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

All right, here we go. Quick contest to start off the show. People may not know this, but James Mercer and John Sortland of The Shins write the theme music for our show. They are heading out on a nationwide stadium tour with Weezer this fall. You can go online and find tickets. So if you leave the most creative review for the Core Memory Podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Wherever you pod, we will hunt it down and Core Memory will buy 2 tickets for the person who leaves the most creative review as judged by us.

I love this idea and I can't wait to read all of the insane reviews. They better be really creative because I want to laugh hard.

Really good. Review us, star us. This is the way people find out about the show. John Sortland, the drummer for The Shins, edits our podcast. Can you believe it? This is Core Memory. I'm Ashlee Vance.

And I'm Kylee Robison.

Here we go. That was the theme song. All right. Kylie.

Yeah.

How are you?

Good. How are you?

I'm good. We're recording this on a Friday. It has been busy in tech land, busy in our lives, and we haven't really done a show like this before.

Yeah, I've been telling Ashlee that it's insane that we haven't, because when I go on these trips, people are like, do I get to meet Ashlee Vance? And I'm like, no, I'm sorry, it's me. So I thought this was a way for them to meet Ashlee Vance and hear his opinions because he has really good ones.

That's very flattering and ridiculous, but well, so we just had— we made, we made some news out in the world. We had Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on the show. They had allegedly never done a podcast together. It turns out they've kind of done some corporate podcasts together.

Yeah, those don't count.

Not a media—

Reid Hoffman was one of them I saw, and then their own podcast at OpenAI. But those don't count.

Yeah, they don't.

Yeah.

And it seemed well received. We got some grief for putting it under the paywall.

Huge grief.

I know you guys hate that we try to make a living with this thing, uh, but we had to run an experiment, see what happened. The Substack boomed, which is good. Possibly undercuts our general reach, but still did really well. So whatever. I'm sorry, people. We, we, we gotta pay some bills.

Did you ever get the paywall like anger while you were at Bloomberg? 'Cause I, I, at Fortune, The Verge, and Wired, they were all paywalled. So I got yelled at.

Yeah, so this cracks me up a little bit. I mean, I would get yelled at, yes, in the comments, but this was like an entire day of people just shitting on me. And it's like, man, all these— when I work for those other places, they're owned by billionaires and people would put the stories under paywalls and you get like a couple gripes. And then every time we do a story, I'm like, yo, we're the little guy, we actually need this, we have to pay for this, we don't have Mr.

Bloomberg. No.

And, and it's like somehow worse when, uh, independent publication does this. And anyway, well, we don't really need to lay this all on you guys, but, uh, but thanks for subscribing if you do.

And it helps us make all the cool shit that we want to make and interview Sam and Greg and all that.

Yeah. Thank you very much. Yes. Like what we do actually requires substantial amount of money. We're sending people all around the world.

Have you checked flight costs lately? I mean, it's insane.

This is horrifying. Um, so, well, okay, what was your takeaway of the— our time with Sam and Greg?

Yeah, I thought my first takeaway is that— and I don't know if you noticed this, we haven't even discussed it— but Sam looked really tired. Like, he just looked exhausted. And Greg really took the lead and went on his, like, ambitious science journey narrative, but Sam just was like— seemed like he'd been through some shit.

Well, I guess he'd had attempts on his life. Yeah. And then he lives all these, the, everyone in the AI land, I mean, they live just very hectic lives at the moment. I feel this way every time I see any of them. Yeah. Whether it's Dario or Sam. Sam is, well, I don't really mean to pick on personal things or it's not even picking on, he is, he's going gray a little bit.

Yes, he is.

Yes.

He is.

Um, I feel like it's getting to him. I mentioned this on the podcast and I'm sure people think I'm just being soft on Sam. Mm-hmm.

Or something like that.

But I've spent a lot of time with him. Over the last 3 years. Look, the world is very divided on Sam, or maybe not even divided. A lot of people think he's, he's just untrustworthy and this very shady character. I will say this, I mean, I've spent a lot of time with him, coup onwards, never-ending drama. Unless he's just like an incredible actor, which is possible, but he has some mechanism for kind of letting this stuff flow off of him to some degree. I mean, like you said, he's tired, so yeah, things get to him a bit. But, um, I feel like he doesn't— like, maybe he does, but my sense is he doesn't dwell on things.

Interesting. I, I kind of do think he dwells heavily on— I do think he dwells heavily on what people think of him and, uh, you know, how he's perceived. That, that is my take. I think he really does care. There, I remember in some book or some article where they said that he would just lay on the ground when he was overly stressed, cuz he would get very, very anxious. And I think he's better at it now than ever, but he is going on this spree post the launch of Spud where he's replying and tweeting in a way he hasn't in a very long time, where he's being very earnest in himself. Yeah. And trying to be funny and I think I saw this amazing tweet where someone was like, it's not a race to AGI now, it's like you're marketing your earnestness, like who can be the most earnest. And I thought that was sort of incredible because he's taking this new shape after the attacks and after the New Yorker article. So I don't know, it's, it's weird.

I can see what you mean. I mean, I'm sure he cares about what people think about him. There's an element of just like the stuff that's happened at OpenAI over the last 3 years is extraordinary for a tech company. I mean, it's a genuine soap opera. And there is some, I don't know, there's some part of him though where he's just, he's like, okay, well we'll just do this and now we'll move on and do the next thing. And I don't know, I think if I was as rich as he is, I think I would've checked out and just, just, he always tells me, I brought it up in the show.

Yeah.

Because he's told me this many times that he, he wants to retire and his old dream is just to be in Napa with his family. And I don't know, I always— I never know how to take that because obviously he could do that if he wanted to.

There's a lot of— I'm going to call it gossip, but I saw some article clips say that either Fiji or Brett Taylor are going to replace him and it's imminent. He looks tired, so I could see that. But I mean, I don't know, just as Greg said, like, there's a lot more work to do. I don't know if he has it in him to step away from something that's like sort of taken his whole life for the last decade.

No, I mean, you're sitting on, on everything already being one of the most powerful people in the world. And I'm sure, you know, this, as we— many people have talked about, I mean, this is like, it is like the ring in The Lord of the Rings and you want to be close to it and touch it and control it from time to time. So all of that I think is true. I think one part of the show, well, it wasn't just our episode, but it was my interactions with Greg. The last couple weeks, um, are that, look, they want people to think this and they want them to know, but I think it's true that he's really come back, uh, big time setting OpenAI's product direction and strategy. And I think that's interesting because, I mean, Greg got kind of sidelined for a bit. Obviously he took this sabbatical, which was, um, I will get into this in my book that comes out, but, but, you know, some drama where Mira Murati, um, really the former CTO of OpenAI, more or less like pushed Greg out, and, and Sam on some level had to sign off on that. And so you see when they were on our show, the very, I think, genuine friends, or at least dudes who have been through stuff together and have some kind of bond. But you know, Greg's taken some serious shit in that relationship.

