Ashlee Vance

Core Memory

About the show

Core Memory is a podcast about science and technology hosted by best-selling author and filmmaker Ashlee Vance. Vance has spent the past two decades chronicling advances in science and tech for publications like The Economist, The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. Along with the stories, he's written best-selling books like Elon Musk’s biography, made an Emmy-nominated tech TV show watched by millions and produced films for HBO and Netflix. The goal has always been to bring the tales of complex technology and compelling people to the public and give them a path into exceptional and unusual worlds they would not normally have a chance to experience. www.corememory.com

Newest episodes

The Boy Wonder Of India’s New Tech Scene - EP 95 Naman Pushp

Nov 4, 2026 1 hr 27 min

This week’s guest is Naman Pushp, the founder and CEO of Airbound. Pushp is all of 21 years old and trying to build an aerospace giant in India. His company, Airbound, produces carbon fiber to create very lightweight, very efficient aircraft used for the moment to deliver small packages of cargo around the country. Pushp’s core thesis is that the aviation industry has not been aggressive enough with its use of carbon fiber and that he can uses materials advances to outflank drone delivery companies first and then perhaps create a new class of planes for humans too. These are big hopes and dreams and very big claims! And the company has a long, long way to go. But this is all to be expected. I recently visited Airbound’s headquarters and test sites in Bangalore and came away rather impressed with Pushp and his team. They’ve built two versions of their aircraft, and we watched dozens of them fill the skies. The machines take off vertically and then zoom off like airplanes. They’re quiet, and they can hover. Pushp is a self-taught engineer who learned how to build things with carbon fiber by watching YouTube videos and then began constructing aircraft in his teenage bedroom. He got into Carnegie Mellon but skipped university to build Airbound instead. He’s bright and (very) confident. He’s also representative of a new era in Indian technology. Some of the country’s brightest, most ambitious youngsters are opting to stay at home and to try and build hard tech companies that do real innovation, as opposed to mimicking what has happened elsewhere. We get into ALL of this on the podcast. And this marks the start of a series of videos, podcasts, and stories we have coming on the rise of the Indian tech scene. I’ve already managed to anger a large swath of the Indian venture capital industry with this story and am sure to anger others as we go on this journey. SPONSOR The wonderful people at Brex helped make these stories from India possible. You can catch a taste of the ad...

The Man Who Sees The Future - EP 94 Neal Stephenson

Oct 28, 2026 1 hr 37 min

Neal Stephenson came on the podcast. What else do I have to tell you? The man has a weird mind portal into how technology will develop and has influenced generations of nerds. As a result, I seem to have spent my career covering things that Stephenson predicted in his best-selling books. He’s out with a new book now, D: Heavy Water, which served as a lovely excuse to get Neal on the show. In the episode, we talk space, brain computer interfaces, swords, Hollywood and much more. Oddly, Stephenson says that the rapid development of AI caught him off guard. Go figure. Anyway. Living Legend. Go listen and watch. SPONSOR Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex. I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time. Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro1:53 D and the Atomic Race4:34 Inside the Book Tour8:21 AI Caught Him Off Guard11:09 Is This the Singularity?15:27 AI's Manhattan Project Moment28:32 Brains, Bodies and Words38:31 What Actually Worries Neal40:11 Can Fiction Inspire Progress?49:56 Why No Snow Crash?55:06 Jane Austen Meets Fortnite1:03:21 Inside Early Blue Origin1:13:43 Rockets, Guns and Giant Towers1:20:36 Why Radical Rockets Struggle1:23:05 Swords and Selective Technology1:27:15 Can AI Fix Education?1:32:31 Storytelling Versus Predicting the Future 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 Future Of Fighter Jets - EP 93 Hermeus With Zach Shore And A.J. Piplica

