August 11, 2025 • 39 mins
Special thanks to Matt for joining us on this episode!
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:51 - Law or Lore?
00:05:53 - Caterizer
00:14:09 - Scorched.Earth
00:21:06 - New York Timeshop
00:29:24 - Drone Animal Relocation
00:37:45 - Outro
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
I'm Scott, I'm Russell, and I'm Leo. This is Spitball!
Welcome to Spitball, where three law-abiding lunatics 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!
(00:25):
Anything that we say is yours to keep.
And Russell, I believe that you brought our guest this week.
Yes, we have Matt Rybar here.
He's the founder and president of the Michigan Public Safety Drone Association and leads
efforts to integrate drone technology into Michigan's public safety sectors.
Thank you so much for being here, Matt.
(00:47):
Welcome.
Thanks, Russell.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.
As we do every week, we got to get started off with a game.
in honor of all of the times that you have lobbied for the rights of drones.
Drone kind in front of our Michigan legislature. I've written a little game. This time I'm gonna be calling it "Law or Lore".
In "Law or Lore", I'm gonna give you a Michigan either state law or municipality law,
(01:10):
and all you got to tell me is, is this a real ordinance or is this something that I made up?
For example, did you know that in Michigan it is illegal to seduce or debauch an unmarried woman?
And that's a five year felony.
That is still a legal thing on the books today, which is pretty great.
That's true.
Yeah, it's true.
So I know a pizza guy that owes me five years of his life.
(01:34):
In prison.
Anyway, we got to start, as we do every time with with our guest, Matt.
Matt, is this true or not?
Within the Detroit city limits, it's illegal to let your pig run unless
It has a ring in its nose.
-Lore.
Definitely a lore.
-That's a real-- that's a real lore.
[laughter]
-Wow.
(01:55):
-You can't let your pig run within the city limits unless they're wearing a ring,
which is a practical requirement.
-There's a new business.
-I was about to say, new product idea.
-Pig rings.
-Absolutely.
-Or old product.
-Pig rings.
-Head on down to pigrings.biz.
[laughter]
That's great.
Russell, across the whole state of Michigan, is it illegal to sell cars on Sunday?
(02:16):
Absolutely. We are a we rest on Sunday out here in Michigan by the Bible Belt.
That is true as of 1953. Did you know that? It's unlawful for any person, firm, corporation,
even second hand. You're not allowed to sell the car to grandma or whatever.
Wow. Crazy.
Amen, brother. Sorry. You can edit that out.
(02:36):
That's right. Scott, in East Lansing, Michigan, there's an ordinance that says all buildings
with elevators of at least three floors high must play "wax cylinder music recordings or an equivalent."
I hope that is lore. I don't know if Spotify has wax cylinder recordings.
Or an equivalent. Spotify would count? Are you saying that's made up?
(02:57):
That's lore. Yeah, I made that up.
Okay, very good.
Matt, in the city of Grand Haven, it's illegal to leave your hoop skirt abandoned on a sidewalk.
That's a law. Absolutely.
That's a real law.
I think Matt wrote that one.
1890s.
There's a wire problem in Victorian fashion, I guess.
And there's a $5 fine, which I guess would equate to about $165 today.
(03:22):
That means that a whole city, a council meeting happened to say, "Yes, that law gavel slams."
Absolutely.
It's time.
Write that into the law.
We have suffered under this tyranny for too long.
Scott.
Harper Woods, Michigan, it's against the law to paint sparrows and sell them as parakeets. Why?
(03:44):
Lore, please be lore. That's a real one. Oh my god. Extremely specific city ordinance. That's right.
Not in Holland! Not in Grand Rapids!
Every law is here for a reason and I just want to know what happened to that one. I know, me too.
Russell, in the whole state of Michigan if you declare bankruptcy
100 chickens are exempt from collections agents. Oh my that's true
(04:08):
It is true and not only that way by law a debtor is entitled to retain 10 sheep 2 cows 5 swines
100 hens 5 roosters and sufficient feed for 6 months
So I guess you can keep your own homestead or your farm and get back on your feet quickly
My mortgage just got more confusing
(04:31):
One more time through Matt in the city of Rochester, Michigan
There's an ordinance requiring that all bathing suits to be inspected by the city's chief of police before use. That's a law
Absolutely. There is a law so I couldn't find a direct citation for this one
But there's a bunch of like 10 wacky laws in Michigan articles that all say that so I think that used to be a law
(04:53):
And that it's not a thing anymore
But yes
It absolutely was and I think it harkens back to like Victorian sounding like make sure it covers decency
Standards or something, but yeah wacky Scott Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
There's an old local law that prohibits smoking in bed
Sure, I think that sounds reasonable for the UP. That is very much true. Is it my freedom?
(05:18):
In Sault Ste. Marie only you can smoke in bed next door to the what it is outside my bed my choice
That's right. And lastly, Russell, in Marquette, Michigan, in the UP, you may not be a tourist or
guest and view an Aurora Borealis without a license. Oh my, please, lore. Please, lore.
(05:40):
Yeah, I made that one up. Okay. Oh good, what a lord. Oh my gosh.
Very good. I think that means, Russell, you got all three, am I right? I think so.
- Ah, it's just, you know, how I roll most days.
(laughing)
- Russell, why don't you kick us off this week?
What do you have for us for a pitch?
- Oh, great, yes, happy to.
So...
- Or do you need to sober up first?
(06:02):
- Or think of an idea.
- Or think of an idea first.
- No, I got my idea.
Okay, this idea.
- What do you got?
- Little interesting, okay?
Maybe this exists, maybe it doesn't,
but so the idea is called Caterizer.
Basically, it takes any existing mom and pop shop kitchen
or like, you know, little restaurant
(06:24):
and we help set up the catering for that business, okay?
And so what this does is we reach out to,
like we're hyper local,
we reach out to like five or 10 mom and pop shops
that are doing really well
and figure out a catering strategy,
centralize operations for those five
to like have a commercial kitchen that's supposed to make a hundred like 300 chicken sandwiches for
(06:50):
that one catering event right which may not be possible in a current restaurant situation
so we are like the outsourced ghost kitchen that basically takes your recipe takes your brand and
caterizes your kitchen right don't worry about literally you don't have to do literally anything
(07:10):
You just say, I want this.
We take a cut.
We caterize.
Done.
That's it.
This whole pitch was you wanted to use the word caterize that you just coined.
I get it.
That's a good word.
Checking copyrights right now.
Yep.
Russell's got it.
Caterized.
Are you imagining individuals or existing established businesses
(07:34):
coming to this with their recipe?
Existing established businesses that are already killing it.
the ones that are doing super well,
they've been in business for like maybe two or three years, right?
So you want to kind of find the new ones and just take,
not take, expand, right?
Their, their business. Yeah. That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you market to that group? That's hard.
(07:57):
Like you're already doing exactly what you're doing now and you're killing it.
So why don't you give up control of making that to this other company and hope
that it works out? You know, that's a tough pitch.
Well, in theory, you're going to the ones that aren't doing catering right now.
They just can't like they've thought about it.
They've probably done some bulk orders, but they've probably turned down
those types of arrangements, right?
(08:17):
You got to drive some fear into them.
You got to give them a call to be like, Hey, I'm having a wedding coming up.
I need, you know, 400 orders of whatever by this date.
Can you do that?
Oh, you can't.
Okay.
Then hang up.
And then Russell comes in the next day with his service.
Hey, I help you do large events.
Whoa, I got to call this other guy.
I called me yesterday and all of a sudden I'm buying my own stuff.
(08:38):
(laughing)
- So I think I was at a place,
I was at some restaurants in Madison.
It was like a breakfast joint
and they have a really good lunch,
they have an incredible menu.
