I'm Scott.
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I'm Russell.
And I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, where three computerphile creators and a guest empty our heads of startup
and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in there so you can all have them for free.
Anything that we say is yours to keep.
And this week, Scott, you have a special guest for us indeed.
I do have a special guest.
So one of our most popular Spitball episodes we've ever done was the idea for Airbnb for Servants.
And so back by popular demand, our guest this week is none other than its founder, Anthony Bednarz.
Anthony.
Anthony, a therapist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, is here to bring us that unique perspective on the human psyche.
Welcome, Anthony.
It is a genuine pleasure to be back.
We're so glad to have you.
How many servants do you have on your app now, Anthony?
Look, we really want to protect the data of our employees, so I can't give out that information.
Secret sauce.
That makes sense.
I think you get $100,000 in the investment portfolio.
For 10%, I think.
For one servant.
For sure.
I know a lot more about bankruptcy now than last time.
Yeah, right.
Every good entrepreneur does, right?
This week, inspired by the holidays, my wife and her wonderful family are from Minnesota.
And I learned while I was at Thanksgiving in Minnesota that they have a lot of really weird town names all over.
These little, like, less than a thousand person population towns with fantastic names.
So, today, to get us started and warmed up, we're going to be playing a game that I'm going to call Metaverse or Minnesota.
You just have to tell me if this town name is a real place in the beautiful state of Minnesota or if it is a fictional place in a video game.
And, of course, we start as we do every time with our guest, Anthony.
I want to tell you about Little Canada.
Little Canada is where?
Is that a place in a fictional video game or is that in Minnesota?
Is it Little or Lil?
Little Canada or Little?
L-I-T-T-L-E.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm trying to think of which Canadian province is directly north of Minnesota.
Oh.
And if they would have a lot of emigrants.
Oh.
I don't know.
I'm going to say it's from a video game.
It is a suburb of Minneapolis.
No.
Scott.
Loot Lake.
L-O-O-T.
Lake.
That has to be a video game.
It's a video game.
It's a hub in Fortnite.
You're correct.
Okay.
Thank God.
Oh.
Russell.
Crystal.
Spelled out sounds.
Uh.
That's a town.
That's another suburb in Minneapolis.
Very good.
Anthony.
Legion Square.
I'm going to guess video game again.
It's from Grand Theft Auto Online.
Very good.
Hey.
Scott.
Cosmos.
Drink.
Uh.
We're going to go Minnesota.
It is west of Minneapolis.
Population of 507.
Wow.
Well done.
We're doing good guys.
Yeah you are.
Maybe this game is too easy.
Russell.
Climax.
Oh God.
That's a video game.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes.
Not the games I play.
That's of course right near North Dakota.
Population of 253.
Oh.
Climax Minnesota.
The good people of Climax are just happy.
What's the zip code?
What's the zip code?
69.
69.
69.
69.
20.
Anthony.
Great pug.
Great pug.
Spelled like the dog.
I got it.
I'm going to go with video game again.
This is like a Nintendogs or something.
It is a VR chat virtual bar.
Very good.
Little pug.
Yeah.
Scott.
Let's go.
Good thunder.
No idea.
We're going.
This is a war thunder town.
Video game.
It is southwest corner of Minnesota.
God.
Everything is a suburb of Minneapolis.
It's not anywhere near there this time.
It's a population of 560 right near the border there.
Last but not least, Russell.
Sleepy eye.
That is a video.
No, it's a town in Minnesota with an optometrist that found it.
It is in the southwest corner of Minnesota.
Well done.
3,600 people, which I think means you're the only one who got a perfect score all the way
through.
Well done.
Yeah.
My intuition just doesn't fail me.
No, of course.
And I think that means you have to go first, right?
Isn't that the one?
Oh, okay.
Let's go.
Russell, what do you got for us?
Alrighty, guys.
So, as you know, I have kids.
And what's hard with kids is you want to listen to your own music, but you can't because it's
a little explicit at times.
That's the hard thing.
Yeah.
You don't want to have them start saying.
And there's some subtleties like, you know, what is it?
Macaroni in a pot.
Ah, yes.
You know, I can't.
Like, it's not directly inappropriate, but like, can we.
That's the worst part of that song.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, here's my idea.
All right.
I want to listen to my dirty ass music, but I can't find, I don't want to listen to kids
bop version, or maybe I do, but I just need an AI tool that takes all of my favorite songs
or like new songs that haven't hit kids bop yet and AI's it and doesn't like lose its quality.
Like, you know, you still got the rhymes, but they're not maybe inappropriate, but have
an AI, like even with AI voices make the song, but kid friendly.
Right.
Will Smith going to rap all of these.
Clean rap.
The good ones.
Right.
So, yeah, you just thrown in an AI tool, let's say.
And I think these already exist.
