Does science fiction inspire real tech?

Daniel and Kelly discuss whether ideas from science fiction have inspired real scientific or technological progress. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I read science fiction, and I read a lot of it. To escape into another universe where the rules have changed and what it's like to be human and to be alive can be a totally different experience. But I also read science fiction to be inspired and to glimpse potential futures for humanity.

• 2:00Daniel Whiteson?

  In my view, science fiction authors are part of the science and engineering enterprise. Scientists are trying to understand the universe and engineers are trying to bend it to our needs, but science fiction authors are part of that, too. They live on the far forward edge, imagining what we might create and thinking through what it means for living and loving and dying. At least, that's the story. But how true is that in history? What are some examples of ideas from science fiction that actually inspired real engineering or scientific leaps? That's the topic we're diving into today while we're waiting for our warp ship to be completed. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 2:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space. And today, we're talking about some of my favorite topics, which are technology and sci-fi.

• 3:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I read a lot of science fiction.

• 3:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  You do read a lot of science fiction. So what I want to know is, what piece of technology in science fiction, if you could bring to life right now, would you want to bring to life to have in your own personal life?

• 3:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, well, I have two answers to that. One is a replicator. I would love, like essentially a 3D printer that could make anything. I find it really frustrating that there are things we know can exist, but we don't know how to make them, like how to arrange the atoms very easily. And so I would love a replicator. That would be amazing.

• 3:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm having trouble following the dream there. Like, what in particular would you replicate if you could?

• 3:49Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, imagine being able to make food without having to go through this complex food chemistry process to start from ingredients and end up at souffle, right?

• 3:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Daniel Whiteson?

  You could literally make anything in any shape, any arrangement. If you're doing like a complex baking project and you want like chocolate in the shape of a dolphin or whatever, like getting it in that shape is hard sometimes. You have to like coerce it. So yeah, I want to skip over all of chemistry, essentially.

• 4:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. I mean, and why, like, cure cancer when you could have chocolate in the shape of a dolphin? Yeah, I see where you're going. Okay.

• 4:19Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, all right. But I recently had the opposite experience, which is I read a science fiction novel in which something I invented appeared.

• 4:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 4:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Go on.

• 4:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So I'm reading this science fiction novel about somebody who's listening for messages from outer space and they rely on a distributed network of smartphones called Crayfish in order to capture the data. They actually referenced the name of the experiment. Yeah.

• 4:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 4:45Daniel Whiteson?

  I know.

• 4:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did one of our listeners send you? Give me, give me more information. This can't be, do you know this person?

• 4:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I do not know this person and I emailed the author and I was like, wow, thanks for including our experiment in your book. And he wrote back, he's like, oh, this is so fun. And we had a nice conversation.

• 5:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, what's the name of the book?

• 5:04Daniel Whiteson?

  The book is called The Receiver by Seth Jaffe, and you can find it on Amazon. I'm about halfway through it right now.

• 5:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is so cool. Oh, my gosh, you've inspired science fiction.

• 5:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it plays a minor role, but it was fun. Yeah, it was fun to appear in science fiction. I mean, there's no Daniel White's in character, but they took the experiment and used it and they got the science right. So kudos, Seth.

• 5:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. I mean, do you think that it would be more interesting if there was a Daniel White's in character or more interesting if there's tech developed by Daniel White's?

• 5:35Daniel Whiteson?

  I'd be mortified to see myself in science fiction. It was just very cool to influence somebody else's view of like, what's possible out there in the universe? What can we do? Oh, this is a new capability. And that's exactly why we came up with the experiment to create new sensing capabilities. So that was really fun.

• 5:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's awesome. So, you know, over time, I've done like a bunch of interviews where people have asked about like, how do you inspire people to like, do space stuff and like, you know, invest in space? And then there's a lot of this conversation about how science fiction inspires people to do space stuff. And so I have actually pretty often said this phrase that like, science fiction inspires technology and then physics and technology inspires science fiction. And so I realized that when you sent me the outline that I have said those words many times, but never actually dug in to like, figure out what examples, you know, there are of that. And so I am super excited that today we're

• 6:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  talking about this and now I will know, you know, how much meat there is behind that statement.

• 6:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. I do the same thing all the time. I credit science fiction with inspiring technology. I say it's a healthy two-way inspirational street. And I expected when digging into this episode to find lots and lots of examples to back up the claims I've been making for years. But as you know, when you started researching your book about Mars, sometimes when you dig into the details, you learn that the popular story isn't always accurate.

• 7:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, you're giving away the punchline. I wasn't going to give away the punchline. But yes, you had the city on Mars experience where you thought it was going to go one way. And then you're, as you're researching it, you're like, I'm gonna lose all of my friends.

• 7:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, maybe not all of them. Stick around. There are some really fun tidbits in here.

• 7:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 7:30Daniel Whiteson?

  But before we dig into some fun examples, I went out there and I asked the extraordinaries what they thought might have been inspired by science fiction. Here's what folks had to say.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  Star Trek communicators are probably the easy one. Inspired flip phone technology, cellphone.

