Fighting media’s reality distortion

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JIM VANDEHEI: Stop getting news on social media. Stop sharing things that you’ve never read. Stop reading something if a friend sent it to you and you don’t know what the source of it is. Maybe just stop consuming altogether and go hang out with your kids, right? There’s a lot of healthy things that you can do. And then like try to find some sources of news and information that you think are trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth and then you’re gonna have a pretty healthy media diet.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s the co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei. I wanted to talk to Jim today because he recently co-authored an essay that stopped me in my tracks. The piece made a strong case for why the US may not be as divided as we think. I was also eager to ask Jim about Axios’s seemingly counterintuitive AI play, and why media businesses like Buzzfeed, NPR and Google find themselves in hot water. True to his style of so-called Smart Brevity, Jim is knowledgeable, accessible, and concise. This is Rapid Response. Let’s dive in. 

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Jim VandeHei, the CEO and co-founder of Axios. Jim, thanks for joining us.

VANDEHEI: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: So I am a regular daily consumer of Axios content. 

VANDEHEI: Love it. I appreciate that.

Copy LinkIs America hopelessly divided?

SAFIAN: So part of the reason I want to talk with you now is that recently you co-authored with Mike Allen an essay called America’s Reality Distortion Machine, and it really questioned the media drumbeat that America is hopelessly divided, and it certainly caught my attention. What prompted you to write that now?

VANDEHEI: Well, you have this perception if you’re on social media or you’re watching cable TV that everyone has lost their marbles, that everyone is nuts, that they hate each other, that they’re having food fights, that they’re obsessed with politics, that they’re in this awful tribal warfare.

And the truth is, it’s not real. That 70 to 80 percent of people that you come across are very normal people who are just trying to live their lives, navigate the complexities of your day to day challenges, are basically good people who would help you out if there’s something wrong or shovel your driveway if you’re caught in a snowstorm.

And it got us thinking a lot about just the new media ecosystem. And what has changed over the last 15 years in particular, really last five, it’s that because of social media, because of how the algorithms work, and because of the type of people that get the most followers that therefore kind of rise to the top of algorithms, it’s usually the most provocative people, and it tends to be the most provocative people ideologically.

And so it gives off this perception that everybody thinks that way, that every Republican believes that Trump is the second coming of Christ or that Joe Biden, that every Democrat thinks that he’s like a young, vibrant little whippersnapper. When in fact, like, no, most people have pretty nuanced views and you see it even in a lot of polling, we played off this AP poll where they asked both parties about the fundamental rights of being an American: freedom of speech, freedom of religion…

And 90 percent of Republicans, 90 percent of Democrats all basically agree in the same tenets that kind of make this country what it is. And so we wrote the piece just to remind people that all this hang dog behavior and kind of dogging on America, it’s a little bit disconnected from the reality that you’re living in.

And I just noticed it even with myself some days now wondering, ‘is that real? Are people really that worked up? How many people are storming across the border? Are they really trying to vote illegally? Well, could they vote illegally? Sounds hard. If I came here illegally, would I vote illegally knowing it’s a felony?’

Like it’s just stuff that it, it’s kind of like, I always go back to my Wisconsin roots. Like if it sounds kind of like BS, it probably is.

SAFIAN: I mean, the impression of what you’re saying is like the polarization that we’re hearing about so much by journalists, by the media, that it’s kind of overstated. How much is the business model of media to blame for the obsession with polarization?

VANDEHEI: I mean, certainly plays into it, no doubt, right? Because if you look at Axios, look at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the top 20 stories based on traffic on any given day are about politics. So everybody’s covering politics. And when you cover politics, you tend to cover the conflict of politics, which feels like politics is just all conflict all the time.

And it is if you’re a professional politician or if you’re part of the political class, but for most people, it’s just more complicated. I had just gotten back from doing about five or six speeches in Wichita and Fargo and a couple other places, mainly very like meat-eating Trump supporters in the room. And obviously they come in, they’re like “this guy is from the media from DC,” I must be a communist. And I just noticed that almost instantly, once they can kind of tell you’re a normal human being, you can have a very rational conversation with them. They understand the flaws of Donald Trump.

One of the problems is you have a two party system. So you only have two choices. So you become tribal because it’s either your team or their team. When in fact, I think most people wish there were a couple more choices that might better match their actual politics. But when all they really have is Biden or Trump, it’s going to be Biden or Trump. 