Oct 21, 2026 53 min

We’re heading into fighter jet territory this week with Zach Shore (CEO) and A.J. Piplica (Co-Founder and Executive Chairman) of Hermeus. Founded in 2018, Hermeus has set out to make supersonic and even hypersonic jets that can fly themselves. They’re part of this new wave of defense startups trying to prove that the U.S. can still produce technological marvels in a timely and not criminally expensive fashion. Hermeus’s planes would be a new breed of fighter jets that can use their speed and autonomy to carry out missions without putting pilots at risk. We conducted this interview with Shore and Piplica a couple of months back at Spaceport America just ahead of a test flight of Hermeus’s Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 plane. I’m pleased to tell you that the plane did indeed go supersonic, and it was awesome to behold. We’ll have a video on the experience soon on our YouTube channel. This interview covers Hermeus’s journey, the state of the U.S. defense industry, plane design and how the U.S. hopes to keep pace with China in areas like hypersonic flight. Hermeus’s planes are remotely piloted for now, but it has partnered with Anduril to give its aircraft autonomous mission capabilities. For hypersonic flight, it’s developing a fascinating hybrid engine design intended to switch from a turbine to a ramjet midair. Hermeus achieved supersonic flight on Mk 2.1’s third test flight and is betting it can keep building and testing new prototypes much faster than traditional defense contractors. You can see its planes and timelines here. SPONSOR Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex. I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time. Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out mor...

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All episodes

The Boy Wonder Of India’s New Tech Scene - EP 95 Naman Pushp

Nov 4, 2026 1 hr 27 min

The Man Who Sees The Future - EP 94 Neal Stephenson

Oct 28, 2026 1 hr 37 min

The Future Of Fighter Jets - EP 93 Hermeus With Zach Shore And A.J. Piplica

Oct 21, 2026 53 min

Robots Like Us - EP 92 Andrew Kiguel and Matt McMullen From Realbotix

Oct 14, 2026 1 hr 12 min

Our guests this week are Andrew Kiguel and Matt McMullen from Realbotix. Realbotix makes humanoid robots that actually look like humans. McMullen, who founded the company, has spent years refining the animatronics and materials needed to create lifelike machines. His past creations have received tons of media attention both because they’re striking and because they veer into companionship and sex territory. Lars and the Real Girl? Yep, that’s Matt’s work. Realbotix, though, is an attempt to take the technology in a different direction. The company has made AI-infused bots that it wants to put to work out in the world. The bots could greet guests at hotels, provide information at hospitals or perhaps tutor students at schools. The Realbotix bots can carry on conversations and use vision systems to recognize people and take in their surroundings. We conducted this interview in Las Vegas where Realbotix has its headquarters. In a future video on our YouTube channel, which is awesome and you should subscribe to, I head out into Vegas with a bot named Aria, and we have a delightful afternoon together. Some of you will think these robots are weird. And I get this. I will, however, add that most of the humanoids out there are very boring. Companies have focused on what the robots can do rather than what they look like. The folks at Realbotix, by contrast, have put a lot of time and energy into trying to figure out how humans and robots will interact and progress together. We get into all of this on the show. SPONSOR Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex. I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time. Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here. TIMESTAM...

He Bought A Ghost Town And Became A YouTube Star - EP 91 Brent Underwood

Oct 7, 2026 56 min

This week’s guest is Brent Underwood, the proud owner of Cerro Gordo Mines. That’s right. In 2018, Underwood bought the ghost town of Cerro Gordo, located near Death Valley in California, and its old mining operations for $1.4 million. This was a legit crazy thing to do. But, here we are eight years later, and Underwood has turned his sidequest into his mainquest, and he now has a booming YouTube channel in which he documents life at Cerro Gordo. This includes exploration of the mines and Underwood’s attempt to restore the ghost town into a habitable site that people can visit. You will notice (if you’re viewing instead of just listening) that the set for this podcast is awesome. That’s because we went to visit Underwood a couple of months back for this podcast and for a video that will be coming out on our own booming YouTube channel. We spent a couple of nights at Cerro Gordo, living in an old miner’s house, and we explored the grounds with Underwood. As you’ll hear in this episode, Cerro Gordo was a long-running silver mine and, at its peak, had 4,000 people living in the mountains and working the many miles of mines. It’s quite well preserved. You can see the old brothel, theater, and store. And Underwood has been rebuilding the American Hotel that once served as the centerpiece of the town. Underwood does crazy things at Cerro Gordo. He’ll lower himself down the main mine shaft and then spend days underground. He’s used his exploring to help build out the history of Cerro Gordo and wrote an amazing book about Cerro Gordo and his adventures. You should probably buy it and read it. We obviously get into all of the above with Underwood, who is a wonderful storyteller and a good dude. SPONSOR Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex. I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantas...

