You can find us if you so care to at YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and something called Twitter Britain. You know what Twitter is? Yeah, your tweet moving along. Sometimes David this is how it goes. I understand I have a just like when you have Welcome back to Florida tude folks, I am JW my partner Brinton Payne are the hosts of fortitude you can find us if you so care to at YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and something called Twitter Brinton you know what Twitter is? Yeah, your tweet moving along. You can find us at fortitude FW on those platforms. Also our website fortitude fw.com Check us out in our in Please contact us if you have more problems and you’ve already contact us at fortitude FW podcast@gmail.com. We welcome all your criticism I got a problem I’ll tell you that in the pain train. We’re gonna go into the pain train here because Mr. Mr. Payne trains got something to say. So without further ado, welcome to the pain train. She cuz she’s coming in hot today, folks.

 

All right. So my son’s fixing up this Jeep and it comes with a registration sticker of 121. For the for the the registration or is it called the registration we call it an expiration challenge. You guys look around on the street when you’re driving around if you’re listening to podcasts on the road. Look how many people have expired registration stickers. You will be amazed when you’re sitting at a stoplight. Look over to see if that person has a registration sticker expired or not. It is crazy. How many people I think came out of pandemic and they’re like well one thing I can check off my list of things to do is get registration done. I mean, nobody has up to date registration stuff and I don’t know where it comes from

 

enforcement. Are they maybe dropping the ball? Is

 

that where you’re throwing this to? That’s the cops I mean that like That’s code enforcement on the registration I used to always get those things done because you don’t want to get nabbed for something else. Something you’re carrying around in the car. How many hours at the bar you were sitting at whatever you got to keep that either one

 

support our police department someone else on the show possibly does not but get your inspection stickers put up today because we don’t want to see you in any harm’s way.

 

So here’s the thing we’ll do this. If you can find it. Expired registration sticker with a police support sticker on the back. That would be the Australian the oxygen.

 

Folks, our buddy on the show. He knows that all game when they see that sticker they know right away that somebody’s trying to pull fast. Well, for sure. Thank you for that little journey day pain trade. You’re

 

welcome.

 

Our guest today Britain is a really cool, interesting fellow, because we have David tricolour and he’s currently the Director of Strategy and technology for encore delivery in Dallas, where he’s responsible for strategic analysis, analysis supporting the growth of the enterprise. That nail that David. Pretty close. Yeah. Well, David is what some people call a futurist. It’s a very fascinating term Britain, you know what a futurist is?

 

No, what is it?

 

I don’t know, either. But I’ve read a little bit of the bio, and I am definitely interested in what a futurist is. So welcome to the show. David, thank you very much for being here. Yeah. David. First off, before we get into this thing,

 

is the audience a lot of you are in house audience.

 

Your background you’re from Niagara Falls, New York, correct? Correct.

 

So my partner here, aren’t you from somewhere around those parts? Yeah, the New York area and the adoption agency. Have you ever been in a barrel down the Niagara Falls?

 

I bet the beta the mist under the falls at the top of the falls, but I’ve not gone over the fall. Okay. Okay.

 

We’re glad to know that you came to Fort Worth in 1996 with a wife’s job transfer. Right? And then you became began working with encore. And about that time or little years later, years later, years later winded and before we can get into the whys. We’ll get into the meat of this, but you are what we call a futurist, what is a futurist,

 

a futurist, and you talk about oxymorons. Sounds crazy. But a futurist is actually a historian, someone who’s able to look back long ways like millions of years, in some cases to try to figure out what’s going on with our world and how the world is evolving. But then able to take an understanding of deep understanding the history, the look at what’s happening today in context of what’s happened in the past, and then trying to evolve out from that the patterns of how things can evolve from here. So the my, my real focus at encores strategist is to try to figure out what else what were the area north Texas is going to look like, three to five years from now. And what does the company need to do to try to prepare for and as a good example, at Encore, we have a thing that we started a couple years ago called Black Swan dialogues with our leaders, our senior leadership team. And in November of 2019, one of the things we sat down and looked at was, what happens if there’s going to be a pandemic?

 

Oh, you you had talked about that before. We talked about it.

