I'm Scott, I'm Russell, and I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, the Pitching Kitchen, where three lovable scamps, that's us, empty
their heads of any startup and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in here so you
can all have them for free.
Anything we say is yours to keep.
And this week is a special week because it is our first episode with a guest.
Please welcome to the podcast, Miss Stephanie.
Hey, it's Steph.
Welcome.
We're so happy to have you.
This is gonna be a lot of fun.
Steph and I work together in an IT department and we are constantly throwing ideas back
and forth about things that we wish existed, websites and startups and all that.
We think we're gonna have fun today.
All right, Scott, you're up first this week.
What's up?
What do you got?
So this is one that I just, or my wife and I thought of a couple of days ago and I haven't
been able to stop thinking about it.
We were out at a bar and we had biked there and as we were biking home, we played a game.
We kind of like rode onto a basketball court at a school and we were just kind of winding
around the hoops there.
And we had also just previously watched the movie Top Gun the other day, like the new
one.
And as we're doing it, we're a little inebriated and we're pretending that we are both fighter
planes trying to shoot down the other person on bikes like every kid has ever done.
And how we were doing it though is like if I got behind you and you're in my sights and
I would start counting as fast as I could to 20, like one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, whatever.
The first one to hit 20 and you count up for wherever you left off would have shot down
the other person.
Sure.
And it was a fucking blast.
It was so much fun, probably because we were drunk.
But I can't stop thinking about how I would do hardware for this.
Sure.
How do you actually make this into a quick, simple piece of hardware that you could place
on a bike, Bluetooth connected to your phone, and then have whatever features on there,
like picture an IR sensor pointed just directly forward and then a receiver that gives you
360 around you.
So you can be shot from any side, but you can only shoot your IR signal out front.
And every blast of IR would just be specific to whatever piece of hardware so it knows
who it's going to.
And then picture like something that actually holds your physical phone so you can clip
it on your front handlebars.
And it has all your screen, like your health or your ammo count or whatever, and with a
simple button to shoot.
And that is the entire hardware section of it.
I would have a lot of fun with that, and I'm tempted to try it, but I don't have time.
That rules.
You've invented laser tag, but with a mount.
Laser tag on bikes.
Right.
That's what I was thinking, laser tag.
This sounds so fun.
Yeah, that's what it's used.
So the kit like clamps onto your handlebars and stuff, and you've got like a trigger on
the handles.
Okay, okay.
Yep.
Single button for your thumb and nothing else.
I don't know how you avoid the lawsuits here.
What kind of lawsuits?
Someone's going to go flying, right?
Oh, I know.
Okay, well, then you just put it in big letters on top, like do not use ever or something.
Yeah, because that totally works.
Wait, is it like dangerous?
Is that what you're saying?
I just feel like, you know, you're encouraging a bunch of people to do distracted driving,
but on bikes where they have no roll cage around them.
But this sounds awesome.
It's fair.
Every good thing in life is dangerous.
Starts with something dangerous until the lawyers get at it.
Then you can't do it anymore.
It's like lawn darts.
I feel like this is just an app though, right?
I feel like this.
Yeah, the vast majority becomes an app real quick where you, I mean, okay, if you got
multiple cell phones, you can have as many people as you want.
Tell me more about the software side that you're picturing, because I've only ever used
a laser tag kits from like the nineties that had no smartphone component to them and they
just kind of made an explosion sound and you had three lives or whatever.
Right?
So what, what is, what is making a smartphone aware laser tag thing get you that probably
exists now, right?
Like, are there laser tag kits that pair your phone?
You think I feel like it has to, I haven't actually looked for that.
I mean, a great benchmark though.
All the zoomers are going to be mad at us.
That should exist like a laser tag for your phone.
I played laser tag on my iPad 10 years ago, grandpa.
Yes.
So you've got lives, you've got, I think it's just health and an ammo count and a reset.
I mean, that's the absolute minimum MVP you could do for this thing.
You could add whatever features later.
But then with the app, then you would get more analytics.
Like with the regular laser tag, you don't get to see like, oh, you got shot by this
person this many times and this person this many times.
Yes.
Longest stretch that you were in their sights or whatever.
At an actual laser tag facility, sometimes they'll have like grenades or special like
multi shot and that kind of thing.
So there's, there's ways to expand it.
You could add missiles or something on there.
Boom.
Pay to play, pay to win.
Pay to win.
I got it.
