Salt Cannon, It's Lenny 2.0, Metal Detector Drones, and Airbnb for Servants

(upbeat music)

- I'm Scott.

- I'm Russell.

- And I'm Leo.

This is Spitball.

(upbeat music)

Welcome to Spitball, the Pitchin' Kitchen,

where three Musky Tears, that's us,

empty our heads of all 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.

All right, guys, I wanna introduce you

to our special guest this week, Anthony.

Anthony is a certified psychiatrist

and hopefully he can help us critique our ideas

and the mental disorders it took to come up with them.

- Welcome to Spitball.

- A couple of the things that you said were true.

- This is gonna be a lot of fun.

We're glad you're here.

- Welcome.

- All right, guys.

So Russell is on a little bit of an advantage here

because he, like me, is a father,

but today we're gonna be playing Tech or Tots.

So in this one, we're gonna go rapid fire style

and the three of you are going to be guessing

whether or not each name that I'm throwing at you

is a baby product or a baby company

or a tech product or a startup out in Silicon Valley.

All right, starting with our special guest, Anthony.

Hadoop, H-A-D-O-O-P.

Is that a baby product or a tech startup?

- Tech startup, for sure.

- It is, it's an Apache product

for distributing data across large data sets.

Scott, Duna, D-O-O-N-A.

- I'm also gonna go tech startup

and I hope it is something with donuts.

- They make car seats and strollers, sorry to say.

You're down zero one.

Russell, Kibana, K-I-B-A-N-A.

- Oh, that's a baby, that's a baby one.

- They make data visualization software

for tech companies, sorry.

- What, like Kibana?

- Anthony, you're in the lead with a strong first round.

Anthony, you're up.

Zutano, Z-U-T-A-N-O.

- I gotta go with startup again.

- They make baby booties, sorry.

Scott, M-O-Z-Y.

This better be a baby product.

They are an online data backup service.

- Oh my God, sorry.

- Russell, Cybex, C-Y-B-E-X.

- Yo, is that allowed on this show?

That sounds like an adult.

- We're rated T for T now, just for saying it.

- Yeah, that's an adult service site.

- Sorry to say they make car seats and strollers,

so they are very G-rated.

- Are like three of these guys doing car seats?

- Cybex. - I found quite a few of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anthony is still one, the other guys are nothing.

We've got two more rounds here.

Anthony, Tinkerpop, T-I-N-K-E-R, capital P-O-P.

- I gotta say that that one is for kids.

- That's an Apache language and product

for graph traversal in databases and large data sets.

- They also make car seats though.

- Scott, Splunk, S-P-L-U-N-K.

- Tech startup, please.

- Yes, infrastructure security and observability.

They make like insights into your product.

- What is that name of anything?

Okay.

- Splunk, well, you're splunking through your logs, I guess,

and your infrastructure.

- Yeah.

- Russell, we got Grafana, G-R-A-F-A-N-A.

- 100% tech startup.

- You are absolutely right.

That's an open source dashboard product.

That means it's one all and it's our final round.

Very exciting.

Anthony, Juvy, J-O-O-V-Y.

- Huh.

You know, I hope that's a tech startup.

- And they make baby strollers.

(both laughing)

- The only thing your kid needs to be able to do is move.

- That's right.

- As long as they're strapped into something.

- Where's my drink?

Scott, Jupiter, J-U-P-Y-T-E-R.

- Absolutely a kid product.

That is a Python notebook hosted service.

You can write your math online and it'll host it.

And then Russell, the last one, Caddy, C-A-D-D-Y.

- That's a baby stroller.

- That's a web server made in Go.

(both laughing)

- Did we get any of them?

- I've used Caddy before.

You all got one each.

Congratulations.

That seems poetic.

What a great three-way tie.

- Do people call juvenile detention centers Juvy

in your neck of the woods?

Because.

- Not J-O-O-V-Y.

- It would be insane to name any kid's product.

- That's an early 2000s Flickr alternative or something.

(both laughing)

And baby strollers.

- Well, you know what?

Maybe since they do make a product

that you strap your child into.

So maybe it makes a little more sense than I thought.

(both laughing)

- It's early, early Juvy.

- Restraints for your early delinquents.

- Pre-Juvy.

- Kinder Juvy.

- That's right.

- Kinder Juvy.

- It's pre-Juvy Juvy.

- Oh, that's a data backup language.

- If I'm keeping track,

I think Russell, you're up first this week.

What do you got for us?

- So this idea needs a little bit of setup

because does not sound great on paper.

- How about a podcast?

- As opposed to our usual pitches, huh?

- Yeah, but this one definitely saves lives.

So good luck trying to beat that, boys.

Okay, this is a simple startup.

We take the power of the sun

and throw salt via stop signs

in front of the most critical part

of where ice gets in the way,

or where ice causes damage.

So, okay, so let me set that up a little bit better.

Basically, it's a machine that throws salt

in front of the stop signs and streetlight places

where you need to stop all the time, 24/7,

or maybe less, whenever it rains.

Whenever it snows.

- Don't walk over that.

- Just spitting salt forever.

- Stopping anywhere else is overrated.

- Yeah, you have a prize, you wanna get some salt,

you just go to your stop sign.

So why that is, is 'cause I see a lot of,

and I know this episode's gonna be released

during the winter time, I'm sure,

but what is it, whenever those things,

those trucks that move, the trucks.

- Salt trucks.

- The salt trucks. - Salt trucks.

- Yeah.

- I feel like they add a little extra salt

at the stop signs, or they're just stopping

at the stop signs, because, but it's also like--

- I've never thought of that.

