Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: forward Thinking, Welcome to forward Thinking. Well podcasts that looks
Speaker 1: of the future and says please don't drive eighty eight,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be late again. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. And that's the power
Speaker 1: of love. Well, it's actually not the power of love,
Speaker 1: but that's it's another Huey Lewis in the News song
Speaker 1: that also came from the Back to the Future soundtrack.
Speaker 1: So that's that's the first time I've ever quoted the
Speaker 1: same song twice in in consecutive episodes. Hey guys, So
Speaker 1: we're doing our second part of our Back to the
Speaker 1: Future Part two extravaganza. Wait say that title again? What
Speaker 1: is it? Is it part two of our Back to
Speaker 1: the Future Part to two part episode about I called
Speaker 1: it back to Back to the Future to part two.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, So we're doing a second episode about back
Speaker 1: to the Future because the the the year that they
Speaker 1: go forward to and Back to the Future Part two
Speaker 1: is t which and it turns out that's this year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the year that we're recording this. Maybe if you are
Speaker 1: from the future and listening to past episodes of forward
Speaker 1: digging and just giggling up your sleeve. It's the past,
Speaker 1: but right now it's the present. Man, time is hard
Speaker 1: or not quite the present yet because it occurs in October. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're recording this in January, so there's still time for
Speaker 1: all of this to come true. So if you have
Speaker 1: not listened to our first episode about the technology of
Speaker 1: Back to the Future Part two and where the reality
Speaker 1: stacks up against the movie, you should go back check
Speaker 1: out part one and then come to this MP three
Speaker 1: right now, right, and that will make that intro we
Speaker 1: had seemed coherent by comparison apparent. Well, last time we
Speaker 1: talked about stuff that appears in the Back to the
Speaker 1: Future universe like flying cars, uh, self lacing shoes, adjusting jackets,
Speaker 1: three second hydrator, ovens, that a big steamy pizza. Yeah,
Speaker 1: digital binoculars. Oh what else where do they have? Nest thermostats? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we talked a lot about that, digital windows, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, telescoping self extending baseball bad most important
Speaker 1: piece of technology in the future according to Joe obviously. Um,
Speaker 1: but last time we did not talk about the one
Speaker 1: thing that everybody had to be waiting for. So we
Speaker 1: thought we'd do that first in the second part here,
Speaker 1: which is hoverboards, yeah by Mattel in the in the film,
Speaker 1: at least the one that Marty McFly flies on is Yeah.
Speaker 1: To be a few different brands, some marketed towards towards
Speaker 1: older kids, some are marketed towards thugs. Yeah, you got
Speaker 1: the thug thug market. It's an a couple of different
Speaker 1: varieties that can either be powered or nonpowered. I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Don't work on water unless you got power. Very canny
Speaker 1: impersonation and who I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I I
Speaker 1: did watch this entire movie almost um, just last night,
Speaker 1: so I'm an expert right now, right, okay, Well, the
Speaker 1: hoverboard in Back to the Future Part two is basically
Speaker 1: a skateboard without wheels that never touches the ground. It's
Speaker 1: it's again. It's meant to evoke the great skateboard chase
Speaker 1: sequence from the first film. So you know, that is
Speaker 1: kind of one of those instances of hey, you remember
Speaker 1: how much you like this thing when we did in
Speaker 1: that other movie. Well, now we're doing it again, so
Speaker 1: kind of like it's kind of clever actually actually like
Speaker 1: it itself. I actually like it kind of adorable. I
Speaker 1: know I sound like I'm being dismissive, but trust me,
Speaker 1: in this case it works. And movies like Anchorman too,
Speaker 1: maybe not so much, but in this it works great. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's a theme that's throughout all the Back to
Speaker 1: the Future movies exactly, Lauren, the whole idea of history
Speaker 1: repeating itself. Well, so they imagine this technology. It's a
Speaker 1: floating skateboard more or less. Yea, do we actually have
Speaker 1: anything like that now that it's and I know what
Speaker 1: you're gonna say, You're gonna say, oh yes, because I
Speaker 1: saw that video on YouTube and it even had it
Speaker 1: even had Christopher Lloyd, who is obviously an expert on
Speaker 1: the future, and Tony Hawk, who's obviously an expert on
Speaker 1: standing on on pieces of wood that move around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: This product is supposedly made by a company called hover,
Speaker 1: which is a capital h UV and then a little R.
Speaker 1: And the video showed lots of celebrities getting on these hoverboards,
Speaker 1: floating up off of a parking lot and then zooming around.
Speaker 1: Ye and and Christopher Lloyd being kind of doc brownish
Speaker 1: about the whole thing, although not not looking like Doc Brown.
Speaker 1: It was Christopher Lloyd. Wasn't him playing the character? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So um, but it was. You know again, it was
Speaker 1: really well produced video, and it fooled I guess some people.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, the knee jerk reaction for a lot
Speaker 1: of people was this has got to be fake. And uh,
Speaker 1: I still see people arguing about it, saying that it
Speaker 1: was real. Right, And then there was a video that
Speaker 1: Tony Hawk made later where he essentially apologized for the
Speaker 1: hover videos. So we just thought it would a funny joke.
Speaker 1: We never thought anyone was going to take it seriously.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, like that's I I have a hard
Speaker 1: time believing that no one on that group was hoping
Speaker 1: that folks would take it seriously. I mean, when Back
Speaker 1: to the Future two came out, there was a rumor
Speaker 1: specifically created and uh and and distributed that the hoverboard
Speaker 1: technology really did work, and that was just the toy
Speaker 1: companies that were worried about potential lawsuits that were holding
Speaker 1: it back from ever hitting the market. So that was
Speaker 1: back in when this rumor broke, and it was a
Speaker 1: rumor that was supported by Zamacha Zamachi and the rest
Speaker 1: of the film production company. I thought it was hilarious,
Speaker 1: but obviously that was a rumor. Uh, this was an
Speaker 1: orchestra at hoax. It was a joke video. It was
Speaker 1: made by Funny or Die, so that should tell you something.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that there were people when Tony Hawk did
Speaker 1: his video saying, hey, it was all a joke who
Speaker 1: immediately said, oh, no, it was real, and now the
Speaker 1: companies are backing off because it's too dangerous cover up. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's the whole conspiracy theory thing, right, like any evidence
Speaker 1: to the contrary is manufactured. They were also I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people who saw the original video but
Speaker 1: just weren't aware there was ever a disclaimer, right, And
Speaker 1: if you if you watch the one where Tony Hawk
Speaker 1: is actually quote unquote apologizing, it has behind the scenes
Speaker 1: footage of folks wearing harnesses that are attached to cables
Speaker 1: that are are keeping them suspended, and then they just
Speaker 1: keyed the cables out, the wires, the cable they keyed
Speaker 1: them all out later so that they didn't show up
Speaker 1: on screen. Um, so it's not a real thing. However,
Speaker 1: that being said, there is a real hoverboard, but there
Speaker 1: are a lot of qualifiers who have to add to
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what a real hoverboard? Yeah, hindo hoverboards,
Speaker 1: I don't believe you. At a Kickstarter, their goal was
Speaker 1: two dollars. They raised half a million, so they definitely
Speaker 1: hit their people are excited about hoverboards, you guys, keeping
Speaker 1: in mind that these are hoverboards that you would only
Speaker 1: be able to use in very specific circumstances and nothing
Speaker 1: outside of them. You couldn't run them on water unless
Speaker 1: you have power. Yeah, you couldn't run them on concrete
Speaker 1: or wood or grass or they're using electromagnetic repulsion. So
Speaker 1: we've talked about electro magnets a lot and how you know,
Speaker 1: creating magnetic fields is a really powerful thing for lots
Speaker 1: of things. So it's using essentially the same principles as
Speaker 1: a maglev train. Uh. And it works on metallic but
Speaker 1: non ferrous surfaces, so things like copper and aluminum, which
Speaker 1: are are non faires. If it were on iron, then
Speaker 1: what would happen is once you started the electro magnets,
Speaker 1: they're becoming a magnetic field would be associated with the
Speaker 1: iron as well, which would be an aligned with the device,
Speaker 1: and you would end up having a hoverboard that's locked
Speaker 1: to the surface that's on as opposed to one that's
Speaker 1: floating above it. Uh. Non fairest materials is what it
Speaker 1: allows it to have this kind of um repulsion aspect
Speaker 1: and be able to to float above it. Uh. I
Speaker 1: read some reports of various folks, like people from Engadget
Speaker 1: who got to try this out or wired. They said
Speaker 1: it was very, uh, disorienting and scary because you're you're
Speaker 1: on something where you're like, I don't want to fall off.
