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The co-founders of Axios popularized the “Smart Brevity” mantra for years. Now, in the age of AI, comes another: “Simplify.”
Such is the name of a new book by Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, who co-founded
the political news site in 2016 to try and help get people smarter faster. “Simplify,” out Tuesday, expands on that mission, serving as an instructive guide for readers to use AI to excise distractions and boost their personal and professional lives. It’s a mantra VandeHei says worked for the company, prompting the trio over the last two and a half years to figure out how to adapt it for a tome.
“I never sort of set out with, ‘Hey, I’m looking for opportunities to write a book,’” he says. “We really got inspired to write Simplify after just seeing the amazing effect it was having on our company, and also applying some of the stuff personally and seeing the effect it was having on me personally. In some ways you become almost childlike, like I want to share this with other people because it’s making such a such a huge difference.”
The book features a mixture of anecdotes from their personal lives that detail how the three “confront” their challenges, “delete” such distractions to “amplify” their own lives. VandeHei, for example, carves out a dedicated hour for the gym every day and says no to most social functions he doesn’t deem strictly necessary, as does Allen. The latter also had to unlearn his lengthy writing habits from his days spearheading Politico’s “Playbook” newsletter for Axios’ “AM” newsletter. Schwartz, who now runs Axios’ business-focused venture Axios HQ, flipped the barrier his dyslexia provided into a tool to break down complicated topics into simple points, while MS NOW star Rachel Maddow explains her logic behind her all-black uniform for her eponymous primetime show. (“I no longer wanted to spare even the infinitesimal effort of choosing a daily variation on my standard, boring outfit,” she says in the book.)
“We came to all this the hard way, and we came to it by making mistakes,” Allen says. “But the payoff for having this rigor and having this discipline is the third part of ‘amplify,’ and that’s where you cash the check for doing the hard work. That you are able to spend more time on what you’re uniquely good at, and what brings you joy.“
AI is as much a character in the book as any of the co-founders or the company itself, reflecting Axios’ ethos that the technology will be a “moonshot” for its growth (a sentiment that came days after it laid off 11 staffers in March). The company’s enthusiastic adoption of the technology has also made its way into several columns written by VandeHei and Allen, along with a post written by publisher Nick Johnston that drew some mockery over his admission that he used AI as a guide while reading “The Last of the Mohicans.”
“I don’t have a lot of friends that are reading the classics at the beach,” Allen says in his defense, urging people to read the piece. “Nick is an actual book reader, and he’s someone who’s reading James Fenimore Cooper, reading ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ reading, on paper, in hardcover, a classic, and he’s using AI as a smart friend to talk about it as he went along.”
The co-founders warn in the book about the risk of “slop,” both human and AI-generated, interfering with the goals people set out for themselves and creating a trickle-down effect for others, leading to unnecessary work. Instead, they suggest deploying AI agents to help with everything from clearing calendars to posing questions over whether a task, menial or otherwise, is necessary.
“There’s no hero in this story other than you,” VandeHei says. “You have to be the one who kind of really understands the technology, comes at it eyes wide open, figures out when it could be of great benefit to you. That you’re aware of the seductive nature of it, you’re aware of where you could start seeing the parts of your brain that matter most. Just like the burden in the information age on the internet was on the individual, the burden really remains on the individual.”
Schwartz applies this mindset to his business-side clients as well, fusing AI with both “Smart Brevity” and “Simplify” approaches to, say, break down research documents for a healthcare company into bullet points so they can get the information faster. The book also ends with a QR code to help readers use an AI agent to hold themselves accountable to the “Simplify” mantra.
“I hate the category of self-help, but we’ve all read those books, wanted to implement them, and had trouble implementing,” he says. “I think it’s natural, right, to not be able to hold yourself fully accountable. But AI doesn’t care.”
VandeHei understands that the “Simplify” mindset can’t be applied universally, especially when life throws unexpected challenges in one’s way. But clearing up as much as possible in one’s life frees up more bandwidth toward some of those other tasks, which he says is ultimately the book’s goal.
“There’s no doubt that there’s buckets of life that are inherently deep and inherently complex,” he says. “You want to be able to free up enough time so that you actually can deal with complexity when it’s required, or you can deal with depth when you need to deal with it, and so that’s why you have to simplify all the things that can be simplified. Not everything can. We’re not dumb. But the more that you can simplify — the fewer meetings, the less time wasted, the fewer projects that don’t need to be done — that gives you the time to more thoughtfully think about and take action on the things that require depth and complexity.”
