who I talk to, and I try to talk to people who I think – [27:30] truth for them or trueness for them is something I'm [27:34] think is good or I'm attracted to or something? Yeah, it's a hard question. Um, [27:40] And I think maybe to the very least, if I saw that there were dark parts of them and light parts of them or something like that, I would try to point at the thing that I thought was good in them.

[27:51] But would you let them hide? Is your primary commitment to your audience or is your primary commitment to your guests? [27:59] That's a great question. I'm not sure I've, I really have been forced to answer that question yet. Yeah. [28:04] All right. Well, again, I don't know how to define a journalist, but if your primary commitment is to your audience – [28:12] You're a journalist, right? If your primary commitment is to the guest or to an advertiser, maybe you're not. Hmm. [28:17] food for thought. Uh, it's, I like that a lot.

Um, [28:22] media institutions, [28:25] First and foremost, maybe not a long answer, but why... [28:30] Why are they worth preserving? Why do they matter so much? [28:33] Media institutions? At least one like... [28:36] The Atlantic or The New Yorker, these things that have been around for a long time that could go the way of, ah, people aren't going to read that much text. Well, and some do, right? Some publications disappear, right? There are amazing publications that don't matter as much as they used to, right? And there are new publications that matter.

I don't think there's anything... [28:51] Well, there's something nice in the continuum that the Atlantic has played this role. We're founded by Ralph Waldo, Andrew Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, right? Like, you know, look back and like – Abraham Lincoln wrote for the Atlantic, right? And we were founded to help create conversations to help prevent a civil war and like – [29:10] you know, [29:11] Martin Luther King published a letter from a Birmingham jail. There is something important about keeping this publication going. And it's this long run of American history and issues where, for the most part, over time, we've been...

[29:24] Right. [29:26] We've gotten things wrong. We've published things that, you know. [29:28] I don't know. But for the most part, like, we've done things and we've helped, like... [29:33] improve racial progress in America. We've improved intellectual progress in America. Like we, [29:39] helped, I don't know, we wrote really smart stuff about the Iraq war. Like we did a lot of stuff that we got right. And it's nice to be able to tie onto that history. So, I, [29:48] That's one reason, right? Very important institution. You'd like to preserve it.

You'd like to keep it going forward. Secondly, it's just... [29:54] People who do good journalistic work, as we just talked about, I think there should be. [29:57] More of it. Increase the amount of truth. Increases the odds that you get democracy, right? One of the things that happens in dictatorships is they arrest the journalists or they buy the media publications or they shut down the media publications. And then the people in power say... [30:14] You got it right. [30:15] But we want you to write. Right. And that's one of the ways democracy dies.

And if you study the way that autocracy comes about in many countries and you look at what's happening in Hungary and look what's happening in Turkey. Right. And you look at what happened in Russia. Right. Countries where they have less democracy than they did 10 years ago, 15 years ago. What was part of the playbook that Erdogan ran, that Viktor Orban ran, that Putin ran? [30:35] Arrest the journalists, you buy the publications, shut down the critical publications. That is part of the process of democracy to autocracy. And so – [30:44] I would like to – I am going to fight that because I believe in democracy, right?

And I will do my best to fight it both by defending our rights in court if I have to or protecting our journalists or – [31:00] White House were to come and say, we're going to arrest your people because of what they say. You fight it with everything I can, but also to try to create a thriving business model so that we don't go out of business and we don't like... [31:09] Sometimes good journalistic organizations go out of business not because the government tries to shut them down in the process of democracy, but because they manage their finances wrong, right?

And they spend too much on holiday parties. And so, like, my goal is to make sure that we both fight. [31:25] the anti-democratic powers and that we stay as strong as possible to hire as many people as we can to do the best work we can. [31:32] You briefly hit on it. Why is Lorene... [31:35] Um... [31:36] enforcing a goal to profitability or sustainability, actually a gift. I think it's totally a gift, right? So, Lorene Powell, jobs, very wealthy, obviously. [31:46] public knowledge. She cares a lot. And when I was hired...

[31:50] you know, the mandate was you were losing money now and we're not going to lose money. Um, and her reasons for mandating that are her reasons. Um, [31:59] But I do think it's a gift because it forces a kind of discipline. [32:05] Excellence comes through discipline. And if you are forced to like make good decisions about what [32:13] How you run your business and what you pay for this and what you pay for that and how you run your subscription models and how you balance all these complicated mathematical models that determine whether you're successful or not.