• 7:49Speaker 07

  I mean, just taking Star Trek as a great example, their pads inspired tablets, their communicators inspired cell phones, their medical devices inspired, well, I guess, medical devices, and their replicators inspired the replicators that we all have in our homes today. Wait, wait, you don't, you don't have one?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I bet Star Wars inspired a lot of great new theme park ride technology at Disney.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  We have self-driving cars, hoverboards, lasers. Flip phones. Yeah, from Star Trek communicators. I don't know. I'm sure there's a bunch we're missing. Maybe rovers to other planets were thought of before we actually created them? That'd be my only thought. So I read the Neal Stephenson novel, Snow Which was about Metaverse and how you can live these elaborate lives online in this virtual reality world. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the Star Trek communicator and the flip phone.

• 8:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so I'm seeing a lot of communicators, tablets, cell phones, flip phones. Those are some of the things that I would have guessed initially. So should we start there?

• 9:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is the most common thing. People like Kirk's flip communicator. It's iconic. You know, people see it. They see the connection to smartphones. You know, the Motorola phone and it's often cited as the most common example of science fiction inspiring something in reality.

• 9:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Should we explain the Motorola phone for the like five young listeners we might have?

• 9:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so Flip's communicator is a little handheld device. It's the size of your palm. And it flips it open like does this move and it makes this sound. And, you know, something you carry with you. And the cool thing about it is that it's like always on. You don't have to like punch in a number to call Spock. You just open it and you talk and the Enterprise can hear you. And I think the most important thing about the communicator in the show was that it was kind of boring. It was like, not a big deal. Kirk treated it as like, well, of course we can talk to the Enterprise, even though it's in orbit or far away. Right? And it's this amazing thing that he can do that we couldn't do sitting in our boring real universe. And that was exciting. And I love the conflict there.

• 10:12Daniel Whiteson?

  The fact that he's so casual about it.

• 10:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that he was comfortable with the Enterprise listening at all times, just like we're comfortable with Alexa and Siri listening to us at all times. They were also like, I'm going to give away all of my information and all of my personal conversations to the Enterprise.

• 10:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And in science fiction, this was kind of novel. We already had an existence like two-way walkie-talkies. And there were mobile phones at the time, but they were only in cars.

• 10:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  This was the 1960s and there were already mobile phones in cars?

• 10:44Daniel Whiteson?

  There were already mobile phones in cars. That's right.

• 10:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 10:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And we had wireless communication with radios and transistors were shrinking everything. So it was sort of a novel idea, but it also inspired by a lot of similar technology.

• 10:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought that it was like the seventies or the eighties where you had those giant phones in cars. But that was even earlier. I guess it was like the super duper rich were able to have them. And maybe it took up like the whole trunk to make it work. Or my family didn't have one, that's for sure.

• 11:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so the history of the mobile phone development is super fascinating. In the forties already, AT&T introduced car phones. These were big, they were stuck in a car. Yeah, it was not very widespread service. In the forties, the late forties. Yeah, it's amazing. And AT&T kept working on car-based phones. And Motorola was aiming for a handheld phone. So this guy at Motorola, Martin Cooper, and he's the guy who invented the first handheld mobile phone. It's called the Dynatac. And it came out in 73 and it's nicknamed the brick because it's like five pounds. And you know, it's like 20 centimeters by 10 centimeters by five centimeters. Like you should look up a picture of this thing. It looks like somebody's holding up like a couple of bricks, actually.

• 12:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And the thing could talk for like 30 minutes at a time and took 10 hours to recharge.

• 12:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  So for emergency use only.

• 12:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And this is awesome. The first call ever made on a handheld mobile phone was from Martin Cooper to his chief rival at AT&T.

• 12:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing.

• 12:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And then Motorola kept working on the phones. And it wasn't until like 1989 that we had the first sort of small, minimal flip phone that looked like a Star Trek communicator.

• 12:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, that's amazing.

• 12:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And then, you know, the iconic in the 1990s is the Motorola StarTAC, which is this flip phone, which is super popular and everybody who was alive at the time had one or saw one or knew one. Right. And this is connection in people's minds between the Motorola StarTAC and the Star Trek communicator. And this guy, Martin Cooper at Motorola, the inventor of the mobile phone explicitly cites Star Trek as inspiration for this. There's a 2005 movie called How William Shatner Changed the World. And he says, in that movie, in an interview, we were inspired by Captain Kirk.

• 13:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, okay. Wait, a couple of thoughts. One, How William Shatner Changed the World. Did, did the, did the Shat do the writing? Or shouldn't like the writer, shouldn't it have been how the writers of Star Trek changed the world? That feels like the credit's not going to the right person.

• 13:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And it's not even the writers. It's the prop designer. There's this guy, Wang Ming Chang, who created so many iconic props on Star Trek. The communicator, the Romulan bird of prey, the Vulcan harp, all these things, the tricorder. So many things that we identify with Star Trek were invented by this one guy, Wang Ming Chang. So yeah, he should definitely get the credit. I bet he read a lot of science fiction.

• 13:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no doubt. He changed the world.

• 13:53Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. So that's the sort of story that's going around. And if you only dig in superficially, it seems like this is a great example of science fiction, Star Trek in this case, coming up with a new idea. Of course, building on ideas that have been out there already, but coming up with a new idea which caught on and then inspired scientists in the real world to make something real. Right?

• 14:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am so glad that I was correct on all of those podcasts where I, you know, said the thing. So let's move on.

• 14:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But actually, yes, if you dig deeper, in 2021, Martin Cooper recanted that story. Yes, exactly. Apparently there was this popular myth that Star Trek inspired the flip phone. Everybody says it. Kelly Wiener Smith says it and she does a lot of research. So you gotta believe it, right?

