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Fareed Zakaria GPS

How Iran is Using Its Newfound Leverage; The Rupture Between the U.S. and Israel. Interview With Author David Brooks; Interview With Aurelia Institute Founder And CEO Ariel Ekblaw. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired June 28, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:43]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you from the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

Today on the program, the state of negotiations between the United States and Iran, plus Israel and more, with the former national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Also, as America prepares to mark 250 years of independence, I'll talk to the writer and thinker David Brooks about this moment in history and how it fits into the rest.

Finally, Elon Musk wants to build a factory on the moon and has long dreamed of setting up a human colony on Mars. How do you do that? I'll talk to a space architect who is helping to turn dreams of an interstellar future into reality.

But first, here's my take. Two recent events on opposite sides of the Atlantic point to the same problem. In the United Kingdom, the man widely expected to replace the stately Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister is Andy Burnham, who touts business friendly socialism as his credo. In New York, Democratic primary elections produced striking victories for Democratic socialists, suggesting that the insurgent left has found a way to turn protest into power.

A caveat. The left is not marching uniformly toward socialism. Many primaries outside New York City were won by moderate Democrats. In a swing district just outside the city, the combat veteran Cait Conley won handily. But a certain kind of liberalism is losing energy, confidence and connection to the people it claims to represent.

In his book, "The Revolutionary Center," a brilliant new intellectual history of liberalism, from the enlightenment to the present, Adrian Wooldridge reminds us that liberalism was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment, it was the battering ram against the establishment.

Today, liberalism has become identified with power. Great universities, foundations, media organizations, corporations, bureaucracies of all kinds. Wooldridge argues that this has produced two deep failures. The first is passivity. Modern liberalism, certainly since the 1990s, has celebrated free markets and free people. In practice, this has meant deregulating both economic life and personal life, and then treating the consequences as the price of freedom.

In markets, this has allowed corporate consolidation to run wild. In personal life liberals have become reluctant to say that certain behaviors are socially destructive. The result is liberal fatalism. People camp out on city streets, addicted and mentally ill, and liberals often just describe this as a housing problem. Millions suffer from obesity related illnesses, and liberals are more comfortable blaming food deserts than taking on the companies that hook their customers on processed food. Social media companies do the same with their consumers' attention.

Wooldridge calls for a revival of liberal paternalism. The phrase grates on modern years, but a liberal society should celebrate individual rights and also demand individual responsibility. It should understand that freedom can be destroyed not only by the state, but also by addiction, monopoly, crime, ignorance and dependence. This is not an argument for socialism. It's an argument for truer liberalism.

Liberals should love markets, not because they allow the strong to dominate or inequality to grow, but because genuine competition allows the little guy to challenge the strong.

[10:05:11]

A healthy market is not one in which four companies quietly divide up an industry and use lawyers, lobbyists, and algorithms to keep challengers out. It's one in which new entrants can rise. Consumers can choose, workers can move, and incumbents can fail.

The second failure Wooldridge identifies is more uncomfortable because it concerns liberals' own status. Liberalism believes in meritocracy. Historically, this was one of its noblest causes. It argued that people should rise by talent and effort, not birth, race, caste or class. But over time, the meritocratic elite has hardened into its own aristocracy. Elite liberals support social justice but do little to dismantle legacy admissions.

They want the poor to move up the ladder, but not if that requires building more housing in the leafy neighborhoods where they live. They praise individual merit, but have created a vast diversity bureaucracy that too often judges people by group identity rather than individual character.

Nowhere is this clearer than K-12 education. A genuinely liberal politics would start with the child, and it would attack any institution, union, bureaucracy, school board, university department that feeds its own power while failing America's children.

This is where democratic socialists and right-wing populists gain their power. They understand that people want someone to fight for them. They may offer bad answers. The left with class warfare, protectionism and state control, and the right with protectionism, ethnic resentment and racial nostalgia. But they sound like outsiders willing to take on entrenched privilege. And they offer protection in a world where freedom seems to mean chaos.

