The Tim Ferriss Show - #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED

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Starting point is 00:02:51 that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is Nicholas Thompson on Twitter at NX Thompson. He is the editor in chief of Wired. Under his leadership, Wired has launched a successful paywall, a Snapchat channel, and an AMP stories edition, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm not sure if it's AMP or AMP. We'll get back to that. It has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards in Design and Feature Writing. Thompson is a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning. He is also a co-founder of The Atavist, which I've had contact with going way back in the day,

Starting point is 00:03:43 a National Magazine Award-winning digital publication. Prior to joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com from 2012 to 2017. Before The New Yorker, Thompson was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story The Great Escape, which was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. In 2009, his book The Hawk and the Dove, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War was published to critical acclaim. In Feb 2018, Thompson co-wrote Wired's cover story, Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook and the World, an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. That was a nice intro. Thanks for having me here. My pleasure. And I appreciate you correcting, or at least informing my pronunciation of the subtitle of your book. Yeah, Nick is not an easy name to pronounce. My favorite story about it is I was giving a talk about my book in Wisconsin, and like 10 minutes in, this guy runs out. And so Nitsa, one of the characters in the book is my grandfather, Paul Nitsa. This guy runs out.

Starting point is 00:04:54 And at the end, I asked the host, I was like, why did that guy leave? He looks at me and he said, he thought he was going to hear from Nietzsche's grandson. Oh, spelling. In Wisconsin, it was hilarious anyway. So there are many different questions that I want to ask, and I have many, many in front of me that I will ask. But I thought I would start with something that I chanced upon when doing homework for this, which I'll lead into with just reading the line. And it is, he is also an instrumental guitarist who used to supplement his journalism by playing on subway platforms.

Starting point is 00:05:34 Is that true, that you used to play music to supplement your writing income? Presumably, I guess. I think supplement is the wrong word, because I actually made more money. Yeah, I used to play, when I was a young journalist. So let's say ages 21 to 24. I played fingerstyle guitar on the platforms in New York. And you could make a good amount of money. You know, I'd make $20 an hour. You meet people. It's really fun. You learn a lot about the city. It's good sort of forced practice for multiple hours. You learn a lot about the city. It's good sort of forced practice for multiple hours. You learn a lot about the trains. I had a great time doing that.

Starting point is 00:06:09 Did you pick up any best practices for busking? I mean, there are many people who play on the platforms. I'm sure they make different rates. So what were some of the best practices or approaches that you picked up? I think one of the key things, which is kind of interesting, is to figure out the style of music you play and the demographics you're trying to hit. So if you're playing like super familiar stuff,

Starting point is 00:06:32 if you're doing kind of Beatles covers, you can go in a hallway, right, where people will hear you for two seconds and walk by. Or you can be on a train platform and the trains come every two minutes, right,

Starting point is 00:06:40 because people will just hear yesterday and give you money. If you're doing what I was doing, which is like weird instrumental guitar music that people will only like if they get a couple of minutes uninterrupted, you've got to find a platform where, you know, there may not be a ton of foot traffic, but where the trains don't come very often. So for me, the place that turned out to be the best was the L train platform, um, on sixth Avenue and 14th street. People know New York to be able to visualize it. And what was good about that is that the L train platform on 6th Avenue and 14th Street. People know New York to be able to

Starting point is 00:07:05 visualize it. And what's good about that is that the L train comes relatively infrequently. It's one platform with book trains going on either side of it. It's not a split platform. So you get people who are going both West and East. And then it was kind of like perfect for me demographically because it's where all the gay guys in Chelsea get off and then we're all kind of the sort of vegan young hipsters are heading to Williamsburg. So I got like a lot of demographics who are going to like to stop if they see a young guy playing guitar and possibly give money. So that was, I really spent a lot of time thinking it through and that was the one I liked. So what you do is you try to get there. You don't want to be there at like 3 o'clock when schools get out because everybody's like, it's crazy.

Starting point is 00:07:49 People are yelling. Nobody can hear you. The kids are jumping. The kids kind of make fun of you. But you definitely want to be there during commute time, and you definitely want to be there at like 9 o'clock at night. And the rules, at least back when I was doing it, a lot are once you get a spot, you keep that spot.

Starting point is 00:08:04 So it's until you either get bored or have to pee that you have it. So you try to calm right at like 3.30 and then hold it until 10 if you can. And did you ever contemplate going the Beatles route, playing more popular music so that you could get money for a few seconds of attention? Or did you choose your your musical selection for other reasons besides the twenty dollars an hour you know it would be the thing is that i'm not good at beatles covers right and like i i have like a limited i have a very i'm very strange musician i have a limited skill set. I'm very good at writing my own multi-tunel acoustic instrumental guitar songs. I'm really bad at reading music and playing other stuff,

Starting point is 00:08:51 so I never had that choice. But it would be an interesting choice. If you have the capacity to do both, which do you choose? Do you choose the one that gets you more money and is a little less emotionally fulfilling? It's like a typical choice we have in a thousand moments in life. Fortunately, I didn't have to do that in this particular subway music stage of my career. Why did you choose writing full-time instead of music full-time? Seems like both paths are presumably difficult, right? I mean, you are a creator in both paths. I don't know if that's a bad question, but it just comes to mind.

Starting point is 00:09:35 It's like you seem very talented. No, it's a super good question. You know, and I think that what was interesting is that they were kind of competitive with me, right? And so the things that go into how much time do you prioritize playing music? How much time do you prioritize being a journalist? Include factors like how much do you make per hour? But also as time goes by, how do you expect your life and ambitions to grow? And the thing about being a musician is that I kind of, I could see the end point, right? I didn't think I was going to become a transcendentally good musician. I didn't see a career where I would like change the way music was made or, you know, create

Starting point is 00:10:18 a new sound. Like I didn't, I didn't think that even if I devoted myself to it completely for 10 years, I'd ever reach that high point. So I could kind of see the max that I would get to, whereas in journalism, the max was quite a bit higher. So as the earnings began to equal out, as I began to earn more as a journalist, I started to gravitate more towards that.

Starting point is 00:10:39 So it was a combination of having some success as a journalist and then also thinking through, like, what would a life as a musician be like versus what would life as a journalist be like for somebody with my skills and as i said earlier my skills as a musician are limited right i could i could do well at one thing but i didn't think i was gonna really make a life work that way do you recall any particular moments whether it could be at any point in your life really where you thought to yourself this writing writing thing, or this editing thing, something related to long form text is something that I could really be excellent at, or this, this is something that I think I could make a good living doing because I'm, I can be exceptional at this. Was there a moment where you had that

Starting point is 00:11:24 thought that would sort of compel you to pursue that, say, instead of the music? Yeah. You know, the funny thing is that in my mind, through those foundational years, let's say from when, from the time I graduated college to the time I completely committed to it committed to be a journalist, which was 29, it wasn't always music versus journalism. In those early years, it was music versus journalism and other things, and then it was journalism versus other things. When I finished college, I thought I was going to be sort of an environmental activist or I might go into politics. I got kind of put in track into journalism in kind of a slightly odd way, which we can get into. So it was really only at about 29 when I got hired by Wired and started to do a good job editing stories. And when I started writing my book about Nixon and Kennan,

Starting point is 00:12:25 I began to feel really confident about it as a career choice. You said, I think you just said, tracked into journalism in an odd way. Sorry, I should have known you were going to come up with that. So I can't pick that up, or I can't not pick that up, rather. Let's jump into that. It's super bizarre. So when I was in college, I was focused very much on being a good college student and succeeding at college and going into student government and getting good grades.

Starting point is 00:12:53 But I was, to a degree that's strange when I look back, did not think at all about what would happen. I went to Stanford. I had a graduate school fellowship. I did well in college, but I prepared for life post-college extraordinarily badly. Um, and so I graduate and then maybe the fall after I graduate where I'm playing guitar, um, I get, I meet somebody at a party and sort of get surprisingly hired as an associate producer at 60 minutes, which is a great job. And so I moved to New York I show up at CBS or 60 Minutes is and within an hour I'm fired

Starting point is 00:13:28 I'm literally fired within an hour you're fired? within an hour who are you? what was the offense? the offense was being hired in a position sort of beyond my stature it was very strange and in retrospect

Starting point is 00:13:44 it's one of those things where I was treated kind of awfully, but I didn't understand it. I was 22. So I go, I show up, I'm still a member, and this guy's name is Phil Schafer. He's like, who are you? I'm like, I'm the new associate producer.

Starting point is 00:13:55 I'm working under Steve Groff. He's like, what have you done in television before? I was like, nothing. He's like, well, what have you done professionally before? I was like, nothing. I just graduated. And he's like, and we hired you as an associate producer. I was like, yeah, you know, I did these interviews, and I've done these tests. He's like, well, what have you done professionally before? I was like, nothing. I just graduated. And he's like, and we hired you as an associate producer. I was like, yeah, you know, I did these interviews and I've done these tests.

Starting point is 00:14:08 He's like, you're fired. And they literally took me out of the building. Wow. So it gets worse. So that's, I think, December of 1997. I graduated from college in June of 1997. That's December of 1997. So I'm like, huh, what am I going to do now?

Starting point is 00:14:25 One of my best friends from college was starting graduate school in the fall, and he was about to leave for Africa. And so I was like, I'm coming with you. So I go and I get my vaccinations, and within two weeks I'm on a plane. And then I get kidnapped immediately upon landing in Africa. I fly to Paris and Spain, and I take a boat to the Tangiers. And I pull out my guitar at a subway platform in Tangiers. I'm alone at this point.