 

In fact, we had a, we had a protocol that have been in place since 2018. So we had prepared for that kind of eventuality. But we had conversations about a number series of topics in 2019 2020. of things that were high consequence, low probability that we had to prepare for. And interesting enough of the four things that we really focused on in 2019, early 2023 Of the four have come to pass. What are those? endemic? Well, the storm in 2021? Oh, man, one of the things we talked about what what happened if we have a change in our regulatory condition? Well, that change the the things that we as a company have to go do. We looked at what would happen if there’s I’ll focus on reregulation of the of the utilities, utilities. What happens if there’s a potential incorporation of Texas into the larger grid? Because right now on ERCOT is a separate grid. So we actually went through an analysis of what would happen if that happened, and how would we respond to that? It hasn’t happened this time. But it’s been one of the things has been talked about it both the commission and the legislature this last go round. So things that we started talking about a couple years ago, I think that have actually come to pass, not 100%. But we were starting to get ready for them. Because we’re saying, looking back what’s happened in the past? What could happen? What are the things that can cause something unexpected to occur that would have devastating effect on us? And when we’ve had two of those major events just in the last 12 months, or

 

how often does that happen like that? Because you guys have had these conversations far before this, right?

 

Most people never see this kind of thing actually occur. So a lot of people say Black Swan, DIALux high and that’s just, yeah, not like they were really, really worried about that. But now everybody’s center say, well, he Yeah, yeah, that’s this is why we have a futurist so someone who can sit on our staff and kind of say, well, what if? How would we respond to that? Mm hmm. We’ve had things around weather and climate was our last one. Again, that came out of the storm in February. Okay, what do we do about drought is a big major drought in Texas. In 2011, there was a major drought, very, we had, what 40 days of consecutive heat? What happens if it becomes 80 days of consecutive heat over 100 degrees? What happens? Do we have enough water in our service territory to be able to keep people’s homes cooled, and people be able to take baths and sure, but also be able to cool the power plants? Yes, in in the 2011 heat thing, we actually had a couple plants shut down because there wasn’t enough water left in the reservoirs to to cool the plants. In fact, we have the same thing with a nuclear plants. So it’s all these things are inter interrelated. And that’s part of my discussion about going back in time, and how the heat the Earth has he warmed up and then cooled off. And we this is not the last time we’re going to see the cycle,

 

certainly, just being a futurist. Does that give you a special knowledge or sitting in these meetings with encore? Are you the one telling them these things? Or is there a whole bunch of you guys sitting around in the same mind frame? Are they like, David, why are you saying this? They all generally agree with what you’re saying?

 

No, I always agree with what I’m saying. We have a relatively small team at Encore, and the strategy and Emerging Issues group, which I’m the director of. And we pulled together the topics, I do most of the work for the Black Swan, just because of my background of my training versus the rest of the team. But everybody helps me with the research tries to bring the information together. And then we present a scenario to the senior leadership team, and we have a discussion about it. And we’ve taken some significant actions, in some cases based on having those discussions and saying, Yeah, we really ought to have better information about this. So you need to start figuring out how are we going to, for example, electrify our fleet, because that’s coming. Yeah. and things of that nature. We’re, we’ve actually gone one step beyond that. And we now have set up a strategic coordination council, Reggie coordination calls. The company that meets once a month, we walk through a strategy from one part of the company shared with 62. Directors and vice presidents of the company, and a few other subject matter experts. Just try to make sure everybody’s coordinated and joined up at the hip about how are we reacting to these things ringing in if the discussions from the black swans in some cases, and talking about okay, are we executing properly to make sure that we’re doing the right things for our ratepayers, and for the people in North Texas to make sure that we flip the switch the lights are going to be on?

 

So go ahead written?

 

What you’re gonna call me with some other names like some other person or something?

 

Then I’ll go ahead. Do you see the future as getting bright as a futurist? Do you see the future getting brighter or darker for mankind?

 

Both. Okay, looking back and looking what’s going on now and look what’s going forward. This The thing that constantly amazes me is when I go back and I look at specific things that are happening today, and you can go back within the last 100 years, I see this exact same thing is happening in our country before you look in the 1880s. And the things that were going on in terms of just how we were reacting to basically, the freeing of the slaves in the United States, and how, in the 1870s, the election was thrown to a person who was going to end reconstruction. Pretty heavy kind of stuff. Yeah. And you look at populism that was very popular at that time, William Jennings, Bryan and others, it’s the things that you see today, they’re just cycles, they just keep coming back. And if you’re looking in that timeframe, you’ll say, we’ll probably come out of the current cycle and maybe 3040 years, and we’ll go into something else will be better will be worse, who knows, just be different. And the thing that that you can be sure of is looking at things that have happened the past how those same forces, evidence themselves today is different than it was then. Because technology and other things have changed. And our societal values have changed in a lot of respects. So how we treat those things become different. And that’s where I go into writing all these books, I’ve written the 25 books, I take topics that I’m interested in, and I try to do a deep dive in terms of how people are likely to react to a situation. An example, when you see right there, I believe in you. I wrote that in 2004. About a pandemic.

