AI, Energy and Climate: AI's Promise and Peril — and How to Simplify: Jim VandeHei

by David Sandalo and Nagarro Fellow at Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy.

“Join us as we talk with leading experts to explore the intersection between these critical”

issues that will impact the future of each and every one of us. Hi, this is the AI Energy and Climate Podcast, I'm David Sandalo. This summer I read two articles that I thought were excellent and got my attention. One was about how to use AI, in particular, how each of us can use AI tools most effectively in our day-to-day lives.

The second was on AI Policy, taking a somewhat broader view in recommending AI policies for the US government.

Both articles were written by the same person, Jim Vandahy, who is the founder and CEO of Axios. I'm an admirer and regular reader of Axios and also of a book that Jim Vandahy and two of his colleagues wrote called Smart Brevity. In my view, it's a brilliant guide to communicating and in particular to communicating concisely in ways that will have an impact. So I reached out to Jim Vandahy to ask whether he might be available for a conversation on the podcast and I was delighted when he said yes. It turns out Jim has a book that he is releasing this week called Simplify, which I've had a chance to read and highly recommend.

It sounds some of the same things as Smart Brevity, but in a slightly broader context. Jim and I had a chance to meet and talk a couple of days ago when we covered a lot of ground on topics related to AI. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Jim Vandahy, it's great to meet. Welcome to the show, excellent to be here. Thank you. It's great to have you and so just to start, I am a Smart Brevity fanboy.

“I think it brilliantly sets out fundamental lessons for communication and I assign it to all my students.”

If any of our listeners haven't read Smart Brevity, I highly recommend they go out and get it. And I'm also a big fan of Axios. Read it regularly. It's an invaluable news organization. So thank you for that. I'm thrilled to have the chance to talk excited to chat. You wrote two articles this summer that got my attention and let me reach out and see if you might be available for a conversation.

The first article was about how you use AI. The second article was more about policy issues on AI.

And then you have a book coming out called Simplify. And so if it's okay with you, I thought maybe we'd do it start with those articles and then go to your book and starting with that first article. I thought first article was very interesting. You said in their article and quoting, you said, "I've spent the past year using AI obsessively." You then wrote, "It's way better than most people think." And when you said AI is way better than the most people think, "I wonder, say a word about what you meant by that."

“Yeah. In that piece, I talked about how I've kind of made myself an AI lab rat because I run an media company because I write because I think AI is going to be that transformational already has been that transformational.”

I really wanted to understand it. So I think I was early to utilize again, especially CHEAPT and Claude. And I've used it for probably on average hours a day now for well over a year. And what I've discovered is there's a big gap between people who utilize it all the time, particularly for business needs and people who use it passively. If you just use it passively or once in a while as a search engine, it's interesting. It's better than search. It can sometimes be very clever or sometimes bully your mind, sometimes frustrate you.

But if you use it very persistently and you really fine-tune it, that's where you start to see the magic that I think people out in the valley see. And I'll give you two examples, like one for health. I've really, because I wanted to be a lab rat, I'm doing what I'd not necessarily would advise other people do, but I put every piece of medical information ever known about me into CHEAPT and done the same in a Claude agent for my wife. Who has a much more complex medical situation that she's dealing with.

In both cases, I've spent a lot of time fine-tuning kind of where it draws its answers from, like really trying to curtail it to medical journals that I trust literature that I think is a bedvalidated and really like fine-tuned all of the results that I'm plugging into it. In both cases, I have found hers at mine to be way better than any doctor I've ever spoken to. In terms of its ability to really put pieces together to keep track of all the complex pieces of our medical history. To be able to even think about things like supplementation or work out as it relates to maybe things that I'm dealing with or that my wife is dealing with.

The second is just in me using it is like a thought partner sparring partner, like how to be a better writer thinker about the different things that I write and there it required a lot of work on the front and like I input it hundreds and hundreds of columns I've written every speech I've given every video transcript of any interview I've ever done I've written multiple books I put a lot of that into it. I've given it access to my notes function which is where I just keep my my random brain fart so that I have stored on my iPhone and then I really worked on fine tuning it to really understand how I write and how I don't write and also how to think about fact checking in kind of a multi step way so that it's really doing a deeper set of fact checking that it might otherwise do.

