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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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.

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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.

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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.

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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!

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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.

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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.

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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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

Well, here we go. Bryan Johnson has come to the pod.

You have likely heard an interview with Johnson before, since he?s become such an object of love, hate and fascination among the media over the past couple of years. That said, you will not have heard an interview like this with Johnson.

I was covering Johnson?s exploits in the brain-computer-interface and health fields in-depth before anyone else. Back then, my editors and others often seemed to think too much ink was being spilled on the man. But, in January of 2023, I wrote the story that turned Johnson into an overnight sensation, and, well, people just could not get enough Johnson after that.

Alongside the director Chris Smith, I also made the film Don?t Die on Johnson and his longevity pursuits for Netflix.

Over the course of reporting on Johnson for so long and doing the film, I?ve gotten to know our world-famous vampire quite well. So, we tried to go in some more personal directions - erections, cults, smoking toads - with this interview and to chart Johnson?s evolution from someone Silicon Valley shunned to resident longevity guru and blossoming cult leader for some futuristic religion.

Johnson also speaks at length for the first time about his decision to pull away from the Blueprint business and his struggles to figure out what?s next for his Don?t Die movement.

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/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

For the past few months, The Wall Street Journal?s Bob McMillan has been writing a series of stories on fake North Korean workers who have infiltrated American companies. In this episode, we break the whole situation down with McMillan, who is a longtime friend and a top-notch security reporter.

The short of the tale is this: North Koreans hop on LinkedIn and other job sites and pose as American remote workers looking for gigs. Once they get hired, the North Koreans then recruit Americans to help them deal with some of the job mechanics like submitting tax paperwork and running company laptops from inside the US.

McMillan has found some Americans who are managing dozens of laptops at their homes on behalf of these North Korean workers. Each morning, the American patsy wakes up, turns the laptops on, and then logs their North Korean workers into their jobs. It?s a practice now known at laptop farming.

The North Koreans tend to be pretty good workers! That is until they start siphoning off money and intellectual property for the Great Leader.

Last month, Arizona resident Christina Marie Chapman pled guilty to wire fraud and other crimes linked to this scheme. Per the Department of Justice, Chapman ?was sentenced today to 102 months in prison for her role in a fraudulent scheme that assisted North Korean Information Technology (IT) workers posing as U.S. citizens and residents with obtaining remote IT positions at more than 300 U.S. companies. The scheme generated more than $17 million in illicit revenue for Chapman and for the Democratic People?s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea).?

All told, the DoJ reckons North Korea has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from its network of laptop farmers. McMillan writes about it all here.

If you?re an employer on the lookout for one of these fake remote workers, you?ll want to scan for Kevins in your organization who are really into the Minions. We explain in the episode - promise.

Enjoy!

The Core Memory podcast is made possible by the genius investors at E1 Ventures. We?re not sure if E1 is into the Minions or not, but they are into investing in great companies.

We are awash in longevity tests and services. There are ones that measure your blood, others that measure the quality of your DNA and others that check on your gut and brain. You can Blueprint, Viome, Function Health and on and on.

To figure out how at least one of these longevity programs actually works, we decided to have Dugal Bain-Kim from Lifeforce on the pod.

As you will notice, the dude is jacked and does indeed seem quite healthy.

Lifeforce provides - for a montly fee - a lot of what a decent national healthcare system might do in a different universe. It sends a phlebotomist to your home to take a blood draw and performs a wide range of tests on the sample. It then puts you in touch with a medical team for some health counseling and tries to identify areas that will help you become a better you.

Instead of doing this once, you repeat the cycle every three months and try to push what the company calls your Lifescore ever higher.

Bain-Kim is not a doctor and comes from the business world, and two of Lifeforce?s co-founders are Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. Robbins obviously has a reputation as a self-improvement guru, and some of Diamandis?s ventures center on selling optimism. The company also offers supplements and other products. This combination of things will put some people off.

That said, Lifeforce also has a deep medical bench, and there?s real ? and ever-improving - science backing up its measurements and therapies.

I?m broadly excited for services like Lifeforce but also fearful that consumers have little means of judging these various programs and separating the good stuff from the snake oil.

We touch on all of these issues and much more in the show. Have a listen and judge for yourself.

This podcast is made with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures. Your company will almost certainly live longer with E1 Ventures on your cap table.

This week?s guest is Leslie Berlin, the author, historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive.

