February 29, 2024 • 47 mins
You know all of those cords and cables and wires that we use to connect our stuff to the electrical grid so they’ll, you know, work? Imagine a day when energy flies through the air like wifi, utterly cord-free. Well, imagine no more! That day is coming!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, get this. We're coming probably to a city
near you this year. We've got all of our shows
scheduled and Chuck's gonna tell you about them right now.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's right. We're gonna be in Medford, Massachusetts, Washington, DC,
and New York City on May twenty, thirtieth and thirty first.
Right then we're going to be going to Chicago, Minneapolis,
and Indianapolis on the seventh, eighth, and ninth of August. Yeah,
and they're gonna wind it up in Durham, North Carolina
on the fifth of September, and then Atlanta on the seventh.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And tickets are on sale now. You can go to
stuff youshould Know dot com or go to link tree
slash sysk and we would love to see you there.
Tickets are on sale now, so we'll see you soon.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just futzing around
having fun doing what we do. You're on Stuff you
Should Know that right tex Stuff Edition It is heads
off to John Strickland, who's still doing it all these.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Years, we're all still doing it.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I know they won't let us stop.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
My god, we're still doing it.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah. I think he's in year fifteen now.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Uh I was, Yeah, he was like shortly after us, right.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, yeah, right out on the heels. I can always
feel them breathing on our neck. It's really gross. He
has a very humid breath.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Gross.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So yeah, the reason you said this is Tech Stuff
Edition is because this is super tech. Ye, there's a
lot of technical stuff that we're going to dance around.
It's future facing m hm, and it's the kind of
thing that everybody hopes will hurry up and come but
probably doesn't know very much about. So here we go
tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Ahoy, everyone except me.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
You don't want this.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I know. The whole time I was reading it, I
was like, man, it just sounds like a lot of
work to just not have to plug in your phone.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, it is a lot of word to just not
have to plug in your phone. But I mean, haven't
you ever like looked around your house and been like,
these wires are just so stupid, Like I hate having
chords and stuff you have to plug in. You have
to like put something where the outlet is or else
you have to use a drop cord. It's just it's
a it's a little more of a pain if you
(02:25):
stop and think about it, then it appears because we're
used to it. We've lived under the tyranny of courts
for so long. It's normal to us. But it's not normal, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Oh, so you're thinking of future where nothing in your
house is plugged in precisely? Oh no, sure, great, I.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Can't wait for that day. I cannot wait for that.
And not only that, there's a there's the The last
thing we're going to talk about is what I'm really
jazzed about.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Uh Okay, I don't want to spoil.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
It, so don't don't don't bring it up. But everybody,
just stay with us through the end and you'll be rewarded.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, And what we're talking about is wireless electricity, or
more appropriately, wireless power transfer. Because if you think about
your your cell phone that you can just sit on
a little pad and charge it wirelessly. That thing's plugged
into the wall. So what you're doing is you're transferring
power from one thing to another.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
But imagine if that that charger, that pad that you
lay your phone on is your house or no, it
was like mounted on the ceiling of your of your room. Yeah,
and when you walked into that room, immediately your phone
just started charging in your pocket. You turned your TV
on and it was going full blast, no problem. And
(03:42):
then you look behind it and you faint dead away
because it's not even plugged in, and you think there's
a ghost in your house or God is messing with you.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I just I don't think it. Jazz is me, like it,
Jazz is you.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I'm not going to try to convince I've never looked
behind a TV on a wall to look for gable, so.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Oh, well, then you haven't.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But we can talk about the history of it, right,
because this is not a new thing. People have been
trying to do this basically since there was electricity.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, I would have traced it back to Tesla. Tesla
was very, famously, very interested in trying to figure out
how to create wireless electricity that he planned on sending
through the Earth from one end to the other, basically
a global wireless electrical network. Right. He didn't, as we'll see.
But what I didn't realize is it predates him even.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, before him, there was a German physicist name Heinrich Hertz,
who he was a guy who said, hey, manet, electromagnetic
waves are a thing. I can prove it. And he
was able to send energy in the form of radio
as between two antennas in the eighteen eighties, which predated
Tesla's little party trick that I think all of us
(04:54):
probably saw in science or not saw but read about
in science class, or saw on the prestige. Yeah, some
point where he's like, I'm going to make this light
bulb light up, Uncle Fester style, except I won't even
put it in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Right, And it was a different light bulb. It was
the predecessor of the fluorescent light. So the gases, when
they came into the presence of a either a magnetic
field or electrical current, it would glow, it would light up.
But he did actually demonstrate this. He showed that you
can loved it, you can wirelessly power things. And yeah,
(05:29):
this is still the nineteenth century. There's a legend that
a lot of times is repeated as fact by a
lot of legitimate sources, but supposedly there's no actual evidence
of this happening. There's a legend that he lit up
a crop of light bulbs, like I think twenty five
miles away from his research station in Colorado, and that
(05:56):
would be like the far and away the longest transmission
of wireless power in history. No one's even come close
to that here in the twenty first century. So they
think that it probably didn't happen. But he was trying
to do that, but he didn't actually do it.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
I have a question, sure, will you remember what's it
called when you say like a gaga lo geese or whatever?
We did that short stuff on it whatever? You just said,
a crop of light bulbs? Is that the term for
a lot of light bulbs?
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I say, I say it is? Sure?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Oh okay, I thought that.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Was a pronoun. Was it a collective pronoun?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I don't know. But did you just make that up?
Or is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I mean, it just came out of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Okay, do you like it? Sure? Sounds like you're growing
light bulbs out in the field or something.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
By light bulbs. They'll say, you got a crop of
light bulbs here I can buy.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I love it. I mean that's probably a use for crop.
I just didn't know about.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I know, I will say, hey, man, clerk me a
crop of light bulbs.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So Tesla's got his party tricks happening. May or may
not have done this to a crop of light bulbs
over a greater distance. World War two rolls around, and
all of a sudden, we're using radar and we're learning
how to generate like more improved and more directional and
precise beams of microwaves and things like that. In nineteen
(07:25):
sixty four, and you can watch this video on YouTube.
It's kind of fun to watch a William Brown of
Raytheon kept up a little sort of I mean, it's
a helicopter, looks like it's made out of a rector
set maybe yeah, about sixty feet off the ground for
ten hours with no wires.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, And they could have gone longer, but the novelty
wore off, so he just stopped after ten hours.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, He's like, all right, does everyone get it right?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Can we go home? Now?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Like? How many times in part to pass this hula
hoop over it? Right?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Right? So that that was a huge, huge accomplishment, And
I believe the same William Brown of Raytheon created another
record that stood until from nineteen seventy five until from
what I can tell, this past January, like a month ago.
In nineteen seventy five, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab transmitted I
(08:19):
think thirty five kilowatts of power, and like fifty percent
of what they transmitted I think a quarter of a
mile away or something like that, was received and lit
up another crop of light bulbs. That's what people do,
They light up crops of light bulbs when they're demonstrating
what matters electrical.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Trans because they light up and everyone's like, ooh.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, and actually I'm sorry. It was more than a
quarter mile. I think it was basically a slat mile.
It was like one point five to four kilometers.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, so that's a really long way. And it stood
from nineteen seventy five till twenty twenty four, almost fifty years,
and then I believe the Korean Space Agency just broke
it by like three tenths of a kilometer. Really, it's
not like we've jumped by leaps and bounds. And almost
if I were William Brown would be like, really, you
could just wait until you could beat it by like
(09:09):
ten times that.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, it's not very sports have been.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Like no, it's like if you made the world's biggest bagel, right,
and somebody made another world's biggest bagel by like ten
more pounds. What's the point Are we really just gonna
go back and forth year after year with a new
world's biggest bagel? No, you need to really like double
it up at least before you break somebody's record. It's
just common courtesy.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
You know, how to really get their goat. It's just
drop one extra poppy seat on top o me has
more mats.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Man, I would just start bleeding out of my ears.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
So this can happen in a couple of ways, and
who knows what the future holds. We are going to
get to that stuff like you were talking about, Like
you walk in and everything's just like charging the second
U inner. But these days we have what's called nearfield
and what I like to call further afield, but farfield
wireless transfer. When you think of nearfield, you're already doing that.
(10:08):
If you have an electric toothbrush, if you have a
modern smartphone that can wirelessly charge. We'll talk about the
two different ways those are happening, but those are examples
of nearfield. And I think a lot of people like
I was, are amazed to know that when you put
that little electric toothbrush on its stand. Unless I'm wrong,
(10:30):
That little nubbin is only there to keep that thing upright.
It's not conducting electricity at all, is it?
Speaker 1 (10:39):
As far as I know, No, because the whole thing's
fully sealed, so the electricity is going from plastic to
plastic via waves.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So it looks like a little like a charging stump.
But you could just assume lay it down on top
of that thing, right.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I don't know. I think for an electric toothbrush, what
we're talking about at this point is called wireless in duction.
