Core Memory

Ashlee Vance
Core Memory

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. www.corememory.com

  1. An AI Engineer Is Here, and It Might Redesign the Physical World

    6 DAYS AGO

    An AI Engineer Is Here, and It Might Redesign the Physical World

    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! 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

    1h 18m
  2. The Future of Money

    5 JUN

    The Future of Money

    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

    1h 31m

  3. 29 MAY

    Exclusive: Palmer Luckey and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together

    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

    2h 4m
  4. Peter Beck on Rockets, Dinner with Elon and the Future of Space

    22 MAY

    Peter Beck on Rockets, Dinner with Elon and the Future of Space

    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

    1h 5m
  5. He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All

    16 MAY

    He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All

    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

    1h 18m
  6. The Company Trying to Reprogram Aging

    6 MAY

    The Company Trying to Reprogram Aging

    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. 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

    1h 12m
  7. A Brain Researcher's Bid to Make Digital Twins of Humans

    29 APR

    A Brain Researcher's Bid to Make Digital Twins of Humans

    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! 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

    1h 13m
  8. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future of Humans

    17 APR

    Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future of Humans

    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. 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

    1h 3m
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About

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. www.corememory.com

Information

  • Creator
    Ashlee Vance
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Core Memory
  • Show Website
    Core Memory

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