← The Rich Roll Podcast
The Rich Roll Podcast
The Atlantic’s Nick Thompson Is The Fastest Runner In Publishing: On Setting Age-Group Records, Beating Cancer, & Why Media Must Survive AI
02:15:37
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
We are brought to you today by the wonderful folks at GO Brewing. A few years ago, there was this guy, his name's Joe Chura, and he called me up out of the blue and asked if I would speak at this event that he was hosting in Illinois called go, which turned out to be this incredibly memorable weekend for me and for all of the attendees because it was all about how to take inspired action. Joe and I connected, but, you know, life moved on. That was many years ago.
- [00:32]
Nick Thompson
Then a couple years back when I.
- [00:34]
Rich Roll
Was at Jesse Itzler's Running man event in Georgia, I'm walking the grounds when I see Joe. I was surprised to see him again, of course. Sort of different context, but also surprised because he had actually taken inspired action. I shouldn't have been surprised knowing Joe, but I guess I was in the moment. What he did was he took this idea of Go and he turned it into the hottest new brand in non alcoholic beer called, of course, Go Brewing. What sets Go Brewing growing apart is their refusal to cut corners. Everything is handcrafted from scratch in small batches. This commitment to quality has propelled Go Brewing into one of America's fastest growing breweries. Now in over 5,000 locations across 20 states, their salty AF Chalada claimed the untapped number one non alcoholic lager spot in America. They're constantly dropping all these bold new flavors, double IPAs, incredible sours, all without added sugars or any artificial nonsense. The non alcoholic revolution isn't coming. It's here, people. And I'm really honored to be championing it with Joe. So get on board by getting with go by going to gobrewing.com where you're going to use the Code rich roll for 15% off your first purchase. That's gobrewing.com code rich roll. Since 2023, I've partnered with on because I truly believe in the power to.
- [02:08]
Nick Thompson
Bring us closer to ourselves, to others.
- [02:10]
Rich Roll
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- [02:40]
Nick Thompson
Hard.
- [02:40]
Rich Roll
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- [03:25]
Nick Thompson
The thesis of the book is that because running is so simple, you can go running.
- [03:29]
Just you go out the door.
- [03:30]
You can compete with people. You can not compete with people. When you compete with people, you run on the exact same course as the best people in the world at the exact same time. You don't do that any other sport. You can track your inner growth. You can see how fast you're getting, you can see whether you're declining. When you succeed, it's you, and when you fail, it's you. You can understand aging through running really well. And because of the simplicity and because of the time it gives you to focus, you start to think through really deep stuff. Why does running do that? A, it's the daily practice. It's the habits it builds. B, it's the time alone in your head, in motion, outside. If you want to understand yourself and you want to kind of have more clarity on your life, it's not a bad idea to go for a run.
- [04:18]
Rich Roll
Hey, everybody. Really glad you're here because let's just say I've got a lot on my mind. I've got a few things I'd like to share, a lot to process, because it's just. It's been a hell of a month. One of the most exhausting periods of my entire adult life, but also, I gotta say, the most rewarding. If you tuned in to Roll on the other week, then you already know that I've been going through some family stuff, doing my best to help manage the chaos and the unpredictability of my aging parents, enduring the process of getting my mom in a memory care unit due to her dementia. And I really underestimated the toll all of this has taken on me, on my energy levels, on my emotional equanimity, my sanity. But like I said the other week, it's also been pretty revelatory because I don't know about you, maybe you can relate. I have expended a lot of effort over a great deal of time trying to outrun my past, to distance myself from people, from environments that I associate in my mind. At least with unhappy times. And I've crafted this whole story around that. And it's confusing because on some level, by compartmentalizing all of it, by pushing it aside, this has been an effective defense mechanism for survival for many years, and also this lever for growth. Because I think I needed to get away from the people who raised me in order to build a life I wanted, a life that I love and that I'm proud of. But at the same time, that very same defense mechanism, the avoidance, that's what keeps me stuck. Stuck in those old stories, stuck in old patterns of behavior, stuck in resentment. Which of course prevents me from being able to do what I really aspire.
- [06:28]
Nick Thompson
To do, which is to just let.
- [06:29]
Rich Roll
Go of all of it and love more unconditionally. And so I guess what I'm saying is that by going back to D.C. recently, by embracing my past, my parents, by showing up for them in service, that I am making peace with all of it, which is allowing me to let go of all the stuff that has been holding me back. It's been really productive in helping me to liberate myself from those stories so that I am no longer stuck and I can now continue to grow. And the point I'm trying to make is that I tried to outrun my past only to realize that, yes, it's true, it always does find a way to catch up to you, which provides us with a choice. You can either quicken your pace and continue trying to outrun it, or you can decide to suck it up, to stop running, to do an about face and just fucking face it and figure out how to make peace with it. So if you're stuck, this is how you get unstuck. Because you can't grow until you reckon with the hard wiring that has always historically held you back. This is my experience. And it also happens to be the experience of today's guest, a guy who happens to be very good at running. He's a 229 marathoner and an age group world record holder in the 50K who decided to use his running for more than just high performance as a vehicle to better understand his past so he could better understand himself and become a better man. In addition to standing out for his athletic feats, Nick Thompson also happens to be world class at more than just running. A journalist by trade, Nick came up at the New Yorker under legendary editor David Remnick. He went on to become editor in chief at Wired magazine and is now CEO of the Atlantic. He's a public intellectual and a writer on A wide range of topics, including technology, politics, media and foreign policy. So today we're going to talk running, of course, but the real focus is dads and sons, how messy that relationship can be and how running served Nick to better understand his complicated father so he could be a better one to his boys. Which also happens to be the focus of Nick's new memoir, the Running Ground, which I will say is required reading for anyone who runs, but also anyone and everyone still convinced they can outrun their past.
- [09:15]
Nick Thompson
Nick, man, it's great to. It's great to have you here. You have the dubious honor of being the first guest in our brand new, like New York City outpost here.
- [09:22]
So it's incredible.
- [09:24]
Hopefully everything goes smoothly. But you're a curious figure. On the one hand, you're this public intellectual, you're also a high level executive CEO of the Atlantic and at the same time this insanely fast runner. Like you're an elite athlete and you're also a dad. You got three. Three boys, right? Three boys. And that is a difficult equation to balance, I would imagine.
- [09:49]
There are definitely some trade offs and stresses and some moments where. Seems like maybe the time I spent being an elite athlete maybe isn't worth it.
- [09:57]
As much as your book is sort of memoir focused, it's also full of all of these lessons that you've learned, not just from life, but from running, you know, and core to it is this idea of the simplicity of running, like simplicity, paradox of running. Because of its simplicity, it becomes this incredible kind of crucible for growth in all areas of life. So maybe, you know, expand upon that concept.
- [10:21]
It's kind of how I begin the book. I mean, you know, the thesis, not like there's really a thesis, it's kind of a story. But the thesis of the book is that because running is so simple, it's just you, right? You can, you and I, you know, you could, you know, you can go running. Just you go out the door, right? You don't need a racket, you don't need a ball, you don't need a pool, right? And you can compete with people. You can not compete with people. When you compete with people, you run on the exact same course as the best people in the world at the exact same time. You don't do that any other sport, you know, like you don't play tennis against Jannik Sinner on the same court at the same time. And so it's this amazing sport that means you can track your inner growth, right? You can see how fast you're getting you can see whether you're declining. When you succeed, it's you, and when you fail, it's you. You can understand aging through running really well. And because of the simplicity and because of the time it gives you to focus, you' start to think through really deep stuff. And so the reason I wrote the book is that I was having this question about why I had. I kept trying to chew through this question of. I ended up going much faster in my 40s, and I have 30s and 20s. I was trying to figure out why. And it led me to these really deep realizations about my father. Right. And about my cancer and about all kinds of things. And so I thought, wow, running, like, opens up this extremely important psychology. And that is what led me into writing the book which traces my journey, these lessons for myself and then other runners.
- [11:42]
What is it about running beyond that, though, that it becomes this portal for you to make sense of all these other areas of your life?
- [11:50]
Well, so I actually don't know the answer to this. I don't know whether running is a really good portal or whether anything that you study as closely as I've studied running is a pretty good portal. One of the models for the book is William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, about surfing. The first review of this book said it was Zen in the order, motorcycle maintenance for runners. Right. The idea is like, I happen to know a lot about running and have thought a lot about some of the hard things in life and use running as a metaphor and a way to get into there. But I do know that running has opened these pathways for me and for me to understand these things.
- [12:27]
I think what's unique about running, though, is the solo aspect of it, in addition to the simplicity. So it provides that space for introspection. But.
- [12:37]
But.
- [12:39]
It'S this scenario that you set up where you can't beat yourself. And so the harder you go at it, the more you confront. You can't outrun yourself. So at some point in the interior space, in that liminal space that you enter, when it's just you and you're in that kind of extended flow experience, you know, you're faced with your. Your. Your frailties and your character defects, like all of these things percolate up to the surface in the same way they would if you were on a silent meditation retreat, right? And I think they. There's nothing like running that. That can give you that kind of clarity. And with that clarity there, you're then presented with this choice and this opportunity of. Of whether you want to confront These things and heal them and transcend them.
- [13:31]
Yeah, I do think that. I mean, that's very well said. I do think that running is. It's unquestionably my meditation, right? And it's like where I focus on my breath, right? And I focus on the sounds outside me and I focus on. If I'm running here in Dumbo, I'm like focusing on the sounds of the city. If I'm in the mountains, I'm focusing on the sounds of the mountain and the clarity you get from that kind of repetitive action. And I think the physical motion, right, like being outside physical motion, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, triggers things in your brain that are not. Cannot. That are very hard to trigger through other mechanisms.
- [14:05]
There's a stoic aspect to it as well. I'm going to be interested to hear what your conversation with Ryan was like, because I know you just did it. But this idea that it's a template for discipline and it gives your life a certain structure and a healthy appreciation for your lack of control and all of these attachments that we have in.
- [14:30]
The modern world, I think that running and stoicism can be very closely intertwined. And I think in my mind they are intertwined, right? And you go and you run. And it's like a disciplined act that I think encourages other disciplined act. You learn very quickly in running that you can control yourself, but you can't control anybody else, right? You can't control the weather. The weather is extremely important to how fast you run, right? But all you can do is you focus on yourself, you prepare yourself, and if you do it every day, you do get better, right? And these are very stoic lessons. Now there's some non stoic things, right? Like I still trace Strava segments, which I don't think is a very stoic thing to do.
- [15:11]
And there's more eastern aspects to it. Like, you know, you're forced to really be present with yourself. And there's a sort of Buddhist quality as well. And I think what distinguishes is your story from maybe a book that Ryan would write about running is that this is a spiritual journey all the way to discussing ideas like self transcendence. I mean, I was here a year ago when you reached out to me, and you were at the 3100. Come down here and watch it. I guess I didn't realize then that this was in part research for your book.
- [15:46]
I don't know if it started as research or whatever, but back to the sort of the spiritual association, dissociation. It ties a little bit back to what we were talking about. When you look at your watch, you don't look at your watch. When you run, there's this incredible balance between sometimes you want to be totally present, you want to be completely focused, and you want to be aware of your breath and aware of your step and aware of everything that's happening in your body. And then there's times where you want to be completely absent. You want to be just floating above and letting it go. And what's amazing is that in the same race, in the same run, you can have the exact opposite need, right? And you can go back and forth, and there are times where you want to be present, and there are times where you want to dissociate. And that is another element of running that I don't know whether it exists in other sports. When you're playing soccer, you always want to be present. You always have to be present when you're running. You sometimes want to be present, he sometimes want to be absent.
- [16:45]
Do you feel like now that you're. You're. You're much more in the ultra world than you were before? That that is even a more like a more prominent kind of aspect of it, the disassociation aspect. Because I just know from my own training where, you know, I would go out, like, all day and early in the season when, you know, a longer. A longer session would feel like, oh, my God, this is like going on forever. Whereas after a while, like, time bends, your relationship with time is different, and there is this disassociation where it feels like it all happened very quickly, like you are kind of out of your body in a certain way. And there's something unique about endurance sports that. That can put you in. That. Put you in that, like, transcendent mindset that other sports.
- [17:34]
I love that. I love that feeling, right? And I seek that feeling. And like, you can't. You go run three miles around the park, you can't get there, right? And, you know, but you go run 50 miles in the woods, and you definitely can't get there, right? And you kind of have to get there to finish the 50 miles and not turn around after 6.
- [17:50]
You could use running as a. As a practice of self transcendence, but you can also use it to run away from everything in your life total like, you know, and couch it as, like, well, this is my hobby, or this is like, what gives my life meaning, when actually it's just a elaborate denial mechanism.
- [18:08]
So, I mean, running can be Running it. Like, I write this book and, like, obviously I love running, right? I think running has done great things for my life. I think running does great things for people in general. But, like, it can totally make you self absorbed, right? It can make you run away. It can maybe help you process your problems, right? Like, there are times where, you know, I'm really upset and I will go and, like, run hard at the track, right? More when I was young. But for some people, that's a very healthy thing to do, but for other people, it's not a pretty healthy thing to do. It can make you, like, super selfish. It can make you. Can wreck marriages, right? It can, like, make you a crappy parent, right? Like, because you're spending all this time.
- [18:42]
Running, there's a certain self obsession, you know, that's. That's pretty rampant, right?
- [18:46]
Like, what is the great joke? It's a. If you're at a cocktail party, how do you find out how fast someone ran?
- [18:50]
The yellow tell you? Yeah, right. Like, you don't have to ask.
- [18:53]
You don't have to ask, right? So it's.
- [18:54]
It can have a lot of that in check for yourself. Like, do you. How do you gauge that?
- [18:58]
You know, there are times where I, like, sometimes I just try to think of, like, what would my wife think if she was, like, listening to this conversation? Would she just be like, shut up, right? Like, you watch conversations with runners, like, how long it takes until they say how fast they are, right? And it's kind of weird.
- [19:13]
That's why it's good that you live here and not in Boulder.
- [19:18]
And you want to, like, you observe it and you can observe other people. And, like, you don't want to ever be the person who's, like, injecting that into a conversation unnecessarily.
- [19:27]
That, to me, is evidence of how important the identity piece is. Like, this is who I am, and I need you to know that I'm the person who can do this, this, and this. And that's an unhealthy attachment. You've crafted a whole Persona around this that's based upon performances and doesn't really mean anything. And the only people who care are other runners, and they don't even really care. It's really just about you and you, right? And there is something unhealthy about, you know, it's. It evinces a certain insecurity also, like, you know, like, my whole sense of self worth is based upon, you know, these numbers.
