Core Memory

Most of you have not heard of Axon Enterprise. But there it is – a $57 billion company that has reshaped pretty much every police department in the United States. (San Francisco being the major exception.) Rick Smith founded the company in 1993 and turned its major invention – the TASER – into a blockbuster product. Smith hoped the taser would lessen cops’ inclination to grab their guns by giving...

Cathy Tie has been having an eventful year. First she co-founded a company determined to gene edit animals and build literal unicorns . Then she held a wedding ceremony in China with Dr. Jiankui He - the controversial scientist who spent three years in prison for performing gene editing procedures on twins. And then, in May, we brought you the story of Tie being banned from China with government o...

Into the brain we go. Sumner Norman, the co-founder and CEO of Forest Neurotech , comes on the show to take us on a journey across the history and future of brain implants. We start with the first experiments prodding the body and mind with electricity and end up in mind uploading land. Along the way, we cover many of the major brain-computer interface technologies and advances. Norman has a uniqu...

Well, here we go. Bryan Johnson has come to the pod. You have likely heard an interview with Johnson before, since he’s become such an object of love, hate and fascination among the media over the past couple of years. That said, you will not have heard an interview like this with Johnson. I was covering Johnson’s exploits in the brain-computer-interface and health fields in-depth before anyone el...

For the past few months, The Wall Street Journal’s Bob McMillan has been writing a series of stories on fake North Korean workers who have infiltrated American companies. In this episode, we break the whole situation down with McMillan, who is a longtime friend and a top-notch security reporter. The short of the tale is this: North Koreans hop on LinkedIn and other job sites and pose as American r...

We are awash in longevity tests and services. There are ones that measure your blood, others that measure the quality of your DNA and others that check on your gut and brain. You can Blueprint, Viome, Function Health and on and on. To figure out how at least one of these longevity programs actually works, we decided to have Dugal Bain-Kim from Lifeforce on the pod. As you will notice, the dude is...

This week’s guest is Leslie Berlin, the author, historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive. My first encounter with Berlin’s work happened when I picked up The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley , which is Berlin’s biography of the Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder. Noyce, of course, was many things. He co-invented the integrated c...

Our guests this week are Kurt Terrani, an Iranian-born nuclear scientist, and Tommy Hendrix, a Green Beret turned venture capitalist, and they arrive with an exceptional story. Terrani is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Nuclear , and Hendrix is the company’s Chairman and main investor through his firm Decisive Point . Standard has started making a nuclear reactor fuel known as TRISO (Tri-struct...

Ten years ago, Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg vowed to aim almost all of their billions at a singular goal: “to cure, prevent and manage all disease by the end of this century.” Dr. Chan recently visited the Core Memory podcast studio to discuss CZI , aka the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the organization that she and her husband built to pursue this massive undertaking. To date, the couple...

Last November, Dawn Aerospace broke some aerospace records. Its spaceplane – the Mk-II Aurora – hit Mach 1.1 on its way to climbing to 20km faster than any aircraft that has ever taken off from a runway. (The previous record was set by an F-15 in 1975.) Dawn, based in New Zealand, now looks to make flying to the edge of space a regular occurrence. Its craft blends rocket engines with a plane desig...

Andrew Hsu has been something of a legend for most of his life. In 2007, The Seattle Times published a story documenting Hsu’s graduation from the University of Washington. He was only 16 and had just picked up three degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry. But stories of Hsu’s academic feats had already been circulating for years. He’d won science contests, written an award-winning au...

This week on the Core Memory podcast – we fix American science and advance civilization. We were joined by Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marbleston from Convergent Research. They’ve spent the last few years pioneering a new model of science funding centered on FROs or Focused Research Organizations. And FROs take a little bit of explaining. Convergent Research has backing from Eric Schmidt, James Fick...

This week’s guest is Kian Sadeghi, the founder and CEO of Nucleus . Sadeghi has everything you want in a controversialish bio-tech CEO. He’s a college dropout, a Thiel Fellow and a “wild child,” as one Nucleus investor told me. He’s also trying to uplevel the consumer DNA testing game by poring over entire human genomes with every test instead of just looking at snippets of DNA as companies like 2...

The news here is that Paul Eremenko has a new start-up called P-1 AI . Eremenko is billing P-1 as one of the first stabs at building an AI engineer. The company’s “Archie” AI can help with day-to-day engineering tasks today, and, if all goes according to plan, will be designing buildings, planes and rockets in the future. We, of course, getting into what Archie can do today and what it might do in...

More than a decade ago, someone I respect told me to go meet these young, Irish brothers - Patrick and John Collison. The brothers had started a small company called Stripe, and my friend assured me they were primed to accomplish big things. The Collisons were working on payments, and I had no interest in payments, so my attention waned a bit as they described how Stripe functioned and what it wou...

Palmer Luckey has come on the Core Memory podcast today to deliver some full-on shocking news. (And top tips on raising children as well.) As you’ll hear on the show, Luckey’s company Anduril has partnered with Meta to create a product for the U.S. military dubbed “Eagle Eye.” At its core, this product is meant to become the sci-fi style military helmet that you see depicted in movies but that doe...

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

Back when I first began covering technology in the early 2000s, my favorite thing to write about was open source software. I was young and idealistic, and the hardcore free software and open source zealots spoke to me. Code was meant to be by the people, for the people. Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen seemed like heroes. Microsoft and its proprietary code-fueled desktop monopoly seemed clearly ev...

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

Earlier this month, Nature published some of the results from a multi-year effort to better understand the visual cortex of mice. The work took place under the MICrONS effort backed by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), one of the U.S. government’s more exotic research arms. And it represented a ground-breaking attempt to blend cutting-edge techniques in how we analyze brain...

Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong joins the pod to discuss crypto, crypto, crypto. Well, not really. Everyone asks Armstrong about crypto all the time, so we decided to head in a different direction and focus on his life and his interests around very cutting-edge science. Armstrong, for example, co-founded and backed New Limit , which is working on therapies to reverse the damage of agin...

If you’ve seen HBO’s Wild, Wild Space or read When the Heavens Went on Sale , then Chris Kemp needs no introduction. Kemp is one of the stars in both works. For the less familiar, Kemp is the co-founder and CEO of Astra Space, a maker of rockets based in Alameda, Calif. For several years now, Astra has been on a quest to create the cheapest, easiest to launch rocket in the market and to turn rocke...

We flipped the tables on Dwarkesh Patel this week and turned the podcaster into the podcastee. Over the past few years, Patel has made a name for himself as a stellar interviewer of interesting people. Whether questioning a scientist, historian or tech engineer, Patel always goes deep with the subject and refuses to dumb things down for any audience. This is a blessing in an era of our attention b...

A few years ago, I caught wind that Sergey Brin had started funding an airship start-up called LTA (Lighter Than Air) Research. After hitting up some sources, I came to learn that the man heading up the airship venture was Dr. Alan Weston. And, after digging around some more, I came to learn that Dr. Alan Weston had lived an extraordinary life. Among many other things, Weston performed the earlies...

Few figures in Brain Computer Interface Land can match Max Hodak’s output over the past decade. He helped start Neuralink in 2016 and then went on to start Science Corp. in 2021. Science has been working on implants to help restore vision and has clinical trials underway with the technology. The company has also built out a line of brain computer interface products for others to use and is explori...