Axios CEO: How to Get Ahead of Everyone Who's Using AI

In the next two to five years, the open web will largely die. Meaning, you're probably not going to go to www whatever to get your information. Every single one of us will have access to Einstein-level genius across every single topic known to man. Once everybody has access to Einstein-level intelligence, if anything, the need for unique content, human-created content that is truly unique, that is differentiated, will soar in value. People are going to yearn for that. They're going to want something that sits above and beyond AI that everyone has access to. So, I think people that can offer that will probably...

If you have a direct relationship with your audience or you have like domain expertise even on a super niche, I think there's going to be a big space for you in this chaotic era.

We waste at least 25% of every week doing things that never should have been done. That's two and a half months a year. That's 2.5 years every decade. We naturally as a species have this genetic flaw where we make things way more complex than they need to be and we just fritter away time. And unless you have a system that forces you to confront what you do and why you do it, you're just going to keep falling into that trap.

It depends a little bit where you're at in life and where you're at in an organization, but it will give you like a north star of what you actually care about, what you actually want to see happen. I would start both with life and work. You need to figure out...

It's a thrill. Let's, uh, this will be fun, hopefully.

I mean, it's a mess, but I think the state of everything is kind of a mess. And I'm of two minds about the media. Like on the one hand, it's never been a better time to be a news consumer. There's more good, high-quality content available to any of us on any topic as long as we have internet connectivity, which is literally five billion plus people on Earth. And so if you have the time to kind of pick what you care about and make sure that you're getting it from good sources, you can get smarter quicker than at any point in humanity. The flip of that is there's a lot of crap out there. You know, just like it's easy to get good stuff, it's even easier to get bad stuff. The algorithms push things that are aimed at your passion. They often push bad stuff, dark stuff, gossipy stuff, trivial stuff. There's a lot of misinformation out there. There's a lot of confusion even from like not misinformation, just about who to trust, what to trust, what to pay attention to. So those two things are happening simultaneously. And so I'm very sympathetic to the news consumer who just feels anxious and feels uncertain what to trust. I think one of the most alarming things is just the number of people I talk to every day that will send me something, including very smart people, and be like, 'Wow, this is interesting. If it's true, if it's real...' Like the idea that we're questioning, is something real? Is something true? Is that actually a video? Is that actually a person? Was that actually said? That's kind of scary, right? And so we're in this weird phase where you have both information nirvana and information dystopia happening simultaneously.

I don't think there'll ever be trust scores that anyone cares about. People have tried that. People aren't looking for that. It's just not how people consume information. And by the way, someone would have to score it. Like who would you trust to score whether something's accurate or partisan? You're not going to trust the government. You're probably not going to trust the companies. You might trust the individual, but it really depends who the individual is. And so what I like to say to folks is like there is no hero in this story other than you. And I would take a tremendous amount of personal responsibility for what you ingest into your brain, just like you do what you would ingest into your body for your diet, right? In terms of you need to make those decisions. You need to make sure you know who you're following on social media. You need to figure out like the podcast that like you actually trust. You need to find at least one source of truth. Hopefully it's Axios, but it could be the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, something. You need some rooting in general news that you feel like, hey, they're trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth in a non-ideological way on a regular basis. I think you need that. You need that grounding. You need that visibility. And I think if you do take that control, this doesn't have to be a months-long project. This is something you could do over time or, you know, spend a couple hours in one day and probably clean up your media diet. But I think you can't wait for someone else to be your hero. Like you have to be your hero. I will say if you make that decision, I firmly believe, and I'm a beneficiary of this, I think you can develop almost a bionic brain now because you have access to the smartest people on the most interesting topics that none of us, even reporters who are deeply sourced, didn't have this kind of access 10, 15 years ago. Like if you want to know what Elon Musk thinks or says, go on X or go listen to any podcast that he does where he spends hours talking about it. I say the same thing about any topic that you care about. It could be about music. It could be about health. It could be about literature. You have access to the smartest people in the world, most of whom do videos or post their videos or do podcasts. And you can listen to them with a Spotify account, an Apple Music account, often just online for free, going to YouTube and getting it if you have a YouTube subscription or even the free version of it. And so it's all out there. It just really requires you to be a very discerning news consumer.

