Artemis II Recap, Work vs Leisure, AI Backlash | Krste Asanović, Peter Diamandis, Balachandar Ramamurthy

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Today is Monday, April 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Welcome to the show. Wild, wild weekend. Some really great whitepelling stuff, some very disappointing news. We'll go through it all. We have a great show for you lined up. We have to hop to work on some special projects. So a bit of a shorter show, but we still have 3 great guests joining us. One from Critical Loop, next from Sci-Fi, and then Peter Diamandis is joining to discuss everything, AI, technology, life extension. He goes all over the place. Abundance. Yeah, he's the original, the OG abundance, abundance maxer. Well, I read a bunch of different pieces this weekend, tried to sort of tie them together into the newsletter today, but thought we could kind of go all over the place starting with what we talked about a little bit on Friday was the Artemis II mission. It was scheduled to land at 5:07 PM Pacific time, it landed exactly at 5:07 PM Pacific time, like within the exact minute. Everyone was joking like, whoever's in charge of this should be in charge of Uber Eats delivery times or something like that, or DoorDash delivery times, because it was remarkably accurate. And I think they predicted it like days or maybe since the beginning of the mission, like everything was timed out perfectly. Did you have a good time?

Yeah, I mean, you can like predict these things, right?

Yeah, it is physics, but still, I mean—

We know, you know, when the next solar eclipse will be for the next—

10,000 years. Yeah, yeah, 10,000 years. But I don't know, it still feels remarkable that there is no, that there's like no flexibility.

But was that predicted pre-takeoff?

Yeah, right? I don't know, we should dig into this.

Or was that like updated after they had exited?

Yeah, because you'd think there'd be something about like, oh, like this engine fired a little bit too much or a little bit, so we had to make a small adjustment. I don't know, we'll have to figure it out. Anyway, the reactions were really, really positive. Elon Musk said, welcome home to the NASA astronauts. Welcome home Reed, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, the Artemis II astronauts. The astronauts have splashed down at 8:07 PM ET, bringing their historic 10-day mission around the moon to an end. I watched it live and it was, yeah, it was a remarkable moment. I mean, we haven't done this in my lifetime. We haven't done this in a very long time. So Reed Wiseman says, "Thank you, Elon Musk. The four of us glimpsed the red hues of Mars far in the distance as the sun slipped behind the moon, and there was zero doubt in our minds that the creative genius of our greatest minds will have us there very soon. Let's go." And so I really like this. This is great. No, no, no, it is remarkable. And this was inspiring for a few different reasons because I felt like, you know, people were not voicing skepticism publicly beforehand. Like you don't wanna jinx it and also you don't wanna be negative about anything and it makes sense.

But the space people we talked to off air ahead of time were extremely nervous about it.

Yeah, not even just the space, there were like people in every single person had a different take on like, oh, this seems risky, This is aggressive. This has moved very quickly. The government hasn't done something like this in a long time. And so, you know, can America pull this off? Like, America, there's been a lot of worry about the government being able to do things effectively. And like all government, like many government projects, there had been delays and cost overruns. The country has been extremely divided. Everyone knows this. And this mission in particular required Americans from all different backgrounds and political persuasions to come together to work on a common goal. Goal. Like, and we saw some of this, we can talk about it later, but even NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman had been through his own back and forth on the way to getting confirmation. And so he was like sort of new on the job even relative to this mission, which of course has been in the works for years. And so there were a lot of different things. There's also the pressure from the private space industry. You know, can the SLS work in this case? Well, everything did and it was very, very good. There were lots of things that could go wrong. Even the Apple executives seemed to be a little bit sort of nervous about this. There's a post in here that we can pull up.

I would love to know how they test that parachute system.

I think they launch it off of a plane or something. I don't know. How do they do it?

Yeah, yeah. I know. I'm sure there's a good answer, but—

Yeah, but you have to imagine that it's 3 parachutes because it can probably survive with just 2. Yeah. And there's actually 2 stages of parachutes. So there's 1 set and then these break away and then there's a new set of parachutes once the atmosphere gets thicker, I believe. But look at that, it opens up perfectly. And what an inspiring image. Look at that. Yeah, it was really cool. So Jaws over at Apple said, "Welcome home to the Artemis II crew. Honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them." Not the iPhone, not a couple of iPhones, iPhone. This is in the official Apple brand. You don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. But they brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone, One giant leap for space selfies. And so NASA posted this on April 4th, said, "This view just hits different." They took a moment to look back at Earth as they continued deep into space toward the moon, and they showed photos, basically selfies taken with the iPhone, or with iPhone, I guess, of the Earth. And then Tim Cook waited until they landed safely. "Congratulations to Artemis II on a successful mission. You captured the wonders of space and our planet beautifully, taking iPhone photography to new heights." "and we're grateful you shared it with the world. Your work continues to inspire us all to think different. Welcome home." And so Aaron pointed out to the tune of 3 million views, notice that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures from Artemis II until the crew safely landed. So, you know, everyone was like, you know, on the edge of their seats hoping for the good outcome. And that's exactly what happens. There was also, it was very, very high stakes, but it was also in many ways America at its best. Even the never-ending culture war took a backseat to this. There was this interesting back and forth back and forth between Jared Isaacman and someone who is not a fan of, yes, they deleted the post, but the Artemis II crew was listening to Pink Pony Club by Chapel Roan, and that didn't align with someone's politics. And so they said like, this is ridiculous. Why, how can they possibly listen?

Because like the last 5 bands that have come up on the show, it sounds like a made-up band.

Chapel Roan? Oh, she's big. But Jared Isaacman was like, "Hey, like let's cool it with the political rhetoric. It's not my choice in music, but the astronauts rode a controlled explosion into space on a journey farther away from Earth than any human before with everything around them trying to kill them." That's a crazy way to put it, but it's true. They can listen to whatever song they want. And I thought that that was a really, really, really important moment when everyone is so divided. And so the job is very much not finished. Artemis III, which aims to land on the Moon in 2028, will be a much bigger challenge. And there's some extra context today in the Wall Street Journal, and we can talk about the difference between Artemis II and Artemis III and sort of where this is going. So the journal writes, Micah Maidenberg says, Artemis II is a blockbuster. Landing on the Moon will be a lot harder. And so flying around the Moon may end up being the easy part for NASA's Artemis program. This month, Artemis II This month's Artemis II flight captivated people around the world as the agency pulled off the deepest human spaceflight ever recorded and the first crewed mission to the moon since the 1970s. Really, so, so long ago. NASA and its contractors must now get through a series of sprints that would culminate in astronauts landing on the lunar surface in 2028. President Trump outlined that expectation in an executive order he signed last year. The path to the lunar surface is open, The work ahead is greater than the work behind us, said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kastriya at a briefing Friday after Artemis— the Artemis II crew vehicle splashed down. So Artemis III, planned for next year, will focus on docking the Orion spacecraft with lunar landers in low Earth orbit, a precursor to a planned landing on the moon. Some current and former NASA spaceflight officials are skeptical that a 2028 landing will be possible given the technical and operational milestones the agency companies involved need to overcome. Among the challenges: showing one or both of the moon landers that SpaceX and Blue Origin have been developing can safely transport astronauts, and preparing new spacesuits made by Axiom Space. ULA needs to develop upper stages for NASA's SLS rocket. Space missions often take years.

They gotta do, they gotta do, uh, logos all over the spacesuit.

They should.

Private companies should be able to help fund end the mission by—

They really, they really should. And there's, there's another story in the journal here about that, that viral video of the jar of Nutella that ended up floating on Artemis II. So I, I was convinced this was like VFX or AI when we pulled it up. Apparently it's real. We can dig into a little bit of like how this actually happened. Ben Cohen has the story in the Wall Street Journal. As millions of people all over the world watched Artemis, the Artemis II lunar flyby this week, there were minutes They were minutes from seeing astronauts travel the furthest distance ever from Earth when they were suddenly captivated by another majestic sight. It floated through the spacecraft, tumbled right past an astronaut's head, and drifted across NASA's livestream, leaving the roughly 252,000 miles away with the same question. Wait, was that a jar of Nutella? Back on this planet, in a Persephone, New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2:00 PM operating meeting. Operations committee meeting, oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away at 1:52 PM. Their meeting was quickly interrupted by a message in the Microsoft Teams chat flagging that Nutella was in outer space. As it turns out, the people who spread Nutella to every corner of the Earth were more surprised than anyone to see it near the moon. They only found out about the most famous jar of gooey stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post. Dang, how much did Nutella pay for this product placement? And we saw that post and we had the same question. So Nutella says zero, they did not pay for this. This is not product placement, but it is remarkable. They didn't know their chocolate hazelnut concoction was aboard Orion. They didn't even know that the astronauts took it with them. And it's still weird to me that astronauts can just bring random stuff with them, but I guess it's just a bus at the end of the day. You can put whatever you want on it.

Do you remember your first time trying Nutella?

Maybe, not really. I'm not that big of a Nutella guy.

For me, it felt like the first day of the rest of my life.

Really? You're a big Nutella fan?

Not really anymore, but as a kid discovering that, that it was like a peanut butter-like thing that was just on an entirely different level. Yeah. It was magic.

What is it, a condiment technically? What is it?

A spread?

A spread? Is that a thing?

I don't know. It can be a lot of things.

But it's always sort of bothered me that it sort of larps as chocolate. Like it looks like chocolate, but it's like hazelnut technically, which I think is like sort of a betrayal. I don't know. Sound off in the chat if you have strong opinions about Nutella. David says Nutella is like crack for kids. And Jordi is being paid by the Nutella Corporation. No, we are not sponsored by Nutella.

I wish. We'd have a big jar of it right here.

So it's a chocolate hazelnut concoction.

Yeah, it has—

Hazelnut in it, but it has chocolate in it as well. So Nutella, the corporation, did not know that Nutella, the hazelnut concoction, was aboard Orion. They still don't know which astronaut brought it.

They won't know for sure. You just know that for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around the cabin.

Somehow I feel like the NASA astronauts' tax records will be deeply inspected to see that they're not selling ad slots out the back.

We need some iPads floating by like B2B SaaS.

That'd be good.

Yeah, that'd be sick.

Uh, yeah, I mean, the, the, even, even the phone code could be monetized. There's some certain— aren't there some venture capital firms that just have dates?

776.

776. It's like, that's the code that gets you thinking. I don't know, anything can be sold, I'm sure. Uh, they still don't know which astronaut brought it, and like us, they weren't even sure the video was real when they watched the jar hurdle across their screens at exactly the right angle for the label to spin into focus. It all looked too perfect. I couldn't have filmed it any better if I tried, said Chad Stubbs, who is their chief marketing officer. What a great name for a CMO of Ferrero North America, who owns Nutella. But once he reviewed the NASA footage and saw a levitating tub of Nutella, he knew that a marketing opportunity had landed in his lap and that he was no longer sitting in his most boring meeting of the week. It was a lot more interesting than talking about shipping details. And so from the conference room, they started a Teams group to discuss the logistics of their improbable operation. They called it Nutella Mission Control. Before most Americans had never seen the original video, they posted a slow-motion clip set to the iconic theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The tagline, Nutella is out of this world. And I wonder if they could just rip that audio on Instagram using like the integrated music functionality or if they had to like quickly license that because getting like an official theme from a Hollywood film like 2001: A Space Odyssey is— it's definitely within budget for something like this, but it's usually a back and forth with some emails. But maybe as a large marketing team, they have everything like wired up already. Anyway, for as long as humans have been leaving this world, they have been taking products along along for the ride. But in this age when every inch of the planet is sponsored, space has become the most prestigious real estate in marketing because it's the only place where marketing is banned. NASA has a strict policy against promoting or endorsing commercial products, and Tyler's booing, and enforces it so aggressively that not naming brands might as well be part of basic training for astronauts. Unlike college athletes, they can't get paid for their name, image, and likeness, As long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella.

