Core Memory
Core Memory is a podcast about science and technology hosted by best-selling author and filmmaker Ashlee Vance. Vance has spent the past two decades chronicling advances in science and tech for publications like The Economist, The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. Along with the stories, he's written best-selling books like Elon Musk’s biography, made an Emmy-nominated tech TV show watched by millions and produced films for HBO and Netflix. The goal has always been to bring the tales of complex technology and compelling people to the public and give them a path into exceptional and unusual worlds they would not normally have a chance to experience.
Episodes
The Google Engineer Who Set The Skydiving Record At 58 - EP 83 Alan Eustace
Most people think that the Red Bull guy Felix Baumgartner holds the skydiving record. But this is not the case.The real record-holder is Alan Eustace. In 2014, at age 58, the Google engineer rode a helium-filled balloon into the stratosphere and then fell back to Earth from 135,890 feet. Eustace’s fall lasted 4 minutes and 27 seconds, and he broke the sound barrier, reaching a max speed of 822 mph
An Implant That Tracks And Treats Cancer Tumors - EP 82 Ben Woodington
Treating cancer remains a crude practice. We cut, burn and poison tumors, and we do all this with relatively little precision around both the initial treatment and our ongoing monitoring of how effective the treatment is. You show up for scans now and again and hope that whatever you’ve been doing has been working.Ben Woodington - who is an absolute unit - and the team at Coherence have come up wi
Inside The Media Marvel That Is TBPN
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.corememory.comRunning a media business is hard. You’re competing for people’s attention. You must produce a relentless stream of new things that are good and different. And you’re often dependent on the ever-changing whims of the public and advertisers.John Coogan and Jordi Hays somehow made all of this look easy when they started T
Quantum Everything Explained - EP 81 Prineha Narang
Prineha Narang is one of the rising stars of science and the field of quantum technology.She earned her PhD in applied physics at Caltech, taught materials science at Harvard and now has her own lab at UCLA. The lab focuses on quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, photonics, quantum information science and other easily digestible areas. Beyond her academic career, Narang is a science adviso
He Came From Oz To Save American Manufacturing - EP 80 Chris Power
A few years ago, I was lunching with a young Australian man who told me he hoped to modernize manufacturing in America. This man seemed enthusiastic and ambitious, but I must confess to holding some serious doubts about the dramatic scope of his plans and his ability to pull them off.This man was Chris Power, and, well, he did the thing. He’s the founder and CEO of Hadrian, which has a growing emp
The Manufacturing Phenomenon That Is SendCutSend - EP 79 Jim Belosic
If you spend any time inside a company that actually makes things in the U.S., then you’ll hear about SendCutSend.Started in 2018, SendCutSend has become an American manufacturing phenomenon. The company makes metal parts for more than 300,000 customers, ranging from giants of aerospace and defense to hobbyists working on their cars. You ship SendCutSend a computer file of what you want built, and
Body Scanners, Banned Models, and DeepMind's Space Game Obsession - EP 78 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison
Did Kylie and I attend the Midjourney Scanner event? Yes, we did. Did Kylie compare notes on her skincare routine with Bryan Johnson at the event? Also, yes. Meanwhile, I formed more wrinkles by downing cocktails while all this happened.Since the Midjourney pivot into medical devices and health spas is all the rage, we had no choice but to dive right in on this week’s episode. We also explored the
The Future Of Our Brains And Bodies - EP 77 Max Hodak Live Event
Max Hodak is back.The co-founder and CEO of Science Corp. joined me for our first-ever live podcast recording, which took place at the Brex headquarters in San Francisco. Thanks so much to all the Core Memory subscribers who turned up.Max walked us through Science’s technology aimed at restoring vision in the blind, and the company’s new product lines focused on organ transplants and extending the
The Space Race Is So Back — EP 76 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison
The theme for this week’s episode is tick, tick, boom.America is running out of time to catch up with China on manufacturing, and we’re physically incapable of spending an hour together without bringing it up. Release the glorious machines please!! We also go behind the scenes on Kylie’s reporting on motors and actuators — the unglamorous parts that sit in every joint of a humanoid robot, account
