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.
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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 alc...
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 ...
This episode delves into Silicon Valley's latest developments, including Meta's evolving AI strategy and the public's growing skepticism, exemplified by Eric Schmidt being booed. The hosts break down OpenAI's victory in Elon Musk's lawsuit, examining the controversial shift from non-profit to for-profit and its financial necessity. They also explore Phantom Neuro's innovative mind-controlled prosthetics, a unique remote astrophotography business, and a company developing supersonic jet engines, all while reflecting on San Francisco's unique culture of "delusion" and innovation.
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, Bake...
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 bee...
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 sor...
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 ...
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 actua...
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...
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 r...
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 mov...
This episode features Dave Marver, CEO of Onward Medical, a company revolutionizing treatment for paralysis. Marver details Onward's spinal implant and external stimulation devices, which restore movement and address critical issues like blood pressure dysregulation, profoundly impacting patients' lives like Julie's. He also discusses the responsible integration of brain-computer interfaces, the company's MedTech philosophy over tech hype, and the dedicated team driving this life-changing academic research into widely available solutions.
This episode features Pedro Franceschi, the 29-year-old co-founder and CEO of Brex, acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi discusses his incredible rise from an 8-year-old self-taught coder and iPhone hacker to a fintech leader. He shares Brex's journey, the strategic reasons behind its acquisition, and offers a unique perspective on why financial innovation often lags in the US. A significant portion covers his cutting-edge use of AI agents to optimize business operations, manage his personal life, and how this technology is reshaping finance and talent acquisition.
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...
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....
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 tow...
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 a...
This episode features Anna Prouse, an Italian journalist turned international delegate, recounting her harrowing multi-decade career in the Middle East. From establishing field hospitals in Baghdad to navigating complex political landscapes with General Petraeus, she details surviving assassination attempts and confronting dictators. Prouse discusses her unique approach to diplomacy and reconstruction, earning the rare title "Honorary Man" for her ability to thrive in hyper-masculine societies, alongside her later experiences in Silicon Valley and a personal battle with a brain tumor.
Ed Boyden, a renowned scientist, shares his ambitious vision to fully understand and simulate biological systems, likening it to a 'microchip moment' for biology. He details his innovations like optogenetics and expansion microscopy, which are crucial for mapping the brain at a molecular level and capturing dynamic activity. The conversation also delves into the philosophical questions surrounding AI, consciousness, and the future of human-machine interfaces, emphasizing the need for a data-driven approach and a deep understanding of the brain before radical augmentation.
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 pa...
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 abo...
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 tre...
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...
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 ...
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 pro...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
America has a new steel company, which is sort of a weird thing to write in 2025. It’s called Hertha Metals , and it’s based in Houston. It’s also run by a woman named Laureen Meroueh, who is this week’s guest. As far as we can tell, Meroueh stands out as the first female to start and run a steel producer. Meroueh grew up as something of a child prodigy in Florida and went on to earn a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. She then invented some of the processes that make Hertha different from...
Mark Chen, OpenAI's Chief Research Officer, offers an inside look at the fierce competition for AI talent, including Meta's aggressive recruitment and OpenAI's counter-strategies. He details his role in shaping the company's research direction, prioritizing projects, and maintaining a long-term focus on bold, exploratory bets rather than incremental updates. The discussion also covers his personal journey, OpenAI's unique research-first culture, the "blip" crisis, and the exciting future of AI in accelerating scientific discovery, hardware design, and the critical challenge of AI alignment.
