- I'm Scott.

- I'm Russell.

- And I'm Leo.

This is Spitball.

Welcome to Spitball, where three antique adventurers 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, I am so beyond excited to welcome Alec to our show.

Alec is a YouTuber with-- I'm coming up on 3 million subscribers.

He is a heat pump enthusiast, car guy, tech guy, appliance guy, explainer of all things old and new tech.

Alec, welcome to Spitball.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for having me.

This is going to be so much fun.

So as we do every week, I love to start us off with a warm-up game.

And inspired by the many things that I've learned over the years from Alec and his incredible channel, Technology Connections.

I should ask, Alec, where do we find Technology Connections?

- YouTube.com/technologyconnections?

Or are you asking me a different question?

[LAUGHTER] - Where do you find-- where do you live, Alec?

[LAUGHTER] - Somewhere near Chicago.

- Yeah, let's go.

- Inspired by the many things I've learned over the years, I've written a game that I'm going to call Groover, Cruiser, or Hoover.

So in this one, we've kind of drifted away over the years from fun brand names for stuff like Trinitron.

What an incredible thing you could just buy off the shelf 30 years ago, right?

And now we have the CX9 or whatever.

So this week I have a list of a bunch of fantastic brand names from the 40s to the 90s of either a Laserdisc player, a car that's usually like a, uh, an antique prototype car or a vacuum cleaner.

And I'm going to give you the names and all you got to do is tell me which of the three it is.

Laser disc, car or vacuum.

If I had given you a name like Mondo, you would say that that is the Electrolux of canister vacuum, of course.

Right.

All right, Alec, you're up first.

The Navy Star.

And spelled like it sounds all one word.

Uh, is that a laser disc player, a car or a vacuum?

Is NAVY?

Yeah.

I'm going to have to go with car.

That was a kid targeted toy, LaserDisc player.

(laughing) I found it on eBay.

I was like, oh yeah, I can see that's like a car set.

- Okay.

- Yeah, exactly.

(laughing) Scott, the Constellation.

- Ah, I'm hoping a LaserDisc player.

- That's a 1950s canister Hoover vacuum, of course.

(laughing) Russell, the FX-Atmos.

The letters FX.

- That's gotta be a audio thing.

So it's LaserDisc.

1954 experimental two-seat rocket car, of course.

Atmos?

No, the FX Atmos.

It sounded like something AV, right?

Yeah.

All right, we're 0 for 3.

Next time through.

Alec, the trilobite.

The trilobite.

I'm going to go with vacuum.

It is.

It was a precursor to the Roomba.

Electrolux made this little like sea bug prehistoric looking Roomba thing back in, geez, I don't even have a date for that.

Alec knew that.

I think you knew that, Alec.

- No.

- You have one of those?

- No, I just thought it kind of like reminded me of a canister vacuum.

And so.

- Totally.

It's adorable.

You guys should look at it.

It's from like the late nineties and it's a big clunky, ugly Roomba.

Scott, the DiscoVision, all one word with a capital V.

- If this is a vacuum, I'm gonna be really mad.

So I'm gonna say Laserdisc.

- It is a Laserdisc player.

Well done, everybody.

It's MCA's launch era branding for their Laserdisc machines.

- And I have one of those.

- Oh, do you really?

Oh, cool.

It's never going to work.

What does it need?

Everything?

Yeah, I mean, you open it up, it looks like a science fair project.

It doesn't look like an actual product.

I've heard the first few years of those LaserDisc players were a little bit shoddy with, yeah.

Russell, the golden rocket.

Two words.

That's a broom, so I'm going to go with vacuum.

An Oldsbo mail 1956 gold fleck coupe.

One more time through.

Alec, the Avalier, A-V-A-L-I-R.

That sounds like a car.

Right?

I think so.

It's a Kirby door-to-door deluxe vacuum.

Whose name sounds like a D&D dragon.

Scott, the Hi-Vision, H-I-Vision.

Definitely not a car.

I'm going to go Laserdisc.

Yeah, it was.

Very good.

The pioneer Laserdisc players.

Yep.

And then lastly, Russell, the Nucleon.

Oh, uh, that's a car.

I'm gonna just go with car.

It was a nuclear powered car by Ford.

Very good.

Nuke.

That sounds like a disaster.

A nuclear disaster.

The 1957 scale model vision of a nuclear powered family car.

Yep.

It had a complete reactor pod where the trunk should be.

I don't know if it ever actually was like functional though.

I think it was very prototype.

Epcot ball.

I saw that in that cut.

Future ride.

Future world ride.

Tomorrowland.

That's right.

I think if I kept track right that Scott you got two out of three and we're the only one to do so.

So that might mean Just keep guessing laser disc for everything.

I think that means you get to go first this week.

What do you got for us bud?

This was probably the hardest game you've ever done Leo.

All right so my idea this week this is based on Alec I watched one of your videos where you reviewed the FLIR 1 thermal camera and I love everything thermal camera wise.

So we use them all the time at our work and I unfortunately am used to very high-end cameras on here and I've everything FLIR is like top of the line going through and I've always wanted one and I had an idea for a business a while ago where pretty much I went on AliExpress and I tried to find like the cheapest thermal camera I possibly could and I bought it and it was an absolute piece of shit just all the way through.