My first encounter with Berlin?s work happened when I picked up The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, which is Berlin?s biography of the Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder. Noyce, of course, was many things. He co-invented the integrated circuit and reshaped the trajectory of the world in the process. He ran one of Silicon Valley?s most iconic companies. He mentored people like Steve Jobs. And he was the Valley?s first real engineer playboy star.

Berlin?s book is one of my all-time favorite reads and a wonderful example of what a biography can be.

Berlin, of course, is many things as well. She?s been one of the most influential historians when it comes to Silicon Valley and the technology industry. She used to run Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, and now heads up the Steve Jobs Archive. Berlin is also the author of another tremendous book - Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age, which chronicles the work of several people who had distinctive roles across the tech industry.

In this chat, we get into Noyce?s life and what he meant to Silicon Valley, the semiconductor industry, the fall of Intel, the Valley?s history overall and Berlin?s current work.

There?s basically no one I would rather talk to, and we?re thrilled that Berlin joined the pod.

Huge thanks to everyone who has been supporting the Core Memory podcast. It?s been surging up the charts of late. We?re grateful. Don?t be shy. Tell your friends.

A huge thanks, as always, as well to E1 Ventures for they are noble venture capitalists who have great taste and have backed us from the start. Follow them on X.

Our guests this week are Kurt Terrani, an Iranian-born nuclear scientist, and Tommy Hendrix, a Green Beret turned venture capitalist, and they arrive with an exceptional story.

Terrani is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Nuclear, and Hendrix is the company?s Chairman and main investor through his firm Decisive Point. Standard has started making a nuclear reactor fuel known as TRISO (Tri-structural ISOtropic) that comes with the promise of being very safe and with the ability to power a new breed of small nuclear reactors that can be placed anywhere someone needs a lot of power.

Standard Nuclear popped out of stealth mode last month via a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal.

It turns out that Standard?s predecessor - Ultra Safe Nuclear ? had been backed for years by a wealthy ex-CIA operative named Richard Hollis Helms. When Helms passed away in 2024, the company was left in financial peril. Terrani and Hendrix pulled the venture out of bankruptcy and saved its prized TRISO technology.

As we explain in the episode, TRISO is a type of nuclear reactor fuel that the U.S. has been working on for decades. It places a protective coating around fuel particles that makes them incredibly safe, and the U.S. and other countries have proven this out through vast amounts of research. China, of course, has TRISO reactors already as does Germany.

Standard Nuclear hopes to make a lot of TRISO for a coming wave of nuclear start-ups building SMRs, or Small Modular Reactors. These reactors come in various shapes and sizes, but the general idea is that they?re small enough to be shipped to any place that needs serious power ? be it an AI data center, an overseas Army supply line or even an industrial hub in space.

I recently visited Standard?s TRISO plant in Tennessee, which is right next door to Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Terrani and much of his team used to work. We?ll have a video on the visit coming soon.

During our chat, we get into the U.S.?s nuclear failings and aspirations, Standard?s wild history and the future of nuclear technology.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. You can find them here and on X here.

Ten years ago, Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg vowed to aim almost all of their billions at a singular goal: ?to cure, prevent and manage all disease by the end of this century.?

Dr. Chan recently visited the Core Memory podcast studio to discuss CZI, aka the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the organization that she and her husband built to pursue this massive undertaking. To date, the couple has put $7 billion toward a broad range of scientific programs and has backed bio-tech centers across the U.S. They?re funding some of the most cutting-edge work on trying to understand how the human body functions at the cellular level and placing some of the riskiest, boldest bets in bio-tech.

CZI has not operated without controversy. Over the past few weeks, Dr. Chan has faced criticism for dialing back funding on some of the organization?s education and political programs in favor of going Full Science.

We get into this a bit on the show, although, I will Full Confess to being less into telling people how to spend their money than others appear to be.

Mostly, we discuss Dr. Chan?s dramatic life story and the work CZI is doing to push bio-tech forward. Recently, for example, the organization backed a new program aimed at trying to cure children struck with genetic rare diseases. CZI has also just put out a new AI-based model that gives us a better understanding of how cells work.

Since we?ve recently become a sci-tech and tennis publication, we get into Dr. Chan?s tennis career as well. Enjoy!

This podcast was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who also support science and human progress through their investments.

Last November, Dawn Aerospace broke some aerospace records. Its spaceplane ? the Mk-II Aurora ? hit Mach 1.1 on its way to climbing to 20km faster than any aircraft that has ever taken off from a runway. (The previous record was set by an F-15 in 1975.)

Dawn, based in New Zealand, now looks to make flying to the edge of space a regular occurrence. Its craft blends rocket engines with a plane design and can carry small payloads (up to 5kg) for defense, science and commercial customers. In June, the company signed a deal with a group in Oklahoma to perform dozens of flights from the Oklahoma Air and Space Port - and, yes, that?s a real thing.

We sat down with Stefan Powell, the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Dawn, to talk about spaceplanes, Dawn?s satellite propulsion business and the aerospace scene in New Zealand and Europe.

Dawn has moved quite quickly for an aerospace company and, like Rocket Lab before it, stunned the world by doing much of innovation from New Zealand, which has not historically been an aerospace power. Its ability to get to the edge of space and back multiple times a day is unique, and it has plans for even bigger craft in the future.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who happen to invest in hard-tech things like aerospace.

Andrew Hsu has been something of a legend for most of his life.

In 2007, The Seattle Times published a story documenting Hsu?s graduation from the University of Washington. He was only 16 and had just picked up three degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry.

But stories of Hsu?s academic feats had already been circulating for years. He?d won science contests, written an award-winning autobiography and started a foundation to help children in need as an adolescent. Hsu?s family hails from Taiwan, and the young man often found himself being interviewed on TV and touring the country to tell his story.

After graduating from college, Hsu pursued a PhD at Stanford before dropping out and using some Thiel Fellowship money to start an ed-tech company called Airy Labs.

That company struggled, but Hsu?s latest venture ? Speak ? has been booming. It?s an AI-powered language tutor that enjoyed immense success first in South Korea and then beyond. It?s been valued at more than $1 billion after a $78 million funding round closed near the end of last year.

In this episode, Hsu graciously tolerates my child prodigy questions and then gets into how he hit on AI and language before it was cool and how people can learn better.

This episode was made possible by E1 Ventures, backers of bold people and bold ideas.

This week on the Core Memory podcast ? we fix American science and advance civilization.

We were joined by Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marbleston from Convergent Research. They?ve spent the last few years pioneering a new model of science funding centered on FROs or Focused Research Organizations. And FROs take a little bit of explaining.

Convergent Research has backing from Eric Schmidt, James Fickel (a fantastic patron of science) and others and tries to fund small groups of people chasing very big ideas. In essence, Convergent wants to support things that help open up new fields of science and technology, and it funds folks whose ideas might be too expensive for a university lab and/or not obviously commercial enough for typical venture capital. Gamick and Marblestone argue that the FRO model fills a crucial gap in US science funding.

Convergent tends to put $30 million to $50 million into what look like quasi-start-ups and gives them five to six years to build their thing. To date, it has backed around a dozen efforts with a pretty heavy emphasis on the bio-tech and neuroscience fields.

Recently, Convergent also put out the Gap Map, which is a well-researched exploration of all the things that it thinks the world still needs to develop. Go ahead. Poke around.

In this episode, we break down FROs, science funding, the US vs. China, brains and much more.

Our show is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1.

This week?s guest is Kian Sadeghi, the founder and CEO of Nucleus.

Sadeghi has everything you want in a controversialish bio-tech CEO. He?s a college dropout, a Thiel Fellow and a ?wild child,? as one Nucleus investor told me. He?s also trying to uplevel the consumer DNA testing game by poring over entire human genomes with every test instead of just looking at snippets of DNA as companies like 23andMe and Ancestry have done for many years.

Nucleus charges about $500 for its mainstream health test aimed at adults. It promises to give you insights about a wide variety of health conditions, including your likely disposition toward things like mental health issues, cancers and rare genetic diseases. You can use the information to inform your lifestyle choices and to compare your DNA traits with those of your potential baby making partner to see if you?re a good baby making fit. (You can go here to see how Sadeghi uses this information on dates.)

The company also has a new, far more expensive service ($5,000) aimed at parents going through the IVF process to help them select embryos with certain traits. This type of service is quickly becoming all the rage, as we noted in our recent video on Orchid, which you should absolutely watch because it?s awesome. (Orchid contends that it does a much deeper dive on the embryo DNA than does Nucleus. I gave Sadeghi a chance to respond to some of this in the podcast.)

Sadeghi has been controversialish because he?s made big claims about Nucleus?s ability to discern things like someone?s IQ from DNA and because he?s been an aggressive marketer in a bio-tech field that tends more toward conservatism - lest one become the next jailed blood testing start-up CEO. He?s also been way more outspoken about the rather obvious direction we?re heading toward where people will be picking the desired traits of their future kids and where sex may well just become a purely recreational event as society moves toward IVF and artificial wombs for the majority of its new human production.