Starting point is 00:14:55 It's northern Morocco. A guy comes up to me. He's like, hey, my family plays music. You want to come home with me? I'm like, great. Yeah, sure. Why not? I've got a day here before I'm supposed to be my friend. And it turns out that he's like,

Starting point is 00:15:07 he's a drug dealer. He locks me in this room and he has these cockamamie plans where he wants me to distribute his drugs around America. He makes me eat a fish head. It's all very peculiar. But it's definitely not what, it's definitely not come home to my family and play guitar. And so I've come out to a pretty rocky start in africa and eventually he dumps me and says enough of this guy like you i'm not getting what i want out of you and just like dumps me and lets me make my way to the train station um but the funny thing about that hold on let me pause for a second so was he like this guy is definitely not equipped to be a proper drug dealer for me in the united

Starting point is 00:15:43 states i mean what was the kind of the straw that broke the camel's back where he's just like, enough of you. I'm letting you go. I mean, did you have an approach? I mean, how did you get out of that? I was very confused. I think what happened was, you know, I don't think he had like begun that day saying, I'm going to kidnap an American. I think it was more like he saw me sitting there was like, let's see what happens if I take this guy. And then I go there, and he goes through all my stuff looking for money, and he finds that I've only got, I think it was $60 in cash.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And there's no traveler's checks. And fortunately, I had a backpack that had like smuggling sections built into it. And so my passport and like the valuable stuff were in there. And so I think he went through all my stuff and decided that I was like an itinerant traveler who was useless. I don't know what answers I gave him

Starting point is 00:16:37 about being the drug mule for him that turned him off, but it didn't work out. It was a poor job application, and the outcome was the one I wanted. So he dumped me and got rid of me. And then the great thing is that I then had a story, and so I turned that experience and some other experiences I had in Africa. I then spent several months traveling with my friend and some other friends. I turned those into an essay for the Washington Post. So suddenly I had journalistic clips.

Starting point is 00:17:12 And so kind of inadvertently, having been fired from journalism, I used the experience that followed to get clips. And then I came back. I played guitar. And then those clips led to a job as the editor of the Washington Monthly, which was a place that hired sort of young, ambitious people into roles with low paying roles, but high responsibility where you learn a lot. So that was how I got going in journalism. It was very bizarre. How did you pitch the Washington Post, or why did you end up... Was it a cold query or just a cold email to one of the editors who you found on the masthead? Or how did you go about getting this published? I think that... I think it was a cold query.

Starting point is 00:18:09 I know that I had talked to some journalists before I left. I remember talking to somebody from the Boston Globe, I grew up in Boston, about, you know, if interesting things happened to me, would it be possible to write stories from locations in Africa? And so I had gotten some advice. But I think, I think, I think I have wrote If you could just get kidnapped, it would make really good material. I mean, in retrospect, in fact, that was something my friend said to me. He was like, well, you know, to have that experience and only lose $60, it's kind of worth it. I remember him saying that. I was like so shaken by the whole thing. I was like, oh, you jerk.

Starting point is 00:18:46 But he was totally right. It turned out to be a really interesting experience for a mere $60. I saw this woman in New York City at one point walking around with a t-shirt, a crop top that said, bad decisions make good stories. And I didn't quite know how to take the shirt

Starting point is 00:19:03 in the context of her walking around with it. but, uh, certainly true for standup comedians. And it would seem true for, uh, people in Northern Africa considering perhaps a path in journalism. Uh, let's jump forward and I'm sure this is going to be very non-linear and how we bounce around. But one of the things that I mentioned in the intro was this piece, the great escape that later was turned into Argo. And when I was doing some writing on this, uh, a line that jumped out at me that I wanted to dig into was at wired, at least at the time, every pitch was graded on a scale of one to six by everyone on staff. And there's a meeting where these story ideas are pitched and, or then presented rather in reverse order of their scores, along with their standard deviations, which is fantastic. But could you sort of walk us through that pitch

Starting point is 00:20:08 grading process and oh my god tell us the story of the great escape because my understanding is it wasn't a uh it wasn't an immediate point to center field hit home run type of story but i'm most curious in the grading process and how you guys did that. So Wired was run by this guy named Chris Anderson, who had been a writer at The Economist and just a really high IQ Silicon Valley type and a very mathematical way of looking at the world. And so this efficiency mechanism he brought into the pitch process was to run it like sort of a false democracy under a dictatorship. So the final decision would be made entirely by Chris, whether a story was assigned or not. But when you wrote a

Starting point is 00:20:58 pitch, it would be sent to everybody on staff and everybody would vote on it and grade it. And the theory was, it was kind of a wisdom of crowds theory, that if you got everybody's vote, you could immediately tell what was great and what was bad. And that, I think he genuinely believed that one of the things that happens in meetings is that you spend a lot of time discussing stuff that 95% of the room hates, but since only a couple people talk, you can't quite determine that quickly. And so this is a way of determining what is the stuff that 95% of the room loves and 95%

Starting point is 00:21:32 of the room hates immediately, which is a super interesting thing, right? It's like theoretically a great thing to do. The problem with that is that it can be really demoralizing when your pitches do badly. It's okay to get your pitch rejected by the editor-in-chief, but to have your pitch graded badly by all your colleagues is kind of emotionally rough. So for The Great Escape, I remember this really well. It was writer Joshua Behrman, who's done great stuff for this American life. He's written all kinds of wonderful essays.

Starting point is 00:22:00 He was quite a bit younger then. I remember he sent me a bunch of pitches. I can't remember what the whole packet was. Maybe he sent me three ideas. But one was, hey, I'm not the spy. He's got the story of a crazy escape from Iran. And then another one I remember on the same email was, I think Stalin tried to create a half-man, half-ape army. And so, like, the two things were together. Like, should we investigate Stalin's half-man, half-ape army. And so, like, the two things were together.

Starting point is 00:22:26 Like, should we investigate Stalin's half-man, half-ape army? Or should we investigate, like, this escape from Iran? And so through whatever process of conversations between editor and writer Joshua, I decided to pursue the escape from Iran. And I pitched it at the meeting. And I knew it was going to do badly, right? Because it wasn't a wired story, right?

Starting point is 00:22:45 It's like from the 1970s. It's not about, you know, how Amazon and artificial intelligence are shaking. It just wasn't core wired. And everybody voted it really badly, right? The scores were one to six. It probably got a score of like two something. On the other hand, Bob Cohn, who was the executive editor, the number two person there,

Starting point is 00:23:06 I remember at the pitch meeting just being like, it's not wired, but I love it, let's do it. And so he just sort of muscled it through. So again,

Starting point is 00:23:12 it was democracy under a dictatorship and the dictators wanted to do the story because it was such a cool, so manifestly, you know, riveting narrative.

Starting point is 00:23:21 So we ended up assigning it. Josh wrote it, did a great job, published it, and then great job, um, published it. And then Hollywood took an interest. So a few followups, what makes a good pitch?

Starting point is 00:23:33 So when Josh sent you this pitch, let's just assume for the time being that it was, it was a good set of pitches. We can talk about, this is going to sound funny to people who don't have the background, but we could talk more about Stalin anyway. But we'll leave that alone for now. The half-man, half-ape army.

Starting point is 00:23:48 I mean, it's possible there was a real missed opportunity. We would have found out there was a half-man, half-ape army, which would be an amazing story. Well, not only that, but you have, correct me if I'm wrong, it's from the internet, so who knows, but a long friendship with Stalin's daughter. Is that right? Yeah, that is very true. Happy to talk about that. Yes, Svetlana and I were friends for many, many years. Okay.

Starting point is 00:24:10 So putting aside the half-man, half-ape army of Stalin, question mark, what makes a good pitch? If a writer is pitching someone like you, what does a good pitch look like? What are the ingredients? What are common mistakes that make something a bad pitch? However you want to kind of answer that for folks. Yep.

Starting point is 00:24:32 So a couple of elements that I appreciate are when the writer gives options, right? So what Josh had done in that email is he had sent, you know, three ideas, which I think is really great, right? And it's useful to be able to pick and it gives you a sense of the person's range of mind. Another element that's very useful is the element of the pitch that answers the question, why am I the person to do this? So in Josh's pitch, the reason he was the person to do it

Starting point is 00:24:54 is that he had, well, found something that no one had known before, and two, had unique access to the key character, right? Had access to the spy, Tony Mendez, I think that was his name. So that's another important element. And then the third is understanding what the magazine is trying to do in the section you're trying to write for. So what Wired was trying to do in its feature well then as now was tell really important stories about how technology is changing the world, but also tell things that are cinematic and fun to read and that are part of the wired world. So this story, The Great Escape, wasn't going to change the way you think about tech,

Starting point is 00:25:32 but it had characters, right? It had emotional resonance. It had, like there was a movie you could play in your mind, as you met Affleck later, you know, show without question. And that's often a question I'll ask for the story. So how will the reader be able to visualize it? How will they be emotionally attached to it? Why will they care about the characters you introduce at the beginning, what happens to them at the end? So a good pitch is something where you're writing it in a way that makes the editor convinced that you'll be able to write well. It shows why you have special knowledge or special insight or

Starting point is 00:26:00 special access. It shows why the story is new and that, you know, is structured so that the pitch clearly fits the aims and goals of the magazine or publication you're writing for. Do the writers also indicate, or is it just assumed, a given length or a lead time for completion? Is any of that included in that initial pitch or does that come later? Or is it just... That probably comes later. If it's somebody who I've worked with specifically, they may say, hey, I'd like to do this this month, or I want to fit it into my calendar, or I'm planning to go to location TK in June, I could do it then. But normally it's more like this is a story I'd like to do in the next reasonable time frame.

Starting point is 00:26:52 So I just want to back up for a second. For people who don't know what TK means, TK, as I understand it, means to come, but it's spelled TK so that you can find it very easily when you search for it. That's my understanding, at least. That sounds right to me. Yes, because very few words in the English language have T and K. So you can do a control F and find the things that you need to spot really quickly. wondering why tk uh you know a friend of mine neil strauss uh will turn off his wi-fi when he writes and not interrupt it for fact checking and certain types of research and just drop tk in throughout the piece and then do that as a batching process later just for people yeah

Starting point is 00:27:37 so for people who are wondering about that uh he also uses an app called freedom to block the internet so that he can't disrupt himself. That's a good thing to do. So now you just described Chris Anderson's process, which fits his personality. And I've met Chris before, a very smart guy. What is your process? How does your story pitch process differ? It's pretty similar, actually.

