The Atlantic’s Nick Thompson Is The Fastest Runner In Publishing: On Setting Age-Group Records, Beating Cancer, & Why Media Must Survive AI

Nick Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic, an elite marathoner, and author of the memoir The Running Ground. This conversation explores how running reveals our deepest inherited patterns. We discuss Nick's journey from getting fired from CBS in under an hour to running The Atlantic, reconciling with his brilliant father's tragic collapse, setting age-group records at 50, and why AI threatens the very nature of reality. We also discuss why the simple act of running becomes a portal for understanding your deepest patterns. Nick offers profound lessons in post-traumatic growth. And he shares them generously. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉🏼https://www.on.com/richroll AG1: Get their best offer ever – Welcome Kit, D3+K2, Flavor Sampler, plus a FREE bonus gift ($126 in value!)⁠https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com Prolon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift👉🏼https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll The Sprouting Company: Get 10% off and a free copy of “The Sprout Book” with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.thesproutingcompany.com/pages/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  The thesis of the book is that because running is so simple, you can go running just you go out the door. You can compete with people, you can not compete with people. When you compete with people, you run on the exact same course as the best people in the world at the exact same time. You don't do that in any other sport. You can track your inner growth. You can see how fast you're getting. You can see whether you're declining. When you succeed, it's you, and when you fail, it's you. You can understand aging through running really well. And because of the simplicity and because of the time it gives you to focus, you start to think through really deep stuff. Why does running do that? A, it's the daily practice. It's the habits it builds. B, it's the time alone in your head, in motion, outside. If you want to understand yourself, and you want to kind of have more clarity on your life, it's not a bad idea to go for a run.

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Really glad you're here because let's just say I've got a lot on my mind. I've got a few things I'd like to share, a lot to process, because it's just, it's been a hell of a month. One of the most exhausting periods of my entire adult life, but also, I gotta say, the most rewarding. If you tuned in to Roll On the other week, then you already know that I've been going through some family stuff, doing my best to help manage the chaos and the unpredictability of my aging parents, enduring the process of getting my mom in a memory care unit due to her dementia.

• 2:42Rich Roll?

  And I really underestimated the toll all of this has taken on me, on my energy levels, on my emotional equanimity, my sanity. But like I said the other week, it's also been pretty revelatory, because, I don't know about you, maybe you can relate, I have expended a lot of effort over a great deal of time trying to outrun my past, to distance myself from people, from environments, that I associate, in my mind at least, with unhappy times. And I've crafted this whole story around that. And it's confusing, because

• 3:24Rich Roll?

  on some level, by compartmentalizing all of it, by pushing it aside, this has been an effective defense mechanism for survival for many years. And also, this lever for growth, because I think I needed to get away from the people who raised me in order to build a life I wanted, a life that I love and that I'm proud of. But at the same time, That very same defense mechanism, the avoidance, that's what keeps me stuck, stuck in those old stories, stuck in old patterns of behavior, stuck in resentment, which of course prevents me from being able to do what I really aspire

• 4:09Rich Roll?

  to do, which is to just let go of all of it and love more unconditionally. And so I guess what I'm saying is that by going back to DC recently, by embracing my past, my parents, by showing up for them in service, that I am making peace with all of it, which is allowing me to let go of all the stuff that has been holding me back. It's been really productive in helping me to liberate myself from those stories so that I am no longer stuck and I can now continue to grow. And the point I'm trying to make is that I tried to outrun my past, only to realize

• 4:49Rich Roll?

  that, yes, it's true, it always does find a way to catch up to you, which provides us with a choice. You can either quicken your pace and continue trying to outrun it, or you can decide to suck it up, to stop running, to do an about-face and just fucking face it and figure out how to make peace with it. So if you're stuck, this is how you get unstuck, because you can't grow until you reckon with the hard wiring that has always historically held you back. This is my experience, and it also happens to be the experience of today's guest, a guy who happens to be very good at running.

• 5:34Rich Roll?

  He's a 229 marathoner and an age group world record holder in the 50K, who decided to use his running for more than just high performance, as a vehicle to better understand his past so he could better understand himself and become a better man.

• 5:53Rich Roll?

  In addition to standing out for his athletic feats, Nick Thompson also happens to be world-class at more than just running. A journalist by trade, Nick came up at The New Yorker under legendary editor David Remnick. He went on to become editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine and is now CEO of The Atlantic. He's a public intellectual and a writer on a wide range of topics, including technology, politics, media, and foreign policy. So today, we're going to talk running, of course, but the real focus is dads and sons. How messy that relationship can be and how running served Nick to better understand his complicated father so he could be a better one to his boys, which also happens to be

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  the focus of Nick's new memoir, The Running Ground, which I will say is required reading for anyone who runs, but also anyone and everyone still convinced they can outrun their past. Nick, man, it's great to have you here. You have the dubious honor of being the first guest in our brand-new New York City outpost here.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 7:05Rich Roll?

  Hopefully, everything goes smoothly, but you're a curious figure. On the one hand, you're this public intellectual. You're also a high-level executive CEO of The Atlantic and, at the same time, this insanely fast runner. You're an elite athlete and you're also a dad. You've got three boys, right?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Three boys.

• 7:25Rich Roll?

  And that is a difficult equation to balance, I would imagine.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  There are definitely some trade-offs and stresses and some moments where it seems like maybe the time I spent being an elite athlete maybe isn't worth it.

• 7:38Rich Roll?

  As much as your book is sort of memoir-focused, it's also full of all of these lessons that you've learned, not just from life, but from running. And core to it is this idea of the simplicity of running, like the simplicity paradox of running. Because of its simplicity, it becomes this incredible crucible for growth in all areas of life. So maybe expand upon that concept.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  It's kind of how I begin the book. I mean, the thesis, not like there's really a thesis, it's kind of a story, but the thesis of the book is that because running is so simple... It's just you, right? You can, you and I, you know, you could, you know, you can go running, just go out the door, right? You don't need a racket, you don't need a ball, you don't need a pool, right? And you can compete with people, you cannot compete with people. When you compete with people, you run on the exact same course as the best people in the world at the exact same time. You don't do that in any other sport. You know, like you don't play tennis against Yannick Sintra on the same court at the same time. And so it's this amazing sport that means you can track your inner growth, right? You can see how fast you're getting, you can see whether you're declining. When you succeed, it's you, and when you fail, it's you.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  You can understand aging through running really well. And because of the simplicity and because of the time it gives you to focus, you start to think through really deep stuff. And so the reason I wrote the book is that I was having this question about why I had, I kept trying to chew through this question of, I ended up going much faster in my 40s and I have come 30s and 20s, I was trying to figure out why. And it led me to these really deep realizations about my father, right? And about my cancer, about all kinds of things. And so I thought, wow, like running like opens up this extremely important psychology. And that is what led me into writing the book, which is traces my journey, these lessons for myself, and then other runners.

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  What is it about running beyond that, though, that it, that it becomes this portal for you to make sense of all these other areas of your life?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Well, so this is, I actually don't know the answer to this. I don't know whether running is a really good portal, or whether like anything that you study as closely as I've studied running is a pretty good portal, right?

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  One of the models for the book is William Finnegan's Barbarian Days about surfing, right? The first review of this book said it was Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for Runners, right? The idea is, like, I happen to know a lot about running and have thought a lot about some of the hard things in life and like use running as a metaphor and a way to get into there. But I do know that running has opened these pathways for me and for me to understand these things.

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  I think what's unique about running, though, is the solo aspect of it in addition to the simplicity. So it provides that space for introspection, but...

• 10:18Rich Roll?

  It's this scenario that you set up where you can't beat yourself. And so the harder you go at it, the more you confront. You can't outrun yourself. So at some point, in the interior space, in that liminal space that you enter, when it's just you and you're in that kind of extended flow experience, you're faced with your frailties and your character defects. Like, all of these things percolate up to the surface in the same way they would if you were on a silent meditation retreat. And I think there's nothing like running that can give you that kind of clarity.

• 11:03Rich Roll?

  And with that clarity, you're then presented with this choice and this opportunity of whether you want to confront these things and heal them and transcend them.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think that, I mean, that's very well said. I do think that running is unquestionably my meditation. And it's like where I focus on my breath and I focus on the sounds outside me. And I focus on, if I'm running here in Dumbo, I'm focusing on the sounds of the city. If I'm in the mountains, I'm focusing on the sounds of the mountain. And the clarity you get from that kind of repetitive action, and I think the physical motion, like being outside, physical motion, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, triggers things in your brain that are very hard to trigger through other mechanisms.

• 11:46Rich Roll?

  There's a stoic aspect to it as well. I'm going to be interested to hear what your conversation with Brian was like. Because I know you just did it. But like, you know, this idea that it's a template for discipline and gives your life a certain structure and a healthy appreciation for your lack of control and all of these attachments that we have in the modern world.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I think that running and Stoicism. Can be very closely intertwined. And I think in my mind, they are intertwined, right? And you, you go and you run, right? And it's like a disciplined act that I think encourages other disciplined act. You learn very quickly in running that like you can control yourself, but you can't control anybody else, right? You can't control the weather. The weather is extremely important to how fast you run, right? Like, but all you can do is you focus on yourself, you prepare yourself. And if you do it every day, you do get better, right? And these are very stoic lessons. Now, there's some non-stoic things, right? Like, I still trace Strava segments, which I don't think is a very stoic thing to do.

• 12:52Rich Roll?

  And there's more eastern aspects to it. Like, you know, you're, you're, you're forced to really be present with yourself. Uh, and there's a, there's a sort of Buddhist quality as well. Um, and I think what distinguishes, you know, your story from maybe a book that Ryan would write about running is that this is a, this is a spiritual journey, you know? All the way to, you know, discussing ideas like self-transcendence. I mean, I was here a year ago when you reached out to me and you were at the 3100. You're like, come down here and watch it. I didn't, I guess I didn't realize then that this was in part research for your book.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it didn't, I don't know if it started as research or whatever. But back to the, the, um, the sort of the, the spiritual association dissociation. It ties a little bit back to what we were talking about when you look at your watch, you don't look at your watch. Like, when you run, there's this incredible balance between like, sometimes you want to be totally present, right? Like, you want to be completely focused, right? And you want to be aware of your breath and aware of your step and aware of everything that's happening in your body. And then there's times where you want to be completely absent. You want to be just floating above, right? And letting it go. And what's amazing is that in the same race, in the same run, you can have the exact opposite need, right? And you can go back and forth. And there are times where you want to be present, right? And there are times where you want to dissociate.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And that is another like element of running that I don't know whether it exists in other sports, right? Like, when you're playing soccer, you're like, you always want to be present, right? You always have to be present, right? When you're running, you Sometimes want to be present, you sometimes want to be absent.

• 14:26Rich Roll?

  Do you feel like now that you're much more in the ultra world than you were before, that that is even a more, like a more prominent kind of aspect of it, the disassociation aspect? Because I just know from my own training where, you know, I would go out like all day. And early in the season, when you know, a longer, a longer session would feel like, oh my God, this is like going on forever. Whereas after a while, like time bends, your relationship with time is different. And there is this disassociation where it feels like it all happened very quickly. Like you are kind of out of your body in a certain way. And there's something unique about endurance sports that, that can put you in that,

• 15:11Rich Roll?

  put you in that like transcendent mindset that other sports don't.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I love that. I love that feeling, right? And I seek that feeling and like you can't, you go run three miles around the park, you can't get there, right? And, you know, but you go run 50 miles in the woods and you definitely can't get there, right? And you kind of have to get there to finish the 50 miles and not turn around after six.

• 15:32Rich Roll?

  You could use running as a, as a practice of self-transcendence, but you can also use it to run away from everything in your life.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:40Rich Roll?

  Like, you know, and couch it as like, well, this is my hobby, or this is like what gives my life meaning, when actually it's just a elaborate denial mechanism.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So, I mean, running can be, running it like, I write this book and like, obviously I love running. I think running has done great things to my life. I think running does great things for people in general. But like, it can totally make you self-absorbed, right? It can make you run away, it can maybe help you process your problems, right? Like there are times where, you know, I'm really upset and I will go and like run hard at the track, right? More when I was young. But for some people, that's a very healthy thing to do. But for other people, it's not a particularly healthy thing to do. It can make you like super selfish. It can make, it can wreck marriages, right? It can like make you a crappy parent, right? Like because you're spending all this time running.

• 16:23Rich Roll?

  There is a certain self-obsession, you know, that's pretty rampant.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Right. Like what is the great joke? It's a, if you're at a cocktail party, how do you find out how fast someone ran in the last minute?

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  They'll tell you, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Right, like.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  You don't have to ask.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  You don't have to ask, right? So it's a, it can have a lot of other things.

• 16:36Rich Roll?

  How do you keep that in check for yourself? Like, how do you gauge that?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  You know, there are times where I like, sometimes I just try to think of like, what would my wife think if she was like listening to this conversation? Would she just be like, shut up, right? Like, you watch conversations with runners, like.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  How long it takes until they say how fast they are, right? And it's kind of weird.

• 16:55Rich Roll?

  This is why it's good that you live here and not in Boulder.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And you want to like, you observe and you can observe other people and like, you don't want to ever be the person who's like injecting that into a conversation unnecessarily.

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  That, to me, is evidence of how important the identity piece is. Like, this is who I am and I need you to know that like I'm the person who can do this, this and this.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:20Rich Roll?

  And that's an unhealthy attachment. Like, you've crafted a whole persona around this that's based upon

• 17:26Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 17:26Rich Roll?

  Performances, you know, and doesn't really mean anything. And, you know, the only people who care are like other runners and they don't even really care. It's really just about you and you.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:37Rich Roll?

  And there is something unhealthy about it. You know, it's, it evinces a certain insecurity also. Like, you know, like my whole sense of self-worth is based upon, you know, these numbers.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And the funniest thing about it with runners is like these ranges where no one cares, right? So.

• 17:53Rich Roll?

  Like, no one cares. Like, you know, in like, uh, social media profiles when the people put their PR times and stuff like?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Like, so I remember, like, I was so obsessed with breaking 240, right? And to me, like, a 239 was amazing and a 242 was terrible, right? But to the rest of the world, A, for like 99% of the world, nobody cares at all.

• 18:12Rich Roll?

