Woot With Friends, Send Me on a Date, Fantasy Anything, and Flowchart Programming

(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 web weavers 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. Scott, who'd you bring with us this week? - This week, we have one of my oldest friends and former roommate, Doyle. - Hey, I didn't know that. That's fun. - Hey, glad to be here.

Yeah, yeah, we were for a little bit, yep. - Welcome to the show. - It was good times. - Good times. - It was good times. Hey, yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. - Good deal.

All right, this week I've brought a new game for us to try out. This week we're gonna be playing Wisdom of the Crowdfund. So, in this game, I don't know, how familiar are you guys with like history of famous Kickstarters and IndieGoGo's? Is that a scene that you're in? - I have heard of Kickstarter. - Oh, good. That's good news.

- Yeah, I know of Exploding Kittens, absolutely blowing Kickstarter up, followed by, as we were talking about actually before the show, Brandon Sanderson, following up, blowing up Kickstarter, but that's about all I know. - Okay, I haven't picked either of those for this game. So in this game, we have a series of bizarre Kickstarters that have all been successfully funded over the years. These are things that you may or may not even think should have been funded or backed.

And we're going to go through line by line here and take turns to decide whether or not they actually delivered on the product that they said they would, or if this was a complete sham and scam and they never got what they paid for. - Love it. - And let's start, of course, as we do every week with our guest, Doyle. I'd like to pitch to you first. We have a product here called Slice of Sauce. Now this is a no mess slice of ketchup.

You could go to Kickstarter, back it, and Bo's original Slice of Sauce was a flavor packed condiment. It looked like a single, Kraft singles, only it was gelatinous red, and it was a slice of ketchup. Now that got- - Just ketchup. - Just ketchup. There was only ketchup to start here. That was backed by 677 backers and got $30,000. - That's a red flag. - So for $30,000, they blew past their goal, but yes or no, did it ship? - Ooh. - So it wasn't whether this exists. - It existed? It was real.

It's a thing that happens. - It's not like you're making up a Kickstarter. - Did it exist in the fact that did they actually make something or was this just a photo shoot and a scam? - Okay, okay, okay. I have to say that yes, that absolutely it has to be easy enough to just with a little bit of pudding mix and ketchup onto a baking tray. - Put it in a sandwich bag. - You are absolutely right. Slice of sauce shipped to all backers. It was a raving success.

Not only was it a success, it was made by a restaurateur in the upper peninsula of Michigan, our home state. - Oh, wow. - Russell, next the Scarp Laser Razor, 21st century shaving. Now this was a razor that looked kind of like a safety razor that you'd hold here, but instead of a blade, it had a glowing red light and was pitched as the first ever razor that was powered by a laser, irritation free. It got $507,000, 255% of its goal on Indiegogo. But yes or no, did it ship to people? - Yikes.

Ah, this is like one of those things where you take one of those electric lighters and you're like, all right, let's ship it. - Yeah, right. (laughing) - It cuts hair. I'm gonna say it's shipped, but everybody asked for a refund. - Ah, not only did it not ship, Indiegogo suspended the whole campaign and did not allow it to complete. - Whoa. - Why, what was the-- - They didn't even have a functional prototype, which was a rule. (laughing) - Oh, okay, well that's great.

- They're just shipping high power lasers and saying point them at your face. - Yeah, just point it at your face. - Guys, I'm 99% sure lasers exist. (laughing) And if TV's taught me anything, they cut things. - Scott. - Half a million. - I'd like to tell you about my fantastic new product. It's called Telespec, T-E-L-L-S-P-E-C with a capital S. What's in your food? This is a handheld scanner that offered real-time food testing, food safety, and food authenticity.

You point at this scanner at food and it'll tell you all kinds of details about it, whether or not it's legit. Yes or no, did that actually, oh, sorry, it got $386,000, almost 400% of its goal, but did it ship? - Can you tell me what year? - I can. - The country of origin. - Can you use it in a sentence? - Yeah, right. - Can you use it in a sentence? (laughing) - This was, I believe, 2016. - It did not ship. There's no way they could do that, Dan.

- They got all the way to the point of firmware and manufacturing and stuff, but no, you are correct. It did not ship, sorry to say. - The FDA would be fixed, right? - If this was like the last year, I'd be like, okay, maybe. You know, just some chat GPT plugin or whatever. - Apparently they shipped something to some people, but it was a rebrand of some other product that already existed and did not do anything for what it said it would. Round two, Doyle.

The iFind, the world's first battery-free item location tag, like an AirTag or a TileTracker, but it promised to be a battery-free tracker using Bluetooth that harnessed radio waves from the air around you for just enough energy to-- - Oh, that's so cool. - Yeah, so it had a $25,000 goal. It got $546,000. It blew past its goal, hundreds and hundreds of percent, but did it ship? - I'm gonna say no, 'cause if it did, AirTag would be using it already. - Oh, that doesn't sound like the Apple I know.

- The fundamental technology, right? - Yeah, you are absolutely right. Nine years ago, it was also suspended by Kickstarter. That shit didn't even exist. Russell, Bust, CST01, the world's thinnest watch. This is a flexible wristwatch that's an E-Ink display, and it goes all the way around, kind of like a slap bracelet, where you put it on and it had just the time and nothing else. It was a really, really thin wristwatch. - How many backers? - 7,600 backers that pledged over a million dollars.