Speaker 1: But again, because you're limited to those surfaces, it's not
Speaker 1: something that you could just purchase and then you know,
Speaker 1: ride home unless the streets are paid with copper where
Speaker 1: you live, so you you know. I could see this
Speaker 1: being used for something like an attraction at a park
Speaker 1: where they've set up a specific area with like an
Speaker 1: aluminum sheet floor where you can, you know, after signing
Speaker 1: a waiver, go on one of these. But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's going to be something that is going to
Speaker 1: be uh you know, Mattel is not gonna be marketing
Speaker 1: this to little girls, not within the next nine months. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I hate to be a downer, but I
Speaker 1: feel like this almost doesn't count because of the special
Speaker 1: circumstances that are required, like in this case, you might
Speaker 1: as well just take a snowboard into a vertical wind tunnel. Okay,
Speaker 1: so indoor skydiving title, Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's it's similar in spirit to what we
Speaker 1: saw in the movie, but obviously the limitations mean that
Speaker 1: it's nothing like the experience that you saw in the film.
Speaker 1: I mean, you couldn't ride this over any surface besides
Speaker 1: water unless you have power. Uh, it wouldn't do any
Speaker 1: It wouldn't do any good. The power, by the way,
Speaker 1: as I recall, it's like a trio of thrusters that
Speaker 1: are on the back of of griffs hoverboard. It's got
Speaker 1: like a little almost like little jet engines on the
Speaker 1: very back of it, and that's what the power is.
Speaker 1: That's what allows it to have forward propulsion, even over water.
Speaker 1: But anyway, yeah, doesn't doesn't quite fit, which is a
Speaker 1: real big bummer. I mean, the hoverboard was one of
Speaker 1: those iconic pieces of technology shown off in the film
Speaker 1: that people really um got attached to. They thought it
Speaker 1: was super cool. You know, personally, I don't feel all
Speaker 1: that robbed of magic. I think actual skateboarding is difficult enough. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine not injuring myself on a hubboard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't need to be an extra few inches off
Speaker 1: the ground when I fall terribly skateboard, I can't time
Speaker 1: I get on it. I can't do a skateboard, I
Speaker 1: can't can't do wakeboards. Anything that requires balance on top
Speaker 1: of the board, forget it. Um Um, I might as
Speaker 1: well just go ahead and throw myself at the ground.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, that but that's that's one we definitely
Speaker 1: needed to cover, and we got that one out all
Speaker 1: the way. But there's still a lot of other technologies
Speaker 1: that appear in that film. You know, I don't think
Speaker 1: last time we ever got around to communication technology. No,
Speaker 1: we didn't really. We mentioned some things where you could
Speaker 1: consume content, but we didn't talk about ones where you
Speaker 1: could actually communicate with people. Ah yeah, And and video
Speaker 1: calls play a pretty big role in the plot line,
Speaker 1: such as it is if you want to be snarky
Speaker 1: about it, um because yeah, yeah, so so they have
Speaker 1: these huge screen TVs that can I guess either function
Speaker 1: or double as as video call centers. Yeah, there don't
Speaker 1: appear to be any cameras attached, but that's okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that's worked into the bezel. Sure, all right, I okay,
Speaker 1: i'd say we have this. I don't think anybody really
Speaker 1: likes it all that much. Some people do, but I
Speaker 1: think it's I think it's in very specific use cases,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think there are that many people who
Speaker 1: use this as their regular means of communication with other people. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's certainly not. If you want to call up your
Speaker 1: coworker who happens to be flee Um. Yeah, and because
Speaker 1: because that dude is totally flee Um and just chat
Speaker 1: with him about something illegal, You're you're not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to go straight to a voice to to to a
Speaker 1: video call. I mean you might. You might skype with
Speaker 1: a significant other who's who's on a trip far away,
Speaker 1: far away from you, writer, or with family members, or
Speaker 1: you might you might even face time. If you're perhaps
Speaker 1: of a younger generation than anyone sitting in the podcast
Speaker 1: room right now, you might. You might use FaceTime or
Speaker 1: something like that for your daily business and and within work,
Speaker 1: you might use it for something like calling into a
Speaker 1: meeting or in the podcast world, we do it all
Speaker 1: the time, or podcasts where you know you have a
Speaker 1: guest host, especially if it's a video podcast. Then you
Speaker 1: might have multiple people calling in a video conferencing, So
Speaker 1: it's not that it's unusual in the year two thousand
Speaker 1: and fifteen, although I don't Again, I don't think of
Speaker 1: that as the primary means of community. Heck, I don't
Speaker 1: even think of calls as being the primary means of
Speaker 1: communication these days. Now it's all text and and things
Speaker 1: of that nature. I don't know that many people who
Speaker 1: actually enjoy talking on the phone anymore. I enjoy talking
Speaker 1: on the phone. I wouldn't want people to see me
Speaker 1: while I'm on the phone. Again, it's a very specific
Speaker 1: use case scenarios that I want anyone to be able
Speaker 1: to look at my hideous visage. I don't think of
Speaker 1: myself as particularly misanthropic, but I very rarely use my
Speaker 1: phone as a phone. Well, phones are interesting if you
Speaker 1: have friends, you want to talk to those. I've heard
Speaker 1: about friends, thank you, I've been working on. Although interesting
Speaker 1: thing also about the phone system in the movie is
Speaker 1: that UM it will along the bottom of the screen,
Speaker 1: like like where a newscast might have a little a
Speaker 1: little bit of rolling information. UM it will give you
Speaker 1: the callers identification, their their job, their age, their address,
Speaker 1: UM their favorite drinks and hobbies, uh, their family members,
Speaker 1: names and ages, the sports that they play, their political affiliations,
Speaker 1: their food dislikes. So this is like, this is like
Speaker 1: when you watch a movie where you see a high
Speaker 1: powered executive and they're about to make a phone call
Speaker 1: on their assistant is giving them the skinny on whoever
Speaker 1: they're going to talk to, like Okay, he's got two
Speaker 1: daughters there, blah blah blah. So that that you can
Speaker 1: have that that that manufactured personal interaction that actually makes sense.
