← Plain English with Derek Thompson
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- [00:00]
Jim VandeHei
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Nick
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So several weeks ago we recorded an episode of this show called Everything is Television where I pointed out that everything social media, AI podcasts was evolving toward video. And as I said on that show, I didn't expect that I would be able to resist the tide of history. So here we are in a new chapter of this show as this is our first video podcast. If you're listening to us without video there is no need to do anything different. You can carry on. I myself am mostly an audio only kind of guy, but if you're watching us on Spotify or YouTube, welcome and thanks for joining us in this next phase of Plain English. This is a big show for me for a second reason, which is that it's my first show back from two months out on paternity leave. Mom and baby girl are doing great. And rather than start us off on something dense and complicated, like AI or some scientific breakthrough, I thought I'd get back into the groove of podcasting with a subject that is extremely close to home. The State of Journalism and the Fate of the Washington Post growing up in McLean, Virginia, I fell in love with journalism by falling in love with the Washington Post, whose sports section, movie reviews, and op EDS were my introduction to what journalism could be. So it's been more than a little galling to see what's happened to the Post in the last few years, and in particular in the last few weeks. After years of posting losses close to $100 million, the Washington Post announced last week that it was laying off one third of its staff. Later, reports estimate that the paper actually gutted half of its unionized newsroom. It is exceedingly rare for a newspaper to lay off half of its staff. In fact, in research for this episode, I found no previous instance where a newspaper of this size had a layoff of this magnitude. What compounds the frustration or the fury of many people is that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder whose net worth exceeds $200 billion. We have a situation here where perhaps the richest newspaper owner in modern history is overseeing the largest American newspaper layoff in modern history. One goal of this episode is to trace the downfall of the Post under Bezos. In the first Trump year, subscriptions were booming and Pulitzers were raining down from the heavens. In the second Trump administration, however, Bezos has clearly shifted strategy. In 2024, he killed off an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a decision that cost the Post tens of millions of dollars in lost subscription revenue. Since then, almost every left of center columnist has left the paper his hand picked. CEO Will Lewis suffered through a feckless tenure before announcing his own resignation shortly after skipping out on the zoom call, announcing the layoffs and then being caught on camera wandering around a Super bowl party. The Washington Post saga is one pillar of today's show. My ambition, however, is to go one level deeper and to put the Post's story in a broader context. The news media has undergone several shifts in the last 20 years, and I thought the best person to explain those shifts is might be Jim Vande Hei, the former Washington Post employee who left the newspaper 20 years ago to start Politico and then left Politico to start Axios. Jim is going to tell the story of the Post and the state of news media from his perspective, but first I wanted to share my own view which is that I think the future of the news business will more than anything resemble the distant past. If you go back to the 1800s, before the Internet, before the modern age of national advertising, there was what historians call the party press era of News. In the 19th century, newspapers of the time often relied on political organizations who handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals. That era's journalism was not fair or balanced. It was unfair, unbalanced, heavily biased, highly political. Thousands of newspapers competed for market share and they used sensationalism and often outright lies to grab readers attention. As Gerald Baldasti, a professor at the University of Washington, once said to me, these newspapers didn't just want to inform readers, they wanted to politically galvanize readers. End quote. And readers were galvanized. Voting rates in the 19th century were the highest in American history. But when national advertising emerged in the 20th century, the party press era went away. Department stores and other marketers wanted their ads placed next to neutral, objective, you could even say boring or milquetoast reporting. And so this age of advertising led to a new neutered, detached style of journalism, the so called view from nowhere. To avoid offending companies in the 21st century, we are back to the past. Google and social media companies like Facebook and TikTok have gobbled up advertising revenue. And that has forced newspapers to go back to the 1800s to shift their business models from advertising back to subscriptions. For example, consider the New York Times. In the late 1900s and early 2000s, the New York Times advertising revenue exceeded $1 billion every year. That's advertising. Today, its annual ad revenue is closer to $500 million. On its own, that might seem like a calamity, a 50% decline. Except today, subscription revenue has surpassed $2 billion. Twenty years ago, the Times was 2/3 advertising. Today, the Times is two thirds subscriptions. The business of newspapers underwent a total shift in the 1900s. And in the 2000s, it's changed again. This is not just a statistical change, it's an identity shift. Mid century newspapers were as broad and unobjectable as the department stores that advertised in their pages. But the most successful news organizations of the 21st century are very different. Sharp, elbowed, cantankerous, ideological, personality driven. They have perspective, they have an identity. In many cases, they feel like individuals. Because in the case of Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons, Tucker Carlson, they are individuals. If you ask me, the Washington Post didn't just lose revenue in the last five years. Most importantly, what it lost is what 21st century news organizations most need an identity. Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we'll ever go back to the media norms of the 1950s, that mythological era where we all allegedly agreed on a single set of facts, when we could count the number of TV channels on one hand, when newspapers owned local monopolies, and when the words of Walter Cronkite held a special avuncular power. The answer is no. We're never going back to that time. We're never going back to a world when news was scarce. The future of news is abundant. For better and for worse, the messy jungle of the 19th century is here to stay. The question now for the Washington Post and for everybody else in my business is not how to escape the jungle, but how to survive in the jungle by doing good work that also happens to be good business. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jim Vande Hei. Welcome to the show.
- [10:08]
Jim VandeHei
Great to be here. Big fan.
- [10:10]
Nick
Thank you. I wanna do something a little bit ambitious, maybe too ambitious, considering that you are my first pancake. This is my first video podcast. I want to tell a 20 year history of the Washington Post that doubles as a 20 year history of changes to the media and political landscape that I know you've reflected on in recent essays since this is the 20 year anniversary of you leaving the Washington Post and starting Politico. And let's start with the news of the moment. 1/3 to 1 half of the staff at the Washington Post has been laid off. The CEO has resigned. The owner, Jeff Bezos, is nowhere to be seen. I mean, I, I really looked hard at what is a larger layoff in modern American newspaper history. One third, one half. The Washington Post very difficult to find. Which means you're in this moment where one of the richest newspaper owners in American history is overseeing one of the largest newspaper layoffs in modern American history. I mean, how calamitous does this seem to you?
