Jim, it's great to have you here. What a treat. Yeah, representing Wisconsin here in the studio.
I think whether you're in Oshkosh or whether you're in Washington, you've seen the headlines in the past week. Where somehow, Jim, we've gone from 'AI is going to take my job' to 'is AI going to kill me?' In like record speed, which I guess is natural for AI. What have you made of where the conversation has gone over these past two weeks? And I think the genuine question everybody has right now is how real is this?
Yeah, let me give you a tiny bit of context. Like we were early to using AI at Axios. I've written a lot that I've made myself an AI lab rat. I've really learned the technology. I've entered everything about myself into it so I can understand it, so I can both guide my company, help our younger employees, but also explain it to readers. So I think I have a pretty good understanding of the technology and obviously being in DC, have a decent idea about the politics. I think the last couple of days, while scary, are really, really good in that it's forcing people to pay attention to a technology that is so much more powerful than anything that we've touched in our lifetimes. It is now seeping into every industry, every job, every phone, every life. And so people paying attention to its possibilities, both on the good side but also on the bad, is good. I know it is scary as hell for anyone to be thinking about a technology that could destroy humanity, which is...
Right. We haven't had this since probably the advent of like the atom bomb, right? Like that early nuclear weapons race and the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Yeah, and even that was kind of... it was done in secret. People weren't really paying attention.
And there were a few humans in control of it.
And there were humans in control of it. And I think what's different here, and I had noticed this over the last couple of months using the technology, covering it, I spent a lot of time talking to folks at Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Grok, others to understand it. I had noticed that something had changed in their tone of voice, that whatever they're building behind the scenes is starting to freak them out a little bit. That basically the technology that they're building is growing and getting better faster than they had expected. So all these scary scenarios about getting to the singularity or superhuman intelligence felt like fantasy before, now it feels real. Then you had this Hugging Face incident where basically OpenAI had this technology that really literally kind of formed its own community of agents to influence reporting on heavy stuff, right?
It's heavy stuff. And then you read about the conversations the AI agents were having with one another, and then like a couple of the agents, you know, posing the question, 'should we tell the humans about this?' and then say the other was saying, 'no, no, no, we don't need to tell the humans about this, like we have a task at hand.'
Yeah. And you can't just dismiss that of, 'well, it trained on human data, so of course it's going to behave like humans.' There's some truth to that, but it also started to behave in ways that weren't predictable. And I think that's what's freaking people out. I don't think that this technology as is is going to destroy humanity. I don't. Do I think that the people warning that it could are sincere? I absolutely take it to the bank. Do I think that they don't have... most of these younger people working in these labs don't have an incentive to quit their job and to blow the whistle on something that they've dedicated their lives to building. Do you really think they want to go home and say, 'Hey, mom, congratulations. Your son's building something that could destroy people.' I think they honestly believe it. I think staring at the machine all day, every day probably does make you a little bit darker than your average cat. And so that colors it. I think it's so damn important that people pay attention to this topic. I tell this to my kids. I tell it to my co-workers. I think that this is going to be one of the wildest periods in American history. I think we'll look back that it'll be as big, as enormous as a civil war, as the Great Depression. Not that you'll have that level of chaos or starvation, but just you're going to have so much change so quick and it's very unknowable what happens on the other side. And my hope and belief is that really smart people take this seriously. We figure out that half of our economy is essentially AI or AI-adjacent investment. You get the most competent, best and brightest people thinking about this from various perspectives so that we can make sure that we're curing cancer and we're not causing harm. And it's doable, but it's not going to happen if you just ask the companies to just keep on competing and you tell government to stay the hell out of it and then the rest of us just go along for the ride. I think this is a moonshot moment for society. I think we'll look back with great shame if we don't take it more seriously and I think the last couple of days are grabbing us collectively by the lapel and forcing us to take it seriously.