Speaker 1: It sort of combines calls with like the about page
Speaker 1: of a social media program. H right, totally yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like like Facebook is a little bit of what
Speaker 1: it reminded me of. The interesting thing here is that
Speaker 1: I can easily imagine a video calling up that incorporates
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff by scraping information from some other source.
Speaker 1: Either you create a profile in the app itself, which
Speaker 1: just makes it easy because then it just refers to itself,
Speaker 1: or it scrapes publicly available information off of social media
Speaker 1: profiles or even Google searches that kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: it would populate fields so that you would have this information.
Speaker 1: We've seen kind of mock ups of apps like this
Speaker 1: for augmented reality where you know you've seen like the
Speaker 1: smart glasses where a person is looking in a room
Speaker 1: and people's names and they're like little Twitter handles and
Speaker 1: stuff are popping up over their heads. Gives you a
Speaker 1: little bit of information and obviously that brings up questions
Speaker 1: about privacy. It brings up you know, what's appropriate. What
Speaker 1: do we want to make public? Is it is it
Speaker 1: acceptable if we have chosen to make this information public
Speaker 1: that people have easy access to it, or is the
Speaker 1: fact that that access becomes so easy mean that we
Speaker 1: no longer care that we publicly shared it. We want
Speaker 1: there to be a limitation. These questions were still answering.
Speaker 1: Places like Europe are answering it through litigation where they
Speaker 1: they there's the story in two thousand and fourteen where
Speaker 1: Google was taken to task and said that there needs
Speaker 1: to be this right to be forgotten where people who
Speaker 1: want to have certain things in their past kind of
Speaker 1: expunged from Google so that something they did, you know,
Speaker 1: some stupid thing they did maybe fifteen years ago, or
Speaker 1: something that they got involved in in their past that
Speaker 1: no longer has any relevance in their their current lives
Speaker 1: gets taken out of search results because they don't want
Speaker 1: themselves associated with that. Obviously, that raises a lot of
Speaker 1: questions and a lot of problems. And UM, all this
Speaker 1: being said, you know, we haven't seen a specific application
Speaker 1: as far as I know. That mirrors what we saw
Speaker 1: in Back to the Future too, but it's it's totally
Speaker 1: within the realm of possibility. I don't I don't see
Speaker 1: anything about it that makes it, you know, even even
Speaker 1: difficult to pull off. A way in which they we
Speaker 1: talked a few times in the previous episode about ways
Speaker 1: in which this movie did not quite go far enough
Speaker 1: in its imagining of the future. And um, the way
Speaker 1: that this phone system operates within a household is one
Speaker 1: of those ways, because it's a it's a housewide phone
Speaker 1: system that can be accessed from like individual visors, but
Speaker 1: everyone has a single phone number within the family unit.
Speaker 1: It's one phone for the household. So they imagined that
Speaker 1: that people that, like the kids, could each have a
Speaker 1: visor that they could check and see who's calling and
Speaker 1: take the calls supposedly on this little headset of theirs. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's it's just one household line. They couldn't get
Speaker 1: all the way to individual cell phones, right, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is interesting. I mean I can totally see why they
Speaker 1: went with that. Yeah. Of course, in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: I had my own phone number, but I didn't have
Speaker 1: my own phone line. The number also went through the
Speaker 1: same phone line as the only one. It's just that
Speaker 1: it had a different ring to it, so that if
Speaker 1: that ring was going off, my parents knew, oh that's
Speaker 1: one of Jonathan's friends. I'm not even gonna bother picking
Speaker 1: it up. Um, and uh, that was the only thing.
Speaker 1: But otherwise it was you know, if I picked up
Speaker 1: the phone, I was, I had the family line was active,
Speaker 1: so uh, you know, I can see that they were
Speaker 1: just building on what was already common at the time.
Speaker 1: They didn't anticipate a world where we would all have
Speaker 1: devices that have their own dedicated communication channels. Now, surely
Speaker 1: the movie understood that Facts wasn't gonna last forever, right, No, no, what,
Speaker 1: there's a facts machine in every single room in the house.
Speaker 1: And when you given the closet, and when you get
Speaker 1: that and when you get fired, it prints to all
Speaker 1: of them. Well, I think that that boss was just
Speaker 1: not a nice person, but but yeah, it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fact that there was a fact was really pretty
Speaker 1: amusing because again, the facts is one of those pieces
Speaker 1: of technology that has largely been supplanted by digital tech,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff digital displays and and PDFs, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. We still see facts is. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are different companies and specifically government organizations that require you
Speaker 1: to facts in documents as opposed to scanning an email.
Speaker 1: I have facts to shocking number of documents in the
Speaker 1: past year or so, like a shocking number, and by
Speaker 1: that I mean like more than three. But that's stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: considering that we're living in an era where you could
Speaker 1: literally take a picture of it with my phone and
Speaker 1: text to somewhere. They're also depending upon the depending upon
Speaker 1: the document you're talking about. If you already have it
Speaker 1: in digital format, there are a ton of programs that
Speaker 1: already automatically convert that into PDF format, and then you
Speaker 1: could send it as a PDF where you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about people making changes to it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just weird to have a world where that facts
Speaker 1: is considered still a viable and necessary piece of technology.
Speaker 1: According to nineteen nine, that was incredibly incredibly important, yea,
Speaker 1: so important that you needed to have like the aready
Speaker 1: have them in your Yes? Yeah, I guess if I
Speaker 1: ever ran low on toilet paper, you know, pretty handy. Well,
Speaker 1: I found it was massively wasteful as printing multiple copies
Speaker 1: the same message, not even different messages to different rooms.