- [11:10]
Jim VandeHei
I mean, it's an American tragedy. And I don't mean to put to be hyperbolic about it, but it is a tragedy. And I know a lot of conservatives are like, oh, the Washington Post doesn't matter, it's liberal, you gotta step back. It is an institution that is central to this country and certainly central to the country's history. At least going back to the early 70s, it has been literally a central player in some of the biggest dramas and some of the most important reporting on some of the most important topics. And by the way, the most powerful city in the world at probably its peak in power. So it is a tragedy. And what makes it more a tragedy, it was a foreseen and foreseeable tragedy. Like that is what breaks my heart. And I worked at The Washington Post 20 years ago. I used to read all the President's Men or watch all the President's Men, like Joe Theisman would watch Rocky before a Super Bowl. It gets my, my blood pumping. It's one of the reasons that I'm a journalist. It's one of the reasons I have such a romantic attachment to the profession. So it just, it sucks.
- [12:16]
Nick
Let's go back to 2006, 20 years ago. You're a national political reporter at the Washington Post. And you have this idea. You have this idea that there's an unfed need among the American news consumer and the American political news consumer in particular. What did you want to build that you thought the Post wasn't prepared to offer newsreaders at the time?
- [12:40]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah, a couple things at that time. This sounds nuts, but I felt like there was a bigger appetite for more political content that was even deeper and kind of more about the political drama and the interworkings of government than even the Washington Post was producing. And I felt like having been starting to do TV and starting to look at what was taking off on the Internet. I didn't think the Post was as good as the Post thought it was. I thought there were several reporters who were awesome. But I really believed that you were starting to see that if you could put a collection of really good reporters together in one place, you no longer needed a massive army. And if you could hook those reporters up to the Internet and get them on cable TV or get them on network tv, that you could almost instantly have an impact. And that was it. That was the observation at that time. I had just been named like to a beat where I could write about anything. The White House Congress lobbying is kind of the dream beat. I loved the Washington Post. I didn't. There's nothing I didn't like about it. It was more. We had this idea. The idea was really intoxicating. It took on a life of its own and we quit to start Politico. And that all happened in about a six month period.
- [13:55]
Nick
So you leave the Washington Post, Mike Allen leaves time. You get Maggie Haberman, you get Ben Smith, you pull them on board. Just this incredible collection of star journalists. You've written that one of the consequen of Politico and its success is the rise of political porn. This by the hour, by the minute, obsession with political coverage. And I'm quoting from you here. We helped create a monster. Politics as entertainment and the dominant weapon in a never ending cultural war. This wasn't the intent, but we can't deny the outcome, end quote. Before we continue with the history of the Washington Post and the changes in the media political landscape, I'd love you to reflect on this. The idea that you helped to create a monster. That sounds pretty bad.
- [14:37]
Jim VandeHei
It was. I don't know if it's bad, but at that point in time, people weren't obsessing about politics all day. You didn't really have a mechanism to obsess about politics all day. So then that was the void that we filled. And suddenly we're writing. Our mentor was win the morning. We were trying to produce more content before 8am than most reporters would produce by the time they woke up and ended their day. And so we created a new velocity to political journalism. We added more voice to political journalism. We wrote about the and the power and what was animating it. And it nailed it. Right. It nailed a market need. And it took off like a rocket. Within four months, we're on stage co moderating a presidential debate. It was like storybook level stuff. But what happened was after everybody was a naysayer and said, it won't work, then it started to work. Then little by little, people started to pay more attention to their traffic. People realized, oh my goodness, the topic that drives most traffic is politics. Then everybody started mass producing politics. Politics. It metastasized. And then suddenly everybody was consuming politics all day. And the term I used to use is like, it's okay, like Doritos are nice. Like I like a Dorito. Like if you have a Dorito once in a while, that's fine. If you just gorge on them all day, every day, you're gonna be fat, lazy and useless. And that's what I worry happened to the general population. And we contributed to that. There's no doubt.
- [16:06]
Nick
Do you think the success of Politico has something to do with the fact that you sort of. You co evolved with several technologies?
- [16:13]
Jim VandeHei
Yep.
- [16:14]
Nick
You launched 2007. So does the iPhone.
- [16:17]
Jim VandeHei
Yep.
- [16:17]
Nick
You launch 2007. Twitter is just around the corner from taking off. Social media is about to take off. Have you reflected on the possibility that you didn't just have a good idea, you had an idea whose timing turned out to be technologically perfect?
- [16:35]
Jim VandeHei
I think it's a brilliant observation. I do think that everything changed. If you go back, I think that year 2007 is a massive Year, because you start to have massive. You have the iPhone, you start to have phone use, you start to have all these different social platforms start to take off. And we didn't anticipate that. That was never really part of our business plan. Our business plan was coverage. It was a newspaper at the time and it was a digital platform. But because you had those two things happening simultaneously, you have this whole new way of consuming content all day, every day. And that it was based on an attention economy, it was based on an algorithm that would respond to what you were responding to. You suddenly had all this political content being mass produced, thrown at an audience that now had a mechanism to mass consume it. Those two things collide. It really fundamentally changed the nature of information consumption. And it changed the nature, I think, of our politics and our culture by the cause. You can draw lines with all of this in terms of polarization, toxicity, kind of information as combat.
- [17:39]
Nick
I wanna put a pin in this idea, this relatively abstract idea, that the kinds of news media that tend to succeed in a certain period tend to be a reflection of the technology that is taking off in that period. You could say this of maybe early printing technology, of radio technology, of television technology in the middle of the 20th century, the smartphone in the 2000s, and were at the cusp potentially of a new industrial revolution in technology with artificial intelligence. So we'll return to that, but I want to make sure that I put a pin in it. Whether folks love Politico or they blame it for the rise of political porn and the demise of democracy, it has objectively been a success. Why did the Post let you walk out the front door? Do you think there was. Was there an arrogance had that there's an institution and how dare you leave.
- [18:29]
Jim VandeHei
There was this very famous moment where, like, at first I thought they thought we were joking. They didn't think we would do it. At that point in time, people did not leave the Washington Post. They did not leave the New York Times. And so the fact that, like, well, here's Jim, he's only been here three or four years, and like, whatever, he's kind of a lone wolf. And then Harris, John Harris, who was a creature of the institution, had been an intern at the Washington Post, they took it more seriously. Cause he was involved. I think they thought we wouldn't do it, so at first said no, but then they did mobilize. Like, people have criticized Don Graham for not trying harder to keep us. To his credit, at the end, he made a very aggressive and ambitious bid to keep us there. But by that point, we really wanted to do it on our own. And we just had this intuitive sense that doing this within an institution won't be as fun and probably won't be successful. And so they were pissed by the time we left. Because when we left, Don Graham had this very famous meeting with us. And he's like. He looked at us and he's like, I have never said this to anyone. You are making a cat catastrophic mistake. And everybody thought we were making a catastrophic mistake. There were many days back then I thought I was making a catastrophic mistake. It turned out to be the best thing I ever did. It turned us into entrepreneurs and helped us build Politico and now build Axios. And even though, like, we could argue the pros and cons of having more political coverage, I'm very proud of what we created. I think Politico to this day does a lot of great, vital journalism, and it is a durable, scalable model and the world needs more of those. But I think we just have to reckon with the good and bad of all the things that get created.
