I'm Scott.
I'm Russell.
I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball.
Where three nostalgic nerds and so many guests over the last two years have emptied our heads
of startup and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in there so everyone out there
can have them for free.
that we have said has been yours to keep. And this week we're on a summer hiatus and we have a lot of
listeners to the show that are new who may not have heard some of our earlier stuff and we've
had some really great ideas over the last two years. So we wanted to go maybe back into the
archives and pick some of our favorites. So we've thrown together a little best of for you this week.
So kicking it off first, we had an all-time favorite of the three of ours, author, technologist,
and general enthusiast for tech culture, Chase Roberts on the show, where he
pitched us Netflix for Legos.
All right, Chase, what have you brought to us this week?
Um, so I pitched this one in an email actually, uh, a couple of weeks ago.
Um, for my newsletter, just people who have bought my book.
Um, and that was a Netflix for Legos.
So basically my kids, like they'll put together a Lego set and then
basically just goes in the bin with all the other Legos.
And we've got, I mean, I said a bin,
I've got like three of these huge bins filled with Legos.
And like, we have more than enough for free building.
And my kids are terrible at free building anyway,
and never do it.
But it's like, it just feels like such a waste
to spend $100 on a new Lego set, and they do it once,
and then it just goes in the bin forever.
And so I was like, what if I could just rent the Lego set,
they could put it together, I could send it back,
and they could send it on to another kid, right?
So that's idea number one.
- That's great.
- Oh, Lego library.
- Like a Lego library.
And
I think some
libraries might even have Legos.
Mine doesn't.
But I think, I don't know, I think it's a cool idea.
There's some issues with, like,
you gotta figure out shipping,
'cause you start shipping Lego sets back and forth.
If you get
people on subscription
and they're doing
two or three a month,
shipping adds up.
Yeah, and then counting pieces.
I feel like that's a solvable problem.
We could build some robots to count pieces.
There's some YouTube videos of people.
- When it gets back and if it's off by X amount,
then pull it open and count the
pieces or
something.
- Yeah.
- Right, visual learning, right?
That's the visual eye camera thing.
- Yeah.
- But those are solvable issues.
- Yes.
- Those are fun problems.
- And
if you're making the service,
you don't have to use like the official Harry Potter set
with all of its whack pieces.
You could make your own sets that are a little more basic
and easy to keep track of with, you know,
all the
basic parts.
You have your own plane set that your Netflix for Legos
has designed with, you
know exactly
it's the same
like 50 pieces across the entire thing,
so you get the economies of scale there.
- Yeah. - Whoa.
- And there are some people who've done similar things.
I think there's somebody in like the UK
that's doing rent Lego stuff.
I don't know, I think it's a fun idea.
Like I'd sign up and do it.
- Dude, I could Spitball that for like,
what Leo, you just said.
- I know,
like
Chase, you
could totally,
I think you said this, what if you took or scanned
all the Legos in your
library
and just open source Lego creations, right?
And so now people know
your inventory
and now your subscription, Netflix style,
is not getting new boxes but taking your current Lego set
and applying it to new designs,
creator community, or--
It just auto generates the instructions based upon what you have in front of you.
So there's actually an app that does this.
I think it's called Brickit.
And
you spread out all your Legos on the carpet and then you like hold it up and
it, it's supposed to scan your Legos and inventory and then tell you what you can
build.
In theory, it's really awesome.
I haven't used it in a while, but I tried using it like two years ago and I scanned
probably like 200 pieces and then it kicked back and it was like,
you can use 20 of your pieces to build this bird. And I was
like,
well, that's not exciting.
So the execution wasn't quite there when I tested it.
It's probably better now, but yeah,
like the community, there's a lot of people in the Lego space, um,
working on cool ideas
like this.
Peer to peer, like, Hey, you and the guy across town who has,
it's more age
kids has,
if you work together, you could build this mega robot,
but you only have half the pieces
and so do they have the other half.
It's a dating
app, but for Legos.
(laughing)
Yikes.
No, it could be good what you were saying though,
like if you could inventory all of your Legos
and do it correctly, you know,
and then like upload it somewhere
and then we could send you designs,
that'd be cool for sure.
Or if you could just somehow say like,
I know I've bought this Lego set in the past,
I've bought this Lego set in the past,
like I know I have these pieces.
And just do it that way.
Like maybe that's the way to do it.
And then it's like, oh yeah, build the mega robot
from these 20 sets that you said you already, that you have.
- And Lego themselves have the whole ideas forge thing
where people submit designs that they've created
that they want Lego to make a set for.
So clearly there's like a well of people
who are creative with designing cool new things
that are like, they have,
here's what you can make with these parts, right?
That inspiration is out there.
I'm not the kind of person who can look at a pile
and say, this is gonna be great as a robot,
but there's clearly a lot of people out there who are.
I'd love to like get connected with them, yeah.
- That's cool.
- We were so fortunate back in episode 22
to have Rebecca, our friend of all three of ours,
pitch the idea of a bone conducting hearing aid.
All right, Rebecca, welcome and let's hear it.
What's your Spitball idea of the day?
- Okay, so I've always been really interested
in like sensory substitution or sensory expansion.
