I'm Scott. I'm Russell. I'm Leo. This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball where three venture visionaries and a guest empty their heads of
startup and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in there so you can all have them for free.
Anything that we say is yours to keep. And Scott, I believe you brought our guest this week.
I did. I brought my coworker and friend, Drew Morgan. Drew is a mechanical product design
engineer at my work. He works on the advanced product development team. He's probably worked
on a thousand different early stage products and devices in his time here. And I'm very excited
to have him. So welcome, Drew. Welcome. Hey, thanks. Good to be here. This is going to be so fun.
This week, we're going to be doing another game where we're going to get ourselves warmed up here. I'm
calling this one. Will it send? We're going to go through I am services. You guys remember instant
messaging, how crucial that was to the world and how right. It's like schooler. Absolutely. Right. We
were of the age as middle millennials where like I would come home from school and spend time on
AOL instant messenger and all that. And I want to go through line by line here and pick a couple of
the favorites over the years and ask you guys, yes or no, does it still work? Can you download
and install and use these services? So for example, WhatsApp? Yes. Facebook bought it. It's huge
globally. Google Allo, like all other Google products was killed summarily. So of course we
always start with our guest, Drew. I want to ask you about Skype. Skype was founded 20 years ago in 2003.
Wow.
eBay owned it for a while. They were bought by Microsoft. MSN Messenger was folded into Skype and
they became one. Microsoft launched Teams in 2017. But does Skype itself still work? Yes or no?
I'm going to go with yes on this one. I think it does.
It totally does. You're absolutely right. For some reason, they had a 20-year head start on Zoom and
still didn't win.
I can't imagine why it still works. It was actually never that good.
I can still hear the noises in my head.
It's really cumbersome.
The desktop.
Do, do, do.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, it's not great, but you can download and install and use it today, even though they're
trying so hard to make Teams happen. It's not going to happen. Scott, have you heard of
Kik? K-I-K?
Nope.
Kik was launched as, well, it was relaunched. It was originally a music sharing service. But in 2010,
it was launched as a messaging app. And in May of 2016, they announced that they had approximately
300 million registered users. And they were used by 40% of United States teenagers in 2016.
I know. Apparently, we were just too old. And there's probably a lot of younger people saying,
yeah, of course, Kik. I kicked my friends or whatever. But yeah.
Dated ourselves. Okay.
I know. This whole thing happened right under our noses. But does it still work today?
I feel like a 2016. If Skype's around, Kik's got to be around. I'm going to say yes.
Kik still works. It was, actually, it did shut down in like 2019, but then they relaunched.
Somebody else bought the company and now it's back around again. I'm going to count relaunches as,
yes, that does count.
Cool.
Russell, I'm sure you know because you're hip and trendy with the hashtag teens about Yik Yak,
anonymous location-based posting service that launched in 2013. It was popular on college
campuses. They had a very famous cyberbullying problem. Usage peaked around 2014, 2015, but do
they still exist today?
They came up, they shut down, they came up again, and I think they shut down again. So I'm saying
no.
They did get shut down in 2017. They did relaunch in 2021, and they still exist today. You can use
them right now. So not quite.
Russell is the troll I'm kicking.
Very close to being detailed.
Russell, despite all your hard work, your cyberbullying just hasn't shut it down a second time.
It looks like I can get back online, boys.
Yeah, it's time to get back.
Put on the Anon mask, yeah.
Don't find my username.
Drew, did you ever own a BlackBerry?
I never did, no. I actually went to college and there were Palm Pilots.
Yeah, I love the Palm Trio, for sure.
And I had a little flip pad paper, and I called it my Palm Pilot in order to poke fun at the other
students that were rich and had Palm Pilots.
My next door neighbor in the dorm rooms, when iPhones were starting to become popular and
everything had sent from my iPhone in the signature, he made his email signature sent from
my really cool laptop. That always cracked me up.
BlackBerrys were good at a lot of things, but one of the things that they had that was especially
key for their success was BlackBerry Messenger, BBM. It was once exclusive to BlackBerry devices only
for like way too long, but then it opened up to other platforms. So you could download the
Android and iOS apps. Does it exist today?
Ooh, uh, you know, it sounds so far-fetched.
No, I'm gonna say no.
It was shut down in 2019 permanently. You're absolutely right.
2019?
I know!
That's too late.
It would have been the most valuable part of BlackBerry at this time.
All seven people were using it. We're very sad, I'm sure.
How do I export my messages, you know?
Into something. I don't even know what you'd bring them to.
Yeah.
Scott, the king, the goat. AOL Instant Messenger was started in 1997.
Oh, man.
But does it still exist today?
You can't, you can't kill AOL. Like, I feel like you could try and you just can't kill.
I'm gonna say they're still here.
They were shut down in 2017.
No!
Remember when they were bought by Verizon and Oath and that whole thing?
Yeah.
Oh, that's so sad.
But it's sister app, not sister app, another one just like it.
Russell, what about Yahoo Messenger, which was lost in 1998? Competitor to AIM.
Oh, no. Oh, no. You know what? Yahoo was like, it's still a thing.
They probably just bundle it in your email service and it still works somehow.
They got shut down in 2018.
Oh, my gosh.
Which means BBM BlackBerry Messenger survived both of them.
I was shocked.
Outlived AIM?
I know.
That's insane.
I know.
Oh, wow.
I know.
I have an AOL CD in the closet behind me.
Do you really?
Yeah.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, you could get about 20 of them every time you walked out of a Target, if I remember
right.
Go use them as Frisbees.
A stack of them.
I'm gonna use that for an art project, but I never got around to it.
There you go.
It's its own little treasure now.
It might be worth something on eBay.
You should check it out.
Drew, chat roulette.
It launched in 2009.
It was a website.
You go into it.
Oh, by the way, I wrote all these in past tense.
So it was a website that you would go and it would fire up your camera and microphone
and pair you up with a random user like Omegle.
