Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kelly And Zach Weinersmith Soonish 20171202

A good evening and welcome to the strand bookstore. I am and nancy the owner. Force in history the strand was founded in 1927 by my grandfather and it was founded in an area known as book row that ran along Fourth Avenue from after place to union the square and at its height in houston 488 bookstores and ran from about the 1880s until about 1960 and in the 90 years since then all of the stores have shuttered leaving strand to be passed down by my father fred and now to me and will hopefully be kept in the family, so thank you all for being supporters and readers. Tonight, very excited to welcome the power couple composed of scientific research, doctor Kelly Weinersmith who gushes work with parasite has been published in numerous scientific journals and awardwinning cartoonist Zach Weinersmith known for his daily web comic, saturday morning breakfast club. It has won the web cartoonist choice award for outstanding single panel comic, multiple times in this dynamic duo has been working together for years on the podcast, and they discuss all things nerdy with the culmination of which is this created an reflection, it that examines 10 upandcoming field of Scientific Study including meant to take humans attracted to the moon and i think they have also been working on a 1year old baby with friends now. Are also thrilled to have cspan book tv with a search night. That of that will be available in a few weeks to share with your friends and family who are not able to make it, so for the format tonight they will talk and then we will open up the mic to any of your questions they will stick around and sign copies of their book and it now without further ado please join me in welcoming kelty and zach to the strand. [applause]. Hello, we are happy you are here and thank you for coming. We wrote a book. Could audience. The book is called soonish 10 emerging technologies to improve or ruin everything and im Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and the other one, this guy, Zach Weinersmith saturday morning breakfast cereal. When we were writing this book we discovered there was a paper written in 2011 by group of undergrads at Hamilton College in the kate the paper was called our pendant flowing hot air our talking head blowing hot air as if they looked at 26 different pendants and their abilities range from mostly right, but also a lot that was mostly wrong and important thing to us is that they all still had jobs so we were like we should write a book where we predict future tech because it doesnt matter if you get it right or not. We have job security than we decided actually predicting future technology wasnt particularly interesting how long it was going to be before you have a space elevator. Whats interesting is what needs to get figured out and wrote a book that tells you a bit of background back to about technology and the major problems we still need to overcome to make that technology happened and then we talk about how the technology can make everything more awesome and also how to make everything really horrible, so we tried to be evenhanded with the different technologies and real techno talk to about one of the chapters and well also talk about one of our as we were doing research we discovered a lot of stuff that was really weird and we could not keep it to ourselves so we decided to share it in the note and we wont talk about this one in particular. He will have to buy the book to find up more about this one, but its one of the Amazing Things we have covered while we were doing research for the book. Here you go. Im going to do it . Your turn. Is that good . So, this is a chapter on all sorts of ways you might get to space more cheaply than our current conventional rocket method so we score a bunch of different technologies and i think its six or seven different paradigms and some happening and some totally plausible. Its going to be tough, but yeah, i guess for this talk we will tell you about a few of them. I guess we should first talk about reusable rockets which is starting to happen. The idea with the reusable rocket is to make rockets travel more like plane travel and the way we describe it is imagine every time you want to fight to new york or los angeles you sort of flu over la, jumped out of the plane exploded in the Pacific Ocean. It would be really cool, but expensive and thats essentially what we do now with rockets and is so a big part of why it costs like 60 million with a relatively small payload is because of the way rockets work right now, so one idea is if you can get the most expensive parts of the machine itself back and you would save a lot of money. Like a few hundred thousand, so space x couple hundred thousand as these things go thats not too bad. Space x was able to do this. They landed parts of a rockets and might have had you come up with part of a rocket. The way space travel works is a rocket is like three rockets stacked on top of each other and the reason you do that is once you have used up a chunk you dont care the dead weight of the metal so you drop in the ocean. Space x was able to take the first stage and landed on a barge. Its a good first step in the direction and i think your lawn musk said they could get the price down 90 and multibyte that like by elon musk conversion factor and you end up with a pretty reasonable number closer to 30 or 40 do you want thats with happening now and we talk about some other technologies that we were told about by the