In both cases I find it to be like just astonishingly good, astonishingly helpful for the work that I want to do but like I said I had to put in that work and had I not put in that work I probably be like everybody else would be like oh it's fine it's interesting but I don't understand what all the hype is about. I found a lot of people are concerned that AI is going to substitute for thinking that if people use AI as much as you're describing using a gem that somehow they're writing capacities going to a road they're thinking capacity it's a road you've been a writer for your career but you're saying that it's really useful for you could you to speak to that concern.

Yeah I mean again I would differentiate between me is a 55 year old CEO who's written a lot and thinks a lot and is paid to write in the think.

And somebody who's in college who's just having their brain formed and how to think I do think there's a real danger that if you outsource your writing outsource your thinking. Any machine that you're just going to inevitably you're going to be dollar you're going to lose the ability to fact pattern recognize or just to think deeply about things that might perplex you or perplex the world you know I'm 30 years past that and and I kind of and because I'm kind of aware of the pitfalls of AI I think I've been able.

Navigate that and in fact I argue I'm a lot smarter because of it but I do think I'm in a very tiny in a tiny set of people are probably getting that benefit right now mainly because I have the time I have the business.

“Instincts and also of the business need to really people to understand it but I think that's a legitimate issue you know I go to colleges and I'm of mixed minds I'm pretty frustrated what I talked to most of the universities because I find that.”

I know that they're doing a great service to young people because I think there's two different things there's one thing don't use catchy BT to cheat or write.

If I were a professor that is exactly what I would tell my class I would say I want your brain I want your writing I want your thinking that's different than. Quipping somebody who decides to go into marketing or decides to go into business analytics or whatever they go into. That's different than equipping them to be able to use the technology as a power tool when they get into the workforce so that they're ready to enter the workforce as a super well equipped young professional and I think that's where a lot of the universities are falling short they're saying oh my god this is a scary thing we don't want you cheating it uses too much energy.

It's like it's bad bad bad and it's both it's like anything it's everything in life but certainly any technology it's good and bad and this one.

“Could probably be so good it cures cancer and so bad that it does really catastrophic things to humanity I'm very eyes wide open about that but I think that any young person.”

God this is a time to think this is a time to reflect you're going to deal with some of the weirdest things possible ethical dilemmas that you and I would have thought were pure science fiction. Five or ten years ago are going to be staring these young people in the face right like what happens when you have a machine that could offer therapy superior to any human therapist or enter into a relationship. With a thing that's not a person that seems to know you better than you know you and it seems to make you feel.

A way you want to feel like those are really perverted tough things that could have good outcomes and could have bad outcomes and they require.

“Real depth of thinking and I think that's why you go to high school and go to college it's to learn how to think and then learn how to be a professional and so I think there's a lot of work to do I mean.”

I'm sure we'll get at this like I feel like government in business and academia have really let the American public down I think we had this a real opportunity for this to be a real golden moment to come together to master a technology to make sure.

For the few but instead I feel like we've frittered away two precious years.

I want to get to the global policy benefits and risks in a moment but before we get to that just to follow up on how young people usually I wonder what advice do you give young people at at exeos in your entry level workers about using I what guidance are you giving them given their need to learn but also there need to be productive at exeos. Yeah I mean what we do here which I think is the right thing for companies to do we did it early and I encourage any company to do the same which is. One make the technology available to everybody for free that works for you they have to learn how to use this and then bring in people who can teach them how to utilize the technology for the very specific work that they do.

And what I tell young people is you don't necessarily need to be an AI sabond but you do need to understand how to utilize this technology to be the very best at what you choose to do.

It would be like being given a computer or given a phone or given a calculator you want to make sure that you're able to utilize that.

“As as savvally as possible so that you can be as good at what you do as you can possibly be that's what we all want to do where we want to have a job satisfaction we want to feel like we're learning we want to feel like we're contributing.”

And so that is where I would tell people to put their time and attention you know not most people don't listen to me but I do think this is bigger than Trump I think it's probably bigger than anything that we've wrestled with since since I've been on earth. And I would encourage people to understand like you're living history and so this might be something you want to pay a little more attention to like understand like how did inthropic and opening I become the fastest growing companies in the history of humanity.

We've never seen anything like this nothing is approximated it how do you take a chat GPT which didn't exist and get it into the hands of a billion people.

How do you take a technology and have SpaceX IPO at whatever what ended up being 1.7 trillion.

“It's likely anthropic will IPO somewhere between one five and two trillion and it looks like opening I could IPO over a trillion those numbers are never heard of and it's hard for us to get our heads around trillions and billions.”

But we've never seen anything like this this type of growth the tentacles of this technology reaching into every business and every job and I just think it is the it is the topic of our. Of our generation and I would encourage people to understand your living history and really try to understand it. Amen to that. What one of the questions before we get to the policy issue talked about putting your medical information into the entity into cloud and and also connecting it to your emails. How do you think about the privacy issues related to that.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, that's why I'm saying I'm telling you what I do I'm not recommending that everybody do what I did like I'm I understand the risk that I'm taking like that truth is like I just don't have that sexy of a life so like if everything about me was ever known like I just don't really care.

“Much and I think the upside of me understanding the technologies worth the risk, but but it's real right like you are plugging all of your data into a machine now the truth is if you really.”

Took any time to figure out why the algorithm keeps giving you an ad that happens to match the thing that you want most right now you'd realize it most of your data is out there already and the companies have already taken it from you and they're already using it to turn you into a product. And so a lot of what we do a lot of what the the sites that we visit a lot of that is known to other people so in this case. It's just me really trying to understand how good could this technology be and I felt like I wouldn't fully understand it if I didn't turn over more of my own personal information to it so I could see it in action.

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Please consider joining us at DSR network.substack.com. That's DSR network.substack.com. Thank you and back to the show. All right, getting to the big policy issues that you were talking about. You talked about AI big technology of our time in such a dramatic development.

What are your reflections on that? What do you think the risks are that we face and how do we deal with them?

“I think that people should take seriously that not one, not two, not five, not ten, but you're talking dozens of people who've been working inside of these LLM companies.”

So mainly deep mine with Google, with an anthropic and opening eye, have quit and gone public warning that what they're seeing makes them believe that this technology could destroy humanity. That's so chilling and so dramatic that most people can't even process this. But remember, these are people who are sitting inside these companies and who are watching the technology advance. And maybe they're like being spooked by their own shadows, maybe they have delusions of grandeur, maybe they're a little weird.

“But that's a lot of people to come to the exact same conclusion.”

And then the number of people that I talked to privately that all talk like this, like you and I would talk about whether or not you had a baloney sandwich for lunch. Like they're very, very, very casually and openly talk about the potential dangers of this.

And so I do think this is the first technology that is going to be available to almost anybody that if used improperly, could cause catastrophe.

Like it really could because you're talking about basically replicating the human mind, the good, the bad and ugly, potentially surpassing the smartest minds that we know. And then having potentially tens of thousands of those minds working 24/7 without any emotional or intellectual fatigue. Like just even if you just have that scenario, you could see why people worry about these cyber attacks, or you could see why people worry about some crazy people creating some kind of pathogen that is really hard to detect and really hard.

And so those are real, and I think that I'm shocked, horrified, I don't even know what the right word is, so the way Washington has handled this history will shame on, on this city, shame on leaders, the fact that we did not pull the best and brightest people together from industry, from politics, from labor, from academia, to study the hell out of this in a super responsible way. Inticipate the good and bad outcomes, come up with potential solutions for good and bad outcomes, educate the American people, equip the workforce, figure out where the transitions are going to hit the workforce and help match workers with openings, all these things that we could have done that really wouldn't have caused that much money and wouldn't have been that hard to do, we've done almost none of them.

So instead people are sitting here today worried that AI is going to destroy their jobs, destroy humanity, they hate data centers, they have no faith whatsoever in the federal government, they're throwing their hands up with what the education system is offering, like all of that was correctable, all it would have required is like a couple of smart leaders doing the right thing for the right reason without even necessarily requiring regulation or legislation. It just wouldn't have required like some knowledge and some care.