I thought for sure that was on purpose.

You're probably right, they're just going,

and they sit at a stop sign, shoot.

- But I mean, right, they should stop a little extra there,

'cause when you're sliding, at least you catch your edge

right at the stop sign.

Why not install to, right away,

every stop sign has a, you put a bag of salt,

a little throwing machine, and a solar panel,

and now every stop sign and/or street light

becomes instant snow network, save lives.

That's it, that's the company.

Salt saves lives.

- All right, so you're powering these with solar.

I don't wanna no-but you, but the days where it's snowing--

- That's a good question.

- Are those the days where you wouldn't have--

- It's almost like you live in the Midwest.

- You could use salt and water too.

- It's always cloudy in the winter, and terrible.

- Can't you make a battery out of salt and water?

- Isn't that a thing?

- Throw a potato in there and you got it.

- Checkmate.

- Next, potatoes.

- Potato powered, that's it.

- Maybe you could put some of your gamer vitamins in it

for electrolytes.

- It's what the plants need.

(laughing)

- Full circle.

- It's what plants crave.

So tell me about how you plan on not throwing salt

in the eyes of children

before walking through the intersection.

- You see, that's where I need your help here, all right?

We gotta figure out how to pitch.

Maybe you create like, but then there's also the problem

of if there are cars in the intersection,

when do you throw the salt?

I feel like you could do some detection or some motion,

you get one of those motion things.

- We could figure that one out, a millimeter wave thing

out of there or something that detects

if there's no one in there.

- You can buy a $20 home motion sensor on a thing,

you just wait no motion for like five minutes

and then you just chuck a bunch of salt.

- And then just explode into salt, got it.

- Yep, salt.

- So is this like a device that you attach

onto a stop sign, like it clicks on

and just point it towards the road

and it just starts spewing?

- Yeah, and also there's a bag of salt,

I think attached to it, like a hopper, right?

And you just boom.

- So we need a system to refill these.

So, okay, Uber for stop signs, you can hire people

to go over and refill bags of salt

on your local stop sign or intersection.

- Yeah, and I wonder how much salt you need in a year

to cover a stop sign, little square footage, right?

Like, is it just 50 pounds?

I don't know.

- It could be the stop sign itself,

like really, really thick.

You only need to see it from one side, right?

So just make it like as deep as it is wide.

It's a big old hopper, battery and thrower arm.

- You're saying replace the stop sign itself and just--

- With a stop sign shaped salt basket box thing, yeah.

- Sure.

- It's a hexagon but deep.

- This is the multi-billion dollar company.

- Octagon, are they octagons?

Oh, that's embarrassing.

I think they're octagons.

- Smart stop sign, wait, no they're, oh, shit.

Guys, like this is our entry into the marketplace.

We start by selling salt throwing stop signs

and then we become the number one distributor

of all things signs.

- Smart signs.

- I thought you were gonna say all things salt.

- They have salty signs.

That'll be our, there it is.

- The salt market can't be that saturated, right?

- I can't think of a more niche market.

- It's all a bunch of like

Department of Transportation government,

like state government people, right?

There's probably some room for disruption.

- So that's the marketing strategy.

- Well, like you said, you need someone

to replace the salt in these things, right?

So if we're selling the device,

we might as well be selling the replacement, right?

The less work on the end of our customer.

- I like Scott's distributed Uber idea

where like you just hire,

you encourage people in the local community

to go to their own Ace Hardware, buy a bag,

put it in their local on the end of their street

and charge them like five bucks more

than whatever it cost them.

- Yeah, honestly.

- People can make a little extra cash.

- Yeah, people would do that.

The problem is it's gonna be hard to tell

what they're putting in it.

They could just be dumping in gravel

or like taking a shit inside the thing.

No one would know.

- Yeah, that's true.

If people are willing to go around

and charge bird and lime scooters for pennies, right?

- They put salt in.

- Yeah.

- As I'm sure Russell is completely unaware,

stop signs are a natural target for juvenile delinquents.

- It's that Juvie startup, isn't it?

(laughing)

Damn Juvie startup.

- Well, that is true.

So we gotta make a smart sign that's also like,

shoot salt at kids.

- Yes, it's self-defense.

Turn a bug into a feature.

- Yeah, that's it.

- If it gets spray painted.

- Child repellent stop signs.

- Yeah, have you seen those guns

that you can spray like bugs, flies with?

- Oh, the Schultz shotguns.

- Yeah, excuse me, you wanna run that again?

- The Schultz shotguns.

- Yeah, you just have that built in.

I think that uses table salt.

There's probably some,

I don't think you can just chuck the like coarse pebbles

at kids.

- I mean, yeah, you'd have to grind it up a little bit

before you throw it at the children.

- A little bit.

- But I think you could hire the same.

(laughing)

- Table salt only.

- You gotta, it's just the ethical thing to do.

- So you take the,

so you know the people that like change the garbage cans

throughout the winter time, throughout the city?

- I think you just get those same people

to fill those salt bags.

You already have the workforce.

- Oh, I've got it.

- I hear, I'm ready.

- You know, the mid air refueling of a jet?

You've got that sort of thing dangling off the back,

but it's the salt trucks. - From the salt trucks.

- Yes, they go around when they're sitting in the stop sign,

they have a little hopper,

they just sort of pour off the side

into the hopper for a minute and boom.

Now that's set for another week.

- Because the place we need more congestion

is at the stop sign.

(laughing)

- That's true.

- You know how many Apache helicopters sit around all day,

not filling up bags of salt?