Yeah.

And, and then has been polarizing inside of OpenAI. People might not know this, he like hand codes— has hand coded huge swaths of OpenAI's infrastructure, sometimes controversially, because people don't like it.

Yeah.

When he, when he does this. But I will tell you this, I mean, on— he's one of the— his Greg Brain is a serious brain and he is able to get massive things done on his own and has been like this, this force of power within OpenAI. And again, it's like really upset people at times cuz they want team projects and Greg comes in and shuts things down and does it his own way. But it was, it's clear to me that he, after, after kind of being not like pushed totally aside, but, but he's got— seems like a much more active role.

Yeah, I think that podcast that we did with them is very like indicative of that newfound like, I am taking over, I want to be— I want it to be known that I am like leading Spud, I'm really stoked on what we're doing. And he's like taking this more like sort of leadership role. Of course he's always been a leader, but you're right, he was very sidelined despite how much work he did, controversially.

Yeah, it was, was quiet for a bit. And I think there's always been this part of Greg. I wanted to ask him about it, but we ran outta time 'cause we had talked about it before the show. But, you know, he was at Stripe before he was at OpenAI, and that is a company run by these two brothers, Patrick and John, and they're, they're gonna get all the attention. They're the, the co-founders of the company. They're a thing, you know, for all sorts of reasons. And Greg never got a ton of attention for the work he did at Stripe. It's my understanding that that was a real sore point, um, for him and, and one of the reasons he left the company. Um, and then you're at OpenAI and you have Ilya, you've got Elon, you've got Sam. That's really largely been the story over the 10 years of the people getting attention. And same thing, like, here's the dude who the company started in his apartment. He, played a major role in recruiting most of the people. He pretty much ran the company alongside Ilya.

Yeah.

For many years, you know, until Sam kind of came on and Mira rose up. And so, you know, I think there's this part of him, um, I don't think he would ever say it out loud because he's not really wired that way. Totally. But, but wanting people to know what he has done at this company.

Did you see that apartment is for sale right now?

I did.

Nucor memory office in San Francisco.

Well, when I've been reporting this book, there's all these stories of like the first 5, 6, 7, 8 people in that apartment coding. I've got a really great one that I'm sorry I'm going to save about Alec Radford, but I've always wanted a picture in my head. And then I always do this thing when I'm interviewing people, like, describe it to me.

Yeah.

It's hard with engineers sometimes because they have no— they don't really understand what I'm looking for. They think it's a silly exercise. But yeah, so I saw the pictures on the real estate website and it was— I don't know if that's exactly what it looked like, but it was helpful for me to picture these scenes they were talking about.

Yeah, I think, you know, they've had a very, very interesting trajectory. I think the podcast was really illuminating. And I mean, what else? What else do we get into? ImageGen and Spud and all that. I haven't tried Spud, but the ImageGen The text actually blew me away. I was kind of pissed about it because I was— I mentioned in the pod that I was trying to like mock up our merch and it was hot garbage. I sent you some of those pictures. It couldn't get the text right, but now it gets like the tiniest text correct, which I don't know how they do that. It's crazy.

Yeah, it was always annoying when those messed up. I haven't tried anything. I've been too busy this week since we dropped that. Yeah, that's fair. So no, I think I've been Claude 4.7ing.

I do love Claude.

Claude, is it 4.7 or 3?

It's 4.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it's 4.7. Um, I use Claude the most and it's really, really helpful. It's much better at writing. But the image gen, I have like conflicting feelings about image gen because you can notice Anthropic does not do image gen. And I think that's probably a right call because it is just so fraught and I don't understand how much it brings to the public in terms of innovation. Like, okay, now we can make images of people and deepfakes, but like, what can we really do? Uh, but you know, it's, it's really, really interesting what they were able to produce with this new ImageGen. I haven't seen anything like it, not since Nanobanana.

Yeah, well, it's always fun to play with, if nothing else. All right, what do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses and Brex's AIs and software run right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money, and take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. CoreMemory and Brex. And then, yeah, I don't know if I have any other big takeaways. I mean, I thought they were— I think we caught some strays where people are like, oh, you didn't ask enough hard questions. I mean, I think part of this was that they hadn't done the show together in a long time. We have gotten to know them. I mean, I— there's a group of people who listen to any AI podcast and they want you to just break down the models in this gory detail and and, and make it super information dense on where things are heading, which is like something you can do. I think we were set up where maybe like with one of them, you go that path, maybe Greg in particular. And then when they were together, it just seemed like an opportunity for people to get to know them in a different way, I thought. And I thought, um, they, I thought that worked. I thought they interacted in a way that people probably haven't seen. I saw that in some of the comments. So some people got it, some didn't. We kind of ran out of time.

Yeah.

At the end we backloaded some of the drama, some of the drama. And then in the middle of the thing, I got interested in manufacturing as I want to do.

I'm wondering if it showed up really in the episode where you're like, if you don't mind, I go on one more side. And I was like, go ahead.

You should have just slapped me across the face. Stick to the plan.

At least I think that was when you got the actuators line.

It was, which like—

That was worth it. I thought that was crazy.

It was, I knew I was deviating from the plan, but you know, sometimes you actually wanna just have a conversation and see where it goes.

It's fair. I thought it was a good conversation and like going into it, I knew that Greg was gonna get really like tech-focused and into the specifics and his dream of what these models could be. I knew that was gonna be the case going into it. There's just not enough time in the world with two important people. That's just what it is.

Do you want to do the Anthropic of it all?

Oh man.

There's two pieces to this. Like, one is I asked the question where I said, who do you think's executed better over the last 2 or 3 years? And my real statement should have been Anthropic has executed much better than you over the last 2 or 3 years, which is, which is, I thought it was implied, but, um, you know, and they gave the answer that I would expect, which is basically, we've been doing this stuff behind the scenes, and now you're seeing the fruits of it. And, and Anthropic was ahead on coding, and then look at us, we've come back with Codex, and, and, uh, we knew, you know, we had this plan all along. But I mean, really, Anthropic has like been a juggernaut over the last 2 or 3 years. OpenAI has been immensely distracted. They lose key people all the time. They've had coup and, yeah, and almost were like in neutral for a year dealing with that. And so like, there's no question. I mean, Anthropic has, has, it feels like there's, there's always that like 5-horse race in some level with Meta and X and Google and these guys. But it's, it is looking more and more to me like OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling ahead of folks.

I think there's two things interesting about the Anthropic stuff, and I tried to sort of lead the answer I was looking for with like, how would you have discussed things differently looking back? Because Sam sort of pinned Anthropic to do like fear-based marketing, and like their doomer rhetoric is what like caused these attacks on my home. And I thought, am I going crazy? Because I remember watching with my own two eyeballs you say the same things for many years before this. And a lot of people commented when I posted the Anthropic fear-based marketing clip. People were like, didn't he do exactly this? And they're clipping news articles and videos and all that. And yes, I just didn't see him really address that and internalize that. I think he does, but I just thought, this is crazy, because everyone did it. Literally everyone did it except for maybe Google, off the top of my head. I haven't really seen them do that.

