Jim VandeHei: "Simplify"

0:00Hi, it's Michael Smirconish. Welcome to Book Club with Michael Smirconish. A collection of Michael's favorite interviews with authors from the last 30 years through today, on the air, on radio. What sets my book club apart is that I actually read the books. Book Club is now in session. The Axios co-founders have a brand new book. It's called Simplify, Do 50% More With 50% Less. I refer to Jim Van Dehaay, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. If they'd asked me for a blur, blurb would have been how to conmari beyond your closet. This is Jim Van Dehaay. Jim, welcome back. Did my invitation to you to appear here today meet the Hell Yes Standard. Hell Yes. And what is the Hell Yes Standard? You know, it's a Mike actually came up with that. It's this idea of we say yes to so many things. We shouldn't say yes to that not a bad threshold.

1:00It's something you'd actually say Hell Yes to because that means you're excited to do it. It's something you're probably good at. It's something you want to do. It's a big thesis of this book that by habit and inertia, just the weirdness of our species. We end up learning up our days at home and at work with a bunch of stuff we don't want to do and shouldn't do, which then makes it almost impossible to do the things we want to do and that we're good at. And that's why we wrote the book is basically an operating manual. I think everybody knows they want to simplify their life. They just don't necessarily know how. And so we wrote this book not to win any kind of literary award, but hopefully to win like the usefulness award. My parents would not have needed this book. I bet your parents would not have needed this book either. I need this book. Does that mean the technology has brought this to bear on all of our shoulders? Yeah, I think technology, certainly the internet and now AI makes it exponentially more useful and needed. I'd argue vital. You're right and slower times people just have slower days. They're work weeks didn't bleed into their personal life.

2:02They weren't constantly distracted by whatever was lighting up the screen on their phone. And so I think now because of digital media, because of the way our brains work now because of AI, we just have so many taxes on our time, so many cugs and polls. And if you really sit down and take an inventory of your schedule at work or outside of work, most people are going to discover you spend 25 to 50% of your time doing stuff you shouldn't be doing. Don't want to do stuff you do out of habit. Not because you're dumb. It's all of us do it. There's institutional habit. There's individual habit. A nurse is everywhere. It's contagious. It's unescapable. And so you really do need an operating system. A different mindset if you want to combat that. And we put it to test it. I mean, we wrote the book because this is how we started running Axios three years ago. And the response that has been awesome. Like the results have been astonishing, both at a personal level, but then even down to the rank and file employee, who I think has a better sense of what are they good at? What should they be doing? What are the things that they thought were dumb that they

3:04stopped doing? And what can be automated so that they could spend their time doing the stuff that they can do uniquely well? And I think ultimately that's all any of us want to do. We want to be useful and productive. And we want to have fun and we want to spend our time on things that either consciously or subconsciously bring us some kind of joy and some kind of satisfaction. I think too many of us have been sucked into the screen, sucked into the habit and we kind of lost our way. And when you lose your way, you get anxious, you get nervous, you get sad. I think I'd rather be happy. I bought my wife a pair of shoes for Christmas. I tell you that because one of the things that you caused me to do after reading the book was to finally go through email and unsubscribe. And I couldn't remember half the reason why I'd been subscribed, wittingly or unwittingly. And one of them that I really wanted to know, like how the hell did I end up on this list? And why haven't I just taken myself was the shoes, the shoes that I bought back in December. So after reading, simplify one of the things that I did,

4:04I went through and unsubscribed to everything. But here's a dilemma that I have. And maybe it goes with the territory of what I do for a living. I get lots of unsolicited email, unsolicited email from good, decent people who want me involved in things, who want me to speak at events I could never go to. And I'm forever struggling with what is the appropriate response. And frankly, it's a time drain. And I don't want to be so cynical, but I've got other things I need to be doing. Advise me. Yeah, I mean, first, I think you like me, like we're human, we want to respond to people, we don't want to be jerks, we don't want to be cold. So I think one is just having a filter of what do you actually want to do? What brings you joy? What brings you meaning? What brings you value? Just sitting down and I advise us in the book, like write down both for your life and your work. One of the three things that matter most, that you want to be able to say when it's all said and done. That's very clarifying, because it'll start to dictate where you actually want to spend your time. And it will help you decide when you actually want to say,

