00:03:08.020I was reflecting, I saw an old article literally this weekend from Tom Freeman.
00:03:12.520I think it was from probably a decade or so ago and maybe even longer when he's writing that book, The World is Flat.
00:03:18.740And he challenged every politician to wake up and ask and answer the following question every single day.
00:03:25.500And he says it's the question we don't answer.
00:03:27.620And I thought in the context of all the work you're doing and what this book brings to the fore, particularly around the anxiety with artificial intelligence, I'd ask you the following.
00:04:05.000And the reason that I feel that way is mainly because of artificial intelligence, a little bit because of politics, but mainly because artificial intelligence to me is seeping into every company, every job, every screen at a velocity we've never before witnessed.
00:04:22.120And I don't see any scenario where it slows. And in fact, every scenario that I can think of, it intensifies and it has a dramatic effect, even if in the moment it doesn't feel that dramatic.
00:04:33.500and it's going to hit at such a velocity
00:05:28.540I think about the players versus the game.
00:05:30.800Do you think, I mean, you know, I think about in the context you're saying media and in business, the leadership vacuum, obviously, even in politics.
00:05:40.960But is that, I mean, is that because of the quality of the individuals or is it the structures, the system that's been created, the algorithms, the rage, the incentives for bad behavior?
00:06:25.500it feels more trivial, and it feels like the most competent people are not on the public stage.
00:06:32.040Whereas I fundamentally believe, and I genuinely really want to hear your take on this,
00:06:36.840I firmly believe, the reason that I'm rooted deeply in long-term optimism is that I don't
00:06:42.240think my view of humanity has changed. I think 80% of people in this country are good people.
00:06:47.240They do the right thing for the right reason, even in difficult environments. You don't necessarily
00:06:51.920see them represented on your screen. You don't necessarily see them showing up within your
00:06:56.720algorithm. And they might not necessarily be on Fox or MSNBC, but they fundamentally do exist.
00:07:03.380But you have this mismatch because people lost trust in institutions. And so institutional
00:07:08.940leaders have kind of lowered their profile or had their profile lowered. And then in that vacuum,
00:07:14.380it's been filled by people who are often loudmouthed or they're provocative or they're
00:07:19.000they're an extremist in some format. And my hope is, and my belief is that politics is like
00:07:26.220markets. They ultimately correct. They ultimately self-correct. And so my hope is, is that a
00:07:33.780response to kind of the politics we've had of the last, say, eight to 10 years is that people are
00:07:38.600realizing, and I think this is true, that we have a lot of competence, but we've never needed
00:07:43.440competence more than ever. You can't solve AI. You can't steer AI. You can't protect against a
00:07:49.760biological threat or a chemical threat. You can't combat a cyber attack if you don't actually have
00:07:55.460people who are highly, highly competent, who have deep experience and have studied these topics and
00:08:02.360really understand how to be able to respond to those. And I think in all likelihood, it might
00:08:08.420taken a national emergency for a real resurgence of this. But I believe it's there. And I believe
00:08:14.060that if you, and the reason I, what I tell young people, and your kids are a little younger than
00:08:17.540mine, but what I tell young people that is, if you go back to the history of the country,
00:08:22.460we create a lot of chaos and then we clean it up and we always leave ourselves a little bit better.
00:08:27.880And that's kind of the nature of us as a people, us as a country. And so technology and politics
00:08:34.280right now is extremely messy and in some ways like we've created a real mess but i believe in
00:08:39.320the human capacity to to restore that to fix that and to ultimately leave us better off i don't know
00:08:44.600how we get there and right now i understand why some people feel hopeless i'm long-term not
00:08:49.840hopeless because i've seen us do it before yeah without taking the bait and going down the rabbit
00:08:54.580i could not agree with you more and i'm curious just yeah in sort of challenging you back i'm
00:08:59.100curious just from the newsroom perspective in all of your history i mean obviously political but
00:09:03.540at Axios today. In terms of how you imbue that mindset, that construct, which I deeply agree
00:09:11.040with, and I think the overwhelming majority of people agree with, how do you do it in the context
00:09:15.040of what you're feeding every single day? I mean, the challenge you have in this market to break
00:09:22.480news, to just, you know, and you're writing a book about simplifying, but part of that is also about
00:09:28.000going faster and moving with the speed that is required at this moment, obviously, in a world
00:09:34.340of AI. Yeah, I mean, the way that we've personally attacked it at Axios is we don't have an editorial
00:09:40.360page. We ask our reporters, we hire people with domain expertise. We ask them not to pop off on
00:09:45.600social media, whatever. We're one small player in a big ocean. But I do think that works. I think
00:09:52.100gains the trust of really influential readers. I think we're at this weird point and like you're
00:09:58.520living it, right? You're a governor and you're doing a podcast. Like we've got this weird
00:10:02.320moment where I feel real sympathy for the consumer because people always ask me,
00:10:08.640is this, is media worse than ever or better than ever? And I'm like, yep, yes. It's both
00:10:14.160simultaneously. There's more good, high quality content available to you and me or anybody of
00:10:19.500the 5 billion people around the world that have internet connectivity than at any point in humanity
00:10:23.560across any topic at any time of day, at the same time sits next to that a lot of pollution, a lot0.99
00:10:29.760of garbage, a lot of shit, a lot of stuff you should never see, should never want to see, stuff0.99
00:10:33.860that plays to your worst impulses. They sit in equality. And unfortunately, the only hero in1.00
00:10:40.920this story, at least for the foreseeable future, is you, the individual. You have to make the
00:10:46.120decision, which of those paths am I going to go down? Who am I going to follow? What am I going
00:10:50.140to read? What am I going to watch? And you have to do that against a backdrop of these algorithms
00:10:55.960that know the poisons of your brain better than you do. And they play to your worst desires,
00:11:00.760your worst impulses. I will say, having now traveled to a bunch of colleges recently,
00:11:05.860I'm now a little more optimistic than I was a year or two ago, because I feel like young people now
00:11:11.960realize it. They're still staring at their damn phone like I am, but they realize there's a0.97