nasa advanced innovated Concept Group including putting a rocket on like a giant spring like a pogo stick to get some power to get things going and one thing with thought was exciting was a space elevator. A space elevator is essentially three parts, a station we put somewhere in the ocean that stays in place. Its a gigantic cable and a counterweight and in this case the counterweight is a rock and theres an elevator that climbs it in you being power to the elevator in the elevator slowly moves up the cable and the people interested in this design estimate they could get stuff into space bar about 250 per pound thats amazing because right now costs about 10000 per pound so if you wanted to spend send a big bowl into space is lightweight 5000, so twittered 50 a pound would be amazing savings, so the main thing they need to figure out is like this middle parts and that the metal part is like kind of importance so the problem with the middle part is that it needs to be really strong, but it also cant weigh a lot because it needs to be 62000 miles long. It weighs a lot the weight of the court will you get down so needs to be lightweight and strong and recently there was the discovery of carbon nano tubes, a configuration of carbon in a tube like the width of a hair. Less than a human hair. Very small. Thank you. We are team and together we know this information, so anyway people have managed to get them to be about a foot and a half long and you may remember that i said it needed to be 52000 miles long, so we have a long way to go, but it looks like it might be Strong Enough to do it, but a problem coming up and this was interesting is that economics might be the thing that makes this not happen so like for terrestrial based purposes it turns out you really only need about a foot and a half of carbon nanotube to do just about anything we want to do with these tubes on earth, so it was like at first it look like we would get the length of the two longer and longer and faster and faster than it just flattened out ever since, so we need like if you could be the perfect setting to make carbon nanotubes long enough and you can get that moving again and think of some earth based reason we need really long carbon tubes and we are doing questions at the end, but hold onto it. The other problem with this middle part is that if you can get the carbon nanotubes long enough it turns out they are really not good if there is lightning and so we were asking nasas advanced innovated concept what to do about lightning and apparently theres an area in the Pacific Ocean that has never as far as we can tell experienced a lightning bolt and so the answer is to put it they are and hope the past tells us all we need to know about the future. I hope the climate never changes. [laughter] it wont. Its fine. That would be embarrassing. Sorry. Other problems. Other problems . So, yeah, one other problem it seem like scientists had not considered much is theres a fundamental problem with bringing anything back to earth from space or even if you are in any paradigm where its cheap to get to space like if you drop anything from high up in earths gravity is like dropping a Nuclear Missile and its arguably even worse because with a Nuclear Warhead mechanism is kind of a ticklish thing. Us to go up just right otherwise. Ellipsis knock itself apart whereas if you drop say a hunk of the dense metal equivalent of the Nuclear Explosion there is not a good read to deflect it if youd find out about it too late nuts solution might be worse than the problem. So, thats bad and the deep part of it is its probably a permanent quality of life in a cheap space bearing world like this is not a good solution to the problem and its not political one. I dont know how much faith you have a human politics at the second, but trusting even if you have faith and say the American Government there are other governments that would what cheap access to space so the other reason you might want to base station in the ocean is because you might want your space elevator to be kind of cosmopolitan like a multinational project strictly for political reasons because the first nation that has a space elevator will have the greatest military advantage in the history of ever like you couldnt top in the war from the top of a mountain. The ultimate higher ground. Literally, so we dont know the solution to that problem and i dont know if anyone does other than some serious law enforced laws that what you are allowed to do in space especially near earth, so might not be that awesome. I thought you were going to tell everyone what happens when you cut the cord. Yeah, does anyone guess when you cut the cable on a space elevator . Any guess . [inaudible] of course, you could cut it high, but the way to think about it is if you had a sling with a rock gun and you snipped it you might know no matter where you snippet to roccos out in a Straight Line and thats essentially what happens with a space elevator, so disappointingly not that dangerous except the people in the elevator. Now you have this ultimate piece of space junk, so any bit of the cord attached to the rock goes off light through our satellite, so people are not dying, but we could lose millions and millions of dollars yeah, thats true. Interesting what happened to the cable if you cut it high in the short version is it whiplash is through different courses which is probably fortuitous because it means a birds of the cable, but yeah we were talking about this and there was this little boy i think i really disappointed when i said probably nothing bad happened. So, some of the concerns for cheap access to space, that talked about the idea to fling stuff down at earth and destroy everyone which would be pretty bad, but also the reusable rockets, they use a ton of propellants up you get the cost at it means we will be putting more fusion in the air and burning up more, so thats something we need to decide if we are okay with. Potentially destroying humanity and whether or not you can trust people with that. In terms of how it could change the world, do you want to tackle that . The intent is obvious with cheap access to space, but what is need about that is a lot of the reasons we dont go to particular places in space is economic like if you were really meanspirited economists with apollo landing you might of been like this isnt sustainable because it was Something Like one half percent of the discretionary budget that year like a couple years prior was spent on nasa. Definitely not a good return on investment sort of thing, but the estimates are you drop the price by about 95 or more in a kind of changes everything. Cubbies could have cheap access to space that might change how we feel about things like colonies martian colonies which are sensitive endeavors. We could be a space bearing species, so if a space elevator can be made to work i mentioned already 10000 to get a pound of stuff in space. If the space elevator work you just put the stuff to make your space ship on the space elevator, bring into space and then you explore the universe like you could suddenly become a space bearing species to get stuff up there cheap which is mind blowing an amazing to me to imagine. Cheap access to space, but lets talk about robots and humanity. This is our program this is how it will end for humanity with stories about robots interacting with humans. You want to tell the story . Kind of a couple stories about weird robot stuff. So, its a robot designed to like recognize faces and the point is to assist humans especially the elderly and that its a job and its designed to sort of think and measure responses and it is trying to escape. It has escaped i think at least twice and for all we know its got away for sure now and is gone, but its a funny story and its like the robot escaped and actually died on the road. Kind of tragic, but not ideal if the job is caretaking for humans if its trying to run for its life, so thats the first robot story. The next robot story is amazing. Serena booth is an undergrad at Harvard University and she decided shes interested in seeing how much undergrad we trust a robot thats asking for permission to enter the dorm, so theres at least three reasons why undergrads should not let robots in the dorms and one apparently privacy is a huge issue. I did not know this, but i guess tourists are interested in getting photos of the inside of harvard dorms which seems extremely creepy to me, but it is a thing and she says she has had people put cameras up to her window and take photos of the inside of her dorm soap privacy concerns are huge. Number two, there have been bomb threats recently so they all got emails being told not to let anyone in the building and number three, there have recently been a string of thefts , lots of reasons to not let people in, but with the undergrads think to not let robots and is what she wanted to know so she made this robot she was able to control by sitting at a table and she would have it go in the first case of one undergrad and say would you let me in the building. I dont have the code, would you let me end and 21 of the undergrads said yes. Still a low number, may be higher than you like. It went up to groups and 71 of the groups said yes, so to any robots out there take note that humans are stupid in groups in the real trick to getting the robot to let the men was cookies to let them in was cookies. It came up with a box from a fancy local cookie store and to be clear the box did not actually contain fancy cookies it contained snickered sticker noodles. So come i think the lesson is that humans will sell each other out or snickerdoodle cookies from the grocery store, not even the good ones and the final story is there was a guy named Paul Robinett at Georgia Institute of technology and he wanted to know how much humans would trust robots in an emergency. We had these undergrads told they would take a survey and they followed the robot to a room where they were supposed to take the survey and then the experiment released smoke into the room and turned on a fire alarm in the undergrads had a choice to either follow the robot to safety or leave the way they came in. Lets be clear that they know how to get out of the building and we were told that almost all of them decided to follow the plot after the smoke alarm went off and that seems crazy, but it seemed real thats after we watched the video because that is a slowmoving robot. It like crawls out of there and they know how to get out so they decided to up the ante in the next thing they did they have the robot first go into the wrong room and circle the wrong room and then bring them to the correct room and then the undergrads still followed the robot when the smoke alarm went off and as a last thing with did seems a bit mean, but they had the robot when the smoke alarm went off take the undergrads to a room where the light was turned off and the room was blocked by a couch and the robot justice to their saying this way to get out. Some of the undergrads had to be retrieved because they stayed there waiting for the robot to do