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You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, April 13th, 2026. We are live from the TBP Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital. Welcome to the show. Wild, wild weekend. Some really great, compelling stuff, some very disappointing news. We'll go through it all. We have a great show for you lined up. We have to hop. We're working on some special projects, so a bit of a shorter show, but we still have three great guests joining us. One from Critical Loop, the 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 2 mission. It was scheduled to land at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time. And it landed exactly at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time, like within the exact minute. Everyone was joking like whoever is 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. I think they predicted it like days or maybe since the beginning of the mission. Like everything was timed out perfectly. Did you...
Yeah. I mean, you can like predict these things, right?
Yeah. It is physics. Yeah. But still we know, you know, when a solar eclipse will be for the next 10,000...
Yeah. Yeah. 10,000 years. But I don't know. It still feels remarkable that there is no, that there's like no flexibility.
Was that predicted pre-takeoff?
Yeah. Right. I don't know. We should, we should dig...
Or, or was that like updated after, after they had exited?
Yeah. Because you think there'd be something about like, oh, like this engine fired a little bit too much or a little bit, we had to make a small adjustment. I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to figure it out.
Anyway, the, the reactions were really, really positive. Elon Musk said, 'Welcome home to the NASA astronauts.' 'Welcome home, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, the Artemis 2 astronauts have splashed down at 8:07 p.m. ET,' bringing, 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, in a very long time. So, Reid 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, I really like 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 want to jinx it and also you don't want to be negative about anything and it makes sense, but the space people we talked to off air ahead of time were extremely nervous.
Yeah. Not, not even just the space. There were like people in every, every single person had a different take on like, oh, this seems risky. This is, 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. Like, 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. Like, and we saw some of this, we can talk about later, but even, 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, 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, even the Apple executives seem to be a little bit sort of nervous about this. There's a, there's a post in here that we...
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 that?
Yeah. Yeah, I know. I'm sure there's a good answer, but...
Yeah, but you have to imagine that it's three, three parachutes because it can, it can probably survive with just two.
And there's actually two stages of parachutes. So there's one 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 2 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. 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 2 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 three million views, notice that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures for Artemis 2 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 happened. There was also, it was, it was, 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 between Jared Isaacman and someone who is not a fan of... Yes, they deleted the post, but the Artemis 2 crew was listening to Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan and that didn't align with someone's politics. And so they said like, this is ridiculous. Why? How, how can they, how can they possibly...
Because like the last five bands that have come up on the show, it sounds like, like a made-up band.
Chappell Roan. Oh, she, she's big. But Jared, Jared Isaacman was like, 'Hey, like let's cool it with the political rhetoric. It's not my choice of 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, 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 3, 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 2 and Artemis 3 and sort of where this is going. So the, the journal writes, Micah Maidenberg says, Artemis 2 is a blockbuster. Landing on the moon will be a lot harder. And so flying around the moon may have, may end up being the easy part for NASA's Artemis program. This month, Artemis, this month's Artemis 2 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, but the work ahead is greater than the work behind us,' said NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya at a briefing Friday after Artemis 2, the Artemis 2 crew vehicle splashed down. So Artemis 3, 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 and 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... They got to do logos all over the spacesuit.
Companies should be able to help fund 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 2. 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 2 lunar flyby this week, they were minutes from seeing, 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 live stream, leaving the roughly 252 thousand miles away with the same question: Wait, was that a jar of Nutella? Back on this planet, in a Parsippany, New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2 p.m. operations committee meeting, oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away at 1:52 p.m. 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, 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?
Uh, 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, you're a big Nutella fan.
Not really anymore, but as a kid discovering that it was, that it was like a peanut butter-like thing that was just on an entirely different level. Yeah, it was...
It is, it is a weird... Is it a, what is it, a condiment technically? What is it?
I don't know, a spread. Is that a thing? I don't know.
It can be a lot of things.
But, but it, it's always, it's always sort of bothered me that it sort of launders 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, it has, um...
Yeah, 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 want you to know that for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around somehow.
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, we need some iPads floating by with like B2B SaaS.
That'd be good. Yeah, that'd be sick.
Yeah, I mean, even, even the phone code could be monetized. There's some certain, aren't there some venture capital firms that just have dates as...
