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EpisodeĀ 4-13-2026
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 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, yeah. 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 Tabarrock's Peace in Marginal Revolution. So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrialization, 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 3000 hours per year, and now they work about 1800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening, hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we were literally, we're doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he.
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 3000 hours per year, and now they work about 1800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening, hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we literally were doing more with less because of productivity. And so he frames this 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 still too early.
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. Yeah, three day weekends have not been very controversial. Yeah, yeah. Nobody sees a three day weekend on the horizon and is, you know, slamming their computer into their desk. Not at all. And so I was thinking back to the benefits of more federal holidays, more national holidays. And I was reminded of what we talked about last week regarding Alex Tabarrok's piece in Marginal Revolution. So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrialization, the Industrial revolution, to expected improvements in productivity from the AI revolution. And so if you look back between years 1870 and today, the hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%. Americans used to work 3000 hours per year, and now they work about 1800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening, hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we were literally, we're doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he frames this 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. Or moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over pure effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example. And I thought April 10th would be an interesting place to start. And so it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like is, 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. It seems hard like on a macro level to really definitively say that like AI is causing a huge effect on the labor market. Yeah. But the only thing that seems definitive is that companies are, are, are, are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI buildouts. Right? Yeah. And you could also argue that those people like probably were on the chopping block anyways, but so far 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 and in order to actually compete and win, we want to deploy both as aggressively as possible. And so the game theoretic Nash equilibrium is that we both employ a lot of people and use a lot of AI, and we do, and our 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 a real risk of true labor replacement effects. And so taking a leap of faith here and adding federal holiday a bit ahead of the curve feels like the type of action that America needs to cool tempers 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 him.
Effective multinational collaboration. Especially just given what's going on in the Middle East. Yeah, it's 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. Tax wrapped dot com. It's Spotify Wrapped. But for your taxes, you can see what the government did with your money. And it's a very fun one off website a 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 W2 employee or 1099, how much you. If you have dependent or children. And then it will walk you through every segment. I'm gonna do an example for someone that made $100,000 in 2025. If you want the, if you want the. If you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it. Okay, do it. Can you pull up tax wrapped.com we can actually. Here we go. Here we go. So put in 100k. A hundred thousand dollar one hundred thousand big ones. There you go. And then do single, do W2 on the left and then just do no children. Wow, it's over. 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. So that's going to Social Security really goes through everything. Housing assistance, federal employee retirement, retirement and disability health. 5,000 to health. So that's Medicare, healthcare services. I think people might be surprised that defense is so low. I've always. I feel like defense is always large as. Like John, this. There's. I would say the. There are a lot of people in this country that would look at the $3812 and be. No, of course, of course very upset about that. Of course, of course. But the size of the US military, the size of the defense budget has always been so big. It's felt like the number one expenditure category. But it is in fact not next to Social Security and Medicare and healthcare services. But the military is significant, obviously. And Riley on the next slide puts up. Pull it up again about the government business. You're going to want to see this. So the government spent more than it made last year 7 trillion spent, 5.5 trillion in revenue. Government strategy is literally we're going to burn money for a while, but we're going to make it up with scale basically and maybe inflation, who knows? It's a tricky situation. So the deficit was 1.5 trillion last year. And that overspending, it goes on the national credit card, which has been racking UP debt since 2001. It's now about to cross $40 trillion, which is about 114,000 per person. That is not something to be fist bump about. I think I was, I was listening to Tyler Cowan this weekend and he said, I think it was him. He was like, well, you know, if you actually, if you're really AGI pilled. Right, the deficit should be way bigger. Yes, yes. There's like all these things. Yeah, I think it's actually we were riffing on that with Dylan Patel the first time he came on we were saying like, yeah, like so it's not a black pill. Yeah, yeah. You know, government spending went up like extremely AGI pilled position. If GDP starts growing significantly, sort of the opposite of this treaty scenario, which is certainly what I hope happens. But yeah. George Hotz also posted some other blog post last night about this idea of making everyone a billionaire. Creating a $1 billion bill and printing 300 something, 360 million of them, giving everyone one. Everyone is a billion. Everyone's a billionaire then. And he's making jokes about like, obviously that wouldn't work and. But the impact would be to destroy the dollar and go back to the gold standard, which is something he's a fan of these days. Anyway, the person who pays $100,000, who makes $100,000 is paying almost $3,000 in interest payments on the debt, $430 on transportation, $350 on government operations, $260 on natural resources. There's some on agriculture. $76 goes towards researching agriculture. There's international affairs and space flight and research. Science is $71 out of that $100,000 a year paycheck. It's an interesting project and we're big fans of Riley Walls over here. So go check it out. There are a bunch of other posts in the timeline before we bring in our first guest, Tyler Cowan, talk about how we're growing.
