Core Memory

This week’s guest is Naman Pushp, the founder and CEO of Airbound.

Pushp is all of 21 years old and trying to build an aerospace giant in India. His company, Airbound, produces carbon fiber to create very lightweight, very efficient aircraft used for the moment to deliver small packages of cargo around the country. Pushp’s core thesis is that the aviation industry has not been aggressive enough with its use of carbon fiber and that he can uses materials advances to outflank drone delivery companies first and then perhaps create a new class of planes for humans too.

These are big hopes and dreams and very big claims! And the company has a long, long way to go. But this is all to be expected.

I recently visited Airbound’s headquarters and test sites in Bangalore and came away rather impressed with Pushp and his team. They’ve built two versions of their aircraft, and we watched dozens of them fill the skies. The machines take off vertically and then zoom off like airplanes. They’re quiet, and they can hover.

Pushp is a self-taught engineer who learned how to build things with carbon fiber by watching YouTube videos and then began constructing aircraft in his teenage bedroom. He got into Carnegie Mellon but skipped university to build Airbound instead. He’s bright and (very) confident.

He’s also representative of a new era in Indian technology. Some of the country’s brightest, most ambitious youngsters are opting to stay at home and to try and build hard tech companies that do real innovation, as opposed to mimicking what has happened elsewhere.

We get into ALL of this on the podcast. And this marks the start of a series of videos, podcasts, and stories we have coming on the rise of the Indian tech scene. I’ve already managed to anger a large swath of the Indian venture capital industry with this story and am sure to anger others as we go on this journey.

SPONSOR

The wonderful people at Brex helped make these stories from India possible. You can catch a taste of the adventures here.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

TIMESTAMPS

CHAPTERS0:00 Intro6:01 Replacing Roads With Aircraft7:37 Designing Around Carbon Fiber14:23 Taking On Drone Delivery21:29 From Deliveries to Passengers23:09 Aircraft From a Bedroom32:38 From Project to Company37:53 Choosing Aircraft Over College41:11 Why Build in India?48:13 Life With Instant Delivery52:28 India's New Hardware Generation1:01:48 Why Skip Defense Contracts?1:04:35 Democracy and Getting Things Built1:07:40 India Between America and China1:13:18 Can Carbon Fiber Get Cheaper?1:21:44 The Trouble With Scaling

Neal Stephenson came on the podcast. What else do I have to tell you?

The man has a weird mind portal into how technology will develop and has influenced generations of nerds. As a result, I seem to have spent my career covering things that Stephenson predicted in his best-selling books.

He’s out with a new book now, D: Heavy Water, which served as a lovely excuse to get Neal on the show.

In the episode, we talk space, brain computer interfaces, swords, Hollywood and much more. Oddly, Stephenson says that the rapid development of AI caught him off guard. Go figure.

Anyway. Living Legend. Go listen and watch.

SPONSOR

Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro1:53 D and the Atomic Race4:34 Inside the Book Tour8:21 AI Caught Him Off Guard11:09 Is This the Singularity?15:27 AI's Manhattan Project Moment28:32 Brains, Bodies and Words38:31 What Actually Worries Neal40:11 Can Fiction Inspire Progress?49:56 Why No Snow Crash?55:06 Jane Austen Meets Fortnite1:03:21 Inside Early Blue Origin1:13:43 Rockets, Guns and Giant Towers1:20:36 Why Radical Rockets Struggle1:23:05 Swords and Selective Technology1:27:15 Can AI Fix Education?1:32:31 Storytelling Versus Predicting the Future

We’re heading into fighter jet territory this week with Zach Shore (CEO) and A.J. Piplica (Co-Founder and Executive Chairman) of Hermeus.

Founded in 2018, Hermeus has set out to make supersonic and even hypersonic jets that can fly themselves. They’re part of this new wave of defense startups trying to prove that the U.S. can still produce technological marvels in a timely and not criminally expensive fashion. Hermeus’s planes would be a new breed of fighter jets that can use their speed and autonomy to carry out missions without putting pilots at risk.

We conducted this interview with Shore and Piplica a couple of months back at Spaceport America just ahead of a test flight of Hermeus’s Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 plane. I’m pleased to tell you that the plane did indeed go supersonic, and it was awesome to behold. We’ll have a video on the experience soon on our YouTube channel.

This interview covers Hermeus’s journey, the state of the U.S. defense industry, plane design and how the U.S. hopes to keep pace with China in areas like hypersonic flight.

Hermeus’s planes are remotely piloted for now, but it has partnered with Anduril to give its aircraft autonomous mission capabilities. For hypersonic flight, it’s developing a fascinating hybrid engine design intended to switch from a turbine to a ramjet midair.

