Announcer:
From the library of the New York stock exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York city, you're inside the ice house. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSC and at ISIS exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ice house. Here's your host, Josh king of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Hey folks, a special timely episode, we just recorded at the New York Stock Exchange's 2020 Institutional Equity Forum, our annual gathering of our most important clients and partners among the world's leading trading institutions. It's usually an invite only event, but one conversation was applicable to everyone who plans to cast a vote in the presidential election next week, so we decided to share it far and wide. A constant in my early morning routine since 2007 has been the political playbook, the brainchild of the legendary Mike Allen, the man Washington wakes up to as he was once profiled in New York Times. Mike, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz helped build Politico into a powerhouse. Then applied their innovations in online journalism and the news business and launched Axios four years ago, to make us all smarter with what they call smart brevity.
Josh King:
There isn't a more dynamic duo than Jim and Mike to help make smarter about the 2020 election and what may come next, with a second Trump term, or a transition to a Biden administration, and what the next year will hold either way. After the break, we bring you live inside the New York stock exchange for my conversation with the Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. And that's right after this
Advertiser:
Navigating dynamic markets requires a relentless pursuit of knowledge. Now join market experts to learn with ice education live. Attend live video training with practical lessons across global asset classes. On-demand modules provide base knowledge. Participants can then attend live training sessions, including group review. And test for certification. We also tailor training for your needs and in-house projects. Ice Education Live Courses, continue your education. Today.
Josh King:
Here are two headlines you might have missed. Headline number one, "A gambler decides to raise the stakes." And that's a story about the president making a huge gamble in a bid to restore his congressional agenda. And then here's another headline. "New administration cataloging pranks." And that's a story about the incoming president's team discovering all sorts of shenanigans in the west wing left by his predecessor. Now, these might be stories about the current white house or the next one, but you might have missed them because they're actually from 2005 and 2001 respectively, with bylines from Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen way back when they were breaking news for the Washington Post.
Josh King:
Since then, for anyone spending the last few decades under a rock, Jim and Mike went on to become part of the founding team of Politico, which redefined political coverage as we know it and created, among other things, the Politico Playbook, which became as my friend, Mark Leibovich wrote for the New York Times, the principle early morning document for an elite set of political and news media thrivers and strivers. And then four years ago at the height of their game, VandeHei and Allen strived even higher. Leaving the revolutionary news organization that led Washington from print to pixels, and opening the door at Axios. With VandeHei telling van air about this time back in 2016, there is more good information out there than at any point in humanity, but it's harder than ever to get to it.
Josh King:
They've certainly made good on their promise to make it easier for us to get smarter and made a profit to boot. I still begin my day with Mike Allen, his Axios AM newsletter arriving each morning in the six o'clock hour. One of the platforms 22 or so newsletters focused on the niche intersections of politics, finance and tech, or I can hear from his colleague Niala Boodhoo on the Axios Today podcast. And at the other end of the daily news cycle with Mike's Axios PM and Dan Primack's Axios Re:Cap Podcast.
Josh King:
And if that's not enough, tonight I can watch Axios on HBO. Jonathan Swan, interviewing Senator Ted Cruz and Alexi McCammond, talking with representative Ilhan Omar. And then leading to perhaps the most intriguing part of where Axios is headed, if I happen to be living in Denver, Tampa St. Petersburg, Des Moines, or Minneapolis, I can sign up for Axios Local. Filling the void of the local newspaper that all across America is on the endangered species list. But right now, we're one week out from what everyone says every year, but this year is likely true, the most pivotal election in our lifetime. So let's start there. Welcome Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, the New York Stock Exchange and our 2020 Institutional Equity Forum.
Mike Allen:
Thank you. And thank you for living the Axios lifestyle. That is very impressive. Really appreciate it. Josh, Jim and I are grateful for the good times that we've had with you over the years, your amazing life experience. And I will not tell our audience, which of those stories you might or might not have been either a source or a perpetrator.
