- I'm Scott.
- I'm Russell.
- And I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, where three antique adventurers
and a guest empty our 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, I am so beyond excited to welcome Alec
to our show.
Alec is a YouTuber with--
I'm coming up on 3 million subscribers.
He is a heat pump enthusiast, car guy, tech guy,
appliance guy, explainer of all things old and new tech.
Alec, welcome to Spitball.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for having me.
This is going to be so much fun.
So as we do every week, I love to start us off
with a warm-up game.
And inspired by the many things that I've
learned over the years from Alec and his incredible channel,
Technology Connections.
I should ask, Alec, where do we find Technology Connections?
- YouTube.com/technologyconnections?
Or are you asking me a different question?
[LAUGHTER]
- Where do you find--
where do you live, Alec?
[LAUGHTER]
- Somewhere near Chicago.
- Yeah, let's go.
- Inspired by the many things I've learned over the years,
I've written a game that I'm going to call Groover, Cruiser,
or Hoover.
So in this one, we've kind of drifted away over the years from fun brand names for stuff like Trinitron.
What an incredible thing you could just buy off the
shelf 30
years ago, right?
And now we have the CX9 or whatever.
So this week I have a list of a bunch of fantastic brand names from the 40s to the 90s of either a
Laserdisc player, a car that's usually like a, uh, an antique prototype car or a vacuum cleaner.
And I'm going to give you the names and all you got to do is tell me which of the three it is.
Laser disc, car or vacuum.
If I had given you a name like Mondo, you would say that that is the Electrolux of canister vacuum, of course.
Right.
All right, Alec, you're up first.
The Navy Star.
And spelled like it sounds all one word.
Uh, is that a laser disc player, a car or a vacuum?
Is NAVY?
Yeah.
I'm going to have to go with car.
That was a kid targeted toy, LaserDisc player.
(laughing)
I found it on eBay.
I was like, oh yeah, I can see that's like a car set.
- Okay. - Yeah, exactly.
(laughing)
Scott, the Constellation.
- Ah, I'm hoping a LaserDisc player.
- That's a 1950s canister Hoover vacuum, of course.
(laughing)
Russell,
the FX-Atmos.
The letters
FX.
- That's gotta be a audio thing.
So it's LaserDisc.
1954
experimental two-seat rocket car, of course.
Atmos?
No,
the FX Atmos.
It
sounded like
something AV, right?
Yeah.
All right, we're 0 for 3.
Next time through.
Alec, the trilobite.
The trilobite.
I'm going to go with vacuum.
It is.
It was a precursor to the Roomba.
Electrolux made this little like sea bug prehistoric looking
Roomba
thing back in,
geez, I don't even have a date for that.
Alec knew that.
I think you knew that, Alec.
- No. - You have one of those?
- No,
I just thought it kind of like
reminded me of a canister vacuum.
And so.
- Totally.
It's adorable.
You guys should look at it.
It's from like the late nineties
and it's a big clunky, ugly Roomba.
Scott, the DiscoVision, all one word with a capital V.
- If this is a vacuum, I'm gonna be really mad.
So
I'm gonna say Laserdisc.
- It is a Laserdisc
player.
Well done, everybody.
It's MCA's launch era branding for their Laserdisc machines.
- And I have one of those.
- Oh, do you really?
Oh, cool.
It's never going to work.
What does it need?
Everything?
Yeah, I mean, you open it up, it looks like a science fair project.
It doesn't look like an actual product.
I've heard the first few years of those LaserDisc players were a little bit shoddy with, yeah.
Russell, the golden rocket.
Two words.
That's a broom, so I'm going to go with vacuum.
An Oldsbo mail
1956 gold
fleck coupe.
One more time through.
Alec, the Avalier, A-V-A-L-I-R.
That sounds like a car.
Right?
I think so.
It's
a Kirby door-to-door deluxe
vacuum.
Whose name sounds like a D&D dragon.
Scott, the Hi-Vision, H-I-Vision.
Definitely not a car.
I'm going to go Laserdisc.
Yeah, it was.
Very good.
The pioneer Laserdisc players.
Yep.
And then lastly, Russell, the Nucleon.
Oh, uh, that's a car.
I'm gonna just go with car.
It
was a nuclear powered car by Ford.
Very good.
Nuke.
That sounds like a disaster.
A nuclear disaster.
The 1957
scale model vision of a nuclear powered family car.
Yep.
It had a complete reactor pod where the trunk should be.
I don't know if it ever actually was like functional though.
I think it was very prototype.
Epcot ball.
I saw that in that cut. Future
ride. Future world ride. Tomorrowland. That's
right.
I think if I kept
track right that Scott you got two out of three and we're the only one to do so. So that might mean
Just keep guessing laser
disc for everything. I think that means you get to go first this week.
What do you got for us bud? This was probably the hardest game you've ever done Leo.
All right so my idea this week this is based on Alec I watched one of your videos where you
reviewed the FLIR 1 thermal camera and I love everything thermal camera wise. So we use
them all the time at our work and I unfortunately am used to very high-end cameras on here and
I've everything FLIR is like top of the line going through and I've always wanted one and
I had an idea for a business a while ago where pretty much I went on AliExpress and I tried
to find like the cheapest thermal camera I possibly could and I bought it and it was
an absolute piece of shit just all the way through. Did not work. But quick tangent,
Russell and I used to do a startup where we would, we took more expensive hardware when
we would rent it to people and we created a logistical system where we'd send it to
them. They would use it, they send it back to us. Always wanted to do that with thermal
cameras to the point where you just for home efficiency in general, I'm in the process
of buying a house. The installation on the house is absolute trash. Every room I go in,
I'm like, we're going to have to redo that, redo that.
