TECH009: Data Centers in Space, AI Education, Haptic Touch Robotics and More w/ Seb Bunney

26:15and the temperature is changing every 45 minutes because that's how fast you're going around the planet, at least at that distance for the ISS. They might be 45 minutes in the sun, 45 minutes on the dark side of the earth, and then 45 minutes in the sun again. And the temperature of the tools and all of your equipment is swinging by hundreds of degrees in both directions every 45 minutes. And so my question when I was in Lugano was, I remembered this from Tim and I'm thinking from a reliability standpoint, the hardware, could you imagine just that hardware cycling through those temperature changes every 45 minutes and what that would do to the hardware from a reliability standpoint, I would think would be disastrous.

26:55So I asked this guy that question and he said that there's orbits that you can put the satellites in that will keep it more in the sun than it's cycling every 45 minutes on, 45 minutes off. So that was his answer to me during the thing. But I guess for me, I'm also looking at it just from a reliability standpoint. Maybe it's not as harsh. Maybe this is a better environment. I don't know. It's a fascinating discussion. But the point that I could never get over was the reliance on the price reduction going down by 10x just to get it into orbit. And then it's got to work and the reliability and all these other things that are completely secondary to this massive hurdle.

27:36And I mean, he's calling it a moonshot. I think it's really fascinating that they're doing a test run on this. But as far as the actual viability and whether it's actually going to happen, I don't know. It seems like it's just so out there. It's just saying that. I remember reading something years ago, and I think I was just looking up on Google. I think it's called Kessler syndrome. And it's this idea that the more stuff we send into space, we obviously already see on Earth, the amount of solar farms, all you need is a giant hailstorm, and you've just decimated like millions of dollars of solar basically solar equipment what happens in space when an asteroid belt kind of comes i don't know flying through and just kind of like decimates a whole bunch of this material and then you've got all of this space junk like flying around at speeds in excess of tens of thousands of kilometers an hour and they're just nailing into all of these satellites like is there a point where by us sending all of this stuff up into space we're impeding our ability in the future to be able to go further afield and such.

28:35Yeah. Evidently, it must not be too much of a concern because I don't think that they would be going through any of these hoops if they didn't think that it was a very viable path, if they could overcome some of those hurdles like the 10X reduction in the space cost for launch. Let's go on to the next one. And if you are a person who's tracking this and you want to share some information, I would love to learn more. I find this whole thing, this whole idea just super fascinating. Okay. You wanted to talk about custom learning. Is that right, Seb? Yeah. Okay. Let's do this one. Yeah. So long story short, someone ended up posting a lady called Steph, S-T-E-H-U-T, and she was asking about what does AI do for the world of learning?

29:15And this one here, I find really, really fascinating. So I was kind of digging around and I was just like, huh, I wonder where is AI in the world of learning right now? And even from my own personal learning, being able to have this AI bot feed me information about my curiosities has helped me understand the world from such a different lens. So anyway, as I kind of did a little bit of digging, it turns out that I think it was back in September, Google released something called Google's Learn Your Way. Now, in essence, this is basically like a living dynamic tutor that's tailored to each individual's kind of pace, their interests, their background.

29:50And so it can take can ingest these static, one-size-fits-all textbooks. And it's able to take that material and convert it into basically, depending on your grade level, your interests, your learning preferences, it's able to create mind maps, audio lessons, narrated slides, interactive quizzes. And so the way that I'm seeing this is this could profoundly change our educational systems. At the moment, when we think about what is the school system, when you go all the way back, we've come from a bit of a Victorian era where we were trying to create a labor workforce. We want people to do very specific tasks.

30:23And when the bell rings, you move on to the next task. And it didn't really incite curiosity. And so what's really cool about this is I think as AI is taking over a lot of kind of the knowledge worker space, as robotics in the future is going to take over potentially some more of the manual labor space, I think where humans thrive is in more of the creative space. So I think some of these like AI tutors are going to profoundly change the way kids are able to be curious because imagine being in a classroom but essentially having a one-on-one teacher at all times being able to support you. And so if you're getting a question, I don't know, a math question or a physics question or a biology question, and then they're able to phrase it in line with your interests, that is hugely going to increase your ability to learn.

31:10And so already in very early tests, it looks like students, they're increasing their recall rates by like 11 % plus just on recall tests. And to me, I was like, well, that's quite low. I was expecting it to be like hundreds of percent. But I also believe that that is only going to increase as this technology becomes far more efficient and kids are able to communicate in a way that gets information that is in alignment with their level and their understanding and such. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Curious about online trading, but haven't taken the first step yet.

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35:26Just look at your kids. Anybody that's got kids, between one and the other, they learn very differently. Some have to go through examples. Everybody has a different way of learning. I'll give you an example. I love audiobooks. I prefer an audiobook over the physical. I actually, I prefer reading to me as I'm flipping the pages ultimately. But if I had to choose one over the other, I would actually prefer the audio version because I just kind of learn that way a little bit better. And it's different for everybody. And so just as an example, the AI is going to learn these different techniques that people have or that's most optimal for them, the best way to frame it.

36:07As a funny example, when I was a student at the military Academy at West Point, we would always have these tests that were framed from, like, if you're in a math class, it was like, you have an artillery round and you're going to shoot it at whatever. And it was like always framed for some type of military example. And we would always roll our eyes and be like, oh my God, can you just give us a normal question and not some military type question. But I use that as an example to frame the framing of the thing. Let's say your kid is, he loves football or your daughter loves dance or whatever. The examples could always be framed in a way that is exactly what they want to hear and how they want to think about it.

36:49So I think that that's going to be huge. Now, the part that I think is still lacking, when we went through COVID, the kids had to do online Zoom call classes. And to be quite honest with you, Seb, it was disastrous. Like it was just, it was a train. Anybody who's gone to in-person education versus, you know, learning through a computer screen, like there's some advantages for the computer screen, but there's a lot of advantages to like in-person. And I wonder if once you start getting into, I don't know that everybody would agree with this, but maybe the humanoid robot AI is going to maybe have a difference because you're having an in-person interaction.

37:32And so where are we in 10 or 15 or 20 years with respect to some of these ideas with AI learning? Once you put something into the physical environment and you could go over to a chalkboard or you could go on a field day and you could see whatever, I don't know. I think that the learning kind of takes on a whole new level when you start incorporating it into physical space versus just always looking at something on a computer screen. And maybe you can do that with a VR environment. I personally don't like these things on my face. I find them to be highly annoying, but some people might like it or learn that way as well.

38:06Preston Pyshko I think you were spot on. And I think that's a really important point to kind of mention, because I think that when we're talking about any of these points in any of these tech podcasts we do, we're kind of talking about what is the newest technology and how is it impacting us, but there's always going to be pros and cons to everything that kind of interacts with us and our world and how we show up. And what I think about when I think about education is that the knowledge is one aspect of it, but when we're in school, when we're around our peers, when we're interacting with our teacher, there is also the human connection.

38:35And I think part of during our developmental years while we're in school, we're also learning how to regulate our nervous system. And so we're co-regulating with the teacher, the teacher, when they're calm and grounded, that helps us learn. And so what does that do when we're replacing these physical beings with this digital entity? Is that digital entity going to be able to be emotional? Are they going to have that empathy and that capacity to support them? Or can you just completely not replace that with a digital entity? There's far more from a resonance perspective that we're interacting with.

39:05And that's what I find really interesting. I wholeheartedly agree. I'd tell you my wife, hearing me say, oh yeah, you're going to have an AI humanoid robot teaching. She would just be disgusted by such a comment. And I think that there's a lot of people out there that probably would be like, oh my God, that sounds like an absolute nightmare of a future. And hey, maybe it is a nightmare. I don't know, but I can see the demand for some of these things taking place because I think that the customized education that you're going to get out of that is so far superior than some teacher that is an expert in history and everything comes with a history lens.

39:47And maybe the student that they're teaching hates history, can't stand history. And then everything is flavored with history for an entire year as you're sitting there with 30 other students. And so I think that when we look back at the education that you and I grew up with, it's going to be so archaic to where I think a lot of this is going, whether people like that or not. Totally. And there's that famous, I think it's the Buddhist quote, which is like, you shouldn't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. And it's just like, I think the school system, I was 100 % the fish. I was probably even less so a fish.

40:18I was a rock just laying on the floor. There was no way that I could climb a freaking tree. And so I think that school to me, I never felt like I fit in. But once I left school and I was able to find audio books, I was able to find my ability to find how I learn. Oh my God, it was profound. Amen. So I think that how do we find this balance between, I think the biggest question is, it's like, how do we find this balance between like personalized learning while also having human connection? And I think that's something that we really haven't found that balance yet. I have conversations with people all the time and they ask me, oh, what kind of student were you present?

40:51And to be honest with you, Seb, I hated school. I hated it because I didn't feel like I was ever learning something that I actually had an interest in. I was always being force-fed this stuff that I had no interest in, and it was never framed in a way that interested me. Yeah. And same experience. After I got out of college, I just started reading things that I wanted to know more about. And then I just loved it because I was focusing on things that I wanted to learn about and just truly never had that experience the whole time in high school. And I mean, I enjoyed the engineering classes I had in college, but beyond that, I like Like all the other stuff that I literally had to take a poetry class in college with a bunch of, you know, how old were we?

41:3318, 19 year old dudes all standing in, you know, a classroom reading Shakespeare to each other. Like, good God, shoot me. Like it was the worst, the worst experience ever. Cause I, I don't like that stuff. I'm sorry. If you love, if you love that stuff, I'm sorry. I don't like that stuff. And that's, that's to the whole point of this learning thing is like people can lean into finally lean into things that really interest them. And I can't even imagine what that's going to do from if you start that out early and you do it for 20 years where the person is being led down a thing that actually interests them and you're being taught by the world's greatest teacher on subject X, Y, and Z that that person's interested in.

42:13I cannot even imagine what those results would look like by the time they're 20 years old. That's the thing though. It's just trying to find that balance. I wholeheartedly agree. And it's just like, how do we achieve that? How do we find this balance? The human touch and technology, it's a challenging one, there's always a give and a take. Yeah. I have a couple AI topics that I wanted to bring up. The first one I'm going to put up here on the screen, this one's from Andre Kaparthi, the very famous AI. He was head of AI at Tesla for a little bit, and then he was one of the founders at OpenAI. To be quite honest with you, of the YouTube videos I've watched of people teaching AI.

42:49He is probably my favorite of anybody on the internet. He is such a great teacher and he makes things so accessible. And he had this tweet and I just think that it's kind of a really interesting tweet and I think it's worthy of highlighting here. He says, don't think of LLM's large language models as entities, but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask, what do you think about X, Y, and Z? There's no you. Next time, try. What would be a good group of people to explore X, Y, and Z, what would they say? The LLM can channel simulate many perspectives, but it hasn't thought about X, Y, and Z for a while and over time informed its own opinions in the way we're used to.

43:30If you force it via the use of you, it will give you something by adopting a personality, embedding vector implied by the statistics of its fine-tuning data, and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there's a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to asking an AI. So his big point here is don't say, what do you think? He's suggesting people say, who would be the best group of people to have an opinion on this? And then ask the AI, what would this group of people think? I find that to be useful and important. And it gets to the heart of a person who's literally programmed these things.

44:08He's getting at something that is showing you a bias that will give you a cleaner and more accurate answer that you're going after. So I think that that's important for people to understand. Any comments? So we may talk about this if we have time, and it's around kind of this idea of, it was a diary of a CEO podcast that both of us have listened to. And something that he mentioned that I thought was really interesting that kind of is in alignment with this is this idea that if we go on social media, our algorithm is giving us information based upon our interests. it's not necessarily giving us the objective information.

44:43And what he also discussed is this idea that if you go and ask AI, what does it think about maybe this controversial subject? Depending on your location, if in one location, they have very different views, it's going to give you that answer. If you're in another location, it's going to give you a different answer. And so I think the thing that is interesting is that you've got to figure out how to prompt AI to give you the most objective answer. And so this is something that I've personally found, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, as I've been using AI, being able to give the AI a persona.

45:14So saying like, hey, I want your perspective. If you were, say, an expert developer that has a knowledge in X, Y, and Z, I want that perspective. And so being able to look at it through a specific lens, and I don't think people ask AI to look at something through a specific lens. And with that in mind, it's just going to give us what it thinks we want to hear so that we're just more attentive to AI. Yeah. Yeah. And we are going to play a couple of clips from that interview here later on in the show, but yeah, outstanding comment. This next one's a little political and I'm just, I'm bringing it up because I find it kind of an interesting topic.

45:51The president has recently come out and he's trying to take away the state's rights. So we have 50 different states here in the US and they all seem to be coming up with their own AI laws and rules. And the president is now trying to say that there's going to be an executive order on AI this week that forces all of the states to kind of fall under the federal level AI mandate of how we're going to go about this as a country. And as a person that firmly believes in states' rights and pushing responsibility as much out of the federal government and down to the state level as possible. This one pains me.

46:33But at the same time, I'm also looking at it and I understand the logic that we're in a global race and you're up against some other superpowers that are moving out and not in a situation that one state is advantageous, the other one is not. Then the big tech companies set up shop and the one that's advantageous, but they also are concerned about the whims of that local government shifting and changing. And then they have to move all of this infrastructure to another state that now looks like it's more advantageous for doing business there. And I suspect what's happening is the president is getting pressured by the big tech companies to have something that's unilateral across the board.

47:17So they never have to think about, my words, getting rug pulled in state XYZ so that they have to then move all of this huge amount of CapEx into another state and the cost and expense, and most importantly, the time to make that conversion over to a different state. So I think what they're doing is they're lobbying him to do this. I'm curious what you think about some of this. I know this is a US topic, US politics, but I don't know. I can understand why the tech companies are doing this. They just were trying to minimize risk to them. I suspect they're the ones that are pushing on this, but if you have any comments.

47:54This regulation is something that I'm so torn on. And I think that going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I think a lot of Bitcoin has found themselves in this position where they're like, you know what, let's deregulate. We believe that the free market knows what is best. And ultimately, if you want to move towards a society with growth, you don't want to impede that information, making it to the free market. And I think the thing that I really struggle with is I don't necessarily think that it is black and white. It's either no regulation or regulation. It's somewhere in between. And like a perfect kind of example to me is something around the lines of, you can have a corporation that can be capitalizing off the destruction of the environment, and they don't have to front that cost.

48:36And so then does a regulator have to put something in place where there is going to be a financial burden for them capitalizing off the natural environment because they're making profit from destroying forest, extracting minerals, extracting XYZ from our natural environment. And so I think that a lot of these corporations, if their bottom line is obviously profit and there's no regulation, they're going to complete, they're going to continue to extract from our natural environment. And so I think the same thing is true for a lot of these AI entities. If their goal is how do we build the fastest learning, most powerful AI engine.

49:11Even if there is a risk at destroying the human race, we're just going to keep doing it. And so it's just like, does there need to be regulation in place because the free market doesn't have the capacity to push back on something like that? I'm not sure. I don't have a fully formed opinion on it because I can see it from both sides. I don't know what your thoughts are there. Yeah. From a state's rights standpoint, one of the advantages is it creates competition between the states in that if, and let's not use AI. Let's just use oil. Let's say you're an oil refinery. Let's say that citizens of one state just really don't like it because of what it does to the environment, what it does just from an aesthetic standpoint, whatever.

49:52It doesn't matter. And then another state is like, oh no, we don't care. We want all that business to come in here. We want all that commerce. So we're going to be pro-regulation around that particular industry. And this is very hypothetical, just kind of illustrate the pros and cons, the company or the state that allows this to come in and just proliferate everywhere. Let's just say that it's over the top. And it's just one of the ugliest states in the world or in the United States to live where the other one that was more restrictive is a much more beautiful state. And if you're the type of person that doesn't want to be looking at that kind of stuff, well, then you'd move, you'd vote with your feet and move to the other state in the one that's more desirable for you.

50:31Let's say there's a bunch of tax advantages in the one that is pro-oil, right? You don't want to be paying more money than you have to, so you move into that state. So in that scenario, you're creating competition for people to migrate to the state that aligns with what it is they want out of their ecosystem that they're living in the most. When it comes to AI, where this is a little bit different is the product that's being built here. I don't know that it has a benefit or a negative for that state over another one, would be kind of the argument of why, hey, this is different, because you're literally building intelligence.

51:08I think you could make the argument from a data center standpoint in the footprint that the data, and that would be the argument, is the data center and the footprint and the size of that footprint and the energy consumption of that footprint would be concerning from state to state. Some people might not want all of those data centers in their state for whatever reason. Some might love it because of the energy infrastructure that's going to be built out to service it all. So those are, you know, it's a hard one. It's a hard one. That's an interesting point, because I think the physical infrastructure, I don't believe that should be regulated on a federal level.

51:41It's just like if a state wants to open up jobs, if they want to kind of have more data centers, for sure, by all means, it's kind of that's their choice. However, when the benefit or the negative effects of a technology not only impact that state, but they potentially impact humanity or the nation, all of a sudden, it's just like a state could be making a decision that impacts far more than its locality. That's the thing that I find really, really interesting. And so, at what point do we need certain regulation because people are making decisions that are far more detrimental on a bigger scale?

52:13And then the question is, who is, and this is, I think, what gets to the heart of regulation. It's just like, cool. Okay, this is great if we can have perfect regulation. But you've got to ask who is actually creating the regulation and who is regulating the regulators to ensure the regulators are being fair. And where's the money coming from to help fund this regulation? And many times, if you look at, I don't know, the pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical regulating agencies are funded by big pharma. So it's just like there's these conflicts of interest. And so that's where it gets so convoluted.

52:45And again, we're going to talk about this Tristan Harris discussion later in the show. And if you want to go down the regulatory policy path, and if you like this particular topic, then I would highly encourage you to listen to that entire interview because it gets very heavy in this domain as to whether you should or shouldn't. And it's a very biased point of view by the person being interviewed, which is Stephen Barlett. I'm sorry, Stephen Barlett's doing the interview of Tristan Harris. Tristan obviously has a very strong opinion in that, but I think that it's good just for a person to kind of hear that counter-argument or that argument and whether it's something that they agree with or not.

53:26So let's go to the last one that I have on just the AI topics here. I'm going to put this up on the screen. And this is interesting because we're talking about Google's Titans. This person had this post here. And so like, what is this? Titans is a Google's new architecture type that gives a language model something like a real long-term memory while the model is running. And so they have a chart up here and they're showing how it's ingesting 10 million tokens, and it's still maintaining around 70 % accuracy, which I guess is insane. And it has some of the other models and what they do with 10 million tokens, and it's nowhere close to what Google has uncovered here with Titans.

54:05This one I found interesting because I find myself wanting to just put really large documents into a really long context window, asking it to still perform. And it gets laggy. And clearly there's something missing when it comes to long-term memory. So this paper came out in 2025. It didn't come out this past week, but it did come out this year. And the title or the subtitle of the paper is learning to memorize at test time. And some of the token sizes that you're putting through this thing. I was playing around with it, trying to understand how it works. And I got this paragraph that I'm just going to read for folks to think through how it's doing this.

54:47Imagine you're scrolling through your social media feed and most posts are usually stuff like memes or friends' lunch picks. Your brain, like the AI, expects that junk and mostly ignores or forgets it to save space. But suddenly there's post about a surprise concert ticket giveaway for your favorite band. That surprise grabs your attention, so you remember the details like the entry deadline and rules while letting the boring posts fade away. In Titans, the AI uses a similar surprise signal from calculations based on gradients to spot unexpected or important info in the huge stream of data, deciding to store that useful bit in its long-term memory.

55:26This way, it keeps what's valuable for later tasks, like answering questions without cluttering up the irrelevant repeats. So my immediate follow-on question for that was, okay, so then how does the AI know that that concert ticket or that particular band is a surprise in the feed? And what I got back was it's just looking at the sheer amount of training data that it was trained on, which is the whole internet. And as it's going through said document that has these millions and millions of tokens in size. It is finding something that is unique in reference to the entire data set that it was trained on.

56:07And that gradient is what's allowing it to say, oh, that was different than what I would have predicted or expected. So then it remembers it. And what I find so fascinating, so years ago, I interviewed the author that covered Claude Shannon. And when we were covering information theory, I distinctly remember him saying, Preston, it's just surprise. Like his algorithm, his mathematical algorithm is just looking for surprise. And when it was going through this Titans thing, I was just like, wow, this is literally just like information theory in order to do like long-term memory, which is just mind blowing, right?

56:46It's fascinating, dude. It's what was it? There's that word in information theory, which is if I send a letter to you, there's going to be a lot of noise in that letter. ultimately you're looking for the surprise the new piece of information and it was kind of the inverse of information information is noise what we're looking for is the signal in that noise and so it's kind of like if you've got a block of marble you're cutting away all that excess to find the statue inside and i've got blanked on that but what comes to mind as you're talking about this is there's one of my favorite ted talks i've ever listened to and i think you've read the book is by a guy called Donald Hoffman and he talks about do we see reality as it is.

57:28And he gives the analogy and I highly recommend anyone going out and listening to this, just type in TED Talk, Donald Hoffman, do we see reality as it is. So good. And he mentions, there's this, it was like a dune beetle in Australia. And this dune beetle has been around for something like 300 million years. So you would assume if it's been around for 300 million years, of course it sees reality as it is. But then the Australians started throwing these beer bottles, these brown stubby beer bottles into the desert. And all of a sudden, this doom beetle nearly went extinct because it had effectively created a hack, a rule of thumb in its brain that is, hey, the bigger, the browner, the better.

58:06And it just goes and tries to mate with these brown beer bottles, nearly went completely extinct. So the Australian government had to step in, ban beer bottles, and all of a sudden that beetle started to kind of recover. But what I find really interesting about this talk and what he's trying to kind of get at is this idea that we are not optimized to see reality as it is. We're actually optimized for survival of the fittest. And so what we do is we take in all this information, we discard all the noise, and we try and create these rules of thumb to basically maximize our chances of survival. So if there's a train coming towards us, we're not processing all this information being like, what is this thing?

58:40I wonder how fast it is going. At what velocity is it going to hit my body? And we ignore all that data. We're just like, train's coming towards me. I need to get out of the way. We've created a rule of thumb to recognize that this is dangerous. Now, the reason why I say all of this is because AI, what is surprise to the AI? What information, when it's looking at 10 million tokens, how does it know what is valuable? What is it actually optimizing for? Because we're optimizing for survival of the fittest. What is it optimizing for? And so that's where I think I'm curious to dig deeper into these models and try and understand like, what are they trying to pull out?

59:14because either a developer has had to code that in, this is the type of information that we're actually looking for, or it's figuring that out itself. And is that actually relevant? And I'm curious to hear your take or your thoughts on that. I don't know that I have enough information on how these gradients are determined. I do know that I've seen posts by Elon Musk and others that really speak to the idea that the training data set, like using the entire internet, every single thing that you can get isn't necessarily leading to the best model for task X, Y, and Z. Is it going to train, is it going to do really well for understanding English or the language?

59:53Yes. Is it going to be most optimal if you're trying to understand a medical discussion? No. So then you got to get into like, okay, so we have an AI that understands the language perfectly or near perfectly. And now Now we're going to apply that to a different model that then is more focused on the training set as to what we're putting in it. But all of that is way outside of my depth of understanding as far as how much research I've done on it. I have seen a lot of conversations by heavy hitters in the space talking about curation of the data set and making sure that you don't just put everything in there because it's somewhat disastrous or how competitive it'll be in particular tasks.

1:00:37I think that this is a really important point, which is that I think it still falls on the individual to determine what is valuable and what is not. And I think that you can have this huge, huge research study that you're kind of a research paper that you're looking at, and it's spitting out a whole bunch of information saying, this is valid, this is valid, this is valid. And to the average individual, maybe like, cool, this is rad. But to a scientific researcher who understands the subject, he's able to, again, filter through that again and separate out the signal from the noise. And I think that's where ultimately, humans aren't going to be replaced anytime soon, because specialists in their field are able to see what is valuable and what is not.

1:01:16It's just how, as Bitcoiners, we can see when there's a newspaper article or a New York Times post or whatever that says, oh man, Bitcoin is consuming more energy than Argentina. It's just like, well, that's misleading and that's not necessarily accurate. And so I think that you still need to be a specialist and deeply understand the topic to understand the validity of the output from a lot of these models. Seb, let's go to our last topic for this show. And we're running a little long, so I think we're going to have to schedule another one to put some other topics in there, because I don't even think we're going to get to this Tristan Harris discussion.

1:01:47But you wanted to talk about long distance haptic touch. Go ahead and take this topic away. Totally. So this is something that, oh man, it blew me away. I didn't even know this existed. essentially i stumbled upon this post by mario norfeld i wonder if i can even open up the post and i'll show you guys so i was kind of scrolling twitter the other day and i stumbled upon this post by mario and basically what scientists have kind of created are these long distance haptic touch and so for those that aren't familiar with this word haptic it's basically it's like how do we create flexible patches that bring touch into virtual reality augmented reality and such.

1:02:26And so it gives a little bit of information in this post, but I started to dig a little deeper and I found the original scientific study, which kind of dove into this, the actual scientific study you can find here. And it was basically called skin attached haptic patch for versatile and augmented tactile interaction. And so this is basically the abstract kind of says the first little bit, it's like wearable tactile interfaces that can enhance immersive experiences in virtual augmented reality systems by adding tactile simulation to the skin along with visual and auditory information delivered to the user.

1:03:00And so to me, what I found really, really fascinating about this is these little haptic touch patches, essentially, they are, if I remember correctly, they're 1.1 millimeters in size and they're extremely powerful for their size and they're able to create both pressure and like high frequency vibrations. So if you were to wear a glove with these haptic touches on your fingers, you would be able to, if someone else was say wearing the same glove and they went and touched textures, shapes, edges, letters, 3D surfaces, you could feel what they are feeling through these haptic touch sensors. And so what does that do?

1:03:39I think we could use this in so many different ways. Either you could basically have an interaction with someone, let's say through Zoom, you and I are talking right now. And if we went to hug or we went to communicate in a way that we wanted to involve touch, I could feel what you were feeling and have a much more like three-dimensional detailed interaction. But we could also look at it from the perspective of like virtual reality and augmented reality where you'll be able to wear certain things, whether it's gloves or a suit, and you'd be able to wear VR goggles, you'd be inside a simulation and you could be interacting with the simulation, not just from the visual sense, but also from the physical touch sense.

1:04:17And that to me, I think is mind-blowing. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on kind of this haptic touch sensor. Yeah. So while Seb was talking there, for people that are just listening to the audio, I put up a video of a company that is called Fluid Reality. And the company is putting these haptic sensors. And the way that they're using that particular company is doing is they're trying to give the humanoid robots better sensing of how they're feeling different objects and whether they should be squeezing an apple very hard or very lightly as they're interacting with it. And then you can see up on the screen right now, if you're seeing the video of a person that's wearing a glove that's training one of these humanoid hands with the sensing capability that Seb was describing.

1:05:03And when we just look at the robot's ability to do certain tasks, like let's say it's doing laundry or it's doing whatever, you can very quickly realize that the amount of pressure that it's applying to the objects that it's interacting with become really important. It becomes important from a power management standpoint, from just not breaking the object that it's holding or damaging it. And I think that haptics are a huge part of humanoid robots and where a lot of that's going to be going. And this is something that is definitely worth paying attention to. And I have a couple more videos here.

1:05:37I'm just going to quickly put up on the screen for people to see. And this is the Tesla robot for people that are just on the audio, showing you how crazy accurate the hand gestures and the mechanics in the hands are. And I don't know where they're at from a haptic pressure feedback standpoint on this particular humanoid robot, but by the looks of the hand gestures, it looks like it has a lot of sensitivity built into it. I think this is one of, from my understanding, haptic touch is one of the biggest hurdles that I think robotics is trying to overcome right now. Because it's one thing to have a robot that is a forklift truck, that is just going around doing its own thing, picking up containers, moving those containers, dropping those containers.

1:06:19But it's another thing to have a robot that, say, operates in the kitchen and can pick up an egg without crushing it, or to be able to do more pressure-sensitive things like use a screwdriver and understand when it's starting to strip the screw or starting to do things like surgery or sewing and cooking and things where ultimately I think there's a lot more fine motor skills than we really take into account as humans. Like we are being given so much information through our hands, through our sensory touch and making decisions on that information that we're doing autonomously and being able to bring that into the robotic world.

1:06:53I think we're still a little ways away because from my understanding, a lot of these haptic touch sensors can cost anywhere from like$10 ,000 to$50 ,000 for a set of hands that are able to do things like this. So we're a long way off having this available to everybody in their household. But to your point earlier, if we get a 10x improvement, like a 90 % reduction in price and all of a sudden you can be doing this for a few thousand dollars, I think it's going to be far, far easier. But again, I just think it's so fascinating, both on the robotic side of things and on the individual side of things.

1:07:27And so one thing that I just wanted to kind of bring up, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, we had a, when was it? In March of this year, we were skiing in Jackson Hole together. And we ended up having a conversation, I don't know if you remember, on are we in a simulation? We were kind of sat at our table and we had this conversation of are we in a simulation? And this idea of is AI and say some of the robotics we're using today, is it being created or is it being rediscovered? As in it already exists. And so when I think about how to do touch. What comes to mind is the movie Avatar. And I think about as humans, we want to feel a part of a community.

1:08:05We want to create value. We want to feel like we've got purpose. And so what do we do? We start to create products. We start to create technology. We start to create companies. And we go out into this world. In response, we create advancements in productivity and efficiency and such. And we start creating technology that starts to replace us. So all of a sudden, when we start to replace ourselves, we're losing that sense of purpose. We're losing that sense of like community where we feel like we're creating value. And so at that point, if society is degrading and all of a sudden there's rising rates of depression and suicide and substance abuse and all of these things, what do we do as a community?

1:08:38Well, if technology is advanced enough, you could create a simulation with haptic touch like Avatar, where we're able to step into a world and move back to a much simpler time and back to that simpler time where we can start to create value again. And then we go and do it again and again. And it's like, how many times have we stepped into a potential simulation? Now, I'm not necessarily saying this is what I believe, but I think it's an interesting thought because we are at a point where it wouldn't surprise me if in the next 30, 40 years, we're able to create simulations that feel unbelievably realistic and we can't differentiate between the physical world and more of these simulations.

1:09:19It's one of Elon Musk's biggest talking points when this topic of simulation theory comes up is exactly what you described, Seb. But we'll leave you with that thought experiment. I don't know. I don't have an opinion, but I do find it to be a fascinating thought experiment and fun to kind of just tease out. How would we know? The pace. Well, the other thing that I find fascinating or all these AI environments that are just kind of ad hoc making up. They're showing videos of these things. I don't know if we've ever put it on the screen of one of the podcasts, but maybe we did earlier. But it's just making up this environment and you're watching this video of somebody walking down a street and it looks completely real.

1:10:03And it's just being made up on the fly by AI. And then there's a bit of a memory component that if you turn around and that you saw a tree just a couple minutes ago, that if you turn around and start walking back the other direction, the tree will still be there for a certain amount of time. And yeah, it's just that environment's being made up. And so I can't imagine in 20 years where this is and then the memory recall of what's been experienced in this made up world that somebody's going around and sensing in virtual reality. And I guess I say all this because it's teasing out this idea that you bring up, which is like, how do you know what is real and what you're experiencing is reality.

1:10:43Because, you know, you go into any of these theoretical physics conversations and they'll tell you that what you think you know is not that at all. It's very, very, very different from a quantum mechanics standpoint. But anyway. Absolutely. And we've spoken about it on previous episodes where NVIDIA is creating, I think it's Cosmos, which is their like simulation so that people are able to test robotics in a simulated world before they enter the physical world. and these simulated worlds are getting so realistic now. They have fluid dynamics, they have gravity, they're able to apply all of these various physics pressures and such.

1:11:19And so I think that the world we're living in is really, really fascinating. We're at a point where we're kind of joining the physical and the digital world to the point where it's just like, are we going to be able to separate them? Because I do think that there's teenagers, there's kids that are growing up in this new world, and sometimes they get confused between what is real and what's not because of that constantly interacting socially, digitally, everything emotionally in the digital world. Yeah. All right, guys, we're going to wrap here. I hope you guys enjoyed the conversation. Seb, we'll probably do this again in like two weeks to kind of cover the other topics that we didn't even get to.

1:11:55Most importantly, we want to cover this Tristan Harris discussion on the Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett's podcast, a couple of different topics that were brought up there we want to discuss on the show in addition to more tech topics. If you guys are loving this, let us know in the comments. We're having fun. Hopefully, you're having fun hearing some of the different topics that we're bringing to you. And if you have any recommendations of things you want to hear, bring them to us on X, and we'll be sure to try to incorporate it into the next show that we do. So Seb, give people a handoff to your book or anything else that you want to highlight that's out there, and then we'll go ahead and wrap.

1:12:29Absolutely. And again, we really appreciate anyone who just kind of takes the time to give these episodes a listen. So if at any point, you're just like, oh man, I'd love to hear you guys' perspective on this technology or that technology, feel free to just like share it in the comments. And yeah, we really want to go just talk about what's happening in the world today and just kind of share our perspective. And yeah, you can find me at Seb Bunny, and that's B-U-N-E-Y on Twitter. And my book, The Hidden Cost of Money, or B is for Bitcoin. But again, appreciate everyone giving this a listen. Thank you for listening to TIP.

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