Redwood Materials Has Built A Recyling Empire
A couple of months ago, we went out to Nevada to hang with JB Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and the co-founder of Tesla. JB took us on a tour of Redwood’s massive battery recycling operations and showed us the company’s next chapter, which centers on building battery and solar farms to power AI data centers.The result of our time with JB is a different style of podcast episode
Can You Reverse Decades of Drinking Damage? Perhaps. - EP 75 Jacob Kimmel Is Back
Jacob Kimmel returns to the show. And he might have cured the hangover and liver disease. NBD.Kimmel is the co-founder and president of NewLimit and one of the deepest thinkers in the longevity field. His company has been working to reverse the aging process in the body and has seen some stunning results with a new therapy that undoes liver damage in mice. We’re talking old mice that shrug off the
The Startup Trying to Save Us From AI Bioweapons- EP 74 Hannu Rajaniemi
Our guest this week is the renowned science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi. And he has come to terrify and then perhaps comfort you.Rajaniemi made an immediate name for himself in literary circles with his debut novel The Quantum Thief. He’s since written a string of novels that explore the directions technology might take in the future, and his work always stands out for its creativity and imagin
Schmidt Out of Luck — EP 73 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison
We are back with another episode of Ashlee and Kylie gossiping about the latest in Silicon Valley.First, a re-cap of our Alexandr Wang interview — his first real sit-down in eleven months — and what it actually revealed about Meta’s AI play. Wang seemed nervous hashing out the strategy in the studio, and we both keep circling the same puzzle: Meta has endless compute and top talent in Nat Friedman
The Freshman Who Took Down Stanford's President And Its Perfect Image - EP 72 Theo Baker
As a freshman, Theo Baker signed up to write for The Stanford Daily on a lark. He thought it might be a fun way to spend some time when he wasn’t busy studying and coding. But then, he turned out to be quite good at reporting and tips started coming his way. One of these tips included information suggesting that there were inconsistencies and perhaps massive errors in past scientific papers tied t
Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang
Last June, Meta pried Alex Wang away from Scale AI, the company he co-founded and ran, in a deal valued at $14 billion. Zuck could feel Meta fading in the AI race and decided that Wang was the rescue plan. He would work full-time at Meta, assemble a super team and hopefully make the company more competitive against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet.Wang has basically been in hiding ever
Everything You Need To Know About The Nuclear Energy Boom - EP 70 James Krellenstein
We’re in the midst of a new nuclear energy boom. Start-ups – both fusion and fission – abound, and the U.S. government has cleared the way to build again. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead with nuclear plans that dwarf those of the rest of the world combined.As with any boom cycle, there is a lot of hype and a lot to understand if you want to get a handle on what’s real and what’s not. And so, we b
The Cyborgs Commeth - EP 69 Connor Glass
It is time to talk about robotic body parts.Connor Glass, this week’s guest, has a company called Phantom Neuro, and it makes a human machine interface. By this, we mean a computing device that gets implanted in your body and lets you control a robotic limb with your mind.The first people using this technology are amputees. If, for example, you’ve lost your arm, you can get outfitted with a roboti
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 ha
The Great Reset At OpenAI — EP 67 Sam Altman And Greg Brockman
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman came on Core Memory together for a ten-year look back at OpenAI. It’s also the first time they’ve done a media podcast together.We juiced every second of our 90 minutes with the cofounders of OpenAI. We got into the company restructuring. Why Sora got cut. Why the social network is dead. The “personal AGI” that knows your calendar and your taste and books the concert t
The $50,000 Underwater Drone - EP 66 Ulysses
Guinness. Sharks. American manufacturing. These are a few of the interests I share with the founders of Ulysses, a San Francisco startup building autonomous underwater drones.The idea for Ulysses started when one of the four co-founders was on a surf trip and learned how much of humanity depends on a single marine plant: the humble seagrass. He spent a weekend designing a robot to plant it. Two ye
The Very Wild, Very Real Plan To Build AI Data Centers In The Ocean - EP 65 Garth Sheldon-Coulson
