Kids Countdown Timers, Intentional Corporate Espionage, Drones for Hire, and Radio Powered Batteries

(upbeat music)

- I'm Scott.

- I'm Russell.

- I'm Leo.

This is Spitball.

(upbeat music)

Welcome to Spitball, the Pitchin' Kitchen.

We're three digital dreamers, 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 that we say is yours to keep.

And Scott, you brought our guest this week, right?

- I did.

I actually brought my boss and long-time friend, Kyle.

- Oh, that's awkward.

- Kyle's, I know, right?

No.

Kyle's an electrical engineer.

He's the manager of my team.

He's always coming up with cool hardware designs and ideas.

And I think he would be perfect for this.

So welcome, Kyle.

- Welcome, Kyle.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- We're so glad you're here.

This is gonna be fun.

We are starting off today with another this or that game.

So today we're gonna be playing Array of Tongues.

I don't know if you know this.

There's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

of languages, world languages around the world.

Some of them are pretty obscure.

You definitely have not heard of most of them.

And that goes for both like spoken or written language

as well as programming languages.

So I'm gonna go down the line here one at a time.

And you have to tell me if something

is either a world language that somebody speaks or writes,

or if it's a programming language

that someone writes code in for a computer.

And Kyle, we gotta start with you, our guest, of course.

Tell me, starting off here, we've got Vellato, V-E-L-A-T-O.

Is that a programming language or a world language?

- That one sounds like a world language

from like some obscure island.

- It does.

It's actually a MIDI music file language

where you can define pitches in orders of notes.

- All right, Kyle's gone here.

Every single one of these games, Leo,

I'm like, I'm gonna be good at this.

I will get this.

I know this stuff.

And I get it wrong 100%.

- Not yet.

- Russell, Kusunda, K-U-S-U-N-D-A.

- That's a world language.

That's...

- It's a language spoken in Nepal.

Very good.

Very few fluent speakers left.

Scott, Wintu, W-I-N-T-U.

- I'm gonna say a world language.

- Yeah, it's native to Northern California.

Very good. - Let's go.

- Northern California? - Only a few

descendants left.

Yeah, yeah.

Kyle, you're next up.

Malbodge, M-A-L-B-O-L-G-E.

- All right, that's gotta be another computer language.

- It is.

It's a language designed from the ground up

to be almost impossible to write in.

Well done.

I believe it's one-off.

It's just difficult to program in.

It's like really ugly and bad.

You should check out Malbodge.

It's funny.

Russell, P-I-E-T.

- Computer language.

- It is.

It's a programming language where programs

are supposed to look like abstract paintings

and the codes colored blocks.

Of course.

Scott, Votic, V-O-T-I-C.

- I'm gonna say language, but like from Star Trek.

- They are all actually on Earth, I will tell you that.

- Okay.

- Either in a computer or no sci-fi in here this week.

- Still language.

- It's a Uralic language spoken in Estonia.

Very good.

Last time through, one more round.

- We're getting lucky.

- I believe it's one, two, two.

You are on a hot streak.

Kyle, we've got Sentinel, S-E-N-T-I-N-E-L.

- All right, that's gotta be a computer language.

- Spoken by the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island

in the Indian Ocean.

- Wow.

- Largely uncontacted, so you're forgiven

for not knowing that.

Russell, Rotokas, R-O-T-O-K-A-S.

- That's the way you said it.

- Or Rotokas, Rotokas.

I haven't looked up how to pronounce any of these.

(laughing)

- We apologize.

- So that's an island out in the middle of the Pacific

called Roto, same where Roto-Rooter is from.

So it's definitely a spoken language.

- Are you making this up?

- One more time the name of the place again

so I can look that up.

- Roto.

(laughing)

- It's actually, it's spoken in Papua New Guinea.

Very good.

- Same dish.

- You pretty much got it.

- You're actually right on it,

'cause that's the descendants of New Zealand

are Roto-Rooterans or something like that.

I made up a story just like I make up my ideas.

It's just how it is.

(laughing)

- The Maori?

Is that what, yeah.

- That's the one, yeah.

- Yeah, and then Scott, Dumi, D-U-M-I.

Finish strong for us.

- I'm gonna finish strong with complete guess.

I'm gonna say programming language.

- That was the language of Nepal,

another obscure one in the mountains.

Sorry to say, I believe it was one Kyle Scott,

two Russell, three our winner this week.

- Oh nice Russell.

- Yeah, let's go, I never win these.

(laughing)

- Yeah.

Gonna remember this the whole episode by the way.

Just gonna hold it over.

- How proud you are.

- Keep bringing it up.

As winner of the--

- I'm so distracted.

- The glow of the win.

- Yeah, you're--

- The high of victory.

- Your trophy is 3D printing in the basement right now.

(laughing)

- All right, Leo,

what are you bringing to the table today?

- Okay, so I don't know if you've ever interacted

with a kid, maybe a nephew or niece,

or you've got your own kids,

or you've got some neighbor or something,

and they ask about when something's going to happen.

When are we gonna leave?

When is this?

How long do I have to wait for that?

And you say, I don't know, 15 minutes.

The kid says, how long is that?

How do you even explain to,

everyone has their own system for like,

it's a one and a half Paw Patrols,

or it's, you know,

you're gonna have to count to 60, 15 times,

like any kid's little brain can fathom

what that could even mean, right?

I would love to build a piece of hardware for this.

Maybe it's smart speaker controlled,

maybe it's app controlled, I don't know,

but it's got a bar of LEDs,

maybe an LED matrix,

where it visualizes a countdown timer.

Google Assistant kind of does this with smart displays,

and there's like some shoddy websites out there,

but I can't find an actual dedicated hardware product

to show time remaining, a countdown timer of some kind.

