Running From and Running Toward: Rewriting the Stories We Inherit with Nicholas Thompson

What if the stories you inherited about who you’re supposed to become—from your family, your industry, your own fears—are the very narratives holding you back? 

In this powerful episode of the Positive Leadership Podcast, I welcome Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, a visionary media executive who has led transformations at The New Yorker and WIRED, and an extraordinary marathoner who set an American record in the 50K at age 45. 

But Nick’s story isn’t just about professional success or athletic achievement. It’s about the conscious choice to rewrite the narrative we inherit. 

Nick grew up watching his brilliant father—a Rhodes Scholar and academic star—whose life eventually “cracked up” due to alcoholism and personal struggles. Around Nick’s 40th birthday, his father warned him: “All men’s lives fall apart at this age.” That was the script Nick had inherited. A story of inevitable decline. 

But Nick refused to live that story. 

In our conversation, we explore: 

🏃 The Running Ground – How Nick used running as therapy to honor his father while writing a different ending (achieving a 2:29 marathon at 44) 

📰 Truth in the Age of Misinformation – Leading The Atlantic through a crisis of trust, deepfakes, and algorithmic manipulation 

🤖 AI as Editorial Tool vs. Existential Threat – Why he says AI is “the best tool we’ve ever had” but could also “completely obliterate us” 

👨‍👦 Inherited Patterns – Recognizing generational trauma and consciously choosing a different path 

⚖️ ️ The Church-State Separation – Why editorial independence matters more than ever 

💪 Defying Aging – Getting faster with age and what it teaches about leadership limits 

Nick’s profound insight: “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

That sentence captures everything: honoring where we come from while consciously choosing who we become. 

Whether you’re navigating generational patterns, leading through uncertainty, or simply asking yourself what story you want to live—this conversation will challenge and inspire you. 

Key Themes: Narrative identity, media leadership, AI ethics, generational healing, resilience, editorial integrity, running as therapy, conscious choice 

🎧 Related Episodes You’ll Love: - 

•  Herminia Ibarra: Growing through personal disruption https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/10210926 
• Caroline Leaf: Managing your mind - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/15018482 
• Angela Duckworth: The power of grit - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/14677055 
• Peggy Johnson: Leading a human-centric future of AI - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/18329548 

