Core Memory

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 Fickel (a fantastic patron of science) and others and tries to fund small groups of people chasing very big ideas. In essence, Convergent wants to support things that help open up new fields of science and technology, and it funds folks whose ideas might be too expensive for a university lab and/or not obviously commercial enough for typical venture capital. Gamick and Marblestone argue that the FRO model fills a crucial gap in US science funding.

Convergent tends to put $30 million to $50 million into what look like quasi-start-ups and gives them five to six years to build their thing. To date, it has backed around a dozen efforts with a pretty heavy emphasis on the bio-tech and neuroscience fields.

Recently, Convergent also put out the Gap Map, which is a well-researched exploration of all the things that it thinks the world still needs to develop. Go ahead. Poke around.

In this episode, we break down FROs, science funding, the US vs. China, brains and much more.

Our show is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1.

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 23andMe and Ancestry have done for many years.

Nucleus charges about $500 for its mainstream health test aimed at adults. It promises to give you insights about a wide variety of health conditions, including your likely disposition toward things like mental health issues, cancers and rare genetic diseases. You can use the information to inform your lifestyle choices and to compare your DNA traits with those of your potential baby making partner to see if you’re a good baby making fit. (You can go here to see how Sadeghi uses this information on dates.)

The company also has a new, far more expensive service ($5,000) aimed at parents going through the IVF process to help them select embryos with certain traits. This type of service is quickly becoming all the rage, as we noted in our recent video on Orchid, which you should absolutely watch because it’s awesome. (Orchid contends that it does a much deeper dive on the embryo DNA than does Nucleus. I gave Sadeghi a chance to respond to some of this in the podcast.)

Sadeghi has been controversialish because he’s made big claims about Nucleus’s ability to discern things like someone’s IQ from DNA and because he’s been an aggressive marketer in a bio-tech field that tends more toward conservatism - lest one become the next jailed blood testing start-up CEO. He’s also been way more outspoken about the rather obvious direction we’re heading toward where people will be picking the desired traits of their future kids and where sex may well just become a purely recreational event as society moves toward IVF and artificial wombs for the majority of its new human production.

What’s clear enough is that the first wave of consumer genetic testing companies arrived many years ago when DNA tests were rarer and more expensive, and we’re now seeing them be usurped by a new crop of services that really take advantage of the massive decreases in sequencing costs. In short, we can test more of your DNA more cheaply than ever before, and we have much better data and software to analyze the DNA now.

Sadeghi and I get into all of this on the podcast.

The show was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1, or at least that’s what I tell my kids.

Enjoy!

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 the years to come in the pod. Spoiler alert: Eremenko thinks we get MUCH better spaceships.

Most of our time, though, was spent discussing Eremenko’s rather incredible life and career.

Born in Ukraine, Eremenko came to the US at 11 and went on to get aeronautics degrees from MIT and Caltech and then – just to show off - a law degree from Georgetown. He’s worked at DARPA and Google and as CTO of both Airbus and United Technologies. He also tried to turn hydrogen into a mainstream fuel source for commercial planes at Universal Hydrogen, although that venture did not pan out.

And so, we got into Eremenko’s life, aerospace and where AI is possibly taking us a species.

Eremenko’s dog Li made a special guest appearance and picked me as his favorite podcast host by the end of the show.

As ever, we thank the wonderful people at E1 Ventures for their support with the podcast

Enjoy!

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 would one day do. What was very clear, though, was that the brothers were bright - as in exceptionally bright - and focused and determined. I interview start-up founders for a living, and there’s been a handful of times where I knew for certain that the people in front of me would succeed at whatever they chose to do. This was one of those times.

This is a long way of saying that I have the utmost respect for the Collisons and try to take particular note when they and/or Stripe make big bets. They tend to have a pretty accurate window into the future.

Last year, Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge was a two-year-old start-up that had started out doing some NFT nonsense and then pivoted almost right away into stablecoins.