In charging, it's the same kind of principle that you
use for an induction cook top. Magnetic fields are generated
that create an electric current that's passed to another coil
on the other side that's received, and then that's attached
to a battery that gets recharged. Right, And I think
(11:16):
for something like a toothbrush, it has to be really precise,
so the coils have to basically line up as close
to one another as possible, but they don't have to
physically touch, which is why you can encase it in
plastic and seal it off and use it for an
application that's around water, like an electric toothbrush. But I
do think that has to be precise. I think you
can get a little more jiggy with it with the
(11:40):
resonant induction charging, where the coils are bigger or there's
more coils. But they also have I don't know how
they do this, but they make the frequencies that come
out of one coil and go into received by the
other perfectly in sync, so that the the coils are
(12:00):
basically tuned to one another. So you can actually keep
something a little further away and still get a charge
out of it.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Okay, so I was wrong, then that stump serves the
purpose of probably aligning it perfectly, probably, although it's not
actually you know, like a charging stump. You probably could
not just set your toothbrush down with a butt in
near that stump, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
No, but if you're talking about like your phone on
like a pad charger, you just kind of set it down. Sure,
Sure it'll still charge, even though it's not like perfectly
centered on the charger, depending on the type of charging station.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, and I have seen those to be fairly hit
or miss through the years. Yes, the little charging pad
sometimes they work. Sometimes you've got to move your phone
around it and it makes more sense now than I
know how it works why you may have to move
your phone around. And it's also slower than like a
wall charge, which you know is one of the the
(12:59):
humps to get over that we'll get.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
To it is, and they have basically gotten over that hump.
So for a while I didn't realize this, but Nokia
was the first to be like, hey, everybody, check out
our wireless charge. Well back in twenty twelve, I had
no idea. Yeah, and that set off like a whole
stampede where every phone company wanted to create a wireless
charging pad, right, and so everybody was coming up with
(13:22):
different protocols, different structures on how to make this happen,
and finally a group called the Wireless Power Consortium basically
emerged with their cheese standard key like the Chinese traditional
medicine concept of the life force that flows through.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Everything, Yeah, like gigong exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, that's also associated with this wireless power transfer to
where everybody builds it the exact same way. Right, So
that's pretty cool. But it wasn't like you had to
get it pretty much dead on to get a decent
charge out of it, like you said it was. It
transferred far less power, I think about five watts rather
(14:06):
than the standard fifteen eighteen or more that you get
from plugging your phone in. Yeah, so they came up
with G two point zero and you know the new
Apple Apple chargers that like snap onto the back of
your your phone with a magnet.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
No, oh, really, do you have my iPhone? I do?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Is it fairly new?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Uh? Let me see what I usually get, like every
third or fourth version.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Okay, you may or may not have this. I don't know.
I couldn't even tell you what if you told me
the the which one it was, I'd be like, oh,
actually I don't know. So I don't know why you've
been asked to that. But the newer iPhones, yeah, that
should have it. I think that's what I have too. Yeah,
it is and it works. So there's a there's a
(14:54):
type of charge you can get called a mag safe charger.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, yeah, I got that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Okay, so then this you have what I'm talking about.
It snaps into place, so like magnet, it holds the
phone in place, right, Yeah, I got one of those
in my car. Okay, So what that's doing is it's
holding the coil to the coil, so that in addition
to them being powerful and tuned to the same frequency,
they're also precisely interlocked, so the transfer of power is
(15:21):
way more efficient. And now they're reaching like power transfer
like fifteen, eighteen, twenty watts, just like you would have
with a traditional like pluging cord.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, and you know what, I'm not much of a
what do you call it? Buzz marketer, but I have
to say the car charger from Spiegel is what I like.
The catalog I don't know, it's SPI E G E L.
(15:51):
Is that spelled to save? Yeah, spell the same. I
mean their charger. It's fifty bucks and it works flawlessly,
and it looks good.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
And it just says a pompadour.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well it sticks on, you know, but the little stick
on base is smaller than other ones I've seen, so
if you know, sometimes your car you can't get it
in like a great place or whatever. But anyway, I
think it works great, and so I do actually use
this technology very nice.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Okay, so make safe so you have that. But the
thing is is we've actually kind of gone backwards in
that sense where you're getting more power transfer again wirelessly,
like you're not plugging your phone into anything. It's laying
on something that is connected to a power source, but
your phone's not plugged in, so it is wireless power transfer.
But rather than making it easier to just toss your
(16:41):
phone onto a pad or a table or something like
that and it immediately starts charging, it has to be
more precise. Hence the magnets. Sure, we want to be
going in the opposite direction to where your phone doesn't
even really have to be anywhere near that charging pad
to get a charge, and that's where people are moving toward.
But the cool thing about the sheet two point zero
(17:02):
is that this protocol is it's spreading out so that
if you had, say like an Android phone and iPhone,
you would be able to use the same charger for both,
which is brand new. That's a new thing, and that's
a really great way for the industry to be going
because it cuts out on packaging, cuts out a manufacturing,
it cuts down on all sorts of stuff it costs.
(17:22):
So it's a good direction to be going in.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, and divided houses can come together once again exactly
this kind of charging. There is a future application that
might be kind of cool. If you drive an electric
car to where you pull in your garage and you
just pull over charging Matt much like your telephone basically
to where you wouldn't have to plug it in or whatever. Again,
(17:47):
for me, it's like it's no trouble to plug something in,
so it's not that big of a deal. But I
imagine these little conveniences are a big deal to a
lot of people for sure.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
I think the one that I'm really excited about is
like that plus application, which is putting those kind of
coils that transmit electricity wirelessly to a receiver coil in
your car in asphalt, so when you're driving on the highway,
your car is actually charging. That would do it. That
(18:19):
would do it for gas engine cars people, you would
have to just be a total jerk to have like
an internal combustion engine after that point, because that's the
big problem with it. Like do you remember that stupid
electric car that I rented in Seattle and drove to
Portland and I had to sit for forty five minutes
in this little town doing nothing but waiting for the
(18:40):
stupid rental car to charge. That is no way to live.
But if I had just been able to drive down
what is that five? The five, and that what they
call it.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I think that's a California think.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Okay, well, if I had just been able to drive
down I five and my car's charging the whole time, perfect,
there's no reason for any any fossil fuel car all.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Now, is the idea there that every road in America
has is redone with charging capabilities underneath it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
What I would guess is they would you would probably
just need to do one lane.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And then and then maybe only on expressways or something.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Right, So one lane on an expressway and you like,
if your car has over some amount of charge, like
the Cultural Folk Way would be, you don't go on
that lane. You leave it open for people who really.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Need to charge the car. That'll go over well exactly
in the United States. That'll that'll become the uh look
at that jerk lane.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Exactly. Yeah, it'll be like the new driving slow in
the fast lane thing.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I look forward to that day. I'm gonna be old
and feeble and I just you can send me updates
on how things are going from the road.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
But that's but that's all. But you just need one
lane like that on a stretch of highway, and I
think that would do it, at least at first, all right,
I we get this done like tomorrow, all.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Right, But in the meantime we should take a break, okay,
because we're gonna have to buy some tools. Okay, all right,
we'll be right back. All right, So we're back. Josh's boy.
(20:35):
Look at the smile on your face thinking about driving
untold miles without having to stop.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I mean, it's just going to change everything.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Peeing in a gatorade bottle. You're not stopping for.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Nothing, No, no way.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Just think of the cannonball run I have.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I'm just gonna take this opportunity, all right, But yes,
the cannonball run would work really well with that. Yeah,
if you I see this enough that I feel like
this is worth mentioning. If you ever find yourself in
an emergency situation where you have to pee into a
water bottle or a mountain dew bottle or something like that,
that's fine, that's fine. Like that is a thing you
have to do sometimes. I never have, but people do it,
(21:14):
and I get it. But you don't leave that on
the side of the road for somebody else to pick up.
That is yours to hang on to until you're able
to dispose of it. In the trash where it belongs. Yeah,
put the cap on, get it out of your way,
make sure it doesn't spill or anything like that. But
you do not set that outside of your car until
it goes into the trash. That is, it's tied for
(21:37):
first with throwing your dental floss stick down on the
ground for someone else to pick up.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah. The only time I will do that is camping.
If it's rainy or really really cold, then I'm in
my tent. I will have the forethought to bring an
appropriate bottle smart so I can just get out of
my sleeping bag and you know, and ppe in the bottle.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
A big wide mouth bottle, Am I right?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
And then I just leave it there in the woods.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
No, no, of course not okay, okay, I was shocked.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
All right. So we're back and we're getting started now
on far field wireless transfer. Because your phone on your nightstand,
that's great. Driving over a mat in your garage would
be amazing, But you really are cooking with gas, as
they say, ironically, not with gas. If you can start
figuring out how to do this over longer and longer frequencies,
(22:36):
and they are figuring that stuff out by ways of
electromagnetic waves or which you know, what you do is
you send it out as an electromagnetic wave, it transmits
it as a beam, then it converts it to power
or through laser beams.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yes, so you can do laser you can do millimeter waves,
you can do I think microwaves is are the big
ones because they'll I mean they'll they're electromagnetic waves, so
they're an energy carrier and all you need is a
way to convert electricity to electromagnetic energy and then a
way to convert it back on the other side, and
(23:13):
then you've just transmitted power from a distance.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
That's what they're possible already, right, They just absolutely haven't
figured out a great consumer application because it's not efficient
or great jeap.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
That's the problem. It's not cheap and it's inefficient. So
yes that I believe there are consumer products out there,
just a handful of them that you can spend a
lot of money on and be like, look, this thing's charging.
