I'm Scott, I'm Russell, I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball with three Pythonic Pals 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, Scotty, I believe you brought our guest.
I did. I am excited to introduce Dave Harkey.
And I just realized this, Dave, I think you and I have been working together for over 10 years now.
Whoa.
This year on a variety of projects and industries.
I was always the hardware guy.
Dave was the software guy.
Like he's the one they called when the hardware looks fine, but nothing was working at all.
[laughter]
Dave, I--
It was always hardware anyway.
[laughter]
That's right.
We would fight all the time about that.
Yeah.
When he says I was the software guy, what he means was there was no other software
guy.
I was like the only guy you can go to.
First string and second string and third string software guy.
Oh boy.
Well, welcome to Spitball.
We're so glad to have you, Dave.
Thank you guys.
I'm excited to be here.
Fun fact about Dave is that he also holds the record for the longest troubleshooting
call at our last company.
I think it was like 17 and a half hours of one call trying to fix a bug.
Did you fix it?
the call. Uh, yeah. When we ended the call, I took a screenshot. And so that's like, just like on my
wall now. It's it's my it's my background. I feel good about that one. Well, on this show, from time
to time in our little pre show chatting, sometimes the guests will say something like, Oh, I have a
million ideas, and I don't know even which one to pick from. And Dave, you are one of those
candidates. And when we have that, we will sometimes do a little warm up that we call
Intramurals, which is our reject half ideas where we throw out the things on the list that aren't really deserving of a full pitch
But are worth discussing something about so who wants to kick us off with an intramural this week? I will
Okay, so
metal detecting when you like you're trying to find treasure, but if
Somebody's already been there. Like are you really finding treasure?
So the idea is
crowdsource metal detecting a map whereas your metal detecting
You can put the point and when you metal detected on the map so you can see. Oh am I gonna find the
1776 bullet from the war
So I can sell it to a museum or not
So that's I'm picturing like an app
That's like a map with a fog of war like a real-time strategy game where it's a whole black and as you like a metal
Detect you're like clearing the map open. That's fun. That's
Cool there. I explore the whole beach and I've covered every square inch because I've been all the all the blank spaces
But they fade they fade over time. So you have to Rick refill. Oh, that's good. Yep. Yep. Yep metal detecting crowdsource style
I'm sure you could sell data to to somebody right? There's probably some way
to like, oh. - I was just thinking,
I wonder if this map could somehow like highlight like,
this is an area where a music festival happened recently,
or this is an area where there's frequently lost,
you know, beach goers or something like that,
where it would like tell you and guide you where to go to.
- Literally a heat map of people that have,
you found more things in this area.
I like that.
That's dope.
I would buy Metal Detector getting pinged.
Hey, you want to like win some free jewelry?
Go to this spot.
It'll pay for itself.
I mean, it's stupid not to, you gotta get one.
That's right.
Get the whole family.
Cover the whole fog of war.
But only for a week or two.
Yeah, that's true.
And well, if there's people still there, do you think pick pockets would use this
app to be like, Hey, I'm going to go get a head start on all the mail detectors.
I'm gonna go see if I can find stuff actively in people's pockets.
If it's not, if it ain't warm, I ain't getting it.
Do they have to log it in the app when they do?
Dude, yes.
So a leaderboard for hijacking.
Yeah, no way.
It does seem like a lot of the places where pickpocketing would be, uh,
lucrative are the same places where so too would metal detecting, right?
You've got your like public transit and stuff frequently.
probably a Venn diagram where they're like mostly just the same circle.
The middle is there are people here. That are on foot, that are you know
distracted by things and in a hurry to get somewhere else.
Yeah. Oh then you could you could you could tier up your app so you know the
free tier is metal detecting but if you want to pickpocket people for 15 bucks a
month. Nice. You know where your cash can go. I know one organization that would be interested.
Officer I paid for it. Exactly. That's what I was just gonna say. Yeah, you want to sell this data,
how about to the feds? Look at all these self-selecting criminals. You could dig the gold
or you could sell the shovels, guys. This is all about trying to skirt the line between making
money and being part of an organized crime ring. Your honor, I didn't tell them to be pickpockets.
I just had them pay me money to say where to go.
- It's in my terms and conditions, you know?
- You're like a pimp for pickpockets,
trying to tell them where to go and what to do.
- Pimp pocket.
- The illegal. - Pimp pocket.
- Pee pee pee. - You're a pimp pocket.
- Hot pocket.
That'll be called hot pocket.
- Oh, that's nice.
Hot pocket.
- Hot pocket.
- That might be a trademark problem.
- Not the food version for the different industry.
- Hot pocket, asterisk.
Oh no, you just get rid of the vowels.
P-C-K-T.
- There you go.
(laughing)
- All right, we were at a guy's weekend
a couple of weeks ago,
and I think under inebriation, somebody threw out,
"Oh, oh, what about Drunk vs. High, the game show?"
And I wrote that down on my list here,
and I don't know anything more to say about it
other than I have it on the list
and I need to get it off the list.
So how would you guys structure a game show
called Drunk vs. High?
