The Future We Were Promised Geek Out

0:01 How'd you like to listen to. NET Rocks with no ads? Easy. Become a patron. For just $ 5 a month, you get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. $ 20 a month will get you that and a special. NET Rocks patron mug. Sign up now at patreon.dotnetrocks.com. Hey, and welcome back to. NET Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin.

0:37 And I'm Richard Campbell.

0:38 And it's just you and me today, Richard.

0:40 Well, it's show 2027. Right.

0:43 So we're going to start with what happened in the year 2027. Wait a minute.

0:47 Okay, you ready?

0:47 Hang on.

0:48 I don't know.

0:50 Hasn't happened yet.

0:52 Hasn't happened yet.

0:53 But it turns out that we wanted to, we had this idea of sort of thinking about things that we thought would happen by now that haven't happened and sort of our wishes for the future and maybe even a little bit of a prediction.

1:08 It's also, it's very nostalgic engine too, right? Like that wish of, you know, the future we were promised happened over and over again.

1:15 Yeah.

1:15 But I got to tell you, I don't know how much the history bit annoyed people or they liked it or any of those sorts of things, but, But it affected me writing them.

1:25 Yeah, well, and me relearning everything as well.

1:29 So part of this was just coming out of all of these things. And seeing the evolution of SpaceX or the evolution of driverless cars, the evolution of fusion power. Do you know how long we've been talking about fusion power on this show?

1:48 I know. It's crazy.

1:49 It's been a long time.

1:51 Yeah, how about the evolution of. NET? I mean, our whole show tracks that.

1:59 Our whole reason-de-attra.

2:01 Yeah, it tracks that. And we always said that this wasn't a show about. NET all the time. It was a show for. NET developers. many of which we personally know. And so we kind of know what the interests are outside of. NET.

2:17 Sure.

2:18 And on all the feedback we get. Yeah.

2:20 And simply take JavaScript for an example. That's not. NET.

2:23 Sure.

2:23 But we talk about it extensively because it's part of the ecosystem of development.

2:27 For sure.

2:28 Yeah.

2:28 Well, how do we start this without doing the history bit? Is the first thing a comment?

2:33 Let's start with Better Know Framework.

2:35 That's a good idea.

2:35 All right. All right, man.

2:43 What do you got?

2:44 So, I went looking for trending repos that weren't. NET, and I found SQL Fluff.

2:51 What is SQL Fluff? That's a hilarious name.

2:54 Yeah. The SQL Linter for humans.

2:57 Ah, interesting.

2:58 SQL SQL Fluff. SQL Fluff is a dialect, flexible, and configurable SQL linter designed with ELT applications in mind. And ELT stands for extract, load, transform.

3:13 Right.

3:14 SQL Fluff also works with Jinja templating and DBT. SQL Fluff will auto-fix most linting errors, allowing you to focus your time on what matters. And I got this in the, you know, when I search for languages. It was Python that I searched for that. Oh, interesting. This is trending really heavily in Python right now.

3:35 Yeah. That's cool.

3:37 Yeah.

3:37 Okay.

3:37 Good one.

3:38 Okay.

3:38 Fine.

3:38 Yeah.

3:39 So sequel fluff. Yeah.

3:40 Sequel fluff. Apparently it's popular right now. So check it out. All right, Richard, who's talking to us today?

3:45 Grabbed a comment off a show 2019. That's the one we did with Jeffrey Sachs about numerics.net, which I really enjoyed. That was, you know, It's nice talking to a serious math guy and just real work that we do with tech all the time. And this comment comes from Alex Morrison. It's not really to do with numerics.net whatsoever, but he says, one of these days, whenever the opportunity happens to present itself, I think that's today, I think it would be kind of interesting if you two would spend a little time talking about the show logo, more specifically the microphones that each of them seem to be using in the photo.

4:19 I think that might be worth discussing. So I think you, because there's two microphones that are in the top, the banner shot on the. NET Rock site.

4:29 Yeah.

4:30 The one on the right is the original logo microphone. What's the story on that one? Because that was there before I was there. Yeah.

4:37 I mean, I found that, or I purchased it actually from, you know, an online place that sold art.

4:43 Oh, yeah.

4:44 And photographs. And this was a transparent photograph of a mic that said on air.

4:49 Right.

4:49 And I purchased a license for it. And, you know, I've always just been fascinated with radio and it was a very radio thing. Sure.

4:58 That microphone is an RCA 77, which is one of the classic radio mics. And they actually had those little things on top of it. You'll usually see them with like the call letters of the radio station.

5:11 Right.

5:11 I don't know if they're on the air. It looks like it's faked in there, but it's that concept. That was really a thing for those microphones back in the day.

5:19 I think of albums like Donald Fagan's The Night Fly, which is all about fantasies that they had in the 50s and 60s about the future.

5:29 Right.

5:29 And The Shot is about a radio guy, like a DJ, on the air at the foot of Mount Belzoni, jazz and conversation.

5:42 Yeah.

5:43 I got plenty of Java and Chesterfield Kings, but I feel like crying. I wish I had a heart of ice. That kind of stuff. That's great.

5:52 Okay, so the other thing about that banner picture, I mean, the on the air mic, the RCA mic is clearly edited. And I used to think that that picture was a composite and you showed me the original because we did that photo together at the studio years ago. And I was holding that other mic. And that other mic, that's a Shure Unidyne, which is another classic microphone. But I don't think it was ever working. I think it was just a prop. It was just a prop. I borrowed it from my friend, Ben. And he's a local musician and he let me borrow it for the shot. And we had it shot at a local photographer's who was literally in an office space right below the studio at the time.

6:33 Right.

6:34 Serenol.

6:35 And what a great photographer he is.

6:37 And so, it's a powerful picture that, you know, how often do you get both of us looking pretty good? Yeah, that's right.

6:46 We look old now.

6:48 Yeah.

6:49 We were younger then. That picture's a while ago.

6:52 Well, two things about that picture. First of all, the guitar I was holding got stolen.

6:56 Ah.

6:57 Yeah. It was when I had moved into the guard theater and I had left it there and somebody took it. That sucks. And I was pretty stupid about leaving it there because they were.

7:07 You were used to your own studio where you could leave your stuff anywhere, right?

7:10 Yeah, exactly. But there were people who had codes and keys and stuff and people coming in and out all the time. So- And also the microphone got left at Cyrano's place and then he disappeared. He went to the hospital for a long time and shut up his business and moved and stuff. And he told me it was in storage and I haven't been able to get it.

7:32 Since I probably could, if I, if I pushed it and I told Ben about it, he's like, nah, it's all right. It wasn't even working anyway.

7:39 So no, it was a, it's a, it's a prop bike, but it'd be nice to have it there. Art Deco. They're gorgeous.

7:44 Beautiful. And you also would see like early talkies of like Frank Sinatra singing into one of those microphones.

7:53 Yeah.

7:53 In a radio station or in a recording studio or something.

7:57 Yeah.

7:57 Yeah.

7:58 Well, should we talk about the mics we're using now?

8:00 Oh, yeah. Because we're both using the same microphone. We're both using the Heil PR40s. And that's a funny story, too.

8:06 Yeah.

8:07 So when I got hooked into Windows Weekly, Mary Jo Foley had moved on and was doing other things. And Paul and I are old friends. And he asked me, of course, you and I had done a few Windows Weeklys over the years. We were the Bourbon Brothers, right, when we did that?

8:22 That's right. I think we got Leo in trouble one night with some scotch.

8:26 We got Leo in a little trouble. They still talk about that. Because we're good guests. If we're coming in, we're going to bring a gift. So of course we brought whiskey. I didn't expect them to open it.

8:36 And I gave him a theme song too, didn't I? Yeah, yeah.

8:38 That's right. You did.

8:39 Does he still use it? I don't know.

8:41 Probably not for Windows Weekly, but there's a few of them floating around.

8:45 Anyway.

8:46 Anyway, yeah. That was a funny bit. So when Paul asked me to sit on a few shows and we had some fun with that, And the first time, I think I was still using my AT4040.

8:57 Yeah.