And I think there were somebody that was coming in
and asking about catering.
Like, "Hey, we wanna do this breakfast brunch event."
(08:59):
Like, "Hey, we don't do any catering."
There was like 150 people.
And it's probably because, right,
they're trying to run their existing restaurant.
So, I mean, I get it, right?
And what's cool about this is like ad hoc,
you don't have to pay.
It's like if you're a restaurant owner,
you have to pay for a commercial kitchen to do that.
There's this one restaurant that I was talking to years ago
(09:21):
that was like, yeah, like we make literally like 300,
500 tamales to order.
We do that during the day.
We don't open and do breakfast or lunch during the day
'cause we're literally making tamales all day, right?
Like all day.
And so you would just, um, yeah, that's, you'd do it in a different kitchen.
They would rent out other kitchens.
Like, why do that?
I'll just do it all for you.
(09:41):
You could like borrow a chef from the original company.
Like, Hey, I need, I need one of your sous chefs just for the day.
Tell me, does this taste like what you make?
Great.
Ship it.
No, they just use like, now they can make like, I don't know how they make
tamales, but like now you can use like 40, like 10 burners instead of the four.
Yeah, I guess.
And then we would, so like, what's different about this is we would go like
(10:01):
nationwide with it.
We'd be a national brand that would, that would trust and we could ship over overseas.
Oh, you're not white labeling your service.
You're not going to be the fulfillment that like, I don't know, local
Mexican restaurant comes to you and you start doing that.
You're not going to like pretend that you're more poised from them.
You're going to call yourselves the like the caterizers and the caterizers menu
(10:23):
is different every month, depending on what restaurant you're partnered with or
whatever.
I thought you were taking their branding.
I know.
Yeah, me too.
I'm more of an.
Well, I was more thinking like a national, like we would be a national brand to those restaurants.
So when they go to the national convention, right, the kitchen convention would be.
Well, what if you were something that the average consumer recognized?
(10:44):
That could be interesting.
We're like, oh man, sort of like the soup of the day, but I'm the restaurant of the week.
And this week we have whatever for weddings, but next week it's your host in that party.
I don't know.
I like that a lot.
If there's like the most famous restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia,
the most famous mom and pop shop, I would try that.
Hell yeah.
What are they most famous for?
(11:05):
This dish.
I'd try that up here.
That'd be great.
I'm having that grad party or whatever.
Let me have in caterizers.
They'll have something interesting from Louisiana.
Yeah.
It's like door dashing across the country, but there's only one option each week.
That's really fun.
That's actually genius.
Oh my gosh.
Right?
So like the most famous kitchen, like the most famous restaurant in
(11:27):
like Louisiana, like a New Orleans.
Right.
All right.
We're going to make the best Cajun meal.
Yeah.
We're just going to make it all over the place.
They just gave us, they just sent us the recipe and we procure and do everything
and take a ton of the, you know, all the pre-orders purchase boom and just turn it
(11:48):
around.
I love it.
That's just a bunch of free advertising for them too.
And the next time you're in New Orleans,
you gotta try it again if you liked it.
- Is this naive in saying photographers
love being paid in exposure?
Like, are there restaurants out here who are like,
"There's no way in hell I'm giving you my recipe.
"I don't have any control over you."
Like, I feel like this might be a hard sell to it, yeah.
- I'll sign an NDA, whatever, right?
(12:09):
Like, we just make everybody sign an NDA.
- You have to accept the cred, for sure, yeah.
Once you are something that consumers know,
then you have a little bit of sway in the negotiation.
- Dude, if I did like an in and out,
Not in and out, but in and out pop up in the Midwest.
Like, you know how much money I would make for just one day of, I would, I would.
(12:31):
Yeah.
There'd just be no way I could fulfill all the orders for in and out.
But if you do something a little smaller scale, maybe a little less famous, it
up and down, it would pan out.
Dude.
Yes.
Yeah.
Throw some door dash drivers in there.