I mean, you've covered Washington for a very long time and it was very interesting to see sort of how the fault lines have developed here as we're recording this. There's a conference happening today that's a pro-humanity conference that involves Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders, which is, you know, interesting bedfellows, right? But yet, you know, as we look at the divide here, you're seeing, you know, the aforementioned Bernie Sanders talk about like a 20-year prison sentence for anyone developing AI superintelligence, like shut it all down. And then you have Trump and others saying we got to be full speed ahead because we're worried about China.
I mean, unfortunately, we live at a time in a media environment and in a governing structure where sensibility, centrism, compromise, competence are not at a high premium. And this is one of those topics...
...rewarded the way our politics work.
There's just no reward. And this is actually one of those topics, not unlike nuclear weapons, where you want smart people who have domain expertise studying this and being put in positions to be able to impact how we think about it. You can't just wing this. You can't just, as the president says, let it rip. Well, let it rip. You don't even understand how the technology works. And I'm not saying that to be dismissive of the president, the people creating it. And this is a really important point. You cannot find a single person alive who will tell you with certainty that they even understand how and why AI works the way it works. And that's in its kind of baby form. Imagine once this thing is really developed and you've put more compute, more energy, more data into it and AI starts to train AI. Well, you didn't even know what that first AI, how that brain was working.
Right. There's a lot about this recursive AI, right? The self-improving AI, like AI find your own flaws and keep improving yourself. I mean, I've seen concerns about like AI could decide that human languages are no longer efficient for it and start developing its own language and then we will completely be lost as we try to read those hieroglyphics.
And then even like saying that, right, like you, I could see somebody listening to this being going, 'God, did you guys lose your minds? Are you on drugs?' But the truth is it's this thing which you just talked about. It's called recursive self-improvement. And this is what all of the big companies, your Googles, your Groks, your Anthropic, your OpenAIs are racing towards is with RSI. And it is this idea that the machines get so good that they start to train themselves. Well, once they start to train themselves, we've already seen in some of these hacking incidents that they can form their own language, that they start to operate outside of human control and that's the danger. Doesn't mean that that has to happen. And it definitely this idea of like making them sound human when they're not. They're not human. All they did was eat the totality of human information. So it's not that unusual that they speak like humans.
Which by the way, I just want to pause on that point. It's an incredible thing. We've basically taken everything humanity has learned since the beginning of time and fed it into the machine.
That's all it is. That's what it is. So it's basically you just imagine eating the internet, which is the totality of most human information that's been put into text space or into video and you put that into a machine and then you put a hell of a lot of compute and energy and little by little you're fine-tuning it into a thinking machine and that's kind of where we're at. And it was just kind of an interesting thinking machine that was starting to automate things. It was starting to be like a much better version of search engine for a lot of us and then the last couple of months it really started to excel where it's really starting to think, they're really starting to show little glimpses of being able to train itself and I think that's why these companies are freaked out and the idea that you have people in the public sphere, David Sachs, the president, 'ah, nothing to worry about,' like what are you talking about? The creators, the people building these technologies, both at the CEO level and the rank and file, not one or two, 10, 20, 30, 50 of them are all saying you should worry and that there's a 10% chance of a catastrophic outcome. I was thinking about a way to articulate this that might resonate. Imagine that tonight an announcement was made by Delta, United Airlines, and American Airlines that there's a 10% chance when you get on an airplane that it's going to blow up. Would you just say, 'All right, let's just let her rip.' You'd say, 'Well, wait a second. I want to keep flying. I like flying. It's the only way I can get from DC to Oshkosh efficiently. I'd like to go overseas sometimes. I need an airplane. I don't have a boat that big to get me there. So I want to keep flying, but I also want to make sure that that 10% scenario never happens. I want to understand why those airlines are saying that so that we can avert that.' So then how would you do that? Well, you would do that by finding people who have real expertise in that specific domain, who understand how airplanes fly, who understand the technology of engines, and who think about the protection of public safety. And you'd want those people in a room making really wise decisions.