- So true.

- It's a waste of taxpayer money, honestly.

- Yeah, you take the same helicopters

that drop a bunch of water at like flaming forests.

- Yeah, and give them a purpose.

- To fill salt bags.

- I've always said,

what are all those helicopters even doing?

- Yeah.

- Okay, so what if instead of like a conveyor belt system

that you gotta sit at the stop sign and wait for,

if it had like a claw bucket thing,

but you've got that filled with salt

and as it drives by, it just releases and then retracts

and it's just a quick moment, right?

They've got a hopper up top.

- Right, and you only need to do this like once a,

what, once every couple hours?

Whatever the salt to snow ratio is, you just,

I mean, you can't have somebody

occupying a stop sign all day.

(laughing)

Or a bunch of cars, maybe.

I'm no civic engineer.

- Never driven through Florida, have you?

(laughing)

- That's true.

- Well, thank you for your contribution to public safety.

(upbeat music)

- All right, Leo, let's hear what you got this week.

- All right, so back, I don't even know how many years ago,

early days of Reddit, like late 2000s, early 2010s,

there was a wonderful little niche website

and it was a bunch of nefarious, not nefarious,

what's the word I'm looking for?

Mischievous server admins who had built a phone line

in their company's phone tree system

where they could transfer callers to this number.

And that phone extension was a robot

and it would pick up and it would play a recording.

And it was a recording of an old man saying,

"Hello, this is Lenny."

And they had recorded a bunch of sound clips of this guy,

this old man, just answering with non-answers,

like, "Say some more about that.

I think I've heard about that."

Or, "Someone called last week.

Could you tell me more about that?

I think that might've been you."

And it was just these, keep them talking clips.

And all that the robot did was wait for silence on the line

and play a random clip.

So after it said, "Hello, this is Lenny,"

they just waited for the person to stop talking

and then they would prompt them to continue talking.

And it was to transfer scam calls or annoying spam

that you didn't wanna deal with.

So someone would call them and say,

"Hi, I'd like to sell you my white paper."

And the company would say,

"Oh yeah, you wanna talk to Lenny?"

And then they would transfer it to Lenny

and they would record the call.

And the subreddit was just filled

with these angry telemarketers and scammers

and stuff getting increasingly frustrated

as they talked to Lenny.

I've always admired this idea.

It went away a few years ago.

I don't think it's around anymore, but the idea has died.

- I think Comcast bought that, if you ever called them.

- Now that's how they run their customer service,

I think, yeah.

I just don't wanna see it die.

And I think it deserves to be revived in a consumer product.

So I would pay to have an app on my phone

or to have a hardware appliance

that I could plug into a phone line at my office

that does essentially this.

I think with the era of social media

and algorithmic feeds and stuff becoming,

this is ripe for TikTok content.

This is ripe for automatically posting to YouTube

in a way that it was sort of like Kludgy.

You'd have to go to their old website before

and like stream MP3s.

And it was a little bit clunky.

I think you could totally turn this

into like a commoditized business.

You could have large language models generating the scripts

based off of the keywords that they're saying.

You could have really convincing text to speech

done on the fly so it didn't have to be prerecorded.

There's all kinds of stuff that has improved

in the last 10 years

that could really make this next level.

- What an incredible way to combat spam calls too.

Like you were saying, you have an app on your phone

that you just, whenever you're in a phone call,

there's just always a button that you can transfer to Lenny

or it'll just answer, "Is Lenny to start?"

And then if they can get past Lenny,

then you can answer, "Oh, that's probably a bad one actually."

(laughs)

- This is amazing.

I think this is like the most,

I can't wait for a spam call kind of thing

where you're excited to get a spam call

so I can transfer them.

- Yes!

- I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait."

So you could even gamify it

and have like the app have leaderboards

with how long you kept someone on the line

or how many calls you got this week, right?

- Dude, this is a free service too

'cause you just generate content.

Like if you're providing the call screening or whatever,

you just generate all that content,

make so much money off of like spam callers

and you change, you get like five or six voice models

so people, when it becomes popular,

because it's definitely 100% amazing,

you have to change the voices, right?

So it's like totally doable.

- I'll do you one better too.

Instead of doing an app thing, okay?

You get a phone number,

you just put the contact in your phone

and you just tell the telemarketer,

"Hey, give me one second.

"I get my boss or somebody else on the line."

You call the other number, merge the calls, leave, boom.

- Sure.

(laughs)

- That's it, you just do the merge call

and then you can listen in while it's happening

or just let it ride.

- Just go about your day.

- Yeah.

- Well, I like the idea of shortening the process somehow.

I like just being able to click a button

on this app or something

because the thing that you're providing to people with this

is joy, right?

Schadenfreude of someone else's suffering.

It doesn't mean you're getting less spam calls.

I would not use this if I had to pick up and say,

"Let me transfer you to Lenny every single time."

I would absolutely click a button

knowing that the person on the other end

is going to experience some amount of suffering.

(laughs)

- Honestly though, that's the best way

you're supposed to deal with spam calls.

Like outside of just not answering,

you can just waste their time.

The more time you waste to them,

the better it is for everyone.

- You're a hero.

Every time you use the app, you're a hero.

You are.

- That's how we would phrase the leaderboard, right?

This is how much time you saved someone else

of having to talk to a telemarketer.

- 100%.

- I love the idea of a leaderboard, by the way.

- It's like the Kit Boga effect,

but you're making a million Kit Bogas.

The streamer who keeps and wastes spam callers

and scammers' time.