Going off the premise that the Collisons must have spent $1 billion on a very, very, very young company for a reason, we asked Bridge CEO Zach Abrams to come on the podcast to explain what Bridge does, what the hell stablecoins are and where the future of money is heading.

Abrams, thankfully, did not disappoint.

The short of it is that Bridge has made it much easier for companies and governments to move money internationally. SpaceX, for example, relies on Bridge to collect and process payments for its Starlink internet service in far off lands. The same goes for people sending and receiving remittances, which happens to be a massive part of our global economy.

We discuss all this in the show and then get weird. Abrams talks about AIs using credit cards to accomplish tasks out in the world and a future where an AI might end up as the wealthiest being on the planet and what that could mean for us humans and the economy.

This podcast was made possible with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures.

Enjoy!

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 does not actually exist in real life. It will have displays that place all kinds of information in front of soldiers’ faces by tapping into virtual and augmented reality technology and data feeds that will be pumped into the device.

Microsoft once owned the contract to make this type of product for the U.S. Army but had been struggling terribly to deliver anything useful. Anduril took over the $22 billion project earlier this year and will now pair its defense and tech expertise with Meta’s headset and VR/AR expertise to try and give the Army what it desires and modernize the U.S. military in the process. We go into “Eagle Eye,” the technology behind it and how and where it will be made in gory detail on the podcast.

This is all shocking for a bunch of reasons, but the lead shocker is that Luckey has agreed to work with Meta and Zuck at all.

Some context.

In 2014, Facebook acquired Luckey’s Oculus VR for $2 billion. In 2016, Facebook then fired Luckey more or less for being a Republican in public.

In the runup to the 2016 election, Luckey gave $9,000 to a group that put up a billboard depicting Hillary Clinton’s face – with an extra-large forehead – and the words “Too Big To Jail” underneath the face. This was during the Clinton e-mail controversy and came at a time when much of Silicon Valley had gone apoplectic about the idea of Donald Trump possibly becoming president.

Once the mainstream press figured out that Luckey had paid for the billboard, it went full hysteria mode and portrayed Luckey as some kind of hate-filled, fascist meme lord set on destroying the moral fabric of, er, politics and possibly the American Way of Life. Facebook decided it could not stomach the PR hit and pushed Luckey out of the company. Lawsuits and much vitriol between the two parties followed.

For Luckey, the whole incident was well beyond personal. Oculus and VR tech had been his life. Facebook stripped him of his true love, and the press and others turned Luckey into a pariah. The saga is captured wonderfully in Blake Harris’s The History of the Future where hindsight allows us to see how something relatively trivial – the billboard – morphed into an absurdist drama acted out by reporters and Facebook executives.

Luckey also made his feelings on the incident very clear in this historic performance in which he eviscerated professional remora Jason Calacanis.

But, you know, times change. Zuck and others in Silicon Valley have discovered their inner patriots and want to work on defense tech now. Luckey being buddies with Trump and Republicans is so okay that he can appear in a Meta press release. Public apologies have been made. And now, perhaps, soldiers can have their fancy helmets.

We spent two hours chatting with Luckey, and the Anduril/Meta deal is only a fraction of the discussion that also gets into Anduril’s manufacturing expansion, China (of course), AI and a host of other topics.

For more Core Memory pods, head here.

The episode was made possible by support from E1 Ventures.

Enjoy!

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 dear to my heart. I wrote a book about them and made a movie about them.

Beck has an incredible life story. He’s a self-taught rocket engineer who built a commercial space giant in New Zealand. None of this should really be possible. You’re supposed to have a PhD in aerospace and/or billions of dollars to be successful in the rocket game, and you’re supposed to build rockets in places that have some experience building rockets. Nonetheless, here we are. Rocket Lab sits alongside SpaceX as the obvious winners to date in the commercial rocket and commercial space games.

We’re thrilled that Beck gave us some time as he crunches away on preparing the Neutron rocket for its first launch.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. We thank them for their support.

