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

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

Okay, you guys. Nick Thompson is on the show today. Nick is the CEO of The Atlantic. He is the fastest... Well, he's actually a record holder, the fastest runner of his age group of 50K, right? Say it nicer than I did.

I'm the American record holder in the 50K for Guys 45 Up, and I'm the top ranked in the world for Guys 45 Up this year in the 50 Mile. Kind of complicated.

It's like a tongue twister.

It's a little bit confusing.

He's basically the fastest man in the world in his age category for 50K, right?

For weird races.

For ultra marathons. Don't forget, also, he is now the author of The Running Ground, which is a memoir/running book that's actually has a lot of life lessons, business lessons, which is why I like it.

I hope so.

And he's on the show today. So by the way, how we do this show is we start with a magic mind healthy shot since I'm not a drinker, and I'm sure you're not either, given what you do for fun. So this is basically a bunch of yummy good stuff for you. Like ashwagandha. I can never say that ashwagandha. I've said that so many times today. You can look at the ingredients if you'd like, but it's basically a performance shot. So what you really should be doing is taking one of these before you do one of your big runs, and it will keep you super focused and keep your mind right.

I'm all in favor of red beet. I'm all in favor of olive oil. I'm all in favor of everything in this.

It's really great. I'm telling, and it tastes delicious.

Boomerick, Lion's Mane.

It's good stuff. It's really good. No, it's really good. Take it right now. Yeah. We just go, Cheers. Then we do them down the hatchet. I've had a lot today, so I can- Wait, all of it at the same time? Yeah. They're good, though, right?

They're super good.

I can give you some to take home. Great. Awesome. They're delicious. So thanks, Magic Wine. All right. Now, let me ask you a question. You wrote this book, like I said, it's a hybrid book. It's not just a straight on how You Run. It really is... This is just the galley, but it's really about the book of how running bonded you and your father together, right?

Yeah. That's a large part of it.

It is a large part of it. What was your first running experience? And what... Obviously, running had a massive impact on your life. It sure did.

I started running, weirdly, when I was about five years old. My father, this was the running boom of the late 1970s, early 1980s. My dad, whose life was coming apart in complicated ways, was running, trying to hold his life together. He's starting to train for a marathon, and I would go and run with him. I remember running a mile when I was with him. I think he might have even run two miles, which is a lot for a five-year-old.

You were five.

I remember running from my house to Pine Manor College and Back, which is two and a half miles. It couldn't have been older than five because he left when I was six. That was my introduction to the sport. Then in the 1982, when I was seven, He ran the New York Marathon, and I went and watched him. Some of the book is the description of my emotions and feelings as I watched him coming down the Queensborough Bridge or coming off the Queensborough Bridge at Mile 16 of the New York Marathon.

Wow. Describe what that felt like. You said your father left.

Yeah, so my father left. I didn't understand it at the time. I just knew he was there, and then he wasn't there. He's going through all this turmoil. He's a very interesting character. He grows up poor, not poor, but on the wrong side of America. He grows up in Oklahoma, Bacone, Oklahoma, on an Indian reservation. His father's high status on the Indian reservation. He's been a missionary, he come, worked as then President of the college. My father grows up and he doesn't really get along with his dad. His dad this big, masculine, Golden Gloves guy from out here, California. My dad eventually escapes. He's like, I can't handle it here in Oklahoma. He gets a scholarship to Phillips, Andover, and then to Stanford, and then to Oxford. He marries my mother's family. He's in this He has a dominant family in Washington. But his career doesn't really work out. John F. Kennedy says he's going to be President, but my dad just doesn't work out for my dad. He starts drinking too much, and then he realizes he's gay and that he's been hiding his sexuality, his life. And so that's right about 1980, 1981.

So he realized that after I'm born, obviously. Obviously, I guess I figured that one out, right? And so it's this hinge point in his life when he's 40 years old and it's all just turmoil. And his life after that is quite chaotic, deeply chaotic, which we can get into. But at that point, he's still able to hold it together. And so he's running, he's running a marathon. It's just enough to keep him going. And so for me, my memory is just Just absolute fascination with watching my father run, this love emanating from him, this excitement. Just missed breaking three hours, which was such a cool goal. I had this vivid memory. He ran, I think it was three hours and 50 seconds. I was like, Well, why didn't he just sprint? Well, actually, that's quite a big distance. That's what I remember from the race.

When you decided to write this book, so you are, you obviously gleaned so many lessons from running. What would you say the number, the The biggest lesson that running has taught you for life.

Yeah. Why don't I start with the realization that let me write the book, which is quite related to your question. When I was about 30, I ran a marathon. I ran a lot of marathons in my 20s and tried to break three hours and couldn't. When I was 30, I ran a marathon at 2: 43, which is very good. Then right afterwards, I got cancer. Then it took me two years to really get back at it, and I ran another marathon at 2: 43. Then for the next 10 years, I ran, I don't know, 15 marathons. I pretty much ran them all at 2: 43. It's pretty weird, right? You're from age 30 to 40, you should be slowing.

You should be doing something different. It is at the same speed on top of it.

Same speed, always 2: 43. Then in my 40s, I get way better. I run a 2: 29 at age 44, which is completely different. Unless you're a marathon, you don't really know the difference between those times. But 2: 43 to 2: 29, it's a step change. It's a big difference. I I was thinking after I ran that 2: 29, like, What? Why did I run? How did I get so much faster? I remember the day and I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I had this realization, You know what? I hadn't run faster because all I had wanted to do was to run as fast as I had been before I got sick.

You got sick before 30, right?

I got sick before 30. I had run 2: 43, got sick, recovered, and then ran 2: 43 over and over and over and over and over It's your body. It's how strong your calf muscles are and your VO2 max and all that stuff. But so much of it is up here. So much of it is the limits you put on yourself. It was that realization that made me want to write the book, to understand more about what slowed me down, what sped me up, what slowed my father down, what sped him up, and then to look at the lives of other runners to understand what the sport could teach about the hard things in their lives.

I feel like running is a microcosm for life.

There you go. See, she just written the blurb on the back of the book. I know. That's the goal. The goal of the book is to show how it can be that.

It is a microcosm. The reason why I had you on the podcast today was because I feel the same way about overall, just fitness, exercise. I think the life lessons, the soft skills that people learn by doing these hard things over and over again, it's teaching you how to have grit and coping mechanisms and be successful in every other aspect of your life. And so I think fitness is like a microcosm for life. And I think especially running, because running, there's a real mental game with it. I run every day. I don't know if I told you that, not 100 miles like you, but I hate running. I hate running more than anything on the planet. I really do. And that is why I do it every day, because it constantly instills in my brain that I can do a hard thing. If I can do this today, I've accomplished something, I can do it again tomorrow. And there's nothing that clears my mind and keeps me on point better than running. There's nothing. There's no other cardio. There's no other thing in the world. I believe there's a straight line between people who are runners and people who are super successful in business, in life, in everything else.

I really do.

Yeah, I mean, and that's part of the thesis of the book, that because Running is so simple, it's you, it's your shoes, it's the road. You can do it any day, anywhere. It's your thoughts. It's your thoughts. You're alone in your head. And so you get deep into your head while you run. And you can also understand yourself because there's no racket, there's no ball, there's nothing else. There's no water. It's just you out there. And so the simplicity of it opens up the complexity of human understanding and habit formation and all the things that you were just talking about.

Walk me through your life. You were running with your dad, obviously. You saw him. So did something tweak in your brain Where did something like your neurons in your brain become addicted to running because you saw what it was doing for yourself, your life outside? Did you realize the endorphins? What was that moment where you felt like you became a runner?

That's a hard question, actually, because it happens really... It really happens maybe three different times. It happens when I'm five, and I think of myself as a runner, but I stop. My dad moves away, and I run with him occasionally Usually, but I wasn't a runner. Then in high school, I play soccer, basketball, tennis, and I get cut from the basketball team. My sophomore year in high school, I show up at this new school, sophomore year, I get cut. I got cut from the varsity, which I think I'm going to make, and then I get cut from the JB. Pretty embarrassing. And then I get cut from the JB, too. That's pretty hard to do.

You're not really a good basketball player is what you're trying to tell me.

I thought I was pretty good, but clearly not.

Other people were maybe a little bit slightly better.

There are definitely players who were... I should have made that JV2 team. I will stand by this. But no, I wasn't good. And so the only sport you could do was track. And so I started to do track, and I discovered I was good. And then that gave me confidence. I was in a new school. It's a hard school. I wasn't doing very well. I wasn't that socially accepted. But then suddenly in a month or two, I'm a track star, and suddenly I'm cool.

