I've got some really exciting news for y'all. We have been nominated for a webby for best technology podcast. A great big thank you for making this webby a possibility. If you want to vote for the Traceroute podcast for the People's Voice Award on the webbies, go to bit.ly-traceroutewebby. Or click the link that is included in the show notes. Click the link below to get a quick Зап поз word or something like that? I do not. Ah, you see, nobody knows who Waldo Waterman is.
All right, so let me tell you a little bit about Waldo Waterman. So you could really describe Waldo as this weird little kid, especially for his era of time. So he was an inventor, really like a dreamer. And in 1909, while he was still in high school, he designed his very first aircraft, which was a biplane hang glider that he flew on his own, broke both of his ankles doing it, but flew it on his own. The following year, he built his first powered aircraft.
And in 1911, he'd become kind of a hangar on at Glen Curtis' aircraft shop. And Glen Curtis was a big aviation pioneer who had set up shop on North Island in San Diego. But reason Waldo Waterman eventually got his own Wikipedia page, despite the fact that literally nobody has heard of this guy, is because in 1937, Waldo Waterman invented the Aero-Bile, which many people consider to be the first viable flying car. Puppy, yeah, that's Waldo.
Big and aviation circles, of course, but to the general public, no clue. Okay, but there is a point to all of this. But before we get to that point, let's do question number two of our big pop quiz. Are you ready? All right, I'm ready. What is this sound? [♪ sounds of the B-Sounds of a or two of our big pop quiz? Or are you ready? All right, I'm ready. What is this sound? Want it to be George Getzon's car? That's exactly what it is. It's George Getzon's flying car. I did it wrong.
You did it wrong. What is George Getzon's flying car? You still wind the big pop quiz though. Oh, excellent. What did I wind? Um, nothing. Hey, can I be on your podcast? Hey, there you go. That's the perfect prize. So here's the thing that that fascinates me about that is that almost everybody, certainly everybody of our generation is gonna recognize that sound of George Jetson's flying car.
But nobody recognizes the name of Waldo Waterman who is the guy who basically invented the first viable flying car. And I wonder why that is. Look, already it is tomorrow. The year is 1957. And with a launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, America has become obsessed with the promise of the impending space age. Within a few short years, we will program our ovens with punch cards. Cities will be contained under massive shining glass domes connected by sleek monorails.
And the family robot will make sure the dog got her daily walk. And when dad goes to work, he'll wave goodbye from the luxurious contours of his flying car. But here's the thing. We never got the flying car. And crazy or still, the thing that we did get, the piece of tech that has actually come to represent today's modern world that never adorn the cover of popular mechanics magazine in the 50s is the smartphone.
What we got is a device the size of a deck of cards that allows us to connect with anyone in the world and gives us instant access to the sum total of human knowledge and achievement. And we use it to watch videos of cats. But that's another podcast. The bottom line is, we were promised flying cars. But what we got was the internet. Why? What technology did you want to see when you were a kid? What did the future look like to you? It's pretty easy for me. And we actually got it.
So I have a strong memory of when I was young, of reading a newsweek article about, it's probably like sixth grade, maybe a little earlier, about fuel cells, hydrogen fuel cells. And the future was going to be hydrogen, right? It was in the early 80s, in mid-80s, that that idea took off. That it took another, what, two decades before the reality actually hit the streets. And before I left California last year, I was driving a hydrogen car on the road.
So it actually did happen in my lifetime that hydrogen fuel cells came to be a reality. And they're still growing through the world where saw something this morning about trucks in Germany are running on hydrogen somewhere. And so we got it. Oh, that's awesome. The future is now. And how about you, Grace? I'm legitimately, very quickly Googling Zinnon girl of the 21st century. Because I know that silly, but I honestly thought that we would have so much of that technology.
I really thought that we would have like holographic phone calling. And in 1999, I wasn't super young. So maybe I should be embarrassed to talk about this. But I just thought, well, that clearly is everyone's future. And I can't wait for it to be mine. Right. Now, yeah, I mean, for me, it really was flying cars. I remember being in my parents' garage like when I was 19, working on my old 1969 Mercury Cougar.
And thinking to myself, this is pointless because in 10 years, I'm going to have a flying car. Now, of course, I didn't get a flying car. But what did happen in those 10 years, at the risk of totally dating myself here, is that the internet exploded onto the scene. Now, I mentioned this because I didn't see the internet coming at all. Maybe that's because I wasn't employed and tech at the time.
But I certainly considered myself the kind of nerd that was on top of tech developments and breakthroughs. Still, I didn't see the internet coming. Why? Because there were other forces at work that brought this new technology to the consumer. Three things, in fact, which have little to do with the kind of pop culture hype we saw with flying cars. I am Mike Winterfield, I'm the founder and managing partner of Active Impact Investments. And we are Canada's largest climate tech seed fund.
