Welcome to the Wild West of American Innovation

The year was 2047 and this is all that was left the great space wars between the sites of Mustafar Ian and Beza had exhausted all of the Earth's natural resources the Bitcoin virus Andrew Burrs robot drivers and finished the job the only signs of humans had been here were the dilapidated buildings and the windmills that kept turning and turning with nothing to feed them, everyone had abandoned them all, except this man, he was known as decimal no, detours, there is a modicum of truth in all this yes you want to know what the world is like. It will look like when it's a disaster you can head to the Mojave Desert this is where you will find some of the greatest or at least most eccentric inventors in the world this ship is that sexy beast that pushes machines to the limit it is a place where Frost is with passion by engineering and that offers total freedom to tireless handymen.

Join me on a road trip across the Mojave from Los Angeles to Las Vegas as we meet people trying to change the future of self-driving cars and make space cheap and easy, someday we'll work on point trips ready in this episode of Hello world. Silicon Valley may be home to some of the world's biggest tech giants, but it's being challenged like never before. Crazy technological geniuses have appeared. all over the planet doing things that will blow your mind my name is Ashley Vance I am an author and journalist and I am on a quest to find the most innovative technological creations and meet the beautiful monsters behind them hello world, this is Los Angeles that all the The world knows it's people who hang out on Venice Beach and spend their time watching skaters get a sweet henna tattoo and eat a low-carb lunch while the sun warms your body and visions of Kardashian bounce around in your head, but There is a part of Los Angeles that I have always liked best for decades.

The has been home to two thriving communities of builders, the people who design cars and the people who build spaceships. Many of them work in Polish studios and huge industrial buildings, but the man I'm looking for works in a place like this desert, how good to see you? Ray, I see you sir, this is the Molnar Desert and this is where you keep your toys, so when we drive slow we keep the landing gear down and then once we hit the highway, you're in second gear. I'll raise the wheels, so don't be scared. Did you use to fly airplanes in the Air Force?

Betty built rockets and rocket-powered cars. She's been in a few bands. She has been rich. She has been poor. She is a free spirit. She does what she wants, like many Angelenos, she often finds herself stuck for hours on the freeway wishing there was a way to get up and escape the concrete prison. This is my first attempt at a flying car probably back in 2003. I felt pretty trapped. One day I was in Los Angeles, so I started thinking about what the flying car could do for me and the hierarchy of nerd needs. The flying car remains a must-have desert, although he does not see himself as an inventor for the people he is out with for himself and others.

Select a few willing to live life to the limit, you don't think people will think you're crazy, so here comes the guy with the flying car again. The flying car, as development has often been bogged down by the idea that you have to make something for everyone and that you have to simplify it into a consumer product to take a few seconds off someone's trip. I don't have the goal of creating ubiquity. da Vinci made a copy of the Mona Lisa and it wasn't for everyone and it was It's not like you have to make 500 of them, but it still has value and I see a lot of the machines that have been made as works of art and I think what need is a gallery right now as they help drive interest in the development. spark that desert interest soon plan to start a flying car race Read in the Mojave Desert there is a long-standing marriage between Los Angeles and the Mojave it is in Los Angeles where engineers do their day jobs and fancy offices and it is in the Mojave where people who can never stop experimenting, they go to test their ideas on the weekends.

Mojave is a kind of playground for the test bed. It's about the people you want to meet and not the people you don't need. Those are the monsters that I know I care about are the ones that want to go out and take their jet at 300 miles an hour on a Saturday afternoon. Yes, I'll see you with the free bonus. Ok, you can join the club. Mojave is about two. an hour drive into the California desert from Los Angeles and most of that time was spent looking at bumpers. God is driving, deal with this and yes, the flying car seems like a great idea, but as we make our way into the inventor Badlands, the reality of crossing the desert on a loose set of metal pipes and good intentions sets in. somewhere between stupid and terrifying, the truth is that much of this technology is tried and true, the first part of the desert flying car plan depends on this gyrocopter, these types of vehicles have been flying since the 1970s. 1920.

They are cheap, relatively easy to build, and quite reliable. Instead of being powered by an engine, the propeller is supported by the wind as the craft moves forward. It's crazy that you should have this totally different perspective. the engine dies the helicopter falls to the ground like a leaf falling from a tree my adrenaline was pumping right before we took off, but you know, by the time we were in the air, I mean, there's a lot to see. It's nice here, I forget all about it, yeah, and as you saw, I mean, obviously, we can land anywhere here, so it's a perfect place, the gyrocopter takes care of the top part of the flying car puzzle, but still you need something to deal with. with the lines for that desert has this nifty concept vehicle, the goal is to bring the two together and have something that will turn almost any road into a track when that happens, okay, if that happens the select few willing to give it a try will taste the freedom while the rest of us rot in the 405.

