00:00Dylan, I go to you first. What are we learning at this particular hill and valley about how well currently
00:05Silicon Valley and the administration are working?
00:07I mean, we have a conflict upon us at this time, which is very much a tech conflict in many
00:12ways.
00:13Yeah, I mean, I talked about this a little bit last yesterday at a press briefing that we sort of
00:18did where you obviously have this conflict between Anthropoc and D.O.W. right now.
00:23In some ways, you could argue it was a parallel to the Maven project back in 2016. And I think
00:27that's actually a false analogy.
00:29Fundamentally, in this day and age, you're having a technology leader on both sides having this argument, which they may
00:35disagree from first principles.
00:36But Emil Michael is not some bureaucrat that does not understand technology at a fundamental level.
00:40And he's obviously up against Isidari Almaty. I think that looks very different than in the Maven era, where there
00:45was like a true schism.
00:46Now, you touched on whether or not we're sort of bipartisan today.
00:49I do think my sort of last panel that I just got off of, Senator Maria Cantwell, very senior ranking
00:55member on the Democratic side,
00:56Vinod Khosla, one of the largest sort of Democratic donors.
00:59There was a lot of interesting issues that were discussed around how should AI regulation work,
01:03how should the red lines sort of work between D.O.W., autonomous weapons, and Pentagon.
01:07And so I do think this is a perfect forum where you're having discussions about some of the core topics
01:12with even the members of the Senate that are not necessarily in the majority right now,
01:16but they very may well soon be.
01:17And we want to make sure that this forum, irrespective of who is in office after this midterm cycle,
01:22after the 2028 election, still becomes a place where you can convene the leaders of both policy and government.
01:28And I think the way that we know that we'll have succeeded is that in, you know, 2028 when we
01:32run this forum,
01:32whether it's President Ocasio-Cortez or President Rubio or President Vance,
01:36we still have a phenomenal gathering of both elected officials and technology leaders.
01:39And exciting traffic.
01:41And exciting traffic.
01:42Christian, I go to you because what's so interesting in this moment is there's a very healthy debate
01:47on either side of the aisle about China's role at this moment
01:51and the relationship with which we should be exporting AI, U.S. technology to China,
01:56something Vinod Coaster has spoken about year after year here with the Hill and Valley
02:00and the intersection of Silicon Valley and the administration.
02:02How is that being navigated at this moment?
02:05I think you've seen a lot of discussions across different parts of the supply chain
02:09that in particular have sort of highlighted the views here.
02:13And the reality is, is from a national security perspective, for years now,
02:17Americans have all seen the importance of having resiliency within our supply chains.
02:21And every single year, it seems like something highlights a new bottleneck within that.
02:26It was critical minerals and rare earth elements just earlier in the year, last year.
02:30So far this year, it's been memory.
02:32I think you're seeing on energy costs and problems with the grid.
02:35I think Brad Lightcap, who's OpenAI's COO, he brought up the memory bottleneck
02:40as being a restraint on them, at least.
02:43And the energy one.
02:44And the energy as well.
02:45And then years ago, it was getting everything from masks and PPE
02:50all the way down to vaccines and pharmaceutical ingredients.
02:53And so I think it's been a long cycle across both administrations more recently
02:57in realizing these problems.
02:59And I think people are seeing the importance of sort of bringing home domestic supply chains.
03:03However, you're still going to have a deep relationship.
03:05And this is what's unique about this Cold War.
03:07In particular, it's much more of an economic focus.
03:09And there's a lot more ties between global economies than there was in the previous Cold War.
03:15And so that creates some nuances and differences.
03:17And I think whether it's with adversaries and competitors, which these are our adversaries,
03:22I think the forum at least is very, very open about all kinds of different views and discussions
03:26and having debates.
03:27But we're very obvious about who our adversaries are and who the good guys are, in our view,
03:31to use a lack of a better term.
03:33And with Russia, China, and Iran, although there are ties,
03:36there are going to be areas where it just makes no sense to have reliance on these countries.
03:41A lot of this is framed through the lens of defense technology.
03:44But Trey Stevens was just telling us, actually, it's more about re-industrialization generally.
03:48I want to talk to you guys about space, really.
03:52You know, we're going to be fortunate to speak to NASA Administrator Eisenman pretty shortly.
03:57I think you're going to speak to him as well.
03:59At 137, you know, SpaceX is a critically important investment for you guys.
04:04But the big news of the day is basically NASA trying to accelerate the moon program
04:09and also the Mars program away from Hill and Valley and also as a venture capitalist.
04:14VADA is your other job.
04:17One of many.
04:19Let's just ask a simple question.
04:20How is space going for America right now?
04:23And see if you can fit it into 30 seconds.