He’s Here To End Death - EP 90 Dr. Emil Kendziorra

Sep 30, 2026 1 hr 30 min

A few years ago, some people put me in a van and drove me to the edge of Moscow. And by “the edge of Moscow,” I mean where things started to get a bit rural. We turned off a road and went toward what looked like a modest farmhouse with a shed. After exiting the van, we entered said shed and found two large metal containers that were full of human bodies and heads along with the bodies of many animals, including dogs, cats, and a hummingbird. Have a look. These bodies were being cryopreserved with liquid nitrogen in the hope that they could be reanimated at some point in the future when science has advanced and more illnesses can be cured. Cryopreservation/reanimation is not a new idea. It’s been contemplated in literature for hundreds of years. Alcor, perhaps the most well-known cryopreservation company, was founded way back in 1972. The field, though, has suffered from questionable science and been seen as a scientific backwater. Our guest this week wants to add scientific, intellectual, and pragmatic rigor to the cryopreservation field or what he calls the biostasis field. He’s Dr. Emil Kendziorra, the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio. Tomorrow Bio has a team that will show up at the end of life and prepare someone’s body for preservation and then store their body in a Swiss vault. In this episode, we get into the mechanics behind Tomorrow Bio and the pros and cons of biostasis. Kendziorra is a sober, deep thinker on this topic and a great listen. OUR SPONSOR BREX The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster. We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. TIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube) CHAPTERS0:00 Intro5:08 Cryonics Without the Ice8:45 Heads in a Russian Shed12:26 Longevity's Backup Plan19:39 The First Hours After Death30:11 Funding a Second Life37:15 Does Cryonics Actually Work?43:40 Preserving Brains Without Bodies50:52 Why Not Reverse Aging?55:21...

The Wordcel Queen Of Silicon Valley — EP 89 Anna Gát

Sep 23, 2026 1 hr 28 min

We’ve heard a lot of moonshot ideas on this podcast, but this week’s guest may have the most impossible one yet: making tech more cultured. In this episode, Ashlee sat down with Anna Gát, a Hungarian philosopher, playwright, and founder of Interintellect, a platform for hosting intellectual conversations online. She calls herself “the bridge” between the humanities, academia, and the tech world, which in practice means getting engineers to read Goethe. Gát grew up on a TV set in communist Hungary. Her parents made the country’s biggest shows in an era when there was one channel available on Saturdays. In 2015, a family crisis left her starting over in London with two suitcases, one of them for books. She rebuilt her life on Twitter, DM’d Sam Altman, and got him as her first meeting on her first trip to America. Before Interintellect, Gát did just about every wordcel job you can do: playwright, screenwriter, script doctor. She holds graduate degrees in philosophical aesthetics and linguistics, currently splits her time between SF and NYC. The company that would become Interintellect began in London in 2016 as an AI tool for helping “humans have categorically better conversations.” On the side, she angel invests in aerospace. The two get into why X was once the French café that could publish you and is now a place you can’t get discovered from, why the East Coast’s healthiest, wealthiest people are so convinced the future is doomed, and the duty AI builders have to explain themselves. Gát also admits, on the record, that she’s a sucker for Elon Musk’s syntax. Ashlee tries to convince her that kids don’t read books anymore. She tries to convince him Silicon Valley should fund symphonies. IN THIS EPISODE Interintellect — https://www.interintellect.com The Hope Axis — https://twitter.com/TheHopeAxis Anna on X — https://x.com/TheAnnaGat OUR SPONSORS BREX The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter an...