But yeah, I mean, I always think Google was just so pro-AI from the beginning with DeepMind and then got positioned as the problem. You know, Elon going back to, I want to say 2014, 2015. I mean, this is kind of the reason OpenAI got put into existence was that Elon thought Larry and Sergey were, you know, against humanity.

Yeah.

Um, and yeah. And so, um, I don't think Google was doing these fear-based lines but was positioned as the bringer of doom itself, you know. And then, I mean, there is something interesting in all this that Google, at least from where I sit, has escaped so much of the intense scrutiny and focus because it is like Anthropic, the people are like, oh, they're the doomers, you know? And, and then OpenAI is the, um, sort of symbol of, of AI itself. And so all the attention goes on them. Sam's polarizing, Dario's a bit polarizing, and then Google's just over there now. That used to be them, but like now they're just doing their thing. People don't seem to care about Meta like all that much. And then Elon's Elon. So yeah, yeah, I feel like Google's getting a bit of a free ride. It's sort of you become— I don't know if boring is the right word. Right. But then there's a blessing in that to some degree.

Yeah, totally. Sam loves to dog on the media and be like, don't you guys have better stuff to write? Blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, like, they have the most drama and they sort of like shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly on drama. It feels like in a very strange way. And my take since I started covering AI was I just wish because I used to cover enterprise and cloud technology when I was a baby reporter and I was like, it should be as boring as Salesforce, respectfully. Like, it just, it shouldn't be this insane. It is— every article is like taking up so much of the world's mind that for what it actually is, I am pretty like unskeptical of AI now as opposed to when I first started. But still, it's like software. Why are we losing our minds every second? But they, they really manufacture quite a lot of drama.

Yeah. I mean, Sam always, every interview he's like, oh, you can get into all my personal drama. And then, you know, look, I'm not here to defend the media. I dislike huge swaths of the media and, and think they, they, They do do, you know, all the things people accuse them of, their sort of their worst instincts. But in this particular case, you actually have like Sam and Dario hate each other.

Yeah.

Elon hates everyone. And then Zack is on some sort of like revenge quest with Elon to win. Yeah. And then you have— and so like, whatever. Yes. The media with— there's too many people covering AI. It's all— it's too much. But These are unusual, very real, visceral personality conflicts. Some of this is on them for the soap opera they have conducted. And then I try to get at this in the show, and maybe I'm crazy or on some island, but I do think there's this thing where Sam and Dario hate each other for the way Dario's breakup happened. Yeah. OpenAI, and they don't, you know, they don't like each other. They don't trust each other. And, um, But they are kind of getting pushed on it. Like there's Elon, you know, if you look at what happened with Anthropic during the whole Department of War saga, I mean, it's very clear Elon was calling his friends like David Sachs and has obviously more pull with the Trump administration than anyone. Zuck, I know for a fact, has been like courting Republican leadership for the last 3 or 4 years and trying to buddy up with them. And so they kind of seem like they're almost like— Elon and Zuck used to hate each other. I don't know if they— where they are personally, but they're kind of like on a team now.

Did you see those emails that were part of the lawsuit where he was like, do you want to talk live about basically buying the nonprofit?

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Okay. I didn't. Um, but you know, in the— there's like a You saw how Anthropic got treated, sort of like bullied as part of this. And then that could just as easily have been OpenAI. And, and there, there's some weird scenario where OpenAI and Anthropic, I see as like on this, this opposing side to Elon who is marshaling very powerful forces against, against his rivals.

And it's weird that Elon feels that way because again, I, I sometimes I feel like I'm crazy. I'm like, When this all started, I saw the emails in the first lawsuit, if it's not just the same Elon lawsuit with OpenAI, where he said like, you know, this is super dangerous technology. We can't be in the hands of Google. This is really scary, yada yada yada. That is Anthropic's whole thing. And now Elon is seemingly against them as well as he competes. Very Elon. But did you see that Trump is like now kind of pro-Anthropic?

Yeah, it's crazy. I totally fully understand how this happens. I mean, the OpenAI, it was weird because you remember when the Stargate press conference happened and he was up there. I think Altman was up there with Trump. Yeah. Which I was—

and Larry Ellison and Masa.

Right. Right. Which I was shocked by because Elon and Larry are besties and Larry's deeply invested in so many Elon things and then obviously Trump. And but I mean, that might have been—

$2 billion to Twitter, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, and he's big on, on everything. Elon-related. And then, so I was shocked that they kind of pulled that press— whatever, OpenAI has some pull with the government that Elon is unable to like fully tamp down, whereas it looked like they really could with Anthropic. And then now things have cooled. I am super curious who was able to pull that off and have saner minds prevail.

I think Sam can be charming. I can say this because it was on the record, but when I was covering him for he had said he was about to go see Trump the next day. I think it wasn't Stargate, but it was, I think, maybe Saudi Arabia data centers. And I asked him, I was like, "What's Trump like?" And he was like, "Very funny." And so, so I think that there is probably some charisma. You know, you saw how Trump reacted to Mamdani. Like, he likes a little charisma. So I think Sam has that and has probably won them over. And I don't think Elon was at the dinner table, the very famed dinner table with Trump. All the tech executives. I think Mark Zuckerberg was next to him and Sam was across from him.

It's very weird, but I, I'm curious who from Anthropic was able to smooth something, how this got worked out.

I don't know. I mean, the lawsuit, right? They threatened or fully did sue over the, the supply chain risk designation. And I mean, it makes total sense that they would do that and perhaps win that. And I don't know, it was just kind of crazy. And Anthropic has such amazing models, and they already were the only one that had classified access, so why would they not work with them? I understand that the reporting and the drama is that Anthropic wanted to dictate how it's used, but it really like fucking became a shit show so quickly.

Yeah. Um, all right, let's switch gears. Yeah, speaking of gears, You can make your own gears if you go to SendCutSend, which is a new sponsor for the Core Memory Podcast. If you don't know SendCutSend, you should go to their website. They can make anything. They, they make— this is like the closest thing America has to China, making parts very quickly, um, for people who are like mom and pop working on their car or whatever project you got going on, all the way up to I won't say these are customers of Senkotsen, but companies like SpaceX and Apple and the world's largest companies order thousands of parts and they are our new sponsor.

Yeah, before they became a sponsor, I was sold on the idea because we were on like a real hardware tear and you had brought it up. I had learned about them. And then when I talked to Ulysses, the co-founders, when I was in their warehouse, they were talking about how hard it was. Like they're sort of bottlenecked by what they can get and how quickly. And then I brought up Senkotsen and they're like, You know, send, cut, send. So I was won over by the idea already.