You press a button to leave and be repaired with someone else immediately, which was good
because there were a lot of penises.
A lot of penises.
A lot.
It doesn't still exist today.
Ooh.
I haven't tried that.
I haven't tried that in a long time, but I did use to chat roulette occasionally.
Same.
No penises though.
I always was lucky too.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I was lucky.
I'm going to say maybe they shut down.
Chat roulette usage doubled during COVID.
They are more popular than ever.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Yeah, I was surprised.
All right.
I'm going to chat roulette after this and see what's up there.
Maybe don't.
Especially not at night.
Not with me.
I feel like COVID made or broke a lot of these.
Hey, it's daytime somewhere.
Right.
Scott, you may recall that your and my good friend Russell Fyfe tried for a hot minute to
make Voxer happen.
Voxer is a push to talk walkie talkie group chat app that launched in 2007.
Oh, wow.
It's kind of a chat thing, but you like push and hold and you're sending audio messages
to each other and they went live to everyone else.
Kind of Nextel phone style.
Does it still exist today?
I have no idea, but my gut is no.
I feel like that one came up really quick and died really quick.
Launched in 2007.
Still kicking.
You can play with Voxer.
Honestly, I'm happy for them.
That's awesome.
They kind of did a pivot to like business communication a little bit, but it's still a thing.
You could like use their SDK to make your construction site all use Voxer or whatever, I guess.
That actually is really cool.
My wife uses it.
Yeah.
Does she?
I hate it so much.
It's like all the worst parts of voicemail and then only that.
What does she use it for?
Work or friends or something else?
Yeah.
Work.
Okay.
Fascinating.
Is she like required to have the app for work or something?
No, it's just her and a friend slash business partner and they send messages back and forth
that way.
And they're like 15 minutes long and they're not talking about anything for most of it.
I just don't get it.
And it's always on speakerphone too.
Right.
It's never something you put it.
Well, maybe they've changed it, but it's always speakerphone.
It seems like the kind of thing that like, like what does it do better than just sending
an audio thing on iMessage or whatever?
I don't know.
I don't get it.
Lastly, Russell, I got a good one for you to finish this off.
The Facebook poke.
An early feature from 2004 that allowed somebody to go on Facebook and poke them.
That's all it did was it said, you've been poked by Russell.
It was a form of greeting, but does it still work today?
That's a good one.
Oh man.
2004.
It was one of the first features that the platform had.
That was like why you went on Facebook.
So you would poke every day.
The back and forth.
Poke streak.
Wow.
Probably some MBA at Facebook was like, this makes us no revenue.
Let's kill it.
And so they probably killed it.
It is nowhere, anywhere in the UI, unless you go to facebook.com slash poke.
There's still a list of all your friends and you can send pokes and it sends a notification.
It still works.
What?
That's my public service.
Like journalism for this episode today is you guys all got to go and get all of your friends
to see the notification.
You've just been poked.
They have a whole page just for that?
That's all it does.
Yeah.
Facebook.com slash poke.
It's a list of all your people and press to poke.
And 40 ads.
Yeah.
But there's nowhere else that you can find it that I could see.
Like all the news articles were saying that this is apparently resurging last May as popularity.
So maybe we're the last people to talk about it.
But I was amused.
That's what inspired this whole game.
It's like, hey, the poke.
Wow.
Time to poke some friends.
Which I think all three of you got two out of three, right?
So I guess it's a tie.
Woo, tie.
Congratulations, everybody.
I think that means you have to start then, Leo.
All right.
I'll go first.
If you guys aren't too sick of hearing me talk.
My pitch this week.
So do you guys remember as a kid, there were the cheap, like, it's a little globe that has
a light bulb inside.
A little bit like a disco ball, but with just little pinpricks of light.
And you'd get in a dark room and it would make like stars all over your wall.
Yeah.
I think that this could be modernized and turned into something really interactive and interesting.
So I'm imagining small short throw projector on a base that has a swivel up, down, left,
right, pointing all around it, all the different screens.
And you could have that be movies or whatever, but I think it'd be really fun if you had a
software hardware thing that made the whole purpose of it be an interactive pet.
So you're setting it in the middle of the room and you've got this cute little Tamagotchi
frog or like a little puppy who's hopping around your walls and like snuggling with your kid
and all that kind of stuff.
But they're just on the wall and they're being whimsical and you can have fun like Disney
animations and things that aren't possible in the real life.
You know, ooh, he turned, he grew wings and flew up into the whatever, you know what I mean?
Wouldn't it be neat if you could just like set down the one thing, it makes a rough 3D map
of the room and adjusts its skew proportionately so that it looked like it was like hopping
around the room and doing things.
That's my whole pitch.
It's like a half-baked idea, but I think it'd be so cool.
That is so cool.
So like projection mapped Tamagotchi.
Yeah.
And maybe like every day you got to like bring it a little biscuit that you put in the box
or something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Leo, that is amazing.
That's a really good idea.
I don't know where it came from.
Friends come over and like, come, you have to go in the basement to see my pet, right?
I don't know.
I don't like the way you phrased that.
And then you murder them.
The basement.
I guess.
Sorry.
I was like, I was like a elementary kid in my mind.
Where's your pet?
It's in the walls.
He lives with people.
Yeah.
You could even have it be.
I don't know how good like compacts.
You always see those little cheap compact projectors that you could get on Amazon for a couple hundred
bucks, right?
Like, I don't know how miniature we could get with this thing, but it could be portable-ish,
right?
It'd be like a night's little, oh, my unicorn read me my nighttime story tonight kind of thing
or something, you know?
Oh, my niece is obsessed with Frozen 2.
Never seen Frozen, but loves Frozen 2.
And Elsa is like, you know, life and everything.
And if you had an Elsa on the wall, like the same size as her, you could just interact
with.
That would be incredible.
You know, the first thing that came to my mind is actually Peter Pan's shadow.
Yeah.
Like, it's kind of like a living being in the room, but it's confined to stick to the
walls and floor.