The way out of liberalism's crisis is not to abandon liberalism. It's to recover its radical spirit. Liberals should once again be the people who hate monopoly, inherited advantage, closed systems and rigged games. They should champion real competition, real meritocracy, and real equality of opportunity. They should take on corporate power when it crushes markets, government power when it protects insiders, and cultural power when it creates bureaucracies that substitute group identity for individual dignity.

As Wooldridge argues, the center cannot be merely a midpoint between left and right. It has to be revolutionary in its own way. Liberalism's great promise was never that people would be left alone to decay and freedom. It was that people would be given the tools, rules and responsibilities necessary to flourish. Liberalism began as a revolt against encrusted power. It would survive only if it becomes one again.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let us get started.

It's been over a week since the signing of the memorandum of understanding and the start of negotiations, all intended to end the war with Iran. Already we have conflicting accounts. Trump has touted Iran's agreement to allow the highest level nuclear inspections long into the future for n, infinity, three exclamation marks. The Iranians say they have made no new commitments on inspections.

What can be achieved in the 60 days allotted for talks if this is the starting point?

Joining me now is Jake Sullivan. He was one of the key negotiators of the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. More recently, of course, served as President Biden's national security adviser.

Welcome, Jake. So it seems to me the Iranians are playing this perfectly where they are basically trying to create a situation where there isn't full compliance, but there isn't full rejection, which could then trigger sanctions. So they're in this kind of zone where they can -- every now and then they can assert power and get everyone worried that they control the Strait of Hormuz, but never so much that it, you know, it begins the end of the ceasefire and things like that.

Is that what we're likely looking at for the next several months?

JAKE SULLIVAN, FORMER U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I think that that is a perfect summation. The Iranians are leaning forward to exercise control over the strait, to remind the world that they control that waterway, then leaning back when the Trump administration objects vigorously enough because the Iranians want to keep getting the windfall that they've gotten out of this MOU.

[10:10:09]

And then when it comes to the nuclear file, I think they will dribble out very small concessions bit by bit, then pull them back, then put them forward, then pull them back to keep the United States at the table. But that we're very unlikely to see material solid progress, especially on the nuclear program in the next 60 days.

ZAKARIA: So what's most likely is that that 60-day window gets extended?

SULLIVAN: Yes. In fact, in the MOU, it says it can be renewable by mutual consent. Now, if you go back to the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, the interim agreement that set up the negotiations was done in November of 2013. The deal, the full comprehensive nuclear deal, didn't get done until the summer of 2015. So that gives you a sense of how long this takes.

Sixty days is a kind of ridiculously short amount of time to negotiate a nuclear program. But what they'll do is just keep extending that timeline, I believe, as long as something doesn't happen that fully disrupts it. But I think both sides have enough incentive to keep it going that you'll just see this continue 60 days, then another 60 days, then another 60 days. And that's kind of the new normal we're living in.

ZAKARIA: What does it tell us that the Iranians, I don't know if in this particular negotiation, but in the last one and certainly in the ones that you guys took part in, bring 30 to 40 people, nuclear experts, energy experts, ballistic missile experts. And on the American side, it's two guys. It's Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

SULLIVAN: Well, first of all, if you just look at how they work the wording of the agreements they do, they are highly detail oriented, not just because they're lawyerly, but because they want to extract benefits from those details. Just one example from the MOU, the provision that says the U.S. would waive sanctions refers to oil and then there's this little clause that says and derivatives.

What are derivatives? The petrochemical sector. That is the second largest sector in Iran. Now, do I think the U.S. really even understood what it was signing with that? Maybe not. But Iran knew it would get billions and billions of dollars just by inserting that word. And that's why you bring a very large delegation, because you're looking for every advantage in this highly complex, detailed negotiation.

And I think as long as they're bringing that expertise and we're only bringing a couple guys, it will be advantage Iran.

ZAKARIA: What does this do to the Gulf States who have been, you know, staunch allies of the United States? You know, you've talked to the leaders of many of these places. How are they looking at their future going forward?

SULLIVAN: Look, I think that they are now questioning the basic model upon which they built their security, which has been essentially a deep partnership, security partnership with the United States, including forward deployed American bases in their countries. I think now they're asking themselves, what are we getting for that? And do we need basically a more diversified approach that involves a degree of hedging with other powers, maybe including China, and definitely includes quiet diplomacy with Iran to try to make sure that they're de-escalating with their neighbor across the strait.