A lot of very one-sided challenges depending
Let's have an eating contest guess who's gonna win. Yeah most profound thought
So is this where like the the contestants are
Are either inebriated or high and the audience is trying to figure it out
Maybe maybe it's like they're their loved ones. No, they would know him too. They're like third grade teachers. Come on
Oh, yeah, Jimmy. Yeah, you can like talked a lot in the corner like
The third grade teachers trying to figure out I was picturing like a family feud
You got two sides lined up on each side and then something but that's way better
like trying to figure out who's what by like you only get a certain amount of questions or
Physical challenges you have to make them do
Walk the straight line or something eat this whole bag of Cheetos pass the sobriety exam by a cop. I like that. Yeah
Maybe there's a I don't know a take-home game that you play with your friends
All right, everyone count off one two one two guess which team you're on
All right, Scott. What do you got? All right. Parents are in northern Michigan right now during this nice polar vortex
I just learned today that they have to keep the the city called everyone in their city and said hey
You have to keep your water running all the time
At least the so the water coming out is the thickness of a pencil
We will pay for all water costs with this but pipes are freezing and this is cheaper for us
Just you just a waste the water then it is for the damage. It's gonna be
There is they're having a blast. They're just filling up water bottles and do whatever they want with that on there
What can you do with unlimited free water?
First thought was like I just want to stick a hose on this thing put it out in the backyard and make an ice rink
or something but
Infinite you can only do it like a pencil. You can only do it like a pencil width at a time
Yeah, is that a minimum? I got to do a maximum. Could you run every faucet and get it all?
They're paying for it.
All of it or just some of it?
They said that they would cover the costs, whatever
it is, more than previous years of that month.
OK.
Oh, so you'd pay the amount--
That sounds like there's no upper limit.
Infinite.
No ceiling.
Yeah.
OK.
So yes, ice rink is good.
Till next year rolls around and you're like, oh, crap.
I have to do it last year.
Now I have to use more water.
Could spray-- you get one of those ski sprayers or whatever
that spray snow.
Just make tons of snow.
Polar vortex my ass.
I don't think they want more.
Yeah, double down.
What about-- you know how some houses have the whole home
generator?
What about a turbine powered by the water pressure?
So you've got-- yeah, you've got your electricity covered too.
Bitcoin miner.
You're charging your phone, or yeah,
you're mining Bitcoin by some sort of apparatus
that you've stuck in the bathtub.
Thanks to the water department.
Yeah, how much theoretical energy could the average water
supply to a home generate if it was all put into a turbine?
That's a great question.
Somebody call Randall Monroe, XKCD,
and get that guy on it.
Wonder how many gallons that is per hour.
Or like--
I was wondering that too.
Decent, right?
Yes.
I'm going to put two gallons per hour.
That's a full ice rink in a couple days.
That's your calculation?
Yep.
- You just think, just think, just think about a milk gallon
jug underneath the sink with a pencil with the flow.
- Per hour.
- Per hour?
Oh, that's probably right, every 10 minutes.
Maybe, maybe a gallon per minute, 10 minutes?
I don't know.
- That's pretty wide, a big asterisk on your calculation.
- And on this round of Drunk Verse High.
(laughing)
That is the perfect freaking question for Drunk Verse High.
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait.
So you're telling me--
- Think about a pencil.
Look at how I pour this beer into this cup,
how long it takes.
(laughing)
Oh, oh, oh, damn it.
Oh, someone get me a paper towel.
(laughing)
- All right, Dave, you got it.
- Yeah, what do you got, Dave?
- All right, we all use,
sorry, I'm crying still from that last round.
We all use social media and we all,
let's be honest, we all hate it.
We're like, why am I on this thing?
You know, four hours goes by and you're like,
what did I just do with my life?
I don't know why I keep going back to it,
like a dog to its fauna, but here we are.
We're all using social media.
We all hate it.
So I'm looking for any excuse I can
to not use social media,
to make it unappetizing to myself
so I don't use it as much, right?
One thing that I did recently, and this is a free tip.
This is free for any listeners.
I instead of using the Facebook app on my phone,
I deleted the Facebook app and I used the browser on my phone
and I log in through the browser.
The UI is crap and I almost never wanna be on it
because it always wigs out, doesn't work right.
I get frustrated with it after 10 minutes.
It's great, it sucks and it's great.
So here's another idea down that vein.
So somebody comes with an app
that kind of is like a banner around your social media
so you can like access it through this app.
The only difference is that there's a ticker at the top
and it says social media has earned.
And every time you swipe up past an ad
and they're making money off of you,
that number at the top of the banner goes up.
- Yeah.
- By like a few cents, you know,
15 cents every time you go buy, whatever it is.
I don't know what the numbers are, I'm just guessing.
But if I saw the insidiousness that is always happening
but isn't visible to me and I just was reminded of that
from this just ticker at the top or bottom,
I would be like, okay, I hate these companies.
Why am I on?
I just want to be done with this.
I'd get on for two seconds.
- I'm getting angry just thinking about that right now.
Imagining that number up there.
I'm getting heart palpitations.
No.
You've got to have a little evil cartoon Zuckerberg,
like, ha, ha, ha, ha, yes.
Just handing the money to him.
Eating it up like Pac-Man.
Yeah, Canadians from South Park, right?