So yeah, I'm not saying the astronauts should be able to do it independently. I'm just saying that NASA should try to build out a multi-billion dollar advertising campaign.

You gotta go straight to the top. You gotta go straight to the government. Yeah. And say, hey, you know, Lockheed's showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the spacesuits. Blue Origin's doing a moon lander. Why not Nutella chipping in as well? At least paying for part of it. I don't know.

It would just be extremely American.

It would be extremely American to make the Orion capsule look like—

That's what I was saying, pay-per-view.

A NASCAR.

And add, you gotta have a pay-per-view.

Yeah, pay-per-view for sure.

Like you can watch the stream when they're just kind of hanging out traveling, but for anything like a landing, splashdown, takeoff, it switches to pay-per-view.

Oh, it switches to pay-per-view mode?

Yeah.

I think they gotta sell the windshield. They gotta sell the windshield. When you're taking photos of Earth, you gotta see Tide. You gotta see Tide across the windshield. It's like, oh, seeing the blue marble from this distance is amazing.

Reminds me, I have some laundry to do.

And I kind of have to put the camera in between the I and the D.

Podcast ads over during the stream too.

Yeah, there is a lot of dead air.

Just letting you guys know, in T-minus 30 minutes, we'll be coming around the moon. And this segment, this moon passing, is brought to you by Athletic Greens.

Yep, great. Okay, so as long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella. When one Artemis II crew member let slip in a press conference that he was bringing an iPhone to get mesmerizing photos of Earth, he caught himself. He said, "I don't think I can actually say that as a government employee," Reed Wiseman said. Said. We have small, highly powerful computing devices that we'll take with us, uh, with outstanding cameras. And so, yeah, uh, what, what, what is an iPhone if not just a small, highly powerful computing device with outstanding camera? Uh, while in the cosmos, they also found other purposes for those powerful computing devices. One picture shared by NASA showed Jeremy Hansen with an electric shaver in one hand hand and his iPhone in the other because he was using it as a mirror, and that wasn't even the most amazing part of the shot. Anyone who looked closely would have spotted another product in the corner, a container of Jif peanut butter. Now, what's interesting is that the government does have, at least with peanut butter, are you familiar with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Techniques or Technology or something, NIST? So NIST is like our official weights and measures, like they keep like, the canonical, like, what is the 1 pound? What is 1 gram? And they have a whole bunch of standards for all sorts of different things. And then different companies can, like, agree on, okay, well, we are both, you know, saving to a certain standard.

They're reinventing and defining the gram.

Yeah, but all sorts of things. And one of the things that NIST, like, has is peanut butter, reference peanut butter. So if you are doing some sort of lab experiment and you need to say that you are testing this product when it comes into contact with peanut butter, you can go to the government and get the most standardized, the official peanut butter.

The official peanut butter.

Because otherwise somebody might say, well, did you use Jif or did you use Skippy or did you use something else? And this way you can just say one thing. And so there is a world where the government would say, okay, don't bring Jif peanut butter, bring NIST peanut butter. But I don't know. But anyway, Jif got another shout out in here, although I can't see it in this image. But to find out more about space oddities, this journalist at the Wall Street Journal said he called Robert Pearlman, who obsessively tracks them as the editor of Collect Space. He told me something curious about outer space. The deeply ordinary parts of NASA missions resonate back home as much as the extraordinary "We remember the astronauts who flew around the moon and the flying Nutella. It makes us feel closer to the humans who have never been further away. After all, most of us will never see the dark side of the moon." Disagree, and I think we're gonna have Peter Diamandis.

Looks like a Coachella set.

It does look like they're twisted knobs or something. What are they doing there? Oh, they're checking their watches, okay.

Wrist check?

Wrist check.

The Artemis II wrist check?

I mean, there was— there's been a knockout drag-out fight between all the watchmakers to make sure that their watches are the ones on the wrists of the astronauts, going back to the original Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch edition, that one. And was it going to be a Rolex? It wound up being an Omega. That was a big moment. So, uh, in fact, this particular jar of Nutella was just one of the 60 million sold in America over the past year. When Nutella was invented, nobody could have imagined that it would one day be in space. Nobody had ever been to space. During a post-war cocoa shortage in the 1940s, an Italian pastry chef named Pietro Ferrero had the genius idea to combine the scarce resource with an ingredient his town had in abundance.

Hazelnuts.

Hazelnuts, yeah. It was engineered into a spreadable paste in the 1950s and officially launched as Nutella in 1964. So they had a shortage of chocolate, of cocoa, and so they were cutting it, they were cutting the brick with hazelnuts, and it was sort of a Jevons paradox situation where by dropping the cost of a spreadable chocolate substance, consumption skyrocketed. Good news, it's the ultimate white belt. 5 years later, NASA launched Apollo 11. Even then, one product was already synonymous with the wonder of spaceflight. Do you know what we're talking about? Can you take a guess? What is the main product that was famously designed for astronauts in space?

Is it the ice cream?

No, no, that's close. The freeze-dried ice cream is up there. No, what? Whip cream? No.

Tang?

And no one knows Tang? You don't know the story of Tang?

I think that's before our time, John.

There's Tang, and then there's also, you know those super bouncy balls? Bouncy Balls, those super bouncy balls there. I don't know how apocryphal that is, but there's always been this story, at least when I was a kid it was introduced to me, that those super bouncy balls were designed as rocket fuel or something like that, and, and that the experiment went wrong and like this was all they could come up with. Probably fake news. As an 8-year-old, like, I was like, this is lore, this is peak, this is peak lore, this is, this is peak lore. So let's talk about Tang.

Cinema.

The beverage was struggling. Tang, which is sort of like a Gatorade, it's like an orange juice type liquid, but it comes in a powder, you mix it, it's actually the early AG1. It's early AG1.

Or Element.

Yeah, or Element. The beverage was struggling until NASA realized it could mask the metallic taste of water on board. So tap water in space, apparently a nightmare. Aurora, gotta get Aurora up there. That's the next move.

There we go.

And every kid who wanted to be an astronaut instantly wanted the neon orange powder. I was one of them. I remember learning about Tang and being like, this is cool. A half a century later, the drink that was once a flop would crack $1 billion of annual revenue. Let's go, 50-year overnight success.

That's wild.

To this day, brands dream about making it to space because they know the most valuable marketing is the kind that isn't really marketing and can't actually be valued. And there's been a whole trend on YouTube of YouTubers taking products and putting them on weather balloons and flying the weather balloons up technically past the Kármán line with a GoPro and they take the footage down. And no one really counts that, but it still gives you a little bit of the aura of space. It's not the same as like a NASA—

Calculate how many weather balloons we would need to attach to you to take you to space.

I think that's been done. I think Red Bull did that with—

With Felix?

Felix Baumgartner. Is that his name?

He just rode weather balloons up?

Yes, that was weather balloons. That was not rocket.

Really? I thought it was like a high altitude plane.

No, no, no. The whole thing was weather balloon all the way up. When he gets to the top, he jumps outta the capsule and then he just like spins on the way down. It's one of the craziest things. That's an amazing marketing stunt. I talked to the head of marketing at Red Bull who was behind it behind that and the numbers, like the ROI, that it might be the highest ROI marketing campaign in history. Like it was truly like remarkably affordable for what, for how massive that campaign was. So speaking of similar space campaigns, for this trip, the astronauts wore Omega Speedmaster X-33 watches and brought cameras made by Nikon and GoPro in addition to their iPhones, which we talked about in an earlier essay that Brandon Gorrell wrote for the newsletter, tbpn.com. While on board, Christina Koch even asked Mission Control—

This is extremely disappointing.

ChatGPT says, "I would need dozens of large weather balloons." But look up the Felix Baumgartner thing because that was such—

But that could have had some type of, like—

I don't think it had a rocket on it or something, but it also might not have gone that high. Like it went higher than anyone had ever done that jump, but it might not have gone all the way to like the Kármán line or all the way to space, right? But it went really high and it was very impressive. So while on board, Christina even asked mission control for help finding something essential, her favorite Honest hand lotion. Honest, that's Jessica Alba's brand? Interesting.

The Honest Company.

Okay, got some Honest Company organic media there. As he watched the Artemis II mission Pearlman waited for the moment when that random product popped up. He knew it would happen. He didn't know when or what it would be. Nutella, he told me, wouldn't have been at the top of my list. As it happens, the product was at the top of his list of another type of chocolate, M&M's. In microgravity, even the men and women on NASA missions can't resist the opportunity to gobble up floating dots. Astronauts love becoming human Pac-Men. On this mission, they had access to 100 189 menu options, 5 different types of hot sauce, precisely 43 cups of coffee, and one crew preference that NASA simply calls chocolate spread. Hours after that chocolate spread bobbled through the cabin, the Artemis II crew disappeared behind the moon and briefly lost contact with society. When their signal returned, Christina's voice crackled back to Houston with a message for humanity. We will visit again, the astronaut said. We will construct science outposts, we will drive rovers, we will do radio astronomy, we will found companies, we will bolster industry, we will inspire, but ultimately we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other. And at least one of them would choose Nutella. Uh, that's a funny story. Anyway, back to what's going to happen in Artemis III. Uh, space missions often take years to come together as teams of engineers stitch together complex machinery and software that must be able to deliver in harsh harsh conditions, creating systems that keep astronauts safe adds to the pressure. NASA and its contractors have struggled with delays during Artemis program. The first Artemis mission missed several earlier launch date goals, and the agency ran into problems fueling the SLS rocket for the mission before starting it in late 2022. Questions about the Orion spacecraft's heat shield contributed to delays for Artemis II, with officials pushing off the expected launch date twice in 2024 alone. And I remember there was a lot of nervousness about the heat shield. And then when it came back, there was a picture. What?

Got a good idea from PRA in the chat.

What we got?

Artemis II Nutella, Artemis III GLP-1. How much would one of the GLP-1 manufacturers pay to have one of them? One of the astronauts. That could potentially fund the whole mission.

I feel like if you're, don't astronauts have to be in like peak physical condition? I feel like if they're not natty, it's not really, it's a, you know, it's a lost.

I don't want my astronauts to be natty. You want 'em optimized.

I guess.

There's no anti-doping organization in space, John.

