Why one CEO sets ‘non-goals’ - and what ultramarathons taught him about focus and mental toughness

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: When you're a CEO, when you're a leader, you have to constantly be trying to think, okay, how much energy do I have to put into this task? How much time do I have? And, what are the things that are most efficient for my organization?

I use a principle called non-goals, which is what is a thing that is valuable that I do not have time for? Okay. So then that's a non-goal. And then everything I do has to be more valuable than that. And it's a way to structure your day so that you actually aren't spending time on stuff that's not valuable, scattered, not useful.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader. I'm Linda Lacina and I am excited to introduce you to Nicholas Thompson. He is the CEO of The Atlantic and he has been driving a digital transformation at that 169-year-old publication. He's also the best-selling author of The Running Ground and he is going to talk to us about the themes from that book as well as how anyone can build mental resilience and think about the future and drive long-term change. How are you, Nick?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me here.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So, let's just maybe level set for folks, you have run for most of your life and you just wrote this book. Tell us about it. What inspired you and why did you write it?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I wrote the book because I was trying to figure out this interesting question of why I had been a pretty good runner in my thirties. I had run a marathon in two hours, 43 minutes, repeatedly and then in my 40s, I became much better and I ran one in two hours and 29 minutes and then I set an American record and became a world leader in ultra marathons.

And, as I thought through that question, I realized that it was tied to some very deep personal views, both the way I related to my father, who had passed away, and the way I had conceived of my own abilities and limits after recovering from cancer when I was 30-years-old.

And, once I realized that there are these kind of profound questions tied up in my running, then that became an interesting book, because, you know, a guy in his forties running a slightly faster marathon is not that interesting, but the way that our limits can be transformed as we get to a greater understanding of self, now that's an interesting story.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That is. You mentioned your father, right? And, in part, he's sort of what got you sort of interested in running. Tell me a little bit about him and his influence.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Yeah, my father, Scott Thompson, was a remarkable man. He was a man who rose from tough situations to be somebody who became a promising young man that many people said would be president, including John Kennedy, who said he'd be president. And he married my mother, has children, life is going all right and then he comes out of the closet, realizes he's gay.

And then his life gets very complicated and in some ways he's a civil rights pioneer and then in some ways his life gets completely chaotic. And people used to ask me what my parents do for a living and I would say, well, my mom was an art historian, my dad runs a brothel in Bali. And he lived this tempestuous, crazed life, but running was one of the ways we connected. It was the sport that he had offered to me. He was always my biggest supporter, we run together. And so the story in some ways is about how to love a complicated man and how I maintain my relationship, in part through running with my father, even as he, you know, approached certain levels of King Lear-like madness.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: His own father, they had sort of a complex relationship. You mentioned when you were reading your father's journals, that he sort of felt like his success was maybe his own father's failure. Tell me a little bit about maybe that element and how that also factors in.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Yeah, that was a very strange dynamic where my grandfather seemed to believe that as my father did better, it would make him do worse. Like the universe had only a set amount of success that could be given to the Thompsons and so if Scott Thompson's star rose, Frank Thompson's star would fall. And that was extremely hard on my dad.

My dad would later say the hardest thing in his life was coming to this realization that his father, who was a Baptist minister, a generous, thoughtful man, did not have generosity towards his son and my father struggled with this.

I think there's a really hard dynamic. It's one of the reasons I love my dad so much, is that it's rare to have people in your life who truly want the best for you at every moment, right? Sometimes people kind of want the best and kind of don't or kind of resent success or kind of want you to come in second, not first in that race. And my dad always wanted the absolute best for me and that was one of the... part of the... I feel like every parent owes that to their child and I appreciate that my father gave it to me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I think it's really powerful because your father is not a tidy mentor. A lot of times when we think about mentors, they're these sort of gleaming people, they're on pedestals, Everything that they do is just something to follow, there's a path to follow there. Why is it important to accept imperfect influences in our lives?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, we don't get that many people. You only get one father, right? You don't get a lot of people who are biologically tied to you, who are there for key moments of your childhood. And you can't trade, right, you can't get rid of a biological parent. I mean, you can in some ways. You can stop writing, you could stop communicating, you can have somebody else, you can be adopted, but like, for many of us, there's one person who can play this role and because of that, you have to work at it and you have put in the effort to see whether you can make the relationship work and I was willing to do that with my father.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Even with people who are in the workplace, sometimes our bosses, of course, have wonderful qualities and, surprise, surprise, sometimes they have shortcomings and I feel like sometimes people want bosses to be fully perfect or then it's a failure. My boss is terrible because X or Y, right?

