I'm Scott. I'm Russell. And I'm Leo. This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, the Pitchin' Kitchen. Where three mouth-breathers... That's us... 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 we say is yours to keep. And this week we are delighted
to have a good friend of all three of ours, Mr. Carl. Welcome to the show. This is going
to be a lot of fun.
Thanks for the invite and I'm glad to be here. Long time listener. Sometime in the future
I'll probably be within like the first 1% of people that joined your show as a follower.
Heck yeah, you're in early days, man. This week we're going to be kicking off the show
by playing a little game that we're going to call Best of AliExpress. So we're going
to take some turns here where we have two actual products from either AliExpress or
Wish.com. For those of you who don't know, Alibaba, the giant conglomerate from China,
is known for medium to low quality stuff that you can get in six to eight weeks if you're
patient, but you can get for dirt cheap here in the States.
I'm a Teemu. I'm a Teemu man now, actually.
I didn't even check Teemu for these products. We're going to give you two actual products
and one that we just made up here. Let's start with our guest, Carl. I'm going to read three
things for you here. You tell me which one you think is fake.
Item number one, a USB powered whisk. This plugs directly into your computer's USB-A
port and spins a whisk quickly. How quick? I'm not quite sure. Item number two, a Lego
coffee mug. This ABS plastic mug is covered with pegs and holes all along the outside
that you can put compatible Lego bricks all over. Or item number three, a fried chicken
leg pillow. It's what it says on the tin, a giant stuffed chicken wing, but it's a pillow.
We got whisk, Lego mug, or fried chicken. Which one's the factual product?
My opinion here is that the Danish people own Lego, and they're not normally very stupid.
My pick is that the Lego is fake. What if it's a Mega Block mug? Would that change your
opinion? Yeah. China's not very famously litigious.
Unfortunately, it was the USB powered whisk, which I made up. I'm glad you all enjoyed
that though. Feel free to take that idea, anyone and everyone.
That was what I'm like, "That's probably online somewhere. I could see that."
Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Scott, you're up. Number one, a fanny pack with a print
of a photograph of a beer belly gut, so you can wear it on the front.
That's real. Number two, the pimple popper toy, a silicone
nose with holes in it. When you squeeze it, goo comes out.
Probably real. Or number three, the ego boosting mirror.
This is a small LED makeup mirror that has a proximity sensor and a speaker, and it speaks
affirmations such as, "You look great," when you approach.
Oh man. We've got fanny pack with beer gut, pimple
popper toy, or ego boosting mirror. I think I got to go with the ego boosting
mirror. Oh, that's hard.
That is indeed the one that I made up. Well done. It's one, zero. Russell, imitation grass
flip flops. They're normal white flip flops, but along the top part that your foot comes
into contact with is just artificial turf for some reason.
An item titled a food safe shower sponge, a hot pink sponge pictured being held by a
smiling woman standing in a shower, wearing a towel, washing a dish, or the suture training
kit, a wobbly silicone slab about the size of a deck of cards with various slices and
gashes in it so you can practice stitching them closed.
What was number two? Flip flops, food safe shower sponge, or suture
training kit. Food safe.
Totally right. I made up the description. I tried to be specific in details, hoping
you wouldn't notice, but yeah. It's the kind of thing that I, it's what I picture in my
head for AliExpress, right? Yeah.
Carl, number one, a disposable phone charger, a power bank about the size of a D battery
with a permanent six inch old style iPhone lightning charger coming out of one end and
nothing else. There's no way to recharge it. It's one time use only. I assume it has an
alkaline battery inside. Number two, long bendable hose funnel.
On one end, a large opening and on the other, a funnel for peeing into a bottle on long
road trips. And number three, a nail printer, a $500 white cube, roughly the size of a basketball
with a touch screen on the top. Apply a fake nail, place your finger in the hole in the
box, select a design to be inkjet printed onto the nail.
Whoa. We've got disposable phone charger, peeing
on trips hose, nail printer. I want two of those. Not going to say which
though. Don't tell us which.
Nail printer. The nail printer is real.
Whoa. I imagine it doesn't work very well.
Which one is it real? I still want to try it. The disposable phone charger is something
I made up. I imagine there's not enough juice in the D battery to get you too far.
Scott, a novelty Amazon cardboard box, the size of a dice. Very, very small little box
that has Amazon written on the side that's made of resin, I imagine, or something like
that. Fascinating. The taste changing cutlery set. This is a
bulky fork and spoon that I found that each have a mesh compartment on the mouth end to
house a miracle berry fruit tablet, which tastes, changes the taste of sour foods to
be sweet. I don't know if you've tried those before. Or a cloth fish wallet. It's a one
foot long carp made of cloth that unzips along the bottom and it has a print of fish guts
on the inside. I don't want it to be the third one, but I
think the third one's fake. And if it is, we should make it ourselves.
Sorry to say I made up the taste changing cutlery set.
Wow. Hop on in.
There is a fish wallet that you could purchase for the low price of a couple bucks if you
wanted it. Minimum order quantity, 10,000.
Dude. That was on wish.com.
Miracle fruits and untapped like, yeah. Yeah, there's got to be some product in there,
right? They got it. They got to make that.
Russell, a metal Zippo shaped device with two lasers that says you put it in your mouth
to quote cure ulcers and throat to glowing red led truck nuts that go under the back
of your bike seat or three aromatherapy earplugs. This is set of 12 foam earplugs that come
in lavender, lemongrass or rosemary. Oh my gosh.
We've got the Zippo mouth ulcer thing, truck nuts for your bike or aromatherapy earplugs.
I'm sorry, earplugs that smell good. Yeah, they come in 12 each. Your choice of
lavender, lemongrass or rosemary. Essential oils, man. It's all the rage. That's
got to be real. I just never thought to shove them in my ears.
That's all. I feel like the truck nuts market must have
like exploded and people were like, all right, how do we expand our market? So that's got
to be real. So I'm going to go with number one, the light in the mouth.
I'm delighted to inform you that aromatherapy earplugs do not exist, but the metal Zippo
thing does. I have to show you this photo. It is incredible.
We'll put it in the show notes. Good Lord Almighty. It is wonderful. It doesn't exist
anymore. I had to find it on the internet archive. What the market for that isn't there.
It's aromatherapy earplugs though are freaking genius.
You like that? Yeah.
Thank you. The essential oil like world like, oh, just
dip earplugs into essential oils and you got a lavender, you know.
Heals your headaches. Instantly.
Look at that. It's like, so we're looking at a $38 device
that looks like a woman shoving a lightsaber down her throat.
Why is her mouth so wide? Why is her mouth so open?
USB type low level laser therapy apparatus for the oral ulcer and throat home treatment.
Dude, it looks like a lightsaber. It's good shit.
Guaranteed to remove ulcers and give you cancer. That too could be yours if you have access
to a time machine. All right. Who's up first this week?
I'm going to do drop shipping. Like everybody's got to do a drop shipping business right there.
All right, Russell, as the winner, I think, were you, who won? I didn't even count.
Russell wins. Russell wins. You go ahead and go first. What
do you got for us this week? All right, guys. So I don't know. I just watch
a lot of videos lately on Tik Tok or it shows up in my newsfeed, right? Of packages getting
stolen on Amazon. Amazon packages, common problem. A lot of famous YouTubers, Mark Rober,
creates different ways to combat these thieves. All right. I'm also personally having issues
where Amazon packages get soaking wet because they don't have like a roof over the front.
So packages get dropped off and they get wet. My idea is a bag, a small bag that allows
package Amazon delivery drivers to drop a bag, a box into this bag and they close it
up and it's like a one way lock, right? Throw it in the bag, you close it. Amazon's happy
because they don't have to deal with less. They can deal with less theft. The Amazon
driver can show that it was sealed. It keeps it a little waterproof, reduces theft, and
then you just unlock it, right? With a simple combination code.
I tried looking for this, but everything out there is like a giant box for packages. I'm
like, no, I don't want a box in front of my house. When packages arrive to not get stolen.
So here's a bag, you just throw it in the bag and leave. That's it. Simple.
That's so simple because you're right. I've looked myself for those giant chests or whatever
that the Amazon delivery driver can put them in. And they're just, they're huge, they're
ugly. My wife would kill me if we had one of those on our front porch anywhere. That's
a really good idea. Is the bag attached to your house somehow?
Yeah, like a bike lock. I think you just straight up bike lock it. I think Amazon should pay
for every Amazon, like you put Amazon Prime logo on it. Boom, comes with your membership.
Every year you get a new bag, you know, it doesn't last very long, but it reduces theft.
You expect your Prime users to have a ton, a big subscription. Hell, Walmart.com is going
after Amazon. Walmart, you give out those bags, you know, they become the household
staple or something. We're different. We're all about security, you know, something like
that. I love this too, because your exit strategy,
one, you could just sell these as is on Amazon or wherever. But two, your exit strategy should
be, I got the manufacturing, everything set up. I'm just going to sell this whole thing
to Amazon. Maybe they'll buy 10,000. Yeah, I got to file a provisional patent before
this one goes live. No, I mean, I want somebody to take this, right? I want somebody to build
this because I feel like it's a no brainer $25 bag that I buy at Amazon and it just...
Get them on AliExpress. It'll be $4 each. It'll be great.
Yeah, it's just peace of mind. You know, you may never have had a package stolen.
Would you call it the package sack? The package sack.
Pack sack. Dude, that's a great name. The sack, the box
sack instead of the box sack. Nothing round goes in here. Oh man, we need some women on
this show. Yeah.
I don't think you'd need anything that crazy though. Like even if it was just a burlap
bag, like that's still going to be enough to deter people from trying to open a freaking
burlap bag on someone else's porch. You see all these videos of someone just like walking
up, grabbing a package and walking away. I think if you added five to 10 seconds of
inconvenience to them, that would be enough to deter most thefts here.
Especially the people with the ring doorbells that are like, even with those doorbells,
they're just shamelessly stealing them and walking away. You get like five, 10 seconds
hypothetically. Like if they have a knife and they came ready to go, right? You'd still
capture that. I think a little bit more, it's a pain in the ass to steal like in general.
So why, if it's a little bit harder, not that I have any experience stealing, okay. It just
seems like...
Sure, Russell.
Nothing, and like nothing like that exists outside of those boxes, right? You got this,
it's like a ugly ass box that you can't steal.
I'm picturing kind of like what those big zipper cooler bag type things, but can you
elaborate on how you, you imagine this being a one way thing? How does it like lock so
that they can't reopen it or someone can't walk away with your whole bag?
Okay. I've thought a little bit about this, but you have one end that's locks and the
other end that's a one way, I don't know, zip tie, we'll say like a zip tie. Okay. One
ends a zip tie, one ends a lock. And so it's always locked. The delivery driver comes in,
pulls it, the zip tie is one way and the only way to open it is through, you cut it. Then
you replace the zip tie with like some, some engineer will come up with a reusable zip
tie.
