Axios Co-Founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen on the 2026 Midterms, AI, and Simplifying Your Life

Jim VandeHei, Co-Founder & CEO, Axios: We are just at the very beginning of what will be the most chaotic, wild, 18-month period for any single human who's alive today, certainly for you and me. I don't think there's going to be anything that will come close to it.

Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs, Blackstone: Hello and welcome to Inside Blackstone. I'm Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs. Here's today's lineup. Up first, our Monday Morning Meeting guest, John Watson, a partner in our Tactical Opportunities group. He's here to explain neoclouds and why they're the focus of considerable attention these days. In lieu of the Economic Weather Report this week, be sure to check out Jon Gray's Market Views on YouTube for his quarterly take on the macro. Our guests this week are Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, co-founders of Axios. They are among the best-sourced journalists in politics, business, and technology. They're gonna help us unpack the midterm elections as well as discuss how they built one of the most influential media companies of the last decade. And we're gonna discuss their new book, Simplify. Then, my colleagues Wayne Berman, Head of Government Relations, and Vice Chairman Tom Nides, our resident political experts, are joining me in the Debrief. They're gonna share what the midterms could mean for markets and the business community. Now, to John Watson.
 
Christine Anderson: John, so great to have you here. You flew in this morning at 2 a.m. That's massive Inside Blackstone commitment. So thank you for that.
 
John Watson, Senior Managing Director, Tactical Opportunities Group, Blackstone: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here and feeling well rested.
 
Christine Anderson: All right, I bet. I bet. So much news these days about neoclouds. I thought maybe we'd just start with a simple explanation. What is a neocloud?
 
John Watson: Sure, so neoclouds are infrastructure providers to the world's largest users of compute. So, if you think about companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, neoclouds provide integrated infrastructure services to those companies. And that includes going out and buying accelerators or computer chips from places like NVIDIA or Google, putting them in data centers and then operating them at very high availability and very high scale for the benefit of the world's largest compute users.
 
Christine Anderson: Okay, so what's happening in neocloud demand right now?
 
John Watson: Neocloud demand and compute demand is absolutely off the charts, and for all of the businesses that we touch that are in the business of selling compute, we're finding that pricing is inflecting higher. Jensen made a comment last week that is consistent with what we see in our portfolio. 100% of GPUs around the world are fully utilized.¹ We are seeing absolute, absolute explosions in demand, driven by all these emerging new technologies that rely on accelerated compute.
 
Christine Anderson: So really foundational to this AI infrastructure build-out.
 
John Watson: It is the base layer for the AI infrastructure build-out, correct.
 
Christine Anderson: So, you and Jas Khaira, who oversees our N1 business, really helped kickstart this new financing market for compute, tell me a little bit about that.
 
John Watson: So, in 2022, everyone heard the sort of ChatGPT shot heard around the world and this product that would move to change all of our lives. We were working with some of the early neoclouds before that sort of explosion had happened and trying to understand sort of how their business models operated. One of those companies, CoreWeave, came to us in the first quarter of ‘23 and said we have demand from some of largest compute users in the world in the form of a contract, where they were going to pay this company revenue per hour for compute. And they needed help financing it. And we basically said to ourselves, we think we can apply some of the learnings we have from our previous infrastructure investing experience and use that technology to finance the beginning of this build-out. So it was very simple. We set up a special purpose vehicle. We put 82,000 GPUs into that vehicle. We put this contract from these very large customers into that vehicle. And as those customers paid the rental rate for the compute, we took a piece of that to fund the payment of our loan.
 
Christine Anderson: Really pioneering. What should we be watching with respect to neoclouds and what's coming?
 
John Watson: Yeah, look, those early financings train the market to look to investment-grade balance sheets as sort of the central financeable thing as it relates to compute financing. And they worked at the time and obviously were novel, as you've said. I think what's emerged is folks saying to themselves, perhaps compute itself is an asset class and should be financed in a way that's commensurate with the economic value that the compute creates. We often think back or joke about what it would have been like to be in the capital markets when people first started making the Ford Model T and going to someone and saying, would you finance a Ford Model T for me? And people would have said, I think like, this is an emerging technology…
 
Christine Anderson: I’m not sure.
 