I think that the discipline of being forced to make it profitable made it a better publication. [32:30] And the fact that it's an excellent publication also, of course, made it possibly become profitable. Good CEO so far, I think, too. Yes, to some degree. But like there's a lot that goes into this place's experience. [32:43] into this place of success. The most important thing, the reason why [32:49] So a couple of things were important to our transition from losing a lot of money to making money. One is... [32:55] Continued excellence of the reporting, which is top-notch every single day and has been since I've been here.

And then building a business model that is responsive to that and that is downstream of that. And so instead of saying... [33:07] We're going to build a business model that depends on... [33:10] lots of output and depends on covering these particular topics where we think we can like sell event sponsorships instead it's like okay you guys do what your best at and we'll try to figure out a business model around that right and sort of working backwards as opposed to so one thing i tried at the beginning i was like you know

[33:27] When I was at Wired, we ran an affiliate revenue business. We would review headphones, buy headphones, and we'd get cut. It was great. Probably a good fit for Wired. Great. It was a great fit for Wired. I was like, okay. Okay. [33:37] Let's do that here. It's so good. Like we'll do it on books, right? We'll like put in affiliate links and we'll like, maybe you could do it on movies, right? And so one of the first things I did was... [33:46] All right, let's build out the mechanism so we can get affiliate revenue, let's build out the dashboards so we can track how much affiliate revenue we're getting.

Let's make sure we put in the tags. And then we run it for a few months. I'm not even kidding you. Our affiliate revenue is like $400. [34:00] And I was like, what are we doing? It's like this is not a publication that… [34:04] I'd rather have $400 than $0. I'd rather put an affiliate link than an Amazon link without an affiliate link. But it was pretty clear that… [34:12] That was trying to latch a business model on the Atlantic. That just didn't fit the Atlantic. It's a business model product fit almost.

Yeah. Right. [34:18] Hmm. [34:19] - [34:20] On the note of the point you're making about [34:24] for lack of overly compressing it, like journalism defending democracy. There's a, maybe I'm probably overweighted, spending a lot of time in the tech world, and recently there's a view [34:37] amongst a lot of capitalists that like journalists hate capitalists as much as they hate [34:42] whatever fascists or do you use much more extreme language? Um, [34:47] Thank you. [34:48] One, do you think like this is a new phenomenon as it just kind of always has been there?

And to what extent is it? [34:55] the journalist's job to also, I mean, you've done amazing work on Facebook, among many other things. [35:01] Is it also the role to check the [35:04] increasingly powerful capitalists as much as it is the government. Yeah, this is a really big story in Silicon Valley, right? And it's... [35:13] There are a few things. So... [35:16] Journalists are skeptical of power, right? It's part of the personality. Right. [35:22] And... [35:23] Silicon Valley, people in Silicon Valley went from not having power to having power. So they went from...

[35:27] being treated with less skepticism, being treated with more. [35:30] skepticism right and a journalist will look at elon musk when he's just like [35:35] scrappy guy making Tesla differently from when he's the richest man in the world with an empire, right? And [35:41] You know, most of the coverage of him when he was a scrappy guy just starting Tesla. [35:45] had a different hinge, but he's also a different person, and he acts in different ways. He sees himself similarly, though, which I think is one of the critical reasons he's so upset with all of this.

He's like, why are you treating me so differently? Right. And the answer would be, [35:57] you're different, like power [35:59] changes people, you influence the world in different ways. But this was like, this was a constant conversation with Musk in particular when I was at Wired. So part of it is like, there is skepticism of power, you take an organization that goes from not being powerful to being powerful. Another thing that's interesting is that Silicon Valley in particular, [36:18] Like, [36:19]. [36:20] It saw that it could counter journalism, right? And no longer needed it.

And so it wasn't just that they... [36:27] part of what happened is they felt like they could express feelings they may have bottled up before. Right? So a tech leader in 2015 may not have, [36:38] yelled at the New York Times publicly, A, because they didn't have a Twitter account with 100,000 followers, and B, because they wanted the New York Times coverage. But now they know that they can start a stuff sack, and so they feel like they can go around. So they may be expressing things... [36:51] that they felt.