And I would love to have one of those high-end thermal cameras where I could
just point, maybe connected to an app and be like, here's all the ways
that you can improve the house.
Here's a simulation of what it could be.
If you put
in the insulation, these rooms versus what you're at right now.
And so the idea this week is buy a bunch of nice thermal cameras, not the cheap
Aliexpress ones, rent them to customers.
Russell, we're going to use your vibe coding and we're going to create an
app that can simulate and do the fancy.
This is what you could get to full on rental system of hardware.
That's what I got.
Okay.
So you're making like a map.
Yes.
Yep.
You're a
map on the house.
You're the home.
Exactly.
I
have
been thinking of insulation nonstop for like the last week and a half ever since
this inspection and I'm getting stressed about it.
So I want a thermal camera and I want an excuse to buy one.
This seems like a great one.
Okay.
You're going to have to compete with libraries that let you check them out for free.
So your secret sauce is going to be the mapping part.
I think you could make a fancy pretty enough app and you have to you only this camera can connect with it in some form.
I would think that if there were you could probably create it to know based on the outside temperature basically what heat loss is actually occurring.
And probably it would be pretty possible to kind of like give a potential optimization strategy.
As in like, I have this camera pointed at, I like get a waterproof box for this.
I sit it outside the home and I pointed at it for several hours or overnight or
something, and I'm able to see, or are you saying like, I put a camera on a drone, I
fly it up to the roof and then I leave it there for X amount of
time.
Oh, I was, I was actually thinking from, from the inside of the house, you could look at.
Oh,
that makes
way more
sense.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking
too.
Inside wait, you're saying outside Scott.
I thought he was outside
Well, I mean there's there's stuff you can learn from the outside as well, but
yeah mostly
who's growing weed in your neighborhood
But yes, the inside is way more like here's your huge focus areas
I mean, I see
like probably the doors or like certain areas that are colder,
right?
I mean
the other way around it probably might be might be easier to get a better picture cuz like interior you have to like
do every wall, every window, you need like 30 of those bad boys.
This would just be like four, maybe five.
And you don't need a drone, you can just put one on a flagpole, you know?
You don't need a rental flagpole.
But yeah.
There you go.
Really long flagpole that you carry around your house.
A tenna, you know?
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure that Fleur makes a lightning or a USB-C version for phones too,
is that
right?
use
and yeah it's okay okay
really
okay that's what I was gonna get it I think
iPhones have a lidar and have built-in easy to use software wise API's for like
mapping a room that 3d space so it's almost like you could make the software
experience for that existing hardware
that's more like
it's both light are
ring to make the map and it's doing the like remembering of the the various heat
spots that you've pointed at, you know?
Yeah.
I'll tell you one thing that I would really like to see is the thermal emissivity of different
materials affects the accuracy of the reading.
And if there were some way that the app could just intelligently recognize, "I'm looking
at vinyl siding, so I need to adjust to this particular value."
Totally.
When we, um, when this inspector came into this house, I'm attempting to purchase, I
camera he just put it in every room took a picture moved in the next room took a picture next room
and like the
inspection report was beautiful like i had full 360 shots of everything going through
i have not tried to google this but is there a 360 version of
a thermal imaging camera
and you just
you have steps set up and you put that in every room and you take pictures and then maybe russell
we go back a couple episodes and we take your box fan idea and we like you ever see that where they
they put a box fan on a window and they try to suck
all the air out of the house.
And then you can see where cold air is coming into the house
from all the leaks everywhere.
- Oh, that's called a blower door test.
- Blower door, that's what it is.
- That's so smart.
- Combine that with a 360
FLIR camera in every room,
make an app that makes it stupid easy for people,
put it all together.
- Wow, there are a lot of people
that pay a lot of money for that, Scott.
The whole
energy industry.
- I'm one of them.
- Yeah, the
power industry, you might get, you know,
targeted on a list.
It's that good.
That's cool.
Yeah, I think if you don't have a three-seated camera,
you just get four flurs.
- Tape them all
together. - Tie them together.
Yeah, four different, and that's just it.
You mesh the images together or something.
- A
flur and a motor.
- Yeah, that's probably
gonna be the easiest way.
- That's a
great idea.
- I
don't have a great understanding of the lenses
in thermal imaging, but I know that they're weird
and
that's part
of why they're so expensive.
- We had at Hope College,
we bought a device called a Swivel, S-W-I-V-L.
I don't know if they still make them.
This was over 10 years ago,
but it was a little stand that you stuck an iPad in
or an iPhone in and it motorized.
The whole dang thing was like a 360 mount
and it tracked the person that it was filming
for like student teachers.
They'd walk around with a little beacon thing
and
be like, "Hey,
I'm teaching over here."
and the camera would kind of follow them and vice versa.
It almost looked like one of those cheap phone holders
that you'd get on your desk, but it just was motorized.
You almost need something like that to stick the camera in
that's like on a tripod where it just sort of looks around,
it takes three minutes and slowly,
like a pan, tilt, zoom camera, I guess.
That's a very established market.
- Just has one button on it.
Put it in the room, hit
button,
exit room.
- There you go, it beeps when it's done.
- You could be performance-based almost at that point, Scott.