04:24Yeah, I mean, I think it's becoming an exciting, you know, sort of moment.
04:27You know, when Morgan spoke with the administrator just a couple weeks ago,
04:30he was announcing NASA Force, which was trying to combine some of the, you know,
04:33sort of private public, you know, sort of talents so that you start to have people rotate in.
04:36As an example of the Hill and Valley Forum being a venue for that type of policy,
04:39we're actually doing a sit-down with the administrator as well as a bunch of the private commercial space companies
04:43that are here to talk about NASA Force and how to participate in that.
04:46Today was obviously the launch of ignition and their broad policy change,
04:48which I would argue is probably the largest space policy change that the United States has had in the last
04:5220 years.
04:53What's specifically different about it now?
04:55It's a large focus on increased, you know, sort of cadence and in particular an increased reliance on autonomy
04:59across all of the areas, Mars, Moon, as well as lower Earth orbit.
05:02And so the discussion today was around rather than right now, you know, only relying on human-based space
05:06and transport to the moon to establish the infrastructure, starting to do monthly robotic launches basically down to the moon
05:11and using the robots ahead of time to start to establish infrastructure before humans come.
05:16Same thing in low Earth orbit.
05:17Jared has talked a lot about igniting the low Earth orbit economy,
05:20and a part of that is doing both things on human-rated stations like the ISS and the future Axioms,
05:25VAST,
05:25the center of the world.
05:26Commercial space station.
05:26But then also relying on these, you know, autonomous, you know, sort of platforms like what we build on Avarda
05:30that allows you to accelerate with high cadence and high production,
05:33similar to what we're doing on the moon with the robotic missions like Firefly, like Intuitive Machines,
05:38like, you know, Blue Ghost.
05:39It's an exciting time when maybe we see the capital needs of a SpaceX become a windfall for venture capitalists
05:47at some point.
05:48But Christian, your perspective on just how much money is necessary from private hands at this moment to keep on
05:53building in space?
05:54It's a great question.
05:56You know, I think the growth of the private sector has been very conducive to give founders more opportunities
06:00and more options in order how to build their companies.
06:02The space sector, alongside many others within broader hard tech or industrials, aerospace and defense broadly,
06:08is much more capital intensive.
06:10Sure.
06:10But what's changed is the access to capital has is very different than what it was five, ten years ago.
06:15It's much easier to build a company like Varda, not just because SpaceX exists and paved the way
06:19for how to build a business selling to the government here in the United States,
06:23but also driving costs down to make this business model even work.
06:27But the last piece as well is it's made venture capitalists much more, and risk capital,
06:31much more interested in these harder problems because they see the opportunity sets.
06:35And government plays a huge role in this.
06:37Government very much is on the other side.
06:39They create the demand signal.
06:40And when they make big bets and take risks on companies in the private sector,
06:44it allows new businesses and new founders and new individuals to try to go build things.
06:49And that creates a really, really powerful recursive loop that leads innovation
06:52and also leads to economic opportunity.
06:54There are people that are able to build wealth now and able to create businesses that would not have existed
06:59before
06:59if government didn't do its part and if companies like SpaceX and others didn't pave the way.
07:02Dell, real quick, TerraFab.
07:05It was so SpaceX heavy.
07:07You know, it was much more about Orbital Data Center than anything else.
07:10What did you make of it?
07:11Yeah, I mean, I think in order to tackle some of the economic challenges against competing against terrestrial data centers,
07:16you do need to figure out how to both make new chips that operate at much higher temperatures.
07:19By the way, I loved watching you over a course of a year on X just go up and down
07:22with Orbital Data Center.
07:23So just, yeah, have at it.
07:24Yeah, you know, it's definitely been fun.
07:26One of the, I think, like, preliminary or, you know, prominent websites that discusses the economics of it was done
07:31by our chief engineer at Varda, Andrew McCaleb.
07:34He actually was cited in The Economist, showing the, like, McCaleb cost of data centers and then, you know, what
07:38SpaceX was projecting.
07:40I think the only way that they are able to figure it out is if they do it at the
07:43scale of what they're, you know, sort of talking about.
07:44It's going to require new materials.
07:45It's going to require much larger satellites than they've ever produced it before.
07:49And you're going to be talking about Starship launching thousands of times.
07:51I think the best thing, though, is that on the journey between now and the Orbital Data Centers being there,
07:56there's going to be a ton of economic value that is created along the way because these satellites are going
07:59to just become more and more powerful Starlink internet satellites.
08:02And so I don't think we're that far away from an iPhone having a phased array antenna inside of it
08:06and you having 24-7 coverage across the globe
08:08because it turns out that's more than enough from Starlink.
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