Core Memory

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

We know that there are trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals sitting on the ocean floor. The big question is whether humans should start hoovering them up.Our guest this week is very much Pro Hoover. He’s Gerard Barron, the head of The Metals Company, which has spent years preparing to become a major player in the seabed mining industry. The company has found a spot in the Pacific Ocean that’s full of black, baseball-sized nodules rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese. In short order, The Metals Company plans to send vehicles down to gather the nodules up and then refine them.We work hard to bring you these guests. Please subscribe and help support Core Memory. Thanks!The pro case here is that the nodules are quite literally sitting atop the ocean floor. You don’t need to burrow into the seabed and wreak the usual environmental havoc associated with mining. You don’t need people laboring under dire conditions. And these nodules are so mineral rich that you don’t need the typical amounts of refining to get at the good stuff.The con case is that we don’t know a ton about what goes on down there on the ocean floor in terms of animal life. Us humans could be triggering yet another environmental catastrophe on our way to harvesting what we desire.Barron is well aware of the criticisms against seabed mining. John Oliver, among others, has gone hard at him and The Metals Company. And Greenpeace thinks Barron might be Satan.Meanwhile, the U.S. very much wants to become a seabed mining power, as it attempts to blunt China’s dominance in critical minerals and rare earths. And, of course, the modern world depends on things like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese, and seabed mining looks like a very efficient way to get more of them.We get into the pros and cons of this new field in gory detail on the pod. Some of you will be satisfied with Barron’s philosophy. Some of you won’t. In either case, you’ll come away better educated on the history of this industry and the technology driving it.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

Jed McCaleb grew up in Arkansas where he lived in a cabin in the woods that had no electricity or running water. Now, he’s a billionaire building a space station and funding some of the world’s most adventurous science.America remains a thing, I guess.McCaleb, 50, has been at the center of several major technology movements. Back in the peer-to-peer glory days, he released the eDonkey application for music and file-swapping and had the pleasure of being sued by the major record labels. Then, in 2010, he launched the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, which dominated the crypto world until it turned into a story of mega woe.A couple of years later, McCaleb developed the Ripple protocol before moving on to build yet more crypto innovations. This work made McCaleb fabulously well-to-do. (He’s worth $3 billion . . . if you believe Forbes.)McCaleb has used his fortune to back a number of start-ups and philanthropic endeavors. When Elon Musk pulled out of supporting OpenAI, McCaleb helped backfill the financial vacuum. He’s also been a major investor in Max Hodak’s Science Corp., which is developing brain computer interface technology and in the rocket maker Firefly Aerospace.McCaleb’s real blockbuster investment is Vast Space. The start-up is building a commercial space station designed to be the successor to the International Space Station, which is very much on its last legs. McCaleb says he’s prepared to put $1 billion of his fortune into Vast to make sure it happens.My conversation with McCaleb travels across these various tech eras. He comes off, at least to me, as an oddly down-to-Earth guy for someone who invests in such a variety of wild ideas.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

We have a proper treat this week. Core Memory special correspondent Eryney Marrogi comes on the pod.Marrogi is a scientist and soon-to-be doctor who has followed the rise of the gene editing tools at humanity’s disposal. He wrote a piece for us a couple of months ago on “Baby KJ,” the child who received a customized, life-saving gene therapy in record time. Now we get into what Baby KJ means for the future of gene therapies.The gene therapy field is advancing quickly but remains costly and technically complex. Marrogi breaks down how hopeful people should be – or not – that new techniques can be applied to more than super rare, single gene problems.We also get into the ups and downs of the DIY Bio movement, Marrogi’s work creating gene-edited mosquitoes and the vaping crisis he sees with America’s youth, who are taking in unfathomable levels of nicotine.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

