Core Memory

This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it.Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats.Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode!Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him: “The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the b******t of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.”Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon. You’ll have to listen for that last one.IN THIS EPISODECore Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experimentSmithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread projectPacific Light & HologramOUR SPONSORSBREXThe Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.SENDCUTSENDYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.TIMESTAMPS* 00:00:00 — Intro* 00:02:38 — Why Tech Hype Sucks* 00:07:37 — Why Talking About Your Work Kills It* 00:10:42 — Early Life, Physics, and Jazz* 00:21:57 — Fermilab & Academic Politics* 00:30:47 — Building the First 3D Video Game Engines* 00:34:18 — Early Game Development Culture* 00:38:37 — DreamWorks & Working for Steven Spielberg* 00:44:32 — Joining Microsoft & Pitching the Original Xbox* 00:54:04 — Fighting Corporate Bureaucracy to Save Xbox* 01:03:42 — Abducting Jimmy Fallon* 01:07:20 — Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Yeast* 01:10:40 — Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab* 01:17:09 — Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

We have been promised glorious gene therapies for decades. This is supposed to be the stuff of reprogramming the body to blunt or cure diseases with something approaching a permanent fix. While gene therapy progress has been made, treatments remain rare and expensive, and it’s very tough to get the therapies to go into the desired parts of the body.Our guest this week is here to help. He’s Adrian Veres, the chief scientific officer and co-founder of Dyno Therapeutics. Founded in 2018, Dyno has been pursuing new and better ways to deliver gene therapies via modified viruses.Dyno was well ahead of the AI meets biotech curve, using AI models to design new viral shells that let genetic instructions get into the right places of the body. For the moment, Dyno has focused on creating delivery mechanisms for companies working on therapies aimed at the brain, eye and muscles.In this episode, we talk with Veres about the promise and perils of gene therapy technology, some of the most recent cases where gene therapies worked and how Dyno’s technology came to be and functions. And we get Veres’s take on whether or not we’re entering a golden age of biotech on the back of AI.Due to some poor camera work on my part, Veres, who is a tall man, looks particularly giant. Fear not, he did not harm me and was actually quite nice.OUR SPONSORSBREXThe Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.SENDCUTSENDYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.IN THIS EPISODEDyno Therapeutics: https://www.dynotx.com/The FDA framework for individualized ultra-rare disease therapies: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-launches-framework-accelerating-development-individualized-therapies-ultra-rare-diseasesCore Memory on Baby KJ and the new gene therapy playbook: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-new-gene-therapy-playbook-babykjCore Memory’s gene-editing conversation with Eryney Marrogi: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-state-of-gene-editing-eryney-marrogiCore Memory’s podcast with Jennifer Doudna: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-present-and-future-of-gene-editing-jennifer-doudna-crisprTIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube)0:00 Intro3:34 Why Does Gene Therapy Still Feel Rare?7:38 What Is Gene Therapy, Really?14:48 How Do You Deliver DNA?17:47 Turning a Virus Into Medicine21:53 The 700-Letter Box28:20 Testing a Million Designs at Once 34:28 Why Does the Liver Steal the Cure?36:43 Getting Past the Brain’s Bouncer 43:04 Is Delivery the Missing Piece? 47:24 Can Million-Dollar Therapies Get Cheap? 52:10 Did Dyno Start Too Early? 1:00:03 Was Biology Oversold? 1:09:36 Will We Cure Every Disease in 10 Years? 1:18:20 Should You Build Your Own Peptide Stack? 1:20:55 Is China Winning the Biology Race? 1:27:40 What Baby KJ Changed 1:32:34 Should the Next Generation Study Biology? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Over the past five years, Alex Colville has become one of the most influential figures in the longevity and aging fields.There’s a decent chance you have not heard of him, which is a bit by design. Unlike many longevity gurus, Colville does not seek much attention and, for the most part, operates in the background where he’s been doling out many millions of dollars in investments. Today, Colville runs age1, a venture capital firm that has backed the likes of Loyal, Science, Conception and a bunch of other companies listed as “Stealth” on its web site.Colville is the guy I call to reality check whatever is being hyped up in Longevity Land. He studies the actual science. He reaches sober conclusions. He’s honest about where the technology is today and what might show promise in the future.In this episode, we get into Colville’s takes on GLP-1s, partial cell reprogramming, China’s biotech rise, the odd animals teaching us the most about longevity and, well, the prospects of living forever. We also get into Colville’s life and unusual rise as the longevity kingmaker, and, of course, we discuss keeping a human head alive without a body because what choice did we have.If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!!OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)0:00 Intro2:41 Meet the Switzerland of Aging8:01 Why Did Aging Become the Enemy?10:28 What Can an Axolotl Teach Us?26:23 What Works in Worms, but Not Yet in Humans?30:16 The Longevity Expert Who Takes Nothing34:37 Are GLP-1s Already Anti-Aging Drugs?44:14 Can We Make Old Cells Young Again?58:48 What Do Hibernating Squirrels Know?1:05:02 When Does Medicine Become an Upgrade?1:09:57 Has CRISPR Lived Up to the Hype?1:12:43 What Are Altos and Calico Really Doing?1:20:24 The Breakthrough That Could Change Everything1:25:14 Will China Win the Biology Race?1:28:24 Why a Virtual Cell Is Not a Cell1:30:28 A Head in a Waymo? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Every couple of days, a new AI-meets-biotech startup sends me a pitch, and the pitches all sound the same. AI is amazing, and it can now tame biology. We’re on the cusp of producing new cures for diseases at a rapid rate, and these startups know just how to get the job done. To which you should wonder – is this at all true?On this week’s Core Memory episode, we have brought in the big brains to answer – or at least debate – this question. Our resident science whiz and medical professional Eryney Marrogi takes on the hosting duties to interview Abhishaike Mahajan, he of Owl Posting and now OpenAI Foundation fame.These two men of science take hold of this AI/biotech moment to explore where we’re seeing the most promise from this new wave of technology and where the messiness of biology continues to confound AI. They also get into some lighter topics like our collective death from AI bioweapons and China’s impending biotech dominance. Good times.You’re all probably buzzing over Moderna’s stock price doubling and the end of cancer. So ride that enthusiasm right into this podcast and see how you’re feeling on the other side.If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!!OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (they link out to YouTube) 0:00 Intro4:24 Is Intelligence the Bottleneck?6:58 A Thousand von Neumanns12:29 The Cancer Drug That Failed21:15 Can AI Read a Tumor?31:38 Is Text All You Need?44:39 The Machine Nobody Built54:16 A Trillion Dollar Organoid?1:02:26 Biosecurity Lost the Plot1:06:02 ChatGPT vs. a Virus1:19:13 Why the Terrorists Failed1:24:37 Who Gets to Order DNA?1:42:41 China Wins Biology1:53:41 The Lab Nobody FundsThanks for listening! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. And now, in a very rare appearance, Eustace has come on the podcast to discuss his adventure.Baumgartner, who dropped from 128,852 feet, received tons of attention because Red Bull turned his jump into a media spectacle. Eustace, by contrast, came up with the plan for his jump and spacesuit at his kitchen table, paid for a small team to help him build his suit and then did his skydive with just a single reporter there as a witness.This all fits with Eustace’s personality. He’s quite private and just goes about his work.It took several months of begging to get Eustace on the show, and I don’t think he’s ever discussed his skydive in this type of detail before.In this episode, we get into what drove a 58-year-old man to want to chase this feat, the rich history of stratosphere jumping and Eustace’s remarkable career as one of the key Google engineers who built the modern internet. We also hear Eustace’s thoughts on AI and his latest quest to search the ocean floor.(I apologize for saying that Eustace jumped from space in the episode. It was the stratosphere. I was excited.)If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!!OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)00:00 Intro03:26 Chasing Alan Eustace07:42 Rocket Sleds and Seatbelts10:38 Why Build a Capsule?13:00 Kittinger’s Three Jumps18:11 The Idea Takes Hold21:07 Elon’s Mars Greenhouse23:18 The Jump That Failed28:37 Solving the Death Spin30:07 Racing Red Bull32:26 One Reporter, No Livestream34:12 The Kittinger Coincidence38:26 Not Your Typical Daredevil40:43 Goodbye Videos for His Kids44:35 The First Spacesuit Jump48:37 Two Hours to Space50:53 Google Earth in Reverse54:36 Can I Get a Countdown?58:55 Breaking the Sound Barrier1:00:08 The Crash Landing1:02:16 What It Really Cost1:08:28 The Magic of Gas Balloons1:10:30 Did the Jump Change Him?1:17:03 The VLSI Golden Age1:22:56 Is AI Revolutionary?1:29:20 The Google Translate Story1:35:49 The Fall of DEC1:41:09 Reinventing the Data Center1:48:51 Impossible to Inevitable1:51:40 Inside Commonwealth Fusion1:56:21 Hunting Amelia Earhart2:03:21 What’s Under the Golden Gate? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 with a new way to monitor and treat tumors. They’ve built an implant that, as the name suggests, gets placed inside the body to keep a constant watch on a tumor’s behavior. The chip also brings with it the ability to deliver electrical signals that may blunt a tumor’s growth. We’re talking constant monitoring of a tumor to see if treatments are working and the ability to read and write electrical signals as part of a totally novel bio-tech device. In this episode, Ben explains how this technology works and, more broadly, he walks us through the emerging field of neuro-oncology or cancer neuroscience. We have a look at Coherence’s device, which is reminiscent of Neuralink’s implant, and rival technology.Since we recorded this episode, Coherence has begun a study in Australia where its device is being used to record and stimulate brain activity in patients having brain tumors removed. The company has also put out a paper detailing some of its work and has brought on Neuralink’s neurosurgery lead Matthew MacDougall as an advisor and investor.This episode was a treat for me because I had no idea this type of technology even existed, and because Coherence seems to have made a remarkable amount of progress on its hardware in a short time.If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!!OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)0:00 Intro3:54 Cut It, Poison It, Burn It. Is There a Fourth Way?6:16 Your Tumor Is Rewiring Your Brain8:29 The Clunky Device That Somehow Already Works11:35 Why Patients Take It Off15:12 Inside the Implant: A Neuralink for Tumors20:32 Could a Chip Replace the MRI?27:13 What the Mice Are Already Telling Them31:38 First Humans, and Why It's Always Australia35:36 "They Should Have Hired a Few Apple Engineers"43:24 Neuralink vs ONWARD: Who's Right About the Spine?47:09 The Idea Nobody Else in Neurotech Had1:01:45 Cut One Nerve and the Cancer Stops Spreading1:06:12 A Cancer Sensor Inside All of Us?1:09:12 Do Cancer Drugs Work Better Before 11 a.m.?1:14:59 If AI Ran Medicine, It Would Build This This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 TBPN in late 2024. The daily tech ne…

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 advisor to the government and a venture capitalist at DCVC.As you might imagine, we get into quantum computing and quantum technology in this episode. Quantum vs. AI, the US vs. China, when quantum tech will break encryption, quantum sensing and whether or not quantum technology actually has a bright future. The quantum sensing portion of the chat was all new to me and rather astonishing.Since Narang is also a competitive runner and mountaineer, we provide some top tips on gear because that is just the kind of all-purpose podcast that we deliver.And, if you can’t get enough quantum computing, come check out our video episode on PsiQuantum building the largest quantum machine in history. Enjoy!OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you!BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Narang Lab at UCLA: https://naranglab.ucla.eduDCVC: https://www.dcvc.comOratomic (the Caltech neutral atom spinout): https://www.oratomic.comAtom Computing: https://atom-computing.comMesa Quantum: https://mesaquantum.comGoogle's work on the cost of quantum factoring: https://blog.google/security/tracking...NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-q...DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative: https://www.darpa.mil/research/progra...Hyperlite Mountain Gear (the Dyneema packs Prineha swears by): https://www.hyperlitemountaingear.comTimestamps (they link out to YouTube)00:00 Intro02:17 The Physicist Who Almost Became a Pro Runner13:39 A Cold Email, a Full Ride, and the Road to Caltech26:15 How Video Game Chips Quietly Took Over Science31:56 Is Quantum Losing the Spotlight to AI?40:50 "I Still Don't Believe in Quantum": Answering the Skeptics46:28 The Google Result That Could Break Encryption53:44 Is It Time to Panic About Q-Day?1:06:48 Quantum Sensing and the Case of Who Sneezed1:17:30 Does Consciousness Run on Quantum Rules?1:22:28 The Advice She Gives Terrified Students1:30:20 So When Does Quantum Actually Get Real? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 empire of mega factories packed full of machines that cut, bend and weld metal. Hadrian has become a workhorse for defense and aerospace and other big industries. It has used software to make it easier for people to control many machines at once and to keep track of the manufacturing process in a bid to add more quality control to industry.Power has become one of the main players in the Reindustrialization movement and one of its more direct and critical voices.We did this interview at Hadrian’s headquarters in Los Angeles with factories humming behind us, and we’ll have a video with all the machines soon on our YouTube channel. Chris and I get into his history, Hadrian’s history and the state of American manufacturing.To celebrate AMERICAN MANUFACTURING and AMERICA and THE WORLD CUP and BEING SUBJECTED TO A BROKEN HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM, we’re offering a magnificent 4th of July merch SALE, SALE, SALE. Come get 30 percent off Core Memory’s hats, shirts and hoodies by using the promo code AMERICAAA right here.