AI isn’t simplifying your life . . . yet. It’s mass-producing more options, more decisions, and more noise. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei makes the case that the antidote isn’t a better productivity app, it’s a ruthless, three-part system he calls Confront, Delete, Amplify. VandeHei s what he’s learned from running Axios by these principles, including calling a leadership meeting with the subject heading “Let’s Kill S***.”
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In advance of your book Simplify, you wrote an article this summer about prepping for an Axios board meeting, and you said that even a six-month planning horizon, you realized, was pure fantasy, that everything could change in a month. I love this phrase you pointed to, a post-processable velocity, that the speed of an AI world is outpacing our ability to comprehend it as humans. I’m just curious how this acceleration of change feels to you.
I’m of two minds. Part of me, to be honest, finds it exhilarating. I change. I trying to think about how I use this technology to enhance our business, enhance our relationship with news consumers. I that part of it. But what I wrote is true, and I think it’s true of most CEOs. Things are just moving so fast. What technology do I use? What is the better AI? What can it do today that it couldn’t do yesterday? Employees are a little bit nervous. Employees are changing their skill set because they’re using this new technology. And we really have entered this period where it’s just hard to process.
I’ve always laughed at one-, two-, or three-year planning
I’m , “How the hell do you do that?” But now I kind of laugh at six-month planning. It’s hard for me to think out more than six or seven weeks about, okay, what do I feel highly confident about in the business? Things are changing that quickly. I’ll give you a good example. In the media, six months ago, 30 to 40% of our traffic was coming through Google Search, and every media company has seen that bottom out. It’s now down to 5% or 10% of our traffic. Well, that’s a lot of people. You’re talking about millions of people who were customers or were coming to and tasting our content who no longer are, and that happened almost overnight.
The last couple of months, there’s been a huge surge in the number of bots that are attacking websites. There are these machines that are kind of hitting your site, trying to get information, trying to get data, and they’re polluting the open web, and that’s new. Okay, well, let’s wrestle with that. I think that’s why there is a Twilight Zone feeling right now, where people are hearing about this technology that could end humanity, and that you could start a business with one person. And most people are , “I don’t know. I don’t really use it, or if I use it, it’s kind of a glorified search engine. What’s all the fuss about?”
I think the demarcation zone is people in companies that use it persistently and aggressively live in a different world right now than those that don’t. So if you go out to Silicon Valley, they feel , “Oh, my God, this is 1999. The world is changing. I’m on the cutting edge. Everything’s about to explode.” But then you go to Toledo or you go to Topeka or you go to Oshkosh, and most people are , “I don’t know. I’m just running my company, man. I guess there’s this new AI, and my employees are talking about it. I’m sure we’ll get to that one day soon.” And I think that’s somewhat natural because it’s a new technology.
I think introducing any kind of technology into an existing company is hard, because even if it’s the coolest technology ever, you have to hook it up to all your clunky systems that you built over the last decade, and that’s necessarily messy
I call it the messy middle, which is where I think most companies are right now. They’re starting to use AI. They’re prototyping. They’re seeing the promise, and then they’re realizing, “Oh, crap, I’ve got to hook this up to my data reservoir.”
Right. This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, right?
This is way harder than I thought, yeah.
Yeah
So Simplify opens with this bracing line that AI isn’t simplifying your life. It’s mass-producing more options, more decisions, more noise. I know I find myself sometimes falling into a rabbit hole as I explore new things with AI tools.
Yeah.
You’ve described yourself as an AI lab rat. Do you ever fall into that noise yourself?
Oh, for sure
Yeah, I fall into it. And I think for most people, in the short term, it is a complexity-creation machine, mainly because now anybody can write pretty well if you use AI to help you write. Anybody can do deep research on a new idea, or have AI do the deep research for you and then dump that into an email and send it to your boss. So suddenly, all of us are getting more emails, more presentations, more ideas, some of them well thought out, many of them not well thought out. It just means, “Oh, my God, now I have more decisions to make?”
And that’s the whole point of the book. How can we help you, outside of work and at work, delete as many things that you’re doing out of habit, out of inertia, just because that’s the way we’ve always done it, so that you can amplify the things you actually want to do? It might sound simple. Do I actually need a book to do this? And what we discovered in running our company this way is yes, you need a book to do this, because we don’t do it naturally. If you don’t have a system, if you don’t have instructions about how to simplify your company, how to simplify your meetings, how to simplify your management structure, how to simplify the work that you do as a rank-and-file employee, you just won’t do it. You’ll just keep on keeping on.
The data from The Economist and others is that, on average, we waste 25% of our week doing things we never should have done or that add no value to our company. We do it out of habit. That’s the way we’ve always done it. We do it out of inertia. Well, think of 25%, man. That’s two and a half years out of every decade that I pissed away doing things I don’t want to do or shouldn’t be doing. I want to be doing things I should do.
You love attacking things in threes
Your framework is “confront, delete, and amplify.” The confront part, that’s not the action part. That’s the mental part, right? Open yourself up to the fact that you’ve got the wrong habits.
Just confront it: Why do I do this? Nobody asks that simple question. I’ve got a meeting after this at 1. Almost no one asks, “Do I need to be at that meeting? Do we even need to do the damn meeting? Are we meeting on something we even want to do?” A company, a life, just takes on a momentum of its own, and unless you have these checkpoints to say, “Wait a second, do we need to do that meeting? Is this something I could skip?” you’ll just keep doing things you don’t necessarily need to do.
Confronting is just asking that question, whether it’s at home or at work: “Do I need to do this? Why am I doing it?” That simple exercise allows you to spend one minute and then decide, “Could I delete this?” which is step two, or, “Could I say no to this obligation?” And then if you can delete some things and say no, then you can amplify, which is the fun stuff. Do the stuff that you doing. Do the stuff you’re good at. Do the stuff at work that’s going to get you a promotion or more money or more attention or whatever the hell it is that you want out of work. But you have to have a system.
It’s funny, because we started this about two and a half years ago at Axios
This whole simplify system was just how we operated the company. And the reason we wrote it is we saw the magical change it had for our company, where suddenly people were more focused, they were more productive, but most important, they were happier. A couple months ago, I called a meeting of my leadership team, and the subject line was, “Let’s kill shit.” The whole purpose was, I wanted to sit around the table and hear all the things you think we do that are dumb: meetings, process, products. I wanted to sit there for an hour or two, and I wanted to kill shit.
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