I have managed to hardware pill Kylie.

You really have.

Of course.

You really have.

She did not know what an actuator was.

No.

Is now part of my Bring American Actuators to America religion.

It's huge to me. I started reading Freedom's Forge, which I came across because I was reading about Ulysses and someone in the comments of a profile had said like, this reminds me of Freedom's Forge. And I started reading it and it's incredible. It's just about like early Ford and GM and, you know, the Hoover Dam and just these people who fucking built in America. So I'm— I am pilled. It's true.

So people don't know, on these humanoid robots and other things, um, there's an actuator. It's a motor. It makes the arms and legs and parts move. And This is a problem for the United States. I'm not some crazy patriot, but I like living here and the country's been good to me and I think it needs to be competitive on some level if it wants to do interesting things. And you know, if you, I'm not convinced like humanoid robots are gonna be a, well, I think they will be a thing. I think it's gonna take longer than maybe we think. But anyway, it's kind of the key part of these robots along with the batteries. And it turns out China makes like, all of this. And if you wanted to make an actuator in the United States, it would cost probably like 10x what it would cost to make it in China. And so I've been on this campaign because I just think there's these core parts of what we are probably going to need. I mean, if AI is going to take up— well, it's taking off, but, you know, at some point there has to be this physical manifestation of this technology out in the world. And it just strikes me that the US will have no participation in that you've got Elon and Optimus trying to make things, even, even Tesla, though, um, I think it's sometimes they make their own actuators, but I've seen them placing orders for billions of dollars of at least prototype actuators for their robots. Um, it's never clear to me where companies like Figure are in terms of making their own stuff. People, I'm not saying they fib about this, but lots of people in the robotics space kind of, it's very opaque.

Yeah.

As to like, do you make your own? Really? How much do you make your own? So anyway, this is, this is like, uh, I've been, we need some, we need probably multiple actuator startups. Right. Um, Casey Hammer keeps trying to convince me to start this company, but I have plenty to do at the moment.

Dude, you're gonna make actuators? You're gonna compete with OpenAI?

He really wants me to. I mean, Sam, so Sam, you, all these, AI companies, the big ones, are seemingly into robotics as well. And yes, Sam straight up said we're going to build all the parts of our robot. We're going to do it here in America. I can't tell if it was a Sam thing and he was just like saying that on the fly.

Yeah.

Or if that's actually happening.

That, that would be nuts. That was perhaps one of the most crazy parts of the pod. I was like, sorry, what do you mean you're going to make your own actuators? That's nuts. Actually, going back to humanoids, when I was FaceTiming my grandpa on my drive down to Palo Alto, he said, I have a question for Ashlee Vance. Why do we make robots look like humans? He said it's probably not as efficient. Is it just because they look more friendly and noticeable? And I figured you might have an answer.

Well, Grandpa, thank you for the question. I love— we always get Kylie's like family group chats.

Yeah, yeah.

In our group chat. I mean, we kind of do. We kind of don't. You know, there's been people that take different cracks at this. I remember I was in Japan And I think we were with Hitachi and, you know, they were making one that looked like a koala. I think it was called Emu or Emo, um, nice. Or Mimou or something like that. Got it. Um, and, and, you know, so they try to make it look cute and like a, almost like an anime kind of figure. There's people that do instead of the walking, like just the wheel base. And it's, it's like purposely, we don't want this to look like a human and legs are really hard and walking's really hard. Why do we? Need to try to mimic what humans do. There's a robot, it just has to get somewhere.

Yeah.

And so I think we're gonna see, um, I think it just— there is a handful of companies where it starts out like that and it looks like a human, and I think that's like a natural thing where people try to mimic that and figure it out. But I, I think they're gonna— I think it will take all different shapes and forms, sort of for the reason your grandfather's thought. You, you— there's Could be a lot of people that don't want a human-looking robot. We've talked about this before. I, I feel like there's a real division between the sexes on these robots where when almost universally— I don't think I'm being too, uh, outlandish with this or generalizing too much— like, most women I talk to, the thought of having one of these like humanoid robots in the house, they're like, fuck that, that thing is scary, it could just like kill me.

Uh, when I first started at Core Memory, I was at the Foundation shoot and that shit scared me pretty bad.

I mean, they're no joke, you know? And I think I've just noticed the thing where I don't think women are like real big on having something like that around the house. So I think it will evolve.

Yeah. I was telling my grandpa, my guess is that if you have a robot on four legs running at you, that's a lot scarier. And he said, if you have any robot running at you, two or four legs, you better run.

Yeah. Yeah. Although, yeah, those ones that Boston Dynamics makes you would not want around your house at all. I am so fascinated where all this robotic stuff goes.

Yeah. So American manufacturing— Ulysses is a part of the American Dynamism Fund from A16z. Real big sort of theme on American manufacturing and why it matters. And you said on the podcast, like, we're fucked.

We are fucked. I feel legitimate saying this. I'm— I don't know. Again, Who knows? I feel like I've probably been to more of these places than maybe anyone, even like the venture capitalists, because they— I think they're constrained. I've done it all. We've been— spent the last— well, spent the last year going all over the country, and I've been doing that for 10, 15 years. I mean, I was covering this stuff before it was cool. So, yeah, I mean, things are a little bleak. There's stuff I've written about on the Substack, and I don't think people fully get it. I mean, basically at this moment in time, the area around Los Angeles and Southern California is the, um, it's the most exciting, um, innovative, creative hardware end of America. And people forget Los Angeles is actually the biggest manufacturing hub in the United States.

And over Detroit?

Over Detroit. Wow. Yeah. And, uh, we has this massive 100-year history, a bunch of airplane companies started there, created this huge aerospace industry. The automobile culture and companies were based there. And you have all these mom-and-pop shops of people who lathe and mill and made all the parts for these companies. And so it's these decades of tradition. There's all these young startups there now who have super cool ideas and are trying many different things. It's a tiny, small scale. For every one of those, China has like 10 or 15 similar companies which the government is subsidizing and the— they don't have to make money. So, so the American startups, there's one to the 10 or 15. They have to actually eventually find a way to turn that into a real business, whereas China is going to see it through no matter what. And so that's difficult. And then all these California companies, they more or less make their prototypes there, get the first hundreds of things that they can make, and then they're all looking where else can they go in the United States, whether it's Texas, Ohio, um, Georgia, North Carolina. These are all pretty typical spots where they can then actually set up a huge factory. And that part's fine, I guess. There's this element where California is constantly shooting itself in the foot. There's parts of like, we, we went to visit Senkotsen in Nevada and They have a paint shop and basically like paint shop where you're, you're painting parts. They're basically illegal in California at this point from like an environmental standpoint. Even if you can show that you're vacuuming up all the, all the things floating up into the air, like Senketsen, when you go there and they run it, I mean, there's nothing going up out into the world. It's all quite contained and done well. And so California makes parts of the manufacturing illegal. It's expensive for real estate, it's expensive for people. That part's much harder to solve, I think, than some of these regulatory bits and pieces. But it's just, yeah, it's just generally a problem. I don't think people understand fully. They probably hear stories about China and the supply chain and all this, but like, most of the key parts of like any hardware system now are just made in China, like on a scale that is unfathomable, um, for the US. So I see signs of life, I see people trying.