Because you were fast.

I was fast.

Can I ask you a question? Because when you walked in here, I'm like, of course. You have the body type to make a good runner. There is a genetic component, I do believe. I mean, to becoming an ultramarathon. If you are more voluptuous, I feel more athletic, it's very hard because it's the people that do the best. They have very narrow hips. Their body types are a certain way. So do you feel that you just naturally were... You were built to be... If you're going to be doing a sport, I'm not surprised it's running. You're built to be a runner.

Yeah, definitely. To those of you who are not watching the audio version, I am a skinny guy.

That's what I was trying to say. You're a skinny person. But you also looks like you're... Were you always just very genetically thin?

I wasn't as thin as I am now. I probably weighed a bit more when I was that age. But yeah, clearly, when I show up on the track team, the coach looks at me and he's not going to say, go do the shot put.

Right, right, right. Or go do wrestling or whatever.

Clearly, this kid should be running the distances. Maybe the mile, maybe the two mile, but he's not going to be a sprinter. He's not going to be a shot putter. He's not going to be a long jumper. I'm physically built to be a long distance runner. Probably to a degree that you don't even appreciate. Part of it is my size, but I have other genetic advantages. It turns out that I'm reasonably durable. It turns out that I have a reasonably efficient cardiovascular system. Running is this very weird sport where it's power times efficiency divided by mass, and I have low mass. You can have relatively your power and efficiency. You can compensate by having low mass.

Do you find it harder to run as you get older? Just because it's so hard on your body? I won't even do a marathon because I find that the pounding on your joints can be really hard.

I'm extremely fortunate in that I've had almost no injuries in running, which is very rare and surprising.

Because your body type.

Because my body type. Then I also have this wonderful thing that happened, weird, which is that I was a musician in my 20s, and I was a guitarist, and I had really debilitating wrist pain. I played a very physical guitar. When I was about 24, 25, I was playing in New York City subways, played all the time, played all these concerts in New York. I I just couldn't move my wrist. I couldn't open the door. I couldn't brush my teeth. I tried all these different things. I tried injections. I rekeed my keyboard so that the letters are closer together. I still type that way, which is a very nice security hack. When I give my laptop to someone, they always get confused.

Wow. I would never think to do that.

It's so cool. It's called the Dvorak keyboard. It makes you type more quickly, but it also means less strain on your fingers.

Anyway- That's not an anyway. That's a great thing to know. It's awesome. Where do you even get that from?

You can just change your software. You can go into your computer right there and just change keyboard layout to Dvorak, and then all the letters will be different. Because the initial keyboard was set up to slow you down so that the keys on old typewriters don't jam. Look at your keyboard. The letters make no sense.

They don't. Right? Yeah.

Letters you don't use are in the middle of the keyboard where your index fingers go.

This is crazy.

It's so dumb and it's so annoying once you're aware of it. There's no logic to it whatsoever. This thing called the Dvorak keyboard puts the letters you use the most and the patterns you use the most in the simplicity. When I type, it's like this. When most people type, it's like, right?

That's so true. What a great thing. So probably it saves you a lot of time.

I mean, how much time it saves you, but it saves you a little bit of time. A little bit of time. It is a good security hack. Somebody steals my laptop and starts typing away. They'll just... Unless they know how to... Well, now I've given away my secret. Do you have a lot of thiebs who listen to your podcast?

I think maybe. I don't know. I can make sure I edit this part out.

Anyway, so back to the injury. I all these crazy things, trying to make it better. Then I went and saw someone who teaches the Alexander technique. It's a training of posture training for actors and musicians. He says, Bring your guitar. I bring my guitar. He watches me play. He's like, Well, this will be easy. Then he just adjusts the way I hold my feet and the way I hold my head and the way I hold my wrist when I play guitar. Then this two years of agony goes away in weeks. Almost immediately, I can feel a difference. My wrist no longer hurts. Suddenly, I've learned this way of holding my body that makes this injury go away. Now, that was 25 years ago, anytime I start to hurt, I just did a big race. Afterwards, I had a little tendonitis in my knee. I suddenly have a way of holding my body to increase energy flow, increase balance that makes me hurt less. When I run, my posture is very much based on Alexander technique. I'm convinced that that and the general practice of learning how to release muscle tension that came from this guitar injury has prevented me or helped prevent me from having injury problems as I've gotten older.

Now, that said, I'll probably break my ankle tomorrow. I know.

Don't even say that. What shoes do you wear?

I wear all kinds of different running shoes. I ran my last one in... I guess I ran the ultra in the Nike Ultra Flies, I did my last 50-mile in the- You were in Nikes in...

You were actual Nikes when you did an ultra marathon. I'm not a trail Nikes. No, but Nikes, it's known to be a nice-looking shoe, but not really a performance shoe.

Well, the Vapor Flies and the Ultra Flies, they're the performance shoes. They wear the Puma R3s in the last 50 miles. I wore New Balances in the race before that.

I would think you were an A6 or a New Balances person because they're more Brooks even. No?

I alternate shoes a lot, and I alternate shoes because it changes the tension and pressure it puts on your body. If you wear, I don't know, high lift in the heel, lots of cushioning under there, maybe it puts more pressure on your Achilles and maybe less on your knee. And what you want to do is you want to alternate the amount of pressure. And so I actually think you should wear as many different kinds of shoes as you can during a training cycle, but you should be very particular about the ones you race in. And so I do a lot of data analysis to figure out what shoes I should race in on a particular course on a particular day. But when I'm training, I vary it a ton.

That's actually a great tip. So what are your top shoes to train in?

So for what? Just for around the day?

No, if you're Yeah, for a few miles around the day, a few miles. Yeah, three or four miles a day.

I've been wearing the Puma nitros. I think they're a very good pair. The Puma R3s, fast R3s, are what I raced in. I think the Nike Pegasus and the Nike Bormaros are really good training shoes. And then I use the vapor flies for road races and the ultra flies for trail races. I use on shoes for regular running. The cloud booms, I think, are very cool. I've run in hocas. You like It does? Sure. Yeah, totally. I ran in the Rockets. They're cool.

How about the idea of... Do you wear orthotics or anything like that? No. Is it because you think that they're not good for your feet because it puts your foot into a weirder position? Because that's what a lot of my friends have been telling me that I should be getting out of orthotics and just wear, even go barefoot and do stuff barefoot.

So you should... Okay, so I do think you should do some stuff barefoot. I don't think you should ever run on a road barefoot?

No, not on a road there.

There was this moment like 15 years ago and everybody's running barefoot, and then it was great for a week, and then they all stepped on nails.

Right. No, I was going to say, how about even walking on a treadmill with bare feet?

Yeah, that's great. I think that's I think it's good, and I think it's good spiritually, and I think it's good physically. I think it strengthens your ankles, it strengthens your toes. I run on golf courses barefoot, so I will go and do sprints on a golf course after a workout or strides or on a soccer field. Maybe I'll run a workout around a track, and then I'll do strides afterwards on the grass barefoot, which I think is great for strengthening your feet and just connecting your toes and your head sky. That's really wonderful. But I do think that I'm not against orthotics. If your doctor says, Use orthotics, use them. I do think you really want to vary your shoes. Because I do think that it changes a lot. Also, I learned this really interesting lesson once, and I was talking to this really smart guy about running. I'd gone and I'd run up and down this mountain, and I'd run in and worn out shoes, and my quads hurt like hell. I call them up, and I'm like, This is so stupid. He's like, No, that was smart. I was like, What do you mean?

He's like, The whole point is you want your quads at some point in your training cycle to get more stressed than they will in the marathon. Because in a marathon, you're going to be 26 miles, pound in a road, your quads are going to hurt, your cardiovascular system is going to hurt, you're going to get dehydrated, you're going to have gastric distress. At some point in the training cycle, you want to stress each of those systems more than you'll stress it in the marathon. In the marathon, you'll stress everything to the max on that day. Training, you want to stress everything a little bit more. So one way to do it is to run down a mountain in bad shoes. And so what he was saying is your quads hurt because you stress them and now they're growing back stronger. You run down the mountain in really nice shoes, you actually hurt your quads less, and so they develop less to their resilience. And so I like the idea of messing around with different shoes, running barefoot, running in bad shoes, all of that.

That's really it. But the thing is, what about injury? That's how people get injured. If I have a bad ankle or a bad knee and I'm not wearing orthotics, I would be nervous that I would obviously hurt myself.

Yeah, that is definitely a counter argument. I would say that maybe actually what you need to do is if you have a bad knee, change whatever shoes you wear when you got the bad knee or every other day wear a different pair of shoes because maybe it's those shoes are putting the extra pressure on your knee and you should shift some of the pain to your Achilles. But hey, I'm not a knee doctor, and don't take this advice to a bank.