- Oh my gosh. Dude, just take everybody that loves Pebble and funnel them into this scam. Never shipped. - Absolutely right, it never shipped. Total bust. - Russell, are you telling me people don't wear their Pebble anymore? - Oh no, there's a hardcore community that I would still be a part of right now if it still existed. - For those listening, Russell has four Pebbles on right now.

- If Fitbit didn't buy Pebble, and then Google Fitbit, I'm like, "Oh, you see?" - I've got my Pebble time, and my Pebble time round right here. Our good friend Andrew also has his. - It's the GOAT of watches. - They still work. - Yeah, there's a whole community to make them still work. It's great. Scott, oh, do I have a pitch for you? This is called the Romp Him, H-I-M, the world's first male romper. This is a repeat Kickstarter. - Romp Him? - Romp Him, R-O-M-P, capital H-I-M.

This had 3,000 backers, $353,000 in 2017. It's a romper in fun fraternity-looking patterns, kind of splotchy, whatever, and it was a romper. - Is there the '90s Swish? - It's got '90s Swish vibe. Jazz, I believe was the name of that band. - No, but like, yeah, jazz. - It doesn't actually have that, but similar, yeah. Yes or no, did it ship? - Not a high barrier to entry. I say it definitely shipped. - It definitely shipped, you're absolutely right. - I'm gonna buy one right after this.

- The Romp Him, an excellent Christmas gift. One more round? - Let's go. - One more. - Let's go again. - Doyle, the Smarty Ring. This is kind of like an Oura Ring, a couple years back. That is the first ring of its kind. It was a notification alerts buzz in a ring that you wore on your finger and it had a tiny OLED screen and not much else. It would buzz when you got notifications and a little tiny screen promised to be a lot.

It raised almost $300,000, 744% of its goal of 40,000, but did it ship? - If it was just the vibration, I would say yes, but an OLED screen seems like a lot to put in a ring, so I'm gonna say no. - You're absolutely right. Not only that, they famously started a second campaign to raise more money without delivering to the first yet and it pissed off a lot of people. Bluetooth 4.0 technology. It didn't even promise to do a lot. I'm surprised it didn't make it.

The screen, I guess, but yeah, never happened. Russell, the Transporter. This is a portable hard drive that you can turn into a online off-the-cloud storage solution. It's kind of like a NAS. You put your files on it. It sits there. It looks like a router, black, sleek-looking thing. It's for storing your files on your network. It got 1,055 backers and $260,000 way back in 2013. - Wait, it's just a wireless portable hard drive?

- It's a wireless portable hard drive that you put your own hard drive in and it made a private cloud. - That's pretty cool. - Wait, what's the name of this product? - The Transporter. - Oh. - You have not heard of this product. - I've heard of something. I think-- - I mean, it's like a NAS or a time machine or whatever, but it promised quite a bit in a time where that was not really super popular yet. It got $260,000. - I think it happened. Hold on, hold on. How many gigabytes did it store?

- No, you bring your own drive. - Oh, it's BYOD? - They had a version that you could buy. They had a version you could buy with one terabyte hard drive that it shipped with, but the regular version was you bring your own. - Oh, well then totally, yes, it happened. - Use any capacity mobile drive, it says. - Just a USB hub. - It did indeed happen. You're absolutely right. - I like that one. - It barely made it through. Yeah. - Wow. - And then lastly, Scott, the M Printer.

That's a lowercase M, capital P, an analog printer for a digital world. Small black receipt printer, thermal printer, that printed snippets of information that they called M Prints. You could set it up with your phone so that you print out the weather for today or a to-do list or your Facebook notifications or I don't know, like Sudoku puzzles and the headlines for the day.

You set it on your counter, you walk out the door with your receipt full of information, like a little mini personalized newspaper. - Does your screens not go back? - $88,000. (laughing) - Can I print coupons? - Well, this is 2015. (laughing) Different time in 2015. 700 backers, $88,000, but did it actually ship? - Nintendo did this, right? In the late nineties, the Game Boy Printer. - The Game Boy Printer, yeah. Like that, a little bit bigger. - Okay, then this definitely shipped.

Also, I love that idea. Could have used that last week with Sam. - It never even shipped. - This is a product that you'd think like a thermal printer, you put it like an ESP32 on it or something, you're good, right? You go to AliExpress and you glue a circuit board onto a thing that already exists and you're done, but nope, they had a whole promise and never even shipped a thing. - Lame. - That-- - I lost track of our scores. (laughing) - I just know-- - I think I won. - I think we all win.

- We all win for finding all of these. - I think we all won. - Thanks very much to the shitty Kickstarter subreddit for some of your inspiration. - That's good. I like that game, that was a good game. - Sweet.

- All right, Scott, your first this week. What do you got for us? - All right, here is my half-baked idea. Actually, just seeing Doyle and being able to interact with him. Doyle lives in New York right now and I'm currently in Michigan and it is nice to be able to catch up with him. - It's very nice to be able to catch up with you guys. - And so I'm gonna combine that with, do you guys remember Woot before they got bought out? I don't know, I think Amazon did it.

So it's a website where it's one product a day and you just kind of check it, like not like an auction, but just, hey, they're selling this today, do I want it or no, yay or nay? I'm gonna combine that with Doyle being in New York with a subscription service. So you pay a monthly like 10, 20 bucks a month and then maybe once or twice a month, an item, you'll get notified that this is the item this month.