Starting point is 00:28:06 I mean, we've gotten rid of the scores and the standard deviations. I thought that probably introduced a little bit too much stress and unnecessary anxiety for people. But there is value to it, I can see. So what we do is a similar process. So the writer will work with an editor and they'll come up with a pitch. We try to make sure that they're under a page just to respect everybody's time and because constraints lead to better work in general. So people send in a one-page pitch. We sit around in a room. Lots of people are invited. Editors will be assigned in the stories, kind of sit around the main table. The story comes up and we talk about it. We talk about what are the unanswered questions. Will the writer be able. We talk about what are the unanswered questions?

Starting point is 00:28:45 Will the writer be able to do that? What are common unanswered questions? Sorry to interrupt. Sure. Like a lot of pitches will, they'll be missing that element of how, of what the scenes will actually be, right? And who, how the characters will develop, right? It's like, here's a big idea. Here's an important thing that happened and I'm going to write 5,000 words about it. And there's almost no thing that is big or important enough that you can write 5,000 words about it if you don't have like specific scenes and visual moments where you can pull a person in. And again, this is for wired features, right? And we run like web stories. We have a much more informal process. We run short things in front of a book where there's a more informal process, but, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:26 we only run four features a month, so 48 of them a year. So we do discuss them all and whether, you know, they'll be able to pull it off and how will the chronology work? And there's a lot of discussions about the writers because an incredibly talented magazine feature writer, sort of the subset of ideas they could write about is a lot larger than somebody with more limited skills and experience in this particular craft. So we'll talk about, okay, well, what have you read by this person? Oh, I remember reading that story.

Starting point is 00:29:54 I didn't think it totally worked, or I read that story. It did work quite well. So that's how it works. We all talk about it, and then afterwards, I'll speak with the executive editor and a couple of other editors, and we'll make a decision. Red light,

Starting point is 00:30:05 green light, red light, green light. So we're going to talk about out of this, the startup that I mentioned, but I'm going to tie, I'm going to tie it in here because my understanding is that you've had a decent amount of exposure to,

Starting point is 00:30:24 to feature pieces being optioned for film and argo or rather the great escape which then became argo's is one such example a lot of a lot of writers dream of having things optioned it's questions, I suppose, are A, is it a dream worth having? Or is it just almost uniformly disappointing or somewhere in between? And then B, if you were having something optioned of yours, what are the deal points

Starting point is 00:30:59 or the deal structures that you would pay attention to? Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so, yeah. Wired, I think very few stories from Wired were optioned before 2007, and then Wired started getting a reputation as a place where stories were optioned and has had a good amount of success since then. The Atavist, which we started in 2009, has had success from the get

Starting point is 00:31:27 go. I mean, it's something like 25% of the stories that have run in The Atavist have been optioned to Hollywood, which is a crazy, crazy percentage. Maybe it's 30%. And so is it a dream worth having? Yes, it is a dream worth having. the most important thing is having a good agent who has actually sold films before. Not like a lot of writers, um, don't know the right agents and having the right agent just is utterly transformative. It takes you from, you know, almost no chance to a very good chance. Um, so having an agent who has actually had success selling magazine stories in Hollywood before is really important. And so what we did at The Atomist is we just started out with an agent who had had a lot of success, the same guy that my co-founder, Evan Ratliff, who's been a writer for Wired, and that I had used at Wired.

Starting point is 00:32:18 And so we just brought him in with The Atomist from the get-go, or from fairly early on. And then when you're looking at the deal points, what you want is there's a whole series of stages along the way where you get different payouts. You get an initial amount of money, and then you get certain renewals, and then if the script is written, and then if the movie is made. And so what you want are you want to make sure that high-quality people are sort of being added at each step so that it's more likely to move from A to B to C to D. Um, and that you, um, you don't kind of fall for the, um, the dream where it's

Starting point is 00:32:54 like, all right, we'll give you a thousand dollars now, but a million dollars if we make it. Um, and there's almost no chance we'll make it right. You want to make sure that you get paid real money upfront because even a really good script with really good people attached to it has a fairly low percentage of chance of getting through. Are there any other clauses that are particularly important? And I've never, I've had for the first book that I did, I've had folks approach me about film adaptation. But it seemed like, at least in the structures that were being offered, it was very much a lockup period with almost no monetary compensation, with no guarantee that they would actually do anything with it in the sense that the reversion of rights clause became really important to consider much like if you're a product developer or an inventor and you develop something that you want to license to a larger company, there's nothing compelling them to spend marketing dollars on it or to develop it or push it in less,

Starting point is 00:34:06 or I should say, you increase the likelihood of that if you have that dictated in the terms of the contract and then some reversion of rights clause, right? So I suppose what I'm wondering is how much time in your mind do you allow for a story to float out there in the ether of say Hollywood before you can, you, you pull it back in some fashion or, or allow it to take a different path potentially because I, I know friends who are writers who've had stuff just float around and so and so is attached,

Starting point is 00:34:39 but Oh no, they're not attached because they're busy. And then when this person's attached, no, they're not because they had a conflict and And it just goes on and on and on for years and years and years. Is there any ways that you've found to mitigate against that in any way?

Starting point is 00:34:55 Yeah, so I'm not, you know, this is not my area of top expertise, but a couple of things. One, I think that the value of before you publish and before you put it up for auction of locking a few things down is really important. Making sure you have the life rights to the central character that you've negotiated. You know, in the example in the Argo story, it was really important that Josh had locked up rights to Tony Mendes' story so that after the story ran, it wasn't like somebody else could do the same story, but without Josh attached to it because Josh and Tony came as a package. And so they

Starting point is 00:35:33 had negotiated a deal together. And so that's a really important thing to make sure that you have as much as you can, the rights to that particular story buttoned up because it gives you just much more leverage if potential bidders aren't like, you know, I can probably do this without Nick or I can probably do this without buying the rights to Nick's story because it's public domain. So talking to an agent and working through that, I think is really important. And then just knowing that, you know, there's no part of the world where people kind of tell more baloney stories about how this is, about the stars that are coming in Hollywood.

Starting point is 00:36:09 Like there's so many, oh yes, you know, we'll attach Francis Ford Coppola, right? We'll do this, we'll do that. And they're not lying. It's just never true, right? So you really need to have it written down. And so I think where people get caught

Starting point is 00:36:22 is they sort of fall for that. And what you need to do is you need to have an agent, you need to have an auction, you need to have a formal process, you need to get more than one person excited, and you have two people bidding, then you have much more leverage on making sure that you get terms where you get either a decent amount of money or a pretty good guarantee that it will be made. You know, what we did at The Atavist is we ultimately set up a first look deal, meaning we work with a Hollywood studio that pays us an annual guarantee every year to be able to read the stories before everybody else and to have the opportunity to bid on them. And so that was a way of getting guaranteed income, making sure that somebody was interested and kind of locking the process in a way that worked for us.

Starting point is 00:37:01 That's great. Yeah, that's very smart. I didn't realize that. For people who are wondering, agent, agent, agent, I keep on hearing agent. How do I get an agent? How do I figure out who the agents are? I'd love to hear your thoughts. A very good starting place is to, in my experience, sign up for IMDb Pro and look at the credits of different films that you've enjoyed, uh, or perhaps screenplays, uh, that, uh, that you might be interested in and try to trace back the roots of that way. IMDB then provides say contact information for different actors, directors, and so on. And you'll start to see certain names that pop up a lot, like William Morris Endeavor, WME, CAA, Created Arts Agency, UTA, and so on. But would you

Starting point is 00:37:51 have any other recommendations for people who want to educate themselves about that side of the business, per se? My only other recommendation would be to find friends and friends of friends who have actually had success and say, who sold it? And I do this much more in the book publishing world where a higher percentage of my friends have sold books where, you know, you, I know you sold a book. What agent did you use and would you recommend him or her? And then if you've got five people who sold books, you ask them all, a couple of names come up and you go meet with them, see who you click with, who you get a good bond with. I mean, the best possible agent is somebody who has a track record and who actually likes you and cares about you. And sometimes those things are kind of like inversely related because they have a track record.

Starting point is 00:38:33 They have so many clients, they're not going to care about you. So you just got to figure out how to find somebody who's both good and responsive. responsive uh so i want to segue to the new yorker for probably more than a few minutes since i find the new yorker fascinating as i do wired but in a i think it was a 2015 interview you'd said and again fact fact correct as needed but the most encouraging thing we found is that the stories were prouder of the stories we put more effort into attract more readers so the i'd love to talk about what that means if you could elaborate on that because as someone who personally speaking for myself enjoys long form content and make some effort to resist the temptation to listicle myself to death in hopes of eyeballs and clicks what what what did that mean

Starting point is 00:39:36 and how did you foster that at the magazine that's that was like one of the most important kind of existential both debates and findings at The New Yorker. I started at The New Yorker on the print side when the magazine hadn't put a lot of effort into having an ambitious daily website. The website at The New Yorker mostly just published the print stories. Some of them were behind a paywall, and some of them were not. And then as part of this process where David Remnick became much more excited about daily journalism and the importance of having a website, eventually I was moved over to run the website, work with a bunch of people. And so the initial challenge was, can you publish daily content?

Starting point is 00:40:23 Because the magazine is put together by so many people with so much experience, and the website was this kind of startup within the organization where you have to be a lot scrappier. You're paying people. A New Yorker writer will get several dollars a word to write 5,000 words, so you're looking at $15,000 a story. And on the website, you're looking at $200 a story. So can you produce content for that $200 that won't sort of detract from the other stuff?