Speaker 1: You're going to crush a man in his dreams, you
Speaker 1: need to really go all out. Yeah. Well, speaking of crushing,
Speaker 1: are there any good crushing or you know, really any
Speaker 1: kind of robots in the home of Back to the
Speaker 1: Future Part two? Well, there there was. It wasn't It
Speaker 1: wasn't pictured directly, but there was definitely. Um these these
Speaker 1: like trash bag sized blocks of trash kind of hanging
Speaker 1: out around a local dumpster. So I thought that that
Speaker 1: was interesting because it implies that within every home there's
Speaker 1: probably some kind of like large scale trash compactor, right
Speaker 1: that you're using to create these bundles of trash. Why
Speaker 1: on earth would you need that unless you're generating ridicu
Speaker 1: hellosus amounts of trash. Because they were generating ridiculous amounts
Speaker 1: of trash, that's true. Yeah, the fax machine prints out
Speaker 1: a duplicate of every single message in every room of
Speaker 1: the house. You're probably creating like three pounds of paper
Speaker 1: waste every hour probably Yeah. Um, there were also roving
Speaker 1: around the city, these robotic trash cans, these kind of
Speaker 1: like our two D two looking things. Yeah, that would
Speaker 1: kind of just willy nilly sort of sort of rove
Speaker 1: around waiting to accept your refuse and we've you know,
Speaker 1: there's a great example of this as a concept. It
Speaker 1: was actually used in a in a commercial. It wasn't
Speaker 1: meant to be like an actual product. It was more
Speaker 1: of a gimmick for a TV commercial. A robotic trash
Speaker 1: can that used a robotic chassis with wheels at three
Speaker 1: wheels that could spin kind of like casters on a
Speaker 1: on a on a chair. They could spin into any direction,
Speaker 1: so it could the robot could quickly maneuver in any
Speaker 1: given direction at a moment's notice. Uh, moved really really fast.
Speaker 1: On top of that chassis was mounted a trash can
Speaker 1: like a regular little waste paper beIN so that it
Speaker 1: had just enough clearance from the floor so it wouldn't
Speaker 1: scrape around and the wheels could turn freely. And then
Speaker 1: it was had a processor in it that was connected
Speaker 1: wirelessly to a connect sensor, a Microsoft Connect sensor, and
Speaker 1: the way it worked was that if you tossed a
Speaker 1: piece of paper, the connect sensor would detect, it would
Speaker 1: project out the pathway of that piece of paper, send
Speaker 1: a command to the robot to intercept that piece of paper.
Speaker 1: The robot would move into place and then catch it
Speaker 1: as it hit before it could hit the ground. And
Speaker 1: it was used in this commercial just as a little
Speaker 1: gimmick where someone is typing on a typewriter, which already
Speaker 1: was you know, was already anachronistic, but typing on a typewriter,
Speaker 1: and then, like the classic, pull the sheet out, crumple
Speaker 1: it up, through it behind you, and this happens three
Speaker 1: or four times, and then the person typing on the
Speaker 1: typewriter it gets a stick of gum or something whatever
Speaker 1: the commercial was actually selling. And then the next time
Speaker 1: this doesn't make the person better at writing. Apparently all
Speaker 1: it does is make make the world magical around them,
Speaker 1: because then the next piece of paper, they again pull
Speaker 1: it up, they crumple it up, toss it behind them,
Speaker 1: and the trash can moves and catches the piece of paper.
Speaker 1: I just thought it was funny. I'm like, well, if
Speaker 1: I were making a commercial where someone was chewing gum
Speaker 1: while while failing over and over to write whatever they
Speaker 1: were trying to write. I'd have them succeed in writing,
Speaker 1: not failing again. But now the trash can catches their garbage,
Speaker 1: makes fire more convenience. I guess a lot of the
Speaker 1: role of gum in human life. Yeah, but at any rate, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a great video and I'll make sure to share
Speaker 1: it on social when we when we put this podcast up.
Speaker 1: That shows the both the commercial and the behind the
Speaker 1: scenes of how it was done. Although it's it's not
Speaker 1: in English, but it is. It does show you, like
Speaker 1: the the actual design process where I mean they machined
Speaker 1: parts to make this robotic trash can a possibility. To me,
Speaker 1: it really just cool about being able to use a
Speaker 1: connect to do path prediction. Yeah, I thought that was
Speaker 1: really interesting. So um yeah. Other other robots that they
Speaker 1: feature in the movie include um in the eighties cafe
Speaker 1: that they go to, that's that's kind of partially a
Speaker 1: throwback to the nineteen eighties and partially the way that
Speaker 1: nostalgia cafes work. Nothing like what the eighties was like
Speaker 1: at all, kind of like if you go to a
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties diner, it's not really like the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: it's like option way less sexism and racism. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty great. Well, I think a lot of if you
Speaker 1: go to a nineteen fifties diner, it's taking you back
Speaker 1: to what people in the seventies thought in the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties were like, it's like happy days, not like the
Speaker 1: real nineties shirt sure, sure, and and all of the
Speaker 1: technology that they use in those fifties cafes are updated technologies. Similarly,
Speaker 1: in this eighties cafe, they have these robotic m video
Speaker 1: servers like wait waiters and waitresses. Um, you can be
Speaker 1: served by Michael Jackson or by Battling Ronald Reagan and Ayatola.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, because because they're
Speaker 1: they're they're you know, asking you what you want and
Speaker 1: talking about the day's specials, and you know, one of
Speaker 1: them is like you should have the bean dip, and
Speaker 1: the others like, no, get the chicken tenders, and then
Speaker 1: they like fight a lot, so which I'm not, but uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things where where the all
Speaker 1: the depictions of the various personalities are put through what
Speaker 1: I like to think of as the max headroom filter. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was very much what they were, like this kind
Speaker 1: of shoddy digital representation of a person that would occasionally, um,
Speaker 1: the playback of their dialogue would kind of skip like
Speaker 1: a record, basically entirely unlike digital representations of things skip right.
Speaker 1: That would mean that you would have to program in
Speaker 1: either the or there'll be some terrible buffering problem. But
Speaker 1: either way you're just wouldn't make you repeat, it would
Speaker 1: just make you pause. Yeah, it's it's it's a weird
Speaker 1: thing a rate um. Yeah. So so that's that's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one piece of technology we kind of kind of jumped over,
Speaker 1: but it's still one that I wanted to mention really quickly.
Speaker 1: Is that Lauren You mentioned that mentioned that in the
Speaker 1: house people could get calls on glasses. We do have
Speaker 1: video glasses. I mean they're not great, but at least
Speaker 1: none of the ones I've tried have been really great.
Speaker 1: But that's that's one of those pieces of technology that,
Speaker 1: again you can get. It's not it's like a lot
Speaker 1: of the ones word mentioning. It's not something that everybody
Speaker 1: has their hands on, but there are examples out there
Speaker 1: to varying degrees of success. Some of them are more
Speaker 1: video screens, some of them are essentially a replacement for
Speaker 1: something like a mobile device. Most of them connect to
Speaker 1: a mobile device, so really it's an extension of a smartphone.
Speaker 1: But it's one of those things where we do actually
Speaker 1: have them, but it's not in the same implementation as
Speaker 1: in the film. But anyway, all right, so we've done robots,
Speaker 1: we've done communication, we've talked about the importance of fax machines.
Speaker 1: Let's let's move on to health, because we've talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of these these other areas, we haven't really
Speaker 1: focused on the health side. Now. Granted again I don't
Speaker 1: remember much about health and Back to the Future part two. Okay,
Speaker 1: Early on in the film, UM, Christopher Lloyd's character explains
Speaker 1: to Marty that that he has been to a rejuvenation
Speaker 1: clinic and that Marty should not be alarmed because he
Speaker 1: will look very different when he peels off this mask
Speaker 1: that he is wearing, and he looks exactly the same,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the idea, suddenly looks younger. Allow
Speaker 1: me to explain to you the jokes in this movie
Speaker 1: which you have probably seen, um. But but so, this
Speaker 1: rejuvenation clinic, he says, can remove wrinkles, repair your hair,
Speaker 1: change out your blood, what's the transfusion between friends and
Speaker 1: and thus add another like forty years to your life
Speaker 1: and also maybe replace your colon. I'm not I don't know.