You can either buy it for yourself or send it to a friend on here in order to maintain contact with someone or stay in touch or whatnot. So say the item this week is a, what'd you call it, a round pin? Or. (laughs) - Yeah. - Yeah, I see that and I get notification like, hey, you've already paid for this 'cause you paid for your subscription. Who do you wanna send this to? And I'd be like, this is for Doyle, this is built for Doyle.

I'm gonna send it to him with a note or zero contacts or nothing. And that way I can just kind of stay connected with someone. That's the idea. - Fantastic. - Peak consumerism. So you can just send random crap to anyone. - Absolutely random crap. A pair of socks, a bag of dog treats. Like whatever. But it lets you think about like, ah, this really screams Russell right here. I'm just gonna send this to Russell. - Do you tell it? - It's a social network, but physical goods.

- Yeah, do you tell it who you're sending stuff to and then it finds more things like that thing for that person? - Well, it's always the same item for everyone in the whole using the service. Like, yeah, this week is this fancy pair of Harry Potter socks or whatever. Who would like this best? Woot was genius because it was selling overstocked stuff. They had too much of one thing in the thing and how do we get rid of it? And there was always limited supply.

They made a big deal about, "Hey, there's only 35% of these are remaining. Now's your chance." They gave you a lot of FOMO. Combining that with also, oh, I feel warm and fuzzy 'cause I'm sending a gift. It makes a lot of sense. - Well, I think the question is what happened to them? - They got bought by Amazon. - Well, that's what happens to all of us. - And then the founder went and started another one. - He just did the exact same site again called Meh. - Right. - Meh, that's right. He did.

- He still exists too. - Exactly. - Meh.com. - But now when you go to Woot, you can get special benefits if you're an Amazon Prime member, it's kind of sad. - Okay, I wanna throw a loop in this. So you know all those Amazon returns, those bins, bulk bin buying, okay. Turn this into a, every month you spend 20 bucks and you can randomly, so like, it's straight up like a click shuffle. Like if you pick, if like, it's just the bins. You know those shopping bins that are stupid cheap?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And you get your item and it's like, who, do you want this or do you wanna send it to somebody else, right? And it's just, you have like three re-rolls and then after the third one, (laughing) you're like, all right, you're stuck with this one. We're sending it to your house or you're sending it to a friend. So it's either like a gag gift or just, or it could be a full on like returned Amazon drone, coffee roaster, it could go wild card with this, right?

'Cause you can buy those bulk return bins at like a flat rate. And so now people are on there subscribing for the lucky coffee grinder that costs 150 bucks or they're like, I'm just gonna send Doyle a pair of socks. (laughing) - Who did that famously? They have the bag of crap, which is a mystery item. - I love the bag of crap. - Like 10, 15, 20 years ago, whenever it was that they had the Nintendo Wii, they went out and sent all their employees to wait in line and they all got Wiis.

And then that was one of the things they sent out for the bag of crap when you couldn't buy them anywhere. And it was like a really big deal. Yeah, you could leverage that FOMO. I love it. - What I like about your addition, Russell, to that is that sort of you found what Woot found. Like Woot had found, okay, we have overstocked items and we need to get rid of them. You're taking like, okay, you have these random boxes that Amazon puts together of returned items. Like let's turn that into money.

Because like if you could buy for, what is it? Like 300 bucks a box of things that are, probably retail worth $2,000, but you just can't do anything with them. (laughing) But yeah, you found it. You just buy, you keep buying those boxes and then whatever was in those boxes is what's on sale on the site that day. I think it doesn't necessarily have to be one item. It could be, we only have one of each item. And as things get picked, it's gone. - First come, first serve.

- I don't know, I have a PS5 in here today. It's gone in 10 seconds somehow 'cause someone wrote a script to do that. - Yeah, there is a problem. Like you could just be sending broken things, like just straight broken equipment to somebody or claiming it for yourself. So there's a balance. - You could have a pretty easy-- - You know the risk. - You could have a pretty easy-- - You check that box. - No, you could pretty easily cover that.

I mean, like we were saying, like it's 300 bucks for the box or something like that. I think you can have 500 and it's probably $3,000 worth of items. Like, okay, one quarter of them are broken. You just go, sorry, okay. Don't worry about it. - We'll send you another. Yeah, here, we'll pull it out of the other bin. Yeah, that's true. - No, just give them their money back and you're like, sorry, no problem. But you've already made your money off all the other things that did work.

- That's right, that's right, yeah. Add five more re-rolls to your next order. - Sorry. - Here's your money. - We're gonna be considered gambling in no time. Just watch. - Well, but we're actually undoing the mystery box of it. We're taking the gambling out of it. (laughing) - Yeah, it's-- - We're gambling that we'll be able to sell it. (laughing) But the internet's a big place.

- We have a local auction house here in West Michigan that buys them in bulk and gets the pallets and then breaks them up and does just an auction site. I've gotten all kinds of great stuff from them. It's great. - So this is like drop ship though too, right, Scott? Like you could buy like a million of Bose headphones and all of a sudden and get them stupid cheap and-- - Mass drop even. - Mass drop. So mass drop subscribed.

- And then if you have over inventory at the end, just sell all the wood or something. - Ooh, or if you wanted to keep the element of surprise, right, that you were like, if you wanna leave it a little bit mysterious, you just do a silhouette of the item on the shelf. - Who's that Pokemon? (laughing) - People buy it based off what they think that probably is. - Next to a banana for $75. - That looks like a Leo shape. I'm gonna send that to him.

