I'm Scott.
I'm Russell.
And I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, where three educated extroverts 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 delighted to have brought along my sister to the show.
Uh, Marie is a senior at Western where she's going to be going into elementary education,
so she can hopefully babysit us well enough to stay on topic this episode.
So Marie, welcome to Spitball.
Happy to be here!
Oh, this is going to be a good time.
And this week, in honor of you spending so much time in classrooms, I've written a little
warm-up game that I'm going to call K-12 LOL.
And in this game, I have a list of a bunch of failed tech for the classroom projects
that I've dug up over the years.
Lots of smart board wannabes that never really took off, and all we have to do, I'm just
going to go through this list and you got to tell me if it's something that I made up
or if it's a real thing.
So if I were to tell you about the high school in China in Zhang Hao in 2018 that installed
AI cameras above every blackboard that scanned students' faces every 30 seconds to detect
Emotions and categorize their attention levels. Why that would be a real story
Apparently students reported feeling like mystery eyes were watching them and didn't love it
So it's things like that that kind of fell through we start as we always do with our guests Marie Marie the Newton
KNEWTON an adaptive learning startup that raised a hundred eighty million dollars promising a quote robot
Tutor in the Sky that could quote semi reads students minds
Was this a real thing or a made-up thing
I'm gonna go is real based on the name. That is absolutely
Yep, they were acquired in 2019 for a hot
17-million so about 90% less than they were originally made for after
Failing to deliver. Scott the Learn Pod by Focus First individual sound dampening focus pods that were
$4,200 each with built-in tablets white noise generators and air quality monitors marketing for reducing distractions
Real or made up?
This is a 420 joke. I'm gonna say fake on that one. I made that one up very good
Number was too specific. I had a whole like backstory about them facing a lawsuit after a child
- Oh, it's here. - I'll get an asthma attack,
but we don't have to go into it.
It's fine.
- A panic attack trapped in their pod.
- Exactly.
Russell, ChalkSync 2.0.
There was never a 1.0, but ChalkSync 2.0,
a smart chalk tray that detected
which color chalk you grabbed underneath a chalkboard
and auto-labeled the board notes
that you take in Google Drive.
Real or made up? - Whoa.
Wait, that sounds so cool, but I don't think it's real.
- Yeah, I made that one up too, very good.
2.0 though, Leo, you got me.
Like I was, I thought I was going to lose that one,
but the whole, there's no 1.0.
The concept of a school with a chalkboard
using Google Drive is very funny to me.
Yeah, that's it right there.
Well, I mean, they had smart boards.
I don't know, maybe it's a predecessor.
I tried.
Marie, the Engkey, E-N-G-K-E-Y.
In South Korea, egg-shaped robots with TV screen faces
displaying avatars that remotely controlled
Filipino teachers paid way less than Korean teachers.
- I'm gonna go with real.
- Yeah, that was real.
- 100%. - Yeah.
- 100%. - Wow.
- 2010, so like really early in like,
what was the iPad, like 2012?
So this was an early shape, yeah.
Apparently it's cheaper to outsource
literal teaching to another country.
- It's a crazy use of globalization, that's nuts, okay.
Scott, the Amplify tablet, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp
spent a billion dollars building proprietary Android tablets
for competing with Apple in schools,
but the chargers overheated and melted.
Real or made up?
(laughing)
- I really want this to be real.
I'm gonna say real.
- That's real, very good.
Yeah, apparently--
- Chargers actually overheated and melted?
- Yes, and screens shattered all the time
Plastic melted and it was a total nightmare and never took off of course then they was sold to Zune
Can you imagine Rupert Murdoch controlling all of our schools now - that's nightmare fuel right there
Russell the no K&O
Dual screen 14-inch tablet designed to replace heavy textbooks, but weighed five and a half pounds and cost $900
Still cheaper than a text I know I think this is real it is real very good
They were five and a half pounds.
The original iPad weighed one and a half.
So this is like a cinder block in your backpack.
- That is very heavy.
And $900 on top of that.
- It only lasted two years, 2010 to 2012.
- Still had to probably pay the same price
for textbooks too, you know?
- Marie, Hall Pass with the little,
what is it called when there's a line over the A?
Not an umlaut, but the-- - Schwa?
Ah, Halpas 2019 to 2021, digitize student IDs
with Bluetooth mesh networking tracking chips
to automatically unlock doors, take attendances,
and approve bathroom passes.
- This feels real.
- Yeah, I made that one up.
- Oh, okay.
- Nah. - Wow.
- They allegedly collapsed due to COVID
and a battery that needed recharging every 10 days
was the story that I made up
(laughing)
in case I needed more talking points.
- That sounds so cool though.
That's a Spitball right there, Leo.
- Yeah, there you go.
I just came up with that on the fly.
So if you wanna go ahead and make--
- I think all the fake ones are ones that Leo's like,
"I need this in my educational world."
- You can be the one in charge of trying to get thousands
of high schoolers to remember to charge their IDs.
(laughing)
- True.
- Scott, the talking typewriter in the 1960s.