Starting point is 00:40:50 And that's a challenge, right? And you have to figure out what is the DNA of the worker. How long were those stories? I'm sorry to interrupt. The online? Maybe 800 words, you know, 1,000 words. I mean, that was actually an interesting conversation. Like, if you make 300 words, you know, will it actually detract more than if you make it 800 words?

Starting point is 00:41:06 Should you make the web stories more like the long print stories or less like the long print stories? And so there's a lot of back and forth. This is kind of the central debate in my mind for several years, right? How do you make daily web content that feels of a piece with the New Yorker magazine. It's been around for 85 years and has such an incredible history and such great stories. And so back to the initial question, over time, we found that what got the most readership that worked the best in every sense were smart pieces of analysis of what was happening right now, ideally written by the same people who wrote for the magazine. And they would spend far less time per word on their web posts

Starting point is 00:41:50 than they would for the magazine stories, but they would feel related. They'd feel of a piece. If Philip Gurevich wrote a web piece about a terror attack that had just happened, it would feel enough like a Philip Gurevich magazine feature, and the readers would appreciate it. And so ultimately, our strategy became getting the staff writers to write regular posts, hiring people who could write very quickly, could write at the cadence of the web, but who had similar prose styles to the New Yorker staff writers. Moving, John Cassidy, for example, who was a magazine staff writer,

Starting point is 00:42:21 writes a column every day for the website, which is great, really valuable to know that every day you would have a terrific column by this super smart, well-respected guy. Same with Amy Davidson, who had been a senior editor. So bringing over people, bringing in new people, getting some of the staff writers, and what we found was that the stuff people liked was the best stuff we published, and that was really heartening. People didn't want to go to Newyorker.com to read, to sort of click through sensationalized slideshows.

Starting point is 00:42:50 They wanted to come to New Yorker to read smart, interesting things. And that was great because when your business incentives align with your sort of journalistic incentives, you're in a much happier place than if the two are sort of run perpendicular to each other. So I would love to get your help encouraging people to do more long form. And by people, I mean publishers to foster that type of kind of patient editorial in some cases. And so I'm going to make this really personal. I've thought a lot about hiring writers to do longer form pieces for my blog, for instance, which does not have the draw or cache of the New Yorker, certainly, or Wired, but nonetheless, decent amount of traffic. I hand a couple million people, a couple million uniques per month. And I think what struck me when i was trying to think through this as someone who loves

Starting point is 00:43:49 long form is that i didn't know the process it's harder it's more of a black box than trying to put together a list of 12 bullets or a slideshow which i'm not going to say it's mindless, but it really doesn't require a lot of planning. So if for instance, I wanted to, uh, I had ideas for certain pieces and wanted to invite people who had ideas for pieces who were qualified writers to do, let's just call it three to 10,000 word pieces, right? So very broad spectrum. What is the process then for figuring out how much I should pay someone in a context like that? Because you noted yourself, there's kind of a very wide, there's a very wide spectrum.

Starting point is 00:44:40 I think I just used that twice in like three sentences. Shame on me. But nonetheless, in terms of payment per word, I don't even know how that works because I've never done it. But how would you think about going about doing something like this? If I wanted to do an experiment of like three to five pieces with different writers and see how it goes, how would you suggest I even think about this? You have so much experience and I have none because everything on the blog with a few rare exceptions have been my own stuff. Yeah, that's a really interesting question.

Starting point is 00:45:10 It's kind of like what we went through at the Atomist. So here are a couple ways to think through it. So first you could say, all right, well, how much advertising revenue will I get? And so you can do the math, right? So let's say you would get 50,000 people might read the story. That's a lot, but through your social promotion and through general traffic to the site. So 50,000 people will read the story. You'll be able to sell your ads at whatever CPM you sell.

Starting point is 00:45:37 Let's say $15 per 1,000 visitors. And you'll be able to show four ads per person, you know, one quarter of the people will be turning on ad blockers. So we'll say three, um, and, um, how much revenue you generate in total, right? And so you go through those calculations, right? You figure out what is your shelter rate on the advertising, what is your CPM of the rates. And the problem is when you do that, if you add those numbers up, you're going to end up with generating for your story that has a couple of ads viewed per person. And because people, you're going to end up generating like $2,000 in total revenue for the story. The numbers are just not good. And so if you have an advertising-supported, long-form journalism shop, it's really hard to pay for the writer, the editor, the rights to the art, and sort of the bandwidth.

Starting point is 00:46:34 It's a really hard thing to justify. And that's something we thought through a lot at The New Yorker and at Wired and at The Atomist. Okay, so how do you make the economics work? If you're only going to generate, you know, sometimes just a couple hundred dollars in advertised revenue, like what can you do? Well, at the New Yorker and Wired, there's a second revenue stream, which is subscriptions, right? And so you generate way more money from subscriptions

Starting point is 00:46:54 on these long-form stories than you do from advertised. So suddenly the amount of total amount of revenue generated by a long story is much higher, right? So suddenly you're generating, you know, $4,000 for a story or $5,000 for a story or whatever it is, and you can justify paying higher rates. The third way of making money is like find another thing. So at the Adventist, it was Hollywood, right? Where we could end up, we would pay writers. I think we would pay them, well, we had different models,

Starting point is 00:47:22 but you end up being able to pay them much better rates because you know, if they agree that they will give you 50% of the option price, if they sell it to Hollywood. So we would bake that into our contracts. Like, you know, either we can pay you $2,000 for this story and you can keep all the rights, the Hollywood rights,

Starting point is 00:47:39 or we can pay you $10,000 and give us 50% of the Hollywood money. And then the writer generally would choose the second option to get the higher guaranteed payment so they can justify spending all the time on it. So with you, you might want to think through something like that or think through whether there's another revenue stream you can attach to, whether it's being part of events or something like that, or find a specific sponsor for a kind of story. But that's how I would think through the economics of how to support it. But again, the core problem and the reason why it's really hard for publications to do long form is that it takes a writer two months to write a story that will get 50,000 readers.

Starting point is 00:48:18 And if you have that writer putting out listicles, they'll be able to generate three of them a day, each of which will get 25,000 readers. And it's sort of the bang for the buck equation unless you change the economics somehow by having subscriptions or movie deals or something else all the economic incentives push people towards short stuff yeah i'm i'm uh i'm in a somewhat uh odd position maybe in the sense that i don't i don't have advertising i don't have memberships. I, there's a possibility I could do something with Hollywood optioning. There are just stories that I would love to have told and characters I know who are just endlessly to me, at least fascinating who I don't have. I don't have current bandwidth, maybe even the capability to do justice in a really long form piece.

Starting point is 00:49:07 And I would love to just, I want to just see it in the world and pay them to do that. Probably reserve any option, right? For film or anything like that. In the case that I'm paying them, how would you, how might you determine how to pay them in a scenario like that?

Starting point is 00:49:23 Is there, I mean, if you're prepared to lose, if you're prepared to lose, if you're prepared to lose money on it, then you can get prepared to lose money, but not like hemorrhage out the face, if that makes sense. Right.

Starting point is 00:49:33 Like I'm, I want to pay a fair journalism. So you won't hemorrhage out the face. I mean, if you pay people $2 a word, you'll get like all the best writers in America will be thrilled to write for you. You pay them a buck 50 a word. There'll be,

Starting point is 00:49:42 you know, you'll get a slightly smaller pool. You pay a buck, people will be like, so, um, yeah. So your, your range will be somewhere between a dollar and $2 a word. Cool. You know, if you're Michael Lewis, you'll ask for substantially more, but for like really terrific writers, um, they will be happy with those rates. Cool. Amazing. Well, all right. Well, I'm going to publicly say just for any writers who are listening, I will pay you $2 a word, uh, given the ideas that I have. So,

Starting point is 00:50:11 uh, yeah, just, and I mean, that may change, but for the first few pieces, I want to do some, some really, there's some things that I've been thinking about and, uh, they've been eating up like the Ram in my, the back of my mind for probably a year or two. And I think there are people who are better qualified to tell some of these stories. So, cool. That's great. I love that you do that. That's amazing. So, cool.

Starting point is 00:50:31 Yeah. Productive podcast. Productive podcast. Cool. So, I'll make this, well, I guess it is called the Tim Ferriss Show, so I shouldn't feel badly about being so self-indulgent, but let me move on. Also at the New Yorker, and this was in Politico. This is an interview. So this was, I suppose, when you were senior editor.