Performance-based contracting where you're just like yeah, I'll literally cut your heating and cooling bill in a third.
Here's your energy report
Here's how much you will end up saving
If you would do
these
steps, we'll
take 20% of it.
Yeah
Whatever like a year's worth. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the there's a lot of sketchy people
Well, I mean
there's
um, there's some financial services company that you give them you're like
Verizon bill and your whatever bill and then they take 20% of whatever money they save but it doesn't cost you anything to use the service
You know, so if they can't save you any money, then you don't pay anything. But if they can save you money then
Whatever some
person you know talking
about. Yeah trim. That's what it was
That's what
business model where like, you know, you give them your before and after of your energy bill
And then it doesn't cost the user anything. That'd be cool
Scott. Yeah, and the rental camera thing, you know flares are so expensive
you only need them for like 30 seconds, right?
Yeah, and then you send them back.
- I've been
stuck on this, yep.
- Yeah, that's true.
If you could make it as a little kit,
people only need this once, maybe per house.
- You could do one in the winter
and one in the summer too.
Really double down for
those.
- There you go.
You give a coupon for half a bottle.
- The winter one.
- The premium feature is like twice the, you know.
- I mean, it would be useful to have data
for both heating and cooling.
I don't know how easy it would be to extrapolate
one to the other.
>> All right, Leo, what do you have for us this week?
>>
Okay. So you guys have several times over
the last 40 episodes mentioned stumble upon as
something that you remember and look back upon fondly.
Stumble upon's key insight.
One of the things that they did really well
was they used what's called a bookmarklet.
So along the top where your bookmarks bar is,
usually you have those be websites.
But you can also instead bookmark a piece of code.
And when you're on a web page and you press that bookmark,
a little bit of code runs.
Parallel to that-- So, park that idea.
Parallel to that, there is, um, the website Rap Genius,
which is now called Genius, had this idea years and years ago
that I can't get out of my head, where for a minute,
when they got all their venture capital money,
they really wanted to be the annotation layer
on every web page on the web.
They're like, "We can have people commenting
about what these rap lyrics mean,
what about if we could be on any web page?
They launched it for like a hot minute and then decided,
no, we're just gonna stick to music lyrics
and then rolled back everything.
And now they don't do that anymore.
I would love to build a service
where you're on any web page on the web,
the Facebook homepage, that one interesting blog post,
that crazy New York Times article,
and you press the bookmarklet, the button,
and it launches an audio call without leaving that web page
with only other people that are currently looking at that webpage.
So it's a discussion chat room thing for whatever it is that you're on.
And the second you leave that webpage, you're no longer in the call anymore.
And it'd be pretty easy to build all this because there's something called web RTC.
So browsers can now talk directly to each other pretty easily without having to like,
whatever, there's a bunch of technology reasons why this is now possible where it
wouldn't have been 20 years ago.
And I think it would be so cool to be like, wow, this is a really interesting
I can't believe that that thing in Iran just happened."
Or, "Wow, there's a lot of people who are interested
in the front page of whatever today."
And you just click this link that's in your toolbar,
and boom, you're in a Zoom or Google Meet-like experience,
but you haven't left the page.
So you can just discuss with other people, right?
There would be moderation
challenges,
of course.
Like anyone talking on the internet for any reason.
Yeah, a little dicey, but on the whole I feel like that would be a really like I would try it a chat roulette
But topical
Omegle sort of thing that's bitch.
Awesome. Yeah, that's it. I always love
going on Clubhouse. Yeah
I was I was
thinking
Clubhouse Clubhouse
came to mind right away. But like
what is Clubhouse? It's a bygone
Covid project.
Yeah, it was like
what is it like a group?
It was like public group audio rooms like public discord
- Yeah,
it was like the precursor to Twitter spaces,
which just ripped it off immediately.
And then--
- So social
network where it's all just audio calls.
And some people on the call are able to unmute
and some people can only listen.
So live podcast-y kind of.
- Oh, that's cool.
- It was.
It still is around?
Did it finally die?
- Yeah,
I don't know.
- It's still around.
I just looked, 'cause I forgot what it was called.
But yeah, I guess this reminds me of Clubhouse.
And then for moderation, that's easy.
You do the hate, like the group boot thing, you know?
Should we boot this?
- Oh, vote?
- Yeah, you know, that's very easy.
You get a certain amount.
- Okay. - Right?
But I think that's really, that's really interesting.
I think there'd be a lot of people that just be like,
wanting to talk about this.
It would bring more discussion that's,
I think it's actually got like a social element
that's beneficial, you know?
Then leaving a comment on a Discus plugin, right?
Or whatever that's completely
anonymous.
Like, this is like the next level.
It's like texting versus phone call.
like that
level of difference and intimacy or whatever,
like connection, human connection, like that's--
- Yeah, it's easy to be brave in the comments section
because you're a username and some typing, right?
But if you're actually hearing the other person's
intonation in their voice and stuff,
you're probably a little bit less brash.
I mean, you would hope,
us salt of the earth
Midwesterners would hope.
(laughing)
- Yeah.
- You
ever go on like the most niche of niche subreddits
of just whatever crazy hobby you're into
and you always see like two people online,
three people online.
It just gives you
that warm, fuzzy
feeling
like there's someone else here with me on this.
I'd like this idea just for that reason.
- The Reddits of the world could build something like this
where it's got a button on Twitter,
Twitter rips off Meerkat and Clubhouse and all these, right?
Or you've got your Reddit button
that says launch audio chat room.