Let's talk about data centers in particular, which you just mentioned, because I got to say in all the years that I've been working on policy issues in the United States,

I've never seen a political issue move as quickly in terms of public sentiment as the opposition that were as what's affected data centers.

We did a study at my center at Columbia last year, we released it in December of 2025, and we looked at what was happening in state legislatures on data centers in 2025. I guess what, most of the bills that passed in state legislatures last year with suspected data centers provided incentives for data centers to come to those states. Now, eight months later, nine months later, 75% of the public hate data centers, and we have widespread calls for moratorium, the Republican government of Texas is imposed on moratorium, the Democratic governor of New York is imposed on moratorium.

“One, any reflections on what's this all about? And what do you think we go from here with suspected data center policy?”

I think it's a proxy for AI. People hate AI. They're scared of it. They're freaked out by it. They don't want it. They think it's going to take their job. They think it's creepy. They think it benefits a bunch of weird people in Silicon Valley and does nothing to help them.

They worry it's going to make their life worse, not better. They just finally sort of got over dealing with the algorithms and trying to figure out how to like pull their brain out of that feed.

And now they've got a brand new technology they have to deal with. So I think they look at data centers and they just see AI. Like, come on, like the number of people who hate data centers doesn't really make sense because 99.5% of people don't live anywhere near a data center. So why would you care or why would you hate it?

Here too, just what imagine what a little bit of smart leadership could have done. These companies, these data centers, they actually do and can bring enormous economic benefit to a local community.

“They actually can be built in a way that doesn't strain the grid. They actually can be built in a way that doesn't further deplete an area that might be light or low on water.”

They can build them in a way that they aren't necessarily kind of a physical nuisance. They can build them in a way that they're far enough away. Or nobody hears any buzzing sound that might be coming from it. All that could have been done.

If people just took a little bit of time to figure out how do you do that, how do you make clear to communities how you're going to benefit.

If it's what they're doing now, everyone's now scrambling like we're going to give bonuses here. We're going to give tax breaks there. We're going to build a school. We're going to build a racetrack. They're doing all these things. Well, they couldn't have done that on the front end. And because people weren't because we didn't bring people along with this technology, we just sprung it on them. People are having a reaction to it and I don't know how you want to do it. I've never seen an industry or a specific topic like you said go in the tank on both sides.

“This fast, this profoundly, so much so that I think there's a not unreasonable chance that the Bernie Sanders position of pausing AI.”

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the two major parties in 2028, their entire platform is we're shutting down AI. Not just like we're pausing it. We're shutting it down. Because people hate it. If you're a politician, you like to find things people hate so you can jump on it. I agree with everything you just said and I think if there's a path out of this, it has to do with both delivering benefits at the community level and at the national and global level. And you know, at the community level, I saw some statistics that got my attention.

About one in five Americans that are overdue in their electric bills and get total utility arirages of all Americans are about $23 billion right now.

The profits of the mag seven technology companies last year were $400 billion or more. So for five or six percent of the profits of the mag seven companies, you could literally wipe out the utility arirages of all Americans were overdue on their electric bills. That may or may not be the right thing to do, but coming in with actual community benefit plans that need people's lives better with certainly make a big difference. And then delivering the benefits that people have talked about. I mean, AI has been talked about as potentially curing cancer.

We've done a lot of work on how do you use AI to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but but so far I think those are mainly in the distance and people haven't seen them in their lives. So my view is, that's what that's what it's going to take. How about the diplomatic side is I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but but some of these risks that we're talking about particularly the so-called alignment risk and risk of AI getting out of control. If some in bioterrorism risks or something that directly threaten both the US and Chinese governments.

“Do you see any prospect for US and China actually working together a drug acquisition and how important would that be?”

