I'm Scott. I'm Russell. And I'm Leo. This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, where three turing complete tech guys 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 this week, boys, I brought our guest. I am delighted to introduce the world to Paul, my friend Paul, who works at Hope College with me.
Paul is a graphic designer and marketing guru and a film enthusiast and friend of mine.
I am fortunate enough to have him as a resource because I can't design for shit.
And whenever I have some digital signage need or something on campus, I throw it on his list and he always wows and amazes.
Paul, welcome to Spitball. It's good to have you.
Hey, thanks for having me.
We're so excited to have you.
This is awesome. This is really exciting. I've never done a podcast like this where we're like over video.
So this is incredibly cool. Usually like all the ones that I have guest hosted on before, I get like in the room with people and then we have microphones and, you know, all that other stuff.
But this is great. I'm really looking forward to it.
I feel like we should start doing something with video. We record the video. We don't do anything to like make highlights for the tick tocks and all that. We got to subscribe to our Patreon. It's the only way behind the scenes. We're all shirtless and nobody knew it.
I can make a killer YouTube thumbnail for you guys. I'll make it like look. I'll make it definitely look more like Mr. Beast.
Yeah.
Wow face. Yeah. I've got our mouths open looking shocked at some pitch that Scott just threw out. I love it.
Million dollar idea. Billion dollar idea for free.
This idea will change the world. Whoa.
This week, we're going to get warmed up and started by doing an intramurals round. We each brought a half idea that doesn't really deserve its own full pitch, but we want to talk about kind of rapid fire style. So who wants to kick us off?
I'll go.
Do a wrestle.
This is great lead in Paul because I know you're drinking kombucha right now.
Yes, sir.
Leo, you said it's like Megan still got a kombucha business thing.
Yeah, her dad. My wife's dad has a kombucha brewing business over in Minnesota. Yeah.
Well, I'm about to stop all kombucha businesses cold with this amazing idea.
So kombucha is, I hear, I've never done it myself, relatively easy to brew in home, what have you.
And so my intramural idea involves creating the Keurig for kombucha.
So you have two little, like, let's say, carboys or smaller versions of that.
You plug it into a machine and, you know, it just slowly, you pick one at a time.
So it brews.
And then when it's ready, you just rotate between.
You just, you know, you refill with juice on one side while it's brewing.
You still got kombucha on the other.
You can go three or four carboys deep or however many you want.
And now you have.
You're just chaining carboys together.
Yeah.
And, you know, you create the whole setup so you don't have to deal with all the, I don't know, the junk that is involved with, you know, kombucha brewing.
So it's just, but they're smaller and it's really home convenience.
You throw it in your basement and now you go downstairs and you feel like, let's say, a mini pitcher if you really want to.
Or you go bigger, you know, just have it on your shelf, right?
So this thing's fully automated?
Yeah.
I mean, it's relatively automated because I think with kombucha, once you get the scobies going, the thing that actually brews it, you just fill it with just fruit juice.
Like, and that's it.
It's just fruit juice in a pump.
Bottomless kombucha.
I'm so excited about this.
I figured that you were going to go like, like a true, like Keurig, like it rapid fire ferments the kombucha.
And it's ready.
It's ready in like 60, yeah, 60 second booch.
That's what I figured.
And I was like, how's that going to work?
Because it has to ferment for hours and hours and hours and weeks.
Create a super yeast.
Behind me, one of those boxes over there is literally the Amazon starter kit to get going with kombucha.
And I keep leaving it in the box and not doing it for months because I don't have freaking space in my fridge.
And that's what you get with kids who go through a gallon of milk every three days, right?
You just like, where am I going to put it?
I would totally take a standalone gadget, especially if it doesn't need to be in the kitchen.
And I can like stash it away somewhere, basement or whatever.
Like you said, I love that.
A carboy is the big like water cooler jug.
Is that what I'm picturing?
Yeah.
You get like a smaller one.
I don't know.
They have like the smaller carboys.
I'm not a home brewer.
You need to get me up with the terms.
Let's do like a gallon jug, but it's like rectangular.
Oh, okay.
Let's say.
How about that?
All right.
You slide them into slots.
Got it.
Jump them in.
And then you have a nozzle, let's say, or like a port in the top to like refill it.
That's great.
Your juice of choice or, you know, the proprietary blend of juices so that we have a recurring business model.
That's it.
Well, and part of the magic that makes like a batch of kombucha really good is the SCOBY that's been like, this is my SCOBY genes.
You know, my certain flavor that I've honed over many years, many generations, that's kind of like a proprietary trade secret.
So you could even have the like, this one's a little more milder of a SCOBY starter kit.
And this one is one that we've perfected.
That's got a real bite to it or whatever.
And like make that part easy because I think you kind of have to either know a friend or get like a business that already has one to like source that, you know.
Is there like a underground SCOBY selling business right now?
It's essentially a big glob of snot too.
It's not appetizing.
Yeah.
Like the thing that floats in there, you want to skim it out.
So if you get the little machine like doing, running it through filters and stuff, heck yeah, that's great.
Is the SCOBY the stuff that leaves the mother in the bottom of all kombucha?
The mother?
Yeah.
I'm learning so many words about kombucha right now.
Yes, it is.
But yeah.
According to some of the threads that I follow on Twitter, Lady Gaga is mother.
That's like, that's like, that's like, that's Gen Alpha, Gen Z language.
And I don't understand it at all.
Yeah.
It's a recurring theme that we just kind of are very out of touch with Gen Z culture on the show.
It's just so bad.
You'll fit right in.
Thank goodness we work with college kids, right, Leo?
I guess so.
Yeah.
It makes me feel older every minute.
Can I go with my intramural idea?
I'd love that.
Russell, I love your kombucha idea.
I think that has some legs to it for sure.
So I thought about this and I wrote, Leo was like, keep a notebook of all the things that
you might want to say.
And I was like, I have like eight ideas.
I want to do a reverse microwave.
And I don't know what you would call it.
Microwave, microwave, opposite, opposite microwave.
So basically like something that-
Flash freezer.
Yeah.
Something that can freeze something in like 30 seconds.
Now I know that like restaurants have blast chillers and stuff like that, but they're
obnoxiously expensive, right?
So like, I don't, I'm not going to fork over the money for a blast chiller like that I would
need to have for residential purposes.
So if I could have one that is like a microwave, but in reverse, so it doesn't heat anything up.
It rapidly cools stuff down.
You can make ice cream in, I don't know, a minute and a half, maybe something like that.
Frost a glass.
Get that warm, lukewarm beer out and you have frost a glass and it instantly gets a cold drink.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, cause if, even if you put like, I put this kombucha in the freezer, right?
Before I opened it and then put it in the freezer here and it was in there for probably like 20
minutes and it barely had any ice crystals in it.
Sure.
And so I wanted it to be ice cold and it was in there for 20 minutes.
But meanwhile, like I could heat something up in the microwave and it would be ready in 30 seconds.
So a veriver, oh yeah.
Or a air fryer.
It sounds, it's the cold fryer.
It sounds counterintuitive to call it like a, a, a, a microwave freezer, but that's exactly
what.
A flash freezer.
That's top countertop.
A flash freezer.
Yeah.