776. It's like that's the code that gets you thinking. I don't know. Anything can be sold, I'm sure. 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 hurtle 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 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, I wonder if they could just rip that 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, as a large marketing team, they had everything like wired up already. Anyway, for as long as humans have been leaving this world, they have been taking products 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, try to build out a multi-billion dollar ad...
You got to go straight to the top. You got to go straight to the government. Yeah. And, and, and say, 'Hey, you know, Lockheed's showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the, the spacesuits. Blue Origin's doing a moonlander. Why not Nutella chipping in as well?' At least, 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. NASA and you got to have a pay-per-view.
Yeah, pay-per-view for sure. You can watch the stream when they're just kind of hanging out traveling. But for anything like a landing, splashdown, takeoff, it switch...
Oh, it switches pay-per-view mode. Yeah, I think they got to sell the windshield. They got to sell the windshield. When you're taking photos of Earth, you got to see Tide.
You got to see Tide across the, across the windshield. It's like, oh, seeing the blue marble from this distance is amazing.
Reminds me I have some laundry to... And I kind of have to put the camera in between the I and the D.
Podcast ads over during the stream, too.
There is a lot of dead air.
Just, just letting you guys know, in, in t-minus 30 minutes, we'll be coming around the moon.
And this, this segment, this moon passing is brought to you by Athletic Greens.
Be great. Okay. So, as long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella. When one Artemis 2 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, I don't think I can actually say that as a government employee.' Reid Wiseman said, 'We have small, highly powerful computing devices that we'll take with us with outstanding cameras.' And so, yeah, what, what, what is an iPhone if not just a small, highly powerful computing device with outstanding camera? 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 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, another product in the corner, a container of Jif peanut butter. Now what's interesting is that the, the government does have, at least with peanut butter, are you familiar with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology or something, NIST? So NIST is like our official weights and measures, like they keep like the canonical, like what is the one pound, what is one gram, they, and they have a whole bunch of standards for all sorts of different things, and then different companies can, can like agree on, okay, well, we are both, you know, saving...
Reinventing, defining the gram.
Yeah. But all, 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, 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, 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 CollectSpace. 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 going to have Peter Diamandis.
Looks, looks like a Coachella set.
Yeah, it does look like they're twisting knobs or something. What are they, what are they doing there? Just watching.
Okay. Oh, they're checking the watches. Okay.
The Artemis 2 wrist check.
I mean, there was, there's been a knockdown, 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, 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, they were cutting it. They were cutting the brick with, with hazelnuts. And it was sort of a Jevons paradox situation where, where by dropping the cost of a spreadable chocolate substance, consumption skyrocketed. Good news. It's the ultimate white pill. Five 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?
What is the main product that was like famously designed for astronauts in space?
Wait, is it the ice cream?
No. No. That, that, that's close. The freeze-dried ice cream is up there.
No. What? Whipped cream? No.
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. 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. But as, as a, as an eight-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. The beverage was struggling. Tang, which is sort of like a Gatorade. It's a, it's like an orange, orange juice type liquid, but it comes in a powder. You mix it. It's actually the early AG1. It's early AG1...
Yeah. Or Element. The beverage was, was struggling until NASA realized it could mask the metallic taste of water on board. So, tap water in space, apparently a nightmare. Got to get Aura up there. That's the next move. There we... And every kid who wanted to be an astronaut instantly wanted the neon orange powder. I was one of them. I, 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 one billion of annual revenue. Let's go. 50-year overnight success.
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, there's been a whole trend on YouTube of YouTubers taking products and putting them on weather balloons and driving the, 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 like gives you a little bit of the aura of space. It's not the same as like a national...
Calculate how many weather balloons we would need to attach to you to take you to space.
I think, I think that's been done. I think Red Bull did that with, uh...
Felix Baumgartner. Is that his name?
He just rode weather balloons up.
Yes, that was weather balloons. That was not rocket.
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 out of 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, the head of marketing at Red Bull who was behind that, and the numbers, like the ROI, 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, tbp.com. While on board, Christina Koch even asked mission control...
This is extremely disappointing. PT says, 'I would need dozens of large weather balloons.'
But look up the Felix Baumgartner thing because that was...
That could have had some type of like, um...
I don't think it had a rocket on it or something, but it also might not have gone that high. Like it, 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.
Okay. Got some Honest Company organic media there.
