Technology

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 complex technology and compelling people to the public and give them a path into exceptional and unusual worlds they would not normally have a chance to experience.

www.corememory.com

Latest Episodes:

The Joy And Doom Of New San Francisco - EP 55 Jayden Clark Feb 04, 2026

Show notes

The center of the universe has been born again. The most insufferable posters on our timeline, including myself, are enjoying the abundance found in San Francisco thanks to the AI boom lining the pockets of fresh college dropouts. The themed parties are bumping, the LLMs look good, the La Croix is flowing. There is much doom in this world, but not in this podcast.

On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Jayden Clark. He’s the host of Members of Technical Staff, a podcast about niche San Francisco tech culture. He’s been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Business Insider. We discuss all the important parts of life in this new version of San Francisco: themed parties, online discourse, and the permanent underclass.

The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This 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.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

The Present And Future Of Gene Editing - EP 54 Jennifer Doudna Jan 28, 2026

Show notes

Let’s get right to the point: Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna is on the pod this week.

Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work developing “a method for high-precision genome editing.” They, and others, helped usher in the CRISPR revolution with people getting very, very excited about the prospects of editing genes in humans, animals, and plants with more precision and ease.

There have been some massive recent CRISPR wins. Casgevy, which treats sickle cell disease, emerged as the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy. And, last year, an infant in Pennsylvania had a rare disease treated with record-breaking speed via CRISPR technology.

That said, CRISPR has, in many ways, not lived up to the hope and hype just yet. CRISPR therapies remain expensive and tough to distribute throughout the body.

Doudna is convinced that several major CRISPR breakthroughs are upon us, and we get into where she sees the field going. We discuss the work she’s doing at start-ups and the Innovative Genomics Institute – a research powerhouse that links UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Davis.

And we talk about Pomona College, our shared alma mater, rejecting our wonderful, brilliant children who will no doubt go on to do amazing things in the world and likely make untold billions that will be donated to other tremendous institutions. JK. Chirp, chirp!

If you want to get up to speed on gene editing’s present and future, you will not find a better discussion.

The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This 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.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups.

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

He Left OpenAI To Think Bigger - EP 53 Jerry Tworek Jan 22, 2026

Show notes

On January 5th, famed AI researcher Jerry Tworek stunned world+dog by announcing his departure from OpenAI. A few days later, he hopped over to the Core Memory podcast studio for his not-so-formal exit interview.

Tworek joined OpenAI in 2019 when the research lab was a research lab and had about thirty employees. He went on to work on many of OpenAI’s most consequential products, including the company’s reasoning technology, which ushered in a new era for the entire AI field. (Yes, Tworek worked on Q* before it was Strawberry before it was o1.)

Both Kylie and I have been longtime Tworek fans. He’s smart, funny and never really sought the limelight despite his massive contributions.

In the episode, Tworek reveals that he found it hard to keep doing high-risk, pioneering work at OpenAI as the company shifted toward what Tworek describes as more conservative ways. He, in fact, thinks the large AI companies have become conservative as a whole and that there might be bigger, better ideas to be found elsewhere.

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

Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun Jan 14, 2026

Show notes

Biohacking has gone through a lot of different phases. Implanting an NFC chip in your hand is old school and having a blood boy is passé. Among Silicon Valley’s 20-somethings, all the cool kids have a peptide stack.

Jasmine Sun joins us this week to chat about all things peptides. She was previously a product manager at Substack, but now she writes about San Francisco culture on her own Substack. Jasmine recently published a deep dive in The New York Times about the trendy injectable and deets on the Chinese peptide rave (which you first read about from our new writer, Kylie Robison, last month).

If you want to be like Wolverine, don’t do drugs. Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast instead. Our words are made of adamantium.

Do you feel old yet? We do.

In this episode, we get into all the important bits: What are peptides, why are they Chinese, and how is RFK Jr. involved? This is not medical advice, but if you do inject some peptides after this episode, tag us.

The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

Our show is sponsored by Brex. It builds finance tech that makes expensing and accounting for things like peptides super easy, if your company is cool with such things.

Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups.

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

New, More Precise Cancer Therapies Could Soon Be Here - EP 51 Richard Fuisz Jan 12, 2026

Show notes

We have a guest host and some breaking news for this episode.

Eryney Marrogi, the scientist and soon-to-be doctor who writes for us now and again, has taken over the pod studio to interview Richard Fuisz. Earlier today, Marrogi broke a story on Fuisz’s company Nonfiction Labs, which has developed technology that could make it possible to use magnets to better control how cancer therapies are doled out in the body.

The two big brains get into Nonfiction’s technology and into Fuisz’s rather prolific work at the cutting-edge of the biotech field. The conversation goes into how biotech actually gets built, competition with China and Fuisz’s family legacy of invention (his grandfather was the prolific inventor featured in “Bad Blood”).

The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

Our show is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememory

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

Is The Era Of AI-Designed Drugs Actually Here? - EP 50 Josh Meier and Jack Dent Dec 24, 2025

Show notes

We have been talking about computer-aided drug discovery for well more than a decade. It used to be the case that start-ups pitched their ability to use “machine learning” to hunt for new, promising therapies. Now we call machine learning “artificial intelligence” and have a new class of start-ups claiming big science breakthroughs.

