Simplifying your work-life in the AI era

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

JIM VANDEHEI: Be 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. I think once you get into that mentality, you’ll really see a pretty appreciable difference almost overnight.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Jim VandeHei, CEO of influential news outlet Axios, and co-author of the new book Simplify. Jim is one of the most insightful business leaders I know, as well as a deeply sourced journalist. In today’s episode, we talk first about the upcoming midterm elections and the implications for businesses, and then we quickly turn to how AI-driven change, what he calls post-processable velocity, is altering planning, expectations, and habits. Jim’s solution to all that disruption is to lean into simplicity through a three-part plan he calls confront, delete, amplify. We talk about cognitive fatigue and how he’s redesigning his personal life, plus the risks of getting into business with OpenAI and more. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I’m here with Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios and co-author of the new book Simplify. Jim, welcome back to the show.

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

Copy LinkWhat the election signals for business leaders

SAFIAN: Before we get into the book, do you have a simplified view for our audience about the election season that we’re moving into?

VANDEHEI: I think you’d probably rather be a Democrat than a Republican. The fundamentals really favor the party out of power in general. The fact that President Trump is probably right around 40 percent 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 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 who’s super energized, Democrats seem way more energized. And when you have an energized base in a tough economy or a high-cost economy, that’s when you have the potential for a landslide.

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

VANDEHEI: 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 the tariffs no doubt have really put pressure on pricing. In 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 wages are decent. 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.

Copy LinkWhy data centers became an political flashpoint

SAFIAN: Anti-data center sentiment is going to hurt Republicans. How did data centers become so politically toxic so fast?

VANDEHEI: I’ve very rarely, in politics, been doing this 30-some years, seen an issue become so prominent and so toxic so quickly. Even if you went back last year, most politicians, most legislation, was all kind of pro-data centers. People saw these as job-creation machines, and now people hate them. The truth is, 99 percent of people don’t live anywhere near a data center. I think it’s a proxy for AI. I think people are just worried. “These guys out in Silicon Valley are creepy. I worry about my job. I worry about my kids’ mental health.” And I think data centers are paying the price for that.

Now, that might change. The companies are putting a lot of money in to try to explain that they are good economically in local communities. Maybe they’ll start to move the needle. I don’t think they’ll move the needle that much. This week we had this guy come out from Anthropic and warn that there’s a 10 percent chance that their technology destroys humanity, which, I don’t know, last time I checked, is probably not a great sales pitch for the product that you’re building. I think one of the reasons it took off is because people are pissed. Then they see this Hugging Face AI going rogue and hacking into companies, and maybe they don’t understand it, but they’re like, “OK, 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 percent chance I’m going to be dead. That’s not a recipe for popularity, brother.

Copy LinkKeeping up with the speed of AI

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, you realized, was 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.

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: But before we get into what can we do about it, I’m just curious how this acceleration of change feels to you.

VANDEHEI: I’m of two minds. Part of me, to be honest, finds it exhilarating. I like change. I like trying to think about how I use this technology to enhance our business, enhance our relationship with news consumers. I like that part of it. But what I wrote is true, and I think it’s true of most CEOs. Things are just moving so fast. What technology do I use? What is the better AI? What can it do today that it couldn’t do yesterday? Employees are a little bit nervous. Employees are changing their skill set because they’re using this new technology. And we really have entered this period where it’s just hard to process.

I’ve always laughed at one-, two-, or three-year planning. I’m like, “How the hell do you do that?” But now I kind of laugh at six-month planning. It’s hard for me to think out more than six or seven weeks about, OK, what do I feel highly confident about in the business? Things are changing that quickly. I’ll give you a good example. In the media, six months ago, 30 to 40 percent of our traffic was coming through Google Search, and every media company has seen that bottom out. It’s now down to 5 percent or 10 percent of our traffic. Well, that’s a lot of people. You’re talking about millions of people who were customers or were coming to and tasting our content who no longer are, and that happened almost overnight.

The last couple of months, there’s been a huge surge in the number of bots that are attacking websites. There are these machines that are kind of hitting your site, trying to get information, trying to get data, and they’re polluting the open web, and that’s new. OK, well, let’s wrestle with that. I think that’s why there is a Twilight Zone feeling right now, where people are hearing about this technology that could end humanity, and that 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. What’s all the fuss about?”

