Core Memory

• The Iranian Scientist Leading America’s Nuclear Rebirth

  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. 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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• Priscilla Chan and Her Multi-Billion Dollar Quest to End Disease

  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

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• Spaceplanes Are Upon Us

  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

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• The Child Prodigy Teaching Other People How To Learn

  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

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• Fixing American Science Funding

  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

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