Josh King:
Thank you. I trust your confidence, Mike, as always. And I'm going to trust our audience to ping us questions on the screen in front of you if they have them. And as soon as they come in, we'll put them to Mike and Jim. But for either one of you guys, 538 has the polling average of Biden leading Trump by 52 to 42.9. Our friend Howard Wilson reminded us this morning that a week ago it had Biden at a 10.7 point lead, to what do you ascribe the tightening and how do you see the race playing out over the next eight days?
Jim VandeHei:
I guess I'll take a first crack at that. Thank you for having us. I think, listen, like by almost every measure that you or I would've applied to politics pre-Trump, you would say that Biden is a clear front runner. That you look at the state polls, you look at the local polls, you look at the fundraising, you look what happening in swing states, you look what's happening with the House and Senate candidates and what their internal polling is showing, and you would think that Biden has a very, very, very good chance of winning and bringing in a Democratic majority with him. But all of us live with the scars of 2016, of not being able to see in advance that Trump was coming, and so we forever will have the asterisk. And the asterisk to me is amplified by a lot of my travels this summer.
Jim VandeHei:
I was just on the phone with my brother in rural Wisconsin. I've never seen anything like it. Once you get outside of the bubble, the number of Trump flags and Trump boats and Trump hats and people digging into their pockets and doing things for the Trump brand that I've never seen done in politics before. People didn't have Clinton painted on their boat. And people didn't have Reagan flags that were bigger than the American flag in front of their beachfront properties, that didn't happened in the past. And it tends to be a very different Republican. It is a working class, white Republican, many of whom weren't involved in politics necessarily, very actively in the past. And so the big question and sort of the big asterisk still in my mind is, how many of those people that didn't vote last time that now have the flag or have the hat, or have the shirt, are going to vote this time around?
Jim VandeHei:
And that is still the Trump theory of the case. They would say we have a better chance of winning than you think, though they're not terribly optimistic, but they'd say you have a better chance than you think, because there's a lot of those people in rural communities, particularly in Michigan, particularly in Pennsylvania, particularly in the Northern 1/2 of Maine, that aren't going to show up in polls, and if they show up in the numbers that the Trump campaign thinks they will, they have a shot. They know it's a difficult shot. They know they really do once again, have to pull an inside straight. But I think in the tightening, not the national polls, which I don't care about, but the tightening in Wisconsin now, some of these polls show it's within five, if I were a Democrat, that would make me a little bit nervous.
Jim VandeHei:
The Pennsylvania in this final week is around five, but that would make me nervous if I were a Democrat. So there's a reason, I think that the Biden campaign is confident but also nervous and probably will be until all the votes are tallied.
Mike Allen:
And Josh, one reason you're seeing a ton of attention to Florida right now is that as the campaigns look ahead to election night, which could turn into election couple of days and even election week. The key to avoiding a Bush V. Gore two, which Josh, you lived through, the key to heading that off, which this country just is not ready to handle, is not set up to with the amplification that's going to take place on social media, with the emotions, the way that they're running right now. I've done a morning newsletter as you mentioned, Josh, every morning, 365 days a year for 14 years, Axios AM. And great connection with my readers because you just hit reply and it's in my inbox. And just people are so much more passionate now. So much, frankly, angrier now. So much more determined that their side is the only side. That any kind of prolonged uncertainty will just be very difficult for the country to manage.
Mike Allen:
And so that's why they're watching Florida. And that's why you see Mike Bloomberg putting a 100 million into Florida. Because if Joe Biden were to put Florida away, it would really rob president Trump of even the plausible paths that they're hoping to hang onto. And the interesting thing about Florida is, Florida reports quickly that unlike some of the other states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida counts it's mail and ballots leading up to election day. So election night, we're much more likelier to know a final result in Florida, than we are a lot of other places that matter
Jim VandeHei:
We'll reverse engineer it. If Trump were to win, which I think would surprise most people, it's going to be a combination of working class white turn up being exponentially higher than any of us anticipated, and this oddity where the Hispanic vote, if anything, Trump across the board looks a little bit stronger than last time around. There's a poll out today out of Texas by the New York times just posted. Once again, it looks like Biden is doing a little bit more worse than Hillary Clinton was with Hispanic voters, which has been a dynamic that we've seen in several states with some level of persistence. And those two factors combined, could be enough to give him hope. The counter argument obviously is that you're just seeing this early voting enthusiasm that's not really tied to Biden, it's just tied to really hating Trump. Again, if Biden were to lose, I think the fair critique would be you did the four corner stall for five months, no wonder people weren't that enthusiastic. But it seems like people don't really care about Biden, they really hate Trump, which is a pretty powerful motivator.
