#311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED

Nick Thompson (@nxthompson https://twitter.com/nxthompson) is the editor-in-chief of WIRED https://www.wired.com. Under his leadership, Wired has launched a successful paywall, a Snapchat channel, and an AMP Stories https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/wired/ edition; it has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards http://www.magazine.org/asme/national-magazine-awards in design and feature writing. Nick is a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning https://www.cbsnews.com/cbs-this-morning/. He is also co-founder of The Atavist https://magazine.atavist.com, a National Magazine Award-winning digital publication. Prior to joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com https://www.newyorker.com from 2012 to 2017. Before The New Yorker, Nick was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story https://www.wired.com/2007/04/feat-cia/ that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00BHMEALA/offsitoftimfe-20. In 2009, his book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805081429/offsitoftimfe-20 was published to critical acclaim. In February 2018, Thompson co-wrote WIRED's cover story Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook -- and the World https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/, an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees. In this conversation, we cover a wide range of topics, questions, and skills, including: What makes a good pitch? How does a good features writer (or editor) "map" a story? How does writing get optioned for feature film, and what are important deal points? How can publishers (and website or blog owners) hire and pay good long-form writers? And much more... Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn https://LinkedIn.com/Tim and its job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you've ever hired anyone (or attempted to), you know finding the right people can be difficult. If you don't have a direct referral from someone you trust, you're left to use job boards that don't offer any real-world networking approach. LinkedIn https://LinkedIn.com/Tim, as the world's largest professional network -- used by more than 70 percent of the US workforce -- has a built-in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them, their connections, and their former employers and colleagues in a way that closely mimics real-life communication. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Nicholas Thompson on Twitter at NX Thompson. He is the editor in chief of Wired. Under his leadership, Wired has launched a successful paywall, a Snapchat channel, and an AMP Stories edition, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm not sure if it's AMP or AMP. We'll get back to that. He has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards in Design and Feature Writing. Thompson is a contributor for CBS News and regularly appears on CBS This Morning. He is also a co-founder of The Atavist, which I've had contact with going way back in the day, a national magazine award-winning digital publication. Prior to joining Wired, Thompson served as editor of NewYorker.com from 2012 to 2017.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Before The New Yorker, Thompson was a senior editor at Wired, where he assigned and edited the feature story "The Great Escape," which was the basis for the Oscar-winning film "Argo." In 2009, his book "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War" was published to critical acclaim. In Feb 2018, Thompson co-wrote Wired's cover story "Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook and the World," an 11,000-word investigation based on reporting with more than 50 current and former Facebook employees.

• 2:42Tim Ferriss?

  Nick, welcome to the show.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Thanks, Tim. That was a nice intro. Thanks for having me here.

• 2:47Tim Ferriss?

  My pleasure. And I appreciate you correcting, or at least informing, my pronunciation of the subtitle of your book.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, Nitze is not an easy name to pronounce. I was, uh, my favorite story about it is I was giving a talk about my book in Wisconsin, and like 10 minutes in, this guy runs out. And so, Nitze, one of the characters in my book is my grandfather, Paul Nitze. This guy runs out. And at the end, I asked the host, I said, "Why did that guy leave?" He looks at me and he said, "He thought he was gonna hear from Nietzsche's grandson."

• 3:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, spelling.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  In Wisconsin, it was hilarious, anyway.

• 3:29Tim Ferriss?

  So, there are many different questions that I want to ask, and I have many, many in front of me that I will ask, but I thought I would start with something that I chanced upon when doing homework for this, which I'll lead into with just reading the line, and it is, "He is also an instrumental guitarist who used to supplement his journalism by playing on subway platforms." Is that true, that you used to play music to supplement your writing income, presumably? I guess, how to read that?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  I think "supplement" is the wrong word, because I actually made more money. Um, yeah, I used to play, when I was a young journalist, so let's say ages 21 to 24, I played, um, fingerstyle guitar on the platforms in New York. And you could make a good amount of money, you know, I'd make $20 an hour. You meet people, it's really fun, you learn a lot about the city, it's good, sort of forced practice for multiple hours, you learn a lot about the trains. I had a great time doing that.

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  Did you pick up any best practices for busking? I mean, there are many people who play on the platforms, I'm sure they make different rates, so what are the, what were some of the best practices, or?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  I think one of the key things, which is kind of interesting is to figure out the style of music you play and the demographics you're trying to hit. So if you're playing like super familiar stuff, if you're doing kind of Beatles covers, you can go in a hallway, right, where people will hear you for two seconds and walk by. Or you can be on a train platform and the trains come every two minutes, right? Because people will just hear yesterday and give you money. If you're doing what I was doing, which is like weird instrumental guitar music that people will only like if they get a couple of minutes uninterrupted, you've got to find a platform where, you know, there may not be a ton of traffic, but where the trains don't come very often. So for me, the place that turned out to be the best was the L train platform on Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. People know New York

• 5:22Speaker 00

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

• 6:04Speaker 00

  everybody's like, it's crazy, people are yelling, nobody can hear you, the kids are jumping, the kids kind of make fun of you. But you definitely want to be there during commute time and you definitely want to be there at like nine o'clock at night. And it's, the rules, at least back when I was doing it, a lot are, you know, once you get a spot, you keep that spot. So it's until you either get bored or have to pee that you have it. So you, you try to come right at like three thirty and then hold it until ten if you can.

• 6:32Tim Ferriss?

  And did you ever contemplate going the Beatles route, playing more popular music so that you could get money for a few seconds of attention? Or, or did you choose your, your musical selection for other reasons besides the twenty dollars an hour?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  You know, it would have been a... The thing is that I'm not good at Beatles covers, right? And like, I have like a limited... I'm a very strange musician. I have a limited skill set, right? I'm very good at writing my own, like, multi-tunnel acoustic instrumental guitar songs, and I'm really bad at reading music and playing other stuff. So I never had that choice. But it would be an interesting choice, right? Do you go for... If you have the capacity to do both, which do you choose? Do you choose the one that gets you more money and is a little less emotionally fulfilling? It's like a typical choice we have in a thousand moments in life. Fortunately, I didn't have to do that in this particular subway music stage of my career.

• 7:28Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose writing full-time instead of music full-time?

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Um...

• 7:37Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like both paths are presumably difficult, right? I mean, you are a creator in both paths. I don't know if that's a bad question, but it just comes to mind. It's like, you seem very talented.

• 7:53Speaker 00

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

• 8:37Speaker 00

  think that even if I devoted myself to it completely for ten years, I would ever reach that high point. So I could kind of see the max that I would get to, whereas in journalism, the max was quite a bit higher. So as the, you know, as the earnings began to equal out, as I began to earn more as a journalist, I started to gravitate more, more towards that. So it was a combination of having some success as a journalist, and then also thinking through, like, what would a life as a musician be like versus what would life as a journalist be like for somebody with my skills? And as I said earlier, my skills as a musician are limited, right? I could do well at one thing, but I didn't think I was gonna really make a life work that way.

• 9:14Tim Ferriss?

  Do you recall any particular moments, whether it could be at any point in your life, really, where you thought to yourself, this writing thing, or this editing thing, something related to long-form text, is something that I could really be excellent at, or this is something that I think I could make a good living doing because I can be exceptional at this. Was there a moment where you had that thought that would compel you to pursue that, say, instead of the music?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the funny thing is that, in my mind, through those foundational years, let's say, from when, from the time I graduated college to the time I completely committed to be a journalist, which was 29, it wasn't always music versus journalism. You know, in those early years, it was music versus journalism and other things, and then it was journalism versus other things. You know, I thought, when I'd finished college, I thought I was going to be sort of an environmental activist, or I might go into politics. And I got kind of put and tracked into journalism, kind of a slightly odd way, which we can

• 10:28Speaker 00

  get into. So it was really only at about 29, when I got hired by Wired, and started to do a good job editing stories. And when I started writing my book about Nissen Kennen, that I began to feel really confident about it as a career choice.

• 10:46Tim Ferriss?

  You said, I think you just had tracked into journalism in an odd way?

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Sorry, I should have known you were going to come up with that.

• 10:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I can't pick that up, or I can't not pick that up, rather. So, let's jump into that.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's super bizarre. So, when I was in college, I was focused very much on being like a good college student, and succeeding at college, and like going into student government and getting good grades. But I was, to a degree that's strange when I look back, did not think at all about what would happen, right? I went to Stanford, I had a graduate school fellowship. Like, I did well in college, but I prepared for life post-college extraordinarily badly. And so I graduate, and then, maybe the fall after I graduate, where I'm playing guitar, I get, I meet somebody at a party and sort of get surprisingly hired as an associate producer at 60 Minutes, which is a great job. And so I moved to New York, I show up at CBS, where 60 Minutes is.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  And within an hour, I'm fired. Like, I'm literally fired.

• 11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, within an hour, you're fired?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Within an hour.

• 11:50Tim Ferriss?

  What was the?

• 11:51Speaker 00

  The thing to be serious, who are you?

• 11:52Tim Ferriss?

  What was the offense?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  I, the offense was being hired in a position sort of beyond my stature. It was very strange. And in retrospect, it's one of those things where I was, I was treated kind of awfully, but I didn't understand it. I was 22. So I go, I show up, I still remember it, and this guy, his name was Phil Scheffler. He's like, who are you? I'm, I was like, I'm the new associate producer. I'm working under Steve Croft. He's like, what have you done in television before? I was like, nothing, you know? And he's like, well, what have you done professionally before? I was like, nothing. I just graduated. And he's like, and we hired you as an associate producer? I was like, yeah, you know, I did these interviews and that, some of these tests. He's like, you're fired. And like, they literally like took me out of the building.