• 14:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  She's wrong sometimes, guys.

• 14:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. And it turns out that when he was being interviewed, he says he felt pressure to endorse this popular myth, even though it was. Isn't true. Here's a quote from him. I got caught up in this thing. Their premise was that the cell phone came from William Shatner and Star Trek, and I didn't argue with them. This is show business. We don't worry about facts. And I've had to live with that for how many years now?

• 15:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think when he sleeps on his bed of money, he probably sleeps pretty well. But, uh, but so then where did he get the idea?

• 15:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's another twist, right? First, we're thinking, oh, it's inspired by Star Trek. Then it turns out, no. But the answer is it's inspired by a different science fiction source. As a kid, he read Dick Tracy comic strips and Dick Tracy, for those who don't know, is this famous detective and he had a two-way radio wristwatch. And Cooper, who's like 99 by now, read this in the 40s and he was inspired by the Dick Tracy wristwatch. That was the real inspiration for mobile communications.

• 15:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, so here's what I want to know. So was Star Trek inspired by Dick Tracy? Or is this the case of like, an idea? Like, I feel like some ideas, when their time comes, they're just obvious, right? And so like, maybe someone was going to come up with this idea, or like many people were going to come up with this idea independently. And it was just gonna, it was an obvious thing that was going to happen eventually.

• 16:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people came up with this idea. Um, you know, we had wireless communication already, you know, in World War I. And then if you look at like cartoons depicting the future, there's examples in like 1920s of a cartoonist drawing a crowd in the future where everybody's walking around, holding their own personal phone. So the idea was definitely there. There's lots of drawings like that. And it appears all over the place in science fiction. So the idea of small personal communicators was everywhere already, sort of in the zeitgeist. I think that Star Trek made a really cool prop and a really cool noise. And it was just seen by everybody and sort of coalesced into this one concept.

• 16:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  So do you give this initial idea to sci-fi? Or do you give this to the engineers?

• 16:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Where does the point go?

• 16:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I think science fiction really did inspire this. I mean, Cooper says, if we can trust him now, that he was inspired by science fiction. And this timeline also makes more sense. I mean, by the time that Star Trek came out in the late 60s, like Motorola was practically in the home stretch. It's not like they saw Star Trek and then a few years later, they put this thing together. They'd been working on this project for decades, right? People had had mobile phones already in cars. They were working towards handheld devices. So I think this story makes a lot more sense. But you know, the flip phones that we have still can't do some of the things that Star Trek communicators could do. So they still work out there for engineers to do. For example, Kirk's communicator used subspace transmissions, which could bypass electromagnetic

• 17:36Daniel Whiteson?

  interference and have almost instantaneous communication, which of course, our cell phones can't do because we're limited by relativity.

• 17:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but like, I don't sense a delay, so I don't know. Does that seem worth investing in?

• 17:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, don't you want to have faster communication with the moon and with Mars? Like, wouldn't that be cool?

• 17:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, okay. By the time we're, you know, spending a lot of time on the moon or Mars, yes, we should figure that out. I'll give you that.

• 18:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they had this version of the communicator with badges, like you could just press your badge to talk to somebody, which is not something you see anybody really working on. I don't know if it's just not cool enough or what, but it's a capability of communicators in Star Trek, which we haven't yet seen in the market.

• 18:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know, that's kind of like just talking to your wrist Apple Watch, isn't it? I mean, I don't really want to have to like, touch my chest to like, make a phone call, but touching my wrists feels like way less weird.

• 18:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I have not bought into the whole Apple Watch thing, so I can't speak to that.

• 18:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I don't have one either. I'm way too clumsy. I would smash it into a wall and break it, but okay, all right.

• 18:41Daniel Whiteson?

  But you can get an app on your phone, which makes the sounds of a communicator. You can feel Star Trek-y.

• 18:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing.

• 18:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but we still can't use subspace.

• 18:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, maybe one day. Okay, so score one for science fiction, although as a person who has married a cartoonist, I feel like maybe this should be score one for like comic books or comic strips and they should get a little bit more cred. But let's take a break and when we come back, we will move on to our next potentially science fiction inspired technology.

• 19:21Speaker 01

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• 20:08Speaker 04

  Man, I'm a black and Mexican kid from San Pedro, and I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in LA was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

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• 21:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. And is our next science fiction technology also inspired by Star Trek? Daniel?

• 21:49Daniel Whiteson?

  It is. Star Trek has like really wormed its way into the minds of engineers. Nerds out there love Star Trek. And something that's ubiquitous in Star Trek, which we now also have, are these tablet computers, right? In Star Trek: Next Generation, they had these PADD, Personal Access Display Devices. And, you know, if you watch the show now, it looks a lot like an iPad. These things are flat. You use them by touching them. They're really portable. They use them for all sorts of stuff like reading information, like signing documents, sharing data, all sorts of stuff. And just like the flip phone, it was treated casually. Like you treat it like a piece of paper. It's not like this is some cool piece of technology.

• 22:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Everybody be careful around it. You just like casually toss it on a desk, right? And so these things are everywhere in Star Trek.

• 22:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Am I wrong in queuing into the fact that it's called a pad? And we now have iPads? Is, was that on purpose or am I jumping the gun?

• 22:50Daniel Whiteson?