John Watson: Are people gonna use it? Yeah, I'm not sure. Horse and buggy seem to work fine. And of course, massive, massive automotive finance markets evolved. We think that ultimately the questions around, is accelerated compute gonna be important to the economy have been answered. And ultimately what needs to happen now is folks like ourselves are saying in the capital markets, we realize and see the economic value of the compute. So how can we begin to think of it as a financeable asset class, absent just looking to investment-grade customers to be signing up for contracts?
 
Christine Anderson: Really appreciate you being on to explain compute as an asset class. I'm sure we're going to have lots to talk about in the months ahead. So thank you for being here.
 
John Watson: Thanks for having me.
 
Christine Anderson: All right. And now over to my conversation with Jim and Mike from Axios.

Christine Anderson: Well, welcome, guys. It's so great to have you both here. Mike, you and I met when I was in my 20s working in the White House. I was a young press staffer. Jim, we met a few years later when I was on a political campaign and you were covering that presidential race. I think you were there as well, so we all converged there.
 
Mike Allen, Co-Founder, Axios: We're living history together!
 
Christine Anderson: Exactly. I bet at that point you probably never would have thought that squirt would be interviewing you someday, but here we are and really excited to have you both on. For our listeners that may not know you as well, two veteran political reporters, think Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and also two close friends that have founded a media company together that's been shaking things up for the last decade. So we're really excited to have you on, and I thought we'd dive into the midterms since that's the most timely topic we have today.
 
Jim VandeHei: Great to be here.
 
Mike Allen: Thank you, Christine.
 
Christine Anderson: Any states we should be watching election night particularly?
 
Mike Allen: Yeah, watch Maine. That is the one place that Republicans might win, early. If Susan Collins loses in Maine, it is over for Republicans. And I can tell you, Christine, my barometer has been that, for weeks now, very few Republicans have been making the case that anything good is gonna happen. As I talk to these campaigns across the country they’re like, give us some good news. Give us something to talk about and they don’t have it.
 
Jim VandeHei: I think Republicans think they’ll lose the House, potentially badly. And I think the Senate’s legitimately in play.
 
Christine Anderson: What do you think is in store for business in a divided government?
 
Mike Allen: Even if, miraculously, Republicans won everything, November 4^th, the day after the midterms, he's still officially a lame duck.
 
Christine Anderson: Lame duck.
 
Mike Allen: Like everything moves to 2028 as you have lived over your career. And...
 
Christine Anderson: My brief political stint.
 
Mike Allen: '28 is gonna be AI, the data center conversation has been the leading edge...

Christine Anderson: Oh, we know.

Mike Allen: World events are going to fuel that conversation heading into 2028.
 
Christine Anderson: So you think it’ll drive the next Congress? It'll be the number one topic that we hear about?
 
Jim VandeHei: I think that, affordability, and the war. It is the economy, right? It's investment. It is the future of business. I mean, this technology has already seeped into every industry, every business, every job, every phone. That's not going to slow down, it only intensifies. The models that the companies are sitting on are vastly more powerful than people can fully appreciate. The technology is so good. And eventually every company will see, kind of, what we see using it, and it's gonna be irresistible. And it's gonna have huge effects on how we run businesses and what the economy looks like and therefore what politics looks like.
 
Mike Allen: And history will say, why in the world was this not the only topic, now?
 
Christine Anderson: It does surprise me. It's not the main topic. Why is Washington a little bit slower to get up to speed on AI?
 
Jim VandeHei: That's super charitable. They're not a little bit slower. They're a lot of bit slower and I think we will look back and we'll be like shame on us as a society that we didn't put a hell of a lot more forethought into this topic. This could be our golden age if we had really competent, smart people who are thinking about the fact that we have a six-to-nine month lead on the Chinese on the most formidable technology probably created by mankind. And that we could have taken that and tried to figure out early on all the danger zones, figured out how do you make sure that we set up a system so that this technology worked to the beneficiary of all.
 
Mike Allen: The most important thing to remember is that, yes, all the things that we worry about are right to beconcerned about. But with the other lobe of our brain, AI is opportunity. And for your four kids, for my nieces and nephews, there's never been a better time to start a business, try to cure something…
 
Christine Anderson: Disease.
 