It takes forty eight hours to get to five percent,
but it's charging wirelessly. That's where we're at right now.
(23:46):
But it is possible. People have figured it out. But
just like with that CHI protocol, with like the charging
pads that the industry is in the same place right
now with figuring out a a common protocol for everybody
to use now. So it's kind of the wild West
any they're trying to figure out the best way to
efficiently do it and also safely do it, as we'll see.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, in one application they can use it on today
that does make sense. And Livia dug this up and
helped out, and this one makes a lot of sense.
With RFID tags radio frequency identification tags, and you've probably
heard of these. There's all kinds of applications for these,
but one of the big applications is if you have
(24:31):
like a warehouse full of stuff, instead of having a
barcode on every single thing that you have to walk
up to with a bar code scanner like several inches
away or whatever, you can track your inventory more efficiently
because it can if you do it through RFID, you
can group things together, you can scan a bunch of
stuff at once, you can scan it from three, four
(24:53):
or five feet away, maybe you don't have to be
right there up on it. So using this technology to
have little RFID tags that don't require batteries is a
realistic application.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, and you just said a mouthful with that. They
don't require batteries, because that's a big reason why you
would want to use something like wireless power transfer is
with the little RFID tags, they have an antenna in them,
but they don't actually have any power. They're not internally powered.
But when that radio wave hits it, it carries just
enough energy to make contact with it, give it a
(25:29):
little juice. There's a modulator inside that takes that radio
wave and converts it back to shoot back out to
the scanner with a little with its number associated with it.
All without batteries. It just uses They figured out how
to use the energy in that electromagnetic wave in the
form of radio waves, and so we're already doing this again.
(25:52):
It's just really inefficient. But they're onto something with that
because you know, we've entered the Internet of Things. I
think we did a whole episode on that way. I'll
bet that needs so much updating.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
But all the little like sensors in your refrigerator, all
the little little gadgets, the thing that connects your refrigerator,
the to Wi Fi. Now all of these things are
like really tiny little components and the smaller the component.
The harder it is to put a decent battery in there,
(26:23):
and you also kind of want a rechargeable battery too,
but some of them don't have batteries. They still are
going to report that say like you're running it low
on ketchup or something like that. Wireless energy would be
able to do the same thing that we're doing with
RFID tags, but with the little sensors and chargers that
make up the Internet of things that make your home
(26:44):
a smart home.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, or to not have to have a follow up
surgeries to replace batteries in your pacemaker would be pretty.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Remarkable, Yeah, Because that's another like really big part of this,
in addition to like the whole g whiz aspect of
it and the no chords they which I'm really happy about.
The bigger point in the near term is that it
will do weigh with disposable batteries. All will have is
rechargeable batteries. If we have any batteries at all. Some
things won't need it, but things that do need a
(27:13):
battery to keep going without a power source, those will
be rechargeable and they'll be more easily replenished with wireless
power transmission. So you can say goodbye to buying batteries
at the store. They'll just be gone and the earth
will breathe a deep, deep, happy sigh.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah. Well that is, and now we're getting into sort
of your utopia, which is these companies that are exploring
initially probably like a room system and then eventually a
whole home system to where what you described at the
beginning of the show would be possible, where you can
walk in your house the second you walk in, your
phone is charging in your pocket. If you have a
(27:52):
smart home and you have like powered blinds on your windows,
those are always charged. They're not plugged in. If you
have remote control for your TV and everything else in
your home, they actually have a tiny battery made by
the company. In this case, I mean, we can go
back and talk about Guru, but there's a company called
(28:13):
Oca inc Ossia, and they have a system called the
Kota system Ota, and that's the idea is you have
a unit in your house. It looks sort of like
a well it's a little smaller than a board game
and a little more square, and it's just a little
transmitting stand and it shoots power across the room. It
(28:38):
bounces it around and you have receivers that are attached
to your devices, like your receiver would be built into
your phone case in the case of a phone. Or
they're making what they're calling forever batteries, which is a
little double a battery that actually has a tiny receiver
in it, so that remote control battery will never die
(29:00):
and it essentially just makes any device in your house
compatible with this transmitter. The one thing I wondered about, though,
was like, well, when is duras El gonna buy them
out and just shut it down?
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Oh? Man, I hope we don't run into something like that.
I mean, big battery is a major threat to democracy, true,
but I don't know. I think I don't know. I
think these other startups have some pretty good clout too.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Well, should we talk about Guru then, sure? Jumping back
a little, Guru.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Got together with Motorola and two years ago they debuted
basically a charger, an over the air charger, a wireless
power charger that was very similar in design. It seems
like to that Coda charger, and it can I think,
charge four phones at once up to ten feet away
(29:53):
with one hundred degree field of vision, which is pretty cool.
It's still not out to market. I think people are like, yeah,
but you guys didn't mention how efficient it is, like
how many watts does it transfer? And motoroles like stop
asking questions and they went back to the drawing board.
But the code of stuff seems like it's so close
it might actually already be available in some areas.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
And didn't see it for sale yet, but I might
be wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
They are touting their wireless power security camera, the archos AR.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Now that's a good use, yeah for sure. Yeah, because
if you have a house where you didn't have like
you if you have security cameras whatever, you didn't have
them built in and wired initially, and you're just like, oh,
I want to get a Nest cameras or any other brand,
Like you got to plug those things in. Yeah, and
if they're outdoor cameras, you're either running wire to an
(30:44):
outdoor plug that someone could just unplug right or you're
drilling holes in your wall. So I think this is
a really realistic, like worthy application.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
It's part of like my week to go around and
connect the charger, the outdoor charger to the outdoor cameras
and just top them off because they're not hardwired. So yeah,
I agree with you. I think it's a great application.
Now imagine that for your TV.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Although kind of make one complaint real quick about security cameras. Yeah,
they're great to have. They can help out with different
things and help out with neighbors. Hey I saw someone
and them like breaking into my car. Your neighbor has
a camera pointing, like we can all help. But in
my experience in Atlanta, with car break ins and house
break ins, I've had both, they don't help you catch anybody.
(31:34):
They don't help stop anyone. So it's almost more like, hey,
you want to watch some guys steal your stuff? Right, Yeah,
police can't really do much with them, and it certainly
doesn't keep anyone from doing anything. So I don't know
it's good for more than just like break in security.
I think there are a lot of if you have
dogs and you're like, want to see what your dog's doing,
(31:56):
is eating the wrong thing or throwing up or you know,
it's beneficial for a lot of different reasons, but catching
a bad guy at my experience, security cameras don't really
help with that.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
No, you're likelier to have some weird footage from your
camera end up on the national news or America's funniest.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Toying exactly catch a UFO or something.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are likelier to catch a UFO
than somebody stealing packages off of your porch with your
security camera.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Sort of. The real deal here is like one day
when they can come up with a system where it's
built into Amtrak and subways and airports, so all of
these sort of heavily used public spaces are just charging
everyone's everything.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yes, And the problems are the same with the wireless
phone charging just across the board. Anytime we're talking about
wireless power transfer, it's the inefficiency is what's the big
stumbling block right now. Yeah, the further you get away
(33:00):
from the charger, Yeah, the less power the receiver is getting.
The most i've seen, I think that ar Chose security
camera gets like less than a wt thirty feet away
at its maximum distance, which is still I mean thirty
(33:20):
feet is a decent.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Decent Is that enough to power it?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
I think as long as it had you probably would
have to charge it first, plug in when you first
get it, and then if it had continuous contact it
was constantly receiving it.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I would hope that they would design it so that
it uses less energy than that can get it its
maximum distance. I don't know, but that could be a
challenge right now. That's the kind of inefficiency problems that
it's running into. I think typically when you try to
transmit electricity through an electromagnetic beam, you get about twenty
percent on the other end of what you sent out.
(33:59):
And that's even a step backwards from what the Jet
Propulsion Lab did. They got forty nine percent across a mile.
So I guess they just didn't tell anybody how to
do what they did, because we're still catching up to
what they did in nineteen seventy five. But so even
if you're like, okay, we're getting twenty percent of the
electricity that we are generating converting to an electromagnetic wave,
(34:23):
transmitting to another receiver, and then converting back to electricity,
we're losing eighty percent of that. That is ridiculously inefficient.