Did not work.

But quick tangent, Russell and I used to do a startup where we would, we took more expensive hardware when we would rent it to people and we created a logistical system where we'd send it to them.

They would use it, they send it back to us.

Always wanted to do that with thermal cameras to the point where you just for home efficiency in general, I'm in the process of buying a house.

The installation on the house is absolute trash.

Every room I go in, I'm like, we're going to have to redo that, redo that.

And I would love to have one of those high-end thermal cameras where I could just point, maybe connected to an app and be like, here's all the ways that you can improve the house.

Here's a simulation of what it could be.

If you put in the insulation, these rooms versus what you're at right now.

And so the idea this week is buy a bunch of nice thermal cameras, not the cheap Aliexpress ones, rent them to customers.

Russell, we're going to use your vibe coding and we're going to create an app that can simulate and do the fancy.

This is what you could get to full on rental system of hardware.

That's what I got.

Okay.

So you're making like a map.

Yes.

Yep.

You're a map on the house.

You're the home.

Exactly.

I have been thinking of insulation nonstop for like the last week and a half ever since this inspection and I'm getting stressed about it.

So I want a thermal camera and I want an excuse to buy one.

This seems like a great one.

Okay.

You're going to have to compete with libraries that let you check them out for free.

So your secret sauce is going to be the mapping part.

I think you could make a fancy pretty enough app and you have to you only this camera can connect with it in some form.

I would think that if there were you could probably create it to know based on the outside temperature basically what heat loss is actually occurring.

And probably it would be pretty possible to kind of like give a potential optimization strategy.

As in like, I have this camera pointed at, I like get a waterproof box for this.

I sit it outside the home and I pointed at it for several hours or overnight or something, and I'm able to see, or are you saying like, I put a camera on a drone, I fly it up to the roof and then I leave it there for X amount of time.

Oh, I was, I was actually thinking from, from the inside of the house, you could look at.

Oh, that makes way more sense.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.

Inside wait, you're saying outside Scott.

I thought he was outside Well, I mean there's there's stuff you can learn from the outside as well, but yeah mostly who's growing weed in your neighborhood But yes, the inside is way more like here's your huge focus areas I mean, I see like probably the doors or like certain areas that are colder, right?

I mean the other way around it probably might be might be easier to get a better picture cuz like interior you have to like do every wall, every window, you need like 30 of those bad boys.

This would just be like four, maybe five.

And you don't need a drone, you can just put one on a flagpole, you know?

You don't need a rental flagpole.

But yeah.

There you go.

Really long flagpole that you carry around your house.

A tenna, you know?

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure that Fleur makes a lightning or a USB-C version for phones too, is that right?

use and yeah it's okay okay really okay that's what I was gonna get it I think iPhones have a lidar and have built-in easy to use software wise API's for like mapping a room that 3d space so it's almost like you could make the software experience for that existing hardware that's more like it's both light are ring to make the map and it's doing the like remembering of the the various heat spots that you've pointed at, you know?

Yeah.

I'll tell you one thing that I would really like to see is the thermal emissivity of different materials affects the accuracy of the reading.

And if there were some way that the app could just intelligently recognize, "I'm looking at vinyl siding, so I need to adjust to this particular value." Totally.

When we, um, when this inspector came into this house, I'm attempting to purchase, I camera he just put it in every room took a picture moved in the next room took a picture next room and like the inspection report was beautiful like i had full 360 shots of everything going through i have not tried to google this but is there a 360 version of a thermal imaging camera and you just you have steps set up and you put that in every room and you take pictures and then maybe russell we go back a couple episodes and we take your box fan idea and we like you ever see that where they they put a box fan on a window and they try to suck all the air out of the house.

And then you can see where cold air is coming into the house from all the leaks everywhere.

- Oh, that's called a blower door test.

- Blower door, that's what it is.

- That's so smart.

- Combine that with a 360 FLIR camera in every room, make an app that makes it stupid easy for people, put it all together.

- Wow, there are a lot of people that pay a lot of money for that, Scott.

The whole energy industry.

- I'm one of them.

- Yeah, the power industry, you might get, you know, targeted on a list.

It's that good.

That's cool.

Yeah, I think if you don't have a three-seated camera, you just get four flurs.

- Tape them all together.

- Tie them together.

Yeah, four different, and that's just it.

You mesh the images together or something.

- A flur and a motor.

- Yeah, that's probably gonna be the easiest way.

- That's a great idea.

- I don't have a great understanding of the lenses in thermal imaging, but I know that they're weird and that's part of why they're so expensive.

- We had at Hope College, we bought a device called a Swivel, S-W-I-V-L.

I don't know if they still make them.

This was over 10 years ago, but it was a little stand that you stuck an iPad in or an iPhone in and it motorized.

The whole dang thing was like a 360 mount and it tracked the person that it was filming for like student teachers.

They'd walk around with a little beacon thing and be like, "Hey, I'm teaching over here." and the camera would kind of follow them and vice versa.

It almost looked like one of those cheap phone holders that you'd get on your desk, but it just was motorized.

You almost need something like that to stick the camera in that's like on a tripod where it just sort of looks around, it takes three minutes and slowly, like a pan, tilt, oom camera, I guess.

That's a very established market.

- Just has one button on it.