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendYou know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)00:00 Intro04:07 From Melbourne to a California Factory Floor07:37 The Thesis He’d Work On for the Rest of His Life10:00 How America Gave the Whole Farm Away14:46 Why We Can’t Rebuild Our Own Missiles19:08 Can You Really Put a Master Machinist Into Software?24:38 From Missile Parts to the Entire Missile29:19 The China Problem Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud33:40 How Far Behind Is America Really?41:45 “You Can’t Automate This.” Answering the Critics45:22 Why Can’t Anyone Else Copy Tesla and SpaceX?53:03 Can America Actually Build Its Own Shenzhen? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 it often arrives at your house or factory the next day.Jim Belosic started the company because he always had hardware side projects running in the background and wanted something like SendCutSend to exist. He spent $750,000 on his first metal cutting machine and then soon discovered that there were lots of other people like him who also wanted something like SendCutSend to exist.The company has since evolved into one of the few homegrown options that can compete with China in terms of getting metal parts to customers quickly and at a reasonable price.SendCutSend had been flying under the radar of the wider public for years with Belosic building the business largely with his own money and some smaller investments. Recently, though, SendCutSend raised $110 million from Sequoia, Paradigm, and Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison is now valued at $1 billion.Our interview with Jim was conducted at SendCutSend’s headquarters in Reno and covers his history, the company’s history and the state of manufacturing in the U.S.Full Disclosure: SendCutSend is a sponsor of the Core Memory podcast. This interview, for what it’s worth, took place before the company came on as a sponsor when my brain and soul were still objective.Jim and I subsequently found a lot of overlap in what we care about and how we go about things. Our readers and viewers will know that we’re rather into folks who make things, and so is SendCutSend, so it’s quite the natural fit.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (Links head to YouTube)00:00 Intro04:09 What Does SendCutSend Actually Do?06:01 The Black Market for One-Off Parts08:31 The $750,000 Bet That Started It All11:22 From Facebook Software to Cutting Metal18:02 What on Earth Is a Teslonda?24:31 The One Thing Nobody Else Tried30:28 300,000 Customers, From Rockets to His Mom35:23 Is Reindustrializing America Just Theater?42:20 Why “Software First” Is a VC Trap50:22 Is U.S. Manufacturing Stronger Than We Think?1:03:42 Anodizing, Nevada, and What They Can Build Now1:13:29 The One Competitor That Scares Him This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 government’s ban of Anthropic’s latest model, the odd tie-up between DeepMind and Eve Online, Noam Shazeer leaving Google for OpenAI, Snapchat’s Snapcrap glasses, the Rafael Nadal documentary (naturally) and a robot that kills fish in the name of better sushi.Come get it.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps (links go to the YouTube channel)0:00 Intro0:38 Inside Midjourney's Secret MRI Machine15:42 What Does Brian Johnson's Skin Really Look Like?21:14 The First AI Model America Ever Banned36:26 Why Is DeepMind Obsessed With a 20-Year-Old Space Game?45:47 The Transformer Inventor Just Switched Sides49:36 Whatever Happened to "Scaling Hit a Wall"?52:26 Who on Earth Is Buying $2,200 Smart Glasses?1:00:34 Dating in San Francisco, COVID Shots, and the World Cup1:05:32 The Time Ashlee Nearly Pocketed Rafael Nadal's Racket1:16:21 A Robot That Kills Fish the Japanese Way1:19:31 Is Ashlee Turning Republican? Plus Where Batteries Go to Die This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 abilities of brains. So, like, totally normal, everyday stuff.Mostly, we talked about the merger of humans and machines and the progression of bio-tech and AI technology.We’ve had Max on the show twice now because, for our money, he’s one of the most daring minds in the neuroscience and bio-tech fields, and there’s a decent chance that Science becomes one of the most fascinating companies in the world.Thanks, of course, to Brex for hosting this event and to you guys for all the great questions.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.Timestamps0:00 Intro4:23 One Company or Three? Inside Science's Real Master Plan6:25 Why Is Humanity So Bad at Curing Disease?9:12 Implants That "Work" But Don't: Miracle or Mirage?13:34 Restoring Sight to the Blind: How PRIMA Really Works22:34 The BCI Gold Rush and the Money Problem No One Talks About31:44 Keeping Human Organs Alive Outside the Body36:52 Artificial Wombs and Bodies Grown Without a Brain?41:23 Audience Q&A: Is the AI Biotech Boom Actually Real?47:53 The Bet Every Other Bionic Eye Company Missed56:02 Can a Brain Implant Make Us Superhuman?1:05:04 What Will Surprise Us Most by 2035? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 for roughly 60% of what that robot costs to build, and come almost entirely from China. Her piece profiles the two startups trying to change that. Plus a new proposed bill out of Congress that would kick Unitree’s robot doggies to the curb.Then the rockets send Ashlee off on his space tangents. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin had an expensive mishap recently when an explosion took out the rocket, its launch pad, and possibly America’s dreams of beating China back to the moon. Ashlee walks through why a pad explosion can be a near-death moment for a rocket company, and why SpaceX — now flying roughly every two days while everyone else is grounded or behind — increasingly just wins by default. Plus the new Starfall capsule, SpaceX’s move into making medicine and maybe chips in orbit, and the wild logic behind a $1.77 trillion IPO.We also got into the media drama consuming our X timeline: the firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. Ashlee tweeted an opinion, the trolls came for him hard, and he pleads his case here. We’re a little biased since, well, we’re off building this whole new-media thing ourselves. Will there still be a ticking clock and a man in a suit raking in views twenty years from now? Tune in for what we think, and leave your hot take in the comments.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.(Ed. Kylie - Don’t think I forgot to make you a playlist. “Lazy Eye” and “New Slang” were key to my college experience. I first crushed on Rivers Cuomo thanks to “Perfect Situation.” Listen to it here, and don’t forget to leave a comment to win tickets to their tour).OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps* 00:00:00 – Intro* 00:02:05 – The American Actuator Crisis* 00:06:51 – WestMag vs. Atlas Motion Systems* 00:14:21 – Uncle Sam Pays Attention* 00:16:47 – Chinese Robot Ban* 00:21:16 – A Robot in Every Home* 00:24:29 – Are You AGI-pilled Yet?