Core Memory

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.

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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.)

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 to imagine a sky full of these aircraft working that well.

During the dinner, though, Zipline pulled off a sneak attack maneuver and plopped some cookies down right beside me without me noticing the drone at all.

The technology was quiet and precise, and it made me want to learn more - which is why we’re bringing you Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the company’s co-founder and CEO, on this latest podcast.

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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 a deep dive on Retro’s technology and Altman’s $180 million investment in the company. [Update: Would like to make it clear that MIT Technology Review reporter Antonio Regalado broke the story on Retro’s existence and Altman’s backing. This post previously had some self-congratulatory language that made it sound like I got there first. My apologies to Antonio, who does brilliant work.] 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 life. In this episode, we explore both along with the heart of Retro’s science.

This is the first episode of the Core Memory podcast, and we’re beyond amazed to reveal that James Mercer and Jon Sortland of The Shins worked up the music for the show. We go hard.

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