How to save a magazine

NICK THOMPSON: This is fun, by the way. Thanks for having me on.

JEFF BERMAN: Thrilled to do it. Did you run up here, by the way?

THOMPSON: I was going to run. Then you stink during the interview, and it’s not great.

BERMAN: Yeah.

THOMPSON: I should have done it.

BERMAN: Should have done it. You want to re-rack? You can—

THOMPSON: Yeah, could we reschedule this for 11:30? I’m going to go home and run.

BERMAN: Nick Thompson didn’t run to the studio for our interview, but he runs almost everywhere else. He runs marathons, ultra marathons, and most days he runs to work at his job as CEO of The Atlantic.

When you saw subscriptions actually drop, was there a moment where you had a crisis of conviction about this?

THOMPSON: Yeah, totally. I was terrified.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, Nick Thompson. He’s the author of a fantastic new memoir called The Running Ground. We’ll get into his running life later in the conversation, but first I wanted to speak with Nick about his day job. He’s the CEO of The Atlantic, and he’s leading an extraordinary turnaround at the iconic magazine. Nick, welcome to Masters of Scale.

THOMPSON: Thank you.

Copy LinkWhy Nick Thompson joined The Atlantic

BERMAN: I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while. You are now the CEO of The Atlantic. Why take on the challenge of turning around this iconic American institution?

THOMPSON: A couple things are important that somebody who just looks at my resume or just sort of knows me from my Twitter handle wouldn’t know. One is that when I graduated college when I was young, I didn’t intend to be a journalist. I didn’t not intend to be a journalist, I just didn’t know what I was going to do. But then eventually I found my footing and I got some great jobs. And so I work at Wired, I work at The New Yorker, I go back to Wired to run it. And then the opportunity comes to be the CEO of The Atlantic, which is a big shift. And the way I thought about it was I’m a pretty good writer, I’m a pretty good editor, pretty good manager, but there’s this concept of comparative advantage where what matters in life is not what you are best at, it’s what you are best at relative to your peers.

And I sort of thought that my comparative advantage was figuring out business models for serious journalism organizations. And if that’s my professional advantage, that’s the thing that I’m best at relative to my peers. I may not be, certainly not the best in the world at it, but compared to everybody else in journalism, I’m in a higher tier. At The New Yorker, there are a ton of people who can write better than me, right? So many of them. And how many of them are better at figuring out business models for serious journalism? Well, I don’t know, fewer. And so the opportunity came up. I was like, “Well, I should really test and see how this works.” So that’s why I made the shift five years ago.

BERMAN: I met with David Bradley about this job–

THOMPSON: Oh, wow.

BERMAN: When it was open. I think I was maybe the 712th person he met with along the way. He made a much better choice, and I wasn’t available for the role at the time, but I walked away really struck by two things. One, what an opportunity. I mean, this is one of the most important institutions in American media and American culture, and the chance to take it in decline and build it back up is off the charts. And at the same time, holy shit, this is a big hill to climb.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: This is not easy. You’ve got a legacy institution in a sector that’s in decline and all of it. When the opportunity presented itself, when you were sitting there, deciding, “Am I going to do this,” I’m sure you’re excited about it for so many reasons, but how daunting was it?

THOMPSON: It’s funny to go back to that. This was 2020. I took the job, it was announced in December of 2020, the middle of COVID. And there were two really salient facts. One, I knew the economics of The Atlantic were terrible, and they’d been reported that they were losing $20 million, $30 million a year. They’d laid off 20% of their staff. They shut down the whole live team, they’d fired the whole video team. David Bradley had written this effusive memo, it was very complicated. This is the time of George Floyd, it’s the time of COVID. So I knew it was in deep financial trouble. It’s a real cultural touchstone for me.

But the other salient fact was that the journalism was amazing. And I knew that because I’d been competing with it. And I’d been running the newsroom at Wired while we were competing with The Atlantic on stories on COVID. And so I thought, “If the journalism wasn’t amazing, not a fixable situation, but journalism is amazing.” I know how to run a playbook where, The New Yorker, we built a digital subscription model, we built a thriving website, advertising business, all kinds of ancillary business that really worked. We did the same thing at Wired. I know how to work on building plausible economic models. So I thought, “I don’t know, I bet you we can do this.” So I said yes. Plus, David Bradley’s so charming.