In the 1970s, scientists created the first wiring diagram of a worm brain. To do this, they sliced up a worm, imaged the slices under microscopes and then reconstructed a map of the worm’s neurons and their synaptic connections. Wonderful. (It was 302 neurons and really a map of the worm’s central nervous system.)We haven’t come terribly far since then. It took until 2024 for scientists to create a full map – aka a connectome – of an adult fly brain (140,000 neurons) and researchers now dream of completing similar work for a mouse brain and one day perhaps a human brain with its 80 billion neurons and one trillion connections.The belief is that if we have a proper wiring diagram of the brain, we will understand the brain and how it works much better.Things have been slow and hard because mapping something like a mammalian brain requires a lot of laborious work, tons of computing power and some method for labeling all the neurons and their connections in a comprehensible and useful fashion.E11 Bio was founded in 2021 to try and develop new techniques for mapping brains faster and cheaper. And today marks a big moment in the organization’s history. The E11 Bio team has published a paper – in conjunction with loads of high-profile contributors – detailing the success of its techniques. (There’s much more info on E11’s web site here and here.)In very simplified terms, E11 can put viruses in the brain that carry proteins to neurons. Those proteins then distribute markers across the neurons that make them light up in different colors under a microscope. This technology has made it much easier to find individual neurons and trace their connections.E11’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Payne was kind enough to come on the podcast to discuss the organization’s work and its brain mapping process. We also got into why this all matters, the challenges ahead and where neuroscience and artificial intelligence overlap.Enjoy!If you care about science and this type of in-depth reporting, please subscribe and support our work.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

In this episode, Dan Wang comes on the show to discuss his new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.I’ll start by noting that the book is fantastic, and you should read it. It’s a well-researched, vibrant account of how China became dominated by its engineering culture. The country has displayed an unmatched ability to build over the past forty years, and Wang traces the scale of these accomplishments in detail. He also documents how pervasive this engineering mindset is by diving into the one-child and zero-Covid policies, and the brutally efficient ways they were carried out.Subscribe to the Core Memory podcast here and on all major podcast platforms.Wang contrasts China’s engineering-first culture with the US’s regulation-first culture. China’s top politicians are mostly engineers. The US’s top politicians are mostly lawyers. Wang argues that the US once built like China until the 1960s came, and the US began regulating itself into a collective torpor.As you’ll find in the book and hear in our discussion, Wang is not a China propagandist. Far from it. He offers a sober look at the pros and cons of both China and the US and points out that the two cultures have remarkable similarities.In this episode, we explore the book and much beyond it, discussing what hope, if any, the US has of competing against China in the coming century.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

This week, we bring you the story of California Forever in all its “never told before” glory.For the past eight years, Jan Sramek and a group of wealthy investors have been buying up land in Solano County with the hopes of creating a great new city in Northern California. All told, the California Forever group has spent $1 billion to acquire 68,000 acres (100 square miles) in an area about halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Their goal is to create a community of 400,000 people who can live and work together and to make it possible for California to manufacture more of the things that it invents in state.The Czech-born Sramek became consumed by the idea of founding a new city after experiencing California’s well-known problems – expensive real estate/lack of housing, long commutes in heavy traffic, loss of manufacturing jobs and skills, and over-regulation – firsthand. And, sort of insanely, he decided to try and do something about it. He set out to see if California still had the will and the way to make a shining new city.(TL;DR: In this episode, Sramek tells the full story (for the first time) of how California Forever was created and pushed forward, including the incredible lengths he had to go through to keep the project secret. We, of course, also get into much of Sramek’s reasoning for wanting to dedicate his life to this project and why he cares about trying to help California thrive.)Sramek managed to convince an all-star cast of investors to buy into his plan. California Forever is backed by the likes of Patrick and John Collison, Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Andreessen, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. Together, these people bought up the Solano County land in relative secrecy over the course of about six years and have set to work putting in the regulatory structure needed to get building. Their current plan includes not just the city itself but also nearby manufacturing and shipbuilding hubs.The project has, naturally, run into controversy. People have grumbled about the billionaires being up to something shadowy. Others have complained about building on land historically used for ranching and about potential environmental concerns. At one point, local politicians even suggested that perhaps China was buying up the land so that it could spy on Travis Air Force Base. For a while, it appeared that the naysayers might win and stall California Forever indefinitely. But the combination of a second Donald Trump election and the widespread feeling that California is over-regulating itself into oblivion have injected new life and enthusiasm into the California Forever effort. Many people and politicians in Solano County are now looking to join up with the project and help make it happen.Not everyone will agree with me here. This is natural. But, for me, California Forever represents an existential moment for the wonderful state that I call home.Nowhere on Earth do people have it better than Californians. But we are on the verge of the greatest economic self-own in history if we can’t learn how to build and develop and do big things again. We must get out of our own way and create a system that allows for hope and optimism and the notion of creating a better future.Building a picturesque city where people can live close to their jobs and manufacture the products that they invent on underutilized land should not be controversial. It should just happen.If we can’t let something like California Forever flourish, we’re signaling that California has lost its way, its spirit and its ability, and this strikes me as profoundly sad.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