• 12:30Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Alright, so it gets worse. So that's, that's, I think, December of 1997. I graduated from college in June of 97. So that's December of 97. So I'm like, huh, what am I gonna do now? One of my best friends from college was starting graduate school in the fall, and he was about to leave for Africa. And so I was like, I'm coming with you. So I go and I get my vaccinations and within, you know, two weeks, I'm on a plane. And then I get kidnapped immediately upon landing in Africa, right? Or I fly to Paris in Spain and I take a boat to Tangiers. Um, and I, I pull out my guitar to Subway platform in Tangiers. I'm alone at this point, in, you know, northern Morocco.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Um, a guy comes up to me, he's like, hey, you know, my family plays music. You wanna come home with me? I'm like, great, yeah, sure. Why not? I've got a day here before I'm supposed to be my friend. And it turns out that he's like, he's a drug dealer. He locks me in this room. And he has these cockamamie plans where he wants me to distribute his drugs around America. And he makes me eat a fish head. It's, it's all very peculiar. Um, but it's definitely not what, it's definitely not come home to my family and play guitar. And so...

• 13:42Speaker 00

  I've been off to a pretty rocky start in Africa. And eventually he dumps me and says enough of this guy, like you, I'm not getting what I want out of you and just like dumps me and lets me make my way to the train station. Um, but the funny thing about that.

• 13:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, hold on, let me pause for a second. So was he like, this guy is definitely not equipped to be a proper drug dealer for me in the United States. I mean, what was the kind of the straw that broke the camel's back where he's just like, enough of you, I'm letting you go. I mean, was, did you have an approach? I mean, how did you get out of that?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  I, I was very confused. I think what happened was, you know, I don't think he had like begun that day saying, I'm gonna kidnap an American. I think it was more like he saw me sitting there was like, let's see what happens if I take this guy, right? And then I go there and he goes through my stuff, he like goes through all my stuff, like looking for money and he finds that I've only got, I think it was sixty dollars in cash and there's no traveler's checks and fortunately, um, I had a backpack, uh, that had like smuggling sections built into it and so my passport, um, and like the valuable stuff were in there. And so I think he went through all my stuff and decided that I was like an itinerant traveler who was useless.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  I don't know what answers I gave him, um, about, you know, being the drug mule for him that turned him off, but, um, it did, it didn't work out. It was, it was a poor job application, uh, and the outcome wasn't what I wanted. So, so he dumped me and got rid of me. And then the great thing is that I then had a story and so I turned that experience, um, and some other experiences I had in Africa, yeah, then spent several months traveling with my, my friends and other friends. I turned those into an essay, um, for the Washington Post. So suddenly I had journalistic clips. And so kind of inadvertently, having been fired from journalism, um, I used the experience

• 15:35Speaker 00

  that followed to get clips and then I came back, I played guitar, um, and then those clips led to a job as the editor of the Washington Mumpin, which was a, you know, a place that hired sort of young ambitious people into roles with low paying roles, but high responsibility where you learn a lot. So that was how I got going in journalism. It was very bizarre.

• 15:59Tim Ferriss?

  How did you pitch the Washington Post? Or why did you end up? Was it a cold query? Or just a cold email to one of the editors who you found on the masthead? Or how did you go about getting this published?

• 16:17Speaker 00

  I think that, I think it was a cold query.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  I know that I had talked to some journalists before I left. I remember talking to somebody from the Boston Globe, I grew up in Boston, about, you know, if interesting things happened to me, would there be, would it be possible to write stories from locations in Africa? And so I had gotten some advice.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  But I think, I think, I think I've worked through the travel editor.

• 16:47Tim Ferriss?

  If you could just get kidnapped, it would make really good material.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  I mean, in retrospect, in fact, that was something my friend said to me. He is like, well, you know, to have that experience and only lose $60, it's kind of worth it. I remember him saying that. I was like so shaken by the whole thing. I was like, oh, you jerk. But he was totally right. It turned out to be like a really interesting experience for a mere $60.

• 17:11Tim Ferriss?

  I saw this woman in New York City at one point, walking around with the T-shirt, the crop top that said, "Bad decisions make good stories." And I didn't quite know how to take the shirt, like, in the context of her walking around with it. But certainly, true for stand-up comedians, and it would seem true for people in northern Africa, considering perhaps a path in journalism.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:36Tim Ferriss?

  Let's jump forward, and I'm sure this is going to be very nonlinear in how we bounce around, but one of the things that I mentioned in the intro was this piece, "The Great Escape," that later was turned into "Argo." And when I was doing some writing on this... A line that jumped out at me that I wanted to dig into was at Wired, at least at the time, every pitch was graded on a scale of one to six by everyone on staff. And there's a meeting where these story ideas are pitched. Or then presented, rather, in reverse order of their scores along with their standard deviations, which is fantastic.

• 18:20Tim Ferriss?

  But could you walk us through that pitch grading process?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 18:29Tim Ferriss?

  And tell us the story of The Great Escape? Because my understanding is it wasn't an immediate point to center field, hit homerun type of story. But I'm most curious in the grading process and how you guys did that.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Wired was run by this guy named Chris Anderson, who had been a writer at The Economist and just a really high IQ Silicon Valley type and a very mathematical way of looking at the world. And so this efficiency mechanism he brought into the pitch process was to run it like sort of a false democracy under a dictatorship. So the final decision would be made entirely by Chris, whether a story was a swing or not. But when you wrote a pitch, it would be sent to everybody on staff and everybody would vote on it and grade it. And the theory was, it was kind of a wisdom of crowds theory, that if you got everybody's vote, you could immediately tell what was great and what was bad.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And that, I think he genuinely believed that one of the things that happens in meetings is that you spend a lot of time discussing stuff that 95% of the room hates, but since only a couple people talk, you can't quite determine that quickly. And so this is a way of determining what is the stuff that 95% of the room loves and 95% of the room hates immediately, which is a super interesting thing, right? It's like theoretically a great thing to do. The problem with that is that it can be really demoralizing when your pitches do badly. It's okay to get your pitch rejected by the editor in chief, but to have your pitch graded badly by all your colleagues is kind of emotionally rough. So for The Great Escape, I remember this really well.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  So there's a writer, Joshua Baerman, who's, he's done great stuff for This American Life. He's written all kinds of wonderful essays. He was a little, you know, we're quite a bit younger then. I remember he sent me a bunch of pitches. I can't remember what the whole packet was. Maybe he sent me three ideas, but one was him as a spy. He's got the story of a crazy escape from Iran. And then another one I remember on the same email was, uh, I think Stalin tried to create a half man, half ape army.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And so like the two things were together. Like, should we investigate Stalin's half man, half ape army? Or should we investigate like this escape from Iran? And so through whatever process of conversations between editor and writer Joshua, I decided to pursue the escape from Iran. And I pitched it at the meeting. And I knew it was gonna do badly, right? Because it wasn't a wired story, right? It's like from the 1970s. Um, it's not about, you know, how Amazon and artificial intelligence are shaking. It's not, it just wasn't core wired. Um, and it's, everybody voted it really badly, right? The scores were one to six. It probably got a score of like two something. Um, on the other hand, Bob Cohen, who was the executive editor, the number two person there, I remember at the pitch meeting just

• 21:24Speaker 00

  being like, it's not wired, but I love it. Let's do it. Uh, and so he just sort of muscled it through. So again, it was democracy under a dictatorship and the dictators, uh, wanted to do the story. Um, because it was such a cool, so manifestly, a, you know, riveting narrative. So we ended up assigning it. Josh wrote it, did a great job, um, published it, and then Hollywood took an interest.

• 21:46Tim Ferriss?

  So a few follow-ups. What makes a good pitch? So when Josh sent you this pitch, let's just assume for the time being that it was, it was a good set of pitches. We could talk about, this is gonna sound funny to people who don't have a background, but we could talk more about Stalin anyway, but we'll leave that alone for now.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, the half man, half ape army. I mean, it's possible, like, there was a real missed opportunity. Like, we would have found out there was a half man, half ape army, which would be an amazing story, but...

• 22:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not, not only that, but you have, correct me if I'm wrong, this, it's, it's from the internet, so who knows, but, uh, a long friendship with Stalin's daughter. Is that right?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that is, that is very true. Happy to talk about that. Yes, Svetlana and I were friends for many, many years.

• 22:29Tim Ferriss?

  Putting aside the half man, half ape army of Stalin, question mark. What makes a good pitch? If a writer is pitching someone like you.

• 22:41Tim Ferriss?

  What does a good pitch look like? What are the ingredients? What are common mistakes that make something a bad pitch? However, you want to kind of answer that for folks.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yep, so a couple of elements that I appreciate are when the writer gives offense, right? So what Josh had done in that email is he had sent, you know, three ideas, which I think is really great. Right, and it's useful to be able to pick and it gives you a sense of the person's range of mind. Another element that's very useful is the element of the pitch that answers the question. Why am I the person to do this? So in Josh's pitch, the reason he was the person to do it is that he had, well, found something that no one had known before. And two, had unique access to the key character, right? Had access to the spy, Tony Mendez, I think this was his name. So that's another important element. And then the third is understanding what the magazine is trying to do in the section you're trying to write for.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  So what Wired was trying to do in its feature well then as now was tell really important stories about how technology is changing the world. But also tell things that are cinematic and fun to read and that are part of the Wired world. So this story, you know, The Great Escape, wasn't going to change the way you think about tech. But it had characters, right? It had emotional resonance. It had, like, there was a movie you could play in your mind, as you know, Ben Affleck later, you know, showed without question. And that's often a question I'll ask of the story. So how will they be able to visualize it? How will they be emotionally attached to it? Why will they care about the characters you introduced in the beginning and what happens to them at the end? So a good pitch is something where you're writing in a way that makes the editor convinced that you'll be able to write well.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  It shows why you have special knowledge or special insight or special access. It shows why the story is new and that, you know, it's structured so that the pitch clearly fits the aims and goals of the magazine or publication you're writing for.