Put it in the room, hit button, exit room.

- There you go, it beeps when it's done.

- You could be performance-based almost at that point, Scott.

Performance-based contracting where you're just like yeah, I'll literally cut your heating and cooling bill in a third.

Here's your energy report Here's how much you will end up saving If you would do these steps, we'll take 20% of it.

Yeah Whatever like a year's worth.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the there's a lot of sketchy people Well, I mean there's um, there's some financial services company that you give them you're like Verizon bill and your whatever bill and then they take 20% of whatever money they save but it doesn't cost you anything to use the service You know, so if they can't save you any money, then you don't pay anything.

But if they can save you money then Whatever some person you know talking about.

Yeah trim.

That's what it was That's what business model where like, you know, you give them your before and after of your energy bill And then it doesn't cost the user anything.

That'd be cool Scott.

Yeah, and the rental camera thing, you know flares are so expensive you only need them for like 30 seconds, right?

Yeah, and then you send them back.

- I've been stuck on this, yep.

- Yeah, that's true.

If you could make it as a little kit, people only need this once, maybe per house.

- You could do one in the winter and one in the summer too.

Really double down for those.

- There you go.

You give a coupon for half a bottle.

- The winter one.

- The premium feature is like twice the, you know.

- I mean, it would be useful to have data for both heating and cooling.

I don't know how easy it would be to extrapolate one to the other.

>> All right, Leo, what do you have for us this week?

>> Okay.

So you guys have several times over the last 40 episodes mentioned stumble upon as something that you remember and look back upon fondly.

Stumble upon's key insight.

One of the things that they did really well was they used what's called a bookmarklet.

So along the top where your bookmarks bar is, usually you have those be websites.

But you can also instead bookmark a piece of code.

And when you're on a web page and you press that bookmark, a little bit of code runs.

Parallel to that-- So, park that idea.

Parallel to that, there is, um, the website Rap Genius, which is now called Genius, had this idea years and years ago that I can't get out of my head, where for a minute, when they got all their venture capital money, they really wanted to be the annotation layer on every web page on the web.

They're like, "We can have people commenting about what these rap lyrics mean, what about if we could be on any web page?

They launched it for like a hot minute and then decided, no, we're just gonna stick to music lyrics and then rolled back everything.

And now they don't do that anymore.

I would love to build a service where you're on any web page on the web, the Facebook homepage, that one interesting blog post, that crazy New York Times article, and you press the bookmarklet, the button, and it launches an audio call without leaving that web page with only other people that are currently looking at that webpage.

So it's a discussion chat room thing for whatever it is that you're on.

And the second you leave that webpage, you're no longer in the call anymore.

And it'd be pretty easy to build all this because there's something called web RTC.

So browsers can now talk directly to each other pretty easily without having to like, whatever, there's a bunch of technology reasons why this is now possible where it wouldn't have been 20 years ago.

And I think it would be so cool to be like, wow, this is a really interesting I can't believe that that thing in Iran just happened." Or, "Wow, there's a lot of people who are interested in the front page of whatever today." And you just click this link that's in your toolbar, and boom, you're in a Zoom or Google Meet-like experience, but you haven't left the page.

So you can just discuss with other people, right?

There would be moderation challenges, of course.

Like anyone talking on the internet for any reason.

Yeah, a little dicey, but on the whole I feel like that would be a really like I would try it a chat roulette But topical Omegle sort of thing that's bitch.

Awesome.

Yeah, that's it.

I always love going on Clubhouse.

Yeah I was I was thinking Clubhouse Clubhouse came to mind right away.

But like what is Clubhouse?

It's a bygone Covid project.

Yeah, it was like what is it like a group?

It was like public group audio rooms like public discord - Yeah, it was like the precursor to Twitter spaces, which just ripped it off immediately.

And then-- - So social network where it's all just audio calls.

And some people on the call are able to unmute and some people can only listen.

So live podcast-y kind of.

- Oh, that's cool.

- It was.

It still is around?

Did it finally die?

- Yeah, I don't know.

- It's still around.

I just looked, 'cause I forgot what it was called.

But yeah, I guess this reminds me of Clubhouse.

And then for moderation, that's easy.

You do the hate, like the group boot thing, you know?

Should we boot this?

- Oh, vote?

- Yeah, you know, that's very easy.

You get a certain amount.

- Okay.

- Right?

But I think that's really, that's really interesting.

I think there'd be a lot of people that just be like, wanting to talk about this.

It would bring more discussion that's, I think it's actually got like a social element that's beneficial, you know?

Then leaving a comment on a Discus plugin, right?

Or whatever that's completely anonymous.

Like, this is like the next level.

It's like texting versus phone call.

like that level of difference and intimacy or whatever, like connection, human connection, like that's-- - Yeah, it's easy to be brave in the comments section because you're a username and some typing, right?

But if you're actually hearing the other person's intonation in their voice and stuff, you're probably a little bit less brash.

I mean, you would hope, us salt of the earth Midwesterners would hope.

(laughing) - Yeah.

- You ever go on like the most niche of niche subreddits of just whatever crazy hobby you're into and you always see like two people online, three people online.

It just gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling like there's someone else here with me on this.

I'd like this idea just for that reason.