Copy LinkThe opportunities Nick Thompson identified early at The Atlantic

BERMAN: A remarkable human being and very hard guy to say no to, I’m sure. Every time you take a new job, it’s a covered dish. You think you know what you’re getting and you open it up and you just, “I didn’t know there were raisins and almonds in this thing.”

THOMPSON: Right.

BERMAN: So when you got there–

THOMPSON: It’s actually when you take a bite that you realize the raisin and almonds.

BERMAN: Right, right. And cumin on top of it. When you got there, what did you see, what did you learn where you were either like, “Holy shit, I can’t believe we have to deal with this, too.” Or where you were like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how big this opportunity here was?”

THOMPSON: Well, it’s interesting because when I came in, I saw a couple opportunities that didn’t matter. I was like, “Wow, they haven’t digitized their archives.” That’s crazy. Go back to 1857, the archives aren’t readily accessible. “Let’s just do that. It’ll cost $2 million to do it, and then we’ll generate tons of traffic, Google SEO. We’ll be able to run an archival playbook like we did at The New Yorker.” And we digitized the archives. It’s a great project, so glad we did it. Does it generate millions of dollars? No, it does not. The second thing I was like, “Well, at Wired, we built this incredible affiliate business model. We review gadgets and people buy. We get an Amazon commission.” I was like, “We’ll do that through books at The Atlantic. We’ll figure it out.” We build that, it generates $7,000 a year. It doesn’t matter.

What did matter was, “Okay, wait, we have this paywall, and we have this great journalism. Let’s figure out the math, and then we’ll just do hundreds of tests.” I think we ran 230 tests last year on different variables involving essentially the paywall. This actually comes from covering the tech industry where you watch Amazon they have this brilliant idea, and part of the way they execute is just every variable gets tested 1,000 times. And if something is 1% better, they change it. And so we start this culture of data science, iterative testing, and it turns out that changing the math on the way the paywall works and the way the paid marketing works and the way the offers work, suddenly our subscription growth goes from da, da, da.

BERMAN: Right, you start to see the hockey stick.

THOMPSON: We see a hockey stick and that’s what takes us from losing a lot of money to making money.

BERMAN: The Atlantic is easily in my top tier, most valuable subscriptions.

THOMPSON: All right.

BERMAN: I mean, I’m in that cohort where if I woke up tomorrow and you’re like, “Yeah, we’re doubling it,” I’d be like, “Well, I’m in, okay.”

THOMPSON: Great.

BERMAN: Don’t test me in that pool, please.

THOMPSON: Hold on, a note to self, I’m writing this down.

BERMAN: But was there an inflection point on the subscription piece where you said, “Oh, this is going to work, we can really do this?”

THOMPSON: When you’re The Atlantic, you don’t publish that many stories, but you publish a lot of hits and you have people out on MSNBC and all over the radio, talking about it. It turns out that actually you can have a very hard paywall. Now, there’s a trade-off there, though. You have a hard paywall. A, it hurts your advertising business and B, maybe hurts your brand. And C, maybe it’s not great for democracy. You’re in this business because you want people to get your information. And so you suddenly have to square all those things. And we had this meeting bringing together all the stakeholders, and I was kind of like, “This is what the numbers show we should do.” And we didn’t go to zero because of all these trade-offs, but we went much tighter, and we built a very sophisticated paywall.

The goal when you have a paywall is if someone’s not going to subscribe, you want them to read the article. And someone is going to subscribe, you want them to pay to read the article. And the problem is you can’t know. You can’t interview every person about their subscription or propensity. And so you have to guess, and you guess based on what the story is, based on what the referral source is, based on all the information that you have about them. And if you can set your paywall rules so that you guess correctly more often and incorrectly less often, you’re in really good shape. Maybe you set different rules where people are coming in from Google Search, and people are coming in from Drudge, what about if they’re coming in from Twitter, if they’re coming in from The Atlantic? What if they’re coming in from somebody else? And so you can kind of make a bunch of rules based on that.

Copy LinkInside The Atlantic’s turnaround

BERMAN: And in year two when you saw subscriptions actually drop, was there a moment where you had a crisis of conviction about this?

THOMPSON: Yeah, totally. I was terrified.

BERMAN: So what happened?

THOMPSON: I was just worried. I was like, “Well, maybe I’m not good at this.” I came in with all this confidence. We could run The New Yorker playbook, the Wired playbook. But what I knew was the team I was building was amazing. The team was getting better and better, and morale wasn’t dropping. It wasn’t like people were starting to fight it. When an organization goes up, it’s kind of like everybody’s happy, right? You have to re-manage it, and you have to figure out reporting lines and flows of information.