  Way more than 99%.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  But like, even, okay, so even for the 10th of a percent that cares at all about running times, either 242 and 239 are exactly the same because they're both fast, or they're exactly the same because they're both slow, right? There's like, no one, like, the people who run between 237 and 245 care about that. But if you're faster than 237, you think it's ridiculously slow. If you're slower than 245, you think it's absurdly fast. And most people don't care at all.

• 18:37Rich Roll?

  At all.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  At all. Um, but there is a difference between 245 and 229.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, right, that's, I've spent a lot of time trying to like figure out that difference.

• 18:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and, and you were able to get there. I mean, that's like, that's so fast.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so, and that's interesting less because, I mean, the interesting thing about my improvement, right? Okay, so I run that 243 in 2007. And then from 2007 until 2018, 11 years, a couple of interesting things have happened. A, I never get injured, which is an interesting story about parenthood. Like, I literally don't miss a workout. And then B, I never get faster, right? I run like almost exactly the same speed, right? And so. You know, it's like 243, 243, 245, 242, 240. Like, it's just ridiculous. Then, in 2017, my father dies. And then 2018, I get this email from Nike. And they're like, hey, you know, we're starting a new program where we train, you know, civilians with elite coaches. Would you want to try it?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  At this point, I'm the editor in chief of Wired. I'd gone from Wired, I'd spent six years at The New Yorker. I'm now back at Wired in the top job. Obviously, it wasn't a random selection, right? Like, Nike wasn't reaching out to the editor of Hub of Wired, just like, oh, we like pulled the name out of a hat and it was you, Nick. But in any case, I agreed to do it. And then they start training me more intently and in really smart ways. And then I start getting much faster.

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  Shocking, that when you got, you know, good coaching advice and you followed it, that you would get better.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  And, you know, we were talking about like the mental limits and like what happens when you look at your watch. And so one of the things, so I start with these three guys. Brett Kirby, who's the sports scientist, who's written all these research papers, trains like Yipchoge. Joe Holder, he's this like great personal trainer. And his other clients are like Virgil Abloh and Naomi Campbell, while he's like training me. And then Steve Finley, who's the main person I work with. And Finley, he interviews me, calls me up in the summer, early summer of 2018. And he's like, hey, you know, how old are you? I'm 43 years old. Okay, what do you want to run? My god, like, if I could break 243, that would be awesome. He's like, well, I kind of think you'd go faster. And we have this conversation. I interviewed him later, and he's like, it was clear that you had the talent to go

• 20:50Speaker 01

  much faster than 243. But it was also clear that you were like a little afraid of those paces, that you were like a six-minute mile, running 240 is like 610 per mile. And a six-minute mile is like a 237. And I was clearly, he said, terrified of going faster than six-minute miles. And so one of the things he did is he had me start running short intervals, like 200 meters and 400 meters, at 450 pace.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And there's something about seeing like 450 pace on my watch that he thought would trigger less fear of running a 550 for a marathon.

• 21:21Rich Roll?

  Your mind and your body are getting used to what it feels like to run at that pace. And it doesn't feel like scary or like you're in too much in the red.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yep. And so he's trying to basically force this, and he didn't tell me this at the time. He's trying to kind of force this mental transition and so that I can like, as he would say, step into this younger version of myself. And so I start to increase my mileage. I start to do these workouts on the track. I start to do more focused tempo workouts. I start to eat a little bit better. I start listening to your podcast more. Like I do all these things that improve your physiology.

• 21:54Rich Roll?

  Beet root juice.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I do beet juice every day.

• 21:56Rich Roll?

  Definitely works.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Weird, but you know, it definitely works. And so I do all these things and then I run a 238 in the fall of 18. So I've been training with him for three months. I'm like, oh my God. And then I run 234 at the next Boston Marathon. And then I run 229 at the next Chicago Marathon. And then I get way faster and COVID hits. And so that's where it stops.

• 22:18Rich Roll?

  All the marathons are canceled, right? Right again, like, you know, it's another rug pull for you.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Who knows? I mean, yes, but you know, who knows?

• 22:27Rich Roll?

  But you end up doing that Prospect Park Marathon like on your own, right?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  Everyone's doing their backyard, whatever.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I run a backyard marathon by myself. And then I run a 50K where I set the American record for my age, which was very cool.

• 22:40Rich Roll?

  So, American record for like 45 to 49?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:45Rich Roll?

  In the 50K. And you ran like, what, like 306 or something like that?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  304.

• 22:50Rich Roll?

  304. And does that still stand?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:53Rich Roll?

  That's so fucking fast.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It's cool, right?

• 22:55Rich Roll?

  It's cool. And you were 44 when you ran 229?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00Rich Roll?

  Right? There's a lot in there about, you know, age-defying athletic feats. I mean, I was 44 when I did Epic 5. Like, you know, that was probably my, you know, peak physical year. And being older than you, like, the idea that you could do, you could excel at all athletically in your 40s was like, you know, insane. And that narrative has changed so much, you know, and you're, you know, obviously an example of that. It's interesting. And part of what you talk about in the book is you're challenging these mindset limiters that we have around like what we're capable of. And running is just a, you know, a vehicle or a metaphor for this in all areas of life, right?

• 23:39Rich Roll?

  Our bodies are, you know, age declining, obviously. Uh, but that doesn't mean that we can't have like what you call these rolling peaks.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:46Rich Roll?

  So, explain that concept.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the idea is that like, I used to think it was just a mountain up, you know, like until you're 28 years old, you get stronger and stronger. Like you improve linearly and then you decline from 28 until death, right? And maybe that's kind of a little bit true, probably not at 28. Um, but I then started to think, well, wait. You can actually get smarter about it, right? You can learn a new way to train, or you can learn a new thing to eat, or you can learn something different. And then, instead of it being a descent, it's like actually rolling peaks, right? And you go down, and maybe you get a little bit worse, but then you get better. Maybe you get a little worse and you get better. And I'm still clearly like, there's a lot physiologically happening in my body that's slowing me down, but I can do a lot to go the other direction. So I had this conversation, the most interesting version, with my mother.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And she's now 77, and she's like, "My, my reflexes are getting worse." Like, just, you know, it's terrible. Like, every day my reflexes get worse. I was like, "Mom, they don't have to. Like, they could be getting, I mean, they are getting worse, but you can go the other way." And so, I like got her out on the porch, I was with her for a week this summer, and I would like throw tennis balls to her, right? And she'd like catch them to the side, and I'd like throw them like a little further. And you could tell her reflex is getting better. Like, she's getting better at catching the tennis balls by the fourth or fifth day. And the lesson was the same as my running. Like, yes, your reflexes are going to get worse. You are 77 years old. You know, your reflexes probably start to climb when you're 23 or 24, which is why tennis players peak younger than other athletes. But that said, you can work on it.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And you can identify the thing that is pushing you backwards, and you can push against it, right? You can't solve all of it, but you gain wisdom, you gain physiological, there are physiological benefits that you get, and there are ways you can counter it. And, you know, yes, I'm declining. Yes, there are a lot of things about running, I'm now 50, that are harder than they were when I was 44, but I can still push back against it.

• 25:37Rich Roll?

  There's also something about understanding what your strengths are when you age, and what the weaknesses are that are gonna kind of decline a little bit more precipitously. Like, Arthur Brooks talks about like the ...the ability to kind of synthesize information better.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  All right, it's like static intelligence, fluid intelligence versus fluid and fixed.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And those who kind of hang on to the fixed intelligence too hard are missing the opportunity to lean into the fluid intelligence piece and also on the self obsession piece to like make yourself, oh, now you're in kind of more of a mentor role and you have a lot to give other people and you can find meaning in different ways. But in the purely athletic context as a runner, you can continue to develop your endurance capacity as your ability to, you know, maintain a top speed is going to decline. And so you enter into the ultra world, right? And as this now very fast and very experienced marathoner, you're tackling the 50s and the

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  100, you know, like this is like a whole different world, but it's just, you know, a blank canvas for you. And what's the difference like in those worlds for you?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  So I start, I run my first ultra as a 50K, but 50K is not really an ultra technically.

• 26:51Rich Roll?

  It's a marathon with a little tag on it.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:53Rich Roll?

  You know, basically.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I was so scared.

• 26:55Rich Roll?

  And you were doing it, you were pacing Des Linden, like just for people that are watching or listening, like this is the level that you're at. And she, what, like went 258 or something?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  She set the world record. I signed up for the race to be one of her pacers and then she got too fast and I asked if I could still run it even if I was a few minutes slower. Right, so I run that and then I decided I'm going to do 50 milers. And, but I decided I'm going to run 50 milers, kind of the way a marathoner runs them, I'm going to run for pace, I'm going to worry about like how long it takes me to pick up the goo.

• 27:22Rich Roll?

  You can't do that.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  Can't really, can't really do that.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  For someone who was like as experienced as me, I went, I ran my first 50 miler at Tunnel Hill when I was, I want to say 47. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to set the American record in the 50 mile, right? And I'm going to like, I'm going to wear my super shoes, I have to run 640 pace, I'm totally manageable. And I like make my plan and I get everything ready. And then I wake up the morning of the race and there's like an inch of snow on the ground. I was like, wait, what? Now the obvious, what you should do in those figures?

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  Super shoes and snow.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  So what I should have done is I should have put on a pair of like trail shoes, right? Or like maybe run in my trainers, I don't even know what I had in my bag. Certainly if I was going to wear the super shoes, I should just like reset the goals a little bit, right? Like you would think this guy who's been running for a long time. But instead I go out there like a marathoner. And then the, the worst thing that happens is You know, I hold pace, I run well, but it's totally predictable. You know, I think it's like mile thirty-one, thirty-two, I'm on track, but I like slip in the snow while getting a goo, I fall, if something happens to my hand, and then by mile thirty-seven, like, everything's falling apart. And then I drop out, right? And I remember, I get into this tent, at mile, there's an aid station, and I get in the tent, and I put on the, you know, blanket, I start drinking the hot cocoa, and I'm like,

• 28:39Speaker 01

  you know, what am I doing? Like, I should, I should probably keep going, right? Like, I was weirdly, like, I sit in the tent for like ten minutes, my Achilles hurts, and I'm like, oh, man, this is terrible. And then, like, part of me has, like, the marathoner's mentality, like, well, you're clearly, like, the same thing that made me drop out of that race at mile twenty-three, I'm not gonna break three hours, I'm gonna drop out. And I was like, you know, I tried to sit the American record, I'm not gonna get it, like, I'll, there'll be another chance, like, let's just get out. And part of me is like, what are you doing, man? Like, you're in third place, like, you've been sitting here for fifteen minutes and no one's gone by, right? Like, you know, there are all these guys you meet at the, and women that you meet the night before, and they're like, they're gonna be out there for twenty-four hours, running a hundred mile there, like, just get out and run with them, right? Like, that's why you're here, right? Like, what's the point of ultras?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And I dropped out, and I, like, you know, a friend of mine, like, drove back, cheered another friend on. It was so late. And then I, like, went back home, and I, like, I remember, I remember being at home, I go for a bike ride with my older kids, and, uh, I'm, like, looking at my watch, I'm like, oh, you see, I was like, oh, my god, like, the guy I had dinner with the night before is finishing now, right? And I should've just, you know, like, the point is, you're supposed to keep going, like, that's why you do these ultras, and I didn't realize that. But I learned that, right? And I learned that in ultras, you go up, you go down, right? You have moments of despair, you have moments where, like, things hurt, like, yeah, you have moments where you're convinced you're injured, sometimes you do get injured. And since then, you know, I've had terrible moments in ultras, but I've always, I've always finished.

• 30:07Rich Roll?

  But what it symbolizes for me is this journey or this growth arc that you're on of shedding the competitive aspects of running or the internal competitive nature of yourself and realizing that there is this other opportunity for growth within running that you've been missing all along.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 30:29Rich Roll?

  And you pepper in the book like these stories of these other runners who have had analogous experiences with running and setbacks and ultimately find a way to reframe their relationship with running in a way that makes their lives actually much more meaningful than they were when their relationship with it was about competition and performance.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, so what I did, the book was it's like a super challenging structural problem. And so at some point, I should do like a journalism class on it. But I had the notion that I was going to write about my father's life. I had the notion that I was going to write about my life. And I had the notion that I was going to write about other runners. And you start the project, you don't know what other runners you're going to write about. You talk to lots of people and you figure out who's going to fit in. And then you start to like, oh, this person's story is amazing. This person's story is interesting. And then, OK, so now I have all these stories. But you have to make it work chronologically. So my first drafts, I had other runners kind of interspersed whenever they came in.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And so there would be like a section on Runner A here and then section on Runner A later. And then I eventually decided, OK, no, wait. I'm going to just do full profiles of these runners and I'm going to put them in when they entered my life. I have five character sketches and they're each people who cross into my life at a certain point. So I tell their stories when that happens in my life. So it allowed me to keep a chronological structure while adding them in. And then with my father, I kind of do this trick where I put