- The Reddits of the world could build something like this where it's got a button on Twitter, Twitter rips off Meerkat and Clubhouse and all these, right?

Or you've got your Reddit button that says launch audio chat room.

But if this was like across all services in a different separate thing, I feel like it'd be more useful.

I would want to see some, I'm not sure how useful it would be if it was just like random people.

Like I would think people would want to be able to like form some sort of social relationship with other users and how would you envision that working?

- Well, it's launching JavaScript code.

So in theory, you could build your own UI.

You know, when you press the button, it could have something in the corner or whatever.

It doesn't just necessarily have to be invisible.

So you could have a user naming, You could have how many people online indicators and stuff.

You can build as much or as little infrastructure around it as you wanted.

Like imagine you just go to your YouTube channel's homepage and see like 12 people online right now.

Do you wanna join in?

Like that could be interesting, right?

- That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, like if I had a friends list and I saw them discussing a certain article, I'm in.

- Oh, you press the button somewhere and you say like those five people, people that I've friended over the years, right now three of them are over on New York Magazine or whatever, yeah, that's interesting.

- I mean like social, it's like browsing your news, but you're talking about it, that'd be kind of interesting, I don't know.

- I like the idea of like creating a physical space, but like there have to be different subdivisions of it, as in like there's a thousand different bowling alleys that everybody's in.

- Yeah, totally.

- That's good, that's a great analogy.

- Yeah.

- Like a bunch of like, yeah, you're all in the same like room, but different alleys, like group of six or 10 people at a time, right?

That's that's probably how it'll work and then you can rotate your rooms or whatever if you don't like Shuffle me in this pot like I don't like this group anymore The home page of this site could have the top 50 rooms or whatever and maybe there's a max cap of 10 And it sticks you in a random room and you don't get any more than yeah Cuz obviously voice chat gets a little unwieldy when you reach a certain critical mass That recent game you showed us Leo on Steam where it's all about the audio and proximity - VR chat?

No?

- Yes, the one that's coming out from the Untitled Goose Game guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I'm just picturing like an overhead view of like just a bunch of bubbles in this massive bowling alley room.

And you can just kind of move your bubble around to different groups and talk to different groups all about it.

And then you can shift over to this one over here and it's all voice and proximity.

- I did a virtual, I've been doing like a higher ed tech conference every year for 10 years.

And during COVID, we did a virtual thing and there's a site called gather.town that'll do that.

It's basically a top-down, it looks kind of like Pokemon, right, you're controlling a little guy, but it's proximity chat, so you can build little virtual rooms and walk from room to room and hear each other and stuff.

Something like that does already exist, yeah.

- Combine it with yours.

- That's kind of nice, 'cause then if you have somebody screaming, you know, like, just move away.

- Just walk away.

- Go over here.

- Just move away.

Yeah, just walk away.

You could also turn this into a competitive app, You know, like every room has got a debate winner, and they get to move on to the next room.

Who is loudest in this room?

- I have 12 debate bucks or whatever from winning.

How do you win the comment section of a news article?

- Everybody likes to feel like they won, so let's just deemify the heck out of it and throw it into audio.

- What about just minutes spent being productive and having a nice time?

- Whoa.

- No, there has to be a winner.

- Doesn't fuel the internet.

That's, no, the internet doesn't work that way.

- I don't know, I kinda like that.

- Internet and altruism are like rare.

- But can you combine the altruism, ultra, I can't say the word, with just actually gamify that though and make it the more, like you said, the more constructive the conversation you have, the more points you get.

I love that idea.

- How do you quantify that though?

- It's gonna force people, I don't know, have an AI do it in the background.

- The Reddit upvote and the Reddit downvote are supposed to be not, I agree with this opinion, but I think that this person is contributing to the conversation whether I agree to them or not.

There was a thing 20 years ago called Reddit it.

You kinda wanna have the, you know when you're in a call and it has thumbs ups and hearts going by because somebody's liking it hard, you know?

Maybe we could do something like that where it's like, they're being productive even if what you just say is something I disagree with.

I don't know.

- I mean, something like that, that's kinda cool.

incentivize altruism, I guess, you know, I don't know.

Or like, well, maybe it's not altruism.

It's just more like, you may not be the loud, even if you're the loudest voice, you may not be the most popular, but nobody wants to say anything.

Because you're the loudest voice doesn't mean everybody agrees with you.

- Sure.

- I don't know, I just wanted to spin it.

I wanted to throw some.

- All we have to do is just solve how to be good people on the internet.

I'm sure nobody's thought about this problem before.

- I'll tell you one thing you shouldn't do is make it only positive signals.

I think that has never worked and yet we're still trying it Mm-hmm, that's true.

But I feel like starting with audio is a good place to start.

It's harder to hide I guess you'd have the occasional wacko who's like putting soundboard memes and making themselves sound like Darth Vader or whatever But for every one of those you probably would find quite a few people who just want to chat, right?

I mean like Oh Meggle and chat relates still exists, right?

Yeah, those but like there's no thing to talk about It's like going on a first date and seeing a movie first.

So you have the thing to talk about at dinner, you know or like if you're on the Article or the home page of Facebook or whatever it is that people want to meet up and chat about then you have something to Discuss, you know, do I love it?

I love it even if like influencers did that like you could become you could create news influencers instead of That would be like really good interpreters of their own like news articles or something.

