YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Thompson

lines on the record

106

first

2018-04-27

most recent

2018-04-27

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Introduces a couple of facts that will be important later to the story. And then it mostly runs chronologically. So it's the structure is 80% chronological and 20% thematic. At certain points you have to introduce stories slightly out of chronological order because of where you are thematically in the story that you're talking about Russia. You have to introduce a fact about Russia even if it doesn't exactly fit the timeline. But my co-author Fred Vogelstein and I worked really hard as much as possible make it chronological as a very deliberate structural choice. So you could map out that story and by mapping it out learn the things that I just said and also have a closer sense of the moments where we chose to break away from the chronology and then be able to think through why we did that. And so you can do that with most stories and you'll see flaws in some of them. You'll see brilliance in some of them. You'll see chronological structure.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “So, how exactly does it work? Where is information presented? Where are characters presented? So I'll use this example because it's sitting right here on my desk. My 11,000 word story about Mark Zuckerberg that you mentioned at the intro. It has a very specific structure that may not be the right structure or may not be the ideal structure, but it is a very deliberate structure. So the way the story works is several characters are introduced and the story, the first section of the story is chronological from roughly February of 2016 to I think it's April of 2016 and tells the story of Facebook during that two-month period. And then the piece has its one jump back where it goes and it tells very quickly, story of Facebook from 2007 to 2016, and it introduces several specific themes and a couple of characters will become important later. And that was very deliberately done. Then the story jumps back into the chronology, kicks up right where it was in April of 2016.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “And she wrote a lot of pieces about poverty. Her last book was about India. She doesn't write a ton, but what she writes was extraordinary. But you could also do it with Kalafasene, or you can go back and do it with John McCee, or you could go and do it with Rachel Luvie for whoever your favorite writer or stylist is, or even just a piece that you loved. had all kinds of features in Wire that are super interesting to read if you read them out loud. Find a writer you love for whatever publication and study them and think about what exactly are they doing. I also most of my trading in this was done as an editor, but you could also do it as a reader, which is to map a story. I will often on a whiteboard when I'm working with a writer, but you could also just do it as an exercise for the finished piece, like look at the structure of the piece.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Yeah, so a couple of things that I think are useful are Okay, first, so how do we get a better sense of style and structure? So, one of the things that I think was really important to me is that I found some writers I really loved, and I just read their stuff out loud. Like, that sort of forces a level of concentration and tension of prose. I remember go through the pieces of this writer Catherine Boo, who wrote for the New Yorker I thought was maybe the best stylist around it. And I would just read her pieces out loud. What was her name again? Catherine Boo.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “I've ever worked with. And I would never adjust a sentence of his with my own purse. I would never say, why don't you write it this way? I would just say, I don't think this works, please rewrite it, or please do this, not redoing it. I would never redo it myself, but I worked with a lot of other writers who I would be much more likely to say, maybe you should write it this way, or maybe you should do this way, or even some writers where I would go in and rewrite sections. With some writers, I remember I worked with Ryan.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “strong, I really like this, but I don't think you hit this core issue. I think that the chronology is broken in these four ways. I think you overuse this. And I really think you need more reported on that. And so for every writer, that's kind of the first step, which is here's what I think is wrong with the piece. And you adjust that based on the amount of time you have allotted. If it's like a political piece and it has to run next week, you try not to, if they're only going to be able to jump over somebody that's four feet high because the time available, you try not to set up a barrier that's six feet high. So that's the first step. Then after that, it starts to really vary depending on the writers. So each edit, you go through a process from sort of wide aperture, big comments to very narrow focusing on specific sentences at the very end. And the process by which you go through that is different for different writers. So I worked with Califasane, right? One of the greatest pro styles.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Because just procrastination is the enemy of good editing. You should just start and do it. And so if you get the draft while you're in the middle of something else important like editing another draft, of course you wait for an hour, but really you should, you know, within the first six hours of getting a draft from the writer, you should have read the draft. And so then you read the draft and then you start thinking through. And usually the first step would be going through and sending them back a memo saying, hey, this is good, you know, these are the things I like, but here are the big structural issues and actually giving them specific guidance. And my goal was always to make it a memo that I wouldn't have to kind of amend. Like you want to write and say, I haven't really figured this out, but I kind of think you might want to do this. I'll tell you more tomorrow. No, you want to give them actual advice and things they can work with. And if they disagree, you can have a conversation. But I would write a memo saying, hey, this piece is...”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “it totally varies, right? So the great thing about the New Yorker is that you it's all staff rate or driven. It may be a unique publication in America in that kind of 90% of the content is written by 50 people. And so you show up and they're whatever there are, 60 of your editors. That means that eight people work with you. And so your life is about those eight people, so making sure that they have the right ideas. They're all working all the time, that you're helping them maximize their talents, their ambitions, and helping them find stories. And so I worked with a group of writers, and with all of them, there were some things that I would do the same and some things that I would do differently. So first, whenever they file the draft, I would immediately write back and say that I've got it. Because even if they're the most talented writer in the world, everybody is slightly insecure and wants to know that their story has been received by the editor. So I've got it. Second thing is I would read it right then.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Long term journalism, so you won't hemorrhage out the face. I mean, if you pay people $2 a word, you'll get all the best writers in America. It would be really right for you. Got it. But you pay them $1.50 a word, you'll get a slightly smaller pool. You pay a buck. People will be like, so. Yeah, so your range will be somewhere between $1 and $2 a word. If you're Michael Lewis, you'll ask for substantially more, but for really terrific writers, they will be happy with those rates.”