As he watched the Artemis 2 mission, Pearlman waited for the moment when a 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-Man. On this mission, they had access to 189 menu options, five 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 bobbed through the cabin, the Artemis 2 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.
Oh, that's a funny story. Anyway, back to what's going to happen in Artemis 3. 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 conditions. Creating systems that keep astronauts safe adds to the pressure. NASA and its contractors have struggled with delays during the 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 2, 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 P in the chat. Artemis 2 Nutella, Artemis 3 GLP-1. How, how much would one of the, the GLP-1 manufacturers pay to have one of them? One of the, 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, if they're not natty, it's not really, it's, uh, you know...
You want... I don't want my astronauts to be natty. You want them optimized.
There's no anti-doping organization in space, John.
I suppose. I suppose. But you, you want, you want the astronauts to be like the pinnacle of, of, you know, what, what humans can achieve. You know, we talk about Jonny Kim, the, the Navy SEAL turned doctor turned astronaut. You know, you want, you want to see what's possible when someone just puts all of their effort for years and years towards like achieving greatness, you know, not, not just, not just clicking order online. Anyway, NASA and its, 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 trade-offs 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 surface. Officials said the approach resembles the Apollo program in the 1960s, officials 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 3 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 rockets in part by greenlighting 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, you know, riding aboard SpaceX and building a company with Shift4. And you can imagine that he is pretty, pretty in favor of like iterative design. And so, when you see something like Artemis 2 very successful, the, the, the inclination should be run it back immediately and, and, and start adding little, little tweaks constantly. So, the Artemis 3 mission next year is supposed to help set up NASA and its contractors to attempt one or more visits to the moon in 2028. So, that's Artemis 4 and 5. 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 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 and 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 as 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, you know, sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus 5 or some crazy data center. And so you could be in this interesting situation where, where Elon is incentivized to, to move a lot faster. Probably not with humans on board, but 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, it's, it, I think it becomes more difficult to, to stay focused on this like 30-year...
Yeah. Part of, 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, how do we get as much mass as possible up to the, you know, whether, whether it's space or the moon, et cetera. And just basically leaning a lot more into drones.
And, and going more for volume versus these sort of like high-risk, high-cost.
Yeah. At the same time, I mean, we, we, 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, the folks from Fly & Digg 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 got to just get a human to be able to, you know, do so many more like flexible buildouts and move equipment around. Like clearly there's, there's current leverage that you get from having a, a human there. At least for the time being, although you can do a lot with, with drones and robots. Well, so let's, let, let's... There are a few more reactions to the Artemis landing. Trunk Fan 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 2 crew. Eric Doerty has a, a video here of them, uh, 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. Tonight, he's on the deck of a Navy ship waiting to welcome four 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 restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the US. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO.
100% of, 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. Four people with no astronaut training, three 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 on to by a 12-foot cable in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside of a government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, further than any human had been since the Apollo crew in 1972. And so there's some more, there's some more facts about Jared there, but I had a wild proposal, which was to make April 10th a national holiday celebrating Artemis 2. 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 the noise and see support.
Three-day weekends have not been very controversial. Yeah. Because nobody, nobody sees a three-day weekend on the horizon and is, you know, slamming their computer into the, 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 in Marginal Revolution. So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrializ-, 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 and 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, it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like, is, is AI causing unemployment? There's been a lot of hiring freezes, a lot of, 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.
The only thing that seems definitive is that companies are, are, are, are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI buildouts, right? And you could also argue that those people like probably were on the chopping block anyways.
But so far that's been, 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, 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, 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 needs to cool tempers during, during a time of rising unrest, 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 covering a Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house. Then there was a shooting outside...
Friday morning, early hours.
He said 3:45 a.m. 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, and he says, and, and, 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 will, 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 life 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 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. 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 the weights of a model that cost a billion dollars 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 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 this could play out.
So, he says, "I do not think it's right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future." And so, there's been a bunch 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 want to move towards more security and more...
Of course the notable, you know, it's been shared widely at this point, but one thing that was notable about Friday, the attacker from Friday, is just they were sharing all of the AI doom material. They were clearly consuming it, sort of caught up in it.
And Midhawk, formerly of Andreessen Horowitz, out there with a 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 re-education. 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 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 the Bernie Sanders, the data center ban, and all of this feels very intractable in 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 want to make foreign policy now. That's a really tall order. But fortunately I think people are starting to at least investigate what the path towards some coalition between different countries might look like.