Those are two different questions to me. Are we in a better place today than we were a year ago? I think yes. Here's why. I think more people are more aware today than they were a year ago about the dangers of algorithms and the bias that algorithms contain. I think more people today than a year ago are taking a break from their phone and they're thinking a little bit more deeply about the type of content that they read and that they share. I think today, even versus a year ago, there's just a lot of good sources of news, right? There's a lot of individual people on Substack, a lot of people at podcasts, a lot of bigger companies like Axios or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that continue to do a lot of really good work. And so I think today is better than a couple of years ago for sure. I feel pretty strongly about that. Mainly because it took us a while to figure out like what happens to our brains on phone and what happens to our brains on algorithm. And only in the last couple of years have I think we really started to grapple with that. And by the way, I think you're starting to see this seep in a healthy way into schools where they're saying, 'Hey, maybe you shouldn't look at a damn phone while you're going to school.' Or maybe you should limit the amount of time you're spending on social media. Or maybe the reason that my young girl is depressed and sitting in a room is because she's staring at an algorithm for far too long. Those things are all better. That's separate from the question of like, will it be better six months from now, a year from now? I don't know the answer to that. And the reason is I think we're about to go through a platform shift. I think sometime in the next, you know, two to five years, the open web will largely die. Meaning, you're probably not going to go to www whatever to get your information. I think you're going to probably get most of your information in the not too distant future from an LLM. So from a large language model, probably some product produced by a company like Anthropic or OpenAI or Google that knows more about you, knows more about your style, more about your taste, more about your rhythms, more about your passions than probably any person on earth, maybe including you. And it is going to be a very personalized experience. And it is going to be in some ways a very private experience. I think you'll still have public expression on social platforms, but most of the ingestion will probably come through an LLM. Is that a better space than we are in right now? I don't know. I think it really depends about how isolated do people become? How do people use that technology? Do they use it to make themselves smarter and to maybe give themselves more time to connect with humans face to face? If that happens, and I'd say it's a positive outcome. If people retreat even deeper into the digital dark world, that's always a bad outcome. I don't think there's any good outcome where people staring at a screen is good for humanity, good for the individual. So, we have to find balance. I tend to be an optimist on this. I tend to think that over time, we're going to figure this out. We're going to live in a different information ecosystem. It's going to require a lot of personal responsibility. It's going to have a lot of personalization, but I think there's potentially a lot of good upside if we get artificial intelligence right that could help people learn more about more topics and also become more efficient so that they can spend maybe more time away from work and more time in nature, more time with other people. My personal view is I think there'll be a direct inverse correlation. I think the better AI gets, the better technology gets, the more people are going to yearn for and seek human connection. I think you're already starting to see that in a lot of local communities. I think we're just at the very, very early stages of that. I think there could almost be a renaissance of community. That's what I hope that people realize, that you know what, that isolation of COVID, the isolation of the phone, it was like when we all drank a lot in college and then you realize maybe I shouldn't drink that much, right? I think that we might have the same relationship with phones. Like, okay, man, I went on the bender, but that bender's over now, folks. And I'm sobering up and I'm going to live a different life. And I think that that could be true in the information ecosystem world.

I don't know. I think that the courts are going to litigate that over the next probably one to four years. I think you'll start to see court rulings on how much power do these companies have to both in real time and retroactively take the work of others, take the work of publications like Axios or an individual podcaster and turn that into the corpus of knowledge that was used to create these LLMs. So I think that answer will be answered by the courts. Like right now, the companies are telling you exactly how much money you're going to get for your information. It rhymes with bureau. You're going to get nothing. Zero. Because they feel like fair use laws allow them to take whatever they want off the internet. They might be right, by the way, legally. We can debate whether that's morally correct, but legally they might be right on that. I do think that for LLMs to work and for humanity to function, you do need new information. You do need new ideas. You do need human expression. And I think that companies are realizing you're going to have to compensate for that. Now, whether that's just paying people to produce content because that's going into the machine or whether that's like licensing deals or whether maybe your personal LLM allows for you to have a variety of subscriptions just like your apps on your phone allow you to, I think that is a possibility. And so I think that we will figure that out. I don't see a world where AI eats all knowledge, eats all creativity, and we're just sitting around in the forest waiting for AI to tell us what to do. That just seems so inconceivable to me. And I just don't think that that's the future. I think that just like the phone was a messy, messy thing, the internet was a messy, messy thing, AI will be a messier thing. It'll be a faster thing. It'll be a more pervasive thing, but it'll be a thing. And like I assume we're going to figure out a way to get through it in a way that still works and it works well for humanity. And again, if we nail it, it could work beautifully for humanity. If we screw it up, it could end catastrophically for humanity.