A computerized electronic typewriter
developed by McGraw Edison that placed children in booths
where they could explore letters.
The machine wouldn't let them type unless they had the correct letter on the screen
pressed in front of them on the keyboard.
Really made up.
The 60s?
No, there's no way.
That was a real thing.
Like a clockwork?
The talking typewriter, yeah!
What?
Is it like the size of a building?
It must have been all mechanical.
I don't understand how it did that.
That's crazy.
I know.
It gave audio feedback and everything.
And then lastly, Russell, Classcraft, a web app that turns classrooms into lightweight
RPGs where students become heroes, earning XP and powers by completing assignments as
quests and losing health points for disruptions, tardiness, poor quiz scores, that sort of
thing.
Real or made up?
[Russell] [laughs] Lightning Bolt, be quiet!
[laughter]
teaching. Oh like real escape. For like atomic habits basically like just getting it. But I
think it's real. It was a real thing for ten years. You could, you too could use
instead of Google Classroom, Classcraft! Are you brave enough warriors to go on a
quest to do your division this week? Yeah! That's just class dojo but cooler.
What's class dojo? That sounds awesome. Class dojo is like that? What's class dojo? Oh it's like
- Like teachers can give points or subtract points
for like specific things.
- Hogwarts style.
- Exactly.
But also they use it to like text parents and stuff.
Like it's mostly texting at this point.
But it started when I was in third and fourth grade,
which my mentor was horrified to learn.
(laughing)
- I think Russell, you got all three right
if I'm tracking that right.
Pretty sure.
Well done.
You win again.
- Dominating as always.
- Winner, I'm a winner.
- You're a winner.
That means of course that you get to pick who goes first,
as we do every week.
(laughing)
- Very consistent.
- Yeah, that's always been the rule
and no one questions it.
So what would you like to do?
You wanna kick it to someone else
or do you wanna take it?
You gonna kick the ball or you gonna receive?
- Who's gonna volunteer?
If there's any, are there any volunteers before I?
- You got this, Russell. - All right, I'll start.
- Do it.
- So I do a lot of, like,
I do a decent amount of traveling for work
and I have children.
And I've realized that when I go on these trips,
they usually have these books about the place I'm going to
and I buy them on the way home
and I realize when I read the book,
I'm like, this is great content.
I wish I had read this book before I had gone.
- This is a regular thing?
You buy it on the way home always?
airports usually have like, you know,
or like, there'll be like a gift shop, right,
in Boulder or somewhere and they'll have
like a special book there.
Like, oh cool, this is Boulder.
And then like, whoa, I should have gone
to the Celestial Seasonings frickin' thing, right?
Or like, all this other stuff.
I've been here for a week and I didn't even know.
So I guess my thought would be like,
you would buy these books before you travel
to help my kids also know where I'm going.
And then if I go to those spots,
they could connect with me and like with those books, right?
So we read the children's books every night.
Oh, I'm gonna be in Louisville, right?
This was a really cool book.
They have a giant baseball bat there.
They have like cool caves and a river.
And I learned all this stuff at the end of my trip.
And there's one for Vermont too,
which we go there all the time.
But like, it'd be cool to have like an add-on
or something for like traveling dads or in general
to give the kids, 'cause I end up buying a gift anyway
or something to keep them entertained.
But they want to be a part of my travel experience,
I just don't know how.
And so these books would be a great way to do that.
Or more, right?
If I could buy like a gift basket too or pre-buy it maybe,
'cause I'm just gonna come home
with a bunch of bullshit anyway.
I mean, might as well pre-buy that, right?
Or something.
And yeah, so I think it'd be a cool package, right?
That's it.
Cities would love it.
And yeah.
- Do you often fly or do you drive?
- Fly, fly.
I'm always flying for work.
- This should be the airport gift shop
in the departures area, right?
It's got like all the major hubs
that are likely to be flown to.
If you're in the Detroit airport,
why is there so many Detroit swag stores?
There should be like, you're going to Houston and Atlanta
and Sacramento and stuff.
Make like the little, like,
here's where you can expect to go shop, right?
- Ooh, I'm a Spitball of that, Leo.
Why don't you make like a vending machine
that like can customize it to anywhere
that you're coming from, right?
So if I wanted to buy a book for Houston.
- I like the Princeton on demand.
- Princeton on demand.
What else am I gonna be doing
sitting around at this airport?
vending machine with infinite infinite selection you can you can buy a blank and just print it
right there they just load it with like 10 20 and 40 page blanks and boom the entire like soul out
of this oh yeah i just came from houston but i bought this blanket in grand rapids it's just
that's awesome it's amazing russell i really want to add to this idea but it's literally my pitch
next but it's gonna fit perfect with you on here. Oh that's fun. I think we just gotta bring this in
on it. All right yeah let's pivot. Do it. Just do it. We're doing a hybrid. No no we will continue
on yours I promise you but uh yeah if we if you and I did that um if you pitch yours can we go
back and forth between these ideas and build them? Absolutely. Well then just do it. Absolutely. Hit
us with your pitch now. Okay. Phone go baby. Russell and I did a weekend startup way back
when we did like a local community business sponsored coloring book where like these books
would be given out for free and then a local business could sponsor a page like some mom and
pop coffee shop would be like this is my picture for this coloring book here. I recently occurred
to me that like sorry putting a dollar in the AI jar but you could one of the hardest things we
struggled with was generating the pictures for this guy like who's going to be the artist for
for these because this is back in like 2019.
