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

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1:25maybe 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 going to have a pretty healthy media diet. That's the co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim Vandehei. I wanted to talk to Jim today because he recently co-authored an essay that stopped me in my tracks. The piece made a strong case for why the U.S. 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.

2:10True to his style of so-called smart brevity, Jim is knowledgeable, accessible, and concise. This is Rapid Response. Let's dive in.

2:32I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Jim Vandeheye, the CEO and co-founder of Axios. Jim, thanks for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So 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 really questioned the media drumbeat that America is hopelessly divided. And it certainly caught my attention. 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 awful tribal warfare.

3:30And the truth is, it's not real that 70 to 80 percent of people that you come across are very normal people who are just trying to live their lives, navigate the complexities of your day-to-day challenges are basically good people who would, you know, help you out if there's something wrong or shovel your driveway if you're caught in a snowstorm. And it got us thinking a lot about just the new media ecosystem. And what has changed over the last 15 years in particular, really the last five, it's that because of social media, because of how the algorithms work, and because of the type of people that get the most followers that therefore kind of rise to the top of algorithms, it's usually the most provocative people.

4:14And it tends to be the most provocative people ideologically. And so it gives off this perception that everybody thinks that way, that every Republican believes that Trump is the second coming of Christ or that Joe Biden, that every Democrat thinks that he's like a young, vibrant little whippersnapper. When in fact, like, no, 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 kind of the fundamental rights of being an American, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. And 90 percent of Republicans, 90 percent of Democrats all basically agree in the same tenets that kind of make this country what it is.

4:54And so we wrote the piece just to remind people that all this hangdog behavior and kind of dogging on America, it's a little bit disconnected from the reality that you're living in. And I just noticed it even with myself some days now wondering, is that real? Are people really that worked up? How many people are storming across the border? Are they really trying to vote illegally? Well, could they vote illegally? Sounds hard. If I came here illegally, would I vote illegally knowing it's a felony? Like it's just stuff that it's kind of like, I always go back to my Wisconsin roots. Like if it sounds kind of like BS, it probably is.

5:28I mean, the impression of what you're saying is like the polarization that we're hearing about so much 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 top 20 stories based on traffic on any given day are about politics. So everybody's covering politics. And when you cover politics, you tend to cover the conflict of politics, which feels like politics is just all conflict all the time.

6:09And it is if you're a professional politician or if you're part of the political class. But for most people, it's just more complicated. I had just gotten back from doing about five or six speeches in Wichita and Fargo and a couple other places, mainly very like meat-eating Trump supporters in the room. And obviously they come in, they're like, this guy's from the media, from DC, I must be a communist. And I just noticed that almost instantly, once they can kind of tell you're a normal human being, you can have a very rational conversation with them. They understand the flaws of Donald Trump. One of the problems is you have a two-party system, right?

6:47So you only have two choices. So you become tribal because it's either your team or their team. When in fact, I think most people wish there were a couple more choices that might better match their actual politics. But when they are all they really have is Biden or Trump, it's going to be Biden or Trump. I mean, 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 looking at the at the numbers and sort of the reality of it, that it's maybe not quite as bad as, I don't know, as we feel like it is?

7:26You have to put some of this in perspective. I've been thinking a lot about this with the protests that you're seeing at university campuses about the conflict in the Middle East. And you see these pro-Palestinian protesters and you're like, oh my God, these campuses look like they're on fire and everybody's protesting. And yet, no, it's like kind of the same number of people who are worked up about a topic that you probably would find at any point in history about different topics on different campuses. And even this coverage of the people who are leading these colleges, you'd think they're all, every professor is some left-wing lunatic who's trying to indoctrinate their students with some crazy left-wing propaganda, when in fact, like, no, most teachers are going into the classroom and they're teaching biology and they're teaching journalism.

8:12They don't have time or interest 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 kid's head. So another area that there's been a lot of hype, certainly a lot of attention to lately, has been AI. And Axios was recently profiled in the New York Times about how AI is impacting your plans. And I actually thought it was a rather clever effort on your part because your plans aren't about deploying AI. Instead, they're kind of at the opposite.