Totally.
That would be cool.
Mm-hmm.
We had a coworker, Dan Parker, who had a, he was working on something like this.
It was a handheld projector, but it just had like a laser line of sight where, you know,
it measured the exact distance from the wall and it would set its focal point depending on
wherever it was in the wall looking for.
I mean, the hardware and everything for this is here.
And if you're pointing at like the corner of a room, the thing.
The actual image that you would have to be projecting out would be bigger and kind of
skewed and weird looking if it was on a flat surface.
Yeah.
But you can do that math to where you're doing it.
Yep.
Rough approximation of like keeping it the same size and shape as it goes around.
Absolutely.
But then you need like a laser mapping system.
I feel like I've seen some museum experiences that have a badge you wear around your neck
and it does this like projecting onto things in the room that way.
That's cool.
That'd be cool.
How does that, what kind of content do they show for something like that?
It's escaping me.
I don't remember.
That's really interesting.
You're going to watch on Mackinac now where you'll have some historical soldier telling
you the history of the fort and what we ate in the 1700s.
Okay.
Very thrilling.
Like a kids museum exhibit would be really neat with something like that.
And the brand, like you were saying, Elsa, like the brand tie-ins, you could partner with
Looney Tunes or whoever wants to get some advertisement for their cool new animated Paw Patrol movie or
something, right?
You're going to make this.
It's going to become super popular.
And then soon after, there's going to be a horror movie based on it.
I can't turn it off.
Put a blanket over it.
I think this is like the coolest nightlight ever.
I feel like you're going to, if this is going to get made one day, Leo, whether you build it or not.
It's just one of those things.
I feel like if you just plug it into an outlet, it becomes a nightlight in the room.
It tells stories.
You could put like the whole, what is it?
Skylander stuff.
You can buy different toys and you put it on top and then it projects it into the room.
That's good.
Now you got insane monetization.
Even in standby mode, it could just be doing like a little soft red dot on the wall and that's my nightlight.
And it's bubbles that slowly go around the room while I'm sleeping or something.
There's all kinds of animation potential when you take the space you're in and you have free reign to augment it.
Your target markets are endless.
Okay, but here's the big question.
Is it internet connected?
If you need to download the content and stuff, I guess.
But that does open up a lot of scary.
Oh no, the Russians got my projector and now the scary stuff's happening on my wall.
Yeah.
You can buy like physical chips, like maybe like video game cartridges or something.
Yeah, like a Yoto player, I think is a product out there that does that.
It's a connected online system, but the only way to interact with it is through physical cards.
It's a little cube that's a speaker so you can set as apparent like this tile when you touch it to the speaker cube, honey, sets your audio book.
Or this one reads you a story and this one is the branded tie-in with Disney that tells you the Lion King, whatever.
Yeah, that's the kind of model that it seems like companies are a little bit more open to making those deals, like the content owners.
That'd be so cool to like sit in front of like even just like a small projector and like now you have the story that you're going to read with your kid.
It's like you put a little rug around it, becomes story time.
It doesn't feel like you're watching TV.
It feels like, it doesn't feel like screen time, right?
And so short little three minute things.
The storybook characters hopping around your wall on wall to wall, like the whole space.
That's the thing.
It's not fixed.
I'm not sitting on the couch.
I'm like, it's all around me.
And that's like the best part is that your market is so open to this.
Like you have the children's version, put like Cortana or something in there and turn it into Siri or something and just have it like, hey, this is who I interact with instead of this, you know, random device on my desk.
It's such a much better experience too than like a small screen.
A lot of home assistants have like you're, there's no reason that your pet, Tamagotchi, dog, whatever it is, can't also tell you what the weather's going to be.
Exactly.
And if it's internet connected, yeah.
Oh, true.
You're sitting in your home office and you're just talking at the wall and the wall's talking back at you.
Yeah.
You forgot to email Bob about those blueprints or whatever.
Ooh.
I wonder if you could do some directional speakers to really like kind of make it sound like the wall is talking.
We have standards for 360 audio, like the Dolby Atmos stuff.
Totally.
Yeah.
That would be maybe a little kind of breaking point of realism is where the sound is coming
from.
That's true.
Yeah.
Unless you did it.
Yeah.
Put a couple of satellite Sonos speakers around the room that it's talking to or something.
That'd be sweet.
Dude, I wonder if you could make us a version.
Like it's a little cheaper.
Like if you want to go really cheap with it, but you have like kind of like a music box with like,
I don't know if this is a little crazy, but like a ribbon that casts shadows across the
wall over a light.
Oh yeah.
And then that way it can like plays a movie almost from the project instead of having like
a film projector.
Yeah.
Like a, but it's just a light with shadows.
Right.
And so it like moves across the screen and maybe plays a song.
That's fun.
Before you go to the full 3d model, like the 3d version with audio, like all the bells and
whistles.
Cause I'm how expensive and how hard is like a short throw projector?
Those are like ridiculous, right?
They've come down, but you're still talking many hundreds, if not a grand or two.
Yeah.
Well, the engineers will fix that one, right?
Make it cheap.
I mean, or Timu.
I've got some ideas.
It actually brings to mind the Microsoft Surface, not the tablet, but the other one, which has
like a bunch of these weird pillars that go up and down.
I think it was also called Surface.
Yep.
Am I wrong about this?
The original table thing.
Is that a random James Bond movie where they're like touching the table and throwing pictures
back and forth on the surface?
Or is that just something else?
They tried really hard to promote it in a movie.
They wanted, I think you're right.
They wanted like hotel lobbies and restaurants to have this as their table and stuff.
And they had a bunch of cool demos, but I don't think it ever really caught on.
Anyway, there's like a particular kind of, I don't know, voxelized physical display that
probably could be amenable to your shadow puppetry idea that you just said of like somehow actually
flipping little windows in a ribbon that kind of creates that shadow on the wall.
Absolutely.
I don't know.
