What are the fewest number of people we need in the fewest number of meetings, jumping through the fewest number of procedural hurdles to get something done? You need to be that ruthless, constantly thinking about fewer, fewer, less, less, quicker, quicker. And I think once you get into that mentality, you'll really see a pretty appreciable difference almost overnight.
That's Jim Vandehei, CEO of influential news outlet Axios and co-author of the new book Simplify. Jim is one of the most insightful business leaders I know, as well as a deeply sourced journalist. In today's episode, we talk first about the upcoming midterm elections and the implications for businesses. And then we quickly turn to how AI-driven change, what he calls post-processable velocity, is altering planning, expectations, and habits. Jim's solution to all that disruption is to lean into simplicity through a three-part plan he calls Confront, Delete, Amplify. We talk about cognitive fatigue and how he's redesigning his personal life, plus the risks of getting into business with OpenAI and more. So, let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Jim Vandehei, CEO of Axios and co-author of the new book Simplify. Jim, welcome back to the show.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, before we get into the book, do you have a simplified view for our audience about the election season that we're moving into?
I think you'd probably rather be a Democrat than a Republican. I just think the fundamentals really favor the party out of power in general. The fact that President Trump's probably right around a 40% popularity rating. I think Democrats actually did a pretty good job on the Senate side of recruiting candidates. They have a money disadvantage, but in general, I think Democrats should win the House. I think they have a reasonable chance of winning the Senate. I think it really depends on what is the mood of the voter, particularly around the cost of living and the war, because if Republicans are bummed and they don't show up, and I think that is a big concern, that hurts. But the flip side is Democrats seem much more motivated. When you look at polls of like who's super energized, Democrats seem way more energized, and when you have an energized base in a tough economy or a high-cost economy, that's when you have the potential for like a landslide.
Does America have any like unified mission or goal, something that it stands for, is reflected in this year's candidates and platforms?
Not that I can detect. I don't think there's a whole lot of unification between the two. I think both parties understand affordability matters. People don't like to spend more money. I mean, ultimately, they want to hold somebody responsible. They tend to hold the party in power responsible regardless of the policy. In this case, I'd say the party in power is responsible, right? Because you can directly trace the increase in prices to the war for oil. And then the tariffs, no doubt, have really put pressure on pricing. And like the new round of fights with Canada, you end up paying more for things that you were paying less for before. And that makes people upset, right? They're ordinary because their wages are decent, and in some areas wages are going up, but they're not going up high enough to account for inflation. And that's the pinch Republicans are in.
Anti-data center, you know, sentiment's going to hurt Republicans. How did data centers become so politically toxic so fast?
I mean, I've very rarely in politics, been doing this 30-some years, seen an issue become so prominent and so toxic so quickly. Even if you went back last year, most politicians, most legislation was all kind of pro-data centers. People saw these as job creation machines. And now people hate them. Well, the truth is 99% of people don't live anywhere near a data center. I think it's a proxy for AI. I think people are just worried. These guys out in Silicon Valley are creepy. I worry about my job. I worry about my kids' mental health. And I think data centers are paying the price for that. Now, that might change. The companies are putting a lot of money in to try to explain that they are good economically in local communities. Maybe they'll start to move the needle. I don't think they'll move the needle that much. This week, you know, we had this guy come out from Anthropic and warn that there's a 10% chance that their technology destroys humanity, which I don't know, last time I checked, probably not a great sales pitch for the product that you're building. You know, that took off. And I think one of the reasons it took off is because people are pissed. Then they see this Hugging Face like AI going rogue and hacking into companies, and maybe they don't understand it, but they're like, 'Okay, that's weird.' So I have weird, and I have a data center I don't like, and now this guy saying there's a 10% chance I'm going to be dead. That's not a recipe for popularity.
Brother, in advance of your book, you wrote an article this summer about prepping for an Axios board meeting, and you said that even a six-month planning horizon we realized was like pure fantasy, that everything could change in a month. I love this phrase you pointed to, post-processable velocity, that the speed of an AI world is outpacing our ability to comprehend it as humans. I know Simplify is a guide to navigating this environment. But before we get into the sort of what can we do about it, I'm just curious how this acceleration of change feels to you.