Speaker 1: He didn't really specify. No, here's the thing. The fact
Speaker 1: that he doesn't look significantly different to Marty suggests to
Speaker 1: me that this this could be intentionally or otherwise a
Speaker 1: very clever, satirical way of saying. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of services out there that are making these huge promises.
Speaker 1: The idea of preserving your youth is an enormous industry
Speaker 1: and has been for centuries, but now we've gotten into
Speaker 1: the high tech portion where everything from injecting what would
Speaker 1: be considered a deadly toxin into your body so that
Speaker 1: you could preserve a renkal free existence is now accepted
Speaker 1: in society. Um. Yeah, it's not really that unusual to
Speaker 1: have this kind of of statement from a character. So
Speaker 1: if we take it from that perspective that there is
Speaker 1: an industry that still exists in that's catering to people
Speaker 1: who are fearing the aging process, but is not, you know,
Speaker 1: demonstrably incredibly effective. This this prediction is absolutely true to
Speaker 1: today because because there's nothing stopping a company making these
Speaker 1: grandiose claims as long as they never get you know,
Speaker 1: called out on it then So I think this is
Speaker 1: one of those things that is fairly accurate because we
Speaker 1: don't actually see the techniques that are being described as
Speaker 1: working in that way. It's not like we are. We
Speaker 1: don't encounter any characters who are forty years older than
Speaker 1: you think they should, like that have lived forty years
Speaker 1: longer than you think they should have been able to live.
Speaker 1: We never encounter a character who's like a hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty in Back to the Future too, So it's very
Speaker 1: possible that what Doc is saying is just complete hogwash
Speaker 1: that he himself has bought into. It's a possibility. Now,
Speaker 1: granted that's kind of taking a meta view, so it's
Speaker 1: not exactly Yeah, it makes sense to me, and I
Speaker 1: do think I mean, especially since, um, since Biff, who
Speaker 1: is of grandfatherly age, of the kind of age that
Speaker 1: someone would have, well, I guess he's he's what we
Speaker 1: can use our skills and counting. He he would be
Speaker 1: uh sometimes like like eighteen plus thirty plus thirty Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so seventy eight and he looks, you know, despite the
Speaker 1: range of age makeup that they employ. Um, I guess
Speaker 1: maybe about that age, I'd say is a pretty generous
Speaker 1: lifespan for Biff based upon his lifestyle. That's true, So
Speaker 1: you may you may be able to infer some life
Speaker 1: extension technologies. Yes, the injury is still out on this one.
Speaker 1: But at anyway, we don't have like amazing rejuvenation techniques
Speaker 1: that can actually add forty years to your life. Yes.
Speaker 1: Another thing that we do not have is um sleep
Speaker 1: inducing alpha generator. Definitely not the way they are in
Speaker 1: the movie. Uh. This is this device that conveniently gets
Speaker 1: a character out of the story for as long as
Speaker 1: the plot requires. Yeah, Doc uses this to uh to
Speaker 1: put Marty's girlfriend Jennifer Um into a state of sleep
Speaker 1: for her a period of a few hours um and
Speaker 1: in which he says that she'll wake up kind of
Speaker 1: groggy and and based on the fact that this is
Speaker 1: induced alpha waves in her brain, will assume that everything
Speaker 1: about this this future that they've been talking about will
Speaker 1: seem to her a dream. Right, So that in other words,
Speaker 1: that he doesn't have this this ikey uh loose end
Speaker 1: to tie up. You know, he doesn't have to kill
Speaker 1: her and dump her body into prehistoric America. Why did
Speaker 1: he take her in the first place, because she was
Speaker 1: there with Marty when he came back at the end
Speaker 1: of Back to the Future one, and they couldn't just
Speaker 1: leave her there because, to possibly go babble, she had
Speaker 1: seen the time machine. Right. He comes back at the
Speaker 1: end of Back to the Future Part one, at the
Speaker 1: very end of Less Sweet than I Remember. Well, it's
Speaker 1: when he comes out and he sees Marty and he
Speaker 1: sees Jennifer and he says that you guys got to
Speaker 1: come back and says, what back? No, we got to
Speaker 1: go to the future. What's the matter, Doc? Do we
Speaker 1: turn out to be get ready to believe? No? This
Speaker 1: holes or something? And then Doc says, uh, says no, no,
Speaker 1: you guys are fine. It's kids, Marty. Something's got to
Speaker 1: be done about your kids. And then they get in
Speaker 1: the car and they fly, so she's with them at
Speaker 1: the end of back. So they had the problem. We've
Speaker 1: got this character. It's a continuity problem, but we don't
Speaker 1: know how to write for women, so we we can't
Speaker 1: have her in the movie. Let's knock around as soon
Speaker 1: as we possibly can. Yeah, So they hold up this
Speaker 1: device which essentially shines a couple of lights into her eyes,
Speaker 1: knocks her out. It reminds of the Men in Black device, honestly,
Speaker 1: which I guess. I guess the Men in Black device
Speaker 1: reminds me of this. Yeah technically, yeah, so very similar
Speaker 1: in that sense. And it's supposed to induce alpha waves,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, and at the time, alpha waves
Speaker 1: were really being associated with, uh like your early early
Speaker 1: phases of sleep, so light sleep, not when you've gone
Speaker 1: into R. E. M. Sleep. However, since then, uh, more
Speaker 1: study has been made into alpha waves. And while we
Speaker 1: still you know, sleep is still largely mysterious to us,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that we don't really understand.
Speaker 1: We've talked about that in previous episodes too, But it
Speaker 1: looks more like alpha waves might indicate a time where
Speaker 1: you're kind of in a relaxed state, but you are awake,
Speaker 1: so kind of like meditation when you've when you're doing
Speaker 1: actual uh progressive relaxation exercises, that kind of stuff. Your
Speaker 1: eyes are closed, you're breathing slowly, you're you're actively trying
Speaker 1: to relax you you're going to have some alpha wave
Speaker 1: brain activity, but you're not asleep. You know, you're not
Speaker 1: sleepy necessarily, and also can happen during R E. M sleep,
Speaker 1: But that's different too, and there's not a whole lot
Speaker 1: of agreement over exactly what role what it means. You know,
Speaker 1: as far as our em sleep is gone, it goes.
Speaker 1: So even if we had one that would induce alpha waves,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't knock somebody out like that. We do have
Speaker 1: various devices that are supposed to help you relax, like
Speaker 1: either by playing soft music or or other relaxing sounds,
Speaker 1: or or they're even ones that use light. There's light
Speaker 1: therapy ones that are meant to help with relaxation. I
Speaker 1: think I think both Joe and I are just going
Speaker 1: like or get you tipsy like a bottle of wine.