 

How accurate is it compared to what’s happening? Currently?

 

I had a few minor changes, but depending on which theory you believe about the sources and debbik, I may have been right or I may have been wrong.

 

Yeah. Does that does that book? You You call it fiction or nonfiction?

 

It’s fiction fiction, does

 

it? How does it end? If you mind me asking without skipping a spoiler, do it does mankind die off? Or do we?

 

A whole lot of people die? Oh, well,

 

people, let’s hold really close.

 

Well, that was kind of my one of my next questions was, is population growth, the problem or as technological advance, then of all these things, the problem you brought it in where you were, like, you kind of taking it, you’re looking at it from an interest of, you know, the technology affecting the way humans look at these cycles that are been happening in the past. But But is the technology like this big impetus, like just like this dividing line in, in that, I mean, granted, there was technology a long time ago, but

 

I’ve used technologies and an enabler of what’s happened. Technology has enabled us to have much longer lifespans and go back 100 years, how long do people average life is about 60. Mm hmm. And a lot of people died in their 40s. You go back in terms of, you know, the things that people could do in the 1850s. There were no electric lights, there were no cars. If you if the electric grid finally suddenly suddenly went away, how would life be? And some people have said, you know, it may go away, it could go away, it go away for five days? And I worry? How do people live without electricity? Yeah, and how you, but it’s, yeah, it’s been an enabler of a different lifestyle, as a lifestyle in 1850 was the same lifestyle has been in 18 117 50. And before that minor changes, it’s just it’s accelerated the change the rate of change, just like social media, like what we’re doing right now. Yeah, this is accelerating the rate of change, because it’s disseminating information much quicker than we were 100 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Yeah. Consequently, people that are smarter about things. And this is one of the things that I’m really starting to focus in on now is, stop and think about education in 25 years. Will people really need to be able to read and write? watch

 

YouTube videos?

 

It doesn’t seem likely, though, for sure. I assume you’re going with that.

 

So do we really need to even have an alphabet? All of a sudden words become sound letters, not written. Alright, if you need if you want something done, you say, a Alexa or a Google or whatever everything is. And we’ve a lot of the things are moving towards voice technology of now on our tech our devices, I think in 10 years, you’re going to find very few that have key inputs. So I’ll be voice will just tell it what to do. Yeah.

 

So what can I step forward? A little bit on that. So in your mind and your some of your writings? What is what does the world look like in 50 years? Is that a fair answer? Or how about this? What is what’s it? What is the worst case scenario for mankind in 50 years if certain things happen?

 

Clearly the worst case is it’d be fire or ice.

 

It’ll be dead or ice.

 

Yeah, that’s still you know, thing. will the world end in fire or will it in Ice and Fire? If it’s a nuclear bomb? I lend an ice if we just destroy the planet, right? So if 50 years could we destroy the planet? No, we wouldn’t. Even with all the climate change things are going on 50 yours now will still be here 50 years if the if the plan is going to end it’s going to be a nuclear war or something of that nature that just destroys everybody or a pandemic of much greater magnitude than what we’ve seen that just destroys life as we know it. But it could have been, it’s feasible. Is that a black swan? Absolutely. No, high consequence, low probability, and in my mind is probably low probability. And one of the things that Brent and I were talking about before was, am I an optimist or a pessimist? Yeah. For mankind, I’m a very much an optimist. You look at what we’ve done as a species, humankind, not Americans, not Russians, not Chinese, whatever, just humans, humans have solved every issue that we face been faced with for the last 30,000 40,000 years. We always seem to be able to find a way to resolve the things that we create for ourselves. And the other questions that asked me that Britain asked was, is mankind its own worst enemy? At the moment, I would say no, it close because I think that weather and the climate and the planet is our worst enemy at the moment. Because we haven’t done anything to arrest the causes that could in fact, overwhelm us. Certainly, how many people are being affected right now by the fires and stuff in California? Yeah. Well, the drought out west, or how many people were affected by the freeze. And looking at the fact that they say El Nino is coming back this year? Again? 2022? We have another deep freeze in Texas. And are we ready for it? And encore, we’re doing everything, make sure that we’re ready. We’re not the ones who caused the problem last time. Yeah. So what,

 

David What, in your best opinion, what is the way that ends mankind? And how far out does that go? If you if you’ve if you’ve obviously thought of these sorts of scenarios, what’s the what’s the best idea of how mankind gets its ended?

