Nicholas Thompson - CEO of The Atlantic (50k American Record Holder) | The Simple Sport That Reveals Everything About You

Why is running the simplest sport? It's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself. Your successes are your own, your failures are your own. I start running very seriously when I'm about 15 and initially I do it for a love of competition and I do it because I'm good at it and it gives me status at high school. It makes me cool. He's a storyteller who turned media into mission. Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of the Atlantic and under his leadership the magazine returned to profitability earned multiple Pulitzer prizes and grew its digital subscription base exponentially. When you're running, pain doesn't work the way we're talking. Most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about homeostasis. If you can reach that level of awareness of yourself you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits. You also co-founded The Atavist, a multimedia publishing company acquired by WordPress and wrote The Hawk and The Dove. He runs a daily video series dissecting technology, culture and power, reaching millions and reshaping how we think about the future. When your life is hard there's something about going into the track and just running to the point where you fall over that feels amazing. We're all on Instagram all the time, we're all on Twitter all the time, we're all constantly distracted and we feel all those empty moments with screens, social interactions and notifications. What's interesting is at the same time that that has happened the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathons as skyrocket. So Nick, why is running the simplest sport? Hey Scott, it's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself. You don't need a racket, you don't need a ball, you don't need someone else. You just go out, you don't even necessarily need shoes though they're useful particularly if you're on rocky terrain. But you have the ability to just go out there and do it whenever you want. And then because it's just you, you're able to observe things about yourself and understand things about yourself as you do it. Your successes are your own, your failures are your own. You understand aging and creates mental space that other sports don't do. So my hypothesis of my book is that if you look closely at running and you look at what it does to people's lives and you look at what it did to my life, you can actually understand really deep and really meaningful things. Do you think that people in general have a hard time being alone with their own thoughts? Some people do, some people don't, but we all have to spend a certain amount of time alone, so we all should be comfortable. And you know, there's this interesting phenomenon in modern life where we're all on Instagram all the time, we're all on Twitter all the time, we're all constantly distracted and we fill all those empty moments with screens, social interactions, notifications. But what's interesting is at the same time that that has happened, the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathon tests skyrocketed. And so there's almost an inverse relationship between how distracted we are by our phones and how much we seek sort of long distance, long endurance competition. That's very interesting. Yeah, I feel like as you describe running in such an eloquent way and I haven't heard many people describe it that way, but it's, I've experienced it with a variety of different fitness things, but none are as, how do I describe it? Like when you run, you get into a state, I guess it's flow state or something where you, there is no distraction. It is really just you and your thoughts, which can be a good thing or a scary thing, but it's really interesting that you notice that correlation between our thoughts being overwhelmed by social media, being constantly stimulated, be constantly bombarded with messaging and images and ideas, and our need to find an outlet that gives us back our mental peace almost. It gives us back our mental peace. It can access to, you know, we were, right? We hunted antelopes on the, you know, Savannah when we were, you know, many, many centuries in generations ago. I do think there's something very pure about running. Even when you do it, like I do it in an industrial city, you know, most of my running is from Brooklyn to Manhattan over a bridge with a train. So it's not like I'm off running in the fields of wildflowers. So I do think that even if you do it that way, there's a way it connects you to our ancestors and a way it connects you to the sky. I do think there are really beautiful things that happen through it. Where does this sort of, I don't want to say love for running, but need for being okay with your own thoughts and persevering through difficult times. Where does this inflection point or this major theme come into your life? When does it first present itself? I mean, I start running very seriously when I'm about 15 and initially I do it for a love of competition and I do it because I'm good at it and it gives me status at high school. It makes me cool. But I also very quickly also learned that it's a way to be outside, be in the woods, think at a deeper level process complicated things. And so it's probably pretty early in my relationship with running where I realized like I didn't just want to go out and try to beat people on the track. I wanted to see if I could run to the top of Kinsman Mountain, right? I wanted to see if I could, you know, get to the next ridge line. And you don't do that because you want to prove anything. Now you might do it for a Strava segment, but back then you didn't. And so it was really about finding some kind of spiritual peace. So I think that my need, the mental benefits that come from running started to make themselves present then. But I think it was later in life when, I mean, the inspiration for the book came in a pretty important moment, which was, you know, when I was 29, at least when I was 30, I ran a fast marathon. I had this long struggle to run a fast marathon. I just couldn't break three hours. I finally break it and I run 243 and I feel amazing, right? And then shortly thereafter, I'm diagnosed with cancer. I recover. We talk more about that, that process, that whole thing. Then for the next like 13 years, I keep running and I just run 243s over and over again, just nonstop. 