Can The Media Fix Its Trust Problem? — With Nicholas Thompson

Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of Wired. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a nuanced conversation about why the media is losing the public's trust and whether it has a chance to regain it. Listen for a wide-ranging discussion on business models, politics, and the tech press's relationship with the industry's builders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And this is the fourth in our series of podcasts coming to you from Davos. And we are here in collaboration with Web3 Foundation in unfinished. Our guest today is someone I'm really excited to get a chance to speak with. Nick Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic. We're going to speak about trust in media, the economy at large, and then maybe how his fitness routine is going because I always see him running in Brooklyn. Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, I'm going to talk to you about trust in media and maybe we'll talk a little bit about the Brooklyn bubble, but I really don't, I, there's, you know, I can't throw too many daggers because I see you running by while I'm eating donuts. So we're in the same, the same media bubble out there.

• 2:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I'm really glad to have a chance to speak with you. Yeah, it's great to talk with you. Thanks for inviting me on. So let's start with, with trust in media. It means I'm really at an all time low. Every, every poll I look at shows how it's dropped even further and further. I didn't really know there was further that it could go down, but it keeps, keeps going. You've worked on the editorial side. Now you're on the business side of The Atlantic. What do you think is happening?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Well, it's certainly going down. Remember Joe Biden's introductory joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner that he was happy to be there because he could finally be in front of a group with a lower approval rating than he has. Why has trust in media declined? Well, a lot of it is due to the filter bubblization of America and people who don't trust media that's outside of their bubble. Some of it is due to the previous president we had, who very much worked deliberately to drive down trust in media. And a lot of it is due to mistakes that media has made. Some of it is due to social media. It is quite frequent to have, of course, often happen that you will have reporters or individuals

• 3:09Speaker 02

  from publications who are seen as proxies for the entire publication. Sometimes that brings love for the publication. Sometimes it brings down trust. So there's a whole constellation of factors and it also ties into the decline of trust across sectors in America. But, you know, the, here's, those are all sort of obvious reasons. The thing that I think is most interesting and is most on my mind. The one sort of surprising thing I can add is I wonder whether it has a little bit to do with the subscription models. And my first job, or my first job where I set up a paywall is at The New Yorker and then at Wired and now at The Atlantic. And initially, when I set up that first paywall at The New Yorker, I had an assumption that shifting from a business that was fully supported

• 3:52Speaker 02

  or primarily supported by advertising to one primarily supported by subscriptions would have nothing but salutary effects on the journalism and on the relationship with readers, right? When you're supported by advertising, you have real incentives to push growth that can lead you in, you know, reason to make decisions that aren't necessarily best for the readers. When you're incentivized by subscriptions, you're trying to build a relationship with your readers, right? You want them to pay you money. So shouldn't that be great? And all of the early data at The New Yorker suggested that

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Subscriptions are incentivizing us to do all the things that people want. Over time, and I think during the Trump presidency, and if you look at many of the political publications, it may be the case that having subscription business models incentivized publications to write more and more polarized stories and similar stories to feed into the same group of people that are buying subscriptions. If so, it's possible that the business model is leading to some of the decline in trust. I hope that's not true, but it is a potentially interesting hypothesis.

• 4:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. And you can contrast that with advertising. The advertising business has largely been about a volume play. You try to get in front of as many people as possible. How do you do that? Oftentimes, it's through social media. And you write for outrage on places like Facebook and Twitter. So it seems like, I mean, news organizations have a choice whether to follow these incentives or not. But the media business kinda sucks. It's a tough business to be in. And so these companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, right? You can write for outrage and sell ads, or you can write for polarization and sell subscriptions. How do you handle that?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's interesting about the outrage and ads. It's partly true, right? But they're different kinds of ads. If you're trying for, so now that I'm executive and not a journalist, I have a much more refined view of all this. If you're trying to, if you're selling programmatic ads, right? And you're selling ads through automated auctions, yeah, definitely. More traffic, better. If you're selling ads to direct advertisers, you actually want particular kinds of content. In fact, nobody wants to put their brand next to outrage political content, right? So if you're trying to sell an ad to any of the Fortune 500 companies, they're gonna want to, they're gonna say, "We're not gonna put it next to polarized and outrage content." So in some ways, selling direct sole ads doesn't push you towards polarized content.

• 6:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  So does that mean you're gonna drop your paywall?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. I think that the, I mean, the Atlantic strategy is very much... To appeal to the broadest spectrum of people as possible. If you look at the range of opinions on the Atlantic website and you look at where our readership goes in, you look at the stories that best perform, it's very clear that we have a ton of people who come in and they, you know, they read David from, they read David French, right? They're reading people who, they're not on the far right, but they're all Republicans. Arthur Brooks, right? One of our most read writers, who, he's an extremely well-known Republican. So, the Atlantic publishes very heterodox opinions. We're building our business strategy. Even if we could get more subscriptions by publishing a narrow range of opinions, we

• 6:50Speaker 02

  wouldn't do that. Our objective, right? Our founding motto of No Party or Click is to publish heterodox opinions across a broad political spectrum and ideally that's be great for our business too.

• 7:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you've worked on the editorial side. You're in Wired and now you're on the business side. One of the questions, and I used to be on the business side, now I'm on the editorial side, so I've made the opposite.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Which do you enjoy more?

• 7:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  I love the editorial side, but I'm actually kind of in the middle now because I'm running my own business while doing journalism. One of the things I always wondered about was some of the people who wanted to attack the press said that journalists are writing for clicks. Now, to make that argument more sophisticated, I think what they were implying was that journalists were paying attention to the business model and trying to do journalism that syncs with the business model.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, you know, for a while I thought that was ridiculous. We never really spoke about the business model when I was in the newsroom at BuzzFeed or at Ad Age. However, what I'm hearing from you is actually the business model does sort of have an influence on editorial. You know, if you talk about like what subscriptions incentivize, what advertising incentivizes, so, I mean, it does have to shape a little bit of the way that the editorial direction is. So unpack that a little bit.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of, a couple of great, great points that you made there. So, it is true. I've always thought, you know, one of the critiques of Silicon Valley is that, one of the critiques that Silicon Valley makes of the media is that the media is writing critical stories about Silicon Valley for clicks, right? And that, or they're writing critical stories of Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley, advertising companies, Facebook and Google compete with the media. And I always thought, and in fact, I still do think that that is kind of ridiculous. The reason journalists wrote critical stories about Facebook, Google, Silicon Valley is that they didn't like them, right? They thought that the businesses were... You know, corrupting America, making bad decisions, right? All the critiques that were in the stories were like genuine heartfelt critiques. In Silicon Valley, I thought the motives were not pure. I think the motives were genuine and pure.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I didn't believe in that. I do think that what I mean by saying that

• 8:54Speaker 02

  business models can influence the kind of reporting is not that reporters will do anything because of the business model. Right? In fact, the reporters generally don't know the business model. They don't really care about the business model.

