Ep. 068 - Covid-19 catch up - mental health in a pandemic, tech issues under coronavirus and work from home in the new normal

Yup, you knew it was coming - we had to discuss this beast and try to make some sense of it all - and yes, we had to take a tech angle as well. Bob & Kevin talked all things tech in a pandemic... well, not all things... but you know how we roll. We talked Zoom, bandwidth in the new #WFH era and more.

Let us know what you thought of this episode and feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Ep. 067 - International Space Station UFO Video, The Expanse and how they get space travel in the ballpark of correct

Yup, here we are talking about aliens again! This time, we REALLY thought we had the definitive proof. It all started with this article: https://www.iheart.com/content/2020-02-26-nasa-captures-footage-of-ufo-on-space-station-live-cam/

Then we watched the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2eIcSs0zCQ

Then we found an un-edited version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmbBJS89J_0 and we were still pretty excited.

THEN we got a little skeptical when we could not find other "news" outlets covering it, until we stumbled upon these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWARgvKvvyg - the Rick & Bubba Show

Anyway, we had a blast talking all things aliens, UFOs, IFOs and more.

Let us know if you miss the full transcripts - or if you have better ideas how we should include them instead of just dumping them in the episode description. Feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Ep. 066 - Social media and your mental health

In this latest edition, Bob & Kevin discuss the impacts of social media on our mental health. They also identify some common social media post types, give them names and discuss strategies on how to minimize the impact of social media on our health.

This episode was inspired by a conversation that Kevin recently had with an educator and by Bob's involvement as a school board member for the past two years. 

Bob and Kevin also share some of their own experiences with social media and how it has impacted their mental health at times.

Let us know if you miss the full transcripts - or if you have better ideas how we should include them instead of just dumping them in the episode description. Feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Ep. 065 - Iowa caucus app scandal. When in doubt, blame a developer

Bob & Kevin try to get to the bottom of the Iowa caucus app scandal and share their point of view on app development and development in general. Feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Full transcription from Otter.ai

Kevin 0:00
So breaking news, your fearless leader has been acquitted of all charges Bob, and I will ask you how that makes you feel because I really know how that makes you feel. But it does.

Bob 0:13
I didn't think we were gonna date our podcasts like this, but that's okay.

Kevin 0:19
That's true. That's true. But we are going to talk about something that did happen recently. But we're gonna expand upon it and look towards the future as we often do. Can you guess what's happening? But before we get into that,

Bob 0:34
yep. Before we get into that, can we give a shout out or two to we had some social media engagement this week? from a recent episode about space travel to Mars? Shout out to Conrad.

Kevin 0:48
Yes, Conrad. He's probably like, damn you guys when we're gonna do this collaboration thing so I can like fight you mano a mano right on these topics.

Bob 0:59
Well, it's funny Though because I feel like Yes, we did ask a lot of questions. mostly focused around how, how this all works, you know how you make an engine that can do that trip. But then also, you know, the subspace communications thing. It's great. You can reference Star Trek, but I mean, we don't. That's fantasy, right?

Kevin 1:21
It is. But the best thing about Star Trek is it's like a Venn diagram. It's definitely real, in some cases, believable, and it's definitely fantastical. However, it's not just lasers from spaceships. I mean, I guess they do have lasers, which are very accurate, but they do have a lot of Well, technically, yes, that's possible, but it's completely unreachable by today's standards type stuff.

Bob 1:48
Right. And it does. Star Trek historically has driven a lot of our current technology on to watch how well I'm going to connect some things together right now. So Last night we were watching. Well, actually the last two nights we've been glued to the TV because we're old folks now. And we watch politically geared television, mostly following the Iowa caucus debacle, which we'll touch upon. But Caroline said to me, she goes, this is like 2020. Why is there such a delay between the asking of the question, and someone answering the question when they're really just from, you know, New York to Iowa? I'm like, still has to go up to the satellite and back down. It's about what a second and a half

Kevin 2:32
No, it well, yet. It's about 500 milliseconds, half second. Doesn't sound like a ton. But

Bob 2:38
is it a half up and half down or half total?

Kevin 2:41
It's a half total. It's 250 milliseconds up. 250 down.

Bob 2:45
Wow, it feels like a lot more on those live broadcasts, which is kind of it Yeah,

Kevin 2:50
I saw Biden the other days talking to Seth Stephanopoulos or however you say his name and it was awkward because they just kept stepping on each other and Biden. I think had Like no idea on how to like, Okay, hold on a second

Bob 3:04
Joe. Shut up. Let the man talk Grandpa Joe, Grandpa Joe doesn't understand

Kevin 3:11
satellite delay. He probably does. But he he definitely didn't handle it. Well, but Anyway, I digress.

Bob 3:18
So that half millisecond up and down though that's an ideal? Yes, it is circumstances. So it could lag long.

Kevin 3:24
Yeah. So that that's just your transit time, from ground to satellite to back. However, you still have encoders because, you know, in the modern world, we, we take the signal and we change it from analog to digital digital to analog, because that signal that goes all the way out to space is an analog radio wave. And we've got to convert those back into bits on both sides. So there's a little bit of latency there, injected as well. So I mean, yeah, we've got some additional stuff.

Bob 3:53
So we're learning a lot about the candidates every single day. And there's a lot of technology tied to that, but If I asked you this question, historically speaking, would you say that elections have been very tightly tied to technology? Other than recent history? I don't

Kevin 4:11
think so.

Bob 4:13
I mean, you think about you go into the booth. And for the most part and a lot of locations, you're still actually punching a hole in a piece of paper or, you know, there's there's a printed paper ballot. That's a result of that. I would not consider any of that very high tech.

Kevin 4:27
Yeah, so my earliest memories of going, tagging along to go voting with my parents in the 80s. My earliest memories of voting, you'd walk you go to the school or wherever your voting precinct is, you walk into this thing you draw the curtain behind you. It looked like something it looked like George Booleans analytical machine it just looked like this metal thing and really exactly levers pulley. I don't know how you people voted back then. But apparently, I mean, of course, I was, you know, young child. So this is just my impression of it all. But apparently you did something and it Did something in the outputted like a punch card or something, and I guess that was your boat, and then they threw it on the stack and the next person went in. So that's my earliest memory. And then my, my modern memory and it hasn't really changed. Since I've been able to vote. It's It's like an E ink type screen where you push the button either on the far left or far right, there's like buttons on the left and right. And then when you get to the last page, you push the giant red button, which is now lit up like a Christmas tree. This is pushing this button means your vote counts, you know, you push the button and that's

Bob 5:32
and then the dot matrix does its thing well,

Kevin 5:36
it feels like you know, like a calculator from the late 90s technology, like you know, like a ti 85 is probably what runs my voting machine like nowadays. So I guess that's because years have the Jogwheel have such things it must be like an innovative voting. Well, we still have the big red button, okay. And we have the left and the right arrows have another not their arrow shaped buttons but then most of my adult voting has had the machine with the jog wheel so that's how you like you know there's a 256 color screen and it moves the highlight oh we have ours is to color it's it's literally like II think so there's no color to it at all but you know what really grinds my gears now that you brought it up you've triggered me Bob what grinds my gears is you can there's buttons in Indiana you can say you can vote straight party lines push this button for all republican push this button for all democrat and then that just bothers me that you don't even have to look I'm just gonna go

Bob 6:40
over the screen. Yeah, on the first screen we get that option too but it's still like a screen and then in ours is like digital checkboxes I don't know it's pretty lame but it's still not I would not consider high tech in any way shape. I think they should ban those just like select all republican or select Oh democrat I just feel like that's totally disingenuous to the process. Just vote for the team. Well, it's funny that you bring up disingenuous to the process because the caucus the other night, the caucuses the other night in Iowa. I've never caucused personally have you.

Kevin 7:19
I have not cockiest and it's so weird to use that word as a verb. But no, I've never cockiest

Bob 7:25
apparently I'm going to get a chance to this year because my wife is either making me do that and or phone bank for a candidate coming up very soon. But anyway, I digress. The whole like disrespecting the process or whatever that exact phrase that you used, the fact that you line up in an area publicly, and then there's a chance for you then to persuade your friends and neighbors to join you in your area for the next phase that just feels

Kevin 7:53
feels kind of icky. Like you can bring like a cheesecake and be like, hey, Fred, I know you're in the cheesecake, but hey, I'm into I'm into Bernie What do you think? I'll give you a slice it

Bob 8:04
they were reporters talking about promising to shovel their neighbor snow for the following year baking them cookies like they've heard all these side conversations so yeah, people try to convince and or bribe each other to, to come stand in the corner with which is so weird is but part of me is like because it's not binding right?

Kevin 8:25
But part of me is like okay, you're trying to persuade people and let's be honest people persuade people all the time with things and whatnot and a private citizen persuading another private citizen is not as lucky as a government official. Who sits on government money person get it being persuaded by a lobbyist for instance.

Bob 8:46
Okay, fair enough. That's true. Just say

Kevin 8:50
for sure, but yet caucusing. Sounds weird only because I'm using the actual definition of weird which means something other than outside my norm. You know, not that Yeah, weird bad this is outside what I'm used to.

Bob 9:03
Well, I think we're gonna get to Is it weird bad or is it just bad bad here in a couple minutes, but do you think we should try to set a record and kick this off?

Kevin 9:12
Yeah, let's do it.

Bob 9:14
All right. So key music, edit that out.

Kevin 9:17
So to add a little context, so the Iowa caucuses recently happened, but it happens every year. So whenever you listen, this pot it it happened. But what happens every four years? Thank you. What happened this time around is at the end of the night. No winner could be declared because

Unknown Speaker 9:35
Bob, technology technology

Kevin 9:37
and a little more context is the results were to be transmitted by a mobile app to the DNC of Iowa, Democratic National Committee of Iowa's headquarters, so they could feed cnn they could feed Fox News, they could feed all the outlets right?

Bob 9:57
It I don't know what it was that the intent of the app because See, I'm so confused by this because I was watching it live. And while you know, obviously, the news outlets can't be at each one of the 1700 caucus locations, they were at, they picked like some of the high profile ones. And they were five, I was watching the CNN broadcast full disclosure, but there were five locations that they were covering pretty much live. And those locations ranged from, you know, slightly over 100 people at the caucus location to I think one of them was approaching 1000. So like 900, some I think the attendees were, and it's a very analog. caucusing is a very analog event. They literally are counting people in an area. So one of the things that they did differently this time around, is for the first time ever, they were going to share transparently with the viewing public or with America, basically, the first round numbers so you basically pick a candidate And based on the number of people at the location, they pick a viability threshold at 15%. So if there were 100 people at the caucus location, you would have to have 15 members in your caucus group to be viable. If you weren't, if you were underneath that threshold, the people in the non viable groups had to pick a second pick. But then that was it, they were locked in. So the first time ever, they were going to share round one numbers, round two numbers, then, as always, the delegate distribution, which is a whole nother set of fuckery after So,

Kevin 11:38
so the app wasn't meant to integrate directly with CNN but it just you know, it's a means to say okay, I need to transmit numbers to from location A to location B, location being DNC headquarters to it, then the CNN of the world could then get tallies of all the precincts

Bob 11:57
right, but in the olden days, people would call And I'm assuming or if they were close enough to the central repository, they would just drive their ballots there. Because there are cards that for each individual preference. And they would still report those, like one of the things mentioned over and over on the night of the caucus, which was just a few nights ago, that, you know, historically will last for you know, at 2016. At this time, we were 80% reported already. And that was the good old fashioned way with paper. So,

Kevin 12:29
you know, I get the intent of, hey, it's it's the year 2020 let's let's find some slick technological way to make it easier because driving your your paper ballots there takes time. Sending a spreadsheet through email seems arcane. It just seems like you know, a lot of like, on the surface, hey, this is a great idea. But

Bob 12:54
those wait before you get to your buck, can I ask you a simple question? Did you hear about this app? Before the day of the course not, I did not. Okay. I didn't either. I just wanted to make sure that I was either a part of the uninformed masses or be just an idiot. So it sounds like not many people knew about this app Well, up until the day of But should we

Kevin 13:16
have? I think the answer is also no. I mean, this isn't one of those things that we should just be like, Hey, did you hear about Iowa? They're, they're running this new app. Let's see how it goes and do an elbow jab and somebody's rib, you know, I don't know.

Bob 13:27
Yeah. But as a fast forward, though, when things are going in the shitter. And then all of a sudden you hear somebody say, oh, there was this app that we are really worried about. And we think, because early on, it was like, well, maybe that's what caused it. Just like casual maybe it was the app that was causing the problem. So to inform the lay listener here, what had happened was

Kevin 13:50
apparently, not much because the there was a friction. There was a lot of friction between the precinct people trying to transmit Through this app to headquarters, and I was seeing some of the error messages, you know, basically couldn't connect or so there was some problem.

Bob 14:08
And look, did you see that XYZ protocol one? Yeah. I'm

Kevin 14:13
not. I'm not sure if that was like a placeholder, hey, you're using the wrong

Bob 14:17
know that looked like a screengrab?

Kevin 14:19
Well, it did. But I think it was a generic error message, hey, the protocol you're trying to use such as XYZ, blah, blah, blah. I don't think it was the actual literal one, like leaving foo, and bar code like I've done before, but I'm just saying, I hope that it was a generic label, but I was like, Well, fuck, that's not going to work. So there's no such thing as XYZ protocol. This app was created by a company called shadow Inc. And that is its own laughable thing. Wait a second. You tell me their shady operation and it's called shadow Inc. Okay.

Bob 14:55
What what government group? I mean, seriously, let's take Technology aside, this is just basic common sense. I'm a government organization who hires a company called shadow Inc. Well,

Kevin 15:09
I made the comment in her channel that Well, it's because sheisty ship com was already taken boots.

Bob 15:17
And government is just not supposed to be in the same phrase together in the public.

Kevin 15:24
So the app apparently costs 60 grand because my which is lower than my initial guy. I was thinking this was the least a seven digit app just because it's talking to government and put up with government bullshit, you add extra decimals and plays when we know.

Bob 15:38
Do we know that it was talking to government? Um, wait, it seems like a point to point like, I don't think the government was involved. Well,

Kevin 15:47
it's it was the DNC involved. So primaries are run by political parties. They're actually not run by the government. However, everyone at the DNC and all the candidates are completely associated with the government, right?

Bob 16:03
Yeah, but we're talking about the same DNC that's had servers exposed to the outside hacked. pillage. So, I mean, they don't have a great tech track, right?

Kevin 16:12
Total leadership via fail, I'll kind of get into that a little more. I'm gonna get through some of the details of the app and the company. So shadow Inc 60 grand, it used to factor off, which apparently was part of the problem. Hey, I'm all about to factor off. But we'll talk a little bit more about that. That the more shady part of this is that it was a side loaded app. Are you familiar with side loaded apps?

Bob 16:37
sideload apps or that? Isn't that the protocol that you have to go through when it's not officially in the app store?

Kevin 16:42
Because if you want to get an app on Android, you go to the Play Store, you want an app on? Apple, you're going to get it from the Apple Store, the App Store, and so wait, but

Bob 16:52
I'm thinking if I wanted to protect something like that, I would totally go the sideload mess right.

Kevin 16:59
I'm glad you brought Because I brought this up yesterday, too, because somebody said like, hey, shouldn't have been a warning flag. Yes and no. Because, Bob, what can I do with code, even if it's compiled?

Bob 17:08
You can decompile it. So if it's public, that's all right.

Kevin 17:12
So if I have an app that's meant to go to 1700 people, but it's on the Play store where anyone can download or apps or anyone can download it, that possibly opens up a bit of a risk there. Aside from that, Android will take any app, it could be a guest, your number game,

Bob 17:30
they'll take it. Where Apple, yes, your number game where we steal all your information,

Kevin 17:35
exactly. Where Apple is very stringent on their stuff, good for Apple. But let's say you don't want to go through that bullshit. And you're like, hey, look, there's 1700 people, we're going to use this. So there's different ways to distribute that and I think it's like fairy app or whatever they use, but there's one called hockey puck. So if you do mobile development, and you're like, Hey, Kevin, check this out. Or hey, Baba, can you test this out for me? It's not a In the store or this version is not in the store, you use the side services to get that app onto your phone. So at face value when somebody says, but it was sideload, isn't that shady? Well, yes and no. And I would actually come down on the idea that that's maybe what I would do too. Because,

Bob 18:19
yeah, unless you do unless you upload it into your own server and had secure distribution, I mean, but that's still a sideload.

Kevin 18:26
It's still a silo, because unless it's coming from the official Google Store, or iOS, it is a sideload, no matter where you get that from, and then to sideload that you got to turn off or turn on, if you will, developer mode. And there's just starting to become barriers to installing

Bob 18:42
this right. There's a giant general user barrier to entry. But can we can we talk a little bit about like, just the concept of the app in general, because you said 60 grand, and you were a little shocked that it was below your original gas, which, obviously if you say hey, guess how much the government paid for this piece of shit. You're going to say a million dollar. Right? Exactly. That's just, that's just your standard answer. But when you think about what that app actually had to do, so 1700 locations, but each one of those locations was literally only sharing three numbers. First round total, second round total per candidate. So times will say times 10, even though it wasn't 10 candidates, so 30 numbers. Yes. You and I could build that in half day. Yes. So, so 60 grand, still pretty expensive. So Bob,

Kevin 19:38
if you wouldn't mind in the top right. desk drawer, pull out your shiny tinfoil hat because I've got two answers for you.

Bob 19:47
Dude, I've been wearing that tinfoil hat for

Kevin 19:50
72 hours straight. I've got two answers for you and somebody put it in a tweet and I totally agree it was either gross incompetence, or somebody had an angle here and Angle like, hey, let's let's round this extra Penny and put it in a foreign bank account that went bad. It's like ship, ship ship, you know. So I am of the opinion that it is the former gross incompetence because you're right. All you gotta do is put some numbers in, send it to a server. Oh my god that is like every app ever and that is just like, I mean, we're not talking about threading. We're not talking about graphics.

Bob 20:28
We're just like, it's literally five lines of code to post something to another flex like

Kevin 20:35
this out, please. I mean, it wasn't hot. So I'm looking at this going. You have one job, but somebody actually tweeted, I think it was the voice of God handle you had na n Yeah, here, whatever.

Bob 20:49
final number to come job. Oh my. Um, but yeah, so I think it's a combination of both. I think because I'm still wearing tinfoil hat. It was shady shit with gross negligence.

Kevin 21:05
So to finish out the context, so it went completely horrible. We had no winner at the end of the night, which is worst case scenario, you have a sitting,

Bob 21:14
we still don't have one

Kevin 21:16
for dating ourselves.

Bob 21:18
They still they could have counted these votes 10 times. Oh,

Kevin 21:21
we have a sitting president, who's the opposition to these candidates laughing his ass off and going motherfuckers thank you for that gift. Thank you. And not that they need a new one. But thank you. All right. So, um, let me start kind of picking this apart. So where was the testing and where's the dry run? Because I think it was obvious based on some of the feedback of the people some people said they had no intention of using it because air quotes sounded too hard, or they waited till the Day of to try to install it to them,

Bob 21:57
but from what I read The committee chair people are captains or whatever they call it. We're getting emails up until the day of the caucus with updated links for the app, right.

Kevin 22:12
Which goes to show it's like, well, I am By the way, I don't blame developers. And

Bob 22:18
we'll get to that point, I think, because that's the big combination. But anyway, right. Okay.

Kevin 22:24
So, so some people are like, Oh, fuck, it's too hard. And then other people are like, hey, I've got this three year old or four year old android phone like me, and it just won't load because you know, part of the positive things of going through the apple review or getting it on Google Play as well you can you have a much wider distribution of bugs and whatnot, and hey, this doesn't work. When we report this bug. It just fucking sucks or, or it's great. But if you wait until the last minute and you have 1700 phones that may or may not work, I'm getting Android

Bob 22:55
song recipe. Candy Cane.

Kevin 22:58
Right or marshmallow. One of the main one like that Android naming is hard, right?

Bob 23:03
Don't ask me Well, okay.

Kevin 23:06
Okay. Apple named after mountains and shit like that.

Bob 23:08
Phone Oh, SF Tom crap like that.

Kevin 23:13
And it used to be big cats used to be like Cheetah and lion and like mountain lion or whatever, whatever. Anyway, yes, naming is hard. Okay, so. So clearly they were under some sort of last minute deadline for all we know they got this contract the week before, you know, and here you go. This has got to happen. It's 60 grand. And then they put their developers on the death mark. I feel

Bob 23:35
like there's a timetable printed out there somewhere. And it's a little bit more liberal than I think what we're giving them credit for.

Kevin 23:44
Maybe they oversold as an agency. Yeah, we'll take that back that never know. Let's do next week. That's it? Well, if we get into a waterfall versus agile, you will almost never have that problem with agile because you've got to show a working product weekly or every two weeks we're waterfall I think you can easily fall in that trap where it's like, oh shit, we've been planning and getting around to it. Our homework is actually due next week. And then you know, this is where you go like find something on the internet, cut and paste rename. Not saying I did that in college. But anyway, I like the internet barely existed back then. It was

Bob 24:25
called that avalanche development, not waterfall. Oh, nice.

Kevin 24:31
So do you have any other details on the applications development at all?

Bob 24:36
I'm scanning through, but I mean, no, actually the development of the app itself, other than the price tag and stuff like that. No. It's so simple, though. I mean, it's got to be simple.

Kevin 24:49
So in pop, and politics, everyone loves to point the finger actually, they do the they do the knuckle thing where, you know, I think Clinton started where you can't actually point and then Obama Did it you make this like random thing? It's kinda like a face with that first fingers like kind of push. Exactly. Bob, Bob knows the struggle. So the do knuckle pointing, right? Like cuz you don't think these days where the D. the DNC is basically like, Oh, this is a serious flaw in the app. Yeah.

Bob 25:18
And but that didn't come out until our three after the coxes. Were all done. Like it was delay, delay, no information, no information delay delay. We're being extra careful. We're going over the results with a fine tooth comb to make sure that they are you know, as legitimate and unquestionable as possible. And then all of a sudden people kept praying. Well, actually, no, that's not even true. People didn't keep praying tweets started surfacing of the chair people captains, the caucus captains saying that they were having trouble with the app. And then obviously some reporters dug into the fact, in then they said there was some inconsistency of the data submitted through the app.

Kevin 26:10
Yes. So there could be so many things. It could be simply Bob the precinct or not Bob. But Fred, the precinct Captain put in the wrong numbers. That's an inconsistent, right. But it has nothing to do no app. It could be that somebody who was looking at the source code told his boss Yeah, I see this bug here. But that wasn't it. But somehow some way that got transmitted up, hey, well, we did find this bug, but that wasn't it, which turned into Oh, they found the major bug. No, you know, over

Bob 26:39
midnight, eastern time, the night of the caucuses, so.

Kevin 26:44
So it was a huge clusterfuck. And but what was really obvious to me is their contingency plan either didn't exist, or they didn't take it serious.

Bob 26:52
In the original proposal. I did see this. So in the original proposal, it was the app and the call center. So So they were going to act in tandem to be fallbacks for each other, but also to potentially limit the bandwidth requirement for each. So you could call in, or you could use the app. The I think the committee, the the Iowa democratic committee, opted to not go with the full package. So they ended up only with the app in a severely understaffed call center.

Kevin 27:28
So if you're going to launch an app like that, do you think that's a high visibility app,

Bob 27:33
but I think the intention was it wasn't going to be high visibility at all. And that was where the oops hat Well,

Kevin 27:40
the curse of the IT industry as a whole. If you're doing your job, it's a non event, because the system is working. The bits are moving. Congratulations,

Bob 27:47
however,

Kevin 27:49
however, when Google goes down, Boss calls, why can't I google? And that's what happened, right? Why can't I send votes? So it's the curse of of visibility here that I think what got Miss allocated in terms of risk assessment here is, Hey, guys, what happens if this app just totally doesn't work? What if? What if the cell towers go down? What if? I don't know what, what if something, you know, what's the worst case scenario?

Bob 28:20
All those would have been like pretty legit. But apparently they didn't even test if people could log in.

Kevin 28:29
Right? Which is a bit mind blowing. But somebody pointed out to me at work. Kevin, do you realize what the average precinct workers demographic is? And it's not his words, but my words, but I would characterize them as this. There are people in their 60s or 70s and they are the same people who couldn't set their VCR clocks in the 80s and 90s. And we think Facebook and the internet are the same. Now I did. These are the people working The poll a

Bob 29:00
lot of younger precinct captains, but I think that those might have been the ones associated with that kind of the younger campaigns. You know, Bernie staffers are usually pretty young and their volunteers are pretty young Mayor Pete very much the same. Elizabeth probably the same as well, but yeah, so But yeah, it's they're they're not tech savvy users for the most part.

Kevin 29:25
No, and I would say the poll workers and the candidates

Bob 29:29
volunteers are to know the caucusing people are they're truly like the the ones that are the committee captains their volunteer

Kevin 29:38
there. So but are they associate with usually closely

Bob 29:41
tied to a candidate?

Kevin 29:44
Oh, man, that's news.

Bob 29:47
coverage. So anyway, coverage from group to route group, like you'd have a committee like a captain, a caucus captain, and he would put he or she would put themselves in a group and they would say we have to call somebody over over to Kenya. Because I'm you know, I'm caucusing for Elizabeth Warren, even though they were a volunteer for the caucus itself that they're all politically involved people so they are tied to candidate. Yeah, I'm sure.

Kevin 30:14
Well, I mean, who who works at polling doesn't have a candidate they like I mean, the reason you're there is because you're into politics right. So therefore you probably have

Bob 30:23
the politically agnostic yet interested in politics person is going to be very, like very much the exception.

Kevin 30:31
Right. All right. So their contingency plan was okay. The app is shit the bed. We have this hotline, and I was

Bob 30:40
watching this wolf blitzer. fuck that guy.

Kevin 30:43
Yes. Oh my god. case you haven't seen that. Well, Blitzer is talking to a guy who's on hold with the DNC the hotline. And he's talking He's like, yeah, I'm on hold and this is what we're supposed to do. And I've been on hold forever. And then the lady finally says Hello. Hello. He's like Wolfie, you won't believe it. I'm finally off hold and she's like, hello. And she's like, She's like, Okay, I gotta go. And then she's like, click here, the click on the phone, Caroline,

Unknown Speaker 31:14
she has to call back and get back in line. We're yelling at the TV. We're like, no, she's gonna hang up. She's gonna hang up.

Kevin 31:23
It was amazing TV right there. So. So there's that that was a contingency plan. But how can you not just be like, Okay, if both of these should fail? Or maybe we didn't have enough people in the call center. Guys, can we just send out an email? This wasn't a part of the contingency plan. We have 1700 email addresses, I would think, can we just send out an email says, hey, I've set up a Dropbox. This is the official Dropbox, post some sort of file in here with your tallies, and then we'll we'll just throw them in a spreadsheet together, guys, let's just get that This done. But guess what, Bob, as you alluded to earlier in this frickin episode, it's been a couple days since the goddamn voting

Bob 32:09
is occurred, and they still haven't figured it out over over 48 hours are actually coming up on 48 hours. And we are 85% reported, I believe is last I saw like just a couple minutes ago,

Kevin 32:22
I mentioned that. I mentioned a scenario that could come up the New Hampshire primary is next week. What is the possibility that we might have new hampshire results officially in before we have Iowa results? Well,

Bob 32:37
technology aside, these results are going to get contested because of what's happening. So they might not be official, like they might reach 100% you know, like with 100% district reporting, but then somebody who didn't get their number that they wanted, they're gonna cry and they're going to contest it.

Kevin 32:58
Where it means Yo, guys Sorry, because I saw him on. Cuz I saw Joe Biden He's like, well, we'll get more than our fair share of delegates. Dude, go away. I mean, the only reason he's still around is because of the impeachment. In my humble opinion. It's like, ah, he would have gone away but we impeach the guy. Ah, now we have to deal with Biden for a little bit longer.

Bob 33:22
86% reporting right now. We got 14% left. Okay.

Kevin 33:30
So, I'm gonna ask you some pointy questions.

Bob 33:36
I love the pointy question segment of the show.