I mean, it doesn't even be AI.
It's like the, there's like even apps out there that like you can take the transcript, rewrite
the words, and all of a sudden it takes, it makes it rewrite the audio or something.
And now you have a perfectly clean version of Kendrick Lamar's album.
But it's, and it sounds like Kendrick, you know, that's, so I don't know.
It's, that's the idea.
So you're picturing like a switch and Spotify, Apple music, whatever.
That's just like the filter or like it flips it over to clean mode, family friendly mode,
but doesn't actually different songs.
That.
Yeah.
Or let's say you have a desktop app that like we'll listen to the song and just like
auto do something with it.
Like if you can't, if Spotify doesn't have that feature, like some sort of third party tool
that allows for it to happen.
Right.
Yeah.
Or it's his own service, like its own music service that like, I guess I'm wondering if
it like falls under like parody content too.
So you might have some like really good, I don't know what the parody law looks like, but
like, can you make it like fall under that?
And now you have your own kid spot playlist.
You have like, literally you take the top 50 billboard on like Spotify or 100 billboard
on, and you just have your own.
Run it through.
Yeah.
You can prompt it.
So you're like, make this song actually about sandwiches or whatever.
So I will say this, Russell, we were driving back from getting a Christmas tree last year.
It was just my wife and I and my six year old nephew.
And we, he was in the backseat of the car and like the weekend came on and he was just
like, uncle Scott, what is this?
Can you turn it up?
And like, he was just vibing to it.
Like it wasn't anything raunchy on there going through.
It was just the background beats going through.
But he's like, you know, this kid's been listening to Baby Shark his whole life.
Like this was just like, oh my God.
So I think there's some potential here, Russell.
My four year old loves Daft Punk.
And there's some stuff in there that's right on the edge.
My two year old loves Blitzkrieg Bop and Ballroom Blitz now.
And I didn't even mean for that to happen.
This is just, yeah.
Kids are drawn to music that isn't bad.
It's just, we put bad music in front of them.
So like any way that we can get better music in front of these kids, I'm four.
Is there a way that we could package this together with like a rock band or a beat saber?
Like a rhythm game for kids kind of thing?
Oh, for the kids.
A Fruit Ninja thing.
Oh yeah.
Fruit Ninja meets Daft Punk.
I learned from the McElroy's video game podcast recently about a little console that you can get that's four kids.
That's kind of an Xbox Kinect, but all in one box.
And it has both the games and the camera.
You set it in front of your TV and you jump around the living room playing Fruit Ninja or whatever.
This seems like a great game for something like that.
That'd be so fun.
Doing your Guitar Hero.
And like you can get the latest music on there too.
So like this album just dropped and now my kid can Fruit Ninja his way through it while I don't have to listen to Baby Shark every day.
Why did Guitar Hero and Rock Band fade out?
It had a moment, but why is it totally gone?
There's like no way to play unless you're doing modded PS3 games and stuff, right?
Didn't Fortnite just come out with a Guitar Hero variant?
Oh, did they?
Really?
Yeah.
That's cool.
Fortnite Festival.
All the old Guitar Hero stuff is like expensive.
But how do you play?
It's expensive.
You can't find it anymore.
Yeah, you gotta get a guitar.
You have to buy it.
You have to buy an old Xbox 360 with Guitar Hero and get the old guitars right now.
So your thing could definitely be a hardware startup too, man.
Uh-huh.
Just go full rock band kids version.
Kids rock band with good music.
I don't think that's just us being nostalgic for it.
I really think there's still a place in the modern world for rhythm game hardware.
That was life.
Yeah.
Right.
And it wasn't just...
Dude, and kids with love.
Yeah, it wasn't just of its time, I don't think.
There's something really there.
How does the Fortnite version work, Anthony?
I have no idea.
Just skins, I'm sure.
You're our Fortnite correspondent on this show.
God damn it.
I'm sorry.
Well, I was going to talk to you about a game from the 90s called Audio Surf.
Do you remember Audio Surf?
You could upload your...
It was a rhythm game.
You could upload your own music and it would auto create a track for you.
Yeah.
If that thing was...
Yeah.
If that was possible in like the 2000s, right?
We could do this all with like...
AI could generate you a rhythm game for any song that you upload, right?
And scrub it to the clean version.
This is a whole console and set, man.
Man.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering what...
Like if you apply this to like video, can you do that for like movies and TV that's
like maybe PG-13 and like cut out?
I mean, maybe not the...
There's probably some like...
It won't read the video, but like maybe it just takes the audio transcript and like...
I'm tired of this Monday to Friday plane.
Yes.
Snakes on the...
Okay.
I waited...
Monkey flying plane.
Snakes on a plane was on Spike TV once and I waited like the entire movie just to be
like, how are they going to say the line?
How are they going to say the line?