8:58 The first time I sat down to shoot with them as a co-host. And Leo, who really has a sharp ear, like he knows which mic is which and what's going on. But, you know, goodness, that guy's made more shows than we have, which is saying something.

9:13 That is true.

9:13 We were in a pretty rare league. He's in a rare league. And he's like, I don't like that mic. I'm like, what do you want to do about it? It's like, I'm sending you a Heil.

9:20 I'm like, okay.

9:22 I didn't know he was actually going to do it, but he sent me the Heil. It showed up. So I got the spider for it. I rigged it up. I plugged it in. And the very first time you and I recorded together. You're like, what's that microphone?

9:33 Yeah.

9:33 It's like, that sounds so good.

9:35 And it was so, it was that, it was like the first thing you said to me, it's like, you didn't say hi. You said, what's that microphone? That's the Heil PR40. It's like, I'm ordering one. I'm like, okay.

9:45 Yeah.

9:45 And I've been using it ever since.

9:47 And then, and the next thing after that was after we both had one, you're like, Hey, uh, we got to reshoot the ads.

9:54 Right.

9:56 Cause they, they need to be in the same voice. Right. So yeah. uh it's hard to argue with these hiles they're they're pricey and they're worth it they're so good that's yeah they're so so we learned a.

10:07 Long time ago not to chintz out on microphones the microphones that we used for doing dot net rocks live yeah the first ones And I don't even remember what they were, but they cost like $ 300 a piece.

10:19 We went through three versions of microphones on the road until you finally landed on those D-Finds, on the DPAs.

10:25 Yeah, the DPAs are twice the money. And hey, testament to Sweetwater, because my guy- They took them back every time? My guy was like, you know what? These things, the first time, they all broke, right? The first ones.

10:38 Have you priced them today, the DPAs? No. They're like $ 1, 200 now.

10:43 They're twice as what we paid for them? Oh, my goodness.

10:46 Yeah.

10:46 I think we could probably sell them used for a profit.

10:49 Now you're talking like a Ferengi.

10:54 So, Alex, there's your story about microphones. And I'm sorry, we are truly microphone geeks. We love them. We work with them. We put a lot of hours into them. It's important to us. but there's your story. Thank you so much for your comment. And a copy of music to go by is on its way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music to go by, write a comment on the website at.net rocks.com or on the Facebook. So we publish every show there. And if you comment there and read it on the show, we'll send you a copy of music to go.

11:17 And if you don't want to do that and you just want to get music to go by, go to music to code by.net and you can download the collection in flack MP3 and wave formats. And, uh, What else did I want to say? Oh, I got a little geeky story before we start.

11:33 Go.

11:34 My bass player is taking his first vacation since he retired, and he's going to visit his wife, who's visiting her mother, who's elderly, in South Korea.

11:44 Oh, wow.

11:44 And it's the first time he's been to Korea, but he's not at band practice.

11:48 Right. Right.

11:49 So for two weeks. And we wanted to learn this new song. And it's not a new song, but it's new to us. Right. We don't learn new songs. So I found a MIDI file of it. And I got the bass part soloed. And I used a really good bass instrument, virtual instrument, instead of the crappy MIDI things that are built into Windows. And I put a click track on it. And we played to it last night several times. And I'm just thinking to myself, you know, it's just like no big deal to do that kind of stuff today. It was just like, foop, foop, foop, and done. And we have a bass player for rehearsal. Crazy, man.

12:32 It's crazy.

12:32 It's a different world, without a doubt.

12:34 Just so cool.

12:35 And that is not a future we were promised. It's just a future we've discovered.

12:39 Well, yeah. It was a future that was amazing 20, 30 years ago. And now it's just like, oh, yeah, you did that. It's trivial. It's trivial.

12:45 Yeah, it's easy to do.

12:46 I got to say, the MIDI file did cost me $ 8, though. So, there is... Commerce is alive and well on the internet.

12:53 There you go. There's still some money to be made.

12:56 All right.

12:56 So I put out on the social medias this idea of the future we were promised and like what were the things you think about when you think about the future you expected. And I more or less ordered it in the list that people asked the most. And let me, I'll call out some of the folks. So what do you think was the number one?

13:13 Well, I think from a baby boomers perspective, most of them are dying without ever having a jet pack.

13:19 Yeah. Jet packs. A good one. It's on the list, but number one, that was a fifties. Yeah. By a mile was flying.

13:24 Car, flying cars. That's how we met my friend.

13:26 That's how we met was me talking about the molar car, which of course is obviously disappeared. Right?

13:31 Yeah.

13:32 So a call out to Devin Goble and little John and Corey Robinson and Wad fan all said flying cars. And to be clear, You don't really want a flying car. What you want is no traffic. You want no waits. Because we've built flying cars that exist today. Terra Fugia is a roadable airplane. It didn't quite finish its qualifications as a road car. But what it was was a two-seater car that you could drive on the road whose wings folded up. And then you could take it to the airport, unfold, and fly away. It got light sport certification from the FAA in 2011. And so it was a real product. Now, a Chinese company called Geely bought it up, and it's basically disappeared at that point. But it never took off because it's got problems, right? There's

14:26 another version, a version called the PAL-V, which, again, also– exists. And this is more of a rotable gyrocopter, so unpowered rotary aircraft. It's certified, but it got certification both by the FAA and by the National Transport. So it's truly a car and a flying machine. But same thing, you go to the airport, you accelerate down the runway, your gyrocopter spins up and off you go.

14:50 The things that I've seen that look promising anyway, and who knows if they are, obviously not because we don't have one yet, Are things based on drone technology? Yeah.

15:00 Let's get there because I want to wrap up this, the original flying car idea before we get into what we call eVTOL. All right, cool. Because the reality is nobody actually wants to fly. It's freaking hard.

15:10 Yeah.

15:10 Right? It is, right? You need to have two licenses, a driver's license and a pilot's license. Like, none of that's easy. And all flying machines are noisy.

15:20 Yeah.

15:20 If you are a helicopter pilot flying in urban areas, you're required to stick over, stay over– noise zones, so down rivers and industrial areas and things like that, people don't like them around.

15:32 And people get very suspicious when there's helicopters in.

15:34 The air that are hovering around. Black helicopters.

15:38 Yeah, this just happened recently. The Amtrak inspections, track inspections were going on over the last month and big helicopters were hovering over you know, railroad tracks and they go through cities and stuff. So people naturally get nervous. Hey, what is that?

15:58 What is that?

15:59 And the mayor actually of new London actually had to put a Facebook post. I was like, look, this is nothing crazy. This is just doing track inspection. We expected this. It's the Amtrak inspectors, you know, go back to your homes.

16:14 Yeah.

16:14 Take a breath. You're going to be fine.

16:16 Yeah.

16:16 I would also argue that GPS, Google Maps, especially with traffic data, has changed driving fundamentally. I know where I'm going. I plug it in to really know is the road closed or what's the rest route, that kind of thing. Exactly. We've done a lot of optimization that way. And then you have the Ubers and the Lyfts of the world.

16:37 If you really don't want to pay attention, let somebody else drive for you. We can talk about the problems of gig economy and stuff. But, you know, that product uses too.

16:43 Speaking of trains, they also have trains where you can drive your car into a train car.

16:47 Yeah.

16:48 And park it there and then go take the train. And when you get out, you got your car.

16:52 You got your car. That's the channel experience.

16:55 Yeah.

16:56 So let's talk about eVTOLs, which in general, these are not personally owned vehicles. They are air taxis. And so, yeah, taking drone technology, you know, because the personal version is going to be $ 100, 000 plus.

17:11 Sure.

17:12 You know, maybe there's some market for it, but you're likely to need some kind of pilot's license. The most advanced of these or the most real of these is in China. It's called the Ehang EH216. So, it's a two-seat autonomous flying taxi. And they've made about 300 of them over the past few years. But they're not …

17:32 commercial product per se like they're not flying between key destinations you can get a ride on one but it's mostly like novelty flights so at at the harbin ice and snow world show you can do a 10 minute ride in one of these taxis for 500 rimby which is about 70 or so But, you know, it's just a 10-minute fly around and back again. Like actually going point to point, even though there's several hundred of them, they really have not got any schedule of flying.

17:59 Yeah.

17:59 In the U.S., there are two products that are in fairly far advanced certification with the FAA. One by Joby Aviation and one by Archer Aviation. Both of them are four-pasture vehicles plus a pilot, so not autonomous.

18:14 Right.

18:14 And they use variations on the tilt rotor ducted fan approaches. So they're electric vehicles. fan based. So they're quieter than helicopters cause they have multiple fans, but they're still pretty noisy and they do need a pilot. When the closest thing to an autonomous fly taxi in the U S is a thing called whisk, which is backed by Boeing.

18:32 I don't know if that's an advantage or a disadvantage. It's in much earlier stages, but to carry that droney concept of multi road or fixed wing and so forth. Right. Many of the other, uh, products out there, the Lillian's and so forth. It got funding, spent too long building, ran out of money. There's lots of failed projects like that.

18:55 But for the most part, they're all too noisy, flight restrictions and so forth. It's going to be very tough to make these into products. But the air taxi model point to point is pretty close. We might get that future.

19:06 Yeah.

19:07 And I imagine... Because of the popularity of those things, the prices will be less than, you know, chartering a private jet or that kind of thing.

19:17 Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean, say an air taxi sort of sets the price for it, right? Right. It should be cheaper than a point-to-point helicopter.

19:23 Right.

19:24 You know, so the $ 100 range, like that's very feasible.

19:27 Sure.

19:27 To make that happen. If you can get rid of the pilot and literally be autonomous, you know, that's a big cost factor. Pilots get well paid as well as should be. They're qualified specialists. All right. Next topic. Self-driving cars.

19:40 Yeah.

19:41 Our friend Dominic Beyer mentioned this one, but lots of people think about self-driving cars. There is a rating system for self-driving. Level zero is considered no automation, although that might still be blind spot alerts, collision and lane departure warnings, that kind of thing. Your level ones are your adaptive cruise control, you know, distance maintaining cruise control.

19:58 You and I both have that.

19:59 Keeping you in a lane, that kind of thing. Level two is what they call partial automation. So now you're steering, accelerating, braking, but the driver must be available at any time to take control.

20:08 Like Teslas.

20:10 That's the official level of a Tesla is a level two. Although entirely too many people use it in level three, which would be conditional automation where you don't really need to pay attention until the system asks for it. But let's be clear, by the time a Tesla is beeping at you, you're in danger. You might die. And people have.

20:30 Level four, high automation, no driver, no supervision, but limited domains.

20:35 That's Waymo.

20:36 Right. And then level five, the thing nobody's ever achieved, drive anywhere, anytime, any weather, on any road with no restrictions. And we've never pulled that off.

20:43 So, first of all, a couple of stories here. Yeah. My sound guy slash roadie has a Tesla and he brags about outsmarting the thing that lets you know that you're in tries to keep it safe. Yeah, that lets you know you're not paying attention.

21:03 Yeah.

21:03 So, apparently, if you avert your eyes down, you know, to your phone, let's say.

21:07 Yeah, the camera sees that.

21:09 Camera sees it and says, ah, stop, you got to look ahead. So, what he does is he wears sunglasses.

21:14 So, he can't see his eyes.

21:16 I swear to God, he's telling this story and I'm like, and you're proud of that? Yeah.

21:20 Endangering your life. I know folks who've hung a picture in front of that camera of their face.

21:25 Yeah.

21:26 It doesn't trigger it.

21:27 No.

21:27 Yeah.

21:28 Stupid yeah it's like remind me never to drive with you.

21:30 Yeah no kidding but if if you're in the right city and that city list right now is what phoenix san fran la austin atlanta miami dallas houston san antonio orlando you can get a waymo right no driver fully automated uh there is a ability for a moat operator to take control of the vehicle although they don't really drive it so much as they tell the vehicle what to do it doesn't sound driving You'll notice something in common with all those cities. Weather's very mild there because there are challenges with weather, of course. Although all those places have rain, and these machines drive more carefully in the rain, but they do drive. So they are level four, just regional. And I've seen some accidents happen with Waymos. Yeah,

22:10 and stuff does go wrong, but it's rare enough that it makes the news. They are supposedly going to expand into Denver, and that means actually managing snow. So we'll see how that actually goes.

22:21 Can I ask you, this might be in your notes already, but I understand that China has a very developed automatic taxi and car system.

22:29 They're going down that path as well, very much based on Waymo. But it's the same thing. These systems, because they use LIDAR, need very detailed maps of their operating areas.

22:40 Right.

22:41 And so it just takes time to build up the map set. Yeah. And so that's been the only thing that's worked so far. So limited areas, but fairly effective for most cases, especially from a taxi role. This is good enough. Okay. And so, understand, this is just a long tail problem. There's so many edge cases. It's going to be very tough for us to ever get to level five. Goodness knows when that's going to happen.

23:01 Right.

23:01 That being said, I would be remiss to not mention Aurora. So, this is on the semi-trailer truck side, the heavy truck side.

23:07 All right.

23:08 And Aurora builds the electronics for several cars. Truck manufacturers, and they're actually operating point-to-point routes. So between logistic hubs doing automated highway driving without a person on board.

23:21 Yeah.

23:21 So between Dallas and Houston, between Fort Worth and El Paso, like these kinds of deserty areas with good weather conditions. And they just go from one logistics hub at the edge of the city to another logistics hub at the edge of the city.

23:32 You know, I don't remember– what show number it was or what year it was but the first time we talked about this we talked about uber and self-driving cars in the same show and it was at a live what maybe a code mash or something like that.

23:46 Possibly or it might have been that conference.

23:48 Yeah it might have been that conference yeah i think it was actually that conference yeah but uh at the time you know we speculated that That tractor-trailer trucks would be the first, you know, casualty.

24:00 Because they have the most economic advantage, right?

24:03 Right.

24:03 Because a tractor-trailer driver, which, by the way, is one of the best-paying jobs for someone with only a high school education and employs a huge number of people in the U.S. So, it's a big deal if this gets disrupted and it's likely to be. By law, they only drive eight hours a day.

24:16 Yeah.

24:16 So, that pretty much means that truck is parked. 16 hours a day and if you could automate that without a driver so that it was fully utilized literally three times the utilization like that drives down the cost of goods like you think about a refrigerated truck moving produce yeah the idea that it can get that produce fresher to the to the locations that it needs to be it's a big deal it adds up it's a huge deal yeah it will change economies while also creating a huge disruption employment and it's one of those things where the If you can make it work at that 24-hour cadence, the non-automated trucks will just not be able to make money.

24:54 The change will happen very rapidly.

24:57 The other thing that you could foresee happening before that is you have the driver driving eight hours and then sleeping eight hours and then you know, being in the car for awake for the 16 hour for the other eight hours.

25:11 Well, and arguably if you can only drive eight hours a day, just drive in the city where the machine can't handle it. All the long range stuff done by automation. Right. So you get better utilization.

25:19 So you get the best.

25:20 Like you're exactly right. A hybrid. A hybrid.

25:22 Yeah.

25:22 Is a great answer.

25:23 Okay.

25:24 Let's keep moving. We've got lots of topics to cover next on the list. Then Corey Robertson called this one specifically fusion power. Oh, fusion.

25:32 Fusion power.

25:33 Been 20 years away for the past 70 years. And the last time we did a Geek Out of Fusion was 2017. Yeah. When I did an update after doing the triple set of shows.

25:45 Yeah.

25:46 We did the update. And back then, I talked about the joint European Taurus, which was actually from 1997. They had their biggest run. They got 16 megawatts of power out for 24 megawatts of heating. That's not good. Far more energy went in than came out. ITER, which is the huge project in France that all these countries are contributing to, was under construction and was going to have first plasma in 2025. It didn't make it. Really? All the fusion was pretty much just government-funded. Although that was around the time, and I mentioned at the time, that Commonwealth Fusion was partnering with MIT to make what would become SPARC, and that was using high-powered– superconductive magnets and we hear we talk about we hear about spark again

26:32 in 2021 when they actually build their first revco magnet now a little fusion recapper for those remember we're trying to make a sun and the way stars work is with gravity right that you have enough gravity to press hydrogen atoms together so they fuse in the helium atoms and emit a lot of energy and that fusion continues up the chain from helium over to lithium and so forth We don't have that much gravity, so we have to contain it with magnetic fields. There's a few different ways to go about this with inertial confinement and so forth, but let's talk about the magnetic field one. The strength of the field matters. In the case of the joint European Taurus jet, they were just using copper coils cooled

27:11 with water. Magnet can only be up to maybe a Tesla from that. The ITER project, which by the way still isn't functioning, is using niobium-10 superconductors. And they can put out about three Teslas of field. The Spark demonstrator, which may actually get done before ITER, you can actually get niobium tin up to nine or 10 Teslas, but it can do 20 Teslas. And in fact, that's what they demonstrated in 2021, is that they built a REBCO coil.

27:40 And that's challenging because REBCO superconductors are not a metal. Niobium tin, they're both metals. You can make them into wire. REBCOs are actually ceramics. So how do you make this into a coil? Well, you have to spread this stuff on a tape and then use the tape to wind it. It took a long time to get that right. But making more powerful coils, more powerful magnetic fields means you can make a smaller, more efficient fusion reaction. Next big milestone in 2022 was the National Ignition Foundation. This is Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Their real business is understanding how nuclear explosions work. This was a side project for them. But they did what we call fusion ignition, which is you

28:21 have enough fusion that more energy comes out of the reaction than went into it. So this is in 2022, where two megajoules of laser energy being fired at a halorum creates three megajoules of fusion energy. That's a big deal. No one had ever done that before. That's a Q of 1.54. Anything above a Q of 1 means you got out more energy you put in. Now, that being said, lasers are not that efficient. So, well, yeah, they made a 2 megajoule laser. We are using megajoules here because it's the total energy over time as opposed to instantaneous energy.

29:04 It took 300 megajoules of energy to make that 2 megajoule laser beam. So, this is still way behind in the energy equation. But, it is we can make a fusion reaction that emits more energy than we put into it. And they have repeated and improved that project since then.

29:23 Well, that's encouraging. What are your thoughts on it?

29:26 It is very much so. I don't think inertial confinement is the way forward. And believe me, we're going to talk about more problems in fusion before we get to the end of this. But I think the talk of Mac approaches are more sustainable. And, and so, but it's good to get that experiment done to actually demonstrate that they've been working on that experiment for many, many years. Uh, the laser system is very old. It could be improved, but that's huge amounts of money. Uh, so goodness knows when that, what that'll actually look like. Uh, I'm going to switch over. China has a reactor called the East reactor, uh, And their real experiment is sustainable plasma. So this is a Takamak style, like the donut style. Same as JET,

30:04 same as ITER. There's a bunch that work this way. Their first plasma was back in 2006. But their goal was, can you do really long runs? Because that high energy run, the JET run in 1997, that was the record for many years, is literally several seconds. You know, five, six, seven seconds. That's all it did. What China's East reactor was trying to do is, could you actually run this for long enough that it would be a meaningful amount of energy? And so in 2025, they hit their record where they've sustained 120 million degree plasma, so that's real fusion temperatures, for 18 minutes. So dramatically longer than anything else go on. The reality here is we're at a point with these superconducting tachymax now where it's about the

30:46 control systems. And while the Chinese project didn't actually do this, there is a lot of work today on using machine learning models to adjust the magnetic fields to keep the plasma combined. for longer and longer times. Today, if we're talking about fusion, we need to talk about ITER, who was supposed to go first plasma in 2025. Current date now is 2034.

31:09 We've been talking about ITER ever since we've been talking about fusion.

31:12 Because it's been a story ever since. They are building the thing. They've poured enough money into it, but their goal is to get to a Q of 10. The current record is 1.5 So that would be I put in 50 megawatts of heating, I get out 500 megawatts of thing. That's impressive. It still won't be enough to be really productive. They would want to build another reactor after that, but this is the large-scale project. And the funny thing is they're so far behind schedule, I wouldn't be surprised if Commonwealth Fusion and Spark actually deliver before them.

31:42 It's really going to be a question on the read. But there have been some great experiments, including famous AI-related experiments like DeepMind worked with the Swiss Tachymac to actually use reinforcement looming to improve plasma. So we're at the point now where we can make the plasma. We're starting to get real run times. But now we get into the next set of problems. And one of the largest problems that you can face with now is what they call the fuel problem. So 100 million degree plasmas that you can do fusion with are hydrogen-based, right? Specifically, heavy isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is a hydrogen atom with one neutron. Deutridium is a hydrogen atom with two neutrons. Deuterium is common. You can get it out

32:25 of seawater. It's that stuff we call heavy water. It's easy to find. But tritium... It has a short half-life. It decays constantly. And so you have to make it in reactors. Today, it's primarily made in fission reactors where neutrons from the reactor bombard a lithium blanket, which is a catalytic reaction. It doesn't destroy the lithium, but it does produce tritium as a byproduct. But the worldwide production of tritium today is in the kilograms because the main thing it's used for is nuclear weapons. Ah.

32:57 Right.

32:58 So we don't need very much of it. And if you are actually going to run a power plant with DT fusion, because it's the lowest temperature fusion, only 100 to 200 million degrees, you need tons of tritium. Now, the current theory has been because the byproduct of DT fusion is a lot of neutrons that will use the fusion reactor. To breed its own tritium. The challenge here is can you breed more tritium in that process than you're consuming to operate it, which nobody's been able to demonstrate.

33:34 Because it's kind of counterintuitive. Like, how would that even be possible that as the fusion reaction of a tritium breakdown for fusion spits out enough neutrons to actually make more tritium that you're in a positive breeding cycle?

33:49 Mm-hmm.

33:49 Mm-hmm. There's another solution to this, which is to stop using DT, deuterium tritium, because the neutrons are also a problem. One of the things that JET showed was that DT fusion destroys the inside of the reactor. You can't contain neutrons in a magnetic field. They're not magnetically reactive. So they go right into the walls. Now, normally, that's how you'd actually make power, is you'd collect those neutrons in water.

34:18 and that would create heat, and you'd boil that water, pressurize it, spin a steam turbine. So once again, fanciest reactor in the world, boiling water like a kettle.

34:28 That's what they all do, mostly.

34:29 It's unfortunate, but it's true.

34:31 Yeah.

34:32 But another approach is the one we talked about in a past show, which was tri-alpha energy, or TAE. These guys want to do proton-boron fusion. Yeah. Boron is element four rather than element one. It's a bit heavier. You collide it with a proton, which is essentially an ironized hydrogen atom. It does not emit a lot of neutrons.

34:53 It emits alpha particles, and you can collect those. Those are charged, so they can be neutralized by the field. And part of what TAE's approach was that you pulse these reactions. You build up two groups of plasma at either end of a tube and then you fire them at each other and they fuse when they impact. And that burst of magnetic energy actually turns into the way you collect that energy off of the field. It's complicated.

35:23 It's very cool. So it would be a modern way to collect electricity in a pulsed form with no neutrons, so non-destructive as well. Here's the problem with proton-boron fusion. If you're trying to get to between 100 and 200 million degrees for DT fusion, you need to get between 1 and 2 billion degrees to do proton-boron fusion. That's a lot more heat. Do we have magnetic fields strong enough?

35:49 Good question. Not the primary problem. The other thing that happens when you start to get to those kinds of temperatures and pressures is that sometimes the way the electrons break down emit X-rays. Now, that's hazardous, but you can absorb it with heavy metals. But it's also a waste of energy, right? You're trying to collect all that energy and actually use it to make electricity. And so we might lose more energy to the x-rays than we're getting from the higher energy fusion. So I just get the scope that there are so many problems to solve in this space. It's not simple. We're further away than you think.

36:30 And that's why it hasn't happened yet. All those reasons.

36:33 And with that, why don't we take a break and then we'll do the back half.

36:36 Sounds good. We'll be right back after these very important messages.

36:43 And we're back. It's done at rocks. It's a geek out the future. We were promised. I'm Richard Campbell. That's Carl Franklin. Hey, we did all of the, you know, cars and, and of course fusion, like the most popular ones right off the bat. Why don't we get into some travel-related stuff, starting with supersonic travel. Okay. So we had Concorde. It was announced in 62. It first flew in 69. They only ever built 20 of them, of which only 14 went into service. They had about 100 seats in them, all quote-unquote business class, but this was 1970s business class, which is pretty basic. So commercial service started in 76, just in time for the oil crisis, which jacked up the prices because it burns a lot

37:24 more fuel to flew at supersonic speeds than to fly subsonically. And then, of course, there was that terrible crash of Air France in Paris in 2000, which they did a bunch of repairs and improvements to the vehicle to make it safer. It returned to flight November of 2001, just after 9-11. Yeah. And that finally ended it in 2003.

37:45 Cursed by bad timing.

37:47 And to that degree. But also, it was just expensive. And I think the bigger thing was air travel had changed, right? Yeah. With business, if you're going to spend that price on Concorde just to cut the time in half, so instead of a seven-hour trip from New York to London, you now have a three-and-a-half-hour trip to New York to London, it's still long enough that you want to be comfortable.

38:08 And they never really improved the interiors that much. There wasn't a lot of room in that vehicle. It was quite narrow. It's a supersonic aircraft. It was all about the speed.

38:14 Yeah.

38:15 Yeah.

38:16 Where for the same amount of money, you could fly a 777 first class with a live flat seat and nice meals and– You didn't want to get out of that seat. It was so nice.

38:27 Right.

38:27 And that's the thing. It not only happened with air travel, but with train travel too. It's like, you know, instead of.

38:34 Yeah. Just make it more luxurious.

38:36 Yeah.

38:36 Make it more luxurious. Give everybody free Wi-Fi, give them some free drinks, you know, and then nobody wants to, nobody cares that it's taking a longer time.

38:46 No. And that sort of, you know, we gave up a supercharged travel just wasn't worth it. Now, that being said, you've got companies like Boom Supersonic trying to build a new vehicle that's a supersonic aircraft, 60 to 80 seats or so. They've flown a demonstrator. But they haven't really addressed any of the real issues. It's still going to have just modern materials. Maybe it'll be more efficient. I wonder if they won't get past the biz jet version of it. It won't really be an airliner. And then there's NASA's X-59 where they're trying to change the shape of sonic booms because one of the things that happened to Concorde when it became popular was we didn't allow overland flights. The sonic booms were too disruptive. They rattle

39:21 windows and wake people up and people don't like that. Right. But the X 59 is demonstrating that we can make sonic booms that are more like a car door closing than an earth window shaking explosion. And that's actually got the FAA talking about changing regulation where we're not saying no supersonic flights, just your boom can't be louder than X.

39:41 You know, I knew if they put Chief O'Brien in charge of that, that he could figure out a way to lower the sonic boom impact.

39:47 Yeah, he can. So is it going to be enough? I don't know. Because still, the same old thing. Cut the flight in half, but more money. But what if you cut the flight by like 10 times? So SpaceX Starship. One of the proposals that Elon's made with Starship, because it's a fully reusable spacecraft, is under an hour to any point on the Earth.

40:09 Right.

40:09 Because full- Because it goes up so fast and comes down so fast.

40:13 Yeah.

40:13 It's just a parabola.

40:14 A full low-Earth orbit is only 90 minutes. You only have to go halfway. Now, you'd have to have these launch pads away from city, so you'd be going out to probably a floating platform. You and maybe 100 of your friends load up into this rocket and 45 minutes later, you're landing on your tail on the other side of the world. So, take a flight like the one I do regularly, Vancouver-Auckland, 15 hours on the 787. It's a long way. You knock that down to 45 minutes.

40:41 That's pretty crazy.

40:42 That's crazy. Now, admittedly, you still have a couple of three hours at the airport getting out there and so forth, and you're going to have some time on the other end. So, maybe it's four or five hours.

40:51 You're going to have to pull some Gs.

40:52 Well, that's the other part of this, right? Like, Typical crew spacecraft is 3Gs. That's fine when you got a bunch of astronauts, but a bunch of fat old business people with stents and hard blood pressure, you might kill somebody with that stuff. Plus, I mean, Starship has only gone into orbit exactly once at the time of this recording.

41:15 It's going to do some more. It's a cargo ship. It wasn't until the 86th flight of Falcon 9 that they flew a crew. So it's going to take some time to mature Starship enough to say, is this safe for crews? And we've gone back to capsule style flying because it's safe, right? You can pull away from an exploding rocket and so forth. The way Starship's designed, it might be more like shuttle, which is to say there's no way to get out of the vehicle. So if the vehicle fails, everybody dies. So- But when you, you know, I'm only talking about long haul flights that we can do today. Let's talk about long haul flights you couldn't do right now. Like they're now, Qantas is doing a specialized version of an A350 to fly from Sydney to

42:01 London direct. Wow. That's over 24 hours on a flight.

42:04 Wow.

42:04 It's the other side of the world. The fact that you could knock that down to less than an hour.

42:08 Yeah.

42:09 Like that might be worth it.

42:11 Wow.

42:11 So.

42:12 There's possibilities there, but it's only if we get down to those kinds of times. So, it's enough savings. So, you don't care. Like, you're not going to have a bathroom. You're not going to get out of your seat. You're on a starship. You're going to be packed into a memory phone seat, strapped in a six-point harness, and you're there.

42:27 You might have your phone and you might have a barf bag, but that's all you're going to have.

42:30 There's another hidden problem there, which is extreme jet lag. Extreme, you know?

42:36 Yeah, it's a great question. Is it more jet lag or less jet lag if you travel that fast? Is it the speed and distance that matters, or is it the time in the airplane that matters?

42:47 Yeah, I think it's the time change. I think it's the time change, right? I mean, if you take off at 6 p.m., right, where you are, and you wake up at, At 45, you don't even go to sleep. 45 minutes later, it's 6 a.m. You're screwed. I mean, you have to acclimate over a day at least.

43:10 I think you do your acclimation at home, you know, a day or two before you start sleeping to your destination schedule.

43:16 Yeah, that's a good, I mean, you know.

43:18 All right. Let's keep moving. You mentioned his personal jet pack, so let's talk about him. Okay. So, we've seen him, 1961, the Bell Rocket Belt Pack. This is a hydrogen peroxide rocket engine. You saw it in the James Bond film, Thunderball, 1964 or 1965. They only had like 30 seconds of flight time. Yeah.

43:38 And it was tethered too, right?

43:39 So, very dangerous.

43:41 Yeah.

43:41 Yeah.

43:42 Today, there's a couple of companies making jetpacks, but now they're using jet turbines. So jetpack aviation is one of them. Gravity industry is another. Jetpack aviation is very much that backpack concept. They've got several turbines on the back, up to 10 minutes of flight time. That's pretty legit. You're not going to go that far, but it's kind of an indulgence running on kerosene. But gravity industries are the guys making the Iron Man-like jetpack. So you actually have two turbines on each hand. as well as ones on your back. So you are the flying machine. How you move your hands is how you do your maneuvering. It takes a lot of practice, but these are actually being used for search and rescue and military applications today.

44:26 That makes sense.

44:27 So I've seen the demonstration of a guy who's a search and rescue guy with an emergency kit for an injured hiker way up on a hill. And the fact that this guy could take off and fly up that hill rather than have to climb it in a minute and get to the person who's injured and be able to apply first aid right away while waiting for an extraction crew.

44:48 It's powerful.

44:49 That's really good.

44:49 And there's, been demonstration of military applications for shipboarding very dangerous process yeah for coast guard or our navy to try and get on another ship by helicopter where you have to hover very risky the idea that individuals could come up on all sides of a ship in these little packs and land and you know.

45:08 You're you're at such a disadvantage when you're trying to board a ship because they have the home turf and.

45:13 They have the home turf they're already in place yeah but To go down to human size, multiple targets moving simultaneously, actually probably the best way to board a ship. So military product, without a doubt.

45:22 Yeah, okay.

45:23 So that sort of come true. Again, we get back to the personal flight travel, which is you just want to travel that was quick. And these are not long-range devices. These are quick point-to-point devices for a particular app. Okay. Here's a random one. This is from Christian Wadengard. I did not put this on my list. He put it on the list. He asked about pneumatic tube travel.

45:44 Oh, God.

45:46 So, this comes from the.

45:48 Pneumatic tubes are only cost-effective at the bank, right?

45:53 You're exactly right, right? It goes all the way back to the Victorian era, mid-1800s. For mail, right? And memos and things, little tubes you could fire around. But in 1864, in the Crystal Palace, there was the pneumatic railway. So literally human-sized, get in this vehicle, pneumatic pressure moves the tube from point to point. Very cool. Very exciting. And then science fiction grabbed on with the evacuated tube concept, continent flying, like you can do supersonic speeds when you have no air in the way. And this then turns into Hyperloop, right? Back in 2013.

46:26 Right.

46:27 Elon, the old Elon, you know, the guy who flew his sports car into space, not the guy who.

46:32 Yeah, the Elon we like.

46:33 Yeah, the one that was easier to like. Clearly annoyed about the problems with the LA to San Francisco train, said, why don't we just do this thing, right? Where you just revive that whole idea of being able to fly airline speeds on the ground by doing an evacuated tube maglev train at very high speeds.

46:51 I haven't heard too much in the news about Hyperloop lately. Yeah.

46:55 Why?

46:55 There's a reason. It's– well, starters, the same way we– same problem with monorails. Changing tracks, very difficult. Maintaining that evacuated tube over hundreds of miles, extremely difficult. But the main stopper when you're talking about people is the failure modes are not survivable. You're moving at 700, 800 miles an hour and the tube depressurizes, the deceleration is going to turn everybody into strawberry jam. The tube actually breaks or anything goes wrong in any respect, everybody dies. Like there's all the failure modes involved, everybody died. You just can't move that fast and not have safe failure modes.

47:36 Virgin Hyperloop went the farthest with this. And one of the last proposals was actually cargo transport between Vegas and L.A. Interesting idea. Cargo doesn't care about acceleration near as much and so forth. But you know what else cargo doesn't care about?

47:48 Speed. Yeah.

47:49 Not that important, right? Trucks are cheaper. Hybrid was never going to be cheap. So the idea is largely done. Okay. Uh, from a listener, Hassan Savarin asked, what about the next internet? Is there a next internet? I think, I don't think there's a next internet. I think the next internet is the internet.

48:05 Well, the next internet is, it's what it's today versus what it was yesterday.

48:09 I mean.

48:09 Sure.

48:10 And I think it's already gone through a couple of transformations.

48:12 And that trend is going to continue, I think.

48:14 I totally agree. Uh, especially when you start thinking about moving away from browsers and agents are what communicates over the internet. You don't, You didn't actually want to surf the web per se. You just wanted answers. The fact that we're starting to have new tools that can do that for us is kind of interesting.

48:31 And comes with a whole bunch of new security concerns.

48:35 Oh, by far. And data quality concerns. Like we've dealt with all of this and we'd have to deal with it again. And then when you start thinking about post-smartphone, like virtual reality stuff or augmented reality, goggles, glasses, that kind of thing, same thing. The real thing that changed the internet is the interface changes. Yeah. It's been the browser for a long time. It wasn't always the browser.

48:58 Once upon a time, it was gopher, you know, then it was, it's been the browser for the long time, but it could be changed again.

49:06 If you're Joe Finney, it's back to windows apps.

49:08 So I love it. That was such a great conversation. Another one from a listener, quantum computing. Are we ever going to have ubiquitous quantum computing?

49:17 Yeah.

49:17 Okay.

49:19 From what I understand, and it's very little, from what I understand, you wouldn't do the same kinds of things with quantum computing that you do now with conventional computing.

49:31 They are not general purpose computers. They are specialized computers for very specific tasks. They are a kind of supercomputer. And for their specific tasks, so things like molecular simulation and physics problems and prime number cryptography, which is the scary one, they are extraordinary at those things. We don't have enough algorithms for them. We certainly haven't built big enough ones yet, but we've done a post-quantum show for a reason. The threat to cryptography is real, and there are solutions that make us immune. So they're going to move away from that. But that just means that You're not going to have a smartphone with a quantum computer into it. It's probably just going to be a cloud device.

50:11 The question is, when would you use a quantum computer? And I suspect it's when you're not going to decide that. You can envision with the new tools that are emerging today around large language models and agents and things, you describing a problem that you want to work on. Say you want to make a new material or a new device or something. And then that tool decomposes that problem into a set of steps. And one of those steps could be best served by a quantum computing calculation. And then it helps prepare that calculation, sends it off to a service to compute it, along with all the other computing workloads it is doing around that to assemble your solution.

50:46 Quantum computing is going to be another platform in the cloud at some point. Okay. Sam Sipp asked about robotic maids.

50:56 Oh, well, okay.

50:57 All right. Your personal home device, right?

51:00 Yeah, the Rosie Jetson kind of thing.

51:03 Yeah, that's it. The Rosie the robot kind of thing. And let's face it, there's some interesting progress being made in here. But mostly– China. China's done a bunch. Of course, when we think about North America, it's like the Tesla Optimus and the figure robot. And you've seen very carefully curated demos of their robots picking things up and putting them away.

51:27 And, I mean– Some funnier things that I've seen with robots are them doing sports challenges.

51:33 Oh, yeah.

51:33 And totally failing. Like running into a wall.

51:37 Well, or running so fast they cannot stop.

51:39 Yeah, they can't stop.

51:41 Yeah.

51:42 Getting beamed.

51:42 There's a reason we run as fast as we can run. That limit is not our muscles so much as our ability to stop. And now that they've made robots that can run faster, they're finding out they cannot stop.

51:51 That's how that works. It's kind of funny.

51:54 But the real linchpin when we talk about a household robot is the hand. Yeah. Hands are incredible. Our human hands are extraordinary. to be able to pick up a sock, something soft, pick up a wine glass, something brittle, pick up a banana. Like those are not small problems.

52:15 I still have a hard time believing at 58 years old that a human such as myself can play guitar. And after practicing for so many years, it just, it's like drinking water, you know? And, and I just marvel at the mechanics in the memory and the muscle memory and stuff. Cause you know, it, You tend to think when you see people doing something ridiculously cool with their hands that they're thinking about it, like they're concentrating on it.

52:43 No, they couldn't.

52:43 They couldn't.

52:44 Well, you're my proof point, Carl, about what practice actually means, right? I've seen you do it. I've traveled with you for days and days and days and you practice every day and it's practice. Yeah, it is. It's pressing against the edges of your ability. It's not playing a song.

52:59 Yeah.

53:00 It's practice and it's you are– modifying the neurons in your spine yes to have those.

53:07 Reflex have the memory i'm you can see in the in the video but we can see each other but you guys can't see us but i have my guitar on the stand and that's because every single day after the last gig that i did where i completely screwed up the solo to peg by steely dan oh god it.

53:24 Was horrible did you really oh man you ate it.

53:28 I totally ate it. And it was because I hadn't practiced because I had a finger injury, right?

53:33 Right.

53:33 Your hands weren't.

53:34 And so, I hadn't practiced and I hadn't practiced. But now, every single day, I pick that thing up and I play that solo and all the other hard solos and things. And it's just for the point of muscle memory. The next gig, I just want it to flow.

53:48 Yeah.

53:49 And it will. But it's still amazing to me.

53:51 It has to be there.

53:52 Yeah.

53:52 Yeah. So, you know, the other thing you think when you think about one of these robots, there's a few other concerns around these robots. One is, okay, I get having a hand articulate enough to handle all the different materials. There's another question for it to assess and go, ah, that's a pile of dog poop.

54:06 Yeah.

54:07 Don't pick it up.

54:08 Right.

54:08 Right. You know, this is the curated demo you've never seen is, you know, Baby barf.

54:14 Right.

54:15 Now it's got to go get a mop or get a towel or how to clean that up. You know, a little kid can do that, but our software is not that good. Figuring that stuff out is really hard.

54:24 Well, if you think about it, the LLMs are smart enough to tell a human how to do it.

54:30 Yeah.

54:30 But it's the interface between interpreting... English language and turning that into mechanical movement, that's the difficult thing for robots. It's easy for them to say or to be presented with.

54:44 They've never done a carefully curated demo of wiping something up. Right. You talk about the thing a hand can do, a human hand can do that's unreproducible, wiping up a spill. It's just not that simple.

54:59 They pretty much have walking down... now yeah fairly well fairly well.

55:04 Yeah but yeah you're right so and it's and i mean why would we have a legged robot because a lot of our houses can only move to be removed around in the legs right i also think that the companies have sabotaged themselves by these constant cases of oh these robots being taken over by a person seeing through the robot so you know when i talk to a civilian normal human about why would you have one of these in there it's like they're spying on me it's like they probably are that's fair Heck, we've got enough problems with robotic vacuums sending ultra-tremendous telemetry out.

55:33 Do you remember we did a show where I think it was Steve Smith had an iPod, an iPad on a stick on a robot wheelie that he could operate around and move around and talk to people with a FaceTime, right?

55:47 Hanselman did that for Microsoft.

55:49 It was Hanselman too, yeah. But I remember Steve Smith doing it as well.

55:52 That's a product.

55:53 Yeah.

55:53 It's pretty cool, actually.

55:55 It's pretty cool. All right. So Yeah, I asked the spouse, you know, what would it take for you to have a robot in the house? And she said, toilets. I'm like, you know, legit. If you had a machine that could reliably clean the toilet, and it doesn't have to be a humanoid, really.

56:09 Right, right.

56:09 As long as you can get around and you can get over a toilet and actually clean it, you probably could.

56:13 If you could have a self-cleaning toilet or a toilet cleaner that sits next to the toilet or rolls in. Something. For Kelly, my wife, it's coffee maker.

56:22 Yeah.

56:22 She said, I want you to invent a robot. She's telling me, I got to invent a robot.

56:25 Yeah, you got to do this.

56:27 You got to invent a robot that brings me a hot, fresh cup of coffee in the morning in bed. I said, well, you know, get a Keurig, plug it in, put it on a timer, and that'll be your alarm clock.

56:36 Yeah.

56:37 No, it's not good enough.

56:38 Not good enough. That's not what you really want. All right. Let's get through a couple more. I have a Star Trek set.

56:44 Yeah.

56:45 So Universal Translator, I think this is solved. I think we got Universal Translation now. I mean, it's through our smartphones, and it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we both have text and speech translation. I now think it's not unusual to flip over my phone and look at a foreign language menu and can figure out what I want to order.

57:05 I've had conversations with people that don't speak English using Google Translate and just put the phone right in the middle. You speak, it speaks English. the other person speak it speaks to you it's.

57:16 Really novel enough and let's face it the communicators of star trek are nothing on the modern smartphone we've vastly exceeded those communicators yeah um what about the tricorder ash asked about what about medical scanners we're getting pretty close You know, everybody's got a wearable now that'll do heart rate, blood ox saturation, ECG, sleep monitoring, activity level.

57:42 Still, it's nothing you could just go in front of somebody.

57:45 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do have handheld ultrasonic scanners now.

57:49 Yeah.

57:50 So, you have to press against the person to do that. But you can look inside them. So, we have some of that capability. And we certainly have.

57:58 I have a continuous glucose monitor.

57:59 Yep. continuous glucose monitoring. That's a little robot. And we now have machine learning models that are analyzing that data and giving us pretty useful feedback these days. Certainly more like that. And then there's all the experiments happening with lab on a chip. So we're getting closer to the idea of, you know, a little bit of spit or a little bit of snot. It's like, this is what you're infected with. Here's the best treat.

58:21 Yeah. I can't wait for that. I just remember the day that I had a cold and I went to the doctor and doctor's like, well, I can't really do anything for you. I said, can you like put it under a microscope and send it to a lab and have them tell me what the bacteria or the virus is? And it turns out viruses are very, very hard to detect under a microscope. In fact, impossible.

58:41 Yeah.

58:41 Because they're so small. Bacteria can be detected, but, and that's what you want.

58:45 Bacteria can be detected.

58:46 I mean, you just want to knock a few obvious ones out. So I'd be interesting.

58:49 Well, you know, if it's not a bad bacteria, you can tell it's a virus and then they can just send you home with chicken soup. What more can you do?

58:55 I mean, one way or the other, they can give you medicines, you know, flu or cold medicines and, And you can either take those and get over in about a week or do nothing and it'll pass in like seven days.

59:04 Right.

59:05 Unless it's particularly virile like COVID or something.

59:08 Unless it's something serious, right? And that's the real thing is you want to be able to test for something serious. One more Star Trek technology. Replicators. George Armstrong asked about replicators, right? And to be clear, the replicator, like the transporter, these were just workarounds for limited budget in Star Trek.

59:23 Yeah.

59:23 They're wildly more advanced than everything else that was in Star Trek. Like, Star Trek makes no sense in this disproportionality of technology. Sure. I mean, that being said, what is DoorDash but basically a food replicator? You pull out your phone, you tell it what you want, and an hour later it appears. That's pretty close, man.

59:41 That's pretty cool.

59:42 Yeah.

59:42 Yeah.

59:43 Yeah, no kidding.

59:44 Do you think of 3D printers as replicators of some kind?

59:47 I think so, yeah. Especially when you get into more of the ecosystem of them. So your little 3D printer may be only working in various kinds of plastic. But that file can be sent to a service and have it made out of titanium. Yeah. Right? Or any other combination of metals. Even we're starting to see versions of laser sintering where they're doing dynamic alloys and coatings.

1:00:08 Isn't it ironic that tea, Earl Grey hot, is probably one of the hardest things to just pull out of thin air? I mean, seriously.

1:00:16 Well, yeah. Although you could easily make a machine that had Earl Grey tea bags or Earl Grey Keurig and just run it.

1:00:23 Yeah, that's true.

1:00:24 There is some 3D printing for food.

1:00:26 I've heard it.

1:00:26 You see these 3D printed like chocolate dust on top of your latte and things like that. Yeah. But yeah, these things are pretty convenient. I would take this another level, too, which is, and I've done this a bunch of time on the coast here now, where I have a broken part. I pull out my phone to take a picture of the part with the recognizer. It tells me what the part is. I select that part on Amazon. Part appears the next day.

1:00:50 Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

1:00:51 It's astonishing, right? You're getting 3D printing or getting replication just done with Amazon.

1:00:58 Right.

1:00:58 Okay, last set. Space stuff.

1:01:01 OK.

1:01:01 And it's mostly just tourism, right? So Keith Hill asked about hotels in orbit. Let's be clear, space tourism exists today. You just need to be a billionaire.

1:01:10 Right.

1:01:10 A Crew Dragon's about $ 100 million to save up for you and three of your friends. Axiom Space will get you to the space station if you want to go. It's just expensive. We're seeing a new generation of space stations starting to come along. So vast aerospace, I think, is the most interesting one, flown on a Falcon Heavy.

1:01:27 These could be the first generation of space hotels. Here's the real problem with all of this, and we have empirical data around this for the inspiration for our flight. You are going to be space sick.

1:01:37 Yeah.

1:01:37 You are going– everybody is space sick. In fact, if you're not space sick, there's something wrong with you. There's a couple astronauts with a genetic defect that make them not space sick. But the difference between an astronaut space sick and a regular person space sick is the astronauts being paid to be there and doesn't care that it takes a couple of days in a six-month flight to recover.

1:01:55 If you've just dropped a lifetime price of a house for one week in space and three of those weeks you're vomiting the whole time, this sucks. Now, your answer is going to be rotating space station, right? 2001 A Space Odyssey, Space Hilton. Now, we've never built one. We will. It's time to start doing experiments with rotating space stations.

1:02:17 But here's the sad part. Why do you want to go to space?

1:02:19 To get away from Earth.

1:02:20 You want to look at the Earth. You want to look at the Earth, right? You want to look out. You can't really see anything else but the Earth. You know what you don't want to see? The Earth wildly spinning around because you're in a space station.

1:02:31 Right.

1:02:31 Everybody who talks about the International Space Station talks about going to the Coppola.

1:02:34 Right.

1:02:35 And they may be floating, but they're staring at the Earth and it's beautiful. If you're in a rotating structure, it's going to make you nauseous to be whipping around like that.

1:02:43 It's not only beautiful, that picture of Earth from space, but it's life-changing.

1:02:47 Yes. No borders.

1:02:48 Because you see no borders, no countries, no– Yeah. different people it's it's one people on one place yeah it's amazing.

1:02:55 Oh no it should be a requirement for any world leader yeah go up and see the world as a whole yeah we we want you to to think that way yeah we'll all be better off for it so it's gonna they this whole laura thurbert thing it's gonna be tough it'll be very interesting to see how they figure this out uh bases on the moon We seem to be on our way. There's a lot of energy around this specifically.

1:03:18 Oh, by the way, we own that now.

1:03:20 Based on the moon.

1:03:20 I didn't know if they told you in Canada, but yeah, the US owns the moon.

1:03:23 Pretty sure there was an agreement, the Space Act 1967.

1:03:27 Anyway.

1:03:31 We're going to have science labs up there with the tourism part. Goodness knows when. I mean, the tourism of the moon is more feasible in low Earth orbit because at least you'd have some gravity. You're only a few days away. You'd spend three days getting there. That would be your space-sick part. Then you'd have some amount of time on the moon, and then you'd have three days coming back. It could be a 10-day trip. Obviously, a lot of technology needs to be advanced. The main thing is in-situ resource utilization, starting to use water on the moon, starting to make stuff with moon materials. That's the current lab experiments we want to get to, the developments that are going on. So this is still decades away, but

1:04:06 genuine progress is being made on that. And then last topic, of course, people ask about Mars colonies. There is no time horizon on this whatsoever. Elon seems to have largely abandoned the subject. It was a daft one anyway. Yeah. Science experiments on the moon totally makes sense. We should have scientists up there learning, understanding that you go from a 10 or two week trip to the moon to a three year trip to Mars. It's going to take you six months to get there. Then you're going to have to wait for orbital conjunction to be able to get back.

1:04:35 If you survive.

1:04:35 So if you survive. There's no rescue modes. There's a bunch of rescue modes for the moon. There's no rescue modes for Mars. You either make it or you don't. There's no reason to want to be on Mars. It's not any more habitable than the moon, really. We're better off if we want to build habitats, building O'Neill cylinders and things like that.

1:04:55 Yeah, I agree.

1:04:56 Research is a good thing. It's still decades away. So it's not the future as we thought it, you know, mostly it was marketed to us, but it's a pretty cool future, you know, and I'm not going to say we don't have problems. We do. There's a bunch of things that people asked about, like universal healthcare that I didn't necessarily fit into that. I don't know that anybody was necessarily promised universal healthcare. I would say as a living in a country that has it would recommend, but you know, it's outside of the spectrum that the Star Trek, utopian life, the post-scarcity. We can see it from here.

1:05:31 We just have to choose to work towards that. And that's a whole other set of battles. And one would argue that the current stupidity that's going on right now is the fight against what post-scarcity looks like, which is how that mindset dies.

1:05:48 Hey, before we leave, can we put on our future-looking... caps for a bit and give our opinions about, let's just say, the next year as the economy and AI converge. Do you have any predictions? I do.

1:06:10 Well, it's funny that you mention that because we happen to be recording on the day that the South Korean stock market took a big dump, like 10% down. And one of the questions was, is this the contagion? Is this the beginning of the decline? It turns out so far it hasn't been, but the day's not over. But often that's the way these things start is with the stock prices of a bunch of the RAM makers, Samsung, Heinex, and so forth, took a hit. We know that AI is over-leveraging our markets. The products are unstable. that the build-out for data centers is kind of outrageous and unnecessarily expensive and not sustainable from the point of view of the costs. So far, the big hyperscalers, the Amazon, Microsoft, Googles,

1:07:03 have been financially stable over this. But you look at companies like Meta and Oracle who are selling bonds and things to try and leverage their builds. That's really getting risky. So we're seeing all the ingredients that reminds me of the dot-com boom ending.

1:07:21 Yeah.

1:07:23 Um, 2027 is going to be tricky for that. You know, we, we, we're hitting the limits. We, these companies have made promises of their investors that they cannot deliver on. When do the investors decide enough's enough?

1:07:35 I read an article, uh, in the wall street journal by Andy Kiesler Kessler, uh, October 11th called how the AI boom ends. And, you know, he's talking about, um, prices, the demand isn't about to let up. And this is the tagline. Demand isn't about to let up, but prices will start plunging by factors of 10.

1:07:57 All right.

1:07:58 So you're already starting to see LLMs on smartphones.

1:08:03 Yep.

1:08:03 Like Quen.

1:08:05 And they're good enough.

1:08:05 Quen has got their, yeah, 80% of the way of what the big ones do. And Quen is good enough. They got it down to like six megabytes or something like that. unbelievable, this model. And so basically, there's a couple of things that come out of this. So if the prices start plunging and it's a race to the bottom, all these big companies that are currently propping up the world economy are going to tank, right? And so that's a big problem for the economy. Now, for people who Yeah.

1:08:40 Yeah. Maybe bringing in $ 50 billion a quarter, but they're spending $ 100. And they're raising their rates to try and get those numbers to make sense. And it's driving customers over to the free models. And so you get into a situation where the debate we've always had is, are they Netscape or are they Google? Both existed during the dot-com boom. Netscape had vanished, having created the dot-com boom.

1:09:15 And Google went on to be relevant. And at this point, with these numbers, they are all Netscape. The companies that are going to survive are the hyperscalers, the ones building all the data centers, Microsoft, Google, Amazon. They appear to be fine.

1:09:32 But the cost of new data centers, or the building of new data centers is practically going to be non-existent it'll probably stall it's the ones that are all right yeah the ones that are existing and owned.

1:09:45 Mel, and I've done this talk where I said, what we're really seeing by those big three is the same thing that the telcos did in 2000. Buy up all of the locations where you can put cell towers so there'll never be a cell tower competitor again. Yeah.

1:10:00 Right?

1:10:00 You couldn't start a cell company today. There's nowhere to put the towers.

1:10:03 Right.

1:10:03 Well, you're watching the big three buy up every location you could reasonably put a data center. So they'll never be a competitor again. They're locking up their lead. And it doesn't matter what they put in them. It's just a big box. They can put anything they want in them.

1:10:17 So the options for running your own local LLM become probably a lot cheaper because the prices are going to fall. That's going to affect the chips and the NVIDIA's chips and the hardware that you would run it on. So that's going to become more and more attractive to companies, especially where privacy concerns are. And I've talked about that.

1:10:39 Sure.

1:10:39 All along. Which since we failed the privacy so badly.

1:10:43 Yeah.

1:10:44 You know, the people are just going to want to keep it to themselves. It's the simplest solution. Right. Exactly.

1:10:49 So there is that. But I also don't want to gloss over, you know, what could happen to the economy. Yeah. Like a major, major correction crash.

1:10:57 Yeah. Correction.

1:11:00 Depression?

1:11:01 We'll see.

1:11:01 Who knows?

1:11:02 Yeah, we'll see. We've been through this before. It ends in a couple of years. Those will not be fun years.

1:11:07 Right.

1:11:08 Well, I've been out of the stock market since March, I think. And I had all my cash just sitting there. And today, I purchased some more silver.

1:11:18 Wow.

1:11:19 Even though silver was up at $ 127 or $ 128, it's back down to less than half that. But it's still up, what, $ 150? 20, 150% from where I bought it first, but it's still, I think that it's at a low where it's a good investment, especially if you're going to see a major correction. No, that's what I got.

1:11:43 We'll see.

1:11:43 We'll see. Hang in there. I know what, we're going to be here every Thursday with the new. NET Rocks, no matter what happens.

1:11:50 Yeah. Don't forget the end of the year, there will be the space and energy geek outs. I'm already working on them.

1:11:55 Yep.

1:11:55 All right.

1:11:56 Thanks, Richard.

1:11:57 You bet.

1:11:57 All right, and thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on.

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