• 32:04Speaker 01

  His life, you can't have his life chronologically because then it all happens in the first third of the book. And so what I do is I overlay his time at Andover, my time at Andover, his time at Stanford, my time at Stanford. And then I put them in chronologically, both his life and then my realization about things in his life. So his life then some becomes parallel to mine. And so it was this very complicated puzzle of trying to make it fit narratively, right? It was definitely the hardest, constructing a chronological framework for this book was definitely the hardest journalistic project I've ever done. To the runners, you're exactly right. Like, a lot of them have this reframing. The clearest is this guy, Michael Westfall. And so he's this amazing guy. And he, uh, he beats my dad in the 1982 Northeast Tarver Road Race.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  And then I meet him because in 2021, the Northeast Tarver Road Race is this five-mile race in this little town in Maine that I go up to. And my son, my, uh, son Zachary, who's then 11, is running the race. And, um, you know, I finish and I go back to find Zachary on the course. And, uh, he's running, like, right in front of this guy who's, like, swaying all over. I was like, what's going on? Is the guy having a stroke? And my training partner up there is this policeman, uh, named Judson. I'm like, Judson, like, and he's like, nah, man, that's Michael Westfall. That guy's a legend. I was like, wait, what? And so I go out and visit him. I mean, he lives on this tiny island, Cranberry Island. And it's, you know, take a ferry, it's like 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And it's this tiny island, population of like 50 people in the winter.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  And he tells me the story where he, he'd grown up on the island, he's like got powdered milk, there's like two kids his age, there's one two-mile road, and he like starts running, right? Because of, kind of because there's nothing else to do.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And it becomes this island where I think six of the 50 residents are sub-three-hour marathoners, which is hilarious, right? It's amazing. And they're all like tracking each other by their footprints in the snow and just going back and forth and back and forth. Anyway, so it's partly the story of that and like, you know, you're creating freedom within restraints, like, how do you, you know? That's the line from Hamlet where like, you know, you're, I could live inside a nutshell in the man of infinite space, right? And it's partly a story about that, but it's partly, um... It's really a story about what happens next, which is when he's like 49, his arm starts to shake. And then he realizes he has Parkinson's. And so at first, that really shuts down his running because he's embarrassed. He's like a strong carpenter. He's built all the houses on this beautiful island.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And then he realizes, wait, no, I should run with it. And so then it's a story of like a man dealing with really symptomatic Parkinson's, like full-on Parkinson's. He ties his arm behind his hip with a string. He's worried about suffocating himself. What puts on a sweatshirt? But he runs like, I think it's like a 3:15. He's incredible. Like, he's in the top age group. He's like in his 60s, running these like killer marathons. Parkinson's, like he's a Boston qualifier with full-on Parkinson's. And I go in, I go to the island with Ellis, my oldest son. And he greets us at the dock. And then he gets in the car and like, I don't want it to show up, but like, we're terrified because he's shaking all over the place. You're like, how is this guy going to drive?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And he drives us through the island, like no problem, of course. And he's just like the smartest, most sophisticated guy. But he talks about, you know, when he started, like all he wanted to do when he's young is beat everybody, just like everybody. And then when he gets Parkinson's and he starts running, he's like, well, actually there's like real community and I'm like really learning about running as a way to process pain and process aging and process hurt and like serve as an inspiration for other people with Parkinson's. He's like, and I developed a much more holistic, broader, emotionally balanced view of running. And so I go out, I actually went out with him this past summer. So I finished writing the book, like maybe the book wraps in May or June. And in August, I go out there with my son, James, the little guy.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And we actually ran a little bit with him. He has, he's totally stopped running. He said he totally stopped running. I was like, okay. I was like, James and I are going to run on the road. You know, I want to run this sacred road. And he's like, I'll come with you. And so I got to like run half a mile with Michael Westphal. He's just, he's such an incredible guy, such an incredible guy. And he's like, he's still out there. He's still working. He's still running. He's still being healthy. He's still like on this tiny island. He doesn't leave the island, you know? David's wife got sick and I stick her to the hospital and all that. But like, he's just built this beautiful world in this tiny little part of the world.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  You always seem very even keeled, though. Like, I haven't spent that much time with you, but you always, you know, you always seem pretty relaxed for somebody who's handling a lot of responsibility.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  That is definitely my, whether it's genetic, whether it's learned, my ability to not get stressed about races, work, problems is definitely one of my strengths.

• 36:58Rich Roll?

  What is, what is your strategy for that? What, what techniques do you deploy for that?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of, I don't know whether it comes from racing, or whether it comes from working, or whether it comes from parenting, but just the sort of the realization that you do the best you can, right? And then you go on to the next moment. And sometimes then go, something goes catastrophically badly, but you can't, you can't control the outcome. You can control what you do. And so I've kind of just inculcated that attitude, and it helps reduce stress. Cause you know, your kid is sick and you do your best to help your kid get healthier. Your kid is struggling, you do your best to help your kid figure that out. Something's gone terribly at work, you do your best to try to counter it. And like, sometimes you can't solve it, and but if you try, that's all you can do.

• 37:40Rich Roll?

  There's a difference between understanding that intellectually, though, and bringing it into practice. Like, most of us know, like, there's very little we can control. We can't control these outcomes.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the other thing is-

• 37:50Rich Roll?

  But we allow these things to ramp up our anxiety and our stress.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  My guess is that it has a lot to do with having grown up with my particular father.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I write about it in the book. And if you grow up with a man like that, and you grow up with a, someone who should be your role model, who acts as like, crazily and high-strung and spinning all over the place as he is, you can either be like him or try to be the opposite like him. And over time, I've done my best to learn to be the opposite of him.

• 38:15Rich Roll?

  This book is really, you know, it's, it's, it's a, you know, fundamentally, it's a running memoir, but it's, it's about so much more. I mean, you're, you're essentially on a spiritual journey. It's a book about fathers and sons, and it's a reconciliation with your past. And it's about intergenerational trauma. And, you know, when you have a parent like that, like, there's a lot of, I mean, your story's very different than mine, but there's a lot of like overlapping themes here. So I related to it deeply. And I, I wasn't expecting, you know, it to be a read of such depth, you know? And, and fundamentally, it's about how you're, you're making peace and, um-

• 38:58Rich Roll?

  Trying to find a way to love your father unconditionally and not allow his, you know, his, his character flaws limit you or inhibit you. And most importantly, to arrest them so that you're not passing them on to your boys.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is exactly what it is. That's what the, it's a book about running, but it's not a book about running, right? It's a book about complicated things in life, including what we pass our children, what we inherit from our parents.

• 39:28Rich Roll?

  I've been thinking a lot about this and I'm, I'm writing a book myself and, and some of these themes are, are coming up. And the more I think about it, you know, when you're a parent, like this, this is the job, you know, like, you know, what are you passing on and what are you preventing from passing on? Because we're all a victim of the mindset and patterns and, you know, genetics that we inherit from our parents for better and for worse. But it's amazing when you kind of get to a certain age and you realize the extent to which you've been influenced by things unconsciously that you inherited.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  And then you think about, well, what am I influencing in my children? And you, it can make your head spin because you don't really know. You don't know what they're getting. I, you know, one funny but minor detail, I tell a story in the book about, you know, running a marathon by myself during COVID and I run, you come back and I like lie under the blankets, shivering, just, you know, uncontrollably. I just looked like death. And my older son is there watching and afterwards he's like, Dad, I'm never going to run. And then the next day I'm out in the park and I'm just going for a walk with a friend. It's during COVID, it was a work meeting. And I see my little son run by. I'm like, wait, what are you doing? And he's like, I wanted to go run a loop, right? And so it's this amazing situation where the act of running to the point of

• 40:42Speaker 01

  total exhaustion has had effect on one child and the exact opposite on the other, which is kind of a metaphor for sometimes you just don't know what they're going to take or what they're going to bring with them. But that's not a recipe for like indifference and saying, oh, well, whatever, like you can't control it. You just, it's a, it's a reminder that you don't have complete control over it, but you do have some control.

• 41:03Rich Roll?

  My sense is that.

• 41:06Rich Roll?

  We all parent either, we either, like if we grew up in a healthy household, we're gonna mimic, you know, what we learned and pass it on to our kids. And if we had a, some level of dysfunction, like we, the pendulum swings almost too far in the other direction, like I'm gonna do all the opposite things to make sure that my kid, you know, doesn't have the experience that, that I did. And there's errors in, you know, at that end of the spectrum as well.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the most revealing things for me in the book, so I didn't know a lot about, when I started the book project, I did not know a lot about my paternal grandfather, so my father's father. And, you know, the hardest moments for me in my life with my relationship with my father, by the end of his life is essentially running a brothel in Bali, completely bankrupt, everything is chaos. And he's drinking way too much, and I'm trying to get him to stop drinking, and then he like threatens to kill himself to wrangle money out of me, right? Hard stuff. I'm going through his diaries and his letters, and I realize the exact thing happened with him and his father, where he's trying to get his father to stop drinking, his father's career is on the rails, and his father threatens to kill himself in the middle of this fight.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  And you're like, wait dad, having lived through that with your father, why are you doing this to me? Right? As I look at it, you know, seven years after my father passed away, I just was like, oh my god.

• 42:25Rich Roll?

  Cause we're all, we're all perpetrating these unconscious patterns, and it takes a lot of like work and awareness to even recognize what's happening, let alone, you know, course correct and arrest them. But your dad didn't start out that way. I mean, your dad was kind of a baller, early on, you know?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Totally a baller. I mean, and even at the end of his life, still was to some degree. So the synopsis, the quick story of my father, grows up in Oklahoma. His father is this, you know, imposing Golden Gloves boxing champion, but, you know-

• 42:55Rich Roll?

  And minister, right?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  A minister, Baptist minister. And they grew up in Baycon, Oklahoma, where my grandfather had been a missionary and then eventually become, became president of a Native American university, Baycon University. My dad grows up, he's kind of scared of his dad. Family falls apart, doesn't want to be there. And so he busts away, applies to the school, Phillips Academy, Andover, gets a scholarship, then gets a scholarship to Stanford, then wins a Rhodes Scholarship, then like marries into my, meanwhile, wins the Rhodes Scholarship. The letters from recommendation when he's a student at Stanford are like, this is the best kid we've had since Herbert Hoover and until Rich Roll. Like, this is like, it's crazy. Goes to Oxford, comes back, marries into my mother's family. My mother has this prominent DC family, extremely successful. So my dad's like on track, right? John F. Kennedy. He meets JFK, yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  JFK is like, this guy's gonna be president before me. Yeah. He meets JFK with Judith Exner and John F. Kennedy in a terry cloth robe, right? Like, he picks him up at the hotel while he's like starting the affair. Oh my god. Which is amazing. Yeah. Drives him to Stanford where he gets a speech. My dad's just totally killing it. Everyone thinks he's gonna be senator, he's gonna be president, he's gonna be something. And then he comes back, he marries my mother. Means his new father-in-law is the undersecretary of defense, right? Like, he's marrying into a great family. And then he can't pull it together. And he starts to drink too much, smoking a lot, and then he has this realization that he's gay. Whether it's a realization or it's a coming to terms, and he really struggles with that.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Leaves my mother, comes out of the closet, and then, there's lots of good moments and there's lots of good time, and we lived together for many years, but then it's this kind of descent over 30 years into mania, which is where he ends up in Bali.

• 44:38Rich Roll?

  When you reflect on that, how do you make sense of that fall from grace? I mean, it's such an unlikely ascent, you know, from this small town, you know, under the, under the hand of a, you know, a kind of, you know, very intimidating father that he had. And somehow, he had the wherewithal to, you know, transcend that, which makes his, you know, his, his fall like even more kind of like calamitous and precipitous. Like, what, is it repressed sexuality? What do you think, like, what do you think it was that, that?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Well, the rise, the rise is easier explained than the fall, right? So the rise is that... This is a guy who just had more energy than anybody, right? He, and you could, even at the very end of his life, everybody believed this. Like, he's just so interesting, right? Like, you meet him at a party, you, Rich, would be like, wow, this dude's incredible, right? You would have like some kind of an interesting conversation. You would sense the like excitement from him, like the life force in him. And that's what, when he had control of it, when he was, you know, 21 years old, 23 years old, it was just this wonderful force field that drew people in. And then the question is, why he lost control of it? Whether it was the alcohol, it was a huge part of it, right? If he were to diagnose this, he would have said the alcohol, right?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  If you read through his diaries, it's all like, I could get this, I could figure it out if I could understand the alcohol. Some of it seems to have been repeating his father's mistakes, like at some unconscious level, like needing to do the things wrong that his father had done. And then there's also, like, the real chaos comes after he is 50. And this very important thing happens where he has a friend in a contemporary, this guy named Roger Hanson, who also, like my father, was a Rhodes Scholar, also, like my father, photographed for Life Magazine, also, like my father, didn't live up to his potential, becomes an academic, also, like my father, repressed and gay.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And my father and Hanson become friends, but Hanson can't deal with his sexuality. And so he commits suicide in my father's garage. So his life story is this book, Remembering Denny, probably lots of people have listened to, by Calvin Trillin, or lots of people have read. And so after Hanson dies, my father, it really like makes my father afraid, right? Makes my father afraid of his depression, it makes my father afraid of, you know, staying in the shadows. And so the way he deals with it is... Like he just starts, I mean, he sleeps with a new person every night, right? And he brings them to like every party. Like you would go to a cocktail party in DC and dad would have like this 18 year old, like people he'd met on the internet, right?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  All like of the exact same type. And it just was, it was really bizarre. And he lost total, complete self-awareness, had no idea how this was perceived. Cause he thought, well, you know, I'm, I'm no longer being repressed. I'm showing all these people in Washington that I can like bring 18 year old male prostitutes to the French Embassy, right? And wow, it's not the best thing to do.

• 47:42Rich Roll?

  And then he goes professional by like going to the Philippine, like moving.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Moving to Southeast Asia.

• 47:48Rich Roll?

  How are you processing all of this? I mean, first of all, you're growing up under the shadow of this incredibly accomplished, charismatic man, right? And, and you're following in his footsteps on some level. You go to Andover, you go to Stanford, you're like, you know, you're tracking.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 48:03Rich Roll?

  Right? And so you're inheriting that ambition or that, you know, kind of purpose driven, you know, place your stamp on the world kind of energy. But at the same time, as this is starting to slide, that must've created tremendous amount of confusion and fear.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. I mean, and like, not only do I go to the same schools, but I, I, I kind of look like him and kind of like remind people of him. I once went, I was with, I was at this like, this restaurant in San Francisco and I'm with, this is after my father had died. And I'm with one of his best friends from college. And another college classmate walks into the restaurant, someone I've never met. And so my person I had in lunch with walks up to the classmate and says, hey, see this guy? He's the son of one of your classmates. Who do you think he is? And the guy looks at me and he's like, that's Scotty Thompson's son. And I was like, whoa.

• 48:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  You know, guy who had not seen my father in what 40 years, had never met me, was able to piece it together. So I'm quite similar to him in lots of ways.

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  See of a hyper-awareness.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Hyper-awareness. And all of these, like I didn't just go to Andover and Stanford because like they were a great school. I was like. And he didn't force me to go to him. I just was sort of like inevitable, right? Like he sort of laid out this path and the things that I would do. And I did them. And so of course, yeah, I'm terrified. My, you know, my 30s that I'm going to be, you know, that I'm going to kind of lose it, right? And then I'm going to lose my discipline and then I'm gonna, I mean, there's still time, Rich, right?

• 49:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. How old was he when it, when it started?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  So he divorced, I mean, he started drinking too much, probably at like 37.

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you don't have that issue.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  So you don't, you don't.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  I'm clear on the alcohol. And then 40 is when he splits from my mom, moves to DC. 50 is when it starts really going off the rails. And by the time, well, probably not 60 is when it was complete banana cake. So I still may get there, Rich.

• 50:06Rich Roll?

  You don't have the alcohol and you're, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know you that well, but you don't strike me as having a depressive streak to you.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't have a depressive streak.

• 50:14Rich Roll?