* 00:27:23 – Shoutout to Micayla Sortland* 00:31:01 – Blue Origin’s Explosive Launch* 00:42:52 – Low Earth Orbit Drugs* 00:49:42 – The Two-Trillion-Dollar Elon Bet* 00:57:07 – Founders Fund’s Viral “Mafia” Game Night* 01:01:23 – Ashlee Braves His Notifications* 01:06:12 – Legacy Media vs. The World This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. You’ll probably want to consume this on the Substack, Spotify or YouTube where there’s video, and you can see what’s happening.If you’re not familiar with Redwood, well, it’s up to big things. Around 70 percent of all the lithium-ion batteries that have reached their end of life make their way to Redwood’s facility where they’re then broken down into their base elements, including lithium, cobalt and nickel. Redwood stands as the largest cobalt producer in the United States and does this all from recycling. As in, zero mining.Redwood is now taking car batteries that still have some life left in them and clustering them together alongside solar panels to create giant energy storage systems. Naturally, it’s aiming these systems at the AI set first, offering power that does not depend on the grid or turbines or anything else in short supply and high demand.In this episode, we go through Redwood’s entire recycling process and check out its first storage system. Along the way, we chat with JB about Redwood’s history and the recycling business. It’s a banger.OUR SPONSORSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 effects of too much booze as if they were teenagers and that exhibit recoveries from long-term alcohol abuse.The results have been good enough to help NewLimit raise another $435 million from the likes of Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. They’re also good enough to have NewLimit kick off a human trial of the therapy next year. And I’ll drink to that.We discuss all of this on the podcast and then go much deeper on the longevity field, bio-tech and the collision of AI and biology.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.Timestamps0:0) Intro3:50 What Is Epigenetic Reprogramming?7:16 Growing a Whole Animal From One Old Cell13:06 Meet Ambrosia, the AI Hunting for Youth22:44 $435 Million and the Race to Human Trials29:26 The Drunk Mice That Skip the Hangover36:48 Inside the First Human Trial43:14 Will There Ever Be a Hangover Pen?49:39 Beyond the Liver: The Delivery Problem1:03:27 Answering the Skeptics1:12:42 Will OpenAI Become a Drug Company?1:23:53 The Health Story Bigger Than AI?1:35:00 How Far Behind Is the US vs China?1:53:10 Can We Build Computers From Neurons? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 imagination.These days, Rajaniemi is putting those skills to very practical use at Red Queen Bio. The company appeared near the end of last year with a focus on AI biosecurity. Red Queen’s main objective is to try and outthink and outflank bad actors and/or AI systems run amok that might unleash bioweapons onto the world. As such, Red Queen must concoct all sorts of dark scenarios and then come up with ways to undercut and defeat them.Rajaniemi has a background in mathematics, physics and bio-tech and possesses one of those fast-twitch minds that makes the rest of us envious. We talked about his life and career and, obviously, the wild reality we now inhabit.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 and Daniel Gross, so why does the model still feel underwhelming?We get into Eric Schmidt getting booed off a commencement stage at the University of Arizona, which becomes a longer conversation about the generational fury aimed at AI. Everyone Kylie’s age seems to hate it, but is it due to misinformation or legitimate anger about jobs and data centers? Ashlee admits he’s more confused by this moment than anything he’s covered in tech: the predicted Wall Street collapse hasn’t come, the models keep getting better, and the valuations still make no sense.Then, the news that broke minutes before we hit record: OpenAI won the Musk lawsuit on statute-of-limitations grounds. We dig into whether OpenAI’s shift from open-source nonprofit to for-profit was an original sin or just the only way to pay for the compute. Also, Ashlee’s texts with Sam Altman being part of discovery?!In more Musk news, Bloomberg reported that Musk’s xAI stiffed staff on the $420 they were promised for feeding their tax returns into Grok. One host would decidedly not trust a chatbot with their financials, and the other already has. We also get into the strange new bedfellows: SpaceX selling compute to Anthropic, a company Musk has long been philosophically against.We even take you behind the scenes at Core Memory — so study up and watch our latest videos on Phantom Neuro and Starfront Observatories. Consider this your homework on mind-controlled arms and galaxy photography. Essay due on our desk by morning.Don’t forget you could win tickets to the Weezer tour by leaving an amazing review for our podcast wherever you listen.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 to Stanford’s then-president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.Despite warnings to stay away from the story, Baker pursued it and produced a string of pieces that did, in fact, show a long history of shoddy research publications linked to Tessier-Lavigne. The mighty Stanford president, who had been a towering force in the scientific community, resigned by the end of Baker’s freshman year.Baker has now written a book about his experience and joined the podcast to discuss it.How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is three things: a rollicking account of Baker’s takedown of Tessier-Lavigne, an indictment of the start-up-obsessed culture Stanford has fostered, and something of a memoir, describing what it’s like to endure one of the more unusual freshman years any student will ever have.The bulk of the book focuses on Stanford and what it has become, which is a meat market of young, brilliant minds being wooed by the venture capitalists seeking to acquire their talents. There are investors paying students tens of thousands of dollars for connections to other students and inviting the kids to their mansions and sex parties. All very wholesome stuff.The book is fantastic. Baker is a rare talent. We had a wonderful conversation. You will enjoy it.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.OUR SPONSORSSendCutSendDo you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.BrexThe Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 since. He moved from San Francisco to the South Bay to be closer to Meta’s headquarters and has been working non-stop. Last month, the world saw the first fruits of the revitalized AI effort in the form of Meta’s new Muse Spark model. And now Wang is speaking for the first time about the model, Meta’s grand AI ambitions and all the happenings over the last year in an exclusive interview here on the Core Memory podcast.Wang arrived at our studio sporting a mullet and a powerful whitetail deer camouflage shirt. He was in good spirits and tried his best to convince us that Meta can catch up to its rivals.We hit on his personal beef with Sam Altman, Zuck delivering soup to AI recruits, the incredible pay packages Meta has been handing out, the vast amount of work Meta still has to do and the Meta AI hierarchy that includes all-stars like Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Shengjia Zhao, who seems to have blocked me on X for reasons I know nothing about.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.Enjoy!Do you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.The Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did. We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 brought James Krellenstein onto the podcast. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Alva Energy and he’s sort of frightening in how much he knows about the nuclear industry. Like, really. You’ll see.This episode runs long because we wanted to use it as a chance to go through the past few decades of history and really explain why the U.S. nuclear industry slowed and how the U.S. might fix the situation. We also wanted to explain how all these new technologies work and, of course, explore where China is heading.Krellenstein is something of a contrarian and thinks many of the U.S. nuclear start-ups are misguided in their approach.He’s also incredible to listen to. You will enjoy this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.We’ve also brought on a new sponsor. Welcome, SendCutSend!! They are an American manufacturing powerhouse and will help you make your metal parts with speed and skill. Core Memory subscribers can get a 15 percent discount on their next parts right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 robotic prosthetic coupled with Phantom’s implant and then make your prosthetic move by thinking about what you’d like to do with it.Phantom’s technology competes in places with implants from the likes of Neuralink and Synchron. The big difference is that nothing needs to be implanted in the patient’s brain. Phantom’s implant goes near the site of the amputation and links the robotic prosthetic with motor neurons to convey signals back and forth from the brain. It’s a simpler, faster surgery.Where this technology is heading in the future is another story. Glass can see a day when humans have elective amputations to become, well, cyborgs.We get into this weird and possibly wonderful future on the episode, along with Glass’s backstory and much more detail on how Phantom’s implant works.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

We’re trying something new. Ashlee and Kylie dishing on Tech Land and dishing hard. The Core Memory podcast you didn’t know you needed but now can’t live without.We dove into our recent sit-down with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman: why Greg seems to have stepped back into a real leadership role at OpenAI, our biggest takeaways from the episode, and why the startup has become its own telenovela.We had to unpack the state of American manufacturing. Ashlee makes the case that we’re screwed on actuators — the motors that move every humanoid robot — and walks through who’s actually trying to fix it. LA as the secret manufacturing capital, Texas as the emerging center of gravity, SendCutSend (our newest sponsor!) as the closest thing America has to China for fast parts, and the hardware cult in central Texas that you should probably watch our video about.We get into SpaceX’s $10B partnership with Cursor that may or may not be a Hail Mary for xAI. Whether space data centers are real or window dressing. Why Apple under Tim Cook feels creatively bankrupt and who actually builds the next computer for the AI era. Also, Anthropic quietly becoming a trillion-dollar company while Google somehow escapes scrutiny.Plus: organs grown in mouse wombs (yes, really — go read the KindBio piece), merch is finally live, and a very special listener contest. Leave the most creative review on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube and we’ll send you two tickets to The Shins/Weezer tour. Do it!!! Er, please!!!!The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 ticket without asking. Sam said he’s worried Elon Musk will drop the lawsuit before it gets to court. Read that however you want.There’s new OpenAI tech on the horizon too — a model that “makes ridiculously great images,” another that’s allegedly better at writing.Ashlee pressed them on American manufacturing and whether we’re cooked. Sam says OpenAI will go so far as producing their own actuators for robots. We discussed the possibility of a real permanent underclass, the two futures Sam sees, and the third one Greg wants instead. Safety. Anthropic. The Mythos thing. Sam also talked, briefly, about the days after the attacks on his home.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.Core Memory is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 years later, the group of Irishmen — and for diversity, a Scot — have moved well beyond ecological restoration. They’re providing services for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and selling their drones to the U.S. Navy.The robots are called Mako. They’re two meters long, weigh about 400 pounds, and can dive 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours at a time. They’re also modular — payloads swap in and out like Legos, so the same vehicle that plants seagrass in Australia one week can inspect a submarine cable in the Baltic the next. A base Mako costs $50,000. Most legacy underwater drones built by big defense contractors can run between $1 million and $20 million each.On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Will O’Brien and Akhil Voorakkara, co-founders of Ulysses. They build these drones out of an office in San Francisco — for conservation, for academia, for national defense. They just raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz through its American Dynamism fund. We discuss what it actually takes to make robots for the most hostile environment on Earth, why the ocean is about to have its SpaceX moment, and the surprisingly thin line between planting seagrass and defending NATO.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 lollipop. This odd contraption is meant to live out in the deep ocean and produce energy from the movement of waves. Water goes into the node where it’s funneled through a series of channels and pressurized. After that, the water is directed into a turbine that spins and connects to a generator that produces electricity.How big is this node? Quite f*****g big. It’s about 20 meters across at the top of the lollipop and then goes down about 80 meters into the water. The contraption can move and steer on its own and travel about 30 miles a day to reach the ideal spots where the waves just keep coming and coming.There’s some universe where this thing is bobbing around in the ocean, generating electricity day and night and storing the electricity in batteries. Panthalassa, though, wants to put servers packed full of GPUs and TPUs right on board and use the electricity to fuel AI jobs. It will then send the results of the work up into space via Starlink and then back down to Earth. Simple.We get into all of this in detail with Sheldon-Coulson.Panthalassa has been operating in semi-secret for about ten years. This episode marks the first time that Sheldon-Coulson has discussed the company’s technology at length. We talk about his backstory, how this wild idea came to be and the engineering behind the nodes.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 Onward and met its CEO Dave Marver, who is this week’s guest.During my trip, I did, in fact, witness amazing things. An Italian man named Michel was walking again with the help of a spinal implant device made by Onward. He could stand and walk and exercise daily. And a young Belgian woman named Julie used an Onward device to regulate her blood pressure. Before receiving the Onward technology, Julie had contemplated suicide because it took her hours each day to get out of bed – the result of blood pressure fluctuations that caused her to pass out. After receiving the device, she reenrolled in her PhD program. Her whole life had been turned around.Onward has developed products that deliver electrical stimulation to the spinal cord. Some of these products work outside of the body and some require an implant. More recently, Onward has begun pairing its spinal implant technology with brain computer interface implants. This allows patients to think about their desire to move and have those thoughts translated into actions executed by the spinal implant.In this episode, Marver walks us through the history of Onward’s technology development and how all of these products work. It’s a story of academic research being turned into life-changing technology. I would argue that no company does more to help people dealing with paralysis.This episode will surprise you, and, I think, warm your heart.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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, Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi is all of 29 years old now, so he’s done alright.Brex led a new wave of companies that brought more modern financial tools first to start-ups and then to businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it’s had some ups and downs, and Franceschi has been remarkably open about Brex’s stumbles, his mental health struggles and about the areas where he thinks Brex got things very right.Franceschi remains a hacker at heart and has been experimenting away with AI agents. He, in fact, says he’s running Brex – and his life – with a team of AI agents that read his e-mails and Slack messages, perform job recruiting tasks and schedule his day-to-day activities.We get into all of this on the episode, charting Franceschi’s rise from hacking phenom to running a multi-billion-dollar company and discussing where he thinks AI and money are heading.Do we have journalistic conflicts with this episode? Yes, we do. Brex has been the top sponsor of our podcast and video series. You can learn more about the depths of our relationship and what Brex can do for your business right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 decided to get into the space business as well via a start-up called Aetherflux. The company aims to build a network of solar panel-packed satellites that suck up sunshine and then beam it down to Earth via infrared lasers. Yes. Actual space lasers. What could go wrong?The lasers would feed antennas and ground stations on Earth with energy. In theory, you could then direct power just about anywhere without needing to build a ton of infrastructure on the ground. Army convoys, data centers, etc. could just have electricity sent to them in remote areas.Bhatt explains all of this in the episode and gets deep into his personal story. He also recounts starting and running Robinhood through its ups and downs, including being both beloved and despised.Will the space lasers work? I dunno. It’s a lot. But we are fully in the era of trying new, bold ideas in Low Earth Orbit, and, well, I wrote a book predicting this very thing, and so am very much here for it.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 public for a couple of big reasons. First off, Conyngham has no real science or biology background. He’s a longtime AI researcher who used things like ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok to give him a plan for how to attack Rosie’s untreatable cancer and then how to craft and shape a unique mRNA shot for his pup. This exercise demonstrated the powers of AI technology to aid all of us with extra knowledge and skills and just how far bio-tech has come in terms of new cancer therapies.Most people have had their hearts warmed by the tale of Paul and Rosie. Dude’s dog is dying. Dude goes to great lengths to try and solve the problem. Dude and his dog seem to mark a major moment for AI and medicine.Some other people on the internet, however, are less excited by the story. They argue that the AI tools did very little here and that the science isn’t terribly conclusive or ground-breaking. Companies like Moderna and BioNTech already have personalized cancer vaccine data in trials, and it looks good. Who cares if we did the same thing for a dog? Rosie has also been treated with chemotherapy drugs, so we don’t even know if the mRNA technology is really the thing shrinking her tumors. And so on.You can find some of the major criticisms here and here.Some of the pushback may be valid, although Conyngham isn’t having it – as you’ll hear in the episode. It also sort of misses the point of this story.After talking to Conyngham, it’s clear enough to me that he used AI in some profound ways here and that what was done with Rosie is symbolic of a huge shift in medicine. Regulators better get ready because the tools now exist for people to do rather daring experimentation on their pets and themselves. People in dire circumstances and with some means are going to be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on a regular basis. Paul and Rosie hit a nerve because their journey bundled up some massive technological and societal shifts into a tidy narrative.Anyway, come listen to Paul and have a peek at Rosie.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 did. And your tired heart could be fresh and loving again.Billions of dollars have been funneled toward trying to figure out how to push iPSCs into our organs safely and effectively. We have not cracked the code yet, but there are signs that scientists are getting closer.Nabiha Saklayen, the co-founder and CEO of Cellino Bio, is an iPSC whiz and joined the podcast this week to bring us all up to speed on the technology. She covers how iPSCs work, their history and the state of iPSC treatments around the world.Her company is trying to take iPSCs, which have largely been made by hand, and mass produce them to accelerate experimentation and hopefully therapies and to reduce costs around this fascinating technology.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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, Wilson fears that humans will lose their software writing skills over time as AI takes on more and more tasks. We’ll become dumber as a whole. Which would also be bad.Wilson is a mathematician turned start-up founder who built the company Antithesis in a bid to modernize software testing techniques and help humans write better code.In this episode, we get into his life story, his fears around AI software and what he thinks we should do to make massive improvements to the code that underlies everything.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 society.(If you can’t tell, we’re going a little off schedule with this week’s podcast. I heard about Prouse’s story from a friend and had no choice but to have her on the show.)Born in Italy, Prouse is a former journalist who ended up in Iraq in 2003 and went to work trying to rebuild the country’s health infrastructure first for the Red Cross and then on behalf of the U.S. government. She lived in constant danger for many years and proved adept at moving between the U.S., Iraqi and Iranian powers because of her unique approach to problem-solving.More recently, Prouse has worked in Silicon Valley, including a stint at Google where she found complaints from the workforce about the quality of the quinoa and sushi quite comical.As if her career was not dramatic enough, Prouse also survived a brain tumor during what were meant to be her easier years.We discuss all of this in the show, using Prouse’s best-selling memoir as a guide through her journey.