• 24:29Tim Ferriss?

  Do the writers also indicate, or is it just assumed, a given length or a lead time for completion? Is any of that included in that initial pitch, or does that come later? Or is it just...

• 24:44Speaker 00

  It usually...

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  That probably comes later. If it's somebody who I've worked with specifically, they may say, "Hey, I'd like to do this this month," or "I want to fit it into my calendar," or, "You know, I'm planning to go to location TK in June, I could do it then." But normally, it's more like, "This is a story I'd like to do in, you know, the next reasonable timeframe."

• 25:09Tim Ferriss?

  So I just want to back up for a second. For people who don't know what TK means, TK, as I understand it, means "to come," but it's spelled TK so that you can find it very easily when you search for it. That's my understanding, at least.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  That sounds right to me.

• 25:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, because very few words in the English language have T and K, so you can do a Ctrl+F and find the things that you need to spot really quickly. So for people who are wondering why TK, you know, a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, will turn off his Wi-Fi when he writes and not interrupt it for fact-checking and certain types of research, and just drop TK in throughout the piece, and then do that as a batching process later. Just for people who are...

• 25:53Speaker 00

  That's smart.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so for people who are wondering about that. He also uses an app called Freedom to block the internet so that he can't...

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I use that too.

• 26:01Tim Ferriss?

  ...disrupt himself.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  That's a good thing to do.

• 26:04Tim Ferriss?

  So now, you just described Chris Anderson's process, which fits his personality, and I've met Chris before, a very smart guy. What is your process? How does your story pitch process differ?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  It's pretty similar, actually. I mean, we've gotten rid of the scores and the standard deviations. I thought that probably introduced a little bit too much stress and unnecessary anxiety for people.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  But I, there is that, there is value to it, I can see. So, what we do is a similar process. So, the writer will work with an editor, and they'll come up with a pitch. We try to make sure that they're under a page, just to respect everybody's time and because constraints lead to better work in general. So, people send in a one-page pitch. We sit around in a room. Lots of people are invited. Editor, editors will be signing the stories, kind of sit around the main table. Story comes up, and we talk about it. We talk about what are the unanswered questions? Will the writer really be able to do that?

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  What are common, what are common unanswered questions? Sorry to interrupt.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Sure. Like, a lot, a lot of pitches will, they'll be missing that element of how, of what the scenes will actually be, right, and who, how the characters will develop, right? It's like, here is a big idea. Here's an important thing that happened, and I'm gonna write 5,000 words about it. And there's almost no thing that is big or important enough that you can write 5,000 words about it if you don't have, like, specific scenes and visual moments where you can pull a person in. And again, this is for Wired Features, right? And we run, like, web stories. We have a much more informal process. We run short things in front of book where there's a more informal process. But, you know, we only run four features a month, so 48 of them a year. So, we do discuss them all and whether, you know, they'll be able to pull it off.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  And how will the chronology work? And there's a lot of discussions about the writers, because an incredibly talented magazine feature writer, sort of a subset of ideas they could write about, is a lot larger than somebody with more limited skills and experience in this particular craft. So, we'll talk about, okay, well, what have you read by this person? Or, I remember reading that story. I didn't think it totally worked. Or, I read that story. It did work very, quite well. So, that's how it works. We all talk about it, and then afterwards, I'll speak with the executive editor or a couple of other editors, and we'll make a decision. Red light, green light, red light, green light.

• 28:26Tim Ferriss?

  So we're gonna talk about Atavist.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  The startup that I mentioned. But I'm gonna tie, I'm gonna tie it in here because my understanding is that you've had a decent amount of exposure to, to feature pieces being optioned for film.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:47Tim Ferriss?

  And Argo, or rather, The Great Escape, which then became Argo, is one such example.

• 28:55Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of, a lot of writers dream of having things optioned. It's my, my questions, I suppose, are, A, is it a dream worth having?

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or is it just almost uniformly disappointing? Or somewhere in between? And then, B, if you, if you were having something optioned of yours, what are the deal points or this, the, the deal structures that you would pay attention to?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so, um, yeah. Wired, I think very few stories from Wired were optioned before 2007, and then Wired started getting a reputation as a place where stories were optioned and has had a good amount of success since then. The Atavist, which we started in 2009, has had success from the get-go. I mean, it's something like 25% of the stories that have run in The Atavist have been optioned to Hollywood, which is a crazy, crazy percentage. Maybe it's 30%.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  And so, is it a dream worth having? Yes, it is a dream worth having. The most important thing is having a good agent who has actually sold films before. Not like, a lot of writers don't know the right agents, and having the right agent just is utterly transformative. It takes you from, you know, almost no chance to a very good chance. So having an agent who has actually had success selling magazine stories in Hollywood before is really important. And so what we did at The Atavist is we just started out with an agent who had had a lot of success, the same guy that we had used at, um... That I, that my co-founder, Evan Ratliff, was a better writer for Wired and that I had used at Wired. And so we just brought him in with the auditors from the get-go, from

• 30:39Speaker 00

  fairly early on. And then when you're looking at the deal points, you know, what you want is, you know, there's a whole series of stages along the way where you get different payouts, right? You get an initial amount of money, then you get certain renewals, and then if the script is written, and then if the movie is made. And so what you want are, you want to make sure that high-quality people are sort of being added at each step so that it's more likely to move from A to B to C to D, and that you, you don't kind of fall for the, the dream where it's like, all right, we'll give you a thousand dollars now, but a million dollars if we make it. And there's almost no chance we'll make it, right? You want to make sure that you get paid real money upfront, because even a really good

• 31:22Speaker 00

  script with really good people attached to it has a fairly low percentage of chance of getting through.

• 31:26Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. Certainly, it seems that way. And yet, there are some that make it through.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Like The Great Escape, for instance. Are there any other clauses that are particularly important? And I've never, I've had, for the first book that I did, I've had folks approach me about film adaptation, but it seemed like, at least in the structures that were being offered, it was very much a lockup period with almost no monetary compensation, with no guarantee that they would actually do anything with it, in the sense that the reversion of rights clause became really important to consider, much like

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:10Tim Ferriss?

  if you're a product developer or an inventor, and you develop something that you want to license to a larger company, there's nothing compelling them to spend marketing dollars on it, or to develop it, or push it unless, or I should say, you increase the likelihood of that if you have that dictated in the terms of the contract, and then some reversion of rights clause. Right? So I suppose what I'm wondering is, how much time, in your mind, do you allow for a story to float out there in the ether of, say, Hollywood, before?

• 32:45Tim Ferriss?

  You kind of, you, you pull it back in some fashion or, or allow it to take a different path potentially because I, I know friends who are writers who've had stuff just float around and so and so's attached, but oh no, they're not attached because they're busy. And then when this person's attached, no, they're not because they had a conflict. And it just goes on and on and on for years and years and years. Is there any, yeah, any, any ways that you've found to mitigate against that in any way?

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm not, you know, this is not my area of top expertise, but a couple of things. One, I think that the, the value of before you publish and before you put it up for auction of locking a few things down is really important, right? Making sure you have the life rights to the central character that you negotiated, you know, in the, um, sorry, example in the Argo story, it was really important that Josh had locked up rights to Tony Menendez's story so that, um, after the story ran, it wasn't like somebody else could do the same story, but without Josh attached to it because Josh and Tony came as a package, um, and so they had negotiated a deal together. And so that's a really important thing to make sure that you have as much as you can

• 33:56Speaker 00

  the rights to that particular story buttoned up because it gives you just much more leverage if potential bidders aren't like, hmm, you know, I can probably do this without Nick. Um, or I can probably do this without buying the rights to Nick's story because it's public domain or, so talking to an agent and working through that, I think is really important. And then just knowing that, you know, there's no part of the world where people kind of tell more baloney stories about how this is, about the stars that are coming in Hollywood. Like there's so many, oh yes, you know, we'll attach Francis Ford Coppola, right? We'll do this, we'll do that. And it, they're not lying, it's just never true, right? So you really need to have it written down. Um, and so I think what people get caught is they sort of fall for that.

• 34:41Speaker 00

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

• 35:18Tim Ferriss?

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

• 36:02Tim Ferriss?

  WME, CAA, Creative Arts Agency, UTA, and so on. But would you have any other recommendations for people who want to educate themselves about that side of the business, per se?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  My only other recommendation would be to find friends of friends of friends who have actually had success and say, "Who sold it?" And I do this much more in the book publishing world, where a higher percentage of my friends have sold books, where, you know, "I know you sold a book. What agent did you use and would you recommend him or her?" And then if you've got five people who sold books, you ask them all, a couple of names come up, and you go meet with them, see who you click with, who you get after a good bond with. I mean, the best, you know, the best possible agent is somebody who has a track record and who actually likes you and cares about you. And sometimes those things are kind of like inversely related, because they have a track record, they have so many clients, they're not going to care about you. So you've just got to figure out how to find somebody who's both good and responsive.

• 37:00Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to segue to The New Yorker for probably more than a few minutes, since I find The New Yorker fascinating, as I do Wired.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  I love both.

• 37:13Tim Ferriss?