  I think you're gonna be okay. But still that looms large, right?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  It looms large. I mean, it looms large for my sisters too. And they, I, my sister and I were just talking about, we once, we were like driving to U-Haul from his farm in Virginia, like in Western Pennsylvania. We had this amazing conversation where we both revealed to each other that our deepest fear was becoming like our father in different ways. But like, that was the single animating fear of both of our lives.

• 50:40Rich Roll?

  Was it also a situation in which you felt like you had to live up to those expectations? Like, you know, an approval seeking gene in you, like, here's a guy who's done so much, you know, and I'm gonna have to, you know, find my way to repeat that as well.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Completely, right?

• 50:59Rich Roll?

  In order to get his approval.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's this silly detail in the book about like, you know, his obsession that I too would win the Rhodes Scholarship, which like even when I was writing, it was kind of embarrassing to write, right? This seems so frivolous and weird. And then when I didn't win it, like, oh my God, like I happened like,

• 51:17Rich Roll?

  You've lost a step.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  My father foretold this, right?

• 51:20Rich Roll?

  In the in the context of you trying to make sense of this and and find a way in towards reconciliation, it becomes really all about running because on some level, you know, your dad was on his own journey of of, you know, trying to find connection and meaning and running, you know, he did it in all kinds of insane ways, but like running was a vehicle that seemed to really ground him and and help him. And that's really your point of connection.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  That was one of the things that animated the book or led me. The reason I wrote the book partly because it's a good story of my father's my father's life is an interesting story, partly to understand myself and then partly to understand my running life. And it was one of the forces that animated the book was the realization that my running is both a way to connect with him and to avoid being him. And he had taught me to run like we had he had run that he ran the New York City Marathon in 1982 when we divorced. And when before he had left, he and I would run a little bit in Brookline, Massachusetts. And that was my introduction to the sport. And then I had watched him run the marathon, which was this incredibly important moment in like when I was seven years old. And then it was just part of the way we connected and we would run together and head out whenever

• 52:36Speaker 01

  we were.

• 52:37Rich Roll?

  And he went, he ran like 301, right?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was three hours and 51 seconds. He was fast.

• 52:41Rich Roll?

  And then you write this poem, right, that you discover later, like he had kept, like when you kind of find him later in life. And that seems like this way that you're going to be able to make peace with this guy and be able to love him and forgive him and kind of transcend all of the negative emotions that you're, you know.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Well, part I mean, part of the way I was able to transcend the negative emotions is that he was completely devoted to me, right? And when you talk about like what you can do for your parents, wait, sorry, what you can do for your children. And like, he like, was always trying to like, get a like, extra hundred bucks out of me and like, super offensive all the time, but like, clearly loved me deeply and like, wanted nothing but success for me. And, you know, we email basically every single day about something, even when he's living in Asia, living this like manic life with his like semi-brothel.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  So, he loved me deeply, right? And so that's part of like, what I think with my children is baseline, right? The thing that you always have, always, is like, they should know that you were completely committed to them and that you love them absolutely, right? And you may make mistakes and you may push them the wrong way or not push them in a certain way that they wish you had pushed them, right? Who knows, right? You can make all kinds of errors of omission and commission. But as long as they absolutely know with total certainty that you love them at all moments, that's where you start.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What is your first introduction to running yourself then?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  So it's really, I mean, it's, I think it's my dad just saying, hey, come run around the block, right? And like, three times around the block was a mile where I lived. And I think I probably ran it once and then twice and then three times. I don't remember the first time I ran, but I remember when I first ran a mile, which was like, whoa, a mile. And then, he, I must have, I, I have a visual memory of running around Pine Manor College, which would have been like a three mile run from where I lived. But he left when I was six, and a three mile run when you're five is pretty ambitious. I can't quite scare those, square those things. Any case, he moves away, and then I remember watching the eighty-two Boston Marathon, which is the Alberto Salazar versus Dick Beardsley, amazing race.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And then that would have been April of eighty-two, and then I came and watched him in the New York Marathon in October or November of eighty-two.

• 54:56Rich Roll?

  Right, like, so remind me, like, Beardsley was, there was some injustice there, right?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, oh my god, the race was incredible, right? And so, they both, I think they run the two fastest times that Americans have ever run. They're side by side from the time they start going to heartbreak, right? They like, are tracing each other by like, looking at the shadows. You know, Alberto like, doesn't stop for water. And then Beardsley like, gets cut off by a horse, and so he like, has to like, veer around.

• 55:24Rich Roll?

  Like a cop on a horse kind of thing?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, cop on a horse, and so he's like, Salazar is pulling away, Beardsley like, gets knocked behind, and you're like, oh man, like, totally unfair. And then, Beardsley comes up and like, catches him, right? In the last half a mile. And I remember talking to Beardsley about it and he told me the like the most amazing thing, which is he had a charley horse in his leg. This is, this is great running physiology. And then he steps in a pothole, but somehow stepping in the pothole fixes the charley horse, right? Like, you know how like a TV can be on the friction, you like bang it and it like goes straight. So that happens. It catches Salazar and you watch the broadcast again and it's incredible because it's like Salazar's got, he's coming, he's coming, Beardsley's coming. And then you hear like someone yelling, go, Dicky, go. And then

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Salazar wins. And there are all kinds of things I like about the race, one of which is that Beardsley was estranged from his father and his father watches the race. And after the race, his father never drinks again. Whoa. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's a great detail. I mean, Beardsley's life after the race, you know, is pure, pure pain, like.

• 56:35Rich Roll?

  So for you then, is this in the back of your mind, like, if I just run fast enough, my dad will stop drinking?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't know that fact about the appearance until well after my father had passed away. But if, if you had told me that if I ran like sub two 20 in my twenties, my father would stop drinking, like, I would have gone for it. I would have gone for it.

• 56:55Rich Roll?

  But it's not as if running took hold immediately. I mean, you, you kind of get into it because you're not excelling in basketball.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, not excelling is a very generous way of putting it. I mean, like, I think I'm going to make the varsity basketball at the high school and I get cut from the varsity. Okay. Then I get cut from the junior varsity, embarrassing. Then I get cut from the second junior varsity.

• 57:15Rich Roll?

  Persistence, though.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  It's like, you're not getting the memo.

• 57:18Rich Roll?

  It's pretty.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Like, you have to be pretty bad at basketball to not make the sophomore team as a sophomore.

• 57:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  And so that's when I start running track. And so that's the only sport I can do. So I ran with my dad until I'm six. I kind of stop until I'm 15. I show up as a, I started at Andover as a sophomore and I then I'm on the winter, winter track team.

• 57:36Rich Roll?

  And you have like some pretty quick success there.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Pretty quick, but not immediate, right? Like, the first six or seven races, I run 1140, 1135 or something, which is not that fast, right? Like, you know, everybody runs that when you're on a high school track, kid. It's when I. For some reason, my coach enters me in the New England Championships. Here, you're allowed to enter two runners. And I'm entered. I don't know the distance of the track. It's like the story Alex Hutchinson tells in Endure, where I'm on the track and I don't know how fast I'm going. And this is why it's such an interesting metaphor. So I go and I expect to run 1130. That's 5 minutes 45 seconds per mile. I expect to come in like 10th place. And I go out and they're calling out the splits, but I don't understand the splits because it's a new track

• 58:25Speaker 01

  and I'm kind of new to the sport. And then I go through the mile and they're like 525. I'm like, wait, what? Well, something's wrong, whatever. And I'm in like third place, you know, fourth place. And then I finish in 1048, which is actually, that's a good time, right? Like, that's the sophomore record for that track. And so suddenly I realized, whoa, hey, I am good. But what's so interesting about that experience is that I never could have run that fast had I known how fast I was going.

• 58:50Rich Roll?

  It's almost exactly the same story that Alex tells.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:54Rich Roll?

  And it speaks to the power of the mind and the superpower of naivete, you know, like inverting your expectations. Because had it been properly calibrated, you would have adjusted your pace based upon what the clock was saying, thinking like, well, this is outside of my ability or I need to reel it back.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Or even weirder, like, you know, it wouldn't have even been a conscious decision. My brain would have like made my legs hurt, right? Like, you know, the weird balance between to what degree pain is an actual physiological, logical fact and to what degree it's just your brain messing with you. And there's no way I would have been able to go that fast.

• 59:33Rich Roll?

  I just read Sanjay Gupta's new book about pain called, It Doesn't Have To Hurt. And we did a thing the other night at the 92nd Street Y.

• 59:42Rich Roll?

  And what's interesting about his book and some of the kind of investigative journalism he's been doing on pain, you know, is, you know, this notion, A, pain is generated entirely in the brain. We know this. It's also an entirely subjective experience. And we forget that. Like, we think that the pain is, you know, located in the locus of the injury or whatever. And in the context of athletics, like... How we, you know, calibrate that and, and what, how that gets translated into like what we're feeling in our body and our own sense of capabilities is like this, you know, mysterious thing that if you can master, you can have these breakthrough performances or you can,

• 1:00:25Rich Roll?

  you know, you can like shatter your limitations. And sometimes it happens accidentally, like in that case.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, I sometimes wonder with my, like, with my kids, if I should like not tell them how fast they're going or like have them run on different sized tracks. Do you want to run faster if I was, I, I kind of coached the running on my kid, my 11 year old son's soccer team. And I'm often thinking like, oh, there may be there ways you could, you know, trick him to trigger this. But it's unquestionably like the craziest thing about running. And something I had to be running 30 years before I fully realized this, that, you know, when you run, the, the, the thing that proved it to me, right? The evidence, I remember running a race, it was actually the race where I ended up under the blanket, shivering, where I really realized it, is I was running and I got all these pains, like my shoulder hurt. And I'm like, what the hell would your shoulder hurt?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Right? And I'm like, then my left knee, then my right knee, then my ankle, my stomach, my head. And then at some point, probably at like mile 24, everything hurts. And then I get to the last hill before the end and nothing hurts. Right? Well, how is that possible?

• 1:01:32Rich Roll?

  Right? Because you have a mental concept of the finish line.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  And so then your brain's like, oh, so it's basically

• 1:01:38Rich Roll?

  You're not gonna die.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Once your brain realizes you're not gonna die, it's like, okay, so I guess I don't need to like mess with you. It's this, and it, okay, so fine, but like, where does the line between the brain and the body exist? Where's that line drawn? And trying to figure that out and trying to understand it. Because you do hurt for real reasons. Like, your brain is slowing you down because it's worried about homeostasis or injury or things that are real. And you can't ignore it completely. Like, if you turn off all your pain receptors, right? You've seen these studies, right? They inject people with fentanyl, right? And like, they do terribly. So you have to have control of it and you have to try to master it. But it is such a strange phenomenon.

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  This is the tension between being data-driven and being, you know, kind of fully mind-body-integrated, right? Like, you need the data, you want the data. This is how you calibrate your progression and all these things. But you can easily become a prisoner of the data. And when your watch is telling you your heart rate's too hot, you're in a race and your heart rate's, oh no, I gotta, you know, like you're making decisions based upon that that are kind of detached from really feeling yourself and understanding that you have the ability to transcend these limits. And that's why, you know, a lot of elite athletes, endurance athletes, like, they either don't wear a watch or they're not like, in the Tour de France, they'll tape over their power meters and they don't want to be, you know, they want to just be able to race.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Except it can also work the other way, right? Which is what's so hard, right? Like, you can look at your power meter and see that it's low and you can do it. And then maybe your body stops hurting so much.

• 1:03:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're rolling the dice a little bit, too. You know what I mean? I think it's all, it's just about like how attached you are, how like, you know, how firm your grip is on the numbers.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  I was running a race two or three weeks ago, and I remember the sensation, it was kind of, it was 100K and I was off in the mountains. And I remember there was like five miles to go. And I was like, I hadn't looked at my heart rate monitor in like hours. I was like, should I look at it?

• 1:03:31Rich Roll?

  But you know what? You could, you could, you could probably say my heart rate's this right now and you would be within one or two beats of it.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  But at that point at the race, I was like, okay, wait, if I look at it, and I was like, I had this debate in my head. If I was like, if I look at it and it's like over 130, I'm gonna be like scared. But if it's below 110, I can gun it. And so...

• 1:03:51Rich Roll?

  It's roulette.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I like, and then I finally decided to look at it and it was like lower than I thought it would be, just like a couple beats per minute. And I was like, okay, I have a little extra left. And then it kind of actually reduces the pain, right? Because your body now has some more object, your mind has some objective information about your body. But it is this crazy game, you're right, between sort of association, dissociation with your data.

• 1:04:18Rich Roll?

  So you're basically like a high school standout. You're fast enough to get recruited to a bunch of places.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

  But like me, you end up as a walk-on at Stanford.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  Like, we share that in common, you know? And you kind of pulled the ripcord sooner than I. I mean, I quit for, you know, I didn't swim my senior year. But we were both, you know, kind of trying to hang on to something there.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Ripcord kind of maybe got pulled.

• 1:04:42Rich Roll?

  But you had a, like, a whole series of calamities right out of the gate when you showed up there.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  But all, well, not all, but mostly self-inflicted, right? So I show up and, you know, my recruiting class has like, I don't know, three of the top seven kids in the country.

• 1:04:56Rich Roll?

  So you were, we talked about this, I can't remember, but like Ryan Hall, Sarah Hall, Jesse Thomas, they were older, were they older than you?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  They're younger than you. So they came a little bit after me. So I'm in Vin Lanana's first recruiting class. So he's at Dartmouth, he comes to Stanford.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  He says this amazing thing when I interview him, by the way.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  I interviewed him, you know, many years later when I was writing the book. And he's like, oh, you know, every time you go to a new school, you learn something about the old school. When I went to Stanford, I realized how hard it had been to have everybody train in the snow at Dartmouth. And when I went to Oregon, I realized how hard it had been that some of the kids at Stanford still wanted to get As.

• 1:05:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  The amazing thing that the coaches aren't supposed to say there. But he's a genius. So he gets this incredible recruiting class, which includes three of the top seven kids in the country, six other kids who are like nine, 10, nine flat, two milers, which was fast back then, and me. And so I'm like the 10th best kid in the recruiting class. And so, of course, what do you do when you're the 10th best kid in the recruiting class? You drive yourself into complete oblivion the summer before freshman year. And so I'm mad, I double the mileage that I'm running. I'm like running these races, I'm running like crazy. I get very fast. But of course, I get stress fractures right before I show up. So then... I have stress fractures and then I finally heal and then I get mono from all the

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  other things that you do when you're a freshman at a new college and like suddenly, you know, just months go by before I can train and by the time I come back to the team, I'm sort of hopelessly behind and then I stopped at the end of freshman year.