We’re in a moment of insatiable desire for more energy and more computing. And so the ideas of how to provide said energy and computing are getting ever more adventurous.Case in point: Panthalassa, which is the subject of this week’s episode, alongside our guest Garth Sheldon-Coulson, the company’s co-founder and CEO.Panthalassa makes an object that it calls a node and that looks like a giant loll
The Company Helping Paralyzed People Move And Thrive Again - EP 64 Dave Marver
Three years ago, I’d caught some videos online of paralyzed people walking again. This struck me as miraculous. It also confused me. If paralyzed people were moving again, why weren’t more people talking about this incredible occurrence?The company helping people move again is called Onward Medical, and it’s based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2023, I booked a flight to Europe and went to visit Onw
He Hacked Finance And Is Now Building An AI CEO - EP 63 Pedro Franceschi
Pedro Franceschi taught himself to code when he was eight years old. At 12, he began receiving legal notices from Apple, asking him to stop hacking iPhones. By 14, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling software and had his mom accompanying him on job interviews in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. Even among coding and hacking prodigies, Franceschi stands out.Today, Francesc
Here Come The Space Lasers - EP 62 Baiju Bhatt
Baiju Bhatt is trying to pull an Elon Musk.About 25 years ago, Musk sold his finance tech company PayPal and left dot-com life to get into rockets with the founding of SpaceX. Hardly anyone considered this a rational choice on Musk’s part. Space, after all, was where rich people went to blow their fortunes and fail.For his part, Bhatt co-founded the investing service Robinhood in 2013 and has now
The Aussie Man Who Used AI To Create A Cancer Cure For His Dog
We have tracked down the man and dog of the hour.Paul Conyngham and his dog Rosie gained worldwide attention over the past week for breaking new medical ground. Using a variety of artificial intelligence tools, Conyngham – and some doctors and scientists in Australia – managed to create a personalized (petalized?) cancer treatment for Rosie that appears to be working.The story resonated with the p
Inside The Race To Reboot Human Cells - EP 60 Nabiha Saklayen
The mainstream media says almost nothing about induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). So, you’re lucky that we’re here to help.These cells with a clunky name hold the promise of being able to reverse the aging process across our bodies. Put rather bluntly, your old, wine-soaked liver could become like your twenty-something, Jell-O-shot-soaked liver. Your aging neurons could fire like they once di
He Thinks AI Code May Break Everything - EP 59 Will Wilson
Will Wilson paints a bleak picture for where we’re heading with code written by AIs.He thinks the world will fill with poorly written code that no one understands and that software bugs will proliferate through critical systems. Your airplane that has gotten safer and safer with each passing decade will be running on code that no one has really checked all that well. Which would be bad.What’s more
She Survived Being Shot, Bombed And Working At Google - EP 58 Anna Prouse
Anna Prouse has survived multiple assassination attempts. She’s been tapped by General David Petraeus to get work done in Iraq that U.S. troops couldn’t handle. She’s faced off against Iranian militants. Over a multi-decade career working in the Middle East, Prouse earned the rarest of titles – “Honorary Man” – because of her ability to thrive and hold positions of authority in a hyper-masculine s
The Grand Quest To Simulate Life - EP 57 Ed Boyden
Ed Boyden has spent the last twenty or so years building the technology needed to create a working simulation of living systems. Put another way – he’s been trying to turn biology into physics.Boyden has helped develop new techniques for imaging the brain and the body, including optogenetics and expansion microscopy. He’s also known for nurturing all-star talent at his lab at MIT and he and his st
What's Real And What's Fake In Tech - EP 56 Peter Barrett
We do not usually do venture capitalists on the Core Memory podcast. They can be a lot and like to hear themselves talk a bit too much. (Not you! The other ones – Ed.)But, for Peter Barrett, we will always make an exception. He’s a general partner at Playground Global and is one of those people who knows an awful lot about an awful lot of things. He is one of my favorite people to listen to and ge
The Joy And Doom Of New San Francisco - EP 55 Jayden Clark
The center of the universe has been born again. The most insufferable posters on our timeline, including myself, are enjoying the abundance found in San Francisco thanks to the AI boom lining the pockets of fresh college dropouts. The themed parties are bumping, the LLMs look good, the La Croix is flowing. There is much doom in this world, but not in this podcast.On this episode of the Core Memory
