Let’s Kill Sh*t: Axios CEO on simplifying your work-life in the AI era

AI isn't simplifying your life… Yet. It's mass-producing more options, more decisions, and more noise. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei returns to Rapid Response to make the case that the antidote isn't a better productivity app, it's a ruthless, three-part system he calls Confront, Delete, Amplify. VandeHei shares what he's learned from running Axios by these principles, including calling a leadership meeting with the subject heading "Let's Kill S***," and why he shuttered the Axios app despite years of internal resistance. He also reveals his candid read on the midterms and what they mean for business, the data center backlash he thinks could reshape the political landscape, and what's really at stake in Axios's OpenAI content deal. Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:07Speaker 02

  Be just constantly thinking about, 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. Once you do that, it creates an energy of its own and others around you start doing it naturally. And I think, once you get into that mentality, you'll really see a pretty appreciable difference almost overnight.

• 2:39Bob Safian?

  That's Jim Van De Hei, 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

• 3:22Bob Safian?

  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.

• 3:37Bob Safian?

  I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Jim Van De Hei, CEO of Axios and co-author of the new book Simplify. Jim, welcome back to the show.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 3:47Bob Safian?

  So before we get into the book, do you have a simplified view for our audience about the election session that we're moving into?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  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 40% popularity. 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

• 4:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:47Bob Safian?

  Does America have any like unified mission or goal, something that it stands for, as reflected in this year's candidates and platforms?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Not that I can detect. I think both parties understand affordability matters. People don't like to spend more money. 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 ornery. Because they're not necessarily, 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.

• 5:40Bob Safian?

  Anti-data center sentiments gonna hurt Republicans? How did data centers become so politically toxic so fast?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I 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

• 6:31Speaker 02

  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 warned 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, they're pissed. Then they see this hugging phase, 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's saying there's a 10% chance of him to be dead. That's not a recipe for popularity, brother.

• 7:14Bob Safian?

  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 "a 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?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  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, 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

• 8:30Speaker 02

  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're 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 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

• 9:12Speaker 02

  to get information, trying to get data, and they're kind of polluting the open web. And that's new. Okay, well, 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 it could, 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.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  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 gotta hook this up to my data reservoir.

• 10:37Bob Safian?

  Right, this is a lot harder than I than I thought it was gonna be, right?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  It is way harder than I thought, yeah.

• 10:43Bob Safian?

  Yeah, so Simplify opens with this 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?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, I fall into it. And 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

• 11:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:39Bob Safian?

  And I think that's the beauty of it. There's a lot of waste in all that, right? I thought AI was gonna make us more efficient, not not necessarily, not now, not yet.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Over time, it can and it will, but in the short term, I think that when people are, I'm 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. That's a lot, man. We used to just sit around with a book or a newspaper, we had a rotary phone and wondered if anyone would call us once a week.

• 13:14Bob Safian?

  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

• 13:20Speaker 02

  It's too hard.

• 13:21Bob Safian?

  And you can't.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  You can't.

• 13:22Bob Safian?

  Right?

• 13:23Speaker 02

  You can't. I think that is like, that is the point.

• 13:26Bob Safian?

  You love attacking things in threes. Your framework is confront, delete, and amplify.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:32Bob Safian?

  The confront part, that, you know, that's not the action part, that's like the the mental part, right? Like, open yourself up to the fact that you've got the wrong habits.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  You know, just confront, why do I do this? Like, nobody asks that simple question, like, I've got a meeting after this at 1 o'clock. 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? A company, a life just takes on 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 this 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,

• 14:26Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  A couple of months ago, I called a meeting of mine, leadership team, and and the subject line was, let's kill shit. 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 wanted to sit here for an hour or two and I want to kill shit.

• 15:25Bob Safian?

  Although you you killed the Axios app, which I imagine there might have been some resistance to.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  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, they 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. So the fewer things you do, the better you are at doing them.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And the fewer people that you can involve, the faster you're gonna 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 AI up 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, 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.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:20Bob Safian?

  This framework and this perspective, like, this would have applied at any time. It always made sense to simplify. Is simplifying more important now?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I'd say it's way, way, way more important today than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago. We have in the book, I think the average person gets like 120 texts, 150 emails a day. Just think about that, the mental strain. I don't think we think enough about that. There's been tons of studies, tons of brain scans, that show the more decisions that you make, the worse you get at making decisions. It's called cognitive fatigue, mental fatigue. We're all susceptible to it. So unless you eliminate the number of decisions you have to make, you're not gonna be that good making the decisions that you want to make. And so you kind of have to eliminate those. Like Roy in the book talks about things that he's automated at home that do end up being real mental stressors for me, which I've now tried to adopt, which is all the stuff

• 18:15Speaker 02

  that we buy on a regular basis, that we might run out to CVS or Giant to go buy toothpaste, deodorant, things like that. You know how often you need it, you could put it all on auto order, set it up through Amazon and never have to think about it again.