Josh King:
The coin of my own realm with presidential advance work was crowd size, talking about Florida. Mike, the president was in the villages over the weekend. It's a measure that president Trump still believes is decisive. And from the safety of my living room, it still looks impressive, and that while Biden speaks to a few dozen people with a foliage backdrop and his surrogate, his number one surrogate at Barack Obama, addresses a drive-in rally of a parking lot full of cars. How has COVID changed campaigning and will it revert back and will politics ever be the same?
Mike Allen:
Yeah, Josh, you'll appreciate this. My favorite innovation of 2020, and there's not a lot not to love about 2020, but I love the horns. The honking of the horns at the private rally for President Obama, for Vice president Biden. It's a new rhythm and it's a new sound of politicking. And by the way, some of you saw him, president Obama, who we haven't seen much of as he works way on his one volume memoir, which we saw an excerpt today from the New Yorker, which quickly became a two volume memoir, there's some betting it may actually be a trilogy before we're done. But he loved being back on that stop. And he loved being back out, trolling Trump, he was in the north Miami son and he said, how many of you all have a secret Chinese bank account? And he like very theatrically looked around, everybody's honking the horns, right?
Mike Allen:
And then Josh, you're right about president Trump's rally, there's on one on right now. The Trump rally channel is now on three times a day. And somebody worked for his campaign was joking, told me that the real message of these rallies is that we all should be taking Regeneron, because he's loving it. And I will say, this is not necessarily a good sign, but this really is the greatest hits tour. Going in for some really deep cuts over the weekend. He was back doing some of the Hillary Clinton stuff he hadn't done in four years. The caravans were back. I hadn't heard of about them in a while. Retelling some of his favorite stories, including a several minute rendition of his bargaining with the CEO of Boeing, about the new price of a new pair of air force ones. Loving telling that story. And now at the rallies, this is brand new this weekend, they're showing videos. So he'll in the middle of his rally, thousands of people, and he's pulling up, it's actually pretty clever. He's pulling up video from the Democratic debates of Bernie Sanders trolling Vice President Biden.
Mike Allen:
So he's loving it. The problem is that what you're seeing for him, is a lot of people in one place, they're not necessarily in the right places. And you just have this tremendous democratic energy on the other side. So on paper, this is a very data driven audience. This is an audience that's succeeded through data. And as Jim alluded to, anything that you can measure, whether it be state polls, whether it be TV advertising, whether it be the direction of the country, whether it be what people are talking about online, anything that you can measure, that points to a fight of what we always remind ourselves of. And after 2016, seared in our brain, he's winning on paper, but elections are not held on paper. Elections are people. And that's why there is that asterisk.
Josh King:
Let's play out the Trump view of the world, Jim, on the assumption that he wins, Jonathan Swan and Elena Trin have a story out today on Axios, that the president will want to wield the ax on his CIA and FBI directors, his secretary of defense, even his attorney general, for lack of loyalty. And beyond the musical chairs, what do you think a second Trump term would look like?
Jim VandeHei:
It would look a lot like the first one, but maybe with fewer people to choose from to work for him. It's a huge problem. It's been a huge problem for the beginning. It's like him getting talented people who he'll listen to, to stick around. And then not just the Cabinet Secretary or Chief of Staff level, it's throughout government. I've always thought it is the single biggest risk to the country is that you don't have the people that you want in the right seats that aren't headliners, but that make a lot of operational decisions that really do decide whether or not distribution programs work, or whether your national security system is optimally charged. And so I think if he won, he's putting no thought whatsoever into his second term agenda, which is why you don't hear much about it on the campaign trail.
