Jim VandeHei

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 scrolling through your phone.

It's just, it's not healthy.

It's one of the reasons that when we left Politico 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 the only way that you fix that, like I worry everybody thinks that some hero is going to 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 you put it nicely, this symmetry between the rise of political 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.