And people in the industry, which is basically just nothing
but startups and venture capitalists right now are saying, well, well, yes,
that's true, that's ridiculously inefficient. But we're talking about replacing
batteries right here, and the cost of the electricity that
(34:44):
is wasted is like five thousand times less than the
cost of a double a disposable battery. So really, if
you look at it in terms like that, it's we're
not that far off from it being cost effective if
we can use it to replace batteries.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, And one of the cool pieces of or cool
parts of this tech is let's say you have a
room that's set up to charge everything in there. It's
apparently with this OSA system, it is it's bouncing all
over the room, pinging like one hundred times a second.
So it's not like if you turn your back, it's
not shooting waves through your body and we'll get to
(35:22):
safety here after the break. But regardless of that, it
bounces around you. If you have your phone up to
your head, it will bounce around your head off the
back wall to hit the back of that phone.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Oh really, the OSA system does.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
That, Yeah, supposedly, and only delivers power like if something
needs it, so it's not constantly on and supposedly we'll
prioritize whatever's in the room that needs juice the.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Most smart Yeah, because just like RFI D tags that
chargers constantly surveying the stuff in the room that has
right a coder receiver attached to it and saying like,
where are you at, what's your levels? You need some
you need some juice. I got some for you. They're like, no,
not right now. I'm good, okay, but I'm here if
you need it kind of thing. Yeah, So I didn't
(36:10):
know that it actually went around people, though, which is
a big deal, because that's a genuine concern at this point.
If you're beaming electricity throughout a home, if you're creating
an electrical field that's just indiscriminately moving everywhere in a room,
it's going to come in contact with things that are conductive. So,
(36:31):
like someone one issue I've seen raised is the idea
that you're just yeah, your pots and pants are going
to get super hot just sitting in the drawer in
your kitchen. Yeah, if you're using microwaves, if the microwave
is powerful enough it can cook you from the inside out,
that doesn't seem to be a threat. I mean, the
people who are designing these things are like well aware
(36:53):
of the dangers of microwaves cooking human beings. So the
stuff they're they're like deliberately setting these things at levels
that wouldn't be able to do that, but it just
kind of goes to show like that's the stage that
where i'd is like, that's still technically possible with what
we're doing. Laser beams can still shoot you in the eye.
They could still burn your skin.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, those are the ones that don't hang around the room.
If it's laser base, then you have to have a
direct line.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yes, and supposedly if you get in between the laser
and the receiver, it just automatically turns off. But you know,
there's still that moment that singes your hair.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, or you could have the high tech mirrored system
like any bank security in the movies, or I'm sorry,
museum security. Probably, Oh yeah, like that, like shooting the
lasers all around grid.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, for sure, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
And then before you know it, Catherine Zada Jones is
slinking underneath one of those things.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, and you're like, what are you doing in my kitchen?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
You're too old to be slinking around like that lady.
You know, pull a muscle.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
So what else is there?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Well, we should take a break probably, oh yeah, yeah,
and then we'll come back and bush up with the
serious future right after this.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
All right, Chuck, So we're talking about future applications that like,
this is the real whiz bang stuff that I'm just
really jazzed about because we're approaching that dream that Tesla
had of fulfilling that dream of basically creating a world
where everything's just getting wireless power all the time.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. So there's a group called the Persistent Optical. This
is a plan the Persistent and we love our acronyms.
Is one of the best assistant optical wireless energy relay.
What does that spell?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Power? What have you got power?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
It's a great one. I love it when it perfectly
aligns like that. And that was proposed by the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which we all know is DARPA.
And this is a situation where they could beam electricity
from a web of aircraft flying above onto the ground
(39:32):
into let's say, either you know Libya's aid a conflict zone,
but maybe a disaster zone where there's no power on
the ground anymore and people are dying. Potentially a web
of aircraft above could shoot this stuff down to the ground.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yes, but it does have immediate military applications because just
like how you know, people were saying, like, wait a minute,
we have twenty percent efficiency of the electricity where we're
transmitting here. Yeah, the same thing is running into this
problem too, Like there's a loss of efficiency. But even
if there's a massive loss of efficiency, it's still more
(40:11):
efficient than literally flying in tanks of oil and gasoline. Yeah,
into a conflicts owner disaster area, filling up generators and
then plugging into those. It'd be still much more efficient
than that. And because it'd be more efficient, because it
would just give such a ridiculous advantage on the battlefield.
(40:33):
This is probably coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, but like you said, they have a leg up
because it's so inefficient. The alternative that we've been using
is that it doesn't have to be as efficient as
like a home version that we're talking about for people
to get on board, because that's one of the problems
is people aren't gonna start buying this stuff up. Even
that cool system we were talking about out for like
(41:01):
one room, you'd have to be a really you have
to have a lot of money and be a super
into early tech adoption to just kind of show it
off to friends. At this point, to make it mass marketed,
they have to make it so everybody sees the benefit
and can afford it, and that's not the case with
(41:21):
these potential military applications.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
No, but it's sad but true that the military research
and development has trickled down to a lot of really
important consumer items for short years too. And this could
be the same exact thing.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Absolutely, there's another There's a group in New Zealand called
EMROD and they are basically creating line of sight towers
to where that just beams from one to the other,
basically like those bonfire towers and Lord of the Rings. Yeah,
it's just the same thing, but rather than like line
of sight, you're transmitting electromagnetic waves carrying energy, and then
(41:57):
at the other end, or probably at each of one
of these transmitters, you're able to convert it to usable
electricity and then you know, power up a disaster area,
a rural area, whatever area you want to.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I don't remember that from Lord of the Rings. Is
it just a signal over long distance? Yeah, like that,
like a bit visually signal.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, from like mountaintop to mountain top. They had like
a bomb fire and then at anybody else noticed it
and they let their bombfire and it was like a
transmission of information. That's what we're talking about in much
the same way that Wi Fi transmits information. We're talking
about the same exact thing, using the same essentially kind
of electromagnetic spectrum, but instead to transmit energy rather than information.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah. Absolutely, Like people don't freak out over a Wi
Fi being being through their house and it's essentially the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Some people do, like Chuck McGill from Wood.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
No, no, no, I haven't seen that, but I know there
are people.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, So there's a really exciting application with that New
Zealand structure where to tower. Yeah, the emrod one is
they could you could transfer wind energy from remote places
to an urban area that really needs that electricity, all
(43:14):
those renewables. So it's like the fatal flaws like you
they they're too far away from the grid. Nope, not
any longer. You can transmit it wirelessly through New Zealand
at least.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well talking about being too far away, too far away.
The think about being an outer space and having a
web of satellites outfitted with these huge solar panels far
above the Earth that could transmit energy down as microwaves.
That is not out of the realm of possibility. In fact,
(43:45):
it's even been done just last year in twenty twenty three,
cal Tech, Yes, Caltech Space Power Project, they sent a
detectable amount of energy from a satellite to Earth.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
You know, I don't think they were charging a car
or anything like that, but they showed that it's possible.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah, and get this, Chuck, I mean, aside from the
infrastructure costs involved, that's free energy. You're just taking solar
energy and transmitting it, even if it's just a little
bit and there's a massive loss of efficiency. You're not
burning coal to get that. You're just you just built
a satellite that's harvesting it out and outer space, which
is a huge advantage, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, that's like the first step toward a Dyson sphere. Really,
if you think about it, I love it. That's the
one I was jazz the most.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
About the satellite one.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yes, harvesting solar injury in space and transmitting it as
a usable power down on Earth. That is jazz worthy
for sure.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:50):
All right, Well, Chuck has nothing else. Neither do I.
We'll just have to sit and wait and see what
the future holds. And while we do that, let's say
It's time for listener now.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
This is an email again from our old buddy Mark Konts.
Marking Gale counts in the Ohio area, longtime supporters and pals,
and this is what Marcu has to say. And you
might remember Mark. He's an art therapist, Hey guys, licensed
art therapists and the director of mental health services at
the Clark County Education Service Center in Springfield, Ohio. My
(45:23):
team work extremely hard to provide Sources of Strength to
as many students as we can in the state for free.
Most people assume that suicide prevention work focuses on sad,
shock and trauma, but we run a program in our
schools called Sources of Strength, which capital s capital s
by the way, which focuses on hope, help and strength.
(45:44):
Sources of Strength is made possible to us through funding
and support from the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation and Prevention First.
Sources of Strength is more than just suicide preventions, an
overall wellness program focusing on eight protective factors, some of
them being positive friends, healthy activities, generosity, stuff like that.
(46:05):
It is free to all Ohio students and can be
started in the classroom as early skindergarten. Meanwhile, the junior
high and high school students can work with adult advisors
of the program to run school wide campaigns and events.
Only skimming the surface here, guys, So if you live
in Ohio, you should look up Sources of Strength Ohio
dot org to learn more about it and become one
of the mini schools participating. If you don't live in Ohio,
(46:28):
you can still be a part of the movement that's
taking place in the US, Canada and Australia about going
to Sources of Strength dot org. And that is from
our old buddy Mark Goods.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Well, thanks a lot for that. Mark. Good to hear
from you as always. And if you want to be
like Mark and talk about some amazing stuff you're doing
so we can tell everybody else about it. We love
that kind of thing. You can wrap it up and
send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more pod casts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, get this. We're coming probably to a city
near you this year. We've got all of our shows
scheduled and Chuck's gonna tell you about them right now.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's right. We're gonna be in Medford, Massachusetts, Washington, DC,
and New York City on May twenty, thirtieth and thirty first.