I'm of two minds. Like part of me, to be honest, finds it exhilarating. Like I like change. I like trying to think about how do I use this technology to enhance our business, enhance our relationship with news consumers. And so I like that part of it. But what I wrote is true, and I think it's true of most CEOs. Like things are just moving so fast. Like what technology do I use? What is the better AI? What can it do today that it couldn't do yesterday? Employees are a little bit nervous. Employees are changing their skill set because they're using this new technology. And we really have entered this period where it's just hard to process. And I've always laughed at like year or two or three-year planning. I'm like, how the hell do you do that? But now I kind of laugh at six-month planning. It's hard for me to think out more than six, seven weeks about, okay, what do I feel highly confident about the business? Like things are changing that quick. I'll give you a good example, like in the media, six months ago we were getting, you know, 30 to 40% of our traffic is coming through Google search, and every media company has seen that bottom out. It's now down to like 5% or 10% of our traffic. Well, that's a lot of people. You're talking about millions of people that were customers or coming to and tasting our content that no longer are. And that happened almost overnight last couple of months. Huge surge in the number of bots that are attacking websites. There are these machines that are kind of hitting your site, trying to get information, trying to get data, and they're kind of polluting the open web. And that's new. Okay, let's wrestle with that. I think that's why there is a Twilight Zone feeling right now where people are like they're hearing about this technology that could end humanity, and you could start a business with one person, and most people are like, I don't know, I don't really use it, or if I use it, it's kind of a glorified search engine. Like, what's all the fuss about? And I think the demarcation zone is people in companies that use it persistently and aggressively live in a different world right now than those that don't. So if you go out to Silicon Valley, they feel like, 'Oh my god, this is like 1999. Like the world is changing. I'm on the cutting edge. Everything's about to explode.' But then you go to Toledo or you go to Topeka or you go to Oshkosh, and most people are like, 'I don't know. I'm just running my company, man. I guess there's this new AI, and my employees are talking about it. I'm sure we'll get to that one day soon.' And I think that's somewhat natural because it's a new technology. I think introducing any kind of technology into an existing company is hard because even if it's the coolest technology ever, you have to hook it up to all your clunky systems that you built over the last decade, and that's necessarily messy. I call it the messy middle, which is where I think most companies are right now. They're starting to use AI. They're prototyping. They're seeing the promise, and then they're realizing, 'Oh crap, I got to hook this up to my data.'
This is a lot harder than I thought it was.
Way harder than I thought. Yeah.
So Simplify opens with this bracing line that AI isn't simplifying your life. It's mass-producing more options, more decisions, more noise. I know I find myself sometimes falling into a rabbit hole as I explore new things with AI tools. You've described yourself as an AI lab rat. Do you ever fall into that noise yourself?
Oh, for sure. Yeah, I fall into it. But I think for most people in the short term, it is a complexity creation machine. Mainly because like, well now anybody can write pretty well if you use AI to help you write. Anybody can do deep research on a new idea or have AI do the deep research for you and then dump that into an email and send it to your boss. So suddenly all of us are getting more emails, more presentations, more ideas. Some of them well thought out, many of them not well thought out. That it just means like, 'Oh my god, now I have more decisions to make.' And that's the whole point of the book. How can we help you outside of work and at work? Delete as many things that you're doing out of habit, out of inertia, just because that's the way we've always done it. So that you can amplify the things you actually want to do. And it might sound simple like, do I actually need a book to do this? And what we discovered in running our company this way is yes, you need a book to do this because we don't do it naturally. If you don't have a system, if you don't have instructions about how to simplify your company, how to simplify your meetings, how to simplify your management structure, how to simplify the work that you do as a rank-and-file employee, you just won't do it. You'll just keep on keeping on. The data from The Economist and others is that on average we waste 25% of our week doing things we never should have done or that add no value to our company. We do it out of habit. That's the way we've always done it. We do it out of inertia. Well, think of a 25%. Man, that's two and a half years out of every decade that I pissed away doing things I don't want to do or shouldn't be doing. I want to be doing things I should do. And I think there's a lot of waste in all that, right? I thought AI was going to make us more efficient. Not necessarily. Over time it can and it will, but in the short term I think that when people are anxious, I'm confused, and I'm like, you should be anxious and you should be confused. This is a weird time to be alive. Just think about it. Like even in the course of anyone listening to this podcast, you probably already got five texts, a couple of emails, a Tinder alert. Like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot, man. We used to just sit around with a book or a newspaper and we had a rotary phone and wondered if anyone would call us once a week. That's a lot.
Well, and you would return all those calls, and so you feel like you have to respond to all this stuff that's coming in, and it's too hard, and you can't, right?
You can't. I think that is the point.
Yeah. I mean, I know you love attacking things in threes. So your framework is Confront, Delete, and Amplify. The Confront part, that's not the action part, that's like the mental part, right? Like open yourself up to the fact that you've got the wrong habits.
You know, just confront, why do I do this? Like nobody asks that simple question. I've got a meeting after this at 1:00. Almost no one asks like, do I need to be at that meeting? Do we even need to do the damn meeting? Are we meeting on something we even want to do? Like a company, a life just takes on emotion, a momentum of its own, and unless you have these checkpoints to say, well, wait a second, do we need to do that meeting? Is it something I could skip? You'll just keep on doing these things you don't necessarily need to do. And so confronting is just asking that question, whether it's at home or at work, do I need to do this? Like why am I doing it? And just that simple exercise will then allow you to spend one minute and then decide, oh, could I delete this, which is step two, or could I say no to this obligation. And then if you can delete some things and you can say no, then you can amplify, which is the fun stuff. Do the stuff that you like doing. Do the stuff you're good at. Do the stuff at work that's going to get you a promotion or more money or more attention or whatever the hell it is that you want out of work. But you have to have a system. And it's funny because we started this about two and a half years ago at Axios. This whole Simplify system was just how we operate the company. And the reason we wrote it is we saw the magical change it had for our company where suddenly people were more focused, they were more productive, but most important, they were happier. A couple months ago, I called a meeting of my leadership team and the subject line was 'Let's Kill.' And the whole purpose was I wanted to sit around the table, tell me all the things you think we do that are dumb, meetings, process, products, and I want to just sit here for an hour or two and I want to kill.
Although you killed the Axios app, which I imagine there might have been some resistance to.
We debated that for years, years, but the truth was we have like tens of millions of people who come to Axios, like 30,000 people were using it on a regular basis, right? But to maintain an app, to make changes through the app store, that took a lot of people. It took a ton of work and it wasn't the best place to spend our time because most people don't actually want to go to an app. They either want their news pushed to them through social media or a newsletter, or they want to go to a website. And so just killing it, like great, now we just freed up all that time, all that money, all that mental space so that the things that we actually do that are unique, that all got better. And that's what happens. The fewer things you do, the better you are at doing them. And the fewer people that you can involve, the faster you're going to get it done. Like the thing that drives me nuts is when I look around even at our company where we're maniacs on this stuff, and there'll be like 12 people on a call and I'm like, why are all these people here? Why am I here? If you're just there to get informed, hook up your AI to your computer, get a summary that will tell you exactly what you missed in 10 seconds. Why would you spend 30 minutes for 10 seconds of material? And you have to have that mentality because each and everything, like skipping a meeting or maybe saying no to a social obligation, any one of them seems trivial in isolation. But you add them up and you literally get years of your life back. Years. So every hour of the time that you control, if you're doing something you don't need to be doing, don't want to do, you're just frittering away what is a very, very precious and finite resource. And really the only thing that gives us real meaning, which is what do we do with our time here on earth? And so the whole idea is like I want to free people to have more time to do the stuff that brings them joy, brings them reward.