But if this was like across all services
in a different separate thing,
I feel like it'd be more useful.
I would want to see some,
I'm not sure how useful it would be
if it was just like random people.
Like
I
would think people would want to be able to like
form some sort of social relationship with other users
and how would you envision that working?
- Well, it's launching JavaScript code.
So in theory, you could build your own UI.
You know, when you press the button,
it could have something in the corner or whatever.
It doesn't just necessarily have to be invisible.
So you could have a user naming,
You could have how many people online indicators and stuff.
You can build as much or as little infrastructure
around it as you
wanted.
Like imagine you just go to your YouTube channel's homepage
and see like 12 people online right now.
Do you wanna join in?
Like
that could be interesting, right?
- That's what I was thinking.
Yeah, like if I had a friends list
and I saw them discussing a certain article, I'm in.
- Oh, you press
the button somewhere
and you say like those five people,
people that I've friended over the years,
right now three of them are over on New York Magazine
or whatever, yeah, that's interesting.
- I mean like social, it's like browsing your news,
but you're talking about it,
that'd be kind of interesting, I don't know.
- I like the idea of like creating a physical space,
but like there have to be different subdivisions of it,
as in like there's a thousand different bowling alleys
that everybody's in.
- Yeah, totally.
- That's good,
that's a great analogy.
- Yeah.
- Like a bunch of like, yeah, you're all in the same
like room, but different alleys,
like group of six or 10 people at a time, right?
That's that's probably how it'll work and then you can rotate your rooms or whatever if you don't like
Shuffle me in this pot like
I don't like this
group anymore
The home page of this site could have the top 50 rooms or whatever and maybe there's a max cap of 10
And it sticks you in a random room and you don't get any more than yeah
Cuz obviously voice chat gets a little unwieldy when you reach a certain critical mass
That recent game you showed us Leo on Steam where it's all about the audio and proximity
- VR chat? No?
- Yes, the one that's coming out
from the Untitled Goose Game guys.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah.
- I'm
just picturing
like an overhead view
of like just a bunch of bubbles
in this massive bowling alley room.
And you can just kind of move your bubble around
to different groups and talk to different groups
all about it.
And then you can shift over to this one over here
and it's all voice
and proximity.
- I did a virtual,
I've been doing like a higher ed tech conference
every year for 10 years.
And during COVID, we did a virtual thing
and there's a site called gather.town that'll do that.
It's basically a top-down, it looks kind of like Pokemon,
right, you're controlling
a little guy,
but it's proximity chat,
so you can build little virtual rooms
and walk from room to room and hear each other and stuff.
Something like that does already exist, yeah.
- Combine it with
yours.
- That's kind of nice,
'cause then if you have somebody screaming, you know,
like, just move away. - Just
walk away.
- Go
over here. - Just move away.
Yeah, just walk away.
You could also turn this into a competitive app,
You know, like
every
room has got a debate winner,
and they get to move on to the
next room.
Who is loudest in this room?
- I have 12 debate bucks or whatever from winning.
How do you win the comment
section
of a news article?
- Everybody likes to feel like they won,
so let's just deemify the heck out of it
and throw it into audio.
- What about just minutes spent being productive
and
having
a nice time?
- Whoa. - No, there has to
be a winner.
- Doesn't fuel the internet.
That's, no, the internet doesn't work that way.
- I don't know, I kinda like that.
- Internet and altruism
are like rare.
- But can you combine the altruism,
ultra, I can't say the word,
with just actually gamify that though
and make it the more, like you said,
the more constructive the conversation you have,
the more points you get.
I love that idea.
- How do you quantify that though?
- It's gonna force people,
I don't know,
have an AI do it in the background.
- The Reddit upvote and the Reddit downvote
are supposed to be not, I agree with this opinion,
but I think that this person is contributing
to the conversation whether I agree to them or not.
There was a thing 20 years ago called Reddit it.
You kinda wanna have the, you know when you're in a call
and it has thumbs ups and hearts going by
because somebody's liking it hard, you know?
Maybe we could do something like that
where it's like, they're being
productive
even
if what you just say is something I disagree with.
I don't know.
- I mean, something like that, that's kinda cool.
incentivize altruism, I guess, you know, I don't know.
Or like, well, maybe it's not altruism.
It's just more like, you may not be the loud,
even if you're the loudest voice,
you may not be the most popular,
but nobody wants to say anything.
Because you're the loudest voice
doesn't mean
everybody agrees with you.
- Sure.
- I don't know, I just wanted to spin it.
I wanted to throw some.
- All we have to do is just solve
how to be good people on the
internet.
I'm sure nobody's thought about this problem before.
- I'll tell you
one thing you shouldn't do
is make it only positive signals.
I think
that has never worked and yet we're still trying
it
Mm-hmm, that's true.
But I feel like starting with audio is a good place to start. It's harder to hide
I guess you'd have the occasional wacko who's like putting soundboard memes and making themselves sound like Darth Vader or whatever
But for every one of those you probably would find quite a few people who just want to chat,
right?
I mean like Oh Meggle and chat relates still exists, right?
Yeah,
those but like there's no thing to talk about
It's like going on a first date and seeing a movie first. So you have the thing to talk about at dinner, you know
or like
if you're on the
Article or the home page of Facebook or whatever it is that people want to meet up and chat about then you have something to
Discuss, you know,
do I love it?
I love it
even if like influencers did that like you could become you could create news influencers instead of
That would be like really good interpreters of their own like news articles or something. Like I really like the way this guy interprets
News right right now. I just interpret it by myself, right?