The Present And Future Of Gene Editing - EP 54 Jennifer Doudna
Let’s get right to the point: Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna is on the pod this week.Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work developing “a method for high-precision genome editing.” They, and others, helped usher in the CRISPR revolution with people getting very, very excited about the prospects of editing genes in humans, animals, and plant
He Left OpenAI To Think Bigger - EP 53 Jerry Tworek
On January 5th, famed AI researcher Jerry Tworek stunned world+dog by announcing his departure from OpenAI. A few days later, he hopped over to the Core Memory podcast studio for his not-so-formal exit interview.Tworek joined OpenAI in 2019 when the research lab was a research lab and had about thirty employees. He went on to work on many of OpenAI’s most consequential products, including the comp
Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun
Biohacking has gone through a lot of different phases. Implanting an NFC chip in your hand is old school and having a blood boy is passé. Among Silicon Valley’s 20-somethings, all the cool kids have a peptide stack. Jasmine Sun joins us this week to chat about all things peptides. She was previously a product manager at Substack, but now she writes about San Francisco culture on her own Substack.
New, More Precise Cancer Therapies Could Soon Be Here - EP 51 Richard Fuisz
We have a guest host and some breaking news for this episode.Eryney Marrogi, the scientist and soon-to-be doctor who writes for us now and again, has taken over the pod studio to interview Richard Fuisz. Earlier today, Marrogi broke a story on Fuisz’s company Nonfiction Labs, which has developed technology that could make it possible to use magnets to better control how cancer therapies are doled
Is The Era Of AI-Designed Drugs Actually Here? - EP 50 Josh Meier and Jack Dent
We have been talking about computer-aided drug discovery for well more than a decade. It used to be the case that start-ups pitched their ability to use “machine learning” to hunt for new, promising therapies. Now we call machine learning “artificial intelligence” and have a new class of start-ups claiming big science breakthroughs.One of these new wave start-ups is Chai Discovery and its founders
The Next Step Toward Understanding The Nature Of Intelligence - EP 49 Sebastian Seung
Well, here we are. It’s brain uploading time.As we’ve just reported, famed neuroscientist Sebastian Seung has created a new start-up called Memazing. The company has set out to build digital brains in software that are based upon the maps of animal brains. Memazing is, in effect, seeking to reverse engineer how animal brains work and to use this information to bring to life a new form of computeri
Attacking Cancer With Code And Winning - EP 48 Jake Becraft
Jake Becraft was working on mRNA way before it was cool.In fact, Becraft’s advisors at MIT told him trying to develop therapies with mRNA would be a colossal waste of time. But, here we are in 2025, and Becraft has pushed the mRNA technology that gained so much attention during the pandemic in rather incredible new directions.Becraft joins the podcast this week to talk about his company Strand The
America Has A Steel Start-Up. Yes, Really - EP 47 Laureen Meroueh
America has a new steel company, which is sort of a weird thing to write in 2025.It’s called Hertha Metals, and it’s based in Houston. It’s also run by a woman named Laureen Meroueh, who is this week’s guest. As far as we can tell, Meroueh stands out as the first female to start and run a steel producer.Meroueh grew up as something of a child prodigy in Florida and went on to earn a PhD in mechani
OpenAI's Research Chief On The Soup Wars, Poker And The Next Models - EP 46 Mark Chen
One must not feel sorry for Mark Chen. He gets paid very well to work in one of the most exciting fields imaginable.That said, as OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, he has the difficult job of picking the company’s research priorities and of dealing with OpenAI’s employees begging him for more, more, more GPUs to power their work. This is a hectic gig, and, if you believe that AI will do all the thi
The Famed Hacker Trying To Find The World's Best Inventors - EP 45 Pablos Holman
Pablos Holman has one of the most-watched TED Talks of all time, and that’s sort of the least interesting thing about him.For the past 30 years or so, Holman has been traveling amid the most inventive and eccentric tech circles. He grew up in the wilds of Alaska and turned into a hacker extraordinaire. He helped start the rocket company Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos and sci-fi author Neal Stephenson
The Open Source AI Model For The West - EP 44 Misha Laskin
