Core Memory

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?


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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



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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?


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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 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 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


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