Like I really like the way this guy interprets News right right now.

I just interpret it by myself, right?

I just read it and hope that Twitter agrees or something right or find my little echo chamber I wonder if a good pilot would be like a live Wikipedia talk page.

Yeah I love that just on one site It could be like a little plug-in that just runs on there because Wikipedia is pretty neutral stuff to discuss most of the time Yeah, that's actually cool is that's awesome.

Like you can even um drop like voice notes or something, right?

Oh, I don't know if that's Oh asynchronous kind of missing out on the live Aspect of it right fun.

Wikipedia is a good spot There are pages for like Benjamin Netanyahu or whatever that would probably get a little spicy But on the whole, like, page for list of guitars or whatever is probably pretty innocuous.

So Wikipedia would love that.

Create events, get more donors, more donors, more donors.

Right?

They'd love that.

But I mean, if you create more...

(LAUGHTER) -If you create...

-Jimmy.

Jimmy needs your five bucks again.

But he-- Yeah, I think that would be-- Create more engagement on Wikipedia rather than it being a reference site.

It's a communicate-- It's like discussion -Healthy discussion.

-Why not?

I mean, you referenced the talk page.

I mean, not a lot of people see the talk page for any given thing, but, like, Wikipedia is pretty spicy for back-and-forth edit wars and debate and controversy and stuff.

It's just all, like, under the surface.

So this could maybe be a healthy way to bring that up and make Wikipedia a little more interesting.

-I wanna see this.

-So any given page, you can see the list of edits, but then there's a commentary about why those edits are being made.

Like this person doesn't actually deserve to be called noble or whatever.

And you're like, Oh, interesting.

You know, yeah, I think you could truly circumvent Godwin's law.

If you just had people like actually talking voice to voice at the Nazi one.

Yeah.

Godwin's law was, um, every internet argument eventually dissolve, dissolves into being a Nazi debate or whatever.

Yeah.

Maybe it would just stall it for a longer.

(laughing) - Russell, what do you got for us this week?

- All right, so recently I've been dealing with this change in my car insurance.

It went up like two to $300 and it really irks me because I'm like, why, why does this happen?

And then I have to go do the, let me call some people.

Maybe I'll get the right letter in the mail to make me consider going to that other car insurance company.

Do those work on you?

Sometimes the letter in the mail.

All right.

Sometimes it's like, all right, $700.

Like, you know what?

It's more of a reminder to try to get my rates lower.

Sure.

Right.

Kind of feels like Comcast, you know, when you buy the comm and then they upgrade, you know, I'm just feeling like one of those things.

So I would love to create a experience where I just post anything that I'm not loyal to.

That seems to be one of those like relationship based businesses like car insurance, home insurance, lawn care, anything like that.

I will upload my invoice, upload my contract, upload anything anybody wants to know about my-- Is my social credit card number?

Except for that.

My home address?

Except for that.

Like my policy, right?

I would post my policy publicly if it meant that I get quotes for literally the exact same policy for less money.

I am sure there are car insurance companies and new agents out there all the time looking to get a deal.

So they just literally go on this website, find everybody that has similar car insurance policies and just outbid my current rate.

And literally you can switch on a dime.

Like they take care of, like when I switch homeowners insurance or car insurance, they like literally take care of everything.

You might, I might have to make a couple of phone calls, but for $300 like, sure, Why not?

Like, boom.

- Awesome.

- And so, yeah, I'm like anti-loyalist to a lot of companies.

They just want my money and I just want this service.

Why do I have to like be in a relationship with these people?

They don't wanna be in a relationship with me, really.

Like, just sell me your service.

I will get the best rate, move on.

And then yeah, this app would, that's it.

You just post and receive.

Better bits.

- It's kind of like a consumer side RFP.

Yeah, or your request for proposals.

Yes, yes.

Universal nationwide.

Yeah.

The personal version of an RFP.

So we have to do those at work if it's over a certain amount of money.

Most businesses need that.

So I need to make a big purchase.

You have to get quotes from everybody in this space.

I like that, but you're coming to them with an already existing plan.

That's interesting.

That would help drive transparency up and prices down probably if nothing else.

Yeah.

- I like the idea of starting from beat this basically.

- Yeah, there we go, that's the name, beat this.

Purchasing a home has taught me one about insurance brokers that literally do this, they're just like, here's my insurance right now, someone give me a better rate and they go off and find it and take a cut of that and everyone wins.

But also you can do that with mortgage lenders too, I didn't know this, they're just like, here, post your closing costs for your mortgage and here's the interest rate that you get and you're based on your credit and blah, blah, blah And all these other lenders are like, well, I could knock a couple thousand off that closing cost and I could not charge you for this line item right here if you come with me, 'cause I want that loan.

And it's just make them all fight each other.

I love that idea, Russell.

Apply that to everything you possibly can.

- Everything.

- Everything.

- Everything, man.

- Beat this.

Beat, dot, this.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - That might also be taken already.

- So, I mean, like car insurance, I think is the easiest one.

Homeowners insurance even easier, 'cause literally they take care of everything.

They call up the other home insurance company and be like, "They're switching to me." Ah, shucks, I'm sure they have a great conversation.

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

And then our services could be like, we could do some concierge, we can make some money on top of every transfer, right?

