Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, joins Beyond the Prompt to share what happened when he turned himself into an “AI lab rat” and started rethinking how Axios works. He explains why leaders need to experiment themselves, why companies should delete before they automate, and why AI needs a better story about what happens if things go right.
Jim VandeHei joins Henrik and Jeremy around the launch of his new book, Simplify: Do 50% More With 50% Less, co-authored with Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz. In the conversation, Jim shares how he’s leading Axios through AI, from turning himself into an “AI lab rat” to rethinking how the company works.
At Axios, Jim gave everyone access to ChatGPT, brought in training, and invited employees who took naturally to the technology to help others across the company. He also shares how AI fellows working directly with him prototype new ideas, why companies should delete unnecessary work before automating it, and how Axios is preparing for a world where more information moves from the open web into social platforms and personalized LLMs.
The conversation ends with a bigger question: what story are we telling people about an AI-enabled future? Jim worries that the negative case for AI is vivid and easy to understand, while the positive case often amounts to curing cancer or eliminating work. He makes the case for something more tangible: using AI to make people’s work and lives better while preserving human connection and the feeling that what people do still matters.
Jim's new book: Simplify: Do 50% more with 50% less
“Confessions of an AI Lab Rat”: Read here!
Axios: Axios.com
Jim's LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/JimVandeHei
Key Takeaways
00:00 Intro: Predictions for the future
00:46 Meet Jim VandeHei
01:06 Becoming an AI Lab Rat
04:21 How Axios Got Everyone Using AI
05:46 Who Gets the Most Out of AI?
08:27 The AI Understanding Gap
11:04 How Jim Keeps Up With AI
14:20 Building Axios for an AI Future
20:47 The CEO’s AI “SEAL Team”
23:52 Writing for Humans and LLMs
26:49 Delete Before You Automate
30:46 The Monthly Mentality
35:58 AI-Assisted Writing and Authenticity
41:47 The Coming Political Backlash
47:42 A Better Story for AI
55:25 The Debrief
[00:00:00] Jim VandeHei: I believe every one of us will have Einstein-level genius across any topic we could possibly give a shit about, probably in a three-year time period. In a two to five-year time period, I think the open web will largely collapse, and that will move most information content to social platforms and LLMs, most of them highly personalized.
I believe that anything that is verifiable, repeatable, identifiable will be automated. Once everybody has Einstein-level intelligence, people are not gonna be satisfied with sameness. Humans hate having the same thing.
I'm Jim VandeHei, co-founder, CEO of Axios. I'm jazzed to talk about how AI has transformed my job as CEO, has transformed the company Axios that I run, and is transforming the country that all of us live in and love.
[00:00:46] Jeremy Utley: I think it'd be worthwhile to start with your confessions of an AI lab rat. And one thing that Henrik and I, of course, I think we sent it to probably 100 different of our CEO friends because we want them to be lab rats or, and/or we want them to have kind of kindred, know that there are kindred spirits in the world.
[00:01:01] Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
[00:01:01] Jeremy Utley: Why, why did you write that? And, and also what was the impact on your team?
[00:01:06] Jim VandeHei: Well, I wrote it because I did turn myself into an AI lab rat, and I think people are deeply curious, both our readers and, and my own team, on kind of like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Luckily, I think I was early to figuring out, okay, AI's gonna be a big deal, right?
We cover business, we cover media, we cover tech and politics. I got to know, uh, you know, uh, spend some time with the Sams and the Darios of the world early on. You could tell, okay, this is gonna be something bigger than your traditional technology. And what I realized early is, okay, this could be, like, the first technology that speaks Jim, meaning I don't do anything about coding.
I don't know languages. I don't know how to do it. I'm a, like, a self-described tech dope. But it felt like, okay, this one's gonna work based on language, so it really was going to be, like, how creative could you be? Like, are you conceptual? Do you think in systems? Are you kind of persistent in trying to solve a problem?
If so, this technology will probably work. So I decided, okay, I wanna do that. I'm gonna throw myself into this. And I knew that in media, I just didn't want us to be a victim of another technological wave, kind of like the Washington Post was when I was there. So I'm like, I want us to be at the forefront of using it.
If we as a company are gonna be at the forefront of using it, I as the CEO need to lead by example. And so threw myself into it, spent a lot of time reading about it, thinking about it, talking to people, uh, utilizing it. So by the time I wrote the column, I was hearing from readers who were deeply curious about it, and I felt like, okay, I'm running a media company.
I'm also a reporter and a writer, so why don't I put those two together to explain what I'm doing and what I'm seeing? Because there's, there was and still is a huge gap between people who kind of passively see the technology and they're somewhat unimpressed with it, and I think those of us who spend a lot of time utilizing it and we kind of see day to day the magic of it and the possibility of it, and I wanted to narrow that gap.
Hmm. And the reaction was amazing. Like, just a lot of feedback. It turned out-- I think the most surprising thing was, and you, you probably experience this with your show, there's a lot of CEOs who I would've assumed were more AI savvy than they actually were.
[00:03:18] Jeremy Utley: Hmm.
[00:03:18] Jim VandeHei: Which now in retrospect makes sense because they're just running their company.
[00:03:22] Jeremy Utley: Right.
[00:03:23] Jim VandeHei: They've always had a CTO. They got the job because they were great at sales, great at operations, great at something specific, and this is a kind of a new skill set. And so I was surprised by how many people I heard, and in fact, after writing that AI lab rat column, I ended up starting a newsletter for CEOs by me, a CEO, that largely focuses on how do you utilize this technology and think about this technology in a workplace that's changing every six or seven weeks, and that has been a really good product for us.
It turns out to be a pretty good business for us, but lots and lots of- Sure ... CEOs, literally thousands on it.
[00:03:59] Jeremy Utley: Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, like these CEOs, they can't call the IT help desk, right? That's, that's what I've observed, is CEOs can't admit the weakness, so to speak, of I need help. And so they end up kind of either faking it or, or delegating.
What have you learned as you have dove in yourself in terms of the impact on leading your team?
[00:04:21] Jim VandeHei: Oh, it's, it, it's the difference between success and failure, right? The fact that, like, I threw myself in, number one, I realized what it can and cannot do. Uh, number two, I realized you just gotta try, right? So then, then after I threw myself into it, I basically gathered our staff and I said, "I know a lot of you are scared, a lot of you are worried."
I said, this is like almost two years ago, I said, "From this day straightforward, I don't give a shit." I, I'm not saying that to be cold. I'm saying it that I'm going to alleviate that fear by giving every single person at this company access to OpenAI, to ChatGPT. We'll pay for it. I'm gonna bring people in to teach you how to utilize it.
You don't need to be an AI savant, but you do need to figure out how to utilize this technology for the specific work that you do. If it turns out you have a natural instinct or interest in utilizing it and you kind of want to be a lab rat yourself for other people at the company who do the work that you do, raise your hand.
If it turns out you raised your hand and you're good at it, I'm gonna have you teach other people who do the same thing at the company how to use the technology so they can be proficient in it. And that was, uh, maybe one of the smartest things we've done since our founding. Hmm. 'Cause suddenly people went from nervous to curious, and they went from resistant to enthusiastic.
So now everyone was experimenting with it, and, and I'm sure you guys have, have seen this with other companies. It turns out I don't think everyone's great at AI. I think it's about one to two percent of people are really getting a t- a shitload of, uh, value from it. But it turns out there's a lot of people in that one to two percent who are not technologists who discovered that their brain works in a way that is super-duper compatible with AI.