   2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Write a story that will get 50,000 readers, and if you have that writer putting out listicles, they'll be able to generate three of them a day, each of which will get 25,000 readers. And it's sort of the bang for the buck equation unless you change the economics somehow by having subscriptions or movie deals or something else. All the economic incentives push people towards short stuff.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “with different models, but you end up being able to pay them much better rates because you know if they agree that they will give you 50% of the option price if they sell it to Hollywood. So we would bake that into our contracts like either we can pay you $2,000 for this story and you can keep all the rights the Hollywood rights or we can pay you $10,000 and give us 50% of the Hollywood money. And then the writer generally will choose the second option to get the higher guaranteed payment so they can justify spending all the time on it. So with you, you might want to think through something like that or think through whether there's another revenue stream you can attach to, whether it's being part of events or something like that or find a specific sponsor for a kind of story. But that's how I would think through the economics of how to support it. But again, the core problem and the reason why it's really hard for publications to do long form is that it takes a writer two months to”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Revenue generated by a long story is much higher. So suddenly you're generating $4,000 for a story or $5,000 for a story or whatever it is. And you can justify paying higher rates. The third way of making money is like”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Let us use your CPM and the rights. And the problem is when you do that, if you add those numbers up, you're going to end up with generating for your story that has a couple of ads viewed per person if it's people, you're going to end up generating like $2,000 in total revenue for the story. The numbers are just not good. And so if you have an advertising-supported long-form journalism shop, it's really hard to pay for the writer, the editor, the rights to the art, and sort of the bandwidth. It's a really hard thing to justify. And that's something we thought through a lot at the New Yorker and acquired and at the analyst. Okay, so how do you make the economics work? If you're only going to generate, you know, sometimes it's just a couple hundred dollars in advertising revenue, like what can you do? Well, the New Yorker and Wired, there's a second revenue stream, which is subscriptions, right? And so you generate way more money from subscriptions on these long-form stories than you do from advertising. So suddenly the amount of total amount of...”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It's kind of like what we went through at the Atomist. So here are a couple ways to think through it. So first you could say, all right, well, how much advertising revenue will I get? And so you can do the math, right? So let's say you have you would get 50,000 people might read this story. That's a lot, but through your social promotion and through general traffic to the site. So 50,000 people will read the story. You'll be able to sell your ads at whatever CPM you sell. Let's say $15 per 1,000 visitors. And you'll be able to show four ads per person, you know, one quarter of the people will be turning on ad blockers, so we'll say three. And how much revenue you generate in total. And so you go through those calculations, right? You figure out what is your sell-to-rate on the advertisement.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Click through sensationalized slideshows. They wanted to come to New Yorker to read smart, interesting things. And that was great because when your business incentives align with your sort of journalistic incentives, you're in a much happier place than if the two are sort of run perpendicular to each other.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Would feel related. They'd feel of a peace. If Philip Gurevich wrote a web piece about a terror attack that had just happened, it would feel enough like a Philip Garevich magazine feature, and the readers would appreciate it. And so ultimately our strategy became getting the staff writers to write regular posts, hiring people who could write very quickly, could write at the cadence of the web, but who had similar pro styles to the New Yorker staff writers. moving John Cassidy, for example, who was a magazine staff writer, writes a column every day for the website, which was great, really was valuable to know that every day you would have a terrific column by the super smart, well-respected guy. Same with Amy Davidson, who had been a senior editor. So bringing over people, bringing in new people, getting some of the staff writers, and what we found was that the stuff people liked was the best stuff we published. And that was really heartening. Like people didn't want to go to New Yorker.com to read, to sort of...”