And I was tired of these...
Monkey flying snakes.
On this Monday through Friday plane.
Yeah.
No way.
So that's the thing.
When you have like a video on an airplane seat or whatever, they'll like...
dub in other versions.
But yeah, AI could make the tone and the inflection and then detect all the curse words and you
just turn on family mode and all of a sudden that Saw movie is just for kids.
Wait, imagine the headline AI censorship.
That's going to go over great.
Oh God.
You can't even tell it's happening.
It turns the movie into about four minutes, but...
Saw is four minutes long.
Want to play a game?
Credits.
Want to play a game?
It's really happy.
There's some purists who are not going to be happy with the artist intent implications,
I'm sure, but...
I'm already upset.
I mean, maybe you could also have a slider.
Like, all right, I'm PG-13 G.
That would actually be really fun to play with.
Does it work the opposite way?
Could you turn it up to X?
Yeah.
Make it more explicit.
Add to nudity.
What?
Well, now we've hit the money maker.
Obviously.
What about if you took Baby Shark and you made it extremely raunchy?
What is it?
The other way around, too.
What would that sound like, Russell?
Finding Nemo rated R.
And I think it'd go a little something like this.
Yeah, I don't know.
Baby Shark doodoo.
Like, doodoo.
Doodoo.
I don't think you're allowed to cut that joke, actually.
No.
That's dated.
Mommy Shark.
Well, Leo, thanks for that great B segment.
What's your idea this week?
What are you doing?
So, early on, in honor of throwing back to having one of our first guests back, I also want to throw back to one of my really, really early ideas that actually didn't make it into the show.
So, before we actually had this thing up and running and we were making this show, I pitched Scott on an idea.
Podcasts, but on CDs.
And we got so far as to, like, do a little bit of market study where I was like, well, what would it look like if I could press a button on a catalog on a website and get an episode of a podcast mailed to somebody who doesn't have access to, you know, the internet and stuff.
Like, grandma wants an episode of this or the library archivist wants to get this series in their collection or whatever, but they want to have it on physical media, etc., etc., etc.
We found out that nobody wanted this idea and I've let it die on the vine.
But, I still occasionally have people in my life, grandparents, non-internet natives, who I want to share a podcast episode with because I know they would love that episode of some history deep dive or this interesting perspective on politics that I know that they would actually like.
There's not a good way to share a podcast with someone, period, but especially if they're not really online.
Recommending and sharing podcasts kind of sucks.
And so, I thought, what would it look like if there was a hardware solution?
So, I want to make some sort of little tabletop radio that the user can walk up and press play on and I, on the other side of the town, city, country world, have queued up things for them to listen to at their leisure.
You are creating a playlist for them.
Yeah!
There's those apps out there where you're like, you buy a photo frame and you control the photos that are on it, but you give it to grandma.
This is this, but for consumable media.
So, maybe it's a TV and it's got YouTube videos and you're sending it to them.
Maybe it's got podcast episodes.
That was my original conceit.
Maybe you could even record like a little intro to each one.
Hey, I really thought you'd like this because while I was listening to this, I thought about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you send that and that's just another thing in the queue for them to press go on, right?
I don't think it'd be that hard to build.
You got to make a speaker.
You got to make a little like control server thing and a button that says play, right?
And then they can play pause on their end and maybe a skip and you get told like, oh, she didn't like that one.
My grandma always skips over my intro welcomes.
It wouldn't be a very complicated UI on their end.
And then on your end, all you need is like press this one to find something in a catalog and queue it up and send it over to their player.
It could also be good for kids too.
Oh yeah.
Put your Daft Punk down there.
How much of the content is behind paywalls and like how do people get around that, right?
You can't like YouTube playlist somebody, right?
That's the beauty of the podcast industry where you don't have, yeah, with YouTube and with Spotify and all this, you're going to have to kind of make a deal with these content owners, the record labels, the media rights holders and stuff.
But in podcast world, everything is like freely distributed unless it's an exclusive to a platform.
For a little while there, like Joe Rogan was a Spotify exclusive or whatever.
You got those here and there, like this one's only available on Audible.
But for the most part, most shows are just here's the link, here's an MP3 file, download it, do whatever you want with it.
That's why I love podcasts so much is it's one of the last remnants of the old internet where like anyone can come along and just host a podcast and it's just available.
And you can do what you want with distribution.
That's why there's a hundred podcast apps and websites and directories and stuff.
I love that.
And this is just one other interface.
But for the technologically unable, I don't know.
You have a friend who's blind, who doesn't have the ability to navigate a computer very well.
She can walk up and press that thing that you've queued up for or something.
I don't know.
Dude.
Okay.
Yeah.
Leo.
Hit me.
I have so much to Spitball on this.
Pivot.
You know the Tony box?
Is that the like NFC tag thing?
