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Growth shouldn't depend on whether you happen to have access to the right mentor or organization. Everyone deserves support and becoming more effective, more thoughtful, and more confident in how they show up. Visit strawberry.me/smart and take 50% of your first session. Make sure you let them know Matt sent you that strawberry.me/smart and now back to our conversation. Each of us needs to have a hobby or outlet that helps us grow and develop. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Nick Thompson. Nick is the CEO of the Atlantic and the former editor in chief of Wired. He is also a highly accomplished competitive runner, holding the American age group record for men 45 and older in the 50K race, and being ranked among the top master marathoners in the world. His newest book is The Running Ground. Welcome Nick, I am super excited for our conversation. Thank you Matt, I am thrilled to be here talking with you on my favorite campus in the world. So we get started, let's do it. Excellent. You've had a front row seat to many, many changes that we've all seen in the way that we communicate. What makes for a good communicator in today's world of likes, LLMs, and quite frankly, let's face it laziness? This is cliche, but I found that the things that work are clarity and authenticity. If you can get across what you're really trying to say, if you can say it honestly, specifically, and ideally, briefly, that's good. And you can say it in a way that feels like it's you. That's great. Now, you can fake authenticity, authenticity is hard to define, but I definitely think that when you try to force yourself in a box, I'd do something that doesn't feel natural, the audience can tell. And you yourself, you write, how have you found your voice in all of this? What have you done to find what's authentic to you? There are a whole bunch of different ways I communicate. So I do a daily video, right? And the daily video is just me in the moment, right? And I film it wherever I am yesterday. I filmed it because I had the idea while I was walking to the office on the wharf, and the only place I could film it was by balancing the phone above an ice machine stand, facing out over the river. And then I stood up to do it, and then I realized I had a problem, which is that if I took a step back, I would go in the river, right? And so I had to be really careful last night, not the fall. But what people like is it's short. It's to the point. I explain what's happening in tech, something that's on my mind. And I just do it where I am. It's not polished. It doesn't go through comms. So that's one form of communicating. Another form of communicating is of course what I write. And that's much more serious, right? And that's polished. That's I try to find voice. I try to add humor. I try to make it as brisk as possible. I try to have scenes and structure all the things I learned in my years at the New Yorker at Wired, at the Atlantic. So that's a very different kind, but both forms are things I care about a lot. How much do you edit your work? The book immensely. So my new book is just out. And it's now November of 2025. I finished the first draft in August of 2023. And so I haven't done a word comparison, but I think if you were to do a word comparison of that first draft or the final draft, probably 5% of the sentences existed in the final version. It just went through so many different revisions trying to get it right. I have learned in my time how important editing is. I used to think editing was just a necessary evil, but in fact, I think the most creative things happened during editing. You really do have to think through who's my audience, what's my structure? How do I make it clear and concise? I've had to learn to be a better editor. And actually now I think I'm probably a better editor than writer as a result. It's interesting. I went the other way around where I was an editor first and then became writer. So I loved the craft. And you would watch at the New Yorker or I worked this place called Legal Affairs before. And you'd come in and you'd get this 10,000 word draft and part to get through. And then you would go through all these rounds and you'd end up with this beautiful 6,000 word, final version that had all the same good information and was just much cleaner, tighter, better structured, character handoffs, chronology, everything. And so with my book, at the end, I was going through it every, I was like reading out loud every 100 word sequencing. Is there anything I should cut? Anything I like? Do I actually have something interesting in this paragraph? If I don't have anything interesting in this paragraph, let's get rid of this whole paragraph. And really working to make it tight and controlled. And I actually made these giant sort of the chronology. And like, how can I do a handoff from this character to this character? Okay, this observation happened at this point involving this thing which sort of relates to this event. So there are three places in the book. I can put it. If I put it in the third place, what other pins does it knock over later on on the chronology? I put it in the second. Okay, let's dig your that out. So it was a really complicated process. I want you to comment a little bit more about the reading out