• 9:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sometimes don't care to the point of hurting their own careers.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Perhaps, or you know, and they certainly they're they're not impartial. They're not tracking it. They don't know how many subscriptions their stories generated. They

• 9:16Speaker 02

  it's more the kind of reporters who are hired, the sections you expand into, the sort of the way you structure it all. But in the actual act of reporting, I don't think the journalists care at all about the business model. And in fact,

• 9:28Speaker 02

  you know, many of them don't track or follow it at all.

• 9:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is interesting because now I'm thinking back to my Buzzfeed days and we did know very keenly how much traffic our stories were generating.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  And was that good or was that bad?

• 9:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think that was bad.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I also speak to people. Well, it was bad, I think, combined with the fact that we were writing for audiences on social media.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now I think I've done a 180 on this whole right for social media thing. I don't think it's good for journalism because you see what performs and stuff that does play to identity and stuff that plays to outrage. And I don't think that was, you know, we did great journalism at Buzzfeed. They continue to do great journalism there. Won a Pulitzer Prize last year. However, yeah, I think that overall, knowing those traffic numbers and knowing how you're getting that traffic. That could be pretty detrimental.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  It's incredibly hard. It's not my job now, right? I'm the CEO. I'm not the editing chief. I don't, I don't even, I don't read a single story before it appears. I don't know what we've assigned. I have zero influence whatsoever in all of the assignments. I don't have any influence on the writers we hired. I don't have any influence on anything there.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  So I can't really talk about how the writers and the editors use metrics at The Atlantic. I can't say it wired, though. We tried to have a real, a balance where we didn't want people to feel like they had to write for clicks. And we certainly would, you'd never want someone. If they were choosing, today I'm going to work on a story that's important, or today I'm going to work on a story that's going to generate a lot of clicks. Which one do I choose? You'd never want them to choose the one that generates a lot of clicks. You'd want them to always choose the one that's important. So how do you set up an incentive system so that they can both understand how many clicks they're getting, both so that they have some factors that are pushing them to write more and engage more of an audience, drive more subscriptions? How do you do that? So the model we chose at Wired was to say, look, if you want access to the analytics, you can have access to the analytics. But we're

• 11:14Speaker 02

  not going to force you to have access to analytics, and we're not going to tell you. We'll send out an email at the end of the week that says which stories generated the most subscriptions, right? Well, you know, and that will give like a little shout out. In fact, I think I sent a pair of like cool colored socks to whoever generated the most subscriptions that week. Like a slight push to have people thinking about how they're engaging readers and getting people to engage with Wired. So we tried to find like a middle ground where we made it clear that these things do matter to the business, they do matter to Wired. You know, in general, the things that drive subscriptions were salutary. We wanted a little bit of a nudge, but we didn't want to get in that trap that so many other publications get into. We also didn't want to be in the area where, you know, more

• 11:59Speaker 02

  old school publications where there's a real aversion to the numbers. So that was, when I last ran a newsroom in my last job, that's how we did it.

• 12:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  I like that style. So you'd mentioned something else that I found interesting. Social media might have an impact on the fact that trust in media is declining. And you said that in some cases, it looks like some of the more vocal reporters, I'm just going to paraphrase, on Twitter are seen as a proxy for a publication. Oftentimes, that can be the most extreme reporters.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 12:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can you unpack that a bit?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Sure. So...

• 12:34Speaker 02

  It is often the case, actually not at any of the places that I've been at, where very vocal reporters who generate a lot of attention have different brands from the publication, right? Where the publications brand is trying to be all the news that's fit to print, right? Take the New York Times, right? New York Times is very much trying to, it very much wants to be a respected, plays it down the middle, tells you the facts. A lot of the reporters can be out there on Twitter, certainly in the past before they changed their Twitter policies. And on Twitter, first of all, you can be incentivized to say things that are a little bit extreme because that's the way the algorithm works and that's what gets you attention and that's what gets you engagement and that's what gets you followers.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  And secondly, things are taken out of context. And so someone who wants to take, hurt the New York Times can pull a tweet out of context and say this is the position of the whole New York Times. And it's like the worst statement of one person who works for the New York Times. And it's really not such a bad statement, but it's been taken out of context. So you can see-

• 13:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sometimes they're bad.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Sometimes they're bad. In general, I feel like the brand damage done to the institutions by the tweets of the reporters is more than deserved. I will say though, the opposite is true, right? The Atlantic's brand, right? We have some of the absolute best tweeters in the world. You look at Ed Yang, you look at Derek Thompson, and you follow their tweet threads and they're wonderful. And you could not have a better reflection of the Atlantic brand, right? Force of ideas, spirit of generosity in following the Twitter threads of some of these writers. So there are wonderful brand enhancements that come from having your writers on Twitter. So it's a, it's, you know, push and pull.

• 14:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Dean Bakke, the editor in chief of the New York Times, did send a note out to their reporters being like, cool with the Twitter. That's not going to happen at the Atlantic.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Again, that wouldn't be my decision. That would be Jeff Goldberg's decision. I'm on, I'm on the, I'm on the business side.

• 14:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  But from where you sit, you don't really see the necessity.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, our writers, well, you know, I don't know exactly Dean Baquet's motivations, but I think his, a couple of things. One, I think he was rolling back kind of the opposite directive, which was, hey, guys, go out there and engage, right? And a lot of the reporters were saying, I don't want to be out there. You know, people are attacking me, they're doxing me. Like, it's not fun to be on Twitter. So I think that he was partly responding, both not to the potential effect on the Times' brand, but also reporters who felt like they were being pushed to be on social media. And so at The Atlantic, where we haven't gone out and said, hey, go be on social media, we don't have to roll anything back.