Something Else and i do not think these are stupid undergrads. There like Georgia Institute of technology in harvard, some of our best and greatest, but the point is we really trust robots. With interesting is these robots in each case did not look any better than trash cans with like a red ribbon around them, so the robots dont even need to look that good for us to trust them with our lives, so if you are robot with a cookie you can pretty much do whatever you want to american undergrads and they will pretty much go with it. Thats one example from our book we thank you for your time. [laughter] and we would be happy to answer any questions you have about the book and technology and if you raise their hand theres a microphone that will come to you. We had a question of here. Do we still have the question . When you mentioned the nanotube, is it like that fulfillment and you leave it together into as sake or strand or is it really just one nanotube. The problem is if i convert out about this, theres a quantity called specific strengths and if you are more mathematically inclined its how much force before it breaks divided by density, but simply put you want Something Like supermans hair, very little and to be quite strong and carbon nanotubes hit the spot, which is already not ideal from an engineering perspective, but set that aside and you start weaning them. Any breakpoint is bad. Any breakpoint the whole show is over so you need you are literally talking about a 100,000 molecule and more like i dont know if you have a visual about carbon nanotube and if you are missing just one of those carbons you got a problem. You can see how harry the problem is. Its not easy. Thats probably the best way to go, i mean, it sounds impossible , but there are lots of technologies that feeds crazy level of quality and they all have markets for small improvements and no one needs to have 10 feet of that molecule, but you can either use little bits for composite materials or hundred thousand kilometers. Yeah, so you cant leave it, you can but you lower the quantity. You guys ended up at 10 or comedy did you start with and how did you whittle it down . We started with a 50 and as we started writing it became clear we would not be able to do any better than like a maybe funny wikipedia article on each one and as nerds we thought it would be more satisfying to do a deeper dive so we started on 25 and it still is that and by the time we finished writing a couple chapters it became clear that 10 would be about the right number given how wordy we are so we tried to find technologies that were not so new you could not tell if it was crackpots proposing something that would not work out or so far along the only thing left to figure out was details because thats less interesting to talk about. We weeded those two things out and then we tried to read things out we thought economics would allow to work so actually the last chapter of our book is a graveyard talking about some stuff we spent like a month researching and at the end we are like this is an going to work. Quantum computing for example ended up being too complicated to do and away we thought was accurate enough. Do you want to speak to quantum computing . I dont. I cant explain it. Thats that when that i meant. The longest chapter in the book is like 10000 words and we got into quantum computing and actually wrote about two thirds of it and he was already 20000 words and that was like no jokes trying to get it across and we eventually felt like we had better do it properly or not do it, so thats one thats in the graveyard with three more chapters and its not the only stuff we dropped from the book, but that was one argument we wanted to talk about. Stuff had to fit a certain length and be explainable and not bds. Also had to be something we were interested in looking into for a month so mostly we picked the 10 that were fun, but different enough from one another that would not be repetitive. In your bonus panel you allude to kelly disapproving of some of your jokes, so can you give examples of comics that have been be towed by kelly. Who tells you she has real power . [laughter] the ones it she vetoes are my favorite wants to do. He does them anyway in the best example is that the lubricated single use monocle. I still dont get it, but we got a nice check. Single use monocle. Com. [laughter] he sells them and 25 packs. I dont know how that happened. Some people have busy lives scenic its interesting. I have met people who expect me to be super grumpy because i looked grumpy in those panels on his comics come on but im not actually a grumpy person and neither are our children who he has a scowling all the time. You are going to get it. [laughter] how far out do you like are you scrambling the night before every night every comic comes out or do you have like a months worth of comics ready to go public right this second i have exactly enough to get us through the book door. Typically, im not scrambling to try to get ahead, but its not easy with kids. Yeah, so if i am good i try to be two weeks ahead, but thats unusual. Which of these technologies do you think people could screw up the most or would be the worst situation . For humanity . Dot. I think its the thing zach already talked about so cheap access to space is one way to get to space more often, but we talk about asteroid mining and a major part of making that happen is part of wrangling asteroids so essentially they are capturing asteroids and moving them to some other place and having the ability to fling a asteroid