Jim VandeHei:
He's a man of improvisation, always has been. And everyone, it's unlike anything I've ever seen before. He'll just blurt something out and, whatever is there in terms of people, they rally around it to try to turn that into a policy as they wait to see if he actually was serious about it, which has made them slower than other administrations might be at different junctures of the presidency, especially early on, when they had full Republican rule, they couldn't take full advantage of it, because it just doesn't run like a normal white house. And so I think it would look a lot like this one. And I think it'd be really tough on the country. Listen, I imagine, the thing I think the markets are tanking today, the things I don't think the market is factoring in is, I think the chances for a really bad couple of weeks after the election are much higher than most people think, because he himself is signaled that unless it's a blowout, he hasn't even said the blowout part, I'll throw that in there. But unless it's like a decisive blowout, he's going to protest the vote.
Jim VandeHei:
They're going to try to figure out different ways to take different cases, whether it's the Pennsylvania cases, Michigan, others, and take it all the way to the Supreme Court to try to invalidate some of the results. To say that you shouldn't be able to have early voting. You shouldn't be able to count votes if they came at this date. And so they've lost a lot of these cases at the state level, but he's been very clear that he's not going to be accept the results. And if Trump were to win, could you imagine your liberal friends? My goodness. You think about the derangement syndrome after one term, I don't think liberals would be able to handle it. I don't think money people in the media would be able to handle it.
Jim VandeHei:
They would feel like they're just truly live a land that they don't understand at all, which they already feel is their existence under Trump. And so I think that would have lots of protests and lots of potentially violence on both ends. And so I worry a lot about that post post-election scenario, unless it is a blowout, and I think the only one who could have a blowout obviously is Biden. And Biden, unlike Trump, you have two contrasts. You have one who hasn't thought at all about what would happen next year. And then you have Biden, who would come into the presidency, probably more prepared, better staffed, ready to have a much more detailed conversation about staff across all agencies, than maybe anybody in the history of the presidency. Why?
Jim VandeHei:
Because he did it. He came in here once before as vice president in the middle of an economic crisis, realizes that when you have all party rule, which he likely would have if he wins, that you have to hook yourself up to a vat of Red Bull, don't sleep, get people in the right places at the right time, and then re-engineer the country in your image while you have that ability, because you have all party control. And so they've put a lot more thought, ironically, probably a lot more thought than the incumbent president has into what that next year would look like.
Josh King:
I listened to... Go ahead, Mike.
Mike Allen:
Yeah, Josh, just a quick point about all party rule, in addition to the fact that with this blue wave, this possible blue tsunami, you'd have White House, Senate House, you have a strong house. They're looking at a possible strong Senate majority and that's going to give, would be give a president Biden more muscle than we've seen in many generations. There's no question that this new president, whichever one of them it is, is going to have more in their inbox than any president since FDR, and if it's Joe Biden with a blue weight, he's going to have more power. Because Biden, president Bush 43, they each had all party rule for two years, you look ahead, he could well have it for all four.
Josh King:
So let's play out this strong Biden scenario a little bit. I listened to Axios Today this morning on my way to work, Niala Boodhoo interviewing Elena Trin on Amy Comey Barrett's first week. And as Elena reported in her first week on the job, ACB maybe deciding which votes to count in the election by her third week, she may be deciding the fate of the Affordable Care Act. Talk about the Trump legacy, if it is rarely in the rear view mirror of judicial confirmations. And then help us cut through the fog of Biden's court packing statements, as he ponders how to undo it with some of the congressional strength that you're alluding to, Jim.
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah. If you think about the Trump voter and the things that they can point to, like substantive, they can say, "Listen, the guy, you might hate him, you might think he's a clown, you might think he's a bore, but he delivered everything that he promised us." And I think the court is his strongest card, and I'm surprised he doesn't talk more about it. What presidential candidate gives you a list of pre-vetted judges from which he promises to pick, then has three opportunities and picks from that list in all three cases, and by the end of this week, we'll have of all three of those justices sitting on the court and moving it decisively in a partisan direction that could last most of our lifetimes. That's a hell of an achievement. He's not the best at talking about the past and talking about achievement, but that is a big achievement.
