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Santa Meta Quanta

Episode Description

Who is Santa Claus? Is he the source of unending joy and happiness for children worldwide that we have all been led to believe? Or could he be the first MCU hero with superpowers like super speed, super insight and a super cool ride. Or, as we, at 3TB, suspect, he is a tech geek who loves playing around with quantum mechanics with the right splattering of AI, digital cloning, warp-speed mobility and other alien tech. OMG - could Santa be an alien? Find out in the 3TB Christmas special. Look forward to your feedback at 3TB@unblox.com.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Samiran. Hi, I'm Nilesh. Hi, I'm Sheetal. And you're listening to 3TB. 3 Techies Banter.

Hi, I am Sheetal. Welcome to 3TB, a podcast where 3 techies banter. It's a podcast where you can explore tech in a non-tech way. It is about how tech and economics behind the tech impact us today and in the future. We have useful information, fun facts, and common sense that is spoken in a language that everybody can understand. Today we are doing a special which is a Christmas special for you and the way we thought about it is that, imagine that every year Santa goes around the globe delivering gifts to kids below the age of 15 i would think. All of us believe in Santa but who really believe in the power of Santa and believe that they should leave out some cookies and milk for Santa and things like that. If we have 1.5 billion kids approximately around the planet who need these gifts to be delivered in one night, Santa goes around delivering gifts around that one night. We thought we’d talk how eco system for Santa works and can you imagine the aspects of eco system Nilesh, it would be research and consumer understanding because he has to understand 1.5 billion kids, has to know who was naughty, who was good, who did good, how well did they behave and all of that. Then he has to do demand supply analysis because he has to figure out what their gifts and requirements are and see how he is going to build that. There is data analytics which has to be done because there are names being added every year and every day and every month so you have to keep up with the updated data. You have to make sure that demand-supply production happens on time so his elf’s need to work. I don't know how many hours and non-stop. He has to follow compliance and law. We don't know how Santa is going to get slapped with the GDPR suit very soon; everybody is worried about personal information that is lying. His IT infrastructure, his HR policies, his funding, his marketing and the biggest being supply chain, how does he deliver all of this. So we thought we would do this entire piece. Of course I have not added the fun bits, one is that Santa is the only one who has built a recession proof business, none of the large businesses have built a recession proof business and the other thing I find strange is that Santa has done no succession plan. So if Santa died tomorrow I think we might have a global issue. So Santa needs to do succession planning, I think. So these are some of the aspects of Santa’s ecosystem that we should cover today and let's understand how tech can make Santa’s ecosystem run even more efficiently. Samiran , any thoughts?

So I kind of went back and said that I am charged with the responsibility of coming up with some paradoxes. I was like let's figure out if there is a paradox that really talks about Santa and law and behold there is one, it's called Curry's paradox apparently. So it is the most ridiculous thing. It says, if this statement is true then Santa exists, it is as arbiter as that and i am not even going to bother to try to explain what it is, all the people who want to read about it and who want to go into this whole aspect of whether Santa exists or not can read about it and it's completely crazy. It's got a lot of alphabets, it's got a lot of numbers, it's got a lot of theorems attached to it but essentially people have given it a lot of thought.

If that is the paradox then i am going to say, if this statement is true then I am the statue of liberty.

I think it's a question of fastest finger first here. Somebody just said it and it became a paradox. So i think the one thing that has always intrigued me is the fact that this chap just goes around the world in one night and does this humongous amount of work, what does he do the rest of the year. Then I thought about what would be the parallel in terms of this complex logistics and the only example that I could think of was the Bombay Dabbawala. I figured that this guy must be practicing with the Mumbai Dabbawalas for 364 days refining his skills and come 356 days, Christmas, boom he manages to do everything. But I think it is very interesting that we picked this topic up because just to share in terms of the tech that is involved, just the requirement gathering, who knows. From the good boy to the bad boy, who wants what, how do you get into this and there have been some tons of stuff written about it in terms of quantum super positioning and he must be traveling through wormholes to be in different places, there must be some crazy technology for elf cloning, not just presence because you need people to pack, right. So there is tons of stuff that people have written about that. I actually thought that Santa was this great figure of goodness and I did not realize he was an icon for technology till I started reading about this episode.