When an organization’s going down, you can have a great team and everybody’s mad, right? And we didn’t have that. I also had said, it was like my first all-hands, I said to the staff, “We want to get to 1 million subscribers, a really hard goal, and we want to get to profitability, a really hard goal. And when we get there, everybody gets a $10,000 or 10% bonus.” So I started in 2021 and 2022 was ominous. And then 2023, it starts to pick up. I think it’s the summer of 2023.

BERMAN: What happened that summer?

THOMPSON: The tests started working and maybe it just took enough time to gestate, maybe it was some changes in personnel. But when I was there a year and a half, that’s when you could start to see when you look at the leading indicators, “Oh wait, actually, the numbers everybody else sees are bad, but the numbers I see are good.” And then by the winter of 2024, it was like, “Oh wow, now everybody can see the numbers are good.” And then by the end of the year we were profitable and had reached 1 million subscribers, so everybody gets paid. And everybody was incredibly excited about that. But there’s a period, I guess it’s about 18 months from when I start to when the indicators look good. And it was probably about the year to 18 month period where I was like, “God, maybe I should have stayed a journalist.”

BERMAN: Yeah. Well, and incredible where you guys are now. The goal was 1 million subscribers. When you came in, you were at?

THOMPSON: Maybe 800, but we were not growing.

BERMAN: Yeah, right. And you were losing $20 million to $30 million dollars, and so to be where you are now-

THOMPSON: And now we’re at 1.46 and we’re making, I can’t say exactly how much we’re making, but we’re making good money. I mean, we take the money we make and we hire new people. The goal of The Atlantic is really interesting. We’re owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who obviously doesn’t need revenue from The Atlantic as her principal source of income, but she doesn’t like being taken advantage of. And she liked the things she owns to make money and be sufficient and be serious, and not to treat her like she’s an ATM.

And so the way I think of it, not everybody in the organization agrees, is you have to be profitable and you’ll do everything to be profitable. And if you’re not going to be profitable, then you make hard choices and all that. If you are going to be profitable and you’re going to make $2 million, well, then you can take $1.9 million and put it back into the most valuable things at the organization, ideally to grow and have more influence and hire more great journalists. You’re going to make $4 million, maybe put $3.9 million back in. And so that’s the way we’re running it.

Copy LinkThe Atlantic’s licensing deal with OpenAI

BERMAN: One of the decisions you made is to do a big licensing deal with OpenAI.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: There are a lot of media companies that are doing these deals, there are some that are hesitant to do them. Why did you do that deal?

THOMPSON: This was interesting because I had the most hate and the most anger internally. We ran a story. I signed this deal and then our journalism side, which is separate from the business side, runs a story called “The Deal with the Devil.” And we run all these stories that are kind of attacking our deal, and there’s a lot of commentary, and I do this all-hands, which is quite aggressive. I never doubted that it was the right thing, 100% confident, and remain so. The reason we did the deal is that the AI companies came, they scraped all our data, clearly in violation of our terms of service, probably in violation of copyright law. Courts are going to sort that out. Certainly in violation of every sort of ethical standard.

And then they built competing products against us. So they did this, and we weren’t savvy enough to catch them and stop them in the beginning. So then the question is, all right, what should you do about that? The thing that’s not useful is just kind of stomp your feet and be frustrated. And unfortunately for many of my peers, the strategy has been stomp your feet and be frustrated. And so I basically said, “Look, we would like to be compensated. So we’re either going to sue and pursue this legally or we’re going to make deals.” And with OpenAI, we said, “Hey, here we are. Let’s talk.”

And they said, “Great, let’s make a deal and you’ll become a partner as we build this new part of the internet.” And to me, that’s a much better deal than not doing that. Now, I can see the argument. The New York Times argument here, “Let’s sue, go get them.” And we are a party to another lawsuit and who knows, we’ve reserved all rights. There has to be a fair exchange of value. And if there isn’t a fair exchange of value, well then, we’ll use whatever methods of pressure we can, whether it’s lawsuits or whatever. And so that’s how I’ve approached it.

BERMAN: If you look at the last 20-ish years, there’s sort of two directions that it seems like this has gone, three. One is the NBA where it’s like, “We’re leaning into YouTube, we’re going to figure out how we build a global audience here and we’re going to work with the platform to make this happen.” Two is Viacom just sues YouTube like, “We’re not going to play ball, we’re going to sue you.” And then three is where the traditional media companies just became arms dealers to Netflix, licensing content to Netflix where all of a sudden, eventually Netflix is displacing and replacing them and now buying them. How have you informed this decision about doing the OpenAI licensing deal with this data from the last two decades or so?