Mike Allen: …start an organization. If you are a dreamer, if you are a builder, there's never been a more magical time.
 
Christine Anderson: Turning now quickly to the founding of Axios. So,  both of you were working at Politico, an organization you helped co-found, and you both decide to leave to form this new organization. Had to have been a hard decision to do that. Curious, tell us like the moment where you decided the world needed a new news organization, you were gonna leave to go do that?
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah, I mean, when you start something, you're trying to solve a problem. Now, the problem we were solving 20 years ago is we didn't think there was enough political coverage, it didn't have enough voice, and there wasn't enough kind of domain expertise by niche. Now that's all you have. It sounds crazy, but go back in the way back machine and you'll see that that actually was an issue that needed to be solved. We solved it. But then in that ten-year period, it became very clear because of the Internet. Our brains were getting like just hit with so much taxation of bells and whistles and inquiries and emails and texts, that it was becoming clearer it was gonna get harder for people to get smarter on the topics that mattered most. At the very moment, you needed to know more across more topics to actually kind of navigate society or your job to where we came up with this idea of Smart Brevity. And so once we knew we kind of had the solution and we kind of, we had some data points that gave us a high degree of confidence that it would work. It was fun cause having done it the first time, like you're just scared the whole time and you just assume you just destroyed your life. The second time you have more confidence.
 
Mike Allen: With Axios the first two words of the Axios Manifesto: audience first. How is the audience changing? What does the audience need? How can you be obsessed with what they need? That will make you a winner.
 
Christine Anderson: The concept of Smart Brevity, I remember when that first newsletter came out, and it really was groundbreaking, right? You'd see emojis, and you'd see short headlines, and, well you know, breaking it all down in a way that hadn't been done before. The feedback on that must have just been extraordinary when that first went out.
 
Mike Allen: The big idea of Smart Brevity is do the work for the audience. In journalism, we used to be literally taught how to hide the good stuff, right? I had two good quotes from you, two good stats, and I would dribble them out over 2,000 words. Smart Brevity says, pick one thing. Like know what your one thing is, whether as an individual in your role, in your org, what is your one thing? Write like a human, talk like a human, speak like a human, we tend to communicate in journalese, corporatese, bureaucratese, legalese, right? All these dead languages.
 
Christine Anderson: I agree. Although I did love that newsletter, I will say, I mean, and you wrote that for nine years, right? Something like 3,000 editions.
 
Mike Allen: This, yes, this is very sad but true.
 
Christine Anderson: This is required reading for like all of Washington and beyond.
 
Mike Allen: Well, thank you. I have written a morning newsletter every morning, 365 days a year for 19 years, eight or ten months.
 
Christine Anderson: Unbelievable.
 
Mike Allen: But it's a great…
 
Jim VandeHei: It's sad but true.
 
Mike Allen: ...conversation with America. And one of the things that we do at Axios, you hit reply on one of our emails. It goes direct to my inbox, [email protected], the easiest email address in town. And it's because we learn from our readers. It's a human conversation. Audience first, like that's why it works.
 
Christine Anderson: You mentioned that you were turning yourself into an AI lab, and Axios as well.
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Christine Anderson: Tell me more about that.
 
Jim VandeHei: I mean, I think for whatever reason, three plus years ago, we had a pretty good intuition that this will be bigger than people could fully appreciate, and having been running media companies, so we did Politico twenty years ago then we did Axios ten years ago. When we did Politico twenty years ago, we felt very viscerally what happened when you created the internet, what it did to the news media, right? It almost destroyed us, and in many ways destroyed a lot of companies. Well, we were hell bent on not having that happen, so, we said, okay, let's really learn this technology. One, so we can put it to work and make sure we're not victims of it. Two, that we can explain it and teach the people who work for us. And that we can explain it to our kids, to our readers.
 
Christine Anderson: Which you do very well.
 
Jim VandeHei: Thank you very much. And we've and so like, very hands on I’ve used it, extensively, probably too much. Every MRI result, every blood result, like I have my own little version of a doctor, which I would argue is better than any doctor I've ever met. And then every part of the company, business strategy, just thinking about how we organize anything that could possibly be automated, automate it as quickly as we can automate it. And so we've really seen the magic of it and the power of it. And then it's allowed us to be able to talk about it more fluently and more, hopefully, convincingly because we're not just talking about it abstractly.
 