Solar Energy's Second Act — EP 88 Joel Jean

Sep 16, 2026 1 hr 29 min

In this episode, Ashlee sits down with Joel Jean, CEO of Swift Solar, a San Carlos-based startup trying to create new solar technology using perovskite. We previously published a story about Swift, if you’re wondering what the f*ck perovskite is! In short, it’s a synthetic crystal that turns sunlight into electricity better and cheaper than the silicon currently used in solar panels. This stuff is finicky though, and experts have doubts, as they always do — but Jean explains how Swift is closing in on a solution. “Everyone and their mom can make a perovskite that’s decently efficient,” Jean says, but no one seems capable of making it as durable as silicon. The material degrades under heat, light and its own moving ions. This is obviously not the ideal situation for an energy grid. So why not stick with silicon? Well, the laws of physics haven’t quite blessed it. A silicon panel can turn, at most, about 30 percent of the sunlight it gets into electricity, and today’s panels usually churn out about 25 percent. If they’re able to successfully layer perovskite on top, that pushes the ceiling to 45 percent. These are fabulous gains in the solar nerd world, and we could really use some innovation here because we are one very, very energy-hungry species. And of course, this is Core Memory, so you know where this is headed: China and AI. China makes 90 percent of the world’s solar cells and wafers, installs more panels than the rest of the planet combined, and builds the machines that nearly every U.S. solar factory runs on. (Except for Swift, apparently!). That dependency is, as always, a risk. Meanwhile, AI data centers need more power than God, and the folks making models are happy to welcome any new gains in that department. Some are even putting their money on it; renowned AI researcher Jeff Dean has invested Swift. Charge your crystals, folks. We’re perovskite-maxxing. IN THIS EPISODE This Is The U.S.’s Last Chance At Solar — Core Memory Swift Solar Meyer Burger acqui...

The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

Sep 9, 2026 1 hr 23 min

This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it. Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats. Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode! Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him: “The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the b******t of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.” Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon...

Gene Therapies That Work? - EP 86 Adrian Veres

Sep 2, 2026 1 hr 34 min

We have been promised glorious gene therapies for decades. This is supposed to be the stuff of reprogramming the body to blunt or cure diseases with something approaching a permanent fix. While gene therapy progress has been made, treatments remain rare and expensive, and it’s very tough to get the therapies to go into the desired parts of the body. Our guest this week is here to help. He’s Adrian Veres, the chief scientific officer and co-founder of Dyno Therapeutics. Founded in 2018, Dyno has been pursuing new and better ways to deliver gene therapies via modified viruses. Dyno was well ahead of the AI meets biotech curve, using AI models to design new viral shells that let genetic instructions get into the right places of the body. For the moment, Dyno has focused on creating delivery mechanisms for companies working on therapies aimed at the brain, eye and muscles. In this episode, we talk with Veres about the promise and perils of gene therapy technology, some of the most recent cases where gene therapies worked and how Dyno’s technology came to be and functions. And we get Veres’s take on whether or not we’re entering a golden age of biotech on the back of AI. Due to some poor camera work on my part, Veres, who is a tall man, looks particularly giant. Fear not, he did not harm me and was actually quite nice. OUR SPONSORS BREX The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster. We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. SENDCUTSEND You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. IN THIS EPISODE Dyno Therapeutics: https://www.dynotx.com/ The FDA framework for individualized ultra-rare disease therapies: https://www.fda.gov...

The Realest Longevity Guru - EP 85 Alex Colville

Aug 26, 2026 1 hr 39 min

Over the past five years, Alex Colville has become one of the most influential figures in the longevity and aging fields. There’s a decent chance you have not heard of him, which is a bit by design. Unlike many longevity gurus, Colville does not seek much attention and, for the most part, operates in the background where he’s been doling out many millions of dollars in investments. Today, Colville runs age1, a venture capital firm that has backed the likes of Loyal, Science, Conception and a bunch of other companies listed as “Stealth” on its web site. Colville is the guy I call to reality check whatever is being hyped up in Longevity Land. He studies the actual science. He reaches sober conclusions. He’s honest about where the technology is today and what might show promise in the future. In this episode, we get into Colville’s takes on GLP-1s, partial cell reprogramming, China’s biotech rise, the odd animals teaching us the most about longevity and, well, the prospects of living forever. We also get into Colville’s life and unusual rise as the longevity kingmaker, and, of course, we discuss keeping a human head alive without a body because what choice did we have. If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!! OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. Brex 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. Times...

