America is running out of time to catch up with China on manufacturing, and we’re physically incapable of spending an hour together without bringing it up. Release the glorious machines please!! We also go behind the scenes on Kylie’s reporting on motors and actuators — the unglamorous parts that sit in every joint of a humanoid robot, account for roughly 60% of what that robot costs to build, and come almost entirely from China. Her piece profiles the two startups trying to change that. Plus a new proposed bill out of Congress that would kick Unitree’s robot doggies to the curb.

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Then the rockets send Ashlee off on his space tangents. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin had an expensive mishap recently when an explosion took out the rocket, its launch pad, and possibly America’s dreams of beating China back to the moon. Ashlee walks through why a pad explosion can be a near-death moment for a rocket company, and why SpaceX — now flying roughly every two days while everyone else is grounded or behind — increasingly just wins by default. Plus the new Starfall capsule, SpaceX’s move into making medicine and maybe chips in orbit, and the wild logic behind a $1.77 trillion IPO.

We also got into the media drama consuming our X timeline: the firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. Ashlee tweeted an opinion, the trolls came for him hard, and he pleads his case here. We’re a little biased since, well, we’re off building this whole new-media thing ourselves. Will there still be a ticking clock and a man in a suit raking in views twenty years from now? Tune in for what we think, and leave your hot take in the comments.

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

(Ed. Kylie - Don’t think I forgot to make you a playlist. “Lazy Eye” and “New Slang” were key to my college experience. I first crushed on Rivers Cuomo thanks to “Perfect Situation.” Listen to it here, and don’t forget to leave a comment to win tickets to their tour).

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Do you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? 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.

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The Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

Timestamps

• 00:00:00 – Intro

• 00:02:05 – The American Actuator Crisis

• 00:06:51 – WestMag vs. Atlas Motion Systems

• 00:14:21 – Uncle Sam Pays Attention

• 00:16:47 – Chinese Robot Ban

• 00:21:16 – A Robot in Every Home

• 00:24:29 – Are You AGI-pilled Yet?

• 00:27:23 – Shoutout to Micayla Sortland

• 00:31:01 – Blue Origin’s Explosive Launch

• 00:42:52 – Low Earth Orbit Drugs

• 00:49:42 – The Two-Trillion-Dollar Elon Bet

• 00:57:07 – Founders Fund’s Viral “Mafia” Game Night

• 01:01:23 – Ashlee Braves His Notifications

• 01:06:12 – Legacy Media vs. The World

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Late last week, a high-profile list of frontier AI folks, policy experts and biologists released a letter calling for immediate measures to mitigate the risk of AI-mediated bioterrorism. The details in the letter are scant – you can read it at screendna.org – but the gist is simple. As Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis see it, AI is making it too easy for bad actors to harm America using biotechnology, and the solution is to regulate biology rather than the models. In the current reality, where the US biotech industry is getting crushed by China in every metric that matters, introducing shortsighted regulation is not a mistake America can afford to make.

The published letter accompanies a report by the Institute for Progress with specific recommendations on securing the biotech supply chain, along with a NY State Assembly bill proposing new requirements for DNA synthesis service providers. Specific proposals focus on introducing KYC (Know Your Customer) laws as a start, which is a benign request on the surface. The logic here is that bioterrorism threats – like an individual actor trying to revive the extinct but still-deadly smallpox virus or give pathogenicity to an existing bacterial strain – all require designing and manipulating DNA fragments. Biologists have the option of extracting these DNA fragments from live organisms or buying them as a commodity through 200 or so international DNA service providers. Most opt for the latter, but the former still remains an option even with this bill in place.

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Although no legal mandate currently exists, the majority of the approximately 50 US DNA synthesis providers proactively screen 90% of incoming orders. Exceptions to this voluntary screening are generally limited to very short sequences and a handful of smaller vendors. The proposed bill adds little actual screening. What the bill would add via the KYC requirements are barriers to American biotech start-ups at the exact moment new ideas and energy are needed in a stumbling industry. Much of the restrictive legislation currently strangling American innovation started out innocuously. Look no further than Good Manufacturing Practice requirements, which have effectively given China the reins of the cell and gene therapy industry. New requirements placed on synthesis providers are likely to go similarly, as there is no way to enforce KYC laws for international vendors, granting them a competitive advantage against our home-grown DNA synthesis companies.

By the authors’ own admission, none of the measures stop a sufficiently driven actor, particularly those operating on behalf of an adversarial state. Offensive knowledge and materials cannot be contained indefinitely, as demonstrated by the benchtop DNA synthesizers already available for purchase. This proposed legislation endorsed by AI leaders is likely to act as a foothold on which costs can be raised, blunting a market that startups rely on. Worse, AI doomers worry models will soon zero-shot novel pathogens. But, if threats can emerge from an effectively limitless sequence space, exhaustive screening is computationally impossible. Codifying existing algorithms is simply not a realistic response to curbing future threats, as they are easy to circumvent as it is. At best, this legislation is ineffective, and at worst it further incentivizes American biotech companies to look abroad for synthesis. None of the legislation applies to Chinese oligo synthesizers, who, along with their AI colleagues, do not red-team, regulate raw AI models or use KYC laws. Chinese counterparts are not thinking much about biosecurity at all, which puts American competitors at a disadvantage if new legislation creates even the slightest friction.

Security must come primarily from defense, but not one built on regulatory grounds. Widespread pathogen surveillance, sequencing, rapid diagnostics and a constant stream of emergent biotechnology platforms act as fantastic countermeasures to any threats. COVID is the clearest example of this. The speed of the mRNA response is owed almost entirely to infrastructure that happened to be available at a time of crisis - mRNA therapies coupled with the selective deregulation of the first Trump administration. Lipid nanoparticle delivery was nascent, but again, was an option simply because the broader innovation environment supported its development. Genomic surveillance was available to help manage the pandemic because of previous work and innovation done by pioneering sequencing providers. A regulation-first posture optimizes against a bad actor that cannot really be stopped, while a capacity-first angle provides an agility best suited to biosecurity challenges.

It’s worth mentioning that these measures are extremely unpopular with lab biologists. A concern from biologists, including exceptionally prominent founders (who are reluctant to speak up because of their business with big AI labs), is that legislation like that proposed and backed by the AI industry acts to further the goals of frontier labs without absorbing any of the blowback. This is all done at the expense of America’s already-struggling bio-economy. While new regulations aimed at the non-existent screening problem are being discussed, frontier labs are fighting pushes from outsiders looking to regulate models over a certain size, citing their heated rivalry with the growing Chinese AI labs. Furthermore, Anthropic has taken to adding strict, self-imposed filters on basic bio-related topics, providing further proof that AI labs buy into the idea of self-governance as opposed to de facto governance.

Frontier labs ultimately do these things because they resist rules that they view as misaligned with the actual pace and shape of their core technology. Just like with those AI-focused bills, it’s likely DNA synthesis restrictions will contribute to strangling the US’s attempts to escape from its current biotech death spiral. It’s a problem best left to industry players, which have already demonstrated a serious commitment to safely providing synthesis services without the need for stifling government intervention.