- That pair of headphones could be a $2,000 Sennheiser set or-- - Or it's like a doll turned sideways. - Skull candy. - Or a skull candy, right? - Or a skull candy, yeah. - Dude, this is cool, Scott. I think it's just like the experience. It's like lottery, a subscribed lottery model or something. 'Cause it is random items every month anyway, right? - Right, yep. - So that's just interesting.

I think there's a missed opportunity to ship mass amounts of goods 'cause for one of our podcast guests, it was cheaper or just as cost effective and convenient to buy a microphone and send it through Amazon than to ship one of our own personal microphones. So there's like an element of-- - Really? - Why ship it, just buy it? Maybe there's a whole website that you can create like that. Just it's cheaper to buy it.com. I don't know. - Make a website that-- - Three ideas have come from this one.

- Make a website that tracks what you're trying to ship and then immediately puts an ad that says, "You could just buy this." - Dude, honey.com. - Four ideas. - Yeah, honey for things you're trying to ship. - Okay, I'm gonna add on to this a little bit more, Scott.

This is a fun idea because what if you take like, you just send like, all right, you mass drop 10 random pieces of art, let's say, and you can send them to like 10 or five of your friends and now you all share the same piece of crap all of a sudden, right? - All five of your friends' wives are mad at you at the same time, it's great. - Or it's just like, it's like, oh, I did this subscription box and I have to sign up three other friends.

And so now it's like, all right, we're all subscribed and it's always, we all get shipped the same thing every month so that we all talk about it. So if it is a pair of socks, we all got the same pair and now we can all, did you guys get your mystery box from scottsocks.com? - So you just have to sign up three of your friends and then they have to sign up three friends and you get a cut every time. - Very triangle shape. - No, no, they don't buy it.

You Scott got subscribed 40 bucks a month and you have to add three friends to be a part of this. - Right. - You're gifting it. - Oh, I'm still the one who paid for everything. Yeah, okay, I actually like that a lot 'cause when I do send, I gift one of these items to one of my friends, it comes with our branding and packaging on it so maybe they'll do it for someone else then. And it's like a pyramid scheme. - It's sideways though. - No, it's sideways pyramid.

So you start and then you send it to your friends after three months, they're like, you know what? I wanna do it with my parents and my siblings. (laughing) - Opt out, unsubscribe please. - That's the beauty, you can't. (laughing) - I have to say like my relationship with stuff, like having moved from Michigan to New York however long ago that was, five, six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know however long it was.

I'm still getting rid of things that I have had from Michigan that I'm like, why is this taking up space in my apartment? Like it's small here guys, every square foot counts. And the idea of sending people stuff they don't need, it like deeply hurts me. (laughing) Just like that's more stuff that I just can't let go of because I care about it but just takes up space in my life. - That's the prank, that's the prank dude. We all got the same beer bottle opener now, you're stuck with it.

- Well that I'll take, you always need more beer bottles. - See and then we can all shit on the same romper that we're all sharing, right? Like you send a romper to everybody and now we're all like, all right. - Did you get a romper? - No again, that I'll keep, that I would keep. - You see, you say it so bad. - Romp him is a terrible name. (upbeat music)

- Okay Russell, what do you got? - So guys, here's the thing. We have a incredible resource in every local community. It's a, they're called like the community centers where you go to figure out where, like as certain as every city has this, where they get visitors, they have the website, they tell you about events about a city. Visitors bureaus, okay.

I know, so these visitor bureaus know all the best spots to go on dates, they know all the spots to hang out, the best deals, the best happy hours, 'cause they have to, it's their job to know and just communicate information to people. So my idea, this is a Russell's Love Corner idea. - Cue the music. (laughing) - Is you take, you take these experts in a geographic region and you get all these single people and you work with these small businesses to bring them all together.

And you say, hey, send me on a date. You go to these visitor bureaus and you catch up with people and the visitors bureaus will match you with either singles events or hell, even if you're a couple, they can send you on a date to find like, all right, this isn't busy on Tuesdays, really good spot. It's kind of like finding hidden gems within your local area. They need money, they need a way to like, I think connect with not just visitors, but like the local residents too.

So yeah, this is, send me on a date. - And businesses could pay you to pull in the people. - Yes. - When businesses come to you and they say, yeah, can you put me on the books for next Tuesday? You charge a fee and then suddenly they have a couple hundred customers or whatever.

- I think it could be like, you could almost have like a date planner, like on the thing, where you go, you're like, oh, I've meant to plan a date with my wife or with my girlfriend, or the person who I asked out on a date, now I don't know where to take them. You could like, yeah, you could go on the thing and just be like, I need a date. Like, what am I doing? And it could like come up with like a schedule for the day. - Burst into the bureau, I need a date.

- I'll be honest, I tried to make this a singles app idea because I thought it'd be better, but you know what? It is actually why I wrote it down, is because every once in a while, it's like my anniversary, I've been to every fricking restaurant in this area and just some like, mix it up, please, somebody, anybody. And so I called the visitors bureau and they're like, have you tried this place and this place and this place?

Sure enough, there's like three places I've never heard of within 20 minutes of here. I'm like, thank you so much. Everybody should use you. You were the matchmaker of better, no, sorry, making my life better through visitors bureaus. - I think the couples that already exist still count as part of your love corner. - You are, yeah. - You're just a guru. - Just a guru. I'm just trying to streamline relationships. - No, I think that's a good idea.