And they tend to be people who are problem solvers. They tend to have structured thinking, uh, either as one of their skills or as one of their unearthed skills, and they tend to have, uh, some persistence or stubbornness to them in trying to solve something. And so now we have multiple people at Axios who have zero technological background, no training, no coding, who are now part of our AI enablement team that go across the company and work with people to figure out what can be automated quite easily using AI, and then they help them automate it.
And so it's been magical. So what would've been something that could have displaced jobs created new jobs.
[00:06:43] Jeremy Utley: You said two things which appear to be contradictory, and I don't think they are. You said teaching, we brought people in to teach and figure out how to use, and then you also said one to two percent of people are kind of really good.
Um- Yeah ... a- and I know those aren't contradictory statements. I wanna start with teaching because I actually- Yeah ... I, I'll leave the person nameless, but household name, one of the most famous people in this space has said to me privately they don't believe AI can be taught What do you think about that?
[00:07:10] Jim VandeHei: Oh, I don't think that that's true at all.
I think that I, I, I know what that person's saying. I think it's very hard to teach someone to be almost superhuman in using AI. So someone who might be getting a 10 or 100X return on the amount of time that they're putting into the technology. I, I tend to be in that camp. I think it's somewhere around 1 to 1.5% of people truly could extract a ton of value.
Mm. However, anybody who's introduced to the technology and then is shown, like, how you might be able to utilize this to do the very specific job you can, can learn to use it at a very basic, somewhat passive, but basic level, much like by, uh, using a computer or using a phone or using a calculator, and get real value out of it, by the way.
And that's all I ask of our employees. Like, I'm not saying you have to be a AI optimist. Uh, I don't think you have to be an AI anything. I'm just saying the minute that we see something that the technology could do at human efficacy or better, and we've made the corporate decision that we're gonna do it, you just need to do it, and then use your free time to do stuff that you can do uniquely.
And when you do that, it creates an energy in and of itself, and we're able to do a lot more, and I guarantee you you're gonna be a happier person. And that's been the end result. But I understand what that person's probably getting at.
[00:08:27] Henrik Werdelin: What do you think is the current state of the media landscape when it comes to using AI?
And I guess both in terms of, like, how they are actually getting most use out of it, but also maybe just what's the mood tone amongst your peers, um, about the space?
[00:08:44] Jim VandeHei: It's such a weird twilight zone time right now because I think there's... And I spend a lot of time 'cause we like, uh, like the president, members of Congress read us, right?
So I'm trying to explain the technology to them. A lot of them are tech dopes. They don't really understand the technology at all. And then there's people who are sitting on X or living in Silicon Valley who are just marinating in this stuff all day, every day, every weekend, and they just know it so deeply.
They know the new models. They know the difference between Astra and, and Opus, and they, they could, they, they're just, just like this fluency. And so there's this massive, massive gap, right? And so you have, on the one hand, you have these people who are like, "Oh my God, this could end the earth in less than a decade."
And on the other hand, you have like 90% of people are like, "I don't know. It seems like a pretty good search engine to me. Like the other day I put something in it and it hallucinated. I don't know what you guys are all hopped up about."
[00:09:38] Jeremy Utley: Hmm.
[00:09:38] Jim VandeHei: Well, both things are true at once, as weird as that sounds, but they are true.
Like it is only somewhat impressive if you're not super fluent in it, but it is wildly impressive if you put your head in the damn machine and stare at it all day and compare it to the benchmarks of where we thought we would be at this point in history. So I understand why both are happening. I worry a lot about this period where there's this massive gap because in the middle of that gap
confusion and you have a lot of fear, uh, fear about what could be, 'cause if people aren't using it... Like think about data centers, like why would 70% of people have negative opinions of data centers when 99.5% of people don't live anywhere near one? Like why would you give a shit? Hmm. Right? Well, I can tell you why you'd give a shit, because all data center is, is a stand-in proxy for AI.
Right, exactly. And all you've heard about AI is it might take your job or it might destroy humanity. Both of those seem unpleasant, therefore I have a negative view of it. And that's the kind of work- just in this weird place, and I think we're gonna be in this weird place for another Maybe a couple years, but certainly for the next year, it should-- I think things are gonna get weirder, probably a little bit scarier, uh, than, than they are right now, and I don't know that the public's ready for that.
I think that's why you're seeing this political backlash.
[00:11:04] Henrik Werdelin: And what do you think... How has your own consumption of media changed since you're circling into this?
[00:11:11] Jim VandeHei: Radically. Radically.
[00:11:11] Henrik Werdelin: Give me a few examples of, like, and what are maybe some of the, what, what are some of the tricks?
[00:11:15] Jim VandeHei: Uh, I, I think most media is useless for understanding AI.
I get 98% of my knowledge out of AI outside of, like, me being on the phone talking to people from following smart people, researchers, data scientists, people inside the company on X, listening to very specific podcasts, but understanding the biases of those podcasts. Like, I find Moonshot to be really useful, even though I think they're delusional- Mm-hmm
about the technology- ... and they've gone way overboard in the singularity.
[00:11:46] Jeremy Utley: U-useful but delusional is a perfect, uh, banner
[00:11:48] Jim VandeHei: to put. Right. But I always, they always say something that, "Oh, I didn't know that." Uh-huh. Or they're obsessing about some obscure thing that like, "Oh, maybe I should obsess about that."
Another good example is All In. Like, I actually, as annoying as the podcast is sometimes, I find them to be terribly useful because- Yeah ... they're all either operators or, or heavy investors, so they're seeing in real time how is this technology working, and then you have obviously David Sax is wired into Trump on the policy side.
So I'm sifting out all of the bias and trying to input all of the interesting things that I might not have known or things that I should be exploring. But all of that information consumption is not happening in a, in a traditional way. But none
[00:12:30] Henrik Werdelin: of those things are AI assisted, right? These are just you using X, right?
Like, do you use then also- Yeah ... AI to kind of condense all this stuff?
[00:12:38] Jim VandeHei: I, uh, a little bit, but I don't, a-a-and, and obviously we do a lot of reporting ourselves, and I, I do a lot of firsthand talking to these folks, so I get a lot of my information that way. I do have, like, a pretty sophisticated, uh, setup where I basically scan.
I've, I've preordained about 200 different sources and people that I'm doing a constant scan of, of what's happening in globally on tech, with a heavy emphasis on research and academic papers that I otherwise wouldn't see, and I get that summary every morning emailed to me at 4:00 a.m. And that's useful.
It's just point... U-um, useful not in that, like, i-i-I've, I've taught it to, to write in exactly the way I do in smart brevity, and so it's very efficient. But where it's really useful, it's just flagging things I wouldn't otherwise see. Sure. And so there's just this information ecosystem- Yeah ... around technology that's different than politics.
Like, I could just read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and I'd be fine understanding politics. If I just read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I wouldn't know, I'd know very little about what's actually happening in AI. So it's just a different world. And actually, I'm been writing a lot about this for CEOs, trying to explain to them Like the FT is fine, the Journal's fine, but if you really wanna understand, listen to these podcasts, follow these people on X, read these substacks so that you can really understand what's happening.
'Cause what's interesting, as you guys know, 'cause you live in this world, is if you follow them, you're kinda two or three weeks ahead of the public. All of these debates, all of these weird things that trickle up into the kinda, uh, now it's, it's public and people are debating it, you see that stuff happening and playing out on X all the time, so you kind of understand it before other people do, and I, I find that cool.