  You're jumping the gun. There's an interesting twist there at the end. Whether or not the iPad was inspired by the Star Trek pad.

• 22:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right.

• 22:57Daniel Whiteson?

  But they're certainly very similar.

• 22:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can wait, I can wait.

• 22:59Daniel Whiteson?

  And they appeared briefly in the original series. And they're hilarious. Like I love the Star Trek: Next Generation Technical Manual, which gives you like ridiculous, science astounding stories for like how things work. And so I looked this up and apparently the PADD is powered by cerium-methyl power cells and have an outer casing of boronite whisker epoxy, allowing them to drop 35 meters without any damage.

• 23:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow. Wow. Boronite whisker?

• 23:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Boronite whisker epoxy. I'm going to go get that at the hardware store.

• 23:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  That, yeah, that's amazing. Where did you find those specs?

• 23:33Daniel Whiteson?

  In the Star Trek: Next Generation Technical Manual, of course.

• 23:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, is that something you can buy online? Or do you have that on your bookshelf?

• 23:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I do not have that on my bookshelf, but you can look it up online these days. Yeah.

• 23:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, amazing.

• 23:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is not actually the first time this kind of device appears in science fiction. But it's the first time it's so similar to the device we have now. Back in 1951, in the novel Foundation, Isaac Asimov's characters have this thing called a calculator pad. And then in 1968, 2001 Space Odyssey, they have flat displays, which was a big thing. They don't have touchscreens, but they don't have like CRTs with a crazy curved monitors. And that made it seem really futuristic. And lots of books from the golden age of science fiction have things like e-readers, ebooks. We don't have like physical printed pages.

• 24:25Daniel Whiteson?

  But most of those have things like, you know, a button at the bottom where you press to change the page, not like really a touchscreen device.

• 24:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  And fans of Doctor Who might remember that one of the characters there has a tablet in which he can input data using swipe gestures. This is 1967. So like the idea is sort of out there even before it's again coalesced into an awesome prop on Star Trek.

• 24:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so is this so surprising? So like, if you've got this idea of like a flip phone where you can like see Spock when he pops up. An iPad is just like the flip phone wider. Like, so is it's not that different, is it?

• 25:02Daniel Whiteson?

  You sound like all the naysayers who were like, the iPad is not going to succeed. And meanwhile, it's like a zillion dollar business. You're right, it's very similar to the smartphone, but it's something different, right? That's why people buy tablets and also smartphones, because it's like a bigger window into the internet somehow. I was also skeptical. I remember being like, it's just a big smartphone and smartphones are already too big. But lots of people like their tablets.

• 25:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're right. When the iPad first came out, one, I thought the name was hilarious. And when the Saturday Night Live jokes were coming out about how it's named after a feminine hygiene product. I was laughing. I was like, this is never going to work. And now my family, you know, every member of my family has one. So definitely in my face. But I don't think it's a big jump to imagine that like you you might want bigger screens for some ideas. Like, it doesn't seem like a completely different technology to me.

• 25:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet. As in many cases, they came in very late, made it awesome, and sold billions of them, right? The idea for like a touchscreen tablet goes way, way back. The first patent was in 1979 by Tima Hitachi for the idea. And Apple had a touchscreen Macintosh concept as early as 1984. You can see a prototype of it in the SF MoMA, actually. And in 1989, the predecessor to the Palm Pilot, the first maybe successful tablet was this GridPad, which is based actually on MS-DOS, for those who remember that. And then in 93, Apple came out with the Newton, which is, you

• 26:43Daniel Whiteson?

  know, like a little tablet device and you could interact with it. It didn't have a keyboard, right? It wasn't a smartphone. It really was like a proto-tablet. But there were lots of failed devices in the 90s, like Microsoft came in and tried to build one, the Wing Pad, which never went anywhere. And people kept trying to build this and said, consumers are going to want it. In 2001, Nokia developed a tablet internally, but decided not to sell it because they said the market wasn't ready. And in 2005, they finally came out with a tablet. And then again, before Apple and the iPad, in 2008, the first Android tablets came out. So Apple wasn't even the first, like, to produce the tablet like what we see today. In 2010, Apple came out with

• 27:26Daniel Whiteson?

  the iPad and pushed to the mainstream. And by like 2012, one third of US households had a tablet.

• 27:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing.

• 27:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And, you know, the power of Apple and their design and their slick interface and their marketing, I don't know. All right. So did the Star Trek pad inspire the iPad or other similar devices? So if you ask the guys at Star Trek, they think it did. Doug Drexler, he was one of the designers behind the pad, he said that iPads felt, quote, eerily similar. Similar to his team's vision, quote, "It's uncanny to have a PADD that actually works," he said, calling it the true Star Trek dream. And so they see a connection, right? They claim credit for it. But if you ask Apple execs, they are mum on the idea. Like, nobody at Apple admits that Star Trek inspired their work, or even earlier designers of tablet computers.

• 28:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know if that's an intellectual property issue, and the lawyers have weighed in, but the engineers deny it.

• 28:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Would Doug Drexler say that he was inspired by earlier science fiction that came before him?

• 28:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Probably. I mean, I'm sure as a designer on Star Trek, he's read all that earlier science fiction, and he knows he didn't come up with the concept all on his own. But again, you know, it's a big step forward, right? Having it be ubiquitous, having it be in casual use, having them be so small and portable. These were new things for Star Trek to come up with.