- [20:07]
And the funniest thing about it with runners is, like, These ranges where no one cares, right?
- [20:12]
So, like, no one cares. Like, you know, in, like, social media profiles, when people put their PR times and stuff.
- [20:17]
Like, like, so I remember, like, I was so obsessed with breaking 240, right? And to me, like, a 239 was amazing and a 242 was terrible. Right? But to the rest of the world, a, for like, 99% of the world, nobody cares at all.
- [20:31]
Way more than 99%. Yeah.
- [20:33]
But, like, even. Okay, so even for the 10th of a percent that cares at all about running times, either 242 and 239 are exactly the same because they're both fast, or they're exactly the same because they're both slow, right? There's, like, no one, like, people who run between 237 and 245 care about that. But if you're faster than 237, you think it's ridiculously slow. If you're slower than 245, you think it's absurdly fast. And most people don't care at all. At all.
- [20:57]
At all. But there is a difference between 245 and 229.
- [21:03]
Yeah, well, right. I've spent a lot of time trying to, like, figure out that difference.
- [21:06]
Yeah. And you were able to get there. I mean, that's like. That's so fast.
- [21:10]
Yeah, well, so. And that's interesting. Less. Because, I mean, the interesting thing about my improvement. Right. Okay, so I run that 243 in 2007. And then from 2007 until 2018, 11 years, a couple interesting things are happening. A, I never get injured, which is an interesting story about parenthood. Like, I literally don't miss a workout. And then, B, I never get faster. Right. I run, like, almost exactly the same speed. Right. And so, you know, it's like, 2432-432452-42240. Like, it's just ridiculous. Then in 2017, my father dies. And then 2018, I get this email from Nike, and they're like, hey, you know, we're starting a new program where we train, you know, civilians with elite coaches. Would you want to try it? At this point, I'm the editor in chief of Wired. I'd gone from Wired. I'd spent six years at the New Yorker. I'm now back at Wired in the top job. Obviously, it wasn't a random selection, right? Like, Nike wasn't reaching out to the editor of Wired, just like, oh, we, like, pulled the name out of A hat. And it was you, Nick. But any case, I agree to do it. And then they start training me more intently and in really smart ways. And then I start getting much faster.
- [22:18]
Shocking that when you got, you know, good coaching advice that and good coaching, if you followed it, that you would get better.
- [22:25]
And you know, we were talking about like the mental limits and like what happens when you look at your watch. And so one of the things, so I start with these three guys. Brett Kirby, who's the sports scientist, written all these research papers, trains at like Kipchoge. Joe Holder, he's this like great personal trainer and his other clients are like Virgil Abloh and Naomi Campbell while he's like training me. And then Steve, who's the main person I work with, and Finley, he interviews me, calls me up in the summer, early summer of 2018 and he's like, hey, how old are you? I'm 43 years old. Okay, what do you want to run? My God, if I could break 243, that would be awesome. He's like, well, I kind of think you can go faster. And we have this conversation, I interviewed him later and he's like, it was clear that you had the talent to go much faster than 243, but it was also clear that you were a little afraid of those paces, that you were a six minute mile running 240 is like 6:10 per mile and a six minute mile is like a 237. And I was clearly, he said terrified of going faster than six minute miles. And so one of the things he did is he had me start running short intervals like 200 meters and 400 meters at 4:50 pace. And there was something about seeing like 4:50 pace on my watch that he thought would trigger less fear of running a 5:50 for a marathon.
- [23:40]
Your mind and your body are getting used to what it feels like to run at that pace. And it doesn't feel like, you know, scary or like you're in too much in the red.
- [23:48]
Yep. And so he's trying to basically force this like, and he didn't tell me this at the time, he's trying to kind of force this mental transition and so that I can like, as he would say, step into this younger version of myself. And so I start to increase my mileage, I start to do these workouts on the track, I start to do more focused tempo workouts, I start to eat a little bit better. I start listening to your podcast more. Like I do all these things that improve your with physiology Beetroot juice. I drink juice every day. Definitely works weird, but, you know, it definitely works. And so I do all these things, and then I run a 238 in the fall of 18. So I've been training with him for three months. I'm like, oh, my God. And then I run 234 at the next Boston Marathon, and then I run 229 at the next Chicago Marathon, and then I get way faster, and Covid hits. And so that's where it stops.
- [24:37]
Or that's our marathons are canceled. Right, right, right. Again, like, you know, you're get. It's another rug pull for you.
- [24:43]
Who know. I mean. Yes, but, you know, who knows?
- [24:46]
But you end up. You end up doing that. That Prospect park marathon, like, on your own, right?
- [24:50]
Yeah.
- [24:51]
Everyone's doing their backyard whatever.
- [24:52]
I run a backyard marathon by myself. And then I. Then I run a 50k where I set the American record for my age, which was very cool.
- [25:00]
So American record for, like, 45 to 49?
- [25:03]
Yeah.
- [25:04]
In the 50K. And you ran like, what, like 306 or something like that? 4. 304. And does that still stand?
- [25:11]
Yeah.
- [25:12]
That's so fast.
- [25:13]
It's cool, right? It's cool.
- [25:15]
Rich Roll
And you were.
- [25:16]
Nick Thompson
You were 44 when you ran 229? Yeah. Right. There's a lot in there about, you know, age defying athletic feats. I mean, I was 44 when I did EPIC 5. Like, you know, that was probably my, you know, peak physical year. And being older than you, like, the idea that you could excel at all athletically in your 40s was, like, you know, insane. And that narrative has changed so much. And you're obviously an example of that. It's interesting. And part of what you talk about in the book is you're challenging these mindset limiters that we have around what we're capable of. And running is just a vehicle or a metaphor for this in all areas of life. Right. But our bodies are age declining, obviously, but that doesn't mean that we can't have what you call these rolling peaks. So explain that concept.
- [26:07]
Yeah, so the idea is that I used to think it was just a mountain up until you're 28 years old. You get stronger and stronger, you improve linearly, and then you decline from 28 until death. And maybe that's kind of a little bit true. Probably not at 28. But I then started to think, well, wait, you can actually get smarter about it, Right? You can learn a new way to train, or you can learn A new thing to eat, or you can learn something different. And then instead of it being a descent, it's like actually rolling peaks, right? And you go down, and maybe you get a little bit worse, but then you get better. Maybe you get a little worse and get better. And I'm still clearly, like, there's a lot physiologically happening in my body that's slowing me down, but I can do a lot to go the other direction. So I had this conversation, the most interesting version, with my mother, and she's now 77, and she's like, my reflexes are getting worse. Like, just, you know, it's terrible. Like, every day my reflexes get worse. I was like, mom, they don't have to. Like, they could be getting. I mean, they are getting worse, but you can go the other way. And so I, like, got her out on the porch. I was with her for a week this summer. And I would, like, throw tennis balls to her, right? And she'd, like, catch them to the side, and I'd, like, throw them a little further. And you could tell her reflex is getting better. Like, she's getting better at catching the tennis balls by the fourth or fifth day. And the lesson was the same as my running. Like, yes, your reflexes are going to get worse. You are 77 years old. Your reflexes probably start to climb when you're 23 or 24, which is why tennis players peak younger than other athletes. But that said, you can work on it, and you can identify the thing that is pushing you backwards, and you can push against it, Right? You can't solve all of it, but you gain wisdom, you gain physiological. There are physiological benefits that you get, and there are ways you can counter it. And, you know, yes, I'm declining. Yes, there are a lot of things about running. I'm now 50, that are harder than they were when I was 44, but I can still push back against it.
- [27:56]
There's also something about understanding what your strengths are when you age and what the weaknesses are that are gonna kind of decline a little bit more precipitously. Like, Arthur Brooks talks about, like, the brain's ability to kind of synthesize information better as you get, like, static intelligence.
- [28:13]
Fluid intelligence versus fluid and fixed.
- [28:15]
Yeah, exactly.
- [28:16]
Yeah.
- [28:17]
And those who kind of hang on to the fixed intelligence too hard are missing the opportunity to lean into the fluid intelligence piece and also on the self obsession piece, to like, make yourself. Oh, now you're in kind of more of a mentor role, and you have a lot to give other people and you can find meaning in different ways, but in the purely athletic context, as a runner, you can continue to develop your endurance capacity as your ability to, you know, maintain a top speed is going to decline. And so you enter into the ultra world, right? And as this now very fast and very experienced marathoner, you're tackling the 50s and the hundred, you know, like. And this is like a whole different world, but it's just, you know, a blank canvas for you. And what's the difference, like, in those worlds for you?
- [29:06]
So I start, I run my first ultra as a 50k, but 50k is not really an ultra.
- [29:09]
Technically, it's a marathon with a little tag on it.
- [29:12]
Yes.
- [29:12]
You know, basically I was so scared and you were doing it. You were pacing DEZ Lindon, like, just for people that are watching or listening, like, this is the level that you're at. And she, what, like, went 258 or something?
- [29:22]
She said the world record. I signed up for the race to be one of her pacers and then she got too fast and I asked if I could still run it even if I was a few minutes slower, right? So I run that. And then I decide I'm going to do 50 milers and. But I decide I'm going to run 50 milers kind of the way a marathoner runs them. Like, I'm going to run them for pace. I'm going to worry about, like, how long it takes me to pick up the gear.
- [29:41]
You can't do that. Can't really.
- [29:43]
You can't really do that. Like, for someone who was, like, as experienced as me, I went, I ran my first 50 miler at Tunnel Hill when I was, I'd say 47. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to set the American record in the 50 mile, right? And I'm going to, like, wear my super shoes. I have to run 640pace. I'm totally manageable. And I make my plan and I get everything ready. And then I wake up the morning of the race and there's like an inch of snow on the ground. I was like, wait, what now? The obvious. What you should do in the race and snow, Right?
- [30:13]
Yeah.
- [30:13]
So what I should have done is I should have put on a pair of trail shoes, right? Or, like, maybe run in my trainers. I don't even know what I had in my bag. Certainly if I was gonna wear the super shoes, I should just reset the goals a little bit, right? Like, you would think this guy who's been running for a long time but instead, I go out there like a marathoner. And then the worst thing that happens is I hold pace, I run well, but it's totally predictable. I think it's like, mile 31, 32, I'm on track, but I slip in the snow while getting a goo. I fall if something happens. And then by mile 37, everything's falling apart. And then I drop out, right? And I remember, I get into this tent a mile, there's an aid station. And I get in the tent, I put on the, you know, blanket, I start drinking the hot cocoa, and I'm like, you know, what am I doing? Like, I should. I should probably keep going, right? Like, I was weirdly, like, I sit in the tent for like 10 minutes, my Achilles hurts. And I'm like, oh, man, this is terrible. And then, like, part of me has, like, the marathoners mentality. Like, well, you're clearly like, the same thing that made me drop out of that race at mile 23. I'm not going to break three hours. I'm going to drop out. And I was like, you know, I tried to set the American record. I'm not going to get it. Like, I'll. There'll be another chance. Like, let's just get out. And part of me is like, what are you doing, man? Like, you're in third place. Like, you've been sitting here for 15 minutes and no one's gone by, right? Like, you know, there are all these guys you meet at the. And women that you meet the night before, and they're like, they're gonna be out there for 24 hours running 100 mile there. Like, just get out and run with them, right? Like, that's why you're here, right? Like, what's the point of ultras? And I dropped out. And I, like, you know, a friend of mine, like, drove back. I cheered another friend on. It was so late. And then I, like, went back home. And I remember. I remember being at home. I go for a bike ride with my older kids, and I'm like, looking at my watch and I'm like, let me see. I was like, oh, my God. Like, the guy I had dinner with the night before is finishing now, right? And I should have just, you know, the point is you're supposed to keep going. Like, that's why you do these ultras. And I didn't realize that, but I learned that, right? And I learned that in ultras, you go up, you go down, right? You have moments of despair. You have moments where, like, things hurt. Like, yeah, you know, you have moments where you're convinced you're injured. Sometimes you do get injured. And since then, you know, I've had terrible moments in ultras. But I've always. I've always finished.
- [32:26]
But what it symbolizes for me is this journey or this growth arc that you're on of shedding, you know, the competitive aspects of running or the. Just the internal competitive nature of your and realizing that there is this other opportunity for growth within running that you've been missing all along. Totally. And you pepper in the book, like, these stories of these other runners who have had analogous experiences with running and setbacks and ultimately find a way to reframe their relationship with running in a way that makes their lives actually much more meaningful than they were when their relationship with it was about competition and performance.