I just read it and hope that Twitter agrees or something right or find my little echo chamber
I wonder if a good pilot would be like a live Wikipedia talk page. Yeah
I love
that just on one site
It could be like a little plug-in that just runs on there because Wikipedia is pretty neutral stuff to discuss most of the time
Yeah, that's actually cool is that's awesome. Like you can even um drop like voice notes or something, right? Oh, I don't know if that's
Oh
asynchronous kind
of missing out on the live
Aspect of it
right fun.
Wikipedia is a good spot
There are pages for like Benjamin Netanyahu or whatever that would probably get a little spicy
But on the whole, like, page for list of guitars
or whatever is probably pretty innocuous.
So Wikipedia would love that.
Create events, get more donors,
more donors, more donors.
Right? They'd love that.
But I mean, if you create more...
(LAUGHTER)
-If you create... -Jimmy.
Jimmy
needs your five bucks again.
But he-- Yeah, I think that would be--
Create more engagement on Wikipedia
rather than it being a reference site.
It's a communicate-- It's like discussion
-Healthy discussion. -Why not?
I mean, you referenced the talk page.
I mean, not a lot of people see the talk page
for any given thing, but, like,
Wikipedia is pretty spicy for back-and-forth
edit wars and debate and controversy and stuff.
It's just all, like, under the surface.
So this could maybe be a healthy way to bring that up
and make Wikipedia a little
more interesting.
-I wanna see this. -So any given
page,
you can see the list of edits,
but then there's a commentary about why those edits are being made.
Like this person doesn't actually deserve to be called noble or whatever.
And you're like, Oh, interesting.
You know,
yeah,
I think you could truly circumvent Godwin's law.
If you just had people like actually talking voice to voice
at the Nazi
one.
Yeah.
Godwin's law was, um, every internet argument eventually dissolve,
dissolves
into being a Nazi debate or whatever.
Yeah.
Maybe it would just stall it for a longer.
(laughing)
- Russell, what do you got for us this week?
- All right, so recently I've been dealing
with this change in my car insurance.
It went up like two to $300 and it really irks me
because I'm like, why, why does this happen?
And then I have to go do the, let me call some people.
Maybe I'll get the right letter in the mail
to make me consider going to that other car insurance
company. Do those work on you? Sometimes the letter in the mail.
All right. Sometimes it's like, all right, $700. Like, you know what?
It's more of a reminder to try to get my rates lower. Sure. Right.
Kind of feels like Comcast, you know, when you buy the comm and then they upgrade,
you know, I'm just feeling like one of those things.
So I would love to create a experience where I just post anything that I'm not
loyal to.
That seems to be one of those like relationship based businesses like car
insurance, home insurance, lawn care, anything like that.
I will upload my invoice, upload my contract,
upload anything anybody
wants to know about my--
Is my social credit card number?
Except for that.
My home address?
Except for that.
Like my policy, right?
I would post my policy publicly
if it
meant that I get quotes for literally the exact same policy
for less money.
I
am sure there are car insurance companies and new agents out there all the
time looking to get a deal.
So they just literally go on this website,
find everybody that has similar car insurance policies and just outbid my
current rate. And literally you can switch on a dime. Like they take care of,
like when I switch homeowners insurance or car insurance,
they like literally take care of everything. You might,
I might have to make a couple of phone calls, but for $300 like, sure,
Why not?
Like, boom.
- Awesome.
- And so, yeah, I'm like anti-loyalist
to a lot of companies.
They just want my
money and I just want this service.
Why do I have to like be in a relationship
with these people?
They don't wanna be in a relationship with me, really.
Like, just sell me your service.
I will get the best rate, move on.
And then yeah, this
app would,
that's it.
You just post and receive.
Better bits.
- It's kind of like a consumer side RFP.
Yeah,
or your request for proposals.
Yes,
yes.
Universal nationwide.
Yeah.
The personal version of an RFP.
So we have to do those at work if it's over a certain amount of money.
Most businesses need that.
So I need to make a big purchase.
You have to get quotes from everybody in this space.
I like that, but you're coming to them with an already existing plan.
That's interesting.
That would help drive transparency up and prices down probably if nothing else.
Yeah.
- I like the idea of starting from beat this basically.
- Yeah, there we go, that's the name, beat
this.
Purchasing a home has taught me one about insurance brokers
that literally do this, they're just like,
here's my insurance right now,
someone give me a better rate and they go off and find it
and take a cut of that and everyone wins.
But also you can do that with mortgage lenders too,
I didn't know this, they're just like,
here, post your closing costs for your mortgage
and here's the interest rate that you get
and you're based on your credit and blah, blah, blah
And all these other lenders are like,
well, I could knock a couple thousand off that closing cost
and I could not charge you for this line item right here
if you come with me, 'cause I want that loan.
And it's just make them all fight each other.
I love that idea, Russell.
Apply that to everything you possibly can.
- Everything. - Everything.
- Everything, man. - Beat this.
Beat, dot, this.
- Yeah. (laughs)
- That might also be taken already.
- So, I mean, like car insurance,
I think is the easiest one.
Homeowners insurance even easier,
'cause literally they take care of everything.
They call up the other home insurance company
and be like, "They're switching to me."
Ah, shucks, I'm sure they have a great conversation.
But it's like, I don't know.
And then our services could be like,
we could do some concierge,
we can make some money on top of every transfer, right?