Yeah, you're making hundreds of them, an army of them.

Yeah.

- Amazing concept.

- If we launched this during the,

what was it, like, "Waste His Time 2020" or whatever.

- What's that?

- I don't know that one.

- Just about girls wasting annoying guys' time.

It doesn't matter.

(laughs)

- Oh, it's like a hashtag trend.

- Are you in the middle of this, Anthony?

Are you like in the middle of being hashtags right now?

- Right.

- No comment.

(laughs)

- That was a big swig there, Anthony.

- So you're worried about,

"Oh, we could combine this with the rejection hotline."

You remember that back in the day?

There was a phone number you could memorize

and you'd give it out at a bar

if you didn't want someone to have your actual number

and say, "Hi, you've reached the rejection hotline.

"The person you gave you this number,

"they don't want to add their number."

- Totally rejects you.

- Yeah, exactly.

So we have that, but interactive, real-time,

large-language model powered with AI.

(laughs)

- This is the definition of chaotic good.

- I love it.

- You know, you could just put this number

on a bunch of different,

like you just Google free iPad.

And you just, you know, if you ever Googled free iPad.

So back in my day, when I didn't like somebody,

I would go and search free iPad

and type in, fill out the form for this person

so their email would just be bombarded with spam

for the rest of their life.

Like it's unavoidable at that point.

(laughs)

You just do that with this phone number

and it's chaotic evil. - What could someone

have done to you that deserves

that unbalanced response?

- Well, honestly, a little bit of mild...

(laughs)

It takes-- - Mild annoyance.

- A mild annoyance, yeah.

It honestly takes you like 30 seconds to Google it

and then typing the email

and ruin somebody's email forever.

- For the rest of their-- - Any truck that has a,

"How's my driving?"

Russell has entered that number into it.

- For a good time call.

- That's another idea.

We can just do that.

Free iPads.

- We're already almost to this Lenny idea

with Google Assistant's latest thing, Built into Pixels,

where you can have it answer for you.

And it seems like they're right on the...

If we could somehow hijack

that existing phone interception transcription system

to expand it from the few pre-programmed phrases

to something this big, man,

we're like 95% of the way there, right?

- Google knows too.

Every time it'll say, "90% chance of spam call incoming.

"We do not recognize this number.

"We've known this has been spam before."

Just any time, any chance of that comes in,

send it to Lenny.

- I have someone in my life

who is a vulnerable population to be scammed

and they lost a ton of money to scammers

about six months ago.

And it was heartbreaking.

And I just, I think this is the perfect chaotic good,

like you said, a way to fight back against the industry

and make it not worth their time as much anymore.

- Especially if you get that grassroots movement

where just I would contribute my phone

to receive calls to that in order to spam other people.

And if enough people started doing that,

it would just waste enough time

that maybe the spam calls aren't worth it anymore.

- That's the dream.

- That's the dream.

- The fun part about Lenny

was that it was a really old sounding guy

who was clueless, right?

So the people on the other end would take their time

and repeat stuff and all that.

You could totally leverage that to be like,

all of the voices that you have are old

and sound like vulnerable in their program to say,

"Yeah, I could buy gift cards."

And things like that,

that really keep them on the line and waste their time.

And we can make it a game.

- What if you created like this

to give to those people with grandparents

and say, "Hey, if you ever get a spam call,"

not a spam call, they don't know, right?

It's just like, "If ever Microsoft calls you or whatever,

send them to my friend Lenny."

My friend Lenny, here's his number.

You just say, "Call this guy."

And now they're redirecting all those calls too, right?

Literally.

- Said, "Press the big red button, grandma."

- I mean, you could even do it without a button press

like Scott was saying.

Google is fairly okay at detecting these sorts of things.

Now, if you said to your grandparent or whatever,

"Hey, let me have your phone for a second.

I can just download something

and you'll never get a spam call again in your life," right?

And they didn't have to even interact with it in any way.

And that could be their experience.

- Like a good grandson. - That sounds awesome.

We get a game on entertainment out of it.

They get protected.

Yeah, sort of like how Google has those advanced protections

that you can turn on if you're a celebrity

or a journalist or whatever.

It'll force you to have MFA

and really strict requirements for how to log in and stuff.

You can optionally enable, like, "I feel more at risk.

Like people are going to try to do phishing attacks

at me more."

You do that, but for the vulnerable people in your life

where you say, "Hey, I'm pretty sure this person's

not going to need to talk to random salesmen and stuff.

They only really call these five numbers.

Anyone else who's not in their contacts

or anyone else who's a new number to them or whatever,

just automatically send it this way."

And then they don't understand why they never heard back

from the landscaper that they called. (laughs)

- Yeah, it just seems like this needs to, like, wow.

We need to have something that stops this spam call thing.

At least for the vulnerable population,

I think there's enough people out here that, like, get it.

They know when a spam call is coming.

I'd never answer a call, basically,

if it's not on my contact list, right?

So it's-

- Even if it is. (laughs)

- Well, yeah, I'd let it go to voicemail.

And if they leave a voicemail, you know,

everybody's got their own process to, like, vet a spammer.

- If it's really urgent, I'll text them back tomorrow.

(both laugh)

- Yeah, or, like, you just send them a text message

and it's, "Oh, this is a landline number."

Well, you're full of shit, right?

Just goodbye. (laughs)

- Right.

- So, no one has landlines.

Dude, I just think the leaderboards are, like,

there's gotta be, like, the best content.

Maybe there's a way to get the community to vet

and listen to all these calls,

'cause you're gonna have so many calls.