8:48Yeah, I mean, right now, 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 OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Amazon, they're all right, that this is going to be this crazy technology that's as smart, if not smarter, than humans and could displace a lot of the work that we do. If that's all true, for me as someone running a media company, what does that mean? How would people be getting news and information?

9:23And the conclusions we came to are, listen, even if that's the case, people are still going to need human expertise, human sourcing. In an artificial and virtual world, people are going to want in-person connectivity around topics that they have a shared passion around. So we're building a membership program around our most famous journalist. And so it was very much us just trying to adapt to where we think the world's going. The New York Times did do a piece on it. 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 in how people relate to news and information.

9:59What 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 going to have a personal assistant and that this personal assistant is going to know about the topics you care about. And it's going to know about when you care about them. And it's going to know about how you want that information ingested. Maybe you want it sung to you by Taylor Swift. Maybe you want it delivered in bullet points. Maybe you want it longer form, more lyrical, in a more poetic style. And it's going to be able to build that news and information for you and probably even anticipate a little bit about stuff that's out there that you might be interested in.

10:43And so my guess is that's what the world's going to look like. And I just want to make sure that Axios as a media company, that we're well ahead of that change in consumer behavior so that we can continue to have a durable company that can outlive us. And what's going to make you stand out in that kind of engagement is the special things that your people will bring to it, as opposed to the special things that your technology will bring to it. Yeah, in all likelihood, 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.

11:21We'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 going to figure out a way to make money off of that. Is that an ad or is the personal assistant company paying me to ingest proprietary intelligence that we're picking up? I don't know, but there will be a business model around it. And I just want to make sure that we're not asleep at the wheel. And you're not particularly wary about your content being scraped to train AI?

11:57I mean, I'm a pretty practical guy. Like I try to control the things I can control. Like it's been scraped and they'll keep scraping it. And would I like for us to get paid for it? Do I feel like if you're making a product that's derivative of our IP that was expensive to be able to create, should we be compensated for it? I do. Are we big enough to be the one that takes open AI to the Supreme Court to figure out what fair use laws are going to apply to content? The New York Times is doing that for us. So we'll see how that stuff plays out. Hopefully we'll get paid by some of these models for our content.

12:31But 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 thanks to the benevolence of four tech 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 sundae. Like, okay, we'll take it. We're not going to 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.

13:05He 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, Van de Heij 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. Stay with us.

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14:33And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

15:16So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Before the break, co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei explained why the U.S. may not be as polarized as the media wants us to believe. Now, VandeHei dissects why certain other high-profile media companies are struggling and why the days of business leaders speaking out on political issues may be behind us. Let's jump back in. I wanted to ask you about BuzzFeed. I've had Jonah Peretti on the show a couple of times, the CEO and founder of BuzzFeed. Super sharp guy, been ahead of the curve in media on a lot of things.

16:03Last year, he talked to me extensively about how he planned to use AI in content production. But they seem to be just floundering. Do you have a sense about why that is? Yeah, I wasn't at the company, so I don't know the thinking behind some of the decisions they made. But they were a business that was built in the internet era around social media. And they relied solely on the benevolence of other people paying them for content. And when daddy closed the wallet, Jonah's out of money. And that's a problem. Like it was too reliant on other companies to do the work for them. And I think ever since then, they've struggled to figure out what is BuzzFeed.

16:44They basically shut down BuzzFeed News. So I don't really think of it as a news company anymore. I think of it as a content company. And, you know, their stock is at 40 cents or whatever, you know, so they're sucking some wind. But, like, 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 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?

17:21And hard to get audience, hard to get trust, hard to keep audience, hard to keep trust. So there's a lot of pieces that have to break your way to work. So I'm curious what you think about the fracas at NPR, assertions that the news coverage hasn't been even handed or is otherwise distorted. Has that sparked any conversations inside Axios about how you're doing things? It has not. I mean, I obviously read about it and followed it. Like, 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 leans left and they have a liberal sensibility to them.