Do you think that it can also help in the workplace to be able to be like, well, you know what? These are the things that I can really learn from this person, these are the things I can benefit from. Yeah, there's this other shortcoming, I'll need to manage that, I need to navigate around that. But do you think it also helps in the workplace to be able to make the best of both sides of the coin there?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I do think that it's very valuable in the workplace to be able to tolerate and get the best out of difficult people. And one of the things that I actually learned from my father was how to do that. I went into a job interview, the first job interview for a big job in my life, and the boss says, hey, what's your relationship like with your father? I said, well, you know, my father's an alcoholic, but we get along great. And this man, who drank a little more than he should, took that as a wonderful sign and would later say that after I said that, he knew he was going to hire me.

And, you know, it's a funny story because of the connection of alcohol, but I do think that we confront difficult people who have different goals and objectives all the time. We confront them in life, we confront them at work. And sometimes you have to fight, sometimes you need to resist, sometimes, you quit. But one of the things that I learned from my father is how to kind of work through it. And that served me well in life. I've worked with a lot of difficult people and I've had pretty good relationships with most of them.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Especially that sort of adaptability, because people are always changeable, so that you can kind of move with them. You sort of make the point in the book that running sometimes drives home how a lot of our limits we set ourselves, they're mental limits. How does that show up in running?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, one of the most interesting things I learned about running is that pain is not necessarily a physical process. It can be, but it's also a mental process. It's your body being afraid of what's happening, your body thinking you're going too fast, you can't handle this, you better slow down.

I learned this the most when I was in high school and I was, I just started running and I entered this big race and I thought the fastest I could do would be 11.30 for two miles. I was convinced and the funny thing was the track was a different size than I thought and so I go out and I'm running, maybe it's 22 seconds a lap, and turns out that I'm not running 5.45 pace, which would make me run 11.30, I'm running 5.20 pace. And I never could have done that if I'd known how fast I was going, because my brain would have gotten too scared, right?

When I was older, my brain had some kind of a block against running faster than two hours 40 minutes in a marathon and I had to break through that block in order to go and run a 2.29. I had this remarkable progression where I couldn't get under 2.40, I couldn't get under 2.40. And then I got under 2.40, and within a year, I was under 2.30. So your brain just, once you can crack these barriers in your mind, you can go a lot faster.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: In some cases, some of the running metaphor might fall a little short in the workplace, right? So sometimes, in terms of burnout, I'm thinking in particular, where a lot of people don't even realize that they're experiencing burnout until maybe it's either too late or maybe a year later, they're like, oh gosh, that's why I was experiencing all those symptoms and all those things, that's why I was so cranky and sad. So was there a moment that maybe you learned the hard way that maybe you can't work the way that you run?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, running is an interesting sport where the way I run is, I run every day, I run a lot every week, but I only run hard two or three times a week. And so when I'm running and training, I run, I rest. Like Mondays I rest, Tuesdays I run hard, Wednesdays I rest and it's actually not the worst philosophy for work where you put in, you do some really hard stuff, but then you have to maybe take it a little easier the next day.

You have to be able to figure out what you want to do in running. You build up your body so you can take on more load, and then you rest so you strengthen, then you can add on more loads. And it's not the worst metaphor for how to work. And in running, you realize that if you push too hard, you get hurt. And you can take those same lessons to work, so if you look -- I think about Davos. How do I do Davos? I'm not out until three in the morning. I'm out until six. I skip the after parties. I run in the mornings. I try to take care of myself so that I can actually put a little more load on in total than if I had sort of hammered early in the week.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Now, I think that's an interesting point, because a lot of it has to do with managing energy, right? Why do sometimes leaders lose sight of that, that importance for them to be able to manage that as opposed to just maybe managing projects or managing widgets?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I think that one of the things that people can feel and they probably feel in Davos, is there's like a certain heroism. If you're like, I was out till four and I did a panel at 6.30, right? And it kinda can make you seem or look like Superman or Superwoman. And so there's a tendency to maybe wanna do that or to feel like if I can get in 40 bilats, instead of 30 bilats, the day is more efficient. And it might be for some people that works.