You got to upgrade to this 28 speed bike and that's the only way you're going to outmaneuver
them.
I'm a bike laser whale.
I'm going to spend a hundred dollars a day on this.
Cosmetics for days.
Yeah.
Is there a way we can turn this into an ARG where it's like world, like Pokemon Go, where
this is always happening everywhere and you just see people running around with their,
you know what I mean?
Like they have to go out to certain checkpoints and get things at certain times.
And so you see the bikes just sort of flying around.
Is this a bad idea?
I don't know.
Well, I just pictured like, I mean, I love the bike aspect of it.
That's what made this so much fun.
You're saying if we had a piece of hardware that you could just put on any phone and all
of a sudden it becomes like Pokemon Go or whatnot, where random people on the street
are playing, but you can only see who's playing through the app or whatever.
But then all of a sudden we're going to have people pointing their phones at other people
like guns and then someone's going to get shot for real.
So that might not be a good idea.
We'll stick with the bikes.
Yeah.
It can't look like a gun, but it doesn't have to.
Right.
That's the cool part about this is you maybe have some sort of like flag or denote some
way to say, oh, I'm playing this game on my bike or whatever, or maybe you'd even know
what the hardware strap to it, but it doesn't have to look like a gun because the bike is
the weapon in this fantasy world.
Laser tag has the whole like gun connotation, whereas if you just have this, you know, starfighter
pilot or deemed or whatever, you know?
Yeah.
We found that the game didn't work too well when we were going home.
You know, you're pretty much going in from point A to point B in a straight line.
It was hard to get crazy fun maneuvers on there.
But when we were both on a very open court with random obstacles like basketball poles
and stuff, when we're maneuvering around, that's when it got extremely fun.
So I don't know if it would be good at the randos on there.
That sounds fun.
I'm on the street.
Do there are a lot of parks.
I feel like this could this could exist in like some random parking lot.
You go to the one of the dead malls, you know, and you just we're going to meet up and do
bike tag.
I don't know.
Well, it'd be the because like in the neighborhood near us, they've been doing like Nerf wars
and they have they invite all the neighborhood kids and they come do a Nerf war.
Well, this would be the adult version.
Love that.
Totally adult version.
Well, yeah, as I said, it I was like, well, I can't adults have Nerf wars too.
Heck yeah.
We just got to make it a drinking game.
That's all you get shot down and take a shot.
Move back.
I mean, what if you brought like paintball, like dying paintball facilities and you're
just like, all right, add bikes.
What if we just put a gun on the front of the bike?
It's just paintball.
There's no app or anything.
You have like an actual paintball gun on your bike.
You know, we don't even need bikes.
You guys just want to go play paintball.
Well, like you're all wearing helmets anyway, right?
Of course it's safe.
You can still mount it to the front, right?
So you can't like, you know, side shooting or something, but like you can still have
like the same wing, like fighter pilot aspect, right?
So it's just mounted to the actual bike.
Yep.
Dude, that'd be, I mean, not paintball.
OK, replace paintball with Nerf darts, you know, replace paintball with Nerf balls and
you got a kid friendly version, right?
That would be pretty cool.
Just a full launcher on the front of some kind.
Orbeez.
Having it be fixed to the bike straight ahead is genius because if it's just like a gun,
you're just flailing it around shooting and stuff.
But if you have to have strategy.
Yeah, you got to actually face them, which is why I really want to try it in pairs.
Like you actually have a wingman that you're working with because it was just two people.
I mean, we still had a blast.
It was just two people.
But if I had a partner where they couldn't get behind me or someone could cut them off,
that would be sweet.
Dude, that is so cool.
I don't know anything about dogfighting strategy.
I have one data point.
Dude, you can bring like blankets to the fight to like blind them.
You know, you throw a blanket on somebody while they're...
Can you imagine riding on a bike and throwing a blanket on someone?
Tangled up in their spokes.
Dude, it's war, man.
I don't know what to tell you.
War is hell.
All right, Leo, what you got?
All right.
This is something that I've actually built an MVP for and have in my personal life that
I need to, I don't know, bet against you guys and get feedback on and maybe expand into
mass production or have someone else take and run with it.
So Amazon has gone through a phase a couple of years ago where they made Lexa accessories
for everybody.
So like for every possible thing that you could glue a computer in, they had like the
Lexa microwave and the smart whatever, right?
One of the things that they had that was an accessory was a clock, an analog wall clock.
And I was inspired by it the minute I saw it.
It is a regular clock face and all along the rim of it is a bunch of white LEDs.
And the only thing that it did was it paired directly to your echo.
And when you set a timer, it lit up the LEDs to have a visual, always there representation
of how much time was left on your timer.
So like if you said set a timer for 10 minutes, it...
Oh, God, it's a full circle around a circular analog clock.
Okay, I got you.
Yes, exactly.
It's the diameter of it.
And if you said set a timer for 10 minutes, the 12 all the way to the two would light
up to show 10 minutes left and it would tick down, right?
That's all it did.
And I looked at that thing and thought, what a waste of software on beautiful hardware.
What if we could show other stuff on this?
So a couple of years ago, I made my own basically.
Made your own clock?
I took a bunch of RGB LEDs and put them around a clock.
And I have a working prototype of color along the rim representing my Google Calendar, or
the weather or other information.
So when I look at this clock, if I have an event from two to three, and my Google Calendar
is orange on the screen, then between the two and the three is lit up in orange.
And so...
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, for the next 12 hours, you kind of have a quick glanceable view of what your calendar
is going to look like.
You don't know what it is, but you know something is during this time.
Yeah, I'm going to be busy from noon to four this afternoon.
Oh man, it's going to be a big long afternoon or look at that, my whole morning's free kind
of thing.
And it switches between that and a temperature gradient like you'd see on your local news
where it's going to be really hot in the afternoon.
So it's all red over down there.
And it's really, really pretty.
And it's functional.
Wait, how does the temperature one work again?
I don't get that.
So it shows the next 12 hours, wherever the hour hand is now.
Oh, every LED lights up with every single one of them is the correct color according
to temperature.
And it's a spectrum from like a dark purple all the way through blue to green to yellow,
orange and red for how cold or hot it will be at that moment.
So you just kind of end up with like a yellow to orange to red to orange again.
Oh, it's going to get me pretty hot in the next few hours.
Does temperature fluctuate that?
I guess it does.
Yeah.
Enough.
I mean, oftentimes I'll look at it as just solid yellow for the next 12 hours.
I'm like, okay, the temperature will be steady, but that's useful too.
And so I kind of want to make more stuff where, you know, if it's going to be raining, then
it'll twinkle at that point or.
Oh, on just those numbers between two to three or whatever.
Or if it's going to be a storm, it'll like flash like lightning or something.
Yeah.
So there's more you can do with it.
But I, I kind of am at the point where I don't know what the next step is other than, hey,
I kind of made this hacky thing just for me with hard coded my calendar in it, you know,
and it's working, it's working.
It's right there.
It's fantastic.
It's that it's an Ikea clock and some Ada fruit LEDs and a little Arduino and it works
pretty well.
But is this something that anyone in the world but me would be interested in?
I guess is my first question.
I mean, it's like, I know it depends how much it costs.
Right.
I suppose.
But it's like one of those cool little devices you give to a friend, right?
They're like, like, oh, like, here you go, dude, you like weather and clocks and tech,
you know, thrown on your wall, right?
Wait, I know a guy.
Every single YouTuber on the planet.
Like the fish.
The fish.
The big mouth billy bass.
Everyone knows a guy that would like the bass.
I may have one of those on the wall right next to my clock, actually.
I think you made him an Alexa, too, didn't you?
Yes.
An Alexa fish.
When you ask the trigger word, it lifts its head and talks in sync to the voice.
It's pretty goofy.
Amazing.
Yeah.
So that's my pitch.
Is it one ring of LEDs or multi ring?
Right now it's just one ring and there's five LEDs per hour.
So you couldn't have it be more of a strip if it was nicer or maybe even multiple.
Like if you had right now, if I have an event from two to four and my wife has an event
from three to five, the overlap is like a mix between the colors.
So if I was red and she was blue, that it's purple in the middle, you can usually tell
at a glance what it's doing there.
But that took some some math.
Yeah, I feel like if you could pick like three rings that you would have one be the calendar,
one be the weather temperature, and then the next would be like if it's raining.
That's where my head goes.
Or you create like, you know, they have that in the bar graph thing where the temperature
increases over time.
On the Apple on the Apple weather app, like night sky does this you show dark sky, yeah,
dark sky increases, it goes closer to the ring, the larger ring and down as temperature
increases and decreases.
So would you have it like is the x axis for that in the middle?
So it's like a wave that's going out farther from the middle and then back in when it's
getting hotter or colder?