One of these new wave start-ups is Chai Discovery and its founders Josh Meier and Jack Dent join the podcast this week. (The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms and on our YouTube pod channel.) The company was founded in 2024 and is backed by OpenAI, Menlo Ventures+Anthropic, Thrive and others. (Chai is already a unicorn.) It published a number of notable accomplishments this last year, including using its own AI model to churn out promising antibody designs at an unprecedented clip.

The first couple iterations of machine learning-aided drug discovery companies came and went without tremendous success. Chai and Nabla Bio are two of the buzziest members of this new era of AI companies. Their models really do seem to be harnessing the advances in AI to hit on potential drug targets and designs in rather profound ways. Bio-tech, in fact, seems like the place where AI may make the most stunning scientific advances first.

In this episode, we get into Chai’s intellectual roots as a research project within Facebook/Meta and how the company has gone after building its models. We also try to provide a realistic picture of the current state of AI drug discovery.

The implications of the work done by Chai, Nabla and others are far reaching. If we’re able to come up with new drug designs at this accelerated rate, we will need major changes around how drugs are tested and put through trials. The current drug testing and FDA approval system is simply not set up to move as quickly as bio-tech appears to be going.

This will be our last episode for the year, and we’re taking a tiny break between posting the next one as the Core Memory crew has a little time off. Thank you so, so much to all of you who have listened to the show in our first year. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned some things along the way.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

The Next Step Toward Understanding The Nature Of Intelligence - EP 49 Sebastian Seung Dec 17, 2025

Show notes

Well, here we are. It’s brain uploading time.

As we’ve just reported, famed neuroscientist Sebastian Seung has created a new start-up called Memazing. The company has set out to build digital brains in software that are based upon the maps of animal brains. Memazing is, in effect, seeking to reverse engineer how animal brains work and to use this information to bring to life a new form of computerized intelligence.

This work could lead to, say, more energy efficient AI systems that are modeled on real brains. It could help with aligning AI systems with human intelligence. And it could be a major step toward creating emulations of full human brains and perhaps, one day, making minds uploadable.

We get into all of this with Seung on this week’s podcast. We also explore his decades of neuroscience work dedicated to building connectomes, or ultra-detailed schematics of animal brains and all their neurons and synapses.

Seung is brilliant and fascinating. Listen and/or watch for yourself.

The Core Memory podcast is available on all major platforms and our YouTube channel.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

Attacking Cancer With Code And Winning - EP 48 Jake Becraft Dec 10, 2025

Show notes

Jake Becraft was working on mRNA way before it was cool.

In fact, Becraft’s advisors at MIT told him trying to develop therapies with mRNA would be a colossal waste of time. But, here we are in 2025, and Becraft has pushed the mRNA technology that gained so much attention during the pandemic in rather incredible new directions.

Becraft joins the podcast this week to talk about his company Strand Therapeutics and its programmable mRNA technology. Strand has developed a way to send therapies into the body and have them aim right for diseased cells. Its first clinical trial has focused on melanoma where Strand has been able to treat patients who were deemed incurable with any other medicines.

Jake and I met up at Strand’s headquarters in Boston with a double-helix hanging over our heads. We covered Strand’s work, Jake’s background and the future of synthetic biology.

We’ll have a video episode coming on Strand and its lab and technology soon on our YouTube channel, which you should be subscribing to because it’s awesome.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

America Has A Steel Start-Up. Yes, Really - EP 47 Laureen Meroueh Dec 03, 2025

Show notes

America has a new steel company, which is sort of a weird thing to write in 2025.

It’s called Hertha Metals, and it’s based in Houston. It’s also run by a woman named Laureen Meroueh, who is this week’s guest. As far as we can tell, Meroueh stands out as the first female to start and run a steel producer.

Meroueh grew up as something of a child prodigy in Florida and went on to earn a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. She then invented some of the processes that make Hertha different from traditional steel producers.

Hertha relies on natural gas and hydrogen instead of coal to make high-grade steel. Its process is potentially cleaner, simpler and cheaper than the approaches used by the traditional steelmakers that have been around for more than 150 years. The start-up is already producing one ton of steel per day and is now looking to prove that it can make much, much more and compete head-to-head against the major steel players.

In this episode, we get into how Hertha’s process works, the steel industry overall, why the U.S. needs this type of technology and how Meroueh ended up as a steel magnate.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

OpenAI's Research Chief On The Soup Wars, Poker And The Next Models - EP 46 Mark Chen Dec 01, 2025

Show notes

One must not feel sorry for Mark Chen. He gets paid very well to work in one of the most exciting fields imaginable.

That said, as OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, he has the difficult job of picking the company’s research priorities and of dealing with OpenAI’s employees begging him for more, more, more GPUs to power their work. This is a hectic gig, and, if you believe that AI will do all the things that AI companies promise it will do, then an awful lot of pressure and expectation is on Chen’s shoulders.

We recently spent almost two hours with Chen talking about his job, his background and his fierce competitive streak. (I’ve seen the man play poker. He takes it very seriously. He’s also proven willing to counter Mark Zuckerberg’s personal soup deliveries to AI researchers in order to court and retain talent.) And, of course, we got into the future of AI.

This conversation took place just a couple of days after Google released Gemini 3, and we spent some time on how OpenAI plans to counter this new, powerful model.

We think you’ll get to learn a lot more about Chen’s personality and motivations in this episode. Enjoy!

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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

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