- [20:09]
Nick
Can we just hold on that? I'd actually love to hear what you think about the downsides of overlarding the news environment with, say, too much political news. Like, what is the strongest argument you can muster that we are overserved? That not just Politico itself, but the cultural moment that it helped to create leads to a kind of political coverage that is bad for us, that is, in fact, that super sized box of Doritos that we shouldn't be consuming?
- [20:47]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah, it's just not that important in the scheme of things. It's just not that important. It is important, like how we're governed, like how people run and win campaigns. It's important. Important. But it's not 80% of your life important. Is it more important than artificial intelligence or technology or how businesses are created and run, or how we as people interact with each other or build functioning societies or communities? There's no way that it's that much more important than everything else. It's just that it's something everyone pays attention to. It's with characters. Everybody knows the characters in the plot. And it has a good team and a bad team. It has constant tension. And then it has a cast of characters who care. Came up, by the way, with us during that 20 year period and learned to be creatures of these platforms and be characters who kind of care more about the performative art of politics and governments than actual governance. Government's not supposed to be sexy. It was Built, it was constructed to be slow plotting, thoughtful thinking about 50 states and a governing structure for all that. Nothing about that is supposed to be getting you all hopped up all day, every day while, you know, scrolling through your phone. It's just, it's not healthy. It's one of the reasons that we, when we left Politico, we and started Axios, the whole idea is like, how can we help people pay more attention to other topics other than just politics? And we still do a lot of politics, but we do a lot of other topics. And so I think, you know, I think the only way that you fix that, like, I worry everybody thinks that some hero's gonna come in and save the day. Whether it's on AI or government or politics or social media feeds, there's only one hero right now. It's you. You, the consumer. You have to realize that what's getting pumped into your brain is not necessarily under your control. It's usually what's coming through the algorithm. And that you have to make the conscious decision to read and watch and listen to healthy content that's getting you smarter across more topics than just doom scrolling or getting seduced by essentially political porn. And I do think people are coming to that realization. I think, like you put it nicely, this symmetry, like the rise of Politico and the rise of technology. One of my theories and one of my fears about AI is that we as a species, we weren't built for change. At this level of velocity. We're just not. Most people are not capable of change. And by the way, from the creation of man through now, we never had to deal with change at high, high velocity. And once you had the phone, it was just too much. It was too much of a change. It was too much stuff coming at you, too much discernment that would be required to use it in a healthy way. Well, now we've had books, written, research, education, people are starting to understand the consequences of it. I think we're finally really, as a society, coming to grips with it. And at the very moment we're finally coming to grips with it, a new technology is gonna take over, which we can get to, just to weave this.
- [23:49]
Nick
Back into the history of the Post. So you leave in 2006, you start POLITICO. 2007, you go on to found Axios. About a decade later, the Post later brings in Ezra Klein. He starts Wonk Log. He leaves to start Vox and his enormous podcast. Do you see a kind of parallel timeline for the Washington Post where it owns big stakes in the stars that it helped to create and nurture, that it's this kind of conglomerate or, you know, landing zone for Politico and Axios and the Ezra Klein product. Is that a plausible sort of Earth 2 second timeline, or do you think that it's to a certain extent the nature of entrepreneurs to leave the places where they get their start?
- [24:34]
Jim VandeHei
I think it's a little bit of both. Listen, Nick, it's hard for big old institutions to realize they're not as big and impressive as they think they are, right? Like once upon a time, I'm sure IBM thought nobody would leave IBM, right? Or even Apple thought nobody would leave Apple. Like it just, it happens in the Washington Post, I think thought it was bigger than its individual parts. And what the Internet did is it made the individual parts much more valuable than the institutions realized and sometimes much more valuable than the institution themselves. And so, yes, there is an alternative universe where they realize and they utilize the brand prestige of the Washington Post to entice those people to stay, financially incentivize them to stay and basically do what the New York Times did. That is essentially what the New York Times did. The New York Times is a good counterpoint to the Post. It knew what it was. We are going to be the newspaper of kind of rich, like city dwelling, educated left America and we're going to dominate that. And then we're going to try to find different stars, whether it's on podcast or whether it's as columnist or now on video. We're going to try to lock them in and we're going to use that and then offer the things that people in that category care about. Food, health, buying gadgets. And we're going to focus solely on subscriptions. A genius, whether you like the New York Times or not, a beautifully meticulously run strategy. And company knew exactly what it is, knows exactly what what it is, and did it. The Post could have done a version of that, and instead they've now, for the better part of a decade, done everything you shouldn't do if you want to build a great media company in this era.
- [26:20]
Nick
And before we get to what the Post should not have done, I think it's actually worth slowing down in the 2010s to remember a kind of golden age for the Washington Post, the boom years, really. I mean, Marty Barron comes over from the Boston Globe and whatever mistakes the Post might have made in earlier years, there's really no debating that under the first shock administration, it is a real commercial success. Digital subscriptions go from just under 500,000 to nearly 3 million. The paper wins 11 Pulitzers under Marty Barron. Was this period of success, I really am trying to connect all the dots. From 20 years ago to now, was this period of success, do you think, the result of excellent journalistic and business choices made, or to a certain extent, was the first Trump administration a kind of rising tide for resistance journalism that lifted so many boats that if you just put your yacht anywhere close to that rising tide, you are inevitably gonna benefit?
- [27:17]
Jim VandeHei
I think it's both. Right. I think that in retrospect, if you look across the media, everybody benefited tremendously from Trump being a celebrity and this sort of outsider and somebody that people were just captivated by through love or hate. Everyone benefited from that. At the same time, Marty Baron was the real deal. Like they were doing real investigative work and people were responding to that and they were smart enough to exploit that for subscription sales. So that probably that was the high watermark of kind of the modern last 20 years Washington Post. The problem is, is that, and now as like somebody who started companies but runs them, you gotta live paranoid. You gotta always make sure you're not responding to a false indicator, either positive or negative. And there was a sense that, oh my God, like we can just keep growing like this forever because we're the Washington Post, as opposed to, wait, take a deep breath. Everybody seems to be growing. Viewership in TV seems to be growing. Website traffic's going through the roof for everybody. Is this a moment or is this the Post? And at that point is when they start to make all these investments in overseas and let's have a bureau in South Korea and London and losing it really. But is that what the Post consumer wants? Is that what somebody in Korea wants? That's where you started to probably see a divorce between kind of their success and the reality around them.
