Live harder, longer?

How Alex Mather's new project recasts his time running The Athletic

In the end, we shouldn’t be surprised.

You look up Alex Mather online to see what the co-founder of The Athletic is up to these days.

And then you see that the man who helped create the site that promised to disrupt sports journalism and pillage every local sports section in the process has a new company he’s raising tens of millions of dollars in VC money.

And that company is one that promises to help you “live harder, longer.”

Of course it does.

A screengrab of the Eternal home page from last week.

Before gambling became legal and accessible, I probably wrote more about The Athletic than anything else.

I was critical of it from the start. But truth be told, I always liked the site. I’m a subscriber, and I read it every day. Friends of mine have worked there and still work there. It’s evolved into a wonderful hybrid kind of site where the daily sports page meets Sports Illustrated.

I’ve met Adam Hansmann, Mather’s co-founder. He’s a very smart, very nice man. He appeared on a panel that I hosted at the AEJMC Conference in 2020 to talk about The Athletic’s past, present, and future.

The idea of The Athletic was always intriguing. It promised to unbundle the sports section from the rest of the paper at a time when breaking up bundles was the trend in the media. It promised a web experience free of ads, auto-playing videos, and other junk. It was built around writers and writing and stories. They were actually hiring writers, paying them well, allowing them to travel. The idea of the Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism that I’m obsessed with first came to me when my friend Galen Clavio and I were studying those “Why I Joined The Athletic” essays that were everywhere in 2017 and 2018.

What I was always critical of was the hype around The Athletic. The story it told about itself, and the way that those in the future-of-journalism world talked about The Athletic. The vibe was that sports journalism was irrevocably broken and they alone could fix it. That sports journalism need to be disrupted.

And look, there are a lot of flaws in sports journalism. I have an entire blog dedicated to writing about them. But in the end, many of the problems in sports journalism are due to the systemic issues facing daily journalism in this age of digital and social media.

The hype around The Athletic just always felt a little too much for me. It was pitched as the thing that was going to save sports journalism, and I didn’t realize it needed saving.

And then, there was the quote:

We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.

Mathers and Hansmann, remember, came from the tech world where they helped create Strava. They got their start at Y Combinator, which in hindsight should have tipped us off. They raised a ton of VC money — at last count, $55 million. At the time that was seen as validation of their vision by the marketplace. We know now that VC funding is a deal with the devil that requires constant growth and returns on investment, and that the call for constant growth is antithetical to running a quality journalism outfit. Soon, there were layoffs. There was a pivot to video. There were ads.

At the time The Athletic launced, I was listening to just enough podcasts about the tech world to know just a little bit to recognize the signs of an acquihire. It never felt like The Athletic was being built to last, but rather it was being built to be sold.

Sure enough, in 2022, The New York Times bought it from Hunsmann and Mather for $550 million. In 2023, The Athletic became the de facto Times sports section .

Like I said, I read it every day. It’s a really good site for sports journalism.

It’s just not as revolutionary as the hype promised.

As for Mather … well, that brings us back to where this post came from. In Drew Magary’s Jambaroo on Defector, he wrote about Mather’s next act.

Allow me to break it down. If it sounds like I’m dunking on him, it’s because I am.

I’m scared of dying. I’m guessing you are, too.

OK, banger of a lede. Well done. When I teach news writing, I call this a “compelling statement” lede. It hooks reader right away. You want to see what comes next.

A small point: Make the first paragraph just one sentence. Really drive home the point.

I’m scared because I don’t know what happens after. I’m scared that I'll never see my loved ones again. I’m scared because I feel alone in facing the decline in my fitness, body, and health. The idea of giving up the active life I currently live is terrifying.

The other day, I realized that my daughter will be picking her college three years from now. That hit me hard, because that is not a lot of years from now. I think Alex Mather and I are close to each other in age, so I guess I’m saying that while I don’t share his fear of death, I do get the impulse behind it.

But that word active in the last sentence is, to borrow a phrase from Spencer Hall, a load-bearing wall of a word. It’s doing a lot of work.

My objective is clear: I want to live harder, longer.

Oh god.

Not live a long life to the fullest. Not live a long healthy life to be there for my kids. Not live long enough to help my community, to raise others up with my incredible fortune.

Nope.

Live harder, longer.

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awful.

If you met someone at a party and they said wanted to LIVE HARD, you’d pretend your phone buzzed and walk away.

After selling The Athletic to the The New York Times in 2022, I spent a ton of time with my family. In addition to making tons of boxed lunches (we had two kids under 4 at the time), I spent time reflecting on what was a tough but amazing journey. I had no idea what I’d work on next, but I knew that there would be something.

You know there would be something. Excellent. You’ve got millions of dollars after working on two incredibly successful companies. No doubt, this something will be using that vast fortune to help the world. Maybe address climate change. Help queer kids. Address food insecurity or homelessness.

I took advantage of my lighter schedule to focus on my health, spending more and more time at the gym and on the trails.

Nope. Just did your own thing. Gainz. Cool story bro.

The last time I invested so much in my fitness was when I was building products for endurance athletes back in 2011 at Strava.

Subtle flex, dude.

Only now I was over a decade older and hyperaware of the effects of aging. That, along with my fear of dying, led me pretty quickly to where we are today.

Oh this should be good.

Today, I’m excited to announce Eternal. Our goal is to redefine what healthcare looks and feels like for the physically active and “mostly healthy” population.

It is not good. It is not good at all.

We’ve raised a $13.25M seed round. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-led by Courtside Ventures, Treble Capital, and Next Ventures. Other investors include Founders Fund, Terrain, Jazz Venture Partners, Precursor Ventures, Bling Capital, Flare Capital Partners.

I’m sorry, but at least four of those have to be made up names. The businesses next to Bob’s Burgers have more realistic sounding names.

Also … OK, we can agree that the U.S. Healthcare system needs massive systemic investment and overhaul. What better way to do it than a VC -unded wellness company from a techbro who made a tracking app for runners and a sports news site that was centered around the idea that people like reading stories.

We’re in the early innings of a movement where the most proactive are taking ownership of their own health. Ignored by our modern healthcare system, they’re running their own scans, tests, and blood labs. They’re hiring concierge support. Some are even running experiments on their own bodies in the pursuit of a longer, healthier life. I’ve personally participated in this empowerment movement, doing a ton of this stuff on my own, and I have uncovered many ways to improve my life now and in the future. Yet the deeper I go, the murkier it gets. I’m overwhelmed with tactics, hacks, supplements, workouts, scans and never feel quite sure about what to spend my time, effort, and money on.

I’m sorry, but what rich white guy has ever been ignored by the modern healthcare system? Why would I run my own scans, tests, and blood labs? Dude, I can barely figure out my thermometer. And anytime you hear somebody talk about “empowering” you to take charge of your health, they’re about to sell you something dubious.

He then quotes Sun Tzu because of course he does, before going on.

We’re building facilities in San Francisco and New York City where we can measure everything we (and you) need to take control and add just the right amount of rigor to your journey to live harder, longer.

Screw you, Nebraskans! No living harder, longer for you.

He then maps out the core of Eternal, which is (or course) a subscription business. “A membership that is meant to be at your side until you die” which is … hun. Membership gets you regular tests and reports, goals and blueprints, access to “experts” and a coach and a care team you meet with regularly. No pricing yet, but it’s like the fish at the fancy restaurant. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

I wanna go back to the experimenting on their own bodies, empowerment movement for a minute. There’s a great episode of Maintenance Phase where they talk about Halo Top ice cream, which actually has its roots in the so-called biohacking movement. As Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon point out, this is just dieting for dudes, but because diets and diet culture are so traditionally feminine coded in our society, they needed to brand it different.

Sigal Samuel wrote a great explainer about biohacking at Vox, which is referenced in that Maintenance Phase episode. Samuel quotes one biohacker saying:

“I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”

In other words: live harder, longer.

There’s something so profoundly sad and empty about this. Again, our healthcare system is flawed in a lot of ways. There are also a number of ways guys like Mather could impact public health — funding hospitals, building and maintaining parks for the public good, funding research into communicable diseases or pediatric cancer, paying for universal school meals.

It’s so endemic of the Silicon Valley billionaire class that this health company is a private membership club where elite people get fancy treatment and everyone else is just left out.

And there’s something so empty at the core of this.

From Drew Magary:

I am going to die one day. Knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen now, I'm cool with it. And being cool with death means I don't have to spend every waking every, every living hour, sweating it. I can just enjoy the days I have, without existing in a constant state of dread. This was not a fun lesson to learn, given that it involved losing people that mattered the most to me. But it's probably the most valuable lesson there is. Those who refuse to learn it are either trying to con you, or con themselves. Probably a bit of both. You can either buy what they're selling, or you can live easier.

Or my man

Jared Paventi

talking about billionaire Bryan Johnson:

But all of this sacrifice is for what? Lasting longer so you can hold on to your money? Where’s the joy? Where’s the fun in having red light shot into your head and doing shots of your own private-label olive oil? The purpose of life is to live and Johnson doesn’t seem like he’s doing much of it. It’s a lot of time, effort and money to live forever only to not live at all.

Eternal also recasts Mather’s time running The Athletic. It was never about building better sports journalism, recapturing what we loved about the profession and what made it feel so special. It was a business opportunity. A market inefficiency he saw and filled to make hundreds of millions of dollars with claims of a revolution that was really just a very good site for sports journalism.

A way to raise a ton of VC money so that he could sell high, make lunches for his kids, worry about death and respond create a new subscription service to provide fancy health care to rich people..

And one of the first investors, according to his LinkedIn page … is Lance Armstrong.

We shouldn’t be surprised.