Right then we're going to be going to Chicago, Minneapolis,
and Indianapolis on the seventh, eighth, and ninth of August. Yeah,
and they're gonna wind it up in Durham, North Carolina
on the fifth of September, and then Atlanta on the seventh.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And tickets are on sale now. You can go to
stuff youshould Know dot com or go to link tree
slash sysk and we would love to see you there.
Tickets are on sale now, so we'll see you soon.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just futzing around
having fun doing what we do. You're on Stuff you
Should Know that right tex Stuff Edition It is heads
off to John Strickland, who's still doing it all these.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Years, we're all still doing it.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I know they won't let us stop.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
My god, we're still doing it.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah. I think he's in year fifteen now.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Uh I was, Yeah, he was like shortly after us, right.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, yeah, right out on the heels. I can always
feel them breathing on our neck. It's really gross. He
has a very humid breath.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Gross.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So yeah, the reason you said this is Tech Stuff
Edition is because this is super tech. Ye, there's a
lot of technical stuff that we're going to dance around.
It's future facing m hm, and it's the kind of
thing that everybody hopes will hurry up and come but
probably doesn't know very much about. So here we go
tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Ahoy, everyone except me.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
You don't want this.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I know. The whole time I was reading it, I
was like, man, it just sounds like a lot of
work to just not have to plug in your phone.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, it is a lot of word to just not
have to plug in your phone. But I mean, haven't
you ever like looked around your house and been like,
these wires are just so stupid, Like I hate having
chords and stuff you have to plug in. You have
to like put something where the outlet is or else
you have to use a drop cord. It's just it's
a it's a little more of a pain if you
(02:25):
stop and think about it, then it appears because we're
used to it. We've lived under the tyranny of courts
for so long. It's normal to us. But it's not normal, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Oh, so you're thinking of future where nothing in your
house is plugged in precisely? Oh no, sure, great, I.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Can't wait for that day. I cannot wait for that.
And not only that, there's a there's the The last
thing we're going to talk about is what I'm really
jazzed about.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Uh Okay, I don't want to spoil.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
It, so don't don't don't bring it up. But everybody,
just stay with us through the end and you'll be rewarded.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, And what we're talking about is wireless electricity, or
more appropriately, wireless power transfer. Because if you think about
your your cell phone that you can just sit on
a little pad and charge it wirelessly. That thing's plugged
into the wall. So what you're doing is you're transferring
power from one thing to another.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
But imagine if that that charger, that pad that you
lay your phone on is your house or no, it
was like mounted on the ceiling of your of your room. Yeah,
and when you walked into that room, immediately your phone
just started charging in your pocket. You turned your TV
on and it was going full blast, no problem. And
(03:42):
then you look behind it and you faint dead away
because it's not even plugged in, and you think there's
a ghost in your house or God is messing with you.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I just I don't think it. Jazz is me, like it,
Jazz is you.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I'm not going to try to convince I've never looked
behind a TV on a wall to look for gable, so.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Oh, well, then you haven't.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But we can talk about the history of it, right,
because this is not a new thing. People have been
trying to do this basically since there was electricity.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, I would have traced it back to Tesla. Tesla
was very, famously, very interested in trying to figure out
how to create wireless electricity that he planned on sending
through the Earth from one end to the other, basically
a global wireless electrical network. Right. He didn't, as we'll see.
But what I didn't realize is it predates him even.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, before him, there was a German physicist name Heinrich Hertz,
who he was a guy who said, hey, manet, electromagnetic
waves are a thing. I can prove it. And he
was able to send energy in the form of radio
as between two antennas in the eighteen eighties, which predated
Tesla's little party trick that I think all of us
(04:54):
probably saw in science or not saw but read about
in science class, or saw on the prestige. Yeah, some
point where he's like, I'm going to make this light
bulb light up, Uncle Fester style, except I won't even
put it in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Right, And it was a different light bulb. It was
the predecessor of the fluorescent light. So the gases, when
they came into the presence of a either a magnetic
field or electrical current, it would glow, it would light up.
But he did actually demonstrate this. He showed that you
can loved it, you can wirelessly power things. And yeah,
(05:29):
this is still the nineteenth century. There's a legend that
a lot of times is repeated as fact by a
lot of legitimate sources, but supposedly there's no actual evidence
of this happening. There's a legend that he lit up
a crop of light bulbs, like I think twenty five
miles away from his research station in Colorado, and that
(05:56):
would be like the far and away the longest transmission
of wireless power in history. No one's even come close
to that here in the twenty first century. So they
think that it probably didn't happen. But he was trying
to do that, but he didn't actually do it.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
I have a question, sure, will you remember what's it
called when you say like a gaga lo geese or whatever?
We did that short stuff on it whatever? You just said,
a crop of light bulbs? Is that the term for
a lot of light bulbs?
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I say, I say it is? Sure?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Oh okay, I thought that.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Was a pronoun. Was it a collective pronoun?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I don't know. But did you just make that up?
Or is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I mean, it just came out of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Okay, do you like it? Sure? Sounds like you're growing
light bulbs out in the field or something.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
By light bulbs. They'll say, you got a crop of
light bulbs here I can buy.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I love it. I mean that's probably a use for crop.
I just didn't know about.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I know, I will say, hey, man, clerk me a
crop of light bulbs.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So Tesla's got his party tricks happening. May or may
not have done this to a crop of light bulbs
over a greater distance. World War two rolls around, and
all of a sudden, we're using radar and we're learning
how to generate like more improved and more directional and
precise beams of microwaves and things like that. In nineteen
(07:25):
sixty four, and you can watch this video on YouTube.
It's kind of fun to watch a William Brown of
Raytheon kept up a little sort of I mean, it's
a helicopter, looks like it's made out of a rector
set maybe yeah, about sixty feet off the ground for
ten hours with no wires.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, And they could have gone longer, but the novelty
wore off, so he just stopped after ten hours.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, He's like, all right, does everyone get it right?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Can we go home? Now?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Like? How many times in part to pass this hula
hoop over it? Right?
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Right? So that that was a huge, huge accomplishment, And
I believe the same William Brown of Raytheon created another
record that stood until from nineteen seventy five until from
what I can tell, this past January, like a month ago.
In nineteen seventy five, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab transmitted I
(08:19):
think thirty five kilowatts of power, and like fifty percent
of what they transmitted I think a quarter of a
mile away or something like that, was received and lit
up another crop of light bulbs. That's what people do,
They light up crops of light bulbs when they're demonstrating
what matters electrical.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Trans because they light up and everyone's like, ooh.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah, and actually I'm sorry. It was more than a
quarter mile. I think it was basically a slat mile.
It was like one point five to four kilometers.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, so that's a really long way. And it stood
from nineteen seventy five till twenty twenty four, almost fifty years,
and then I believe the Korean Space Agency just broke
it by like three tenths of a kilometer. Really, it's
not like we've jumped by leaps and bounds. And almost
if I were William Brown would be like, really, you
could just wait until you could beat it by like
(09:09):
ten times that.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, it's not very sports have been.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Like no, it's like if you made the world's biggest bagel, right,
and somebody made another world's biggest bagel by like ten
more pounds. What's the point Are we really just gonna
go back and forth year after year with a new
world's biggest bagel? No, you need to really like double
it up at least before you break somebody's record. It's
just common courtesy.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
You know, how to really get their goat. It's just
drop one extra poppy seat on top o me has
more mats.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Man, I would just start bleeding out of my ears.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
So this can happen in a couple of ways, and
who knows what the future holds. We are going to
get to that stuff like you were talking about, Like
you walk in and everything's just like charging the second
U inner. But these days we have what's called nearfield
and what I like to call further afield, but farfield
wireless transfer. When you think of nearfield, you're already doing that.
(10:08):
If you have an electric toothbrush, if you have a
modern smartphone that can wirelessly charge. We'll talk about the
two different ways those are happening, but those are examples
of nearfield. And I think a lot of people like
I was, are amazed to know that when you put
that little electric toothbrush on its stand. Unless I'm wrong,
(10:30):
That little nubbin is only there to keep that thing upright.
It's not conducting electricity at all, is it?
Speaker 1 (10:39):
As far as I know, No, because the whole thing's
fully sealed, so the electricity is going from plastic to
plastic via waves.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So it looks like a little like a charging stump.
But you could just assume lay it down on top
of that thing, right.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I don't know. I think for an electric toothbrush, what
we're talking about at this point is called wireless in duction.
