Flying cars and the precautionary principle | Hour 1

And again, thank you so much for your support. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, unveiled what he described as a flying car that's equipped with thrusters. He did this during a live streamed event at his SpaceX rocket company's facility on Thursday. CBS News reports technical and regulatory challenges have so far prevented the much hyped flying car sector from getting off the ground. and this is news to me, I was not aware that there's an entire flying car sector, but okay, look forward to that. Musk revealed Tesla's new Roadster sports car during a launch event, no pun intended, at a SpaceX test facility in Texas. And during this demo, the car did a couple different things, okay? So they had this roadway track, whatever, built onto the stage of but it wasn't like a horizontal track. It was a vertical track. It starts on the ground and then kind of slopes upward, eventually going like 90 degrees vertical, and then it bends over on top of itself, basically. So it's like a half pipe kind of a look, like a semicircle. And this car drives up the track and then stops halfway up. So it's like sitting on the wall, like a fly or something. It's like, just sitting on the track vertical. Then it goes up all the way to the end of the track, and it just is like now hanging upside down on the road. It's very weird. Then it backs down, goes all the way back down again onto the ground, and then it takes off again, goes up the track, goes all the way around the half loop, and then takes off after it runs out of track, and it like kind of flips over, spins around, a bunch of thrusters kick on, and it then lands on the ground. Very impressive. Very cool. Okay. Musk described the development as, quote, what happens when you have a collaboration with the world's best company, car company, and the world's best rocket company, referring to Tesla and SpaceX. The vehicle would go into production in 2028. He said prices were not announced, but I would add, if you have to ask, then you probably can't afford it. The vehicle, um, It notes on the website that the planned flying model is not approved for public use. Boo! What is the deal? What are we even doing here then? What is the point of this if we can't buy this thing and fly it over traffic? I mean, because that's the obvious application for me. It's like I want to be able to lift up and fly over all of the cars that are in my way. It would also shorten my commute. because now I can just fly over trees and stuff. I don't have to stick to the roads. I can just go right over the trees and go like as the crow flies, you know? Would-be buyers can place a reservation online with a $ 5, 000 deposit for a non-flying model. Okay, so there's like a good, better, best tier system here for the kinds of models. A limited edition thrust model, that's the flying one, is also promised online, but it cannot be reserved. Apparently, that's going to be offered by invitation only. So that tells me I need to be really doing more on Twitter, trying to engage Elon so I could get an invitation. And maybe a free car, because I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to afford it. It wasn't immediately clear what government agency would have oversight of the vehicle. Yeah, this is going to pose a... We're going to need a new department, I guess. Another government agency, maybe? A senior U.S. Transportation Department official expressed some skepticism to CBS News that the vehicle will actually be able to take off, but acknowledged there was not a clear answer. I think he means, like, take off in the marketplace, not, like, literally take off physically, because, like, we just saw it take off. So we know it can do that. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration typically has regulatory oversight of vehicles, but it delegates safety certification to the individual automaker. NHTSA, the organization, the agency said, while the vehicle may appear to defy the laws of physics, the manufacturer must ensure that it does not defy applicable federal motor vehicle safety standards. And the driver must obey all local traffic laws. What's the local traffic law here? That I'm not allowed to fly over traffic? Is that in the rule book? I've not seen that. I'm not aware of there being a rule that I'm not allowed to leave the pavement and fly over traffic, okay? NHTSA will continue to monitor the situation and won't hesitate to act to protect the driving public. Aha, I'm no longer driving public, okay? I'm not a member of the driving public if I'm flying. I'm now a member of the flying public. The FAA said that the vehicle does not meet the agency's definition of an aircraft. So it seems to me like we are in a gray area here, people. I don't think that there's any governing agency here that can muscle in on this, unless we obviously create new regulations or a new agency. Now, from the Los Angeles Times, the sleek white sports car, and by the way, there is a reason why I'm doing this. It's not just that we were all promised flying cars with the documentary series called The Jetsons. It's not just that. There's a larger issue at