In other words, Mike Winterfield is a venture capitalist. And he understands explicitly one of those three main reasons we get the technology we get. Money has to be put into the tech, and money has to be made from the tech. And this is where our old friend, Waldo Waterman's flying car, his technologically viable flying car, eventually met its demise. He couldn't find anybody to put up the money for its production. A huge financial outcome has to be possible.
And that huge financial outcome literally means that across all the companies that we invest in in a diversified portfolio and a fund, we need any one of those particular companies to have the potential to be able to return all of the money of the fund. So that's a big outcome. And so to get a big outcome, you need a giant market, a giant problem. You need to know that there is a ton of customer polls so that the timing is right. Before we go on, let's unpack a few things here.
The role that money plays in the development of technology can be a dicey subject. On the one hand, we all need a paycheck. And striking it rich with a brilliant new idea is fundamental to the American dream. On the other hand, does that mean that really cool ideas that might not be as financially viable are never going to find funding? I think a big part of venture capitalism is the hype cycle.
And so while there might be some really incredible ideas that exist, I don't think that those ideas get funding the same way that if another tech genius comes up with something that is the holograms I mentioned earlier, that might be more likely to be funded because that's a part of the hype cycle. Okay, that's a really good point. And it's one of the reasons why I sought Mike's input here.
Because while some might say that green tech is pretty hype these days, it still has significant detractors, people who believe society can't make a viable shift away from a petroleum economy. But since Mike is a VC who specializes in funding tech that's not part of this hype cycle, this is a great way to test our theory that money is a key driver in new technology. Mike, you've been really forthcoming in the idea that profit plays a significant role in what gets chosen and what doesn't.
Do you find yourself needing to reconcile that with the good work that you're doing in climate technology? I used to think it would, and that was definitely a debate early in our thesis is there are some funds out there that have decided intentionally to be sort of like a lower return profile. But point two is if we want to grow this market, which we do, so those that are willing to invest in themes like climate, you're gonna have to show investors returns.
There's just not enough investors out there that are willing to put money in harm's way just to do the right thing. And so that's another reason why we have decided, our thesis is we're going to have to be competitive with any other place that somebody could be placing their money in order to grow this market. But you must believe then that there is room in climate tech for large profit. Absolutely, I actually believe that climate tech will be an enhancer of returns.
If you think of sort of like a Venn diagram of another VCs out there looking for the very best enterprise B2B software companies to invest in, guess what, so are we? But layered over top of that is that we are investing in ones that also create this sustainability advantage for companies. And so now we get all of the tailwinds that come along with that.
According to Mike, that means $32 billion in venture capital looking for green projects, which is up three X in the last two years, as well as $370 billion in climate initiatives from the Inflation Reduction Act. But money isn't everything. And throwing money at a piece of technology doesn't guarantee success. You know, we have to invest across the board and if I could tell you right now which ones we're gonna work then. I'd have 10 times the end time exactly.
I'd have the highest preferring fund in history. So new technology takes money. It takes money to make and it needs to make money. So did no one want to put up money for flying cars back in the 1950s? Because judging by at least their iconic popularity, it seems like there had been a lot of money to be made in selling flying cars. But the truth is venture capital to start a flying car company was not exactly readily available in the late 50s.
In fact, the first modern VC firm by the standards we recognize wasn't created until 1946. And venture capital as an asset class wasn't really established until the 1960s. And this is why some of the earliest flying car designs were created not by entrepreneurs, but by aircraft and automobile designers and manufacturers. But it wasn't just a lack of funding that prevented a flying car in every garage. You see, in order to get new technology, you need old technology.
It's called the stack for a reason to get new stuff. You're going to have to build on the old stuff. And Amy, you were talking about this in the AI episode where you were explaining how basically everything that we put in place for the blockchain is kind of responsible for AI. We had all of this processing power available to us. And the blockchain thing kind of was like, uh, okay, didn't quite go where we thought it would go.
But because we had that, because we had all this compute power, now we could do more AI with it. Is that sort of the way it works? That an infrastructure exists. And we build the technology off of that and that that's the determining factor of what we get. Largely, yes. Like in advance, when it's happening in personal computers, is the PCI Express Bus.
But I learned something about that recently that I changed my view a little bit in that most of the technological advancement in that space is materials research. So we think, when we think of a computer, we think of people writing code, right? And we think of CPUs, which are also largely determined by materials research. But the bus there, it's when new alloys of metal and manufacturing techniques are created so that they can build these high speed wires between all the chips in the computer.