We help alleviate the bidding process or the phone calls, right?

make it as easy as possible.

- I went to buy a heat gun recently and the local Lowe's and Ace Hardware and Hometown Shop were all $189.99 and one other store in town was $90, $91 for the exact same product.

I almost wish I could take your website and do it for that one purchase that I need to make no matter how big or small it is that does the comparison bidding and shopping for me.

Like, I know that I want to buy a new car, so every local dealer is bidding in an RFP process.

Here's the model that I want, but you 12 dealers in the area all have to submit a bid or something, no matter how big or small.

A reverse eBay.

Dude, I traveled to Ohio to buy my car for thousands of dollars less.

Like, why not?

Why not make it a national brand?

There's a car salesman that's like, I gotta turn inventory.

This guy's willing to travel.

He's gonna buy a plane ticket to come to me?

Like, sure, I'll save him $500.

Reverse RFP.

That's PFR.

- Well, that's an advance.

(laughing) - I was gonna say RRFP, but I like that better.

- Personal funding rituals.

- PFR.biz, my new cool site.

- I think this goes for like lawn care, child care.

Leo, I think for your idea-- - Child care to the lowest river is not.

(laughing) - I'll take 'em.

- I'll throw 'em-- - River.

- I'll throw 'em in a shed if it's five bucks cheaper.

I don't care.

(laughing) Discount bargain bin child care is what I'm after.

- Maybe not that one.

- I know what you mean though.

Sometimes it matters less, yeah.

- But I think for purchases that you're not gonna do right away, but if you got for the right price, that's really interesting.

'Cause like Facebook Marketplace, you know, it's really addicting, or like whatever, Craigslist or whatever, to like browse what's, stuff that you didn't want to buy and now you are going to buy it because it's cheap.

- Such a good deal.

- I think the reverse could work if you're willing to sell something, but you weren't until you saw somebody willing to buy it.

- My friend and former guest on this show, Steph, is part of several different palette groups where they post, "I am seeking this Ninja blender," and all these people who buy the big pallets of Amazon returns will be like, "Okay, so I know that there was one person who wanted this." It's like a matchmaking service, but for people, like what you're saying, people who wanna buy this thing versus people who wanna sell this thing.

People have sort of made that happen, I think, ad hoc on Facebook, if I'm understanding that right, but that doesn't seem very well organized.

And if you could put structure around it, I think there's a demand for that.

- I thought you were talking about, Now that I'm in a commercial office space and I get to see the pallet people.

- Oh, sure.

- Do you know what I'm talking about?

- Oh, like the wheeling around pallets, right?

- Well, like I'm always fascinated by how like in, when you wanna get rid of a pallet, you just put it out back and someone's going to take it.

- Yep.

(both laughing) - That's so true.

- And the wood pallets.

- Yeah, there's like an ecosystem where there's a bounty on the pallets and people just, they make businesses out of driving around and picking up pallets and then delivering it to the people who have a bounty on the pallet.

- Hunting for the best pallet, best wood, right?

Best structure.

- Yeah, what were we talking about?

- I don't remember.

Oh no, bidding, PFRs.

- I really want this for HVAC companies because that has been my big crusade of how are you coming up with that price?

Well, you're not telling me because you're not itemizing it, So you just have to get bids from a million different people and it's absolutely obnoxious.

Mm-hmm.

And there's no structure to it and everyone does it a little different and they all want to come and see it.

And yeah.

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

So I have been going on a bit of an organizational project to try to get all of my crap together.

And I've realized there's a category of product that I would really like to have, which is basically a toolbox, which has reverse minibar technology, where it will tell you every tool that you've removed and will give you a list of all the tools that you have taken out of your toolbox.

So you put them back.

In the right one.

Yes.

That's excellent.

So you're doing like an initial setup where I have these five boxes.

I know that this is going to be my this and that's going to be my that and you're like inventorying it.

Yeah.

I mean, I there's a whole bunch of ways this could be done.

My first thought was literally like a mini bar in a hotel where there's a bunch of little switches and you can just program in that like, okay, this tool's missing because those switches haven't picked up.

But then I realized that sounds expensive.

So then I thought we could do like RFID tags like libraries use for their books.

And if you just have an RFID tag on all your tools, if there were some sort of a toolbox that can do a mass scan and tell you you're missing these tools, I would pay a lot for that.

I've worked on something similar before for a medical device where doctors would actually leave pieces of gauze or tools inside patients.

And so they had to...

They would RFID every single thing inside that would be used on the table, and then when they're done with the surgery, they would sweep them with an RFID reader to be like, Is anything still in there?

No?

Great.

We can keep going.

So I like the RFID methodology.

That makes the most sense to me.

That sucks that that's necessary.

Yeah.

Well, it makes me feel better about leaving tools around the place.

I guess so.

You ever left a pair of scissors in someone before?

Not that I know of.

You guys know that like stick that you use to find water in cartoons?

Oh.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this.

But like, what if you did that for finding your tools?

- Like when you lose a stick.

- Can you go back to the stick?

- I'm forgetting the name of it.

It's a water thing.

- It's in the shape of a Y upside down.

- It's a Y stick and yet it points it towards water.

- What?

- It's an old timey, like you would hire people to find where to dig a well.