Subscribe now to JP's free monthly newsletter "Positive Leadership and You" on LinkedIn to transform your positive impact today: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Hello, this is Jean-Philippe Courtois. Welcome to Positive Leadership Podcast, the podcast that helps you grow as an individual, as a leader, and eventually as a global citizen as well. Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming a truly visionary guest. He's a renowned technology journalist, former media executive who's led digital transformation at The New Yorker and Wired, and still the Atlantic, a 166-year-old institution, into the future. Under his leadership, The Atlantic surpassed more than one million subscribers, returned to profitability, proving that principal journalists can thrive in the digital age. But what really strikes me about him is his deep commitment to trust and truth as well in media. He marries that with his innovator's mindset. And he's not just a media leader, by the way. He's also a Navy Marathoner who set an American record in the 50K race for his age group. He's even written a wonderful memoir about running and his father titled Running Grounds. He believes in pushing limits, whether it's running faster with age or innovating in the industry while keeping humanity at the core. Where he does. Nicholas Thompson, Nick, if I may, very welcome to the Positive Leadership podcast. So excited to have you on the show.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: That was a lovely introduction. Thank you, Jean-Philippe. I'm thrilled to be here.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So, Nick, I'd like to start, as I usually do with my guests, with a first question about your early life. You've written, obviously, a wonderful book which I love about your dad and how his journey influenced you. And even down to your shared love of writing. But beyond your dad, we'll come back to your dad later on, if you don't mind. Can you tell us more about your family background? What about your mom, by the way, as well, that you talk a bit less about? And what kind of values did you inherit from them that kind of shaped who you are today?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, my mother is an incredibly strong, kind, generous woman. So my father left when I was six or seven years old. My mother raised the three of us in Boston. She comes from a prominent political family. Her father was at that time Ronald Reagan's chief arms negotiator. Her grandmother had been the first female congresswoman in New York City. So she comes from this wonderful line. And she married my father who had huge political aspirations. And when they met, he was returning from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. And his career didn't pan out the way he wanted. They had us three lovely children, and then he left. So she's very generous, kind, sweet, smart. She's volunteered at the church for 30 years. She has, I don't know, 30 godchildren, right? My memory of her when I was just a little kid is her carrying all the suitcases and making sure that everything was set up and online for us, and extremely protective of us. And we needed that because my father was a tornado. And he comes out, he leaves the family, comes out of the closet, and then starts just filing lawsuits. It's financial mayhem, it's political mayhem, it's social mayhem. And my mother wanted, he calls the school and says, I'm going to be kidnapped by his rogue boyfriend who had just killed my sister's cat, right? There's a lot going on. And my mother is like, you know what? My children are going to be all right. I'm going to protect them. They're going to read books. They're going to study hard. They're going to do well. They're going to have good values. They're going to marry kind people. They're going to treat other people with respect. They're going to have good Christian values. And that was her mission.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Does it mean that it was kind of a yin and yang between your dad and your mom? Calmness on one hand, and tornado on the other hand as well?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, even he was aware of that. He wrote me this wonderful revealing letter when I turned 21, in which he thanked my mother for countering some of the chaos that he had brought upon us children.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: What are the values you think you inherited from your mom? Because I think we'll come back to values as well, you inherited from your dad.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, I think a little hard to disentangle, a little hard to know what you get from your friends, what you get from your school, what you get from anything. I do think that there are certain values that I have, probably a kind of patriotism and love for America that comes from my mother and from my mother's side of the family. I very much respect the rules. I very much respect other people. I very much seek compromises and try to be kind, generous, see the other side. I think that all comes from my mother. And then I think that the sort of drive and intensity probably comes more from my father.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: We go further. You know, talking about that upbringing reminds me a little bit about a kind of common background a little bit you have with Peggy Johnson, by the way, who introduced me to you. Thanks, Peggy. You know, she made a reflection about her family. She's a kid of 15 children. So a few more than yours. And she taught me that, obviously, in that family, every voice mattered. And of course, when you are one of 15, you better have a good voice to be heard. So I know you've had as well, obviously, beyond your early years, some incredible adventures. I've read that you were five minutes in your very first day working at CBS, and soon after you were actually kidnapped in Morocco while traveling. And ironically, I heard as well that your dad also had some funny story in Ghana. So can you tell us more about those two separate stories? What did you end up in Morocco kidnapped by someone? Why? And then the way you lost your job after, I don't know if it was 60 minutes, but it was very fast.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I mean, they're actually connected. So what happened is I graduated from college and I didn't really have a plan for life afterwards, which is quite confusing to me now when I look back in retrospect. I was so focused on being a good college student that I didn't really focus on what happens next. And I was so immersed in the world of my undergraduate university. So I graduate and then, you know, what should I do? So I go and I go play guitar and I'm playing guitar in New Hampshire. But I also go down to D.C. and I'm engaged in political life, and I meet someone who's a producer at 60 Minutes, someone I've met before. And she says, well, I'm hiring an associate producer. I said, Great. And so I go and I interview. She says she wants someone who'll help her carry her cameras across Laos and memorize the names of everybody in this, every aide in the Senate. I'm like, I can do that and probably could. So she hires me as an associate producer, which is great. And so I leave New Hampshire where I'm playing guitar, I go down to New York, I show up, and the executive producer, this guy Phil Scheffler, calls me into his office and he's like, Hey, who are you? I'm coming to the new associate producer. He's like, what have you done in television? I was like, well, I haven't done anything in television. But I got hired and he fired me on the spot. And yeah, I was there less than 60 minutes. And it was a couple of reactions. One, I didn't quite understand, probably illegal what they did. It was certainly ethically wrong. I didn't quite understand. I was like, oh, well, I guess I got fired. I'll get another job. And I didn't quite recognize how badly he had behaved or how inappropriate it was. So then I'm like, well, what am I going to do? And I was talking to one of my friends, my friend who had, he was going to England the next year to start graduate school. He ended up getting a Marshall Scholarship. He said, well, I'm going to Africa. I'm going to tour West Africa for six months before going to graduate school. I said, I'm coming with you. And so I went and got vaccinated and told my mother and met with some foreign correspondents and learned how to get some tips on how to live and travel in Africa. We were just going to take buses and stay in hostels on a very small budget. I thought I would try to write news stories. So I go to Africa and I've got my guitar and I show up in Morocco, right? Tangier, I've taken the boat down from Spain. And I'm in the train station. This is day one. A guy comes up to me and he's like, Hey, you want to come home and play guitar for my Ramadan feast? And my friend is with me, he's like, no way. I was like, no, this is great. I get in a guy's car and I know something's wrong immediately when he starts.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Justin, you're on. Nobody else, just you.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Just me. And then he holds me, he has this strange plan about me selling his drugs in New York.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Oops.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Locks me in a bathroom, his brothers. It's a very weird episode. But eventually he's like, let's me go. I mean, not eventually, a day later. And so I then take the train and go meet my friends. So it was a rocky start to Nick's 22nd year on this earth.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Were you scared actually by that moment when you spent that night with that stranger or someone in Margo?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I was extremely scared. Yeah, I stayed up all night and I remember him and his brother sitting there smoking pot and I was like on the couch. I wasn't like tied up. But it was clear that it was a very bad situation and I was worried about what might happen. They searched through my bag. You know, they're talking about, I remember them talking about Moroccan prostitutes. I don't know, like, I don't quite remember what the context was. Like, they weren't, they didn't have a gun, they didn't have a knife, but like it's two, you know, big guys in the country where I don't know where I am. And so I was scared, but I was never, I know, it was before, you know, for your listeners, this was before 2001, right? If you're kidnapped after 2001 with the sort of Islam, Jihad, Western, after Daniel Pearl, it's a whole different context. This was 1998. So I never felt that, I never felt like my life was at risk.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah, got you. But I'm sure that you've been probably more cautious in not following strangers after this story, even in New York.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I've been quite cautious in not following strangers. I've been, you grow up fairly, I mean, you take a trip like I did, I spent, I don't know, four months there, just, you know, the first place we stayed was like, okay, let's find the cheapest hotel in Dakar, right? And there's some weird sounds, oh wait, we've like rented a room in a brothel, right? Like you just see and learn things and you're like, we've got to get out of here. And this is for a kid who's like, you know, went to Andover and Stanford. And so now I'm in West Africa and I'm traveling everywhere. I'm on a very low budget and trying to figure out if I can balance the books by writing news stories. It was a great experience. It was great.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So Nick, as you said, you've been trying a lot of things, I think, in your early years, right? In your 20s, from being a musician in a subway to working in tech, considering law school, I think, one point as well, even environmental work, if I'm not mistaken. But eventually found your vocation, if I can call that your vocation, your calling, with journalism, right? Could you share with us what ultimately drew you into journalism? Was there a moment? You know, kind of a trigger that made you realize that telling stories and seeking truth was your passion and path for the future.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: You know, it's pretty interesting because it didn't happen the way it normally happens. Like most people who go into journalism, they work for the school paper, they realize they love to investigate the truth, they love the process of getting from A to B. And that wasn't me. I mean, I had worked in journalism, but not as a reporter. I had founded a magazine at Stanford where I was an undergraduate about political debate and it was right wingers versus left wingers. It was wonderful. It was a great experience actually for now, because I had to sell the advertisements for it. And then I had been a columnist. And so I had seen the persuasive power of journalism. And I had even written op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post as like, you know, 21 year old with strong views on politics. And so I had seen its political power. But I didn't understand reporting. I didn't understand journalism. I was like an op-ed writer. And so I finished college, I come back from Africa and I'm trying to figure out what to do. And as you said, I spent some time working as a street musician. I joined a computer company, 'cause a friend of mine was running a Linux hardware company, which is fun. I worked for the Environmental Defense Fund as an intern. I did a lot of things. I'm trying to find my footing. I'm having a hard time finding my footing.