I watched Nick Thompson interview LinkedIn's head of product live

🏆 AI Expert of the Week: Nicholas Thompson

I was in the audience at TechBBQ in Copenhagen when Nicholas Thompson sat down with Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's head of product. Within the first few minutes, I understood why Thompson is one of the best interviewers in tech.

He doesn't pull punches in interviews, he pulls out the stories and insights that matter to people trying to figure out how to use technology.

LinkedIn’s Introduction to AI

The most striking moment came when Thompson got Cohen to share a story most audiences never hear.

Fall 2022. Cohen gets an unusual request from Satya Nadella and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott: fly to Redmond tomorrow. When he arrives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from OpenAI are waiting in a small conference room.

"Greg opens the laptop and he starts prompting what was then GPT-4 that came to market many, many months after," Cohen recalled. "At the beginning there was a sense of like, okay, interesting, because everybody thought what was being shown was kind of canned."

Then Brockman said something that changed the room: "Hey, what do you guys want to ask it?"

"You can feel the air intensified," Cohen said. "People were like, 'Oh my god.' You're seeing faces with multiple expressions from smiles to giggles to very big open eyes."

The next day, Cohen went back to his team and said: "I don't care what we're building right now. Let's go back, open the whole thing, and restart from scratch."

That's the kind of moment Thompson consistently extracts from his subjects, the pivotal realization that changes everything.

So What Does This Mean For Events?

The most useful insight from the interview applies directly to our industry. Cohen laid out what's coming:

"Whether or not you're changing your job, your job is changing. For many years, we've been in a role and we kind of knew the ladder and how to get to the next thing. But nobody told us, hey, 5 years from now, your job will be dramatically different. And by the way, there's no playbook. You're going to have to build yourself towards that."

The numbers are stark: 70% of job skills will change by 2030. And the bottom rung of the career ladder, the entry-level tasks like moving documents, writing reports, handling basic customer service, is getting automated first. That's creating real unemployment among young professionals who can't get their foot in the door the traditional way.

Cohen's sees three traits mattering more than specific skills:

1. AI Fluency - You can work with AI tools effectively

2. AI Agency - You're resourceful enough to jump between tools as better ones emerge

3. Growth Mindset - When your job evolves, you evolve with it

And for anyone waiting for their company to figure this out, Tomer says, "The last thing you want is to wait for somebody else to write the playbook for you, because by the time you want to adopt, the playbook has changed."

Thompson's AI Philosophy

In addition to interviewing others about AI, he's developed a clear philosophy from his own use as the CEO of The Atlantic and former Editor-in-Chief at Wired. In a recent podcast appearance, he explained his approach:

"I use AI as a highly intelligent editor on call 24 hours a day. But I would consider it unethical and wrong to use an AI-generated sentence in something I publish."

For his new book The Running Ground, he used AI extensively for what he calls "grunt work". This includes processing his late father's diaries, checking chronology, and organizing research, but not for writing full sentences.

His biggest concern is "Cognitive offloading." The more we let AI do our thinking, the less we exercise those mental muscles. It's the calculator problem applied to reasoning itself.

How Running Shaped Nick as a Person + Professional

I got to chat with Nick most recently two weeks ago at a private dinner held to celebrate the launch of his most recent book, The Running Ground.

The book explores how he got faster as a runner in his 40s, including a 2:29 marathon at age 44 and setting the American record for men 45+ in the 50K, while processing his father's death. It's part memoir, part meditation on discipline and what we inherit from our parents. Throughout, Nick also draws parallels between success in running and success in business.

At the dinner, I asked him what advice he'd give someone just getting into running for the first time. His answer surprised me: Don't worry about the time. Lean into the meditative aspect of running. Focus on how you feel during the act.

From someone with those credentials, that's not the advice I expected. But it tracks with his philosophy on AI adoption too: build the right habits and mindset first. The performance improvements follow.

As a beginner in both running and business, my goal is to bring that meditative mindset into both and worry less about hitting milestones and rushing the process.

If you’re interested in checking out The Running Ground yourself, you can find it on Amazon here.

More on Nicholas Thompson: CEO of The Atlantic since 2021, former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED, co-founder of SpeakEasy AI. His daily LinkedIn series reaches nearly 2 million followers. The Running Ground is a USA Today bestseller.

Want to bring Nicholas Thompson to your next event? As a moderator and speaker, he brings journalistic precision to conversations about AI, media, and the future of work. Book him through The Lavin Agency or reply to this email for details.

Till next time,

Noah Cheyer

Do More With Less Using AI

PS: What event planning task would you like me to solve with AI next? Reply to this email and I might feature you in a future edition!