What?s clear enough is that the first wave of consumer genetic testing companies arrived many years ago when DNA tests were rarer and more expensive, and we?re now seeing them be usurped by a new crop of services that really take advantage of the massive decreases in sequencing costs. In short, we can test more of your DNA more cheaply than ever before, and we have much better data and software to analyze the DNA now.

Sadeghi and I get into all of this on the podcast.

The show was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1, or at least that?s what I tell my kids.

Enjoy!

The news here is that Paul Eremenko has a new start-up called P-1 AI.

Eremenko is billing P-1 as one of the first stabs at building an AI engineer. The company?s ?Archie? AI can help with day-to-day engineering tasks today, and, if all goes according to plan, will be designing buildings, planes and rockets in the future. We, of course, getting into what Archie can do today and what it might do in the years to come in the pod. Spoiler alert: Eremenko thinks we get MUCH better spaceships.

Most of our time, though, was spent discussing Eremenko?s rather incredible life and career.

Born in Ukraine, Eremenko came to the US at 11 and went on to get aeronautics degrees from MIT and Caltech and then ? just to show off - a law degree from Georgetown. He?s worked at DARPA and Google and as CTO of both Airbus and United Technologies. He also tried to turn hydrogen into a mainstream fuel source for commercial planes at Universal Hydrogen, although that venture did not pan out.

And so, we got into Eremenko?s life, aerospace and where AI is possibly taking us a species.

Eremenko?s dog Li made a special guest appearance and picked me as his favorite podcast host by the end of the show.

As ever, we thank the wonderful people at E1 Ventures for their support with the podcast

Enjoy!

More than a decade ago, someone I respect told me to go meet these young, Irish brothers - Patrick and John Collison. The brothers had started a small company called Stripe, and my friend assured me they were primed to accomplish big things.

The Collisons were working on payments, and I had no interest in payments, so my attention waned a bit as they described how Stripe functioned and what it would one day do. What was very clear, though, was that the brothers were bright - as in exceptionally bright - and focused and determined. I interview start-up founders for a living, and there?s been a handful of times where I knew for certain that the people in front of me would succeed at whatever they chose to do. This was one of those times.

This is a long way of saying that I have the utmost respect for the Collisons and try to take particular note when they and/or Stripe make big bets. They tend to have a pretty accurate window into the future.

Last year, Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge was a two-year-old start-up that had started out doing some NFT nonsense and then pivoted almost right away into stablecoins.

Going off the premise that the Collisons must have spent $1 billion on a very, very, very young company for a reason, we asked Bridge CEO Zach Abrams to come on the podcast to explain what Bridge does, what the hell stablecoins are and where the future of money is heading.

Abrams, thankfully, did not disappoint.

The short of it is that Bridge has made it much easier for companies and governments to move money internationally. SpaceX, for example, relies on Bridge to collect and process payments for its Starlink internet service in far off lands. The same goes for people sending and receiving remittances, which happens to be a massive part of our global economy.

We discuss all this in the show and then get weird. Abrams talks about AIs using credit cards to accomplish tasks out in the world and a future where an AI might end up as the wealthiest being on the planet and what that could mean for us humans and the economy.

This podcast was made possible with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures.

Enjoy!

Palmer Luckey has come on the Core Memory podcast today to deliver some full-on shocking news. (And top tips on raising children as well.)

As you?ll hear on the show, Luckey?s company Anduril has partnered with Meta to create a product for the U.S. military dubbed ?Eagle Eye.? At its core, this product is meant to become the sci-fi style military helmet that you see depicted in movies but that does not actually exist in real life. It will have displays that place all kinds of information in front of soldiers? faces by tapping into virtual and augmented reality technology and data feeds that will be pumped into the device.

Microsoft once owned the contract to make this type of product for the U.S. Army but had been struggling terribly to deliver anything useful. Anduril took over the $22 billion project earlier this year and will now pair its defense and tech expertise with Meta?s headset and VR/AR expertise to try and give the Army what it desires and modernize the U.S. military in the process. We go into ?Eagle Eye,? the technology behind it and how and where it will be made in gory detail on the podcast.

This is all shocking for a bunch of reasons, but the lead shocker is that Luckey has agreed to work with Meta and Zuck at all.

Some context.

In 2014, Facebook acquired Luckey?s Oculus VR for $2 billion. In 2016, Facebook then fired Luckey more or less for being a Republican in public.

In the runup to the 2016 election, Luckey gave $9,000 to a group that put up a billboard depicting Hillary Clinton?s face ? with an extra-large forehead ? and the words ?Too Big To Jail? underneath the face. This was during the Clinton e-mail controversy and came at a time when much of Silicon Valley had gone apoplectic about the idea of Donald Trump possibly becoming president.