00:11:17.340perversion to it. They realize they shouldn't be doing it. They realize deep in their soul,0.99
00:11:23.200something needs to give, something needs to change. And you don't really get change until
00:11:28.480you have this realization that like, man, something's wrong, right? And I always liken
00:11:33.880it to this idea of like, we've kind of been on this bender. We've all been drinking way more
00:11:38.060than we knew that we should, and we know now, okay, we got to sober up. Well, we actually now
00:11:42.580got to quit drinking, and we got to do the steps to getting sober. But my hope is that that's where
00:11:48.500it leads, because you can't, you live this as a governor, you live it as a candidate,
00:11:55.040you can't extract technology from politics, from media, really from business. They're all
00:12:00.720interlinked in really complex ways. And so to fix whatever needs to be fixed, you kind of have to
00:12:08.440fix it all. And that's why I really think we're probably at the cusp of a moment where it's going
00:12:14.460to require a societal fix. I don't think whoever you wave a magic wand and you get the best president
00:12:20.340you want, you get President Gavin Newsom, you can't really change shit unless the other parts0.96
00:12:26.600of the system change. And I write a newsletter to business, to CEOs. So I have thousands of CEOs0.97
00:12:33.000that I write to every week, just about what's happening with AI and politics and how to think
00:12:37.060about things. But one of the things I try to stress with them is in some ways, if the individual's the
00:12:42.400hero of the media story right now, the only person who can make those determinations,
00:12:46.580business leaders are really the only people in positions of power where people still respect
00:12:52.380them if they work at their individual company. And I think all of us that lead people, whether
00:12:57.460you lead a state or whether you lead a 500-person company like I do at Axios, we need to take a more
00:13:03.160traditional view of leadership and the responsibility that comes with that. And it's not just that we
00:13:10.000get money and power. It's that we get to shape how people think and how people behave. We get to model
00:13:16.060how people look at like just look at politics in the last like six 70 years not to critique
00:13:22.040not even just dump on trump but like the way that the the language that he uses and the personal
00:13:27.140nature of it look how quickly that filtered into the white house then through washington
00:13:31.780now everywhere and i've noticed that you probably noticed with your staff running at the governor's
00:13:37.840mansion like how quickly what you and i do gets emulated almost instantly and that's true of any
00:13:43.620person in any position of power, whether you're running a sports team or a country.
00:13:48.160No. So look, society becomes how we behave. We are our behaviors. And so I think it's important.
00:13:55.280There's that old sort of, I don't know if it's true or not, but the billboard down at the 405
00:14:00.700freeway in Los Angeles that says you're not stuck in traffic. And you go, you know, it takes about
00:14:06.58020 minutes, you get a hundred yards closer to the billboard and below the blazing title of you're
00:14:12.000not stuck in traffic. In parentheses, in small letters, it says, you are traffic, which is
00:14:17.300emotion, right? When you always say, honey, I'm stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Society, again,
00:14:21.640becomes how we behave. And so I totally agree with that. That said, I agree with you on business
00:14:26.840leaders. I don't know if you can see them here, but I've got all these damn knee pads that I'm0.97
00:14:31.600selling on my Patriot site for all those CEOs that are selling out, for the corporations, for many in0.93
00:14:37.940the media that sold out to the current powers that be to law firms that are selling out.
00:14:42.820So what the hell is going on in that context? These folks know better. And what you just
00:14:48.320described, I agree with, but they're not doing better. And they're not modeling that better
00:14:54.320behavior. Why? Power is seductive. I think tribalism is seductive. I think we've not
00:15:02.280elevated and rewarded people who actually show great character. They're out there. I know who
00:15:07.660you're talking about and there's people that i'm i'm amazed at people that i know in this town who
00:15:12.100are friends of mine yeah really smart people and they say things that i know that they believe to0.83
00:15:17.080be total shit and and they do things that i know that them as an individual they don't want to
00:15:22.960model that and there's just something corrupting about that particularly when you get to the very0.99
00:15:27.040very top and that's why i tend to think about whatever is going to fix this is kind of bottom
00:15:32.440up it is like it might be people in small businesses and they might not be people running
00:15:36.500the big three tech companies, but it might be the next layer. At some point, we're going to
00:15:41.520realize this, that there's a reason that there's certain values that have sustained throughout
00:15:46.440history, because it actually is a good thing to be honorable. It's a good thing to be honest. It's
00:15:51.500a good thing to do the hard thing, even when people aren't looking. And I truly believe that
00:15:56.380these things, they ebb and they flow. And I believe that there is a resiliency to us that
00:16:01.020we don't give ourselves credit for. And I'm not diminishing. The critique when I say this is,
00:16:05.160oh yeah, whenever you're either you're privileged or you're on drugs. But I don't think I am
00:16:10.820because I do spend a ton of time trying to talk to people at different levels of business. And I,
00:16:14.640and I try to watch people. The test that I give is like when people say, well, I think most people
00:16:20.740are, and I'm curious if you think, I think most people are good. I asked this question at a dinner
00:16:25.300party the other night, but most people said, no, they actually think most people are bad. And I'm
00:16:29.280like, oh man, I hate that. And the reason I think most people are good, the test I give people is,
00:16:34.200well think about in a given year how many people you run into that you can make an appraisal of
00:16:38.640their character and you you get to define the attributes of what you think is good but we
00:16:42.700probably uh congregate around similar ones and most people say i had 90 95 percent of people
00:16:47.980that i personally come into contact with are good people they're doing the right thing i don't see
00:16:52.040them in my algorithm i don't see them on tv shows well really you think you just happen to be the
00:16:56.660one person who ran into a sampling of 90 or normally that's most people but to your point
00:17:02.180These people who are getting power, like they're not exhibiting power and they're not, I don't think they're respecting power.