Yeah.
So there's this kid thing.
So I guess like, just to Spitball over that, it's a box.
You put a Elsa doll on it and it plays Let It Go.
Like a song.
Right?
Kid music player.
Yeah.
Literally you buy action figures.
Oh, got it.
Got it.
Got it.
Okay.
Okay.
So, but it's a kid, right?
It's not like a, it's not like this would be an adult kind of like more mature experience.
That's like a physical media, but like, let's say instead of it being like a Amiibo looking doll thing, it's like literally cards.
Oh, it's not even CDs at this point.
I'm just sending grandma a hundred cards, each of them with like an episode or she taps her one episode, her card on there every morning and it plays the latest episode of the Daily from the New York Times or whatever.
Whoa.
You could record your own voice saying, hey, grandma, miss you.
You're the best.
I'm DJing for grandma.
Yeah.
And like, she can save all these little cards in her little Rolodex and, you know, pull them out whenever she wants.
Like, Merry Christmas.
Like, you could sing a happy birthday song to her and if she's missing you, you know, she can play her little card, right?
Or you could be reading, you know, a story or a book or vice versa.
Like, grandma could record a story, right?
That she has, like, maybe this device is also the recorder.
So, let's say you give her a stack of cards and she plugs in a card and she hits record and now she does like, oh, this one time when you were a little boy.
I love this, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Yeah, totally.
Well, impersonation.
And then now she's sending you a card and now you have that.
So, not everybody has a reason to have this box because it's like your digital exchange of, like, kind of an audio version of a mailing card or, like, instead of it written.
But it's a little more authentic, a little bit more, I don't know.
Just minimum features on it because you've got to have as few features as possible.
And it's easy to take one of those cards and put it in the mail or whatever, get it to somebody else.
Yeah.
Or you just get a notification on your phone because, you know, it's just a one-way sort of thing.
But then we can't sell that other person a box.
Well, the box, like, you can probably...
They have a subscription service.
Of course.
You can probably do both, right?
You can probably save...
Like, you can have the physical media version, you know, if you want to make it special.
Or you have the digital version, right?
Like, your app connects.
You can still do it for, like, the high-tech people and all that.
So, yeah.
The Tomies and the Jukies of the world are, like, kid-friendly for sure.
But it does seem like...
Like, adults love walking up to a jukebox and perusing a catalog and picking a thing.
Just make it a jukebox.
Right?
It just flips through all the cards.
It's just a massive jukebox with a little ESP32 inside.
I meant more, like, it's...
There's something good about having physical things that represent digital data, right?
And it feels good to, like, open your binder of CDs and flip through to find something.
And we've lost that in the digital age.
So, this is a neat way to, like, take that song, album, podcast, episode, video, YouTube video you love, and, like, imprint it onto a thing.
Yeah.
Have an artifact for it.
I don't know.
I get the same kind of feeling in that when you first mentioned it, I immediately thought of, like, mixing somebody a CD.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
The mixtape has died.
My father-in-law gave me a Christmas gift last, no, two years ago of the entire Leonard Skinner best of in CD form.
So, he would be a good person for this.
That's great.
He does not like technology.
No.
That was a re-gift, Scott.
He got that, like, 30 years ago.
And he's like, I gotta give this to somebody.
You know?
He got it last, the Christmas before and said, oh, I don't have a CD player either.
It's a thought thing.
I think you could do the same kind of photo frame.
There's always the photo frame things that are advertising on podcasts.
Like, do you remember the Aura?
Aura.
Aura Frames is always like, it's so easy for you to set up, and then you ship it to your loved one, and then you manage it.
It's the same kind of thing.
You advertise, you market toward the hip and trendy Gen Xer or Millennial or Zoomer who's, like, actually doing the buying and configuring, and then they ship it off.
Who always needs a gift for mom and dad.
They're hard to buy for.
They are.
You've given yourself an ongoing responsibility.
Grandma called again.
She's run out of podcast episodes.
God damn it.
It was silent the whole time.
Well, you had it on mute, you know?
I'm tired of listening to Dan Carlin.
Give me something else.
Oh, that'd be cool.
But, like, I don't know, even audio, like video audio or something.
There might be, it'd be cool to have, there's, like, old baseball games or something you want to listen to.
Like, maybe some, like, nostalgic stuff that might be more relevant to their time.
It's like, oh.
December 7th, 1941.
Maybe not.
The first man on the moon.
Tear down this wall.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Want to relive those moments?
You guys remember Hit Clips?
Little boom box that had, like, a SD card-sized chip and it'd play 30 seconds of a song?
Yes.
Like, cereal box.
This is, like, a late 90s, early 2000s thing.
I had those, but for, like, Star Wars action figures and it'd play, like, a voice line from the character or something.
Whatever the minimum amount is, they won't get sued.