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. The world is changing. I’m on the cutting edge. Everything’s about to explode.” But then you go to Toledo or you go to Topeka or you go to Oshkosh, and most people are like, “I don’t know. I’m just running my company, man. I guess there’s this new AI, and my employees are talking about it. I’m sure we’ll get to that one day soon.” And I think that’s somewhat natural because it’s a new technology.

I think introducing any kind of technology into an existing company is hard, because even if it’s the coolest technology ever, you have to hook it up to all your clunky systems that you built over the last decade, and that’s necessarily messy. I call it the messy middle, which is where I think most companies are right now. They’re starting to use AI. They’re prototyping. They’re seeing the promise, and then they’re realizing, “Oh, crap, I’ve got to hook this up to my data reservoir.”

SAFIAN: Right. This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, right?

VANDEHEI: This is way harder than I thought, yeah.

Copy LinkWhy AI creates more noise before gains

SAFIAN: Yeah. So Simplify opens with this bracing line that AI isn’t simplifying your life. It’s mass-producing more options, more decisions, more noise. I know I find myself sometimes falling into a rabbit hole as I explore new things with AI tools.

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: You’ve described yourself as an AI lab rat. Do you ever fall into that noise yourself?

VANDEHEI: 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 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. It just means, “Oh, my God, now I have more decisions to make?”

And that’s the whole point of the book. How can we help you, outside of work and at work, delete as many things that you’re doing out of habit, out of inertia, just because that’s the way we’ve always done it, so that you can amplify the things you actually want to do? It might sound simple. 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 percent of our week doing things we never should have done or that add no value to our company. We do it out of habit. That’s the way we’ve always done it. We do it out of inertia. Well, think of 25 percent, 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.

SAFIAN: Yes, there’s a lot of waste in all that, right?

VANDEHEI: A lot of it.

SAFIAN: I thought AI was going to make us more efficient. Not necessarily. Not now, not yet.

VANDEHEI: I think over time it can, and it will. But in the short term, when people say, “Oh, I’m anxious, I’m confused,” I’m like, “You should be anxious, and you should be confused. This is a weird time to be alive.” Just think about it. Even in the course of anyone listening to this podcast, you probably already got five texts, a couple of emails, a Tinder alert. That’s a lot, man. We used to just sit around with a book or a newspaper, and we had a rotary phone and wondered if anyone would call us once a week. That’s a lot.

SAFIAN: Well, and you would return all those calls.

VANDEHEI: And you’d return them.

SAFIAN: And so you feel like you have to respond to all this stuff that’s coming in, and you can’t.

VANDEHEI: It’s too hard. You can’t. I think that is the point.

Copy LinkHow “confront, delete, amplify” cuts waste

SAFIAN: You love attacking things in threes. Your framework is “confront, delete, and amplify.”

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: The confront part, that’s not the action part. That’s the mental part, right?

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Open yourself up to the fact that you’ve got the wrong habits.

VANDEHEI: Just confront it: Why do I do this? Nobody asks that simple question. I’ve got a meeting after this at 1. Almost no one asks, “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, “Wait a second, do we need to do that meeting? Is this something I could skip?” you’ll just keep doing things you don’t necessarily need to do. Confronting is just asking that question, whether it’s at home or at work: “Do I need to do this? Why am I doing it?” That simple exercise allows you to spend one minute and then decide, “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 say no, then you can amplify, which is the fun stuff. Do the stuff that you like doing. Do the stuff you’re good at. Do the stuff at work that’s going to get you a promotion or more money or more attention or whatever the hell it is that you want out of work. But you have to have a system. It’s funny, because we started this about two and a half years ago at Axios. This whole simplify system was just how we operated the company. And the reason we wrote it is we saw the magical change it had for our company, where suddenly people were more focused, they were more productive, but most important, they were happier. A couple months ago, I called a meeting of my leadership team, and the subject line was, “Let’s kill shit.” The whole purpose was, I wanted to sit around the table and hear all the things you think we do that are dumb: meetings, process, products. I wanted to sit there for an hour or two, and I wanted to kill shit.