00:17:09.260Like ultimately we're going to be judged for how we carry ourselves.
00:17:12.900And, you know, I guess the older I get, the more I think about this.
00:17:16.000But I think it's such a privilege to be in a position of power where people listen to us and want to emulate the things that we say and do.
00:17:24.480And I just, I hope, and I hope that, and I think this is happening, that there will be a reaction to whatever we've gone through for the last, it's not just 10 years, it's not just Trump at all.
00:17:35.120This is a 20-year slide away from institutional respect.
00:17:39.760We could dissect the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church, unions, business, especially big, big business, tech, and then we could look at politics.
00:17:49.420But it's all those institutions that have declined simultaneously.
00:20:13.580that it was going to amplify those, you know, the more positive and enlightened voices and not necessarily create this polarization that we've experienced.
00:20:23.000And I got that wrong. I think a lot of us did. And, you know, back in 2010, you know, 2011, when we had this sort of, you know, do no harm, break no glass mindset about what these platforms ultimately can do.
00:20:36.660sort of these armies of David's construct. But you know, something that I started, I talked about
00:20:43.520in the book, we went from social, local, crowd, cloud. And I remember talking about going from
00:20:49.060search to suggest, which was sort of the, you know, just leaning into not gen AI, but AI at
00:20:55.620the moment and what algorithms meant. And a guy came out a few years later with a book called
00:21:00.300Filter Bubble. And I was like, wow, I remember being at a TED Talk and, you know, this fact that
00:21:04.860we're in these filters and all of a sudden it goes to the answer to your
00:21:07.760question. I think these algorithms and how, you know,
00:21:10.740it was seeking and searching us as opposed to the other way around.
00:21:16.180And, you know, led me to this podcast, Jim, where, you know,
00:21:19.200my son was telling me all about this guy, you know,
00:21:22.360that was organizing all the college campuses, Charlie Kirk.
00:21:26.320And I'm like, how the hell do you know about Charlie?
00:21:28.380And it was fine. Charlie was finding him on his Chromebook.
00:21:32.460And so were the Tate brothers. And I was like, what the hell's going on? And so in some ways, you know, you talk about the power that we have as individuals. I worry that we're powerless increasingly in a world that's driven by these algorithms, that's driven by the amplification of rage and fear and how much we do get and receive in these devices that become our consciousness and the power of just a handful of people.
00:22:01.140to determine what we think, how we feel, who we love, who we hate.
00:22:07.140I think that's right. And I definitely, there's parts of me who share that fear. And certainly
00:22:12.180there's tons of evidence about all the downside effects. And I probably would agree on the
00:22:16.800downside effects. I will say that those same technologies could be used differently, right?
00:22:21.840They can be used to organize. They can be used, the thesis of your book, it could be used for
00:22:26.380good, right? And it's not too late. I think people, really, it's only since COVID that people have
00:22:31.800really, really understood the power of algorithms and really understood that they were no longer
00:22:37.120in control, that there was something in the background that was really messing with their
00:22:41.300minds. That realization now is in full. And I think you're starting to see people have much
00:22:46.800better conversations about what is the right relationship to have with technology? How do you
00:22:52.620actually find and appreciate the reality that you have? And then how do you reconnect with people?
00:22:58.760I really do. We're starting to see some evidence of this. We have at Axios, we have local
00:23:03.360publications in 43 cities. And one of the things that we are seeing is that as the technology gets
00:23:09.140better, we are starting to see a return to where people want more human connection, whether it's
00:23:14.060at dinner parties or events. And I have a theory that there's going to be an equal and opposite
00:23:19.280reaction to ai the better that the ai gets the more people are going to seek out each other seek0.97
00:23:24.620out humanity seek out nature and that could be that could help clean it up and actually even llms
00:23:31.300in some ways in if i want to have like a positive spin on this llms unlike algorithms they have a
00:23:41.300their incentive structure is for accuracy it's not for manipulation right if you're creating a
00:23:47.880machine like an algorithm like for an llm to be really useful it has to spit out truth it has to
00:23:52.900spit out things accurately whereas an algorithm was all about attention it was all about addiction
00:23:57.860well guess what all of us have perversions and we tend to get seduced by those perversions whether0.99
00:24:03.900it's gambling or pornography or just looking at stupid cats or or funny memes like we're all0.96
00:24:09.560susceptible to that llms could be uh different but i think that too is going to be that's hitting0.96
00:24:15.460just as people are sobering up from what hit them with algorithms.
00:24:18.780And that's why I worry if you don't have more people
00:24:22.360thinking more deeply about this topic,
00:24:24.940this transition into AI is going to be really bad.
00:32:20.520Together, we set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael's letters.
00:32:24.720As one married couple, trying to understand another.
00:32:27.480Listen to Death of an Artist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:32:33.220It's interesting to me, and it's been interesting to a lot of people, and it's, you know, and you've been, you know, you've gotten so much attention as a consequence.