- [28:48]
Nick
It's interesting, this question isn't written down, but the way you were describing this era of media reminded me of what so many different companies said about the pandemic years, that it was this blip of acceleration that seemed to pull these companies into the future that got them investing so much in certain kinds of digital technologies in particular. But that turned out to be an overinvestment. And then you saw TV companies push, pull back, and movie companies pull back and tech companies pull back. I never quite thought of the Trump years being for left of center media what the pandemic was for the digital economy. This sort of like false impression of, oh, a period of nonstop boom and ironically, like both legs to Like a little mini bubble happening that required a correction. I never quite thought about that. But that's interesting.
- [29:34]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah.
- [29:35]
Nick
In 2021, Marty Barron steps down and Fred Ryan replaces him with Sally Busby, formerly of the ap. The paper goes on a hiring spree while subscriptions are flatlining to slightly falling. The Post loses a reported $80 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024, close to $100 million I've read in 2025, which means just. Just pausing there, that the Post lost more money in the last three years than Jeff Bezos paid for it in 2013, which is just. No matter what you think about the journalism being done at the Washington Post, that is a business strategy disaster. We can talk about the higher purpose of journalism and investigative reporting, I guess, in a bit. But if you're a newspaper losing $100 million a year, you've clearly done something extremely wrong. So why do you think the Post flailed so badly in the Biden years, even before we get to the decisions that Bezos infamously made in the last six months?
- [30:34]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things. I think it didn't know what it was like. That's what I'm always looking for in companies is like, do you have a sense of who you are? Do you know what you need to do every day? The term I always use with our staff jokingly is like, we gotta know every day whose ass we gotta kick. Right? We gotta know exactly how we win. And the Post seemed to lose its sense of self. Right. Is it a technology company because we have Bezos backing us, A Washington company because we're in Washington. Are we now an international brand because we've started to expand overseas? That's happening. And then they. They. They don't fully appreciate the value of talent, and they lost a lot of talent. If you went back three or four years ago and wrote down the top 50 people that you and I have to read, maybe 49 of them are left. And they didn't have. They don't have enough talent to back that up. And these are talent businesses. And if you're not breaking news, if you're not telling people things they don't know, if you don't have that big investigation, you. If you don't people a reason to read. They don't care what your name is, they don't care that you are draped in glory, are a utility to them. Are you vital to them today? If you're not, you start to fade. And I think they had that happening. They, for whatever reason, had what I would describe as cultural rot in that there always just seems to be infighting this us against them. Part of it is because they're a highly unionized shop. Part of it is because people at different times didn't like Fred or didn't like Will. There's just this tension which is just. It's odious. Like, I can't imagine operating a company like that. I just wouldn't do it. Like, it would be miserable. Like, I'm blessed that like I've got a great relationship with the people who work for us and we try to take care of them. We enjoy each other. Like, to not have that is very contagious. So then you spend all of this time infighting, gossiping, trying to position as opposed to doing great journalism in a really competitive environment when the economics are almost impossible and the margin of error is almost zero. Right. So they're doing everything wrong throughout that entire period. And that's where you end up with losing $100 million and more than that, like losing a lot of readership and really just like losing cachet in this town and then feeling driftless. Right. That's how I would describe. I don't know if someone said describe. I just listened to Matt Murray's podcast where he talked about this episode of Will leaving and I still after it. I don't understand. Like, what is the Washington Post? Like, how can I. Jim, who worked at the Washington Post, who loves the Washington Post, who lives in the D.C. area, consumes a stupid amount of media. How can I not know what you stand for? That's awful, that's sad.
- [33:12]
Nick
I think we finally have to bring Jeff Bezos into this because, I mean, you look at what was said about bezos between say 2013 and 2020, and it seemed like the journalists respected the fact that he was plowing a lot of money into the institution while also keeping a hands off approach, which is what every journalist and editor want from their billionaire benefactor. It's give us all the money and then leave us alone. You compare that with what's happened in the last year, year and a half, with him pulling the Kamal endorsement, turning the business section, excuse me, the op ed section, essentially into a kind of makeshift economist where all of the left or center voices have been pushed out. And it's sort of a place for libertarians to be libertarians. What do you make of Bezos? At least it seems to me like utter lack of focus here. This is someone who clearly is a brilliant person. Who, when he pays attention to companies, the companies tend to thrive. What do you make of his involvement in the Post over the last decade?
- [34:09]
Jim VandeHei
I don't know. I'm baffled by it. Listen, I think we have a tendency to think because somebody has domain brilliance in one area, that therefore they are structurally wholly brilliant. It's possible he's the smartest person ever to get you to figure out how to buy shoes and buy product at the lowest possible price with the best, best possible delivery, but terrible at actually managing a media company. A totally different space. I don't think I'd be very good at operating a company that's trying to get you to buy that pair of shoes at the lowest possible price. I don't have any domain expertise, nor do I have any passion, nor give a crap about it. And so I think he got into a space that's hard. I think he thought you could just like, magically sprinkle some technology dust on it and it would solve problems. It doesn't. And then I think he got into, like, living life on a yacht and dating and getting buff and all the stuff that you see him do. And he didn't pay any attention to the operation of the company. He doesn't have to. He can do whatever he want. He bought the asset. It's capitalism. It's a free country. Do whatever you want. It breaks my heart that that's what he chose to do because he ended up hiring an atrocious CEO in Will Lewis. Again, foreseen, foreseeable, let it persist for far too long despite everybody begging and pleading with him to just at least take a look at what's happening and see if you come to the same appraisal that they were. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you wanted to be conspiratorial, you'd say he's just worried about, you know, pissing off the President of the United States. So he's trying to, you know, go light on Republicans and doesn't really care if the. The Post loses its mojo and he'll play the long game. I don't know.
- [35:48]
Nick
This episode is brought to you by Firehouse Subs.
- [35:51]
Jim VandeHei
Who just dropped a game changing sandwich. The French dip.
- [35:56]
Nick
Literally one of my favorite sandwiches slash subs. Roast beef, caramelized onions, melty cheese, little freshly toasted garlic butter roll, and the warm savory au jus.
- [36:09]
Jim VandeHei
I've been eating these forever, since I.
- [36:12]
Nick
Was living on the east coast in la.
- [36:15]
Jim VandeHei
I think to me, this versus the.
- [36:17]
Nick
Cheesesteak, the French dip. No contest. Way better. And I think it's really because of the au jus.