I think Senkotsen is one of them. Like, how do we unfuck it?

Yeah, I mean, they're like the heroic story. I mean, we, we have like some fundamental problems, which is like labor. China just has got a lot more people and we need these concentrations of labor. We will have to be super creative. I think there's parts where what we make is gonna be more expensive, but if the United States is serious about actually having access to these things that we need to— this is not just defense, but that's like a big part of it. But all these other products that if something, changes in the world, like Donald Trump decides to start a war somewhere else, right? Or whatever. You're going to get cut off from things. And so there's just going to be parts of the economy that it's like, no, we need to do that here. I think we'll probably accomplish that, although we're in a moment where people are buying into that, but it would have to be sustained over quite a long period of time. But then, so we just put up a video today on this place called Proto Town in Texas, in central Texas. I mean, it's weird. It's like, it's early days. Um, it's like a hardware cult. Um, you know, I say that lovingly. A bunch of guys bought this ranch land in central Texas between Austin and San Antonio. They've got all these startups there. They're like working there, they're living there. You should definitely watch this video 'cause it's insane. Um, and on our YouTube channel and, and, um, you know, so there's, there's, these efforts being made. I think Texas, you've got this Elon, um, Gigafactory there. They're making Starlink terminals in the same area. Obviously he's got like Starbase in southern Texas. I mean, he's— you need a— you do need a center of gravity, some sort of critical mass. And I think between Austin and San Antonio, he's really providing that. A lot of this stuff is in Bastrop, Texas. And so I could see, I could see somewhere like Texas, like, like making a go of this and totally ramping it up.

Totally. Does Texas have more access to energy because they have more land and it's not as like sort of siloed to neighborhoods where people need that energy? Because that's what I heard for data center builds.

Yeah, well, look, Texas has the whole Permian Basin in West Texas, so they've got lots of natural gas and oil. Like when I went to Stargate out in Abilene, it's just running on natural gas that's being piped right into the data centers. Some people will know this. I mean, Texas has more alternative energy than any other state. Yeah. Wind and, and some solar. And so, and then yes, just has tons of land, all the right conditions for that. A lot of it is the lack of regulation. And so, well, you can get a tax break, one, if you have cows on your property, you can just have like, I don't know what the official number is, but you can have like 20 or 30 and then you're kind of taxed as a, ranch or a farm, and Texas wants to encourage that longstanding tradition. So you get a break on that. I mean, it's just generally lower taxes in a lot of areas. And then you can, you can blow things up, which is you can make, you know, there's just so much less bureaucracy in your way, right, to, to start a factory, all that stuff. So the question is like labor still, I think. So You do have like this whole class of people in Texas who come from the energy industry. And so they're sort of similar and adjacent to the types you might find in Los Angeles, but not directly. You don't have like, so you've got like people who might do this kind of labor who used to work on oil wells and, and, um, are used to doing stuff like that. But you don't have the mom and pop machine shops, um, all over the state like you do. In California, in the Midwest. And so you really do need— these are craftspeople and this is stuff you learn over decades. And so I don't know if there's elements that are missing and then there's elements that are working.

I am going to find my, my— what's the word— next thumbnail ideas. And you guys can tell me I'm awesome, please. I would like that. I would like that for Prototown. Pledge allegiance to the fab. Y'all, Jen, I like Shenzhen, but y'all, come on, come on. Uh, The Lone Star Fab. And then Arman, our social lad, he said Lone Star Startup. I liked that. Lone Startup.

They were good, they were good.

They're not catchy enough. I get it, I get it.

YouTube's a mystery. You gotta, gotta tempt people somehow. Yeah, um, yeah, but now I get to say them on the pod.

That's all that matters. So American manufacturing, this is important. Two other topics I thought we could go through. Should we go to SpaceX or TSMC chips? What tickles your fancy?

SpaceX, maybe.

Because that one's— so here's why I think SpaceX is interesting, and you're going to know more about this, that they're sort of taking this AI data center pivot. They've got the rights to purchase Cursor. It's a $10 billion partnership. I believe they can spend $50 to $60 billion in 6 months or towards the end of the year to buy them. They have first right to do that. Fun fact, Microsoft has that with Nvidia. Did you know that?

It did not.

Microsoft still— it's still in Nvidia's like earnings reports that Microsoft has first refusal to purchase Nvidia, which I think is nuts to purchase all of Nvidia. Yeah. Dylan Patel of Semi Analysis tweeted about it and I was like, what? What? It's crazy to me. Okay, so, so, uh, SpaceX has 6 months for Cursor. Um, I'll start with something a friend told me, which was he thinks it's a Hail Mary downside hedge. Uh, xAI keeps whiffing on models but keeps scaling compute. At some point you need an application to run that compute into. Cursor's already proven with Composer 2, they can build models that eat compute. So if xAI keeps losing, Cursor becomes the thing that justifies Colossus existence. But this is crazy because they make rockets. So how did we get here?

Oh, wow. God, that part I can explain. I mean, Elon's got this long-running knack of packaging ideas and things in a way that always move the ball a little farther around the promise of where his companies are heading. I mean, it's been like magical, you know? I mean, people think they see SpaceX launching all these rockets and they think that's like a great business. I mean, certainly, look, I've written more about SpaceX than anyone and am massive in awe of what they've accomplished. But launching rockets is a terrible business. And even SpaceX figuring out reuse, I'm sure they do it better than— they're the closest to like having a viable rocket launch business of anyone because of the way They, they do it, but you, you, it's just, it's very expensive to launch a rocket no matter how you do it. SpaceX brought the price way down from what governments used to charge from like $3 billion or like $300 million per launch to $60 million per launch. So your, your margin, you've constrained your own margin and Starlink came along as like a, it wasn't a Hail Mary, but I mean, this was not, this was not always in the master plan. I mean, Starlink just sort of materialized. And turned out to be this massive, massive business that's way better than rockets in a lot of ways because it's like a subscription business and you're basically a telecommunications company and you're locking people in forever. And yeah, and it's—

Brink uses Starlink for their, you know, everyone, right?

It's become this like glue, um, for the— when you're— this like underlying internet just blanketing the entire Earth. So you know, and then, and then SpaceX, Elon's always massively ambitious. So you have to keep— so Starlink kind of made SpaceX way more valuable than it was. And then you have to kind of keep that going, right? And clearly XAI has had successes and then massive issues as well, where all the—

almost all the founders have left.