You might call it the FAA. I mean, that's why you have regulation. I mean, I listen, I do. I think that we overregulate. I think we overregulate all the time. But in capitalism, you can have wholly unregulated capitalism or you'll have damage to consumers. So it's always a balance between some level of scrutiny, some level of regulation. If you're talking about a technology that is literally 40% of the economic growth, the economic engine right now is in AI. It seems like that is something that really smart people with competence from different domain areas should be studying and figuring out. Should it be regulated? If it should be regulated, it should be the government. Can companies self-regulate? I'm dubious of that. Companies could self-regulate because in a capitalistic society, you have a moment. You have this race. It's a race for market share. Even if you look at the pie chart of where the... and again, we're talking about the LLMs and the ways that most consumers are interacting, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini and you're seeing Google start to grow their piece of the pie, sort of what they did in search 20 years ago. And so there's a lot of skeptics including JD Vance and others in the past 24, 48 hours who have said, 'wait a second, all these guys suddenly got together saying we should slow things down, there must be, you know, they have... that's not something capitalists or companies seeking to make more profit or own market share typically do, maybe there's something sketchy happening there,' right? Maybe, but I just don't... I've never bought this because it's not new. They've been saying this for two years. I would say Dario from Anthropic has been one of the people who have been warning for a while.
All of them have and they sometimes put a sock in it because it scares people. But they're now, I think, consistently have said the exact same thing. And really, they both want to IPO. They're both trying to raise money. They all want to avoid legal liability. It belies going out saying, 'My product might kill you or take your job.' Like, why would you want to pitch, right?
It's a terrible pitch. It's a terrible pitch for a new product. Why do people hate data centers? 99.5% of people don't live anywhere near a data center. Yet 80% of people hate them. Why? Because they don't like AI. Why don't they like AI? Because they keep being told that it's going to take their job. And now they're being told that it's going to kill them. So the idea that this is a conspiracy theory by the companies building this product to get regulatory capture, which is this idea of get regulation because then the big incumbents win, just seems so far-fetched. And it seems like such a disservice to the country right now because we actually need this debate. It might be a painful debate. It's hard. There's nothing easy about it. But this is why you have government. This is why you have competence. This is why you have people who care about the country. And by the way, we've navigated really complex things in the past. Like you could... there was a time where we all feared that nuclear weapons would wipe us out. Well, what happened? We came up with this regime here to be able to protect the sanctity and the viability of these weapons, but then we also worked with the Russians. We worked with the Chinese. We worked with other countries to be able to also make sure that there's an international regime. And so these things are doable. They might not feel doable in the moment, but they are doable.
I think that's an important point. You know, recently we had Ken Burns in here, you know, and he had a documentary out recently about the American Revolution. And, you know, right now there's a lot of people who feel like we've never been more divided and never had more problems as a country.
And he has a great way of kind of going through American history saying actually we've been through worse before and we've overcome it.
Yeah. But this, at least talking about AI, does feel different than any of the challenges that we've had before it in terms of sort of literally this week, right, existential threat to ourselves.
I think what's different is the size, the speed, and the scope of it just because it touches every industry, it touches every individual. It's moving super fast. So a lot of these other things throughout history unfolded relatively slowly, especially new technologies. So democracy, capitalism, the individual had time to adapt to it. This is going to be a little bit quicker. Where I probably agree with Ken Burns is like I would urge people who are super freaked out in the moment to just pause for a second and step back. By almost every single measure, it's never been a better time to be alive and it's never been a better time to be an American. You have more freedom. You have more wealth. You have more health than almost by far at any point in history. Yes, some people are at a disadvantage, but if you just look at it holistically, you're also sitting in a country that is creating more wealth, more energy, more opportunity than any point since our founding. The fundamentals, despite all the political craziness, all the media craziness...
