So much is colliding at once in this moment: how technology and AI are reshaping our institutions, how politics and the economy are colliding, how national security concerns are shifting, and how media and culture are struggling to keep pace with all of it. Few people are positioned to speak across the full landscape — but Nick Thompson is one of them. From Wired to The New Yorker to his current role as CEO of The Atlantic, Nick has spent his career at the center of how information moves, and how the forces shaping this moment connect to one another.

Last fall, he published The Running Ground, a memoir about running, his father, and what discipline built over decades of miles taught him about ambition, aging, and rebuilding a sense of self after loss. It’s a personal book, but its questions — how do you sustain yourself for the long haul, what do you do when the thing that drives you also threatens to break you — track closely with what a lot of leaders in this room are working through right now.

This lunch is a chance for a small group of leaders to dig into this American moment together — across whichever of these threads is most on your mind — with Nick’s expertise as the anchor for where the conversation goes. Bring your own read on the landscape, your questions, your story in The Running Ground’s themes of ambition and endurance — this is a table conversation, not an interview. Expect an intimate, dynamic, wide-ranging exchange.

This is a Chatham House Rule conversation — candid, collaborative, and designed to surface the kind of honest exchange that only happens in a room of trusted peers. Come ready to engage.