And I know that I would use this constantly.

So you just say, here's my 15 minute timer,

and it animates with progress bar style,

or circle filling up style, to just show,

you can see the fading going on,

and the time running out.

Kind of like, you know, a sand timer,

but something a little bit more flexible

with how much time is left.

That's the whole pitch, some kind of LED matrix.

- Love it, so something,

I'm picturing like those things that you get at restaurants,

where they're like, hey, we got a 45 minute wait,

go away, hold this piece of hardware.

But something that they can physically hold in their hands,

the kid, and that something is changing on it,

so they can see, or at least have a very clear idea

of when time is gonna be up.

- Yeah, maybe the time,

like the full amount of the progress bar

is 30 minutes or something,

and then you say, oh, 20 minutes,

so you set it to two thirds full,

and they just expect, okay,

now I can visualize how much time is going by.

I have, I'm from the generation where every classroom

that I was in growing up had an analog clock,

and so when someone says that's 45 minutes from now,

I just feel how much progress

that is of a minute hand moving, right?

- It's been ingrained in you. - Intuitively, but I don't,

I feel like that's something that little kids can do too,

and you could try to teach analog clocks to a three-year-old,

I don't know if they'd really get it, you know?

- Yeah, that reminds me of that game

where the timer, and you try to hit it

at the 10 second mark exactly to the millisecond.

Play that game 100 times,

and it'll be 15 minutes, right?

Like, I think it's like,

I never realized how hard it is

for like a little kid to understand time,

'cause it's so slow for them, I feel like,

and so I don't know, like games are like, right,

a fun animation, that's really interesting.

Like, I think there's like an entertainment element,

like they have to feel like time moving faster,

and I feel like if they were to watch "Paint Dry"

or "Seconds on a Clock," it's just like,

this is so long, right?

It's gonna feel like an hour and a half to them,

so how do you make it like,

'cause in a way, it sounds like you wanted it

to move fast for them, right, in general?

- Yeah, yeah, for sure.

- So like, as it gets closer and closer to the time,

the end time, it'll pulse or pulse faster

or something interesting.

- Yeah, like it starts changing colors,

like you're red, then yellow, then green, finally.

- Yeah, I honestly, I feel like this could come in handy

at restaurants too, you know,

I'm one of the types that gets really hangry,

and so they handed me this little restaurant buzzer

that starts counting down at 20 minutes.

I can just like watch this and say like,

"All right, there's only like two more little dots left here.

"I can hold out that much longer,"

but I'm just like standing there

waiting for this thing to buzz.

I'm just like staring at my phone, like,

"Come on, come on, come on," and it never comes.

- I love that.

Restaurant buzzer where that indicates your place in line

is a brilliant idea that also needs a pitch.

- Yeah, like it doesn't have to tell you the exact time,

just how many people are before you and let you defer it,

then it gives the restaurants, you know,

plausible deniability of,

"Well, we don't know the exact time that it's gonna be,

"but there's four parties ahead of you."

- Yeah. - Whoa.

- And I know that this is kind of being supplanted

by like text message systems and stuff,

but not everyone uses those.

- Guys, this is like the Domino's pizza tracker, right?

They don't really give you the time,

like they give you a rough time,

but like, you're kind of like,

"Whoa, the pizza is in the oven right now."

And there's just something exciting about that, right?

- Dude, so instead of saying, "Derek is making your pizza,"

your buzzer would say,

"The Smith family is finishing up dessert."

(laughing)

- Oh, man.

- That's my table. - Yes.

Speed them up, you know,

and you start pressing the button

and it's like throwing like napkins at them

or something in real time.

- Oh, there you go.

- If you turn this into like a microtransaction,

you spend a dollar and the waiter is gonna come over

and give them a nasty look.

(laughing)

- There you go.

- $10 and they pour water on their lap or something.

- Right, it's like Disney's Fast Pass, but malicious.

(laughing)

- Okay, if you were having dinner

and somebody was like throwing dollars at you to leave,

like, would you like?

- I'd stay, yeah, right.

- Oh, man.

- It's like the airline booth when you're waiting,

maybe 200 bucks will get you a little wait,

maybe 300, you just stay at the table

and they're throwing money at you.

This is a reverse incentive.

- I guess you're right.

- It would backfire so quick,

but what a social experiment that would be.

- Yeah, for sure.

- I'll leave right now for 50.

- Yeah.

(laughing)

- I wanna go back to the MVP of this though.

So timers like this for kids on here.

- Oh, yes.

- I wanna do one for like,

hey, this is how long it is till Christmas.

And it's just like, you know,

it's months of timer on there,

but it gives them a day by day or week by month,

how many more wake ups until it's Christmas time

or some their birthday, some big event.

- Yeah, we do this with paper rings.

So we'll make like a long chain

and every day we take one down kind of thing.

- Oh, nice.

- Something a little bit more digital, reusable,

something could be cool to wear.

- Dude, like a 15 minute advent calendar type of thing.

That's like reusable and doable, like, right?

Like, oh, every minute this box will drop something

or I don't know what fun activity would fall out of there.

You know, that would be cool.

Then they get to play with 15 different toys in 15 minutes.

Like that's gonna make time fly.

- They're still playing with it,

but they have the excitement

that something new is still gonna drop.

- It's like the, what's that one dog feeder,

the Furbo dog feeder.

(all laughing)

- It drops a tic-tac every couple of minutes.

What color is it gonna be this time?

Or maybe it's a Skittle.

We're gonna have to wait one more minute.

- One more Skittle.

- My dog is-

- Mom, how much time still dinner?

Huh?

Huh?

Set the thing.

(all laughing)

- My dog is so food motivated.

We could probably teach him time,

like how time works just by dropping a treat

every five minutes or 15 minutes or something.

- Regular intervals, yeah.

- Whoa.

I'm gonna be gone for 15 treats, it's okay.

- 15 treats, really?

Yes.

- He's just happy.

- You're leaving.

- Yeah, right.

- Yeah, I came to this with a half-baked idea here.

I don't have a clear vision yet

for what the physical animations

and product and stuff itself looks like, but.

- I think we're selling the restaurants now is what it is.

- I think a friend of mine actually made one of these.

- Yeah.

- Because it had a similar problem.

Like, kid wanted to get out of bed

and go run around and play.

He's like, "No, no, no, you have to stay in bed

"until 6 a.m."

Or some bonkers early hour here.

But it's a kid, so he wants to get up

and go run around and do whatever.

So, it had this little clock that you set a timer,

and then once the timer turns green,

you're allowed to get out of your bed

and go play in your room.

And then once it turns blue, now you can leave the room.

And so it kind of just gave him a good set of rules,

some boundaries there to go through.

And I don't know if he made that

or if he found that somewhere to buy it,

but maybe they're available already.

- We've got one, yeah.

So, there's one company that's productized it,

but it's a timer based like at this time every day,

it makes noises and does it, yeah.

- Oh, yeah, okay.

So, you can't like dynamically set it

to give a 15 minute countdown or something?

- Hmm, not to my knowledge.

I could fire up the app and look, but I don't think so.

I think it's more like every day at 5 a.m. it does this,

and 6 a.m. does that.

That's a good idea.

Maybe my whole request is just a feature request

for this already existing product and company.

(laughing)

- It's what 90% of our ideas are, it's fine.

- The poor listeners out there are like,

that already exists, idiot!

We hear you, we see you.

Post social media us and tell us about what dummies we are.

- Okay, wait, another way to think about this too,

music, you throw like, here's four songs,

just super quick software, right?

I need 15 minutes on the clock

and it finds a bunch of kid-friendly songs or whatever,

boom, once you're done with these songs,

we're ready to go.

- I like that.

- And it has the like, three songs in the lineup,

it shows them and then they go away as they play,

so you can see, oh, looks like there's only two songs left,

I can see that, yeah.

- Oh, I really like that.

- Yeah, nursery songs are always like,

a couple minutes long, I mean, seven of them maybe,

like, hopefully they can party through it.

- Freebird, 10 times in a row, go.

- Full concert, kids love it.

- Right?

(laughing)

- That's great.

- That's really good.

- You could turn it into a game too,

where if you played like WarioWare,

where we just a whole series of like,

20 second mini games, right?

And so if you set that up to say,

I need 15 minutes worth of mini games,

and then now the kid can play all these things,

you could even like, make it educational right now,

all of a sudden it's like,

you solve 15 minutes worth of math problems or whatever.

- I love that, yeah.

- Whoa.

- Making it interactive is a great idea.

- Like, bop it, but the timer countdown, you know, like.

- How many more times do I have to pull it, mom,

before dinner's ready?

- I'm tired of this, grandpa.

(laughing)

- Yeah, I know.

- Pass it.

(imitating music)

- We're aging ourselves, I think this is like,

a very much like-

(laughing)

- Our half-assed memories of what the bop it sounds are.

- What the hell, yeah.

- What's a bop it?

(laughing)

- Is it like cookie clicker, you know?

So stupid.

- Oh, God.

- Sorry, Gen Z.

- I feel like we apologize to them every episode.

- Yeah, they're, you know,

they're the future rulers of the world, right?

So we gotta be kind to them, I guess, but, you know.

- I for one, welcome our Zoomer overlords.

- Yeah, help us fix the economy, I guess.

- You know, whatever's going on here,

so that'll be another couple of years.

- Millennials are in their 20s and early 30s,

we've already given up and said, you guys can have it.

(laughing)

It's over for us.

- Yeah.

(upbeat music)

- All right, Scott, what do you got for us this week?

- I think I'm gonna deviate from the usual hardware

and go into more of a corporate espionage.

So.

- So software.

- Kyle and I, our company contracts our employees

to other companies in the local area.

At one point, one of our contractors left our company

for another company, it happens all the time.

However, this contractor, since they left,

has been still throwing business our way

from the new company.

So for example, if the new company needed

specific help contracting on a project,

this employee would encourage the new company

to throw work back to us,

which I found fascinating.

So my question/idea is today,

could you make a business out of this?

Could you take a covert group of individuals

who were purposely hired to other companies,

but their loyalties still remain

with the original parent company,

whose sole purpose was to throw business back

to the parent company?

That's about as far as I got,

and then I got into a really legal gray area.

- Like Steven Elop.

There was a high ranking Microsoft executive.

He was like just under the CEO, I think,

and in the mid-20 teens,

he went over and became the CEO of Nokia, I think it was.

Yeah, he went over to Nokia,

and then Nokia was doing worse and worse and worse and worse,

and then he switched the whole company

to be a Microsoft customer and make Windows phones,

because he came from Microsoft,

and then they continued to not sell super well,

and then he wrote this famous letter that was like,

"This is a burning oil platform,

"and we all need to abandon ship,"

and then he sold the whole company to Microsoft

and became a Microsoft executive again.

He went to Finland and just corporate shoehorned

this whole massive tentpole of a company in the industry,

and just as they dwindled, he brought them back home.

Yeah, it was crazy.

- That's amazing.

- Yeah.

- So was that actually Microsoft's plan from the start?

'Cause that's kind of where Scott's idea is going, right?