ZAKARIA: Bottom line, this is bad for the United States' image. It's been bad for allies. But at the end of the day, it's better than continuing this misguided war. Right? And it's sort of like bad for Trump, good for the world.

SULLIVAN: It's always hard to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once. This is a terrible deal. Iran has one huge. The United States has lost out huge. On the other hand, it beats continuing this war. And so we should all be glad that the war is over, even though we're stuck with something that is much worse than we could have gotten if we had never started this war in the first place.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. When we come back, I'm going to ask Jake Sullivan about America's relations with one particular ally in the region, Israel, when we come back.

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[10:18:18]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with the former national security adviser of the United States, Jake Sullivan, in Aspen, Colorado.

Jake, one of the things that has been really striking in the last 10 days is the extraordinary break between Israel and the United States. Not only Bibi Netanyahu and Trump obviously not on the same page, J.D. Vance is criticizing the Israelis, but in Israel there is an eruption on the right. Basically anti-Trump, talking about how Trump has betrayed Israel.

What do you think is going on?

SULLIVAN: Well, look, let's start with the fact that Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has tried to get multiple American presidents to go to war with Iran, to directly attack Iran. He couldn't get President Obama to do it. He couldn't get President Biden to do it. He couldn't even get President Trump in his first term to do it. Then he did. And once that happened, it became very clear that Israel's interests and America's interests in this region and in this war diverged because from Israel's perspective, they didn't mind this continuing.

They didn't mind the Strait of Hormuz being closed. They didn't mind the instability and the shocks to global markets. Well, the United States of America did, and Trump ultimately had to recognize that and make a decision that on behalf of the United States, he was not going to let this war continue. And I think that has created a deep and real break between the U.S. and Israel because of the priority that Israel places on not only being able to continue to fight Iran, but also fight its proxies, especially Hezbollah and Lebanon.

ZAKARIA: I'll tell you what, a number of Democratic foreign policy types have been telling me quietly that they listen to Trump on Israel, and they grudgingly feel like, you know, at least he's saying things that we have never been able to say when he says, look, if two -- if two Hezbollah drones go and land in the middle of a desert or get shot down by Israel's air defenses, you don't have to go up and blow up several buildings in Beirut.

[10:20:17]

This seems totally disproportionate. Is it fair that Trump is saying stuff that you guys could have, should have said four years ago?

SULLIVAN: Well, first of all, I think that observation is bereft of a really important context, which is Donald Trump joined Israel in launching a misbegotten and illegal war in Iran, got stuck in a corner that we never got stuck in --

ZAKARIA: Right. And is therefore --

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: And therefore could stop with the Israelis --

SULLIVAN: And had to get out of it. So --

ZAKARIA: But in doing it, is he saying some things? Is he being able to confront Israel on some of its, you know, let's say, massive overreaction to drone attacks?

SULLIVAN: I think basically what he has finally come to, but only because he allowed Israel to restart a war in Gaza that had stopped. And he started a war with Israel in Iran that has cost the United States huge is he finally has kind of reached the end of his rope, but I think it is only after two years of doing things that went way beyond anything that the previous administration did, or that administrations before that had done.

What he's saying makes sense. It's logical, but it has to be understood in a context in which he pretty much put America's security at risk and set us back strategically by joining Israel in a war that President Biden and previous presidents had refused to join.

ZAKARIA: Do you think this rift between the United States and Israel is a momentary spat, frankly, like many of the ones in the past? Or is this a kind of watershed moment?

SULLIVAN: I think it's deeper. I think there is the center of gravity on the discussion in the United States on the relationship with Israel has shifted. I think that relationship will look different in the future than it looks now. I do not believe this is just momentary.

ZAKARIA: If, you know, Rahm Emanuel is talking about end of all aid, if they want, they can stand in line and buy what they want. What's your view? How should the United States -- should the United States continue to give military aid to Israel?