• 1:06:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Well, actually, that's not quite true. The calamity that is, I guess, funniest in retrospect. So I have this moment before sophomore year, I'm like, you know what? I can get back at it. I can do it. You know, I've made this commitment to quit, but you know what? Why should I? So I start like training like a maniac again, right? I think I may have run 30 miles in one day. But I also, I have this job in Acadian National Park and it's like 10 or 15 miles from my house there. I'll run there, bike back, one or the other. And then I'll swim in the harbor. But you know what they do in the harbor is they dump the sewage. So I get hepatitis A from the sewage and so right before school starts, I've got hepatitis. I lose like 30 pounds and I'm peeing black. And so that was definitely the end of that.

• 1:07:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The universe is saying like, you're not meant for college athletics. We need you to focus on your academics because we've got a whole idea about where you're headed. You can revisit the running later.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  So that was the end.

• 1:07:21Rich Roll?

  You can see that, you know, clearly now, but at the time, I'm sure that was very difficult.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  The difficult moment was probably the spring of my freshman year or the winter of my freshman year where like you show up at campus and like you need an identity and there are all these smart kids and you need like, it's very helpful to be good at something and you show up as a runner, right? And you have the identity as a runner, but you're a terrible runner. Like everybody knows you're the worst runner. You're not just like kind of a backpack. Like I was unquestionably the worst.

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  And every one of these kids like in your dorm is like, is like the best in the world at something. It's crazy.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  It's not fair. Like Tiger Woods is there, right? I guess Tiger Woods came the next year. It's, it's, but in fact, the woman who's three doors down from me had won high school cross country nationals twice in a row and she was on the swim team. So.

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Right? So she's like training. She's like, she gets up at like five, trains until nine, or whatever you loony swimmers do, right, because you don't have the same wear and tear as us runners. She then goes and lifts weights with the cross-country team, then does her cross-country workout in the afternoon, like.

• 1:08:21Rich Roll?

  Right, and is probably getting A's.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Who knows, but like, people are incredible. Anyway, so that was hard, like realizing this thing, I'd come up with my identity, but it doesn't take long to get a new identity and everything's great.

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  And so how long does it take before you, you know, resurface your, your relationship with running? You have to change your relationship with it.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Totally. So I, when I'm, my next three years in college, I do this thing called the Stanford Mountain Running Team, where it's much more sort of kamikaze and fun, but also it's awesome, right? We get up at five in the morning on Mondays, we bike out to Windy Hill, we run up Windy Hill. It's like the thing you should do when you're 19 years old. So then I'm getting the experience of running in the mountains and the kind of the spiritual mystical sense of running. Then it's in my early twenties where I start marathoning again, and I try to get my dad's goal of running a three-hour marathon, and I can't, like for a decade, I can't run a three-hour marathon.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  So what's going on with you, like mentally and emotionally around, A, like that decision, like this is what I'm gonna do, and why it's so important to you that you're gonna run faster than your dad?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  It's funny.

• 1:09:25Rich Roll?

  This is like, you know, this, this is Fathers and Sons, like, what am I gonna do to like, you know, be better than my dad?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  I never actually thought of it as beating him. It just was like, that was what you should do, like you should run a three-hour marathon. That's what he had wanted to do and couldn't do, and like, that's what I should do. It just seemed like, that was the demarcation line. If you run faster than three hours, that's good, and slower than three hours, that's bad, right? That was just like, it was, I didn't have like a vision of beating my dad. If I had run three, I think, say he ran three hours and 50 seconds. I didn't care at all about running three hours, 49 seconds. I only cared about running 259. And he wanted me to run that too. So, you know, one of his virtues, he was never competitive with me. Anyway, so I start trying to run in my twenties, and there's this weird symmetry between like my professional career and my running career, where they're both terrible at the same time, and then they're both really good at the same time.

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  You got, you got fired from CBS in less than an hour?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  It's pretty impressive. From 60 Minutes, in less than 60 minutes.

• 1:10:21Rich Roll?

  What happened in less than 60 minutes?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Fired from 60 Minutes in less than 60 minutes. It's so embarrassing and so weird. I get hired, right? So it's the fall after my graduation.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I've written a bunch of op-eds, but I haven't been a journalist. I haven't gone and reported. But I go to CBS and I interview for this job opening as an associate producer, which I accept, I was unqualified. Like, there's that fact set against me. On the other side, they offered me the damn job, right? Like, whatever, I was charming enough in the interviews, they give me a job. So I go down to start, I move to New York, I get on these nice clothes, and I show up at the office, and they're like, "Okay, welcome, you're the new associate producer, you're working for Steve Croft." And I go in, and I remember I watched some film, Mel Elfin, the famous guy, was there, and he like asks me whether I'm a right-wing gun nut, just as a joke. And then, at some point, after

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  I watched this little screening and like get oriented, I'm brought into this guy Phil Scheffler's office, and he's the head of it. He's like, "Who are you?" I'm like, "I'm the new associate producer." And he's like, "What have you done in television journalism?" And I was like, "Nothing." "Well, what have you done in, you know, in media?" I was like, "Well, I wrote an op-ed about like student activism in the LA Times, like, here's that." And he's like, "What the hell are we doing?" I was like, "I don't know, but you hired me." And he fired me, like, right then and there. And then the only redemptive part of this story, I like left, I was so embarrassed, and then, probably 20 years later, I'm in, I'm at an award ceremony, and I edited a story at the New Yorker that's won a big award, and Steve Croft runs the thing. And the guy who wins the award is like, "And I'd like to thank my editor, Nick Thompson,

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  who did all this, blah, blah, blah." And then I'm in the elevator after the event, and Steve Croft gets in. And he's like, "Oh, you're the guy who, that guy was crazy, that's amazing." I was like, "Yeah, well, you know, Steve, here's this funny detail, you know, I worked for you for less than an hour back in 1997." Yeah. And he's like, "No way. You're the kid they kicked out like that?" He's like, "That fucker. I couldn't believe they did it to you." Wow. And I was like, "Wow!" And actually, that made me feel- That's cool. Yeah, you got your, you got, yeah. And like, Steve like remembered, and like, he couldn't do anything, like, he's the, he's the on-air talent, Scheffler's the guy who runs the show. You know, and I would go on, I'd work with 60 Minutes, I mean, I'd work with CBS later on in my life, I didn't hold it against them, but it was a, it was not a great moment for Nick.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  So then, so then, it gets even better, I get, I'm fired from 60 Minutes, I'm like, "Well, what the hell am I gonna do?" One of my best friends is going to Africa. So I'm like, I'm coming with you. And I get a bunch of inoculations and I fly to Morocco where I immediately get kidnapped. So this is like not the best start to my career.

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Rich Roll?

  All this promise, Nick.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:13:07Rich Roll?

  It's getting squandered. You're getting all kinds of diseases when you're trying to run. And then, you know, you just can't catch a break in your career.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  It was really not.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  And then this return to running isn't exactly going swimmingly.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Return to running doesn't go well either. And so I, you know, eventually the kidnappers let me go after 24 hours. It's a pretty, pretty second rate kidnapping. Um, I spent a couple of months in Africa and then I come back and I do try to run through my twenties, but I never, my first marathon, I run, like I run three hour pace for 20 miles and then I just get sick and finish in 318. Then I go and I'm going to go run, you know, go run three hours. My dad is going to come watch. We get a flat tire so I didn't get to the start. Then, God, then I don't like, I run like, I can't remember exactly, but there's basically there's five or six marathons and they all end just in misery. I run 306 in one of them, but the rest I'm like walking or DNF. Uh, the worst is the New York City Marathon in 2003 where my dad comes to watch.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  It's the only time in my entire life where he would come and watch a marathon. I don't, of course, don't know that at the time, but, and I, my knee starts to hurt and I'm like a little off three hour pace and I stop at mile 23. And I just walk off the course and go home. And he's like there at the finish line with my wife. I just like, when I go back, I just like, I can't believe I stopped. I would, I would have run like 305, 310, like who cares, right? Like finish the damn race, kid, you know? Um, anyway, I walked off the course, went home. I was just sort of ashamed of having not.

• 1:14:37Rich Roll?

  You just, you just refuse to quit though. Like you keep, you stay in this, like you're, you're very determined to have these breakthroughs. I mean, it's not until you're like 29 though, that, that you're, that you're shifting your approach.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the one time where I have the, like, I look back at all that running and I'm not actually proud of how I trained. I don't think of myself as committed. I don't think of any. My career wasn't going very well either. It was all a mess. I couldn't get hired anywhere. I was mostly making money on the subways here playing guitar, right? It's how I'm like, I was like, very good.

• 1:15:06Rich Roll?

  You have this whole side thing with music.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm very good street musician.

• 1:15:11Rich Roll?

  If you had had a big track career at Stanford, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have developed your musical ability.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Right, and I wouldn't have been able to play on the L train.

• 1:15:18Rich Roll?

  But it's just, it's, it's like, so you're like busking on the subway.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I'm busking, yeah.

• 1:15:22Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was, you know, we're not, we're not on the L train line here, but we're in your studio in Dumbo on the F train. I didn't really play that much, but I would, the best demographics were the sort of the Manhattan to Brooklyn, because it's like the hipsters going to Brooklyn, professionals coming to Manhattan, gay people going to Chelsea, like all the demographics that like the music I'm playing.

• 1:15:42Rich Roll?

  How much money were you making doing that?

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I would make hundreds of dollars in an afternoon.

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you make tons of money. It's, you had, it's hard to get the right spot, right? It's a, basically the rule is if you're there, you stay until you leave, right? So you have to like dehydrate yourself, so you don't have to go to the bathroom, right? And then you get your spot at like the uneconomical hours, right? You show up at like 11 a.m. and 11 a.m. to 2 is okay. 2 to 4 is terrible because it's all kids and it's like chaos, right? And they're all going to and from school, and so nobody's paying anything. And then 4 to 9 is where you're making your money, because it's like rush hour, people going out to dinner, maybe, you know, until 10 at night. So you're there for a long time, right? And you're getting really good practice in. But you have to like suffer through some hours in order to get the best hours.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  And then they're different, you want to be on a train, you want to be on a platform where the trains are going in both directions, right? So you get customers going both ways, right? You want to be on a platform where the trains come in frequently, right? Like the 2-3, the 1-9-2-3 station, no good, because it's two platforms and the trains come all the time, right? L train, great, right? Because the trains never come, or they're like seven minutes apart.

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  Right, I had no idea there was so much strategy.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  There's so much that goes into it.

• 1:16:56Rich Roll?

  And I would imagine all kinds of unwritten rules and etiquette, like who's spot, who, you know, like with the other musicians, etc.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Oh my god, and they're like cartels, like the single stralian instruments, like they would like hand it off to each other, which would piss you off, right? Because like they're working together to get the spots and then sharing the money. It's like getting people, paying people to stand in line for you.

• 1:17:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Anyway, so that's like where Nick, this like promising, you know, Stanford student is now like busking, right? Which like neither mom nor dad thought was the right thing for me to be doing.

• 1:17:23Rich Roll?

  How did you get over the hump and get your foothold in journalism then?

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  I got, I got, I mean, I kept at it. Like, I loved being a journalist. I loved writing. I had, I did get a great job when I was 24. So from when I was 24 and 25, I worked at this place, The Washington Monthly, which was awesome. And then it was really kind of before that and then for a few years after that. I just, I stuck at it and then I got hired at this cool magazine called Legal Affairs out in New Haven, which was, remember this guy, Link Kaplan, who's wonderful, but it wasn't where I wanted to live. And so I was, I had given up, that I was going to give up. I had applied to law school, right? Like, the thing to do to get out of journalism back then is go to law school, right? And so I had taken the LSAT and I had agreed to go to NYU Law School, like move back to New York.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  And then that summer, I got an email from an editor at Wired saying, "Do you want to apply to be an editor here?" And I said, "I'd like to apply." And then I had this crazy game theory where the summer of 2005, so I'm 29, turning 30, and law school starts mid-August. The email comes in July. I interview, and I don't have the job when law school is going to start. And so it's literally the day before law school starts and I have to decide, do I defer and try to get this Wired job, or do I go? And, right, had I gone to law school, life is completely different, right?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Like, who knows what happens? But then I made the decision to bet on myself. And I deferred law school and I got the Wired job and think about it.

• 1:18:57Rich Roll?

  And that was 2005?

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Rich Roll?

  So that's a big year.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Rich Roll?

  So you get, you get this job, I'm not, you became the editor at Wired.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  2017.

• 1:19:08Rich Roll?

  Right. You start as an editor.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  Uh, but 2005 is the year that you get the cancer diagnosis.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Well, everything happens in like 2004, 2005. So I get married in 2004, 2005. In the spring, I finally break a three-hour marathon, which is great. And then I moved to New York, um, take the Wired job, start training hard, run a 243, like. What, right? Like, that's a big jump from like, can't break three hours to just barely broke three hours to run a 243. And then, right after the 243, I get diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Everything is finally coming together, like, into focus, right? You have the breakthrough in the career and in the running.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  And like marriage, like, I'm happily married, right? We're gonna have kids, it's awesome. Like, I've moved to New York, I've got this great job, like, everything's going well. I mean, like I said, like, in life, for whatever reason, like, professional success and running success, you'd think they might be perpendicular, but they're totally parallel.

• 1:20:03Rich Roll?

  That's another, uh, interesting thing about elite athletics, that idea that if you could just go live in the woods and all you have to do is train, this is the path to ultimate optimal performance. Um, but every great performer, at least ones with longevity, will tell you that that is not the case. It's, it's when you have, you know, not necessarily the most complicated in life in the world, but when you have other things in your life that have value that you're nourishing at the same time, um, you would think that those are distractions, but those ultimately are, you know, kind of a lever for continual improvement.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Certainly the case for me. I mean, there may be people who need to woodshed and focus, like, maybe you need to be like a guy who wants a runner, um, but I actually don't think so. I think it's really helpful to have these other things in life, and particularly in running, right, where you don't train that much, right? Like, even the best runners run 100 miles a week, they're running six-minute mile, so that's 600 minutes, that's 10 hours, like, they're 168 hours in a week. Like, you need stuff to do.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for me, it was always, if things were synced up and things worked really well, uh, things were in balance, that was, that was when stuff worked.