1972. And so there's some more, there's some more facts about Jared Eisenman 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 our capacity as a country to do bold and impressive things. And there are currently no federal holidays in April and, 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 for that. Three day weekends have not been very controversial. Yeah, 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 Peace in Marginal Revolution. So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrialization, 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 3000 hours per year, and now they work about 1800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening, hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we were literally, we're doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he frames this 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, more. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over pure effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example. And I thought April 10th would be an interesting place to start. And so it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like is, 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. It seems hard, like on a macro level to really definitively say that like AI is causing a huge effect on the labor market. Yeah, but the only thing that seems definitive is that companies are, are, are, are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI buildouts. Right? Yeah. And you could also argue that those people like, probably were on the chopping block anyways, but so far 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, and in order to actually compete and win, we want to deploy both as aggressively as possible. And so the game theoretic Nash equilibrium is that we both employ a lot of people and use a lot of AI, and we do, and our 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 a real risk of true labor replacement effects. And so taking a leap of faith here and adding federal holiday a bit ahead of the curve feels like the type of action that America needs to cool tempers 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.
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 Sports. 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 average. You got to go straight to the top. You got to go straight to the government and say, hey, Lockheed showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the spacesuits. Blue Origin's doing a moon lander. Why not Nutella chipping in as well, at least paying for part of it. I don't know, it would just be extremely American. It would be extremely American to make the Orion capsule look like that. That's pay per view. 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. 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 windshield. It's like, oh, seeing the blue marble from this distance is amazing. Reminds me I have some laundry 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 end. Just letting you guys know, in T minus 30 minutes, we'll be coming around the moon. And this segment, this moon passing is brought to you by Athletic Green. Yep. Great. Okay, so as long as.
What's the right thing to do, buy or build? How do you think about depreciation or just the lifetime of a chip? There was a big discussion over Will GPUs burn out over six years? And at the same time, a lot of people have computers that have one CPU that they've been using happily for 20 years. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a trend or change in the lifetime of CPUs that are going to be used for AI workloads in data centers running very aggressively, probably 24, 7 for years. Are we seeing these chips burn out faster or is that a sort of surmountable hurdle? Well, there is a. There's one technical problem which is the chips are literally burning out faster just because at the spine of geometries, you know, wires move and melt. And so we're dealing with aging failures like we haven't before. But at the business side of things, I think companies trading off a bunch of things. One is it's hard to get new silicon. You see all the shortages. The fabs can only make so much silicon. AI is sucking up all the, all the capacity in terms of new production. But the incentive to build new silicon is that I have a limited power budget. So if I want to do more, I can't just get more power from PG&E or whoever. I need to go make more efficient systems. So sometimes I'll swap out those racks for a new rack that's 2x3x more power efficient. I can do more with the same power budget. So it's sort of capability cap on. Some of these companies, they just need to replace the silicon if they want to grow their capabilities. Yeah, zooming out. Do you think that the.