- [36:23]
Jim VandeHei
I don't know anybody who doesn't like au jus. An elite game day sub.
- [36:27]
Nick
Fun to order by the way, if you want it delivered because they usually.
- [36:30]
Jim VandeHei
Put the au jus in the special.
- [36:33]
Nick
Little container you can pour it on, knock yourself out.
- [36:35]
Jim VandeHei
The French dip here for a limited time.
- [36:38]
Nick
I wish it was longer. Only at firehouse subs. Limited time at participating firehouse subs restaurants while supplies last. Can I dip my toe into conspiratorial waters here? I think all that's true. I think he lost interest. I think he fell in love with other stuff. The yacht lifestyle. I also think that Occam's Razor is the simplest explanation for why Bezos has had this about face change in the last year and a half is to look at the business of Blue Origin. His rocket business, his space technology business. So when Bezos bought The post In 2013, Blue Origin was basically a fledgling company. It had nothing more than million dollar ten million dollar deals with the government. I did some digging into contracts this morning assigned with Blue Origin. Before 2020, Blue Origin had only signed contracts worth barely $100 million. In 2023, Blue Origin signed its largest federal contract for a human landing system for Artemis missions with NASA. $3.4 billion. That was under the Biden administration. 2025, blue origin signs another contract for launch services with the billion. Jeff Bezos is in the business of signing contracts under a government and under a president that we know is vindictive, that rewards people who do things who do favors for him and punishes people who criticize him. And so it's in a way, while it's terrible for journalism, it doesn't seem to me to be very mysterious that Bezos is essentially sacrificing a lesser asset to protect a larger asset by essentially allowing the Post to wither. Reject the fact that there's a clear strategy here that could work when the Post's identity was democracy dies in darkness, we're gonna stand against the authoritarian tendencies. The Trump administration, its subscription sextupled between 2017 and 2020. Clearly that strategy could work to a certain extent. Again, I think they're not pursuing it because Bezos has decided that pursuing it would put at risk a business that is now doing $5 billion. At least with the government, at least in contracts signed in the last few years. It seems to me like you just can't ignore an explanation that's that potentially obvious.
- [38:58]
Jim VandeHei
Again, we have no proof that that's the motivation. But I think it's fair for you to have that conspiratorial appraisal of it until he steps in and explains what the hell is he doing. Like, he could sell it, somebody would buy it. It is an important Washington institution. There are people that would go to work and try to make it work. They would take it off of his hands and he doesn't have to deal with this. Then he could focus on blue origin, if that's where his emphasis is. And everybody comes out a winner. Right. So is he really get that much? Is Trump really gonna care that much if he sells the Washington Post to a group of Washington locals? I doubt it.
- [39:39]
Nick
Right. You were engaged in a Twitter conversation about what you would do if someone tapped you on the shoulder, maybe it's Jeff himself, and said, what would you do to save the Post? Do you want to walk me through some of your thoughts about what you think is possible right now to turn around this institution that's so important to you as it is to me?
- [39:57]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah. I'd start by stop doing all the things that you're doing. Like even this crap about we're just going to follow the date. Like, I don't even understand what that means. That works perfectly if you're trying to sell a pair of shoes because you can watch what size and style people are looking for and just be clear.
- [40:11]
Nick
This is an illusion of the fact that I believe it was Bezos himself in an interview or maybe a statement.
- [40:16]
Jim VandeHei
They all keep talking about, we're going to follow the data. I'm sorry, if you're going to follow the data, what you're going to end up is mass producing content around porn, gambling tips, weed variations, funny memes and videos. Like, that's where data is gonna lead you.
- [40:34]
Nick
So if there's a 19 year old listener or viewer right now, they're like, that actually sounds like a Washington Post in my subscribers.
- [40:38]
Jim VandeHei
I love that Washington Post. So, like, that doesn't seem like it. And then I would say, you are the Washington Post. Right? Like, yes, Politico did eat your lunch on politics and a lot of the policy, but there's no reason you couldn't reclaim that. There's all these federal agencies, there's all this money, there's all of these contractors. This is a rich, rich, rich area. Make no mistake about it. It even with the economic uncertainty right now, and even with the cuts in federal government, the derivative businesses around here are massive, massive. So if you just built it around the federal government and all the people that feed off the federal government and the fact that you have pretty powerful people who come into this town, do business in this town, live in this town, care about the sports teams, care about the housing prices. It gives you a pretty clear blueprint of if you're the Washington Post, what you could own this idea that, like, oh, we're gonna be the publication for all America. All America doesn't care about the Washington Post. Like, what is it that the Washington Post could give me in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that I can't get from a thousand other places? Why would the Washington Post have a right to win across the country as opposed to in its own backyard? And by the way, these businesses aren't terribly complicated. They're difficult. Media's a very, very. It's the coolest business to be in and probably the hardest in terms of making money on a year to year basis. But they're easier to run today than they were five or 10 years ago. Your technology costs are lower. You kind of understand the subscription business. You understand the high end subscription business, you understand the events business. This stuff has been figured out. And so I just don't feel like this is rocket science. The only reason I weighed in on X on it is like I care about the publication. I don't think they'll do any of the things that I laid out anyway. So if it's a competitive threat to us, like, I don't really care because I don't think they'll execute on it anyways. And the stuff that want to execute on, we'll execute on and probably execute better than they would. So I just hope that somebody takes over that publication that cares and somebody who has a business thesis, because I just think it would be an American tragedy if the Washington Post shrunk to nothing.
- [42:46]
Nick
Maybe there's one more question on the Post before we broaden the conversation to talk about changes to the media and political landscape. In the last 20 years. It seems to me like the easiest, dumbest, lowest hanging fruit here is the Washington Post has, for years, decades seen itself as being in competition with the New York Times. The New York Times has thrived not only because it has hired and held on two journalistic stars, but also because it has become so much more than just a newspaper. It has become, as you said, a lifestyle brand. My guess is that most of the subscriptions to the New York Times in the last, say, five years, maybe in particular during the Biden years, sure, maybe some of them were about the journalism, but I would guess the plurality or majority were for cooking and for games and for the stuff that existed around the journalism. Why not just copy the New York Times? In a way, it's almost like. It's like if you're an NBA team in 2014, 2015, and the Rockets and the warriors are winning 60 games a year by chucking up a bunch of threes, why not just at least try to get some people on your team who can chuck up threes? That seems to me to be sort of like the duh equivalent of trying to do a little bit more, to hire a chef star, hire some engineers who build games and build that kind of lifestyle presence around your media product.