5:05no, you could say no and be very polite. I say no all the time. Like a good example is one of the most important things to me in life is that when I die, I can say, you know what, I was a great son, great sibling, great husband and great father. Well, maybe everybody wants that. But to do that, I have to be able to allocate a lot of time to what is a group of about a dozen people. And to be able to allocate a time to dozen people, I have to say no to a lot. So what I decided was I'm going to say no to 99.99% of any social ask of me outside of family, even though running a company as a CEO in the media, you would think I need to be public facing. I need to be out and about. And I made the decision, no, I'm not going to be a social creature, because I need to allocate that time to the thing that I know in the end is going to bring me the most meaning, which is my family. And I think most people don't take the time just to sketch out what does matter for me at home, what does matter for me at work. Once you do that, you have this North Star.

6:05And then everything that flows down from that, you have this new clarity. Because people might be like, oh, whatever Michael, the way who cares, you cleaned up your inbox. That's one small thing. And if you do that across 10 parts of your life, and it probably only took you 20 minutes to do, if you do that little by little, you take back literally days out of your week. We have that study from the economist in there that the average person weighs at least 25% of their work week doing stuff they shouldn't do. And I think that number's low. But think about that. That's 2.5 years out of every decade that you're wasting on things you shouldn't be doing. But more importantly, that's 2.5 hours. You could be doing things you like doing that you're good at that make you feel better about yourself. And that's why I think you need a different way to look at this. A lot of people have written about this idea of how do you simplify life. I don't think anyone's actually created an operating system that works in an AI digital world that you can apply to both your work and life. And we put it to test and we're able to see

7:06the results that it had for us. So in simplified my copy, it's all marked up. I don't know if Jim Vandahy can see, but I've actually made a note that you've given me language that I can use. Thank you so much for thinking of me and including me in this. Sadly, I'm going to have to pass. I really appreciate the invite. And I hope it turns out to be a great success. I find your lessons in this book to be very valuable. They speak to me in particular. I guess that's the way every reader is intended to feel. But here's my one note. It's at odds at a certain level with my mingling philosophy. I believe that societal disconnect is our greatest problem. We need to find ways to instill common experience or as Robert Putnam would describe social capital. Are you taking me out of my mingling world with this book? I don't think so at all. I think I'm liberating you to actually mingle in that world in an undistracted way. If your calendar is clogged with stuff you don't want to do.

8:06If you're wasting a bunch of hours at work, those are hours that you could spend in social engagement. And you might list that as you're one, two, or three most important thing. Then you need to make sure you're freeing up time so you can actually have meaningful mingling. And I think that that's what we need. I believe powerfully that there is going to be an equal and opposite reaction to AI, which is the better that technology gets, the more we're going to yearn for human connection. I certainly feel it in my own life. What I want to do in my life, when it sounds like you want to do in your life, I just want to make sure that I get rid of all those things that are a roadblock between me and doing that in a meaningful way. And I think if you just let inertia take over, if you let habit take over, if you just use Mikey's term, keep on keeping on, you're just going to not have the time to do those things. And I'm not saying this in the book, as you know, and I love how you are marking it up, because that's actually, if you look at it, that's how it's written. It really is written like a tool. And I think it's a good way to work. Jim, Jim, I've gone, I've gone a step further. And there's a lot of discussion

9:07about artificial intelligence in the book. You have caused me to initiate via Claude, a life plan for my next 10, 15 years, because there's a part of the book where you say something like you don't assess your life until it's almost over. And then you think about what kind of a life, and I thought, Jesus, I'm 64, and that kind of sounds like where I'm headed. How many productive years do I really have? I've probably got 10, hopefully I've got 15. How do I want to spend them? So I am using AI as a grid to map out, how should I be most productive and most happy for those next 15 years of life? That's the influence that the book has had on me. Let me talk about something lighter. I love that. This is Book Club with Michael Smirconish from Sirius XM. Michael Smirconish program. Listen, weekdays at 9 AM East on POTUS, Sirius XM, Channel 124, and anytime on the Sirius XM app. Let me talk about something lighter. I love that. Have you watched the new Larry David show