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The Guarding the U.S. Against Adversarial Robotics Dominance (GUARD) Act was introduced last week by Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, alongside Reps. Jay Obernolte of California and Jennifer McClellan of Virginia. In a press release published Wednesday, they warn that China-made humanoids and quadrupeds contain backdoors the People’s Liberation Army can fling open at will — a threat one endorser compares to the plot of the 1984 film Red Dawn. Here’s Molenaar’s take:

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Kimmel is the co-founder and president of NewLimit and one of the deepest thinkers in the longevity field. His company has been working to reverse the aging process in the body and has seen some stunning results with a new therapy that undoes liver damage in mice. We’re talking old mice that shrug off the effects of too much booze as if they were teenagers and that exhibit recoveries from long-term alcohol abuse.

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The results have been good enough to help NewLimit raise another $435 million from the likes of Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. They’re also good enough to have NewLimit kick off a human trial of the therapy next year. And I’ll drink to that.

We discuss all of this on the podcast and then go much deeper on the longevity field, bio-tech and the collision of AI and biology.

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

OUR SPONSORS

SendCutSend

Do you make stuff? Do you need metal parts fast and believe in truth and justice? 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.

Brex

The Core Memory podcast is also sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

Timestamps

0:0) Intro
3:50 What Is Epigenetic Reprogramming?
7:16 Growing a Whole Animal From One Old Cell
13:06 Meet Ambrosia, the AI Hunting for Youth
22:44 $435 Million and the Race to Human Trials
29:26 The Drunk Mice That Skip the Hangover
36:48 Inside the First Human Trial
43:14 Will There Ever Be a Hangover Pen?
49:39 Beyond the Liver: The Delivery Problem
1:03:27 Answering the Skeptics
1:12:42 Will OpenAI Become a Drug Company?
1:23:53 The Health Story Bigger Than AI?
1:35:00 How Far Behind Is the US vs China?
1:53:10 Can We Build Computers From Neurons?

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Hardware nerds, I’ve decided, are my favorite kind. Humble, maybe because building physical things stomps the ego out of you. They always bring their latest gadget and like to twiddle with their laser-cut objects as if they were fidgets for this tactile brand of engineers. Tell people in this crowd you’re interested in actuators and the reaction is near-unanimous: a quiet, excited yessss. That’s the magic word. Actuators — and for extra zest, American-made actuators. Watch a party-goer set down his imported beer and lean in.

“I love actuators,” one founder at the party said in earnest. He runs a robot arm company and had just learned that Westmag cofounder David Hansen bought one of his machines. “What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “Tear it down,” Hansen said, to get at the precious actuators inside.

WESTMAG IS not a merch store, but they’re likely to send you t-shirts if you say the magic word. It’s a startup that makes electric motors and actuators right here in the U.S. of A. Its main office is in South San Francisco, known as the Industrial City, a neighborhood dotted with bland, one-story office buildings and piles of rusted rebar. Semi-trucks slug their way from the nearby highway into warehouse parking lots.

Past the Taco Bell and next to the Refrigeration Supply Depot, you can find Westmag’s tiny workshop filled with Chinese machinery. The CNC machines, the metal stamping tools, even the Unitree robot sitting on the couch in the lobby are all from China. That’s the problem Hansen and his cofounder Jordan Sanders are trying to solve.

“China gets to do all the fun stuff. I really like factories… So we get to steal back from China all the fun stuff, which is manufacturing,” Hansen tells me.

The device you’re reading this on almost certainly contains an actuator. By the end of this story, you’ll start seeing them everywhere — in your car, your camera, your vacuum. They are the small, unheralded engines of modern comfort. More to the point, for the future of industry, they are the foundation of modern hardware, making robot arms move, factories hum and weapons weapon. Most of them are made in China.

That fact, which people naively ignore, is one of the major obstacles sitting between the U.S. and its grand reindustrialization dreams. The U.S. can assemble all the humanoids and self-guided missiles it wants, but if it doesn’t make the motors and actuators inside them, it stays dependent on whoever does. Right now, there are shockingly few folks figuring out how to tackle this uncomfortable, if not existential, truth.

It’s the people, like Hansen, who are weird enough to love actuators who might give the U.S. a real shot at a future it builds itself.

HANSEN, 41, STANDS six foot four, often sporting a backwards cap and a jade fishing-hook necklace, a Māori token for safe travels. As such, he sticks out like a sore thumb on a Chinese factory floor. He’s been called “forward” by Midwest manufacturing standards, but I find the directness is part of his charm. Formalities bore him, he says. He prefers to get straight to the point — how are we going to fix this mess?

He grew up, in his words, a robot kid. Hansen’s last company built self-balancing bikes and motorcycles back when you couldn’t just buy a cheap robot actuator off the shelf. So, they made everything themselves, by hand-winding the wire, placing the magnets, and building the electronics and gearing from scratch. Then, in 2024, the company took a nosedive. That’s when he started tweeting.

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Hansen went back through his old company archives and posted all the secrets — innards of actuators, factory photos, his own predictions about where prices were headed. “Half my tweets were just screenshots from AliExpress,” Hansen says. His network now — Westmag’s customers, other founders and enthusiasts — all derived from his constant actuator posting. He became known as the motor guy on X. Jeff Bezos even follows him.

By late 2024, Hansen figured he should probably get a job, except, as he put it, “I’ve never had a job.” So instead, he drove around the country talking to robotics and drone companies, where he kept hearing the same complaint: every shop has a guy sitting alone trying to build motors in-house, it never works, and everyone’s stuck buying from China. “People just kept telling me, ‘I need a solution. What are you going to do about it? You know all the problems. What are you going to do about it?’” Hansen says. One of those people was Sanders, an old friend who’d backed the failing motorcycle company and stuck around as an advisor. They started Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, last May.

The pair’s first round of funding came when Nat Friedman — former GitHub CEO, prolific angel investor, current Meta executive — slid into Hansen’s X DMs last April. He paraphrased the message from Friedman for me: Hey, I’ve invested in several companies, spent some time on robot actuators lately, talked to a lot of teams, would love to chat.

The first idea the gang kicked around with Friedman was to, well, just go buy a motor factory in China. “He’s like, ‘Do you want to just go to China next week?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely. Yes. Not going to ask my wife. That’s just a yes,’” Hansen says. They didn’t end up going. The problem, Hansen realized, is that you can’t actually buy a Chinese motor factory because the factory isn’t the thing.

“If you want to buy a motor factory or an actuator factory, you can’t just buy the factory, you have to buy the neighborhood,” Hansen tells me.

The suppliers in China cluster so tightly that each neighborhood itself functions as the production line — pick up one shop and you’ve got a building full of equipment and none of the complementary knowledge that made it work. So Friedman funded the $1 million pre-seed for another version of the plan: acquire the machines piece by piece, haul them across the Pacific, and rebuild the factory in San Francisco.

Standing up this production stateside requires, as Hansen likes to quip: “A bucket of money. The biggest one.”

So far, investors and politicians seem to get the point — but in moderation. Last August, Westmag raised an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Founders Fund, Lux, and Menlo participating. Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer also visited the Westmag HQ and announced the field trip on LinkedIn, touting her work on “the future of American manufacturing.” Westmag and America, though, still have much to do.

“By the end of this year we’ll be in the tens of thousands of motors per month,” Sanders says, only for Hansen to interject, “Which is not enough.” And to which Sanders agrees, “Which is not enough for our customers.”