Starting point is 00:50:53 And it said you'd been responsible for shaping the 10,000-word raw copy filed by writers like, and it went on with this amazing list of writers. How did you do what you did as an editor? How does one edit these incredible writers who have 10,000 word pieces? Like when you read the first, I suppose, first of all, do you get a effectively finished piece? Do they send you a first draft that is rough? How do these writers work with you? Or did they work with you? Yeah. So it totally varies, right? So the great thing about The New Yorker is that you, it's all staff writer driven. It may be a unique publication in America in that kind of 90% of the content is written by 50 people. And so you show up and there, whatever there are, six senior editors, that means that eight people work with you. And so your life is about those eight people. And so you show up and they're, whatever there are, six senior editors. That

Starting point is 00:51:45 means that eight people work with you. And so your life is about those eight people. So making sure that they have the right ideas, they're all working all the time, that you're helping them maximize their talents, their ambitions, and helping them find stories. And so I worked with a group of writers. And with all of them, there were some things that I would do the same and some things that I would do differently. So first, whenever they file the draft, I would immediately write back and say that I've got it because even if they're the most talented writer in the world, everybody is slightly insecure and wants to know that their story has been received by the editor. So I've got it. Second thing is I would read it like right then, but I wouldn't, um, delay,

Starting point is 00:52:22 right? Cause I just procrastination is the enemy of good editing. You should just start and do it, right? And so if you get the draft while you're in the middle of something else important, like editing another draft, of course you wait for an hour. But really you should, you know, within the first, you know, six hours of getting a draft from the writer, you should have read the draft. And so then you read the draft, and then you start thinking through. And usually the first step would be going through and sending them back a memo saying,

Starting point is 00:52:48 hey, this is good. These are the things I like, but here are the big structural issues. And actually giving them specific guidance. And my goal was always to make it a memo that I wouldn't have to kind of amend. Like you want to write and say, I haven't really figured this out, but I kind of think you might want to do this. I'll tell you more tomorrow. No, you want to, you want to give them, give them actual advice and things they can work with. And if they disagree, they can have a conversation. But I would write a memo saying, hey, this piece is

Starting point is 00:53:17 strong. I really like this, but I, you know, I don't think you hit this core issue. I think that the chronology is broken in these four ways. I think you overuse this. And I don't think you hit this core issue. I think that the chronology is broken in these four ways. I think you overuse this, and I really think you need more reporting on that. And so for every writer, that's kind of the first step, which is, here's what I think is wrong with the piece. And you adjust that based on the amount of time you have allotted. If it's like a political piece that has to run next week, you try not to, if they're only going to be able to jump over somebody that's four feet high because of the time available, you try not to set up a barrier that's six feet high. So that's the first step. Then after that, it starts to really vary depending

Starting point is 00:53:53 on the writers. So each edit, you go through a process from sort of wide aperture, big comments to very narrow focusing on specific sentences at the very end. And the process by which you go through that is different for different writers. So I worked with Califasani, one of the greatest prose stylists I've ever worked with. And I would never adjust a sentence of his with my own prose. I would never say, why don't you write it this way? I would just say, I don't think this works, please rewrite it. Or, you know, please do this, not redoing it. I would never, I never redo it myself, but it worked with a lot of other writers, um, who I would be much more likely to say,

Starting point is 00:54:34 yeah, maybe you should write it this way. Maybe you should do this way. Or even some writers where I would go in and rewrite sections with some writers. Um, I remember I worked with Ryan Lizard, um, and you know, he would always be under this crazy deadline. You have to write the leading from behind story and have to run on Thursday. So we would literally be in Google Docs where I would be rewriting the beginning of the piece while he would be writing the end of the piece. We would spend our whole weekend with him sort of filing down the story and me chasing him as an editor, and then him sort of cycling back up and going through my edits, that's just sort of looping through the piece with me trailing behind him. So there were different processes with different people, but that's kind of a guideline

Starting point is 00:55:14 to how it worked. But I think I can go into much more specifics on that, because it's one of the things I absolutely loved. Do you become a good writer first and then a good editor? Do you have to, or can you do it the other way around? For people who want to develop an eye for editing, I suppose, which is also very, very closely related to rewriting. Do you have any recommendations? or classes or writers you would pay attention to perhaps to people who are listening who say you know what i really want to develop a keener eye as a writer slash editor yeah so a couple of things that i think are useful are um well for okay first so how to be like get a better sense of style and structure so one of the things that i think was really important to me is that I found some writers I really loved, and I just read their stuff

Starting point is 00:56:08 out loud. That sort of forces a level of concentration and attention to prose. I remember I'd go through the pieces of this writer Catherine Boo, who worked for the New Yorker, I thought was maybe the best stylist around, and I would just read her pieces out loud. What was the name again? Catherine Boo. How do you spell

Starting point is 00:56:24 Boo? B-O-O. Oh, there we go. And she wrote a lot of pieces about poverty. Her last book was about India. She doesn't write a ton, but what she writes was extraordinary. But you could also do it with, you know, Califasene, or you could go back and do it, you know, with John McPhee, or you could go and do it with Rachel Levine, or whoever your, you know, favorite, your favorite writer or stylist is, or even just a piece that you loved. Um, you know, we've had all kinds of features in wire that are super interesting to read if you read them out loud. So, um, find a writer you

Starting point is 00:56:58 love for whatever publication and study them, right. And think about what exactly are they doing? I also, um, you know, most of my training in this was done as an editor, but you could also do it as a reader, which is to map a story. So I will often, on a whiteboard when I'm working with a writer, but you could also just do it as an exercise to the finished piece, like look at the structure of the piece, right? So how exactly does it work? Where is information presented? Where are characters presented?

Starting point is 00:57:30 So I'll use this example because it's sitting right here on my desk, my 11,000-word story about Mark Zuckerberg that you mentioned at the intro. It has a very specific structure that may not be the right structure or may not be the ideal structure, but it is a very deliberate structure. So the way the story works is several characters are introduced, and the story, the first section of the story is chronological from roughly February of 2016 to, I think it's April of 2016. It tells the story of Facebook during that two month period. And then the piece has its one jump back where it goes and it tells very quickly the story of Facebook from 2007 to 2016. And it introduces several specific themes and a couple of characters who become important later. And that was very

Starting point is 00:58:11 deliberately done. Then the story jumps back into the chronology. It picks up right where it was in April of 2016, introduces a couple of facts that will be important later to the story. And then it mostly runs chronologically. So the structure is 80% chronological and 20% thematic. At certain points, you have to introduce stories slightly out of chronological order because of where you are thematically in the story. You're talking about Russia. You have to introduce a fact about Russia, even if it doesn't exactly fit the timeline. But my co-author Fred Vogelstein and I worked really hard to, as much as possible, make it chronological. It's a very deliberate structural choice. So you could map out that story, and by mapping it out, learn the things that I just said, and also have a closer sense of the moments where we chose to break away from the chronology, and then be able to think through why we did that. And so you can do that with, you know, most stories and

Starting point is 00:59:05 you'll see flaws in some of them. You'll see brilliance in some of them. You'll see, you know, chronological structure is not a particularly interesting structure, but it's a very good one. You'll see interesting ways to do it. You can do it watching movies too. But I think it's a really useful exercise. It will make you a better writer and observer to take these things apart. When you map a story, just to use the tool you mentioned, which is a whiteboard, what does it look like visually? I mean, is it kind of bullet, bullet, bullet from top to bottom? Is it a set of circles going from left to right with things inside the circles, outside the circles? How do you map out a story if you're doing it on a whiteboard? It's probably, um, it probably has, I mean, there are different ways to state of the story,

Starting point is 00:59:50 but it probably has two things. It probably has like section, right? So section a, you know, the crime section B, the chase, right. And then so sort of titles for all the sections and then sort of lines with the different characters who are being introduced and where they're being introduced, and maybe even the different themes that are being introduced and where they're being introduced. So it's not really circles. It's more like, it's closer to bullet points. Mm-hmm. Recommendation I'd love to make for people also, this is something I really need to revisit myself, although I'm not doing as much writing at the moment, but for people also, this is something I really need to revisit myself, although I'm not doing as

Starting point is 01:00:25 much writing at the moment. But for people who are really interested in structure and this mapping of stories, Draft No. 4 by John McPhee is just a fantastic read. And it really gets into the weeds, so you have to be exceptionally interested in writing to get into it. But it shows some of the diagrams of his structures for various feature pieces that he's written, including for The New Yorker, which I find incredibly, incredibly fascinating, given that if anyone has not read Levels of the Game by John McPhee, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Um, also from a structural standpoint, that sort of chronology plus theme combination, uh, just to tell a story about McPhee, because he's in some ways the reason why I ended up working at The New Yorker. So when I was at Wired as a senior editor, The New Yorker reached out and said,

Starting point is 01:01:34 hey, we've heard you're a good senior editor. We have an opening. Would you like to apply? I said, of course. I mean, I loved Wired. I loved everything about Wired. But New Yorker would be an amazing challenge. And so I applied, and I went through the process. And the process was you edit two 10,000-word stories. You rewrite things. It's an exhaustive process. You interview with eight people.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And I went through it, and I didn't get it. But I could kind of sense in the note that they sent that I had been close. And then maybe, so that was probably probably I think this was 2009 it was probably October of 2009 and then there was a holiday party in December of 2009 where I met somebody who had been an assistant

Starting point is 01:02:14 at the New Yorker and they were like Nick Thompson oh my god they went back and forth back and forth they almost hired you but they didn't hire you

Starting point is 01:02:20 right I was like well that's interesting information I suppose it's painful but it's interesting. So then two months later, about February, I had gotten, I knew I was about to receive

Starting point is 01:02:31 weirdly sort of two other offers, one to go into television, one to work for another magazine, both of which were very tempting. And so I knew that I would be switching my career soon. And I remember staying up late one night, and I read The Shape of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee, which is just a kind of unknown book, but just brilliant. It's like all the thief workers.

Starting point is 01:02:51 It's so good. And so I read it and I finished it. I remember lying on my couch. It's like 2.30 in the morning and I finished it. I was so emotional. I was like, you know, I really, I want to give the New Yorker another shot before I, before I totally step away. And so that night at 2.30, I sent an email to the deputy editor, Pam McCarthy. I was like, Pam or Ms. McCarthy, I know you almost hired me, you know, four months ago. And I'm about to leave the company. Wired is part of, Wired where I worked then, where I work now is part of Condé Nast, which the New Yorker is also part of.

Starting point is 01:03:21 I'm about to leave the company to go somewhere else. But I really want to work for you. So this would be the moment. And I'd love to have another shot at it. And it was kind of a strange email to send. I was just sort of so emotional after reading McPhee. And Tim wrote back and was like, okay, let's come meet with me again and meet with Remnick again.