I mean, like here in Brooklyn, we have a lot of like things in the city that are known and exist, like for instance, we have the botanical gardens or actually Greenwood Cemetery, as weird as it says to be a cemetery, the cemetery is actually really cool. And they have events, they have things like, they have classes on like apiaries, like handling apiaries and bees in the cemetery. They have, they actually, this last summer I went to, they had like fire jugglers and like circus performers.

- Circus performers? - Yeah, yeah, no. - What? - Like, because it's like, you know, I don't know. Some people are still buried there, but it's like a historical cemetery. I mean, it's like back civil war cemetery. - I'm picturing fire jugglers and then like a morning young kid over in the corner there. - They still need to make money, you know, but it's not like anyone's buying plots. - Got it, got it, got it. - Pre-buy.

- But it's huge and it's beautiful and it is great, but like not just the cemetery, but all these things. They have events, but I never know when they are. I never know, like, and I can check their website, I can check their whatever. But if it was like, hey, no, this Saturday, I planned to, you know, my wife and I wanted to go out and do something, then it could be like, hey, here's the events in Brooklyn that are going on and make it, you know, make a plan or make a day out of it.

- This is, yes. - 'Cause like, it's really hard to host an event and create events. So it works on the other side and you're like, oh, I'm gonna make this event, but I don't know who's gonna show up. Well, if you have this whole visitors bureau of people with a list, it's like, I got a hundred people looking for date ideas. Just come up with a date night, segment, or like buy one, get one pizza, flatbread, and my wife and I will be there, you know? So. - Right. - Totally. - No, I like that.

- It works both ways, yeah. Would you guys use this? We're all married, we're all married men. - Yeah, no, I totally, 1000%. - I would. - I totally. - Absolutely use it. - I'm thinking of all the, like, there's a hundred that have tried this. You know, you got your like Facebook local events and you've got your whatever. I'm trying to think where, why has it fallen short? It's just the visitors bureau is brilliant. I never think to go to them for anything ever.

- They actually have the information. - And they don't need to make money. - Yeah. - That's really what it comes down to is there's no, there's no business for them. They can lose money doing this. - Yeah. - Well, what if you, would you pay money for this? - No. - Instant, instant date. What if they saved you money? - The money comes from the businesses. I don't think you need to charge the people. - Yeah, I'm not paying for it. - Why not?

- Your local restaurants go to the visitors bureau and they pay a little bit for the cannon of the, the fire hose of people that the visitors bureau send their way. - You all know we're all going to password share. (laughing) - Like what? - Subscribe. - Okay, so then. - Yeah, no. - What if, what if you, when you subscribed, you always got the couple's discount. So you were always making money. It was, it was, it was, as long as you use their service, you were making 10 bucks a month.

And then every time you use their service, you get a $10 coupon. - Now you're having to make a new, now they have to make a deal with the business. They're not going to get some businesses because they can't abide by the deal. - Businesses. - Then it's not, it doesn't encompass everything. I want it to encompass everything. - Well, it's. - Russell, I almost like your variation of, you're the one who physically called this tourism bureau. You got the names and the cool ideas.

Can we utilize that part where this is a separate business where we're using the bureau as a resource in order to create our own catalog of cool things in each city? - So just, you're siphoning government money. - Right. - I got it. - Give me all the information you have and I'm going to commercialize it. (laughing) It's public, I paid for your tax dollars. (laughing) - Just scraping their website.

(laughing) - Well, I don't know, I kind of like that he talked to a real person here who actually knows the town inside and out and it's not just. - Yeah, I like that too. - SEO boosted article saying how Russ's is the best restaurant in West Michigan or something. - That's the thing, I can't trust like these blog posts anymore, travel, like Yelp. Everybody's figured out a way to like break the reviews. - Yeah. - You know, and you're like, what am I? I can't look for anything.

I'm just going to find it myself or like look at the menus online now all the time, so. - That's your value prop. This was told us by a real person who works for the city. - That's right. You have like people that spend their whole life just every day. - And that's how you know it's good. - Thinking about the best places for Russell to go on a date. - Yes, yes. Listen, sometimes you just need like, you know how many freaking dates you're responsible for? We're all Ford's married dudes.

So you're responsible for the birthday date, the anniversary date, the Valentine's day, the every single one. It's just like, can't we just outsource one of the 10 that we're responsible for? (laughing) - Can't I just outsource one of them? - Carrie doesn't listen to this stuff, right? She doesn't listen to this podcast. - I think her, her dad, some other people. (laughing) - Listen, listen. - It's like half our subscribers. - Sir, anything I can do to automate my relationship with my wife?

(laughing) It's too much work. - You know she's standing behind you right now, Russell. - Oh no. - There are other ways to show that you care about your significant other. Sometimes it's not making a decision on where to go to eat, which is, or where to do. Like sometimes you just need to like, what's a good, I've done the make your own pasta thing. I've done the make your own candle thing. Like paint and pour.

Everybody that I know is in a long-term relationship has a picture that you and your significant other have painted together probably and it's hanging somewhere. It's like we're running out of date ideas. - See, Scott's going. - As a date. - See, we need more of those. - What'd you have there, Scott? - That's the painting that him and CJ painted, right? Right behind you. - I love that, the boat he's got behind him. - The other one. - My aunt actually painted that one.

- See, Leo, what you said is what every guy, you know, when I bring this up would say to me, they're like, oh, you're not romantic enough. It's like, no, I've been romantic many times. It's 10 years, 20 years now. I need something new. But I will go make a knife with my significant other if it means that it's something different. Do you know what I mean? - Sure, absolutely. - It's about having all the information. It's not about automating it. It's about having all the information.