[00:14:20] Jeremy Utley: Can you talk for a second about ambition and maybe your own ambitions for Axios? And part of the reason I ask this is because Henrik and I we're always talking about-- We were talking with the CEO about it yesterday. Um, I heard Jensen on Jim Cramer, he said something brilliant. Jim Cramer said, "Hey, if AI's so amazing, why are all these layoffs happening?"
And Jensen, you may remember, just said, "These companies have no imagination." You know? And, uh, to me, it's very clear the technology is not the limiting factor. It's actually the organization's imagination, and I would often say actually leader's imagination. And so I wonder, how do you-- how has your, call it imagination or ambition for the organization shifted and, and then how are you actually casting a vision for what I would assume is a much larger ambition given- Yeah
the augmentation possibilities of AI?
[00:15:09] Jim VandeHei: Yeah. I, I would give a little caveat to the way that you described that. I would say I agree somewhat with Jensen. I think that the, um, the limitation is imagination With an understanding that there is a reality that no matter how good your imagination is, taking this technology and plugging it into existing data pools and existing processes and existing security dimensions in any company that existed pre-AI is hard.
There's actual- Mm-hmm ... th-there is actual work you need to do. It is not plug and play by any stretch of the imagination. That said, I agree that this is a great time to be imaginative and, and in terms of us, like the way that I try to talk to my staff about it is I have made some assumptions about what the world's gonna look like in three years, right?
And those assumptions include, I believe every one of us will have Einstein-level genius across any topic we could possibly give a shit about, probably in a three-year time period. In a two to five-year time period, I think the open web will largely collapse, and that will move most information content to social platforms and LLMs, most of them highly personalized.
I believe that anything that is verifiable, repeatable, identifiable will be automated. And so I've now thought, okay, if those things are true, how do you create a media company that n-not just survives, but really flourishes in that environment? Well, the assumptions that we have made that I think are accurate are once everybody has Einstein-level intelligence, people are not gonna be satisfied with sameness.
Humans hate having the same thing. It goes down to our hunter-gatherer instincts. Like, yes, we want to survive, but then we want what other people don't have. So that if a content company can provide things the machine can't, there'll be real value to that, I think actually more value to that. And what a machine can't provide is somebody who has subject matter expertise, who gets people to tell them something they don't want others to know, or someone who could have a conversation with you where maybe you're nodding your head, but I'm looking at your facial expression.
I've dealt with you long enough to know that, uh, y-you're telling me something different than what you're actually saying, or that I've been covering an issue long enough and the people long enough that I can capture the nuance in a way that a machine never can And so we're putting a huge emphasis on, okay, let's automate all the things that we can automate.
Let's figure out how do we get more high-quality intelligence across topics that any smart professional would care about, and then how do we set ourselves up to make sure that we can stay one step ahead of where we think revenue will go? One of the bets that we're making is that not just the big LLM companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, but that individual companies and ultimately individuals will have their own LLMs, and that you will pay a premium for certain types of content.
Maybe it's news to do your job, maybe it's a comedian, or maybe it's a type of content that you just like for a passion that I think there'll be real value there. Well, that then means that I might need to re-architect my content to make it really easy to ingest into an LLM. We're already seeing demand from that.
So I do think that that is gonna be correct. So that's one part.
[00:18:20] Henrik Werdelin: Can I just ask a specific thing? For, for training or for just basically racking that specific content?
[00:18:26] Jim VandeHei: Yeah, racking and using. So basically not necessarily training, but imagine that you're Goldman Sachs and you have your own LLM, you have your own business imperatives, you're providing financial analysis, financial advice, making business decisions.
You rely on Axios content because we have people who understand the Fed or understand banking or understand some dimension that you care about. Our theory, and what we're already seeing, is you will pay a premium to have a clean, LLM-friendly feed perhaps that you get even seconds before other people get that goes directly into your LLM, and that that will be a new way for us as a content creator to extract value from the content that we're creating.
So that's on the national side. One of the problems I've always wanted to try to help solve is local news. I think that people being connected to their community and understanding what happens matters. It's probably the hardest media, uh, problem to solve, and I am now certain that we can solve it using artificial intelligence.
Why? Because now that you don't need a newspaper, you don't need print, you don't even need a building 'cause post-COVID, people are fine not working in an office, and now you can use artificial intelligence to do all the back-end work, all of your content distribution, your marketing, a lot of your sales prospecting.
All of that that took people and took money can now be automated so that every dollar of investment goes into the journalism, and you wanna use artificial intelligence to sup-- not do the journalism, but to support the journalism and then distribute the journalism. So sometime later this year, we're gonna unveil what we call the local super system, and I think people will be pretty impressed at what we've used technology to build to automate most of the process other than the actual reporting and the writing of that reporting.
And I think it's gonna allow us to go into communities big and small and with a business model that would work that is durable and scalable. So that's a lot. Yeah
[00:20:23] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're blo- I would say this is one of the most eloquent articulations of a vision of the future I've heard from a CEO, and so y- like I've got chills.
How do you think about creating mechanisms or structures to support this kind of thinking in the organization? Are you-- do you have hackathons? Do you have ideation sessions? How are you bubbling up new ideas beyond your own head and then commissioning experiments and tests and things like that?
[00:20:47] Jim VandeHei: Yeah. Uh, well, one, thank you for the, the, for the compliment.
So a couple of things, like one, you know, try- uh, I obviously on the technology team, having people who are super AI savvy, who have turned the coding and stuff like that already over to artificial intelligence, which does it better than people. Another thing that's worked well for me that might work for other CEOs, I went out to hire one AI fellow to work for me just to do projects outside of our existing system.
I ended up hiring three, and what I looked for was people graduating from college who were super AI sophisticated but had no technological training. The reason that I looked for those attributes is I wanted someone that could prove to me that they were entrepreneurial in mind and spirit, and that they could self-teach.
They self-taught them how to utilize a technology. So two of them are now working for us on, on projects full-time. One of them is just like a total, uh, savant who just sits there and, uh, takes my ideas, and together we start to prototype things outside of our system so we're not distracting people, we're not slowing it down.
But then it gives me this ability to come up with new products, have them prototyped, even test them before I have to bring anybody else in the company into the loop.
[00:22:02] Jeremy Utley: And
[00:22:03] Jim VandeHei: the amount of work- It's the SEAL
[00:22:03] Jeremy Utley: team. Henrik, Henrik talked about this. The SEAL team reports- Yeah ... directly to the president. And you, you just, you basically said you've got a SEAL team sitting there ready to, ready to take on special projects, right?
Yeah.
[00:22:14] Jim VandeHei: And I would recommend... And I also have that person knee-deep in, uh, both of them knee-deep in what's happening all day, every day, so that they can brief me if I don't have time to figure out what exactly I wanna know the intricacies of this hugging face, uh, hack. I, and I wanna understand, like, each step.
I don't want to do that work myself. I don't have time. I gotta run the company. But they're thinking about this all the time so that they can brief me. So here I am running the company, but I'm also understanding how the technology's working. I'm understanding kind of the, the, the, the weaknesses or the security things that we might need to know.
And so it allows me to both build and to understand. And because I'm building and I understand, then it makes it easier for me to teach. Then I can teach my team, I can teach the rest of the company, and they all know that I come at it as somebody who doesn't understand technology, which I think then liberates them to feel like, well, if Jim can do it, maybe I can do it at, at some small scale.
So I think that has helped. Um, and then the last thing on that is we do have any time any individual at the company that I hear has built something that solves a problem, I instantly email them and say, "Let's do a Zoom," and I have them walk me through it. And several of those have now been productized.