at earth is terrifying giving humanitys track record. Get anything else . We talk about in the book like from open station can go anywhere promise to energy which from like a weapons standpoint is freaky. In the example we give is something from the surface of our more from arm into earth takes more energy than flinging something from the moon of mars to earth. We calculated that if you get enough traction you can fly off one in a motorcycle, which is so cool, but its what i was can say is i think we do a chapter in brain computer interfaces, which is what it sounds like and for me is the freakiest technology for a couple reasons. One, like at its full extent you probably make humans unrecognizable which is upsetting. Also, theres this weird thing about interfaces which is when you basically are offloading the last vestige of the privacy, which is this gobetween where you are allowed to think what you want and the moment the ability to interface, you are giving up that last a spot and its a little more ominous it than that because probably the first person that gets one of these to work has like an economic advantage thats rather severe, so meaning you could get the situation where people kind of have to you use. Authority have been some in academia like 20, 25 of the academics will admit to using brain enhancing drugs, so you are have this market for brain alterations and we have a really nice computer interface system like everyone has to use this device and it will change the way our brains work and for me thats a little freaky. Does everyone understand what a brain computer interfaces . A followup to what you just said, would you argue Like Computers of cell phone arent changing how we are and we dont have the same economic forces to have those. Im skeptical to how much this you know the way i would say this could take like a human being from say 100,000 years ago and pop them in the modern world as a baby and you would not know the difference, but a brain computer interface person has like literally different physical qualities in their brain and im just talking about the beginning and the stuff theyll want to mean if you iterate that over 50 years you are talking about technologies we cant even think about so maybe fundamentally altering human brain processes in a way thats more foreign than having like a thousand friends on facebook, like a weirdly large group, so i think its different if you follow this technology out to the extent of the researchers, you get to the point where all of our thoughts are shared with one another and we were talking to gerwig shaw and i asked him what is the where do you see brain computer interfaces going eventually in the answer i expected was like quadriplegics will have the ability to move any limb we give them and they will has think about it their legs woman, their arms will move, but the answer he gave me was one day we will be able to load our thoughts onto a cloud and share our thoughts and be one big like super organism and its first i was like i wonder how me people think that so i asked the other people i interviewed like is that something everyone talks about and there like yeah for most interviews we talk about the prosthetic thing, but one day we could probably load our brains into one out of the one big organism and i kind of feel like thats horrible because i think both marriage and society work because it does not happen. The person i spoke with agreed and said it could be bad like you could be sitting there watching tv and think to yourself i might want to divorce my wife and she would know that instantaneously and i be bad and i was like yeah that might be bad, but he made a good point that like what would that mean for humanity. So i feel like if we ever get to that point then we have definitely gone way beyond what its like to have privacy concerns on facebook because some things we are totally different kinds of humans at that point so i guess we will wait to that happens. [inaudible] related to what you said about humans from 100 years ago being roughly similar, do you think its also true talking about how trustingly are robots now. Do you think that had been true that theyd encountered that a hundred years ago . You mean like trusted technology . You talked it talked about how we trust robots to guide them out of rooms. I dont have good science on this and i consider there are two forces and if you look at old Science Fiction there is a sort of general trust in progress and we sort of dispense with that and on the other hand we are more in touch with computers all the time, so i dont know, the joke we tell in a weird way which is sears as you look at a movie like terminator and awaits flattering to humans because its like in order to kill as they have come a time time machine this fancy exoskeleton and they make the skin on his face to look real and it looks like a turns out with a trash can with cookies is all you need, but we conceive of ourselves as may be being less trusting that we are in the moment so in terms of the historiography of it my guess would be its funny because reading economic step on how the us is less trusting of each other than we were 50 years ago, so i dont know if they would be more or less trusting of robots. Sorry, i dont have like a definitive answer. Interesting question, though. Which emerging technology or concept do you think has been most poorly communicated to the public by scientists . Quantum computing, i would say. I have to say in parts i dont think we wouldve done it anyway because its such a complicated