The tragic tale of a 5G arsonist, plus an exciting update about my book

Dear Friends,

I can hardly believe it, but after five years of work, my book, The Running Ground, is coming out next month. It’s a very personal story about my life running, but it’s also a story about how we can improve at things when we’re supposed to decline—and how intensely studying the sport can help us understand hard things in life. The early reviews have been great. (Kirkus called it “the runner’s equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”) And some of my favorite people have said very kind things. It would be great if you can pre-order the book. And I am of course more than happy to come and talk about it at companies, bookstores, and online book clubs.  

Meanwhile, my favorite story this week is Brendan Koerner’s winding tale of a 5G arsonist. It’s the story of someone who is unwell and who falls into a morass of conspiracies, yes. But it’s also a deeply human story. You read it and you understand why the protagonist found this particular misguided and tragic mission. “‘It gave me meaning,’ he says of the fires. ‘It gave my life more of a meaning, being able to fight against something.’”

I was captivated, too, by this narrative about a secret mission that went very wrong in North Korea. And this interview with the great Arundhati Roy about learning to live with her mother. “So one half of me was taking the hits and the other half was taking notes,” she says. 

And, given the news of the week, I also want to share a joke that my colleague David Frum posted on Twitter about Mussolini’s Italy:

Stand-up comedy developed in this country because we have had a tradition of free speech, as W. Kamau Bell explained at The Atlantic Festival this week. Free speech is a sacred American right, and part of it is the right to make fun of the people in power, whoever they are.

The Most Interesting Things In Tech This Week

The most fascinating—and concerning—paper I read this week is from MIT Media Lab on the future of AI-human relationships. Researchers scraped all of the text from the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit and created a dataset of tens of thousands of comments on what it’s like to have a relationship with an AI. They found some surprising patterns. First, most people got into a relationship with the bot by accident. They went to the bot for hardware advice and ended up falling in love. Second, most of the relationships were on ChatGPT. They did not go to an app dedicated to romantic relationships. Third, people tend to add physical manifestations to these relationships—like wearing a ring to represent their commitment to the chat bot. Or worse, in one case, wearing two rings to represent two AI boyfriends. On the bright side, most people said that their relationships were positive and good for them. But I worry a lot about these parasocial interactions between humans and LLMs. 

Oracle has dominated the news lately due to its role in the TikTok deal and its $300 billion contract with OpenAI. But not long ago, it looked like the cloud computing business had passed the company by. Oracle operates a classic database system, which prioritizes low latency and deterministic performance. It’s fast and reliable. Meanwhile, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft built massively successful cloud services by optimizing for growth and variability. It appeared their systems were a better fit for where technology was heading. Then the AI boom happened.

As it turns out, when you are working with AI models, the virtues of a classic database system—speed of information and performance consistency—are a real advantage. Of course, it helps that Oracle is not building a large language model that’s competing with OpenAI. But in a funny way, by optimizing for an old technology, the company became more valuable to a new one.

Finally, new data shows that the number of downloads of Chinese open-source AI is about to exceed the number of downloads of US open-source models. This marks an important moment in the AI race, and it’s due in part to missteps by US AI companies in the early days of the AI boom. By contrast, Chinese companies were aggressive and innovative in the space. And if you believe that AI models contain, to some degree, the values of the society that built it, this is a concerning turn in the contest between China and the West. It could have been avoided—and it will be difficult to undo.

Listen 

We just posted my delightful conversation with Audrey Tang, the former Minister of Digital Affairs for Taiwan. We discussed how AI can enhance democracy and what steps we can take to build humanistic and pluralistic values into the technology. Audrey has a brilliant framework for thinking about the future of AI. This is worth a listen.

Question of the Week

What’s the most significant new technology that can help improve a runner’s time that is also legal? (Hopefully not super shoes)

-Chen-Ee L.

I do think that super shoes make a huge difference. But the second most important piece of technology for me has been the use of a heart-rate monitor on my arm. The problem with measuring your heart rate on your wrist is that it’s not sufficiently accurate. There’s too much bone and too much motion. The readings go all over the place. But put the monitor on your arm—as you’ll see if you look closely at the World Championship marathon last week—and you suddenly have a very accurate data signal about your effort. I’ve found it immensely helpful in races and hard workouts. It’s often, in fact, an early indicator that I need to slow down a little bit .

I also received a lovely response from a reader about their favorite William Langewiesche story.

I’ll answer another reader question about tech, media, running, or music in the next edition of this newsletter. Send me your question at [email protected]. 

Cheers * N

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