243 is fast. It's cool. It's great. Like, 243 is a great time. It's objectively like it makes you the fastest person in your company, right? Usually if you run 243, you know, fastest person on your block, whatever. Then in my mid 40s, I get way faster, right? And I run 229. And now suddenly I'm like one of the best in the world. In my age group, you start setting records and the inspiration for the book, the moment I decided to write the book came when I was trying to think through like, what the heck happened? Like, how did I get so much faster? And more importantly, clearly, I have this latent ability. Why didn't I realize it while I was training my butt off in my 30s? Like why couldn't I gotten faster than like makes no sense? And then I had this realization, oh, wait, it's because I had only cared about at some deep psychological level, being as fast as I had been before I got sick. Like that was the only thing that mattered to me. And so it was that realization, oh, wait, like the things that make you fast, the things that slow you down, the things that determine how well you can do at this sport are very deep inside. They're not just like your cardiovascular system, your legs, they're deep in your mind. And it was that realization that led me to start writing this book. That's very interesting. So you discovered that the reason why the reason why you weren't getting better is really because of, I mean, to put it very, very simply, sort of a limiting belief for not even like a baseline or a benchmark that you thought that was what you wanted to achieve. I mean, this is like obviously we're talking about running and sport, but this is something that transcends almost everything you do in life. Totally. Like, I don't, like, there's so many multi factors and lots of elements, but yes, it was essentially like I was not, I just wouldn't let myself get faster because I didn't care because all I was trying to do was prove that I was still alive and that I was like similar to the person before he had gotten sick. And that seems to have been what was going on inside my head. What is that? What does that teach you about sort of, you know, aging into your prime? Because I think that that's something that I mean, like, I don't think a lot of people at, at, you know, 45 are trying to break records. I don't think that a lot, and I always tie, listen, I am a business guy in a sports gun. I do tie a lot of sports performance and sports lessons back to business because I think that some of the mindset hurdles that you overcome to succeed in sports and teamwork and all these different ideas, they really do translate into, into, into business as well and just life success. But I think that you're talking about somebody who's 45. I don't think they're looking to, you know, create incredibly new milestones in their career, incredibly new milestones in their, in their athletic life, incredibly new milestones in their relationship, even though I think they should be, but I think that around that age is when people are thinking, okay, you know, I've done it. I figured it out. I'm good. Let me coast into retirement or whatever that looks like. Yeah. A couple of things. So one, I had a very good model. My maternal grandfather who doesn't really play a role in the book. He's mentioned a couple sentences, you know, worked until he was 83 years old at the highest levels of US government, right? And he just got fired all the time, you know, got fired by him. Seven out of 11 US presidents and then just would work his way back, right? So I had a pretty good role model that said, you don't stop, you don't give up, you don't go, like you don't say, okay, at 55, I'm going to retire or at like 40, I'm going to stop running. You just keep going until until the end. You know, he was playing tennis with me when he was 90 years old. I put a little like chair out on the court and you would like sit down between points. So that's, you know, that's one element of it. Another element is, I think the lesson that I learned, there are forces that slow you down as you age, right? It is inevitable. And, you know, my, I don't know, less lean muscle mass than I had when I was 28 years old. I have a, you know, lower maximal heart rate, right? I have, they're all kinds of like, I let a lower VO2 max. They're all kinds of like physiological things that unquestionably make me slower. That said, I also have wisdom, right? I've learned things about training that I didn't know before. I have learned actually forms of endurance through my professional life that are useful for running. So you have a bunch of forces pushing you backwards. You have a few forces pushing you forward. And so I'm never going to, even if I devoted my whole life to running, I'm not going to run 220 or 219. But I can, you know, keep, I can keep pushing back against the declining. I had this conversation with my mother. She was like, oh my god, my reflexes are just getting worse and worse. You know, it's like every day and my reflexes are worse. And I was like, mom, that doesn't have to be the case. Like, let's go out on the porch. And I'm going to throw you tennis balls. I'm like, sort of, toss them to the right, toss them to the left. I'm going to bounce them. You're going to catch them and throw them back to me. And like, we went and did that. And she's like, oh, my reflexes are getting better. And you're like, yeah, you know, you can like, there are forces that push us in one, you know, towards decay. And you can push back, you know, not at everything, but at what you want. You know, we're not going to live forever. You know, I'm probably going to die at roughly the same address going to die out if I didn't do all this running. But I'm glad that I haven't like given in to the forces of the client, at least not yet. You write about running with awareness, not just discipline. Explain what that means. What's the difference? Yeah. So when you're running, this is important. It gets into like a little bit of, it's almost spiritual stuff. But you have to the trick, one of the tricks in running fast, one of the most important things. And so the less than I think applies across life. Pain doesn't work the way we're taught or the way we think about it when we're young. Then I started running. I thought that the reason I hurt when I ran was because my muscles were inflamed or, you know, something was going wrong with my nervous system. Or like, I used to think there's like, there's lactic acid buildup, right? And the lactic acid buildup is what makes you hurt. Well, no, it's not. There is lactic acid buildup. But that's not what makes you hurt. Most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about homeostasis. And so your brain is, you know, sending signals through the rest of your body to try to get you to slow down because it doesn't think it can maintain the pace you're running for the distance you want to run. So when I run a marathon or anyone runs a marathon, you get all these weird pains, right? And you're like three miles in your shoulder will start to hurt, right? And on a regular day, your shoulder's not going to hurt three miles in a run because there's nothing going on with your