Rapid Response: Fighting media's reality distortion, w/Axios CEO Jim VandeHei

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. 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 all together 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.

That's the co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim Vanden Hai. 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' 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. I'm Bob Safe and I'm here with Jim Vandenheigh, the CEO and co-founder of Axios. Jim, thanks for joining us. Uh great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I I I am a regular daily consumer of Axios content. Love it. I appreciate that.

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 it really question the media drumbeat that

America is hopelessly Divided. Yep. And it certainly caught my attention. What What prompted you to write that? Now. 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 tr awful tribal warfare. And the truth is It's not real. that seventy to eighty 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, you know, help you out if there's s something wrong or shovel your driveway if you're caught in a snowstorm. And and it got us thinking a lot about just the new media ecosystem and

What has changed over the last fifteen 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 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 v vibrant little whipper snapper. Well in fact, like no, like 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 you know kind of the fundamental rights of being an American, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And in ninety percent of Republicans, ninety percent of Democrats all basically ag agree in the same tenets that kinda make this country uh 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 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 th a felony? Like it's just stuff that it it's kinda like I always go back to my Wisconsin roots. Like if it sounds kind of like being BS it probably is. I mean, The impression of what you're saying is like the polarization that we're hearing about so much by by journalists, by media.

that it's kind of overstated. Like how much is the business model of media to blame For The obsession with polarization. I mean certainly plays into it, no doubt, right? Because if you look at Axios, look at the New York Times, Washington Post, any CNN the the the top twenty 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 at Wichita and and and uh 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's from the media from DC, I must be a communist. And I just notice that almost instantly, once they can kind of tell you a normal human being, you can have a very rational conversation with them. They understand the flaws of Donald Trump. The the One of the problems is you have a two party system, right? So you only have two choices. So you become tribal because it's either your team or 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 they or all they really have is Biden or Trump, it's gonna be Biden or Trump.

I mean I I'll say one of the reasons it resonated so much for me, it's It's like I want to think. That America is not on the brink of, you know, civil war. And there you guys sort of laid out that like Well We're not. Like look looking at the at the numbers and sort of the reality of it.

That it's n maybe not quite as bad as I don't know, as we feel like it is. You have to put some of this in perspective. I've been thinking a lot about this with the uh protests that you're seeing on at university campuses about the the conflict in the Middle East. And you see these uh pro-Palestinian protesters and you're like, Oh my God, these campuses look like they're on fire and everybody's 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 this coverage of of the the people who are leading these colleges, you'd think they're all every professor 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 in trying to like 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 kids' head. So a a another area that there's been a lot of

Hype, certainly a lot of attention to lately has been AI. And uh actually I was recently profiled in the New York Times about how AI is impacting Your plans. And I 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 about the opposite.

Yeah, there I mean, right now we j there just isn't that much AI to deploy. Like it's in the early stages, to be honest. It's a little jankier than people would have thought at this point. And so I can't even copy edit yet, much less be a reporter. And so what we've thought more of is like let's just assume That That that OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Amazon, they're all right that that this is gonna 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 are, listen, even if that's the case, people are still going to need human expertise, human sourcing in 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 uh journalists. 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 a piece on it. I was very happy with it. In the article you're quoted as saying that we're in the middle of a very fundamental shift. And how people relate to news and information.

What is the shift that you see happening? 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 gonna have a personal assistant, and that this personal assistant is going to know about the topics you care about, and it's gonna know about when you care about them, and it's gonna know about how you want that information ingested. Maybe you want it uh 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 gonna 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 could continue to have a a durable company that can outlive us. And what's gonna 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. Yeah, in all likelihood, if if again, like just like always assume that the big companies are right. When they throw trillions of dollars at a technology, they're probably going to will it into existence. We'll 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 gonna figure out a way to make money off of that. Is that a ad or is the personal assistant company pay me to ingest uh 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 I sleep at the wheel. And and you're not particularly wary about your content being scraped to train AI. I mean I i i I I I'm a pretty practical guy. Like I try to control the things I can control. Like it it's been scraped. Uh and they'll keep scraping it. And why would I like for us to get paid for it? Do I 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 uh 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 uh models for our content. But Even then, like I don't like what I tell our staff is like I don't want to be the welfare state of Google. Like that my entire company is just sitting here praying that we get some kind of licensing fee, uh, thanks to the benevolence of four type giants. Like 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 Sunday, like okay, we'll take it. We're not gonna turn down money, we're not stupid, but we also don't want to be a welfare state.

Something about Jim's approach to AI is really refreshing. He doesn't sound particularly excited or hyped up about AI, but he's pragmatic and focused on its potential to open up opportunities for his business. In a time when you're expected to Either be anti-AI or an AI evangelist. I think many leaders could benefit from this sort of clear headed and receptive approach. After the break, Vandehaya 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 quote unquote Bible for anyone looking to get ahead in their professional life.

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Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. 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 for 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.