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I go to an interview at, I can't remember if it was an environment, I don't even remember the organization, but it was some kind of like policy organization, right? Because I thought of—NGO. An NGO of some sort. It was like, it wasn't the National Resource Defense Council, but it was something like that. And I showed up for the interview wearing a sweater that's like, I don't have holes in it or something. And I meet with this woman and she sits with me for like an hour. And at the end she says, you're a really interesting young person, right? You don't know how to dress, you don't know how to do an interview, you don't know how to be a professional, but you're quite ambitious and reasonably smart. She said, you should apply to work at the Washington Monthly. I was like, I've never heard of the Washington Monthly. So I go home and I Google the Washington Monthly. And it's this magazine in Washington. And so I send them a letter and I say, hey, I'm interested in working for you. So then they call me up and they say, fine. And I didn't realize this at the time, but basically this is this amazing publication that has no money. And so when they find something they think will write a story for free, they'll assign the story. And they call me up and they say, sure, we'd like you to write a story. We won't pay you for it, but we'll pay you basically nothing. And we need to talk about it. And I agree to write a story about—I was right about that. Remember when Thailand's economy, Thai currency markets crashed and it caused all sorts of waves? I said that I would write a story about currency markets in Thailand. I had been in Thailand at the end of my Africa trip. I'd gone to Southeast Asia. I wrote that story for them and they really liked it and they ran it. Then they hired me as an editor. There's a system at the Washington Monthly where it was run by this benevolent tyrant, benevolent alcoholic tyrant, Charlie Peters, who had gone from the Peace Corps into journalism and he'd found this magazine. And the business model that he'd eventually settled on was him at the top and then two young editors, often hired out of Harvard Crimson. And it turns out that some combination of his ability to spot talent, his mentorship and the network effect meant that a fairly large percentage of America's best journalists had started there, right? Jim Fallows, Taylor Branch, Kate Boo, Jason DeParle, all these just awesome journalists. John Meacham had come right before me. And so I get hired there. I'm hired there by Robert Worth, who now writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, great correspondent. And so I start there and I spend two years there. And I remember the first—it was like the second story I wrote. I remember I was like, what does the word report mean? Like, what does that actually mean? I didn't know. And then this is the funniest thing. It's so embarrassing. I filed my first story. It was all these great quotes in it from all these people. And Bobby Worth is like, that's awesome. You talked to all these people. I was like, no, no. They said these in other publications. I thought I could just reuse them. He's like, you can't do that.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Doesn't work that way.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: You can say they said that in the Los Angeles Times, but you can't just say they said this because it sounds like they said it to you. And I was like, oh. And I remember just frantically revising my story to take out. But it was in that process that I learned how to record and I learned about fact-checking and I learned about how to structure a story and how to interview people and the rhythm of interviews. And that was my—and then from then on, that's been my career.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And do you recall your very first kind of editing? I mean, some of the red lines, maybe, I don't know if they are red, that your editor made on your first kind of article?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, he very well, in fact, he didn't edit the way he didn't use red lines. So what he did is this. I filed it, it would have been my second article. And I don't remember what he said about the Thai currency story, but I sent in the story about gambling. And he's got this thick West Virginia accent. And you know, you work seven days a week and I'm in the office on a Sunday. And maybe I've handed it in on Saturday. And then the phone rings and this is what I hear. Is this Nick? Yeah, yeah. Now, why would someone give me a story like this? Because they're an asshole. A fucking asshole. Hangs up the phone. Right? So then, well, that's not good feedback. It's really not what you would call motivational.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Highly motivational, yes.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Highly motivational. I go to Bobby and I'm like, man, what's going on? And he's like, oh, man, let me check. He looks and he's like, yeah, the Redskins are losing. He's drunk. But yeah, he's probably not happy with this. And so then I go and I see him. I go to this restaurant on Monday. I go up Connecticut Avenue. We're down in Dupont Circle. I go up Connecticut Avenue and I go see Charlie. And he writes in this green felt pen and he has my story printed out. What I remember him saying is I was like, well, can you elaborate? Like, what did I do wrong? He's like, well, you wrote it like a pompous dickhead. And then I remember he showed me, am I going to get exactly right? But I had, there was a program in Georgia where they used lottery receipts to help finance, like, educational grants for poor people. It was called the Hope Program. And at the beginning of the piece, like, I was very anti-gambling and so I had called it the ironically named Hope Program. And it just, it upset Charlie because he's like, you know, okay, fine. Gambling is bad. Be a moralist. But like this money is going to a good place. Like what's wrong with you? Why are you like such a dick to call it ironically named? Just call it the Hope Program. And he wasn't wrong. And so I went back through the piece and it's actually a very useful exercise for the kind of journalism I do now, which is you may not like gambling, Nick, right? You may think it's wrong, but that's it. You don't need to shove that down the reader's throat. In fact, like it's not relevant. Your job is to explain what this program does, why they do it, and what the implications are. And that's like your job, not to take your preconceived moral positions and like put them into every sentence. And Charlie was right. I mean, it's not that, I mean, he wouldn't last five minutes in today's media environment before he got canceled, but. He and maybe it's not psychologically healthy to call your 24-year-old employee who's just started a fucking asshole, like, all the time. But it is what it is and it worked for me and he was dead on.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Thank you for all sharing this wonderful story with a lot of colors as well, from red to green and others. And eventually, obviously, Nick, you landed a wonderful job at The New Yorker. And later on, becoming Editor in Chief at Wieden+Kennedy. So looking back again, those experiences at The New Yorker and Wieden+Kennedy, what were some of the pivotal lessons, a couple maybe that you learned as an editor and then as a leader? We'll come back to the leadership position, which is different, obviously, than being a college journalist, right?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, so there's three chapters. There's when I'm Wired, I'm a senior editor at Wired. And then I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker, and then an executive at The New Yorker, and then I'm the editor-in-chief at Wired. And so what I learned in that first chapter, which is as a senior editor at Wired and a senior editor at The New Yorker, is that when you're an editor, the most important thing you can do is you build a network of writers who trust you, and you get the best that you can out of them. And some can do work at this level, some can do work at this level, some need to be—some you rewrite every sentence, some you don't touch a sentence. You learn what their skills are, you learn what their strengths are, you learn how to talk to them. Your success and the magazine's success depends on whether you can get the best out of these people. There are all kinds of ways you can step on that. You can treat them all the same. You can think that your writing is better than their writing. You can be competitive with them. Like editors make all kinds of mistakes. And so I quickly realized when I was at Wired that my job was to go and to find really good people with whom I could have this relationship. And I remember like kind of struggling at the beginning. And then like there's this cohort of writers I pulled in, you know, it was Evan Ratliff, Jen Khan, Doug MacGray, like these people who I was about the same age as who I really liked personally and who produced excellent work. And so then once I'm working with them, I'm really learning and I'm learning from them and they enjoy working with me. And I go from kind of like being a confused editor at Wired to being like a very successful editor at Wired. And then that leads me to The New Yorker, where it's the same lesson again: you come in and I came in as a senior editor. My job was just, I had like six writers I had to work with, maybe eight, right? And that's the whole job. The job is not to write, the job is not to do anything else. And so you really learn, like I remember I worked with Ken Auletta who's very different from Calafisani. I work with both those people trying to get the best out of them. And it's a great challenge and I love that job. And also the other thing I learned, I wasn't a reporter, I wasn't a writer. I'm not writing stories myself back then. But you learn how to find stories because you want them to trust you that you'll give them good stories. And so I learned, you know, I would go to a dinner with some with, you know, I'd be at dinner with a group of eight people, and I would, like, be tuned to, like, hey, you know, what's going on that's interesting in your world? Like, oh, you're a lawyer. What's a, what's a case you, what's a case you've read about that's, like, surprising and unresolved? Oh, you know, you're, you're an investigator. Or, like, you know, trying to sort of, you just developed this sort of very curious habit of mind, and then I would go back and write down possible stories and. That became one of my strengths, finding stories for people to write.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I love it. And would you say that similarly to some other leadership roles? And we'll talk later about your business role as well, obviously, Nick. At the end of the day, your success, success of your journal is going to be about your ability to pick the dream team, the best talents.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: To grow them, to nurture them, and to get the best out of them because of that unique trust relationship. And if that's the case, what do you do if you land in a place where you don't have the dream team? Do you also recast the whole team?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, I mean, it's a great challenge, right? So your role, I view my role in all these different places is, and whether I've been at the top or in the middle or the bottom, do your best to make sure it's the best team. Help anybody you can increase the levels, improve talent where you can. And then the other really important step is identifying what you can do that is most helpful to the team. And so when I was at Wired, when I was back when I was the editor-in-chief, I actually wrote a bunch because that was what we needed. When I was at The New Yorker, it's not what we needed. And so, depending on what your team is good at and where your team is strong. And depending, let's say you're equally good at 10 different things. And that doesn't mean you should spend equal amount of time on those 10 things. You should identify your team and like, oh, the team is weak in these two, I'll do these two. And in fact, I don't need to do these other eight. And so that's another element. To the question of the team, it's one of the hard, I mean, everybody knows this. It's one of the hardest jobs in management, right? And you come in, and when I came in, for example, to The Atlantic, where I had real authority, I mean, even when I came into Wired as the editor-in-chief, you have to make quick decisions because folks are there who, maybe they want you there, maybe they don't, maybe they're good, maybe they're bad. And the longer you wait, the harder it gets to make a change. And so you have this problem where you have an incentive to make a quick decision, okay, this person is out, this person stays. But you have been sent to make a long decision. I need more information. Or we need to really understand this place. I think that a good framework is like, you should basically touch nothing until three months, and then at three months you should make changes, and then in a year you should make more changes. Gotcha. And I don't know, that might have come from David Bradley, who's one of my sort of mentors and wisest people I know. But that's what we did at The Atlantic, where we made a few changes three months in, like it seemed like a couple people you didn't really want to be there with me or had a very different view. It was all amicable and fine. And then after about a year, some more changes. And now the team is utterly superb and functions extremely well together.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Wonderful. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about your leadership at WIRED. I think, and I was a reader of WIRED, I must say, in the past, it went down from being seen as a cheerleader for Silicon Valley to holding tech giants accountable when needed, if I may say so, all right?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So I think you also made a bold move to implement a digital paywall. You paid off by boosting subscription, I think, by almost 300% in the first year. So what drove you to really find a wider mission in that way? And how did your audience and team react to that more nuanced stance on technology, which was not that obvious at the time?