  But in a, I think it was a 2015 interview, you'd said, and again, fact correct as needed, but the most encouraging thing we found is that the stories we're prouder of, the stories we've put more effort into attract more readers. So the, I'd love to talk about what that means, if you could elaborate on that. Because as someone who personally, speaking for myself, enjoys long-form content and makes some effort to resist the temptation to listicle myself to death in hopes of eyeballs and clicks, what did that mean and how did you foster that at the magazine?

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. That was like one of the most important kind of existential debates and findings at The New Yorker. So I started at The New Yorker on the print side when we really didn't, when the magazine hadn't put a lot of effort into having an ambitious daily website. The website at The New Yorker mostly just published the print stories, and some of them were behind the paywall, some of them were not. And then as part of this process where David Remnick became much more excited about daily journalism and the importance of having a website, eventually I was moved over to run the website, work with a bunch of people. And so the initial challenge was, you know, can you publish daily content?

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Because the magazine is put together by so many people with so much experience, and you know, the website was this kind of startup within the organization where you have to be a lot scrappier, you're paying people, you know, a New Yorker writer will get several dollars a word to write 5,000 words, so you're looking at $15,000 a story. And on the website, you're looking at $200 a story. So can you produce? Content for that $200 that won't sort of detract from the other stuff. And that's a challenge, right? And you have to figure out what is the DNA of the New Yorker.

• 39:11Tim Ferriss?

  How long, how long were those stories? I'm sorry to interrupt. The online?

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Maybe 800 words, you know, 1,000 words. I mean, that was actually an interesting conversation. Like, if you make them 300 words, you know, will it actually detract more than if you make it 800 words? Should you make the web stories more like the long print stories or less like the long print stories? And so there's a lot of back and forth. This is kind of the central debate in my mind for several years, right? How do you make daily web content that feels of a piece with the New Yorker magazine? This thing's been around for 85 years and has such an incredible history and such great stories. And so back to the initial question, over time, we found that what got the most readership,

• 39:55Speaker 00

  that worked the best in every sense, were smart pieces of analysis of what was happening right now, ideally written by the same people who wrote for the magazine. And they would spend far less time per word on their web posts than they would for the magazine's stories, but they would feel related, they'd feel of a piece. If, you know, Philip Gurevich wrote a web piece about a terror attack that had just happened, it would feel enough like a Philip Gurevich magazine feature and the readers would appreciate it. And so ultimately, our strategy became getting the staff writers to write regular posts, hiring people who could write very quickly, could write at the cadence of the web, but who had similar prose styles to the New Yorker staff writers, moving John Cassidy, for example, who was a magazine staff writer, writes a column every day for the website, which was

• 40:40Speaker 00

  great, really valuable to have, to know that every day you would have a terrific column by the super smart, well-respected guy. Same with Amy Davidson, who had been a senior editor. So bringing over people, bringing in new people, getting some of the staff writers. And what we found was that the stuff people liked was the best stuff we published. And that was really heartening. Like, people didn't want to go to NewYorker.com to read, to sort of click through sensationalized slideshows. They wanted to come to New York to read smart, interesting things. And that was great because when your business incentives align with your sort of journalistic incentives, you're in a much happier place than if the two are sort of run perpendicular to each other.

• 41:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I would love to get your help encouraging people to do more long form. And by people, I mean publishers, to foster that type of kind of patient editorial in some cases. And so I'm going to make this really personal. I've thought a lot about

• 41:45Tim Ferriss?

  hiring writers to do longer form pieces for my blog, for instance, which does not have the draw or cachet of The New Yorker, certainly, or Wired. But nonetheless, decent amount of traffic. You know, I had a couple million people, a couple million uniques per month. And I think what struck me when I was trying to think through this as someone who loves long form is that I didn't know the process. It's harder, it's more of a black box than trying to put together a list of 12 bullets or a slideshow, which I'm not going to say it's mindless, but it really doesn't require a lot of planning. So if, for instance, I wanted to,

• 42:26Tim Ferriss?

  I had ideas for certain pieces and wanted to invite people who had ideas for pieces, who were qualified writers, to do, let's just call it, three to 10,000 word pieces. Right? So very broad spectrum. What is the process then for figuring out how much I should pay someone in a context like that? Because you noted yourself, there's kind of a very wide,

• 42:54Tim Ferriss?

  this very wide

• 42:57Tim Ferriss?

  spectrum. I think I just used that twice in like three sentences, shame on me. But nonetheless, in terms of payment per word, I don't even know how that works because I've never done it. But how would you think about going about doing something like this? If I wanted to do an experiment of like three to five pieces with different writers and see how it goes?

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  How would you suggest I even think about this? You have so much experience and I have none because everything on the blog, with a few rare exceptions, have been my own stuff.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It's kind of like what we went through at The Atomist. So here are a couple of ways to fix your ad. So first, you could say, all right, well, how much advertising revenue will I get? And so you can do the math, right? So let's say you have, you would get fifty thousand people might read the story. That's a lot, but you know, you, you know, through your social promotion and through general traffic to the site. So fifty thousand people will read the story. You will be able to sell your ads at whatever CPM you sell. Let's say fifteen dollars per thousand visitors. And, you know, you'll be able to show four ads per person. You know, one quarter of the people will be turning on ad blockers, so we'll say three.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  And how much revenue will you generate in total, right? And so you go through those calculations, right? You figure out what is your sell-through rate on the advertisements, what is your CPM rate? And the problem is when you do that, right, if you add those numbers up, you're going to end up with, you know, generating for your story that has a couple of ads viewed per person. If it has people, you're going to end up generating like two thousand dollars in total revenue for the story, right? The numbers are just not good.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  And so if you have an advertising-supported, long-form journalism shop, it's really hard to pay for the writer, the editor, the rights to the art, and sort of the bandwidth. It's a really hard thing to justify. And that's something we thought through a lot at The New Yorker and Wired and at The Atomist. Okay, so how do you make the economics work? If you're only going to generate, you know, sometimes like just a couple hundred dollars in advertising revenue, like what can you do? Well, at The New Yorker and Wired, there's a second revenue stream, which is subscriptions, right? And so you generate way more money from subscriptions on these long-form stories than you do from advertisements. So suddenly, the amount of, total amount of revenue generated by a long story is much higher, right? So suddenly, you're generating, you know, four thousand dollars for a story, or five thousand dollars for a story, or whatever it is. And you can justify paying higher rates.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  The third way of making money is like find another thing. So at The Atomist, it was Hollywood, right, where we could end up, we would pay writers. I think we would pay them, well, we had different models, but you end up being able to pay them much better rates because you know, if they agree, that they will give you fifty percent of the option price if they sell it to Hollywood. So we would bake that into our contracts, like. You know, either we can pay you $2,000 for this story and you can keep all the rights, the Hollywood rights, or we can pay you $10,000 and give us 50% of the Hollywood money. And then the writer generally will choose the second option to get the higher guaranteed payment so they can justify spending all the time on it. So with you, you might want to think through something like that, or think through whether

• 46:11Speaker 00

  there's another revenue stream you can attach to, whether it's being part of events or something like that, or find a specific sponsor for a kind of story. But that's how I would think through the economics of how to, how to support it. But again, the core problem and the reason why it's really hard for publications to do long form is that, you know, it takes a writer two months to write a story that will get 50,000 readers, and if you have that writer putting out listicles, they'll be able to generate three of them a day, each of which will get 25,000 readers, and it's sort of the bang for the buck equation unless you change the economics somehow by having subscriptions or movie deals or something else, all the economic incentives push people towards short stuff.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm in a somewhat odd position maybe in the sense that I don't, I don't have advertising, I don't have memberships. I, I, there's a possibility I could do something with Hollywood optioning. There are just stories that I would love to have told and characters I know who are just endlessly, to me at least, fascinating, who I don't have, I don't have current bandwidth, maybe even the capability to do justice in a really long form piece. Uh, and I would love to just, I want to just see it in the world and pay them to do that, probably reserve any option right for film or anything like that in the case that I'm paying them.

• 47:36Tim Ferriss?

  How would you, how might you determine how to pay them in a scenario like that? Is there?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, if you're prepared to lose, if you're prepared to lose money on it, then, you know, you can get it.

• 47:46Tim Ferriss?

  I'm prepared to lose money but not like hemorrhage out the face, if that makes sense, right? Like I'm, I want to pay a fair.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's long form journalism, so you won't hemorrhage out the face. I mean, if you pay people $2 a word, you'll get like all the best writers in America will be thrilled to write for you.

• 47:58Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But you pay them a buck fifty a word, they'll be, you know, you'll get a slightly smaller pool. You pay a buck, people will be like, meh. So, um, yeah, so your, your range will be somewhere between a dollar and $2 a word.

• 48:09Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  You know, if you're Michael Lewis, you'll ask for substantially more, but for like really terrific writers, um, they will be happy with those rates.

• 48:19Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. Amazing. Well, alright, well, I'm gonna publicly say, just for any writers who are listening, I will pay you $2 a word, given the ideas that I have.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 48:28Tim Ferriss?

  So, uh, yeah, just, and, I mean, that may change, but for the first few pieces, I wanna do some, some really, there's some things that I've been thinking about, and they've been eating up, like, the ram in my, the back of my mind for probably a year or two, and I think there are people who are better qualified to, to tell some of these stories. So, cool.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  That's great. I love that you did that. That's amazing. So, cool.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Productive podcast.

• 48:50Tim Ferriss?