Mike Allen: And something that's been very inspiring is seeing all of Axios come with us. So a couple of years ago, we had a meeting. Jim said, I know that a lot of you are skeptical. I know that a lot of you are worried. I don't care. We are going to embrace this. And Christine, what we said for every single person at Axios, from the day-one intern to Jim, we said, your job is to be the world's number one expert in what AI can do to enhance your role. To be a force multiplier for your superpower. And that is an empowering way to talk about AI.
 
Christine Anderson: Okay, so what I thought would be fun, given Axios is so good at breaking everything down. We've talked a little bit about AI...
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Christine Anderson: ...so far, but maybe we can just try to do a Smart Brevity take on a few topics that I think...
 
Jim VandeHei: Perfect.
 
Christine Anderson: ...are so related. We can go back and forth, but so your Smart Brevity take on what's unfolding right now, before our eyes.
 
Jim VandeHei: We are just at the very beginning of what will be the most chaotic, wild, 18-month period for any single human who's alive today, certainly for you and me. I don't think there's going to be anything that will come close to it.
 
Mike Allen: This is a once-in-a-thousand-year moment, a thousand years from now. As long as people study history, they will study this moment. And so for everyone in your audience, they should ask themselves, what am I doing in this thousand-year movement? What am I doing to understand it? What am doing it to engage? What am I doing to be a doer and not to be passive in these times of times?
 
Christine Anderson: What is overhyped? Anything that you see, that has you concerned?
 
Jim VandeHei: The thing that's overhyped in politics is, I think, division is way overhyped. I think that algorithms in our TV screens have completely warped our view of this country. I think 80% of this county doesn't pay attention to politics, they like each other, they're good people, they’re gonna be part of the rebuilding project, they just don't show up in your algorithm, they don't show up on your screen and our brains have been polluted and we now have a distorted view of a great country.
 
Mike Allen: 80% of people, agree on 80% of things, 80% of the time. And that is not what we see on our screens or what we hear in our public conversation.
 
Christine Anderson: Global AI race. What's your take on what's unfolding there?
 
Jim VandeHei: I think we're clearly winning. There's only, the global AI race, it’s two people, it's us and China, everyone else is like not in the game. The two things that people should pay attention to if you don't study China very much would be one, the Chinese population seems much more enthusiastic about using the technology and feels more optimistic about it than we do. And two, there's much more application, state-driven in China than here. And, you know, the whole idea is gonna be if you can really integrate this into solar, integrate it into your cars, integrate it into your factories that's probably where you're gonna drive economic value so I worry sometimes that, yes, we're ahead on the technology but we're behind on the application.
 
Christine Anderson: What about outlook for jobs?
 
Mike Allen: What we've found is that, especially for our journalists, that AI unlocks humans to do what humans are best at, human expertise, human connection. And that's why we're hiring journalists like crazy. We have lots of job postings out right now, and it's because there's more opportunity in these times.
 
Christine Anderson: Hardest person to get on the phone? Is that a Fortune 500 CEO or a senator?
 
Mike Allen: Well, the funniest thing, the easiest person is the President of the United States, which is like a first...
 
Christine Anderson: It's kind of amazing.
 
Mike Allen: ...in the history of the world. Barak Ravid from Axios is the best global security reporter in the world. Like sometimes President Trump calls him. He'll like, the first time he thought it was a misdial. And the president now has, he has the reporter's number saved in his phone, so he knows...
 
Christine Anderson: He knows.
 
Mike Allen: ...who it is.
 
Christine Anderson: It's kind of wild. Great for you guys.
 
Mike Allen: One time he said I have to go to the Situation Room. Call me back in 15 minutes.
 
Christine Anderson: Oh my God.That's amazing. What amazing stories you two must have. Well, let's talk a little bit about the future of the news business, right? It's probably one of the hardest times to be a reporter, right? Social media, all these things that have changed the job so dramatically since we all met, and then a really hard time for the business.
 