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It was tricky because WIRED was founded as a publication that Silicon Valley, they were the outsiders. WIRED was the real champion. We just loved these people. WIRED, when I had been there from 2005 to 2010, the editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, who I adored, said, this is a magazine about optimism. And we were extremely enthusiastic. And then the editor who preceded me, Scott Dadich, brilliant guy, he was very interested in the look and the positioning. Utter brilliant man about that and also good reporting. But when I came on board, it was clear that the position of the brand didn't really match reality as I saw it, which is that these companies, they weren't lovable outsiders, right? They like Sergei Brin and Larry Page were like these amazing coders, PhDs with this great way of putting the web together back in 1997. And by 2017, they were still totally likable, interesting guys, but they were like monopolists. And Facebook, okay, well Facebook, what a cool company, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg's position had changed. Elon Musk's whole personality had changed, right? Power had, to some of them, structural power had corrupted them, and to some of them, just actual power had corrupted them. And the role of technology in American life was both wonderful, hugely positive. Technology is hugely positive for us as a culture, for society, for longevity, for GDP, but not unambiguously positive. And so I viewed my role at WIRED as understanding the tech better than everybody else. Hire people who want to take the devices apart and read the terms of service. Hire people who want to understand the algorithm deeply. Hire people who are interested in what exactly, how exactly do you put a blockchain together? And then write, you know, enthusiastically, but also sometimes critically and take things apart. And so I tried to model that on my report and I wrote some big stories myself, kind of people I hired. And then to your question of how the audience reacted.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: To some of our audience, it was quite jarring and they viewed it like Elon, for example, who's a WIRED subscriber, was furious. He viewed the role of WIRED as a cheerleader. There were some of the early founders of WIRED who were mixed, but some were critical and some were supportive. So that was tricky. But it's also the case that there were lots of people who just said, wow, fine, WIRED is now serious. Now it's investigating, now it's breaking news, now it's doing stories like the ones that we had done at the New Yorker. And the audience clearly liked it because subscriptions skyrocketed and revenue went way up. So that was how that worked. I'll also say there's this interesting spectrum where to the staff, I was probably not critical of the tech industry enough. So I'm the editor in chief.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Pushing harder.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah. Right. They're like, and the staff is, they all live in San Francisco, they all come from a relatively small number of schools, and they're very critical of the tech industry. And so I was in this interesting spot where I think to some people, I was like almost an apologist for the tech industry. And then to some of the older WIRED readers, I was this liberal New Yorker who didn't understand the ethos of the publication. I think in the end, I felt it was definitely one of the hardest issues to manage, but I feel like I think we did a, I look back at those issues and I look back at our web coverage. I think we did a great job. I think we were fair. I think we were honest. I think we broke important stories. We didn't endorse political candidates when I was there. We stayed out of stuff you should stay out of. You're a technology journal. I think the success of the magazine reflects that. You've asked a question that was, a lot of sleepless nights thinking about that, right?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yeah. And I'm sure it took some, we'll come back, it took some courage in terms of leadership as well, because I'm sure that some of the CEOs and founders of many of those tech companies, small or fast growing companies, might not be friends anymore, I guess. I just guess, don't know.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, totally. I mean, I don't know whether I lost any, I don't know whether I lost any friends, because I mean, it's interesting, like even the places where I've written the toughest stories, right? I mean, the companies I've criticized, you know, I ran an investigative story about Facebook where he put a, you know, bloody picture of Mark Zuckerberg on the COVID and it was a very tough story. But you know, everything in that, everything in the story was right, right? And like, I had worked at the New Yorker where you fact check everything to within an inch of its life. And like, I had called people at Facebook and I basically read the entire story out loud to them before it was published. And if you think anything is wrong, you can tell me. Tell me no. Don't try to persuade me, right?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It's factually wrong. If you don't like it, I'm not gonna change it. But if you think it's factually wrong, I owe you this. And this is gonna be a big story. And the truth is, I've just done five events with Facebook executives. I'm doing a thing in Davos with Andrew Bosworth, who's one of the top executives. They understand that I was critical. But they appreciate that it was accurate because there's a lot of stuff that is critical and not accurate.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Exactly.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I actually don't think I lost any friends in the tech industry because of our tough reporting.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: That's wonderful. We'll come back to that later on in the AI discussion because I think it also creates a new framework for that as well. So your success, Nick, at WIRED caught obviously a lot of attention. And in fact, the Atlantic poached you from WIRED to become the CEO in 2021, a move that doesn't happen every day, I think, in the media world. How was the transition from editor to chief executive officer? And as someone, again, I think, and I could hear it, I could feel it, was some ink in your blood, literally, right? How do you balance the business side of running a media company with editorial independence, of course, which is so critical to the Atlantic's trust and integrity.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah. So the job wasn't, the job is different, but it's not as different as one might think. When I was at the New Yorker, I had been an editor, but then I had gone and I had run the website. So I had managed the product and engineering team. I had done our re-platforming. I had worked with McKinsey to develop the paywall rules. So I had a lot of business experience there. Then at Wired, I worked incredibly closely with the advertisers. I dealt with building the affiliate model. I had access to the P&L. So there was a lot of stuff that I knew from those jobs that came over to the Atlantic job. Now, running an entire executive team, presenting to a board, selling ads directly, those are things I hadn't done before. So there are some new things, but it's not quite as new as one might think. The editorial independence, that was what everybody thought. It's kind of, I worry too, like, my God, am I going to want to get in the middle of our reporting? Am I going to, what if I have a good idea for a story? And we just made a rule very early on that I would have nothing to do with it, nothing, not even 1%. And we ran the test. I was given an incredible scoop, an incredible scoop that came to me because of my previous reporting. We couldn't run it at the Atlantic and ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for it. I think it was a Pulitzer. Maybe it was a local work, but for another publication. And that's just the way it works. And so, and the funny thing is it's never bothered me. Like, I don't, I don't wake up in the middle of the night thinking, my God, how are we going to cover Maduro? Like, it just doesn't, like, that's just vanished. It'll be interesting. What I wonder, if I ever go back, I don't know what I'm going to do next. I'll be here for a while, but whatever I do next, like, if I go back into a news job, will I still have those chops? I don't know. But I literally, it was almost like I just went cold turkey. I don't assign stories. I don't know what we're going to publish. I'm not sure.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: You just don't. That's pretty incredible. So, clearly, you've evolved, as you just said, Nick entails the role. And I think we could agree we are now in what many people call a post-truth era with misinformation everywhere. A while ago, I was here on this show, Paul Polman, you may know or not, he's a former CEO of Unilever, and he talked about the way that we need to rebuild trust in institutions, especially now. Whether in business or media, you need to start restoring trust and trust in society. And as a leader of a major journalistic institution, you face this head on every day. So what do you see as the Atlantic's core responsibility in an age of misinformation and cynicism, and are you working to restore trust in journalism and uphold the truth in public discourse?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It's very hard. I mean, so we're entering an era where no one's going to know what's real and what's not real, right? Like, there's a very brief window right now where it's possible to create fake videos, but it's reasonably hard, and soon it will be infinitely easy. And you'll have no idea what's real or what's not real. And you can see it right now; you can see a video online and you can kind of parse it apart and you can figure out what's true and what's not. That will be gone fairly soon, right? And you'll have no idea whether you're talking to a real human or whether you're talking to just an AI-created voice. And that's going to be a very strange transition. And clearly, what the Atlantic needs to do is to maintain its position as created by humans and wholly trusted. And we need to fact-check extremely vigorously. We fight very hard to protect our brand. But we have to maintain that trust and it won't be easy. We could get something wrong. We could say something's real that's not real. There are good publications that got tricked by this fake AI character who sent in stories and pretended to be a real person. There are going to be traps out there all the time. And then not only that, we have people, there's this conservative commentator, Dinesh D'Souza, and every six months or so, he shares a fake Atlantic headline on Twitter. And it goes viral, right? And it shows something that conservatives might think that a liberal publication would share, even though we're not really that liberal, but whatever. And, you know, we have to deal with that and we have to say, hey, please don't share that stuff. It's wrong. And to his credit, he usually does take it down. But there's going to be ever more of that, you know, more stuff circulating online of, you know, fake images that we have to deal with. So we have to maintain our trust, we have to maintain our brand. And then, you know, at the same time, and this relates to that, there are very powerful people who don't think, who don't think it's in their interest for there to be an independent media and who recognize publications that are strong. And so they try to break it down, right? And you can see J.D. Vance trying to sort of stir up anger at the media, both because he genuinely is frustrated with some of the media's coverage, some of it rightly so, much of it wrongly so, and because he doesn't want there to be an alternative power source, an information source, like the government would like to be able to just tell you here are the facts and not be challenged.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: That's it. Yeah.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: And so you have these very powerful forces, Elon, J.D. Vance, trying to break down the media. And so you can't, what you can't do is you can't have that turn your soul dark and fight them. You just have to soldier, I mean, this is a little bit like what my mother taught me. You just have to keep going through and publish the most accurate stories you can and try to check all your instincts. That lesson I learned I told you about from Charlie Peters about the Georgia story, right? You have to check your assumptions, make sure that every bias that you're just presenting the news as best you can. And so as a, you know, those are mostly editorial issues and things for the editorial side to deal with, but that's what I hope for for our brand. And then my job is to set up the business model and the incentive structure so that we have the best chance of surviving if we publish only the highest quality, deepest report of best written journalists that we can. And so that's my role.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And this is a very challenging line, I guess, to keep, right? And then to keep working every day, to keep working on every day. I'd like us to dig down a bit more on AI, because I know you are an avid user of AI, both for running, by the way, but also for working in many parts of your life, like I do as well, obviously. My bias after 40 years in tech. So I'd love to understand the way, Nick, you approach technology and AI in particular, it's number one in the Atlantic. Because on the one hand, what are the opportunities do you see for AI to strengthen journalism, which I think can happen? And on the other hand, what are some of the biggest challenges that you started to mention that are almost vital for your business?