You buy your little CO2 or liquid nitrogen capsules that you, you know, it's like a subscription
or whatever.
And that's your business model.
I love that.
That's exactly right.
It's all Pivener.
You just mess with the pressure inside of a contained thing and drop it as quick as you
can.
And the temperature will follow.
Well, apparently too, you can use, um, you can do it with like a, a bath of ice and water.
And then if you put salt on top of the water, it will help flash freeze stuff in probably
like three to five minutes.
So I don't know.
I was an art major, not a chemistry major.
So I have no idea.
Well, that's what you do for an ice cream maker.
Normally in an ice cream maker, you stick your water and ice and stuff on the side and then
you dump salt in it too.
Yeah.
Exactly right.
But even an ice cream maker takes like how long, right?
Right.
I mean.
Especially if you're a hand cranking that.
But imagine, imagine having ice cream done in 30 seconds.
That would be amazing.
Yeah.
It's fun.
You could sell so much different like accessories like that, like ice cream mix and all that
other stuff.
It just.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Instant custom ice cream.
Well, you kind of.
So I think the other thing that you might have with this, where like a competitor would come
in and say something about it is that you could basically take frozen fruit, throw it in a
blender and have ice cream in a matter of minutes.
Right.
I mean like.
Yeah.
Or sorbet or whatever you want to call it.
Right.
So I've made, I've made frozen ice cream with bananas before, like frozen bananas and chocolate
and.
Yeah.
And my wife, like my wife is like, this tastes like fricking bananas.
Okay.
Not like.
Crazy bananas.
Not.
No.
Yeah.
I know.
I realized how that sounded.
I know what you mean.
No, she's like, this is disgusting.
It literally tastes like bananas.
Not like this is bananas.
It's so good.
Do you have a food themed one, Scott?
Cause I don't.
I do not.
Okay, great.
We're time to hard pivot, I guess.
You want to go?
Awesome.
Sure.
Go ahead.
This is one that I have thought about ever since Russell started his job.
And I finally, it's been written in my notebook forever.
And I finally ran the math on it and realized that this is just a terrible idea.
I have always wanted to create a power storage device using rain barrels or rainwater.
Something where you see those things where they're like during the nighttime, you can use cheap energy to move something very heavy.
And then you lower it during the day in order to produce electricity.
And then you can sell it back to the grid for a profit.
I want to make a home version of that using just rain barrels or water or something with a little turbine or something in between.
And then if you have a blackout or whatever, you could just turn on your rain barrel and it'll slowly release water to give you just enough energy to keep moving.
Yeah.
And that doesn't work?
No.
It doesn't work.
The water change.
It's like by the time you hit the bottom, the electricity gets back to your house, you're at like 19% efficiency of what you started with going through.
What?
Oh boy.
Even on the like big ones that power plants run?
Not big ones.
I'm trying to come up with like a home version.
Something.
No, I hear you, but like why is it so much less efficient than the giant ones in the mountains?
Probably because I'm buying my turbines off of AliExpress.
Oh.
I see.
Cheap off the shelf.
Just get five barrels.
You know?
Yeah.
You pump it up to the attic.
You leave a bunch of barrels up in the attic.
So I was just trying to think, is there anything else that you could use to store potential energy besides water running down your house?
What about like a grandfather clock weight, but it gets stored in the chimney you don't use?
Ooh, that's a good one.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know how long that would last or how much weight you'd need.
I don't think people want a giant flywheel in their basement that could explode at any point.
Just running at all times.
Ramp it up at 10,000 RPMs.
What if I get a blackout tonight?
We got to leave the flywheel going.
What's behind this door?
Right?
Right.
Just all times.
10,000 pound flywheel.
Leo, that reminded me.
I don't know about if Scott and Russell are fans of the greatest television show ever created.
A four-letter word called Lost.
Oh.
But.
Scott is a big fan of Lost.
I was just going to say that like that was giving me big like polar bear behind the wall,
cranking, turning the crank.
Oh, yeah.
Turning the wheel.
To move the island.
To move the island, yeah.
Yeah.
Just got one of those in your basement.
Yeah, exactly right.
Yeah, just a polar bear in Michigan, yeah.
I might bring that one back to another day if I come up with a better idea.
If you get better turbine sourcing.
More efficient turbines for cheap.
We've got one of those in Muskegon.
You know that?
Do we really?
Yeah.
What do they use?
They have a giant, basically lake.
Our former guest and friend of the pod, Carl, told me all about it.
Yeah, they pump a bunch of stuff up into a man-made basin that's basically a giant pond,
but then they'll run the turbine.
The exact same turbine that runs as, when you feed it energy, a pump in one direction
that just goes backwards to generate it, going back out the same pipes and everything.
I'm sure that's the part that I'm missing, to have a lake in your backyard versus something
small and portable.
Well, if you can have a few inflatable hot tub style, big giant things in your attic, what
could go wrong?
It's just up at the high point in your house.
Drip, drip, drip.
Just plug your drains.
Every bath you take, every toilet you flush, screw the rain barrel.
Just throw some turbines in every pipe in your house and use the gravity at the end of the-
Why can't we do that?
Yeah.
Do they put turbines on water towers?
It's just water up there.
Can we at least get some of that energy back on the way down?
Oh, yeah.
I don't know.
I think the whole point is to generate the pressure, and you're probably taking off some
of the pressure by putting restrictions in the way, on the way back down.
Because they're using a pump to get it up there.
Yeah.
And then it's using gravity to put pressure on the system.
You don't want to have things stopping that.
Still, in the home, yeah.
Why don't we have a couple dozen little micro turbines in my sewer line going out of my house?
Just kind of giving me a little ambient wattage every time I let the bath out.
The poop will stop the turbine.
That's probably why.
Oh, yeah.
Why don't I block my sewer line with stuff?
I don't understand.
That's a great point.
There's a different way to probably do that, but yeah.
Yeah, probably.
This is why we're on the intramurals.
That's right.
Moving on.
What you got, Leo?
All right.
I've got something extremely technical and nerdy, and this is going to be something that about,
I don't know, one listener out there is going to vibe with me, and everyone else
is going to roll their eyes.
So, USB-C is a connector, and there are about 50 different kinds of cable that a USB-C cable
can be, and it's so frustrating.
You can be holding a USB-C cable that looks identical to another one in the other hand,
and it's USB 2 versus 3 versus 3.1.
This one is Thunderbolt 3.
This one's Thunderbolt 4.
This one, because of the gauge of the wire, can support more wattage than the other one
over here.
This one doesn't have any data cables at all.
It's just for charging only, and they all look the same.
We solved this problem before by having different connectors on the end, and then we standardized
on one connector, and now we're reaping the benefits of, oh god, they are different cables,
but they all look the same, and nothing has a label on it.
Why don't they have a label on it?
I don't know.
Parallel to that, there is a device that you can get if you work with networking stuff a
lot called the Fluke.
I don't know if that's a brand name or not.
But basically, you plug in Ethernet into the wall, and it'll say, yes, this port that you're
plugged into is active.
Here's how fast it is.
Here's what IP address it tried to give me.
Here's the kind of cable that this is.
It's a crossover cable.
It's a regular Ethernet cable.
Let me test it.