WHAT IS an actuator? When I asked Sanders, he got lost trying to turn the definition into a haiku. So, while he thinks about that, I guess I’ll be the one to tell you.

It’s part of a machine that turns energy — electric, hydraulic, pneumatic — into motion. An electric actuator, which is the one we care the most about here, is usually a package of three things: a motor (the thing that spins), control electronics (that tell it how fast and how hard), and gearing (that trades speed for torque so it can push or hold weight). Actuators can move in a straight line or in a circular motion, known as linear or rotary, respectively.

What makes them so special is their broad use in manufacturing things like a plane’s landing gear, sewing machines, your car’s seat adjusters. Just about every machine that moves is thanks to an actuator. I will repeat: these parts are largely manufactured in China.

China’s dominance in actuator manufacturing traces back to two industrial markets that happen to need the same part. The first is drones, which use motors in their propellers. One report estimates Chinese companies “control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” (I previously wrote about a startup working to revive the U.S. drone industry.)

The other, bigger one is electric vehicles. China’s rush to go all-in on electric vehicles gave it exactly the industrial stack that motion-based hardware runs on: batteries, power electronics, sensors, precision motors, and the rare-earth magnets that sit at the heart of any electric motor. Tens of millions of EVs later, China controls both the assembly and the whole supply chain beneath it, down to the magnet processing. Chinese automakers produced roughly 60% of all electric cars sold worldwide in 2025.

There is a blossoming third industry here: robotics. China accounted for nearly 90% of the humanoid market last year. It’s still a really tiny market, with somewhere between 13,000 and 18,000 humanoids sold around the world in 2025. But those robots require a load of actuators, which eat up between 40% to 60% of the cost of a building one.

Some analysts (and, of course, hardware nerds) expect the humanoid market to explode in the coming years. I’m personally not betting on a humanoid feeding my cat for me by 2030, but American startups like Figure and Agility are very much making the explosion assumption. If you think drones, electric vehicles and robots will matter in the future, then the United States has a problem. Or, in the words of my boss Ashlee Vance, “We’re so fucked.”

SINCE YOU definitely listen to our podcast, you probably noticed I’ve gone from U.S. manufacturing skeptic to acolyte. Once you visit companies like Ulysses and Brinc, it’s hard not to leave the warehouse realizing how fucked we really are. Even the guy taking on China by himself, Elon Musk, is buying Chinese actuators for his humanoids. It doesn’t take a huge leap in logic to wonder how screwed we would be if, say, China invades Taiwan and trade ties are cut off.

The good news here is that designing motors and actuators is not a dark art. Many people know how to make these things, and the schematics for them (including Chinese designs) are pretty easy to find. The trick is committing to some standardized designs and then pumping them out by the millions.

Take, for example, the story of MIT researcher Ben Katz. He open-sourced his own motor design and watched it get cloned into China-made products on AliExpress — an outcome he openly called a dream. That’s because China did what America hasn’t figured out; took a useful architecture and built a shitload of them, cheaper and faster than anyone else.

No one who does business with China would say this aloud, but we have come to the part of the program where the U.S. must now steal — or borrow, if your sensibilities prefer — from the P.R.C. Instead of having each hardware start-up try to show off with its own approach to motors and actuators, the U.S. needs to mimic China and piggyback off the same standardized, openly available designs and then fire up the mass production.

“We are grounding our motor and actuator designs in what is already in-demand at scale, which are the motors and actuators that are being produced in China,” Sanders says.

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The process of making one works something like this: a stator, the stationary core of the motor, is a hunk of about 30 razor-thin sheets of electrical steel, pressed, stacked, pressed again, then powder-coated in green (Westmag is trying to make theirs orange like the company logo, which Hansen admits is “going to be an engineering task” since the coating isn’t heat-rated). Westmag stamps those sheets themselves now, uses a machine to wind the wire, and will soon also cut its own magnets down to size — going, as Hansen puts it, “up to cutting metal, but not melting metal.” The steel comes from the US or Japan.

The real barrier that has held the U.S. back from motor and actuator glory is cost. The Chinese-style designs are optimized for things that are cheap in China and expensive here. Hansen holds up a motor part machined from a solid block of aluminum. In China, he says, that costs about as much as the raw block — the labor rounds to nothing. “Go ask [SendCutSend CEO] Jim Belosic to do that. It’s very expensive to do,” he adds. (Belosic also invested in Westmag, and SendCutSend sponsors Core Memory).

Westmag’s gamble is that the expense is only temporary — a function of low volume, not American inadequacy. Hansen’s argument runs like this: at a big enough scale, the cost of almost anything drifts down toward the cost of its raw materials, the steel, the copper, the magnets, and the labor premium that makes a single American-made part pricey shrinks toward nothing. “You can reach efficiencies of scale with almost any widget once there’s enough of them,” he says.

Hansen calls this the “dumb-guy, smart-guy” approach. Don’t try to improve the motor, just try to make it, because building it is what teaches you to be good at it. This, Sanders adds, requires resisting the Silicon Valley urges to “disrupt” and “revolutionize” and convince people that you’ve outthought a whole industry.

“[You can] use a woo-woo AI to optimize perfectly, but there’s a ceiling to what you can do and it turns out it just doesn’t matter,” Hansen says. “You just have to make something first. Make a bunch of something first and then once you have the machine, which is actually the factory running, then you can optimize stuff.”

The company has already partnered with high-volume customers, though they wouldn’t name exactly who, to jump right into its scaling bet. The plan is to make motors by the tens of thousands a month, then actuators, then as the theory goes, the math stops looking insane. “We started the company with a thesis: if you can aggregate the demand across companies, now it actually might make sense to build it here,” Sanders tells me.

Not everyone in the actuator business believes that. About 400 miles south, another startup is making the opposite bet — that trying to mass-manufacture a commodity in the United States is a patriotic fantasy, and that the smart move is to keep the clever part here and build the rest somewhere cheaper.

TOM BARON was 20 years-old when he started throwing up blood.

He didn’t dwell on the episodes at first. Baron prided himself on working hard and figured puking blood might just be part of the job. “When you’re 20, you don’t think ‘I’m sick,’” Baron says. “You think you’re being a little bitch.”

And so the puking went on for months. Then, one day, Baron took a boat ride with some friends, fell out of the boat and discovered that he couldn’t stay afloat despite being a strong swimmer. This incident finally drove him to the hospital where doctors diagnosed him on the spot with a collapsed lung. It took another few weeks to find what caused the lung to collapse in the first place, which was a very rare cancer (stage-four) in his peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen. He went through twelve surgeries in about six weeks. Doctors tried to move him to hospice. Then Johns Hopkins took him on.

“They were like, ‘Hey kid, basically you’re probably going to die, but [we’ll] try out some cool stuff on you if you accept,’” Baron says. He had a sixteen-hour operation — surgeons cut out every cancerous lesion they could see, then circulated heated chemotherapy inside his abdomen for the duration. It worked. He’d passed his five-year remission mark three weeks before we spoke.