I suppose, I suppose. But you want the astronauts to be like the pinnacle of, you know, what humans can achieve. You know, we talk about Johnny Kim, the Navy SEAL turned doctor turned astronaut. You want to see what's possible when someone just puts all of their effort for years and years towards like achieving greatness. Not just clicking order online. Anyway, NASA and its contractors have struggled with delays. We talked about this. Everything starts with the premise that NASA should not do anything that's unsafe, but there's no question that we need to move faster, said Senator Jerry Moran, chairman of a subcommittee that set funding levels for the agency. So there's these tradeoffs here. Keeping the next Artemis mission on schedule will be a major test for Jared Isaacman, former guest of the show, who's aiming to ensure the agency returns an American crew to the lunar surface before China, while starting to build a permanent base there. Isaacman in February rolled out new plans to accelerate the return of US astronauts to the moon's surface. Officials said the approach resembles the Apollo program in the 1960s. Officials, uh, uh, in the 1960s, when a stepping stone approach built up confidence in the systems needed for constructing the historic Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Under the revised plan, Artemis III will no longer feature a landing on the moon as the agency had previously hoped. The agency also aims to move faster with the SLS rocket rockets, in part by jettisoning an upgrade to the vehicle that had been in the works. We're not going to turn every rocket into a work of art. We're going to increase launch rate. We're going to do it in a logical evolutionary way, Isaacman said in February. And this ties to his experience riding aboard SpaceX and building a company with Shift 4. And you can imagine that he is pretty, pretty in favor of iterative design. And so when you see something like Artemis II, very successful, the inclination should be run it back immediately and start adding little tweaks constantly. So the Artemis III mission next year is supposed to help set up NASA and its contractor to attempt one or more visits to the moon in 2028. So that's Artemis IV and V. NASA's inspector general said in a recent report that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have run into delays developing spacecraft for Artemis missions. Each company has been working on in-space transfers of super cold propellants to power lunar flights, fueling operations that are still largely unproven. So that is a very, very complex and new technology that we are, that the entire space community is clearly working on. The in-space refueling is sort of critical to actually getting to the moon in a meaningful way, not just sort of ripping it up there and then figuring out how to get back and just blasting back. To set up a full lunar economy, you need to be doing tons and tons of refueling operations, which are obviously incredibly complex. A NASA safety panel separately raised questions about how quickly SpaceX's human lander based on its Starship vehicle would be ready. A landing operation of astronauts with the Starship ship lander within the next few years appears daunting and to the panel probably not achievable, the group said in a report released earlier this year. The companies have key tests coming up that will inform their lunar work in vehicles. SpaceX next month plans to launch an upgraded version of its Starship rocket, while Blue Origin is working towards launching a cargo lander to the Moon with its New Glenn rocket. So with all of this has like the backdrop of the SpaceX IPO, and you have to imagine that even if it was incredibly cost intensive, we're in this weird dynamic with SpaceX where the CapEx requirements of something like this and sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus V or some crazy data center. And so you could be in this interesting situation where Elon is incentivized to move a lot faster, probably not with humans on board, get even just a basic Optimus robot up there, get a lunar lander up there, just continue to deliver payloads because it just shows so many more milestones. And as you go public, I think it becomes more difficult to stay focused on this like 30-year mission.

Yeah, part of like the value of actually sending humans to space is entirely like kind of marketing and just to prove that it's possible. Like you would think that, you would hope that a lot of this is, like it's just very cool. It's very inspiring. I feel like it's important. But at the same time, you would think that NASA should just be optimizing for how do we get as much mass as possible up to the, whether it's space or the moon, et cetera, and just basically leaning a lot more into drones and going more for volume versus these sort of like high-risk, high-cost.

Yeah. At the same time, I mean, we'll see where the humanoid robots go, but there is no, there's no current substitute for the versatility of having a human astronaut in a spacesuit there being able to, I mean, we talked to the folks from Firefly and they were sort of digging up moon dust and analyzing it. Things open up when you can get a guy out there with a jackhammer, right? You gotta just get a human to be able to do so many more flexible buildouts and move equipment around. Clearly there's current leverage that you get from having a human there, at least for the time being. Although you can do a lot with drones and robots. Well, so let's, there are a few more reactions to the Artemis landing. Trung Phan, Dan had a post, did that go away? What else is here? Jared Isaacman dropped out. There's a little bit of a story about Jared Isaacman because he was personally on scene for the splashdown of the Artemis II crew. Eric Doherty has a video here of them talking to the astronauts. And there's a little bit of history on him. Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship waiting to welcome 4 astronauts home from the moon. That basement company is now Shift4 Payments. It processes $200 billion a year in credit card transactions. About a third of all restaurant, hotels, and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it.

And 100% of firearms retailers?

Probably, yeah. Yeah, he's carved that out perfectly. He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for US Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million. He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter jet that tops 1,500 miles per hour, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record. I didn't realize he held the world record for, what is that, transatlantic, transcontinental? I don't know, circling the globe. In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian space flight, 4 people with no astronaut training, 3 days days orbiting the Earth, $250 million raised for St. Jude's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft. I didn't realize he'd been to space twice. I thought he'd only been once. That's crazy. He ran it back, held onto by a 12-foot cable in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside of the government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, further than ever than any human had been since the Apollo crew in 1972. And so there's some more facts about Jared Isaacman there. But I had a wild proposal, which was to make April 10th a national holiday celebrating Artemis II. Is this the biggest achievement NASA has ever done? No, not compared to landing on the moon, but I think it symbolizes a very important turn in, in our capacity as a country to do bold and impressive things. And there are currently no federal holidays in April, and I think people would enjoy it. And it's hard to think of anything with broader support than this mission. There are so many interesting projects happening. A lot of them, even electric cars, have pushback from different people. And there's like so many things that are controversial. And this was one story that I just saw continually cut through through the noise and see support.

Yeah, 3-day weekends have not been very controversial. Yeah, yeah. Nobody sees a 3-day weekend on the horizon and is slamming their computer into their desk.

Not at all. And so I was thinking back to the benefits of more federal holidays, more national holidays. And I was reminded of what we talked about last week regarding Alex Tabarrok's piece piece in Marginal Revolution. So, he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrial revolution to expected improvements in productivity from the AI revolution. And so, if you look back between 1870 and today, the hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%. Americans used to work 3,000 hours per year. and now they work about 1,800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening? Hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we were what, we literally were doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he frames this, you know, around AI. He says, so if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe in Wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general-purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example. And I thought April 10th would be an interesting place to start. And so it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like, is AI causing unemployment? There's been a lot of hiring freezes, a lot of AI tool deployment, but we're not really seeing replacement yet.

It seems hard like on a macro level to really definitively say that like AI is causing a huge effect on the labor market.

Yeah, but the only thing that seems definitive is that companies are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI buildouts, right?

Yeah.

And you could also argue that those people like probably were on the chopping block anyways.

Yeah.

But so far that's been, yeah, that's been happening.

And so it is still a little early to net out all the effects of, is this going to be more Jevons paradox type effect where the competitive dynamic is that you have humans and AI at your disposal, you have a token budget and a human capital budget, and I have a human capital budget and a token budget. And in order to actually compete and win, we want to deploy both as aggressively as possible. And so the the game theoretic Nash equilibrium is that we both employ a lot of people and use a lot of AI, and we do, and both of our products get better, and we continue to compete with each other. That's certainly one possible outcome. But there's also, you know, there are, you know, a real risk of true labor replacement effects. And so taking a leap of faith here and adding a federal holiday a bit ahead of the curve feels like the type of action that America America needs to cool tempers during, uh, during a time of rising unrest, uh, as seen over the weekend in San Francisco, which I'm sure you all saw. There were a variety of attacks. Sam Altman posted a blog post, uh, covering a Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house. Then there was a shooting outside Friday morning, Friday morning, early hours. He said 3:45 AM in the morning. He said thankfully it bounced off the house and no one got hurt. And I saw another article that said that the suspect is in custody. And he says, and Sam goes on to sort of restate what he believes. He says, working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for him. AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be Essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI, and we, we must figure out how to make it happen. And then he also says it will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified. We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, perhaps ever, maybe bigger than the Industrial Revolution. And so you would expect the, the, the, the, the light and the existence of the American populace to change over that period of time. And we have a duty to make it as smooth as possible. And he says, we have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model. We urgently need a society-wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future. AI has to be democratized. Power Power cannot be too concentrated. George Hotz actually had an interesting rebuttal to Sam Altman's post, sort of re-arguing for open source, which is something that a lot of people have not been arguing for lately, but it was sort of interesting to see him continue to push back.

Was it just about open source, or was it about sharing research?

It was— he was saying that you don't have an obligation to open source. You should open source the weights of a model that cost $1 billion to train. He's not arguing for that. But he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the research ideas, basically publish the research papers again and empower a broader community. And of course, there's a lot of competitive dynamics there, but that is something that could potentially happen via regulation or something, or happen just due to, you know, just a competitive dynamic. Like there are other labs out there that don't have as much compute and might realize that they have great researchers and maybe they want to open source more. There are a lot of different ways that this could play out. So he says, I do not think it's right that a few labs, few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future. And so there's been a bunch of, of back and forth about the attacks and what's driving them and how risky the rhetoric has been. I think in general, it's a very tough situation because you don't want to just spark more controversy and more discussion around this stuff. You mostly wanna move towards more security and more, more.

Yeah, of course, the notable— you know, it's been shared widely at this point, but the notable, uh, one thing that was notable about Friday, the attacker from Friday, is just they were sharing all of the, uh, you know, if anyone— all the AI Doom material. They were clearly consumed, consuming it. Yeah, um, sort of caught up in it.

Yeah.

And, um, uh, yeah, uh, formerly of Andreessen Horowitz, with a new fund, Amp Public, said time is running out for technology leaders to show they care about public benefit above all else. Slow down your layoffs, reinvest in reeducation, mentor the next generation. We are all on team humanity. And I think that's a good message. And so as the AI race continues to heat up in America, geopolitical dynamics have consistently acted as a binding constraint limiting the viability ability of proposals set forth by AI lab leaders. And so we've seen this at Davos with various lab leaders saying, well, we would agree to a slowdown if we could all agree. And then in the Bernie Sanders, the data center ban, and all of this feels very intractable with the backdrop of geopolitical competition if you don't have buy-in from all the different countries, you wind up just falling behind another country, and you have the same dynamic again. And so that piece of the discussion has sort of fallen by the wayside, because it's so difficult to argue if you're running a private corporation in America, and you're like, I wanna make foreign policy now. That's a really tall order. But fortunately, I think people are starting to at least investigate what the power what a path towards some coalition between different countries might look like. And Sebastian Malaby, author of The Infinity Machine and former guest of the show, published an op-ed in The New York Times outlining one possible solution to the US-China dynamic. And so, we can go through this and try and understand Sebastian's points because he makes a— he actually went to China. And talk to lab leads there to try and get their side of the story and what they might be open to in terms of collaboration. So he says in 2022, the Biden administration tried to arrest China's development of artificial intelligence by denying it cutting-edge semiconductors. This was the CHIPS Act, which at the time I was very in favor of, but of course the policies have all evolved evolved and there are much more complex situations with the entire semiconductor supply chain and how fast the technology is advancing. So President Trump has relaxed that policy a bit without a clear plan to replace it, but the chip export controls have failed. And so he dives into, you know, how chips are actually getting to China. China's tech sector is too sophisticated to be stopped from building powerful AI. In pursuing an impossible objective, the United States is missing an opportunity to, to try for one that sounds fanciful, but which after a recent reporting trip to China, I believe is more realistic. America should negotiate with China on a global pact on AI safety, which would impose universal limits on a technology that can do much good, but in the wrong hands would do much harm. The premise of the export restrictions was that the United States United States would be able to successfully block China's access to powerful AI chips. The premium chipsets used in AI data centers are the size of skateboards and can't be smuggled in a simple suitcase. And it's hard to put them to use without hands-on support from the chipmaker's engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models and chips located in other countries. They were using cloud instances and, and Neo Clouds in other countries. And this is always a question of even if you stop the flow of chips into the country, can you set up a holding company that allocates the reserves?

Yeah, and there's some questions last year of like, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars of orders?

And Malaysia was another one that was— and even in the Middle East, there were always questions about, okay, well, if the Middle East gets chips, are they going to be able to have Chinese companies as clients? Science remotely. And there were discussions of folks basically putting training data on hard drives and/or model weights on hard drives and just flying them from one country to another. It's very, very hard to actually contain the movement of the critical pieces of the AI value chain. So he says a Chinese model builder needs only to rent capacity on an AI data center in one of China's Southeast neighbours, like you mentioned, concealing the model's Chinese origin is straightforward, partly thanks to this loophole. He says, let's see, partly thanks to this loophole, China has rolled out a series of excellent AI models. China's ability to skirt US controls will not change even if the Senate follows the House in passing a bill to restrict China's access to outside data centres, which is the next step. Next domino to fall in the chip ban and chip control project. China is learning how to do without cutting-edge chips by stacking less powerful chips together. And Huawei, the 910B, 910C, the Huawei Ascend chips seem to be less powerful, but if they can actually manufacture them at scale, they can wind up marshaling the same or similar compute.