loud piece. I encourage people to do that. And I'm curious why you recommend that. And then to see your narrative, to see your story visually and to connect the dots, I am a huge supporter of having structure and logic in communication. So many people just list and itemize. I love this idea that you actually visually represent it. And then take yourself through that mental questioning of if I move things around. What are the consequences? I appreciate that. But talk to me about the reading out loud. That was something I started really doing at the New Yorker. And I didn't have confidence. So I worked at the New Yorker from about age 34 to 41. So it like a very important point in my career. And I started a moment where I had done well in journalism. I was like, I'd hired a the New Yorker, but I didn't have full confidence. And I certainly didn't have confidence in my writing. And I showed up at this place with the best writers in the world. And I wanted to be like them. And I knew I couldn't write like that. And so I would go home and I would take their stories. And I would read them out loud. And I would try to understand what are they doing. Because when you read out loud, you force yourself not to skip words. Or when you're reading on paper, your eyes are scanning, you're moving, you're like taking a little piece of this paragraph and that piece of paragraph. And you can understand voice and flow when it comes through. You read out loud, forcing yourself to really understand, to study it and through it. And then when you do it for yourself, you can't cheat. Right? When you're writing, you can pretend that the sentence makes sense. But you read it out loud and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't flow right. Or it's repetitive. You're confronted with it. Like it's, you know, you look in the mirror and you really see yourself in a way you don't when you're just reading it. Right. It's almost like you're having a conversation with yourself. And if a conversation doesn't make sense, you change it. I will tell you that one of the scariest things for me. So I finished the book. I've gone through it and I've read it out loud. I've gone through all this editing. And then I had to read the audiobook, right? And you're in there for 14 hours. But at that point, you're done. You can't change anything. And I remember going to the studio the first day. I'm going to want to change so many things when I read this out loud. And then I didn't. It was fine. One of the most stressful experiences I had in writing my latest book was the audiobook reading. I believe attention is the most precious commodity we have in the world today. How do you coach your editors and writers to craft sticky content? That's not just sound bites. And how do you actually get people to write in a way that's meaningful and draws people in? There are a couple of rules that I follow that I think are really important. When I was working as an editor at Wired, I would push people and I would say, let's take a look at your story. If you were to describe the story to someone at a cocktail party, would they be interested? And if you were to describe this section of the story, would they be interested? And if not, find a different story. Okay. Secondly, now can they visualize it? Not necessarily is it kind of, you know, sell to a Hollywood screenwriter, but as they read the story, is there going to be a little movie playing in the theater of the mind? Right? And if there's not, you need to rewrite it. Because if they can't see it, right? And if they can't relate to it, they're not going to be able to follow it. Okay. Now, what is their emotional reaction going to be? It has to be something. They can be angry. They can hate it. They can love it. But if there's no emotional reaction, what's the point? Okay. Now we've got those things in order and like the writers there. So now let's go through the story. And let's just identify exactly how the narrative is working. Why is this here? Why is that here? Is it completely chronological? Do you have any extraneous characters and just going through with writers to make sure that the piece was as crisp as possible, as clean as possible? I really appreciate the idea of visualizing your narrative, your story, seeing it. What is it showing people? And then what makes ideas sticky for sure is the emotion and thinking about what is the emotion you're drawing out and how do you bring that about in people? I can't speak to somebody who does what you do without bringing up the AI question. What role should AI play in journalism specifically and in our everyday communication more generally? So AI is the hardest thing in journalism by far. And the reason it's so hard is that there are a whole bunch of different matrices on which you have to evaluate it. And there's a question of how journalists should use AI to do their reporting. And my view is they should use it all the time, right? Not to write anything because the reader is reading the story. It has your name on it. It should be you, right? So they should never write a sentence. Also, it's a bad writer right now. Maybe it'll get good, but even when it's good, it should be you. But for finding stories, for understanding topics, for like figuring out chronology, take your 3,000-rich story before it goes to the editor.