You're not a shoe salesman either. But I love the nitty-gritty of things, though, too. I love that stuff. Okay, so now I know the shoe situation. When you were running, did you become obsessed with the feeling afterwards?

Oh, yeah. I didn't answer your initial question, which is what was the thing that pulled me in? Initially, I think it wasn't the feeling of the sport. I spent a lot of time thinking about this because I think it was really just the self-confidence, right? It was the... It translated across my life. I'm a little embarrassed to say that because now I think I believe you run for self-transcendence and you run for all kinds of things. But I didn't understand that when I was 18 years old. I loved running because it's fun. I love going up mountains. I've always loved going up mountains, right? I did feel a spiritual connection while I did that. You do get an endorphin rush when you're running fast. But I stopped I wasn't good anymore. I went to a college with a very good team, and I wasn't good enough. Where'd you go? Stanford. They won the NCA title and they're great. My freshman recruiting class was a class that went on to win NCA. It's a bunch of great runners, and I wasn't fast enough, and I quit. I spent a lot of time when I was writing the book thinking about that decision.

Part of it, I don't feel great about it because I think I quit. The funny The thing is this, now that I realized how fast I am in my 40s, I had the talent to be on that team. I could have been a very successful runner on that Stanford team. I know that now. I stopped before I realized that. Why did I stop? I stopped because I didn't love the sport for deep enough reasons. I stopped because I got injured, I fell behind, and then it seemed impossible to catch up, and so I quit. Had I understood the spiritual dimension, the deeper dimensions of running back when I was 18, I probably would have kept running. Then, ironically, I would have probably realized that I was fast enough to be on the team. But whatever. I'm glad I didn't run on the team because it's pretty hard to be a college athlete and you miss a lot of other stuff. I probably wouldn't have met my wife.

You don't think so because you had so many hours just running. Running is also a solo sport. So much of the time you spend alone.

I would have spent my whole college. My college life would have been focused on the team, which is great.

You may have met someone else.

Yeah, but I'm very happy with the I met.

We're good. What I'm saying is you never know how life- You never know. You never know. Sliding doors. Life could have gone this way. Life could have gone that way based on whatever small little decision that we make.

You can't unwind one thing.

You can't ever unwind.

Okay, so now back to you. I'm going to actually answer your question. Are you sure? I've now failed twice. I have half answered the second time. Initially, I started running because it was a bond with my father. When I was 15, and I discovered running for the second time, it was about self-confidence. Then I think in my 20s and 30s, when I started to really love it, it became a form of meditation. It became a way of... It was like a connection to a different part of the world. I started this very... I've worked very hard in these intense jobs in media in New York City. I go in and I work, and I work all day. I work on hard stuff, and it's stressful all the time. The way I do it is I run in and then I run home. Running became this way of detaching. Even while you live in New York City, even while you have this intense to-do list, even though when you're working, you're getting up at 4: 00 AM and working, you're working till late. Running became this release in this different way to recenter myself. That's when I think I began to really love the sport.

How long were you running? How long did it take you to run to work and back?

It's like it depends on where my office has been. The longest it's ever been is eight and a half miles from my house, so then I would usually only run one direction. Most of the last 15 years, it's been about 4 to 5 miles from my house. And so it's 10 miles if you do it both ways.

And do you take a shower at the office or you don't care? You just work.

I worked at Conde Nast. I'm in the elevators with the editors of Vogue.

Yeah, I was going to say, what are you doing then? You're all sweating coming to the office.

It was a little awkward. I would shower at a gym nearby, but then you still have to change. You shower, you change back your running clothes, and then you keep your suit at the office, and then you change the bathroom at the office. You figure out how to do it. It's a little weird. It's a little awkward.

But it works. It works. But also, were you doing it for a sense of stress, just stress release? You always have these big media jobs. Was it your outlet for just stress?

Well, the outlet for stress, it's also quite efficient.

It's the most efficient.

Because you got to get to work somehow. It's not actually any slower than the subway.

But I just mean in general, did you become addicted to running?

I don't think I ever became addicted to running, but I did love it.

You didn't? Every time you ran, you actually like the process of running?

Oh, yeah. I love the process of running.

I love the feeling after running. I don't love the running while I'm doing it.

I love both. Totally.

Oh, you do? Absolutely. Okay. Again, what is your How do you think running... What did running teach you that made you successful in other parts of your life?

That's a hard question. It's also interesting, the inverse of that. What did working hard teach me about running? I think the most important lesson is the benefit of consistent daily practice. Because what you realize with running is that if you go every day and you run like you do, or you run like anybody, and you run three miles every day or four miles every day, you get better. You do see that. Because running, it's just you and the clock, you could actually see for sure that you're getting better. If you play tennis every day, you might not realize you're getting better. You probably do, but it's a little harder. It's very clear with running. You learn that consistent practice gets you better. Then you go through these periods where you run a marathon, you take some time to recover, you start up again, you're like, Oh, my God, I'm never going to be fast again. Then you just go through the same process again, and you realize, actually, I will be as fast again. You learn the consistent practice. Then you learn... Consistent practice is actually hard because some days it's hot, and some days it's cold, and some days it's rainy, and some days you You don't have a lot of time, and some days your foot hurts, and some days you're sick to your stomach, and some days there's a bee's nest, whatever.

There's always a reason not to run. But once you commit to it, then you just learn to get past those reasons, and you learn that you should just do it in the time available. That's a really good habit for your job. I'm not sure which I learned first. If you want to get something done at your job, you just have to do it right now. Or the best time to do it is right now.

Don't procrastinate.

If you have to get something done in the next hour, start now. Don't complain about how you only have an hour. Same thing with running. If you want to get your run in and you have a window, you just go and do it. That's part of it. I also do think endurance translates. I do some things in my job where you're doing all hands with a staff in a complicated situation. You have to be on and answering questions for two hours. If you make a mistake, might be in the news. How do you get good at that? Not that I'm as good as I could be. Probably helps to run Marathons, right? Right. Doing that probably helps your marathoning, right? I do think that two things go back and forth. The ability to focus hard at a job, I think helps me focus in my training, and the training helps me in the job. Now, they distract from each other, too, because sometimes I have a project and I go running, maybe I should work on the project.

But probably the run afterwards probably made your brain way more sharp, way more focused, productive. The benefits, I think from the running will probably make you way more successful at your job because it centers you, probably, too.

Totally. I have always worked three shifts. I get up and I work, and then I run, and Then I get my job, and then I go home, and I work. In between, now that I have kids, I spend all that time playing with my kids. But at some point, they go to sleep. Then after they go to sleep, I tend to work. When I wake up early, I tend to work. It's like, if I just work work, work, work, subway, work, subway, work.

It breaks up your day. It breaks up your day. I guess what would be your big message then for people listening to the podcast? Why did you write the book in the first place? Just so you like to Run, right? Big deal. I like to run. But why did you write the book?

I wrote the book to try to understand more about why I run and what I get from it. I also wrote, the book has stories of different runners who who have used running as a way to get through really complicated stuff. It's people who enter my life at different points. One of the characters is this guy, Tony Ruiz, who is my coach, and he used running as a way to conquer his heroine addiction. Another is a guy named Michael Westfall, who beat my dad in a race and then was one place behind my son. His story is the fastest run to run a marathon with Parkinson's. It's learning about how to cope with the physical decline caused by Parkinson's and how to use running to help with that. I tell the story of this woman, Super Beckford, who ran a store down the street from my dad. For nine years in a row, she ran and she won the 3,100-mile race in Queens, where you run 3,000 miles around the same block. And so that's a story of using running as intense self-transcendence.

This is what I love about it. Again, it's like to everybody, it's funny how running could transcend or transform people's lives in lots of different ways, right? I see the evolution. I think what you said was very resonated. People start for one reason for self-confidence or weight loss. Then it turns into meditations. It becomes like my meditation and how it helps people who get through really hard times in life. It's like There is something about running that is very different than any other, I don't know, modality out there. That's right.

I think that's right. There are negative things that can make you self-centered. It can make you selfish.

How? Because you're saying it's a lot of solo time where you're doing a lot of stuff for yourself. Because people who are ultra-marathoners, you're spending hours a day running by yourself when What does the joke go?

How do you find out how fast someone ran a marathon when you meet them at a dinner party? Don't worry, they'll tell you.

That's hilarious.

There are ways that it can make you a little too focused on yourself. But I think for the most part- Why do you think that is, though?

I think that's an interesting take.