• 1:21:16Rich Roll?

  So thyroid cancer.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's so linked to my marathoning. I, um, I have a schedule to see my GP, like, you know, like, two weeks before the marathon. And I'm like, I'm not gonna go to this, because he's gonna see me and he's gonna tell me not to run, because my knee was hurting, right? And so, I did the thing you're supposed to do, of course, which is to move the meeting, right? Like, totally, you can't be told by the doctor not to run. I run the marathon.

• 1:21:40Rich Roll?

  It goes great. Runner move.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Total runner move. And so, I run the 243, and then I go and see him the next week, and then he, like, puts his hand on my neck and he finds a lump, right? And then... You know, I'm 30 years old, right? Like, I've had some professional ups and downs, but like, I don't have cancer. What are you talking about?

• 1:21:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Right, like, and he's like, oh, there's something there. And then, you know, as we'll be familiar to, you know, many people who listen, like, you just go down this process where it's like, you're like, okay, there's like a 1% chance. Oh, now it's a 10% chance, now it's a 25%, now it's 50, now, okay, shit, now it's there. And then, eventually, they're like, okay, so, we have to do surgery. This is probably, marathon's in November, it's by the end of December. And they have to do surgery to figure out whether it's really cancerous.

• 1:22:26Rich Roll?

  You can see that scar right there, yeah.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, even 20 years later. And so they do the surgery, and they examine it, and then they, a couple of days later, they tell me, you don't have cancer. And I'm like, incredible, right? And it's like, the world has been lifted.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  And I still have this moment, this memory, where I was with Danielle, and I was with a bunch of my friends, and I get a phone call, and they're like, you don't have cancer. And like, to see people's reactions, like, you can tell that someone like, really loves you when, they don't have time to prepare for the news, it's just like, you just got the phone call, you just told them, you can see their eyes, right? And so Danielle was through the moon. And then, two weeks later, I get another call, and the doctor's like, I'm sorry, Nick, we misread the slides, right? You actually do have cancer, and we're gonna have to do surgery again, right? So if you look very carefully, you can see there's two lines, right? And so, they go back in, and then they have to take the whole thing out.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  And then, it's like radiation therapy, and then you have to get, you know, you get on your Synthroid, your Levothyroxine, and it's not, like, for cancers, like, this is, this is the cancer to get, right? It's not, you're not, it's not pancreatic cancer, right? And you, you know, people survive this, particularly like, healthy 30-year-olds.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  But it was just a total different, it's like just a shock to my brain. And to like actually have to think about the fact that I might die and that I might not be here. And like Danielle and I might not have kids and this might be it. And my mom might have to like bury me, right? And my dad.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And so going through that mental process is just completely different. For someone who, you know, grows up in a comfortable home, goes to schools, has a crazy dad, but like nothing like this. And so I go through radiation, it completely wiped me out. I can't walk around the block, certainly can't run. And then it's this very gradual, slow process of coming back. And because the diagnosis was so tied up with my running, like the healing process had to be tied up with my running. And a lot of, I remember like the most, one of the most vivid ones in my life is, it was, I think, it would have been August. So it would have been like five or six months after the surgery.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  As I remember, it was at my cousin's wedding and I run up, this route called like Warren Lakes in Aspen, Colorado. And you go up Smuggler Mountain and you go up this incredible road. And it's like, it's an 18 mile run in the mountains. And I remember when I was coming down, and I had made it all the way to the top. And I was coming down, I was like, I cannot believe I can still do this, right? And like that this is happening again. And it just was like the most joyful moment. And then 20 years later, I went back and I ran the same route by accident. Like I was running a marathon out in Aspen and I went down, I was like, oh my, and I had like the same incredible, like just the feeling of being, of being alive, right, after what I'd gone through. And the way it was tied in with running was one of the greatest feelings of my life.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  And so I came back and like started running again, started running hard again. And then eventually, you know, two years later, ran the New York Marathon again.

• 1:25:36Rich Roll?

  13 seconds faster than your previous pre-cancer best.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  I know, which was incredible.

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  Best case scenario for cancer, but still cancer, two operations, radiation. I can't, you couldn't even walk around the block, like, you know, you're young, you're vital. You know, that's a challenge for anyone, obviously.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Rich Roll?

  But you talk about, you know, that confrontation with mortality, like giving you a certain clarity, that's kind of a gift.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  You know, I look back, and if I look back at my life, I feel like there's...

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Any of the positive psychological traits I have now, or time management traits, or views towards life are developed in those years right afterwards. And it's partly getting through the cancer, right? You have post-traumatic growth. You get on the other side. You recognize you have limited time, right? You recognize, you stand on the edge of death and when you get to the other side, you behave differently, right? This is a well-known psychological effect. And then I have kids too. And so, kind of the same thing happens. You just sort of care more about life and you're a much more focused person. And you cut out trivia, like you concentrate on things that matter. I, in fact, came a little more stoic, like a little more,

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  you know, not as focused on setting gigantic goals and more focused on doing the best I can in the moment. Not that I don't set goals. And all of that happens in this period between age 30 and 35. When my kids arrive, I've overcome my cancer. And that's when I start, my career starts, I start to do good work. And I start to like figure out what my place is in the world. Like what am I actually good at, right? What am I not good at? And I won't do that. And what am I good at? And I'll do that. And, you know, these are, in retrospect, I don't know how much of it is the post-traumatic growth. I don't know how much of it is being a father. I don't know how much of it is just being in my 30s. I don't know how much of it is tied to like consistent running. But it all kind of comes together in those years.

• 1:27:41Rich Roll?

  I mean, what I see is somebody who faced a bunch of obstacles and you use them as opportunities for growth and evolution. Like you move towards them. You learn from them. You extracted lessons and principles that you then informed into your life that made your life better than it perhaps would have been without them, right? Like, you know, these things happen. We don't have control over them. We can, you know, craft a victim narrative around them or allow ourselves to be imprisoned or handicapped by them. Or they can be these levers for growth, you know? And it's interesting because your career is so, you know, like you've created this unbelievable career out of all of these things.

• 1:28:23Rich Roll?

  And you seem like a great dad and you're able to perform at such a high athletic level. Like, your life is like humming at a very high frequency. And... And it seems to me that, that, you know, these experiences were formative in kind of helping you level up to become the man that you are today.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, things are coming reasonably well. They also like part of the recognition that you can get knocked off balance. That was also really helpful, right? Like, I live in, you know, constantly aware that things can go very wrong, both from having observed my father, both from like all the ups and downs professionally. I think that, I do think it's also helpful. You need to have professional downs in order to have steady ups. And, you know, the other, the other like formative thing that happens is I write a book at this time in my early years at Wired about my maternal grandfather, Paul Nitsa and George Kennan. And one of the interesting things about writing this book, so the book is, it's the story of America through the Cold War, as told through the rivalry of Kennan and Nitsa. And

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  they're the two men who, only two men who are active in American foreign policy between 1945 and 1990. And Kennan writes the Long Calligram and Mr. X article, my grandfather writes NSC 68. My grandfather is like the key hawk, right? From the Truman administration to the Reagan administration. Kennan is a dove. And what's amazing about this story is that they're both involved in everything, right? You can tell the story of the Vietnam War through the rivalry of Nitsa and Kennan slightly, but they're friends the whole time. And so I write this book about their friendship, their rivalry. It's called The Hawk and the Dove. But what it does, A, it's fun, it's interesting, it gets extremely well reviewed, it's great for me professionally. But I get to spend all this time studying the lives

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  of these two guys, right? Two guys who performed incredibly well at incredibly high levels for many years. And I'm reading their diaries, I'm learning their habits, I'm studying their lives. And I think that actually has a really positive effect. And if you look at my grandfather, Nitsa.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  You know, what is most impressive about him is the number of times he got knocked down and then got up, right? So he, he's kind of fired by the Eisenhower administration, he's kicked down by the Kennedy administration, he's almost demoted by the Johnson administration, booted out by the Nixon administration, kicked out of the Carter administration and fired by Bush, right? It's like a lot of downs, right? For a guy who every single time gets back up and works his way back in, right? And, you know, to be able to study that life and then, okay, wait, what can I learn from that? Oh my God, this is like my genetic grandfather, right? So I think there's a lot of things that happen in this period where it's cancer, it's fatherhood, it's writing this book and like studying these people, it's running, and then it's like the anti example of my father.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  And you mix these things together and that has all, all those things have been helpful. That's fascinating. When you write a biography of someone, you know, you learn so much and there's so much that doesn't go in the book and the lessons you take from both of them. And it wasn't like I was on one person's side or the other, right? Nitz is my grandfather, my politics maybe align more with Kennan's, but Nitz is clearly, I mean, in some ways, the more admirable man when it comes to like how he treats his family, how he treats his friends, how he treats his colleagues, how he treats his peers. Kennan is a, you know, one of the greatest writers in American history, one of the smartest observants, but also kind of depressive. You like, you learn a lot of what one should do and what one should not do.

• 1:31:53Rich Roll?

  As far as lessons go, are you able to take that inspiration and, and, you know, channel that into your, like, I guess what I'm asking is, how are you doing with your own relationship with competitiveness?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Rich Roll?

  You know? Like, you don't want to let go of it and you're still competitive and you have goals that you want to accomplish and it's your drive and your competitiveness that has, you know, fueled your career and, and given you this amazing life. And yet at some point, you begin to realize like, is this the healthiest relationship that I should have? And, and in, and in this, you know, kind of reconciliation with your father, like, obviously, these are gifts that your father gave you, right? And, and amazing gifts. And there's other pains and in this process of reconciliation, like where does your competitive nature and your drive land right now as you're, you know, trying to make sense of, you know, what the next decade or two decades or three decades of your life looks like?

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  I think what's nice about work, my father always gave me this drive. He says this thing, like, if there's something better, you should go for it. Right, like, he believes that and he like inculcates us, right? Like, it's hard to define what is better, but if you can define what it is, you should go for it.

• 1:33:09Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  And what's nice about work is that I've, I've like found what I'm good at and what I enjoy. And like, I am very good at building healthy business models for serious journalistic organizations. Right? New Yorker, Wired, Atlantic. All of these places, I've played a role in creating an economic model that helped the institution create amazing journalism, which is good for.

• 1:33:33Rich Roll?

  When did you realize that? Because you're writing, you're being an editor and a journalist.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Rich Roll?

  These are not necessarily, you know, business person, you know, occupations, so.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  It happens at The New Yorker. So I go and I work at The New Yorker and I start there in 2010. And I'm kind of, I'm a little different in that everybody there is an English major and a poet. And like, um, you know, I'm probably the only one with a BS. Sorry, I studied all, studied earth systems at Stanford. And I've kind of got like a little bit of a tech background and started a company. I worked at Wired, right? I spent a little time in the open source world. And so, you know, Remnick, David Remnick, the editor, is one of my heroes in life, kind of sees this and like senses that I have like a little digital know-how. And so he puts me in charge of running the iPad app, right? When the iPad, like iPad's going to save journalism, we're going to do multimedia storytelling. He puts me in charge of that.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  And then I realized, oh, I'm pretty good at like managing these projects. And then he puts me in charge of the website. He's like, you know what? You're an editor and writer, but also want to run the website, right?

• 1:34:38Rich Roll?

  And also, you're, were you on the younger side? Like, there's probably not a lot of other people that are even interested in that. Or this is a side project, like, this isn't really that important. They realize like, this is the same story that like Nick Bilton has at The New York Times. Like, he was like the only guy who, you know, like, he wasn't even really a writer. He was like a photographer or something like that. But they're like, well, if you want to like write on, write a blog on our website or whatever, because no one else wanted to.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, I mean, it's funny. It wasn't like directly by age. You know, one of the most, uh, ferocious bloggers was Roger Angel, age 96. But yes, it did generally correlate. And so Remnick puts me in charge of the website and then. Then I'm in charge, okay, now I'm in charge of the website. And then it's like, okay, now like hire some engineers and product managers. Okay, so now I'm in charge of the tech team, right? And then we're like replatforming it, we're going on a new CMS. And now, okay, now let's build a paywall, right? So now I'm like helping to run that with Pam McCarthy, the deputy editor.

• 1:35:34Rich Roll?

  And are you also writing at the same time?

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't write a ton. I mean, one of the nice things about The New Yorker, so this is where, like, there's a very important lesson professionally, which is, like, it's not just what you're best at, it's what you are best at relative to the organization. And so I'm a pretty good writer, but I'm not a very good writer inside The New Yorker, right? And like, put me at another magazine, like, when I was at Wired, I was a pretty good writer. When I'm at The New Yorker, I'm not that good a writer, because they are amazing writers. Put me at a tech company and I'm not a very good product manager. Put me in The New Yorker and I'm the best product manager, right? And so recognizing like where your skills lie within the organization. And so soon I'm running the products and engineering team, I'm running the paywall, and I'm doing all this stuff.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  And so we build a business model around launching a website and then charging people to read a certain number of stories a month. They're pushing them to a subscription after a couple of stories a month. And so that business model is a massive success. And it like helps turn The New Yorker's, when The New Yorker's fortunes were okay, but like, hypercharges them. And so I learn all of those skills. And then I go to Wired as the top editor, and I start to pick up skills. Like, there I'm in charge now, you know, I'm also in charge of the whole P and L. And so now I'm, or not I'm in charge of it, I have a role in the whole P and L. And so I'm suddenly learning all these different skills. And then I go to The Atlantic as CEO and, you know, adding a few new things, but it's mostly that.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  But in any case, as I go through these three steps, it's kind of at The New Yorker where I realize, wait, I have a real knack for this. Because I've been a journalist, I've been an editor, I've like run a social media team, I understand the different elements. I love this thing of doing serious journalism. Let me build business models. And so when I took the Atlantic job, like, I don't, I don't edit, I don't write, like,

• 1:37:17Rich Roll?

  You're running the business.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, like, they've put a bunch of stories on the internet since we started talking. Those stories might have blown up advertising relationships. I have no idea.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  You're, you're asleep at the job. You're like, moonlighting, doing a podcast right now.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Why, but like, and it's not even, even if I was at my desk, I wouldn't know what's coming, right? Like, I'm totally separate from the editorial process at the Atlantic. But what I am good at is building the business model that creates a lot of money so that we can hire lots of journalists to write more stories. And so, in any case, I am at peace with my role professionally, which is, for the next however long I can see, I'm going to work as hard as I can at the Atlantic to try to make as much money for the Atlantic, so the Atlantic can hire the maximum number of journalists, who can create the maximum number of good stories, which I believe is good for this country. So, I'm like, I don't have to worry about being competitive, ambitious, or going anywhere else there. In my running life, back to your question,

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  I think I, I definitely haven't lost, like, I still have goals, right? I'm gonna run the New York City Marathon.