We help alleviate the bidding process
or the phone calls,
right?
make it as easy as possible.
- I went to buy a heat gun recently
and the local Lowe's and Ace Hardware
and Hometown Shop were all $189.99
and one other store in town was $90, $91
for the exact same product.
I almost wish I could take your website
and do it for that one purchase that I need to make
no matter how big or small it is
that does the comparison bidding and shopping for me.
Like, I know that I want to buy a new car,
so every local dealer is bidding in an RFP process.
Here's the model that I want, but you 12 dealers in the area
all have to submit a bid or something,
no matter how big or small.
A reverse eBay.
Dude, I traveled to Ohio to buy my car for thousands
of dollars less.
Like, why not?
Why not make it a national brand?
There's a car salesman that's like,
I gotta turn inventory.
This guy's willing to travel.
He's gonna buy a plane ticket to come to me?
Like, sure, I'll save him $500.
Reverse RFP.
That's PFR.
- Well, that's an
advance.
(laughing)
- I was gonna say RRFP,
but I like that better.
- Personal funding rituals.
- PFR.biz, my new cool site.
- I think this
goes for like lawn care, child care.
Leo, I think for your idea--
- Child care to the lowest river is not.
(laughing)
- I'll take 'em.
- I'll throw 'em--
- River.
- I'll
throw 'em in a shed if it's five bucks cheaper.
I don't care.
(laughing)
Discount bargain
bin child care is what I'm after.
- Maybe not that one.
- I know what you mean though.
Sometimes
it matters less, yeah.
- But I think for purchases
that you're not gonna do right away,
but if you got for the right
price,
that's
really interesting.
'Cause like Facebook Marketplace,
you know, it's really addicting,
or like whatever, Craigslist or whatever,
to like browse what's,
stuff that you didn't want to buy
and now you are going to buy it
because it's cheap. - Such a good deal.
- I think the reverse could work
if you're willing to sell something,
but you weren't until you saw somebody willing to buy it.
- My friend and former guest on this show, Steph,
is part of several different palette groups
where they post, "I am seeking this Ninja blender,"
and all these people who buy the big pallets
of Amazon returns will be like,
"Okay, so I know that there was one person who wanted this."
It's like a matchmaking service, but for people,
like what you're saying, people who wanna buy this thing
versus people who wanna sell this thing.
People have sort of made that happen,
I think, ad hoc on Facebook,
if I'm understanding that right,
but that doesn't seem very well organized.
And if you could put structure around it,
I think there's a demand for that.
- I thought you were talking about,
Now that I'm in a commercial office space
and I get to see the pallet people.
- Oh, sure.
- Do you know what I'm talking about?
- Oh, like the wheeling
around pallets, right?
- Well,
like I'm always fascinated by how like in,
when you wanna get rid of a pallet,
you just put it out back and
someone's
going to take it.
- Yep.
(both laughing)
- That's so true.
- And the wood pallets.
- Yeah, there's like an ecosystem
where there's a bounty
on
the pallets
and people just, they make businesses
out of driving around and picking up pallets
and then delivering it to the people
who have a bounty on the pallet.
- Hunting for the best pallet,
best wood, right?
Best structure.
- Yeah, what were we talking about?
- I
don't remember.
Oh no, bidding, PFRs.
- I really want this for HVAC companies
because
that has
been my big crusade
of
how are you coming up with that price?
Well, you're not telling me
because you're not itemizing it,
So you just have to get bids from a million different people and it's absolutely
obnoxious.
Mm-hmm.
And there's no structure to it and everyone does it a little different and they all want to come and see it.
And
yeah.
All right, Alec, what do you got for us this week?
So I have been going on a bit of an organizational project to try to get all of my crap together.
And I've realized there's a category of product that I would really like to have,
which is basically a toolbox, which has reverse minibar technology, where it will
tell you
every
tool that you've
removed and
will give you a list of all the tools
that you have taken out of your toolbox.
So you put them back.
In the right one.
Yes.
That's excellent.
So you're doing like an initial setup where I have these five boxes.
I know that this is going to be my this and that's going to be my that and you're like inventorying it.
Yeah.
I mean, I there's a whole bunch of ways this could be done.
My first thought was literally like a mini bar in a hotel where there's a bunch of little switches and you can just program in that like, okay, this tool's missing because those switches haven't picked up.
But then I realized that sounds expensive.
So then I thought we could do like RFID tags like libraries use for their books.
And if you just have an RFID tag on all your tools,
if there were some sort of a toolbox that can do a mass scan and tell you you're missing these tools,
I would pay a lot for that.
I've worked on something similar before for a medical device
where doctors would actually leave pieces of gauze or tools inside patients.
And so they had to...
They would
RFID every
single thing inside that
would be used on
the table,
and then when they're done with the surgery, they would sweep them with an RFID reader to be like,
Is anything still in there?
No?
Great.
We can
keep
going.
So I like the RFID methodology.
That makes
the most sense to me.
That sucks that that's
necessary.
Yeah.
Well, it makes me feel better about leaving tools around the place.
I guess so.
You ever left
a pair of scissors in
someone before?
Not that
I know of.
You guys know that like stick
that you use to find water in cartoons?
Oh.
I don't know why I'm thinking
about
this.
But like, what if you did that for finding your
tools?
- Like when you lose a stick.
- Can you go back to the
stick?
- I'm forgetting the name of it.
It's a
water thing.
- It's in the shape of a
Y upside down.
- It's a Y stick and yet it points it towards water.