In December of 2024, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the world with the release of an AI model that appeared much cheaper to make and run than those from its American rivals. The company also open sourced its AI, meaning it released the blueprints of its model to the public.Our guest this week is Misha Laskin. His start-up Reflection AI looks to be the prime counterweight to DeepSeek and a h
Aliens, AI, and Saving the Planet - EP 43 Will Marshall
Well, I wrote a book and made a movie about this week’s guest, so he must be fascinating. (Otherwise, I wasted six years of my life.)Will Marshall has done things beyond supplying me with material. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. For those who don’t know, Planet changed the aerospace industry forever by lowering the cost of satellites and proving that they could be mass produced. It ha
He Bought The First Tesla Roadster 2 In 2013 - EP 42 Konstantin Othmer
Over the past week or so, Elon Musk has started hyping up the launch of the long-, long-awaited Tesla Roadster 2.Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast last week and said he hoped to unveil the car before the end of the year. (When it goes on sale is another story.) He suggested the car might fly. (Okay?) And he said that it would almost certainly be the most memorable launch of any product in his
Trump's Cyber Czar on China's Infiltration of America - EP 41 Joshua Steinman
Joshua Steinman spent four years (2017-2021) working for President Trump and had a very broad remit. He shaped all cyber, telecommunications, cryptocurrency, and supply chain policy.It’s fair to say the Washington press corps did not adore Steinman. He was often portrayed as a young, brash Silicon Valley-type who bubbled over with ambition and lacked the usual political decorum.Despite how the pre
She's Here To Make Dogs (And Then Humans) Live Longer - EP 40 Celine Halioua
Celine Halioua and her company Loyal are on track to deliver a drug next year that could help dogs live longer.Loyal’s therapy is aimed at senior dogs (10+ years of age) that weigh more than 14 pounds. It’s a pill that the dogs will take daily and that’s designed to extend the dogs’ lifespan by at least a year. To get to this point, Loyal conducted a massive clinical trial with 1,300 dogs, and the
Now We Shall Mine The Oceans - EP 39 Gerard Barron
We know that there are trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals sitting on the ocean floor. The big question is whether humans should start hoovering them up.Our guest this week is very much Pro Hoover. He’s Gerard Barron, the head of The Metals Company, which has spent years preparing to become a major player in the seabed mining industry. The company has found a spot in the Pacific Ocean that’s f
He's Building A Space Station For $1 Billion - EP 38 Jed McCaleb
Jed McCaleb grew up in Arkansas where he lived in a cabin in the woods that had no electricity or running water. Now, he’s a billionaire building a space station and funding some of the world’s most adventurous science.America remains a thing, I guess.McCaleb, 50, has been at the center of several major technology movements. Back in the peer-to-peer glory days, he released the eDonkey application
The State Of Gene Editing - EP 37 Eryney Marrogi
We have a proper treat this week. Core Memory special correspondent Eryney Marrogi comes on the pod.Marrogi is a scientist and soon-to-be doctor who has followed the rise of the gene editing tools at humanity’s disposal. He wrote a piece for us a couple of months ago on “Baby KJ,” the child who received a customized, life-saving gene therapy in record time. Now we get into what Baby KJ means for t
We Shall Finally Map The Brain - EP 36 Andrew Payne
In the 1970s, scientists created the first wiring diagram of a worm brain. To do this, they sliced up a worm, imaged the slices under microscopes and then reconstructed a map of the worm’s neurons and their synaptic connections. Wonderful. (It was 302 neurons and really a map of the worm’s central nervous system.)We haven’t come terribly far since then. It took until 2024 for scientists to create
China Builds, The US Regulates - EP 35 Dan Wang
In this episode, Dan Wang comes on the show to discuss his new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.I’ll start by noting that the book is fantastic, and you should read it. It’s a well-researched, vibrant account of how China became dominated by its engineering culture. The country has displayed an unmatched ability to build over the past forty years, and Wang traces the scale of t
Can California Ever Build Again? - EP 34 Jan Sramek
This week, we bring you the story of California Forever in all its “never told before” glory.For the past eight years, Jan Sramek and a group of wealthy investors have been buying up land in Solano County with the hopes of creating a great new city in Northern California. All told, the California Forever group has spent $1 billion to acquire 68,000 acres (100 square miles) in an area about halfway