say, "Hey, are there any chronological gaps in the story?" There's a whole set of editorial things you can do with AI. Put it in there. It'll give you suggestions. You can fix them or not fix them. But if you don't, I think you're crazy. That's one thing. On the other hand, my profession has been very wary of adopting it. My company in particular. The reason for that is the industry is built on theft and theft of our material. All of these companies came, scraped our sites in violation of our terms of service, often using bots that they disguised. It made the people in my profession very angry. Secondly, they're quite scared because every study and every ranking of what industry is going to be displaced the most, journalism is at the top. They're very scared and they're very angry. Also, our business is being disrupted by AI, particularly in search. We have an existential business threat that we're already facing. There's this funny, complicated mess where we need to use AI. I really want everybody to use AI. But more or less everybody hates AI and is terrified of AI. Do you use it in your daily life? Oh, 50 times a day. Non-stop for prepping for anything. Last night, I had to host a dinner for 18 people. We're talking about a really complicated tech question. I didn't know the 18 people. I knew a couple of them. "Hey AI, get me Bios." Okay, great. Now AI helped me sort through the most interesting questions that relate to these Bios. Okay, great. "Please make me flashcards and quiz me on who everybody is. Give me a name. I'll tell them their company. Give me the company I'll tell them the name." Takes a process that would have taken ever six hours, makes it an hour process, right? And so I go to dinner. I'm totally prepped. I know everybody's name, I know other companies. I can identify their faces and I have a bunch of good questions. And so it's so helpful. That's a great use case and when I might borrow from you. Like you, I enjoy running. But unlike you, I only run 10Ks. You're a true runner, marathon's ultra-marathons. What does running mean for you? And how has it helped you in your life? It's my form meditation, right? So I go out and I listen to the birds, listen to the sounds, listen to my breath, listen to my body, understand. It opens up all kinds of thinking. So it's a very important time in my day. By the way, because we're on the Stanford campus and we're not far from campus drive, I'll tell you when I decided never to listen to music. I was on the Stanford track team at my freshman year in college. I wasn't good enough to stay through, but I was good enough to be there freshman year. I remember the coach, thinl and Nana, who's one of the legends of the sport. And I remember it. He gathers us all around and he's like, I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something like, you know, a big race coming up and we're here to compete. We're here to try to win. We're here to our best. And if you're not on board with that, just go put on your headphones and run around campus drive. And what he was saying is that if you're going to be serious about it and you're really going to try to like understand your body and improve, you have to turn off the music, you have to listen to yourself. Anyway, so back to your question. So it's a way for me of meditating, releasing, getting out of the world. I work in New York City. I live in Brooklyn. I'm very domesticated. But I used to love the mountains, right? I grew up and it's outside all the time. The thing I love to do most is my mom would just let me go out the back door and main and I just go run in the forest. And so running is a way to get back to the spirit of that little child. So that's important. But then it's also taught me all kinds of habits of mind and discipline and pacing. So there are all kinds of lessons from the sport that apply to my business life. And then also I like to win and get faster. I can tell you've got a competitive streak in you. I have always found and recommended that having some physical outlet, whatever it is, I don't care if it's building Lego models, playing music. For me, it's martial arts. Finding some opportunity to express yourself in a different way. And like you, they're great learning opportunities. I hear you when you say you learn about yourself, your body, but you also can bring that into your work. That's really important. Just connect from your phone, right? And you disconnect from all the stuff. One of my theories people often ask, like, why do so many people run marathon? Why do 55,000 people run their marathon? I'm like, complicated reasons. But in part because they know they're on TikTok too much and running a marathon and training for marathon is a way to get away from it. Do you often run solo or do you run with other people? I mostly run solo. I prefer to run with other people, but then you have to schedule it. And like my life is so complicated, I've just forgotten that. You've noted that running is the simplest sport and the simplicity can be a tool to understand complicated stuff. Can you give us a concrete example of how you've taken those lessons of simplicity and brought it into what you do for a daily thing? So what I mean by running is the simplest sport. You really, you can scroll it all yourself, right? You can open the door and run and you can do it any day, any time and night. I ran it four o'clock this morning and it was cold, but it was fine. I couldn't have done any other sport at four o'clock in the morning and watched in DC on the Worf. No one was there to play tennis with me. I didn't have a ball. I didn't have a bat, right? Running you really can control when you do it and how you do it and not only that, you can tell how you're doing. You can go run at 10k and you run it a minute slower than last year. That's bad. You run it a minute faster. That's good. And there's no external factor like maybe the weather, but really it's like about you. And so what that does