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah. So on the advantages, I do think it's the greatest tool ever for journalism. I remember I told you a few minutes ago about how when I was an editor at the New York World Wire, I'd go around looking for stories, right? And I would ask people like, hey, what's the most, you know, your ability to use AI to sort through data sets, to sort through masses of information to, you know, help me find something that's interesting. This is the kind of story I want to write. Please, like, build me a research report. So it can be great at finding stories. It can be great at, like, helping you understand things. It can be great at kind of every step of the writing and editing process. You shouldn't use it to write the sentences, but as, like, a thought partner, kind of like. As an always on-call editor, it's a great tool. And I certainly used it that way with my book, right? And like my human editors were far better, but aren't available 24 hours a day. And so I would use it, a friend of mine described the way you use AI is like the way you use a backboard when you're training for tennis, just like constantly playing with and learning, you know, improving with. And so it's great. It's amazing. It's an incredible tool. And it's an amazing tool, as you know, and everybody listening knows like, for certain organizational functions. Of course, you should do level one customer service with AI, right? We're trying to clean up all our old systems with AI, obviously. Okay, so that's all good. Then there's a sort of a medium-term risk, which is, does it break the distribution mechanisms you have right now for journalism? And so right now the plurality of our readers coming through Google, What happens when Gemini and Google are no longer sending people to the outer web, they're just absorbing and answering the queries, right? And you can see that, you can see total search queries and many publications going down. Okay, so how do you prepare for that? How do you prepare for this new algorithmic age? How do you prepare for a world in which people will increasingly rely on agents to go and summarize the news for them? And maybe someone will have an agent who they power through a voice box and the agent, they say to the agent, hey, tell me the 15 most important news stories today. And then how do you monetize that? So do you want the Atlantic to be part of that? Okay, do you the person figuring out the business model there? So that's like a near-term problem for us. And then there's kind of a long-term problem, which is A, like what happens if the whole web disappears, right? Not only is Google not sending out links, but you know, what happens when like some kid in Macedonia can say, can like, you know, figure out how to scrape the Atlantic's archives from like the Wayback Machine or whatever, the Internet Archive, you know, and then create a fake Atlantic, give it a different name, create writing, and just sort of create information that competes with us. Or what if there's like nothing on the web? And then also what happens if it's not just agents, it's like physical AI devices, and we kind of move beyond the text-based internet, right? What if actually no one reads five years from now, because all we're doing is talking to these little Johnny Ive necklaces. And so, you know, that's a hard problem, which I can't see. Anyway, so what do I do, business strategy-wise? For bucket A, as much as possible, try to get our team to use the right tools to improve processes and go faster. I try to, journalists are very wary of AI for a good reason. Our jobs are under threat from AI. But try to get the Atlantic to use it as well as any other news organization.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Just on this bucket, to stop one second, are you also orchestrating a fleet of agents on top of your own, basically, editors and writers? No, you're not.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Okay. We're not yet. We're not yet. And we don't have, we have not, I'm not sold enough on the agentic web to think that's something I want to do. And certainly not in 2025, maybe 2026. But use the best tools we can there. And then for the middle thing, like try to get direct relationships as much as possible, right? Like, yeah. You know, one of the funny things we did last year is we increased the number of print issues.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Why?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, partly because it's a print. You just mail them issue to someone like through the United States Postal Service, right? You know, we work really hard to get people in newsletters, we work really hard to get people in the app. We work really hard to have, we just put out a book, like we're trying to get direct relationships so that AI is not in the middle. And then we try to plan and we try to see what's coming and then like figure out. So, you know, I remember when I was at the New Yorker, right? Like, do you want to bet on video? Do you want to bet on audio? Do you want to bet half on both? And we kind of put all our chips in audio and it was a good bet. Now it's like, okay, so now with AI coming in, where do you want to put your chips? Do you think that, will AI change so much of the reading experience that you should go all in on audio? What's it going to do to virtual reality? Should we be dealing with gated ecosystems? There's a whole series of interesting questions that come from it that we have to make choices on.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: If I continue to peel the onion on this issue, because I think it's quite fascinating to understand the Again, the evolving role of AI in the media business. I recently had another guest, I think that you know Navrina Singh, the co-founder of Credo AI, on my podcast. And as you know, well, she had a score that AI will inevitably mirror the values of its creators. And ultimately, she's calling obviously for leaders everywhere to help build what she calls infrastructure of trust around AI. So what is infrastructure trust? That you are building as CEO of the Atlantic?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, I mean, I do think that one of the things, so it's a really interesting business opportunity for us. So our hope is that we can create the most trustworthy and accurate and beautifully written pool of information. And there should be value of that. A, if AI models train on it, they should marginally incorporate our values, which I think is probably good for the world. But I do think there's a business model. And we probably, we're not going to make as much money as the Wall Street Journal, which publishes tons of stories. But if we're really trusted, you can imagine a couple of business models. You can imagine a model where we license that data, and we license our new data, and we license it maybe to a small number of AI models. And then maybe one AI model is powered partly by the Atlantic. And it's whatever AI model we think best captures our values or incorporates our values, and we have the best deal with. And then you can also imagine a world where we take our tools that we use for verifying information and maybe we build out a product that allows others to verify information. That would be a great business. Particularly if you can sell it into places which really value truthful information, like hedge funds, right?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Where there's like market moving, knowing whether, did Ronald Reagan National Airport actually just blow up? Because if it did, we're going to short a bunch of stocks. And if it didn't, we're not, right? And can you verify this deep fake? It's a super interesting business model. And so we're looking at all of that, but the key thing right now is we believe that if we publish trusted, verified, sourced information, there'll be a business model in the AI world.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: This is something you're going to explore more?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, absolutely.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So talking about that, I know that it's public information, so I can talk about it. You recently announced a deal with OpenAI, right? Yeah. Which obviously is a big player. On one hand, I would say this deal is very pragmatic and future-oriented. On the other hand, I could say, or maybe your writer could say, or your readers could say, what's original and what will be original in terms of writing will be AI-made, right? So how do you reconcile Nick the Atlantic's mission, protecting truths and nuance with the risk of losing your authentic voice? Maybe at a higher level, because I know you and I did a quick chat on that, how would you frame the opportunity for real AI for good, which goes far beyond that OpenAI deal, obviously?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, so the OpenAI deal was quite controversial. And if you look in our archives, you'll see that we, in fact, proving the independence of the editorial side and the business side, wrote multiple articles denouncing both me and denouncing the deal. But it was, in my view, 100% the right decision and has been vindicated many times over. And so the logic behind the deal was the AI companies came and they scraped our sites and they violated our terms of service and maybe they violated copyright law, probably they did, but the courts will have their say on that. But certainly what they did was unethical, potentially illegal. And they took all our data and there was no getting it back. So then you look at that and you can either just say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stamp my feet and I'm going to be really pouty and maybe that will be good. Or what you can do is you can say, okay, here's this situation as it is. Let's try to figure out everything we can to stop them from scraping additional data. Initially, we'll launch that text and now Cloudflare blocking. Let's go to them and let's say, hey, there needs to be a fair exchange of value, both for what you did and for what you're doing. So you can either pay us in money, you can build a product like the old web that has a fair exchange of value where there's information going in and links going out. And we went to all of the AI companies. And if you don't, then we'll sue you. And so we've joined a lawsuit against Cohere. There may be more lawsuits to come. And with OpenAI, we made a deal where they pay us And where we also have some influence over their creation of a new AI search engine. And so there's a fair exchange of value, right? And you can imagine that if the deal terms were different, we might have sued them like the New York Times. Of course. The New York Times tried to negotiate a deal, couldn't come to a deal, and so sued them. We tried to negotiate and we got a deal, so we didn't sue them. And so we have a deal that I think is quite advantageous to us, provides real compensation. Now, there are other AI companies like Anthropic. They've scraped our site and they have no, they have done, no compensation, no deal. So who knows what happens with that next, but that's a complicated relationship.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It is. So far so good and you're pleased with that move that you did.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It was clearly the right move. I mean, the only thing I wish is that I had done it a little bit sooner and done the deal for longer because the price of back when we negotiated this deal, which is the spring of 2023, the value that the AI companies put on data for training was quite high. And now that they have confidence in synthetic data, the market price has gone down.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It's going down.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I couldn't have anticipated that. I didn't know that. But if I could do it again, I would have signed a deal with everybody. I mean, my staff, they might have come in and executed me, but I.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Would have.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Because there's a moment of extreme tension for understandable reasons. But I think we missed a bunch of opportunities for deals that would have been valuable. Now, the real goal though is not like, you know, I mentioned a couple parts of the OpenAI deal. There's money, which is valuable, but it's short term. And then there's ideally helping them design a search product. And that's where the thing that matters, right, is not that we get cash infusions or we won lawsuits and we get paid. That's not the goal, right? I mean, it's nice to have money because you hire more journalists and do more good things. The goal is to try to reach a stable equilibrium where the AI companies are giving back as much as they're taking in a way that creates a healthy ecosystem, which is better for them because if all journalism goes out of business, they're in trouble too because they have less good data. So there was a stable equilibrium with Google, right? They read the whole internet, they inputted our links, and then people clicked on the links, they made money selling ads against the links, and then people clicked on the links and came to the web. Great. And we need to figure out that the new economics doesn't match perfectly. Yeah, the un-economics of this. And so there has to be a way. And so that's where I put a lot of my time and effort. There has to be a way to get to that. And I don't, the AI companies, so Google and Microsoft, back when and Facebook, back when the old iteration of the internet was invented, they got to these stable equilibriums where it was fair. Facebook built Facebook Instant and paid people and then they added external links. The AI companies all think they're taking us to Nirvana. They all think that they're going to create infinite wealth and they're going to AGI. And then the real problem will be how we merge our brains with machines and then don't have civic unrest. And is the New York Times still in business? Do people still read the Atlantic? Like, oh my God, who are these old folks? What are they talking about? It's a little harder to negotiate with them.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Sure.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: When somebody thinks the rapture is coming, it's harder to negotiate a deal.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Lovely. We're lovely, I don't know, we'll see later. I like to switch gears clearly, moving away from AI, and talk about Nick as a runner beyond the office. One thing that fascinates me is your passion for running, Nick, and of course, it's very well known. You are not a casual jogger for listeners by any means. You're a competitive marathoner who actually got faster with age, defying expectations and gravity. I believe in 2021 at age 45, you even set the American record for the 50K in your age group. Wow. And you've also written extensively about running, including a wide piece on trying to run fast after 40. I know your wonderful new book, The Running Ground, of course, talks a lot about that. So what does running mean to you personally? And how has it influenced your approach to life and leadership?