I think the reality is that a lot of people in this world like to have some kind of advantage in life no matter what they're doing, whether it's a bigger stereo or, well, You know, a swimming pool. at home but the reality is that in nature all birds can walk all insects that fly have legs and can fold their wings on their back they survive in different environments because they have adapted to traverse them and say that we are going to spend 40 thousand millions of hours a year in the United States sitting in traffic saying well, no one will ever own one of these.

I don't really care if that's the party line, you can do something that will allow you to escape this ridiculous chick. eternity line below I am headed to a spiritual oasis in the desert. You have the opportunity to discover who you really are, what you really like and visit the home of the new space movement with Richard Branson. The important thing is to make sure it's safe and feel safe with return tickets, not individual tickets for any successful engineering based spiritual quest or else you'll want to get a shaman. I found a spiritual guide who calls himself Ricky Ricardo, the proud and wonderfully eccentric owner of this desert resort. a place isolated from civilization but right in the middle of a transdimensional energy vortex or something this was many many years ago this was a real Indian crossing everything around here is like a treasure trove of arrowheads and artifacts it's amazing Ricci has a house in Los Angeles, but spends most of his time here hanging out with the other Desert Rats and feeling free in '93.

My partner and I went to Burning Man. Incredible, it changed my life. I said, well, why can't I spend those two? weeks after a whole year I decided to live my life like this. Ricci worked for years on Hollywood productions and likes to invite friends and complete strangers to enjoy massive showers in the desert. Art installations from past parties mostly dot his land, though he's here setting up his A Great American Script, Alone and Off the Grid, Does This Phone Work? Yeah, if you're talking to yourself, maybe that's what it takes to get out here in Los Angeles.

A little introspection, that's what takes up more of your time than anything else, I think. What you're here for is that conversation with God, you know, it goes back to the saying: if you really like yourself, you don't really have a problem because you have the opportunity to really explore the depths of your own person, you know? To find out who you really are and what you really like, not everyone comes to the desert to find God, some come for the simple pleasure of blowing things up and just down the road from Ricky, these people have created their own temple to destruction, this is the A distant land where Hobbyist rocket friends, all kinds of people come here to blow up things from the big guys like SpaceX.

About 15 years ago, a group of amateur rocket enthusiasts decided to buy their own land, now hordes. of university students have shown up to say goodbye to their end-of-year projects. Where is that flag I have? keep that pressure on the children we are all members of SED we are the students for space exploration and development this group of around a hundred children hopes to make history if we are successful here today we will be the first students in the world to launch a rocket powered by a 3D printed engine. The students design the engine themselves and it is comparable to technology that large aerospace companies have recently begun to explore. and today marks the culmination of months of work.

I went to bed between three or four in the morning. We got up at six in the morning, so I was left without a couple of hours of sleep. Darrin Sherrier is the incoming president of UCSD. The team believes that 3D printing is the future of rockets. Traditionally, these things had to be made by hand, as students now have the ability to design them on a computer, send them to the manufacturer, and it is simply printed. Did we get any movement? Well, let's check again Brian, dear King, leads the UCSD recovery team. We know that the engine works.

It's more a question of whether everything will work out this time. Throughout the day, one rocket exploded after another as other college teams tested their equipment as the hours passed. Because of the specter of unease hanging over the San Diego team, they were way behind and the wind was still picking up, most of the veterans thought the San Diego rocket would fail, these engineering students have pulled their asses and They're all excited and you know, part of coming here is a little sad to see people trample on your dreams. I will say this about the San Diego team, they listen to the naysayers all day and stick with it after hours and hours of delays, the tired ones.

The kids buckled up to see if they could prove that the rockets were truly veterans. In the end, the Rockets rose into the sky and flew perfectly. Youth prevailed. The team's parachute did not open, which meant the rocket crashed to the ground. The parachute had been Bryan's responsibility. and the crash was hard clearly it didn't help his mood oh there he is applauding better the rest of the team took advantage of the experience and the attack they traveled to the rubble with joy and went to look for souvenirs their parachutes deployed but that's okay He left, That was the main goal of this mission and what are you going to do to celebrate?

Maybe we'll come back and just sleep here in Mojave, there's rocket testing and then there's operational testing, it'll be a kick in the butt. rocket company, you know you need to test a lot, people who are successful can iterate quickly, many of these young rocket tears will be heading here after they graduate, it's the Mojave airport, which is located right in the center of Mojave, the town, this is where the big kids play with fire and the arsonists at Virgin Galactic hope to soon offer tourists the chance to visit space for about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a ticket.