AI Will Cure Us All!! Or Not!! - EP 84 Abhi Mahajan

Aug 20, 2026 1 hr 58 min

Every couple of days, a new AI-meets-biotech startup sends me a pitch, and the pitches all sound the same. AI is amazing, and it can now tame biology. We’re on the cusp of producing new cures for diseases at a rapid rate, and these startups know just how to get the job done. To which you should wonder – is this at all true? On this week’s Core Memory episode, we have brought in the big brains to answer – or at least debate – this question. Our resident science whiz and medical professional Eryney Marrogi takes on the hosting duties to interview Abhishaike Mahajan, he of Owl Posting and now OpenAI Foundation fame. These two men of science take hold of this AI/biotech moment to explore where we’re seeing the most promise from this new wave of technology and where the messiness of biology continues to confound AI. They also get into some lighter topics like our collective death from AI bioweapons and China’s impending biotech dominance. Good times. You’re all probably buzzing over Moderna’s stock price doubling and the end of cancer. So ride that enthusiasm right into this podcast and see how you’re feeling on the other side. If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!! OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. Brex 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. Timestamps (they link out to YouTube) 0:00 Intro...

The Google Engineer Who Set The Skydiving Record At 58 - EP 83 Alan Eustace

Jul 22, 2026 2 hr 7 min

Most people think that the Red Bull guy Felix Baumgartner holds the skydiving record. But this is not the case. The real record-holder is Alan Eustace. In 2014, at age 58, the Google engineer rode a helium-filled balloon into the stratosphere and then fell back to Earth from 135,890 feet. Eustace’s fall lasted 4 minutes and 27 seconds, and he broke the sound barrier, reaching a max speed of 822 mph. And now, in a very rare appearance, Eustace has come on the podcast to discuss his adventure. Baumgartner, who dropped from 128,852 feet, received tons of attention because Red Bull turned his jump into a media spectacle. Eustace, by contrast, came up with the plan for his jump and spacesuit at his kitchen table, paid for a small team to help him build his suit and then did his skydive with just a single reporter there as a witness. This all fits with Eustace’s personality. He’s quite private and just goes about his work. It took several months of begging to get Eustace on the show, and I don’t think he’s ever discussed his skydive in this type of detail before. In this episode, we get into what drove a 58-year-old man to want to chase this feat, the rich history of stratosphere jumping and Eustace’s remarkable career as one of the key Google engineers who built the modern internet. We also hear Eustace’s thoughts on AI and his latest quest to search the ocean floor. (I apologize for saying that Eustace jumped from space in the episode. It was the stratosphere. I was excited.) If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!! OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. Brex The Core...

An Implant That Tracks And Treats Cancer Tumors - EP 82 Ben Woodington

Jul 15, 2026 1 hr 22 min

Treating cancer remains a crude practice. We cut, burn and poison tumors, and we do all this with relatively little precision around both the initial treatment and our ongoing monitoring of how effective the treatment is. You show up for scans now and again and hope that whatever you’ve been doing has been working. Ben Woodington - who is an absolute unit - and the team at Coherence have come up with a new way to monitor and treat tumors. They’ve built an implant that, as the name suggests, gets placed inside the body to keep a constant watch on a tumor’s behavior. The chip also brings with it the ability to deliver electrical signals that may blunt a tumor’s growth. We’re talking constant monitoring of a tumor to see if treatments are working and the ability to read and write electrical signals as part of a totally novel bio-tech device. In this episode, Ben explains how this technology works and, more broadly, he walks us through the emerging field of neuro-oncology or cancer neuroscience. We have a look at Coherence’s device, which is reminiscent of Neuralink’s implant, and rival technology. Since we recorded this episode, Coherence has begun a study in Australia where its device is being used to record and stimulate brain activity in patients having brain tumors removed. The company has also put out a paper detailing some of its work and has brought on Neuralink’s neurosurgery lead Matthew MacDougall as an advisor and investor. This episode was a treat for me because I had no idea this type of technology even existed, and because Coherence seems to have made a remarkable amount of progress on its hardware in a short time. If you can spare a minute, please do us a favor by filling out this ever so brief survey, so we can learn a bit more about our subscribers. Help us be better for you. Thanks!! OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then...