  Productive podcast, cool. So, um, I'll, I'll make this, well, I guess it is called The Tim Ferriss Show, so I shouldn't feel badly about being so self-indulgent, but let me move on. Uh, he, uh, also at the, at The New Yorker, uh, the, and this was in Politico, this is an interview, so this is, I suppose, when you were senior editor, and it said you'd been responsible for shaping the 10,000-word raw copy filed by writers, like, and it went on with this amazing list of writers. How, how did you do what you did as an editor? How does one edit these incredible writers who have 10,000-word pieces? Like, when you

• 49:30Tim Ferriss?

  read a, the, the first, for, I suppose, first of all, do you get a effectively finished piece? Do they send you a first draft that is rough? How do these writers work with you? Or did they work with you?

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, it totally varies, right? So, the great thing about The New Yorker is that you, it's all staff writer-driven. It may be a unique publication in America, in that, kind of, 90% of the content is written by 50 people. And so, you show up, and there're, whatever there are, six senior editors, that means that eight people work with you. And so, your life is about those eight people. So, making sure that they have the right ideas, that they're all working all the time, that you're helping them maximize their talents, their ambitions, and helping them find stories. And so, I worked with a group of writers, um, and with all of them, there were some things that I would do the same, and some things that I would do differently. So, first, whenever they filed a draft, I would immediately write back and say that I've got it. Because even if they're the most talented writer

• 50:27Speaker 00

  in the world, everybody is slightly insecure and wants to know that their story has been received by the editor. So, I've got it. Second thing is, I would read it, like, right then, that I wouldn't... Um, delay, right, because just procrastination is the enemy of good editing. You should just start and do it, right? And so if you get the draft while you're in the middle of something else important, like editing another draft, of course, you wait for an hour. But really, you should, you know, within the first, you know, six hours of getting a draft from the writer, you should have read the draft. And so then you read the draft and then you start thinking through. And usually, the first step would be, um, going through and sending them back a memo saying, hey, this is good, you know, these are the things I like, but here are the big structural issues.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  And actually giving them specific guidance. And my goal was always to make it a memo that I wouldn't have to kind of amend. Like, you want to write and say, I haven't really figured this out, but I kind of think you might want to do this, I'll tell you more tomorrow. No, you want to, you want to give them, give them actual advice and things they can work with. And if they disagree, they can have a conversation. But I would write a memo saying, hey, this piece is strong, you know, I really like this, but I, you know, I don't think you hit this core issue. I think that the chronology is broken in these four ways. I think you overuse this, and I really think you need more reporting on that. And so for every writer, that's kind of the first step, which is, here's what I think is wrong with the piece. And you, you know, you adjust that based on the amount of time you have allotted.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  If it's like a political piece and it has to run next week, you, you know, you try not to, if they're only going to be able to jump over something that's four feet high because of the time available, you try not to set up a barrier that's six feet high, right? So that's the first step. Then after that, it starts to really vary depending on the writers. So, you know, as, you know, each edit, you know, you go through a process from sort of wide aperture, big comments, to very narrow, focusing on specific sentences at the very end. Um, and the process by which you go through that is different for different writers. So I worked with Cal Sisane, right, one of the greatest pro-stylists I've ever worked with. And- I would never adjust a sentence of his with my own prose. I would never say, "Why don't you write it this way?" I would just say, "I don't think this works, please rewrite it."

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Or, um, you know, "Please do this," not redoing it. I would never, I would never redo it myself. But I worked with a lot of other writers, um, who I would be much more likely to say, "Yeah, maybe you should write it this way, or maybe you should do it this way." Or even some writers where I would go in and rewrite sections. With some writers, um, I remember I worked with Ryan Lizen. Um, and, you know, he would always be at this crazy deadline, right? You have to write the leading from behind story and have to run on Thursday. Uh, and so we would like literally be in Google Docs, where I would be rewriting the beginning of the piece, while he would be writing the end of the piece. And we'd spend our whole weekend with him sort of, you know, filing down the story and me chasing him as an editor. And then him sort of like cycling back up and going through my edits. And us just sort of looping through the piece with me trailing behind him.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  So there were different, different processes with different people, but, um, that's kind of a guideline to how it worked. But I can go into much more specifics on that, because it's one of the things I absolutely loved.

• 53:37Tim Ferriss?

  Do you become a good writer first and then a good editor? Do you have, or, or can you do it the other way around? For, for people who want to develop an eye for editing, uh, I suppose, which is also very, very closely related to rewriting. Uh, do you have any recommendations? Are there any, any books or classes or writers you would pay attention to perhaps? To people who are listening who say, "You know what? I really want to develop a keener eye as a writer slash editor."

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a couple of things that I think are useful are, um... Well, first, okay, first, so how to be, like, get a better sense of style and structure. So one of the things that I think was really important to me is that I found some writers I really loved. And I just read their stuff out loud. Like, that sort of forces a level of concentration and attention to prose. I remember, uh, going through the pieces of this writer, Catherine Boo, who worked for New Yorker, I thought was, you know, maybe the best stylist around. And I would just read her pieces out loud.

• 54:38Tim Ferriss?

  What was the name again?

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Trying to get a sense of what she was... Catherine Boo.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Boo?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  V O O.

• 54:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, there we go.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  And she wrote a lot of pieces about poverty. Um, her last book was about India. She doesn't write a ton, but what she writes was extraordinary. But you could also do it with, you know, Calipso Senna, or you could go back and do it, you know, with John McPhee, or you could go and do it with Rachel Levine, or whoever your, you know, favorite, um, your favorite writer or stylist is, or even just a piece that you love. Um, you know, we've had all kinds of features in wire that are super interesting to read if you read them out loud. So, um, find a writer you love for whatever publication and study them, right? And think about what exactly are they doing? I also, um, you know, most of my training in this was done as an editor, but you could also do it as a reader, which is to map a story.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Um, so I will often, on a whiteboard when I'm working with a writer, but you could also just do it as an exercise to the finished piece, like, look at the structure of the piece, right? So, how exactly does it work? Where is information presented? Where are characters presented? So, I'll use this example because it's sitting right here on my desk, my eleven thousand word story about Mark Zuckerberg that you mentioned at the intro. It has a very specific structure that may not be the right structure, or may not be the ideal structure, but it is a very deliberate structure. So, the way this story works is several characters are introduced and the story, the first section of the story is chronological from roughly February of twenty sixteen to, I think it's April of twenty sixteen. It tells the story of Facebook during that two-month period.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  And then the piece has its one jump back, and it goes and it tells very quickly the story of Facebook from two thousand seven to twenty sixteen, and it introduces several specific themes and a couple of characters who will become important later, and that was very deliberately done. Then the story jumps back into the chronology, kicks up right where it was in April of twenty sixteen, introduces a couple of facts that will be important later to the story. And then it mostly runs chronologically. So, it's, the structure is eighty percent chronological and twenty percent thematic. Um, you know, at certain points, you have to introduce stories slightly out of chronological order because of where you are thematically in the story, right? You're talking about Russia, you have to introduce a fact about Russia, even if it doesn't exactly fit the timeline.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  But my co-author Fred Vogelstein and I worked really hard to, as much as possible, make it chronological, it's a very deliberate structural choice. So, you could, you know, map out that story and... You know, by mapping it out, learn the things that I just said, and also have a closer sense of the moments where we chose to break away from the chronology, um, and then be able to think through why we did that. And so you can do that with, you know, most stories, and you'll see flaws in some of them, you'll see brilliance in some of them, you'll see, you know, chronological structure is not a particularly interesting structure, but it's a very good one. Um, you'll see interesting ways to do it. You can do it watching movies, too. Um, but I think it's a really useful exercise. It will make you a better writer and observer to take these things apart.

• 57:42Tim Ferriss?

  When you map a story, just to use the tool you mentioned, which is a whiteboard, what does it look like visually? I mean, is it kind of bullet, bullet, bullet from top to bottom? Is it a set of circles going from left to right with things inside the circles, outside the circles? How do you map out a story if you're doing it on a whiteboard?

• 58:01Speaker 00

  It's probably, um, it probably has, I mean, there are different ways to tell the story, but it probably has two things. It probably has like section, right? So section A, you know, the crime, section B, the chase, right? And then some sort of titles for all the sections, and then sort of lines with the different characters who are being introduced, and where they're being introduced, and maybe even the different themes that are being introduced, and where they're, where they're being introduced. So it's not really circles, it's more like, it's more, it's closer to bullet points.

• 58:33Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. Uh, recommendation I'd love to make for people also, this is, this is something I really need to revisit myself, although I'm not doing as much writing at the moment, but for people who are really interested in structure and this mapping of stories, Draft Number Four by John McPhee is just a fantastic read, and it really gets into the weeds, so you have to be exceptionally interested in writing to get into it. But it shows some of the diagrams of his structures for various feature pieces that, that, that he's written, including for The New Yorker, which is just, I find incredibly, incredibly

• 59:16Tim Ferriss?

  fascinating, given that if, if anyone has not read Levels of the Game by John McPhee, I would, I would, cannot recommend it highly enough. Um, also from a structural standpoint, that sort of chronology plus theme combination, uh, just, just a fin, just a wonderful, wonderful read.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  You know, since you said that, I'm gonna tell a story about McPhee, because he's the, in some ways, the reason why I ended up working at The New Yorker. So I, when I was at Wired as a senior editor, The New Yorker reached out and said, hey, we've, you know, we've heard you're a good senior editor. We have an opening. Would you like to apply? I said, of course, right? I mean, I loved Wired. I loved everything about Wired, but New Yorker would be an amazing challenge. And so I applied, and I went through the process, and the process was you edit two ten thousand word stories, you rewrite things. It's an exhaustive process. You interview with eight people. And I went through it, and I didn't get it. And, but I could kind of sense in the note that they sent that I had been close.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  And then maybe, so that was probably, I think this is two thousand and nine, it's probably October of two thousand and nine. And then there was a holiday party in December of two thousand and nine where I met somebody who had been an assistant at The New Yorker. And they're like, Nick Thompson, oh my God, they went back and forth, back and forth. They almost hired you, but they didn't hire you, right? I was like, well, that's interesting information. Both is painful, but it's interesting. And so then two months later, about February, I had gotten, I knew I was about to receive weirdly sort of two other offers. One to go into television, one to work for another magazine, both of which were very tempting. And so I, I knew that I would be switching my career soon.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  And I remember staying up late one night. I read The Shape of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee, which is just a, it's a kind of unknown book, but just brilliant.