Jim VandeHei: It is and isn't the hardest. Like I actually think that, I think that, it was probably harder five years ago. I think a lot of companies have figured out how to navigate kind of a post-paper world so that businesses are better businesses. I think, listen, I think that sometime in the next two-to-five years, you're not gonna go to a website. You're not gonna go to an app. You're certainly not gonna probably pick up a newspaper. You gonna get all of your information on a personalized LLM that knows what you do, what your interests are, where you work. How you want your news, when you want your news, how you like your clothes, where you buy your clothes, when you buy it. It's gonna know everything about you. And so all our time now is just thinking about okay in a world like that, where does news and information fit in that? And we think that if anything, high-end news and information like me being able to tell you something that you don't know because of sources we have or our ability to fact pattern recognize. Will soar in value because if everybody has equal intelligence with AI and their LLM, they're gonna yearn for information that sits above and beyond that, and they'll yearn for human connection. We do a lot of events. Like we're talking national issues, but we’re in, we have local Axios's in 43 cities. We're about to launch in 16 more. My guess is we'll be in hundreds, if not thousands of cities in the next several years. And so I think that content, that human relationship of being able to connect people in those local...
 
Christine Anderson: More important than ever.
 
Jim VandeHei: ...communities, connect people nationally is also a pretty good business.
 
Christine Anderson: I think we have a special guest for a minute.
 
Jon Gray, President & COO, Blackstone: I came to say hello…
 
Christine Anderson: We're gonna just let him interrupt.
 
Jon Gray: …and thank you guys.
 
Christine Anderson: Jon Gray.
 
Jim VandeHei: Oh my goodness.
 
Mike Allen: This is a great honor. Thank you so much.
 
Jon Gray: Thank you. Thank you guys.
 
Jim VandeHei: Hey, how are you?
 
Jon Gray: Thank you for doing this. It's really good to see you.
 
Mike Allen: I love your studio.
 
Jon Gray: Well, we figured out that we need to communicate with people at scale.
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Jon Gray: Because the number of customers we have has gone from a couple hundred to hundreds of thousands, so reaching that audience is much harder to do having individual meetings. And then, we happen to have this talent who didn’t know she was, had this talent. But it's no different than what you guys did. You know, media content that's digestible for people…
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Jon Gray: …in the way that they consume, right?
 
Mike Allen: When we're talking to people about communications, I always remind CEOs that if someone sends you a long email, they're asking you to do work.
 
Jon Gray: The Smart Brevity.
 
Mike Allen: Thank you, thank you!
 
Jon Gray: Jim, take care.
 
Jim VandeHei: Appreciate it.
 
Producer: Jon.
 
Christine Anderson: All right, are we ready?
 
Jim VandeHei: You were just asking if it was going to, what, how it affects the economics.
 
Christine Anderson: Thank you for reminding me. 
 
Mike Allen: But I can jump in. Human expertise and human connection. The, what will matter in the media business is if you have insight, if you have reporting, if you have experience that no LLM can match. Inside Blackstone was an overnight success and it's because...

Christine Anderson: Thank you.
 
Mike Allen: ...people are craving this, right? Like we all get these texts all…
 
Christine Anderson: You can't get anywhere else.
 
Mike Allen: Yes...
 
Christine Anderson: This dialogue.
 
Mike Allen: ...and all day we get these texts, is this real, right? And someone listening or watching this, and they say, oh, I know this executive, I know these journalists. This is real. That becomes more valuable than ever.  
 
Christine Anderson: I read something you wrote about super journalists being sort of the, you know, in the future, that's who people will trust is people that have built up these followings, have unique relationships...
 
Jim VandeHei: Yup.
 
Christine Anderson: ...insights.
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah, for sure. Like people who just know things that you don't know that people want to know have expertise. We always define it as like people with the screw loose, like people who are just they're just so maniacal about a topic that they know everything. Those are like my favorite journalists in the world because they can just tell me stuff I never knew about. They do it with such an enthusiasm. I think those people will have a ton, a ton of value. Everyone needs trust, right? You need it with your clients, you need it, with your potential "would be" clients. And I do think like that human connection is the great facilitator. Getting to know you, getting to know Mike as a reader is the thing that really creates that bond and creates value.
 
Christine Anderson: The hope is, too, that they, people revert to these trusted news organizations to get their news.
 