Before the illness sidelined him, Baron had been in constant motion. He moved around the country a lot as a kid, the result of his Navy pilot father. After high school, he went straight into the workforce. His first gig was writing attitude-control software for small satellites and prototype engineering for a climate-tech company. He founded a few small startups with “minor exits” before he spent six years at MITRE, the federally funded research outfit that functions, in Baron’s words, as a pseudo extension of the government. His job was to get loaned out to agencies and build prototypes, much of it drone work, which took him to Colombia and a string of other far off places.

After recovering from the brunt of his cancer ordeal, Baron welcomed his first child. The series of massive life moments rearranged his sense of what to do with his time. He didn’t want to spend it getting passed around government agencies and away from his family. He wanted to do something bigger. So he left MITRE and landed at a defense startup called Mach Industries. That’s where he met Christian Mochen and Carlo Dela Rosa, the trio that would cofound Atlas Motion Systems and open a second front to pursue America’s actuator dream.

THE THREE MEN codified their shared love for motors and actuators while sitting around a bonfire constructed in the Mach parking lot. Beers were being passed and shop was being talked. Baron would grumble that his government work always suffered because it revolved around small numbers of bespoke parts. Suppliers didn’t feel like doing custom tweaks for low volume orders, which, in turn, limited innovation. Mochen had similar issues only from the opposite extreme. He’d mass produced cars at Toyota and Tesla and couldn’t demand the requisite attention even with all that heft. “Magnet sourcing was a huge issue even at Tesla,” Mochen says. “Although Tesla had an arm in China, for our U.S. plants, they still wouldn’t give us the best-grade magnets they had.”

America, they decided then and there, needed to control its motor and actuator destiny and that would mean controlling the entire motor and actuator supply chain. And that would mean doing something drastic. They quit their jobs, incorporated in February, and — with $300k of their own money and a $4.5 million pre-seed investment — Baron got on a plane to the Philippines to build a factory.

WESTMAG’S ANSWER was to build in America and bet that scale would eventually drag the cost down. Atlas looked at the same problem and drew the opposite conclusion. “We make them where it makes sense,” Mochen says. “The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States, the unit economics make sense, and it benefits the average American taxpayer at the end of the day.”

What Atlas found in the Philippines is the thing Westmag wants to import: a neighborhood. Atlas’ factory is clustered near manufacturing hubs for Toyota, Nidec, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Honda, Dyson — close enough that Baron calls it “a little mini-Shenzhen effect.”

The neighborhood effect makes the expert labor cheap and readily available. Baron says that 77,000 English-speaking engineers graduate from Filipino universities every year. He added that hiring a CNC machinist at Mach took six months. In the Philippines, they post a job and have ten qualified people by the end of the day.

The difference also shows up in those pesky costs. Baron says they sent one machined part to Protolabs, a U.S. shop with global manufacturing hubs including China, and paid $3,500 for ten pieces. They sent the same part to a local shop in the Philippines and got fifty pieces for $16. “Better quality,” Mochen adds. “And faster.”

The way Atlas runs splits the company across an ocean. The California side — an arm in Long Beach, Calif. — handles the high-variability, low-volume work. Which brings us to what Hansen might describe as some woo-woo AI software, and what Atlas likes to call Vector.

Vector is the software system the Atlas team built to spin up and iterate new motor designs in five to ten minutes from a common set of raw inputs. It’s centered on an in-house, physics-based AI model trained on every piece of motor designs Atlas could feed it. Open-source architectures, the team’s own internal designs, academic papers, and expired patents.

For example, a customer gets on a call and says they need a motor that hits a certain RPM at a certain voltage and fits inside a thirty-millimeter slot. Today, Mochen says, that customer would normally have to compromise on their custom specs and opt for a standardized piece because designing a new motor from scratch requires six months of work “with four cross-functional engineers or engineering teams,” by which point the customer may have moved onto a different design entirely, making the ordered part obsolete.

The Vector software generates the geometry, runs the finite-element and electromagnetic simulations, produces a spec sheet, builds the bill of materials, and cross-checks against Atlas’ own warehouse inventory so the team knows what they actually have on hand to build it. Then it models the new motor against the customer’s own platform, like a drone, to predict performance before anything is assembled. Whatever they prototype on a test stand in Long Beach gets fed back into the model to train it.

Once a design is locked, the architecture moves to the Philippines for mass production at a facility Atlas owns outright. “We’re not using subcontractors out there,” Mochen says. The bread and butter is motors and actuators, specifically the brushless DC motor, the kind that spins a drone’s propeller. Design in America, build at volume in Asia, keeping both ends in-house.

How long would I have to wait to get an Atlas motor in-hand? Mochen and Baron squirm at the question. “If it’s a net new design that we just don’t have any inventory for … it would take you around eight weeks to get your motor,” Mochen says. They’re trying to bring that down to a week, which they say requires fresh funding to pull off.

It also requires boots on the ground. Baron moved his family out to Manila in the early months of Atlas to stand the operation up. The third cofounder, Dela Rosa — who’d built a manufacturing plant in India for the defense company Shield AI — is on the ground there now.

“In California, as soon as you get a warehouse, there’s all this temporal overhead that goes into building out a factory,” Baron says. “Whereas in the Philippines, we get the keys to the spot, we’re able to get through the bureaucracy fairly quickly, and our people are renovating the factory as soon as we get the keys, and we’re ready to put machines in within three weeks of opening the lease. Which I don’t think would be possible, frankly, in California.”

IT’S BETTER for America to manufacture abroad, according to Baron. In fact, trying to build everything in the United States is, in his words, a little silly.

Not because he’s against it — he’s careful to say he isn’t — but because he thinks it misreads where American advantage actually lies. “One of the U.S.’s biggest assets is that we’re quite well-liked around the world, despite what the news would have you believe,” he says. The Filipinos, he believes, would rather work with Americans than with the Chinese. As Baron sees it, America will win back manufacturing dominance through its allies, not by walling itself off from them.

“The thing we want to do as a company is project commercial power throughout the world,” Baron says. He adds that DJI and BYD are kind of the reverse of us. “They project Chinese commercial power by making the best products in the world in their categories… Silicon Valley should strive to do the same, which is, build things the entire world wants, not things the Department of War can subsidize with their high premiums. We want to make something people in India, Poland, Nigeria want to buy — and we have customers in those places.”

For all his certainty about where the work should happen, Baron isn’t smug about the personal toll of it. “I would like to manufacture in the U.S. It sucks to fly 15 hours to Manila,” he says. His wife and kid are there now, and though his father immigrated from the very same town decades ago, it isn’t exactly home for him yet. He’d rather make things in California or Texas. He just doesn’t think the math adds up for the moment. So, instead of hand-wringing in an American factory about costs, Baron believes the best way to tackle China’s dominance is to play the game internationally.

“The story will be written that we failed to recapture our ability to make our own robots, and we essentially lost our sovereignty and became subjugated to those who did — or the story will be that we recaptured it and maintained our sovereignty,” Baron says. “That’s our worldview, and why we think it’s so important.”

PEOPLE IN the American Hardware Clan have known about the motor and actuator crisis for some time. It’s been right up there with the battery crisis, the drone crisis and the solar crisis. All of these are technologies America helped invent and needs but can no longer make in very meaningful quantities. Since the U.S. still has no answer to BYD in batteries or DJI in drones, you might ask why people are suddenly taking motors and actuators so seriously.