If you, these things solve for all of your lowest possible bitrate of NSYNC needs.
They sounded like garbage and they only played, like I said, about 30 seconds of a song anyway.
But, yeah, it seems like you could take the time to embed the actual, like, storage and chip stuff into these cards.
But you don't have to.
Just make it, like, an NFC thing and it pulls it down from the internet.
Oh, yeah.
No, the NFC thing, I mean, the CD could even have an NFC tag on it, too.
So, if they can't figure out, you could have both, right?
There you go.
Whoa.
Whoa.
I put an NFC tag on my CD.
Can we circle back to the original idea of, like, mailing someone something?
Because I really like the idea of, like, propaganda bombing someone with, like, 100 episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast, right?
There's something really appealing to me about sending people content they don't want to hear on a CD.
I finally found my niche audience for the Podcasts on CDs project.
Oh, no.
Trolls.
Yeah.
The original vision for that was, you know, I want to send this to someone.
Let me go on, browse the catalog, add to cart, add to cart, add to cart, send, and then you send it off and we fulfill it.
It's dirt cheap to buy blank media still in bulk.
You burn it.
You put it in an envelope.
You send it via media mail, which is the cheapest possible USPS thing, and it counts as a thing that you can do.
And for, like, really, really cheap, you can mail CDs with podcasts on them.
But nobody wants that.
So, now I'm giving it to you.
But you're telling me that I have the ability to do that myself right now if I just burn enough CDs?
I mean, yeah, go for it.
Buy CDs.
You can get them on AliExpress.
I know what you guys are getting for Christmas.
A spindle of 100 blank CDRs.
White elephant here.
I'm burning every episode of this podcast onto them.
All right, Scott, I think you're up.
What do you got for us?
Okay.
This idea came from two parts.
One, there is a shop down the street that just went up for sale.
There's a lot of, like, random buildings that are just kind of going up for sale, like space for rent.
And then, two, I watched Bob Ross last night.
And if you've ever tried to follow along with Bob Ross, like, hey, I am feeling artistic.
I'm going to get some paints out, and I'm going to try to copy him.
You are humbled extremely quickly.
And every time there, I'm always like, is it just because, like, I don't have all the right stuff?
I don't have all the acrylic paints and the titanium white and all the things and the easel and blah, blah, blah.
So, I want to take one of Russell's ideas from a while back where he was, it was an old love corner where he's like, I want to create some cool, clever dating ideas that people can do because I'm running out of date ideas.
And I want to lease a space and turn it into, like, a tryout studio where every month we are just constantly cycling new things.
So, like, the first month, I'm going to have a bunch of Bob Ross easels and other things in setup and him playing in the corner.
And you can just go in and try that out.
You could turn that into, like, a professional chef or I want to do the Great British Bake Off and I put everything in front of me and I just have this full setup on here.
And, but we'll just constantly be cycling this.
And if you've got, like, four or five of these locations or however many, you could just keep moving the stuff around between them all.
Oh, yeah.
Going through.
And then it keeps something new and going through.
It can be a subscription service or just constantly blast all your old patrons on there.
And there are so many random things that I have always wanted to try once, but I just don't have the setup or time or anything to get that going.
Whoa.
And that is my idea.
I want to make Bob Ross.
Yeah, a little date zone going through.
And that's it.
I want to get this place next door and paint Bob Ross.
That's very clear.
For the first month.
Yes, for the first month.
And then the next month it's going to be, like, learn to do stop motion animation or.
Learn to solder with your spouse.
Yeah, exactly.
Woodworking.
Hell.
Russell's example on his was knife building or creating a knife.
Knife throwing.
Knife throwing.
Maybe not a good one.
Create and throw.
Here's a block of steel.
Get to the target.
But I think, yeah.
Any form of creating or cooking or other thing.
And that's it.
Dude, this sounds like the escape room network or whatever.
Like, have you heard of?
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
What is that?
Well, I don't know.
They just have conventions.
And, like, literally there's escape room networks that they share and exchange ideas.
So, like, you might have an escape room idea.
You build it.
But then you can sell or trade that escape room and all their locks and all the little props to another escape room.
And so now you're kind of, it turned into this, like, trading thing.
And I think they've gone into, like, you know.
That's, like, for some reason the escape room network built off of that and, like, created their own rotation.
Right?
Like, I love the idea of an escape room on that, too.
But I always feel like if I buy a building and I put an escape room down there, my audience is only so big.
It's only local.
And over time, people are going to be like, ah, we did that.
I don't want to do that anymore.
I want to be able to keep monetizing on that lease.
A lot of that stuff's permanent-ish.
Where, like, yeah, that's hard to refresh it.
Well, like, I think your date, this date in a month box is, like, kind of similar.
Learn to make a bonsai tree or something.
Yeah.
Like, why not?