Speaker 1: Some of us don't drink alcohol. Wouldn't it have been
Speaker 1: funny if what had happened in the movie is like
Speaker 1: Doc Brown whips out of devices like this will put
Speaker 1: Jennifer to sleep and it starts playing like saxophone music.
Speaker 1: That would have been a much better joke. I still
Speaker 1: think the whole killing her and dumping group Rhistoric America
Speaker 1: would have really gotten around this all right. I think
Speaker 1: that if we get a time machine, we need to
Speaker 1: go back in time and talk to Robert Zeneca's. Yeahs Zeccas,
Speaker 1: Now this was granted. I mean, the whole purpose of
Speaker 1: her being unconscious is for a gag that happens later
Speaker 1: in the film where she wakes up and sees her
Speaker 1: future self. Yeah. Well they have to get her into
Speaker 1: the house so that she can witness the goings on
Speaker 1: of her of her fututure family. Yeah. So it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's they did make use of her, but
Speaker 1: it was clear that it was going to be harder
Speaker 1: to have this be a two character stories, so they
Speaker 1: had to get rid of her somehow without killing her off.
Speaker 1: So that's that's how they did it. Well, do we
Speaker 1: have any like, you know, exo skeletons and power suits
Speaker 1: and robotic limbs in the future rising lack of exo skeletons.
Speaker 1: I was really kind of hoping for some of those.
Speaker 1: Uh but but no, but there are some bionic implants. Uh.
Speaker 1: Doc mentions kind of off handedly that that Griff Biff's
Speaker 1: grandson um, because that's how names go, right. That's another
Speaker 1: convention of the future is that your grandchildren will have
Speaker 1: your same first name, but with the g R consonant
Speaker 1: you don't see Biffs direct kids at any point. Do
Speaker 1: you know, just your grandchild will be groan than well,
Speaker 1: I will grow. That's a great name. That's like a
Speaker 1: troll name. So you just need to move to Norway
Speaker 1: and you got it all planned out. Sorry, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: bionic limbs all right? So so so so Doc kind
Speaker 1: of kind of jokes that there's a short circuit in
Speaker 1: Griff's bionic implants um, which which implies that he's got
Speaker 1: it implies to me that he's got some kind of
Speaker 1: brain implant going on. Um, but when you meet him,
Speaker 1: he when when he moves around there sometimes um these
Speaker 1: terrific pneumatic robots sounds that accompany it, kind of implying that, like,
Speaker 1: like especially when he's when he's like stretching his limbs
Speaker 1: out or standing up tall or something like that, implying
Speaker 1: that he does in fact have bionic limbs of some kind,
Speaker 1: although and driven by the same pneumatic stuff that is
Speaker 1: fed through little tubes all over the city. I guess
Speaker 1: that's funny. It makes me wonder if Griff is not
Speaker 1: in fact Biff's biological grandchild, but a hybrid, uh cyborg
Speaker 1: clone of Biff. Yeah, that would explain why we never
Speaker 1: saw Biff's son. Yeah, cyborg Biff. Alright, So it's a
Speaker 1: terminator on the inside, that's what the pneumatic noises are
Speaker 1: coming from, and then on the outside it's living tissue
Speaker 1: grown from Biff's DNA. I don't mean to to dampen
Speaker 1: you know, the party or anything, or or to really
Speaker 1: bring things down. Well, we have cyborgs right now. The
Speaker 1: whole purpose was to really talk about the technology as
Speaker 1: it relates to today, not to invent new ways to
Speaker 1: incorporate back to the future mythology into other existing science fiction. Okay,
Speaker 1: so getting to that, we do have cyborg you know,
Speaker 1: bionic limb type stuff, but it's all obviously very much
Speaker 1: in in the early stages, early prototypes. Some limbs are
Speaker 1: a little more further along than others, but things like
Speaker 1: the robotic arms. We've started to see some really cool developments,
Speaker 1: I mean amazing stuff, uh, that have come out of
Speaker 1: things like Dean Cayman's group. The Deca Arm, also known
Speaker 1: as the Luke Arm, is a great example the original
Speaker 1: versions of that. We're controlled using actual sensors that were
Speaker 1: built into shoes, so you would use your toes to
Speaker 1: control the arm. But now they have versions of it
Speaker 1: that connect to you know. They they you can contract
Speaker 1: muscles in whatever is left of the limb that you've lost,
Speaker 1: and that will send the commands to the robots. So
Speaker 1: there's still a learned there's a learning curve. You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously you need to learn how to to contract the
Speaker 1: muscles you need to send the command you want your
Speaker 1: arm to do. But as you learn it and you
Speaker 1: practice it, it becomes more and more natural to you,
Speaker 1: so that you're no longer really thinking of it, you know,
Speaker 1: in in a conscious way. And uh, if you read
Speaker 1: any of the reports from the folks who have tested
Speaker 1: this out, like the actual amputees who have used this technology,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's incredibly inspirational stuff. It's really really moving
Speaker 1: to hear people talk about Like there was a guy
Speaker 1: who said, I picked up a water bottle with my
Speaker 1: left hand. The last you know, he's like in his
Speaker 1: late forties, is the last time I did that, I
Speaker 1: was twenty three. You know, as you know, you hear
Speaker 1: something like that and you're like, wow, all of the fields,
Speaker 1: but yeah, and listening to them talk about some of
Speaker 1: the kind of like average things that they can do,
Speaker 1: like like like fasten their own pants. It's to feed themselves,
Speaker 1: right right, it's it's it's really awesome. Um it is
Speaker 1: you know, prohibitively expensive and um technical enough that it's
Speaker 1: or complex enough a system that it's it's really only
Speaker 1: for those kind of cases where you're trying to restore
Speaker 1: function to someone who has lost it, and not in
Speaker 1: this case, for beefing up a belief. Yeah you don't,
Speaker 1: you don't have like the it's not used as enhancement.
Speaker 1: It's used as it's used to to regain independence. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where the reality and the
Speaker 1: fiction are obviously very very different. And again, I mean
Speaker 1: I don't blame the film for this, because you know,
Speaker 1: they're trying to project a really you know, like they
Speaker 1: were blue skying the whole future thing. What do they
Speaker 1: care it's nine. When they're making the movie, they just
Speaker 1: want They wanted to be fun and interesting and say like,
Speaker 1: all right, it's thirty years out. What could happen in
Speaker 1: thirty years? And when when you have a question like that,
Speaker 1: if you ask me like, in five what's the what's
Speaker 1: the baseline level of technology going to be? Like I'd
Speaker 1: be making some pretty crazy predictions too, pretty when when
Speaker 1: when I used to be on tech stuff, we used
Speaker 1: to make some pretty crazy predictions for just the very
Speaker 1: next year. That's true, That's true. Another thing that they
Speaker 1: mentioned in the movie is suspended animation kennels. So apparently
Speaker 1: suspended animation is not only so widespread and successful that
Speaker 1: humans can use it, but they can you can put
Speaker 1: your dog in it, right, I mean to yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're going out town. You don't wanna, you know, take
Speaker 1: care of the pooch. It's you know, to them, it's
Speaker 1: like you never left. Yeah. Oh well, although I can
Speaker 1: see the appeal of that, I guess, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're not traumatizing your dog. I mean the appeal I
Speaker 1: see is that. I mean, obviously, this is assuming that
Speaker 1: the actual process of putting your dog in suspended animation
Speaker 1: is not at ull traumatic h for anybody the dog
Speaker 1: in question, Einstein seemed to find. So, assuming that that's
Speaker 1: the case, the thing that appeals to me the most,
Speaker 1: and this is totally like uh super squishy Jonathan feelings,
Speaker 1: is that you have the most time with your dog.