00:32:39.560you've looked at the peril, certainly, and you've made a sober case for the peril and the challenges
00:32:44.760of truth and trust. But you've also made a case, and you've leaned in, unlike any of your colleagues
00:32:50.700from my perspective, on the promise of AI, and you did it early. And you're a guy that actually
00:32:56.140knows the difference between Fable and Sonnet. And you actually, with respect, I don't hear a lot
00:33:03.520of that nuance in Washington, D.C., and I don't mean that as a cheap shot because I'm on the
00:33:09.560receiving end of too much of that, so I'm not trying to talk past people. But it's interesting
00:33:14.420how you have as a consequence, perhaps, is it your entrepreneurial background? Is it just that
00:33:20.320mindset you have? Is it the operating system that you've embraced as going back even your time as
00:33:26.920a journalist, that you've been willing to embrace this, learn about it, try to sort of dominate it
00:33:32.560as opposed to allow it to dominate you?
00:33:35.660Yeah, I mean, I think I realized early on,
00:34:32.360Like it has made me, I think, 10 times more useful in terms of I'm able to do a lot more, a lot more quickly.
00:34:39.980I've been able to integrate it pretty fully into our company in really healthy ways, not ways that ever affect the journalism.
00:34:45.620But just stuff that is – there's so much that you can automate that people don't want to do that then you can unleash people to do the things that require a human brain to do, creativity, human connection, so on and so forth.
00:40:17.900I mean, people have the same debates everyone else has about AI and kind of the future,
00:40:22.060but in terms of using it at work, they feel like they have control.
00:40:25.620When you give people control and you give people the tools magically, they actually use them and they figure out how to be creative and be capitalistic about it.
00:40:35.160And what we're finding is people who didn't even think of themselves as technological like myself are suddenly finding that, oh, my God, I can do things I never thought possible.
00:40:46.260We have a young woman from our finance department who now leads AI enablement because she had solved 20 problems in finance.
00:40:54.220I had heard about it and said, why don't you do that across the company?
00:40:57.460We have someone in sales who's now doing that across the company.
00:41:00.900And it just turns out that their brains tend to work in fact pattern recognition.
00:41:11.320And that doesn't mean that everyone will.
00:41:12.760I don't think most people will be sort of AI savants, but it doesn't mean that you still can't use the technology for, if you're a marketer, to do marketing sales, to do sales.
00:41:22.960And to me, it's just like a logical way you should approach any new technology within a business.
00:41:28.600But man, I go to these colleges, I do not like what they're getting taught at all.
00:41:34.720I think there's so much fear, there's so much BS being pumped into their heads.
00:41:38.580some of it's real and you should have this debate about energy and water and and i don't think
00:41:43.640people should use it to cheat and i think you're in college to get your brain to learn how to think
00:41:48.360and to be creative but at the same time you better understand the technology and how to apply it to
00:41:53.760whatever field you're about to go into and i think a lot of colleges are doing a disservice to our
00:41:58.940young people right now and hopefully they're gonna they're gonna notice that and they'll make
00:42:02.940that shift and it's hard for a big institution like a college to just to switch quick but they're
00:42:08.120going to need to. This isn't a 20 year thing. It's a that thing. And you, you know, and speaking of
00:42:14.560that, there was a sense, you know, when Dario came out and it was amplified by Musk in different
00:42:20.660ways, others amplified that 50%, you know, I mean, Dario infamously 50% of entry level jobs will be
00:42:26.040eliminated by 2030, which is around the corner. Some felt like that's just proof that we're being
00:42:30.940hyperbolic about all of this, that this is going to be the age of abundance. There's this, there's
00:42:36.160this interesting dialectic in this respect about that, where, I mean, you talked about the nature
00:42:41.020of jobs changing, not necessarily losing jobs, but, but you're worried. It sounds like I'm
00:42:46.060reading between the lines that this is coming much sooner than people think in a much more
00:42:50.980ubiquitous way. And we're not necessarily prepared for that transition. Is that what I'm, is that
00:42:56.340what I'm picking up or what, what you, where are you on the jobs front in terms of more your
00:43:00.380contemporary thinking versus even where you were a year ago? Yeah, I'd say I was probably more
00:43:05.440worried about mass drop destruction a year ago. I think what I've learned at least at our company
00:43:10.980watching it unfold is that initially, yes, you can do more with fewer people, but almost as quickly
00:43:17.160you realize, oh my gosh, there's all these new businesses that we could go into or new business
00:43:22.180lines that are going to be created because of this new technology. So for us, net net, we're going to
00:43:26.800end up adding more people. I assume that same dynamic will happen at other companies and other
00:43:31.720industries, a little bit different if you're in a regulated industry, a larger company. But I think
00:43:36.400the same dynamics ultimately hold. That doesn't mean there won't be pain. There's a lot of things.
00:43:41.320If you're doing something that's rote and verifiable, like a lot of research, accounting,
00:43:45.220stuff like that, you're damn right. The machine's going to do it better than you. And so you better
00:43:49.200figure out how to use the machine to do the thing you're doing much better, or you're going to get
00:43:53.440washed away. So part of it will be how quickly do businesses adapt and teach, how quickly does
00:43:58.560government retrain and get people in a position to be able to take on the new opportunities.
00:44:03.040So I think there's a way to navigate that successfully. I thought, and we actually got
00:44:07.540Dario initially to go public with his concern. I thought he did a public service by saying it.
00:44:12.640And that's why we asked him to, was because we wanted people to realize that Dario believes it
00:44:17.900in his heart. I think he's a truth teller in terms of what he says about the technology.
