Core Memory

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...

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 advis...

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 e...

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, an...

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 t...

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 t...

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, accoun...

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 episod...

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 th...

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 imag...

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 Friedma...

As a freshman, Theo Baker signed up to write for The Stanford Daily on a lark. He thought it might be a fun way to spend some time when he wasn’t busy studying and coding. But then, he turned out to be quite good at reporting and tips started coming his way. One of these tips included information suggesting that there were inconsistencies and perhaps massive errors in past scientific papers tied t...

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...

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...

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 rob...

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...

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...

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...

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 l...

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 O...

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, Frances...

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 no...

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...

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 d...

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 mo...