Yeah, power being less of a constraint helps as well.

Three Gorges Dam and other nuclear power plants and all sorts of different initiatives that they've done. They have a ton of solar, they have a lot of energy. So its model builders also take full advantage of a process known as distillation. Every time a US lab produces a cutting-edge model, Chinese rivals quickly reverse engineer its capabilities and build a copycat version. The follower has the advantage, he says. American AI scientists used to say that competitors being able to fast past follow would not matter. An intelligent explosion was approaching, the argument went, as AI systems would soon become capable enough to write upgrades to their own code. AI would create better AI, better AI would create even better AI, recursive self-improvement would drive performance skyward. The nation that had just reached this so-called singularity first would be the winner of the AI race. So more, more the AI race than winning the AI future messaging. Even if the fast follower were just a few months behind the leader, 3.5 years after the Biden administration shipped controls, AI is generating code to upgrade itself. The promised feedback loop has started, but the accelerating power of the leading models won't determine who wins the AI race. It's AI deployment that will matter to transform economies and armies. AI must be embedded into the business processes and weapons systems, the raw power of the cutting-edge models must be turned into applications, he says. The upshot is that China and the United States are roughly level in the AI contest. Top Chinese models may be a few months behind American ones, and the relative position on military applications is difficult to ascertain as so much is classified. But on industrial applications, China seems to be leading. US-sanctioned companies such as Huawei and Hikvision are rolling out AI systems that perform maintenance checks on high-speed trains, managing mining operations, scanning water samples to assess pollution, and more. At Huawei's campus near Shenzhen, he recently took a ride in an autonomous car. A device in the passenger seat massaged my back, and the steering was immaculate. Tyler, do you generally agree with most of these takes here?

No.

Okay.

What do you think is wrong? Yeah, to start, I think I think Chinese labs are farther behind.

Okay.

The only reason that they're close behind is because distillation.

Distillation.

I also think—

Yeah, and he's kind of saying like, he's saying that the chip export ban is not working.

Yeah, also.

But I feel like them being behind is proof that it is working. And he's also saying, you know, the labs want to get to recursive self-improvement. We're starting to see early signs of that. And so I feel like there's kind of some kind of inconsistency.

Yeah, I mean, also just on the chip stuff, like we're clearly not like policing it as hard as we could. We could be policing it way harder, right? I remember it was like Supermicro, we saw those videos where they had smuggled in the boxes and it was like extreme—

Yeah, the hair dryer.

Yeah, it's like if we really wanted to solve this issue, like we for sure could.

Let's check in with Supermicro's stock. It's up 17% the last 5 days.

Wow.

But like very clearly, I think among like the leading labs in the US, you are seeing some kind of like takeoff, but like among them, right? It's like very much recursive thing.

Yep.

The models improve the harness, which improves the next model. Like I think this thing is actually true. Like you're not seeing open source labs like kind of keep up, I think.

Yeah.

I mean, it was very, very remarkable watching seeing like DeepSeq not accelerate in the same way that I think a lot of people expected.

Yeah, I mean, like Qwen is kind of what DeepSeq, what people thought DeepSeq would be, and Qwen models are good, but again, like I think most of the reason that they're good is just because of distillation.

Yeah.

It's clearly like they have good researchers, right? Tsinghua is like a great university.

Yeah.

But I think like generally, I think people are too bullish currently on Chinese AI.

Yeah, yeah, there are too many, like too many secrets that are still locked up in US labs.

Yeah, I mean, even if it's like, okay, at some level, like AI, if you're super AGI-pilled, it's all about the compute, which means it's all about capital. US has better capital markets.

How much is it about secrets versus just raw scale?

I don't know.

Access to compute.

Yeah, it's interesting. Well, let's continue. So Sebastian Malaby writes in the New York Times, fans of chip controls continue to insist insist that even a modest slowing of China's AI advance is worth pursuing. If China is a formidable adversary, imagine how much more formidable it might be if the chip controls were lifted. But the controls are failing to deliver the prize of a China with limited AI, so it's worth considering their cost. My China trip persuaded me that the cost is too high. The Biden administration made a strategic choice to prioritize the slowing of China rather than addressing other worries. The alternative would have been to say China, the alternative would've been to say to China, this would be the Biden administration to the Chinese Communist Party, you are a tech superpower, we are a tech superpower, let's work together to make sure AI doesn't fall into the hands of rogue states and terrorists. The goal would've been an AI equivalent of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, treaty, a regime that would require all countries using AI to sign up for safeguards on it. The Biden team didn't think China would collaborate on something like that, but over a dozen conversations with AI leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou made it clear to me that China's elite does care about AI safety. And this was something we dug into previously, Tyler, looking at the statements AI leaders in China and the Communist Party directly, it did seem like they were not wildly accelerationist. Was that generally the takeaway?

Yeah, I mean, if you're comparing the statements of the actual CCP to the government, the United States government, CCP definitely looks more pro-safety than the US government does.

Yeah. And so, I mean—

Within groups within the US are certainly much more, you know—

Safety belt.

Yeah.

Safer build than China's generally.

Totally. But yeah, but the pushback against that was always that, okay, well, you are encouraged to be pro-safety when you don't have the lead because you're just like, slow down the fast one, right? And so that could be the dynamic. But if the rhetoric is true, if Sebastian Malaby's reporting is true, then there is an opportunity community for some sort of accord that could be good if that's, you know, indeed a critical path to the good ending. And that's sort of what happens in AI 2027. You know, the good ending is like a geopolitical sort of come-to-Jesus moment where everyone decides to, you know, rein things in. Is that your read on it?

Yes, but you know, there are two paths, right?

There's two paths, yeah.

Yeah, it's like a choose your own adventure.

Yeah, it's a choose your own adventure, but the good path requires something like this.

Yeah, yeah, there's like a slowdown, everyone agrees.

Yeah, yeah. So he says he visited a prominent tech company that builds and distributes an AI foundation model. So I imagine that's Deepseek or Alibaba or some other big Chinese company. But he says, for now, that model is open source. Meaning that users can download and modify it at will. If a user prompts the AI to conduct cyberattacks, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that person, except for the fact that it might be, you know, deeper in the training data and in the model behavior that even though it's open source, it might not be completely turnkey, but it does pose a risk. And he says the chief executive of this company made a striking admission. As AI becomes more powerful, it would be crazy to continue making it open source, he said. That's the exact opposite of the George Hotz position, interestingly. You wouldn't open source a nuclear weapon, he added. During my trip, the controversy surrounding the advanced model OpenClaw illustrated the rising concern for AI safety. Throngs of ordinary Chinese downloaded the digital assistant, eager to experiment with capable— with a capable AI agent. The enthusiasm apparently confirmed that China loves China loves innovation more than it fears it, but researchers and industry leaders told me they were appalled. It makes your computer naked, an eminent business school professor told me. Soon after that, China's leaders firmly discouraged the use of OpenClaw in government systems and warned citizens that the agent might wreak havoc on their data. For now, China's instinct to race for powerful AI overwhelms any caution. This is a rational response to a US administration legally determined to put speed ahead of safety. But if a US leader went to China and offered to scrap chip controls in exchange for collaboration on AI nonproliferation, there would at least be some chance of the proposal succeeding. This presumes that US-Chinese dialogue is even possible, but the West should not succumb to the self-fulfilling fatalism. At times during the Cold War, the United States pursued its interests by switching from coordination to, shift from confrontation to detent. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came just 6 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now is a good time to recall that history. And so I thought that was an interesting sort of contrarian take at a time when the general consensus has been continue to push forward on the chip controls, maybe go deeper in the supply chain. There's always been a more complex complex discussion. He doesn't mention Taiwan, which is a whole other complex issue. But it was sort of a reminder of a potential collaboration that I think is maybe worth considering. So everyone is still in the early stages of working through the situation, but the reporting here just generally shows that there might be more opportunity for collaboration than many people previously thought. Thought. So I like that.

Anyway, AI 2027, which has been shockingly accurate to date, has mid-2026 China wakes up. Yeah, they say in China the CCP is starting to feel the AGI. Chip export controls and lack of government support have left China under-resourced compared to the West. By smuggling banned Taiwanese chips, buying older chips, and producing domestic chips about 3 years behind the US-Taiwanese frontier, China has managed to maintain about about 12% of the world's AI-relevant compute, but the older technology is harder to work with and supply is a constant headache. A few standouts like DeepScent do very impressive work with limited compute, but the compute deficit limits what they can achieve without government support, and they are about 6 months behind the best OpenBrain models. Of course, they're using—

Yeah, they mash up all of these.

Yeah, so you guys—

DeepMind plus OpenAI, AI, and then they do deep plus deep seek and stuff.

It's, uh, the general secretary had long dreamed of doubling down on real-world physical manufacturing and avoiding American post-industrial decadence. He viewed software companies with suspicion, but hawks in the CCP warned that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored. So he finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research, creating an immediate information-sharing mechanism mechanism for AI companies. It will, again, that's like an advantage that they could, and to date it seems like they do have, which is like there is a very real incentive to just share everything at the moment, or not everything, but at least more than what our labs are doing. It will escalate over the course of a year until all the best researchers merge into a DeepScent-led collective where they share algorithmic insights, data sense, and compute resources. Forces with each other. A decentralized development zone is created at the Tianwan Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the world, to house a new mega data center for DeepSent along with highly secure living and office spaces to which researchers will eventually relocate. Um, and to close it out, but China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies, among in the world double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain's weights. This is a much more complex operation than their constant low-level poaching of algorithmic secrets. The weights are a multi-terabyte file stored on a highly secure server. Their cyber force think they can pull it off with the help of their spies, perhaps only once. And again, it goes on and on and on. So we'll see. We'll see if they wake up. I'm not at all convinced that that there's gonna be any type of like effective multinational collaboration, especially just given what's going on in the Middle East.

Yeah, it's chaotic time. Well, if you wanna know how much your government taxes paid for across everything that the US government spends, if you paid taxes in America this year, Riley Walls has launched a website for you, taxwrapped.com. It's Spotify wrapped, but for your taxes. You can see what the government did with your money. And it's a very fun, you know, one-off website, a drop, because even when you open it on desktop, it renders like it's an iPhone app. It's very— it's like entirely mobile first. I think that's an interesting trend is if you're doing one of these, Just make it work on the phone because that is the endpoint for all of these things. So you can type in exactly how much you paid, whether you're a W-2 employee or 1099, how much you, if you have dependents or children, and then it will walk you through every segment.

I'm gonna do an example for someone that made $100,000 in 2025.

If you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it.

Okay, do it.

Can you pull up taxwrapped.com? We can actually—

Here we go, here we go. So $100,000, $100,000 big ones.

There you go. And then do single, do W-2 on the left, and then just do no children.

Wow, it's over.

So you pay $21,000 in taxes, $1,700 goes towards income security. And I think I filled out the same one here. So you can see. Let's see.

So that's going to Social Security.

It really goes through everything.

Housing assistance, federal employee retirement and disability.

Health.

$5,000 to health. So that's Medicare, healthcare services.

I think people might be surprised that defense is so low. I've always I feel like defense is always the largest—

John, I would say there are a lot of people in this country that would look at the $3,812 and be—

No, of course, of course.

Upset about that.

Of course, of course. But the size of the US military, the size of the defense budget has always been so big. It's felt like the number one expenditure category. Category, but it is in fact not next to Social Security and Medicare and healthcare services. But the military is significant, obviously. And Riley, on the next slide, puts up—

Pull it up again.