Hermeus achieved supersonic flight on Mk 2.1’s third test flight and is betting it can keep building and testing new prototypes much faster than traditional defense contractors. You can see its planes and timelines here.

SPONSOR

Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro3:39 Supersonic With Nobody Aboard6:21 Building an Aircraft Company17:02 From Turbines to Ramjets22:18 The Unmanned Bomb Truck30:25 Will Passengers Fly Hypersonic?31:56 America's Flight Testing Bottleneck40:08 Who Actually Flies It?45:12 Rebuilding the Skunk Works47:06 China and America's Aerospace Bet

Our guests this week are Andrew Kiguel and Matt McMullen from Realbotix.

Realbotix makes humanoid robots that actually look like humans. McMullen, who founded the company, has spent years refining the animatronics and materials needed to create lifelike machines. His past creations have received tons of media attention both because they’re striking and because they veer into companionship and sex territory.

Lars and the Real Girl? Yep, that’s Matt’s work.

Realbotix, though, is an attempt to take the technology in a different direction. The company has made AI-infused bots that it wants to put to work out in the world. The bots could greet guests at hotels, provide information at hospitals or perhaps tutor students at schools. The Realbotix bots can carry on conversations and use vision systems to recognize people and take in their surroundings.

We conducted this interview in Las Vegas where Realbotix has its headquarters. In a future video on our YouTube channel, which is awesome and you should subscribe to, I head out into Vegas with a bot named Aria, and we have a delightful afternoon together.

Some of you will think these robots are weird. And I get this.

I will, however, add that most of the humanoids out there are very boring. Companies have focused on what the robots can do rather than what they look like. The folks at Realbotix, by contrast, have put a lot of time and energy into trying to figure out how humans and robots will interact and progress together. We get into all of this on the show.

SPONSOR

Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro3:31 Robots Built for Conversation5:58 An Artist Builds a Robot15:31 Faces You Can Swap23:40 What Does a Robot Cost?26:17 Giving the Robot a Personality28:32 The RealDoll Question33:32 Can Robots Ease Loneliness?43:52 Hotel Clerks and Robot Tutors46:41 Hands, Eyes, and Memory56:31 Escaping the Uncanny Valley1:04:41 China and the Robot Bubble1:09:24 How Unfiltered Should AI Be?

This week’s guest is Brent Underwood, the proud owner of Cerro Gordo Mines.

That’s right. In 2018, Underwood bought the ghost town of Cerro Gordo, located near Death Valley in California, and its old mining operations for $1.4 million. This was a legit crazy thing to do. But, here we are eight years later, and Underwood has turned his sidequest into his mainquest, and he now has a booming YouTube channel in which he documents life at Cerro Gordo. This includes exploration of the mines and Underwood’s attempt to restore the ghost town into a habitable site that people can visit.

You will notice (if you’re viewing instead of just listening) that the set for this podcast is awesome. That’s because we went to visit Underwood a couple of months back for this podcast and for a video that will be coming out on our own booming YouTube channel.

We spent a couple of nights at Cerro Gordo, living in an old miner’s house, and we explored the grounds with Underwood.

As you’ll hear in this episode, Cerro Gordo was a long-running silver mine and, at its peak, had 4,000 people living in the mountains and working the many miles of mines. It’s quite well preserved. You can see the old brothel, theater, and store. And Underwood has been rebuilding the American Hotel that once served as the centerpiece of the town.

Underwood does crazy things at Cerro Gordo. He’ll lower himself down the main mine shaft and then spend days underground. He’s used his exploring to help build out the history of Cerro Gordo and wrote an amazing book about Cerro Gordo and his adventures. You should probably buy it and read it.

We obviously get into all of the above with Underwood, who is a wonderful storyteller and a good dude.

SPONSOR

Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

Timestamps

0:00 Intro4:53 How to Buy a Town11:29 The American Hotel Burns17:36 History Meets the YouTube Algorithm22:46 Five Days Below Ground28:29 The West Was Brutal33:33 Who Actually Got Rich?40:37 Where the Water Went44:31 California Versus the Hotel49:14 Can a Ghost Town Live?

A few years ago, some people put me in a van and drove me to the edge of Moscow. And by “the edge of Moscow,” I mean where things started to get a bit rural. We turned off a road and went toward what looked like a modest farmhouse with a shed. After exiting the van, we entered said shed and found two large metal containers that were full of human bodies and heads along with the bodies of many animals, including dogs, cats, and a hummingbird. Have a look.

These bodies were being cryopreserved with liquid nitrogen in the hope that they could be reanimated at some point in the future when science has advanced and more illnesses can be cured.

Cryopreservation/reanimation is not a new idea. It’s been contemplated in literature for hundreds of years. Alcor, perhaps the most well-known cryopreservation company, was founded way back in 1972. The field, though, has suffered from questionable science and been seen as a scientific backwater.