- [44:14]
Jim VandeHei
You could. I think that's a harder. It's harder because one, the New York Times is pretty good at being the New York Times. I think that even in those spaces that you mentioned, there's a lot of individual companies outside of media that do it quite well. And there's nothing about the Washington Post that tells me that they have a consumer base that's big enough that wants that, that that's where I would put my investment dollars. Whereas I think there's easier places. The way you got to look at it when you're running a media company is, okay, what are the audiences that I have the right to be able to. To kind of lock in on a near daily basis where they need me to kind of live their life, do their job? And then how, based on those audiences, what is the easiest way for me to monetize those in the most robust possible way, in a scalable, durable way? That's why I think, like the Washington market, there's a lot of money here, right? We're not a great indicator of media overall, but like, Axios has never been better. And we just had our best quarters at our best month. And why? Because there's just a lot of people who want to reach people in positions of power, and there's a finite number of ways to do that. And so I don't really want the competition because not having it benefits us. But I will say one of the market dynamics I've seen here is that the more competition you have, it does seem to continue to lift at least our boat, if not all boats. And so I think competition in all spaces actually sharpens the soul. And that's why I would welcome it. And I think that that's just a safer place for the Post to play than it would be to do kind of trying to be a knockoff of the New York Times, which has a Much, much bigger base.
- [45:49]
Nick
To start with, I wanna make sure that I name check the conservative critique of the Washington Post here, which is that the financial disaster of the Post in the last few years flows directly from the journalistic malpractice of the Post becoming too liberal. When I read that critique, my view is that it misses the degree to which modern news organizations tend to thrive when they have a discernible identity. Sometimes that identity is a person. Bill Simmons, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, they all have first names. That's how you know that they have identifiable personalities. But you look at also organizations like Fox News, which is openly biased, has a very discernible identity. My feeling about the conservative critique is that it misses that whether or not media should be overtly liberal or conservative or libertarian. I think it actually helps in an abundant media environment to be known for what you produce. And I feel like the Post lost an identity rather than losing purchase on a view from nowhere objective middle ground. But I wonder how you feel about the conservative critique that once too many people associated the Washington Post with a kind of left wing resistance politic. It hurt its ability to grow in the post Trump years.
- [47:15]
Jim VandeHei
Listen, I think parts of that critique are very fair. I do think that the Post was more ideological than it led on. I don't think that that's the reason for its demise. I think you're right. Had it doubled down on Democracy Dies in Darkness and been more of a resistance like proudly resistance publication, they would probably be thriving. And well, Jim, you're nuts. Well am I like why is the Atlantic thriving? Why is the New York Times thriving? And so the, the, the, the, the actual data on people who made that choice as a, as a business strategy shows that it, it can work. I think it's that they have no identity. I think what conservatives get wrong about media, especially in Washington, is like, even if you're perceived as, as is, is ideological, even if you're seen as part of like the enemy, if you are writing things that, that they know they have to reckon with and they know to be true, they continue to do business with you. There's such a WWF kind of piece of journalism that people don't get of like Trump. I hate the media. I hate the media. And yet he's talking to more reporters in one day than any president I've ever met has talked to reporters in a year. Like they're interacting with you. Like we, we have days where the Trump White House hates us and loves us. But I find them to be more accessible by far than any administration that we've ever covered. And they might say they don't like us or they don't like the media. They engage with it. And so had the Washington Post just stuck to its identity of we are going to be the dominant publication about the interworkings of power and of governance and of politics. That's a beautiful place to be. And there's always money to be had around there because there's always audience to be around there. This is a company town. That company is politics, that company is government. And the fact that they surrendered that and allowed us at Politico to eat their lunch, like that's a tragedy. They shouldn't allow that.
- [49:13]
Nick
And Politico Axios Punchbowl. I mean, it'd be one thing if the Washington Post were like a tree in a Superfund site where it died because the ground underneath it was toxic. It's like a dying redwood in a forest of redwoods. It's being decimated in an environment where a bunch of other news organizations are going. And that tells me that the mistakes are more strategic than structural. When it comes to the Post, I do want to shift to the broader changes that you've observed in the last 20 years. You recently wrote a really interesting essay for Axios about what you've seen since between 2006 when you left the Washington Post to 2026. It seems to me like the single most objective observation you can make about the difference in media today versus 20 years ago is that there's just more of it. The most significant change is just a change of quantity. And I think quantity has implications of its own. I think quantity changes the way that people see their own role in a media environment. If you know that you are the local monopolist, you might feel like you have a responsibility to be something for everyone. If you feel like you're one voice among a million, I think you're much more likely to be antagonistic me against the world and choose a specific ideology that represents you specifically. So I wonder what you see as the most important implications or consequences of there just being so much more Damn Media in 2026 than there was 20 years ago.
- [50:40]
Jim VandeHei
It's like great, great paradox of the moment, which is there is more awesome, high quality, deeply thought out like nirvana level information available today to the 6 billion plus that have Internet connectivity around the world than at any point in the history of humanity. Sitting next to that is there's more crap, more manipulative content, more garbage, more seductive in a bad way type content than ever before. So, like, you're right. Like, the more is probably the biggest change. There's just tons of it. You could quantify it. Right. It's just piles and piles of content, and the consequences of that are everywhere. Right. It's why I think people are so confused. I think it's why people are so anxious, why they're so overwhelmed. The fact that. That myself, even now, in a given week, will send Mike Allen or somebody something I see and like, oh, this is really interesting. Is it real? Just pause on that for a second. You never asked that question five years ago. If I sent you something or you read something, you would assume it was real. And now the smartest people with the most discerning filters, others don't know if what's real because you're just. There's so much stuff coming from so many directions. And I worry about it, and I talk to my kids a lot about this. That I think the biggest differentiator for success over the next couple of years, in addition to kind of AI proficiency and enthusiasm, is being on the right side of information inequality. Like, if you filter things correctly, if you know what to watch and what to read and what to listen to and what not to read, watch and listen to, you can form a bionic brain. Right now I feel so much smarter today than I did three or four years ago. But not to kiss your ass, like, part of it is finding people like you who kind of think panoramically on topics and provocatively on topics that I'm interested in, but that I didn't really have anywhere to get that type of content five years ago. And now it's everywhere. And you follow individual people or you watch a video on YouTube or you listen to the right podcast. Like, think about even us as reporters being, like, honest, like pretty wired reporters. We could probably get almost anybody on the phone, but it's not like I could get Elon Musk on the phone ten times a year. Right. And we never could, even in the heyday of our jobs. But he's doing a podcast a week or two, so you have access to the smartest minds across any topic available for basically free or a Spotify subscription. And you can listen and you can learn. And so if you could filter that correctly, it is a beautiful time to be intellectually curious. It's just so hard if you're not kind of doing this for a living and have the time to filter out the bad stuff and you just get on your phone and you're stressed out and the kids are Screaming. It's just easier to get into the bounty of crap.