Jim VandeHei: You hope.
 
Christine Anderson: I read something that Pew said that 38% of 18-to 29-year-olds get their new from influencers, or regularly get their news from influencers...
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Christine Anderson: ...right? And who have, you know, mixed credentials, if you will.
 
Jim VandeHei: Yeah.
 
Christine Anderson: So I think over time, reverting to news organizations that at least have proven that they have fact checking and whatnot, I think might be, might be something we see.
 
Jim VandeHei: I'll stay on the hopeful theme. The difference between an LLM and social media. Social media is built on an algorithm. An algorithm doesn't care if it's healthy, doesn't care if it’s accurate. The difference with an LLM is an LLM fundamentally doesn't work unless it's accurate, unless it’s real. And so the incentive in terms of what it's ingesting, it needs reality, it needs truth, it needs fact. And so I hope that that helps clean up the information environment.
 
Christine Anderson: So now let's turn to the book for a little bit.
 
Jim VandeHei: So we wrote a book called Smart Brevity, which is how do you communicate...
 
Christine Anderson: Which I loved.
 
Jim VandeHei: ...much more effectively. And so we're not trying to win literary awards and we don't even need to write a book, but because we're journalists who became entrepreneurs, who in my case became a CEO, and we take notes because we’re used to writing, and we're learning all these things running companies. And so, Simplify was basically our operating system that we adopted two and a half years ago about how do we just do more with less? Like how do we focus on the things that matter? How do we get rid of all the dumb things that build up inside of companies and inside of our individual workday so that we can spend most of our time doing the things that drive value. And we saw literally a magical response to that at our company. It's not just that productivity went up. Employees were happier because they're focusing on work that they're actually good at and work that we were super proud of doing as a company. And so we're like, oh, well, we should, we should write this because we want to share it with our readers.
 
Mike Allen: Yeah, the big takeaway of the book is we want you doing the right work, not more work. And this came from our professional experience, but also our life experience.
 
Christine Anderson: You have a great thing about how to say no to things.
 
Mike Allen: Yes!
 
Christine Anderson: Which I love.
 
Mike Allen: So two words that are gonna change...
 
Christine Anderson: Tell us how to do this.
 
Mike Allen: Two words that will change your life. Somebody asks you to do something. “I'm booked.” You don't need to apologize. You don't need to explain. “I'm booked.” It's respectful. It's true. There's not a day in your life that's not booked and here's two more words that will be very actionable, relatable for anyone listening to this, watching. I call it the “hell yeah” rule. And if somebody asks you to join something, do something and you're like, I guess I should, I probably should, then just say no. If you can say “hell yeah,” then...
 
Christine Anderson: Instantly, then you're in.
 
Mike Allen: It's something worthy of your time, worth doing. In Simplify, we show you how to list the three things that you need to do to crush it in your job or the three things that you need to do, that you want to do, to be known for, to be successful in your personal life. What are you uniquely good at? How can you maximize the amount of time that you spend doing that? And how do you maximize what brings you joy? And like the Simplify power tools help you do that.
 
Christine Anderson: You all have learned so much from starting your own company, from your careers, that you're sort of pouring it into your writing and trying to let other people learn from that. One thing that I picked up from, I think, one of your interviews was that, and maybe it's even in the book as well, is that you said you're more maniacal and hard charging than you were twenty years ago, but just better at finessing it.  
 
Jim VandeHei: Well, but part of learning that is that I used to be really like, not temperamental, I didn't have a hot temper, but like I burned hot, right? And I was just like go, go, go, and you would notice it. Well, part of like running something is you realize nothing's ever as good as you think it is...
 
Christine Anderson: Right.
 