The Man Who Changed Policing In America - EP 33 Rick Smith
Most of you have not heard of Axon Enterprise. But there it is – a $57 billion company that has reshaped pretty much every police department in the United States. (San Francisco being the major exception.)Rick Smith founded the company in 1993 and turned its major invention – the TASER – into a blockbuster product. Smith hoped the taser would lessen cops’ inclination to grab their guns by giving t
She's Ready To Gene Edit Babies - EP 32 Cathy Tie
Cathy Tie has been having an eventful year.First she co-founded a company determined to gene edit animals and build literal unicorns. Then she held a wedding ceremony in China with Dr. Jiankui He - the controversial scientist who spent three years in prison for performing gene editing procedures on twins. And then, in May, we brought you the story of Tie being banned from China with government off
The History And Future Of Brain Implants - EP 31 Sumner Norman
Into the brain we go.Sumner Norman, the co-founder and CEO of Forest Neurotech, comes on the show to take us on a journey across the history and future of brain implants. We start with the first experiments prodding the body and mind with electricity and end up in mind uploading land. Along the way, we cover many of the major brain-computer interface technologies and advances.Norman has a unique p
Life Beyond Blueprint - EP 30 Bryan Johnson
Well, here we go. Bryan Johnson has come to the pod.You have likely heard an interview with Johnson before, since he’s become such an object of love, hate and fascination among the media over the past couple of years. That said, you will not have heard an interview like this with Johnson.I was covering Johnson’s exploits in the brain-computer-interface and health fields in-depth before anyone else
How North Korea Infiltrated American Companies With Fake Tech Workers - EP 29 Bob McMillan
For the past few months, The Wall Street Journal’s Bob McMillan has been writing a series of stories on fake North Korean workers who have infiltrated American companies. In this episode, we break the whole situation down with McMillan, who is a longtime friend and a top-notch security reporter.The short of the tale is this: North Koreans hop on LinkedIn and other job sites and pose as American re
The Company Putting A Score On Your Life - EP 28 Dugal Bain-Kim
We are awash in longevity tests and services. There are ones that measure your blood, others that measure the quality of your DNA and others that check on your gut and brain. You can Blueprint, Viome, Function Health and on and on.To figure out how at least one of these longevity programs actually works, we decided to have Dugal Bain-Kim from Lifeforce on the pod.As you will notice, the dude is ja
The Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley - EP 27 Leslie Berlin
This week’s guest is Leslie Berlin, the author, historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive.My first encounter with Berlin’s work happened when I picked up The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, which is Berlin’s biography of the Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder. Noyce, of course, was many things. He co-invented the integrated cir
The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth - EP 26 Kurt Terrani
Our guests this week are Kurt Terrani, an Iranian-born nuclear scientist, and Tommy Hendrix, a Green Beret turned venture capitalist, and they arrive with an exceptional story.Terrani is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Nuclear, and Hendrix is the company’s Chairman and main investor through his firm Decisive Point. Standard has started making a nuclear reactor fuel known as TRISO (Tri-structura
Her Multi-Billion Dollar Quest to End Disease - EP 25 Priscilla Chan
Ten years ago, Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg vowed to aim almost all of their billions at a singular goal: “to cure, prevent and manage all disease by the end of this century.”Dr. Chan recently visited the Core Memory podcast studio to discuss CZI, aka the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the organization that she and her husband built to pursue this massive undertaking. To date, the couple ha
Spaceplanes Are Upon Us - EP 24 Stefan Powell
Last November, Dawn Aerospace broke some aerospace records. Its spaceplane – the Mk-II Aurora – hit Mach 1.1 on its way to climbing to 20km faster than any aircraft that has ever taken off from a runway. (The previous record was set by an F-15 in 1975.)Dawn, based in New Zealand, now looks to make flying to the edge of space a regular occurrence. Its craft blends rocket engines with a plane design
The Child Prodigy Teaching Other People How To Learn