Jim VandeHei:
So then if you're biting, what do you do? Obviously he is going to be under tremendous pressure to pack the court. He's already signaling what he's going to do. He's going to create a bipartisan commission. Usually one of the more useless things that Washington does, but it certainly buys you a little bit of time. Because in his heart of hearts, he's an institutionalist. He doesn't want to pack the court, because if you pack the court, they can pack the court. I think the more likely play, and I think it would be a real test for him because he is such an institutionalist, is get rid of the filibuster. Make that your compromise. You have all party rule with no filibuster. And let's say you have 50 to 52 democratic seats, which is probably the likely outcome. If he were to win the presidency, you can do a lot.
Jim VandeHei:
And Democrats are so often not. They really are timid about power in a way. I don't really understand. The idea people are pulling their hair out, that Trump put somebody on the court so close to the election, why wouldn't you? You have the constitutional right and ability to do it, why would you not utilize power to its maximum extent to be able to achieve your ideological objective? That's why you get into the political game. The question for Biden is, will he upend some of these traditions, like the filibuster to do that? And I think that might be the thing he does instead of packing the court. If I had to guess, he'll come back within several months, he'll say we're not going to pack the court. We're going to put term limits, we're going to push for term limits for Supreme court justices, which might probably makes some sense, given that you often end up with justices that are still practicing well into their 80s or 90s. And so we probably could use a younger court over time. And I think that will be the card he'll play.
Josh King:
The future Senate Judiciary Committee may be chaired by Dianne Feinstein or another member of the caucus, or it could be continued to be shared by Lindsay Graham, perhaps all depending on how Graham's race against Jamie Harrison turns out. Guys, give us a quick spin around the country, starting with the Palmetto State on the races to watch for control of the Senate.
Mike Allen:
South Carolina is such a surprise. As you know, Senate Chairman usually impregnable, you see in that race, the Democrat running against him has raised the most in a quarter of anyone running for Senate anywhere, either party in history. And then Lindsay Graham who's raised much less, has raised the most of any Republican. So a crazy amount of pent up money going in there. And part of it is two factors. One, at home. People are just puzzled about Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham, who was John McCain's best friend and was his partner in crime on Capitol Hill for all those years. John McCain who had such enmity with the president, the president didn't even go to his state funeral, and mocked him in life and in death, both basically unheard of for a war hero.
Mike Allen:
Now you have Lindsay Graham, suddenly president Trump's golf partner. Nobody can really explain it. So there's puzzlement about that at home. But second, that race became a proxy for liberal rage about what was going on with the court, became an out outlet for progressives liberals who wanted to give. So, that race became a surprise. Races that we knew were going to be up there, and there were a little bit of a Canary in the coal mine for president Trump. If you look at Montana, where the is a close race, Arizona, a close race, Colorado, the Republicans probably going to lose. Maine, the Republican could well lose. Then we talked to the consultants who are working in those races and it's a great way to get a leading indicator of what's going on with the presidential race. And the turn was races, which most of them had been very close, Susan Collins in Maine had been struggling. Cory Gardner in Colorado had been written off, but the real turning point in these Senate races, when suddenly Republicans became the underdog was that first debate.
Mike Allen:
People were looking at the polling coming out of the states, even before you could see it in national polling or in swing state polling, said that Republicans fell through the floor after that debate. And here's the simple reason why. That, there were a lot of people who the pollsters call them open to Trump. And there's really no one who's undecided, maybe 4% claim they're undecided. But if they're open to Trump, people who either voted for it before and then regretted it or people who didn't vote, that want to come out this time or voted for Hillary Clinton, but just because they couldn't take Trump the first time around. Any sort of open to Trump, those are people who like what he does, but don't like the show.
Mike Allen:
And at the debate, what they got was the show. They got the interrupting, all the craziest side of Trump. And it just played terribly. And it played terribly with the boaters that mattered most to them. So ever since then, Republicans have really been on the back foot. And then you see over the weekend reporting that the president, hopefully behind the scenes at a fundraiser, says that Republicans are going to have a hard time holding onto the Senate. And there's some of them that he would have a hard time being before. I can make a prediction. I'm going to break my rule. We don't make very many predictions after 2016, but here's one. I bet the president will say that in one of these rallies that's going on. Because one thing that we've found, and we've spent some time with the president behind the scenes, what we found is that anything he tells you behind the scenes, no matter how unlikely it seems to be for public consumption, sooner or later, he will say it of a camera or a microphone.