Yes, yes, yeah.
You almost need like a full LCD or OLED screen, something like that.
Put an iPad up there, all the pixels we need.
Let's just make an Apple watch with magnifying glass, you know, or a Fitbit, you know, then
you can make your own watch faces.
Why don't I just tape the Google Calendar app on a tablet to my wall, and then I'm I
can see it all the time.
Yeah.
No, it looks that'll look ugly as hell.
Like the bird.
You guys ever have those bird clocks?
The bird every hour?
Oh, yeah, they do the different chirp on each.
Oh, yeah.
I'll be walking through the woods one day and I'll be I'll hear a random bird be like,
Oh my god, it's 630 or something.
Just my childhood nostalgia flashed back.
I'm at grandpa's house.
Exactly.
No, there's somebody and they had a bird clock and I didn't know it.
I'm like, where's this bird?
He's very on the hour.
Just leave it in a drawer.
There's something trapped in the wall.
Yeah.
Dude, that's that's what you got to add, Leo.
You can bring back the the analog bird clock.
The bird clock.
For you know, your grandpa, your dad.
Gen Z bird clock.
That's right.
That's cool.
We have a niche product.
How can we make it more niche?
I downloaded the app.
It's the bird app.
It'll chirp every hour, right?
So you got to put an app star behind it, Leo.
Boom.
And a speaker can have different.
Yeah, I can't stop thinking about what the Gen Z or millennial bird clock is it like
means on every hour?
What's the equivalent on that?
I like tortles.
Oh, it must be noon.
That is not a bad idea either.
No, you have that clock and then there's like a bug in it or it got reset and somehow it's
not linked to your account anymore.
And so there's just like lights up there and you're like, I have something at two o'clock.
What is it?
You can't find it because it's not on your account.
Something is looming.
The Russians hacked it.
Now it's just flashing at me.
Right.
I really do like the idea of just one or two rings around it.
The simplicity of this is what makes it so good.
Like I'm watching your clock twirl in the background.
That's so cool.
Every 15 seconds it switches and it does a little animation between the two.
And it's been, you know, something that I kind of worked on for a while and haven't
touched again.
And I look at it every day, but I love it.
I keep thinking, what are other pieces of data that live on a timeline that I could
visualize like for the next 12 hours, the temperature, my calendar, the fact that you
got your work schedule on there plus weather like that's awesome.
I don't know.
I think that is plenty right now as an MVP to go to market with.
I think it's an app store.
Like I like why?
Why think of it yourself?
You know, just let other people make the cuckoo clock sound or the, you know, the grandfather
clock and just have people.
Totally.
Yeah.
Come up with their own ideas.
And maybe I don't go to Ikea and hot glue LEDs to the back of clocks that they sell
anymore, but I actually get it manufactured somewhere.
Well, now that it's on this podcast, if someone else wants to take it and productize it, I
won't be mad.
It's got to show us though.
But maybe I'll open source what I have so far or something.
Everything said in this podcast is copyrighted by Spitball.
We made it three episodes in before we're super protective over ideas now.
Just saying, we're going to sue you if you're famous.
Episode one, we're like, anyone can have this, but episode three, we will send our lawyers.
We're starting to like our ideas.
No, we just need a royalty.
I just want a royalty.
Just 10%.
A free clock, right?
A dollar a unit.
Venmo us what you think is fair.
I don't know how well that Amazon clock sold, but maybe I could just buy their extra inventory
and flash their firmware, scratch off the logo on the back and call it mine.
That's interesting.
I wonder if you could do that.
If you could just straight up reflash it on there.
It might just be an ESP32.
All the hardware's there.
Yeah, or Arduino or something.
I don't know.
I don't think they're colored, but you can make something.
Yeah, let's go look it up.
We'll find some Amazon warehouse bins, the dump bins and start buying clocks.
All right, Steph, you're up.
What do you got?
So coming from the Midwest, we have lots of snow all the time.
Well, you're always pushing it and shoveling it.
And there was a really big snowstorm a couple of years ago, and there was no place for the
snow to go.
We were out of space.
You couldn't even see my neighbors because the pile of snow was like eight feet high.
And it's like a 10 foot strip of grass between our two yards.
And we both just snowblowed together on top of the one pile between our houses.
And there was just too much and it had nowhere to go.
And so I thought, well, snow in frozen form has huge volume, but melted, it would take
up a tiny bit of space.