Like everything at the moment, the answer revolves around AI. Many people view humanoids and their ilk as the inevitable physical manifestations of AI technology. And it’s here that things turn more personal and intimidating than batteries and solar cells. Americans can tolerate their electric stove being “powered by BYD,” but will they accept a Chinese-made humanoid next to them on the factory line or in their home? The U.S. military would seem to want to draw the line at its soldiers of the future having all their joints and limbs produced in Shenzhen.

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“If you are AGI-pilled and you think that AI is going to get out of data centers and it’s going to be embodied and it’s going to be in robots, then that’ll be the biggest industry in the history of the world and we don’t need just millions of actuators,” Hansen says. “We need billions of them. And if you want to control your own destiny, you have to own your supply chain.”

Fortunately, the American manufacturing renaissance is picking up steam, and some of the best-capitalized private companies in history are taking notice. Sam Altman said on our very own podcast that OpenAI will manufacture its own actuators. The startup recently even posted an open role for an actuator design engineer “focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics.”

For its part, the U.S. government has been working its way down the supply chain to weaken China’s stronghold — first chip fabs, then EVs, then drones — each one with a different mix of tariffs, export controls, procurement bans and subsidies. Actuators may be next, even if Washington hasn’t quite said so. “Smart government folks have looked around and been like, ‘What else does this apply to?’ So it’s chip fabs, drones, what comes after drones? And we’ve been running around telling everyone: inside every robot actuator is a drone motor. China is really good at robots because they got really good at drone motors,” Hansen says.

So far, there is no CHIPS-style act for actuators, no targeted subsidy, no Department of Energy motor-fab program. The de facto sanctions on China-made drones put startups like Westmag and Atlas in a better position, but it doesn’t prevent American drone companies from buying motors from China.

On that point, neither Atlas nor Westmag would name their customers. That reticence is something I first picked up listening to Ashlee ask hardware startups whether they make their own motors — and watching the bashful faces that question tends to produce. My read is that some companies may claim to build it all themselves when, in reality, they’re buying from startups like these two, or buying the parts from China and clicking them together stateside. “We don’t want to neg someone’s narrative,” Baron says when I ask about this.

Two customers, the biggest of them all, would be the government and defense primes. Planes, ships, drones, all of them need motors and actuators. Westmag went to Michigan to convince the once-great-manufacturing-hub to fork over government cash to reshore this production. “What’s interesting is the government suddenly being into our shit. There’s a lot of motion right now,” Hansen says. Westmag declined to share whether they’re on track to receive federal funding.

Meanwhile, the Atlas cofounders aren’t opposed to federal funding, but they think becoming a defense contractor is essentially a trap. “Over the next 18 months, with the demand being shoved into the industry by the drone dominance program right now, there’s going to be a lot of subsidization efforts that allow companies to come in and solve the problem the wrong way,” Mochen says. That is, not utilizing ally nations and becoming a globally dominant industry.

Strip both ideas down and the disagreement is simple. Westmag thinks American means American soil. Atlas thinks American means American owned. One of those might even turn out to be the right answer for the next century of hardware in the U.S.

Rajaniemi made an immediate name for himself in literary circles with his debut novel The Quantum Thief. He’s since written a string of novels that explore the directions technology might take in the future, and his work always stands out for its creativity and imagination.

These days, Rajaniemi is putting those skills to very practical use at Red Queen Bio. The company appeared near the end of last year with a focus on AI biosecurity. Red Queen’s main objective is to try and outthink and outflank bad actors and/or AI systems run amok that might unleash bioweapons onto the world. As such, Red Queen must concoct all sorts of dark scenarios and then come up with ways to undercut and defeat them.

Rajaniemi has a background in mathematics, physics and bio-tech and possesses one of those fast-twitch minds that makes the rest of us envious. We talked about his life and career and, obviously, the wild reality we now inhabit.

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First, a re-cap of our Alexandr Wang interview — his first real sit-down in eleven months — and what it actually revealed about Meta’s AI play. Wang seemed nervous hashing out the strategy in the studio, and we both keep circling the same puzzle: Meta has endless compute and top talent in Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, so why does the model still feel underwhelming?

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We get into Eric Schmidt getting booed off a commencement stage at the University of Arizona, which becomes a longer conversation about the generational fury aimed at AI. Everyone Kylie’s age seems to hate it, but is it due to misinformation or legitimate anger about jobs and data centers? Ashlee admits he’s more confused by this moment than anything he’s covered in tech: the predicted Wall Street collapse hasn’t come, the models keep getting better, and the valuations still make no sense.

Then, the news that broke minutes before we hit record: OpenAI won the Musk lawsuit on statute-of-limitations grounds. We dig into whether OpenAI’s shift from open-source nonprofit to for-profit was an original sin or just the only way to pay for the compute. Also, Ashlee’s texts with Sam Altman being part of discovery?!

In more Musk news, Bloomberg reported that Musk’s xAI stiffed staff on the $420 they were promised for feeding their tax returns into Grok. One host would decidedly not trust a chatbot with their financials, and the other already has. We also get into the strange new bedfellows: SpaceX selling compute to Anthropic, a company Musk has long been philosophically against.

We even take you behind the scenes at Core Memory — so study up and watch our latest videos on Phantom Neuro and Starfront Observatories. Consider this your homework on mind-controlled arms and galaxy photography. Essay due on our desk by morning.

Don’t forget you could win tickets to the Weezer tour by leaving an amazing review for our podcast wherever you listen.

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It’s with great pleasure that we present this excerpt from The Impossible Factory by Josh Dean. It’s a tremendous, new book about Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Skunk Works.

Copyright 2026 by Josh Dean. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Kelly Johnson knew that engineers, especially those in defense contracting, had a responsibility to understand and predict the market. No commercial enterprise that lives at the bleeding edge of technology can survive for long if it doesn’t anticipate the needs of its buyers far in advance. So, Kelly was constantly talking to his contacts in the Defense Department and in the national intelligence establishment about the global chessboard and the challenges that lay ahead.

He caught wind of a “desperate need” for a new type of American aircraft before anyone asked him for it—one that “could safely fly over the USSR” and bring back critical information on Russia’s missile capability and other details about its defenses and military infrastructure.

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On May Day 1954, the Soviets unveiled their latest nuclear bomber—the Myasishchev M‑4 “Hammer”—which soared low over Red Square, creating quite a stir in Washington, especially because it hadn’t even been a year since the USSR had detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb.

Top officials—including, if not especially, President Dwight Eisenhower—were particularly worried about the Soviet Union’s strategic bombers, like the Hammer, which could carry nuclear weapons and which U.S. military and intelligence leaders knew almost nothing about: a type of plane that would potentially allow for a Pearl Harbor–style sneak attack, but far worse.

In the spring of 1954, Eisenhower asked James Killian, president of MIT, to form a committee to make recommendations for how the United States could leverage its tremendous base of scientific and technological firepower to determine what the Soviet military was capable of—and as a result, how much danger America was truly in.

A subcommittee was told to “find ways to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based, to provide better strategic warning, to minimize surprise in the kind of attack, and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” No pressure there.