And I can't remember what this is called.

It's got a weird name.

- Was it just pseudoscience?

Was this a real thing?

- Yeah, it's pseudoscience.

- Okay, all right.

Although people claim to be able to sense the waves, you know, there's actually a really interesting discussion that Adam Savage has on his Tested channel about Mythbusters wanting to test this.

Okay.

Let's go.

It's real.

I told you.

I don't think that was the lesson.

It's not.

It's like this.

It's like a USB.

It just loops around and it finds your tool.

Okay.

That's what I'm trying to do.

Going back to like, that would be cool.

Well, if they are all tagged, then yeah, you could have something kind of like an air taggy type thing, but it'd have to be pretty close, though.

Well, and for me, like part of what I'm intrigued by, so I'm going to give you a little bit of a backstory here.

Have you seen this would go viral every once in a while where people will be like, "Oh, McDonald's is making sure homeless people don't get free drinks.

They put chips in the cups now." No.

Oh my gosh.

Have you seen that?

Yeah.

On the bottom, right?

Well, so when I was a cast member at Disney World, that was a thing there.

Oh, it was.

This is a lot older than the people seem to know, because at the resorts, you can buy a refillable mug, which you will program to work for one, two, three days or your entire stay.

But even the paper cups that they give you to buy one time have an RFID sticker on the bottom of it.

And so, like, if those stickers are so cheap that Disney's putting them on paper cups, Why can't we just have them to stick on our tools and crap?

Yeah, totally.

I mean, yeah, even libraries.

At least the 10mm socket wrench.

Libraries are not famously well-funded places, especially nowadays.

So if they can put it in all their books.

Yeah, I want a consumer version or consumer-facing version of that integrated into a toolbox and some sort of shameful alarm goes off if you haven't put the tool back in five hours.

If you step out of the room and your tools aren't all put back.

There you go.

I mean you can apply this is so many things like toys.

I was gonna say collectors There's the people who are like really into like I don't know Funko pops or something or their video game collection or something that they're like Wanting to keep inventoried and all that and organized beautifully.

I'm sure that yeah There's all kinds of people who'd have need for something like this Oh bar I've been trying to find a solution for this for a long time Alec and the only one that I've come up with is like gridfinity in general where like my drawer is so Beautifully laid out that if something is missing from it It is very obvious and it like angers me to the core that like I need to put this tool Back, otherwise, my perfect setup is gone.

Fortunately.

I that's the only way to get past my ADD I know my brain does not work that way, unfortunately So same you gotta have that - Well, and the thing is, I'm usually pretty good at knowing where the tools are.

I have this internal catalog, but then what always happens is, the thing I actually need, I have so many measuring tapes and utility knives.

(laughing) Because they, and I actually, the last time I needed utility knives, I specifically bought them in bright red, hoping that would help.

Didn't help.

- I have like four tool bags that travel depending on like the basement spot, the garage spot, and then like the other spot, right?

Like, I mean, yeah, there's like corners of my space that it would be good to know like, all right, I don't have to dig through this bag for five minutes, like wave the wand.

Nope, not in there, wave the wand, nope.

That'd be so nice.

- Or the bag itself is doing it.

You pull up the app and then the bag is saying like, oh, bag number three.

I don't know where bag number three is, but it has these 12 things in it.

You search for W-R-E-N, oh wrench, that's in bag five, and that's the orange one, right?

- Whoa, are you saying the bag itself-- - Why not?

- Is tracking constantly?

- Yeah, it would know what's inside of it.

- Oh, sorry.

- Or that it was the last one.

- I don't know, I thought you were just selling, like, no, okay, that's way cool.

- That would be pretty easy to do, relatively.

- That is awesome.

- Like, having them all have little coin cell batteries and stuff sucks, but if you have each tool just with an RFID tag, and there's no battery, it's all passive.

- Yeah, I mean, that's part of why, you've probably sensed I get jaded when the tech industry makes things overly complicated and then everybody gets excited about an AirTag and they forget about the two-cent RFID tag that's been around for years and years.

- 100%.

- And so I would like that, but more, and for people.

- Totally.

There is no consumer-facing RFID, is there?

That's interesting.

- This is a great bookshelf, too.

- Like a bookshelf, like it would sell this, like you could power that thing up, plug it in, you know what I mean?

- They're pretty flexible for like, like if you take a stack of eight library books that have those tags in them and you put them on the reader, it's able to get all eight of them at once pretty easily.

- I remember being like mind blown when I used the self-checkout at the library, just blunk, do-do-do-do-do, whoa.

- Yeah, totally.

- How hard is the reader?

Like is that reader, like the library book reader like-- It's a pad.

It's just like a little like-- - That's right.

- Plastic thing you set it on.

- You're limited by power consumption on it.

That's what I've learned by wand waving medical one.

It's like you need a pretty, you need a decent bit of power in order to project the wave enough that I can read it from a distance.

A couple centimeters is easy.

- Yeah, okay.

- But we were trying to do a wireless version.

No, but it's a toolbox.

You already have a drill battery in it.

Just plug the drill battery into the thing.

- There you go.

- It could be, yeah.

All those Craftsman toolboxes, my dad has one, obviously.

Midwestern dads have some sort of crazy-- and you pull it out, and you're like, damn, this is nice.