Jim VandeHei: ...or as bad as you think it is. And you kind of teach yourself. Not to be zen, but just to be like, oh like, anything that's good or bad is just now to me intellectually interesting. Like, we're gonna solve it, or we're gonna overcome this. And so you learn to have this calm, but you kind of like, we sold, you know, Axios, a majority of it to Cox several years ago, and like, whatever, we could retire. But like, in fact, I think we work more hours. Like we both still get up at like 3:30, four in the morning. We go all day. We love it. We get paid to learn, paid to have conversations with this, smart people. And like that fire is never dimmed. And, but, I just think you can't run hot all the time around people. And I say one of the big lessons now, having done this a long time, that would be relevant to people listening to this, is just like, I find like it's like a great honor and responsibility to lead people. And I wish more people took it that way. Like so many people, I watch it, our organization or others, like instantaneously, if you're in a position of leadership. Almost overnight, all your habits, good and bad, seep down. And like that gives us a huge responsibility to like carry ourselves with dignity and class. I think you can be as ambitious as hell, we're as ambitious, but you can still be a fundamentally really good person.  
 
Christine Anderson: You were both English, Poli-Sci majors. What would you tell people to study today?
 
Mike Allen: I think that when we were coming up that it was safer to color inside the lines, right? But now employers are looking for people who want to spin up a side project or who are maybe not even employed and they’re doing something interesting on X or YouTube, or someone who can come into an org and say, oh what about this, what about that? And its real opportunity because we were very confined by org charts, right, and like moving up the ladder. But if you’re creative, if you’re willing to be the Swiss Army knife, if you’re willing to do a project that someone hasn’t told you to do. If you can see it. If you can spot like what’s sitting there, there’s, you can suddenly rocket up the chart.
 
Christine Anderson: If you were to advise two friends starting a company together, what would you tell them?
 
Jim VandeHei: Mike and I have just been really good friends forever, like we talk all day, every day, probably 20 times a day from sunup to sundown. Like, I don't think this job would be that fun if it were just like me and it wasn't especially Mike who we share an office. Like I'm ten times more effective because Mike literally, as you know, talks to every single person in power in the world, like all day. I don't how he does it.
 
Christine Anderson: He might be the most connected person I know.
 
Jim VandeHei: But then he tells me all of that. So like, I don't have to do any of that, I'm getting all this input of amazing intelligence that I can then focus on the company or focus on whatever I have to focus on.
 
Mike Allen: And the amazing thing about these times, so we talked about these as once-in-a-thousand-year times and like we both are on fire. We both are so excited to be able to make a difference in these times. And some people would look and say, oh you’re on the back nine. We feel like we’re just getting started and something that’s very exciting for me, been his best friend for 25 years. Because of what’s possible with AI, because of the stakes of these times, he says, like I love being awake. I love being a part of the action. Like, he can’t wait to have new ideas, to act on them.
 
Christine Anderson: Well, it's been so wonderful to have you both with us.
 
Jim VandeHei: You're the best!
 
Christine Anderson: This was a lot of fun. I could have talked to you all afternoon. Thank you so much.
 
Jim VandeHei: Thank you.
 
Mike Allen: Well, thank you, Christine. And...
 
Christine Anderson: And everyone should read this book.
 
Mike Allen: When in doubt.
 
Christine Anderson: It's very useful.
 
Mike Allen: Simplify!
 
Christine Anderson: Simplify.
 
Jim VandeHei: Thank you so much.
 
Christine Anderson: Thank you both.
 
Christine Anderson: All right. Well, welcome to the Debrief. We have Wayne Berman and Tom Nides, two creatures of Washington who have been served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They know this world better than anyone. So no two better people to help us unpack this interview. Thank you both for being here.
 
Wayne Berman, Head of Global Government Affairs, Blackstone: Thanks for having us.
 
Tom Nides, Vice Chairman, Strategy and Client Relations, Blackstone: Thank you, very much.
 
Christine Anderson: You think you can keep it together? And kinda do it, you know?
 
Tom Nides: We’ll see.
 
Christine Anderson: Keep it straight. Okay, all right. They’re also…
 
Tom Nides: We’ll attempt to.
 
Christine Anderson: …known for having a little bit of fun. Too much fun at times. So you listened to Jim and Mike. They're predicting election night we end up with divided government. Does that sound right to you?

Wayne Berman: It sounds right to me. I think election night is going to be unusually fascinating for a midterm election, not because of the House where I think the Democrats are certain to have a majority and take the majority from the Republicans. But I think these Senate races are so close and so unpredictable and people are all over on it. I think it's gonna be amazing to watch the results and everybody's gonna to be looking for what's the key race that will decide it all. I think it’s gonna be really a fun night.

