Axios

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Jim VandeHei, Co-Founder and CEO of Axios and Co-Founder of Politico, joins us to explain why he believes the open web will largely die within 2 to 5 years as LLMs become the main way people get their information, why unique, human-created content will soar in value once everyone has access to Einstein-level AI, and how his Simplify framework helps people delete the busy work that eats up roughly 25% of every week.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

* Why trust scores for media will never work

* Why Jim can’t understand how anyone is a solo founder, and how he has worked with his co-founders: Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz for nearly 20 years

* Who gets paid when LLMs train on creators’ work: the courts, licensing or subscriptions?

* The plan to save local news with AI, one community at a time

* Why Axios fires talented people who aren’t good people culturally, and what “killers with humility” means

* The Simplify framework: how to stop wasting 25% of your week

Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

Download the transcript 👇

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Jim VandeHei(2:11) The State of Media Today(4:09) Will We Have Trust Scores?(6:48) Are We in a Better Place Today?(11:08) How Will Creators Be Compensated by LLM Models?(13:32) Timely vs. Timeless Content(17:51) The Opportunity for Creators(19:10) AI Summaries(23:32) How Will Creators Make Money?(25:14) The Opportunity for Local News(31:25) Inside Axios(35:25) How to Navigate Tough Days(39:09) Surrounding Yourself with Great People(47:46) What Makes Dyslexic Founders Tick(49:14) 50% More, with 50% Less(52:22) How to Prioritize Your Life and Work(56:23) Ollie Joins as Jim's Chief of Staff

Lessons from this episode with Jim

1. How Mike Allen’s humility shaped Axios’s culture, and why what a leader does is instantly contagious Jim credits his co-founder Mike Allen with the company’s culture. Mike brings cupcakes to events and stays behind to clean up so the cleaning crew doesn’t have to.

* If the most famous, powerful person at the company has no ego, nobody else has an excuse to have one.

* Whether you lead one person or many, your behavior spreads fast: treat people well and they will treat people well.

* Bad behavior spreads the same way, and he says it will move like cancer if you allow it.

2. Why AI companies pay creators nothing today, and why Jim believes they will have to compensate them Jim says AI companies currently believe fair use lets them take whatever they want off the internet, and that legally they might be right. He argues that AI still needs new information, new ideas and human expression, so it will have to pay for them.

* He expects the courts to decide over the next one to four years how much power AI companies have to use other people’s work.

* Whether the companies are morally right is a separate question from whether they are legally right.

* He sees three possible routes to payment: paying people to produce content, licensing deals, or subscriptions built into your personal LLM.

3. Why unique, human-made content will soar in value when everyone has Einstein-level AI Jim says he works under the assumption that within three years, everyone will have access to Einstein-level intelligence on every topic. In that world, he argues, content that is truly unique becomes more valuable, not less.

* He compares it to everyone having equal access to a trivia contest when Google is in front of them.

* People are wired to want survival and also something other people don’t have, so demand for differentiated content won’t go away.

* Commodity content that isn’t vital or useful to anyone will have no value.

4. Why your media diet is your responsibility, and why there is no hero in this story other than you Jim argues that no one can credibly score information for you, so you have to take personal responsibility for what you consume. He treats your media diet like your food diet.

* Nobody would agree on who should score media for trust, so it comes down to the individual.

* Find at least one source that tries to get closest to the truth in a non-ideological way.

* Done properly, he says you can develop almost a bionic brain, with access to the smartest people on any topic.

5. Why you learn more in a year at a startup than in eight years of college Jim advises anyone young to join or start a startup, and describes it as a living experiment built on the assumption that you’re going to fail.

* He says you learn more in a month at a startup than in five years of a regular workplace.

* Most startups fail, but you learn about yourself, about fear, and about what you want and don’t want in people.

* The pain builds emotional intelligence beyond intellectual intelligence, and gives you a more panoramic view of people and the workplace.

6. Why Jim thinks it has never been a better time to be aliveJim says he doesn’t share the pessimism of other people, and believes a lot of them are living in a dark parallel universe. He argues that by most standards, this is the best time in history to be alive.

* As a species, he believes we have handled bigger problems than this one and will figure it out.

* In his view, most people today are richer, more mobile, more educated, healthier and living longer than at any point in history.

* He says that almost everything he lists is not debatable.

7. The 10-minute exercise for deciding what to focus on: write down the three things you’d want to be true about your lifeJim answers how you get down to the two or three things that really matter. He starts with a simple exercise you can do even without reading the book.

* Imagine you’re at the end of your life and write down the three things you’d want to say were true.

* Use them as a North Star for decisions like taking a job or learning a new skill, then repeat the exercise for your career.

* If you’re new to a job, work out the three things you need to do to crush it, then check with your boss that you’re on the same page.

Where to find and connect with us

Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsythFollow Jim on X: https://x.com/JimVandeHeiVisit Axios: http://axios.com

Jim's new book: https://www.smartbrevity.com/simplify

Our partner for today's episode - Harmonic: Your go-to startup provider: https://harmonic.ai

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