THOMPSON: What we’ve seen in the relationship between the media companies and the tech industry and the tech platforms, and I view these guys as like the new tech platforms, and they will probably have a similar role to what Facebook and Google had. None of these partners can be trusted. Not because they’re bad people, they’re good people, they’re friends of mine, but they’re capitalists, and they’re self-interested and they would rather they make money than you make money. And if you can both make money, they’re happy, but they don’t actually really care that much about you. So you shouldn’t rely on their goodwill, but you should rely on their economic incentives. As a result of that, we’ve got to build direct relationships as much as we can. We expanded our print magazine, in part to have direct relationships with people. We work really hard on our app to have direct relationship with people.

We built our newsletter product. Those are all about direct relationships, so there’s no algorithm in the middle. But with the algorithmic players, the key is to develop an ecosystem that is mutually beneficial. And in the old internet, we had a mutually beneficial ecosystem. Google scrapes the internet, scrapes us, but then it has links, right? There are all kinds of different ways where you can have a mutually beneficial relationship. With the AI companies, we don’t have that yet. And them paying one-time licensing fees, that’s not it. What has to happen is the AI companies, whether it’s Gemini, whether it’s ChatGPT, whether it’s Perplexity, whether it’s Claude, someone has to figure out a model where there’s a real exchange of value.

And it could be modeled on what ProRata has done. What ProRata has done is they’ve built a search engine, you search for something. They identify, “Okay, the answer comes 6% from The Atlantic and 4% from The Guardian, therefore we’ll give 3% of the revenue to The Atlantic and 2% to the Guardian.” There’s a direct payment relationship, that’s a really good model. You can imagine a different model where Gemini says, “You know what? We’re trying to make The Atlantic whole because they’ve given us all this data and they’ve given us all this stuff. We’re going to run our algorithms and we’re going to identify who’s a high propensity subscriber. And if there is one, we’re going to put a call-out to The Atlantic or we’re going to put a link to The Atlantic subscription page.” That’s an amazing exchange of value. Perplexity could do that, too. Claude could do that as well.

So you can imagine all kinds of different models. What about subscription integration? What if you’re an Atlantic subscriber and you authenticate it with ChatGPT? And then when you search in ChatGPT, you either get The Atlantic to inform your answer or you don’t? And what if we only do a deal with ChatGPT or what if we only do a deal with Gemini? And then there’s a way that we’re making money and they’re building a better product for their consumers. Now, what hasn’t happened is any of those things. And what I hope happens in the next year is that one of those big companies says, “Oh, we’re going to figure this out so that we can build a model for the future internet that works as well as the old model did.”

BERMAN: How do you get them to see that it is in their long-term interest to work with you, rather than just cannibalize you?

THOMPSON: Yeah, okay, amazing question. Part of the problem, part of the reason we have less leverage than we did in the last round is that they all think that their ultimate value is going to be infinity. So now the question is how do you get leverage, and how do you get them to pay attention? And there are a couple of ways you can do that. One, and I wish the media industry had done this sooner, is block them from scraping you. And so initially we were like, “Gosh, they’re scraping us.” And then we were like, “Okay, well, we’ll put a robots.txt file up and we’ll say, ‘Hey, please don’t scrape.'” And that’s like a no trespassing sign. You know what? You know how much they care? Zero. So then it was like, “Okay,” then Cloudflare comes in and they’re actually good at blocking bots.

So now we have a nice dashboard and we can say, no, no, no. And so we block them, so that gives us a little bit of leverage. Now what are the other points of leverage? Well, you could move up the stack and have people somewhere else in the stack of information supply. You can imagine an ISP, right? That’s one point of leverage. Second point of leverage would be legislation. It’s not going to happen in the United States, but it might happen in Europe, it could happen in Australia. And then once there’s legislation, then things change. Another point of leverage would be lawsuits. Anthropic just had to pay out billions of dollars to authors. What if we start winning? And the case law has been a little mixed so far, but you can imagine we start winning lawsuits. Well, then that changes it.

And then another lever is public pressure. My view is that once one of these AI companies comes out and actually does the right thing for the publishing industry and the right thing for content creators and the right thing for Hollywood and the right thing for authors, once somebody does that, maybe they’ll get the reputation as the ethical AI shop and then things will be much better and that’ll actually be good for their brand. And you can imagine a discussion like, “Huh, wouldn’t it be good to have the reputation as the ethical AI search engine as opposed to the unethical one?”

