Core Memory

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 portion of the mouse brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. In the first stage of the research, the team recorded the activity of neurons in that region as it showed a mouse videos of different landscapes.

The researchers then dissected the mouse brain and doused the cubic millimeter with hardening chemicals. Then they shaved off 28,000 slices from the block of tissue, capturing an image of each one. Computers were trained to recognize the outlines of cells in each slice and link the slices together into three-dimensional shapes. All told, the team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells, along with 523 million neural connections.

Andreas Tolias, our guest on today’s podcast, was one of many researchers involved in this effort, and he walked us through MICrONS in detail.

Tolias also took us on an exploration of the history and future of brain research and his current passion, which is to represent human brains in digital form. He’s a fascinating man working one of the most fascinating areas of science.

This episode was sponsored by the kind people at E1 Ventures. Enjoy!

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 Stack. This is his vision of the IVF clinic of the future in which people can make eggs from skin cells and do all sorts of gene editing on embryos either to thwart diseases or even give babies some enhancements. And he sees these babies coming to life in artificial wombs.

Let’s get weird, y’all.

As Coinbase CEO, Armstrong has been to known to generate controversy now and again with some strongly held views on politics in the workplace and on the Feds. The press has not taken kindly to Armstrong at times for said views, and we get into that as well.

If you listen to this and need you some more Brian Armstrong, there’s a great documentary on him and Coinbase called Coin.

And now on with the show.

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 lows where it verged on bankruptcy. Over the past year, Kemp and Astra co-founder Adam London took the company private and raised a fresh $80 million as they head toward flying Rocket 4 - their next-generation machine. We have lots more on that story here.

In this episode, we get into Astra’s tumultuous journey with Kemp, his disdain for some of my filmmaking choices and the future of rockets. He envisions a world with rocket launch sites in many countries and rockets ferrying things like drones into battles in far-off places in a matter of seconds.

As always, you can listen here or via your favorite podcast provider. And we have a YouTube channel with the podcasts and our latest science and tech videos. Leave a review. Like and subscribe. Calm our souls.

Most of all - enjoy!

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.

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.