Axios’ Jim VandeHei on Smart Brevity, Media & the Future of News

Up today, we're gonna be speaking with Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. Jim, how are you today?

Uh, great. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for joining. I know it's been a really busy time for Axios and we'll dig into all that, but before we do, I'd love to get a little bit of background about your journey and how you got started in the news industry.

Sure. For most of my life, I was a journalist and kind of thought I would be a journalist. Moved to Washington to be a political journalist and covered Capitol Hill. I was lucky enough to get hired at a pretty young age to cover the presidency and Congress for the Wall Street Journal in my late 20s, and then the Washington Post to cover the White House and campaigns and elections, including the presidency for the Post. And I kind of thought that's what I would do for the rest of my life until 2006 rolled around. And that's when there was just so much upheaval in media and it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that like dark clouds were coming in for mainstream media and kind of had the idea of like, why don't we try to control our own destiny? And what if we created a publication that could rival the Washington Post when it comes to political coverage? And so 6 months later, we launched Politico, which took off and had a lot of success. And I'd say that, that journey there, like, transitioned me from being just a journalist to being much more of a leader and being a CEO. Maybe midway through my time at Politico, I officially became the CEO so I could run the business and overall operations. And really at that point became much more of a business mind and a strategic mind when it comes to media. And we did that for 10 years. And 5 years ago, we started Axios. And we started Axios because it was clear to us that one of the fundamental challenges for people was that they're going to have to know more across more topics at a time where they have less time, and that you would need to create real efficiency in content consumption. And so we came up with this concept of smart brevity, which is combine real intelligence on smart topics with real efficiency, hence the brevity part. And now we're 520 people and we've had a lot of success and we're expanding into new areas.— but I love the media space, still consider myself a journalist at heart, but I, I got a side run companies.

Fascinating. And going back to when you founded Politico in 2006, I imagine when you talk about the upheaval, you're talking about really the forming, earliest stages of the forming duopoly of Google and Facebook. What were some of the other issues and signals that led you to, to going off on your own and starting this business?

It was just clear back then that you had the rise of the web and that readers were going to gravitate towards the internet and that the economics of newspapers, which are expensive to produce, were going to be very problematic. Because remember, we launched in basically '07, which is right— the iPhone, I think, came out right—

I was about to say that, 2008. Yep, next year.

Yeah, right around that time. So, the duopoly, Facebook, Google, really hadn't matured at that point. And so, they weren't gobbling up the money. We didn't see that. But what we did see was that the consumer was going to move to the internet and that Bing was lumbering bureaucratic newspapers, we're going to have a hard time making the transition from newspapers and deadlines and news holes to the reality of the internet.

Yeah, so, and we have a lot of writers, copywriters, designers that, you know, are thinking maybe right now about how do I go from working at an agency to starting my own agency. I would imagine the path is very similar from going from being a writer and a reporter to starting your own publication. What was that process like and what were some of the risks that you were wrestling with when you made that decision?

I mean, the risk is that you are taking a kind of safety and probably a good paycheck in the scenario you're, you're outlining, and you're risking that you're going to flop and you're not going to make any money. So there's real risk involved. And I think that is a gut check that anyone has to do. It depends a little bit where are you in life? How much money do you have? How much risk tolerance do you have? But if you have risk tolerance, I think one of the great things about America, one of the great things about capitalism is the fact that anybody can start a company. And it's a meritocracy. If you create a product that other people want and are willing to pay for, you can have success beyond your wildest dreams. And you can control your own destiny and your own work hours and your own culture and the type of people you're around. And so, I would gladly encourage anybody who has entrepreneurial instincts or hunches, to follow them if you can. I think it's the best way to live life. It's just like a free, fun, self-determined lifestyle. It's not for the faint of heart. Most startups fail. Even if they don't fail, they're hard. I work a lot. I've always worked a lot. And I'm not afraid of working hard. I'm not afraid of failure. Not everybody is that confident in terms of what they do that they're willing to risk failure. But it's just great. And then you get to learn from all your mistakes. It takes— I mean, everything that I'm good at now, I was terrible at when I started it. It's not like we're born with an understanding of how to create a culture or hire people or structure a company or sell a product or talk to staff or talk to customers. You learn those things and you've got to have both self-confidence, but you also have to have a lot of forgiveness for yourself and realize, "You know what? I'm not going to get everything right, but if I work hard and have a good idea and I can figure out a way to monetize that idea, good things will happen." Absolutely, couldn't agree more.