That's when we release a new version of PCI, right? And it's not just the new wire. It's the full technology stack has to evolve, not just in the manufacture of those alloys, but in the people who manufacture the boards, and the people who manufacture the chips, and the software engineers have to build new software to drive it. So each of these kind of incrementally steps up.
And we put a number on it and say, this is the new thing, because that's kind of where we all come together in an agreement, but each time we're kind of building on the science that came before, we've learned from the science that came before, we build something just a little bit better. And sometimes we take many things that are a little bit better, put them together in a novel way, and we get innovation. So do we have the infrastructure now for flying cars?
The infrastructure has to really support the idea, and it really has to give that idea space to flourish. And I don't know about y'all, but what I've seen about the cars on the ground is not giving me faith about those cars being lifted up to the heavens.
Like I would have a lot of logistics questions, but I think that that's part of the problem is, we just don't have an infrastructure kit that can support it, who's going to be the traffic guard for the flying school bus like what we saw on the Jetsons. I'm not volunteering myself, is anyone volunteering themselves and their jetpack? Grace has a really excellent point here.
An existing infrastructure that supports her new technology is key to both the development and adoption of that new technology. Before we had horse-drawn carriages, we already had wheels. And before we had motorized cars, we had roads. So is Grace right? Did we not get flying cars because we didn't have the infrastructure for it? Well, the short answer is yes. If you look at the design of the first flying car prototypes, they're basically a car with an airplane attached to the top.
How was the thing supposed to take off? Freeways are not runways. There was a proposal that had flying cars launching from the rooftop of your suburban home. But every rooftop had to be designed like an aircraft carrier for this to happen. So does that mean we're forever doomed to a world without flying cars? No, because great entrepreneurs know that if the infrastructure isn't there, then adapt the tech to the existing infrastructure.
I'm Oliver Walker-Jones, and I'm the head of marketing communications at Joby Aviation. And what does Joby Aviation do? Joby Aviation is a company that is developing all-electric flying aircraft that take off and land vertically, and then transition to forward flight a little bit like a traditional aircraft before landing vertically again at the destination. So you make flying cars? Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, I've been really looking forward to this part.
As you probably knew from the very beginning, flying car development is in fact finally taking off, about 70 years late. And one of the reasons is because companies like Joby Aviation have solved the infrastructure problem. The most obvious one is batteries.
We need batteries that are capable of delivering a very high output in terms of power to lift the aircraft vertically off the ground, but also having lots of capacity so that you can fly a good distance with the people that you've got on board the aircraft. So batteries is one key area. The next is lightweight materials. So if you want to lift something off the ground vertically, you want the aircraft to be as light as possible.
And so advances in materials, things like carbon composite, lightweight, strong materials that you can cast into interesting shapes. That's an area where there's been a lot of development these last couple of decades too. And the third is compute power. So being able to get a lot of computing power in a very small space, also very lightweight, that allows you to control an aircraft like this.
So we have six propellers stationed around the aircraft, instead of like the one big one that you'd see on a helicopter. And each of them work independently. And so the pilot doesn't sit there with six little levers that they're pulling in, pushing forwards. All of that is automated and controlled by the compute on the aircraft. And so you need to be able to put a significant amount of that within the aircraft. And we needed it to be small.
We needed to be lightweight and combine those three things coming together, kind of put us where we are today. Very interesting. So that compute power that didn't exist until very recently. Yeah. And certainly not in a lightweight way. And that's really the thing you'll hear me say a lot, I think, is if you want to get an aircraft off the ground using batteries, you need to make it as light as possible, which means compute power that can be condensed into the smallest lightest possible space.
Also, as it turns out, there's no need for anti-gravity robot traffic cops. Yeah, you know actually when you fly around the skies in the US or in other parts of the world, the vast majority of the skies are actually relatively uncontrolled. You don't need to be given vectors to fly by somebody in a tower. You just go where you want to go, as long as you don't go over a certain altitude. It's pretty uncontrolled, and as we don't get that.
So, we've now covered two of our fundamental building blocks for new technologies. The infrastructure has changed enough or evolved enough to make flying cars viable and the money is there. In fact, Toyota is one of the many investors in Joe B. Aviation. And as of this recording, they've already put in around $400 million to the project, and that leads us to the final element that's necessary for new technologies. Demand. You can't sell a product that nobody wants.
Now, obviously, I want a flying car, and I have since I was nine years old. But did people really need them in the 1950s? There were actually significantly more cars sold in America in the 1950s than there were in the 2020s. So, one must imagine that demand would have been high for a car that could soar above all that traffic. However, it only proves the point that all three elements, money, infrastructure, and demand must be in place or new technology to flourish.