• 28:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I'd say this is definitely a point for science fiction.

• 28:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  And probably actually a point for Star Trek. So you're not having the full a city on Mars experience here. In fact, this is a very light ACOM experience.

• 29:06Daniel Whiteson?

  There's a lot more nuance here than I expected.

• 29:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes. All right. So are we going to get to a technology that doesn't have anything to do with Star Trek? Or is Star Trek the only, the only thing that's driven technology forward?

• 29:18Daniel Whiteson?

  No, let's go underwater. Many folks are under the impression that the book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which came out in 1870, inspired people to build submarines. And it's like the reason we have submarines now. And it was a really cool book. You know, a lot of concepts in that book, like electric propulsion and driving for a long time underwater and having self-contained life support. These are really cool concepts that we now see, of course, in submarines. And Simon Lake, who's a submarine pioneer, he cites Jules Verne as an influence, right?

• 29:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 29:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But the problem is that like, people have been building submarines long before this.

• 29:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's a problem.

• 29:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, the history of submarines goes all the way back to the 1500s. So like 300 years before Jules Verne wrote his novel.

• 30:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  I gotta be honest. I would not want to be in a 1500s submarine. I can't imagine that was safe.

• 30:11Daniel Whiteson?

  There's a record that in the city of Toledo, two Greeks submerged and surfaced in the river Tagus several times without getting wet and with a flame that they carried in their hands, still alight. So this is like, you know, one record of maybe some prototype submarine all the way back in 1560s.

• 30:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did they probably have like a tube that went to the surface or?

• 30:32Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not clear. There's not a whole lot more details there in the record.

• 30:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 30:36Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's like the first reference to maybe what could have been a prototype submarine.

• 30:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 30:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And then in 1578, the English mathematician William Burn recorded in his book Inventions or Devices, one of the first plans for an underwater navigation vehicle. So there's evidence of like, the idea was around. The first time we're sure that somebody actually built a submarine is 1620. A Dutchman named Cornelius Drebbe built this thing and it's powered by oars. And it looks kind of like a submarine, but with oars sticking out the side. Of course, the holes, you know, have cloth or rubber or something to keep it waterproof. And so it's looks a little bit like a sub and then it's, you know, it swims along. It's kind of like a mechanical fish.

• 31:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like underwater?

• 31:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, underwater.

• 31:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  With like, I know I'm harping on this too, but like with like a tube that attaches you to the surface for breathing air?

• 31:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 31:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Also, I gotta be honest, I would not trust a man named Cornelius Drebbe. That sounds like someone who's trying to put you on.

• 31:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Apparently this thing was tested many times in the Thames, but failed to attract enough enthusiasm and was never used like in combat or anything. So this guy basically invented it in 1620.

• 31:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Holy cow.

• 31:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. The first military submarine was the Turtle, 1775. This thing is shaped like an acorn. It's basically for like one person. It was designed by American David Bushnell and it's the first verified submarine capable of independent underwater operation. And the first time they used screws for propulsion, right? You know how like a modern submarine has basically a propeller, right? To push it along. So instead of like oars, they used screws, which basically, you know, you turn. And it pushes the water.

• 32:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huh.

• 32:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he would like run into things on purpose? Like, what can you do? I guess he's just spying to figure out where things are. Is that?

• 32:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think at this point it's spying. In this US Civil War, actually, was one of the first uses of submarines in actual battle. In 1864, the Confederate had a submarine called the HL Hunley, and it was the first military submarine to ever sink an enemy vessel. It sank the USS Haasatonic. Problem is, it also killed the crew instantly and sank the submarine.

• 32:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, thumbs down.

• 32:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, thumbs down. But, you know, progress, I guess.

• 32:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Of a sort?

• 32:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Of a sort. And then the French developed the first mechanically powered submarine in 1867. So we're still before 20,000 leagues under the sea. This was the plongeur, which is French for diver. And it had compressed air inside, which I guess must have protected the inside a little bit so you can go a little bit deeper. And this probably was the inspiration for Jules Verne. So I think in this case, it actually went the other direction. Jules Verne saw this like exciting development in submarine technology, and then he went further.

• 33:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we've got a point for engineering now.

• 33:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 33:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and Vern probably saw this at the World's Fair in Paris that year and then extrapolated.

• 33:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  OK, so we've got two points for sci fi, one for engineering.

• 33:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And then, you know, submarine pioneer Simon Lake, he really was inspired by Vern, right? And he made the first open ocean voyage by submarine in 1898. And then Vern sent Lake a telegram. So I think there might have been a little bit of healthy back and forth here, right? Engineers inspire science fiction, who inspire more engineers? Dot, dot, dot. The U-boats sink the Lusitania, and we get into World War I.

• 34:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love you in wet blanket mode.

• 34:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, I'm still doing two for sci fi, one for engineering. If I remember 20,000 leagues under the sea, one thing I think Vern did pioneer was like a really posh submarine, which I feel like most submarines have not taken up yet. As far as I know, most are a bit cramped and stinky.

• 34:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, no velvet couches and like nice table for your drinks and stuff.

• 34:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no. All right, but let's leave the sea and let's start talking about communication.