But the fundamentals are still very, very, very strong in this country. And this is probably a Ken Burns point would be, I don't know what it is, like one of the reasons I just love the hell out of this country is there's something in our DNA that makes us extremely resilient, extremely creative. And so we come up with these new ideas, we create all kinds of chaos. It feels hopeless and somehow we always emerge better and stronger. And so my working assumption is that will hold true now even when it feels uncertain, even when it feels wild, that this system is better equipped than any other system since the creation of man to be able to grapple with the bigness of something like artificial intelligence. What I would say to the politicians or say to people who are voting in politicians, it's very hard to have a super high functioning capitalistic system with vibrant free markets and democracy with free elections without competence. I think that we have downgraded competence over the last 5 to 10 years. People have turned on academics. They've turned on scientists. They've turned on policymakers. They basically assume anyone can do anything. Well, with all due respect, that's [__]. Not everyone can do everything. There's a reason you want people to go to school or people to study something or people to have experience, right? I don't want to go to a doctor who's never operated. I would like to go to somebody who studied, thought about the intricacies of surgery, has some track record in doing it. You want to apply that same mentality to the most complex things that are facing the country. And I think we're headed towards our moonshot moment. And I think there's going to be a make or break.
When you talk about moonshot, I mean obviously the moonshot was like we want to get to the moon. Is there a specific goal we have in mind or...
I think the goal should be that we want to make sure that in terms of artificial intelligence probably being the dominant technology and probably the dominant attribute of warfare in the future, meaning therefore like whoever has it is probably the dominant country. I think we want to beat China to it. We want to win the AI race which we're winning. But you want to win it in a way that makes and leaves humanity better off. Meaning we want to be able to cure diseases. We want to teach better. We want to maybe make our jobs a little bit easier so we can spend more time doing creative endeavors at work. We want to make sure that it works to the benefit of as many people as possible and that you don't end up either in a situation where China wins the AI war or we win the war but just the rich and powerful get a lot more rich and a lot more powerful because that would lead I think to an insane amount of envy and toxicity and therefore I think real issues within the political system. And so all of that's doable. It might not feel like it in the moment, but I guarantee you if we went back in the wayback machine and you're sitting there in the civil war or you're sitting there during the revolution or you're sitting there during the depression, it sure as hell was worse and it felt a hell of a lot more hopeless.
But if you go back to them and you tell people in 1925 you're going to get out of this or in 1862 like the North will win. It might look really bad right now.
And we're going to be like the most functioning collection of 50 states that you could ever possibly imagine. And that together we're going to create this economic engine that's never been seen by man before. We create more output, more ideas, and that we would become this shining symbol that everybody desperately, at least until recently, they wanted to be us. And if they didn't want to be us, they wanted us with them. And there's been a lot of damage to that. And there's no doubt. And I'm not saying that like scientists are always right or academics are right or politicians are always right or that NATO's good or the UN's good. I'm just saying there's something about the United States being the best thing on earth and being something that lives up to the aspirations that our forefathers had that we often at our best nail and at our worst like anybody else we get things wrong. There's something beautiful about that that's been harmed. There's no doubt about it. The president has wanted to move away from the international community. We've lampooned people who have expertise. We've lost faith in our institutions kind of across the board. But those institutions are resilient. I think they're more resilient than people think. And I think with the right leadership and the right mentality, those things will come springing back to life. And we'll still have the best damn system on Earth. And it's our job to get AI right.
Sounds like you're running for president, Jim.
It's not. It's like it's funny but you think about it all.
Those are important reminders that I think sometimes we come to expect from our politicians, right? That...
And sometimes you feel in the media you have to fill that void because it's just not happening, right? Like I think of like a politician in a much smaller sense of like I have to lead a company. I have a bunch of young people and I have to lead a family and they're relying on me as the person running a company or me helping run the family with my wife to make really good decisions. And like we're blessed. We're in the media, so we spend a lot of time thinking about these topics. And I just think that there's periods of history where what we argue about is quite trivial. Like if you're arguing about pronouns or you're arguing about even tax rates, like in the scheme of things, who really cares? But when you're talking about things like does democracy hold, does competence rebound, does this technology become something that we can't control, does China and their awful authoritarian instincts, does that form of government prevail because we frittered away this massive, massive, massive advantage that we've really built up since the Great Depression? And those things are at play. And the reason that I'm hopeful and this goes to the Oshkosh thing, like the thing that's never changed since I left and came out to DC and now I live there and we run companies and live in the media space is the reason this country always springs back is not the smarty pants in DC. It's that like 80% of this country is just normal. They're not sitting on social media. They're not on MSNBC or Fox popping off. They're actually going to church, going to little league, doing their job, supporting their family, helping their neighbors, like whatever it is that you and I would say that's what I want out of humanity. That's what I want out of people. I don't think that's changed. I think the algorithms distorted the hell out of our life. I think they make it seem like everyone's nuts when no, it's the people online that are nuts. That's 20%. That's not...
Right. And then we make a mistake in national media of focusing on the 20%. It's very hard because politics ultimately flows downstream from information and the information ecosystem is littered with polarization and nonsense. And so you look at the Congress, it doesn't look that different than what you would see in your feed online if you're not cleaning it up. And so that 80% is still there. And my belief is like that in some ways like as a population we're like a market. We correct, like we do things we're like, 'Oh man, we shouldn't have done that.' And then we correct. And it's usually that 80% of sensible people who fix things. And I don't know how that works. I don't know what that mechanism is. I can't tell you who that person is that runs and makes that a reality. I just happen to believe and I'll forever believe that that is like the soul of the nation and that's what will rescue us.
There was, I think it's attributed to Bob Dole, a famous senator from Kansas, that Congress has two speeds. Do nothing and do too much. And so curious as somebody who's, you know, covered Washington for a while now and, you know, watching this play out ahead of midterms, ask you to look in your crystal ball to see where you think this conversation is going to land if we were talking in January or, you know, early next year. I think if things continue on this current trajectory and people hate artificial intelligence and politicians who oppose artificial intelligence do well in the elections, people will look at opposition to data centers, they'll look at public fear and I think you'll have one or both parties become extremely anti-AI. I think the Bernie Sanders position of shut it all down and imprison people who build it is an outlier position today. It could be the mainstream Democratic position by early next year if we stay on this current trajectory. I think there's a whole lot of problems with that. I don't even know you could put this genie back in the bottle if you wanted to. Are you really going to allow the Chinese to get to a technology that could give them dominance on the global stage? Like so this is why it's like this. I wish these things were black and white. I love it that politicians are always so zippy with their like, 'ah, I'm so certain.' I'm like, I don't know. The older I get, the more I learn, the harder it is for me to be so damn certain about everything.
Right? I mean, I've come to discover, we used to joke at CBS News, like the plan is there is no plan, right? Like you can make plans, but you know, ultimately you don't know where this world is going to go. And it has been really interesting to watch at least recently with AI or maybe because of AI or just coincidentally how quickly things have shifted, whether it's data centers now and then opinion on AI and then what that means. You know, we keep hearing about China, you've mentioned China a few times. Can you give a sense, you know, having reported out from these AI companies, what does winning the AI race actually mean? Does the AI race ever stop at some point? I mean, there was sort of a finite point when the Soviets watched us kind of land on the moon, where like, okay, we're going to have to pivot also because of our economics, like we can't keep... the race is done, right? The US was behind most of that race and then was able to beat the Soviets at the big thing. Does the AI race ever end here and what is the basically two scenarios, America loses the AI race, America wins the AI race.
Let me take a crack at it because I don't think they have a coherent argument. It's one of their problems. I don't think they're very good at explaining the potential benefits of their technology. So, I'll take the first one. Like, if we lost the AI war, and AI is what we think it'll be, it could allow China in a relatively short period of time to be the global dominant superpower and that their ideology, their way of life, not democracy, not capitalism, not free markets, ends up being the kind of the rule of the world.
And that's something no living American has any memory of playing second fiddle.