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  So good.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  It's like all McPhee's work is, it's so good. And so I read it, and I finished it. I remember lying on my couch. It's like two thirty in the morning, and I finished it. I was so emotional. I was like, you know, I really, I want to give The New Yorker another shot before I, before I totally step away. And so that night at two thirty, I sent an email to the deputy editor, Pam McCarthy. I was like, Pam, or dear Miss McCarthy, I know you almost hired me, you know, four months ago. And I'm about to leave the company. Wired is part of Wired, where I worked then, where I work now. It's part of Conde Nast, which The New Yorker is also part of. So I'm about to leave the company to go somewhere else. But I really want to work for you. So this would be the moment, uh, and I'd love to have another shot at it. And it was kind of a strange email to send. I was just sort of so emotional

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  after reading McPhee. And Pam wrote back and was like, okay, let's come meet with me again and meet with Remick again. And so, uh, I went upstairs to their office, met with them again. Um, Remick was, you know, very blunt about why he hadn't hired me the first time. Um, asked me whether I could address the concern he had. The concern he had was basically that you would come on and, um, you want to write and do television and do all these other stuff instead of like just putting your head down and being an editor. Um, I said, no, I will put my head down and be an editor. I can prove it to you. He'll give me another edit test. Uh, they gave me another edit test and then, you know, probably a week or two later, they hired me.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  So it was entirely, uh, McPhee that, um, that spurred me to write that email to Pam and then got me hired.

• 1:02:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's so amazing. What a great story. Oh, my God. Uh, yeah. I mean, for people who really want to go down that rabbit hole, I mean, Brigade de Cuisine, uh, there's so many. Oh, my God. It's, you've, you really can't go wrong, uh, with, with McPhee. Uh, yeah. Uh, that's, that's a wonderful story. How did you decide to get into the startup game? Startup game is a full contact sport, generally very, very difficult. How did that come into the fold?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  So that happened, um, so I was an editor at Wired and at Wired, you know, particularly under that time, under Chris Anderson, really encouraged people to do different things. I had done this crazy, wonderful story where there's a writer, Evan Ratliff, who I edited at Wired, awesome guy. Um, we had gotten, um, very drunk one night and we were talking about, um, for some reason, there were like a lot of people who were kind of faking their death and starting life over, right? Which is an interesting thing to do in the digital age because it's kind of easier to

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Start a new life and create a new identity, right? Just create a new email address and Twitter account. But it's also easier to track people. So it was kind of an interesting Wired dilemma. And we were talking about how to tell that story. We were two other friends, Doug McGray and this woman, Jen Con. The four of us were having ceviche and alcohol. And somehow, through this like long conversation, Evan came up with this idea, which is that he would write a story about how to fake your death and start life over. And then we would run it. And then he would fake his death and we would run like a manhunt to find him. Well, not fake his death, but basically go off the grid and Wired would run a manhunt to find him. This is early Twitter. And so we took that idea to the Wired pitch meeting. It got a very high score, got approved. He wrote part one, which is, you know, here are some stories about people who've tried to start over their digital age.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  And then he went on the run. And so we ran this experiment for a month. It was August of, um, I guess August 2009. And the experiment was Evan Ratliff has disappeared. If you find him, you get $5,000. And then the rules were that I would have all the information a private investigator would have. So I would be able to interview his family members. I would have access to his old photos, like his social security number, all those things. And I would leak them out through Twitter over the course of the month. And we had no idea it was gonna work. Um, you know, it was one of those things that like, I, maybe he'll get found the first day, right? Or maybe no one will care. Um, but through the sort of-

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  Did you end up leaking his social security number?

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't think I leaked, I might have. I leaked so much information about him. I certainly like put out his address, his girlfriend's name, his exes, like photographs that came in high school, like his mother's name. Like all the stuff he would have. Um, you know, his credit card bills. Um, and it was crazy. People got so excited. And it all happened on Twitter. It's like the first time I was really into Twitter. Um, and-

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  So the deal is if he made it a month, he got five thousand dollars. If he got caught, the person got five thousand dollars. And so he got caught because he was using Tor to disguise his IP address. It's a masking thing that makes it impossible for people to see what IP address he'd use. But he screwed up once. And by screwing up once, some smart coder figured out a little bit about where he was. Then that guy figured out the fake Twitter account that Evan had created and followed it by creating a fake fembot. And so we had a fake fembot following editor Evan. They somehow then figured out that Evan was in New Orleans. We made a deal with Will Shortz that if you solved the New York Times crossword puzzle embedded in it would be a clue about where Evan was. And so I think

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  the clue was something like, um, he'll be at a pizza restaurant. And I had leaked online that he was gluten free. So these like geniuses online, they like solved the crossword puzzle and basically put together that there's only one pizza place he can go to in New Orleans which serves gluten free pizza. And they caught him on the last day. It was this amazing hunt. Yeah. So that was really exciting. And so that happens. And Evan and I, of course, bond despite the fact that I've almost ruined his life as the private investigator. Um, and so maybe a month after that, Evan and I were, maybe two months after that, we were watching at his apartment, watching a football game, like an Alabama college football game. Um, he's from the South and was rooting for them. And he's like, you know, we should start

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  a magazine that does that kind of thing. I was like, sure, that sounds like fun. And I had a, I just published my book and I had a really good web designer, this guy named Jeff Robb. I was like, well, let's meet with Jeff and see whether he wants to do it with us. And so the three of us got together and we said, okay, let's start a digital only magazine. And so the idea was that I would keep my job. The two of them would go full time to start the Atavist. Um, we would, you know, run experimental stories, crazy long form stories and see what we could do. And then right about that time, Apple introduced the iPad. So then the idea became though, you know, kind of be iPad focused and, um, we'll do multimedia. And so we started this company at a super propitious moment.

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  In order to create the stories, Jeff had to write a content management system that would make it easier for us to do multimedia storytelling. And so accidentally, we suddenly had a business too, because then we were able to license the content management system to people. So we built a really cool business. So the goal hadn't been to start like a software company, a software company. The goal had been just like, let's make a cool magazine that does long form. And we inadvertently built a good business. And so, you know, nine years later, we still got it. It's still publishing every month, and there's still a CMS that we're still selling.

• 1:08:18Tim Ferriss?

  All good things start with ceviche and alcohol.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's probably true.

• 1:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  What was the name of, if you recall, the headline, the title of the piece about, well, I suppose it wasn't about Evan at this point, but about people starting over in a digital world? Do you recall?

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  I don't remember the first story.

• 1:08:42Tim Ferriss?

  How might people find?

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Well, if they type in Wired Vanish, it was all called Vanish, you'll find it. Or if you type in Evan Ratliff, R A T L I F F. I think the headline, it's like Vanish, Evan Ratliff Tried to Disappear, Here's What Happened. And it will tell, because after he was, after he got caught, he wrote this great 8,000 word story about his life on the run. So good. It was the first story for Wired ever nominated for a National Magazine Award in feature writing. Such a good story. So yeah, Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish, Here's What Happened.

• 1:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  And did, would looking for his name in Vanish also lead to the preceding piece that he had written about?

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:09:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, very cool.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's an ongoing fantasy. Although increasingly difficult.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  It does give some good advice, but maybe a little bit out of date, because, you know, eight years ago, the digital tracking tools are different.

• 1:09:35Tim Ferriss?

  So you, by any objective measure, have gotten a lot done and get a lot done. Love to talk about structure and routine, not in writing, but in your life. And this was as good a place as any to ask, do you still run to and from work? Or how long you do?

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  I do, yeah.

• 1:09:57Tim Ferriss?

  So. Alright, so what I have here is you run to work, shower at the gym next door, and then you have suits in the office to change into. And then at the end of the day, you change back into your running clothes and run back home.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that important to you? Have you always been running?

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was a runner in high school and college. And then I took some time off, but I started sort of marathoning recently, seriously, in my late twenties. And it's important for all kinds of reasons. It's important as a sense of self. It's important physically. It's important, you know, the half physical things one does as one gets older, in my early forties now. It's important emotionally, because at one point in my life, I got very sick. And so it's a reminder, when I can still do it, that I'm no longer that. So there are a lot of intense reasons why I run and why I like to run. But it's really hard to find time to run. Because I have this ambitious job, I work super late every night, I've got three kids, and I'm a very devoted father.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  So I need to be with them in the morning, I need to be with them in the evenings. So I can't kind of take off and run. And in fact, it's often harder to find time to run on weekends than it is on weekdays. So having it structured into my life, where I put my cell phone, wallet, and keys in a little pack, strap it on, run, you run home. It works really nicely. And it keeps me... I think it's also a good mental break. You know, you spend the morning with your kids, getting them ready. You know, there's a lot of energy and excitement. And then when I go back home, you know, there's a lot of energy and excitement, putting them to sleep, and then kind of going back to work. So it's nice to have like two little breaks in the day where I'm running.

• 1:11:43Tim Ferriss?

  If you're open to talking about it, you mentioned you had a period when you got very sick, which I don't know anything about. Could you tell us a bit more?