Unknown Speaker 33:41
Two questions from Kevin does Bob so

Kevin 33:44
so shadow Inc, apparently apparently took money or can take money from candidate parties to help for the development of the app. So I guess not just the DNC you know, hired them but they actually have Candidates allegedly or quotes contributing to the development of this app. Do you think there's a conflict of interest if I say I don't want to give $20,000 to shadowing for this talling thing to

Bob 34:13
know hey, make sure you count them right we have I think we didn't give money to shadow Inc we donated money to acronym dirty Are you familiar with that company after we are

Kevin 34:26
up um let me in on it because I did see the name but they're apparently distancing themselves from shadow

Bob 34:33
ink so also another oh shit like names are. These names are like hysterical. They're just so fake. So acronym is a nonprofit corporation funded in 2017 by Tara gallons, political strategist. But anyway, they launched shadow ink. So they were the ones collecting the money.

Kevin 34:56
Well, I was actually thinking about this Kevin Then maybe we have a show disclaimer at some point already. Kevin, you've been tasked to create this app the same app that you're going to do it right air quotes, because what is right anymore, right? So you're gonna do it. My first impression might be guys.

Unknown Speaker 35:18
Let's take a

Kevin 35:18
little bit of lesson learned out of this and go maybe we should set up a second company.

Bob 35:25
Guaranteed.

Kevin 35:28
I'm just saying because if this goes bad, and we need to rebrand like overnight, we could just get rid of that car.

Bob 35:35
Right? Right. And the internet is flooded with in this is what I love about the internet. When people see something that might be hinky they screen grab it. And so their screen grabs of you know, acronym walking back their association with with shadow, but then somebody is like, what about this post that used to be on your About Us page.

Kevin 35:58
So what does tinfoil hat say about a candidate contributing to a counting a simple counting tallying app. Do you think there's any chance that they're like, hey, sub adding just one at 1.1? And let's round up if you know what

Bob 36:16
I'm saying. Let me let me layer even more conspiracy theory on top of that. What if some of those candidates that were maybe sharing a little bit of money with those companies that may have been alphabet named acronym or shadow in nature name shadow? What if those political candidates have special ops background consultant that dealt with behavioral science for a large consulting firm in has some ties to the CIA? What would you think about those?

Kevin 36:48
I would think it would be a great documentary coming to Netflix.

Bob 36:53
I feel like hashtag Mayor cheats bio that I just read

Unknown Speaker 37:00
Yeah, that was

Kevin 37:03
kind of how Cambridge I see the parallels with Cambridge Analytica, just kind of like this company just kind of out there and you just give them the right amount of money and they make things happen Scott like the fixer from Pulp Fiction. Hey, what do you need? What happened was the body Okay, we'll take care of it. You know, don't worry about it. We got it. So I very much feel is you know, Shadow ink is definitely appropriately named. Ask me.

Bob 37:31
I'll also layer on some more conspiracy. Pete was the only one who went on TV and declared victory that night there were no results. Guess Guess who's in the lead? So

Kevin 37:45
Mayor P. So Mayor Pete is from the great state of Indiana to wit I am broadcasting from hasn't right now. I will say that I'm not 100% sure he would actually win the state of Indiana at this point. Only because he's very localized to South Bend as far as being, you know, popular obviously being running for president has brought attention to him so we'll see. Oh, don't sugarcoat it.

Bob 38:16
I'm a little shocked he won't win Indiana because he's gay.

Kevin 38:21
Well, there's definitely that I mean it's

Bob 38:23
no no Well, I mean to my primary my liberal Indiana friends but my conservative Indiana friends will be like

Unknown Speaker 38:31
yeah

Kevin 38:34
yeah, it's this is a tough state because the conservatives definitely wouldn't vote from the general election that but I don't know how it would go in the Democratic primary. You don't you might be right.

Bob 38:47
I don't think maybe surprise gonna kick in there.

Kevin 38:52
I have never voted in a democratic primary. So I don't even keep track. So I've barely been voted any primaries, because what's the point? Which takes me to my next point? primaries and this, I think this is for all states. They're all run by the DNC, the RNC. And it's really not government sponsored whatsoever, isn't even a real election. I know the general election is a real election, but is the primary an actual real election? You know,

Bob 39:27
I think it's just a mechanism to try to try to make it look like the people's voices are heard. I don't think it's official in any way, shape or form. I think the Democratic National Committee at any point in time could change the rules for the delegate convention and, you know, put their person up, but also, that's probably a tinfoil hat as well. I don't think there's any. I don't think there's any overarching legislation of how a political organizations candidate is put forward.

Kevin 39:57
So they could at any point, say okay, We're going to have our convention and the only one that can win is if your name rhymes with Bernie Sanders. Raise your hand if your name runs through,

Bob 40:10
then you're out because that's the whole DNC thing. But, um, let's get back to because I think one of the things that I got the biggest chuckle out of the other day was, you know, when all else fails, blame a developer. And that's been some very interesting chatter online, too. It's like, How in the hell yeah, sure, you could point the finger but the developers not going to be the one to stop. I mean, a rare one could but like, the developer isn't the problem here.

Kevin 40:43
I would hundred percent agree. We talked about this too. In the small group. developers do what they're asked really no more, no less. They do bring up challenges and like, Hey, I know you want that new feature, but I'm still working on this old features kind of buggy and heavily tested this because I don't feel Comfortable right now. And I know where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. So I think the developers just doing their job I really put this on my leadership fail at at shadowing. Firstly, and then secondly, at the DNC. So it's mostly the leaders at shadow Inc. There, hey, you're in charge of this. What is your load testing plan? What is your distribution plan? What is your we're going to be on 1700 phones of which we not sure necessarily what the mix of technology? Are they all apple? Are they all Android or that mix? Somebody's got a fucking Windows Phone out there. You know, what, what is your plan? And if this all goes to shit, have you communicated your risk assessment to the client and be like, Look, we're doing everything we can XYZ. But let's plan for fail because if you don't have a plan, you're if you fail to plan you plan to fail, right? But in the developer circles, I'm very much of the mantra that I plan for failure. What if this when I make this What if that service that I talked to dies? What am I gonna do? Yeah,

Bob 42:03
but how about that? I'm sorry. It's not ready. I can't. It's not working. Ah,

Kevin 42:10
well, do you really think a dev is hiding behind that going? I can't tell him it's not ready. I don't believe that because most Deb's I know go, No, I just couldn't get to that. Yeah. Or it's buggy.

Bob 42:21
Or when I experience a dev tells the truth to the project manager and the project manager somehow then doesn't tell the truth to everyone else.

Kevin 42:29
Yeah, you know what the most annoying thing about her is that the most annoying things about developers is they're typically very pragmatic, pessimistic and very honest. And that's not very good for sales. When we're like, No, you want to do what you want when you need that by Are you crazy? And you're right. And then when that gets put through the business filter Now, fortunately, and I Yes, I am. I am. I'm disclaiming here. I don't have that. From where I'm at, we have very good communication. And but I'm not seeing that this happened necessarily shadow ink, but I don't know it shadowing.

Bob 43:10
Well, yeah. And I'm also very curious to find out like, I haven't seen a body count. Like, you know how many people are actually employed by shadowing? How many developers how big the team was? None of that.

Kevin 43:23
But even if we did know that, I don't know if that would be insightful or not.

Bob 43:29
Well, I think it would be interesting. Definitely, because right now I feel like it's one guy in his basement who made 60 grand.

Kevin 43:38
Could be Hey, I mean, he took PR hit was

Bob 43:43
his buddy is the one who lied. The guy in the basement made 20 grand the guy who lied made 40 grand, you know?

Kevin 43:53
Put some I put some of this on the quiet. We've got the saying. Maybe just America, the customer is always right. Well, no, because here's why the customer has to do their own risk assessment to what if this company doesn't deliver? What if they deliver me? Shit on a shingle? What if you know what is our contingency? Has this ever been used before? Do we have a track record of this app just working to have a track record of this company providing services that are reliable, and I would have to say the DNC of Iowa, failed at their own mission? Because an app is just a tool in this situation.

Bob 44:35
Yeah, but where's that gray line though, where I'm paying for something, the person that I'm buying it from, not the developer, mind you, the person I'm buying it from? The company says, we're good to go. It's packaged people can start downloading it. I mean, if I'm working for the Iowa DNC, and I don't employ any kind of internal technical resources, I have to take that vendor at their word.

Kevin 45:00
So, so yes, you're right. But that goes on your risk assessment, hey, we don't have anyone that can verify these claims. So it's all about risk. And they accept that risk by not hiring somebody not having somebody on staff not not following up, because trust is very important. So Bob, let me let me put you in the hot seat. You are a business owner, and you hired a company to do an app. And then they say it works.

Bob 45:26
Are you just gonna take it from Well, no, and not distribute it to 1700 users and cross my fingers and you know, hope?

Kevin 45:35
As an educated IT professional yourself, you would probably say, well, let's do some user acceptance testing. Did you make what it is? I asked you to make? Let me Let's do it. Well, okay, great. How many users have you tested this on? Great, what kind of phones How does this work on? Great and if you're, you're naive, and you're like, Well, I know of Android and iOS, and I don't know what questions to ask. I think some of the best advice ever given Ever is to air quotes, hire somebody smarter than you hire somebody who does that, if you don't know, and if you're not comfortable hire somebody who does know. And if you're unwilling to do any of that, why are you willing to spend 60 grand on app that you're just going to accept them based on

Bob 46:19
the blind is really weird too.

Kevin 46:24
So who knows, maybe there was a bunch of back and forth, maybe with their reassurances. Maybe the DNC had somebody on staff saying, Oh, this is great. Yeah, worked Bible Latin, maybe all that maybe this was just a colossal fail. But I don't really believe that because I, I really believe if you go through all those exercises, and a lot of us don't like to go through those exercises of risk assessments and whatnot. But this is why this is definitely one of those cases where you go, yeah, I'm glad we did or Damn, we should have and this is going to be one of those where you come case studies for a long time.

Bob 46:57
Let me ask you a question in your research. Did you see any screen grabs that were beyond the failed logins?

Kevin 47:10
Are you saying? So you're saying? Did anyone actually get to Oh, yeah,

Bob 47:14
I'm curious. I mean, obviously, in a scenario like this, you're not going to hear any, you know, victory tales where, you know, like, Hi, I'm Jane user, and I got logged in and submitted my 15 sets of numbers, and everything was just great. And I was home and in bed by nine o'clock. But you would think if you were getting some balanced reporting, you would see more than just the failed logins. But once again, based on the fact that we're still not fully counted on 1700 locations. I'm going to guess nobody got their data through.

Kevin 47:52
Or if they did, I think it's potential that it's untrusted at this point. And so they may be compounding factors like well, of the Those who did get in, they didn't know how to use it. And it wasn't because of the ATMEGA calculations, because the user had no idea what to put in. So they just put in grandma's cookie recipe. Yeah. And that was,

Bob 48:11
yeah, we kind of just be like, first authenticate, get logged in. Step. Next, pick candidate from list, Joe Biden. First round, enter number, second round, enter number, third round, enter percentage of delegate votes.

Kevin 48:30
So all of that is user stories. And not every agency goes through the trouble of doing I had another quote that I stole from the internet and it was weeks of coding can save hours of planning. Yeah. And it's I got a good giggle on that one too. Because I think a lot of us used to or I used to go to the code, right? real quick. Oh, you need to say, oh, let me start sketching out.

Bob 48:54
No, I've been pretty tactile. You know what problem it is. you're solving very tactical in my ears to me

Kevin 49:01
Step one, understand the problem you're actually solving and communicate this reciprocate the problem back in your own words back to the stakeholders and get the get the acknowledgement that yes or no, that's not what we meant, you know. So I think there's huge value in there. And I think, again, this is just so much case study stuff going on there. So in order to give a positive, well, what would you have done Mr. smarty Kevin? Well, I think I would have done a dry run. Hey, everyone needs to login. Hey, Sally, you. You didn't log in the summer day. bloggie logging in, what's the deal? Because it sounded like people literally met the app. The day of

Bob 49:45
right, that was, I think the earliest that I saw it was over the weekend. Like maybe it was a Friday or Thursday. And then there is another email sent out if you haven't downloaded the app. Over like maybe Saturday or Sunday. And then it was, you know, it was game time it was Monday. So, and I think they sent out an email saying that they needed to read download or something. So there's just a lot of bad planning, no testing. But I guess at the end of the day, my ultimate question is, are well, I think I know the answer this question, as a society as a nation. Are we ready for any kind of electronic, you know, voting or do we have to take it back full circle and stay with the hanging chads and the jog wheels?

Kevin 50:35
So I'm laughing because it's my next bullet point. And it was yet again, another topic that came up. And it's basically the question is, is should this technology have a place in our election system? Does it and will it ever and on face value as a technologist I would say, hell yeah. Why wouldn't you want to automate this bullshit, you know, and then upon further review, I'm like, God, no, no, we need to keep this simple. Yeah. You know, let's, let's just keep it we need an audit trail. We don't need the possibility of getting hacked. We don't need the possibility of somebody you know, you know, an app not working. Can we just have old fashioned easy these pieces of paper? What do you think?

Bob 51:23
I feel like I'm very much in line with you. I feel like technology. I feel like there's other parts of the world, the world that has embrace technology for their elections. Um, I just, I think we're too big. I think we're too. We're not as technologically advanced as we think we are, especially at the government level. And then when you start to bring private enterprise into it, Allah acronym and shadow Inc. Then you have an extra layer of liability there and I think we probably are. I mean, hell, I'd even go back to the Like putting rocks in a bucket.

Kevin 52:04
We need integrity to be maintained in the system. This week's episode of The IOA app definitely doesn't help integrity at all. And you security like and it's kind of weird. Because to make things more secure on the web, sometimes you have to mitigate things like brute force, you know, well, if I, if I just make it so you can only try to brute force five passwords, then I lock you out, I've made it very difficult for you. Well, the harder I make it to hack the system by creating out of no air gaps, you actually have to create these pieces of paper, not just, you know, for each loop and it you know, it tallies or or just set a number in a system. It's like altering your bank account. You can't just put a million dollars in your bank account, there has to be a check and balance in the whole system. Otherwise, that's going to get flagged, boy, he don't have a million dollars just because you say you know somebody went in the database and change 2 million there has to be the debits and credits the trail

Unknown Speaker 53:02
No, you just oh,

Bob 53:04
I definitely offer tools you just changed the number in the front end.

Kevin 53:08
Just yeah inspector take a screenshot call customer service or like hey, it says, Now I only have $1 What happened? You owe me answers. So in in Iraq and places like that, do you ever notice what they do after an election? They hold up a finger and you notice what's on their finger? They mark them, right?

Unknown Speaker 53:27
Yeah, ink.

Kevin 53:29
Because that ink is not easy, doesn't easily come off. So it signifies several things. It signifies that you have a church that's your

Unknown Speaker 53:36
sticker in

Kevin 53:39
and you can't go come back later and vote again. So that's that simple thing will prevent people from voting multiple times. No voting, you know, under different names. Now, I don't know if they like actually take their fingerprint. Yeah, like, hey, put your fingerprint on the person you want to vote for but I think that would be a great idea because it's like, Look, this is my vote. Here's who it's for, and it is very hard to fake. So, again, that's just a simple simple system. And maybe we just need to get simpler instead of more tech. Yeah.

Bob 54:11
Because I mean, think about this. A, they didn't save a lick of time with this.

Unknown Speaker 54:18
Be who's gonna,

Bob 54:19
who's gonna be a? Alright? So this is b one and B, two, B, one who's going to be the next company to say, Hey, we won't fuck up like shadow. You know, here's, here's our better mousetrap. And then B to who's going to be the organization that takes the risk to go with an outside vendor to try to do this the right way. Like it's basically set it back probably two to five years. Is what my guess is.

Kevin 54:48
So could could this resistance to technology election speed generational because our current workers are in their 60s and 70s. You know, fast forward When you and I are that age, we've never been alive at a time where our our elderly have had technology as ubiquitous as it is today. So right now the current 60s and 70 year olds, they're like, hey, VCR, that was pretty cool. And PCs, I really haven't gotten into a bucket. I can text that's the newest cool thing I can do, or this Facebook thing or whatever. But when you and I get older, in 2030 years, will have been on the bleeding edge of probably some of the smartest elderly people that have ever existed.

Unknown Speaker 55:32
Our kids are that age and then it's

Kevin 55:34
exactly and and it's just going to outweigh so eventually that word will turn but we're not ready for.

Bob 55:41
I'm not ready for that kind of price not ready for I don't trust my digital vote. Like I wouldn't trust a digital vote for like if I if I was given a device and said I had to vote electronically. I wouldn't trust that vote.

Kevin 55:56
So I want to bring up the idea of I read an academic paper on Hey, would it be cool if we issued a digital certificate to everyone so very much like an SSL cert to everyone in the country. And so instead of a social security card, you would digitally sign everything with your SSL cert. But you could also vote with it. So to the point where, hey, did my vote actually count? I'm looking at these numbers on the TV, and it says Bernie only got whatever or, or so and so only got whatever, ha, did they actually count my vote and then you'd be able to check the digital register and go Yeah,

Bob 56:30
there, there is my vote and they are in ties, the ultimate flaw in the entire system. Because you're voting for representative vote, that may or may not align with your actual vote. Meaning, I don't meaning that your candidate could get the popular vote, but the delegates system decides that your vote isn't really as informed as they think it is. And they cast their stone in that other person's bucket, even though you put yours in person ones bucket.

Kevin 57:08
So as cool as a system that I just described sounds, it's actually terrible. And it's terrible, because it's too

Bob 57:17
well it also sounds a lot like Salafi record to

Kevin 57:22
kinda, you know, that was actually on my list of, hey, maybe we should just put this on the blockchain, solve all our problems and make us breakfast and bucket. Yeah. So I think that the more clever we get with voting, the the worse of an idea it is. We need to keep it simple. And right now I'm not aware of any logistic problems with people voting through with paper or while we've had the hanging chads or disabled, we've had challenges but

Unknown Speaker 57:58
we have

Kevin 58:02
I would take that over a digital problem because, Bob, you want me to really wake up in the morning or if I can get you to really wake up in the morning. You know what I can send you a message Hey, Bob accidentally deleted the production database and we don't have backups. Can you help me out? There's, there's nothing I can do for you.

Bob 58:24
Nothing, right in this simple fact. So any kind of electronic system we do end up migrating to is still going to have a paper backup, guaranteed.

Kevin 58:35
So one of the last topics I have here, and do you have any more technology stuff, because this is less techie

Bob 58:41
now? I mean, it's, it might I mean, it was a pretty cut and dried tech thing. I

Kevin 58:48
I had an amazing day with co workers discussion and just the internet in general. The iOS app thing, just to be honest, was kind of a fun topic. I wouldn't say At this point hundred

Bob 59:00
percent

Kevin 59:02
so, so I want to get that out there. And one of the things that I learned in discussions was something called ranked choice voting. Have you ever heard of such a thing, Bob?

Bob 59:12
That's the new system that they introduced in Iowa right.

Kevin 59:17
It's similar to caucusing. But it It eliminates the third party spoiler. So back in the day, we had George W. Bush, we had Bill Clinton and H Ross per hour. And so as ross perot stole the republican vote, therefore gave us Bill Clinton as president because he split the vote. If you had ranked choice voting, those who you'd vote for you may rank george bush at one ross perot to Bill Clinton three or not even ranked Bill Clinton or reverse Hey, I just want Bill Clinton I don't care about the other guys. However, it's like a relegation if you came in last. Your votes go to whoever the second that's

Bob 59:56
kind of the modified system for Iowa with that three rounds are the two rounds.

Kevin 1:00:03
Right? The main difference, as pointed out to me is it's still anonymous. So you don't you don't hang around for three hours go, oh God, can we just pick somebody? He just say, 123. here's here's my ranked order. And then it just it's instant runoffs is is essentially what it is. And I watched a video on it, maybe I'll get it to you if you're interested. But it was I'm like, why don't we do that? Because our current system obviously favors big political parties. And if you're a third party spoiler like I don't know Gary Johnson that maybe I voted for instead of the other two. And the last you know, I don't get exactly it. I don't get the heat from the losing democrats go. Well, we got Trump because you Kevin, really? Sure. We got our

Bob 1:00:48
Yeah. The delegates didn't like Hillary Oh.

Kevin 1:00:53
Well, I humbly believe a society always gets the politicians it deserves nap though. voted for

Bob 1:01:03
that was my head.

Kevin 1:01:05
Yeah. All right. Uh, wow, we actually eat that. Good. I knew we would. All right, get any final thoughts or comments on the Iowa slash election technology ask

Bob 1:01:22
us what we've really been enjoying the interactions on Twitter. It is probably the best way to reach out to us. And it's fun to have these conversations because it kind of helps us set up show content and also helps us reflect on prior shows. So please keep that up. We really appreciate it and I got nothing else. What do you got?

Kevin 1:01:45
going on vacation I'm going to learn about the technology of Disney because disney world knows how to hurt people very well. electronically and I'm hoping to bend

Bob 1:01:56
Bob's ear a little bit about I will contribute very little to that conversation. But I will Enjoy it all the same. So until next time, tune in to the Bob and Kevin show in about a week or so. Talk to you later.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ep. 064 - Mars, commercial space travel with Space-X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic

Space travel... yup.. that is what we are talking about in this episode! Feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Bob 0:00
You think I'd get this right eventually? Yeah,

Kevin 0:03
well, yeah. So, yeah. So what he's talking about is we try to sync up our audio because we're still about 1050 miles apart. So we do this, like seance and ritual. And we hit the button at the same time.

Bob 0:13
And you know what? Bear in mind, this is Episode 64. So we've been doing this for a pretty long time. Yeah, I can never remember it. It's like, what's that movie with? Two buddy flick? where it's like, are we going on three? Or is it three go? Right? It's a cop show. cop movie.

Kevin 0:41
Of course. Okay. So Bob, approximately approximately 40 years ago.

Bob
You were born.

Kevin
Hmm, yeah, a little more than that. But approximately 40 years ago, we sent out a few probes. They were named Voyager one. Voyager to you want to guess how far away from Earth they are right now?

Bob 1:08
40 years - they've made it past Saturn.

Kevin 1:15
Oh no, they've left the solar system.

Bob 1:17
Oh, well then I'm correct.

Kevin 1:23
Answer Jeopardy what or who is somebody that's never been in my kitchen? Well, yes. I don't know. Ah, anyway, they're they're far, far away. throw me off. So today I would like to talk a little bit about about travel. Oh, no, we're not going alien ADAL space probes from South Park. We're just going space for weeks.

Bob 1:51
But we did mention aliens, so maybe we'll get some less.

Kevin 1:54
Yes, yes, absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 1:57
You are listening to the Bob and Kevin show. We're Bob Baty Barr and Kevin miszewski. Each week we cover relevant tech and social issues related to technology. Our website is Bob and Kevin dot show. And our episodes can be found virtually on any Podcast Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Just search for Bob and Kevin show.

Kevin 2:27
So, what I want to focus on isn't Star Trek type stuff where it's like want to be fantastical if we could sail the space and stars and visit all these m class planets and have sex with green aliens. Allah Captain Kirk

Bob 2:44
right when we talk about the lesser known Starfleet vessels

Kevin 2:53
supplemental Okay, so, I had a fan on here just turn it off. Hopefully they come through the audio but too late. Now

Bob 3:00
Anyway, I'm surrounded by fans. Just kidding.

Kevin 3:07
So I want to stay away from the fantastical side of space travel because we have Netflix CBS all access the new Picard series for Star Trek is streaming live now etc. So I don't really want to go that route. What I want to try to focus on

Unknown Speaker 3:22
is this is the most fantastical time for space travel in the history of man.

Kevin 3:28
In what way

Bob 3:30
we have individual companies, not just governments in the space

Unknown Speaker 3:34
travel game, that's so rather than fantastic.

Kevin 3:38
Rather than apply the hashtag of fantastical to SpaceX, I will apply the hashtag of practical and that's actually what I want to talk about the practicality what is realistic, I think in terms of space travel in the year 2020. And looking ahead, because why my 11 year old son says Dad, why haven't we been to Mars yet? And I said, well, because it's really far away. It's hard, right? It's It's not easy. So why is it hard? Well, guess what? I've made a bunch of show notes here and outline, if you will, that I would like to share with you, Bob. How does that sound?

Bob 4:14
It sounds great. But I already have a question. Yes. So we mentioned those probes that have been jettison away from Earth for 40 years, and they are past Saturn, in fact, well outside our solar system, and they've never

Kevin 4:27
been in my kitchen.

Bob 4:29
Okay, never even in my kitchen. Yes. They got there over the course of 40 years. However, there's no way that a person could go at the speed that those vehicles are traveling correct.

Kevin 4:43
They can because humans just need to survive the G force. And g force only exists if there's acceleration. So let's say you're going 17,000 miles an hour, all you're actually doing is just orbiting Earth but you don't don't feel any g force because You're not accelerating, you're at a constant speed. Is that the speed of an orbiting vessel? Yeah, if you want to orbit around Earth, you have to go around 17,000 miles an hour. And actually, my son Jackson asked me, Why is that dad? And I tried to explain to him if he took a heavy object like a bolt or nut and tied it to a string, you spun it around. That bolt, actually is a pretty good model for this because that bolt wants to fly away from the center. However, it cannot fly fully away because of the string. Well, if we look at that, in terms of an earth model, the string is gravity and the speed that keeps that string tight, it happens to be 17,000 miles an hour. If you go faster than 17,000 miles an hour. What would happen Bob? The string still won't break. The string won't break, but Well, technically, yes, it does because you leave Earth's orbit grass Nobody can no longer contain you.

Bob 6:02
And so you're going around this circle at 17,000. Well, actually, the theory is, is those crafts aren't really going around the circle, the gravity is what keeps them in the circle, right?

Kevin 6:11
Well, you're anything orbiting Earth is constantly falling back to Earth. with gravity. However, it's the balance between centrifugal force trying to push you away from Earth because you're spinning around it so fast and gravity holding you on. So it's a delicate balance. If you don't go at least 17,000 miles an hour you d orbit and you come back to Earth. That's why you have to go from 17,000 miles an hour to something more agreeable on Earth, because that's not good to hit the ground at 17,000 miles an hour, you need to slow down and, and the air itself heats up. That's why you have the like the space shuttle shuttle and the Apollo capsules and all that have those heat shields because you need to decelerate essentially. And if you go faster than 17,000 miles an hour you just leave Earth orbit and go somewhere else.

Bob 6:59
So the other day De the Dragon capsule, right? Is that what they back out up to Mach two?

Kevin 7:08
Well, they if you're talking about they did a emergency abort test, right? Yes. And I don't know if it left, it didn't leave the atmosphere. Because the idea there was, hey, if we have to hit the ohshit button or some automatic system hits the ohshit button, can these dude survive the G forces? And can they get away from the rocket and it was a successful test?

Bob 7:32
Right, but I saw a stat that it said that the capsule got up to so they had mentioned live that it got past Mach one. I think Ilan came out as part of the post analysis and said it got up to mock to do people good at Mach two. I believe two times the speed of sound, right. Right.

Kevin 7:54
But again, it all depends on acceleration. You right now you're going I don't know 1000 miles an hour just spinning around Earth, but because you're not accelerating, it's a constant speed, no big deal. So going Mach two is not a big deal. The problem or the difference here is when you're on a rocket, you're not at a constant speed, you're going from zero to Mach two. So there's a constant acceleration so a g force being imparted on you. And when that rocket fires on the top of that to to tear off the the people to take them to safety, there's even more g forces because there's an acceleration that happens. And then being a paratrooper I'm very familiar with the deceleration g force when your parachute opens. Holy shit. Ah, you know, it's like, but it's the best feeling in the world because you know, your parachute opens because

Bob 8:41
you know, you're not gonna bounce.

Kevin 8:42
Yeah, at least not yet. Exactly. It's it's not the fear of heights that will ever kill you. It's a sudden stop at the bottom. That's the one you need to look out for.

Bob 8:51
I don't know speaking for someone who's afraid of heights that could possibly get me

Kevin 8:57
so let me ask you a Question about space? Like, why? Why do humans want to go to space? So I wrote down two possibilities. Actually, let's, let's call it three, just the technology like satellites. Okay, space, we know there's a use case their space tours. So you got like Virgin Galactic selling tickets, basically to go up to low Earth orbit, and then come back, and then colonization. So those are the three things I can think of. Is there anything outside of the way three?

Bob 9:28
I think exploration is probably the top of the heap. Right? Okay.

Kevin 9:33
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't really, I mean, I guess I conflated colonization with exploration. So you could take a lap around the moon and come back home and exploring the surface of the moon.

Bob 9:45
Right. Right. But we have those unmanned probes we started the show out with that are really just on a mission of pure exploration. True.

Kevin 9:54
They're not as necessary. Go ahead.

Bob 9:56
Well, Virgin Galactic is not actually doing trips, though. Yet, right, but they're selling tickets.

Kevin 10:02
They have things that can go up to the edge of space and back and they are selling tickets. But I honestly it's priced out of my budget, so I haven't kept up on it.

Bob 10:14
Hmm, yeah, I felt like that was still vaporware, that they're not really actually doing that.

Kevin 10:20
I would agree. I would tend to agree with so we kind of have those four sorts of things, space tours, colonization, exploration, and just you know, app applying communication tech or telescopes and shit like that, right?

Bob 10:37
Yeah, sorry, hang on. I'm looking at this Virgin Galactic bullshit. Actually, they actually have been into space But have they been into space with paying customers? Well, I thought

Kevin 10:48
I saw recently where they can touch the edge of space. So it also comes down to the legal What does going to space air quotes me

Bob 10:56
right? It's a quarter million dollars for 90 minute flight. they've received about $80 million in deposits from future astronauts.

Unknown Speaker 11:03
What the

Bob 11:05
frick? That was December of 2018.

Kevin 11:09
Hey, man, we need a tax write off its tax season. By the way, we need a tax write off, Hey, I know want to buy a ticket. You can hide some of that money in a space tour. ism. Right?

Bob 11:21
Yeah. All right, I'll stop looking at that crap. So you asked me a question about telescopes and whatnot. What did you say? Well,

Kevin 11:26
well, basically, I think we boil it down to why the frick should we even go to space? And I think we have four kind of reasons, right? Why do we give a fuck? Right? We have exploration, space tourism, colonization, and then applying technology like satellites and stuff like that.

Bob 11:45
Right during that also just what people do, like people are starved to learn about things they don't know about.

Kevin 11:52
True. I mean, you hear stuff all the time. We know more about outer space than we know about our own oceans like we just kind of Right. Yeah, we I mean, we lost the whole airplane and H 370. Somewhere in earth in an ocean somewhere. Nobody can find it. That's weird. Yeah, that's strange. Okay, so, space. It's not easy, right? So to come back to my son's thought, hey, why am I getting the Mars yet? Well, I mean, think about the moon. That was 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong's dead

Bob 12:24
in theory, in theory, it was just oh,

Kevin 12:30
you know, one of those people are, you know, I was you know, almost had me there. Okay. So it's it's been 50 years and then we did the whole space shuttle thing and we're like, hey, reusable spaceships and shit. And that kind of like turned into Well, they can do low Earth orbit. They're basically fancy satellites with with a crew cab, and then that comes back down. Yeah, that's cool. It's an advancement, but then they killed him off. They killed off the space shuttle. That is event Then enter Space X and there's some other ones. But of course, they're not as ubiquitous, I guess a Space X. What's this one called? Like deep blue or something like that? Bad? I don't know. Why am I not surprised Jeff Bezos is shoveling money into a space program? Is it like a billionaire thing to be like? Well, let's see, we need our own spaceship company.

Bob 13:22
Well, no. And that was actually one of the cruxes of the article that I sent you earlier today is that, you know, one of the things that happens in any industry like this, especially when it's early, you know, like early adopter early get into that there's a consolidation. And, you know, one company will acquire the other and, and make itself bigger gain technology, but they don't feel like the three billionaires that are doing it. So you got Branson, Bezos, and musk. And they don't see any of the three of those actually working together or like, you know, combining.

Kevin 13:55
Gotcha.

Bob 13:55
So it's totally a billionaire. It's a billionaire thing, like what are you doing? I got Well, I better get to.

Kevin 14:03
That's fair. So it takes a long time to get anywhere in traffic here on Earth takes even longer to get somewhere by airplane. But you know, we can still get around this earth. You know, like the longest flight, you know, just happened recently. You can go from like London to Sydney, and a ridiculous amount of times like 14 hour flight or something ridiculous. I don't know, pick a number. So you get to outer space. Hey, now we're using spaceships. We'll get there faster. Right? Well, I have a list here, Bob. And I'm going to go through all eight planets, and even give you a bonus one called Pluto.

Bob 14:40
And back in or is out again. No,

Kevin 14:42
it's still out. We're still still blaming people like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Bob 14:46
I thought it was not eggs. I thought it you know, it's good. It's bad. It's in the towel.

Kevin 14:50
I think it's still out. So we're going to start from the end and go out. How long do you think it would take us to get the mercury let's say you had a reason to go to New York mercury. What you don't

Bob 15:00
we'd never make it because we'd burn up. Um, there's bad to get to mercury right now.

Kevin 15:09
Yeah. How long would it take on a current technology?

Bob 15:13
year and a half?

Kevin 15:15
Hundred and 47 days is what it would take

Unknown Speaker 15:17
half a year. Sorry. Well, that Well,

Kevin 15:19
hold on. There's an asterisk here. Hundred 47 days is what it took the mercury probe in 1970. And so in the 1970s to go past there, however, to slow down enough to actually land can actually take six and a half years. Oh, that is it because Sydney has to match the orbital velocity and slowing down is hard. Because we always think about space travel and getting up to speed and getting there quick. Well, what they don't show you in Star Trek is much is the brakes right? How do you slow down and not splat right into the planet or just totally miss it

Bob 15:57
without a for some really bad TV. If there are We've got to spend a half an episode slowing down.

Kevin 16:05
I'm doing the best I can but the brakes this quickie, so Yeah, exactly. All right.

Bob 16:13
Who is that? okati

Kevin 16:18
that's my best Scotty. All right, Venus. How long do you think it would take to get to Venus?

Bob 16:26
With the slowing down.

Kevin 16:29
I don't know if this one's qualified with this line that just pick a number. How long would take the flyby get there touch it. About 15 months apparently Oh, apparently the the program mercker is called messenger and we sent Magellan to Venus and it took 15 months. Now. As we get through this, you might start thinking Wait a second. I've seen the solar system model Earth can be on the left hand side and the planet we're going to

Bob 16:58
be calculating this based on Well, path I'm sure,

Kevin 17:03
right. So NASA does their thing and says, Well, we've decided our our window to get there is here and it took 15 months. And then do you remember how many days of course, do you remember? Hey, Bob, remember that time you watch Apollo 11? land? No, you were sorry. I didn't mean to imply. Well, Bob, you went to venture gas on how long it took Apollo 11 to get to the moon.

Bob 17:29
I feel like that wasn't very long. Like it was less than a day, right? Fuck this

Kevin 17:36
Mars the opportunity lander, believe it or probe? Whatever opportunity was. How long do you think it took to get to Mars?

Bob 17:46
Well, I feel like I've heard that that is an 18 month one way trip.

Kevin 17:52
You know, I, I've heard anything from six months to five years. I'm like, I'm gonna Google that shit. And we're going to come back to it more but Took opportunity seven months there.

Bob 18:03
But that was the slowing down to land or no did not want to actually slow down and land.

Kevin 18:09
I have a list of things that have gone to Mars and we're going to cover that in a minute. So stick a pin in that. If you were to, if you were the GALILEO research for the GALILEO probe, and we happen to send you out to Jupiter, which we did, how long do you think it would take to get Jupiter?

Bob 18:30
12 years? Six years pretty good.

Kevin 18:34
Right on Bob, we sent Cassini to Saturn, how long did you think that took? And that left in 1997 and got there in the year 2000 and 7004.

Bob 18:48
So it took seven years to I'm getting closer.

Kevin 18:51
Now this one, I'm going to try not to giggle because it's it's how, how long did it take to get to your anus?

Unknown Speaker 19:00
Enough.

Kevin 19:02
I'm get going. Yes, apparently boys are when it did it hit so we have two voyagers one and two but one of the Voyagers it took eight and a half years so we sent

Bob 19:11
a probe to your anus

Kevin 19:13
apparently, you know it's funny because over the years you know when I grew up we called it your anus but apparently you know Uranus Uranus. But you know when did that happen? Did just like the political correct people say no caffrey Uranus. We got to see Uranus.

Bob 19:28
Too many elementary school children losing their shit every time they talked about space.

Kevin 19:34
Yes. And then Voyager made it to Neptune. How long do you think it took to get the Neptune so from the beginning?

That's right, Bob 12 years. And then new horizons. That's one of the most recent ones and it made it to Pluto, which is a nonprofit It in 2015 but can you guess when we actually sent the probe

Bob 20:05
to Pluto? 1998 2006. So

Kevin 20:09
it took nine and a half years to Pluto is on one of those really weird orbits where it's like get some 200 year like, you know, once around the Sun thing. It's kind of weird

Bob 20:22
because it's really far away.

Kevin 20:24
Yes. So what I was kind of getting at here is it takes a long time to get somewhere. In fact, some more examples of going to Mars as promised here Viking one and 1976 took 335 days to get there. Viking to also in 1976 360 days almost a year to get there. In 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 210 days curiosity 253 days and Phoenix lander 295 days so yeah, takes a minute to get there. So How's the space travel looking to you so far? Bob, do you want to go anywhere in the solar system? It's starting to look pretty, pretty long.

Bob 21:08
Well, but it's interesting though, when you look at those probe type vehicles and some of the other ones, they're not very big, so their fuel capacity is not very big, so they probably can't do like very long giant sustained burns. So their speed is probably far less than what we would achieve in something that could take passengers right.

Kevin 21:31
Yeah, so the the speed at which we hurl the thing, whether it's got people in or not, is dependent on how much fuel there is in it hundred percent. The and the reason you can't put much fuel, let alone a lot of payload into a rocket is because leaving Earth's atmosphere isn't easy. You have to overcome that whole gravity thing out here on Earth. Once you get out of Earth's gravity. You keep chugging along, but the real trouble is just that in Lift.

Bob 22:00
So is the new thing that I'm hearing? Or did I totally make this up in my mind that we're going to be exploring, like a staging from the moon, so it doesn't take as much fuel to get out from there.

Kevin 22:14
I've heard of some things like that, but I think we're,

Bob 22:19
we're moon though, right? Like, I feel like there's a new commitment to going back.

Kevin 22:25
That's what Trump said, right? We will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars. And perhaps someday too many worlds beyond. That's what he said. But I don't know if he's just sad to say it, you know, he didn't exactly say in this decade, I promise we will go to the moon or whatever, you know, Kennedy said so every every note he ever says, decayed, or that's weird, very Boston. It is it's east coast. All right. Um, so There are challenges with going on through space travel. One of the dangers Yes, duh. One of the dangers is radiation. So once you get outside of Earth's magnetic field and they had this problem with Apollo is the sun wants to kill you. It wants to irradiate you and here on earth we are protected by the ozone, the magnetic thinking and all that so you got radiation. The next thing you got is supplies, you know humans, or let's assume human space travel here. We need food, water, oxygen, shelter, power. What else do we need Bob? Anything or that covered?

Bob 23:44
waste disposal.

Kevin 23:46
Open the door, hang it out. Close the door.

Bob 23:49
That's not how that works in space.

Kevin 23:52
But they've got that pretty well figured out right? I mean, I imagine if you can stay on the space station for a year they figured out where to put the pool right.

Bob 23:59
Good point. Yeah so the space station we really haven't covered that

Kevin 24:05
so so you need so you have radiations problem distances a problem supplies so the food water oxygen and what have you just break down this there's no like you know a spaceships broke down think you could take a look at it you know somewhere out in the middle nowhere triple A is not coming out to fix you right?

Bob 24:25
Yeah those first people that are going to be making that trip they're gonna it's pretty much going to be a success or not.

Kevin 24:35
So as we alluded to one of the challenges is just getting up to speed you have to break out of Earth's atmosphere. So you're going to have to go at least 17,000 miles an hour in a direction. And let's say you're going to Mars. At some point, you gotta slow down. Slowing down is part of the equation. A lot of times these rockets nice probes will We'll face back the way it was coming in, do a burn to decelerate. And then one of the troubles you have there if you actually want to land on Mars, because that'll put you into orbit around Mars, is now you're changing atmospheres. So the engine that gets you from off of Earth is one thing, the engine that got you from Earth to Mars, maybe another and then the engine that puts you back man safely onto Mars could be a third one, it could be like the first one. So I have a list of rocket types here that Oh, my goodness.

Bob 25:35
Couldn't we just group I'm into small, medium and large? I don't understand.

Kevin 25:38
I don't know because I'm gonna say I'll be like, I've never heard of the heavier this one. Yeah, so we're going to do that in a second. But of course, when you enter Martian atmosphere, you could use a parachute. So passive braking thing like a parachute bouncy balloons. I guess retrorockets would be more of an active thing, but that's a common thing. So Imagine just leaving Earth atmosphere. A lot of times we use solid rockets or liquid rockets, right? Yeah, very traditionally see him on TV? Blah, blah, blah. So those were all very familiar with but apparently there's the Hall Effect thruster, Bob do remember the Hall Effect thruster?

Bob 26:18
What are we talking about those when it we were talking about starlink? Yes. Perfect. Like that ion exchange kind of deal. Is that what that is?

Kevin 26:27
That's right. So, you ever remember, remember, maybe you did or didn't Popular Mechanics, you know, when I was growing up as a kid Popular Mechanics would be in somebody's mailbox, it happened to read it. And it would always be this fantastical new engine that you know, this will get us to Mars in five years, you know, blah, blah, blah. You're tracking with me? You know the guy. Yeah.

Bob 26:49
Very familiar with Popular Mechanics. Popular Science. Yeah. Yeah, maybe? Yeah, one of those. And so kennix is going to be more like on the ground here. I'm sure you're thinking popular song.

Kevin 27:00
Yeah, I think you're right. Very good. So at some point, you got to go Well, today that stuff ever pan out? And how would you know? So Wikipedia actually has a list. And NASA keeps a scale, if you will, it goes from one to nine. Number. So if you're a number one type technology, you are a basic principle observed and report it basically, you're a shower thought at this point, no more. Then it goes all the way up to level nine, which is, it's in operations and it's in testing and there's everywhere in between there. So if I look at my list of space propulsion, and I'm going to send you a link just just cuz I

Bob 27:43
can follow along at home.

Kevin 27:45
Yes, exactly. So if you guys scroll down, there's there's a table but only 1234 or five six types of engines, if I counted correctly, are actually flight proven number nine And then you've got three that are eights, two that are sevens. Oh, it looks like solar sails are also a nightmare. So I guess seven. But there's a lot of these technologies that are like, well seems like a good idea. We're throwing a shit ton of money at it, but none of its ever actually kind of gone anywhere. And if you think of things like warp drives and things like that, I think that those are on this list somewhere.

Bob 28:26
But what that's got to be closer to one though, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't even know drive is totally theoretical, right?

Kevin 28:33
Yeah. Okay, so, uh, what's interesting about this list, you have solid rockets and liquid rockets, and the column that I am interested in is the firing duration. Think about it. They can only fire those rockets for a few minutes, right. And that shit either is you've used all your fuel or you got to conserve it. The ones that are interesting are the Hall Effect thrusters, which are on the starlink satellites. Those things can last months, if not years. And so the idea is if you are constantly accelerating and within acceptable human you know, where you won't kill a human. You know, could you get to Mars or somewhere much quicker because you don't? Why? Cuz you're burning constantly because in order to get to Mars quicker, you just need to use more fuel. And so there's not very many engine types on here that last a long time. They're pretty much like fireworks if you will. Yep, yep, there was. That's all we got. And so I'm not very optimistic that we're going to get to you space or to Mars. That is any quicker. What do you think?

Bob 29:50
No, I don't I mean, I don't see anything on this list that would actually put us you know, it not within reality. No. So we're living on existing technology, which means we need a giant fuel capacity and we're not going to be able to go very fast.

Kevin 30:08
So if we look at Mars again and go, Okay, how long does it take to get to Mars? We originally said about seven months However, because the way Earth and Mars you know, kind of dance around the sun at different, you know, speeds and whatnot, it could actually be as closest 39 days, or as far as 289 days, however, comma, that assumes a straight line distance because we've always been told, well, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So that straight line will take you through the sun in some cases, and ignores gravity and orbits and things like that. So practically speaking, it takes about nine months to get there. And that the real son of a gun here is is that window of opportunity, where it's about seven to nine months to get there is only every 26 months So imagine somebody on Mars calling 911 Hello, NASA 911 how many states are emergency? All right, well, we'll be there in 26 months, maybe, you know, it's not very practical. So that's another challenge. You're, you're pretty much in the frontier. No kidding, right?

Bob 31:22
Well, not only is it a challenge for the rescue aspect of it, or the health aspect, but also just the practicality of the trip in general. So let's say we go once we're going again, a year and two months later,

Kevin 31:39
probably not. Or probably yes, I mean, you've got you've got a land people on that planet, often right?

Bob 31:46
Right. Yeah. But I guess what I'm getting at though is like what is the so one leaves today say the window is today. Say it gets there in nine months. They're not getting any support again, for another No, well, 16 1718 months,

Kevin 32:04
not necessarily. I mean, because Earth and Mars are still out there. So you could send somebody this week and somebody else next week except the people that leave this week, it takes them seven months to get there. The people who leave next week at seven months and plus, maybe three weeks because Mars is getting ahead or getting behind Earth is pulling ahead, you know, that sort of thing,

Bob 32:26
right? But logistically speaking, you're not going to start staggering them like that until we have a proven method and sustainability.

Kevin 32:35
properly. Right. So what are some of the challenges of colonizing Mars specifically? Well, if we come back to food, water, got it. Oxygen, shelter, communications and distance. Those are my main ones here. So we haven't really talked about Communications at all. Know what really grinds my gears about Star Trek Bob. A lot, but let me help you. It has a lot Do the communications because Starfleet Command on earth will be sending a message to Captain Picard and Captain Picard will take it. And he's 100 light years away from Earth, right? And then suddenly he just can speak real time to Starfleet Command makes no sense whatsoever. Because, wait a second, if communication signals travel speed of light, and we're 100 light years away from Earth, shouldn't that radio message take 100 years to get to us? So that bothers me. So, yes, in real terms, if you were to make that 911 call from Mars, or if you wanted to send a Christmas Graham to an astronaut, or whatever, do you want to send the signal, it takes you anywhere from three minutes to about 22 minutes depending on the position of Earth and Mars in relation to each other. You want to talk about latency as it says and latency. considerable lag going on there. So the other day somebody on Twitter had mentioned, you know, time zones with Mars, I'm like, Oh my god, could you imagine having to code not only time for Earth, but time in relation to another planet? Oh boy, how do you want to go there? Is that even possible? You know, train, a train leaves a station on Earth. Another train leaves the station on Mars. When will these two trains collide? Yes, their space trains But yeah, I mean, that's just like, Ah, you have to have,

Bob 34:34
yeah, but the daylight the definition of a day on Mars is going to be substantially different than a definition of a day here.

Kevin 34:40
Right? So we have universal time here on Earth. Where in Zulu time, does that become the Galactic time? You know, if I'm on Mars, do I just have to care about well what time is it back on Earth but you're right, they have different orbit, orbital periods as they rotate and then they go around the Sun differently. I don't even know if my mind can comprehend this at this point.

Bob 35:04
Yeah, this is becoming less and less of a potential possibility as we were on here on the timeline of broadcast.

Kevin 35:14
All right, so have you seen the Martian with? What's his name?

Bob 35:20
Matt Damon?

Kevin 35:21
Yes. I think so. Where he says, I'm going to science the shit out of this. So the premise of the movie is he grows potatoes and the thing Yes, he gets left behind left for dead and then he's actually not dead. It's a pretty good movie. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson says pretty realistic. So I wanted to know, all right, could Is that possible? I did some some interweb research. So let's, let's look at food. So you're Matt Damon. Wait, wait, wait. So you googled? Is it possible to grow food on Mars? Yeah. And there's lots of stuff like that NASA has their own papers on this and I'm going to reference this.

Bob 35:59
Yes. How does Now even though they've only sent a little rovers

Kevin 36:03
Ah, so I'm going to send you another link while I I talk here. And long story short, we need food right? So how do you grow food on Mars? Well, there's two ways you can grow here. Easy. No, no, we're not going fantastical. Here. We're going practical. So I can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I can't cut and paste and talk at the same time here. Okay, so link set. So I familias hydroponics. Oh yeah. So hydroponics for the lay listeners, you can grow plants without soil at all. All you have to do is basically put nutrient rich water over the roots, and then voila, you have a plant. So Secondly, you can also grow that's overly simplified, but okay. Are you an expert, Bob, can you please enlighten us?

Bob 36:55
Plenty of plants with too much water. So trust me, it's possible. All right.

Kevin 37:01
So, in the movie with Matt Damon, he grows food basically under attempt, if you will. And according to NASA, Mars has all the nutrients needed for growing stuff. And, in fact, let's see here. I don't know if that that link working that I sent you.

Bob 37:23
Yeah, but what about so these are all the things that they found that were positive in this world that would support life. But what about the bad things?

Kevin 37:31
Like?

Bob 37:33
Well, they didn't list them here. But what about things that would be damaging to plants? Like what if it's overly acidic, or all those things,

Kevin 37:40
I can barely get my grass to grow. So I'm no expert at this. But according to their little PDF here, white paper, all the essential plant nutrients are available such as oxygen, carbon, hydrogen bottle bottle, and there's a big list. All right, nobody wants to hear the list. It's out there and Google it. Alright, so assuming to it Assuming we can feed ourselves and that we've overcome the distance to get to Mars in the landing and all that fun stuff. Next thing is water. Where do you think we're going to get water from Bob

Bob 38:13
from all the ice?

Kevin 38:15
Yes. Where's the ice on Mars though?

Bob 38:17
I believe it's underground.

Kevin 38:20
Very good. According to my sources, the ice is just below the surface. And or mostly at the southern polar cap. Apparently, there's enough ice frozen up the solar or the southern polar cap. In order to if it were to melt, there would be 36 feet of water over the whole planet. Allegedly. So

Bob 38:44
that's a lot of water. Give it a couple lifetimes and I'm sure we'll figure out how to flood that place too.

Kevin 38:48
Well, there there's a problem with water on Mars. Bob, do you want to guess what that is? liquid gravity of this note close. If it's not gravity You have no idea what it would be. Bob, if you were to take off your space helmet as you're whipping around Earth trying to fix the Hubble Telescope for the 10th time, what would happen to you?

Bob 39:15
Something bad, I'm assuming

Kevin 39:16
Yes. where I'm going with this is water here on Earth, liquid water only stays liquid because of temperature and one other element and that is pressure. So if you take a cup of water with you all the way up to outer space, it will evaporate, it'll boil away because the boiling point of water changes depending on how much pressure there so in a vacuum water will boil instantly, right?

Bob 39:41
It's at a much lower temperature here,

Kevin 39:43
right? So if you take off your space, how much space your liquids boil away, that doesn't sound very fun. So on Mars, it only has 1% of the pressure atmospheric pressure that Earth does. So liquid water If you could haven't liquid water, it would instantly boil away. So it doesn't want to be liquid. You need to have it pressurized.

Bob 40:06
How does it stay in a frozen state that

Kevin 40:10
frozen water is different than liquid? Well, that's why I kept trying to qualify it with liquid water. Because I don't know chemistry.

Bob 40:19
Yeah, but don't you think that the low boiling point due to the lack of pressure would prevent the frozen state from even occurring?

Kevin 40:27
This I have no idea I out of my pay grade.

Bob 40:30
I don't know science well enough, either. I just I feel like there's lots of really smart people that are you know, investigated this but some of it's not logical out for me.

Kevin 40:41
So, so we could get our food, we can get our water allegedly. If we do some stuff.

Bob 40:47
We'd have to create artificial pressure environment so it wouldn't boil.

Kevin 40:51
Well, you have to do that anyway. It's called your space suit. Because so you don't your liquids inside you don't boil

Bob 40:57
well sorry, larger scale right artist. Fishel pressurized areas

Kevin 41:01
in Well, you're gonna need a habitat Anyway, you don't want to be like, we're on year three, and I've never taken off my space suit. I've snapped on the inside because I haven't been able to clear anything Reek. Oh my god, but my poop chute. Still working. It's not gummed up too much yet. Anyway, so you've got to have some sort of habitat, which takes the Academy. Next point. In order to go to Mars, you don't just go to Mars with nothing there. You should you should pre stage a bunch of habitats, rovers, food emergency rations, right? You're sending all that way heavier.

Bob 41:40
That gets back to one of my earlier comments, though, like how, how many? I mean, realistically, we start right this second. We had all the materials to send up there. Just think about how many trips it would take to even stage the area given optimizing the distance and the speed and the length of time it takes to get there. We're just Far out

Kevin 42:02
totally agree but if I'm if you're like Kevin, you need to go to Mars I'd be like Bob, you better spot can send supplies for even put my spacesuit on. Exactly.

Bob 42:11
And we haven't sent any of those yet. Right. Okay. And I don't even know what we would send yet Dewey?

Kevin 42:17
Well, food, oxygen, water.

Bob 42:19
We understand the categorical. You know, we understand the boxes, we have to check but we don't have any of the we don't have existing technology right now to a get it there, be deployed and see have it still be viable by the time people get there?

Kevin 42:36
Not math, certainly not. Because every time we send like a rover or something, we all pucker our butts going well, is it gonna crash? That gonna make it you know, it's definitely not perfected yet.

Bob 42:47
Right? And it's and that's just one small thing, not nearly enough to sustain a pre flight of supplies.

Kevin 42:53
Yeah. And my son and I were talking about this. He's like, Dad, what happened if you put all your supplies here and then you miss you land on the other side? Well, that's bad. So do you have to pre stage all you know, at strategic places all over the frickin planet?

Bob 43:07
And that actually, you know, one thing that I do appreciate about some of the more the media, the fantastical, the shows the movies, they're starting to get a little bit more on board with everything doesn't go perfectly. And yeah, the supplies were here, but we're actually 25 miles from there. how we're going to get from point A to point B.

Kevin 43:25
Yeah, that's kind of cool. I think you're probably referencing Netflix, Mars. TV show. You've seen that right?

Bob 43:32
Yeah, but Lawson space deals with some of that shit on a regular basis. So

Kevin 43:35
juicy Season Two yet I've lost in

Bob 43:37
space. We're in the middle of it right now. Okay,

Kevin 43:39
yeah, actually enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, definitely some laughter knows. But yeah, I really like the Mars thing because they they flip this one of those weird docu dramas where they flip back and forth between reality and drama.

Bob 43:53
Is that actually a National Geographic? I don't know. I thought it was a Netflix But well, no, I think it is on net. flicks, but I think it's a National Geographic, like docu drama.

Kevin 44:04
Gotcha. I don't know. I might I'm gonna go watch that after this. All right, so we've talked about food we've talked about water, oxygen, how do you take enough oxygen to a planet that just doesn't have enough Bob?

Bob 44:17
Well, I don't think they're going to be able to take it I think they get once again, I think they're going to have to devise some technology probably tied to the water and the pressurization to extract oxygen out of that process in kind of like fabricate an environment,

Kevin 44:33
very good. Everything. I think in the Martian, they do this basically, you can split the water atom, which is hydrogen, oxygen. If you use a process called electrolysis, you can use electricity to simply have to free the bond between hydrogen and the oxygen. And you can have pure hydrogen and oxygen Of course, it's very dangerous because pure hydrogen flammable and pure oxygen is Well, that's one of the ingredients of freaking fire here, right is an oxidizer. Yeah. So it's a dangerous proposition. The real trouble with electrolysis is it takes a lot of power. Yeah. So you'd have to take that ability up there with you to exactly we haven't even talked about shit. How do we generate? How do we keep the lights on? Right? Because solar power ain't gonna cut it on Mars, you're too far away.

Bob 45:24
It's funny though. Like, if you bring this back to conversations we've had about, like artificial intelligence, where it's in its infancy. And then if you layer on top of this, you know, we've mentioned Ilan a couple times already, some of the stuff that he's working on, like, you know, with his solar batteries, his battery banks, the research that they're doing for starlink, you know, to be able to synchronize and you know, the stuff he's doing with SpaceX to be able to send rockets out, bring them back, all the precision that goes into that, like a lot of these pieces actually stack up pretty well as Legos. toward us getting someplace else.

Kevin 46:02
Yeah, my fear is we've put all of our attention into getting there and not enough in the Now what? Now so I I'm a little worried that we don't hear me I'm sure some smart think tanks thinking about this. But isn't NASA is Space X worried about this is a another billionaire needs to come along ago Okay, we're not SpaceX we're not we're not the Uber ride to get you to Mars. What we are is where the sustainability company that'll keep you alive.

Bob 46:31
Well, I think you might be working toward that with a lot of these smaller projects and I'm doing smaller and air quotes. I mean, maybe they are pieces to a bigger puzzle.

Kevin 46:40
So Bob, we've talked about oxygen, but here on earth we don't breathe all oxygen in the air. Do we?

Bob 46:49
Sure feels good when you do though.

Kevin 46:51
It does. But are you familiar with the infamous ending of Apollo one there was a fire right there. A pure oxygen environment that killed Gus Grissom, Ed white and Roger Chaffee because they didn't think about putting nitrogen and the oxygen environment to prevent an explosion and or a fire from instantly just roof

Bob 47:16
you know, consuming the entire capsule.

Kevin 47:18
So nitrogen fortunately is available on Mars and the soil, but that's again something else you've got to extract it's not free, it's going to take energy. Now, I imagine because your space, it's starting to wreak as we talked about, you're gonna want to take that off, and you're gonna need a shelter. You're gonna need to some way to bathe yourself somewhere to

Bob 47:42
that bathing things that happen for a while.

Kevin 47:45
Did you know that in the military that women are not allowed to be out in the field for more than three days? For hygiene reasons.

Bob 47:56
Well, that's not space travel.

Kevin 47:59
Sorry. It's not space travel, but I gotta think it's got to be the same thing. So it basically have to, are there are there rules for spaceforce written out anywhere? Well, if I guess it's a military branch, so I mean, when you're in basic training, army base training, you are nothing. They don't give two shits about you. But the important thing here is the go. I know we don't care about you your training. We don't care if you're dirty, nasty or whatever. But the women need to go back to the barracks every three days and bathe and come back. And as a male I was like, What the hell? I'm covered in bug bites I smell why cannot go back take shower. Suck it up private.

Bob 48:41
Yeah, it's gonna end up going away. That's not gonna be a forever rule.

Kevin 48:45
I honestly I'm not a woman. I have no idea. Why that not a rule.

Bob 48:50
Never been a woman.

Kevin 48:51
Not looking now. So I don't know why I didn't. I didn't want to ask Hey, why why do you have to go back every two days. Is there something else? unaware of what happens to you in these,

Bob 49:02
I'm pretty sure when they send men and women on this trip to Mars, there's not going to be any weird rules about women having to bathe every three days.

Kevin 49:12
Well, what there might be is rules about fraternization procreation.

Bob 49:18
Like mean it's required.

Kevin 49:20
Like, if you get if you have a baby or get somebody pregnant, that's that's like, oh, gee, what are we gonna do? Because you think they're sending the gear to handle that?

Bob 49:33
Well, first of all, it will be strictly forbidden. Second of all, there's not a damn thing in the world that can do to stop it. It will be strictly forbidden. The first several trips, several, several, maybe most of them too. I mean, we'll get to this later, but they'll all be one way trips. So no one's good. Even though they will be a strict rule not to procreate while they're there. It's going to happen.

Kevin 49:58
Yeah, for sure. Because Somehow some way evening army basic training people hook up and I have no idea why you don't want to do that. It's so disgusting.

Bob 50:09
But it's that's just human nature for sure.

Kevin 50:12
Okay, so we need shelter, we need to be able to

Bob 50:14
take that off. You have an important question for you before we get Yep. I honestly believe that we're going to get to this that you and I will see this in our lifetime.

Kevin 50:25
That's that's amazing question because Jackson asked me that he's like dad will never happen in our lifetime. I said he's

Bob 50:32
got a better shot than you and I do but what and that's what I said that's exactly what

Kevin 50:35
I said. I said my lifetime know, your lifetime. Maybe. But honestly, if you I'm kind of doubting that too because and he wants to be the first one on Mars. You know, it's very noble, very, very 11 year old kid, right? But I look at everything go Wait a second. We haven't been in the moon 50 years. Do we give a shit enough to make this happen because the world Just Elon Musk ain't gonna cut it.

Bob 51:02
No, but you and I've talked about this before, though there is a there's a very, you know, it's almost like Flat Earth versus round Earth. There's camps that believe we have to go to Mars because this planet is almost done. And then there's actually another camp that thinks even though this planet might not almost be done, we need to go there because we need to be first. And then there's the camp of people who said, We don't need to do that. We need to fix it here. First.

Kevin 51:26
Let me see if I can address all three camps. this planet's fucked, we should go to another planet. Honestly, you're you're older than me. And I'm not that far behind. We're to the point where Earth can be around long enough, at least for me and you and probably our kids. No problem. Honestly, just I don't

Bob 51:40
know if that's a no problem, but okay. I see a greater chance of us losing coastal lands in our lifetime then getting to Mars. Well, why am I losing coastal lands in the world? So

Kevin 51:55
yeah, and I'm no climate denier. But here's what I think Earth doesn't give a shit. Humans are here not earth will be here whether or not there is lots of water lots of land uninhabitable doesn't care humans aren't Earth problem is nothing that humans can do to really piss off Earth, whatever. So it's really a matter of our own existence. Do you do this human humanity went to keep Earth habitable or not. And if we don't want to, or can't, or it's too late or whatever, we have to go to Mars. But let's take a step back. You're telling me we have a better chance on Mars? After all the things we just talked about, Oh,

Bob 52:33
no, no, no, no. I'm not saying we have a better chance of seeing more major cities relocated from the coast because they're, they're underwater. Yes, in our lifetime, then us getting to Mars in our lifetime.

Kevin 52:45
But given that, given the horrible tragedy of that, that's still like, I'd rather take that over. All the things we just talked about going to Mars that we'd have to overcome.

Bob 52:56
Oh, yeah. But there's still camps that say we have to go to Mars because Those things.

Kevin 53:01
That's fine,

Bob 53:02
sizable camp. I think it would be neat.

Kevin 53:05
But if you if I look at everything, like from a business, like, what's the business need here? What what's the business case? I'm going to mark, there isn't really a good one is there?

Bob 53:17
Well, there's probably going to be a time in the very near future that that type of business venture could employ people that who otherwise would not be employed, because of the way we're going technologically as well. So

Kevin 53:31
well, we have we have unlimited examples of companies that don't make money in the name of well, it would be cool if and why don't we try this? I just don't see the profit of going to Mars because of the enormous expense of just putting a single human being on that frickin planet is amazingly high.

Bob 53:54
I will say that it won't become any kind of reality and Unless someone finds a way to make money from it

Kevin 54:03
exactly. Oh, or, or we're in a race with the Russians or Chinese, which is more like that.

Bob 54:10
That's what I said. The second camp was the people who said that we need to do it because we need to be first. Right? Have you watched that Apple the apple series for all mankind?

Kevin 54:21
I don't think so. But do you have apple in Miami? No, I don't. So I guess I haven't.

Bob 54:27
Okay. Basically, it's the premise is that we were second to the moon. And it's fictional. Oh, well, yeah. Cuz we were first.

Kevin 54:38
I don't know if this is a conspiracy theory, like Flat Earth. Okay.

Bob 54:43
It's like, um, it's very similar to man in the high castle. It's look at what life what life would be like if we lost the race to the moon. And then how, how everything cascades down from that it's about the space program in the States. How that was impacted by now. Being first. Okay, I guess it's kind of interesting. I like those premises.

Kevin 55:05
So a large part of me believes the only reason we went to the moon wasn't because it was there. And it was hard. It's because the Russians were beating us in the space race pure and simple, right.

Bob 55:18
Can you just do the rest of the episode with your SJ? Okay.

Kevin 55:24
We choose to go to the moon, not because it's easy about because it's hard. Okay. Wow. That's right. That's on a podcast forever now. Okay. So, one of the last things that we talked about, we already touched on is power. So I can only think because solar power is kind of out. You're not gonna burn coal. You're not gonna have you might have methane there. But I think nuclear power would be the ideal choice, wouldn't it?

Bob 55:54
I think for portability and relative ease of setup and something we're familiar with Yes, because everything else is very large scale. Yeah, everything's large and scale

Kevin 56:06
the electrolysis if I mean, you're gonna need oxygen. And that takes me to like, okay, now you've let's assume we've overcome the impossible. And we have some infrastructure there. What sort of skill sets are we putting there? I'm thinking doctors, engineers, mechanics, security, what other kind of people

Bob 56:28
it's almost going to have to be like a microcosm of every discipline we have in any thriving community, because you're going to need all those support staff. And then anytime where you can find multiple hat wearers, in those very specialized areas, they'll be worth their weight in some rare metal that we just go from Mars that somebody gets rich from.

Kevin 56:48
So not that I'm volunteering to go to Mars, but when you're in the military, and they send you to, I don't know, the Middle East where there's nothing and you have to stand up a whole tent city and have internet and everything. You start start figuring out who's valuable and who's not. And I was in a communications unit and we had to wear those multiple hats. One thing that we weren't good as communicators was getting the generator running, keeping it running the the heavy equipment, so we had mechanics embedded with us. So I imagine you need some very specialized people you're not sending philosophers to Mars properly. You're not sending poets. You're sending blue collar, no, and they'd be the proverbial tits on a chicken. It's amazing. So, um, I think a lot of our I'm probably influenced a lot by our sci fi stuff where you have like, you know, security people, but But what I'm more thinking of you probably have martial law there, right? Hey, you quit fucking so and so quit trying to make a baby. You're gonna ruin the mission or whatever. Right? Yeah, I would think the military would be like the project managers. Just like the general, like, structure to it all. So yeah, military would be there. They'd be your security, police slash project managers. So in season two of Mars, they had two groups on that land on Mars One was like the UN version of colony and the other one was private, private enterprise. And so whenever the private enterprises do something, the UN people like, hey, you're not allowed to do that. Blah, blah, blah. And they would always reply, like the fuck we can't, we're private. Go fuck yourself. We can do whatever the fuck we want. Go ahead and stop it.

Bob 58:34
Well, that brings up a really good question, though. And something we really haven't talked about, which is kind of why we started this topic, though. We will have any un presence, would we because it's going to be 100% commercial at this point.

Kevin 58:50
We would well see, that's where it gets slippery because NASA government agency funds SpaceX, so there's You know, the old world the money really kind of controls

Bob 59:03
everything. Do they fund a SpaceX or do they contract to SpaceX?

Kevin 59:09
All right, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. But somebody wrote a check.

Bob 59:12
That's all I know. Right. But Ilan could most certainly, or more likely, you know, a basis or a Branson could go there with their own funding, and NASA would be cut out of it, like, almost like NASA scientists would be hired as consultants from the commercial enterprises. That's how kind of I see it.

Kevin 59:34
So when we talk about starlink, we kind of talked about what happens is, if SpaceX goes out of business, and there's 40,000 satellites zipping around up there, and nobody's in control of them anymore. The government's gonna take that over, right?

Bob 59:47
Or he sells them for pennies on the dollar to Jeff Bezos who's trying to do the same thing. Okay, I would like that to happen first,

Kevin 59:54
my latest episode of Black Mirror sounds like this. Elon Musk died. SpaceX goes out of business. There's 200 colonists stuck on Mars haven't heard from Earth. They're not sure what's happening anymore. yada yada yada yada. So who rescues these people?

Bob 1:00:14
I don't think anyone does.

Kevin 1:00:15
Damn, that better be in my contract.

I'm gonna be getting some life insurance there.

Bob 1:00:20
So no, I think anybody who's making that trip for the foreseeable future and I'm talking like, you know, the better part of a quarter of a century they're not they're going to it's a one way mission. Nobody's coming back from there for a long time.

Kevin 1:00:37
Dear, do you think it should be a one way mission period there is no come home figure it out. I mean, I'd be motivated if I'm there. Okay. There is no go home guys.

Bob 1:00:46
Well, since we barely have a plan, well, we don't we don't have any methodology or plan to get there this point. I don't see the get home park coming for far, far past to get there.

Kevin 1:00:59
So let's take that temperature. Can you you asked the question, will this happen in our lifetime? I think we agree not not yours or mine.

Bob 1:01:07
Right? Yeah, totally agree with their

Kevin 1:01:09
pick. Pick a number on the timeline. What year do you think will be there if at all?

Bob 1:01:14
So we're at 2020 right now. Yeah, I would guess. Other so we're talking about first landing like six people in the smallest spaceship possible. Man has taken his first leak on Mars. When does that happen? 2080

Kevin 1:01:35
Okay, what technologies need to have all the things we talked about getting there? generating food, water, shelter, oxygen of all those things. What technology Do you feel is holding us back the most?

Bob 1:01:56
I think the the the portability of reliable storage structures. I think that's like what it's you know, it's it's not. It's not an appear infrastructure thing. It's the ability to take something that needs to be at scale quickly after landing, but have it be portable enough to get there in one shipment. I think that's the biggest challenge,

Kevin 1:02:19
basically, blast off an entire Moon or Mars base with crew and everything and we'll be able to land everything in place.

Bob 1:02:29
I think you get a shortcut for the first trip, because you could make the ship somewhat sustainable for long enough maybe for the next people to get there. But you have to have some kind of architectural, you know, modularity, that it's simple to deploy and highly functional and environment that we don't know that much about.

Kevin 1:02:50
I think it's the propulsion to get there. That's the biggest thing get us back six months. It's just seven months or longer getting there with certain launch but I think that's just crippling at this point.

Bob 1:03:02
Yeah. But do you think I just don't know if that technology? I mean, that technology might be hundreds of years off to close that gap?

Kevin 1:03:12
Well, the Mars show we've been talking about had a really cool concept. I just remind myself up. They have an orbital space station at Mars. That's the supply drop ship. So right so only

Bob 1:03:24
one ship has the land basically. Right?

Kevin 1:03:27
So you could send a barge, if you will, from Earth. Okay, so imagine the space station that we have right now. Hey guys, it's it's decommissioned. But you know what, it can hold a lot of shit. They can hold supplies. So what we're going to do is we're a packet full of stuff. And then we're going to attach rockets to it and then we're going to send it to Mars, and it's going to now orbit Mars. Now we're going to send humans to Mars, to the space station and we're just going to start by inhabiting the space station nobody goes down to earth yet or Mars yet

Bob 1:03:56
just like we thing, but our space station. What's it max capacity 642 Yeah. Okay.

Kevin 1:04:07
All right, it needs to grow a little bit. But let's, let's say we upscale that a little bit. We have a space station that's going around Mars, and then that's the supply closet, if you will. And then we can send you know, once once we establish a human presence around a Mars, we can then start with accuracy start going, Okay, we need to land supplies here. Now we can land humans there, we kind of take away a lot of the risk. I think

Bob 1:04:32
it also takes away Yeah, it takes away a lot of the targeting oopsies too. Because you get into orbit you eventually dock with the space station. In theory, there's a shuttle that's much more easy to target and control getting back and we'll even one ways so that the trip that goes out there, there could be like a capsule that becomes the new thing that they just shoot down at the surface.

Kevin 1:04:53
Yeah, and they have that so emergencies came up in the in the season and what they would do is they would radio to the channel. Nice, I think we're running the space station like, Hey, we need a whatever, whatever. So when you fly over that particular area, do a drop. And then you know those people get it. So I think that's actually one of the nicer things because if you send a rocket from Earth and you want it to land on Mars, I think you enter orbit first. That's normal. But why not have a more permanent presence in Mars orbit that you could, you know, use as a lifeboat if you will, for anyone who goes to the ground? Pretty much what the Apollo program did?

Bob 1:05:31
Yeah, that's still I still think we're a good hundred years off.

Kevin 1:05:36
I would agree. It's not gonna happen in my lifetime. I don't know if I can tell Jackson. My honest to god opinion because I don't think it'll happen in his lifetime either. I think we spend too much time on the, the possibility of the rocket I think we haven't spent enough time on the Okay, we're here now what? Because, you know, I just don't think we've thought about Emily's, they said it doesn't happen in the public very often. We've talked through a lot of the things here that could go wrong and that's a lot of weight lot of infrastructure, a lot of gear. And then we got humans, you know what if a human goes crazy whether they're they're gonna they're gonna incarcerated human have a prison on Mars?

Bob 1:06:14
No way. They'll just zap them. Right.

Kevin 1:06:16
I mean, that's probably what will happen. But you know, are you gonna go ahead and say that's your policy? Probably not. Yeah. fuck up, you're dead? By who's?

Bob 1:06:27
I think that's an understood risk of the entirety of the trip.

Kevin 1:06:30
Well, I that's why I think it's gonna be very militaristic. I mean, the military has come up, or has had these situations come up. So this isn't like new way of life for the military. That's why I think there comes a point where civilians can only do so much maybe the civilians can create the rockets, but you're gonna have to send the space force or whoever to actually man it.

Bob 1:06:55
Well, tell Jackson to figure out what he thinks the biggest problem is and have that dude up and maybe it happens in his lifetime if he studies up.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:04
Yeah, I'm not so optimistic, but I'll

Kevin 1:07:07
tell them what you're about. Yeah. All right, what do we forget?

Bob 1:07:13
I'm sure we forgot tons. But since we were kind of like, disclaimer, we're not scientists or mathematicians know we're billionaires are just two dudes bullshit about tech.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:25
And today it was about space.

Kevin 1:07:28
All right, good stuff, man.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:29
Yeah. Remember, if you're still listening,

Bob 1:07:34
do that like thing. Have your Spotify listener follow? I don't know what it is. That just helps us know who we're reaching. And you know what, you can always hit us up on Twitter.

Kevin 1:07:46
Yes, and if you want to Bob and Kevin show sticker. I've actually sent a few internationally now and some domestically. And if you'd like one I gotta do is reach us on social media. I'm going to do all the cyber stalking like hey, do they have Follow uh, so they just like try to get free sticker do they actually listen or do all that? Of course I'll just set it anyway but, but I'll tell you

Bob 1:08:08
if you're following us, I'll tell him not to. So.

Kevin 1:08:11
Alright, have a great day stamp.

Bob 1:08:13
Yes. Until next time, this has been the bob Kevin Show.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:21
Hey, have you ever wondered how you can get in touch with us at the Bob and Kevin show? Well, first, you can try us via email and comments at Bob and Kevin show calm or are you more into social? If so you can find us on Twitter at Bob and Kevin show. Or on Instagram, as Bob Kevin show. That's Bob the letter M. Kevin show. And if you're still on Facebook, you can even find [email protected] slash Bob and Kevin show. And for the serious business fans. You can even find us on [email protected] slash company slash the dash Bob dash Kevin dash show How's that for a handle? Let's connect

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ep. 063 - CRISPR and in-home biohacking kits and where this technology may take us, plus Diego the tortoise and his amazing sex drive

In this episode, Bob & Kevin talk all things CRISPR - basically the REGEX of DNA editing... and guess what? Apparently you can do it at home... soak in the transcript below (from our friends at https://otter.ai/) and feel free to ping us on social media with your thoughts on this episode or any of our others - Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow. 

Kevin 0:00
So Bob, is this a safe place for discourse?

Bob 0:06
I hope so

Kevin 0:07
good. Because

Bob 0:09
I've been pretending it is for quite some

Kevin 0:11
as we have the normal show disclaimer, but rather than disclaim, I mean, we'll do the normal disclaimer. But rather than just do the normal disclaimer, I'm going to go ahead and say it right now. I'm probably going to piss off the science folks. And I'm probably going to piss off the religious folks.

Bob 0:27
Why are you going to piss off the science folks? That doesn't seem like something you would do?

Kevin 0:31
2020 outrage culture was born. Not that long ago and people disliked we pissed.

Bob 0:38
So what do scientists play that game? Because they're pretty factual.

Kevin 0:42
There's there's different kinds of scientists, right? There's, there's Yes, there's just I mean, they're humans, right? So it depends.

Bob 0:51
I guess I just don't see Neil deGrasse Tyson getting outraged.

Kevin 0:54
So something number scientists so something happened in 1984 Bob, do you know what happened?

Bob 1:02
George Orwell wrote a book.

Kevin 1:05
Now he actually wrote that in 1948 but you know about the year 1984 I probably got the year you write it wrong, but as a long time ago anyway, know what you meant to say, but you didn't say is gozer that goes arion asks the Ghostbusters if they're gods. And Bob, do you remember what they say?

Bob 1:26
Oh, how did I How did I misquote that? Right?

Unknown Speaker 1:31
You?

Kevin 1:33
So do you remember what the Ghostbusters replied? Who you gonna call? Oh, in fact, they said no. I said, you know when gozer says are you a god? And they're like, no. And then she like tries to destroy them. So how does this okay, I am I'm a bastion of useless pop culture references. Okay, so Bob, would you like to play God unearth,

Bob 2:01
Kevin. I think I have since I have children, doesn't that qualify?

Kevin 2:06
Yeah, maybe I guess he kind of brought life into this world and the common thing is I brought you in this world. take you out, take you out. At least that's what I was told when I was a child. Okay, so playing God,

Bob 2:21
I don't really know if I have God like playing God like tendencies. Like I'm a floater. I just kind of go where the wind takes me for the most part.

Kevin 2:29
All right, so

Unknown Speaker 2:32
would you

Kevin 2:33
consider saving or manipuri manipulating populations of species of animals on earth a bit of kind of messing with how things work kind of kind of godlike a little bit.

Bob 2:51
I know where this is going. I know where you're taking me. Oh boy. Um all right no but we do well let's naturally or not

Kevin 3:06
we let's develop it a little further. So there is like an article and I think his name was Diego or something the turtle maybe maybe you know his actual name. He He's been tasked he's a giant turtle has been tasked with making babies making more giant turtles.

Bob 3:22
I think he succeeded and they set him free. Yeah, he made like 2000

Kevin 3:25
babies so there is at once you know a very small number. Now there's 2000 thanks to his sexual prowess as a giant turtle right? Did they I didn't read the article. Did they do it naturally or did they do it extraction and implantation? I'm pretty sure he did it the old fashioned way, Bob. Good. No, yeah. So if you listen to Joe Rogan, which I know we both do, sometimes I'll mention, wolves are being reintroduced to curb like elk populations, or do population and things like that. And other things that we kind of play God as humans is genetically modified organisms. And you and I have talked a little like three sentences, maybe on the pod and maybe a little more off about where we are with genetically modified organisms. And for the lay user, a GMO is basically vegetables that produce bigger fruit. It's going to be chickens. Well, actually, before we get the chickens,

Bob 4:32
it's gonna be basically but since the dawn of, but hang on since the dawn of time we've been genetically modifying just by breeding.

Kevin 4:41
Yeah, and like, just like the turtle the good old I was trying to come up with what what do we call that as humans because we took corn because like the original corn was like really nice. You know, small Meeker looking and we use I guess, expedited natural selection to make the corn super fat and feed population.

Bob 5:01
Well, you brought up apparently something similar has happened to bananas as well, because apparently the bananas of old don't taste like the bananas today. Well,

Kevin 5:09
how long have bananas tastes? They don't exist?

Bob 5:12
What? I don't think the bananas of old actually exist anymore.

Kevin 5:17
All right. I mean, there's those things called playing pains or whatever they kind of look like. But I

Bob 5:22
think that there's I'll have to find the article and maybe put it in the show notes. But there's definitely some discussions about how bananas have been genetically re engineered, you know, but through breed, you know,

Kevin 5:34
bananas are like the number one selling thing at Walmart. I believe. Yeah. And I used to work at a Walmart distribution center, grocery one. And bananas were like the first class citizen and products in the warehouse. I mean, you want to get in trouble. Go mess with the bananas. There's a whole team of people that will like take you down, if you can try to mess with the bananas. It's amazing.

Bob 5:58
All right. So we've we've crossbred corn Well, it's just it's very popular in the plant world to cross pollinate species to create a new plant, whether it'd be more suited to feed more people or visual appearance plants, you know, like flowering plants are pretty common there.

Kevin 6:20
So there's a lot of people who are against GMOs because I guess they ignore the idea of natural expedite and natural selection because that's air quotes nature. There's also the laboratory version where they're kind of doing gene editing and then you there's no shortage of labeling. If you go you'll see gluten free and then you also see non GMO on the on the box too.

Bob 6:42
But do you think so, as far as that classification goes, they're talking about laboratory genetically modified, not classic, just cross pollinate, and I saw a tweet and I'm not gonna be able to give the person credit,

Kevin 6:55
but basically, it came down to the difference between laborat And natural selection is basically this human emotional laden burden that you put upon yourself because at the end, they both won't kill you. They both taste good, and they both will feed you. So who cares whether it was in the lab or natural selection, right.

Bob 7:16
But I think in this is probably getting to the crux of we're going to anyway, I think that the general fear is if we're doing this artificially, in even so far as the artificially not encouraging the crossbreeding of species, those kind of things. But if we're doing it in a scientific lab, underneath microscopes with, you know, syringes and centrifuges, and things like that, I think the inherent fear is that that's going to cause a domino effect of negative consequence. Right.

Kevin 7:49
And if we stick with food for a moment, and I told you, you know, what, here's corn, I'm not going to tell you whether it was modified by the laboratory whether it was not modified at all or was we just had many, many, many generations of expedited natural selection. Here you go. Would you eat it or not? Or would you care?

Bob 8:10
I probably wouldn't care. I definitely wouldn't know. Although like supernatural stuffs tends to be a little bit different flavor, profile, texture, all that kind of stuff. But I mean, yeah, the, it really makes no difference to that the

Kevin 8:24
other buzzword in food is organic, which if you look at the rules, basically there's as long as you check back to two or three of these boxes, you can use the word organic, but it's totally in my opinion, non GMO and organic is totally a marketing term. It's totally just some hipster way of saying we're better than you and it's just the new marketing. What do you think? Yeah,

Bob 8:46
organic is more of a organic is definitely more of a an encouragement to follow a specific set of standards is outlined by some organization where the GMO is almost like a confession or not confession, like you know, so we're just letting you know this product has been genetically modified and I probably should have looked up for that. So what the true definition of genetic genetically modified is while I news on this next topic, maybe if you want to ask Mr. Google or so the next part is and so we talked about plants, and you mentioned the word breeding. So we breed plants we also breed animals so we have dogs right we I own two labradoodles that's unnatural for the most part, unless you have a Labrador now poodle, who are like friends lab thinking uh, you know, tootles can keep asking rato day Yeah, they use

Kevin 9:42
like doggy Tinder, it's really weird, but you know, to, to labradoodles. So bark, left bark. And then we also have so we don't eat dogs. Well, unfortunately. But we have cattle, pig, sheep, you know, that sort of thing. We do have like the Bacon's and the stakes of the world. And we've also done a an expedited natural selection of those. We also have things like this is antibiotic free, we have free range chickens, things like that. So we definitely, I don't know that that rises to the level of God, but it definitely rises to the level of manipulation. And hopefully I've got enough time for you to tell us what GMO is defined as,

Bob 10:28
Oh, totally GMO, or genetically modified organism is a plant, animal micro or micro organism or other organism whose genetic makeup has been modified in a laboratory using genetic engineering or transgenic technology.

Kevin 10:46
A couple couple $5 word. That's right. We'll just go with it. Some science involved, right?

Bob 10:51
Well, I think the I think the important part is laboratory. Okay. So if there's two different crops in a field and they cross pollinate, and it makes a crop that more suitable for fill in the blank that is not genetically modified that is just good old fashioned farming.

Unknown Speaker 11:08
You are listening to the Bob and Kevin show with Bob Baty bar and Kevin chesky. Each week we cover relevant tech and social issues related to technology. Our website is Bob and Kevin dot show. And our episodes can be found virtually on any Podcast Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Just search for Bob and Kevin show.

Kevin 11:46
Just to take it to the extreme because that's what we do here. So if I now build four walls and a roof around your field, and they're making babies under the roof, and I stick a sign on that says, Kevin's laboratory farm is that now GMO

Bob 12:03
Would you be using genetic engineering or transgenic technology? I think the operative words in their engineering and technology

Kevin 12:15
i don't know i don't think

Bob 12:16
i don't think you would. I think if you put a house over your plants that we're doing it with people don't the plants that weren't there species I think

Kevin 12:25
you're I was gonna ask you then if the tomatoes that are growing in a window at grandma's house is she, you know, practicing GMO so I guess we're saying no,

Bob 12:34
so well, it's funny that you bring that up because I'm sure we'll touch on this later. Well, I'll save that. Okay, where are you taking this next?

Kevin 12:43
Alright, so manipulating, breeding, growth of vegetables laboratory, things like that takes me to, you know, like, when when when an animal is going to be extinct like the turtle or loner like the black rhino or pick pick some sort of an Dangerous species as humans, and this is where I'm going to piss off probably, I don't know, maybe everybody I look at that and go, maybe we maybe we should let them all die. You know, please don't ask me. But I'm

Bob 13:14
asking No, but I think there's a definite, I don't think it's just you. I think there's a whole camp of people who believe that the natural consequences of all of our actions are those natural consequences, and we should let those play out. I think there's obviously another group camp of people who believe that we should do everything within our power. I'm doing everything in air quotes, by the way, right, everything in our power to stop that destruction based on our natural consequences. But then, however, some people in that camp would be appalled if quote unquote, unnatural methods were used to course correct, even though unnatural methods probably put us on the course in the first place.

Kevin 13:56
Right. So to recap, I on one hand, we introduced Wolves to bounce an ecosystem. On the other hand, we take an ecosystem that is favoring the extinction of obsolete potentially animals. And we we artificially prop them up as

Bob 14:13
well. But I think in a lot of those cases, those are reintroductions. So, let's say especially as it relates to the wolf, the wolf used to roam free across many a continent. And then due to expansion, technology, and probably very specific measures to remove wolf populations from an area. Now, we're finding that they did serve a purpose in the conservation effort and management of wild animals. So now we're reintroducing species back into areas where they used to be but aren't any longer

Kevin 14:57
and I get the whole idea that ecosystems can collapse and you have to possibly recognize it and make adjustments. But let's take it to the extreme of Bob and Kevin show favorite. So the Tyrannosaurus Rex was not completely extinct by a meteor. In fact, they lasted until the early 20th century. And the final ones were placing the captivity. Do we need to keep them alive? Is what I'm getting.

Bob 15:25
Yeah, I'm sorry. Wait, wait, this is fake. Oh,

Kevin 15:29
totally. Yeah. So okay.

Bob 15:32
I was like, what books are you reading?

Kevin 15:34
No, I am definitely at risk of sounding like weird flat earther. guy. I completely hypothetical. What if the T rex lived to modern times? Would there be people out there going we need to save the T Rex. Meanwhile, we haven't heard from that person in a while after the after they tried to feed it, you know?

Bob 15:52
Oh, without a doubt. There would be the save the T rex people. All right.

Kevin 15:58
All right. So now we've kind of set the table here. So, imagine me,

Bob 16:03
I'm smoking.

Kevin 16:04
Where is this going? So imagine you had the ability to bring back the T Rex, kind of like Jurassic Park. But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think of a shot. Or more likely, you had the ability to prevent or cure people of genetic diseases such as I don't know. I don't know, bad stuff. There's a whole list of bad things.

Bob 16:30
Hold tight hold total list and imagine

Kevin 16:33
that there's a technology allows you to cut and paste DNA like it. We're a frickin Word document, and just change the genetic code. And the recap. DNA is the double helix thing and it's got four sets of possible letters, I forget the four letters, it's like TCGA or something like that. And those are the only depending on how you combine these that's that's basically what defines Bob you as person me as person. And then everyone else. So sometimes there's errors in those. And those errors give rise to diseases. So there's a technology called CRISPR. Bob, do you know what CRISPR stands for? It's an acronym.

Bob 17:15
I do have a tab open somewhere that tells me what CRISPR means. All right.

Kevin 17:23
clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, wow, say that 10 times fast. So we're just going to call it CRISPR moving forward,

Bob 17:34
and it's also typically grouped with a

Unknown Speaker 17:39
protein called cast

Kevin 17:41
nine, but there are more than one. So there's technology and it's I don't want to call old technology, but it's emerging technology, but it's been around for at least five years or so. And it allows this cut and paste of somebody's DNA. So the first question I had for myself was this Wait a second, you can cut and paste so DNA but DNA is per cell, right? So each cell has the same DNA, but if I want to cut and paste, you know, a skin cell, great, but what about the other cells in my body? How do I, you know, make it propagate through my body or whatnot. So I looked this up. And there's two ways to do this. They can either take cells out of your body, cut and paste and then put them back in. Or they can add at at the sperm egg level at the embryo stage, you know, right when it combined get the first cell they can edit that one cell, and they subdivide, now it's in every cell in your body sounds awesome, doesn't about we can just cure every disease, the end.

Bob 18:44
Highly unlikely that that's the short. All right, well,

Kevin 18:46
let's let's look some more at kind of how it works. So I watched the, I guess, the equivalent of TED talks and stuff on this in different videos on YouTube. So essentially, what CRISPR is is a molecular scalpel. It's actually according to them, Well, actually, it's very accurate, easy, quick and inexpensive. Those are usually things you don't associate with like new modern cutting edge tech technology, right?

Bob 19:13
Yeah, I think like legit machine is only like

Kevin 19:16
10 grand. And so there's a you can you can buy kits online for about $200 and you can do biohacking on yourself. And the way it works is in your cells, you have RNA, and they they program these proteins to look for a certain sequence of genes or nucleate proteins, if you will, in your body. And once it finds a match, it will then cut and paste the take the old one out, or I guess it'll be cut and recut. Yeah, it'd be cut and paste.

Bob 19:50
Yeah, it can remove completely, it can replace or it can repair and repair would just be realigning the CGS T's and the is to put it in the desired sequence.

Kevin 20:04
So the programmer amigos, ah, so this is pretty much a regex. So based on this pattern and kind

Bob 20:11
of it kind of is

Kevin 20:12
and Bob, when you if you have 99 problems totally. Okay. Yeah. So, because imagine what would happen and this happens all the time programming, hey, I think I got the the pattern to match and then you apply in it, either a doesn't match or B. What's worse is it matches a bunch of stuff you didn't intend it to match. So that's, that's kind of,

Bob 20:36
if I have trouble with a regex for a phone number, for instance, right? You're telling me that scientists have figured out the regex for all DNA sequences or Well, I guess I haven't figured out for all of them. But they the literature says it's relatively simple. I believe that's a quote to pretty much decode anywhere they want to

Kevin 20:59
so We can't so phone numbers, tough emails even more like controversial because there's like, hey, I need to read it. If you Google the regex for email, you will get so many answers that all of them say are right. And then there's the well, actually guy who always puts a little comments that go for it. Well, actually, it doesn't cover this cares. Okay, whatever. I got it. Okay. So, what's what's this best for? Well, apparently, if you have a single gene that's jacked up, this is the best thing so far that they've got. And one other delivery method that they have for this. And the idea here is this is going to cure some disease, that one delivery method that they're trying to use is create a virus that attacks every cell in your body, and it performs the cut and paste everywhere in your body. So the virus becomes Yeah, the transport mechanism, if you will.

Bob 21:53
That's basically the process they were outlining in NPR. episode of radiolab that I listened to a couple years ago. I think they actually just revisited it not too long ago so

Kevin 22:08
one of my kids has to get monthly infusions at the hospital and we have to do that for his foreseeable future for life as far as you know cuz he got a jacked up immune system. So there's a bit of an appeal here that hey, you know, we can do this here. If you know somebody with cancer, I guess that's one application to they can program. Things to, you know, attack cancer. But what, what is kind of weird when people kind of go to the Black Mirror episodes are you know, could you create a super soldier? Could you create a designer child or whatnot, right, so that's where it starts getting weird.

Bob 22:46
Well, I think that's the slippery slope for most technology. Even that Netflix, limited series, I guess is what they're calling it that you had recommended even in episode one. That the practical uses versus the I would say cosmetic uses that Joe user biohacking in their basement. Like it was almost three to one cosmetic type.

Kevin 23:14
Wow, that's an awesome transition because I got a list of things here that well, if this were possible, what what could people use this for? Well, obesity would be one of them, right? Hey, I want to be able to eat whatever I want. And I want my body to be able to just whatever, you know, that's, that's what I want Oreos every day and I still look amazing. So that's, that's one thing that people would use for vanity, right?

Bob 23:39
Yes, so you got that metabolic and then also, like the muscle tissue, like the ability to multiply muscle tissue at a faster and

Kevin 23:47
just to make things weird. Breast augmentation, right. Right now, it's very popular for women to do breast augmentation or reduction, if you will, some sort of body modification there and for men I don't have to lead you very far to tell you what men might want to do.

Bob 24:05
If we say male enhancement, can we put that in the show title and get that click Yes.

Kevin 24:10
Let's say one more time male, enhance male and there we go. So it'll definitely be in the transcript. Now, the SEC to me would be the next thing. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to do anything other than take an injection and now you're just

Bob 24:25
shooting blanks. They almost have that down to an injection at this point. Anyway, it's such microsurgery so

Kevin 24:32
and along these lines, what what if we perfect this so much, and I'm just going I like going to the black near end of the spectrum, sometimes what if we no longer procreate the old way air quotes, everyone becomes sterile through an injection, and then you just order your baby online

Bob 24:51
you from the central repository.

Kevin 24:53
You've heard this story before, except this time, you're going to take a swab of your mouth and then your potential mate And he sent both q tips in and Eddie that sounds high and for Box Tops from your favorite cereal and it goes to the central repository they engineer your child from an embryo they basically go the freezer and you know do their thing and you know drop in your whatever it is they do and then your kid shows up the woman doesn't even have to go through the pain of childbirth anymore they everything is custom ordered. It's your kid there's hopefully knows no swapping of DNA with the wrong donor you know? Yeah, whatever. What do you think?

Bob 25:37
Let's let's take it back a half stuck, because I think the one of the original like sales jobs part of this would be we can eliminate x and x in this instance the sales job part of it would be something awful that is taking lives at a at a high rate at this time. current state in our you know our our global community of people so let's say that that works like without without a large dollar payment because it seems like this would be in the best interest of mankind so why would it be expensive first of all that would never go down like that it would be super expensive to start but let's say that they could fix something that that affected a lot of people the the immediate cascade effect is that of that is we have people starving all over the world now anyway, they do. So why would we want to artificially inflate our population that's already growing at an extreme rate?

Kevin 26:40
And oh, so one of the specials that I was watching brought up immortality sounds great, right? We can live forever that's a shitty idea. It is a shitty idea and be even if you double the life of humans 200 years imagine the food requirements and the just the Annette air the the The actual cleaning of the human population numbers won't happen at the same rate. I mean, you want to talk about overpopulation now,

Bob 27:08
right? The only thing I could think of that would be worse than being 100 would be being 200. Ah,

Kevin 27:14
well, okay because of aging, but did you know that the common lobster does not age?

Bob 27:22
Okay, by what standard?

Kevin 27:25
I don't know I they were talking about how lobsters don't age and I guess squids, there's like different things that don't they still die. They're not immortal. But they don't age. They're the same, like, age wise. I don't know how you determine age of a lobster. But

Bob 27:40
you asked him, Hey,

Kevin 27:44
I'm 32 but I feel like I'm six months or whatever.

Bob 27:49
I'm calling so much bullshit on that statement. The lobster doesn't Google it.

Kevin 27:54
Check it, look into it, look into it.

Bob 27:57
Alright, but the simplest Like ourselves age, like that's a known thing, cells age and die, right? And they're not they're not the same as the day that they were formed. So how do we have organisms swimming around our oceans don't age? Well,

Kevin 28:13
I we'd have to look up the definition of aging. But the implication here is if humans can take lobster DNA and put it into humans, perhaps we don't age either or we can even reverse the effects of aging.

Bob 28:26
Or we end up with a hard outer shell and well, okay,

Kevin 28:31
see, I love I love your we didn't plan this. But you have another bullet point I have on here.

Bob 28:37
Also, we never plan anything just in case. Well, we don't we do plan

Kevin 28:42
separately, just not collaboratively. So right. But imagine, we're like, Hey, we got this figured out. You can go on Amazon. Order your crisper kit. You're like, Hey, you know what, instead of those tacky wild eyes for Halloween, I want real red eyes this year. So you go on Amazon you buy a crisper kit suddenly have red eyes You're like I'm getting tired of the red eyes. Let me go back to blue. Oh, you should make them like glow bioluminescent eyes when that be cool, you know kind of like the night King from Game of Thrones. Yeah, yeah. Add that to cart to Yeah, get one for me get one for me right what could go wrong?

Bob 29:17
Yeah, but have you ever cut a piece of paper and then pasted it back together and then cut it again and pasted it back together. Eventually, eventually the ship gets shorter. And eventually it just breaks

Kevin 29:28
kind of like if you take a JPEG and just keep receiving 1000 times it turns into this. So what I'm getting at here is, are we risking creating bio disasters by making this super easy and convenient? I would say yes, we're going to have that exoskeleton that we didn't mean to get from the lobster because we thought we're getting a no aging but now we have these freaks of nature, right?

Bob 29:53
Yes. And did you see that panel is like the Silicon Valley Comic Con, which I imagine that's probably like the biggest freak shows of everything. But in the first episode of that Netflix special, they had that panel. And the one guy, I get what he was lobbying for, you know, this CRISPR technology is being highly regulated with good cause. But we won't know what the implications of it are if we can't test it on healthy people. So I get with the guys coming from but I just feel like you're just asking for shit ton of negative consequences.

Kevin 30:35
Yeah, so like anything. So okay, let's let's take the invention of the atom bomb, which was preceded by the splitting of the atom. So when they split the atom, they probably will that the Manhattan Project was built for war purposes. And but I think it's Oppenheimer who ran the project was like, Fuck, you know, basically the cats out of the bag at this point, you know, we A new era is Dawn. And that's absolutely happened. And so the atomic bomb had some noble consequences, which is energy, nuclear submarines more military. So we had nuclear power and things like that. But it came at the consequence of having created the most destructive weapon ever. And so I look at this crisper stuff is going, Hey, this is cool. It has some good here, but it also has the consequence of having potential bio disasters, we could create some sort of biological weapon that can actually annihilate all of us overnight, you know, some virus or something

Bob 31:35
almost seamlessly and silently, right. And I think you brought up you brought up Game of Thrones, and I was just thinking about, you know, the, what was that army? The unfallen

Kevin 31:48
was this insanely, I believe, on Unix.

Bob 31:54
Right, so they could in theory, speaking of the bioengineering Not just like chemical warfare but they could bio engineer people without remorse without you know, appendages that aren't necessarily needed or, or appendages that would tempt them. So or make it so

Kevin 32:14
tons or make it so humans are not hermaphrodites and you can actually reproduce asexually and you don't need a mate anymore. He just divide or whatever boy,

Bob 32:25
I'm pretty sure the republicans will never let that like I said, we're gonna piss off everybody here today. So

Kevin 32:33
hey, if we really want to get this off people abortion, I'm gonna bring up a portion. So you're probably wondering, how does this mix in Well, in a lot of countries and a lot of places, there's pre, there's early pregnancy testing, and some people choose to abort their pregnancies or terminate the pregnancies, whatever the PC version of that is, based on that and so you could look at this as go hey, we Prevent abortions of the that variety. If we can fix it, you know, hey, we say there's a hole in the heart. Let's fix that. We don't have to abort the fetus, right. So there is, you know, I could see people coming. Where am I going with this Can I can see people from both sides of the aisle, you took my

Bob 33:19
line.

Kevin 33:21
Damn it, I could see people on both sides arguing for and against this is what I'm saying when I say both sides it's the tip. It's the two sides in America people spoiler alert. So I'm not sure how this will come down. Do you see this going any particular way.

Bob 33:38
I think that the in womb, genetic defect repair is definitely another one of their sales tactics for this type of technology. But also to go back to your blue I read I you know, cutting that piece of paper so many times that it just shreds I could see that same technique being used for fertility like an on and off bit for fertility. Oh yeah. So you mentioned it with the vasectomy, you know, it could obviously be used for women's reproduction as well. So you basically could go in and instead of being on birth control pills get your DNA edited over a six week course or whatever it is to turn off your reproductive organs and then when you get to a point in your life where you think you're ready to settle down and have a family just go back and get it turned back on the new birth control right hey, I'm young I don't need It's the new everything control unfortunately I that gives rise

Kevin 34:35
to Hey, I'm going to take my children down to the clinic turn hit the off button because they get born with it on so I'm gonna hit the off button. Hey kids, you just go be promiscuous as you want to learn about everything. Hey, we've even taken care of HIV. That's not a thing. We turn that off too. So you resistant just go for it. Man. This is getting really weird.

Bob 34:56
But I think when you like in going back to the doctor Come again or whatever that is the limited series. It's called Netflix

Kevin 35:03
called unnatural selection because I don't think we've set on

Bob 35:06
natural selection. Okay, sorry, I meant to name it the first time. But you can go back to unnatural selection. This whole discussion of putting these kits are the ability for these kids to exist in a quote unquote, home lab. I mean, basically, you could start to, you know, there's the people there that were biohacking themselves, but you could most certainly biohack your kids without their consent, though.

Kevin 35:31
Really. That'll be the next thing because we already have let's see, it's the HPV virus vaccine that you can give to a tweener. 12 1314 ish. And that's controversial. I mean, heck people by getting the measles vaccine controversy. So, you know, I have Yeah, I have. I have a hard time thinking that this will get very far. However. I think some of the aims of these biohackers is to make it so simple that if it's not legalized There'll be a black market of biohacking out there, kids. You're worried about marijuana worry about people getting genetically modified at this point?

Bob 36:09
No, I think that the biohacking movement is well underway. And I mean, body modifications have really transitioned into biohacking to be more permanent in nature. And it comes up and sci fi shows all the time. Oh, so I mean, it's definitely part of culture. And this technology, like I said that one article I found, I think the base regular machine that scientists uses only 10 grand for crisper, and now they've found a way to replicate it for literally pennies. So do you ever watch crime shows like the last 48 or? I try really hard not to

Kevin 36:47
so I'll binge watch some of those and just think less of humanity. But a common theme during those shows is the DNA match the results? Well, guess what I do. You know, let's say you murder someone I didn't wanna say I murder someone. Let's say someone murdered somebody. And I bought one of these kippy if you're listening,

Bob 37:08
I'm sure Kevin murdered someone.

Kevin 37:12
Oh, man, it's weird.

Bob 37:13
Let me finish my thought took off his game.

Kevin 37:16
So, could you modify your DNA after the crime, and it suddenly no longer match? And now I am able to say, Well, I'm only an 8% match versus the 99.99% match. I didn't By the way, you're not the father. Well, Maury Povich for you.

Bob 37:38
Yeah, it's totally gonna mess up the Maury show. Um, but no, I, first of all, huge personal disclaimer here. I've never killed anyone unlike my co Hey, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not what I meant to say. I don't know from the research that I've read. So I think it's very, very realistic to say, yeah, you could tweak something in be that not 99, nine match. But I don't know how long the course is to make a genetic correction to that.

Kevin 38:10
I don't either. Of course, that's during a lot of these talks. And one of the the, I don't know, she's a co founder, but she's one of the names. Her name's Jennifer Doudna.

Bob 38:23
Yeah, that actually sounds right. She was,

Kevin 38:26
you know, she was on this panel. And she was very upfront and said, hey, look, we can change one gene, we can maybe change a few sequences. And then when the panelists were being asked about these black media type things, well, not yet, but she didn't rule it out. She's like in the future, maybe. But she kind of threw a dose of reality. I think on some of that. I did have another sort of use for this. Imagine your Russia, North Korea, or even maybe United States is they're known to do some door during our Let's say no let's say you had a detainee or a dissident political dissident like China, you know, if you're not part of the party, you're against the party. Could you modify he send them to a, let's just say, we'll just

Bob 39:15
go China? Okay. It if

Kevin 39:18
could you modify them in a way that would mark them or alter their behavior or some sort of or even like, you know, your truth serum? Hey, turn on these jeans and they will tell a lie, you know, during the interrogation. I mean, there's so many bad things. I think they're gonna come out of this.

Bob 39:39
Oh, no doubt. No.

Kevin 39:42
All right. I have a question for you, Bob. Okay, if it were safe. And if you had some sort of debilitating thing, hypothetically, would you do it to yourself or would you consult a professional who could perform so Sort of modification to you.

Bob 40:03
I think that begs such bigger questions

Kevin 40:09
you're so responsible by that's such a responsible answer.

Bob 40:14
I think about this all the time, because, you know, I think you and I both do because we're parents, you know, our kids, they're unique and ourselves personally, we're unique because of who we are and in what our circumstances and how we deal with that circumstance. And just like you wouldn't want to say you're defined by fill in the blank. It's still part of who you are. Um,

Kevin 40:41
I just don't know. I think I would fear the downside. Like the unknown downside. Yeah. Try to undo something that's already been done for whatever reason, or no, really so but it's done if I were to have surgery, and I've had minor surgery, but you know, I've known people have major surgeries. That's a physical manipulation of the layers above the stack, if you will of DNA, that's a higher order modification, getting your ears pierced getting a tattoo, those are all body modifications to different, you know, extense. So I could see a rash now that DNA modification is just a modification of the body at a different stage of the the diagram, if you will. And if I were dying, and there were a certain cure, and there was, I guess the chances of it working or not, or high or low, but you're saying there's a chance, you know, I might consider it

Bob 41:43
right, but that's life or death. I think that there's so many situations where in betweens, right or out of convenience,

Kevin 41:52
like being paralyzed, or

Bob 41:55
Well, maybe parallel because I think parallel ization definitely contributes to a life or death situation. So there's a saying an injury

Kevin 42:04
that is based on life, limb or eyesight. So I think one of those three would definitely rise the level of Hell yeah. Let's try it. However, vanity things such as I have got this freckle right here on my butt or whatever. Can you make it go away but don't use a knife but can you just make it no longer part of my genome and you know stuff like that? I don't think obviously it's worth the risk. But I'm I know people who have you know, those giant where they call it gaged earrings a man. He got frickin coffee cups saucers, his gauges, there you go, man. You go. I'm not that but you that guy would get his freckle removed off his ass.

Bob 42:54
Yeah, I wonder if that would work. I don't know. There's just so much you don't know about but he There's one thing that I wanted to make sure that I got to before too long. One of the things that freaked me out in doing this research and I don't know if you saw it, or notice it if you're doing any of the research online, but there are freaking ads. Like I'm staring at one right now. It's in the middle of one of the articles that I pulled up. It's about the the lab that found a way to basically make crisper tools for pennies. There's an ad on the page, it says stop doing crisper for yourself. Order your knockout cell lines. So there are companies that you can pay to fabricate your knockout cells for you. Because apparently that many people are doing at home. There's advertising for it. There's a

Kevin 43:46
there's a market for this. Wow. Yeah, well, I wonder if this is kind of looked at by the FDA as like a supplement. This hasn't been tested. This statement has not been tested by the FDA. Good luck

Bob 43:58
but I think one of the channels Is that they talk about all the time, is that China? Or maybe it's because it's only regulated at the upper levels and not at the personal level? I don't know. But, you know, one of the arguments is, well, China's way ahead of us in this technology, because it's not as regulated as it is here. The old we gotta get ahead of them. The bad guys, right? Seems to be a very common theme.

Unknown Speaker 44:23
So

Kevin 44:25
I just want to ponder another potential use of this. So life is very fragile. As far as we know, you need oxygen, you need water. You need you know, place here or you need a space suit. Imagine going to Mars without a space suit. We can genetically modify our astronauts to breathe a very thin atmosphere or we could genetically modify them to breathe methane on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Of course, there's other problems like pressure suits. I get that don't don't that me but man In, we can modify, you know, humans to travel through the cosmos.

Bob 45:06
But all that would require an extreme amount of experimentation, which is the problem right now,

Kevin 45:12
like takes me relax. All right click the aliens.

What? What? Why? So they're aliens. Okay, so imagine aliens have already had this problem. They want to go visit Earth, but we can't get there because of these biological issues. So what if they've evolved to the point where they now can do their own DNA splicing and editing and they've modified their bodies so that they got big, black guys and their small bodies and they're gray and they're very smart, and they can travel across the cosmos? Maybe maybe aliens already doing this Bob? What do you think?

Bob 46:00
I'm going to guess they probably have better genetic code to start out with. That's what I'm going to guess. All right, so they live in a society where the genetic modification of their organism is an accepted norm. And they bioengineer themselves to suit whatever Next, you know, Global Mission they have.

Kevin 46:27
All right, so we've always heard of things like intelligent design versus evolution, right, tell Joe is gonna piss off everyone. Right? So, so intelligent design is basically the idea that humans started out as humans, they did not evolve to humans were evolutions. Basically. We started it in a petri dish, you know, a little swamp and then eventually became humans over millennia. So what if humans were actually designed by a And I keep bringing this back. I'm sounding really like tinfoil hat. I apologize to everyone. But what if humans were dropped here as an experiment, or monkeys, or apes or chimps, if you will, we're here. And then they're like, hey, let's take our own DNA and take these bipedal organisms with arms, and let's combine it with our own DNA and just leave them here. And we're some lab experiment that they're checking in on us every now and then.

Bob 47:28
Well, I think that's a definitely a common argument for a lot of technological advance. It's either the simulation argument or that, you know, we're the experiment of an alien race. But I don't know if that addresses or solves just because can does that mean we should kind of I think, which is the original premise of you know why we're talking about this, right?

Kevin 47:56
Right. Oh, for sure. Because for me, this sounds like a James Bond. Movie plot at this point where you got the evil you know, the the antagonist is totally like building this genetically enhanced army or building a bio weapon, or God knows what the thing is, is I think this crisper thing is flirting with the hubris of humanity. And I think it's this innate thing that we have, especially as parents that we want to create life and you know, programmers want to create artificial intelligence, and you got the whole gamut of things. And it always comes back to what you said which is just because we can should we and I am on the fence at this point because I can see the potential good for it but I am right now the bad luck so overwhelming. How do you feel about it?

Bob 48:48
Well, I think the bad looks so unknown, which makes it overwhelming, but I'm also super intrigued that I didn't think of this and you brought it up with the the AI the machine learning And then we can even tie this back to bad bias to, I can see it going toward analysis of data, ai determining what the perfect gene sequence looks like. And then the system of splice is done with crisper to get some one person to that point. And, you know, depending on the garbage that goes into that, ai analysis, the output could be terrible. Yeah,

Kevin 49:33
we can end up with nothing but zombies, a bio weapon that just inadvertently kills everyone. Or we could end up with a great future. But the thing is, it's like, it's like counter terrorism, you have to account for the 99 things that they can do to hurt you and they only have to be successful once, right? So I look at this as going for the one thing or the few things that it looks like it could be good for. I also see that Listen, the downside of this and that I don't know if it really scares me yet because it's it's more academic papers and there's a couple cases out there at this point. But as they mentioned in one documentary in the 70s, they had okay computers, but they knew they would have better computers one day. Well, right. I think the same thing applies here. They have pretty okay technology with gene editing. Now, we know in the future, it'll probably only get better.

Bob 50:31
Okay.

Unknown Speaker 50:33
What do we forget?

Bob 50:35
Well, I think it'd probably be a little bit remiss to not mention that I think we're both in agreement here that regardless of the outcome, I think the the technology itself, in the research that's, you know, been put into this, this problem that needs to be solved, apparently of, you know, splicing genes in figuring out that you could use a Protein x is a virus to basically do the work. It's pretty impressive. I mean, it's a very impressive Oh,

Unknown Speaker 51:07
it like who who thinks of this shit.

Kevin 51:08
I was reading some of the Wikipedia articles and trying to make sense of it. And I just said, I'm glad I'm a programmer. I'm not a biologist, because I don't know what's going on here.

Bob 51:19
It feels like it crosses over into programming a little bit, though, with the, you know, the sequence and the wirings. And the knowing how do I like developing a technique for identification of the bad sequence, and then the replacement or the reorganization or removal of that sequence? It's just crazy.

Kevin 51:38
Yeah, it's kind of like the chemical version of Find and Replace.

Bob 51:43
Yeah, it's,

Kevin 51:45
like you said, and that's and and for non programmers, programmers out there. regex is stands for regular expressions, and there's nothing regular about them. It's just a fancy way of pattern matching.

Bob 51:55
No way. You could totally find the pattern in anything. So

Kevin 52:00
I'm going to watch more of unnatural selection on Netflix because it's a little short series I haven't made it through all the way there's some good videos on YouTube regarding crisper and whatnot. I've probably pissed off science people can conservationist religious types, but I just wanted to do a kind of throw out there all the angles and definitely got in some chops for aliens are probably

Bob 52:28
probably not putting that in the title but hey, and for anyone that's still listening, if you've got thoughts on this, interestingly, we got well Kevin because of course he puts all of his good tweets on his own Twitter account. Got some pretty good engagement on talking about that we were going to be talking about this on the show today. So if you did listen, obviously we gave this a 30,000 foot cuz Hey, we're not biologist be we're not scientists, but it's a technology topic that I think is There's gonna be more and more

Unknown Speaker 53:02
brought to the forefront as these days tick by so let us know what you think on it, for sure.

Kevin 53:09
All right, Bob, I think we're good to go. This is good, good, good stuff. I'm sure we'll have more to follow as the technology develops

Unknown Speaker 53:17
and or as zombies approach my front door.

Bob 53:22
Just Just remember kids don't give your DNA to any of the online stores for DNA and maybe don't modify it with it at home crisper kit.

Unknown Speaker 53:33
Yeah, just say no kids.

Unknown Speaker 53:38
Hey, have you ever wondered how you can get in touch with us at the Bob and Kevin show? Well, first, you can try us via email and comments at Bob and Kevin show calm or are you more into social? If so you can find us on Twitter at Bob and Kevin show or on Instagram, as Bob e Kevin show. That's Bob. The letter M Show

Unknown Speaker 54:00
and if you're still on Facebook, you can even find

Unknown Speaker 54:03
[email protected] slash Bob and Kevin show and for the serious business fans, you can even find us on [email protected] slash company slash the dash Bob dash Kevin dash show. How's that for a handle? Let's connect

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ep. 062 - The decade in review - top 10 best and worst tech of the 2010s

Well, everyone else is doing a decade in review, so why not Bob & Kevin! Be sure to like, follow, subscribe or whatever the heck you need to do on your podcast listening platform of choice! Help us kick this show into high gear. Follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and enjoy the show transcript below from our friends at https://otter.ai/

Kevin 0:00
So we're back Holy crap, it's the year 2020

Bob 0:05
I have so much disappointment about the statement of year 2020 I just can't even not really about the year itself or anything that it may or may not bring but you know there's just a lot of bullshit flying around right now about not just New Year new me. new decade new me whatever they're saying. I have no idea.

Kevin 0:24
Yeah, this is the time of year when you start thinking, Man, maybe I should lose some weight. And of course, you know, even if you do lose weight, it finds you because the only thing that really works is changing the whole lifestyle thing like I don't know living to a state with mountains and hiking all the time. Hey, let me tell you that doesn't take off wait either, by the way, damn it. Oh, that stinks. So according to Back to the Future to in 1989 in the year 2015. Not only will the Cubs win the World Series, which was almost accurate as off by like one year, but we'd be flying around in our automobiles, Bob, are we there yet?

Bob 1:05
Well, depends which call flying around.

Yeah, we have some autonomous features and functionality in some of our vehicles. We even kind of have hovery skate boardy things. Not really though.

Kevin 1:23
I don't know. So it's been a few weeks since we had a pod. We've had a few holidays. Today, as I saw on the internet is the Monday-ist Thursday of the entire year, and it certainly felt that way.

Bob 1:37
This whole holiday break has been the shittiest shitty of anything. You could just fill in the blank Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

Kevin 1:45
but did you acquire or partake in anything? especially notable over the holidays?

Bob 1:54
I had two have my three kids home so that was kind of cool. would have been nice to be 3-for-3 Um, didn't really get any tech related gifts were really minimizing the whole Christmas thing. got this cool piece of artwork though, that I was looking at and my kids noticed that I was looking at it and they bought it for me

Kevin 2:12
so awesome. So is it hanging in said, domicile,

Bob 2:18
it is prominently displayed in the dining area. It is a collection of hand crafted pine trees they are I think they're created with a arc welder to actually cut out the metal and then uses some kind of patina technique to give them a cool bluish green tint. They're pretty awesome. How

Kevin 2:42
about you? Um, yeah, so we are highly evolved. People as a couple my wife and I that is we don't buy each other gifts so usually tend to buy the kids some gifts. We've decided to go on a vacation few weeks after the holiday so that was part of their gift and then The fun thing I got to play with over the last week or so is a vinyl cutter that was not a part of Christmas. It was just one of those things sitting in a box that nobody

Bob 3:08
I can't believe you had one of those and no one was using it. That's crazy.

Kevin 3:12
Well, my wife's very into scrapbooking and she actually bought it for herself. And then once I learned we had set thing in our possession, boom, started using it and I've already made some stickers and tried screen printing with making it a laser cut stencils, some really cool things you can do.

Bob 3:32
So I've seen pictures and some of this stuff looks pretty big. What's that? Like? I don't really know much about vinyl cutters and maybe some of our listeners don't. What? Yeah, but I saw his and hers above your bathroom. That's pretty big.

Kevin 3:47
Yeah, so out of the box, so I have the cricket or we have I like it's mine now. Okay, we've got That's beautiful. Yeah, we've got the Cricut Explore air. I'm looking at it here it is on my desk. So possession is nine tenths of the law. So, out of the box, it cuts a 12 by 12 piece of vinyl if you want, and then it goes up to 12 by 24. If you buy a optional mat, which I've totally bought, and then really the sky's the limit because if you need something bigger than that, and you're using cricket, he just basically print it in sections and you put it together.

Bob 4:26
So you tile it out. Hmm,

Kevin 4:27
yeah, so the his and hers that you can find on my Instagram and or my Twitter account. Yeah. You probably won't go look for it. But I'm just saying the his and hers are one piece each and they are fairly large or like,

Bob 4:41
Oh, those are 1pm or one piece each. Yep.

So they worked probably on the 12 by 24.

Kevin 4:46
Yes, that is correct. And I've since printed, some stickers, some JavaScript stickers. It's great for like laptop stuff. I'm showing Bob here some stickers to the camera. I've made one here for one of my kids. gran starion Yep, and I made him a white and black version. I made a an airborne patch because I was in airborne in the army here this is gonna go to my car and if you notice, what Bob can see is that you can have multiple colors which is really cool. You just layer them on there you cut them in you cut you know one color then you cut the other color then you put them on top of each other. It's pretty cool.

Bob 5:23
Is any of this computer driven or is this all manual?

Kevin 5:27
Well, the cutting in the designing is all computer driven.

Bob 5:46
how much is a cricket runya

Kevin 5:48
that's a 200 bucks and there's different versions like version one back in the day you got like Nintendo cartridges. were basically you know you had to buy this cartridge from the local craft store. Plug it in like a video game. Then you get to choose, you know, from an enumerated list of things and is kind of shitty after a while because you're like, but I want to print this custom thing. Oh, here comes version two points version 2.0 is like, hey, we've got this app. And all you basically need is a transparent background. png file. And there we go. And then there's a ton of videos on YouTube to kind of get you going. And holy crap. I'm like, pretty excited. I'm not gonna lie. You appear to be having

Bob 6:30
fun with it, because I see lots of pictures. And sorry, you answer you said you're integrating that with your screen printing as well.

Kevin 6:37
So yeah, I guess I guess I haven't really talked about screen printing on the show. So I do screen printing. It's kind of like my analog hobby when I just want to get away from the digital world. And so there's many ways to screen printing Bobby, you said you use the screen for maybe you still do, but not still, but used to that there's three primary ways and the first way I I learned was you buy this thing called an emulsion sheet which is pre coated and it's sensitive to sunlight. You print something on a transparency, plop it on top, go out in the sun for a minute, and then you wash it out. And it works actually really well. One drawback there is you can't keep tension on it. So you know, it's guys drawbacks, but it's very easy to burn. The second is the traditional way, which is you, you.

Grape, I guess is the right or you go a screen, a traditional screen squeegee the screen. Well,

Bob 7:33
now before you get to the squeegee, you kind of said that most of you put the emotion on the squeegee to so

Kevin 7:39
well that's the thing I've got. It's like it's called a scoop coder. So you scoop code it and then that's like a

Bob 7:45
net sloshing around.

Kevin 7:46
You've got to do it in a dark room. So I've had to put together a makeshift dark room and a half and I had to buy red lights and everything. And then I had to build and I'm going to show Bob this. I don't know if you can see it right at the end of my desk here right radio. I know right? The end of my desk is it Hey, this houses my undeveloped screens because it's light sensitive. And so I turn all the lights out usually at night time and then I expose them with UV light. So that's method to method three to bring it back to the cricket is to vinyl cut something and then just apply it right to the screen but you do it in reverse and put it on the bottom side. And then you just squeegee it through. Now I think that's brilliant. Now each way actually has their pros and cons. Do you think that the vinyl cut way is like well, why wouldn't you always do that just less mess easy. The drawback is if you have very fine detail, the vinyl cutter isn't the best solution for that. Really? Yes, you'll want to go traditional in the ocean with the UV light or the or the first method.

Bob 8:45
Did I see that you did our logo as a final cut as well did and that turned out

Kevin 8:49
really freakin well. So if you want like a car sticker. Oh, that's great. Yes.

Bob 8:54
Oh shit. Yeah. Did you remake the did you make the audio waves or was that right from the logo? That

Kevin 8:59
is right. Right from the audio, I did not remake anything.

Bob 9:02
Damn, that did look good. I'm actually if anyone's interested in checking that out. Did you share that on the show Tweeter,

Kevin 9:09
I you know, I have no idea anymore. We have so many accounts, both personal and professional podcasting accounts that it's

Bob 9:17
really hard to keep track of super, super professional podcasting accounts. So, um, before we get into the meat of the show, this is kind of like a little transitional thing. Speaking of the show social media. One of the show New Year's resolutions that I've made for myself is to try to be more engaged in the marketing of the show. So I want to share with listeners since we're less than 10 minutes in and maybe most of you are still here, our primary platform appears to be looking back at the 2019 stats, Spotify. So if you are on Spotify, please I think they have a follow button and using that follow button actually subscribe to the podcast but then also helps Spotify algorithm determine where to show our podcast is recommended to some folks that may not have heard us in the past couple years. So that's pretty

Kevin 10:12
good do that. That'd be very that's a great resolution. I have traditionally stayed away from resolutions but I did give myself some. So a little more personal info about me. I am a arms dealer of Lego so

Bob 10:28
You scared the shit out of me for a second.

Kevin 10:31
I buy sell Lego and that's kind of a finicky thing because you know, you just got to pick out the right one then you basically turn around keep them for a while and you sell them

but what I learned with that experiences

Wow, it is really awesome to make money while you sleep. And I've tried six ways from Sunday to to make money in software like an open source projects making this little library that is that is a tough business. So selling frickin Legos has made Like a million times more money than any software gig I've tried to do on the side, just putting that out there. So the problem with Lego is, is, well, eventually you run out of the good stuff. So I've been into woodworking slash screen printing for the last four or five, six months. And that's where my future efforts are going to continue. And I'm going to open up an Etsy store and I'm going to sell a bunch of woodworking stuff. And I like to really bore the shit out of people by posting all my projects that I have on Instagram often

Bob 11:35
No, I love it because I'm not as artistic as I used to be. And it's cool to see you making stuff. I mean, I'm, I'm super engaged with all of my friends that do creative things outside of code. Because I don't do that much creatively outside of code. Well, except maybe podcast.

Kevin 11:54
I've definitely I'm at peace with the idea that I'm a creative person, but I don't necessarily have to do In the digital realm, and so I really really, really like balancing my digital creativity with analog creativity. So I played music play guitar, I

Bob 12:10
I draw I you know, I fabric Kevin does all the show artwork in case anybody didn't know that. Yes,

Kevin 12:16
stick figure art is harder than it looks.

Bob 12:21
Especially when you have an annoying co host. It's like, Can you make it look like this?

Kevin 12:25
Yes. So yeah, the creativity thing. That's kind of my resolution thing, but in so expect more show swag. Bob and Kevin show branded show swag that you probably can't buy because you probably don't want to buy it. But

Bob 12:41
I might have but if you're good listeners and drop us some lines on social media, maybe you'll just could

Kevin 12:47
Yeah,

Bob 12:48
possibly get some and then

Kevin 12:50
I've done a lot of signs that. So confession time Kevin really likes Pinterest and from what I understand That's that's, you know, takes a lot of courage sticks, you know, to say that so I really like Pinterest and I steal all my great woodworking ideas from there. There I said it.

Bob 13:10
You use it as your creative Muse you don't steal? Yeah,

Kevin 13:13
I liked you could be my marketing manager if this ever goes anywhere.

Bob 13:18
I like it. I don't think you're going to need one. I think the shop speaks for itself. Well, alright, so we've talked a little bit about some resolutions. And I think that it's a very popular, hip trendy thing for shows like ours to take a look back at the prior year and technology or whatever the topic of conversation is, but since we did turn that big decade clock, I think we turned the decade clock. I think there's debate on that as well. But everyone's saying we turn the decade clock. So I think we're going to take a little bit of a look back at the the decade in tech.

Kevin 13:56
Does that sound about right? Yeah. So the other day, I think we'd agreed upon some ground rules on what should we freakin talk about in our New Year's episode? And you didn't follow any of the ground rules? Oh, we'll see. We'll see. So the rules were that we had to come up with the 10 best and 10 worst things and or releases or objects tech related in the last decade. Right. That was kind of the right rules.

Bob 14:22
Yeah. And a little glimpse behind the curtain for those of you who listen, and we probably mentioned this before, this show is not highly scripted at all. And when we do come up with topics like this, we don't share like our our conversations during the day get very awkward because we want to talk about this stuff, but we can't. So I have no idea what Kevin's top 10 and top 10 lists are and he has no idea what mine are. But I'm actually pretty excited to see if there's any overlap at all. In which would be even the most entertaining is if I have something on the good list. He has it on the bad. Or vice versa. Like,

Kevin 15:03
it's like the naughty and nice list.

Bob 15:05
Yes. So So where do we want to start? Let's hear let's just so I did rank Where did you rank yours? I don't know how heavy my writer rank in descending order from 10 to one, I have two honorable mentions in each category. All right,

Kevin 15:19
very good. Let's just give me your 10th best technology of the 2010s.

Bob 15:25
What should I do my honorable mentions first because they're outside the top 10?

Kevin 15:31
Uh, no. Give me

Bob 15:33
the Oh, we're going to close out with those after we get the number one. Yes. So we're doing the positive ones first.

Kevin 15:39
Let's go back and forth. So we'll do a best one will do this one and then so Okay.

Bob 15:45
All right. So this one is going to be my number 10 of the most positive things and tech from the last decade. For me, I said the rise of music subscription services and the end of the CD and Digital piracy era I key cuz full disclosure, I used to sometimes stumble across music that I didn't own prior to the 2010s

Kevin 16:11
that's, that's interesting because

look, are you including or maybe you don't want to tell me streaming video as well

Bob 16:20
and this this is specifically to get it so so I was kind of looking at personal things so as well as like big industries the

Kevin 16:28
streaming is huge and it's such a strange concept to no longer have a tangible piece of music like an album if you are does an album even exist anymore.

Bob 16:41
Yeah, actually really cool. hipsters will release their albums on vinyl on very limited release, although it has been increasing in popularity again. But this has been a very big conversation in our house over the holidays to with the digital music, because nobody actually owns the music anymore. So David, for the most part, David Neil

Kevin 17:00
Also known as at Reverend geek, he was on one of the early Bob and Kevin show, YouTube additions. He tweeted the other day is like, hey, CDs, it's kind of like an offline version of Spotify just laughed my ass off. So,

Bob 17:16
but it's not, though, because the CD doesn't know what you want to hear next.

Kevin 17:20
There's no algorithm,

Bob 17:22
right? There's no algorithm on the disk. Okay,

Kevin 17:25
well, you can burn your own playlist. So I guess there's, there's some in there,

Bob 17:29
I know. But think about it. So we went through that evolution where you had a bunch of CDs that you purchased at the store, then you digitize those CDs. And then you took those CDs in major own mix CDs. So think about how much waste we've,

Kevin 17:46
I don't know, not prevented, but ceased to create because of this movement, but that or do we just move it because now everything's streamed and you have to create the energy to move the bits each and every time

Bob 18:00
Yeah, but the internet was gonna do that anyway. But it

Kevin 18:03
didn't need to do this.

Pick a song over and over and over and over and over and over again and it never downloads anyway,

Bob 18:10
that's what bandwidth is about. Alright, so let me throw that was my number 10. What was yours?

Kevin 18:15
My number 10 Best thing was the iPad slash smartphone. So I realized that's a very broad category.

Bob 18:23
I like where you're going with that though, because phones have basically become iPads lately.

Kevin 18:26
Well, the iPad was released in 2010. And full disclosure, I made a lot of fun of it at the time because I'm like, this is stupid. This will never work. There's no keyboard oh my gosh, why would she do there's no apps you know, live to do them. I was wrong. I am raising my hand for the camera here. I was wrong. And then smartphones themselves I worked at a wireless carrier, a Verizon Wireless carrier, and I was a part of the retail side of moving a bunch of smartphones to the public. I realized the iPhone was invested in 2007. But I really don't think it took off until Android was released, which was in that neighborhood. I'd have to have the internet we don't have and can't afford look that up. But I do remember at the time blackberry happened to be king,

Bob 19:17
right? Hey, oh, god, you're gonna laugh so hard. This is the best radio ever got. I can't wait, keep going.

Kevin 19:23
Well, I was just gonna mention Whatever happened to hard Qwerty keyboards on the phones. Well, they lost to the soft screen. So what do you think?

Bob 19:33
Well, I think that that's a great number 10 for the positives. Do you want to hear my number 10 for the negative laid on me. Listeners at home, this is not scripted by number 10 for some of the downside things, I guess this actually could be spent as a positive people who should not have been making phones like Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone Those are all really bad smartphones of the 20.

Kevin 20:04
Well, I allow me to split hairs. blackberry was the jam. So if you want a corporate email on your phone, Blackberry was it. I mean, even President Obama was like, give me my crackberry

Bob 20:19
it was, but very early on in the 2010s. blackberry was already in the throes of like the death throes the last twitches of life where they came out with their tablet. I can't remember what they called it, but it was you know, they were trying to revive their, their smartphone presence and they just couldn't do it. So I totally

Kevin 20:41
missed by I totally missed Windows Phone but I wouldn't say I missed it. Or do miss it. Blackberry. I think they tried to come out with a soft screen again. Bob, Bob's holding up his

Bob 20:54
apparently I my windows 8.1 phone that I still have because it runs like a beat

Kevin 21:00
So in Facebook, do they actually have a smartphone?

Bob 21:04
So Facebook was toying with the idea of a smartphone and what they did instead of making the hardware, they came out with a basically a flavor of Android that they tried to distribute on pre made devices and, like a lot of Facebook things it didn't.

Kevin 21:21
While we're talking Facebook up a quick reminder that my particular version of Android cannot uninstall Facebook. I can only disable it. Thanks, Mark, because I didn't need that 300 mega space on my phone anyway, right.

Bob 21:36
I'm gonna make a quick prediction here that Facebook is going to come up in this conversation more than what can I do my

Kevin 21:41
number 10 then Hell yeah. Number 10. Worst thing the bad thing was the bad yeah, bad things. Facebook acquires Instagram in 2012

Bob 21:53
Wow, that was still that was wet number 10. For you. Wow. It's it's in this list is gonna get into

Kevin 22:00
Yeah the list is young. So yeah so in in 2012 I don't know that any of us including the FTC, or whatever government agency overlords you know, mergers and stuff like that. I don't think they necessarily saw future things like surveillance state 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, yada yada yada in 2012. So yeah, sure, why not? You got money, they, you can buy them great. And nobody really understood how the filter bubbles and how speech was going to be shaped in 2019 2020. Well, pick a year.

Bob 22:38
So you're so funny. God, this is the best. I knew this was going to be great.

Kevin 22:42
So what do you think? hasman number 10.

Bob 22:46
Number. Yeah, that's very interesting that that's your number 10 because you kind of bit off a lot there. So I'm very curious to hear what 931 are for the bad. Well,

Kevin 22:57
yeah, I may have tipped my hand a little bit. But let's let's go with your number nine, what's your number nine.

Bob 23:02
Okay thing. So number nine positives. It's funny that you said iPad was your number 10. Number nine for me was the Microsoft Surface Book. Because in the surface the surface line of products from Microsoft, very much along the same lines, full functional computing with detachable screens in still very pop powerful graphics processing and overall CPU not just the GPU so I love my Surface Book. I have one personally and one professionally, and they're talking about getting new machines at work. Luckily, we've already run the disclaimer If not, I'll drop it in here as well. But I don't want a new one. I don't want a new machine. I like my surface. Wow. So Microsoft for as much as they struggle. I feel like in various consumer based hardwares and software's windows 10 and Surface line we're pretty big in the 2010s for me so I think so

Kevin 24:04
I've never had a surface but here's what grinds my gears with when with with Microsoft Surface before the Microsoft Surface that you're talking about debuted Microsoft had another surface Do you remember that at all?

Bob 24:19
Well, I think they have the I would guess they call it the they don't call it the plain vanilla but they do have just the surface period. And it you know, has a type of cover and Nope, nope, nope.

Kevin 24:30
Other surface so in 2011 I went to Indianapolis, Indiana to the Gen Con board game convention. Yeah, nerd alert.

Bob 24:40
Right. So we need to alert nerd alert drop right.

Kevin 24:44
So back then Microsoft had a product called surface but it was a table that was so thick of the screen is the table top and you can put things on it and it would you know like capacitive touch, you would know what's on it and then they would it was really good. Cool, but they totally went away from that. So,

Bob 25:03
yeah, I wish I wish they would go back. Maybe they'll bring it back maybe. All right. Are you ready? So that was my nine, number nine positive. So your number nine positive is

Kevin 25:12
Azure, AWS slash cloud, the cloud, all the things now this is cloud computing, cloud computing, right? And this is very near and dear to my like, daily professional life, because one of the worst things that I can imagine as a web developer is on premise hosting. You know, yeah, on one hand, you're like, yeah, I have control the box, I can do whatever. But with AWS and Azure, there's this concept of server less, which, by the way, it's still

Bob 25:42
a real server, right? It's in a box, which

Kevin 25:44
it's terrible naming when they say server lists it, explaining it to non tech people. Oh, so there's no server. No, there is a server, it's just virtualized. Anyway, I digress. So but it's really changed my day to day job. It's really enabled this thing called DevOps automation, and it's really changed. Like the landscape of everyone because it what it does, what it does is it lowers the bar, you know, expose the CD ends to Joe developer, Jane developer. It does all these things. So you mentioned earlier music streaming, I humbly think that the cloud revolution helped enable the streaming revolution. What do you think?

Bob 26:23
Oh, I think so much of that is dead on, you know, physical boxes. Don't really, I mean, I'm sure they exist. I'm sure there's tons of them out there still. But yeah, that platform, the whole idea of that distributed computing that is easily accessible and the, you know, the front end that they've given all that stuff with the front end tool, so it's not all command line stuff. Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

Kevin 26:50
Yeah. And AWS started because they basically had an internal need and then they just said, Hey, wouldn't be cool if we just sold some of our capacity. I don't know. Azure has a similar history but I thought that is some of the best ways to create tech you know, create a business which is solve a real problem and then see if you can make it generic and or you know, you know, abstracted if you will, so that was mine. Which guy

Bob 27:19
so, we're on so my it's my number nine bad one, right? Yes. Okay, so I kind of went off the beaten path a little bit on this one. This is kind of more of a pet peeve than a so my number nine is bad Kickstarter tech launches. And the one that really comes to mind from the 2010s is the the coolest cooler, which was the cooler that was just trying to be way too many things than just a cooler. I think it had streamable music it had multiple USB chargers speakers on board. It had everything Swiss Army knife

Kevin 27:58
or cooler Right.

Bob 27:59
Yeah. But for a fucking cooler so

I think that paved the way for a bunch of people to be like, Hey, I know this crazy thing that's a bunch of things taper to other things and let's start a Kickstarter for it. And that got really annoying. So

Kevin 28:15
full disclosure, I think in 2013 or 14 I was part of a Kickstarter campaign totally failed. But that reminds me because this isn't on any of my list. I'm glad you brought this one up. Because Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe. Those are the ones just off the top my head. Everyone in their brother and sister are holding their hand out going Hey, give me money. Why? Because of an idea. Okay, well,

Bob 28:48
or I can't make rent. here's the kicker. Here's a good one for I can't make rent this month. Yeah.

Kevin 28:54
Yeah. So I still like being, you know, contributing when I can can do a charity I'm mostly I can contribute my time not so much money. Every time I see a Patreon for somebody I know, we call it the Tupperware problems, like, I gotta buy at least two bowls, you know, a salad bowl with the leg, make sure you get the lids, otherwise, you know, he's gonna be pissed. And you know, I want to be friends still. And so we call it the Tupperware party, Bob and I do and it's really hard because you look, as a creator, we're Bob and I are both creators, we look and go, I look at all these great, you know, people doing great things and getting Patreon. But then it's like the top 1% It feels like that's, that's actually getting somewhere on these platforms. And then there's everyone else. So Kickstarter sells you this dream and with the 1% actually doing it and they collect, you know, the funds underneath as a fee. So I really look at that stuff and go on. That's just, I don't even know what to call it's not really snake oil, but it's definitely like Same shit different, you know method here where, hey, we're just trying to separate people from money, right?

Bob 30:06
Well, my boys bless their hearts. They're both big fans of Kickstarter type projects. And they are just now receiving stuff that they invested in when they were in their mid teens. And they're both in their 20s

Kevin 30:23
man, also not a super long game. I guess I won't tell you what's not on my list just in case it's still on your list. All right, let me go with my number nine and you'll be like we're What?

The Video Game fortnight This is on my negative list.

Bob 30:38
Oh, that's so funny.

Kevin 30:42
Video Game my mind. So go ahead. So I put fortnite on there. Mostly

Bob 30:46
for shit. No, I did put a video game on mine. Well, I'm

Kevin 30:51
so fortnite just the way

it affects all the kids. All the children in my orbit. my nieces, my nephews, my own kids. These people are dicted listen Like a real drug and on top of that, it pretty much shut down every other video game except for maybe Minecraft and untitled goose game. Alright, so there's like three video games left in the world because of fortnight has just totally come in steamrolled everything. And they have this concept of V bucks, where, you know, the kids are like, Hey, can we get or can we get a gift card for Microsoft so we can apply it to our Xbox so we can basically just give it away. I'm like, Oh my god, this is this is life. And then there's like this internal gambling addiction that they all have, because you can get these llamas and these crates and you get this random thing that comes out. And while I'm on the gambling thing, my girls who don't play fortnight as much they do play fortnight. They have toys like lol dolls are familiar lol dolls. It so so. So if you go to Walmart or any retailer, they'll have them so it's a sealed box opaque. You can't see what's in it. The whole idea is you got to buy it to see what's in it and it plays on these like human emotions. curiosity. Anyway, so number nine is fortnight for me What am I?

Bob 32:08
Oh, that is a great

so now we're to my number eight.

Kevin 32:13
Number eight positive

Bob 32:14
number eight positive and I lied and I want to stress again this is not scripted, we did not see each other's list. My number eight positive tech from the 2010s is Minecraft because it's a family focused gaming adventure and you can play it with your kids and actually with my kids, I taught them how to manage their own minecraft server so they weren't out there messing around with the general public so taught them how to give server line commands basically through the through the Minecraft thing so this is so funny that you were fortnight and now I'm on Minecraft so

Kevin 32:56
okay so interesting sacred you're picking Minecraft Yes, Minecraft

Bob 33:02
positive. Oh, okay.

Kevin 33:03
Yeah so Minecraft I think has replaced Lego and a lot of housecalls for sure yeah

Bob 33:09
digital Lego without a doubt yeah and when I again

Kevin 33:12
another thing I was totally wrong on with Minecraft cuz I see it I'm like what the hell is this shit The graphics are terrible right you know it's very blocky no kids gonna like this right they're just gonna be like oh well you know give me like Call of Duty or something with high end graphics but actually I kind of like Minecraft because it It stimulates creativity and building and whatnot.

Bob 33:38
Yep, that's pretty much why I was coming in at number eight for me of the 2010 Alright, so

Kevin 33:42
my number eight you'll probably snicker a little bit is crypto slash blockchain.

Bob 33:51
So this is your number eight positive Oh,

Kevin 33:53
oh, I'm sorry. This is my negative shoot.

Bob 33:58
No, that's why

Kevin 34:00
I totally messed up. So all right,

I'm gonna I'll come back to my number eight positive

because I've already tipped my hand. So my number eight negative is crypto blockchain because as of right now, I don't think crypto blockchain has changed the world because that's basically what all the crypto slash blockchain people are saying, Oh, we got a blockchain all the thing it will change the face of insert industry, crypto currency, it will change the face of whatever. I'm still waiting for it to change any part of my life. Bob, what part of your life has it changed?

Bob 34:35
Um, I think the only thing that it's really affected is our podcasting because of the Libra kinds of Libra crypto trying to desperately make its way to market. We did do that experiment a couple years back with investing in crypto and tracking the markets. So but that was more just fun. And I Still have not recouped from where we invested.

Kevin 35:03
Yeah, you and I totally hit the apex of crypto hey look at all this great stuff happening in crypto let's invest and the good thing I sold out right, I am out for save whatever 15 bucks a Bitcoin was worth a few months ago.

Bob 35:19
Yeah, I'm still in. I'm still in.

Kevin 35:22
Yeah, we're such suckers, man.

Such suckers. Alright, so that was my number eight negative. Do you want me to catch up and just do my number eight positive and then we'll Yeah, we'll just flip it so you do your number a positive so my number eight positive is SpaceX reusable rockets. Wow. So you and I had a live stream of the Falcon Heavy launch which highlighted the landing of the booster rockets and that was in 2017. We had my kids.

Bob 35:56
They got two out of three on that one, right?

Kevin 35:59
Something like that. But it looked like a frickin science fiction alien invasion movie, which was awesome.

Bob 36:07
Suit I got choked up.

Kevin 36:09
Oh, me too. And to this day every time they stick the landing, which is it pretty much every

Bob 36:14
time now it's regular now. Yeah,

Kevin 36:16
that's, that's awesome. I think one of the rockets that went up recently was like its fourth or fifth flight. And that's gotta save money somewhere. And I've heard a lot of people say, Oh, it won't be financially feasible still, you just gotta throw those away and start over. But I think they're starting to prove that wrong. What do you think?

Bob 36:35
Yeah, no, I think they're getting financial benefit with the multi launch multi land for sure. That's how they're able to really kind of like supplement the starlink programs. So yeah, the reusable rockets. That's brilliant. Yeah. So and for the most part right now, those are 100%. unmanned trips, right?

Kevin 36:55
Yeah. They are testing the ability to send up manned crew and they've had some success recently, because right now we're actually dependent on Russia of all people to send people up the space station. And I will be in Florida in a couple months and trying to catch a falcon nine launch for the starlink program but that's about like thread that needle at this point.

Bob 37:21
Right You showed me the schedule it looks like it's not going to happen while you're there.

Kevin 37:25
You know, I don't know the schedule enough to know that maybe I'm just looking too far out and they're just gonna fill the schedule or or what have you, but I'm excited. My kids are too They want to see it.

Bob 37:35
That would be awesome.

Kevin 37:36
Yes. All right. We're up to your number eight. Worst, my number. My number eight bad. Yes.

Bob 37:44
This could be a trip down memory lane for some not a positive one. Kevin, did you ever hear of the lytro camera back in the 2010 never heard of it. It is a light Field Camera. And it was supposed to revolutionized digital photography. And it looked like a rectangular tube. But what the camera did it was supposed to capture the infinity of the light that created an image. So you could capture that photograph doing air quotes. And then you could do it ever you wanted to with after that, because it had infinite resolution. That's interesting. So,

Kevin 38:28
yeah, it failed, by the way. So have you ever been in photography?

Bob 38:33
I yeah, I actually do love photography. And I should love to

Kevin 38:37
talk. So when you focus on a certain spot it becomes or there's a certain spot of moving the focal length and you'll hit what's called the hyper focal distance. And everything beyond that point is in focus. It's just like, we can take a picture of a mountain range and it's like, why is that always in vice, the background noise and focus because you've got the focal length, that's the hyperfocal distance, anything in front of You start getting the beaucaire or Boca or however you want to pronounce it. I don't even know what the real word way of pronouncing that is.

Bob 39:07
But it's I'm not that big in photography,

Kevin 39:09
but to get the subject in focus in the background out of focus. So anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sounds interesting. But you said it totally failed.

Bob 39:17
Yeah, first of all, they were super expensive. And the UX, the form factor for the device itself was just very clunky. So, but it was something at the time, I was very into photography and spending money on lenses and things like that, and was very excited about but there was no way I could afford it. When it came out. They came up with a better form factor, but it was still like over 1600 dollars. I think at the time, well,

Kevin 39:47
you know what, there's a there's a thing called the iPhone 11. That's got about three cameras on it, and it's a little less than that. So

Bob 39:54
right and you can totally adjust that bootcut whatever it is, too. So yeah.

Kevin 39:59
Interesting.

Bob 40:01
All right, but yeah, so that was yet some of these are very personal to me. So this is pretty fun.

Kevin 40:07
I'm glad I didn't bet money if what your number eight was eight would be all right, my number seven positive is 3d printing slash CNC slash vinyl cutting.

Bob 40:22
Man, I'm so glad you hit that market too.

Kevin 40:24
So 3d printing for me it's very cool. I've seen people make just some ridiculously cool things are basically like hey, yeah, we'll take one of those it's sort of like the the real life replicator from Star Trek shout out to start a supplemental. We need a nice here we need to eventually do this crossover episode

Bob 40:43
crossover coming soon.

Kevin 40:44
Yes. So that's what I think a 3d printer does. My vinyl cutter is that 2d printer very cool. In I've also seen that they can 3d print organs now which is like totally mind blowing like, hey, can 3d print a new heart and stuff They're printing.

Bob 41:00
Yeah, they're printing meat too, which is really weird.

Kevin 41:04
So I think 3d printing is still early, but I think it has a lot of promise. I've seen 3d printed houses out of concrete, you know, for in developing countries, just they can just set up a machine and it prints overnight. Yeah, just mind boggling. So what do you think?

Bob 41:21
Yeah, I think that that's a really good one. I actually did not touch upon 3d printing. But it's funny that you brought it up because my wife the other day was asking if 3d printers were getting cheaper, and so I thought that was really like that was a bizarre, surreal moment in the baby bar household that she was even considering 3d 3d printing. I like the aspect of 3d printing as well as like printing pieces or tools to do things without having to go to the store to purchase tools. I think that's pretty cool as well.

Kevin 41:54
Yeah. Yeah. I played the game civilization quite often. And one of the technologies that you can unlock is called replaceable parts, you know, like preceeds. Like, it's like Civil War era type thing where you could start, you know, fixing things rather than just having to craft it from A to Z every time well give me a couple of these parts, and then we're back to New. So I see the 3d printer is an extension of replaceable parts. And not that I think a hardware store is going to go out of business anytime soon. But when 3d printers become more ubiquitous, that might change.

Bob 42:30
Well didn't one of the like space shuttle missions or some space mission space station, maybe even they were able to 3d print a wrench that helped them out in a situation or something like that

Kevin 42:42
sounds familiar, but I can't recall the exact one. All right, we got anyway. Yeah, that's a great, well gotta move on. I say what's your number seven positive

Bob 42:51
by number seven positive is pretty interesting because I think you've already alluded to this, but number seven positive was cable cutting with streaming services like Sling TV. And we've talked about this on the show several times where I think in the early 2010s when this started to happen, it was meant to be a very positive thing. But now with every service jumping on the streaming subscription bandwagon, really if you add them all back together, it probably costs more than traditional cable

Kevin 43:22
and it has the side effect of putting us into an additional filter bubble. We haven't really talked about filter bubbles on this episode just yet, but you know, you're in your platform, you're in your channels and you're you know, you're on Netflix. I cord cut in 2012 off of DirecTV and my wife was pissed she's like, I want my whatever that we remember DVR. I mean, back then, you had to DVR things now. Everything's on demand. I mean, just the world has changed so much.

Bob 43:51
Yeah, we need my family off. DVR was a very interesting experience to the cord cutting. So

Kevin 43:56
yeah, I like it. I guess now we can transition to My number seven worst and it is crisper. Are you familiar with crisper?

Bob 44:07
The DNA editor

Kevin 44:08
so I would like to bundle this with DNA testing as well. So there's a Netflix series I forget what it's called, but it follows how crisper works and things like that. And I don't even want to you know, it's not a religious thing and nothing like that. I just think it's a bad idea to fuck with nature,

Bob 44:26
right? Oh, I think gene editing is a terrible idea.

Kevin 44:29
Yeah, um, the The one thing I think is is way more acceptable is GMOs. You know, if we can make corn feed us more and you know, whatever, that's fine but trying to alter somebody's intellect I color you know, the frick people aren't frickin ecommerce items. I mean, I guess you are in some countries, which is very sad. But so, you know, you don't order your children often many right?

Bob 44:57
Yeah, and I can really can't imagine a society where you Would I mean, that's definitely a black mirror up. So

Kevin 45:02
for sure, well, I mean, I could definitely, you know, play antagonistic to myself. People would say, Well, Kevin, we can eliminate cancer, we can eliminate whatever, whatever. But you and I are coders what happens when we fix bugs Bob?

Bob 45:17
New bugs have Thank you.

Kevin 45:20
cancer, but you're gonna create God knows what

literally God knows wouldn't be the only one who knows what. And maybe that wipes this all out. Period.

Bob 45:28
Right. It's just a cascade of it's just a bit. It's a cascade of bad consequences.

Kevin 45:33
Yeah, so.

All right, well, so I think the pendulum has now swung your number six.

Bob 45:41
Good. Now I think we're on my saddle bag. Right.

Kevin 45:44
Say it's good thing. We should call it a good thing. We're calling this out because I can't even count the 10 apparently.

Bob 45:49
That's okay. Number seven bad is Google in perpetual beta throughout the 20 times, and then the ultimate bait and switch where free services no longer We're free services. That one's pretty self explanatory. I think we hate all the big tech giants with equal

Kevin 46:07
disregard. So I'm familiar with the website, killed by Google. com.

Bob 46:14
I'm pretty sure we brought it up. And when you're talking about all the companies

Kevin 46:16
are also actually brought this up just for this episode. And I did not know two things on here are actually already scheduled for the X number one is Angular JS be one that is no longer supported, as of one year from now, so in one year for using Angular one dot, whatever, and I realized that's very nerdy and very like specific to coding and I am trying not to go down specific things here. But Angular JS is an older but super popular thing that we used

Bob 46:49
to go super stable.

Kevin 46:50
Yes, absolutely. I

Bob 46:51
don't know why they fucked with the law.

Kevin 46:53
Well, reasons right. Then here's the one that I was like. Are you kidding me? Google Hangouts is being

Bob 47:01
I did hear that they were sundowning that, but I think they're just giving it a different name to be on it.

Kevin 47:06
Yeah, apparently it's going to be called shit. I don't sit here, it's gonna be part of the G Suite. So maybe it's just, they're just not making direct money on because people just use hangouts for random garden variety shit. And that probably costs money. Right?

Bob 47:22
Right. And they want to bring it into G Suite because G Suite is not one of their paid things. Yeah, so that's

Kevin 47:27
kind of another 12 months according to kill by Google, but killed by Google is kind of a fun website because he just I mean, it's a lot of scrolling a lot of vertical scrolling of Holy shit. All of that is now dead. And while the lay person could probably care less than we do, but Bob and I, you know, when when we're asked to integrate with service x, I don't know about you, Bob. But when it's owned by Google, I go, Oh, well, how long do we even have left with whatever this is,

Bob 47:58
right. It's a Total question mark for sure.

Kevin 48:01
hate it. And I, you mentioned google maps that totally did a bait and switch on that. I'm trying to get Google out of my life, if you will. I'm actually using DuckDuckGo lot more. And if you do like a search on DuckDuckGo, and like directions, it's actually powered by Apple Maps, which is kind of an interesting twist on things. Oh, boy. Apparently, I don't know if I like that. I haven't really used Apple Maps. I heard it was really bad. And they've made improvements and I'm know apple.

Bob 48:36
I think they bought ways one of them bought ways Google or Apple to go. Okay, Google that. Okay. Yeah,

Kevin 48:41
that was unceremoniously explained to me the other day when I was like, why is Google Maps and way so similar? Whatever ignorant thing I said. Okay, so, so your number six positive, that's what we're up to. And then I know this is gonna be real nerdy, so I'll try to keep up light for the general listener. hub picks the number one spot over there the decade to become the go to place to dump your source code.

Bob 49:08
Now, I think that's a good one.

Kevin 49:10
Now, why does that matter? Well, I can tell you it prior to the 2010s. Source Control was very optional. And a lot of people may say, Yeah, right, not where we work. But let me tell you, I worked a lot of places, and it was copy paste, and you do control C, Control V, that's your backup. And they said, you know, it just put the little numbers that Windows does, you know, 123 as you control C, Control V. So GitHub really changed it. There was a bunch of competitors, and there still are subversion, whatnot, and then Microsoft bought them. So that was kind of a big deal that happened recently. And why does this matter? Well, GitHub is very known for open source and basically, the open source revolution. I'm going to try to put that in here as well. It's a big deal for both programmers and non programmers why is it important for non programmers? Because the programmers can bring you things that they couldn't before. What do you think?

Bob 50:08
Yeah, and I think it's a great learning tool opportunity for developers and non developers alike. If you're interested in getting into code. GitHub being basically the open source, you know, realm, you can, you can just pick up a lot of great grades. I'm sure you can pick up a lot of garbage too, but there's a lot of good stuff out there.

Kevin 50:27
So okay, where does that leave us? Which list are you on? Remember now?

Bob 50:32
That was your number six positive so it's time for my number six positive and I think this one will be brief. I think slack is my number six positive and its ability to kind of almost fulfill the Facebook mission of bringing people together without necessarily all the ads in bullshit stuff that I'm sure we'll talk about a little later.

Kevin 50:58
So yeah, slack is my number six. Good. So when I worked at the first agency I worked at we were an early adopter of slack. So slack was created in 2012. We start using in 2013. And, and at at the time, it's like, yes, it's cool, but I thought it was just yet another thing that you know, was out there. But it's really changed things because it's dead simple. It's web based. It pretty much killed off things. And it'll probably laugh AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, remember, I mean, you'd have to have all of those installed. Because depending on who you want to talk to, right?

Bob 51:34
Yes. Do you remember that one that pulled them all together? I can't think of the name of it now. But there was like a universal chat app that you basically registered all your other accounts through and you could use it Damn it. I can't remember it was called

Kevin 51:46
it sounds sketchy price stores your password.

Bob 51:49
Yeah, there was all kinds of shitty stuff with that, but it was a trillion trillion Pro. I love to trillion.

Alright, so let's see. Where's an hour back to the bad? Right? Okay, so

Kevin 52:03
so my number six, and this is going to be specific. But Oracle sued Google because of Android, the API's and aerosol. Yeah. And that's still being litigated. And it's for like billions of dollars and Oracle is one the initial judgment, and Google's appealing. But the real trouble with this isn't the money that's changing hands, because you and I wouldn't say it anyway. It's doesn't have anything to do with us. But it set the precedent that the API signatures I believe, is, and I could have this totally wrong, but the API signature think of the interfaces as copyrightable. Not the implementation, but just having a method named void save or something.

Bob 52:42
Yeah, see, that's crap. That's like, I don't know. That's like trademarking toilet paper. Yeah.

Kevin 52:48
So, speaking of frivolous patents, I should maybe I put that in that maybe that's the overarching theme here. somebody tried to claim that the shaft car was their patented invention and in fact, I believe they actually got the patent, and Newegg contested it because this guy is like hey, Newegg. And if you're not familiar Newegg. They're like a computer retailer. You owe us a bunch of money because you have a shopping cart completely like was like, you know, you can't patent the mouse click. The shopping cart is obvious. So, patent trolls and whatnot. I just hate that kind of stuff. So we put that in there too. What do you think?

Bob 53:29
Well, I think that's great. I yeah, there's so many shitty things that apparently happened in 2010.

Kevin 53:34
And we're only halfway done.

Bob 53:37
So my number six is going to be super quick because we've already touched on it. My number six of the not so great tech would be the crypto craze. Bitcoin was pre 2010. But a theorem kind of brought wallet, online trading all that kind of good stuff to the forefront because it was something other than just Bitcoin. It's a mess.

Kevin 53:57
So that's a good one.

I'll just quickly transition to my number five positive and I'll just throw it out there as the gig economy so if you're a god damn

magician, car driver whatnot the power

is is did you

Bob 54:17
say magician? Yeah

Kevin 54:18
because the reason I said I'm watching on Netflix it's

Bob 54:22
Oh my son watches that one the magician's right

Kevin 54:24
well, there's a button no not not that one's on CW but there was one on Netflix. It's called, like, magic for humans or something. And it's like he actually mentioned in there the gig economy, you can basically get anyone to do anything on the internet these days. Whether it's, you know, back in the day when you're growing up, it's like, you can hire a band, you know, you have this like sketchy part of Craigslist. Well, that's come out and they're their apps. I mean, when I was at your there's an app for that when I was at your place, you had like three or four options of people who will bring you food to your house. Yeah, guess how many cats Has well we still have pizza hut and Papa John's that's about it and I don't think this qualifies gig economy, right?

Bob 55:07
Nope, not so. Alright, so that was your number five good? Yes. My number five good basically encompasses a lot of stuff we talked about today 4g LTE networks that came of age in the 2000s which made a lot of this digital communication streaming from your phones possible so

Kevin 55:30
that figure that was a really big that might be on my list that might be on my list of the a quick one. Okay, so 4g definitely did change it and I'm patiently frickin waiting for 5g because while sometimes I will use my 4g hotspot do work and or do a podcast with you. 5g is where I think I need to be for the whole house because I don't think my 4g phones gonna handle that.

Bob 55:57
So now melted.

Kevin 55:59
Yes. So that's good. Alright, moving along here.

Bob 56:03
Number five bad or five bad net

Kevin 56:05
neutrality. So good one net neutrality for the lay person is a topic that came up a couple of years ago, basically the current administration, FCC head said, you know, what, no longer are these protections in place? What protections were they? You say, Kevin? Well, what they are is let's say your internet provider wanted to throttle slow down your Netflix, because you're doing a lot of binge watching or whatever,

Bob 56:36
before net neutrality, or because large corporate interest, wanted more bandwidth and paid for it. That's yourself.

Kevin 56:42
That's it. So So net neutrality protected us. But those rules got rescinded. And now it is possible that you can be throttled unless you pay to play right.

Bob 56:56
Yeah, tinfoil hat guy and me says we've always been throttled.

Kevin 56:59
Yeah. How do you check that right?

Bob 57:02
Yeah, exactly. All right. I think we're back to the positives. Nope. My number five negative. You've just got the ping pong game all wrong. My number five negative. You've already brought it up. Mine was DNA kits for the masses. Yeah, so don't do it. We don't we Yeah, we don't need to be testing our DNA, who who cares? Who cares where we're from? Who cares what we might die? Well,

Kevin 57:24
it's a pseudoscience really Anyway, I've read so many articles were there. Who knows if what the information they're giving you is any were true because you can be, say Jewish as a race or a Jewish as a religion. You can be from the Middle East, but your skin color you know, I mean, there's just so many combinations and it's just doesn't make sense. Plus, the Pentagon just recently put out a warning saying, hey, if your God member you shouldn't be submitting these DNA tests for for security reasons.

Bob 57:59
That's got to be One of the biggest red flags I've ever seen it's just such a data grab so gross right all right, all right, so your number four good one he might

Kevin 58:09
crap your parents, but I'm gonna loop in AI ml and neural nets. Oh wait

Bob 58:16
as a good one

Kevin 58:17
toes you're gonna crap your pants. So actually, this one kind of rides the line for me between good and bad and I've got a few of those. So I was watching the YouTube series that I pass along you which is only three to three episodes before YouTube

Bob 58:33
I was gonna say it's paywalls right only

Kevin 58:35
the first three episodes are free but after that they want money and sorry YouTube, you've already you're already profiting off me somehow someway. But fucking drug dealers. One of the cool things in there was a guy a former Tennessee Titan football player had ALS or has ALS and they use speech recognition type things to help learn how he talks now. Excuse me versus how he used to talk Like press conferences and things like that. And now they can translate him very well. And I was like, that's what ml

Bob 59:07
is. Wait, so they can translate him in his own voice basically. Yes.

Kevin 59:11
So he's very well, that's beautiful. That's cool. He's very difficult to understand in real life now. But they can, they can go both ways they can, okay, he can say something now, and it can just do text, or they can also replay in his own voice, which is amazing. That's pretty awesome. They also have it where somebody has lost a limb and they have the Luke Skywalker hand where you know, you move these things in your arm and it knows then it learns you as a person on how to move it. Because previous attempts at like limbs, specially hands hands are very complicated is well how do we make this work for everyone? Well, you don't that's the problem. Everyone is wired kind of a little bit differently. And if you leverage machine learning, to kind of figure out you know, the nuances A few and hey, that work that didn't and adjust on the fly. That's great. And so that's where I think it's super. That's great noble, where I'm not so hot on AI and machine learning is like self driving cars. I really think that's just you know, I know. That's just a waste of time. You know, we're, you know, I just read the other day, Tesla hat was involved in another autopilot death, you know, where the car was an autopilot and killed some people. So, of course, yeah,

Bob 1:00:30
but still, they've got like, hundreds of thousands to go before that's really an issue.

Kevin 1:00:35
Right? I mean, the the easy defense of that is Yeah, and so and so died from dear, you know, crashes and that's human control. So what's your point carry

Bob 1:00:46
on? Yeah, on that same day, 3000 people probably got killed by regular people driving. So

Kevin 1:00:53
what I'm getting at is, I don't put auto or self driving cars at the top of the machine learning like to do list I put right mbts I put people who have medical, I put that high up. So that's why when I, when I see like, hey, there's this new self driving car and it's blah, blah, blah. I'm like, that's great and all but is that changing humanity? I mean, getting rid of effect. Yes. We're saving you from the tyranny of driving a car. Ooh, you know, that's, that's really not high on my list of things we need.

Bob 1:01:26
I'm telling you though, next year when I get my cyber truck, I'm getting it with the autonomous mode. Alright,

moving on. That is an upgrade.

Kevin 1:01:35
Alright, so we are on Bob's number four positive,

Bob 1:01:39
right my number four positive also spooky. You already had it ride sharing gig economy apps, basically, where's my number four. So Oh, the ability to have a system in your pocket where there's thousands of participants where you can pretty much good anything you need on because they're volunteering to be in the system. So

Kevin 1:01:58
the only notable thing there is With the gig economy comes the obvious potential exploitation by the overlords running the apps. Yes. Lyft Uber, I think are the two that are considering unionizing or you know, there's there's issues there. And then the other one is with YouTube, YouTube's not really a gig economy unless you look at it through the lens of Well, I'm a performer Raiders

Bob 1:02:21
kind of our Yeah,

Kevin 1:02:22
so yeah, so there's exploitation potential there. But

Bob 1:02:28
what I think the technology to make that open for pretty much anyone to participate in that economy is the bonus part. Maybe the way it's executed is not but the ability the technology is open that door.

Kevin 1:02:42
I think that's pretty Yeah. And let me tell you, Airbnb if we're considering that also a gig economy that is a huge huge plus thing I'm, I'm going to Disney World for the second time, or third time with an Airbnb because it's just way better than doing a hotel. So

Bob 1:02:58
we always look for the Yes, Airbnb places to quirkier the quirkier the better. Alright, so your to your number four bad

Kevin 1:03:09
Cambridge Analytica. That's my number four.

Bob 1:03:12
Wow, that's really far out. We thought it'd be higher up. I thought it'd be closer number one

Kevin 1:03:20
yeah, it gets pretty crowded here.

So Cambridge analytic if you're not very up on that there's a Netflix documentary called I think it's the great hack if I'm,

Bob 1:03:31
yeah, okay, I did an episode I

Kevin 1:03:32
did an episode on it. And basically, we're all suckers and it will be a component of one of my to a component of two of my top three negatives here in a bit. But Cambridge Analytica basically exposed how much data is the new oil. I'm channeling my inner Bob Baty buyer right there.

Bob 1:03:56
That's his data is the new oil that is trading. That's right.

Kevin 1:04:00
So I'll just leave it there. I don't have time to explain Cambridge Analytica, I, I don't think you would disagree with you. Maybe you went to high No,

Bob 1:04:07
not at all. No, my it's actually higher up on my list, but I don't disagree at all. My number four bad is an old guy rant. It's Instagram, Snapchat and tick tock. I just can't keep up with all this shit anymore. Like I was very active technology dad, and introduce my kids to Facebook and Twitter and kind of introduced them to Instagram and then Snapchat and tick tock all kind of blossomed on the scene in the 2010s. And I just can't keep up with all the different interfaces and what's the expectation how the content supposed to be formulated and delivered. It's just it's too hard. So that was my number four bad. It's just the rise of all these little micro networks. I still don't understand Instagram Stories dependent and people have explained it to me over and over and over. I just don't get it. I consume them pretty regularly because I think they're a good think they're good platform for consumption. But to have to make an Instagram story I struggle. Yeah, the struggle is real as the kids.

Kevin 1:05:07
Alright, we're back to the positive right?

Bob 1:05:09
Number Three positive for you, Kevin. Number three.

Kevin 1:05:13
Actually, this one's a mixed bag too. But it's gonna be like, Oh, I guess that is the thing, hashtags and the like button.

Bob 1:05:21
So Oh, that's a continuation of my old guy ran. Yeah. So

Kevin 1:05:24
hashtag, you would think that non tech users getting the them to use hashtag would be really difficult. But humans seem to know how to use hashtags nowadays. And the like button while it's positive is is it's a quick feedback. What I don't like about it is the ambiguity of not pushing the button. Does that mean people don't like the post? Or does that mean people haven't seen the post? And that ambiguity is by design, right where it's like, well It's not that people don't like it. Maybe they didn't see it or whatever. What do you think?

Bob 1:06:04
Yeah. Well, that I think that not seeing it, especially with all the stupid algorithms that these different networks have. I think that's a big possibility. I'm always, like perplexed by someone will post something that, especially on Twitter, actually Instagram too. So they'll post something that is actually kind of sad and not positive. But you want to show that you support them somehow. But your only option is to like the fact that they put something really sad there. Yeah. So I do like that Facebook has a little bit more wider range of things.

But yeah, I do struggle with that a little bit.

Kevin 1:06:43
Yeah. Do you think Twitter Instagram will adopt the multiple emoji reaction?

Bob 1:06:50
I don't know. Would Facebook come out and say against Twitter like No, we've patented that.

Kevin 1:06:56
We've patented the for emoji response or whatever it is now.

Bob 1:07:00
That's interesting. And then you'd have to remember what the equivalency is between the platforms. See, that part just pisses me off.

Kevin 1:07:06
There's there'll be an app for that. Don't worry, old guy rant continues. All right, your number three positive,

Bob 1:07:13
my number three positive. Actually, I struggled putting this as low as number three, I wanted it to be closer to one. But there's so many, I guess I didn't have so many good things. My number three positive was the Apple Watch and fitness trackers in general. Apple Watch kind of came to the largest prominence early in the 2010s. With that whole scheme and the connectivity, I dislike having, it's very futuristic, having all that stuff on your wrist. And I have the mentality where it doesn't consume me even if people in my household think it might. But I have the ability to focus my attention in many different directions. But I like that it's a constant reminder of your activity level and the ability to track it. I think. I love data, which which version

Kevin 1:08:00
do you have?

Bob 1:08:02
I am wearing a four which they discontinued because it was so similar to the five that they launched. So you today you can purchase a three or a five D. So do you have to have your phone close by? Is it near field required? Well, you still get all the functionality of the tracking on the watch so that you can still analyze your heart rate, you can still track a workout. I don't have the LTE version. So if I want interactivity with my phone, yeah, I have to be within Bluetooth range of it. So but it's still a watch. Regardless, I had a Dick Tracy watch, because that's what I think they are. I would prefer that it works by itself. And I don't have one because I'm in the Android side. Well, the LTE is more expensive and I'm a cheapskate. So

Kevin 1:08:48
I think my wife has the LTE version. She's in the apple ecosystem. And I really wish there were some more options and Andrew and I haven't looked for a while. I have a Fitbit That's really nice has nothing to do with my phone or anything. But I think that might be the future innovation where I mean, these phones are huge. And you guys stick them in your pocket, you know, they're just they're just somewhere or you're going to drop them. But I think if if the phones become exclusively wearable, I think that would be huge.

Bob 1:09:21
I think we're going there for sure. All right. So your number three. Good, right. I already did that one. Oh, then you're on number three bad Sorry, I lost track.

Kevin 1:09:34
By number three bad is the 2016 US election I realized that is not a tech topic. It is though, because we were basically compromised in a digital fashion from bad actors around the globe. It's the rise of fake accounts the rise of, of being an expert at being a bully online the expert of inflaming people and the exploitation of filter Bubbles. So I think that for me is one of the largest negatives that I could come up with, even though I have two more ahead of it.

I guess it was the third largest

Bob 1:10:12
thing. Yeah. If you haven't watched the Cambridge analytical special on Netflix, totally encourage you to do so.

Kevin 1:10:20
So, yeah, hopefully, hopefully we won't have a repeat in 2020. But guess what I think, Bob,

Bob 1:10:26
it's already happening. Yeah. Very good. All right. You're not on Facebook. So you don't see the shit show but it's already happening.

Kevin 1:10:32
Well, I I only see the Twitter side and thankfully, I don't see it on Instagram, which is a Facebook property.

Bob 1:10:38
Yeah, but Facebook is the worst. Yeah,

Kevin 1:10:41
I don't doubt

Bob 1:10:42
it. Alright, so where does that leave us is that you're not so my number three bad plays right off of that. Oddly enough, it's weird. It's like we know each other and our friends. Mine is the rise in social media addiction, and the rise of outrage culture, kancil culture, virtual signaling, virtue signaling, and all that. bullshit that goes with all that stuff. So, uh, yeah, social media really big negative, I think for the 2010s and I don't see that ending anytime soon. Uh,

Kevin 1:11:11
there's a, there's a lot of people who are good at psychology on Twitter, they know exactly how to word it. Because, like you said, virtue signaling, you know, I'm going to write this in a way that it'll make me sound superior to everyone else. And somehow, you know, gain sympathy or empathy for just like this negativity to propel yourself forward and people are very good at it.

Bob 1:11:39
Yeah or we all should be doing x y and z but if you dig into the profile the person who posted that they don't do anywhere near x y&z and in another problem is is the fake accounts thing. The person that's

Kevin 1:11:51
you know, we have

certain certain certain group for certain certain certain candidate and they're just flaming Each they're playing both sides. And it's hard to tell what's real, what's not. Side note, Facebook attempts to have a real person behind the username. Twitter does not give quick thoughts on, on whether making it real person would fix any of that.

Bob 1:12:22
No, because it's just kind of like the the spam bot issues with web forms. You know, we found ways to kind of mitigate that. But then people figured out that they can just employ people for pennies on the dollar to be the humans to do the same spam botting and check the box that says I'm not a robot. So the shits gonna go bad either way. All right, let's go back we need to shift to

Kevin 1:12:48
go back to the positive my number two positive is electric vehicles.

Bob 1:12:54
So very interesting.

Kevin 1:12:56
What's even more interesting is we've had electric vehicles for About 100 years now. And if you're a historian of vehicles, you'd you know, find where big oil I'm using air quotes is basically killed off that industry so that we can all have internal combustion engine vehicles and we all like hell yeah, we got muscle cars. I mean, we did it all. But now we're to the point where electric vehicles just kind of makes more sense and it's not even a clower

Bob 1:13:25
the point where the planet is definitely going to die. I was

Kevin 1:13:28
gonna say, I'm actually not into electric vehicles because the plants gonna die. I'm into it first, purely economics. Right and also maintainability and internal combustion engine has a lot of frickin moving parts and explosions under the hood, where no light by design and electric vehicle is literally

Bob 1:13:50
simple in it, but Kevin they catch fire. Well,

Kevin 1:13:54
you know what sort of cars with flammable liquids and so

Bob 1:13:59
that comes Last under the hood

Kevin 1:14:00
right so um I would like to think my next vehicle will be an electric car or vehicle but that's a bold statement however the reason that's I'm in a hybrid right now I'm telling you cyber truck is on my list what I really wish for the future though is the infrastructure because Big Oil had to put in had to solve the their distribution problem to hey you're in the middle of Utah How do you keep going without you know we need fueling stations well we need to figure out a way to have bigger life batteries and Tesla just got this was the patent you know that claiming to have a lot longer battery life but we also need to be able to charge faster or we need to be the ability to swap out batteries rather than go and charge the battery just say hey give me another one and in charge this one and then you pay like a propane fee like you you know changing out your grill propane cylinder you know, here you go. Here's my, my 20 bucks and whatever. So that's my hope and and electric vehicles a huge kind of an allegory or side to this one right? Here is I really wish we could harness the title energy of the moon. You know, when that moon spins around Earth, it does a lot of moving. So the kinetic energy from that and just like turbans underwater, you'd think we would have infinite free electricity at this point. But apparently we haven't figured that out yet.

Bob 1:15:20
It would definitely contribute for sure.

Kevin 1:15:22
So there we go. Evie, that's me. That's my number two.

Bob 1:15:26
My number two positive would be voice assistant services like Amazon, Google. Siri, all those good ones. So.

Kevin 1:15:37
So real quick, there's a lot of positive there in fact that my kids learned that this morning and if you say Alexa fart, she will comply.

Bob 1:15:46
You need to let me try that later. Try that out on the big speaker.

Kevin 1:15:51
It's it makes me giggle.

So there's that and then if I if I go ahead and put on the tin foil hat here and And say well we do invite the surveillance state into our home with all of these things. There's that.

Bob 1:16:09
So we have an episode for that as well. Yeah, once again, I think the big disclaimer on these these lists is I think the underlying technology is the positive the use of that technology is where things get totally sketched out Black Mirror, also know your number too bad.

Kevin 1:16:27
My number too bad.

You are last few ones here definitely gonna overlap. So

as it's written on my,

my little notepad here, mental health connection to technology. So I think technology number three, technology has a huge impact on mental health. And number one is we actually probably get doping mean highs. And then when that doping mean goes away. You are you have a little bit of withdrawal feeling but it also creates these highlight reels like Instagram is really a highlight reel.

The see

the idea that you do or don't get likes, I was talking to a school teacher recently. And she's like, it's actually become a problem where people get social care students are getting social anxiety because they'll post something and get no reactions. Or we are now in a world where are you cool? I don't know, how many followers do you have? Do you have the new iPhone? You know, it's like,

man, when I was growing up, it was

can you catch a football? How tall are you? But now it's what do you possess? What's your status symbols? You know, what's your social network look like? And holy crap. I've seen a lot of people and I really praise them for doing that. Like, hey, I need to take a break from social media. It's, you know, it's getting too much. I just need to take break. I'll see. We'll see you next week. Or I really don't like it. When they pick it. They

Bob 1:17:58
come back when you're ready. Giant the giant dick and me though, says that's virtue signaling as well. Um, Don't you wish you were as strong as I am that I can take a break from social media? All right, that's fair.

Kevin 1:18:11
That's totally fair. You don't have to announce it there. How about that? Right?

Bob 1:18:15
Yeah. Just do it and be quiet about.

Kevin 1:18:17
Yes.

Do you think there's a podcast version of virtue, virtue signaling? And did you just do it, Bob? I'm just asking asking for a friend.

Bob 1:18:27
Yeah. I do it all the time. I'll admit it. So

Kevin 1:18:31
mental health is something I've always struggled with. And technology sort of exploits those flaws sometimes. And it sucks. All right, back to you, Bob. What's your number two shitty thing.

Bob 1:18:45
My number two bad thing. We've already touched on this apps to collect data in the combination for now is that hold the Cambridge analytics thing? Or Cambridge Analytica. So basically coming out with apps that are viral in nature basically designed to help create that 3d avatar that data avatar of, you know, citizens around the globe. So that's my number two

Kevin 1:19:09
took me out to city. It took me a while to figure out that Oh, wait a second. How do you the original way of funding a free app is to have an ad supported and if you didn't want to ad supported the opposite of that was to pay for it. Well enter pick a pick an arbitrary time, some mid 2008, a mining 2010s. Facebook now incentivizes your free apps to to monetize that way. So you have a menu of things that could happen. You could have an app that is ad supported only app that is not ad supported, but it's Facebook supported because they're, they're shoveling all your stuff over the fence to Facebook, or you could have both. And then the third thing you could well there's like three and four here. The third thing you can have is it's you pay for it

and they still send it off

Bob 1:19:58
to Facebook. right and that's the ones will steal your data

Kevin 1:20:01
and that's the was a really pissed me off, especially Amazon. It's like, Wait a second, I'm paying. I'm a Prime member, I'm paying you 120 bucks a year, and you still have these fucking third party cookies that say, Hey, would you like to buy that? Whatever? No, I don't and when I do, I'll come back or I'll buy it Where the fuck I want.

Bob 1:20:20
Okay, but Here, take this music as a trade.

Take these videos as a trade. Oh my gosh, so, okay, so I want to finish on a good note. So we're going to double down and do okay, the bad ones are number one bad ones and then we'll go over to our number one good.

Kevin 1:20:36
How's that? Okay, well, I'll make it real easy on mine. My number one bad one was air quotes surveillance state. So it's basically what we just talked about where the culmination Yeah, yeah, it's, it's the weaponizing and let's just call it for what is the theft of your person, your persona that that of your persona,

in the real problem and

dh David Heinemeier him saying, whatever, sorry, I can't pronounce your name, right? The Ruby on Rails guy was just tweeting recently that, you know, we know it's bad, but why do we still do it? And I'll tell you why. Because there's so many hands in the cookie jar right now that it's become normalized. It's normal to steal data. And once it becomes normalized, go ahead and try to swim against that current because you're gonna have clients that say, Well, I want I want that too. Because the competitors doing this, why can't we do this, Kevin? You and your principles why, what? Why? Why? Why should you restrict me? Because I'm losing an economic advantage here, because over here, they're getting all this great data from Facebook.

Bob 1:21:38
Did you have you watched Have you finished Silicon Valley yet? I haven't yet. Oh, keep that in mind.

Kevin 1:21:46
Maybe I'm just in tune or the red is there in tune with?

Bob 1:21:48
Yeah, well, yeah. It's, it's, it's funny because it's true. Um, so my number one is Facebook in general. But the question I wanted to ask you was, do you Think so we've gone through this top 10 list almost in its entirety for good and bad. Do you think that the combination of all those good and bad things that we've that we've kind of highlighted today actually contribute to your both of our number ones that surveillance state? that such a negative?

Kevin 1:22:17
Yes.

Okay. Terrible radio have one word answer. Yes.

Bob 1:22:23
I think that's really what it boils down to you. I mean, we've covered a lot of ground. So yeah, um, Alright, so let's move to our number one positive. So let's, let's close it out on our number one positive notes. Do you want to go first, do you want to go set up?

Kevin 1:22:36
I'll let you go first. And it's really easy. My number one is actually on your list. And you may be surprised how how high it is, but mine's actually the 4g LTE infrastructure.

Bob 1:22:46
Well, and I debated on that too, because obviously that 4g LTE made most of the stuff we've talked about,

Kevin 1:22:54
yep. Everyone's pockets. It's the enabler of everything else.

Bob 1:23:00
That's a good one. I totally appreciate that. I fanboy it a little bit for number one, basically my number one, tech positive for the 2010s is Elon Musk. Everything that fine young gentleman has done from Tesla SpaceX to the boring company. You name it, even the fucking flame thrower. I'm a giant fan eaten that shit up, aren't you? I am. I think that, you know, the world needs great minds like his. And yeah, sure, he still makes money doing this stuff. But he spends a ton and he's almost single handedly responsible for saving the United States space, you know, space exploration platform, basically, because NASA is they washed out basically in the 2010s. And he helped to bring them back basically.

Kevin 1:23:51
So I look at Elon Musk is sort of the modern day, Thomas Edison, you know, insert inventor here and it's bet there was a large gap between Early 20th century inventors, and what we have today because there was a lot of just Yeah, I don't think a lot of people gave a fuck, you know, we had a lot of words in there, you know, just, you know, a lot of things happen. So, Mr. Musk,

you're not perfect, but damn, you're inspirational.

Bob 1:24:17
Yeah, I mean, you look at the Facebook's of the world, the Googles of the world, you know, the Amazons, the world, the people that are at the helm of those organizations, they're really not, even if they say they're doing it for the betterment of mankind, I don't really see a lot of positives from what they're doing. And I think our lists illustrated that pretty fairly. And I do feel like he's got a little bit of a, at least a for the betterment of mankind, backbone.

Kevin 1:24:45
So

I would like to point out, this is probably going to be the longest podcast date that we've ever done, and it's

Bob 1:24:53
close. It's definitely close. Well,

Kevin 1:24:55
you're gonna give your your honorable mentions and then actually have a list to

Bob 1:25:00
Oh geez. Okay, so really quickly because I know that we're, you know, we are pushing the envelope for length here, my honorable mentions from a negative standpoint, and I think you'll appreciate one of them movie pass is definitely one of my negative honorable mentions had such potential to. I did but it was dumb. And then the Xbox and the Xbox Kinect. I bought one in the early 2010s. And I think that the games total the number of like, in the handfuls and it just was not great. It's kind of like

Kevin 1:25:36
the light gun for the original Nintendo with that guy. You know, they had like, organic still play Duck Hunt, though. Yeah.

Bob 1:25:41
Fair enough. All right. And then my Do you want a guy of positive honor I mentioned him as well. Yeah. The commitment to teaching kids how to code in the 2010s. I feel like that was a really big movement with things like Lego Mindstorms and scratch. So I think that was a good one, and then the Xbox. So I slammed box for the negative, but their adaptive controller that they came out with in the late 2010s the commitment to inclusion in the consumer hardware world which, you know, unless you're building appliances for the differently abled, you know, there's really not much going on in the gaming world for that. So

Kevin 1:26:18
I thought that was pretty Have you actually seen the TV commercials for those controllers? Oh God, they make me ball my face. I was gonna say the same thing. I'm like, man, they're frickin touching is how all right? Yes, they are. Alright, so I'm going to go through it a little differently if you don't mind. I almost got like a timeline, just walk down memory lane of things. So in 2011, we had the first Chromebooks

Bob 1:26:42
in 2012. We had the first Raspberry Pi in 2010. That almost made my list to

Kevin 1:26:47
in 2012. We had windows eight with the Start button fiasco. Alexa fart. All right. Apple Watch was introduced in 2014. Also in 2014, we had the first eight core Intel I seven. Is she fighting? I hear something she did. She did in 2015 we skipped windows nine and went right for Windows 10.

Also in 2015, the alpha

go event which we covered somewhat in our great AI debate, I do believe or at least we had

Bob 1:27:26
talked about in the last episode. Yeah, I think we talked about last episode too, so that has definitely some

Kevin 1:27:32
talking points around it. 20 x I'm gonna go backwards little bit 2010 was when 4g LTE was released. Uber 2011 slack 2012. We did cover that. fortnight was released, I believe in 2017 ish. Wow. Yeah, felt closer. Um, and then 2017 also SpaceX landed their first reusable rockets. And then In 2012, kind of Golden sciency here, the Higgs boson was first discovered at the CERN Super Collider in Europe. Oh man, I thought they did that in Batavia. Do you want to guess when the Amazon Echo first debuted? 15 Yes, correct. 2019 saw the first starlink items go up. Oculus Rift. Pokemon GO Boston Dynamics robots, drones, Siri, and self driving cars. We're all a part of this crazy ass decade. And then one thing that will probably talk about in the future in 2019, Google achieved quantum supremacy Bob, do you even know what the fuck that means? I had to look it up.

Bob 1:28:48
I think they were the first one to actually develop true quantum computing, right?

Kevin 1:28:54
They are but quantum supremacy allegedly means it is that means that this computer can do With a quantum computer that no traditional computer can do as in if you use the regular modern day computer to figure could never complete the right right. It would just take crazy amount of time. So infinity amount of Exactly. And then oh, I did forget the most important one that Trumps all this technology. The Bob & Kevin show started in 2017.

Bob 1:29:24
Ooh, nice. I like that one.

Bob 1:29:30
Well, I can't think of a better way to close it out and that can you I cannot this was a good one. Also the longest one, maybe? Yes. So if you made it to the end, find us on social media. Have a great week, and we're back on a regular schedule.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ep. 061 - Will your next job interview be conducted with artificial intelligence?

This episode could perhaps be a Bob & Kevin Show FIRST! We stayed focused on on a single topic for a full hour... and this topic is right up the BK Show alley! In episode 61 we discuss the use of artificial intelligence for the job interview process. We did pick on https://www.hirevue.com/ because they surfaced in an article from our friends over at Recode - https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-intelligence-ai-job-screen.

One of the things that really caught our attention was the references to A.I. "eliminating bias and discrimination" - so you know we had to jump on that.

We also found a couple videos offering advice if you are ever asked to participate in an A.I. fueled interview process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2VnJOw5Cd0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BlTO3jURwk 

Take a listen to the episode and let us know what you think... heck, just let us know that you read these descriptions of the episodes :)
https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow

Thanks for listening!
Bob & Kevin

Ep. 060 - Black Mirror season 6 sneak peek and best tech gifts for Christmas 2019

This week, Bob & Kevin challenged each other to write episode teasers for two possible Black Mirror episodes - and we think you will like what we came up with!

We opened the show with some discussions about China and Russia and their new regulations related to software within the boundaries of each nation.

What would a mid-December episode be without a discussion about the best tech-related Christmas gifts of the season? Bob & Kevin discuss three tech gifts each, with a couple bonus gifts as well.

As always, hit us up on twitter - and give us some feedback about the episode - maybe there will be some free swag in it for you! If you listen on Apple podcasts, please consider rating the show, or leaving a review and if you listen on Spotify, like most of our amazing listeners... thanks, and keep downloading!!!

Thanks again,
Bob & Kevin

Ep. 059 - SpaceX Starlink - Elon Musk and the top 10 tech CEO salaries

This week we took a look at the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation project and the potential positive and negative impacts.

We referenced this video as a jump off point - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU

If you listen to the end, you will learn about a give-away we have going on.

As always, feel free to reach out to us on twitter - https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and let us know what you think of this episode or anything else we have covered!

Thanks,
- Bob & Kevin

Ep. 058 - Jeffery Epstein did not kill himself memes, social media engineering political viewpoints and Joe Rogan #1386 with Matt Taibbi

In this episode Bob & Kevin discuss the recent troubles with YouTube and content geared towards children and the violation of child data privacy rights. We also discussed how the various social media platforms each have their unique rule sets and personalities.

We also tackled the apparent flooding of social media with Jeffery Epstein memes and how they are influencing public opinion and speculate what (or who) may be driving this agenda.

As always, feel free to reach out to us on twitter - https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and let us know what you think of this episode or anything else we have covered!

Thanks,
- Bob & Kevin

Ep. 057 - Apple credit card and Goldman Sachs algorithmic bias analysis and is cord cutting really working out the way we wanted it to?

In this episode, Bob & Kevin kick things off discussing all the various streaming services that are popping up as fast as javascript libraries were a couple years ago. After the break, they get into the meat of the episode and discuss the topic of algorithmic bias and the recent accusations against the Apple credit card and Goldman Sachs.

Feel free to reach out to us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and let us know what you think. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider giving us a star rating and/or leaving us a review - it is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for listening!
- Bob & Kevin

Ep. 056 - Is TikTok really a Huawei sized problem or is it the new cheap keyboard you just got - and did Edward Snowden foreshadow all of this?

Bob & Kevin continue their crusade against sketchy tech practices and in this episode discuss how the U.S. Government is taking issue with Tik Tok because it is an app developed out of China and it might be stealing our data... but apparently Facebook, Google and the like are just fine, because the government can actually request any of their data - or so Edward Snowden says!

We talk about some other tech stuff too. Hey, as always, reach out to us at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or what you want to hear us discuss more of.

Thanks for listening!

- Bob & Kevin

Ep. 055 - Is zuckCoin aka Libra and their digital wallet offering Calibra f*cked before it is even reality?

In this episode Bob & Kevin break down the recent House Financial Services Committee hearing with Mr. Zuckerberg defending his pending crypto currency, Libra and the digital wallet service for said crypto coin, Calibra. We thought he hearings were both informative and entertaining with plenty of content to make fun of!

Speaking of making fun of stuff... feel free to make fun of Bob for his HUGE technical mess up with his microphone. In the open you can even get more detail on how funny the opening exchanges of the podcast actually are :)

As always... hit us up on the tweeters - https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow [but don't complain about Bob's mic -- really ;) ] and let us know what you like or don't like about the show or let us know what tech related topic you would like to hear us discuss next.

Thanks!
Bob & Kevin

Ep. 054 - Snowden speaks recap of Joe Rogan Experience #1368 with Edward Snowden and the implications of mass surveillance

Well, since everyone on the planet appears to be talking about Edward Snowden, we thought it was time that we weighed in. Bob & Kevin both recently listened to Mr. Snowden as a rare, remote guest on the Joe Rogan Experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efs3QRr8LWw) so we had to talk about the episode and a bunch around mass surveillance, our darn cell phones and how facebook just ruins everything for all of us!

We also discussed how the US government is basically in a "no lose" situation with Snowden and that Ed is basically in a "no win".

Of course, we discussed the area in the Snowden interview where he brought up aliens... and we had thoughts!

Feel free to message us on twitter (https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow) and let us know what you thought of this episode!

Ep. 053 - Speedboats vs. air craft carriers: Apple Catalina dumpster fire, rapid fire windows updates, Stack overflow ass-hats, rural tech issues and more alien tech discussions

In our latest episode, Bob & Kevin (self-proclaimed tech pundits) discuss the new release cycles for our major operating systems, the ettiquette (or lack there of) on stack overflow and how there is a definite developer drought in rural America. Listen for Bob's struggles with the word rural several times and try to coin the phrase "tech desert"

Kevin is desperately seeking a tech meetup in the middle of nowhere - can anyone help him out?

Bob & Kevin took some time to decunstruct the most recent #demDebate as it related to "big social" and the implications of social media in our current election cycle.

Somehow, we looped it all back to darn alien technology and propulsion that has yet to be figured out. F*cking aliens!!!

Got thougts on this episode? Hit us up on twitter - https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow our DMs are always open for you to comment - or just at us... as the kids say.

Ep. 052 - The tech of weed - Bob & Kevin talk flower, shatter, edibles, THC, CBD and how tech plays into it all

oh, and we were both on edibles when we recorded this episode...

So, we are learning that the more episodes we do, the more we learn tech is integrated into pretty much everything. This week we discussed the technology of making marijuana based products, the tech of consuming some of those products and some of the tech driving the industry and where we think that tech is going.

We also spent some time discussing the various laws around cannabis growth, consumption and sales.

As always, we are STILL interested in hearing from you (our loyal listeners) about the topics we discuss and if you would like us to cover a particular topic.

https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow - DMs are OPEN!

Ep. 051 - A look back at aliens, moon technology, Joe Rogan Episodes and fifty shades of podcasting fun!

Yup, we did a retrospective on our 50 podcast episodes so far. We even talked a bit about our old YouTube channel experiences and how that led to our illustrious podcasting career... well, career in air quotes... we still have our day gigs!

We looked back at our most favorite and our least favorite episodes - let us know what you want to hear more of in our next 50! https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow

Ep. 050 - Seven tips to monetize your podcast - plus we talk Atlas the robot, building your personal brand, Between Two Ferns the movie and more.

In this episode we celebrated our 50th! Sure we had about 30 or so YouTube Shows (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmOHJDCtT0THNKW49Ghxtmg) but can you believe we have recorded FIFTY podcast episodes!?!?!

We have been tackling some heavy topics lately on the show, so today we decided to talk some tech headlines and see where things took us.

We talked about the latest iteration of the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(robot) in addition to how the idea of the "personal brand" has evolved since we got in "the game". 

We took a look at some recent press about podcast monetizing and the various options out there, plus much, much more! As always... if you want to leave us a comment, feel free to hit us up on twitter - https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow

Rumor has it, if you send us a DM, we will reach out to you with a very special gift! DO IT... DO IT NOW!

Ep. 049 - The tech of sex: from leading edge adult video technologies to vibrators with phone apps to full blown A.I. sex dolls

So, this week we decided to discuss the role of technology in the adult entertainment/porn/sex industry. We did do some research and all the links can be found below.

We started with some banter about a the recent admission by the U.S. Military that some videos of UFOs were indeed authentic, but then we quickly got into the main topic - the tech of sex.

We started the discussion around web technology and how the "adult industry" really has been the birthplace of many technologies used throughout the web today. We also discussed how sites like pornhub.com make their stats available for research and how staggering some of their numbers are.

We then moved onto app controlled, self-pleasure devices and the Autoblow A.I. v3.0 - yeah, we are not making this crap up!

We then moved onto the sex doll industry and the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence in the latest iterations of sex dolls. 

Definitely listen to the episode and please check out some of the research we used for this week's show... it might not be the most "safe for work" research, but it is interesting for sure.

Documentary films:

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/sex-robots-us/
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/substitutes/

Websites/articles:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/autoblow-a-i-replicates-human-oral-sex-techniques#/
https://realbotix.com/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yw54wj/ai-sex-dolls-are-driving-chinas-sexual-revolution
https://www.wired.com/story/ose-vibrator-ces-controversy/
https://www.vibease.com/
https://medium.com/voice-tech-podcast/sex-robots-when-ai-goes-too-far-and-why-we-should-be-concerned-fd687b2378b4

YouTube and other podcasts referenced:

Harmony, the first A.I. Sex Robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CNLEfmx6Rk

Joe Rogan #1328 with Whitney Cummings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hhc90mpKNc

also, the Whitney Cummings Netflix special - "Can I Touch It?" was referenced in the Podcast.

Thanks for listening,
Bob & Kevin

Ep. 048 - Assault vape pen ban, another Apple money grab with Apple Pro, the death of the gig economy and more

Wow did we cover a lot this week! We started with a rant from Bob on the near instant ban of flavored vape juice products in the wake of 7 deaths and still nothing to be done about guns in this country! We then moved on to discuss the recent iPhone 11 and the iPhone Pro - as you can imagine, neither Kevin, nor Bob are fans of most of what apple had to announce - but Bob expressed some interest in one of the new streaming services.

We also talked a little about a new Netflix show all in Russian and about sex bots... that was interesting! Oh, and we cannot forget AlienStock, also known as the new Fyre Festival :)

As always let us know what you think of the show by hitting us up on the tweeters! 

Seriously... DO IT!
https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow

Love always, Bob and Kevin

Ep. 047 - Can forced diversity work in tech? In podcasts? Anywhere? We discuss recent issues plaguing the Ladybug Podcast and more.

We don't typically shy away from controversial topics, but we really debated if we would discuss this topic or not - it is super tricky at best and we just want to say, we tried. Both Bob & Kevin had thoughts on how difficult it is to define what diversity is vs. should be. Heck, we even started the conversation with the fact that we (as two white males) may not even be permitted to discuss this issue... alas, we were not thwarted in sharing our thoughts and opinions (which are completely our own, btw and not those of our employers... past, present and probably not future). 

We are sure you have insight and thoughts you want to share with us on this topic and maybe you want to even call us out for some of our views... feel free to so at https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow 

oh, and if you want to give a listen to the Ladybug Podcast - you can check them out here: https://ladybug.dev/

Thanks for listening!

Ep. 046 - Enter the Matrix! How do we know that we are not living in a simulation? Elon Musk, Neil Degrasse Tyson and others think we may be living in a simulation!

In honor of the newly announced Matrix 4, Bob & Kevin tackle the tough (and trippy question) 'How do we know we are not living in a simulation or the Matrix already?'

We did a little bit of research (see links below), but mostly we just had our minds blown by things like "The Mandela Effect" and the "fact" that maybe Sinbad did not star as a genie in the movie Shazzaam in the 1990s... what the heck!

Anyway, we hope you like this one... peep our research links below, and let us know what you think!

Cold Open chat - https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/27/20834974/youtube-ceo-letter-open-susan-wojcicki-creator

Main Show Stuff:

https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/15-irrefutable-reasons-we-might-be-living-in-a-simulation.html

https://www.thethings.com/15-unsettling-signs-that-we-are-actually-living-in-the-matrix/

https://elonmusknews.org/blog/elon-musk-quotes-about-living-in-a-simulation

https://www.philosophyzer.com/the-allegory-of-the-cave-by-plato-summary-and-meaning/

https://www.simulation-argument.com

Ep. 045 - Gun safety tech - Smart Guns, Second Amendment and the NRA and some Joe Rogan #1138 with Ted Nugent

So, this week we take on the VERY controversial topic of how, if at all possible that Gun related technology can help solve some our our issues with gun violence here in the good ole U.S. of A. But before we could tackle that topic, Bob & Kevin shared their personal stances and experiences with guns. Once we got past the setup, we were able to discuss the various smart gun technologies that are currently being worked on, and more importantly, we discussed the potential reasons WHY this tech is not widely available or sold here in the states. If you are interested in some of the tech we discussed, feel free to browse this resource to learn more: https://smarttechfoundation.org/gun-safety-technologies-2/

Also, feel free to jump on over to hear Joe Rogan discuss some gun related issues with the Motor City Mad Man, aka Ted Nugent here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yp6ZdCIE3k 

Let us know if you have issue with our discussion or want to simply add to the conversation - find us on twitter: https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow

Ep. 044 - The Great Hack - Cambridge Analytica, Project Alamo, Brittany Kaiser and more

Bob & Kevin both watched the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack" and, of course, they both had thoughts! Tune in to hear how your two favorite tech news podcasts hosts debate how to fix what is wrong with personal data rights today.

Feel free to reach out to us on twitter: https://twitter.com/bobandkevinshow and let us know what you think of the show! Like, Subscribe, give us some stars and/or leave a review on your favorite podcast app and thanks for listening!