 

As I said to him before, I don’t think it will end in my lifetime anyway. That’s a joke. I’m that long. But yeah, mankind will probably end in some form. One of the series of novels I wrote was all about the be the ability to transfer consciousness into a robota sized body so that we will live forever. I actually wrote three novels from that series, starting with ghosts in the machine. And the fact that I’m starting to work on number 27 right now and conceptually, that will be really focused around.

 

You can take that if you like,

 

no, hate to fellow futurist it is, but some of us are,

 

is there a secret? Is there like a club of futurists? Or is there a secret club? You guys secret club?

 

Yeah. Is there a cobble of souls of people out there trying to tell everybody what the rules gonna be like in 100 years? Yes or no? There, there are a lot of people who are futures. One guy who I would direct the audience to, if you’re interested, is guy named Tony Seba, SCBA. He’s a professor, I think, at Stanford. And he has a group called rethink X. And he’s a, he’s not a futurist per se. But he’s someone who tries to create pathways to enabling things to happen. And the reason I got an involved father, Tony was, I happen to see a presentation he made, where he talked about a picture that he showed of New York City Broadway on Easter Sunday, in 19 1900. And his question was, where’s the car? And if you look at the picture, you finally see this, there’s a automobile somewhere on Yeah, all the way on 1900. And then he had another picture from 1913 13 years later. And his question was, where’s the horse? So you see, and he says, Most of his discussions are about, we sit here and say that that’s not going to happen, can’t happen. Now, technology doesn’t change. We don’t change that fast. But he showed him two pictures, that 100 years ago, we completely changed over from horses, to cars, a technology adoption in 13 years, you start looking at the adoption curves for things like cell phones, yeah, adoption curves for the internet. All adoption curves are starting to develop now for electric cars and, and battery electric devices of different sorts. It’s all happening in much faster accelerated timeframes. You know, and, you know, look how fast Facebook took off. Yeah, going from college group and at Harvard to, you know, 3 billion people worldwide, just in a very few short years. So we are we’re the adoption of technology is accelerating. And while I think a lot of people will sit here and say, well, the technologies that are being applied are applying different kinds of things. And they’re not the fundamental, shifting kinds of technologies like an electric grid from an electric grid where everything transforms Well, the internet pretty much shifted everything again. Yeah. And there will be other things, internet of things they’re talking about where the internet now controls everything in your house, and your streets. Those are the kinds of things that will fundamentally change who we become. And that goes back to my thing about education. When you get to the point where you have artificially intelligent devices, that will make all your decisions for you, all you have to do is blink at something. And it automatically knows that that’s what you want to do. Because we already have Blink recognition things for cars and other things that they can use. You won’t even have to say anything to it, it’ll know what to do for you. Right? So what’s your value in the equation now?

 

Well, and then the other question is what how susceptible? Does that make human kind for either the opposition of other humans upon them? Or just if the machine has a glitch, right, you know, as driving next to somebody to Austin yesterday, the guy sitting back there on his phone, he’s in a Tesla, he’s got no hands on the wheel, probably no feet on the moon, we’re going 75 down the freeway. And he’s just letting the car drive it. And it’s like, well, I know even at this day, even a brand new laptop will still get the blue screen of death if you push it hard enough. And so it is this kind of question of

 

a punch is a tragic flaw. The premise of that novel is that we have now gone to all autonomous drive vehicles, and they’ve outlawed self drive vehicles. In California, nationwide, worldwide robot sits, it’s a little bit the future a few years. What they find out in this tennis stock story, that there was a zero day defect in the software. All of a sudden, all the systems stopped on the same day sued can no longer go anywhere. Except for the hero who has a 2012 Tesla chocolade has an average for 200 years

 

that Yeah, that could lead us something like this. Maybe we talked about nuclear war earlier. But how big a likelihood not to cover up the the automation technologies. That’s something we want to discuss as well. But how likely do you think this is in in the history of the near history, the future history, whatever.

 

And the recent history, the United States dropped two bombs in a war. So the United States has no moral agency about nuclear war zero. We’re the only nation in the world that has actually engaged in nuclear warfare. So is it likely I’d say the fact that it’s not happened in 70 years is a miracle. And the fact that we have some crazy people around the world who have access to those things, even if it’s only just a dirty bomb, which is like using the nuclear stuff that comes out of a sensor in a hospital, X ray machine, you know, that can cause major damage in a community where people can’t live there for 30 To 40 to 50 years, would we have a major war where we lose the whole world? My my opinion, again, this is just one person who’s been looking at history and looking at his stuff and worked for a defense contractor is that even if we had an all out nuclear war, mankind would not stop to cease to exist, we would still be here, a whole lot fewer of us, but we would survive as a species. And we will find a way to dig our way back out of that scenario. So I would say it is highly likely that there will be a limited nuclear war, potentially in our lifetime.