Having something bring to you all the options that you never would have thought of. - But tailored to where you're currently living. I love that. - Well, hopefully you can get there within a day. - Okay, Doyle, I think you hit something that I'm really excited about now, like knife making. But then like, what? - Oh, they have, no, that wasn't a joke. They have that here. They have it like, yeah, yeah, it's expensive as hell, but they have it.

And then you can be like, I love you so much that I forged this knife with you and you can kill me at any moment with it. And that's just how much I trust you. - That is weirdly and scary romantic. - See, you could, like, there are a bunch of like, let's say you're a wood shop, right? And you literally manufacture wood products. All of a sudden, the Visitor's Bureau is like, hey, we have like 100 couples looking for dates and calling every month.

Would you create a class once a month for making a birdhouse? And now all of a sudden, businesses are like, oh, shoot. Maybe I-- - That's a good add-on, I like that. - Add something crazy. And it's more about the Visitor's Bureau being like a network of, or a holder of all these couples in the local community and redirecting them to businesses 'cause, man, I don't know. If you guys aren't romantic enough out there and you've run out of ideas, it's 10 years.

That means you have to have how many, like, wait, let me, what's the number? Somebody do a number crunch here. - Right, no, the-- - 10 dates a year. You've been in a relationship for 10 years. That means you have to figure out 100 things to do. That's not that much, is it? - Yeah. (laughing)

(upbeat music) - All right, Leo, what do you got? - All right, I have a friend and colleague who is the coolest person in the world. Hello, Reagan, if you are listening. She plays fantasy Great British Bake Off with 10 friends. They buy in, they not only choose, like, who's gonna be Star Baker and who's gonna be going out this week, but they also do, like, will Paul Hollywood be in the intro this week, and will Noel be wearing a shirt with an animal on it?

And they put in real money for it, and they have a whole system with Google Forms and spreadsheets to decide how people are winning. I think this is the coolest thing in the world, right? My pitch this week, yeah, this is not the pitch. The pitch is, why is there no fantasy sports app but for custom things? Like, I'm gonna be the commissioner of the Fantasy Survivor League. - Oh, man. - I'm gonna be the fantasy Keeping Up With The Kardashians commissioner for this year.

Will there be a fight between X and Y or whatever? So there is a custom fantasy sports app. It doesn't seem great. Somebody's sort of started this idea, but it doesn't pull from anything. You're on the hook for manual whatever. If you go to the season of Great British Bake Off on Wikipedia, there are detailed charts with what each person made, who was Star Baker, who got voted out. It's all on the internet. So we need to automate the idea and build the league for people.

You can have suggestions. You can even feed all this into GPT-4 and say, hey, how would you structure a game that's built off of this TV show, this movie. - Here's all the information about it. - Let's play fantasy. What's gonna be in the movie theaters this fall and what will do well? Fantasy Oscars, right? You can do all sorts of things where you structure the data and you have points, you have bidding, however you wanna build it, where the app keeps track of it for you, right?

And then you can pull all this stuff from Wikipedia, from Twitter, from whatever you wanna pull it from and make it automated. 'Cause nobody is going into their fantasy sports app and entering in what the score was between the Buffalo Bills and the whoever this week, right? The beauty of it is that it takes care of all that stuff for you. And that doesn't exist yet. And I want it to, both for my friend, Reagan, and for the world. - Okay, two things. One, that is a fantastic idea. I love this.

Two, "Breaking Bad" season six, we were living in college and a bunch of guys at the time when that came out, and we had a whiteboard in our kitchen, a huge whiteboard with everyone's bet about what was gonna happen for the next episode each week. Is Hank gonna die this week? Or is this guy gonna get captured? And blah, blah, blah. And we took that very seriously. And I love this. - I love this idea too.

I mean, I've never wanted to be in a fantasy league of any sort until you just said the words, Great British fantasy league. - It's so cool. - And yes, number one, yes, I want that. And B, no, I mean, I think it needs a platform. I mean, it's a huge growing industry, so much so that John Oliver did a thing saying it needs to stop. - Oh, wow. - And of course-- - That's how you know it's good. - No, not really. Just like the FanDuel and DraftKings and all that is getting insane.

But anyways, all that aside. No, like, yeah, it should be pretty simple in the sense of you should be able to decide what data is being tracked or being, and then, I mean, I think you'd still have to put the data in a bit, right? Like, it doesn't know if the Kardashians got in a fight that episode. Like, that's, you know what I mean? Unless you're having AI try to determine from like the transcript of the closed captions of the show, maybe.

- Under over on how many times they curse or whatever it is, yeah. - But if you can just put the data in once, if you can just be watching the episode and be like, it has a list of things that people are betting on and then your commissioner or whatever is like, yep, that happened. Yep, this whatever. But then it gives you all the stats, all the breakdowns, all the tables, all the whatever after, which is just data entry once, I think is due. - You could have voting.

Yeah, you could have like everyone have to reach a consensus on whether or not that counted as a thing, you know? Have it all be voted in there. Yeah. - Guys, this is how FanDuel and DraftKings breaks into a whole market segment of women that haven't thought about gambling, but know that that person's gonna get the rose on The Bachelor, that knows that they're gonna like, the reality TV show segment is insane. And so you just are like, hey, how much do you actually know that?