In charging, it's the same kind of principle that you
use for an induction cook top. Magnetic fields are generated
that create an electric current that's passed to another coil
on the other side that's received, and then that's attached
to a battery that gets recharged. Right, And I think
(11:16):
for something like a toothbrush, it has to be really precise,
so the coils have to basically line up as close
to one another as possible, but they don't have to
physically touch, which is why you can encase it in
plastic and seal it off and use it for an
application that's around water, like an electric toothbrush. But I
do think that has to be precise. I think you
can get a little more jiggy with it with the
(11:40):
resonant induction charging, where the coils are bigger or there's
more coils. But they also have I don't know how
they do this, but they make the frequencies that come
out of one coil and go into received by the
other perfectly in sync, so that the the coils are
(12:00):
basically tuned to one another. So you can actually keep
something a little further away and still get a charge
out of it.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Okay, so I was wrong, then that stump serves the
purpose of probably aligning it perfectly, probably, although it's not
actually you know, like a charging stump. You probably could
not just set your toothbrush down with a butt in
near that stump, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
No, but if you're talking about like your phone on
like a pad charger, you just kind of set it down. Sure,
Sure it'll still charge, even though it's not like perfectly
centered on the charger, depending on the type of charging station.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, and I have seen those to be fairly hit
or miss through the years. Yes, the little charging pad
sometimes they work. Sometimes you've got to move your phone
around it and it makes more sense now than I
know how it works why you may have to move
your phone around. And it's also slower than like a
wall charge, which you know is one of the the
(12:59):
humps to get over that we'll get.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
To it is, and they have basically gotten over that hump.
So for a while I didn't realize this, but Nokia
was the first to be like, hey, everybody, check out
our wireless charge. Well back in twenty twelve, I had
no idea. Yeah, and that set off like a whole
stampede where every phone company wanted to create a wireless
charging pad, right, and so everybody was coming up with
(13:22):
different protocols, different structures on how to make this happen,
and finally a group called the Wireless Power Consortium basically
emerged with their cheese standard key like the Chinese traditional
medicine concept of the life force that flows through.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Everything, Yeah, like gigong exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, that's also associated with this wireless power transfer to
where everybody builds it the exact same way. Right, So
that's pretty cool. But it wasn't like you had to
get it pretty much dead on to get a decent
charge out of it, like you said it was. It
transferred far less power, I think about five watts rather
(14:06):
than the standard fifteen eighteen or more that you get
from plugging your phone in. Yeah, so they came up
with G two point zero and you know the new
Apple Apple chargers that like snap onto the back of
your your phone with a magnet.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
No, oh, really, do you have my iPhone? I do?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Is it fairly new?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Uh? Let me see what I usually get, like every
third or fourth version.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Okay, you may or may not have this. I don't know.
I couldn't even tell you what if you told me
the the which one it was, I'd be like, oh,
actually I don't know. So I don't know why you've
been asked to that. But the newer iPhones, yeah, that
should have it. I think that's what I have too. Yeah,
it is and it works. So there's a there's a
(14:54):
type of charge you can get called a mag safe charger.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, yeah, I got that.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Okay, so then this you have what I'm talking about.
It snaps into place, so like magnet, it holds the
phone in place, right, Yeah, I got one of those
in my car. Okay, So what that's doing is it's
holding the coil to the coil, so that in addition
to them being powerful and tuned to the same frequency,
they're also precisely interlocked, so the transfer of power is
(15:21):
way more efficient. And now they're reaching like power transfer
like fifteen, eighteen, twenty watts, just like you would have
with a traditional like pluging cord.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, and you know what, I'm not much of a
what do you call it? Buzz marketer, but I have
to say the car charger from Spiegel is what I like.
The catalog I don't know, it's SPI E G E L.
(15:51):
Is that spelled to save? Yeah, spell the same. I
mean their charger. It's fifty bucks and it works flawlessly,
and it looks good.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
And it just says a pompadour.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Well it sticks on, you know, but the little stick
on base is smaller than other ones I've seen, so
if you know, sometimes your car you can't get it
in like a great place or whatever. But anyway, I
think it works great, and so I do actually use
this technology very nice.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Okay, so make safe so you have that. But the
thing is is we've actually kind of gone backwards in
that sense where you're getting more power transfer again wirelessly,
like you're not plugging your phone into anything. It's laying
on something that is connected to a power source, but
your phone's not plugged in, so it is wireless power transfer.
But rather than making it easier to just toss your
(16:41):
phone onto a pad or a table or something like
that and it immediately starts charging, it has to be
more precise. Hence the magnets. Sure, we want to be
going in the opposite direction to where your phone doesn't
even really have to be anywhere near that charging pad
to get a charge, and that's where people are moving toward.
But the cool thing about the sheet two point zero
(17:02):
is that this protocol is it's spreading out so that
if you had, say like an Android phone and iPhone,
you would be able to use the same charger for both,
which is brand new. That's a new thing, and that's
a really great way for the industry to be going
because it cuts out on packaging, cuts out a manufacturing,
it cuts down on all sorts of stuff it costs.
(17:22):
So it's a good direction to be going in.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, and divided houses can come together once again exactly
this kind of charging. There is a future application that
might be kind of cool. If you drive an electric
car to where you pull in your garage and you
just pull over charging Matt much like your telephone basically
to where you wouldn't have to plug it in or whatever. Again,
(17:47):
for me, it's like it's no trouble to plug something in,
so it's not that big of a deal. But I
imagine these little conveniences are a big deal to a
lot of people for sure.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
I think the one that I'm really excited about is
like that plus application, which is putting those kind of
coils that transmit electricity wirelessly to a receiver coil in
your car in asphalt, so when you're driving on the highway,
your car is actually charging. That would do it. That
(18:19):
would do it for gas engine cars people, you would
have to just be a total jerk to have like
an internal combustion engine after that point, because that's the
big problem with it. Like do you remember that stupid
electric car that I rented in Seattle and drove to
Portland and I had to sit for forty five minutes
in this little town doing nothing but waiting for the
(18:40):
stupid rental car to charge. That is no way to live.
But if I had just been able to drive down
what is that five? The five, and that what they
call it.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I think that's a California think.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Okay, well, if I had just been able to drive
down I five and my car's charging the whole time, perfect,
there's no reason for any any fossil fuel car all.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Now, is the idea there that every road in America
has is redone with charging capabilities underneath it.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
What I would guess is they would you would probably
just need to do one lane.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And then and then maybe only on expressways or something.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Right, So one lane on an expressway and you like,
if your car has over some amount of charge, like
the Cultural Folk Way would be, you don't go on
that lane. You leave it open for people who really.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Need to charge the car. That'll go over well exactly
in the United States. That'll that'll become the uh look
at that jerk lane.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Exactly. Yeah, it'll be like the new driving slow in
the fast lane thing.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I look forward to that day. I'm gonna be old
and feeble and I just you can send me updates
on how things are going from the road.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
But that's but that's all. But you just need one
lane like that on a stretch of highway, and I
think that would do it, at least at first, all right,
I we get this done like tomorrow, all.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Right, But in the meantime we should take a break, okay,
because we're gonna have to buy some tools. Okay, all right,
we'll be right back. All right, So we're back. Josh's boy.
(20:35):
Look at the smile on your face thinking about driving
untold miles without having to stop.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I mean, it's just going to change everything.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Peeing in a gatorade bottle. You're not stopping for.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Nothing, No, no way.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Just think of the cannonball run I have.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I'm just gonna take this opportunity, all right, But yes,
the cannonball run would work really well with that. Yeah,
if you I see this enough that I feel like
this is worth mentioning. If you ever find yourself in
an emergency situation where you have to pee into a
water bottle or a mountain dew bottle or something like that,
that's fine, that's fine. Like that is a thing you
have to do sometimes. I never have, but people do it,
(21:14):
and I get it. But you don't leave that on
the side of the road for somebody else to pick up.
That is yours to hang on to until you're able
to dispose of it. In the trash where it belongs. Yeah,
put the cap on, get it out of your way,
make sure it doesn't spill or anything like that. But
you do not set that outside of your car until
it goes into the trash. That is, it's tied for
(21:37):
first with throwing your dental floss stick down on the
ground for someone else to pick up.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah. The only time I will do that is camping.
If it's rainy or really really cold, then I'm in
my tent. I will have the forethought to bring an
appropriate bottle smart so I can just get out of
my sleeping bag and you know, and ppe in the bottle.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
A big wide mouth bottle, Am I right?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
And then I just leave it there in the woods.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
No, no, of course not okay, okay, I was shocked.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
All right. So we're back and we're getting started now
on far field wireless transfer. Because your phone on your nightstand,
that's great. Driving over a mat in your garage would
be amazing, But you really are cooking with gas, as
they say, ironically, not with gas. If you can start
figuring out how to do this over longer and longer frequencies,
(22:36):
and they are figuring that stuff out by ways of
electromagnetic waves or which you know, what you do is
you send it out as an electromagnetic wave, it transmits
it as a beam, then it converts it to power
or through laser beams.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yes, so you can do laser you can do millimeter waves,
you can do I think microwaves is are the big
ones because they'll I mean they'll they're electromagnetic waves, so
they're an energy carrier and all you need is a
way to convert electricity to electromagnetic energy and then a
way to convert it back on the other side, and
(23:13):
then you've just transmitted power from a distance.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
That's what they're possible already, right, They just absolutely haven't
figured out a great consumer application because it's not efficient
or great jeap.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
That's the problem. It's not cheap and it's inefficient. So
yes that I believe there are consumer products out there,
just a handful of them that you can spend a
lot of money on and be like, look, this thing's charging.