BERMAN: Still ahead, how Nick Thompson learned to run faster than ever in his 40s and what it can teach the rest of us, even if you are an extremely reluctant runner like I am. 

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Copy LinkNick Thompson on whether CEOs should have personal brands 

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably seen Nick Thompson’s videos there. Even after moving into his new job at The Atlantic, he decided to keep publishing his popular daily series, which has evolved from the most interesting thing in tech to the most interesting thing in AI.

THOMPSON: I think I stopped for two weeks when I took the job. And then I remember the first one I posted, one of the first comments was, “Dude, you’re CEO of The Atlantic. Why are you still doing this?” And then I remember thinking, “Well, you know what? It’s actually a really good learning mechanism.” And so it’s a way to force myself. You become CEO, you can spend all your time doing things that are helpful to your job, but you’re not learning about the world in a way. That’s what’s best about being a journalist. So it was like a learning enforcing mechanism. And then I actually realized it’s good for a business. Because you know who’s watching these videos? CMOs, and they’re really important people to reach.

And so you go into a meeting with the CMO and you’re like, “Hey, I think you should advertise in the Atlantic.” “Tell me more about it. By the way, I like your videos.” And it turns out to be a really good marketing channel for The Atlantic. Now, I still do it as a journalist. I’m not talking about our advertisers, I’m not talking about our partners, and sometimes I’m upsetting them. I’m just saying what’s on my mind. And as soon as I stop doing that, then the things are worthless. As soon as it’s canned, rehearsed, as soon as it goes through our comms channel, then it’s dead. The whole point is this is Nick unfiltered, what’s on his mind, and it’s done great.

BERMAN: It’s going to be foreign for boomer CEOs, it may be a little uncomfortable for Gen X CEOs, for leaders. When you think about the next generation of leadership, are you advising CEOs and aspiring CEOs to be building their personal brand on these platforms as well?

THOMPSON: I don’t. And I couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong choice if, A, I wasn’t good at it. It’s not that I’m naturally particularly smart or whatever, it’s just that I was on TV. You go on CBS for years and you have two minutes to explain something, you get better at explaining stuff in two minutes. So I had all this training that makes it easier for me to do this. And I was an actor when I was in high school and college. And I was a street musician, too. Talk about a thing where you have two minutes to impress someone. Street music is pretty good. You’re always on and then the subway comes and you have to stop. And so it depends on the personality. And then two, there’s an opportunity cost. Time is your most precious resource. There are definitely some people where it’s worthwhile and there’s some where it’s not.

BERMAN: One last thread I want to pull on in terms of leading The Atlantic right now. You and I are sitting here the same week that Renee Nicole Good was killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. We have an all-hands meeting today, our standard Friday meeting. I woke up this morning trying to find the words that I will share with my team. How do you lead an organization of several hundred people who are deeply committed to The Atlantic’s mission in a time of such turmoil?

THOMPSON: Yeah, that’s a great and hard question, so I’ll say a couple things. One, the way The Atlantic is structured is that Goldberg runs the editorial team, I run the business team, we both report to the board. And what that means is that we have our own series of influence, church and state. I don’t know what they’re going to publish today, and that’s good. It also means that on issues like this, I’m very careful. My view is that as the leader of a media organization, if I’m going to make a public statement on issue, there’s a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping, copyright, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, but I shouldn’t be making statements about ICE. If it’s anybody’s role in the organization, it’s Jeff’s. It’s certainly not mine. But that doesn’t really answer your question, that’s just about public statements.

And maybe I’ll answer it this way. We have a set of founding principles at The Atlantic. Spirit of generosity, treat people well. But at the same time, the force of ideas. You respect ideas, you argue it out. And if you have an idea and you don’t feel like you can state it, well, then we’re doing something wrong. And sense of belonging. This is a place where they belong and this is a place where the ideas can be heard. Whether they are traumatized by ICE or whether they think that guy who shot Renee Good was doing the right thing because his life was under threat, you want to make sure these people feel welcome at The Atlantic. And that’s a challenging management problem. Our founding statement says, “Of no party or clique.” We are not supposed to take stands, even as journalists.