 

So I was gonna ask kind of if you can do a colonel, because we’ve talked about the kind of war and fighting population, electricity a little bit, you know, or energy sources in there. And then, well, let’s just go, Well, we could save money or something, but let’s just go with those three. So you’ve written all of these books? Do you have a pattern you go to where it’s like, Okay, here’s mankind, man, you know, gets to a point where he starts getting greedy or fighting with somebody, then it’s about electricity, or just like a, you know, one natural resource or made me resource. Do you have kind of a, I’m not asking for your playbook on how to write it. But these recurring themes that you’ve seen with all of this kind of research and writing that keep presenting themselves and what would be the chronology of those kind of big, big items.

 

I only have written really one book that’s close to that extent, and that’s called Lucifer. I would just direct people to go read that heartwarming classic, what is it about? It’s it’s about a future world where we have had peace for 100 years. And what happens when we have a event that removes that which keeps us peaceful? Hmm.

 

Interesting.

 

And interesting enough, it’s based on technology that exists today that I ended up working with that technology. For a number of years actually sold a whole bunch of internationally to some of our international partners, was working for a defense contractor. So it exists. Yeah.

 

Can we circle back back a little bit to the social media piece we were talking about a second ago. But where do you we all know we’ve seen the we’ve seen social dilemma we all understand our kids are now basically robots some regard. But where does social media where’s it going to lead us? And how does that how does that mess get solved or not?

 

Another book I did, did I bring it? I think it did bring it. It’s called Truth. It’s all about regulating social media. And in that case, it comes back to what is, again, focusing on the human side of this whole thing. The book really focuses in on the toll it takes on the people who have to mediate the media to try to keep us from killing each other.

 

Okay, so what’s the Okay, I’m gonna ask this question like oddsmaker question. Nuclear war, natural disaster, or social media technology, like forcing humans get each other, which happens first, in our lifetime.

 

I’m an optimistic optimist about social media, because it’s so new, and it’s so young, that we will figure it out, we’ll figure out a way to make it work for everybody.

 

Is that your doomsday alarm, by the way? Oh, it’s

 

just telling me what shelter to call before?

 

Is there a nuclear weapon heading

 

out on a podcast? Could you like I just kind of did like a fire in the movie theater. I don’t know if that’s, we might have to edit that out. Here. I’ll do like this. Okay, there we go.

 

Now, we I’m not, I’m not concerned about a nuclear war in the short term, only because the people who are most likely to want to use those kinds of weapons aren’t desperate enough to do it yet. If certain trends continue, it could be pushed in that direction. And it won’t be somebody that we expect who will have the weapon, they will have acquired it from somebody we didn’t know had it. My guess is how that will play out SPNs. Because I think that the only way we’ll get used is because it will be an unreasonable man, I’ll put it that way, who have chosen to emulate themselves, the whole bunch of his friends, and anybody else he may know, right. And just to prove a point and hope that somebody remembers him after he’s gone.

 

Well, weapon could also not serve something like this, it could be something as simple as a, an algorithm that knocks out all the electricity that then maybe ultimately leads to people going against each other or something like that.

 

An algorithm that lacks electricity, again, is going to be a short term kind of thing. Okay. Our in our electric grid is becoming more and more sophisticated. But a lot of it is still based on technology, in some cases, 100 years old, it would be very hard for someone to take out our entire grid permanently. Yeah, we would be able to get it back up relatively quickly. And to be piecemeal, a little bit of go out here. And though to go out of your substation, maybe you’re someone may be able to take a generator offline. But in the state of Texas, there are 710 generators. They got one you take out five, right, for the most part, you’re not going to end life as we know what on earth. Yeah, we we’ve built a very resilient society. Why am I all of a sudden very popular? It’s a prime. I don’t think we’re doing this podcast live. That happened to be once before when I was up on stage A call came in. It was my dentist. Oh, oh, nice. Giving me the results of a put on examination that I had to go back and have done talking about?

 

Yes, like Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman when he does that.

 

I remember that piece. Yeah. Yes. That was that was one of my favorite movies as well. Oh, yeah. But that’s another thing futurists does the futurist looks at what all the Hollywood people say. And spend your days I spent a lot of time debunking their theories and saying, Yeah, that’s kind of interesting way of looking at it. But that’s not how I would write it. Right. But again, you know, the reason why I’m a futurist, other than the fact that that’s what I do for a living with being a strategist, is I try to use the novels and things I write, to let me understand how this can all play out for us. Because too many people just look at technology. And they say, oh, that’s bad. That’s better. That’s good. That’s good. But they don’t really go to the next step of saying, Yeah, this could have caused this to happen. The guy who is the Chief Technology Officer for I believe Google is a guy named Kurzweil. And he has a theory that by 2045, will be able to transfer human consciousness into computers.