For me, the best way to get the most meetings in in the week, and to get most out of it and to perform the best was actually to try my best to rest some of the time and to recover, and get ready for the next day. It's Thursday, I feel great, I'm gonna have a great panel on Friday morning. You know, in part, because I didn't fry myself Monday and Tuesday. I mean, that's a lesson from running. You just, you can't. You learn about your body. You learn what you can take. And if you don't follow those lessons, you get hurt.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How does it also sort of parlay into prioritization, if you are a CEO or a top leader in a team that you really need to only be focusing on a couple of priorities? You can't be scattered everywhere. How does that also sort factor in?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, I do think that's a very important principle. When you're a CEO or a leader, you have to constantly be trying to think, okay, how much energy do I have to put into this task? How much time do I have? And what are the things that are most efficient for my organization? I use a principle called non-goals, which is what is a thing that is valuable that I do not have time for? Okay. And so then I say that's a non-goal. And then everything I do has to be more valuable than that. And, it's a way to structure your day so that you actually aren't spending time on stuff that's valuable, scattered, not useful.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What are some of your non-goals?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, so one of the non-goals that I've held for a long time is developing a video strategy for The Atlantic. It would be great to have a video strategy, but there are a lot of reasons why that's hard, right? And there are a lot reason why we can't implement that in the organization and there are a lot reasons why economically it's not a big part of our organization. But it would definitely be valuable. And so I think about that sometimes, like, is this more important than spending another two hours working with people on our video strategy?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When people are doing things in a gym or things in sport, it's a little bit easier to explain how change comes with physical pain. And that you might be sweating and huffing and puffing and so the hardness of growth, it's obvious and it is visual and it's right there in front of you. It's a bit harder when people face some of those headwinds in the workplace, because sometimes the hard moments, say a plan changing at the last minute or something that you never expected coming in to kind of torpedo your calendar, how do you help people embrace discomfort in the workplace?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: There's a principle from running that I really like and when you train hard, you run a lot. You learn this very important thing, which is you do not ever get better without consistent effort and if you put in consistent effort, you always get better and you're training for a marathon, you don't think you can possibly run a marathon, you go out there you run a mile and then you run two miles and you run three and eventually you get up and you run 26. And you can learn this principle in lots of ways. Learn from Confucianism, you can learn however you want to learn it, but the principle is that if you want get some place, you just put in steady work every day and you will get there.

And that's a great lesson for work because you have an impossible project, right? I can't get this done; I'm not going to be able to get this in six months. Well, here's what you should do, don't complain about how you can't get it done, just start and see what happens because sometimes you'll actually get it done. You learn this actually in journalism, I remember there were times where I can't possibly write this. I can't possibly do it. Why don't you just start Nick, start making phone calls and you start thinking, well then you do get it done. And it's a really great lesson. I mean sometimes you can't, sometimes the story is too hard, you can't figure it out, but if you worry about not having the time, you definitely won't get it done.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You also make the point that you know, sometimes runners need to know when to back off, because you can get stronger when you know how to back off. Tell me a little bit about that

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Running is a hard sport because what brings people down is often injuries and if you look at why people leave the sport, why they stop running in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, it's often because they had a knee problem that they couldn't solve, or they got a stress fracture and then they came back, they had a stress fracture on their right leg and then suddenly they had something in their left hip and then something wrong in their right shoulder. Pain often moves diagonally through the body. And you have to kind of prevent that at the beginning. If you can't prevent it at the beginning, prevent it in the middle, right?

And so you have to learn when a pain is an injury or when a pain is just fatigue. And so, you know, I'll lie down in bed at night and I'll think about what I feel in my legs and what I feel on my knees, right. And is that an injury or is that just fatigue, right, is that the muscle's rebuilding stronger or did I actually tear something? And if the right leg feels a lot worse than the left leg, there's probably something wrong with it. If they both hurt kind of equally and they feel kind of like hot embers, well maybe I just trained hard that day or I trained hard the day before. And you have to like understand, well wait a second, I took a rest day yesterday, but I still don't feel quite right, do I back off? And so learning to get in touch with your body is one of the most important things you can do as a runner.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how does restraint show up in leadership?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Sometimes you have to know what your organization can handle. You have to know how much pressure they can take, right? You want people to go. You want this project to go twice as fast. Do you say, darn it, make it go twice this fast? Or do you say let's try to do these things so we can go 20% faster? How do you push the right amount in the right ways with the right people? How much can they make?

My old boss and mentor, David Remnick, used to say if someone's jumping over three feet and they can jump over five feet, you don't solve it by asking them to jump over a bar that's seven feet, right? You have to find the right place and try to motivate people to the top of their abilities and then you have to try to help them build their abilities. They go a little higher a little further.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there an example of a way that you've done that?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO The Atlantic: I try to work really hard with my direct reports and I try to ask them, like, what is the thing that you're afraid of doing, but you think you might be able to do, right? What is the thing we didn't do last year, but you think we should? If we were a slightly more efficient organization, we were slightly better, what would we do? What would we do differently? And you have that conversation and then maybe you say, well, maybe, hmm, sounds like maybe we should try that and then, maybe we do.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a leadership equivalent of stopping a run early?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO The Atlantic: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, this is one of the key things, right? Sometimes, like, you have an idea, and you think it's a really good idea. You know, well, this doesn't work, right? Like none of the numbers are coming in and you have to just stop.

I can't give you the details, it's confidential, but I came in highly confident when I started at The Atlantic that there's this move we could make that would really work. And it took a lot of effort, a lot things to push to try to get there and then it wasn't working, didn't work. So we just pulled the plug and said, you know what, this is not working.

And that's an important thing and it's the same thing in running, right, you go and you're like, you know what I'm gonna go and I'm going to run this workout and sometimes you're just not there. Now, what you don't want to do, you don't wanna get in the habit of quitting because every time you do something it makes it easier to do it the next time, right? And so when you quit a workout, it's a little easier to quit the next workout. When you abandon a project at work, it's a little easier to abandon the next project at work. You have to be systematic and smart about it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Distance runners spend countless hours negotiating with their own minds and things like that. You don't listen to music when you run. Tell me a little bit about that.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I don't listen to music for a couple of reasons. One is for me, running is a meditative process. I want to be able to be in my own head and I want to, it's a time for me to process my thoughts and it's a rare time for me to process my thoughts. The second reason I don’t listen to music is that the reason you're running is you're trying to make your body stronger and you're trying to make your leg muscles stronger, to some degree you're trying to make your arm muscles stronger, but you're also trying to make your mind more aware of how your body works and you're trying to get your mind to understand the pain in your body and like what is the real pain and what is not. You're trying improve your neurological system, right?

It's actually, there's an element of coordination to running fast. If you're listening to music, it disrupts all that. It disrupts the learning. It disrupts the coordination. Like maybe it motivates you to like push a little harder at the beginning, but that's not the point. The point isn't to push hard at the beginning, the point is to learn how to pace yourself, to push maximally through the whole thing. So, music can confuse the signals that actually make us better runners.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When you're having that inner monologue, that meditation with yourself, what's going through your head? What's happening?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I wish I could say that, you know, it's like the Buddha and I'm just feeling it flow with the universe, right? And that's what I aspire to, right. I wish I were just like breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, like really focusing on the sounds of the birds in the trees and really like understanding the way the sunlight is reflecting off the snow. But sometimes I'm like preparing for a panel or I'm you know worrying about whether the Bruins made the right trade last week.

You're just thinking about whatever you think about, but even all that stuff's important. Your mind is just, you're almost in like, you just in an imaginative state. And when you're moving, your mind works a little differently than when you were at rest. And, so I think you open up more memories and thoughts and your brain mixes them a little more. It's like you stir the pot.

