Jim VandeHei

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 work.

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.

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, 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 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, right?