00:44:21.700We could debate whether he's delusional because he's staring at the machine too often,
00:44:25.860but but he believes it in his bones that that that could be the outcome of it and that was a good
00:44:31.740warning to have because then we can have this discussion just like the discussion about hey
00:44:35.880can it destroy humanity is hyperbolic but the fact that not one two but like 50 or 60 people
00:44:41.340have left these companies and all said the exact same thing to me common sense dictates let's listen
00:44:47.020what are they actually saying what could we do reasonably and responsibly to be able to prevent
00:45:22.760to be able to study the risk if you have to have an independent auditor and they actually follow
00:45:27.680through on it. The truth is the government does have teeth already. They're already reviewing
00:45:32.460these models for national security threats. I don't know why the government doesn't just admit
00:45:36.800that. They've slowed down Anthropic multiple times, but that's another thing. But that's not
00:45:42.940a terrible way to look at it. And so to me, it goes back to that society-wide. If we could roll
00:45:49.340back the tape a year ago and you had really smart people across these domains thinking about it,
00:45:54.360we knew all this stuff was coming. We knew the cyber stuff was coming. We know the biothreat
00:45:58.720stuff's coming. We knew there's going to be real worries about whether or not you could have
00:46:03.800catastrophic outcomes from this. So you want people who have real expertise studying it,
00:46:09.480anticipating this, and then preparing business and government for all the different permutations.
00:46:15.380And that could have been done and it still could be done. It won't, but it could.
00:46:19.340No, and that's why it's just it's it's refreshing to hear someone talk in terms of the nuance that is required of this conversation and that these old stale binaries that have their political potency that are so unhelpful in this debate.
00:46:35.680And of course, I'm a practitioner out here in California. It's not a hypothetical for me. I'm not a member of a think tank. I'm not publishing an article on this.
00:46:44.820I've got to be a practitioner and trying to find that balance and trying to maintain the entrepreneurial energy, trying to maintain an optimism so that we have a shared future where everyone feels included, not just financially, but also in terms of the possibilities as it relates to health care.
00:46:59.960It relates to pushing out the boundaries of science and discovery and solving for some of life's vaccine issues.
00:47:53.500It's easier to sue if you're a newspaper because you actually have stronger copyright protections because you actually take a newspaper, you send it to the copyright office.
00:48:00.880We're a digital publication, so I think our case would have been weaker.
00:48:03.640But then the other piece is that OpenAI has done a grant with us to be able to do more in local news, and I think local news is an area where I think artificial intelligence is going to help us fix something that was fatally broken, meaning people were losing reporters in cities, in small towns because the economics of local news sucked.
00:48:27.020Well, the truth is that the economics sucked
00:48:29.900because you had to have a building, a printing press.
01:02:28.300They hate doing things they shouldn't do.
01:02:30.180dug into the data, it turns out that most of us at work are spending anywhere from 25 to 50% of
01:02:35.400our day doing things that should never be done. And we then apply that outside of work, which is
01:02:40.960okay. The truth is we're hit with too much stuff. And unless we have some kind of mental or physical
01:02:46.600exercise to force ourselves to take inventory about what matters in life, what matters at work,
01:02:51.940and then ruthlessly revisit that and delete the things that we shouldn't be doing so that you can
01:02:57.480amplify the things that you want to do. And it might sound simple, but almost none of us do it
01:03:02.880because of life. Like life just takes over and we just go with the flow. And what the book does is
01:03:09.320it's like a power tool. We're not going to win a literary award. It is a power tool of how could
01:03:14.160you do some of the things that we've done that really worked at life and worked at work. And
01:03:18.480the truth is, I bet you if I just interviewed you on this subject, you have an operating system like
01:03:24.980You wouldn't be a governor, a presidential candidate, an author and a podcaster, a father and a husband and do all of those at a very high level unless you have some kind of operating system.
01:03:36.280The difference that I have is that we get to do those things because we're in a position where we can.
01:03:41.660But I'm also a journalist who can then break that down into, OK, how can I take that Gavin Newsom operating system or that Axios operating system and make it applicable to anybody?
01:03:53.340And I think, you know, you do it in politics and governance. What I try to do in media is I just want to be useful. Right. I don't need to write a book. And, you know, you write a book because you want to be useful. You think that someone else can take this and put it into application. And I hope and I hope that's what it does for people.
01:04:11.860And I love that. I mean, this is a book to your point. I mean, you've been wildly successful. People know your work, obviously, Politico, but you were able to sell, but you're still at Axios. And for if that was even half of the reported figure, you're doing fine. And so I love the spirit that brings you that talking about, you know, I talk about David Brooks and, you know, talking about resume versus the eulogy values. And that was very powerful for me, that distinction.
01:04:36.760but you make that same point where you talk about your obituary and what do you want people to say
01:04:40.760about you when you're gone. And so you frame that in the context, you reference delete and amplify,
01:04:46.960but you focus first on confronting. And I think that, so it begins there, the why, why I'm doing
01:04:53.340fill in the blank. Tell us about that framework, confront, the delete, the no, and then the amplify,
01:05:00.040finding your bliss. Yeah. I mean, think about it. We don't, the confront part is we never ask,
01:05:58.860But to do that, that means I have to allocate a hell of a lot of time while I'm also running a company and doing stuff that I want to do for myself.
01:06:06.680So to do that, I have to delete things.
01:06:08.600And the thing that I've really deleted most dramatically is I don't say yes to almost any social obligation outside of my family, certainly during the week, because I want to allocate that time to my family and to the people who matter.
01:06:21.380And living in Washington, I'm sure the same dynamic for you, certainly worse for you in politics is, well, you have to do that.
