Core Memory

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 s...

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 s...

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 g...

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 Memor...

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 plan...

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 com...

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 ....

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 do...

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 founder...

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 comput...

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 T...

America has a new steel company, which is sort of a weird thing to write in 2025. It’s called Hertha Metals , and it’s based in Houston. It’s also run by a woman named Laureen Meroueh, who is this week’s guest. As far as we can tell, Meroueh stands out as the first female to start and run a steel producer. Meroueh grew up as something of a child prodigy in Florida and went on to earn a PhD in mech...

One must not feel sorry for Mark Chen. He gets paid very well to work in one of the most exciting fields imaginable. That said, as OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, he has the difficult job of picking the company’s research priorities and of dealing with OpenAI’s employees begging him for more, more, more GPUs to power their work. This is a hectic gig, and, if you believe that AI will do all the th...

Pablos Holman has one of the most-watched TED Talks of all time, and that’s sort of the least interesting thing about him. For the past 30 years or so, Holman has been traveling amid the most inventive and eccentric tech circles. He grew up in the wilds of Alaska and turned into a hacker extraordinaire. He helped start the rocket company Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos and sci-fi author Neal Stephenso...

In December of 2024, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the world with the release of an AI model that appeared much cheaper to make and run than those from its American rivals. The company also open sourced its AI, meaning it released the blueprints of its model to the public. Our guest this week is Misha Laskin. His start-up Reflection AI looks to be the prime counterweight to DeepSeek and a...

Well, I wrote a book and made a movie about this week’s guest, so he must be fascinating. (Otherwise, I wasted six years of my life.) Will Marshall has done things beyond supplying me with material. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs . For those who don’t know, Planet changed the aerospace industry forever by lowering the cost of satellites and proving that they could be mass produced. It...

Over the past week or so, Elon Musk has started hyping up the launch of the long-, long-awaited Tesla Roadster 2. Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast last week and said he hoped to unveil the car before the end of the year. (When it goes on sale is another story.) He suggested the car might fly. (Okay?) And he said that it would almost certainly be the most memorable launch of any product in hi...

Joshua Steinman spent four years (2017-2021) working for President Trump and had a very broad remit. He shaped all cyber, telecommunications, cryptocurrency, and supply chain policy. It’s fair to say the Washington press corps did not adore Steinman. He was often portrayed as a young, brash Silicon Valley-type who bubbled over with ambition and lacked the usual political decorum. Despite how the p...

Celine Halioua and her company Loyal are on track to deliver a drug next year that could help dogs live longer. Loyal’s therapy is aimed at senior dogs (10+ years of age) that weigh more than 14 pounds. It’s a pill that the dogs will take daily and that’s designed to extend the dogs’ lifespan by at least a year. To get to this point, Loyal conducted a massive clinical trial with 1,300 dogs, and th...

We know that there are trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals sitting on the ocean floor. The big question is whether humans should start hoovering them up. Our guest this week is very much Pro Hoover. He’s Gerard Barron, the head of The Metals Company, which has spent years preparing to become a major player in the seabed mining industry. The company has found a spot in the Pacific Ocean that’s...

Jed McCaleb grew up in Arkansas where he lived in a cabin in the woods that had no electricity or running water. Now, he’s a billionaire building a space station and funding some of the world’s most adventurous science. America remains a thing, I guess. McCaleb, 50, has been at the center of several major technology movements. Back in the peer-to-peer glory days, he released the eDonkey applicatio...

We have a proper treat this week. Core Memory special correspondent Eryney Marrogi comes on the pod. Marrogi is a scientist and soon-to-be doctor who has followed the rise of the gene editing tools at humanity’s disposal. He wrote a piece for us a couple of months ago on “Baby KJ,” the child who received a customized, life-saving gene therapy in record time. Now we get into what Baby KJ means for...

In the 1970s, scientists created the first wiring diagram of a worm brain. To do this, they sliced up a worm, imaged the slices under microscopes and then reconstructed a map of the worm’s neurons and their synaptic connections. Wonderful. (It was 302 neurons and really a map of the worm’s central nervous system.) We haven’t come terribly far since then. It took until 2024 for scientists to create...

In this episode, Dan Wang comes on the show to discuss his new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future . I’ll start by noting that the book is fantastic, and you should read it . It’s a well-researched, vibrant account of how China became dominated by its engineering culture. The country has displayed an unmatched ability to build over the past forty years, and Wang traces the scale o...

This week, we bring you the story of California Forever in all its “never told before” glory. For the past eight years, Jan Sramek and a group of wealthy investors have been buying up land in Solano County with the hopes of creating a great new city in Northern California. All told, the California Forever group has spent $1 billion to acquire 68,000 acres (100 square miles) in an area about halfwa...