And then you have guys sitting on their FanDuel app all of a sudden that's like, hey, I got 50 bucks on a Bachelor gambling, you know? Maybe I'll just ask my-- - Bachelor gambling. - Yeah, all right. You guys watch The Bachelor, like all of a sudden, you know, you start asking your friends about The Bachelor and they will tell you everything about it. Who's up next, who do you think is gonna get gone? And now you're like, I just, I think I'm just gonna bet 50 bucks.

- Who's gonna be the next Bachelorette? - There are Vegas odds for everything. And if you could get into some of those APIs for, you know, who's gonna be the next speaker of the house or whatever, people are bidding on all this stuff. Only you're just making it for like your friends. - Vegas will just give that away. - I remember seeing the Vegas odds of who's gonna get the Iron Throne in like season six of Game of Thrones and they had all of their bets up.

- Dude, we did this in college with, what was the one, two armies fighting against Deadliest Warrior? - That's it. - On Spike TV. - World's Deadliest? - He gave us the show World's Deadliest Warrior where they just have two random people in history, like I'm gonna take a pirate and fight a knight or something, who's gonna win? Or a Spetsnaz soldier against a World War II Marine or something. But they would give you the list of who's fighting who at the beginning of each season.

And we had huge betting pools of, I think this person's gonna win this one and this one's gonna win this one. Yeah, Russell, that's an excellent example. - What if this app, okay, say you're in a Great British Bake Off pool, right? And there's probably 10, 100, 1,000 other Great British Bake Off pools, right? Now people are placing their bets in their own pool but our app looks across pools to aggregate the odds. - Figures out what the most popular types of bets are and what not.

Right, what people think is gonna happen. And then adjust the odds for everybody's pools based off of all the pools and what people are betting on. - The tech podcast Hard Fork a couple months ago talked about this. They had one of the two guys went and did a, I think this was a New York Times thing. So there's a whole world around forecasting nerds, the manifold markets. And it's, yeah, it's this exact thing.

They take, will the CEO of Twitter still be Linda Riccarino in six months from now, yes or no? And there people are all betting real money on it. Manifold.markets, that's the one. But the idea is like, can you use the wisdom of the crowds to guess how will the Israel-Hamas war end or whatever? - Oh, that's crazy. - House speaker, SBF trial, will he be guilty? Or will we get a government shutdown? That's a current thing that's being threatened right now or whatever. It's crazy.

And you can actually do real data science off of this. People always say like, I bet you $10 that X is gonna happen next week. Oh yeah, well, let's put your money where your mouth is. Let's do it. That's the idea of manifold markets now. - I mean, he was right. Twitter did become X. (laughing) - Boo. Yes, it did. Cultural vandalism. I wanna be on the record about that. But yeah, turning that but a game amongst friends, I think is the key that nobody's done yet.

- I think keeping it amongst friends also honestly puts you legally more in the safe zone in the sense that once you get into like serious betting outside of like a small group of friends, that's where you kind of, where things get more regulated. And that's where like the problems with FanDuel and DraftKings is kind of coming from. But like if you can keep it, there's less money. To be honest, there's less money being made if you keep it with people, with friends.

But I think legally, and some would argue orally, probably better to keep it like office pools. - Fantasy is so fun that I don't really care about the NFL too much and I still enjoy fantasy football. It's the decision-making coaching side of things. And there's a lot of things that I care a lot more about than football that I would love to fantasize. - Fantasize? - I don't wanna fantasize them. I don't think that's what that means.

(upbeat music) - All right, Doyle, what do you got for us this week? - All right, I have a couple ideas, but I have one that I decided to share for this because I feel like time is of the essence before somebody does it. And I just wanna say- - I just wanna say I thought of it first. - Yes. - I saw you. - Yes. - I knew it. - Write it in an envelope, mail it to yourself. - Right, yeah, exactly. But anyways, so I'm sure you guys are all familiar with the low-code, no-code movement of apps.

- Oh, sure. - Of creating apps in the sense that there's not enough trained programmers and coders or whatever to make all the new apps with all the new updates for everything, always, all at once. So they've come up with a lot of things. They've come up with node-based making of apps and dragging and dropping elements to have it write its own CSS, HTML, whatever. I was thinking you take a UI like Unreal Engine. Are you guys familiar with how Unreal Engine does its programming?

For anybody who's not, the idea for Unreal Engine is it has all the things out of the box that you might need to put onto a screen, right? But when you get down to how two objects or two things should interact, you can pull pre-written code that's just shown to you in a little box and on the left has inputs and on the right has output. And when it comes down to programming, everything is just sort of inputs and output, right?

So you take your user input node and you hook it up into a little black box and then that little black box does something and outputs it. Now the programmer's job is to know what's in that little black box. But now we have AI programmers. So I can just tell the AI, I want these inputs to have these outputs every time. And maybe I hook it up to a database and then it will write the code again and again and again until it passes all your tests.

And then now you have a little box that does one specific thing and you do that one by one by one for like node-based graph of how you want your data flow for your app to go. - Like a flow chart, you mean? Node-based, you mean flow charting, yeah. - Yeah, like a flow chart sort of, you know? Kind of in the same way that Unity does, you can grab little code blocks that you move around and you have them all interact with each other. But now I don't have to know how to write any of it.

I just am describing to the AI what I want each box to do. Small, contained, solvable problems, but I'm giving it the larger algorithmic architecture of the app. - I'd use this, yeah, absolutely. - And then if you want, you can go under the hood, look at the code, fix something if it's simple or if you know, or if you do have knowledge, you can tell it to write the whole thing in a language you know so that you have the better ability to debug it. But all it knows is inputs and outputs.