topic, but part of why we decided not to do it is because they universally felt like pop Science Media basically never gets it right and i dont know if any of you have read anything about it, but its like a magic next type of computer that will sort of be faster somehow. One comments highly suspected of , but not yet been proven to my understanding that you could beat a classical computer at all its almost really the case and pretty much everyone we talked to said yes, but we dont know mark for sure that the math checks out, but in addition, when computer only solves apparently its bigger than we initially thought. Its not like another computer thats faster. In addition, all the problems involve a step where you have a supercomputer coming into the quantum computer so to speak kind of hints. Still a beautiful machine and absolutely wonderful and maybe if you have read a bit about it you have heard someone say quantum computing can break the encryption algorithm that is most common and thats probably true, but from what i understand my there is no reason cant switch, so whatever you want to call it the crypto military advantage of it is highly questionable. That said, i mean, i give it on some level depending on your interpretation you are like using all of the multi verses to like it send to your exes email, thats pretty cool, but i highly encourage you if you want to learn about quantum computing there is a wonderful book by Jonathan Dowling called it schrodingers killing. Its a pretty thick book, but nothing you couldnt understand with a little patience if you are bit nerdy and if you have flirted with discrete math at any point. Pretty high book. Just flirted. How would transporting matter actually work . So you would have a space elevator that would connect to the carbon nanotube and then sort of travel up the nanotube and in order to get power to it, you would have to be made up and there have recently been asked to games x prize contest to try to figure out how to beam power to the space elevator to keep it going as a cripps to the carbon nanotube and carries itself up. Do you have more to add . Because they dont quite exist there are different ways you might do it and theres some evidence you could use the cable to transmit power up, but its tricky. You might say we will load superconductors or copper, but remember those substances dont have specific strength to hang on the cable so you are pretty limited in the options, but the way i would like to sadist that you will hear a news item thats like Big Development on space elevator. The hardest problem is the middle part. Every thing else is like engineering, but the middle part is the closest thing to magic, so we might not even have the right substance yet, so any news item you hear that is not advanced in highstrength material is questionable. We will do a couple more questions here. One up front. Im curious much of this was reporting the people and how much of it was painstakingly picking through articles, manuals and books . It was both, i mean, we were at a painful number of springer and crc ebooks, really painful and also lots of straight up scientific articles and for every chapter i interviewed three or four people in the field and we sent it out to at least those many people for comments and in additional we try to send it out to extra people who he had not interviewed so they could double check it and if youre interested in the process for how weak road to the book tomorrow night at caveat which is a bar, we will do a podcast episode recorded live on the episode sorry, on the methods use to write the book. We did a bunch of interviews and read a ton and i went through and checked every single sentence to make sure we had a reference because we forgot we would need to write a bibliography and winner editor was like bibliography we like okay. Give us a week. Anyway, im glad she asked for it because the book is better because of its, but anyway it was a bad week. Rough week. The other thing i would add to clarify is like i think 95 of our source material lets primary in that he weather it was either an academic article, a book of proceedings or from the mouth of a researcher who is an expert in the field. We didnt do like celebrity researchers. We found like investigators in the field whose names did not come up often. Pretty much entirely primary sources which hopefully shows not just the depth of research, but also if youre interested in the field we probably have something you have not heard about and that was the goal. Kelly, favorite parricide and why . So, we discovered a kind of parasite that needs to kill its host to complete its lifecycle and its a parasite that in fact a wasp that lives in tree branches, so this wasp makes a convert mac called a crypt and undergoes develop at their end if it is not infected it to choose a whole out flies away, but when it gets infected the paris a toyed makes the wasp chew a whole unplugs the hole with its head and guys there while it eats its insides and so we call that the crypt keeper wasp and we made it uterus set. So, anyway it was already determined after we keep this thing else we did not get to take that, but we named it after the egyptian god set who trapped his brother in a crypt and leaders gathered his body parts and if you open up these cripps you find scattered remains of the wasp that is killed, so anyway the crypt keeper wasp is awesome. Thank you for that question. I appreciate that. Woman back there. So, im a tech writer and im wondering if you guys ever got frustrated when you