Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Wild, wild weekend. Some really great white-pelling stuff. Some very disappointing news. We'll go through it all. 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 p.m. Pacific time, and 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.
I think they predicted it like days or maybe since the beginning of the mission.
Chapter 2: What was the significance of the Artemis II mission?
Like everything was timed out perfectly. Did you have a take on this?
Yeah, I mean, you can like predict these things, right?
Yeah, it is physics.
But still, I mean... We 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's no flexibility.
But was that predicted pre-takeoff?
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Chapter 3: How did the Artemis II crew's landing demonstrate precision?
Yeah, right? I don't know. We should...
Or was that like updated after they had exited Leo?
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 2 astronauts have splashed down at 8.07 p.m. ET, bringing their historic 10-day mission to Earth. 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. 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 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 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. And we saw some of this. We can talk about it later.
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Chapter 4: What reactions did the Artemis II mission evoke from notable figures?
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 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 three million views, notice that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures from Artemis II until the crew safely landed. So everyone was on the edge of their seats hoping for the good outcome, and that's exactly what happens. 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, I guess 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...
How can they possibly listen? Because the last five bands that have come up on the show, it sounds like a made-up band.
Chapel Road? Oh, she's big. Jared Isaacman was like, hey, 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 2 and Artemis 3 and sort of where this is going.
So 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 end up being the easy part for NASA's Artemis program. This month, Artemis...
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 1970s. NASA and its contractors must now get through a series of sprints that would culminate in astronauts landing on the lunar surface in 2028.
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Chapter 5: What challenges lie ahead for the Artemis III mission?
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.
Fortunately, I think people are starting to at least investigate what the path towards some coalition between different countries might look like. And Sebastian Malabai, 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.
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. 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 chip makers engineering teams.
But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models and chips located in other countries. 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?
Yeah, this is a question of like, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars of
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