- [33:09]
Totally. I mean, so what I did the book was it's like a super challenging structural problem, right? And so, like, at some point, I should do, like, a journalism class on it. But I had the notion that I was going to write about my father's life, I had the notion that I was going to write about my life, and I had the notion that I was going to write about other runners, right? And you start the project, you don't know what other runners you're going to write about. You know, you talk to lots of people, and you figure out who's gonna fit in. And then you start to like, oh, this person's story is amazing. This person's story is interesting, right? And then, okay, so now I have all these stories, but, like, you have to make it work chronologically, right? So my first drafts, I had other runners kind of interspersed whenever they came in. And so there would be like a section on runner A here, and then section on runner A later. And then I eventually decided, okay, no, wait, I'm gonna just do full profiles of these runners, and I'm gonna put them in when they entered my life, right? So I have five character sketches, and they're each people who I. Who cross into my life at a certain point. So they all. I tell their stories when that happens in my life. So it allowed me to keep a chronological structure while adding them in. And then with my father, I kind of do this trick where I put his life. You can't have his life chronologically because then it all happens in the first third of the book. And so what I do is I overlay his time at Andover, my time at Andover, his time at Stanford, my time at Stanford, and then I put him in chronologically, both his Life and then my realization about things in his life. So his life then suddenly becomes parallel to mine. And so it was this very complicated puzzle of trying to make it fit narratively. Right. It was definitely the hardest. Constructing a chronological framework for this book was definitely the hardest journalistic project I've ever done. To the runners. You're exactly right. Like, a lot of them have this reframing. The clearest is this guy, Michael Westfall. And so he's this amazing guy, and he beats my dad in the 1982 Northeast Harbor Road Race. And then I meet him. Because in 2021, the Northeast Harbor Road Race is this five mile race in this little town in Maine that I go up to and my son, my son Zachary, who's then 11, is running the race. And I finish and I go back to find Zachary on the course and he's running right in front of this guy who's swaying all over. I was like, what's going on? It's the guy having a stroke. And my training partner up there is this policeman named Judson. Like, Judson, like, he's like, nah, man, that's Michael Westfall. That guy's a legend. I was like, wait, what? And so I go out and visit him. And he lives on this tiny island, Cranberry Island. And it's, you know, take a ferry. It's like 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And it's this tiny island population of like 50 people in the winter. And he tells me the story where he. He'd grown up on the island. He's like, got powdered milk. There's like two kids his age. There's 12 mile road, and he starts running because there's nothing else to do. And it becomes this island where I think six of the 50 residents are sub three hour marathoners. Which is hilarious, right? It's amazing. And they're all like tracking each other by their footprints in the snow and just going back and forth and back and forth. Anyway, so it's partly the story of that and like, you know, creating freedom within restraints. Like, how do you. What's the line from Hamlet where, like, you know, I could live inside a nutshell and be a man of infinite space, right? And it's partly a story about that, but it's partly. It's really a story about what happens next, which is in when he's like 49, his arm starts to shake. And then you realize he has Parkinson's. And so at first that really shuts down his running. Cause he's embarrassed. He's like, A strong carpenter. He's built all the houses on this beautiful island. And then he realizes, wait, no, I should run with it. And so then it's a story of, like, a man dealing with really symptomatic Parkinson's. Like, full on Parkinson's. He ties his arm behind his hip with a string. He's, like, worried about suffocating himself while he puts on a sweatshirt. But he runs, like, I think it's like a 315. He's incredible. Like, he's in the top age group. He's, like, in his 60s, running these killer marathons. Parkinson's. He's a Boston qualifier with full on Parkinson's. And I go in. I go to the island with Ellis, my oldest son, and he greets us at the dock, and then he gets in the car. And I don't want to just show up, but we were terrified because he's shaking all over the place. We're like, how is this guy gonna drive? And he drives us through the island. No problem, of course. And he's just the smartest, most sophisticated guy. But he talks about when he started, all he wanted to do when he was young is beat everybody. Just like, everybody, right? And then when he gets Parkinson's and he starts running, he's like, well, actually, there's, like, real community. And I'm, like, really learning about running as a way to process pain and process aging and process hurt and, like, serve as an inspiration for other people with Parkinson's, he's like. And I developed a much more holistic, broader, emotionally balanced view of running. And, you know, so I go out. I actually went out with him this past summer. So I finished writing the book. Like, maybe the book wraps in May or June, and in August, I go out there with my son James, the little guy. And we actually ran a little bit with him. You know, he asked. He's totally stopped running. He said he totally stopped running. I was like, okay. I was like, james and I are.
- [38:22]
Rich Roll
Going to run on the road.
- [38:23]
Nick Thompson
You know, I want to run this sacred road. And he's like, oh, well, I'll come with you. And so I got to, like, run half a mile with Michael Westfall. He's just. He's such an incredible guy. Such an incredible guy. And he's like, he's still out there. He's still working. He's still running. He's still being healthy. He's still, like, on this tiny island. Leave the island. You know, his wife got sick and has to take her to the hospital, all that. But like he's just built this beautiful world in this tiny little part of the world.
- [38:56]
Rich Roll
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- [40:42]
Nick Thompson
About my friend rj.
- [40:44]
Rich Roll
Now you might know this guy as the founder and CEO of Rivian. He is certainly that, but he's really so much more. He's one of those rare people who.
- [40:52]
Nick Thompson
Actually walks the walk.
- [40:55]
Rich Roll
I've watched him over many years and I know him to be this incredibly deeply committed person, committed to preserving wild spaces while also inspiring people to explore responsibly. And that's basically Rivian in a nutshell. Their mission, keep the world adventurous forever comes from this understanding that adventure and a healthy planet, these are not separate things, they're the same thing. Here's what gets me Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to run farther, to be changed by the journey. But obviously that's only possible if we're not destroying those places in the process of getting there. So yeah, Rivian builds electric vehicles, but really they're building something bigger momentum toward a future where exploration does not come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it. It's like, why create the ultimate adventure vehicle if we're not protecting the adventures themselves? And that's why I'm so proud to align forces in partnership with Rivian. This isn't just about transportation. It's about building a world worth exploring for our kids, for their kids, and for generations to come.
- [42:12]
Nick Thompson
You always seem very even keeled, though. Like I haven't spent that much time with you, but you always, you know, you always pretty relaxed for somebody who's handling a lot of responsibility.
- [42:22]
That is definitely my, Whether it's genetic, whether it's learned, my ability to not get stressed about races, work problems is definitely one of my strengths.
- [42:32]
What is, what is your strategy for that? What, what, what techniques do you deploy for that?
- [42:36]
I, I think it's kind of, I don't know whether it comes from racing or whether it comes from working or whether it comes from parenting, but just the sort of the realization that you do the best you can, right? And then you go on to the next moment and sometimes something goes catastrophically badly, but you can't, you can't control the outcome. You can control what you do. And so I've kind of just inculcated that attitude. And it helps reduce stress because, you know, your kid is sick and you do your best to help your kid get healthy, your kid is struggling, you do your best to help your kid figure that out. Something's gone terribly at work, you do your best to try to counter it, and like, sometimes you can't solve it, but if you try, that's all you can do.
- [43:14]
There's a difference between understanding that intellectually though, and putting it into practice. Like, most of us know, like, there's very little we can control. We can't control these outcomes.
- [43:23]
I mean, the other thing.
- [43:24]
But we allow these things to ramp up our anxiety and our stress.
- [43:27]
My guess is that it has a lot to do with having grown up with my particular father I write about in the book. And if you grow up with a man like that and you grow up with someone who should be a role model, who acts as, like crazily and high strung and spinning all over the place as he is, you can either be like him or try to be the opposite like him. And over time, I've done my best to learn to be the opposite of him.
- [43:49]
This book is really, you know, it's, it's, it's a, you know, fundamentally it's a running memoir, but it's, it's about so much more. I mean, you're, you're essentially on a Spiritual journey. It's a book about fathers and sons, and it's a reconciliation with your past, and it's about intergenerational trauma. And when you have a parent like that, there's a lot of. I mean, your story is very different than mine, but there's a lot of overlapping themes here. So I related to it deeply, and I wasn't expecting it to be a read of such depth. And fundamentally, it's about how you're making peace and. And trying to find a way to love your father unconditionally and not allow his, you know, his. His character flaws limit you or inhibit you, and most importantly, to arrest them so that you're not passing them on to your boys.
- [44:50]
Yeah, that is exactly what it is. That's what the. The goal. It's a book about running, but it's not a book about running. Right. It's a book about complicated things in life, including what we pass our children, what we inherit from our parents.
- [45:01]
I've been thinking a lot about this, and I'm writing a book myself, and some of these themes are coming up. And the more I think about it, you know, when you're a parent like this, this is the job, you know, like, you know, what are you passing on and what are you preventing from passing on? Because we're all a victim of the mindset and patterns and, you know, genetics that we inherit from our parents, for better and for worse. But it's amazing when you kind of get to a certain age and you realize extent to which you've been influenced by things unconsciously that you inherited.
- [45:32]
And then you think about, well, what am I influencing in my children? And it can make your head spin because you don't really know. You don't know what they're getting. One funny but minor detail. I tell a story in the book about running a marathon by myself during COVID and I come back and I lie under the blankets, shivering just uncontrollably. I just look like death. And my older son is there watching. And afterwards he's like, dad, I'm never going to run. And then the next day I'm out in the park and I'm just going for a walk with a friend. It's during COVID It was a board meeting, and I see my little son run by. I'm like, wait, what are you doing? And he's like, I wanted to go run a loop, right? And so it's this amazing situation where the act of running to the point of total exhaustion has had effect on one child and the exact opposite on the other, which is kind of a metaphor for. Sometimes you just don't know what they're going to take or what they're going to bring with them. But that's not a recipe for, like, indifference and saying, oh, well, whatever. Like, you can't control it. You just. It's a reminder that you don't have complete control over it, but you do have some control.
- [46:37]
My sense is that we all parent either we're either, like, if we grew up in a healthy household, we're going to mimic, you know, what we learn and pass it on to our kids. And if we had a. Some level of dysfunction, like, the pendulum swings almost too far in the other direction. Like, I'm going to do all the opposite things to make sure that my kid doesn't have the experience that I did. And there's errors at that end of the spectrum as well.
- [47:04]
I mean, one of the most revealing things for me in the book. So I didn't know a lot about when I started the book project. I did not know a lot about my paternal grandfather. So my father's father. And, you know, the hardest moments for me in my life with my relationship with my father, who by the end of his life is essentially running a brothel in Bali, completely bankrupt. Everything is chaos. And he's drinking way too much. And I'm trying to get him to stop drinking, and then he, like, threatens to kill himself to wrangle money out of me. Right? Hard stuff. I'm going through his diaries and his letters, and I realize the exact thing happened with him and his father where he's trying to get his father to stop drinking. His father's career is on the rails, and his father threatens to kill himself in the middle of this fight. And you're like, wait, dad, having lived through that with your father, why are you doing this to me? Right? As I look at it, you know, seven years after my father passed away, I just was like, oh, my God.
- [47:59]
Cause we're all perpetrating these unconscious patterns, and it takes a lot of, like, work and awareness to even recognize what's happening, let alone, you know, course correct and arrest them. But your dad didn't start out that way. I mean, your dad was kind of a baller early on.
- [48:15]
I mean, and even at the end of his life, still was to some degree. So the synopsis, the quick story of My father grows up in Oklahoma. His father is this, you know, imposing Golden Gloves boxing champion, but, you know.
- [48:29]
And minister. Right, and minister.
- [48:30]
Baptist minister. And they Grew up in Bacon, Oklahoma, where my grandfather had been a missionary and then eventually become. Became president of a Native American university, Bacon University. My dad grows up, he's kind of scared of his dad. Family falls apart, doesn't want to be there. And so he busts away, applies to the school, Phillips Academy, Andover, gets a scholarship, then gets a scholarship to Stanford, then wins a Rhodes Scholarship. Then marries into my. Meanwhile, wins the Rhodes scholarship. The letters from recommendation when he's a student at Stanford are like, this is the best kid we've had since Herbert Hoover. And until rich roll. Like, this is like, it's crazy. Goes to Oxford, comes back, marries into my mother's family. My mother has this prominent D.C. family, extremely successful. So my dad's like on track, right? John F. Kennedy.
- [49:12]
He meets jfk. Yeah, yeah.
- [49:13]
JFK is like, this guy's gonna be president before me. He meets JFK with Judith Exner and John F. Kennedy in a terry cloth robe, right? Like, he picks him up at the hotel while he's like, starting the affair.
- [49:25]
Oh, my God.
- [49:25]
Which is amazing.
- [49:26]
Yeah.
- [49:27]
Drives him to Stanford, where he gets a speech. My dad's just totally killing it. Everyone thinks he's gonna be senator, he's gonna be president, he's gonna be something. And then he comes back, he marries my mother. He means his new father in law is the undersecretary of defense. Right. Like, he's marrying into a great family, and then he can't hold it together. And he starts to drink too much, smoking a lot. And then he has this realization that he's gay. Whether it's a realization or it's a coming to terms, and he really struggles with that. Leaves my mother, comes out of the closet. And then there's lots of good moments and there's lots of good time. And we live together for many years, but then it's this kind of descent over 30 years into mania, which is where he ends up in Bali.
- [50:12]
When you reflect on that, how do you make sense of that fall from grace? I mean, it's such an unlikely ascent, you know, from this small town, you know, under the. Under the hand of a, you know, a kind of, you know, very intimidating father that he had. And somehow he had the wherewithal to, you know, transcend that which makes his, you know, his. His fall, like, even more kind of like calamitous and precipitous. Like, what is it? Repressed sexuality? What do you think? Like, what do you think it was that. That.
- [50:44]
Well, the rise. The rise is easier explained than the fall Right. So the rise is that this is a guy who just had more energy than anybody, right? He and you could even at the very end of his life, everybody believed this. Like, he's just so interesting, right? Like you meet him at a party, you, rich would be like, wow, this dude's incredible, right? You would have like some kind of an interesting conversation. You would sense the like excitement from him, like the life force in him. And that's what, when he had control of it, when he was, you know, 21 years old or 23 years old, it was just this wonderful force field that drew people in. And then the question is why he lost control of it. Whether it was the alcohol, it was a huge part of it, right? If he were to diagnose this, he would have said the alcohol, right? If you read through his diaries, it's all like, I could get this, I could figure it out if I could understand the alcohol. Some of it seems to have been repeating his father's mistakes, like at some unconscious level, like needing to do the things wrong that his father had done. And then there's also like the real chaos comes after he's 50 and this very important thing happens where he has a friend and a contemporary, this guy named Roger Hanson, who also, like my father, was a Rhodes scholar, also like my father, photographed for Life magazine. Also like my father didn't live up to his potential, becomes an academic. Also like my father repressed and gay. And my father and Hansen become friends. But Hansen can't deal with his sexuality body and so he commits suicide in my father's garage. So his life story is this book, Remembering Denny. Probably lots of people have listened to by Calvin Trillin or lots of people have read. And so after, after Hansen dies my father, it really like makes my father afraid, right? It makes my father afraid of his depression. It makes my father afraid of, you know, staying in the shadows. And so the way he deals with it is like he just starts. I mean, he sleeps with a new person every night, right? And he brings them to like every party. Like you would go to a cocktail party in D.C. and dad would have like this 18 year old like people he'd met on the Internet, right? All like of the exact same type. And it just was, it was really bizarre. And he lost total complete self awareness. Had no idea how this was perceived because he thought, well, you know, I'm, I'm no longer being repressed. I'm showing all these people in Washington that I can like, like bring 18 year old male prostitutes to the French Embassy, Right. And, wow, it's not the best thing to do.
- [53:16]
And then he goes professional by, like, going to the Philippines, like, moving.
- [53:19]
Moving to Southeast Asia.
- [53:21]
And how are you processing all of this? I mean, first of all, you're growing up under the shadow of this incredibly accomplished, charismatic man, right? And you're following in his footsteps on some level. You go to Andover, you go to Stan. You're like, you know, you're tracking totally, right? And so you're inheriting that ambition or that, you know, kind of purpose driven, you know, place your stamp on the world kind of energy. But at the same time as this is starting to slide, that must have created a tremendous amount of confusion and fear.
