31: 10 Breakthrough Technologies

[Music]

Hey everybody and welcome to the Coffee and Code Cast live from Seattle's Pioneer Square

District. This is the Coffee and Code Cast, a weekly live stream tech podcast where we

talk about neither coffee or code. And I'm Kyle Johnson. And I'm Mike Shehan today on

the cast. An exciting topic to cover. This is from MIT's Technology Review. Bill Gates

10, Breakthrough Technologies. We're going to get into that a little bit. Follow up on

I want some show notes and I'm sure Tesla news is probably

here somewhere, Kyle, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, maybe some Tesla news.

Excellent.

I don't want to give anything away.

We're going to spend a lot of our time on this breakthrough

technology piece.

There's really cool, a lot of good stuff in here.

So thanks for joining and send us your questions.

Right on.

Well, let's start right off with some interesting news here,

actually.

In the past week, I just added this to the notes.

Maybe you haven't seen this yet or not.

But Mike joined my team here at the office.

- Fuck man, are you my boss now?

- Well, I'm not your manager.

- Oh okay, that's good.

- So I mean, I can't really,

I mean, I can tell you what to work on

but I really can't tell you what to do.

- I appreciate that, that's good.

That's kind of how I liked the arrangements ago.

That's good.

- How's it going so far?

Am I the overbearing asshole manager?

Like, hit me straight.

- Are you, I wasn't gonna ask you the same question.

So my, the grumpy old man, yeah.

Yeah, it's been a little rough transition for me,

but it's been good.

It's been good, I like it, but it's been fucking rough.

It's been a little difficult, Kyle.

We had quite a conversation before the show,

and actually I wish we would have been recording it,

'cause we had a really good conversation

about kind of all the new guys that are on the team

and all the new energy that they're bringing

and that sort of thing.

It's a really exciting time to be here,

but it's also, in some respects,

a little bit of a frustrating time,

especially for somebody who's new to the project,

learning all these new technologies,

learning a bunch of different things

that you've had no exposure to in the past.

That's one of the joys of being a full stack developer.

And it's the one constant, I would say,

we've been doing this, what, 20 years almost now.

And throughout that time, technologies change,

frameworks change, and evolve.

The browsers change tremendously.

And the problems have changed.

But the problems don't go away.

And I think that's what's interesting,

is that I think we mentioned last week, like this team now,

we're trying to get this thing across the finish line.

And we've got nine full-time developers

on this project that you're leading.

So it's a huge crew, a lot of moving parts, a lot of work.

But yeah, it's been a challenge

just because you get comfortable on a particular thing.

And so the last six months,

I was working more middle tier

in a traditional environment,

and this is using some newer technology.

So not all things are working well.

And then to add a little more on top of that,

I'm doing it all on my Mac instead of my Windows machine.

so just shit doesn't work like it's supposed to.

That has created a little bit of complexity,

but I think that's fine.

I think it's something that we should be working through anyway

because the idea of the whole product

is to be able to be cross-platform, no problem.

So it is interesting that we are running

into some of those issues.

We don't have anybody here working on a Mac,

aside from you.

So you are kind of the guinea pig in terms of that.

So you are running into your fair share of issues

that are a little bit unfortunate

and giving you some frustration,

but generally to your point,

like we have nine people working on the project

and it's all I can do to keep everybody busy,

keep everybody unblocked.

It's definitely kept me busy.

I don't get my hands on the code all that often anymore,

but that's OK.

It's a really exciting time.

We've got a lot of people that are kind of really heavy go-getters,

and I definitely, like I said, appreciate the energy,

and it's really exciting.

It's a fun environment to be in.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on.

When you get to be a team of that size,

then all of a sudden, the dynamic shifts.

Because so much of what we've done in the past

has been siloed, or there's one or two people working

on something, even if you're on the same project, usually one guy's working on the back end piece,

you're working on the front end, so you tag team stuff that way, but this is a true atmosphere

where you're all in the same space, kind of doing the same type of stuff.

And so it's a fun, exciting thing.

So I've enjoyed that.

It's the largest team I've ever worked on in my career.

I think it's the largest team we've ever had.

What was your, that I don't know where, at least in the tech department?

It is, yeah.

for sure in the tech department.

And then if you add in PMs and that sort of thing,

I think we're what, like around 12 people.

- Three quarters of the tech team.

- Which when I started was probably the size

of our tech team, to be honest with you.

We didn't have many more people than that

when I started five years ago.

So it's a net positive, it's a good thing.

And this is just a temporary assignment

to help get the project finished.

But yeah, it's always tough transitioning

because you spend six months in the back end

and then you gotta go to a front end project

and so much has changed since six months ago.

And I think that that's always the things are speeding up,

not slowing down.

And so it's a good thing because it

keeps us sharpening the saw, so to speak, but no dull moments.

It's always interesting.

And there's always troubleshooting.

And this afternoon was a little frustrating.

But it's good stuff.

Good.

As long as it's not me that's causing the frustration,

then I'm doing my job, I guess.

You gave me a few beers over here.

I feel pretty good right now.

Mike's about three beers in.

So let's move on to the next bit of show news here.

Nice transition there.

Just a quick, just a quick note.

We are working with the tune in folks,

the folks at tune in radio.

Our feed is broken currently.

What's going on over there?

We had them update.

Are they eating a ransom or something?

I had them update the artwork

and some of the information for the show.

And it seems that they broke the feed.

So if you look at tune in radio

and if that's where you consume the podcast,

you're gonna have to find something else

of the time being, I do have an email in for them

to correct the problem, but who knows

when they're gonna get to that.

- Right, yeah.

- Just a heads up on that.

So, onto some follow up, huh?

Last week, we talked a little bit about a monitor.

You had a great idea.

- This was a couple weeks ago, actually.

Had a good idea for, we were talking about chargers.

We talked about the Apple Power Mat,

how that was, they killed that project.

And I thought it would be a really cool idea

they had a Qi charger built into the base of a monitor.

Right, and we're going to patent that.

We're going to make a million bucks.

Yeah, I was getting ready to put my fucking two weeks in, man.

And then you told me to hold off.

Unsurprisingly, Dell has already beat us to the punch.

Get out of here, dude.

Fucking Michael Dell, that son of a bitch.

So you can already order these things from Dell.

So if you're interested in Qi charging on your wireless stand--

I do have a Dell, actually.

On your monitor stand.

Yeah, what does that look like?

That's a good question. I don't have any information on that. I just have an article here regarding charging on the Dell in this case the U2417HJ monitor.

Okay. You can do it. It's a support article. I didn't find any monitors that actually had the ability.

Getting the stand is probably a little more difficult because they have their own proprietary mounting on the back. A lot of these things are visa mounted.

if you want to hang them on a wall, right?

There's like a Visa standard--

Is that the square, like with the four screws?

That's kind of like the standard mount?

So yeah, that would be like--

I think that's Visa 100 or 200.