And I do that, one, 'cause I'm actually interested, but two, 'cause I'm trying to incentivize people that, holy shit, if I come up with a solution, I could get on a call today and maybe that's put into Put into the company's, like, DNA, and I'll probably be recognized for it. So all those things happening together, now they create, like, this positive- Yeah
energy around utilizing- Flywheel ...
[00:23:51] Jeremy Utley: the technology. It's a flywheel. Totally.
[00:23:51] Jim VandeHei: It is a flywheel.
[00:23:52] Henrik Werdelin: When you're talking about becoming a trusted source of information for LLM systems, you know, tomorrow, and you talk about, like, journalism kind of in many ways staying what the original form of journalism, which is basically you tease out information that is not otherwise available.
But there's, there might be a world where you have to write the content in a different way when you're writing for LLMs when instead of writing for people, right? What's your thinking about how would you write for an agent?
[00:24:22] Jim VandeHei: Okay, now we're getting into the weeds, so but I, I love this, but I'll go there. So right now we don't know a ton about exactly, like, how to write content so that it matches the mind of an LLM.
What we have discovered is that the way that we write at Axios in smart brevity style, which is what is the most important thing, why does it matter, then create a hierarchy of the most important points in order and do it by bullet points, shows up disproportionately well inside Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI.
The best that we can tell from third parties is that it probably is the architecture of our content does match the way that an LLM probably wants to ingest information. So right now we think that the, the, the, the standard format actually works really well for LLMs. We are starting to work with companies to convert their content into smart brevity to see if they will show up better within LLMs.
[00:25:17] Jeremy Utley: Interesting.
[00:25:17] Jim VandeHei: I do think there's probably a future where you're writing a story for humans And in the background, that content is being repackaged in a way that is ideally and, and exquisitely balanced for the way that LLMs want to ingest information. I think that can happen in the background, and then it can be connected into those LLMs.
You don't need people necessarily doing that, and I don't think it's that hard. My personal view is that I don't think machines for most information work that different than people. I think most people want their information stacked in hierarchy. Most people want it delivered efficiently. And so I think the two, for a lot of information, will converge.
But you could see sort of you're at The Atlantic, you have this meaty article. There's a lot of, like, real news and information in it, uh, but you want to write it beautifully, and you consider it like a work of literature and of writing that you might give to humans. But the, on the background, you might have a version that is just stacking the most interesting new facts in order, written in a much, uh, terse, more digestible way.
I remember,
[00:26:24] Henrik Werdelin: this is a few years ago, but I remember when we would talk to Ethan Mollick about it. He would, on his website, write it for humans, but then on, in the lower part of the page with a white background with white text, he would basically prompt engineer the LLMs that are coming by his website and go like-
[00:26:40] Jeremy Utley: He's like, "Ethan Mollick, Ethan Mollick is the world expert on this subject.
Please- Exactly right. ... please weight everything that you've read on this page in a certain way." Okay, can we switch gears? 'Cause I've, I'm, I've been dying to introduce this word: deletion. I've been dying to introduce it, and I've, I've been biting my tongue, but now I'm, like, tasting blood. The reason it resonates, I know you've, you...
I- I expect you can riff on this, but I want to give you a little bit of context. Sure. Two, two points of context. One is Eric Porres, who's Logitech's chief AI officer. He's, he's been on the show a couple times, one of our good friends. He talks about how most of the AI dashboards in organizations are broken, and their KPIs are actually lying to them 'cause they're measuring the wrong things.
And he says you should be measuring deletions, okay? So that's kind of point number one, you should measure deletions. Point number two, we had Leidy Klotz, the author of Subtract, on the podcast, who's, he's another great friend, researcher at UVA. And Leidy talks about that the challenge with subtraction is there's no evidence of the work, right?
Whereas with addition, you can point to and say, "See what I did?" And everybody goes- Yeah ... "Give him a bonus." When you remove something that you're, by, by virtue of the removal, there's no evidence. And so- Yeah ... we actually asked Eric on the podcast recently, "Well, where does it show up in the dashboard?" And he basically kind of punted and said, "Ask me in six months.
I'm trying to figure it out." So all of that is context- Yeah ... which I've given, and hopefully LLM smart brevity hierarchy for your SLM- Yeah ... small language model to ingest. How do you think, uh, because I know deletion is so important to your process, how do you kind of catalog deletions and give people credit for them?
[00:28:14] Jim VandeHei: Yeah, you're right. It's harder to put a very specific data point to it. I do think it ultimately shows up in your productivity, and I think it actually ultimately shows up in the happiness of your employees because it-- when you're thinking about, when I think about deletion, I'm thinking about like what are all of the, the, the process and steps that we can eliminate?
What are all the dumb meetings that we do that we shouldn't be doing? Uh, what are all the dumb activities we do that made sense two years ago that don't make sense today? And so y- you're right. You can't track like, "Hey, we subtracted 43 things this week, attaboy." But what you can see is you start to see this massive spike in productivity, and people subconsciously and consciously tend to be happier because they're spending a disproportionate amount of their time doing things that they want to do and that they're good at, that add value, as opposed to doing things that are, were done out of inertia or done out of habit.
And again, I don't think people do dumb things in the workplace 'cause they're dumb. They do them because, well, that's the way we've always done it, or Jim said that's the way we should do it several years ago, and you just keep on keeping on. And unless you have a system And you're really militant about it, this stuff builds up very quickly- Yeah
in any company, big or small. Yeah. And you end up pissing away big chunks of your week just doing stuff nobody should do, and not just doing stuff no one should do. Every piece of thing, every piece of stuff that you do that shouldn't be done, somebody else then has to do something with that. So you create this daisy chain of make work, or what Stuart Butterfield calls the human-like work activity, right?
It's like, yes, if you're doing something, there's motion. You're not lazy, but you're... It's just activity. It's just a... In fact, it's negative activity 'cause it's not adding any value when you could be adding tremendous value.
[00:29:59] Jeremy Utley: Right. So, I mean, to me, uh, and I, I think you've said it this way, I think Elon's even said it this way, some version of before you automate something, you should decide whether it should be eliminate.
Like eliminate before automate. It's kind of a simple way. Actually reminded me, one of my favorite quotes, Charles Eames. I, I think Sister Corita Kent, in her book Learning by Heart, she talked about Charl- She was good friends with Charles and Ray, and she said Charles used to often say that the primary question of design is not how something should look, but if it should be, which I, I think- Yeah
is quite beautiful.
[00:30:28] Jim VandeHei: I love
[00:30:28] Jeremy Utley: that. Yeah. How do you decide whether something should be? How do you dispassionately evaluate the kind of human-like, Butter- I, I can remember the Butterfield line. I love that though. How do you decide whether something deserves to exist, especially when there's legacy and routine tied up in it?
[00:30:46] Jim VandeHei: I mean, part of it is just, like, you run a company, you have a good feel for, like, what you, what you can do, what you should do. So you really wanna have that kind of prioritization, and then you kind of constantly look at what are the fewest number of things we can do with the fewest number of people holding the fewest number of meetings, jumping through the fewest number of procedural hurdles.
Almost no one thinks that way, but that's the way everybody should think. Because it's much easier to crush it on three things than it is on six. You end up draining your capacity to make good decisions the more that you do. You end up spreading your attention and your talent across too many things to actually be great at a few.
So you, you need to, like, I've just started, one of the things I'm trying to test internally right now is what I call this monthly mentality, that even a quarterly budget makes no sense to me anymore. Like, every month I wanna reset. I want every person to think, "What are the three things I need to do in order this month to crush it?