We could AI generate coloring books on this now, but Russell, you could have Russell's
adventure.
You went out to Italy.
This is a coloring book for your kids where this is Russell at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
This is Russell at the Coliseum or whatever.
And just all of these auto-generated based upon where Russell's going so they could color
it and then Russell gets home and they can show him, "I saw you here."
And I could take photos.
Yeah, that's awesome, Scott.
- We have a nice little caricature of Russell
doing all these cool things on his trip.
- Did you guys ever make a Flat Stanley in school?
Or read the book Flat Stanley?
- I know of Flat Stanley.
- That's where you travel with the hamster, right?
- Is it the hamster?
- There's this, it's a book about a kid
who gets flattened by a bulletin board above his bed,
and then it turns into this school project
where kids will either make themselves,
like I was Flat Marie, and then I mailed it
to one of my aunts, and like Flat Marie
went on all these adventures.
So I'm thinking, what if this was like a series
where you have like, I don't know,
Joseph the Worm or something,
and it's all about Joseph the Worm goes to Paris,
Joseph the Worm goes to Rome.
He's not Joseph the Worm.
But whatever character,
and then you don't even have to be like
regenerating all these things for specific,
once it's made for your trip to France,
then you can get slightly more detailed
into like recommendations from locals or something
if they wanted to use it as like a travel hook.
- It's crazy that we're bringing this up.
I was literally today thinking about an upcoming,
I'm going on my first road trip with my family in April-ish
and we're gonna drive across a couple of states.
And I was thinking like,
should I make like a map for them for every day,
some sort of log or like, how do I do this?
But if I could give them each a little coloring book
that was like information about where we're going
Pictures and stuff about the destinations for those they can be in the coloring book - sure with Joseph the worm
Which is the worm? He's the tour guide
the tour guide
It would be good to have like a binding thread some sort of character. That's like, you know taking our family along or something
Yes, yes. Yes guiding you through the whole thing
Yeah, so what's cool Scott about like by connecting what I'm actually doing to the coloring book
that'd be so legit, right?
Like, here is where I'm gonna be today.
Why don't you color this page while I'm there, right?
- Yeah, and you try to recreate the picture with it all.
- That'd be awesome, exactly.
Now your kid, it's more about like,
like asynchronous connection, right, with your kids.
And it's like, that's where I was.
You colored the page that I was on, like where I was at,
and here's the photo, right?
I'm usually sending videos after,
like when they're, by the time they're going to bed,
you know, sometimes because it's so late.
So like, that would be so cool though.
And you AI generate it, or maybe I take the photo.
I guess part of me is like, if I take the photo
and then they print it or something,
and then they color it, but who has printers?
But something to that effect, right?
- Just becomes a printer selling business,
strictly for this reason.
- It doesn't seem-- - You gotta buy
this printer hardware first. - Coloring book printer.
- Coloring book printer, boy, we just don't use
our coloring book printer. - It only prints
in black and white.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Hey.
- Yeah, I think our ideas come together because we buy,
like if we get businesses to sponsor this stuff,
to like sponsor the pages,
we're just making money everywhere.
Sponsored book, like the book is sponsored, right?
We don't pay a cent, and then it's AI generated,
and then we sell on top of it.
It's just, I don't know how we lose.
- You charge your kids a subscription fee,
like it's perfect.
I mean, maybe, right?
- Turn past the Panda Express page
straight to the Exxon page, honey.
You're gonna love this one.
(laughing)
I don't know about that.
- Really, I really like the idea
of the tour guide on there too part.
Like Russell's, Russell family has their dog Maya
and like Maya could be the guide
throughout this whole thing or something.
There's something directly related to them.
Cookie and Pixel are bringing Russell through Italy.
There's a lot happening there.
- Yeah, dude, that's so cool.
The Flant Stanley idea, I think I know what you mean by that.
You're bringing it around and you're writing that story.
That's really cool too.
I guess if they had something at home that would connect to who I'm--
If I'm bringing Flant Stanley with me or something, if they had the partner Stanley or whatever.
The stuffed animal that is included in it or something.
-Yes, stuffed animal that they know, but Russell brought with him on this trip
and he was guiding him around.
-Our brother did the same Flat Stanley thing, but with Felix.
Wasn't there a rabbit named Felix?
Maybe that was me when I was a kid, but we did the same idea.
We mailed a little stuffed rabbit to the various relatives
of all the kids in my class and he went on a road trip adventure and all that.
-I feel like if there's some unifying mascot,
that's also a branding thing, like elf on the shelf.
if all the kids at school are talking about like,
"Yeah, my dad went on a business trip
"and he brought my stuffed purple dog.