SAFIAN: I mean, I’ll say one of the reasons it resonated so much for me. It’s like, I want to think that America is not on the brink of civil war, and there you guys sort of laid out that like, well, we’re not — looking at the numbers and sort of the reality of it, that it’s maybe not quite as bad as we feel like it is.

VANDEHEI: You have to put some of this in perspective. I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the protests that you’re seeing at university campuses about the conflict in the Middle East. And you see these Pro-Palestinian protesters, and you’re like, “Oh my God, these campuses look like they’re on fire and everybody’s protesting.”

And yet, no. It’s like, kind of the same number of people who are worked up about a topic that you probably would find at any point in history about different topics on different campuses. And even with this coverage of the people who are leading these colleges, you’d think that every professor is some left wing lunatic who’s trying to indoctrinate their students with some crazy left wing propaganda. When in fact, like, no, most teachers are going into the classroom and they’re teaching biology and they’re teaching journalism. They don’t have time or interest in trying to program people. 

And that doesn’t mean there’s not a liberal bias on campuses. There obviously is. but that doesn’t mean therefore that every single person is trying to put a liberal chip into your kid’s head.

Copy LinkWhy Axios isn’t deploying AI right now

SAFIAN: So another area that there’s been a lot of hype, certainly a lot of attention to lately has been AI. And Axios was recently profiled in the New York Times about how AI is impacting your plans. And I actually thought it was a rather clever effort on your part because your plans aren’t about deploying AI, instead they’re kind of at the opposite? 

VANDEHEI: Yeah, I mean, right now, there just isn’t that much AI to deploy. It’s in the early stages, to be honest, it’s a little jankier than people would have thought at this point, and so it can’t even copy at it yet, much less be a reporter. And so what we’ve thought more of is like, let’s just assume that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon, they’re all right. That this is going to be this crazy technology that’s as smart, if not smarter than humans, and could displace a lot of the work that we do.

If that’s all true. For me, as someone running a media company, what does that mean? How would people be getting news and information? And the conclusions we came to is even if that’s the case, people are still going to need human expertise, human sourcing. In an artificial and virtual world, people are going to want in person connectivity around topics that they have a shared passion around. So we’re building a membership program around our most famous journalist. 

And so it was very much us just trying to adapt to where we think the world’s going. The New York Times did do a piece on it, and I was very happy with it. 

SAFIAN: In the article, you’re quoted as saying that ‘we’re in the middle of a very fundamental shift in how people relate to news and information.’ What is the shift that you see happening?

VANDEHEI: Based on the known-knowns of today, what do I think that relationship will look like two or three years from now? My guess is we’re all going to have a personal assistant, and that this personal assistant is going to know about the topics you care about, and it’s going to know about when you care about them, and it’s going to know about how you want that information ingested.

Maybe you want it sung to you by Taylor Swift. Maybe you want it delivered in bullet points. maybe you want it longer form, more lyrical in a more poetic style. And it’s going to be able to build that news and information for you. And probably even anticipate a little bit about stuff that’s out there that you might be interested in.

And so, my guess is that’s what the world’s going to look like. And I just want to make sure that Axios as a media company, that we’re well-ahead of that change in consumer behavior so that we can continue to have a durable company that can outlive us.

SAFIAN: And what’s going to make you stand out in that kind of engagement is the special things that your people will bring to it, as opposed to the special things that your technology will bring to it.

VANDEHEI: Yeah, in all likelihood. If again, just like always assume that the big companies are right when they throw trillions of dollars at a technology, they’re probably gonna will it into existence, will carry that out.

So then what could sit on top of that is human intelligence. Like, I have access to people in power that other people don’t. If I can extract information and I can tell it to you in a way that is informative and timely and illuminating, I’m going to figure out a way to make money off of that.

Is that an ad or is the personal assistant company paying me to ingest proprietary intelligence that we’re picking up. I don’t know, but there will be a business model around it. And I just want to make sure that we’re not asleep at the wheel. 

SAFIAN: And you’re not particularly wary about your content being scraped to train AI?