Mike Allen:
That's one reason there's not many secrets in this administration, you report a story, you get ready to pop it, you've got all your sources lined up, and the president goes and says it on the south lawn, next to the helicopter at what they call the chopper talk. And he loves chopper talk.
Josh King:
I mean, we've heard more about the US weapons systems that were supposed to be secret than I think we've ever heard over the last four years. Jim, one of the things you find on Mike Allen's Twitter feed is his News Shapers interview with former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, that show powered by Bank of America, and YSC took the symbol BAC, McMaster told Mike that what the Russians want to do in 2020, which is no matter who wins, raise doubts about us among the legitimacy of the result. I helped plan Bill Clinton summits with Boris Yeltsin and you both covered President's Bush and Obama in their meetings with Putin, in the two possible election outcomes here, how does our relationship with Russia evolve?
Jim VandeHei:
The relationship only gets worse, probably under both scenarios, but certainly with Biden. I think Biden is going to take a much tougher posture towards the Russians. Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin to this day befuddles me. Because actually substantively, if you look at what he's done on sanctions, done with other policy moves, he hasn't been that weak on Russia, he's just terribly weak when it comes to his rhetorical posture towards Russia and the secret conversations with Putin, without anybody present or any transcript that you traditionally would get from these interactions is baffling. And I think it's one of the few mysteries, because he does tell you everything. One of the few mysteries that will be uncovered post presidency, whenever that is. But Russia's a huge problem. China's a huge problem. There's all these things we don't talk about in this campaign that baffle me. But the idea and especially you're seeing it play out Twitter in, and in Facebook, a little bit on YouTube right now, where, listen if you're an adversary of the United States, we're such an easy target for manipulation on social platforms.
Jim VandeHei:
And listen, if I'm a thug and I'm in Iran or North Korea or China or Russia, I'd probably doing what they're doing. Just set up a bunch of fake accounts, set up bots. We're not hard to read. We know exactly what three topics divide us and bring out our worst instincts. And then you just try to engage as many people as humanly possible, create a little bit of fog and misinformation and just continue to cleave away and make sure you get that division to feel more real, more profound, more sort of the heart. And that's a huge problem. Again, if Trump win or lose, it's going to take us a decade to undo this. And undo not just what he did. And he obviously tells more lies than most presidents would ever imagine telling in a public setting. But it's just the amount of just hammering away at truth.
Jim VandeHei:
Not just fake news, fake news, that's his thing, and that's his gimmick with the base, it's this idea that we're fogging people's minds. Where if you think about your own life, the number of smart people that you know that don't believe truth in a way that they would have five or 10 years ago. That scares the hell out of me. You can put aside what your politics are. When you have a vast part of your population that's skeptical of anything that isn't reinforcing or self reinforcing, it just makes it hard to govern, makes it hard to sort of do anything. Make it hard to trust. And when you're about to head into, if Biden wins or Trump wins, it's not like you're inheriting a bounty of beauty and easy things to fix, you're going to inherit a whole bunch of crises, right?
Jim VandeHei:
You're going to inherit a pandemic. You're going to an economic crisis. You have an information crisis that we've done nothing about, by the way. We've done nothing to really govern what you can do on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, through Google. We've done nothing with these new technologies. And you have the crisis with China, which maybe there'll be an adversary, maybe we'll be at war with them. We don't know exactly how far this will go, but there's no doubt that China is articulated a plan called the 2025 plan. Then they have a 2050 plan, which loosely interpreted is we're going to eat America's lunch. And we're going to try to do that technologically, militarily, diplomatically, economically. And they're very out front about this and you see it unfold every day. And to me, those are the things that I wish there'd been much more debate about. And Mike and I were joking, our buddy, Jaymar's writing a campaign book and I'm like, what are you going to write about? There's no campaign, neither side's really campaign.
Jim VandeHei:
You have Trump saying everything that's on his mind in a public forum, and you have the other guy doing the four corner stall. And so you put aside the coronavirus, which obviously puts severe restrictions on what anybody can do, there's just not that much campaigning going on.