SULLIVAN: Well, look, I actually came out publicly and said just a couple of months ago that I had been advocating to members of Congress that they should vote for these resolutions of disapproval, basically blocking direct military assistance to Israel during this war because we shouldn't be fighting this war, and we shouldn't be helping Israel fight this war. So I do think the security relationship between the U.S. and Israel has to change.

ZAKARIA: But going forward also, that was about this war. I mean, going forward, no more aid? That they buy it?

SULLIVAN: Well, look, even Bibi Netanyahu himself has said Lindsey Graham has said, you know, Israel can stand up on its own two feet. Does it really need the United States to continue in the future to provide it assistance, security assistance, where we're handing American tax dollars over?

And it's interesting because the last memorandum of understanding that provided this assistance was negotiated during the Obama administration, it was 10 years. That's coming up for renegotiation. Let's see what President Trump does.

ZAKARIA: You are still criticized for not having stopped the war in Gaza, for not having put more pressure on the Israeli government at the time. Do you think, in retrospect, that you guys could have done more? And there was a certain hesitation about being seen as anti- Israel?

SULLIVAN: I've said publicly that we should have done more to put pressure on Israel.

ZAKARIA: But what stopped you?

SULLIVAN: Well, the big trap that I think that we fell into is we kept thinking we were close to a ceasefire and that if you take a dramatic step, like cutting off aid to Israel, it could actually set you back from getting a ceasefire and hostage deal because Hamas would react to that. And so we kept thinking, let's try to get to that ceasefire and hostage deal. It took us too long to do that, but we did achieve a ceasefire and hostage deal before we left office.

The guns had gone silent before we left office, and President Trump allowed them to start up again the following year. So it took way too long. And yes, we should have put more pressure on Israel earlier. Looking back in hindsight, we kept thinking we can get this done and that just took way too long and too many people suffered and died as a result of it. And that's something that I sit with and I lie awake with at night thinking about.

ZAKARIA: Jake Sullivan, always good to have you on.

SULLIVAN: Thanks for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, as the United States marks its 250th birthday, it is also experiencing deep divisions and distrust. How does the country recover? David Brooks and I had a conversation that opened the Aspen Ideas Festival, when we come up.

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ZAKARIA: As America approaches its 250th birthday, it's living through a profound moment of distrust. In politics, institutions and even distrust amongst each other. In a Pew survey from last year, 53 percent of Americans said their fellow citizens have bad morals and ethics, the highest share in any of the 25 countries surveyed.

So how can the country find its way back? David Brooks is a writer at the Atlantic and a best-selling author. He and I opened the Aspen Ideas Festival this week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: This festival is taking place at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and I don't know if it would be fair to say of all of American history, but certainly in modern American history, I've always thought there's one simple rule in trying to figure out who is going to be the next president, and that is the more optimistic candidate has won. Think of Franklin Roosevelt against Herbert Hoover.

Think of John Kennedy versus Richard Nixon. Think of Obama versus McCain. Think of Clinton versus George W. Bush. Except in 2016 and 2024.

And I think that it wouldn't be -- it would not be doing a disservice to Donald Trump to say he campaigned as a pessimist. He said the country is going to hell. His first inaugural address was probably -- could have been titled American carnage which was a phrase out of it. Why is -- why is pessimism working or winning?

DAVID BROOKS, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Well, you know, I guess the way I'd put it is we used to be an optimistic country and we're not anymore. We are in a more pessimistic public conversation than during the Civil War than during World War I and World War II, and any -- name your crisis. So, what the hell happened?

Well, I would say it was a loss of faith. The post-Cold War world, we -- I think Iraq, we lost faith in America's power to project goodness abroad. And the financial crisis, we lost faith in a certain kind of capitalism. And there have been a successions of loss of faith. And the most important to our -- first, loss of faith in each other. So, it used to be -- you go back two generations and you ask people, do you trust your neighbors? It was 60 percent. And now it's 30 percent and 19 percent of millennial and Gen Z.

And so when you lose faith in each other, and when you lose faith in each future, you are in a pessimistic frame of mind. You're in a distrustful frame of mind. You see the world as more threatening than it actually is. And Donald Trump spoke right into that. He appealed to the dark passions, which are what you get in a pessimistic age, hatred, anger, envy, resentment. And he appealed to those passions, and he fit in with the culture, and people who fit in with the culture get elected. And the final thing to be said about the loss of faith and the pessimism, it's wrong. And I'll try to explain, maybe in the course of a conversation, I'll be curious to know if you share my optimism that the moment of sucking on the gas pipe is over.