- [53:52]
Totally, totally. I mean, and, like, not only do I go to the same schools, but I. I kind of look like him and kind of, like, remind people of him. I once went. I was with. I was at this restaurant in San Francisco, and I'm with. This is after my father had died, and I'm with one of his best friends from college, and another college classmate walks into the restaurant, someone I've never met. And so my person I'm having lunch with walks up to the classmate and says, hey, see this guy? He's the son of one of your classmates. Who do you think he is? And the guy looks at me and he's like, that's Scotty Thompson's son. And I was like, whoa, right? You know, guy who had not seen my father in, what, 40 years, had never met me, was able to piece it together. So I'm quite similar to him in lots of ways.
- [54:40]
So you have a hyper awareness.
- [54:42]
Hyper awareness and all of these. Like, I didn't just go to Andover and Stanford because, like, they were a great school, like, and he didn't force me to go to them. I just was sort of, like, inevitable, right? Like, he. He sort of laid out this path and the things that I would do and I did them. And so, of course, yeah, I'm terrified my 30s, that I'm gonna be. That I'm gonna kind of lose it, right? And then I'm gonna lose my discipline, and then I'm gonna. I mean, there's still time, Rich, right?
- [55:10]
Yeah, I know. How old was he when it started?
- [55:14]
So he divorced. I mean, he started drinking too much, probably at like 37.
- [55:19]
And then you don't have that issue?
- [55:21]
No, not at all.
- [55:21]
That's not. So you're.
- [55:23]
I'm clear on the alcohol. And then 40 is when he splits from my mom, moves to DC 50 is when it starts really going off the rails. And by the time, well, probably not 60 is when it was complete banana cake. So I still may get there rich.
- [55:39]
You don't have the alcohol and you're. I mean, you know, I don't. I don't know you that well, but you don't strike me as having a depressive streak to you.
- [55:47]
I don't have a depressive street.
- [55:48]
I could be okay, but still, that looms large, right? It looms large.
- [55:52]
I mean, it looms large for my sisters, too. And they. My sister and I were just talking about. We once. We were, like, driving a U haul from his farm in Virginia and, like, in western Pennsylvania, and we had this amazing conversation where we both revealed to each other that our deepest fear was becoming like our father in different ways. But, like, that was the single animating fear of both of our lives.
- [56:14]
Was it also a situation in which you felt like you had to live up to those expectations, like an approval seeking gene in you? Like, here's a guy who's done so much and I'm gonna have to find my way to repeat that as well, completely in order to get his approval.
- [56:34]
And there's this silly detail in the book about his obsession that I too, would win the Rhodes scholarship, which even when I was writing, it was kind of embarrassing to write, right? This seems so frivolous and weird. And then when I didn't win it, like, oh, my God, like, I haven't.
- [56:50]
Like, your father foretold this, right? In the context of you trying to make sense of this and find a way in towards reconciliation, it becomes really all about running. Because on some level, you know, your dad was on his own journey of. Of, you know, trying to find connection and meaning and running. You know, he did it in all kinds of insane ways. But, like, running was a vehicle that seemed to really ground him and help him. And that's really your point of connection.
- [57:25]
That was one of the things that animated the book or led me. The reason I wrote the book, partly because it's a good story. My father's. My father's life is an interesting story. Partly to understand myself and then partly to understand my running life. And it was one of the forces that animated the book was the realization that my running is both a way to connect with him and to avoid being him. And he had taught me to run like we had. He had run. He ran the New York city Marathon in 1982 when we divorced. And when before he had left, he and I would run a little bit in Brookline Massachusetts. And that was my introduction to the sport. And then I had watched him run the marathon, which was this incredibly important moment when I was seven years old. And then it was just part of the way we connected. And we would run together and head out whenever we were. And he went.
- [58:11]
He ran like 301, right?
- [58:12]
Yeah. 3 hours, 51 seconds. He was fast.
- [58:15]
And then you write this poem, right, that you discover later, like, he had kept, like, when you kind of find him later in life. And that seems like this way that you're gonna be able to make peace with this guy and be able to love him and forgive him and kind of transcend all of the. The negative emotions that you're, you know.
- [58:35]
Well, part. I mean, part of the way I was able to transcend the negative emotions is that he was completely devoted to me. Right. And when you talk about, like, what you can do for your parents. Wait, sorry. What you can do for your children, like, he, like, was always trying to, like, get extra hundred bucks out of me and, like, super offensive all the time, but, like, clearly loved me deeply and, like, wanted nothing but success for me.
- [58:59]
And.
- [58:59]
And we email basically every single day about something, even when he's living in Asia, living this manic life with his semi brothel. So he loved me deeply. And so that's part of what I think with my children is baseline. The thing that you always have, always, is they should know that you are completely committed to them and that you love them. Absolutely. And you may make mistakes and you may push them the wrong way or not push them in a certain way that they wish you had pushed them. Right. Who knows? Right. You can make all kinds of errors of omission and commission, but as long as they absolutely know with total certainty that you love them at all moments, that's where you start. Yeah.
- [59:38]
What is your first introduction to running yourself? None.
- [59:41]
So it's really. I mean, it's. I think it's my dad just saying, hey, come run around the block, right? And it's like three times around the block was a mile where I lived, and I think I probably ran it once and then twice and then three times. I don't remember the first time I ran, but I remember when I first ran a mile, which was like, whoa, a mile. And then I must have run. I have a visual memory of running around Pine Manor College, which would have been like a three mile run from where I lived, but he left when I was six. And a three mile run when you're five is pretty ambitious. I can't quite square those things. Any case, he moves away. And then I remember watching the 82 Boston Marathon, which is the Alberto Salazar versus Dick Beardsley amazing Race. And then that would have been April of 82. And then I came and watched him in the New York Marathon in October or November of 82, right?
- [60:30]
Like, so remind me, like, Beardsley was. There was some injustice there, right?
- [60:35]
Oh, my God. The reason. It's incredible, right? And so they both. I think they run the two fastest times that Americans have ever run. They're side by side from the time they start going to heartbreak, right? They, like, are tracing each other by, like, looking at the shadows, you know, Alberto, like, doesn't stop for water. And then Beardsley, like, gets cut off by a horse, and so he, like, has to, like, veer around, like, cop.
- [60:58]
On a horse kind of thing.
- [60:59]
Yeah, cop on a horse. And so he's like, Salazar is pulling away. Beardsley, like, gets knocked behind, and you're like, oh, man. Like, totally unfair. And then Beardsley comes up and, like, catches him right in the last half a mile. And I remember talking to Beardsley about it, and he told me the most amazing thing, which is he had a charley horse in his leg. This is. This is great running physiology. And then he steps in a pothole. But somehow stepping in the pothole fixes the Charlie horse, right? Like, you know how, like, a TV can be on the fridge and you'd.
- [61:29]
Be like, bang it.
- [61:30]
And it, like, so that happens. It catches Salazar, and you watch the broadcast again. And it's incredible because it's like, Salazar's got. He's coming. He's coming. Beardsley's coming. And you hear, like, someone yelling, go, Dicky, go. And then Salazar wins. And there are all kinds of things I like about the race, one of which is that Beardsley was estranged from his father, and his father watches the race, and after the race, his father never drinks again. Whoa. Yeah.
- [62:00]
I didn't know that.
- [62:01]
Yeah, that's a great detail. I mean, Beardsley's life after the race, you know, is pure. Pure pain. Like, he.
- [62:09]
So for you, then, is this in the back of your mind, like, if I just run fast enough, my dad will stop drinking?
- [62:15]
Yeah, I didn't know that fact about the appearance until well after my father had passed away. But if you had told me that if I ran, like, sub 220 in my 20s, my father would stop drinking, like, I would have gone for it. I would have gone for it.
- [62:29]
But it's not as if running took hold immediately. I Mean, you kind of get into it because you're not excelling in basketball.
- [62:36]
Yeah, right. Not excelling is very generous way of putting. I mean, like, I think I'm going to make the varsity basketball at the high school. And I get cut from the varsity. Okay. Then I get cut from the junior varsity. Embarrassing. Then I get cut from the second junior varsity.
- [62:48]
Persistence, though. It's like you're not getting the memo.
- [62:52]
It's pretty. Like you have to be pretty bad at basketball to not make the sophomore team as a sophomore. And so that's when I start running track. And so that's the only sport I can do. So I run with my dad until I'm six. I kind of stop until I'm 15. I show up as a. I started at Andover as a sophomore and I. Then I'm on the winter. Winter on track team.
- [63:10]
And you have, like, some pretty quick success there.
- [63:13]
Pretty quick, but not immediate. Right. Like the first six or seven races I run 11:40, 11:35 or something, which is not that fast. Right. Like, you know, everybody runs that when you're on the high school track, kid. It's when I. For some reason, my coach enters me in the New England Championships. You're allowed to enter two runners. And I'm entered. I don't know the distance of the track. It's like the story Alex Hutchinson tells in Endure, where I'm on the track and I don't know how fast I'm going, right? And this is why it's such an interesting metaphor. So I go and I expect to run 11:30. That's five minutes, 45 seconds per mile. I expect to come in, like, 10th place. And I go out and they're calling out the splits, but I don't understand the splits. Cause it's a new track, and I'm kind of new to the sport. And then I go through the mile, and they're like, 5:25. I'm like, wait, what? Well, something's wrong, whatever. And I'm in, like, third place, you know, fourth place. And then I finish in 1048, which is actually. That's a good time. Right. Like, that's the sophomore record for that track. And so suddenly I realized, whoa, hey, I am good. But what's so interesting about that experience is that I never could have run that fast had I known how fast I was going.
- [64:24]
It's almost exactly the same story that Alex tells. Yeah. And it speaks to the power of the mind and the superpower of naivete, you know, like inverting your Expectations because had it been properly calibrated, you would have adjusted your pace based upon what the clock was saying, thinking like, well, this is outside of my ability or I need to reel it back, or.
- [64:47]
Even weirder, like, you know, it wouldn't have even been a conscious decision. My brain would have like made my legs hurt. Right. Like, you know, that weird balance between to what degree pain is an actual physiological, physiological neurological fact and to what degree it's just your brain messing with you and there's no way I would have been able to go that fast.
- [65:07]
I just read Sanjay Gupta's new book about pain called it doesn't have to Hurt. And we did a thing the other night at the 92nd Street Y. And what's interesting about his book and some of the kind of investigative journalism he's been doing on pain, you know, is, you know, this notion, a pain is generated entirely in the brain. We know this, it's also an entirely subjective experience and we forget that, like we think that the pain is, you know, located in the locus of the injury or whatever. And in the context of athletics, like how we, you know, calibrate that and what, how that gets translated into like what we're feeling in our body and our own sense of capabilities is like this mysterious thing that if you can master, you can have these breakthrough performances or you can shatter your limitations. And sometimes it happens accidentally.
- [66:04]
Like in that case, I sometimes wonder with my kids if I should not tell them how fast they're going or have them run on different sized tracks. Do you want to run faster? If I was, I kind of coach the running on my 11 year old son's soccer team. And I'm often thinking like, oh, maybe there are ways you can to trick him to trigger this. But it's unquestionably the craziest thing about running and something I had to be running 30 years before I fully realized this, that when you run, the thing that proved it to me, the evidence I remember running a race, it was actually the race where I ended up under the blanket, shivering. Where I really realized it is I was running and I got all these pains. Like my shoulder hurt. Why the hell would your shoulder hurt? And I'm like, then my left knee, then my right knee, then my ankle, my stomach, my head. And then at some point, probably at like mile 24, everything hurts. And then I get to the last hill before the end and nothing hurts. Right. Well, how is that possible? Right?
- [67:06]
Because you have a mental concept of the finish line, right? Yeah.
- [67:09]
And so then your Brain's like, oh.
- [67:11]
So it's basically, you're not going to die.
- [67:13]
Once your brain realizes you're not going to die, it's like, okay, so I guess I don't need to like, mess with you. It's this and, okay, so fine, but like, where does the line between the brain and the body exist? Where's that line drawn? And trying to figure that out and trying to understand it. Because you do hurt for real reasons. Like, your brain is slowing you down because it's worried about homeostasis or injury or things that are real and you can't ignore it completely. Like if you turn off all your pain receptors. You've seen these studies, right? You inject people with fentanyl, right? And like, they do terribly. So you have to have control of it and you have to try to master it. But it is such a strange phenomenon.
- [67:49]
This is the tension between being data driven and being kind of fully mind body integrated, right? Like, you need the data, you want the data. This is how you calibrate your progression and all these things. But you can easily become a prisoner of the data. And when your watch is telling you your heart rate's too hot, you're in a race and your heart rate's like, oh, no, I gotta. Like, you're making decisions based upon that that are kind of detached from really feeling yourself and understanding that you have the ability to transcend these lim. And that's why, you know, a lot of elite athletes, endurance athletes, like, don't. They either don't wear a watch or they're not. Like in the Tour de France, they'll tape over their power meters. And they don't want to be, you know, they want to just be able to race.
- [68:34]
Except it can also work the other way, right? Which is what's so hard, right? Like you can look at your power meter and see that it's low and you can do it. And then maybe your body stops hurting so much, right?
- [68:43]
But you're rolling the dice a little bit too. You know, I think it's all. It's just about like how, how attached you are, how, like, you know, how firm your grip is on, on the numbers.
- [68:52]
I was running a race two or three weeks ago and I remember the sensation. It was kind of. It was 100k and I was off in the mountains and I remember there was like five miles to go and I was like, I hadn't looked at my heart rate monitor in like hours. I was like, should I look at it?
- [69:05]
You know what? You could, you could you could probably say my heart rate's this right now. And you would be within one or two beats of it right at that.
- [69:10]
Point at the race I was like okay, wait, if I look at it. And I was like, I had this debate in my head. If I was like if I look at it it and it's like over 130 I'm going to be like scared. But if it's below 110 I can gun it.
- [69:21]
And so yeah, it's roulette.
- [69:25]
Yeah. So I like. And then I finally decided to look at and it was like lower than I thought it would be. Just a couple beats per minute. I was like, okay, I have a little extra left. And then it kind of actually reduces the pain. Right. Because your body now has some more object. Your mind has some objective information about your body. But it is this crazy game. You're right. Between sort of association dissociation with your data.
- [69:49]
Rich Roll
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- [74:43]
Nick Thompson
So you're basically like a high school standout. You're fast enough to get recruited to a bunch of places but like me, you end up as a walk on at Stanford. Like we share that in common, you know. And you kind of pulled the ripcord sooner than I. I mean I quit for, you know, I didn't swim my senior year but we were both, you know, kind of trying to hang on to something. Ripcord kind of maybe got pulled. You had a like a whole series of calamities right out of the gate you showed up there.
- [75:12]
But all, well not all, but mostly self inflicted. Right. So I show up and you know my recruiting class has like, I don't know, three of the top seven kids.