VANDEHEI: I’m a pretty practical guy, like, I try to control the things I can control. It’s been scraped, and they’ll keep scraping it. And would I like for us to get paid for it? Do I feel like if you’re making a product that’s derivative of our IP that was expensive to be able to create, should we be compensated for it? I do. Are we big enough to be the one that takes Open AI to the Supreme Court to figure out what fair use laws are going to apply to content? The New York Times is doing that for us. So we’ll see how that stuff plays out. Hopefully we’ll get paid by some of these models for our content. 

But even then, like what I tell our staff is “I don’t want to be the welfare state of Google.” That my entire company is just sitting here praying that we get some kind of licensing fee thanks to the benevolence of four tech giants. That seems like a sucker’s play. I’d much rather let’s build something that can live on its own. And if we happen to get money from these big platforms, that’s additive. It’s kind of the cherry on the sundae. Like, okay, we’ll take it. Would I turn down money? We’re not stupid, but we also don’t want to be a welfare state. 

SAFIAN: Something about Jim’s approach to AI is really refreshing. He doesn’t sound particularly excited or hyped-up by AI. But he’s pragmatic and focused on its potential to open up opportunities for his business. In a time where you’re expected to either be anti-AI or an AI evangelist, I think many leaders could benefit from this clear-headed and receptive approach. 

After the break, VandeHei explores why it’s more important for a news organization to be trusted than politically neutral. And how his new book aims to be the “bible” for anyone looking to get ahead in their professional life. So stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, co-founder and CEO of Axios Jim VandeHei explained why the U.S. may not be as polarized as the media wants us to believe. Now, VandeHei dissects why certain other high-profile media companies are struggling, and why the days of business leaders speaking out on political issues may be behind us. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkWas BuzzFeed too revenue-reliant on other companies?

I wanted to ask you about Buzzfeed. I’ve had Jonah Peretti on the show a couple of times, the CEO and founder of Buzzfeed. Super sharp guy. Been ahead of the curve in media on a lot of things. Last year, he talked to me extensively about how he planned to use AI in content production, but they seem to be just floundering. Do you have a sense about why that is? 

VANDEHEI: Yeah, I wasn’t at the company, so I don’t know the thinking behind some of the decisions they made. But they were a business that was built in the Internet era around social media, and they relied solely on the benevolence of other people paying them for content. And when Daddy closed the wallet, Jonah’s out of money. And that’s a problem.

Like it was too reliant on other companies to do the work for them and I think ever since then they’ve struggled to figure out what is BuzzFeed, they’ve basically shut down BuzzFeed news so I don’t really think of it as a news company anymore. I think of it as a content company. And you know their stock is at 40 cents or whatever. So they’re sucking some wind, but I don’t know what his plans are to try to revive it.

Running media companies, I’m sure Jonah’s said it on here, is hard. It is so fun. It is really exhilarating, but it is exhausting. It is difficult. The margin of error is really, really small. This isn’t a SaaS company. This isn’t a whiz bang technology company. It is a human labor company, an expensive thing to run, right? And hard to get an audience, hard to get trust, hard to keep an audience, hard to keep trust. So there’s a lot of pieces that have to break your way to work.

SAFIAN: So I’m curious what you think about the fracas at NPR. Assertions that the news coverage hasn’t been even handed or is otherwise distorted. Has that sparked any conversations inside Axios about how you’re doing things? 

VANDEHEI: It has not. I mean, I obviously read about it and followed it. I don’t know who was out there thinking that NPR wasn’t liberal. Come on, give me a break. Like we all know, it leans left and they have a liberal sensibility to them. They do a lot of good work in addition to that. 

Listen, they’re publicly funded. So Republicans have every right to raise concerns with it and people have every right to hold them accountable for it. But no, I think people who work at Axios kind of know what we’re doing and we don’t pay a lot of attention to things that are getting other people spooled-up. We don’t have an opinion page. We try not to have an ideology. We try to be very clinical in our coverage. And as long as we do that, we’re controlling our destiny. I try not to get too worked up about what others do.

Copy LinkIs the goal for Axios to be neutral?

SAFIAN: And the goal for you, is that to be neutral? Is that the goal?

VANDEHEI: No, it’s to be trusted. Right. It’s to be smart and trusted. Just being neutral or trying to offer the perspectives of both sides can lead to ludicrous coverage. Like we’re trying, I don’t want to insult your intelligence and I don’t want to waste your time. So what I want to do is have really smart people who have authentic subject matter expertise telling you something smart, telling you something urgent, telling you something important, and doing it as efficiently as possible.