It was pretty damn good. It was great. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. I thought it nailed that perfectly. Last question for me, reflecting on the work of Ray Kurzweil, what do you think? It feels like his predictions have held up incredibly well. Incredibly well. I mean, to nail the Turing test date within a year, if not exactly to the day, basically. You can quibble on all these things, but it feels remarkably accurate. What do you think enabled him to predict and project the future so accurately? I mean, he did it by the math. He was looking at doubling rates. He actually looked back in time to look at what was happening and what were the doubling rates. He calls it Moore's Law is a certain part of it. It's basically integrated circuits. But he has something called the law of accelerating returns, and he applies it to everything. And so what's interesting is what is he predicting next? Right, so longevity, escape velocity by 2033, and high bandwidth brain computer interface, BCI, being able to connect your neocortex, your 100 billion neurons of your brain to the cloud by 2035. I mean, these are extraordinary futures coming our way. It's like we're speed running every science fiction movie ever made wild. This is why we need more positive science fiction today. Yeah, we do. Absolutely do. Well, yeah, I mean,
But yeah, isn't that amazing? Because we always forget how far we've come and we just sort of like, say, ah, okay, show me some other miracle, please. Because yesterday, I think what people don't realize, and I wrote a paper with my shopmate Alex Wiesner Gross, who's our resident genius, called Solve Everything. And I think what's really exciting, what's coming in the very near future is the fact that these AGI ASI systems are going to solve math. They've already effectively solved math. What comes next is physics and chemistry, biology, material sciences. And so we're about to see this extraordinary golden era of scientific discoveries that are going to occur at a rate far beyond anything else, right? Scientific breakthroughs, Nobel Prizes came at rate of the number of geniuses on the planet, but we've now number of genius individual equivalents by billionfold. And so we're going to end up with a situation where, you know, we get room temperature superconducting and we've got new substrates that allow us to pull carbon in the atmosphere at a rate like ever before or, you know, allow us to reach escape velocity. So I had Kevin Will from OpenAI on stage with me at my Abundance Summit this year. And Kevin used to be the chief product officer at OpenAI. He's now head of science at OpenAI. And what an incredible position to have where you're using these models to solve physics and then all the breakthroughs that come out of there. So people talk about the revenues that are going to come from large language model genetic systems that the Frontier labs are creating. I think what they're not talking about is the massive revenue that comes out of the breakthroughs that these companies are able to create. If you've solved longevity, what's that worth? Yeah, I want to talk about longevity, but first you mentioned desalination. I've always been extremely interested in water desalination.
You know, just hideous. Yeah. Let's talk about longevity. Do you. How big of a deal do you see GLP1s? It feels like we've been dealing with an obesity crisis for so long, it's still really early to see a jump in life expectancy. But if there was one horse I had to bet on as a new technology that enabled life extension, it would probably be GLP1s. But how have you been processing that boom relative to other next gen solutions that might be coming down the pipe? 5 or 10 years? I spend about half of my time in AI and my time in longevity. Right. I've written a few books there. I have a large venture fund investing in the tech, building companies in the space. And you're right, GLP1, by the line, by the longevity health community, is considered really the very first longevity drug. And part of it is we know that if you are metabolically unhealthy, if you're carrying too much visceral fat, if you're carrying too much fat on your body, that shortens your Life. And so GLP1s enable you hopefully to change your diets, your habits. But what's coming. So, yes, it's the first, and we're seeing generation two, generation three, generation four GLP1 drugs coming online right now, which will enable you to keep the weight off and also maintain muscle, which is the downside of the original, earlier versions of the GLP1 drugs. But what's coming on the back of that are a whole set of new longevity therapeutics. So one of my friends, David Sinclair, not sure if you've had him on the show. I'd love to. Yeah. He's amazing. And you definitely must. That'd be amazing. David's one of the most, one of the great geniuses in the longevity space, as is George Church. And David has, for the first time ever, we see a age reversal technology going into human trials. It's his OSK trial that's being done by Life Biosciences. Full disclosure, I'm an investor advisor to the company, but they demonstrated that three of the four Yamanaka factors, I won't go into detail there, are able to reverse the age of cells. And they did this work first in mice, then they evolved it to primates, which were very similar to humans. And demonstrating that in your eyes, in particular, for a couple of different conditions, macular degeneration and naive disease, that you can reverse the age of your visual system. Now, this month, they're going into humans. It's the first time, because it's an age reversal technology. While it's being tested in the eye, the concept is that it will work on all organs in the body. And we're heading towards a world in which hopefully we'll be able to take a therapy and knock back your functional age by 20, 30 years. And another X prize, the desal was the largest at 119 million. The next largest is.