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  There's nothing about it on the internet. I got thyroid cancer, which is, you know, it's cancer, which is a horrible, terrible thing, but it's kind of the least dangerous kind. But what had happened with running is... Um, I'll sort of tell that whole story. Um, you know, I started running, started running marathons and like, I remember really wanting to break three hours. As a child, I'd watched my father, he'd run a marathon, it was like three hours and ten seconds. And he had like been frustrated that he couldn't run a three hour marathon. And so I started running marathons and I like couldn't crack it. And then one year I like totally cracked it and ran a two forty-three, right? And was like way underneath it, my dad was super proud.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  And then right after that, um, I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer. And I ended up having a couple of surgeries, going through radiation treatment.

• 1:12:40Tim Ferriss?

  How did you di- how did you diagnose it? Was it during a routine physical?

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  I just went through a checkup, yeah. It was like, it was like a couple of weeks after the marathon. It was, marathon's in November, and so it was early December. And the doctor's like, there's a lump, it's probably nothing, but let's check it. And so he checked it and it was like, oh, it might be bad. You know, and then you go through that whole process that people have been sick go through where, you know, oh no, this could be bad, but it'll probably be okay. Right, and I'm in my twenties, I've always been healthy. Oh no, it looks like it might be bad. Oh no, it is bad, but it won't be that bad. Oh no, it is that bad, right? And you just sort of go through, through months of these tests and experiments and biopsies as you either like, you either exit or you like just get ever deeper into it.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Um, you know, at one point, I remember they thought, actually, oh no, you're okay. Um, but in any case, so I went, then I went through like the surgery to have it all removed and then the radiation treatment and then the sort of titration of the medicine to try to get you back to normal. And it just completely obliterated me. Uh, it was the first time in my life that I'd been just, just knocked off my feet and I couldn't, like I couldn't run, you know, like fifteen feet, right? Um, so that was a really tough emotional period for all kinds of reasons. You know, you're thinking about mortality in a real way for the first time in my late twenties. Um, I had just been married, you know, thinking about, well, now will I ever be able to have children? Like what, what? Your expectations on what life becomes are totally different.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  And so I went through that period and fortunately came out the other side and then it was really emotionally uplifting and psychologically powerful when, I guess it was two years after that first marathon. I think in that first marathon, I finished it in like two hours, forty-three minutes and like fifty-two seconds. And then like two years later, I ran the same marathon and finished it in like two hours, forty-three minutes and fifty seconds, or something like that. And it was incredibly powerful to suddenly feel like, in a way, that signal that I was through it. And so every year since then, I've, more or less every year since then, except for the years where I've had kids, I've tried to run the same marathon. That ties you back to the original story about running.

• 1:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, it's, I think, easy for folks to look at your bio or read about all the things you've accomplished and assume that it's just been one kind of home run after another, after another, aside from that kidnapping in northern Africa, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise of sorts. But I appreciate you sharing that. And to further sort of flesh out the picture just a little bit, could you tell us about a time when you felt, aside from that particular period, when you felt overwhelmed?

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Tim Ferriss?

  Or a darker period? Yeah, any of that and how you found your way out, or what you do in those circumstances?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Well, there've been, you know, my, my professional career in my, you know, the first six or seven years was, was not great.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  I, you know, so I, I finished school, I have that, that kind of messed up period where I, you know, go to Africa, I write for the Post, but it's, you know, it's a period of getting rejected by twenty jobs before I get hired at the Washington Monthly. So then there's like a moment of awesomeness, where for two years I'm editor of the Washington Monthly, going back to New York, playing guitar on the weekends. Um, but the Washington Monthly job is very much a two-year job. And the expectation when I finished was, like all previous editors in Washington Monthly, I would go on and have an awesome career in journalism. I finished, you know, I, I think I finished like September ninth, two thousand and eleven. Um, and after I finished, I had a really rough time. Um, I couldn't get hired. I, you know, I got rejected by twenty journalistic institutions. I was sure I was gonna

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  get hired at the New York Times, I didn't get hired at the New York Times, I was sure I was gonna get hired at the Washington Post, you know, I thought I had, um, it just, it didn't work. I ended up, I ended up as a fellow at the New America Foundation, which was fine. Um, but from roughly two thousand and one to two thousand and five, I couldn't, I couldn't get journalism going again. Um, and so in the summer of two thousand and five, I guess in two thousand and five, I was working in a magazine called Legal Affairs, which I will like and is really grateful to, but it wasn't, it was in New Haven, my girlfriend, who's not my wife, was in New York. Um, I, you know, I applied to law school, which is the way you get out of journalism, right, and the way you retract your life, right? If you're in your twenties and the career you're doing is not working, one great

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  way to retract your life is through law school. Uh, so I applied to law school and I got into NYU and I was literally set to go, um, I guess I would have matriculated in August of two thousand and five. Um, I think Wired wrote to me in July of two thousand and five, saying, hey, were you interested in being a senior editor? And so that summer, um, it was crazy, right? Cause my whole life is gonna, I know it's gonna hinge on this decision, right? Am I gonna stay in journalism? And, or am I gonna go to law school and then like do something completely different? Um, and the way it, you know, shook out, I remember the- I hadn't, I don't think I had been offered the Wired job, but I was pretty sure I was gonna get it. And so the day before I was doing NYU, I wrote to them and said, "No, I'm not going."

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  And then I prayed I would get the Wired job.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  And I did get it, and I started the next month. But it was, that was like, those were a couple of years where I was like, you know, did I make the right decision? Because remember, when I had been like a teenager, I hadn't expected to be a journalist, so I had all this self doubt about whether I had ended up in the wrong profession accidentally, where, because if you look at your life as, you know, the, when you're 25 and you think back to what would Nick have thought at 19, the funny turn into journalism, which now seems so propitious and so good, like the sort of the weird story where I'm kidnapped and I write the story and I get hired to Washington Monthly and it attracts me, like if you look at it from now, it looks like a really fortunate thing that those things happened. But if you're in your mid twenties and journalism isn't working, and you look at it and think,

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  wait, I wasn't supposed to be a journalist, I didn't want to be a journalist, so maybe that just all got me going on the wrong foot and I should have, like if I hadn't gone to Africa, I would be in a much better place. So, that was really complicated to think through and work through, and it ended up all working out really well, and I'm extremely happy where I am now. But that was, there was definitely a couple of years where I was totally adrift, where my, your peer group was doing much better than I was doing, and where I felt like I was in the wrong field.

• 1:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  How did Wired find you? Or how did, how did it come to pass that they reached out to you with that potential offer?

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  So, because I have a friend for whom I've had like a, like sort of amazing career overlap. There's a guy named Brendan Kerr, and he and I are exactly the same age. And I edited something he wrote at, when I was at the Washington Monthly, and he was at US News and World Report, and he wrote that at the Washington Monthly, and I edited it, and he liked the way I edited it. And so we became friends. And so then, he left US News and got hired at the New America Foundation, and then I got hired at the New America Foundation after him, and he had recommended me. And then he went to Wired, and he recommended me there. And so I got hired at Wired, and I recommended him to my book agent, and he ended up selling a book through that.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  And then he wrote for me at The New Yorker, he wrote for me at The Atavist, and he's got the current cover story in Wired. So we've had these like, amazing intertwined careers and friendship, it's been really terrific. And he's one of those people who... You know, with some people who are like the same age and in the same field, they're like competitive and maybe don't always want you to succeed. And for whatever reason, he and I have had a relationship where I've always only wanted him to succeed and he's only always wanted me to succeed. And so we've been extremely helpful to each other. And that's been, that's been great. And so look at the cover story of the next issue and Brendan's name is there and I'm super proud of it.

• 1:20:51Tim Ferriss?

  The karmic cycle continues. That's great.

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Tim Ferriss?

  I wanna, I wanna go back to the, whatever it was, 24 hour period where you've turned down this exploding offer slash expiring offer for law school, yet you haven't, yet you haven't yet been offered the job at Wired. Can you walk us through the, the dinner, the conversation in your head, the sort of hours preceding notifying law school that you were not going to be a truculent?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Tim Ferriss?

  Because that is, that strikes me as terrifying. That seems completely terrifying.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  I mean, the game theory was both a little trickier and in some ways easier because there was a third option.

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  I had written, my grandfather, Paul Nitze, had died and George Kennan had both died in early 2004. And I had written an essay about their parallel lives. And so I had also decided that maybe I would write a book about the two of them. And so I had a proposal for a book. So I had three things that I could do with my life. And I was going to do some combination of one of those three things or two of those three things. I knew there wouldn't be time to do all three. You can't go to law school, work for Wired and write a book. And so the law school offer was going to explode mid-August. The Wired option, I was going to hear about relatively soon.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  And the book, I think I had sent a draft of a proposal to my agent. And so either that was going to become a reality or not a reality. And so in some ways, the decision was if I go to law school, even if I don't get the Wired job, I still maybe have a shot at the book. So the odds were like, the odds were okay.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  But I, you know, what do I remember about that day? I was in Maine up at a place my family has up near Acadian National Park, where I spent summers through my childhood, which is like a very reflective, wonderful place and a place where I always feel good and confident. And maybe it was being there, maybe it was...

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  You know, I, there was some unease, some deep unease about going to law school. Some sense that I was giving up, some sense of, like, you know, it was the, the weak choice to make. Um, I don't exactly remember, but I do remember being terrified when I wrote them and said no and thinking, well, this is, you know, you came up with a pretty good backup here, Nick. You came up with a pretty good plan. NYU's a pretty awesome law school to go to. It's three years and you're, you know, you graduate, you're guaranteed a really well-paying, successful career in life in New York. Um, and you're throwing that away. Um, but I went for it.