Speaker 1: You're not cheated out of a single moment of your
Speaker 1: time your dog, because you know, you're not losing that
Speaker 1: week that dog is. Yeah, you could even do it
Speaker 1: at night or when you go to work and then
Speaker 1: you come back home and then like so your dog
Speaker 1: could live to be like forty. I miss my dog. Guys, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't blame you, but but yeah, we've had an
Speaker 1: entire episode about how unlikely it is that suspended animation
Speaker 1: is ever gonna work right, well, at least for certain
Speaker 1: types of animals. Yeah, right, mammals maybe not so much.
Speaker 1: There's some like reptiles and things where it's much easier
Speaker 1: to see how you could achieve some kind of suspended animation,
Speaker 1: especially with the kinds of reptiles and fish and certain
Speaker 1: animals that you can just freeze and not kill them.
Speaker 1: And we also talked about how the breakthroughs we've seen
Speaker 1: in quote unquote suspended animation are really more about giving
Speaker 1: the best chance for for victims of terrible injury or
Speaker 1: disease or whatever to recover during a surgical procedure that
Speaker 1: may last a few hours. So you're not talking about
Speaker 1: something where someone's indefinitely being put into suspended animation. It's
Speaker 1: more about let's try and create an environment where they
Speaker 1: we are increasing their their chances of survival as much
Speaker 1: as possible. So it's not, you know, it's it's a
Speaker 1: very different outcome than what we're seeing in in science fiction.
Speaker 1: All I'm saying is I can imagine pretty easily a
Speaker 1: suspended animation kennel for your pet juvenile salamander. Yeah. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see that being a thing. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much you a few years out though, that's certainly
Speaker 1: not it's they overreached. You could be. You could just
Speaker 1: be a guy on the street corner with a big freezer.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, just have a sign, don't do that. Don't
Speaker 1: really suspended animation kennel for salimated. It be nice to salamanders. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're wonderful creatures. Yes. One one last bit of health
Speaker 1: equipment that we see in this film are so Marty's father, George, George,
Speaker 1: thank you, George McFly, who who is now of grandfatherly
Speaker 1: kind of age, has thrown out his back and so
Speaker 1: he is in this hovering, suspended upside down ankle holding brace. Right.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like if you've ever seen those things
Speaker 1: of people who would get in these these these kind
Speaker 1: of stretchers that would get inverted and the idea was
Speaker 1: that I was supposed to treat back pain. It was
Speaker 1: supposed to be an actual therapy for this. Um it's
Speaker 1: that same idea, except now it's hovering around so that
Speaker 1: you actually have mobility as opposed to your stuck upside
Speaker 1: down in a certain section of a building. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: sort of it's sort of like yeah, yeah, yeah, or
Speaker 1: it's like that spell in Harry Potter that that James
Speaker 1: uses on snape when their kids. Okay, yeah, my wife
Speaker 1: could even tell you what it is nursery across nursery
Speaker 1: in fact, well the the so yeah, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: tell you the reason for that technology in the in
Speaker 1: the context of the film, because it's funny. Well, also
Speaker 1: that they could not get the actor for George McFly
Speaker 1: for part two. So what better way to disguise the
Speaker 1: fact that you don't have the same actor than inverting
Speaker 1: them upside down and never getting a really good look
Speaker 1: at them. So that was Yeah, Crispin Glover didn't want
Speaker 1: to come back. Well, he wanted to come back, but
Speaker 1: only if he got like a crazy amount of money
Speaker 1: in all with with uh yeah kind of but yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, so that didn't happen. They said no, there's
Speaker 1: no way we can do that, and so he walked
Speaker 1: and they got a different actor. But yeah, if you've
Speaker 1: got that, that's why if you back to the future
Speaker 1: to all the scenes that have George in them, there's
Speaker 1: like a screen door that you're looking through or back
Speaker 1: from the scene. Yeah, exactly, so that way you don't
Speaker 1: have it's not as obvious as a different actor. Um.
Speaker 1: Not that they had problems with Jennifer that way, but anyway,
Speaker 1: that's that's a difference. Nobody cared about Marty's girl, not
Speaker 1: I mean, she's female. That's why we got rid of
Speaker 1: her in the beginning of the I do I do
Speaker 1: feel really bad that I've been just calling her Marty's
Speaker 1: girlfriend this entire time. She has a she she is
Speaker 1: a person, she's self actualized kind of the way the
Speaker 1: movie treats her. You can't be blamed for calling her
Speaker 1: Marty's girlfriend, because that's pretty much all she serves in
Speaker 1: the all right enough editorializing about Yeah, we do have
Speaker 1: one last category here, and that is a citywide infrastructure. Um,
Speaker 1: and we we've already covered the inflation rate. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: idea that if if we get to a point where
Speaker 1: you need a fifty dollar bill in order to go
Speaker 1: buy a pepsi, not saying that pepsi itself is fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: but that a fifty dollar bill would be necessary to
Speaker 1: cover the cost. Then obviously inflation would have to go
Speaker 1: out of control for us to get to that point
Speaker 1: in the next nine months. Yeah, they don't have to.
Speaker 1: They don't have to be a catastrophic event, which were crust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's I'll knock on wood. Um, I'm not sure. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that there's wood somewhere undering underneath the sneer of
Speaker 1: our table. Um other infrastructure. They have a weather service
Speaker 1: that controls rain and clouds and sunshine like to the
Speaker 1: precise second. Yeah, yeah, at the controls it, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: or or perhaps predicts it. But it looks like a
Speaker 1: control situation because as far as I know, southern California
Speaker 1: doesn't have um or doesn't typically have very brief, very sudden,
Speaker 1: very intense periods of rainfall. Yeah. And and what we
Speaker 1: see at the beginning of the film is um there
Speaker 1: they they just arrived, they've just landed. Uh, there's it's
Speaker 1: pouring rain, absolutely pouring rain. And um and and Doc
Speaker 1: has a little a little watch one of his two watches,
Speaker 1: because he's wearing two watches in the movie, which I
Speaker 1: think is really adorable. Um, he looks at the screen
Speaker 1: and and says, just wait another like five seconds, and
Speaker 1: and as if by magic, the clouds part, the rain stops,
Speaker 1: the sun comes out. So there's apparently some kind of
Speaker 1: weather service. I I took it to mean as controlling.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. It could be either way, or it could
Speaker 1: just be that they're actually predicting the weather. To the second,
Speaker 1: that seems well, the prediction, the prediction part. Neither of
Speaker 1: these are realistic obviously, certainly not for today. I mean
Speaker 1: like maybe in another well, even then I would say,
Speaker 1: to the second seems wrong. The prediction part is at
Speaker 1: least the less impossible, less egregious impossible, just egregiously impossible, because,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed on this very podcast before, weather patterns
Speaker 1: are incredibly difficult to predict. They have an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of energy and them, uh, they're extremely chaotic events. When
Speaker 1: you look at a weather report that says there's a
Speaker 1: seventy chance of rain, essentially what that means, and I'm oversimplifying,
Speaker 1: is that on all the other days that had weather
Speaker 1: conditions similar to the day in question, it rained. Of
Speaker 1: those days. That's why chance of rain means that in
Speaker 1: those same conditions, seventy percent of the time it rained,
Speaker 1: of the time it did not rain. So it's it's
Speaker 1: literally just giving you a percentage of chance that it's
Speaker 1: going to rain that day. My favorite of the times
Speaker 1: when it says that it is currently raining outside and
Speaker 1: you look out the window and it's not. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that sometimes can happen to Uh. That's so that's
Speaker 1: the getting to a point where we can predict it
Speaker 1: precisely is mind blowing, because again, it's just such a
Speaker 1: complex issue. I mean we whenever you talk to any
Speaker 1: climatologist about this sort of stuff, uh, and or or
Speaker 1: a meteorologist, which would be more appropriate. Climatology is of
Speaker 1: course looking at very long patterns, but if you talk
Speaker 1: to a meteorologist about this kind of stuff, you realize, wow,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of factors that go into this,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them are very difficult to predict,
Speaker 1: and some of them are impossible for us to know.