play here that I will get to, I promise. The sleek white sports car drove upside down, thrust itself into the air, and performed a flip over a lineup of other Tesla vehicles. It then, this is pretty crazy too, it did a speed test on the stage. It went from zero to 60 miles per hour in under one second. That's crazy. Like, it just zips by. Zero to 60 in one second. Which is going to change the entire game for me when I'm stopped at a red light and it turns green. Like, this is a whole new world for me. Again, if I get onto the invitation list, you know? Musk says that this vehicle will eventually be able to travel as fast as half the speed of sound. Okay. I'm not so... I'm not so sold on that part. I don't know if I trust others on the road with me to be going half the speed of sound. I'm not, yeah. I don't trust people to stop at stoplights behind me. I'm always watching people as they come up behind me at the red lights. Now, at this demo event last week, Musk said that production is going to begin in 2028. This is the second generation Roadster because the Roadster was the first ever Tesla and it was originally unveiled in 2017. And that plan or the plan then was for production to begin in 2020. Delaying something for nine years, according to Brian Moody, an analyst at Capital One Auto Navigator, says delaying something for nine years, if that was Mazda, no one would stand for that. Tesla just seems to get a pass on everything like this. The original Roadster hit the roads in 2008, but was discontinued in 2012. 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Go to createavideo.com or visit them in Mint Hill just off I-485. Your photos and videos are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. Going over this really incredible demo that Tesla made or put on display on Thursday out in Texas of this flying car, the Roadster. And this vehicle has been in development for quite some time. People have actually put money down as deposits for the future production. you know, construction and delivery of these vehicles. But it's been a while. Actually, it's been a long time and people have actually gotten kind of upset about it. And again, there's a larger issue at play here just besides the vehicle. So since 2017, Tesla has collected numerous deposits of $ 50, 000 from customers who wanted to reserve their Roadster. Many of those customers have taken to social media to complain that the wait has been too long. Yeah, I'd be pretty ticked off if I put $ 50, 000 down on a on a vehicle, and it's been now, what, eight years. That's a little long. At the demo, according to the LA Times, the Roadster did not exactly soar through the air. It thrust itself off the ground for brief moments using thrusters on the bottom of the vehicle. The version of the car that's capable of leaving the ground won't be publicly available and does not have approval for use on public roads. Once again, I say, boo. Also, How are you going to police that unless we're going to unless police departments are going to get one of these for themselves so they can chase people? I'm not sure how if I'm you know, if I'm going to take off zero to 60 in one second in my roadster and then launch myself to avoid being pulled over. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how cops are going to catch me there. But anyway, there are three different tiers for this. The rocket package, that is the thruster-enabled Roadster, will be sold only to invited customers. It'll seat one person only, and it will be equipped with a multi-mode suction system and cold gas thrusters that can boost it up into the air. So that's the rocket package. The thrust package, that's like the mid-level one, will see limited release, and it comes with thrusters positioned on the rear of the vehicle, that can propel it forward at record speeds. Okay, so that's the one that's going to get you from zero to 60 in one second. The rocket one lets you fly. Musk said that this thrust package is going to crush every track record ever that's ever existed. Customers can now reserve the lowest tier, which is called the performance version, the performance tier, and the performance Roadster can be driven on regular roads He did not announce a price for that vehicle, but it is expected to cost more than you can probably afford. So this from fortune.com, it uses thrusters to leap over a line of Tesla vehicles. They did this demo as well. They put up a bunch of vehicles and then they had the roadster or the sorry, the rocket version. It like drives right at the line of cars and then just basically jumps over the line of cars. No ramp. It just like lifts itself up and goes right over like a Tesla Cybertruck, even one of the Tesla Semis, which is pretty crazy. The Roadster that took the stage Thursday is a radically redesigned car. Like I said, it comes in three different tiers, the Performance, the Thrust, and the Rocket tier. Tesla Engineering Vice President Lars Moravi said the thrusters run on about 600 liters of rechargeable compressed air. Hmm. So now, wait, wait, wait, wait. This has me thinking now. Can I just buy a bunch of compressed air tanks and do this myself? I mean, it would