"Oh my gosh, I have one too."
Whatever.
- I see.
- I saw that Jeremy the dog went there
and you have Jeremy the dog going here
and we can compare our books and yeah, yeah, for sure.
- Now we're talking.
- There used to be a character, a unifying guide.
- Dude, that stuff spreads like wildfire at schools too.
- Right?
- Like, yes.
- Freaking elf on a shelf, man.
Once one kid's got it, every parent has to have it, right?
Because every kid talks about it.
And now it's like, well, I need to buy something
for the grandkid, right?
I got to buy something for the nephew.
All right, well, they just talked about purple pixel pups.
I don't know what I'm going to call this thing.
What do we call it?
The traveling book man.
Sisterhood of the traveling book man.
Traveling book man.
Do you think it's that expensive to have
two or three illustrators just like knocking out black and white traceable
like that's a very funny cuz we did all the math on this in 2019 line drawings
like they're the whole point of coloring books is that they're not finished like
you don't have to make it super elaborate especially for little kids get
it it's the Eiffel Tower like yeah a triangle a big part of this coloring
-The second book concept was that you have to hang
your kids' coloring page on the fridge whether you like it or not.
-Oh, yes. I forgot about that.
-The sponsor-- -You always have that ad.
[laughter]
-That was so brilliant, Russell.
-The whole selling point was like that whole--
-We're going to get you in the center of every home.
All you got to do is sponsor.
-Sponsored by Chase Bank.
-Be the biggest thing on their fridge.
- Yeah, the sponsored pages are twice as big.
- Yeah, right?
The centerfold.
- That's right.
- Chase Bank, huge center thing.
That's great.
This is really wild, but my pitch was gonna be
about coloring pages on the fridge, so.
- You're kidding, Leo.
- What?
(laughing)
- Bring it in, bring it in.
- Marie, is your idea even remotely
about children's creativity output?
No?
- You'd think, but no.
- No, excellent.
Well, you want to transition once more?
- No, we're doing one super pitch.
We got this.
- One super pitch.
(saxophone music)
So, we have this routine of taking kids' drawings
in our household and putting them on the door,
on the wall, whatever.
And then once it accumulates,
there's the great purge that they are not privy to.
Things go in the trash.
We take a couple that we like.
We save them forever in a box or whatever,
and then the rest just gets garbled.
And I think that that's what everyone does.
Also, digitizing these things is pretty easy,
and there are established family photo frame
type services and stuff.
So I think that there should be a gamified
kids repository of art that the kids have generated,
that the parents digitize, add to the digital collection
and trash the original so that you can have the,
oh, remember when you made that collection built up
without having the stuff accumulate.
Maybe this is like an E-ink screen
or maybe some sort of screen of something
that is like the dedicated space
for where the kids art goes.
It does a slideshow.
I don't wanna stick another TV on my wall,
but something that's like a digital photo frame
that's on the wall, that the kids,
it's all it does is kids art, right?
And we market it for that, and we make it the centerpiece
of this is where art goes that you make kids.
And we make it a fun game somehow.
I haven't figured out the gamified side of it yet.
So that's where I need your help
to help me Spitball this guy.
But how do we solve both accumulation
and keeping these things forever, right?
Maybe there's like a,
I was gonna say like a scoring or ranking
something but that's a bad idea. Another trash one. Boy this month is just awful.
Uninspired. Exactly, derivative. You gotta make it, no I don't you mean, the the idea of you
can't throw out something in front of your kids right? Exactly. So how do you
make it cool enough where they want to throw it out.
I have so many.
Yeah.
That's gotta be part of the process, right?
Like the kid is like, uh, Oh, you did it.
You finished your thing.
You've been working on that for two days.
That's so awesome.
Let's put it in the thing.
Right.
And now it's added to the collection, the museum.
It's just a scanner and a paper shredder at the same time.
Yeah, totally.
It's like that one piece of art, that big, the Banksy that shredded
itself or whatever.
(laughter)
- Broke halfway through.
- My kids wrote, "I miss you, Leo," my name,
on a piece of paper and slid it through my door.
And it was so cute, right?
But then they did it like eight more times.
Am I supposed to keep all eight of them that are identical?
Ah!
So I took a picture of a couple of them
and I have that fun memory, right?
But if I instead said like, "Oh, that's so fun,
Let's put it into the repository somehow.
I feel like there's something there.
I really like the idea of your repository is, sorry,
it is another screen, but the screen is on your fridge.
Yes.
And it's just like permanently all of them end up there.
I feel like for a kid to want to be part of this ritual,
there has to be a physical component.
They have to be able to put it into the scanner and then it disappears.
Maybe it's connected to a box that you check the scan later
to make sure it worked and then you throw the contents of the box away.
Yeah.
Or something like that.
And then it appears across the room like magic.
Like the television thing in Willy Wonka.
Oh, you have the like sparkle.
Yeah.
Or maybe it's actually part of the device itself.
Maybe they stick.
And so it's a TV that's an inch thick and they can stick the art into it.