I came to the States when I was two and I'm partially deaf,
so I have a hearing aid in my right ear
and it's not from the auditory nerve,
which means I don't have brain damage,
so I can still pick up sounds through vibration,
but it just needs to be amplified.
It's basically a mechanical issue.
So my eardrum is static.
Usually an eardrum is really dynamic
and with sound waves, it flexes
and then translates those waves into sound in your brain.
Mine's damaged, so it doesn't actually flex.
There's a lot of scar tissue on it.
And throughout the years, like hearing aids,
functionally, if I took it out right now,
it almost looks like a little tiny satellite
that can go right into the ear.
So I take it out when I work out, I do hot yoga.
So it's like, I feel like they're tasting and everything
And all of the little electrical components are pretty delicate.
And I was on a plane one time and I saw this guy.
He had these totally encased silicone earphones that actually sat above his ears like a cochlear
implant would.
They're called Shox.
I think they're like 200 bucks.
And they're waterproof and it seems like such a better feature for a hearing aid.
So when I went to my audiologist, I was like, "Do you have anything that's like a cochlear
implant, but it's like just single and I don't actually have to have a hole drilled in my
head that I could use because they, I, I, he let me try them on and they were awesome.
The sound came through really crisp and clear and I have to like stick something in my ear
and have it sit like on top. I don't have, I wouldn't have to take it out when I exercise.
It's like the shock absorbent properties of whatever the shocks were made out of. Plus
an actual hearing aid that's like a cochlear implant that sits above the ear instead of
piping something directly into the ear canal. And it's, yeah, more user-friendly for exercising.
I think you could probably even swim in it. So
yeah.
So once again, I have a pair of the Aftershocks, the running version, so they're not
totally
waterproof,
but they're sweatproof and stuff. And they're great. I use them because they sit
on top of my ear, like you said, and they're bone conducting, and you don't have your ear
occluded so you can still hear traffic.
And when I'm commuting via bike or I ride a one wheel, I can still hear traffic and
car horns and things around me without occluding, you know, and blocking out the world.
They're also great for wearing around the office.
You have your podcast or music in or whatever, and if somebody says, "Hey, come here for
a second," you can still hear what's going on around you.
They're great.
They don't sound super great, but they'd be great for an amplification of in-room audio
for sure.
And you're saying that this doesn't exist as a hearing aid right now?
That is crazy.
Your options for the bone actually is for a cochlear implant.
That's it?
That's ancient technology now, right?
I feel like they've been doing that for a long time.
I guess it's like
2024.
They haven't fixed that?
My thing is like, we can literally send shit to Mars,
and we can't come up with better things
that like go on our bodies, that it makes me feel crazy.
- And the Aftershocks
that I have,
have a microphone in them for phone calls, for Bluetooth.
But they just don't pipe the microphone that's in them
into the speaker that's on them.
- Wait, what?
Like there's a separate microphone
to it?
- You're 99
.9% of the way there.
- Totally, I feel like you just do
a steady change.
- They're headphones.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, they're headphones that have a microphone,
So you can take a phone call, right?
Like any, most Bluetooth headphones have,
but there's no way to like turn on,
make the microphone pick up what's in the room
and make that sound louder in the headphone.
It only can pipe the sound to the phone call,
to the phone, you know?
- No, no, I'm confused as to why this doesn't exist.
This seems like very doable and clearly useful.
- Without Googling it, AfterShokz,
I think,
makes a version that's two independent ones too.
So we're like 99.99% of
the way there.
- You just need to call
their
customer service line.
- Should
we not air this episode?
- Could you please turn on the microphone?
- Yeah.
- So the other piece of it is too,
like for people who are profoundly deaf,
like I still have hearing in my left ear
and I'm not profoundly deaf, just partially.
I feel like there's options for vibrations
to be able to be translated in different parts of your body.
So maybe you can't, your auditory nerve is broken,
but I've seen things like wristwatches
or like whole chess pieces that people put on
like smaller children to translate sound waves
or vibrations and correlate it to certain sounds
like certain pitches and the sound of a dog
that can help round out
the way that you
hear
'cause your brain is just perceiving these sound waves.
And so I feel like there's some kind of in-between there
between like an over the ear hearing aid
and that vibrational piece that people are like strapping
all over their body.
But I don't know how any of the
science pieces
of it work, but.
Yeah, you just need an equalizer, so you make your bass more loud
if you can't pick that up naturally as well or vice versa.
I think that most traditional
hearing aids themselves do filter out.
Like I know that my pair of I think it's Pixel Buds or Sony earbuds
or AirPods all have active noise cancelling
where you can say only let the voices through
but the rest of the sound not.
And AI is getting really, really good at real time,
like only let certain frequencies through.
So if you had a personalized profile
of what frequencies you can and cannot pick up naturally,
then you just boost what you're not able to pick up.
And you like, it's your own real
world EQ
and you normalize it yourself.
That's so
good.
- Can I tune out certain voices of certain people
and just be like,
(laughing)
this person talk ever.
I'm sorry, I can't. I can't hear you. You're on
mute. Sorry,
I put you on mute.
You, a person.
Real life mute. Isn't there a black mirror about that? Somebody gets like
shunned from
society so they're blacked out and you can't see or hear them and they're just like
a blur
because they were committed to crime or something? That's gonna be this show. It's like that. When
we
we get famous, you know, people are gonna be muting us.
(laughs)
Full
kids.
- IRL blocked.
(laughs)
- I wanna, I guess like imagine,
thinking of concerts, right?
You can't, you wanna hear the concert,
but you wanna talk to your friend
and you don't wanna scream, like, or you're at a bar
and now you're just, everybody's talking
and now you can have a normal voice conversation
and not yell at
each other because you have
this like,
bone, you still have the bar experience with,
but you can isolate voices or.
Yeah,
like it's maybe more magnify rather than like isolate because you still want to hear the outside sound
But you want to magnify in a specific voice
So aftershock should just or whatever we create a version like this
That's just like a setting that allows you to have normal conversation with people in loud places
simple, right
Rebecca this is one of those ideas that's making me angry that it's like doesn't exist because it's we're so close as a society
Aftershocks only makes the kind that you're talking about
where
they wrap all the way around
and it's one big wrap
around earbud.
There is no one that I've seen that's two from them,
but other brands have some like bone conducting ones.
So basically you just want to like take one of the two
pair of earbuds that bone conducts and stick it on the side
that you are more deaf in and crank up the volume
from the
mic that's on it.
Yeah, totally.
- And I feel like anything in age tech,
most deaf patients are older.
I feel like there's a silver tsunami coming
and we have to figure some of this stuff out
and then people like me will benefit greatly.
- Yeah.
- Hearing aids were recently opened up
for over-the-counter administration,
which hopefully will spur some innovation in this market
because they've been restricted by,
you need to go to an audiologist,
you need to have a prescription and stuff for
decades.
- What's crazy is it's not covered by insurance either.
- What? - That's nuts.
- Yeah, they're only four grand.
- Man, this country sucks.
- And they're not covered by insurance.
- Four grand, is that what you just said?
- And it's not covered by insurance.
- Man, how long do they last?
- I mean, you can like 15 years, 10 years,
but like the tech gets
better all
the time.
- Wow, I guess like, is that its own insurance?
It's like vision, maybe that's why.
Like, I guess people are walking around blind all the time.
I just don't understand why that's not covered by insurance.
It's okay if they're blind, you know,
they gotta pay for vision insurance,
not healthy, it's not for their health.
- Or dental, like,
yeah,
you're covered
except for the teeth, like what?
- That's not critical to your health.
- How is that not health?
This country makes no sense.
Yeah, it sucks that they're $200
for a really good pair of Bluetooth earbuds,
which do a lot more than a hearing aid,
but then a hearing aid unit itself is thousands and
thousands.
- Totally a racket.
- Hopefully that's being fixed soon.
- Like my urgency here is I'm not getting more hearing.
So the deafer I get, so somebody out there listening,
make me an on the bone hearing aid.
- Mark, it's there.
- You said that you do have a little bit of sensitivity
in the one
ear, right?
- On the right ear, I'm partially deaf, yeah, yep.
- Do you have, partially, okay.
Have you ever tried putting in one Bluetooth earbud
and just cranking up the pass through?
- No.
- Really, really loud?
- No.
- That'd be interesting to do
as a little experiment.
- Probably just
every noise though, right?
You can get-- well, I mean, like, AirPods and Sonys,
you can say only let voices through and stuff.
So that would be an interesting thing.
Everybody would be different listening to this.
Yeah.
Yeah, because they tune them.
Like, when you
go to an audiologist,
based off of the frequencies that you can hear--
and lower
sounds are much
harder for me to hear.
So they-- like, I'll take it out if I go to a concert,
or mine's tuned to pick up lower frequencies.
So male voices, if I'm not looking at you
and kind of watching your mouth, I
I can miss like a third of a
conversation.
- Three white married 30 somethings
on a podcast, for example.
(laughing)
- You're piped like directly in,
so.
- Wish you'd
have crank it up
guys,
for us.
(laughing)
Yeah, I feel like there's other applications too
that it's not like, it's a benefit
to those of hard of hearing, but like, I don't know.
I wonder if the isolation thing is really important
in other scenarios or, I don't know.
It just seems like there's a lot of other use cases and I'm curious what our listeners are going to come up with, you know
Yeah, like the bar scenario. I mean even dinner in our restaurant during like a
Work event or any type of social gathering. There's like tons of ambient noise that's happening all the time
And there's like a like a buzz that's always there in the background. You have to really pick out
tonalities so feel like if that tech improved or became more accessible it benefit multiple venues
yeah actively canceling out just the TV at the bar or
Just the
yeah,
you don't want man. I wish I could open an app and it would show me
Here's the four different things that we're detecting around you that are the category of sound and which ones do you want to just turn?
Off TV
at the bar. You're on a plane crying, baby
That would be incredible.
Yeah.
Or like a concert again.
You want to listen to the band and not like the people--
or you want to enhance the audio, get clearer
audio.
And--
But turn off the screaming drunk guy that's one row ahead of you.
Yes.
Who's singing
along with it.
Yeah.
Well, if it's on
the bone, you'll be able to turn off,
I think, as many voices, right?
