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PODCAST

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

technology

All Episodes

62:14

Priscilla Chan and Her Multi-Billion Dollar Quest to...

Core Memory ·

2025/07/16

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

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75:05

Spaceplanes Are Upon Us

Core Memory ·

2025/07/09

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

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77:52

The Child Prodigy Teaching Other People How To Learn

Core Memory ·

2025/07/02

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

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82:43

Fixing American Science Funding

Core Memory ·

2025/06/25

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

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84:50

The New Era of Consumer DNA Tests

Core Memory ·

2025/06/18

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

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78:18

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

Core Memory ·

2025/06/11

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

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91:01

The Future of Money

Core Memory ·

2025/06/05

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

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124:00

Exclusive: Palmer Luckey and Meta Make Peace to Make...

Core Memory ·

2025/05/29

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

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64:44

Peter Beck on Rockets, Dinner with Elon and the...

Core Memory ·

2025/05/22

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

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78:06

He Comes Promising AI Freedom For All

Core Memory ·

2025/05/16

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

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72:13

The Company Trying to Reprogram Aging

Core Memory ·

2025/05/06

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

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72:38

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

Core Memory ·

2025/04/29

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

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62:55

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future...

Core Memory ·

2025/04/17

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

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72:26

Chris Kemp on Astra's Comeback, Rockets and Drones...

Core Memory ·

2025/04/04

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

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70:06

Dwarkesh Patel Wants People to Learn Things

Core Memory ·

2025/03/25

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

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85:10

The First Bungee Jump, Space Weapons, Lunar Landers...

Core Memory ·

2025/03/20

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

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70:47

Max Hodak Loves Brains

Core Memory ·

2025/03/13

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

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70:42

Consciousness in the Quantum Realm

Core Memory ·

2025/03/07

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

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72:52

On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic...

Core Memory ·

2025/02/27

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

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58:33

Because Sometimes a Chicken Sandwich Needs to Get to...

Core Memory ·

2025/02/21

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

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46 results

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