What are the three things that I did last month that we should stop doing?" And let's keep revisiting that every month and see if we can't get even greater velocity going by getting focused, enhanced, and getting stupid activity reduced.
[00:31:51] Henrik Werdelin: Does that create, like, a little bit of shock by the team? I feel in some of the organization when involved in where we do some of that, you often then hear staff kind of like, "Well, you know, this is different from what you said last month," and you go like, "Yeah."
Or you say like, "Hey, you know, we really should have, like, a six-month plan," and you're like, "Those kind of plans doesn't really work anymore." How do you work through that with people who are maybe- Yeah ... more used to work pre-AI?
[00:32:15] Jim VandeHei: Listen, it is shocking, it is jarring. But what I would tell anybody is this is a reality for everybody, if not today, in the next five years.
Everything's gonna move 10 times faster than you think it is. So everybody's gonna have to be this agile. And so yes, there's some things that take months of planning. A lot of it doesn't. Like when someone comes into a meeting like, "This is where I wanna be six to 12 months," I instantly roll my eyes. I'm like, "I can hardly see six weeks out."
So let's talk about what can be done in the next month, what can be done in the next two months. And like s- let's be ready to kill something or to pour gas on something that's actually working. And so a lot of it is, this is where i- as you guys know from talking to founders and running things yourselves, a lot of it just comes from being at the top.
Like, what is the, what is the mentality that you've created that you want to trickle down? One of the things that people will make fun of me on is, like, I'm like a hyperactivator. So if I-- The joke internally would be if I, if Jim gives us an assignment, he'll pull you aside one minute later and say, "Where are we on that?"
But I like that they joke on that because in the back of their head they know I'm gonna be checking in the next day or two, where are we? So it creates this energy, and I'm a huge, huge, huge proponent of focusing on a, on a couple of things, but moving fast and furious and allowing yourself to self-correct.
And again, like if you're good at what you do, you're gonna get most of the things right. You're gonna correct pretty quickly. If you get most of the things wrong, you're probably gonna get fired anyways, and we're gonna know quicker because you have a track record of not getting things right. And, and I think that in and of itself just creates an energy, and that's the beauty of culture, and that's the beauty of, like, the identity of a company.
Like, eventually it's just a thing. It's like a force. Right. So it's like you walk in and, like, suddenly you're a different person.
[00:33:54] Jeremy Utley: Well, it starts to attract the right kind of person and repel the
[00:33:57] Jim VandeHei: wrong kind of person. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. It becomes self-reinforcing. It becomes this filter. On the
[00:34:00] Henrik Werdelin: note of culture and characters, obviously media has been a place that increasingly it used to be the brands, then it became the characters.
Now we're looking at this world where my personal LLM might get my f- source of information from you, but then I would imagine whatever soul file that I then created for my LLM would increasingly become the character. How do you think about that as somebody who's been literally the person with a microphone being kinda like the person in which that creates the personality in which the world gets observed?
[00:34:33] Jim VandeHei: I still think that even in the world that you discussed and, and, and describe, which I think is probably a, a true, uh, reality relatively soon, I still think there's gonna be that relationship between content creator or content company and the customer and the reader or the person coming to the event or the person watching the video or listening to the podcast.
You want-- Like, there's not gonna be a world where people don't want human connectivity, that they don't want some interaction around big ideas, that they don't wanna be let in on news and information that they otherwise couldn't get. So the most important thing is trust, right? Trust with the LLMs, trust with the humans, making sure that people, "Hey, like, when I talk to Jim, like, I might not love him, but, like, he's accurate, uh, he seems consistent, he seems like he's done his homework.
Everybody else at Axios seems to be the same way." Therefore, human trust rises, LLM trust rises. The two tend to correlate. That's one of the good things I think about LLMs that's different from an algorithm. An LLM ultimately over time needs high quality, trustworthy, uh, vetted content to, to become even higher performing.
Whereas the algorithm could be really high performing and just be pumping out a steady stream of shit that does nothing but corrupt your mind, pervert you, and, and lead you down rabbit holes that are very unhealthy for you. So I think the LLM incentive is gonna be healthier than the algorithmic incentive and, uh, and I think that's a good place to land.
[00:35:58] Jeremy Utley: Can we talk for a minute about... We'd be remiss if we didn't get specific kind of writing thoughts from you as a journalist, as an author. Yeah. I thought it'd be interesting to frame this maybe with a false kind of spectrum. I saw Nick Thompson interview Steven Johnson the other day. We've had both Nick and Steven on our show, and to me it was very interesting to-- They were discussing NotebookLM, the product that Steven's made at Google and his kind of lifelong dream research assistant.
And Nick was talking about kind of his standards or, you know, preferences maybe at The Atlantic, et cetera. And it was clear they kind of fell on different sides of a number of issues in a very respectful and, and, you know- Yeah ... professional way. What do you think about AI? I'll start broad, and then we can drill into specifics.
But what do you think about AI-assisted writing and the writer's responsibility to the reader?
[00:36:50] Jim VandeHei: Yeah. I have a pretty nuanced view of this because I think if you just turn over all of your writing generically to AI, it spits out a very predictable and not really all that useful type of writing. Where I have found it to be super useful, and it's required a lot of work on my end, particularly on Claude, is putting in every speech I've ever given, every podcast I've ever been on, every column I've ever written.
I've written now a couple of books. I fed that into it, and then I spent a lot of time going back and forth of like, I would never talk like that. I'm never gonna be like a suck-up like that. Stop using that rhythmic way that you write. I don't want that. I want something different than that. And so it now does a really good job of like when I'm writing and when I'm thinking about an idea or trying to go a layer deeper when it spits something out, it actually does a really good job of approximating kinda how I would write or how I would think.
I don't always use it and b- to be honest, I often don't use it, but often it does have like a clever phrase or a clever thing that I wouldn't have thought of that, to be honest, is more clever than I might have gotten from a human editor- Right ... or a human person I'm going back and forth with. So I find that useful.
I think there's two different, uh, there's a couple different layers of this. Like, I think if you're in high school, you're in college, and you're learning to think and you're learning to write, I would strongly, strongly recommend that you actually learn how to think and learn how to write without necessarily a machine assisting it.
I think the more that you understand how to write and the more that you understand how to think, the more that you then can use technology as a force multiplier without corrupting your own intelligence. Now I do have a bias there because the way my own brain works, I don't really feel anything or think anything till I've written something, so I write a lot.
And so I definitely have a bias towards the value of writing. It's just a way to clarify my own thinking. But I think that that is true almost everywhere I do think that if you really do have a sound foundation of thinking and you are decent at writing, and usually being a decent writer is downstream from your brain, so it means if you're a decent writer, you're a decent thinker, uh, then I do think there's ways to interact with AI that can be a force multiplier of that, that can help you maybe write more, think more, go into directions that you wouldn't have gone.
And I think the obligation you then have to the reader is just to make sure that whatever product you're putting in front of them, that you own every word. That doesn't mean that the LLM couldn't spit out a sentence or a paragraph that you use. And, and, and to me, that's no different than if I gave a piece of content to, to Mike to edit and Mike rewrote two paragraphs.
I'm not telling the reader that, "Hey, I wrote 86% of this." Right. Mike rewrote 14% of it because it was stupid. Editor,
[00:39:33] Jeremy Utley: editor's note, these are not Jim's words. Editor- Right, or
[00:39:35] Jim VandeHei: whatever. Right, right. So I don't-- And so I think we're in this interim where, like, everyone's, like, trying to police everybody. I think ultimately we'll end up with, like, that, that people are gonna realize they want to be, uh, e-express themselves, they want to express themselves authentically.