We do stand for truth, we stand for honesty, we stand for reality. We care about democracy. The things we care about, the core values that we have, but our job is very much not to be perceived or to be on the parts and sides. We have Adam Serwer writing this. We have David Frum. You know who doesn’t agree all the time? Adam Serwer and David Frum. But we publish both of them. And then for me personally, I feel like, a little back to what I said a minute ago, there’s a subset of issues where I should speak publicly. And if there’s a law coming in about copyright, I will happily talk about that, but I’m not going to talk about a law about ICE. And so we have that as the rule and the expectation.

Copy LinkHow The Atlantic competes with Substack and independent media

BERMAN: Nick, we’re in a moment where you’ve got a lot of legacy media, talent leaving to launch a Substack, podcast, et cetera, build effectively, independent creator-led media companies. You’ve got extraordinary talent at The Atlantic. How are you thinking about that as you lead the organization and bring talent on and keep them?

THOMPSON: Yeah, it’s an incredibly hard issue and we’ve lost people. Derek Thompson came up through The Atlantic and now is on Substack, so we have a challenge. We have to make it so that the next Derek looks at the options. And you make a lot of money on Substack and you can make more money there than you can at The Atlantic where we have bans on what people can be paid. So we have to figure out what is the value that we can give somebody that makes it worth it to stay. We can give you copy editing, we can give you fact checking, we give you editing, we give you social promotion. We give you the SEO value of being on The Atlantic, we give you the reach of The Atlantic, we give you the network of The Atlantic. And so we have to optimize all of those things.

We also have to figure out how we can let you do some of it. And so maybe you have this itch and maybe you want to go and do some independent stuff, not because you think you can make more money, you want to have a YouTube show. Well, you know what? David Frum has a YouTube show. We’ve got to give people those opportunities and make it so that they can feel as fulfilled as they would being independent on Substack. You know what I want? I want every Atlantic journalist to wake up in the morning and say, “You know what? I think we’re in good hands because Nick’s running this organization. And Nick and his team are out there and they’re looking out for us.”

And one of the ways we’re going to lose people is the minute that doesn’t happen. If I do a good job, then I have a better chance of keeping them. Jeff Goldberg’s job is to make sure that they’ve got the best editors making their stories better. And then Jeff and I collaborate in making sure that we’re putting it out in the world to get as many readers and have as much influence and they’re on the right stages. What I want us to be able to do is I want us to be a combination of the Yankees and the Devil Rays. I want us to be able to go out and find stars. And we just hired Sally Jenkins. Everybody knows Sally Jenkins.

BERMAN: I grew up reading the Washington Post.

THOMPSON: Maybe she’s the best sports reporter in America. She’s awesome, so you hire those people. But you also make some bets on some 25-year-olds you hire as fact-checkers or maybe you assign freelance stories to. And the hope would be you do both. You can build up the young people and you can hire the proper stars. Derek is an interesting case because Derek came up through The Atlantic and The Atlantic helped make Derek. And so maybe the really smart 25-year-old is like, “You know what? I can’t make it on Substack now, but if I go to the Atlantic for 10 years, I can on Substack.” And we get 10 years of great work. I can guarantee you that David Bradley is delighted he hired Derek Thompson as an editorial fellow.

Copy LinkNick Thompson on lessons from his father

BERMAN: Nick’s new book is The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. 

I have a bit of a confession to make, which is, I got a pre-release copy of the book in anticipation of sitting with you. And it took me a while to pick it up because I have such an aversion to running. I’m not a runner, I’ve never been a runner. I’m allergic to the idea of running.

THOMPSON: You saw that photograph on the cover and you were like, “No.”

BERMAN: Right, yeah. And I start reading the book and it’s the best memoir I read in 2025.

THOMPSON: Oh, that’s awesome to hear.

BERMAN: And it’s not even close. And it strikes me that it’s at least three books in one.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: It’s very much a book about your father. It’s a book about you and your career, and it’s a book about running.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: Tell us about your father and specifically, what did you learn about your father in the process of researching and writing the book?

THOMPSON: Big question. My father, remarkable guy, grows up in tricky circumstances in Oklahoma. And then it’s like the world’s fastest rise up the American meritocracy. Andover scholarship, Stanford scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship. Stanford. Marries into Paul Nitze’s family. My mother comes from this prominent DC family, and Scott Thompson’s on top of the world. And then it doesn’t work. Everyone’s, “This guy’s going to be President, he’s going to be Secretary of State, he’s going to be president of the university,” and life’s hard. You can be a really promising kid and a really promising student, and you can have what it takes to succeed at Stanford and not what it takes to succeed in Washington. And he starts to drink too much, gets a little depressed, it’s not really working. And then he comes to this realization that he’s gay after I’m born. By the end of his life, he’s running something kind of like a brothel in Bali, he has this ridiculous sex addiction, he’s bankrupt.