Oh, that's good.
And there's an animation of it coming onto the screen, right?
And now it's like, oh, it gets floated away
like a paper airplane into the other ones or something.
Shredded out the back.
Yep.
God burn it.
There's an incinerator.
Save on heating bills.
The more art you make--
We have to figure out how to incentivize art that takes time
because it would be very easy for them to take one marker
line.
I know my daughter would jump straight to,
I spent five seconds.
I'm feeding it in, feeding it in, feeding it in, feeding it.
This is the fun part now.
So it still needs to be about preserving actual stuff
that took time.
So I don't know how to make it like,
wow, you spent a lot of time on it.
Maybe there's some kind of time tracking component
or logging or something.
- Or you do have, you were joking about,
let's rank these and score them.
But like, maybe there is like a private subtle rank
that the parents can do to be like,
ooh, that's a nine there.
Eh, that's a two.
You don't need to show that one as much.
It's still in the system,
but we're not gonna bring it to the front much.
- We're public.
- You tell the people on special paper
that it has to be covered with a certain amount of ink
or something to be fed into the machine.
- It has to have at least eight colors.
- Yeah.
- If you stick it in, it just like spits it back out.
Like a dollar bill in a vending machine.
Not enough art.
The bot has denied your sacrifice.
(laughing)
- Wow.
- We want to train him to have inadequacy issues.
- That'd be cool, the multi-color thing.
You have to use these five colors, right?
Or something like that.
That's really...
- Or like there's, oh, maybe it prompts you.
Like this must have at least three hearts somewhere on it
or something like that.
Like they go to the piece for the inspiration.
Today's challenge that everyone in the world is doing
with this one is everyone's drawing a picture of a dog
and it has to be a dog that's wearing shoes
and here's everyone around the world's attempts at it
and you're like linked to other ones maybe or something.
- And then the next day, if you show a kid
who's older than five a picture and you say,
"Oh, this kid won best dog with shoes yesterday."
Today, they're gonna work real hard on their cow on Mars.
- Oh, that's so smart.
- Build in that competitive nature from the start.
- Yeah, like the Twitter account of the company
posts the top three every day or something.
- Well, he won a $200 ice cream gift card.
(laughing)
Better luck next time with your shitty dog.
- Get him started on social media super early.
- They have to vote too, like for other people's paintings
and it actually turns them into better artists, you know?
- A little competition.
- There's Leo trying to draw an incredible donkey
eating a carrot to win a $200 gift card though.
- The parents are rigging it.
- My three year old drew this, I don't know.
- Yeah, exactly.
- This could be a really cool,
you could do some sort of piece,
like the paper itself, Leo.
I don't know, like those pressure papers or whatever.
You have a special, I'm gonna use E Ink touch screen, okay?
They draw on it, multicolor, and then you submit it
and it clears it, right?
Or you have a special piece of paper
that when you feed it into the machine,
it comes out the other side and the paper's clear, right?
So that it like, that way you don't have to keep
using new paper, you have to use this one sheet of paper.
You can't start five different versions of it, you know?
- Special markers and some kind of heat
makes it disappear, some, hmm, that's fun.
- There you go, right?
Or some Etch-A-Sketch.
They walk up to it and have to fiddle knobs.
That's right.
That's exactly-- Etch-A-Sketch, but physical paper version
of that.
That's proprietary, too.
It's a lot less intrusive in the home, too.
It's not just a big device.
It's like, oh, this is a piece of paper.
And maybe you can plug it into your phone,
and it will save that image somehow,
instead of having its own--
or like an iPad or whatever that you already have.
And then it's, there you go.
- I know, that's the downside of this
is I don't want another screen in my house
and I know I would, so that's my partner.
- Yes you do.
- At one point, one of my friends had a notebook,
like a spiral notebook that she could wash off.
And like she would scan the corner of the page
and it would just send her notes to her Google Drive.
- Oh, that's a nice bag. - My coworker has that too.
Yeah. - Yeah.
'Cause then it's still physical to draw on at least.
-Oh, you just wash it? -Reusable.
You just wash it with soap and water or just-- Whoa.
Like a damp rag, yes.
-What? -It's got a waxy coating
and you could use it a few dozen times and stuff.
Oh, perfect.
-Yes. -I really want this for--
All over the years, all of the t-shirts that you just had
that are just like, I don't know,
we're sentimental in some form or another.
The go-to thing is like Zoe, she'll go out and she'll make a quilt
of all of the cool t-shirts that she's had over the years.
Is there any way to save them before they all disappear
or get too ratty in some way that you--
-I see. -Like a scrapbook?
-Scrapbook?
Can I put them on Leo's fridge though?
That's my goal.
-T-shirt with ink screen built in.
You could wear whatever shirt you want every day.
-Yes, I know that though.
It's not that the shirt is old.
Maybe you just reprint the shirt.
What if you scanned it and it--
-Whoa.
-This could be for anything now.
It's more the problem that I lose the shirt after a while.
I'll look at an old picture of me and be like,
"Ah, I really liked that one.
