For the past few months, The Wall Street Journal’s Bob McMillan has been writing a series of stories on fake North Korean workers who have infiltrated American companies. In this episode, we break the whole situation down with McMillan, who is a longtime friend and a top-notch security reporter.

The short of the tale is this: North Koreans hop on LinkedIn and other job sites and pose as American remote workers looking for gigs. Once they get hired, the North Koreans then recruit Americans to help them deal with some of the job mechanics like submitting tax paperwork and running company laptops from inside the US.

McMillan has found some Americans who are managing dozens of laptops at their homes on behalf of these North Korean workers. Each morning, the American patsy wakes up, turns the laptops on, and then logs their North Korean workers into their jobs. It’s a practice now known at laptop farming.

The North Koreans tend to be pretty good workers! That is until they start siphoning off money and intellectual property for the Great Leader.

Last month, Arizona resident Christina Marie Chapman pled guilty to wire fraud and other crimes linked to this scheme. Per the Department of Justice, Chapman “was sentenced today to 102 months in prison for her role in a fraudulent scheme that assisted North Korean Information Technology (IT) workers posing as U.S. citizens and residents with obtaining remote IT positions at more than 300 U.S. companies. The scheme generated more than $17 million in illicit revenue for Chapman and for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea).”

All told, the DoJ reckons North Korea has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from its network of laptop farmers. McMillan writes about it all here.

If you’re an employer on the lookout for one of these fake remote workers, you’ll want to scan for Kevins in your organization who are really into the Minions. We explain in the episode - promise.

Enjoy!

The Core Memory podcast is made possible by the genius investors at E1 Ventures. We’re not sure if E1 is into the Minions or not, but they are into investing in great companies.

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We are awash in longevity tests and services. There are ones that measure your blood, others that measure the quality of your DNA and others that check on your gut and brain. You can Blueprint, Viome, Function Health and on and on.

To figure out how at least one of these longevity programs actually works, we decided to have Dugal Bain-Kim from Lifeforce on the pod.

As you will notice, the dude is jacked and does indeed seem quite healthy.

Lifeforce provides - for a montly fee - a lot of what a decent national healthcare system might do in a different universe. It sends a phlebotomist to your home to take a blood draw and performs a wide range of tests on the sample. It then puts you in touch with a medical team for some health counseling and tries to identify areas that will help you become a better you.

Instead of doing this once, you repeat the cycle every three months and try to push what the company calls your Lifescore ever higher.

Bain-Kim is not a doctor and comes from the business world, and two of Lifeforce’s co-founders are Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis. Robbins obviously has a reputation as a self-improvement guru, and some of Diamandis’s ventures center on selling optimism. The company also offers supplements and other products. This combination of things will put some people off.

That said, Lifeforce also has a deep medical bench, and there’s real – and ever-improving - science backing up its measurements and therapies.

I’m broadly excited for services like Lifeforce but also fearful that consumers have little means of judging these various programs and separating the good stuff from the snake oil.

We touch on all of these issues and much more in the show. Have a listen and judge for yourself.

This podcast is made with support from the fine people at E1 Ventures. Your company will almost certainly live longer with E1 Ventures on your cap table.

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This week’s guest is Leslie Berlin, the author, historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive.

My first encounter with Berlin’s work happened when I picked up The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, which is Berlin’s biography of the Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder. Noyce, of course, was many things. He co-invented the integrated circuit and reshaped the trajectory of the world in the process. He ran one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. He mentored people like Steve Jobs. And he was the Valley’s first real engineer playboy star.

Berlin’s book is one of my all-time favorite reads and a wonderful example of what a biography can be.

Berlin, of course, is many things as well. She’s been one of the most influential historians when it comes to Silicon Valley and the technology industry. She used to run Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, and now heads up the Steve Jobs Archive. Berlin is also the author of another tremendous book - Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age, which chronicles the work of several people who had distinctive roles across the tech industry.

In this chat, we get into Noyce’s life and what he meant to Silicon Valley, the semiconductor industry, the fall of Intel, the Valley’s history overall and Berlin’s current work.

There’s basically no one I would rather talk to, and we’re thrilled that Berlin joined the pod.

Huge thanks to everyone who has been supporting the Core Memory podcast. It’s been surging up the charts of late. We’re grateful. Don’t be shy. Tell your friends.

A huge thanks, as always, as well to E1 Ventures for they are noble venture capitalists who have great taste and have backed us from the start. Follow them on X.

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

Our guests this week are Kurt Terrani, an Iranian-born nuclear scientist, and Tommy Hendrix, a Green Beret turned venture capitalist, and they arrive with an exceptional story.

Terrani is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Nuclear, and Hendrix is the company’s Chairman and main investor through his firm Decisive Point. Standard has started making a nuclear reactor fuel known as TRISO (Tri-structural ISOtropic) that comes with the promise of being very safe and with the ability to power a new breed of small nuclear reactors that can be placed anywhere someone needs a lot of power.

Standard Nuclear popped out of stealth mode last month via a fascinating story in The Wall Street Journal.

It turns out that Standard’s predecessor - Ultra Safe Nuclear – had been backed for years by a wealthy ex-CIA operative named Richard Hollis Helms. When Helms passed away in 2024, the company was left in financial peril. Terrani and Hendrix pulled the venture out of bankruptcy and saved its prized TRISO technology.

As we explain in the episode, TRISO is a type of nuclear reactor fuel that the U.S. has been working on for decades. It places a protective coating around fuel particles that makes them incredibly safe, and the U.S. and other countries have proven this out through vast amounts of research. China, of course, has TRISO reactors already as does Germany.

Standard Nuclear hopes to make a lot of TRISO for a coming wave of nuclear start-ups building SMRs, or Small Modular Reactors. These reactors come in various shapes and sizes, but the general idea is that they’re small enough to be shipped to any place that needs serious power – be it an AI data center, an overseas Army supply line or even an industrial hub in space.

I recently visited Standard’s TRISO plant in Tennessee, which is right next door to Oak Ridge National Laboratory where Terrani and much of his team used to work. We’ll have a video on the visit coming soon.

During our chat, we get into the U.S.’s nuclear failings and aspirations, Standard’s wild history and the future of nuclear technology.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. You can find them here and on X here.

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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 U.S. They’re funding some of the most cutting-edge work on trying to understand how the human body functions at the cellular level and placing some of the riskiest, boldest bets in bio-tech.

CZI has not operated without controversy. Over the past few weeks, Dr. Chan has faced criticism for dialing back funding on some of the organization’s education and political programs in favor of going Full Science.

We get into this a bit on the show, although, I will Full Confess to being less into telling people how to spend their money than others appear to be.

Mostly, we discuss Dr. Chan’s dramatic life story and the work CZI is doing to push bio-tech forward. Recently, for example, the organization backed a new program aimed at trying to cure children struck with genetic rare diseases. CZI has also just put out a new AI-based model that gives us a better understanding of how cells work.

Since we’ve recently become a sci-tech and tennis publication, we get into Dr. Chan’s tennis career as well. Enjoy!

This podcast was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who also support science and human progress through their investments.

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

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 company signed a deal with a group in Oklahoma to perform dozens of flights from the Oklahoma Air and Space Port - and, yes, that’s a real thing.

We sat down with Stefan Powell, the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Dawn, to talk about spaceplanes, Dawn’s satellite propulsion business and the aerospace scene in New Zealand and Europe.

Dawn has moved quite quickly for an aerospace company and, like Rocket Lab before it, stunned the world by doing much of innovation from New Zealand, which has not historically been an aerospace power. Its ability to get to the edge of space and back multiple times a day is unique, and it has plans for even bigger craft in the future.

This episode was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures, who happen to invest in hard-tech things like aerospace.

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

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 Taiwan, and the young man often found himself being interviewed on TV and touring the country to tell his story.

After graduating from college, Hsu pursued a PhD at Stanford before dropping out and using some Thiel Fellowship money to start an ed-tech company called Airy Labs.

That company struggled, but Hsu’s latest venture – Speak – has been booming. It’s an AI-powered language tutor that enjoyed immense success first in South Korea and then beyond. It’s been valued at more than $1 billion after a $78 million funding round closed near the end of last year.

In this episode, Hsu graciously tolerates my child prodigy questions and then gets into how he hit on AI and language before it was cool and how people can learn better.

This episode was made possible by E1 Ventures, backers of bold people and bold ideas.

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

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 ideas. In essence, Convergent wants to support things that help open up new fields of science and technology, and it funds folks whose ideas might be too expensive for a university lab and/or not obviously commercial enough for typical venture capital. Gamick and Marblestone argue that the FRO model fills a crucial gap in US science funding.

Convergent tends to put $30 million to $50 million into what look like quasi-start-ups and gives them five to six years to build their thing. To date, it has backed around a dozen efforts with a pretty heavy emphasis on the bio-tech and neuroscience fields.

Recently, Convergent also put out the Gap Map, which is a well-researched exploration of all the things that it thinks the world still needs to develop. Go ahead. Poke around.

In this episode, we break down FROs, science funding, the US vs. China, brains and much more.

Our show is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1.

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

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 aimed at adults. It promises to give you insights about a wide variety of health conditions, including your likely disposition toward things like mental health issues, cancers and rare genetic diseases. You can use the information to inform your lifestyle choices and to compare your DNA traits with those of your potential baby making partner to see if you’re a good baby making fit. (You can go here to see how Sadeghi uses this information on dates.)

The company also has a new, far more expensive service ($5,000) aimed at parents going through the IVF process to help them select embryos with certain traits. This type of service is quickly becoming all the rage, as we noted in our recent video on Orchid, which you should absolutely watch because it’s awesome. (Orchid contends that it does a much deeper dive on the embryo DNA than does Nucleus. I gave Sadeghi a chance to respond to some of this in the podcast.)

Sadeghi has been controversialish because he’s made big claims about Nucleus’s ability to discern things like someone’s IQ from DNA and because he’s been an aggressive marketer in a bio-tech field that tends more toward conservatism - lest one become the next jailed blood testing start-up CEO. He’s also been way more outspoken about the rather obvious direction we’re heading toward where people will be picking the desired traits of their future kids and where sex may well just become a purely recreational event as society moves toward IVF and artificial wombs for the majority of its new human production.

What’s clear enough is that the first wave of consumer genetic testing companies arrived many years ago when DNA tests were rarer and more expensive, and we’re now seeing them be usurped by a new crop of services that really take advantage of the massive decreases in sequencing costs. In short, we can test more of your DNA more cheaply than ever before, and we have much better data and software to analyze the DNA now.

Sadeghi and I get into all of this on the podcast.

The show was made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1, or at least that’s what I tell my kids.

Enjoy!

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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