Is America Cooked? — EP 68 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

We’re trying something new. Ashlee and Kylie dishing on Tech Land and dishing hard. The Core Memory podcast you didn’t know you needed but now can’t live without.

We dove into our recent sit-down with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman: why Greg seems to have stepped back into a real leadership role at OpenAI, our biggest takeaways from the episode, and why the startup has become its own telenovela.

We had to unpack the state of American manufacturing. Ashlee makes the case that we’re screwed on actuators — the motors that move every humanoid robot — and walks through who’s actually trying to fix it. LA as the secret manufacturing capital, Texas as the emerging center of gravity, SendCutSend (our newest sponsor!) as the closest thing America has to China for fast parts, and the hardware cult in central Texas that you should probably watch our video about.

We get into SpaceX’s $10B partnership with Cursor that may or may not be a Hail Mary for xAI. Whether space data centers are real or window dressing. Why Apple under Tim Cook feels creatively bankrupt and who actually builds the next computer for the AI era. Also, Anthropic quietly becoming a trillion-dollar company while Google somehow escapes scrutiny.

Plus: organs grown in mouse wombs (yes, really — go read the KindBio piece), merch is finally live, and a very special listener contest. Leave the most creative review on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube and we’ll send you two tickets to The Shins/Weezer tour. Do it!!! Er, please!!!!

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