So watching his rise and then the downward trajectory of his later years, during which he’s also a loving father and an interesting guy, it was hard to live through and then it was hard to process as a writer. And so your question is what I learned while writing the book. And I think my view of him matured while I was writing the book. I think forgive’s not quite the right word, but to be more appreciative of the love he gave while also being entirely aware of the chaos he caused. 

And I have this insight, it’s sort of been bubbling for a while, that my father was both the person I was most like, the person I, in some ways, had spent my adult life trying to please and to live up to the expectations he set, and the person I was most desperate not to become. And people, a lot of men, a lot of women, they run towards their father, they run away from their father, and I was doing both.

One of the greatest set of documents that I got was his reviews as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. But they’re these pretty vicious analyses by the Dons, so when my dad was at Stanford everybody loved him. I read his recommendation letters and they’re like, “This is the best kid we’ve had since Hoover, never seen a kid like this.” The Dons see something and they write, “This kid doesn’t have the attention span to be a great academic. He can’t stay still. You know what he should be? He should be a journalist.”

And it’s kind of interesting that in some ways, I have the same trait. I like to do lots of things, I like to move around. I like new challenges, I like learning this. I like learning that. And I kind of think that my dad should have been a journalist like me. He’s great at talking to people. He’s always interested, he’s always curious. He’s unafraid of travel, he’s unafraid of difficult situations. He’s happy to sleep on the floor. If there’s something interesting, he’ll get there the next day. It’s kind of interesting that I sort of wish, not that I had followed in his footsteps, but that he had somehow figured it out and done the same thing that I did.

BERMAN: Yeah. How does how your dad parented or didn’t parent you affected how you’re raising your kids?

THOMPSON: My dad did a bunch of things that I don’t do. A, he was absent. I spent more time playing sports with my kids yesterday than my dad did my whole childhood, so I am way more attentive and focused on them. I also don’t push them as much as he pushed me. He made it very clear to me that, “You should absolutely do the best at every single thing you do and you have that capability. And if you don’t do it, it’s due to lack of effort.” And that’s an interesting lesson to get because it’s both good, it’s good to get that support. You can also crash out if a parent believes that and you can have a hard time with that. It ended up being a good way to parent me for whatever reason.

There is one thing that he did teach me that I 100% follow, which is if I was with him and he was meeting anybody, if he had a meeting, lunch with a senator, he’d bring me. And I do that with my kids. My little guy got to interview Joe Biden one day when I was interviewing him for CBS and the lights went out and couldn’t do it. And he was like, “Hey kid, come interview me.” And it was a cool experience for my child and I bring them to everything I can. If they’re free and I’m going somewhere, they’re coming with me. And I think they learn a ton.

BERMAN: Yeah, there’s so much. I mean, we always had the kids at the table at the dinner party no matter what, right? You can be excused early, but there’s a lot to exposing your kids to that adult world and treating them like grownups in it.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

Copy LinkWhat running has unlocked for Nick Thompson

BERMAN: It’s powerful. There’s so many obvious lessons from the kind of running that you’ve done, the training that you’ve done, that are applicable to the business world. What have you learned about yourself in that process and how has that informed what you do as an organizational leader?

THOMPSON: Well, there was a crazy thing I learned about myself that was really the impetus for writing this book. I’d spent my 20s trying to break a three-hour marathon. I hadn’t. I did when I was 29 years old and then when I was 30, I ran a 2:43. And for people who aren’t marathoners, that’s quite a difference. It doesn’t sound like that big a difference, but it’s a huge difference. And then right after I broke that 2:43, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I go through a really hard treatment. Two years later, I come back and I run another marathon. You know what I run? 2:43, amazing. And then the next 12 years, you know what I run basically every marathon? 2:43. And people make fun of me and they call me Mr. 2:43. And when I was in that period, I was like, “Well, this is as fast as I can go.”

Then this crazy thing happens when I’m 43 years old and 44 years old, and it’s not coincidentally right after my father dies. Suddenly I run a 2:38. Then I run 2:29. And then I set the American record in the 50K. And so the observation that then led to the book was not Nick ran faster because he trained harder. That’s not a very interesting book. What was interesting is I had this realization, it happened one day when I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge. And I sat down and I realized, wait, the reason why I had been stuck at 2:43 was that I had a mental block about going faster than I had been before I got sick. And that was really interesting. That led me to the realization that what makes you fast or makes you slow is often buried much deeper than you think.