The United States and the Soviet Union were still in the early days of a nuclear arms race, and any edge in that race created leverage in the battle for global supremacy. But there was a fundamental imbalance when it came to intelligence gathering. As a free and open society, the United States was susceptible to on‑the‑ground spying. But the Soviet Union, being a closed, authoritarian state, was nearly impossible to infiltrate with spies.

To make up for that, the United States had to be creative. It would need to use science and technology to out‑spy the Russians. And if American spies couldn’t get into the Soviet Union to gather intel, they’d have to fly over it, which presented its own challenges. Like being shot down.

The design challenge facing Kelly Johnson, then, was daunting: To safely overfly the Soviet Union and take high‑quality photos undetected required a plane that could fly more than four thousand miles without refueling, and reach at least 70,000 feet—beyond the reach of Soviet air defenses and so high that it wouldn’t create vapor trails, thus revealing itself.

In short, this plane would need to be extremely light, while carrying an array of the most advanced cameras, sensors, and navigational gear available.

The need was also urgent. Existentially so.

That March, Kelly submitted Lockheed Report #9732 for an ultralight, high‑flying surveillance plane with an enormous wingspan to the Air Force.

The pitch was radical in that the plane Kelly was proposing had no landing gear, to save weight. Being as light as possible is mission critical for flying high, so Kelly was looking for weight savings wherever he could find it and decided that his plane would drop its gear upon takeoff and land on a reinforced belly.

The pitch was not a hit. Kelly received a letter from the Air Force declining the proposal “on the basis that [the concept] was too unusual.”

But one Air Force official loved the idea: Trevor Gardner, the “technologically evangelical” assistant secretary for research and development. Gardner knew of a different buyer who might be interested and summoned Kelly to Washington in November for an urgent meeting.

On November 19, Kelly met with a group of officers, engineers, and scientists, and endured a grilling that reminded him of his college days.

Shortly thereafter, top officials took the proposal to Eisenhower in person, because the president feared leaks and the subject was considered too highly classified to be put in a written report.

Eisenhower approved the plan, with a stipulation. “It should be handled in an unconventional way so that it would not become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department.”

It was given instead to the CIA.

In advance of his trip to Washington, Kelly had been warned by his bosses not to commit to anything and he worried that he might have to take a leave of absence from his job at Lockheed proper to take on this project.

Lockheed’s capacity was straining, especially in engineering. Still, when Kelly met Robert Gross and Hall Hibbard—the only two men he was cleared to tell—he told them that this was a job Lockheed had to take. And that secrecy demanded that he run the entire program, from design to manufacture, in his Skunk Works.

The two bosses heard him out and agreed.

This was, arguably, the biggest single moment in the history of the Lockheed Skunk Works, in that Kelly now had approval for something more than an experimental design shop. He was given the green light to run his own production, too. Which meant that he wasn’t just building prototypes. He would oversee full production of all planes built for the program.

What’s more, the government was willing to hand him unprecedented control. Lockheed was taking “full responsibility for the design, mockup, building, secret testing, and field maintenance of this unorthodox vehicle.”

Kelly spent two days refining the concept himself, then summoned five key Skunks to his office for a meeting.

He looked at the assembled talent and spoke of a new program, one more secret than anything any of them had ever worked on, and then, without revealing any details about what they’d actually be doing, asked if they were willing to commit eighteen months to such a project.

All five said that, yes, they absolutely would. And then Kelly leveled with them. He’d sold the CIA a high‑altitude reconnaissance airplane. They could have a few days to wrap up their current work but should be ready to go full bore on Monday, December 2. It was time to make history.

—

Kelly’s reconstituted Skunk Works began with twenty‑five engineers, with his trusted shop man, Art Viereck, in charge of production. Kelly assigned Ed Baldwin to handle the traditional three‑view drawing.

Four days later, Baldwin had the first drawings completed, and by December 10 the basic design was frozen. It was, more or less, the configuration that would go into production. Which is fairly astounding to consider once you know what the plane Kelly laid out and Baldy sketched would become.

Shortly after beginning, Kelly prepared a twenty‑three‑page report for the CIA with his updated thoughts on the plane his Skunk Works would build. Among them, that the Angel, as he was calling it, would have a maximum speed of Mach 0.8 (460 knots) in level flight, with a ceiling of 73,100 feet—an absurd altitude that had only been reached at this point by research balloons and a few highly experimental one‑off aircraft.

He promised to have the first plane flying by August 2, 1955, and all Angels finished and delivered to an as‑yet‑unchosen test site by December 1.

When Kelly selected his design team, he announced that they’d all work forty‑five‑hour weeks. That number quickly rose to sixty‑five,

and the actual schedule, once the project was fully running, required more like one hundred hours a week. It was the only way Kelly could hit his audacious eight‑month target.

The work was fast and furious. “Working like mad on airplane,” Kelly wrote in the project log. So mad that he began work before he had a contract or any idea of how the money would flow from the government to Lockheed.

Government contracts were sometimes paid upon completion or on delayed schedules. Kelly insisted on splitting the tab up into smaller payments, made regularly, so that he didn’t have to “go running to the bank to carry the government.”

It is almost impossible to believe that a company as large as Lockheed could charge forward on an experimental program without a contract from the government, but this combination of mystery and subterfuge only assured Kelly that no bureaucracy would stand in his way. As for the government, this unconventional method of paying a contractor—in secret, out of oversight of even Congress—wasn’t illegal.

So‑called unvouchered funds were allowable for covert projects, according to a law passed by Congress in 1949, which stated that only the director of the CIA could access them. This was the only way a program could control secrecy, by avoiding things like competitive bidding and public procurement of parts.

The project was codenamed AQUATONE and would be funded by the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund. Herb Miller, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence’s Nuclear Energy Division, was named executive officer. And Richard “Dick” Bissell was handpicked by CIA Director Allen Dulles to oversee this audacious program.

Bissell’s so‑called Development Project Staff was the only CIA section with its own communications office and operational cable traffic that transmitted to and from Lockheed. Only Bissell, who read every cable, could disseminate them, and they were the only cables at the CIA that didn’t automatically get copied and distributed to the director’s office.

Kelly’s loose, often garrulous nature wasn’t an obvious fit with Bissell’s stiff, effete stoicism, but the two got along well. Bissell understood that the program would only succeed if it stayed small and moved fast, and Kelly was almost uniquely suited among defense contractors to follow that model. His decisiveness in particular—“which allowed him to take shortcuts and render quick judgments without jeopardizing safety”—impressed Bissell.

Bissell didn’t give Kelly a deadline, but he imposed one upon himself. This new plane, which would fly higher than any in history, would be in the air by August 1—nine months after the project commenced.

Bissell doubted this was possible, but he worked with Kelly to strip as much bureaucracy as they could from the program. Kelly had just one point of contact—Bissell—who could answer his questions in a single phone call, and their monthly progress reports would be ruthlessly short, about five pages.

If this had been the Air Force, Bissell noted, that same report would be an inch thick, and every design change would require approval by “Wright Field, a couple of different laboratories, the budget office, the regulations office, and so forth.”

The CIA project was really version two of the Skunk Works, and its new home, Building 82, was an upgrade from the lean‑to where Kelly’s division was born, but not a big one.

Ben Rich was told to report there in December 1954. Rich was a twenty‑nine‑year‑old thermodynamics expert whose first patent had been for a special heater that helped solve a painful and embarrassing problem for naval aviators: At higher altitudes, their penises would sometimes freeze to the side of the tube used for peeing in flight.