shoulder, right? Like it's just there, right? It barely moves. But your brain is like, it's worried about running 26.2 miles on this particular day. And it's worried you've taken it out too fast. But it's trying to get you to slow down. And so it's looking for weak points. And there are all kinds of studies that show this. And so your brain is running all these calculations. How hot is it? Like, how long is this going to take? How hilly is the course? How hard of my work? What is my part rate? And it's measuring all these factors. And it's like a thermostat. And then if those factors kind of exceeded different level, it like sends a pain signal out. And so when you're running, you're trying to understand this and you're trying to understand these different pain signals and you're trying to understand like, is this just something I can ignore? This is like this thing in my shoulder. Or is it an actual pain signal? Is it like I've actually injured my Achilles, right? So I was running this past Saturday and something started to go wrong on my hamstring, right? I was like, okay, is this like a real thing? Or is it just worried that I'm trying to run a 20 mile run? And that is like a really profound and deep body awareness that if you can reach, and not that I've reached perfection, but if I've written, I am at a much deeper understanding of my body than I was 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, if you can reach that level of awareness of of yourself, you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits. In part by sort of like using your brain, I call it plain height and seek with your brain, right? But the only thing you have to use your brain to play hide and seek with your brain, but you can kind of convince yourself to go faster. They're obviously physical limits. Like it's not like the perfect Buddhist can run a one minute mile, but you know, you can still do better if you have a deeper understanding. You actually set records for men 45 and up in a 50k race. Like this is not just a casual, uh, I go for a run on a Sunday morning. Was that done purposefully? Did you say I never want to be 100% my work? Is that benefited your work? Is what's the relationship between this sort of the two conflicting identities? Well, it could be a it could be a strength. It could be a weakness. I mean, I think that like my whole life, and if you look at different moments and you look at people who have evaluated me, you know, the people who like me and the people who are impressed by me and you think I'm doing a good job are always like, you know, Nick does so many things, right? And the people who kind of think I'm a schmuck are like next distracted, right? And it's a theme that goes through, like my academic life, my 20s, my 30s, my 40s. And you know, they're there are there are trade-offs when you have a life where you have a bunch of things you do. There are moments where your goals end up intentionally with each other. What I've tried to do is to make the life work and to make it so that nobody the Atlantic ever thinks I'm slacking on the job because of my running, right? I run two and from the office takes about the amount same amount of time as going on the subway. I'm often listening to podcasts. I'm going to work out, obviously, I'm not because I'm trying to cultivate awareness, right? I'm using running as a way they can help my job. There are things I learn from running that really help my job, there are things from my job that help my running. So I've been able to build it into my life, so they don't think any I don't think anybody at the Atlantic would ever say I shirk on responsibilities, you know, I think they mostly think oh Nick has this like hobby that he's able to keep contained. And you know, one of the things about running is that you can do it at an elite level without putting that much time in, right? You know, you spend I spend what eight hours a week running. It's a lot, but like you could spend eight hours a week watching Netflix. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now think about listening to this podcast right now. You're probably multitasking, you're probably catching 70 to 80% of what we're talking about, but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching 20%. That'd be crazy, right? It's really not a good use of your time. If you only remember 20% of what we're talking about, but most businesses, most entrepreneurs are only using 20% of their data. All the most important details and call logs, emails, chats with their customers, it's just left floating in digital space not being used. HubSpot, it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more, you grow more. Visit HubSpot.com to get the full picture of your business today. NetSuite is a success story partner. Now, what does the future hold for business? 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There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility. Just go to Indeed.com slash Clary right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Clary terms and conditions apply if you're hiring Indeed is all you need. When you think about the idea of obsession is obsession useful, helpful to you, a good thing, a bad thing. Just because I feel like I love obsession to be quite honest. I think that it and I look at what you've accomplished over your life and I feel like a portion of you, not 100% but a portion of you is obsessed and that's what allowed that's what's allowed you to get to where you are. What is your thoughts on obsession with running with performance, with work, with everything you've done? I'm like, that's a good question because obsession is, you know, it's hard to be obsessive about. It's hard to be like a obsessive polygamist. And so my whole life I've never really focused in on one thing to the exclusion of others. But I am very driven and very focused and I care a ton about doing well at my job. I care a ton about running fast and I care a ton about being a good father than my three boys and a good husband to my wife. I think obsession, I think sort of like a modulated obsession where you like really care passionately and you like you, it's just whatever the goal is, right? So the most important goal in my life, right? Besides being a good father, good husband, the most important goal is figuring out a business model. So this amazing publication founded by Ralph Walder, Emerson and Haribit, Peter Stowe can thrive for generations to come and play a role in helping American democracy and helping America like exist as a nation, right? That's my objective, right? I don't write the stories. I don't edit the stories. My job is to find the business model and I am obsessed by that. I think about it all the time, right? And it's in the back of my head, what should we do? Are we doing this? Are we doing