That's a true MVP right there. We're just going to put a zip tie on this burlap.
50 zip ties, call it a day. You know, when I was Googling this a while ago, have you
ever seen those gates? I don't know. It's the craziest thing. There are some gates out
there with three different locks and any one of those three locks will unlock the gate,
but it's structured in a way so that one lock opens the whole gate.
I know what I'm trying to understand that. So I'm picturing burlap sack with what different
compartments in it. So I can put multiple packages inside of the same one. Oh, I got
you. I mean, you could do three. Dude, here's another thing. You know, what's a pain in
the ass when I have to sign for something, man, can I just like leave the signature on
the bag, let's say, and now Amazon knows, all right, I'm going to drop this off in the
like security bag. So now I don't have to worry about a signature as much. Reduce that
whole cost that happens in the logistics system.
No, because the point of the signature is you accepting like, yes, I got it. Yes, it's
not damaged and all that. So you're saying if you had this as an extra level of guarantee,
you would feel less like you needed one, right?
It's both for the shipper and for the receiver, because it's an inconvenience for everybody,
right? Including the logistics person, right? It's like, all right, the signature parts,
the worst part for everybody. I have to be home all day to wait for this damn package.
With box sack, you don't have to worry about that.
Package sack.
At the very least, get the branding for this down before this episode airs.
Pack sack.
What's stopping me from this, from me making this?
It's such an easy path to market too.
Right. It's just Amazon theft. Every ring video about a package thief, you're just like,
"Oh, get the box sack." I love that word now. It's going to catch on.
I wonder how much every year Amazon loses in having to ship things twice, package theft.
If you can get the costs for your whole project just below that, right? That's your target
price.
Oh, yeah.
You can manufacture them for cheaper than what it costs them, then they're coming out
ahead and you've got a pitch.
Yep. Stupid easy. I just got to find it on AliExpress.
My question is, would you tie a cable to it with a giant retracting motor and then allow
enough slack so that someone can steal it, run halfway across to your yard, lock that
sucker down and suck it right back to the house?
Hell yeah. That's great. Big old steel cable.
I don't even think you need the retracting motor. I just want to see them run away with
it.
Or like a bungee cable, but something thick so they kind of get snapped back. That's fun.
Get to the end of the rope and fall down.
Hack sack sap.
I think it needs a rebrand if it's got some sort of like prank element to it. That's great.
That's the add on. That's the add on.
I think I'd have more fun watching people get the thing yanked out of their hands and
watching their reaction than I would the glitter bomb. That's fun.
You know, it made me think too, like maybe you get rid of the whole sack component and
it's just the Amazon delivery driver just stabs a pencil or like the locking mechanism,
not pencil, a lock into the box, right? You know, this is crazy. But like making it easier,
right? Because a package driver is like, all right, I'm here. Like punch card. It clicks
in. It doesn't. It's hard to retract out like those drywall screws, you know?
I've just pictured my new 70 inch television with a stab going right through the middle
of it when I open it.
Yeah, you have steel cable to some sort of lock that can be detached on the end and on
the end is like a VH, a very high bonds, you know, 3M sticky thing where it kind of adheres
to the box. You just throw the box away with the reusable pad or the disposable pad and
you've got, you know, way cheaper version, a tether.
A tether. Yeah. Yes.
That you have a key for.
Then you could have the tether run over up the side of the house to a giant barrel full
of building bricks. And when the tether gets to the end, it releases the trigger on the
barrel full of building bricks that falls down two stories to the ground and pulls that
thing right back out of that guy's hand.
Is this a roadrunner?
What if when the delivery driver drops off your package, it triggers the tether to suck
the package up to the second floor of your house?
That's fun.
Your package is like bear bagged up at the second floor of your house.
Hoisted.
And no one's going to steal it. The bear can't take the goods, man.
You just pull in all your deliveries in the second story window. That's wonderful. And
you can have a bunch of barrels of hot oil to pour on your enemies.
Just murder holes on the side of your house.
Dude, tie it to a piano and you got a full Looney Tunes sketch. Like.
Just a little legal disclaimer. I'm not advocating at all for anyone setting any booby traps.
It's not a trap until someone gets hurt.
That's what the law says, I'm sure.
All righty, Scottie B, let's see what you got this week.
All right. In usual fashion, I have a... Well, I started with a half-baked idea and then
I put it in the chat GPT and it finished it for me, which I was like, that's pretty cool
actually. So every year I go to a fish camp out in the middle of nowhere, Quebec. And
it's just with a bunch of old guys who have been doing this for decades. And all of these
guys are absolutely convinced that in these dozens of huge lakes we go to, there are only
like three spots that you can catch fish.
What I want to do is come up with a data-driven way to determine where optimum fishing spots
are instead of just some old guy's gut feeling because he caught a fish there in the seventies.
So this gets a little more elaborate than my past ideas, but what I'm thinking is that
you take whatever kind of fish you were trying to catch. In our case, it was bass. And I'm
going to release a hundred bass into a couple of these lakes. And then I'm going to track
the position of each of these bass and see where they go, where they hang out, what they're
doing during certain times of day, what they're doing at different barometer readings, and
just get a heat map of the lake doing that. So I can come back and be like, this is the
actual spot where we should be fishing, not this spot just because you saw a log there
once. So that's where I got stuck. Like, this is great in concept. How the hell do you execute
this? Like you can't put little GPS tags on fish. I just couldn't think of a good way
to triangulate them. So I put all this idea into ChadGBT and it instantly came up with
this little sonar tablet. I'm like, what the hell is that? And apparently it's a little
thing that researchers use where it'll just constantly emit like every five, 10 seconds,
a ping, like a submarine. And I put a different one in for each fish at a different frequency.
And then at the same time, I put little receivers at different points around the lake, at least
three, maybe four. And from these, each of these fish are emitting these little sonar
pings. As long as I have the data from all four collection stations, I can tell exactly
where each fish is at any point. So this is kind of where it gets crazy. Let's just, I
don't know, do this to a couple of different lakes in different areas, create these heat
maps and figure out the types of spot that fish actually want to go to. And then that's
kind of where I got lost. Do we, yeah, sell the data or if there's one particular lake,
we will offer a service that you can come in and map the lake of whatever kind of fish
you want. It is a huge technological challenge, but my God, it sounds so much fun.
How much data do you need, I guess is the real question. Like a week?
Yeah, a week or two is worth should be plenty at this point. These fish aren't just going
to sit in one spot as they're going to get eaten by something bigger than them. They're
going to actually go to where they want to go.
What are the receivers like? Like, do you have to have like a lot of receivers?
I don't think you would need that many just to triangulate something. I mean, you need
at least three, but if you have a weird corner or shape of the lake where it bends around
like an oxbow, you'd probably need one at the end of each of those.
Okay, if I were to do this MVP style, I would literally just throw a bunch of bobbers on
a bunch of those fish. And you literally just watch the bobbers. And you just look around
the lake for the glowing orange bobbers. Yep. Or glow in the dark.
Who needs hardware? I got bobbers and a glow stick. So we're just going to follow them.
That's right. And then you're just like, oh, a lot of glow sticks landed over there, you
know, or all the bobbers, right? You just like drive around the lake afterwards. You're
like, where did all these bobbers land? You know, you can have them dissolve. Okay, keep
it eco-friendly. Have the hook in the fish dissolve after a certain amount of time. And
then it's super low cost, Scott. You solved your problem.
No, I want the complex hardware solution. I mean, it doesn't work if there's like current.
Fishes arch nemesis, current. Current. There's so many factors and every single person I
fish with believe they are the most superstitious bunch about every little thing affects every
possible way to catch fish. Oh, so it's just a bunch of hoopla. It's astrology.
It's essentially astrology in a aluminum small boat.
Have you guys heard of SOSUS? No. So like during the Cold War, the US wired the entire
North Atlantic for sound. So there's this microphone array to listen for Soviet submarines.
So what if you did something that had like three or 50 sonar buoys all across various
lakes that then sent out a ping and then mapped where the fish were on any particular day
at any particular time and then mapped them on a web page that then said depth, water
temperature and where they're congregating. Whoa, that's great. You just drop a few mics
around in the various spots of your little lake there.
One of the arguments that we've had up there is we struggle with fish finders before. I
thought it was really cool actually. It's like a floating fish finder and you cast it
into the middle of the lake and it maps out the bottom of the lake and in theory also
acts as a fish finder. It did not work at all on these lakes that we were on. There
was just too many weeds and logs and it was saying there was fish everywhere when you
can just clearly see that there's nothing. I think that would work really well on a larger
lake. I don't know about these smaller Quebecian ones.
There's got to be some way to detect movement then, right? Like vibrations of the water?
Is LIDAR, isn't that light? LIDAR is light. Dude, they're on Roomba vacuums. They clean
my house. Can't they find some fish? I'm just going to go to the lake and drop a Roomba
in and hope it maps it real quick before it sinks.
I mean, it's halfway there. Just waterproof a Roomba. There you go. You can just see a
fishing, a guy out trawling for fish somewhere on some lake with like 50 Roombas going around.
I'm in circles. Doesn't iRobot, the company that makes Roombas
has like a pool cleaning one. We're like 88% of the way there.
Tells you where the fish are and cleans the bottom.
Scott, there you go. Here's a fish researchers, buy this up, dude. You got multi markets here.
I want to track fish behavior. Use our LIDAR or sorry, whatever it is. Yeah. Roombas.
What if the Roomba was shaped like the fish you're trying to hunt? Then it could swim
with the fishes. The fish mole.
Yeah. Yeah. So then it goes, it just swims around until it identifies, Hey, there's what
I am. And then it follows that fish at speed, at depth, and then just lives with that fish
until it finds more. And then it says, Oh my gosh, there's a bunch of us. And then it
sends up a little bobber up to the top and then calls the fishermen there and says, Yo,
yo over here. This is where you want to drop your hook.
This is fish terminator. And then Skynet, which is humans come and attack all the fish.
Hello, fellow fish. Where are we congregating today? The fish mole.
Okay. Okay. What about this? Could you, I don't know if fish congregate in certain spots,
they got to be pooping the whole time. Right? Can't you just find the piles of fish poop
in the bottom of the Lake and just be like, Oh, a lot of poop here and somehow track it
that way. I didn't think I'd be Googling. Does fish
poop float today? It doesn't. It dissolves. Haven't you ever
watched him at the dentist? No, exactly what you're talking about. I think
everybody else knows the long trail that just is the longest dingleberry of all time for
a fish. But then it just, the end of it just kind
of dissipates. So what if you feed a bunch of fish, like
a tracker, like poop track? I was going to say, maybe, maybe you could
sense the difference of the poo water and like map it, like sample it as, as you go
in like a grid pattern and sample the water looking for the high concentration water of
poo water. Yeah. Like you build up too much ammonia in
an aquarium. So that's why you have to switch it out. You probably could have some sort
of detection. You know, it's, it's just like those people
that hunted for COVID in the wastewater streams. You know, maybe, maybe that's what you need
to do. You give the fish a virus and then you can look for it in the lake and where
it's concentrated, you know, that's where the virus is.
So I got to catch all the fish first. Or you could make, what if you could make
the poop float all of a sudden? Okay. Okay. Hear me out now. Now all the fish poop that
floats to the top, you're like, found the fish. It smells like fish shit.
Like I like this. Yeah. You need a bait that changes their diet to be more fatty. So it
floats up. There it is.
Some Chipotle or something and just sprinkle it in.
There's some lighting element in there, you know, so you throw the nightlight on fish
shit floaters. And that's what I want to eat too, is a fish
that you've given a different diet so that it's poo floats. I'm sure that hasn't tainted
the meat at all. Does that count as a GMO?
What's great about it is you don't even have to catch any fish, Scott. You just dump the,
you just fill the lake with all this like pig slop, floating fish food, pig slop, right?
With flora, like what are those? Lumino, fluorescent. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Biofluorescent, bioluminescent. That is so fascinating. Could you create a
heat map of a lake that like you could see at night, maybe something that emits some
ultraviolet or IR thing. And just feed the fish.
And feed it to the fish and make a heat map of where they're at.
What if you fed the fish tritium dust? Does tritium come in dust form?
Well, I mean, you can get it in a hard form. I mean, it's, I assume that you could dust
it because I mean, they use it for like gun sights. It lasts for like 20 years. So I mean,
why couldn't you grind it up and feed it to the fishes?
What's tritium? It's a radioactive isotope that glows in the
dark by itself for like 10 years. Oh, so it goes away in 10 years?
No, not really. It hangs around for about a hundred.
We're just going to chum the water with it. Oh.
I think I would rather eat fish that was eaten pork than fish that was eaten tritium.
Have you had tritium fish though, Leo? That's true. I shouldn't knock it till I
get it. I'll do anything once, right? That's right. And that you would do once.
All right, Leo, what do you got? Okay. So we missed out on the era of CB radio
and its popularity. I think it's peaked. It's come and gone. It still has a niche with some
truck drivers, but it isn't popular and I want to bring it back. So what would a CB
radio in the year of our Lord 2023 even look like? I'm glad you asked. I think we should
have a on off switch in every cabin of every car that can either be retrofit or built in
always on microphone. You're not clicking on and off. This is just a conversational
chat room that you have that is ambiently with every other car in your near proximity,
say a few car lengths, maybe even a little more, I don't know, a few hundred feet that
you are always hearing what they're doing. They're always hearing what you're doing.
You just can have a conversation and choose to participate or not. But someone cuts you
off, yell into the ether, see if they have their radio on. You want to thank someone
for letting you merge? Just yell. Maybe they'll have theirs on and you can say thanks. I feel
like it's hard to communicate with other cars. You do the wave, you do the like honk briefly
to say I'm mad at what you did, but there's got to be a better way to communicate. Right?
And CB radio built a whole culture around itself of like slang and interesting cultural
things that have been lost to time. The way that memes travel, you know, I feel like this
could happen IRL where you have like local slang, you have ongoing something to do other
than listen to podcasts and be by yourself. Ham radio tries to be this a little bit, but
it's too niche. I think it's got to be something that's easy to access and CB would be it,
right? You just have those existing frequencies. Don't worry about clicking on and off and
fumbling with stuff. Just build it in. Either I'm participating or I'm listening to the
radio.
That's dope. I think like when a traffic accident happens or like when you're stuck in traffic,
like everybody's like, what happened? What happened? You know, and you could literally
because the distance thing, like I bet you could walkie like a game of telephone. Sure.
What's going on? Guy 10 cars ahead of me said this, pass it on. Totally. I think it would
get people off their phones more too. Oh, true. People are fumbling with ways or whatever
trying to figure out what's going on with this traffic accident. All the cop detection
would be amazing. Right. Cop ahead. Dude. And truckers would love it. Truckers would
be using it. Like if they're using it already, I feel like that's their jam, right? You just
talk it. Well, maybe that's also probably the problem is you're talking to truckers
half the time. I don't know. Thank you truckers for listening. But if you're listening to
this right now and you're in your car, isn't there some car that you've seen in the last
few minutes that you think like that must be an interesting person. What a weird vanity
plate. Why do they have a sticker on their window for the whatever flag? Wouldn't it
be fun to just like have those fleeting moments? I don't know. There's always the bad egg who
has road rage problems, but I feel like it'd be fun to like you can just like turn them
off though and be like some guys yelling. You'd be like, I don't need to listen to you
right now. And then it's just back to old school road rage. If it's yeah, you could
turn yours off or if it's a digital thing, we could have a block system where everyone's
on a slightly different thing. Yeah, you just say, you know what, that one car, you've got
your list of seven license plates that are all around you right now and you tap on one
or something to just take them off.
We can have rating systems for different ones. You thanks for letting me in five out of five.
That was a poor merge three out of five. But you know, it's funny, Leo, I've thought about
I've as I've sat in traffic, like how I would communicate with people and I was like, maybe
you put, but these are ideas that suck like an led strip in the back of your car that
gives thumbs up or thank you or whatever.
That exists. Yeah, it does. Someone has a little like circle led that makes smiley faces
or frowny faces and that you can press, but it's not the same, right? That's one directional
cringy. Yeah. Okay. Another thing too, I think this is actually crazy, but don't cars like
self-driving cars would communicate to each other, right? Like that's a thing. Could you
use that to like have cars talk to each like have cars talk to each other in? Yeah. Prevent
accidents. Yeah. That's part of the plan. Yeah. That they're able to communicate state
of light up ahead and plan their speed accordingly. And if you get self-driving cars down to the
millisecond, you don't have to have stoplights at all because they can thread in between
each other.
Also, this would make an amazing rom-com movie. You just are like always on the highway, lady
on the radio, you know, I leave work every day and we just always hit it off. We always
beat up around exit 40. Do you have like codes like you have like that? That's a whole culture,
right? Like you have your own call signs and stuff in ham radio. Yeah. CB people would
make their own like slang names for each other, but that was just anyone could have one for
any reason. And radio, you have to like take a test for and get licensed and get a call
sign and all that. Oh, so what's the what's CB radio? It's just like it's it's a walkie
talkie for a couple of different channels for anyone who's got a truck. Like it's I
don't think you need a license. I'm pretty sure about. No, I don't think you do. Yeah,
no, you don't need a license. We should all get CBs in our cars. That way we can talk
to each other around town. That'd be fun. I'd love that. Oh, be awesome. So is that
like what all walkie talkies use? So like Scott has like a walkie talkie, right? Like
that's all CB radio. Totally different. Yeah. All right. How do you? Yeah. So we got to
make a romcom movie in order for this to catch on, because I feel like it's just like it's
the adoption of it. Right. Because this already exists. Everybody go buy a walkie talkie.
Right. And sit on Channel eight. And that's it. That's the or the walkie talkies prebuilt.
Right. How do you I think it just be like a device you press in your car. I'm almost
picturing like it's integrated into Android auto or something where it's just, Hey, it's
just another app I can select on here. And here's who's close to me. And like Leo said,
I could block this guy or mute this guy or say, Hey, I'm, I'm free to talk right now.
There's something charming about it being an actual radio signal coming and going, but
really this could be modernized over the internet. And you have like, you know, I define my range.
I want to hear the chatter all over the region versus just in my local area. You could do
it over an app, but then you just have to have good constant cell phone service, which
is tricky. I like it. I really like it where it's local to your car. Just like I got a
hundred yards in every direction. CB radio goes five miles. Dude, this is like Omegle,
but in your car. Yeah. Seriously though. Chat roulette. Yeah. Car roulette. The application
for this would be really easy in my new pickup. Cause it's, it's connected to the internet
and you can just download apps. So you could just put a new audio app in the truck and
download it right to the, to the touch screen in the pickup. And it would know its GPS coordinates
and have access to the microphone and speakers and be ready to roll. How soon until people
start advertising across it? Day one. Unskippable 30 second ads before you can start your car.
Oh, I was just thinking to some guy who's just blasting like it's the next level of
bumper sticker advertising. Right. The abuse vector is pretty high. If everyone's got one
of these to start blaring their, uh, Rick roll at maximum DB. Overpasses too. You just
hang your radio on, on repeat. Just like, yeah. That's why this blocking feature is
kind of a necessity. I think I could see it being very useful during an election year.
Oh man. Yeah. Anytime. Anytime. Ham radio has a bad rep for being old crotchety guys,
um, vent for political opinions or what their radio sounds like or the weather. So we have
to figure out culturally how we make this something that's enjoyable. I would very much
enjoy that if I had that in my car, especially on long trips. Dude, this would be okay. Like
this could be like a geo caching thing. I'm wondering like, okay. Kind of like you go
around town and you listen to audio messages. Kind of like how you go find geo caches. I
don't know. You could play on that a little bit. So gamify it. Yeah. Yeah. Something like
that. Like, Oh, I'm going to leave a, well, I don't know if that's possible. I'm sure
there's a way to do it where you have little devices that repeat a message and turn it
into a feature, right? Turn the, turn the spam into the culture itself. Like numbers
stations. You've heard of those? No, no. Oh, Scott, you'd like this especially there's
this is the thing you know about right, Carl, the number of stations, the radio there's,
there's radio frequencies that people have observed saying random numbers at consistent
times throughout days, weeks, months. And they assume that it's for spies who are abroad
to listen into, to know that their orders are, but you there's all over the East coast,
especially you can tune your radio to certain frequencies and just hear these mysterious
numbers that nobody knows where they're coming from. That's terrifying. Yeah. That's a good
Wikipedia rabbit hole for you listeners. If you want to take an afternoon and just sort
of check starting at numbers stations and ending up, you know, somewhere in the cold
war listening to Carl's underwater sonar system. Is it a person talking into the microphone
or is it like robot? Yeah. Whoa. 12, seven 88 three. Yeah. Whoa. I don't, I don't like
that. That's a thing. I don't like knowing that. I don't know if there's still a thing.
It's probably pretty easy for someone to track them down in this year, but uh, they were
a thing for many decades. Use the triangulating fish finder. You could find them. No problem.
There you go. Wait, you can't find people, right? You can't like, there's no way to track
like the signal. A sport in amateur radio is called foxhole hunting. And some Saturday,
some guy will go find like a Denny's or sit in his car in the middle of nowhere and every
pre agreed upon interval. So I will broadcast for 30 seconds every 10 minutes and people
that's the first to find them wins and it's practice so that if somebody is being abusive
and the FCC wants to take a tower down or whatever, they can find them. But yeah, you
basically have directional antennas. So you're doing the like trying to figure out where
it's coming from. You know, when you're finding water, right? It's like a compass kind of,
but a compass that you can only look at for a few seconds every couple of minutes. And
so you try to figure out where they are, you know, so yes, you can track them, but kind
of on a two dimensional plane. Why do you ask?
I was just curious. Yeah, because I want to find these number of people.
All right, Carl, what do you have for us this week?
All right. So not this past summer, but the previous summer, my wife and I decided to
plant an orchard. So we bought two apple trees and two peach trees. The apple trees not doing
so hot, but they're still alive. They're still green. One died, but we replaced it and it's
kind of limping along. But the peach trees have been just booming. So the first year
we put the peach trees in, we got a whole bunch of peaches growing on them, looked great.
And then within like middle of August, within like one day, all the peaches were gone. On
both trees the first year. And it was like we couldn't figure out where all these peaches
go. So then this year we had like a bumper crop, like I'm talking between the two trees,
we had like 300 peaches gone. What?
Two weeks, August, like one day they were just gone off the trees. So there's some type
of animal that's eaten the peaches and we're pretty sure it's like a squirrel or a bird
or who knows what. So that's been very frustrating. So we're like, let's do some bird nests or
some like bird nets. And I bought like an eagle and I bought an owl and I'm like getting
irritated and I'm trying to figure out what to do with my garden. Additionally, the apple
trees aren't getting the right type of water or enough watering or the right water timing.
So we've had this water issue. So I was thinking that I like artillery cannons. Like those
things are awesome. Like they're sweet. They shoot things like this is awesome. So I thought
what could I combine to take care of my watering issue and my animal issue at the same time?
And so I thought, what if I made a multi-axis laminar flow water cannon that could shoot
water in a pattern wherever I needed it. And I'd be able to like set up auxiliary cameras
around my garden that when it sensed movement of like a squirrel, it would call in an artillery
strike from my automated water cannon to blast the squirrel. And then it would also like
during the day when it's just sitting there, it'd say, oh yeah, we need to, we need to
distribute like four and a half gallons to this tree area and four and a half gallons
to this tree. And so it would sit there and just, you know, rapid fire, you know, right
a carpet bomb, this tree and then that tree. And then it would carpet bomb my corn rows
and then it would carpet bomb my raspberry bush and my blueberry bush and in those specific
areas. So I'm not wasting all that water on grass that no one cares about. I'm putting
it on the plant where I need it, but then also pestering the animals that come, not
killing them, not harming them. Just anytime an animal shows up, I'm just calling in an
artillery strike to just barrage that sucker with water. And I'm, I'm thinking that, you
know, a laminar flow cannon that shoots water at high pressure over a long distance might
even be able to be like set up in the middle of my backyard and water my entire lawn. So
it sits there and just runs, you know, 24 seven or eight hours a day or whatever it
is, but it's also on guard for my garden. This rules. Dogs are going to love this. Pete
is going to love this. I'm not hurting the animals. That's right. You're watering them.
So growing up, we had hostas all along our house, like a huge row of them, unfathomable
amount of hostas and without fail, deer would come in in the season and eat them. And my
dad tried sound devices. My dad tried all kinds of stuff until finally we had a motion
detecting sprinkler. Whoa. And it was an instant fix. Squirrels would get in there. A deer,
excuse me, would get near it. It would just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
and then be done. And they wouldn't go anywhere near it. Not even afraid. They were just afraid
of the sound and the movement, not even like getting blasted. Maybe they got it a little
bit or something, but they were perfect circles of protection and right outside the range
of where this thing would trigger, they would be all eaten. Right? Whoa. It's exactly what
you're talking about, but not automated. I love this. I can tell you from experience
that it would work beautifully. I just want to feed 10,000 pictures of a, of squirrels
and rabbits into a AI bot and have it a camera system with a triple axis, be able to recognize
them and pinpoint the exact X, Y, Z of this guy with a camera. With a camera. So you can
watch the fun, of course, record it and make a highlight reel. Nice. Maybe you have like
one camera mounted on the artillery piece. That's like zone control. And like, cause
you're going to have the hose run to this thing. You're going to have probably a high
pressure pump. You're probably going to have a little bit of power. So it's, it's going
to be a pretty fixed unit in my brain. You know, you might need a camera in a different
position to like, look from a different angle that then also coordinates and triangulate.
So then you'd need some calibrating shots to call in like, okay, we're going to coordinate
where this is and then it can fire for effect. Bring it up, bring a water artillery round
in and land it right where they need it. Be the kids summer fun. Yeah. Put it on fun sprinkler
mode and it's like raining spots and stuff. You make games out of it. Teach it to target
small children. This'll be perfect. That would be so fun. This would actually be a lot of
fun growing up. That is, I think that's the bigger market. Carl, screw all that stuff.
Like you turn this into like, uh, this is an adult automated super soaker turret. Right.
Oh, it could have all the modes. It could have a child play mode where it goes out and
just goes crazy. It could have regular sprinkler mode where it runs around and just does the,
you know, and, and sprays in a big giant arc on the grass or it could have, you know, prestrigion
strike mode. Don't you dare eat my rose bushes or a joystick mode that you're manually controlling
for fun. Oh, absolutely. You could have like a video game controller and some POV goggles
with a targeting patch on it. And you could sit there and intercept it and shoot the squirrels
if you wanted to with water. Of course, I'm only talking about water, but you know, it
would be so much fun. And then if, if a precision strike is called in, you could have it automatically
save the clips and then automatically snip the video so that you have the replay reel
so that you can enjoy it and upload it to YouTube. Yes, yes, yes. Dude, super soaker
is gonna, if you like turn this into super soaker toy, boom, like do the, do the laminar
flow thing, right. For, you know, the other market, but you sell this kind of this game
concept as super soaker, boom, you got a market. I'm picturing like a target or something on
it and kids got to sneak up on this turret and try to hit the target with their own water
in order to shut it down or something long enough for them to, I don't know, capture
the flag or whatnot. You just got to get past this thing. A capture the flag mode on it
would be pretty sweet. It's like spy mode, right? Like I'm a secret agent trying to capture
the flag. There's nothing crazy about this too. Like all the technology for this is there.
It's just putting it together. That's why I picked that as my idea. Like what's the
MVP, right? So like, I can't, is it hard to do these like giant ass pumps? Do you have
to like have a big pump to like shoot water that hard and fast?
That's a great question. How hard is it to lob a artillery amount of water across the
yard? Water's pretty heavy. Well, I looked into that and the trick is really to get the
laminar flow. Cause then you can send a packet, but you're limited by the surface tension
of the water. Cause as the velocity goes up and you get this packet of water going, if
it's bigger than a regular rain droplet, which rain droplets are the size rain droplets are
because of some actual physics constraints. And so what will happen is, is if you send
something say the size of your thumb, it will dissipate into at a certain velocity and with
not enough surface tension, it will separate and disintegrate into, you know, the corresponding
drops that would be a droplet size. And so then your targeting accuracy starts to go
down and your velocity starts to go down because you have more drag. And then you have a larger
amount of droplets that are going to dissipate from your normal grouping. And so that's,
that's kind of an important shotgun. So then it ends up being a shotgun. We have some variation
of this that self fills biodegradable water balloons and just a lobs them across the yard.
You won't have to deal with that. And he's just, there is your artillery strike is water
balloons coming from seemingly nowhere from the sky. Essentially a automated trebuchet.
Oh, that's great. I just want to build that biodegradable. Yeah, you're right though. It's
all physics. If you know the exact weight of the projectile, what if you didn't care
so much about precision accuracy and you did the trebuchet, but just, it's like a five
gallon buckets worth of water that gets lobbed. Would you get the like enough of a spray,
you know? Well, you don't want to knock the peaches off the tree. All right. That's true.
You know, that was, that's the original goal here. Or snap a bird's neck. Yeah. You can
use it to harvest the peaches. It'll be great. What about the angle? What if you just had
a high arc, like literally create rain on your lawn though? What if you did the five
gallon bucket, but you lob it so high in the air, the spray, right? Just covers the whole
lawn bucket after bucket after bucket. I don't know how long that's going to take, but the
laminar flow thing is great. Yeah. I don't know. I like that idea. I like making rain
on my lawn through one trebuchet. I've never imagined laminar flow that has a brief on
off. Like the only time I've ever seen laminar flow is when it looks like a solid pillar
because it's constant, but I've never seen intermittent laminar flow. Well, I guess there's
like jumping fountains that sometimes look kind of cool where they've got the splash
pad. Yeah. Downtown. Yeah. They're always a little like disturbed though. I've, you know,
those really precise videos of jumping fountains that are like the splash pads where they're,
you know, like intermittently on, off, on, off, on, off. You could get something really
cool going there when you scale it up. That would be cool. That sounds like a fun and
very hard to pull off hardware project. Very cool. Yeah. You could sell add ons like additional
barrels. You could do like, I have a quad barrel, a sprinkler. It would be sweet if
it was a quad barrel. And then, and then the barrels kind of came back and forth. Like
one of those, uh, bofors that they had in World War II. Anti-aircraft guns. I was picturing
four barrels, but they're all along the roof in different spots. So you have this sort
of reigning terror of different angles and stuff of various blobs of water from all sides,
overwhelming the enemy. It'll be squirrels. Maybe that's how you make the valves work.
You move the barrels and slide them in and out. So it's like the bofors, but the sliding
in and out is where it takes a new slug of water and admits it into the barrel. A slug
of water's excellence. Shoot a water slug with a compressed air backup and just all
day, all night. Turn off the artillery, honey. It's hard to do that quiet. I bet. Air compressor
running all night. It's just knob in the backyard for these poor squirrels. You could design
it like a mini gun, you know, like a Gatling gun, like one of those spins. Yeah, sure.
Okay. Like super, why is it super soaker? Like all over this stuff, like we need adult
water guns or water turret systems. Like this is our generation growing up. We need like
this version in our lives. My roommate in college modified a nerf gun to where it was
like really painful levels of speed. It would leave welts. They needed that scene, but for
super circuit, that probably exists, right? Where you have like stainless steel canisters
instead of plastic shit. Have you seen the, uh, the phalanx gun that they put on the U.S.
warships that intercept missiles that are inbound towards a U.S. warship? Yeah. And
it's those are 75 rounds a second, something like that with, with water. That's what I
want in my backyard for the squirrels. That sounds fun. Identify target, aim, targeting
solution and then just, and squirrels not eating my peaches. Incredible. Well, thank
you very much for listening. We hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you, Carl, for your wonderful
contributions to the show. We are very excited to have you back sometime soon. Sound good.
Sounds good. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Wonderful. Our website is Spitball.show. Please
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