About the government deficit.

You're gonna wanna see this.

So the government spent more than it made last year, $7 trillion spent, $5.5 trillion in revenue.

Government strategy The idea is literally we're gonna burn money for a while, but we're gonna make it up with scale?

Basically, and maybe inflation, who knows? It's a tricky situation. So the deficit was $1.5 trillion last year, and that overspending, it goes on the national credit card, which has been racking up debt since 2001. It's now about to cross $40 trillion, which is about $114,000 per person. Person, that is not something to be fist bumping about.

I think I was listening to Tyler Cowen this weekend, and he said, I think it was him, he was like, well, you know, if you're really AGI-pilled, right, the deficit should be way bigger.

Yes, yes.

There's like all these sorts of things. Yeah, I think it's actually—

we were riffing on that with Dylan Patel the first time he came on. We were saying like, yeah, like, so it's not a black pill. Yeah, yeah. Government spending went up, like extremely AGI-pilled position. If GDP starts growing significantly, significantly. Sort of the opposite of this tree scenario, which is certainly what I hope happens. But, yeah, Jordi Hays also posted some other blog post last night about this idea of making everyone a billionaire, creating a $1 billion bill and printing 300-something, 360 million of them, giving everyone one, everyone is a billionaire. And everyone's a billionaire then. And he's making jokes about like, obviously that wouldn't work, but the impact would be to destroy the dollar and go back to the gold standard, which is something he's a fan of these days. Anyway, the person who pays $100,000, who makes $100,000, is paying almost $3,000 in interest payments on the debt, $430 on transportation, $350 on government operations, $260 in natural resources, resources. There's some on agriculture. $76 goes towards researching agriculture. There's international affairs. And spaceflight and research science is $71 out of that $100,000 a year paycheck. It's an interesting project. And we're big fans of Riley Walls over here. So go check it out. There are a bunch of other posts in the timeline before we bring in our first guest of the show.

What did Tyler Cowen about how we're growing like half a point?

Oh, the GDP division number?

GDP.

That's not so bad.

I'm sure he linked to it.

You gotta ask him if that's good.

It could be better. Could be better. Well, let's move over to something else in the timeline. Andrew Reid has a funny post here. Wow, 12,000 likes. It's like Apple built little ejection seats for your AirPods. AirPods when you drop your case on the ground. That is like extremely real, right? Jordi wouldn't know anything about that. He's not an AirPod enjoyer. But when the AirPods hit the ground, they truly explode everywhere.

I got to experience that before I was enlightened.

You were enlightened?

Right before I went wired.

Yeah, people, they really do go flying. People really— this really resonated with people. 12,000 people liking this.

Lulu says This is the real reason they're called AirPods.

Yeah, they get some air. Clouseau Investments is joking about physical delivery of crude.

Dear client, this notice is to inform you that your account carried an open long position in WTI crude oil futures. As a result, pursuant to NYMEX Rule 200.01, a physical delivery obligation has been assigned to your account. "Get ready to receive 2,000 barrels in Cushing, Oklahoma." This is an April Fool's joke. "Meet me at Tank Farm 7, Bay 14." No.

This is an April Fool's joke. This is not real. But I believe this has happened in the past. Didn't oil go negative at some point during COVID Yeah. There was something that was going on there with the potential risk that certain traders would have to take delivery that created this weird economic incentive, because there's a cost to take delivery. If you're not set up for it, you could be in a weird position. But it is a very, very bizarre situation and never been a crazier time to be an oil trader. I'm sure the commodity markets are absolutely wild these days. There's an interesting narrative violation. "After decades of slumping sales, vinyl records are making a comeback." And so we can pull up this chart. Vinyl, of course, was booming in the '70s and the '80s, and then fell off precipitously from 1984 until 1990, when, of course, the cassette tape and the compact disc, the CD, took off like a rocket. And so cassettes had their moment, had its moment in the late '80s and early '90s. The CD dominated the '90s and 2000s. Then quickly digital downloads start spiking in the 2005, 2010 period, followed by the massive rise of streaming, which has come to dominate nearly every category. But vinyl is making a comeback and for 2025 generated $1 billion of revenue. For US recorded music revenues, which is more than CDs, more than 3 times as much as CDs, and more, uh, and more than digital downloads.

Yeah, that is—

people aren't paying for 99 cents a song anymore.

You will own nothing and be happy, except vinyl.

You will own a lot of vinyl, and I think you'll be very happy with it. I think that there's a chance. Um, I mean, we've been joking about about pressing the show onto vinyl, and the new Acquired FM homepage is all vinyl-themed. Vinyl has this, because it's like the first stored music medium, it's the oldest, so it will stick around maybe the longest, whereas CDs and cassettes just don't have, it's like if you're gonna go retro, just go full retro and go with vinyl instead of going half retro and saying, oh, we're doing a CD.

Let's throw a CD on.

Set the mood. It doesn't quite do it. It doesn't quite do it. 8-track was really short. 8-track in the precursor to the cassette tape, sort of big in the late '70s and then fell off.

Did you ever have a cassette era?

I had a cassette era. I would get books on tape.

So funny.

You were literally books on tape.

You were using cassettes because it was the normal thing to do, I imagine.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah, basically.

I was using them Ironically?

No, I remember I had a Star Wars book that was on tape, and I would put it in the tape player and listen to it.

Book on cassette.

Book on tape was great.

That's so hard.

Yeah. And I was never super—

It was the most satisfying medium, like throwing a cassette into a car.

Yeah. And I remember I had to do a lot of reading over the summer for school, and audiobooks Books have always been easier for me to process. So you go and you find the cassette version of it, the audiobook version of it, and you listen to that, and then you retain way more if I'm an auditory learner. It was a good time. Well—

That's so insane to me that vinyl is more than 10% of—

That is crazy revenues.

Streaming revenues.

I really, yeah, the vinyl is really big.

Who's, there's gotta be like a vinyl billionaire.

Power law? I mean, certainly collectors. But I don't know, I think there is something special about even if you just like, even if you don't have a record player, you might say, I wanna support that artist, so I'm gonna buy the highest tier. Like I believe the Taylor Swift drops come, like she also sells vinyl and you get it and you don't necessarily listen to it, but you have it as like a memento. And it's almost like an artifact that you put on your desk or in your house, or you might frame it. You might not really listen. Yeah, we have a Metallica vinyl. We still got to get a record player. But anyway, without further ado, we have our first guest in the waiting room. Paolo Remo Murphy from Critical Loop, the CEO working to accelerate grid access using autonomous control, storage, and flexible generation for industrial and mission-critical power needs. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic. Great to talk to you guys.

Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on. Since this is your first time on the show, Joe, would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

Yeah, uh, of myself, I, I'm an engineer by training, and I founded this company, uh, a few years ago. And, uh, I worked at SpaceX for 12 years, uh, before that.

Overnight success. So much soundboard.

Sorry, I'll stop and let you talk. We're just having— we're having fun.

SpaceX for 12 years. What, what decade was that When exactly is that?

That was like from prior to sending the first Dragon capsule to the space station.

Wow.

Through flying human spaceflight.

Wow.

I kind of led efforts to make Falcon 9 suitable to fly humans.

That's amazing.

And then decided to turn my attention to the electricity grid because I think it's that important, you know?

Yeah, wait, yeah, unpack, you said the grid, what was the term that you used?

Yeah, just the electricity grid.

Oh, sure.

Pretty important. Take manufacturing. I mean, everybody talks about data centers, right? But let's take just the, you know, the power that you and I use, the power that's required to manufacture. All that stuff needs a reliable source of cost-effective power. And right now, kind of the condition that people have is like, you know, companies are going to the utility and waiting for multiple years to get the power they need. And so we decided to start this company with this vision of how can you get the power that you need quicker, right? Like, how can you better utilize— you know, the crazy thing is, since you guys seem to like stats, uh, the grid is pretty underutilized as you, as you look at it, right? It's like less than 50% utilized.

Sorry, give us the stat. You have to wait for the stat and then you play the soundboard. I got, I got over—

you said it was underutilized. I got, I got kind of excited.

Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, it's always exciting to find something underutilized and figure out how to make it more, you know, better utilized. And the way to do that is to throw energy storage at the edge.

Sure.

Close, close to where, you know, the industrial customer is consuming. Sometimes some generation as well, right? So basically we can take this like multi-year wait time, uh, and instead make that, you know, months and maybe even sort of days, right? So that's kind of what Critical Loop's about.

Okay, so maybe let's— I get the general idea, but is it you're saying putting storage at the edge so that you can take power during off-peak times and store it to kind of like smooth out demand? Is that generally the approach?

Yeah, exactly. So when you look at the history of grid infrastructure, right, it's always built built historically to the worst possible condition, like the hottest day of the year when everybody's going full blast on ACs, also running their peak AI training loads, etc., right? It's designed for the peak. And so the paradigm that we're trying to work towards is like, you know, what if you could, you know, what if instead of overbuilding the grid to support that peak, what if you could take some of the storage and some generation at the edge and offset Basically, the upgrades you would have otherwise made for millions of dollars, for a fewer million dollars. Basically, yeah, exactly as Jordi said, you're using, you're switching to more local sources of power, you're either storing or generating power more locally. To do that requires pretty sophisticated orchestration to do that seamlessly. That's what Triple Loop is about.

So do you see this as like the, do you wanna jump straight to like the gigawatt mega projects or is there actually more opportunity with like smaller scale? Like I remember seeing like, wasn't Colossus 2 originally like a washing machine factory or something like that? Like there's a lot of industrial like buildings that make things and they draw a lot of power and they probably probably only operate 9 to 5 or maybe they have a night shift, but for something like that, they could put a battery installation, be absorbing power from the grid when usage is low and then deploying that during peak hours without straining the grid. Is that the general thesis?

Yeah, that's the general concept. There's a massive middle here, right? Yeah. As you point out, right? And you know, a lot of our referrals come from, of customers come from commercial real estate, right?

Yeah.

Where people are signing up to a facility then they're going to throw some machines there to do some cool stuff. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow, we have to wait 5 years for the power. That's a problem. And so by then deploying this energy storage at the edge and this orchestration layer that Crypto Loop has created, you have this ability to identify when there's capacity on the grid, use power from the grid. When there's not capacity, store that in batteries, use generation, traverse that gap. And so our customers range from, you know, everything from like ports, airports, critical infrastructure, logistics hubs. Yeah, it's the whole range. And I mean, that's not to say we won't one day take on some of these gigawatt things because it's the same operating system, if you will, right?

Yeah, totally. Talk about the technologies that are actually like augmenting power generation on site because I, you know, you always hear the story about like the hospital has a 1-megawatt diesel generator on site or something in case there's a blackout. And it feels like we're moving more towards battery banks. But what are you actually seeing in terms of various technologies that are going through scale-up on the manufacturing side, becoming more economical? We've talked to a lot of nuclear founders who are sort of saying in 2030 you'll be able to have a 1-megawatt nuclear reactor. That seems farther out. But what are you— where is demand right now?

Yeah. So I think your most efficient source of generation is always going to be sort of the centralized one. And the challenge has to do with like how you distribute it. And so that's why battery capacity is like, you know, the cost of batteries generally coming down and the power conversion technology advancing more. You have this ability to store and dispatch battery power like AC or DC eventually, right, to serve whatever machines that are at the site. And so that also allows you to save money on the generation. Like, you know, imagine like doing a bunch of fuel drops. If you can avoid that, you might use the battery. So I mean, we also— I mean, the cool thing about our systems is that, you know, we run sites where there's like propane generation and batteries. That allows you— I mean, generators are in super high demand, right? And because centers and whatnot, this—

a lot—

what our technology allows is like you can use like more commonly available generators and use the batteries to do the peak power. So, uh, I mean, reactors— I mean, I'm a huge fan of SMRs too, and like one day we're gonna, you know, make all these things work together. And like, you know, who owns the management of the grid at the edge? That's kind of what we're excited about.