this well enough? Can we hit this metric, right? So in a way I am like profoundly obsessed about that, but not to the extent that it prevents me from spending a bunch of time running. No, I think I like that strategically obsessed. Yes, strategically obsessed. There you go. There that's that. There you go. I'm strategically obsessed. When you get cancer at a young age, you, I mean, to a degree you're facing mortality, how does that change your relationship with running your hobbies, your pastimes, your family, work? Like what does this do? What is the thoughts that go through your head when you do get cancer at a young age? Well, so one of the thoughts, so I got it when I was 30. You do suddenly, you just, you question who you are and what you are because you're like, wait, if I die, what have I, have I done anything? Have I left anything? Have I, you know, the world would be identical without me or at least if you're 30 and you're like, I was at 30, right? I mean, if you're so super accomplished 29 year olds, maybe different. But it, it makes you wonder your place in the world. It makes you think more about the people who truly love you. You go through this moment and you also, you get to see how people react and you get a better sense of who truly loves you and who truly matters in your life. And then if you're lucky and you get through it as I did, you take life more seriously and you, you have a, you have post traumatic growth, you know, you have this thing you can hold on to, right? You've been to the precipice, but you've survived and you, you care more about certain things and you care less about other things. And so, right, you maybe care more about trying to figure out your place in the world of journalism and you can maybe care less about whether the Red Sox when the AL East, right? And so you just sort of like your, your shift of priorities and your way you spend your time, I think changes. There have been studies that have shown that people who get cancer and survive it end up with, they end up becoming more religious, they end up becoming closer to their family members, they end up becoming closer to their deep friends, they end up probably having fewer weak social connections and they end up more focused, right? Like there's a kind of, they do a whole bunch of things that are very salutary for the mental health and they, I think they also spend more time, you know, outside like thinking about important things, like you kind of like remove trivia and add important stuff into your mind. And, you know, there have been lots of studies that show that it's not true for everybody and you do have to obviously survive it and come out the other side, completely intact, right? And you can come out with all kinds of different outcomes. But, you know, when I look at my life, there are a lot of things that didn't go right in my 20s, I went right in my 30s, running, it's a very obvious one, but they're all kinds of them. And part of it was having had this really dark and scary experience with, you know, the thyroid cancer, which is, you know, if you're going to get cancer, it's the, the cancer you want to get. And very high survival rate, I was very young, there wasn't, you know, I was terrified and thought I was going to die, but there is no moment where like a rational doctor thought I was going to die. But you come to the other side and you're a different, more serious, more focused person. There was one line in your book. It was along the lines of when we're teenagers were pulled by instinct. Now my emotions were those of an older man, a steady rain that formed a river pushing relentlessly forward. So this sort of, it's very well, very well written and beautifully worded a sort of evolution of a person. And was that cancer that brought you through that evolution? It was a couple of things. I mean, that line in the book, I was comparing two different races, and they're both like very emotional races. So the first was when I was 18 years old or 17 and it was the New England Championships and it was the 3000 meter race and it was for the New England title. And it was both for the individual and for the team title and my race, the 3000 was the last race. And so it's me against my art rival. If I win, we have a good shot, a win in the title. If I lose, we have no shot. So I have to win. And I go out, I like fall behind, I get depressed, he gets ahead, and then I catch him. And then it's just this man sprint. And so what I love about those memories is that you can just, when you're running a sprint on a track, you can just let your emotions out. You can channel every element of energy you have into forward propulsion. And I don't think I've ever felt quite like I felt those last 200 meters were neck and neck. We're just going back and forth. I hated the guy. He insulted me on the track like three weeks before. It was the only person who beat me all season. It was unfair. He was a post graduate. I wanted to beat the guy. And so we're going at it. I pass him a catch him, which is amazing. And then I lose. And he wins. And so I was describing the emotions of that race and what it feels like to give it all and to like be a young man and be like screaming inside yourself and moving on into lane two, which amazingly in track is called the lane of high hopes, which is so cool. So that was the first race. And then the second race is the 50K in Oregon, where I set the American record, where you know, in that first race across the finish line and I black out, like I don't even know I've lost when I cross the finish line. It's so close. I think I might have lost, but who knows? And then it's like, um, then in the 50K, it's like, I remember the end where I can see the finish line and I know I'm going to break the American record and they've pulled out the tape. And I run through and the video is kind of amazing, right? And you watch and I go through and I break the tape and I look, I look good. And then, and I remember feeling good. And then I like top over, you know, I'm like, I'm clearly like completely maxed myself to the exact, you know, it's like, you know, I don't know, you pull into the gas station and there's like one drop of gas in the tank. And that was like what I had done in that race, but I had done it like in sort of a steady, smooth way as opposed to that first race, where I lost. By the way, I will say that the guy who beat me in that race when I was a 17, he read an article I wrote about running and sent me an email and said it, he loved it, it was great to read about it and like it had inspired him to get out and play more squash. And I now, I'm now friends with him. That's so far. The Arch Nemesis. No, but I think that that, so yes, you're right. It wasn't just cancer, but it was like this. It was just life just turning away. I mean, it's a lot