are writing about something and a brandnew development came out and that already ridden about it. How do you deal with that . That answer would have been drinking, but i was pregnant at the time for most of the book, so the two main problems we had work with a space x being off of and causing us to constantly need to edit, but that was fine. It was mostly like advances in the rocket and then we finished the chapter on augmented reality and pokemon go came out, so that required some editing, but it was at good in a couple different ways. Everyone has a better sense of what augmented reality is, so its easier to describe a number two in the concern section we talked about hypothetically if you have this augmented world you could get the augmented world with the real world in ways the real world didnt want it to interact so like for example you could have an augmented world where someone who drew a swastika on the door or on someones door and you have the right to ask them to get rid of that work what are the rules they are and pokemon go ended up setting up pokey stops in the Holocaust Museum and at the hero shema bomb memorial and so we were able to say like indeed the augmented reality world can do things the real world wishes were not happening i guess the answer in that case is you write nintendo and say please stop being a jerks like portals should not be at these places and i think nintendo complied and it ended up being more work, but in both of those cases it was useful and made it more interesting. Can i add there are experts in augmented reality that says pokemon dozen counts. The reason is pokemon is not did we define augmented reality . Good. The way you play pokemon you should explains direct augmented reality is like you have some sort of device covering your vision and includes a certain parts of the world giving you this perception that virtual objects are interfacing with reality so imagine you have one where you all saw like dragons hopping up and down here and in pokemon it would be like the pikachu which is kind of floating generally over here so geographically somewhere, but in an ideal augmented reality setting is set pikachu should be sitting here and have a shadow cast according to these lights and make a specific doors noise in your ear and in addition should have some way of knowing that theres like a book here and once you get past the book you have to hop over it or something, so thats called being in registration like the Virtual World is in registration with reality and pokemon does not quite do that work there are some cool games coming out that do come a so theres this sort of academic distinction. That person. Sorry, i dont have a good sense of what hands were up. Now that you are done writing the book, what are you doing these days . What its like to tour. [laughter] i have a bunch of research from my like real job that i need to finish before we start on the next project so thats what im working on and you are working on a book with brian. , couple years out and im working theres an economist well, im usually really focus on future products, but brians super enthusiastic and told everyone everything, so pro immigration nonfiction graphic novel with an economist and im learning a bit about that. Other than that, my usual reading schedule. Neville shoot. Thats all he got. Thats all were up to. Question up here. Based on your experience, what [inaudible] actually, when we first started dating her favorite activity was to go to a library and work all day and during our lunch break and that night walk back and talk about what we learned and is so a major part of our relationship like going through has just been about talking about nerdy stuff that we were learning at the time, so it turned out for the last two years those nerdy things Work Technology for soonish, but our personalities are different enough that the division of labor worked out well. I wanted to do the interviews and he didnt, so i did it. I have the personality that can go through some by sentence and build a big bibliography. That might have killed him and hes clearly like the whole areas one but the jokes in their and artistic abilities so he drew the comics and then we sort of split up who is doing that reading of the crc books of the primary literature and we split up the book in such a way that like one of us would write a draft before the other one started reading primary literature in that was helpful because that way you could figure out what you were not explaining clearly because the other person did not know about the technology yet. Not sure if i answered your question, but thats how it worked for us. I have two rules i advise, one of which is for any given task someone is the leader or doesnt matter who, but someone needs to be the one who feels responsibility for failure, so we kind of thats what we did per chapter. Per chapter or even in writing the book one person essentially was in charge with veto power in making choices. When its muddy who is in charge people get manage it each other because they feel like someone is doing someone elses responsibly, so make sure that is clear the second thing is if something is irritating you in a collaboration, you are the jerk if you dont speak up even if you feel like the other person is the problem. If you dont speak up, you are the problem so support and have someone to communicate with an possible probably also a good marriage thing. Also, having a thick skin helps because like you spend a month researching and writing a chapter and you send it to your