• 15:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. I hadn't heard that second thought about how reporters felt the pressure there. What do you make about the argument that the news media is too woke? I mean, you look at the trust in the media, and it sort of tracks the approval rating of the progressive brand of democratic politics. So what do you think there?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  I think that it's really important for, you know, all these media publications are based in large urban areas. They are, you know, the people who go into media have a narrower range of politics than readers. But I also think that people who go into media try very hard to, you know, tell the stories in the fairest and best ways they can. So there's a lot of different pressures at play. Do I think that media is too woke? I mean, I think there are probably some publications where that's a real issue. I

• 16:11Speaker 02

  don't think, I mean, at The Atlantic, where I work now, actually, I'll answer it from a Wired, where I did oversee the editorial side. You know, Wired, the politics of the staff were very different from the politics of the readers, right? And the staff, I mean, we never asked everybody how they voted, but I would guess it was not 50% Trump, 50% Hillary Clinton, right, based on the Wired staff. But the readers of Wired include all of these old libertarians, right? Wired comes out of, you know, partly out of the counterculture. One of our founders is a hardcore, is a hardcore Trump supporter, right? Make America Great Again.

• 16:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Who's that?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Louis Rossetto. Follow his Twitter feeds. He was quite critical of the response on COVID, quite supportive of Trump. Right? And Wired comes from this, you know, place of wanting to dismantle existing systems and build new systems. And that can lead you to a lot of different directions. So my directive to the staff was, you know, we all have different politics. We all have different views in the world. Our objective is to serve our readers and to cover the tech industry in the fairest and best possible way we can. So one of the things that I would often talk about is if you're writing a story and it has a political component, if it deals with Trump, right? It deals with Trump's FCC regulations. It deals with the Mueller report. Do your best to put yourself in the mind of someone who completely disagrees with all of your prior policies.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Right? And if you have a friend like that, read your story aloud to them, right? Or run your assumptions by them, right? And just make sure that you're not letting your assumptions and the general assumptions of the politics of a, you know, reasonably liberal staff get in the way of presenting the facts in the clearest, fairest lights to our broad base of readers.

• 17:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  How do you square that then with the fact that, you know, from my perspective, the discourse or the relationship between the tech press and the tech industry is, seems to be at an all time low right now?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and this is, this is the hardest part of my job at Wired where,

• 18:09Speaker 02

  one of, one of the hardest parts of my job at Wired. Wired initially was a publication about optimism, right? And it basically viewed all of the tech companies as positive forces in the world because they're remaking society. Right? And we were cheerleaders and champions. And we would write about fraud and, you know, we'd write about bad things that happened, but Wired was, was a champion. And by the time I became editor in chief, I worked there from 2005 to 2010. All right. And I went to the New Yorker for six years and I came back to be the editor in chief in 2017. And by 2017, this is after the Trump election and it's clear that the perception of tech has profoundly changed. And the sense that tech is an unadulterated force for good in the world no longer existed, as you may be aware. Secondly, these people who even in my first round of Wired,

• 18:54Speaker 02

  We're outsiders, we're now kings, right? They're the richest people in the world, they're the most powerful people in the world, and they need to be challenged. And so I came in and I said, look, our job at Wired is to maintain that sense of optimism, to be excited about tech, to look at the wonderful things that tech can do for the world, but also to write about it clearly and fairly and to do the deepest investigative reports that we can about what tech is doing wrong. I wrote a lot about Facebook, wrote a lot about some of the troubles at Facebook, always tried to, always tried to make sure it was as accurate as possible, as fair as possible. And over the time that I was the editor chief of Wired, the

• 19:33Speaker 02

  the reporting on Silicon Valley changed dramatically, and then there was a backlash from Silicon Valley, which started to dismiss reporters, stopped being friendly to reporters, started to attack reporters on Twitter, started to denounce the incentives of reporters. It became a really hostile relationship and my, what I wanted for Wired was for Wired to be a place both where reporters critical of Silicon Valley felt like they could come and do their best work, do their best reporting, and where the people who worked in Silicon Valley wanted to read it because there were still smart insights, and they wanted to talk to us because they trusted us that we would tell their stories right. And that wasn't a balance that, if you were to get, Mark Andreessen, we're sitting right here, he'd say that I did not succeed at that.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Other people would say that we did succeed at that, but that was certainly the ambition.

• 20:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I feel like this conversation needs to tuck a little bit about this whole free speech debate going on right now. Because there is a view that reporters out there are hall monitors, basically spending their time finding content that they don't like and asking for it to be taken down. And it's really come into focus with the Elon Musk situation with Twitter, where Elon says that he doesn't want content moderation anymore, and there's a lot of negative stories about Musk's potential to take over Twitter. Where do you stand on that? And do you think that is the media's role to play to look at content practices inside these social media companies?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And sort of do the work. I mean, there's this famous tweet, type of tweet that went around back in the day, maybe around the 2016 election, where reporters would be like, "I'm doing Facebook's work for free. Look, I'm finding all this stuff that they refuse to take down."

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that didn't go challenged, and now it is starting to go challenged.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think that, I actually don't think that that's a...

• 21:23Speaker 02

  I think that since 2016, the tech companies have massively invested in their content moderation, right? The amount of content, the amount of compute resources and the amount of humans, right? There are probably more people at Facebook looking for offensive content than there are journalists in America. I mean, I don't know the exact statistics, but it's like, that's not quite true, but there are about 30,000 people at Facebook who do content moderation?

• 21:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  They almost, yeah, probably almost trump it, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Right? So, okay, let's put it this way. There are 30 times as many people doing content moderation at Facebook as there are reporters at the New York Times, right? Newsroom's about 1,000 at the Times, 30,000 people, something like that. So, Facebook has a lot of people doing that. Is it the role of journalists to find that kind of content? A, it's really the role of social media companies. B, a lot of times when you do find that content, all you end up doing is drawing much more attention to it. On the other hand, sometimes, there's a really interesting story that explains a flaw in a social media company's algorithm, or that shows a weakness, or that shows a vector of vulnerability, and if a reporter finds it, that's a great story. And they should bring it to the public and push it out there. So, it's a little bit of a mixed response,

• 22:26Speaker 02

  but I do think there are very worthy examples of reporters finding content that should have been taken down. I don't think that it's... If I were an assigning editor to tech publication right now, I would not say, "Hey, you know, go look for the worst tweets that have not been taken down and make that your beat." But, in some situations, there's interesting stuff.

