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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

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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58:43

The Start-up Making IVF and Egg Freezing Faster and...

Core Memory ·

2025/02/13

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

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70:56

Fly Another Day: The Daring, Thrilling, and Misguided...

Core Memory ·

2025/02/07

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

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67:11

Life After Extinction: Bringing Woolly Mammoths Back...

Core Memory ·

2025/01/31

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

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63:39

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton on Zipline's Drone Delivery...

Core Memory ·

2025/01/26

A few weeks ago, I went out to Zipline’s test facility in Half Moon Bay, California for a dinner and to see their delivery drones in action. I was not expecting much. It feels like we’ve been promised delivery drones for years and years. And, in fact, we have. These visions of the future don’t always arrive on schedule, but the delivery drones were feeling extra tardy. I also wasn’t even sure if delivery drones made that much sense. Drones run loud. They could obviously crash into things. It’s hard

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77:20

Joe Betts LaCroix on Longevity and Building and...

Core Memory ·

2025/01/17

Sam Altman has placed a few very large bets. There’s OpenAI, of course, and Helion Energy for fusion; World (fka Worldcoin) for finance and identity; and then Retro Bio for longevity.In late 2023, I did the first deep dive on Retro’s technology and Altman’s $180 million investment in the company. Along the way, I got to know the Retro co-founder and CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix and have spent a lot of time following Retro’s work since. Betts-LaCroix has an unusual background and an original philosophy on

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125:14

Audio: Geoff Hinton on Brains, AI and Life

Core Memory ·

2021/05/13

Here we have the dulcet sounds of neural net pioneer and all around AI guru Geoff Hinton, as interviewed by your truly. The incomparable Ryan Manning appears as host and eccentric archivist. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ashleevance.substack.com

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