But the kind of stuff that is going on, I would think his technology is way ahead of ours. So I think he lives in the 5th dimension, everybody keeps talking about these multiple dimensions especially like the doctor Strange stuff. I think he lives in multiple dimensions and maybe what happens in one dimension is one whole year while it is day in our dimension. It could be any dimension.

I was thinking, each and every element when you try to think of it and see a technological parallel, probably you can't think of any system that could scale or give those kinds of results to kind of deliver what Santa delivers. So i was just thinking, you mentioned about who was good and who was bad so when we were building this whole block chain stuff so you know in the block chain you need to figure out malicious notes, canine faults v/s malicious faults who is trying spoof the system and stuff like that, what you need to do is build a reputation management, right. So it started from the peer to peer networking days from where every note had a reputation and it still fails. You can't figure out whether this was a malign thing or someone was doing malicious and you may term that person as bad reputation but here you have to get it right, you cannot get it wrong. There is no option so fantastic reputation engine, fantastic recommendation engine. It can't be the recommendation that you bought rice and probably you are going to buy a cooker now. It has to be a very deep recommendation engine.

So the funny thing here is that just imagine the beauty of this system is that, of course he knows who is good or bad but look at the problem from the other end. So if I get something I feel that I am a good guy but if I don't get it, it's not Santa’s fault, it's actually my fault because I was a bad person. So that's the perfect system because it can't go wrong.

That is what Sheetal said, right. Precision proof. So funda is whatever 1.5 billion kids (I am not too good with numbers, Sheeta will give the numbers) all those kids whether they get or they don't get, they will still believe in Santa and they will think it happened because of their own fault. Amazon doesn't have those kinds of liberties, if you don't get the parcel the fault is Amazons. Another thing that came to my mind is, you mentioned dabbawalas, so I was just thinking of a parallel to Pista House Halem. So I discovered it a few years back and I have been ordering Halem from Pista House since then during the Ramdan months and it has become a case study in supply chain management and it is nothing compared to this whole Santa logic we are talking. So just to give you the figures, they process something like 10 tonnes of meat every day during that period and they start that process and this is a perishable good, you have to cook it in time, deliver it and finish it off, get the fresh stuff again and start cooking. So they start at 4am it seems, finish cooking at 1. From 1pm to 2pm it is put in those boxes, from 2pm to 3pm it reaches airports and places from where it flows out so that everyone gets it before breaking the fast across India and now they also have in the Middle East. Once they were able to perfect this system, I have tried it for 3-4 years and it has not failed ever. So now it has become a case study and now just put that scale to 10 times of delivery.

Or maybe a 1000 times. So Samiran hears some stuff. Let's imagine a world where tech can make Santa’s life easy. So from an understanding point of view for children I think AI will do a fantastic job for Santa to be able to understand kids. So imagine if you could use artificial intelligence which crawls through and figures out which child is good, which child is bad then that would reduce the workload on Santa and his team considerably. From a research consumer understanding point of view I am sure he must be doing focused groups as a true research I would like to believe.

You have a job.

Yes, maybe I should apply to Santa. So AI could help with research and understanding. What do you think would work better with, what kind of infrastructure, think about it, what kind of servers would Santa have for this data?

I have to take a stab at it because I told you, me and Samiran, we love decentralization. So I think the first thing Santa needs to do is be on a decentralized network and essentially create, call them clones or call them decentralized versions so that these master nodes are scattered across maybe 1 per country and maybe you have a hub and spoke from there but decentralization is a key. Right now one thing that must be killing Santa and his elf is too much centralization, it has to be distributed completely.

I have to take a stab at it because I told you, me and Samiran, we love decentralization. So I think the first thing Santa needs to do is be on a decentralized network and essentially create, call them clones or call them decentralized versions so that these master nodes are scattered across maybe 1 per country and maybe you have a hub and spoke from there but decentralization is a key. Right now one thing that must be killing Santa and his elf is too much centralization, it has to be distributed completely. I was just thinking what kind of server capabilities, right and where these servers would be and what kind of cloud are we talking about.

So it has to be decentralized and edge, probably Samiran will love now. Edge computing.

Basically this really means that every kid must be a node actually. They have to process everything and it will be completely crazy. I don't think it is an imaginable situation also, how this is possible to do at that point in time because typically whenever we talk about AI, we talk about historic data, we talk about predicted data and things get collected and all but here we are talking about the vims of children and that cloud will put all the pollution and climate change and fog on the planet to shame, it will be so foggy and cloudy.

So since we are speaking of AI, there has been so much talk about it and Samiran and Sheetal spoke that we probably even might do an episode about it, chat GTP, i have to touch upon it because from an AI perspective. So I was reading an article, you know the fantastic article. One guy said, "Let me text chat GOT. The aim was very simple, will it put developers out of business. So now we are looking at Santa and chat GPT kind of things. So what he did was he told chat GPT that he wants to build an application to do list applications. So when the first version came out, he realized he needed to give more instructions, it was not chat GPT’s fault. So he gave instructions to do a list, you can remove tasks, add tasks and it has to be a data based super system so all the data has to be there over the cloud and all and to hold and behold a code was churned out by chat GPT bot. He tested the code and then he analyzed the code and it was a very interesting analysis. What he said was, no chat GPT will not put developers out of business, it gave a working code. The issue was that the learning mechanism of chat GPT is based on the web only. So what he did was, he found out pieces of code which were written for a to-do application and this guy had already done a Google search behind it separately. So essentially every developer in the world goes to stack overflow. So stack overflow goes down then developers are in a problem. So everyone goes there, figures out a good solution, and then have discussion groups there with developers to figure out the best solution. So what he said was that today chat GPT the state that it is in, it is a fantastic thing but all it is doing is, it is probably one level filter above Google search. So if I had to search I would have done 10 more things and reached where chat GPT reached. Chat GPT directly reached there, that's all. It went to stack overflow, figured out multiple code snippets, and took the code snippets. You would also do that and reach there but chat GPT was the best solution but it was not churning out code itself so there is a long way to go. So chat GPT will definitely not replace the Santa.

So that's now going to help Santa. I am just wondering that from a data integrity point of view and GDPR compliance point of view, I wonder what he will have to do to make sure that every child imagine you have to know how every child has behaved, whether the child has been good or bad. It is the most personal kind of data which has been voluntarily given to Santa. I wonder what GDPR and compliance will have to say for that and how the world is going to react about it.

So I think Santa must be having some kind of a Ghajni complex because i think you must be self-erasing. There is no other way, he cannot get passed unless let us assume he doesn't have GDPR exemptions. It comes in his brain and goes out. So it's like then and there, in the moment and it is just like a self-erasing mechanism.

Very true, otherwise he is not delivering anything in Europe, for sure.

Ok, so that's fun. Now let's think about the delivery and the supply chain mechanism. So one of the pieces of statistics I was reading up is that if he has to deliver up to 2 billion parcels across the globe in one night then he needs to travel at the speed of 2,000km/hr. Now if you think of 2,000kms/hr and he travels about a kilometer above the surface of the earth I would assume because he goes around. So I am assuming he doesn't need to worry about visas and passports and things like that but what technology will allow him to travel at 2,000km/hr and make sure it doesn't burn out in outer space, he has not been able to get anything out there. So any stamps?

I am definitely going to go with 1. Firstly his driver has to be Tom Cruise, Top Gun 2. He has to break the 10Gs. So essentially he is going 10 times the speed of sound roughly about 9 also. So his pilot has to be Tom Cruise, no one else can survive so many G’s. What are your thoughts again?

This is literally like, this is actually traveling at the speed of thought, there were some fictional movies like that, you imagine a place and land up there, and this is literally like that. This is at the point where physics stops making sense because you can't be traveling at that, I don't think materials exist that can make spaceships like that. Let alone Rudolph, I don't think Rudolph is going to be, he can have more than a red nose, I can tell you that if he is traveling at that speed. Some people know better because NORA (North American Air Space Agency), they publish a tracker, so there is a NORA tracker for Santa so it tells you where Santa is and I think even Google has that. I still remember that Virgin Atlantic had done this amazing campaign where they had this 24th December flight and they were working with Microsoft, they had actually shown Santa being tracked and Santa lands on the plane and comes in and welcomes them and gives Microsoft products and all. So clearly some people know how this works but obviously this is a very -very well kept secret.

Sheetal I think you were mentioning something which made a lot of sense which is 5 dimensions or something.

The 5th dimension. See we keep talking about the fact that we are just living in a certain space but there are multiple dimensions. I don't know if you are a fan of MIB but in MIB also he keeps talking about multiple things that can happen. So if he doesn't put the tip something will happen, if he puts the tip something else will happen. So that parallel universe is going around and I am just thinking that maybe Santa is living in a different universe and is delivering to us in a universe which is faster than ours but we think it has happened over night so that could be a fun way to think about it. From a supply chain point of view I had a thought, you remember honey I shrunk the kids, the movie where he is talking about and then there is another one where everything becomes outsized and all that. Imagine if you had a Nano toy maker such that the toys grow under the trees. So you just have to have a Nano toy maker which makes life much easier. I was reading about it in one of the articles, imagine having a Nano toy maker and just leaving gifts and then everything becomes overnight the gift it is supposed to be. That would be awesome.

Literally grows into it.

Literally grows into the gift, yes.

Has to be something like that. It has to do something on its own, self-growth, that's interesting.

I don't know if you have figured this out but Santa comes in too many forms, shapes etc. the definition of Santa, I was just thinking so the way BC Santa, the chubby guy with the pink cheeks is a coca cola creation. They created the first illustration of Santa to use in their advertising so while they did not really own Christmas they kind of created the image of Santa in our head. I used to work in retail and we used to also celebrate Christmas at the stores but it's very difficult to find nice tones, chubby cheeks, and white Santa clauses for reindeer. Think of all of India and you can't just find too many Santa clauses so we would have Santa clauses in all shape, size and form and I would always think that it might shatter some child’s imagination of what Santa is. So with 3D printing technology coming into play now we are talking about 3D creating organs and all of that. Imagine if you could 3D print Santa’s which looked exactly like the same and could be allocated 1 Santa per country. So this is India Santa, this is Bangladesh Santa, this is Norway, this is somewhere else. You just have Santa’s across but Santa looks the same in each of the countries, that would keep really keeping a child’s imagination intact or at least his expectations from whatever he or she has read completely intact, that might be a fun thing to do. So I am going to end this episode on my favorite topic which is Santa in the meta-verse. It has to be, right?

Block chain has come so meta- verse has to come.

It has to be because why should we have to go anywhere, feel anything, you could feel everything in the meta- verse and Santa could deliver your gifts in the meta- verse and you could utilize the gifts in the meta verse and that would be completely game changing. So while we all have our physical gifts etc. but I think gifts in the meta verse is something which might change and my belief is that if in the real world Christmas is a couple of 100 billion dollars as a business then I think in the meta-verse, if the meta-verse really takes off the way it is planned to take off, you could have a parallel economy which could be a couple of other 100 billion dollars. So technology would help us also build another parallel universe which could be very -very large in the meta- verse, that I think is something I am looking forward to, Christmas in the meta-verse. You are sitting in Dublin and really enjoying a white Christmas, I will only be able to enjoy the white Christmas in the meta-verse.

I am white washing the walls of my house right now. It is as white as it can get.

So I am always going to enjoy Christmas in the meta-verse because then I can live every dream that I have had of a white Christmas in my life.

I think meta-verse would solve a lot of problems for Santa so with your decentralization meta-verse, a couple of our favorite technology pieces of 2022 which I think did well so they do remain very relevant for Santa also, completely agree with that.

But I also think that while we have talked so much about technology, we should not take away the fun and physical aspect of it, especially the eating. This is more for the kids out there. This is the time to go out, have fun, enjoy yourself, be with your friends, family, whatever, have a great time, have a great Christmas, have a great new year and have a good time basically.

And we will see each one of you and hear from each one of you in the New Year, 2023.

So this brings us to the end of a special episode of 3TB. This was a great year. I think we saw our listeners grow and thank a lot of that. I hope you keep liking our episode, please share the episode that is how this whole endeavor of our passion project will grow. We are available on all major platforms. If you are on an apple podcast please renew, it helps the podcast grow. We will be starting our season 3 as I said it is special and we will come back to you here with some very interesting formats and an interesting episode. Wish you a merry Christmas and a very happy new year.

Happy 2023 everyone.

See you on the other side.