is it means that you can see yourself aging in a way that's hard with other sports. I couldn't really tell I was sick, but I was kind of sick. And then I ran a marathon. It was like 30 minutes off my goal. Well, clearly I had some kind of respiratory problem. You understand things about yourself, but then the important part is because it's you and because you control it, this gets to the habits. You can go every day, which means that you can teach yourself a habit, sort of a stoic habit of I'm going to go and run every day. It's like a tennis game and you get somebody else. It's a little harder. It's harder to blame yourself when you fail and it's harder to credit yourself when you succeed. And so running for better or for worse really lets us kind of form ourselves and shape ourselves in good ways, bad ways. I really like how you use it as a tool for growth. We'll be right back to finish our conversation, but first a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. Think about the last time you walked into a big meeting, a presentation or podcast recording, and wish your key points could stay with you without losing eye contact or your train of thought. That's exactly what even realities was built for. Even G2 are productivity smart glasses designed to keep real time support right in view. With teleprompting, conversation support, AI assistance and the real time translation is remarkable, live translation across more than 35 languages right in front of your eyes. And unlike most smart glasses, they're designed to look and feel like premium eye wear with no camera and a lightweight design you can wear all day. To learn more about even G2, go to evenreality.com. And for our listeners, use promo code
[email protected] to get 10% off even ring one and or the even ring clip when you add them to your even ring G2 order. Before we end, I like to ask everybody three questions. When I make up just for you and two, I've been asking since the podcast started right up for that course. So in order to train like you must have to train for ultra marathon's marathon, you must be a master at time management. How do you make it fit in? Clearly it's a priority, but I have a lot of things that can be busy in life. I can't imagine the allocation of time I need to run the distances you do. Well I mean I train eight hours a week, which is a lot, but it's not 20 hours. It's not 30 hours. And a lot of it is multitasking like I run to the office. I could take the subway to the office and it would take just as long. So it does take some time, but not that much time. And I think that net, he creates time because of the way it relaxes and the way it opens my mind and lets me think about things. So sometimes I wonder, and I think my wife probably wonders this too, like Nick just stopped running and like what would where would that extra time go to? Would it go to working more efficiently? I don't know when it would go to, but I think it would, I think my life wouldn't work as well if I didn't spend that time running. I hear you on that and because running is something you can do whenever you can use it as a way to get to work. I think that's great. So somebody who might be not as into running as you are might upon hearing the sale, there's ways I can fit it in. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? I think Adam Grant's amazing. His ability to very pithily say what's important in life and to explain it. I've never seen someone like that. Every time you see something that he says, something that he does, a question that he asks, I think he's just great. He's a very economical communicator who also is able to get to the point. Question number three, our final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? In your audience, who are you talking to and why? I don't know what the exact right word is, but it's almost like the water of a recipe or the milk of a recipe. It's like, are you conveying the essential thing and is it right there? Either there can be some fluff around it to set people up and there can be some fluff at the back, but are you putting the right thing at the core? Are you getting the actual important stuff in there? The third ingredient, you respect. Are you respecting the person you're talking to? Are you respecting the audience and is it actually about them? Focusing on the audience is by far the number one bit of advice people give. Critical to start there. This idea of distilling it down to its essence, its core, making sure that's clear and getting that upfront really important. I really like this idea of respect. I think people are so focused on just getting the information out. They don't really think about that respect. He's giving you time to listen to read that you need to respect them. You don't have to agree with them and you might even challenge them. Nick, this has been fantastic. Not only have you taught us about better writing and better communication, but you've taught us about the importance of having a sport in our life that can really help. Yours is running. I run as well. I certainly can see how the feet on the ground can help you be grounded for sure. Thank you.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, The Podcast. For more information on movement and activity and how it relates to communication, please listen to episode 183 with Kelly McGonagall. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wunder, with thanks to podium podcast company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep-divideos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community, where you can join a global community of people interested in honing and developing their communication skills. You get access to A-Sync lessons, an AI coach, quests, and challenges, and much more. Join us at fastersmarter.io/learning. That's fastersmarter.io/learning. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast, Talk Smart.
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