01:06:28.320You're a candidate. You're a governor. You're a CEO. Well, you don't have to do shit, right?
01:06:32.780You're not there to matter. And you can say no. And if I suffer from that, okay, I'll suffer0.99
01:06:39.560from it. But a benefit is the thing that I actually care most about. You can do that same
01:06:46.420exercise for your work. Like, what do you want out of your career? And if you have that,
01:06:51.800and you can just look at that, I have it in my notes function. But if you just look at it,
01:06:55.260it just helps you make decisions about how am I allocating my time like even me who's ruthless
01:07:01.640about this every couple of months when I go back and revisit it I find that I've larded up my
01:07:06.880schedule with meetings I don't need to be in doing calls I don't need to do that are all taking away
01:07:13.060from the things that I want to amplify which is I'm a creative guy I'm a good communicator certain
01:07:17.260things I know that I'm good at that I need to do for my own satisfaction but for the benefit of
01:07:22.380the company. And again, if you don't have that system, life just, inertia is just this awful,
01:07:29.620powerful force that just ends up sapping all of our spirit because fundamentally we want to do
01:07:36.480interesting things and good things and fun things. We don't want to just do crap, but so much of life
01:07:42.460is just like, oh yeah, I'll go do that. So we're told all our life we're supposed to say yes to0.76
01:07:46.900things because it creates opportunities, adventures. I mean, that we never know, you know,
01:07:53.020you don't, you know, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. I think I was Gretzky
01:07:56.840who said that. So now you're saying, you say no. And now all of a sudden I'm feeling guilty. Now
01:08:03.000a door, a door that could have opened up the world to me. I don't even know. I never even,
01:08:07.820I never even attempted. So how do you, how do you square that? How is this? I mean,
01:08:13.600that's hard for folks. No is hard. It is hard. It is hard for folks, but we're also in a different
01:08:19.220world than we used to be. Like the number of people, followers that you say yes to the number
01:08:24.440of, of just of alerts that you get that you turn on. Like there's your, your brain is not the same
01:08:30.500brain as it was 10 or 15 years ago. Just think about the tax on your mind and your life of
01:08:35.640getting that a hundred emails, a hundred texts, all those alerts, like that is so taxing. So you
01:08:41.100have to have some framework to be able to say no to a lot so you can say yes to the things that you
01:08:46.280want to say yes to that give you value. And yes, you want to probably put yourself in situations
01:08:53.100where you can have serendipity, but you've got to liberate yourself from all of the stuff you
01:08:58.860don't want to do if you actually want to have time to do that. Again, I probably take it too
01:09:04.300far in terms of having a method, but one of the things that is really important to me is just
01:09:09.600thinking time nice like i'm at like i am my most valuable thing to myself for like stuff that
01:09:15.440brings me real energy but also brings the company value is i'm creative but to be creative i have to
01:09:20.940have time to hike run meditate pray well i also have to run a company i have kids parents i have
01:09:26.360all those obligations so like if i don't have a way to free up that time i'll go a week two three
01:09:32.120weeks without doing any of that and that doesn't help me and it doesn't help people around me so
01:09:36.580there's no there's no science to this i can't tell you to say yes to jan and no to fred i can
01:09:41.740what i can do is i can say that there's uh if you go through the book every chapter just gives you
01:09:45.940a little exercise takes 10 minutes i guarantee you almost all of them will be helpful to you
01:09:51.260and they'll just help get rid of some of that clutter and if you get rid of some of that clutter
01:09:54.660you bring back time and you bring in in there it's not only is it operating manner and in these
01:10:00.800power tools which i love at the end they're short tatters 20 what three plurif chapters so this is
01:10:06.560but they're, they're short, they're punchy and they go to your point. They also provide a lot
01:10:11.280of hacks. Meaning when I love one of the frameworks, which, which I appreciated was,
01:10:15.340will I regret not having gone to that event a month from now? Uh, this, you know, just starting
01:10:20.740to ask simple questions like that. But what, what, what I love about this book is you, and you
01:10:25.860referenced it, but I think it's important for folks to appreciate. You put this into practice,
01:10:29.820Like you dove deep, what, two and a half years ago, and you brought this into not just AI into the conversation at Axios, but you made this sort of a mandatory framework.
01:10:41.900So it changed the size of the meetings.
01:10:52.020So you know what you were trying to ultimately accomplish.
01:10:54.040So speed matters as well, getting the right people around the room, not just deciding to edit aspects of your life.
01:11:01.360Tell us more about how it's impacted things at Axios.
01:11:04.800Yeah, I mean, it's all because it affects, OK, what we ended up getting rid of two or three business lines so that it's very hard for any company or any individual to do five things exceptionally well.
01:11:14.940You can do one or two or three things really well.
01:11:17.080And so we really tried to narrow that focus.
01:11:18.820But once you do that, then everything flows from it.
01:11:21.760You narrow how you speak about things.
01:11:24.200You narrow the number of meetings that you have.
01:11:26.100You narrow the number of participants that need to be in that meeting.
01:11:29.680You narrow how you communicate what happened in that meeting.
01:11:32.860And the truth is, you're all going to have to do this soon because everything moves faster
01:11:40.420It's just going to require all of us to be a lot more agile.
01:11:43.820It's probably going to force most organizations to be a little bit flatter.
01:11:48.180I mean, you must live this every day in politics, right?
01:11:50.680you have to make a choice about what is it that you actually want to accomplish this quarter.