Like, how do you vet the content?

- Really, I think you're supposed to inform someone

if they're being recorded on a phone line,

but we can work around that.

- It depends on the state, actually.

Some states are two-party consent,

where both have to say they agree to be recorded,

and some, I believe, like Michigan,

are one party has to consent.

- So, can we transfer to, like, a Michigan phone number

or, like, a Nevada one or something?

Is there an equivalent of VPNing yourself

into another state so it's legal to record it?

- That's interesting.

- 'Cause you're the one who merged the calls, quote-unquote.

Lenny lives in Nevada. - The data center's

over in Detroit, yeah, right.

- Well, who's doing the recording, right?

If it's our company doing the recording,

maybe if we're just headquartered somewhere, right?

It's not the person with the phone

who's doing the recording, right?

This is an automated app. - Right, right.

The data center's in Guam. (laughs)

It's fine.

- With all this AI power, like,

Lenny could be your, like, buffer.

If Lenny detects, like, wait,

this might actually be an important call,

I'm gonna transfer you to the person.

- Totally. - Oh, yeah.

- I mean, that's kinda how the Google one works, right?

- It's exactly how it is, except it's just a harder boss

you gotta get through now.

His name is Lenny.

- Can you imagine meeting somebody and be like,

hey, if Lenny picks up my phone,

just say operator, like, five times.

(laughs)

It'll come to me.

Say this passkey.

- Yeah, right.

Tango, alpha, bravo, yeah.

Well, big ups to the guys who invented Lenny.

We'll put their information in the show notes

if you'd like to hear more Lenny calls

from back in the day.

It was a good time.

(upbeat electronic music)

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

- So I was walking my dog the other day

and I ran into a guy with a metal detector.

And I've always been fascinated by them,

but I really don't know anything about metal detecting

as a hobby or hardware.

And the more I was talking to him,

the more I was thinking, like, this is a lot of work,

him just walking around looking for random things

and covering all the ground he covers

he has to physically walk, right?

Can we combine a metal detector and a drone?

I'm gonna take the base part of metal detector,

there's a bunch of simple hardware for that,

put enough power into that guy,

put it on a drone with a pre-conditioned GPS grid on it,

bring it to a beach or a field or something

and just let it go.

It goes in a grid pattern throughout the field

and then comes back to you with like,

I found something potential here, here, here, and here,

go take a look.

Or maybe it'll circle back on those spots

and get a clearer picture on it.

The technology's all there for all of these parts.

It's all, there's so many open source things

for autonomous flying drones and pathing,

metal detectors, you can get them tiny nowadays

after talking to this guy,

it would not be hard to get something

that a drone could lift and go through.

That is a pitch, it is just literally

gluing two pieces of hardware together and then some code.

- Totally.

Does it have to be a flying drone?

I mean, why can't it be like an RC car?

- I think it's cooler flying.

(laughing)

- I like 10 minutes of battery life.

- I was gonna say, you're gonna Roomba the beach.

- Roomba the beach!

- Yes.

- It's like, sell this idea to iRobot, yeah.

- Honestly though, a ground one is a pretty good idea.

- It's already having to drag on the ground, right?

- Yeah, it's gotta be, that's the problem he was saying,

it's gotta be as close to the ground as possible

so you'd have to have some kind of object detection

if you're flying.

- You heard him tell you,

it has to be as close to the ground as possible

and thought, yes, let's make it fly.

- Let's make it fly.

- Well, okay, I'm just picturing on beaches mostly,

like you have essentially level terrain.

- Dude, yeah, you attach like 10 and you drag it behind,

I don't know, like a pull mower and just drags across

and every time it beeps, you drop a smoke bomb or something

and it just, it goes off and you have your fleet of people.

- I kinda like that.

- All right.

- This smoke bomb, it drops a little marker or something.

- Yeah, the orange posts.

- Honestly, the easy thing would probably just be a tablet

and it just pings like, hey, in this location,

here's the Google map of it, super zoomed in

and then you come back with a real metal detector,

but it's just saving you time from covering all this ground.

You could, hell, you could do Minesweeper with this.

Oh, crap. - They recently found a--

- That means the military probably has done this,

haven't they?

(laughing)

- They recently found a ship in the Great Lakes

that was pretty well preserved

using a similar technique, right?

Where they were kind of scanning broadly

and then once they found a few promising echoes

from whatever sonar they were using--

- Oh, just boats going back and forth?

- I think so, yeah.

They knew that it was somewhere in these,

whatever, square kilometers.

They went back and forth

until they found a couple of promising leads

and they did more detail on those spots.

Makes sense.

- Well, since the time I talked to this guy,

I haven't found any benchmarks of this yet,

so this would be a lot of fun to try to make.

- Would be.

- Sell it to hobbyists or the US military, apparently.

- You know, there's a ton of people

that lose their rings on beaches, right?

And you just, like, people would pay insane amounts of money

to find their wedding ring or something.

So you just sell this service,

you buy 30 and you sweep the beach, man, with this thing.

- That's the thing, you only need one, though.

It's like Anthony said, it's a Roomba.

Like, when it's done, it'll go back and recharge

and then continue on forever.

- Solar-powered on a beach?

(laughing)

- I wonder if you could pitch this

as like an environmentalist thing, right?

Like maybe the park service would pick these up, right,

as a way to clean up beaches.

- Totally.

- Oh my God, I left it on the beach.

I can't find my gun.

(laughing)

- That's an environmental hazard.

- Dude, this is so funny 'cause it's like,

metal detecting that hobby is just like spelunking, man.