So what if you could shovel your snow onto this snow melter platform down at the end
of the road that would drain into the storm drain?
Then you would have no more snow.
That's brilliant.
So like a giant tarp or something, some material and spot that you shovel onto.
Okay.
What happens to in storm drains in the winter?
Do those just freeze up or do they still work?
Do they freeze since they're underground?
I feel like I should know this.
I know.
They're underground.
They say if you don't want your pipes to freeze to have like a pencil of water flowing, then
it won't freeze.
So I think storm drains don't freeze because they're always just flowing.
That makes sense.
Like some creeks.
And so I'm picturing like a two by four heated plate or something that you would push the
snow onto and then it would melt and then go down the drain.
I had an aquarium with a beta fish for a couple of years and it came with a little
like, I don't know, a little bit bigger than a credit card size, just rubber flap and a
long cord that went right into the wall.
And all it did was heat.
Like you just stuck it in the aquarium in the rocks or whatever and it just heated stuff.
You want that, but a little bigger.
That's brilliant.
Yeah.
Like a heating pad for your driveway.
For a sore back.
I just want to figure out the math here.
How much energy does it take to move a two by four block of snow equivalent?
To melt it down, you mean?
Yeah.
Because like, I just keep coming back to flamethrowers on here.
Like I just want to do a propane flamethrower, like facing right on top of that and you're
just pushing snow into this open flame and then you're good to go.
One can an hour or something.
Or one can five minutes.
Yeah.
You could have like a snowbox and then you have the flames come down from the front and
you would push it into the box.
The flames would come down and melt it.
I figured this was just a slow thing.
So like you, at the end of the driveway here in the Midwest, we have these awful like icebergs
that form.
But if you just had like a strip all the way along it, it doesn't have to melt it in a
couple of minutes.
It could be like I push it onto there and then over the night or over the day, it just
sort of slowly melts it.
Okay.
That might be the thing.
Because if it's like an energy thing, right?
Like I can see like it costing a ton of electricity or whatever, right?
Maybe there's like, you know, when it's really hot out or like 32 degrees, snow could melt,
right?
If you maybe put a tarp over it or like some sort of like passive heating thing.
Totally.
And then you're shrinking it down, right?
It's like if the volume is too big, like how do you shrink it?
Maybe just a black tarp.
Is that all it takes?
Like, but it's covered.
What you want is a solar like pool heat.
You know how they have those like, yeah, you can go to a hardware store and get a big old
plastic container with black hose that just snakes through it and you set it in the sun
and add it to your pool loop and it slowly heats it with just making it warm in the sunlight.
Just from sunlight.
It's just a greenhouse and a black.
Yeah, yeah.
You could even make like a closed loop.
So like antifreeze, you throw antifreeze into a couple tubes, you stick them in the thing
and like a little just a little bit of heat, right?
Will slowly melt the snow over time.
It's got just got to be a little bit warmer than 32, right?
There was some kind of material and trying to remember what like piezo something.
It's just a it looks like a flat piece of ceramic tile.
If you run a current through it, one half gets really hot.
The other half gets really cold.
And just depending on how much electricity in the or the direction of the electricity,
one of those two things will happen.
So like if I were to reverse the flow, the cold side would get hot and the hot side would
get cold.
And so you could use they're not very efficient, but you could use them to make like if you
put it in a box with the walls made of this, you could either have a heater or cooler or
flip a switch and it would be the opposite.
And I'm just trying to think we made a tile platform of this ran a crap ton of electricity
through it.
Could the cold side just be the side facing the ground?
Yeah, exactly.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
The cold just has to go somewhere.
You could I mean, you could channel it out to wherever you want or up in the air or something.
Interesting, man.
OK, I'm thinking simple firewood, water or something like how do you how do you bring
it like I just think that there's got to be another solution besides an outlet that you
an extension cord that you run out there.
Propane.
Well, I was wondering how much solar energy like we're talking about, like how much heat
do you need and how much energy does that take to melt the lower layer?
And then would solar be enough like sorry, shot in the dark here.
OK, compost piles.
All right.
OK, in December, in December, stay hot.
No, they stay hot.
The comp really.
Yeah.
If you go around, there were houses on Mackinac that used to heat themselves through the winter
using just what from the like the gas, maybe.
No, it's just the the reaction, the chemical reactions going on of a bunch of little microbes
in there eating and pooping is enough to generate heat.
What?
Yes.