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Maybe 800 words, you know, 1,000 words. I mean, that was actually an interesting conversation. Like, if you make them 300 words, will it actually detract more? But if you make it 800 words, should you make the web stories more like the long print stories or less like the long print stories? And so there's a lot of back and forth. This is kind of the central debate in my mind for several years. How do you make daily web content that feels of a piece with the New Yorker magazine? It's been around for 85 years and has such an incredible history and such green stories. And so back to the initial question, over time we found that what got the most readership that worked the best in every sense were smart pieces of analysis of what was happening right now, ideally written by the same people who wrote for the magazine. And they would spend far less time per word on their web posts than they wrote for the magazine stairs.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “You're a New Yorker writer will get several dollars a word to write five thousand words, so you're looking at fifteen thousand dollars a story. And on the website, you're looking at two hundred dollars a story. So can you produce content for that two hundred dollars that won't sort of detract from the other stuff? And that's a challenge, right? And you have to figure out what is the DNA. How long were those?”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “The magazine. That was like one of the most important kind of existential both debates and findings at the New Yorker. So I started at The New Yorker on the print side when we really didn't, when the magazine hadn't put a lot of effort into having an ambitious daily website. The website of New York are mostly just published the print stories and some of them are behind the paywall and some of them were not. And then as part of this process where David became, David Remick became much more excited about daily journalism and the importance of having a website. Eventually I was moved over to run the website, work with a bunch of people. And so the initial challenge was can you publish daily content because the magazine is put together by so many people with so much experience and the website was this kind of startup within the organization where you have to be a lot scrappier. You're paying people”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “I know you sold a book. What agent did you use, and would you recommend him or her? And then if you've got five people who sold books, you ask them all, a couple of names come up, and you go meet with them, see who you click with, who you get a good bond with. I mean, the best, you know, the best possible agent is somebody who has a track record and who actually likes you and cares about you. And sometimes those things are kind of like inversely related because they have a track record. They have so many clients they're not going to care about you. So you just kind of figure out how to find somebody who's both good and responsive.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “My only other recommendation would be to find friends or friends of friends who have actually had success and say, who sold it? And I do this much more in the book publishing world where a higher percentage of my friends have sold books where you”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Story because it's public domain. So talking to an agent and working through that I think is really important. And then just knowing that there's no part of the world where people kind of tell more baloney stories about how this is about the stars that are coming than Hollywood. There's so many, oh yes, you know, we'll attach Francis Ford Coppola, right? We'll do this, we'll do that. They're not lying, it's just never true, right? So you really need to have it written down.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Yeah, so I'm not, you know, this is not my area of top expertise, but a couple of things. One, I think that the value of before you publish and before you put it up for auction of locking a few things down is really important, right? Making sure you have the life rights to the central character, that you've negotiated example in the Argo story, it was really important that Josh had locked up rights to Tony Mendez's story so that After the story ran, it wasn't like somebody else could do the same story but without Josh attached to it because Josh and Tony came as a package. And so they had negotiated to deal together. And so that's a really important thing to make sure that you have as much as you can the rights to that particular story buttoned up because it gives you just much more leverage if potential bidders aren't like, hmm, you know, I can probably do this without Nick, or I can probably do this without buying the rights to Nick.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “And there's almost no chance we'll make it, right? You want to make sure that you get paid real money up front because even a really good script with really good people attached to it has a fairly low percentage of chance of getting through.