01:11:56.220And it's funny because I had this, I just wrote recently about this, this idea of,
01:12:00.480I call it post-processable velocity, that we've reached the point where things are moving so fast
01:12:06.000you can't process it. And I came to it when I was sitting in a budget meeting and someone was
01:12:09.660talking about a six-month plan. And I'm like, bullshit, how could you, I have no idea what0.98
01:12:13.960the world looks like in six weeks. Like, how are you making these plans years from now?0.99
01:12:18.660And I just think that's all of our reality. And I think that's going to require a different mentality, just like the internet era required a different mentality and like life just changes. And I think we just always need a different construct for how do we navigate that. And that's ultimately what all of us want, right? We want to have deep meaning.
01:12:39.240I don't think people are looking for just happiness.
01:12:58.460And that's ultimately what we're trying to do here.
01:13:00.480If someone works for us, I want them to leave here a smarter, better person.
01:13:05.260And if we can give them these manuals and it helps them and then they take that somewhere else, I've left a little piece of us and someone else that gets passed on to someone else.
01:13:13.740And I think that's a really good way to, going back to our debate about leadership and why people do goofy things once they have power, like one thing that is achievable for all of us is this idea of we all have these great attributes.
01:13:29.660And how do we leave little pieces of that in someone else so that they can pass it on to someone else?
01:13:35.460And I think when we do that, like organizations benefit, the country benefits.
01:13:40.080I want to go back because I thought one of the most powerful things is what you do with your employees one-on-one is you ask them, and you reference this, but I want to amplify it a little bit more.
01:22:13.820it predated simplified. Actually, we had a book before this called Smart Brevity, which the whole
01:22:20.680thing was, how can you communicate what matters to you way more efficiently and way more effectively?
01:22:27.520If you think about all those alerts, all the tacks on our mind, you have to communicate much
01:22:33.560more crisply and clearly, and you have to do it with a real hierarchy. The days of being able to
01:22:38.960write or talk in a long, meandering way and assuming someone has the time to digest it,
01:22:44.520they're over. It just doesn't exist. And so, yes, we have a spinoff company that teaches companies
01:22:49.580to do that because companies are like news organizations. They got bad habits. They got
01:22:54.540flabby. They got long-winded. And they stopped thinking about the other side. The most useful
01:22:59.620thing I can tell anybody listening to this, watching this, about communications is the
01:23:04.140number one thing you can do today that will be life-changing is when you communicate, particularly
01:23:09.080at work, stop being selfish. Be selfless, meaning don't worry about what you want to say or showing
01:23:17.100like how smart you are or that fancy-ass word you just learned because you're playing Wordle or you
01:23:22.260went to Harvard. Think about what does that person want to hear? What is the crispest, clearest,
01:23:27.940quickest way you could convey that to them so that they can remember and act on it and then just stop?
01:23:34.140And that will radically change how you communicate because you're not – and then people want to be in conversation with you because they're like, oh, wow, every time we have a conversation, it's crisp and it's clear.
01:23:44.800If you're long-winded and meandering, they don't want to talk to you.
01:23:47.600They're not going to open your email, and they're not going to respond to your text.
01:23:50.580And these things, they all sound so – isolation can sound small or trivial.
01:23:56.160But if you do them in totality, like, it's a game changer because suddenly you're more effective, you're happier, and you're actually clearer thinking because if you want to articulate something clearly, you have to actually spend one minute to make sure you've thought it through about what you're trying to articulate.
01:24:15.560And that's the beauty of being able to run organizations like you and I have is you get to think about the reverse engineering of how did you get here.
01:24:23.340And then if you can share it to someone and they can pass it on to someone else, it's just a cool gift.
01:24:28.220And isn't that the core of what is allowed both political but notably Axios to be so successful is that frame, right?
01:24:35.680I mean, is it that – that's what you do better than anybody else, right?
01:24:39.940Yeah, I mean the whole idea is like really smart content delivered as efficiently as possible.
01:24:54.560And that's fundamentally what people want.
01:24:57.100It hit, like, at first, it just, like, it resonated with people, and then it took off
01:25:01.140because they realized, I'm busy, and here's a way to get smarter quicker.
01:25:04.920And that's fundamentally what people want.
01:25:07.320And we had just, we had a true sense of self.
01:25:10.420We were trying to do something very specific.
01:25:13.080To be honest, I think, like, the next challenge, like, if I were going to start, you know,
01:25:16.300we did Politico 20 years ago, Axios 10 years ago.
01:25:19.180I think the next communications thing to fix is not that we need more content. I think it's really
01:25:26.820helping people understand the complexities of what's happening around them and bringing it to
01:25:34.560them a little bit more clearly. So in some ways, there's too much really good information. It's
01:25:40.480really hard to synthesize it so that most of us can understand it and take action. And when people
01:25:46.440feel overwhelmed by something, they retreat. If they feel overwhelmed by politics, they retreat.