You know,
I think your key to value proposition for your books is doing it big though.
(12:52):
You don't take DoorDash orders.
You take minimum 200 quantity orders.
Yes.
Right.
And maybe that can be-
Whole businesses, right?
Entire block of, uh, what's your restaurant?
What's your restaurant that you guys want to have?
What, like, what is the best restaurant?
All the West coasters talk about like, oh God, Whataburger and In-N-Out
and Shake Shack and stuff, and we don't have any of that stuff in here
(13:15):
in Michigan, up in the Midwest.
We're just now discovering raising canes and Popeyes and stuff.
It's like, there's so much that we're missing out on.
-We didn't have Sonic on the East side in Detroit.
We would get commercials for Sonic all the time growing up, but there
was just no Sonic in Michigan.
That really pissed me off.
-Yes.
-Well, Caterizers will be at your door this year to sell you all those.
(13:39):
-For me and 199 of my closest friends and family.
One week only.
I only wanted one In-N-Out burger, not 160.
(laughing)
- Buy a deep freezer.
- Buy a deep freezer.
(laughing)
- I love bulk prepared secondhand recipe In-N-Out burgers
(14:00):
that are in the deep freezer for a few weeks.
That's peak culinary experience right there.
(laughing)
- Hell yeah.
Just throw it in the air fryer, all right?
- Yeah, that's right.
(laughing)
All righty, Scotty B, what do you got this week?
- All right, I have a drone idea
that I have been saving for Mr. Rybar here.
(14:22):
So, we recently had rain in our area
and this entire summer,
I have felt like we haven't had any mosquitoes.
And then all of a sudden there's mosquitoes everywhere
and it's really pissing me off.
And so I'm wondering, can we make a drone product
that will, after a rainstorm,
go around and just like poison every puddle so that larva can't like spawn there.
(14:47):
Every small body of water, it could just detect and go in and drop like a little tablet.
Apparently there's like things that don't affect the environment at all, but they just make it so
larva can't develop some kind of protein.
And then it just flies back home and returns.
It just keeps doing that until there aren't any mosquitoes in a hundred yards around me in any
direction.
And that's the entire idea.
Wow, honey.
I feel like ever since we hired Scorched Earth,
(15:10):
there's been no single wildlife pest outside.
I haven't seen a thing living or dead.
- I did a little bit of due diligence on this,
and there are environmentally safe ways
to kill mosquito larvae that don't affect most wildlife.
- What about humans?
What's the effect on humans?
(15:32):
- How's that well water treating you?
- It's a naturally occurring bacterium
that specifically targets mosquito larvae.
- That's cool. - And like some kind of,
most kinds of flies.
- And living human cells.
- Anyway, I wanna poison the water supply using drones.
(laughing)
- I see nothing wrong with it, absolutely.
- Okay, we got approval from the Senate.
- Yeah, the president says so, the drone association.
(15:56):
- Dude, I mean, we, like, why not?
Just like, let's just, why don't we sew it into the clouds?
So why don't we just put that chemical--
- This isn't that much,
Let me narrow the scope a little bit.
This is kind of like when you have pest control
like spray around your house, right?
Like you have a small scale, you sort of make a barrier,
but it's your nearby--
- Yeah, I don't want to disrupt the entire ecosystem,
(16:17):
just my lawn.
- I think the follow-up product though
is a mosquito zapper on that drone.
It kills the larvae, then it flies around
the little zap ranges.
(laughing)
Zaps from out of the sky.
- Our bug zapper is just not active enough.
It needs to chase them down and kill them.
(laughter)
(16:38):
- Psh, psh, psh, psh.
Just buzzing around.
- Great marketing. - That's awesome.
- Whoa, what's that?
Is that a bird, a plane?
No, that is the mosquito's--
- It's an electrified, electric fence
combing through the air.
- This could be sold with caterize.
You clean up the event before the guests show up.
(17:01):
- Couple different niches here, but you know what?
but marketing says they go great together.
(laughs)
- So like rain barrels, I will say Scott,
being in the stormwater industry,
the rain barrels, there's like tablets you throw in
to prevent mosquito larva.
It's like a thing, it's totally real.
- Put it on a drone, drop it in a puddle.
- Just everywhere. - Everywhere.
- But like for real.
- Everywhere you detect water.
(17:23):
- Like why do we let mosquitoes live?
- Bats.
- That's right, pure silence.
- If you're an environmentalist, please write in to us.
- Or don't, I think I know what that email looks like.
(laughs)
podcast@Spitball.show. We'll take all of your hate mail. I guess my question to you Matt
is that within the realm of possibility can a drone one detect water, two drop a
(17:44):
small object, three return home, and do it again? I don't see any problem with that.
That's actually very feasible. How about the legality of that? Let's not talk about that.
Okay what state should we be doing this in? Probably Texas. Louisiana just passed a
that they can shoot drones out of the sky without any issues.
(18:07):
So it's federally illegal, but they said screw the feds
and we're going to do our own thing.
So that might be a good place.
Turn the frickin' frogs gay with your tablets
that you're dropping from the sky.
We're going to make some conspiracy theories come to life.
Can I send another drone to kill a current drone?
Like if I see one, can I have like a hunter seeker drone?
This is my drone drone.
My drone drone.
(18:28):
My anti-drone drone.
There's ones out there.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
-A little kamikaze drone action?
-I do have a kamikaze drone in case Scott's drone
comes over to poison my water, my iron dome.
-Leo just loves the mosquitoes, man.
He's been farming them for years.
-I remember what I was thinking.
Okay, so in my parents, when I grew up,
(18:50):
they would literally have a truck come by
and they would spray for mosquitoes.
You guys have that? -Yes.
-Do we have that here? -Yes.
We were talking about it on the other side of the state we did.
-What chemical is that? -It's just bleach.
- Who knows?
But whatever Scott is dropping on my puddles
is probably gonna be made of the same chemical
that just goes literally on like a truck
(19:10):
that just take a hose and spray it in the direction
all over the playgrounds, all over the trees.
Like we don't give a single about that.
At least Scott's is a little bit more precise.
Like yeah, that puddle, no.
You know, that little pool of water, drop it, right?
-No, right now we're totally cool with trucks just spraying the shit out of everything.
(19:35):
We should at least be-- -Scott's is the environmental solution.
-Yes, exactly right. -I'm just picturing sitting outside
with a lemonade and a drone comes up and drops a little tablet in it and flies away.
[laughter]
-We sent a letter in the mail, Scott.
[laughter]
Don't go outside from 6 to 9 PM for the spray, the drone spray.
(19:56):
-8 AM to 8 PM.
I mean, what's so different?
Like, Scott, yours is actually way safer
than those trucks driving by and just fogging
the whole neighborhood, right?
So it sounds scary on paper, but like--
It said it was even--
whatever BTI that I was looking at
says it's even harmless to bees.
So I'm like, OK, great.
(20:16):
This is a good one.
Let's try it.
It comes in tablet form.
OK.
The bees could go too, though.
Let's kill them all.
You know what?
Screw it.
We'll go back to Leo's scorched earth.
(laughing)
- Why use chemicals, Scott?
Why don't you just drop a bunch of frogs
and tadpoles in all these ponds?
- There is a dot earth TLD.
You could have scorched dot earth
(20:36):
if that's not taken already.
- Whoa.
Dude, that's definitely taken.
- Yeah, it must be.
- What eats mosquito larva?
Is there like an animal, I mean, that's probably like a--
- Larva, I don't know, but--
- Minnows, like crazy.
What if you dropped just a minnow?
- What if the drone dropped a bunch of minnows
into that puddle so that at the end of a day,
you had hot baked minnows all over you.
(20:58):
(laughing)
- Everyone wants this service.
Hey, no mosquitoes, baby.