• 1:38:19Rich Roll?

  You have a packed 2025 running calendar.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I just ran, um, I just ran the Twisted Branch 100K. I'm gonna run the New York City Marathon. And then after it, I'm gonna, I'll try to, I think, probably go for some age group record, depending on how I recover and injuries and all that, whether it's... I've just turned 50, so there are a few records that are totally within, within, plausibly, yeah.

• 1:38:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you wanna hit those records when you're on the bottom end of that age bracket.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I set my 50K record when I was 45. I mean, you can, I can definitely tell, like, there are definitely things that are harder this year than they were last year. If you look at, like, my Strava, I don't, I have never done this analysis, but if you were to do a Strava analysis of the first mile of my runs, like, probably it's gone over the last six years from, like, seven minutes to nine minutes. Like, I just cannot get going.

• 1:39:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you need, you need a lot more, uh, wind up and wind down, and all the in-between stuff becomes, like, really important, that when you're time-crunched and you're CEO of the Atlantic, it's hard to rationalize making time for, but if you wanna be...

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  He calls me the slowest fast runner on Strava. You know, because I just like, you get out there.

• 1:39:26Rich Roll?

  The slowest fast runner on, that's, that's, that's a pretty good title, actually.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  I'll take that.

• 1:39:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think the better one is like the fastest runner in publishing. I mean, you, you have that crowned by a long shot. Everyone, you know, everyone, uh, you know, sort of focuses on Malcolm Gladwell, but like, you know, you've got that guy.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Malcolm, you know, and running a mile.

• 1:39:45Rich Roll?

  I think I asked him, you know, and I, when he was on, did you listen to the podcasts I did with him? I think I asked him about you and he was like, oh, man, Nick is like so much faster. He's so much better than I am.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  He was very, he was very generous. Malcolm's, Malcolm's amazing.

• 1:39:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Anyway, so the, the competitive versus the dissociation. So I just ran this 100K Twisted Branch where I really, I didn't care that much about place. I didn't, certainly didn't care about time and that partly that's, you know, growing up, aging, self-transcendence and partly like, you really shouldn't care about time when you're running 100K through the mountains on a day where it's 90 degrees.

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  It's not the point. Because the clock is really not, you know, a thing.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are times where I did, I wanted to run a sub five minute mile on my 50th birthday. And that was magical because I ran it with Zachary, my middle kid. We, um, he's now like, he had just, he, my two younger boys are very good soccer players. And they also like run a little on the side and Zachary had run a sub five minute mile, just, you know, um, in the spring.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  And how old is he now?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  He's now 15.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  And so we went to the track and did eight by 400 together twice, um, where I would lead one, he would lead one, like at 74 seconds at 400. And so then on my birthday, he, he and I and another runner ran sub five.

• 1:40:59Rich Roll?

  He, he dropped off.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  1200 and like, let me go. But it's amazing to be able to do that with my son. And then my little guy, the 11 year old, you know, I lead his soccer team in workouts and he ran, he ran 550. So he's crazy for an 11 year old. His team's like so fast, those kids. It's awesome. Any case, I do still have like a goals oriented competitive drive, which may not be. Maximally healthy, maybe something that I should have matured out of at some point I'll mature out of, but haven't done it yet.

• 1:41:30Rich Roll?

  There's all kinds of age group world records sitting out there for you, Nick.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:41:35Rich Roll?

  Low hanging fruit. I think also, the ultra world, you know, it's still pretty new, like it's maturing quickly, but we have yet to see, you know, runners of the highest, at the highest level, who are, you know, experienced on the world stage in track and field or marathon running, take a serious stab at some of these 50 milers and 100 milers. That's just beginning, but I think that, you know, many of those, those records are going to get completely rewritten as soon as there's a little bit more money in there and a little bit more incentive for, you know, somebody maybe in the twilight of their professional career to get serious about that world.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  And more races, like there's so few, you want to run a fast 50 miler.

• 1:42:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Where are you going to do it? So the last, the last 50 miler I ran, the last, was at this place called Lake Waramog, and the record I wanted was the record for fastest 50 mile, which, you know, when I ran it, I was 49, but the record was set by a 50 year old. So I really, you don't think of the 45 to 49 record. And it was set by Ted Corbett.

• 1:42:43Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. Legend.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Legend, right? Who, you know, he used to train, he'd either run one loop, two loops or three loops, and a loop is Manhattan, right? So it's 30, 60 or 90 miles, Jesus rock, right? He'd run 200 or 300 miles a week and he set the 50 mile record in like 1970. And it's 535. So that's like 630 per mile. And so I went for it at Lake Waramog and I was on pace through 44 miles, maybe? And then I was on pace, the, the actual age group record is 539. And when I went through 50 miles, I actually went through it in less than 539, but because you couldn't run perfect tangents around the lake, there are cars driving around it and stuff, you know, I ended up not getting even that record.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  But if there was one record that I would like to get, it would be to run the 535. Just because I've now tried for that, I've done three races, four races where I've had that as a goal, and I've gotten closer and closer and closer. I haven't gotten it, and that would be cool.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  But pushing against it is the fact that like Ted Kurgor is an animal. Like all the great runners in history, he's up there. A guy qualified for an Olympic team. That is not an easy, he didn't, a guy have all kinds of advantages, like super shoes. But he's a whole different world from what I am.

• 1:43:57Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  But that still would be, that would be cool.

• 1:43:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all right, well, let's hold you accountable here for that.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll find, I can't go for it at Tunnel Hill this year because I'm running the marathon, which is six days before, but I'll find a fast 50 miler.

• 1:44:09Rich Roll?

  We could do a three hour podcast just on the current state of the media, the magazine industry, this transition that we're seeing, and the tension between digital and traditional and all of that. But, you know, so we can't, you know, we can't do that big of a deep dive on that right now, but I do want to get your sense of what the landscape is right now. I mean, obviously, you know, magazines have declined in terms of like cultural importance. And yet, The Atlantic really seems like a robust, healthy business and has this, you know, kind of cultural and perimeter that almost no other magazine has.

• 1:44:51Rich Roll?

  And obviously, your job is to protect that, to nourish that, and to make sure that it's a robust business with longevity in a climate in which that is becoming increasingly more and more difficult because the business model just doesn't exist like it used to.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  And so this is a very difficult Rubik's Cube for you to solve.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  It's a very, very Rubik's Cube, right? And so like two things really push against the success of the magazine news industry. One is The ad business, you know, right? Like, we used to have a monopoly on ads, right? You wanna reach people who like golf, you buy an ad in golf magazine, and then social media breaks that up, right? Classified ads go away. So there's this huge pressure on the media industry as the thing that had supported it forever blows up. And then the second thing is the rise of social media, right? You wanna understand what matters in clothing. You read Vogue, now you go to an influencer. And so those two forces over the last 15 years, you know, obliterate my industry, right? And, you know, the niche that I've helped, you know, or that I've worked to try to figure out is, okay, given that, what is a new business model here?

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Well, it looks like subscriptions are kind of the winning business model for now and have been for the last few years, right? Create content, create some scarcity with that content, make it so that people have to pay for that content, and then develop a direct relationship with those people and give them something that gives them real value, and then they give you money. And so that's the business model that we've built. Now, we're facing this new problem, which is AI. And so what AI will do is it will disrupt the mechanism by which people find content, right? You used to go to Google and you would say-

• 1:46:28Rich Roll?

  Search is dead or declining precipitously.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Or search is being absorbed, right, into Google, right, into answer engines. And so you will no longer go in and type in, I don't know, right? Like, my favorite, my favorite search example was that if you type in "what is the meaning of life", you got an Arthur Brooks Atlantic article, right?

• 1:46:46Rich Roll?

  That's so funny. How did you engineer that?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  We didn't engineer it. It just was like he wrote some story.

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  The LLMs just decided that this was the-

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Well, no, the LLMs eat it. It used to be that Google would give it to you. Now, if you type in "what is the meaning of life", Google would, like, Gemini would just tell you what the meaning of life is. And so we're losing all of our search. So that's, you're losing people coming in. And then not only that, you know, all these other individuals are gonna be able to create publications from scratch that are like the Atlantic, right? Intelligence becomes commodified through AI. And so somebody can create a faux Atlantic. It doesn't even have to be a faux Atlantic. That's like the cost of creating a new intellectual publication will be very low. You can also just go to the Atlantic, scrape it all, summarize it. Slightly change it, republish it as yourself, right? So we have this huge competitive threat. So we've got fewer readers coming in because search is going away.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  And then we have this massively different competitive landscape, right? On the plus side, AI can allow us to run our business much more efficiently. It can allow us to create stories more efficiently. We never write with it because we need to maintain our trust with our readers. And we have a pretty big moat. We have a bigger moat than any other publication because our stories like it involves phone calls and style and depth. And so my job right now is to figure out, all right, where can we find readers? They're not going to come in from search. Where are they going to come from? How many can we hold on to from search? Can we optimize answer engine search? Can we work with the AI companies to get as much of value from them? All right, get what you can there. You're not going to get as much as you're losing. All right, now let's see how we can build the best direct relationships with readers.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  How do we, you know, how do we serve them directly without the AI companies in the middle? One of the weird things we did, this is like one tenth of 1% of our business, but we increased the number of print magazines, right? So that we can have a direct relationship, us, you, postal service in the middle. And so how do we get more people into our app? Okay, how do we get more people into our newsletters? Okay, how do we make our live events more resonant? And how do we get more people into our live events? Where can we do live events where we're not reaching people? What are parts of the country where the people who know about us have high affinity towards us, but not many people know us? Okay, let's go those places, right? And so identifying markets, brand opportunities, relationships, that's my job,

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  while holding on to as much readership as I can and trying to build out new readership in different places.

• 1:49:10Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting. So The Atlantic is this brand and that brand has incredible value. And there's an association with that brand of high level journalism, but also sophistication, integrity. But it doesn't necessarily have to be like a magazine. It could be these event, like what does The Atlantic stand for? And what are new and creative ways of extending that brand in businesses perhaps that are either less developed or ones you hadn't even thought of yet?

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Right. And what are new and creative ways of doing it where you don't weaken and dilute the brand association, right? So, you know, should we do YouTube videos? Well, maybe we should if we had a really good idea and we could do it economically. But we don't want to do a bad idea.

• 1:49:56Rich Roll?

  Careful.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  We don't want to do something that's not economical, right? And so we've actually been super cautious for better for ill. Like, we have a podcast venture, we have audio arms, right? I record a podcast, most interesting thing in it, it's good, we sell advertisers against it. But we're not, very small percentage of our revenue comes from audio. Tiny percentage of our revenue comes from video. But we're constantly looking at where we can expand, what we can do differently. Normally, what we've been doing is just expanding different. Oh, you know what? We see an opportunity in doing like a little more health journalism, right? Or, you know, recently, where like the Washington Post is imploding, you know, for

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  reasons of its own doing, there's an opportunity to hire amazing political reporters and do accountability journalism. So let's just hire, you know, the best folks who are leaving the Washington Post, right? Or even, let's just hire amazing political journalism and do more accountability journalism. So we're constantly like looking at the market and evaluating where there's opportunities. But I live, you know, I am well aware that we're going to have to be quite different in the next three to five years. What exactly we're going to do, we're working through.

• 1:51:01Rich Roll?

  You've also become, as a result of this job, a public intellectual in the AI space. Like, you're speaking all over the, you're taking the stage all over the place and discussing AI. And that's another three hour podcast that we could do. So maybe just, you know, share with us a little bit about, you know, where you see all of this going. Like, in that three to five year window, what does the world look like? What is, what does media look like? Like, setting aside the Atlantic, like, you know, how are we getting our information? How are we discerning fact from fiction? Like, can democracy cohere amidst this, you know, the most disruptive technology that humanity has ever seen? Like, what's fact, what's fiction?

• 1:51:45Rich Roll?

  You know, where are you kind of placing your flag?

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  I think the technology is amazing, right? I think it continues to improve, right? So on the question of like, you know, you know, is it hitting a wall? Is it, and the question is, like, hitting a wall? Or will, like, extinguish the light of human consciousness and evaporate all human intelligence? I'm like.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  It's definitely improving, right? Not where like Dario Amade is, but like it is definitely improving. It will continue to improve. The AI we see right now is the worst AI we'll ever see. It will be absolutely extraordinary. On the question of business disruption, I think that happens pretty slowly. And I think that like one of the ways I like to think about is it's very easy to imagine how AI can do somebody else's job, but very hard to imagine how AI can do your job. Mm hmm. Right? That's because there's so many like little complicated things that don't actually involve machine-based intelligence. You know, it's very hard. You know, if something is 99% accurate and it's a three-step process, actually you wouldn't want to use an AI for that because 0.99 times 0.99 times 0.99, so you start to have a lot of errors. So it's very hard to incorporate it in business processes.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  So I think that most businesses change reasonably slowly, even as the technology improves pretty quickly. Media, though, is one of the most at-risk industries because the closer you are to the training of AI, the faster you're disrupted, right? That's why coders are disrupted first. That's probably why media is disrupted second or third. And so I think there are a lot of media companies that I would not want to work at right now, right? And I would not invest in, right? If I'm like in the summary of news or the curation of news, right? That is not a good business to be in because AI will do that incredibly well. What The Atlantic does, I think, is fine, right? Or at least for the foreseeable future.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  And so, you know, my general sense of AI is that I guess I'm an optimist. It's hard, it's hard to aligns optimism pessimism because you actually believe that it's improving really quickly. You're like an optimist on its progress, but probably a pessimist on society. Let me tell you actually what worries me the most. What worries me the most is what I call the end of reality and just the sense that you don't know. You know, you don't know what's happening, right? You don't know whether the person you're talking to is a bot. You don't know whether the thing that you're reading was written by a human. You don't know whether anything is real, right? And we're getting to that point. We're starting to see that on social media, right? You have no idea if an image is real, right? And it means you don't trust the images that are real.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Uh, and so, you know, people are getting into relationships which are not real, which terrifies me, right? You know, parasocial relationships with bots, I think, is the worst, the worst consequence of what's going on. So net-net.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Low business impacts in the short term. Huge benefits to people who use it correctly. Significant disruption to media and significant social disruption.

