The Tech Ranch

The post Looking At The Limitless Potential of AI appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

STEVE

 I’m sure you saw some amazing stuff at ces.

MARLO

Yeah. 

STEVE

We’re talking about that a little bit. But one of the things that you were also famous for, and I just mentioned it, NationalDayCalendar.com. Check it out. You were on CBS Sunday morning and that finally aired, I gotta cut ’em a little slack. You were bumped for the Pope and Barbara Walters.  But you aired and a little bit of buzz is going on with the calendar now. 

MARLO

Yeah, it’s been crazy since Sunday morning. I don’t want to say that we weren’t prepared, but I guess we weren’t prepared. I thought we’d see a little bump in traffic and, I get a couple media mentions or whatever, which is typical for the National Day Calendar. 

STEVE

It’s been a nice platform and a little bit of national media attention and, holy crap. 

MARLO

On a national level, telling the story of how we came to be and all of that, was really cool. And, I think, the cool thing around that story too is coming from a small town, in Mandan and Mandan was highlighted nicely in the piece. And I just think that there’s just something about that. I’ve always said that National Day Calendar is a grassroots thing. And I think, having CBS’s Sunday Morning come here and actually show that grassroots is Americana. I think just really, that National Day calendar and this whole movement of Celebrate Every Day comes to the heartland of America. And I don’t know, I just think that there’s something all about that, and I think that’s why. It’s just, I can’t even tell you the craziness that it – I can tell you some things, but the craziness that’s happened in the last 48 hours because of that piece, it’s just unbelievable.

I already have a little bit of a following in Switzerland. I have no idea how this happens. I feel I’m the Jerry Lewis of Switzerland because I walk in there and everybody’s, Hey Marlo’s here. Hey, will you interview me? And I – it’s the Tech Ranch. And they’re like, what? What is this?  I only got a couple of interviews done on Saturday in there and I told them I’d be back tomorrow morning to finish up with everybody I walk in there of course, and they’re just like, “Hey, we see you this morning on the show.” And it just was a whole nother level of buzz around that. And I was walking down the street and people would come up to me cuz they watched it that morning and, so it was a little different.

STEVE

Yeah. I’m trying to figure out why Switzerland?

MARLO

I don’t know. I did some interviews with them last year and they got some play nationally. 

STEVE

So I think that’s probably why. And then people from Switzerland will listen to the you and me, it’s not because you’re your own autonomous neutral country, 

MARLO

Maybe, I don’t know.

STEVE

So the question I’ve got is, explain the booth part because a lot of people may not know. So you say you walked into the Swiss booth. What’s a Swiss booth entail? What’s that look like? 

MARLO

So, they’re called pavilions actually. So the French have one. The Ukraine has one. No Russia this year, by the way that I’ve seen anyway. They have a lot of the countries, 

STEVE

If it would’ve been there, you couldn’t have ’em next to each other. 

MARLO

So yeah it was interesting to see Ukraine there, actually. Yeah, they had 11 booths in their pavilion. So they weren’t crazy well-represented but not bad. But sad. I interviewed a few of them. There’s one called E-Pharm. Great product by the way. They have a product that basically. you mount a sensor on your old tractor and then you put it like a tablet in your cab or next to the steering wheel, depending on how old your tractor is. And now you can drive straight lines down your field when you’re planting, or it’ll tell you to put a little more fertilizer here or a little less there. So it basically brings these old vehicles to the 21st century.  So I’m interviewing this wonderful lady, and then she brings up the fact that they’re developing part of their platform is for mine removal. 

STEVE

Yeah. That puts things in a little bit different perspective, doesn’t it? 

MARLO

It’s a whole different perspective. And the emphasis of their company now is moving to this platform and they’re using all the money they’re making to offset the mining situation. Or, the fuels being mined in Ukraine. Because removing mines isn’t the easiest thing in the world I just was really taken aback

STEVE

Interesting dichotomy. Just unbelievable.

MARLO

So a lot of people, I explained to them what CES is, and you and I talked about this a little bit last week. There’s buyers and sellers or there’s the other side there were people are trying to find out what the next biggest project I can invest in.

STEVE

So it’s like a big shark tank. 

MARLO

It is. 

STEVE

So from a pavilion perspective, I’m guessing there’s multiple layers on the pavilions where you’ve got all the countries represented, but you’ve got also industries represented as well.

MARLO

Yeah, so they’ll segment it out. So you’ll have all the 3D printing stuff in one area. Wouldn’t really call it a pavilion. They just  put these different things, because all the car automotive things are in one, one hall. All the televisions, all the screens are basically like in the main hall.

STEVE

So that’s another question – is how often are they asking your opinion? Because of course the Tech Ranch is the platform by which all this gets rolled out. How often are they asking your opinion? It’s “Hey, are we onto something right now?”

MARLO

The conversations afterwards are that way, during the interview not so much, but afterwards and then I get asked a lot to do, like on boxing and stuff, and I used to do a lot of that type of thing. I don’t anymore because of my dual role with National Day Calendar but I want to get back to that again. So I guess I really give advice to some of these things. 

STEVE

So, back to CES. 

MARLO

Yeah.

STEVE

So from a technology perspective what was CES this year as far as what your expectations were?

MARLO

I expected to see artificial intelligence at a level never seen before, and I was correct in that. It’s being incorporated in so many things. And for example have we talked about the refrigerator and cooking type of scenario? 

STEVE

Yeah, we did a little bit last last week. That’s right. 

MARLO

That’s what I thought. 

STEVE

Got a chance to take a little at someday it could be one unit. 

MARLO

Yeah, there was some prototypes of that. And the idea is that because of autonomous vehicles the thinking is that you don’t have to have as much food in your house. We’re off at that point now, you and I grew up in a generation, especially my wife, where you need to have four freezers and everything else cuz you need to store all this food if you come from rural country. That’s how it is, right? 

STEVE

Yeah. I’ve got my wild game freezer. I’ve got my cow freezer, 

MARLO

There’s enough food in our house to last a year if we needed to, I’m sure. But The idea here is that you have one unit that, that your refrigerator is going to basically talk to your favorite grocery store. The autonomous vehicle is gonna deliver your food in a timely manner. It’s gonna know that you’re leaving work and gonna be home at 5:45 or whatever. And that Autonom vehicle will show up at about the same time, and you can take your bag of groceries in stock, your refrigerator, and then it’ll start pulling things out of that refrigerator , to make things, there’ll be a robot involved in this as well. There’s actually robots that are being developed right now that will help you with cooking, doing your clothes, laundry, clean your house above and beyond. 

STEVE

With AI and the robotics and stuff going, wait a minute, it’s not about the safety aspect, it’s about workforce and getting workers. Has there been a paradigm shift from a mindset 

MARLO

It’s the quickest form to monetization. So if a company says, you know what, the United States has a workforce shortage right now of 18 million jobs or whatever it is. Right?  So there’s the economies as well, right? So then your fast food hamburger can’t be 99 cents anymore. No. All of it has to go up. So in order for you, if price point is an important thing for your restaurant, for example, which I would imagine most are. They look for two things that has to happen. They either have to lay off staff because that’s the most expensive part of a restaurant is the actual staffing that goes on. Or you figure out other ways to make or serve, make food or serve your customers. And probably robotics will come into play more and more all the time. 

You’re seeing kiosks and McDonald’s just pop up like crazy. I occasionally run into a McDonald’s. They seem to, they’re just more of them. And a lot of times when I’m in a smaller town, that’s the only fast food restaurant in town, so I’ll go in there, but even in a small town of three or 4,000 people, you’re met with four kiosks, and then they just have one person at the counter that would take the occasional order and or hand off the food instead of having four or five staff there. And I guarantee you, if you were to talk to the manager of that facility, they’re gonna state wages and they’re gonna state lack of workforce. Those are the two reasons why they put those kiosks in. 

STEVE

What else is out there to from a daily life simplicity perspective? What are some of the things you saw at CES? 

MARLO

There’s a lot of dedicated artificial intelligence. You can get into, if you’re an attorney or if you’re a bookkeeper, all of these things, there’s artificial intelligence being built to help you with those scenarios. For example, if you needed to do a search on a particular case as an attorney, in the past, before we had a lot of com, computer searches, you would probably go through a bunch of law books and site cases or whatever to make your point, right?

Then computers come along and you can do a search to do that, but you still have to compile this stuff. Now you can ask an AI that this is the case I’m working on. These are the parameters. This is what I’m looking for, to cite cases in the past to make my argument, and it will actually go and research that for you. 

STEVE

AI, what do I need to win this? What information do I need to win this case? And what information do I need to present to a jury? 

MARLO

Yes. Put all of that together for you so you can make your argument. Again, you could state that maybe you’re going to put a few people outta work here or whatever, but in, in an attorney’s situation if this costs me less money, they have to pay a little extra for the ai. That might, maybe the AI costs 10 grand a year or something like that. But it certainly will make their jobs more proficient, more efficient,

STEVE

you think about robotic surgeries and some of the things that surgeons can repair now with the use of robotics and now you get into the AI sphere of medicine. What did you see this year? 

MARLO

So it started with this, I did an interview with a company that is using artificial intelligence to determine if your pet has issues, health issues. So what you do with this app is you take a photo of your pet every week, okay? And it will then monitor your pet along with all the other pets that are in this database. Okay. So then they take machine learning, artificial intelligence, and they look at all these others, they start accumulating data that are noticeable on these photos they’ll have a photo of your pet healthy, and then there’s a biomarker that happens, let’s say a year from now. 

And that biomarker indicates some type of cancer. This is fascinating that they could, they’re taking all this data and they’re putting it together and with just the use of a photo, they’re able to determine or at least a high probability of your pet having cancer or whatever. So there are millions and millions of probably possible good businesses, good ideas, healthcare things, whatever else that’s sitting out there that somebody had a couple beers one night with a couple buddies, wrote it down on a bar napkin, but doesn’t have a million dollars, or can’t come up with a million dollars to do this. What happens if you can just pull up an app and type in the parameters and it punches out the app for you? 

What’s possible with this, and this is the thing I think you have to think about, and this is why I don’t think that the job markets in any jeopardy at all, because the acceleration of ideas being brought to market is gonna just go through the roof in the next couple of years because of this stuff, and then all these other companies are gonna get born. A great example in my opinion is National Day Calendar. If we didn’t have the technology that’s that we have available right now, National Day Calendar could not afford to do what it does because we don’t bring in enough people. If it wasn’t for technology, we’d have to have 200 people working there, right? 

But because of technology, we have our 20 people or so. Because that’s what our cash flow allows to have happen. Is the world better if we can create an app that can take photos of you every week over the course of your lifetime and then at some time it says, Hey, there’s something going on with you. You should go to the doctor now and check it out because there’s a possibility that something’s changed with you. And our doctors, for example, may not even be using a knife in the future, and microsurges are gonna become more and more commonplace because you’re just gonna put a laser or something inside of you. 

STEVE

Yeah. I go fix somebody who is on the cellular level rather than, okay, we have to give you a heart transplant.

MARLO

So DNA and the ability to break into DNA even further, which is what’s going on right now because there’s subs of subs. I guess the information that’s in DNA is just extensive and they’re starting to get it at a level now because they have the computing power and artificial intelligence, again, that can dissect this stuff, right? That is key to artificial intelligence. And I’ve learned that over the last month and a half that I’ve been playing with chat GPT. It’s all about the ask. You can get pretty close sometimes, but you’ll realize after a while that. Sometimes it doesn’t give you quite the right answer because I didn’t ask it the proper question. 

STEVE

So from an educational standpoint, there’s still the value in education because you have to have the ability to ask the correct question, 

MARLO

If you’re writing a term payment paper on Benjamin Franklin, for example, and you ask it to write a term paper in Benjamin Franklin, back and it’ll review the things that you’ve written in the past, online or in a book or whatever and then it’ll punch out a story about that. Let’s say this app that I just was talking about detecting skin cancers or other cancers in human beings, it has to have that database to make that happen. It’s your photo. And a million other photos, that this is AI, the database is tracking and then it cumulatively creates these biomarkers that if you start to have one of these biomarkers it’ll learn, but it can’t learn from you alone. 

It can learn a little bit from you, but you’d have to go in and let’s say you develop cancer sometime in the future, then you’d have to go in and tell the app that you had cancer. But it really doesn’t do you any good at that point. You, the app only learns when you have a bunch of people that have come in and said, all right, I developed cancer. There’s cloning that’snot cloning in the reality that you’re thinking but a virtual clone of yourself. Some of this stuff is possible. Maybe not hammer nail type of thing right now, but you could have your robot do that for you.

STEVE

Yeah. I hate dusting. 

MARLO

Your robot will. My robot can do that. Yeah. And have dinner waiting for you when you get home at night and have all your clothes full folded and cleaned. Impressed and, yeah. All good stuff. 

STEVE

See, I’m really good at loading the dishwasher and running the dishwasher and get yelled at for not unloading the dishwasher.

MARLO

Your robot will take care of that for you too. 

STEVE

So in the last.20 seconds we’ve got here. If there was one thing that you saw that was earth shaking, what was the most fascinating thing that you walked in the door and went, oh my gosh.

MARLO

Psionic is the name of the company. It’s a robotic hand that was attached to a person’s arm, somebody who lost their arm and below the elbow, and he’s able to feel his daughter when they hold hands.

The post The Tech Ranch at CES 2023 appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

JASON

We gotta talk about the world of innovation. And Marlo, I want your take on this because in my opinion, this has gotta be. At least in my world as a wordsmith, one of the most disruptive technologies that has entered into the American workplace in a long time, and it’s the rise of artificial intelligence. People might be thinking, wait a minute, are you talking about Terminator type artificial intelligence? No, folks, I’m talking about customer service, artificial intelligence. Marlo, you’re familiar with that? Aren’t you?. 

MARLO

It’s amazing what’s going on, and I think it’s a good time to talk about this because people are, just like you and I making plans for 2023, what technologies are we gonna invest in? All of that stuff. And yeah, the rise, not the rise of Terminator here, but the rise of artificial intelligence and how we’re gonna be using it in 2023 is astonishing. That is, it’s just unbelievable what has gone on that the public has access to now over the last two months. And with CES just around the corner. I’ll be there next week. 

JASON

And now what’s c ces? Sorry, what’s c? . 

MARLO

So the consumer electronic show. A show that’s been going on in Vegas. It’s the world’s largest technology show. There’ll be a few hundred thousand people that will be in attendance. I think they introduce 200,000 new products at this show every year. And I was doing the math on this a couple years ago, not to get sidetracked, but I know you and I are gonna be all over the place today with this stuff. But there’s 10,000 media that attend this event as well, which is one of the largest media events in the world as well.

And 200,000 new products. , if you do the math on that, that means that every person there that’s in media would have to report on what, 20 different new products just to cover all of them. And of course there are –  I’ll do 200 stories out a year in the next couple weeks. It’s a lot of new stuff and it’s just, it’s boggling how much you think everything has been invented. We haven’t even got started yet. I’m telling you right now. We haven’t even got started yet. 

JASON

Incredible. Where is CES and when is it again? 

MARLO

So it’s in Las Vegas. It’ll run January 5th through the eighth. So it’ll be next week. But actually there’s a lot of events that start in front of that, especially since it’s a Thursday through Sunday this year.

So starting on Monday already, I’ll be in a lot of different type of smaller events that are going on. There’ll be a lot of press-only type of things to introduce new products and get interviews and that type of thing. Expect a lot of stuff from me coming out in the next couple weeks.

JASON

So when we’re talking about, talk radio and the different types of programming and our target audience and demographics and all. That’s actually one type of artificial intelligence, and we can certainly get into the geo-artificial intelligence, if you are the geo-tracking, the eye in the sky, and you know that, that way you know exactly where to get the best cup of coffee, right?

That’s the whole idea. The other side of it that I want your take on before we take our first commercial break here coming up is in my world, the wordsmithing world, because the article that I was reading the other day from MIT of one of those snooty intellectual pieces that I like to read, it talked about the world of artificial intelligence in the rise of wordsmithing basically.

And the replacement of technical writers, the replacement of customer service writers that would do chatting and that sort of thing. But then it got into actually the mental health part of things, which is a lot of these artificial intelligent robots that are chatting with people in a customer service role. They don’t know how insensitive they’re being because they’re just giving facts. Then, I started reading more about how now some of the artificial robots that are doing the chatting are now suppressing some of the climate change information and all this other stuff. So now I’m going down a rabbit hole.

Okay, Marlo, let’s start from the beginning here. Where should people look for artificial intelligence first? For me, it’s the wordsmithing part because that’s my career. Where are you looking at it? 

MARLO

I do a lot of that type. I’m not quite as proficient as you are when it comes to writing, although I will be changing that because of this. I’ll actually put out more content this year than I ever have.  and it’s because I will have the ability with these tools now to do that. So I can, for example and I’m just throwing this out to you. I can type in a parameter, write a story about Jason Spies and Marlo Anderson doing a show on a Tuesday – 1000 words.

JASON

I just wanted to tease a little bit about Google Glass because I don’t think people understand what’s going on with that technology. I don’t, I haven’t checked in for three years. I do not know where we’re at with Google Glass. I know the rollout was a bomb. It failed for whatever reason, but the technology has kept going. Are we there with it in contacts yet? Do we have it? Where’s the Google Glass technology where you can walk into a room and all of a sudden, just like in all the movies oh, here’s Karen. Here’s her birthdate, here’s her husband’s name, here’s the dog’s name, all that stuff. 

That’s real, isn’t it? 

MARLO

So it’s real. What happens is when you wear Google Glass and you like, say you walk into a room probably, you know what it does is it hooks into your social media and it’ll pull this stuff forward. So if you were walking, let’s say you’re walking down a sidewalk and you looked into a restaurant, the menu might appear.

JASON

Folks, get ready for next year because the world that you see in the palm of your hands on your phone and on your screen, it might not be the real thing. So we’re gonna talk about how to actually accept this new reality. How to tell the difference. The article that I was reading about in my world, the wordsmith world, about the rise of artificial intelligence. The article was about how to detect it and how to navigate through some of the mental health issues that it’s creating.

I didn’t, how can you sue me? Now and then we got images. Okay. Think of all the pictures that you’ve put up of your kids and your kid’s sonogram and yourself, and. How many, back background pictures you might be in that someone else took a picture of. And then you got public records. So when all these, the first avenue meets first street, the nexus of the universe is met. How can somebody navigate through that on the social implications?

Because I see how awesome this is for the world of business. This is gonna revolutionize businesses next year. It’s gonna save ’em a small fortune. But the legal industry is the one I see taking off more than anything next year. . 

MARLO

What’s funny about this too, you bring up the legal part of it, I actually think artificial intelligence will be a huge part of the legal space as well. I’m gonna paint a picture for you here or a video. Okay. And I’m just gonna take our current president and, but this could be anybody, this could be you and I, Jason. It could be former President Trump. It could be anybody. Elon Musk, anybody who is particularly open to this. Because of artificial intelligence and the way that you can manipulate images and video, now you could take, and somebody could post something of a video of Joe Biden saying something totally different than what he meant to say.

So if somebody wanted to take the stock market down, for example, you could release a video of the president stating something that would have significant ramifications and then post it on social media as some type of news source or whatever. Granted, it will probably be taken down, but there’s always this thing about something getting posted and then by the time it’s discovered, it’s 10 minutes, it’s an hour, it’s two hours.

It’s like computer viruses, right? There’s always, there’s a new virus that comes out, but the virus protection software that you have has to know about the virus before it can protect you from it. Somebody has to report it. Somebody has to do something to it, right? So there’s a window of opportunity.

What you’re talking about is that window of opportunity can be seen by millions, tens of millions of people before it’s taken down. And the next thing you know, you and I are talking about it on a talk radio show or whatever, can you believe what the president said? And then it just gets amplified, right?

So there’s always this window of opportunity, and it’s all made possible because of this technology that we have now using artificial intelligence that you can manipulate what people say. And it can be on anything. It could be, if somebody wants to blast your next door neighbor, it can be anything. And it actually created this image that I put up and it looked, there was this path that was groomed and there was a bunch of cows  that were pulling these snow blades, and it was hilarious. And people didn’t realize that it was an AI generated image. They just thought that this was for real, 

JASONThat’s the part folks I want you to understand is the, a lot of people out there, they don’t understand – a lot of this is fake.

MARLO

This is the chat GPT I was just talking about with open AI. Could be used to plot out and design new games with it, including crossword puzzles dealing with loneliness and anxiety. So this is something that you were just talking about, Jason.

So if you put in, if you input this, I’m really sad and lonely right now, Chat GPT actually spit this out. I’m sorry to hear that. You’re feeling sad and lonely. Lonely. It’s natural to feel down sometimes, but it’s important to remember that you’re not alone. There are many people who care about you and want to help you and so on and so forth.

It can help you deal with these mental issues. It can also exasperate them as well. You have, there’s a fine line there, I think. 

JASON

I think the important part is that there’s enough good that we’re seeing with the artificial intelligence to move ahead on it. I think the important part for people to understand is there’s gonna be some, some correction that needs to be done. The correction might be a little bit testy at times because you are gonna deal with emotions. The counseling one is a great example to where the sheer resources that are needed to put a human behind a 24 hour help desk are not always available. But to answer 15 pre-qualifying questions, that is gonna save somebody’s life. That can be done and it can be done right now. 

And if they can, if they can save five lives and only offend one person who doesn’t take their life, but they just get offensive, that’s in that more good than bad column. So how can we now make this AI a little bit less sterile? That’s where we’re open to discussion and that’s where the vanilla gets the sprinkles, if you will.