We think it's about this long, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I just want a USB-C Fluke.
I want to be able to plug in one of these cables that's sitting in a drawer into a device, one
end into the other, so it goes into itself, and it'll tell me what kind of cable it is,
and maybe even it has a label maker so that it spits out, hey, here's what it is so I can
label them all.
Oh, that's great.
There isn't much to vamp on.
I don't know if there's much meat on these bones, but it's something that I really desperately
need in my life.
It's very practical, I'd say.
It's pretty cut and dry.
No, I found one of these on Reddit, and I was so excited, and I'm like, I have to buy
this for Leo.
This is like three months ago, and I almost bought it on the spot.
I went to the webpage, and it was like $350, and I'm like, oh, okay.
I have purchased, so I found several different things that purports to kind of do it.
There's like a thing that you can put into the port itself, and then the cable into it
as a little, it looks kind of like a flash drive, only it has a little screen on it,
and it'll say, here's how much wattage is moving through it, and here's what kind of
cable we think it is, and stuff, they don't work.
Nothing that I've tried has worked.
If you found something, then we'll put it in the show notes, because that sounds amazing.
How hard could it be, though, to detect a type of USB cable?
Right.
It's just like, this pin's connected to this pin, so that means it's this.
It seems like the kind of thing where a little bit of firmware and two ports and a simple,
yeah, yeah.
There's no way it should be that expensive.
I agree.
Like, they do this for outlets to check if they're live.
Mm-hmm.
Like, why not just, like...
Right.
Or phone cables.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm surprised this doesn't exist.
$350 on a guy on Reddit?
How is this not a real...
I don't know.
It just seems like...
Someone out there, there are dozens of us who would be customers, I'm sure.
Yeah.
No.
Seriously, though.
IT departments all over.
I mean, we have people in my IT department who will walk in and say, hey, I'm trying to
use this charger to charge my whatever.
Why isn't it working?
And it's some dinky little Chinese cheap phone charger that they're plugging into their gaming
laptop that there's no way in heck that would ever, like, pump up enough wattage.
If there was something that was like...
Trying to put 60 watts through a 5 watt cable.
Right.
It's smoking.
Right.
But just, I don't know how to solve the cables are hard to distinguish problem on a whole,
but if there's some easy off-the-shelf solution that's in everybody's home that's like, hey,
you plug this in and then it tells you...
I want one of these in every home in America.
This seems...
That's my platform.
Herzog 2028.
We don't worry about it.
Too soon.
Too soon, Leo.
Wait.
I'm just thankful.
I'm just thankful that the iPhones finally came out with braided cables.
Yeah.
My goodness.
And they put the USB-C port on the bottom of the Magic Mouse.
It's like God intended.
15 years of having to flip your mouse upside down to charge it.
That's not coming to an end anytime soon.
Thank you, Apple.
Okay.
So here's the thing about that.
I've gotten...
Leo and I have had this discussion before, I think.
If you put the...
I mean, I can see one sitting over here at our desk or where our students work.
But like, if you put the charging port on the front of the mouse, yes.
Okay.
It does.
It does work while you're doing it.
But guess what?
You just gave yourself a wired mouse.
Yeah.
For like an hour.
The whole point of it is so you don't have to have a wire.
Yeah.
So you charge it for like 20 minutes and then you're good.
I don't want to argue about this again, Paul.
No.
It's functionally unusable.
Yeah.
You get it.
Yeah.
But if you put it in the front, you just gave yourself a wired mouse and congratulations.
You just hopped in your DeLorean and went back to 2003.
That's better than no mouse, though.
Would you rather have a wired mouse for an hour or no mouse for an hour?
I would have no mouse for an hour.
I guess so.
Purist.
I respect that.
Apple just wants you to go take a walk outside.
That's all it is.
That's exactly right.
Yep.
Yeah.
Guess I don't get to work this morning.
Yeah.
Every...
You know, here's another business idea.
Every time that you charge your Apple Watch or your Magic Mouse, your Apple Watch goes off
and says, hey, go take a walk.
It's a fitness integration.
Get up and move.
Time to go.
That's right.
It's time for your...
All about personal wellness.
Every other month, mouse charging walk.
There it is.
It's a special kind of workout.
Sorry, mouse is charging.
I have to go.
All right, Scott, what do you got?
Kick us off.
What do you got for us?
Okay.
This idea came last week.
I was walking my dog.
I came across a different lost dog.
It was a little white lab that was just standing in the middle of the street, happy as could be
in a neighborhood.
If you are a millennial, a dog owner, whatever, you just like can't let that happen.
You can't just leave a dog just sitting out there lost and stupid.
It was seriously like looking at cars like, oh, this is awesome.
So eventually I just, I went to a couple houses around the neighborhood, knocked and just no
one was like, I've never seen this dog in my life.
They had a collar on.
There was no tags or anything.
I'm just like, God, I don't want to deal with this right now, but I can't leave this guy.
Eventually brought him home.
I kept my backyard.
And after several Facebook and next door posts and looking on random websites as a bunch for
like lost dog, finally found someone who had lost them several hours ago.
They came, everything was happy.
What I want is a app, probably even just a website where I can just take a picture of an animal that I'm walking by,
upload it.
AI recognizes the type of animal it is, the breed.
It has, it's, it's a picture, right?
A modern day.
So I have the geolocation and everything on this, and then I can just keep on moving.
And then it can search, honestly, even all the websites and all the work that I did that day.
There is no reason that something else shouldn't be able to scrape all of those real quick and say,
hey, this matches this one here, or this one matches this one here.
Here's the phone for it.
There's somebody on Instagram who posts pictures of a dog like this that lives half a mile away from you.
Exactly.
It's all location based on there.
And then you could add other things.
I could eventually add a feature where I could upload a picture of my own dog to this website.
So it just knows, hey, if I ever, it can recognize what my dog looks like versus other ones that look similar.
AI is, Google Photos is terrifyingly good at that.
You could gamify it.
I found six dogs this week or something.
I don't know.
Dog hunter.
So it just would have been really convenient to have had last week.
And I've been thinking about that a little bit.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
It's the Pokemon Go of lost dogs.
You could imagine like pet owners going to this and doing the thing kind of like how they register their chip that's in their dog once where you say,
this is my name and email address or whatever.
I have a dog of this breed that is about this old or whatever.
And then just like forget about the account and not use it anymore.
And then they get notified if somebody else posts about a breed that's like the one that you registered with earlier.
Yep.
Reminds me of like Amber Alerts, but like the opposite.
Like you sign up, you join the Amber.
I don't know.
There's probably a different color.
Crimson Alert.
I don't know.
Network.
Amber was the name of a girl who was abducted.
Oh, that's why.
The Sparky Alert.
We'll pivot away from that though.
The Sparky Alert.
The Fido Alert.
Fido Alert.
There it is.
That's good.
Yeah.
Something like that.
And then you can upload your photo.
You're part of the network.
You know, and not everybody's posting like, oh, put it on.
What is it?
Fido Alert.
Now you got it.
This honestly seems like a feature more than a full-fledged app that something like an Instagram or a Nextdoor or something should just have.
And that's why I'm always thinking like, don't even make an app.