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

VANDEHEI: We debated that for years. But the truth was, we have tens of millions of people who come to Axios. Thirty thousand people were using it on a regular basis.

Right? But to maintain an app, to make changes through the App Store, that took a lot of people. It took a ton of work, and it wasn’t the best place to spend our time, because most people don’t actually want to go to an app. They either want their news pushed to them through social media or a newsletter, or they want to go to a website. So killing it was great. Now we just freed up all that time, all that money, all that mental space, so the things that we actually do that are unique all got better. And that’s what happens. The fewer things you do, the better you are at doing them, and the fewer people you involve, the faster you’re going to get it done. 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 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 and 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? You have to have that mentality because everything, like skipping a meeting or maybe saying no to a social obligation, seems trivial in isolation. But you add them up, and you literally get years of your life back, years. So every hour of the time that you control, if you’re doing something you don’t need to be doing, don’t want to do, you’re just frittering away what is a very 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? The whole idea is, I want to free people to have more time to do the stuff that brings them joy, brings them reward.

SAFIAN: This framework and this perspective would have applied at any time. It always made sense to simplify.

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Is simplifying more important now?

VANDEHEI: 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 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 going to be that good at making the decisions that you want to make. And so you kind of have to eliminate those. 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, like all the stuff that we buy on a regular basis that we might run out to CVS or Giant to 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.

SAFIAN: Right.

VANDEHEI: 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 or grab that coffee with the person that I wanted to.

SAFIAN: On a work front, even if I decide to ignore that text or delete that email without reading it—

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: It’s still a decision I’m making.

VANDEHEI: Right. And the best thing that we did with our staff as part of this simplify stuff over the last couple 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: one, two, three. And then write, one, two, three, 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 whether there is 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 where they write down the list of the dumb things that they think we do. They’re often right. So just getting people to think, “OK, if I think that’s dumb and useless, maybe it actually is dumb and useless.” And if you think, “Man, I’d like to stop doing it,” voilà, maybe you can stop doing it.

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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Before the break, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei 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 health care, and how he’s redesigning his personal life. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHow AI could revive local news

One of the things at Axios that you want to expand dramatically is Axios Local.

VANDEHEI: Yep.

SAFIAN: Why do you think now is the moment for that, and that you can sort of defy all the other failed attempts to solve local news?

VANDEHEI: I’ll even do this on the fly. I’ll use confront, delete, amplify, right? We confronted the fact that local news seems impossible. 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 back-end 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 go to the heart of what is uniquely journalism, then maybe you could 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 technology now 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 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 VandeHei in college. But I wouldn’t do that as a business 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 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. That’s very exciting.

SAFIAN: And it’s not that AI is replacing the journalists. If I’m hearing you right, AI is, in some ways, allowing you to have more journalists.

VANDEHEI: 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 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.

SAFIAN: And for journalists who are worried that AI is going to replace them — and I’m using journalists as a stand-in for lots of other jobs — that’s not something you particularly see coming in the future.

VANDEHEI: 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 are some things that are easily automatable? I do. Would I want to be kind of a generic consultant? Probably not, because I think 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 can figure out how to use the technology for the specific work that you do as a force multiplier, and you can be really good at utilizing this technology, I think you’re going to be fine. I think you’re actually going to be in higher demand. And I think it’s going to be table stakes, if not now, relatively soon, that you understand how to use this fluently within the workplace.

Copy LinkWhy Axios agreed to a licensing deal with OpenAI

SAFIAN: You guys have a content licensing deal with OpenAI that gives them access to Axios content to train ChatGPT.

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: 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.” I remember BuzzFeed steaming ahead based on its Facebook relationship, and that hasn’t ended well.

VANDEHEI: Yeah, this is where I’m like a ruthless businessman, right? 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 make the economics of going to court worth the size of the verdict that we would get.

SAFIAN: You don’t have enough content out there.

VANDEHEI: We don’t have enough content. And so then…

SAFIAN: Yeah.

VANDEHEI: 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,” you really, as the publisher, are 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?