 

I thought that was already happening with the vaccine. Now, just kidding.

 

And he’s serious. Yeah, absolutely serious. And in fact, that was the that was the stimulus for me to write that series of three books. Well, we actually do transfer it into a robota size by now when he was he thought about he thought it more in terms of actually obsessive So make it into a computer. But I actually moved it into a mechanical robot, saying that we’re not going to be ready to go to be just electrons, we’re going to want to be something else as an intermediate, av 1000 years down the road, you might want to, what if you got a machine? That’s you now, every time the parts were out, you just replace them? You just keep on going. You know, mankind could live forever.

 

In that scenario, would I be able to find a partner on the podcast to do more work? Actual work around here is that you think it’s possible?

 

Just depends on that partners consciousness?

 

Oh, my God, I’ve already I’ve already frozen some in a carbon thing

 

like you and Walt Disney. Yeah, so

 

I was true. But David, real quick back to electricity, yes, electricity, something will be needed in the future? Or will that go away in 100 years,

 

not electricity now exponentially grow need

 

in 100 years? Will we get to the point where we can generate all electricity on a renewable basis? 100 years, maybe if we can figure out some way to be able to transmit it.

 

Printing money or mining for money in the future?

 

cryptocurrency is going to be releasing that supposed to be releasing their first like exchange traded funds for Bitcoin? next few days? Is becoming a mainstream kind of investment vehicle. Yeah, it’s gonna be around Do you spend much time with crypto? I’m doing a strategy for encore right now around blockchain. And then cryptocurrency you

 

share your your summary, ensure that what what is the what is the crypto market mean for people who don’t really grasp it? And why is it so relevant?

 

It enables a different way of accounting for things that don’t require banks.

 

does it enable a different way for building out an electrical grid?

 

Not how we would build out the grid but how we

 

manage the grid or infusion of capital in order to do Yeah, how people pay

 

their bills. Yeah, transactive energy where you know, you have a Sun Sun panel on your roof, you’re generating more power they need today, there’s somebody else someplace else in the country, you need some power. I’ll put my excess energy into the grid and also Trent sell it to them using Blockchain. Yeah, to transact the past sales are.

 

So crypto will be around exponentially in the future. There’s no There’s no slow in this thing down on this planet

 

until it’s replaced just as hard currency is being replaced. Or the anybody carries actual cash anymore. Why would you know you don’t

 

need to buy a sandwich or something?

 

Well, yet, most everybody is going to be able to take a scan of your eyeball pretty soon and you eyeball pays for you. Because everything is right back into the computers that will automatically see. Okay, it’s AWS, his eyeball. Okay, he’s just authorized us account. Right? You go. And you authorize it because he blinked at the camera.

 

So in bringing us kind of back around and kind of slowly going to the to the wrap up. He can’t answer this either, where it’s like, you don’t have a choice where there is this is good. I mean, ours? What is what’s happening with technology, hurting us more than it’s helping us? Oh,

 

think back to 1850 1850s technology? Was Was that a lifestyle that you’d like to live? Or would you rather live the lifestyle we have today with all the technology that enables all this stuff for us?

 

Well, I don’t know what was going on in 1850. Like was that I

 

can train time? Yeah, I’d see my kids more, you see that cuz they’re all you now have 25 of them working the farm so that you can actually go into food, or something. But again, it’s this this thing of technology enables a different lifestyle and will continue to accelerate, it will change how we interact with each other, which is what I come back to, which is we’re being intermediated by all this technology. So when do we get to the point where people can’t talk to each other anymore?

 

And we’re gonna get to that point you think we’re getting there?

 

Yeah, I wrote a novel about that, too. Yeah. Actually, I wrote a screenplay about that what somebody bought and almost got made. It’s called Avatar.

 

It’s not You’re not the avatar that they made, though, right?

 

James Cameron actually read my script, but didn’t use it.

 

Oh, interesting. Yeah. But so somehow, you never saw any royalties off that I’m guessing.