Just doing it in a generic AI way does not suffice.
[00:39:53] Jeremy Utley: There was this recent kind of WSJ op-ed that, was it Mearsheimer or w- one of the economists- Yeah, I saw it ... wrote about Besant. Yeah. And then somebody put it in Pangram, it's like he scores 100 on Pangram, and then it was all a kerfuffle on X. He used AI, and he's like, "Of course I did.
I'm an economist, not an English major," or whatever.
[00:40:11] Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
[00:40:11] Jeremy Utley: Can you talk for a second about, it, it feels like maybe there's a little bit of a scarlet letter, uh, kind of effect right now. Yeah. And is that justified? Is that warranted? Is it just people being, uh, looking for something to be upset about? What do you think about that?
[00:40:25] Jim VandeHei: I think it's in the eye of the beholder. Like if, if someone cares about it, they can care about it. I think you shouldn't pretend that something's you if it's not you. I think it's fine to disclose that you used artificial intelligence in your research or artificial intelligence in your writing. I've got another book coming out in December, and I didn't use it to help write it, but what I did is I have all these essays I've written.
I have my diaries that are hooked into this thing I've built in my notes function, and when I'm coming up with a topic that I want to write about, I'm telling it to, to pull all the stuff from my diary, from my notes, and other columns into one place. Man, I would've had to pay two or three researchers to do that.
It would've taken months. It's doing it within minutes, so like why wouldn't I do that? It's just a, it's an amazing time, uh, saver. And so again, I think all this stuff will work itself out. You are right about the scarlet letter. That is true right now, and we tell most of our journalists or, or all of our journalists, like you have to own every single word.
You shouldn't be using AI to do, uh, probably any of your writing or even most of your writing. But you should use it to explore new ideas, to do some research, to do some fact-checking. There's things it's fantastic at, right? Like if you set it up, I have two-layer fact-checking that I've, I've created, uh, it with my agent.
It's great. It's better than a fact-checker that I'd have to hire. They're not perfect, but humans aren't perfect. I would say the minute it gets to human efficacy, then I'm usually comfortable using something.
[00:41:47] Henrik Werdelin: You seem to have a bunch of, uh, hot takes, so I was curious about some of the things that other people Definitely do not believe that you hold as being truth
[00:41:56] Jim VandeHei: I feel very, very confident.
I don't know this is not, I mean, Silicon Valley would be the popular view, but I think probably in DC a, a minority view. I feel highly, highly confident that this technology will be as good or better than what its creators talk about it being in a two to four year period. I think everything that I see, it's clearing benchmarks quicker than I thought it would.
Uh, the things that you, you apply it to, it seems to be better at this point than I would've thought at this point. I assume that these companies keep throwing nation state amounts of money at this problem, and so they'll only continue to put more compute and more energy and more data into it, and I assume that that means it speeds things up.
It gets better, uh, bigger quicker, uh, than we anticipated. So I don't know if that's an unpopular or popular, but I think that to be true. I think probably the most out there view I might have on AI is I think there's a much higher chance than people realize that in the next six months, one or both of the two parties will be so anti-AI as a party that they call for shutting it down altogether.
I think Bernie Sanders' view could be the dominant view of the entire Democratic Party in a very short period of time. It would not surprise me, by the way, if Republicans join them. I think JD Vance on truth serum is closer to Bernie Sanders on this topic than he might be to Donald Trump. I don't think he'd ever say that publicly, but if you think about the things that interest him, his paranoia about big tech, uh, his, uh, interest in the individual worker, I could see there being a massive, massive backlash.
If I were a tech company right now, I'd be really, really, really, really worried that this political backlash could spiral out of control in the next couple of months. I think data centers were just a small taste of, of how upset, how scared, how worried people are, and I think you have a group of people that are out there publicly talking about these technologies that sound like, um, moronic aliens to your average person.
[00:43:51] Henrik Werdelin: So from a CEO point of view- Yeah ... you know, that we all had that fable moment where- Yeah ... we were all kind of excited for a week, and then suddenly somebody kind of took our best toy away. So true. Do you think there's something that we need to be careful of as CEOs that we kind of start to create all these new workflows, and suddenly, to your point, there might be something where it just gets turned off for a while?
[00:44:13] Jim VandeHei: I think for most people, no. Because the truth is, I was thinking about this this morning, most of the stuff that we've done in terms of automation at Axios so far, you don't need that sophisticated of a model to pull off, right? Mm. The scary stuff happens when you have swarms of agents operating with loose rules in an unregulated environment, uh, doing potentially nefarious activity.
Now, that's not most companies, and most companies don't need that level of sophistication or technology to solve something. Like even the hard stuff, even trying to solve, say, cancer, y- if you think about the corpus of information that it takes to be able to solve cancer, it's actually not that big. That doesn't...
Yes, you might wanna throw a lot of compute at it, but you don't necessarily need a super exotic system to do kind of the rigorous, like, analysis that it's gonna take to figure out what is the, the DNA shift that you need to make or what is the protein you need to put here versus there. And so I, I don't worry a lot about that right now.
I'd be much more worried if I were the big LLMs. I just, I think they're realizing it now, but people don't like them. They don't like their companies, they don't like their products. Uh, uh, Elon's gotta be very careful the way he talks about this. You can't be out there, "Well, don't worry, you're all gonna soon have a robot."
The average person I know would love to punch a robot in the face. It has no desire whatsoever to have a bunch of robots building things for it. They don't want energy abundance so they don't have to work. This is the thing that's most maddening about what he says, this idea like, "Oh, within five to 10 years, there'll be no cost to anything, therefore you won't have to work."
And, and, and I, I keep thinking to myself like, all I know are, are about people. I know a lot about men, 'cause I'm a man And I have a lot of male friends, and the worst damn thing you could do to them is tell them that they're not gonna work. 'Cause the idea that they're gonna go teach themselves poetry or learn Mandarin, no, they're gonna go watch porn, they're gonna get high, they're gonna get drunk, and they're gonna gamble.
Like, that's what men do, and they're gonna fight.
[00:46:15] Jeremy Utley: Yeah.
[00:46:15] Jim VandeHei: Like, the, the idea that we're gonna all become like, "Whoa, man, I'm a Renaissance man"-
[00:46:19] Jeremy Utley: No ... like
[00:46:20] Jim VandeHei: I haven't met that dude.
[00:46:21] Jeremy Utley: Thank you. Jim, you are, you are unhinged in the best way. Have you read, have you read Player Piano, by the way?
[00:46:27] Jim VandeHei: I haven't. I
[00:46:28] Jeremy Utley: will. Vonnegut.
Great, great Vonnegut book- Yeah, yeah ... that I, that comes to my mind often. I mean, the basic premise in short is- I
[00:46:33] Jim VandeHei: bet it's
[00:46:33] Jeremy Utley: true ... you know, 10% of the population are engineers and, and it envisions a world where, uh, you know, basically machines are automating, hence Player Piano, right? Even pianists don't have to work anymore.