Most of you have not heard of Axon Enterprise. But there it is – a $57 billion company that has reshaped pretty much every police department in the United States. (San Francisco being the major exception.)Rick Smith founded the company in 1993 and turned its major invention – the TASER – into a blockbuster product. Smith hoped the taser would lessen cops’ inclination to grab their guns by giving them a non-lethal option for dealing with dangerous situations. In more recent years, Axon has moved into body cameras, drones and software and data systems used by police forces.Core Memory is a reader-supported publication. We need your help to do what we do.The taser was never going to be without controversy, and Smith and Axon have found themselves under scrutiny time and again. John Oliver recently spent thirty minutes on a taser takedown and mocked Smith. In 2023, Reuters also went at Axon, accusing Smith of making up the company’s founding story, over-paying his executives and maintaining an “unusual” workplace culture. (In this podcast, Smith answers the founding story accusations for the first time with a journalist.)Despite the digs and plenty of lawsuits, Smith has spent three decades on this singular quest of changing the nature of policing. Axon can point to plenty of data that show tasers have reduced officer shootings, and body cams have added transparency to the actions of both cops and criminals.In its next turn, Axon hopes to build taser-equipped drones that can be used to assess and deal with incidents. Smith has even talked about using these types of drones to patrol schools and protect against active shooters – yet another controversial idea.In this episode, we get into the history of Smith and Axon, how the company’s technology works, all of the controversies and where Axon is heading.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

Cathy Tie has been having an eventful year.First she co-founded a company determined to gene edit animals and build literal unicorns. Then she held a wedding ceremony in China with Dr. Jiankui He - the controversial scientist who spent three years in prison for performing gene editing procedures on twins. And then, in May, we brought you the story of Tie being banned from China with government officials apparently not liking the idea of her teaming up with Dr. He romantically and/or professionally.Well, Tie is back in the U.S. now and has just started the Manhattan Project – a start-up that unapologetically seeks to perform gene editing on embryos to block them from inheriting diseases. It’s controversial and then some just like Tie herself.In this exclusive podcast, Tie discusses her plans for the Manhattan Project, her whirlwind 2025 and her efforts to push the bio-tech field into a new 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

Into the brain we go.Sumner Norman, the co-founder and CEO of Forest Neurotech, comes on the show to take us on a journey across the history and future of brain implants. We start with the first experiments prodding the body and mind with electricity and end up in mind uploading land. Along the way, we cover many of the major brain-computer interface technologies and advances.Norman has a unique perspective in this field. He’s a mechanical engineer by training but can talk neuroscience with the best of them. I’ve always found him to be realistic and fair with his assessment of various brain-computer interface approaches.Forest Neurotech makes a brain implant that uses ultrasound to analyze the mind. The company argues that its approach allows it to see more of what’s happening in a brain than electrode-based implants - from Neuralink, Synchron, et al. - that can only probe the small areas where they sit next to neurons. It has been running trials with its implant in a bid to help doctors and patients better understand the nature of mental disorders.In a fascinating turn, Forest has started to detect "covert consciousness" in comatose patients who are otherwise completely unresponsive. The people appear to be able to hear and interpret what is being said around them. This is both comforting and not.The ultrasound approach that Forest helped pioneer is now starting to look like a thing with other start-ups using similar techniques.Beyond Forest, we get into the economics of the BCI industry, its promises and limitations and, of course, cover much sci-fi ground.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