You have all these thoughts and all these fears and all of these things go in your mind and it's like, it's a little big pot with lots of different elements in it and you're stirring it and you are stirring it. Whatever is rising to the surface is what you're thinking about. And I think when you're running it, maybe you're stirring it a little bit quickly. Sometimes I think about it as though, maybe this is a better metaphor, your mind is this river, right? And it's like all these things flowing through it and there are all these sticks. And you're kind of like, it's almost like when you run and you reach in and you pull out a stick and then you're dropping, or you're pulling out another stick here. You know, there's a leaf and you're grabbing it. And so that's how I think about it when I run.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Do you think that we create enough space in our days for reflection, for meditation?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Some people do, some people don't. I think probably some people create too much space. I think in Davos, maybe people could create more space. I think that, I mean, Davos is complicated. You're here for a week. Every person you know you want to work with and do business with is here, so you want to meet them all, right? And you have a hundred requests for meetings, and you can take seven of them. And so there are 93 people you probably should meet with, but you can't. You have seven in a day or whatever it is.

But it's also the case that I think that in Davos and everywhere, you should set some time in your day where you go for a walk, or you swim or bike ride or you sit outside. And humans weren't meant to be sedentary, weren't meant to just be inside a building and drinking coffee and eating granola bars. We were meant to be outside, so even here in Davos, I go on a run every morning, right? And I'm outside and I'm watching the sun come up. And I think it's an important part of preparing yourself mentally for a day and recovering from whatever happened yesterday.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Did you go running today?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I actually went for a nice long run this morning. I got up and I ran up from town to the Schatzalp above town and then I ran up the mountain above the Schatzalp and I ran up to the top of the ski lifts. And then, so I was at the top and then I ran down, which is really fun because you're like running down the ski slopes.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Having that sort of moment to yourself while there's all this hubbub and busyness -- what does that feel like?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: It was funny, I'm running, I was like, you know and I get to the top of Strela and you know the sun's coming up over the mountains in the distance and you can see like with bits of light reflected. It's quite gorgeous and you're looking down and you see all of Davos and you're near a couple thousand feet up above Davos at this point and I'm running down and thinking like, those are all my friends walking to panels.

And there was a panel I'd wanted to go to. Satya Nadella had a panel I was invited to this morning at 7.30. I was like, you know, am I going to go to the Satya Nadella panel, which will definitely be interesting. That man's very smart. Or am I gonna run up Strela Alp and be watching people going to it as I run down? I was, like, I'm gonna run Strela Alp.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: This kind of fits in with my next question. You said that you make time for running. This is the quote. You set up your run so they don't detract from the things that matter, but enhance the things that matter. Tell me a little bit about that.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, this is a real issue at home, where I have three boys, I'm a parent, I'm a proud father. I care so deeply about my children and I try very hard to make sure that they never feel like I'm choosing to run or choosing to be with them. And so a lot of my run is I run to the office and from the office. I do it instead of the subway. It saves time. It takes about 35 minutes, whether I take the subway or whether I run. I will often run before they wake up. If I'm going to go run 20 miles, I'll go run at 5 o'clock in the morning and I try to make it so that I'm not taking away from the things in life that are most important.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When you are making your what makes the cut, do you have a framework for where your time goes?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Yes, I definitely do. I keep a Trello board and I keep track of what are the five most important things I wanna do during the day. I have another board, which is like what are next three things I'm gonna do? I'm going to do this and sometimes it's, I'm going to complete this task and sometimes I'm going to spend 20 minutes on this task. Then I have another board, that's what am I gonna do today or what do I aspire to do today? And then the third one, which is like what are the things I am working on in general.

And so what I'm trying to do is to is make sure that I'm prioritizing properly, that I am responding to the urgent stuff in a timely manner and that I also spend a lot of my time on the big stuff. Because in a job like mine, you can get distracted, you can spend too much time responding to email or dealing with things that somebody else can deal with and you need to be spending a lot of your time thinking about the really important stuff, building the relationships that matter the most.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What are you making time for now, what are your big priorities?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, this week, my biggest priority I have to moderate ten different conversations, lunches, dinners, panels and so this is a moderation week. And it's complicated, because when you moderate a panel, you have to really understand each person on it. You have to understand the flow and you have come up with a structure for the panel.