Yeah, in part because you're not part of a team, usually. It's you. It's It's just you. Part of what makes it such a good form of meditation and self-understanding is what makes you potentially self-centered about it.

I guess that's true, right? Because, again, I always go back to the fact that you're alone. It's a one-man sport type of thing, right?

Right. If I were sitting here and I wanted to, if I were to make the case against running, A, it can make you self-centered, and B, what is success? All you're doing is pushing the other people back. You finish one place higher, everybody else finishes one place lower. In a team, you're with a bunch of other people, and you're competing against a bunch of other people. In a marathon, you're competing against everybody.

Everybody. Exactly. But how is that different than swimming?

It's not. I don't know exactly how most swimming meets are scored, but- Well, no, but it's similar, right? It's similar. I mean, in swimming, it might be worse because you can go out and you can do it like 4 hours a day or five hours a day and like, turn everything else off in your life.

How do you use running?

Part of the hard thing, one of the interesting and complex things in running, I guess we're going to go down what's hard about running bit, which is nice because if my wife were here and you gave her Ruth Serum, she would tell you that she's annoyed at my running sometimes. What the hell? She came downstairs the other day. Normally, I get up, I make everybody breakfast, put the breakfast on the table, and then they come down and we all The other day, I went running because then I'll go run to work. But the other day, I went running. She came downstairs. I'm like, Where's nick? I thought I'd be back before she woke up. But no. That's a minor infraction. We have a very healthy marriage. We've been together forever. But there are times where I'll go for a long run and she'll be like, What is he doing? Why isn't he here? There's stuff going on.

How many hours are we talking?

Well, if I go for a long, I try to do it before everybody wakes up. So if I'm going to go run three hours, I'll go leave at 6: 00 or I'll go leave at 5: 00.

But by the way, that's actually quite thoughtful in a way. You're not running at 10: 00 when everyone's running around looking for you.

No, of course not.

No, don't say, of course not.

I would be divorced by that.

Well, right. But I've had a lot of people sit here with me who are big ultra-marathoners and all the things. And the ones who check themselves, they're doing it. They're running at 4: 00 in the morning or they're doing all these things because of this reason, right?

Part of it is running has never been the most important thing in my life. It's always been important, but it's never been. I mean, this was part of the problem at college. It wasn't the most important thing in my life. It's why I At my age of peak physical fitness, I came in, I don't know, 200th place in a marathon where if I really focused, I could have come in significantly faster. It's always been something I've put a lot of time and effort into, but it's always had a place, right?

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The main message of the book is that running can be a wonderful psychological force in your life, and it can be a way for you to understand yourself, to understand others around you and to build habits that are great for the rest of your life.

Okay, so that's the beginning. And then is it because you have a lot of time to think and it gives you a place where you can... For me, I get my best ideas when I'm running, right? I I don't like to do yoga, but I like to run because that's when I think of the best. Is that what you mean by that? It could be very meditative. It can bring up certain things that you... Because it's like you're bored. You're alone in your thoughts for all these hours. That's when creativity lies. That's where thoughts come into your head. Is that what you mean? Are you a better CEO because you run?

Definitely. It's a way of spurring a creative process in your head. You have the possibility of thinking. As you observe yourself as you run, you think more deeply about yourself and you think more deeply about your place in the world, which is why, in the case of Tony, who I was just mentioning, it was a very important factor in his ability to come back from debilitating drug addiction. It's a way to stay centered and to think about who you are and what your place in the world is. It's a way to just understand complicated things in life. My sense is that... Now, running isn't the only way to do this stuff. My point is not, run, don't bike, or run, don't swim. Running is just the thing I know. It was a way for me to write about the thing I know in the deepest way I could come up with. The first review Two of the book called it Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for Runners. The idea there is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a way of writing about bikes that would help you understand father-son relationships philosophy.

One of the books I read a lot was Barbarian Days. That's a way of writing about surfing as a way to understand father-son relationships, how a young man develops. This is a way of writing about running as a way to try to get at of the complicated things in life, including my relationship to my father, all of these different other runners coping with different barriers.

Talk about the father relationship. What was the relationship? How did running help you cope with your relationship with your father?

To get to there, my father, I mentioned a little bit his interesting childhood and then- Is he alive right now? He passed away in 2017. But his life, so he comes out of the closet in the 1980s. He's working in the Reagan administration. He's actually played an important civil rights role. He's a rare outwardly gay Republican, right? He has this position that being open about your sexuality, the more people who know that gay people are everywhere, the more tolerance there will be in the world. I have a lot of admiration for that. But he's also a maniac, and he ends up in relationship after relationship, hundreds of men a year who he's dating. He proposes marriage and exchanges rings with dozens of them. He ends up essentially running a male brothel in Southeast Asia. He has this, and he's run out of money. He's a tax fugitive. He's in all of these lawsuits with everybody. There's all of this incredible tension and mayhem. He's calling me up and threatening to kill himself if I don't send him $200 so he can pay off the prostitute he's just got. It's a mess. He's a complicated guy.

A guy who John F. Kennedy said was going to be President ends up in Southeast Asia They're completely bankrupt with a harem. Complicated stuff.

Really, this is a book about your dad, but you have to couch it as something beyond because nobody knows who he is.

Nobody knows who he is. He's an amazing character, and he's a very complicated character. I have to deal with him. I stay, weirdly to many people, I stay quite close to him his whole life, even as this is going on. I love the guy deeply. We email back and forth every day, even while he's going through this. I'm financially supporting at the end, the last 5 or 10 years of his life.

Even though he didn't raise you after five.

Correct. Even though he was pretty hostile to my mother. He did a lot of bad things, but he always loved me. That's a very important part of it. He always wanted the best for me. He always thought the world of me. He always supported me. He was always there for me. He never didn't love me. That's the first thing you should ask for from a parent. I forget He gave him a lot.

Did you have a time when you didn't forgive him? Was there ever a moment in time when there was like, estrangement?

There's never estrangement. There was anger, but there's never estrangement. He was estranged from my sister's. They had a more complicated, they had a harder relationship with him, but I was never estranged from him.

It's funny. Even when you talk about your dad now, you can see you're very emotional about him. I know.

It's a little hard to- To talk about him. Many people who met him said they never met anybody quite I like him. He was this just incredible bundle of energy and excitement and interesting. He's so smart and he'd be so fun to talk to. If you met him and you were here for a party or dinner or cocktails and showed up, he'd showed up and he'd probably break something and he'd spill wine on this nice chair and be impossible. He'd probably offensively hit on someone who might be straight, but he'd be convinced he's gay, but he'd be awesome. You'd have a lot of fun with him.

Yeah. I This is like an homage to your dad, the book. It really is.

A little bit. I don't know what he would think of it. He told me at one point, he said, You should write a very candid memoir, and you can say anything you want about me. I don't know. I'll be very interested when his friends read the book and their response to it.

When you sold the book to your publisher, how did you sell it? Where did you say this was?

It was interesting. It was a different structure back then. I said it was a book about running. I said it was a book about my time in the sport. But the initial structure was that It would be like it would trace the stages of a marathon. We talk about the beginning of a marathon and what happened physiologically in the first five miles, the next five miles of the marathon, and that it would layer my life story in running and my journey from being pretty good, being Very good. Then that structure just didn't work. It was like a good... It was good for the proposal. It sounded cool. I tried to write it that way and you couldn't read it. Then it became a very different book.

Well, you just said something that I find interesting, the psychological stages of what happens when you run that long. How do you keep yourself from not giving up and keep on going?

Okay, so at what distance and what race? Because there are different things that I've learned as I've shifted. When I started writing the book, I was only a marathoner, and I became an ultra marathoner during the process.

As you were. Even to go from marathoner to ultra marathoner.

This was really interesting for me. Most of my life, I've been a marathoner. When I'm a marathoner, I'm out there and I'm trying to run a specific time. The window, the band of possible finishing times is quite narrow. You know when you start that there's a 95% chance you run between, I don't know, 2: 35 and 2: 45. You said that. When you run an ultra, you have no idea. I just ran this 100K up in the finger lakes where I just wanted to finish before the sun went down. You have a totally different... You start at 4: 00 in the morning and you know the sun's going to set at 7: 00, so you want to finish in 15 hours, but who the hell knows?

But by the way, not to say that's only But you're not even... That's not 100 miles. No, it's just 100K. That's 100K. Not just 100K, but it's like 65 miles or so.

The other... Weirdly, 100K is 62 miles, but the race was like 66 because I don't really wanted to mess with us.

Have you ever run 100 miles?