And, you know, obviously going from a writer to being co-founder and CEO of a publisher also, I would imagine, means that you're— that kind of your day shifts and you're not just worried about meeting the next deadline, but you're worried about payroll, hiring, ad sales. How did your overall responsibilities change? And, you know, did you— were you always writing along the way, or did you kind of give that up and just focus on the operations?

Yeah, I've always been a writer. And I think being a reporter and a writer has helped me. I still write for the site. I tend to write, I used to write only about politics. Now I write a lot more about leadership because it's what I'm interested in right now. But I also write a lot to sharpen my own thinking. I use notes on my phone and I have thousands of notes about how do I think about different topics so I can sharpen and challenge my own thinking. And I communicate a lot in writing with staff because I think I'm a pretty good writer. And it's just how I prefer to communicate because I could be precise with my language and I can convey exactly what I want to convey. I can think about it before I hit send. And so, I think once you're a leader, it's all different, right? I was a lone wolf reporter. I remember when I told Don Graham that I was leaving the Washington Post to start a company, he looked at me like I was on LSD. [LAUGHTER] He's like, "You've never managed anyone. You've never asked to manage anyone. You've never led anything because, in fact, you're never in the office. You're always off just doing your thing and writing, and now you're going to run a company? And he was right. At that point, if you looked at the evidence, you wouldn't say, "Oh, Jim is going to be a natural CEO." You'd say, "That's weird." But it wasn't. I basically was able to apply the skills I had as a reporter, a good BS detector, a good pattern recognizer, good at finding out what's real and not real, and then applying that to the business of running a business.

And how about ad sales? Were you involved in bringing advertisers on in the earliest stages?

Very much in terms of going out and pitching like, what is it that we're creating and why should they be enthusiastic about it? And particularly with Axios, we came up with a brand new sort of smart brevity ad unit where we got rid of popups, got rid of banners, put it within the feed of content. It was new. And what I wanted to tell, show them is like, listen, I think it's gonna be way more effective than any ad you've ever used. Most of the ads that you're often doing are kind of, they're noisy and they're irritating to the reader. These are pleasing. You're gonna learn all the things that we learned as reporters to get people to engage with your content. Buy, and if I'm not right, you won't get the results that you want. But if you get the results you want, I want you to spend a lot more money with us. And thank God we were right about the smart brevity unit. We've been able to do quite well on advertising and clients who do their own brand lift surveys and other things to validate the efficacy of advertising come back quite pleased. And that's great, 'cause I'm a big believer that great journalism has to be paired with a great business. And I respect advertisers and I, you know, a lot of journalists, "Ugh, advertisers and business." I'm like, "No, like that's what supports the journalism that you do." And why shouldn't they have like the best tools at their hand? Why shouldn't they have the best data to be able to present ads in a clearly marked advertising space, but they should be as effective as a journalist at engaging their audience. And I'm proud that we're quite good at that. proud that we have a big advertising base. And I think without advertising, you wouldn't have free journalism. And so I don't think advertisers necessarily advertise just to support journalism, which I think is important to a healthy democracy, but because of the work that they do, a healthy democracy for the most part, most days, uh, does still exist. And I think a lot of that's because a lot of media is still free thanks to advertising.

Absolutely. So you mentioned Axios, and that was my next kind of line of, of this interview, is talking about Axios. So you started in 2016. What was the gap you were looking to fill at that point when you decided to go live with this new publication?

The gap to us was very clear, which was everybody was having the same problem I was having at a personal level, which is I'm getting hit with more content than ever before from more directions and I don't know what to trust. At the same time, me as a media operator, I need to know a lot more about a lot of topics. I need to understand AI, China, healthcare, workforce changes, politics. Well, to do that, and it's not just related, right? It's in collision. It's the collision of those topics that creates controversy or new ideas or new products. Well, you can't do it in the traditional way. No one has enough time in the day. And so, we wanted to help people, at least for that content that's kind of moment by moment and day by day, make it exponentially more efficient so that people could spend less time with the content, but walk around, walk away with more learning, more knowledge so that fundamentally they can make better decisions. And it worked, it worked almost instantly. We were able to get really high-level people, CEOs, politicians, tech leaders, media leaders to read us and then little by little radiate out to a larger audience. And that was very gratifying because when you start a company, you have a theory, you have a thesis, and you want to tether that to, okay, if I'm right about this theory, I could probably make money, but you don't know. You don't know until you unleash it into the wild. And once we unleashed it into the wild, it behaved the way that we thought it would behave. And we've been able to probably grow a little bit faster than I would've thought and expand into new areas that I had not anticipated at the time. But I think it's because when you think about bringing efficiency to content, it works in a lot of places. It works nationally, locally, it works inside companies who are trying to learn how to communicate, works— Yeah. Wonders in the advertising space where advertisers are desperate to get into a clean, well-lit space with effective advertising. And so it's been fun. And then you build a culture around people you want. I'm blessed in that I did well at Politico and I've done well in a career. So I have the freedom now to do what I want to do with the type of people I want to do it with. And I want to work with really high-achieving people who have good hearts and good souls and are jerks and aren't arrogant and aren't just in it for themselves. And we've built an entire company around that. And that makes for a very dynamic, fun workplace. Like, it's a very high-achieving workplace and very demanding workplace, but we give as much as we get. And I love that. That's like how I aspire to live my own life. And it's how I want to arrange my work life.

Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of purists, for lack of a better term, in journalism have often said short form is the death of journalism and it takes away from the deep reader experience, et cetera. But I think you guys have really proved the opposite. And the reality is the consumer is changing. The millennials is a completely different species than every generation that came before them. And a lot of what I— the way I would describe Axios is you get a lot of breadth and you can, like you said, you have the collision of all these different distinct topics versus having to go too deep. And you guys do also give the ability to go deeper as well. But I think the form factor was really something that was quite disruptive at the time. And obviously, to your point, proved to be a really valuable thesis.

Thank you. And it's scalable.

Yep.

Right. That's what we were trying to do. Like, how do you create a form that's scalable? Like, yes, there might be some journalistic skepticism. I think there's less than I had anticipated. But the truth is, like, all we did was create an architecture that gets you closer to how I would share really important information with you if we went and had a beer. I'm not going to lard it up with a bunch of silly words. I'm not going to meander to the point. I'm going to tell you what is fun and exciting to me. I'm going to tell you why it matters. And then you're going to give me some kind of social cue about whether we should go deeper. That's how the mind wants to interact with information. That's how the mind gets enthusiastic about information. It doesn't have a— I don't get there in talk to you in the voice of God and suddenly seem stilted and foggy. I'm trying to be direct and fun and engaging. And that's the format that we tried to create. And I think it resonates because that's how we as a species want to interact with, with each other and interact with information.

Absolutely. And over time, I think, obviously, given your background coming out of DC, you know, obviously the world's become so much more polarized, especially here in the United States. How have you guys walked that tightrope in terms of trying to stay as close to the center as possible without losing your soul, so to speak? Because obviously one of the huge issues facing American media right now is this partisanship, especially in any publication that goes anywhere near politics.

Yeah, I mean, we did a couple things and we were pretty purposeful about it. One, we made the decision early on we're never going to have an opinion page, which, you know, comes at a cost because opinion can drive a lot of traffic. Number 2, we ask every employee, regardless of your position, whether you're on editorial, technology, marketing, we ask that when you work for us, that in public settings, you not engage in political activity and argument on Twitter and other forums, mainly because what I'm telling our staff is like, we're just, we're trying to rebuild trust. The country is suffering from not just a deficit of trust, but potentially a debacle from the deficit of trust. And so the little part we can play is try to restore that relationship of trust between us as a public communication and the reader. And then when we ask our journalists is like, we say, listen, like cover this stuff clinically. We want you to be tough. And I think if you look at some of the interviews we've done with Trump and others, we've been as tough as anyone else, but we're not hyperbolic. We're not on cable or Twitter, like saying these guys are losers or stupid or whatever. We're trying to hear the facts based on real expertise of reporting delivered in a clinical but direct way. And then we're not editorializing around it. And I just think there's enough hyperventilating on Twitter and on cable TV. They don't need more of that from us. What we can do is offer real expertise and thought into what is happening inside institutions or how this is an anomaly in terms of how institutions have been operated and run in the past, and then let people make decisions. And I think that served us well because I think I don't know the exact ideological makeup of our readership, but we have a lot of Republicans, a lot of Democrats, a lot of independents. And I hear from all sides that while they might not love that we're not using sharper language occasionally, but they do like the fact that we're trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth. And I'm not delusional. We're not going to save democracy and we're not going to change media ourselves, but we do have— We do. What I call a staff. You have something that 99.999% of humanity doesn't have. You have a platform that is read by some of the most powerful people around the country and around the world. And so we should protect it. We should just protect the sanctity of that, do everything we can to day in and day out, try to earn the trust of people who are persuadable. There's some nuts out there, we're never gonna be able to persuade them to trust us. They might want ideological fuel, we don't offer it. But I don't think that's most people. I think most people are normal and we're trying to appeal to the normal part of our country.