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Magazine stories in Hollywood before is really important. And so what we did at the Atomist is we just started out with an agent who had had a lot of success, the same guy that we had used that my co-founder, Evan Ratlitz, had been a writer for Wired, and that I had used at Wired. And so we just brought him in with the Attis from the get-go from fairly early on. And then when you're looking at the deal points, what you want is there's a whole series of stages along the way where you get different payouts. You get an initial amount of money and then you get certain renewals. And then if the script is written, and then if the movie is made. And so what you want are you want to make sure that high quality people are sort of being added at each step so that it's more likely to move from A to B to C to D, and that you don't kind of fall for the dream where it's like, all right, we'll give you $1,000 now, but a million dollars if we make it.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so Yeah, wired, I think very few stories from Wired were optioned before 2007 and then Wired started getting a reputation as a place where stories were optioned and has had a good amount of success since then, the Atavist, which we started in 2009, has had success from the get-go. I mean, if something like 25% of the stories that have run in the Atavist have an option to Hollywood, which is a crazy, crazy percentage, maybe it's 30%. So is it a dream worth having? Yes, it is a dream worth having. The most important thing is having a good agent who has actually sold films before. Not like a lot of writers don't know the right agents and having the right agent just is utterly transformative. It takes you from almost no chance to a very good chance. So having an agent who has actually had success selling”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Particular craft. So we'll talk about, okay, well, what have you read by this person? I remember reading that story. I didn't think it totally worked, or I read that story. It did work very well. So that's how it works. We all talk about it, and then afterwards, I'll speak with the executive editor and a couple of other editors, and we'll make a decision, red light, green, light, red, light, green light.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “Like a lot of pitches, they'll be missing that element of how the scenes will actually be and how the characters will develop. It's like, here is a big idea. Here's an important thing that happened and I'm going to write 5,000 words about it. And there's almost no thing that is big or important enough that you can write 5,000 words about it if you don't have specific scenes and visual moments where you can pull a person in. And again, this is for wired features, right? And we run web stories. We have a much more informal process. We run short things in front of book where there's a more informal process. But, you know, we only run four features a month, so 48 of them a year. So we do discuss them all and whether they'll be able to pull it off. How will the chronology work? And there's a lot of discussions about the writers because an incredibly talented magazine feature writer, sort of the subset of ideas they could write about as a lot larger than somebody with more limited skills and experience in this.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “It's pretty similar, actually. I mean, we've gotten rid of the scores and the standard deviations. I thought that probably introduced a little bit too much stress and unnecessary anxiety for people. But there is value to it, I can see. So what we do is a similar process. So the writer will work with an editor and they'll come up with a pitch. We try to make sure that they're under a page just to respect everybody's time and because constraints lead to better work in general. So people send in a one-page pitch. We sit around in a room and lots of people are invited. Editors will be signing the stories kind of sit around the main table. Story comes up and we talk about it. We talk about what are the unanswered questions. Will the writer real be able to do that?”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “Probably comes later. If it's somebody who I've worked with specifically, they may say, hey, I'd like to do this this month or I want to fit it into my calendar or I'm planning to go to location TK in June. I could do it then. But normally it's more like this is a story I'd like to do in the next reasonable timeframe.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “Visualize it, how will they be emotionally attached to it? Why will they care about the characters you introduce at the beginning? What happens to them at the end? So a good tit is something where you write it in a way that makes the editor convinced that you'll be able to write it well. It shows why you have special knowledge or special insight or special access that shows why the story is new and that is structured so that the pitch clearly fits the aims and goals of the magazine or publication you're writing for.