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: So running is my single most important hobby. It's my single most important mental release. It's one of the things I've done consistently since I was in some ways since I was six and in other ways since I was 15 and in other ways since I was 30. To structure my life. And so every day I wake up, I run to work, I work, I run home. I do workouts a couple times a week, I run marathons a few times a year, I run ultra-marathons a couple times a year. And through that process I've learned habits of mind, habits of pacing, mental resilience, I've learned dietary habits, health habits, all kinds of things that kind of keep me functioning at a higher level and I think give me a more Zen approach to life, an ability to both work through pain, to understand limits, a much better physical understanding, but also a mental understanding. And so I view running, and it's not like only running could have given me this or only running can give other people this, but there are ways that running has just made me a more observant, more thoughtful, more dedicated, more disciplined person that have been quite useful to my life. It can also create habits of mind that are useful, like useless. It's probably made me more selfish. It's made me waste time. I've missed things that are important. I don't know, I miss work events where you have real social connection all the time because I never go out in the evenings because I'm always running early in the morning. So there are trade-offs, but it's unquestionably been one of the most important structural forces in my life.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: It's very clear. I think we can feel it as well in the way you talk about life, the way you've been writing again this essay by Iran. And he says, you wrote very candidly about your dad's struggles. You took up running to be like him and kept running because he stopped actually. So there's a particularly moving scene where you describe around your 40th birthday where your dad publicly warned you that all men's lives fall apart at this age, reflecting on his own life, you understand, and you resolved not to let that happen to you. Can you tell us more about that story? What you learned deeply from it?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, so my dad, we talked about it a little bit early on, but my dad at this point, so when I was 40 years old, my dad was 73. And his life had been, he had not lived up to what he had thought he was going to, you know, I have his old letters. He thought it was going to be President of the United States, right? He was a Rhodes Scholar. The Stanford Provost had said he was the best student in Herbert Hoover. John F. Kennedy had said he was going to get to the White House before him. And his life hadn't quite worked out that way. And by the time he was in his 70s, he was bankrupt. He's an expat. He's living in Southeast Asia. He's dealing with alcoholism. He's dealing with sexual addiction. He's running something like a brothel. It's kind of a very complicated, messy life, but an amazing guy, loving to me. And I turned 40. And he puts his note on my Facebook page, like a public note, right? And I have like, I don't know, 70,000 followers there or something at the time. And he's like, Hey, Nick, happy birthday, right? Things are going well for you. You have great kids, great wife, happy job. You should know that all men's lives fall apart at 40, right? And in his life, that's when he divorced my mother and came out of the closet. His father had started really struggling with alcohol and professional anxiety then. And 40 is a hard age because you're still taking care of your kids. You can't use youth as an excuse if your life hasn't really, you don't have the professional aspirations that you've wanted to hit. You probably have sick parents, and your own body is starting to break down. And so in some ways, it's a great age, but in other ways, it's a really hard age because you have pressure from people younger than you, pressure older than you, pressure from the side. And my dad's view was that it's at that age that men crack. Many of them get divorced. They can't handle aging. My father dealt with aging and the frustration of his body breaking down by dating ever increasingly younger men. Totally, 22 year olds in the Philippines. Totally inappropriate. People he just met on manjammer.com or whatever website he's on. Not the folks he should have been dating. And so he puts that on my website, I'm sorry, on Facebook. I'm like, Dad, send me a text message. But what I also, it made me think about why his life had come undone like this and what had happened to him. And I'm very similar to him in a lot of ways. And part of my realization was that he had just let his, either he'd let his discipline slip or he'd never quite had it. And I decided like that, I have to be very focused to not let that happen. And part of that, though not all of it, but a part of it was running, right? Where he had kind of, when he'd been running, his life had been more disciplined and contained. He had like a little centripetal force in his life. And when he stopped, he didn't have it. And so part of my resolution to not become my father was to keep running.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Well, so in a way, that person Facebook was a big kicker for you in your life.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It was a big, it was a big, it was a real reset. I read it a lot. I think he may have deleted it when I went to fact check the book. Really? I read it online, yeah.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: There's actually something deeply moving in how you describe recognizing generational patterns, Nick, your grandfather's scandal as well. We didn't discuss that yet, I think. Your father's breakdown that you talked about and then consciously choosing a very different path. Reminds me actually of a very powerful idea shared by a French journalist called Nathacha Kalistreme who had been on this show, who is an author who blends science, spirituality, even Shamanic traditions to help people heal emotional wounds. So, you know, one of our protocols helps people release inherited trauma to identify and cut the thread of a parent of ancestral unresolved pain so it doesn't soundly shape their own lives, which happens to many people, it turns out. So it struck me that running seems to be your own therapeutic protocol beyond, of course, this very healthy habit you have every day, the way maybe of processing pain, reclaiming identity and healing across generations. Do you see actually running as a kind of emotional release or just that ritual and daily discipline for you that you just talked about?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It's definitely the latter. I think it's probably the former. The other element of running that's so important is that it's a sport that I had started because of my father, and I had watched him run a marathon and he had taken me on runs when I was six or seven, and I have very strong memories of watching him run. And then when I was in my teenage years, in my 20s, I would run with him. I do think it's a way, you know, and as you said, it's a way that I've both tried to hold him close, like do this thing that we love doing together and also a way to not become him. I do think that when someone dies and someone who's close to you, a good way to mourn, right? You can mourn by like, you know, praying and thinking and reading their letters, but a good way to mourn is to do the thing that you did together, the thing that you associated with them. If you went for walks, go for walks. If you skied, go skiing. And it just allows you this sort of the way memory works, it happens in your brain, it happens in your body. And the way, you know, processing information works happens in your brain and in your body. I think it's one of the most interesting differences between humans and AI. And you can love someone you used to ski with, right? And you go skiing. And I think certain things happen with the way you process those memories in a way that's healthy. And so for me, running, particularly in the year after he died, was a way of thinking through this incredibly complicated man who died all of a sudden. I didn't have a chance to mourn him before he left. I knew he was old, I knew he was sick, but he wasn't supposed to die that year or even the next five years. And so running was a way to process his death. So in a way, it is both this healthy habit, but also this spiritual connection.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes, we got you. Thanks for sharing that. Nick, just to finish a little bit on that particular story through the running around again, your story unfolds in distinct seasons again in your life from your very first smile, I think at age five with your dad you just talked about, to that defining run of CadiaC Mountain, I think at 29, when you choose to bet on yourself to facing illness as well, just after your fastest race, and later chasing new limits in your 40s after your dad's death. So each season to me kind of blends discipline, purpose, personal reckoning. It echoes what Bill George with the pharmacy of Medtronic shared with me on the podcast, what he called the crucibles of life in his book, True North. You know, those moments that test and ultimately shape our own lives and leadership. So how do you reflect on those seasons of running? Do you see them as your seasons of life? And what are those couple of crucibles that have taught you about growth, purpose, and the kind of human you've become, eventually?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It's interesting. Your running is tied into many of the hardest and most important moments of my life, in part because I use it as a way to handle those crucibles. So the Cadillac Mountain story is revealing. That was, in retrospect, the single most important day of my life. It was in the summer of 2005, August of 2005. I had worked at the Washington Monthly and I had done very well. Then I had struggled as a journalist. So, at this point, I was 30 years old. I had finished the Washington Monthly four years before. It had been rocky, right? I worked for this wonderful man in New Haven. I'd done some good reporting in West Africa, but things weren't on track. That summer, July of 2005, I was called by Wired and they wanted to interview me for the senior editor job. But by the time August came around, I didn't have the job. I had three prospects in life or three sort of professional prospects. I had applied to law school, not because I wanted to go to law school. It kind of did, but mainly it's like an off ramp, right? Like law school is a great off ramp for an ambitious person. You sort of check yourself in for three years into the school and you come out on the other side with this great credential and you have all these paths. You can become a professor, you can work for the ACLU, you can work for a firm, you make lots of money. You're okay, right? And I had gotten into NYU law school. My wife lived in New York. I had been traveling around trying to get myself to New York. So I have these three opportunities: I have a proposal for a book, but it hasn't sold and I'm not sure it's good; I have the possibility of a job at Wired; or I have law school. And I have to decide on law school by, let's say, August 15th, right? Because that's when it starts. So it's August 14th, and I'm in Maine, and I haven't decided yet. I keep waiting. I know that if Wired offers me the job, then yeah, I'll defer law school. If I was certain I could sell the book, sure, I would write the book. I remember going on that run, at sunrise. It's a pretty hard run, right? Because my mother's house in Maine, you go out the door, you have to run through the woods in the dark. So you run through the woods in the dark, then you run through these nice carriage trails, then you run again through the woods and up these scrambling rocks and iron holes you have to hold onto. I don't remember if I had a headlamp, but I'm running in the dark and I get to the top of the mountain and the sun is coming up. So I must have left at three. I'm thinking a lot while I run. I think, well, I do a better job if I'm sitting down, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to think about this thing. Maybe I can't think about it the same way that if I run. Because when you run, your mind goes to it and your mind drifts away. But you've made some progress, then your mind comes back and then you drift away and then you come back, right? When I finally came home, I decided, you know what? I'm just gonna bet on myself. I'm gonna defer law school, see what happens to the book, see what happens to Wired. I could have easily made a different choice. There are very few moments in life where there's a specific choice.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: And you don't quite know at the time what's right or what's wrong.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: For sure.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: But completely diverged. Maybe I'd be in the United States Senate as a law school graduate right now. I'd be like, God, thank God I wasn't still a journalist. But looking at it now, 20 years later, thank God, right? Thank God I made that choice. Then it worked out. I got the Wired job. I sold the book. I wrote the book. It turned out well. Everything from that moment on worked out pretty well.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So would you say that you've made most of your most critical life decisions when running actually?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I don't think so. Some, yes. I remember I wrote the speech for my wife for our wedding while running in my head.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: In your head? Wow, that's pretty hard. Without any AI embedded, just talking to yourself.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: I just remember the structure came to me and then I came home and wrote it down. I think some of them, but other hard life choices I've made sitting, talking. But running is always part of it, in part because I have something important going on. The other day, last Thursday, we had an all-hands meeting and I had to talk for a long time and figure out how to present some complicated things. One of the ways I prepared is I went running and rehearsed it in my head while I ran. So I do use it as a way to process hard stuff all the time.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes, got you. So now, Nick, let's enter into the very last section of the podcast. It's all about leadership, positive leadership, and the kind of future you are shaping today and for tomorrow. Again, in this show, I had the pleasure to welcome a few years ago Daniel Goleman, who wrote this book obviously on emotional intelligence. I'm sure you know Daniel as well. And of course, he emphasized a lot that empathy and trust are what make a leader someone we actually like and follow. And from what I've seen, you foster a culture of trust for sure and excellence in realization by empowering your team. The way you talk about your team, people, the way you let them do stuff is very clear to me. How would you describe your leadership style at The Atlantic? And what kind of culture are you trying to build in a newsroom and a broader organization that has led The Atlantic to that wonderful success?