Artemis II Makes History, Nutella in Space, The US-China AI Race | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:Wild, wild weekend, some really great white-pilling 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 p.m. 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.

0:40John Coogan: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 take on this? Yeah, I mean, you can like predict these things, right? Yeah, it is physics. Yeah. But still, I mean. We know, you know. Yeah, relativity. 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. Was that predicted pre takeoff? Yeah. Right. I don't know. We should we should. Or was that like updated after after they had exited?

1:08John Coogan:Yeah, because 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 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, two astronauts have splashed down at 8.07 p.m. ET, bringing their historic 10-day mission around the moon to an end. I watched it live, and 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.

1:40John Coogan: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. It was 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.

2:17John Coogan:Yeah, not not even just the space. There was like people in every single person had a different take on like, oh, this seems risky. This is this is aggressive. This is 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.

2:56John Coogan:And we saw some of this, we can talk about 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. 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 seem to be a little bit sort of nervous about this.

3:29John Coogan:There's a post in here that we would pull up. I would love to know how they test that parachute system. I think they launched 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. Yeah. But you have to imagine that it's three parachutes because it can probably survive with just two. Yeah. 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.

3:59John Coogan:Look at that. 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, It was basically selfies taken with the iPhone, or with iPhone, I guess, of the Earth.

4:39John Coogan: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.

5:10John Coogan: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 II crew was listening to Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rhone 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 yeah it sounds like yeah like a made-up band Chapel Rhone oh she's big 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.

5:59John Coogan:That's a crazy way to put it, but it's true. They can listen to whatever song they want. And I thought 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 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.

6:40John Coogan: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 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. 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 Ahmet Kastria. 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.

7:22John Coogan: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 years to come together. They got to do logos all over the spacesuit. They should. Private companies should be able to help fund the mission.

7:59John Coogan:They really should. And there's another story in the journal here about that viral video of the jar of Nutella that ended up floating on Artemis II. 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 the Artemis II lunar flyby this week, there 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 ,000 miles away with the same question.

8:45John Coogan: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 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 stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post.

9:21John Coogan: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.

9:52For me, it felt like the first day of the rest of my life. Really?

9:55John Coogan:You're a big Nutella fan? I'm 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. It was magic. Is it? What is it? A condiment? Technically. What is it? I don't know. Spread. Spread. Is that a thing? I don't know. It can be a lot of things. But but it's always it's always sort of bothered me that it sort of LARPs is 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.

10:30John Coogan:David says Nutella is like crack for kids. And Jordy 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. 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 a borderine. they still don't know which astronaut brought it. 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.

11:13We need some iPads floating by with like B2B SAS. That'd be good, yeah. That'd be sick.

11:18John Coogan: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. Stubbs. Of Pharaoh, 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.

11:51John Coogan: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 on Instagram using the integrated music functionality or if they had to quickly license that because getting an official theme from a Hollywood film like 2001 Space Odyssey, 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 wired up already.

12:36John Coogan: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 and 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.

13:14Yeah, 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 You got to go straight to the top.

13:22John Coogan:You got to go straight to the government. Yeah, and and and say hey You know Lockheed showing up with some stuff SpaceX is contributing Axiom space is doing the the spacesuits Blue origins doing a moon lander. 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 pay-per-view and you got to have a pay-per-view yeah pay-per-view for like you can watch the stream when they're just kind of hanging out traveling but for anything like a landing splashdown takeoff yeah it switches 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 the iphone tied 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 i have And I kind of have to put the camera in between the I and the D.

14:18Podcast ads over during the stream, too. There is a lot of dead air. Just letting you guys know, in T minus 30 minutes, we'll be coming around the moon. Yep. And this segment, this moon passing, is brought to you by Athletic Green. Yep.

14:34John Coogan: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. We have small, highly powerful computing devices that we'll take with us with outstanding cameras. And so, yeah, 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.

15:15John Coogan: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 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 one pound?

15:51John Coogan:What is one 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 standard, the official peanut butter. The official peanut butter.

16:25John Coogan: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. To find out more about space oddities, this journalist at the Wall Street Journal said he called Robert Perlman, 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.

16:57John Coogan: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 like a Coachella set. It does look like they're twisted knobs or something. What are they doing there? Okay. Oh, they're checking the watches. Okay. Wrist check? Wrist check. One product was already synonymous with the wonder of space flight. 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?

17:36Is it the ice cream?

17:37John Coogan:No, no. That's close. The freeze-dried ice cream is up there. No, what? Whipped 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? 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 that the experiment went wrong and like this was all they could come up with. It's probably fake news. But as an eight-year-old, I was like, this is lore.

18:11John Coogan:This is peak. This is peak lore. This is peak lore. The Artemis 3 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 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 the entire space community is clearly working on.

18:48John Coogan:The in-space refueling is sort of critical to actually getting to the moon in a meaningful way. 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. 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, you know, sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus 5 or some crazy data center.

19:38John Coogan:And so you could be in this interesting situation where Elon is incentivized 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, I think it becomes more difficult to stay focused on this 30-year mission. Part of the value of actually sending humans to space is entirely marketing and just to prove that it's possible. You would hope that a lot of this is just very cool. It's very inspiring. I feel like it's important.

20:18But 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, you know, whether it's space or the moon. And just basically leaning a lot more into drones.

20:31John Coogan:Yeah. And going more for volume versus these sort of like high risk, high cost. Yeah. 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. 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.

21:13John Coogan: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 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, may be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. And so you would expect the life and the existence of the American populace to change over that period of time.

21:47John Coogan: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 Hots 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 the path.