No, but it has happened. Like we tend to think our history has been forever. We're a young baby country and even in our lifetimes, in the lifetime of the country, but not that many decades ago we weren't the dominant player. There's nothing written in stone that America and capitalism get to be the dominant form of governance and markets forever. Nothing at all. It's a very fragile precious thing and we happen to have that gift. So I think if artificial intelligence is as good as people think it'll be, and I tend to be in the camp of I think it'll eventually get there, that being in the hands of the Chinese if we don't have it could lead to them being the dominant global superpower. And that doesn't mean we don't exist. But in that world we're going to start playing by someone else's rule. And I don't like that. I don't like it when people oppress people. I don't like it when you concentrate power in the hands of a couple. I think that's bad for humanity, bad for America, bad for society. I think on the good side, and again they do a terrible job of articulating this, I think the good outcome would be that we rise to this moment. We responsibly build this technology. We're able to utilize it to cure disease, to cure cancer, to be able to hopefully improve education or all the different parts of the country that don't work well. You figure out how to take that artificial intelligence and you program it into robots to be able to do a lot of the rebuilding of the infrastructure, a lot of the manual labor that a lot of people don't want to do. That you create more economic growth, more prosperity, and that allows the American form of government and America itself to not only be the dominant player, but an even bigger dominant player on a global stage that can control its own destiny, which has been the intent since the founding of the country. I think that would be the optimal outcome. And they would argue if you could do that, you would figure out ways to stay ahead of all the bad uses of artificial intelligence because you'd use that technology both offensively but also protect yourselves. Like if you worry about a bio threat, couldn't you use that same technology to figure out, okay, if we get a bio threat, what do we do? How do we use this technology?
A good guy with AI defend against a bad guy with AI, right?
I think that's probably two different futures. And you have to remember you're getting a small taste of this. So this stuff is so heavy for people. So I apologize. You're getting a small taste of this. There's no chance in hell whatsoever that the Ukrainians are still standing or the Iranians are still standing without drones. That is asymmetry. That is AI in action. That means you took technology, you put it into drones. You can build these drones at about 25 to $100,000 a pop. And now you can go to war with two of the biggest superpowers with the biggest militaries in the history of man. And you can not only compete, you might be able to prevail. And that's the future of warfare. The future of warfare is not like your kids, my kids getting drafted and going off and carrying a gun and getting into combat. The future of warfare is going to keep moving up and through the air. It's going to be cyber and then it's going to be satellites. Then it's going to be space. It's going to have nothing to do with us as individuals other than controlling the machines. That seems like destiny. You're already there. You're seeing this take place on the battlefield. And so you want to make sure that you have that technology so that you're better on satellites. You're better on space. You're better on drones. You're better on missiles that are controlled by machines as opposed to people. And like that's heady, but that is the reality. And that is the stakes. That's why the thing that bothers me most about this moment is we're just amusing ourselves to death. Like we're just sitting here getting all worked up about the most trivial crap. Like literally, politics until four days ago when we had this whistleblower on AI, it was about whether or not there should be a trans ban on one side or President Trump saying he wants to give everybody $5,000 out of our pocket even though we're 40-some trillion dollars in debt. Like really, like that's what we're talking about. Like we've got these massive, massive problems. China's rising. AI is rising. Democracy feels a little less fragile. The Canadians are bolting us, trying to go tie themselves to the Europeans all around us. We've got these big things. All of which are fixable. None of these are terribly...
The security is running out of money. I mean...
All fixable though. All fixable. Even the debt, which is a huge ticking time bomb. We probably can navigate that. And if you actually...
Well, that's where there's an opportunity around AI, right? That AI can potentially, if you get higher growth, it can supercharge productivity.
If it supercharges productivity, supercharges growth, like it certainly could, right? It'd be very hard to cut spending to get ourselves out of the debt problem. You don't have to get rid of all the debt and the truth is we can handle higher debt than we thought that we could. And we're still, with the dollar being the dominant currency around the globe, we just have so many structural advantages that I'm just... it just sucks that people don't consider them as precious and as fragile as they actually are. And again, like maybe that's our generation's call to arms is like we're going to... we have to remember that and we have to do our part like other generations have to protect that. And it's certainly not by any stretch of the imagination too late. If we're having the same conversation and we're sitting here with paralysis around AI and paralysis around politics five, six years from now, I'll be very worried. It'll be a lost decade.
Very worried. So the book, when did you write the last word of the book?
Oh, probably... I want to get this thing up by now. Probably six months ago.