Yeah.

Uh, Matthew in the chat is talking about how you're placing the cells on semi-trucks as well. So they're mobile. Is that—

Yeah.

So when you look at this general problem, it's dynamic in nature. A big logistics facility moves in, all of a sudden they're like, we're going to add robotics to this site. But that problem might change as time progresses where the utility pulls out a transformer eventually. Right? And so you can think of like the maximum return on investment way to run this business is like you, you're able to physically relocate these assets, batteries or generation to new sites over the life of these assets. And that's kind of this modular and relocatable approach is kind of fundamental to how we think about it.

What did you do to earn the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal?

That's a, this is the first time someone's asked me this question. But yeah, I certified Falcon 9 for human space flight. So I made it suitable to fly astronauts and I was the chief engineer for the first flight of Bob and Doug, the astronauts we launched to space.

That's amazing. I love it. Thank you.

What was your reaction to the Artemis II mission?

Oh yeah, I was excited, man. Like, I mean, Funnily enough, I worked on that project too in 2007, and my first job out of college. Yeah, so I worked on the Orion capsule. So it's a long time coming, and I was excited to see it. And I'm really hopeful that lots more cool things will fly in space in the next year or so.

Why did you stop?

Why did you stop? Why'd you put Nutella? Why'd you put so much Nutella on board?

Why not continue on your space journey?

Journey?

You seem like you'd be on the potentially path to going to space.

Yeah, well, you know, I enjoy a good challenge. So to me, the next most complex machine, or, you know, maybe even more complicated machine than a rocket, was the electricity grid. And then how do you fix this thing? Yeah, which is like, you know, there's so many regulatory aspects and industrial and utility clashing and how do you make this machine work? And to me, that's fundamental. That's not to say that I won't be interested in space again. I call it my hobby now.

Yeah. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong.

Yeah.

So we closed a $26 million round.

From who? Yeah.

So Conifer Industries. Infrastructure Partners in Hanover led the round. They're really seasoned operators in the realm of energy, and we're super excited to partner with them.

That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

Great to meet you.

Great to meet you. Thank you so much.

Very interesting career. Excited to follow the company and very important work.

Cheers, guys.

Goodbye. Up next, we have the chief architect from SciFi announcing a massive fundraising to scale risk vCPUs and AI intellectual property.

If we have some time.

Yes. Oh, I think our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

How are you doing? Hi, doing okay. You hear me fine?

Yeah, we can hear you fine. Thanks so much for taking the time. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company.

So yeah, I'm Chris Tarasanovich. So I was a professor at UC Berkeley. We developed RISC-V, which is an open standard instruction set. We then, a couple of my graduate students, we set up a company, SiFive, to commercialize RISC-V. And we just completed our Series G round to go work on data center CPUs.

That's amazing. How long have you been actually working on the company? I mean, Series G, it seems like there's been a whole sequence sequence of events. Can you take me through a few of the milestones that unlocked growth and sort of where the company is today?

Yeah, so we founded the company in 2015, so it's been almost 11 years now. Wow.

Overnight success.

When we first started the company, we thought we'd be doing custom silicon, but then when we started talking to customers, you know, get out there and into the trenches and talk to customers, they all wanted RISC-V IP IP, like designs they could use in their own silicon. And so we pivoted a little at that point, started making IP for them. And, you know, RISC-V, the ecosystem has grown over that 10-year period. And so initially a lot of our designs were smaller, lower-end embedded processors. And then we sort of over the years grew, you know, going through the various rounds of funding as we grew the product portfolio, we added more higher-end processors and processors specialized for doing AI kind of tasks as well, what we call our intelligence line. And then this last funding round really signals we're getting back to very high-performance CPUs that sit next to GPUs in data centers.

Yeah.

So that's the—

like, help me understand if I have this correct. You know, AI is very GPU intensive, but the GPUs need to be filled with data that needs to be processed through a CPU if you're doing some sort of reinforcement learning environment, you might need to spin up a piece of software and that requires CPU. And so even though we are in a GPU crunch, we are also in a CPU crunch. And so more and more companies and hyperscalers are developing their own CPUs and GPU companies like NVIDIA are also doing this where they have a CPU that is designed to work directly with the GPU make sure that the workloads are as efficient as possible. And so you're able to license your intellectual property to make those CPUs more efficient, more effective. Is that roughly correct?

Yeah, that's roughly correct. So one way to think about it is AI, the last few years has been focused on building those models, getting that working. Now they're being applied at massive scale. And you know, if you have an AI coder, it needs to come, if it's going going 30 times faster than a human, you need to compile stuff 30 times faster. So it's putting that load on the regular compute. And that can be the bottleneck, not the GPU side. It's the getting the work done on the CPU side as well.

It can be the bottleneck. So if you're not doing, it sounds like you're not fabbing chips yourself.

No.

So the RAIS seems, very significant. It's large. Is this mostly to hire talented researchers to advance the designs? Like, what is the use of funds?

Yeah, so the very high performance processors take a significant engineering investment. You know, very large teams working for a long time. You're working at the very edge of high performance core design. Very— we're looking at, you know, uppermost tier there. And so it's very expensive to, you know, lead the talent. You need a lot of work, a lot of modeling, a lot of development. So it's quite a labor-intensive process to get those designs. And then this is why an IP company makes sense. A lot of companies are focused on the more system aspects. They just want to have a very high-performance CPU that can drop in. You know, for example, like you may design an airplane, but you get the engines from Rolls-Royce. Similar kind of model here. Like you want to design a high performance system, but you want to get your CPUs from a good source like SiFive.

So those CPU companies that will actually go and once they license your technology, go and produce the chips with some fab, are you forward deploying folks into their organization? Is there some sort of, do they just come to you and they just want like a design document and then they're all good? How collaborative is that process?

No, so that's part of this, you know, some of the folks involved in the financing and some of these lead customers as well and partners, they view it as a collaborative development. We have to work way ahead of time to figure out, like I use the airplane analogy, like do you have the right kind of engine for the kinds of planes you want to build? You don't just, you know, put in the catalog and say, pick one of these three we built previously. We have to understand where the customers are going, what their needs are, And one of the benefits of SiFive technology, we make our cores quite customizable. So for different customers, we can adapt and configure it to their needs, to their workloads. And so we have to work with them ahead of time to understand what they're gonna try to do. And so we can plan our products appropriately.

How are the design trade-offs changing around custom CPUs and just custom silicon in general? Is it just all cores? Is it all about performance versus, you know, like flops per watt, like, or price to produce the actual chips? Like, what are the key levers that companies are most interested in pulling these days and how has it changed?

Well, you know, if you look at the overall picture, it's just classic business ROI. Like if I make this silicon, am I gonna make more money by saving on, you know, cost of ownership, power, whatever, other things are. And also can I offer a capability that brings me customers? That's going to increase my top line. So it's just a classic business decision of buy versus build. And what you'll see is the big companies will be buying some chips, they'll be designing their own chips. Depends on the application and domain. In each case, they're making their own ROI judgment on what's the right thing to do, buy or build.

How do you think about depreciation or just the lifetime of a chip. There was a big discussion over will GPUs burn out over 6 years? And at the same time, a lot of people have computers that have one CPU that they've been using happily for 20 years. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a trend or a change in the lifetime of CPUs that are going to be used for AI workloads in data centers running very aggressively probably 24/7 for years. Are we seeing these chips burn out faster or is that a sort of surmountable hurdle?

Well, there is a— there's one technical problem, which is the chips are literally burning out faster just because of those finer geometries. You know, wires move and melt. And so we're dealing with aging failures like we haven't before. But at the business side of things, I think companies AI is trading off a bunch of things. One is it's hard to get new silicon. You see all the shortages. The fabs can only make so much silicon. AI is sucking up all the capacity in terms of new production. But the incentive to build new silicon is that I have a limited power budget. So if I want to do more, I can't just get more power from PG&E or whoever. I need to go make more efficient systems. So sometimes I'll swap out those racks for a new rack that's 2x, 3x, more power efficient, I can do more with the same power budget. So it's sort of capability cap on some of these companies. They just, you know, need to replace the silicon if they want to grow their capabilities.

Yeah. Zooming out, do you think that the tech community, the AI community is doing a good job of using all different process nodes effectively? There's been so much focus on the leading edge TSMC TSMC 2-nanometer, 3-nanometer, the really advanced nodes. There is a lot of lagging edge capacity out there. At least it felt like there was. I don't know if there's, do you think that there's low-hanging fruit there that we might see the AI industry or the tech community start figuring out a way to get more out of in the future?

Well, I think for the large data centers, probably not. I think again, these power constraints could be, you want the most, advanced technology. However, as AI gets pushed out and permeates all these applications out in the real world, I think those trailing nodes will be used for intelligent doorbells, robots. There's lots of places where they're good enough. And also there's some applications where you're interfacing with higher voltages, where you're working with non-volatile memories that are not available in advanced nodes. And so those older technologies definitely have a place, but probably probably more in the edge AI space.

Tell us about the round.

How much did you raise?

So we raised $400 million.

Who participated?

Lead was Atreides. We had some other, you know, notable names, including NVIDIA participated in the funding. Yeah, very cool.

That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us. We appreciate you. And good meeting you. We'll talk to you soon.

Okay, thanks.

Goodbye. Up next, we have Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. He's an entrepreneur, futurist, and he's known for incentivizing breakthrough technologies. We're very excited to be joined by Peter Diamandis. How are you, Peter?

What's going on, guys?

A long time coming.

Long time coming. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Everyone's very excited. Lots of applause, lots of applause. I would love to start with just your temperature check on how technology is progressing, how you're feeling. I saw you in the fabulous AI doc. I think you did a great job of articulating some of your view of how technology is progressing over the next few years. But when someone comes to you and they they see things moving so quickly, they might have some anxiety. What are you returning to? What are the ground truths that you start with?

Yeah, really important point. I mean, first of all, it is overwhelming. I mean, I spend at least half my week consuming, trying to understand what's going on, basically trying to interpret it and project where things are going and teach about it in my Moonshots podcast, whatever I'm doing. And I think, One of the questions is if you're in a state of fear or overwhelm, that's the worst place to be facing the future from. And it's really your ability to feel like AI and all this technology is happening for you instead of to you. Yeah, it's the difference between success and failure today. So I think one of the things I've spoken about and I've written about is the coming age of abundance where every single human on the planet has access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education that they want. And I think we're most definitely heading that way at a rapid speed. Um, and the question is, we have got to reinvent society, which has been very different and, uh, has been, you know, our current society is based on the Industrial Revolution and not the AI revolution. So there's going to be a lot of rewiring the social contract, what, how people, you know, uh, get purpose in their And it's gonna be a bumpy road for the next 2 to 6 years. But on the backside of that, it's gonna be extraordinary.

Yeah, I agree. I do enjoy your podcast. I was wondering, it feels like you go way back with Elon Musk. How did you first meet? What have you learned from him? I'm very interested about that relationship because you've done so many interviews with him over the times, like how do you think he's changed as the leader? What have you learned from him? Yeah, what's that journey been like?

Yeah, so we met in 2000. I was running a top secret private robot mission to the moon called Blastoff. It was fun. It was with Idealab and Bill Gross, CEO. I'd hired a team out of NASA. We had bought two launch vehicles. We were building robots to go and land privately to the moon and do the first pay-per-view back then.

No way.

No kidding me.

Pay-per-view.