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.' This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 students have gone on to form numerous bio-tech start-ups. Overall, Boyden is regarded as one of the top scientific minds of this era.It was a genuine honor to have Boyden on the show, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy this episode. In this episode, filmed at Boyden’s office, we discuss his background as a child prodigy, his work and what it might actually mean to engineer something like a mind or consciousness. We also get into Boyden’s skepticism around current large language models and the state of science funding in the U.S.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 gets my mind racing with tons of new ideas every time we speak. Self-taught, Peter spent the early part of his career as a force of nature in the software industry. He was visited by the Men In Black as a teenager. He helped start Rocket Science Games, which was the hottest video game maker in town before it wasn’t. While there, Peter happened to employ a young intern named Elon Musk. . .Later, Peter would be part of the team that created WebTV and a longtime distinguished engineer at Microsoft, working alongside Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.These days Peter goes deep on deep tech at Playground. As such, we talk quantum computing, the insane world of AI agents, nuclear power, data centers in space (and why they won’t work) and whether or not humans should be in total panic.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 podcast, we’re joined by Jayden Clark. He’s the host of Members of Technical Staff, a podcast about niche San Francisco tech culture. He’s been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Business Insider. We discuss all the important parts of life in this new version of San Francisco: themed parties, online discourse, and the permanent underclass.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 plants with more precision and ease.There have been some massive recent CRISPR wins. Casgevy, which treats sickle cell disease, emerged as the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy. And, last year, an infant in Pennsylvania had a rare disease treated with record-breaking speed via CRISPR technology.That said, CRISPR has, in many ways, not lived up to the hope and hype just yet. CRISPR therapies remain expensive and tough to distribute throughout the body.Doudna is convinced that several major CRISPR breakthroughs are upon us, and we get into where she sees the field going. We discuss the work she’s doing at start-ups and the Innovative Genomics Institute – a research powerhouse that links UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Davis.And we talk about Pomona College, our shared alma mater, rejecting our wonderful, brilliant children who will no doubt go on to do amazing things in the world and likely make untold billions that will be donated to other tremendous institutions. JK. Chirp, chirp!If you want to get up to speed on gene editing’s present and future, you will not find a better discussion.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 company’s reasoning technology, which ushered in a new era for the entire AI field. (Yes, Tworek worked on Q* before it was Strawberry before it was o1.)Both Kylie and I have been longtime Tworek fans. He’s smart, funny and never really sought the limelight despite his massive contributions.In the episode, Tworek reveals that he found it hard to keep doing high-risk, pioneering work at OpenAI as the company shifted toward what Tworek describes as more conservative ways. He, in fact, thinks the large AI companies have become conservative as a whole and that there might be bigger, better ideas to be found elsewhere. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. Jasmine recently published a deep dive in The New York Times about the trendy injectable and deets on the Chinese peptide rave (which you first read about from our new writer, Kylie Robison, last month).If you want to be like Wolverine, don’t do drugs. Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast instead. Our words are made of adamantium.Do you feel old yet? We do. In this episode, we get into all the important bits: What are peptides, why are they Chinese, and how is RFK Jr. involved? This is not medical advice, but if you do inject some peptides after this episode, tag us.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.Our show is sponsored by Brex. It builds finance tech that makes expensing and accounting for things like peptides super easy, if your company is cool with such things. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 out in the body.The two big brains get into Nonfiction’s technology and into Fuisz’s rather prolific work at the cutting-edge of the biotech field. The conversation goes into how biotech actually gets built, competition with China and Fuisz’s family legacy of invention (his grandfather was the prolific inventor featured in “Bad Blood”).The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends. Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 Josh Meier and Jack Dent join the podcast this week. (The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms and on our YouTube pod channel.) The company was founded in 2024 and is backed by OpenAI, Menlo Ventures+Anthropic, Thrive and others. (Chai is already a unicorn.) It published a number of notable accomplishments this last year, including using its own AI model to churn out promising antibody designs at an unprecedented clip.The first couple iterations of machine learning-aided drug discovery companies came and went without tremendous success. Chai and Nabla Bio are two of the buzziest members of this new era of AI companies. Their models really do seem to be harnessing the advances in AI to hit on potential drug targets and designs in rather profound ways. Bio-tech, in fact, seems like the place where AI may make the most stunning scientific advances first.In this episode, we get into Chai’s intellectual roots as a research project within Facebook/Meta and how the company has gone after building its models. We also try to provide a realistic picture of the current state of AI drug discovery.The implications of the work done by Chai, Nabla and others are far reaching. If we’re able to come up with new drug designs at this accelerated rate, we will need major changes around how drugs are tested and put through trials. The current drug testing and FDA approval system is simply not set up to move as quickly as bio-tech appears to be going.This will be our last episode for the year, and we’re taking a tiny break between posting the next one as the Core Memory crew has a little time off. Thank you so, so much to all of you who have listened to the show in our first year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned some things along the way.Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 computerized intelligence.This work could lead to, say, more energy efficient AI systems that are modeled on real brains. It could help with aligning AI systems with human intelligence. And it could be a major step toward creating emulations of full human brains and perhaps, one day, making minds uploadable.We get into all of this with Seung on this week’s podcast. We also explore his decades of neuroscience work dedicated to building connectomes, or ultra-detailed schematics of animal brains and all their neurons and synapses.Seung is brilliant and fascinating. Listen and/or watch for yourself.The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms and our YouTube channel. Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 Therapeutics and its programmable mRNA technology. Strand has developed a way to send therapies into the body and have them aim right for diseased cells. Its first clinical trial has focused on melanoma where Strand has been able to treat patients who were deemed incurable with any other medicines.Jake and I met up at Strand’s headquarters in Boston with a double-helix hanging over our heads. We covered Strand’s work, Jake’s background and the future of synthetic biology.We’ll have a video episode coming on Strand and its lab and technology soon on our YouTube channel, which you should be subscribing to because it’s awesome.Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 mechanical engineering from MIT. She then invented some of the processes that make Hertha different from traditional steel producers.Hertha relies on natural gas and hydrogen instead of coal to make high-grade steel. Its process is potentially cleaner, simpler and cheaper than the approaches used by the traditional steelmakers that have been around for more than 150 years. The start-up is already producing one ton of steel per day and is now looking to prove that it can make much, much more and compete head-to-head against the major steel players.In this episode, we get into how Hertha’s process works, the steel industry overall, why the U.S. needs this type of technology and how Meroueh ended up as a steel magnate.Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 things that AI companies promise it will do, then an awful lot of pressure and expectation is on Chen’s shoulders.We recently spent almost two hours with Chen talking about his job, his background and his fierce competitive streak. (I’ve seen the man play poker. He takes it very seriously. He’s also proven willing to counter Mark Zuckerberg’s personal soup deliveries to AI researchers in order to court and retain talent.) And, of course, we got into the future of AI.This conversation took place just a couple of days after Google released Gemini 3, and we spent some time on how OpenAI plans to counter this new, powerful model.We think you’ll get to learn a lot more about Chen’s personality and motivations in this episode. Enjoy!Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. And he helped Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and Edward Jung create an invention factory at Intellectual Ventures.If you like our stories, videos and podcasts, please do subscribe. All of this stuff takes a team to produce, and we could use your support.These days, Holman is running a venture capital firm that scours the world for the biggest ideas from wild-eyed inventors missed by others. He published a book this year that captures some of his thoughts on invention and where our civilization is heading.In this episode, we dive into the book, Holman’s bizarre career and the future of science and research and development. I think you will be surprised and entertained.Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 host of other open source Chinese models. Laskin argues that open source models can be just as good as the models developed by the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic and that the West needs this to be the case.Reflection has raised $2 billion and is valued at $8 billion, although the figures in AI have become so lofty as to almost feel meaningless at this point. That said, the company was able to raise so much money because of the pedigree of its team with a number of engineers, like Laskin, coming from DeepMind.I have, in full confession, not been paying enough attention to open source models and the ways in which the Chinese models seem to have become the basis for a lot of corporate work in the US. Laskin dug in deep on this topic, and hopefully you’ll feel more up to speed after listening to the episode.You can find the Core Memory podcast on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 has surrounded the Earth with hundreds of satellites that photograph and analyze all our planet’s landmass every day.Go on. Sign up. We bring you these people for free. Help us, help you. In this episode, we get into Planet’s history, what these satellites do and why they’re so important.Marshall is a deep thinker on many areas and has lived in an unconventional manner. So we also get into much, much more, including the communal house scene in the Bay Area, what Marshall sees as the three major shifts that will occur over the next decade and how he balances his idealism with being a capitalist.In conclusion, Marshall is fascinating. I did not waste six years of my life. And When The Heavens Went on Sale makes for a great Christmas present.Seriously. Let’s make the world smarter.Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 history. Which is a very Musk thing to say and - also in keeping with Musk - possibly true.At the Tesla shareholder meeting today, Musk again promised to wow with the Roadster 2 unveiling. This promise came in response to a shareholder who asked if he could, in fact, have the first Roadster 2 VIN. “Well, I guess it’s according to whoever put down their deposit in that sequence,” Musk said.Well, we are here with a special podcast to reveal exactly who stands to get the first Roadster 2 off the line – the investor Konstantin Othmer.I ran into Othmer rather by coincidence this week, and he happened to be holding the receipts that show he wrote the first Roadster 2 check for $200,000 back in 2013.This episode has some wonderful early Musk and Tesla tales plus the whole Roadster 2 backstory. Enjoy!Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 press corps felt, Steinman did important work on several fronts. Before and during his time in Washington, he helped create deeper ties between the U.S. military and Silicon Valley in a bid to modernize the technology at the Defense Department’s disposal. He also sounded repeated alarms about how vulnerable the U.S. infrastructure is to cyber attacks, particularly those originating in China.These days Steinman runs Galvanick, a company aimed at hardening the technology infrastructure of industrial companies and operations.Steinman is opinionated and then some. In this episode, he will claim that Trump is among the smartest humans on Planet Earth. Some of you will be okay with this. Some of you will hate this. I look forward to your comments.Beyond Trump, we get into Steinman’s unusual career, the state of U.S. military technology and security, the cyber Cold War between the U.S. and China and a host of other light topics. Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 FDA has liked what it’s seen so far.Halioua joins the podcast this week to chat about her unique approach to cracking the longevity field.Loyal has been betting that it will be easier to prove that longevity drugs work (and get regulators on board) by starting with dogs instead of humans. The company has been testing promising longevity compounds and now has three therapies in its drug pipeline aimed at our canine friends.I’ve known Halioua for several years now. She’s one of the deepest, most pragmatic thinkers in the longevity field and approaches her work without the hype and false promises that often accompany some of our live forever gurus.We get into her life, her work, some of the oddities of running a company in San Francisco and what it’s like to be in bio-tech during the great AI hype era.Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe