Given the pointed announcement and the scrubbing, I suspect a serious breach of trust or personal rift happened between chad and Nate/TR - that could mean anything, and either side, or both, could be culpable.
That said, it does reopen the Amber departure. Nate and Jonathan used to gush over Amber. Fans loved her and she was a foundation of the podcast. Then mysteriously she disappears and but for a small post in the forum she is persona non grata at TR. no thanks yous, no acknowledgement that she left (unless I missed it) no final podcast.
It has the air of a personal rift that was heavily managed and left me feeling a bit less confident that TR is as fun and easygoing as it seems.
personally, i haven’t tuned in to the podcasts for a while. I don’t find the various guest athletes to be particularly compelling or insightful, no offense to them. being an excellent athlete doesn’t always mean you have a ton of great insight for the average folk
I haven’t spotted a comment to this point as yet, but I felt Nate looked particularly emotional / tired behind the announcement and we should acknowledge that it likely hasn’t been easy for either party.
My best wishes to both Chad, Nate and the TR team.
Not at all good corporate communication. A terse, emotional statement to customers about a major customer facing figure is not good public relations. There should have been a written statement and without the involuntary part. With their purported 100 employees do they not have anyone in charge of communication?
Maybe an unpopular opinion… and while enjoyed Chad’s coaching advice, and the science stuff was awesome… some of the deep dives were too long. They were great in the live round table days but once it shifted online (and this isn’t a Chad thing, everyone on the podcast does this to some extent… except maybe Nate) they just read what they typed out on a document. I would rather just hear the summary and discussion and read the full dive myself. I understand others are different and liked they way it was but to me I inda feels like when you’re at a meeting and someone just reads off the PowerPoint or reads a report word for word. It is the discussion and interaction that makes a great a podcast.
In that regard, I think a rotation of new guests and personalities would bring new life to the Podcast. Ivy has been great. And while we are at it… it would be nice to have differing opinions. It was evident Jonathan got rattled a bit by some of Keegan’s comments about training in episode 412. As some have said the podcast is their main advertising for the platform and it seems like some things need to be kept on script. But it’s ok to discuss different views.
I’ve just watched it. I wondered if the forum was over egging it but no, it felt extremely wierd.
Thing is for us long timers here is that we all grew together, learning about training at a time when there was a paucity of information. As we learnt we also got to laugh along with the three amigos as they blundered through challenge after challenge. It was a great time to be a keen racing cyclist.
Inevitability, it had to end. There’s so much knowledge and opinion on the Internet now that there’s nothing new to learn. The original three aren’t really riding much let alone racing anymore.
I hope we get a proper goodbye to Chad though, I think we all loved that guy for his dry wit and depth of knowledge.
Big hugs to you all. Life is complicated, we all know that.
That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why say anything at all if you’re not going to follow up with a clear statement? Like, we know Chad lives in WA and isn’t on the show very much. He could have missed another month of shows and I wouldn’t really have wondered what happened to him, I’d probably figure he had other life things going on. So to make this statement just brings attention to something happening, but then to leave it in such vague terms and ghosting us has rubbed me the wrong way. Nate has been transparent on almost everything in the past, so this just feels weird.
I listen to podcasts at night as I’m falling asleep and last night, one show ended and it jumped over to the TR podcast and I woke up enough to hear a weird cryptic announcement about Chad, who has been on TR as long as I’ve had it, has been “dismissed”?
Strange how Nate has been transparent about everything for as long as I can remember. Divorce, mental health, social justice, etc. But when one of the most integral pieces of the company leaves, it gets a 20 second statement and then swept under the rug? I can understand if it’s something that CAN’T be disclosed, or maybe it’s being withheld to protect Chad, so it’s not an easy spot to be in. But as a listener, cyclist, and customer…we kind of want more clarity.
Will miss Chad’s deep dives. I could really tell how much he put into getting the details out of the most obscure questions to support or debunk with SCIENCE and evidence. I submitted a question not too long ago about alkaline water and was hoping Chad would jump on the science behind that…if it’s real or just “sorcery”.
They sure have said too much, because now it opens the door for future employers to ask/wonder about his departure. Instead of a “Oh, he left TR”, the perception, as can be witnessed in this thread, turns into “Oh, he was fired for an unknown reason”. May be well warranted and easy to justify by TR’s side, depending on circumstances, but may also become a massive headache in case he decides to pursue the matter, especially if he has a hard time finding new work and can show it is because of what was said on the show.
It’s just a sad say really. Chad will always be the voice that I hear on the workouts as they are his workouts. But the old days of the podcast were better when they were live and the room had a vibe to it, the video element has taken the soul out of the affair. I used to be waiting every week for the next instalment and now i just pick and choose episode, if they had Chad on I always listened to them, if not then not so much.
We also never got anything related to Amber leaving from Nate. She was just gone and then there was a forum post from Amber. As someone mentioned above, I’m now reevaluating how that all went down in light of Chad’s departure.
Let’s try to process this. To me the constituent parts are purpose and content, intended audience and method/medium and timing.
Say nothing?
We should also consider one option first: TR also had the choice to say nothing. However, eventually people will figure that Chad’s absence is permanent and inundate TR with questions about his status. Eventually, we’d have a thread “Where is Chad?” and the silence would be deafening. @ambermalika said goodbye in a post, Pete had his goodbyes on a podcast, so we know they seemingly left on amicable terms.
Method/medium & intended audience
A written statement makes sense if you were to communicate that to the press. But here, the intended audience were listeners of TR’s podcast, so I think the proper medium is the podcast. It is also consistent with Nate closing that the podcast will continue, etc.
Suppose TR had just put out a press release. Then someone like @dcrainmaker (who I would think is among the target audience) would likely post something on his site. A few seconds later one of us would create a thread and we would have arrived … here in the forums.
Timing
When other notable TR employees left, them leaving was communicated with the same sense of urgency. Why not wait until the next podcast and announce it there rather than tacking on the announcement to a podcast episode? That points to something very serious. I don’t want to speculate, it wouldn’t be fair to anyone, but I have only seen something like this once with a former colleague — the reasons for their firing were serious.
Purpose and content
I agree with you that TR could have omitted the involuntary part or obscured that a bit. However, I think Nate wants to maintain his sense of integrity and wouldn’t want to say “He wanted to pursue new opportunities, we thank him for his service.” or something to that effect if it weren’t true.
And if you say “He no longer works here.” you say the same thing he did now, just in corporate speak. I prefer straightforwardness. At the same time it would have invited more questions. So overall, I am not convinced that would have been better either.
All of this, the urgency, the carefully worded statement and its content, points to something rather serious having gone wrong. It was communicated to the relevant audience on the appropriate medium.
Corporate communication in companies with strong, opinionated leaders can take different forms. Steve Jobs also had unusual ways to communicate at times and his long-time PR chief Katie Cotton knew what he liked. Perhaps it is a matter of taste, but I like less corporate speak.
PS The guys on the podcast mentioned that TR has about 100 employees.
I completely agree it is weird, but given Nate’s style of communication, my conclusion is that something weird and extraordinary must have happened. If Chad just wanted to move on, even if they were no longer on the best terms, none of this would have been necessary.
Yeah, it would have been more classy if she got to say her goodbyes on a podcast. Who knows what happened in the background.
I still think the fact that Amber got to say goodbye on the forums indicates she had at least a professional working relationship with the rest of TR. She got to turn in her badge rather have her access code revoked and login blocked. With Chad it felt more like the latter.
“The AI is getting too powerful, maybe we should slow down”
“We should what?! Slow down? We’ll never slow down. Must go faster… Must make the whole world FASTER! Security!”
Not knowing at all what happened, I would hope TR has a very strong reason for including the “involuntary” part, otherwise a lawsuit may not go in their favour. I’ll also say that there may very well be a good reason for the departure that should be public; sexual harassments, discrimination, racism, etc. come to mind as issues that your company most definitely wants to and should be public about. But they kind of went half-way with “it wasn’t voluntary” …