Okay, so I don't know if you caught earlier, but we were talking about this. I was saying like, I think there's a world where NASA could make certain parts of the mission pay-per-view. Of course you can release the replay, but if you wanna watch live—

But it's so thrilling.

Pay up.

I love that.

Yeah, it was funny because my biggest cost was not the rockets. We bought a Taurus, We bought a Dnepr from Russia for these vehicles. Our biggest cost back then was Akamai. It was the cost of distributing the signals to all the users. Anyway, it was under wraps. And then hits the dot-com apocalypse in April 2001. And I'm introduced to Elon as someone who might fund our private Moon mission. He could just— so he just sold PayPal to eBay. And he didn't do that. Ended up joining our board at X Prize and was part of that adventure for our first private spaceflight. But I met Elon just when he was deciding what he was going to do next after PayPal. And it was, you know, energy in the world and rockets. And, you know, he's extraordinary, one of the most brilliant people on the planet. And he went from basically reading college and graduate textbooks in aerospace to building now the dominant mechanism by which humanity gets into space forever, it looks like. And what I've seen continuously is he actually implements everything he says he's going to do. It may not be in the time frame he says he's going to do it, but ultimately he's going consistently delivered on all of his visions. And a lot of people get wrong, I think, the fact that he's, um, he's in it for the money or he's in it for domination.

Sure.

I think consistently what he's done, he's just looking to solve problems.

Yeah.

And, uh, and try and accelerate humanity's potential. Yeah.

I was sort of grappling with that, uh, his post about the mass driver on the moon, and I was working backwards roads with a couple AI models trying to understand like what is a reasonable time frame on this. We talked to a lot of investors who are very pro-Elon, and I mean Elon didn't give a time frame, but everyone was saying like, okay, this is 10, 20, 30 years out. That's really far. And I was processing and I was like, yeah, maybe it is, but I still think that there's a benefit to having a leader in technology that is actually talking about something 20 years away or 30 years away. And I was—

yeah, I mean, the idea of mass drivers on the moon goes back to the '80s. There was a guy named Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton University who had the Space Studies Institute, and he actually built the first mass drivers on Earth, right, demonstrating the ability to accelerate to lunar escape velocity. And it was always thought that we were going to—

what was he driving at? What was he driving at the time?

Just rocks, basically? Basically?

Yeah, I know, it's basically just a carrier, just a shuttle, a carrier that would accelerate in the vacuum of the moon to a lunar escape velocity. But the— his original idea was we're going to mine the moon for, uh, nickel and iron and oxygen and silicates and build solar power satellites in Earth orbit. The idea was we build satellites in orbit that, that gather the sun's energy and beam Earth. I'm not sure it made full sense because of solar was demonetizing at a very rapid rate. But the idea of building data centers on the moon, or at least the components for launching into Earth orbit, could make sense. But of course, that's next after doing it from the ground. So, Elon's terawatt in Earth orbit based upon ground-based future Starlink satellites It's an insane number of satellites. It's like, you know, I think it's a Starship launch every hour to get that capability up there, which if you think about airplane operations, that's nothing. But for rocket operations today, it's 2. You know, it's a launch every 2.3 days on Falcon.

So yeah. But that, I mean, that ramp was unbelievable to watch. You've seen the time-lapse maps of Falcon launches from Florida, and it starts with just one and then it doubles, and you can see the exponential growth. And so it doesn't seem that crazy, especially with the new landing infrastructure where you catch it and immediately put it on another one. Like, yeah, it's gonna be years. It's gonna take a lot of work and a lot of effort, but it certainly doesn't break the laws of physics, as Elon likes to say.

Yeah, I mean, it's— the fun thing is watching seeing the entire evolution of humanity's journey into space go from government programs to private companies. So in 1996, under the Arch in St. Louis, I announced a $10 million prize for private spaceflight. And this was when we just had the shuttle era that was coming to an end. And it was always government astronauts, government programs. But could we flip it to commercial? And I thought suborbital flights would be the lowest-hanging fruit. And of course, Elon and Bezos have come along and just decimated— not in a bad way, but way overcome suborbital flights to now get into orbit on a regular basis. And we're going to see commercial flights to the moon. Apollo— what we just saw with Artemis II was going around the moon and coming back to Earth. You'll see Starship offering seats on flights like that, eventually to the lunar surface. And it's the beginning of, it's the early 1500s of Europe coming to America. And that's an exciting time.

Well, in that future, what do you think the role of government space exploration or scientific research is? Because when I think about the helicopter, helicopter that landed on Mars. Like, it's really hard to underwrite that as an investor, but I love it because now we have a new data point on how that works. And if there is some gain from that, every private space company can take whatever the learnings are and immediately start commercializing them and competing to figure out, okay, is there an economy here? Is there a business?

Yeah, well, and that's the government. It's going to be— I mean, there's like 4 epic science missions that NASA has planned over the next few years, right, with nuclear-powered inner solar system transporters and going to, to Europa. And I think ultimately NASA is going to be funding these, these science missions. And when they say funding the science missions and giving those missions to the money to private companies to go and do that work on behalf of that, on behalf of the government.

Yeah. Where else are you seeing promise? We are in this weird moment where we're seeing incredible growth in the power of artificial intelligence, but it's not curing cancer yet. It's, you know, the best case scenario is that it's gonna make all of our cybersecurity systems way more safe because we're gonna go and find all the bugs, patch every hole, and we're gonna navigate that system so that the white hat hackers have the tools longer than the black hat hackers before they get to them. And that is good, that's a positive externality, but that's not the same as curing cancer or abundant food. What is the next domino?

We cured obesity and John's like, I'm moving the goalposts, I'm moving the goalposts.

But yeah, isn't that amazing? Because we always forget how far we've come and we just sort of like say, ah, okay, show me some other miracle, please. Because yesterday, I think what people don't realize, and I wrote a paper with my moonshot mate Alex Kuisner-Gross, who's our resident genius, called Solve Everything. And I think what's really exciting, what's coming in the very near future, is the fact that these AGI and ASI systems are going to solve math. They've already effectively solved math. What comes next is physics and chemistry, biology, material sciences. And so we're about to see this extraordinary, uh, golden era of, of scientific discoveries that are going to occur at a rate far beyond anything else, right? Scientific breakthroughs, Nobel Prizes came at a rate of the number of geniuses on the planet, but we've increased number of genius individual equivalents by billionfold. And so, we're going to end up with a situation where we get room temperature superconducting and we've got new substrates that allow us to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, or thallinate at a rate like never before, or allow us to reach escape velocity. So, I had Kevin Will from OpenAI on stage with me at my Abundance Summit this year. And Kevin used to be the chief product officer at OpenAI. He's now head of science at OpenAI. And what an incredible position to have. Yeah. Where you're using these models to solve physics and then all the breakthroughs that come out of there. So people talk about the revenues that are going to come from large language model systems that the frontier labs are creating. I think what they're not talking about is the massive revenue that comes out of the breakthroughs that these companies are able to create. If you've solved longevity, what's that worth?

[Speaker:ASH BENNINGTON] Yeah, I want to talk about longevity. But first, you mentioned desalination. I've always been extremely interested in water desalination because I live in California, and there's always been this debate over where the Colorado River goes and what the opportunity in Arizona Nevada is if California could desalinate the ocean and wouldn't need to pull so much water from the more central parts of America, you could wind up with more green areas and more farmland potentially in desert areas. But I'm wondering, is desalination— is it a material science problem, a physics problem, a science problem, or is it permitting or marshaling the resources, or just economics? Like, what, what do you think is interesting? Because that feels like such a, such an amazing technology if we can unlock it in any reasonable amount of time.

I think it's all of those in some degree. You know, I run— I don't run, I'm now executive chairman of the X Prize. Amazing woman, Anousheh Ansari, runs X Prize, and we've launched about $600 million in large-scale incentive prizes that have driven by $30 billion in R&D. And the largest prize we have going on right now is a desalination XPRIZE. It's funded out of Abu Dhabi by the president of Abu Dhabi.

Yeah.

And it's asking basically to increase the energy efficiency of desalination. It's also asking— one of the challenges with desalination is when you pull the water out and put the saline back, it's got an impact on the environment.

Yeah.

So you have to be able to, you know, to améliorer that impact. And so we're going to see additional breakthroughs. It's going to be material science. It's going to be energy and physics that are driving that.

Yeah.

But the other thing that's going on is the idea of atmospheric capture of water. Right. There's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. We call it rain when it falls on us. Yeah. But there's technologies now coming online scale that for the majority of all countries on the planet, you can extract water from the atmosphere. So I think the water issue is solved by desal, atmospheric capture, and by actually AI looking at efficiency of water utilization because we overuse in some places and not others. And then it's going to be recycling of water. So You know, as I wrote in my first book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, back in 2012, technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant, right? We talk about water wars and water scarcity. There's plenty of water on the planet. The challenge is, you know, 97% is salt, 2% is ice, and we fight over, you know, less than 1% of the water in the, in the freshwater.

Wow. Uh, what do you think needs to change around the narrative narrative of energy. Do different new energy projects have a narrative problem? Because it feels like nuclear, where the technology has been around for so long, we're close to breakthroughs here. We talk to founders all the time that are building in nuclear, but it feels like there's still some nervousness and anxiety about actually rolling that out. Solar's a whole different question, but how have you grappled with the trade-offs between the technology, the government, and just popular responses to the idea of a nuclear renaissance?

Yeah, so energy first is the single innermost loop. It's the most important thing we've got going on. We've seen chips as the gating factor for a lot of AI. It's no longer chips. It's now strictly energy, which is why Elon's looking at space data centers in orbit.

It.

But in the near term, I think, you know, this is not investment advice, but I'm investing more in energy companies than I am in AI companies these days because of how fundamental it is. Nuclear, you know, the challenge is we're stuck in the nuclear paradigm from 30 years ago with Gen 1 and Gen 2 fusion plants, which were not safe. And we saw Fukushima, we saw Three Mile Island, we saw all of these these disasters. But the new generation plants are in fact safe. And, you know, they're coming. Small modular reactors are coming. Fusion is coming. And we need everything. We need all of them. But at this point, you know, I'm fond of saying I would put a nuclear power source in my backyard.

I love it.

They're safe enough.

Right.

And so, I mean, there's also Communities need to understand this, that there's a direct correlation between the amount of energy you have in your community and the GDP of your community, the health of your community, the intelligence and education levels of your community. Energy scales all of these things. And so you should want access to the most energy you possibly have in your country, in your city, in your—

How do you think about the aesthetics of technology? And the impact of aesthetics, because it feels like Elon has been very, very deliberate in the way he designs the CyberCab and the way he announces these. And the future should look like the future. It certainly looks futuristic. Maybe there's a little cyberpunk edge there sometimes. But we were talking about this with data centers that, you know, there's a lot of things around power, but that's solvable. But the aesthetics is another piece. You know, people are more likely to drive by a cell phone tower that's dressed up like a tree and not think about it as opposed to if they just see something that's very machinic. I'm wondering how you process that. Does that need to be more of a first-class consideration for technologists if they're working on megaprojects?

First off, I think one of the things that's interesting is we're going to start to repurpose the energy plants that are already there, right?

So the coal plant—

yeah, the coal plant already has got, you know, permitting to some degree. It's got all of the, um, uh, supply chain coming into it, has the power lines coming out of it. So what you're going to probably see is the, the coal plant was, you know, used to have a coal-fired boiler. You're now going to pull out coal segment of it and put in a fusion device to boil the instead. So you're going to maintain the same footprints. You're just going to actually replace the engine with something that's more powerful and is cleaner, which I think is an important thing to realize. That's one of the transitions that's going to occur. And yeah, I think making things beautiful needs a little more attention and you can get there. And I think one of the things that AI can do if you ask it is how do you beautify something that might otherwise look, you know, just hideous.

