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

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
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 two tickets for the person who leaves the most creative review as judged by us.

**Kylie Robison** (0:40)
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.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:47)
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.

**Kylie Robison** (1:00)
I'm Kylie Robison.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:01)
Here we go.
That was the theme song. All right, Kylie.

**Kylie Robison** (1:24)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
How are you?

**Kylie Robison** (1:25)
Good, how are you?

**Ashlee Vance** (1:26)
I am 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.

**Kylie Robison** (1:36)
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.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:52)
That's very flattering, and ridiculous. But well, so we just had, 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.

**Kylie Robison** (2:11)
Yeah, those don't count.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:11)
Not a media.

**Kylie Robison** (2:12)
Reid Hoffman was one of them I saw, and then their own podcast at OpenAI, but those don't count.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:18)
They don't count. It seemed well received. We got some grief for putting it under the paywall.

**Kylie Robison** (2:23)
Huge grief.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:24)
I know you guys hate that we try to make a living with this thing, but we had to run an experiment, see what happened. The substack boomed, which is good. Possibly undercut our general reach, but still did really well, so whatever. I'm sorry people.
We got to pay some bills.

**Kylie Robison** (2:43)
Did you ever get the paywall anger while you were at Bloomberg? Because at Fortune, The Verge, and Wired, they were all paywalled, so I got yelled at.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:50)
Yes. This cracks me up a little bit. I mean, I would get yelled at, yes, in the comments, but this was an entire day of people just shitting on me.
It's like, man, when I work for those other places, they're owned by billionaires, and people would put the stories under paywalls, and you get a couple gripes. Every time we do a story, I'm like, no, we're the little guy, we actually need this.

**Kylie Robison** (3:12)
We have to pay for this, we don't have Mr. Bloomberg.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:16)
No, and it's like somehow worse when independent publication does this. And anyway, well, we don't really need to lay this all on you guys, but.

**Kylie Robison** (3:28)
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.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:37)
Yeah, thank you very much. Like, what we do actually requires a substantial amount of money. We're sending people all around the world.

**Kylie Robison** (3:44)
Have you checked flight costs lately? I mean, it's insane.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:47)
This is horrifying. So, well, okay, what was your takeaway of our time with Sam and Greg?

**Kylie Robison** (3:55)
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 ambitious science journey narrative, but Sam just seemed like he'd been through some shit.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:15)
Well, I guess he'd had attempts on his life, and then he lives, 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, whether it's Dario or Sam. Sam is, well, I don't really mean to pick on personal things, I just not even pick out, he's going gray a little bit.