• 1:23:34Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank God for that, I suppose.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Well, who knows?

• 1:23:37Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, who knows, right? In the parallel universe.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, who knows?

• 1:23:42Tim Ferriss?

  Who knows? It seems to have worked out.

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  But I do think about that a lot, right? Like, that was, like, there are very few moments where your life entirely hinges upon a specific decision, right? Like, the choice of who you marry, but that's not really a, a, a choice. You know, it's not so much like that. Like, I, I can't think of any other day that's close to it. Um, I mean, I guess the choice to write Pam McCarthy at The New Yorker, um, had a, had a big influence. Um, you know, there was the choice to leave The New Yorker to accept this wire job. That was a pretty easy choice, you know, towards The New Yorker, but you're going to be at a junior wire, you definitely take it. Um, so, there, there are a few moments, but that was definitely the day where I made the choice that had the biggest effect. But you don't get to, you know, live life multiple ways, so it seems like the right choice. Everything

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  worked out as well as it possibly could have, but who knows?

• 1:24:32Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, well, Nick, I want to be respectful of your time, so I just have just a, a few more questions for you.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:24:38Tim Ferriss?

  And these are, these are my, some of my usual questions that I like to ask. Uh, the, the first is, what book or books have you given most as gifts to other people besides your own?

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, uh, that I can answer. So this year, so each of the last two years, I've given one book to a bunch of people. And this year is a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism is True. And it's a story about mindfulness and about the science of Buddhism and the current neuroscience about how our minds work, making the argument that, you know, the things people have said about mindfulness, meditation, and the way it changes your capacity to empathize with other people and to sort of break out of the tribalism that we're all locked into, the things that Buddhism has said about that turn out to be scientifically correct. And here's a story about why. Wonderful book. Robert Wright is one of the smartest writers I've ever read. His book, Non-Zero, is among my five favorite books of all time.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  So that book came out recently and I gave that to my closest friend and my family. The year before, I gave a book by Larissa McFarquhar called Strangery's Drowning, which is a story about people who make extraordinary moral choices, like the choice to adopt 23 children and bring them into your lives. You just make crazy choices and why they make those choices. And Larissa is one of the smartest writers at The New Yorker. Everything she writes is absolutely brilliant. And the book is brilliant, beginning to end. It's sort of 10 discreet chapters about people who make choices like that. So I gave Larissa's book last year and Robert Wright's book this year.

• 1:26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. Just wrote those down.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're good. Totally worth reading, both of them.

• 1:26:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, they're, they're on the, on the to-read list, which is always on the bottom right-hand corner of my notes that I take during these conversations.

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. That's cool.

• 1:26:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right, just a few more. Uh, let's see, I'm picking, picking here. In the last, in the last few years, could be five years, could be 10, could be two, what behavior, new behavior or belief has most improved, positively impacted your life, would you say? Or has just had a very significant impact?

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Oh, having kids. Um, you know, so my kids are nine, seven, and four now, and... Thinking about the responsibilities one has to your children who will outlive you and who in certain ways will carry on your personality, you carry on your life after you're gone, thinking through my responsibilities to them, how the choices I make or will be viewed by them when they're older, thinking about both how I can help them thrive and be the people they want to become and also how I can be somebody who when I'm gone they admire, those are deeply profound things and, you know, I had no capacity, but I was

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  like to have children before I had children, like none, but it's psychologically profound in every way, so definitely that.

• 1:27:41Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any advice or books or anything else that you found particularly helpful as a parent?

• 1:27:50Speaker 00

  I don't, you know, I don't think I've actually read a book on parenting that changed my philosophy of parenting. I mean, there are a couple of books about how to get your kids to sleep, which is like useful technical stuff. I haven't read, you know, that's interesting. I don't think I've read a book on parenting where it's like, oh, I should raise my child that way, or I should talk to them this way. It's been much more just do it and just thinking through, oh wait, that wasn't the right way to talk about this, or, oh yes, let's try to set them, you know, set them up for success in this way, or like, let's let them do this, or let's go do this with them.

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a, you mentioned the why Buddhism is true. Do you have a meditation or mindfulness practice?

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  I don't. I kind of think the running is the substitute for that. And when I'm running, I do, it's very much, I don't think it's that dissimilar from mindfulness meditation because when I run, I guess there are two things I'd say to that. One is the running. So, you know, I do very much try to, I either listen to podcasts, or if I'm not listening to podcasts, I'm thinking about like trying to clear my mind or thinking through specific things and trying to concentrate on it or paying attention to what I see or what I hear. So I think that's reasonably close to mindfulness meditation. And then the second thing is I do Alexander Technique, which is a technique I learned from playing guitar, just for how one positions one's body, and like aligning your head to make sure it's straight with your back and making sure your feet are solid on the ground. That was something I did when

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  I was having a lot of wrist pain from playing guitar too much. And I think that's a sort of a centering technique that also plays a similar role. But I have, you know, I have not figured out how to work meditation into my life.

• 1:29:30Tim Ferriss?

  The Alexander Technique, is that something that you use while you're sitting in a chair at the office throughout the day? When does that tend?

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's something I think about, of course, as soon as I say it, and I find myself like adjusting myself in the chair. Yeah, it's something where whenever I'm kind of out of position, or I can feel like something's not aligned, I, you know, straighten up, you know, try to think about it when I wash my hands, right? I just do just, okay, make sure my back is aligned, my head is aligned. And it's something that I think has prevented a lot of injuries. I almost have never gotten hurt while running, even though, you know, I'm running a distance that often will get people hurt, and I think it's partly due to posture training.

• 1:30:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, just, uh, just two or three more. And this, this is sometimes a question that stumps people, but you've been pretty fast on your feet, so if you need to buy some time or pass, that's fine as well. If you could have a, if you had, this is really metaphorically speaking, a giant billboard on which you could put a word, a question, a quote, someone else's quote, a question, anything really, a message to get out to millions or billions of people, what might you put on that billboard?

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  You're starting a whole nother chain of events that can lead to a really positive outcome. And so his point when he was making the statement, which is more or less that, is... Even if things seem like they're going in the wrong direction, or things seem really wrong, like you can stop and you can do something small, that's right, and then that will begin another chain of events that will lead to something really good. And so I often think about that when I'm thinking about whatever the next thing I'm going to do is or the next moment is, right, you're beginning a new chain of events, a new chain of events that will lead you in the right direction, or you're continuing in a good chain. So it was that idea from Kenan that was based on his historical studies that I think about a lot.

• 1:31:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good one. Well, Nick, this has been a lot of fun and

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been great talking to you.

• 1:32:06Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for taking the time. Do you have any final words, any ask of the audience, recommendation, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up?

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  No, I love talking to you. I mean, the thing I want, I'd love people to subscribe to Wired, that'd be great. If everybody subscribes to Wired, I'll be a very happy man. You know, journalism is a complicated business, particularly at this moment, so we would love your support.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  And if they want to say hi on social, NX

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  I'm on social, I talk to people all the time. I'm at NXThompson on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook, there's a private page, public page. I love talking to people, I love hearing feedback. I'm very active in comments and all that, DMs are open, so I'm available, I'm around, I'm on the internet.

• 1:32:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Nick, thank you again for taking the time. This was a really fun conversation.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I thought we covered a lot of interesting ground. Thanks for your awesome questions and probing. That was really, that was really fun.

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, of course, my pleasure. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything, Wired, the books, resources, and the Alexander Technique, among other things, in the show notes, as per usual, for this episode and every other episode, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:33:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:34:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. And I'd heard about Peloton over and over again, but I ended up getting a Peloton bike and the whole system after I saw my buddy Kevin Rose. I've known him forever, some of you know. And he showed up at my gate at my house a while back and he looked fantastic. And I asked him, I said, "Dude, you look great. What the hell have you been up to?"

• 1:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  Because he's always doing a weird diet or another, but it only lasts like a week or two. So he always regresses to the mean after like 75 beers. And he said, "I've been doing Peloton five days a week." Now that caught my attention because Kevin does nothing five days a week. And you know I love you, Kevin. But it really piqued my curiosity, ended up getting a system, and it's become an integral part of my week. I love it and I really didn't expect to love it at all because I find cycling really boring usually. But Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule or making it to a studio with some type of commute, etc. New classes are added every day and this includes options led by a lead

• 1:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  New York City instructors in your own living room. You can even livestream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors or find your own favorite class on demand. And in fact, Kevin and I rarely do live classes and you can compete with your friends, which is also fun. Kevin, I'm coming after you. But we usually just use classes on demand. I really like Matt Wilpers and his high intensity training sessions that are shorter, like 20 minutes. And I think Kevin's favorite is Alex and everyone seems to have their favorite instructor or you can select by music, duration, and so on. Each Peloton bike includes a 22-inch HD touchscreen, performance tracking metrics. I think that, along with the real-time leaderboard, are the main reasons that this caught my

• 1:36:17Tim Ferriss?

  attention when cycling never had caught my attention before. It's really pretty stunning what they've done with the user interface to keep your attention. The belt drive is quiet and it's smaller than you would expect, so it can fit in a living room or an office. I actually have it in a large closet, believe it or not, and it fits with no problem. So Peloton is offering all of you guys, listeners of the Tim Ferriss Show, a special offer, and it is actually special. Visit onepeloton, that's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N, onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM, all caps, T-I-M, at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Now, you might say, meh, accessories?

• 1:37:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:37:45Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, onepeloton.com, code TIM.

• 1:37:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:38:34Tim Ferriss?

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