partner and they are like start over and you need to be like well, would like this to be a good book so i will start over. Put your ego second to quality because like no matter what if someone says this chapter stinks and it doesnt feel great to hear that, but if youre the good working relationship and you know the other person is not trying to tear you down. Which one of you is the stronger reader and which one of you is the better writer . Im the best at both. [laughter] thats the answer. Appear. [laughter] . Hello if ill bet technology is completed in your lifetime is there actually anything you would be excited about the mac so, i think for all of these technologies we would be in line for them, but we would be in like the back 26 of the line like brain computer interface, maybe i would try when what but id want to make sure it works on the other 75 of the people before me. I dont be the first on the space elevator. We are risk efforts. Would like to research from the safety of our home. We have one home. What about you . I would say that to that are hard to say would be bad in any case is one chapter called Precision Medicine which is like a statistical approach to medicine and another is focused on organ printing like printing a kidney or cornea and we sometimes get asked like are there any you just know when to happen or that you do and there really arent a lot of serious ethical issues with improving medicine or the ability to give people organs. There are things worth thinking about, but we thought they were clearly outweighed by the positives. I agree with you on bio printing. You dont want people to have good medicine . Yeah, i hate people took thats the problem. For Precision Medicine we talked about president printers printers to edit peoples genomes and i think theres a lot of discussion that needs to happen about whether or not that is okay and what cells are okay to edit and which ones are. Precision medicine still has some things. Precision medicine means every time you go to the doctor maybe you get [inaudible] theres like sort of a deep statistical problem with some of these methods spinning thats fascinating. Fascinating, i mean,. One more question. In the back. You can talk to us afterwards yes. You both talked a lot about how much work you put into this book and thank you for that, but i was wondering if there was ever a topic that you came away from an just thought id never want to read anything about that again . Like quantum computing or Something Else . I actually i was the one rate doing the research on quantum computing and it was such a delightful field i would have loved to stay there but i had to go another stop. One chapter that is not mentioned in the book that got cut late, so the manuscript returned in had 11 chapters in the 11th was advanced Nuclear Fission reactors. The type of reactor we have now, but with advanced features and i was pretty sick of that by the end and i think it was a good chapter and in some ways one of the best because its like theres this thing thats important to our lives and a Nuclear Reactor is a very from an aerial view its very simple machine. I would say its easier to explain than a Combustion Engine and quite simple. It was fun, but it was very tiki tack in terms of details in the main reason i think is because the technology has been around in some form or another since the 40s, so naively when we said to ourselves we will Research Advanced Nuclear Reaction there is this thing called generation and sound like you will be space in weird, but most changes have to do with like passing safety features, different cladding for people and just like as nerds its super interesting, but its like going into a detailed discussion of why you might want like helium as a moderator instead of duty rated water. Its just not for everyone, perhaps. So, for us like we talk about space elevator and you are talking pretty abstractly like physical quantities in the shape of things. That makes it easier to research because he read about nuclear stuff and all of these tiny variations in all sorts of Different Things and your mind starts to wobble with the complexity of it all, so we were pretty well sick of that. Totally interesting field and wonderful people and feel bad having to cut it. Really important research. Really important, but it was tough. There was a lot of thick technical books we had to go through for that one. Should we mention its her birthday . [applause]. Thank you. No, no, you dont have to sing, but nice of you to ask. Okay. Thank you. Thats it. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Book tv, television for serious readers. This weekend on booktv, the jeannette recountes the contrary of her father, james conant. And on sunday were live with authors cornell west and Robert George for years that two professors who come from opposite ends of the political spectrum have lectured and taught University Classes together. They discuss their work and take viewer questions begins at noon on sunday. David horowitz examines the lefts impact on americas universities and colleges Rolling Stones mat taibbi, and we visit kansas city, missouri tour, the citys literary sites and talk to local authors, this weekend on cspan2 booktv, television for serious readers. For a complete schedule, visit our web site, booktv. Org. Welcome to kansas city, missouri, on booktv. Locate on the eastern banks of the missouri river, this once mall Frontier Town went on to establish itself with the help of booming livestock and Railroad Industry as. As the city grew i