Andrew Hsu has been something of a legend for most of his life.In 2007, The Seattle Times published a story documenting Hsu’s graduation from the University of Washington. He was only 16 and had just picked up three degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry.But stories of Hsu’s academic feats had already been circulating for years. He’d won science contests, written an award-winning auto
Fixing American Science Funding
This week on the Core Memory podcast – we fix American science and advance civilization.We were joined by Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marbleston from Convergent Research. They’ve spent the last few years pioneering a new model of science funding centered on FROs or Focused Research Organizations. And FROs take a little bit of explaining.Convergent Research has backing from Eric Schmidt, James Fickel
The New Era of Consumer DNA Tests
This week’s guest is Kian Sadeghi, the founder and CEO of Nucleus. Sadeghi has everything you want in a controversialish bio-tech CEO. He’s a college dropout, a Thiel Fellow and a “wild child,” as one Nucleus investor told me. He’s also trying to uplevel the consumer DNA testing game by poring over entire human genomes with every test instead of just looking at snippets of DNA as companies like 23
An AI Engineer Is Here, and It Might Redesign the Physical World - EP 20 Paul Eremenko
The news here is that Paul Eremenko has a new start-up called P-1 AI.Eremenko is billing P-1 as one of the first stabs at building an AI engineer. The company’s “Archie” AI can help with day-to-day engineering tasks today, and, if all goes according to plan, will be designing buildings, planes and rockets in the future. We, of course, getting into what Archie can do today and what it might do in t
The Future of Money - EP 19 Zach Abrams
More than a decade ago, someone I respect told me to go meet these young, Irish brothers - Patrick and John Collison. The brothers had started a small company called Stripe, and my friend assured me they were primed to accomplish big things. The Collisons were working on payments, and I had no interest in payments, so my attention waned a bit as they described how Stripe functioned and what it wou
Anduril and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together - EP 18 Palmer Luckey
Palmer Luckey has come on the Core Memory podcast today to deliver some full-on shocking news. (And top tips on raising children as well.)As you’ll hear on the show, Luckey’s company Anduril has partnered with Meta to create a product for the U.S. military dubbed “Eagle Eye.” At its core, this product is meant to become the sci-fi style military helmet that you see depicted in movies but that does
Peter Beck on Rockets, Dinner with Elon and the Future of Space
The facts are these: Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, and Rocket Lab is an absolute beast in the aerospace world. It has launched more than 60 times from spaceports in New Zealand and the US and is in the midst of creating a bigger, more powerful rocket to help it earn more business and compete more directly against SpaceX and others.Beck and Rocket Lab also happen to be near and d
He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All
Back when I first began covering technology in the early 2000s, my favorite thing to write about was open source software. I was young and idealistic, and the hardcore free software and open source zealots spoke to me. Code was meant to be by the people, for the people. Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen seemed like heroes. Microsoft and its proprietary code-fueled desktop monopoly seemed clearly ev
The Company Trying to Reprogram Aging
First. The news.The bio-tech player New Limit has raised $130 million from just about the fanciest assembly of smart, rich people imaginable. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross – via NFDG - Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Human Capital are there in their corporate forms and Patrick and John Collison, Josh Kushner, Joe Lonsdale and Fred Ehrsam are there as individuals.Over the past four years, New
A Brain Researcher's Bid to Make Digital Twins of Humans
Earlier this month, Nature published some of the results from a multi-year effort to better understand the visual cortex of mice.The work took place under the MICrONS effort backed by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), one of the U.S. government’s more exotic research arms. And it represented a ground-breaking attempt to blend cutting-edge techniques in how we analyze brains
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future of Humans
Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong joins the pod to discuss crypto, crypto, crypto.Well, not really.Everyone asks Armstrong about crypto all the time, so we decided to head in a different direction and focus on his life and his interests around very cutting-edge science. Armstrong, for example, co-founded and backed New Limit, which is working on therapies to reverse the damage of aging.