[36:53] before. [36:54] Right. So those are a couple of the factors that are at play. I think most of what's happened is [37:02] I mean, and there also is like there is a certain amount of skepticism because of a lot of a lot of there's this very important moment, like the key moment. And when I think that media and the tech industry diverge is after the election of Trump. [37:15] where sort of this notion that technology tools would... [37:21] bring the world together, right? Make the world more open and connected, as Facebook said, right?

Suddenly, these technology tools have clearly been used to create a president or to help elect a president whose ideology you may like, you may not like. I try to be entirely nonpartisan. [37:38] but whose ideology is certainly not make the world more open and connected right and so journalists look at that and they're like wait [37:45] The tech industry is not what it says it was, right? And these things don't work the way... [37:51] We've been told they work. And we've got this person who most of the industry quite clearly was highly skeptical of for lots of reasons.

And so I think that was a real turning point, too. [38:01] I think there's an element too of... Can I say one other thing? Please, please. [38:05] There's also this interesting thing where... [38:08] Thank you. [38:09] One of the things that Twitter did... [38:12] So journalism is an interesting industry where it... [38:15] over-indexes on influence versus its financial status in the world. If you were to add up, [38:25] the market cap of all companies in journalism. It's like, [38:29] a fraction of one tech startup, right? But if you were to take the kind of the social influence that the journalists have in setting the agenda, and then like you take the influence they have on Twitter, it's massive, right?

And so it's like... [38:41] one [38:42] 10th of 1% of the influence financial influence in the world and then like 7% of the influence on Twitter, right? So there's like just this massive gap and [38:50] So, [38:51] Maybe that's a positive thing in some ways, right? It helps distribute stories. But then, like, journalists start saying... [38:57] things on Twitter that are [39:00] You know, they criticize individual venture capitalists. They say things they wouldn't say inside of their institution, right? And so suddenly, these people who have more attention, right? [39:07] than one might expect.

And they're saying things that... [39:12] clash with the kind of overall views of their brand. And then because the way Twitter works, the dumbest thing that anybody in any organization says is what gets seen. And it's seen as the stand-in for the whole thought of the organization, right? And so you can have a publication, I don't know, [39:28] Let's just take a random one, Politico, right? And Politico publishes all these stories, and they're balanced, and they're thoughtful, and they're respectful, right? And then one person at Politico tweets one crazy thing, and it goes viral, and then it's seen, and it's shared by everybody.

And then suddenly that becomes the stand-in for what Politico thinks, right? Well, Politico is balanced. They give equal attention to multiple sides. They write these really thoughtful stories. No, they're crazy. Do you see that tweet, right? And the tweet is true. Like, the person did tweet that. And that happens to every organization or someone inside the organization. [39:58] more to journalism than anybody else. And so the perception of [40:02] of the way journalists saw the world. We became seen as like, oh my gosh, they're actively trying to take down Andreessen Horowitz.

Well, no, just like one journalist in one publication tweeted this kind of dumb thing. And it's not really what... And so I do think that there was this imbalance. It doesn't explain it all. [40:20] You know, there is this imbalance between the reality of journalism, which is a lot of really thoughtful people trying to do their best work to explain things, and then the perception, which was shaped by – [40:34] to some degree. [40:35] Some dumb tweets by people who probably shouldn't have been given access to their phones on those days.

[40:41] And I don't want to overstate. It's not like... [40:44] That's all of it. But I think that's underappreciated. And it's particularly underappreciated because people don't recognize the sort of the delta between the. [40:53] influence on social media platforms versus, you know, power in the world. [40:57] I was going to bring up, there was a moment recently where... [41:02] Wired did a story on the gay tech mafia or something in SF. [41:08] My version of Twitter was wild frustration. Wired used to be optimistic. It's an element of what you were just describing.

I think there's also a thing [41:17] that the technology world... [41:21] who has recently come to a lot of power, has a view... [41:24] to go back to your Facebook thing, that like, more technology is good. Technology is value neutral, basically, and that more technology is good. And like... [41:33] It seems that your root point around plurality makes sense in a vacuum, or even in reality. I think the challenge is, like, how does speaking truth to power... [41:44] I even struggle with, you brought up Elon. I really struggle with Elon, because I have some people in my life who worship him, and I have some people in my life who think the fact that you would drive a Tesla means you're evil.