"What happened to that?
"That disappeared."
- Bespoke custom shirt replication service is fun.
- What if you could print your art?
Like if you're, you know, whenever you want,
that's a part of your service is you can find the art
that your kid made at any point in time.
If you ever want this back in your room,
we just hit print and they send it in the mail, right?
And you can literally, you create duplicates.
So when you save it, it's not like it's destroyed forever.
You can pay, I know another printer service company.
- Okay.
- Yeah, so if you want that piece of paper again, Leo,
after you threw it out, you have the digital version,
you can say, "Send me another."
It's sure it's not the same.
It's a clone, right?
But it's, I don't know, now you have it.
So now your kid would be way more interested
in throwing it out 'cause they'll print another one
if they ever want to.
Seems is really wasteful if they just are like.
- I don't want it.
Oh, actually I do want it.
Actually, I don't want it.
Actually, you know what, I'll take another one.
- I'll print it, I'll throw it out.
I'll print it again.
But here's another thing.
This drawing on my wall here, as you can see,
has got Q-tips on it, popsicle sticks,
and what is it, stickers?
- So it's a 3D printer.
- Pompoms. - Multimedia.
- Yeah.
- Pipe cleaners or something, sure.
- So I don't know if your device could do that.
Like, there's a lot of arts and crafts,
I think, that aren't just flat.
And it'd be cool if you could do the parallax effect.
- Oh, I thought you were gonna say some dude in Indonesia
who's like gluing the Q-tip back on,
so you could get a copy of it.
(laughing)
- This looks different than the original, send it back.
- Refund.
(laughing)
-Your Teemu kids art just doesn't look the same.
[laughter]
-Or just parallax video view of like,
they have these new things where you--
-Parents are on the hook for 3D scanning the kids' Q-tip art.
[laughter]
-Taking like hundreds of pictures and assembling a 3D model.
-It's light art.
-The boys in engineering will figure that out.
-That's right.
-Totally different product, convert your microwave into a 3D scanner.
Put the product in, it rotates and takes pictures of it.
Yeah, every household's got a 3D scanning microwave.
Just don't cross the modes, it'll be fine.
It's a device that attaches to the window on the front of a microwave and takes pictures as it rotates.
After 5 minutes of bonfire.
I just keep getting sent PDFs of my soup.
Wrong button again, Grandma.
(laughing)
- Stop scanning your food, grandma.
- We can call it the pretty delicious food, the PDF.
(laughing)
All right, Marie, what have you brought for us this week?
- Okay, so imagine you are watching season three
of "RuPaul's Drag Race," and for context,
there are currently 18 seasons.
So my girlfriend and I consider ourselves
big fans of the show. However, we're on season like 16 and we started on 3 about
two years ago. It's a show with like a cult following. Like people are talking
about this show every week and so if we wanted to look up anything about the
show we could not because it will be like, "Oh yeah, you mean the winner of
season 12?" No. I wanted to know where they got their shirt or whatever. So I'm
I'm proposing spoiler-free searching in social media
that allows you to see context related
to what you have seen.
So there are filters where you can be like,
don't show me anything about "Drag Race,"
but I have seen up to, say, season 15, episode 12.
I wanna know what people said about episode 12
without knowing anything about episode 13.
So were people happy that that person got eliminated?
Were they mad?
Was it a controversy related to this episode?
At one point, there was a big controversy
with one of the contestants,
and when I was searching to figure out what it was,
I found out when she got eliminated.
But I just wanted to know what the scandal was.
That's the problem.
- Spoiler-free context.
- So you can, I'm thinking like,
almost like Wayback Machine vibes.
- Right.
- Like I go back to the day,
two days after an episode was released.
- On the subreddit.
- Yes, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Yes.
- It's filter, I feel like it's date filtering.
- Kind of, right?
- Yeah.
- Like a huge amount of date filtering,
but with everything, not just like,
I don't know if you can do that though on Reddit, right?
Like you can't like go back in time and like,
I wanna see everything up until this very day
between these two days.
- Not built in.
- Without somebody commenting on it and being like,
oh yeah, you mean the person
who got eliminated in the next episode?
- Yeah.
- That's the issue.
- All comments.
- I knew this for "Survivor".
- Yeah.
- Yep.
There's so many reality shows that are like this.
- Yeah.
- Video games too.
There was something where I was like,
I want a specific hint about this one puzzle
that I'm trying to do.
And I do not wanna read through 95 pages
of how to on how to do every single thing.
I don't wanna watch a video of somebody doing it.
I just want like a little nudge in the right direction.
And so I listed out like, here's where I am to an LLM
and it's still fricking ruined it for me.
So like, I need some way to be like,
yeah, I need a specific piece of information.
You almost want like a dialer expert on this thing,
like a forum post and request system
for somebody who's really into "RuPaul's Drag Race,"
who can just like spell out that one thing for you
in real time without ruining it for you.
You need like the people who edit the wiki about it.
- Yeah.
- Ooh, oh, that's really cool.
Like you could go get links,
like just collect a bunch of links, you think,
and like put it into a Wikipedia and like harvest,
like, you know, just like put it all in one spot.
- I struggle so hard with,
so Leo, "Dungeon Crawler Carl,"
a series that Leo has gotten me into,
a lot of characters, a massive wiki on it.
Every time I need to look something up, I go there,
but you're absolutely right.
it always spoils it way down the road on there
'cause I'm on book four and they're like,
well, in book 19, here's what happened with this guy.
- Character, name this, status deceased.
You're like, no, dang it, why would they have that
at the top?
Yes, exactly.
- I was also thinking, not only do I want answers
to questions, but I want to hear what people said about it.
My favorite part of reality TV is talking about it
and I don't like to watch old reality TV
because who am I gonna talk to about it?
I can't be like, have you guys heard of Survivor?
I just started on season two.
Nobody else is watching season two of Survivor.
So I want to see, almost like,
do you guys know Letterboxd?
How people will log movies?
If people were logging, after this episode,
I was shocked about this, or whatever.
And then I go to that episode, and I see what people said.
- You know how there's a whole thing around
watch podcasts and rewatch communities and stuff.
Why don't we like version that so that it happens asynchronously?
I'm going to sign up and subscribe for the free newsletter, the free forum or whatever,
and you're adding in your thoughts and you're reading other people's thoughts, but they
don't have to happen at the same time as you.
The first few people that are watching it are building up this discussion forum thing
where it's plotting it along the timeline, and then any number of months or years later,
else can come along and like start at episode one and follow along with the
things that the people before them have laid out. Exactly. Like it's so weird to
think that like content lives forever and people are starting stuff that you
like have already experienced right? But also like when people want like if
people are gonna watch Breaking Bad or something I kind of want to hear them go
through each season. I kind of want to. Right? That's the best part. It'd be so
fun just as like I want to see their reaction to the Red Wedding in person or
I was a mega fan of Lost, Community, whatever.
And I would pull up today,
what are people who are just now watching this episode
thinking about it?
Because I bet that's different
depending on the cultural moment we're in too.
If somebody started that one episode of Community
with the Dungeons and Dragons thing,
where there was blackface for a moment,
it probably is a little bit different now,
but it's still, I don't know,
is that perceived different by a different generation
or by the cultural moment we're in or something?
Maybe it was really self-aware at the time,
but did that age well?
- I think you're right.
I think this is its own site.
It's a whole new way to create and talk about media.
- I love that.
- It can't be the typical stuff.
And then what's cool about it is it's self-feeding, right?
I think to your point, Leo,
like I still enjoy the thought of,
like somebody started watching Breaking Bad
and they left a cool ass comment about, you know,
season four versus season five and six.
Is that what I'm thinking?
Or like, I don't know, even like the office, right?
Like when Michael Scott leaves,
I just wanna see everybody's reaction
every time they leave that, you know?
- I feel like Diversity Day and season one of Office
may not hit now the way that it did in,
what was it, 2010, 2009, right?
Where there's like a bunch of really insensitive
race jokes and stuff.
You're like, what would somebody who's just watching this
for the first time think about that, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
That's so true.
And then it is cool, like when my younger cousins
are starting to play video games or whatever
that I used to play when I was a kid.
And you're like, "Oh, you're playing that retro game?
Like you gotta tell me when you hit this level
or whatever, right?"
Or like, they're playing Minecraft for the first time.
And they're like, "You're like, whoa, you're playing Minecraft?
It's just cool to, I don't know."
- How did you ever deal with this camera
in Super Mario 64 when you were a kid?
This is awful.
Things have gotten so much better now.
Shut up, old youngin'.
- That's right. - Back in my day,
we liked it.
- It's a much more bite-sized way to approach
a fandom of any kind.
'Cause if you think about somebody picking up
the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight,
any major series,
and they're trying to join the culture of it,
not just read it, but,
oh, what do people think of this?
you're getting to invented characters and like,
no, this character would never do that
because everybody decided.
- Right, right, right, right.
- Everyone decided.
(laughing)
- So if you're doing it episode by episode,
chapter by chapter, broken up in some sense,
you're not like, oh God, I didn't know
that you actually thought the Malfoys were the good guys.
'Cause I don't know.
'Cause Slytherin is actually just misunderstood.
I didn't get that in the books.
Yeah, it's really easy to moderate, I feel like, too.
Because if you do one spoiler, everybody will just report you
and you're banned forever.
Right?
Zero tolerance policy.
Oh, absolutely.
Just kill.
Just get rid of them.
There could be like a, you show a comment
to x percent of people first, like A/B test things
to different people.
There's got to be algorithms for that until they're vetted.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
I would also love to see not only media that I cared about
as it aired being rewatched by somebody
and what their thoughts were because of the modern context,
but also their demographic.
It would be very fun to see what Zoomers or Gen Alpha
think about that thing that Millennials
or Gen Xers or Boomers really liked, or vice versa.
I would do a rewatch of, I don't know, what,
Hogan's heroes and like tell some boomers
what I thought about it and they might find that funny
or vice versa, you know?
- Blazing saddles, right?
- Right.
- Yeah, I think about that whenever I checked
Letterboxd reviews, like I'll log every movie I watch.
I'm always like, this is great.
I had such a good time watching it.
And then the type of people who are logging movies
on Letterboxd are like film bros.
- Yeah, sure.
- So I was like, two stars, the production was awful.
I'm like, Sharknado 3, oh hell no,
is one of the best movies I've seen in a while.
I don't know.
- It's real.
(laughing)
- It's coming.
- So like that whole structure would have to be around like,
is there a way to verify that you watched it?
So you wouldn't just have people.
- Take a quiz.
(laughing)
- You could take a--
- Like accelerated reader.
Like in elementary school
when you had to prove you read the book.
(laughing)
- Spark noting Breaking Bad season five.
(laughing)
- Hey, Draco.
I was picturing it also like I put in,
"I am watching How I Met Your Mother right now.
Episode one, thoughts, star ratings,
other people's comments after I submit mine,
and then I have to click next,
and then it puts me onto episode two."
Like you can't just jump in for every show.
- You have to say something at that point,
or give your rating or whatnot.
- Or you have to hit the skip button.
Like who really wants to spoil season 17 episode two
by clicking through every episode ever.
- That's a way to do it.
- You can see when people commented,
it would be cool to get a comment back
after like a year and a half,
like, "Totally agree, they should have," you know?
- "That idiot, this was a travesty.
How could you even blah, blah, blah?"
Yeah, I'm sure people would only say
"totally agree" on the internet.
- I love your thoughts.
- Who's still watching in 2026?
- Who's here?
- Did you do a time capsule?
Okay, so like when a new episode of Game of Thrones
whatever comes out and like Reddit is going crazy and it's just like the live comments
of all the reaction to it on there. You have your timeline, your filters like bring the
just have the feedback of what was happening way back when when that first aired and you
could see all those original comments in real time. Real time?
Yeah, you gotta like freeze it somehow. Yeah.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, the Dance Moms rewatch podcast that I confess that I listen to. Um, they end every
episode with like yeah fans thought that Maddie was robbed and they thought that
Nia's solo was very good but judged poorly whatever yeah sure and so I don't
know if they're getting that from AI or what but I'm assuming just based on the
way they read it it sounds kind of like something produced by like chat GPT of
like what did people say about yeah this episode of Dance Moms but something like
that's but all that stuff has totally been influenced since then right like
there's no way to know like is that just the collective thoughts of people
between ten years ago and now or is that really what people thought ten years ago
yeah that's why you somehow got to lock it up I totally get you like I like the
idea of seeing number of comments per episode because like what if I saw an
episode that I didn't think was controversial and then like there's so
many people talking about it but then what if you well I know my opinion of it
Yeah, what if you have people re-watch a show?
Like re-watch the series and leave a comment after
and it's like, oh, well that's, then they would get banned.
Right?
And you know what else?
Even in real time, if you're watching the show
as it's airing, I feel like people bandwagon so hard
that if you prevent them from posting.
Yes.
Prevent them from reading other people's posts
until they have posted, that will probably solve
lot of your reviews problems, right? So you can't post because you haven't watched it yet, and you
can't read other people's posts because you haven't done it yet, even if it's five years after
Air Date or whatever, you don't get to see anything about the cultural zeitgeist until you add your
own thoughts first. That would be really interesting reviews. Everyone's in the Reddit comments like,
"Yeah, for sure. I definitely thought that was poorly dialogued." You're like, "Come on, you
you don't know how to be a Hollywood writer.
You don't really know.
(laughing)
Right?
That's interesting.
- Yeah, people will talk about Drag Race
and be like, "Oh, the lip sync between Latrice Royale
"and Ben de la Creme."
We all remember that one.
And I'm like, "I've figured out actually.
"I forgot about that one.
"I'm sure it was great, but I don't remember it."
And so I kinda wanna know what the zeitgeist is also
at the same time.
original thought to that'd be nice, you know, I get yeah
Yeah, it would lead to a lot more diversity of thought wouldn't it? That's interesting
I get so mad at Anthony where I'll go out and see a movie and he'll go out and watch a
Youtuber view of the movie and have really strong opinions on and I'll be like you didn't even see it like I like that part
What are you talking about? Like no, it's an allegory for such-and-such
Well, dear listener if you are enjoying us
in the Uber on the way to the movie theater.
Thank you very much for listening.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you very much for joining us, Marie.
This was fun.
- Thanks for having me.
- Our website is spitball.show.
There you can find links to our YouTube channel,
other social media.
Hey, if you have an idea, record a pitch and a voice memo,
send it on over to podcast@spitball.show
and we might discuss it in the show.
That's also how you can follow us on the Fediverse,
such as Mastodon.
We are podcast@spitball.show
and on BlueSky at spitball.show.
Our subreddit is r/SpitballShow.
Our intro/outro music is Swingers by Bonkers Beat Club.
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who keeps spoiling every fricking episode
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