Once the mainstream press figured out that Luckey had paid for the billboard, it went full hysteria mode and portrayed Luckey as some kind of hate-filled, fascist meme lord set on destroying the moral fabric of, er, politics and possibly the American Way of Life. Facebook decided it could not stomach the PR hit and pushed Luckey out of the company. Lawsuits and much vitriol between the two parties followed.

For Luckey, the whole incident was well beyond personal. Oculus and VR tech had been his life. Facebook stripped him of his true love, and the press and others turned Luckey into a pariah. The saga is captured wonderfully in Blake Harris?s The History of the Future where hindsight allows us to see how something relatively trivial ? the billboard ? morphed into an absurdist drama acted out by reporters and Facebook executives.

Luckey also made his feelings on the incident very clear in this historic performance in which he eviscerated professional remora Jason Calacanis.

But, you know, times change. Zuck and others in Silicon Valley have discovered their inner patriots and want to work on defense tech now. Luckey being buddies with Trump and Republicans is so okay that he can appear in a Meta press release. Public apologies have been made. And now, perhaps, soldiers can have their fancy helmets.

We spent two hours chatting with Luckey, and the Anduril/Meta deal is only a fraction of the discussion that also gets into Anduril?s manufacturing expansion, China (of course), AI and a host of other topics.

For more Core Memory pods, head here.

The episode was made possible by support from E1 Ventures.

Enjoy!

The facts are these: Peter Beck is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, and Rocket Lab is an absolute beast in the aerospace world. It has launched more than 60 times from spaceports in New Zealand and the US and is in the midst of creating a bigger, more powerful rocket to help it earn more business and compete more directly against SpaceX and others.

Beck and Rocket Lab also happen to be near and dear to my heart. I wrote a book about them and made a movie about them.

Beck has an incredible life story. He?s a self-taught rocket engineer who built a commercial space giant in New Zealand. None of this should really be possible. You?re supposed to have a PhD in aerospace and/or billions of dollars to be successful in the rocket game, and you?re supposed to build rockets in places that have some experience building rockets. Nonetheless, here we are. Rocket Lab sits alongside SpaceX as the obvious winners to date in the commercial rocket and commercial space games.

We?re thrilled that Beck gave us some time as he crunches away on preparing the Neutron rocket for its first launch.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. We thank them for their support.

Enjoy!

For more podcasts and the finest in sci-tech reporting, subscribe here.

Back when I first began covering technology in the early 2000s, my favorite thing to write about was open source software. I was young and idealistic, and the hardcore free software and open source zealots spoke to me. Code was meant to be by the people, for the people. Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen seemed like heroes. Microsoft and its proprietary code-fueled desktop monopoly seemed clearly evil. I enjoyed the energy and vitriol on both sides during the peak of these debates. Linux 4EVA!!, I would write on my all-too hard to use Debian machine.

The software religious wars kind of, sort of linger on but in much more muted forms than I remember.

Sad.

We, however, might have a proper tech revolutionary for this contemporary era in the form of Guillaume Verdon.

Some of you will know Verdon better as Beff Jezos, the X personality who built the e/acc or effective accelerationist movement into a countervailing force against the doomy, gloomy Effective Altruism movement, which, rather comically, managed to undermine itself without Verdon?s help by taking gobs of money from the anxiety-ridden villain SBF and wrapping itself in an uninspiring blanket of malaise.

Anyway, Verdon became and remains a thing both with e/acc and with his start-up Extropic, and the two are very much interlinked.

Extropic has shown early success with ?thermodynamic computing.? It?s a form of computing that Verdon says harnesses the underlying properties of nature and probabilities in far better ways than traditional computers and in more practical ways (possibly) than quantum computers. Verdon used to work on quantum computers under Sergey Brin at Google, so he might even know what he?s talking about.

The revolutionary part of all this is that Verdon thinks Extropic will make cheaper, more energy efficient AI processing systems than the likes of Nvidia, OpenAI and Google. His AI computers will not require trillion dollar investments in data centers but rather will be affordable to the masses (possibly).

It?s very early days for Extropic, so much of this decentralized AI fervor is fueled by prognostication and hope.

Obviously, we get into all of this on the pod.

The show starts Extropic heavy and then veers into e/acc and decentralized AI territory. So, if thermodynamic computing is not your thing, go ahead and skip to the more philosophical stuff where you?ll find that Verdon is fun to listen to and something of an engineer philosopher.