It's just a website where it has one button that says upload picture and there's nothing else to it.
You upload the picture of the dog.
It'll take care of the rest.
That's interesting.
Oh, what about like making it really easy to post on all these different sites?
Like Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, everything.
Like, you know, maybe not even on your behalf, but like on some other version of that.
Right.
Like this in localized and all that stuff.
Maybe it's like even a Facebook ad that's hyper local, you know, depending on how much money you want to spend.
Right.
Instead of doing the reward, you can just.
Seems like a nonprofit that could pay for the ads for you.
You know, you get donations and they pay for the ads.
Yeah.
Have you seen this dog?
Is that crazy?
Would you want to pay for like, I mean, I think you would write like Facebook ads to find your dog.
I'd throw 10 bucks at it.
Hyper local, like hyper local.
Right.
Facebook's targeting system for ads.
You could say, you know, only post to these four street corners.
Yeah, exactly.
I want it even for the laziest person who wouldn't even pick up the dog that they're walking by or helping anyway.
They're just like, this is the absolute minimum I could do.
I see this cat.
I take a picture of the cat and I keep on walking or something.
So you make a new website that has one button on it.
Upload a photo.
Maybe we'll say up and down.
With a capture.
We'll add a capture.
What percentage of things that you're going to get in are going to be photos, Scott?
You have fun trolling through those.
Yeah.
Be taking photos of your dog, Scott.
Uploading it to your own app.
Just for fun.
The trolls.
I wonder if that would work with like other things that are lost that like you misplaced and they're somewhere in your neighborhood.
Like maybe one of your neighbors borrowed something and you know they borrowed it and then it played like a game of telephone getting around your neighborhood like a shovel.
Or let's say that you lost like kids losing soccer balls or baseballs or something like that.
Right?
Lost my wallet.
Yeah.
That's a whole other thing.
Yeah.
I wonder if it would work.
I wonder if it would work for that too.
Like could you post.
So you're saying that you could post like what was like you found something.
But what if you could also post, hey, I lost this thing.
That's a good majority of what the websites are right now.
Yeah.
But the other problem is that there's like, you know, way too many of them.
And I was Googling around like how do I find this dog?
Oh my God.
There's like 19 different websites and half of them are from other states and other things.
Oh, yeah.
You have the network effects problem.
Yeah.
What if you, I mean, what if this was like a bounty hunting app but not like the dangerous kind?
Like, do you know what I mean?
Like you just have crazy bounties for like, I lost my wallet for about a year.
I had to buy a whole new one, cancel the credit cards.
It was like at the start of winter.
But like I probably would have done like $100.
I know the location, the tile.
I had my tile in my wallet, but I couldn't ring the bell thing.
I don't know.
Treasure hunters.
Yeah.
And now instead of you take the geocaching community and you apply it to a paid find this stuff in this general area thing.
Works for rings when you lose it at the beach.
Works for all that other stuff.
And now you have like a bounty network that's like search and find, lost and found my sweater, my hat, my hood.
I don't know.
And just, right?
Something like that.
And create like a paid geocaching, right?
Do they still exist?
Yeah.
I think so.
That's the thing.
Friend of the pod, Sander is still a big geocacher.
Yeah.
But what do you lose that's like expensive enough for like a bounty outside of a dog?
That still like isn't something where you post it and then someone just goes and takes it and now it's theirs.
You know what I mean?
Right.
You have to somehow tap into either altruism and people wanting to do the right thing or make it run passively in the background.
It's valuable to me, but not valuable to pawn.
Yeah.
True.
I wonder if you could sell like special dash cams whose sole purpose is to like find stolen cars.
Keep it up in your, connected to your car.
It's just always running and just always looking at different license plates and things going by and like, oh, that one, that's a stolen car.
Or license plates on the Amber Alert.
Yeah.
Oh, that's a great one.
I don't know how you convince people to put that in your car.
I mean, when those go out, they often say there was a blue pickup truck going eastbound on this time.
Keep your eyes out.
That's kind of what those Amber Alerts often say, right?
It just does it on its own.
Yeah.
Every car's got one.
You volunteer your car's backup camera to be just contributing to that network or whatever.
Whoa.
It's like, that's a whole different idea.
Surveillance state.
Yeah.
It's like, let's purposely, let's move towards 1984 as a community.
If your car had a checkbox in the settings that said, contribute my cameras to police.
Like, I don't know if I'd check it.
Now that I think about it.
So I, I dropped a phone into a lake a couple of months ago and it's gone.
And I hired a scuba diver and I went magnet fishing and it was a whole thing.
Yeah.
And no luck.
It's not worth that much, Leo.
I don't know if magnet fishing is good for a phone either.
Minus being on the bottom of a lake.
Well, it had a case on it that had the MagSafe ring.
And so I was like, maybe there's a chance and why not?
It'll just kind of be a fun, wouldn't that be a crazy story?
And otherwise I'm just entertained by the journey.
It's down at, uh, in Saugatuck.
So I was paddle boarding and I had like a five day old brand new phone on me.
The hockey stick shot it off the paddle board.
I had my phone cause I was taking adorable pictures of my children paddle boarding for the
first time and, and it was gone.
But if I could go to your cool message board thing and say, all right, like $400 bounty,
go, you know, here's where I know I was.
Here's the part of the lake I was in, et cetera, et cetera.
Dude, lost phone.
The saga is, yeah, right.
The saga is really long.
But, um, one step of that whole journey was after I lost it a couple of days later, I got
the email saying, Hey, it's Google.
Don't forget.
You can still buy accidental damage protection on that phone you just got.
And so I did.
And then I filed a claim and it was like, Oh, this doesn't include lost or stolen items.
Only damaged items.
It's like, no.
So I was out even more money.
I mean, that's massive water damage though.
So all I needed was any phone in my hand from the bottom of the lake, even if it was like
totally kaput and then I would have been good.
Right.
So did I miss my lesson?
Did I miss that?
You said you hired a scuba diver.
I did.
And then that guy got COVID and he's like, my other buddy's also a scuba diver.
I'll send him instead.
And the first guy would have had a magnet with him.
The second guy didn't, but there's probably other amateur scuba diverists who are looking
for a place to go and something fun to look for.
Right.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Where does one hire a scuba diver to go find a phone?
My coworker and friend of the pod, Steph.
I keep my name drama tonight.
Yeah, you did.
You said friend of the pod like four times.
I know.
She posted on a local, what we call Holland informed, a local like Facebook group of people
who just live in the area and said, I know someone who dropped a phone.
Anyone have any ideas?
And there were like three people in the comments who said, here's an idea.
I know a guy.
Here's a different guy.
You could ask.
Here's their phone number.
So it was all local networking.
It's awesome.
That's super cool.
It was kind of a fun conclusion to the saga, you know, like, you know what?
This will be an entertaining afternoon.
Let's hire a dude on Facebook to go troll around for an hour or two.
And he did.
He came with his tanks and gear and everything and put his little flag up.
That was a buoy bobbing in the water.
Diver below.
Didn't have any luck though.
Anyway, I don't know if we're keeping any of that.
That's fine.
If we're not, then how much does a scuba diver cost for an hour?
I think it was a hundred an hour.
Minimum of two hours.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
That's how you clean your boat, Scott, right?
It is.
Yeah.
I have a guy named Gary who just goes around in the yacht club and he asked me, hey, you
want me to wash the bottom of your boat?
And all these race people are like, hell yeah, here's 50 bucks.
That ring cam money treating you well with your boats and your yachts.
That ring cam money, man.
And my shitty ass boat.
Yachting.
All right, Paul, what idea have you brought us this week?
Yeah.
So this summer, I have an eight-year-old and she has a lot of friends in the neighborhood,
which we call the scooter squad because they're always riding scooters, especially in the summertime,
back and forth to each other's houses.
They're playing in the yard.
They're doing what all these kids in suburbia usually do in the summers and they all play
together and they all have a lot of fun and all this other stuff.
And they go from house to house and, you know, whatever.
But one of the things that ends up happening inevitably is that they leave doors open when
they come in, right?
So they leave the door to the mudroom that goes into the garage open or they leave the front
door open or they leave the slider open that goes out to the back patio deck and, you know,
all this other stuff in my house.
So my house had a lot of flies this summer and those mother effers are fast in the summer,
right?
You get into this time of year and they're super slow.
Like I could swat them probably with my pinky, but in the summertime, they're super fast.
They're super active.
I don't know how flies breed, but I would imagine that they're trying to breed.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going on.
It is the season.
I could never.
Yeah.
I could never have, I could never get access to the fly swatter fast enough.
I could never get a towel fast enough.
I could never grab, you know, I see a fly and I see them land and I'm like, I'm going to
get that son of a bee and I'm going to mess them up real good.
Mess them up.
Yeah.
So all these kids are leaving my damn doors open in the summer.
Flies are coming in and out of the house.
So my idea is that you can, um, we need like clothing sleeves or like a sleeve of your shirt
that turns into a fly swatter.
Like a lot.
Like, so like, think like either like Henry Cavill in the mission impossible movie where
he like reloads his arms before he punches.
Right.
In that one where he's like, and he does that thing.
Or in, uh, like Christian Bale's Batman where like they run an electric current through the
cloth and it becomes stiff.
Yeah.
Right.
So think like that.
But then you, you do that and your sleeve.
So like you could just like punch your sleeve out and it automatically turns solid into an object
that you could then just thwap right down, kill the fly, not have to worry about grabbing the fly swatter from the mudroom
or behind the broom closet or wherever it is, or trying to get a towel and whip it at the fly.
You automatically have it built into your sleeve and it is ready to go when you see that sucker
and you can just end his life in the most glorious way possible.
Um, I know just Wolverine claw fly swatter out.
That's exactly right.
But I think it fly swatting clothes.
I think the biggest thing is that it has to turn, like somehow there has to be a mechanism in there,
whether it be that electric current like Batman or whatever, where it turns stiff because otherwise
you're not going to be able to kill the fly.
So you got to have something that does that.
I don't know what that would be.
Um, it would get all the damn flies out of my house.
So maybe this is an elephant in the room and maybe this is just my brain only,
but main reason I don't go after flies with my sleeve is hygiene.
What, what do we do about fly guts and blood and gore all over our sleeves?
Oh, well, I mean, I would say that.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It's a warning.
Yeah.
It's like, it's like when the, like, yeah, when a dog pisses in its territory, it's like
you, you leave that blood, like you leave that set behind.
It's a warning to others.
This is, you do not belong here.
Stay away.
Um, or I think too, like if we've got the technology to stiffen clothing through kinetic energy,
we would certainly have it to like sanitize it afterwards.
Right.
Yeah.
Google has project was a project weave where they've got shirts that they sell where there's,
uh, capacitive sensors all along it.
So you can skip going to the next track by like running your finger along your sleeve.
Oh, that's why I was by double tapping your sleeve and stuff.
We're close, man.
We're close.
That's some Tony Stark stuff.
Wow.
I know.
That sounds like a cool, like.
Jaquard.
Even besides the flies.
I don't know if your flies like a euphemism for like your, your enemy, Paul, like a human
enemy.
It's not, but now it is.
I'm going to pepper spray.
Bar fight.
I mean, like, yeah.
You're at the bar.
You want a little self-defense.
You don't want to carry your gun with you.
Yeah.
I've got a weapon, a club ready to go.
I like it.
I mean, I think that might actually have some utility outside of just the common fly.
Every law enforcement agency in the country is perked up, man.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I'm almost wondering if you could do it without clothing though.
Like it, like it's a accessory, a bracelet or something that turns into a fly swatter on
there.
Cause I'm picturing you and you're right about in the winter, they're a lot slower, but in
the summer I'm probably not wearing long sleeves at the same time.
That's fair.
But if we had some kind of accessory to go for it.
Oh yeah.
Like the slap bracelets, right?
You get one of those.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah.
The fly swatter at the end.
It just recoil.
Every time the slap bracelet is on, it just recoils.
And then when you stretch it out, it turns into the fly swatter.
And I mean, because the alternative here is to teach a bunch of seven and eight year olds
how to close doors properly.
And that, that sure shit is not going to happen.
I can tell you that much.
Reinvent fashion is much easier.
Yeah.
That is, there's no way that they're going to learn how to do that.
Not anytime soon.
Have you ever played with the fly shotguns?
The salt shotguns?
I have family who has.
Never have.
Never held it.
No.
Does it work?
It's incredible.
We got one as a joke gift for Christmas last year and I love it.
Every time there's a bug of any kind in the house, I get so excited and I sprint into the
pantry.
I pull it off the wall and I chak chak.
And it just shoots a small amount of salt.
You just literally put table salt in the top and it just scatter blasts them and they go flying.
Does it kill them?
Yeah.
Instantly.
Or immobilize them?
Oh, really?
Oh, wow.
You might have to do a double tap for some of them, but they're on the ground after that
first shot.
Sure.
That does sound fun.
So it's like, it's salty, salty buckshot for.
Yeah.
For, for, uh, flying nuisances in your home.
Salty buckshot was my stripper name in common.
That was you?
That was me.
I want to Spitball that door thing one day, Paul.
Like how to keep doors shut.
How to keep a door.
Like, oh yeah.
I guess.
With children around.
My neighbor down the street and across the way has two elderly dogs and about every
three or four weeks, they're just wandering because they have two kids who just leave the
door open.
Oh no.
Hey, I found Ike again.
Sorry.
I like walk him over there.
Hey, it's your dog.
Oh, back door must've been left open.
They're so casual about it.
We're building a connection with Scott's app that are the, the photo upload, you know,
with your story there, Leo.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
I wish that there was a way, I mean like the, the only other thing that I think would work
to get people to, or to get little children to close the door is that like every time they
close it, it like puts a piece of candy in there or something like that.
Yeah.
Pavlovian.
A little dog treat.
Totally Pavlovian.
They just like, every time they close the door, they get a little treat.
Yeah.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Open shot.
Candy dispenser.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
I totally empathize with this freak.
How do you kill flies more conveniently?
I feel like the fly swatter needs to be like, it's, it's time.
It's like, it's kind of like Frisbee.
Like it's just all in the wrist.
Right.
I mean, you gotta, you gotta like swap it.