When you moderate at dinner, you have to memorize 17 faces, 20 faces, their bios and you have to know how to move a conversation so they all can participate, so you can find the right points of attention. So my Davos is, there's some meetings, one-on-one meetings, I meet with advertisers, I meet people who are interesting. Sometimes I even see friends and I do run. But most of what I'm doing in Davos is just like planning these panels, planning these lunches.

When I get back to New York, I'm back in the job, right? And then I'm really meeting with advertisers. I'm trying to figure out what our advertising strategy is. I'm working through here's the best way to get subscribers to The Atlantic. I'm trying to figure out our AI strategy; how do we implement it better in our engineering team? So I'm working through those kind of big structural questions of how my job works.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: For people who might not realize what a CEO of a media company does, can you talk a little bit about that?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Yeah, so I don't oversee the editorial, you know, I don't even know what we're publishing today, I'll read it tonight. So, I don´t have any say in that, what I do is I try to make money so that we can then hire more journalists and do more good work that I think is good for the world.

And so we make money mostly just through two things, through advertising, you know, some appears in our print magazines, some at our events, some in our digital stories, some branded content. So I try to meet with advertisers, help make deals, figure out how we can get them stuff that makes them happy, helps them with their brands. And then I work really hard on building a subscription engine. What can we do to get people to subscribe to The Atlantic? How do we get people subscribe to stay? What can offer them? How can we help them feel better? What does our brand mean to them?

And so a lot of it is the math of how you run a subscription engine at a media company. So, do you set up a paywall? We've got a paywall. Do you let people read three stories a month, two stories, one story, zero stories? What if they come in from different referral sources? What if it's Tuesday, not Wednesday? What if they've read a culture story? Should we let them read a politics story? What is the formulation that gets the most people to subscribe? What is our relationship with the AI companies? Where is our traffic coming from? So analyzing all those questions is really important.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You have a 169-year-old publication, what is it like to be preparing that so that it can be a going concern for another 169 years possibly? What does that feel like to be trying to keep that ship going?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Yeah, The Atlantic was founded in 1857 and it existed through the American Civil War, World War I, World War II. It's existing just fine through the second Trump administration. It was founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It'd be a real bummer if I was the guy who blew it, who took it out of business. So, I try really hard to make sure that we make enough money that we can sustain it. But the thing that happens in journalism companies is you start to lose money, your advertising business breaks, you can't build your subscription model and you hope someone will bail you out because rich people often buy journalism companies.

But that's not what I want. I want us to make money and sustain and be profitable. We're owned by a very wealthy woman, but I know quite well that if we don't make money, bad things happen. It's always the story of media companies. So my goal right now is to figure out a model where we continue to make money. We were losing a lot of money a few years ago, now we're making money. It's good. I want to sustain that. And then I have to figure what happens with AI. AI is going to radically change journalism, both how it's created, how it is read and how the business works. And I need to make sure that I understand it and I stay ahead of it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You guys have a special partnership that you announced recently with OpenAI. Talk a little bit about it and why that was so important.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, the AI companies all came and they violated our terms of service, they probably violated copyright law, they took all our content, they fed it into these machines and they built a model that competes with us. And so that's not great. And so with many of them, they've offered us nothing in return. They just took our data, built their engines, built a competitive model and we have nothing in return, so some of them we've sued, some of them we're negotiating with.