It takes forty eight hours to get to five percent,
but it's charging wirelessly. That's where we're at right now.
(23:46):
But it is possible. People have figured it out. But
just like with that CHI protocol, with like the charging
pads that the industry is in the same place right
now with figuring out a a common protocol for everybody
to use now. So it's kind of the wild West
any they're trying to figure out the best way to
efficiently do it and also safely do it, as we'll see.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, in one application they can use it on today
that does make sense. And Livia dug this up and
helped out, and this one makes a lot of sense.
With RFID tags radio frequency identification tags, and you've probably
heard of these. There's all kinds of applications for these,
but one of the big applications is if you have
(24:31):
like a warehouse full of stuff, instead of having a
barcode on every single thing that you have to walk
up to with a bar code scanner like several inches
away or whatever, you can track your inventory more efficiently
because it can if you do it through RFID, you
can group things together, you can scan a bunch of
stuff at once, you can scan it from three, four
(24:53):
or five feet away, maybe you don't have to be
right there up on it. So using this technology to
have little RFID tags that don't require batteries is a
realistic application.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, and you just said a mouthful with that. They
don't require batteries, because that's a big reason why you
would want to use something like wireless power transfer is
with the little RFID tags, they have an antenna in them,
but they don't actually have any power. They're not internally powered.
But when that radio wave hits it, it carries just
enough energy to make contact with it, give it a
(25:29):
little juice. There's a modulator inside that takes that radio
wave and converts it back to shoot back out to
the scanner with a little with its number associated with it.
All without batteries. It just uses They figured out how
to use the energy in that electromagnetic wave in the
form of radio waves, and so we're already doing this again.
(25:52):
It's just really inefficient. But they're onto something with that
because you know, we've entered the Internet of Things. I
think we did a whole episode on that way. I'll
bet that needs so much updating.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
But all the little like sensors in your refrigerator, all
the little little gadgets, the thing that connects your refrigerator,
the to Wi Fi. Now all of these things are
like really tiny little components and the smaller the component.
The harder it is to put a decent battery in there,
(26:23):
and you also kind of want a rechargeable battery too,
but some of them don't have batteries. They still are
going to report that say like you're running it low
on ketchup or something like that. Wireless energy would be
able to do the same thing that we're doing with
RFID tags, but with the little sensors and chargers that
make up the Internet of things that make your home
(26:44):
a smart home.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, or to not have to have a follow up
surgeries to replace batteries in your pacemaker would be pretty.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Remarkable, Yeah, Because that's another like really big part of this,
in addition to like the whole g whiz aspect of
it and the no chords they which I'm really happy about.
The bigger point in the near term is that it
will do weigh with disposable batteries. All will have is
rechargeable batteries. If we have any batteries at all. Some
things won't need it, but things that do need a
(27:13):
battery to keep going without a power source, those will
be rechargeable and they'll be more easily replenished with wireless
power transmission. So you can say goodbye to buying batteries
at the store. They'll just be gone and the earth
will breathe a deep, deep, happy sigh.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah. Well that is, and now we're getting into sort
of your utopia, which is these companies that are exploring
initially probably like a room system and then eventually a
whole home system to where what you described at the
beginning of the show would be possible, where you can
walk in your house the second you walk in, your
phone is charging in your pocket. If you have a
(27:52):
smart home and you have like powered blinds on your windows,
those are always charged. They're not plugged in. If you
have remote control for your TV and everything else in
your home, they actually have a tiny battery made by
the company. In this case, I mean, we can go
back and talk about Guru, but there's a company called
(28:13):
Oca inc Ossia, and they have a system called the
Kota system Ota, and that's the idea is you have
a unit in your house. It looks sort of like
a well it's a little smaller than a board game
and a little more square, and it's just a little
transmitting stand and it shoots power across the room. It
(28:38):
bounces it around and you have receivers that are attached
to your devices, like your receiver would be built into
your phone case in the case of a phone. Or
they're making what they're calling forever batteries, which is a
little double a battery that actually has a tiny receiver
in it, so that remote control battery will never die
(29:00):
and it essentially just makes any device in your house
compatible with this transmitter. The one thing I wondered about, though,
was like, well, when is duras El gonna buy them
out and just shut it down?
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Oh? Man, I hope we don't run into something like that.
I mean, big battery is a major threat to democracy, true,
but I don't know. I think I don't know. I
think these other startups have some pretty good clout too.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Well, should we talk about Guru then, sure? Jumping back
a little, Guru.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Got together with Motorola and two years ago they debuted
basically a charger, an over the air charger, a wireless
power charger that was very similar in design. It seems
like to that Coda charger, and it can I think,
charge four phones at once up to ten feet away
(29:53):
with one hundred degree field of vision, which is pretty cool.
It's still not out to market. I think people are like, yeah,
but you guys didn't mention how efficient it is, like
how many watts does it transfer? And motoroles like stop
asking questions and they went back to the drawing board.
But the code of stuff seems like it's so close
it might actually already be available in some areas.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
And didn't see it for sale yet, but I might
be wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
They are touting their wireless power security camera, the archos AR.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Now that's a good use, yeah for sure. Yeah, because
if you have a house where you didn't have like
you if you have security cameras whatever, you didn't have
them built in and wired initially, and you're just like, oh,
I want to get a Nest cameras or any other brand,
Like you got to plug those things in. Yeah, and
if they're outdoor cameras, you're either running wire to an
(30:44):
outdoor plug that someone could just unplug right or you're
drilling holes in your wall. So I think this is
a really realistic, like worthy application.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
It's part of like my week to go around and
connect the charger, the outdoor charger to the outdoor cameras
and just top them off because they're not hardwired. So yeah,
I agree with you. I think it's a great application.
Now imagine that for your TV.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Although kind of make one complaint real quick about security cameras. Yeah,
they're great to have. They can help out with different
things and help out with neighbors. Hey I saw someone
and them like breaking into my car. Your neighbor has
a camera pointing, like we can all help. But in
my experience in Atlanta, with car break ins and house
break ins, I've had both, they don't help you catch anybody.
(31:34):
They don't help stop anyone. So it's almost more like, hey,
you want to watch some guys steal your stuff? Right, Yeah,
police can't really do much with them, and it certainly
doesn't keep anyone from doing anything. So I don't know
it's good for more than just like break in security.
I think there are a lot of if you have
dogs and you're like, want to see what your dog's doing,
(31:56):
is eating the wrong thing or throwing up or you know,
it's beneficial for a lot of different reasons, but catching
a bad guy at my experience, security cameras don't really
help with that.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
No, you're likelier to have some weird footage from your
camera end up on the national news or America's funniest.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Toying exactly catch a UFO or something.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are likelier to catch a UFO
than somebody stealing packages off of your porch with your
security camera.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Sort of. The real deal here is like one day
when they can come up with a system where it's
built into Amtrak and subways and airports, so all of
these sort of heavily used public spaces are just charging
everyone's everything.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yes, And the problems are the same with the wireless
phone charging just across the board. Anytime we're talking about
wireless power transfer, it's the inefficiency is what's the big
stumbling block right now. Yeah, the further you get away
(33:00):
from the charger, Yeah, the less power the receiver is getting.
The most i've seen, I think that ar Chose security
camera gets like less than a wt thirty feet away
at its maximum distance, which is still I mean thirty
(33:20):
feet is a decent.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Decent Is that enough to power it?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
I think as long as it had you probably would
have to charge it first, plug in when you first
get it, and then if it had continuous contact it
was constantly receiving it.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I would hope that they would design it so that
it uses less energy than that can get it its
maximum distance. I don't know, but that could be a
challenge right now. That's the kind of inefficiency problems that
it's running into. I think typically when you try to
transmit electricity through an electromagnetic beam, you get about twenty
percent on the other end of what you sent out.
(33:59):
And that's even a step backwards from what the Jet
Propulsion Lab did. They got forty nine percent across a mile.
So I guess they just didn't tell anybody how to
do what they did, because we're still catching up to
what they did in nineteen seventy five. But so even
if you're like, okay, we're getting twenty percent of the
electricity that we are generating converting to an electromagnetic wave,
(34:23):
transmitting to another receiver, and then converting back to electricity,
we're losing eighty percent of that. That is ridiculously inefficient.
And people in the industry, which is basically just nothing
but startups and venture capitalists right now are saying, well, well, yes,
that's true, that's ridiculously inefficient. But we're talking about replacing
batteries right here, and the cost of the electricity that
(34:44):
is wasted is like five thousand times less than the
cost of a double a disposable battery. So really, if
you look at it in terms like that, it's we're
not that far off from it being cost effective if
we can use it to replace batteries.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, And one of the cool pieces of or cool
parts of this tech is let's say you have a
room that's set up to charge everything in there. It's
apparently with this OSA system, it is it's bouncing all
over the room, pinging like one hundred times a second.