- [75:21]
So you were, we talked about this, I can't remember but like, like Ryan Hall, Sarah Hall, Jesse Thomas, they were older, were they younger than you?
- [75:28]
So they came a little bit after me. So I'm in Vinlanda's first recruiting class. So he's at Dartmouth, he comes to Stanford. He says this amazing thing when I interview him. By the way I interviewed him many years later when I was writing the book and he's like, oh, you know, every time you go to a new school you learn something about the old school. When I went to Stanford I realized how hard it had been to have everybody trained in the snow at Dartmouth. And when I went to Oregon I realized how hard it had been that some of the kids at Stanford still wanted to get a days. The amazing thing that the coaches aren't supposed to say there but he's a genius. So he gets this incredible recruiting class which includes three of the top seven kids in the country, six other kids who are like 9, 10, 9 flat, 2 milers which was fast back then and me and so I'm like the 10th best kid in the recruiting class. And so of course what do you do when you're the 10th best kid in the recruiting class? You drive yourself into complete oblivion the summer before freshman year. And so I ma, I double the mileage that I'm running. I'M like, running these races. I'm running like crazy. I get very fast. But of course, I get stress fractures right before I show up. So then I have stress fractures, and then I finally heal, and then I get mono from all the other things that you do when you're, you know, freshman at a new college. And, like, suddenly, you know, just months go by before I can train. By the time I come back to the team, I'm sort of hopelessly behind. And then I stopped at the end of freshman year.
- [76:50]
Yeah, well, actually, that's not quite true.
- [76:54]
The calamity that is, I guess, funniest in retrospect. So I have this moment before sophomore year. I'm like, you know what? I can get back at it. I can do it. I've made this commitment to quit. But you know what? Why should I? So I start training like a maniac again. I think I may have run 30 miles in one day, but I also. I have this job in Acadia national park, and it's like 10 or 15 miles from my house there. I'll run there, bike back one or the other, and then I'll swim in the harbor. But you know what they do in the harbor is they dump the sewage. So I get hepatitis A from the sewage. And so right before school starts, I've got hepatitis. I lose, like, 30 pounds and I'm peeing black. And so that was definitely the end of that.
- [77:34]
Yeah. The universe is saying, like, you're not meant for college athletics. We need you to focus on your academics because we've got a whole idea about where you're headed. You can revisit the running later.
- [77:45]
So that was the end.
- [77:46]
You see that clearly now. But at the time, I'm sure that was very difficult.
- [77:50]
The difficult moment was probably the spring of my freshman year or the winter of my freshman year, where you show up at campus and you need an identity, and there are all these smart kids, and you need. It's very helpful to be good at something. And you show up as a runner, and you have the identity as a runner, but you're a terrible runner. Everybody knows you're the worst runner. You're not just, like, kind of a backpack, like I was unquestionably.
- [78:13]
And every one of these kids, like, in your dorm is, like. Is, like the best in the world at something. It's crazy.
- [78:19]
It's nuts. Right? Like, Tiger woods is there. Right. I guess Tiger woods came the next year. Right. In fact, the woman who's three doors down from me had won high school cross country nationals twice in a row and she was on the swim team, so.
- [78:31]
Oh, I already know that.
- [78:32]
Right. So she's like training. She's like, she gets up at like five trains until nine or whatever you loony swimmers do, right? Because you don't have the same wear and tear as us runners. Shane goes and lifts weights with the cross country team, then does her cross country workout in the afternoon. Like right.
- [78:46]
And it's probably getting A's, who knows?
- [78:49]
But like, wow, people are incredible. Anyway, so that was hard, like realizing this thing. I come in with my identity, but it doesn't take long to get a new identity and everything's great.
- [78:57]
And so how long does it take before you resurface your relationship with running? You have to change your relationship with it totally.
- [79:06]
So my next three years in college, I do this thing called the Stanford Mountain running team game where it's much more sort of kamikaze and fun, but also it's awesome. We get up at 5 in the morning on Mondays, we bike out to Windy Hill, we run up Windy Hill. It's like the thing you should do when you're 19 years old. So then I'm getting the experience of running in the mountains and the kind of the spiritual, mystical sense of running. Then it's in my early 20s where I start marathoning again. And I try to get my dad's goal of running a three hour marathon and I can't for a decade. I can't run a three hour marathon.
- [79:37]
So what's going on with you, like mentally and emotionally around a, like that decision? Like this is what I'm gonna do and why it's so important to you that you're gonna run faster than your dad. It's funny, this is like, you know, it's fathers and sons, like what am I gonna do to like, you know, be better than my dad?
- [79:56]
I never actually thought of it as beating him. It just was like that was what you should do. Like you should run a three hour marathon. That's what he had wanted to do and couldn't do. And like that's what I should do. It just seemed like, like that was the demarcation line. If you run faster than three hours, that's good. And slower than three hours, that's bad, right? That was just like, it was, I didn't have like a vision of beating my dad. If I had run three, I, I think, let's say he ran 3 hours and 50 seconds. I didn't care at all about running 3 hours 49 seconds. I only cared about running 259, and he wanted me to run that too. So, you know, one of his virtues. He was never competitive with me anyway. So I start trying to run in my 20s, and there's this weird symmetry between my professional career and my running career where they're both terrible at the same time and then they're both really good at the same time.
- [80:40]
You got fired from CBS in less than an hour.
- [80:43]
It's pretty impressive from 60 minutes in less than 60 minutes.
- [80:46]
What happened in less than C? Get fired from 60 minutes in less than 60 minutes.
- [80:51]
It's so embarrassing and so weird. I get hired, right? So it's the fall after my graduation. I've written a bunch of op eds, but I haven't been a journalist. I haven't gone and reported. But I go to CBS and I interview for this job opening as an associate producer, which I accept. I was unqualified. Like, there's that fact set against me on the other side. They offered me the damn job, right? Like, whatever. I was charming enough in the interviews. They give me a job. So I go down to start. I move to New York. I get on these nice clothes and I show up at the office and they're like, okay, welcome. You're the new associate producer. You're working for Steve Kroft. And I go in and I remember I watched some film, Mel Elfin, the famous guy, was there, and he, like, asks me whether I'm a right wing gun nut, just as a joke. And then at some point, after I watch this little screening and, like, get oriented. I'm brought into this guy Phil Scheffler's office, and he's the head of it. He's like, who are you? I'm like, I'm a new associate producer. He's like, what have you done in television journalism? I was like, nothing. Well, what have you done in, you know, in media? I said, well, I wrote an op ed about, like, student activism in the LA Times. Like, here's that. And he's like, what the hell are we doing? I was like, I don't know, but you hired me. And he fired me, like, right then and there. And then the only redemptive part of the story I, like, left. I was so embarrassed. And then, probably 20 years later, I'm in. I'm at an awards ceremony, and I've edited a story at the New Yorker.
- [82:17]
That'S won a big awards.
- [82:18]
And Steve Croft runs the thing. And the guy who wins the award is like. And I'd like to thank my editor, Nick Thompson, who did all this blah, blah, blah. And then I'm in the elevator after the event and Steve Croft gets in. He's like, oh, you're the guy who. That guy was crazy. That's amazing. I was like, yeah, well, you know, Steve, here's this funny detail. You know, I worked for you for less than an hour back in 1997. And he's like, no way. You're the kid they kicked out. Like that. He's like, that fucker. I couldn't believe they did it to you.
- [82:48]
Wow.
- [82:49]
And I was like, wow. And actually that made me feel good.
- [82:51]
Yeah, you got your. Yeah.
- [82:53]
And like, Steve, like remembered and like he couldn't do anything. Like, he's the on air talent. Scheffler's the guy who runs the show, you know, And I would go on and I'd work with 60 Minutes. I mean, work with CBS later on in my life. I didn't hold it against him, but it was a. It was not a great moment for Nick. So then, so then it gets even better. I get. I'm fired from 60 Minutes. I'm like, well, what the hell am I gonna do? One of my best friends is going to Africa. So I'm like, I'm coming with you, right? I get a bunch of inoculations and I fly to Morocco where I immediately get kidnapped. So this is like not the best.
- [83:26]
Start to my career. Yeah. All this promise, Nick, it's getting squandered. You're getting all kinds of diseases when you're trying to run. And then, you know, you just can't catch a break in your career.
- [83:39]
It was really not.
- [83:40]
And then this return to running isn't exactly going swimmingly.
- [83:44]
Return to running doesn't go well either. And so I, you know, eventually the kidnappers let me go after 24 hours. It's a pretty, pretty second rate kidnapping. I spent a couple months in Africa and then I come back and I do try to run through my 20s, but I never. My first marathon, I run like I run three hour pace for 20 miles and then I just get sick and finish in 3, 18. Then I go, and I'm gonna go run, you know, go run three hours. My dad is gonna come watch. We get a flat tire. So I don't get to the start then. God, then I don't. Like, I run like, I can't remember exactly, but there's basically, there's five or six marathons and they all end just in misery. I run 306 in one of them. But the rest, I'm like walking or DNF. The worst is the New York City Marathon in 2003, where my dad comes to watch. It's the only time my entire life where he would come and watch a marathon. I don't, of course, don't know that at the time. And my knee starts to hurt and I'm like a little off three hour pace and I stop at mile 23. Like I just walk off the course and go home. And he's like there at the finish line with my wife. I just like, when I go back, I just like, I can't believe I stopped. I would, I would run like 305, 310, like, who cares, right? Like finish the damn race, kid. You know? Anyway, I walked off the course, went home. I was just sort of ashamed at having not.
- [85:03]
You just, you just refuse to quit though. Like, you keep. You stay in this. Like you're very determined to have the, these breakthroughs. I mean, it's not until you're like 29 though, that, that you're. That you're shifting your approach.
- [85:15]
Yeah. The one time where I have the. Okay. I look back at all that running and I'm not actually proud of how I trained. I don't think of myself as committed. I don't think of any. My career wasn't going very well either. It was all a mess. I couldn't get hired anywhere. I was mostly making money on the subways here playing guitar. Right. It's how I'm like. I was like very good.
- [85:32]
I'm very good side thing with music.
- [85:34]
Yes. I'm very good studios.
- [85:36]
If you had had a big, big track career at Stanford, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have developed your musical ability.
- [85:41]
Right. And I wouldn't have been able to play on the L train.
- [85:43]
But it's just, it's, it's like. So you're like busking on the subway.
- [85:46]
I'm busking.
- [85:47]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [85:47]
Nick Thompson
That's crazy.
- [85:49]
Yeah, it was. And it was, you know, we're not, we're not on the L train line here, but we're in our studio in Dumbo on the F train, where I didn't really play that much, but I would. The best demographics were the sort of the Manhattan to Brooklyn because it's like the hipsters going to Brooklyn, professionals coming to Manhattan, gay people going to Chelsea. Like all the demographics that like the music I'm playing.
- [86:08]
How much money were you making doing that?
- [86:09]
Oh, I would make hundreds of dollars in an afternoon.
- [86:12]
Wow.
- [86:12]
Yeah. You make tons of money. It's you. It's hard to get the right spot, right? It's a. Basically, the rule is if you're there, you stay until you leave, right? So you have to, like, dehydrate yourself so you don't have to go to the bathroom, right? And then you get your spot at, like the uneconomical hours, right? You show up at like 11am and 11am to 2 is. Okay. 2 to 4 is terrible because it's all kids and it's like chaos and they're all going to and from school and so nobody's paying anything. And then 4 to 9 is where you're making your money because it's like rush hour, people going out to dinner maybe until 10 at night. So you're there for a long time, right? And you're getting really good practice in. But you have to suffer through some hours in order to get the best hours. And then there are different. You want to be on a train. You want to be on a platform where the trains are going in both directions, right? So you get customers going both ways, right? You want to be on a platform where the trains come in frequently, right? Like the 2, 3. The 1923 station. No. Good. Because it's two platforms and the trains come all the time, right. L train. Great. Right. Because the trains never come or they're like seven minutes apart. Right.
- [87:18]
I had no idea there was so much strategy.
- [87:20]
There's so much that goes into it.
- [87:21]
And I would imagine all kinds of unwritten rules and etiquette. Like, whose spot who? You know, like with the other musicians and stuff.
- [87:27]
Oh, my God. And they're like cartels. Hells, like the single strailing instruments. Like, they would, like, hand it off to each other, which would piss you off, right? Because, like, they're working together to get the spots and then sharing the money. It's like getting people paying people to stand in line for it. Right? Anyway, so that's like where Nick, this, like, promising, you know, Stanford student, is now, like, busking, right? Which, like, neither mom nor dad thought was the right thing for me to be doing.
- [87:48]
How did you get over the hump and get your foothold in journalism then?
- [87:52]
I. I got. I got. I mean, I kept at it. Like, I loved being a journalist. I loved writing. I did get a great job when I was 24.
- [87:59]
So from when I was 24 and.
- [88:00]
25, I worked at this place, the Washington Monthly, which was awesome. And then it was really kind of before that, and then for a few years after that, I just, I stuck at it. And then I got hired at this cool magazine called Legal affairs out in New Haven, which was being run by this guy Link Kaplan, who's wonderful. But it wasn't where I wanted to live. And so I had given up. I was going to give up. I had applied to law school, right. Like, the thing to do to get out of journalism back then is go to law school. Right. And so I had taken the LSAT and I had agreed to go to NYU Law School, like move back to New York. And then that summer, I got an email from an editor at Wired saying, do you want to apply to be an editor here? And I said, I'd like to apply. And then I had this crazy game theory where the summer of 2005, so I'm 29, turning 30, and law school starts mid August. The email comes in July. I interview and I don't have the job when law school is going to start. And so it's literally the day before law school starts and I have to decide, do I defer and try to get this wire job or do I go and. Right. Had I gone to law school, life is completely different. Who knows what happens? But then I made the decision to bet on myself off and I deferred law school and I got the wire job and things.
- [89:22]
And that was 2005.
- [89:24]
Yeah.
- [89:24]
So that's a big year.
- [89:26]
Yeah.
- [89:27]
So you get, you get this job. I'm not you. You became the editor at Wired 2017. Right. You start as an editor.
- [89:35]
Yeah.
- [89:36]
But 2005 is the year that you get the cancer diagnosis.
- [89:40]
Well, everything happens in like 2004, 2005. So I get married in 2004, 2005, in the spring, I finally break a three hour marathon, which is great. And then I move to New York, take the wire job, start training hard, run a 2:43. Like, what? Right. Like that's a big jump from like, can't break three hours to just barely broke three hours to run a 2:43. And then right after the 2:43, I get a diagnosis of thyroid cancer.