definitely not be as technologically advanced as the Tesla vehicle. But could I just put a bunch of these, like, compressed air, like the big tanks, put them on the bottom of the car, and then lift myself up and over the stop traffic? Hmm. Ooh, what could this do for my cartapult idea? I feel like there might be some cross-engineering overlap. I should contact Tesla. Musk might be interested in the cartapult idea where we fling vehicles over the tops of cities in order to avoid them having to drive through the city. This was an idea that I had in Asheville where Uh, they don't want the tourists coming, but they want the tourist money. And so I, I, I proposed a, basically a vehicle trebuchet where you would drive over it and it would launch your vehicle over the city. And then all of your money would kind of tumble out of the open windows, fall onto the city. So they get your tourist money, but you don't actually ever step foot in their city, which was their preference. So maybe we could use this technology by the way. Um, The Tesla claims a top speed of more than 230 miles an hour. The redesign also comes with some compromises. The original four-seat sports car now only seats no more than two, and Tesla now promises a range of more than 300 miles, which is less than half of what they originally said they would have, like a 620-mile range. So 300 miles, and then you've got to recharge this thing. Now, Musk is not pitching this as a safe vehicle to his credit. Like we all kind of notice the inherent safety issues with flying a vehicle, flying a car. So he says, quote, this is not necessarily a safety optimized car. OK, good call. Yes. And securing a spot in line is not going to come cheap. Tesla is asking for $ 50, 000 reservation payments for the performance model for the for the lowest tier. For the mid-tier, it's a quarter of a million dollars. The flying rocket version is available only by invitation with no publicly disclosed reservation fee. Tesla has yet to announce final prices for any of the three versions, and it has not said what will happen to customers who put down their deposits back in 2017. They say, according to the industry, the value in this vehicle is lies somewhere else. This is not like a mass-produced car for the marketplace. TechCrunch says the Roadster is basically what they call a halo car, a vehicle meant to showcase the company's tech ambitions rather than a volume seller. Okay, why is that important? Why is that important at a civilizational level? I will get into it in a moment. All right, real quick, every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real, it's in your name, and 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to calendarmetals.com. That's calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. All right. So from the LA Times, they quoted a piece at TechCrunch that said this new Tesla Roadster is a halo car for Tesla. It's meant to showcase the company's technological ambitions rather than be a volume seller. Okay. This reveal also came days before Tesla reports third quarter results, which analysts say matter far more to investors. So This is not expected to move the needle. There was some reporting also on the stock price, which, you know, it did not reflect, like, some massive increase. Like, oh, my gosh, this is, you know, going to change everything. And so, like, we're going to, you know, put more money into the stock or whatever. That did not really happen. All right, so what does it mean to be a halo car or a halo product, right? Why is it important to showcase the company's technological ambitions? Well, for this, I turn to a fellow by the name, and I've read some of this stuff before. His name is Breveil Le Pogon. He's French. And he's the founder of Argyle AI or Argyle AI. I don't speak French except for hors d'oeuvre, rendezvous, and ho, ho, ho. That's the extent of my French vocabulary. But anyway, He's the founder of an AI company, okay, so a tech dude, and he said, he's talking about what this innovation means. He says, last November on Joe Rogan's podcast, when he was asked why Tesla would build a flying car, and Musk's answer was simple. He said, that his friend Peter Thiel once observed that the future was supposed to have flying cars, and we never got them. And he said, if Peter wants a flying car, he should be able to buy one. Everyone knows the famous Peter Thiel line, which was, we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, which was a reference to the character limit on Twitter. You could say the modern version would be, you know, we wanted flying cars, but we got TikTok, okay? And so for 50 years, Le Programme writes, for 50 years, the West stopped building in the world of atoms and retreated into the world of bits. Apps, infinite scrolling, targeted ads, right? And we called all of this progress. But He says now Musk has closed the loop. Not a ministry, not a five-year plan, not an ethics committee or something, a car company and a rocket company that decided to work together. And this is just the beginning. He says, we are living through the most extraordinary revolution in human history. We got AI, robotics, energy, space, biology. Everything