• 1:54:36Rich Roll?

  Do you have confidence that we will be able to erect necessary sort of checks and balances on the fact versus fiction, AI-generated versus reality aspect of all of this? Or will it be like performance-enhancing drugs in sports where the ability to detect is always behind the innovation with the next performance enhancer?

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  It's gonna be like performance-enhancing in drugs in like the 2005 Tour de France. It's like the worst.

• 1:55:09Rich Roll?

  Right. And so like what happens when nobody knows what's real and what isn't? Like, is this like, how do we? We can't go here as a society like that.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  But what is so scary is that it's partly why my job at The Atlantic, I feel, has value, right? Like, we will be, I mean, not everybody trusts us, right? And like the bifurcation of American media and the way social media has pushed us into filter bubbles and the deliberate work by the richest man on earth and the most powerful man on earth to discredit the media has done a lot to discredit straight shooters in the media. And what is scary is that nothing is going in the right direction right now. There are a lot of good efforts, like a lot of people trying to figure out how to do identity verification, like how to figure out whether somebody is human, right? How to figure out whether something is real. But it is not. It is going much slower than the rate at which people are able to create synthetic reality.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  So I don't think we're going in the right direction at all. What happens? I think society holds together. I just think that there is much more toxicity online. I think there's a lot more confusion. There's a lot of new kinds of fraud. There are some societal breakdowns. We do figure it out, but it's gonna be chaotic.

• 1:56:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There was just an article in the New York Times a couple of days ago about all the doctors that are getting deep faked right now. You know, and they're always, it always is some fake podcast with a real person, a real doctor who's now selling some kind of Dr. Oz situation.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  It's gonna happen.

• 1:56:42Rich Roll?

  It's pretty like, you can, like, I can, for the most part, I feel like, clearly, I know this is bullshit, but... Like, like you said, this is the worst it's ever gonna be.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know it now, but like six months from now.

• 1:56:54Rich Roll?

  You're not going to.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  I mean, everybody's always like, oh, my god.

• 1:56:56Rich Roll?

  We're all gonna be, like, you know, to the extent that that can be weaponized to manipulate people to believe whatever is, you know, that's just existential threat.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  Well, this is the scariest thing, right? The fact that, like, you know, Elon Musk is trying to go through history and try to change it to his views so that his Grok AI only gives his political views, because those are the correct views, is terrifying. Like, to be able to synthetically create truth and then, like, force feed it through your AI is a very, a very scary, scary thing. Now, there is no, of course, there is no singular truth. Of course, like, Google Search Engine has its own biases in it, but it is a dark, a dark world that we're going into. And so, you know, kind of my, like, taking this, bringing it back to the kind of the Stoic view, like, all one can do, if you're Rich Roll, or if you're Nick Thompson, or

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  if you're whoever, is like, try to be as honest as possible on social media, try to, like, help the folks building the best tool. Okay, so here's the, the best metaphor I've heard is from this woman named Audrey Tang, who was the digital minister at Taiwan, and is like one of the saints of the technology world, just, you know, trying, trying to figure out how to build open protocols, how to build open tools for the good of the people. And what she says is there's a vertical race, right? There's an ego-driven race, right? And it's by these companies with trillion-dollar valuations, or multi-hundred-billion-dollar valuations, trying to essentially create nirvana, right? And meanwhile, there's a horizontal race. And on the horizontal race are all these, like, nonprofits, governments, academics,

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  and they're trying to do things like identity verification. They're trying to figure out how to, like, stop child pornography. They're trying to figure out how to make sure there's, you know, real things online. And the hope is that if the horizontal race goes as fast as the vertical race, then tools will be built, and the, when we have all-powerful AI, or super-powerful AI, all these good tools will eventually be absorbed into it, right? And so, that's when you will have all-powerful AI with humanistic values and with an understanding of reality. And so, that is... The best version of the future.

• 1:59:02Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, that sounds quite utopian, you know, like, given the incentive structure

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  You've got to hold on to something, right?

• 1:59:06Rich Roll?

  Under which these are being developed. Like, there's just not, there's a lot of hand wringing and, and, and talk about, um, gatekeeping these things and safety and regulation, uh, and checks and balances. But is that really happening?

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  It's some, it is, it's interesting because it is, right? Like-

• 1:59:23Rich Roll?

  I'm, I'm happy to hear that.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Look at Anthropic, right? Anthropic, they're a super interesting company because they've been, like, maximally bad in, like, stealing copyrighted materials and not compensating anybody for it. And yet, maximally good. So one of the questions is, like, can you understand how these AI models work, right? Explainability. Can you figure out why they make the choices they make? And we have no idea, right? Like, they're so spooky and so weird. But a lot of the best research into it is coming out of Anthropic, right? OpenAI actually does a lot of good research on this. Google does some good research. So the economic, like, and Google builds, like, you know, Google is trying really hard on the publisher side to figure out models so that they could build all powerful AI without obliterating the ecosystem, because that's in their interest.

• 2:00:08Rich Roll?

  Well, they're cannibalizing their own, you know, the search is how they make, you know, all this money, right? So they're, so, so, you know, this is falling by the wayside as a result of their, their own innovation.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Right. So they're, they're cannibalizing themselves. And then they have this other problem in that they make money because of the qual-, I mean, this is true of all the AI companies. They exist because of all this good information created.

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  Sure. Well, this is the dead internet theory, right? Like, we just start populating the internet with AI, you know, derived content, and it becomes a, you know, a vicious cycle.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Right. So if you ran a big AI company and you were aware of that, you would try not to have that happen.

• 2:00:45Rich Roll?

  Right. That, so that is an incentive.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  So there are incentives to, like, they're in this ego-driven race. They're trying, like, they all, all of them believe that the first person to get to AGI kind of owns the world, right? So they believe the stakes are infinite. So they're willing to cut a lot of corners, but they also know that if they kill the rest of the internet, it's quite bad for them. So there are forces that are pushing the AI industry in a good direction.

• 2:01:07Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Um, I would love to have you come back and talk more in depth about that.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  I mean, this is like, this is the question of the

• 2:01:15Rich Roll?

  Right, this is

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  of the world, right?

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  This is the question of the moment.

• 2:01:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  And you have, I have like three kids who are about to

• 2:01:20Rich Roll?

  Like, how do you parent your children? How do you tell them what they should focus on? What should they study? Yeah, all of these things are like

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  This amazing conversation, this is so funny. I'm a, so my oldest son is 17 and he is, you know, super ambitious and does really well. And he, he and I go, I'm moderating these panels at the UN AI for Good event in Geneva. And he comes with me because it's summer break and we went around Sharm El-Hit went hiking and then went to Geneva. And we meet this guy who's, um, he's an AI professor at the University of Louisville. And he believes that like AI is gonna kill us all, right? And like, we're both potentially living in a simulation and that super powerful AI will come in like five years. And so I say to him, I'm like, all right, great. So what should my son do here? He's like applying to school. What should he do?

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  And he's like, oh, he has to go to a party school.

• 2:02:18Rich Roll?

  Like, just ride, ride it on, ride it out into the sunset. Like, you know what I mean? There's nothing you can do about it.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:24Rich Roll?

  It's like, we're the, we're the dinosaurs, except we know that the, you know, the asteroids are coming.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  He's coming, right? So just like, have fun.

• 2:02:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  What I actually tell my kids is, or what I actually believe is, A, use these tools as much as possible, right? Like, my middle kid, I'm like working with him to prep for the SAT using OpenAI, right? And so we're using OpenAI education mode. We've set up like a module for him. He's like studying with it. You know, my elder son is doing linear algebra. He's convinced that he wouldn't have been able to get through his math class junior year without AI as a tutor, right? And so what I've said to them very clearly is if you use AI to write your paper, you are cheating yourself, right? Cause you are not learning, right? If you use AI to tutor you,

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  you're at a superpower, right? And like, I can't like look over their shoulder as they do it, but I've had 100 conversations with them where you should absolutely use this and you should understand it. And like, we talk about it all the time with this in the podcast about it. But for the love of God, do not cheat yourself, right? And do not give up this process of learning right now.

• 2:03:27Rich Roll?

  It's an incredible learning tool and, uh, and, um,

• 2:03:32Rich Roll?

  You know, a way to accelerate your own, your own learning. Have you listened to this new, I guess it's a podcast series, but it's on Audible with Scott C. Burns, the screenwriter who works with Soderbergh. He wrote Contagion and he has this, it's kind of an audiobook podcast series on Audible called What Could Go Wrong? And basically the premise is he's trying to figure out how to come up with a sequel to Contagion and he's been stymied, like, you know, people want this movie to happen, but he just can't come up with anything compelling enough to invest the energy. And so he decides he's going to investigate if AI could be helpful with this.

• 2:04:14Rich Roll?

  And it's a whole, it's incredibly compelling, like, you know, multi-episode series of this deep dive exploration into these tools and how you can use them effectively. But essentially what he ends up doing with the help of Nick Bolton is who's like super into AI is creating like a writer's room with all of these different AIs that have backstories and different experiences, et cetera. Like who's the ultimate like writing room that you want for this project who can like come up with all these creative ideas? And, and obviously that's a conceit or a, or a notion that anybody could use in their own life, like, okay, if I want it, who are the 10 mentors that I need in my life? Or for this particular project or problem I'm trying to solve, who are the kind of

• 2:04:58Rich Roll?

  people who would be most helpful? And then, you know, kind of creating your own agent, you know, to help you solve these problems, like this is available to all of us right now, which is amazing.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  And I use it in my running, like I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but I, you know, I like, I upload what I eat, I upload my training logs and I ask it for advice. And like, it's can be very useful. So I, I came off Twisted Branch three weeks ago and I had a little pain in my knee. And, um, you know, I can kind of tell it's like runner's knee, it's tendonitis, it's at the top of the knee. And so I've, you know, I have a little tendonitis after this race. This is my weekly mileage leading up. This is the race, this is how it went down and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I think the things I'm supposed to do, I'm supposed to do. Glute exercises. I don't like to do squats because I feel like that always makes it worse. My foreman squats, whatever it is, I can't do it. Glute exercises and I should foam roll on my quads, my hamstrings and my IT band.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  And my general view is that I should run as long as it doesn't get worse after the first two miles. Right. And it responds, yeah, that's all correct, except don't use the foam roll on your IT band. Right. And, you know, like, there's something about the way people foam roll on your IT band, which I actually think makes sense. When I foam roll on my IT band, like, things get worse in my body. Anyway, I worked through like a whole protocol of how to do my recovery from my tendonitis in my knee with Coach AI, which, you know, I bother be directly going through it, like, having a session with, you know, my top Nike people, but like, if they're not available and I'm like traveling, I was in Spain with my kids, you know, so I just went through with AI and, you know, whether it was that or not.

• 2:06:36Rich Roll?

  And the next level of that now is to create a multitude of coaches and like, one's a Ted Corbett guy and one's a, you know, like, one is, you know, with different philosophies and backgrounds or whatever. And then what you do is you have them talk to each other.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  And then have somebody else evaluate what they're saying and bring it to you. Which is a little bit like my Nike experience where I had those three people, they would talk and then they would synthesize it.

• 2:06:57Rich Roll?

  Because it's the synthesis and then with the human involvement, you know, then you can extract from it and synthesize it yourself.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Which is.

• 2:07:04Rich Roll?

  Like, that's the value right now.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Right. So it's this, it's this tool that's so crazy because the societal, like, the consequences to my business could be catastrophic. Like, it is absolutely entirely possible that the Atlantic will be like driven out of business by AI. On the other hand, it is like the best tool that we have for making a better Atlantic, right? It is the best tool that I have for figuring out my training. I use it all the time for all kinds of stuff. Uh, it's, it's fabulous.

• 2:07:31Rich Roll?

  We got to put a pin in this thing, but before I let you go, um, maybe, you know, leave us with, uh, really the, the, the wisdom that you want people to extract from your story and what you've learned from running that you think is, is the core lesson, you know, for the non-runner or just the reader out there, uh, you know, to extract from the message that you're trying to communicate.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  I think the message of the book is that.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  If you look really closely at running, you can understand yourself a lot better. And it doesn't have to be running. It could be meditation. It could be something else. For me, it was running. And it was through intense and focused running that I understood what my illness meant to me. And it's how I understood what my father meant to me. And, you know, why does running do that? A, it's the daily practice. A, it's the habits it builds. B, it's the time alone in your head in motion outside. But if you want to understand yourself and you want to kind of have more clarity on your life, it's not a bad idea to go for a run.

• 2:08:44Rich Roll?

  You never complete a run and say, I wish I hadn't done that.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:48Rich Roll?

  Right? The upper just kind of says it all.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  And there's a, you know, I was thinking about my dad and like, you know, I had this, I had this line in the book that's the opposite of alcohol, right? Where alcohol, you feel good and regret it. Running, you feel bad and feel great, right? And it's like, you know, when I look at my dad's life, the days he ran were the days he held things together. Right? And I think that no matter, I have a chapter, it's called a tiny and perceptible tailwind. And the general idea is that every time you do something right, it creates this little tailwind in the rest of your life. And so the daily practice of running creates a little tailwind, right? A little tailwind through everything else you do, whether it's work, whether it's your self-examination, whether it's your parenting. And so if you can figure out how to get it in,

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  you can figure out how to do it. You can figure out a way that you can enjoy it. You know, you can create a positive force that flows through your entire life.

• 2:09:42Rich Roll?

  The book is great. I really think you did an amazing job.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rich.

• 2:09:47Rich Roll?

  And I can't wait for people to read it. So this was really fun. Thanks, man.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  I'm terrified of people reading it, but I'm so glad.

• 2:09:53Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a good, I think that's a good sign.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that you read it and enjoyed it.

• 2:09:57Rich Roll?

  You know, there's a lot of vulnerability in there. And so I can understand that. But, you know, you were talking about how to structure this book and how difficult it is. Like you are, on some level, yeah, it's a memoir. It's a, you know, story about your past and it's a sports story. And it's also kind of a little bit of an Alex Hutchinson, you know, kind of book about running, you know? And that is difficult. And it requires a certain level, you know, like a delicate balance. But I think you achieved it and I loved it. So thanks, man.

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thank you, Rich.

• 2:10:30Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the

• 2:11:11Rich Roll?

  help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper

• 2:11:55Rich Roll?

  Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.