No, I've never run 100 miles. But in a race like that... I learned a lesson the first time I did it. The first time I ran it, this race called Twisted Branch. This was last year, I've run it twice. I had this very important moment where I was like 30 miles I've been running for, I don't know, 6 hours because you're going up and down mountains. I was like, My God, right? I've run longer than I've ever run before, and I still have 30 miles to go. I've got my heart rate monitor on. I'm looking at my pace. I'm checking all that. I was like, You know what? I'm just going to turn my watch off. I'm going to turn my heart rate monitor off. I'm going to forget about all that stuff, and I'm just going to think I'm a kid running in the woods. I'm just going to enjoy where I am. I'm no longer racing. I'm no longer worried about the finish time. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not thinking about hydration. I'm not counting calories. I'm just a kid running in the woods. This is something that had been taught to me by that woman I mentioned earlier, Superbebector, who runs 3,000 miles on a block in Queens.

Just think you're a kid. I turned the racing part of my brain off. And once I did that, I was great. I was just galloping through the forest.

It's like mind tricks, basically.

And then when I'm running a race, I'm running a... I ran this 50 in Connecticut in April, and I was trying to set the American record, and so I knew exactly what I was trying to do. I was on pace through 43 miles, 44 miles. And the last five or six, I'm falling apart. My body's in it. If there's a photograph of me coming across the finish line, tears are down my face. I just look totally deformed and wrecked. At that point in a race, when you're trying for a time and your body's giving out, then you're just I'm trying to focus on a mantra. I focus on a mantra where I go, one, two, three, one, two, three, where it's right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right foot. It's a way I both get myself balanced, Alexander technique. You're not landing too hard on one side and the other. It's a way of just really meditating and letting go of everything else. Sometimes I do that. If that starts to break down, I'll be like, Okay, I'm just going to run to the next tree. Let's see if I'll just hold this pace to the next tree.

That's not working. Maybe I'll look. In that race, you're lapping runners. You're seeing people in the distance. Okay, I'm going to run hard until I pass the person in blue. You're playing all these different mind games to stay in it. In the twisted branch race, I'm dissociating. I'm stepping, I'm moving up to a cloud and watching nick run through the forest. In the Lake Warramog, that 50-mileer, where I'm trying to stay on pace, I'm locking into a very narrow version of myself. Both of those experiences, so when you're running a race like that 50-mileer, you lose all awareness of what's going on around you. It's this very interesting experience where it's almost like mind and matter are one. There is no thought. If you were to have a videotape of what is going on in my brain, there is nothing. It is just forward motion, straight ahead, as opposed to this like, cinematic, wonderful thing that's happening when I'm dissociating. Sometimes you're focusing and sometimes you're dissociating when you're in a tense and complicated race like that.

Okay. How did you train differently besides the mind games?

In which period? When I started running Ultras or when I got fast in my '40s?

I was going to ask you on both. But really, I guess now that you say so, how did you become the fastest man in your '40s? How did you train differently? What did you do differently?

That When I was 43, I met with these coaches.

How old are you now?

I'm 50. Okay, 50. When I turned 43, it was a year after my father died, which I don't think is a coincidence. They looked at my training, they looked at my logs, they asked me how fast I thought I could go, and I was like, Well, 2: 43, that's what I always run. I was like, I'd love to hold on to that. They're like, Yeah, okay. I set up a fairly specific routine where I would run seven days a week, and then three days a week, I would do something hard. On Tuesdays, I would go and I would run basically stressing my VO₂ max system. I'd run 400-metre repeats, 12: 400s or 1,600, 400s, or 8, 800s. Thursdays, I'd basically be working on my lactate threshold. I'd run 4 by 2 miles, 3 by 2 miles, 2 by 3 miles. Then Saturday or Sunday, I would run 20 miles, 22 miles. I just kept changing the goals in each of those workouts and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Through doing that, I both improved physically and I improved mentally and realized I could go faster than I thought I could go. Those coaches were trying to trick my mind to make myself think that I could go faster than 2: 43 pace.

So 2: 43 pace is like 6, 15 miles. I was terrified of running a marathon at under 6 minute miles, which is 2: 37 pace. They would have me run like workouts where I'd be doing short distances under five minutes in the hopes that it would reset my mind so I'd be less scared of going under six minutes in a marathon. That eventually got me to run the 2: 29 marathon, which is like, I don't know, 5: 41 pace. That was step one. That was how I got fast at marathons. Then, of course, I ran the 229 in 2019, COVID hit. Then when it was training for ultras, which I'd done maybe the last four years or so, it's similar, but obviously, I'm not running as many, like Me to repeat something on the track.

What other training do you do to improve your endurance or stamina or your strength? Do you do any weight lifting? I'm going to rephrase that. Do you do any It's like resistance work?

Yeah, now I do some weight lifting. Now I do it with my... Okay, this is the funniest thing or one of the revelations. I was talking to a physical therapist once, and he asked me, When was the last time you got hurt? I was like, It was 12 years ago. He's like, 12 years ago? I was like, Yeah, that's the last time I missed a workout. He's like, That's crazy. He's like, What do you do for strength training? I was like, I don't do anything. He's like, What do you do for mobility? I was like, I don't do anything. He's like, You just run? I was like, Yeah, I just run. He's like, But do you ever move your body? I was like, Oh, yeah, I play I Nerf basketball with my kids, and I wrestle with my kids. I play soccer with my kids. I play water wars with my kids. I do one-arm push-up contest with my kids. I do parkour with my kids. He's like, Well, that's why you don't get hurt, right?

You do all this cross-training.

I do all this incredible cross Training because I have three sons who are active. How old are they? They're now 17, 15, and 11. But I play with them all the time. Wow. It was like that was my cross training. Now they're a little older. I like, We'll go to the gym with them and I'll weight lift with them. I was like- You're weight lifting? I was supporting my 11-year-old while he's bench pressing like 35 pounds the other day.

You're super active. You know what? This is actually very... I'm a big believer in this, too. You don't have to be going to an actual gym to get fit. You're doing all the cross training you need by doing all these... You're playing with your kids. You're doing so much functional training also, right? Holding this, doing that. You do do a lot of stuff.

Yeah, I do. Now that they're older, I do more stuff. I also do... Now, we're talking on, I think it's a Wednesday. On Monday, my two younger kids play for this great soccer team, this great club, and I will do workouts with them. I had a couple of 11-year-olds over, and we were doing glute work together.

What?

Just like leg lifts, leg drives, like squats, box jumps. That's all working out. Totally. But I'm training with 11-year-olds. I'm I'm not at a CrossFit gym.

Right. But I think you're so conditioned, especially with the cardiovascular and endurance, and you're very lean, so it's easier for you to do other things. Totally. You know what I mean?

Well, and here's the nice thing about training with an 11-year-old. You're not going to do so many box jumps. You get hurt, right?

Yeah, exactly.

You're going to do the right amount of box jumps. You're not doing like 500. Right.

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I'm a pescetarian, so I do eat some animal protein. I'm pretty strict on my diet. I get up, I have, I don't know, I usually have like, oats mixed with chia seeds, ground flax seed, and a bunch of nuts. Then a bunch of nuts, and then I add some fruit. I have that with coffee and green juice for breakfast. At lunch, I'll try to have salad vegetables, add in a protein, and at dinner, similar. So lots of green vegetables, lots of whole wheat, lots of nuts, lots of Gomes. I do eat carbs.

Good. You have to with that running schedule.

Also, carbs are delicious.

Yeah, they are good. I agree. They're very good. But you'll be pretty healthy. Okay, I want to talk about being the CEO. There's very few publications that are relevant anymore, as I'm sure you know, right? Yours is probably one of the very few. How does The Atlantic keep its relevance? How many people are subscribed? I want to know the nitty-gritty now of The Atlantic.

Sure. This is what I do for a little bit. I know. We now have 1. 35 million subscribers. We are up substantially. We were at maybe 800,000 a few years ago. We've been skyrocketing. It's great. We've gone from losing lots of money to making a good bit of money, which is amazing.

How is that? Through advertisers?

It's actually most... I mean, advertising has I've been the CEO for four years, and advertising has grown. If you are an advertiser or a CMO listening to this podcast, please do advertise. But the principal growth has been through subscriptions. The way that the model has come to work is that we have been really focused on how to get someone to subscribe. There's a whole bunch of questions that come into that. What is the subscription offer? What is the meter? What is the color of the background? If somebody comes in from Google, do you push them to subscribe? If they come from Twitter, if they come in from a newsletter, okay, what are the places where people have real subscription propensities? There's this giant math equation. Every time someone comes to the atlantic. Com, they're either a potential subscriber or they're not. What you want to do is you want to put the paywall in front of the people who might subscribe and not in the ones who won't. If you can get better at that, marginally better at that every day, you make the product more successful.