Inside The Media Marvel That Is TBPN

Jul 9, 2026 5 min

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.corememory.com Running a media business is hard. You’re competing for people’s attention. You must produce a relentless stream of new things that are good and different. And you’re often dependent on the ever-changing whims of the public and advertisers. John Coogan and Jordi Hays somehow made all of this look easy when they started TBPN in late 2024. The daily tech ne…

Quantum Everything Explained - EP 81 Prineha Narang

Jul 8, 2026 1 hr 38 min

Prineha Narang is one of the rising stars of science and the field of quantum technology. She earned her PhD in applied physics at Caltech, taught materials science at Harvard and now has her own lab at UCLA. The lab focuses on quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, photonics, quantum information science and other easily digestible areas. Beyond her academic career, Narang is a science advisor to the government and a venture capitalist at DCVC. As you might imagine, we get into quantum computing and quantum technology in this episode. Quantum vs. AI, the US vs. China, when quantum tech will break encryption, quantum sensing and whether or not quantum technology actually has a bright future. The quantum sensing portion of the chat was all new to me and rather astonishing. Since Narang is also a competitive runner and mountaineer, we provide some top tips on gear because that is just the kind of all-purpose podcast that we deliver. And, if you can’t get enough quantum computing, come check out our video episode on PsiQuantum building the largest quantum machine in history. Enjoy! OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you! Brex 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. Narang Lab at UCLA: https://naranglab.ucla.edu DCVC: https://www.dcvc.com Oratomic (the Caltech neutral atom spinout): https://www.oratomic.com Atom Computing: https://atom-computing.com Mesa Quantum: https://mesaquantum.com Google's work on the cost of quantu...

He Came From Oz To Save American Manufacturing - EP 80 Chris Power

Jul 1, 2026 58 min

A few years ago, I was lunching with a young Australian man who told me he hoped to modernize manufacturing in America. This man seemed enthusiastic and ambitious, but I must confess to holding some serious doubts about the dramatic scope of his plans and his ability to pull them off. This man was Chris Power, and, well, he did the thing. He’s the founder and CEO of Hadrian, which has a growing empire of mega factories packed full of machines that cut, bend and weld metal. Hadrian has become a workhorse for defense and aerospace and other big industries. It has used software to make it easier for people to control many machines at once and to keep track of the manufacturing process in a bid to add more quality control to industry. Power has become one of the main players in the Reindustrialization movement and one of its more direct and critical voices. We did this interview at Hadrian’s headquarters in Los Angeles with factories humming behind us, and we’ll have a video with all the machines soon on our YouTube channel. Chris and I get into his history, Hadrian’s history and the state of American manufacturing. To celebrate AMERICAN MANUFACTURING and AMERICA and THE WORLD CUP and BEING SUBJECTED TO A BROKEN HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM, we’re offering a magnificent 4th of July merch SALE, SALE, SALE. Come get 30 percent off Core Memory’s hats, shirts and hoodies by using the promo code AMERICAAA right here. OUR SPONSORS SendCutSend You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. Brex 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 o...

The Manufacturing Phenomenon That Is SendCutSend - EP 79 Jim Belosic

Jun 24, 2026 1 hr 20 min

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 SPONSORS SendCutSend Do you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? Then head on over t...

Body Scanners, Banned Models, and DeepMind's Space Game Obsession - EP 78 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

Jun 19, 2026 1 hr 26 min

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 SPONSORS SendCutSend 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. Brex 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. 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 b...

The Future Of Our Brains And Bodies - EP 77 Max Hodak Live Event

Jun 17, 2026 1 hr 9 min

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. Timestamps 0:00 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 Space Race Is So Back — EP 76 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

Jun 10, 2026 1 hr 22 min

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 “Per...

Redwood Materials Has Built A Recyling Empire

Jun 9, 2026 1 hr 7 min

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 SPONSOR SendCutSend 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. 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

Can You Reverse Decades of Drinking Damage? Perhaps. - EP 75 Jacob Kimmel Is Back

Jun 2, 2026 2 hr 0 min

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 SPONSORS SendCutSend 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. Brex 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. Timestamps 0:0) 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...