Like, become a botanist.
Like, learn how to keep your plants alive, right?
Yep.
Awesome.
I love your idea of having multiple locations and they rotate, too.
Yeah.
That's what sold it for me.
Because, like, one business doesn't want to have easels that are sitting untouched for two years.
No.
You don't want another warehouse to store all this crap.
You just want to give it to some guy in Philly or something.
Yeah.
Ship all these easels.
So, is your business then the marketplace that connects the franchisees together instead of you operating the store?
I think so.
I think you'd have to start with multiple locations initially or you have to start with the franchise initially.
It would be an upfront thing, but it wouldn't be crazy.
Open four.
Honestly, you could just have two and just cycle back and forth.
And then when you're ready, open a third and get a third idea and going.
How do you teach the people who are doing the task how to do the task?
Is there, like, a person there?
Is it a recording?
Nope.
There is a projector and there's YouTube playing.
I want this as minimal as possible, man.
I want a single teenager running the whole operation who has no idea what's going on.
That may limit you on the...
Interesting.
You probably couldn't get to build something if it involves, like, a hammer, right?
Well, okay, for real.
Like, you ever see, like, master...
What is it?
Master class or something?
There's just some...
Yeah.
Just make a deal with those guys and have, like, hey, I would like to project one of
your classes up on here and I will provide all the stuff up for that.
Okay.
I mean, you could absolutely bring in a specialist to someone who just hangs out there.
That'd be cooler.
I'm just...
But it's the teenager at the store who has to, like, troubleshoot and, like, answer people's
questions.
The TA.
The TA.
Exactly.
I mean, you could probably find local community people that are experts in cooking or experts
in painting or, like, the closest thing to it and you hire them for a month.
And I'm sure they'd love to talk about it, right?
And I'm sure after...
Yeah.
After going through one class and surviving it, they'd be like, oh, yeah, I could absolutely
teach another class of this, let alone another 100 people.
But, like, with the rotating model, you have to have that collective of people for each of
these tasks in each geographical area.
Economies of scale there.
Well, what if you make sure you're near a local college or something and, like, you then
partner with some professor that's in a similar and supplement that?
Like, I bet there's an art teacher out there that teaches for high school kids.
That could totally do this class and need supplemental income that's after school.
You do that for cooking.
All the basic dating.
Let's say all your model is based off of, like, local teachers or whatever, right?
Honestly, so I used to work at one of those old-time photography places, right?
And it was much, much more important to have someone who could, like, was happy and enthusiastic
and willing to interact with people than it was to have someone who knew how to take a
good picture.
You did not need to know how to take a good picture in order to do that.
The people just had to have a good time.
So I think if you found the right person, they could absolutely learn whatever it is
that month's rotation is very quickly to the point that they could have people have a good
time.
You just have to make sure that your chosen activities have, like, zero.
Yeah, exactly.
Very low learning curve that the intern...
Oh, I wanted to learn shooting.
Damn.
Yeah.
Like, you'd be selective on there, but I'm sure, like, candle making or creating the
perfect perfume blend or whatever this month could be good.
Just have them sign a razor or razor a waiver.
But, dude, you could get, like...
I mean, there are so many different things, too.
Like, the crickets or whatever.
You can do arts and crafts.
You could do, like, oh, here's the theme of the month.
Like, you could...
I don't know.
You could have some of the, like, makerspace stuff in there.
Like, yeah.
Like, you have a laser engraver, right?
Did you say the crickets?
Yeah, the cricket.
They're called crickets or cry cuts?
Cry cuts.
I don't know what you're talking about, man.
I'm trying.
What is the freaking thing?
Like, the 3D...
Oh, the vinyl cutter.
The vinyl cutter.
The vinyl cutter.
I got it.
Yeah.
That's what I'm talking about.
There's a brand name.
I got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some specialty equipment that you can bring in.
Yeah.
And then what?
It's just run the equipment and draw...
Like, laser engravers.
Right, Scott?
Like, you just run a laser engraver and you teach somebody and then now they're just,
like, coming up with ideas or what...
I guess there's...
I don't know.
There seems to be overlap there.
That's just super...
And you want to make it like, hey, we got to do this before the end of the month because
we're going to...
We won't be able to do...
It does help drive traffic, doesn't it?
The limited time only.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you box it all up in a U-Haul and you drive it over to Nebraska and you grab
whatever they had last month and you drive it to your other franchise and you...
Change places.
You do a loop once a month where you spend two days on the road and switch out everyone's
easels.
I really...
I just love the rotating thing.
You could be, like, the date spot for a couple, right?
If you're only doing the one thing, they go on the one date to your place.
But, like...
But it's always new and exciting.
And it can become their thing.
Their cute little thing.
Their first date was there.
They go there every month.
Yeah.
And, I mean, it's kind of great because they have to go every month.