Effective multinational collaboration. Especially just given what's going on in the Middle East. Yeah, it's 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. Tax wrapped dot com. It's Spotify Wrapped. But for your taxes, you can see what the government did with your money. And it's a very fun one off website a 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 W2 employee or 1099, how much you. If you have dependent or children. And then it will walk you through every segment. I'm gonna do an example for someone that made $100,000 in 2025. If you want the, if you want the. If you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it. Okay, do it. Can you pull up tax wrapped.com we can actually. Here we go. Here we go. So put in 100k. A hundred thousand dollar one hundred thousand big ones. There you go. And then do single, do W2 on the left and then just do no children. Wow, it's over. 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. So that's going to Social Security really goes through everything. Housing assistance, federal employee retirement, retirement and disability health. 5,000 to health. So that's Medicare, healthcare services. I think people might be surprised that defense is so low. I've always. I feel like defense is always large as. Like John, this. There's. I would say the. There are a lot of people in this country that would look at the $3812 and be. No, of course, of course very upset about that. Of course, of course. But the size of the US military, the size of the defense budget has always been so big. It's felt like the number one expenditure category. But it is in fact not next to Social Security and Medicare and healthcare services. But the military is significant, obviously. And Riley on the next slide puts up. Pull it up again about the government business. You're going to want to see this. So the government spent more than it made last year 7 trillion spent, 5.5 trillion in revenue. Government strategy is literally, we're going to burn money for a while, but we're going to make it up with scale basically and maybe inflation, who knows? It's a tricky situation. So the deficit was 1.5 trillion last year. And that overspending, it goes on the national credit card, which has been racking UP debt since 2001. It's now about to cross $40 trillion, which is about 114,000 per person. That is not something to be fist bump about. I think I was, I was listening to Tyler Cowan this weekend and he said, I think it was him. He was like, well, you know, if you actually, if you're really AGI pilled. Right, the deficit should be way bigger. Yes, yes. There's like all these things. Yeah, I think it's actually we were riffing on that with Dylan Patel the first time he came on we were saying like, yeah, like so it's not a black pill. Yeah, yeah. You know, government spending went up like extremely AGI pilled position if GDP starts growing significantly, sort of the opposite of this treaty scenario, which is certainly what I hope happens. But yeah. George Hotz also posted some other blog post last night about this idea of making everyone a billionaire. Creating a $1 billion bill and printing 300 something, 360 million of them, giving everyone one. Everyone is a billion. Everyone's a billionaire then. And he's making jokes about like, obviously that wouldn't work and. But the impact would be to destroy the dollar and go back to the gold standard, which is something he's a fan of these days. Anyway, the person who pays $100,000, who makes $100,000 is paying almost $3,000 in interest payments on the debt, $430 on transportation, $350 on government operations, $260 on natural resources. There's some on agriculture, $76 goes towards researching agriculture. There's international affairs and space flight and research. Science is $71 out of that $100,000 a year paycheck. It's an interesting project and we're big fans of Riley Walls over here.