of things, right? There's a lot of changes happen. So I think I really like, there's sort of four things that happen at that time period. There's one, I overcome my cancer, two, I start having children, right? So I have three boys and they appear in the years after I get healthy. Third, I write a book and I write a book about my maternal grandfather, who I mentioned, who is this just phenomenal diplomat, but also just a force of nature and a model. I read a book, it's the history of the Cold War based on his rivalry in George Kenan's. And then the fourth is that I have this very intense relationship with my father. And I watch this very driven man, you know, kind of fall off into alcoholism and despair and bankruptcy. And I like have a counter example, right? Like if you let things slip, this is what happens, right? And that sort of, you know, I start to really process that. So all of those things are happening at the same time in my life. That's a lot, that's a lot, a lot. One last thought on this because I think it's a useful idea. And I can help people that are going through difficult things. God forbid, hopefully, nobody, although probability dictates people who are listening to this are going through cancer, some sort of cancer scare, but just negative, negative moments of people's lives in general, you found a lot of relief in running to really take your mind away from the cancer. But the point is running physical activity, it gave you something that would take your mind away from anything negative. Like I'm assuming you've used it to escape a lot of, you know, really mentally exhausting and stressful situations over your life. Talk to me about what people should, what people should know about running just when they're going through something, hopefully not cancer, but if it's cancer, anything else, like what's the, what's the thing that running gives you that nothing else really does? You know, I don't know, I mean, for, I don't know if other people, it gives you something that's nothing else can give you, but there's, there are a couple of things that can happen with running. So one, it allows you, you know, sometimes when you're running, what you're doing is you're actually seeking the pain, right? You're like, you're going out there and because things are hard in your life, you're just like, you want the opportunity to kind of get into ultra runners called the pain cave, but you want to get into like just a point of, there's something when your life is hard, there's something about going to the track and just running to the point where you fall over that feels amazing, right? So that's one use, right? I don't use it that much, that's more kind of like a young person's thing. You know, but that, that was kind of like what, you know, if I like broke up with the girl when I was young, I would like just go one hard, right? And like, you know, sometimes like bringing pain on can process the other pain. What I use running for now is kind of the opposite. It's almost like spiritual escape. It's like, I'm going to go and I'm going to run and I'm going to feel this different thing and I'm going to be out in the universe and it's going to be closer to meditation, right? And I'm going to go, maybe something hard happens in my life now. I just go out and I go run in the woods, right? And I don't run hard. I don't necessarily run long, but I go and it's a way of like releasing my mind and freeing myself. And so I think people can reach that mental state, you know, that kind of dissociation. You can reach it through multiple ways. You can go for a walk, right? You can, you can go bird watching, right? Like there are different ways of kind of escaping and going. Maybe you can meditate. Maybe you can sit quietly in a chair, but for me, it's running that gets me to that state that's even really helpful. 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What was your relationship like with him? He's a very complicated guy, but my relationship with him was always made a very strong relationship. We emailed, you know, more or less every day throughout his life. He passed away seven years ago, but he's a very complicated guy where he grows up, and he grows up in kind of a tough family where he's afraid of his father. He grows up in Oklahoma, and his father, they're on a Native American reservation, his father's president of the university there, and my dad just doesn't fit in, doesn't have any self-confidence. And so he kind of escapes. He learns about the school called Andover, applies, gets a scholarship, and then it's this just like rocket ship trajectory for the next 10 years, right? Where he goes to Andover is an outcast, figures it out, goes to Stanford, wins a road scholarship, you know, dean of students, you know, I find these recommendation letters where they're like, Scott Thompson's the best student we've had since Herbert Hoover, right? John F. Kennedy says this guy's going to be president, runs every political organization. He's just a dynamo, goes to Oxford, you know, with his road scholarship, comes back with his defail, marries my mother, who's the, you know, glamorous daughter of this important political figure. And so my dad's like just, you know, the guy's going to be certainly he's going to be senator, right? But then he doesn't really like, he never gets on track professionally. And, you know, from the time he marries my mother where he would have been me to 26 years old, 27 years old, until he's 40, he's in kind of a rut. Um, he starts to drink too much, becomes alcoholic, he then, you know, can't really get himself going professionally, can't really write an important book, get stuck in all these sort of political battles, um, inside the faculty where he's, where he's a professor, he then finally like starts to make it in the late 70s. Um, and he becomes kind of a well-known public intellectual, Ronald Reagan gets elected and he's the top choice to run the policy planning staff, which is a great job. Uh, he doesn't get it. Um, but it's right then that he realizes he's gay. And, you know, it's something he thought about, you know, he, it's unclear exactly when he realized that he had tendencies, he's clearly bisexual of a some degree, but they were his, his male tendencies were stronger. And so then he leaves my mother, he, you know, moves to DC and then he just unravels. Um, and he, you know, he starts to, he would, he would, there would be hundreds of men who he would, you know, would come to our house and he would, you know, I said he didn't spend a night alone for 20 years. Um, and he is, you know, there, many of them are completely inappropriate, right? Some of them are like violent, some of them are thieves, some of them are, you know, yeah, I don't know, just kind of like, imbisels, right? Like they're not the people that's got