I’ve been wanting to have Kathryn Mitchell on The Friday Reporter for a while. She’s one of those people in Washington who has earned the right to have a real opinion about one of the most consequential policy debates of our time — and she’s generous enough to explain it in terms the rest of us can understand.

Kathryn spent nearly a decade in government, moving from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce, where she served as chief of staff for the CHIPS R&D office at NIST. She helped stand up the $50 billion CHIPS for America program — essentially from scratch. Earlier this year she moved to DLA Piper, where she now helps tech companies navigate the government landscape she used to sit inside.

This conversation covers a lot of ground. We talked about the origin story of the Chips and Science Act — passed bipartisan under Biden, now being implemented differently under Trump — and what Kathryn is watching to gauge whether the U.S. is actually getting this right. (She says we won’t know for a decade or two. But she knows exactly what signals to track right now.)

We also got into something I find genuinely fascinating: the role of relationship-building in Washington. Before you can change a policy, before you can land a government contract, before your innovation can make it out of the garage and into a lab — you build the relationships. That’s what Kathryn does every day for her clients, and she explains why it’s the foundation of everything else.

A few things I’m still thinking about from this conversation:

Her point that AI and semiconductors are “inexplicably tied” — but that AI won’t solve the physical-world challenges of building fabs, navigating permitting, or standing up domestic production. That nuance matters a lot right now.

Her career advice: “Wear your honors lightly.” Don’t aim to be the smartest person in the room. Aim to be the one who keeps learning. I’m going to borrow that one.

And her lightning round answer on Washington: “It is both a marathon and a sprint every day.” That about sums it up.

This episode drops today — wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it.

— Lisa

The Axios Takeover of The Friday Reporter wraps with one of the sharpest eyes on Democratic politics in the business. Holly Otterbein covers the 2028 presidential race for Axios — and she’s here to tell us why the race is already underway, even if most people aren’t watching yet.

In this conversation, Holly breaks down the fault lines fracturing the Democratic Party right now: it’s not just progressive versus moderate anymore. It’s generational, regional, ideological, and increasingly shaped by the Israel-Gaza divide. She explains why Kamala Harris is more of a 2028 factor than Washington insiders want to admit, why Gavin Newsom may be the only Democrat who truly understands the attention economy, and why the Maine Senate primary is a perfect case study in everything the party is wrestling with at once.

Holly also goes deep on a story she wants to keep digging into: AI in campaigns. Democrats, she says, are behind — and the race to shape what chatbots say about candidates may be the new search engine optimization. Plus, the quiet pivot among 2028 hopefuls on AI data centers: yesterday’s economic win is becoming today’s political liability.

And on the craft of political journalism itself — how do you stay independent when you’re embedded in the vortex of a campaign? Holly shares the advice that’s stuck with her since she started covering presidential races.

Subscribe to Axios 2028 — Holly’s Sunday newsletter — by searching “Axios 2028,” and follow her on X at @HollyOtterbein.

Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but she came to the beat from Wall Street, and that changes everything about what she’s looking for. She spent years covering markets, interviewing Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio, and building one of the most-read financial newsletters in the country. She knows how investors think, how they hedge, and how wide the gap is between what they say publicly and what they actually believe.

That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.