is converging at once. For the first time, we can reinvent almost everything. All of our systems. education, healthcare, government, production, distribution, all of it. We can dream of systems more efficient than any generation before us could even imagine. Solve access to food, make extremely high quality goods and services available to everybody at a cost trending towards zero. Abundance is no longer some sort of utopian vision. It's an engineering problem that can be solved. But at some point he says, We have to open our eyes to it. The West right now is sort of dysfunctional. And Europe, where he lives, is the most advanced stage of that dysfunction. He points out where value comes from. Value comes from freedom. The freedom to start a company. The freedom to build, to build something new. The freedom to try. The freedom to fail. The freedom to start again. This is a key component. The freedom to fail is vital. Not every idea is a good idea. So you try your idea. It doesn't work. Maybe you go back and you try to figure out what failed, and then you figure out what did fail. You address that, and now it's successful, and you've created something that's groundbreaking, that changes the world. Or maybe you try to fix the thing that failed and then that doesn't work either. And you keep trying to fix the failures, none of them work, and eventually you abandon it because it's not working, okay? Like that's the benefit of failure. When you rob that risk from the equation, well, now you've got a lot of bad ideas and bad systems that just keep on going on and on in perpetuity because they never fail. The perfect example of this Government, right? Government programs, government services, they never fail. They just get more money because when they don't achieve what they were promised to achieve, what they were promising to achieve, then they just say, well, we need more money to achieve the promises. It never fails. You have to allow things to fail. That's a vital part. It's a signal in the free market that either people don't want this thing, this thing doesn't work, this thing can't work, or even if it does work, right, it doesn't solve a problem that people were clamoring to have solved, okay? So the freedom to fail is important. And he says this gets to Europe's problem. It's not technological, it's a mental problem, which, like, I think we're all on board with that idea that it's mental problems in Europe. But anyway, we are running, he says, an ideological software that looks more and more like neocommunism, which is to say the precautionary principle as state religion. What is the precautionary principle? Well, I got to admit, I was not aware of this until I was actually watching the city council meeting here in Charlotte about the data centers. And a woman got up and spoke about the precautionary principle in opposition to data centers. She was an opponent of data centers. And here is what she said. Good evening. My name is Caitlin Schroering, and I am a resident in District 5, and I am pro-moratorium. I also have a PhD in sociology, and my area of expertise is on access to clean water, resource conflicts, and political economy. I urge you to use the precautionary principle framework, which emphasizes taking a more cautious approach and slowing down before new problems. implementing new innovations and technologies that may actually cause harm and be disastrous. The precautionary principle says that until we can prove it is safe, we need to assume harm can be done. There you go. Until we can prove that it's safe, then we need to slow it down. Slow everything down. Assume that the harms are going to outweigh the benefits. Assume this new thing is going to create harm, so slow it all down, right? This is what Brevard Le Pogon, this is what he is talking about. This precautionary principle is now basically a state religion. What does he mean by this? I'll go over it in a minute. We are discussing the precautionary principle as state religion. This is something that Brevard Le Pogon said. He's the founder of Argile AI. He's a French guy in France. It's a French AI company. And he says the precautionary principle, which is like, We should just assume that any new technology has harms, and so we should slow it all down. He says this has basically become a state religion, particularly in Europe and France, where he is. He says impact becomes the only moral compass Degrowth becomes the horizon. Social justice, a pretext to redistribute before anything has even been produced. He says, we replaced the question, what are we building, with what are we banning? Sound familiar? Yeah, this is the opponent of the data center's And all of the other people that spoke against the data centers, right? This is their sort of default mentality, not what can we build, but how do we ban this thing? What can we ban? What else can we ban? There ought to be a law, right? He says, as long as we run this software, we can pour all the billions of dollars we want into AI plans, but nothing's going to happen. We'll regulate what others invent. We'll tax what others produce. We'll watch on our phones other countries make