The Startup Trying to Save Us From AI Bioweapons- EP 74 Hannu Rajaniemi

May 27, 2026 1 hr 48 min

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 SPONSORS SendCutSend 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. Brex 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

Schmidt Out of Luck — EP 73 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

May 22, 2026 54 min

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 podc...

The Freshman Who Took Down Stanford's President And Its Perfect Image - EP 72 Theo Baker

May 20, 2026 1 hr 27 min

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 SPONSORS SendCutSend 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 pe...

Meta's AI Chief On AI Beef, New Models And Life With Zuck - EP 71 Alex Wang

May 13, 2026 1 hr 23 min

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 d...

Everything You Need To Know About The Nuclear Energy Boom - EP 70 James Krellenstein

May 6, 2026 2 hr 34 min

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

The Cyborgs Commeth - EP 69 Connor Glass

May 1, 2026 1 hr 19 min

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

Is America Cooked? — EP 68 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

Apr 28, 2026 1 hr 13 min

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

The Great Reset At OpenAI — EP 67 Sam Altman And Greg Brockman

Apr 21, 2026 1 hr 22 min

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

The $50,000 Underwater Drone - EP 66 Ulysses

Apr 16, 2026 1 hr 10 min

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...

The Very Wild, Very Real Plan To Build AI Data Centers In The Ocean - EP 65 Garth Sheldon-Coulson

Apr 15, 2026 1 hr 19 min

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 faste...

The Company Helping Paralyzed People Move And Thrive Again - EP 64 Dave Marver

Apr 8, 2026 1 hr 9 min

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, t...

He Hacked Finance And Is Now Building An AI CEO - EP 63 Pedro Franceschi

Apr 1, 2026 1 hr 30 min

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

Here Come The Space Lasers - EP 62 Baiju Bhatt

Mar 25, 2026 1 hr 36 min

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

The Aussie Man Who Used AI To Create A Cancer Cure For His Dog

Mar 18, 2026 56 min

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...

Inside The Race To Reboot Human Cells - EP 60 Nabiha Saklayen

Mar 11, 2026 1 hr 17 min

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

He Thinks AI Code May Break Everything - EP 59 Will Wilson

Mar 4, 2026 1 hr 9 min

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

She Survived Being Shot, Bombed And Working At Google - EP 58 Anna Prouse

Feb 25, 2026 2 hr 5 min

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

The Grand Quest To Simulate Life - EP 57 Ed Boyden

Feb 19, 2026 1 hr 13 min

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

What's Real And What's Fake In Tech - EP 56 Peter Barrett

Feb 11, 2026 1 hr 31 min

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 Joy And Doom Of New San Francisco - EP 55 Jayden Clark

Feb 4, 2026 59 min

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

The Present And Future Of Gene Editing - EP 54 Jennifer Doudna

Jan 28, 2026 1 hr 17 min

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...

He Left OpenAI To Think Bigger - EP 53 Jerry Tworek

Jan 22, 2026 1 hr 16 min

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

Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun

Jan 14, 2026 1 hr 14 min

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/corememory 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

New, More Precise Cancer Therapies Could Soon Be Here - EP 51 Richard Fuisz

Jan 12, 2026 1 hr 34 min

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/corememory 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

Is The Era Of AI-Designed Drugs Actually Here? - EP 50 Josh Meier and Jack Dent

Dec 24, 2025 1 hr 29 min

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...

The Next Step Toward Understanding The Nature Of Intelligence - EP 49 Sebastian Seung

Dec 17, 2025 1 hr 28 min

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/corememory 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

Attacking Cancer With Code And Winning - EP 48 Jake Becraft

Dec 10, 2025 1 hr 23 min

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/corememory 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

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The Boy Wonder Of India’s New Tech Scene - EP 95 Naman Pushp

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Podcast details

Created by: Ashlee Vance
Status: Active
Latest episode: Nov 4, 2026
Episodes: 97
Release period: Weekly
Avg. episode length: 1 hr 21 min
Explicit: No
Language: English

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