• 22:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think if Elon Musk does close his deal with Twitter, that it's going to make Facebook look responsible by comparison?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  [laughing]

• 22:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or does it maybe make Facebook move more towards the less moderation? It's so interesting, because Zuckerberg has always been out there talking about how he stands for speech and stuff like that, but they do have aggressive content moderation. Trump's not on the platform right now. However, compared to the brand that Musk wants, it's very different.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would have think, I think that, right, it's true. If Musk does end up closing this transaction, which is a big if, obviously...

• 23:19Speaker 02

  It could open up space for Facebook to be a little looser on its content moderation. Absolutely. It could also create a brand halo for Facebook if Twitter becomes a place where, you know, the amount of toxic material becomes overwhelming to a greater number of people. Absolutely. So, that's a great, that's a great question. My guess is that in the short run, it provides, maybe moves some more people over to Facebook who are on Twitter. It's gonna put a whole bunch of people on Twitter who weren't on Twitter, right? Because they don't, they don't trust the content moderation of Twitter. Who knows exactly how it'll play out, but my guess is that there's a slight benefit to Facebook and that in the long run, it probably does give Facebook a little more freedom to do less invasive moderation.

• 23:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I asked Nick Clegg about that a couple of days ago, and he seemed pretty happy about the fact that Elon was making this move. It makes his job easier.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think he's probably happy about it because his, I mean, right now, it's not, it's not great for Twitter, right? The Twitter stock's not doing well. Twitter employees aren't particularly happy, right? It's not, you know, Twitter's a competitor to Facebook's, they're in Facebook's newsfeed. Now, if Elon does acquire it and does come in and fix it, and you should not underestimate that guy.

• 24:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  And Twitter becomes this, you know, he somehow, Occam's razor, somehow, like the same way he figured out how to make SpaceX work, same way he figured out how to make Tesla work when everybody said it couldn't work, somehow figures out, like, the exact perfect solution to content moderation, you know, everybody at Facebook says it's too hard, it's too complicated, and let's say he does figure it out. I don't know if Nick Clegg will be so happy about it then.

• 24:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it's a great insight because we had Alex Redder on the show a couple of weeks ago, who's the former CTO of Twitter, and he said the one way Elon could expand the appeal of Twitter from where it is now, which is very niche, 217 million daily active users compared to the three and a half billion people that use Facebook, although I think that's monthly. But he said one way that they could actually expand and, and get, you know, potentially get to that one billion users is to go into lifestyle content as opposed to where they are now, which is a very intentional move towards news and politics. They get into lifestyle, that means they're coming for the Facebook newsfeed and they're coming for Instagram.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't, I suspect that's not what Elon wants to do, right? But, you know, maybe he's gonna end up hiring a great CPO or a CEO who sees some, you know, market path for them and off they go. I mean, the thing about Twitter that is so appealing to Elon is because they focused on politics and technology, they massively over-index in influence versus their market cap, right? It's where everybody who sets the news agenda in the United States gets their news in the morning. So, that's why he's, that I assume is one reason he's highly interested in it.

• 25:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have a couple more questions about trust in media, then we'll go to the break and then move to business models and fitness. So, I actually read this really interesting story in the New York Times about Lara Logan, the former 60 Minutes correspondent, who's taken a pretty hard right turn. There was a really interesting quote in there from Peter Klein, who was a former CBS producer. And he said, "There's a system in place in newsrooms that offers checks and balances. Most of us need that system, but she really needed that system. We knew that from the beginning. Now she's just unfiltered." I kind of found that quote absurd, that he's basically saying that newsrooms moderate reporters.

• 26:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I do view, I do think there might be an issue that without being able to be, to go to the extreme sometimes, you know, reporters can get in line with the establishment and end up moderating. And when there's actually something bad, say, "Maybe it's not so bad." Or there's actually something impacting the American people and, or people worldwide in a way that's, that's pretty detrimental. You know, not throw those punches because they're moderated by the tendency of newsrooms to be conservative. What do you make of that?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  I think that I, there's one way that I think newsrooms should moderate and one way I think they should not. So, I think that a really good editor should be able to work with a writer. Didn't read the Lara Logan Stogge, but work with any writer and bring out the best in them. And maybe that means tempering their emotions, right? Because maybe the emotions and the politics. Take them away from the best kind of story. And sometimes it can mean accentuating them, like trying to find the story that makes them most passionate. And I, as at my time as an editor at The New Yorker and then at Wired, I would certainly, there's certainly some writers where I would look at them and I would say, okay, wait, now the five ideas they've just given me, I think the most appropriate one is the most modern one, and for some it's the most extreme one, and others it would be, you know what, let's take that one at the end of the spectrum, let's make it even more extreme.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Because I knew that they were at their best when impassioned, or the issue demanded, right, that kind of intensity. However, the part, the thing that the newsroom should always do, is it should always make your story more accurate, right? You should, the editing process, the fact checking process, you should be able to remove errors, false assertions. A newsroom should absolutely be able to find that too. So to the extent that taking a story and bringing it to the truth, and making sure that multiple opinions are heard, and making sure that someone who's being criticized has a voice in the story, that is absolutely the role of a newsroom. But I don't think that you want to, you know, heat up all the cold water and cool all the hot water.

• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, along that line, last fall, under your leadership, The Atlantic introduced a bunch of newsletters.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  From individual journalists. I don't want to talk my book the whole time, but there has been this movement towards individuals, towards newsletters. I'm curious how that experiment is going for you, whether you plan to expand it, keep it the same size, and whether you think having this relationship built with readers and individual writers versus with readers and a publication, might be a way to build more trust, or what you make of the entire thing, movement in general.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a big topic, it's a great issue. So, in general, the, I mean, first off, the experiment's been a huge success, I love it, we're going to keep doing it. The idea behind it was, clearly, there's this shift in power from brands to the nodes, right? You see this in every industry, you certainly see it in media, right? Where the brands are less trusted, less known, the individuals are more trusted, more known, it's because of, it's because of, it reflects, it's expanded by social media, right? And it led to the newsletter revolution. And so, as CEO of The Atlantic, I was watching this, and you're watching our reporters get offers from newsletter companies, you're watching peer publications, thinking about newsletter programs, and so we said, well, okay.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  You know, there are great advantages to being part of The Atlantic. There's reputation, and there's editing, and there's resources. This is a magazine founded in 1857, an abolitionist magazine. Like, it is an amazing place to work. But they're also huge advantages to being out on your own. Can we create a program that gets the best of both worlds? That incentivizes the writers, lets them have their own voice, lets them have a direct relationship with readers, but also lets them be part of The Atlantic? Can we build a business model that works for them and works for us? And so, we launched this program, subscriber-only newsletters, and we have nine writers. They're all fabulous. And they have direct relationship with their readers, but they are edited. They are incentivized to bring in people, and you can only read their newsletters if you're a subscriber to The Atlantic. So, the business case is that we all win, right?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Charlie Wurzel, who's almost certainly been talking to you about a million things for many years. Former colleague of mine. Yeah, of course. Former colleague of yours, too. You know, Charlie writes for The Atlantic. If you want to read his newsletter, which is absolutely fabulous, you gotta subscribe to The Atlantic. And so Charlie has incentives to get people to subscribe, and once they subscribe, they can read all of our stuff, they can read the other eight newsletters. We have an incentive to promote Charlie, which is why I'm promoting him right now. Subscribe to his newsletter, please. And in theory, it should work for everybody. So far, you know, we're what, six months in? It's been great. The numbers are really good. The readership numbers are good. I think the newsletter writers are happy. Will we expand it? That's mainly an editorial decision, but economically, you can certainly make the case for expansion. Okay.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  What does success look like? I guess, is it readership, money? Yeah, it's a couple of things. It's, um, it is readership, it is money, right? And those two things are connected, but it's also, are the newsletters good, right? Do they reflect The Atlantic, right? If you had a newsletter that was bringing in lots of subscribers, but didn't feel like it was part of The Atlantic, because it wasn't written to Atlantic standards, or it was, I don't know, filled with falsities, right? There are a lot of things, but one of the big questions is, are the stories good? And from an editorial perspective, when you read them, do you think they're good? And do they feel like they're part of The Atlantic? And by that metric, yeah, they absolutely are succeeding. They get edited. They do get edited. Not the same way that, you, they're different.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Kinds of editing for different kinds of stories. There's a whole spectrum from a print story to a long web feature, to a short web feature, to a newsletter. You know, when I was at The New Yorker, we used to do, you would have to do edit tests, different kinds of edit tests, right? Where sometimes we would say, okay, here, you know, here's a 3,000 word piece. You could have, you know, the weekend edited, right? When I, when I applied to be a senior editor at The New Yorker, I had to edit something like 18,000 words of copy, right? When I was the web editor at The New Yorker, we would sometimes say, okay, you have 10 minutes to edit a story, right? And we'd give somebody a draft and say, okay, 10 minutes, give me the red line back, right? Because that's sometimes I have to work, right? You are editing the story, but because it's a breaking news situation, you really only get 10 minutes or five minutes to edit it. So you're looking for errors, you're looking for all the things you look for in a very

• 32:36Speaker 02

  short period of time. So different kinds of stories get different kinds of editing and newsletters are, again, I'm not on the newsroom, I don't exactly know how they're edited, that's not my job. But different stories in journalism get edited in different ways.

• 32:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Nick Thompson is with us. He's the CEO of The Atlantic. We're coming to you here from Davos. We'll be back on the other side of this break to talk about the state of the economy and Nick's running routine. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate.

• 33:29Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 34:01Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 34:46Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 35:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, former editor in chief of VAR. Do you prefer Nick or Nicholas? Nick. Nick, okay. Usually when I'm being introduced, it's Nicholas, but it's Nick. Okay, okay, sounds good. It's nice actually being here in person. I've been doing the podcast for two years, and it's been entirely through ZenCaster. And it's really different and nice to actually be in a studio and sitting next to someone. So that's cool. All right, let's talk about the business, the state of the business world right now. Put on your CEO hat. We've talked about editorial. Now we can talk about business stuff. Sit up a little straighter here now that I'm not in my media role. It's all about synergies now. Button, button my, button my suit. Put on my tie. We're in the middle of a bit of a crisis. We have inflation that's sky-high.

• 35:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have the Fed raising rates and asset prices tanking. Every time I read the year-to-date price of a stock or cryptocurrency, it's like, it seems like it's down at least 15%, 20%. I mean, then you get into the Shopify area, which is 70%, or there are some even that are down 80% or 90%.

• 36:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  We could go on, supply chain's broken, we have war in Russia and Ukraine, which is again like causing shortages. What's your, and you've been hobnobbing with some of the most important business people in the world over the past couple of days. What's your take of what's happening and where we're headed?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think we're headed into not a great place. I mean, I will, I will say that the world is always in crisis. There always are a number of terrible things happening. A lot of the decline you're seeing in crypto prices or technology stocks is due to overinflation during the bubble or during hype cycles. So yes, things are not headed in the right direction, but looking at certain indicators can lead you to think they're actually worse than they are. So from my perspective, what I'm trying to forecast is what will, you know, reader demand will be relatively constant. The number of people who want to subscribe to The Atlantic, I don't think will be too affected if there's a recession. Yes, it'll probably be harder to raise prices on subscriptions. Maybe some people will churn, they'll have

• 37:12Speaker 02

  a little bit of subscription fatigue, but The Atlantic also, you know, excels in times of crisis. People come to trusted news sources during times of crisis. My guess is that our consumer business, our subscription business remains, you know, reasonably countercyclical, you know, reasonably protected even during a down cycle. What's really at risk, of course, is the advertising business, right? Because companies are going to, you know, either in a recession or in preparation for a recession, cut their advertising budgets and then they're going to cut it from thought leader publications, right? They're gonna, you know, reduce advertising in publications that they're using for brand enhancements more than ones they're using for direct sales. So I need to forecast how a recession will affect our advertising

• 37:56Speaker 02

  business. So I am, of course, looking at that carefully. What do I think's gonna happen? I mean, I, you know, I don't know enough or have particular insights to go outside of the, I think the standard consensus view that we're probably headed into some kind of a recession. It will probably be reasonably short and we'll see what happens.