You'd be only--
well, I don't know, I guess.
Oh, maybe
you--
- Whatever your input is, process the input
and
determine
your output.
- But the TV's at a bar.
That was, yeah, Leo.
All right, it's less weird, put something in your ear,
but now I can listen to this, yeah, this TV, that's great.
- I've used active noise canceling headphones
in one form or another for many years,
and it's still novel every time to turn on
the noise canceling and have the (makes noise)
sound where it just
sort of turns off
the--
I didn't even realize there was an air conditioner running in this room, but
yeah, that's way better.
Feels good.
Every pair of active noise cancelling headphones I've ever owned has a microphone on them
because they have to, to, like, cancel out the wave of the sound that it's around.
Just frickin' pipe that in but louder and boom, that is, that is ear enhancement. Dang.
Rebecca, you're saying there's devices that someone who can put, like, around their waist or something
that is able to translate sounds into vibrations?
Or like your wrist, you said?
- So it gives like electromagnetic pulses,
which that's all your brain is using to convert into sound,
'cause your brain doesn't see
and your brain doesn't actually hear.
Just takes in these electromagnetic waves.
So basically, these devices, there's,
I think the smaller, or like for children,
it's an actual chest band,
and then for adults, there's like a wristwatch.
And it takes a little bit for your brain to be able to kind of learn how to hear through the pulses.
But basically it'll, I don't know how they tune it, but then they have you wear this for a couple of days and you're able to pick up like, um, certain words because of the way that your brain is starting to train on the vibration.
That's amazing.
And I mean, there's major implications for sensory, like substitution or sensory expansion.
like, think Google lens even, or,
or what were the glasses that came up?
Yeah,
totally.
Oh, like, oh, so I was at South by Southwest and there's this VR set.
And the only thing it plays is like these K-pop dancers who are
coming like really close to you.
And they're,
you know, there's like
these dudes lined up with these goggles
and they're like right in your face.
And I'm like, this is what we've used the
technology for.
so we can
create an entire experience
and put people elsewhere and this
is what we chose to do.
(laughing)
I know, I know, don't get me wrong, I like K-pop.
(laughing)
We're so close in all these areas,
we're so close to really revolutionizing some things
for sensory expansion in a way that's helpful.
- Sensory expansion, can I,
so I'm really interested in how dogs
and smell an entire different world than humans.
Not that I want to, but it's just like,
they don't see as well.
Like you can't do that.
You can't, can you train,
like are there people trying to train people's noses
to like, I don't know, pick up crazy stuff
that maybe wouldn't be able to.
It's just like the weirdest thing
'cause like there's no technology out there for smell.
And I always am like trying to figure out how like--
- I've wondered that too actually.
- There's an entire
world that you can't see,
feel,
taste,
process, even with technology.
Like we have cameras, we have microphones,
we have, I'm sure, feeling technology,
but you can't do smell yet, I think.
- But I imagine it's just like if you could translate
the what stimulates the olfactory nerve in your
brain,
right,
like they could hack it.
They could figure out to just saturate you
with the most sumptuous smells
based off of triggering some series of
dots
in your olfactory system.
send you some electrical pulses and boom, yeah.
- And
all of a sudden it activates a sudden,
I mean, there's people like stroke victims
who can speak other languages
or all of a sudden have like cheese then associate,
like the small cheese associates with like forest fires
and things like that because the wires get crossed.
I feel like even technologies like infrared
or like night vision,
I feel like we're one step off of being able to see,
like if someone was just sitting down in a seat,
we can see like a heat print of where they were sitting
based off like having goggles or something
that allows us to see like a thumbprint on a mic
and see who last touched it
because there's still a heat transfer on it.
Like I think sensory expansion is,
like we're so close with VR and like night vision goggles
or stimulating the olfactory nerve.
Like we're really close to this whole other world
where like what if we could see the way that
There's like animals that have such a larger spectrum of color
that they're able to access.
And that's got to be a center in the brain too, right?
Oh, yeah.
And you're right.
Smell is one of the only senses we haven't really
developed much augmented technology for.
Could argue taste too, I guess.
But it's kind of hand in hand with smell.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
I think just-- yeah, it's kind of like bio training.
It's like biohacking, but with training.
Like, that is crazy.
Can you imagine like 20 years from now
and your kids are like, yeah, I smelled that.
What?
- What did you smell?
Did you hear about that?
There's a woman in the UK
a couple of years ago
who has some sort of,
what's the word I'm looking for?
Genetic mutation that lets her smell Parkinson's
and scientists
are totally baffled by that.
What is that all about?
Like once in a while, I
guess a human
comes along
that's inches closer toward some new unlocked realm
of smell that we've never had before.
It's such a crazy mutation.
That's
awesome.
It just
validated my idea.
We like Rebecca, we got this, like it's going to
happen now.
We just got to,
we just got to start having people smell
diseases and shocking them.
And that's it, right?
Just a little bio shock.
Like Scott, you got a taser.
Anybody got a taser?
Why me?
You're going to be the, no, not you.
I just need to tase you until you can smell new smells.
Oh my God.
I'm not tasing you,
I need the taser.