10:09that President Obama plays a producer role in? I have not, I saw the president was doing that. Did you see the clip nonetheless about how the tan suit comes back, the Obama tan suit, and why would I bring up the tan suit to Jim Van Dehaay? Yeah, I mean, because we talk in there about this idea when you're trying to figure out, how do you get rid of the decisions that you have to make? Because every decision you make actually taxes your ability to make good decisions. And so it's not a coincidence that Mark Zuckerberg, President Obama, Michelle Rachel Maddow, others, they all try to wear the exact same thing every day. Some of it is stick and style, but there's some science to it, which is they're trying to eliminate the number of decisions that they have to make. So when they have to make important decisions, they're sharper, because you really do have cognitive fatigue when you make a ton of them. And so that's a fun example in there, but you stack those and it makes such a difference. And I love, love, love how you just talked about the book.

11:10Like when you write a book and you're writing a book for it just to be useful, and then to have you say, hey, I'm marking it up and I actually took the time to think about the 15 years. But I have a mind, Michael, you sound nuts, but you're not nuts because I am nuts. I am nuts. I am nuts. You don't look at, well, we're all nuts, but you have to look at it like 15 years is not that much. And okay, sleeping a third of it, you want to make sure that those other hours are used for maximally, so you're doing as much good as you possibly can do for yourself and others. That's not weird and that's not too mechanical and that's not a bad use, by the way, at all of AI, you're not saying you're outsourcing how, you're going to spend your time, you're using a technology to help you think about how you can optimize your time. So you say in the book and you just argued here that decisions deplete us. I've got one of these. One of my idiosyncrasies is lunch is a big thing to me. I'm not a social lunch person because I get to work very early in the studio, but by the time the program ends, which is noon Eastern, I'm famished.

12:11Here's the thing. Lunch bedevils me every fricking day. Like there's a diner I like to go to, it's a 20 minute drive. I ate there yesterday, solo went in and sat at the counter and had a bowl of soup and tuna salad, but every day it's like, oh my God, where am I going to eat? I need the Obama equivalent of the soup for lunch. I mean, that's funny because I have a sweet green downstairs. I eat the exact same salad at the exact same time every day. Like every day. Sounds boring. Every day. It is a little boring, but I'm like you, like I have a screw loose too, like my version of yours, which sounds so weird. I like beer. If I go into a grocery store and there's 80 different types of beer there, I literally lock up. My dad laughs at me. I just sit there and stare because I'm like, oh, I don't know what IPA would be delicious. Man, I'd really love a heavy vise. And oh, there's a juicy IPA. And next thing I know, I've just spent 30 minutes. I spent longer picking up beer than I spent drinking the damn thing. And so I just tried to eliminate that. I'll just pick one beer and have it sent to me.

13:12And I'm not even going to a store to think about it. And all of those things seem trivial in isolation, but they pile up, man, as you as you well know. Yeah, okay. One more and then we can both see our respective shrinks. Oh, Jack. When all of a sudden did they decide that some people like pulp, some people like a little pulp, some people like a, I stand in front of the orange juice in the grocery store, just looking for a medium grade of pulp. I can't imagine that there's a market to people who want all these different, how about this one? Wheat fins. Go buy some wheat fins and just see, like talk about a time train to stand there and decide, how do I like my wheat fins? I want the original wheat fin. So the marketers, I think, are part of the problem robbing us of all this time. We are just, I mean, if you think about all the books we've written, it really comes down to like, we are weird, man, our species is just bizarre. We have all these weird habits. And left to our own devices, we will just think ourselves into a pretzel.