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah. So in my executive team, there are 10 people who report to me. What I want is for people to be team players who don't demand, you know, individual acclaim, who aren't sort of out there for turf, who work well with each other, are ferociously smart, and who are better at what they do than I am at that thing. And my CFO better be better at finance than I am, and our publisher better be better at selling ads than I am. And they are, right? Our communications head is better at communication strategy than I am. And so I work very closely with all of them, but I also give them a ton of independence, right? They can make their own decisions, and they know when to come to me if there's a tiebreaker, if there's a hard decision. Sometimes they can just make a decision and inform me, but I'm not in their way. And there's a lot of independence. Next level down, I try to get to know everybody, but I can't know everybody. You can know everybody's name and some of their strengths, and you can do check-ins with them every two weeks. And again, with them, I don't know enough to be able to demand as much. So there, I'm just trying to listen, be helpful, convey strategy as best I can in these skip levels. Beyond that, you can know people's names and you can have social relationships, but it's tricky in an organization. Like, you can't have strong evaluations of 150 people. So what I try to do is convey the values, right? The values of the organization. Like, we care about forced ideas, spirit of generosity, sense of belonging, right? We want people to be smart, to feel like they're welcomed and they treat each other well. I care a ton about energy and velocity. I like people who want to win, right? You know, not everybody has to win. Like, you can enter a marathon and not really care, just want to finish, right? And that's great, right? And it's great for a marathon, right? But that's not the attitude to bring to the Atlantic. I want people who show up every day wanting to win. And it's not true of everybody, but it's true of a lot of people. And I try to hire people with—there's this wonderful phrase, I think it was Dario Amodei who told me—that talent density matters more than talent mass, right? Meaning it's better to have three 10s than four 9s, right? And so it makes all the difference. It's kind of amazing, right? Because you would think four 9s is 36, better than three 10s which is 30, but it's not. And so trying to get the culture to the point where everybody is generous, smart, excellent, and working really hard. And we're not there. There are still changes to make, people to hire, people to mentor, people to bring up, people who should be moving to different roles. So that's the goal. And then my leadership style, I try to be very open and available. I don't know whether I fully succeed. I think there's still some people who are scared to come into my office, but I try to say, if the door is open, come in, right? The strategic plan is right there in sticky notes. Okay, right? Come on in and I'll show you the strategic plan. I'll talk through everything with you. I try to model good behavior. I try to model certain kinds of ethics. I try to model ways of treating people. And then you hope that there's a combination of direct message: this is what we're doing, this is where the strategy is, right? These are our goals. We just set two big goals, right? These are the goals, everybody try to go. And it's a combination of setting big goals, setting the strategy, and then modeling behavior. And that's the way I do it. And then I try to, like, I know that I didn't grow up in a management culture. I didn't grow up reading books. And so I also try to, like... I have a—there's only one book on my desk right now.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Which one is it?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: It's Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She was the CEO of Stripe. And it has a lot of really smart analysis. I just went through my annual reviews and said, okay, what do you do when you really are trying to get more out of someone? What do you do if you're doing this? How do you have this kind of conversation? So I'm trying to learn all of that and try to, like, we're growing fast. The Atlantic is growing fast, so the organization gets more and more complicated. We're not like tech growing fast, but media growing fast. And so I'm trying to get better at that stuff.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: But thanks, Nick. Very clear in terms of the way you embody that CEO role in setting the vision, picking the talents, the 10s and the 9s, but mostly the 10s, but also certainly some shared values. But it's also, in my experience, also about building and shaping a worldview, particularly as a media, more than anybody else, I guess. And I know the Atlantic has a strong tradition of engaging with big issues—climate change, social justice, the future of democracy, and so on—with often a perspective of improving society. And again, back to the example I share of another guest, Paul Polman, in a previous show, he urged leaders to adopt what he called a net positive approach, which is the name of his book as well, to give more to the world than they take, which is very similar to the concept of the givers and the takers, this book that you may know as well. So Nick, can a media organization like the Atlantic aim to be net positive by addressing societal challenges like climate change, threat to democracy? And do you feel a real responsibility on your shoulders as a media CEO not just to report on those issues, but to lead on some of them in some ways?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, okay, so this is hard.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: This is very hard.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Net positive, yes. And that's why I do this job. I think the Atlantic was literally founded by a group of people who were having conversations about how to prevent an American Civil War, right? Frederick Douglass wrote for the early Atlantic. Ralph Waldo Emerson was at that table. This publication was created for a social purpose. It has served that social purpose, with some ups and downs, but mostly since 1857. And that is an incredible legacy to have, and it's a burden to bear. I don't want to be the guy who screws it up. So that's one thing. I certainly think it can fulfill that mission. Now, I do think society has huge challenges like climate change. I do think there are major threats to democracy. I do think there are correct policy choices that one should make, whether it's about better or worse choices on how to handle protests in Iran, what to do with Venezuela, or what your policy on cryptocurrency is. I think the Atlantic's role, though, and I believe this very strongly as does Jeff Goldberg, is not to say what that is and to push America to that. It is to hire the best writers in the world, the best editors, and the best social media people, and put out stories that people might disagree with. It is to create a great writers' collective and a group of thinkers that publishes fair, accurate information about all this stuff. If it ever appears that we're partisan, and if we ever become predictable—if you know what we're going to say about climate change, or if Nicholas Maduro gets captured, and you know we're going to say it's great because we love Trump, or we're going to say it's terrible because we hate Trump—well, this is complicated because who knows what happens to Venezuela? Nobody knows, right? Sure. And if anybody ever comes to think that we're entirely predictable, A, we're not serving our social purpose; B, our financial model is cooked; and C, our reason for being is cooked. We have to continually surprise and be fair, truthful, honest, and interesting. And that's really hard. So I don't think we should lead on any of those issues you mentioned, but I do think that the people who lead should be reading the Atlantic.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Got you. So if I may push you a little bit harder on this one as well, does it mean that any societal issue anyways is political? So you cannot lead in a way that is not partisan, but is about really embracing, let's say, climate change, right? Of course, it's highly political in many different ways, but you could say, well, there's a well-understood actual set of reasons for why the planet and the humans living on the planet should take care of the planet in which we live, right? So I'm just trying to get to a point where is there an upper cause, whatever it is, where you can lead the way not by forming a monolithic opinion to the people and say, this is the way to think about it, but where you engage in a deep way?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah. Okay, so you have a whole series of really interesting notes in there. One thing I'll say is that there are issues where we do have absolute views, and those are like, and where I'm allowed to make public statements and feel comfortable. So like about press freedom and about democracy and First Amendment rights. Like things that are core to our publishing and our sense of being. And, you know, I do not make statements about ICE, but I will make statements about imprisoned reporters. So there's like one category that is easier for us to talk about. Now there's a second category, like climate change, where we are on the side of truth, right? And the facts clearly show that there is man-made climate change. Now, the degree to which humans are contributing and whether carbon sequestration is the right policy or not the right policy. So where the Atlantic will, I hope, have surprising views about carbon sequestration, you will find that among the people who accept the, there's a bunch of people who just gaslight, right? You're not going to publish in the Atlantic and we're not going to pay them credit. We're not going to both sides it. Well, one expert says that climate change is happening and one says it doesn't. But what ideally we'll do is find the interesting arguments and like conversations within that reality-based climate change conversation. So that's the way we do it. And also, okay, so the question of whether everything is political, that's a great question. And I'll answer it more the way I dealt with it at Wired, which is because Wired I had to say over editorial and I was there during the first Trump administration. Wired, there were issues that were political, right? And there were issues that fell within Wired's domain, right? Like who's going to be the head of the FCC, right? What policies are we going to have on encryption? Will TikTok be banned, right? And on those issues, we should cover the Trump administration. But there's a lot of stuff the Trump administration does that has no bearing on Wired's world and we should not include it. And then there are lots of stories we write that have nothing to do with the Trump administration. And there's a temptation when you live in America at a time like this, where like every story has to have something to do with Trump, right? And like every reporter wants to put in and like you write a story about education and you want to like whack the Trump administration when you write it. And so when I was at Wired, I was like, I would go through stories, I'd say no, no, no. He doesn't need to be in the story. Like this isn't about him. This is about something else, right? And like, everything's about him. No, no, it's not actually. And so that's a really interesting balance.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Yes.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: And the other thing I would do, if there was a story and it was about something to do with the Trump administration, right? And let's say it was about whether to ban TikTok. You have to really, like, if you have a reporter, and the reporter just tries their best to be fair, but they really don't like Trump, right? Or maybe they try their best to be fair, but they really do like Trump. You have to go and make sure that they're like, I used to do this thing where I'd be like, okay, find your best Republican friend or your best Democratic friend and read the story out loud to them and just see where they get upset, right? What are the assumptions that you've embedded in there that are totally unnecessary? Like, what is the, I use this line on the podcast, I kind of like, which is like, What is the random thing you've said about Brendon Carr that you don't need to say? And then take that out. So there's an editing challenge in that as well.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I got you. That very last couple of questions, but quite important ones for the listeners as well. As we start looking ahead, I want to zoom out to the bigger picture of positive leadership in media. A discussion spans, as you can imagine, across empathy, trust, purpose, and positive impact, societal impact, I just touched about, right? The core themes of this podcast with my guests, I often reflect on how these qualities can flourish in different fields. So Nick, when you hear the words positive leadership, what does it mean to you personally in the context of running a media organization?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: So I think when I think about positive leadership, and I'm sure there are many other ways of defining it, I think one of the things that I believe and have for long, like, I'm pretty optimistic about the world and that you can find a path through it. And, you know, I felt this way at Wired. Maybe it was sort of coded into me when I was at Wired, but that, you know, not only is the world likely to be, there are ups and downs and there are things that I hate that are happening in the world right now, but in general, you know, we're going in a good direction. And in general, like, not only that, if you are optimistic, you are more likely to be helpful to the world. Right?