How can you do that?

Well, you run a whole bunch of tests. You test, what happens if we make the price $69? What happens if we make the price $79? Okay, what if we offer this? What if we put the gate, we allow people to read two stories a month before the gate? What if we make the gate so you can only read one story a month, except on stories where there's a subscription propensity above X during the first 12 hours of the day? You run just all of these tests and you build models behind it. That's what we do. Building that successfully, and you get really good at running advertising. You put advertisements on Facebook and Google, driving people to particular stories, and you identify identify the stories that people are most likely to pay to read. You run that over and over and over and over again, and you look for what users want, and you try to build that. Magic, it's worked. What we have never done, I should also add, our journalists are amazing, and they keep writing awesome content. What we have done is we've taken what the journalists want to do, and then we've built the business model based on that, as opposed to what happens at a lot of media companies where they say, There's a real opportunity for selling advertisements to electric car companies.

Why Why don't you write some stories about electric cars? Then you do that, and then the journalists either say, buzz off, or they write bad stories about electric cars. What we say, hire the best journalists in the world. Here's a bunch of money to do that. Have them write the stories they think are the absolute best, and then we will try to get people to subscribe to read those stories. That model has worked fantastically, at least for the last four years. Who knows what happens with AI? But for now, it's going gangbusters.

Since you've been at the helm, the subscription have skyrocketed.

Yes. Now, I wouldn't make... That might be correlation, not cause, but it is true.

Well, we need it. It could be, but it is. You were at Wired before.

I was at Wired. We did great. We published all kinds of wonderful stories about tech. Then the big shift was shifting from being the editor-in-chief and being in charge of what stories you run and reporting and writing to being the CEO, where you're in charge of the product decisions, the engineering decisions, the advertising calls.

How did you go from editor-in-chief of Wired to the CEO of The Atlantic?

Why did they hire me?

Yeah, because that's a different job. That's a creative job versus now you're in a business position.

Yeah. The Atlantic had a very particular need where they wanted someone who understood business and understood tech, but who also appreciated editorial. They couldn't have hired someone from a straight business background because the system would have rejected it. Then I was actually a very rare candidate. When I had worked at the New Yorker, which is the job I had before Wired, I had been in charge of the website, I had been in charge of the iPhone app, and I'd actually been in charge of the product and engineering team. Because I was the only guy at The New Yorker who knew how to fix the printer and could plug the keyboards in. I was put in charge of the tech team. I knew all this stuff, and I'd covered the tech industry. I knew a lot about business and tech and engineering and product. I had a lot of the skills that mapped onto the Atlantic CEO job. There's a lot of stuff in this job that I'd I've never done before, but I had managed teams. I knew how to handle product managers. I was a reasonable candidate. Then they, I don't know, it took a long time for them to settle on me.

It was a hard call.

Really?

I mean, I don't know. You'd have to get Lorraine Powell jobs on the podcast. The Atlantic is a sacred publication. It was found in 1857 to stop the American Civil War by people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harry Peter Stowe. It is an important institution. It has an amazing editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, and getting the right CEO is tricky.

For sure it is. Well, it seemed to have worked out for you.

Worked out for me, and I think they're reasonably happy.

They're reasonably happy. But what have you seen has been an uptick? What do people care about the most? What gets the most traction in terms of content?

It's actually really wonderful where it's stories that are deeply, emotionally resonant and that people spend a lot of time working on. Reader's love. Reader's love our best stuff. It's wonderful. If you look at the stories that drove the most subscriptions, it's this, well, obviously Jeff's story about Signal, where he was mistakenly included on the White House's Secret Chat. That drove a lot of subscriptions.

Oh, wow. That was a big one.

That was a big one. That drove a lot of subscriptions. But from the previous year- How many subscriptions did that story, the signal story, drive? Many tens of thousands. Lots of subscriptions. I don't have the exact number here.

I bet you it put you on the map. I bet you a lot of people didn't even know what the Atlantic was, and then they saw it in the news all the time because of that journalist from the Atlantic.

Well, and he handled it exactly right. I mean, that was the beautiful thing about it, where it wasn't like, scoop fell in his lap, and he handled it perfectly. And that reflected well on the institution.

Well, how did he handle it? I don't remember. I know he had a lot of class with it, though.

He did. So what happened is he's mistakenly included on the chat.

What a bunch of morons. How could that even happen?

Do you want my Yeah. Okay, so this is unclear, but this is my theory. His name is Jeff Goldberg. His initial is J. G. He meets Michael Walsh at a party. We have photographs of him meeting Walsh, Walsh's business card. They clearly meet Walsh as the National Security Advisor. My theory is that Walsh puts Goldberg's number in his phone under J. G, not under Jeff Goldberg, because he doesn't want his staff to know he's talking to a reporter. So he puts his name under J. G. Then they're starting the signal chat to talk about bombing the hoothies, and he wants to add the Trade Representative because it It involves the Straits or Moos. The trade representative is Jamieson Greer. And so then he adds J. G. Thinking it's Jamieson Greer. That's my theory. Then in Signal, when you look at who's in a group chat, if they're in your address book, they show up as how they are. It shows up as JG on Mike Walsh's phone. Pete Hegset doesn't have Goldberg's number, so it just shows up as 202, whatever his number is. Nobody realizes he's in there. That's my theory. Now, there are other theories, like maybe someone stuck them on, there's some of the fat fingers, maybe who knows?

Any case, that's my work in theory. He gets in the chat and he starts to see what's going on. He's like, What the hell? Then he stays in for a while because he thinks it might be a hoax. He sees what's happening. Then he leaves the chat when he realizes they're discussing classified information and he shouldn't be there. That is actually the proper thing to do.

He left the chat?

He left the chat. Because clearly, he shouldn't have been in it.

True, but curiosity and just being a voyeur. Okay.

Well, curiosity versus espionage act. I mean, you weigh these two. You weigh these two things against each other.

Okay, you're right. Espionage, curiosity, very similar but different.

He leaves the chat, and then He writes up a story because it is in the national interest to publish the story, but he's very careful to leave out secret details and to leave out details of the specific raid and to leave out details of things they wrote. He writes the story, and then, as a good reporter should, he calls the White House and says, Hey, here's the story we're going to publish. That's what you do. You call the person. You don't just publish it in blindside. You call them because you might have something wrong, or there might be something where you need their opinion in. Then they say, Oh, yeah, that's true. Go ahead. Accurate. Then he writes the story. Everything done by the book. We've called our sources, we've handled it admirably, we've taken into account national security. Jeff's kid is in the military. Jeff cares a lot about the military, cares about national security. We were founded as a magazine to protect America. Sometimes we don't agree with Donald Trump, but we are a magazine in favor of America. And so he does it. And then the White House at first is like, Yeah, it's true.

And then for reasons that are beyond me, and again, I'm just a CEO, they start to say the story is not true. And like, There's nothing classified in that chat. We don't know what the Atlantic is talking about. They're making stuff up. There's nothing in the chat that was classified. Because remember, we haven't published the screenshots, right? Then they're like, Wait, what? Why are they doing this? Normally, what happens in journalism is someone denies the story and then eventually admits that it's true. They don't do it the other way around. Admit that it's true and then like, weirdly, deny it. They're now denying the story, which is banana cakes. Then Jeff and Shane Harris, his co-data, are like, Well, I guess we're obligated to the whole thing. Then we put all the transcripts online. We put the screenshots online afterwards, the second day. That's the story. At no point, he's always checking. Everything is always 100% accurate. Everything is to the book, like calling your sources. Even if someone is denouncing you, and even if someone is lying about you, you still call them because you can't be wrong on your side. You have to be as accurate and honest as fact check as you can be.

He does everything exactly by the book. He does everything exactly the way a reporter is supposed to do it. The story ends up reflecting really well on us. It's a benefit to the Atlantic. The scoop falls out of the sky, right?

Literally, yeah.

It literally falls out of the sky onto his phone while he's at the Safeway parking lot. But he handles it perfectly, so it reflects really well on the Atlantic.

Who denied it? Was it that woman, the press? What's her name? The blonde lady?

Yes, she definitely, Caroline Levet. Caroline Levet? She denied it and denounced us. I think she called us a failing magazine. Maybe it was either her or Trump that says that we're a failing magazine about to go to business, which I run the PnL. We're actually doing great. Media is having a hard time. We might go out of business next year, but right now we are crushing it financially. We're doing better than we've ever done. They're making stuff up about our finances, which annoys me as the finance guy.

Of course it does.