Yeah, that being said, I'm sure you did have to walk a fine line at times because even things that you, you know, present as facts in this world, there are many others who will say that's not a fact. So I would imagine it's, I mean, the way you describe it is quite black and white, but I think even if you go down that route, I would imagine sometimes you have people that really have a lot of dissent towards what you're putting out there.

Well, sure. Obviously in this environment, you have more of it than ever. You've got a group of people that will say that the election was rigged and that there's widespread evidence of voter fraud. And all we can say is there's very little evidence of voter fraud. And in fact, in most of these swing states, it was Republicans who investigated it and showed that there wasn't voter fraud. That's just a fact. It's not me putting my hand on ideological scale. It is what it is. Just like January 6th, the storming of a Capitol, the killing of people in Congress, never happened before. And it is something that no one ever thought would happen in America. And to point that out is not to make a judgment about the entire Republican Party or every Trump supporter, but pointing it out in very vivid and direct terms that that's not normal, that's not usual, and that there are real threats to democracy when people move away from the truth. If you'd ask me, like, my biggest concerns about the country, it's that. I really, really worry that a lot of smart people are being duped by misinformation. And I think— Matt Britton. The reason that I have faith in our resiliency as a country is that most people I meet are normal. And yes, they might be a little ideological, but I think that they volunteer, they work hard, they would shovel your driveway if there's a snowstorm. Like most people are good people and that's who we've got to make sure those people are armed with high quality information so that they can be better citizens, better workers, better neighbors, better people.

Yeah, absolutely. I wanna go back to the business side of Axios. So one thing that's definitely unique about Axios is that you guys have raised venture capital and a lot of publishers have kind of bootstrapped their way, but at the same time, you've always been profitable as a business, which is certainly unique for venture-funded companies. What drove the decision to raise the VC dollars and how has that impacted your strategy and ultimately the way you executed the business plan?

Yeah, I mean, to be blunt, we just weren't rich enough to start it on our own. We made some money off of Politico, but not enough to fund a company. And so we had big ambitions.

So it was mostly launch capital.

Yeah, you need money, right? And so we went out and we raised money. I think we initially raised $10 million. I can't remember what it was, $10 or $15 million. And we found investors that were both strategic investors, but also cared about media. So we knew that they'd be patient. And then we had a lot of success. So we were able to raise money, we were able to be profitable, like you said, and build a real business. And I think we had a track record for doing it at Politico. So they had confidence that we'd get it right, but they don't have a say in what we're doing. And because we had success, they were great investors and we loved them all, but like, they're not that involved in the company or kind of how we thought about the strategy. Like, we're pretty responsible with money regardless of whose it is. And, you know, we just recently did a deal with Cox where they bought out and they're now the owner, they're the majority shareholder. But we did that deal mainly because it was kind of a, just this rare marriage, like a company, they were investing in us, they're fourth generation, they care about local news. They're good people. I spent 6 months talking to people who left that company unbeknownst to them to find out, are these people really this nice? Are they really this good? Do they really have this strong of a culture? And they really checked out. They showed real passion for the type of work that we're doing. They care about journalism. They want us to continue to run the company for as long as we're functioning. And that's exactly what we were looking at. So we did a deal. Our banker, I think, said it was the easiest deal he's ever seen done. But it was mainly because I think people with a shared vision and to be honest, a shared morality or a value set, we're able to do like a very straightforward deal. There's no BS, there's none of this like games and then shit that you usually see.

Well, they're a family-owned business, right? Cox, and that I think has a lot to do with it. I think once companies go into the public markets, I think a lot of their motivations and intentions come from different directions. They're not always savory, but if you have a multi-generation family-owned business, usually you're going to find what you're describing.

Well, there's a lot of rich people who are weird. They're not. So, the downside of privately held companies is you could get into a web of weirdness, but they're not. They're very straightforward. You take on their culture. And you're right about public companies. Public companies, we could debate the public markets. I don't love quarterly reporting because quarterly reporting, I think, creates really bad incentives for companies to do short-term thinking when companies, you don't make money in quarterly thinking. You got to be thinking 2, 5, 10-year increments if you really want to build forever companies that are good for the consumer, good for the worker, and good for the country. And I, I don't like the short-termism.