- Billy Gates tells them, "You're out of here.

"Go to Nokia, Microsoft, tank the company."

He's six steps ahead of us right now.

- Balmers in the back room, like,

"We've got a new plan for you, Steven."

Yeah.

- I guess, I don't know the business part yet.

I think I'm gonna get there,

but the idea of just as people are exit interviewing,

listen, we're gonna cut you a commission check

for any sale that we do because of you.

That way you're always kind of still in the network soul,

like, just give them an incentive

to sell your services, right?

- You have to have the incentive there.

At the same time, this truly becomes like spy versus spy.

Like, you are moving to another company.

You have a handler back at your original company

that all your communication is coming to in and out of.

- Oh.

- Exhibit A in the court case.

- Oh, interesting.

(both laughing)

- So you're kind of working

with a covert ops agent internally.

So this is like,

I think this is like a business culture shift.

Like, all right, every employee that leaves

is coming out as a salesperson.

And that salesperson has access to the sales manager, right?

And this is how they work, right?

Like, this should,

it's kind of like replacing your sales team with people,

like, as you churn at a company, large company,

your churn becomes your sales pipeline.

Like, that's, I mean, I feel like that should be,

I don't know, maybe people think this way already,

but maybe not incentivized, I don't know.

- Yeah, but if you do incentivize,

any company that has high turnover for whatever reasons,

all of a sudden could make that high turnover work for them,

profitable in some way.

Although I guess if you have high turnover,

people generally don't wanna be loyal

to their original company that they left in the first place.

- Unless that's the plan from the start.

- Yeah.

- Your whole culture's around like,

all right, but you really still,

you love working here so much,

we have a new idea for you.

- Show your loyalty.

- We will pay you under the table.

- This is actually what Elon.

- You're gonna go apply for these jobs over here.

We have these that will help you like write your resume

and do everything.

You're gonna become this salesperson over here

because we know that they need what our company provides.

- Yeah.

Oh yeah, Elon fired everybody at Twitter

so that they could go work other jobs

and sell more Twitter ads.

That's totally this whole.

- That's been the plan from the beginning, day one.

- 5D chess.

- Yeah, we're playing checkers, he's playing chess, right?

He's fired everybody for this sole reason, Scott.

- I'm just stealing Elon's idea right here.

- Right.

They're advertising revenues down like 70 something percent.

- It didn't work.

- It didn't work.

Nope.

Everyone who left or was fired hated that new management.

- Only on paper.

- Next time.

- I was just thinking now,

like this idea actually kind of exists

in like the medical world.

So athletic trainers at colleges, high schools,

those are all people who are salaried employees

of like a local hospital.

- Yeah, yeah.

- That local hospital pays the athletic trainer

to go and sit at high school football games

and in high school workout rooms.

And then when that person gets injured,

they're like, "Hey, go to my local hospital.

That's where I'm from and you should go there."

And so that's kind of how those work.

- Like are they working there paid by the hospital

or does the high school?

- They're paid by the hospital, yeah.

And so--

- High school doesn't pay at all?

- The high school pays in like an in-kind sponsorship.

So when you see like local health center

as the ad on the football stadium,

that's usually where that's from.

- Interesting, okay.

So this is kind of like that, but I think, yeah.

- Kind of.

- I guess what I'm thinking too,

like what if there's like a middleman construct, right?

Like to that end, like is that employee getting a kickback

for every patient, right?

Like they send their way,

like they're straight hustling like somehow maybe, but.

- Commission based.

- Commission, yeah.

- But I don't think the commission should come,

like so how you would make a business out of this maybe

is you're the middleman third party.

So like this engineering firm, you know,

"Hey, we can't technically give you a kickback

for every sale, but this company that we partner with,

if you like to sign up for, we'll give you a kickback

for no apparent reason or something, you know.

- That's a really good idea, Russell.

All you need to do is find every person,

you just scrape LinkedIn every day.

And anytime someone changes jobs from one to another,

reach out to them on LinkedIn and be like,

"Look, I see you just moved jobs here.

I see you have ties with your old company.

If you can throw business to your old company,

we will facilitate that somehow."

And...

- Yes, you're a facilitator of the deal, right?

- Interesting.

- The old company would pay the middleman

to get business from the new company.

Everyone wins.

It's like a recruiter, but for business.

- Yeah, okay.

This is some black hat stuff now.

But I wanna add, oh, this is gonna sound terrible.

(Russell laughs)

After an NDA expires, three years or whatever,

there are some methodologies

that I think people would find valuable, right?

Like at your previous job.

I would say it's not a trade secret.

It's just like, if you just knew which company we used,

like third-party company we used to supply,

we use Uline for our packaging.

But some people are like,

"We go through local suppliers," you know?

Or something like, if there was a way to facilitate

those types of conversations without it being super sketchy,

but it's like, I don't know.

- You reach out to the person.

You've been here three years.

You probably know a few things like this.

Would you like us, yes or no, to contact the company

and try to start that conversation for you?

They don't have to know that that information

is coming from you,

but we can anonymously deliver the information

from the employee under your care

who's remaining anonymous to management to say,

"Hey, your competitors do this."

- They pay you for the tip.

- It'll probably be pretty obvious who's selling it.

It's probably Derek who came from the other competitor.

- But it doesn't matter.

You got plausible deniability,

and LinkedIn has all the information

you could ever need for this

based on people's employment history.

- And I feel like this probably already happened,

like a consulting firm probably reaches out

to previous employees about their use of certain systems.

How did you do this in your ERP?

Oh, well, and it doesn't sound or feel

like a corporate secret that you're spilling, right?

But now you're just kind of socially engineering information

out of past employees,

so at least be a little transparent with it

and give them, you know, like,

we are soliciting not secrets.

- Be totally upfront about it and pay them for their time.

- It's more honest, I guess, than like, you know,

yeah, sure, we're wearing black hats,

but at least we show it, you know, instead of just like.

- But we wear them proudly.

- Yeah.

- You're an arms dealer.

- Yes, we sell illegal guns, but it's,

at least we tell people.

- Trade secrets.

- I just don't wanna get incriminated.

You come up with a tax fraud one, Scott, it's just like.

- One episode, man.

- It's always the nice guys that have all the super genius,

evil genius ideas, right?

- All right, Russell, what do you got today?

What's your idea?

- All right, so I feel like there's this problem

where being tech gadget people,

we like to buy expensive gadgets.

And then we have this like wishful thinking

and buyer's regret about our expensive gadget now.

And one of those gadgets is drones, right?

Like quadcopters, it's like so cool for the first,

maybe couple months you have it.

And then all of a sudden you're like,

oh, it sits in the garage a little too long

or doesn't get used.

And so why I'm hyping on drones

is because I feel like there's a huge matching need

for people that own a lot of drones that sit around

to create maps like GIS,

LIDAR maps of areas, cities need it,

businesses need it, roofers need it.

Everybody needs a fricking drone shot.

But they also like, probably it's too expensive

to like have a bunch of drones in your corporation

for every person in your fleet.

And so drones for hire is this idea

where you get all the little people

that kind of want drones to be the Uber drivers

of drone footage, right?

So you drop requests for mapped areas,

you fly your drone, you capture the footage,

you upload it, right?

Rinse and repeat.

At my current job, right,

there's this huge need for like LIDAR mapping

or just pictures of houses in the fall

because once all the leaves are gone,

all the tree canopy stuff,

you can't take really good photos of houses

until all the leaves are gone.

And so we just need hundreds of drones

to fly and capture footage of every possible region

as quickly as possible

while that sliver of time in the season, right?

So that's drones for hire.

It's just like ad hoc hiring drone people

to fill this giant need for maps

at a drone level, right?

- Lots of uses.

So to clarify, you, the drone owner,

you've bought this drone, it's sitting in your garage.

You would be the one who would sign up for this app

and be like, yeah, I can go fly my drone

and get whatever footage you need.

It's not just you handing your drone to someone else.

- Correct, yeah.

You would be an Uber driver.

Like you would maybe have to drive to a site,

fly your drone, upload your map, move on, right?

- Love that.

'Cause you still get to fly the drone.

That's the whole point, you got it.

- Right, and you're now making,

it's kind of like a revenue stream.

It like breaks, so you have it for fun,

but then you're also making money on it.

It's just like owning a car, right?

It's, and then Uber driving or whatever.

So yeah, this, a huge need.

I think that's just DGI or whatever,

should just give drones out for free

or like at a discounted rate and say,

or like, what is it?

Amazon does the Kindle with ads.

You just do something where you give out drones

and you're like, all right,

you can't use your drone until you've done 10 flights.

Here's how you do it.

Something like that.

- You gotta fly through this obstacle course

and prove you're worthy of this service.

- Or like--

- Then we just sell the obstacle course 'cause it's fun.

- Yeah.

- That sounds fun, just on its own.

Like those drone racing companies,

competitions that they have out in Vegas or whatever.

My wife and I had a drone videography business

when they were like still pretty clutch.

We had a DJI one before they had cameras built in.

So we had the model that you strapped a GoPro to basically.

It was super great.

My whole goal with it was like start an LLC,

get just enough income to pay for the drone itself

and the experiment and then maybe I'll even stop.

I don't know.

But after about a year,

we had done a couple of jobs

for like a plastic injection molding company and stuff.

Got some video and stuff, made a few hundred bucks,

paid for the drone itself.

And then we were looking at this like vast chasm

of we're gonna have to get certified.

There's gonna be a bunch of new regulation.

There's gonna be like insurance to deal with and stuff

'cause this is becoming legitimate now.

Let's bounce and we got out of it

because there was such impending headache

when it came to like all the paperwork and stuff.

So if I could abstract all that out and say,

hey, I need to hire a drone for this or whatever,

it comes with a pilot who's insured,

who's certified, who's done all this

and knows exactly what I need.

Or your platform maybe matches me to local pilots

who have, you know, this one's better for like video.

This one does LIDAR.

This one goes around and, I don't know,

makes 3D maps of your farm or whatever you need.

Then yeah, you're kind of making a marketplace there.

- Right, I think your revenue stream

is gonna be the insurance company at this point.

Let's start a drone insurance company

and then just have it as the baseline

of this entire operation.

You gotta use our insurance for it,

you know, $2 a month or whatever.

- Well, could you, as that marketplace owner,

incentivize the drone owners to sign up by saying,

hey, we'll insure you.

And then you can take a cut of whatever it is

that they make from their rental to insure them.

- That's a great idea.

- And then maybe you have to go through

some vetting process to make sure

that they're not just gonna crash their drone

and call your insurance

because they've never flown it before.

You have to go through their obstacle course first, right?

But yeah, maybe that's the play.

- Yeah, yeah, it makes me think about like,

right, like Toro or like every job

you have to pay for insurance, right, or something.

So the insurance is that, I guess it makes,

I didn't realize right when I started thinking

about like the Uber model,

everybody's already got insurance for their car,

they've already got that stuff.

So there's not really like this whole headache process

when you buy, I mean, when you buy a car,

you know what you're signing up for,

but with drones, it sounds like it's a pain

to get all your certifications and stuff, right?

So maybe that's where the app comes in,

just getting more drone pilots, certified drone pilots.

Yeah, making all that easy.

- I don't think people, the average person

who's sitting in an office as an accountant or whatever

may not even know what a drone could do to like,

like part of this could be the sales pitch of,

did you know that something that you're dealing with

could be made a lot easier

if some drone did it for 20 minutes?

Like you could get some really cool videos of this

or what are some of the other things

that you wish you had drones for that you can't do?

- A 3D model of my home.

I could do that. - Yeah, seriously though.

- Right, like, I don't know.

- Surveying.

- Surveying is a great one.

- Yeah, I mean, roof inspections,

there's something I hate,

have to climb up on the roof, right?

But to say like, did that hail storm damage my roof?

- Ooh, or vice, like what if a roof company just like,

hey, fly a drone out, I'm going to sweep like 100 homes.

I think Kyle is what, maybe what you're saying,

like I can look at 100 homes once

without sending a guy in a truck out there

and it hailed over here, let me check like 100 roofs

and then send my sales team to those five or 10 homes

that probably had the most damage,

like 24 hour turnaround.

That makes money for everybody, I think so.

- Yeah.

I know like cities need this all the time

for like flooding and flooding management,

like topography, home insurance, right?

I think when you get homeowner's insurance,

you could fly a drone.

I mean, there's a ton of small individual uses

that literally people in trucks have to go out and do

that could just instantly be replaced with Droober,

drone Uber.

(laughing)

- Droober.

- Droober.

(laughing)

- That was off the cuff, that was.

(laughing)

- Drunk Uber.

- It sounds like drunk Uber.

- Drunk Uber.

(laughing)

- Drunk Uber.

(laughing)

- Need to work on the branding there.

- Now to be confused with.

- If this idea already exists,

I have a way to make it not exist.

If it does, you could,

(laughing)

basically what I'm trying to say is you throw some,

that open street map thing,

but this is all drone mapping, right?

Oh, so you just create a whole new layer to open maps

that's like high quality drone footage and is a layer.

And maybe that's a thing.

Is that a thing?

Leo, you're the map guy, you know?

- You could do satellite,

they work with like Bing aerial satellite stuff,

but there's no like local street view equivalent.

That'd be awesome.

- Like, yeah.

Is there a, can you capture?

I don't even know how legal this,

maybe you guys don't know either.

Like, can you capture foot like legally

other people's homes, like fly a drone and video it?

I guess like the satellites do it.

Why can't I fly my drone and do it, right?

- I mean, yeah, the street view truck does it.

You can do it on public streets.

- This is a thing.

We should just create,

why don't we just make our own drone network

and map the entire world from a hundred feet

off the ground, right?

Or maybe a little higher.

Like what's the highest building?

Just like a little bit higher.

- What's the highest the FAA will allow us to fly?

- There we go.

- I think it's 400 meters, isn't it?

Where airspace starts.

- 399.

That's our website, 399.com.

(laughing)

- 399.99.

Data is king, man.

- But that could actually be really nice to do

'cause you know, some of those like

miniature autonomous delivery robots

that just like drive down people's sidewalks

or on campuses.

I don't know what they rely on right now,

but I suspect it's like open street maps

or satellite views,

or they drive down with a camera on the front of them

and then move around.

But to have that aerial view,

that's not quite so satellite based

could be really good data

for that kind of robotic application.

- I looked, it's 400 feet, not 400 meters.

I was close.

Don't do 400 feet to drone and blame us.

- So then the drones dock on top of Amazon delivery trucks

and that's how they recharge.

- Oh God.

- Wait, did we talk about this idea already or no?

(laughing)

- Something like that.

(laughing)

- Did you ever see that render of the like

Hindenburg size blimp with the Amazon logo on it?

- Yes, that's right.

- And it's like going over a town

while "Ride of the Valkyries" is playing in the background.

- Absolutely apocalyptic.

- And like thousands of drones are coming down,

delivering packages and going back up to the mothership.

- I need my crock pot now.

(laughing)

- All right, I gotta check something.

How many square, like what if I paid a dollar

per square mile of land, right?

So like, let's just create a bounty.

We're gonna map the entire United States.

How many square miles in the US?

Okay, guess.

You guys get it?

This is actually like, I--

- Jeez.

- Square miles.

- Programming language.

- Square miles, 2.5 million.

- 800 million.

- 3.797 million.

So just under 4 million.

So you get a--

- I was close.

(laughing)

- Sorry, Kyle, I just was like so excited.

This is basically, you're saying like,

all right, capture a square mile, set a bounty, right?

Get a VC firm to say, all right,

we're gonna capture $100 per square mile.

And you could just create entire companies.

And now you have the most accurate map

of the continental USA in, for 400, what, I mean,

if you give 100 bucks per square mile, yeah.

400 million bucks.

- I don't think you can fly over private land.

- Why not?

- I think you can be in public streets,

but I don't think you can just go over someone's house.

Or if you can, maybe they have the right to shoot you down.

- Oh, I don't know.

- We'll start selling equipment to shoot down drones.

- This is why we need comments.

This is why we need the listeners on the live stream.

- You can't fly near airports either.

- All right, then you skip over those.

- There's no flight zones.

- Save us some money.

Just save our investors some money.

- I like that, though.

You increase the bounty for areas

that people aren't likely to go.

So out in the middle of the desert,

no one wants to go there,

but it's gonna be 10 times the prices

just flying down New York City or something.

- Dude.

- When Waze first started,

every map on the whole map had little dots,

and then your character was Pac-Man-ing them up

to get you to drive over and map,

like, where are these roads exactly?

And a lot of the roads were either missing or wrong,

but then when you went around,

you were correcting the map for everyone else.

It was really cool.

- That's awesome.

- And incentivized you to, like, gamify, you know?

Same idea.

- Yeah, I think we actually talked about this

on the OpenStreetMaps thing that you had on the last one.

- Maybe.

- Just setting coordinates,

and people could set bounties, right?

And then that, you know, I put,

if you capture this square mile,

I'll throw $10 in, and now it becomes, like,

an ever-growing pot, and certain areas are, like,

if you map it, we got 100 contributors

that would pay X amount of dollars

to get this map on the map,

and so we'd facilitate and take fees off of that, right?

So, like, just the accuracy of satellite data is just,

(grunts)

just too, yeah.

- Totally.

Russell, I have come so close in the last 12 months

to buying a drone, and each time I talk myself out of it,

because I know it would, like you said,

it would sit in a corner,

but if I could scratch the itch

by renting one a couple of times,

I would be a customer, absolutely.

- See, we could also crowdsource a drone, Leo.

All four of us here could just be part owners of a drone,

right, like?

- Hmm.

- Always spitballing, A-B-S.

(laughs)

- A-B-C, always spitballing.

(laughs)

(upbeat music)

- Kyle, love to hear your idea.

- Yeah, all right, so in my spare time here,

I like to mess around with smart home equipment,

so I've probably got a dozen or so different sensors

floating around the house of one form or another,

taking temperature, checking to make sure

my sink's not leaking, so on and so forth.

Leo, you're not in your head, you're a smart home guy too.

- Oh yeah.

- Yeah, so you can probably relate to this then.

My dozen or so sensors have a dozen or so

different types of batteries that they all take.

So, and you know, I've got double A's, triple A's,

seven different types of coin cells,

all sitting in my house,

and all have to get changed every six months, a year,

whatever it is that they are,

and some of these are in hard to reach places too,

you know, up in an attic, down in a crawl space,

places you really don't wanna go all that often,

that's why you've got a sensor there

to tell you if something goes wrong.

So, that's a big problem.

One of the ways that companies are starting

to account for this is they're really getting into

like alternative energy and energy harvesting, right?

So if you can take solar power

and power all these smart home sensors, well, that's great.

Now you don't ever have to change the batteries.

One big thing that they're really starting it into

is RF harvesting.

So it's using the wifi signals or Bluetooth in your house.

There's just all this excess energy

that's bouncing around your house all the time

that you're not doing anything with,

but these sensors can pick it up and just sit there churning,

picking up this power, absorbing it, absorbing,

and then once every 15 minutes or half an hour,

they've got enough information or enough power now

to turn on, take a temperature, spit it out over wifi,

and go back to sleep.

And then they just sit there for another 15, 20 minutes

picking up more energy.

So as those start to come out,

people are gonna start purchasing those

'cause you never have to change batteries in those again.

So that's just great.

The challenge is that's gonna create

a whole ton of electronic waste

because people are just gonna go scrap these other pieces

that they never wanna change batteries again,

so why would they?

Plus you got all these kids toys too, right?

Lots of other things to take battery.

So my idea is to use that same energy harvesting concept,

but package that into the same form factor

as a typical battery. - Oh man.

- And then now you've got these batteries

that never go bad.

It's the last battery you ever buy.

So you take six of these energy harvesting

triple A size batteries,

you slop them into your kid's RC car,

and you don't have to worry about changing the batteries

if they forget to turn it off, right?

You can just drive this thing around.

So now you've got this interim solution

for smart home stuff,

but you can also use this

for any other battery application you need.

- I have always been fascinated by RF harvesting.

Is it fringe science?

Is it, can you actually get enough to power a wifi radio

or like matter or something low power?

- I mean, yeah, with patience, right?

It all comes to how much data you need to send

and how long you're willing to wait

for that message to go across.

But absolutely, I don't know,

it's probably like a one watt.

- That's enough, yeah.

- Would be my guess for a typical broadcast

of a typical wireless router.

There you go, my router.

Probably 500 watts.

I don't know what it is, but yeah.

- If our intro to engineering class,

it blew my mind when the professor took

just like a wire, hooked it up to a headphone

and the wire was coiled as an inductor to the point

that there was nothing powering the system.

It was just a breadboard,

but you could still put that headphone up to your ear

and pick up the local FM radio or AM radio on there.

And it was just feeding energy from the air

enough to power it so that you could actually hear something

that blew my mind that there's so much energy

just floating around all the time.

- Tin foil. - There's stories of Brinkley.

There was this huckster who lived, I think,

in Texas or somewhere out South who was broadcasting

like snake oil commercials over the radio.

And he had this pirate radio station

that was way over the legal limits in the USA.

So he moved right over to Mexico

and he had this like 1000 watt transmitter,

something insane that was way, way more

than it should have been.

And people talked about in nearby towns,

their bed springs would play the radio.

(laughing)

- Oh my God.

They could hear it in like pots and pans and stuff.

- So if I got a big, like, let's say,

I'm thinking of this as like an antenna.

Like if I got a bigger antenna,

like would it produce more power?

Is that a thing?

Like if I bought a giant cover for the ceiling of my office,

could I power or charge more with a bigger net, right?

- Yeah, I don't think it has to do

with the size of the antenna so much

as it has to do with the power supply

that's powering the antenna.

So I think you need like a 500 milliwatt antenna

to actually get your, I don't know, FM radio.

I'm throwing numbers out here.

But if you have like a one watt,

now suddenly you can go 17 times the distance.

- Ah, okay, okay, that makes sense.

'Cause I was about to go big with that.

(laughing)

That was real, I was like, whoa.

- He was about to invent wireless extension cords.

(laughing)

- I just want a way to never have to change the battery

in my fricking fire alarm ever again.

That's--

- Oh, your smoke detector.

I bought new smoke detectors recently

and they had a sealed in lithium ion battery.

And it made me angry that I went my whole life

without having that.

'Cause yeah, it just needs to stay charged for 10 years

and then they're not good anymore anyway.

- Right. - Yeah, yeah.

But I know what you mean.

- There's a lot of things like that too.

- Clocks, right?

Like changing a clock battery is like the worst.

- I know, I'm thinking remote controls right now.

Like every remote or Roku or whatever,

they would just have a self-charging battery.

The power consumption on them is so minimal

and so sporadic.

It would always be fully charged

if it could just pick up AM whatever station on there

and charge itself up.

- Yeah, Xbox controller.

- Xbox controller, that's a great one.

- You could charge that thing.

- Especially when it like sits around all,

like for a whole day.

- Right. - It doesn't do anything.

Right?

- 99% of the time, it's just chilling there

until you press a button on it or something.

- Totally.

And smart home is the perfect application for this.

You're totally right.

With new protocols like matter and stuff,

a lot of them are really low power.

- Yeah, 'cause then you can toss sensors

like literally into the wall

and you can drywall over top.

- Oh man. - And just forget about it.

- You don't have to worry about it, right?

- Your whole wall.

- You were telling me that you put a accelerometer

on your washing machine and had it text you if,

hey, the laundry, it stopped jiggling

so the laundry's done and let you know.

And I thought that was the most brilliant thing

I've ever heard.

- Hold on, I'm an Amazon Zigbee vibration sensor.

Thank you very much, Kyle.

- Can we, wait, Kyle, I think you're saying like,

can I put a, like paint over, replace drywall, right?

I just put a giant sticker on the wall

and now I could put devices all over the wall.

- Wallpapers back, baby.

- Yeah, like could you just like have a,

I mean, this would be a cool, or like a toy.

Let's say you make this into a kid's toy, right?

Or something, you just have like a board

and all of a sudden, whatever you put on the board

is receiving power from like this wireless mats or whatever.

And now you're just like creating it,

like it just is magic.

It looks like magic, it acts like magic.

- Yeah, you could absolutely do that.

Actually, I saw a place, I was at CES back in 2021

and they had a really cool place there

that had a, like a transmitter box

up in a corner of their room.

And it was just blasting probably five Watts of power.

I don't know, it wasn't a ton,

but it was enough to wirelessly charge

every single different thing in their demonstration area.

So they had like three or four different phones

that had this little plug hooked in there

that were receiving power from this.

And now all of a sudden,

your phone just gets trickle charged all the time.

Your tablets get trickle charged,

your TV can be powered through this little box

that sits up in the corner.

Now you're gonna get on, I'm sure all sorts of like

health concerns around.

- I was just thinking that.

- How much power am I gonna,

am I X-raying myself every day?

- Irradiating my body overnight.

- So that's why I like your original idea,

just 'cause it's--

- It's already there.

- Hey, we're using existing, you know,

radio stations or existing 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi

to trickle charge everything we possibly can.

- Can I ask a naive question?

If I had a bunch of these all over my house,

would my Wi-Fi signal be down?

Like would I have less RF power

penetrated through the walls and stuff?

'Cause I'm taking that energy and using it.

- I don't actually know.

I don't think so though.

- Huh, yeah, me either.

- I mean, presumably, I mean, yeah,

'cause the power does like bounce off of all these things.

And so when it, now something is absorbing it,

it will pick up some of that power.

So maybe, but I don't know how many devices

you'd have to do to like really make that affect you really.

- This is free energy in a way, right?

'Cause other people already paying for it

are like radio stations and all that stuff.

So like--

- Yeah, or you're paying for it, right?

By broadcasting your Wi-Fi signal out too.

So in a way it's, right,

it just seems like if I put a hundred batteries

in my basement or like on my roof, right?

Could I just like trickle charge for as a generator?

Like, all right, my power goes out once every two years.

But when it does, I have been trickle charging

for the last, I've been trickle charging.

- From the local radio station.

I feel like solar is probably way more worth your time

than the local radio station.

- I guess so, Leo.

I guess that makes sense, right?

- Yeah.

(laughing)

Not to know about you, but.

- Yeah, why would I even buy a device then?

I guess I could just buy a generator, right?

Yeah.

- I wanna jump back to the CES thing you were saying, Kyle.

Like were these like actual plugs

that I put into devices to power them?

'Cause what you described, I'm picturing like,

so an Android or iPhone phone, something with that,

I guess it's all USB-C now,

a USB-C device that always is trickle charging,

that you have always plugged into the bottom of your phone.

So your phone is always slowly trickle charging

no matter where you go.

- Yeah, that's basically the idea.

- Based on local Wi-Fi or radio.

- Yeah, so basically it's like,

yeah, it plugs in USB-C to your phone.

And then it's just like this little circuit board

that probably sticks to the back of the phone,

it would be my guess, or maybe it's the case.

And then it just absorbs all that energy

and transmits it into your phone as it needs it.

- It's crazy that there's enough wattage

to actually make that useful.

- That's awesome.

- Yeah, I don't, again, don't know what sort of wattage

they were pumping out of that thing, but.

- This needs to exist.

This needs to exist.

- There goes your potential sponsorship from Duracell.

Never gonna see a penny from them.

- We'll go with a dollar store battery.

That's more our speed.

- That's who's gonna sponsor.

- Well, thank you Duracell for listening.

And thank you for listening, listener.

We hope you enjoyed yourself this evening.

And thank you, Kyle, for being here.

This was lovely.

- Yeah. - Thanks, had a great time.

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