So it's not like if you turn your back, it's
not shooting waves through your body and we'll get to
(35:22):
safety here after the break. But regardless of that, it
bounces around you. If you have your phone up to
your head, it will bounce around your head off the
back wall to hit the back of that phone.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Oh really, the OSA system does.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
That, Yeah, supposedly, and only delivers power like if something
needs it, so it's not constantly on and supposedly we'll
prioritize whatever's in the room that needs juice the.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Most smart Yeah, because just like RFI D tags that
chargers constantly surveying the stuff in the room that has
right a coder receiver attached to it and saying like,
where are you at, what's your levels? You need some
you need some juice. I got some for you. They're like, no,
not right now. I'm good, okay, but I'm here if
you need it kind of thing. Yeah, So I didn't
(36:10):
know that it actually went around people, though, which is
a big deal, because that's a genuine concern at this point.
If you're beaming electricity throughout a home, if you're creating
an electrical field that's just indiscriminately moving everywhere in a room,
it's going to come in contact with things that are conductive. So,
(36:31):
like someone one issue I've seen raised is the idea
that you're just yeah, your pots and pants are going
to get super hot just sitting in the drawer in
your kitchen. Yeah, if you're using microwaves, if the microwave
is powerful enough it can cook you from the inside out,
that doesn't seem to be a threat. I mean, the
people who are designing these things are like well aware
(36:53):
of the dangers of microwaves cooking human beings. So the
stuff they're they're like deliberately setting these things at levels
that wouldn't be able to do that, but it just
kind of goes to show like that's the stage that
where i'd is like, that's still technically possible with what
we're doing. Laser beams can still shoot you in the eye.
They could still burn your skin.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, those are the ones that don't hang around the room.
If it's laser base, then you have to have a
direct line.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yes, and supposedly if you get in between the laser
and the receiver, it just automatically turns off. But you know,
there's still that moment that singes your hair.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, or you could have the high tech mirrored system
like any bank security in the movies, or I'm sorry,
museum security. Probably, Oh yeah, like that, like shooting the
lasers all around grid.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, for sure, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
And then before you know it, Catherine Zada Jones is
slinking underneath one of those things.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, and you're like, what are you doing in my kitchen?
Speaker 2 (37:48):
You're too old to be slinking around like that lady.
You know, pull a muscle.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
So what else is there?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Well, we should take a break probably, oh yeah, yeah,
and then we'll come back and bush up with the
serious future right after this.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
All right, Chuck, So we're talking about future applications that like,
this is the real whiz bang stuff that I'm just
really jazzed about because we're approaching that dream that Tesla
had of fulfilling that dream of basically creating a world
where everything's just getting wireless power all the time.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah. So there's a group called the Persistent Optical. This
is a plan the Persistent and we love our acronyms.
Is one of the best assistant optical wireless energy relay.
What does that spell?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Power? What have you got power?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
It's a great one. I love it when it perfectly
aligns like that. And that was proposed by the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which we all know is DARPA.
And this is a situation where they could beam electricity
from a web of aircraft flying above onto the ground
(39:32):
into let's say, either you know Libya's aid a conflict zone,
but maybe a disaster zone where there's no power on
the ground anymore and people are dying. Potentially a web
of aircraft above could shoot this stuff down to the ground.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yes, but it does have immediate military applications because just
like how you know, people were saying, like, wait a minute,
we have twenty percent efficiency of the electricity where we're
transmitting here. Yeah, the same thing is running into this
problem too, Like there's a loss of efficiency. But even
if there's a massive loss of efficiency, it's still more
(40:11):
efficient than literally flying in tanks of oil and gasoline. Yeah,
into a conflicts owner disaster area, filling up generators and
then plugging into those. It'd be still much more efficient
than that. And because it'd be more efficient, because it
would just give such a ridiculous advantage on the battlefield.
(40:33):
This is probably coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Yeah, but like you said, they have a leg up
because it's so inefficient. The alternative that we've been using
is that it doesn't have to be as efficient as
like a home version that we're talking about for people
to get on board, because that's one of the problems
is people aren't gonna start buying this stuff up. Even
that cool system we were talking about out for like
(41:01):
one room, you'd have to be a really you have
to have a lot of money and be a super
into early tech adoption to just kind of show it
off to friends. At this point, to make it mass marketed,
they have to make it so everybody sees the benefit
and can afford it, and that's not the case with
(41:21):
these potential military applications.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
No, but it's sad but true that the military research
and development has trickled down to a lot of really
important consumer items for short years too. And this could
be the same exact thing.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
Absolutely, there's another There's a group in New Zealand called
EMROD and they are basically creating line of sight towers
to where that just beams from one to the other,
basically like those bonfire towers and Lord of the Rings. Yeah,
it's just the same thing, but rather than like line
of sight, you're transmitting electromagnetic waves carrying energy, and then
(41:57):
at the other end, or probably at each of one
of these transmitters, you're able to convert it to usable
electricity and then you know, power up a disaster area,
a rural area, whatever area you want to.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I don't remember that from Lord of the Rings. Is
it just a signal over long distance? Yeah, like that,
like a bit visually signal.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, from like mountaintop to mountain top. They had like
a bomb fire and then at anybody else noticed it
and they let their bombfire and it was like a
transmission of information. That's what we're talking about in much
the same way that Wi Fi transmits information. We're talking
about the same exact thing, using the same essentially kind
of electromagnetic spectrum, but instead to transmit energy rather than information.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah. Absolutely, Like people don't freak out over a Wi
Fi being being through their house and it's essentially the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Some people do, like Chuck McGill from Wood.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
No, no, no, I haven't seen that, but I know there
are people.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, So there's a really exciting application with that New
Zealand structure where to tower. Yeah, the emrod one is
they could you could transfer wind energy from remote places
to an urban area that really needs that electricity, all
(43:14):
those renewables. So it's like the fatal flaws like you
they they're too far away from the grid. Nope, not
any longer. You can transmit it wirelessly through New Zealand
at least.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well talking about being too far away, too far away.
The think about being an outer space and having a
web of satellites outfitted with these huge solar panels far
above the Earth that could transmit energy down as microwaves.
That is not out of the realm of possibility. In fact,
(43:45):
it's even been done just last year in twenty twenty three,
cal Tech, Yes, Caltech Space Power Project, they sent a
detectable amount of energy from a satellite to Earth.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
You know, I don't think they were charging a car
or anything like that, but they showed that it's possible.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah, and get this, Chuck, I mean, aside from the
infrastructure costs involved, that's free energy. You're just taking solar
energy and transmitting it, even if it's just a little
bit and there's a massive loss of efficiency. You're not
burning coal to get that. You're just you just built
a satellite that's harvesting it out and outer space, which
is a huge advantage, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, that's like the first step toward a Dyson sphere. Really,
if you think about it, I love it. That's the
one I was jazz the most.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
About the satellite one.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yes, harvesting solar injury in space and transmitting it as
a usable power down on Earth. That is jazz worthy
for sure.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:50):
All right, Well, Chuck has nothing else. Neither do I.
We'll just have to sit and wait and see what
the future holds. And while we do that, let's say
It's time for listener now.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
This is an email again from our old buddy Mark Konts.
Marking Gale counts in the Ohio area, longtime supporters and pals,
and this is what Marcu has to say. And you
might remember Mark. He's an art therapist, Hey guys, licensed
art therapists and the director of mental health services at
the Clark County Education Service Center in Springfield, Ohio. My
(45:23):
team work extremely hard to provide Sources of Strength to
as many students as we can in the state for free.
Most people assume that suicide prevention work focuses on sad,
shock and trauma, but we run a program in our
schools called Sources of Strength, which capital s capital s
by the way, which focuses on hope, help and strength.
(45:44):
Sources of Strength is made possible to us through funding
and support from the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation and Prevention First.
Sources of Strength is more than just suicide preventions, an
overall wellness program focusing on eight protective factors, some of
them being positive friends, healthy activities, generosity, stuff like that.
(46:05):
It is free to all Ohio students and can be
started in the classroom as early skindergarten. Meanwhile, the junior
high and high school students can work with adult advisors
of the program to run school wide campaigns and events.
Only skimming the surface here, guys, So if you live
in Ohio, you should look up Sources of Strength Ohio
dot org to learn more about it and become one
of the mini schools participating. If you don't live in Ohio,
(46:28):
you can still be a part of the movement that's
taking place in the US, Canada and Australia about going
to Sources of Strength dot org. And that is from
our old buddy Mark Goods.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Well, thanks a lot for that. Mark. Good to hear
from you as always. And if you want to be
like Mark and talk about some amazing stuff you're doing
so we can tell everybody else about it. We love
that kind of thing. You can wrap it up and
send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more pod casts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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