Like, they have to...
They have to go on a date every month.
Like, whether you hate them or love them in the moment.
You could sell subscriptions.
Six months of...
Yeah.
Subscription service.
In the next 12 months, you get six hole punches on your card to do one of the things
that interests you.
You could even...
Completely blind, too.
Like, hey, we're not even going to tell you what this one is this month.
Or you don't even have to know.
You just got to show up and it's going to be something fun.
You have to build a reputation.
Would you go on a mystery date today?
That's a big ask.
Depends how much it is.
Depends how much it is.
That's it.
That's the right answer.
I could risk 50 bucks, not 100 on this.
Like, you know?
The core idea is convenience, for sure.
You don't even need to rotate.
Like, I bet there's even, like, a whole set of dating apps.
Or dating apps.
Dating apps.
Dating eye date making ideas that are just disposable.
Like, bonsai trees, right?
You don't need 100 pots, right?
You just send home with everybody with their stuff.
You don't need to keep anything.
Like, easels, yeah, you probably need to.
But, like, that's something that you store and you maybe rotate every year or something, right?
Bonsai trimming scissors?
I can't just give those away.
A U-Haul full of them.
Yeah, you can buy, like, those kits.
Like, 20 bucks for a bonsai tree and you learn how to keep it up or whatever.
But maybe, I don't know.
That's not.
I'm not the expert on the date ideas.
Yes, you are.
You're literally the expert.
You're literally the expert.
See, matchmaking?
You're what?
Maybe a little more.
Once you're matched up, I don't know what you're going to do.
That cadmium yellow is not going to buy itself.
All right, Anthony.
What have you brought us this week?
Well, this idea comes to you once again from Twitter.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, hell yeah.
Brace for impact.
This is an idea that I've had since before my episode of the podcast aired because it took you guys so long to put it out.
No.
So there's some Twitter drama that happened, right, that I made a note of.
Here's the scenario, right, that inspired my idea.
So an individual who has a disability, right, is ordering Uber Eats.
And they live on, like, the third floor of some apartment, right?
And the driver gets there and he has, like, a broken leg or something.
He can't climb the stairs to get up to the top of the apartment, right?
So he physically can't deliver their food and they can't come downstairs to get it.
And, you know, somebody tweets about this.
It blows up on Twitter, obviously.
It turns into some whole argument about, I don't know, who is in the right, who is in the wrong kind of thing, right?
So my pitch is to solve for this obvious problem.
A drone service that connects your gig economy delivery drivers to individuals who maybe live in apartment complexes, dorm rooms, right?
Areas like these that are maybe a little bit more difficult to deliver to.
That can ferry whatever good that they've purchased from one individual to the other to avoid this kind of problem.
Middleman.
A drone for a drone.
The last hundred feet.
The last hundred feet.
That's a good start.
Everybody's solving for the last mile when it comes to logistics, you know?
This is the last hundred feet.
And there's, I mean, look, there's a legitimate reason to have something like this, right?
Because the people who use a lot of these delivery services, like they have the data on this, are disproportionately people who, you know, struggle with physical disabilities.
And the same is actually true for some of these gig economy services.
More of their, like a higher percentage of their employees are people with disabilities than the general workforce, right?
This is going to continue to be a problem.
This situation might be coming up more than, we might actually be solving for something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dude, these drones could, like, charge in the car.
They, like, pay, like, you know, they're, like, they're just literally a passenger, right?
You roll down the window and it zooms out, zooms back in.
That's what I was going to ask you.
Do you think that this drone is a retrieval robot for the person who called the service?
Or is it a last hundred feet sending service from the driver or delivery person?
I could see either way.
I figure it'd be easier to sell to maybe the companies that are running these services than the
individuals in their homes, but I don't know.
I just had this crazy dystopian image of a semi, a McDonald's branded semi truck that's just going, like, up and down suburbia like an ice cream truck.
And there's drones flying off of it, dropping off door dashes on people's doors.
Oh, sure.
This is how you actually eliminate the workers themselves.
Fully automated.
Whoa.
A mobile McDonald's.
Mobile McDonald's.
You can have self-driving cars and then you have the whole thing.
You know what I mean?
Like, self-driving car goes to restaurant, picks up food, brings it to car.
Car goes to place, self-drives, delivers food at door, leaves.
Soon we'll have robots eating it too.
Well, so, you know, a lot of these, like, food places, fast food places, they don't employ delivery drivers, right?
Because they don't want to have to pay all of these people and have all these extra employees.
But what if they could have a drone fleet instead?
Oh, my God.
I'm sure they'd jump all over it.
They could avoid doing business with the Ubers of the world, right?
Cut out that extra cost, that middleman, right?
Instead, we become their middleman selling them this product.
Whoa.
That they couldn't totally make themselves and do without me.