I need a research
grant so I can just tase students and see if they smell new
smells.
You need the real scientist.
Nah, we got this.
Close friend to all three of ours.
We had our good friend Carl on who that episode definitely went off the rails a
little bit.
We had Carl pitch to us the anti-squirrel artillery cannon.
All right, Carl, what do you have for us this week?
All
right.
So not this past summer, but the previous summer, my wife and I
decided to plant an orchard.
So we bought two apple trees and two peach trees.
The apple trees not doing so hot, but they're still alive.
They're still green.
One died, but we replaced it and it's kind of limping along, but
the peach trees have been just booming.
So the first year we put the peach trees in, we got a whole bunch of
peaches growing on them, looked great.
And then within like middle of August, within like one day, all the peaches
were gone on both trees the first year.
And it was like, we couldn't figure out where'd all these peaches go.
So then this year we had like a bumper crop.
Like I'm talking between the two, three, two trees.
We had like 300 peaches gone.
What?
Two weeks, August, like one day they were just gone off the trees.
So there's some type of animal that's eaten the peaches,
and we're pretty sure it's like a squirrel or a bird or who knows what.
So that's been very frustrating.
So we're like, let's let's do some bird nests
and I or some like bird nets, and I bought like an eagle and I bought an owl
and I'm like getting irritated
and I'm trying to figure out what to do with my with my garden.
Additionally, the apple trees aren't getting the right type of water
or enough watering or the right water timing.
So we've had this water issue.
So I was thinking that I like artillery canisters.
Like those things are awesome.
Like they're sweet.
They shoot things like this is awesome.
So I thought, what could I combine to take care of my watering issue and
my animal issue at the same time?
And so I thought, what if I made a multi-axis laminar flow
water cannon that could shoot water in a pattern
wherever I needed it?
And I'd be able to set up auxiliary cameras
around my garden that when it sensed movement of a squirrel,
it would call in an artillery strike from my automated water
cannon
to blast the squirrel
And then it would also like during the day when it's just sitting there. It's a oh, yeah
We need to we need to distribute like four and a half gallons to this tree area and four and a half gallons to this
Tree, and so it would sit there and just you know rapid-fire
You know
right
Carpet bomb this tree and then that tree and then it would carpet bomb my corn rows
And then it would carpet bomb my raspberry bush and my blueberry bush and in those specific areas
So I'm not wasting all that water on grass that no one cares about I'm putting it on the plant where I need it
But then also
Pestering the animals that come not killing them not harming them. Just anytime an animal shows up
I'm just calling in an artillery strike to just barrage that sucker with water
And I'm thinking that, you know, a laminar flow cannon
that shoots water at high pressure over a long distance
might even be able to be like set up
in the middle of my backyard and water my entire lawn.
So it sits there and just runs, you know, 24/7
or eight hours a day or whatever it is.
But it's also on guard for my garden.
- This rules.
- Dogs are gonna love this.
- PETA's gonna love this.
I'm not hurting the animals.
That's right.
You're watering them.
So growing up, we had hostas all along our house,
like a huge row of them, unfathomable amount of hostas.
And without fail, deer would come in in the season and eat them.
And my dad tried sound devices.
My dad tried all kinds of stuff until finally we had a motion
detecting sprinkler. Whoa.
And it was an instant fix.
Squirrels would get in or a deer, excuse me, would get near it.
It would just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
and then be done and they would go anywhere near it.
Not even afraid.
They were just afraid of the sound and the movement,
not even like getting blasted.
Maybe they got it a little bit or something, but there were perfect
circles of protection and right outside the range
of where this thing would trigger, they would be all eaten. Right.
Well, it's
exactly what you're talking about, but not automated.
I love
this is I can tell you from experience that it would work beautifully.
I just want to feed 10,000 pictures of a of squirrels and rabbits into a AI bot and have it a camera system with a.
Triple axis be able to recognize them and pinpoint the exact XYZ of this guy
with a camera with a camera so you can watch the fun of course record it and make a highlight reel.
Nice.
Maybe you have like one camera mounted on the artillery piece.
That's like zone control.
And like, cause you're going to have the hose run to this thing.
You're going to have probably a high pressure pump.
You're probably going to have a little bit of power.
So it's, it's going to be a pretty fixed unit in my brain.
You know, you might need a camera in a different position to like look
from a different angle that then also coordinates and triangulate.
So then you'd need some calibrating shots to call in like, okay, we're
We're gonna coordinate where this is
and then it can fire for effect.
Bring a water artillery round in
and land it right where they need it.
- Be the kids' summer fun.
- Yeah.
- Put it on fun sprinkler
mode
and it's
like raining
in little spots and stuff.
You make games out of it.
- Teach it to target small children.
This'll be perfect.
- That would be so fun.
- This would
actually be a lot of fun growing up.
- I think that's the bigger market, Carl.
Screw all that
stuff.
You turn this into like, this is an adult.
- Automated super soaker
turret.
- Right.
- Oh, it could have all the modes.
It could have a child play mode
where it goes out and just goes crazy.
It could have regular sprinkler mode
where it runs around and just does the,
you know, and sprays in a big giant arc on the grass.
Or it could have, you know, prestrigion strike mode.
Don't you dare eat my rose bushes.
(laughing)
- Or a joystick mode that you're manually controlling
Oh, absolutely. You could have like a video game controller and some POV goggles
with
a targeting patch on it
And you could sit there and intercept it and shoot the squirrels if you wanted to with water,
of course
I'm
only talking about
water
You know, it
would be so much fun
and then if if a precision strike is called in you could have it automatically save the clips and then
Automatically snip the video so that you have the replay reel so that you can enjoy it and upload it to YouTube.
Yes
Yes, yes, dude. Super soaker is gonna if you like turn this into super soaker toy
boom like
Do the do the laminar flow thing right for you know the other market
But you sell this kind of this game concept as super soaker
Boom, you got a market.
I'm not picturing like a target or something on it
Kids got to sneak up on this turret and try to hit the target with their own water in order to shut it down or
Something long enough for them to I don't know capture the flag or whatnot
You just got to get
past this thing a capture the flag mode on it would be pretty sweet
It's like spy mode right like I'm a secret agent trying to capture the flag
There's nothing crazy about this too. Like all the technology for this is there. It's just putting it together
That's why I picked that as my idea.
Like what's the MIT the MVP, right?
So like I can't is it hard to do these like giant ass pumps?
Do you feel like you have a big pump to like shoot water that hard and fast?
That's a great question.
How hard is it to lob a artillery amount of water across the yard?
It's pretty heavy.
Well, I looked into that, and the trick is really to get the laminar flow
because then you can send a packet, but you're limited by the surface
tension of the water because as the velocity goes up
and you get this packet of water going, if it's bigger than a regular raindrop,
which rain droplets are the size rain droplets are
because of some actual physics constraints.
And so what will happen is,
if you send something say the size of your thumb,
it will dissipate into at a certain velocity
and with not enough surface tension,
it will separate and disintegrate into,
you know, the corresponding drops
that would be a droplet size.
And so then your targeting accuracy starts to go down
and your velocity starts to go down
because you have more drag and then you have a larger amount of droplets that
are going to dissipate from your normal grouping.
And so that's kind of an important...
So it's a shotgun.
Yeah.
So then it ends up being a shotgun.
Could we have some variation of this that self-fills biodegradable water
balloons and just lobs them across the yard.
You won't have to deal with that.
And he's just, there is your artillery strike is water balloons coming
from seemingly nowhere from the sky.
A trebuchet.
Essentially a automated trebuchet.
Oh, that's great.
I just
want to build that.
Biodegradable.
Yeah.
You're right though.
It's all physics.
If you know the exact weight of the projectile.
What if you didn't care so much about precision
accuracy and you did the
trebuchet, but just, it's like a five gallon buckets worth of water that gets lobbed.
Would you get the,
like enough of a spray,
you know?
Well, you don't want to knock the peaches off the tree.
Oh,
right.
That's true.
You know,
that was, that's the original goal here.
or snap a bird's neck.
You can use it to harvest the peaches.
It'll be great.
What
about the angle?
What if you just had a high arc?
Like literally create rain on your lawn though.
What if you did the five-gallon bucket, but you lob it so high in the air,
the spray just covers the whole lawn, bucket after bucket after bucket.
I don't know how long that's going to take, but
The
laminar flow thing is great. Yes.
I don't
know. I like that
idea. I like making
rain on my lawn through one trebuchet.
I've never imagined laminar flow that has a brief on off.
Like the only time I've ever seen laminar flow is when it looks like a solid
biller because it's constant, but I've never seen intermittent laminar flow.
Well, I guess there's like jumping fountains that sometimes look kind of cool
where
they've got the splash pad.
Yeah.
They're always a little like disturbed, though.
I've, you know, those really precise
videos of
jumping fountains that are like
the splash pads where they're, you know, like intermittently on off, on off, on
You could get something really cool going there when you scale it up. That
would be cool
That sounds like a fun and very hard to pull off hardware project
Very cool.
Yeah, you could sell add-ons like additional barrels. You could do like I have a quad barrel
Sprinkler
It would be sweet if it was a quad barrel and then and then the barrels kind of came back and forth like one of
uh, bofors that they had in World War II.
Anti-aircraft guns.
Yeah, there you go.
I was
picturing four barrels, but they're all along the roof in different spots, so
you have this sort of reigning terror of
different angles and
stuff of various blobs of water
from all sides, overwhelming
the enemy.
Enemy squirrels.
Maybe that's how you make the valves work.
You move the barrels and slide them in and out, so it's like the bofors, but the sliding
in and out is where it takes a new slug of water and emits
it into the barrel.
A slug of water's excellence. Shoot a water slug with a compressed air
back up and just *pfff pfff pfff*
All day, all night *psh
psh psh psh*
Turn off the artillery, honey. It's hard to do that quiet, I bet.
-You're a compressor running all night.
-Yes.
[laughter]
-It's
just nom in the backyard for these poor squirrels.
-You could design it like a minigun, like a Gatling gun,
like one of the--
-Oh my God.
[laughter]
-Spins?
-Yes.
-Oh,
sure.
[laughter]
-Okay, why is it super soaker all over this stuff?
We need adult water guns or water turret systems.
This is
our
generation growing up.
We need like this version in our lives.
- My roommate in college modified a Nerf gun
to where it was like really painful levels of speed.
It would leave welts.
They needed that scene, but for Super Soaker.
That probably exists, right?
Where you have
like stainless steel
canisters
instead of plastic shit.
- Have you seen the Phalanx gun
that they put on the US warships
that intercept missiles that are inbound
towards a US warship?
- Yeah.
Those are 75 rounds a second something
like that with with water. That's what I want in my backyard
for the squirrels
That sounds fun
identify target aim targeting solution and then just
and
squirrels
Not eating my peaches
Incredible
Most recently in episode 36, we had our good friend Jessica on and Jessica pitched us uber for home bakers
All right, we save the best for last
Jess what do you got for us? All right. All right. Hold
on to your seats guys. Here we go. So
Well, I feel like it's actually similar to something that Russell said so I
Love making sourdough, right? You'll not everyone knows that
but
you guys know that I love making sourdough
making sourdough everything.
And I also love eating it,
but I don't want to own a micro bakery.
There's way too many startup costs for that, right?
But I love selling it to like friends or neighbors
or people in my town.
And I really feel like there's a lot of people like that.
Like, hey, I would make rolls or pasta or bagels
or anything for you like occasionally, but not,
I don't wanna get branding and be a big baker
thing, but I have this skill and I'm willing to share it with people.
And so you kind of,
you have this opportunity for people to order things,
to order sourdough or micro bakery type things from people like
me. And it's like an order comes up and I can like the standby line.
I can choose to take it like, yeah, I'm free today. I could make that. Or sure.
I could have five loaves by Friday, but like, I don't want to do,
I don't want to be a baker and have people just demand all my time and be like,
Yeah, I want 20 loaves.
Yeah, I want five loaves today, tomorrow, the next day.
I can't do that every day of my life.
But I would really love to be able to sell it sometimes
to just be able to make some money,
but not have it be my job.
It's like Uber, but I'm, Uber eats,
but I'm like, other way around.
It's like, sure, I will claim that food order
and I will make it
and fulfill it.
- Those are, what's it called?
Cottage food laws, right?
Where
like, I can
sell baked goods
and I don't need a full
FDA approval.
- From my
home.
- Yes, from my home.
but you're combining
that with the open source,
or Leo, what are those, 3D print groups
where all these people have a 3D printer
and anyone can select jobs from this large site.
- It's a gig economy.
- And just
print at home.
Gig economy, thank you.
- 'Cause so many of us sourdough bakers
are already making stuff all the time.
I make stuff to feed my family.
It'd be really easy to make an extra loaf
when I'm making a loaf.
But if
I'm not making it,
I don't wanna really make something for somebody else.
But if there's an order comes up,
It's like, oh sure, I'll make that.
I'll make that tomorrow, whatever day.
Bagels, sure.
I feel like making an extra 10 bucks, extra 20 bucks.
So.
- That's great.
- Yeah.
- Whoa, okay.
So this is like a ticketing system of like,
I want a dozen bagels, some homemade bagels, right?
Let's go.
- And see who around there. - Right?
And then
you wouldn't have to find a local baker
or bakery or friend to make them for you.
You could just get on your phone and be like,
I want bagels.
and then it'll be like,
Jessica Zoe will be fulfilling your order.
Like, you know, sourdough takes a while.
So it'd be like tomorrow.
- Pick 'em up here.
- Sourdough
can't be instant, unfortunately.
But, you know, that's the idea.
- It's part of the rules.
It's part of the fun, I think, too.
It's the trade-off.
- Would this marketplace be assisted or hindered
by a rating system of the bakers and stuff?
Like, oh man, I got Diane again.
Oh, she's awful.
- You know, I was wondering that,
because obviously when it's homemade,
it's like, do
you get to select,
like I only wanna pick from these five people,
like are there
a list of
bakers?
And you can start making your own baker wishlist
and be like, only if these five people say yes.
- When you go to post a thing on Facebook Marketplace,
there's a checkbox that says,
don't show this to my friends and family.
So you almost need like, okay,
did you like that meal that you just had?
Okay, don't ever
show
my tickets to that person ever again.
- There you go.
(laughing)
Yup.
Or like, you also need a way to make sure
that people's kitchens are like,
you know, it's like, I don't want someone baking
that has cats or something.
- Oh yeah.
- I
don't
want--
- And a peanut oil house or whatever.
- Right,
allergy stuff
or yeah.
So, you know, it's like,
then I can have all these like little things,
these little stars on my profile like,
peanut free, this free, dairy free, whatever.
I don't know.
- Totally.
- That would be so cool.
'Cause I feel like people that want to eat sourdough
or eat something that's like healthy or homemade,
to go to a bakery is, well, it is really expensive,
but also sometimes they don't have the variety
that you're hoping for,
or you just don't have one in your town.
Like, I don't even know where,
most towns probably don't have a sourdough bakery.
- Right.
- It's made with love too.
That's the
difference.
- Only if you get one of those.
- That's the
app.
It's made with love, right?
Added ingredient, right?
The secret
ingredient.
And that's it, that's why.
- Your order will be fulfilled by Taco Bell.
What?
Aw, you got the corporations on your app.
- All right, so here's what I don't know.
So does someone get to just put up in the app,
like, I would like blueberry sourdough scone,
or is it like they have a menu in the app
and bakers upload what they can make
and then people can click on stuff, like a menu,
because I'm very creative.
And if you tell me to make something, like, sure,
I'll look up a recipe and it'll probably be great.
My motto is it'll probably be
fine.
- I like that way better.
- You know, so there's this fun side to it.
Like, cool, I'll make something new.
Like, I wanna try.
- That makes a
lot of sense to me.
A couple of episodes ago,
I don't even know if this episode's out yet,
Russell pitched, I think it was Russell,
Grandma's Sassified, like, baking delivery
fulfillment service.
So it was kinda like that, where you have like,
Etsy stores, but they're all menus of, you know,
recipes that people have posted, I make this really well.
And then you, his pitch was you outsource that idea to like the factory
actually makes it and you just put the recipe in there, remove all the
love.
Remove
the
love.
But having
it
not be menu based where you have
like, what are five different
local people's takes on blueberry scones?
It's really fun.
I, I, yeah, I think that that's where the match happens.
Like you uploading your recipe makes it make sense.
It's a little bit anonymous, right?
So like maybe, you know, you might be the only baker
that does scones this way, right?
So then trying to not overwhelm that person,
like, dude, those scones I got on whatever app,
like, I'm ordering them every week now.
And now all of a sudden you're just like overwhelmed
because you're just such a good baker.
All of a sudden, like everybody's buying that
recipe.
- She's going
viral on, oh, what's the app called?
Ooh, hmm.
- Honestly, if there was an app or a website
where I could order just a box of scones,
but they were all made by a different person,
logistically
it's a nightmare,
but I got to like blindly vote on these
and then a communal vote of the world of like,
A1 is the best scone of all of these,
made by such and such.
Boost his business.
I would do that in a heartbeat.
I'd love that.
- So then it would just be like a drop off thing
where I would bring like 30 scones
and drop them off at
a certain place.
and so would 10 other bakers.
And then there would only be 30 boxes available, right?
We put one score on each box.
And then
it's just
a,
yeah,
there's just a, like a limit to how many it's like,
okay, every Friday, every Friday,
there's 30 boxes first come first serve.
Oh, then you can start bidding on them.
- Oh man, I've been making muffins out of a box
because I just like don't have the energy
to make it from scratch, right?
But if I could, like, there's something different
about like, I buy muffins all the time.
I go to LJ's, get the muffins there.
I get muffins from Blueberry store,
but they're not as good as, I don't know,
even the box stuff that I make at home,
it tastes better than sometimes the stuff I get at LG's.
And so it's like, it'd be nice to just get somebody
with a little bit more, you know.
- Somebody who knows how to handle a sourdough, you know?
- Just like,
you know, I'm trying my best with this box,
but it'd be nice if somebody who actually tried
to provide the good stuff, you're
like, oh man.
- Fresh fruit, all that, yeah.
Yeah, yes, fresh fruit, real good ingredients, you know?
There's no short cutting of employee work or whatever.
I mean, it's just like, I don't know.
- Your app would be the first
thing I would fire up
if I was traveling too.
If I'm in a new town for a week,
what are they known for here?
Oh, a really good curry that's made
by that lady down the street or whatever.
That sounds awesome.
Delivered to my hotel room for sure.
- Oh, that'd be interesting
too.
- Wow, that would be really cool.
- Just a convenient way
to get food
That's homemade from people that you don't know.
(laughing)
Awesome.
You do have to deal with the random arsenic poisoning
or whatever, but.
- Just give them a one star review and then move on.
(laughing)
- I'm sure the one star reviews will keep
all of the ill intentions in check.
- Yeah.
- They will be hilarious to read.
- Put razor blades in your carrot cake, one star.
(laughing)
- Three stars and above is just like
how good of a baker you are.
Two or less, something's happening.
It'd be so cool to just buy some legit cookies,
not like the--
I think you're just hungry.
Russell's in.
You are too.
He is on board.
All right, what are we going to call the app, Russell?
I just want some good baked goods.
Good?
Russell missed homemade muffins.
Whole
baked.
Baked whole, or something like that.
You could go healthy holistic or
whole--
like
not fake.
Maybe there's a spin on the at which is just like not like crud ingredients.
You know, you have to use good stuff.
Whole.
Oh, no, it sounds weird.
Donut whole.
W H O
L E.
All right.
Whole foods.
Just whole it baby.
Uh, now I'm, uh, shoot.
I don't know what to do for dinner.
I'm going to whole it.
Whole, whole goods instead of whole foods.
Just.
You know, we could just call it zo good.
Zo good.
Oh, that's pretty good.
And then
no one will ever mispronounce
our last name again, because
it would become famous.
Yeah.
As always, thank you so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed yourself. And thanks to
all of our guests we've had over the last couple years. It has been an absolute joy.
We're coming up in the next few episodes here on 200 ideas, which is unfathomably cool.
We're going to keep at this as long as we can. And thank you very much for listening.
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