OK, could you have your compost be in a hole in the ground and its lid is flush with the
ground then and it's like putting off the heat and that's what you shovel the snow onto
water piping heat pile.
OK, somehow get the OK, maybe figure this out.
We'll figure this out with like the engineers.
We'll hire the engineers to figure this out.
Wave your hands a little bit.
We got a compost pile over here.
We have a snow pile over here.
How do we bring the heat from here to there?
OK, Steph's about to blow our minds.
So I think I've had this conversation with Leo before.
We've argued about when you use the oven and you're done cooking, whatever you're cooking,
do you leave the door open and have it heat your house or do you leave it closed?
But he said, where does the heat go if the door is closed?
Well, what if you could have a fan blow that extra heat from the oven out there because
you're cooking more in the winter?
That's brilliant.
Yes, Steph, I don't know if you're joking or if that's just the most genius idea I've
heard today.
You could probably pull heat from addicts in the winter, right?
Well, because our company, they have heated sidewalks in some places because it's using
the excess heat from somewhere.
So I was like, well, what is a heat source in your house?
OK, another idea.
Sorry to take this.
OK, you know how you run your AC in the summer and you heat your house in the winter?
Yeah, I'm with you.
No.
OK, store it old school.
OK, why get rid of why get rid of something that's totally useful in the summer?
Yes, instead of having the melted snow because snow in itself has big volume.
Well, melted to a liquid instead of putting it down the storm drain, you make it into
cubes and leave it outside to refreeze it.
And then those are the cubes that you set in your house to cool it in the summer.
Just hold on to them for a few months.
There's a real thing.
They're called ice houses.
We're just back to the 1800s.
What's wrong with that?
That's free energy, baby.
Like in Texas, we could.
The old freezers are called ice boxes because you just put a cube of ice in there.
Boom.
I'm just I'm just wondering why we in Michigan, but any Midwest city, you would ever have
an AC unit if we could just figure out how to store these mountains of snow.
OK, as insane amounts of snow, they do this enough.
What is it like?
Some manufacturing plant will run the run an ice machine all night because it's energy
efficient so that they keep the.
Have you heard about this?
It's more energy efficient to make the ice at night because the electricity is cheaper
at night so that they can use it throughout the day.
Yes.
So it's not more energy efficient.
It's just cheap.
People do this.
It's cheaper.
Yeah.
Well, there's free ice every year.
I don't know.
I just I'm like it's a wasted resource, man.
It's free resource falling from the sky.
We just free cooling, free heat, free cooling, dude.
I don't know.
Can we turn it into energy?
So our roofs sometimes around here have those little like melty snake things that keep the
ice dams from forming.
How do those work?
This is just that.
Right.
But in a place I always thought that was electricity.
That's what I mean.
I'm coming back to the beginning here.
Are those really that expensive to operate that we're trying to figure out ways to store
ice for six months?
Like why don't we just plug it in?
I don't know.
How are those not super expensive?
I guess I just feel like the amount of calories it takes to melt snow is like crazy.
Like it just it's way.
All right.
I'm going to go to chat.
You be the fifth podcast guest.
I need to Google this.
We don't Google things anymore, Stephanie.
How much energy?
Googling is so 2021.
And first half of 2022.
Large language models are where it's at.
They will be our engineer.
All right.
What about snow compression?
Compress the snow.
Into ice.
Is that water?
I wonder if you like simultaneously heat and compress snow into giant ice blocks.
Yeah.
Compressing stuff heats it up, right?
So you guys ever remember those graphs in physics where it's like, here's the three
states of water and you have the center point and whatnot.
I think if we compress it, it's just going to turn back into water at that point.
And then it goes down the drain.
We're trying to make it go from solid to liquid here, Scott.
Can you use the weight of the snow to compress snow to melt snow?
This idea has got legs.
When I was growing up, we had I had grandparents who their main trash in their kitchen was
a big trash compactor.
You closed it and every few minutes, not a few minutes, every few days or whatever, you
press the button and it's smashed into a little cube.
I thought it was the coolest thing.
We just need that.
But for snow and then it turns it into ice and drains or into water and drains out the
bottom into the storm drain.
Right.
Yeah.
How much pressure do you need?
Yeah.
I just asked chat that chat GPT that it's called pressure melting.
Apparently, it is very much a thing.
Is it hard to do?
When I park my car on top of the snow, what compress?
Oh, I'm thinking of ways to use your way.