Our guest this week wants to add scientific, intellectual, and pragmatic rigor to the cryopreservation field or what he calls the biostasis field. He’s Dr. Emil Kendziorra, the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio.

Tomorrow Bio has a team that will show up at the end of life and prepare someone’s body for preservation and then store their body in a Swiss vault.

In this episode, we get into the mechanics behind Tomorrow Bio and the pros and cons of biostasis. Kendziorra is a sober, deep thinker on this topic and a great listen.

OUR SPONSOR

BREX

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

TIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube)

CHAPTERS0:00 Intro5:08 Cryonics Without the Ice8:45 Heads in a Russian Shed12:26 Longevity's Backup Plan19:39 The First Hours After Death30:11 Funding a Second Life37:15 Does Cryonics Actually Work?43:40 Preserving Brains Without Bodies50:52 Why Not Reverse Aging?55:21 Can the Company Outlive You?1:03:37 Waking Up Centuries Later1:08:28 The Problem of Rewarming1:15:14 Selling Hope Without Overselling Science1:19:40 Would Longer Lives Be Better?1:23:42 Elective Cryonics and Family Life

We’ve heard a lot of moonshot ideas on this podcast, but this week’s guest may have the most impossible one yet: making tech more cultured.

In this episode, Ashlee sat down with Anna Gát, a Hungarian philosopher, playwright, and founder of Interintellect, a platform for hosting intellectual conversations online. She calls herself “the bridge” between the humanities, academia, and the tech world, which in practice means getting engineers to read Goethe.

Gát grew up on a TV set in communist Hungary. Her parents made the country’s biggest shows in an era when there was one channel available on Saturdays. In 2015, a family crisis left her starting over in London with two suitcases, one of them for books. She rebuilt her life on Twitter, DM’d Sam Altman, and got him as her first meeting on her first trip to America.

Before Interintellect, Gát did just about every wordcel job you can do: playwright, screenwriter, script doctor. She holds graduate degrees in philosophical aesthetics and linguistics, currently splits her time between SF and NYC. The company that would become Interintellect began in London in 2016 as an AI tool for helping “humans have categorically better conversations.” On the side, she angel invests in aerospace.

The two get into why X was once the French café that could publish you and is now a place you can’t get discovered from, why the East Coast’s healthiest, wealthiest people are so convinced the future is doomed, and the duty AI builders have to explain themselves. Gát also admits, on the record, that she’s a sucker for Elon Musk’s syntax. Ashlee tries to convince her that kids don’t read books anymore. She tries to convince him Silicon Valley should fund symphonies.

IN THIS EPISODE

Interintellect — https://www.interintellect.com

The Hope Axis — https://twitter.com/TheHopeAxis

Anna on X — https://x.com/TheAnnaGat

OUR SPONSORS

BREX

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

SENDCUTSEND

You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 — Intro

2:56 — The science of dialogue

6:34 — Growing up famous in communist Hungary

13:06 — Nobody saw 1989 coming

16:43 — Losing everything in 2015

20:57 — Silicon Valley as the new Ellis Island

28:38 — Balaji's DAO campaign33:42 — Elon's syntax

39:18 — Why does America hate tech?

46:25 — Engineers took over the world

53:20 — Have LLMs solved language?

1:01:29 — Are books dying?

1:06:51 — No Pop-Tarts

1:10:46 — Who funds culture?

In this episode, Ashlee sits down with Joel Jean, CEO of Swift Solar, a San Carlos-based startup trying to create new solar technology using perovskite. We previously published a story about Swift, if you’re wondering what the f*ck perovskite is! In short, it’s a synthetic crystal that turns sunlight into electricity better and cheaper than the silicon currently used in solar panels. This stuff is finicky though, and experts have doubts, as they always do — but Jean explains how Swift is closing in on a solution.

“Everyone and their mom can make a perovskite that’s decently efficient,” Jean says, but no one seems capable of making it as durable as silicon. The material degrades under heat, light and its own moving ions. This is obviously not the ideal situation for an energy grid.

So why not stick with silicon? Well, the laws of physics haven’t quite blessed it. A silicon panel can turn, at most, about 30 percent of the sunlight it gets into electricity, and today’s panels usually churn out about 25 percent. If they’re able to successfully layer perovskite on top, that pushes the ceiling to 45 percent.

These are fabulous gains in the solar nerd world, and we could really use some innovation here because we are one very, very energy-hungry species. And of course, this is Core Memory, so you know where this is headed: China and AI.

China makes 90 percent of the world’s solar cells and wafers, installs more panels than the rest of the planet combined, and builds the machines that nearly every U.S. solar factory runs on. (Except for Swift, apparently!). That dependency is, as always, a risk.