I don't know. I've not really thought about that specific outcome. Listen, I think, here's what I think. I think three years from now, if I extrapolate the progress that I see being made by the AI labs, I work under the assumption three years from now, every single one of us will have access to Einstein-level genius across every single topic known to man. I think that will be true. We can debate whether I'm wrong or not, but I'm just telling you, disclosing that's what I think to be true. Much like all of us have equal access to winning a trivia contest if we have Google sitting in front of us. Less efficient than an LLM, but we would all have access to the exact same repository of information. I think once everybody has access to Einstein-level intelligence, I think if anything, the need for unique content, human-created content, human-curated content, human content that we can connect around that is truly unique, that is differentiated, will soar in value. And I think people are going to yearn for that. They're going to want something that sits above and beyond just AI that everyone has access to. All of us from the beginning of time were programmed as hunters and gatherers to want survival, but also to want something that other people don't have. And I don't think that that human desire goes away. And so I think that media will adapt. I think media will still matter profoundly. You could argue media information matters more than politics right now, more than technology. Almost every debate culturally, every debate politically, every technological advancement flows downhill from information, from the sharing of information, from the creation of information, from the manipulation, both in good and bad ways, of information. And so I don't think that that fundamentally changes. I do think if I were producing commodity content or content that's not vital or useful to somebody, it'll have no value. Why would I need that or want that? I don't think it has value today. Like it might be, you can find value because you can just get people to click on something they shouldn't have clicked on. But I think over time if you can produce something that's truly unique, and that's what we try to do at Axios, right? Is try to have people of subject matter expertise tell you things that you do not otherwise know, that you want to know, and that you have a human delivering it. And the thing a machine's not going to be able to do is to have a conversation with you, get you to tell me something you didn't want me to know, or for me to watch your eyes and realize you said something, you meant something different. And what the machine also can't do is understand kind of all the complexities of kind of human relationships with historical context on a topic and give an analytical input that is unique. Like it'll be able to give an analytical input, but I don't think it'll miss that human dimension. So I think people that can offer that, and it could be about your personality, it could be about your brain, it could be about your ideas, it could be about your sourcing, I think anybody who has those attributes will probably do very well in whatever the new world order is. And by the way, they're doing pretty well right now. If you just look at the last couple of years, you've seen the explosion of individual people on YouTube, on Substack, smaller startups, Punchbowl here in DC, you know, Puck out on the West Coast. You're seeing these individual companies do quite well. You're seeing these individuals who might have made $100,000 a couple years ago might be on Substack making $400,000 a year. So people who are idea generators, who are content creators, who are good at what they do, who have and offer something unique, if anything, the marketplace is valuing them higher today than it did five years ago. And I think in an LLM world, we'll value them even higher. That is the bet certainly that we're making.

I do. I don't think that that changes. I think if anything the market gets better for those people. Like if you have a direct relationship with your audience or you have like domain expertise even on a super niche, I think there's going to be a big space for you. Now, does it play out in a newsletter? Does it play out on YouTube? Does it play out in some kind of weird device that's connected to our wrist or our chest or whatever? I don't know. But I think that it's still going to have like tremendous value. I think creativity, I think individual expertise, I think vital information that you could provide, like that's all going to have a ton of value. And I don't know that it'll even look that different. It might be the device you're getting it from might look different, but who cares? Like I used to read a piece of paper, then I looked at a big screen, now I look at a small screen. If that changes to something else, as long as it's super useful, okay, all right, like we evolve all the time.