Use the cars.
Yeah.
Or like, yeah, something like that.
Why not?
Hmm.
So, your whole driveway is a big pad.
You shovel the snow.
What?
Yeah.
Like, what if you I don't know, instead of.
All right, here we go.
I got it.
Car sized box.
When you're not in your driveway, it is up at ground level.
One of the sides of the box is ramp.
You shovel all of the snow into that drive up onto box, which pushes it down and compresses
it and liquidizes it.
And then it goes through your house's plumbing out to the sewer lines.
Boom.
Like, I know it sounds like is this sounds like it's possible between pressure like pressure
should melt snow.
We're going to get like a single email with like three lines of math being like, you guys
are stupid.
Well, ask that guy to solve this problem then.
All right.
At least we're trying over here.
This would take enough electricity to power Las Vegas for eight years.
Okay.
But my driveway is clean.
That's right.
All right, Russell, let's see what you've got now.
All right.
So I'm going to do a dating app, I think again.
Hell yeah.
Russell's Love Corner.
I'm a married man.
Every other episode.
Russell's Love Corner episode two.
I'm in.
We need a sound for that.
Welcome back to Russell.
Can you say welcome back to Russell's Love Corner?
Welcome back to Russell's Love Corner.
Brown chicken, brown cow.
Hit us up.
I'm so excited.
So you know, I've got a many dating app ideas, but as a married man, I will never do them.
As we previously established, married men cannot invent dating apps.
That's right.
Like watch me.
This is my favorite dating app.
It's called Sonder.
Okay.
If anybody's seen, there's like this viral YouTube video about how you pass people all
the time and their lives are just so intrinsically complex, like your own, I don't know, this
deep BS that tells people like, hey, when you pass somebody on the road, like especially
in a major city, it's just kind of crazy how that person that you'll never see again is
going to live their entire life and you will never see them again.
All right.
Okay.
So the dating app, all right, takes that concept and says, all right, whenever you pass people
that are single and on the app, you kind of match, right?
It's a light match.
You don't actually get to know each other.
It's just a light match.
And the more instances where you're passing people, you get more hits, right?
And eventually the more hits you get with people, the more likely you are to match with
them.
This is a concept that actually Nintendo DS did.
Street pass.
That's what I was thinking of too.
I don't know what this is.
It's insane.
You, if you had your Nintendo DS in your pocket and you walk by another person that had a
Nintendo DS in their pocket, you would exchange information and like get points and like special
prizes and stuff in your game.
Right.
And it was sick.
You could, what was also crazy is if you went to like certain wifi hotspots, right, you
would pass with multiple people at that wifi hotspot.
And so basically now this dating app is not a swipe and be it's matching with people that
do similar stuff as you that you would normally pass by in life.
Oh, so I'm putting all my interests on here ahead of time.
Like I like sailing or I like, no, whatever.
No, you are living your best life and connecting to wifi hotspots and you're passing by other
people's phones.
Right.
And every time.
So if you and some other girl go to the same Kroger every week, it'll match you and you
just miss each other like by one minute.
Like let's say you go on the same commute every day to nearly the same spot, to the
same gym, but you're always off by one hour.
Right.
Talk about that one small town girl living in a lonely world.
Like imagine you just missed that your life partner, because you take the train 10 minutes
after them, you go to the gym one hour after them.
Right.
So you have like the perfect life together.
This app would solve that through wifi hotspots and passing by people.
So now we're matching people on.
So like it kind of incentivizes the more you do, the more you're likely you're to match.
Right.
So if you go to concerts, you go to events and how cool would it be if 10 years down
the road you're like, Whoa, I match with you.
We passed each other a hundred times, never saw each other until this moment.
Right.
Until we started having the, like, this goes beyond dating app almost.
This is like cool for life also.
Like I would love to like have a friend that I meet down the road.
I'm like, Whoa, let's see if we pass each other like a million times.
Like I don't know, but all I have to say is I feel like the dating app version would be
way cool because it just matches people more authentically.
Right.
That's it.
I love this.
So I need to credit a guy named Shannon, C H A N N O N Perry, who wrote a blog post last
fall, actually about a year ago today in August of 2022.
This person took their Google history, their location history, which they had about 10
years worth of and their partners, and they overlapped it and did a bunch of math and
Python and learned that before they met, they had 33 times that they were within a hundred
meters of each other and talked about like, there were 2,700 something coordinates that
were both recorded at the same point in time, but it only lasted for a moment.