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

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. Before the break, co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim Vanden Hy explained why the US may not be as polarized as the media wants us to believe. Now Vanda High 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. I want 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 and content production.

But they seem to be just Floundering. Do you have a sense about why that is? Yeah, I can like I'm I'm 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 the When when daddy closed the wallet, Jonah's out of money. And that's a problem. Like it was too reliant on 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 shot shut down BuzzFeed News. So I don't really think of it as a a news company anymore. I think of it as a content uh company and, you know, their stock is at forty cents or whatever, you know, so they're the it's it they're sucking some wind, but like I I don't know what his plans are to try to revive it. Running media companies, I'm sure Jonas said it was on here, is hard. It is so fun. It is uh it is really exhilarating, but it is exhausting, it is difficult, your 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 and and hard to get audience, hard to get trust, hard to keep audience, hard to keep trust. So it's it's there's a lot of pieces that have to break your way to to work.

So I'm curious what you think about the fracas at uh 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.

It has not. Uh I I I I mean, I obviously read about it and has and followed it. Like I I mean 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 uh it leans left and they have a a liberal sensibility uh to them. They do a lot of good work, uh in addition to that. But No, you know, I think people who work at Axios kinda 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 uh 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 don't I I try not to get too worked up about what others do. And the goal for you is

To be neutral? Like is that is is that the goal? No. It's to be trusted. Right, it's to be smart and trusted. It's like neutral Just being neutral or trying to offer the perspectives of both sides. Well can lead to like ludicrous coverage. Like we're trying

Like, I don't want to insult your intelligence and I don't want to waste your time. So what I wanna do is have really smart people who have authentic subject matter expertise. Telling you something smart. Telling you something urgent, tell 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 uh for us. And so yes, I want our reporters to check their ideology at the door. Like we have 550 employees. We tell every person it regardless of your position here, if you take a job here, our ask of you is to not

practice politics at 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 uh 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 a a worthy uh source of information and I lose you. Then we all suffer.

Well I I liked in your in your note yesterday about You know, 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 leading, here's some sources on the left, which by the way is what I try to do to keep my You know, self not just informed.

But I hold myself accountable to the My own impulses. For sure, right? Like I don't like we all have like our our biases and our beliefs. But I I find it I don't know why people find like 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, I 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. As we're talking, I'm remembering my early time at Time Magazine. I just started there and it was the the heat of the two thousand four presidential election. And I remember they They would do this, we're like, 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. You know, it was like

It was Trying to be s even handed But wasn't necessarily focusing on Like What's most important for voters?

To know this week. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's like it's it's it's about the customer. Like what do they need, not what do we want. And Listen. You don't wanna just cover one side and not the other. You wanna give people a full buffet of what's happen happening in Uh 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 if it's nonsense and Maybe he's just pumping out more nonsense today than 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 like something really substantial uh that that someone is saying and then give people some context of why that is important, why it matters. 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. W I think it depends on the who is the leader and what is the company. At the end of the day, let's That'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 I 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 the CEO of that company have to decide, like is 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 c customer base, sure, go do it. But this idea that all these CEOs got trapped into about 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 company 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 wanna make sure this is a great place for you to work. I wanna make sure it's a safe place for you to work. I wanna 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. You had a c 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, The hell with you.

You can't work here. You're violating your job responsibilities and so Uh listen, you have every right to protest and they have every right to fire you. Uh they do. 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.

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? So the 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. And the basically by sixty some lessons inside of the book, but they're all written in smart brevity, all uh with action filled like here's five things you can do if you're dealing with a bad boss uh type advice. And so there's just a lot of like I think very practical advice written in kind of my no BS uh

style. I just s always say kinda what's on my mind. I'm respectful about it, but I but I it's written the way that I talk. So the lessons. So can you can you give us one or two of these No bullshits? I think the biggest one is that uh 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 gonna eat, whether you're gonna work out, whether you're gonna be kind to somebody, whether you're gonna f quit because your boss is a jerk who's been making you feel like crap for the last uh five months or five years. Uh 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 kinda call my happiness matrix, my my different buckets that I know need to be full for me to be effective, you're gonna be a much more productive employee. You're gonna be a much better leader, you're gonna be a much happier person, which is all that really matters at the end of the day. It's interesting because in in your job and in the the coverage that Axios does, like you get steeped in a lot of the information about

Things that are Really troubling, you know, 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. I couldn't be more hopeful. Like listen, I I say that I open the book Talking uh all true. As if you met me at the age of twenty.

I'm smoking. Camel cigarettes. I'm drinking every day. I have a one point four nine one 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 going, Oh my God, that guy's gonna go start a couple of companies, he's gonna interview presidents, he's gonna be on this podcast, he's gonna 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 were 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 if Jim can 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 like 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 will be the sweet spot. Well, Jim, this is this has been great. Thank thank you so much for uh for joining us. Thank you, appreciate it.

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 gonna be threatened more and more. So keep going.

Keep trying. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safi.

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