18:03They do a lot of good work in addition to that. Listen, they're publicly funded. So Republicans have every right to raise concerns with it and people have every right to hold them accountable for it. But no, you know, I think people who work at Axios kind of know what we're doing and we don't pay a lot of attention to things that are getting other people spooled up. We don't have an opinion page. We try not to have an ideology. We try to be very clinical in our coverage. And as long as we do that, we're controlling our destiny. I don't I try not to get too worked up about what others do. And the goal for you is to be neutral?

18:36Like, 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 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 want to do is have really smart people who have authentic subject matter expertise telling you something smart, telling you something urgent, telling you something important, and doing it as efficiently as possible. And if we do that, you'll reward us with more time and attention.

19:12It's just the way that it's worked 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, regardless of your position here, if you take a job here, our ask of you is to not practice politics in a public forum, meaning I don't want you popping off on social media. We don't want you giving money to political candidates. We don't want you endorsing political candidates. And the reason that we do it is I just want people who are persuadable to real truth to take us seriously and to give us a chance. And if we do anything to jeopardize that bond, like if you start to suspect that Jim has an agenda or that Axios is not a worthy source of information and I lose you, then we all suffer.

20:00Well, I liked 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-leaning, 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 my own impulses. For sure, right? Like we all have like our biases and our beliefs, but 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.

20:36I find it much more interesting to find someone who has a different view of the media than I do. And I probably learned 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 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.

21:11maybe 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 going to 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 heat of the 2004 presidential election. And I remember 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.

21:45You know, it was like, it was trying to be 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 about the customer. Like, what do they need? Not what do we want? And listen, you don't want to just cover one side and not the other. You want to give people a full buffet of what's happening in politics. But that doesn't mean that for every Republican article, there's a Democratic article or that everything that Donald Trump says, if it's nonsense, and maybe he's just pumping out more nonsense today than Joe Biden is, and it's fine to say that.

22:24And by the way, it's also fine not to cover the nonsense, right? If someone says the same outrageous thing every single day, are we really helping by amplifying that it was said again and again and again? Maybe just ignore it and wait until there's something really substantial that someone is saying, and then give people some context of why that is important, why it matters. 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.

22:59Are leaders and all of us wise to be wary about taking a position in an environment like this? I think it depends on who is the leader and what is the company. At the end of the day, let's level set. You're a company. Your job is to build a product. Like if you're Nike, you're selling me a shoe. I don't care what you think about foreign affairs or your position on immigration. Like either you got a really good shoe or you got a crappy shoe. And that's going to decide whether or not I buy it. So then you as the CEO of that company have to decide, like, are there topics that really go to the core of who we are and who our customer is?

23:38Do we want to explain ourselves and we want to take a position? If that flows naturally from your product and your customer base, sure, go do it. But this idea that all these CEOs got trapped into 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 CEOs should take positions on everything. You're there to do a job. And I think it is fine for CEOs or managers to say, that's outside of work. We got a job to do. And I want to make sure this is a great place for you to work. I want to make sure it's a safe place for you to work.

24:12I want to make sure that there isn't hostility. But ultimately, you're here to do a job. So then what happens at Google is you actually had a very small number of people. Remember, it's a massive company. It's a nation state. And he had a small number of people who were protesting while working in a way that was really making it harder for them to do work. And they said, to hell with you. You can't work here. You're violating your job responsibilities. And so, listen, you have every right to protest and they have every right to fire you. They do. It's just that some people don't love that answer, but they do.

24:46We'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?

25:19What are its key lessons? So the book is very much written for leaders, managers, college grads, people who are trying to think about how to navigate the tough stuff of work and life. And basically it's probably 60-some lessons inside of the book, but they're all written in smart brevity, all with action-filled, like, here's five things you can do if you're dealing with a bad boss type advice. And so there's just a lot of, like, I think very practical advice written in kind of my no BS style. I just always say kind of what's on my mind. I'm respectful about it, but it's written the way that I talk.