• 34:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So a famous science fiction author is Arthur C. Clarke, and he's written lots of influential stuff, including not just fiction, he's actually written essays. And in 1945, he wrote an essay proposing that we build a set of satellites in geostationary orbit so we can have global communications, right? So this is pre Sputnik. This is like visionary and saying, hey, let's put a bunch of stuff up in space so that I can talk to people on the other side of the world, right? At the time, this was seen as wildly speculative, right? We didn't have commercial satellites at all yet, so it was kind of a cool idea. We had already the concept of geostationary orbits. People understood that like that was a solution, that was something you can do.

• 35:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And in 1929, another guy, Herman Patachnik, already had thought about using satellites in space for observation and communication. But Clarke was the first one to have this idea, like really specifically how this would work and what the network would look like and to use satellites for orbit. In fact, these orbits are sometimes called Clarke orbits now because they're inspired by this essay.

• 35:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Was Clarke also an engineer? Like, was this a case of a sci fi writer also being like an engineer? Like, I'm wondering if we could split this point.

• 35:53Daniel Whiteson?

  I think Arthur C. Clarke is not officially an engineer, isn't like no real education there. He's an all around nerd, though. I mean, he was like inspired as a kid by dinosaur cigarette cards, enthusiastic about fossils. He's sort of like a futurist more than an engineer.

• 36:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did you say dinosaur cigarette cards?

• 36:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm, yeah.

• 36:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  What do those three words mean together, Daniel?

• 36:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Cigarette cards are these things which appeared in like packets of cigarettes that had like images on them. You would have like actors, or you could have pictures of dinosaurs, or whatever, or like, you know, football players, or something.

• 36:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was a different era. Okay.

• 36:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe I watched too much Edwardian or Victorian television, so I like knew these things. I'm all about Masterpiece Theater.

• 36:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I watched Moulsterpiece Theater when I was a kid. It was Disney. So I guess we're, we were different kinds of kids. Okay, so it sounds like we're giving this point to sci-fi. All right, keep going.

• 36:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. He got a lot of technical details, right? Of course, these days, you know, we're all about satellite-based communications. It started like in the 60s, 64, 65, with the first launches of commercial satellite-based communication systems. These days, of course, you know, most of the satellites in orbit are Starlink satellites for internet. We are using one right now to have this conversation.

• 37:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  We sure are.

• 37:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you to Arthur C. Clarke for pioneering this idea.

• 37:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I don't think the Starlinks are in geostationary orbit.

• 37:21Daniel Whiteson?

  No, they're not. They're in low Earth orbit, right? And the idea there is that they can be closer, and so they're a lower latency. But you're passed off from one to another. It's a different system. Yeah.

• 37:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. But we'll, we'll still give that to Clark. All right, let's take a break, and we will move from Arthur C. Clarke to Heinlein.

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• 39:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we are back, and we were just discussing what Arthur C. Clarke contributed to technology today. What about Heinlein? What did Heinlein contribute?

• 40:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's a great book called Starship Troopers, came out 1959, which is mind-blowing that it's so old. It feels much more modern.

• 40:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  You gotta watch out. We did a survey, and we have a number of listeners who are, let's say, older than we are.

• 40:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I think that you don't want to, you don't want to be casting dispersions on the year 1959.

• 40:31Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, it's the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. I feel like, why that book didn't come out that long ago, did it? It makes me feel like, okay, yes, maybe I'm saying I'm old and our listeners are too. Oops.

• 40:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, anyway, a cool idea that's in that book is powered armor, basically like an exoskeleton. And, you know, we've seen this, of course, much more recently, it's all over Avatar, and it's an alien and all kinds of stuff. But some people give credit to Heinlein and Starship Troopers for the idea of powered armor.

• 41:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So does this point go to sci fi then? Give us the context.

• 41:09Daniel Whiteson?

  It's nuanced. The idea for this definitely predates Starship Troopers. In the 1890s, there was a Russian inventor, Nicholas Yagan, who invented a spring and piston based apparatus for running and heavy lifting. He used like compressed gas and springs. This is like real steampunk exoskeleton kind of stuff. It must have been awesome.

• 41:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Totally, unless it like exploded and.

• 41:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure it was super dangerous. And then in 1917 in the US, we had the pedo motor, a powered soft exosuit. So this idea was definitely out there to use like mechanical support for human labor. And even in 1958, so a year before Starship Troopers, General Electric came out with something called the Handyman, which is basically like robotic arms that you could use for like heavy lifting and this kind of stuff. And then in 1960s, they worked on the Hardy Man, which was aimed at like full body augmentation. So like legs in addition to arms. So this thing was definitely in development and in the zeitgeist before Starship Troopers. I think that Heinlein here gets credit for like popularizing the idea

• 42:19Daniel Whiteson?

  and maybe like codifying the concept and then influencing, you know, engineers and science fiction down the road.

• 42:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I wonder if GE was super excited when Starship Troopers came out because they were like, free advertising.

• 42:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Or if they were like, hey, we got scooped. That was our idea.

• 42:34Daniel Whiteson?

  There's probably some grumpy engineer at GE who's mad that Heinlein gets credit for this.

• 42:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, probably. Fair enough.

• 42:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Something we definitely learned is that like credit is not being applied correctly. Like Kirk and Shatner do not get credit for the flip phone.

• 42:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Okay. But, you know, welcome to life. Am I right?

• 42:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it sounds like this point definitely goes to engineering, right?