Thompson should be with. Yeah, there's some people I like, but mostly like they're not really the right people for him to be with. And so then he like the next 30 years of his life, he's a loving father, he's fully supportive of me, fully devoted to me. Um, he's an amazing man to talk to right. The guy is always so smart and interesting and well read and he's like, he's a great person to have at parties, but it's just chaos, right? And he like, falls behind on his taxes, he makes all these bad real estate deals, he ends up in like thousands of court cases, maybe hundreds of court cases, he eventually leaves to Ashex, he can't handle an American anymore. And then by the end he's, he's running this hotel in Bali that is it really a hotel or is it just like people come and sleep with the male gardeners? And you know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty dramatic story of rise and fall from like this little kid in Oklahoma, the, you know, halls of Washington the rice patties, you know, and then eventually he dies in Batanga, Philippines. Um, so it's a, it's a, it's a, the other reason I wrote this book is because my dad's life story, whether there's a lesson in it or not a lesson, it's interesting, right? Like if I tell people they're like, they're like, what is your dad do? And they sort of assume your my dad has a kind of a different story than what he does. Um, so, you know, it's, he's an interesting guy, but what's important, what's most important is that he was completely devoted to me. He loved me. And even though he like, he threatened to kill himself to like get a couple hundred bucks from me or, you know, all kinds of like blackmail and craziness, you know, order prostitutes to like into my apartment. There's like, there's, and there's even worse things that I don't put in the book. Um, despite all that, like we maintain our relationship and you know, we stay in touch and we have a loving father's own relationships with a very end. Is there, is there a lesson? Um, is there a lesson? To me, one of the lessons was, don't get knocked off track. And if you do get knocked off track and you do start to like lose yourself confidence and you do find yourself, you know, sort of letting slip the things you care about, get it back. Like it seemed like what happened with my father was the way he coped with his drinking problem was to drink more. And the way he coped with having drunk more was to drink more. And what you want to do is the opposite. Um, you want to like, you sort of cultivate a little bit of self-awareness. He was a very interesting man and that he had, you know, such incredible ability to view the strengths and weaknesses of other people and could see through you and could, you know, identify. He wrote me a letter when I was 21 that, you know, forced off a huge portion of my life. It's one of the most incisive letters that I've ever received. And how well did he know me? I spent two weeks a year with him, spent time with him in weekends. I read it just recently and I was like, oh my god, this man. He was, he was, but he didn't have his own self-awareness. Yeah. I mean, he, you know, what he would say is, you know, that like his sexuality, that he came of age the wrong time that was really hard to be, had been born gay in 1942. Right? If you're born gay in 1982, you can come out of the closet. If you're born gay in 1922, you just stay in it. And so he was born gay in 1942 and then came out, you know, in during the middle of the AIDS crisis, he was, as you mentioned, who's diagnosed as HIV-positive that turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis. He would say that he, you know, just life gave him, life gave him a DNA imposed limit. And because of his sexuality, he couldn't have succeeded professionally the way he wanted to. Like Washington would not have allowed an openly gay man to succeed. And once he realized he was gay, he could not, you know, control it. And because he hadn't been able to like be a young man exploring his sexuality, when he was a teenager, he had to compensate by, you know, dating this endless parade of, you know, 19-year-old guys he met on man jammer. Like that's what he would say. Which is not, I think, you know, fully persuasive, but that was his argument. No, I think that there's a lot of inner turmoil there for obviously. But I wonder if, and you probably know, you've probably thought of this at least once or twice before, if even though it was a good relationship and there was a certain degree of chaos in the relationship, but even though it was a good relationship, you're saying it was a good relationship, did it? You kind of ended up being complete 180, like a complete opposite. Like when things don't go right, you make sure that you don't lean into the wrong, you find a way to correct it. Like I see you as actually a very disciplined person, as somebody who like leans into the hard things as opposed to sort of giving way to the easier things. I think that I don't know if that's part of what shaped who you are. I think for sure that there's something that comes from our parents that definitely at least imprint on us to a degree. But you seem to be a complete opposite of that. Well, to the extent I am, it's deliberate, right? It's like, you're my sister, my two sisters, older sister younger sister, we've all talked about like our fear of becoming like him. And the what we do to try to not become like him. But on the other hand, like I am quite similar to him in other ways, you know, I, you know, he was this like bundle of energy who is always doing lots of stuff, you know, people like his old friends always say I remind I remind them of him. What what makes something so simple? And we did touch on this, but go go a level deeper, please. What makes something so simple become so profound and and such a benefit to your life? Yeah, I think it just it opens up levels of thought and it opens up levels of experience that you know are pretty hard to open up. One of the things I did in the book is I, you know, both tell my story and what running is done. For me, but I'll tell the stories of five other people who have struggled with really hard things in life and used running to cope with them. And you know, the first maybe I'll just tell her story, well, maybe I'll tell two of them. The first is this woman named Bobby Gibb. And they're all people who've intersected with my life. You know, she's the mother of a friend of mine. And she, you know, grows up and she's just, she's wired differently and she really doesn't, she just can't stand the role the women are supposed to play in, you know, 1950s, 1960s America. Like when you can't have a credit card, you can't have a job. You just got to be a wife. She just can't stand it. And the way she copes with it is she's like, you know, I'm going to