There's a few different 100, 200, 400, something

along those lines.

And there's different-- there are different hole

configurations on the back, but they're all for wall mounting.

The stand would be a little different.

So that's not as universal.

But yeah, I'll have to take a look at that and see.

It would be nice to have one less accessory on the desk.

I mean, I'm pretty lean right now.

but it'd be nice to have that and just drop your phone on there and there you go.

But you better make sure that it fits with the monitor aesthetic that you have because

you have a pretty nice looking...

Give me a hard time here.

Well, I mean, you have a nice looking layout, man.

It's clean, it's minimalistic, I like it, but you don't want to like knock your like,

you know, feng shui going on there.

That is a very high concern of mine, so I would want to make sure that the aesthetic

fit in first before I've got any purchases.

They have them in all kinds of different sizes and colors and yeah finishes. It is a good idea. I think it makes sense

Particularly because everybody now has even apples caught up in the game and they have wireless charging

So why not? Yeah, but I do kind of like the angle. They don't have angles

They have an angle built in is that an extra accessory?

You know, oh so instead of laying flat because most of the most of the stands are flat yeah flat base

So you'd want it you would want some kind of like a propped up version so that your phone would be looking at you

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be cool. That would make sense too. Maybe that's our next angle

Maybe we go for that patent instead then the next thing would be you could put your iPad on that thing

And then you'd have a screen sitting underneath your screen. Yes. Yeah. Have you seen those news?

This is kind of reminded me of this but the Samsung phones now that they have

Charging like peer-to-peer charging. Yes, so it's an output, right? So it can take an input. Yes wireless charge

But it can also be an output. That's right

Yes, that is an interesting thing and I have seen some articles recently that say the next iPhone is gonna be able to do that same exact thing I

Like the concept it would be helpful if someone's down to nothing

Well, you know last week I had happy hour with my

good friend Pat and

His phone died at the end of the night and so I got him an uber to get out of get out of there

But we could have done that we could have just put the phones together for five minutes

had enough charge to get what he needed to get out of there.

Right.

Everybody carries around these gigantic battery bricks

to recharge their phone, whereas you actually carry one

all the time.

Yeah.

Like, your phone battery's capacity is pretty large.

So if you can help somebody out, give them, you know,

5% charge or something like that off of yours,

that'd be fantastic.

Yeah, that makes sense.

You have kind of a cool thing.

I like that.

Yeah.

Nice, dude.

Well, OK, so that's some good follow up.

Yeah, we have one more bit of follow up here.

And I was a little bit concerned, you know, this week--

As you are.

Like this is your main concern in life. Well, the Tesla news was a little sparse this week

So I was a little concerned that you know, my streak was gonna be broken. Yeah

Well, luckily fair not. Yeah, exactly

There is some news and it is follow-up because we did talk about this so a couple episodes ago. You asked me what you do

While you're charging your Tesla

Did I ask you this you did ask me that how drunk were you?

I don't know. I made a couple beers maybe that's not really a hold up

No, you ask like, okay, where do they put these chargers?

Are they in a place where you can do something or go out to eat or go to, you know, whatever?

Yeah, because you were saying that even with, well, there's newer technologies out there,

but in general, if you go to a supercharger station, it's about an hour or so.

It could be, depending upon the charge level. Yeah. So you might be there for a while.

Right.

So what they announced this week was that with the Tesla supercharger 3s, which we've talked about previously,

There's going to be a couple of updates. One will be the speed of the charging, so number one, you won't have to be there as long.

Nice.

Number two will be that each of those chargers will provide its own free Wi-Fi access point.

So now suddenly there's...

Built-in.

Yeah, so you can connect to that from your Tesla. Maybe it's already automatic connected. I'm not sure how they're going to engineer that.

However, the interesting thing is that Elon tweeted this week that if you're in park and you're at one of these things,

if you're connected to Wi-Fi, it's going to allow you via the screen to be able to stream

online content. So in other words, you could stream in theory, Netflix or Amazon Prime or

something like that. So while you're sitting there, you have something to watch, something to do.

Something to look at. This is a little bit like AirPlay technology. Kind of. But the car itself

has its own cellular connection, so it could connect. Oh, you're not actually sending it over

from your device. You're just able to, it unlocks this feature where you can put movies on. Yeah,

Yeah, as long as you're in park and you can like I said, you can use their Wi-Fi that they have available to nice

So while you're charging you have some kind of media to keep you entertained if you don't want to leave the car or whatever

So that's pretty exciting

I think that's a good idea and as long as it's limited to

Only when the cars in park or only when it's charging or whatever. I think that's a good move

It is funny on that note because that there's videos out there now with the software release that that came out recently where they're doing

Autonomous driving there was a guy on the East Coast somewhere. I think he was in New York City

and he enabled autopilot to get him home,

you know, from the freeway to whatever,

like city streets to his place,

and the whole time he's got his camera out

just like filming the whole thing.

(laughing)

- Doing exactly what it tells you not to do.

- Yeah, please don't do that.

Like please keep your hands on the wheel, be prepared.

I'm like, this guy's not paying attention to shit.

Like this car doesn't know what to do.

It's gonna be another, you know, story

on Twitter the next morning.

Speaking of, we did get a new update that enables it.

This was already available.

Like lane changing via the car,

changing lanes on its own was already available,

but they did enable the ability now

that you can turn a toggle

and basically it'll change the lanes on its own.

So not only will it drive down the highway

and maintain distance,

but if it decides it wants to go around a car,

it'll just go ahead and do it,

which is, that's pretty crazy.

I haven't used it yet,

so I don't really know how it feels or what it looks like,

but there's been a number of people online,

you know, online video reviews,

where they say it works perfectly.

So, very cool.

- One step closer.

- Yeah, well, that's good.

That's good.

I think that's great, man.

- Yeah, let's move ahead away from the Tesla news, shall we?

- Let's move it along.

(upbeat music)

- All right, so we got a big topic here today.

This is gonna be probably the meat of the show.

- Yeah, I hope so.

I would like to talk about some of these things

in a little more detail.

a lot of times the topic, we don't have a lot of time

to get into it.

And so I thought this was a great piece.

I get a lot of publications and newspapers

and that sort of thing.

And I recently subscribed to the MIT Technology Review,

trying to get some other tech news other than where I normally

source it from online.

And this seemed like a good option.

By the way, it's not available on News Plus.

So if you're looking to get that on Apple for $999,

better look elsewhere.

But so far, I've been really happy with this.

And I got the first issue.

And the topic of this is MIT's 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

So this is an article that Bill Gates wrote for the publication.

And really kind of some cross-the-board stuff.

I mean, you've got health care, energy, agriculture,

climate change.

There's a lot of different--

I mean, really all the current issues that we're facing right

now and technologies that are in progress or have already arrived that are being tested

right now that could really dramatically change the landscape of any of those disciplines.

So I thought it was some fun stuff and here I was reading through this the other day and

I said we should talk about this on the cast and dive into it a little bit.

Yeah, when you put this on the notes and I started reading through it, there's a lot

of really interesting things.

Some things that I already knew about that are pretty fairly obvious and then some of

them that are kind of way out there and I was just like wow this could be like really,

really game-changing in terms of the way the world works.

So we'll go through these one by one by one.

If you want to follow along, you can hit it up on HTTPS

www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2019.

That'll give you the same list that we're looking at.

And we'll go through these kind of one by one

and start chatting about them.

- Yeah, and before we get into it,

just to preface it a little bit,

in the opening page or page and a half,

he starts talking about the process of doing this article

and what it made him think about.

And he really made an important distinction

between where we have been historically with innovation

and kind of the pivot that we've faced in modern times

in the last 30 to 50 years.

And so much of, he talks about the plow.

And so like originally, that was a big innovation,

whereas before it was all by hand,

and you could only go so fast and do so much,

and then like the invention of the plow,

like now all of a sudden you can do more,

more seeds planted, more crops, more food for everybody.

And so that was a huge innovation, right?

And so much of it was about really like quantity,

like how can we squeeze more with the same amount of time?

And up until very recently, like we've done a lot of that.

We really maximized efficiencies,

and so we're not that we can't do more of that,

But we've done a really nice job progressing along those lines.

And now there's this shift of going from quantity

to quality of life.

And so he's talking about, for example, life expectancy went

from 34 years in 1913 to 60 years in 1973 and 71 today.

So I mean, we've more than doubled life expectancy

within about 105 years.

And so now it's about quality of life.

So what do you do for that?

And so some of these topics really address

how we can enhance that.

So let's just go ahead and get started on the first one.

So the first one is just titled Robot Dexterity, which

is fairly self-explanatory.

What you see probably traditionally

is you see like the--

what is it?

Is it Toshiba?

Who's the robot manufacturer that you always see walking around?

Oh, there's the--

Dactyl's the one that I'm thinking of, right?

upright one that you always see in the demo is like,

oh, he'll be jumping over something

or he'll be walking straight or whatever.

Looks like an animal or some kind of,

like it's four-legged.

Yeah, so you see a lot of these things and like,

yeah, they're cool, they can walk,

they can jump over an obstacle or whatever.

Like they can do kind of some basic things,

which is cool and we're making progress

and every day they're getting a little bit better.

But like once you throw like something

that it doesn't expect into the mix,

like suddenly they fall over.

Or in this case, they kind of use more of like

the factory assembly line example, right?

They talk about, well, you know, in a car assembly line,

a robot can do a precision thing

like many, many, many times over.

- Move this from A to B.

- Yeah.

- And hold it here and let, you know,

something else will screw it in or something.

- And as long as that car or whatever it is working on

is in the exact position that it's supposed to be in,

great, everything works fantastic, right?

- Yes.

Move it a half an inch or change the part

or any variable that's in that whole equation

and the thing, there's no intelligence behind it.

It's just doing what's programmed to do.

Turn here, grab this, move it 90 degrees.

- Right, so I think what this guy's talking about

is basically that in the next,

well, these are all for 2019, right?

Wasn't that part of the--

- This one's pretty soon.

This is a few years out, but it's like three to five.

Not too far away, but there's been some good progress

made with AI and other technologies to make it smart.

And so they had the demonstration that they were talking about

was with robot dexterity.

And so they have a robot that taught itself

to flip a toy block in its fingers.

And that's a really difficult problem to solve.

And they kind of hacked it.

They had a hacky way of doing this, where they let

AI kind of come in and account for the imperfection

of what it was doing.

So it's not just trying to follow instructions now,

but there's some variability there that it can learn from.

And it was able to figure out how to manipulate this thing

in ways that before would have just dropped the thing.

And that's it.

>> Which is, and that's an interesting example

because there's so many things that could go wrong

as you flip something through your fingers, right?

Like the way that the thing is angled,

the way that it falls, the gravity that affects it,

how it comes off your finger.

I mean, there's a million different scenarios

that it has to learn and be able to understand.

And so I think that's gonna be a common thread

through a lot of these things.

This kind of AI and machine learning

are gonna be a common theme.

But yeah, I think they're coming along

and they're getting these things figured out slowly

but surely it's just a matter of can they put them

all together end to end.

They can make them do all these one-off things.

Oh, now I can make this robot stand up and avoid obstacles.

Oh, now I can make this robot flip a coin

in its hand or a block in its hand.

But can it learn to do these things

like more than just this one stupid trick?

- Yeah, that's right.

Think about Amazon warehouses

and how fun it is to work in one of those places

if you talk to people that are in there

and that environment and the heat and everything else

and just the, it's just a very physical job

and not a lot of breaks and not a lot of pay.

This is a task that a robot traditionally

has been very poor at because it requires some thought.

I mean, it's not a lot, but some like go to this location,

grab this, oh, it's over on the right side a little bit.

It's not quite where I thought it was.

And so they have an example of this robot now

that can go and fetch items from a pallet.

And they're not in any particular order,

just within a kind of a general area.

And then it can grab the box, move it over,

and put it on an assembly line, or put it on a chute

to get delivered to some other station for delivery,

or something like that.

And that's where it's important,

is where it can determine things that are not

what it expects.

Because obviously robots are very good at doing

the same tedious task over and over and over again

with no, you know, they don't wear out,

they don't have, you know,

they don't have to take a break or whatever, right?

They can do the same thing

as long as it's the same precise movement all the time.

But once you give it anything

that's out of the realm of what it expects, now it fails.

So if a robot can now learn and understand like,

oh, my world is not perfect anymore,

now you've opened up the world to just crazy, crazy things.

Like if you can suddenly like not have to have everything

be precise, be like within a millimeter precision,

- Right.

- And the robot can just kind of walk up to its environment

and say, oh, I know what to do.

Here's this thing that I have to complete.

I can complete it and not have to be

in some precise measured position.

- Well, I think a little bit about one of my favorite jobs

that I've ever had, I've talked about this,

is like when I worked at UPS.

And I was a hub sorter there back in the early 2000s.

It was a cool job.

So I was in one of the distribution centers

in Omaha at the time and a lot of automation.

I mean, they kind of pioneered automation

before Amazon was doing anything on their own

with the robots.

Like these guys really had some cool stuff.

They had, remember, they had a thing for,

we called the smaller envelopes and packages, smalls.

And so for the smalls area, they had a whole floor

where they had the leapfrog.

And so like you'd have an envelope

that comes through a conveyor.

And then there's a bunch of lasers

that scan the label on the envelope.

And let's say it's going to New Jersey.

So it goes down a row and there's,

it's on a little tray.

And there's like 50 bags on the left side of this conveyor

and 50 bags on the right side of this conveyor.

And they're all going to different locations.

And so the scanner knows it's going to New Jersey

and it knows it needs to go to bag 37 or whatever.

So when it gets to that point, it shoots air up on the tray.

The tray flips up and knocks the envelope into the bag.

That's kind of the traditional automation, right?

The robot can pump air and or whatever,

like we can automate that.

But with this type of technology that's being developed,

Now you could take over some of the jobs

that we had on the HubSort line, which basically,

like when trucks are being unloaded,

they're throwing tens or hundreds of packages

onto a conveyor.

And it's kind of going down a row.

And the HubSorters, in really rapid time,

I think our quota was something like one package every two

seconds or two packages every three seconds, something along--

I don't remember exactly now.

It's been a long time.

But behind us were 12 different shoots.

And we had to know like, oh, top left,

like that's California, like bottom right is like,

you know, Kansas City, Kansas.

And I mean, it would be very weird.

Like you had to take a whole, like you had to memorize

zip codes and know which one of the shoots

based on the zip code.

Oh, if it's 958, it goes over here.

So that's the kind of thing that this technology

could replace where in rapid fire,

it could see the zip code or even know ahead of time

from the scanner, like where it's going,

grab it and dump it down a shoot.

And so you could expedite delivery of packages

and sorting and that sort of thing.

Right, because as it comes down the chute,

there's no perfection.

There's nothing that it can specifically say,

like, oh, at this particular exact spot,

it can expect a barcode.

It could be jumbled.

It could be turned.

Who knows?

So it can adapt to that and solve for that problem.

So yeah, very powerful, very exciting.

And again, I think this is going to be the common theme,

is machine learning and AI is going

to just be pervasive in robots, for that matter.

Cool stuff.

Well, we had a lot of fun with that one.

That kind of went long, but we can keep moving on here, yeah?

I don't know.

Maybe it didn't run long.

We're doing great.

We're wonderful.

Let's move on.

All right, new wave, nuclear power.

Number two.

Number two.

So yeah, why don't you kick us one off?

So this one is basically dealing with a new type of more or less--

what is it-- nuclear fission.

Yeah, there are two types.

I don't understand this very well, but there's fission and fusion.

And from what I know, fission is--

There is more innovation happening right now in the fission space and fusion is still a

harder problem to solve.

Yeah, so as I understand this, it's basically they're creating smaller reactors that are

basically not able to melt down in the traditional way that you would think of nuclear power.

So much, much, much safer and can create incredible amounts of energy compared to what a traditional

nuclear reactor as we know them today can produce, right? So I think it's something

on the magnitude of like what, 10 times? Well, I don't know about that. I thought

it was the other way because they're talking about small reactors, I thought.

Okay. Because the traditional reactors are like a thousand megawatts and then

you have all kinds of issues with like meltdowns and scary shit happens. But

but I know that this and maybe I missed this somewhere but I know that like some

the smaller ones they're working on are like tens of megawatts.

And so at that point, these are miniaturized reactors.

And there's really a low financial, low safety risk,

because there's just not the same magnitude of stuff

of radiation that could get out.

Yeah, you're right.

I misread it was the other way around.

So they're much smaller, produce obviously much less power.

Yeah, tens of megawatts, whereas a traditional nuclear reactor

is what, 1000 megawatts, something like that.

- But they're getting ready to put some of these things

into the grid.

There are a few companies out there,

like Terrestrial Energy, TerraPower,

a few others, and they're working on putting

this type of energy into the grid

as early as next year.

- And the other thing too that's important about these

is they don't create high level nuclear waste

that has to be stored, which is a big problem now.

Like you have to take the spent rods, right?

And you have to store them underground probably

in some bunker for what, hundreds of years I think,

or thousands of years, I can't remember exactly

what the lifespan on one of those is,

but it's an absurd amount of time.

- There's a facility in Colorado

that's buried deep in a mountain,

that's where they put a lot of this nuclear waste,

because it's so impenetrable that the radiation

can't seep out at that point.

- Yeah, so the good thing about this is that the public

is expected to not have any kind of resistance to it

because there's not, it doesn't have a lot of the downsides

that a traditional nuclear reactor might have.

So could be a very adoptable technology,

but it's also, you know, this one says that

this could be like a breakthrough in 2019.

It also does say that nobody expects it potentially

before like 2030.

So I think like maybe the ability to make these reactors

could happen potentially this year,

like they could have that breakthrough.

But apparently this has also been something that like

is perpetually always like right on the horizon.

Like, oh, we're almost there.

Oh, we're almost there.

We're almost there, right?

And they just haven't ever made it,

But apparently they're very close.

If they do get it working, then they could put it out,

get it in this dream, and maybe by 2030,

we could be utilizing nuclear fission, right?

- I think this is very interesting.

I was doing some YouTube,

casual YouTube watching the other day, and I wasn't--

- As you do.

- I got through all the chiropractor

back cracking going on, and I thought it was kind of neat.

They were talking about the Cold War

and how post-World War II, during that time,

the race to nuclear, right, was huge.

And so the US was at the forefront of that technology

with the atomic bomb, and then they

started looking at other ways that they could develop

nuclear-powered technologies.

And so I didn't realize this.

But in 1955, they were doing a lot of experiments

up in the Northwest, in Idaho, even,

around nuclear-powered airplanes.

I had never heard of this before, but they had taken and retrofitted some aircraft.

And they were doing it for a few years, like 55 to 59 or something like that.

They were just testing facets of the technology.

They didn't actually have a nuclear-powered plane.

But they were trying to measure the amount of radiation leak and all that stuff, like

how would they do it, and actually managed to get an aircraft into some test flights

that was nuclear-powered.

They discontinued it because there were a lot of problems and it was imperfect and I think

there was even a lot of radiation that was still spewing out of it.

And a risk of crashing.

Yeah.

There were a lot of concerns.

It was a crazy idea.

But a lot of this technology was born out of that at that time.

So it was very interesting.

Like you think about this being a new, a lot of new innovations, but this is stuff that's

been going on now for 70 years or more.

And we've really learned how to harness that and perfect it over time.

And here's going to be another common theme of these items through this list is miniaturization.

Miniaturization and localization.

So like now you can take these little miniature power plants and put them in many other small

local areas versus like a very massive scale plant that serves a very wide area.

So that's going to be kind of another common thread that you see throughout a lot of these

items but it also applies to this particular item where like now you're creating more of

a local version.

That's right. Yeah, it's like we were talking earlier today. I think we were just kicking

around some ideas about how we went from being a grid or being centralized. Your energy,

your grid system is centralized and power and energy. And now you have this decentralization

where you've got battery technology and nuclear technology so you don't have to rely on a

central grid, internet even, in a lot of ways is becoming decentralized. We talked a couple

weeks back about that SpaceX project and Amazon jumping on that bandwagon to create like what

3,000 satellites to provide global satellite internet.

Right.

And so here you know, it's taking on a new level of sophistication, but we're getting smaller

and we're getting decentralized to where it's really harder to break this thing, bring this thing down.

Right. Which is important. Like another thing that we're going to talk about here is population

growth. But as the population grows, there needs to be more of these like small centralized things,

whereas like, yeah, you can't you can't attack one, one portion of the grid and like the whole

and collapses like we need to have this more localization, more localized communities if you

will that have self-sufficient, they're independent on their own, independent of the large grid like

you talked about. Exactly. Cool stuff, man. Yeah, well let's move on to the next one.

Number three is predicting preemies. This is a healthcare one. This is really interesting, man.

So this has like overtones of Pteranose for me because Pteranose is on the brain. I've been

been watching Elizabeth Holmes documentary and 2020 stuff.

But this is legit.

Supposed-- this should be legit.

So check your sources.

But yeah, the idea here being that, well, first of all,

15 million babies born prematurely every year.

And it's the leading cause of death for children under age

five.

Of course, measles will probably be making a resurgence now.

Oh, boy.

Anti-vaxxers.

Anti-vaxxers.

Get your kids vaxxed.

Vax them.

I might lose a few people for that.

- Uh-oh.

- This is very cool.

So this is around blood testing.

And so there's new methods out there for simple blood tests

to predict if a pregnant woman is at risk

of giving birth prematurely.

- This is crazy.

So this reminds me a lot of like,

I remember hearing like many years ago

where like they were able to take and test like,

I don't know, various cancer cells or something like that,

or human cells or something like that

and like reverse them, reverse course

and basically make them attack other cells

or something like that.

Or maybe you won't even cancer, maybe it's, I don't know.

But whatever, it was just crazy.

Like this is like, they're basically taking non,

what was the deal?

It's like non-blood cells.

They're like kind of like waste cells, right?

- Well, yeah, this is like what genetic mutations

that it's looking for here.

And it's a quick, cheap, $10 assessment that you can do.

I mean, this is kind of crazy too.

It's really accessible.

It's looking for defects like in the DNA.

Key indicators they found that are in premature preterm birth.

From the mother, I believe, too, right?

Yes, that's right.

And it's not living cells.

What do they call it?

RNA, I think is what they call it.

And that's what they're looking for, right?

Well, that regulates-- yeah, regulates gene expression,

how much of a protein is produced from a gene.

- Yeah, and so through that they can detect

indicators for premature birth

and start taking action quite early

to prevent or to slow down how quickly the baby will be born.

- Yeah, and there are preventative measures they can take

to try to slow that process down

to keep the baby in longer

and give the child a better chance to live.

- I think that's a big deal.

And yeah, I didn't realize, I missed the $10 for the test.

Like that's a no brainer, why wouldn't you do it?

- Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be just a routine procedure

that I imagine you'd go through at that point.

Everybody would do that.

It's about five years away,

so it's not readily available yet, but it's close.

- It's in a startup phase,

so I would assume there's gotta be some more testing

and more regulatory approval and all that kind of thing,

I'm sure, but definitely on the cusp of something there,

I think that's good.

- Awesome stuff.

- Isn't the United States like the leading,

the leader in like baby deaths?

- No way, really?

- I thought it was something,

there's some pretty bad stats about stuff like that

where the United States leads some pretty bad categories

where you would think that we would be doing pretty well.

- Yeah, healthcare, fat zero.

- Yeah, that'd be one of them.

Well, this would be related to healthcare,

so there you go.

- National debt, fucking national debt.

- Negative 10 trillion.

- Yeah, we'll pay that back.

- Chump change, man.

- Yeah.

- Chump change, that's what my old boss used to say.

- Chump change.

All right, well, let's move on to the next one.

So the next one is another miniaturization item.

- Yeah, this thing looks cool, man.

They got some wacky photo on here.

- So this is basically taking a miniaturized pill

that contains a camera that would travel through your gut.

- That's right, gut probe in a pill, it's so-called,

And it's actually testing in infants this year.

Right, so it's swallowingable.

They don't test in rats anymore.

They're testing infants, I guess, nowadays.

It goes straight to the source, man.

Kind of the new thing now.

Yeah.

Okay.

So basically it doesn't require anesthesia.

Just a swallowingable pill that'll pass through, right?

Just like anything else.

Right, exactly.

And take photos as it goes through.

So yeah, like you said, used in children, used in anybody.

It's not just a pill though, it's like tethered.

So it actually has a little string attached.

And there's like little miniature microscopes

inside this device that can send images to a console

with a monitor so you can see what's going on.

And yeah, this thing's--

it's really cool.

You can image the entire surface of the digestive track

at the resolution of a single cell.

So it's not just a camera.

I mean, this thing is a high resolution device.

It's like a microscope.

Absolutely.

Right.

multiples they say in here.

Yeah.

And so it has the ability to screen

for some types of cancers as it goes down, like right?

It's off a gel, is that how you say it?

It's off a gel cancer and other things.

So I mean, it has a number of different uses

that can be utilized for.

Infant testing is planned for next year, no, this year.

This year, this year.

Yeah, later this year.

So it's already being utilized.

Yes, that's right.

It's right around the corner.

Which is huge.

It could be happening today right now,

it could be happening right now, somewhere in Boston.

Somebody's swallowing one of these little cameras.

And well, they talk about this other thing too.

I'd never heard of this before.

EED, they say is environmental enteric dysfunction

is one of the costiest diseases.

I've never heard of this before.

I had never heard of this either.

What is it?

I don't know.

It's EED, man.

But this is one of the solutions for detecting that as well.

This is something that they can do to--

I guess it's more widespread in poor countries

and has to deal with malnourishment and that sort of thing.

But not really sure what the cause is,

or how it can be prevented or treated.

But this will provide some additional research

so they can see things that they probably previously

couldn't see before.

Yeah, sounds like EED is one of those things

that nobody really knows what causes it.

It says it's a rare chronic skin disorder characterized

by skin nodules.

And apparently I have to click for more information.

But there you go.

Send us your email address.

and let it to our newsletter.

There you go.

All right, so continuing on in the healthcare vein,

so that's three in a row here.

Oh, hang on a second.

Uh-oh.

I gotta address this right here.

Dave Lester, still working?

No time for a quick mug?

Oh man.

Well, let me get you a mug here right now.

There you go, buddy.

Actually, there's a real one here.

I think you need another.

Thank you.

I'm telling them right now.

You were a regular podcast listener.

He's supposed to be our biggest fan, right?

That's what he told me.

He said he was a big fan.

Listened to all the episodes.

Oh, boy.

He feels really bad now, I think.

Maybe you got to do something here, and maybe at Fuel,

we need to get the live broadcast at Fuel.

That would be a huge distraction and a waste of time.

OK.

I think that would be super fun.

But no, if I did that, then nothing would get done.

It would be fun to do something like this.

We talked about having that at the office before, right?

Like having, you know, co-workers and people

that were interested in how we do this thing,

like come on over and watch and--

- Have a live studio audience, kind of speak?

- Yeah, exactly.

So, oh, he's still texting me now,

like no consideration that this is live.

He's like, oh, well, maybe we can hang out later.

What's going on? - Hey.

- I told you I was busy tonight.

So yeah, I don't know, it'd be fun to do something like that.

It'd be fun to do a live deal and maybe one day.

If we have aspirations, right, we have aspirations,

I'll leave it at that.

And if we did go out into the other part

of the company meeting space and change our location

and got some video cameras, sky's the limit buddy,

whatever we wanna do, we can do it.

- That's right.

So let's move on to the next item here,

custom cancer vaccines.

So this one--

- This thing's ridiculous.

- This is crazy.

So this one, it's kind of what I was describing earlier,

but a little bit more specific.

So they're basically creating a vaccine

that's custom to your particular type of cancer.

That's right.

Cancer genes or whatever you wanna say

that are applicable to your type of cancer.

And it basically is attacking only those particular cells.

It's taking your immunity, your immune system

and using your immune system to attack those cancer cells.

- Yeah, traditional therapies involve

more general radiation type therapy.

- Which kills everything.

- Yeah, good and bad, and that's why you have

the care loss and all kinds of other

horrible side effects that come from that.

- And why you're tired all the time,

'cause basically it's killing everything.

- Yeah, this is very targeted just to the cancer cells itself.

And so the whole process is pretty simple,

but extremely complex, right?

I mean, they biopsy the tumor, they'll analyze and sequence

the DNA, and they will take that information

and very quickly create a vaccine that

will be delivered back to the hospital.

Boom.

Administer that to you, multiple treatments,

and then time is of the essence.

That's kind of the key.

They got to do it quickly.

Right.

So this is a trial already, right?

Yeah.

and they're trying to expand, it looks like.

So they're trying to work with

10 different types of cancers.

That's right.

And they're trying to enroll in an additional 560 people

around the globe to try and participate in the studies

of this particular vaccine.

And there's a couple of different companies

that are producing these things.

So like you said, it's a time critical thing.

Has to be to the hospital in, you know, promptly.

They don't specify with detail, like, is it hours or days?

But it would be very--

I would imagine it would have to be very quickly,

because these things rapidly multiply.

They're exponential.

So yeah.

So this is very promising.

Cancer is obviously a huge contributor to deaths

everywhere in the world.

So everybody's been--

everybody's dealt with a cancer death, I think, probably.

if you haven't, you're extraordinarily lucky.

It's very common.

Yeah.

So having a vaccine, even the beginnings of a vaccine,

even like the possibility is something huge on the horizon.

That's not something that has ever been like even close

to being a possibility.

Like they've had some ideas where like,

they can do some targeted things

where yeah, it'll kill like everything in a given area

or you know, it might even,

they might even have something similar to this

where they kind of mutate something,

and it goes in and it kills a lot more than just the cancer,

but they've never had it where specifically

is able to target some kind of antibody in the body.

You remember, this is bringing me back a little ways now,

but when we were at the Nebraska Medical Center

back in early 2000s, mid-200s, like 2005,

they, I don't remember the technology now,

but they had something along those lines

that you're describing where they could target.

It was a laser.

- Oh.

- I can't remember the name of it now.

Like some kind of laser guided.

- I remember it being a big deal.

Like had a specific name.

Like they had some product name for it.

- Yeah, there was a whole product name behind it.

And what they would do is I mean,

they kind of like would get the telemetry

of like where these cancer cells were in your body

and take very precise measurements.

And then this laser would go in.

It was like some kind of beam radiation or beam there.

I can't remember now.

But yeah, I mean, it was still the same idea.

you're killing whatever it comes into contact with, but it would be very precise and just

like isolate a very small area of your cells.

Yeah, the damage was minimized.

I remember that and it was basically because it could shoot the radiation in such a precise

pattern that it could alleviate damaging surrounding tissue at least as much as possible.

So you look at it like from a calculus, like this is just a very narrow, like a very small

know, radiation, like a micro size radiation. But this is this the vaccine

thing's very interesting here. And a lot of this is just because it's come out of

the human genome project, which in what 2008. So like five, yeah, five years after

that was what they say, began to take shape in 2008, five years after that

genome project was completed. And then they had the first sequence of a cancerous

tumor cell. So once they identify what that looked like, now they're able to be

very precise about what they're attacking. So big advancement.

And not to attack it with some third party foreign object to

attack it with your own body, which I think is important. Your

own immune system is doing the doing the correction of the

cancer cells, which is I think that's probably the best thing

you could possibly ask for is that your own body is destroying

the things that are that are poisoning you huge. Yeah. All

right, well, let's move on to the next thing. I think you're

very excited about this. Oh, dude, I get excited about this stuff.

Man talked about this already on the show at least one time probably a couple times boy. I could go for a burger right now too

Hey, oh

Not really place right across the street. We just get into it. I've been eating some periakia fucking afternoon. I'm good

This is the cow free burger. Yeah, cow free burger. So

We've talked about impossible foods a lot in the last few weeks because I just think this is

Venominal I love it because the big news story on April 1st was that Burger King was going to be getting a deal with impossible

to do an impossible whopper.

So this is, their particular methodology right now

is plant-based.

So they figured out they've isolated proteins

that make meat taste like meat, like some of those qualities.

They've isolated those things

and they've found a way to reproduce those in plants.

And so what you get is a product that looks like meat,

tastes like meat, has nothing to do with meat.

It doesn't have anything to do with cattle or livestock

or the emissions or any of those things.

- So idea here is that population of the world

is booming, right?

We're eating more meat than we've ever ate before.

- Yes.

- You can't sustain it.

Like it's just not a sustainable practice.

And so in a way, in an effort to look for alternatives,

we're looking to plants as a possible substitute, right?

- That's the first step.

The second step will be lab grown

and that's something that's a little further out,

not too far, a couple years next year,

as soon as next year possibly.

They've got a way that they can just grow this in the lab.

So you get to that kind of scale,

and that'll revolutionize everything.

Bill Gates is an investor in Impossible Foods as well,

but go check it out.

I mean, just go to YouTube and search Impossible Foods.

They've got some really cool demos of the plant,

the facility, they'll walk you through the whole thing,

show you what they're doing.

This is huge and it's starting I mean it's it's obvious to me that it's when you start seeing

fast-food chains and like we mentioned before white castle was one of the early adopters red Robin

It's in all the red. Well, yeah, it's in all the red Robins now and so, you know, it's kind of a

Side-by-side it's a it's a compliment to the menu like you can if you're a vegetarian or you have other dietary restrictions

then you can get the impossible burger instead. But it's going to get to a point where you

don't even have an option, I believe. You're just going to have a burger. And where it's

sourced from doesn't fucking matter because it tastes like a burger.

Yeah. So some interesting stats, and I'm just going to read here verbatim. It says, "Depending

upon the animal, producing a pound of meat protein with Western industrialized methods

requires four to 25% more water, six to 17 times more land, and six to 20 times more

fossil fuels and producing a pound of plant protein. So that's pretty huge. That's a,

like, just switching strictly to a plant protein product is, that's a huge difference.

Which is just the first step for these, these guys. Massive difference and the content, the

quality of the product is better. I don't want to say healthy because I don't know that burgers

are really a healthy food item. Some people would argue that I'm sure. Yeah, but there's a

a significant reduction in fat content that you get from this while still

maintaining flavor and lower cholesterol. So I think the thing to

understand here too is like that that they are not prescribing that we should

only go to a plant what do you want to call it a plant meat diet right? They're

basically saying like look people are not gonna stop eating meat that's not

gonna happen. Yeah it's just never gonna happen. So they're like what we need to

do is we need to supplement as much as we possibly can with plant-based

products to quit destroying the planet in such a rapid fashion. So that's

what they're trying to do here and keep it at the closest possible taste

profile as they can. Because like I think we were talking a week or two ago,

the Whopper product, they're claiming that you won't be able to determine the

difference, right? Exactly. And there's a video on YouTube that goes through this

whole thing and I would recommend you watching it if you haven't already done

and so, but they do.

This reporter goes out to St. Louis

where they're trialing the Burger King whopper

and he goes and grabs one and brings it back to the lab

and they do a comparison and it looks the same.

You put the holding together and take a bite out of it

and the consistency is the same, the texture is the same.

So yeah, for all intents and purposes

you're eating the same thing

and people that were in Burger King

testing the quality control of the food

could not easily discern the difference

between the impossible whopper and the regular whopper

that they make.

And the meat patty, it says, would probably

generate 90% less greenhouse gas emissions.

That's the big one.

That's huge.

That's a massive--

That's a big change.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially when we're talking about climate change

and everything like that.

Like, such a contributor there is all of the methane

and the water for growing the feed and all of these things,

right?

To have an instant 90% reduction just by switching over.

It seems like a no-brainer to me.

And I think it's something that most people would get behind.

I don't think we necessarily, there was a study on this too.

People don't, people care about the flavor profile the most.

Right or wrong, it's the animal treatment is not the primary reason why people would get away from it.

But yeah, it's clearly the flavor.

So if you can keep it the same and I can enjoy it the same, then people are not going to have a hard time switching over to this.

And I think we discussed this a little bit like if you if if you were to just switch these out if you were just to

Switch out the impossible burger and they didn't tell you and it tasted the exact same and you ate it

What the hell do you care? Why would I care? Yeah? Why would I care? We talked about this too, but I

Unless I really want a Mexican Coke

Do I really care if it's high fructose corn syrup or sugar? I'm not paying attention to the ingredients

I just like the taste and so therefore I'll

Consume it if taste is what you're after then then that does prove true

But once you if you if you're kind of like eating healthier or trying to eat for a specific need

Then it might be a little different story, but right correct if you have dietary needs that would be an issue right?

Very promising technology Bill Gates investor in that I I would love to

They there's a chance that impossible foods will IPO this year and I would say keep an eye out for that because I think

They've already got a great program going and this whole thing where they get off a plant based

Into lab grown meat

Is gonna just take off like wildfire that stock?

I mean that could be the next big stock sure. Yeah the next moonshot

so quick note on this that I mentioned to you earlier, but the article mentions that

What do they estimate UN estimates that by 2050 the world population will be at about 9.8 billion

Something like that and we said what right now? It's about seven point seven currently. We're almost at seven point seven billion

So two billion more people in another 30 years

Yeah, so that led me down kind of an interesting rabbit hole and I'll link this in the show notes

But there's this thing called world meters which I which I looked up and that's where I got the world population numbers

And when you start to go through this we talked about this a little bit

There's some really interesting demographic data on this website. Not only does it list like births today and deaths today?

It tells you what the population growth just today was on the planet, what the population growth was for the year at this point.

Same thing with births and deaths.

Gives you the largest population by country in a live metric view. So to give you an

example, what are we at? 328 million in the United States?

Yep.

Versus 1.4 billion in China to give you an example.

Shows you the world population over time. So you know every year

So let's see what are we looking at here about

19

Somewhere in the but that what is this?

1850 something like that the population just goes whoo wow, you know straight up

Whereas before it maintained a pretty flat

Consistency what we call hockey stick growth here. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. It's like the dollar is rolling

It's got the population growth rate percentage

As a line chart so luckily that one's starting to go down because it was really high for a while

Just really fascinating statistics.

I recommend going and taking a look at it.

There's a whole lot of data there.

I'll link it in the show notes.

So just wanted to throw that out there.

Yeah, this is good.

Man, we're only 60% of the way through.

Oh boy, we better get it moving.

We're about 90% out of our time.

The next one goes hand in hand with our,

what the hell were we talking about?

The gases.

Greenhouse gases, emissions.

Yeah.

This is number seven on our list.

the carbon dioxide catcher. We gotta go on here, man.

Well, I don't know. We can soak up carbon dioxide from the air.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's kind of, this is somewhat of a last-ditch effort because we're

ignoring this shit, you know, in every other way that we can try to cut back. But the idea

is that, you know, removing CO2 from the atmosphere might be one of the last viable ways to slow

thing down. The unfortunate piece is it's not ready to go for another five or ten years, so I don't

know what that would look like. Massive pumps in the air that are sucking emissions out,

and then you've got to figure out what to do with those emissions once you capture them too. So do

you convert it into some kind of fuel or energy source or what do you do from there?

That'd be the ideal possibility, but our good friend Elon.

Mr. Musk?

Mr. Musk, if you will. Sir Musk.

Why doesn't he put these into each Tesla? Why don't we just have a carbon scoop on each Tesla?

Just instead of having a pipe, tailpipe, you know, just like sucks in

carbon emissions and does something with that. That'd be fantastic.

From what he relayed, because he's talked about this in a couple different

press conferences that he's done, the once you've untapped carbon from the ground,

it's incredibly expensive and difficult to re harness it or recontain it,

which is what this article starts to talk about, right? Like it's incredibly expensive,

where at least traditionally they thought it was,

basically like by the ton to re-harness or re-regrab carbon

from the atmosphere.

It's like a hundred bucks a ton or something like that.

That's what this product would help with.

Yeah.

It was far more expensive than that,

at least that's what they thought,

to pull it out of the atmosphere before.

So it wasn't even an approach that they were considering

because it was just too damn expensive.

Whereas this now brings it down to $100 a ton,

which maybe is a bit more of a possibility

that they could potentially look at in terms of ways

to fix the problem.

- Say a lot of the focus that's happening right now

and a lot of the legislation is around offsets.

And I've got a little experience with this

with some stuff I've done in the past

and projects I've worked on,

but a lot of that is about offsetting your emissions

or paying for offsets so that whatever your consumption is,

like you're paying in other things

that could capture that amount of carbon.

But I think this is interesting because we need something

at a little more rapid scale at the rate we're going.

So this would be a very interesting technology

that we really need quickly because these glaciers

are falling off and all kinds of crazy shit's happening.

And there's another bomb cyclone happening right now

in the Midwest today.

- So the problem too, like with what you were talking about,

to use it as another fuel source is like,

if you use it as another fuel source,

like it's just gonna end up back in the atmosphere

yet again, and then you have to capture it yet again.

So you're perpetuating a vicious cycle.

So really what you need to do is capture it, contain it,

and put it back kind of in the ground, ideally.

Like it was before we mined it or refined it or whatever

it is that we did to it to make it a usable product.

Well, and the deforestation is huge too.

I mean, that's got to be more systematic, right?

Because the carbon is captured by these trees,

and it's stored until it dies.

But when the tree dies and it decomposes,

that carbon gets released back out.

And so you want to have some level of that,

I mean, for the health of the system.

But if it's not done properly, then you can have an imbalance there as well.

Yeah.

So they talk about, again, same thing as we were talking about nuclear, like the,

the answer so far has been to like bury this shit underground again.

Right.

So build a big bunker, put it underground and just like, Oh,

we'll deal with it later type of mentality.

So something we need to figure out, but this, this seems promising.

It seems to cheapen it.

And would be a way to help out the planet, obviously.

So it says we need to remove as much as one trillion tons

of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere this century.

So at $100 a ton.

- Do the math on that.

- Yeah.

- That's a lot of math.

- Where's the pocket book?

- Ceri, hey Ceri.

- How much money do I got?

- What's one trillion times 100?

Oh, no you're not, not listening at all.

Okay, moving along.

We got two minutes Kyle, what else is left here?

What do we got on this great 10 technological breakthroughs?

- Oh, well I've lost my page.

Oh, we got an ECG on your wrist.

Yeah, heart health, heart health.

This is huge.

And Apple had a big announcement about this

with the release of their Apple Watch version, 100 trillion.

Gomer's always like, Gomer is our resident statistician.

He's been very active tonight.

I apologize, I haven't been sharing his knowledge

with us tonight, but he's awesome.

Like you throw an equation out there,

he is the Siri of the fucking cast.

Look it up guy.

100 trillion.

Yeah.

And he was talking, we were talking earlier about nuclear

and he was mentioning like half lives

and that sort of thing.

So I appreciate your input.

Sorry we didn't get you.

We were trying to scramble to get all these 10 out here

quickly, but thanks for being back again.

Well, we can move through this one fairly quickly

'cause Apple has announced this in their Apple Watch

where basically you can run a test on the Apple Watch

and it can detect anomalies in heart rhythm, right?

That's right.

To basically find out if you have larger problems

that may lead to like heart attacks or strokes.

So they're basically saying that this is gonna

become a pretty common thing, right?

That most people can have these on their wrists

with no problems.

They're just gonna become more, what's the word?

- You're ubiquitous.

- Yeah, there you go, that's what I was looking for.

- That's right, everybody's gonna have one

and can really save lives.

The technology's getting better.

This wristband that this live core has developed

is very interesting.

The worst that the Apple Watch too.

- Yeah, so I don't wanna spend too much more time

on that one, 'cause I wanna spend a little bit of time

on this next one, which again goes back to the localization

and kind of miniaturization of things.

- Yes.

- And this is sanitization without sewers.

- Huge.

- So being able to treat waste on the spot

that it's created, rather than sending it again

to like a central treatment plant,

you'd be treating it locally.

- And laying the infrastructure, the pipes, the facilities.

I mean, think about the mega infrastructures

that most cities have.

And then you have the situation now

where those things are time-dated,

and so you've got systems that dump into rivers

and clean, fresh water streams and the pipes break,

and so you've got this maintenance problem

and you've got this,

lots of problems that come from having this.

This is a way that you can kind of decentralize that.

- So here again, we talked about the population

of the planet here,

so 2.3 billion people don't have good sanitation.

- So like 20%.

- So we said, again, the population here

There was almost 7.7 billion.

25, yeah.

Yeah, that's a shit ton of people.

Like 25% or more.

Yeah, so obviously poor sanitation creates all kinds of problems.

Parasites, diarrhea, cholera, all kinds of horrible different conditions.

Death, obviously is another one.

So yeah, this is basically bringing smaller scale localized sanitation.

Few different systems out there.

There are some that are still for communities,

small cities, where you've got more of a container,

shipping container type solution that does it

on a smaller scale than these large wastewater treatment

facilities currently do.

And then there are some interesting technologies

that are even more portable than that,

where it's just like within the toilet itself.

- Yeah. - To filter that out.

- So there's different types of prototypes

that are mentioned here.

One is like a toilet-sized looking device

that can filter out certain things.

There's one that's more of like a shipping container size

that can kind of sanitize and take care of things

and output, you know, different products

like maybe compost or fertilizer or something like that.

But to your point, like you said,

like some of them are built for smaller amounts of scale.

Some of them are built for more kind of communities,

but they don't have this like very large concept

for like, you know, a Seattle-sized city

that they could just drop one of these things in Seattle

and be like, oh yeah, this will take care of--

- Not doing this for millions of people.

But the amount of money and infrastructure costs

so that go into these systems,

you could go to a sub-Saharan Africa or other places

that don't have any facilities

and really have a significant impact

on their daily living.

Right.

So I think this is super important.

I think this is huge for the world again

as the population balloons.

We need more of this.

We need more smaller areas,

not connected to a centralized position.

Just makes us more redundant, more safe,

more whatever the word you wanna look for is.

But yeah, more sanitized.

Yeah.

More, more cleanly.

I like that.

Yeah.

Last but not least, not a lot to say about this, but this

interesting too, this one's pretty obvious.

You know, the improvement of AI assistance, right?

We, we know how it is now having Google or Siri or Alexa in the home.

And I was just talking to Ali about this today because she says, is

your Alexa as dumb as mine.

And I ask at this thing and it doesn't understand and it kind of

repeats shit back to me.

And I think, you know, what they're talking about here is like just advancements that Google and well actually Alibaba to Chinese

influence on AI to

You're gonna see AI shift from just a kind of a one-way. Hey asked answer this question to more of a dialogue

And the speech is gonna be more fluid, right? It's gonna be instead of like I can answer like Siri

Just answered you like I'm sorry. I don't understand what you meant right now, right?

And then you gotta start over again.

- But it's gonna sound much more natural.

It's gonna sound like an actual person talking to you

versus like a robot.

So it's all gonna come together eventually.

- Yeah, that's right.

I think that's cool.

Some of the earlier ones I think were more impactful.

I mean, this is certainly fun stuff.

I have one, I like it.

But a lot of good stuff here in this episode.

While we barely packed it in,

I thought we were gonna have extra time.

We never do have extra.

Why do I always think that?

We never have extra time.

- Well, you had four beers tonight,

so you were kind of gabby.

I got a lot to say.

(laughing)

- All right, well, as always,

the Coffee Code Cast is recorded from Seattle, Washington

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