- What?
- It's an old timey, like you would hire
people
to find where to dig a well.
And I can't remember what this is called.
It's got a weird name.
- Was it just pseudoscience?
Was this a real thing?
- Yeah, it's
pseudoscience.
- Okay, all right.
Although people
claim to be
able to sense the waves, you know, there's actually a really
interesting discussion that Adam Savage has on his Tested channel about Mythbusters wanting
to test this.
Okay.
Let's go.
It's real.
I told you.
I don't think that was
the
lesson.
It's not.
It's like this.
It's like a USB.
It just loops around and
it finds your tool.
Okay.
That's what I'm trying to do.
Going
back to like, that would be cool.
Well, if they are all tagged, then yeah, you could have something kind of like an air taggy type thing,
but it'd have to be
pretty close, though.
Well, and for me, like part of what I'm intrigued by, so I'm going to give you a little bit of a backstory here.
Have you seen this would go viral every once in a while where people will be like, "Oh, McDonald's is making sure homeless people don't get free drinks. They put chips in the cups now."
No. Oh my gosh.
Have you seen that?
Yeah. On the bottom,
right?
Well,
so when I was a cast member at Disney World, that was a thing there.
Oh, it was.
This is a lot older than the people seem to know, because at the resorts, you can buy a refillable mug,
which you will program to work for one, two, three days or your entire stay.
But even the paper cups that they give you to buy one time have an RFID sticker on the bottom of it.
And so, like, if those stickers are so cheap that Disney's putting them on paper cups,
Why can't we just have them to stick on our tools and crap?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, yeah, even libraries.
At least the 10mm socket wrench.
Libraries
are not famously well-funded places, especially nowadays.
So if they can put it in all their books.
Yeah, I want a consumer version or consumer-facing version of that integrated into a toolbox
and some sort of shameful alarm goes off if you haven't put the tool back
in five hours.
If you step out of the room and your tools aren't all put back.
There you go.
I mean you can apply this is so many things like toys. I was gonna say collectors
There's the people who are like really into like I don't know
Funko pops or something or their video game collection or something that they're like
Wanting to keep inventoried and all that and organized beautifully. I'm sure that yeah
There's all kinds of people who'd have need for something like this Oh
bar
I've been trying to find a solution for this for a long time
Alec and the only one that I've come up with is like gridfinity in general where like my drawer is so
Beautifully laid out that if something is missing from it
It is very obvious and it like angers me to the core that like I need to put this tool
Back, otherwise, my perfect setup is
gone. Fortunately. I that's
the only way to get past my ADD
I know my brain does not work that way, unfortunately
So same you gotta have
that
- Well, and the thing
is, I'm usually pretty good
at knowing where the tools are.
I have this internal catalog,
but then what always happens is,
the thing I actually need,
I have so many measuring tapes and utility
knives.
(laughing)
Because
they, and I actually,
the last time I needed utility knives,
I specifically bought them in bright red,
hoping that would help.
Didn't help.
- I have like four tool bags that travel
depending on like the basement spot, the garage spot,
and then like the other spot, right?
Like, I mean, yeah, there's like corners of my space
that it would be good to know like,
all right, I don't have to dig through this bag
for five minutes, like wave the wand.
Nope, not in there, wave the wand, nope.
That'd be so
nice.
- Or the bag itself is doing it.
You pull up the app and then the bag is saying like,
oh, bag number three.
I don't know where bag number three is,
but it has these 12 things in it.
You search for W-R-E-N, oh wrench,
that's in bag five, and that's the orange one,
right?
- Whoa, are you saying the bag itself--
- Why not? - Is tracking constantly?
- Yeah,
it would know what's inside of it.
- Oh, sorry. - Or that it was
the last one. - I don't know,
I thought you were just selling, like, no, okay,
that's way cool. - That would be
pretty easy to do,
relatively.
- That is awesome. - Like,
having them all
have little coin cell batteries and stuff sucks,
but if you have each tool just with an RFID tag,
and there's no battery, it's all passive.
- Yeah, I mean, that's part of why,
you've probably sensed I get jaded
when the tech industry makes things overly complicated
and then everybody gets excited about an AirTag
and they forget about the two-cent RFID tag
that's been around for years and
years.
- 100%.
- And so I would like that, but more, and for people.
- Totally.
There is no consumer-facing RFID, is there?
That's interesting.
- This is a great bookshelf, too.
- Like a bookshelf, like it would sell this,
like you could power that thing up, plug it in,
you know what I mean?
- They're pretty flexible for like,
like if you take a stack of eight library books
that have those tags in them and you put them on the reader,
it's able to
get all eight of them at once pretty easily.
- I
remember being like mind blown
when I used the self-checkout at the library,
just blunk, do-do-do-do-do,
whoa.
- Yeah, totally.
- How hard is the reader?
Like is that reader, like the library book reader like--
It's
a
pad.
It's just like a little like--
- That's right.
- Plastic
thing you set it on.
- You're
limited by power consumption on it.
That's what I've learned by wand waving medical one.
It's like you need a pretty,
you need a decent bit of power
in order to project the wave enough
that I can read it from a distance.
A couple centimeters is easy.
- Yeah, okay.
- But we were trying to do a wireless version.
No, but it's a toolbox.
You already have a drill battery in it.
Just plug the drill battery into the thing.
- There you go.
- It could be, yeah.
All those Craftsman toolboxes, my dad has one, obviously.
Midwestern dads
have some sort of crazy--
and you pull it out, and you're like, damn, this is nice.