Rich had no idea what was happening inside that enormous assembly building by the runway before Kelly asked “to borrow a thermodynamicist, preferably a smart one.” The timing was fortuitous. Rich, in his first year at Lockheed, felt “creatively frustrated” and was on the verge of leaving the company.

This job was a dream. The surroundings, not so much. Rich was surprised to find the company’s brilliant star engineer, the venerable Kelly Johnson, tucked away in what felt like a warren. Desks were crammed together.

“Adding to the eccentric flavor,” Rich later wrote, when the hangar doors were opened to get some air flowing, birds would fly in “and swoop around drawing boards and divebomb our heads, after knocking themselves silly” against the windows that were painted black, at Kelly’s direction, for secrecy.

One of Kelly’s top engineers, Dick Boehme, assigned Rich to a desk in an office with six others and gave him a copy of Kelly’s ten basic rules. “For as long as you work here,” Rich recalls him saying, “this is your gospel.” Then he told the young engineer what he’d be working on—a jet engine modified to fly 15,000 feet higher than any engine had flown before—and showed him a picture of the plane it was to go with.

Rich was stunned. He’d expected a fighter, not a glider. “What is this?”

“The U‑2,” Boehme replied. “You’ve just had a look at the most secret project in the free world.”

Rich would go on to have his own legendary career at the Skunk Works, as Kelly’s right hand, and the boss’s determination was one of the first lessons he absorbed: “Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten‑pin strike,” Rich would say. But for that to work, you have to be willing to back it up with results, and spine. “With his chili‑pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse‑makers, or fault‑finders.”

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The sum total of Kelly’s attributes, Rich thought, was that you just wanted to make him proud: “We peons viewed him with the knee‑knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament.”

It wasn’t that the Skunk Works was established as a set of rules and governed exactly that way for decades. Kelly was constantly refining his methods along the way.

One of the key elements of making an experimental shop work was that the company had to allow the person running it to—as he once explained—“tear down long‑established empires.”

Departments become entrenched and defend their responsibilities. It’s hard to take them away once they’ve been established. Purchasing, for instance, gave Kelly fits. The Skunk Works needed its own purchasing, with its own rules, one of which was that the guys who worked there shouldn’t also do engineering. But the engineers also shouldn’t do purchasing.

Engineers want the perfect part, even if they don’t actually need it, and they don’t always know the cost. Often, something slightly less perfect, or less expensive, works just as well. And vendors want to make the engineers happy. They also like sales. The end result is higher bills.

Secrecy was of paramount importance. This was the most secret defense program since the Manhattan Project. And Kelly took that very seriously. But, on the team itself, this was mostly about trust and understanding.

Keep the group small, make the stakes clear, and don’t bother with an elaborate security apparatus. Kelly’s philosophy about secret documents was that they should not be labeled. If you stamp secret on something, you’re just asking for someone to try to read it. A document is far safer if it looks like any other boring old report. He felt the same way about locked drawers, and even doors.

When a program was finished, he mostly just destroyed the documents. Years later, when the Air Force came in to perform a security audit, they asked Kelly where the files were. I destroyed them, he said. And where’s the record? He didn’t have that, either.

The phrase “need‑to‑know” is today a cliché of covert projects, but the concept was born on these early CIA black programs. Many workers even inside the Skunk Works didn’t have the entire picture of what was going on. They might know that they were building a wing for a high‑altitude plane, but they didn’t know what that plane was being designed to do. That simply wasn’t information you needed to know to do your job.

Secrecy complicated everything, including the official name of the plane. Inside the Skunk Works, people tended to use the nickname Kelly liked—“the Angel”—while the small group cleared into the program at the CIA, being bureaucrats, called it “the Article.”

The project was so closely guarded that in early 1955 the Air Force put a call out to contractors for a plane it called the X‑17, and when Johnson saw the proposal, he was irate. It was, he thought, “a dead‑ringer for our original presentation.” The Air Force department that issued it had, in his opinion, clearly used his original pitch and somehow didn’t know about the CIA’s secret project, which was a good sign for secrecy but infuriating nonetheless.

Kelly called Dick Bissell on a Sunday, then flew to Washington to share the proposal with Bissell and Gardner. Their reaction, Kelly wrote in the project log, was “stark horror.” The proposal was swiftly killed.

It was, to Kelly, yet another sign of the Pentagon’s broken contracting process.

Throughout Lockheed’s development process, tension simmered among the small number of people within the Air Force and CIA who knew about Kelly’s project.

In March 1955, the Air Force chief of staff told DCI Dulles that he hoped to take over the program once the plane was flying, and he met stiff resistance. That debate simmered until Eisenhower declared that the CIA would remain in control even once missions commenced.

“I want this whole thing to be a civilian operation,” Eisenhower said. “If uniformed personnel of the armed services of the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want any part of it.”

Engineers who worked under Kelly often talk about how practical his genius was. Rather than obsess over innovation that might be possible, he’d focus on what he knew could be done, based on existing technologies. The U‑2 is a prime example. “It’s sort of a nothing, technically,” is how Dick Heppe later described it, as a preface to explaining how impressive Kelly’s design mind was.

It was, essentially, the fuselage of a previous design— his F‑104 fighter—with subsonic inlets for the engine, because this plane didn’t necessarily need to be fast. The U-2’s key novel attribute was the enormous wing, and extremely light wing loading, paired with a powerful engine. The result was a capability “completely unknown and unavailable in any other machine,” the ability to fly long range at 70,000 feet or higher.

And by late summer 1955, the prototype was ready.

The plane had arrived on time and under budget—a lot under budget. By the time Kelly had a prototype flying, there was $4 million to $5 million in leftover funds. He used that, plus spare parts, to deliver five extra planes to Uncle Sam for free. This special bonus price was, Air Force liaison officer Leo Geary later said, “probably the finest bargain the American taxpayer has ever had under any circumstances.”

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Despite warnings to stay away from the story, Baker pursued it and produced a string of pieces that did, in fact, show a long history of shoddy research publications linked to Tessier-Lavigne. The mighty Stanford president, who had been a towering force in the scientific community, resigned by the end of Baker’s freshman year.

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Baker has now written a book about his experience and joined the podcast to discuss it.

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is three things: a rollicking account of Baker’s takedown of Tessier-Lavigne, an indictment of the start-up-obsessed culture Stanford has fostered, and something of a memoir, describing what it’s like to endure one of the more unusual freshman years any student will ever have.

The bulk of the book focuses on Stanford and what it has become, which is a meat market of young, brilliant minds being wooed by the venture capitalists seeking to acquire their talents. There are investors paying students tens of thousands of dollars for connections to other students and inviting the kids to their mansions and sex parties. All very wholesome stuff.

The book is fantastic. Baker is a rare talent. We had a wonderful conversation. You will enjoy it.

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

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Wang has basically been in hiding ever since. He moved from San Francisco to the South Bay to be closer to Meta’s headquarters and has been working non-stop. Last month, the world saw the first fruits of the revitalized AI effort in the form of Meta’s new Muse Spark model. And now Wang is speaking for the first time about the model, Meta’s grand AI ambitions and all the happenings over the last year in an exclusive interview here on the Core Memory podcast.