And I'm like, man, I don't know how to think about this guy. [41:58] This guy probably pulled us forward on EVs in space, five to ten years, alone. [42:04] And he clearly can't also sit with the fact that anyone is speaking truth to his power. [42:11] Like... [42:11] it doesn't seem that we're [42:14] headed towards [42:16] This getting better. [42:18] Well, I think that's true. There's a lot there. No, no, there's a lot. I mean, he's a great example, right? And like, if you look at Elon in totality, [42:26] it's this combination of this amazing man, right?

You listen to, like, sometimes you listen to a podcast with him. You listen to, particularly if you listen to podcasts from old Elon. Yeah. [42:33] Wow, right? He talked at Davos this year, right? [42:38] It's incredible, right? He's so smart. He's so sensible, like climate change, right? Like, do I want to go to Mars? I don't want to go to Mars. But do I think humans should explore Mars? Sure. It's like SpaceX and incredible companies. What do you do with Tesla? Absolutely amazing. You know, do I want solar walls? I do.

Do I think that he maybe has done the right thing? Maybe not. But, you know, just this. [42:56] Both the intelligence dream and like generally pointed in the right direction on society's biggest challenges. And he believes in something very clearly, which not every technologist does. [43:06] But he's also like weaponized a platform against civil discourse in America. Right. He has made it. [43:12] almost impossible to have good conversations in the town square. He's totally polarized it politically. He has... [43:20] very little conception of what is true and what is not true.

Like he has the biggest spreader of misinformation on that platform. You have like this... [43:29] mess of Elon Musk. And everyone who knows him says the same thing. They're all like, what do we do with this? And part of the problem of why it's hard to have a conversation, you and I can have a thoughtful conversation. You can't do that on Musk's social media platform because it's been engineered for toxicity. Yeah. [43:48] And so part of the reason we can't have good conversations about Elon is because what Elon did to the town square.

[43:54] Now, that's not the only reason. There's many other reasons. And there's partisanship in America. And like, maybe television has pushed us into more partisan ways. And, you know, it's not like Blue Sky is this like site of like beautiful civil discourse where people like respectfully disagree with each other and, you know, go to consensus, right? [44:13] But – [44:14] Part of the reason it's hard to talk about Elon is because what Elon did. [44:18] Mm-hmm. [44:19] why it's changing your slightly, but still in the kind of broader bucket. Um, [44:26] Why?

[44:28] Should really talented writers... [44:31] want to join or remain part of an institution, uh, like this one. Yeah. Great. You mean, or why, why would they not go to Substack, right? Or, [44:41] So part of it is [44:44] you get value from the institution, right? We edit, we copy edit, we fact check, we promote, we help put you on TV, right? We have the best editors in the world, right? They are amazing. If you've never gone through the process of working with a great editor, [45:00] It's transformative, right? Because it's not just...

[45:04] Like, a lot of... [45:06] A lot of people listening to this don't understand exactly what an editor does. It's not just that they... These people haven't really been edited. Right? It's not just that they make sure the apostrophe is in the right place in its. [45:16] They are... [45:17] often, [45:19] Like... [45:20] A little bit like what I said about Elon, like breaking things down to first principles and helping you resort them. Right. And so you take this book. Right. So. [45:28] I worked with a bunch of great editors on this book.

[45:32] Some of what they did is they changed sentences, some of which they changed emphases, some of which they changed ideas. [45:38] One of the notes that I think was so interesting. [45:41] This book is mostly about my life and it started, both about my life and my father's life. And it started with, it's also about running, [45:50] In the early versions, the first time I had a full draft, it started with, here's an introduction, these are the ideas of the book, okay, now let's go back to the beginning, here's my dad as a child.

[46:01] You can't do that. [46:02] Nobody cares about your dad as a child at this point, right? They just don't. And they don't care about you as a child. No one cares about anyone as a child. And so they have an emotional relationship and you're not famous enough, right? If you're Leonardo DiCaprio, start your book when you're a child because people buy the book. [46:15] and they care about Leonardo DiCaprio. Nobody cares about Nick Thompson, right? And you have to make them care about you. [46:22] And you're not going to be able to do that unless – [46:25] There's an incredible story from your childhood, but it's not.