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “Why am I the person to do this? So when Josh has pitched, the reason he was the person to do it is that he had, well, found something that no one had known before. And two, had unique access to the key character, right? Had access to the spy, Tony Mendenz, I think this was his name. So that's another important element. And then the third is understanding what the magazine is trying to do in the section you're trying to write for. So what Wired was trying to do in its future, well, then as now was tell really important stories about how technology is changing the world, but also tell things that are cinematic and fun to read and that are part of the wired world. So this story, you know, the Great Escape wasn't going to change the way you think about tech, but it had characters, right? It had emotional resonance. It had like there was a movie you could play in your mind. Ben Athlet later showed without question. And that's often a question I'll ask in the story. So how will there be to be able to”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “Yep. So a couple of elements that I appreciate are when the writer gives options, right? So what Josh had done in that email is he had sent three ideas, which I think is really great, right? And it's useful to be able to pick.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “Leave that alone for now. Man, halfway barrel. It's possible. There was a real missed opportunity we would have found out there was a half-man half-ape barmy, which would be an amazing story.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “riveting narrative. So we ended up assigning it. Josh wrote it, did a great job, published it, and then Hollywood took an interest.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “Was I think Stalin tried to create a half man, half ape army And so, like, the two things were together should we investigate Stalin's half man, half ape army, or should we investigate this escape from Iran? And so through whatever process of conversations between editor and writer Jasper, I decided to pursue the escape from Iran. And I pitched it at the meeting. And I knew it was going to do badly, right? Because it wasn't a wired story. It's like from the 1970s. It's not about how Amazon and artificial intelligence are shaking. It just wasn't core wired. And everybody voted really badly, right? The scores are one to six. It probably got a score of like two something. On the other hand, Bob Cohn, who is the executive editor, the number two person there, I remember at the pitch meeting just being like, it's not wired, but I love it. Let's do it. And so he just sort of muscled it through. So again, it was democracy under a dictatorship, and the dictators wanted to do the story because it was such a cool, so manifestly...”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “Of the room hates, but since only a couple people talk, you can't quite determine that quickly. And so this is a way of determining what is the stuff that 95% of the room loves and 95% of the room hates immediately, which is a super interesting thing, right? It's like theoretically a great thing to do. The problem with that is that it can be really demoralizing when your pitches do badly. It's okay to get your pitch rejected by the utter-in-chief, but to have your pitch graded badly by all your colleagues is kind of emotionally rough. So for the great escape, I remember this really well. This writer Joshua Behrman, who's done great stuff for this American life, he's written all kinds of wonderful essays. He was a little, you know, we're quite a bit younger then. Remember he sent me a bunch of pitches. I can't remember what the whole packet was. Maybe sent me three ideas. But one was him at the spy. He's got this story of a crazy escape from Iran. And then another one I remember on the same email.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “Curious Yeah, so wired was run by this guy named Chris Anderson who had been the writer at the Economist and just a really high IQ Silicon Valley type and a very mathematical way of looking at the world. And so this efficiency mechanism he brought into the pitch process was to run it like sort of a false democracy under a dictatorship. So the final decision would be made entirely by Chris whether a story was assigned or not. But when you wrote a pitch, it would be sent to everybody on staff and everybody would vote on it and grade it. And the theory was if you, it was kind of a wisdom of crowd theory, that if you got everybody's vote, you could immediately tell what was great and what was bad. And that I think he genuinely believed that one of the things that happens in meetings is that you spend a lot of time discussing stuff at 95%.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “If you could just get. I mean, in retrospect, in fact, that was something my friend said to me. He was like, well, you know, to have that experience and only lose $60, it's kind of worth it. I remember him saying that. I was like so shaken by the whole thing. I was like, oh, you jerk. But he was totally right.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