- [90:06]
Everything is finally coming together, like into focus, right? You have the breakthrough in the career and in the running and like marriage.
- [90:13]
Like, I'm happily married, right. We're gonna have kids. It's awesome. Like, I've moved to New York. I' got this great job. Like, everything's going well. I mean, like I said every, like in life, for whatever reason, like professional success and running success, you'd think they might be perpendicular, but they're Totally parallel.
- [90:28]
That's another interesting thing about elite athletics. That idea that if you could just go live in the woods and all you have to do is train, this is the path to ultimate optimal performance. But every great performer, at least ones with longevity, will tell you that that is not the case. It's when you have, not necessarily the most complicated in life, in the world, but when you have other things in your life that have value, that you're nourishing at the same time, you would think that those are distractions, but those ultimately are kind of a lever for continual improvement.
- [91:07]
Certainly the case for me. I mean, there may be people, people who need to woodshed and focus. Like, maybe you need to be like a guy and wants a runner. But actually, I don't think so. I think it's really helpful to have these other things in life, and particularly in running, right, where you don't train that much. Even the best runners run 100 miles a week. They're running six minute miles, so that's 600 minutes. That's 10 hours. They're 168 hours in a week. You need stuff to do. Yeah. And for me, it was always. Things were synced up and things worked really well. Things were imbalanced. That was when stuff worked.
- [91:41]
So thyroid cancer.
- [91:43]
Yeah. I mean, it's so linked to my marathoning. I have a schedule to see my gp like two weeks before the marathon. And I'm like, I'm not gonna go to this. Cause he's gonna see me and he's gonna tell me not to run. Cause my knee was hurting, right? And so I did the thing you're supposed to do, of course, which is to move the meeting. Right.
- [92:02]
Like, you can't be told by the.
- [92:04]
Doctor not to run. I run the marathon.
- [92:06]
Classic runner move, total.
- [92:09]
And so I run the 243. And then I go and see him the next week and then he like puts his hand on my neck and he finds a lump, right? And then, you know, I'm 30 years old, right? Like, I've had some professional ups and downs, but, like, I don't have cancer. What are you talking about?
- [92:22]
Right?
- [92:23]
Like, and he's like, oh, there's something there. And then, you know, as it would be familiar to, you know, many people who listen, like, you just go down this process where it's like, you're like, okay, there's like a 1% chance, okay, now it's a 10% chance. Now it's a 25%. Now it's 50 now. Okay, shit. Now it's there. And then eventually they're like, okay, so we have to do surgery. This is probably Marathon's in November. It's by the end of December, and they have to do surgery to figure out whether it's really cancer.
- [92:51]
You can see it right there.
- [92:53]
Yeah, yeah. Even 20 years later. And so they do the surgery and they examine it, and then a couple days later they tell me, you don't have cancer. Cancer. And I'm like, incredible, right? And it's like the world has been lifted. And I still have this memory where I was with Danielle and I was with a bunch of my friends, and I get a phone call and they're like, you don't have cancer. And like, to see people's reactions, like, you can tell that someone, like, really loves you. When they don't have time to prepare for the news. It's just like, you just got the phone call. You just told them you can see their eyes. Right, Right. And so Danielle was through the moon. Then two weeks later, I get another call, and the doctor's like, I'm sorry, Nick, we misread the slides. Right. You actually do have cancer, and we have to do surgery again. Right. So if you look very carefully, you can see there's two lines. Right? And so they go back in, and then they have to take the whole thing out. And then it's like radiation therapy. And then you have to get, you know, you get on your Synthroid, your Levothyroxine. And it's not like for cancers, like, this is the cancer to get. Right. It's not. Yeah, you're not. It's not pancreatic cancer. Right. And you, you know, people survive this, particularly, like healthy 30 year olds. But it was just a total different. It's like just a shock to my brain and to, like, actually have to think about the fact that I might die and that I might not be here and, like, Danielle and I might not have kids, and this might be it. And my mom might have to, like, bury me. Right. And my dad. Dad. And so going through that mental process is just completely different for someone who grows up in a comfortable home, goes to schools, has a crazy dad, but nothing like this. And so I go through radiation. It completely wipes me out. I can't walk around the block. I certainly can't run. And then it's this very gradual, slow process of coming back. And. And because the diagnosis was so tied up with my running, like, the healing process had to be tied up with my running. And a lot of I remember like the most vi. One of the most vivid runs in my life is it was, I think would have been August. So it would have been like five or six months after the surgery. As I remember, it was at my cousin's wedding. And I run up this route called like Warren Lakes in Aspen, Colorado. And you go up Smuggler Mountain and you go up this incredible road and it's like, it's an 18 mile run in the mountains. And I remember when I was coming down and I had made it all the way to the top and I was coming down, I was like, I cannot believe I can still do this right. And like that this is happening again. And it just was like the most joyful moment. And then 20 years later I went back and I ran the same route by accident. Like I was running a marathon out in Aspen and I went down, I was like, oh my. And I have like the same incredible like just the feeling of being, of being alive right after what I'd gone through. And the way it was tied in with running was one of the greatest failings of my life. And so I came back and like started running again, started running hard again. And then eventually, you know, two years later ran the New York Marathon again.
- [96:02]
13 seconds faster than your previous pre.
- [96:04]
Cancer best I know, which was incredible.
- [96:07]
Best case scenario for cancer, but still cancer. Two operations, radiation. I can't. You couldn't even walk around the block. Like, like, you know, you're young, you're vital. You know, that's a challenge for anyone obviously.
- [96:21]
Yeah.
- [96:22]
But you talk about, you know, that confrontation with mortality, like giving you a certain clarity. That's kind of a gift.
- [96:32]
You know, I look back and if I look back at my life, I feel like there's any of the positive psychological traits I have now or time management traits or views towards life are developed in those years right afterwards. And it's partly getting through the cancer. Right. And you have post traumatic growth, you get on the other side, you recognize you have limited time, you recognize you stand on the edge of death. And when you get to the other side, you behave differently. This is a well known psychological effect. And then I have kids too. And so kind of the same thing happens. You just sort of care more about life and you're much more focused person and you cut out trivia. Like you concentrate on things that matter. I in fact came a little more, a little more stoic, like a little more, you know, not as focused on setting gigantic goals and more focused on doing the best I can in the moment. Not that I don't set goals. And all of that happens in this period between age 30 and 35 when my kids arrive. I've overcome my cancer, and that's when my career, I start to do good work and I start to figure out what my place is in the world. What am I actually good at, what am I not good at? I won't do that. Well, what am I good at? And I'll do that. And these are. In retrospect, I don't know how much of it is the post traumatic growth. I don't know how much of it is being a father. I don't know how much of it is just being in my 30s. I don't know how much of it is tied to like, consistent running. But it all kind of comes together in those years.
- [98:06]
I mean, what I see is somebody who faced a bunch of obstacles and used them as opportunities for growth and evolution. Like, you moved towards them, you learned from them. You extracted lessons and principles that you then informed into your life that made your life better than it perhaps would have been without them. Right. Like, you know, these things happen. We don't have control over them. We can, you know, craft a victim narrative around them or allow ourselves to be imprisoned or handicapped by them, or they be, can. They can be these levers for growth, you know, and it's, it's just interesting because your, your career is so, you know, like you've, you've created this unbelievable career out of all of these things and you seem like a great dad and you're able to perform at such a high athletic level, like your, your, your life is like humming at a very high frequency. And, and it seems to me that these experiences were formative in kind of helping you level up to become the man that you are today.
- [99:09]
Well, I mean, things are coming reasonably well. They also part of the recognition that you can get knocked off balance. That was also really helpful. Right. Like I live in, you know, constantly aware that things can go very wrong, both from having observed my father, both from like all the ups and downs professionally. I think that, that, I do think it's also helpful. You need to have professional downs in order to have steady ups. And the other formative thing that happens is I write a book at this time in my early years at Wired about my maternal grandfather Paul Nitze and George Kennan. And one of the interesting things about writing this book, so the book is, it's the story of America through the Cold War as told through the rivalry of Kennan and Nitzen. And they're the two men who. Only two men who are active in American foreign policy between 1945 and 1990. And Kennan writes the Long Telegram and Mr. X article. My grandfather writes NSC 68. My grandfather is the key hawk from the Truman administration to the Reagan administration. Kennan is a dove. And what's amazing about the story is that they're both involved in everything. You can tell the story of the Vietnam War through the rivalry of Nitzen Kennan slightly, but they're friends the whole time. And so I write this book about their friendship, their rivalry. It's called the Hawk and the Duck. But what it does a. It's fun, it's interesting. It gets extremely well reviewed. It's great for me professionally. But I get to spend all this time studying the lives of these two guys, right? Two guys who performed incredibly well at incredibly high levels for many years. And I'm reading their diaries, I'm learning their habits, I'm studying their lives. And I think that actually has a really positive effect. And if you look at my grandfather, nhtsa, what is most impressive about him is the number of times he got knocked down and then got up. He's kind of fired by the Eisenhower administration, he's kicked down by the Kennedy administration, he's almost demoted by the Johnson administration, booted out by the Nixon administration, kicked out of the Carter administration, and fired by Bush. Right. It's like a lot of downs, right, for a guy who every single time gets back up and works his way back in. Right. And, you know, to be able to study that life and. Okay, wait, what can I learn from that? Oh, my God. This is like my genetic grandfather, right? So I think there's a lot of things that happen in this period where it's cancer, it's fatherhood, it's writing this book and, like, studying these people, it's running. And then it's like the anti example of my father. And you mix these things together, and that has all. All those things have been helpful.
- [101:42]
That's fascinating.
- [101:44]
When you write a biography of someone, you learn so much, and there's so much that doesn't go in the book and the lessons you take from both of them. And it wasn't like I was on one person's side or the other, right. Nitze is my grandfather. My politics maybe align more with Kennan's, but Nitze's clearly. I mean, in some ways, the more admirable man when it comes to, like, how he treats his family, how he treats his friends, how he treats his colleagues, how he treats its peers. Kennan is one of the greatest writers in American history, one of the smartest observers, but also kind of depressive. You learn a lot of what one should do and what one should not do.
- [102:18]
As far as lessons go. Are you able to take that inspiration and channel that into your. I guess what I'm asking is, how are you doing with your own relationship with competitiveness? You don't want to let go of it, and you're still competitive, and you have goals that you want to accomplish. And it's your drive and your competitiveness that has fueled your career and given you this amazing life. And yet at some point, you begin to realize, is this the healthiest relationship that I should have? And in this kind of reconciliation with your father, obviously these are gifts that your father gave you and, and amazing gifts. And there's other pains and in this process of reconciliation, like, where does your competitive nature and your drive land right now as you're trying to make sense of what the next decade or two decades or three decades of your life looks like?
- [103:19]
I think what's nice about work, my father always gave me this drive. He says, this thing, if there's something better, you should go for it. He believes that, and he inculcates us. Like, it's hard to define what is better, but if you can define what it is, you should go for it. Right. And what's nice about work is that I've. I've, like, found what I'm good at and what I enjoy. And, like, I am very good at building healthy business models for serious journalistic organizations. Right. New Yorker, Wired, Atlantic, all of these places have played a role in creating an economic model that helped the institution create amazing journalism, which is good for me.
- [103:58]
When did you realize that because you're writing, you're being an editor and a journalist.
- [104:03]
Yeah.
- [104:03]
These are not necessarily, you know, business person, you know, occupations.
- [104:08]
So it happens at the New Yorker. So I go and I work at the New Yorker and I start there in 2010. And I'm kind of. I'm a little different in that everybody there is an English major and a poet. And like, you know, I'm probably the only one with a bs, Right. I said, you're also studied Earth systems at Stanford. And I've kind of got like a little bit of a tech background and started a company. I worked at Wired. Right. I spent a little time in the open source world. And so, you know, Remnick, David Remnick, the editor, is one of My heroes in life kind of sees this and like senses that I have like a little digital know how. And so he puts me in charge of running the iPad app, right? When the iPad, like, iPad's going to save journalism, we're going to do multimedia storytelling, he puts me in charge of that. And then I realized, oh, I'm pretty good at like managing these projects. And then he puts me in charge of the website. He's like, you know what, you're an editor and writer, but also, why don't you run the website? Right?
- [105:03]
And also you're. Were you on the younger side? Like, there's probably not a lot of other people that are even interested in that. Or this is a side prod. Like, this isn't really that important, right? They didn't realize, like, this is the same story that like Nick Bilton has at the New York Times. Like, he was like the only guy who, you know, like, he wasn't even really a writer. He was like a photographer or something like that. But they're like, well, if you want to like, write on, write a blog on our website or whatever. Because no one else wanted to.
- [105:29]
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, it wasn't like directly by age. You know, one of the most voracious bloggers was Roger angel, age 96. But yes, it did generally correlate. And so Remnant puts me in charge of the website. And then, then I'm in charge, okay, now I'm in charge of the website. And then it's like, okay, now like, hire some engineers and product managers, okay, so now I'm in charge of the tech team, right? And then we're like, re platforming and we're going on a new cms. And now, okay, now let's build a paywall, right? So now I'm like helping to run that with Pam McCarthy, the deputy editor. And so.
- [105:59]
And are you also writing at the same time?
- [106:01]
Yeah, I don't write a ton. I mean, one of the nice things about the New Yorker. So this is where, like, there's a very important lesson professionally, which is like, it's not just what you're best at, it's what you are best at relative to the organization. And so I'm a pretty good writer, but I'm not a very good writer. Inside the New Yorker, right? And like, put me at another magazine. Like, when I was at Wired, I was a pretty good writer. When I'm at the New Yorker, I'm not that good a writer because they are amazing writers. Put me at a tech company, and I'm not a very good product manager. Put me at the New Yorker, and I'm the best product manager. Right. And so recognizing, like, where your skills lie within the organization. And so soon I'm running the product and engineering team, I'm running the paywall, and I'm doing all this stuff. And so we build a business model around launching a website and then charging people to read a certain number of stories a month or pushing them to a subscription after a couple stories a month. And so that business model is a massive success, and it helps turn the New Yorkers when the New Yorker's fortunes were okay, but hypercharges them. And so I learn all of those skills, and then I go to Wired as the top editor and I start to pick up skills. Like, there, I'm in charge now. I'm also in charge of the whole P and L. And so now I'm. Or not, I'm in charge of it. I have a role in the whole pnl. And so I'm suddenly learning all these different skills. And then I go to the Atlantic as CEO and adding a few new things, but it's mostly that. But in any case, as I go through these three steps, it's kind of at the New Yorker where I realize, wait, I have a real knack for this because I've been a journalist, I've been an editor, I've run a social media team. I understand the different elements. I love this thing of doing serious journalism. Let me build business models. And so when I took the Atlantic job, I. I don't edit, I don't write. Like, I don't know, running the business. Yeah, I like, they've put a bunch of stories on the Internet since we started talking. Those stories might have blown up advertising relationships. I have no idea.