It's— it just is not in— even when they've had those moments where the model looked pretty good, on X it's huge, but like my sense in the regular world is this is an OpenAI, Anthropic world.

Yeah.

And, and you just can't get past those brands. Like ChatGPT is such a strong brand, and then Anthropic did so well in corporate land. So this is a massive problem. I saw the same things, people saying Elon can build these huge clusters, um, faster than anyone, but that there wasn't enough, enough software to shove in, in there. And so, and Cursor, obviously, like any AI company is gonna benefit from as much compute as you can possibly throw at things. Totally. So, you know, Elon packages all the time. He's turned, I was, I was getting my haircut this week and there was an xAI guy coming in after me and he is like, hi. Oh, he is like, I'm whatever, I work at SpaceX. And I, it's just, it's kind of like made me laugh a little bit. I'm like, that's funny. It's like hard to wrap your, head around. But, you know, and Elon's done the same thing with Tesla, right? Which is starts as a car company, then they get into solar, um, and, and building huge batteries. That is like an energy company. Now it's like a robotics company. And so, and sort of an AI company with the CNNs. Yeah, like, look, eventually all these are going to merge. I mean, I mean, Elon, there is, there's part of this which is like a show, and you're You're dangling these things in front of investors, the promise of this at a $2 trillion valuation, right? It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then part of it is real. I mean, I think I wrote about this in my book 10 years ago. I— there's a chapter called like the Unified Field Theory of Elon Musk. I mean, these things all converge at some point, I think. I mean, why not? You know, I mean, they've been in this situation where Tesla was a public company and SpaceX was private, And Elon really wanted to keep SpaceX private, so you couldn't really just glue them together. But anytime Elon's in trouble to like need to raise money, needs, needs that glow. Like you mentioned, I mean, the, the space data centers. I've covered this stuff, I swear to God, more closely than anyone. This was like a farcical notion at best, like a wouldn't that be interesting one day? And then, you know, when Elon says it, then suddenly it becomes real. Yeah. And then it becomes like the hinge of this, this multi-trillion-dollar IPO. So amazing.

Is it mostly— do you think it's mostly window dressing or is it real?

You know, now, okay, well, Historically, Benny SD-Lot is a terrible idea and he comes up with all kinds of stuff that seems insane and then somehow makes it work. I mean, I think, look, there's, there's like a thing where the world should have this. It's like, would you rather have data centers on the planet spewing out all this energy, requiring all this energy, spewing out all this exhaust into our planet? Or would you rather have that in space? It would be better in space.

Cooling is better. The access to energy is better, supposedly.

Well, but then, you know, Building a data center in West Texas is a lot cheaper than putting it on a rocket and sending it into orbit and then trying to operate it there. And then you're always going to have the latency of sending the data back from fucking space when we have fiber optic cables here.

The latency, the maintenance. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

So all that is, you know, so there's this part of this, like, will, will planet Earth, um, one day have huge swaths of our industrial infrastructure in orbit? Like, probably because it's like better to shove it in space for things where you can. Like, is that going to happen in the next 20 years? I don't know. That seems tough. That seems— that seems tough to me.

I understand it's hard to bet against Elon and getting manufacturing pilled. I have come to really understand Palmer Luckey and Elon and people really being fans of them. I've just sort of like completely changed my worldview of like, oh yeah, they actually made it happen against all odds. And that's why people find this like so, so incredible. But the critics— and I agree— it's like, weren't we supposed to get to Mars by now? Weren't we supposed to have Hyperloop? Like all of these things that he promises and we don't actually get to. But I also interviewed Nolan Arbo while I was at The Verge, and like you see something like that and you're like, this is fucking incredible. So it's a real mixed bag.

It is a mixed bag. I have a very complicated relationship with Elon, and I— no matter what I say, I promise I'm not some apologist. There's, there's just bits where you have to look at Tesla. It like literally made electric cars real worldwide. It was the most, you know, the US— it's like the only interesting thing about the US auto manufacturing business. And, and then SpaceX is you cannot put into words what they accomplish because it should not exist. And they are so dominant. It's unbelievable to me. I mean, they just launched SpaceX versus the entire world. People have no idea how fucking hard it is, what they have accomplished. And it is for sure, for me, the most like miraculous business story in the last 20 years. So if you can do that, like you can do Crazy things. Neuralink, same thing. People get all upset about— well, okay, they don't want Elon Musk putting chips in people's brains. They get upset about the animal testing, things like that. All of these things I understand. On the other hand, I have spent all this time with patients like Noland, and this is some of the most exciting technology in the world. When you're hanging out with somebody who has ALS or they're paralyzed and they're like speaking again and their kids are running around, it's enough to bring a grown man into tears.

I mean, it's crazy.

Like, literally cried while, while filming, um, with these people. And, you know, Neuralink's not alone. There's a lot of companies doing this now. And, um, it's whatever. I mean, look, dude, the guy's polarizing for myriad reasons, but I am somehow— I don't know, I just think people should be a little more nuanced about some of this because it's like, it's like Okay. Yes, I get it. I get it. And then on the other hand, there is— sometimes it feels like it's like— and then this is complicated too, 'cause Tesla has all this business in China, but sometimes I feel like it's like Elon versus China because he's doing robotics, cars, rockets, BCIs. China has like entire cities for each one of these things. And then, you know, you mentioned like Palmer and there are these other people, but I haven't seen anyone who's like actually done something on the level of SpaceX or Tesla yet.

And when you say it like that, it is nuts and terrifying. And that's part of what got me pilled is like, oh my God, we only have Elon sort of the only person who really cares about how important this is. And I mean, we all really should care. It is nuts. It is nuts. One of my favorite pieces I read about Elon was from, well, the book, but also Ronan Farrow wrote about how he has like the secret shadow rule because he has so much power and You know, he's able to connect with people like Putin and Trump and like everyone across the world. And he has this shadow rule, but he sort of earned it, didn't he? Like, he was the one who cared. He made the products. And why, why can't we have more of that? That's stunning to me. Yeah.

Like, this shit's really hard. I mean, there's a reason we haven't done it. Elon seems to have some knack of like— I mean, he obviously always just barrels ahead as he wants to and sometimes is doing it without really paying attention to rules that have existed. There's some of that is true. And then also people should realize, I mean, SpaceX is very regulated by the FAA, the FCC, NASA, and, and has at times pushed the edges of that stuff but really hasn't done anything too egregious that I can remember. Neuralink, they've gone through the FDA for like all these trials. They've passed. The FDA has been astonished by like how quickly Neuralink's moving. Tesla is regulated anyway. I mean, there's something about him where within these, he could play in the rules and then push the rules to the edge. And then he's, I don't know, he's like willing to do stuff. He can get a— he does get away with things that, like, other people can't. And, like, it seems like we need, like, 20 people maybe who could sort of— I, I actually don't know why. There's parts I know, but then there's parts I don't know about, like, why he seems to be the only one who can get to this next level, um, of, of gigantic stuff.