Enjoy!

For more podcasts and the finest in sci-tech reporting, subscribe here.

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 evil. I enjoyed the energy and vitriol on both sides during the peak of these debates. Linux 4EVA!!, I would write on my all-too hard to use Debian machine.

The software religious wars kind of, sort of linger on but in much more muted forms than I remember.

Sad.

We, however, might have a proper tech revolutionary for this contemporary era in the form of Guillaume Verdon.

Some of you will know Verdon better as Beff Jezos, the X personality who built the e/acc or effective accelerationist movement into a countervailing force against the doomy, gloomy Effective Altruism movement, which, rather comically, managed to undermine itself without Verdon’s help by taking gobs of money from the anxiety-ridden villain SBF and wrapping itself in an uninspiring blanket of malaise.

Anyway, Verdon became and remains a thing both with e/acc and with his start-up Extropic, and the two are very much interlinked.

Extropic has shown early success with “thermodynamic computing.” It’s a form of computing that Verdon says harnesses the underlying properties of nature and probabilities in far better ways than traditional computers and in more practical ways (possibly) than quantum computers. Verdon used to work on quantum computers under Sergey Brin at Google, so he might even know what he’s talking about.

The revolutionary part of all this is that Verdon thinks Extropic will make cheaper, more energy efficient AI processing systems than the likes of Nvidia, OpenAI and Google. His AI computers will not require trillion dollar investments in data centers but rather will be affordable to the masses (possibly).

It’s very early days for Extropic, so much of this decentralized AI fervor is fueled by prognostication and hope.

Obviously, we get into all of this on the pod.

The show starts Extropic heavy and then veers into e/acc and decentralized AI territory. So, if thermodynamic computing is not your thing, go ahead and skip to the more philosophical stuff where you’ll find that Verdon is fun to listen to and something of an engineer philosopher.

This podcast was sponsored by e1 Ventures – the smartest and most noble podcast sponsor in Silicon Valley and all points beyond.

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, New Limit has been trying to identify the right combinations of transcription factors – a certain class of proteins – that can rewind cells and take them back to a younger state. Their work piggybacks on the Nobel Prize winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, and it’s among the most exciting technology in the entire bio-tech field – at least for me. As you’ll hear in this interview, they’ve made massive progress over the past 18 months or so.

We’ve talked about transcription factors and related technology with Joe Betts LaCroix from Retro (podcast under the Joe link, and full video episode on Retro here) and with Brian Armstrong, who co-founded New Limit.

In this episode, however, we hung out with Jacob Kimmel, another New Limit co-founder, for a real deep dive on transcription factors and New Limit’s approach to taming them. Kimmel is as clear and eloquent as it gets on explaining this technology.

This pod might feel different than the usual pods. It comes from a sit down interview we did with Kimmel for an upcoming Core Memory video on New Limit. Still, it’s glorious.

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by the wonderful people at E1 Ventures. Their money and hearts are pure.

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 brains with artificial intelligence technology.

As The New York Times wrote,

The researchers zeroed in on a portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes.

The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections.

Andreas Tolias, our guest on today’s podcast, was one of many researchers involved in this effort, and he walked us through MICrONS in detail.

Tolias also took us on an exploration of the history and future of brain research and his current passion, which is to represent human brains in digital form. He’s a fascinating man working one of the most fascinating areas of science.

This episode was sponsored by the kind people at E1 Ventures. Enjoy!

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 aging. (We’ll have a Core Memory video episode on them soon.)

He’s also been on X talking about the Gattaca Stack. This is his vision of the IVF clinic of the future in which people can make eggs from skin cells and do all sorts of gene editing on embryos either to thwart diseases or even give babies some enhancements. And he sees these babies coming to life in artificial wombs.

Let’s get weird, y’all.