Starting point is 01:03:41 And so I went upstairs to their office, met with them again. Remnick was very blunt about why he hadn't hired me the first time, asked me whether I could address the concern he had. The concern he had was basically that you would come on and you want to write and do television and do all these other stuff instead of just putting your head down and being an editor. I said, no, I will put my head down and be an editor. I can prove it to you. You can be another edit test. Uh, they gave me another edit test and then, you know, probably a week or two later they hired me. So it was entirely, uh, McPhee that, um, that, you know, spurred me to write that email to Pam and then got me hired. That's so amazing. What a great story. Oh my God. Uh, yeah. I mean,

Starting point is 01:04:27 for people who really want to go down that rabbit hole, I mean, brigade de cuisine, uh, there's so many, oh my God, it's, you've, you really can't go wrong, uh, with, with McPhee. Uh, yeah. Uh, that's, that's a wonderful story. How did you decide to get into the startup game startup game is a full contact sport generally very very difficult how did that come into the fold so that happened um so i was an editor at wired and at wired you know particularly under that time under chris anderson really encouraged people to do different things. I have done this crazy, wonderful story where there's a writer at Ratliff who I edited at wired. Awesome guy.

Starting point is 01:05:11 Um, we had gotten, um, very drunk one night and we were talking about, um, for some reason there were like a lot of people who are kind of faking their death and starting life over, right?

Starting point is 01:05:22 Which is an interesting thing to do in the digital age because it's kind of easier to start a new life and create a new identity, right? Just create a new email address, new Twitter account, but it's also easier to track people. So it's kind of an interesting wire dilemma. And we were talking about how to tell that story. We were two other friends, Doug McRae and a woman, Jen Kahn. The four of us were having ceviche and alcohol.

Starting point is 01:05:43 And somehow, through this long conversation, Evan came up with this idea, which is that he would write a story about how to fake your death and start life over. And then we would run it. And then he would fake his death, and we would run a manhunt to find him. Well, not fake his death, but basically go off the grid, and Wired would run a manhunt to find him. This was early Twitter. And so we took that idea to the Wired pitch meeting.

Starting point is 01:06:05 It got a very high score, got approved. He wrote part one, which is, you know, here are some stories about people who've tried to start over in the digital age. And then he went on the run. And so we ran this experiment for a month. It was August of, I guess, August 2009. And the experiment was,

Starting point is 01:06:22 Evan Ratliff has disappeared. If you find him, you get $5,000. And then the rules were that I would have all the information a private investigator would have. So I would be able to interview his family members. I would have access to his old photos, like a Social Security number, all those things. And I would leak them out through Twitter over the course of the month. And we had no idea it was going to work. It was one of those things that, like, maybe he'll get found the first day, or maybe no one will care.

Starting point is 01:06:47 Did you end up leaking his social security number? I don't think I leaked it, but I might have. I leaked so much information about him. I certainly put out his address, his girlfriend's name, his ex's, photographs of him in high school, his mother's name, all the stuff he would have.

Starting point is 01:07:06 His credit card bills. And it was crazy. People got so excited. And it all happened on Twitter. It was like the first time I was really into Twitter. And so the deal was if he made it a month, he got $5,000. If he got caught, the person got $5,000. And so he got caught because he was using Tor, which disguises IP address.

Starting point is 01:07:30 It's a masking thing that makes it impossible for people to see what IP address he used. But he screwed up once. And by screwing up once, some smart coder figured out a little bit about where he was. Then that guy figured out the fake Twitter account that Eb had created and followed it by creating a fake fembot.

Starting point is 01:07:49 So we had a fake fembot following editor Evan. They somehow then figured out that Evan was in New Orleans. We made a deal with Will Shorts that if you solved the New York Times crossword puzzle, embed it in it would be a clue about where Evan was. So I think the clue was something like, um, he'll be at a pizza restaurant and I had leaked online that he was gluten-free. So these like geniuses online and like solve the crossword puzzle and basically put together that there's only one pizza place you can go to in new Orleans, which serves gluten-free pizza. And they caught

Starting point is 01:08:20 him on the last day. It was an amazing hunt. Yeah. So that was really exciting. And so that happens. And Evan and I, of course, bond, despite the fact that I've almost ruined his life as the private investigator. And so maybe a month after that, Evan and I were, maybe two months after that, we were watching at his apartment, watching a football game, like an Alabama college football game. He's from the South and was rooting for them. And he's like, you know, we should start a magazine that does that kind of thing. I was like, sure. That sounds like fun. And I had a, I just published my book

Starting point is 01:08:53 and I had a really good web designer. I was getting Jeff Robb. I was like, well, let's meet Jeff and see whether he wants to do it with us. And so the three of us got together and we said, okay, let's start a digital only magazine. And so the idea was that I would keep my job. The two of them would go full-time to start the Atavist. Um, we would, you know, run experimental stories, crazy long form stories and see what we could do. And then right about that time, Apple introduced the iPad. So then the idea became, though, you know, kind of be iPad focused and, um, we'll do multimedia. And so we started this company at a super propitious moment. In order to create the stories, Jeff had to write a content management system

Starting point is 01:09:33 that would make it easier for us to do multimedia storytelling. And so accidentally, we suddenly had a business too because then we were able to license the content management system to people. So we built a really cool business. So the goal hadn't been to start like a software company, a software company. The goal had been just like,

Starting point is 01:09:49 let's make a cool magazine that does long form. And we inadvertently built a good business. And so, you know, nine years later, we still get it. It's still publishing every month, and there's still a CMS that we're still selling. All good things start with ceviche and alcohol. Yeah, that's probably true. What was the name of, if you recall, the headline, the title of the piece about, well, I suppose it wasn't about Evan at this point, but about people starting over in a digital world?

Starting point is 01:10:21 Do you recall? I don't remember the first story. How might people find? If they type in Wired Vanish, it's all called Vanish, you'll find it. Or if you type in Evan Ratliff, R-A-T-L-I-F-S,

Starting point is 01:10:34 I think the headline, it's like Vanish. Evan Ratliff tried to disappear. Here's what happened. And it will tell, because after he got caught, he wrote this great 8,000-word story about his life

Starting point is 01:10:45 on the run. So good. It was the first story from where I'd ever nominated for a National Magazine Award in feature writing. Such a good story. So yeah, Evan Ratliff tried to vanish. Here's what happened. And would looking for his name in Vanish also lead to the preceding piece that he had written

Starting point is 01:11:02 about? Yeah, definitely. Okay, very cool. Yeah. That's an ongoing fantasy. Although increasingly difficult. It does give some good advice, but maybe a little bit out of date, because, you know, eight years ago, the digital tracking tools are different.

Starting point is 01:11:18 So you, by any objective measure, have gotten a lot done and get a lot done. Love to talk about structure and routine, not in writing, but in your life. And this was as good a place as any to ask, do you still run to and from work or how long you do? So what I have here is you run to work, shower at the gym next door, and then you have suits in the office to change into. And then at the end of the day, you change back into your running clothes and run back home. Why is that important to you? Have you always been running? Yeah. So I was a runner in high school and college. Um, and then, um, I took some time off, but I started sort of marathoning reasonably seriously

Starting point is 01:12:09 in my late twenties. And it's important for all kinds of reasons. It's important as a sense of self. It's important. Um, physically it's important, you know, to have physical things one does as one gets older in the early forties. Now it's important, you know, emotionally, as one gets older. I'm in my early 40s now. It's important emotionally because at one point in my life I got very sick,

Starting point is 01:12:29 and so it's a reminder when I can still do it that I'm no longer that. So there are a lot of intense reasons why I run and why I like to run. But it's really hard to find time to run because I have this ambitious job. I work super late every night. I've got three kids, and I'm a very devoted father, so I need to be with them in the morning. I need to be with them in the evenings. Um, so I can't kind of take off and run. Um, and in fact, it's often harder to find time to run on weekends than it is on the weekdays. So having it structured into my life where, you know, I put myself a

Starting point is 01:12:59 wallet and keys and a little, like a little pack, strap it on, run, run home. It, uh, it works really nicely. Uh, and it keeps me, I think it's also a good mental break strap it on, run, you run home. It, uh, it works really nicely. Uh, and it keeps me, I think it's also a good mental break. You know, you spend the morning like with your kids, getting them ready. You know, there's a lot of energy and excitement. Um, and then, um, when I go back home, you know, there's a lot of energy, excitement, putting them to sleep and then kind of going back to work. Um, so it's nice to have like two little breaks in the day where I'm, where I'm running. If you're open to talking about it, you mentioned you had a period when you got very sick, which,

Starting point is 01:13:30 which I don't know anything about. Could you tell us a bit more? There's nothing about on the internet. I, I got thyroid cancer, which is, you know, it's cancer, which is a horrible, terrible thing, but it's the, it's kind of the, the least dangerous kind. But what had happened with running is, I'll sort of tell that whole story. I started running, started running marathons, and I remember really wanting to break three hours. As a child, I'd watch my father.

Starting point is 01:14:00 He'd run a marathon. It was like three hours and ten seconds, and he had been frustrated that he couldn't run a three hour marathon. And so I started running marathons and I like couldn't crack it. And then one year I like totally cracked it and ran a 243, right. And it was like way underneath it. My dad was super proud. And then right after that, um, I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and I ended up having a couple of surgeries going through radiation treatment. How did you, how did you diagnose it? Was it during a routine physical? I just went through a checkup. Yeah, it was like a couple weeks after the marathon.

Starting point is 01:14:30 It was the Marathon of November, so it was early December. And the doctor was like, there's a lump. It's probably nothing, but let's check it. And so he checked it, and it was like, oh, it might be bad. And then you go through that whole process that people who have been sick go through where, you know, oh, no, this could be bad, but it'll probably be okay. And I'm in my 20s. I've always been healthy. Oh, no, it looks like it might be bad.

Starting point is 01:14:53 Oh, no, it is bad, but it won't be that bad. Oh, no, it is that bad. And you sort of go through months of these tests and experiments and biopsies as you either like you either exit or you like you just get ever deeper into it. Um, you know, at one point I remember they thought actually, Oh no, you're okay. Um, but in any case, so I went, then I went through like the surgery to have it all removed and then the radiation treatment and then the sort of titration of the medicine to try to get you back to normal. And it just completely obliterated me. It was the first time in my life that I'd been just, just knocked off my feet and I couldn't,

Starting point is 01:15:29 like I couldn't run, you know, like 15 feet. Right. So that was a really tough emotional period for all kinds of reasons. You know, you're thinking about mortality in a real way for the first time in my late twenties.