And Sebastian Mallaby, 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 actually went to China and talked 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 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 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 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 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 engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models on chips located in other countries. So they were using cloud instances 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...
There were questions last year of like, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars of...
Malaysia was another one, 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 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 Asian neighbors, like you mentioned. Concealing the model's Chinese origin is straightforward. 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 centers, which is the 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 marshalling the same or similar...
Power being less of a constraint 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, or 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-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 just reached this so-called singularity first would be the winner of the AI race. So more the AI race than winning the AI future messaging. Even if the fast-follower were just a few months behind the leader, three and a half years after the Biden administration chip 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?
I think, yeah, like to start, I think Chinese labs are further behind.
The only reason that they're close behind is because of distillation.
Yeah. He's kind of saying like, hey, he's saying that the chip export ban is not working.
But I feel like the 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 some kind of inconsistency.
I mean, also just on the chip stuff, like we're clearly not policing it as hard as we could. We could lose it way harder, right? I remember it was like Super Micro. We saw those videos where they had smuggled in the boxes and it was like extreme.
Yeah, it's like if we really wanted to solve this issue, like we for sure could.
Let's check in with Super Micro stock.
It's up 17% the last five days.
Wow. But like very clearly I think among like the leading labs in the US you are seeing some kind of like takeoff among them, right? It's like very much recursive thing.
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 like DeepSeek not accelerate in the same way that I think a lot of people expected.
Yeah. I mean like Qwen is kind of what people thought DeepSeek 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.
It's clear like they have good researchers, right? Tsinghua is like a great university.
But I think generally I think people are too bullish currently on Chinese AI.
Yeah. There are 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 capital markets.
How much is it about secrets versus just raw scale?
Well, let's continue. So Sebastian Mallaby writes in the New York Times: Fans of chip controls continue to 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 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 have been an AI equivalent of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation 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 Wuhan 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 from AI leaders in China and the Communist Party directly, it did seem like they were not wildly accelerationist. Was that generally, if you're comparing like the statements of the actual CCP to the United States government?
Yeah. CCP definitely looks more pro-safety than the US government does.
Within groups within the US are certainly much more, you know, safety pill.
Yeah. Safety pill than China is generally.
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 Mallaby's reporting is true, then there is an opportunity for some sort of accord that could be good if that's 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 come-to-Jesus moment where everyone decides to rein things in. Is that your read?
Yes. But you know there are two paths, right?
It's like a choose your own.
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 cyber attacks, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that person except for the fact that it might be 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 a capable AI agent. The enthusiasm apparently confirmed that 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 that is equally 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 non-proliferation, there would at least be some chance of the proposal succeeding. This presumes that US-China 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 confrontation to détente. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came just six 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 to continue to push forward on the chip controls. Maybe go deeper in the supply chain. There's always been a more 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. So I like AI 2027, which has been shockingly accurate to date, has mid-2026 China wakes up. 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 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 DeepSeek do very impressive work with limited compute, but the compute deficit limits what they can achieve without government support and they are about six months behind the best OpenBrain models. Of course they're using...
Yeah, they mash up all of these.
You get DeepMind plus OpenAI and then DeepSeek plus DeepSeek and stuff.
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 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 DeepSeek collective where they share algorithmic insights, datasets, and compute resources with each other. A decentralized development zone is created at the Taishan power plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the world, to house a new mega data center for DeepSeek, along with highly secure living and office spaces to which researchers will eventually relocate. And to close it out, but China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies, among the best 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 there's going to be any type of effective multinational collaboration, especially just given what's going on in the Middle East.
Yeah, it's a chaotic time. Well, if you want to 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, but for your taxes. You can see what the government did with your money. And it's a very fun one-off website drop because even when you open it on desktop, it renders like it's an iPhone app. It's 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 if you have dependents or children, and then it will walk you through every segment.
I'm going to do a sample for someone that made $100,000 in 2025.
If you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it up there.
Can you pull up TaxWrapped.com? We can actually put in 100k. $100,000.
There you go. And then do single, do W-2 on the left, and then just do no children.
So you pay $21,000 in taxes. $6,700 goes towards income security. And I think I filled out the same one here so you can see. Let's see. I need to...
So that's going to Social Security.
It really goes through everything.
Housing assistance, federal employee retirement, and disability.