As Coinbase CEO, Armstrong has been to known to generate controversy now and again with some strongly held views on politics in the workplace and on the Feds. The press has not taken kindly to Armstrong at times for said views, and we get into that as well.

If you listen to this and need you some more Brian Armstrong, there’s a great documentary on him and Coinbase called Coin.

And now on with the show.

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 rocket-making into a mass production affair.

The company has enjoyed glorious highs all the way to orbit and lows where it verged on bankruptcy. Over the past year, Kemp and Astra co-founder Adam London took the company private and raised a fresh $80 million as they head toward flying Rocket 4 - their next-generation machine. We have lots more on that story here.

In this episode, we get into Astra’s tumultuous journey with Kemp, his disdain for some of my filmmaking choices and the future of rockets. He envisions a world with rocket launch sites in many countries and rockets ferrying things like drones into battles in far-off places in a matter of seconds.

As always, you can listen here or via your favorite podcast provider. And we have a YouTube channel with the podcasts and our latest science and tech videos. Leave a review. Like and subscribe. Calm our souls.

Most of all - enjoy!

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 being seized by 30-second blips and bloops on our phones and social apps.

Patel had done a particularly excellent job on the AI front. He’s interviewed most of the major players in the AI field as large language models have risen to the fore. To that end, this podcast brings news. Patel and his co-author Gavin Leech are putting out a new book on AI through Stripe Press. Called The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, the book is an oral history of the recent AI era.

You can buy it in digital form now and later in hardback. (Look at that Stripe Press website, publishers. Know what you’re capable of with some effort.) I received an early copy, and it really is a wonderful way to understand current AI technology and its implications.

In this episode, Patel and I, of course, talk AI, but we also delve into his life and sudden rise as a podcasting force. We recorded the program together in Patel’s San Francisco podcasting lair. I enjoyed his beard. You will enjoy the show.

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 earliest bungee jumps while a member of the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford. He later built space weapons as part of the Star Wars effort under Ronald Reagan. Then, while at NASA, Weston led a team making a super low-cost lunar lander. (The story of that project is documented in When The Heavens Went on Sale.)

Post NASA, Weston began constructing airships for Brin in a hangar on the NASA Ames campus.

Few people have experienced such a range of engineering adventures and fewer still have such knowledge about the aerospace industry. This is to say you’re going to enjoy the chat with Weston.

Also, this podcast comes with breaking news. We can report that Al Weston has left his post as CEO of LTA and now leads up rocket development at Astra. He’ll be looking to get the company’s Rocket 4 into orbit soon.

(We recored this before our video podcast era started and before Weston joined Astra. It’s also possible I called this Episode 2. Fear not. It’s Episode 10.)

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 exploring some very weird and promising technology around lab-built neurons that can be infused into brains.

Hodak has done relatively few interviews over the years and there’s not much about his background available online. I recently paid a visit to Science’s headquarters in Alameda, Calif. to rectify this situation and speak with Hodak about his science journey, his philosophies around tech and business and where BCI technology is heading as humans and machines join forces . . . possibly for good.

Also, we discuss the Jennifer Aniston neuron, if you’re into that sort of thing.

As ever, you can subscribe to the Core Memory podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and all other fine podcast purveyors, and you can find past episodes here. Do us a solid and leave some ratings and reviews. Thanks!

For the past decade, the scientist Suzanne Gildert has been working to imbue robots and AIs with new skills. She co-founded a pair of start-ups - Kindred and Sanctuary AI - that strove to add intelligence to robotic arms and bodies. The results were robotic arms that could do factory work at Kindred and then an upscaled, much weirder version of the technology at Sanctuary.

In the background, Gildert spent much of her time longing to really bring robots and AIs to life. She’s been an advocate of a very sci-fi future where humans and androids go about the world alongside each other and share in their day-to-day lives. Gildert has pined for a future in which our metal companions have thoughts and feelings that resemble ours.

Her latest start-up - Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies Inc. - is an attempt to bring those hopes and dreams to fruition.