do my own thing. And so she goes off and she runs across the country. You know, not directly across country. She's in a van, but she like gets in the van and she'll drive starts in Boston and drives to the, you know, Berkshire's and go every night she'll go and run like, I don't know, for four or five hours, you know, and then sleep on the ground and like, look at the stars and look at the sky. And she goes across the entire country and goes to, you know, goes to San Francisco. And then she's like, you know, I kind of love this running thing and then she goes, enters this 100 mile race in Vermont and she was able to run with the horses here on 66 miles and two days. And she's just like, running gives her this way of being a spiritual being out in the world that nothing else does and helps her like escape these feelings. So then she's like, you know what, I'm going to run the Boston marathon. And so it's where she grew up. So she sends a letter. And then we're going to as we're like, sorry, women are incapable of running the Boston marathon. It was just like belief, right? The women weren't able to run the, I can't remember this. It's like, what year is this? 1966. Really? Yeah, it's crazy. Well, women like, women didn't run distance races at the Olympics until the 70s, 80s. It's absurd. Well, I didn't know that. That's insane. Yeah, it's wild. And so Bobby gets this letter back and it's like, women are incapable. Sorry, you can't run the Boston marathon. She said, we just ran 66 miles with horses. And so she runs it. She like puts on her brother's sweatshirt and like sneaks in the bushes and then just goes out and runs the Boston marathon. And she runs it in like three hours and 20 minutes or something. And it's this, she's the first woman to run it. And so it's a wonderful story about running, helping this person, you know, find her role in civil rights, find her role and you know, bringing freedom, bringing equality. And it's just a beautiful story there. You know, all the other five characters I mentioned, one of those guy Michael Westfalt. And so he lives on this tiny island, 30 people out and off the coast of Maine. And there's nothing to do because it's a tiny island of eating your powdered milk and staying inside. And so everybody on the island becomes a runner, right? And there's one two mile road. And he'll run like 100 miles a week back and forth in the two mile road. And they end up having like, population of 37 of them runs sub three hour marathons at one point. And so he becomes this great runner. And he runs this road race in Northeast Harbor, which is a town on the mainland. And he wins it. He or one year my father runs it. So 1981, I think then 30 years later, my son runs the race. So I'm running the race, my son runs the race. And I'm watching my son. And he's coming, you know, mile left. And I've finished. I've gone back to go find my kid. And there's this guy right with him who's like arms are flailing all over the track. And I'm running with this buddy of mine as a cop. I'm like, is that guy okay? He's like, yeah, it's Michael Westfalt. And so what happened? What happened to Westfalt? He'd gotten Parkinson's. And so he had gotten Parkinson's in his like 40s. It's like runner, carpenter, strong guy built up all the houses on the island. And he'd had to learn how to run with it. Like he loved running. It was the thing he did. And at first, he was embarrassed. And then he learns how to like tie his hands behind his back so they don't flail too much when he runs. And he runs, he's like, qualify as Boston Marathon Times with Parkinson's. He said it's a world record for fastest marathon Parkinson's. He's incredible. And and so I spent a lot of time interviewing him about how he coped with like using running as a way to deal with, you know, I had to deal with decline. I had to deal with cancer. I had to do a fear. He gets a disease from which there's no return, you know, and he gets it at 49. And he knows that the rest of his life, it's just going to get, you know, harder and harder, but he wants to keep running because he loves it. And it's a story about what he learned about competition, what he learned about running. So I tell those two stories. There's others in the books that are like it, but the point is there's something about this sport and the fact that you can do it. Like you can't play tennis if you have Parkinson's, right? You can't like, you can just go out and train and do it. You know, you can sneak through the bushes and get into the Boston Marathon course, right? Because it's just you and it's just your shoes. There's something about the freedom and the self-determination that come from the sport that allow you to really reach deep places and do important things for somebody who is like a high performing individual. What from work helps them with the running? What from what what from running? Excuse me, helps them with their work. Yeah. I think that concentration is really it's something that really trends. I mean, you mentioned earlier that there are a bunch of habits, right? Like you eat well, you sleep well, you know, you learn how to like modulate your energy levels. Like there's a bunch of like you develop this kind of stoicism, right? I'm going to go run today. I'm going to work today. I'm going to run today. I'm going to work today, right? Like you develop this confidence in like building up your skill step by step brick by brick run by run, right? You learn like the power of consistent effort, right? And you learn that through both. But I also think that concentration really does come, you know, I've learned through running how to focus and I've learned through work how to focus. And I think the two feed each other. One last question about running. You've run through time square at midnight. You've been chased by cows and a lemur. You've dissipated like a thousand no trespassing signs. Just what was the most insane running story that you have, not somebody else, but something that you've dealt with? You mean like the weirdest run or like the most? Oh, that's a good quote. You take it however you want it. Give me the weirdest and give me the best, whatever. One of the points I'm making in that chapter is that like you just find time to run, right? And you just run wherever you are. Actually, I'll say like this is actually an important one. And this is this was something I didn't even know this had happened until I was right in the book. There was a time where I went to my my then girlfriend's house and she you know she'd become my wife but it's the first time like meeting her parents and I go over there and we have a big dinner. I think they're out living in Berkeley and I don't know maybe I drink some wine. We have a good time. I maybe I'll watch a movie together. I have kuno's and then it's like 11 o'clock and