 

I did see a royalty but not from Cameron from another party. That’s good. Because I took a different approach to the topic of avatars. Right? And as I understand it, a filmmaker did make a film from it. I’m not sure we ended

 

up I think you need a really good lawyer being What are you doing? Oh, I

 

paid I got paid for it. So I was happy to get paid. Yeah. But to

 

protect some of these ideas right that you see kind of come into fruition. I don’t know if you can do that per se, but I

 

write the books and let people think about it. Cuz I’m, I’m like the burr under the saddle. I’d rather get people thinking about stuff. Yeah. Think give them the answers. Yeah. And I can just look with my own team. Yeah, I asked a whole lot more questions than I give them answers to things. Mm hmm. When we did our black swan dialogues, I paint the picture and say, how do we respond to this? And then we have a discussion about that. It’s not just me, it’s everybody coming in and saying, we need to go do this, or we need to go do that. And yeah, then we go off and start working on those issues.

 

Any thoughts on modern medicine, where we’re headed with that? Are we going to cure certain things, or we’re going to cure cancer in the future, any, any thoughts there,

 

the pandemic has accelerated, everything we were doing in, in medicine, we’re probably going to be 10 years ahead of where we would have been otherwise, but what’s happened, particularly the vaccines, right, the fact that we can have vaccines now for a whole lot of things we never even thought about. Wanna, again, one of the going back to, I believe in you, in the whole one I did about pandemic, one of the things that came with it was in that book was really focusing on the role that vaccines play. And just, you know, that the fact that pharmaceutical companies don’t find enough volume, in a lot of diseases that we have to be able to make any money, so they don’t put any money into the research for what will this mRNA approach, we’re not going to be able to batch stuff, much smaller amounts to make money, the pharmaceutical companies to attack some of these things that up until now we just haven’t bothered to take go after because the couple of people who have to make the medicine vaccines and stuff couldn’t make any money doing it. So I think we’re gonna see just a huge expansion of medicines and treatments to address how people have addressed their their issues with different diseases. But we’ll also the the CRISPR, Gene tech gene splicing gene technology stuff, you’re gonna have most babies within 10 years, we’ll probably be very, very healthy, you won’t have the birth defects and other things that you have, you won’t have as much genetic. In frailties, that frailties that come out, we’re going to be a healthier people to begin with. And there’s already a whole lot of research going on about lifespan extension, really focusing in on the human body’s response to deprivation, I was a professor by the name of Walter something rather, out in California, who actually will sell you a kit to extend your life, where you basically fast according to a very reduced diet one week, a month, and he believes that that will reduce that will expand your lifespan. people right now are saying most people probably won’t live past 120. But the babies were being born today, a lot of them will make that number. And a lot of it goes back to the telomeres and just your your cells, you know, degrade over time. But I think we’re gonna see an expansion of life’s life’s lifespan. And if my predictions in Ghost the machine come true, and we can go to the cat sized bodies, why not? Right? We’re seeing more and more heart replacements, you know, heart replacements, liver replacements, were able to replace major parts of the human body. When do we get to the point where you just replace it all? Yeah, for your consciousness.

 

So now you bring up something interesting, stronger humans, when the Rise of the Machines comes to this is, and it’s all generated by technology. It’s, it’s kind of crazy to think about that. Yep.

 

What about population growth in the in the same breath, food supply? Out? Are these things coexist in a future?

 

Well, in 1850, no one thought there would be 6 billion people in the world because there’s enough food well, in right now we have enough food, generally for the world.

 

Well, especially if we fast for a week, every month. But

 

again, it goes back to the fact that our technologies will allow us to find ways to start replacing cows will be able to grow Ember, we already do. So we don’t need nature in its current form to provide all the foodstuffs for us. Where’s the limit?

 

Yeah. Well, especially if we become machines. But that’s because we don’t pay for electricity from encore.

 

That’s the one thing that in my novels that the character has to recharge periodically. So that’s the thing that slows her down the main character.

 

Oh, yeah. Before we run out of time, David talked about tests a little bit. You mentioned that but off air before the show, but what’s what’s going on with Tesla, and it’s some thoughts there.

 

Well, as we know, the Tesla factory in Austin is going to be opening up here very soon, probably right after the first of the year. Tesla, a from the analysis that I’ve done and things I’ve been reading and people I’ve talked to they’re going to start replacing the major manufacturers because of the volume of vehicles they’re going to be able to produce. Classic example is Ford. You know, they have the Ford F 150, which could be the number one electric vehicle in the world if they wanted it to be, particularly in Texas, the whole world is Texas. Why do we care? On talking with people at Ford, they say that by 2023, they will have produced 150,000 of them. And I said protects us and they said no for the world. This plant down here in Austin that that So is getting ready to open will produce 3 million vehicles a year, he’s up to full capacity. And that’s one of four plants that they got out. And they’re expanding the capacity in California, they’re opening up their Berlin plant in the next few months, and that has capacity for 2 million cars, and they’re already producing a half a million in China. And they’re going to be able to produce over a million in China by the end of next year. Test Tesla is it’s going to and one of the things I was reading was that they are able to produce their cars for 1/3, the cost of what Volkswagen builds their electric