- At least there's no mosquitoes, honey.
(sad violin music)
- All right, Leo, what do you got for us this week?
- All right, a simple task for us this evening, gentlemen.
We need to solve the political divide in this country
and fix the news outrage cycle, okay?
(21:20):
No problem.
- Perfect. - Easy.
- Here's something I've been thinking a lot about.
the news outrage cycle fuels itself on these stories
that both left and right-wing people hear
and get in a big tizzy about,
and then forget about for the next thing.
Three weeks later, nobody's talking
about that thing anymore.
So I want to build the news outrage cycle reminder,
(21:41):
which sends a thing, a push notification,
maybe once or twice a week,
or maybe even more frequently,
that's, "Hey, do you remember that thing
"that you thought was so urgent and important
and the thing that really bothered you four years ago,
three years ago, six years ago,
that's not really that important anymore, is it?
On the right wing side,
(22:01):
you've got your Bud Light boycotts from a few months ago,
and you've got your, oh God,
the Harvard plagiarism scandals or whatever.
On the left side, you've got your changes to like,
I don't know, the Hollywood strike
or whatever the heck's going on this week, right?
And then we forget about them.
What if I was put everything into context?
Maybe you even grab some current news stories and like throw them next to this and say, "Hey, this looks like it's about as important as that caravan of Hispanics that was coming across the border that you were really worried about four years ago, but really wasn't even happening."
(22:33):
I think everything needs to be contextualized so that we see ourselves in that funhouse mirror and maybe chill out a little bit. How's that?
Holding a mirror up to society is very scary, Leo. We don't want to see ourselves. I do really like this idea, though.
If you register yourself, you can even use like advertisements, put an ad on
NewYorkTimes.com or FoxNews.com and say like, "Hey, I see this story is really
(22:59):
important. Do you remember when those three other stories were just like this
and nothing ended up happening?" I'm not advocating for complete apathy, but
maybe tonal, I don't know, bringing everything down by a little bit.
So that's all.
Well, so like one, I have never forgotten when Obama wore that tan suit.
I will never forget that.
I think about that every day, so I
(23:20):
don't think that app will work.
Yeah.
But no.
Well, this would be pushed too conservative to say,
remember when the war on Christmas
was the thing you mattered the most, or Obama's tan suit,
or whatever.
Red Starbucks.
And it ended up not being a big deal.
Red Starbucks cups.
I think that was Starbucks that made it up.
But you know, this makes sense.
It's like the throwback, right?
Like the throwback feature you get on your Snapchat.
(23:41):
It's TimeHop mixed with the New York Times app.
[LAUGHTER]
That's--
That's really good.
What a self-realization.
Like, oh, that-- wow, I was so--
I was heated about that topic, wasn't I?
Exactly.
I'm not claiming that this is something that only one
side or the other does.
Like, this is a problem for all of society,
(24:03):
I think, at the moment.
I really like this video.
Free Britney.
Guys remember this?
Like, that was a--
I mean, whether-- what left--
Free Britney.
I still have strong feelings on that, Russell.
Oh, yeah.
Free Britney.
No, I mean, that was like a huge deal.
Like, I don't even--
- Might be a little too far back, right?
- Is that too far?
I don't even know.
- I don't, maybe not.
I don't know.
- But like perfect time hop, like, oh wow, yeah, I forgot.
(24:24):
We were really, everybody was fighting about that,
weren't they?
You know?
- Kony 2012, am I right?
- Right, that's right.
You forgot about that.
Who gives a shit now?
But like, damn, people were heated about that time.
- It ended up not even being like a real story.
That's the thing.
these things are just red hot fire 24/7 news coverage for a day or two or three
(24:46):
and they a week a month later were proven to not be true at all or to be
highly exaggerated or taken out of context so like what if we had this
service providing like a little bit of a Snopes.com thing but far in the future
where everyone's cooled down and you get the like the follow-up closing the loop
(25:06):
satisfaction of conclusion to each one of these stories maybe that would help
tone everyone down a little.