But then Hegsas is out there, Nikki Haley is out there saying there's nothing classified in it, which is nonsense.

The The whole thing is a total... How that even happened? I know that your hypothesis makes perfect sense, right? How that could have happened. In any case, why the hell are they on signal talking about this stuff?

It's so... A, they shouldn't be on signal. They should be using a skiff. They're government officials planning an attack, not on their phones, not on signal. Duh. Two, even if they are on signal or even if they're in a skiff, they shouldn't be boasting and BSing about it. There are details that Hegset is putting there that he has no need to. He's just trying to impress the folks in the chat.

It's beyond me. It was so weird. It's beyond. But this is just a gaggle of clowns, really, who are doing all of this stuff.

Then when the story broke, when we published our first story, what they should have done is like, This was a mistake. We've cleaned it up. We've made it so we won't do signal. What this showed is there was a good conversation, but yes, the Atlantic is correct. Instead of making it so much worse by saying, well, there's no classified information, lying about us, lying about the conversation. They shot themselves in the foot there.

Yeah, I would say so. Are you guys then not... This is obvious. Are you guys not allowed to be in the press room?

In the White House press room? I actually don't know the exact policies right now. They have not come after us. Jeff went to the White House and interviewed Trump afterwards.

Really?

Yeah. I don't want to speak out of turn because I don't manage the journalist, but we have gone there. And Trump called our reporter, Michael Shera and Ashley Parker, at 2: 00 in the morning one night, from his cell phone. He still cares about The Atlantic, right?

Well, listen, it's a very prestigious magazine. But why is he calling these people at 2: 00 in the morning from his cell phone? Does he think they're going to answer the phone? Did they answer the phone?

No, it was a voicemail. Or it was just a missed call from... You wake up and it's like- Donald Trump, 2: 00 AM. And then Donald Trump called you at 2: 00 AM. He might be on the phone with Ashley Parker right now. I have no idea.

Does he not sleep, this man?

I I think he sleeps different hours.

Is he like a... What are those... Not Dracula, you know. Ampires that they don't sleep during the day. By the way, not for nothing, this man is like 80 something, and the guy doesn't sleep. The guy has more energy. He eats McDonald's all day. I think that I'm doing things wrong. I mean, I should have his energy and his stamina.

Well, he has this theory, right, that I don't know whether you agree with it, but that I believe he stated this publicly multiple times, but that humans have a fixed number of heartbeats. And so the trick is to not use those heartbeats up. When you're born, there's a whole bunch of people who believe this, right? That every animal has a similar number of heartbeats. That if you look at the number of times an elephant's heart beats, it matches that of a mouse. And that humans are in the middle. And so if you use your heartbeat set, you're likely to die sooner. Now, I disagree with this hypothesis.

Really?

He has stated this. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting theory. You'll have to talk to a physiologist. He may have stated it like haphazardly, He may say that's not what he really believes in. I don't want to misquote the President of the United States of America. But it is a theory that I've heard from multiple people. I don't think it's correct, to be honest. But he's clearly vigorous.

Clearly. By that hypothesis, does that mean if you run and I run, we work out a lot, our hearts are beating faster. Are we going to die faster?

Okay, so we'd have to pull out a calculator, but it's actually a pretty interesting calculation. It depends, because what happens when you exercise, your resting heart rate goes down. That's true. Let's say your resting heart rate goes down 10 beats a minute because you exercise a lot. It goes from, say, 55 to 45. Then 23 hours a day, you're saving 10 beats a minute. For one hour a day, you're going up 100 beats a minute. You have to do the math.

It's like a balancing.

It's actually pretty close. I'm not sure whether... It depends on how much exercise reduces your resting heart rate and your your average walking heart rate, and it depends how much your heart rate goes up when you exercise. I think probably an hour a day of exercise is the optimal amount if you want to keep your total lifetime heartbeats.

That makes sense. An hour a day. So someone like you or people who are doing ultras for 12 or 13 hours a day. Well, that's not- The fact that you're even alive at 50, you should have been dead at 37.

Well, this gets to another really interesting debate, which is, is there a point at which too much exercise is bad for your heart? The heartbeat debate is a silly, fun one, but this one is a serious one. And there are very smart cardiologists who believe that there is a limit. There are very smart cardiologists who believe that if you look at the data and you look at studies of ultra-endurance, thinnish skiers, the more exercise, the more time, the longer you live. It's clear that exercise, to the extent that I do it It does some bad things. It increases my odds of atrial fibrillation. It does some bad things to the heart, but it also does so many other good things that it may be a net benefit.

It may balance itself up.

I think it's a net benefit, but of course, I think that because I love running.

Well, you could justify... Anyone can justify anything.

But you could find some smart cardiologist to scare the hell out of ultra runners if you wanted to.

I believe that, though. That I can believe. There's a lot of people that I know who are stupid fit. They play tennis five hours a day. Perception, from the outside, optics would say that they were really fit, and they dropped dead of a heart attack when they were like, 45. And maybe it's because of that whole thing that you just said, right? Like they've used up their ticks, or it's because it actually can be counterintuitive. Sometimes more is not or whatever. More is actually More is less, not more is more.

There are also a couple of other additional hypotheses. So one, it's all of that, the hearts of muscle, building the muscle. Maybe that's not totally great in every way. Two, a lot of people, when they exercise a lot, they use that as a justification. I can have the fries because the engine burns hot. You can put anything in the engine. But that's not true at all. That's so true. I can have a drink because I exercise hard. I have a second drink. I have a third drink. I'll be able to run it off in the morning. And so Exercise can create good habits. I'm not going to drink at all because I have to run in the morning. Or it can create bad habits. I'm going to run in the morning so I can drink. I think a lot of super fit people actually have a bunch of terrible habits. I was listening to your podcast with Lance Armstrong. You were talking about he ate four hot dogs, and I had a diet cook. I was like, what the hell?

Totally. He's a perfect example of this. But I meet people like Lance a lot, where a lot of friends of mine who are super athletes, like Lance level, just not in biking. And I go out with them, and they're not doing all the crazy stuff. They're not biohacking their lives to death. They're eating much more freely. They're exercising, but they're not frantic and crazy about it. They're more balanced in their life. To be honest with you, what I want to say is that I actually think that's actually more healthy because I think anything extreme is what it does to your mental The psychology that goes on in your brain is actually why it's detrimental, more so to your body. And over-exercising. How about this? Because I over-exercise for sure. I do it because if I didn't, I would be a lunatic. But I've broken down my body. I have ankle problems. I have a knee problem. You know what I mean? I have probably my cortisol is high versus people I know who don't really do much, and they're probably way healthier in the inside. I may look better, like fitness. I may look more fit, but my insides are probably much more fucked up than somebody else's who like, casually does some walking and some yoga.

You know what I mean?

Totally. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, lived in '97, and he smoked a lot, he drank a lot. His philosophy was this amazing philosophy, which is like, what you should do is never exercise, except occasionally exercise really hard. Play tons of tennis or hike a really hard mountain or go skiing like crazy. He lived this awesome life and he had so much fun. He like, sport was this just source of joy for me. Mounteneered and never stressed about it. He wasn't taking his resting heart rate when he woke up in the morning. He had a very healthy relationship to it. Also, there are genetic elements. I just had my blood work done and there's a genetic component of heart disease risk, which is your LPA. Mine is massive. It's like in the 99th percentile of bad. I have a huge genetic risk of a heart attack, which I wouldn't have known and which could wipe me out despite all of my running when I'm in a much younger age than you would expect. There's all kinds of reasons that are totally independent of how we train that could mean the end of us.

What also I find interesting about the running part is the burning of all the lean muscle mass. Whenever I look at runners who are crazy runners, extreme, they never They're soft fat. You know what I mean? They don't have tone in their body.

Well, this is back to it's fun talking about some of the bad things about running. It can also make you in a way anorexic. There's this coach. When I showed up at Stanford to join the cross country team, I'm a pretty lean guy, he sends this thing. It's like, You should weigh 2 pounds per inch. Sounds fine. I was like, Okay, cool. Whatever. I was like, Okay, so I'm 6'1. That's 73 inches, so I should weigh 146 pounds. I went 165. I was 19 pounds overweight. Skinny guy. I was like, Oh, my God, I'm 19 pounds overweight for the Stanford cross country team.

How much you weigh right now, by the way?

Like 155. I'm still like nine pounds overweight.

Wow. You're so skinny.

Yeah, but I'm super overweight. Now, he would never say that now because you're not allowed to.

Only because it's not PC to say it.