People will, in the future, get their phone out, tap in the Joe B app and book a flight that they will, let's say, leave it in half an hour and it will fly them from Jeff K airport to Manhattan downtown. And you will book that as an individual and you may well share the aircraft with somebody else, but it will function very much like a taxi.
Now, who decides to travel on it depends on whether routes are, and the way we like to think about it, is this relatively unlimited in terms of the opportunity, because the amount of infrastructure you need to start a service or node in the network is basically a concrete pad and a charger. So, you need somebody to be able to land the aircraft, you need to be able to charge it, and that's kind of all you need.
So, you know, there's no reason why, you know, in a beautiful future ahead of us, is you look ahead that that customer base shouldn't expand to be basically anybody who might get in an Uber today. This idea of demand as a main driver of new technology is something that Mike Winterfield also had a unique take on. If you have a giant problem and lots of demand, but you've got the wrong team working on it, you're in deep trouble.
If you've got the very best team in the world and they're working on a small problem or a problem that not a lot of people care about, you've got a big problem. So, it really is the marriage between finding a world class founder and a founder who knows how to stack amazing talent around themselves, and that they're working on a big awesome problem that they've got a unique solution to that the market's ready for. I kind of want to come back to your original question John about demand.
And if you had asked customers what they wanted, they would have wanted a faster horse. I don't remember the exact quote, but it goes something like that. And so, it's not always demand. I think that folks who want to believe in the capitalistic drive toward innovation. That is the best explanation for their theory of the world is that demand drives innovation. But we know that's not true as the only way. It's one way that innovation gets done.
And I think, you know, John and I both have in the rooms we're in musical instruments. And very often we go and we create with musical instruments out of curiosity and joy. And not necessarily because of demand. In fact, like, what's all the stories we tell about great musicians? A lot of them were hustling to pay the bills. But we don't necessarily tell that story. The one we tend to tell is the one about what they wanted to create because they were driven to create. They had a curiosity.
They wanted something new in the world. And it wasn't just necessarily about putting bread on the table. But I wonder if demand these days is changing. And if like an informed citizenry is starting to incorporate more criteria into demand. I like that example of musicians, Amy, because I do think that a lot of musical innovation is about like hunger and hustle.
We don't think about it, but it's, you know, individuals or collectives looking for this outlet for what I think is a divine conception, which is creativity. So I think that as we talk about demand, I think in this current age, a lot of people are still driven by, you know, a bottom line.
But that there's also another group of people who may also be interested in that bottom line or not, who are saying, let's really plan out the way in which we actually do this innovation in a way that maybe does the least harm to other people and to the planet that we call home. And that that's actually becoming a part of the pipeline process of ideation, implementation and distribution of new technology, new products and new ideas.
Honestly, I'd like to think the same thing too, that there's this group of people who innovate and a group that nurtures that innovation, who come from a thoughtful informed place. And I see it in people like Mike Winterfield, who funds new technologies that exclusively help our climate on a massive scale. And I see it in companies like Joby Aviation that knew on some level that demand for flying cars would come hand in hand with thoughtful developments in infrastructure.
This American Space Age society we live in, we do so many of the right things for the wrong reasons. We wanted to defeat Soviet communism, and in doing so, we landed a man on the moon. Some scientists and academics wanted to see if they could talk to each other through their computers. And what we got was an internet that allows almost every living soul on the planet to connect with one another. It takes money and infrastructure and demand to create new technologies.
But perhaps, just as important, it also takes weird kids with big dreams. Kids like Waldo Waterman, who treppt of flying cars. New technology takes dreams of a future we want to live in. So keep dreaming people. Keep dreaming. Trace Route is a podcast from Equinix and Story Sphero. This episode was hosted by Grace Ressi, an Amitabha, and was produced by John Taylor with help from Sadie Scott.
It was edited by Joshua Ramsey with mixing sound design and original composition by Brett Van der Laan, an additional mixing by Jeremy Tuttle. Our fact checker is Anna Alvarallo. Our staff includes Tim Ballant, Suzy Falk, Liza Harris, Elisa Menjadas, Steven Staver, Lyksandra Uresta, and Rebecca Woodward. Our theme song was composed by Ty Gibbons. You can check us out on X at Equinix Metal and on YouTube at Equinix Developers.
If you want to find transcripts and other info about the show, visit Trace Route Podcasts.com. We'll leave all of our links down in the show notes. If you like this story and you want to hear even more like it, drop us a rating on Spotify, our rating review on Apple. I'm Math Artelia Yohns, Senior Producer for Trace Route, and we'll be back in two weeks with a brand new story. Until then, thanks for listening.