Thinking On Paper Technology Podcast

China controls every Tesla, drone and electric toothbrush. Why? Because it produces over half of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and more than 90% of all neodymium magnets. They are the core ingredient in Teslas, drones, robots, and every electric motor you interact with daily. China also mines 70% of global rare earths and processes 85–90% of them. The Electric Stack is Chinese. In this episode of Thinking on Paper, Mark and Jeremy read Packy McCormick’s Not Boring Essay: The Electric Slide to understand the history, economics and technology of the electric stack. Because if it can go electric, it will go electric. The story of the Electric Stack - and the slide -  begins in 1973 with the oil crisis. Everyone’s favourite oil company, Exxon, funded early lithium battery research by Stan Whittingham. Stan’s batteries exploded. Enter John B Goodenough, the man with the best name in technology. He has a voltage breakthrough. Akira Yoshino joins the show and stabilises the technology further. Sony get a whiff and use them to shrink the Handycam. It’s the Alpha product that makes lithium-ion batteries a global product and a commercial goldmine.Elon Musk and Tesla take up the EV mantle. Tesla’s early cell-pack experiments, coupled with Panasonic’s partnership accelerate the progress.Battery maker A123 in the United States collapses. China eventually acquire it for a fraction of its value. The Beijing Olympics becomes a turning point: BYD test large battery systems in buses across the city, gaining a lead that CATL and BYD still hold today.Then come the magnets. Neodymium magnets were discovered in 1983 in parallel by Masato Sagawa in Japan and John Croat at GM. They powered the boom in hard drives, then drones, then the emerging humanoid robotics market. Today, China produces nearly all of them.America is playing catch-up, does it stand a chance?Please enjoy the show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz--Timestamps(00:00) The Electric Stack(02:13) Beginnings: War, The Oil Crisis & Stan Whittingham(03:46) The Song Handycam: Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology(05:06) Tesla, Elon And Handycam Batteries In An EV(06:46) China Buys US Battery Company A-123 At A Carboot Sale(08:40) China, The Olympics And The Serendipity of Battery Technology(11:37) Faraday And The Birth Of Neodymium Magnets(14:26) The 3.5 Inch Neodymium Magnet Alpha Product(16:46) Magnequench(18:16) Drones, Ukraine And The Magnet War Machine(20:16) Politics, Rare Earths And 'The Future's Too Important' T-shirts

The median US income is $68,000. Only 13% of the US workforce earns a salary; everyone else is paid by the hour or hustling in the gig economy. The median home price is $440,000. Housing is unaffordable because the system is built to extract value rather than create stability.“Affordable housing” is a great idea. But flawed. It relies on outdated subsidies, wage assumptions that no longer hold, and ownership models that extract rather than stabilise. Chris Moeller joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about an alternative: stable living.Stable living is a model built on long-term security instead of short-term yield. It separates land from structures, brings ownership back to residents, and uses impact capital, industrialised construction, and better coordination technology to rebuild the fundamentals.Please enjoy the show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz--Timestamps(00:00) Trailer(03:19) Challenges of Homeownership(05:46) The Housing Market Dynamics(08:29) Technology's Role in Housing Solutions(10:41) Innovations in Construction(12:29) Financing Housing for All(15:06) Reimagining Ownership Models(16:30) Technology's Role in Food Access and Coordination(18:43) Adaptive Reuse in Real Estate and Community Development(19:58) Commercial Real Estate Challenges Post-COVID(23:15) Infrastructure Needs for Sustainable Living(25:31) Global Community and Local Solutions(26:45) Stable Living for Civil Servants and Community Heroes(28:20) Creating Stability and Long-Term Impact

What is consciousness? We're reading Irreducible, Federico Faggin's incredible book on quantum information based consciousness, to find out. Do we agree with it? Quantum based panpsychism? A conscious universe run by quantum conscious units called Seities? Not sure yet. Only in the last hundred years, with the advent of quantum physics, have we made great strides in understanding the nature of reality. We have, in fact, discovered that matter — which seems solid and compact — is instead made of vibratory energy. During the last 20 years, we have understood that everything is made up of quantum information.However, there's still no theory capable of giving us a vision of the world that is consistent with both general relativity and quantum physics. In this book, I put forward the hypothesis that the universe has been conscious and had free will forever.Please enjoy. And share with a conscious friend.Cheers, Mark and Jeremy.PS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

How do brands build trust when the internet has decayed into into AI-driven slop and tripe? The systems that once promised connection now work as mirrored cages, feeding your biases, hiding your real customer, and distorting the truth.Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft and writer at Damns Given, argues that brands now live inside engineered distortions. Funnels collapse. Neutrality is impossible. And AI is being layered onto a system already built to extract rather than empower.In this conversation, Nick joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about:Why brands operate inside algorithmic cagesHow information distortion shapes every customer interactionWhy mass neutrality fails and perspective becomes strategyHow modern marketing hijacks curiosityWhy platforms hoard customer insight inside black boxesHow influencers stand in for trustWhy network-based growth outperforms funnelsWhy analog tactics and patient capital are becoming competitive advantagesThis episode tracks the widening distortion gap, the limits of AI-driven marketing, and the slow, analog tactics required to build something real inside an internet optimised for extraction.If platforms are collapsing into noise, where does trust come from?Please enjoy the show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.--Be our internet friend:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyzWatch On YouTube--Timestamps(00:00) Trailer(01:00) Disruptors & Curious Minds(02:00) Mark Has A Trust Issue(02:42) What Is Trust?(07:14) How Deep-Tech Brands Build Trust?(09:38) Steve Jobs And Selling A Feeling(10:00) The Cult Of Silicon Valley(10:35) Was the Internet Ever Not Shit? (15:05) What Is The “Distortion Gap”?(20:11) Reducing Your Digital Marketing Spend(21:45) Analog Marketing(23:40) Why the Marketing Funnel Never Really Existed(25:08) VCs, Capital And The Comfort Zone Of Risk(27:04) Analog vs Digital: What Actually Creates Meaningful Connection(28:40) How the TikTok Generation Uses the Internet Differently(32:40) Your Curiosity Is Being Hi-Jacked(35:22) What Are Load-Bearing Inefficiencies?(40:47) The Importance Of Resilience in a World Of Entropy(42:29) What Do We Want Humans To Be?

AI can answer your questions faster than any human. It can write your emails, help you code, and shape the way you see the world - and the people in it. But from the very beginning, AI was designed to deceive you.This is the story of asking and answering questions, of the difference between being born to think and being built to think. Ultimately, it’s about the power of questions: how they connect us and divide us, where curiosity meets manipulation, and why we may be losing the muscle for real wonder in the age of prompting.Pia Lauritzen Thinks On Paper with Mark and Jeremy Gilbertson. She’s asked and analyzed over 30,000 questions from people across languages and cultures. She’s a philosopher, TEDx speaker, Forbes writer and a philosopher of the question. Tune in and you’ll learn why we default to “what” and “how,” why “why” is so rare (and so radical), and how every question transfers responsibility.And then we go to the bible. Who asked the first question? And what can we learn about Adam and Eve and the pesky snake that changed the course of fictional humanity.There are dancing with question analogies, the dispelling of myths - adults don’t lose their questioning instincts, they just hide them. Because of fear, ridicule, ego.And finally, once the stage has been set like a Shakespearean play, the crux of it all: AI can’t think for you; blank pages matters; struggle is not a bug but a feature, and how the real test isn’t in the machine, but in your ability to hold onto what makes questioning, and not-knowing, uniquely human.Please enjoy the show. And click subscribe, it’s the best way for other curious minds like you to find our show.And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.Cheers, Mark & Jeremy--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Trailer(03:28) 30,000 Questions & the What/How Bias(07:38) Questions That Connect vs Questions That Manipulate(09:59) Do We Really Lose Our Curiosity?(14:21) How to Start Better Conversations (18:40) Conversation as a Thinking Space(19:46) Why We Lead with Polarising Topics (20:35) How School Trains Us to Have Answers, Not Questions(22:22) Rethinking Education in the Age of AI(25:22) AI in the Classroom: Tool, Threat or Opportunity?(30:07) Why AI Can’t Help Us Think(32:55) The Essence of Technology, AI Deception & the Turing Test(38:17) What Could Humans Be in an Age of AI?

What makes neutron stars so fascinating that they once fooled astronomers into thinking they were aliens? In this episode of Thinking On Paper, we sit down with Katia moskvitch, science journalist and author, to explore the wild discoveries and cosmic mysteries around pulsars and the densest objects in the universe.Why were neutron stars only theoretical for decades, and who first imagined their existence? How did Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a then-PhD student in 1967, discover these cosmic lighthouses using a homemade radio array of wooden poles and copper wire—and why did her supervisor, not her, end up with the Nobel Prize? If you enjoyed the episode, please like, subscribe and share so more curious minds like you can find our channel.Cheers,Mark & JeremyOther ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

Everyone thinks they are a great driver. Most drivers think they can judge a safe overtake. They can’t. In this Thinking On Paper shot, Barry Lunn breaks down the sensor technology that sees eight cars ahead, detects velocity before brake lights appear, and intervenes when the driver is about to make a mistake.Radar, not cameras, not lidar, could be the backbone of next-generation driver assistance. We get into how millimetre-wave signals bounce around traffic, how machines detect danger long before humans register it, and why more than half of global crashes are rear-end collisions that could be prevented with earlier insight.We also examine what this means for trust: why people resist hands-off driving yet quickly rely on a system that prevents the accidents they didn’t even know they were about to cause.Please enjoy. And check out our full length technology interviews if you like what you hear.-- Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

What if someone handed you the recipe for a quantum computer? In this episode, that’s exactly what happens.Coleman Collins of IonQ breaks down DiVincenzo’s criteria, (a checklist proposed by physicist David DiVincenzo) the five capabilities any physical system needs before it can call itself a quantum computer. There are five criteria.A well-defined qubitAbility to initialize qubits. You must be able to reliably set every qubit to a known starting state.Long coherence times. The qubits must remain stable long enough to run operations without losing their quantum state.Ability to measure qubits. You need to read the state of each qubit at the end of the computation (ideally individually).A universal gate set built from entanglement and single-qubit control.Mix them all together in a serving bowl and these let you perform any quantum computation you wish.You now know the foundation behind every major quantum architecture, from superconducting circuits to trapped ions.Cheers, Mark and Jeremy.Keep Thinking On Paper. Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

Radiation-hardened space electronics don’t get splashy headlines, but nothing in orbit works without them. Starship, the ISS, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Starlink... the whole caboodle depends on hardware that keeps running when the vacuum, extreme temperatures, and radiation of space would annihilate your laptop plug on Earth.The extreme environments of space are no place for trial and error with the small things.  Danny Andreev, CEO of Sunburn Schematics, designs those systems for real missions. In this episode of Thinking on Paper, he walks you through what actually keeps spacecraft alive: particle-induced faults, gate-driver failures, thermal shock, and the methods space companies use to mitigate the risks.We go from chip-level physics to the industrial picture: why the next phase of space isn’t glossy renders but an off-world supply chain built from proven terrestrial machinery, cheaper short-lived satellites, and megawatt-class power standards that mirror EV infrastructure.It’s an unromantic, inside-the-factory look at how space becomes an industry rather than a spectacle.Please enjoy the show. And subscribe. That's the best way to help other people find the channel.Cheers,Mark & Jeremy.--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) Thinking On Paper Trailer(02:59) The Role of DC to DC Converters in Space(03:46) Challenges of Power Systems in Space(05:30) Designing for Reliability in Space(07:13) The Impact of Radiation on Electronics(08:52) Testing and Validation of Space Electronics(11:03) Environmental Challenges for Space Electronics(12:28) Success Rates and Lessons Learned(15:22) The Importance of Music in Space Missions(22:30) The Future of Space Exploration(25:23) Building a Lunar Economy(27:51) Power Conversion in Space(31:57) Exciting Developments in Space Technology(35:13) Philosophical Insights on Space and Life--Say hello! Connect more technology dots with us elsewhere: ⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: hello@thinkingonpaper.xyz

In 1983, a Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov faced a critical choice: trust a faulty missile warning or follow his intuition. His decision to ignore the alarm may have thwarted nuclear disaster. The hosts discuss how Petrov's unique mindset, shaped by his education, influenced his actions under extreme pressure. They delve into the idea that machines, limited to binary logic, lack the consciousness and intuition necessary for true decision-making. This gripping tale highlights the difference between mechanical compliance and human judgment in moments that matter.