Starting point is 01:15:42 I had just been married, you know, thinking about, well now will I ever be able to have children? Like what, what your, your expectations on what life becomes are totally different. Um, and so I went through that period and fortunately came out the other side and then it was really emotionally uplifting and psychologically powerful when I guess it was two years after that first marathon. I think in that first marathon, I finished it in like two hours, 43 minutes and like 52 seconds.

Starting point is 01:16:11 And then like two years later, I ran the same marathon and finished it in like two hours, 42 minutes and 50 seconds or something like that. And it was incredibly powerful to suddenly feel like in a way that signal that I was through it. And so every year since then, I've more or less every year since then, except the years where I've had kids, I've tried to run the same marathon. And that ties you back to the original story about running. Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, it's, I think, easy for folks to look at your bio or read about all the things you've accomplished

Starting point is 01:16:46 and assume that it's just been one kind of home run after another, after another, aside from that kidnapping in Northern Africa, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise of sorts. But I appreciate you sharing that. And to further sort of flesh out the picture just a little bit, could you tell us about a time when you felt, aside from that particular period, when you felt overwhelmed or a darker period?

Starting point is 01:17:19 Yeah, any of that and how you found your way out or what you do in those circumstances. Well, there have been, you know, my professional career in my, you know, the first six or seven years was not great. You know, so I finished school. I have that kind of messed up period where I go to Africa. I write for the Post. But it's a period of getting rejected by 20 jobs before I get hired at the Washington Monthly. So then there's like a moment of awesomeness where for two years, I'm editor of the Washington

Starting point is 01:17:56 Monthly, going back to New York, playing guitar on the weekends. But the Washington Monthly job is very much a two-year job. And the expectation when I finished was, like all previous editors in Washington, I would go on and have an awesome career in journalism. I finished, you know, I think I finished like September 9th, 2011. And after I finished, I had a really rough time. I couldn't get hired. I, you know, I got rejected by 20 journalistic institutions. I was sure I was going to get hired at the New York Times. I didn't get hired at the New York institutions. I was sure I was going to get hired at the New York Times. I didn't get hired at the New York Times.

Starting point is 01:18:26 I'm sure I was going to get hired at the Washington Post. I thought I had. It just didn't work. I ended up as a fellow at the New America Foundation, which was fine. But from roughly 2001 to 2005, I couldn't get journalism going again. And so in the summer of 2005, I guess in 2005, I was working at a magazine called Legal Affairs, which I will like and is really grateful to, but it wasn't. It was in New Haven. My girlfriend, who's now my wife, was in New York. I applied to law school, which is the way you get out of journalism, right? And the way you

Starting point is 01:19:02 retract your life, right? If you're in your your twenties and the career you're doing is not working, one great way to retract your life is through law school. Uh, so I applied to law school and I got into NYU and I was literally set to go. Um, I guess I would have matriculated in August of 2005. Um, I think Wired wrote to me in July of 2005 saying, Hey, were you interested in being a senior editor? And so that summer, um, it was crazy, right? Cause my whole life is going to, I know it's going to hinge on this decision, right? Am I going to stay in journalism and, or am I going to go to law school and then like do something completely different? Um, and the way it all shook out, I remember the, the, I hadn't, I don't think I had been offered the Wired job, but I was pretty sure I was going

Starting point is 01:19:45 to get it. And for the day before I was doing NYU, I wrote to them and said, no, I'm not going. And then I prayed I would get the wire job. And I did get it. And I started the next month. But it was, that was like, those were a couple of years where I was like, you know, make the right decision. Like, because remember when I had been like a teenager, I hadn't expected to be a journalist, so I had all this self-doubt about whether I had ended up in the wrong profession accidentally. Because if you look at your life as, you know, when you're 25 and you think back to what would Nick have thought at 19, the funny turn into journalism, which now seems so propitious and so good, because

Starting point is 01:20:25 sort of the weird story where I'm kidnapped and I write the story and I get hired at the Washington Monthly and it attracts me. Like, if you look at it from now, it looks like a really fortunate thing that those things happened. But if you're in your mid-20s and journalism isn't working and you look at it and think, wait, I wasn't supposed to be a journalist. I didn't want to be a journalist. So maybe that just all got me going on the wrong foot.

Starting point is 01:20:43 And I should have, like, if I hadn't gone to Africa, I would be in a much better place. So that was really complicated to think through and work through. And it ended up all working out really well. I'm extremely happy where I am now. But that was, there was definitely a couple of years where I was totally adrift, where my peer group was doing much better than I was doing, and where I felt like I was in the wrong field. How did Wired find you?

Starting point is 01:21:12 Or how did it come to pass that they reached out to you with that potential offer? Because I have a friend for whom I've had an amazing career overlap. There's a guy named Brendan Kerr. He and I are exactly the same age. And I edited something he wrote at, when I was at the Washington Monthly, and he was at U.S. News and World Report, he wrote that at the Washington Monthly, and I edited it, and he liked the way I edited it.

Starting point is 01:21:35 And so we became friends. And so then he left U.S. News and got hired at New America Foundation, and then I got hired at New America Foundation after him, and he recommended me. And then he went to Wired, and he recommended me there. And so I got hired at Wired, and I recommended him to my book agent, and he ended up selling a book through that. And then he wrote for me at The New Yorker, he wrote for me at The Atomist, and he's got the current cover story in

Starting point is 01:22:01 Wired. So we've had these amazing intertwined careers and friendship. It's been really terrific. And he's one of those people who, with some people who are the same age and in the same field, they're competitive and maybe don't always want you to succeed. And for whatever reason, he and I have had a relationship where I've always only wanted him to succeed and he's only always wanted me to succeed.

Starting point is 01:22:24 And so we've been extremely helpful to each other. Um, and that's been, that's been great. And so look at the cover story of the next issue and Brendan's name is there and I'm super proud of it. The karmic cycle continues. That's great. Uh, I want to, I want to go back to the whatever it was 24 hour period where you've turned down this exploding offer slash expiring offer for law school yet you haven't yet you haven't yet been offered the job at wired can you walk us through the the dinner the conversation in your head, the sort of hours preceding notifying law school that you were not going to be matriculated? Because that strikes me as terrifying. That seems completely terrifying.

Starting point is 01:23:16 I mean, the game theory was both a little trickier and in some ways easier because there was a third option. I had written, my grandfather, Paul Nititsa had died and George Kennan had both died in early 2004. And I had written an essay about their parallel lives. And so I had also decided that maybe I would write a book about the two of them. And so I had a proposal for a book. So I had three things that I could do with my life. And I was going to do some combination of one of those three things or two of those three things. I knew there wouldn't be time to do all three. You can't go to law school, work for Wired, and write a book.

Starting point is 01:23:51 And so the law school offer was going to explode mid-August. The Wired option, I was going to hear about relatively soon. And the book, I think I had sent a draft of a proposal to my agent. And so either that was going to become a reality or not a reality. And so in some ways, the decision was, if I go to law school, even if I don't get the wire job, I still maybe have a shot at the book. So the odds were like, the odds were okay. Um, but I, you know, what do I remember about that day? I was in Maine up at a place my family has up near Acadia National Park where I spent summers through my childhood, which is like a very reflective, wonderful place and a place where I always feel good and confident. And maybe it was being there. Maybe it was, you know, I, there was some unease, some deep unease about going to law school, some sense that I was giving up, some sense of it was the weak choice to make.

Starting point is 01:24:53 I don't exactly remember, but I do remember being terrified when I wrote them and said no and thinking, well, you came up with a pretty good backup here, Nick. You have a pretty good plan. NYU is a pretty awesome law school to go to. It's three years, and you graduate. You're guaranteed a really well-paying, successful career of life in New York. And you're throwing that away, but I went for it. Well, thank God for that, I suppose. Well, who knows?

Starting point is 01:25:20 I mean, who knows, right, in the parallel universe? Yeah, who knows? Who knows? It seems to have worked out. But I do think about that a knows, right? In the parallel universe. Yeah, who knows? Who knows? It seems to have worked out. But I do think about that a lot, right? Like, there are very few moments where your life entirely hinges upon a specific decision. Right? Like, the choice of who you marry, but that's not really a choice.

Starting point is 01:25:39 It's not so much like that. I can't think of any other day that's close to it. Um, I mean, I guess the choice to write Pam McCarthy at the New Yorker, um, had a, had a big influence. Um, you know, there was the choice to leave the New Yorker to accept this wire job. That was a pretty easy choice towards the New Yorker, but you're going to be at energy of a wire. You definitely take it. Um, so there, there are a few moments, but that was definitely the day where I made the choice that had the biggest effect, but you don't get to, you know, live life multiple ways.

Starting point is 01:26:09 So it seems like the right choice. Everything worked out as well as it possibly could have, but who knows? Uh, well, Nick, I want to be respectful of your time. So I just have just a few more questions for you. And these are, these are my, some of my usual questions that I like to ask. The first is what book or books have you given most as gifts to other people besides your own? Oh, that's a, that I can answer. So this year, so each of the last two years, I've given one book to a bunch of people.

Starting point is 01:26:44 And this year is a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism is True. And it's a story about mindfulness and about the science of Buddhism and the current neuroscience about how our minds work, making the argument that the things people have said about mindfulness meditation and the way it changes your capacity to empathize with other people and to sort of break out of the tribalism that we're all locked into, the things that Buddhism has said about that turn out to be scientifically correct. And here's a story about why. Wonderful book. Robert Wright is one of the smartest writers I've ever read. His book Non-Zero is among my five favorite books of all time. So that book came out recently and I gave that to my closest friend and my family.