I mean, we can't even get our two parties here to work together. So the idea that we're going to get to two of the most powerful nations who are needy in a rivalry for global control that are deeply suspicious of each other. Who operate on totally different governing systems to agree on this technology and real time feels like pure fantasy to me. I think you're right that if you could just wave a magic wand, it's very hard for me to see a solution that doesn't involve the United States and China. We're agreeing to some kind of framework probably not that dissimilar to how we have dealt with nuclear weapons to be able to have some kind of regime to look at these models, pause these models until we are truly certain that we can dramatically limit if not eliminate the downside risk of them being released.

To be honest, I think the China having watched the Chinese pretty closely, like did the Chinese really want AI that finally hits recursive learning and could teach itself beyond the control of a company or country given that they're authoritarian and that they want to control everything including the technology. Not so certain they want to unleash that beast themselves, they've been slower than we have. If you look at other Chinese are using AI, it's very much kind of much more practical than we are. They're not racing to have the frontier AI. They're racing to figure out how do we integrate this into building solar and build electric cars and re-tool our schools and to make our businesses more efficient and to be able to be able to create alliances with countries who otherwise were distrustful of us.

I don't think that will happen. I do think that this is one of the rare cases I kind of think that the two will but I just worry that by the time anybody gets around to actually coming up with any of these solutions.

I tend to think it would take a major catastrophe to overcome the deep suspicion between the two countries and get them to work together. Something that totally changes the dynamic on this.

Just one of the questions I just want to talk about about your new book. One of the lines that's spoken the most in the dialogue on AI these days is we need to win the AI war against China or win the AI race against China. What do you think that means?

“Well, I think it's the reason that there's been no regulation and there'll be no regulation and then by the way, I think Biden bought into this too. I think there's a false narrative looking at this retroactively.”

I think Republicans and Democrats have convinced themselves that if China were to get advanced AI, particularly once it hits the RSI, which is a recursive self improvement model, where it can really start to build itself. That you would run the risk that very quickly China would be able to build up a futuristic army that could lead to them taking over the world literally because you could start to control space. You could control satellites. You could build kind of armies of robots. You could mass produce almost anything. You might be able to solve the energy crisis.

All these things that you think might be solvable if they got their first and got into the hands of, in this case, Chinese that might have bad motives.

They really could if you play it out, you could convince yourself they could control the world.

“And I think that's what Trump has convinced himself of. I think it's what Biden had largely convinced himself of.”

I think there's some truth to that. I think there's no doubt that there's some truth to that. I tend to be more like you, I think like right, I think like God, and if we just said like sensible people having this conversation with China, like I don't know that they want to unleash this beast anymore than that we would.

And that there has to be kind of a middle ground, but I don't see the middle ground happening. I just don't. I don't see any chance whatsoever that Trump is going to regulate AI. He's all in on it.

It props up the economy. Like if you shut it down, we could end up in a recession almost overnight. It's literally somewhere between 40 and 60% of the US economy, depending how you want to think about it and it's kind of adjacent investment areas. So I just think this is the status quo and I think that's why you see people in Silicon Valley sounding the alarm because they're sitting there thinking, okay, the government's not going to regulate it. Well, I'm going to go work for anthropic. They seem like they're responsible.

Well, shit turns out that anthropics about to do an IPO and when you do an IPO, you want to have his high of a valuation as possible. So you really want to slow it down and give opening eye and advantage to you when they're also racing for an open for for for their own IPO. No, no, no, no, we got to speed it up, speed it up. So you're sitting there and you're like, whoa, whoa, man, I'm watching this technology grow faster than I ever thought possible.

“We're getting close to a recursive self-improvement and nobody around me wants to put on the brakes. So then they quit and they protest and say, hey, people, you need to pay attention.”

This week, there's been a couple people who've gone public and say, they think there's a 10% chance it destroys humanity. This decade. And like, maybe that's hyperbole, but it's, it's 10%. Would you get on an airplane? If you thought there's a 10% chance it was going to crash? The hell, no, you wouldn't. Yeah, I mean, it's very sobering, but it feels to me a bit like the summer of 2001 before 9/11. The red lights are flashing, something is coming, something world-changing is coming with respect to AI. We don't know what it is and there's not a clear plan for a burning and it's scary from that regard.