Like you're doing shadow puppets, but it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like a grid.
It's not a projector really.
It's a shadow project.
Yeah.
I mean, liquid crystal displays are the backlight shining through.
What if you just had like a really bright projector bulb with liquid crystal layer going on?
Yeah.
There you go.
To make it small, you have to have a very tiny LED.
So it's a point source.
So you don't get blurry shadows.
But we have those now.
LEDs are fantastic.
Unless you build the blur into your animations and it's a wispy little ghost.
Back to your Peter Pan shadow.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's the cloud around the image.
Yeah.
Blobby.
He's my amorphous shadowy friend that lives in the walls.
You're getting institutionalized.
Smudge is my favorite.
Smudge.
All right, Russell, you're up next.
What do you got for us this week?
All right.
So I have been in painting my basement, doing a lot of work, and I have been drying my walls
with a ton of box fans.
And I started to think about this.
Like, and I guess you guys have probably seen this, like the box fan mods for like AC units,
you connect it to a cooler and you run like copper coils through it.
And like, yeah, there's like a bunch of mods.
I guess I was thinking, why don't we create a bunch of mods for the box fan as add-ons to
a line of products.
A standard box fan.
Yeah.
So you can use it as a filter.
Maybe you attach like, you can provide a special hose attachment that connects to your window
to help with the, you know how sometimes you throw a box fan in a window and shut the window
on it?
And it never works.
It falls out.
It never works.
It always does.
Interesting.
So you would create the mods.
You would, you would provide, you'd be a provider of all the different $20 accessories to the
$20 box fan.
And now you can have an air filter, like a real, you can, if you throw an air filter,
like an HVAC air filter on there, I mean, you have a pretty solid air filter running on
a box fan.
I told Scott about this, but University of Michigan did a study during COVID when people were really
worried about how to keep air clean.
And, uh, they tested a bunch of off the shelf, like the leading brands of air filter or whatever.
And the best performing one was a box fan with a 20 by 20 HVAC filter strapped to the
back.
It moved more air and got more stuff through it than like all these $300 home for filter
systems and stuff.
So, yeah, I'm so happy to hear that because that was the entirety of my concrete dust prevention
strategy at my old business that I ran.
It's great.
It does work super well.
It's kind of loud.
Like even on the low setting, the sound of a box fan with something up against it is pretty
noisy, but I 3d printed some little like clips that just held onto it.
It was super, super great.
Yeah.
That's the idea.
I think that's the key to it too, is you just have clips that'll fit on like any type
of box fan, just like the panel grid on front.
It doesn't matter the orientation.
They're all pretty much the same size.
Yeah.
I'm sure they're in weird orientations and stuff compared to each other, but you could
make something.
If you want to hook onto the grate, then probably, but just, I think like they're all the same
width and depth and height more or less.
Yeah.
Box fans are pretty universally about $1 per inch of diameter.
It's the cheapest price per inch of diameter that you can get from a fan.
But as long as you can make some assumptions about the dimensions of the unit itself, you can
have things grab onto the exterior of it and hook up to it.
Yeah.
Some kind of clamp system.
Yeah.
Just like phone clamps, you know, like in your car, there's the whole setup thing.
That's it.
So you've got your copper tubing that makes it cooler.
Got the AC version.
Yeah.
You have the connects to the window.
Okay.
Maybe, or somehow like you want to get, let's say a bathroom that doesn't have a fan.
There you go.
You could throw a box fan on it and create a system that allows for air to go out, but
not to go in.
A one-way valve.
Just like anywhere you want ventilation.
Yeah.
A one-way valve with a vent attached.
Yeah.
Those little louvers, little flaps.
Yeah.
One of those like dryer hose things that you can just extend it to where you want
to go.
Yeah.
I mean, you can get like, you can hang it on a wall if maybe, I know this sounds a little
tense, but like you could put maybe vent, like it could be a form of ventilation in your
home.
If you put the right, you know, make it not look like a box fan.
I don't know, like do some stuff to hide it or allow for circulation.
I just feel like even more like my house is kind of old, so it'd be cool to add a box
fan to certain vents without it looking like a giant box fan that's going to fall over at
any moment.
To just move some of the AC that's down in my basement, let's say, or my first floor up
to my second floor.
These HVAC things are basically, it seems like a bigger version of a box fan, like a super
box fan that moves all the ventilation in my house.
Like, I feel like you could create a whole setup in your house.
So one of your products is you cut a notch out of the duct work and you slide a box fan
into it and hold it with the clip and the kit and you've created like a, like a booster.
Yeah.
I like that.
Yeah.
Or maybe if it's, if you need to be in the room, you have a little duct that goes down
to your floor vent.
And so it just, all the air sucks up out of the floor vent.
Like your thing, Scott.
Yeah.
That's, I have just literally turned it off a second ago.
You have a thing?
Yeah.
But it's way more than $20.
Yes, it is.
You want to describe your, you know, your thing?
Yeah.
It's a little, I have terrible heating and cooling in my office.
And so there's just a little, like, it's like a PC fan that puts on top of my vent and
when it detects the air is flowing through it, it just turns on and forces more air into
my room versus the rest of the house.
It's very clever, but also you're right.
Expensive.
It acts as a pull.
It pulls more air out of it.
Oh, sick.
So there you go.
Box fan attachment.
Box fan attachment?
Box mods.
Seriously though.
So the whole thing goes as one big unit over the vent and like-
Funnels down into it.
Mega blasts into the, that's-
That's a really good one.
So I tried Scott's product.
I bought one too.
It didn't work for my kind of house very well.
But if I could take literal box fan, slide it into the thing that we're selling, which is
a shell that goes over and into the vent and like mega pulls it out.
And yeah, your thing but box fan would be sick.
No other room in the house would get any air.
I also have one of those things.
Nice.
Does it work for your house?
It does.
This is such an easy idea to start too, Russell.
All you need is like time and a 3D printer and a basic website.