- [54:05]
Nick
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that sort of bifurcation or that barbell effect where it's so difficult, I think, to describe the state of media briefly because we live in a period where there is so much more insane conspiratorial bullshit and four hour interviews with physicists that go deep into the nature of the universe in ways that 1957 CBS was never going to touch. And so you can't just say, oh, everything's getting worse, everything's getting better, everything's getting everything. Because there's so much stuff out there that it's very hard to paint it all with one brush. I want to go back to one thing you said that just triggered a thought when you were talking about you and Mike seeing a new piece of information and wondering, is this true? That decline of instinctive trust in media? On the one hand, you could argue that that's a bad sign because it suggests that our media diets, even when we try very hard to keep them clean, can still be encrusted with conspiratorial nonsense. At the same time, a part of me thinks that decline of trust is a part of wisdom for consumers. Like if you go back to. I was reading this interview that Jack Schaeffer did for Harper's Magazine a few months ago. Jack Schaefer, a great media critic, he was talking about how in the 1950s, 1960s, newspapers didn't publish the news as we understood it. Newspapers published what the government told them. And it was only the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, he said, when news developed a slightly more antagonistic relationship with government, where the news wasn't just the press secretary said X, it was the press secretary said X. But that's a lie. And there's a way in which obviously we don't want an implosion of trust such that nobody believes anything that they see. And we all live in this nihilistic world of nonsense. But there's a way in which trusting our eyes and ears a little bit less, holding on to skepticism a little bit longer, that's not the worst way to be a modern news consumer.
- [56:23]
Jim VandeHei
I agree, and I disagree. I agree. If you have the time and the capability to think deeply about what you're talking about, the news, and to hold it up and to think skeptically and think critically. I think most people have a life and they're really busy and they don't have that much time to allocate to information consumption. And I think that they're the victims of this. They really are. I think, to be honest, like, we're the beneficiaries of it. And that's what makes me sad. Right. Cause I want, I believe, like, so powerfully in this country, so powerfully in its capabilities. And I think we have all these advantages that people just don't understand, exist in such abundant ways. And yet people are demoralized instead and they think everything's funky because of what they're seeing on their screen. And so, yeah, I think both exist at the same time. Like, I'm probably in your. I'm more in your camp that if I'm being honest, I have never been more excited to be alive intellectually. Like, yes, like, there's things that scare me. I think there's like, truly existential things that are hovering around us. But intellectually, I have never been more on fire in terms of, like, I find AI both frightening and the most fascinating thing I've ever used and I've ever thought of. I think the political shifts that we're seeing here in Europe and Canada and everywhere that all are kind of mirroring each other. I just find it fascinating. The stuff that you read about in history books when you have these large societal shifts that tend to be global in nature. Even the stuff that you and I are talking about, this transformation of how our realities are formed, this is a once in a hundred year shift. And I think that. And Mike and I have written about this, I think that the root cause, what I always tell people when they're like, I'm anxious, I'm anxious. And I'm like, unless you are medicated to the point of being catatonic, you should be anxious because you have these huge shifts taking place. And it's a long way of saying if you have the time, if you have the capability to throw yourself into it, it is electrifying. I just worry that people don't. And that because people aren't programmed and we're not wired to be able to deal with change at this level of scale in this many ways, that it's just pulling us further apart and pulling too many people too far away from reality.
- [58:51]
Nick
I wanna close on a topic that I know you care a lot about. I care a lot about it too, which is artificial intelligence. I think the way that I wanna do this, the way I wanna get into this particular subject is to point out, and I'm riffing, I think right now on my friend Kevin Roose's observation that there's an enormous disconnect within the media, among journalists about whether AI is essentially just a piece of hallucinating, copycatting, stochastic parrot, autocomplete nonsense bullshit on the one hand versus other people who I think are more enmeshed in the latest offerings from frontier models who are playing with the very latest, most cutting edge tools and are becoming extremely AI pilled. I count you in that category. And so I want to give you a platform to imagine you're speaking to an audience of not just journalists, but an audience of Americans, people around the world who don't believe that these tools can really do anything useful. Because at the end of the day they're just fancy little pieces of autocomplete. Why are they wrong? And what have you built that you think has real value?
- [60:09]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah, I think what I would say to them is of all the things that I feel passionately about right now, I feel there's nothing I feel more passionate about than you're basically being told that the Internet's coming before the Internet came. You have a heads up on a technology that is gonna have a bigger effect on society than the Internet did. And I increasingly think maybe at like an electricity level effect on soc. And for those people that are skeptical, like don't believe me, but also don't believe the one interaction you had with ChatGPT where it gave you a stupid answer or it hallucinated. If you have $20, download the Claude app Opus 4.5 or 4.6, it's $20, you can cancel after a month, spend one hour on it. Not just asking it a simple question, but think about something you would like to build. And don't just, just like, don't just say it once and give up. Like really work with it. Like, try to be very, give it context, explain what you're trying to build, have it ask you questions so that you could flesh it out. And then you'll start to see the magic. You'll start to see why people aren't sleeping in San Francisco, why every investment dollar is going into AI and AI adjacent companies, why people like you and I are up late at night building things. And I'll give you a good example. Like I, I'm being 100% sincere. Like, no false humility. I am a tech dope. I know nothing about coding. It's been the biggest frustration in running media companies that I don't know Ruby on Rails or Python. I can't really fact check whether somebody's good at their job or not. And in the last, like just in the Last month, especially with this explosion of Claude, I've built a half dozen different prototype apps that are high functioning and work. I'm building one right now that basically if you tell me what you do, how long you been doing it and in what industry you're in, it's gonna teach you how to code or how to prompt the machine the way that the most sophisticated people are prompting Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT so that you can get the most out of it. I was able to build that in about a half an hour. As somebody who runs media companies. Had I asked my product team to do that even a year ago, it would have taken certainly three to six people and probably three to four months to get to prototype me. Jim alone, working only on his phone, I'm not even using my laptop for this, only on my phone, was able to build that and get it into an operating state. I'll give you another example I'm trying to build. I'm a fly fisherman. One of my frustrations is that it's really hard when I travel to find a guide. And so I'm trying to build like the Uber of fly fishing where I basically take. And basically all I did is I said, I want you to think like you're Steve Jobs, I want you to study Uber, I want you to study similar marketplaces. I want you then to help me build out a app that would match consumer with either the fishing guide or hunting guide. And it's magical. Like, even the first stab, before I even started to ask it to make some changes, it was beautiful, it was intuitive. It was doing and building things that I wasn't asking it to. And if you want to really go one level deeper to see just how fascinating it is, you can click one button and you can see how it's thinking and just watch how it thinks and then ask yourself, do I have a friend who could think that smartly? I don't. And I feel like I know a lot of smart people. Like, it's coming and it's coming fast. And what I tell our employees, what I tell my kids, there's scary outcomes from it, but what the best. The thing you can do to give yourself the best possible chance to thrive with it is to learn it. Figure out how do I utilize this as a force multiplier of the work that I do or the passions that I hold. And play with gemini, play with ChatGPT, play with Claude, see which one works best for you, and if you can, integrate it into the work that you do. And offload this work you don't want to do or the tasks in life you don't want to do, suddenly you're gonna become exponentially more productive, and you're gonna be fluent in the first technology that speaks j. It speaks English. Like it just. You just talk to it. You don't need to be a fancy coder. You don't necessarily need to be exceptionally bright. If you are creative, you have an idea, you can offer context, have a little bit of patience, a little bit of persistence, you're going to produce something really neat. And so I worry like you do. I live in Washington and I talk to people who are running companies. I talk to people in government, and they're divorced from it. So it's not just you. If you're listening to this and you're like, I'm still scared. I'm telling you, lawmakers, government, CEOs, they're scared, too. You're on equal footing with them. If you just jump in today and you start to learn it, you're gonna have a leg up over other people. You're gonna give yourself the best possible chance to succeed. And that doesn't mean it's gonna displace you or displace your passions or all the other things. But I think just like using it is the best thing you could possibly do.