I agree. Well, I'd like to transit me to your book where there's a much happier topic and let's hope that the 90% occurs and we don't have you because afters, but you're new book is called Simplify and I've had a chance to renavance copy congratulations filled with all kinds of great ideas for helping, okay, and leave their lives. Tell us what, what is the book about? Yeah, it's like you started by talking about smart brevity, which is a book we wrote about just how to communicate more effectively, more efficiently at a time when people's minds are clogged because they're getting hit with information from 1,000 directions.

Simplifies much more about taking some of those principles and just applying it to your life and then really to your work. And one of the things that we discovered in running and starting companies is just how quickly we develop all these bad habits where we just waste a good portion of our week doing stuff that nobody wants to do and nobody should have ever done. It's just all these bad habits or inertia or just like, I don't know, that's how we always did it, so let's just keep doing it. And so we three years ago started to apply this philosophy of simplify, which is way to second, what if we routinely kept taking inventory of like what are the three or four things we have to do is accompany to crush it.

And we took that, we said, okay, well, it would be as a CEO, what are the three things I need to do and then cascade that all the way down to someone starting a new job to make sure that everyone is doing work that is truly vital, but also doing the other side, not just the don't it, but the whole, what are the things that you're doing that you think are stupid or we shouldn't do.

You just end up eliminating all of this nonsense, all of this waste and the data in doing the book is just startling like depending who's data you want to trust it looks like we spend at least 25% if not a lot more of our work week doing things that are useless that actually just create unnecessary work for other people. Well, add that up a quarter, that's months out of your year, that's years out of a decade that you could get back and you could spend doing stuff that actually brings you joy, brings you satisfaction, brings you results.

“And that's what the book is, it really is kind of like a power tool for how do I navigate this moment of total chaos so that I'm focusing on the things that actually make me happy at home or drive value at work.”

Yeah, I thought one of the most interesting parts of the book is not only in organizations which where it's simplified matters enormously, but also how people use these principles to take control of their own lives.

And you spoke to that briefly there, but any more thoughts on that, how people simplify in their lives and generate more kind of happiness and satisfaction from that.

Yeah, it's the same thing, what we do at work, we do at home, right? Like there's almost it's almost indistinguishable these days for most people, but when you're at home, if you just think about how many hours you actually control, you probably spend 30 to 40% of your time at work going to work, complaining about work. Then you spend 30 to 35% of your time sleeping. That gives you very few hours that you actually control and in the hours that you control most people just do things out of habit. They don't take any time to think about, well, do I actually have to go to that party that I've always said yes to or could I spend that like with a friend who I actually really enjoy or reading a book I've always wanted to read or even small things like the things that pile up in your closet, all these clothing choices or all these things that you got to buy.

“That you can put on auto purchase. All these little decisions drain your ability to make better decisions. There's this whole idea we talk about in the book about cognitive fatigue.”

The more decisions you have to make, the worse you get it making decisions that is indisputable in the data across many, many studies and many, many years shows that. So it's all about cleaning it up, but even like the simplest exercise which I talk about in the book, which is how many people have ever sat down even for a half hour and just written down.

What are the three things I want out of my life? Like when I'm on my death bed, I want to say what are the three things that I achieve that would make me feel like I had a life well lived.

I don't think anyone even does that in just writing those three things in order, at least will give you direction or okay, or these are the things that I want, if these are the things that I want, what are the choices that I have to make. And I'll give you a good example, like I've done this exercise many times for myself, but one of the things I want to be able to say is that hey, like I was a great husband, a great father, a great sibling, a great son. Okay, most people would probably say some version of that, but then it would that affects what I do to be able to do that, that means that I'm running a company and I still have to find time to be a good husband, a good son, a good sibling, a good father.

Well, one of the decisions that I had to make from that is that despite running a media company and living in DC, I say no to every single social ask I get at work.

I don't let people convince me. Oh, you've got to do that. We've got to be public, you're a CEO, you got to be present. I don't care. I'm just not going to go because I want to use that time to put it into my kids or to my wife or to my parents or to my siblings. And I think once you write that you at least have a no star of where you want to go and it helps you start to make decisions about what to say yes to and what to say no to. We talked throughout the book about this three step system. You should apply anything which is confront.