 

car for, and that’s Volkswagen, that’s where it can made. Right? It’s this kind of like, do you look back as the futures like you talked about? Do you look back to like the kind of the Japanese invasion of all those cars when it just with the American cars, but from then,

 

with what Tesla’s doing, I made the comment that I don’t know whether to invest in Tesla or not, because if Elon decides to go work SpaceX and not do cars anymore, what was the Tesla? Yeah, hos again, it goes back to the art the the innovator is the person who drives the change. And when the innovator is no longer driving the change, will the bureaucrats who come in behind them to run the company, do what the innovator would have done? Or will they do what they would would do? And consequently, the whole thing changes over again. Right, right.

 

We struggle with that succession plan here at the podcast, quite quite often.

 

Already have the plan in place, don’t worry. But speaking back about Elon I read many years ago, Elon, his goal, his life goal is to go to Mars and come home. You know, the cost is something like $50 billion to achieve this. At least it was back then. you foresee us living on Mars? Or the moon? You see more of this stuff happening?

 

Oh, absolutely. And we’re supposed to go back to the moon in 24. Elon is gonna have a private individual fly around the moon, I think next year, just starship and space tourism while and it’s gonna be the kind of thing where he’s gonna walk me. I’m gonna walk up to Joe and say, Let’s you’re not gonna send anybody. I’ll do it. Mm hmm. Yeah. And in fact, the novel that I’m publishing tomorrow, as I was indicating before, one of the characters is the guy who supplies a spaceship or supply ship for Feline for the after these crops the people on Mars. Why is this the sub resupply ship up to bring up things that they need? Until they can start making another planet? And coming back?

 

Does he have to wait at the Port of Long Beach for those boats to get in? Or how’s that work?

 

No, he’s he’s got his own spaceport Boca Chica. And he actually lives there now. Yeah, it was a $50,000 house in Boca Chica, Texas, he’s worth $600 billion, or whatever it is, yeah.

 

Does the world run out of oil? In your mind?

 

No, because we’ll stop using it before it’s gone.

 

That’s good to hear. For some people,

 

look, we’ll come up with other things. There are other uses for it. So there’ll always be a oil market. It just won’t be at the volumes we’re at today. Because what replaces it all electricity? Well, it’s the it’s the name of the of the green generation is solar, its wind, as biofuels. There’s all kinds of things that one of the things we’ve been looking at a lot recently is compressed air energy storage, where you take the excess energy you have generate during the day, and then you compress air into underground salt domes in Texas. And you could actually compress enough air on a salt almond, Texas, to be able to run a substantial portion of the grid for a week. So if you ever had a storm, like we had before, with enough salt domes for this compressed air energy storage, now they just they just turn the switch and they start letting it out of its compressed state. And it turns a turbine and creates electricity. And there’s no inputs, there’s no fossil fuels involved. It’s whatever generated the force to compress that air in the first place. Right? It’s all green. But it could it could make our grid so much more reliable than it is today. Because you would have the ability to have long term energy storage, that if you had an event like we had in February, you just turn it on and release it and then keep everybody’s up lights on until the cold snap has moved on.

 

Right. David? I truly think it’s fascinating stuff. And we appreciate you saying this, do any of your friends and people you know, think you’re kind of cuckoo? I mean, people think you’re crazy with some of your ideas.

 

I don’t anybody who thinks I’m saying

 

or no answer here enough. Okay. So we, we always ask our guests this family aside, and this will be interesting, coming from a futurist, best day of your life.

 

I’m a perverse person. So the best day of my life was the day that I learned that I was going to have to work glasses for the rest of my life. Interesting, because that was the day I realized I wasn’t going to be going to the Air Force Academy and being a pilot, and I actually was going to have to work for a living and figure out how to do something with my brain rather than with my body.

 

interesting that’s a great answer people find you in your in your books.

 

How do they find me? Yes, you can go to Amazon under D H tricolour it’s all one word, or www.dh tricolour.com. Or you can go to www dot global vino snob for my blogs for world travel that I’ve done because a lot of the stuff is takes place in other countries around the world. But I’ll tell you all about good food, eat in Italy or Albania or whatever you want to do with the places I’ve been. Or you can go to if I have three.org, which is the Institute for future fiction, which is an organization for other people to encourage other writers to write this kind of fiction,

 

David tricolour Thank you very much for your time.