But it would be cool if you plug it into a wall, because it's always in the same corner of the garage.

And then every time you pull out, you can see if I took it, or if my dad took it, or if my brother took the tool.

And I don't get blamed for it.

It could be like Thailand AirTag's group network, where everyone's toolboxes are ratting each other out.

Like Steve, your neighbor has that screwdriver.

Oh, I knew it!

- That was a great idea.

That's fantastic.

- Find your lost tools.

- I knew it, my wrench.

- Well, Scott's gonna have to do a deep dive in my inventory real quick.

- You have a lot of his stuff.

- I probably like, I think between the three of us, like we've bought like tons of tool drill bits, like just so many.

We've just lost the exchange.

I have your air compressor still.

- I have your paint sprayer.

- Before COVID.

(laughing) - Yeah, before COVID.

- It's all good.

I obviously don't need it.

- This would be great for, I have a bunch of cables in this.

You know what I mean?

Like, oh my gosh, I don't even, I wish I knew how many HDMI, USB -C, iPhone cables.

Just throw it in a bag.

And then, right?

- Literally, like you know it's in there.

You just gotta dig for it and you throw it back in the-- - Now that we're dads, we have to have the box that's got the spider web of cables.

- I've got a few of those and I'm not even a dad.

- Yep, yeah.

You reach a certain age.

- The other reason why I kind of wish RFID would just be more, I don't think people are aware of how many kinds of tags and how resilient they can be.

'Cause going back to my Disney days, Disney has RFID tags sewn into every piece of costuming.

- Oh do they?

When you, like, you can wash them, well I should say this is knowledge from 2014, but like, we were totally allowed to take our costumes home and wash them.

And by the way, costume is just Disney speak for uniform.

Everything is showbiz down there.

- Yeah.

- But like, when you return your costume to costuming, you would just put it down a chute and you'd see a little screen that would tell you, oh, you've returned this item.

And like, that's been around for decades.

Why don't we have that?

and it's waterproof, no batteries.

Yeah, totally.

Dang, where were you 10 episodes ago?

I was talking about something like this for my closet.

I just wanna know what shirts in this closet have I not worn in the last year?

And I was trying to figure out something like that.

That's really great.

I want to-- - Well, you know the backwards hanger system?

- That was told to me after the fact.

Yes, someone has mentioned, a listener has told me that you take all of your hangers and you start either forward or backward and then as you wear them, you reverse them so that you know, oh, I have worn that shirt or whatever.

If I was only smart enough to put shirts back on the right hangers.

(laughing) - There's no way I would know.

- Remembering, yes.

That's smart though.

I should start doing that.

- So like, if I were to buy 100 RFID pills, you know, I'm just imagining a little penny like.

- Sure, yeah.

- Are they pills?

- They're like stickers.

- I mean, I see stickers.

Okay, I guess they're stickers.

I guess, why not just buy 100 of them and just make an app that's like, One through a hundred and you just stick them all and then I guess you the reader and then you have a bunch of where's the reader?

The toolbox makes sense have to buy it.

You're right.

How big would the readers be?

I think this would be so cool like every junk drawer every junk bag.

It seems like a like a Dewalt or a craftsman or a Milwaukee could just like shoehorn this into all their existing stuff kind of like others like the works with Apple find my program where like They're shipping the tools and the cheap whatever's with the tags built-in or the sticker pack that you could add on after the fact That would be worth it for like any contractor tool that's hundreds of dollars maybe right like every only string trimmer and leaf blower and Yeah, all that stuff that alone.

That's the market - Oh, you can make billions on that, man.

Every contractor would just have to buy it.

- This is why I get so frustrated with the tech industry, 'cause it's like, this is not rocket surgery.

This is something that has been in practice for a long time, but they keep reinventing it.

- Yep, yep, yep.

- Is it too complicated?

Like, what is so unattractive?

- I think it's too simple, that's the problem.

(laughing) - It's too simple.

- It's hard to monetize.

- Can't make enough money off of it.

- Yeah.

- Like air tags like went next level with it, right?

You're saying, right?

- But then that's a closed ecosystem.

- Like the air tag has some benefits, but then everybody's like, well, if it can't do what an air tag does, it's useless.

(laughing) - Totally.

- That's right.

Maybe it's just not branded well.

Is it like too open source?

Is it open source, is that why?

Maybe that's why it's too simple.

- It is kind of an open standard anyone could make.

Yeah.

It's hard to make a closed walled garden around this because it's all so open.

Yeah.

It does seem like there's, if not a business out of there, at least like a Gritfinity type, you know, group of people who come together and make some like, "We hacked together a thing for this." Well, dear listener, if you are looking for your tools and still can't find them, thanks for listening.

We hope you enjoyed yourself.

And thank you so much, Alec, for being on here.

This was awesome.

- Oh, it was my pleasure.

Thank you for inviting me.

- Oh, that's a delight.

- I hope my idea was worthy of being on here.

- Of course, of course.

- Oh yeah, oh yeah.

- I've been thinking about it for a long time.

- Great.

- This is, yeah.

- Alec's YouTube channel, where you can learn about all kinds of eclectic things like battery standards and dishwashing pods and the color brown and old physical media formats and of course heat pumps, is at youtube.com/technologyconnections.

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