It feels good when you make contact, but it scares the heck out of my dogs and it is covered
with splatted guts and you gotta like clean it.
But you don't want to touch it to scrub it off.
It does need innovation.
I don't know how to make it better.
Dude, you know what?
Let's do this at night.
You know how all the flies go hit your TV when you start?
I think that's it.
You just put up a safe, like a safe non-killing thing.
It's just like a capture light.
Ooh, that's interesting.
I don't know.
There needs to be something.
The bug zapper, but captures.
But like one way in and it's just every night.
They have those.
Oh really?
They do?
Is that a thing?
Paul knows.
Yeah.
They look like a Glade plug-in and they just, you just like plug them in in your kitchen
or wherever and it emits like this blue light and they, I think there's like fly paper in
there.
They just get stuck.
That's incredible.
They say it's a more humane way to get rid of the flies.
And I'm like, I didn't know that we needed that, but thanks ASPCA.
How do we make it less humane?
Yeah.
I'm so glad that the ASPCA is sticking up for flies.
Glue paper is more humane than a quick and dirty splat.
I don't know.
Did you ever see like the Xbox Kinect with a high powered laser on a gimbal?
It's just like a one watt laser, but it can track mosquitoes as they go by and go beep.
It just shoots them out of the air.
What?
It's incredible.
Some guy did this years ago.
An automated 3D camera turret laser?
He just gets the X, Y, and Z.
You calculate where it is based on the picture that you have.
Are you kidding me?
Because you have two that you overlay.
And then you just shine a laser.
And because it's one watt, they just die.
What?
Oh my God.
That's so cool.
So have a couple of these automated turrets around your house, just picking them off as
they go by.
That's insane.
That's some Star Wars shit right there.
How does it not accidentally shoot people?
That's my question.
People.
Yeah.
This is some guy coded this with like an Arduino and an Xbox Kinect.
So.
Hope the room's empty.
I'm sure you could make a better version nowadays.
Shoot the dog.
I mean, AI, you could be like, only if, is this a picture of a fly?
Run it through a quick AI.
Looks at just one part of the image.
Says that is a fly at these coordinates.
Yes.
Or it just is the, it's like only pointed at the ceiling, basically.
No.
I want this shooting everywhere all the time.
All right.
Dude, imagine that on a farm.
It would just like kill every, like.
It's low powered too.
Yeah.
Put that on the back of a horse.
Like you just firing nonstop.
That's a great idea.
Oh, right.
You know.
Saddles with built in fly lasers.
Yeah.
The smart saddle.
Smart saddle.
There you go.
Wow.
And here we are like Paul's inconvenience at his home.
Yes.
Trying to save a horse's ass.
I guess what's the difference?
Your house is basically a barn, Paul.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
Oh, yeah.
All right, Russell.
What do you got for us?
All right.
So it's a love corner idea.
So I have, as you guys, fellow listeners, many listeners, the pot.
This is my dating app idea that I will never launch because I'm a married man.
And that just would seem a conflict of interest.
Legally not allowed to.
You signed it in your marriage.
It's a conflict of interest.
That's right.
Honey, I will be with you forever.
I promise to never launch a dating app.
But look at these profile matches I'm getting on this app while I test this.
Totally fine.
No.
But here's the idea.
So, okay.
What if for this dating app idea, you matched with your celebrity doppelganger?
So I think it's really hard to, or not doppelganger, like your celebrity crush, we'll say.
So you pick your celebrity crushes, okay?
Or who you want to meet with.
And so, for example, are you more of an Aubrey Plaza guy or are you more of a Jessica Day guy?
You know, which, like, completely different ends of the spectrum.
But you now, like, when you sign up for the app, you have to fill out a questionnaire and you match yourself.
Like, the app matches you with a celebrity doppelganger, right?
Because you're like, oh, this is like Nick Miller from the, you know, from New Girl.
Like, sure, he kind of looks a little weird, but, like, so does Nick Miller.
So, shoot, maybe I'd give him a shot.
You know?
I think there's, like, I think, yeah, that's it.
You basically are trying to, you identify yourself and the app identifies you as, like, a set of celebrity personalities.
And because most people can relate to that celebrity personality or actual person, they can give them an extra little bit of grace.
When they look at him, right?
Because, like, there are a lot of ugly people on, let's do Scrubs, okay?
What's his name?
JD?
Is that his name?
The guy?
Zach Braff.
You're not going to be like, damn, I don't know.
I don't know, man.
He was with Florence Pugh for a really long time.
Oh, it's true.
I stand corrected, probably.
So.
Yeah.
Maybe a different guy.
I don't know.
All I have to say is.
Okay, so this isn't me just, like, swiping and being like, I'm hoping I'm going to get DiCaprio or Johnny Depp.
And then you finally meet them in person.
You get to see how they compare.
You're, like, you're looking at the profile, but you're knowing, you're taking it from the lens of that celebrity perspective of who you're looking for.
Or you filter by celebrity, like, options.
Personality type?
Yeah.
So.
Huh.
Like, somebody could be like, I'm looking for a Nick Miller type of guy.
Yes.
Right?
Or, yeah.
Or Jake Johnson, the actor.
Yeah.
Two different personality types, I'd say.
Right?
Jake Johnson versus, maybe they're more similar than they're not.
But, like, that's what it would be.
Aubrey Plaza is, like, crazy weird.
But, like, if that's your type, like, match to your type based on your celebrity personality.
Not just, like, that way when you go on your date, you're not, like, meeting with the other end of the spectrum of Aubrey Plaza.
I don't know what that is.
Yeah.
The actual Aubrey Plaza.
I want the Parks and Rec version.
It does give you something to talk about.
So how are you, like, in Aubrey Plaza?
Yeah.
That's true.
So the main problem, the core issue that you're trying to solve here is that some dating apps don't really give you a quick summation.
This is, like, a way to make something relatable.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is an old idea when I, this was mid-baby pregnancy idea.
But I remember a little bit more now.
Okay.
Basically, it's hard to find your type, right?
Your type.
You can find your type on TV.
You can find your type by looking and watching all these TV shows.
And it's more universal than saying, oh, I like this type of person, a bubbly, whatever type of person.
You can actually match that with a personality that's more universal than just, you know, quiet introvert.
No, this is Pam Beasley from The Office, right?
Yeah.
I like Pam's not, I don't know, Megan Fox's.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's just not my type.
Whatever.
Like, I'm sure there are plenty of Megan Fox's out there for people, but not for me.
Like, that would be, like, the initial.
Yeah.
So, that's it.
That's the approach.
That's really good.
To abstract away the, like, the personality traits into instead, like, a relatable card that summarizes what you're looking for.
Okay.
Do you then yourself get assigned a, like, celebrity persona?
Yeah.
I just want to take the test.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
For real.
Yep.
Who am I?
That's how we get our first users.
We just get a bunch of married men to fill out this test.
It's basically, like, mid-2000s BuzzFeed.
What celebrity are you?
Which Seinfeld character are you?
Yeah.
And then we have all these wives now being like, what the hell is this happening?
They do it, too.
And they're like, oh, do we even match each other?
And now we have this viral campaign of, no, that's, but.
There you go.
Yeah.
He's such a Ross.
Yeah.
Right.
Such a, can you, oh, gosh.
What if you matched yourself with, like, celebrities you do not want to be?
Like, oh.
That's what I was just thinking.
Right.
Change your personality.
I don't know what to tell you.
Like.
Yeah.
Dwight Schrute.
What?
Yeah.
Aw, man.
Ted Mosby, one of the worst.
Yeah, right.
The most wet blanket character in all of TV history.
At least likable.
Yeah.
There it is.
There was a reason why all those BuzzFeed things caught on.
People wanted to know.
It is easy to be.
Pretend you're somebody else.
It's an easily viral thing, right?
Like you.
Yeah.
It's a lens that everyone can understand to see the world.
Oh, I'm such a, whatever, this character.
So using that as, like, a way to quickly convey all the stuff that a dating app needs to convey
about a person.
That's a great idea.
And, you know, after you're done with the date, you can always, like, set a realignment.
Sure.
Like, oh, this guy thought he was Brad Pitt in Fight Club, and now he's more like Dwight.
Steve Carell.
Yeah.
I don't even know what a celebrity doppelganger I'd want to aspire to be.
It'd be interesting if the app told you, but I feel like you probably would have more
accurate listings of who is what if you didn't let the app say.
Like, if someone gets that they are Dwight, they're going to delete the app.
And you know what?
Maybe that's not a bad idea.
Yeah, well.
To some extent.
Like, you're just.
You don't want them on there.
Well, it's just not.
I hate to say it, but, like, there's dating apps are, like, only successful for certain
types of people.
And, unfortunately, the Dwight streets of the world would never make it on a dating app.
Unless you find a bunch of Angelas on the dating app.
That's right.
That is true.
Stand corrected.
Maybe there's, like, a bonus feature, a special mode where you unlock the, not only are you
compatible across this, but you actually were a celebrity dating couple in the show that
you're sourcing this from.
The front end, it knows you're.
Yeah.
The front end shows you.
Yeah, you're a Brad Pitt, for sure.
Back end, it knows you're Dwight.
Are you attracted to power?
Dwight streets is your man.
All right, Leo.
What do you got for us this week?
All right.
So, I learned recently that my boss and friend had been trying to pioneer line painting robot
for their Formula SAE course, where you would take a Roomba-type thing, you set it down in
an empty parking lot, you go to the app and say, I want it to draw a racetrack that looks
like this.
And it goes around and paints, or drops flower, or drops markers, or somehow denotes autonomously
hey, here's a bunch of things to place on this empty parking lot to make it into a racetrack.
Great idea.
I also learned this week that that already exists in the form of line painting robots that fields,
like professional sports places use.
They basically set loose a little Roomba that goes around and draws the lines on fields and
courts and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
I would love something like that.
This started as Roomba Zamboni, but I want to pivot a little bit, where I go to lake,
or pond and backyard, or local pool that's closed in the winter, or whatever, and I drop my little
autonomous robot, and it scrapes the ice and makes it skatable and all that.
Maybe even runs regularly.
But also, you could fire up the app, and it tests for how thick the ice is, and it draws
a bunch of regulation hockey-sized lines all over.
Place your net here.
So it goes all around, and you can imagine the interface of dragging and dropping a field
on top of a lake on your app Go, and it just starts humming around and preparing the ice.
I feel like there's a lot of neighborhoods that are built around ponds that don't get used in the winter,
or there's a house in the suburban woods, where there's some pond back there that you could go through
the work of setting it up in the winter to be an ice rink.
Sometimes there's the cool dad who does it, but it's so much work.
You could go to the lake that, I mean, we live in a Great Lakes state, but there's all kinds of
states around this beautiful United States that have little lakes and stuff that just don't get used
in the winter.
And if I could take my little robot, come back in an hour, and it's prepared a little
cleared-off spot to make an ice rink, and it's tested to make sure that it's safe to do so,
I think that'd be sick.
So it's both Zamboni-ing and somehow testing ice, and maybe also drawing lines.
That's a lot of things to ask of this MVP.
I want to add one more to the MVP.
Yes, please do.
I just want it to be able to draw things, too.
I can be like, put it on a lake and just draw this picture onto the lake.
What kind of things do you want to draw on the lake, Scott?
I don't know.
We'll let the community make use of that.
But it's like your little mini oasis, the sand guy.
Put a marble in a giant thing of sand, and it draws cool shapes.
Let's do that on a grand scale.
That'd be fun.
Even on a big, empty, rolling field of pristine snow, you drop your little robot, and it draws
some art into the snow by driving around for a while.
In the summer, you can put it in the cornfield and make some crop circles.
If Canadians are listening to this podcast, Leo, we're going to blow up.
That's it.
Yeah.
Every Canadian out there, right?
I have a coworker who every year takes their backyard pond and does the hockey thing.
They do hockey, but they turn it into a skating rink.
It's so much work, and it seems like the kind of thing that a robot could automate some of.
Clearing it off, leveling it, making it so that the ice on there is not rough, where it's
like, you know, if it just snows and kind of freezes haphazardly, it's not great skating
snow.
You need to, like, actually put down a layer of water.
So he's hosing it down every couple of hours.
I know that some people will do that with tarps and stuff in their backyards, too.
It seems like the kind of thing you should be able to just, like, make a robot do.
It does.
Okay, so question.
Does the robot freeze the water as it's doing it, or are you relying on atmospheric conditions
to maintain?
Yeah, on a hot July day.
Freeze the lake.
Go.
Yeah, I think you need the latter, but I think Zambonis, like, lay down a layer of hot water.
So it could even be a little heater and scraper and, you know, sand it down kind of situation.
It doesn't necessarily need to be putting fresh water from a tank or something like that.
It can use what it scoops up, you know?
Yeah.
I just know that it, I mean, it depends on how long you want this thing to take, right?
Like, because it takes a really long time for lakes to freeze.
Like, some of them aren't fully frozen until, what, February?
But when do you know?
Like, you're supposed to, I guess, drill a core sample?
Or, like...
Yeah.
How am I supposed to know I can go skate on that?
And if so, is it going to be a good experience?
If I could, in the morning, drop my little Roomba guy off and then by after work in the
evening know, you know, or, like, Friday night to Saturday morning or something, hey, this
is safe and we made a little couple hundred square foot for you to go ham on.
Yeah.
Point a little ultrasonic sensor towards the ice and it could tell you the depth of...
Yeah.
Way better than listening to those quacks at the DNR.
That's right.
What do they know?
Exactly.
It's always astounding to me when you see ice fisherman tents out there.
You're like, oh, man, they're so far out and it's so early.
Are you sure?
But they probably know better than I would.
Yeah.
Until I get my robot.
I've gone with my father-in-law a bunch of times and it's really fun.
It does sound fun.
But, I mean, nowadays you can, like, you can set up an ice hut or, like, an ice fishing
hut and it's like a mini house.
I mean, you can have so many things in there.
Heaters and grills and food and...
Can't you, like, Amazon Prime an A-frame house now, like, ready to go for, like, 15 grand?
Drop one of those on the ice next day.
Two days shipping.
Yeah.
Getting it off.
Getting it off of the ice in time for...
Just let it sink.
Springtime is going to be a bitch.
Another next year.
It's a reef.
Capitalism.
It's a reef.
It's basically ecologically friendly.
That's amazing.
Two-stall garage.
Four-bedroom.
Two-bath.
Yeah.
Beautiful home on the lake.
On the lake.
Airbnb a few times, you make your money back.
Like, home.
Right?
Yeah.
Totally.
You won't believe the water feature on this home.
Lake front property.
That's right.
There's a Mitch Hedberg joke about that where he's like, I just want to live on the lake.
Forget lake front.
I want to be lake on.
Leo, I just found...
It reminded me, too, like a little Roomba robot.
I just found out that there are Roomba robots that cut your lawn.
Yeah.
They were all over Norway.
We went in 2018 and they were...
Every hotel, every, like, cut...
These huge rolling hills had little yellow back and forth robots.
You can get one for pretty cheap nowadays for your backyard.
Yeah.
I'm going to need to do that so my wife doesn't yell at me for taking two and a half hours
to mow the lawn.
It's like under a grand now to get one that just does it all summer.
You just set a little base station.
How those things can navigate and get all the little hills and cracks and stuff of your yard,
I don't understand, but it's so accessible.
If it could mulch or pick up leaves.
I'd be all over that.
I'm sure that if that doesn't exist, that's going to be an attachment.
Put a little trailer hitch on the back.
For a grand, that, like, covers the riding mower way over.
Those riding mowers, like, three or four grand.
I mean, there are some that are a lot more than that, but yeah, I think a robot mower for,
like, the entry-level one are in the mid-hundreds now.
Wow.
Yeah, you get a John...
Like, if you get a John Deere, like, and your mowing deck is anywhere beyond, like, 24 inches,
you're paying, like, $3,500 easy.
And it doesn't need to be, like, a big mower deck, because it can run all day for all I care.
It goes out, doesn't get it.
Goes back, recharges it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Just buy a goat.
You could do that, too.
No maintenance.
Dude, so, like, you did the hockey thing, right?
But what about, like, just regular fields?
Like, what if you did this for, like, soccer fields?
Well, I guess that the cones do well.
You don't need a whole...
Cones are good.
That does exist, but it's very, like, this is the predetermined route, and it costs a lot
of money, and it's the professional stadium that needs to repaint the logo in the middle
and all that stuff.
It does seem like...
Yeah, I agree.
Where I could, like, take my little Roomba-sized thing, drop it down, say, I want a regulation
lacrosse field right here.
Drag it on the map, or, like, put two cones on the corners down and say go, and it just
starts to putz around for 30 minutes and spray paints straight down, you know?
Yeah.
It'd be so fun.
Or, like, you know, if you want to do this in, like, public fields, it could be chalk paint,
and then it washes away.
Sure.
And now you have, like...
Oh, yeah.
You create, like, a really cool experience, right?
All of a sudden by...
To your point, like, what if you had, like, a regulation logo in the middle?
That you put out there?
You just make it feel really professional for very little effort, right?
That would be really neat.
There could be, like, a user-submitted marketplace for your designs for, like, here's the Quidditch
court.
Oh, that's so fun.
Or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like, people are designing their own little courts that you can then...
It's like 3D printing, but 2D and huge.
I'm trying to think of the simplest possible MVP of it, and I keep coming back to, could you
just take a drone, any old drone, map it out to be like, hey, these are the corners, or
these are the spots I need to mark.
Have it fly over and drop something very simple, and you can either put a cone on top of it,
or the drone could bring the cone.
Who knows?
Like, those little cheap plastic soccer ones.
And it just creates your basic outline of it.
And we'll add on from there.
A basic couple hundred dollar off-the-shelf drone has really, really accurate GP.
It could probably just have a little cone dispenser, the basket that hangs underneath it, and drops
them every few feet.
Like you said, chalk or sand, it just marks the spot and moves on to the next.
You get a perfectly sized whatever.
A cone drone.
Cone drone.
Yeah.
It doesn't need to fly.
It could just have big tire treads and putts around.
I know, you always want it to be something that flies.
Flying long-over.
That's what I'm thinking.
Flying Zamboni.
Yeah.
He scoops a little, flies away.
And the battery lasts four minutes.
Not if it's, I mean, unless it's controlled by the flux capacitor, then you can just go all
day.
If I don't have to worry about energy, then energy's not a problem.
A couple extra gigawatts.
I think it should be gas-powered.
You set down this big-ass thing.
Hurr.
It just putzes around.
Big smokestack.
It's a blend of old and new technology.
Autonomous driving, but coal-fired.
I think this would be really cool for, like, drill lines.
So, like, let's say you're running a sports team, and you want to draw lines in the actual
field for drills.
Not actually playing games or scrimmaging.
You want to do, like, some unique pattern on the ground to...
Football plays!
You got your X's and O's on the chalkboard, but you're actually putting them, like, over
here is where you're going to go to, wide receiver.
And the thing goes around and draws them.
That's fun.
Yeah.
Or, like, put marks on the ground for you to, yeah, run those plays.
Or, like, you got to hit this point at this time every time.
And it literally measures...
You create a whole professional athlete version of that, right?
Yeah.
You draw a one, two, and a three, and you tell the player, you got to be at spot number two
by seven seconds into this play.
Start the clock.
Yeah.
That's great.
You can even do different sports that no one's ever heard of.
Like, just like, yeah.
Here's the line pattern for this new sport that I invented.
Now we're getting weird with it, but...
There's a park that's near us that has a built-in equipment for...
What is it called?
Gaggleball?
Gaga.
Gagaball.
Which is, like, a hexagon or an octagon ring that you put dodgeballs in, and there's a rules
plaque on it, but it's, like, part of the playground.
I feel like there's a whole, like, I'm Joe Schmo, and I invented a weird game, and here's a
marketplace now where I can put this out there.
You've put the rules set and the field design into this app, and then the robot goes around,
and anyone can replicate it in.
They have Gagaball at my daughter's school, and I have no idea what it is.
It's kind of like dodgeball.
You start on the edge.
You're trying to, like, swat at each other.
I don't get it either.
Yeah.
When I was in high school, the gym coach was, like, the archetype of cartoon gym coach, the
overweight old guy who, like, yeah.
Everything that you remember, his name was Mr. Waitle, and he invented Waitle Ball, which
was a game that you played in the wrestling room, in the padded room.
It had a bowling pin, and it was kind of like dodgeball, but there was a goalie.
It was a whole thing, right?
But there's probably a lot of people out there who have their weird game like Waitle Ball that's
just sitting in their brain.
They play it at their friend's group or their church youth group or their once-a-year guy's
trip or whatever it is.
It'd be cool to, like, have a marketplace for those ideas.
Kelvin Ball.
Then my little spray-painting robot executes it so anyone else can make it.
That's right.
Flonkerton from the office.
From the Office Olympics.
Exactly.
Well, dear listener, if you're putting on the cleats to go play Waitle Ball or Flonkerton
and you're finishing up this episode in your headphones, we hope you enjoyed yourself.
Thank you very much for listening.
And thank you so much, Paul, for joining us.
Oh, man.
Thank you.
This was a blast.
This was really fun.
Well, I can't wait to see what else is in your book.
Oh, thanks, man.
This was fun.
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