Yeah, absolutely. So kind of to wrap things up here, so you guys have also spun out a software company called Axios HQ, and you mentioned Smart Brevity, which is, I think, for lack of better terms, almost like a— well, why don't you describe what Smart Brevity is? But I, I really like the thesis behind it in this world, but I, I'll let you do it justice.

Smart brevity is just this idea of how do you communicate the most important information as efficiently as humanly possible. And the reason that you want to do it is you want your message or whatever you're trying to say to stick. It's hard to get people to remember anything in this era. So you want to do it efficiently, sharply, smartly. And so one of the things, one of the cool kind of side business stories was 18 months into our creation, we got calls from the NBA, the basketball league, the JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth Group, almost all within a month or so of each other saying, "Hey, all of our executives read you, but they won't read anything that we write internally.

Can you teach us to communicate?" They all want to be their own newsrooms, right? That's really the future of branding is becoming your own newsroom, your own publisher.

They did, and they couldn't get— but people weren't paying attention to what they're publishing. And initially, I was like, "No, it's not our job. You go figure out how to communicate." But the more we heard it from people, the more we're like, "Whoa, there must be a huge problem if these really sophisticated companies can't get their employees to pay attention." to what they're writing. And so we created HQ, which is basically software. It's artificial intelligence that takes all of our data from the newsroom in terms of how do you write a headline? How do you use strong words instead of weak words? How do you divide— when should you divide a couple of ideas into bullet points? How do you use axioms? And it basically takes people who tend to be rather weak or long-winded writers and almost overnight turns you into a much more effective, efficient writer. And that company was doing so well that as part of this transaction, we split it off into a separate entity. That part of the company, myself, Mike, and Roy Schwartz will control. So they're two different companies. Cox controls the media company. And I have very high hopes for it because I think one of the biggest challenges facing any CEO of my size, smaller or larger, is, especially with people working from anywhere, is how do you communicate much more efficiently and effectively to get people to sort of know what's important, remember what's important, and act on what's important? HQ and Smart Brevity, uh, achieve that.

Both for internal communications and also for advertising and getting your message out to your customers. I mean, I think we're in a world that everyone's staring at their phone all day, and the same reason why Axios took off is the same reason why an application like this can, is that companies are way too verbose and, and they're not getting what's core of their message across. And their ability to do that is gonna be highly correlated with their ability to sell product and succeed.

I agree. I think Stuart Butterfield at Slack, I was watching him do a speech one day and he said, "It's weird because 60% to 70% of a leader's time is spent communicating either up, down, externally, and nobody teaches you how to do it well." And I was like, "That's actually true because I'm a leader. I'm a CEO. I spend most of my time communicating. Thankfully, hopefully, I'm a pretty good communicator because I've been in the media for a long time." But most people aren't. Most people become leaders and they came up through operations or finance or sales and their job wasn't necessarily to be a communicator, but you could argue that there's no more important role, maybe other than the CEO at any company for the next 10 years, than being a great communicator, a great marketer, a great advertiser. That's the whole game right now.

Absolutely. So I have a thesis in just looking towards the future of media and publishing that in a world where we don't know which businesses to trust and what's behind those businesses as the world gets more polarized, that consumers are gonna gravitate more towards individuals and people, and that people are gonna become the new brands. You look at somebody like Bill Simmons that left ESPN and then he created a massive podcast network just on the back of his name, right? And so his name became the business and Spotify acquired them. And there's so many other examples. Do you think there's a world where more large publishers like Axios will have, you know, success stories? Or are we gonna enter a world where, you know, individual journalists are gonna use Substacks and other platforms to create their own followings and, it's going to become far more decentralized.