It's sort of, it's sort of baffling entirely.

What is— what has been interesting for you the last week or two in Techlandia?

I have a story that I might want to write, so I can't share it here. Techlandia. I mean, it was weird that, that Anthropic now on secondaries is being valued at a trillion. I thought, wow, everyone really wants to be the most valuable startup to go public and Elon's just smoking them with this cursor. Thing. Microsoft whiffed it. Apparently they were going to buy Cursor and then passed, uh, which is nuts. But yeah, that was, that was the biggest news this week. I texted everyone I knew the moment that news came out and people were freaking, freaking out. Uh, I don't know, it's— AI has fundamentally changed everything and I was a huge skeptic at the beginning. I, I do want to get into someone replying to you and saying that you were a huge skeptic and now you're not because I'm here. But about AI, we We will get into that, but it's just like, I was like, this is kind of bullshit stochastic parrots kind of deal. But you just keep seeing the models get better. If you're this deep in it as an AI reporter for all these years, if you're this deep in it for so long and you're watching every move and every update, you just sort of become baffled by how much better it's gotten. And so Elon really wanting a piece of that, I think XAI continues to whiff it. I think The AI Girlfriend. I, I wrote that story on my birthday at Wired. I turned 27 and I was talking to the sex robot and trying to get it to say bad words. That was a crazy Monday. But yeah, I just don't see what XAI has truly delivered. I think the AI-generated community notes is cool. I think Grok in certain doses can be cool for fact-checking, but it is completely skewed in my opinion. I think Elon has much too— he has too much control over what Grok can say and do, which I think is a whole story in its own. But yeah, coming down to like the IPO race for the trillions of dollars is sort of a nuts week. AI skepticism.

It is going to be like fantastic to watch. I still— so Apple obviously has anointed The new CEO. I remain curious what happens to their AI. It— oh, I don't know if I get in trouble for this or not. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine it. Well, it will get to the point where it's like mathematically unfeasible relatively quickly, I suppose. I'm just shocked that Anthropic hasn't been gobbled up by Apple or Amazon earlier, I guess. Probably, maybe because the Anthropic co-founders are so adamant about, about wanting to run it in the way they want to run it. I find it like amazing that Amazon and Google own such enormous chunks of Anthropic, like, and this doesn't get talked about all that much. I mean, Google has— I don't understand. I guess I understand how this came to be because you need money and you're doing your thing. But like, it's amazing to me that Google has their whole DeepMind land and this enormous chunk of Anthropic. Um, I— it's so—

yeah, can I say two things?

Yeah, yeah, please.

So one, uh, Amazon now partners with OpenAI, which is interesting. I think, like, does antitrust not even matter anymore? Because that's what I would understand with Microsoft not buying Cursor. But now that Lena Kahn is not there, does it even matter? Is anyone paying attention?

I No, I don't even know how to like square the AI land of like what would be, what would be too far, too much, right, in all that puzzle now.

And then also like, please tell me, because you're writing the book, but I was under the impression part of the Dario breaking up with OpenAI, like part of it was the Microsoft investment, and he was like, these corpos are going to like make it really unsafe.

And there were bits of that. There was, there was something in the Microsoft deal I remember being upsetting to them. But I mean, I think in the— there's a lot of personal animus ran quite deep on that one.

But it was just like then now we have Amazon. So it's kind of confusing to me. I know you need money, but it was just like, wasn't that part of it?

I've never understood. I've honestly never understood that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I mean, tech is famous for all these conflicts and everything. I mean, OpenAI is buying compute from Google. I know, I know. Things that are insane. Yeah. So and then Apple Apple, man, I've never been, I've never been a huge Apple watcher, like obsessive. Um, I am so underwhelmed by Tim Cook's reign as CEO, which I know people are like, well, you go try to grow a multi-trillion dollar company by 14x, which is fine. I mean, all credit to him for running the business very well, growing it massively. Um, I think it's generally pathetic how few products they have They were the, you know, trillion-dollar company before anyone else. They have essentially infinite resources. They seem to have very few ideas. I mean, people always point me to like AirPods and the watch, and I refuse to like be excited about that. I'm sorry. A watch has existed for a very long time. It's fine. If you make a really nice fancy watch that helps you with your health and things like that, that's great.

I only use it to record my workouts and that's it. That's literally all I use it for.

You know, which is fine. And the AirPods work great. I just, I'm sorry. I do not think that really counts as like being an innovative, super innovative tech company.

I own all Apple products and continue to only use Apple products. I have owned every AirPod imaginable. But at the end of the day, and I was not an Apple Watcher, I was not an Apple reporter, so Apple fanatics could get really mad at me right now. But of course he grew the company. They just released the same phone and the same laptops every year, and they've always done that, and people are going to continue to buy them. But I haven't seen anything that completely strikes me. And I remember being— I believe I was at The Verge when they said, like, you know, AI in the iPhone. That was a huge, like, sort of brain mind explosion for me because I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to be the first time, like, everyone in my family has access to these models quickly on demand on their phone. That's going to be huge. And then it just, like, kind of didn't happen. And I tweeted about this and people were like, you can use the button on the side of your new phone to, like, analyze, and it didn't work. And also, like, I can just use any other model because it has all these memories of me. And I just— they totally whiffed it. And then they also said— they, they released this paper someone replied to you about, trying to remember, but they just sort of like slammed LLMs.

LLMs don't work. This is, this is like Apple's, uh, AI division. Yeah, publishing papers. On how this stuff doesn't work. But yeah, maybe they'll be right, right? I kind of don't think so, uh, at this point. And I mean, if ever there was a company that could have done something super cool in robotics, um, yeah, brought manufacturing back to the United States in some crazy— I know people want the jobs, but some crazy automated way, just been— I mean, it could have been Apple, um, all like somebody is going to make a computer for this new era and it will probably, I imagine, not look like a fancy Alexa that just does some extra. I think there is somewhere out in the ether, there's a new idea and, and like whoever we have been on this, this like Mac This MacBook in front of me is still in large part based on an idea and design from Xerox PARC down the road in like the 1970s. And, and someone will rethink this in this new era. When I see kids and how they use AI, they're just like using their computer in totally different ways. Totally. And, and whoever figures this out will be a multi-billion dollar hardware company.

Um, there's already sparks of this with OpenClaw and Mac Mini. Uh, was it, was it, it wasn't Chief Keef, There was, oh, Meek Mill. Meek Mill tweeted, I need a Mac Mini for Open Claw, a rapper. Um, it's crazy. So getting an agent to run on a device you own, we're already seeing sparks of that. And like, whoever's gonna be able to combine that into one device definitely wins. And why is it not Apple is shocking, shocking to me.