Yeah. Let's talk about longevity.

Do you—

how big of a deal do you see GLP-1s? It feels like we've been dealing with an obesity crisis for so long. It's still really early to see a jump in life expectancy. But if there was one horse I had to bet on as a new technology that enabled life extension, it would probably probably be GLP-1s, but how have you been processing that boom relative to other next-gen solutions that might be coming down the pipe in 5 or 10 years?

Well, I spend about half of my time in AI and half my time in longevity, right? I've written a few books there. I have a large venture fund investing in the tech. I've, um, I'm building companies in the space. And, uh, you're right, GLP-1 by the longevity health community is considered really the very first longevity drug. And part of it is we know that if you are metabolically unhealthy, if you're carrying too much visceral fat, if you're carrying too much fat on your body, that, that, that shortens your life. And so GLP-1s enable you hopefully to change your diets, your habits. But what's coming— so yes, it's the first and we're seeing generation 2, generation 3, generation 4 GLP-1s. GLP-1 drugs coming online right now, which will enable you to keep the weight off and also maintain muscle, which is the downside of the original earlier versions of the GLP-1 drugs. But what's coming on the back of that are a whole set of new longevity therapeutics. So one of my friends, David Sinclair, not sure if you've had him on the show.

I'd love to.

Yeah, he's amazing and you definitely must.

That'd be amazing.

David's one of the most, you know, one of the great geniuses in the longevity space, as is George Church.

Yeah.

And David has, for the first time ever, we see an age reversal technology going into human trials. It's his OSK trial that's being done by Life Biosciences. Full disclosure, I'm an investor advisor to the company, but they demonstrated that 3 of the 4 Yamanaka factors, I won't go into detail there, are able to reverse the age of cells. And they did this work first in mice, then they evolved it to primates, which were very similar to humans, and demonstrating that in your eyes in particular for a couple of different conditions, macular degeneration and neonatal blindness, disease, that you can reverse the age of, of your visual system. And now this month they're going into humans. So it's the first time. And because it's an age reversal technology, while it's being tested in the eye, the concept is that it will work on all organs in the body. And we're heading towards a world in which hopefully we'll be able to take a therapy and knock back your functional age by 20, 30 years. And another X Prize, you know, the, the D-SAL was the largest at $119 million. The next largest is, uh, we call the Healthspan X Prize. It's a $101 million X Prize. Um, it's $101 million because Elon had funded a $100 million prize for carbon capture. Yeah, and sponsor of this one wanted to be bigger than You want that?

That's great. I love, I love a competition like that. That's amazing.

I know, it's funny. I said, okay, you toss in the extra million bucks and we'll do that.

And we did.

So this is a prize asking teams to come up with a longevity therapy that I can give to you in less than a year. It reverses your functional age by 20 years in cognition, muscle, and immune, which means you've got the cognitive function you had 20 years earlier. You've got the muscular function, ability to build muscle, maintain muscles you had 20 years younger, and immune function at 20 years younger.

You got John's attention now.

We got it. We have Jordi Hays. Imagine if you had the mind of a 9-year-old.

Many people have said I have the mind of a—

Tyler over there could be living the life of a 2-year-old. We take him back 20 years. But yeah, of course, this is more relevant irrelevant.

So, it's exciting. We have over 700 teams competing for this.

Yeah.

And we'll have a winner by 2030. So, there's this idea that, you know, Ray Kurzweil has been a dear friend, my mentor. I started Singularity University with him. And he talks about something called longevity escape velocity. And he says we're going to reach longevity escape velocity by 2033. What is that? Well, It's the idea that at some point for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for greater than a year. And at that point, where's the limitation? So, David's doing amazing work in that area. There are others that are backed by like Retro that's backed by Sam Altman and another one backed by Brian Armstrong. All of these are working towards reversing aging, not slowing and stopping, but reversing aging.

Yeah.

The thing that stands out to me about, about where you're spending time is the revenue ramps in AI have been unbelievable. They also have been unbelievable in the GLP-1 space. When you look at Novo's revenue scaling to tens of billions of dollars, Lilly, tens of billions of dollars. Right. And so Yeah, it almost feels like there could be quite a lot more people going after opportunities.

All of these things are— I mean, the greatest wealth is your health. And in communities of ultra-high-wealth individuals, I say, what would you pay for an extra 30 years of health? It is like everything.

Everything, right?

So if I could just do a quick plug, my book comes out tomorrow. Um, it's called We Are as Gods.

I love it.

Uh, a survival guide to the age of abundance. So I wrote Abundance in 2012. This is a follow-on book.

Yeah.

And talks about how, but we've seen abundance across the board in everything. Uh, we've also seen some negative elements of abundance. Abundance, too much carbon, too much microplastics, too much depression, all those things. But the single thing that people need more than anything else is the mindset to intercept what's coming, right? Feeling like AI is happening for you, not to you. Having the agency and agility to utilize these technologies because we're, as Elon says, about to hit a hypersonic tsunami that's going to change Everything.

Yeah.

What, I would love to know, like, you know, looking back through the last few decades, there's been so much sci-fi and like futurism that just turned out to be pretty accurate. And that makes me wonder who should we be paying most attention to today? Futurists, authors that are writing sci-fi, you know, on a go-forward basis?

So let me riff off that one second. One of my biggest concerns is that most of Hollywood's content has been so negative about the future, right? We've got Ex Machina, Terminator, Black Mirror, and they're just painting this, you know, negative future of killer robots and insane AI. And if that's the future that you see, why would you ever want to live there? And it's causing fear. Fear about job loss is one part, but fear about these technologies that we can't control, because that's what we see in the movies. And so, a month ago, I teamed with Marc Benioff at Salesforce, Google, Cathie Wood at ARK Invest, Rod Roddenberry, the son of the creator of Star Trek. And we launched something called the Future Vision XPRIZE. If you'll go to futurevisionxprize.com—

You got an XPRIZE for everything.

I do.

I do. And so what is it? We're asking teams to deliver a 3-minute trailer that shows a hopeful, compelling vision of the future. And we're going to make the winner's movie. So we're going to create an engine of positive storytelling. 'Cause when I was growing up, way before you guys were born, Star Trek was basically what inspired me to do everything I've ever done. You know, I'm 28 companies in, inspired by Star Trek. And it showed this hopeful vision of the future. And so we're lacking those. Having said that, Hail Mary was pretty damn good.

[Speaker] It was great, yeah.

[Speaker] Yeah.

[Speaker] No, I know, I thought it nailed that perfectly. Last question for me, reflecting on, the work of Ray Kurzweil. What do you think— it feels like his predictions have held up incredibly well. Incredibly well. I mean, to nail the Turing test date within a year, if not exactly to the day, basically, uh, you can quibble on all these things, but it feels remarkably accurate. Uh, what do you think enabled him to predict and project the future so accurately?

I mean, he He did it by the math. He was looking at doubling rates. He actually looked back in time to look at what was happening and what were the doubling rates. He calls it— Moore's Law is a certain part of it. It's basically integrated circuits. But he has something called the law of accelerating returns, and he applies it to everything. And so, what's interesting is what is he predicting next, right? So, longevity escape velocity by 2033. And high-bandwidth brain-computer interface, BCI, being able to connect your neocortex, your 100 billion neurons of your brain to the cloud by 2035. I mean, these are extraordinary futures coming our way. It's like we're speedrunning every science fiction movie ever made.

It's wild.

This is why we need more positive science fiction today.

Absolutely do.

Well, yeah, I mean, I've always had this take that like even in the dystopian sci-fi movies, they usually wind up having good endings where the humans overcome the negative potential ending and wind up victorious. And I think that's something that's really important to remember is that even if you wind up temporarily threatened by some negative sci-fi scenario, you can in fact use human agency to overcome it and be inspired not by the Terminator but Sarah Connor, maybe narrowly, and fight back against whatever negativity, whatever negative outcomes are happening. Because we've been through this time and time again with climate change and so many other, you know, car accidents. And we fought through that and we invented new seatbelts and new cars and new lane, you know, We're still here. Humanity is still here.

We're overcoming.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come. I'm glad you guys—

this is an honor to finally have you on. And, uh, yeah, come back on soon. Excited for the launch tomorrow.

Yeah, thank you.

Everyone listening, go find the book. I'm sure it's available everywhere books are sold. As We Are Gods. Thank you so much.

Thank you all.

Great stuff, Peter. Have a good one.

Goodbye. Well, there is some massive news out of the Cowboy State Daily. CowboyStateDaily.com says, so the Safari Club's big game trophy collection is going to hit the auction block. So if you're into collecting taxidermy.

UltraDome?

This is very important. The Safari Club restaurant's big game trophy collection that took more than 50 years to grow into a world-class taxidermy museum taxidermy display is packing up to be sold. An auction company specializing in big game animals mounts will— big game animal mounts will arrive next week to pack up the massive collection that gave the Safari Club restaurant its name. The restaurant was founded in the early 1980s by Jim Mills in Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis and was a tourist hotspot and the place to go in the Bighorn Basin. Mills' collection had already been growing for years before the restaurant opened. And then was then shared with tens of thousands of customers over decades. We're so proud of my dad who created this safari lodge. The collection is the culmination of his life's passion. The inventory has not even been done yet on the extensive collection to determine how many pieces are heading to auction. The mounts range from an ordinary moose to an extraordinary specimen such as the two antelope locked in an eternal battle. Dad was able to hunt and fish and follow his passions since the In the 1960s, the Hotel and Safari Club represented my parents' travels over the years. It's sad to see the end of an era. And so if you're in the taxidermy world, you're gonna wanna pay attention to this. This is a very important story. Anything else?

Attorney General Ken Paxton of the great state of Texas has launched an investigation into Lululemon over the potential presence of toxic quote unquote forever chemicals in activewear. I'm sort of surprised that they would call out one company in particular, because there are thousands of companies. And so, yeah, of course, Lululemon is one of the largest retailers.

Is it potentially an opportunity for outdoor voices? We've talked to the founder about sort of like Ty Haney about revitalizing that brand, switching things up.

I don't know. I mean, try to find like breathable activewear.

Yeah, without microplastics. But that could be a business opportunity for someone.

Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of brands. There's a wave of brands that are using natural fibers, cotton, wool, things like that. They're not as like, quote unquote, performant in a lot of different ways, but likely healthier. But yeah, again, it feels like, feels like somewhat unfair to launch an investigation into a single company when I think this is—

Also, it's unclear if there are any like broad FDA rules or broad like federal, like what are they bumping up against? Because as I, at least to my knowledge, there's no like major rule around microplastics or forever chemicals.

Yeah, like how about you launch an investigation into the company that makes the—

The forever chemicals? I'm in the forever chemical business and business is booming, or it has been.

I mean, well, there are plenty of— For sure. This is a good place to end it.

Yes.

If you want to, if you want to, if you're in Florida and you want to signal to other drivers on the road that you're ready to rumble, why not get a UFC license plate.

The UFC, it doesn't just go on the bottom, it actually goes before the, the letters. So you can only have 5 letters.

Is your license plate technically UFC?

Is it, is it—

I don't know.

I would imagine you have to select an available plate that's just 5 characters, and you could not get a plate that's just normal but the same 5 characters. So those 5 characters have to be available. But wouldn't it be an absolutely wild choice?

Really, really silly as a UFC fan. Even if I did live in Florida, I think it'd be tough to get behind this.

You'd stick to the bumper sticker.

I'm sure there's a handful of people out there that this made their day. And I'm happy about that.

Anyway. Thank you for watching TVPN today. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we will be off tomorrow, but we will be back Wednesday at 11:00 AM Pacific. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

We love you.

Rolling flashback.

Goodbye.