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Wang arrived at our studio sporting a mullet and a powerful whitetail deer camouflage shirt. He was in good spirits and tried his best to convince us that Meta can catch up to its rivals.

We hit on his personal beef with Sam Altman, Zuck delivering soup to AI recruits, the incredible pay packages Meta has been handing out, the vast amount of work Meta still has to do and the Meta AI hierarchy that includes all-stars like Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Shengjia Zhao, who seems to have blocked me on X for reasons I know nothing about.

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Enjoy!

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The other guy laughed, nodded, and by the time the session ended, agreed to commit a billion dollars over five years to Nvidia’s stack — talent, infrastructure, and compute. The two men shook hands.

The other guy was David Ricks, the chief executive of Eli Lilly — the most valuable pharmaceutical company in the world, a $700 billion firm built over a century, responsible for some ho-hum compounds like insulin, Prozac, and Zepbound. Ricks and Huang had been on a stage at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, widely regarded as the most important annual gathering in pharma.

These were two men, among the most important in their fields, which also happen to be two of the most important industries on earth.

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The relationship has a hierarchy. There is a speed differential. There is an incumbent and an insurgent. And the insurgent is becoming a real threat to the incumbent.

Pharma is slow; AI labs are fast. Pharma is regulated; AI labs are not (as much). Pharma still believes it sets the terms of its own industry; AI labs already know it does not. Everyone in the room knew the hierarchy. Huang said it in a sentence, with a joke, and Ricks laughed along. Two men, one check.

Eli Lilly had just bought ten million truffles.

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“A century of human progress in science could be achieved by AI in just 5 or 10 years.”

Dario Amodei had said it from a stage at Davos a year earlier. Three months after the JPMorgan session, Anthropic quietly acquired the startup Coefficient Bio for $400m in stock. Coefficient was only eight months old, and had fewer than ten employees. It had no wet lab, no clinical capacity, no Investigational New Drug (IND) application. What it boasted was a small team that had come out of Genentech’s machine-learning brain trust, Prescient Design.

Anthropic is not the only foundation lab on the prowl. Within two weeks of the Coefficient deal, OpenAI announced its own pharmaceutical partnership with Novo Nordisk, and just two days later, launched GPT-Rosalind, a biology research agent built specifically for drug discovery workflows. Earlier in the year, Google’s Isomorphic Labs announced a research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson and now expects its first AI-designed compounds to enter clinical trials by the end of 2026. Every major frontier lab is making the same bet at the same time.

I’ve spent the last several months trying to explain to friends in tech why the frontier labs are racing into pharma, and why pharma — the industry that fifteen years ago would have responded to a GPU seller with a polite rejection email — is responding now with billion-dollar contracts and stage time at its most important annual conference.

Pharma is having its Sputnik moment.

The reason this matters past the boundaries of either industry is that the relationship being drawn between AI and pharma right now will determine, over the next decade, how fast new drugs reach patients, which diseases get pursued and which do not, and how much of that calculus happens inside companies whose decisions you can see versus inside companies whose decisions you cannot. It is the story of the system that decides whether the drug your father needs gets approved in three years or twelve.

For most of the last century, pharma was a unipolar power inside drug development. It set the timelines. It set the pace. There was no peer pressure. There was nothing upstream of it that could move faster, no force pulling it toward urgency.

That has now changed. The frontier labs are not coming for pharma’s manufacturing or its trials or its distribution — they cannot, and I will get to why. They are coming for the part of the work that compounds in software, and they are moving at a speed pharma has never had to compete against. This is not a takeover. It is a forced partnership — closer, faster, and stranger than either industry has been in before. Two powers, neither able to fully absorb the other, each forced by the other’s existence to move faster than it would on its own. The space race was not produced by NASA alone. It was produced by NASA and the Soviets, in a relationship neither side wanted but both sides operationalized.

AI is not going to eat pharma. Pharma is not dying. But truffle jokes and biotech acquisitions are the same story told from two ends — in public, and on the cap table.

What are AI labs getting out of this?

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If you have questions, you can email me at eryneym@gmail.com, DM me on Twitter or Substack. Or put them in the comments below!

Also, none of the below constitutes medical advice. (Seriously. Thi…

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The company had its AI model choose the party’s date, time, and even its attendees. Out of more than 8,000 applicants only 200 were chosen to attend. The prompt told Codex to optimize for “people who make the Codex internet feel real” rather than the biggest AI social media stars. This resulted in a real mixed bag of patrons, which became a topic of conversation throughout the night.

After my purse and my person were poked and prodded at four separate security checkpoints, I made it to the event space. There was boba served upon entry, several bars featuring cocktails like Token Refresh (white rum and kiwi) and Multimodal Fizz (gin and passionfruit). Various tables had Goblin Mode and GPT 5.5 stickers strewn about. Two photo booths stood by the stage that created AI-generated pics for attendees as goblins, astronauts, pixel art race car drivers, and poorly drawn sketches.

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As I maneuvered through the crowd, I noticed a familiar face standing alone. It was Altman’s husband Ollie, a warm-spirited and generally shy Australian who works in tech. I asked him if his husband was in attendance, and as if on cue, Altman came waltzing over with a big grin and a Token Refresh in hand.

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As with any boom cycle, there is a lot of hype and a lot to understand if you want to get a handle on what’s real and what’s not. And so, we brought James Krellenstein onto the podcast. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Alva Energy and he’s sort of frightening in how much he knows about the nuclear industry. Like, really. You’ll see.

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This episode runs long because we wanted to use it as a chance to go through the past few decades of history and really explain why the U.S. nuclear industry slowed and how the U.S. might fix the situation. We also wanted to explain how all these new technologies work and, of course, explore where China is heading.

Krellenstein is something of a contrarian and thinks many of the U.S. nuclear start-ups are misguided in their approach.

He’s also incredible to listen to. You will enjoy this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done.

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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.

We’ve also brought on a new sponsor. Welcome, SendCutSend!! They are an American manufacturing powerhouse and will help you make your metal parts with speed and skill. Core Memory subscribers can get a 15 percent discount on their next parts right here.

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§ 01 ORIGINS

Casey Handmer was in seventh grade when he first thought about terraforming a planet. Handmer’s family lived in Sydney, Australia, and …

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Connor Glass, this week’s guest, has a company called Phantom Neuro, and it makes a human machine interface. By this, we mean a computing device that gets implanted in your body and lets you control a robotic limb with your mind.

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The first people using this technology are amputees. If, for example, you’ve lost your arm, you can get outfitted with a robotic prosthetic coupled with Phantom’s implant and then make your prosthetic move by thinking about what you’d like to do with it.

Phantom’s technology competes in places with implants from the likes of Neuralink and Synchron. The big difference is that nothing needs to be implanted in the patient’s brain. Phantom’s implant goes near the site of the amputation and links the robotic prosthetic with motor neurons to convey signals back and forth from the brain. It’s a simpler, faster surgery.

Where this technology is heading in the future is another story. Glass can see a day when humans have elective amputations to become, well, cyborgs.

We get into this weird and possibly wonderful future on the episode, along with Glass’s backstory and much more detail on how Phantom’s implant works.

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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.