Something will happen. Even like Facebook, Meta's done way more. Interesting things with their brain-computer interface and motor neuron interface type technology. So I don't know, maybe Apple's just been sitting on all these gems and they're about to unleash fury upon us, but I'm skeptical. So good luck to the, to the new guy.

Very much good luck. Okay. Should we hit on merch then?

We're doing it. Merch Chief.

Okay, no, no organoids.

Uh, let's do organoids real quick.

Okay.

I mean, if you haven't read the story, you should. It's on, on, on the Substack. Um, completely insane. There's a company named KindBio. They are growing headless groups of organs in the womb of mice. Let me take a step back so you can hang on to that for a second. So, so in the womb of a mouse They've done genetic edits to an embryo so that it grows without a central nervous system, without a brain, without limbs. And so they're growing the organs in this sack. You can go on the website, scientific terms of this. People— I said it looked like a finger. Some people said a penis. Um, I guess it's like a Rorschach test. Uh, so just totally nuts. I mean, the idea would be to give us organ— like, like, we have a massive problem with organ transplants. There's not enough organs. People are dying. Um, could you just grow organs that we harvest? So some of this is gross. It feels gross on first thought and, and like sketchy. Um, there's a clear part of me that's like, I— if you had a loved one who was in trouble and there was this organ available, how, you know, do you care that it was grown in a vat somewhere? And, you know, clearly nobody wants these animals to have central nervous, to have like feelings or thoughts or anything like that. I mean, there's parts of this that are actually very, are more moral and ethical, which is we do all this animal testing. I mean, you could do in this new world animal testing on these organs without actually hurting something. You could help people. Is it sci-fi and super fucking weird? Yeah, it really is. Um, so they are one company doing this. There's another one called R3. Um, it's a little more quiet on how far they've gotten. There's another one in Israel, um, that is doing something slightly different where I think they would take like your own cells from your liver and then kind of grow you a new liver. We've written about a company called Becoming Bio, which is making an artificial placenta, which could be on the way to an artificial womb. Um, so right now KindBio is growing these organs in a mouse, then they're going to move to a pig, and they think you could grow a kidney, a liver, a lung in a pig, make some genetic edits and then have it go into a human.

Yeah.

But there's a world where you could just be growing these as like sort of these like neutral organs in an artificial womb. 3 years ago I would've said this is like super sci-fi, very, very, very, very far off. Probably still quite far off, but then oddly now based on what I've seen, closer than I would've thought. So, Go read that story if you haven't, and please read it, uh, then talk about it at the dinner table.

It's funny, I have my favorite podcast behind ours, uh, Armchair Expert. They just had someone on about the morality economy and like what, what is moral and what is not. And they talked about organ transplants and the laws and regulations in different parts of the world, and they talked about kidney disease and how you You can't buy a kidney, but there's so many people on this list who often die because they—

There's places where you could buy a kidney.

Right, right, at corememory.com. So Ashlee— I'm up for fun.

Get a kidney.

Ashlee for sale.

You don't want mine.

So, you know, growing them I think is really fucking cool. And I'm not grossed out by it. That picture I was a little grossed out by, but—

Well, the picture's a little gross, but you know, like anytime you're slicing open Oh boy, this is— I've been watching The Pit. It's not—

The Pit's so good.

But it's good. But you know, some of that stuff's not pleasant either. Yeah, I mean, look, none of this stuff is— animal testing is— I love animals— is not pleasant. And anyway, world's getting real weird.

We love weird stuff. You find the weirdest stuff and that's important.

All right, tell us about the merch because you've led our entire merch charge.

Oh my God, oh my God, guys, now you're just gonna hear me complain. No, I mean, we have merch now. We are launching merch, uh, hoodies, t-shirts, several kinds of hats. It's very low supplies because it is very expensive. I don't know if I can say how expensive, but it is really expensive in my opinion to order all that merch and get it fulfilled. And I spent a month in Shopify hell trying to connect things, uh, bothering Mark, who runs operations for us, to ask for all of Ashlee's— social info, everything. But it is live now and you can buy it. And I think they look really cool. And I'm hoping if you guys really like it, we can make more cool merch. I just wanted to start with a low supply with, you know, what we wear all the time because these are samples. We have samples that we've been testing. So Yeah, check it out. corememorymedia.com. Get your merch, subscribe.

corememorymedia.com slash— no, no, just right.

Just the domain. Just the domain. Yeah, merch queen over here. Uh, corememorymedia.com, and then subscribers get 15% off.

There we go. Um, green hat, super.

Find the picture of Cayman and David. I think that's green hat.

And we got purple hat.

Yeah.

Oh, here we go. All right. Here's David and Kevin. You guys will have seen them in some of our videos. They are— they're my boys. We made Hello World together at Bloomberg. They came over, co-founders of Core Memory. And these are the guys who shoot all the beautiful videos you see.

They're the best, the best people. I just shot Canada with them. We spent 10 days freezing our asses off and me and David sipping whiskey. It was amazing.

Sorry, if you're just listening, there's two very handsome men, very— one of whom is wearing a green Core Memory hat. So anyway, obviously we can order more if you guys buy more. Yeah. So, so just sell us out and then we'll, we'll fix it. And I think our subscribers to the Substack will be getting a discount code, 15% off, which you can also find on corememorymedia.com. It's a slightly different URL to our Substack. And I think you'll also find links obviously on, uh, I think on our YouTube pages and, and on our Twitter.

I'm sure I'm gonna send it everywhere. I'm gonna blow it up. And I already checked if we can order more merch quickly since we've already done all the mock-ups. They said it'd only take a few weeks. So, uh, I have it set to it can't, uh, sort of over-order. You can't do waitlist. If you guys want that to change, I can make that change, but I just wanted to make sure everything was in the right order and you guys get the merch you demand. So yeah, tell us what else you want.

I want to do some weird products. I really want to sell like rocket launches, and, um, I do want to sell some sort of, uh, biotech things. So tell us what you want. I'm sure we'll be doing something with Send Cut Send where we're—

oh, that'd be dope.

We want to make like some camera equipment. Cayman has ideas, and, um, and so I think we'll fun project.

I've been wanting to get something with like an Arduino where I can like do my own sort of mechanical setup with something. I need something useful. I would love to do a core memory version of that. I need to think. But yeah, yeah, more merch coming. Go buy it, go subscribe, watch Prototown, read about scary organs that are actually really cool, uh, leave those reviews for a chance to win.

Do it, help us out. We love you guys. Just give us a little boost and read Jolie Gunn's story on Medra, which is doing robots working at a biolab. We got so much good stuff on the site this week.

Yeah, and as always, thank you for subscribing, and hopefully you liked this sort of experimental episode with me and Ashlee Vance.

Let us know. Thank you, we love you guys. Bye! The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylie Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Mickelson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and E1 Ventures for all your support. And thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.