After decades of slumping sales, vinyl records are making a comeback. And so we can pull up this chart. Vinyl, of course, was booming in the 70s and the 80s and then fell off precipitously from 1984 until 1990, when of course, the cassette tape and the compact disc, the CD took off like a rocket. And so cassettes had their moment in the late 80s and early 90s. The CD dominated the 90s and 2000s. Then quickly digital downloads start spiking in the 20052010 period, followed by the massive rise of streaming, which has come to dominate nearly every category. But vinyl is making a comeback and for 2025, generated $1 billion of revenue for US recorded music revenues, which is more than CDs, more than three times as much as CDs, and more. And more than digital downloads. Yeah, that is, people aren't paying for 99 cents a song anymore. You will own nothing and be happy. Except vinyl. You will own a lot of vinyl and I think you'll be very happy with it. I think that there's a chance, I mean, we've been joking about, you know, pressing the show onto vinyl and the, the new acquired FM homepage is all vinyl themed. Vinyl has this because it's like the first stored music medium, it's the oldest, so it will stick around maybe the longest. Whereas CDs and cassettes just don't have. It's like if you're going to go retro, just go full retro and go with vinyl. Instead of going half retro and saying, oh, we're doing a cd, just throw a CD on this. Doesn't quite do it. It doesn't quite do it. Eight track was really short eight track in the precursor to the cassette tape. Sort of big in the late 70s and then fell off. Did you ever have a cassette era? I had a cassette era. I would get Books on tape. So funny. You were literally books on tape. You were using cassettes because it was the normal thing to do, I imagine. Yeah, right. Yeah. I was using them sort of ironically. No, I remember I had a. I had a Star wars book that was on tape and I would put it in the T was great. Yeah. And I was never. It was the most satisfying medium. Like throwing a cassette into a car. Yeah. And I remember I had to do a lot of reading over the summer for school and audiobooks have always been easier for me to process. So you go and you find the cassette version of it, the audiobook version of it, and you listen to that and then you, you know, you retain way more if I'm an auditory learner. It was a good time. Well, that's so insane to that vinyl is more than 10% of that is crazy streaming revenue. I really. Yeah, the vinyl is really big. Who's. There's gotta be like a vinyl billion power law. I mean, certainly collectors, but I don't know. I think there is something special about even if you just like. Even if you don't have a record player, you might say, I want to support that artist. So I'm gonna buy the highest tier. Like, I believe the Taylor Swift drops come. Like, she also sells vinyl. And you get it and you don't necessarily listen to it, but you have it as like a memento. And it's almost like an artifact that you put on your desk or in your house or you might frame it. You might not really send us some. Yeah, we have a Metallica vinyl. We still got to get a record player, but anyway.
Markets are absolutely wild these days. There's an interesting narrative violation. After decades of slumping sales, vinyl records are making a comeback. And so we can pull up this chart. Vinyl, of course, was booming in the 70s and the 80s and then fell off precipitously from 1984 until 1990, when of course, the cassette tape and the compact disc, the CD took off like a rocket. And so cassettes had their moment in the late 80s and early 90s. The CD dominated the 90s and 2000s. Then quickly digital downloads start spiking in the 20052010 period, followed by the massive rise of streaming, which has come to dominate nearly every category. But vinyl is making a comeback and for 2025, generated $1 billion of revenue for US recorded music revenues, which is more than CDs, more than three times as much as CDs, and more. And more than. More than digital downloads, that is. People aren't paying for 99 cents a song anymore. You will own nothing and be happy except vinyl. You will own a lot of vinyl and I think you'll be very happy with it. I think that there's a chance. I mean, we've been joking about pressing the show onto vinyl and the new acquired FM homepage is all vinyl themed. Vinyl has this because it's like the first stored music medium, it's the oldest, so it will stick around maybe the longest, whereas CDs and cassettes just don't have. It's like if you're going to go retro, just go full retro and go with vinyl. Instead of going half retro and saying, oh, we're doing a cd, just throw a CD on. Doesn't quite do it. It doesn't quite do it. A track was really short, 8 track in the precursor to the cassette tape. Sort of big in the late 70s and then fell off. Did you ever have a cassette era? I had a cassette era. I would get books on. So funny. You were literally books on tape. You were using cassettes because it was the normal thing to do, I imagine. Yeah, right. Yeah. I was using them sort of ironically. No, I remember I had a. I had a Star wars book that was on tape and I would put it in the T was great. Yeah. And I was never. It was the most satisfying medium. Like throwing a cassette into a car. Yeah. And I remember I had to do a lot of reading over the summer for school and audiobooks have always been easier for me to process. So you go and you find the cassette version of it, the audiobook version of it, and you listen to that. And then you, you know, you retain way more. If I'm an auditory learner, it was a good time. Well, that's so insane to. That vinyl is more than 10% of. That is crazy streaming revenue. I really. Yeah, the vinyl is really big. Who's. There's gotta be like, a vinyl billionaire power law. I mean, certainly collectors. But I don't know. I think there is something special about. Even if you just like, even if you don't have a record player, you might say, I want to support that artist, so I'm going to buy the highest tier. Like, I believe the Taylor Swift drops come. Like, she also sells vinyl. And you get it and you don't necessarily listen to it, but you have it as like a memento. And it's almost like an artifact that you put on your desk or in your house or you might frame it. You might not really send us some. Yeah, we have. We have a Metallica vinyl. We still got to get a record player. But anyway, without further ado, we have our first guest.