But he still thinks it. Everybody knows he thinks it. Mark Whitmore, who was the coach of Colorado Buffaloes, one a bunch of national titles, told his runners that they should look like a skeleton with a condiment. That's what he told the guys. That's not healthy. It's really not healthy for 18-year-old girls to be told that. Terrible. It's really psychologically unhealthy. This is why so many of women runners have all these broken bones and they don't have their period, and all these horrible things happen. It can be a very destructive sport if you focus on the weight loss element. On the other hand, my coach at Stanford has coached a ton of Olympians. Mark Whitmore coached a lot of winners. That is the thing they are doing. One of the ways that you can win is be phenomenally skinny, which is potentially It's not healthy.

Well, by the way, yes, exactly. So there's like that. It's like a very delicate balance, right? Because the truth is, if you're coaching at such a high level, you obviously want the team to have every advantage to win, right? Yeah. I I hate to say it, but for running, well, for a lot of things, it does matter how much you weigh, right? Because if you are small and thin, you'll be faster, right? It just is. It's just physics. Like, It's bio. It's what it is. You have to understand from the perspective of you're hiring someone to win for you, right? Or else you'd have a bunch of body positive people there, like hiring whoever to do it, and you will never win a thing. Right.

I mean, you do better at Ultras, right? I remember my wife came to a mountain race I did. At the end, she said the funniest thing. She watches the finish, and at the end, she's like, You know, nick, the people who beat you in this race, they look a lot more normal than the people who beat you in your other races.

Really?

Why is that? So this is a mountain race. To be a great mountain runner, you need a little extra muscle mass. Strength.

Yeah, you do need strength.

You're literally pulling yourself up.

Well, it's different. Well, that's what I'm Every sport for running, it makes sense why you have to be very thin. I was going to say frail-looking, but I don't mean it that way. No, I know what you mean. I mean very lean.

But look at the people who win the 100-milers. They don't look like the winners of the marathon. In fact, the women who... Women actually are better than men once you get up about 200 miles, in part because they store extra fat and extra energy. Genetically, they're set up to do that because Because childbirth is so hard and takes so long. That is one hypothesis. Women have an advantage when you get to really, really, really long races.

Yeah, that's actually true.

They have a huge disadvantage in the mile in the marathon for lots of reasons, like testosterone levels, body angles.

I was going to say a lot of this is hormones. This is why running is not a great sport for women, though, in general, when you're doing the track because of the hormones. By the way, that's not even... It's not just running. It's like, look at gymnastics. Over-exercising, over-exerting your sofa hours and hours and hours a day is hormonally not great for you.

It totally screws up a lot of these- It screws up your whole body. These women. I tell the story, one of the runners I read about, I read about five runners. I interviewed tons and tons of different runners. I chose five because they each tell something interesting. But one of them is this woman, Julia Lucas, who starts running in high school, realizes she's this incredible talent, goes to college, but just she breaks her leg seven times running, in part because of All of the pressure that's put on these women for the intensity they have to train while you're going through this period of growth. I mostly tell her story. I tell her story for lots of reasons. One is she finishes college and it's so hard to make a living, but she's so focused. She's She's basically homeless while she's training as an elite runner. She lives in Forest Park in Portland and brings her stuff when it rains, puts her stuff in a bag and rents a little locker at the train station. While she's training and she becomes an elite runner, she She comes the best miler in the country. By then, she has a sponsor, but she has to go through this period of years where she's just injured all the time and her body's broken and she's homeless and goes through it.

Then I tell the story of her. She comes as close as you can come to make in an Olympic team without making it. She runs this race where she either has to come in the top three or have the third-place finisher run slower than 15, 20. She comes in fourth and pulls the third-place finisher to a 15, 19. 9. You cannot have a closer miss of the Olympics. Are you serious? It's the most incredible race to watch. She's an awesome person, and she's so smart, and she's so reflective on this race. But I love the story of how... Then she has this very stoic, amazing interview afterwards where she's like, Well, I had no pain, no pain at all. She's this very deep philosophy about running and why she does and what she's trying for. But she also the whole time is struggling with some of the questions we've been talking about, about how much do we run to optimize ourselves and to be the perfect machine and how much do we run for the spiritual release? She has this constant tension between these two. I tell her story for all those reasons.

That's a great story.

Yeah, it's really... She's an amazing person.

That's a good one to choose, actually. All right, my dear, nick, the book is called The Running Ground, Nicholas Thompson. Thank you for being on the show.

That was so much fun to talk. We covered a lot of ground. Yeah, I did not think we were going to get quite so deep into Signalgate, but I'm very happy that we did.

Oh, my God. I'm so happy we did, too. I love I love that. I'm going to clip that. I think it's so interesting. Are there any other juicy little bits you want to tell us?

I've worked on a lot of interesting stories in my life, a lot of interesting reporting.

What would be the... Give me one story. What was the most interesting thing that you've ever worked on?

I had a very long friendship with Stalin's daughter. I had a very long friendship with Stalin's daughter, and for years, we wrote letters. I couldn't publish it while she was alive, but it's a story of a woman who grows up in the Kremlin and who has this intense relationship with her father, where her father sends her boyfriend to the gulag. A lot of people have father issues where they don't like their boyfriend. They're normally not sent to the gulag by Stalin.

Oh, my God.

She has some problems with her father, but also loves him, and he's devoted to her in a way. Her mother commit suicide because she's married to Stalin. This woman grows up, and she's so smart, she's so interesting, and she's so creative. She flees, she comes America. It's a big sensation. Then she disappears. When I discover her and find her and start writing her letters, she's living in this old folk home, anonymously in Wisconsin. I, at the time, was writing a book about the Cold War, and I was writing about this character, George Kennen. Who she had been friends with. She responds to me. She gets interview requests all the time because she's Stalin's daughter. But I write to her not to ask her about Stalin, but to ask her about George Kennen. She starts writing me back, and she's so smart. She's observed everything about Kennen, and she sees things that nobody else had seen. We become friends and we write these hundreds of letters. Then eventually, she starts talking about her life and her loves and her ambitions and what she missed and her failures in life and her aspirations. She sometimes gets really mad at me, and she denonces me.

She's never going to talk to me, and then she'll start writing me letters again. The story of my friendship with her was one of the more fun things I've ever worked on.

That is really interesting.

It was a crazy story. I could only write it after she had died, but I published that in The New Yorker maybe 10 years ago.

That's a great one, too. Tell me one more.

I wrote a really interesting story at the end of my time at Wired. I love to hike. I had heard about a guy who had hiked on the Appalachian Trail. He had been hiking for months, and he had hiked from New York to in Florida, and then he'd been found dead in a tent, amaciated in a tent. No one knew who he was. I wrote the first story, and everybody in the trail knew his name was mostly harmless, but he'd used cash when he'd bought things in the stores. He'd never revealed his own name. I published I published the story, and I was like, Look, this will be in Wired. Someone will know who he is. Someone had called me because on the trail, he had said he was a coder. He had told somebody he was an engineer. All these people were looking for him. I published the story in Wired, and millions of people read it, and No one knows who he is, and no one can figure it out. I start getting all these tips. These Facebook groups are formed, and there's hundreds of people going through every clue and looking at photographs.

They do DNA analysis to try to trace his Trace's relatives. Can they figure out where he's from? Then the DNA analysis reveals that he's from a family in Louisiana. I start buying ads on Facebook in Louisiana, driving to my story so that people will read it and identify who this guy might be. Then finally, after months of tips and red herring and craziness and all these hunters, someone is like, Wait, that's my old friend, Vance. It turns out it's this guy named Vance Rodriguez, who had been estranged from his parents, so they weren't looking for him. No one was looking for him. He's a bad guy. He'd been cruel to his girlfriend. He had disappeared to start over, and no one cared. No one was looking for him. It was a a sad story. But then he turned himself into this saintly character on the trail who everybody loves. It's this missed opportunity of total reinvention, where this guy who is a dark force in life becomes this beloved character. This is why so many people are hunting for him because they're in love him. He's this very handsome, wonderful guy. Then it's revealed that he beats up his girlfriends and is cruel.

It's this incredible cognitive dissonance that all these people have when they realize, wait, the guy they were hunting for isn't Prince Charmy. I wrote the first story. It's called The Search for Mostly Harmless, and then the second story about his life. Those are two of the last stories I wrote at Wired.

I think that's so exciting. I love that. That's so interesting.

It's a pretty interesting tale.

I love this. Well, thank you for being... Listen, I had a great time talking to you. So thank you.

It was so much fun. It was amazing. It was great.

So much fun. Good luck with this book. I'm sure it's a really nice read, and you guys have to check it out, The Running Ground by Nicholas Thompson. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.