- [65:15]
Nick
I don't wanna belabor the point because this is not an AI podcast, and we do plenty of AI podcasts here. But I do want to recircle what I think is a really, really important point for AI skeptics out there who believe that this technology simply doesn't do what some people promise it does. In my experience, there are a lot of people that have essentially used a model that is two to three years old. They used the first edition of ChatGPT, which is 3.5. We're now up to like 5.3 or something. That technology was interesting, but incredibly flawed. It did hallucinate, it did fail to offer links. It did fail to serve as essentially a good research partner. It was ready for primetime. But to reject that technology and then say that all future AI is essentially equivalent to me is like essentially trying out a cell phone in 1989 and then deciding that the smartphone of 2026 doesn't work. These are essentially entirely different technologies. And I would just encourage people who are skeptics. Pay the $20. I think Jim is right. Pay the $20 and see what you can build. Last question, because let me just bring AI close to the topic that we've been discussing. Today, I mean, if indeed Politico succeeded in part because of its co evolution with the smartphone, with social media, if CBS thrived because of its co creation with the radio and television technology, we can go back and do this for a lot of companies that succeed and still exist precisely because they they struck when a certain technology was having its hockey stick moment. What kind of a media company strikes you as being apt for the AI native world? What is the kind of media company that you could almost say couldn't exist or couldn't thrive in a pre AI world, but you think could and might thrive? If indeed this is something that as you say is the next electricity, I.
- [67:12]
Jim VandeHei
Don'T know that it couldn't thrive without AI. But what will thrive with AI is authentic expertise, something that requires true human experience, true human history with a topic. My ability to watch you, talk to you, get you to tell me something that you might not tell someone else, or look at a verbal tic and be able to pick up that you meant something different than what the words actually said. I think that type of content is gonna serve surge in value. I think it's possible it's worth 10x what it is today because everybody else is going to be operating with basically universal general intelligence. So they talk about AGI in terms of the technology achieving human like general intelligence. I think we're all going to have baseline general intelligence just like we all basically, if we have Google, have the same baseline recall capabilities, we're going to have these brains that are just enormous on, on almost any piece of topic. If you can sit above that with expertise, you're going to have value. If you have trust because of either your personality, because of your knowledge, because of your humor, whatever it is, if you have trust that's going to sit above and beyond the LLM, above and beyond AI. And then if you have the ability to connect humans either like through membership events, I think as people become more and more dependent on artificial intelligence, there's going to be an equal and opposite, opposite reaction where people need human touch, need human connectivity. If you can provide that, those three attributes I think will have a ton of value. By the way, that's not most media. If you're generic, you're general, you're not that interesting, you're not vital, you will be obliterated and it will be fast and it will be furious and there's nothing you can do about it. So I think you have to be in those three categories and I think a lot of people fit right. I think you will Thrive, because you're gonna be able to do more than you can do right now. The way you research your stories, the way you distribute your content, your ability to maybe do this and run another company simultaneously, because you're going to have the power of AI around you. And so I'm bullish that if we can get things right with AI, and there's some real things that scare the hell out of me because we have a government that's not paying attention to it, but if we can get it right and it doesn't destroy us. And not to be hyperbolic, I think there's scenarios where it could. I think it could be great for human intelligence. And the last point I'll make is that for media, people in the media are interested in media. You have to understand that we're probably at the leading edge of a substantial platform shift that will be akin to the creation of the iPhone. Like you never stared at your phone before 07 to get your information, in all likelihood, you're going to have some kind of new product in the next, say, one to three years that maybe combines some kind of screen with either a bracelet or a pendant or something where your ability to get information, have it personalized, have it tailored to your taste into your consumption patterns, I think is gonna be. Will be developed. And we don't know what that. We don't know what that looks like. And we don't know then what the unit economics of media are as they fit into that.
- [70:32]
Nick
Yeah. One way that I think I'd synthesize that answer is that there's gonna be some ways that companies are going to succeed in the next 10 years by leaning into AI and doing more with AI. But there's also going to be, I think, media businesses that succeed because in ways they lean away from it, right?
- [70:47]
Jim VandeHei
Yeah.
- [70:48]
Nick
Like why might events be so special in a world with abundant artificial intelligence? Well, because individuals are not AI. And so what is abundance sometimes becomes less valuable. What is scarce sometimes becomes more valuable. Individuals are scarce. Humor might be scarce, like true personal connection. But both through a phone, maybe through a device, but also in the real world, that might be scarce too. And so maybe there's companies that will thrive, especially in this coming age, because they lean away from the technology, not into it. I think that's a possibility too.
- [71:19]
Jim VandeHei
That's smart.
- [71:20]
Nick
Jim Vande Hei, thank you very much.
- [71:21]
Jim VandeHei
I appreciate it. Thank you.