Josh King:
I mean, in terms of the search for truth, Jim, I mentioned in the intro these 22 Axios newsletters, you reminded us on Twitter about Axios Space powered by Lockheed Martin, that's NYSU ticker symbol LMT, one of them. Noting that NASA's mission to snag an asteroid sample is underway. That tweet got 9,000 likes, a thousand retweets, 343 comments, that's a lot of engagement for a niche topic. With that as a backdrop, tell us how the newsletters are connecting directly with those most interest in their subject matter?
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah. Our theory of the case is where that we started Politico. And this seems crazy. When we started Politico, 14 years ago or whatever the hell it was like, the problem we were trying to solve is we didn't think there was enough political coverage and there wasn't enough depth to policy coverage. And that seems insane now, but I do think at that moment in time it was true. And, but 10 years later, there's odds all anybody's doing, it was like mass consuming politics like it's a bag of chips. And the problem there was that the challenge for you, for me, for anybody watching this is that we have to get smarter quicker, across more topics than ever before, to really understand our domain of expertise. You can't be oblivious to technology or AI or robotics or climate or China, and just be a specialist in one area. Not if you really want to have great success, or you really want to understand how these topics collide to create new ideas, new businesses, new threats, new opportunities.
Jim VandeHei:
And so the entire architecture of our company is, okay, what are the topics that are going to be in collision and are going to shape the country in the world over the next five to 10 years? And so we have more people covering technology and automation and robotics, than we do politics, we have a large team covering every aspect of business and business deals, covering energy and climate, covering healthcare, covering autonomous technology. And a lot of that is written for people who just have a passion for those topics, but where we're at our best is where we can bring together those ideas to be able to show you that you can't really understand politics or business or deals, if you don't understand the other pieces that are hitting it. Think about politics, you can't take politics away from media the way you might have been able to 10, 20, 30 years ago. You can't understand the modern Republican party without understanding, with some level of sophistication what happens on Facebook, because that is the largest dissemination tool of information.
Jim VandeHei:
In some cases, mind manipulation, sometimes healthy information dissemination. But it just requires all of us to be smarter quicker. And so my hope is once the Trump phenomenon burns off and people start consuming less politics, which is, I think what the country really needs to do, people will start paying attention to these other things that are, if you think about the plates that are shifting beneath us, they're as tectonic as politics, right? Automation is going to do more harm or more good to business, to tech, to politics, to media than the internet did. And I don't know how that will unfold, you don't know how that will unfold, but you damn well better understand the basics of it, or you're going to miss the next big thing.
Josh King:
Well, gentlemen, on January 31st, 2021, we'll mark the fourth anniversary of Axios getting smarter with Smart Brevity. You guys started this, I can't wait to see, not only this wide big picture view, but the local view that you're going to bring us with these two person teams reporting out of Minneapolis, Denver, Tampa, and Des Moines, maybe just with 30 seconds, Jim or Mike, are we going to see return to the local car dealership ads and help wanted classifieds?
Mike Allen:
Our idea with our local coverage is that in each of these communities, they also want to know what matters, which is the approach that Jim was outlining for Axios. And, so each of these communities, as they emerge from these acquainting crises, the recession, the pandemic, taking on racial reconciliation, all these communities are going to want to connect, they're going to want to communicate. And at Axios, what matters Smart Brevity, sensibility will bring them together.
Josh King:
Well guys, I can't thank you enough for joining us on the 2020 New York Stock Exchange Institutional Equity Forum. We could go on for another hour, I'm sure easily. You guys have so much to cover in the next eight days. We'll be watching very smartly on Twitter, all the platforms right on the web. And can't to see tonight on HBO, those interviews with Omar and Cruz. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Mike Allen:
[crosstalk 00:37:24] Great conversation.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes, so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at icehouseattheice.com or tweeted us at Icehouse podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch and Kearney Ferguson, with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh king, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange, thanks for listening, we'll talk to you next week.
Announcer:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part, from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither Ice nor its affiliates, make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell. A solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have of been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.