Chris Kemp on Astra's Comeback, Rockets and Drones from Space
If you’ve seen HBO’s Wild, Wild Space or read When the Heavens Went on Sale, then Chris Kemp needs no introduction. Kemp is one of the stars in both works. For the less familiar, Kemp is the co-founder and CEO of Astra Space, a maker of rockets based in Alameda, Calif. For several years now, Astra has been on a quest to create the cheapest, easiest to launch rocket in the market and to turn rocket
Dwarkesh Patel Wants People to Learn Things
We flipped the tables on Dwarkesh Patel this week and turned the podcaster into the podcastee.Over the past few years, Patel has made a name for himself as a stellar interviewer of interesting people. Whether questioning a scientist, historian or tech engineer, Patel always goes deep with the subject and refuses to dumb things down for any audience. This is a blessing in an era of our attention be
The First Bungee Jump, Space Weapons, Lunar Landers and Airships: Al Weston Has Done It All
A few years ago, I caught wind that Sergey Brin had started funding an airship start-up called LTA (Lighter Than Air) Research.After hitting up some sources, I came to learn that the man heading up the airship venture was Dr. Alan Weston. And, after digging around some more, I came to learn that Dr. Alan Weston had lived an extraordinary life.Among many other things, Weston performed the earliest
Engineering Brains - EP 09 Max Hodak
Few figures in Brain Computer Interface Land can match Max Hodak’s output over the past decade.He helped start Neuralink in 2016 and then went on to start Science Corp. in 2021. Science has been working on implants to help restore vision and has clinical trials underway with the technology. The company has also built out a line of brain computer interface products for others to use and is explorin
Consciousness in the Quantum Realm
For the past decade, the scientist Suzanne Gildert has been working to imbue robots and AIs with new skills. She co-founded a pair of start-ups - Kindred and Sanctuary AI - that strove to add intelligence to robotic arms and bodies. The results were robotic arms that could do factory work at Kindred and then an upscaled, much weirder version of the technology at Sanctuary.In the background, Gilder
On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic of Silicon Valley
Don’t meet your heroes unless your hero is John Markoff. For he is as good as billed.No one has broken more stories about the technology industry or documented more of Silicon Valley’s most crucial moments than Markoff, the longtime scribe for The New York Times. He was the journalist I most wanted to model my career after, and I will remain forever jealous of all the things he witnessed first han
Because Sometimes a Chicken Sandwich Needs to Get to Space
Several years ago, KFC did something ridiculous. It hired a giant, stratospheric balloon maker called World View to put its Zinger Chicken sandwich into space. Or at least near space. This was an expensive, showy endeavor and no less than Rob Lowe came on as a new Colonel Sanders-cum-Mission Control Lead for the stunt. Ultimately, the sandwich did not go quite as high as KFC wanted, but, still, I
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Giants Talk: A San Francisco Giants Podcast