We cost about twice as much as StubHub. George Whitesides is a NASA veteran and serves as Virgin Galactic's CEO gave me a tour of his operations, which includes a test stand for braking on a rocket engine. Nature doesn't like what we're trying to do here, the art of it is taking something that nature doesn't want and something like that. Bending it to a result, the virgin spacecraft will be carried in the air beneath the plane, the spacecraft will then ignite its own thrusters and head to the skies. It's a complex system and there are some places on Earth where you can fix problems. the only place in the United States where you can design, manufacture and test a rocket engine and then integrate it into a spacecraft and fly it into space.

You know, this is really the frontier of the aerospace industryUnited States. Virgen wants to offer more than a simple walk. believes that people visiting space, even for just a few minutes, will have a profound effect on the way we all view our planet, you know, we have 700 quarter-magnitude people signed up to ride on our spacecraft, that It's more than the number of people who have ever been to space in 50 years, but they will return to communities around the world and bring that perspective with them. I think that will have a really important effect. Virgin's history has been very promising.

Devastating setbacks in 2014 the company's first spacecraft crashed to the ground killing the co-pilot and injuring the pilot today this virgin press event hopes to restore confidence in its technology by introducing the spacecraft in Richard Branson's attempt to resurrect the Galactic Empire from the ashes this has taken over ten years you're still not at the point where we're flying but how difficult this business has been compared to the others it's rocket science it's really difficult we're just reinventing the wheel, completely reinventing the technology, so it's been difficult but now we have some rockets that we know will take us to space, you know, we're sure that we're finally very, very close to being there.

A good and devoted son Branson decorated the spaceship with the image of his mother and the good showman used the spaceships to reveal an excuse to throw a birthday party for his granddaughter which is a bottle of milk made with sugar and I used it for him to the client in 2014 after the accident how close were you to telling me I don't think I've given up anything in life but we would have been irresponsible not to ask the questions the important thing is not to rush a program like this the important thing is to do it right and make sure it's safe for people to get on and that we offer return tickets not individual tickets next I'm taking a road trip into the future this seemed like science fiction but it's actually science coming back and heading down the Las Vegas Strip in a self-driving car is the kind of invitation that you wait a lifetime to

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the Mojave, we are camping next to the pinnacles of the trona, they are a strange and beautiful incest, there will be beers, burgers, tequila and a lot of motor fans and techno fans hanging out together, we will show them how we are. "Reinvent cars," he says, and we're going full speed ahead.

This is Mouse McCoy, he's kind of a hot rod, a Renaissance man with a vision of where the cars of tomorrow will be designed by artificial intelligence. Right now, we're in the space where, like, these things. It seemed like science fiction, but in reality it is a scientific fact, as if we were living a scientific fact before our eyes and being a part of it feels good. mouse mouse grew up in Los Angeles is the son of a pair of producers whom he rose up the Hollywood ladder from stuntman to action director, but it was his time racing motorcycles here as a child that, he said, made him inspired to come up with a better way to build vehicles while growing up here and racing motorcycles here, you really understood the cost. failure like it's a twisted place like you were crashing motorcycles as a kid and I feel like I forged it here in a way that his latest company is called hacker ID.

The goal is to combine human emotions and technology to stimulate an automotive revolution. To do this, Mouse and his team measure everything they can, hook up the cars with dozens of sensors to see how the metal behaves, then create 3D maps of their race tracks to find out exactly how the car behaves, plus , they put straps. brain wave monitors in their heads to detect stress. I think it's safe to say that as I buckle up for today's exam I'm showing signs of anxiety. Hopefully we'll see pure panic on the brain monitor that the hot rod team doesn't start with. a commercially available car chassis, they use artificial intelligence software to create designs and manufacture them in a 3D printer design software and new manufacturing techniques have become good enough to allow a small group of people to build cars customized from scratch.

You're getting into this massive world where only design decisions are dictated, your aesthetic is dictated by some corporate strategy somewhere and it's like that's that hot rodder, you know, and a lot of our mission here is going to be individualization, like having your own design that has its own vehicle this is a complete car Felix Holes used to oversee Mattel's Hot Wheels and Matchbox brands. He is a car addict who quit the Mattel game to start hacking with Mouse. We believe this may be the first shutter ever designed. With artificial intelligence, the AI ​​absorbs data collected from field tests in the desert.

Felix gives you some guidelines and spits out a body design, you test it, input the data and you get an even better car, what used to take years and hundreds of engineers can now do it in a matter of months with state-of-the-art tools and a large number of people or something like that. Hacker ID hopes to show that we both come from a kind of hotrod culture, that hacker culture, and we look at this like we're not Ford or Ferrari or whoever. We don't have hundreds and hundreds of engineers to start designing a chassis from scratch.

There is a true democratization of creativity and design. We, those of us who don't, defend this car. It's called mula, it was the first one built with hot rod technology and the mouse has completely abused it over the course of three days soon and it's time to go back to Los Angeles and let the computers do their job to replace it with mula 2.0 which one is your? Vision of where this company will be in five years. In five years, I think we will have been a major driver in the coming world of automated manufacturing after spending a couple of days in Rota getting covered in grease and dust.

So much dust that I planned my escape. from Mojave, my last stop would be Las Vegas given the nature of this trip. I couldn't just jump into any old Honda. I needed something special, something that would leave a mark on Sin City, so I contacted an old friend who has his own homemade problem with a self-driving car solved. They're a couple miles from Barstow and an acid kicked him where Hunter's Thompson had dr. As a gonzo partner I have this guy, George Hotz, he comes with less drugs, a lot of fear and hatred. Hots became famous when he was a teenager for hacking everything in sight, he hacked the iPhone, he hacked the Sony Playstation, he has the legal fees to prove it and now he is hacking cars.

He surprised the world last year by building this self-driving car in a San Francisco garage in just a couple of months. I visited him back then to see his Acura packed with cameras, radar and AI software unlike the Potts, Tesla and Google of the world, he doesn't give his car a litany of rules to follow; You basically just drive it and the car learns to imitate the behavior and gets better and better at it over time. Don't leave the exit. I'll do it I know you want I know you want I know you see that output oh good job car Hots hasn't surpassed Knight Rider yet but he's reached Hasselhoff heights of confidence in the meantime we'll be back on the road to Las Vegas soon we'll be.

I will probably be able to drive without radar just by using the camera just by using a camera and cameras like the ones on our cell phone that camera is good enough to drive the car I can keep criticizing everyone like I'm the underdog but am I really the underdog that I have ? a working self-driving car, not everyone appreciates Hutt's unique taste; The California DMV, for example, recently told Hots to stop driving his car on the state's roads. That's why we had to head to the Nevada border where true freedom is found the Mojave is still alive we're getting close to the border the border I'll push the button once we get to the border why can't we do it in California they don't like the

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Nevada loves

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that's what I heard oh I see sign I see you son get ready to participate in your command captain here we come

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to Nevada 3 the silver stick for one to be yourself drive Hudson's car never before I had seen the roads in Nevada, but it drove perfectly on its own for miles, that is, until the desert sun went down casting shadows on the road, it's actually the worst time of day for that, the contrast isn't very good anymore. that the sun is still very bright and the road is very dark and look, you see, no, no, you can't drive.

Wow, look, I can't see anything in the picture, this is really bad, what does the house make you think? It's something you can fix over time, a lot of it has to do with the camera, a lot of the error right now is just because the camera I can't say that led to a minor existential crisis when we got to Vegas, moment in which hots began feverishly trying to debug his self-driving roadster. We had come all this way to test out the cars ne

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feature, the ability to go hands-free and stop-and-go traffic, but as we slowly inched toward the strip to see if their solutions worked, it seemed like the stress of being a genius kid could be getting to him.

I've been frustrated by a lot of gibberish lately and that's coming. It's no longer fun with this, this was fun when I was the one building a car, but once the money got involved and the expectations were raised, it just got stupid when we turned the corner and the bright lights came into view. I tried to cheer him up, well, come on. just watch what happens you might leave too soon you might leave too soon oh don't you see them there you see them there you're going don't hit the man don't hit the bed very nice yes good car Oh God strippers - like strippers let's go closer than a god of entertainment that his car passed the test and his existential balls raising the legend of dr.

Haas lives feel better now, yes let's have good total autonomy, we haven't gone offline, it's easy to be cynical these days in knock America, it's the place with the chubby people, we forget how to do things and who don't like to have her hands. It's not dirty anymore, but then you get to somewhere like Mojave and you get a harsh reminder that some of the most endearing elements of America are still alive and well. It is in the midst of all this nothingness that passion, pure passion, has a chance to thrive if cynics want to remain cynical. okay, if they don't, they should put on some sunscreen, buy a pair of glasses, and take a trip to the desert to see what happens when creative adults have a giant playground in hello world.

I will change the desert for the beaches and rainforests of Australia, I will go swimming with the robot I had a dinosaur and I will get my spelunker