Getting the robo-taxi or human driver, bringing the drone to near them is the secret sauce.
Because all these startups that are thinking about drone delivery, like Travis Kalanick and Uber back in the day,
who are like, yeah, we don't even want to have human drivers in the next couple years.
It's all going to be robots, right?
The problem with the drone idea is that they don't have the battery and capacity and stuff.
So if you're driving it to the last, like, neighborhood down the block and then sending them out,
that's something I hadn't even considered.
Okay.
What if, like, this sped up delivery?
So what if you're...
Okay.
Could you do this for UPS drivers at FedEx?
I was just thinking about the Amazon truck.
The Amazon truck drives to the end of your street.
I was thinking about the power lines.
What if the...
What if post offices, okay, like the mailman, he just drives down the block as fast as he can.
And it just...
Zoop!
30 drones go out to all...
Yeah.
And then they...
And then they all come back in one spot, maybe at the end of the block.
Sorry.
There's a little spin of it.
And then you go to each block.
So, like, let's say the post office just goes every block and, like, up and down 30 streets.
And then at the end goes and picks up all these, let's say, like, you know how they have those scooter drop-off, like, scooter ports?
Yeah.
So, now you just have, like, up and then they just go up and they pick up all the little drone modules.
And now they just delivered all the mail in 20 minutes through all these drones.
Only if there's a speaker that's blasting right of the Valkyries while that's happening.
But yes.
How do we eliminate the driver from this equation?
I really want this to put as many people out of work as possible.
Mail people!
I was going to ask the opposite.
It seems increasingly likely with every year that robotic drivers are going to be...
They're never going to capture the entire market, it seems like.
Like, every year that goes by, we get promised, yeah, self-driving cars are totally going to be the thing in the next five years.
And then they never are because it's harder and harder.
And we've got our Waymos of the world, but it's not...
It's looking more likely that there will always be somewhere for a human to be in this equation.
So, I'm wondering if this is a product that we manufacture and sell to the Uber driver.
It's a car-mount charging system with a grapple.
Oh, man.
You are an Uber Eats driver.
You want to, like, boost your delivery rate by 30%?
You put this sucker in the passenger seat.
It flies for a couple minutes and does the last little trip for you.
You open your window.
It goes out.
It brings the little bag to the porch and then comes back.
And then it's doing the thing that you're describing.
But it's a product you're selling the driver.
Because it makes their life easier, their work more efficient.
Yeah.
They're able to then do more deliveries per route, which, I mean, they're all paid in gig economy world by the delivery, I think.
I'm sure there's going to be some person who's going to optimize that completely with a traveling salesman problem.
I mean, like, I could hit these three and deliver to these guys with these drones so I could meet up with them later while I pick this one up.
You could really monetize this by, like, saying, all right, we will supplement your income for this.
So it's like a $1,000 drone, let's say.
Every delivery, we take $3.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so now...
Oh, yeah.
Pays for itself over time.
Now you just get it out of time.
But then you have recurring income.
Yeah.
And, like, now you sell it.
And now they're just...
Like, now you just created the market.
So instead of buying, like, a $1,000 drone, it's like, oh, I pressed this button.
And now I have to give $3 for every delivery.
And I have to do a minimum order or else I have to pay.
Like, boom.
You've just created the gadget that every Uber driver is like, oh, yeah, I got that gadget.
It's, like, the cool thing.
Now it becomes, like, a pride thing.
Yeah.
You got to include a sticker in the box for the back windshield.
That's right.
Oh, me?
I deliver with last 100 feet.
Drones.
This doesn't have to fly either, right?
It could just be a car, like, one of those regular...
A little RC car that zips up the drive.
I don't know how it's going to make it to the third floor of Anthony's apartment building, but...
Well, they got to have an elevator, right?
So it's got to be able to press a button on an elevator.
Oh, my God.
Dear customer, open your window.
Yeah.
Imagine stepping into an elevator and, like, a floating McDonald's bag on a drone, like, comes in with you.
It's just, like, third floor, please.
I feel like the quadcopter is a little more dangerous than, like, those tanks.
Like, what are those, like, tank-looking things?
And you make a cute little face on it, and it says, excuse me.
Of course.
Can you help me press the elevator button?
Please reach forward and grab the McDonald's bag from the flying death copter.
Retrieve McDonald's now.
Retrieve McDonald's now.
Is that a beehive outside my door?
Nope, that's the dovery.
My driver must be using that stupid drone app.
At 6 p.m., the skies go dark.
Well, dear listener, if you just ordered Uber Eats and your food is being delivered by some sort of automaton,
please brace for impact and tune in to the next episode of our show.
Thank you very much for listening.
We hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you, Anthony, for being here.
This was awesome.
I will create dystopian fiction with you anytime.
There is a recurring theme, isn't there?
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