ZAKARIA: You know, I'm congenitally an optimist. I mean, you know, when you're an immigrant, you sort of have to be. You made your bet. You know, you've left behind the old country, your family, your friends. You've sort of made your bed here. You know, that's what people often say, oh, if Trump gets elected, I'm going to move to Canada.

I ain't moving anywhere. You know, I've made my decision and I still believe in the country. I'm going down with the ship.

But that said, what worries me is that what I'm seeing is such a different country than the country I came to in 1982. It's a country that is much less, as you say, optimistic, but with much less open dynamic. There was a sense of possibility. There was a sense of flexibility.

People seem much more dug in. And so I asked myself why? And as you know, in my book, I sort of argue we've had so much extraordinary change economically, the explosion of globalization, technology, the entire creation of a digital economy, the emancipation of women. And I feel like we're living through an age of backlash.

And the question I ask myself is, are we at the beginning of a long backlash or has backlash peaked? And in order to understand this, I sometimes think you have to look not so much at politics, but at culture, you know? Because what is the cultural shift that produced Trump? And are we at the -- you know, are we -- where are we in that cultural shift?

BROOKS: Right. So I think we're at the end of that cultural shift. And, you know, when I ask -- sometimes I'll ask people, what made you who you are? And nobody ever said, you know, I had this fantastic vacation in Hawaii that made me the person I am today.

They always talk about a moment of rupture and repair, some period of hardship they went through and they grew through it, but they had to go through that rupture to get -- to improve the old self. And the good news is culture can change so rapidly.

In the 1950s, we had a culture of moral restraint and self-effacement. But the culture of the 50s shifted very, very quickly to a very different culture of the 60s, which was not about restraint. It was about liberation.

And so we went through another shift in the 80s, which was a rejection of the 60s. And so we went through another shift in 2010, which was a rejection of the early aughts. And so it seems to me we've -- you can't stay mad for long. In the late 60s, it was brutal, bombings. There were assassinations, riots. By 1974, everybody's into crystal and S. And like -- people get sick of the hyper political and they want something personal.

And so my strong belief, and I'll end on this, is that we're a moment of cultural pivot. And I say that because I notice audiences are so hungry for a certain kind of plot, which is the person who remains good in cynical times.

[10:35:08]

If anybody saw the "Ted Lasso" series, that's him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TED LASSO, FICTIONAL CHARACTER: We don't not care.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROOKS: If anybody saw the Mr. Rogers documentary or film, that's that. If anybody seen "Devil Wears Prada 2," Anne Hathaway is the most goody goody person impossible to be in the midst of the fashion industry, and audiences love that. So, that's why I think there's a beginning of the shift.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, more of my conversation with David Brooks.

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ZAKARIA: I'm back at the Aspen Ideas Festival with David Brooks, who is a writer for "The Atlantic" and a bestselling author.

[10:40:05]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: What I wonder about is the degree to which we have become tribalized. So, I'll give you an example. You know, one of the things I have argued for a while is this is not about economics. It's really about these deep cultural changes.

And how do I know this? Because rather than economics informing people's politics, it's actually the opposite. It's politics that informs the economics.

What do I mean? If you look in 2016, most Republicans felt that the economy in 2016, the Obama economy, was terrible. When Trump gets elected, they've changed their minds. They think the same economy is doing fantastically. And Democrats think exactly the opposite. The Democrats all thought the Obama economy was great. And by January 21st, they thought the Trump economy was terrible, right?

So rather than economics shaping their politics, it's politics that is shaping their view of economics. And it's become a situation where your tribe is right no matter what. It's almost like rooting for a sports team.

You know, the sign of your virtue and loyalty is when you are -- when you are sticking with your side even when they are screwing up, right? It's easy to be a Bears fan if they were winning. It's easy to be a Mets fan if they were winning. The true test is that you are a Mets fan when they lose.

So in that environment, even if you and I are right that, you know, this thing seems to have had its play, will people actually see that what they voted for is not working? And I ask you this because we are at a moment where 75 percent of the country, basically, thinks the Iran War was a bad idea, but that doesn't seem to translate into any real loss of Republican support for Donald Trump whose idea it was.

BROOKS: Yes. First, that's literally true. My Mets hat is in my room right over there. I'll be wearing it tomorrow despite the fact that they're absolutely terrible.

You know, I bank on a couple of things. First, what you're describing is the over politicization of American life. And my view is we're over politicized and under moralized. We talk too much about politics, and we use politics as a social therapy to cure our loneliness.

Politics seems to offer you a team, but it doesn't really offer community. It seems to offer you righteous action, but you're just tweeting. And I have a feeling that this obsession with politics, which is left and right, it's just going to seem boring after a while.

Donald Trump is a genius at getting us to pay attention to him, but it's just going to seem boring. And we will enter a more -- less political time. I think we'll also enter a time when optimism does sell. And I am not a fan of Mamdani's policies, but the guy smiles when he talks.

ZAKARIA: Yes, and that's a big deal.

BROOKS: And he seems to be having a good time. He's a total vibe shift from Donald Trump. And I don't know whether we'll have an ideological vibe shift. I really think we're going to have a cultural vibe shift.

Finally, I count on two things, both of which you've written a lot about, America and liberalism, the belief system in your last book was about liberalism, really as a way of life. And when I think of liberalism as a way of life, and you can talk about it more than I, but I think of a story I read in a memoir over the years, a memoir by Viola Davis, which I highly recommend, a great, great memoir.

And Viola Davis, the actress, grew up very, very poor, like dirt poor, dirt poor. And she was in high school. And the teacher -- she was in drama class. And the teacher says to the whole classroom, who wants to be an actor when you grow up? Every hand goes up.

And then the teacher says, you realize there are auditions, and there are failures, and there's poverty, and you lose. You get humiliated all the time. And all the hands start going down. And finally, there's only one hand in the air. It's Viola Davis' hand. And she writes in this memoir, when you've had your heat shut off, you've gone to bed hungry, you're not scared when somebody tells you life is going to be hard. And she says, my dreams were bigger than my fear. And I think that's woven into the DNA of America, to the immigrant people who came here, my family too a little earlier. And I think it's woven into liberalism.

What Viola Davis just expressed, to me, that's liberalism. You can start from nothing. You have freedom, you have ladders. If you want it, and you have the hunger in your heart, you can become Viola Davis.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, can ambitious space dreams actually become a reality? I talked to a space architect who is building the technology to make it all possible.

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[10:49:16]

ZAKARIA: The recent Artemis mission around the moon captured the world's attention. After that SpaceX IPO and all eyes are on the moon and stars. There's talk of putting data centers for A.I. in orbit and of sending humans to Mars. But what will it take to make these ambitions a reality?

Well, there's one woman who's working on just that. Ariel Ekblaw is a space architect who is working on the technology to make space dreams into reality. She is the founding CEO of the Aurelia Institute. She joins me now.

Pleasure to have you on. You really are almost uniquely qualified to talk about this because you are -- you have a PhD in aerospace engineering. You were a physics major.

[10:50:00]

You started this nonprofit and for profit to do architecture in space. The question everyone has I think is, what are we going to learn from going to space that's going to help us here? Or is this just an adventure?

ARIEL EKBLAW, FOUNDER AND CEO, AURELIA INSTITUTE: This is a wonderful point to think about for the future of space infrastructure. Can we actually build really big scale structures in space for the public good? So what are people on Earth going to get out of it even before we think about your lifestyle that you might have in space?

One of the things that we're working on at Aurelia Institute is the idea of an Orbital Biolab. So a really large scale structure, way bigger than you could fit in your biggest rocket that does microgravity research. So this is basically looking at biology when its floating in orbit, really profoundly different behavior than what you get on the ground. And there's amazing potential for cancer and Alzheimer's drug treatment discovery, new types of protein crystallization, and maybe even prosthetics like artificial retinas manufactured in space.

ZAKARIA: I've always thought that manufacturing of a certain kind could be more easily done in space.

EKBLAW: Yes.

ZAKARIA: It's less environmentally bad. Don't have to be done, obviously, by robots and things like that.

EKBLAW: Right.

ZAKARIA: How much of that is a pipe dream? How much of it could actually happen?

EKBLAW: This is actually also one of my favorite, I think, promises for the space industry. When you're floating, you get much more pure crystals. And so there's manufacturing in the biology domain. There's also manufacturing for fiber optic cable.

When you're floating, you don't have any gravity or you're not experiencing gravity so you could do an infinitely long extruded beam and start to build and manufacture really incredible structures in space that you cannot make on Earth. And so that's absolutely something that our ecosystem kind of between Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit side where we do the research, and Rendezvous Robotics where we do the actual scaling up of the space infrastructure, this is definitely a domain that we're actively working on is in-space manufacturing and construction kind of writ large.

ZAKARIA: So how much of this is, you know, science fiction and how much of it is this is a reasonable prospect that five to seven years from now, some of this stuff will actually be happening?

EKBLAW: This is the really amazing inflection point that we have, partly, thanks to the drop in launch costs, really dramatic drop in cost to get to space.

ZAKARIA: Because of SpaceX.

EKBLAW: Because of SpaceX, right. With Starship, it's anticipated that the cost per kilogram might be around $200 a kilogram, compared to about $1,500 or $2,000 a kilogram today and $50,000 a kilogram under the NASA shuttle program. So, huge moment to capture a lot of activity.

So five to seven years, what are we looking at? We want our Orbital Biolab module that Aurelia Institute is building in partnership with the university consortium to basically protect open science in orbit. We think we're going to be ready to attach to one of those commercial space destinations in 2030, 2031. So, four to five years.

For A.I. data centers, one of the profound benefits, even though it has a lot of technical challenges, is you would get that carbon footprint off of Earth from all the heat generation from the electronics. And then you also get the benefit of raw, unfiltered sunlight energy because you're above the atmosphere, right? So you're getting really good free energy.

I think that those two factors, and the idea that we now have Starship and New Glenn coming online, you're going to see a lot more investment of capital into this domain of building big space structures. And we're super excited to support that at Rendezvous Robotics as well.

ZAKARIA: So let me ask a skeptical question which is the thing about space outside of satellites --

EKBLAW: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- which are really more about what they provide for us at Earth, right?

EKBLAW: To Earth, yes. Yes, exactly.

ZAKARIA: But if you look at space travel --

EKBLAW: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- it has largely been a, you know, kind of the gee whiz, oh my gosh, we can do it --

EKBLAW: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- rather than stuff that has actually benefited human beings that much. You know, is it something that we are going to see major -- you know, is this a new inflection point --

EKBLAW: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- or am I misinformed?

EKBLAW: So what's really been the stymying factor for the last 50 years of space to your point, was the domain of military defense and government exorbitantly expensive. We're about to be able to scale up things like artificial retinas in orbit for the benefit of life on Earth. Keytruda drugs like cancer, lifesaving drugs from space, we can now do it at a much bigger scale for humanity, because this drop in cost to actually access the space environment.

The final example that is always in the back of my mind is the image that was taken of Earth on Apollo 8 in 1968 on Christmas eve --

ZAKARIA: Famous image, yes.

EKBLAW: -- Earthrise. Stewart Brand put it on the cover of the Whole Earth catalog, and that helped to launch the environmental movement in the United States in the 70s. So there's both a pragmatic, we can get real science insights out of the international space station, out of the next wave of space stations.

[10:55:02] Now, it's cheap enough to do that at scale, better than we have done. But there's also a philosophical benefit, I think, for humanity of expanding our concentric circles of awareness as a species and coming to really appreciate Earth as the best home we will ever have, even as we -- as we explore further out.

And so I think the space program has already shown that they can really do that. They can really move hearts and minds about appreciating this beautiful blue marble planet that we are living on.

ZAKARIA: All right. On that note of optimism, Ariel, a pleasure to have you on.

EKBLAW: Thank you so much. It's such an honor. Thank you.

ZAKARIA: And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week from the Aspen ideas festival. I will see you next week.

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