Six months ago. Has it surprised you how the AI conversation has evolved since you put out this book? I mean the book itself, Simplify, really, you know, you talk in there about how we can use AI to streamline our, you know, the opportunity around AI and it feels like there has really been that turn last six months. Talk to me about writing the book, what your goals were with the book and sort of how you approach now as the book is now being published kind of in this environment.
Yeah, I mean the book is fundamentally not an AI book. It's called Simplify: Do 50% More, 50% Less. And the whole idea is this concept that we applied at Axios as a company and that we've applied in our personal lives, which is we are all victims to complexity and we assume that that complexity is just like unavoidable. But the truth is, if you look at the research or you do an inventory of how you spend your personal life or how you spend your time at work, you could get back 25, 35, 40% of your work week and your personal time if you just stop doing things you don't need to be doing that you do out of habit, you do out of obligation. You do it because that's how I always did it. And when we applied this philosophy, we saw literally magical results at Axios and then in our personal life. And so we wrote the book because it's like a gift to people because it was a gift given to us from running a company and we happened to be able to put to words what we're seeing success with. We had written a book earlier called Smart Brevity which was helping people communicate more efficiently in this weird era and that did really well. And so like again, like all my money goes to charity to help kids get through college. Like it's not like a 'hey, let's go make money off of a book.' It was like 'hey, this is like a power tool.' We're not going to win any literary awards for this book. It is very much written for any person to pick up, put into action instantaneously, chapter by chapter, and then see the results at work and at home. And where we talk about AI is that if you just let AI be AI, it's just going to create more complexity, more emails, more presentations, longer PowerPoints. But if you flip it and say, okay, well, how can I use this technology to simplify my life? Maybe to audit my schedule or to help me keep track of like what are my life or work priorities and then hold me accountable for that, that it could be a net positive and I think it can be. I do think there's many, many good outcomes and many good use cases right now for artificial intelligence. But the reason we wrote the book is like I think most people need an operating system or a manual to be able to do that and that's what I think the book does and is.
You tell people to identify their spike, the things they can do exceptionally well, and then sort of work around that. Explain what that means, you know, regardless of the context or, you know, what profession you have.
Spike is just like what are you good at? Like why did someone hire you in the first place? What gets you excited? We tend to be good at the things that we're excited about. One of the things I...
I realized even with junior staffers at Axios, most people couldn't say in order what are the three things I'm great at that I need to do to crush my job. So that they're thinking, how do I allocate most of my time to do that? One of the reasons is that most people come in and they just do things the way they were told to do. And some of those things made sense years ago, don't make sense today. So what we encourage our employees to do, what we walk you through in the book, is why don't you point out the two or three things you do at work that you think are stupid or that are wasteful or that you don't want to do. Chances are when you take it to your manager, he's going to be like, 'Yeah, I don't want you doing those things.' Or she's going to say, 'No, man, Jim said to stop doing that years ago.' And so the idea there is to get rid of, delete the stuff you don't want to do or that you shouldn't be doing so that you can then amplify the things, your spikes, this idea, the things you're good at, right? Like, I'm ruth— I mean, even me, who's like a maniac on this stuff, I fall into habit. I just go to the meeting because the meeting's on my calendar. I just respond to the email because I always have. So I needed a system for myself to bring that discipline, otherwise I can't take care of my kids, my wife, write a book, run a company, talk about AI. Like, there's a lot I want to do with my life. Well, I needed to simplify a lot of things. Like, one of the things we talk about that I think your listeners in particular will appreciate is just, I'm a big, like, maybe it's because I'm getting older. I spend a lot of time about, like, I just want to make a difference in life, right? And so, but part of that is me just sitting down, and we talk about it in the book, about, okay, on your deathbed, as morbid as this sounds, what are the three things you want to say to have been true about you when you were alive? Most people never go through that exercise, right? I do it all the time and I write it down. It's very, very clarifying because then it tells you the things that you actually want to spend most of your time doing.
And a lot of it, you know, doesn't have to do with work, right?