cars fly. He says the future is coming. It's coming fast. The only question is whether Europe wants to be an actor in it or a museum. Okay, so keep in mind he is French, and so he's dealing with sort of a different set of problems. He's looking over here and saying, why can't we be more like America? We want to be doing that rather than adopting this precautionary standard, this precautionary principle. He then goes on to say, Elon Musk was right, and the scientists are about to make a real narcissistic or take a real narcissistic wound. He says, two months ago, I had dinner with a quantum physics professor at Normale Soup, one of the best schools in France. He introduced himself by saying, I'm the only non-leftist professor in a swamp of leftist, degrowth-obsessed professors. His colleagues are all anti-AI, and the reason is, they say, it consumes water. And at one point, he says, quote, since the 1970s, no truly serious topic in physics has been funded. I ask him, well, what's being funded instead? He says, theoretical cathedrals. Magnificent, but they're almost entirely useless. Why? He says after everything that happened with the nuclear industry, he says the academic world imposed the precautionary principle on itself. It's afraid of discovering truly profound things. And that is bad. Let me say, that's bad. Science is afraid of finding things? That's exactly what Francois Cholet is describing today. String theory says what happens when an intelligence is cut off from reality. He says it hallucinates. It builds cathedrals. Okay? So it's all operating in the theoretical. No real-world applications. We're not finding things, building new things, right? It's all of the mind. He says, I often talk about Antonio Gramsci, he's the Italian communist in the prison papers. He wrote, you know, the long march through the institutions to take over. He says, you know, you don't seize power by force. You seize the institutions, those being universities, media, culture. And once you hold them, you decide what's thinkable, right? Research hasn't escaped this. He says, we fund what's publishable, consensual, risk-free. We no longer fund what could change everything because that's too scary. Let's take precautions, everybody. Oh my gosh, this is new. This is scary. There could be some harm. So let's slow it all down. Let's not do anything. And that's why so many people in France are crying right now. He says they feel their fake world is dying. This theoretical world, the world where a title was enough, where status replaced results. where you could spend 30 years writing papers read by 12 people without ever confronting reality. He says, Elon is pointing out that a large portion of PhDs are useless. And at his own company, he eliminated the title of researchers. There are only engineers. And the message there is clear we're not paying you to search we're paying you to find science will have to rediscover its true purpose not producing papers not getting grant money not shining at the conferences but to understand reality and then to bend it AI is going to accelerate all of that And it's going to do so pretty brutally. When intelligence becomes abundant, it's no longer the bottleneck. What matters is the courage to confront it with the physical world. So physicists, mathematicians, he says, it's time to pull your heads out of your posteriors, let me say, and create real value for the world. He says, we want antimatter. We want antigravity. We want the warp drive. We want to understand consciousness at the infinitely small scale. The real topics, the ones we have been too scared to touch for 50 years. He says science has been captured, but it's going to be liberated, and that's going to hurt some egos pretty badly. In fact, there's a famous quote, and it actually comes from Tesla. not Elon Musk's car company, but Nikola Tesla, the inventor, right? And he said, the scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today, now remember, this is like, what, 100 years ago? He says, the scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly. but one can think deeply and be quite insane. So what's he saying? That the scientists of today are thinking deeply and that can be insanity. They can conjure up all of these theoretical cathedrals, construct all of these theoretical ideas and principles and theorems and such. But if you are thinking clearly, that requires you to be sane. Because what is this? This is the perspective that things are real, that there is a reality, that there are truths, right? Everything's not just relative and all of that. He says, today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments and then wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which is has no relation to reality. This is Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. See, that's why, whether or not I ever get the flying car from Elon Musk, I probably couldn't afford it anyway, but whether or not this ever becomes a reality, pushing these boundaries is vital. And I want to be part of a civilization that pushes those boundaries. I feel like that's what makes us America. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.