• 42:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Another concept we see a lot is voice control. You know, in Star Trek, for example, was one of the first places you saw natural language commands. In that show, they can just talk to the computer. They ask a complicated question that require context and analysis. It solves problems. It's like talking to a person. It's very conversational interface. Whereas, you know, computers until very, very recently were much more like push button and you had to give them very specific commands.

• 43:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And now it's kind of amazing. Like I, when I talk to AI and I'm trying to use it to like practice Russian or something, it is amazing how natural it sounds.

• 43:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's really incredible. It's improved a lot. But this is something people have been working on again for a long, long time. In 1952, Bell Labs had something they called Audrey, which was a tortured acronym for automatic digit recognition. And its goal was just to recognize spoken digits zero to nine. You know, you could just say numbers and it would recognize them. 52. So like, you know, we did not have powerful computing back then. And then 10 years later, IBM had the shoebox, which could recognize 16 spoken English words. Most of them are like plus or minus, this kind of thing. So it's like a verbal calculator you can use. And this is because natural language processing is

• 44:15Daniel Whiteson?

  really, really hard. Like, language is complicated. It takes a long time to teach a human how language works because, you know, there are rules, but they're not precise and we don't always follow them. And small changes can mean big differences in meaning, right? One comma, for example, can really change what something means. So at the time, Star Trek was really far forward thinking. Like in 1966, nothing came close to what you saw on Star Trek. And folks at Google and Apple, in this case explicitly cites Star Trek as an inspiration for Siri and Alexa.

• 44:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huh. Well, so I guess I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of make a critique I made earlier, which is like, okay, so yes, science fiction came up with this idea first, but isn't it kind of obvious that at some point we'd rather not have to type something in? And we'd want to just be like, you know, sit on our lazy butts and yell across the screen like, turn the TV on, you know, like, isn't it kind of an obvious thing?

• 45:10Daniel Whiteson?

  It's kind of an obvious thing, but it sometimes only seems obvious in hindsight. I think what science fiction does really well is show you how technology can transform life. What would life be like if we had this thing? Like, you can say, yeah, that would be cool, but what would it really be like to be alive in that world and to live that way? And it was incredible what we saw on the screen, the way they could talk to the computer, this assistant they had, which was intelligent and never got tired. It was amazing and very forward thinking, even if they didn't invent the technology or even the idea, they showed us what life could be like if we had it. And I think that is part of the inspiration.

• 45:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that if I was trying to sell a new technology, I would hire you to be the person to pitch it because that was, that was very convincing. All right, how about self-driving cars, which I am hoping that I can purchase by the time my kids are old enough to drive, which is happening way faster than I thought that it would.

• 46:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. So this first appears in science fiction in 1935. This is a story called The Living Machine, where there are driverless taxi cars in a futuristic society. And then it appears everywhere in science fiction, 1950s, The Magic Highway, Herbie the Love Bug in 1968, one of my favorite movies. It's not really a self-driving car, sort of like a car with a mind. And then, of course, Knight Rider in the 1990s, right? That's a car that not only can talk, but can drive itself.

• 46:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm not familiar with any of these.

• 46:38Daniel Whiteson?

  What, you don't know Knight Rider, seriously?

• 46:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know of Knight Rider. I didn't know that it was spelled K-N-I-G-H-T, but I see that in your outline, there's a K there.

• 46:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I can still hum the theme song to Knight Rider.

• 46:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 46:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Which I will not do.

• 46:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but Matt would give you a musical accompaniment, probably.

• 46:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's just ask Matt to give us some musical background right now.

• 47:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 47:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Knight Rider was very influential. I actually went to the Automotive Museum in LA where they have the Knight Rider, one of the prop cars, very big moment for me. I have a picture standing in front of it, of course.

• 47:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, whoa.

• 47:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, Matt.

• 47:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I watched that and the spinoff version with the helicopter, lots and lots as a kid. Anyway, this is big in science fiction and of course now it's maybe big in the real world. But this is something that again, engineers were working on before it even appeared in science fiction. So in 1925, there were already cars without drivers. These are radio controlled cars. So like, think of the RC car that your kids drive around, but just like a real sized version. They had radio technology and somebody like put radio technology together with a car and was like, hey, this is cool. That's not a car you can get in and tell it where to go, but the driver's not literally in the car. So in principle, it's a sort of separating

• 48:00Daniel Whiteson?

  the driver and the car. And then in 1930s, popular magazines already envisioned the futures with automatic cars. So you see articles and depictions where you have driverless cars already in the popular imagination in the 1930s.

• 48:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it sounded to me like engineering gets a point.

• 48:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, absolutely. And then people have been working on this hard for a long, long time. You know, DARPA had these challenges. How long can you drive a car before it crashes? And it was hard. This was like mostly led by university teams and most of the cars crashed after like 10 meters or something. So the fact that we have like competing endeavors and Waymo and Tesla and Zooks and whatever these days that are like almost working is amazing. And in sake of full transparency, my brother works for Waymo. So I have a conflict of interest there.

• 48:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I didn't know that. Can, can your brother get me a Waymo car?

• 48:53Daniel Whiteson?

  My brother can't even get me a Waymo car. So yeah, I know. Or Waymo stock for that matter.

• 48:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. Well, bummer. Okay. So it sounds like we're giving this one to engineering. I think we've got time for one more technology. Let's end on 3D printers and we're back to Star Trek.