And it can be tied up in your expectations, it can be tied up in the way pain works. Now, that leads to this interesting question, the second part of your question. What does that thing you learned, how does it affect your business? And there’s not quite a parallel. There are lessons. One of the things about running, and one of the things I learned while training hard is, you know what you have to do when you run to get better? Make yourself really hurt, really. And you have to go at a pace that you don’t think you can go at. And you can go and run a marathon having a nice time every day. If I want to go run the Boston Marathon in three and a half hours, I can go out and I can run eight miles a day, couple 20 mile runs, and I’ll go run that.

If I want to run in two and a half hours, 2:35 or whatever my best possible thing I could do it in, it’s three months from now, there are about 30 days between now and then where I’m going to have to just withering pain, where at the end of it, I’m leaning over on my hands, on my knees, heart rate is at its max and I’m very uncomfortable. And that’s actually a good lesson for work. Sometimes you have to go at an uncomfortable pace and sometimes you have to just charge into the thing you don’t want to do. And if you’re trying to find the route around, it doesn’t actually work. And that’s a lesson that you can learn in running pretty well.

Part of the hypothesis of the book is that because running is so simple, it’s just you, there are no teammates, there’s no judge, there’s no subjective. It is all objective. You run the marathon and from the time you cross the starting line to the finish line, there’s an amount of time and you either went fast or you went slow and you either went faster or you went slower, and it’s on you. And if you went slower, because of something you did. If you went faster, it’s because of something you did. And so you can learn these lessons really well because it’s so direct. And so, maybe the lesson I’ve learned from my training is more about pain and about pacing and about effort and about how you structure an intense regime, more than it’s about the singular realization about the way pain works, the way memory works that triggered the book.

BERMAN: Pretty much anyone who’s ever led a team of human beings has had at least one person who has been their own worst enemy.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: When you come to that realization that it’s actually your mindset that is the unlock to start shaving those minutes and then chopping those minutes at already elite numbers, when you’ve got someone on your team where you see them holding themselves back, how do you talk to them about unlocking the potential and getting out of their own way?

THOMPSON: The way I’ve tried to do it, and I’ve just gone through annual reviews, so it’s part of this, I like to sort of ask a question of, “What is the biggest thing that you think you could accomplish here at The Atlantic? What is the thing that you haven’t done yet that you want to do? What is the thing that we’re struggling to get to that you think we can do?” And I try to help them. I don’t say, “Hey, I think you should do this.” I remember I started working with these new coaches at the beginning of that training cycle and they’re like, “What is the fastest you think you could go?” And I was like, “Well, I think if I could run a 2:43 again.” And they were like, “Okay.” They had a call afterwards like, “This guy can go much faster. We can’t tell him that, we have to kind of lead them to that.” And so that’s the way I think about my employees.

BERMAN: My last confession for you. I’m sitting in the restaurant in my hotel in Lisbon at Web Summit, reading your book. And there is a story that you tell about being at camp in New Hampshire and you have your first kiss and you describe this beautiful, raven-haired, curly-haired young woman.

THOMPSON: I think I describe her like a Botticelli, right?

BERMAN: You do, you do. And her name is Carrie Politz.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

BERMAN: I went on to my family group chat with my mom and my dad, my brother, my aunt and my cousin, Carrie Politz, who grew up in New Hampshire.

THOMPSON: Wait, is your cousin?

BERMAN: And I send a photo of this page of your book– 

THOMPSON: Are you kidding me?

BERMAN: I’m not kidding you, to the group chat. And I go, “Carrie, this sure sounds like you, it’s New Hampshire.” Your first kiss was with my cousin, Carrie Politz.

THOMPSON: That is crazy.

BERMAN: It’s crazy.

THOMPSON: Yeah. I hope Carrie is listening to this. Hi, Carrie. We had a great three-week relationship back in the summer of 1990.

BERMAN: Stunning small world.

THOMPSON: That’s awesome.

BERMAN: Thank you for being on Masters.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Jeff. It was so fun to talk with you. We covered a lot of really interesting material here.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Nick Thompson for joining us. His brilliant new book is The Running Ground. And as I said to Nick in our conversation, it was my favorite memoir of last year. I really encourage you to pick it up and give it a read. We’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.