It's like, oh, I'm searching.

It's like a treasure hunt

and you just take all the joy out of it,

just rip it out of it,

and just turn it into a commodity.

- Systematic automation.

(laughing)

- It's like, oh, you do metal detecting?

You mean those robots that go up and down the beach?

You do that by hand?

What the hell?

- That covers the whole beach in about eight minutes?

No, I used to spend all day doing it.

- Drops 30 markers per second, you know?

(laughing)

- Well, the beach-going population

is really gonna love you.

There aren't gonna be any rednecks

taking pop shots at your thing.

- Your low-flying drone.

- Blasting their family with microwaves.

- Skimming your ankles.

- And whatever they think.

- Lacerating feet.

- I don't wanna be on the implementation team

as the guy in charge of writing the Arduino code

to light smoke bombs on fire.

(laughing)

You can write that code.

- Strike match.

Chat, GBT, write me code to launch smoke bombs on my drone.

- Autonomous smoke, we promise they're just smoke bombs.

Federal government.

- Yeah, the military definitely hasn't

had any of that technology, right?

Dropping bombs on a drone.

- We're like 9/10 of the way there

to a military robot for sure.

- Hey, that's how we go to market.

You know, that's how every great business starts.

You detect--

- As a military robot?

- Yeah, you just start, you do something snitchy,

and then all of a sudden the military's like,

we want that for ourselves.

Do not sell this.

- We have a drone that detects people

that drops little capsules of Agent Orange on the beach.

(laughing)

- Right.

- Gotta be careful with how you phrase it, though,

'cause you'll put it in a different tax bracket

if you say smoke bomb.

It's gotta be smoke extruder or something.

- Smoke marker.

- Yeah.

- Smoke marker, there it is.

- I am curious how much people would pay

for how much people do pay for when they lose their ring

on a beach or whatever, and they go up and down.

- Man, I love that, though.

Just like an Uber system or whatnot, you lose it.

Oh, I don't know how you would get enough people

to know that, hey, there's a service

that you can find your ex that you lost on a beach,

and someone will come out to the beach and find it for you.

- Oftentimes local metal scouting clubs

will just do it for fun, for altruism.

- Yeah. - Just sweet.

- Well, they're all gonna be out of business

with our drone now.

- What's the target market?

Is this like a service that we provide

to people who lost things?

Because the guys who are treasure hunting on the beach

are all retired dudes who are 60 who have nothing better

to do, they like the monotony of it.

I can see if there's some inherent joy

in piloting a drone.

- There's one guy, Scott, who believes

that this is a great hobby as long

as he doesn't have to do anything.

I hear what you're saying.

Most people who wanna get into this wanna do the thing, yeah.

- But now they can do it just in cover more ground at once

by an order of magnitude.

- You just have to have them drinking a margarita

in the commercial, and people will instantly understand

the appeal of not having to do the work themselves.

- Well, okay, you ever see like those,

like in movies where they make out the rich people

to be like, "Hey, we're gonna go take you hunting,"

and they just put them up in a tower

and they're shooting pigs that run by or something?

We're doing that exact same thing.

We are having a drone go out and marking the spots

on the beach where there's 99% chance metal,

and then they still go out with their metal detector

and they still get to dig the thing up

and have all the pleasure of that,

but just without the majority of the work.

All the fun, none of the work.

- Just fish in a barrel, right?

It's just fish in a barrel.

- Every sport has their purists that say,

"Oh, the new technology's making it

"not what it used to be," right?

Well, it just drops markers.

You have to go do the last step and detect it,

just like you have to go find the deer

that you've immobilized with your drone and then shoot it.

(laughing)

- Our target market is the guys

who shoot sedated lions.

- Yes, exactly, same person.

- Hey, it's okay, though, 'cause they have the most money.

- You're getting ahead of yourself.

- That's my pitch.

(laughing)

- You just said that as an off-chip cuff,

but hunting with drones?

Is that gonna be a thing in the future?

Are we just gonna release drones into the woods

and they just take down deer and you gotta go retrieve them?

- That's awful. - I would be...

- That's horrifying.

- Oh, I was about to say.

- Did you just say, "I would do it"?

(laughing)

Or else it's like I would--

- I would actually enjoy hunting if it was like,

"Whoa, I'm gonna go robot flying."

- First-person piloting and chasing down,

okay, yeah, that does count as hunting.

- I think the tech community is missing out on hunting

until today.

- The first-person viewer--

- Bird to prey simulator.

- Not a big overlap, maybe.

- Yeah, just gotta be careful

with the whole human hunting thing,

but outside of that, it's fine.

(laughing)

- We made a great tool for predators in the woods.

- I was gonna say, before we were at 95% military robot,

now you're at 99.8%, you know?

(laughing)

- With just a little bit of serial killer

making up that last 1%.

(upbeat music)

(gun firing)

- All right, Anthony, what is an idea

that you would love to try, but just don't have time for?

- Well, that's the thing.

So I don't have any ideas,

which is why I went to Twitter.

And so I'm gonna give you guys

a little bit of a challenge this week, right,

of taking this god-awful idea

and making it not horrible somehow.

All right, do you mind if I read,

I'm not gonna mention the guy's name,

but do you want me to,

is it okay if I read the tweet verbatim?

- Oh, yeah, please do.

- Okay.

There is a massive unmet demand in the USA for servants.

Mega opportunity for anyone who can figure out new

and non-icky forms of domestic service

for the American mass affluent.

You have people earning 500,000,

resentfully doing their own laundry

and loading the dishwasher.