41. “I think that it was a cold query. I know that I had talked to some journalists before I left. I remember talking to somebody from the Boston Globe. I grew up in Boston about if interesting things happened to me, would it be possible to write stories from locations in Africa? And so I had gotten some advice. But I think...”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “Dumped me and got rid of me. And then the great thing is that I then had a story. I turned that experience and some other experiences I had in Afghanistan. I then spent several months traveling with my friend and some other friends. I turned those into an essay for the Washington Post. So suddenly I had journalistic clips. And so kind of inadvertently, having been fired from journalism, I used the experience that followed to get clips. And then I came back. I played guitar. Which was a place that hired sort of young, ambitious people into roles with low paying roles, but high responsibility where you learn a lot. So that was how I got going in journalism. It was very bizarre.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “I was very confused. I think what happened was I don't think he had begun that day saying I'm going to kidnap an American. I think it was more like he saw me sitting there was like, let's see what happens if I take this guy, right? And then I go there and he goes through my stuff, like looking for money, and he finds that I've only got, I think it was $60 in cash. And there's no traveler's checks. And fortunately I had a backpack that had like smuggling sections built into it. And so my passport and like the valuable stuff were in there. And so I think he went through all my stuff and decided that I was an itinerant traveler who was useless. I don't know what answers I gave him about being a drug mule for him that turned him off. But it didn't work out. It was a poor job application and the outcome was the one I wanted.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “But it's definitely not what it's definitely not come home to my family and play guitar. And so I've gotten off to a pretty rocky start in Africa. And eventually he dumps me and says enough of this guy. Like, I'm not getting what I want out of you and just like dumps me and lets me make my way to the train station. But the funny thing about that.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “And I pull out my guitar to subway platform in Tangiers. I'm alone at this point in northern Morocco. A guy comes up to me and is like, hey, my family plays music. You want to come home with me? I'm like, great. Yeah, sure. Why not? I've got a day here before I'm supposed to be my friend. And it turns out that he's a drug dealer. He locks me in this room and he has these cockamini plans where he wants me to distribute his drugs around America and he makes me eat a fish head. It's all very peculiar.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “So it gets worse. So that's, I think, December of 1997. I graduated from college in June of 97. So that's December of 97. So I'm like, huh, what am I going to do now? One of my best friends from college was starting graduate school in the fall and he was about to leave for Africa. And so I was like, I'm coming with you. So I go and I get my vaccinations. And within two weeks, I'm on a plane. And then I get kidnapped immediately upon landing in Africa. I fly to Paris in Spain and I take a boat to Tangiers.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

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

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “Yeah, you know, the funny thing is that in my mind through those foundational years, let's say from the time I graduated college to the time I completely committed to be a journalist, I was 29, it wasn't always music versus journalism. In those early years, it was music versus journalism and other things. And then it was journalism versus other things. I'd finished college, I thought I was going to be sort of an environmental activist, or I might go into politics. And I got kind of tracked into journalism, kind of a slightly odd way, which we can get into. So it was really only at about 29 when I got hired by Wired and started to do a good job editing stories. And when I started writing my book about Nits and Kennon, that I'd Again, I feel really comfortable.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “Journalist, I started to gravitate more towards that. So it was a combination of having some success as a journalist and then also thinking through like what would a life as a musician be like versus what would life as a journalist be like for somebody with my skills. And as I said earlier, my skills as a musician are limited, right? I could do well at one thing, but I didn't think I was going to really make a life work that way.”

    2018-04-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #311: Nick Thompson -- Editor-In-Chief of WIRED · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT