Summary
This week we cover a lot. From Trumps crazy pardon plan to NZ politics. We talk about a great app if you watch a lot of streaming content, and discuss the plans Reddit have.
Robots and new tech get a mention. A huge meth bust involving maple syrup. And we talk about the people trapped in a submarine near the titanic.
All this plus much more.
Links
WeFunder.com Investment – AVAWATZ
ChatGPT Designed it’s First Robot
Amonnia for Fuel
Big meth bust
Robot Bee Made by Scientists
Titanic Submarine in Trouble
Show Transcript
This transcript was generated by an AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you have questions about any of the information found here, please reach out to us.
Sam [00:00:22]:
Hello and welcome to episode 435 of the Chris and Sam podcast.
Chris [00:00:25]:
I’m Chris.
Sam [00:00:26]:
And I’m Sam. Welcome to your weekly fix of randomness technology and life, and we hope that you enjoyed the Field Days interviews that we just punched out last week.
Chris [00:00:35]:
Yes, somebody is, because there’s a whole bunch of people listening to the and wouldn’t have guessed which one was the most popular.
Sam [00:00:43]:
That’s all we’re going to say. So you make sure to check them out. They’re real short. I think the longest one, maybe seven or eight minutes, if that. Yeah, the rest are really good. But if you did enjoy that, if you did meet us and you are listening to this and you are a diehard fan, of course, now you are part of the what’s your term for in the listeners?
Chris [00:01:00]:
The Caspers Chris and Sam podcast.
Sam [00:01:02]:
That’s right. When we use Tcasp for a lot of files and stuff that we use.
Chris [00:01:10]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:01:10]:
Anyway, coming up, the 2, July 10:00, a.m. Sunday fireside chat minus the fire with us. Bring your own fire at your own house via Zoom. Don’t come rocking up. Even if you’re in Hamilton, it’s not going to work. Just get Zoom actually talking about that, if you do want to join us, we’d love to hear from you. Just come say hi. We don’t know how many people are going to be or if it’ll just be us. If you haven’t used Zoom before, Jamie Oxley, this could be you. Just download it to your phone, the app Zoom, and just make sure it is downloaded and you can open it. And then we will send you a link. Or you’ll find the link on our Facebook page and you click on that and it will open the app. And then you can join the room and we’ll have a little chat.
Chris [00:01:59]:
Yeah. Link in the Facebook thing. So, yeah, we’ll have that Facebook post up there shortly.
Sam [00:02:08]:
Yes. Will you have a link set up beforehand? Yeah, you can do that.
Chris [00:02:14]:
And I’ll send it to you.
Sam [00:02:15]:
Yes. Sweet. Okay. This week we’ve recovered from field days.
Chris [00:02:20]:
I don’t know. Have you noticed I’m wearing a scarf?
Sam [00:02:24]:
Oh, is that what it is? I don’t even know.
Chris [00:02:26]:
Yeah. No, I’ve been doing a lot of sleeping in the last couple of days.
Sam [00:02:30]:
You got the disease. You got my disease.
Chris [00:02:32]:
Picked up your disease from meeting you live at Field Days. Yeah. So I’m not sick sick yet.
Sam [00:02:39]:
Just the tide.
Chris [00:02:40]:
But I’m being careful. I am a little bit slow. The brain’s not in fifth gear. It’s still in second, so just bear with me on that.
Sam [00:02:51]:
Let’s get on with Chris’s favorite segment, Trump. We were going to bring this up the other day, sort of. We mentioned it off air and we said we’re waiting till everything pans out.
Chris [00:03:02]:
Yeah, well, I I just want to talk about one thing that I know, I know. I don’t want to talk about all of Trump’s stuff because it really is I just don’t want to know. But he did a couple of interviews, or he did one interview that was played over two days in Fox News. And the first one, everything’s about the documents and all the rest of it. But this other thing was just a policy thing that just cracked me up because I actually saw it on Shorts first, and then I saw some videos about it. So the interviewer on Fox News, brett Beer is a guy that considers himself a real news guy as opposed to the propagandists, which is cool. So he did ask him some hard questions. So Trump says this thing, he goes, oh, this woman, she’d been in prison for 22 years. The had 26 more or 28 more to serve or something like that. And I pardoned her because I’m a good guy, because I pardoned her. That’s the power of pardoning.
Sam [00:04:02]:
Okay, there’s something shady about the story.
Chris [00:04:04]:
And he goes, what happened there? Well, she was in prison for 50 years. She got sentenced for 50 years because she talked about doing a drug deal with marijuana on the phone. They caught a phone record doing this. So they sentenced her for 50 years. She served whatever it was, 24 years or whatever, and I’ve released her, let her go. And Bear is like, okay, but with your new policy that you’re putting forward, she would have the death penalty. And he goes, yeah, well, it depends how severe it was. And Brett’s got it all written out. He goes, yeah, no, because she had already had this conviction beforehand and this had happened. And this had happened. So you would have killed her. And he goes, yeah, but until after the policy comes in, like, if the policy comes in, I’m not going to go back and kill her. It’s only if she’d done that after moving forward. Moving forward. But you’re just making this whole point to say that you were compassionate, but.
Sam [00:05:20]:
You would have killed her.
Chris [00:05:21]:
Yeah, but if the death penalty was in place, the would never have made that phone call. He’s an idiot. He’s a freaking idiot.
Sam [00:05:33]:
Just reminded me talking about our local idiot luxon.
Chris [00:05:38]:
So what has he done there?
Sam [00:05:41]:
The basis of it is and you can disagree with us if you’re listening to this, you might be a big national supporter, that’s fine. But some people have said, and they explain it really well is he came from business background. He was CEO of Air New Zealand. He is not used to people saying no to him or asking him hard questions. Yes. And because of that, when they question him on things like, you brought another Tesla and the, you claimed the rebate even though you said, oh, labor’s screwing everyone because your ute is going to cost more now because all the rich people are going to get this rebate. He’s got no reply to that. When they say, well, did your wife purchase it? Or you don’t know. He has no idea.
Chris [00:06:34]:
Anyway, yeah, I’ll be honest, I haven’t followed him in New Zealand. No, there’s not much to follow. And I haven’t listened to him. The only thing I have seen, and I don’t know if we talked about this, but Wayne Brown, and he did that budget discussion thing, he had this whole long it was 40 minutes long. And I listened to that. I was going for a walk and I was just listening to it on YouTube and I was just like cracking up.
Sam [00:07:02]:
This guy’s a moron, he’s off the rails.
Chris [00:07:04]:
Did you see him holding the Kit Kat?
Sam [00:07:06]:
No. It’s time for a break. And he’s holding this KitKat for all these people. And then people were Photoshopping him holding like Pokemon cards and stuff. Hey, anyway, what an idiot.
Chris [00:07:15]:
Anyway, sorry.
Sam [00:07:17]:
And then on the labor side, that Michael Woods got fired. Just quit yesterday.
Chris [00:07:20]:
I did see that on the morning TV or something. I turned morning TV on. First time ever.
Sam [00:07:26]:
Yeah. So I think Hipkins was a bit lost when they had to do an emergency press conference yesterday and he was just like, I don’t know. I don’t know why he’s done this. I just don’t know. Because he keeps forgetting about all his investments.
Chris [00:07:35]:
Yeah, he got twelve months here. Was supposed to divest himself of the Air New Zealand shares and didn’t as the Transport Minister. What a freaking idiot.
Sam [00:07:45]:
Yeah, but now he’s got Shares and Spark and all these other companies as well. He’s anyway, enough of that.
Chris [00:07:51]:
I didn’t know he left.
Sam [00:07:53]:
I’ve got an app for you. It’s called just watch.
Chris [00:07:55]:
Just Watch.
Sam [00:07:56]:
Download it. It’s got some yellow triangles. If you’re looking for the icon, just watch. It is an app that tells you what’s on all the streaming platforms, no matter where you are in the world. So it says, what’s coming up next, what’s new? You can search by a genre and you click on it and it goes, yep, you’re in New Zealand suite. Okay. This is on Netflix or it’s on Apple TV or it’s on whatever, and it’s really good at getting ideas of what you may need to go visit your Uncle Torrent and potentially get if you don’t have a said streaming service.
Chris [00:08:31]:
I was just going to say yeah, it doesn’t give you those things, but yeah, that’s cool.
Sam [00:08:35]:
I like that. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t even know exists unless somebody’s talking about it. Like, I don’t know what’s on Apple TV half the time. So yes. Have you been keeping up with Reddit in their craziness?
Chris [00:08:50]:
Actually, MFM is the only thing that really oh, yes.
Sam [00:08:56]:
I haven’t even listened to that.
Chris [00:08:57]:
The talked about Reddit and what was going on with this thing. So that’s all I know.
Sam [00:09:02]:
I’ll tell you what I know, and we’ll see how we match up. I don’t know. So Reddit has decided to start charging.
Chris [00:09:09]:
For the API access, similar to what Twitter did.
Sam [00:09:12]:
Yes. And for some of the biggest platforms out there, like the one on iOS is going to be $20 million a year just to cover that bill. So they’re like, Nut, we’re out. But at the same time, Reddit is sort of pushing their official app, which is really, really crappy, and it’s really bad for moderators to use. So in the meantime, just recently, some really big subreddits have decided to be not suitable for work and start publishing random adult content. So you could be looking at something about cats or dogs or that’s interesting, and you see a hairy butthole. And the reason they’ve done that is because there’s no advertisements allowed to be shown normally on not suitable for work subreddits. So now the head guy from Reddit, the CEO who nobody likes, he has just started removing all the top moderators. They’re all gone. And it’s just slowly crumbling because all these people are working for free.
Chris [00:10:16]:
Yeah, exactly. And that was the point that MFM was making. My first million podcast, if you hadn’t heard of talk about that before, and they were saying so the thing, the core, the backbone, the spine of Reddit, really is all these moderators mostly voluntary. Like, most of them make no money out of it. Some of them might make a little bit from their subreddits. Most of them make no money for it out of it. And they use these apps. And it’s not like this guy is making a fortune out of these apps. No, they’re paying like I forget what it was, but it’s something like ten dollars to thirty dollars a year to use his app. And he’s making a good income. He’s probably making a couple of hundred thousand a year. Great, whatever. Maybe a little bit more. But he’s not making like, he’s not he’s not ripping off Reddit. And they’re going, no. And in the calls, there’s some calls that got made public. In a call to them with the guy, he recorded a call and he said, look, I mean, people like this app. I don’t know why you’d want me to if you go with this thing, it’s going to cost me 20. I’m not making that much money. I can’t afford that. So it’s going to close. You would be better off buying this off me for 10 million and using it as your actual app.
Sam [00:11:42]:
Exactly that.
Chris [00:11:43]:
And the guy goes, are you trying to extort me? The CEO? You try to extort me? And he goes, no. And then he goes, I’m just saying it would be worth 10 million to you to do that, but you should do that. And the guy goes, oh, no, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I misunderstood. And then a week later he published. The guy tried to extort me.
Sam [00:12:06]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:12:07]:
And that’s when he released the recording and said, decide for yourself whether I tried to plus he apologized for getting it wrong on the call. So he knows that he got it wrong on the call anyway. So yeah, Reddit looks like it’s going down the Googler to me.
Sam [00:12:24]:
So originally it was Dig, and Dig failed for whatever reason, and everywhere jumped ship and went to Reddit. Reddit looks like it’s going to crumble because this API changes on the 1 July. So basically all the apps, the one I’ll go on my phone, that’s going to just stop working.
Chris [00:12:38]:
Yeah. And that’s the problem. It’s all about community. Right. These things are built on community. Dig was built on community. This is built on community. And when you screw the community, you don’t have a platform anymore.
Sam [00:12:52]:
Exactly.
Chris [00:12:53]:
I don’t know why these guys don’t get that.
Sam [00:12:56]:
Exactly.
Chris [00:12:59]:
So just on that the opposite of this, I would say, and I’m sure there’s some detractors, but is WordPress it’s not quite as community, community based, but they’ve been very focused on supporting the people that use WordPress.
Sam [00:13:18]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:13:19]:
They don’t, as far as I know, do any there’s been some big updates over the years and not everyone’s happy about them, but they’ve worked to do that. Right. So that in my mind at least.
Sam [00:13:29]:
And they’ve worked out how to monetize certain things. So there’s WordPress.org, which you self host. There’s WordPress.com, where you pay to be hosted on their platform.
Chris [00:13:38]:
They brought out automatic.
Sam [00:13:41]:
Yeah, automatic is a parent company.
Chris [00:13:42]:
Yeah, but the Automatic did all the these are the additional benefits, bells and whistles that you can and to WordPress, whatever.
Sam [00:13:50]:
Yeah. So I think they brought Jetpack, which I think was an individual thing. Yeah. All sorts of random stuff. And they own what I see, though, they automatic owns a really big random app or something because all the other that was at the bottom, I can’t remember what it was.
Chris [00:14:05]:
I can’t yeah. Anyway, that’s cool. All right. So I have neighbors, they’re climbing the stairs.
Sam [00:14:11]:
That’s right. For a second there, I thought they’re going to stare in the window and say hi.
Chris [00:14:16]:
All right, so I wanted to mention kickstarter, drop kick, sorter.
Sam [00:14:22]:
Sorter, okay.
Chris [00:14:23]:
Sorter.
Sam [00:14:23]:
How much money do I need?
Chris [00:14:26]:
Minimum investment is $250.
Sam [00:14:29]:
Nice.
Chris [00:14:31]:
It’s actually wefunder.com okay. And so it’s an investment kickstarter, crowdsource, crowdfunding thing, rather than a buy a product.
Sam [00:14:43]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:14:44]:
So that was the first thing I was interested in that I’m like, oh, I hadn’t come across this. I sort of knew that they were out there, but this was the first one I’ve actually looked at. And I’m like that’s. Interesting. And it’s called Ava Watts. A-V-A-W-A-T-Z Is the company okay?
Sam [00:15:03]:
Ava Watts. Good already. I’m already on board, yeah. What’s it doing?
Chris [00:15:07]:
It sounds very Indian. Because it’s probably very Indian.
Sam [00:15:11]:
Are you sure on that? Or are you just saying that?
Chris [00:15:15]:
The CEO. She’s Indian.
Sam [00:15:18]:
It’s like, I’ve already been on a call with her. I’ve already placed my order.
Chris [00:15:24]:
No, but I like what they’re doing, and I think it’s a trend. I don’t know if this is Investable, although, having said that, according to this, they’ve got 166 investors. 838,812 so far.
Sam [00:15:38]:
That’s not too bad.
Chris [00:15:39]:
What they’re doing is their whole focus is turning robots into cooperative teams using AI. So the case study that they’re using, which they’ve got some funding. Not funding. They’ve got a contract with US air Force and army.
Sam [00:15:57]:
This is who you want a contract with?
Chris [00:15:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. They got the money and $20,000 for a toilet roll. It’s awesome money.
Sam [00:16:04]:
Exactly.
Chris [00:16:05]:
The markup is great. But what they’re doing is for airports, actually.
Sam [00:16:12]:
Okay.
Chris [00:16:12]:
They have drones flying across the airport, obviously in sequence, with the planes coming in and going or whatever.
Sam [00:16:20]:
Yeah, to avoid that.
Chris [00:16:21]:
Yeah, to avoid them. But the the are looking on the ground for debris. So when planes land, often bits of rubber comes off the tires or whatever, or a bolt or whatever and that stuff at 130. I don’t know what speed they hit the ground at, but that can be quite devastating if it is in the wrong place at wrong time. So they have these drones crisscross across the runway. They spot something, they signal to these little sweeper car robots scooter along a little bit, like the old Star Wars dude that doesn’t, like, Chewbacca, scoots along and sweeps it up and goes. So what they’re talking about is using and I did go through some of their videos and stuff, is using different sensor arrays. In this case, it’s drones, so they’re mobile, but they could be static sensors and different things and tying them together and using AI to do so. And I’m like, yes, that is definitely where things will be headed. And I thought it was very clever.
Sam [00:17:24]:
Now, correct me if I’m wrong. Didn’t we talk to someone or we talked about some drone thing and they were clearing fog from runways?
Chris [00:17:34]:
Yes.
Sam [00:17:36]:
Was that an actual person?
Chris [00:17:38]:
Yeah, that was something.
Sam [00:17:39]:
Oh, gosh, yeah.
Chris [00:17:40]:
That was years ago.
Sam [00:17:42]:
So we don’t know what we’re talking about right now, but at some point, somebody was talking about using drones or something to make sure fog didn’t disrupt flights. Yeah, well, that was the idea, I think.
Chris [00:17:53]:
Yeah. And I think they had tested it. They were testing it somewhere at the time, and that was a couple of years ago. So that’ll be in the show notes somewhere.
Sam [00:18:00]:
Good luck. Good luck finding talking about AI and robots and stuff. Chat GPT has designed its first robot. So the Swiss Technical University and some researchers at T U Delft, where, whoever they are, they’ve been asking Chat GPT to design a robot. And they said, what’s the greatest future challenge for humanity. And they went through it and they went through it and through it, through it. And then basically it said, you need a combat robot. That’s probably what they’re not telling us. No, but it said food production. Food supply is the biggest challenge chatting with Chat GPT. And it decided to create a tomato harvesting robot, this little robot that can go around and harvest the thing. It’s basically a mobile robot with an arm, pulls them off the plant with this little robot arm. But when they’re talking, they even started asking Chat GPT what it thought about how it should be built. And it says, make the gripper out of silicon or rubber to avoid crushing it, and a dynamic or motor is the best way to drive the robot. That’s what you need. So they sort of just kept building this thing from the suggestions, I guess.
Chris [00:19:14]:
That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. I don’t think I mentioned on the podcast, but I mentioned it to you at Field Days. I saw a video. It was a 2025 minutes video, or no, it was in the news video. So it was about a five minute segment in a 20 minutes video about this harvesting machine, or weeding machine, I guess you’d call it, in the States. And it was quite a big unit, like those big tractor units. It was quite wide. And all along the bottom were these arrays of lasers. And as the thing drove across the crops, and the crops were like barely coming out of the ground, the were like fresh crops, so I don’t even know what they were. I had some idea that might have been asparagus, but I might be thinking of something else. And as it was going along, the lasers are zapping weeds. So there’s no pesticides, no herbicides, no genetically modified, necessarily. But the zapping the weeds with these lasers as the first sprouting. So the fresh tilled soil, fresh seeded, all that sort of stuff. First Sprouts and the can tell using AI and sensors, it can go, oh, that’s a plant. Oh, that’s a weed. Zap the weed. And what was interesting was he opens this thing up, this huge box like structure, and it’s just full of servers. And he goes, this is a server farm on wheels, and that’s really where all the money and it costs him a couple of million, I think, to make this unit. The goes, it’ll pay for itself in the first year or a half, two years after that, it’s all profit. But this is where things are going.
Sam [00:20:55]:
Well, we were talking to SPS at Field Days, and they’ve got the drone that can identify the weeds. Yeah, and there’s probably a market and selling databases of that once you’ve got it down pat for certain things.
Chris [00:21:06]:
And the cool thing about the SPS drone was that it can go automated, it can go flying up, it can detect the trees, because it’s all about forestry. Go down and in an area that’s not as easy to get to. And plus, you don’t want to be carrying a big pack full of weed sprayer. Go and spray the weeds. The difference would be this is not using pesticides.
Sam [00:21:28]:
No. Yeah, it was cool talking about agriculture, because, man, we’re segwaying great here today. I got an article from The Spark, which is MIT Technology, and it’s their weekly climate newsletter. So this guy went to this New York based startup called Amogee, A-M-O-G-Y that’s how I’m going to pronounce it. And they’re looking into an alternative fuel source and they’re looking at using ammonia, which is used in fertilizers all the time, and they reckon it could possibly be really good. You can get a bunch of energy into a very small space just using ammonia. And they said they worked out in the market, the missing bit is how to use it. And so they’ve developed it and they’ve got a tractor you can just drive around and it’s powered off ammonia. But basically what it’s doing is it’s splitting the parts, hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen is using in a fuel cell to make the electricity, and then the nitrogen gas byproduct is safely released into the atmosphere. And they said it’s easy. It’s called ammonia cracking. That term. And their key invention is a chemical catalyst that helps the reaction run efficiently at a lower temperature than what is typically used. If you were to try and do that today.
Chris [00:22:49]:
Oh, nice. Okay, so I’ve got a question on that. If you did enough of this, if all the cars in the world used ammonia cracking instead of fossil fuels that they’re currently doing, would that release of nitrogen dilute the problem we have with carbon global warning warming?
Sam [00:23:12]:
Not sure. But their technology cleans up any leftover ammonia that’s not used in the reaction.
Chris [00:23:18]:
So it would be cleaner in the first place. Yeah, I can’t see that coming happening very quickly. No, because there’s not a great what’s the source of ammonia is from a chemical reaction anyway, isn’t it?
Sam [00:23:33]:
Well, yeah, I guess so, because I.
Chris [00:23:35]:
Don’T know where you get ammonia from unless you go to some of the outer planets zones of Jupiter.
Sam [00:23:40]:
Yeah, and that’s right. And it’s not pleasant to be around. It can be toxic. So there’s big safety protocols. You don’t want to suck in a whole bunch of that. They’re working on more demonstration things.
Chris [00:23:56]:
That’s fairly bad as well. That’s true.
Sam [00:23:59]:
But they’re hoping to make modules that fit together. They’re going to try and put it into a tugboat soon.
Chris [00:24:06]:
I’ve got nothing against it. I’m like, I think that’s great. And we should always be exploring these.
Sam [00:24:11]:
They reckon their estimates for low carbon ammonia sources could reach 70 million tons by 2030, but they have to come out of the planning stages.
Chris [00:24:23]:
All right, I’ve got a question for you. Have you ever heard of organoid organoid intelligence?
Sam [00:24:30]:
Oi, no.
Chris [00:24:32]:
Okay. And I’ve spelt it wrong in the notes here. It’s organoid, not organoid.
Sam [00:24:38]:
Anyway, good.
Chris [00:24:39]:
Organoid intelligence. So I saw this video from Cleo Abrams. I think I’ve mentioned her before. She does some really cool science videos and stuff. Okay. And organoid intelligence is basically where they’re getting structures to create effectively like a brain, an organic brain, except these are 3D printed structures. It’s not like they’ve got scrape somebody’s brain. Okay, that’s cool. So the video she showed was this. You see this pong being played, the ball bouncing back and pong, and it’s being played by this organic brain in a dish.
Sam [00:25:17]:
Okay. But mind blowing.
Chris [00:25:19]:
Yeah, I know. Okay, so they’ve got these cells in like, a petri dish and it’s wired to like, little wires coming off to this game and the dish is playing pong.
Sam [00:25:32]:
Does it understand what’s going on or is it just reacting to a stimuli or something?
Chris [00:25:37]:
I’ve been thinking about this for the last year or so in a very basic way, but I think the universe works to order. It just creates order out of randomness. That’s how the universe works. Like evolution is order out of randomness. Everything we do seems to come into some sort of organizational principle that just evolves, right? So these things just get thrown into a place and there is something at the essence of being that just creates order out of chaos. And it’s playing pong. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t know what pong is, but that’s what’s happening.
Sam [00:26:25]:
It’s having a good time. Apparently. This story came out just recently, actually. They’ve had this massive meth bust drug syndicate, had meth in Canadian maple syrup, canola oil. And it was coming to New Zealand and Australia and they busted it. Now the three nations said they worked on this for more than five months to unravel this elaborate scheme that was worth billions of dollars. And the Australians, they got more than six tons of meth delivered to them, so they’re just a little bit. But that was 2900 liters of liquid meth had been hidden in 180 bottles of canola oil.
Chris [00:27:16]:
Damn. I have unloaded I know. Over the years.
Sam [00:27:24]:
So when they did that, the Canadian authority swapped out the meth for a harmless substance and then just let the shipment to continue so they could follow it. So that was all good.
Chris [00:27:32]:
We swapped it with canola oil.
Sam [00:27:35]:
Yeah. Go to gilmore’s.
Chris [00:27:40]:
Sounds like a plan.
Sam [00:27:42]:
We got someone on the inside.
Chris [00:27:43]:
He’s going to unload it by hand. He loves it.
Sam [00:27:46]:
So they’ve got in New Zealand, more than three quarters of a ton of it was shipped with maple syrup, which is crazy. They arrested five men and a six. One is about to be arrested as well, face charges because that’s expensive too.
Chris [00:28:01]:
Maple syrup.
Sam [00:28:01]:
That’s what I was thinking.
Chris [00:28:03]:
Canola oil is like it’s not cheap cheap, but it’s a commodity. It’s not that expensive. You get a container worth I don’t know how much we’re talking there of maple syrup. That’s a significant insurance. You’re going to fly under the radar?
Sam [00:28:23]:
No, but in my head, it would have made more sense to send the canola oil here as well, because we go through heaps of it.
Chris [00:28:29]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:28:29]:
I don’t know. Anyway, so that happened so good on all the law enforcement everywhere.
Chris [00:28:34]:
Yeah. They had to hold off on announcing. So they did it in January and New Zealand, they’d wrapped it up. They had to hold off on announcing till the Australian wrapped up theirs, and they didn’t wrap it up till a couple of weeks ago.
Sam [00:28:47]:
All right, that makes sense. That makes sense. What else? Oh, I can tell you. Some scientists have finally made a little robot bee. They figured out how to make it fly like a bee properly. Now, this thing is so that whole.
Chris [00:29:02]:
Thing about the bee can’t technically fly, but nobody’s told it, so it still flies, that thing?
Sam [00:29:08]:
Well, it’s the six degrees of freedom. They could only ever do four at such a small scale.
Chris [00:29:13]:
Okay, explain what those degrees of freedom are.
Sam [00:29:16]:
They couldn’t work out how to do your so that’s the twisting motion.
Chris [00:29:20]:
Okay.
Sam [00:29:21]:
That’s the hardest thing for them to work out in a flying robot.
Chris [00:29:25]:
Right.
Sam [00:29:26]:
They’ve worked it out. This guy from the WSU School of Mechanical Materials Engineering, they published their report on B plus plus this week, and they said yes. It’s been decades in the making. We finally worked it out. We can fly it in little tiny buildings. It’s going to be good for search and rescue. And all of this doesn’t say so.
Chris [00:29:45]:
This is a robot with wings flapping. Yeah.
Sam [00:29:49]:
Okay, so it’s identical to a bee. Only thing is, it’s ten times bigger than a B. Yeah.
Chris [00:29:56]:
That’s still pretty good, though.
Sam [00:29:58]:
What’s, a 33 millimeter wingspan? That’s still pretty good. And it weighs 95. Well, it says 95 milligrams. Yes.
Chris [00:30:07]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:30:10]:
And that was the biggest.
Chris [00:30:11]:
Do we know anything about battery?
Sam [00:30:13]:
Not at all.
Chris [00:30:14]:
Or anything?
Sam [00:30:14]:
I’m going to say 30 seconds of that.
Chris [00:30:19]:
If you’ve got a camera on that and you’re sending it into a building, you’re going, Well, I hope they’re near the entrance.
Sam [00:30:25]:
We’re at the end of the podcast. Do you want to talk about the submarine people or not? Do you want to do that next week?
Chris [00:30:31]:
Submarine people?
Sam [00:30:32]:
The people that are trapped looking at the Titanic.
Chris [00:30:35]:
No, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know what’s going on. No, talk about it now.
Sam [00:30:39]:
Okay, sorry.
Chris [00:30:40]:
I should have led with this.
Sam [00:30:41]:
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Chris [00:30:42]:
I don’t know what are you talking about.
Sam [00:30:44]:
So you’ll love it.
Chris [00:30:46]:
Actually, just before you do this, when I went through that We Funder thing, this video, it had all this great video of these robots and all this stuff, and lots of stock footage in the. Middle of it. I was going to mention this and I forgot. There’s a submarine with no context of why there’s a submarine on this one and it’s there for, like, 10 seconds of the video. I’m like, what’s the submarine got to do with anything? Never explained. I felt like doing an space ice version right there and it’s never brought up again.
Sam [00:31:19]:
Anyway, sorry we’re going over time, but this is important. This sub is basically an improvised tube that some dude built with some off the shelf components. It’s piloted and controlled by a video game controller. And the image they showed is the identical one that you own, that one. So they use that and it has four crew and a pilot. These people were paid $250,000 each to go into this thing, to go look at the Titanic. And the Titanic is 13,000ft below the surface. Now, originally, apparently, there’s some sort of law suit where some guy used to work for this company and was like, it’s only rated for, like, 1300ft.
Chris [00:32:02]:
There’s a difference.
Sam [00:32:03]:
There’s all sorts of randomness going on. I don’t know. They reckon it’s got 96 hours of oxygen. They reckon the billionaire owner didn’t raise the alarm soon enough. This thing is not tethered to anything. Apparently, they’d use text messaging to talk to people. They reckon maybe about an hour, as we’re recording this, probably an hour or two of oxygen left. A plane. God knows what technology this plane has got has found some faint banging in the sea because they don’t know where it is. They just know it was going from this point to the Titanic and it didn’t come back. And most submarine.
Chris [00:32:46]:
Is there not a boat above?
Sam [00:32:48]:
No, it just started cruising around by itself. It’s just like this thing. Yeah, it makes no sense. None of it makes any sense. Submarine experts are saying normally I can’t remember what the term is, but there’s a term where it dumps out and.
Chris [00:33:01]:
Then it drops ballasts.
Sam [00:33:02]:
Yeah, there’s a technical term for it, but that is what it’s doing. And then it’ll come up and they said it hasn’t done that. So it’s either stuck or they’re dead. Or it just imploded on itself because of the immense pressure.
Chris [00:33:14]:
Yeah. Or even parts of it imploded, which is even worse. If it imploded, they’re all dead and they wouldn’t have known much. But if parts of it imploded, so it can’t work, it’s lost power and it’s just sitting there at the bottom of the ocean and they’re suffocating. That would be pretty bad.
Sam [00:33:28]:
The clock is ticking. Oh, here we go. So the next update here, they’re focused on a large remote area of the Atlantic where they found some noises. They don’t know what the source of the noises are. Might not be from the sub. It had 96 hours of emergency oxygen, which will run out at 10:00 tonight. So it’s got a I don’t know how up to date this is or what time zone they’re using.
Chris [00:33:50]:
Yeah, time zone.
Sam [00:33:51]:
Exactly. A French vessel carrying an underwater vehicle capable of diving deep enough to get down the is on its way.
Chris [00:34:00]:
But what does that mean when you’re talking about a vast expanse of the Atlantic? It’s on its way. It could be three days away.
Sam [00:34:06]:
Exactly. So the British billionaire Hamish Harding is on board Ocean Gate, which is the company that owns it. The CEO, Stockton Rush. That’s a strong name. They’d been warned about this experimental sub could pose catastrophic safety problems. And he fired all the people and then sued all the people that said that. Anyway, that’s what’s happening. That brings us to the end of the podcast. Next week, we might have a little.
Chris [00:34:31]:
I’m waiting for Coffee Zillow to do his thing on this, then.
Sam [00:34:35]:
Yeah, maybe. So. We’ll have an update next week. I’m sure they’ll either be found in some sort of condition or not. And okay, till next time, I’m Sam.
Chris [00:34:44]:
I’m Chris.
Sam [00:34:45]:
See ya.
Chris [00:34:45]:
Bye.
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