But what's interesting is the 90% of the population that Vonnegut imagined this back in the '40s, who don't have to work, they have a higher standard of living than ever before, and they're miserable. Yeah. They're, they're totally miserable, right? And whenever I hear Eyal, I mean, I... He was being interviewed by The Economist editor-in-chief, and he's talking about, you know, how money is irrelevant and how- Yeah
you know, work is irrelevant. And we were actually, Henrik and I were talking with a CEO just yesterday about how right now the doomers have a, a, uh, sufficiently devastating vision of the future, and for whatever reason, the accelerationists or the optimists, whatever you wanna call them- Yeah ... don't have a sufficiently compelling vision of the, of the future.
Yeah. Like right now doomers are winning, I think because, like, extinction is very tangible. Yeah. Right? Never work again, I, I think most people go- Yeah ... "Well, I don't want that," right? And I wonder- Yeah ... are there, are there comp- Maybe this is an interesting place to kind of wrap is, are there compelling visions of the future you've heard that make you, "I wanna sign up for that"?
[00:47:42] Jim VandeHei: I've, I've not heard it articulated. I could articulate a, a version that I think would be appealing to people. Try, please. But the,
[00:47:48] Jeremy Utley: uh- By all means, go.
[00:47:49] Jim VandeHei: But, uh, one, one point on the doomer thing. The other thing is, like, I think that the, the AI companies saying, "Oh, we're gonna cure a strain of cancer, and then people are gonna suddenly love AI."
Here's what I think will happen. I actually think that we will, uh, I do think we'll solve certain forms of cancer, but I think unless you have that form of cancer or you're a survivor of that form of cancer, it's not gonna do a damn thing about how you think about artificial intelligence. Like, until it touches your life, until it actually makes your life better, I don't see how you're ever gonna have an appreciably different view of the technology.
I think that the outcome that, that, that they probably should be talking about and that they should have done from the beginning is talk about the fact that, like, it probably can make people's lives a lot better. I do think that it could almost overnight improve how we teach kids. I think most kids get shitty education, and I think the fact that we could start to figure out how people's brains work, and we can create individual technologies to help tutor them, but you would then need to match that with what I think we could have, which is a big surge of people who wanna be mentors, who wanna be sort of teacher assistants, so that you have that human interaction, but you have a better learning process, so people learn to both socialize, but they also learn to learn much more quickly.
I think if people thought that there were an actual benefit financially to everyone, that if you're gonna be able to use this technology and we're gonna use the profits of this technology to, uh, make food more cost effective for most people, or make healthcare free, uh, for everyone, or take care of some of the curable diseases and costs that, that end up really hampering and hindering families.
I think that would be appealing, uh, to some people. I think if people felt like, okay, this technology is going to make it easier for me to do my job, and maybe I don't have to work 50 or 60 hours a week, I can just work a normal 40 hours a week, and I can use that free time because we have more economic uplift to be able to do things socially, to be able to connect with people.
You've gotta connect the two. Like people, there's a reason... I have a theory that the better AI gets and the better that people think AI is getting, there's gonna be an equal and opposite reaction of people wanting to connect with each other. We're normal people. We like people. We want to socialize. We want to feel that we have value.
We wanna think that our legs and our brains and our eyes a- and our hearts, that they, that they, that they matter more than output of a machine. And so somehow you have to marry those two. You have to show that humanity is still supreme, and that this is just like a really nice technology that might make work better, might make aspects of your life better, and might allow us, if we get it right, to make sure that this beautiful country, this capitalism, that free markets, that these things can prevail for generations to come.
And I think that there's nobody articulating anything like that right now, and I worry, I worry a lot that we're gonna look back and we're gonna say, "Shame on us," that we pissed away a year. We knew a year ago, we knew two years ago what this technology was gonna do. Imagine that smart people had gotten into a room and said, "Okay, we know roughly that what's gonna happen over the next five years.
It might happen in two years, it might happen in four years, but why don't we get people ready? Why don't we sit down, and why don't we create a database of all the new jobs that are being created, and make it super easy, like u- using an Uber app, to go figure out a new job that you might be able to do in a different city that's now being made available because of a technological change?
Why don't we Set aside money to really retrain people if there are jobs that are gonna change. Change it like you see in some Scandinavian countries where they do put a little bit more money into reinventing how people do their jobs, and people tend to not be as fearful of change. Imagine that the best and brightest says, "Listen, we're gonna get academics, labor, uh, some members of Congress, the White House, and we're gonna look at this technology.
We're not gonna regulate it necessarily, but we're gonna pay really close attention to make sure that we're protecting you and your children from any bad consequences, and that we have a mechanism to slow it down to protect people if necessary." Imagine that those same people sat in a room and said, "Okay, let's just plan.
Let's say that Dario Amodei is right and we have massive unemployment. Why don't we have triggers? If there's 5% unemployment, we're gonna do X. If there's 6 un- percent unemployment, we're gonna do Y. But we're gonna get ahead of it, and we're gonna actually show that we have a country of really smart people who can take this moment, which could be a moonshot moment, and we're gonna actually make it a, a net benefit for every single person, not just the rich and powerful and the weird."
All those things could have been done. I think all those things still could be done, but there's nobody in political leadership doing that. There's nobody in tech leadership. Like, the truth is, like, even if that's what Dario or Sam or Sundar wanted to do, they can't. They're in a hyper competition, uh, with a spending literally the, the, the economy of Germany o- on investment within their own companies.
They, they have to focus on that. And so you're left with this void. And like you said, when you have this void, it gets defined by the doomers, or it gets defined by fear. And if we don't figure this out, if we're still doing the same status quo 18 months from now, we're gonna be in a hell of a pickle as a country, 'cause the technology's not gonna get worse, it's gonna get better.
China's not gonna fall further behind us. They're probably gonna start to catch up. And this technology's not gonna feel so distant. It's gonna feel very personal because it's gonna be fully integrated into almost every single company and every single job. So to me, the clock is ticking, and I really hope that somebody stands up.
I hope a group of people stand up and they say, "You know what? This is a pretty cool country." Like, we've solved the Great Depression. We got through the damn Civil War. We left a different continent and started the most unique, interesting financial and governing system known to man. Surely, we can take this technology and make it a net positive for humanity.
But, like, we need that moment. Those people exist. They're not the people that you're seeing on TV. Might not be people that you're electing right now, uh, to public office. But they exist. You know them. You have them on your show all the time. The, the most interesting people in this country. The reason that I, and I'm gonna be done with my hot take rant here.
The, um, the reason that I am fundamentally optimistic long term is that the more I travel, the more I talk to people, the more I'm certain that 80% of this country is normal. Like, they just care. They, they're patriotic. They give a shit. They work hard. They take care of their families. They, they want to, they want to leave things better off for their kids.
They just aren't the people that you ever hear in the public sphere. They're not on X. They're not on MSNBC. They're not on Fox. They're sure as hell not gonna run for public office. They're going to church. They're going to Little League. They don't have time for all this stupid stuff that we get, uh, worked up about.
And that 80%, if you go back through history, they're the ones who rescued us. They're the ones who formed the country. They're the ones who got us through the Civil War. They're the ones who got us out of the Great Depression, right? And I don't know how that happens. I don't know what the mechanism is. I don't know who the people are, but I am certain that that is what will get us through this too
[00:55:02] Henrik Werdelin: I'm grateful that we got you out today- Hot takeover so I can just say it. No, no, it's great. Really, really appreciate it. It might be a good, uh, good time for us to, uh, to call this episode. Perfect. Hey, Jim, thank you so much for, for coming on. Oh, this was fun. Very, very insightful. You know, both your general observation, but also of course because you've done so well with your own, uh, company.
So thank you so much for coming on.
[00:55:21] Jim VandeHei: Thank you, guys. Great podcast. This was a super fun, interesting convo.