I was at university.
They were working near at the time and stuff, but here were the 33 near misses.
And over here at this spot over here, it happened many times and stuff.
I'll put the link in the show notes, but this exact idea, you could, you could even leverage
Google's existing location history.
So you don't have to like start from ground zero and begin, but even say like straight
up imported.
Yeah.
You begin your journey in your cool new app by importing where you've been for the last
10 years.
Yeah.
All that.
See how many near misses you've already had with people.
It's like time hop, but time travel.
Time hop, but with friends.
Time hop with friends.
Yeah.
And, and distances, right?
Like in geography.
Strangers.
Time hop with strangers.
Yeah.
Dude.
That'd be so cool.
That would be really cool.
Even outside of dating apps.
Like I'd love to see that for random people.
Like have we ever met before?
Do I know you?
You always hear those stories of like, wow, I'm in the background of my now wife's Disney
photos when they were on vacation or whatever.
Yeah.
There's probably way more of that.
When they're both like eight years old or something.
Right.
When it's harder to fake, cause you know, you can put on your Tinder profile like, oh,
I like reading and you know, biking.
But this is actually like, okay, are they actually going out biking or?
Do you like hiking?
Have you been hiking?
Or like, oh, my GPS says you haven't left your house in four weeks.
You'd be perfect for this person though.
They live next door.
They never leave their house.
What helped inspire this app is because I know, as I said before, my wife's friends
are very single.
Any guys living on the, you know, listening to this podcast, I got some hookups.
They don't, sometimes they don't leave the house.
Sometimes they don't do anything.
And I'm like, oh, so your chances of meeting anybody are zero.
And they're like, oh, they don't want to be on any dating apps.
Oh, well then your chances are like negative zero.
Well then here's Sondra.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
So if you're looking for anything, just run the app on your phone and you will find your
perfect match just by living your life.
Right.
I don't know.
Like, well, hopefully, right.
Do something, walk your dog, go to the dog park.
I don't know anything.
And you will get matches with people that do similar things that you do.
And now your first date is something you already do.
You don't have to figure it out.
Right.
Or you at least have stuff to talk about.
Oh, man.
You also once a month go over to the whatever.
Yeah.
I remember going over there recently, too.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
I didn't even think about that.
This is great, man.
We have the same chiropractor.
It was love at first sight.
Yeah.
I hate when he cracks my back that way.
Yeah, I know.
Me too.
We're in love.
Hating on the chiropractor for the whole first date.
So how'd you meet?
Well, we met like 80 times and we didn't even know it.
This is I like this.
This is really fun.
It's my favorite idea that I will never launch like this is like, but hopefully somebody
does so I can just install it on my phone and then be done with my life.
Can you make this so I can have the friend version?
Right.
Not the dating app version.
Right.
Yeah.
Just I want to meet new people.
That's great.
Yeah.
I'm going to make it a fair.
Okay.
Got it.
Please.
A fair free.
Can I have the affair free version?
Now it's $10 a month.
No affairs.
Sorry, married men and women.
The terms and conditions are going to be very confusing.
So kind of like that where you're talking about location based alerts and communication
is I was wondering when you started to talk if it would have been you are somewhere and
it alerts you that someone single is nearby.
I'm like, would it tell you who it is?
Or would it just be like, oh, someone single is nearby.
Just chat up everyone.
You know, I could see an entire YouTube channel dedicated to guys getting that notification
on their phone and just be looking up like groundhogs all around them.
I would watch that all day a compilation of that.
So is it bumbled where the women choose first?
Yeah.
The women speak first or whatever.
You have that where the men you have to specify, but when you get the app set up, the men can
only receive notifications and the women can only send them and they can press one button
and everyone in the area is just notified.
They just get pinged.
Send out a pulse.
12 dudes.
The woman pulls out the app and it's like, there are 41 dudes around you who will be
notified.
You press the button.
That's brilliant.
I think that has something.
I think you could tap into that a little bit.
Like if I'm going out with friends and I want to like have somebody approach me, but that's
something like that.
I think that's a different dating app.
I think that's a different one.
Yeah, probably.
Save that for next week's dating app.
That's another one.
Yeah.
Russell's Love Corner.
Tune in next week to Russell's Love Corner.
Oh yeah.
Well thank you very much for listening this week.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
Thank you so much, Steph, for being here.
This was a lot of fun.
Thanks for having me.
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