And you could make a, you know, half a dozen different things like you just came up with.
I think the size scale, you might want to invest in a small vacuum former.
Like those are pretty cheap.
Yeah.
What's that mean?
What's a vacuum?
Oh, like a vacuum forming.
Like it sucks.
You heat up the sheet of plastic and it sucks it down over a mold to create a thin, large
sturdy, you know, part.
You can cut out sections of it afterwards.
3D printing, but a little more permanent.
Not quite an injection mold.
Yeah, right.
It's way cheaper.
The tooling is way cheap.
You can make the tooling out of literally anything.
You can make it out of cardboard.
Okay.
I got some crazy ideas that maybe you guys would know.
So what it, could you make a box fan as powerful as a vacuum and create a vacuum out of a box
fan or, uh, just up the voltage.
It'll do it.
Yeah.
Like, I don't know.
Or like if you set, if you create the right, uh, like weird ass oblong shapes and sizes to
it or, uh, a shop vac, you know, I guess, I guess what I was saying is, could you go crazy
or a water pump?
Like what if you unscrew the whole box fan?
All right.
Put it in your pool.
Use the, you figure out the whole rotary system and you just attach like these five clips to
the fan and it spins to create a pump.
Like, could you go one step further and literally unscrew the five screws or on a box fan, attach
something to it.
And now I'm like, yeah, I have my box fan vacuum for $40, but it works.
And I'm, and listen, I'll throw it out.
Look out Dyson.
Russell, you once said that the electric lawnmowers are just like putting a box fan on wheels and
pushing it around your yard.
Like, let's just do it.
Let's put some casters on it and turn it into a Roomba.
Yep.
Metal blades.
You put metal blades on a box fan and you have a straight up Sun Joe on Amazon for $80.
Or casters and some metal blades.
You can put a bag on top, dude.
It would suck the grass in too.
Like, it would work.
Now you need a second box fan on top for that.
Box fans used to have metal blades, right?
Maybe when the ones that would rattle?
Yeah, back in the day.
Basically there.
He's buying old one on eBay.
He recycled them into our Sun Joes.
Disposable.
Well, you can edit out this comment from the mechanical engineer, but one of the features
that a box fan has going for it that makes it quite safe is that there's big gaps in the
corners where the fan doesn't touch the walls.
So even if you lay it down on the floor, it just churns air through those gaps and back into
itself and doesn't like burn up the motor.
So they actually cannot build up hardly any pressure from behind or in front of them.
The vacuum cleaner idea would be a stretch, but if you chain a bunch of them together, you
might get there.
Or could Russell's attachment cover those inlets and create that extra suction?
You've got a backpack with like six...
I may or may not have tried that out of cardboard once.
Just trying to blow up a bunch.
And Drew, did it work?
That's the question.
Did it kind of work?
I don't know.
It's top secret.
The government doesn't want you to know now.
It's just Drew's sworn to secrecy.
James Dyson.
He's going to kill you.
That's the box fan that had the air filter on it to protect me from concrete death.
Oh, you see?
I have two box fans I'm looking at right now.
I'm like, man, I could chain them together and create a...
What?
What are those called?
Super box fans?
The boats that fly on the water.
Like a hovercraft?
Or a swamp boat?
New Orleans swamp running around?
Yes.
That's one fan.
I got eight box fans and a buoy.
You know, I've seen giant walls of PC fans.
You can make an even gianter wall of box fans.
Yeah, you could for pretty cheap.
Yeah, real cheap.
It's cheaper than bricks.
It's cheaper than bricks by a lot.
And if you get them all pointed at a little bit of an angle, you can make a tornado.
Like, guys, what if your screen door at your old...
You know that one house that you lived at with no AC?
I want a screen door of box fans.
Three box fans stacked on top of each other.
Did you say you did that?
Right.
Yeah, we did that in college.
Really?
We did several of these in college where we took, you know, the copper tubing.
We ran a cooler full of ice that siphoned water through the tooling and then just had the cool air going out.
And it worked.
We had a door that we replaced with box fans coming inward.
It was so hard to make the damn thing that by the time you're like, get it, you know, you're using it.
You're like, oh, this is kind of sucky.
I wish I had put two hours of my time into it.
And that's the service your company provides.
20 bucks more, you get AC.
20 bucks more, it's battery powered.
20 bucks more.
Triple A's only.
Like mosquitoes.
Can you imagine?
Guys, a bunch of these around a campfire to kill mosquitoes.
Hmm.
Put a little zapper on it.
Well, you've seen those fire tornadoes, right?
Yeah.
Fire tornado.
I like the bug zapper idea.
You put the mesh.
Okay.
Bug zapper on a box fan.
That would be really good.
Yeah.
Guys, I'm on the fly with this stuff right now.
I'm like, this is.
You're going.
We need an open marketplace.
We just open source this and everybody just.
Lasco.
Lasco, pay attention.
But what's your company called, Russell?
That Roku competitor from a long time ago called Boxy Box is folded so you could make the Boxy Box.
That's a good name.
Boxy Box.
Ooh, hear me out on this one.
Open fan.
What about box dazzled?
Ooh.
The dazzle of your box.
You're box dazzling mine.
I bought this one just to box dazzle.
I didn't even have it already.
Mom, I bought you a box dazzle.
Oh, which one?
Oh, man.
Oh, yeah.
All right, Scott.
Let's hear your idea this week.
All right.
So we have a dryer, a washer and dryer that is probably one of the most annoying devices on the planet Earth.
It is very, it really wants your attention all the time.
And if a load is complete, if the door is left open, if you've hit a button on it and haven't hit like a second button to finish whatever you started, every 30 seconds, it'll give out a little doo-doo, doo-doo.
It's horrible.
What?
I've also learned that it is extremely motivating to turn it off.
Just like if you have like a seatbelt and you're driving and you don't plug in your seatbelt and like it'll just beep again and again until you are so pissed that you're just like, fine, I will do it.
I will do it.
I move my car up the driveway, but like...
Or the microwave.
My food's done.
Yes, exactly.
My microwave is pretty polite compared to the dryer.
It's like every like two minutes or something.
Anyway, small annoying noises or small annoying things can be very motivating.
So I want to utilize this.
Do you guys remember annoyatrons?
Yeah.
Do you ever have those in high school?
Button cell coin.
A little device that you can hide somewhere that's just on like a simple, yeah, coin cell battery that will just beep every four minutes or whatever at a random interval to just kind of antagonize someone.
Let's combine the two.
Let's make an IoT annoyatron to motivate you to do things.
Like you've seen some examples where it's like, hey, I got to get up in the morning, my alarm clock.
If I put my alarm clock across the room, then I have to get out of bed to actually hit the snooze or something.
What other things could you do?
If you had an IoT device that had, you know, the classic sensors, an accelerometer, a speaker on it, maybe a flashing LED or something.
How could we use this to motivate people to do things if it's fully IoT?
What if the flashing light was also running around the wall and you had to catch up?
Fantastic.
We'll combine it with Leo's idea.
Well, you always jump with your assistant ideas, Scott, to like the don't forget to take out the trash type thing.
I'm trying to be a little bit more creative here about that.
Hey, taking out the trash is a good one.
My trash can just chirps at me.
You got to catch the trash can.
Everyone hates to do workouts.
That's good.
What if your weight's chirped?
There it is.
They will not shut up until you go in there and do X amount of reps.
The treadmill only stops chirping when you're actually running.
Whoa.
That is...
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no.
And then after you've done like a half hour, it's good for the day, but then it starts up again.
Oh, that's haunting.
My chirp has been satisfied.
That's right.
That's great.
Put it on a water bottle.
If you don't take a drink every 30 minutes or something, just have it just go nuts until...
It's kind of like a mouse jiggler.
Yeah, exactly.
The little USB.
Like those ones that remind you to take a wrist break.
Just put the smoke alarm chirp in there.
Oh, gosh.
Oh, like a really loud one.
That would be the ultimate motivation.
Because then all the people around you are also helping you be motivated.
What is that?
Turn that off.
Oh, my God.
Like, I honestly think like of all the like exercise fitness ideas out there, this sounds
like the most motivating one because knowing, all right, if I don't wake up at 6 a.m. to
run or whatever, I'm going to have trips all day.
Yeah.
All day.
Motivatron.
You'd break it.
I feel like...
Battery removed.
Like every...
Solar.
You didn't make...
You couldn't make...
Like, that would be your thing, though.
In order to stop it, you'd have to destroy it.
That's your business model.
People are always going to be destroying these things in order to not do whatever they're
doing with it, right?
I mean, how much power do you need to like chirp every four minutes?
You could just have it be like those solar calculators, the little Casio thing, and it
doesn't even have batteries.
True.
What if it was mobile and could run away?
I've seen the...
There's an alarm clock with wheels that'll like...
If you snooze it too many times, it'll take off screaming.
You gotta like go chase it down.
I think that was a thing on ThinkGeek years ago.
So like micro drone with a chirp?
Yeah.
Like flies up and sticks to the wall?
My cat would be all over that.
Or like the ring one, the little home security drone, but it's just running away from you.
Yeah.
Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.
Oh, dude.
Frickin' get back here.
I swear I'll do the dishes.
My wife would divorce me.
You go on vacation for a week and literally you walk in your home and everything is chirping.
You're sprinting upstairs and trying to pump weights while you're throwing laundry in.
Make it stop.
Changing the dishes.
Take out the trash again.
All right, I'm going to take this in a real weird direction.
Oh, yeah.
Are you ready?
It's an implantable chirp machine.
Into your body?
That goes in your skin.
No.
You can't turn it off.
The worst Fitbit ever created.
Oh, man.
Honestly, though?
For the all or nothing people.
And I'm going to take it even a little weirder.
It doesn't chirp.
It just gives you weird doses of chemicals that make you feel sad.
Oh, I thought you were going to go the other way.
It's like a little jolt of...
Oh, it could just shock you.
Oh, that's good.
I was going to say...
That seems simpler than putting anti-antidepressants into you.
Is it epinephrine?
Just depressants?
Yeah, they're called depressants.
You want to stick them full of like a little EpiPen jolt to get their heart rate going?
You don't want to make them sad.
Honestly, if I'm walking around in public and I'm just chirping randomly, that would be pretty
motivating for me to be like, I need to stop this.
How do I stop this?
You could never fly on an airplane.
I'm trying to figure out how you could do it to stop like doom scrolling or like you have
someone who's been on TikTok or something for way too long.
I mean, I guess chirping the corner is good.
Maybe it just texts your phone or sends you notifications you can't get rid of and just
keep spamming them across your screen.
I guess it's more the IoT version.
This is like user hostile as a service.
Yes.
I feel like you could probably integrate some social aspects of this, like social accountability,
right?
Like if you're doom scrolling for too long, it starts texting all your friends saying like,
Hey, Scott's doom scrolling.
That's the ticket.
Scott's been on his phone for two hours and 48 minutes.
But it doesn't tell you that it's doing that.
It just doesn't.
You just know in the back of your mind that there's a risk that gets higher and higher.
Yeah.
Oh, that's fun.
Oh, the probability goes up for every like five minutes you've been on the phone or something.
In fact, your chirp thing could be in someone else's house that you care about.
Whoa.
He hasn't worked out today.
The sensor's at your house, but the chirp is somewhere else.
If you don't work out.
Oh, man.
Get up, you son of a...
I am tired of the chirps.
Drive my ass over there.
Leo, do your dishes.
God damn it.
Because there's...
I will definitely take care of other people better than I'll take care of my own self.
Yeah, for real.
Dude, the world needs these types of products where it's just like ridiculous.
Like, all right, who's going to do this with me?
You know, like that would be awesome.
You could build a whole brand around whimsy.
Yes.
Have you heard of the most dangerous writing app?
No.
I don't think so.
For authors who have struggled just getting words on the page, it's like a text editor and
you can type in it normally.
But if you stop typing more than five seconds, it starts backspacing faster and faster.
Or whatever the time limit is.
Don't go get coffee.
That's fun.
So basically, it's a text editor that forces you to just stream of consciousness.
Yeah.
Keep typing.
Or else it deletes everything you've done.
Is that helpful?
Like, does that help people?
That's a whole different thing.
Some people swear by like being forced to write all the time, like diary or you just like
have a blank page and just whatever comes to your mind.
It's a form of brainstorming that taps into like, I don't know what I was thinking here,
but that's an interesting idea.
There's a book called The Extended Mind that talks about how we use the world around us as
part of our thought process.
And I think that's what it does is it sort of causes the page to become a part of your
brain thought process, whatever.
So like you're not writing good stuff the whole time, right?
But it's changing yourself.
And you are trying to minimize the filter where like, oh, I wouldn't have written that down
otherwise because sometimes the good stuff dies with the bad.
So what's the chirp product called?
The chirp chip.
Chirps up, dude.
Chirps up.
I know you're trying to such a good name, but.
It is.
It is a good name.
Twerp.
Yeah.
And you buy twerps.
That is catchy.
You can buy, throw a thing in the front or a thing in the, like, twerps by Brandon
Ecio or twerp.
Twerpy.
All right, Drew.
What idea have you brought us this week?
Well, I was debating between a couple of them, but I'm going to give you the one that I've
thought about a little more and there's a lot more meat to dig into.
All right.
This is really more of a service.
Pretty much every guy I know to some extent has a coffee can of nuts and bolts in their
garage.
Some people have many.
Some people have veritable suitcases.
Some people just have a little Tupperware in the kitchen, you know, drawer, but everybody's
got this repository of garbage fasteners and we hold on to them.
We think we're going to maybe use them someday, whatever.
The idea here is that this is a service where I can turn in those crap nuts and bolts and
in exchange, I get useful nuts and bolts.
Yes.
That are labeled and sorted and ready to go.
Yes.
I don't know.
And maybe it's centralized.
Maybe it's peer to peer.
Maybe you ship them all to a sorting facility.
I kind of think that's the way it would have to go because of the tech overhead that required
for this.
But that's the basics.
That's so good.
I have a little cup of like drywall anchors that came with that kit that I didn't end up
using and stuff, but they're all just fricking loose next to quarters and rubber bands and
stuff.
I would love to ship away 30 of them and get back a 10 pack of whatever.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
There's some overhead that goes into it and not all of them are coming back into the circulation,
right?
Like some of these are rusty, damaged, screwed up.
But you send it in and then your account a couple of days later is given like credits
that you can then spend on the pool.
Yes.
Yeah.
And potentially even you buy into or you don't even buy it.
You sign up for this.
It's free.
And you send in your grandpa's coffee can of nuts and bolts and it gives you credits.
And, you know, maybe someday in the future, redeem those.
Maybe you don't.
And maybe the maybe it's kind of a business model like Planet Fitness used to be before Gen
Zers ruined it.
Where they count on people buying memberships and not going.
Or it's just a good way to clean out the drawer.
I don't really need my whatever.
I'll just send in the thing and maybe I'll use it.
Maybe I won't.
The Goodwill model or whatever.
Salvation Army.
Yeah.
I'm just picturing like like this website that has these nice, neat, organized boxes of
nuts and bolts.
Like McMaster Car.
Yeah.
But like it's a pre-assembled thing where it has a huge variety of them.
And you can go on this website and you can buy one of these packs.
But if you send them your by weight random jar of nuts and bolts, you get a discount on
this box of something.
Yeah.
And then they just use those bolts.
They come in and put them making more packs.
Totally.
Lots of disclaimers.
These are not load bearing.
These are not rated.
We don't know what the materials are.
Yeah.
I do wonder how automated you could get on the intake and sort.
Like I know that we have our coin sorter.
Like could you?
As long as you had somebody taking out all the nuts, all the whatever.
Have you seen the machines that sort bad blueberries from good blueberries or whatever with little
puffs of air?
Yeah.
Like I think it's possible.
There's some crazy vision sorting systems out now.
Just like trash intake.
Like the local dump is taking in that and sorting recyclables out sometimes and stuff.
Yeah.
And they're identifying materials with like infrared cameras and other kinds of spectroscopy.
All you need is one good sorting machine too.
You don't need a crazy infrastructure setup.
Just one thing that works and can tell you this bolt size is whatever.
It's all the screws.
Yeah.
And you know, it doesn't even really have to cover everything.
Like I don't care if you have some random specialty wall anchor that came with your chain
link fence accessory.
Like throw that away and nobody's going to use that.
Dude, I was thinking with this more being like a Coinstar model.
Like you go to your local hardware shop and like literally you dump your coffee can into
this machine and it's, you know, you can send it to a local storage facility or whatever.
But what if it was just like hyper localized?
It's like your community's nuts and bolts in a machine and on the wall.
It's like a vending machine, right?
That sorts it into like, you know, 150 or 250 little plastic boxes.
You're looking at the shelf and then you put in a hundred nuts and bolts or whatever.
It sorts it on the screen and then you can trade in, you know, it's like a five to one
model.
You put five nuts and bolts in.
You get to pick from your selection of a hundred, you know, 250 on the wall and like you get credits
or whatever.
But because for all the reasons why, you know, of the five bolts that you put in, one is probably
valuable and goes on the plastic wall.
But then that becomes the sort of, you don't need a facility.
You sell these to Home Depot and whatever for the people that just are like, I don't want
to keep them in my house.
Brings them back into the store.
Like those key cutting machines that have taken over all the key cutting.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes, that's it.
Yeah.
Like that.
But look, but like that way you don't have to send it.
Like, I feel like shipping logistics become this whole thing.
Yeah.
Metal's heavy.
Metal is heavy.
I just think it'd be, it'd be kind of cool to see like, oh, look at, uh, maybe not.
Maybe it wouldn't be as cool as I think it would be like, look at that classic bolt from
the seventies, 1920s, you know, roadster.
I wouldn't have any qualms buying, going to the hardware store and buying the nut off the
shelf that I need, whether it's used or new.
Like, why does it matter if this is 30 years old?
If it's not rusted, then just as good.
Like they don't degrade over time too bad.
Business model might not work well in Michigan.
Yes.
I mean, no, I'm saying you go up to the coin star, you dump your thing and then the people
just take that and put it back on the shelf.
And now you have your little coupon and you get a couple of them for free when you buy,
but it can be part of the inventory of the store.
Yeah.
Ooh.
Or like that actually would probably save on logistics, right?
Cause you get like 400 pounds of like input.
And instead of everybody sending their own individual Home Depot or whoever manages the
machines, bring it and consolidate it to that massive facility.
And now you have your, your intake, uh, like your, your supply model, right?
You got your demand booths like in the store and then, you know, you just get bought a
bunch of screws for this one project.
Don't need them anymore.
Do it a different project.
I did a deck project and was like four screws short and I needed to buy another hundred or
whatever.
Yeah.
That's wrong.
So that's something I often think about with these ideas is who is going to fight you.
Big screw.
And in this case, it's definitely big screw.
Their name is for their motto.
Screw you.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Who, who doesn't want this to happen?
Like these companies are selling them for pennies.
So it's not like you're undercutting too bad.
I get the warm fuzzies just knowing I'm reusing them.
Totally.
The, and, and the ones that get scrapped, like metal has a good scrap value.
It's not, it's not the end of the world.
Like that's not a just trash.
I also wonder with this idea, if there's like a commercial or like B2B version of this where
like I've worked in several factory type settings and there's always like screws and nuts and
washers and bolts that get dropped on the floor constantly and they just get thrown away
because it's not worth resorting them.
But what if there was like a, you know, fast and all S company that just takes all that
in and gives you back, you know, maybe, maybe it's not your nuts, your, your staple things
that you use tons of, but maybe it's like the extras drawer, right?
Like, oh man, I just need to like hang this thing up.
Paperclips.
No.
What if this, is there a model where like the cans where it's like 10 cents a can, but could
you do this for the screws?
For fasteners?
Turn this into, yeah.
Turn this into like a metal recycle up program.
Like, oh, give us your old cups of screws and nuts.
I don't know how much metal would sell for like that.
Like if you had like, like 40 pounds of screws and bolts to collect it from your zinc tin.
Yeah.
Well, here in Michigan, you get 10 cents because you paid 10 cents when you bought it.
Like, I don't know if I want to pay a tax on every screw just that I get back by returning
it later.
But like scrap metal, I don't, I don't know how much metal it takes to actually make it
valuable.
But like, what if it was just like one of those programs?
Like, or like, can you recycle?
If you had enough screws and fasteners.
Is that possible?
I don't know.
Aluminum is pretty easy to melt down.
Yeah.
But some other ones like the zinc plated and then like, oh shoot.
How do I get like the different metals separated?
How do you get the zinc off?
Yeah.
Or whatever.
It's kind of depends.
Just burn it, right?
Just burn it.
Just melt it.
And burn it.
Just send it.
Burn it.
Engineers will figure that one out.
Don't worry.
Engineers will figure it out.
I think the chemists will figure that out in this case.
Just the big cauldron in the corner, right?
You throw the screws in there.
It's the metal vat.
Don't question it.
Yeah.
What's this one made of?
And then like, dribbling out the bottom is like little nuts and bolts.
That's so handy.
Could you do that?
No.
What if you put a bunch of metal in a cauldron and just started churning out like generic nuts and bolts?
Yeah.
That's all alloys are.
It's just mixed up metals.
Yeah.
I mean.
Will it blend?
I'll give you a dollar if that's not what's actually happening in China for like a lot of the cheap screws that I get with some of these things I bought.
Right.
I'm ahead of my time, it sounds like, is what you're saying, Drew.
Ahead of, yes.
Definitely that.
It's not.
You can't make that in America.
That's what you're saying.
We got to ship all the screws and fasteners overseas in order to make this happen.
No, I'm not saying that.
Maybe we just haven't caught the vision yet.
So, yeah, maybe you are ahead of your time.
No.
Melt down everything.
Mix it all up.
My wedding ring.
No.
Shoot.
You accidentally get a golden screw.
It's like one of the ones in the pack.
Hey, that would be a pretty sweet promotion if a screw company put one gold screw in one of their packs of screws somewhere in a hardware store.
And you get to go visit the eccentric factory owner.
I got a golden screw.
Companies don't do promotions like that anymore, but they should.
Yeah.
The cereal box model.
They don't kill children and give away their whole factory.
Well, no, not that part.
No, yeah.
Do you have a name for your idea, Drew?
I'm voting for that's a lot of nuts.
I was kind of going with Pappy's Nuts.
Pappy's Nuts.
Come on down!
Pappy's Nuts.
Bolt Cauldron.
How about Bolt Cauldron?
The Bolt Cauldron?
Yeah, maybe.
Or Bolt Star.
Kind of riff on the Coinstar thing.
There you go.
Bolt Star sounds like a villain in an 80s cartoon.
It's not a bad name.
It's kind of growing on me now that I said it.
You might get sued by Coinstar.
Yeah, you might.
Well, dear listener.
They don't own Star.
They don't own the word Star.
Well, dear listener, if you're headed down to the hardware store to dump your bucket into
Pappy's Nuts and you're listening to us in your headphones, we thank you very much for
listening.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you so much, Drew, for being here.
This was so fun.
You're welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Come back anytime.
You said you have multiple ideas.
We'd love to have you back sometime, man.
I got more.
All right.
Well, our website is Spitball.show.
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