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 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. 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 average. You gotta go straight to the top. You gotta go straight to the government and say, hey, Lockheed showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the spacesuits. Blue Origin's doing a moon lander. Why not Nutella chip it in as well? At least paying for part of it. I don't know, it would just be extremely American. It would be extremely American to make the Orion capsule look like. That's what I was saying. Pay per view. 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. Oh, it switches pay per view mode. Yeah, I think they got to sell the windshield. They gotta sell the windshield. When you're taking photos of Earth, you got iPhone tide. You gotta 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 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 letting you guys know, in T minus 30 minutes we'll be coming around the moon. And this segment, this moon passing is brought to you by Athletic Green. Yep.
So jaws over at Apple said welcome home to the Artemis II crew. Honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them. Not the iPhone, not a couple of iPhones. IPhone. This is in the official Apple brand. You don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. But they brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone, one giant leap for space. And so NASA posted this on April 4, 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 3 million views. Notice that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures from 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 happens. There was also, it was very, very high stakes, but it was also in many ways America at its best. Even the never ending culture war took a back seat to this. There was this interesting back and for between Jericho, Isaac,
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 5:07pm Pacific Time and it landed exactly at 5:07pm Pacific Time, like within the exact minute. Everyone was joking, like whoever's in charge of this should be in charge of ubereats 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 have. Yeah, I mean you can like predict these things, right? Yeah, it is physics, but still, I mean we know, you know when the relativity solar eclipse will be for the next 10,000 years. Yeah, yeah, 10,000 years. But I don't know, it still feels remarkable that there is no, that there's like no flexibility. But was that predicted pre takeoff? Yeah, right. I don't know. We should, we should dig into. Or was that like updated after, after they had exited? 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 2 astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET, bringing their historic 10 day mission around the moon to an end. I watched it live and it was, yeah, it was a remarkable moment. I mean we haven't done this in my lifetime. We haven't done this in a very long time. So. 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 really like this. This is great. No, no, no, it is remarkable. And this was inspiring for a 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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.
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 2. So 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, there 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 livestream, leaving the roughly 252,000 miles away with the same question. Wait, was that a jar of Nutella? Back on this planet, In a persipping New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2pm Committee meeting, oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away. At 1:52pm their meeting was quickly interrupted by a message in the Microsoft Team's chat flagging that Nutella was in outer space. As it turns out, the people who spread Nutella to every corner of the Earth were more surprised than anyone to see it near the moon. They only found out about the most famous jar of gooey stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post. Dang. How much did Nutella pay for this product placement? And we saw that post and we 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 a bored 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 new teleguy. For me it felt like the first day of the rest of my life. Really. You're a big Nutella fan? Not really anymore. But as a kid discovering that, that it was like a peanut butter like thing that was just on an entirely different level. It was. It is a weird. It was magic. Is it a. What is it a condiment? Technically. What is it? I don't know. A spread. A spread? Is that a thing? I don't know, it can be a lot of things, but it's always sort of bothered me that it sort of larps as chocolate. Like it looks like chocolate, but it's like hazelnut technically, which I think is like sort of a betrayal. I don't know. Sound off in the chat if you have strong opinions about Nutella. David says Nutella is like crack for kids. And Jordi is being paid by the Nutella Corporation. No, we are not sponsored by Nutella. I wish we'd have a big jar of it right here. So it's a chocolate hazelnut concoction. Yeah, it has. 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 aboard Orion. They still don't know which astronaut brought it. They weren't sure. You just know that for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around. Somehow I feel like the NASA astronauts tax records will be deeply inspected to see that they're not selling ad slots out the back. We need some iPads floating by with like B2B SAS that. Yeah, that'd be sick. Yeah. I mean, even the phone code could be monetized. There's some certain. Aren't there some venture capital firms that just have dates. 776. 776. It's like that's the code that gets you thinking. I don't know. Anything can be sold. I'm sure 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, better if I tried, said Chad Stubbs, who is their chief marketing officer. What a great name for a CMO of Faro North America who owns Nutella. But once he reviewed the NASA footage and saw a levitating tub of Nutella, he knew that a marketing opportunity had landed in his lap and that he was no longer sitting in his most boring meeting of the week. It was a lot more interesting than talking about shipping details. And so from the conference room, they started a teams group to discuss the logistics of their improbable operation. They called it Nutella Mission Control. Before, most Americans had never seen the original video. They posted a slow motion clip set to the iconic theme of 2001 A Space Odyssey. The tagline Nutella is out of this world. And I wonder if they could just rip that 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 Space Odyssey is. It's definitely within budget for something like this, but it's usually a back and forth with some emails. But maybe as a large marketing team, they have everything 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 and marketing because it's the only place where marketing is.
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 2. So 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, there 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 livestream, leaving the roughly 252,000 miles away with the same question. Wait, was that a jar of Nutella? Back on this planet, In a persipping New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2pm Committee meeting, oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away. At 1:52pm their meeting was quickly interrupted by a message in the Microsoft Team's chat flagging that Nutella was in outer space. As it turns out, the people who spread Nutella to every corner of the Earth were more surprised than anyone to see it near the moon. They only found out about the most famous jar of gooey stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post. Dang. How much did Nutella pay for this product placement? And we saw that post and we 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 a bored 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 new teleguy. For me it felt like the first day of the rest of my life. Really. You're a big Nutella fan? Not really anymore. But as a kid discovering that, that it was like a peanut butter like thing that was just on an entirely different level. It was. It is a weird. It was magic. Is it a. What is it a condiment? Technically. What is it? I don't know. A spread. A spread? Is that a thing? I don't know, it can be a lot of things, but it's always sort of bothered me that it sort of larps as chocolate. Like it looks like chocolate, but it's like hazelnut technically, which I think is like sort of a betrayal. I don't know. Sound off in the chat if you have strong opinions about Nutella. David says Nutella is like crack for kids. And Jordi is being paid by the Nutella Corporation. No, we are not sponsored by Nutella. I wish we'd have a big jar of it right here. So it's a chocolate hazelnut concoction. Yeah, it has. 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 aboard Orion. They still don't know which astronaut brought it. They weren't sure. You just know that for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around. Somehow I feel like the NASA astronauts tax records will be deeply inspected to see that they're not selling ad slots out the back. We need some iPads floating by with like B2B SAS that. Yeah, that'd be sick. Yeah. I mean, even the phone code could be monetized. There's some certain. Aren't there some venture capital firms that just have dates. 776. 776. It's like that's the code that gets you thinking. I don't know. Anything can be sold. I'm sure 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, better if I tried, said Chad Stubbs, who is their chief marketing officer. What a great name for a CMO of Faro North America who owns Nutella. But once he reviewed the NASA footage and saw a levitating tub of Nutella, he knew that a marketing opportunity had landed in his lap and that he was no longer sitting in his most boring meeting of the week. It was a lot more interesting than talking about shipping details. And so from the conference room, they started a teams group to discuss the logistics of their improbable operation. They called it Nutella Mission Control. Before, most Americans had never seen the original video. They posted a slow motion clip set to the iconic theme of 2001 A Space Odyssey. The tagline Nutella is out of this world. And I wonder if they could just rip that 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 Space Odyssey is. It's definitely within budget for something like this, but it's usually a back and forth with some emails. But maybe as a large marketing team, they had it.