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I agree.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: And you're pessimistic and you're like, man, it's the worst. I'm like, you know, ICE is shooting people in the streets and I can't move because of it. Well, that's not gonna, you're gonna end up doing less good than if you're like, okay, there's a lot of problems in the world. You know, AI is like a big problem, but like, I'm gonna try to understand. I'm gonna be curious about it. I'm very curious about what's coming. I'm very interested in it. And I generally believe that if you have an optimistic attitude, you can do more good.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: 100% agree with you, Nick. So next question is really about what is your core purpose or what is called, you know, your personal mission that drives you each day. And has that personal mission evolved over time? So if you had to say a few words about your personal mission, what would that be?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Well, my personal mission is creating positive business models that allow serious journalism to thrive. And that's been my, that's, I didn't realize that was my mission until about 2012 when I started that, you know, in 2012, 2013, I was given this role by David Remnick, one of my heroes, to help the New Yorker become a digitally forward publication with a consumer business model. And, you know, it was It wasn't like the New Yorker was going to go out of business, but it was like figure out the future for the New Yorker. And with a group of amazing people, we did a good job of that. And since then, that's been my job. And that was why I took this Atlantic job. If your mission is, what is the position you can take that can do the most good? Whereas if you do this job well, the amount of good journalism in the world will increase the amount. And that was like, you can be a writer. I could go start a Substack and I could publish good stories. I could go and be an editor somewhere and I could publish six or seven people and have six or seven times as many stories go into the world. Or you can try to make the Atlantic's business. When I started, we were losing tons and tons of money. Subscriptions were in decline in the beginning and the amount of great journalism we could do was under threat. The fact that we've been able to reverse it the last four years is great for this project. That's my mission.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Very clear and pretty amazing mission. My very last question now, which is something I love to ask my guests by the end as well, it's about passing on your wisdom, right?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: So what advice would you give to listeners, to my listeners, particularly young leaders and spending a lot of time with young people because I believe in betting on the new generation to positively change the world. So what would you tell those young people who are trying to lead positively and with purpose in their own fields, whatever it is, right? To shape a better, brighter future for all of us?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: You know, if I have one principle, right? And I have one, it's not really advice and it's, maybe it's mundane, but it's kind of a lesson from running, which is like, if you want to get faster, you have to go out every single day. And some days you have to push yourself really hard, but you don't ever stay in, right? And if you do do that, you always get faster. And if you don't do that, you never get faster. And so it's kind of led to my philosophy of how I work, which is you have good days, you have bad days, you make decisions that are wrong, you make decisions that are right. But you just kind of are always like, sort of each day, each week, each hour, you're figuring out, okay, so I'm going to try to like, a lot of things I'm trying to do. I'm going to try to figure out like, what is the best thing I can do and move it forward. Oh, whoops, screwed that up. Okay, well now let me try the next thing. Whoops, screwed that up. Okay, we'll try this thing, right? And you just, it's this kind of continued, it's almost like stoicism, right? Hmm. But you just, you keep going out there. And that's, you know, that's my main, my main bit of advice. And I try to say to my kids, like, you identify the things you love and the things you want to do and the things that are important, and you just keep trying. Right. And if you, like, you don't sit and wallow and look at your phone or you don't, like, you get all depressed and, you know, you don't, you don't take a day off because, like, you need to, like, maybe you do if you need to refresh, but I generally don't. Like, you just keep going and you just keep going whether it's sunny or rainy.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Basically keep running and driving your passions one day at a time.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Yeah, that's what I do all the time. It's interesting because at some point you have to stop. I'll deal with that. I hope not for a little while.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful and life-changing experience. Thank you, Jean-Philippe Courtois. I energy conversation, I can tell you I got so much positive energy through the screen, Riverside. And for all of the listeners, please, if you love the episode, leave a rating. Five stars always welcome, obviously, and subscribe to Positive Leadership Podcast. And again, a wonderful, wonderful, amazing discussion. Nick, thanks so much for joining me for 90 minutes altogether, which is a big, not a marathon, but quite a long time.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Thank you. Thank you for bringing me on, thank you to Introducing Media Readers, your listeners. I'm thrilled to be here.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Thanks so much.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON: Cheers.