- You know what's funny, Doyle? Like in coding, there's this thing called test-driven development. - Yeah. - Where you write these tests and all the coders are supposed to do is pass the tests. And so in a way, you've just said, the people that write tests, which are like, I don't think typically the senior level coders can become the developers themselves because they just write really good tests. And so the stronger their tests that they build, you're just like, AI, solve for these tests.

And all of a sudden you have a working app, more or less, right, maybe without any UI, but you just have, boom, now it works. And all of a sudden you just have the AI future, man. It's gonna be crazy. - Yeah, you know, people are talking about how AI is gonna be writing all these programs themselves. It's gonna be whatever. And I just kind of was thinking to myself, well, what would it really look like?

What does it really look like when we have AI able to program accurately, correctly most of the time, which it's pretty close now, but all that to say, like, what did those jobs look like? Those jobs look like people writing tests and creating the overall architecture of an app, but not necessarily writing each, every implementation of every little thing.

- I feel like I have just enough coding strength to make small, really niche services for myself and not quite enough to like build a few apps that I would like to be able to build. And if I were to break it down with a tool like what you're describing, I think that would put it just within arm's reach. I would love something like this. - Right, right. - I wonder if you could apply this to like other things too.

Like, I guess when you're thinking about AI, it's like, oh, I want to 3D print a thing and you just keep running a 3D print until it gets it right. I want to be able to capture a bug faster and you just let the AI randomly, well, I guess you don't need a 3D printer to do that. You could just have it generate that. But I guess, you know, it's- - Well, it generates 10,000 iterations and the test that you've defined is efficiency for catching bug or whatever, yeah.

- So I actually tried to write one of our early ideas in the show. I just, I'm like, you know, screw it. I'm just gonna try it. I'm just gonna see if I could actually create this or not. And I don't know how to code. And so I went to chat GPT and I said, I described the app that I wanted and I said, make this for me. And it wrote a Python script and then I ran the Python script and it was buggy and it did blah, blah, blah, and it didn't run.

And so I didn't, like, I have no idea how to troubleshoot or fix this. So I just copied all the errors at the bottom, put them back in the chat GPT and said, fix it. So I tried it again. And then after like three or four iterations of that, I had a fully working app and I just, or at least a section of the app that I wanted to do one of the features. So then I did that again with another one of the features that I wanted to do. I need this to light up this color, blah, make it happen.

Three or four iterations, boom. And by the end of it, I had like six different code sets and then I copied all of them in the chat GPT. And I said, put all these together in one. And three or four iterations later, I had a beautiful state machine and working code. - Well, I mean, that's the idea of programming, right? Is you should be able to write a function that works when you give it the inputs and it gives the same outputs. And then you just do that a hundred times.

So you have a hundred functions and then you have one thing that determines what order you do those functions in. And I mean, it's nested dolls all the way up, but yeah, I mean, that's really all it is. There's actually, that was reminding me, there was somebody who did make a thing similar to what your method, but he made like a package called Wolverine, which all it does is it looks over your shoulder, basically at your screen at what you're typing.

And then when it runs an error, it's like, hey, I know what that error was. Do you want me to fix it? Or do you want to fix it yourself? And then you go, you fix it. And then it fixes it. And then it makes a mistake, right? It declares a variable that would be needed, but never declares it rather. It mentions a variable that would be needed, but it's never declared. And then a new error pops up and it goes, oh, whoops, that was me. And it fixes that.

And it will just do it over and over again until it runs into no errors. And it's like, all right, you take it from here. And then you just keep typing along until you hit another error. And it's like, oh, I can fix that. - Wow. - And it called it Wolverine 'cause it's self healing. It just continually goes over and over and over again until it works. - Okay, I'm gonna throw a curve ball here for a second, but I'm wondering, can you like, so hypothetically it's inputs and outputs, right?

You were saying, let's say you created a connection to the Unity engine and like the goal was, I want to be a better dancer, okay? So you put your, you go on an Xbox connect and you do your dance moves. And then the inputs and outputs, right? Is you input your dance moves and the output is better dance moves. Or like it tells you what's wrong. Like use Unity to like do capture information. And then output is, what if I set the output to make this model dance better, right? The 3D model.

Could you do stuff like that? Like that's something that could be done, right? - And if you can get that going in real time in a VR headset where it's tracking where your arms and legs are in, Russell, you got like, you know how you have the piano learning things where it's kind of like Guitar Hero, they're falling and you're pressing them in order. You got that, but it's a wireframe of where your body needs to be next. And you're, how do I move from here to here to get my dance moves?

- Yeah, if so, anyone's going to have the real time, it's going to be a Pixar will in a few, in like a few years. Like, I'm not sure if you guys know this but they post all their white papers about how they do their 3D stuff on their website. Like you can go to Pixar and read their like full research white paper on how Sully has a million trillion hairs on his body and how they render that all in real time. We got super in the nerd weeds this week. I love it. This was a lot of fun.

- Yeah. - Wow. - Yeah. (laughing) - It was good. - Thank you all for listening. We hope you enjoyed yourself this week and thank you Doyle for coming here. This was a lot of fun. - Hey, I had a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. - You said you have several ideas. So we got to have you back here so we can get that next one out of you, all right? - That's why I didn't talk about any other ones. - Oh yeah. - So I self invited back on. - Already looking forward to it.

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