Open AI came and said, hey, you know, we'll make a deal. We'd like your data, and we'll pay you for it. And not only that, as we build a new search engine, we'll work with you to try to make sure that it respects journalists and that it drives traffic to you. So there are two parts to the deal. They compensate us for the data they took and we work with them to try to help make the AI search experience better. And so that was a great deal for us and I wish the other tech companies did the same and if they don't, we'll try to help them reach the conclusion that they should.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How else is The Atlantic looking at ways to digitally transform?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, so we have lots of things. So you can use AI as a great tool for journalism, right? I like to say that a great story is finding a needle in a haystack and AI is a giant magnet. And so it's a great tool for journalists. You know, we have to figure out how to present our content so people who are using AI or sending out AI agents, you know, find our content. We have to figure out ways that in a world of agents, a world with much less search traffic, our advertisers can reach the people they want to reach. We have make sure that our subscription paywall, you know survives and thrives and we integrate with partners in the age of AI. So maybe someone who has a subscription to The Atlantic, you know has better content that gets fed into an AI search agent or gets fed into their agent. And then we have to learn how to use AI on the business side. Can we do customer service with it? What should we do on our HR department? Okay, can we get rid of the sort of outstanding tickets on our engineering team? So we're working through the list of tasks that we can help solve with AI.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: As you are following how AI can integrate into The Atlantic, you're also following the big trends on how AI is reshaping maybe the global stage. Can you talk a little bit about what's compelling to you right now?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, the biggest question for me is whether we'll have democratized AI that is controlled by lots of different people in lots of different countries and lots of different companies around the world or whether it will be five big companies that build the systems that power the world?

And we have lots of friendships with the five big, six big companies, but I care a lot about open source AI, I care a lot about sovereign AI, I care a lot about independent projects, whether they're academic or civil society, building systems into AI. AI is gonna power so much of the world and I want it to be democratized, I want it to be open, I want it to be competitive. And so the thing I'm interested in right now are new architectures of AI.

So the reason why there's so few companies with so much power is because of what are called scaling laws. In order to have a successful AI company you need billions of dollars to train models, right? Because what makes models better is more compute, more data, more everything. And so the way it's worked the last five years is more money, better model, more money, better model, more money, better model. But the new architectures for AI, whether they're world models, whether they are neural symbolic AI, whether they're continuous learning models, there are ways that maybe that paradigm shifts. Like, maybe it turns out they need a better idea, you don't just need more money, right? And if that ends up happening, maybe AI gets more democratized and if that happens, well all kinds of things change from foreign policy to opportunity to income inequality around the world.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If we don't get that right, what happens?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Well, if we don't get that right and it continues to just be the case that scaling laws are all that matter, you have a you know, you have an AI industry controlled by a very small number of people that is massively extractive with huge environmental consequences, but that also is awesome technology. And I think that's...

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Six of one, half dozen of another!

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I mean, look at what we have right now, part of what we have, we have geopolitical instability and one of the factors of the geopolitical instability we have is that all of the AI power is concentrated in the United States. Or all of the close source AI power is concentrated in the United States, like much of the money being made is in the US. That's why the US stock market is soaring. It's partly why the U.S. is such a geopolitical power. I'm an American and I'd like for America to do well. I also want the rest of the world to be doing well and have access to models.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there sort of a worst case scenario that sort of looms for you with all that?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I mean, the worst-case scenario is that there's a bubble and a crash. I mean, we have very extensive AI companies. We have made a huge bet that massive value will be created. That value has not been created. We are not on a path to create that value right now. If you extrapolate the amount of money, the amount of revenue that the AI companies bring in, they will not be able to pay off their debts and their loans and they will be unable to continue. If they start to crash, then the economy comes down with it. I don't think that's going to happen. I think AI will actually produce massive amounts of value. I do think there's a little bit for many companies and individuals of the J-curve where you don't actually see the value coming from AI until you've had it for a little while and really learned how to use it.

So, I do think that the benefits of AI will start to match the investments in AI or at least will start to get closer and you won't have a crash. But I might be wrong and there might be a crash

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there specific changes when it comes to the democratization of AI, a couple things that need to happen now to make sure that we're sort of poised for that?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I don't know if there's anything that needs to happen right now, but I do think that the smartest framework that I've heard of is from the former Taiwanese minister, Audrey Tang. And Audrey talks about this notion that there's a vertical race and this is kind of the race towards infinity between OpenAI and Anthropic and Grok and Google. And it is what it is. And I would rather that, you know, they do safety testing, I'd rather there's a competition policy. There are lots of things I would like when it comes to the vertical race and there's also this horizontal race.