• 49:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. And Daniel's preferred device, the replicator, right? This is awesome on Star Trek because again, it's something you can just use casually. It's not like you go into the lab and you have to sign up and it takes seven weeks to configure the machine. You just like want a cup of hot tea. You just make a cup of hot tea. Tea are gray hot.

• 49:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Not been programmed into the replication system. Or you can like build spare parts or whatever you need. There's no ordering anything on Amazon. Anything you need, it just assembles it from the raw ingredients. It's incredible and it's everywhere. It's not like the ship has one of them, like everybody's got one in their quarters. It's like having a microwave.

• 49:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Earl Grey, black. Oh, no, wait, what was it? Was it Earl Grey, black?

• 49:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Hot. Course it's hot. What you want in it? Nothing. So this is exactly the kind of thing I would love to have around. And it's the kind of thing science fiction nerds love. But it was not invented again by Star Trek. This appears first in like 1945 in a short story by Murray Leinster. The idea of like feeding plastics into something and then there's a moving arm that makes drawings in the air and the stuff that comes out of it hardens. The idea of like a 3D printer really has much earlier roots than Star Trek. And then in The Midas Touch, a book by Frederick Polk, there's the idea of matter conversion, that you can turn anything into anything. And then more recently, The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson has matter compilers,

• 50:37Daniel Whiteson?

  though these are probably inspired by Star Trek. So there's sort of a thread here in science fiction.

• 50:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right, but did engineering predate the idea?

• 50:48Daniel Whiteson?

  So engineering does predate this. In 1971, there was a liquid metal recorder, basically sort of like printing with metal. The idea that you could like, you know, use something which was a liquid and then hardened and you could use that to build up something. They call this additive manufacturing. The idea really emerged in the eighties. There's a guy named Chuck Hall who invented this concept of additive manufacturing, soft layers which are added one at a time and then cured to make hard with like UV radiation or particles or something. And so it goes from soft to hard and then you can build something. And so this came out in the eighties, which again predates the next generation.

• 51:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And back then you could buy one, you know, in the eighties, a 3D printer, that would cost like two thirds of a million dollars in today's. Money.

• 51:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yikes.

• 51:40Daniel Whiteson?

  People have asked, Hall, like, were you trying to build this thing from Star Trek? And there's no evidence of that. He just thought this would be useful if we could like, you know, basically print stuff in 3D.

• 51:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  You said he was doing it before Star Trek, so he couldn't have been, right?

• 51:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. But the idea appeared before Star Trek in science fiction.

• 51:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay.

• 51:58Daniel Whiteson?

  The concept of a replicator. He says he was not inspired by science fiction. But, you know, once the idea came out and 3D printers were more ubiquitous, Star Trek again had already prepared people. It's a lot like the flip phone. You know, this concept was everywhere in Star Trek. People had the idea, oh, what if we could just build things out of their raw parts? And now printers are everywhere. It's like for $200, you can get a pretty good 3D printer.

• 52:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now we use them to build things like rocket. Like, I think Rocket Lab at least used to 3D print some of their rockets. Maybe they still do. And people are trying to 3D print things like livers and they can already do some stuff.

• 52:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. Casts, right? Bones, things you can put in your blood vessels. Like, if you need a really specific shape for something, then you can 3D print it. And so biomedically, this is a lot of applications. So it's a really cool thing. And it doesn't seem like it was inspired by science fiction. But, you know, maybe its use and its adoption was inspired by science fiction. Science fiction sort of prepared us for thinking about what life would be like if we had this and then made people more enthusiastic when it came around.

• 53:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So what do you think? Do we split that point then?

• 53:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I think maybe we should split it. Yeah, exactly. So where do we stand in the end, Kelly?

• 53:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So here's the neat thing about the point system. I wasn't writing this down anywhere or keeping track of it at all. And so I think probably science fiction won, but I can't be sure because I didn't write it down.

• 53:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, for those of you keeping score at home, you know more than we do about the outcome of this episode. I was assuming Kelly was keeping track, so I don't remember either.

• 53:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nope, nope. Well, that's what you've come to expect from an episode of Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. Extraordinary detail, but not a lot of planning. So.

• 53:47Daniel Whiteson?

  I think my take home message is that a lot of the stories that are out there about science fiction inspiring real technology are on sort of shifty ground and rely on facts that are more myth than reality. But there is real inspiration here. People are reading science fiction, thinking about those future worlds, and then trying to build them. And it goes back and forth. So I think that's definitely solid.

• 54:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And I think that there are so many things that you hear in your daily life that when you dig in and you really look for the facts, the stories are so much more nuanced, which is why I kind of love that we have an hour long podcast where we get to like dig in and try to tell the more nuanced stories. And then we don't record things like points. And, you know, we just, we do whatever it is that we do here.

• 54:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, if anybody's getting points, it's not William Shatner, it's Juan Ming Chang for all the awesome props on Star Trek. So thank you very much to all the science fiction authors who envision possible future worlds. And thank you to all the scientists and engineers who make them happen.

• 54:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. All right. Until next time, Extraordinary. Thanks for listening.

• 54:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 55:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 55:10Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, DNK Universe. Come engage with us.

• 55:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 55:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 55:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule, so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Hey, what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The Odd Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. ShopToyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps,

• 56:58Speaker 03

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• 57:43Speaker 03

  At Food Lion, low prices and MVP savings make it easier to shop for what you need without spending more than you have to. When your wallet needs a little TLC, head to your local Food Lion or shop at FoodLion.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.