He goes on to say,

this shows the core frustration of mass affluence.

You can eat berries flown from Peru,

buy new clothes every week,

drive a 6,000 pound luxury vehicle,

but there is no one to do anything for you.

No one else is poor enough to really serve you.

Okay, so.

- Interesting.

Uber for servants?

- So obviously the service industry

is bigger than it's ever been, right?

You can have someone buy your groceries for you,

you drive you places, you have chauffeurs,

you have people, you know.

- Personal assistants.

- I mean, maid servants have been a thing for forever,

but these guys really want to recapture the experience

of like Victorian era royalty

or like a Southern plantation owner, right?

So like, how do we recapture some of that experience

and resell it to the ultra rich in America?

I have one idea, but I want to hear what you guys have.

- You know, somebody said like Uber Eats,

like you pay, it's like a distributed servitude model,

right?

I pay for DoorDash, we do daycare,

we do like cleaning services.

It all costs money and it's all just disjointed, right?

So you're kind of saying a servant

would do all those things.

This is so bad.

A servant or whatever you call it, right?

Like instead of hiring all these distributed services,

you get a bundle with one person and you save money, right?

Like is that, who goes and picks up your taco bell

at 2 a.m.?

- Seems like the closest modern incarnation of this

is just the personal assistant, right?

You have your business or your personal life,

have the person who manages and coordinates

all those different disparate services for you.

How is that different?

- I feel like you could make this

into a full-time thing though.

Like one quote unquote servant is shared between

four or five different people

and their full-time gig is just running around doing the,

it's like submitting something to IT,

like you make a ticket or your app,

all it would have to make is a ticket.

Do my laundry, clean my kitchen.

- Remember Cha-Cha?

When you were gonna text questions in

and it was like distributed human answers?

You almost want that but for like, yeah.

- Pre-internet.

- Well, it was like early internet, yeah.

- Or pre-cell phone.

- People were texting, that was the main interface

with Cha-Cha and you could be like,

hey, I wanna find this product, can you help find me?

Or I want to get an answer to this question

and it's kind of hard to Google for it, what do you got?

And research this for me and they would charge hourly.

Yeah, I love the ticket idea.

It's almost like personal assistance as a service.

You give them your logins for your Uber Eats

and you give them permission to schedule a maid for you

and a chimney cleaning and whatever the hell else you need.

And then yeah, you reach out to them

who does all of it for you.

- Is this just--

- That's awesome.

- But is it miserable enough?

Does it really capture that feeling

of having power over someone?

- Can you sell that as a service?

- We're thinking too practically, aren't we?

- Is that the selling point?

Is that what they were going for in the tweet?

- Misery as a service.

- It's clearly what this guy wants

that he feels is missing from, all right,

here's my pitch, right?

Airbnb, Airbnb but with live-in servants,

selling the servant experience in small quantities of time.

- Oh, so I don't pay anything

and I get to live in some rich person's house,

I just have to do their--

- Well, you still book it like a regular,

well, yes, if you're the employee, right?

So here's how we make it not icky, right?

We, instead of these Airbnb investors

taking housing off the market,

we are providing housing to other people

who act as live-in servants, right?

Who then play act this class position

for the amusement of the ultra wealthy.

- Yeah. - Whoa.

You know what's funny?

I think people would sign up for this, right?

- I can just picture and check it out on your Airbnb

like amenities, fast internet, hot tub, live-in servant.

- Yes, I'm gonna filter by that.

But at the same time, I know people that are,

they will be terrified of booking an Airbnb

if they have to interact with the host

'cause they're so socially scared

of talking to another human being.

- But how much money do those people have?

The ultra wealthy, our target market,

has no social qualms at all.

- That is an excellent--

- Do you think the ultra wealthy want to leave their homes

and go to another place?

I feel like you could do exactly what you just pitched

but it comes to you.

Like live-in servant for the weekend, rental,

servant rental.

They'd come, they'd stay in a sleeping bag in your basement.

They--

- That sounds pretty geeky.

- But I don't know, how many people had to go to Applebee's

during 2020 in order, you know?

Like if you get to feel that kick,

you will go anywhere.

- Okay, in the ultra, super ultra wealthy,

like this is like LA,

everybody's got multi-million dollar houses.

- Yeah, tell us what it's like, Russell.

- Well, my brother lives out there but that's all I know.

I mean, listen, if you think about it,

the housing, it's like, all right,

if I work six hours a day

and you have four live-in servants in one house

and I get to live in some sick-ass mansion

and we just rotate.

It's just like me and three other dudes doing,

like I don't know what the servant work's gonna entail

but I hope it's just like cleaning dishes,

like washing, cleaning the pool,

washing the windows, whatever, right?

I mean, and it's, I don't know what the cost is.

Am I gonna have to pay rent

or am I just like working for six hours a day

to pay off rent, which shoot,

I mean, rent in certain areas is pretty pricey, right?

You just think about like,

I can live in a sick-ass mansion

in incredible property for just six hours a day

and then you can go work another job

or something to get paid.

I don't know, it's just,

there's like, maybe not full-on servitude

but like work for rent in like killer spots.

Like, imagine you work for like freaking a celebrity

that you like love.

Like, I think there are celebrities

that would just like have servants

'cause they're like, I would do anything for you.

Like, not that we want that,

not that we wanna encourage that crazy,

that's where Anthony is here to--

- We did say icky in the title.

- That's right, it's pretty icky, right?

- Not icky. - Not icky.

- We want it to be not icky.

- Oh, is that what you're going for?

- So I mean like, you know, just like six hours a day,

I just need you to be available.