• 18:28Bob Safian?

  Right.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  So you start to do these little things in different areas, they add up, you're making fewer decisions, you have more time. Now I can breathe, and now maybe I can read that book or have that conversation or grab that beer, grab that coffee with the person that I wanted to.

• 18:42Bob Safian?

  On a work front, even if I decide to ignore that text or delete that email without reading it, it's still a decision I'm making.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Right. And like, the best thing that we did with our staff as part of this Simplify stuff over the last couple of years, is just tell them to take a piece of paper, take 10 minutes and write down in order what you think are the three things you need to do to crush your job, 1, 2, 3. And then write 1, 2, 3, the things that you do that you think are stupid that the company does, or that you think someone else could do better than you, or that we shouldn't do at all. That is a magical process, because, one, you identify, is there alignment between the manager and the employee? Are those the three things you need to do? There's often misalignment. But the better part is that part where they write down the list of like, the dumb things that they think we do. They're often right. And so just getting people to think, okay, if I think that that's dumb and useless,

• 19:34Speaker 02

  maybe it actually is dumb and useless. And if you think, man, I'd like to stop doing it, voila, maybe you can stop doing it.

• 19:42Bob Safian?

  Jim calls today a weird time to be alive, but his solutions are anything but weird. Just do less. Of course, that's not as simple as it sounds. So how do we decide which things to amplify? And when does reliance on AI agents make us vulnerable versus give us superpowers? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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• 22:03Bob Safian?

  Before the break, Axios CEO Jim Vandeheij talked about why simplifying and reducing cognitive fatigue is essential in an AI world. Now, he talks about when adopting new tech makes you vulnerable and when it unleashes superpowers, plus what Axios gets out of partnering with OpenAI, the magic of AI agents in healthcare, and how he's redesigning his personal life. Let's jump back in. One of the things that at Axios you want to expand is Axios Local dramatically. Why do you think now is the moment for that and that you can sort of defy all the other failed attempts to try to solve local news?

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll just even do this on the fly. I'll use like, confront, delete, amplify, right? We confronted the fact that local news seems like it's impossible. Oh, why? It costs a lot of money to print a paper, to roll up a paper and to have some person throw it at your door, and it costs a lot of money to have a big building to house a lot of employees. Well, if you could delete those costs, you take the vast majority of the cost out of the equation. And now, if you can use artificial intelligence to do a lot of that backend stuff, a lot of the, how do I distribute content across social media platforms, how do I help with the copy editing process, all those things that don't necessarily

• 23:27Speaker 02

  go to the heart of what is uniquely journalism, then maybe you can actually get to a cost basis that makes this work, which gets you to amplify. Well, now, maybe I could amplify journalism and journalists across more local communities, which is what we're doing. We're using now technology to be able to do all of the things other than journalism, so that we can go into communities that are either news-starved or news-suffering, and do it with a business model that is sustainable, which is what is always our obsession. We might have a romantic attachment to local news, which I do since I started at The Brilliant News when I was a little Jimmy Vandeheij in college, but I wouldn't do that as a business

• 24:09Speaker 02

  unless I thought we could turn it into a business. And we're really seeing great results. We're going to have a big announcement here in the next couple of months about a huge expansion into local. We're going to unveil what we've been able to build using technology so we can show it to other people and hopefully encourage other people to think similarly so they too could expand into local and other areas. But that's very exciting.

• 24:30Bob Safian?

  And it's not that AI is replacing the journalists. I mean, if I'm hearing you right, AI is in some ways allowing you to have more journalists.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  My hope is we end up hiring literally hundreds of journalists, right? But that's by not having to have all that other cost in the system. Because at the end of the day, all we produce is journalism, and you need journalists to do that. And we still have a lot of work to do, but like, I'm a hell of a lot more optimistic today that we can revitalize local news than I've ever been in my adult lifetime, and I think we're going to do it.

• 24:59Bob Safian?