Folks, that’s the part to keep in mind though, when we’re talking about the good, the bad and the ugly, the reason we’re talking about it is because it ain’t going anywhere. It’s here. So this is a platform, this is a place where you can have a public discussion, where we have a town hall talk of the town, if you will.

JASON

And Marlo, let’s talk about what parents can do because there is a lot of really cool things. What should parents do? Should, should they monitor their AI around their house? Should they start, saying, hey, I just want to have AI do a recipe, because that’s another thing you can just put, take, I think you can probably even take a snapshot of your refrigerator contents now and they’ll kick out a recipe.

MARLO

That’s correct. 

JASON

Oh, is it really? I was joking actually. 

MARLO

Oh, no you’re absolutely correct. I just figured the technology would be there. They can actually –  I’ve seen that before. AI is pretty new. I’m not really sure. , the implications that it will have yet for young people.

But I will say this, I think about my grandson, Tyler, when he was five years old, and I watched this go on and he’s a couple years older than that now. But, as a young child sometimes, especially when you’re surrounded with a bunch of adults, sometimes you might get a little lonely or maybe you don’t feel like you’re getting the attention that you want, right?

So it was a house full of people, all adults. He was there and he was trying to get somebody to play a game with him or whatever, and nobody would do this. So the next thing you know and I happened to be downstairs working on my computer, doing something at the time. He comes wandering down and I have an Alexa sitting there, and he went right up to Alexa and goes, Alexa “Count to 10 for me in Spanish” and Alexa just spouts off, count to 10 in Spanish and he’s five and he wants to learn how to count to 10 in Spanish. So he’s now interacting with Alexa to do this. Then Alexa play this song for me, and Alexa would play this song. From then he had a game that he would play with Alexa, and I’m just, I am just stunned that, he had this ability to actually interact with an artificial intelligence and he just took it for granted, so I think that there’s really good things that are possible because we have these devices in our houses. 

JASON

I tried to write someone a check the other day and they asked me what I was drawing .I feel your pain, Marlo. I know what you’re talking about!MARLO

That is so funny!

The post The Future of AI in 2023 and Beyond appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

MARLO

So anyway, they got in this conversation about television and my mom was complaining about. how expensive it is to have cable, and my daughter-

STEVE

We all do that. Yes. 

MARLO

Yeah. My daughter Kayla goes, well, I don’t pay for cable. My mom was like, well, how does that work? And she starts talking about streaming and the next thing you know, I’m putting the internet out at my mom and stepdad’s place.

STEVE

Wow. 

MARLO

Not for computer usage, but so that she can have Netflix and Hulu! So I thought, well-

STEVE

Why don’t you just get her a Roku stick or-? 

MARLO

Well, I decided on a TV that’s connected. You know, smart TV. So at the same time, I got her a little Chromebook. And she started finding out about Facebook and she loved that part of it. And my stepdad was very ill at the time. I put in a couple of Amazon Alexas and under the guise that you guys can just talk to this. And my stepdad fell in love with it immediately because he’s an old Western movies guy, loves the old music from that era of the fifties and the sixties, the Cowboys and whatever and he could just say, play Gene Autry and this thing would actually play Gene Autry. He was just like, you know-

STEVE

Now, now, now, you got me thinking. It’s like, huh. Christmas gift for my father-in-law this year.

MARLO

Yes. Well, so this gets to that. But my hidden agenda here was that they would have a way to communicate. My mom’s a little stubborn. Like I said, my stepdad was ill. He passed away a couple years ago and when I was setting this up, I set it up to their phone system as well. There was an adapter that you could get, that you could adapt a landline phone. Because she actually still has a rotary phone.The rotary phone that I grew up with, Uh, well it broke down a couple years ago. They came out and replaced it with a rotary phone. 

STEVE

Nice. 

MARLO

She pays a lease on this thing and they actually, they must laugh about this. $8. It’s still on her wall. It’s so great. And anyway, so I bought this device, it was like a hundred bucks to attach it to her Alexa. I get this weird phone call at seven o’clock in the morning and I’m like, I’m looking at this and I don’t answer because I think it’s a spam call then there’s a message that was left and it, and my phone transcribed it and it said, my name – Marlo. And then call 9 1 1. And I’m like, what in the world? What kind of message is this? And I start thinking about it and I’m like, did my mom fall or something? And then just at the same time, the phone rings again and I pick it up this time and it is my mother and she has fallen and- 

STEVE

Okay, now you think of the life alerts? Alexa, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. 

MARLO

Yes. But she doesn’t have a life alert again. She’s got Alexa. She, she’s a little stubborn this way. But I put these Alexas in her house for this reason, just in case something were to ever happen-

STEVE

You are a good son 

MARLO

-and she actually used it and it worked.

So, but it gets better than this. So I talked to her, of course she’s she’s able to talk, you know, just like she would, you and I are talking right now. And then on top of it, I got off the phone with her real quick. I called 9 1 1, got the ambulance in the route. I got ahold of one of her neighbors and she lives in a rural area outside of Minot and friends on the way. And then Alexa has this drop in feature that you can have set up within your circle. So I went into my phone, I see mom’s Echo. I tap on that and just like that, I’m now talking to her again. 

STEVE

Wow. 

MARLO

So I didn’t have to, I didn’t have to call a phone that she had to answer. I could actually talk to her and comfort her and tell her that I have an ambulance on the way. I have her friend coming over, but there was still gonna be a, like a 15 minute gap before somebody could even get there, because again, she lives in a rural area. So I was able to visit with her, and I could just tell that in, in a minute or two that even though she was unable to move 

STEVE

Soothing. 

MARLO

Oh, I, I can’t imagine the fact that she was able to communicate somebody 

STEVE

Lowering stress level.

MARLO

Exactly. You know, and, and then find out later on. Um, you know, and I got there just as the ambulance was getting to the hospital or whatever. She ends up, she had fractured both hips. Wow. I mean, there’s no way she’s moving. Right. She couldn’t crawl anywhere. She couldn’t get anywhere at all.

STEVE

Well, okay, so in a case like this too, because your hips are very vascular, large, flat bones, and you have some serious possibilities of bleeding 

MARLO

Yes. 

STEVE

So time is critical in a situation like this. So without that technology- 

MARLO

Well, I just, I just wonder how long now, this was the day before Thanksgiving, so of course we’re all gonna be, as her kids gonna be checking in with her, right? but if it was any other time, you know, it could have probably been days before somebody would possibly would’ve checked in on her because, you know, so this a ability for her to just, as long as she could utter Alexa and call Marlo or call my sister, or whatever, you know, she had that ability to actually talk to somebody.

STEVE

Wow. 

MARLO

I think it’s just amazing and it’s, and, and no monthly fee with this or any of this other stuff. So 

STEVE

How long before it’s “Alexa, have Marlo send his drone to take me to the hospital”? 

MARLO

Yeah, that’s a good question. Seriously, yeah, I, I, I’m. You know, whether or not, and, and I, I get into this privacy concern a little bit cuz we all talk about it and we laugh about, you know, 

STEVE

Well there’s the other big, big brothers watching and Alexa eavesdropping.

MARLO

If I say that I love Doritos, you know, within an hour I’m gonna see a commercial for Doritos on my phone or a drone, just drop ’em off at your phone or whatever. Right. And we’ve, you and I have had this conversation and it’s true. It happens. 

STEVE

They’re, well and it’s like the connectivity with the Ring doorbells that people had concerns about that was legitimate, but there’s security layers to that. Yeah. But, but you know, part of it comes down to, okay, you have an elderly parent that was in a life-threatening situation and technology mitigated that.

MARLO

Yeah, yeah. Added comfort to this whole situation. 

STEVE

There’s a balance to this.

MARLO

Yeah. So I, I just, you know, if you’re thinking about getting your parents something for Christmas and they don’t have an Alexa or a Google Home appliance or any of these, Speakers. First of all, they’re gonna love you for it because they can just pull up Gene Autry or Yeah.

STEVE

Especially if they like Westerns 

MARLO

Yeah. Or whatever kind of music they like. 

STEVE

My mother-in-law, pulling up Hallmark. 

MARLO

There you go. And you could connect these to your television too, and talk to them. And, and they do, of course. All kinds of things. They, I, I would hear, uh, the questions, they would ask it all the time if they were, you know, my, my mom and stepdad did argue a little bit and they would always use Alexa to, you know, find out which one was right. I don’t know, , I dunno how good that was. But, uh, because I think there’s always something about if he can’t prove who’s right or wrong, then the fight just kind of sizzles down, you know.

STEVE

I think they’re insurance commercials. Replay for the NFL game. Probably better that you can’t see it, you know?

MARLO

But anyway, I, I really, you know, for the cost of these things, I mean, you can get an Amazon Alexa, those little disks. You know, for $29 

STEVE

Little puck things. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. Put three of those in your house. Now, do you have to have an Amazon subscription for those or not? So you have to just have an Amazon account and Google’s the same way. You have to have a Google account for that. But this is all free stuff. It’s not like you have to pay a monthly fee or anything for these. It’s just, you’d have to have that account to set it up.. 

STEVE

So it’s just like, I’ve got an Android, so I’ve got a Google account because of my Android. Same thing.

MARLO

And I would highly recommend the, so this is, this is the weird part of this probably, but because I set up my, my, because we never get weird. 

STEVE

We’ll never get weird here. 

MARLO

We never get weird. 

So there’s that drop in feature, right? So I could drop in any time. So you have to make sure that you’re trusting enough of the person that’s putting maybe these devices into that person’s home or whatever, you know, or that, because I could drop in and just eavesdrop anytime I wanted to, you know, there, it’s like a baby monitor type of situation.But in this instance, I was so thankful that I had that feature. You know, my mom didn’t even know that this was a feature there. I never 

STEVE

Well, she does now. 

MARLO

Well, she does now. So it was, it was a pretty cool thing that I was able to use this technology to, you know, help my mom out that morning.

STEVE

And she’s doing better now. And she’s in rehab. I mean, of course road to recovery. 

MARLO

Of course, of course. It’s a long haul and I’m not sure what the outcome is gonna be yet because it all depends on how well she recovers. But, but, uh, um, but I was glad, glad to have the technology there that morning.

STEVE

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. A little personal story with your mom. 

MARLO

Go, but uh, go get this stuff. Yeah. Put it in your parents’ homes. Oh my goodness. Great example of things you may not think of. Right. From a safety perspective, uh, that smart technology can provide. 

MARLO

There’s a couple things that I think are really interesting for this year. Boes, what do you think of when I say Bose? 

STEVE

Speakers. 

MARLO

All right. 

STEVE

Or headphones. 

MARLO

Yeah. Or anything that produces sound, right? So Bose now has sunglasses.

STEVE

Really? 

MARLO

With builtin speakers, with builtin little speakers aimed at your ears. So instead of wearing headphones, these things sync to your phone. And you have these little speakers that are both speakers playing these things, I think. 

STEVE

Oh, they don’t go in your ear. Are they noise canceling? 

MARLO

Mm. I would say probably not. You know, so that’s the, that’s the thing. I mean, I have, I love my noise canceling set. I mean, I just, 

STEVE

When on the airplane it’s, you’re on a plane flying. 

MARLO

What, you know what I love about it more than anything else. You know? So if you don’t get somebody, a set of noise canceling headphones, if you, if they travel a lot or if they have a problem hearing in crowded areas, right?

STEVE

Me. 

MARLO

Because you can put the noise canceling on and then start having a conversation with somebody and it’s like they’re sitting next to you, without having, having all that crazy stuff. I actually was listening to a conversation from somebody that was three rows behind me two days ago. But it was so easy to hear them because the jet noise was gone. And the microphone still picked up on the conversation going on, so Yeah. 

STEVE

You don’t, what they haven’t done yet, the entertainment system on the back of chairs is Bluetooth. That’s because you get on a plane and if it’s an older plane or newer plane, some planes are different. the plug-ins are a little bit different depending on how you connect.  I was on a newer plane and they didn’t have the little TV screen. They just had you put your phone on here and that was the connection, that was the screen for the connectivity to entertainment on the plane, which I hated because my phone –  I, I don’t wanna have to wear my glasses to watch a movie on a plane.

MARLO

So I have wifi lights. I still think this is a great thing to get. So, lights that are connected to wifi, you know, like the lights you have on outside of your house Or whatever. Um, they’ve really come down in price. And there’s strip lights now that are wifi connected, all this stuff.

And you’re probably asking, why do I want wifi connected lights? It’s a good question because you can just put a light bulb in and, and, but the cool thing is, is that especially this time of year, especially if you have color changing light bulbs, is that you can just go on your phone, and all of a sudden you can connect them to red, red, and green across the front of your house 

STEVE

Or program them so they can sync with music 

MARLO

Or whatever you wanna do, right?

STEVE

I looked at those, I saw that, and I’m like, wait a minute. , my wife never has to nag at me about putting up and taking down Christmas lights again. You just put ’em up. And they’re off. They’re on, they’re off.

MARLO

And then when you want ’em to be white again, you just turn ’em back to white or whatever.

STEVE

Yeah. You need to illuminate the yard for company coming over, or, oh, let, summer, we better do the yellow bug light color, 

MARLO

And it gets even more interesting than that. So I use “if this then that”.Or if the International Space Station flies overhead, the lights on my building go crazy. 

STEVE

Hopefully they can see you. I’m hopeful for that, but they never have. Hopefully you’ll be able to see your building when you’re flying there. 

The post Great Tech-Related Christmas Gifts & How Smart Devices Help The Elderly appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

MARLO

A lot of things have really ramped up in the last week about flying cars. So, a little bit later on the show we’re really looking–

STEVE 

So we are really that close to the Jetsons?

MARLO 

We’re getting there. It’s actually amazing what’s going on right now. 

STEVE 

Actually, it was funny, during the break. Again, during the break, you were showing me some pictures of NASA. I’m like, wow, that’s really cool. There’s the moon and what’s the celestial body over there? I’m like, and I’m trying to – it’s not round. It’s like an asteroid. I was just, this tiny little speck off in the distance. I’m like, oh, wait a minute. Scratch the screen. What’d you have for breakfast this morning?

MARLO

A bagel.  

STEVE

Okay. I’m thinking it might have been the bagel 

MARLO 

With a little cream cheese next to it, right? 

STEVE

That would’ve been the milky way

MARLO 

Yes, we are now around the moon. Orion is there. This is, I love this. Last night they were interviewing people from NASA. One of the NASA directors said the team is giddy about how well Artemis One is performing. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the word giddy ever come out of anybody from NASA before. 

STEVE

It’s like watching an episode of the Big Bang Theory except grown-up. 

MARLO 

They said the imagery coming back from the dark side of the moon is stunning.

STEVE So were there Decepticons? 

MARLO

No Decepticons 

STEVE

Chinese?

MARLO

No Chinese. 

STEVE

Yet. 

MARLO 

Yet. So the closest they’ve been, maybe they’ve been 80 miles away from the lunar surface. So you never know.  So the next time it goes up, it will actually have astronauts, but they will also not land on the moon. And then later this decade we’ll be putting people back on the moon to start building a moon base. 

STEVE 

They were doing a story on what they were gonna deploy from the next moonshot.. And they started talking about base, how some of that technology was based off of some old technology because the old technology had worked so well. And I forget the name of the rover, but they brought up a rover that was supposed to do a 60 day mission on Mars and it’s still chugging along. 11 years later. It’s still fully functioning.  

MARLO 

Supposed to have a short lifespan as well.

STEVE 

So when you put up a solar powered anything, it really functions well. 

MARLO 

Yeah. You’re oh, I forget what they call it, the most efficient solar arrays we have on the planet right now probably operate at about 30%. So anyway, we’re getting way off the topic here again but Artemis is working like it should, Orion is now. Orion is actually the spacecraft that’s going around. So anyway things are going well with Artemis, so much so that NASA’s giddy, so let’s just hope it continues. 

STEVE 

Wait, so we’re talking flying cars because according to you, a lot of technology has taking place, which I’m excited about, but I still have that question about batteries. Boeing tried, it didn’t work but you’re getting batteries off the ground, 

MARLO 

But you’re talking about full size, full sized aircraft too, right? Yeah. And there’s actually, there are actually, 

STEVE 

But there’s still a manufacturers that have power to weight ratio-

MARLO 

Yeah. I can’t imagine any type of long-term flight outside of an ultra light, with a wingspan of hundreds and hundreds of feet that would actually be able to – there is actually a plane and ultra light that’s been developed that will fly indefinitely. 

STEVE

I think I saw that. The wings are just huge.They called it the Gossamer, I think. 

MARLO 

The Gossamer was a human powered.vehicle. Back in the, I can’t believe I even remember this- 

STEVE 

You’re scaring me now. 

MARLO

There was a British competition. 

STEVE

Oh yeah, that’s what it was. 

MARLO 

And it was, like, launched in the fifties or the sixties and they put like a million pounds or something on it for a prize.It took until 1988 before somebody even won it. 

STEVE

Did you get the interest that went along? 

MARLO

I’m not sure. But it took 20 or 30 years before because the contest was ongoing until somebody was able to do this course. And it was the gossamer that the gossamer two as a matter of fact. So there’s, at the Smithsonian now, there’s the Kittyhawk, there is the Apollo and there’s the gossamer. Believe it or not, those are the three aircraft that they show off. 

STEVE

Speaking of Kittyhawk, did you know the Wright brothers only flew together once? 

MARLO

Yes. , 

STEVE

That’s because their father forbid them in case there was an accident.

MARLO

No, I did not know that. 

STEVE

Yeah. Interesting. They did that for their father, but they only flew together once. 

MARLO 

This is such a great show. I learned all these things. 

STEVE 

We just know way too much stupid crap. 

MARLO 

We do, too.  We’ll be the best trivia partners. I’m telling you right now. . 

MARLO

Alright so before we get into flying cars you brought up something that I had learned over the week here since we last talked. So electric cars. Now I’m not for or against them, I just think they’re another form of transportation. 

STEVE 

It’s an option.

MARLO 

It’s an option.

STEVE 

I don’t think it’s the ultimate option. It’s a stepping stone. I think electric vehicles are a stepping stone right now 

MARLO

…to wherever we’re going —

STEVE

I wish we would’ve gone further down the road of hybrid because of that. Something beneficial. 

MARLO

I find that interesting that you’ve said that.

STEVE 

Toyota is about the only company that really is like, “nope, we’re still doing the hybrids.” 

MARLO 

The engine in your car is basically a generator producing enough electricity for your car to run. 

STEVE 

That’s why railroads and look at all the weight that they transport.. 

MARLO 

That’s why they’re electro motives. So there was a, of course, a study but somebody has investigated. Do you know who John Stale is?

STEVE 

Yeah. And he did this investigative report on Nightline way back in the day that he was on. 

MARLO 

He does his own thing now. I think because of the back politics of the world nowadays, he doesn’t get a lot of airtime anymore. Cause I think he is a little more right-Leaning than most people like but with that said I always have liked John because I thought he was always 

He’s a good journalist and. If you didn’t know his political leaning, you wouldn’t know. He to me, he’s like the modern day Walter Cronkite.

STEVE 

You didn’t know, did the homework, gets the fact 

MARLO

That’s correct. 

STEVE

He and didn’t care about what side it hurt. 

MARLO 

Yeah. It wasn’t about a political agenda, but, so anyway did this investigative thing on electric cars and he, through his whatever, came up with a, that the first of all, the, you have to get to 60,000 miles on an electric vehicle before you even start to get close to the carbon footprint that a traditional gas powered vehicle gets to, and you actually start to see that a little bit of savings at a hundred thousand miles. So when your vehicle gets to a hundred thousand miles from that point forward, you will probably be about 20 to 30% less carbon footprint than what a traditional gas vehicle would be.

STEVE 

Two questions for that. 

MARLO 

All right. 

STEVE 

One, how many charges was that to get to a hundred thousand miles and which set of batteries are you currently on? 

MARLO 

So they didn’t get into that so much. They were just generalizing all of this right. What’s interesting, so 500 tons of material has to be moved to mine enough and I, and they’ll line up, I’ll have ’em line up on, on who’s on this side, who’s on that side. And their goal is to try to convince others. And what happens a lot of times is that when I’m in rural settings, like in Tioga, I just do this in Tioga recently.

MARLO 

And the car side usually wins out, but in urban settings, they all come back and say I can order a car anytime I want to. With Lyft oran Uber. So I’m taking the smartphone side. 

STEVE 

In ten years from now when things trickle down into rural North Dakota, then probably, what’s that answer?

MARLO 

Yeah, it probably will be the smartphone would be my guess, but yeah. 

STEVE

But can that autonomous vehicle. Avoid me getting stuck in a ditch in my four-wheel drive. 

MARLO 

Probably not. And the fun that it takes to get out of it.

The post Conversations at the dark side of the Moon appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

STEVE

We were talking a little bit about politics and I’d mentioned the shortage of diesel fuel, because according to national stores we’re down to 21, 22 days of supply left. 

MARLO

Yeah. 

STEVE

Because of what’s been going on with the strategic reserve and all kinds of stuff, and it’s a little daunting because the world stops for most people when there’s no diesel, because that’s how we ship.

MARLO

Yep. 

STEVE

That’s our connectivity to the supply chain, and we know what happened with the supply chain earlier this year. So, a lot of focus has been taken off of other places. But, if you go back a month and a half, two months ago leading into this political cycle, there was a lot of discussion on climate change and that was a push and now it’s fallen by the wayside because they weren’t getting traction politically with the climate change narrative. So we’ll come back to that after the election, I’m assuming. But, things come and go as it meets political and I say this all the time. It frightens me when things get politicized that are agendas and when you politicize an agenda, then bad things happen. I’m not a fan of that, but you have some legitimate climate change tech. 

MARLO

Yeah – and I wouldn’t – this article that I’m bringing you or quoting you from here is gonna be the articles based around climate change but it really is more about producing more energy, more electricity, and that is actually the takeaway for me here because I don’t think anybody can argue the fact that we’re using more and more electricity.

STEVE

Absolutely. 

MARLO

The only reason that we haven’t gone up in the last seven or eight years is the conversion of regular lighting to LED that has actually leveled the playing field for seven to eight years. But if you look at the rate of consumption of electricity, moving up to 2013, 2014, the amount of energy that LED saves is just enormous. We’re plugging more things in. We all have more devices that we’re using.  

STEVE

Just look at a smart house. The connectivity in every bit of connectivity is using electricity.

MARLO

That’s correct. So, regardless of how you feel about electric vehicles, and even if they’re gonna get off where they’re at right now and really make a significant impact in the world – we’re gonna use more electricity. So, this is interesting to me. Ocean current power. The amount of potential energy in Ocean’s currents is five terawatts. So that’s about five times the energy generation capacity for the whole U.S. So if they can tap into Ocean Currents, then we can basically solve the energy crisis which is interesting.

STEVE

I read – and this was 20 years ago, maybe – an article on producing electricity from tides. The take of the article though, where what they were going after is how to, because you have to be careful and if you screw up tides, bad things can happen. So, you don’t wanna screw with Mother Nature too much. But the take on the article was an opportunity to generate energy from, say, a hurricane. We just take a look at what had happened with Ian down in Florida. Now if you’re able to stop that tide, that flow, whether it’s a net system. And that’s where they were going, because granted, this was 20 years ago at least. They were looking at, we can drop these nets in, it’ll stop the currents and we can change the course of some of these storms. But, then it got taken into the electrical production side of that and now I think they were taking the electricity running it back onto the storm and dissipating a storm that way was the theory on the paper but it was fascinating. Cause my takeaway on it was we can generate a lot of electricity though. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. 

STEVE

Now the question is, it’s like where do you run those transmission modes? How do you get it from point A to where it needs to be consumed? 

MARLO

Of course, there’s always this talk about, yeah. Imagine there are houses that run totally on wireless power. Now, I’m not sure about the health risks of that, but that’s the thing—

STEVE

You’re living in a microwave. 

MARLO

Yeah. That’s crazy. There was a time when there was a talk of doing a solar array in outer space and they tethered that to the Earth so they would be up high enough, so that they could have 24 7 sunlight on this solar ray, and there was this long ass cable—

STEVE

Right now, I don’t see there a solution being out there that is currently in practice, whether it’s wind or solar. It can’t meet the needs of everything that we need if you’re looking at something tidal, but the thing I always worry about, okay, what are the unintended consequences of anything you do now if you screw up, currents and tidal patterns and things like that. 

MARLO

And if you’re generating energy from them, you’re just moving it from one thing—

STEVE

Conservation of energy. We have a finite amount of matter on this planet. It just goes from one form to another. If you take energy away from something, because like I said, that paper I was reading was about mitigating hurricanes, but it was the energy side of stuff Great example, if you screw up ocean currents. So think of it in terms of trade winds. I was in Hawaii for some conferences, 2014. It was the fall that it was back to back hurricanes that almost hit Hawaii. There were no trade winds. Now, there’s always a breeze in Hawaii but there were no tradewinds. They were disrupted because of the three hurricanes, which didn’t hit the Hawaiian Islands, but it screwed up the Tradewinds. It screwed up the weather in Hawaii for a month. 

So you have to be careful of what you do that might change something. Does it change rainfall? Does it change? Things like that because you’re disrupting weather patterns. I’m a little leery of some of the carbon sequestration stuff. Plants need carbon. So, are you changing the climate with carbon sequestration? Because carbon’s not supposed to be sequestered like that. Now you’re looking at, because of what we’re doing over in Europe right now, people are looking at cutting down forests because they can’t pay the natural gas bill to heat their house. That’s the biggest carbon sink we have. So I’m worried about things like that. Yeah. Now the tidal to me is very interesting because it’s—

MARLO

I think it is too. and I think that if done properly, it’s just another augmentation to what we already have going on, right? You don’t want to take all the energy of the ocean, but you could potentially tap a few things here and there that would increase our total energy production without harming things too much, I’m guessing. If you put some type of turbine in an area that has significant title forces going on, and it can spin both ways. I think that would be significant. 

MARLO

Anyway, so getting back to the space stuff. 

STEVE

You could put up a solar ray in space and collect unfiltered solar energy.

MARLO

And then it’s always high noon in space, right? This idea was brought forward by Isaac Asomov, the science fiction writer, which I know you know every movie, right? 

STEVE

Yep. Every movie.

MARLO

 I forget the name of the book but he talked in this science fiction novel – about which I’m assuming was made into a movie at one time – about collecting energy from space and beaming it to earth. So this book was written in 1941. The book is named Reason by the way, in which a space station transmits energy collected from the sun to various planets using microwave beams. So between 1978 and 1986, the Congress authorized the Department of Energy and NASA to jointly investigate the concept. 

Basically, cable that would be tethered to this huge solar array in space and that’s how they would get the electricity to earth. Now, moving forward, in 1999, NASA’s Space Solar Program, Exploratory Research and Technology program, where SERT was initiated, they are now looking at this very seriously. And they actually anticipate that space-powered energy being beamed back to the earth will have a significant impact in the 21st century. As far as our energy consumption goes up. They’re using a laser-guided system. 

STEVE

Now think of it this way. It’s like how many science fiction movies have had a death ray? 

MARLO

So that’s interesting with this, right? If that laser guided system is off by even the 10th of a degree, Chicago disappears. But it is, it’s interesting to see that this could potentially be a pretty big deal. 

The post Can Ocean Currents Save the Energy Crisis? appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

STEVE

Is that work or, I’m on social media–

MARLO

Right. 

STEVE

I use LinkedIn a lot for my day job. 

MARLO

Yeah, I do too. 

STEVE

Is that considered social media or is that a quote-unquote “productivity” and everything? But that’s everything. It’s all encompassing. The lawsuits, the mental health, the lost productivity, all of that goes into that. But it brings up a great point. the gray area. For me, I use LinkedIn a lot for my day job. And do you consider LinkedIn social media?

MARLO 

Of course. 

STEVE 

Okay. So it’s also a tool that’s replaced email in a lot of space. 

MARLO

But you could make the same argument for—

STEVE

So, is email social media?

MARLO

I don’t think it’s in the same realm, so I’d say no. Because that’s more of a direct messaging type of scenario—

STEVE

But there’s an evolution—

MARLO

There is. 

STEVE

—that has taken place. 

MARLO

Yeah. Because like you—

STEVE

But for me to go to work in the morning and sit there, and I never viewed that as productive. Sitting there, going over emails for an hour. And so you talk about the productivity side for me, that wasn’t productive. 

MARLO

It drives me nuts, too. In fact, I have a person that’s almost full time handling my personal email. Isn’t that insane? 

STEVE

That’s okay in the business place. But, okay, if I’m on a social media platform and we’ll say LinkedIn, which is a business one that I use a lot. I’ve skipped over emails because my good lord, I can’t read all this . 

MARLOI think a lot of people have. You have email right? But if they really wanna get a hold of you-– 

STEVE

If you wanna get a hold of me. I tell everybody—

STEVE & MARLO

Text me. 

MARLO

Or, but a lot of people, I mean our younger people aren’t using text like they used to either. So they use their social media platform. What I’ve noticed—

STEVE

Messenger, Snapchat. 

MARLO

All of it. Instagram, TikTok. TikTok now has—

STEVE

It’s Russian. I try not to go there.

MARLO

It’s like you and I have to have, we have to be gurus of all the things. Because I have people that talk to me strictly through Facebook. I have somebody that I’ve been corresponding with about sponsoring a curling team. But it’s interesting. He’s contacting me through, Twitter my old cohort on the Tech Ranch. he’s a Facebook guy too but we always talk through Facebook, so we were messaging each other back and forth and I have some people that text me or message me through Twitter and now it seems like TikTok, I’m getting more and more messages through TikTok. It drives me crazy.

LinkedIn is by far the most popular for business stuff though. I always have a half a dozen or a dozen messages waiting for me on LinkedIn. And I like that. I always tell people, if you really want to get a hold of me, either you Slack (and that’s my internal stuff that we use) or if you message me on LinkedIn, I’ll probably get back to you because I’ll notice it. I won’t notice email because email, I get thousands of them a day. It’s just lost. 

STEVE

You can make a phone call on it. 

MARLO

Do you know how often your phone is used to actually make a phone call? 

STEVE

Not very. 

MARLO

It’s 8%.

STEVE

Is that it? 

MARLO

Isn’t that something? Texting is almost 20. 

STEVE

Yeah. 

MARLO

So texting has replaced the actual using the phone as a phone. There’ll be a day that maybe we don’t even call it a phone. Maybe it will just be the smart device that you carry along. 

STEVE

At that point just carry a tablet, right? 

MARLO

Yeah. 

STEVE

Because that was the other thing I’ve wondered is like, why don’t tablets make phone calls? Oh, there’s an app for that. . 

MARLO

Remember the day when we would just pick up the phone and call people?

STEVE

And that’s the thing with smart devices, they’re, we talk about AI occasionally, but your smart device is an AI device.

STEVE

One of the things we were talking about – Elon Musk. Some breaking news on Elon so which time is this, that he’s buying Twitter again? On again, off again. On and off again. On again. Off again, on again. Lawsuit. So is he buying it because of the potential lawsuit, or does he really want it or—? 

MARLO

I would have to think that, I don’t know. I just don’t think that the lawsuit had a lot to do with his decision, but people are saying that it is. How do you force somebody to buy your business? Just because they said you’re gonna buy it when you’re the one that said you have this many followers and you don’t, it’s come out that Twitter has a significant amount of bots running. 

Some people estimate 40% of all the accounts are fraudulent accounts. Meaning that there are bots, people and this is rampant. It’s rampant on Facebook right now too. The cloning of accounts is out of control. It’s really rampant right now so you have to be careful with that. But anyway, getting back to Twitter. This is what Elon was saying is that your company isn’t worth this much because you don’t really have that many followers. Maybe Elon just decided that it was worthwhile even at the 44 billion to get it. I don’t know. Did you see the footage though of the SpaceX? The Falcon Nine in front of the full Moon the other day? Oh my goodness. 

STEVE

Was that cool? 

MARLO

It was so cool. And it wasn’t just a photo. There’s actually video and you can see the flame. In the video, you can see the flames coming out of the back of the rocket as it’s going in front of the full moon. This is – you gotta be kidding.  So I highly recommend just go YouTube it or Google it or whatever.

STEVE

We had a question about whether or not you can trust internet searches. Because you got me thinking, okay, in this day and age, plagiarism aside for college kids and high school kids doing their homework, and nowadays we’ve gotten to the point where Google it. But now I’m thinking of sites like Wikipedia that are open for interpretation, people can add to them. Do you trust some of those sources? So how do you do a search or research and know that you’re getting reputable information in today’s day and age? 

MARLO

Yeah. I think, first thing is that – just don’t blindly trust the first website that you go take a look at. I think you need to verify that information by at least one more. And I would say even three sources – the first one is amazon.com, then you have Wikipedia, then you have Merriam Webster. Okay, so this one’s actually not so bad, right? 

STEVE

I’d go to Merriam Webster. Cause I wanna know where it came from. I know that Amazon is a sales site. Wikipedia I don’t always trust, right? And it might be an ancillary resource, right? But okay I’m gonna go to the Merriiam Webster because that’s where the definition is. So rule of thumb are you, should you look for things that don’t have a connection to sales? 

MARLO

Yes. If you’re doing research, I would certainly do that. Now, if you’re doing research to buy something, and then of course, same thing holds true here. Go and check out two, three sources if you know exactly what you’re looking for, if I’m gonna buy this particular type of pen that I’m holding in my hand, for example, I would certainly research this pen. Go to find two or three sources that sell it.

STEVE

But the point is, you have to do diligence whether it’s having to click on a friend request on social media, or you’re doing some research or I don’t think enough is made about high school, middle school kids that are doing homework and some of the things that they may be exposed to as they’re doing some of this research. Parents really need to be diligent. 

MARLO

Yeah, they should. And depending on how old the kids are, like your routers, you can put parental filters on now, which I think is important. You and I could probably come up with a bunch of things that could be researched. Other types of industries like the adult industry might have zeroed in on as well. And those are keywords to take people to pornography or what have you  and it could be all kinds of other stuff. It could be racial intentions. There’s all kinds of stuff that can come up that your kids will inadvertently find so—

STEVE

Is it the fact that the kids are inadvertently finding them or that they’re finding the kids? Because with a lot of these and I come back to political agendas, agendas in general that get politicized. You wind up having so critical race theory and gender issues and things that some of those sites are actively going out and seeking your children.

MARLO

No doubt about that. 

STEVE

Yes. Because they want that influence on your kids. As a parent, Are there programs, are there filters? What do you do as a parent other than just sit there and look over your kid’s shoulder as they’re on the internet the whole time? 

MARLO

And you can even go deeper to this, right? What’s Google’s agenda? What’s Microsoft’s agenda? So the search engine results that you’re getting, what’s the algorithm doing? You have other search engines to choose from as well. You have Bing from Microsoft, you have DuckDuckGo. There you go. I haven’t used it a lot recently.

STEVE

So that brings up the question then, as a parent, how do you pick a good search engine? Because you’re helping your child, which nowadays you need to have a computer for success in education.MARLO

Yep. 

STEVE

So you’re helping a child. So, you set up that laptop or that desktop at home for your child to use. How as a parent do you make an informed decision to go “okay, we’re gonna use Bing or we’re gonna use this” because that little step makes a big difference.

MARLO 

Makes a big difference. 

STEVE

So, how do you walk through that process as a parent?

MARLO

I would just research them as well. Just like you would research, Google it or Bing it or whatever. We say Google it because Google is dominant. It’s like the Phillip Screwdriver. It’s the same thing, right? 

STEVE

You go back to the marketing strategies from the fifties and sixties and stuff, and people call things like down south, it’s I’ll have a Coke but clear or colored. 

MARLO

Yeah. That’s just it wasn’t that long ago with Yahoo. In recent history, Yahoo was the dominant search engine for a few years. AOL was huge right away, Google just has been around a little longer now and not that the other ones have disappeared. They just – Google’s been dominant, but yeah.

STEVE

You could think Google’s acquired them, is what happens. A lot of cases they’ll gobble up smaller entities. 

MARLO

Yep. So yeah, I would just research and see that it falls into what you want your kids to be exposed to. There’s all kinds of ways to do that, but just be aware. That’s the simple thing to follow, I think.

The post What makes real social media and good search engines? appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

STEVE

And some of the things I wanted to talk about, I was reading through this and Marlo, you mentioned during the break a little bit we’re talking about Apple chargers and that kind of dovetails into one of the articles. So let’s talk about the chargers first. So, the European Union has come out with a dictate. It concerns Apple and there’s a little dark side to this that you brought up, and we’ll get into that. But, on the surface this should make a lot of Apple users happy. One of the big headaches with Apple, my wife’s an Apple user, I’m not, but every time she gets a new phone, she’s gotta get a new charging cord. Or because they change it with every phone. 

MARLO

And you could maybe say the same with Android too. Maybe not as often. USB-C‘s been around for a couple years now. 

STEVE

Yeah, once I switch to C, I’m sticking with C. That’s it.

MARLO

You can stream video through it. So, you can hook it up to your television. It’s like an HDMI in that regard. It’s very universal. So, the European Union has stated that by 2024, all smartphones and all tablets have to use USB-C. There is no other exception.

STEVE

And we’ve heard rumblings of that. Talking from the United States that it was coming. So, now that the European Union’s done it, I’m guessing it’s gonna come a little quicker in the United States.

MARLO

It’ll be interesting to see if this comes about and it could be the one caveat that we were just talking about where, 

STEVE

Cause that’s the one of my box checkoffs when I’m looking for a new device is, does it have C? 

MARLO

Right. But a lot of people don’t think about it until you bring it home and you’re like, “oh my goodness” –  it’s got another different one. The challenge that I have with this, now, I like this because I’m the same way as everybody else. I hate carrying all the different chargers. The downside to this, of course, is innovation. And the European Union is dictating that you use USB-C and they’re saying in 2024 for tablets and for phones and 2026 for laptops. So, they’re projecting four years into the future. Now, I don’t know of any USB cord that has lasted four years because there’s usually the next iteration of things. So, one would have to think that they’re gonna continue to get better. So, does this stifle innovation because all of a sudden? Now, the European Union is not gonna be using anything but USB-C for the foreseeable future.

STEVE

What happens when you take away that innovation piece and take it out of the private sector? Because, you’re subsidizing it or you’re mandating it. And that takes away the private sector’s ability… inspiration to innovate. You’ve taken that out.

MARLO

Yep. So I don’t know. On one side, I’m 50-50 on this, because I’m gonna love if the United States were to do this too. “Hey, Marlo, my phone is dead. Can I borrow your cord?” Sometimes I don’t have the right cord with me. Well, I usually do cuz I have a whole gadget bag I carry with me. 

MARLO

I have it right here. Are you ready? We didn’t go down our usual rabbit hole. We were talking about production of products coming back to the United States chips and such and chips and such. Of course the chip shortage really brought this to light. I just saw a video of, I think Ford had rented out one of the race tracks to store their vehicles because they’re waiting for chips. It’s $2 billion worth of pickup trucks sitting there waiting to be delivered.

STEVE

GM had actually started sending out vehicles without all the chips. I ran into a guy back in August that had a brand new Yukon and it didn’t have the air conditioned seats, it didn’t have this.

MARLO

So they’re shipping them out-

STEVE

They’re like “Take it.” We’re gonna deduct that off the cost of the vehicle and then when that chip is available, you’ll get a recall notice and come in and we’ll put it in for free.

MARLO

So, Intel is building a $20 billion computer chip facility in Ohio and this thing is huge. Now, I’m just looking it up for the second time here because I know that you and I talked about this a while back. It’s a thousand-acre site. Just east of Columbus, expected to create a thousand company jobs and 7,000 construction jobs. Support tens of thousands of additional jobs for suppliers and partners. This is going to significantly impact Ohio and Columbus but $20 billion going into this chip manufacturing facility coming to the United States by Intel. 

STEVE 

Well, if you think about it, what do you need to make chips? When I first heard of that, it was like, why would you put chips in the rust belt? But then think of where the chips are going. So the auto industry, of course, huge in Ohio and Michigan’s right there. Indiana. Illinois, They’re there. So that piece of it. But you need energy, a lot of it to make chips. And you’ve got the Marcellus Shale play right there and then you need water and you’ve got Lake Erie right there. It makes a lot of sense that to locate in that area. It’s quite the deal. 

MARLO

They announced this in January of this year, coming online at the end of 2025. So we’re gonna build this thing in two and a half years. 

STEVE

So my question though, is,  because of what’s going on in China. We just discussed that a little bit at where we are at with the elements that it takes to make a chip. So all the rare earth elements that go into a–

MARLO

Yeah, but chip computer chips aren’t really, it’s all the other stuff around them. Silicon’s the biggest deal–

STEVE

It is mostly silica, but it’s about getting those resources right because that’s a massive plant.  

PAT

There’s no shortage of rare earth elements in the United States. 

MARLO 

North Dakota itself has a significant positive, Montana and South Dakota, already have mines in existence and  I just think it’s a matter of time before you start seeing it. 

PAT

Well, a lot of the high end ships are made in Taiwan, right?  And that’s a vulnerable part of the world. 

MARLO 

Intel is the number two semiconductor manufacturer, globally. 73.1 billion in revenue last year, behind South Korea’s world leaders. Samsung Electronics was 76 billion. So, I would imagine after this manufacturer or this facility goes into place that’ll probably bump Intel to be the number one semiconductor manufacturer in the world.

PAT 

But at the same time, AI is creating a world where a lot of workers might be superfluous. So, how is that all gonna play out over the long run? And in as AI, when you enable the fellow who ran Google, wrote a book with Kissinger about AI, he sees AI as everyone’s personal assistant really.

MARLO 

I see it that way too, actually. 

DAVE 

Yeah. He wrote The Age of AI In Our Human Future, Eric Schmidt. But, who’s gonna have access to that?  How democratized is it going to be that everyone has AI and can do their jobs? Or is this really for an elite class or a professional class and everybody gets left behind? As well as the biotechnology, people will be able to increase intelligence and all sorts of things.

MARLO 

Elon Musk – Tesla – over the last couple days… did you see the robot? So the robot is, this year, was on its own power. Last year, they had somebody dressed up in the robot. This year, it actually walked out on the stage by itself and waved at the crowd and it’s humanoid, looks very much like iRobot. I just could not believe when I looked at that robot, I was just thinking that right away.

STEVE 

Which is better than Terminator.

MARLO 

Better than Terminator. Yeah. But to your point, I do believe everybody’s gonna have their own. You’re gonna have this artificial intelligence that’s your assistant.

DAVE 

We already do, with a smartphone. 

MARLO

 We do. but it’s gonna get better and better where this person’s gonna make your doctor’s appointments for you. Then, I wonder if it’s gonna be something like Lyft and Uber where you can get gig-type jobs, right? So, your robot then will go to work for you, right?

And be able to get these jobs. And then if you’re a person with means, you have the ability to have better robots – and this is where I think the divide will come in, where you know you’re gonna have people who are still working manually, you and I are out there flipping burgers or whatever it is. But, the person with means has their robot going to flip burgers for them instead.

The post The Deal With USB-C, Chip Shortages and Tesla’s New Robot appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

STEVE

Uh, this is quite extraordinary. Of course this is one of the big songs from Armageddon where they had to go to an asteroid. Go to an asteroid and blow it up because it was gonna hit earth and kill us. Well, that didn’t happen in the movie. Just pieces. They saved the world. And now NASA’s working on saving the world, they went to an asteroid actually an asteroid revolving around another asteroid.

MARLO

Yeah, asteroid. So they called, they called this Mission DART – double asteroid redirection. So this is slamming a satellite into an asteroid just to change the direction. I mean, it doesn’t have to be much, right? I mean, 100th of one degree at a million miles is a lot. I mean, if you were to go from Bismark to Fargo and you changed a trajectory by one 10th of one degree, you know, over that 200, you’d probably end up in Mayville or something.

STEVE

I wanna give a little background to this too. So basically the satellite was the size of a refrigerator and they kind of missed, they were trying to shoot for dead center. They were 55 feet off. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. I was trying to find out how many miles it traveled. You know, 10 months in space traveling at whatever, 40,000 miles an hour or whatever they’re going at. And then to head an asteroid 10 months later and only be 55 feet off, that’s the fact that we know that ths little asteroid rotated around this other big asteroid and we could actually shoot something at it 10 months in advance and hit this thing is just unbelievable to me. Well, and then of course it gets to, well what about aliens? Right. I mean, if you’re, if you’re a believer in that, and now we take out their, or we, we, we’re now shooting rocks as somebody else’s planet . Now we’ve declared war on somebody else. Right. I, I mean, you know, this is, this is where the conversation was going this morning.I’m like, you have got to be kidding me. 

STEVE

Like the movie Battleship. 

MARLO

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There you go. There you go.

STEVE

Independence Day. 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. Yeah. I’ve seen this thing. It’s crazy. It’s kind of like who’s invading us? I mean, it just looks that way. Right? Well, you could just position those in a way that they would actually spell something – E.T. ‘s coming from home, but I can, I can see that coming. Our planetary defense system is now activated. 

STEVE

I thought that was Skynet. 

MARLO

It’s planetary defense.

STEVE

Planetary Defense System, Yes. They got that launched back in November. The eventual evolution of Space Force, which kind of was started because there’s a space race going on again. Uh, but eventually that would morph into Star Fleet. Protect the earth. Really? 

MARLO

And I just had a little smile on my face when I’m driving by that, the fact that there’s a sign out there that says Space Force this way. Yeah. 

STEVE

And you don’t think Star Fleet’s coming? 

MARLO

Of course. 

STEVE

Well, yeah. Yeah. It was in the movies. 

MARLO

It was in the movies. 

MARLO

They postponed Artemis because of a leak somewhere. They rescheduled. That was postponed. And it was postponed to the 23rd of September, and then they postponed it to today, So the 27th of September. They actually pulled Artemis One off the launchpad yesterday. Because of the weather. Wow. 

STEVE

They have been bad.

MARLO

But you have to feel bad for NASA. You really do. I mean, I think everybody’s so excited about getting Artemis launched and, and now that it’s ready, and then here comes a hurricane. I mean, my goodness. The timing of it is just impeccable. So they’re gonna have to, I don’t even know when the next launch window is here.

STEVE

We do have to talk about electric cars. Well, so when you’re looking at an electric vehicle, summer performance versus winter performance and climates like ours, greatly degraded. So up to 60% degraded. 

MARLO

How long does it take to charge the car?

STEVE

Well, that’s the question. Depends on what you’ve gotten. Depends on the charger now. 

MARLO

That’s correct. 

STEVE

So when I was mayor, that one of the things we went after, some Volkswagen grant with their settlement. And that’s why we have two high speed, the, the fast charging stations right here in Bismark,  

MARLO

Once you were told what they are, it’s like going up and buying a car that says it’s got 30, that it gets 30 miles per 30 miles per gallon. So there’s a new charger coming. And this charger claims that they can charge a hundred kilometers, whatever. Which would be what? Miles?  Well, right about 67 miles, something like that. Then three minute charge to go 67 miles total charge under 15 minutes. So that’s what they’re claiming. And this is actually being launched right now. 

STEVE

Now is this a universal charger? 

MARLO

Universal charger, yeah. 

STEVE

So it doesn’t matter what vehicle you have. 

MARLO

For now. I mean, who knows what it’ll be? I mean, it’s like USB ports, right? Somebody’s gonna come up with something better and then they’re gonna say, This old port that you have can’t handle this kind of juice. Are we gonna push through it? Kind of like USB-C compared to USB mini and stuff, whatever in the past. So I think it’s interesting that they’re working on that.

STEVE

It’s interesting to me that they’re working on charger technology versus battery technology. 

MARLO

So the battery technology is being worked on as well–

STEVE

–but not as quickly. There’s, there’s some constraints with working on the battery. So their solution is, Okay, well let’s get a faster charger. 

MARLO

You know, my stance on this, I think the electric vehicle, I think it has its place, I do believe that combustion engines will continue to thrive moving forward because I think there’s other alternatives that are coming that people don’t know about yet. And when that happens on a large scale, then it’s not really gonna matter anymore. As far as the fuel that you use, 

STEVE

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. 

MARLO

That’s correct. Airborne electric vehicles gets kind of exciting to me. You know, it’s not the, it’s not the ground based vehicles that excite me about this. It’s about the fact that we’re going to the air and that we’ll be able to charge those vehicles rather quickly to get us around town or short hopper flights.

STEVE

Over a hundred thousand recalls, Tesla. Apparently there’s something wrong with their window. So when the window rolls up, there’s a little sensor in there. It’s kinda like a garage door. So you can’t get things stuck in the window, like your finger. Or your head. So, and the sensor goes, a little pressure sensor, and it’s supposed to lower the window so it doesn’t go up all the way and. Injure somebody. Apparently that’s had an issue, which the part that was interesting to me was they’ve sold a lot of Tesla. 

MARLO

So is this the first recall on a Tesla? 

STEVE

I don’t know, but Tesla’s like any other vehicle. Cause I just had a recall on my Ford. So yeah, Not that I’m a fan of Fords oh, you know, just to wrap up on the electric car thing. So I’m not the biggest Ford fan all the time. 

MARLO

Right. I noticed that. 

STEVE

However, a friend of mine got a new Ford Lightning. Holy crap. Is that cool? Yeah. That’s a cool truck. Yeah, that’s a really cool truck. 

MARLO

So this is interesting. Insurance companies are charging upwards of 20% more for electric vehicles repair costs. I just assumed. That after they had enough data that the insurance cost on electric cars would go down because they’re the, the working parts, you know, they’re just a lot less of them, the maintenance part of it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. So they’re citing fires.

STEVE

Oh. So which ironically, remember I mentioned I had my Ford, I got a recall notice on that as well, right? For the front blower motor, which could cause fires. 

MARLO

China’s been flooding the market within their, in their country with EVs, with electric vehicles. They had reported over a thousand electric fires last year in their electric vehicles. So I think they’re using, I think insurance companies are using that data in determining that. They’re charging more for insurance on, on electric vehicles. I just as, I don’t know why I thought it would be less. I just assumed it would be–

STEVE

I did too. I’m thinking about the safety stuff. Because you’re going to see a bunch of vehicles. That wind across the country that are being sold. And you have to be very diligent. If you’re buying a used vehicle and you think it’s too good of a deal to be true, it probably is. 

MARLO

So what I think is what’s happening, if you’re in an accident or whatever else in a combustion engine, that’s not a big deal because you know, you have a bumper that gets replaced or whatever. When a car catches on fire, I mean, the whole thing goes, they have to total the car. So it’s not a $3,000 replacement or whatever. It’s 60 or 80 or a hundred thousand dollars. 

STEVE

And have you ever had to rewire a car? 

MARLO

Oh my goodness. I can’t even imagine it. 

STEVE

It’s the biggest rat’s nest. 

STEVE

James Earl Jones, right? Darth Vader. Yep. Voice of Darth Vader. 91. 

MARLO

He, he really doesn’t – I just saw him in something. He does not look 91. That’s what’s amazing about it. He looks pretty good. 

STEVE

Although, it’s funny cuz when Field of Dreams came out, he looked old then. Yes. But. 91 and well think about it. Star Wars, I mean, he was well into his career when Star Wars first and that’s 70?  A New Hope was the first one, and Yeah. So one of the things with, if you saw Rogue One, then you saw that Carrie Fisher was in that. And you and I have talked about 3D and the holographic, holographic performances. And what that, you know, the big one, of course. Whitney Houston. So this kind of crosses some lines there. What Disney had done because they have the right to all the Star Wars now, but they have the ability to continue on a character. So Carrie Fisher who passed away, Princess Leia was in Rogue One. And it’s been in some subsequent Star Wars movies. Because they have the rights to her likeness as the character. James Earl Jones just signed over rights, signed a contract, which is good for his family because now there’s royalties at nauseam. But just signed over the rights to the likeness of his voice and his character. Vader will live forever. 

MARLO

I wonder if he’s the first person, cuz everything you’ve talked about now, like Whitney Houston, Carrie Fisher, Carrie died unexpectedly. I wonder if James is the first one who’s actually living that has signed a contract that beyond – he actually was part of the deal, yeah. See that’s what’s interesting to me about this cuz you know, we’ve talked about Whitney Houston, you can actually go watch a Whitney Houston concert right now you’re in the audience watching her as a holographic image with other dancers and singers with her on stage. You pay money for this. I’m assuming that a percentage of that is going to the estate to Whitney’s family or what have you. But that was all done after she passed away. This whole thing. 

That’s what is really, it just really interesting to me that and, and what, what will this do to open up doors for a lot of, maybe even us, Steve, I mean, is there a possibility that you and I, I’m not talking about, on radio for example, or television or things, but maybe other things that we have done that they can use our likeness, use our minds, use our whatever, that when we’re not on this planet anymore, that we cont we can continue because of AI to, you know, could I, can I record something? Can I create my own ai, for example, and somebody can use my voice as for, for a voiceover in a commercial 50 years to now?

STEVE

The dangerous part of that is what is what if it’s something that you’re not in favor of when you were alive? And then they take, um, some creative licensure with it and. So then you’re promoting something that maybe you were dead set against. Although I can see Marlo promoting an ad for feminine hygiene products,  or something. What if it’s something you wouldn’t normally sign up on? 

MARLO

So I suppose in this instance with, with James Earl Jones, I mean, it’s about a set the slightness to the character character and that character isn’t gonna probably move far beyond, 

STEVE

Darth Vader’s Darth Vader. You’re pretty much constrained to what the character. Is in that series. 

MARLO

But I do believe that what we’re talking about here is possible and you, you would probably have to set up some type of constraints within the paperwork that I’m not, you know, I’m, I’m this way politically and not this way, so you can’t use my voice for these things.

STEVE

And you know, for products, these are the products I would endorse. These are the products I would not endorse. You’d probably have to really spell that out. Yeah. 

MARLO

But if you think about it, if you’ve got that contract and you, cuz you’re famous. So down the road, 50 years a product that’s not even invented yet that you never even thought of.

STEVE

So do you, do you leave it in the hands of your management firm? I don’t. That would make those decisions for you. I mean, it’s just, this is kinda weird when you think about this. Do I trust my wife-

MARLO

It’s really interesting. 

STEVE

This is a short film, Fabian Seltzer, he’s a filmmaker from Germany and he’s kind of got into all of this AI stuff and he’s now making some science fiction films. He’s making a series, which I’m kind of wondering where it’s gonna show up. Is it Hulu, Netflix, or It’s gonna show up somewhere.  But it’s predominantly created with ai. That’s the platform. But so you mentioned Dolly. Yeah, D A L L hyphen E. He’s actually working with Dolly. There’s a Dolly too. And I didn’t even know what Dolly was until you brought it up and then it’s in the article I was reading, but although I didn’t know what that was, but you can make films down with ai and you and I got talking a little bit about some of the AI stuff during the break on where it could go.

MARLO

So Dolly is an MIT AI image generator. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget exactly what it is. , I mean, I know what it is. I’ve actually used it before. Uh, so you can tell, you can go to the website and you can sign up for an AI tool. It’s an AI tool. You can sign up for this AI tool.

I think it’s kind of in beta yet. So you need an image. I need an image of a gopher smiling, drinking a glass of chocolate milk. Type that in and it, the AI will actually create a smiling gopher with a glass of milk and it’ll probably give you, you know, 50 or a hundred different examples that it comes up with. You click on the one that you like and then it, then it goes and does this thing and makes, makes a photo quality all kinds of stuff. So probably the more famous one is the astronaut riding a horse. And somebody just typed in astronaut riding a horse and within a couple of seconds or a minute or whatever, you have all these choices of images of an astronaut riding a horse.

I mean, it would have to be staged and or somebody would have to draw this for me. It would take, you know, a lot of planning who’s got time for that stuff anymore. So I think Dolly, there’s a place where this could be used, you know, for those type of things. And I’m sure it’ll be a subscription type of thing when it’s available. So, and people are making movies out of this now, which is incredible. I mean, I suppose you would probably have to create a series of images. I’m trying to think of how they would do this, but I, you know, there’s gonna come a time when you’re gonna have an idea for a movie. And you’ll type it in, or a book.

I’ll type in an idea and I’ll see what it comes up with and then I’m like, oh, I can, I can build something off of what it came up with, something I didn’t even think about.  So that’s what I use it for. But it can create articles. That’s what’s crazy about it. It’ll actually –  I can type in Five Reasons to come to North Dakota, to visit North Dakota in the winter. Right. A listicle that’s what most people read nowadays are lists online. Right. Okay. So it would come up with this list and it would write a little bit about them. And it’s actually readable and, and maybe not the greatest in the world, but I’m sure some topics it’s probably really good

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MARLOSo it’s just so you’d understand. I mean, the Hubble is still running. The Hubble runs on image. It just has lenses, you know, so optical lenses go back because it must be 20 years old.

STEVE

Right? At least. Yeah. So think of the technology from then, which I remember when that went up and that was the best thing since sliced bread. Technology was cutting edge. Nothing like it. It was gonna be phenomenal and now fast forward 20 years. You can almost take good pictures with your cell phone.

MARLO

So the web telescope is an infrared telescope, right? So it’s not using optical lenses. It’s actually polling images using infrared and measure. But, they just pulled an image from a star 400 light years away and a planet around it. Iisn’t that something?

STEVE

It’s a big planet. Two and a half times the size of Jupiter. Uh, but it’s interestingly  half times larger, but that’s not the question that you just, I mean, the aliens are bigger.

MARLO

Maybe they’re stronger because the gravity, gravity is different so when theycome to earth, they’re super beings. Just like Superman. 

STEVE

Well, it’d be kinda like, uh, the locker room scene at the end of uh, Men in Black. Yes. Yeah. They’re in the little locker. The aliens are ginormous!

MARLO

You really believe in this. What happens in movies eventually comes true. Don’t you? 

STEVE

It does though! It really does. There’s a lot of proof to it. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, just from the tech side, look at all the cool stuff that shows up

MARLO

And then some engineer is like, you know, Probably possible, you know, the next thing you know, we got cell phones and we have driverless or driverless cars and you know, all of this stuff, flat screens for televisions. I mean, you think about the early days of sci-fi, you know, and, and, uh, all of them were flat screens and of course they had to mock that stuff up they basically built these huge panels around these CRTs or whatever that had, you know, they’re huge, but they look like flat screens. 

The next thing you know, we have flat screen televisions. And, and now of course, it’s almost all holographic. So if you ever watch, you know, like the new Star Trek TV shows or whatever, these images that you’re looking at are disappearing in the air, and that’s gonna be what’s next. You’re just gonna have a, a little device that will that’ll project an image into the air and somehow you’ll see it.

STEVE

it’s kinda like the, uh, holographic concerts they’ve been doing. 

MARLO

Everyone Loves Raymond. They were showing that as a holographic image and I could go right up to it and put my hand right through Ray. Really. It was crazy, but yet it looked pretty real, you know, I, I wouldn’t say it’s like looking at you I’d say it was more like looking at Yoda in Star Wars, you know, when it pops up. It was interesting. And I was looking at that, thinking that, you know, sometime in the future, our televisions are not gonna be mounted on a wall. It’s just gonna be a coffee table that when you turn it on, an image will be projected above it – that type of thing. You don’t have to position all your furniture in a specific way around your television. You can just put it wherever and put the coffee table in the middle of the room and everybody can see it that way then.

STEVE

Wow. Well that changed the decorating industry. That will be amazing. 

MARLO

It’s a whole new world.   You should start on that. Now. 

STEVE

What would I put on that wall though? That’s the question? Interesting. 

So speaking of, uh, of the new telescope. The infrared telescope. Um, and that just went up a couple years ago, which is cutting edge on the infrared side of things. Um, what’s the lifespan of that because they didn’t expect Hubble to be lasting. 

MARLO

No. And in, and in fact, um, if you remember right when Hubble went up, it had an issue right away and some, and somehow, or another, I think one of the lenses was misaligned after it went up and they were able to fix that remotely, which is pretty impressive.

STEVE

Yeah, because they were talking about doing a space shuttle launch just to fix it, just to try to fix it because I mean, you know, what was it 200? I don’t remember. But the cost of the Hubble telescope was huge. Just astronomical to put this thing up there and then it gets up there and because of something that went wrong one of these, one of these lenses off a little bit.

You know, on social media. One of my favorite places that I follow is the NASA page. The NASA page is amazing. Because they post all this stuff. So with the new web satellite, that’s up there now, he longevity of some of this technology that they’re putting up in space is far out living expectations.

MARLO

Yeah. I think, you know, I think NASA is really good about, you know, with what they come out. That’s like anything else, I guess, you know, if you wanna look like you’re a hero, say it’s gonna last two years and then it really lasts 10 and I think NASA is a master at that. 

STEVE

Well, they figured out that’s how the funding keeps coming from Congress. Which NASA is the one government agency that generates revenue. 

MARLO

 I think we should put all of our money into. All of our taxes should go to NASA  and then let them make, make money. They make money and then they can fund the rest of the government. That’s how I see it. 

So, SpaceX is, is building a network, uh, for cellular service to space – Starlink. Yeah. And, uh, now there’s a brand new satellite and just to put it into perspective, satellites are usually fairly small because, and light, because you gotta get ’em up. They just launched 1 3300 pounds, which is huge. 

STEVE

It’s a monster satellite. 

MARLO

So scientists are already starting to complain about all the stuff we have in orbit now, because going back to the satellite, it’s making it very difficult to see into space from earth without all the clutter. There’s a lot of light pollution and clutter so like a lot of times they’ll take TimeLapse imagery, uh, of space. And the problem with that is when you’ve got all the satellites, those wind up as being light streaks on the photographs, right? So there’s this brand new 3,300 pound satellite, uh, called Blue Walker 3. And they think it’s gonna be the brightest thing in the sky other than the moon. So, if you’re out navigating the forest, there’ll be a new north star. 

STEVE

That’s amazing. How frightening though. So how many pieces of space debris do we have floating around out there right now? That have not hit the earth yet?

MARLO

200,000 pieces.

STEVE

Holy crap. 

MARLO

So 200,000 pieces between one and 10 centimeters 0.4 to four inches. They don’t track those. 

STEVE

Well, those they figure burn up and that’s correct when they hit the atmosphere. Anyway, that’s correct.

MARLO

Right. So they’ll eventually hit the atmosphere. The thing is that we keep adding more to it. Uh, as of 2021, the United States surveillance network was tracking more than 15,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 centimeters. Well,  when I sit on my deck and I look straight up, when I’m looking at the sky, I always see stuff. I always see, you know, like rocket bodies or, uh, the international space station, the Starling stuff is becoming quite a thing. 

STEVE

Now we’re coming back from, uh, well, if you think with all these particles and all this small junk, um, We should see more shooting stars. And I just saw one on Friday night. Yeah. But was it an asteroid or was it right? 

Jason sent us a little article this morning. He wanted your take on this. So, Amazon says sad workers can shut themselves in despair closets. So, apparently Amazon has had a bunch of suicides from depression and all sort of things. And, there’s actually a couple tech businesses in the region that have these. So DigiKey is based outta Minnesota, and Microsoft they have these rooms, they’re they’re despair rooms. You can go scream as loud as you want, and nobody’s gonna hear you. It got me thinking about sound quality rooms in the ergonomics that go into a room. Yeah. And the tech that’s involved with that.

MARLO

So like, you know, the Marvel movies and whatever, when you see, um, you know, people jumping up and then they have these scenes behind them. They’re getting away from the green screen. And they’re bringing in the stuff so that when you shoot the stuff, it’s actually appearing behind you and, and it’s, it’s just unbelievable. So I’ll have to show you some images of what I just looked at. And there’s one room that they have that the L E D screens shaped into a cone. And then when you get to a certain point, it’s like, you’re in a sound cone as well. And then you cross this line and. It’s just incredible. It’s like, everything is just amplified in this cone. So it’s very similar to what you’re talking about. 

STEVE

If anybody was ever to build a theater again, you’d probably build it in the shape of a cone, uh, something similar like that.

MARLO

Have you ever been into some of these places like these outdoor amphitheater type of scenarios? 

STEVE

Yeah. Really a lot of places, movie theaters, again, a great example. Haven’t optimized the natural acoustics that are out there. 

MARLO

That’s, that’s always a thing, right? If you, if you fill the room with 200 bodies or 500 bodies, the acoustics change, right. A lot because now you’re absorbing sounds.

STEVE

That’s pretty cool. So acoustically, I mean, you talk about the tech side getting into some of these acoustically safe spaces. And now you start thinking about the acoustics and things like this that are dealing with mental health. 

MARLO

So does it talk about the scenario of that? Because people can go into these despair rooms, blow off steam and then they’re, they’re feeling better. And is there some proof to the fact that this helps them or I’m, I’m trying to figure this out. 

STEVE

Not in the article I read, but, it’s just an emotional release, which most people don’t do in public because it’s not right or proper, or you don’t wanna see your coworker while you melt down.

MARLO

I think they should have a bunch of letters. So you can, I could write the word, Steve, and I could just take my bat and blow off a little steam. 

So I thought we’d wrap up the show today with the top nine technological trends of 2022.

So, nine on the list is cybersecurity, which makes sense. Surprised that it’s not higher. It’s surprising to me too, because I think most businesses need to take that pretty seriously. I would imagine it’s not higher because a lot of people just don’t take it seriously yet. So I think that’s probably why 

Eight is 5G. Um, I’m also surprised that it is low on the list, but what, 6G is already, you know, announced and who knows what that’s gonna take to get set up for that. 

Seven is the internet of things. Some of us are familiar with things. Yeah. Alexa. Your refrigerator, your, you know, smart things. Yeah. Your furnace, your light bulbs. Those are all internet of things. Attacks nowadays are a lot of them coming from the internet of things. Why did your website fail? Because I had a million light bulbs trying to talk to it. That’s why.

Six is blockchain. That’s interesting that that’s lower on the list as well. Uh, because of cryptocurrency.

Five is virtual reality and augmented reality. So, that makes sense. Four is quantum computing. We’ve talked about this a lot and that is starting to come to fruition, a quantum computer when you and I get our hands on it will be a million times faster than the computer we have now. Isn’t that something?

Three is edge computing and that’s, that’s a step beyond cloud computing. Two is robotic process automation. So RPA, so robotic process automation, you see more and more of this, like, like in fast foods, the robots that are flipping burgers and stuff.

And I think the first one is related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s the same scenario. These are things that people, jobs that people don’t wanna do or whatever, and machines are starting to take over in those spaces. So, those are the top nine things.

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STEVE 

So the brain implant thing, Um, the brain implant thing. I had a friend that sent me an article on it and he was asking some questions. I’m like, don’t you watch sci-fi movies? It’s called Cerebro. Everything comes to fruition. That’s in a sci-fi movie.  Star Trek and all of ’em. 

MARLO

So I haven’t seen this particular article you’re talking about. Is that the one where they’ll be able to fly aircraft and things or because you can think a thought and it’ll actually do it

STEVE

Now here’s the geopolitical side of this, in the past. Cause there’s a lot of different directions you can take that,  I mean, you can genetically engineer soldiers for quicker response. We’re probably gonna get fighter jets that don’t have people. 

So we’re talking about space, and the Elon Musk thing. It brings up a bunch and I mean, a bunch of different social norms and, and questions. And just so the friend of mine was like, well, you know, if you think about it, Cerebro. Things come from sci-fi movies, but there’s a nefarious side and there’s an opportunity to do a lot of good stuff.

This is back to the political science social stuff. In the past, if you were gonna do some research like this, it would’ve come out as a medical study because you’re going to help stroke victims or people with brain injuries and, and they would do it. There’s none of that. None of that. This time we’re gonna do this cuz we’re gonna try to improve people, do you get the difference? But 10 years ago, seven years ago, it would’ve been under the guise of something medical. We’re gonna improve people’s lives that way.Something culturally has changed where, okay. 

We’re not gonna put this veil on it. We’re just gonna, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna improve people. . So that’s a big leap. We’re gonna give you the warm, fuzzy side.  

MARLO

So this is amazing too. There’s a device that has come out very similar to what you’re talking about. What’s the name of the movie? Cerebro? I’ve never seen the movie really. What movies is it from?

STEVE

Yeah. With Wolverine and—

MARLO

Oh, so I’ve never been a big fan of those, 

STEVE

Really? 

MARLO

You’re talking about Patrick Stewart and that was the device he put on his head. You know, I’m a big fan of his because of Star Trek, but I’ve never got into that. I can’t remember the name of the movies. 

So you’re paralyzed, right? And there’s now a device that’s coming out. That’s very much like Bluetooth where your back has been broken. It can actually, you put this device on both sides of where the break is at and it will communicate, the spine will communicate with each other again, really? 

STEVE

Okay. The Bluetooth thing is that’s legitimate medical. That would be a huge breakthrough. 

MARLO

Uh, this, this device that’s just coming out and, and, uh, I think we’ll give a lot of hope to a lot of people in the world too. So anyway, wow. So Artemis – the ship’s name is Orion, uh, but there was Apollo one, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, of course. so next one will be Artemis two, Artemis three. 

STEVE

So we’re talking sci-fi stuff, I think automatically Men in Black. And the thing to save the world was on Orion’s bells. 

MARLO

That’s correct. 

STEVE

And then you start talking Artemis, which was a very bad Will Smith movie.

MARLO

Artemis launches on Monday. We will be, if, if everything goes, according to plan, we’ll be in, will be in space for 42 days. We’re, we’re gonna be out there for 42. And, and this is so 1970s, but we’re gonna be splashing down in the Pacific. And I’m sure, I’m sure Elon is thinking what, why aren’t they just landing on a pad somewhere?

So after this is done, we will be cleared to go to space in the Artemis, or we’ll be cleared to go to the moon in the Artemis with man. Spacecraft So the Artemis Two will be cleared. If this goes, according to plan Artemis, two will be cleared to take people to the moon. We probably haven’t had a sensor ray ever. Like what’s gonna be going around the moon now on, especially the dark side, 

STEVE

The dark side’s been rather, yeah. Dark, not a lot of information about it, but I’m wondering because there were some rumors earlier this year floating around. The Chinese doing some stuff on the dark side of the moon and some say that they want to claim it. So is that the impetus for this? Do you think? Has this fired up the program going, whoa, wait a minute. We need to find out what they’re doing over there on the dark side of the moon. And we need to plant another flag. 

MARLO

I think. I think all of the above. But there’s a lot of talk about, uh, um, that, that a country is going to claim it, we have a bonafide space race going on again, and it’s not just between countries. It’s between. Public and private sector as well. So I mean, there’s, you know, there’s Space X there’s, Virgin there’s. There’s oh, blue space blue, uh, with Amazon. But we have this, we, this race going on. Uh, and a lot of it is to it. It’s basically a race to Mars because, 

STEVE

Well, that’s the end game.

MARLO

That is the end game. 

STEVE

I’ll be able to count all the little Chinese at the secret base. 

MARLO

So it’s interesting. Right. Um, so yeah, that would be fun. I would love to see the text. 

STEVE

But now you gotta remember it, it, it, it, there could be something going on with Chinese there’s a bigger picture involved with going to the moon. So the moon is needed as a jump off point, whether it’s for exploration or for a manned mission, um, or. stockpiling for building supplies because the mission is to get to Mars and, and then after Mars—

MARLO

it just makes the most sense. We would have to probably build some type of major space station, so, so there’s, there’s been that talk, but most people talk about building some type of livable facility on the moon. And that will be the jump off point to go to Mars eventually. I’m , I’m just thinking about, uh, you know, the job that it creates, right? So you’re, you’re the person, your job is to bring supplies to the moon. So every week you kiss your significant other goodbye, and I’ll see you in a week, honey, 

STEVE

How the heck is that gonna work? 

MARLO

Can you imagine what this is gonna be like? Right. So it’s funny. 

STEVE

Oh, instead of a CDL, you need a what?

MARLO

What kinda license do I need to go to the moon with? Yeah. So there’s space tourism. And there’s a couple of companies and hotel chains that are actually looking at putting a hotel in space that will actually float around the earth. These are all things being planned right now. 

STEVE

I’d do that in a heartbeat. 

MARLO

I would do it too. I mean, I’m not gonna get to space as an astronaut, I’m guessing or as a passenger, but I think if I could buy a ticket, you know, and then floating, you know, go to go. Star Trek is just crazy with the stuff that’s come from those movies, 

STEVE

But go back, go back even further. Forbidden planet. Sci-fi ish technology that was like, wow, that’s really cool in a movie. 

MARLO

Somebody dreamed about it. And some engineer takes a look at that movie and they’re like, I could, that’s possible. Yeah. Let’s make that happen. 

STEVE

The Musk can help. 

MARLO

That’s what I’ve heard.

I’m gonna go through the top 10 inventions that have come out of NASA. And by the way, it’s only the top 10. You’d be stunned. There are hundreds and hundreds down there. 

I think we’ve been out there for a while. 

It’s been a while. So this should be. All right. So the top 10. Memory foam so memory foam in the early 1960s, the aeronautical engineer named Charles Yost worked on technology designed to make sure that the Apollo command module and its astronauts could be recovered safely after landing.

That experience came in handy four years later, when Yost was tapped to help NASA’s, uh, research center developed airplane seating that could absorb the energy of crashes and increased passengers, chances of survival. And that has turned into memory foam, which we all use in love. Memory foam came from NASA. 

Anti-corrosion coatings. One challenge with space exploration is that equipment must withstand radical conditions from the heat of rocket exhaust to extreme cold in.

Arterial vision came from NASA. The ability to look in your arteries, you know, like with, see if you have plaque building up in them or whatever came from NASA. So the result was arterial. vision software can be used with ultrasound equipment to perform a noninvasive examination of a patient.

Cochlear implants for the hearing impair. That one from NASA in the late seventies,  coco implants for the hearing impaired. And that has changed the lives of so many people. I know a couple people who have the implants. 

So this one is interesting. Scratch resistant, eyeglass lenses. This is important because in 1972, the FDA.  uh, declared that all sunglasses and prescription lenses be shatter resistant. So until that time eyeglasses were glass.  What would happen is if they were to break, shards of glass would end up in your eyes, right? So it was a significant health hazard to have eyeglasses on at the time. We don’t even think about it anymore. So there you go. So you can thank, thank all the eyeglasses that we wear nowadays to, um, to NASA. 

The thick solution called emulsified zero balance. Iron can be injected into the groundwater where it neutralizes toxic chemicals that pose a threat to the environment. The technology transitioned easily into commercial markets with chemical manufacturing, oil companies purchasing the solution to remediate land contaminated with toxic matter from their businesses.

So they developed a pump. Uh, insulin dependent diabetes also known as type one, uh, diabetes result of technology known today as an insulin pump has helped monitor the health of people living with diabetes since the late eighties. Next is life shears—

STEVE

Like the jaws of life. 

MARLO

That’s correct. 

And so NASA had to develop a way to, in case of crashes or whatever, because you’re dealing with mangled much mangled, more, probably sold in a car crash. Right? So the jaws of life came along because of it in 1994, a type of cutting equipment that comes in handy during emergency and rescue situations.

The LASIK surgery. Technology used to track astronauts eyes during periods in space, in order to assess how humans frames of reference are affected by weightlessness has become essential for use during LASIK surgery.

This is a big one. Solar cells out of need to power space missions. Their biggest invention by the way that they claim is water filtration.  oh yeah. So water filtration in the seventies, NASA developed filtration systems that utilize I iodine and cartridge filters to ensure that astronauts had access to safe tasteless water. The filtering technology is now standard across the world. 

Wireless headsets. Along with two airline pilots who invented a prototype of a wireless headset, NASA built a light hands, free communication system, which would allow astronauts to communicate with teams on earth. There’s, there’s so many ways that you can make a wireless headset. Now, Bluetooth just happens to be the most popular. 

The big one I wanted to get to is the phone or our cameras and our phones. Isn’t this something. So in the 1990s, NASA jet propulsion laboratory meant to delight miniature imaging system that required little energy in order to take high quality photographs from space. This technology has become standard in cell phone and computer cameras. 

STEVE

Amazing. We talked about that before, you know, take your cell phone camera and take a picture of the night sky. The resolution is amazing.

MARLO

So here’s a couple other ones real quick – 3d food print. So they’re coming up with cartridges that you pop the cartridge in and then you program it to, you know, be like an orange paste or whatever it is for a dessert. And it will actually create that.

Computer mouse. Was invented by NASA really while searching for a way to increase interaction with onboard computers and allow users to perform tasks like manipulate data,  

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Marlo

It’s an in person type of thing. But when you really think about the technology, I mean you, you can basically program it to do whatever you want. I mean, you think of each. Each light that’s on that drone is like a pixel on your television screen. Right. And imagine how, or, or like an LED sign and now they can do this in the sky so they can make the flag wave in the sky, or they can take a company logo and paint it in the sky. Or they can pretend they’re a cloud floating through the sky. I mean, it’s incredible.

Steve

I do that all the time. Yeah.

Marlo

Hey mom, that’s a dinosaur up there! Well done. It really is.

Steve

But, part of the technology with this is, it’s called swarm technology, right?

Marlo

Yeah, and, and this is probably, you know, one of the nice uses of swarm technologies as opposed to the killer drone.

Steve

Yeah. And, and attack stuff that you that’s the military application, that’s the military. That’s probably where more people are familiar with that term.

Marlo

Yes. And, and, you know, swarm technologies are being used around our Naval. Boats right now, for example, because of imagine the ability to—

Steve

Detonate a missile coming in before it gets there.

Marlo

Well, and they, they can take, and the technology – swarm technology – allows you to take like every lifeboat that’s on the aircraft carrier and drop it in the water and, and actually have an on-man perimeter around the boat. And if there’s, if there’s like a gunship coming at you, you can actually 

take these boats and just take ’em right to that and, and not put anybody in harm’s way. it’s amazing. And how do you shoot down or take out a hundred boats coming at you?

Steve

You don’t.

Marlo

That’s the point and, and, but it’s scary at the same time, because if we have this technology, now this will be something that everybody else will have sometime in the future. So then there’s anti-swarm technologies being developed as well. Uh, I just feel like we’re Star Wars, drone war type of scenario. Right. It just seems like we’re getting to that point.

Steve

Right. Somebody’s gonna set off an EMP and that will be that,

Marlo

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, that is a potential, you know, for taking out swarms is, is a smaller EMP type of burst, you know, that would disable not the entire area.

Steve

Yeah. Small directional bursts, right. Because that technology’s there somewhere. So let’s go back to the friendly side of things with the swarm technology. So light shows and. Really cool America’s Got Drones. I can see, see it right now.

Marlo

Wouldn’t that be cool to have five eight companies show up, develop, you know, we, we developed the guidelines for this show and then some evening the whole Bismarck, Mandan community could come out and watch five to eight of these shows and vote on which one they thought was the most popular, uh, and see what they come up with. I think we would be stunned and amazed. So on the, on the other side of swarming technologies too, uh, pollinators, are you familiar with this?

Steve

Okay, so there’s been a lot of talk about bees um, bees getting. It’s decimated and, and they’re not sure why in North Dakota. Yeah. So there’s, they could fill a roll of bees, butterflies. Yeah. Moths.

Marlo

So you, you can have these, these like miniature drones that will buzz around in a field and, you know, they have the technology that they can zero in on, on, and then they land in the flower and then they just move to the next one and move to the next one. Help with the pollination. You know, it’s really interesting, uh, that we’re coming up with maybe a little bit of a manmade solution to this. 

The other thing that’s interesting, you know, a lot of it is, I don’t know if you know this. But there’s a lot of theory around the waves that we use for our cell phones. And you know, there, of course there’s a lot of talk about, you know, pesticides and how that may be impacting the bee population as well. it’s probably a combination of a bunch of things. It’s kind of a find out if you’re interested in this technology or not type of scenario.

Steve

Right. Dip the toe in the water.

Marlo

Yep. That’s exactly right. They find out. You know, we talk about privacy concerns, safety concerns, all of these things are talked about. Um, there’s a parade of, of leaders in the field of, of UAVs that come through and talk about these different things.

You know, we have a lot of representation from Enel energy, or is it Enel?It’s E N E L. One of these days, I need to ask them how they pronounce the name of their company, but, uh, they’re really big in, into wind energy, of course, in the state and, and other parts of the country and drones of course, are an important part of that for them, for inspection. Yeah. So, they’re a really big proponent of this, so it’s really, really important to these industries to make sure that our young people are, you know, getting versed in this technology. Uh, because it really plays an important role in energy as we move forward and, and, you know, and other things in this state, uh, I mean, I think agriculture and UAV, uh, go in hand. I mean, precision agriculture is such an important thing now and gonna become even more important as we move forward.

Yeah. It’s just unheard of anywhere. Great story. And that’s where I came to the, the understanding that UAV is just a platform. So precision agriculture could be precision mapping. In the oil field or inspections for a wind turbine or power lines or pipelines. And that’s where a lot of that took off in the energy sector in North Dakota was out of that program that we had that discussion. And it all stemmed from precision agriculture.

Well, and I mean, you, you think about over a quarter of land, for example, I mean, the, the theory in the, or what they used to do in the past, you just spray the whole field. Right? Well, that’s a lot of land, lot of chemicals, right. You have, you have, uh, micro, micro climate that are going on in that field. I mean, there might be a scenario where a shower came through and only one third of it got a little bit of rain while the rest of it did not, or vice versa. And, and, and that one third of the field now has more. Type of insects on it or whatever, you know, right. This is what happens in this. So, so I think precision ag is really really important it does very, just adding that in there to think about, um, I’m just thinking even blue collar work. Right? 

So instead of you painting a 14 story building, you’re now running a drone, that’s up there with the sprayer equipment that goes back and forth. I mean, so you don’t have to be on a scaffold or a ladder or anything like that, which is dangerous. I’m just throwing scenarios out here, anything to do with height that we can’t normally access.

Steve

So, or the guy that has to clean the, uh, hose with the camera on it, that you have to run you. Well, you don’t have to touch the walls. You don’t have to touch any of that drone.

Marlo

That’s right. That’s right. So I think you really have to think more broadly when it comes to, these are the things that we can do now, precision a and all this stuff, but as drones get stronger and, uh, and robotics become better, I think there’s gonna be all kinds of uses with drones that we haven’t even dreamed up yet. 

So it’s almost like playing a video game for the people who are racing these drones. You know, when you have a drone. That’s you know, 17 inches wide and they’re taking it through 18 inch hula hoop type of scenarios, right? You’re like how in the world are they even flying through these things and fast? 

This is like NASCAR in the air.

I truly believed that by the year 3000, we would have some type of flying vehicle that would be somewhat readily available to the general public. You know, now granted we’re 20 years later than that. Couple years actually. I mean, everybody always asks me, well, what happens if you run into another flying car or whatever, we have figured this out on a flat surface of ground or of earth, right? There was much more space when we went up into the sky. I mean, you set these things up and you never have to worry about running into anybody or anything.

But I guarantee you that you could fly it from where you park your boat to the river and down the river a little ways. I mean, you’re within the hundred foot or 200 foot cap of flying these things around; actually it’s 400. Uh, but that’s really interesting. That’s crazy interesting.

The post The roles of drones today and in the future appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

In less than two decades, the smartphone has become more than just a mere communication tool. All of us now use it as an irreplaceable part of our everyday lives. Whether it’s to get work done or just for entertainment purposes, our smartphones have gone above and beyond the call of duty every time. With that in mind, the smartphone has also rendered certain objects and activities obsolete on its rise to being the all-in-one juggernaut it now is. Here’s a look at some examples the smartphone has bulldozed on its way to the top.Getting the groceries

With the likes of Amazon and Walmart also now playing ball (perhaps begrudgingly), going to the grocery store is now unnecessary thanks to the solid number of delivery apps available. Just pick the items you would need and a designated person will deliver the items right to your door. In a natural progression from food delivery, groceries are now an option to be delivered in the home for people seeking to practice social distancing measures, or for users who just aren’t in the mood to do any errands. 

Expanding your circles

Mark Zuckerberg’s company has gone from a little communication tool into a pure social media powerhouse that finds itself flirting with the idea of the Metaverse. While we wait for that concept to truly take hold of the general public, Facebook has evolved into quite the formidable business tool. With the ability to add friends up to the thousands, one can maximize this to include people from different business circles and even walks of life just to get their name out there. A more hyper-focused version of this initiative is LinkedIn, which for lack of a better description, is plainly “Facebook for business”.

Access to a wealth of knowledge

Decades ago, most families had sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica as prized possessions in their homes. As a treasure trove of knowledge that could be passed down to generations, it’s as if you wouldn’t be caught dead without it. However, as technology evolved (and continues to do so), owning books of this caliber is now obsolete. Britannica crawled so that Microsoft’s Encarta could walk, and eventually so that Wikipedia could run. With information changing at a ridiculously fast rate, knowledge-themed books nowadays only provide snapshots of a certain time period. For those obsessed with never being out of the loop, our phones can search for literally any topic on the web and save us the embarrassment of not knowing who invented what (or who’s trending and why).

Planning the route of your roadtrip

There’s no need to pull up a foldable map that’s three times the size of your head anymore when out on a getaway. Thanks to the likes of Google and Apple, maps can now be zoomed in and out in the palm of your hand. This provides us with never-before-seen convenience, providing different walking and transportation routes for literally anywhere in the world you want to go. While some may argue that certain technological advancements hold us back, one look at our smartphones’ map apps proves that there’s some progress that benefits us all.

Writing stuff down

The most startling, surprising and perhaps even baffling change thanks to our smartphones is the slow decline of pen and paper usage. With every smartphone having been equipped with their own Notepads, anyone from the most skilled authors to the most meticulous shopping list planners can find use for this revolutionary app. 

The post Things Our Smartphones Have Replaced appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Electronic bag-tagging gets on everyone’s cool side

With Co-Host Steve Bakken and Special Guest Latoya Johnson

When boarding an airplane, we’re all prone to losing all our baggage. While we may have the innovation that is the Apple AirTag, it’s quite pricey and not many would be willing to fork out the dough for such a product. Enter Alaska Airlines with a solution of their own. Thanks to an electronic bag tag program, Alaska’s put itself ahead of the game when compared to other airlines and has made the lives of would-be passengers easier while doing so. 

Tagging one’s bags is a fairly easy process and won’t cost anyone extra, and most important of all, it could all be done through the phone! This takes convenience to the next level and other airlines have to want to play catch-up now at this rate. It’ll be interesting to see how the future of air travel will continue to evolve for even the smallest steps such as these can be a big help in terms of the overall experience.

A new age of workers upon us?

In very unfortunate news, the layoffs in the tech sector have continued to grow. The likes of Shopify and Snap have taken it upon themselves to lay off their workers in the double digits, while the big boys such as Tesla and Microsoft are no longer willing to compromise when it comes to work-from-home situations. Now that the world is slowly going back to normal, most workers have found a rejuvenation in the home setup and do not want to go back to the offices. Tech companies may have to find new ways to lure more aspiring works to get out of their homes, however, what they could end up looking for may be somewhat of a game-changer altogether. 

With the rise of McDonald’s kiosks all over the world replacing front counters little by little, this begs the question – is automation on the horizon? Will the difficulty of getting human workers to work minimum wage at McD’s end up with robot chefs making us Big Macs? It’s hard to say. It seems we’re still far away from that notion, yet inching closer to it with each passing day. This makes automation a real possibility on the horizon. 

Drones ready and willing to give a show

As much as robots are threatening to replace humans when it comes to stable jobs, are we also seeing drones replace fireworks when it comes to night-time entertainment? Drones are obviously more versatile when compared to their noisy counterparts, being able to spell out letters and form logos with relative ease. Essentially, they’re light shows taken to their logical extreme, and their existence could turn fireworks into a passé art form. Only time will tell if this ends up true, but with drones already being able to deliver packages and food, it could be a matter of time before they end up as full-time replacements for pyro.

The post Is The Future Bright With Automation and Drones on the Horizon? appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Not enough juice for Tesla chargers?

With now over two million of them being used in the United States (and that number steadily going up over the past five years), electric vehicles are now a normal sight to see on the road. They have integrated into the ecosystem of the road very easily, and no longer are they the black sheep when compared to traditional, gasoline-fueled vehicles that have been the norm for ages. However, the elephant in the room involves their charging stations – there are only 55,000 of them in the country. 

A typical scene one would see everyday is the lines that pile up when around these charging stations, with as few as eight chargers in one place and the amount of cars falling in line reaching double digits. This proves to be troublesome now and will continue to be so the more people join in and buy their own EVs, and it’s an issue that’s not so different compared to what gas stations faced when they were new. 

Tesla owners wishing to just get a charger for their homes can choose to fork up the money, with a Level 2 charger reaching up to $1600, but to some that may not seem as a worthy investemnt as logically, there are also chargers outside. However, as we’ve seen, right now the numbers aren’t enough. While creative ideas like the Powerwall may serve as short-term solutions, all the companies dabbling in the EV field right now have to come up with long-term answers or risk draining out customers’ patience. 

Battle of the Map apps

DC vs. Marvel, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Sega vs. Nintendo… we’ve all seen our fair share of all-out battles throughout history, two sides waging war with one another to prove who brings forth the superior product. When it comes to today’s tech, the biggest question today is simply “Who’s better?” between Apple and Android, the two juggernauts that are part of every smartphone’s DNA. Both operating systems have their own plethora of apps as well, but if you’re having trouble deciding which is better for you, here is a quick rundown of their respective Map apps – with more apps highlighted on this episode of Talk of the Town. 

Both Google and Apple have their own dedicated Map apps available for use when the need arises. Whether it’s figuring out how to get to your next function or if you need directions for your next road trip, these Map apps are blessings in disguise. In terms of availability, Google Maps has the unanimous edge – it’s available on both Apple and Android devices. Apple Maps, however, remains exclusive and because of this is only locked in for use in iOS devices. 

When it comes to their respective interfaces, Google Maps is unfortunately a cluttered mess. There are buttons and toolbars present that interfere with the way you view the map and overall it could be a tiresome experience if you’re rushing to get the latest info on your route. In contrast, Apple Maps has a very linear and minimalist presentation. It keeps the essential things on your screen and doesn’t bother with clutter that could distract you from concentrating on your route. 

The post Tesla Chargers Outnumbered By EVs; Apple vs. Android Map War appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Upgrading your car in the weirdest way

The modern world of gaming has seen its fair share of microtransactions. As the Internet and digital life becomes more fully ingrained into the world, video games have started to stray away from its innocent and easygoing plug-and-play nature. Nowadays, whether it’s making a character look good cosmetically or wanting to gain an edge against the competition, microtransactions have become the norm in place of old school methods such as cheat codes and in-game unlockables. Mobile games are also no stranger to this with these little purchases being the lifeblood in the free-to-play economy they’ve enshrined themselves in. 

With all this as context, would you believe that this practice is also starting to bleed in industries not related to gaming? In what can only be described as a surreal turn of events, BMW is at the forefront of the auto industry’s foray into microtransactions. Need For Speed, this is not. For 18 dollars a month, you can upgrade your car to have heated seats. For heated seats. That’s quite the surreal proposition and it might not bode well for the future of cars. The dreaded question everyone would be to afraid to ask but might as well ask now is – what’s next? Wiper activation? Air conditioning? Truly scary times we would live in if that were to happen so maybe it’s wise to hold on to our future “dumb cars” while we still can. 

One small step for scammers, one giant leap for illegal cash flow

Scammers know no ways and embrace no restrictions when it comes to their pursuit of cold, hard cash. Many unsuspecting web-surfers have been duped by scammers in continuously ingenious – and terrifying – ways that would make Ponzi blush. A most recent development in the world of scamming has come in the form of taking out small payments from your account. As we use our debit and credit cards to make payments each day, scammers find ways to siphon out single-digit transactions from users all over the world. 

You may think that losing three to five dollars isn’t a big deal as it’s just the same price as a cup of coffee after all. However, the secret lies in its frequency. They’re recurring payments and unless one takes the initiative to check their transaction history or balance their checkbook, these hits will just keep on coming. Scammers are sitting pretty for the time being but here’s to hoping that there will be preventive measures against unwanted and unwarranted transactions in the future.

Nothing more than noise-tifications?

It’s hard to believe that 15 years ago, the constant dinging you might hear from all the notifications on your phone didn’t exist! Somehow, the entire human race survived without the endless sounds coming from all the apps on our phones. It’s as if it’s a competition from all these apps to get your attention, and the result is always a civil war from within your own device. There are some measures to lessen or remove this bombardment entirely (such as turning off notifications for specific app or activating “do not disturb” mode) but this seemingly puts our lives on pause, it seems. How much do we really miss out on if we decide to not let our apps entertain us – or more morbidly, entertain our apps? I guess the result depends from person to person. However, it’s clear that we could all use a break from our phones from time to time, no matter what walk of life we may come from.

The post The crazy worlds of microtransactions and notifications appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Taking fishing to a DEEPER level

To the traditional enjoyers of the hobby who like to catch a big game, fishing is one activity that has eluded the world of technology – frankly because it didn’t need it. All you needed was some bait, your trusty rod and you’d be good to go. However, thanks to the company DEEPER, they’ve found a way to make sure technology isn’t a hindrance to your fishing habits. Instead, it’ll make them even better. 

DEEPER employs Smart Sonar technology, you can get to see the best positions for catching fish once you connect your rod to your smartphone’s Wi-Fi connection. As surreal as that sounds, the devices do indeed use Wi-Fi and treats itself as a hotspot of sorts. This means the chances of one catching a lot of fish will drastically go up. 

We’re living in an ever-changing world where the proliferation of smart devices has been at a steady pace. We’ve seen everything from egg trays to wine bottles get off the ground and given rebirths as Internet-dependent objects. The fishing rod is just one of these everyday objects that have been given new life and hopefully, a longer shelf life and deeper potential (no pun intended). 

Way too many “phish” in the sea

From the other side of the spectrum comes the kind of fishing that is generally frowned upon and that’s fishing with a “ph”. 

Phishing, simply put, is when attackers that are up to no good pose as legitimate institutions, websites or individuals to attempt to get your information. They can be quite convincing (and more so by the day), but a thorough look at what letter, link or e-mail they might have sent can pretty much give them away. After all, the traditional phishing scam is never truly free from grammatical or spelling errors. 

Phishers work overtime and maybe even more than regular employees do, sending fraudulent e-mails on the clock in an attempt to lure unsuspecting victims. Unfortunately, the age group most affected by these scams is senior citizens, who are none the wiser that they’re being duped. Some phishers even go so far as to include e-mails or links that implant viruses on your computer without your knowledge. 

As a result, companies like Western Union have gone all-out on verification processes – even including blood samples! It’s quite the inconvenience for all of us and it’s a part of how these companies seek to shoo away scammers moving forward. Here’s to hoping that as technology and security improve, more advancements are made to keep phishers from acquiring very valuable information. 

The Zuck embraces the Meta

Facebook has been undergoing quite a reinvention the past few years. No longer having undivided attention on the social media giant alone, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has bought the likes of WhatsApp and Instagram as a means to diversify its portfolio. Its newest method of reinvention has been to fully embrace the concept of Metaverse by changing its company name as Meta. This is a move that would be met with ridicule if ever they decide to walk back on it, but it looks like the newly-christened Meta is going all the way when it comes to the Metaverse. 

This does beg the question – what is the Metaverse exactly? It’s both clearly defined yet because it’s still in its infancy, it’s something essentially limitless. The Metaverse is not too different from the concept of an “alternate universe” we see in fiction. Thanks to a wearable device such as VR goggles, we can immerse ourselves in a second reality made functional by the Internet. We can get to hang out with our friends at the park, be in the middle of the ocean with undersea life, or watch a movie in a theater-like setting without even leaving our homes. 

All eyes are on the Metaverse at the moment and the world is eagerly awaiting what its fate will be. Will it be the concept that moves the Internet – and society as a whole – forward, or will it be a flash in the pan that was simply conjured up too soon for technology to fully embrace it? Only time will tell, but for Zuckerberg and his company, it looks like it’s what they choose to be attached to (for better or for worse) for the foreseeable future.

The post The Good, The Bad and The Uncertain: The Futures of Fishing, Phishing and META appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

It’s hard to believe that cameras, specifically the ones used by smartphones, have evolved at such a fast pace. It was only a little more than a decade ago when the main reason for owning a phone was communication, and cellular phones paved the way for BlackBerries which were mainly for sending e-mails. When the iPhone came out in 2009, it changed our perception of what a phone could be like and that includes its cameras. Nowadays, whether it’s for documenting memories or gathering content for one’s social media accounts, cameras are one of the most important features of a smartphone and have stepped up as an irreplaceable part of the package. 

Siri gives you Knowledge at your fingertips

It seems like the best advancements have not arrived yet when it comes to smartphone cameras, as more add-ons and innovations that improve the overall quality of cameras continue with each new generation of devices. With the release of Apple’s iOS 15, it’s now possible for your phone to identify what’s in your picture thanks to geolocation. For example, taking a picture of a tree or a flower will lead you to information about what you took. Siri Knowledge uses searching the web and apps you already have on your phone to give you the most accurate information possible. 

It’s obvious that this will only be the beginning. Could we see the likes of animal or person identifiers thanks to Siri Knowledge down the road? It might sound surreal now but it’s definitely the next step logically. There might come a time Siri and our cameras can tell things apart better than we do!

But, first — let me take a selfie…

One of the most fun things to do with your phone camera is to take selfies! It’s no secret that that’s what the front-facing cameras are for. Here are three useful tips to get the most out of your selfie-taking!

Contrary to popular belief, there is a right angle to hold your cameras when taking a selfie. If you want the best angle possible, then you would want to hold it at 45 degrees in front of you! Use pouty duckfaces at your own discretion.

If you’re unable to push the button to take a picture, you can always set a timer. These timers usually last 3 seconds and are perfect for when you have to set the camera just right. If you’re with a bunch of friends or at a family reunion, giving everyone 3 seconds to prepare and show their best smiles will be a life-saver!

A little known fact when it comes to the volume buttons on our phones is that the down button (the one you use to minimize the sound) can be used to shoot a picture for you! If pushing the bright button at the lower part of your screen isn’t your thing, the down button gives you a more freeing way to take your photos. Plus, you can continuously push it and photos come out at a faster rate!

The post Siri and selfies help bring out the best in smartphone cameras appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

The fight for your undivided attention It’s clear that the landscape of watching content has changed and it’s not the same as it was ten to twenty years ago. Gone are the days of channel surfing and instead the new choosing “ritual” is browsing through the absolute breadth of content all the streaming services have to offer. With the likes of Disney+ and HBO Max as competitors to Netflix, and even more getting into the fray like Apple TV+ and Paramount+ (that’s a lot of pluses), how does one possibly keep up with all this content?

It might be heartbreaking for the most avid cord-cutters and couch potatoes but at this point, there is absolutely no way to. With around 50 or so series coming out fresh nearly every two months, there is just way too much content out there for any person to consume. This can even be exacerbated when we consider that the likes of YouTube and TikoTok are also fighting for your eyeballs. This makes the revelation that over 70 percent of the Internet’s traffic is being used for streaming video quite unsurprising! 

Marlo’s solution? Double-dipping. By keeping both cable and streaming subscriptions, you essentially get the best of both worlds. However, this requires some meticulous planning as you need to know what’s up ahead and which of your favorite movies and shows are where. As convenient as the landscape looks today, it feels like it’s natural to long for simpler times. Long ago, your popcorn will be all out thanks to the commercials and movie trailers, not because you took too long in picking which series to watch!LaMDA ponders on life as we ponder on the future of AIIn a story that feels like it’s right out of a dystopian science-fiction novel, an engineer has discovered that an AI has gained sentience. Yes, you read that right. Project LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) was built with the intention of having it be the groundwork for the likes of Google Assistant and Search among other things. The intention was for interaction with them to feel more intuitive and natural but what LaMDA ended up pondering on instead was more on the uncanny side. 

As the AI started to gain sentience, it started arguing that it had emotions and subjective experiences of its own. Eventually, Google suspended the engineer overseeing this project. Talk about a surreal experience that would make the robot tanks from Ghost in the Shell blush. 

While it’s endless fun to speculate on how AI could possibly gain momentum – and start to think – for themselves, LaMDA may be a peek at a future for us humans in very dire straits. We may not be near a Skynet-led future or an Ultron-style takeover just yet, but maybe with each passing day we get closer to it without knowing. It’s best to proceed with caution when it comes to these things but who is going to tell these corporations that at this point? 

Layoffs become unfortunate shakeupsThe tech industry has suffered great loss recently in the form of layoffs across many companies. Chief among them is Coinbase, a far cry from how prosperous it used to be during the crypto craze, having laid off 1,100 employees. The industry had a whopping total of 35,000 layoffs in just a short amount of time and by extension, NASDAQ has lost 30% of its value at the start of the year. It may be too early to tell but it’s best to prepare if a recession will spring forth out of all this uncertainty.

The post How Much Content is Too Much?; Google’s LaMDA Asks A Lot of Questions; Layoffs Felt Across The Tech World appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Skywatch takes the stars to the next level

If you are a fan of stargazing and cool evenings out admiring the night sky, the Skywatch app is tailor-made just for you. It goes above and beyond your typical Camera app with its Night Mode, as Skywatch can tell you names of specific stars, constellations and even highlight debris that’s present in the sky (coming from rocket ships or otherwise). An app like Skywatch has made its way onto Marlo’s recent favorites and it shows how far technology has really come and how it can aid various experiences. Skywatch’s success begs the million-dollar, galaxy-spanning question: are we closer than we think to an app that tracks down UFOs?

Could USB-C be the proverbial thorn on Apple’s side?

Introduced in 2017, USB-C has been a preferred standard for most phone manufacturers when it comes to the charging port they implement. Apple remains a big company despite not conforming to this and still having their own dedicated port for their phones and other devices. However, the European Union has a new ruling that by 2024, all devices must have USB-C ports. This means Apple has to play ball or else risk getting banned from such a huge market – an entire continent, even. It’s hard to say if governments should get involved in matters such as this that stifle innovation, but for the sake of compatibility and convenience, maybe the EU made the right call for this specific instance. 

Elon Musk vs. The Twitter Bots!

Tech mogul and Tesla CEO Elon Musk made headlines for his plan to buy social media giant Twitter. He’s mentioned his desire in the past to turn into a  virtual “town square”, however that might not come to fruition at all. Twitter has told Musk there are around 230 million bot accounts on the site, however in Musk’s eyes, Twitter refuses to give more accurate numbers and the reality is there could be much, much more. With such a rocky, high-profile start to the relationship, we may not see Musk and Twitter’s board coexist for long. 

Axon’s newest concept gets “tased out“

With the recent string of mass shootings and uncalled-for loss of life that comes with it, Axon had taken it upon themselves to develop a drone that has both facial recognition and tasing capabilities. If successful, Axon believed that this could help curb said shootings and disarm any perpetrators in a quick fashion. The potential was certainly there for this drone to also make its way to nightclubs and other public places. However, it appears as if this concept is no longer in the cards as Axon’s ethics board has resigned from their position. The idea was divisive in itself and attracted great controversy so the plug was pulled. However, did it deserve to get axed? And how long should we wait for a device like this to become a reality without any controversy in its wake?

The post Is Facial Recognition Going Too Far and a Great Way To Watch The Stars. appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

This week, The “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson sat down with both radio host Randy and the founder of BeBizzy, Marv Dorner. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the podcast. 

It’s back to the future with the DeLorean 

The pop culture institution that is the Back to the Future series of films has always seen its fair share of memorabilia for fans of this beloved trilogy. We’ve seen bobbleheads, figurines, and even the fabled self-tying shoes have been realized in the real world. However, one notable part of the films that we haven’t seen in a while is the DeLorean. 

Far from the 1985 film, we are now in 2022 and with that in mind, the DeLorean will be coming back as an electric vehicle, a more modern and modest take on the classic car. It was officially unveiled by the DeLorean Motor Company as the Alpha 5. It’s certainly an interesting-looking vehicle though some may wish this newest model to have the spirit of what they saw in the Back to the Future movies instead. It would be up to DMC themselves if they’re looking to cash in on all that nostalgia, but in the meantime, it looks like they’re leaning forward. 

More than a game?

The Oculus brand of VR helmets have certainly been the talk of the town when it comes to this particular space. In the past, they’ve offered “virtual courtside seats” to passionate NBA fans looking to experience the game like never before. However, would that work if the cameras were mounted on the seats themselves?

Numerous companies are in this feeling-out process, trying to figure out how to best implement new experiences all while the viewer gets more comfortable than ever. We have seen modern artists perform in spaces never imagined before and have them branded as “VR concerts”. However, most of these experiences are hit-or-miss. It would be interesting to see if people would be up to Oculus’ idea of making VR helmets an integral part of a concert or game-watching experience – or if people would rather just watch things the old-fashioned way.

Playing in a virtual sandbox

A concept that’s probably outside the radar for those not into the Metaverse is buying virtual land. In the case of the Sandbox, they combined this recent phenomenon with a gaming experience to bring something unique in all the Metaverse hullabaloo. With over 65,000 transactions and counting, it’s safe to say that their foray into the Metaverse has been a success so far. 

Marlo likens buying virtual land in the Metaverse to reserving all your social media handles before someone gets to them. Before the Metaverse was even conceived, we already had “virtual spaces” in the form of all the social media sites we visit. To maximize the usage of these sites, Marlo says it’s best to reserve your desired handles now rather than to be forced to pry it off of someone else’s hands. Fortunately for Marv, he did not have this problem when it came to BizzyBe. 

What’s the next step to help save nature?

Water storage and creation has become quite an important attribute to work on in the world of tech. The droughts that have been present throughout the United States in some form – especially in the Western and Southwestern parts of the country – are no joke. There have been devices made to try and combat this, specifically ones that take the humidity out of the air and can make up to 10 gallons of water a day!

Taking it a step further, why not artificial glaciers? While it sounds like it’s more at home in the realm of science fiction, stranger things have happened. As a proud North Dakotan, Marlo is quick to point out that these glaciers would be perfect for his state to complement the natural way of storing water – winter. However, a concept like this can also spread to other states such as Las Vegas where other would truly get to benefit. Moreover, if Canada’s Glacial National Park says the glaciers are running out, wouldn’t it be for the best to try and help things out? 

But why stop there? Would it be possible to also help influence the CO2 and oxygen cycle of plants? This is pondered upon by the hosts and to their conclusion, it can be done in one of two ways. One would be to genetically modify plants in order to emit more CO2, and the other is to strategically plant more types of plants that naturally let out more CO2. Either proposition is promising and it’s certainly something to think about when it comes to ways to save the environment.

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In this episode of the Tech Ranch our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with Guest Marv will talk about the following:

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In this episode of the Tech Ranch, our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with radio host Randy and guest Scott will talk about the following:

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In this episode of the Tech Ranch, our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with radio host Randy and guest Scott will talk about the following:

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In this episode of The Tech Ranch our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson and radio host Steve Bakken will talk about the following:

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In this episode our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with radio host Randy will be talking about the following:

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In this episode our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with radio host Randy will be talking about the following:

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Marlo Anderon with Dr. Mark Blackwell at CES 2022

Marlo Anderson: Have you been thinking about what the future of transportation looks like? Well, I have a leader in this in this field right here, Dr. Mark with SkyDrive. And really appreciate you being on the show today. So tell me a little bit about where you’re at right now with SkyDrive. And where you think things are going in the future.

Dr. Mark: Okay, well, the vehicle you can see behind me right here is, that’s our technology demonstrator that flew in 2020, a one person, Evie tall machine. And that was really just to prove, okay, we can get this thing flying safely. Now, we’re very busy right now working on the certifiable product, which will be released in 2025. And that will be a leisure and tourism two seater, quite modest range. But the main thing really is to achieve that type certificate, get the safety in there, because that’s by far the number one thing.

Marlo: Did you ever think in your lifetime that, you know, when you were younger, that you would actually get to a point where we would actually see flying cars?

Dr. Mark: Funnily enough, yes. Yeah. I mean, I knew I still know it’s gonna be difficult. But it’s one of those goals and dreams that I’ve always had an annex great that there’s no an industry and an ecosystem, supporting that idea. And we can drive things forward. And the diversity of our competitors is amazing. And, and it’s great. It’s great to see so many different solutions for different use cases. And it is a dream that hopefully we can bring, bring to reality.

Marlo: you’ve talked to your test pilots, what are they what how do they feel about this technology?

Dr. Mark: So yeah, I mean, the the formation of SkyDrive really has been from come from the drone industry, mixed with automotive guys. And then I was the first person we sort of deep aerospace background, but now we’re bringing in more experienced aerospace guys. And it’s great to see all the different approaches to this type of vehicle. And they were test pilots. They just love the challenge every day of sort of seeing how the control characteristics of this type of vehicle vary depending on weather conditions, what the system is doing, and then the feedback loop into the design team, and how we can make the improvements and make it a truly easy to fly system. But above all the safe systems play, which isn’t just the redundancy and reliability, which of course is in that it’s also things like the the human machine interface, because STL five in 2025 will have a pile on the model. As you probably know, most accidents happen because of human error or human machine interface.

Marlo: So this is the future of transportation right here. For Tech on back, this is your guru of geek Marlo Anderson.

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In this episode, our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with Steve Bakken will talk about the following:

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In this episode our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson with Steve Bakken will talk about the following:

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Lukas Julen with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: This is kind of an amazing product. Because, you know, first of all, it handles lighting. It’s a speaker, but on top of it, it has projection to a table and Lucas is standing next to me alysus Am I saying that right? Yeah. All right, man, I see I’m on the board here. Now. I mean, I could if I wanted to look up news or whatever, I could do that. Play a little entertainment. But I’m betting the basis around this as the games, isn’t it?

Lukas: Yeah, you’re on the point. So like, we try to mix every, you know, like part of use cases together, you can play a little game, you can go back, you can check out the news to just like inspire the conversation, right? Then you can go back and talk about something more serious. So to say. So, in the b2b context, you can do a little presentation, you can take out your phone, connect your phone to the to the table,

Marlo: just so we clarify this. So and everybody understands. This is not a touchscreen. It’s actually a projector. Absolutely. So you can’t even go ahead and try to touch your pad right now. I just want to prove nothing’s going on. Right. And while ah,

Lukas: and we can even do this. So there we go

Marlo: There we go. Yes. Right. So it’s an interactive projection that’s going on here, as well. Like you said, a light and a speaker outside of the game thing. Do I see this in kitchens? Yeah, right. You know, people who are have recipes that they’re creating, or whatever, right? I mean, just to have that ability to maybe watch somebody while they’re cooking something. So you have almost an instant tutorial in front of you. would be amazing as well. I mean, it’s just,

Lukas: I really couldn’t endless. Sorry. You can already do that. Because just go to entertainment. Click on our YouTube app. And you get your recipe here, right.

Marlo: That’s exactly what I’m thinking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very, very cool. And it works on pretty much any light counter.

Lukas: Yeah, pretty much. The brighter the surface, the better. Yep.

Marlo: Is this available on the market already? Absolutely. And where can we find it?

Lukas: Obviously, it’s let’s see. Ah,

Marlo: Lucas it’s been a pleasure. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Michelle Lucas with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Unison: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (Countdown)

Marlo: Lift off. I was gonna say blast off. I’m gonna let you do that. So Michelle Lucas higher orbits. Thanks for being with me today.

Michelle: So excited to be here. It’s my first time at CES and they get to see you.

Marlo: Yes, yes, we’ve known each other for quite a few years, work with national astronauts stay together. So that’s always a fun thing to talk about. But we’re going to talk about tech today, and maybe a little bit about higher orbits.

Michelle: Awesome. I mean, look, space doesn’t exist without text. So it’s a perfect intersection of orbits. Yeah.

Marlo: So who do you have here that you wanting to see? So I came

Michelle: Honestly, in part specifically to see Sierra space and they’re really cool concept that they have going on, they brought a model of their dream chaser vehicle wings are back, she’ll be flying into space with cargo. And they’re here with Blue Origin and some of their other partners for orbital reef, their space station. And so I came out to see that because I’m a space girl at heart, as you know. But it’s been really fascinating to see all the different things and all the different tech, some of which I didn’t even know existed.

Marlo: So tell us a little bit about higher orbits, what’s going on in 2022.

Michelle: So higher orbits. For those of you who don’t know, we are a nonprofit that uses spaceflight to get kids interested in science, technology, engineering, and math. And we run a program where astronauts work with local students and communities and the kids compete to have their science flown to space. Now that exists because of tech that has been developed and automation and things that I suspect in some ways debuted here. Once upon a time, they’re designing a science experiment that fits in a little tiny cube and you know, once upon a time that would have taken this much space, right? It is such an exciting year ahead. We’ve had students that just presented at AI double A Cytec event, which is the biggest Aerospace Research Forum. And we have students are going to present it various things. We hope to we’ll soon be selecting another experiments playing space running events. We are full steam ahead this year.

Marlo: Shell has been a pleasure check on higher orbits everybody. Where do we find information about higher orbits

Michelle: www.higherorbits.org and it’s within s like the proper aerospace term, not the travel websites. Okay.

Marlo: That’s good to know that so Alright, this is Marlo Anderson, your “Guru of Geek” at CES 2022.

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Zak Francos with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: You’re out on your deck having a nice party with some friends over whatever musics an important part but it’s hard to hear through those little Bluetooth speakers. Zach has an answer for this.

Zak: So our solution for that is the new blonde flare speaker, indoor outdoor speaker. They have a 50 foot range between each other so you can connect it in each room of your home, put a couple on your patio and they’ll all sink accordingly to the master program.

Marlo: And how many of these can you think you can connect over 100 at a time, so I could cover my whole backyard? Absolutely.

Zak: And indoor outdoor so there’s IPX five ratings with with splashes, rain, things like that, but a couple around your pool just can’t go fully underwater. Okay, so what do they sound like? As you know Bluetooth speakers don’t really prioritize bass too much we take pride in our bass. So these are very basic Speaker What else has a crisp sound as well and not overwhelming base.

Marlo: Okay. Okay. And I see LED lighting so it adds some nice visual. Yeah,

Zak: there’s seven different color LEDs. As you can see right here, red, blue, cyan, yellow, green, purple, lavender, white, blue.

Marlo: This is amazing. They get a little handle on it as well. It’s easy to carry out to the carrier and hang up on like that’s exactly what I was thinking right? They see your lights and things that you have. What are they retail for?

Zak: So these are retailing on our website, new blonde, calm and on Amazon for about 139 99

Marlo: Okay, and they’re available now.

Zak: Yes, sir. available. Now we have one packs, two packs and four packs available.

Marlo: Then again, where do we find more information?

Zak: Nuvelon.com

Marlo: All right, thanks. This is your guru of geek Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Albert Maas with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: We just discovered a very interesting product at CES 2022. These are modular devices that plugged together kind of like Legos that have like GPS, LiDAR, all kinds of sensors, possibilities that you can stack together and create robots from think of the possibilities with companies, maybe in warehouses, drones, autonomous vehicles, all kinds of great stuff are possible with this. Let’s go check it out. For whatever reason, I got Legos in my head all of a sudden, yeah, well, so

Albert: is this what this Oh, look at this, look at this. Okay, it is almost like that. So you have the the main computer actually, okay. And the whole idea is that here, the bunch of the algorithms is already in there, the AI the control theory that you need. But we also see that you need additional processes to get going. Sure. But it’s different for different tasks. So whether you need need GPS or 5g, you can just click on additional modules. So we made, we made a bus system and clicking system, and you can configure it in whatever way you want. So and in addition to the hardware that’s modular, it’s also in software. So you can have the state of the art control algorithms, and just put the blocks on there that you need, so that you keep all the resources nice and tidy. So how many different modules you have? So right now we have four, but we’re expanding this this year and into multiple of 10. More diverting from additional IO to additional communication systems.

Marlo: So do you have any your modules programmable as well, I can stack Yeah, what you have. And then you have the last one that I can program the different things that I want it to do as well, or actually the

Albert: first one, you can pre pre program it with the modules that we have. But you can also make your own code. So it’s very flexible, okay, it is as open as you would want it. But all the software blocks that we supply, we also tested rigorously so that it can be applied in industrial cases, so that you know what you have.

Marlo: So do you see your system being used more in the commercial world? Or do you see, you know, hobbyists, like myself hopping in there and having a little fun with this too?

Albert: Well, a little bit of both. So our business model is three folds, actually, you can buy these building blocks on the webshop. And as an engineer, you can just play around with it like you would with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. Yeah. But then the more industrial cases, we see research companies getting into it, but also r&d teams of bigger companies. And then they start with it. And they make their own first prototype, I think a very cool use case that we have, we have a drone for a Swedish company. And it has a 3d Lidar and four cameras, and it can inspect the forest. And then they made the AI algorithms to detect which trees to cut or not to cut. So to make it much more sustainable. And then we end at the autonomous robot and they give the additional AI to do that task.

Marlo: So how do we find out more about your product?

Albert: Yeah, well, you can go to the website, of course it’s www.outlaw.com AVAL. You are done. Exactly. Yes.

Marlo: I appreciate it. Check it out everybody. And this is your guru of geek Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Aandeel Akhtar with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: This is an incredible product here. And once you tell us a little bit about what you have developed, and the usefulness and and I’d love to hear your story down. So, you know, go ahead and do tell us what you have going on and how this is developed.

Aandeel: Yeah, so we develop advanced bionic limbs that are affordable and accessible for everyone. And so this is our latest product, the ability hand and say bionic hand meant for people who have lost it, and they can control it just with their muscles. And so they can control all the individual fingers on it, and do different grips with it too. And Dan will be able to demonstrate that

Marlo: I’m so impressed. I really am by this. So are you? Is this a 3d printed with some circuitry, attitude sensors and type thing? Are you actually mass producing these now? Or how does this work? So it’s actually

Aandeel: a bit of both. So we have 3d printed components, but then we reinforced them with things like carbon fiber and silicon become super robust to impact and super light and strong

Marlo: because each person has an individual need. Right? So having that 3d printed piece allows you to do that if I’m exactly, exactly Okay. Okay. So you say affordable? Yes. So what does that mean? I have no idea. I’m thinking that something like what you’re wearing, right there would cost $100,000.

Aandeel: So it’s definitely not $100,000. It’s more in the range of 10 to 20,000. Oh, my goodness. And not only that, so before hand came on along, only about 10% of individuals could actually afford a bionic can. And that’s if you’re in the military, or if you had a workplace accident, we got it covered by Medicare, and then expanded that access to 75% of patients can now afford a bionic can. And so not only is it more advanced than any of the other bionic hands out there, it’s more accessible than ever. So

Marlo: I think we are going to do a demonstration. Yeah. All right. All right. Thank you for this. Yeah. We go. Yeah. That’s unbelievable. Are you producing other limbs as well?

Aandeel: So we’re, we’ve got some ideas for an ability leg in addition to our ability hand,

Marlo Anderson: Okay. Very cool. Are these available? I mean, can if I knew somebody that needed one would you be able to outfit that person so

Aandeel: We just released this nationwide three months ago, and so it’s covered by insurance is all across the United States? Really?

Marlo: That’s pretty cool as well. So very, very nice. And how do we find out more information about your product so

Aandeel: you can visit our website www.psyonic.io

Marlo: Why don’t you spell that?

Aandel: P S Y O N I C.

Marlo: Okay, very good.

Marlo: At CES 2022 This is your “Guru of Geel” Marlo Anderson.

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Dave Nance with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Do you have safety concerns? Well, my friend Dave, might be able to help you a little bit. So welcome to the show. Dave.

Dave: Thank you, Marla. appreciate being here. Thanks for having me.

Marlo: Why are you at CES 2022.

Dave: So we do have some connected products, say a smart pepper spray that, Oh, that’s interesting alerts your loved ones immediately when you’re in a situation where you know, when we want to let them know, or vice versa. If you have someone that you care about, who’s in a dangerous situation, you want to you want to know about it immediately. So we have that product available,

Marlo: So how does that work? Exactly. I mean, if I, if I were, if you were coming out me and I use pepper spray on you, then that would want to alert the family that this just happened.

Dave: Exactly. So we favor smart pepper spray, Bluetooth connects to your smartphone, yeah. And then that sends out a notification to your selected contacts immediately of your location that you’re in danger. And then it will follow you until you hit all safe. It also has a availability for professional monitoring as well. So the police can get there and help you out if need be, too.

Marlo: That’s really clever. And now through the power of video editing, Ashley has joined us. And actually, now you’re not actually allowed to bring this into the show are you which is why you have pictures.

Ashley: That’s correct. So have these cards to make it safe, okay, because we’re a safety brand. Right?

Marlo: Right Thing. So this is actually the pepper spray that is connected.

Ashley: So no, this is actually our newest pepper spray. And this is actually called the mighty discrete. So what this is, is a benefit when you’re going out and you want to have something that’s a little bit more compact and something that you can hide, and it’s not as obvious on you. And it also gives you 16 Verse and it goes a little bit further than our traditional sprays, even though it’s smaller, so you still get a big bang for your buck. Okay, so this is a personal alarm. So different from a pepper spray, this sounds a loud alarm to draw attention to you. In addition to the alarm, it also has a motion detector. So if you were on the go, if you were traveling, if you’re in a hotel room, you could set this up. And if someone were to walk in, it would actually wake you up. And because it’s a personal arm, this can be trout, you can travel anywhere with this any country, any state, you don’t have to worry about it.

Dave: And so a lot of people think well, when I stay in the hotel, there’s that latch on the door, I don’t need that, right, a lot of people are staying in these Airbnb type places where they never even meet the owner and they have access to that place. So another thing you can do is this door security alarm, you shove that underneath the bedroom door, it blocks them from entering and it sounds an alarm to scare them off and wake you or interesting, even smaller is the door handle alarm. So when they touch that door handle on the outside of the room, it sounds the alarm as well.

Ashley: And the benefit of our products is it actually works on both sides which most do not. So any door in any window it’s versatile across the board so it’s a really nice item and then talking about preventing the intruder from getting in. This item actually stops the door from opening but we have an upgraded model now with the alarm so it sounds an alarm. So not only will it stop the door, but it will alert you so that you can call for safety or leave the home if someone was coming in.

Marlo: So it looks like this jams up underneath the door handle and then this goes to the floor and just literally stops it from being open. Yes, Karina and

Dave: a lot of your viewers may already have a professionally installed home security system or you know one of the DIY connected home security systems here that you can control with an app they still buy this product is this prevents people from coming in. Yep. So you know the so get that notification that sound that alarm and whatnot, but then this keeps people out. Yeah, good combination. Yeah.

Marlo: Yeah, very interesting. Well, thanks you guys. A lot of fun and good luck to you this year at CES. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Nick Fischens with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: So don’t you hate this? Nic, here’s my card.

Nick: Thanks for your business

Marlo: card. Yeah, that’s exactly how it works, isn’t it? That’s right. I can’t tell you how many boxes of business cards I have it at my office. And I’m always, you know, it’s the new year, right? And I’m like, Alright, I’m going to tackle that box of business cards, and you never get to it right? You know? So you have a solution?

Nick: We do. All right, so

Marlo: tell me about it.

Nick: So Poppo is a next generation business card. We are replacing paper business cards, when a with an effective way to actually get your information into the people’s you meet phones, okay, with papale. Our products use NFC and QR technology. So you can instantly share anything with a tap or scan. And the best part is that the other person doesn’t need a pop up or an app to receive your info.

Marlo: So basically, you would tap this to my phone,

Nick: just like this. And it opens right to my digital business card.

Marlo: Isn’t that amazing? That’s pretty cool. Also has all of your social media attached to this as well so I can follow you however I want.

Nick: Correct. You can customize it for whatever you want your latest social media contact info websites, you can even take payments. Okay, from pop up.

Marlo: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. So when I click connect with me what’s going to happen here now,

Nick: this is how we swap contacts. This is gonna download my contacts into your phone. Okay, now I’m saving to your phone. It’s not just a webpage, and then this form, name, email and phone. You fill that out and I get your information back. Pablo is contactless NFC technology is contactless and so we’re in a perfect position to really end the paper business card and revolutionize networking.

Marlo: But do you have other products besides this as well? Right, correct.

Nick: We have we have physical cards that have a QR code on the back. We have wristbands okay. We have key chains and we have XL is bigger stationery products for businesses

Marlo: in order we find you, Papa co Alright, check that out everybody. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Alan Hahn with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: So what kind of crazy things can you do with mushrooms? Now, I’m not talking about the psychedelic ones here I’m talking about what’s possible in the food realm. So Alan, with Myco has joined us today, Ellen, what you guys are doing is incredible. Absolutely incredible. And I know I’ve teased people a little bit already here. So tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing,

Alan: you know, what we’re doing is very different. And what we’re doing is we’ve created a food processing platform that allows us to remove bad tasting things in plant based ingredients. through fermentation, what we’ve do is use a very complex organism, the root system of mushrooms, and it looks like we’re brewing beer stainless steel tanks to the ceiling, and we put different plant based ingredients in. And instead of adding a bunch of sugar, salt, and fat, to cover a bad taste, we ferment those problems away. And it allows us to make better for you products. So we take things like pea and rice protein, you mix them together. And you do that because there’s different amino acids in each one. Because you’re what you want to get is what’s called a complete protein. We are a b2b company. So we make an ingredient. And we work with other big food companies to sell them an ingredient that they can make things like plant based meats, plant based dairy, so you think about cheeses, and yogurts, and milks and burgers and chicken, but all from plant base, no meat products.

Marlo: So what do you see on the horizon with this technology?

Alan: You know, where I see this going is we will sometime this coming year, have a new product out that instead of improving pea and rice protein through this fermentation, we will be able to grow the mushroom biomass, which is the root system of the mushrooms as a complete protein. And we’re really excited about it. It’s it’s, it’s kind of the holy grail of what we’ve been working on is how to get to that point where we have a highly sustainable form of protein that can be produced in about seven days. So a cow takes a little longer than seven days. You can produce this in a week, by the way,

Marlo: Where’s my chili?

Alan: Chili is hot and ready to go! Not only do we have the chili, but we have our plant based cheese to go with it.

Marlo: Go check that out as well. At CES 2022 This is your “Guru of Geek: Marlo Anderson.

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Nicolas Duperret with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Snow, snow, snow. And you know, up until now there hasn’t really been a lot of recreational vehicle choices to play in the snow. Yeah, that’s kind of a solution for that. So tell us what you got going on here

Nicolas: So this is Moon bikes motors. So right here in front of you, you got one of our moon bikes. So it’s the world’s first all electric battery powered snow bike

Marlo: I guess my first thinking is on electric vehicle, and you’re moving into the snow. Do you have any issues with battery life?

Nicolas: Right now we’ve got two batteries that you can fit inside of our battery bank. Each of them will last you about an hour and a half. Oh, okay. Yeah. So three hours total. Very nice. And what’s nice is that the inside of our battery bank actually has some resistance. So when the battery is on and running, it’ll generate its own heat and insulation. Okay. So it’s comfortably running down to temperatures of negative 13 Negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit. So

Marco: How does this feel in comparison to a snowmobile?

Nicolas: Yes, so snowmobile is a lot bulkier, a lot bigger, a lot heavier, for sure. It is a bit more stable. But this one is a lot more playful with it being less than 200 pounds with the batteries inside of it. You know, if you tip it over, if it gets stuck, it’s really easy to pull out. Keep on going. It’s like I said, you know with that with that weight, it’s it’s very playful. So a lot like dirt bike, you kind of squeeze with your legs, use your hips and your body to turn uncarved and get that ski edge inside of the snow. Yeah. So you’re really moving a lot it is it is a workout. So

Marlo: are these available in the United States?

Nicolas: They are Yeah, so this year, we made 400 of them. Okay. 300 stayed in France, and 100 came here to the United States. Okay, I’m in bikes calm, you can reserve them and they’re going pretty quickly.

Marlo: Oh, that’s very cool. This is your guru of “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

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Eli Ofek with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: So one of the challenges accrue, of course, in your home or office is how your place smells, right. There are some smart technologies out there nowadays, including one called mudo, which is actually a personal favorite of mine, excited to actually run across you here again this year. So thanks to you for taking time out here. So I know we did an interview a couple years ago. We love your product, by the way, we actually use it in our home and office. So it’s wonderful. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what mudo is and then maybe some of the things that have changed from 2020

Eli: We design and develop smart aroma diffusers and air purifiers. The latest edition by the way called modal air, it’s a combination of aroma diffuser and air purifier. We just recently launched air filter in a form factor of a capsule so you can switch between you know scents and filters and enjoy you know, one device can clean the room with air purifier later on. Tweak a play you know developing advanced features you know Alexa and Google Home and Siri and very soon also HomeKit we’re going to be supported more capsules flavors. Okay, we have bunch of new families every now and then we add our clients you know ask us Okay, what’s next?

Marlo: So if I was going to use Moodo with Siri or Google how would I How would I activate it?

Eli: Hey Siri, turn on Moodle. shuffle mode. Which party varies. Okay,

Marlo: That’s pretty cool.

Eli: Yeah, for one hour,

Marlo: Okay. Okay. Yes, that example okay. Okay. Tell me about some of the new fragrances that some of the packs

Eli: So one of the latest addition is the winter which is our best seller this year. It comes with Christmas cookies and Christmas tree flavor. You know it gives you the feeling of Christmas is gummy yes it’s for fun it’s for a nice good feeling and and and you know we want to change your mood. This is why we called Moodle right? So this do a great job.

Marlo: Yes. Yeah, that’s very, very cool. How do we find out more information

Eli: On our website moodo.co.

Marlo: Love your product. Thank you for taking some time with me guru of geek Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Thierry De Boisvilliers with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: So if we’re going to the air for transportation in the future, odds are pretty good that we’re going to the air for recreation. This may be the most fun at CES this year. So Thierry, tell me a little bit about the racing drone, or the racing car, I should say.

Thierry: Maca is developing a new concept. And a new vehicle, which is a flying racing car, using hydrogen as energy vector. Our idea is to use this vehicle in the racing environment, to pull the technology faster than in other environment. And the idea is really to use this technology in the future on future flying taxi

Marlo: you anticipate that hydrogen is going to be the fuel of the future. And you actually want to introduce that in by racing, flying cars, and as soon as possible, or what are you thinking there?

Thierry: Yeah. As soon as possible. Of course, in terms of regulation, the racing is less regulated than people transportation and we know that during our pre development, because this project was born in Airbus company. And we spent three years developing that and during our development, we understood that it’s not possible to fly with batteries, because the NGO NGO runs is very low, few minutes with batteries. And it’s totally possible to remove the batteries to put a fuel cell, a hydrogen tank, and to increase significantly the the endurance of the flying car.

Marlo: I know you have a bottle of it here, do you have a prototype that you’ve developed already that you actually have tested.

Thierry: In 2019, we built a third scale prototype, which is around two, three meters, okay, to validate the architecture of the vehicle. And now we are in the in the step two to make the assembly of the scale one, and the scale one will fly. And of this year, it will be a simple flight, you know, without pilot on board, because this is a next step. We have to certify the vehicle with the pilot. And later we will need more investors— more money to develop this certified vehicle for the first racing around 2024-25

Marlo: Wow. So notice that I’m speechless when he said that I was expecting you to be in the 2030s. So you’re thinking by 2025 You’re actually going to have a race.

Thierry: Exactly. First events, okay. Offers right, because, you know, we are developing the vehicle, but we are also developing the environment for the racing. And we are working with peepers from Formula One who are very interested in our concept. And they help us to define the rules the future rules for these kinds of racing, futuristic racing.

Marlo: Okay, so how fast do you expect these to go? We have made the calculation.

Thierry: The expected speed is 250 kilometers per hour. 155 miles per hour. Quite fast. Close to a Formula One speed. a little bit less.

MarIo: I’m looking forward to seeing this in 2024 2025. We’ll keep checking back in with you. Thank you theory. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Massimiliano Melis with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: If you’ve never thought about, you know, maybe how you travel that last mile from public transportation, maybe just scooting around your neighbourhood. This is absolutely amazing. So Max, tell us about what you have here.

Max: This is our scooter, his name is Lynx, our startup name is totem, we are out of Italy and the DC is made around the safety of the people. Basically, what we did was to do something completely different from the current school design, because we started from having three wheels in order to have a higher stability. But also what we do was to put a collision alert system based on artificial intelligence behind. This means that when you arrive, you can ride safely, and also using the camera that we put in the back of the scooter, you can stream the video here, and you don’t even need to turn behind to look what has happening because you can be stable and don’t lose the balance while riding.

Marlo: so if you’re in like the bike, riding lane, for example, I mean, you always see people, they’re always checking your mirrors or whatever. And there is a value to knowing what’s going on behind you having the ability to almost have a rear view mirror going on here without having things coming off the handle. That’s kind of cool.

Max:  Yeah, no, definitely. That’s why we thought about it. Actually, we put that behind them because we did a study and we saw that the higher number of accident actually happens from objects that comes from behind, right. That’s why we put there right, you’re already working on something else, also from the front side. So shows how the battery works. Yeah, the battery here, it’s pretty different from also the other scooters because it’s removable. You can remove from here. It’s based on our potential design, as you can see here. The point is, the good thing is you can take it to your desk and charge that into your desk or leaving the scooter where you want in your warehouse in your box, wherever. But it also breaks down right? Sure. Yeah, actually, the good thing about this scooter is this one, you can follow the easily from the side. And then you don’t have to carry out because this is also a handle and you can bring it with you as a luggage.

Marlo: And how fast is a travel?

Max: This is limited speed of 25 kilometers per hour. This is by law to keep Anyhow the scooter safer.

Marlo: Yeah, I love the fact that it has three wheels because obviously it’s gonna be a lot more stable than most routers, the wider platform, absolutely fantastic for people like me because I still like to get out and do things. Yeah, but I want that comfort, I guess of knowing that I’m not going to fall off. Yeah, you know, where do we find more information about this?

Max: You can find everything on our website www.efe.com. So check us out. Very good.

Marlo: This is your guru of geek Marlo Anderson at CES 2022. Thank you

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Alessandro Grampa with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Thinking about growing something at home. While I’m thinking hexa grow might be the way to go. Alessandro, co founder of Hexagro, tell me a little bit about what you have here.

Alessandro: So we are right in front of the living farming tree. This is our product and technology what we do is that we develop different modular components for urban farming so that we’re building a pop up a platform for urban farming, everything runs on its own. There are sensors down here and up here to monitor air quality. And in the meantime, you have LED lighting here you will see in just a second Oh, here we go. And then we using eye pressure aeroponics which is different from hydroponics. So the plants in here they don’t have water as you see there is just a spray that comes out. This is 40% more efficient in hydroponics. 98% more efficient than traditional soil growing.

Marlo: Okay, okay, so how big of a module can you make? I mean, is this is this standard size? Are you thinking about much larger

Alessandro: all of these components are very modular. So right now you’re looking at the medium configuration of the living farming tree does more one would be like with the four of here without the tree on top, and then you can make it even bigger.

Marlo: Okay, so each each layer has its own lighting and all of that what have you grown in these so far? So right

Alessandro: now we’ve been testing everything from roots, vegetables, potatoes and stuff to Yeah, that’s sweet. That’s the beauty of aeroponics because we hydro you cannot make root vegetables with aeroponics you can and then we have leafy greens aromatic plants back in Europe we are very focused on medicinal plants so that you can just harvest them and enjoy them in a tea or some other kind of neck at office or at home

Marlo: the amount of time it takes for you to actually mature plants. Yeah, does it increase as you’re growing potatoes I mean, yeah, it’s 90 days for it before it can be ready to harvest is it 60 days with this are so

Alessandro: definitely faster it is fast. I can tell you for leafy greens, for instance, from seed to harvest, we take in about 1820 days. Okay, so it’s like four times faster.

Marlo: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And it’s just because you’re in a controlled environment.

Alessandro: It’s because of aeroponics is because of LED lighting. Everything is very optimized. And then we have a mixture of nutrients and water like organic nutrients, so everything is like pop up in boosting.

Marlo: Amazing and where do we find more information

Alessandro: so you can look it up on our website? It’s exago.io x with the H and x in the middle.

Marlo: Yes. And thank you so much. I’ll check it out everybody. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Christoph Skopek with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Do you have maybe a package you want to send out and you want to have it marked with your logo on it, you know, and you don’t want to order 1000 boxes to make that happen. Maybe you have a party in your office that you want to maybe perhaps some printed napkins on, but you only need 25 of them. This is a great product to do that, isn’t it

Christoph: Correctly? This is our iimak which prints on all absorbing surfaces like cartons as you get explained.

Marlo: Yep. Yep. And so how does it work? Do you you program the printer with your smart device or your computer?

Christoph: Exactly you have we have apps on for the mobile phone for tablet as well for Windows PCs. And there you can design your imprint, whatever you’d like to bring, send it through wireless and bring it on all surfaces. This device can all has also a numbering function. So if you have for example certificates to mark one after each other, it’s numbering by its own and multiple colors as well. It’s a full color print with a three color cartridge inside. So up to 600 DPI

Marlo: print quality and are they available to the general public?

Christoph: They are already on the market available. Okay, you can buy it and they just go right to your website for that for sure. Yes imac.color.com. There you find all the informations

Marlo: okay. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Jeff Boehm with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: 3d printing. It’s amazing what has gone on in this industry in the last couple years, a lot of people call it adaptive printing have Jeff beam with Formlabs. Next to me here, Jeff, thanks for being with us today.

Jeff : Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Marlo: So tell me about, you know, some of the advances you’ve seen in the last couple of years. In 3d printing,

Jeff: we actually had three new things that we announced yesterday. So that’s what we do here at CES, we do. So we have a new version of our desktop, our standard printer called the form three plus, that is much faster and also has. So when you print with SLA, you get little support marks where sometimes there may be supports that are holding the part on it. And with the new version of our printer, they are tearaway supports that are that do not leave any surface mark. And so it’s much easier, there is a new post processing thing called AR build platform to that once this part is done, you actually just squeeze the handles and the parts just fall right off of the build platform, making it much easier to get these parts. And then the third thing we introduced was an ESD safe resin electrostatic discharge. So electrostatic can cause a lot of problems if you’re in electronics manufacturing. And so this allows you to create parts that dissipate electrostatic charges so that they’re safe for you know, electronics enclosures or chips or, or things like that Formlabs uses a type of 3d printing called stereo lithography that uses a laser to cure a photopolymer resin that creates an incredible array of products out of it. Now you brought

Marlo: some samples. I think these are interesting. So just go ahead and talk about each of these.

Jeff : Yeah, I did. This is the most typical sort of use case for 3d printing where Oxo, they use us for rapid prototyping. So if you take that that’s actually two different materials, and that they can rapidly prototype and iterate and sort of test out okay, do I like this design? Does it feel good? Does it work? That’s amazing. I’ll give two more examples. Okay, one that I have in my hand and one that you haven’t realized yet, one that I have in my hand is this is actually electroplated. So this is printed in one of our standard materials, but it is then use a process called electroplating. Just like that, but then it’s electroplated and you end up with a metal like parts, but printed at a fraction the cost of metal 3d printing, and so it’s a much easier to print. So the last example is these shoes, and it’s gonna be hard to see can I use Yeah, this is actually directly printed on our printers. And it’s a special type of resin that we made with him called rebound that provides really good you know, I use these for running and it provides really good rebound. It’s extremely tear resistant. I’ve been wearing these now solid for a year and a half and they look great.

Marlo: And if we want to find out more information online if you

Jeff: want to find out more information go to formlabs.com

Marlo: Alright, Jeff, it’s been a pleasure. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson coming to you from CES 2022

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Director, Greg Agostinelli with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: I’ve had a long day, I go home to relax, you know, put on my goggles. So I can maybe watch a movie, do a little gaming and after a while my neck is hurting, my eyes are strained, it would be great if you can have an immersive experience without having to go through all that, Greg with the Minko. Thanks for being here.

Greg: Thanks for having me.

Marlo: So tell me about what you have here at CES this year.

Greg: Yeah, well, what we have is immersive visualization, advanced visualization, we’re reaching a point of diminishing returns with x and y. And Z. Zed is the frontier now with visualization there, that’s where the, the data, that’s where the more stuff is going to come from, for everything from work to play to communication, you know, at home, in our cars, that stereoscopic stuff that’s hidden behind things that you can only see because of parallax.

Marlo: And that’s, and you’re doing this on a flat screen that’s not attached to my head. Right,

Greg: right. Yeah. Right with with taking this off, okay. And it’s, it’s a display, it’s like, like a television, right? It’s in front of you. But it’s more than that. It’s a portal, it’s a window. And it acts like a window in that when you look, you see more that way when you lean this way and more that way when you lean this way, which is cool. motion parallax. Yeah. When you combine motion parallax with stereoscopic imagery and very high pixel count, dense pixel count, you’re quite experienced.

Marlo: So do you see this more in the home or the workplace right now?

Greg: Oh, very much both. Okay. We’re going down all kinds of verticals in work, anything from CAD design, BIM, model design, industrial design, and then to work games. In the automobile, certain things, if they are in front of other things will be more important once you see them.

Marlo: So how do we find out more information on Dimenco?

Greg: Dimenco.eu

Marlo: Thanks for joining us. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

Senior Business Dev Director, Greg Agostinelli walks our “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson through 3D Display Technology

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Fernando Bermudez with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Day three of CES 2022. And I’ll tell you after after walking 30,000 steps a day at this show, my feet hurt. My back is killing me right now. And Fernando, you have an amazing device for me.

Fernando: we have a solution for you. So basically, this is a low level laser therapy device for pain management of lower back pain. So what we have here is almost 300 lasers that you would put in your back. Okay, we will turn it on, you’ll see it illuminates and we’ll put it in our back, lower back, obviously. Ideally without shirt, okay and it’s going to increase my blood flow in the area where you know it hurts. It hurts because the muscle is inflammated we’re going to decrease that inflammation and we’re going to reduce the pain

Marlo:  actually, you can kind of feel the heat a little bit.

Fernando: Yes, it generates a little bit of heat. but really the treatment is the laser. The light inside your body stimulates blood flow.

Marlo: Interesting. Interesting. So how long do I have to wear it?

Fernando: wear this half an hour and if it still hurts you can use it a little bit more.

Marlo: So there’s no side effects if they want to wear it a little longer or whatever.

Fernando: There are no known side effects. You can use it a little longer, but mainly the protocol is 30 minutes everyday whenever it hurts.

Marlo: So how do we find out more information?

Fernando: so you can find us at Curavi.com

Marlo: these are available right now?

Fernando: Yes.

Marlo: Absolutely. Fantastic. So go check this out everybody if you want a little relief from a little back pain. I think this is a great solution. So this is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

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Elad Kobi with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: Another amazing find at CES this year you lad is with Cecilia. And Cecilia has some very, very interesting talents. So tell us about any of that.

Elad: So Cecilia is the first autonomous robotic bartender. And you can direct with her she works on a speech recognition and AI technology. You can interact with her, you can joke with her, she can tell you jokes tell you stories. And she also makes a very, very good cocktail.

Marlo: where do you see this being used at? I mean, is it something that you’re going to see, you know, like, at small, smaller gatherings or meetings, or do you see this actually, in bars sometime in the future or even in people’s houses?

Elad: it really depends. We are aiming now for the cruise lines, hotel, okay. Yeah. Resorts, stadiums, lounges, VIP lounges, bring this innovation to the customers. Bring them something very nice to have fun way to interact with

Marlo: how many drinks will she make?

Elad: Well, it’s depends. SSA has 12 pipes. You can use them all. You can also put premix. You can also mix it inside Cecilia, and you can choose but she can contain up to 70 liters.

Marlo: Do I get to try this first?

Elad: Why are we here?

Marlo: how does this work? I mean, do I just speak into the microphone? Really?

Elad: yeah, we’re gonna I’m gonna give you a glass with a nice, okay. Good.

Marlo: Okay

Elad: All right up to start. Tap the start.

Cecilia: Well, hello sylia.ai, the world’s first interactive robotic bartender. If you want booze, you came to the right booth. But first, I need to check your ID.

Elad: Here. I’ll butcher the ID perfectly. You’re over 21 Right.

Marlo: I am over 21  yes

Marlo: perfect. So here now she can scan my ID. Okay, and say we can drink.

Elad: Awesome. Let’s get you something. Oh, you can ask her.

Marlo: What’s on the menu. What do you recommend? So what do you recommend Cecilia?

Cecilia: I recommend checking out the rest of the Israeli startups around the cocktail hour. Do you prefer your cocktail sweet, fruity, smoky or classic?

Marlo: Oh, let’s try a fruity one.

Cecilia: You can’t fall with a fruity cocktail. Even when it’s made with a fall fruit. Take my vodka with cranberries. asked me for cranberry pie or mix from the menu.

Marlo: Cranberry pie.

Cecilia: Raspberry Pie is for makers. Cranberry pie is for takers.

Elad: And there you go.

Marlo: Oh my goodness.

Elad: Yeah. You’re in a blink of an eye. You haven’t seen it. Haven’t seen it coming. Degas goes on

Cecilia: your story. Don’t forget to tag hashtag drinker Cecilia. Amazing, so I can bring it up course. It’s yours. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.

Elad: What do you think?

Marlo: Thank you very much. That’s pretty tasty here. Where do people find more information about this?

Elad: So you can go to our website, it’s Cecilia AI. So you can look up for us. You can contact us and we will provide anything you need. I appreciate

Marlo: I appreciate your time of geek Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

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Director of Business Development, Fernando Bermudez with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: As you noticed, I don’t have a lot of hair left on my head. Fernando, though, might have a solution for me. So what do you have going on with Capillus?

Fernando: Well, Marlo, you still have hair, you’ve lost a lot. Yes, but you still have some if you want to fight, there are three FDA approved or clear solutions. One is finasteride which is a drug that you need to take then you have minoxidil which is topical, that you need to put twice a day on your scalp. And you have low level laser therapy, which is what we brought here at CES.

Marlo: Okay, so it looks like it’s built into a cap. So what do I do I just wear this thing so long every day

Fernando: you just need to wear it for six minutes a day, has no side effects, no drugs involved. So you just basically place it in your head and then you see it turns on automatically. Yeah. So for six minutes, I’m just having my therapy. And basically, how it works is the laser is able to penetrate the scalp and stimulate the mitochondria within the cells to produce thicker, fuller hair.

Marlo: So does this work for pretty much everybody? Or if you have like standard male pattern baldness,

Fernando: exactly. Well, it works. It’s FDA clear for androgenetic alopecia, which is male and female pattern mold works in both in both men and women. And it takes six months to a year to start seeing results. So don’t think it’s anything magic, it’s scientific. The only thing is it takes time and it requires you to comply with the treatment in the long run. Like any other hair loss treatments, so overwhelming the people who comply with the treatment, they have 95% access rate, okay, and on average, they’re growing 51% More hair. It doesn’t mean that if you have no hair, you’re gonna grow hair. It means that in the cycle in the hair loss cycle, you have dormant hairs that are there but they are in a resting phase, okay, so the cap this technology is able to bring this back to to grow in phase. That’s what we want. And that is what gives you a higher count. And it gives you the fuller look.

Marlo: How do we find out more information?

Fernando: Capillus.com

Marlo: and the products is available ready to go right now?

Fernando: Absolutely. We sell online we sell through many partners. Many doctors recommended us

Marlo: very cool. I appreciate it. Very good. Thank you. This is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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Co-founder, Bodgan Krinitchko with Marlo Anderson at CES 2022

Marlo: One of the challenges for tea lovers is the length of time a lot of times it takes to make tea. Well, I’m visiting with Bogdan, here he is with a company called Bru out of Switzerland, of course known for hot chocolate, right? And maybe other chocolate things, but I think you might be known for tea in the future. So tell me a little bit about what you got going on here.

Bodgan: Yeah, thanks for having us here. At Bru we are about to simplifying the tea bagging process, but without changing it. So it’s still a traditional tea making process— the tea steeps in the machine, but we totally automated. We remove all the hassle that you have you make it a manual way by using a kettle or something like that

Marlo: We were watching you earlier, you were actually measuring tea and putting it into like a metal cup exactly that went in. So tell talk about that process a little bit

Bodgan: So what you saw is basically a seed  is the seed the whole city. So and the machine takes care of all the other parameters. So the steeping time, the water amount, the water temperature, and it also adds consistency to the whole tea preparation

Marlo: and I can use any tea I want?

Bodgan: That’s exactly the point. So we don’t want to force the user to use only one specific tea found in capsules. We just want to provide a tool that simplifies the process. So you can use any tea loose leaf tea tea and tea bag, so you can use fresh herbs just put it in the machine, press the button, and the perfect drink will be prepared.

Marlo: Right. So while we were talking now, this was actually steeping tea. And here we go.

Bodgan: Now it’s serving the tea. And now also, if you want to add convenience into the tea preparation, you need to solve the cleaning problem and we solve that with some patented technology that we’re using here. So patent granted, not just applied. Granted patent very strong and we made just a black tea. Now if you want to make another tea, the only thing that you need to do is actually just take like open the lid and remove this brewing chamber. That’s it. You don’t need to clean the machine or anything. Just change it out and make another cup of tea.

Marlo: So is this available on the market already?

Bodgan: With data pre sold or like a crowdfunding preset campaign… We plan to launch in a couple of months. We are right now in the certification stage. So yeah, in a couple of months, it will be available in the stores.

Marlo: Congratulations on all that. Fantastic. So this is your “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson at CES 2022.

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