I think it is. I still think we're in this, I think we tend to be victims of short-termism. I think we're still sorting through all of this, right? Like one of the reasons that I think Axios worked and Smart Brevity worked is that there's just a lot of content that should be delivered a lot more efficiently. It's like a utility. It just happened today. You know, it's not a book. It's not great literature. It's like I need to understand this thing as quickly as humanly possible because I'm busy as hell. And like if you could do that, there's super value in that. And the more that information that doesn't need to be long is delivered more efficiently, the more time you would actually have to read that book or read that article or listen to that song or listen to that podcast or whatever it is that you want to do that you find personally edifying. And I think we're still in the middle of that shakeout. So I don't think any of that really goes away. And my guess is we're still looking at newsletters five or ten years from now. Now, not everyone will, but like a lot of this stuff will still exist. And even the data on books, like are people reading less, reading more? I don't know. Like sometimes it looks like people are buying more books, but maybe they're reading fewer books. But like there's still a demand for books. There's still a demand for ideas. There's still people are not going to lose human connection. Even summary, just simple AI summary, it's just stupid. It's just not that useful. And like very few people are actually relying on pure AI summaries. And if every AI summary reads the same, it's going to have such a sameness that people will move on to something that's distinct. Well, what's distinct would be a person, not a machine, who's bringing personality to it, who's bringing perspective to it, who's bringing insight to it, who's bringing sourcing to it, who's bringing energy to it. And that's why I just don't have the doom and gloom view about the future of media that other people have. I think that there's going to be some bumpy things. I think there'll be changes, but I mean, come on. Like, is the New York Times weaker today than it was ten years ago? No, it's much bigger. Look at the number of subscribers it has. Wall Street Journal, bigger, better. FT, bigger, better. Axios didn't exist ten years ago. Bigger, better. Politico created twenty years ago. Bigger, better. Go down the road. Like, most high-quality sources of information are doing better than ever. And then, okay, well, I don't want mainstream media. I want my right-wing media. Well, go, man. There's all kinds of podcasts. Go listen to Tucker. Go listen to Ben Shapiro. They have massive followings. They have massive businesses. I want it on the left. Well, there's an explosion. Go listen to the Positive America guys. There is a lot of content out there to reach every community. And I think what will have value is that unique content and that ability to have some kind of connectivity. That connectivity because you, me, and you have a conversation. It could be a group of people meeting up to talk about a topic or to have a book club. Again, I just think there's many more outcomes that are positive. Again, all this is dependent that we figure out AI and that's a whole different conversation about getting that right. But I just assume that as a species we've been pretty damn good at evolving and licking problems bigger than this that we'll figure it out. I don't know exactly how we will, when we will, but I assume that we will. And it feels like we ultimately end up on the better side of things. Like I just don't go through life as pessimistically as other people do. And in fact, I think a lot of people are living in a dark parallel universe that doesn't exist. I think by most standards, it's really never been a better time to be alive. If you're living in America, undoubtedly never been a better time to be alive. I'll argue this still. I'm blue in the face with anybody. Like, sure, you can show me edge cases where it's harder to be alive today than it would have been 100 years ago. That's very few people. Most people are making more money. They're more mobile. They're more educated. They're healthier. They're living longer. They have more energy. They have more access to more wealth, to more opportunity than at any point in the history of humanity in any country at any time. That is just true and almost everything I just said is almost not debatable.

I don't know that it'll be that much different than today. I think it'll be a combination of, I think advertising is not going away. So, we'll figure out advertising whether it's on your podcast, whether it's in your newsletter, whether it's sitting inside your LLM. There's billions and billions of dollars that want to be spent on advertising. They will be spent in media. Yes, we get a much smaller share than we used to pre-Google, pre-the internet, but we still get a big chunk of it. So, I think that will exist. I think subscriptions, like people will pay for some types of content and so subscriptions will be one. I think licensing, I think that whether maybe it's individuals, maybe it's companies, maybe it's a big LLM, they're going to want distinctive content of all flavors. Some of it will be entertainment, some of it will be edifying, some will be very newsy. I think that there'll be a pipeline for revenue to be made there. I think that there's a big desire by the consumer, big desire by business to be part of events. I think there's a reason that most media companies are expanding into the event area. That's a good thing. Like people like coalescing around a topic with a shared interest being in person. It's a beautiful thing. I like it. And I like that it's a good business for us, a good business for other people. So I don't know that it will materially change that much.

I mean, it's a weird time to be a media operator. You know, we're ten years in and we've had a decent amount of success, which is nice. We were early to AI. To be honest, the thing I'm most excited about by far is, and we'll have more to say on this in a month or two, I think we're going to revitalize local news in every single community in the country. I think that artificial intelligence is going to make that possible. We're going to unveil some stuff at the end of the year that I think people will find fascinating. That's going to allow us to scale into communities that pre-AI would not have been possible to go into as a business. And I think we're going to be able to automate away so many of the things that add cost but don't necessarily add value to journalism. At the end of the day, journalism is one product. It's journalism, right? And so I want to put all of my investment into people doing the journalism. If I can automate everything else around it other than probably salespeople for the big deals, that's a good outcome. And we're building what we call the local super system. We spent a year plus building it. I think we'll have something very cool to unveil in the next couple of months and then it's going to be off to the races. Can we really prove that we can go into local communities that have been hit hard, that are news thirsty, news starved, and be able to serve them? And if we can do that, it would be a bigger deal than, you know, we created Politico, we created Axios. I think if we could save local news, that will be harder than creating Politico and Axios combined. And I now think there's more than a reasonable chance that we're going to achieve that. And so that to me is very, very invigorating.