  And for journalists who are, and I'm sort of using journalists as a stand-in for lots of other jobs, who are worried that like, AI is going to replace them, you know, that's not something that particularly you see in, you know, coming in the future?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I don't think it's true for journalists. I don't think it's true for most jobs. Listen, do I think that there's some things that are easily automatable? I do. Like, would I want to be kind of a generic consultant? Probably not, because I think that AI does pretty good generic consulting for people and good business analysis. But I think any individual who has a passion, regardless of what you're doing, if you could figure out how to use the technology for the specific work that you do as a force multiplier, and you could be really good at utilizing this technology, I think you're going to be fine. I think you're going to actually be in hotter demand. And I think that it's just going to be table stakes, if not now, relatively soon, that you understand how to use this fluently within the workplace.

• 26:01Bob Safian?

  You guys have a content licensing deal with OpenAI that gives them access to Axios content to train ChatGPT. And when you were talking about the tremendous drop in Google traffic that you have, I guess I was wondering whether you ever find yourself lying awake at night wondering, hmm, maybe we shouldn't have done that. Like, you know, I remember BuzzFeed steaming ahead based on its Facebook relationship, and that hasn't ended well.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is where I'm like a ruthless businessman, right? Like, at the end of the day, ChatGPT, Google, Anthropic, they all ate the totality of publicly available information on the internet, including everything that Axios ever wrote, right? So then you have two options there. You could do what The New York Times is doing, and you could sue OpenAI and hope that you win in court. I didn't think that we would necessarily win in court, and if we did, we haven't been in existence long enough to probably make the economics of going to court worth the size of the verdict that we would get.

• 27:02Bob Safian?

  You don't have enough content out there.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  We don't have enough content. And so then, then when OpenAI came to us years ago and said, hey, let's talk about a content licensing deal where they're paying for the content, and you are, as the publisher, you're saying, I relinquish my right to sue you for using this content because I'm giving you the rights to it. Then it's just an economic question. Are you giving me enough money to make it worth it? And from our perspective, we ended up with a deal that I thought was fair to OpenAI and fair to us. I think every media company has to make that own determination. But what was different, like the BuzzFeed or the Facebook thing, is we're not dependent on that. Like, that could go away tomorrow, and my business is fine. I'd like to have the revenue, but if we didn't have the revenue, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference in terms of the performance of the company

• 27:48Speaker 02

  overall. Whereas what happened in the digital era is a lot of companies like BuzzFeed basically went to bed with Facebook and these other companies and bet almost their entire business model on it. And I said back then, and I'd say now, to anybody who's running a business, don't ever bet your model on the generosity of a third party that has no vested stake in your business. Because maybe they're friends today, they might not be friends tomorrow. You got to build a direct relationship between you and your customer, and that one has to be profitable on its own for you to have a viable, scalable, durable product. And so, I think the OpenAI deal worked for us. Like, I think the Journal,

• 28:29Speaker 02

  FT, others have done very similar deals with them and others. Other companies like The New York Times have chosen to go to court over it. And God bless them, you know, if they prevail, I think that shows the value of content. And if content rises in value, that's great for all content creators.

• 28:46Bob Safian?

  I was touched by a piece you wrote about your wife's health, building your own AI agent to help and that it's proven more useful than most of the human doctors you interacted with.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's two different stories on this. There's one, I use ChatGPT for my own health, which is I put in every single blood test, every health result, every MRI, my family history. Like, I'm not advocating others do this. I actually would advocate, but you have to make your own decisions about your privacy. But my interactions, when I'm either thinking about a supplement, or I have an ailment, like, it knows everything about me. It's way more useful to me than if I called my doctor, because it's not just drawing on its understanding of me, it's drawing on, like, literally millions of other cases that might be similar to mine. So it's able to think a little bit more creatively and with a more elastic way about things that I'm wrestling with. For my wife, I went a level deeper.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  I basically created a project within Claude. She has a much more complicated, very complicated and often debilitating set of ailments that she's had to deal with. I did the same thing. I put all of her health information. But then I also created a layer where I picked the sources that I wanted it to be, the AI to be drawing from. So Johns Hopkins, or the Mayo Institute, or certain universities. And what I wanted it to do is be thinking about her case, but also looking every week or two at new medical literature, and also searching the internet for other people who are exhibiting similar symptoms, so that I can cross-reference to figure out if there's something that we're missing, something genetic

• 30:27Speaker 02

  we're missing, something that might be happening with other women of a similar age. And I have found it to be astronomically better than any doctor I've ever met with. Until we finally got to Mayo, which I think is the best medical institution in the world, I'd never found a doctor who approximated the interactions and the intelligence that we were getting from what we had built for her. And on both of those, I have a, yeah, I'm lucky, I run a company, so I have a concierge doctor. I would run, like, the results through them and say, this is what I'm seeing. And every time the doctor, that's pretty damn good. In fact, one of the doctors now uses that, I think, to do the vast majority of their work. And so, that's an area where I think artificial intelligence could be awesome. The medical system's hard, and if you particularly don't have a lot of money,

• 31:10Speaker 02

  or if you're in a smaller community, getting any kind of expertise on anything other than, like, a broken bone, or a cold, or flu, or something that's very straightforward, very hard to get really good medical advice. And that's where I think artificial intelligence, these data sets of understanding what people have, and kind of the attributes of those people, that could be a game changer.

• 31:31Bob Safian?

  You talk in the book about deliberately avoiding small talk and social obligations as part of your own simplify routine. I mean, it sounds like a pretty radical life redesign.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  I'm busy, right? I'm running a company, I'm writing books, I'm writing columns, I'm traveling, I do TV, like, I have a lot that I do. So I don't have a ton of time at work. And so, I'm a nice guy, but what I've told my staff, told the leadership team from the beginning is, like, I don't do small talk. So, like, if a meeting starts at nine, it starts at nine. It doesn't mean I don't care about your kids, or about your weekend. I just don't have time. Like, if it starts at nine, it's gonna start at nine, we're gonna be out of there by nine, 12, 9:15. And then, you know, maybe after work, we can get a drink, and you could tell me all the things you're excited about. But at work, we're gonna work. On the personal side, like, the, I think this is a very healthy thing. Like, I did that list, like, what are the three things that I care most about, that I want most out of life? Well, at the top of that list is, I want to be a good husband, I want

• 32:31Speaker 02

  to be a good father, I want to be a good sibling, I want to be a good son. Well, it's one thing to say it, it's another thing to allocate the amount of time it takes to actually do that. So to be able to have the time to spend with all of those people, I have to give up something. And the thing that I decided to give up was, I say no to almost every single social obligation in DC that everyone says, well, you have to go, you're a media guy, or you're, you run a media company, you have to be out and about. And I said, I don't need to. I don't, I'm never gonna go out doing media stuff, and I'm doing as well as I need to do. But I use that time to do the things that I want to do. But had I not actually spent the time to think about it, I might have just done what most media

• 33:13Speaker 02

  executives do. They're out and about, they're going to that party, they're going to this book party, that's what I do, right? I need to do that. Well, no, no, I don't need to do that. And I think there's versions of that for each of us.

• 33:24Bob Safian?

  Absolutely. So, since you like things in threes, for the business leaders listening, can you give us three to-dos right now for them to better position themselves for the future and to simplify?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Number one would be, like, listen, you can't expect anyone at your company to do what you want them to do unless you've already in your own mind decided, what are the three most important things we need to do? What are the fewest number of words I can use to express the three things that we need to do? And how can I say that over and over? So everybody knows exactly what we need to do. And then I would cascade it down. I would at least make sure your leadership team understands these are the three most important things. And I would ask them to write your three most important things to achieve these things, to make sure that you have absolute total alignment. So I think those, those two things. And the third would be just constantly thinking about, what are the fewest number

• 34:20Speaker 02

  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. Once you do that, you, it creates an energy of its own, and others around you start doing it naturally. So, like, I always talk about, like, Axios speed, like, we just move quicker, I think, than other media companies, probably 10 times quicker on some things. But that's because we adopted this mentality. We're constantly thinking about, how can we do this quicker? How can we do it with fewer people? Do we need to be doing it at all? And I think, once you get into that mentality, you'll really see a pretty appreciable difference almost overnight.

• 35:05Bob Safian?

  Jim, as always, great to talk with you. We'll try to keep it simple.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Appreciate you.

• 35:12Bob Safian?

  Jim is so good at keeping things clear. I try to be disciplined, but he's spot on that we can find ourselves drifting if we don't have a system to stay on track. I keep coming back to his stat that 25% of our work time is wasted. That's just bracing, right? And it's not something that AI will solve for us. In fact, it could make it worse. We need to devote our human energy to prioritizing what matters most to us. So be an AI lab rat, as Jim describes himself. Even build your own bespoke healthcare agent, but only if that matches your priorities and goals. Our most precious resource remains our time,

• 35:54Bob Safian?

  and we've got to be absolutely intentional in how we spend it. Thanks for spending your time with Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

• 36:11Speaker 00

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• 36:51Bob Safian?

  Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show, because every Friday, we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator, to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts, and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI, and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 37:36Speaker 06

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 37:41Speaker 07

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 38:11Bob Safian?

  Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian, our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our senior producer is Alex Morris, and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Visit rapidresponseshow.com.