Yeah, right.
Yes.
Dang, that is a good idea.
I would take this as a browser extension on my desktop, too.
Just every minute you're on Reddit,
it's tallying up how much your time was
worth that you could have been spending doing other things.
Yeah.
But no, your money is going right,
your time is being converted into money
and going right into Zuck's pocket.
- I feel so dirty.
I feel like I'm being like,
I feel like a dirty rag being thrown around.
Yikes.
- That's great.
- You put in your salary and it shows you
not only how much they made off of you,
but how much you could have been making.
How much your time was worth.
That last hour you, yeah, no, that was another X dollars.
The opportunity cost yeah, that's a that really hits you in the belt
Wow, this is a complete and fully fleshed idea ready for production. I have no enhancement suggestions. I know seriously
That's great. What do you call it? Make me feel dirty?
What do you that's what you call it? Yeah, just five more minutes. I'm dirty, honey
Just can't put it down
I'm trying to beat the height. Oh god. It would be
I gotta earn
Zuckerberg more money than Russell someone out there will gamify it for the wrong way. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You would make money by putting ads
How much money we're making on you while Facebook is making money on you super targeted just to you now that truly is meta
Do we need to end the show there? And thank you all for listening
All right, who's up first this week? Leo, what do you got this week? Sure
Okay, we have this flow in my house where my darling wife does not
Remember to tell me about things that are coming up or things that we need to discuss
So she says hey trigger word spoken assistant
remind me to this later.
And the flow like nine times out of 10 is,
I see the note for her on the smart display in the kitchen
and say, honey, were you supposed to talk to me about X?
And she says, oh yeah, that's right.
The reminder does not make it back to her.
And I don't know why that is.
So I have been thinking about like,
how do I automate to make sure
that I don't miss the reminder
that she set for herself to talk to me?
(laughing)
like turn that into like a spoken word announcement into the room or like a
little like "bing bong" every hour or something.
And I don't quite know how that's worth.
I need a grandfather clock.
That's like a regular interval, just subtle in the background, like "doo doo".
Don't forget that was that thing that you really wanted to remember
from earlier for both of us.
Said another way, I want a better ambient reminders system and none of the
existing ones on the market are working for us.
So what do you have for ideas for the audio announcement
reminder system?
My first thought was the Remembrall from Harry Potter
that Neville uses.
And it's a ball that changes color when he's
supposed to remember something.
If you have something in your house that just kind of lights
up or a different color going through,
because you don't want it too intrusive.
How do you know--
was there a color system for Neville?
Nope.
It was a very terrible product.
So he looks at it and says, "Purple, uh-oh, that probably meant something.
I wonder what that was."
He forgets all the colors.
Yeah, it's the same thing as like tying a string on your finger.
That was the icon for I need to remember something, right?
But yeah, I know that that's how that would go for me, right?
I'm looking at the string like, "Shoot, that was important.
What was that?"
I guess I need the combination of the string or the remember all and like where to go.
OK.
What about this, Leo?
So instead of turning off an alarm every morning,
you turn on your alarm.
Or before you go to sleep, you have
to check all your reminders.
Otherwise, an alarm will go off telling you--
A gun to my head.
That's right.
You better check yourself at 11 o'clock.
I'm going to turn on this alarm.
You forgot to look.
OK, yeah.
Yeah.
Introducing some sort of deadline or urgency to these reminders is a great idea. I need more stress in my life
Did you check your reminders Scott?
before the podcast a loaded gun
All your toilets flush if you don't check your reminders all your toilets flush in the house. So they're crazy. That's
Actually, yeah, why did all my toilets shit once? Oh
That's right next Thursday
Okay, something wild at a certain time
Did you guys have relatives that had a grandfather clock or like a cuckoo clock or the bird one that made a bird chime every?
hour I
Feel like I have completely lost
Like every single every hour chime that has ever existed does not happen around me anymore
I don't know why that is personal life work life. Where did all those go? Is that like a generational thing?
All phones and smartphones. Yeah, but like surely your office still has a wall clock on it, right?
If you could do any of you fools go to an office. To what?
That's right, I'm the only one that goes to a place to work
Randomly in a park and you hear a bird and you're like, oh, it's three o'clock
No
Birds aren't real. I had a bird clock every like at my house. Yeah, right
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like you hear that pigeon it and you're like, oh, it's three o'clock somewhere and it's like
The pigeons got 2 a.m. Energy for sure
Waffle house. Yeah
Kooing is he's eating his waffles
Leo I do like the the flushing toilets is good
If you want to keep it a little simpler
Maybe you just flash all the lights in your house like once or twice or something and then a display pops up on all of
your home displays. Like every hour, like a little dim, like I'm about to go to a
theater show that's about to start, all the lights dim for a minute in the house.
Yeah I'd prefer the THX sound come on. Yeah the Dolby THX sound.
Take out the trash!
I have a little E Ink display with calendar stuff, I've got all kinds of
the knickknacks that are passive display of digital information and none of them are totally
getting me to, I don't know, remind me about the thing when I need it to be reminded.
Maybe that's an input/output thing or maybe that's a mode of conveyance problem and I
haven't figured it out yet.