Starting point is 01:27:23 The year before, I gave a book by Larissa McFarquhar called Strangers Drowning, which is a story about people who make extraordinary moral choices, like the choice to adopt 23 children and bring them into your lives. You just make crazy choices and why they make those choices. And Larissa is one of the smartest writers at The New Yorker. Everything she writes is absolutely brilliant. And the book is brilliant beginning to end. It's sort of 10 discrete chapters about people who make choices like that. So I gave Larissa's book last year and probably write a book this year. Thank you. Just wrote those down. Yeah, they're good. Totally worth reading both of them.

Starting point is 01:28:00 Yeah, they're on the to read list, which is always on bottom right-hand corner of my notes that I take during these conversations. Oh, nice. That's cool. Yeah. All right, just a few more. Let's see. I'm picking here. In the last few years, could be five years, could be ten, could be two, what behavior, new behavior or belief has most improved, positively impacted your life, would you say, or has just had a very significant impact? Having kids, you know, so my kids are nine, seven and four now. And thinking about the

Starting point is 01:28:37 responsibilities one has to your children who will outlive you and who in certain ways will carry on your personality. You carry on your life after you're gone. Thinking through my responsibilities to them, how the choices I make will be viewed by them when they're older. Thinking about both how I can help them thrive and be the people they want to become. And also how I can be somebody who, when I'm gone, they admire. Um, those are, those are pretty, those are deeply profound things. And, you know, I had no capacity of what it was like to have children before I had children with none. Um, uh, but it's, it's psychologically profound on in every, every way. So definitely that. Is there any advice or books or anything else that you found particularly helpful as a parent?

Starting point is 01:29:35 I don't think I've actually read a book on parenting that changed my philosophy of parenting. There are a couple of books about how to get your kids to sleep, which is useful technical stuff. That's interesting. I don't think I a couple of books about how to get your kids to sleep, which is like useful technical stuff. I haven't read, you know, that's interesting. I don't think I've read a book on parenting where it's like, oh, I should raise my child that way or I should talk to them this way. It's been much more just doing it and just thinking through,

Starting point is 01:29:57 oh, wait, that wasn't the right way to talk about this. Or, oh, yes, let's try to set them up for success in this way. Or like, let's let them do this. Let's go do this with them. You mentioned the why Buddhism is true. Do you have a meditation or mindfulness practice? I don't. I kind of think the running is the substitute for that.

Starting point is 01:30:17 And when I'm running, I don't think it's that dissimilar from mindfulness meditation because when I run, I guess there are two things I'd say to that. One is the running. So, you know, I do very much try to, I either listen to podcasts or if I'm not listening to podcasts, I'm thinking about like trying to clear my mind or thinking through specific things and trying to concentrate on it or paying attention to what I see or what I hear. So I think that's reasonably close to mindfulness meditation. And then the second thing is I do Alexander technique, which is a technique I learned for playing guitar, just for

Starting point is 01:30:50 how one positions one's body and like a line in your head to make sure it's straight with your back and making sure your feet are solid in the ground. That was something I did when I was having a lot of wrist pain from playing guitar too much. And I think that's, that's a sort of a centering technique that also plays a similar role. But I have not figured out how to work meditation into my life. The Alexander Technique, is that something that you use while you're sitting in a chair at the office throughout the day? When does that tend?

Starting point is 01:31:19 Yeah, so it's something I think about. Of course, as soon as I say it, I find myself adjusting myself in the chair. Yeah, it's something where whenever I'm kind of out of position or I can feel like something's not aligned, I, you know, straighten up, you know, try to think about where I lost my hands, right? I just do just, okay, make sure my back is aligned, my hand is aligned. And it's something that I think has prevented a lot of injuries.

Starting point is 01:31:39 I almost have never gotten hurt while running, even though I'm running a distance that often will get people hurt. And I think it's partly due to posture training. Okay, just two or three more. And this is sometimes a question that stumps people, but you've been pretty fast on your feet. So if you need to buy some time or pass, that's fine as well. If you could have a, if you had, this is really metaphorically speaking, a giant billboard on which you could put a word, a question, a quote, someone else's quote, a question, anything really, a message to get out to millions or billions of

Starting point is 01:32:16 people, what might you put on that billboard? Oh, you know what it is? Um, I'm not gonna get the exact quote, right. Which, you know, means I'd have to spell check it, but there's something that George Kennan said that I just find incredibly philosophically profound, which is something I think about a lot. Not enough to remember the exact words, but the idea was when you look at everything that goes wrong historically, you can see a deep chain of continuous mistakes that lead up to it. And in a way, that's really discouraging because it makes you think about like each step like leading to greater consequences. But on the other hand, it's really encouraging because if you think about it and you think about, oh wait, what if you do something right? Can you do something right right now? You're starting a whole other chain of events that can lead to a really positive outcome.

Starting point is 01:33:08 And so his point when he was making the statement, which is more or less that, is even if things seem like they're going in the wrong direction or things seem really wrong, you can stop and you can do something small that's right, and then that will begin another chain of events that will lead to something really good. And so I often think about that when I'm thinking about whatever the next thing I'm going to do is or the next moment is.

Starting point is 01:33:30 You're beginning a new chain of events, a new chain of events that will lead you in the right direction. You're continuing in a good chain. So it was that idea from Kennan that was based on his historical studies that I think about a lot. That's a good one. Well, Nick, this has been a lot of fun and yeah, it's been great talking to you. Thank you for taking the time.

Starting point is 01:33:51 Do you have any final words, any ask of the audience recommendation, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up? No, I, I love talking to you. I mean, the thing I want,

Starting point is 01:34:01 I'd love people to subscribe to wire. That'd be great. Everybody subscribes to wire and I'll be a very happy man. You know, journalism is a complicated business, particularly at this moment. So we would love your support. And if they want to say hi on social, NX Thompson.

Starting point is 01:34:15 I'm on social. I talk to people all the time. I'm at NX Thompson on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. There's a private page, public page. I love talking to people. I love hearing feedback.

Starting point is 01:34:23 I'm very active in comments and all that. DMs are open. So I'm available. I'm around. I'm on the internet. Well, Nick, thank you again for taking the time. This was a really fun conversation. Yeah, I thought we covered a lot of interesting ground. Thanks for your awesome questions and probing. That was really fun. Yeah, of course. My pleasure. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything, Wired, the books, resources, and the

Starting point is 01:34:51 Alexander Technique, among other things, in the show notes as per usual for this episode and every other episode at tim.blog.com. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

Starting point is 01:35:17 that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out.

Starting point is 01:35:55 Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. And I'd heard about Peloton over and over again, but I ended up getting a Peloton bike in the whole system after I saw my buddy, Kevin Rose. I've known him forever. Some of you know, and he showed up at my gate at my house a while back and he looked fantastic. And I asked him, I said, dude, you look great. What the hell have you been up to?

Starting point is 01:36:30 Because he's always doing a weird diet or another, but it only lasts like a week or two. So he always regresses to the mean after like 75 beers. And he said, I've been doing Peloton five days a week. Now that caught my attention because Kevin does nothing five days a week. And you know, I love you, Kevin. But it really piqued my curiosity, ended up getting a system, and it's become an integral part of my week. I love it. And I really didn't expect to love it at all because I find cycling really boring usually. But Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home.

Starting point is 01:37:06 You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule or making it to a studio with some type of commute, etc. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite New York City instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors or find your own favorite class on demand. And in fact, Kevin and I rarely do live classes and you can compete with your friends, which is also fun. Kevin, I'm coming after you, but we usually just use classes on demand. I really like Matt Wilpers and his high intensity training sessions that are shorter, like 20 minutes. And I think Kevin's favorite is Alex and everyone seems to have their favorite

Starting point is 01:37:45 instructor or you can select by music duration and so on. Each Peloton bike includes a 22 inch HD touchscreen performance tracking metrics. I think that along with the real-time leaderboard are the main reasons that this caught my attention when cycling never had caught my attention before. It's really pretty stunning what they've done with the user interface to keep your attention. The belt drive is quiet and it's smaller than you would expect. So it can fit in a living room or an office. I actually have it in a large closet, believe it or not, and it fits with no problem. So Peloton is offering all of you guys, listeners of the Tim Ferriss Show, a special offer.

Starting point is 01:38:26 And it is actually special. Visit OnePeloton, that's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N, OnePeloton.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, T-I-M, at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Now, you might say, meh, accessories? Wait, I don't need fancy towels or whatever other supplemental bits and pieces. No, the shoes you need, you need the clip in shoes and those are in the accessory category. So this a hundred dollars off is a very legit a hundred dollars off. So if you want to get in your workouts, if you want a convenient and really entertaining way to do high intensity interval training or anything else, or you want a convenient and really entertaining way to do high intensity interval training or anything else, or you just want to get a fantastic gift for someone, check out Peloton.

Starting point is 01:39:12 OnePeloton.com and enter the code TIM. Again, that's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off any accessories, including the shoes that you will want to get. Check it out. OnePeloton.com, code TIM. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn and their job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you've ever hired anyone or attempted to do it, you know that finding the right people can be extremely difficult. And if you don't have a direct referral from someone you trust, you're left to use job

Starting point is 01:39:49 boards that don't really offer any real world networking approach. And what I mean by that is, in contrast, LinkedIn, which is the world's largest professional network, has a built in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them and their connections and their former employers or colleagues in a way that closely mimics real life communication. More than 70% of the workforce in the U.S. uses LinkedIn, and more than 22 million professionals view and apply to LinkedIn every single week. Unlike generic job boards, LinkedIn considers skills, experience, and location to match with candidates, making it easier to find quality candidates. And maybe above all, you can directly contact a candidate's connections to get a good sense of if they are a good fit for your business. So visit linkedin.com forward slash Tim and receive a $50 credit towards your

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.