Your childhood is setting up the things that are interesting. Okay, so... [46:29] Very good point, right? Okay, so now what do I do? Okay, well, then let's have a chapter where you describe everything that happens in your mind while you run in a race, one race, beginning to end, right? And that will both explain what is most interesting about the book, which is the ability to sort of, [46:45] Give the feeling of running, right? And the emotions of running and what it like, what it actually means to run while being aware of the world around you, while also allowing you to include little set pieces that explain your crazy father and your, you know, the story about cancer that is pivotal.

And so, yeah. [47:00] That was an amazing edit. That was a great edit. It made the book much better, right? [47:06] That's what great editing does. They see somebody sees like, here's the fundamental weakness in the thing you have written, right? This is the structural weakness. This is the chronological weakness. This is the character you need to add or the character you need to subtract. And great work doesn't happen with great editing without great editing. So what you get at the Atlantic, you know, you may have a writer and maybe you don't like their editor.

Maybe I'll go do it by myself. Right. And I'll go to Substack and I'll just be me. [47:33] And the work is much worse. Now, not true of everybody, but people who go to Substack, the work's great, right? But you get a lot of value in, [47:41] being here from the institution. Also, you know, we pay you a regular salary, you get a check every two weeks, and you know, you know what it is. And if you want more, you ask for more and [47:50] You know, there's value to being at a stable level.

[47:54] place with predictable income, great editing, good promotion. Now, for a certain class of writer, [48:00] you know, [48:01] they can get paid a lot more at Substack, far smaller reach, far smaller audience, but you can get, [48:08] you can make a lot more money. And maybe even if you have a huge enough audience, you can reach equal numbers of people, but because of the way the gating works and all those mechanisms. So we've lost... [48:18] Derek Thompson went to Substack. You know, that was amazing. But like he can probably make – he was a number one best-selling author.

And he's like friends with the folks who are the top people on Substack, which allows him to get in the recommendation engine, which allows him to build an audience. Why would someone like Derek stay? So someone like Derek would stay because – [48:37] You... [48:38] So ideally, you get the best editing, the best editing, the best ideas for your stories, too, the best copy editing, the best fact checking, best social promotion. So you're getting all of that. Do you think this model could work? [48:49] for media outside of writing. [48:52] I do, actually.

I do. I've sometimes wondered whether we could build a network of like – [48:59] like youtubers who aren't famous enough to be making tons of money on their own but are great right and we could like create a network of them we have an awesome ad sales team and so we set we can sell ads more efficiently than presumably they can as individuals or they can get more money if we sell their ads than if they just sell into the youtube ad network like we could create a bundle of youtubers who are like on brand for the atlantic bring them in and they make more money they get more audience we get more content out there it's good for us i just haven't figured out who they

[49:29] Real economics would work. I think there's an element... [49:32] A lot of people do a version of that. They're not a brand like The Atlantic. Yeah. [49:37] I almost wonder about, and you have Cleo Abrams at Vox and she leaves. Like that's also kind of in video as an example. Overwhelmingly, they start somewhere and then they leave. I'm almost more curious about like specifically the editor-writer relationship. Right. Well, okay, so take Cleo. Her work's awesome, right? You can imagine if Cleo, I think, is probably so successful that she wouldn't need, like she probably makes more money than we could pay her.

I don't know. [50:07] exceptionally good. And then you can imagine like a video producer who's incredible, right? And if we have an incredible video producer or incredible video editor or someone who can like think through her next, okay, this is when you're doing your next thing on quantum computing, you should do it this way, right? The difference, by the way, I think now is they just go work for her. [50:25] Right. [50:26] And that... [50:27] Whereas fewer writers... [50:30] Writers don't hire editors. I guess you don't get to a level of scale.

Yeah. I mean, they're different. I don't know the career path for great videographers. I know the career path for great videographers. [50:40] writing editors and they tend to end up at places like the Atlantic, not working as individuals for folks on Substack. Hmm. [50:47] I mean, I think they sometimes go the other way. Like maybe they... [50:51] You go out of a book company and then go work for people on Substack? I don't know. What makes a really great editor? Okay. [50:57] So this is like [50:58] I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

So a couple of things about a great editor. One, they understand what the writer is good at.