I'm like okay, I'm going running and because I hadn't gone running that day. And I leave and my future mother law says to my future wife like wait, what's wrong with that guy? And my wife is like what you don't get is that he enjoys it. And so there've been a lot of situations like that where I just go and run in places. I've you know I've run and I'm like what's coming to mind as I remember once for some reason like I came out of all these roads. I remember running like a 10 mile run in this tough small parking lot in Las Vegas. I can't remember why I had to do it. But it was like the only place I could run that particular day. You know and you just there's actually I remember I was I ran out during there was a time when I was up in the cat skills and I couldn't leave my kids but I had to do a run. So I just like ran around the house which is like pretty small but I ran like 10 miles like a little like tiny loops around the house. You just figure out what to do. I had another time running in Vegas. I don't know why it always happens in Vegas where I was like giving a speech and it was one of those things where I like show up and actually I guess I have a whole bunch of Vegas stories. Once I've met a friend's bachelor party like he's going up the elevator with a bunch of people he's met at the you know at the club. I'm coming down to go running. It's like the rest of the bachelor party's going up and I'm going out. Then there's another time where I'm in Vegas and I've like forgotten to bring a t-shirt and but I'm only there for like three hours and I have like 15 minutes when I can run between meetings and so I had like a winter coat because I've been in New York and so it's like 80 degrees and I'm in shorts and a winter coat running in Las Vegas. Anyway so the point being like I just love to run and we'll do it wherever I can. What do you want? What do you want if you're going to pass on a lesson about running to your three boys what would that lesson be? The lesson that I hope I've passed and I don't know is that they see that. They can't really understand my work right and they can't. I mean now they can. They're 17, 15 and 11 but like when they were little they couldn't and they didn't like quite know what I did. They had some sense of it. They don't really know what it means but they can see the effort right and they can see the discipline and they can see the consistency and they can see that it's like they can learn some of the lessons from running about resilience, perseverance, dedication, building things up steadily and that's what I hope they get and I you know in a way I like my eldest son doesn't run but he works so hard right and he works so hard to school work and it works so hard as debate tournaments right and he you know he's clearly whether he's learned it from watching me run or watching me work or watching my wife who knows but like he's picked it up the other two boys like they both run and they do it really well. You know I just one last thought I think it's like a lesson that I'm picking up from you like running you I mean like you you say running connected you to your father but you also use it as an escape when things are difficult you can use it to focus on something or you can use it for meditation to get your head out of work like it's just it's like this tool really that's that's how I see it it's this tool that you can apply it in different ways just to improve your life and it's such like a multifaceted diverse tool yeah yeah it's definitely that is a very good way to put it because you can do you know there's no one thing I do when I run I seek different things when I run I seek meditation I seek self intense focus I sometimes seek dissociation sometimes I'm running like away from things sometimes I'm running toward things there's a lot you can do with it and I think it's beautiful because I think that we keep trying to add more complexity into our lives with routines and all these different things and all these different fitness things and health things and and they're all good to a degree but I think that sometimes simple just wins and that's that's really what it is um so the book the running ground a father a son in the simplest of sports that is available October 28th so we'll make sure this podcast goes up around the exact same time when this is live and you can get that book anywhere you get your podcasts um if people were going to just take it home if somebody wanted to pick up this book what do you hope they would get from it what's the one lesson or the one idea that you really want to drive home I mean the best thing that happens is when people who don't run read it and then say they went running and I have been a couple times just as I would send out drafts to friends I really love that they're like you know I like I now can think more deeply about this sport and I'm going to go do it and I love that response I love that I think it's just like a leading indicator to picking up running like a leading indicator to a better happier healthier life um last question I ask everybody uh you kind of already you're you already told me what lesson you want to pass over to your kids through running but just a lesson that after going through everything in your life you would like to tell your younger self your 20 year old self what's that one lesson that was really important to you that you think would help that younger version keep at it you know I think I spent too much time I didn't understand then this thing I'm I really believe that if you do your best every day good things happen right and like you don't see it right you don't see yourself getting better you don't see it improving nothing's linear in life but if you keep at it you'll get there and one of the problems I had psychologically in my 20s is that I sort of wanted the world in a minute you know and I like I just sort of assumed that things would happen really quickly and like whatever success I saw or whatever accomplishments or whatever like I thought I'd be able to like write really great stories as a journalist really like you can't like you you have to learn so much and it takes a long time and I didn't quite appreciate the benefits of like compound interest the compound interest of daily work and it took me a while to realize that and because of that I sort of would stop and start and I made it like a bunch of sort of dumb professional mistakes in my 20s and pretty off track and I think it's because I didn't understand that I didn't have the confidence I didn't understand that if you keep at it and if you do your best and if you treat people well and you know you're kind and generous and thoughtful and work hard like it will stuff will like not always and there's all kinds of biases and injustices in the world but you know things will work out better