- [107:52]
You're asleep at the job. You're like moonlighting, doing a podcast right now.
- [107:57]
And it's not even. Even if I was at my desk, I wouldn't know what's coming. Right? Like, I'm totally separate from the editorial process at the Atlantic. But what I am good at is building the business model that creates a lot of money so that we can hire lots of journalists to write more stories. And so in any case, I am at peace with my role professionally, which is for the next however long I can see. I'm going to work as hard as I can at the Atlantic to try to make as much money for the Atlantic. So the Atlantic can hire the maximum number of journalists who can create the maximum number of good Stories which I believe is good for this country. So I'm like, I don't have to worry about being competitive, ambitious, or going anywhere else than there in my running life. Back to your question. I think I definitely haven't lost. I still have goals. I'm going to run the New York City Marathon.
- [108:44]
You have a packed 20, 25 running calendar.
- [108:47]
Yeah. So I just ran the twisted branch 100k. I'm going to run the New York City Marathon. And then after it, I'll try to, I think probably go for some age group record, depending on how I recover and injuries and all that. Whether it's. I've just turned 50, so there are a few records that are totally within. Within. You could plausibly get.
- [109:07]
Yeah, you want to hit those records when you're on the bottom end of that age bracket.
- [109:10]
Yeah, you set my 50k record when I was 45. I mean, you can, I can definitely tell, like there are definitely things that are harder this year than they were last year. If you look at like my straw. I don't. I've never done this analysis, but if you were to do a Strava analysis of the first mile of my runs, like, probably it's gone over the last six years from like seven minutes to nine minutes. Like, I just cannot, cannot get going.
- [109:32]
You need, you need a lot more wind up and wind down and all the in between stuff becomes like really important. That when you're time crunched and you're CEO of the Atlantic, it's hard to rationalize making time for.
- [109:44]
But I have a friend who calls me the. He calls me the slowest fast runner on Strava, you know, because I just like, you get out there. I.
- [109:51]
The slowest fast runner on. That's, that's pretty. That's a pretty good title, actually.
- [109:56]
I'll take that.
- [109:56]
I mean, I think the better one is like the fastest runner in publishing. I mean, you have that crown by a long shot. Everyone you know, everyone you know sort of focuses on Malcolm Gladwell, but like, you know, you've got that guy Malcolm.
- [110:09]
You know, and running miles.
- [110:11]
I think I asked him, you know, and when he was on. Did you listen to the podcast I did with him? I think I asked him about you and he was like, oh, man, Nick is like so much faster. He's so much better than I am.
- [110:19]
He was very, he was very generous. Malcolm's. Malcolm's amazing. Yeah. Anyway, so the competitive versus the dissociation. So I just ran this 100k twisted brand branch where I really I didn't care that much about place. I didn't, certainly didn't care about time. And that partly that's growing up aging self transcendence and partly like you really shouldn't care about time when you're running 100k through the mountains on a day where it's 90 degrees.
- [110:43]
That's not the point because the clock is really not a thing.
- [110:47]
Yeah. So there are times where I did. I wanted to run a sub 5 minute mile on my 50th birthday and that was magical because I ran it with Zachary, my middle class kid. He's now like he had just. My two younger boys are very good soccer players and they also like run a little on the side. And Zachary had run a sub 5 minute mile just in the spring.
- [111:08]
And how old is he now?
- [111:09]
He's now 15. And so we went to the track and did 8 by 400 together twice where I would lead one, he would lead one like at 74 seconds at 400. And so then on my birthday he and I and another Runner ran sub 5. He dropped off at 1200 and like let me go. But it's amazing to be able to do that with my son. And then my little guy, the 11 year old, you know, I lead his soccer team in workouts and he ran, he ran 550. So just crazy for an 11 year old. His team's like so fast, those kids. It's awesome. Any case, I do still have like a goals oriented competitive drive which may not be maximally healthy. Maybe something that I should have matured out of at some point. I'll mature out of, but haven't done it yet.
- [111:56]
There's all kinds of age group world records sitting out there for you, Nick. I know, low hanging fruit.
- [112:01]
Rich Roll
I think also the ultra world, it's still pretty new.
- [112:06]
Nick Thompson
Like it's maturing quickly. But we have yet to see runners of the highest, at the highest level, who are experienced on the world stage in track and field or marathon running, take a serious stab at some of these 50 milers and 100 milers. That's just beginning. But I think that many of those records are going to get completely rewritten as soon as there's a little bit more money in there and a little bit more incentive for somebody maybe in the twilight of their professional career to get serious about that world and more races.
- [112:44]
There's so few. You want to run a fast 50 mile or there, where are you going to do it? So the last 50 miler I ran was at this place called Lake Warmog. And the record I wanted was the record for fastest hits a mile, which when I ran it, I was 49, but the record was set by a 50 year old. So you don't think of the 45 to 49 record. And it was set by Ted Corbett.
- [113:08]
Oh, wow. Legend.
- [113:10]
Legend, right. Who he used to train. He'd either run one loop, two loops, or three loops. And a loop is Manhattan. Right. So it's 30, 60 or 90 miles. Jesus Rock. Right. He run two or 300 miles a week and he set the 50 mile record in like 1970. And it's 5:35. So that's like 6:30 per mile. And so I went for it at Lake Waramag and I was on pace through 44 miles maybe, and then I was on pace. The actual age group record is 539. And when I went through 50 miles, I actually went through it in less than 539. But because you couldn't run perfect tangents around the lake, there are cars driving around it and stuff, I ended up not getting even that record. But if there was one record that I would like to get, it would be to run the 535. Just because I've now tried for that. I've done three races, four races where I've had that as a goal and I've gotten closer and closer and closer. I haven't gotten it. And that would be cool. But pushing against it is the fact that like, Ted Kerbero is an animal. Like, like all the great runners in history, he's, he's up there. A guy qualified for an Olympic team. That's not an easy. He didn't guy have all kinds of advantages, like super shoes, but he's a whole different world from what I am.
- [114:22]
Sure.
- [114:22]
But that still would be, that would be cool.
- [114:24]
Yeah. All right, well, let's hold you accountable here for that.
- [114:27]
Yeah. So I'll find. I, I, I, I can't go for it at Tunnel Hill this year because I'm running the marathon, which is six days before, but I'll find. Find a fast 50 miles. Tyler.
- [114:35]
We could do a three hour podcast just on the current state of the media, the magazine industry, this transition that we're seeing, and the tension between digital and traditional and all of that. But, you know, so we can't, you know, we can't do that. Big of a deep dive on that right now. But I do want to get your sense of what the landscape is right now. I mean, obviously, you know, magazines have declined in terms of like cultural importance. And yet the Atlantic really seems like a robust, healthy business and has this, you know, kind of cultural and perimeter that almost no other magazine has. And obviously, your job is to protect that, to nourish that and to make sure that it's a robust business with longevity in a climate in which that is becoming increasingly more and more difficult because the business model model just doesn't exist like it used to.
- [115:33]
It's true.
- [115:34]
And so this is a very difficult Rubik's Cube for you to.
- [115:36]
It's a very hard Rubik's Cube, right? And so, like, two things really push against the success of the magazine news industry. One is the ad business, you know, Right. Like, we used to have a monopoly on ads, right? You want to reach people who like golf, you buy an ad in Golf magazine, and then social media breaks that up. Right? Classified ads go away. So there's this huge pressure on the media industry as the thing that had supported it forever ever blows up. And then the second thing is the rise of social media, right? You want to understand what matters in clothing, you revoke now you go to an influencer. And so those two forces over the last 15 years, you know, obliterate my industry. Right. And, you know, the niche that I've helped, you know, or that I've worked to try to figure out is, okay, given that what is a new business model here? What looks like subscriptions are kind of the winning business model for now and have been for the last few years, right? Create content. Create some scarcity with that content. Make it so that people have to pay for that content, and then develop a direct relationship with those people and give them something that gives them real value, and then they give you money. And so that's the business model that we've built. Now we're facing this new problem, which is AI. And so what AI will do is it will disrupt the mechanism by which people find content. Right. You used to go to Google and.
- [116:53]
You would search, or declining search is.
- [116:57]
Being absorbed right into Google, right into answer engines. And so you will no longer go in and type in. I don't know. Right. Like, my favorite. My favorite search example was that if you typed in what is the meaning of life? You got an Arthur Brooks Atlantic article, Right?
- [117:11]
So funny. How did you engineer that?
- [117:13]
We didn't engineer. It just was like he wrote some.
- [117:15]
LLMs, just decided that this was the. Well, no.
- [117:18]
Yeah, the LLMs eat it. It used to be like Google would give it to you. Now if you type in, what does it mean in of life. Google would, like Gemini, will just tell you what the meaning of life is. And so we're losing all of our search. So that's. You're losing people coming in. And then not only that, you know, all these other individuals are going to be able to create publications from scratch that are like the Atlantic, right? Intelligence becomes commodified through AI, and so somebody can create a faux Atlantic or doesn't even have to be a faux Atlantic. That's like the cost of creating a new intellectual publication will be very low. You can also just go to the Atlantic, scrape it all, summarize it slightly, change it, republish it as yourself, right? So we have this huge competitive threat. So we've got fewer readers coming in because search is going away. And then we have this massively different competitive landscape, right? On the plus side, AI can allow us to run our business much more efficiently. It can allow us to create stories more efficiently. We never write with it because we need to maintain our trust with our readers. And we have a pretty big moat. We have a bigger moat than any other publication because our stories involve phone calls and style and depth. And so my job right now is to figure out, all right, where can we find readers, right? They're not going to come in from search. Where are they going to come from? How many can we hold onto from search? Can we optimize answer engine search? Can we work with the AI companies to get as much of value from them? All right, get what you can there. You're not going to get as much as you look losing. All right, now let's see how we can build the best direct relationships with readers. How do we, you know, how do we serve them directly without the AI companies in the middle? One of the weird things we did, this is like, you know, 1/10 of 1% of our business. But we increased the number of print magazines, right, so that we can have a direct relationship us, you, postal service in the middle. And so how do we get more people into our app? Okay, how do we get more people into our newsletters? Okay, how do we make our live events more resonant? And how do we get more people into our live event events? Where can we do live events where we're not reaching people? What are parts of the country where the people who know about us have high affinity towards us, but not many people know us? Okay, let's go those places, right? And so identifying markets, brand opportunities, relationships, that's my job. While holding on to as much readership as I can and trying to build out new readership in different places.
- [119:35]
That's super interesting. So the Atlantic is this brand and that brand has incredible value and there's a association with that brand of high level journalism, but also sophistication, integrity. But it doesn't necessarily have to be like a magazine. It could be these events. Like what does the Atlantic stand for? And what are new and creative ways of extending that brand in businesses perhaps that are either either less developed or, or ones you hadn't even thought of yet?
- [120:07]
Right?
- [120:07]
Yeah.
- [120:07]
And what are new and creative ways of doing it where you don't weaken and dilute the brand association? Right. So, you know, should we do YouTube videos? Well, maybe we should. If we had a really good idea and we could do it economically. But we don't want to do a bad idea. We don't want to do something that's not economical. Right. And so we'd actually been super cautious. For better, for ill. Like we have a podcast venture. We have audio arms. Right. I record a podcast. Most interesting thing in a. It's good. We sell advertisers against it, but we're not, not. Very small percentage of our revenue comes from audio. Tiny percentage of our revenue comes from video. But we're constantly looking at where we can expand, what we can do differently. Normally what we've been doing is just expanding different. Oh, you know what we see an opportunity in doing like a little more health journalism, right. Or recently where like the Washington Post is imploding, you know, for reasons of its own doing, there's an opportunity to hire amazing political reporters and do accountability journalism. So, so let's just hire the best folks who are leaving the Washington Post or even let's just hire amazing political journalism and do more accountability journalism. So we're constantly looking at the market and evaluating where there's opportunities. But I live, I am well aware that we're going to have to be quite different in the next three to five years. What exactly we're going to do, we're working through.
- [121:26]
You've also become, as a result of this job job, a public intellectual in the AI space. Like you're, you're speaking all over the, you're taking the stage all over the place and, and discussing AI. And that's another three hour podcast that we could do. So maybe just, you know, share with us a little bit about, you know, where you see all of this going. Like in that three to five year window, what does the world look like? What is, what does media look like? Like, setting aside the Atlantic, like You know, how are we getting our information? How are we discerning fact from fiction? Like can democracy cohere amidst this, you know, the most disruptive technology that humanity has ever seen? Like what's fact, what's fiction? You know, where are you kind of placing your flag?
- [122:12]
I think the technology is amazing, right? I think it continues to improve, right? So on the question of like, you know, you know, is it hitting a wall? Is it? I mean, the question is hitting a wall or it will extinguish the light of human consciousness and evaporate all human intelligence. I'm like, it's definitely improving, right? I'm not where like Dario Amade is, but like it is definitely improving. It will continue to improve. The AI we see right now is the worst AI we'll ever see. It will be absolutely extraordinary. On the question of business disruption, I think that happens pretty slowly. And I think that that one of the ways I like to think about is it's very easy to imagine how AI can do somebody else's job. Very hard to imagine how AI can do your job, right. That's because there's so many little complicated things that don't actually involve machine based intelligence. It's very hard. If something is 99% accurate and it's a three step process, actually you wouldn't want to use an AI for that because 0.99 times 0.99 times 0.99, suddenly you start to have a lot of the error. So it's very hard to incorporate it in business processes. So I think, think that most businesses change reasonably slowly even as the technology improves pretty quickly. Media though, is one of the most at risk industries because the closer you are to the training of AI, the faster you're disrupted, right? That's why coders are disrupted first, that's probably why media is disrupted second or third. And so I think there are a lot of media companies that I would not want to work at right now, right? And I would not, not invest in, right? If I'm like in the summary of news or the curation of news, that is not a good business to be in because AI will do that incredibly well. What the Atlantic does I think is fine, right? At least for the foreseeable future. And so my general sense of AI is that I guess I'm an optimist. It's hard lines of optimism, pessimism, because you actually believe, believe that it's improving really quickly. You're like an optimist on its progress, but probably a pessimist on Society, let me tell you actually what worries me the most, what worries me the most is what I call the end of reality. And just the sense that you don't know, you don't know what's happening. You don't know whether the person you're talking to is a bot. You don't know whether the thing that you're reading was written by a human. You don't know whether anything is real. And we're getting to that point, we're starting to see that on social media. You have no idea if an image is real and it means you don't trust the images that are real. And so, you know, people are getting into relationships which are not real, which terrifies me. Right. You know, parasocial relationships with bots I think is the worst, the worst consequence of what's going on. So net, net low business impacts in the short term, huge benefits to people who use it correctly, significant disruption to media and significant social disruption.