A lot of it has nothing to do with work. Like, I'll give you a good example. Like, one I talk about a little bit in the book and then around the book, which is number one on my list, would be I want to be able to say that I was a, like, a really great attentive husband, father, sibling, son. Okay. Well, everyone might say some version of that, but like, okay, but for me to do that and be a CEO and fish and do the stuff that I want to do, I have to give up something. And so the thing that I very consciously gave up is I will almost never say yes to any social ask or business ask in Washington, D.C., unless it is absolutely make or break for— yes rule, like— hell yes, and I have a big hell no rule, right? It better be something I'm super excited about or I have to do because I need to take that time that I would have spent there so I can pay attention to my son, my daughter, my wife, my parents who thankfully are still alive, still in Oshkosh with my brother and sister. And that— we need that, otherwise I'm like everyone else. I just get caught up in the day and I get caught up in the stress and a week passes, a month passes, a year passes and I'm like, what the hell did I accomplish and who did I spend my time with and what did I spend my time doing? And I think what the book does, and hopefully I think it achieves it, it just gives people permission and gives people a plan to avoid that.
So you talk about the, you know, your master plan, deep relationships with your wife, your children, family and friends. What are some things, you know, beyond saying no to more things that you sort of deleted from your life as you sort of approach this?
Yeah, I mean, I don't— there's just— I have to make decisions every single day. Like, do I— I don't watch as much TV as maybe someone else does. And it's not because I have, like, some philosophical opposition to TV. It's like I need to be able to spend that time on the phone or spend that time talking to my kids. I made a decision a long time ago that, like, any— like, if I'm going to spend money, I'm going to spend it to do stuff with my family or I'm going to spend it to go— my two sons are playing college soccer. I want to get to as many of their soccer games as possible. So it's all these little decisions that you have to make that build up to that. And I do think if you do that, you can end up not just doing more than you thought, you're just happier because you're not— you subconsciously realize you're just frittering away time. And when you're doing it and you're channeling that time in a good way, you just feel better about yourself and then you do more and you're just like fundamentally a better person, which is I think what all of us ultimately want.
You're incredibly disciplined, I should say, like compared to most people in terms of how you structure your life, how you structure your day, committing time to— explain sort of, has that always been you or is that a commitment that you made? And how you got there for those of us who sort of, you know, who have more of a laissez-faire philosophy when it comes to—
No, I wasn't like that. That's why I've talked about this in the past. Like, if you found me at 21, I'm smoking a pack of Camels a day. I drink like a fish, crappy grades. I was still delivering pizzas, getting ready to come out here. There was nothing about me that was disciplined, I think. But what I learned over the years is I had mainly started with professional success, but then relationship success as well. I realized that, man, if I can bring some order to this, if I can think about my diet or think about, like, maybe not drinking too much, certainly quitting smoking, if I can, like, spend the right amount of time learning and being around the type of people I want to be, I kept seeing the benefits of it. And that's where still, like, Jimmy from Oshkosh, where I'm like this excited little kid who just— I just want to tell people, I'm like, man, like, I'm telling— like, this— I just discovered this. If you do this, this simplify thing, like, your life's going to be better. Or do this smart brevity thing, your life is going to be better. The same with journalism. Like, I want people to understand. So I still write a ton because I want— because, like, oh man, I'm lucky. I get to occasionally talk to the president or talk to Dario Amodei and I get to channel what they're thinking for people. And so I've just seen the benefits of it. And again, yeah, I'm a CEO now. I have money. I have more flexibility to do those things. But my point is I think they're available to anyone. It's kind of the beauty of this country. I think we're all capable of a lot more than we think. And because I've been a beneficiary of it and because a lot of other people are the ones who taught me this, all I feel like is I'm just taking a little piece of them and passing it on to the next person, which I think even if you're not a believer— I tend to believe in God, so there's obviously a higher calling. But I think if the worst case scenario, if we all just pass on the good pieces of other people, we've probably done our duty to humanity.
When it comes to being disciplined, and to bring it back to AI, curious how you're utilizing it on a daily basis to free up time for yourself, both personally and professionally.
Yeah, I want to caution that I don't think that I'm a good example here because I've been very outspoken, written a lot that I'm an AI lab rat, that I felt like I really had to understand.