01:25:52.060If they feel overwhelmed by information, they retreat. You either retreat to extremism or
01:25:57.500just you don't participate. And neither of those are good, right? And so I think what we'll figure
01:26:03.420out in the next decade, us, others will be, okay, now that we have in some ways a surplus of really
01:26:10.540good, trustworthy information, how do we make sure we get that in front of people and that they can
01:26:15.520trusted in a time where they feel very distrustful of everything. And if we can fix that, I just
01:26:21.800think it makes our minds and our information ecosystem cleaner. And ultimately, I think it
01:26:27.520benefits politics because you start to hopefully reset the reality by which people are working,
01:26:33.220which gets back to what we talked about in the beginning, is you can't take politics out of
01:26:37.060media, out of technology, out of business. They're all one thing. You must be thinking about if you
01:26:42.620were running CNN, if you were David Ellison and you had this opportunity to sort of reimagine on
01:26:48.700the basis of this reset in terms of ownership, the future of a cable network in the context of
01:26:55.900all of your learningness and the digital space and where you see the puck going literally and
01:27:01.080figuratively, both local, but also, and I imagine a boutique construct, that's what Punchbowl
01:27:06.280represents or semaphore, et cetera. What would you advise in the context of a legacy brand like
01:27:14.560CNN and the media frame? What would you advise the new ownership? They're really hard, hard
01:27:20.860businesses. They really are. There's a lot of public attention on essentially these assets
01:27:24.720that have very, very small audiences. If you actually look at the number of people watching
01:27:28.500CNN or any of these stations at night that are under the age of 55 and aren't older and maybe
01:27:33.820just left it on because they're taking a nap it's it's it's horrifically small so this is not an easy
01:27:39.100business to fix i think that i think that ultimately the they're not going to be the
01:27:44.300dominant players in the information ecosystem i think it's going to be some combination of what
01:27:48.700you're seeing unfold in real time which is really good video that's available on many platforms
01:27:54.140really good podcasts based around people who have expertise in real passion niche publications that
01:28:00.300operate from real domain expertise. There probably would be an opportunity for someone like a CNN to
01:28:06.120consolidate that. You're seeing a tiny bit of it at MSNBC where they'll bring in like a group of
01:28:11.360people who already have a following on another platform. Could CNN, because it has global
01:28:18.480tentacles and does have awesome boots on the ground throughout the world, could they consolidate
01:28:23.040really high-end intelligence and maybe bring in some of the stuff from Substack and YouTube and
01:28:29.080spotify into one ecosystem uh potentially uh potentially but it's very hard for those big
01:28:35.760institutions to move at that type of at that type of speed and so uh luckily i left the post 20 years
01:28:41.820ago i love the post but to start politico and now i live in the in the world of being an entrepreneur
01:28:47.160and not having the baggage of of being too too legacy i i don't think you could pay me all the
01:28:53.260money in the world to run a big organization. Maybe that was the next question, the follow-up,
01:28:57.620will you be running? No, it's not fun, right? I mean, the thing about probably why you love
01:29:05.260being a governor is you want there to be a pretty quick reaction between, like, I have an idea,
01:29:11.540I have the power to actually make that idea become a reality and make a difference in people.
01:29:16.440Like, if I had to work through a bureaucracy and work through all of these legacy channels,
01:29:21.120i think i i don't think i'm programmed for that like i'm i think i'm programmed for this and
01:29:25.680i'd like this no that's why you'll never see me in any legislative role i did my time as a county
01:29:31.140supervisor at local level by the way what i speaking of time i'm i can't let you off the
01:29:35.920hook but i mean five years from i know you're gonna answer i can't figure out what i'm doing
01:29:40.580in six months let alone five years but i mean everyone asking and and it's a torturous thing
01:29:46.000and i imagine all your friends at cox can't stand people asking but the fact that you you're still
01:29:51.100with Axios is pretty cool that you founded it, you sold it, you didn't need to stay, I imagine
01:29:57.560it's vested and everything, but you're still there. And it sounds, it looks like you're loving it
01:30:01.560and you're practicing what you're preaching. The book is an example of that. And you're bringing
01:30:05.700those, that culture, those values and that entrepreneurial mindset into Axios. But I'm
01:30:10.400just curious. I mean, that entrepreneurial, because I have it, man, I start a bunch of
01:30:14.160small businesses. I try to bring my entrepreneurial energy to the work I do as mayor, as lieutenant
01:30:19.380governor even governor um i imagine that still that's a calling you can't help yourself you must
01:30:25.600be thinking a lot of new ideas you still you're still sitting in the seat you're sitting in five
01:30:29.880years from now i think so because i the way we set up the deal i have i basically was able to sell a
01:30:36.400big chunk of the company but still have the control to be able to do the things that we want to be
01:30:41.220able to do and cox is an amazing family an amazing partner my hope is like i really think the local
01:30:46.920new stuff we talked about it sounds it might sound like a fantasy but I truly now see a path
01:30:52.740where we could have boots on the ground in potentially hundreds if not thousands of
01:30:56.760communities at a moment where I think people have lost faith in anything they can't touch and feel
01:31:02.380but they can touch and feel local and if we could figure that out and do that at scale and have our
01:31:07.780tentacles into every community but also into every large sort of political technology media business
01:31:14.340topic that's pretty cool like really like short of being a governor or being president that's like a
01:31:19.340lot of authority in in being useful because i think and i'd be curious for your thing on this
01:31:24.620like i we were talking about longevity we're joking about a little bit about midlife crisis
01:31:28.080but there is something to that like are we in midlife jim i hope we're in midlife i don't know
01:31:32.600is 55 59 50 is that midlife anybody i think we missed midlife about a decade ago but we'll do
01:31:39.540it forever but i just want to be useful right like i want like i love these issues i want to be
01:31:44.560in the middle of the debate i love helping people think about it i like you i like to try to get
01:31:49.700people to confront hard truths and being in the media is a really neat place like i don't like0.91
01:31:56.580if i got fired or i fired myself tomorrow like i probably would do all this shit for free like i
01:32:01.380like to talk about business i like to talk about ai i like to experiment i like to build things and0.64
01:32:05.480And so I think that you win the lottery in life when you really get to do something you truly love doing and you have a natural knack for being able to do it.
01:32:16.360And I just think we're about to go into this wild period, and I really do in my bones believe it is going to be historic, epic, at some point scary, at some point very thrilling.