- [125:01]
Do you have confidence that, that we will be able to erect necessary sort of checks and balances on the fact versus fiction, AI generated versus reality aspect of all of this? Or will it be like performance enhancing drugs in sports where the ability to detect is always behind the innovation. With the next performance enhancer, it's going.
- [125:28]
To be performance enhancing and drug drugs in like the 2005 Tour de France.
- [125:33]
It's like the worst, right? And so like what, what happens when nobody knows what's real and what isn't? Like how, you know is this, like how do we, we can't cohere as a society like that.
- [125:45]
But what is so scary is that it's partly why my job at the Atlantic, I feel, has value. Right? Like we will be. I mean, not everybody trusts us, right? And like the bifurcation of American media and the way social media has pushed us into filter bubbles and the deliberate work by the richest man on earth and, and the most powerful man on earth to discredit the media has done a lot to discredit straight shooters in the media. And what is scary is that nothing is going in the right direction right now. There are a lot of good efforts, a lot of people trying to figure out how to do identity verification, like how to figure out whether somebody is human, how to figure out whether something is real. But it is going much slower than the rate at which people are able to create, create, you know, synthetic reality. So I don't think we're going in the right direction at all. What happens, I think society holds together. I just think that there is much more toxicity online. I think there's a lot more confusion. There's a lot, there's a lot of new kinds of fraud. There are some societal breakdowns. We do figure it out, but it's going to be, it's gonna be chaotic.
- [126:48]
Yeah, there was just an article in the New York Times a couple days ago about all the doctors that are getting deep faked right now. You know, they're always, it always is some fake podcast with, you know, a real person, a real doctor who's now selling some kind of Dr. Oz situation.
- [127:05]
Yeah, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna happen.
- [127:08]
It's pretty. Like you can, like I can for the most part I feel like clearly I know this is bullshit, but like, like you said, this is the worst it's ever gonna be.
- [127:17]
Yeah, right. You know it now, but.
- [127:18]
Right. You're not going to, you're not going to. I mean everybody's always going to be, you know, to the extent that, that can be weaponized to manipulate people, to believe whatever is, you know, that's just an existential point of view.
- [127:29]
Well, this is the scariest thing, right? The fact that like Elon Musk is trying to go through history and try to change it to his views so that his grok AI only gives his political views because those are the correct views is terrifying. Like to be able to synthetically create truth and then like force, speed it through your AI is a very, a very scary, scary thing. Now there is no, of course there is no singular truth. Of course like Google search engine has its own biases in it, but it is a dark, a dark world that we're going into. And so you know, kind of my, like taking this, bringing, bring it back to the kind of the stoic view like all one can do if you're rich Roller, if you're Nick Thompson or if you're whoever is like try to be as honest as possible on social media. Try to like help the folks building the best tool. Okay, so here's the, the best metaphor I've heard is from this woman named Audrey Tong who was the digital minister of Taiwan. And it's like one of the saints of the technology world. Just you know, trying, trying to figure out how to build open protocols, how to build open tools for the good of the people. And what she says is there's a vertical race, right? There's an ego driven race, right. And it's by these companies with trillion dollar valuations or multi hundred billion dollar valuations trying to essentially create nirvana and Meanwhile, there's a horizontal race. And on the horizontal race are all these nonprofits, governments, academics, and they're trying to do things like identity verification, they're trying to figure out how to stop child pornography, they're trying to figure out how to make sure there's real things online. And the hope is that if the horizontal race goes as fast as the vertical race, then tools will be built. And when we have all powerful AI or super powerful AI, all these good tools will eventually be absorbed into it. Right. And so that's when you will have all powerful AI with humanistic values and with an understanding of reality. And so that is the best version of the future.
- [129:27]
I mean, that sounds quite utopian, you know, like, given the infrastructure under which these are being developed, like there's just not, There's a lot of hand wringing and talk about, about gatekeeping, these things and safety and regulation and checks and balances. But is that really happening?
- [129:46]
It's interesting because it is, Right, I'm.
- [129:49]
Happy to hear that.
- [129:49]
Look at Anthropic. Right? Anthropic, they're a super interesting company because they've been maximally bad in stealing copyrighted materials and not compensating anybody for it, and yet maximally good. So one of the questions is, can you understand how these AI models work? Explainability, can you figure out why they make the choices they make? And we have no idea. Right. Like, they're so spooky and so weird, but a lot of the best research into it is coming out of anthropic. Right. OpenAI actually does a lot of good research on this. Google does some good research. So the economic, like in Google builds, like, you know, Google is trying really hard on the publisher side to figure out models so that they can build all powerful AI without obliterating the ecosystem. Because that's in their interest.
- [130:34]
Cannibalizing their own, you know, search is how they make, you know, all this money, right? So they're so, you know, this is falling by the wayside as a result of their, their own innovation, right?
- [130:44]
So they're, they're cannibalizing themselves. And then they have this other problem in that they make money because of the quality. I mean, this is true of all the AI companies. They exist because of all this good information created.
- [130:56]
Well, this is the dead Internet theory, right? Like we just start populating the Internet with AI, you know, derived content, and it becomes a, you know, a vicious cycle.
- [131:06]
Right. So if you ran a recursion, a recursive.
- [131:08]
Aware of that.
- [131:09]
Yeah, you would try not to have that happen.
- [131:11]
Right. That. So that is an incentive.
- [131:12]
So there are incentives to, like they're in this ego driven race. They're trying, like, they all, all of them believe that the first person to get to AGI kind of owns the world. Right. So they believe the stakes are infinite. So they're willing to cut a lot of corners. But they also know that if they kill the rest of the Internet, it's quite bad for them. So there are forces that are pushing the AI industry in a good direction.
- [131:33]
Interesting. I would love to have you come back and talk more in depth about that.
- [131:38]
I mean, this is like, this is the question of the.
- [131:40]
Right. This is of the world.
- [131:42]
Right. This is the question of the moment.
- [131:43]
Yeah.
- [131:43]
And you know, from. I have like three kids who are.
- [131:45]
About to like, how do you parent your children? How do you tell them what they should focus on? What should they study you all conversation.
- [131:53]
This is so funny. I'm so. My oldest son is 17 and he's, you know, super ambitious and does really well. And he. And I go, I'm moderating these panels at the Unai for Good event in Geneva. And he comes with me because it's summer break and we went around Chamonix, went hiking and then went to Geneva. And we meet this guy who's an AI professor at the University of Louisville. And he believes that AI is going to kill us all and we're potentially living in a simulation and that super powerful AI will comp in like five years. And so I say to him, I'm like, all right, great. So what should my son do here? He's like applying to school. What should he do? And he's like, oh, he just go to a party school.
- [132:43]
Rich Roll
Like just ride it out into the sunset.
- [132:47]
Nick Thompson
Like, you know what I mean? There's nothing you can do about it, right? So it's like we're the dinosaurs, except we know that the asteroids are coming.
- [132:54]
They're coming, right? So just like have fun, right? What I actually tell my kids is. Or what I actually believe is a use these tools as much as possible. Right? Like my middle kid, I'm like working with him to Prep for the SAT using OpenAI. Right. So we're using OpenAI education mode. We've set up like a module for him. He's like studying with it, you know, My elder son is doing linear algebra. He's convinced that he wouldn't have been able to get through his math class junior year without About AI as a tutor. Right. And so what I've said to them very clearly is if you use AI to write your paper, you are cheating yourself, right? Because you are not learning, right? If you use AI to tutor you, you're at a superpower, right? And like I can't like look over their shoulder as they do it, but I've had a hundred conversations with them where you should absolutely use this and you should understand it. And like we talk about all the time, we listen to podcasts about it. But for the love of God, God, do not cheat yourself, right? And do not give up this process of learning right now.
- [133:52]
It's an incredible learning tool and a way to accelerate your own learning. Have you listened to this new. I guess it's a podcast series, but it's on Audible with Scott C. Burns, the screenwriter who works with Soderbergh. He wrote Contagion and he has this, it's kind of an audiobook podcast series on Audible called, called what Could Go Wrong. And basically the premise is he's trying to figure out how to come up with a sequel to Contagion and he's been stymied. Like people want this movie to happen, but he just can't come up with anything compelling enough to invest the energy. And so he decides he's going to investigate if AI could be helpful with this. And it's a whole, it's incredibly compelling like multi episode series of, of this deep dive exploration into these tools and how you can use them effectively. But essentially what he ends up doing with the help of Nick Bilton is who's like super into AI, is creating like a writer's room with all of these different AIs that have backstories and different experiences, et cetera. Who's the ultimate writing room that you want for this project? Who can come up with all these creative ideas and obviously that's a conceit or a, or a notion that anybody could use in their own life. Like, okay, if I want it, who are the 10 mentors that I need in my life or for this particular project or problem I'm trying to solve? Who are the kind of people who would be most helpful? And then you know, kind of creating your own agent, you know, to help you solve these problems. Like this is available to all of us right now, which is amazing.
- [135:34]
And I use it in my running. Like I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but I, you know, know I like, I upload what I eat, I upload my training logs and I ask it for advice and like it's can be very useful. So I. I came off twisted branch three weeks ago, and I had a little pain in my knee. And, you know, I can kind of tell it's like runner's knee. It's tendonitis. It's at the top of the knee. And so I've, you know, like, I have a little tendonitis after this race. This is my weekly mileage leading up. This is the race. This is how it went downhill, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like. I think the things I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to do, do glute exercises. I don't like to do squats because I feel like that always makes it worse. My form and squats, whatever it is, I can't do IT glute exercises. And I should foam roll on my quads, my hamstrings, and my IT band. And my general view is that I should run as long as it doesn't get worse after the first two miles. Right. And it responds. Yeah, that's all correct. Except don't use the foam roller on your IT band. Right. And there's something about the way people foam roll on your IT band, which I actually think makes sense. When I foam roll on my IT band, like, things get worse in my body. Body. Anyway. I work through, like, a whole protocol of how to do my recovery from my tendonitis in my knee with coach AI, which, you know, I'd bother be directly going through it, like, having a session with, you know, yeah. My top Nike people. But, like, if they're not available and I'm, like, traveling. I was in Spain with my kids, you know, so I just went through with AI and, you know, whether it was that or not.
- [137:01]
And the next level of that now is to create a multitude of coaches. And, like, one's a Ted Corbett guy, and one's a. You know, like, one is, you know, with different philosophies and backgrounds or whatever. And then what you do is you have them talk to each other and.
- [137:15]
Then have somebody else evaluate what they say and then bring it to you, which is a little bit like my Nike experience. Right. Those three people, they would talk and then they would synthesize, because it's the.
- [137:22]
Synthesis, and then with the human involvement, you know, then you can extract from it and synthesize it yourself, which is like, that's the value right now.
- [137:30]
Right. So it's this. It's this tool that's so crazy because the societal, like, the consequences to my business could be ca. Catastrophic. Like, it is absolutely, entirely possible that the Atlantic will Be like driven out of business by AI. On the other hand, it is like the best tool that we have for making a better Atlantic. Right? It is the best tool that I have for figuring out my training. I use it all the time for all kinds of stuff. It's fabulous.
- [137:56]
We got to put a pin in this thing. But before I let you go, maybe leave us with, with really the wisdom that you want people to extract from your story and what you've learned from running that you think is the core lesson for the non runner or just the reader out there to extract from the message that you're trying to communicate.
- [138:21]
I think the message of the book is that if you look really closely at running, you can understand yourself a lot better. And it doesn't have to be running. It could be meditation, it could be something else. For me, it was running. And it was through intense and focused running that I understood what my illness meant to me. And it's how I understood what my father meant to me. And, you know, why does running do that? A, it's the daily practice. A, it's the habits it builds. B, it's the. The time alone in your head, in motion, outside. But if you want to understand yourself and you want to kind of have more clarity on your life, it's not a bad idea to go for a run.
- [139:09]
You never complete a run and say, I wish I hadn't done that.
- [139:12]
Right, right, Yep.
- [139:14]
Which kind of says it all.
- [139:15]
Right. There's a. You know, I was thinking about my dad and like. Like, you know, I had this. I have this line in the book that it's the opposite of alcohol, right? Where alcohol, you feel good and regret it, running, you feel bad and feel great. Right? And it's like, you know, when I look at my dad's life, the days he ran were the days he held things together. Right. And I think that no matter. I have a chapter. It's called A Tiny Imperceptible Tailwind. And the general idea is that. That every time you do something, right, it creates this little tailwind in the rest of your life. And so the daily practice of running creates a little tailwind, right? A little tailwind through everything else you do, whether it's work, whether it's your self examination, whether it's your parenthood. And so if you can figure out how to get it in, you can figure out how to do it, you can figure out a way that you can enjoy it, you can create a positive force that flows through your entire life.
- [140:08]
The book is great. I really think you did an amazing job.
- [140:11]
Job. Thank you.
- [140:12]
Yeah. And I can't wait for people to read it. So this was really fun. Thanks, man.
- [140:16]
I'm appreciate it. Terrified of people reading it, but I'm so glad.
- [140:18]
Well, that's a good. I think that's a good sign.
- [140:21]
I'm so glad that you read it.
- [140:22]
You know, there's a lot of vulnerability in there and so I can understand that. But, you know, you were talking about how to structure this book and how difficult it is, like you are on some level. Yeah, it's a memoir. It's a, you know, story about your past and it's a sports story. And it's also kind of a little bit of an Alex Hutchinson, you know, kind of book about running, you know, and that is difficult, Difficult. And it requires a certain level, you know, like a delicate balance. But I think you achieved it and I loved it. So thanks, man.
- [140:49]
Awesome. Thank you, Rich.
- [140:55]
That's it for today.
- [140:56]
Rich Roll
Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page@richroll.com today's show the show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake, content management by Shayna Savoy, copywriting.
- [142:13]
Nick Thompson
By Ben Prior and of course, our.
- [142:16]
Rich Roll
Theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support.
- [142:25]
Nick Thompson
See you back here soon.
- [142:26]
Rich Roll
Peace Plants.
- [142:28]
Nick Thompson
Namaste.