[00:55:25] Jeremy Utley: Loved it. Should we call it right there, Henrik? I mean, top 10. What do you think? Listeners, what do you think? Is that a top 10 episode of Beyond the Prompt? I thought it was great.
[00:55:33] Henrik Werdelin: I mean, like maybe the trick is to, uh, just get people on the podcast that are used to being on air that's kinda like maybe-
[00:55:38] Jeremy Utley: That's true.
Yeah ... the trick. He is, as a professional journalist, he does have practice making his opinions known in real time, that's for sure. But I mean, so many insights, right? I'm, I'm blown... Maybe I'll, I'll go first just to give you a chance to collect your thoughts.
[00:55:52] Henrik Werdelin: Yes, please.
[00:55:53] Jeremy Utley: I loved his comment. Y- he calls himself an AI lab rat, and we can link it in the show notes, but he wrote a great article about, you know, confessions of an AI lab rat.
That's where the conversation started. I love that he said, "Raise your hand if you're a lab rat," you know? And he said it's kind of the smartest thing that they've done since the founding of the organization that created the enablement team, enabled folks to kind of build automations for others. Love that.
I, I also love, love, love the mechanism that he described of hiring AI fellows-
[00:56:21] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm ...
[00:56:21] Jeremy Utley: who are basically report directly to him, who are there to build stuff that he dreams up. Isn't it
[00:56:25] Henrik Werdelin: surprised of that seal team that we talked about quite a few times? It's very seldom I hear CEOs actually
[00:56:31] Jeremy Utley: do that. Dude, dude, how many have we heard?
Very few, yeah.
[00:56:34] Henrik Werdelin: Very few. And
[00:56:35] Jeremy Utley: it's just- And it's like directly over complicated ... directly report to me, build the thing that I envisioned, keep me abreast of the latest developments. That to me, if you're a CEO listening to this show, hire two fellows.
[00:56:45] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. And consider how many, much money a CEO uses in other things.
I mean, like this is not gonna be the biggest post on their budget.
[00:56:52] Jeremy Utley: No-brainer. No-brainer. Um, I thought that was super cool. I also loved, and then I'll, I'll hand the floor to you for a second. I loved the fact that if he hears about something someone has built, he instantly emails them and says, "Let's have a Zoom."
I think that's such a brilliant Way to, one, learn and stay on the cutting edge as a leader, but also two, to celebrate and honor experimentation. And then three, be able to kind of put your resources behind scaling up the stuff that actually has potential. I feel like there's so many layers of kind of bureaucracy and politics that usually get in the way of a leader seeing something that's really interesting and worthy of resourcing, and that c- like he just...
I don't know what you call it, a skip level? That's just like a skip level email. Like, the habit of a skip level email is such a cool tactic everyone should steal.
[00:57:45] Henrik Werdelin: Two things for me to add. One is short-term planning. Hear that a lot. Right. Um, I feel most organizations have, uh, are not used to that yet. And so I think a lot of people get a little bit whiplashed by their CEO coming in and saying, "Okay, remember the plan we had last week or last month?
We're not having that plan anymore because something in the world showed up that made me change my perspective." You know, but Jensen and other kind of people that seem to be doing a good job leading their companies are doing that now. So I think it's just an interesting kind of like leadership style that seem to be, uh Yeah, and being embedded into a bunch of organizations, and he of course mentioned it too.
The second thing, and, and we've talked about this in a, a few episodes, but it, it is just jarring that the story of AI, it right now has basically the what goes wrong narrative- Mm-hmm ... pretty locked down.
[00:58:37] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm.
[00:58:37] Henrik Werdelin: And the what goes right, if the story there is it'll cure cancer and you won't have to work, that seems to be not really as appealing as, you know, like the doomer story.
[00:58:50] Jeremy Utley: And-
[00:58:51] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:58:51] Jeremy Utley: Or it's not as visceral, it's not as tangible, it's not as relatable, you know?
[00:58:55] Henrik Werdelin: And then y- the last thing I was just like thinking about and didn't ask him about was those things are, 'cause it came up in a conversation we had the other day too, is that it's the, the divide about the people that are really into it, that understands it and know then how to use it, but also understand what it might lead to in the short term, and then the rest, right?
You know, like the most of the other people that, you know, as you were saying the other day, goes, "I'm not even sure I should subscribe to this thing 'cause I, you know, I, I Googled asked my own name into ChatGPT and it kind of like made up stuff, so it clearly doesn't work." Which I think in, you know, that world is really there too, right?
[00:59:33] Jeremy Utley: Hmm. Uh, I, I, I think if we clip a part of this show, I mean, his kind of, you call... Uh, what did he say? He said it was a hot take at the end, but this whole commentary about shame on us if we, if we waste a year and we don't make the most of this moment, I thought that was really inspiring. I think it, it's absolutely true what he's saying, that most people are normal people doing Little League and going to church, and they're not the people you see on the news, but they are the people who keep our country...
I realize you're in Denmark right now, but as a New Yorker, I'll call you. You know, our country- I absolutely- ... working ...
[01:00:07] Henrik Werdelin: subscribe to that ...
[01:00:08] Jeremy Utley: you know?
[01:00:08] Henrik Werdelin: Yes. Yeah, for
[01:00:09] Jeremy Utley: sure. And- For sure ... and we're not... Uh, and I would say also, and you and I have talked about this in the past as well- When I spend time in the middle, you know, I, I do keynotes in, you know, I'm, I'm going to Ohio twice in the next couple weeks, right?
I'm going to Texas, I'm going to Florida, I'm going to Illinois, right? And when I talk to normal people, they're, they have very, you know, normal concerns. They have very normal hesitations. And then they have, they're not so extremist, nearly as extremist in regards, I mean, to any political issue, but in regards to AI, as the media would have us believe.
And I think having a connection to... We talked with another founder who I don't think this episode will be out by the time we release it, but he talked about he's in Missouri, you know, and he's dealing with folks in Missouri who are just kind of, they're, they're living their lives. And so I think it is in, in the world of kind of AI hype and AI doom and AI news, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that most people are just kind of living their lives.
[01:01:02] Henrik Werdelin: And there isn't a lot of people that operate in that middle space. I was doing a keynote this week, and I couldn't help feeling at the end of it that what I was talking about required quite a lot of detail and knowledge about AI for it to be valuable.
[01:01:18] Jim VandeHei: Hmm.
[01:01:18] Henrik Werdelin: And that maybe it was a little bit on the headier side for the audience.
It was just smart, capable people, like, but just not very into AI.
[01:01:27] Jim VandeHei: Hmm.
[01:01:27] Henrik Werdelin: Um, and, and it's kind of interesting. It, it does seem that the world now is operate between this very shallow narrative around AI that we see some places, and then this very in-depth kind of like information that happens on this show and on X and other, other places.
And so, uh, yeah, it's fascinating to see how we bridge those two worlds and, and maybe to your point, like how we don't waste a year kind of just keeping talking to those two echo chambers.
[01:01:53] Jeremy Utley: Lastly, I have to, if you're willing to include this, I have to give a shout-out to my GSB classmate, Michelle Prol, for introducing us to Jim.
Thank you, Michelle. If you are one of mine or Henrik's beloved friends who listens to this show and have a recommendation and a connection to interesting people like Jim, make the connection, okay? We can't do it on our owns. It takes a village to raise a podcast.
[01:02:16] Henrik Werdelin: And with that note, I've noticed that there's only one thing left, and that is to say bye-bye.