To be honest, there's part of your thesis I agree with, that there are people like Bill Simmons out there who can become brands unto themselves. The part that I'm skeptical of is that as somebody who's run media companies and tried to hire talent for now going on 20 years, it's really hard to find people who are distinctive and who have a brand in a space and can do it on their own. One of the things we try to do is basically take a Dan Primack, a Sarah Fisher, a Jonathan Swan, people who have powerful brands in a given space, and then give them the freedom to express that brand, but give them the trappings of a company where you have editorial support and the ability to be on TV and the ability to have legal review things. And so, I think it'll be a hybrid. I think there'll be a couple of Simmons of the world, but I think they're going to be outliers. And I think there'll be some really high-quality institutions that adapt. To this moment. And then who knows? At some point in the next 5 to 10 years, information consumption is going to move. It went from paper to computer to phone to a little bit of podcasting. Something will come next, whether I'm reading it through my glasses or I'm reading it on the wall in terms of graffiti in the metaverse or something. Something's going to come up and people will adapt to that. But the need for high-quality information, the need for advertisers to reach people, reach consumers in a clean wellness space with effective advertising. I don't think those two things ever end. So I'm very bullish that if you're smart about content and you're, you're really true to trying to develop a relationship between the institution and the reader, that you can have a very prosperous future. Like if you're disorganized or you're tethered to the old ways, or you're kind of confused about your identity, or you're not really producing anything other than a commodity, You're screwed. Like, you'll be destroyed by technology, but that's part of markets and that's part of life.

Yeah, absolutely. And you had mentioned earlier that you are really now focused more so on teaching leadership. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why that's important to you and how you're pursuing that?

It's interesting. So about maybe 6 months ago, we started writing something called Axios Finish Line. And it goes out to probably 600,000 people every night. And the idea was like, okay, everyone doom scrolls all day. It's a freaking downer by the time you go to bed. Is there a way to end people's day with an item about either helpful information about your diet or exercise or a trend that's actually positive in the world? And then one of those days, I was like, I'll write myself just about all these lessons I've learned from being a leader and usually from screwing things up. And I don't mind exposing that to be able to tell a story about how things can be done differently. And the response to it's been insane. In fact, it's changed my view of journalism in some ways. I never thought— I always thought the job of me as a journalist is write and then let people react and go on about their life. Watching the response to Finish Line, the engagement from CEOs and leaders and political leaders, it's so clear people are hungry for like, what can I trust? And like, give me some context about what's working as the world around me is changing so fast. Yeah.. And it makes me feel like an Axios, like one of the jobs we have is to help people kind of give them some more context and some real data-rich evidence about like, okay, what is working and not working for people who are having success navigating the different aspects of life? And so, I enjoy telling those stories. They're often funny. They're often self-deprecating. They're often pretty blunt because I think I've been blessed to be someone who's— I wasn't born a leader. I'm not Al Gore. I didn't think I was going to be president when I was in college. I was a terrible college student. And I've been lucky enough to benefit, not to be cheesy about it, but I love this country. And here's this dope from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who should have gotten kicked out of college for partying and crappy grades. And I got to cover the president and I've been able to start 2 companies and I've done quite well starting those 2 companies. And I'd love to share whenever I learn because I do consider myself a member of normal America. I feel like I've never lost touch with Oshkosh, or I spend my time in rural Maine. I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what people go through, and I'd love to share like, hey man, like you might be struggling right now, but like, look, I was you and I was able to get here, and here are some of the steps that I took.

Definitely. I mean, you strike me as a, you know, a very relatable person and somebody who is genuinely just concerned with not just success of yourself and your business, but with others. So, you know, I really appreciate that, and I've definitely gotten a lot of value out of Socialize as well. So to wrap things up, you know, obviously, you've been very busy and you have a lot going on. What do you do personally to slow you down in such a fast-paced world?

I mean, I have a couple of things. I go and I have 3 kids, so they're in high school and college. So, most of my time is going to soccer games and trying to make sure that they get off to life on a good foot. I'm an avid fly fisherman. I work out a ton. I think a lot about working out and fitness and longevity. I'm 51, so I want to keep being healthy as long as I live. I spend a lot of time in Maine. I spend a lot of time traveling with my wife. But yeah, I'm a big believer, and you probably know from Finish Line, of like all these things fit together. Like I don't— I'm not a big work-life balance guy. I'm very for it, but like I'm always thinking about work. I love journalism. I love ideas. I love talking about advertising. I love talking about stories. I love talking about business creation. And so, I'm lucky that I do something that I would do for free. So, if I got fired tomorrow, I would still be on the phone with someone this weekend Hey, you guys should be doing this, or have you thought about that for your culture? Or here's a great story in politics. And that's— I think you can really hit it out of the park in terms of how you live life if you can do something where you make money that you would do for free. And like, I've won the lottery on that one.

Sure did. Well, listen, I really want to thank you for taking the time on this busy start of the fall. So, and congrats on your recent deal. It's well deserved and really excited for you.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

On behalf of Suzy and the Adweek team, I just wanna thank again our special guest Jim for joining us. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. And thanks again. See you next time, everyone.

Hey!