This podcast was sponsored by e1 Ventures ? the smartest and most noble podcast sponsor in Silicon Valley and all points beyond.

First. The news.

The bio-tech player New Limit has raised $130 million from just about the fanciest assembly of smart, rich people imaginable. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross ? via NFDG - Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Human Capital are there in their corporate forms and Patrick and John Collison, Josh Kushner, Joe Lonsdale and Fred Ehrsam are there as individuals.

Over the past four years, New Limit has been trying to identify the right combinations of transcription factors ? a certain class of proteins ? that can rewind cells and take them back to a younger state. Their work piggybacks on the Nobel Prize winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, and it?s among the most exciting technology in the entire bio-tech field ? at least for me. As you?ll hear in this interview, they?ve made massive progress over the past 18 months or so.

We?ve talked about transcription factors and related technology with Joe Betts LaCroix from Retro (podcast under the Joe link, and full video episode on Retro here) and with Brian Armstrong, who co-founded New Limit.

In this episode, however, we hung out with Jacob Kimmel, another New Limit co-founder, for a real deep dive on transcription factors and New Limit?s approach to taming them. Kimmel is as clear and eloquent as it gets on explaining this technology.

This pod might feel different than the usual pods. It comes from a sit down interview we did with Kimmel for an upcoming Core Memory video on New Limit. Still, it?s glorious.

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by the wonderful people at E1 Ventures. Their money and hearts are pure.

Earlier this month, Nature published some of the results from a multi-year effort to better understand the visual cortex of mice.

The work took place under the MICrONS effort backed by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), one of the U.S. government?s more exotic research arms. And it represented a ground-breaking attempt to blend cutting-edge techniques in how we analyze brains with artificial intelligence technology.

As The New York Times wrote,

The researchers zeroed in on a portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes.

The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections.

Andreas Tolias, our guest on today?s podcast, was one of many researchers involved in this effort, and he walked us through MICrONS in detail.

Tolias also took us on an exploration of the history and future of brain research and his current passion, which is to represent human brains in digital form. He?s a fascinating man working one of the most fascinating areas of science.

This episode was sponsored by the kind people at E1 Ventures. Enjoy!

Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong joins the pod to discuss crypto, crypto, crypto.

Well, not really.

Everyone asks Armstrong about crypto all the time, so we decided to head in a different direction and focus on his life and his interests around very cutting-edge science. Armstrong, for example, co-founded and backed New Limit, which is working on therapies to reverse the damage of aging. (We?ll have a Core Memory video episode on them soon.)

He?s also been on X talking about the Gattaca Stack. This is his vision of the IVF clinic of the future in which people can make eggs from skin cells and do all sorts of gene editing on embryos either to thwart diseases or even give babies some enhancements. And he sees these babies coming to life in artificial wombs.

Let?s get weird, y?all.

As Coinbase CEO, Armstrong has been to known to generate controversy now and again with some strongly held views on politics in the workplace and on the Feds. The press has not taken kindly to Armstrong at times for said views, and we get into that as well.

If you listen to this and need you some more Brian Armstrong, there?s a great documentary on him and Coinbase called Coin.

And now on with the show.

If you?ve seen HBO?s Wild, Wild Space or read When the Heavens Went on Sale, then Chris Kemp needs no introduction. Kemp is one of the stars in both works.

For the less familiar, Kemp is the co-founder and CEO of Astra Space, a maker of rockets based in Alameda, Calif. For several years now, Astra has been on a quest to create the cheapest, easiest to launch rocket in the market and to turn rocket-making into a mass production affair.

The company has enjoyed glorious highs all the way to orbit and lows where it verged on bankruptcy. Over the past year, Kemp and Astra co-founder Adam London took the company private and raised a fresh $80 million as they head toward flying Rocket 4 - their next-generation machine. We have lots more on that story here.

In this episode, we get into Astra?s tumultuous journey with Kemp, his disdain for some of my filmmaking choices and the future of rockets. He envisions a world with rocket launch sites in many countries and rockets ferrying things like drones into battles in far-off places in a matter of seconds.

As always, you can listen here or via your favorite podcast provider. And we have a YouTube channel with the podcasts and our latest science and tech videos. Leave a review. Like and subscribe. Calm our souls.

Most of all - enjoy!

We flipped the tables on Dwarkesh Patel this week and turned the podcaster into the podcastee.

Over the past few years, Patel has made a name for himself as a stellar interviewer of interesting people. Whether questioning a scientist, historian or tech engineer, Patel always goes deep with the subject and refuses to dumb things down for any audience. This is a blessing in an era of our attention being seized by 30-second blips and bloops on our phones and social apps.