• 38:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  What did you make from the body language of some of the executives you've been speaking with?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  It's funny, you know, the, the CEOs are... A little bit worried, right? A little bit worried, but you know, their numbers, their sales, they're, they're, they're pretty good. But the, you know, it's the bankers and the economists who are, you know, much more nervous and the macroeconomists are extremely worried. The thing that people are at Davos that I was most interested in the worry is actual war with China. Really? Where not just decoupling, right? Everybody's been talking about decoupling. Obviously, it's a, a major problem, both economically, socially, politically, geopolitically. But the number of people who feel like we're headed towards some kind of a conflict is much higher than I thought, and I was, I've been quite surprised by that.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  And it's extremely interesting that we're here at Davos, the World Economic Forum, and how many people from China are here? You know, not very many at all. But why the war with China? I mean, there's no, been no rumblings about that. Maybe I've missed them. I mean, war, I mean, okay, war. It's not like we're actually going to be launching, you know, no one actually thinks that, you know, China is going to be launching ICBMs at the United States. But that the idea that the model was being, someone was making this argument to me last night at, at dinner, a prominent economic figure saying that the way that they predict that the way the US treats the Chinese economy in a couple of years will be like the way the West treats the Russian economy right now, that it's complete isolation and block.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  And I don't think that's going to happen, and I think it will be a tragedy if it does. I'm in favor of, you know, Chinese engagement in many, many ways. I've been arguing for a long time, and the advantage of trying to get the tech sector in the Chinese, in the United States and China to cooperate much more than they do. I've been a, you know, as much as possible, given the obvious problems, have been in favor of cooperation with China. So it's certainly not what I want, it's not what I expect, but I've been surprised to hear that. You had an interesting moment with Ruth Porat, CFO of Google? Well, you know, yesterday I interviewed four tech CEOs and Ruth, CFO of Google, and we were talking about data sharing, right? And one of the, Antonio Neri, the CEO of HPE, was saying that data is an asset that you should put on your balance sheets, and everybody was agreeing you need to. That's interesting. It's super interesting, isn't it?

• 40:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  I couldn't.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And.

• 40:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, Silicon Valley companies definitely get away with a lot of creative accounting, but putting like your data asset on your balance sheet.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I mean, I can certainly see the argument that it is an asset like real estate, right? The data is absolutely an asset. It can be valued in some way. Maybe it should be on the balance sheet. On the other hand, yes, you can imagine.

• 40:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's how I know there's a recession coming is because people come up with these crazy ideas to make the books look good.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I'm not, if Antonio were here, I'm not sure he would say it was a crazy idea to make the books look good, but let's press ahead to the China question.

• 41:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, let's get to China.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  We were talking about data sharing and everybody on the panel was saying, yes, you know, more data sharing, insights. And I said, okay, well, data sharing is wonderful, but China's not here, right? There's no Chinese tech CEO on this panel. And it's clearly a question that, you know, you could see, you could feel the temperature dropping in the room a little bit, because it is an incredibly fraught question. So, you know, it's a particularly fraught question for Google, which, you know, withdrew from China for legitimate reasons. I can't remember the exact story, but I believe it was the Chinese government trying to get access to an activist Gmail account. Google said, we can't do business here. Don't be evil. To thought experiments, conversations among Google's executive team about going back into China several years ago, which we covered at Wired. And I think Google is

• 41:45Speaker 02

  well aware. My, you know, my guess of what, my guess is that there are a lot of people at Google who feel not only that it would be positive for Google's business, but genuinely positive for the world, right? For Google to be able to do business in China, but that they can't do that. And I brought that up at the panel and it was, it was a, you know, you've, you've seen, you've watched the video of the panel. You know, we, we moved on to other topics.

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's interesting.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  It was a really fun conversation.

• 42:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I enjoyed it. There is interesting also with Facebook, right? You know, we've gone very quickly from Mark Zuckerberg offering, reportedly offering Xi the ability to name his child.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Right. And learning Mandarin, right?

• 42:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. To now using TikTok and as a punching bag in order to help try to ward off regulation of Facebook. But.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  The idea of Facebook ever going into China is now way off the table.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Now way off the table. It's been a huge transition. And I think, you know, I. I think it would have been better. I mean, it's interesting that Russia banned Facebook during the war. Right? That's actually a good reflection on Facebook. And I've obviously got a massive critique of Facebook in many ways. But the fact that authoritarian governments do not want Facebook in their countries is a reason why you might want Facebook in authoritarian countries.

• 42:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  There is a concept called de-globalization that's been betted about now with all the Western companies pulling out of Russia.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it does seem, and this is going along with your China point, it does seem to be quite likely that we end up in a world with, instead of one global economy, maybe two or three splintered economies. What do you think the implications are of that?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  I think it's, I mean, I'm in favor of global integration of economies. I think it would be absolutely better for the world for there to be more integration. Now, obviously, in a situation like Russia where you want to be able to affect the outcome of a war without actually going to war with them, you know, withdrawing and putting economic sanctions on them is a much better way to change the trajectory of the war, I think, than bombing them. So I'm in favor of economic sanctions and splintering there. What I really hope doesn't happen is that we end up in a situation where we're in something that was like the Cold War and where every country has to decide whether they want a Western technology stack or a Chinese technology stack, right? Are we going to use Huawei routers? Or are we going to use Ericsson routers, right? Are we going to use Amazon, right?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Are we going to use WeChat, right? You don't want the world to be splintered that way. You want there to be every country to choose the best routers based on router technology. So I'm worried we're headed rapidly in that direction, though.

• 44:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it does seem like we are. We've long been moving that direction. There was this very interesting situation with Lithuania, where Lithuania's had some tension with the Chinese. And their scientists published, their computer scientists or researchers from the Defense Ministry of all places, published this report that There was a Xiaomi phone with a list of blocked terms that could be turned on and off at will. And I spoke with the deputy defense minister there. It was really interesting to hear how this back and forth was

• 44:51Speaker 02

  What were the terms?

• 44:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Going on. Well, a lot of it was like Tiananmen was initially. They were all political. And then, when the report came out, the list swelled to like, you know, pornography terms. For them to be like, no, this is just a typical advertiser blacklist. And then disappeared.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Interesting. That's fascinating.

• 45:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Not surprising.

• 45:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think Russia is is out for good?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  No, I don't think it's out for good, but it's out for a long, long time. It's going to take a, I mean, we have no idea where, we don't know when this conflict will end. I mean, one of the most interesting dynamics, and you can see it here in Ukraine and all the conversations, is that the West is now so supportive of Ukraine, and Ukraine is doing so well, that now the question is, you know, at what point, when does the war end, right? And, you know, will it end when Ukraine has restored full territory to where it was in February of 2022, to where it was in 2014? Maybe a little more, I mean, we don't know what the final outcome is. Like, the dynamics have changed so much. And, you know, standing ovation for Zelensky in the in the Congress Hall yesterday, or the day

• 45:53Speaker 02

  before yesterday. We don't know what the final outcome will be. That's sort of the point A. Point B is, I do think that Russia under Putin is out forever, right? There's no way that when he's leading Russia, but you can imagine a different Russia with different leadership that wants to reintegrate with the world. Now, is that going to happen? The history of Russia does not suggest that that will happen immediately. But you can imagine that. You can imagine them coming back, but it will be a while.

• 46:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Could be a couple of decades.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Could be a couple of decades. Could be less than a couple of decades. I mean, how long did we go from, you know, the Nazi regime in Germany to German integration in the in the West? You know, not very long at all.

• 46:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it took Hitler dying.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Right. Well, it took Hitler dying. It's going to take Putin dying, or Putin being, I mean, it will take, Putin will have to no longer be here, Putin will have to no longer physically be in Russia for for any of that to begin.

• 46:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's end with this. I always selfishly like to ask people about how they stay mentally and physically fit in demanding jobs. So, like I said, I see you running in Brooklyn a lot. It's always like, "Oh, I'm going out on this street. I'll probably see Nick run by." How do you, you have a very demanding, very busy job. Not only, you know, you mean you're doing the work, you're also out at conferences, you're speaking, you're at events. How do you, how do you maintain your, your physical and mental fitness?

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Well, physical, physical and mental fitness are very closely tied. I do run all the time.

• 47:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  How do you carve time out for that?

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Well, some of it is my commute, you know, run to the office, run back. For like 15 years, I've run to and from the office, right? And it's a wonderful break in the day.

• 47:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  You have a shower at the office?

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, shower, there's a shower on the floor at the office. I mean, a different, I've had different, sometimes you shower at the gym next door. I've always figured out a way to do it.

• 47:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did that once. I used to, I would go in from Brooklyn into ad age offices and Grand Central, and I had a gym nearby. And I would like city bike in. And I used to be like, "Okay, I could just walk into the office." And then after a week of it, it was like quite clear that a shower was in order.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Oh, you work at Conde Nast. You ride the elevator at the end of winter. You're like, you take a shower before you get into the gym.

• 48:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's right.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  So, part of it has been working in my commute, and part of it is just saying, like, it's a very important part of the day for me physically. It's a part of either spiritual elements to why I run, the meditative elements to why I run. So, I just, you know, figure out a way to make time. Sometimes you turn it into efficiency, right? You listen to podcasts while you run, you listen to audiowoks, right? So, there are ways you can get, or I listen to recordings of interviews I've done if I'm trying to like find the most interesting moments. So, you can use the time efficiently. I also stay fit. I play a lot of soccer with my kids. We do a lot of like pickup games. We'll join games in the park. So, I do a lot of soccer with my kids and a bunch of running and try to stay healthy.

• 48:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you like block it out on the calendar? Because like, sometimes when I'm like ready to run, there'll be like nine things that will pile up immediately. I'm sure that you have 19,000 things that pile up immediately.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Well, yes, but... You know, a lot of times I'm in a particular cycle, preparing for a particular race or the particular goal. And so, you know, you then kind of push some of the other stuff out. I mean, there are clearly times where I go running and there's probably something at work I should have done at that moment. But at this point in my life, I'm, you know, I do it every day. So there's, I'm definitely, I'm definitely going out there.

• 49:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  An hour, two hours?

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Depends. It depends. Yesterday, okay, so yesterday.

• 49:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to hear the full schedule.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  The full, I mean, it depends. It depends on what training cycle. I mean, there's usually a 12 to 14 weeks I go before every marathon or every, you know, whatever race I'm preparing for.

• 49:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  You do ultras too.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  And yep, I'm preparing. My next one is gonna, I hope my next race will be a 50 miler in August that I'm preparing for.

• 49:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Five zero.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Five zero, yeah. I have never raced that distance, but we'll see. So for example, here in Davos, right, it's a, it's a, it's a, I showed up and I said, okay, it's first day, it's altitude, I'm just gonna go run 30 minutes, I got a lot of stuff to do. I went out and there's this beautiful mountain, Jacob Shoren, and I saw a trail and I was like, God, I'm gonna run up that. And I ran up and I ran up a mountain and ended up taking, I don't know, hour, four or five minutes. And I was a little bit late to the opening reception of Davos. But that's the trade off, right? Probably would have been better for me professionally, be right at the opening reception, meet as many people as possible. But hey, it was a beautiful mountain. Next day, you know, I was busy, I was preparing for panels, I just went out and ran on the river. Next day, I barely slept because it's stressful, we're at altitude, there's jet lag. So I ran like two miles in the morning,

• 50:16Speaker 02

  three miles in the afternoon. Today, I don't know, it's 7:00 AM breakfast after a late dinner, right, then go running this morning. But I'm blocked out time this afternoon. And I said, I'm not gonna schedule any meetings with, you know, at a window this afternoon, I'm gonna go running. And then tomorrow, I'm gonna go run a Parson with a couple of serious mountain running friends. So we're gonna go do a, do a real run.

• 50:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, sweet. And then mental fitness. I mean, there's a lot of information coming at us in the news business. Obviously, you're on the business side now. Do you like, do you block out time for reading? Do you, when you see, here's a question, when you, so I want you to answer that one. And then also, when you see an article come across, like emailed or texted to you or come across your Twitter feed, do you read it immediately or do you wait?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So this is, this is actually something I learned, something I've had to work on in my new job. It's one of the, people often ask me what's different about being a senior editor in chief. When you're an editor in chief... You have to read everything, right? Because you're constantly evaluating job candidates. You're trying to figure out how you can find an angle on a picture story. So one of the best things about being a journalist and being an editor is that you're constantly getting smarter. Right? Or your mind is degrading at a slower speed, whatever it is. But you're constantly engaged with that practice of learning new things all the time, and it's awesome. You become CEO, and all the stuff coming at you is a little bit different, right? You're looking at business models, you have HR concerns, you're talking to the legal department, right? You're trying to forecast recession. There's stuff where you're learning, but you don't have the same time to read to encounter new ideas. And it was a little bit into my new job where I thought, wait a second.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  I have some conversation, I think it was a conversation about artificial intelligence, right? And where AI is, and I was like, oh, my God. I haven't read a serious story about AI in a couple of months. Like, what the heck, right? I love this topic. And it was at that moment where I said, OK, I need to figure out ways to structure my day and my life so that I, you know, I'm not going to have the same level of engagement with the news that I used to have. And so I did a couple of things. One, I said, you know what? I did this video series, Most Interesting Thing in Tech on LinkedIn every day. And it was on Wired, I would do it every single day. And I'd talk for two minutes about what I thought was the most interesting thing in tech that day. And I did it because it's cool, builds a LinkedIn following, it's fun. But also because it's a forcing mechanism, right? You have to read the tech news and think about it. Because if you don't read the tech news, or you say something stupid, like people will say you're stupid. And so it's a really good forcing mechanism.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  And I said, OK, I'm going to start making sure I do this at a regular cadence. Not every day, but doing it a bunch. And I started also writing a newsletter just with here are the best things I read, which is, you know, one, it's a cool way to have a newsletter. A lot of people engage, you get lots of nice notes. But it's also another forcing mechanism to make sure that you're fully engaging with, you know, long form across the spectrum, across publications. And so take those two things as forcing mechanisms. And then I also started blocking out time in my calendar where this, you know, certain, there's a certain part of the day that is devoted to reading. And I start and I make sure I read as much of the Atlantic that's been published as I can, you know? And you look at my Twitter feed, you'll see there's a huge percentage of Atlantic stories out, both because I'm supporting the home theme, but because they're great stories. So I do block out time on my calendar for that 100%. What's your relationship with social media?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  I am deeply engaged in it. I spent a lot of time on it. I probably spend more time on LinkedIn than other platforms. In part, it's, I know that is not the typical answer.

• 53:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's happier. I mean, okay, full disclosure, I'm part of their podcast network, but I also think that they're a much better and healthier social network.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  It's a healthier social network. It's not, you know, you can post something on LinkedIn. You post something on Twitter, you post something mildly controversial, and then there's like this, you want to check your phone because you're terrified to like, oh my God, maybe somebody will misinterpret this, or maybe like, you know, because of this, something will go wrong for the publication. And so you, you know, I have this kind of aversion, right, on Twitter, whereas you post something on LinkedIn, you know, maybe you said something wrong, or maybe people disagree with it, but there'll be like a healthy conversation in the comments. So I post a fair amount on LinkedIn. I post a fair amount on Facebook. I have a public Facebook page where I post work stuff, interesting stuff. I have a personal page where I post stories about my kids. Obviously, I'm on Twitter following the news, but I'm much less engaged with Twitter right now than I used to be. You know, I'm posting pictures of my running career on Instagram.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  But, but the other element of it is, of course, trying to study and understand the platforms to see where the Atlantic needs to be, right, and to see, oh, and I put, you know, I'm on Reddit all the time, too, if you count that as social media or not, but I love Reddit. And part of it is to, part of it is about the brand of Nick, part of it is finding readers for the Atlantic, and part of it is trying to understand how the Atlantic's business evolves.

• 54:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I'm having the same thing with Twitter where it used to be the most important social network for me. Now I just find myself like agitated and I'm really trying hard to cut back. I just got this new app. Let's see, it's called Drafts. One of my followers told me about it, where you can just tweet from the app without logging into Twitter. And it's like, you don't worry about all the people yelling back. So Chris Mims, who's a former guest here, has been talking about like, what if you just logged into Twitter once or twice a day and just posted through the right only apps? And I think that's much, I'm trying it, and I think it's a much healthier path. I'm just trying to be consistent on it.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I try. I've done a bunch of things on Twitter to try to, I changed my location to Guatemala, so that all the like trending topics appear in Spanish. So you don't actually, A, you get a little better at Spanish, right, and B, you're not sucked into the same garbage, right? I mute, I muted Trump during the Trump administration, because otherwise it would be 100% Twitter. You know, might eventually have to mute Musk, right? It's all like, all Twitter's now about Musk. But anyway, I tried different mechanisms. There's a timer that turns it off after like 10 minutes. I delete it from my phone. You know, it is, it's a wonderful platform, but it like, it's not, it's not great for your mental health, it's not great for your productivity. You gotta spend some time on it, but you gotta keep it pretty small.

• 55:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Before we leave, do you want to shout out where people can follow you?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. You know, I'm NX Thompson on basically every platform. I'm on, you know, you can just look for Nicholas Thompson. There are a bunch of Nicholas Thompson, the one who's a really buff ultimate fighter is not me. The one in a suit is me. And so I'm on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, but you should really, what you should do is you should subscribe to The Atlantic.

• 56:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nick Thompson, thank you so much for joining.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Thanks, Alex. It was really fun to talk with you.

• 56:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great speaking with you. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll be back, actually, this Wednesday in our regularly scheduled slot with a conversation with Eric Bryjovson, the Stanford professor and author of Second Machine Age. I want to thank you for tuning in to our series of conversations from Davos. And a special shout out to Simon Hipkins from Key Pictures. Did I get that right, Simon?

• 56:34Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 56:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. All right. Well, that'll do it for us today, and we will see you in a couple of days. Take care.

• 56:47Speaker 04

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