Core Memory

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.corememory.comIn January of 2024, Noland Arbaugh became the first human to receive one of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface implants.Ahead of that surgery, Neuralink pulled off a first-of-its-kind engineering feat. The company created a detailed replica of Arbaugh’s skull and brain. With this replica, Neuralink’s surgeons and its surgical robot could practice the …

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 halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Their goal is to create a community of 400,000 people who can live and work together and to make it possible for California to manufacture more of the things that it invents in state.The Czech-born Sramek became consumed by the idea of founding a new city after experiencing California’s well-known problems – expensive real estate/lack of housing, long commutes in heavy traffic, loss of manufacturing jobs and skills, and over-regulation – firsthand. And, sort of insanely, he decided to try and do something about it. He set out to see if California still had the will and the way to make a shining new city.(TL;DR: In this episode, Sramek tells the full story (for the first time) of how California Forever was created and pushed forward, including the incredible lengths he had to go through to keep the project secret. We, of course, also get into much of Sramek’s reasoning for wanting to dedicate his life to this project and why he cares about trying to help California thrive.)Sramek managed to convince an all-star cast of investors to buy into his plan. California Forever is backed by the likes of Patrick and John Collison, Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Andreessen, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. Together, these people bought up the Solano County land in relative secrecy over the course of about six years and have set to work putting in the regulatory structure needed to get building. Their current plan includes not just the city itself but also nearby manufacturing and shipbuilding hubs.The project has, naturally, run into controversy. People have grumbled about the billionaires being up to something shadowy. Others have complained about building on land historically used for ranching and about potential environmental concerns. At one point, local politicians even suggested that perhaps China was buying up the land so that it could spy on Travis Air Force Base. For a while, it appeared that the naysayers might win and stall California Forever indefinitely. But the combination of a second Donald Trump election and the widespread feeling that California is over-regulating itself into oblivion have injected new life and enthusiasm into the California Forever effort. Many people and politicians in Solano County are now looking to join up with the project and help make it happen.Not everyone will agree with me here. This is natural. But, for me, California Forever represents an existential moment for the wonderful state that I call home.Nowhere on Earth do people have it better than Californians. But we are on the verge of the greatest economic self-own in history if we can’t learn how to build and develop and do big things again. We must get out of our own way and create a system that allows for hope and optimism and the notion of creating a better future.Building a picturesque city where people can live close to their jobs and manufacture the products that they invent on underutilized land should not be controversial. It should just happen.If we can’t let something like California Forever flourish, we’re signaling that California has lost its way, its spirit and its ability, and this strikes me as profoundly sad.The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 them a non-lethal option for dealing with dangerous situations. In more recent years, Axon has moved into body cameras, drones and software and data systems used by police forces.Core Memory is a reader-supported publication. We need your help to do what we do.The taser was never going to be without controversy, and Smith and Axon have found themselves under scrutiny time and again. John Oliver recently spent thirty minutes on a taser takedown and mocked Smith. In 2023, Reuters also went at Axon, accusing Smith of making up the company’s founding story, over-paying his executives and maintaining an “unusual” workplace culture. (In this podcast, Smith answers the founding story accusations for the first time with a journalist.)Despite the digs and plenty of lawsuits, Smith has spent three decades on this singular quest of changing the nature of policing. Axon can point to plenty of data that show tasers have reduced officer shootings, and body cams have added transparency to the actions of both cops and criminals.In its next turn, Axon hopes to build taser-equipped drones that can be used to assess and deal with incidents. Smith has even talked about using these types of drones to patrol schools and protect against active shooters – yet another controversial idea.In this episode, we get into the history of Smith and Axon, how the company’s technology works, all of the controversies and where Axon is heading.Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 officials apparently not liking the idea of her teaming up with Dr. He romantically and/or professionally.Well, Tie is back in the U.S. now and has just started the Manhattan Project – a start-up that unapologetically seeks to perform gene editing on embryos to block them from inheriting diseases. It’s controversial and then some just like Tie herself.In this exclusive podcast, Tie discusses her plans for the Manhattan Project, her whirlwind 2025 and her efforts to push the bio-tech field into a new era.Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 unique perspective in this field. He’s a mechanical engineer by training but can talk neuroscience with the best of them. I’ve always found him to be realistic and fair with his assessment of various brain-computer interface approaches.Forest Neurotech makes a brain implant that uses ultrasound to analyze the mind. The company argues that its approach allows it to see more of what’s happening in a brain than electrode-based implants - from Neuralink, Synchron, et al. - that can only probe the small areas where they sit next to neurons. It has been running trials with its implant in a bid to help doctors and patients better understand the nature of mental disorders.In a fascinating turn, Forest has started to detect "covert consciousness" in comatose patients who are otherwise completely unresponsive. The people appear to be able to hear and interpret what is being said around them. This is both comforting and not.The ultrasound approach that Forest helped pioneer is now starting to look like a thing with other start-ups using similar techniques.Beyond Forest, we get into the economics of the BCI industry, its promises and limitations and, of course, cover much sci-fi ground.Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 else. Back then, my editors and others often seemed to think too much ink was being spilled on the man. But, in January of 2023, I wrote the story that turned Johnson into an overnight sensation, and, well, people just could not get enough Johnson after that.Alongside the director Chris Smith, I also made the film Don’t Die on Johnson and his longevity pursuits for Netflix.Over the course of reporting on Johnson for so long and doing the film, I’ve gotten to know our world-famous vampire quite well. So, we tried to go in some more personal directions - erections, cults, smoking toads - with this interview and to chart Johnson’s evolution from someone Silicon Valley shunned to resident longevity guru and blossoming cult leader for some futuristic religion. Johnson also speaks at length for the first time about his decision to pull away from the Blueprint business and his struggles to figure out what’s next for his Don’t Die movement.Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 remote workers looking for gigs. Once they get hired, the North Koreans then recruit Americans to help them deal with some of the job mechanics like submitting tax paperwork and running company laptops from inside the US.McMillan has found some Americans who are managing dozens of laptops at their homes on behalf of these North Korean workers. Each morning, the American patsy wakes up, turns the laptops on, and then logs their North Korean workers into their jobs. It’s a practice now known at laptop farming.The North Koreans tend to be pretty good workers! That is until they start siphoning off money and intellectual property for the Great Leader.Last month, Arizona resident Christina Marie Chapman pled guilty to wire fraud and other crimes linked to this scheme. Per the Department of Justice, Chapman “was sentenced today to 102 months in prison for her role in a fraudulent scheme that assisted North Korean Information Technology (IT) workers posing as U.S. citizens and residents with obtaining remote IT positions at more than 300 U.S. companies. The scheme generated more than $17 million in illicit revenue for Chapman and for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea).”All told, the DoJ reckons North Korea has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from its network of laptop farmers. McMillan writes about it all here. If you’re an employer on the lookout for one of these fake remote workers, you’ll want to scan for Kevins in your organization who are really into the Minions. We explain in the episode - promise. Enjoy!The Core Memory podcast is made possible by the genius investors at E1 Ventures. We’re not sure if E1 is into the Minions or not, but they are into investing in great companies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 jacked and does indeed seem quite healthy.Lifeforce provides - for a montly fee - a lot of what a decent national healthcare system might do in a different universe. It sends a phlebotomist to your home to take a blood draw and performs a wide range of tests on the sample. It then puts you in touch with a medical team for some health counseling and tries to identify areas that will help you become a better you.Instead of doing this once, you repeat the cycle every three months and try to push what the company calls your Lifescore ever higher.Bain-Kim is not a doctor and comes from the business world, and two of Lifeforce’s co-founders are Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. Robbins obviously has a reputation as a self-improvement guru, and some of Diamandis’s ventures center on selling optimism. The company also offers supplements and other products. This combination of things will put some people off.That said, Lifeforce also has a deep medical bench, and there’s real – and ever-improving - science backing up its measurements and therapies.I’m broadly excited for services like Lifeforce but also fearful that consumers have little means of judging these various programs and separating the good stuff from the snake oil.We touch on all of these issues and much more in the show. Have a listen and judge for yourself.This podcast is made with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures. Your company will almost certainly live longer with E1 Ventures on your cap table. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 circuit and reshaped the trajectory of the world in the process. He ran one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. He mentored people like Steve Jobs. And he was the Valley’s first real engineer playboy star.Berlin’s book is one of my all-time favorite reads and a wonderful example of what a biography can be. Berlin, of course, is many things as well. She’s been one of the most influential historians when it comes to Silicon Valley and the technology industry. She used to run Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, and now heads up the Steve Jobs Archive. Berlin is also the author of another tremendous book - Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age, which chronicles the work of several people who had distinctive roles across the tech industry.In this chat, we get into Noyce’s life and what he meant to Silicon Valley, the semiconductor industry, the fall of Intel, the Valley’s history overall and Berlin’s current work.There’s basically no one I would rather talk to, and we’re thrilled that Berlin joined the pod.Huge thanks to everyone who has been supporting the Core Memory podcast. It’s been surging up the charts of late. We’re grateful. Don’t be shy. Tell your friends.A huge thanks, as always, as well to E1 Ventures for they are noble venture capitalists who have great taste and have backed us from the start. Follow them on X. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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-structural ISOtropic) that comes with the promise of being very safe and with the ability to power a new breed of small nuclear reactors that can be placed anywhere someone needs a lot of power.Standard Nuclear popped out of stealth mode last month via a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal.It turns out that Standard’s predecessor - Ultra Safe Nuclear – had been backed for years by a wealthy ex-CIA operative named Richard Hollis Helms. When Helms passed away in 2024, the company was left in financial peril. Terrani and Hendrix pulled the venture out of bankruptcy and saved its prized TRISO technology.As we explain in the episode, TRISO is a type of nuclear reactor fuel that the U.S. has been working on for decades. It places a protective coating around fuel particles that makes them incredibly safe, and the U.S. and other countries have proven this out through vast amounts of research. China, of course, has TRISO reactors already as does Germany.Standard Nuclear hopes to make a lot of TRISO for a coming wave of nuclear start-ups building SMRs, or Small Modular Reactors. These reactors come in various shapes and sizes, but the general idea is that they’re small enough to be shipped to any place that needs serious power – be it an AI data center, an overseas Army supply line or even an industrial hub in space.I recently visited Standard’s TRISO plant in Tennessee, which is right next door to Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Terrani and much of his team used to work. We’ll have a video on the visit coming soon.During our chat, we get into the U.S.’s nuclear failings and aspirations, Standard’s wild history and the future of nuclear technology.This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. You can find them here and on X here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 has put $7 billion toward a broad range of scientific programs and has backed bio-tech centers across the U.S. They’re funding some of the most cutting-edge work on trying to understand how the human body functions at the cellular level and placing some of the riskiest, boldest bets in bio-tech.CZI has not operated without controversy. Over the past few weeks, Dr. Chan has faced criticism for dialing back funding on some of the organization’s education and political programs in favor of going Full Science.We get into this a bit on the show, although, I will Full Confess to being less into telling people how to spend their money than others appear to be.Mostly, we discuss Dr. Chan’s dramatic life story and the work CZI is doing to push bio-tech forward. Recently, for example, the organization backed a new program aimed at trying to cure children struck with genetic rare diseases. CZI has also just put out a new AI-based model that gives us a better understanding of how cells work.Since we’ve recently become a sci-tech and tennis publication, we get into Dr. Chan’s tennis career as well. Enjoy!This podcast was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who also support science and human progress through their investments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 design and can carry small payloads (up to 5kg) for defense, science and commercial customers. In June, the company signed a deal with a group in Oklahoma to perform dozens of flights from the Oklahoma Air and Space Port - and, yes, that’s a real thing.We sat down with Stefan Powell, the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Dawn, to talk about spaceplanes, Dawn’s satellite propulsion business and the aerospace scene in New Zealand and Europe.Dawn has moved quite quickly for an aerospace company and, like Rocket Lab before it, stunned the world by doing much of innovation from New Zealand, which has not historically been an aerospace power. Its ability to get to the edge of space and back multiple times a day is unique, and it has plans for even bigger craft in the future.This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who happen to invest in hard-tech things like aerospace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 autobiography and started a foundation to help children in need as an adolescent. Hsu’s family hails from Taiwan, and the young man often found himself being interviewed on TV and touring the country to tell his story.After graduating from college, Hsu pursued a PhD at Stanford before dropping out and using some Thiel Fellowship money to start an ed-tech company called Airy Labs.That company struggled, but Hsu’s latest venture – Speak – has been booming. It’s an AI-powered language tutor that enjoyed immense success first in South Korea and then beyond. It’s been valued at more than $1 billion after a $78 million funding round closed near the end of last year.In this episode, Hsu graciously tolerates my child prodigy questions and then gets into how he hit on AI and language before it was cool and how people can learn better. This episode was made possible by E1 Ventures, backers of bold people and bold ideas. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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 podcastEnjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe