(upbeat music)
- I'm Scott.
- I'm Russell.
- And I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Spitball
where three prototype profits,
that's us, and a guest to empty our heads
of our 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, I believe you brought our guest this week.
Is that right?
- I do.
I have brought Robbie.
Robbie and I work together.
We're at the same engineering company.
Robbie's a project manager
on the advanced product development team.
He's been the fearless leader
on many difficult engineering endeavors
and has probably brought more projects
from Napkin Sketch Life than anyone I know.
- Wonderful.
- Awesome.
Thanks guys for having me.
I appreciate it.
- This is gonna be a good time.
- Thanks for coming.
- I'm looking forward to it.
I think we're gonna be doing another guest pitch
like we have in the past.
I know this is many months after the series has ended,
but I'm still a little bit bitter that Josh Smalley,
well, can we do spoilers for Great British Breakoff?
Has it been long enough?
I don't know.
It's been about a year, like eight, nine months.
- Morning, spoilers, Great British Breakoff.
- Spoilers for season 14 or series 14
if you're a true fan of British weird words for things.
Josh Smalley, he was the runner up this year.
I mean, I think he should have won,
but he's a chemist and he is way smarter than all of us.
So we're gonna have to bring up
our intelligence level a bit.
- Hi, Scott, Russell and Leo.
Obviously coming from a scientific background,
I think one that I've thought about would be pretty cool
would be having like tailored medicines,
even on an app format,
so you'd have all of your data on your DNA
or taken from a blood sample, for example,
and then all of your sequence, your DNA sequence,
your allergens, your immunity,
histories of diseases and things that you've had
and they know everything about you,
that's all gonna be stored
so that if you were to have any illness
or anything or any disease coming in the future,
that they'd be able to have a tailored treatment,
drug, antibiotic that will be specific to you
or they would know how to make one to be tailored to you.
So that's one thing I could foresee happening
as a pretty cool tech thing, wouldn't it?
I think that's what my suggestion would be.
So yeah, thanks for the question and enjoy discussing it.
- So thanks, Josh.
You're way too smart for all of us.
- Whoa.
- You can imagine a world--
- Anything with a British accent is smart.
(laughing)
- So true.
- I think I got smarter just listening to him.
(laughing)
- You can imagine a world where you take your 23andMe
type kit, you ship it off and a couple of weeks later,
you get your pills in the mail that make you no longer
make cilantro taste like soap
because they've got CRISPR in them
and they just sort of edit you up.
I already don't trust 23andMe and I haven't done those.
So that's a whole new level.
- Now I want them to mail me pills
to modify my genetic code.
- It's a crazy idea.
- The part that I think he's onto it with is,
you know, when you think about like,
what is our generation's version
of crazy historic medical procedures,
like lobotomies and things like that.
When you tell your grandkids that we used to donate blood
to each other or that we used to donate organs,
they're gonna be like, what are you talking about, dude?
- Right.
- And he's kind of onto it.
He's like, there's a specific medicine
that you're gonna get that will fight.
- Did you know when you get a kidney donated,
you just get the third kidney?
They don't replace one?
- I just learned that.
- Isn't that crazy?
- I never knew.
They just shove another kidney up in there.
- I didn't know that.
- They just have a third kidney in their back.
- Yeah, having the-
- Kind of makes sense.
- Yeah, if we can, like you said,
maybe target drugs specifically for you.
Seems like maybe we could have less of that.
Exactly.
- This was a movie, wasn't it?
Gattaca.
- Was this Gattaca?
- No.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, I mean, a little bit.
A little bit.
- What happens in Gattaca?
I don't know, I haven't seen Gattaca.
- It's like a dystopian future eugenics world
where you can pick out all the traits that you want
in a baby genetically ahead of time.
- Designer babies.
- Designer babies all the way through.
- CRISPR.
What happens to the, can you spoil Gattaca for our audience?
- Oh, I don't remember.
This is 20 years ago.
- He goes to space.
That's the spoiler.
- A guy, a normal human.
- We're spoiling Rayburn's bake-off in Gattaca.
- 1997.
- The cornerstones of modern culture.
- Yeah, he goes to space.
- Interesting.
- That's the spoiler?
- Yeah, I feel like the CRISPR designer babies
like discussion has been really ramping up
in the last few years,
and I'm sure we wouldn't have a ton of new ground to tread
with saying, "Oh, what if everyone else
was making their babies smart in utero?"
Then you feel pressure to do it too,
'cause you don't want your kid to be the one left out.
Yeah, true, but also, I don't know,
what if you had a DNA dating app
where you mail in your thing,
and then they say, "Wow, you two are very compatible
over on the other sides of the state
that you live in," or something?
- Your DNA is compatible?
- I don't know. - Dang.
- Most people's DNA is compatible,
if you know what I mean, right?
- How closely related to you are you
to this other person, right?
It's more of, avoid the second cousin thing.
- It's anti-ancestry.com.
- That's right.
- Is there a sweet spot, though,
where it's like fourth and fifth cousins
is optimal for everything?
- You go, oh yeah, you go into the app,
and you say, "I pretty much want my kids
to have these traits," and then they match you up
with potential partners based off that.
- Whoa, I mean, I feel like if there was other crazy people
that were on that app, too,
that would be exactly what they're looking for.
It's like, optimize, I'm not here for money or love,
I'm here for optimal children.
That's not a love corner, that's a--
- Practicality.
- Your pay scale goes according to the level
of partner that you have for you.
- There you go. - Oh, there we go.
Robbie, you're good at this.
- That's dystopian.
- You've been thinking about this a little bit too much.
- You guys, yeah, oh, goodness.
- How many kids do you have?
No.
- Yeah, I have three kids.
That's probably the most unique perspective
I bring to the show tonight, is I have three children.
- No, I wonder if something, I don't know
if this is part of it, but let's say my vision, right?
Could I take a pill, could that help me cure my vision?
Laser eye surgery, sure, but maybe I just pop a pill
with some DNA, M CRISPR.
- Editing.
- My gut is a lot of it is about predictive medicine
versus what he's talking about,
which is specific medicine for you,
but it's being able to predict things
that people run into too late.
You guys hear about the lady that could smell dementia
or Parkinson's, that's right.
She could smell Parkinson's a year
before people were diagnosed.
It's gonna be about predictive medicine, I think,
and helping stop things before they happen.
- I would take a pill that would give me that superpower.
- Does it have to be pills?
Could he mail you a biscuit that he makes?
- You would take a pill to help you smell Parkinson's?
- Yeah.
- I could think of a lot of other pills I'd take
before I'd take that one.
- True.
- Thank you, whoever, what was his name?
(laughing)
Wow, genuine, thank you very much, Josh.
- Good thing we edited this.
- Josh Smalley, do you want me to say Josh Smalley?
There you go, you can say it.
- Thank you, Josh Smalley, eh?
Sorry.
Okay, we got it.
- So natural.
- Do a real one.
- Thank you, Josh, for sending that in.
It was really informative.
I can't, I can't.
- That was great.
- We'll be in season 15.
- Yeah, fix it in post, make Leo fix it.
- That's right, yeah, AI, just AI it.
- Just AI.
- His name is Leo, Russell.
- No, sorry.
- Al, our editor.
- Leo, let's hear your best idea ever, let's go.
- Robbie, we don't know each other super well,
but I've been told you are hardware engineer
first and foremost, so your job today
is to tell me why this can't exist.
So, soldering iron goes from zero degrees,
not zero degrees, room temperature
to hundreds and hundreds of degrees Celsius
pretty dang fast.
I would love to have a switch on my dashboard
to make my windshield wipers get several hundred degrees
Celsius right away so that I could ice scrape
in a couple of seconds.
Why is that not a thing that I can already do?
Other than, you know, the lawsuits and the danger
and the--
- The fire hazards.
- The bird that you solder and fry, you know,
because it landed on your windshield.
Isn't there like, why don't windshield wipers have heaters?
We live in the Midwest here where we get ice scraped on
and you either have to scrape it by hand
with a piece of plastic, which sucks,
or you spray it with de-icer and you sit
as you drag plastic and rubber across it
as it slowly chips away with your like car defroster on high.
Why can't my windshield wipers do this?
They are little scrapers.
- I actually don't hate that as an idea at the outset.
I mean, rubber is your first,
like that's standing in your way, right?
You wanna be gentle with your glass
and don't wanna scratch your glass.
And so you're replacing that rubber with something.
But I had a couple of times in college
where like I let my wipers get stuck
to the windshield with ice and then they snap off
and then you gotta stop at Panera Bread
and wrap a cardboard coffee thing
around the end of the melts.
- This is a very common thing.
- It's all been there.
- Have you guys been there?
Have you guys been there?
So I'm a buyer before I'm a seller on this idea.
I'm not gonna lie to you though.
I mean, there are some, you know,
when you talk about the electrical connection
and the atmosphere and environmental.
- Just throw another battery in the car, it'll be fine.
- Yeah, exactly, yeah.
In your passenger seat.
- Just for your--
- There are lots of ways to make things hot quickly
with electricity, but I don't know what things
you can do that moderately.
So like we don't need to get to hundreds
and hundreds of degrees Celsius,
obviously to just melt water.
What would it take to melt ice, right?
- Scott, you know this, the bag sealer,
the plastic bag sealers, okay.
- Oh yeah. - That's not a bad idea.
- How do those work?
- It's just a metal wire, I think,
that runs electricity through it.
And you can set the gauge, right?
It's like, it's really--
- Jank. - Like zero to one.
It's like janky.
But it's a long metal sponge thing that like kind of,
yeah, you press it down, it seals a bag and you lift it up.
They have this for vacuum sealers and all that other stuff.
Throw that in the end of the windshield,
plug it in your car battery.
- Yeah, they look like the paper cutter
that was in the back of the classroom
that you could behead a cow with.
And somehow they just left open
for all the kindergartners to play with.
- Now we just need to run electricity through it.
(laughing)
- I mean-- - Heat it up.
- And here's the thing, do you really need it?
You need the wiper to sit in the right spot.
And realistically, you need to like warm up
a three to four inch radius hole for you to see through.
If we're all honest.
If you haven't had your ice scraper
and you use the credit card in your wallet,
you don't do the whole windshield.
You do enough to see out of to start the driving process.
And I feel like we could accomplish that 100%.
- Very quickly.
And we already have the prototype, Scott.
It's right in your hands.
We just gotta figure out how to plug it
into your car battery, glue it to a windshield.
- It's crazy to me that we have
the rear windshield defroster
with the lines that are going through the glass
is so efficient and it works so well.
And then in the front, we just like blast it with cold air
that very slowly warms up.
- It's been a hope.
It seems so inefficient.
- For some reason, you're not willing
to sacrifice the black lines, right?
You remember Talladega Nights?
This is very distracting, but I do love Fig Newton.
- I personally probably would.
- You guys remember that?
(laughing)
- Yes.
I personally would take the lines on the front
if it was an option,
but I get that there's probably a hundred laws
and codes and regulations why that's not cool.
- Just make the lines clear, come on.
- If we can't heat the glass, heat a stick
and drag it along.
What if it's even just a separate thing
from the windshield wiper that is a similar motion?
- What if you could plug it in from the inside
and then you just like press it against the windshield
in the right spot?
- Transfer the heat through the glass.
- Yeah.
There's like a perfect line just sort of steaming off
from the outside.
I like that.
How hot can you get before the glass starts
to melt a little bit?
- Pretty high.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, yeah, you'd be good.
- What if you got like,
what are those electromagnetic stoves?
- Induction stoves.
- Induction?
Does water get heated by induction?
Could you just throw an induction,
like press it against the glass and just be like,
send it, heat this water up.
- There are videos of people throwing boiling water
on their icy car and it just shatters the glass windshield.
So there is like a rapid temperature change problem.
- Too fast, too fast is a bad thing.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Man, they should fix windshields then.
That's not my problem.
That's a, I sell the product that fixes the problem,
the ice.
- I wonder if you could like heat your de-icer though,
liquid, like just make it scalding hot
and then just spray boiling anti-freeze
all across your windshield.
- You just unlocked a core memory for me.
My dad had a car that had that.
It was a heated reservoir,
a small little bit that would do that.
And after a year there was a recall
and he took it in to get the recall fixed
and they disabled it permanently.
- Yeah, because that's a crazy idea.
Those parts are all plastic.
My thought was, my thought was you run
what you're talking about.
You run it through the A pillar
that is like the metal part
that goes on the side of your windshield, that's metal.
And so you do have some leeway there
to run some hot water or hot material if you want to.
That's like the edge of your windshield,
but it gives you some leeway to, again,
to be able to like look in the right way,
in the right area and drive.
- I would love to watch dribbling, boiling hot de-icer
go through ice.
That would be just art every morning.
- If you do it cool enough,
people are gonna sit and watch it anyways, right?
And then some idiots laying on the windshield
in their high school parking lot and saying,
"Hit it, hit it, hit it."
And then the lawsuit comes.
(laughing)
- Outside of a Panera.
- Okay, this is a throwback.
What if we did like salt, just like a little salt?
Or chemical, is there like chemical-
- I think that's some corrosion issues, yeah.
- That you could throw at it?
- Anti-freeze?
- That's not anti-freeze.
Anti-freeze doesn't work, I think, that well, right?
Like something that melts fast.
- It's called anti-freeze.
It makes the ice stop being so frozen.
- Oh, I thought it's like-
- No, you're probably right.
- Anti-freeze prevents the freeze versus melting, right?
I guess I'm wondering.
Like, I like your heated water idea, Leo.
I wonder if you could like really salty water.
Very, you know, boom.
- You do have rust issues there.
- What if you could, this is the crazy idea.
I'm left field now,
but what if you could create like a whole,
like a pool that you fill up with hot water.
You like build a barrier that you fill up with hot water
and then you let that quickly melt the ice
and then you just dump all the water out over your car.
So it's not so much about applying hot water to your car,
but it's about creating like a little bathtub
that melts the ice really quickly
and then you get rid of all the water.
- Wait, like your entire car is enclosed
or just around the windshield?
- No, like you-
- Just dunk underwater?
- Like what if you could just bring,
like what if you could bring up,
you could bring up some walls around your windshield
that make like a little pocket of hot water
and then you just fill that with water
and once the ice is gone and you release it all.
- Like those old timey hot water bags
that you put at the foot of the bed, but.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got it.
- Put on the windshield, that's fun.
- The walls can't come up 'cause there's so much ice.
- That's true, yeah, ice always gets in the way.
- If cars can have airbags,
they can have hot water bags built in.
You just press the button and it,
you know, sprays all over it.
- That's great.
- Ooh, okay.
(laughing)
I don't know why I got, I'm just thinking.
- This is called Spitball.
- Could you shake, could you vibrate your windshield
so rapidly that would make all the ice fall off
without it like-
- Like break apart in chunks.
- Super sonic.
- Just place some AC/DC into the windshield
and just find the right frequency.
- What if Northern cars have a Northern like layer
on their windshield and you can just hit, I'm over ice,
you hit a button on your dash
and the top layer of your windshield just like,
like peels off and you're like,
hey, I've got another layer below this.
- You buy disposable.
- Like a screen protector.
- You buy 20 disposable windshield layers.
- One pack, get through the winter.
- And you just have an Ontario screen protector
on your windshield.
- That's fun, I like that a lot.
- I think that would, I would buy a 10 pack,
stick it on my windshield in the beginning of winter
and just whatever, right?
- Or even, you know, the ice storm is overnight tonight,
so I'll just do it.
- Yeah.
- Or you buy a garage, but we're all in the city here.
(laughing)
- Can't afford garages.
- That's a whole building.
(laughing)
- Wow.
- Someday I hope I have a garage instead of a podcast.
- A garage.
(laughing)
The modern day solution.
No, this doesn't solve for the parking lot,
the car, the, you're at work, you know?
Like, I guess I'm wondering if I could like crack open
like a can of salt water.
I just like have 10 in my car, crack it open.
- Fire extinguisher, just.
- Oh, that's not a bad idea.
- Sure, something like that, you know?
- The high pressure one time use.
- Little gasoline, I guess.
- A little, you think.
- And then you have your recurring revenue
because they're disposable.
So you've got your under pressure salt water canister
that you crack open one time use,
recycle the aluminum cans.
- There are absolutely days that I would go out there
and I'm in a hurry and I have to de-ice the whole car.
And if I could just crack something,
even if it costs me to just make it a fraction of the work,
I would absolutely use that.
- Well, you've seen those things
that they use to de-ice planes, right?
They got those giant blasters that they're raising
and lowering and shooting all over them.
I want one of those really, yeah.
- What about like hand warmers?
Like what is the chemical in there?
- The reusable ones?
- Could I just like crack it open
and then dump it all over the car and then just,
all right, in three minutes I'll be whatever,
I'm just driving.
- There's the ones that are like the one time use
like sand silicate stuff.
And then there's ones that are crystal
that you like flip a coin, you break a coin in there
and you can reuse them.
- It's so true though.
It's like the three times you need it in the winter.
It's like the time when you're under the gun
from a timing perspective
and there's a bunch of ice in your windshield.
- Yep.
- I'd pay for that.
- I'm gonna put, I'm gonna buy, let's try this out Leo.
We're gonna buy some heating pads.
- I love it.
- A heated blanket.
iPad screen protectors.
- You get like a pack of 30 for like $10,
stick them on the windshield and just.
- Big old layer.
- Needs a pull tab at the end.
- Yes, every one, right?
- Yeah.
- What is the name of your idea, Leo?
What did we come up with?
- Well, it started with soldering iron windshield wipers
and ended with a lot of different not that ideas.
So I guess the aircraft de-icer, but home edition.
That's what I really want.
I want a little ride on aircraft de-icer
that I'm just spraying my car with,
like a little lawnmower thing.
(upbeat music)
All right, Scott, what do you got for us this week?
- All right, so current company I'm working at right now
has a program where they take engineers in the program
and they spread them all over the company.
They call it the RISE program
where it's essentially a version of cross training
where you take these engineers
and for the first six months,
you're gonna be working on the manufacturing line.
And then the next six months,
you're gonna be working on logistics.
And the next six months after that,
you're gonna be in the R&D department.
And they just keep moving these people around
to give them like this full breadth of knowledge
of the inner workings of the company.
And there's all these stats and things with it
about how they make just such good employees afterwards
and they really enjoy the program.
And it's just all around a good thing.
And I'm wondering, is it possible to create a program
like this for getting introed into real world jobs, I guess.
So like, instead of going to college,
you come right out of high school
and you go in this multi-industry job rotation program
that's gonna help you test out
all these different various career paths
so that you can kind of settle
into that long-term role eventually.
And I keep throwing this idea out in my mind.
There's a lot of little hurdles that you gotta get through.
But I feel like if I had an opportunity right out of school
to work as like in a restaurant
or and then work for six months
and then work as like a banker
for the next six months after that,
I would just have a much better perspective of the world
and whether the grass is greener or not in other places.
And so I'm thinking,
can we make some kind of umbrella company
that partners with a bunch of different industries?
You get paid a flat salary throughout the program.
And by the end of it,
you come out with a lot more real world experience.
And then you could add other things.
- Local businesses get interns.
- Yeah, exactly.
It could be through interns.
It could be, honestly,
interns would be a great thing for that.
- Wow.
Dude, that's really interesting, Scott.
I feel like a lot of post grads from high school too
would love to figure out that,
not like take a full gap year or two doing this.
They have, they live with their parents still probably.
They're not gonna invest in a bunch of credits
that they don't wanna use.
They'd go into college knowing what they want to do.
Like that would be huge.
- And you could tailor it to,
I wanna hit these eight rotations over the next year
or two years or something
that you think could be interesting.
And maybe if--
- My thought is before college
is when it makes the most sense.
It's like you think about like a red shirt athlete
in college as the person who takes a year off
and really like plays on the team but learns how to play.
And it's the same kind of thing here
where it's like I always tell people
I went into engineering
because I was good at math and science in high school.
And I figured, hey,
this seemed like an interesting thing to start.
And if I decide to do something different
along the way, I'll do it.
And I never really found an interesting enough a reason
not to do engineering.
But it was like I didn't opt out
when if you had a program like what you're describing,
I would have been able to opt in
to something more intriguing.
- Dang, you should, I mean, you throw this on in colleges,
like their first, your first year,
it's a five-year program, let's say,
or maybe it could be a four-year program
'cause you're saving all your,
you don't need to figure out your first year anymore,
which is just like figuring out life.
You just try things out.
Part of the college program,
it's what makes them different.
I think that would be awesome.
- The big thing with this program
and the company was all about,
they really vet the people ahead of time
and they make sure that they're go-getters
and willing to put in the work
and they're excited about new possibilities going through.
- My high school in the Genesee County
on the other side of the state
had an option what they called the Skills Center
where you could choose instead of,
I think it was one or two credits
in the middle of every other day,
you would go to another place,
like a 20, 25-minute drive away
where other area schools also sent some students
and it was like an on-the-job,
interni-apprenticeship type thing.
They had a few different programs
like car mechanic and cosmetology and a few other things.
Instead of taking classes, you just kinda--
- Mechanics is a good one.
- Yeah, it was a half-step above like woodshop
where you were actually doing something
a little more career-oriented.
It seems like even high schoolers
would benefit from what you're talking about
where you can opt in where instead of taking eight classes
or six classes, you take five or one or two less
and then every day, every other day, you go and do this.
You're just at the bank for three days a week
for a couple hours.
That's a great way to like,
yeah, it's sort of like the concept
of the 100-level classes at college
where you sort of, I'm gonna take intro to psychology
to see if I like the idea of psychology majors.
Oh, that wasn't for me at all.
I'm gonna take survey of engineering
to see if that's for me but like on the job.
That's super cool.
- But at college, it costs you thousands of dollars, right?
Where it's like if you can do it at a company
and still add value to the company,
you get paid a little bit for it, right?
So it's like, I don't know, if I run a bank
and I have somebody that's at least willing
to learn about banking,
even if they're changing light bulbs
where they're around the bankers,
they still get a chance to learn
and they're doing value-add work
and so it creates that win-win relationship.
- You could also time it for a different industry
seasonally like this restaurant happens to have,
gets crazy packed in the summertime
so we're gonna have our program rotation
during the summer or something.
So we have that extra staff.
- This seems like a feature that a temping agency
could just like tack on to what they already do.
- Oh yeah.
- Instead of me just sticking you in this place
for a five-year contract doing coding or whatever,
accounting, you are like rotated around.
They already have the connections,
they've got the supply of people to send around, win-win.
- Yeah.
- The companies are kind of knowing
they're getting someone short-term
so they plan a variety of things
as part of like the agreement with the agency.
- Yeah, I think the value-add though,
like would you want an engineering intern
that you have trying to doing work for you
every four weeks come in and you teach them everything
and then by the time they're ready to do something like--
- Yeah, the training aspect on that is
you don't wanna have to retrain every single time.
- But if the only goal is to get them to know
what's happening at the business,
it's like when I applied for my internship,
the company told me,
one of the questions I had in my interview was,
"Hey, would you be willing to change the light bulbs
"if you came here as an intern?"
And I was like, "Yeah, as long as I get to hang out
"next to the engineers and learn what they're doing
"in engineering, for sure."
And it's a little bit of that, right?
Where it's like, I'll take out the garbage,
as long as I get to hear what the guy is talking about
that does the thing,
then I'll hang out there for a while,
especially if you give me, whatever,
15 bucks an hour or whatever the case may be.
- It is so hard to get the day in the life
like summary of what some of these career paths are.
- When I was in high school, it was gonna be engineering
or the other thing my skills told me I would be good at
was sports statistician.
And I was like, "Well, I love sports."
I would totally be down to be a sports statistician
and then come to find out that the world of computers,
we're gonna take over sports stats
and that would have been a terrible decision by me.
- Yeah, or the jobs like five,
there's like 10 or 30 gurus and statisticians
that beat the computers or make the algorithms, right?
You gotta be one of those guys.
- Yeah, yeah.
Wasn't gonna be that guy.
- Sounds like you're well-poised to be the programmer
of the statistician software.
You are the engineer that builds the next great algorithm.
- Scott, this is a really interesting, cool,
did you come up with this yourself?
- This is where I'm currently contracted out to right now.
They have this internally
and I just am watching these young engineers
go through this program and how happy they are
and excited to go to the next rotation
and what do I get this time?
But they still have a comfortable living.
They're still on salary through the whole time.
So there's no stress about job changes.
It's just learning and they love it
'cause they're just there to learn.
- Whoa.
- I wanna bring that into real life though.
Take away all the scariness of job changing
so you can actually experience that.
- Dude, this is great.
Like we should make this, Scott.
Or somebody needs to build this one.
Like if somebody already has the resources,
the capabilities, like this is just an add-on
to what they already do.
I think the market could be flooded for this
'cause you have your temp agencies,
you have your colleges, you have your high schools.
- Here's the deal.
Would colleges pay for this?
If you went through this program
between high school and college,
let's say there was a semester
where you go through this program,
it's like would colleges be willing to offer some payback
for you putting people through this program
and validating the fact
that they're gonna be a good college student?
- Great idea.
- It's almost like a study abroad program,
but just here, yeah.
Like an added on service.
- There's tons of grants that we use at our company too
for training and stuff that like the state of Michigan
will pay for you to take X classes and whatnot.
I'm sure that there's ways that you could finagle language
so the government could pay for chunks of this.
- Yeah, I think the Career Development Center
or whatever, the one responsible
for putting jobs in front of you, right?
I feel like that's part of the value add for colleges.
I think there might be like,
the more people that get into the front door,
when they leave a college, they're more likely to,
maybe there's some sign-on bonuses or something for that.
- These companies could recruit
right out of the program too.
Like, hey, you're good at this.
I think you'll be great.
I'll pay you this much salary.
Just ditch this program and come work for me right now.
It's like a way to interview people live
without any obligation.
- It's the internship to employee pipeline,
but you get the rotating buffet
like you're at a sushi restaurant
with the conveyor belts of employees coming by.
- I don't wanna get too high level,
but it's like it speaks to where the world's moving to,
where it's like you used to need the four-year degree
to get to the finish line,
but there's so many ways to gain knowledge nowadays
where if you had a program like this
and a company that's willing to help you
kind of along the way,
you're 90% of the way there
and knowing what you need to know.
- Yeah, and you have the relationships to talk to
as you're going through college.
I feel like the college academia bubbles bursting soon.
- Shrinking.
- Shrinking, yeah.
Like remote schooling is becoming more popular.
- Trade schools.
- Yeah, trade school.
This'll be interesting.
You may launch it and by the time you launch it,
just the college, the whole landscape changes.
- Disrupt the industry, guys.
Disrupt higher education, come on.
- Hey, Billy, do you wanna study abroad in Italy
or do you wanna work in the back of a restaurant
for the next 30 years?
- That's a pitch.
(laughing)
(upbeat music)
- All right, Russell, what do you got this week?
- All right, so a little about me.
I have a 3D printer
and it goes unused a significant amount of time, we'll say.
- So say we all.
- And it just, I mean, I feel like if you own a 3D printer,
you kinda have this like love it
and you use it all the time
and you pause and you kinda let it sit
and you're like, what do I print?
I don't know, the world's my oyster,
but I have no shells to oyster hooks.
Okay, that's not a,
world is my oyster,
but I just don't know what crackers to put on it.
(laughing)
Anyways, that's not the analogy I'm looking for.
Yeah, that's what they say.
Yeah, it's the 3D printer community.
- It's 3D printer lingo.
- I'm sure.
Yeah, everybody that is listening to this podcast
knows about the 3D printer community.
So basically they're really popular.
These new ones are really good
and really easy to work with.
And I guess now you have hundreds, maybe thousands,
maybe dozens of us out there that have 3D printers
or hundreds of thousands of us
that just let it sit, it sits around.
And I would love to, let's say,
be a part of a network that allowed me to use my 3D printer
for things that would contribute to something,
whether that's manufacturing products
for a nonprofit, a for-profit or whatever.
And there's some give and take sort of scenario for this.
- Oh, I see where you're going.
- If I dial in my printer
and maybe I work with this company and set the profile,
like there's a lot of ways to really automate this.
- You get some credits to like spend into the network
if you need extra parts.
- Yes, or they send me a spool of filaments,
maybe half a spool,
and I have to print a certain amount of parts
and it gets sent to some QA facility or whatever
to make it happen, right?
Now you have like really cool mass manufacturing
at prototype manufacturing, we'll say, at scale
to meet like a demand for a hundred pieces.
Like Scott, your IDLE-TC product, right?
Like you could post it to the network.
Anybody that has these filaments
and all these other things can send you,
or somebody might buy the filament
'cause I'm like, "I want that marble filament,
"but I don't have a reason to."
So I will print three IDLE-TCs, make half my money back.
And now I've got like-
- Make all your money back at that.
- Discounted spool, right?
Yeah, there's some shipping stuff and challenges,
but now it's kind of like tapping into this network
of builders wanting to support each other too
that can use their 3D printer for something else
than a piece of furniture.
- Yeah, I don't wanna pay for an injection mold tool,
but I also don't have the ability to print
a thousand of these at home.
I could just tap into this network,
have them print it all across the country,
they ship it to a central facility,
and then I get a box with my a thousand prints in it,
all for much less of the price than the injection mold tool.
- It's Uber for shapeways.
- Uber for shapeways.
- Yeah, I think the shipping logistics gets expensive.
- Maybe, I mean, a lot of plastic stuff's pretty lightweight.
Most of these places go by weight, it wouldn't be terrible.
- Yeah, you're probably shipping regardless, right?
So it's like you have the discount in shipping costs,
you also have the fact that 3D prints can do stuff
that like tool parts can't do.
You can print things that you can't do
with plastic injection mold,
and so that's like an extra value add.
I think it's a huge win.
- Oh, I didn't think about that.
Yeah, that's a good, nice.
- The print in place stuff that you can get
where like all the pieces are already snapped together
and stuff, yeah.
- Yeah, I had a meeting with a client recently actually,
and we were talking about doing,
it was actually, it was metal parts,
but we were talking about doing like metal castings
or how do you do forged parts,
and he goes, "What if we 3D printed it in metal?"
And I was like, "We haven't really worked
"in 3D printed metal."
And he goes, "Well, I'm partnered with a company
"that does 3D printed metal.
"Would you be willing to look into that?"
I was like, "Oh, that's the coolest thing ever."
Like if you had access to three of those organizations,
now all of a sudden you could hit your numbers
with 3D printed metal parts,
and now even metal parts are not off the table.
So I think the world is kind of at your fingertips
on this one.
- Is this on the blockchain then?
(laughing)
- Got my print coins. - Heck yeah.
- I earned some print coins by letting my printer
churn out whatever something sent to it,
and then now I can spend my print coins
to make someone else make stuff.
That's fun.
- And the thing is if people got paid for it,
if people got paid to utilize their printers,
now all of a sudden they're incentivized,
like you say, to purchase a printer
where they weren't before.
- Like how your Tesla's gonna make money
because it'll go around and be a robo-taxi
when you're not using it.
- Yes, yes.
- Any day now, Elon.
- Is that, you're saying blockchain,
and it reminds me, it makes me think
that it's kind of blockchain-y, right?
It's like, oh, there's a network of prints,
I buy, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna claim
three of these, print 'em, send it,
it's, you know, maybe the tokens
or the dollar amount or whatever's up in the air,
but yeah, maybe that's a thing.
- Minting the coin is something, yeah,
you only mine when your printer
is actually doing physical work.
- I don't know about the coin part, but yeah.
(laughing)
- It just screams crypto for some reason,
I don't know why. - Yeah, it does.
- Decentralized manufacturing, right?
That's our company title.
- What about maybe like farmer co-op,
but printing, maybe give it a little more
wholesome bent than blockchain crypto, bro.
- Yeah, we've kind of burned all those buzzwords
in the last couple years. - Or organic printing farms.
- Yeah. - Organic printing farms.
Made with real organic plastic.
- Free-range grass-fed.
This is a free-range 3D print.
(laughing)
- Well, PLA is made from corn, right?
I may be a simple man working on the printer farm.
It's not much, but it's honest work.
- Yeah, you know what's funny?
I think a lot of the 3D printing community too
is deep in the figuring out how to create models
to get cheap prints, filaments,
and there's just a lot of,
1% of people that have 3D printers
have 10 or 15 of them,
and so they're printing random stuff.
I think they would benefit the most
and also be the biggest earners, right?
I mean, like Scott-- - Print coin whales.
- Yeah, like, would you, or I guess in our day,
would we have used this, or would you use this now?
Like, if IdleTC could just produce 13 of them outsource.
- If I had the sales for that,
that I would need to get multiple printers,
then I would absolutely consider that.
- Well, in the Ringcam days, I remember going over
and you guys would just have that one printer
doing its four little special brackets that you needed
over and over and over. - Oh, that poor printer.
- Someone would walk by it and scrape off
whatever just finished and start the same job again
over and over.
If you could have that one part printed,
you know, 200 times across the nation
by everyone doing one job and sending it to you,
that'd be pretty cool. - That would be a lot faster
than one $200 printer bot printing straight
for four and a half years.
- I'll say too, like, my oldest son
is really into Pokemon right now,
and he's discovered the value of generative AI.
And so he's been making his own images
of his own creations of Pokemon,
and like writing in Microsoft Word
the descriptions of them.
And for his birthday, and I'm hoping this episode
doesn't air before his birthday comes,
because I've bought him his Pokemon cards,
like I had them custom made. - Genius.
- But if I could have like a 3D print
of his like Pokemon creations that I could just source,
I don't have a 3D printer at my house,
but if I could do that, even that like as a one-off
would be super intriguing to me.
And so if that's like so readily available
that you could just send an order and have a one-off print,
I think that's a whole new market
that opens up because of this.
- And yeah, Shapeways and a few others exist
where it's the business
that has the industrial machines for this,
but there's something wholesome about it
being like the guy down the street.
- Yeah, totally. - And you're kind of
peer-to-peer. - What is the closest
3D printer I could get access to?
- Oh, that's good. - Oh, it's a good house
is down for me. - Yeah.
- It saves on shipping costs,
you can just drop it off at some point or pick it up.
- That was something that I was,
yeah, the elephant in the room for me the whole time
was, oh man, there's so much more like carbon wasted
by making all this stuff jet across the country.
Like, can we somehow make, yeah, local, that's the sell.
You send it to the network and they say,
yep, down the street, I'll meet you downtown
on my lunch break or come on by my house,
it's on the porch.
Yeah, I love that. - That's so smart.
- Then you learn about your neighbors a little more too.
- This is like a real thing
with like just regular printers.
The print.me, do you know what I'm talking about?
- Send my boarding pass to my neighbor.
- I don't own a printer anymore.
When you desperately need a printer,
you go to Simpatico Coffee, okay,
and they have a booth called Print Me
and you pay $10 and you print.
Yeah, it's the minimum amount to print one piece of paper
so that I can get this thing signed, right?
- Wow. - Spin on that.
- They better notarize it too.
- Yeah, I mean, in a way it's validated
with this regular piece of paper printing.
You can kind of take that same aspect.
They got a map, you can see where the printers are
and you can go to a coworking space
or a coffee shop or whatever.
You can apply that, I love that.
The local idea of, yeah, there's 30 3D printers
in your area willing to print your print.
Here are the prices, here's their ratings, right?
Like you can do all that stuff.
What printer they have if you wanna get in details of it,
but I mean, shoot, like Scott would beat me every day
on that system because he's got the AMS
and he's got the killer 3D printer.
I got like the, I'll undercut him on price, but.
(laughing)
- He mints more coin than you,
more print coin on the blockchain.
- I guess too, it makes me think,
what if I could buy direct?
For example, you're going on these websites
and you're looking to get a 3D print model.
Rather than like trying to figure out
how to download and print, there's a button
that's just buy now.
You click it on every site that hosts
a bunch of these 3D prints.
- That's cool.
- Buy now, and then it lists it in the network
and somebody could claim it and then ship from my printer.
- And it's an auction system where like,
yeah, I love the claiming idea.
You put the thing out there, there's a 30 day or whatever.
You say how long you, how urgently you need it,
and then people can like wait for the price
to slowly go down and then they bid on it
and they get like however many coins
for printing that thing for you.
And then you get like a natural market.
Oh, that's fun.
- Yeah, I mean, something like that, right?
Like that would be cool.
- Not what you were thinking, but yeah.
- I love that though, Leo.
- That went way better than what I was originally thinking.
So I'm all about it.
- You know what I mean though?
Like you go and you say, I wanna do this job,
my maximum I'd pay is this much money.
And then it slowly like lowers until someone claims it
and then that's how much it's worth to them, you know?
That's cool.
- Dude.
- Like a reverse auction.
I would use something peer to peer co-op
that benefits my neighbor instead of,
once in a while I do ship off.
Like I designed dog tags for my dogs years ago
and 3D printed a couple of prototypes.
I liked how they looked, sent it to Shapeways
to get it printed in metal.
And it was, you know, 30 or 40 bucks to get each one of them.
So not the cheapest option, but it's kind of wholesome
to have like the thing that I know that I made, right?
And I totally would send that to the business
that lives in my town that just happens to have
one of those that they're not using right now.
- That's really cool.
- So during the height of COVID,
I got on a web call with a friend of mine
and he was helping my son experience 3D printing
was like this kind of experiential
because we're all locked in our houses, can't experience it.
So he said, I'm going back to the Pokemon thing.
He said, "Hey, draw a Pokemon and I'll 3D print it for you."
And he drew a Pokemon and he was like maybe six at the time.
And it was a poor, poor drawing.
And he got 3D printed and my son saw the 3D print.
And it was that moment where you're like,
this is incredible.
Like he gets to see his creation be turned into reality.
And he looked at me and he said,
"Hey dad, why are my drawings so bad?"
(laughing)
- There's a lot of revelations in that day.
Childhood innocence shattered.
- Yeah.
(upbeat music)
- Robbie, let's hear it.
Let's hear your best idea ever.
- Yeah, man.
I've got a few of them, but I'm a physical product guy.
So I'm gonna hit you guys the physical product idea
that you can riff on a little bit.
- Excellent.
- A couple of Genesis stories here.
So one is my kids, I have three of them.
I mentioned that maybe earlier.
Always, they get really into kind of the pop culture
and social media and the YouTube personalities.
And I don't wanna like,
I don't wanna hurt the viewership of Spitball here,
but if there's any popular YouTubers watching right now,
I'm sorry.
They all put out total crap when it comes to like,
Christmas gifts and things like that.
You can buy like a mystery ball and it's a big plastic ball
and it has plastic bags inside.
And the plastic bags inside have crappy plastic toys
and they sell it for $50 and it's like $5 worth of stuff.
And they ask for it.
It's like, I'm trying to be a good dad.
So I'm gonna buy it, but you know, ahead of time,
it's not gonna be worth its weight, right?
And so that's one moment.
And then the second moment is I've done this a number
of times and my kids get Christmas gifts.
And then we clean out the toy room in order to make room
for the new crap that we just bought for Christmas.
And in cleaning out the toy room,
they discover a toy that they had two or three years ago.
They haven't touched.
And that turns into the toy they play with
for the next two or three weeks.
And it's like, come on, man.
Like I just bought hundreds of dollars
worth of new Christmas toys.
Now we have the old one.
So my idea is this, a large toy box
that's holds all the kids toys over the past X amount
of time and when you hit a button on the toy box,
it presents you with one toy from the past
and you can pick it up and play with it.
You can vote on it and say, I like this toy
or I don't like this toy.
And if you vote that you don't like it,
it puts it in a recycle bin.
And if you do like it, it puts it back in the,
I will play with this later bin.
And it actually sort--
- The trap door underneath it.
- It sorts your toy room for you.
I think the MVP for it is all downvoted toys go into a box,
all upvoted toys go into their own holding compartment
and then it presents it for you.
I think there could be nuanced ways to deal with it
in terms of the amount of times things get downvoted.
You could do like the Pandora system
where you get a certain amount of downvotes at a time.
- Or it's how long it spent out like this one.
Wow, you guys got like four weeks out of this one
where that one was only,
you got bored out of it after two days.
- Totally. - Yeah.
- But the bottom line is I want a toy box
that separates out the bad toys I need to get rid of
and upvotes the good toys so we pull them out
at the right time so they don't have to buy junk
from my kids every Christmas.
- Robbie, this rules.
I have a four and two year old also.
And we have a thing where about every week,
maybe every two weeks, we do a toy rotation, quote unquote.
We're getting rid of all the trains.
They're going away for many months.
We're gonna get new stuff out of the closet
and we have like a subset of stuff out at any given time.
The kids feel less overwhelmed
and we get that effect you're talking about often.
When we're about to like, oh God,
I'm gonna be gone at a conference for four days
or oh man, the kids are sick or whatever it is,
we just, let's just do a rotation
and we'll get that like immediate hit of a new thing
they haven't seen in a while and it always works.
Productizing that is genius.
- I was picturing a toy bin with a kid sitting in front of it
swiping left or right like Tinder.
- Slapping into a Power Rangers, yes train.
- On the iPad.
- Are we training the kids for Russ's left corner?
- That's right.
Do you love this toy or do you not?
- This Marble Run set is three and a half stars, yeah.
I think the ideal version of it though
is some version of, you know, the useless mechanism
where it's like you put something on top of the box
and then you hit the button
and like a hand comes out and grabs it
or like the finger comes out and like hits the off button.
Yeah, it's like, it is kind of that thing
where it's like you put something on the toy box
and then you hit a button
and then it grabs it and pulls it away
and based on how you vote on it,
it like sorts it in different areas.
- A reverse vending machine, that's genius.
- Yeah, exactly.
- I love that.
- And then when they hit the button
and they're like, I want a new toy,
then it does, it kind of does what you say, Leo,
or it like gives them something new and interesting
maybe they haven't seen for a year or six months.
- It's doing the sorting algorithm of like,
here's one that I know you haven't touched in a long time.
Let's see how well it works.
What do you rate it?
Yes or no thumbs up.
How long do you actually keep it out?
Yes, that's great.
It's kind of like the book idea.
So a couple of episodes ago,
I pitched a smarter bookshelf
where like it would keep track of what books,
where I know they get put away
and how often I've taken them out to read them and stuff.
I also want this with my closet.
I haven't mentioned this as a pitch,
but this is something that's been on my list.
I want exactly what you're describing,
but every shirt, pants, sweatshirt that I own
has like an NFC tag on it or something.
And I know how long it's been since I've worn it.
And I don't wear that shirt very often
so I can get rid of it.
I want the toy bin,
but for knowing I actually don't wear that shirt.
- Yeah, scan yourself as you walk out each day.
I like that.
(laughing)
- You wear that sweatshirt every three days.
- So you don't like NFC tags or barcodes on a toy, right?
And every time they take it,
they just scan upvote, the upvote scanner,
the downvote scanner, right?
And now you have a log of all your barcodes
and your inventory tracker.
- I don't even know if you need like NFC tags on it.
I was just with Robbie the other day
and we were at like this little kiosk.
You could purchase food in this building
and there was no attendant there.
It was just like a platform
and you put whatever food you wanted to purchase on it
and it instantly rang it up with a camera system
and said, "Here's your total swipe here."
You can do this all with cameras.
- Oh, I guess that's true.
Just throw an old smartphone on it,
run the app and just maybe run that.
- Or like a self checkout
when you go to pick the produce.
T-R-A-O, train set, got it.
- And is there a way to do like an exchange
or something on the back end
where like all of our bad toys now just get put in boxes
and like, you know, given away for free or donated.
But it's like, if you have the same system
as other people, could you say,
"Hey, our kids think these toys are garbage.
Your kids think these toys are garbage."
But I think my kid would actually like to try that.
- Based on the data of what they like.
'Cause you have all that now, that's a great idea.
- Yeah.
- It's like Storazon, but for kids.
- Yeah, it's Storazon.
- A few episodes ago, Russell pitched an idea
that I haven't stopped thinking about
where you've got your own storage unit
but you don't know where it is.
And instead it's like things get whisked away
and inventoried and you can check them back out
from your own library of stuff
but they're just being stored away.
- Delivered to you by Prime.
- And delivered to you in two days shipping.
Yeah, you have Fisher Price is my first Storazon.
(laughing)
- Guys, I have on my ideas list, toy rotation shared.
A shared toy rotation where you literally,
I didn't want to say--
- There you go.
- Yeah.
- Clearly this is it.
- Yeah, it's it.
Like you just, you send it to the network
of share economy, right?
And it's like you have your toy library, right?
And you're giving donations to it
and you're pulling random toys to pull from.
But--
- You lice all the crap out of that thing
the second it comes out of the box.
You just gotta de-lice it.
Ugh.
(laughing)
That was in someone's mouth like an hour ago for sure.
- It makes me think though,
where do all the toys that go?
Like I feel like the amount of toys that I've gotten
and I must give them all away or like,
but like, or maybe I just throw them out.
But like there have been so many children before my kid
and I think how much crap they've generated.
Like why, like is this all living in Goodwill
or has Goodwill said any kid toy
would just send it right to the trash?
'Cause there must be hundreds of thousands of pounds
locally every day.
Just, it should just go to a toy library
or something, right?
- I think there's way more landfills than you're aware of.
And there's also way more children being born
than you're aware of that get secondhand toys, right?
Like there's a lot of kids living with secondhand toys.
My kids are playing with stuff that I played with
when I was a kid.
And I think that some of it is that, right?
- Us too.
- But yeah, a lot of it's garbage.
It's garbage.
There's, let's not walk around this topic
that it's all plastic waste.
- We should, what is it, break them down,
throw it into my 3D printer network
and now we got plastic, recycle, melted down into PLA.
- Turn it into spools of filament.
- We'll melt them really hot
and then we'll clean our windshields with it.
(laughing)
- In a circle.
(laughing)
- Yes, man, yes.
I wonder too, like what's cool about your idea, Robbie,
is that not only do they pull it off the shelf,
it sounds like they're also putting a toy away.
So like that is ingenious.
- It's a little bit of the monkey in the cage
learning to like press the button to get a reward.
Like if I want to play with a new toy,
I got to clean up this set and put it back away.
You're like conditioning them to keep things clean, you know?
- I didn't want to pitch it that way,
but it is totally a psychological pick up your toys.
You can use the awesome toy box if you pick up your toys.
- Give a toy, take a toy, right?
- Well, it's not my rule.
Yeah, that's how the box works.
You got to put the whole train set back into the box,
otherwise it won't spit out a new fun thing to play with.
- That's right.
- You're not the bad guy.
- That's just how it goes, sorry.
- Brilliant.
- It would also teach your kids how to hack the system
'cause they would like keep the good toys outside the box
and never put them away.
So you'd be teaching your children
probably nefarious activities, but.
- Fill it full of shoes and stuff,
trying to get it to spit out their toys.
- Just Indiana Jones-ing it with a different object
of similar weight.
- You go to grab the recycling box
and it's all your clothes that they've thrown in there.
- Who put a bag of pennies in here?
- There's my wallet.
(laughing)
- Yeah, right.
(laughing)
- They're looking for that one toy
and they just go through all of them at once
and they're just like, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Oh, the toy's not in this.
So I guess.
- Oh, that's true.
(laughing)
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- Throw off all the data.
- The algorithm could account for that.
- It's true, you can only do like three toys an hour.
Just, it locks, right?
- There's gotta be the like optimization algorithms
out there where it, I don't know.
How do you, it's sorting algorithms.
How do you take this list of things
and put them in order of most favorite to least favorite?
You gotta like throw some ones
that you think might be duds out there,
mix them in with the ones that are classics
that are always a big hit, you know?
- Yeah, there's gotta be a way to like force rank them too
if you like have two toys,
like put the one you don't want back.
Yeah, there's a lot.
I think there's a lot of ways to do it.
- How many times is something repeat dispensed
before it like loses its veneer and shelf life?
And yeah, there's so much interesting stats.
- I like the Pandora method of like,
you get three down votes, you know?
And then like you're stuck with this toy
if you don't like it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
But Russell, you're right.
I fear that if you open up the recycling piece,
it's gonna have like the Brussels sprouts
you tried to get your kids to eat a month ago
that they just shoved into a toy box.
(laughing)
- Gotta check it regularly, yeah.
Well, thank you very much for listening, everybody.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you so much, Robbie.
Man, I'm gonna be thinking about that all week now.
- Thanks guys.
I appreciate you having me on.
It was a fun time.
- Dude, come back anytime.
I hear you have more ideas.
Our website is Spitball.show.
There you can find links to our YouTube channel,
all you recent Google podcast refugees.
We've got our shows on YouTube now.
All their social media, follow us there.
We're at Spitball.show.
Email us questions, feedback, ideas,
things that we missed.
Maybe the toy box already exists
and we didn't know about it.
We're [email protected].
We'd love to hear about it.
And that's also how you can follow us on the FedVerse
such as Macedon.
We're just [email protected].
Our subreddit is r/spitballshow.
Our intro/outro music is "Swingers" by Bonkers Beat Club.
Please, if you wouldn't mind,
especially on Spotify, YouTube,
we'd love a five-star review.
Subscribe, rate, leave comments,
wherever you are listening to us right now.
If there's a button next to the name,
Spitball, please press it.
That would really help other people find the show.
New episode is coming out in two weeks.
We will see you then.
(upbeat music)
(dramatic music)