Speaker 1: At the moment. There are a lot of butterflies flapping
Speaker 1: their wings out there. Yeah, yeah, so obviously you know
Speaker 1: those those monsoons are gonna just keep on coming. So
Speaker 1: if it's a prediction thing, it's a little less unbelievable. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that at least then you're talking about just knowing
Speaker 1: when a weather pattern is going to be moving through
Speaker 1: to the point where you can even have it in
Speaker 1: your schedule. But um, if it's about weather control, and
Speaker 1: I took it to mean the same thing to me,
Speaker 1: I thought it was, oh, this is when we've scheduled
Speaker 1: our rainstorm so that we can actually get you know,
Speaker 1: water into the into the area and then it's over. Um,
Speaker 1: that is well beyond our capabilities. Guys, guys. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: I just had an insight that I think perhaps makes
Speaker 1: this whole weather conversation we've just had irrelevant. I can't
Speaker 1: wait to hear it. I think what happened is that
Speaker 1: Doc Brown had already been through this part of the
Speaker 1: future more than once. That's what I mean. He watches
Speaker 1: these events transpire, he sees what happens, and then he
Speaker 1: comes back to get Marty and Jennifer, goes back to
Speaker 1: the future and does them again. So he's already been
Speaker 1: there at that moment, and he would already know when
Speaker 1: it stops right, So it's not that because he says
Speaker 1: specifically that the that the Weather Service is operating like
Speaker 1: down to the tick, he could be lying, Well, he
Speaker 1: is an unreliable narrator. Can basically, I mean, because most
Speaker 1: of these are jokes that are spoken by Christopher Lloyd's character.
Speaker 1: So really, most of these insights that we have about
Speaker 1: this potential future could be the fact that he's a
Speaker 1: deeply unreliable and psychotic narrator turned Doc Brown into Obi
Speaker 1: one kenobi Okay, Okay, Well, I didn't know that he
Speaker 1: had specified that about the Weather Service, And even if
Speaker 1: he hadn't, then you have to go. You have to
Speaker 1: assume that he wrote down the exact moment when the
Speaker 1: rain stopped, like the rain's over, let's see what time
Speaker 1: it is. I should make note of that. I bet
Speaker 1: I can use this to impress Martins. Yeah, because the
Speaker 1: building of the time machine isn't nearly impressive enough, I
Speaker 1: need to tell him when the rain's gonna stop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's really like the Wizard of Oz, I think. Um.
Speaker 1: But well, and also there is in that in that
Speaker 1: newspaper we referred to, Uh, there is a tiny little
Speaker 1: bit of weather. Now, this just shows how people have
Speaker 1: scrutinized every single frame of this film, freezing it and
Speaker 1: looking at all the details. But uh, the October two
Speaker 1: fifteen issue of USA Today has the mornings scheduled weather
Speaker 1: for the Hill Valley, California area. Um so you get
Speaker 1: like the actual time, and in fact, someone has written
Speaker 1: it all down where it says mostly clear twelve am
Speaker 1: to one thirty six am, partly cloudy one seven am
Speaker 1: to six thirty six AM, heavy rain six thirty seven
Speaker 1: am to seven twenty three am. So um so it
Speaker 1: may very well be that this is prediction not manipulation,
Speaker 1: but either way it is, it is unrealistic, especially in so. Uh,
Speaker 1: this one's a miss, but this was fun. Did you
Speaker 1: guys wanna have any other concluding thoughts before we wrap
Speaker 1: up on this Back to the Back to the Back
Speaker 1: to the Future Part two, Part two. I think the
Speaker 1: companion to this episode should be that we get our
Speaker 1: friends from stuff you missed in history class to do
Speaker 1: an episode on Back to the Future three and how
Speaker 1: accurate that is to what eighteen what years supposed to be?
Speaker 1: It would be? I think it was eighteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: because I think it was a hundred years Okay, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that's my suggestion. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: well we'll float it by them and see. I think
Speaker 1: a five person podcast would be a blast. No no, no, no,
Speaker 1: they could do it on their own, okay, and then
Speaker 1: we would just linked to it and we can just
Speaker 1: look in through the windows shout snarky things occasionally. We'll
Speaker 1: have to do that soon, because I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't know if we'll have a window in the new one,
Speaker 1: and we'll be moving before too. We can just cut
Speaker 1: a hole in the wall. I'm sure that that will
Speaker 1: maintain the acoustics property. That's true. We don't want to
Speaker 1: have too great deviation from our current experience. Listeners, if
Speaker 1: you haven't heard this before, we will soon be moving
Speaker 1: and we will have a brand new podcast studio, which
Speaker 1: in the past, if you've heard sirens in the background
Speaker 1: of this podcast, no more. You will not have to
Speaker 1: hear any more sirens, assuming no one in the office
Speaker 1: is carrying a siren around. Because we that our new
Speaker 1: studios will not share an external wall, so they'll all
Speaker 1: be internal rooms. We have two audio studios and two
Speaker 1: video studios. We're very excited about trying them out soon.
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, So there's gonna be some changes, but
Speaker 1: you guys probably won't be aware of them, except for
Speaker 1: the fact that you'll be thinking, well, I haven't heard
Speaker 1: a siren in a long time, but that will come
Speaker 1: up in a it'll take a few more episodes, I
Speaker 1: think before we get to that point. So, guys, if
Speaker 1: you have any suggestions for some of those future episodes
Speaker 1: we can tackle either while we're here or when we're
Speaker 1: in our new digs, send us a message let's know.
Speaker 1: Or if you got any questions or comments about the
Speaker 1: episodes of the past, you know, send them our away.
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