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 its own determination. But what was different from the BuzzFeed or Facebook situation is we’re not dependent on that. That could go away tomorrow, and my business is fine. I’d like to have the revenue, but if we didn’t have it, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference in terms of the performance of the company overall. 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. 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, but they might not be friends tomorrow. You’ve got to build a direct relationship between you and your customer, and that has to be profitable on its own for you to have a viable, scalable, durable product. I think the OpenAI deal worked for us. I think the Journal, FT, and 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. If they prevail, I think it shows the value of content. And if content rises in value, that’s great for all content creators.

Copy LinkHow AI agents can transform healthcare

SAFIAN: I was touched by a piece you wrote about your wife’s health, building your own AI agent —

VANDEHEI: Yeah.

SAFIAN: To help, and that it’s proven more useful than most of the human doctors you interacted with.

VANDEHEI: Yeah. There are two different stories on this. One is that I use ChatGPT for my own health. I put in every single blood test, every health result, every MRI, my family history. I’m not advocating others do this. Actually, I would advocate it, but you have to make your own decisions about your privacy. When I’m thinking about a supplement or I have an ailment, 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 literally millions of other cases that might be similar to mine. So it’s able to think a little more creatively and in a more elastic way about things that I’m wrestling with.

For my wife, I went a level deeper. I basically created a project within Claude. She has a much more complicated, often debilitating set of ailments that she’s had to deal with. I did the same thing. I put in all of her health information, but then I also created a layer where I picked the sources that I wanted the AI to be drawing from, so Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, or certain universities. What I wanted it to do was think about her case, but also look every week or two at new medical literature and search the internet for other people who are exhibiting similar symptoms so that I can cross-reference and figure out if there’s something we’re missing, something genetic we’re missing, something that might be happening with other women of a similar age. 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.

On both of those, I’m lucky I run a company, so I have a concierge doctor. I would run the results through them and say, “This is what I’m seeing.” Every time, the doctor would say, “That’s pretty damn good.” In fact, one of the doctors now uses that, I think, to do the vast majority of their work. That’s an area where I think artificial intelligence could be awesome. The medical system’s hard, and particularly if you don’t have a lot of money or if you’re in a smaller community, getting any kind of expertise on anything other than a broken bone, a cold, or the flu — something very straightforward — is very hard. That’s where I think artificial intelligence, these data sets of understanding what people have and the attributes of those people, could be a game changer.

Copy LinkSimplifying your personal life

SAFIAN: You talk in the book about deliberately avoiding small talk and social obligations as part of your own simplify routine. It sounds like a pretty radical life redesign.

VANDEHEI: I’m busy, right? I’m running a company, I’m writing books, I’m writing columns, I’m traveling, I do TV. I have a lot that I do, so I don’t have a ton of time at work. I’m a nice guy, but what I’ve told my staff, told the leadership team from the beginning, is I don’t do small talk. So if a meeting starts at 9, it starts at 9. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about your kids or your weekend. I just don’t have time. If it starts at 9, it’s going to start at 9. We’re going to be out of there by 9:12 or 9:15, and then maybe after work we can get a drink and you can tell me all the things you’re excited about. But at work, we’re going to work.

On the personal side, I think this is a very healthy thing. I did that list: What are the three things that I care most about, that I want most out of life? At the top of that list is I want to be a good husband, I want to be a good father, I want to be a good sibling, I want to be a good son. It’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to allocate the amount of time it takes to actually do that. 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 almost every single social obligation in DC that everyone says, “Well, you have to go. You’re a media guy,” or, “You run a media company. You have to be out and about.” I say, “I don’t need to. I’m never going to go out doing media stuff, and I’m doing as well as I need to do.” 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 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. No, I don’t need to do that, and I think there are versions of that for each of us.

SAFIAN: Absolutely. 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?

VANDEHEI: Number one would be this: 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? 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 their three most important things to achieve those things, to make sure that you have absolute, total alignment. So I think those are the first two things.

The third would be 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. I always talk about Axios speed. 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, and do we need to be doing it at all? Once you get into that mentality, you’ll really see a pretty appreciable difference almost overnight.

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

VANDEHEI: Appreciate you.