Gildert contends that current AI systems based on large language models are likely too limited to result in consciousness (or something like it) arising. Her theory is that the roots of consciousness may actually come from AI models derived from the quantum realm where physics gets funkier.

Gildert will forever be better than I am at explaining her hypothesis. So get comfy, open your mind and have a listen.

Don’t meet your heroes unless your hero is John Markoff. For he is as good as billed.

No one has broken more stories about the technology industry or documented more of Silicon Valley’s most crucial moments than Markoff, the longtime scribe for The New York Times. He was the journalist I most wanted to model my career after, and I will remain forever jealous of all the things he witnessed first hand from the rise of semiconductors and the PC industry, to the arrival of the internet and the robotics and AI revolutions. John has always brought technology and Silicon Valley culture to life for the masses and done so with style, smarts and integrity.

Beyond his work for The Times, Markoff has written a number of seminal books about Silicon Valley. My favorites might be What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. But you should go ahead and read them all.

I tried to use this conversation to get Markoff’s thoughts on topics old and new, ranging from the early days of the PC right on up to LLMs. The man remains as insightful as ever, and I remain an unabashed admirer.

Enjoy.

Several years ago, KFC did something ridiculous. It hired a giant, stratospheric balloon maker called World View to put its Zinger Chicken sandwich into space. Or at least near space.

This was an expensive, showy endeavor and no less than Rob Lowe came on as a new Colonel Sanders-cum-Mission Control Lead for the stunt. Ultimately, the sandwich did not go quite as high as KFC wanted, but, still, I was entertained.

A young man named Andrew Antonio helped drive much of World View’s marketing for the space sandwich. And he became something of a stratospheric balloon guru in the process.

He’s now the CEO of Urban Sky, a maker of smallish balloons that can be launched in a matter of minutes and, just as impressively, the guest on this episode of the Core Memory pod.

We, of course, talk about the KFC happening and about putting humans, cameras, sensors and all kinds of things into the stratosphere. Antonio’s dream is to have the stratosphere filled with balloons performing useful tasks. As you might expect, China and Russia share in these ambitions.

Enjoy the show.

Dina Radenkovic has set out to reshape women’s health.

Gameto, her start-up based in Austin, has spent the last four years working on stem cell engineering technology that it expects to aim at things ranging from fertility treatments to menopause. On the fertility front, Gameto already has a product called Fertilo that reduces the time women must go through painful, hormonal injections from two weeks down to a couple of days. It’s been approved for use in several countries and is being studied now in a clinical trial in the U.S.

Fertilo works by replicating ovarian cells in a lab and using those cells to mature eggs outside of the body. It’s another example of the iSPC, or induced pluripotent stem cells, technology that has the bio-tech world so excited.

Radenkovic hopes that similar technology can be applied to menopause in the future and lessen the dramatic hormonal shifts women experience.

Born in Serbia, Radenkovic is a doctor and has raised $73 million in venture funding for Gameto to date.

In this episode, we’re joined by the test pilot Elliot Seguin to learn what it’s like to put your life on the line on a regular basis.

Unlike most of the people in his profession, Seguin did not do the whole Top Gun-style military training. He earned his status as a test pilot the hard way by putting in the hours flying all kinds of aircraft and convincing people to give him a go in their birds.

He’s an engineer. A racer. And a brave and possibly nuts soul.

We talk with Seguin about the test pilot lifestyle, his career and The Mojave.

Fresh off closing a $200 million funding round, Ben Lamm from Colossal Biosciences - now valued at more than $10 billion - joins Core Memory - now valued at less than $10 billion - to talk about bringing extinct animals back to our fair planet.

The company has set to work on woolly mammoths, the dodo bird, and the thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger) in its effort to restore animals and ecosystems. To pull this off, Colossal must develop a host of gene editing technologies and artificial wombs, and we get into all this beautiful science.

It’s cool and bonkers and controversial - the holy pod trinity.