I need you to pick up groceries or whatever, right?

- Is this where the housing market is leading us nowadays?

You can't own a house,

you just gotta be a servant in someone else's.

- That is the return to feudalism

that I think this Twitter user

really wants us to aspire to.

- I mean, if there's no demand or market for it,

then fine, but I think there are people out there

that'd be like, yeah, I'll trade six hours

of my life to live in.

- There must be enough people in this world

that have an extra spare bedroom

that would be like, I would have someone live here

if I didn't have to see them much,

but they cleaned up after me all the time.

I think you're onto something.

- Well, let me throw this out there too,

'cause you know, we'll rent like a really nice place

for us to go out to as a group, right,

for a weekend or whatever.

What if we replaced, you know, the service fee,

the cleaning fee with this servant fee, right?

And these guys just like lived in an adjacent property.

We wouldn't even have to interact with them that much,

but we would just dodge that ridiculous extra fee

that Airbnb is so infamous for, right?

We just pay the servant fee up front

and we don't have to deal with any of the cleanup ourselves.

- Servant fee.

(laughing)

- I love this.

- We might need to change some of the wording

and branding on this, but I really do love it.

- While you're there for the weekend,

they can do your taxes.

(laughing)

- Submit a ticket.

- It's like, how far are we from like Alexa

and Google Home being able to do this?

Like Alexa, clean my dishes,

and then 30 minutes later, TaskRabbit sends out a dude

or gal to wash, literally clean my dishes and then go home.

Like, are we there?

I think we might be there already.

Forget the whole live in servant aspect, right?

And just like, could I just get my like...

- I think you're right though.

Like, it'll be like on Rover,

if you have a dog where you kind of,

you do an initial meet and greet,

like, okay, you're a sane person,

I trust you to be in my house and walk my dog

and take care of things.

Like, you do that, the meet and greet with your servant,

and then you can just forever rely on them for anything.

Here's a key to my, or access to my house,

here's the tickets going through.

- Dude, but you don't even need

like a vetting servant process.

It could just be, I don't know,

when you have a five-star Uber rating for like 1,000.

I mean, like if you have 1,000 people

that you've Uber drove for people

and you have a five-star rating,

like, you kind of just,

I mean, you trust anybody to drive you.

Like, driving is the most dangerous thing

you could possibly do,

and you're just trusting literally randos

in their crappy cars to drive you across town in a city.

Like, why can't they wash my dishes or do my laundry?

I mean, that seems way less risky.

Sure, they're coming into my home, right?

Oh no.

But like, what, I don't know.

There's just like a little bit of,

how are we that, what's the trust issue?

Let's solve for that, you know?

Try it for, this idea is insane,

but I'm starting to get more and more convinced

by its potential.

- There is someone out there who would do this.

There are people out there who would not,

but there are a lot of people who would.

- There are people doing this already.

They just don't want to have the relationship

with the one-on-one person.

The whole servant aspect is the actual,

I mean, sure, if you want to be--

- That's the X factor.

- That's the X factor.

I mean, if you're a jack of all servant trades,

I guess you could just go into,

if I do jack of all servants,

but lean into it, I guess.

If I do DoorDash and then I do Uber

and then I do TaskRabbit,

it's like, at some point,

why not just streamline the whole process,

cut out the middleman,

and just be the one-on-one family person?

- Yeah, it's a cable bundle,

but for all of the different services that you do.

- The servant word is the problem here, right?

If somebody who's listening to this show

and is thinking about canceling us,

can you make sure that when you cancel us,

you just come up with a better word than servant

in your tweet or your, I don't know,

YouTube rant or whatever?

Just add the one element,

like, what would be a better word than servant?

So, plug.

- I really like the jack of all trades servant thing.

Maybe we can reclaim that, right?

I can see someone putting in their Twitter bio,

top 1% servant on whatever our service is called.

- I mean, is it TaskRabbit?

It sounds terrible, but maybe we need to,

maybe this is a whole societal issue,

but TaskRabbit's basically like,

I'll pay 30 bucks for somebody to do this random thing.

Are we not the ultra wealthy to some extent

if we're paying somebody 30 bucks to mow our lawn?

- Hang a picture.

- Oh, right.

- It's just, who is the ultra wealthy at that point?

We're just mildly inconvenienced people.

I think inconvenience is becoming a commodity,

because if you think about it, driving, anything,

it's a commodity, inconvenience, right?

So, I mean, if I'm gonna pay an extra $30

to have buffalo wild wings delivered to my home,

it's just like, am I really that strapped for time?

And like, come on.

- You know, I would love to be a part,

and even a small part of the hit piece

that eventually comes out, right?

The reason why our generation can't buy homes

is because you're hiring too many goddamn servants.

(laughing)

- Millennials are ruining everything.

- We might be starting a movement on this podcast.

Like, are we all servants?

Are we all servants to somebody, right?

- Wow, so true.

- That's the evils of capitalism,

and that's really the point that I wanted to get across

on your, what is this, investment show?

(laughing)

- Whoa, you know, you're not wrong, psychology man, Anthony.

Like, psychology.

- Capitalism is evil.

Thank you very much for listening to our pitches

on Business Startup Show.

We hope you enjoyed yourself this evening.

And thank you, Anthony, for being with us tonight.

This was a lot of fun.

- Pleasure to be here.

If the guests request me again, I will show up anytime.

- Oh, delightful.

We will definitely have you back.

Our website is Spitball.show.

Please stop on by.

That's where you can find out the latest episodes

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about how the word servant is not okay

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