And the horizontal race is where you know, civil society organizations, individuals, educators, they're building tools, they're buildings things that will eventually be absorbed into the giant models or whatever comes next. So part of what we need is, we need really smart, independent people building new kinds of evaluations, building new forms of identity, building different value systems and constitutions and experimenting in ways that eventually can be incorporated, trying to build new architectures for AI that aren't as cost-intensive. And it may be the case that you can solve a lot of problems on this horizontal race that end up changing the vertical race.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You post an 'Interesting Thing about Tech' every day. Tell me a little bit about this and how it got started.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I was the editor of Wired seven or eight years ago and I wanted to start experimenting with social media and I wanted to learn more about how the algorithms work and I wanted to learn more about vertical video. And so I started just filming myself and I'd hold the camera up and talk about whatever interested me in tech that day. Maybe it was a news story, maybe it was a new product, maybe a paper. And I just kept doing it.

And it got a following, maybe it's one point, probably about, it's close to two million people across platforms, not all watching it every day, like a tiny, tiny fraction watch every day. But it's just this fun way of communicating. And so every day in Davos, every day in New York when I'm there, at some point, I'm like, well, here's something I'm interested in and I just sort of put up the tripod. I actually lost my tripod, so I've been asking friends to do it in Davos, a friend will hold up a phone and I'll talk for like two minutes and then I'll post it on the internet.

Today, I did it. I was walking from Kurpark where we are right now in this big dome, over to the Congress Centre, which is the sort of centre of action. And I had like 10 minutes between meetings. I was with my friend, Jack Hidary, who's an AI pioneer, and I was like, Jack, can I ask you kind of an embarrassing favour for a guy like you, will you hold this phone for like three minutes and I'm going to talk about AI adoption and some of the sort of complex macroeconomics, and he's like, sure. So I've got a nice video that Jack filmed today.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there maybe one or two interesting things that have sort of come up even this week that are compelling to you?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Oh my gosh, yeah, I've done some videos that I've cared about a lot, actually. I've talked to Eric Schmidt about the benefits of Europe trying to build an open-source AI model. I talked to a woman named Bolor who used to be the digital minister of Mongolia about how Mongolia plans to educate a million people using AI tutors. I talked with Meredith Whittaker, the head of Signal, about the risk that AI agents pose to privacy. The video I posted with Jack was about why some industries are adopting AI much faster. Then I have one that I'm going to post soon with Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, which I've already filmed but haven't posted, on whether AI will make hiring more dependent on networks, connections and schools or less.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a book that you recommend?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: The book I recommend for management is Clare Hughes Johnson's Scaling People. And it's just a great guide to how to think about how to be a boss and how to have hard conversations. The best running book I read in the last two years was Alex Hutchinson's Endure, and the best book I read last year was Rich Benjamin's Talk to Me. That's the story about a young man in New York who is the grandson of a man who was briefly Prime Minister of Haiti, and it's about Rich's trying to understand his past, the history of Haiti and what it means to him as a, you know, young man who went to Stanford and lives in New York City.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how would it change someone who read that?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: It's a beautiful book for both understanding a part of the world a lot of us don't understand, understanding a little bit about America and a young man coming of age and coming out of the closet and living life as a gay man in New York. And it's also a story of how families process and understand pain. A lot of really hard things happen to you. It wasn't like his father was prime minister for a long time. His father was forced out and some terrible things happened to his family.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We're going to close this out with some rapid response, OK? So your biggest work, pet peeve.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Anybody who spends time saying they don't have time to do a project and could just start doing the project.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: The best thing you've stopped doing.

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Squats. You know, they say they're good for runners. I actually don't think they're good for runners and I think they make your knees hurt.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Your best AI hack?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Taking lots of documents and putting them into NotebookLM. So it's fully grounded and there's no hallucinations and using that as a hyper-intense search engine for researching things, like my father's diaries, emails, memoirs.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: First thing you do every morning?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I take a look at my to-do list and I try to identify what's the hardest thing I've got to do today.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: The habit you can't work without?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: Running.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Surprise spoiler alert and what is the biggest challenge you see for yourself in 2026?

Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic: I think that AI is going to disrupt my business really soon in ways that no one in it understands.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Thank you so much, Nick. I really appreciate it and thanks so much to you for listening and for watching. For more video podcasts, make sure that you go to the World Economic Forum's YouTube page. And for more podcasts and podcast transcripts, go to https://www.weforum.org/podcasts