But it would be cool if you plug it into a wall,
because it's always in the same corner of the garage.
And then every time you pull out,
you can see if I took it, or if
my dad took
it,
or if
my brother took the tool.
And I don't
get blamed for it.
It could be like Thailand AirTag's group network,
where everyone's toolboxes are ratting each other out.
Like Steve, your neighbor has that screwdriver.
Oh, I knew it!
- That was a great idea.
That's fantastic.
- Find your lost tools.
- I knew it,
my wrench.
- Well, Scott's gonna have to do a deep dive
in my inventory
real
quick.
- You have a lot of his stuff.
- I probably like,
I think between the three of us,
like we've bought like tons of
tool drill bits,
like just so
many.
We've
just lost the exchange.
I have your air compressor
still.
- I have your paint sprayer.
- Before COVID.
(laughing)
- Yeah, before COVID.
- It's all good.
I obviously don't need it.
- This would be great for,
I have a bunch of cables
in this.
You know what I mean?
Like, oh my gosh, I don't even,
I wish I knew how many HDMI, USB
-C,
iPhone cables.
Just throw it in a bag.
And then, right?
- Literally,
like you know it's
in there.
You just gotta dig for it and you throw it back in the--
- Now that we're dads,
we have to have the box that's got the spider web of cables.
- I've got a few of those and I'm not even a
dad.
- Yep,
yeah.
You reach a certain age.
- The other reason why I kind of wish RFID
would just be more, I don't think people are aware
of how many kinds of tags and how resilient they can be.
'Cause going back to my Disney days,
Disney has RFID tags sewn into every piece of costuming.
- Oh do they?
When
you, like, you can wash them,
well I should say this is knowledge from 2014,
but like, we were totally allowed
to take our costumes home and wash them.
And by the way,
costume is just Disney speak for uniform.
Everything is showbiz down
there.
- Yeah.
- But like, when you return your costume to costuming,
you would just put it down a chute
and you'd see a little screen that would tell you,
oh, you've returned this item.
And
like,
that's been around for decades.
Why don't we have that?
and it's waterproof, no batteries.
Yeah, totally.
Dang, where were you 10 episodes ago?
I was talking about something like this for my closet.
I just wanna know what shirts in this closet
have I not worn in the last year?
And I was trying to figure out something like that.
That's really great.
I
want to--
- Well, you know the backwards hanger system?
- That was told to me after the fact.
Yes, someone has mentioned, a listener has told me
that you take all of your hangers
and you start either forward or backward
and then as you wear them, you reverse them
so that you know, oh, I have worn that shirt or whatever.
If I was only smart enough to put shirts back
on the right hangers.
(laughing)
- There's no way I would know.
- Remembering, yes.
That's smart though.
I should start doing that.
- So like, if I were to buy 100 RFID pills,
you know, I'm just imagining a little penny like.
- Sure, yeah.
- Are they pills?
- They're like
stickers.
- I mean, I see stickers.
Okay, I guess they're stickers.
I guess, why not just buy 100 of them
and just make an app that's like,
One through a hundred and you just stick them all and then I guess you
the reader and then you have a bunch of where's the reader?
The toolbox makes sense have
to buy it. You're right. How big would the readers be?
I think this would be so cool like every junk drawer every junk bag.
It seems like a like a
Dewalt or a craftsman or a Milwaukee could just like shoehorn this into all their existing stuff kind of like others like the
works with Apple find my program where like
They're shipping the tools and the cheap whatever's with the tags built-in or the sticker pack that you could add on after the fact
That would be worth it for like any contractor
tool that's hundreds of dollars maybe right like
every
only string
trimmer and
leaf blower and
Yeah, all that stuff that
alone. That's the market
- Oh, you can make billions on that, man.
Every contractor would just have to buy it.
- This is why I get so frustrated with the tech industry,
'cause it's like, this is not rocket surgery.
This is something that has been in practice
for a long time, but they keep reinventing it.
- Yep, yep, yep.
- Is it too complicated?
Like, what is so unattractive?
- I think it's too simple,
that's the problem.
(laughing)
- It's too simple.
- It's hard to monetize.
- Can't make enough money
off of
it.
- Yeah.
- Like
air tags like went
next
level with it, right?
You're
saying, right?
- But then that's a closed ecosystem.
- Like the air tag has some benefits,
but then everybody's like,
well, if it can't do what an air tag does, it's useless.
(laughing)
- Totally.
- That's right.
Maybe it's just not branded well.
Is it like too open source?
Is it open source, is that why?
Maybe that's why it's too simple.
- It is kind
of an open standard anyone could make.
Yeah.
It's hard to make a closed walled garden around this
because it's all so open.
Yeah.
It does seem like there's, if not a business out of there,
at least like a Gritfinity type, you know,
group of people who come together and make some like,
"We hacked together a thing for this."
Well, dear listener, if you are looking for your tools
and still can't find them, thanks for listening.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you so much, Alec, for being on here.
This was awesome.
- Oh, it was my pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
- Oh, that's a delight. - I hope my idea
was worthy of being on
here.
- Of course, of course.
- Oh yeah, oh yeah.
- I've been thinking about it for a long time.
- Great.
- This is, yeah.
- Alec's YouTube channel,
where you can learn about all kinds of eclectic things
like battery standards and dishwashing pods
and the color brown and old physical media formats
and of course heat pumps,
is at youtube.com/technologyconnections.
Our website is Spitball.show.
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