Patel had done a particularly excellent job on the AI front. He?s interviewed most of the major players in the AI field as large language models have risen to the fore. To that end, this podcast brings news. Patel and his co-author Gavin Leech are putting out a new book on AI through Stripe Press. Called The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, the book is an oral history of the recent AI era.

You can buy it in digital form now and later in hardback. (Look at that Stripe Press website, publishers. Know what you?re capable of with some effort.) I received an early copy, and it really is a wonderful way to understand current AI technology and its implications.

In this episode, Patel and I, of course, talk AI, but we also delve into his life and sudden rise as a podcasting force. We recorded the program together in Patel?s San Francisco podcasting lair. I enjoyed his beard. You will enjoy the show.

A few years ago, I caught wind that Sergey Brin had started funding an airship start-up called LTA (Lighter Than Air) Research.

After hitting up some sources, I came to learn that the man heading up the airship venture was Dr. Alan Weston. And, after digging around some more, I came to learn that Dr. Alan Weston had lived an extraordinary life.

Among many other things, Weston performed the earliest bungee jumps while a member of the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford. He later built space weapons as part of the Star Wars effort under Ronald Reagan. Then, while at NASA, Weston led a team making a super low-cost lunar lander. (The story of that project is documented in When The Heavens Went on Sale.)

Post NASA, Weston began constructing airships for Brin in a hangar on the NASA Ames campus.

Few people have experienced such a range of engineering adventures and fewer still have such knowledge about the aerospace industry. This is to say you?re going to enjoy the chat with Weston.

Also, this podcast comes with breaking news. We can report that Al Weston has left his post as CEO of LTA and now leads up rocket development at Astra. He?ll be looking to get the company?s Rocket 4 into orbit soon.

(We recored this before our video podcast era started and before Weston joined Astra. It?s also possible I called this Episode 2. Fear not. It?s Episode 10.)

Few figures in Brain Computer Interface Land can match Max Hodak?s output over the past decade.

He helped start Neuralink in 2016 and then went on to start Science Corp. in 2021. Science has been working on implants to help restore vision and has clinical trials underway with the technology. The company has also built out a line of brain computer interface products for others to use and is exploring some very weird and promising technology around lab-built neurons that can be infused into brains.

Hodak has done relatively few interviews over the years and there?s not much about his background available online. I recently paid a visit to Science?s headquarters in Alameda, Calif. to rectify this situation and speak with Hodak about his science journey, his philosophies around tech and business and where BCI technology is heading as humans and machines join forces . . . possibly for good.

Also, we discuss the Jennifer Aniston neuron, if you?re into that sort of thing.

As ever, you can subscribe to the Core Memory podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and all other fine podcast purveyors, and you can find past episodes here. Do us a solid and leave some ratings and reviews. Thanks!

For the past decade, the scientist Suzanne Gildert has been working to imbue robots and AIs with new skills. She co-founded a pair of start-ups - Kindred and Sanctuary AI - that strove to add intelligence to robotic arms and bodies. The results were robotic arms that could do factory work at Kindred and then an upscaled, much weirder version of the technology at Sanctuary.

In the background, Gildert spent much of her time longing to really bring robots and AIs to life. She?s been an advocate of a very sci-fi future where humans and androids go about the world alongside each other and share in their day-to-day lives. Gildert has pined for a future in which our metal companions have thoughts and feelings that resemble ours.

Her latest start-up - Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies Inc. - is an attempt to bring those hopes and dreams to fruition.

Gildert contends that current AI systems based on large language models are likely too limited to result in consciousness (or something like it) arising. Her theory is that the roots of consciousness may actually come from AI models derived from the quantum realm where physics gets funkier.

Gildert will forever be better than I am at explaining her hypothesis. So get comfy, open your mind and have a listen.

Don?t meet your heroes unless your hero is John Markoff. For he is as good as billed.

No one has broken more stories about the technology industry or documented more of Silicon Valley?s most crucial moments than Markoff, the longtime scribe for The New York Times. He was the journalist I most wanted to model my career after, and I will remain forever jealous of all the things he witnessed first hand from the rise of semiconductors and the PC industry, to the arrival of the internet and the robotics and AI revolutions. John has always brought technology and Silicon Valley culture to life for the masses and done so with style, smarts and integrity.

Beyond his work for The Times, Markoff has written a number of seminal books about Silicon Valley. My favorites might be What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. But you should go ahead and read them all.