So listeners, if you have any ideas, write it.
Podcasts@Spitball.show.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
What about if you've got a sound system already hooked into your house, like the subwoofer
just starts cranking out at like 20 hertz, 10 hertz, just rumbling your house to its
foundation.
What is that?
That's good.
You can put it in any room, basically.
It'll ping you from the other side of the house because the house itself is moving.
You don't need a speaker because the house is the drum.
Couple years of that, you need foundation work, brother.
But you never missed an alert.
Instantly settle your house.
Mm-hmm.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a whole new idea.
I love it.
What about receipt printer, Leo?
Like every once a day--
I fantasize about this.
And now it's just like a receipt that's
constantly getting longer and longer
until somebody rips it off.
And then, oh--
Does all the things on it.
It has the list as it's printing.
And then it's like, whoa.
Yeah.
The only time that I've seen people,
I've seen several IOT projects for that,
but it's always like the daily morning brief of my calendar
or shopping list or whatever, right?
I've never seen it be an ongoing thing
that you have to remember to like purge.
I like that a lot.
Like the reminder goes in and immediately prints.
And then that's an action item
because it has not been cleared yet.
That's cool.
You can hang those on the wall and fridge
and all that stuff too, if you want to remember for real
again, you know?
We need to make--
OK, pivot to this idea.
We need to make a printer whose paper that goes in
is a stack of sticky notes.
I would love that what you're describing,
but it just popped out, like, boom, boom, even remotely.
Here is the thing.
I think receipt printer is carcinogenic.
It's not great to hold and stuff, the thermal paper.
But just any off-the-shelf sticky note,
you put inside this thing and it feeds it out.
Oh, that's so good.
- And it's just like pumping them out, right?
That'd be sweet.
- Uh-oh. - Oh man.
Somebody do this.
I would buy one.
(laughing)
- Post it if you're listening.
- Little toter. - We're gonna get this.
It's gonna happen though.
The amount of Post-it notes, that'd be cool.
- Oh, and then you could upload your own photo to it
and then it would print out like a huge mural,
like one sticky at a time.
(laughing)
And then you could put the mural together.
It's just black and white.
Each one's a pixel.
You gotta like assemble your mosaic.
(laughing)
- Could just get two different color
post-it notes at that point.
- No, shut up.
You're gonna print black.
(laughing)
- Wouldn't it be classy though?
You go over to somebody's house,
they like, you know, they pull out the fancy wine,
they pull out the, you know, the really nice cheese.
You know, they've got some, you know,
some steak, you know, marinating in the background.
And then you look over and like right above a really nice dining table.
There's just like this sticky note collage of Mona Lisa right there.
It's high art.
I'm sure you understand.
What if you can send sticky notes to other people's printers?
Like, Oh, I want to print something to Leo spit ball tonight.
You share each other.
Oh yeah.
Answer your damn phone.
Oh, look at that.
It must be for Russell.
I'd probably answer my phone way more if I got a Post-it note printout every time.
If I could make you shoot out at your face, yeah baby.
We're reinventing the fax machine and I love it.
[laughter]
The Post-it faxes!
Yes! Yes!
Hey Boomers, you ever thought of this? What about a printer that we could send to each other?
It's got a little nice line of stick on the back, you could just plop it on the wall.
Only if it screams like a dial-up entire American medical system depend on it, too
Can I sign a contract on it? Yes
All right, Scott you're up what do you got I want to keep going off of Dave's
Description of that nice house with the Mona Lisa and the wine and stay down there, but this is an idea
I've had for a while and I love a good segue
This is one of those ones that I really really wish I had done this during kovat because I would have been rich
Okay, so there was a shark tank episode where they had a guy who had
Essentially like disposable wine glasses that were they had full of wine and there's like a peel
Aluminum top on it and it's like it's fully sealed and it keeps all the flavor and he'd had this whole big thing about how
It still tastes just as good when you get it. So let's combine that. Let's pretend we're in kovat times
And you're on all you're doing is sitting there in front of zoom all day
What if you could do wine tasting as a group?
Virtually where every single person gets like a flight of these shipped to them
Of like six or seven fancy wine and you all open them together. You all try them together
Somalia is on the call with you talking you through each one on there
and that's the whole companies that just ship out these groups and you have virtual wine tasting and the Somalia is
11 labs or
So you can scale it
You could do this with other things too, I'm sure you did detect floral notes
Maybe you have a kid version with like different hot chocolates or something or I don't know
It's the only work with things you can drink. Yeah, whiskies are great
I was just really excited that they there's like a way that you could transport single serving wine
That would have been really big for churches during COVID, you know, doing the communion thing.
Yeah, I was when you were describing it. I was thinking of the communion things. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, they like tear off ketchup size cups, right? Like the creamer cup size. That's what it is. Yeah.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
We had the ones growing up where you peeled one layer of foil and it was a little wafer and then you peel the other layer and it was on top of the cup.
Mm. Yeah, yeah.
So that is a thing already.
I went to a church once where they had two different colors and they were passing the plate around and I was like
Oh, I've never seen two different colors. I've never been to this denomination before so I was like, I've never seen like white wine
That's kind of white grape juice. So I took the white and then I you know, I downed it
Yeah, I was like, oh no, I just drink alcohol and I'm 19
Jesus would never
What if you did have a communion plate where you were able to choose your flavor of Eucharist?
I
Thought when you said the two different ones Dave
I thought you're supposed to like take one and drop it in the other and shoot a bolt
Like it fizzes when you put it in
bring up real fast.
This is the live, this is the quick quick go do it!
What are your tastes sir?
Would you like a sweet body of blood of Christ this evening?
Are we narrow casting to like just salty the earth mid-westerners here in our church jokes?
I don't know.
We may have just lost every last listener.
I'll bring it back.
This would be amazing for remote workers.
My entire team is all over the US.
And if I wanted to incentivize something cool
that we could all do on a Friday--
We struggled with that.
The option is play Jackbox as a team or nothing else.
Fortnite.
I like that a lot.
Fortnite, yeah, that's true.
That'd be--
Oh my gosh, man.
I can't do Fortnite with my team.
There's just no way it would ever work.
[LAUGHTER]
Man, yeah, if you could couple that with cheese too, oh man.
Like there's, there's some people who, you know, they're dry, respect that.
Totally.
But like, who can pass up a good cheese?
Like seriously, if you had a little, little flight of cheeses, like who
wouldn't get excited about that?
Peel it off.
Yeah.
Lunchable.
And there's all these meal kit services that have like scaled the ideas, right?
Surely that supply chain, you just like work with one of those ones
and spin this off or something.
Absolutely.
Peel your own charcuterie board.
making it a real fancy feeling and then having someone on the call being the
guiding experience is definitely the thing that has made this unique.
I like that a lot.
Different wineries all across the nation and just, Hey, we're going to bring this
guy in who's helped create all these ones.
And he's the expert on this particular flight.
Cause they're all from the same spot.
That would be, I'd pay for that.
That'd be pretty cool.
Yeah, I would too.
That could even segue into like, did you enjoy this sampler flight?
Well, then here's where you go to get your full bottles
of whatever it is you get there.
- Here's the QR code to purchase more.
- 10% off your first order, yeah.
- And then you too can do one of these sessions.
If you invite 10 friends, we get,
(laughing)
you make 10% of every sale.
- Work from home, be your own boss.
- You'll get 1% of each of them.
And if they have 10 friends.
- Everyone under them.
- Yep, you're at the top of the chain.
(violin music)
All right, Russell, what do you got?
- Okay, so the other day I have like a lot
of extension cords throughout my house
because I needed an outlet here,
I need to bring something and plug it in
and maybe think about if only we could charge,
power things wirelessly, impossible right now,
but the next best thing is power banks, right?
And I'm just thinking what if there was a platform
that I could use to swap out a lot of things,
have different size power banks,
so that I could kind of feel like everything
is a wirelessly powered device,
but really I'm just swapping out either tiny battery packs
or big battery packs for all my devices.
So it's like a universal, like USB--
- A drill battery for everything.
- Yeah, like how USB-C became the ultra standard
for all devices.
Like what if you had a set of power banks,
different sizes, shapes to connect into the same port
and now everything is more or less wireless, right?
Like my doorbell has a proprietary charger, right?
And I have to buy that exact same battery pack, right?
But I have like 30 power banks
or if I just bought like a huge box,
I could power a cooler.
I could power a fridge for an hour.
Like I could--
Oh, they're modular.
You just stack them all and make a bigger one.
Yes, yes.
If you can increase the size--
my monitor doesn't necessarily need to be plugged into an outlet.
It does, for a period of time, need to be--
if I'm on the go for an hour, plug, plug, all right,
I got my super pack on a dolly, and it's
going to charge me for six hours.
Just a pallet of lithium.
Can you imagine a LAN party where everyone just shows up
with their dollies and their monitors?
Hey, guys, I'm here.
At a park.
No power draw, but--
At a park.
Just on a beach somewhere having a LAN party.
I just think about all the limitations
that the plug-to-wall creates, but also
small device that needs to be that doesn't need like a plug right I just
need a little bit of juice and power this board right here is annoying it's
like I got that game board I have to like plug it in it and I wish I could
just buy a battery pack or something that could allow me to be more wireless
with it even if it's just for an hour but that's it just like an open platform
power bank system and this is such a solved thing for like household small
handheld tools, right? You've got your same battery bank that powers your
chainsaw and your leaf blower and your weed whacker and stuff that can also go
right into your snowblower and lawnmower that are bigger things. They just kind of
you need five of them instead of one or whatever. There's so many different
ecosystems for that. We just want to like expand that. Yeah, I'm thinking like
small things too. You could create like ways to shut like if I leave cabinet
doors open all the time.
Oh, if only I had a little power device
to shut the damn cabinets every time it gets open.
Right?
Like, now it becomes feasible.
Wait, hold on.
What?
It's just a motor that's--
Something that simple now is possible.
Accidentally chop your finger off.
Oh, Jesus.
It's a gentle push.
It won't have a lot of power.
But that's just like, you can now create a bunch of--
you can open it to a bunch of different small devices
that would never make sense to use or exist
because you'd have to like get a battery
and power the battery, nobody wants to swap them out.
So you just, you'd hot swap it all the time.
How do you solve the irritation
of having to charge this ecosystem that you've created?
It sounds like a nightmare to have like 200
very dead batteries across your house.
Then buy-- It's a slot.
Yeah, it's like a bookshelf.
Like you'd have a bookshelf of all your different
battery slots and you just, you'd always have,
you'd have so much redundancy.
That's the point.
You'd have like 40 battery packs,
different allo, different amounts that it can store.
- I'm almost thinking the opposite.
Let's go as wasteful as possible on it.
Like picture being able to walk into a gas station
and buy like a like little tiny,
but fully charged battery pack with a little USB-C guy on it.
And it's just like, and they'll last forever.
And you can just plug them in,
like for an emergencies or something.
Hey, my phone's dead.
Go in my car and grab one of these guys and plug it in.
And just to always have a fully charged battery
that works with USB-C.
And then you just use them everywhere.
And when they run out, you buy more, capitalism.
- Jeff Geerling, the YouTuber and tech guy
did a blog post this week that's very apt.
It's right on this topic.
He was talking about in defense of the AA battery.
And just about like every gadget that he owns right now
that uses a rechargeable lithium battery,
has a shelf life, the things from 10 years ago
that use lithium are just starting to degrade or whatever.
He pulls out some cassette recorder
from the 80s or whatever.
The thing works great
when you can just pop fresh batteries into it, right?
And it was just waxing poetic about how nice it was
to have the standard that everything worked with
and it seemed like it made things not have a shelf life
based off of battery technology.
And what you're proposing is the AA battery
but rechargeable and everything uses it.
We need to A, get everything back on AA's or C's or D's
and B, make them all have USB-C ports
and you just plug them in and charge them.
- I like that even more.
We'll make a piece of hardware
that you could put two AA's into
and it just outputs as five volts USB-C.
(laughing)
And then you use that for everything.
And then you buy, then we invest in AA batteries.
- Oh, there it is.
Everything's AA'd.
- Everything's AA again.
- I could charge my fridge and my monitor on the go.
I can power my whole ass computer.
That way you can walk around with a computer monitor,
the thing we all dream about doing.
You don't get it, honey.
I can do it here or here.
I don't know.
Leo, you could have all of your cabinets with Russell's device
slam at the same time in order to remind you of something
that you had forgotten earlier.
Why are the cabinets all going ghost?
The idea of having to like reach and grab a snake spaghetti pile of USB-C cables and
plugging in each individual AA battery sounds like a nightmare, but if I could throw them
all on a tray and they all start wirelessly charging, even if it's really slow, dude,
that would be sweet.
I have been trying to get away from alkaline for the few things that we have, toys or whatever
that do use AA, AAA, and remembering to snap them into the charger that I have that's fiddly
and getting them seated just right so they charge and these ones discharge over time if I don't use them blah blah blah
We need to convenient size a standard battery size that is easy to charge for sure man
Yeah, I'm more I'm more thinking like you you have you ever see those packs at convention centers
Or they have like five battery packs in a single drawer and you can like rent one, right?
Yeah, it'd be like that ports. Yes. Yes, and then it would be kind of like that
But you'd have one in your house, and then you it's just like
Next level version of that because you think about how many things are stuck six feet away from an outlet
Like what if I didn't have to have my TV here? I barely turn it on
But when I do right, I don't know how big this battery pack is but alright
I plug it I plug it in there it works for an hour, but I have two in the hopper right so I get one
Oh, TV turned off.
Swap, swap.
- The TV's dead.
It takes 96 double A's.
(laughing)
Can't wait to change all those.
- No, you wouldn't need to.
It's like a box the size of a laptop, right?
You know, okay, you could get the--
- You got your snowblower battery
that goes in the back of the TV.
- I just don't know how big they have to be.
I don't understand the size requirements
to like power a TV and like for an hour.
- Nor I. - Scott knows.
What is the size of a door? - It's so funny.
- The hardware guy.
- My current job right now is,
hey, if we have our device,
this nice camera, wifi, high energy device,
what if we had a battery powered version?
What would it take to do that?
It's an absolute nightmare, just in every sense.
- How much power, like how big of a fricking battery?
How many double A's?
Can we convert this into double A's?
I can imagine 96 double A's in a package, right?
Would that charge--
For one TV circle.
Would that power a TV for 10 minutes?
How many watts is my television?
The thing is, is all of these electronics
are being designed with the assumption
that there is no battery constraint, right?
So assumedly, the next TV you would buy
would be more efficient with its power usage
and wouldn't be doing whatever it does
that doesn't need to do.
Oh, I could-- yeah, I could buy and-- or I could sell TVs
especially made to be battery powered.
Yeah.
These would be-- all of your accessories
eventually would need to be designed with this in mind.
You're going to have some stuff that can't be.
Your 3D printer back there needs to get really hot
and stay that way for hours.
That's not going to be battery powered.
But--
There's coffee machines that are battery powered.
But the Onyx or whatever, it's like for contract jobs or whatever, contractors at job sites.
Does it work on like a, like a DeWalt drill battery?
I think it works.
It's like, cause that's awesome.
It's like 80% battery.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like just a big battery.
Size of a vending machine.
Yeah.
I think it's like a, yeah, like a tote, like this little tote.
Like that.
Like.
I think Scott may have just learned a terrible truth about your design.
about your idea.
What are we talking?
- Average LED television is running at about 100 watts,
which is gonna be, going through the math,
about 50 AA batteries for roughly 30 to 60 minutes
of practical use.
- That's not bad.
- What's showing?
- 50 AA's for an hour?
- No, for 30 minutes, so 96 for an hour, I was dead on.
- Wait, it's not like you're throwing out these AA's,
you're actually just, you're taking
and you're plugging it back into the charger, right?
So you have basically 100 double A's, two packs.
And every movie you ever want to watch
has a built-in intermission while you change out 96 batteries.
You plug in the 96 battery box.
You know, it's--
96 batteries.
Is it any less efficient, though?
Because I'm still burning the same amount of coal
to charge my battery than it is to power my TV.
I just happen to put it in a box before I put it in.
Some heat loss.
Wait, what problem are we trying to solve?
I'm trying to solve the plug problem.
Why do I have to plug everything in?
If I could just hot swap batteries all day, right?
Rechargeable batteries, guys.
Not like throw out a hundred batteries
after watching TV for an hour.
- I mean, if Severance season three drops
and so does my power,
you know I'm gonna invest in this thing.
I'm absolutely going out and buying one from the store
so I can finish.
- A hundred an hour.
- Yeah, a hundred an hour.
So like a Splendor, like a board game box
would be the size of it.
It's big.
- Yeah.
So you'd have a closet full of fricking power banks.
[LAUGHTER]
But I don't want to have everything on--
a bunch of extension cords running throughout my house.
I have a bunch of temperature sensors
that run on AAA batteries around my house.
It's fun to see which rooms are efficiently
or not efficiently heated in a house from the 1800s.
And every night, my smart home platform
will notify me if any of them are under 10% battery
or whatever.
and sometimes several happen at once.
That would be essential.
Things silently dying would be awful.
So if you could get like some sort of automated daily,
like here's the three packs you should switch out
in the next two days report, you know.
- Print that on a sticky note.
- That would make this.
Forget to tell somebody.
- Swap your batteries.
- They die anyway.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, you put my sticky note printer
right on top of that sucker and you're good.
battery powered. Yes. Until it dies and it can't tell you to change the battery. No!
All right, Dave, what do you have for us? All right, guys, I've got to pick. I've got to pick
and maybe you guys can help me pick. Can I give you three categories and you guys pick one? Yeah.
Okay, sure. All right. All right. So something to help with your physical health, something to help
with your social health and something that helps nobody's health.
That one.
I think we have to go with that one.
That's tempting.
I like social health.
I feel like there's some party vibes in social health too, but no benefit whatsoever is our
brand.
It's no one.
Not useful.
All right.
Useful to no one?
In.
Hit us.
Let's charge forward.
So, okay, so this is just to just to qualify this. I have to qualify this. This is a product that I would never want to actually build myself or promote. So I just I'm going to get that out there. It'll make the very obvious why afterwards. But so so we like Netflix streaming platforms.
That's just how we consume video these days, streaming content.
So you've got these big platforms.
They're always trying to create new content to come out.
They're spending a crazy amount of money to have new content come out.
So they're probably already researching this behind closed doors.
But what about if you could generate your own movie with AI?
you could like say, you know, it's Friday night. I've got my flight of wines that I've imported
with my friends. We want to sync up a movie together, but we're all feeling like we want,
we want a comedy. We want a comedy. It's a good laugh night. And you know, we don't have all night
because we've got kids and somebody's going to have to, you know, get up to white buns or
or something. So we're half an hour, you know, we want half an hour movie.
That's a comedy. And you just like, you kind of like input the parameters and
then you, you know, throw it out there and then you get a movie back that one
that's nobody's ever seen before. Right. It's custom made for you and whatever
you put in there. Like, okay, yeah, I want like, uh, somebody who, um, well,
you probably can't like say I want Jack Black in it, but like somebody who's
like kind of stocky.
License your likeness.
Yeah, there you go.
You know, so maybe you could like pick from like characters
or whatever, like types of characters, whatever.
And it will come up with a plot.
It'll come, you know, hey, I want a fun twist at the end.
You know, and so like, it just writes the whole script.
It all of a sudden like creates a soundtrack to it.
It creates the actors and what they're gonna do.
And so like all of this on different layers
is like generated behind the scenes, right?
You're not seeing any of that.
All you get is this prepackaged movie back that says,
hey, this is the movie you asked for, right?
And so there's another layer to this, right?
So this would be kind of like interesting
to play around with, you know, whatever.
Some of the ones you get back, they're gonna be duds, right?
We've seen AI-generated content.
Some of it is you're just gonna be like,
okay, this is terrible.
Like this is worse than the Star Wars holiday special.
Like I don't know why we try this.
But sometimes you're gonna actually get a good movie back
and you'll be like, "Hey, you know what?
"This was decent."
What if you could save it on a platform
and send it to your friends and be like,
"Hey, I just watched this pretty cool,
"I generated and watched this pretty cool movie.
"What do you guys think?"
And they can download that themselves.
It's already generated, so they can watch it themselves.
And who knows, maybe they could say,
"Hey, that was cool, but I need more Jack Black in it."
They could like regenerate X and that it creates like, you know, a new version of it, but it's
got Jack Black or you know, somebody who looks like Jack Black in it.
You know, there's two twists at the end or something.
You know, it's because it's like this platform where you could just share your generated
videos with each other.
And you know, maybe there's a leader board or like, you know, new this week, you know,
and the people have like give a thumbs up to some videos that are out there.
So they're like climbing the leaderboard.
I wonder who's generated a good movie this week, you know?
And so you just like log on and see.
Anyway.
- Yeah.
- So what do you guys think?
So obviously terrible idea for obvious reasons.
AI is just gonna ruin the world.
But if we get generated movies out of it
that we can share with each other, I mean, guys.
- Curated, generated movies.
- Curated.
- Boil the oceans, let's do it.
- I love that you're like, exactly.
I need this exactly 30 minutes.
Here is my entire Netflix history of all things I've watched before.
Just make me a movie based on all this, go.
Here's three photos of my friend Scott making the British villain
that dies horrifically at the end.
That's right.
Yeah.
Paddington 2, except it's a horror movie.
I love the idea of like all of my friends that are going to watch this
movie together contribute some scene or some plot twist or something.
And so now everybody's like, oh, yep.
The duck, uh, the, yep.
That was me.
Yeah, the flock of ducks.
That brings it back to art.
Yeah, yeah.
And then your prompt to it is like, just make all this flow together nicely in a good movie.
This pile of spaghetti.
It's like Cards Against Humanity.
That's how we stop everybody.
That's the platform's job.
Your job is to be like, I want a giant rubber duck attacking a, you know, whatever.
And you just throw that in there as part of the bot.
Like, what's this movie called?
Flock You.
This is weird.
And it's a rom-com.
Like we just everybody agrees on like rom-com and then there's a duck attacking a
Building scene you're like whoa somebody definitely
Just in the background outside as they're having their romance. That's right
You're just messing with the parameters. You're like everything about this reads scary movie, but right at the end you're like yeah
And I wanted to have a feel-good ending
Swelling romance drama really fun
There's just some stuff that I think human creativity could not achieve and that might be one of those situations are like
10 wild prompt scenes and they just put it all together somehow
It's like long-form Sora. Are like famous actors in the future gonna be a fully AI generated?
Like you were saying like a Jack Black, but not Jack Black. So it creates some new character named
Wilbur or something but then Wilbur becomes really famous in all these movies on these platforms
I want to have Wilbur in it like who owns the rights to Wilbur at that point and it's like the AI actress
Oh, yeah, the one that came out. She was like a Tilly Norwood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a company last fall that made
What you're describing Wilbur, but it's a lady who's
Willing to be licensed to be in movies
That's entirely fictional and she has like a whole biography and everything the company made around her Tilly Norwood, but she's not real
Weird.
She has an Instagram account and everything.
You guys, I mean, like, okay.
So, so this idea, like, do you, do you think behind closed doors right now,
Netflix is like looking for a way to do what we just described?
A thousand percent.
I mean, open AI is doing this with short form stuff now, right?
With Sora, there's, there's, we're so close.
Dude, like all the computer generated costs could just be AI generated.
Man, it would be so fun to go to like a dedicated like movie theater experience for this
Everyone's waiting at the door and they're typing in their three prompts and their one actor that they want. It's crowdsourced
It's like yeah, exactly
Yes, you could go with friends or with strangers
300 people that brings it back to fun
- Yeah, you could generate this on a small scale,
except you can remove the movie component, right?
You just do like audio book or like, you know,
start there, but I guess it's not,
nobody's gonna actually wanna listen to
30 minutes of AI slop, right?
I'd rather watch it.
(laughing)
It's like, whoa, did you see the way their legs moved?
Like, whoa, that's AI, right?
- How many fingers?
- It's gonna put the main character trips
five times in a row.
It's just.
(laughing)
- Unexpected.
- Did they trip again?
(laughing)
- Must not be acknowledged.
- Tippy Norwood?
- No, Trippy Norwood.
- Yes.
- Right, even sitting here,
we're having like these fun ideas come up.
It would be really fun to like surprise each other
in the one story we all created together without realizing
This is at least like a, like a Jackbox type game or something.
Right, man.
That's funny.
The bachelor party version would be wow.
That'd be a,
the adult NC 17 game.
That's going to be out before the regular version, man.
Just gets quiet.
All of a sudden everybody's like, Oh boy,
well, dear listener, if you are sitting in your living room with
earbuds in next to a partner watching the screen, imagine.
whatever it is that they're watching was generated.
And you could be prompting it to take a total left turn
right now.
Thank you very much for listening.
And we hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you, Dave, for joining us.
This was so fun.
You're welcome.
Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
I'll be sure to change my batteries now
that Russell is going to be--
That's right.
You don't need to power your outlet.
Yeah, this is the PSA.
The service journalism our show is for is, hey, everybody,
have you checked your smoke detectors lately?
(laughing)
- Thanks guys.
- Our website is spitball.show.
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