Meanwhile, AI data centers need more power than God, and the folks making models are happy to welcome any new gains in that department. Some are even putting their money on it; renowned AI researcher Jeff Dean has invested Swift.

Charge your crystals, folks. We’re perovskite-maxxing.

IN THIS EPISODE

This Is The U.S.’s Last Chance At Solar — Core Memory

Swift Solar

Meyer Burger acquisition

Joel's "solar for AGI" piece

OUR SPONSORS

BREX

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

SENDCUTSEND

You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Intro

04:56 — How The U.S. Lost Solar1

2:36 — Maxed-Out Physics

20:03 — How China Won

27:53 — What Is Perovskite?

36:52 — The 30-Year Problem

45:41 — China's Scale-First Bet

51:00 — The Meyer Burger Deal

58:50 — Can Solar Power AI?

1:09:43 — Patents, China And The Machines

1:22:15 — Solar For AGI

This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it.

Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats.

Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode!

Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him:

“The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the b******t of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.”

Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon. You’ll have to listen for that last one.

IN THIS EPISODE

Core Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experimentSmithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread projectPacific Light & Hologram

OUR SPONSORS

BREX

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

SENDCUTSEND

You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.

TIMESTAMPS

* 00:00:00 — Intro

* 00:02:38 — Why Tech Hype Sucks

* 00:07:37 — Why Talking About Your Work Kills It

* 00:10:42 — Early Life, Physics, and Jazz

* 00:21:57 — Fermilab & Academic Politics

* 00:30:47 — Building the First 3D Video Game Engines

* 00:34:18 — Early Game Development Culture

* 00:38:37 — DreamWorks & Working for Steven Spielberg

* 00:44:32 — Joining Microsoft & Pitching the Original Xbox

* 00:54:04 — Fighting Corporate Bureaucracy to Save Xbox

* 01:03:42 — Abducting Jimmy Fallon

* 01:07:20 — Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Yeast

* 01:10:40 — Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab

* 01:17:09 — Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire

We have been promised glorious gene therapies for decades. This is supposed to be the stuff of reprogramming the body to blunt or cure diseases with something approaching a permanent fix. While gene therapy progress has been made, treatments remain rare and expensive, and it’s very tough to get the therapies to go into the desired parts of the body.

Our guest this week is here to help. He’s Adrian Veres, the chief scientific officer and co-founder of Dyno Therapeutics. Founded in 2018, Dyno has been pursuing new and better ways to deliver gene therapies via modified viruses.

Dyno was well ahead of the AI meets biotech curve, using AI models to design new viral shells that let genetic instructions get into the right places of the body. For the moment, Dyno has focused on creating delivery mechanisms for companies working on therapies aimed at the brain, eye and muscles.

In this episode, we talk with Veres about the promise and perils of gene therapy technology, some of the most recent cases where gene therapies worked and how Dyno’s technology came to be and functions. And we get Veres’s take on whether or not we’re entering a golden age of biotech on the back of AI.

Due to some poor camera work on my part, Veres, who is a tall man, looks particularly giant. Fear not, he did not harm me and was actually quite nice.

OUR SPONSORS

BREX

The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

SENDCUTSEND

You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you.

IN THIS EPISODE

Dyno Therapeutics: https://www.dynotx.com/

The FDA framework for individualized ultra-rare disease therapies: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-launches-framework-accelerating-development-individualized-therapies-ultra-rare-diseases

Core Memory on Baby KJ and the new gene therapy playbook: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-new-gene-therapy-playbook-babykj

Core Memory’s gene-editing conversation with Eryney Marrogi: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-state-of-gene-editing-eryney-marrogi

Core Memory’s podcast with Jennifer Doudna: https://www.corememory.com/p/the-present-and-future-of-gene-editing-jennifer-doudna-crispr

TIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube)

0:00 Intro

3:34 Why Does Gene Therapy Still Feel Rare?

7:38 What Is Gene Therapy, Really?

14:48 How Do You Deliver DNA?

17:47 Turning a Virus Into Medicine

21:53 The 700-Letter Box

28:20 Testing a Million Designs at Once

34:28 Why Does the Liver Steal the Cure?

36:43 Getting Past the Brain’s Bouncer

43:04 Is Delivery the Missing Piece?

47:24 Can Million-Dollar Therapies Get Cheap?

52:10 Did Dyno Start Too Early?

1:00:03 Was Biology Oversold?

1:09:36 Will We Cure Every Disease in 10 Years?

1:18:20 Should You Build Your Own Peptide Stack?

1:20:55 Is China Winning the Biology Race?

1:27:40 What Baby KJ Changed

1:32:34 Should the Next Generation Study Biology?