And if we do that, you’ll reward us with more time and attention. It’s just the way that it’s worked for us. And so, yes, I want our reporters to check their ideology at the door. 

We have 550 employees. We tell every person, regardless of your position here, if you take a job here, our ask of you is to not practice politics in a public forum, meaning I don’t want you popping off on social media. We don’t want you giving money to political candidates. We don’t want you endorsing political candidates. And the reason that we do it is I just want people who are persuadable to real truth, to take us seriously and to give us a chance. And if we do anything to jeopardize that bond, like if you start to suspect that Jim has an agenda or that Axios is not a worthy partner source of information and I lose you, then we all suffer. 

Copy LinkTips to having a better media diet

SAFIAN: Well, I liked in your note yesterday about recommending a kind of media diet. You’re sort of saying if you’re left leaning, ‘here’s some sources on the right, you might want to pay attention to. And if you’re right leaning, here’s some sources on the left.’ Which by the way, is what I try to do to keep myself, not just informed, but I hold myself accountable to my own impulses. 

VANDEHEI: For sure, right? Like, we all have our biases and our beliefs. But I find it, I don’t know why people find the comfort food dimension to people sharing their view or just amplifying their view. I find it much more interesting to find someone who has a different view of the media than I do. And I probably learn something from that intellectual exercise.

Now again, we’re different because we are actually paid to spend a lot of time marinating in content. And most people don’t. And so that’s why I think most people in the column you’re talking about, it basically outlined a healthy media diet. But the bottom of the article was probably more important than the top, which are the things you should stop doing.

Stop getting news on social media. Stop sharing things that you’ve never read. Stop reading something if a friend sent it to you and you don’t know what the source of it is. Maybe just stop consuming altogether and go hang out with your kids, right? There’s a lot of healthy things that you can do. And then like try to find some sources of news and information that you think are trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth and then you’re gonna have a pretty healthy media diet.

SAFIAN: As we’re talking, I’m remembering my early time at Time Magazine. I just started there and it was the heat of the 2004 presidential election. And I remember they would do this, ‘Oh, well, last week, we did a cover with the Democratic candidate. So this week, we need to do a cover with the Republican candidate.’ It was like, it was trying to be even handed but wasn’t necessarily focusing on what’s most important for voters to know this week.  

VANDEHEI: Yeah, at the end of the day, it’s about the customer. What do they need? Not what do we want? And listen, you don’t want to just cover one side and not the other. You want to give people a full buffet of what’s happening in politics. But that doesn’t mean that for every Republican article, there’s a Democratic article. Or that everything that Donald Trump says if it’s nonsense, and maybe he’s just pumping out more nonsense today than Joe Biden is.

And it’s fine to say that. And by the way, it’s also fine not to cover the nonsense, right? If someone says the same outrageous thing every single day, are we really helping by amplifying that it was said again and again and again? Maybe just ignore it and wait until there’s something really substantial that someone is saying. And then give people some context of why that is important, why it matters.

Copy LinkWhy CEOs shouldn’t take a position on every topic

SAFIAN: A different sort of media company to ask you about — Google. Some staff demonstrated about contracts with Israel. They end up getting fired for disrupting the work environment. It’s a challenging environment for CEOs about how they talk about Israel and Palestine. Are leaders and all of us wise to be wary about taking a position in an environment like this? 

VANDEHEI: I think it depends on who is the leader and what is the company. At the end of the day, let’s level-set. You’re a company. Your job is to build a product. Like if you’re Nike, you’re selling me a shoe. I don’t care what you think about foreign affairs or your position on immigration, like either you got a really good shoe or you got a crappy shoe and that’s going to decide whether or not I buy it.

So then you as the CEO of that company have to decide are there topics that really go to the core of who we are and who our customer is? Do we want to explain ourselves and we want to take a position? If that flows naturally from your product and your customer base, sure, go do it.

But this idea that all these CEOs got trapped into because your employees are angry, they want you to take a position on everything. Like, why would you take a position on everything? No one used to think that companies, CEOs should take positions on everything. You’re there to do a job. And I think it is fine for CEOs or managers to say, “That’s outside of work. We got a job to do, and I want to make sure this is a great place for you to work. I want to make sure it’s a safe place for you to work. I want to make sure that there isn’t hostility but ultimately you’re here to do a job.”

So then what happens at Google is you actually had a very small number of people. Remember, it’s a massive company. It’s a nation state. And you had a small number of people who were protesting while working in a way that was really making it harder for them to do work, and they said to hell with you. You can’t work here. You’re violating your job responsibilities. And so, listen, you have every right to protest and they have every right to fire you. They do. It’s just that some people don’t love that answer, but they do. 

We’re a media company, so we stay out of every political debate, but like people have really passionate views and I think it’s fine internally for people to have conversations, to be able to hear it, to make sure that people don’t feel like they’re being shunned in the workplace because they have a view on this issue or that issue.

But the more you can take politics out of business, and the more you can just do your job and create an environment for people to do their best work. I think the better off you are.

Copy LinkThe lessons behind VandeHei’s new book, Just the Good Stuff

SAFIAN: You’ve got a new book coming out, Just the Good Stuff. So in the spirit of Smart Brevity, what’s the book about? What are its key lessons?

VANDEHEI: So the book is very much written for leaders, managers, even college grads, people who are trying to think about how to navigate the tough stuff of work in life. Basically it’s by 60 some lessons inside of the book, but they’re all written in smart brevity, all with action filled, like ‘here’s five things you can do if you’re dealing with a bad boss’ type advice. And so there’s just a lot of very practical advice written in kind of my no-BS style. I just always say what’s on my mind. I’m respectful about it, but it’s written the way that I talk.

SAFIAN: So the lessons. Can you give us one or two of these no bullshit lessons?

VANDEHEI: I think the biggest one is that people spend way too much time whining about their circumstance or what happened to them in the past and not understanding that we control so much more than we give ourselves credit for. Every day when you get up, you choose what you’re going to eat, whether you’re going to work out, whether you’re going to be kind to somebody, whether you’re going to quit because your boss is a jerk who’s been making you feel like crap for the last five months or five years. You control the type of people you’re gonna be around, you control whether you’re gonna volunteer after work. Like all of those things you can control. And if you stop whining and worrying about the things that are outside of your control and put all of the emphasis on what I kind of call my happiness matrix —  my different buckets that I know need to be full for me to be effective.

You’re going to be a much more productive employee. You’re going to be a much better leader. You’re going to be a much happier person, which is all that really matters at the end of the day.

SAFIAN: It’s interesting because in your job and in the coverage that Axios does, you get steeped in a lot of the information about things that are really troubling — whether it’s polarization or uncertainties in Ukraine, the Middle East and China and climate change and so on. And yet, you seem like you’re hopeful? 

VANDEHEI: I couldn’t be more hopeful. Listen, I say that, I opened the book talking all true as if you met me at the age of 20, I’m smoking Camel cigarettes. I’m drinking every day. I have a 1.491 grade point average. I’m delivering pizzas. I’m barely getting out of college. There’s nothing, not one single thing where you’d have looked at him and gone, “Oh my God, that guy’s going to go start a couple of companies. He’s going to interview presidents. He’s going to be on this podcast. He’s going to write books.” Nothing. 

So if a schmuck like me could go on to interview presidents, could start a couple of companies, be able to make more money than I thought possible doing something that I love. How the hell could I not be optimistic? 

The book will be a success if a bunch of people that like me, small town, didn’t grow up in privilege or didn’t have any special treatment, if they can read the book and realize ‘man, if Jim could do it like why can’t I go do something bigger than I think I can do?’ And I think the book is almost a bible for that. 

I think you’ll learn a lot about modern leadership in the book but I really think if you’re someone like me, you’re trying to figure out how do I crush work and how do I get ahead and how do I make really good life decisions? I think that, I hope it will be the sweet spot. 

SAFIAN: Well Jim, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us.

VANDEHEI: Thank you. Appreciate it.

SAFIAN: Jim’s book, called Just The Good Stuff, is a reminder to lean into what’s possible. That doesn’t mean leaning into every conspiracy theory or embracing everything you doom-scroll. It means focusing on what you can control. And trying to apply the tools we have at hand toward the future we want. I’m not sure I agree that business leaders can turn away from divisive topics. We all share responsibility for tough realities. I get that it’s complicated and risky. But maybe that’s just the burden of modern leadership? Most of all: Let’s keep an open mind about each other. As we reach the six month mark before this year’s election, the pursuit of openness and empathy are only going to be threatened more and more. So keep going. Keep trying. 

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.