I tried to use this conversation to get Markoff?s thoughts on topics old and new, ranging from the early days of the PC right on up to LLMs. The man remains as insightful as ever, and I remain an unabashed admirer.

Enjoy.

Several years ago, KFC did something ridiculous. It hired a giant, stratospheric balloon maker called World View to put its Zinger Chicken sandwich into space. Or at least near space.

This was an expensive, showy endeavor and no less than Rob Lowe came on as a new Colonel Sanders-cum-Mission Control Lead for the stunt. Ultimately, the sandwich did not go quite as high as KFC wanted, but, still, I was entertained.

A young man named Andrew Antonio helped drive much of World View?s marketing for the space sandwich. And he became something of a stratospheric balloon guru in the process.

He?s now the CEO of Urban Sky, a maker of smallish balloons that can be launched in a matter of minutes and, just as impressively, the guest on this episode of the Core Memory pod.

We, of course, talk about the KFC happening and about putting humans, cameras, sensors and all kinds of things into the stratosphere. Antonio?s dream is to have the stratosphere filled with balloons performing useful tasks. As you might expect, China and Russia share in these ambitions.

Enjoy the show.

Dina Radenkovic has set out to reshape women?s health.

Gameto, her start-up based in Austin, has spent the last four years working on stem cell engineering technology that it expects to aim at things ranging from fertility treatments to menopause. On the fertility front, Gameto already has a product called Fertilo that reduces the time women must go through painful, hormonal injections from two weeks down to a couple of days. It?s been approved for use in several countries and is being studied now in a clinical trial in the U.S.

Fertilo works by replicating ovarian cells in a lab and using those cells to mature eggs outside of the body. It?s another example of the iSPC, or induced pluripotent stem cells, technology that has the bio-tech world so excited.

Radenkovic hopes that similar technology can be applied to menopause in the future and lessen the dramatic hormonal shifts women experience.

Born in Serbia, Radenkovic is a doctor and has raised $73 million in venture funding for Gameto to date.

In this episode, we?re joined by the test pilot Elliot Seguin to learn what it?s like to put your life on the line on a regular basis.

Unlike most of the people in his profession, Seguin did not do the whole Top Gun-style military training. He earned his status as a test pilot the hard way by putting in the hours flying all kinds of aircraft and convincing people to give him a go in their birds.

He?s an engineer. A racer. And a brave and possibly nuts soul.

We talk with Seguin about the test pilot lifestyle, his career and The Mojave.

Fresh off closing a $200 million funding round, Ben Lamm from Colossal Biosciences - now valued at more than $10 billion - joins Core Memory - now valued at less than $10 billion - to talk about bringing extinct animals back to our fair planet.

The company has set to work on woolly mammoths, the dodo bird, and the thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger) in its effort to restore animals and ecosystems. To pull this off, Colossal must develop a host of gene editing technologies and artificial wombs, and we get into all this beautiful science.

It?s cool and bonkers and controversial - the holy pod trinity.

A few weeks ago, I went out to Zipline?s test facility in Half Moon Bay, California for a dinner and to see their delivery drones in action. I was not expecting much.

It feels like we?ve been promised delivery drones for years and years. And, in fact, we have. These visions of the future don?t always arrive on schedule, but the delivery drones were feeling extra tardy. I also wasn?t even sure if delivery drones made that much sense.

Drones run loud. They could obviously crash into things. It?s hard to imagine a sky full of these aircraft working that well.

During the dinner, though, Zipline pulled off a sneak attack maneuver and plopped some cookies down right beside me without me noticing the drone at all.

The technology was quiet and precise, and it made me want to learn more - which is why we?re bringing you Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the company?s co-founder and CEO, on this latest podcast.

Sam Altman has placed a few very large bets. There?s OpenAI, of course, and Helion Energy for fusion; World (fka Worldcoin) for finance and identity; and then Retro Bio for longevity.

In late 2023, I did a deep dive on Retro?s technology and Altman?s $180 million investment in the company. [Update: Would like to make it clear that MIT Technology Review reporter Antonio Regalado broke the story on Retro?s existence and Altman?s backing. This post previously had some self-congratulatory language that made it sound like I got there first. My apologies to Antonio, who does brilliant work.] Along the way, I got to know the Retro co-founder and CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix and have spent a lot of time following Retro?s work since. Betts-LaCroix has an unusual background and an original philosophy on life. In this episode, we explore both along with the heart of Retro?s science.

This is the first episode of the Core Memory podcast, and we?re beyond amazed to reveal that James Mercer and Jon Sortland of The Shins worked up the music for the show. We go hard.