Tom Nides: Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be a really fun night for us, or at least for me. Wayne, maybe not so much.
 
Wayne Berman: I’ll have fun anyway, Tom.
 
Tom Nides: Yeah, I think so, but listen the House obviously ‘15, ‘18, ‘20, it could be a wave, man. It could actually…
 
Christine Anderson: A blue wave?
 
Tom Nides: It could be, it could actually be bigger, given the fact that these numbers.
 
Christine Anderson: Blue tsunami?
 
Tom Nides: Well, they said this a red undertow they could talk about all sorts of the idea that the, even if you're a Republican and you won by seven points or less the last election, you have a problem potentially if people are just so angry. On the Senate, Wayne's right, who knows? I think, ultimately, I think the Senate is gonna come down to one or two seats, but for sure the Democrats are gonna have a very good night on the Senate. And I used to joke with Wayne, I’ve done a gazillion of these and I don't think any of us would have predicted that we'd be sitting here two weeks before election that we're actually thinking that the Senate could actually go into Democratic hands. But, it could happen folks and it could be a really interesting night.

Wayne Berman: It could happen. I think it won't, but I do think, I think the opportunity for a tsunami, you know, a big pickup like when President Obama had, and President Bush, President George W. Bush, they lost 45 seats and 66 seats. I think that's very unlikely because of all of the changes in the district lines.
 
Tom Nides: We call it gerrymandering, gerrymandering.
 
Wayne Berman: Yeah, you guys are the experts at gerrymandering. Absolutely, congratulations.
 
Tom Nides: Okay, okay, all right.
 
Wayne Berman: I know you used to be a cartographer, Tom.
 
Tom Nides: Yeah I know, that was good though.
 
Wayne Berman: So I know that you're very into that.
 
Tom Nides: I know.

Christine Anderson: Okay, so if those predictions hold, though, divided government, what does that mean for the business community and markets?

Tom Nides: Listen, again, like all of this, having been through this a bunch of times and Wayne has said. First of all, I think the government works better when it's a divided government. I just think it forces people to work together. That said, I think it’s gonna be very little actual, serious legislation getting done, given the fact that President Trump is still President Trump, and the power of the veto is the power of the veto. And so I think there’s no way the Democrats are gonna have a supermajority under any circumstances. So I think it's very little substantive legislation will get done. I do think one area that there could be some compromise is around AI, and I know Wayne spent a lot of time on this, but I think that's something that I think you could watch closely because there'll be some pressure, both Democrats and Republicans, to act on it.

Wayne Berman: Generally speaking, divided government doesn't make very significant changes in the status quo. Now I think markets will react to things like how if the deficit stays high and if we're gonna have 6% deficits for the rest of time. That's gonna affect the bonds, the bond market, about which I know absolutely nothing.

Christine Anderson: You sounded good Wayne.
 
Wayne Berman: Yeah, thank you.
 
Tom Nides: Yeah, very good.

Wayne Berman: Yeah. Well, I've heard others here who do know something about it say that so I thought I would just steal it from them. And I think that'll have a bigger impact on what the expectations are for that. But I don't see significant tax legislation or any real regulatory efforts.

Christine Anderson: All right. Well, a lot to watch. I hope you'll come back and talk to us about it throughout the season.

Tom Nides: But how exciting is election night though? How fun is it gonna be?
 
Christine Anderson: It’s gonna be a good night.
 
Tom Nides: It's gonna be like a big night. And this is what democracy is all about. You get to watch and see and so I'm pumped up and I'll be trying to console Wayne throughout the evening.

Wayne Berman: I really look forward to being consoled by you, Tom. I must say.

Christine Anderson: All right, well, so fun to be with you two. Thank you for joining us. Always fun as usual.

Wayne Berman: Well, thanks for watching this episode of Inside Blackstone.
 
Tom Nides: And remember, listen and subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts!
 
Wayne Berman: Hey, well done, Tom.
 
Tom Nides: Thank you, Wayne.

Christine Anderson: That was my line.
 
Tom Nides: Again! I…
 
Christine Anderson: You stole my line! I’m just teasing you.
 
Notes:
1) Refers to full utilization of NVIDIA compute across the clouds it serves.
 
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