Delete amplify which is confront just ask like what are you doing and why are you doing it delete anything that you're not super excited about or that you don't have to do there's so many things you just do out of obligation. That you can get rid of that freeze-up time for you to then amplify which is amplify the things you're good at or that you want to do.

“And I think in this era right now where we're just pulled in a million directions we're all stressed out. We all feel overwhelmed.”

All of our bells and whistles going off on our phone 100 tax a day, 100 emails a day. Like no wonder people are frazzled and freaked out and so hopefully what the book will do is give somebody an anchor for okay this is how I can navigate this time period and a really sane way. And the book is not long it's very actionable each chapter gives you three things to do tonight takes you ten ten minutes it's not meant to be overwhelming. Like I said it's written like a power tool we're not going to win any literary awards for this book other than hopefully clarity.

One of the recommendations you have in the book resonated for me which is to make a gratitude list and write down three things that you're grateful for and that's.

I'm grateful for us the chance to talk with you with all the great work you've done and I really appreciate that and I want to move to our closing questions but but before we do that any.

Any topics we haven't covered that you'd like to bring in.

“No I think that's great and I think like even like the gratitude list like these things might all feel small or trivial as one of us but when you do them into talented it really is a difference between like being happy and not being.”

Like I my gratitude list I have it in my notes function on my phone, but I just write down like anybody who's like made a big difference in my life that I can think of either that newly comes into my life or that I think of from childhood and it's. You know it's a couple hundred people and I'll just like read it every once in a while because it's easy to do them scroll it's easy to like oh my god I'm overwhelmed or my kids are freaking out or.

My wife mad at me or my co-workers and I'm mean or whatever like it's nice to have something to balance that with.

Amen that that particular idea is made a huge difference for me at various times and and I hope people take them more than if they haven't done that. See if it helps for them. Well.

“It's interesting in your book you talk about a rule of threes and our closing question on this podcast actually uses a rule of threes.”

We we ask all of our guests to recommend three books reports or articles to our listeners it could be on any topic.

Could be all due to something that is a favorite from your childhood or something that you read yesterday so. Jim. Three books or reports or articles for listeners. Yeah I'll do I'll do books in. One of them. I'll start with like something super relevant to the kickoff the NFL season like my favorite book of all time is when pride still mattered by David Marinus.

And I'm a big packer fan but it's about the Lombardi era and David who's written many best sellers he's worked with him at the post.

“I think it's one of the most insightful beautiful writers out there's beautifully told but it's also just a get amazing.”

The book about Vince Lombardi and that the early year of the Green Bay Packer so I would say that's a with the NFL season starting I'd read that. And then two books that my daughter turned me on to the last book that I read. I just did a hike and Kilimanjaro and I read. She's super into and my wife is super into Joan Diddy and so I feel obligated to start reading more Joan Diddy and so I read South and West which is one of her many books it's just like she's just a beautiful writer super duper insightful.

A past away recently but has many many books at my wife and daughter just consider among the best books that they've ever read. And another one by my daughter she turned me on to like three or four years ago that is really stuck with me that I would tell anyone to read is a big magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. And the book is about how every one of us is a creative and I never come a writer and I'm an entrepreneur but never thought of myself as a creative because I always thought of a creative as like an artist or musician I have no musical skills.

I'm not a campaign to have nothing that would in that traditional sense screen creativity but the book did a beautiful job of talking about how we overthink creativity and that all of us have it inside of us. And that you in just like different ways to spot it in different ways for you to think about like that dimension to yourself and for whatever reason that book really stuck with me both the beautifully written but also just a topic that got my mind thinking in a more elastic way. Jim van the height three very interesting wonderful recommendations I'm with Joan Diddy and fan but haven't read that book so I appreciate you recommending all three of those and I appreciate all you do at Axios and thank you for joining us on the show.

Thank you appreciate you for having me and good luck and I'll be grateful for you. Thanks Jim. Thank you take care. Goodbye. This has been the AI Energy and Climate Podcast a special production of the DSR network.