14:13And that's where I think like books like this can be really useful. It's not going to necessarily change your life, but if it gives you a different regimen, a different approach, a different philosophy, like what a gift? Because then you can do the things that you need to do to reverse all the weird genetic engineering that got us to this place in the first place. The book is called Simplify. The authors are Jim Van De Heijn, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. They are the co-founders of Axios. One more and then you can leave me and I wish you good things with the publication of the book. Say something about meetings. Say something about how you should be communicating and the length of meetings and whether you should even be having meetings. Well, we should think about that, the idea that they can have funny, idiosyncrasy. Well, they're all meetings 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Does every idea actually take exactly 30 minutes or 60 minutes? I pretty much really have to have a good excuse to get a meeting with me beyond 15 minutes now. Because I think most stuff is transactional and it can be done in half the time that people think it can. Mike does an inventory of his calendar every couple of months and then it deletes all the meetings

15:14that it starts from scratch. Because this stuff just builds up. One of the things I do, this is not, I'm a nice guy. I'm a social guy too. But at work, I'm not. I've made it very clear. I've told people I've been up front. I don't do small talks. So if you have a meeting at eight, we're not going to talk about my weekend or your weekend. We're going to have a meeting from eight to eight 15. I'm going to be super respectful of your time so that you can move on. And then if after hours we're getting a cocktail or we're getting a coffee, I'll be as social as you want because I've been really efficient with my actual work day. Confront, delete, amplify. That's the core of the book. Confront, delete, amplify. Simplify is the title of the book, Jim Van Hyke, co-author. Thank you so much, Jim. I really appreciate it. I hope you can tell. Here you go. They're all the notes. You're a great man. I really appreciate you. Thank you. Okay, TC, have at it. Go ahead, parse what you've heard from me and how it applies to my life. I'm very amused because I noticed that this week's team meeting was demonstrably shorter than last week's team meeting.

16:16Let's go get to it. So is that because you've read the book completely? I'm tracking up at this. Totally, cracking up. I also had a lot of things. I had a lot of things that I wanted to cover, but let's get to it. Let's get to it. And apropos of nothing in particular, but something else that I noticed is that people need to pick up the phone when appropriate. Like I'm a huge emailer because I'm a huge emailer because I'm in this studio for half the day and consequently, I can't answer the phone. I am forever telling people, please just send me an email or a text. I can deal with it. Don't try and call me, but there are circumstances where you go back and forth, back and forth. Just pick up the phone and take care of it. Right, absolutely. Yeah, Jim agrees too. He's still with us. Oh, I love it. Oh. I love it. We're trying to let you go. No, Jim, Jim, listen, TC is commenting on the fact that we've a standing meeting Monday, midday when the show ends that now the broader team

17:17are all by Zoom and we're connected. And it's true that yes, this week's meeting was much shorter because I read simplifies. I might have taken note that last week's meeting was 48 minutes. Go ahead. And this week's this week's meeting was 23 and a half. So I'm, I'm not saying. What is that? I have the date. I made, I made the great note of that. You can use the great note of that. I'm not going to take the technology in on 23 minutes. And the company that I bought the shoes from last December is off my list. OK, big changes are happening. If I could only figure out where the hell to eat lunch every day, my life would be great. It's a better week. Sweet green, baby. Sweet green. Thank you, Jim. All right, take care. Thank you, guys. Bye. There you go. The book is called Simplify. Simplify. Are you going to simplify your life? What are you going to do as a result of this? You know what? That's a big part of TC After Dark is simplifying my life, is paying attention to how long it takes you to do things, of having serene surroundings, because my mind is so cluttered. So I feel like this is right up my alley.

18:17I'm going to read it, cover it, cover it. And yeah, I think we need to implement those things. I had a conversation with the head of a large hospital, one of the largest in the nation, not mass. Not mass. I don't want to implicate mass in this. It's not a bad thing. And this individual, we were talking about email and being burdened with email. And this individual said to me that he or she feels no sense of obligation to respond to emails that were unsolicited, because I was saying that a significant part of my every day is in responding to email. And oftentimes it's listeners. And we don't make it easy for listeners to track me down. That's by design, because otherwise, I wouldn't get anything done, no disrespect to listeners, right? So but nevertheless, there's always so much stuff. And this individual said to me, I can't running this massive hospital system possibly get back to everybody. Well, Jim would agree with that. I mean, Jim would absolutely agree with that. And again, the only struggle that I had with simplify

19:20was squaring it with my mingling. But he's my mingling notion. I think he thought that that was taking away the unnecessary in order to allow yourself the time and ability to mingle. I think that's true.