- Oh yeah.
It'd be kind of cool to revisit like a story,
you know, four years later and be like,
all right, I have a fresh perspective.
- I would honestly love to hear the conclusion
of all of these, whatever it is.
- I think Hacker News or Reddit or something
has a view the front page as it was
on any particular given day.
(25:27):
And that's always really interesting too.
Like do the Fox Newses and New York Timeses
of the world have that?
I don't think they're incentivized to.
- No way.
- Nope, new stories, new fear.
- I guess so.
- Dude, that's a great way.
Like you could sell this as like a service to like New York Times subscribers.
You know, you create the tool and then now like imagine that's ad revenue that
(25:49):
reusing the same article to get more clicks on their site, like literally they
do very little and now they're making the same amount of money.
Like, oh yeah, let me reread that article I read four, five years ago.
Like, oh, I have a different, well, like it's kind of cool.
Cause you have a different perspective on it.
Cause now you know what you know.
You have closure, you have an ending.
(26:10):
Probably not, but--
- You know what this could be?
This is a really good premise for like a sub stack
or a blog of some kind, a paid newsletter,
where once or twice a week I'm getting a newsletter
and hey, kind of like those Twitter accounts
that are like this day in World War II,
where it's following along in real time,
like this day six years ago politically or whatever.
Like we pick one really important story
(26:31):
that totally fizzles before it got its day
to find conclusions.
- That'd be so, actually, yeah.
Like you can do the recent, which is six years ago.
You could do one that's 60 years ago, 600 years ago.
If they had that.
(laughs)
- You believe these women and their rights to vote?
- Right, like that could have been a thing.
Just that article that was really popular.
- This got a lot of clicks in 1925.
(26:53):
(laughs)
- Right?
How cool would it be?
I guess like I'd be more interested in reading
about history, let's say, through a service like that.
Right?
Like you said that's an existing service where I can just like get live tweets of World War two. Oh, yeah
There's this going it was a Twitter thing
I don't know if it's persisted into the post Twitter era
(27:16):
but it was like this day in WW2 and it was
like the Allies have just taken this small town in the west of France because it just happened to be like following along in
Real time but X number of years in the past
I would love to follow General MacArthur's Twitter in real time as it's going.
That would be incredible.
It was like briefings from the front.
(27:36):
Here's the little bit of progress that was made that one day.
Here's this little tiny thing that happened, but in real time.
And you got like historical photos and stuff.
It's cool.
I'm really curious how people would react.
Like I feel like you're just going to start some movement accidentally of just people
seeing I am forced to see this story that I was hoping to be gone from my mind at this
point and now it's back again and I have to think about it again.
(27:58):
There's some eating your medicine with this thing and I'm not quite sure how to give sugar. Oh, no, I love that
It's fantastic. But is this something that people would seek out and want like is this just gonna be awful?
Is this a good experience? I don't know. I I think you're right though
It's gonna open people's eyes to be like, oh my god. I am ingesting so much shit right now
Maybe I don't have to eat shit all day. That's the
(28:20):
It's captivating. I could be cool to see an article like like knowing what the top of our
News cycle is this week this day and then finding a rhyming article from like let's say a hundred years ago, right?
Yeah, and then just being like whoa, like this is a new story, but it was from 1920s and it sounds like relevant today
Right. They say everything comes in cycles
(28:42):
So it'd be cool to watch the cycles go over and over back and if journalism really is dying
Then there's probably a lot of really good writers out there who are looking for a new
Angle a new pivot a new side project or something, right? Yeah
easy like easy Twitter like creation Instagram like follow right and then you just
You literally look at what's trending figure out the history news article post about that and tag
(29:08):
What's the name of this bad boy Leo? Oh
New York time hop time
That's pretty good Chicago times hop
- LA Time Hop.
- Right?
- Yeah, exactly.
LA Time Hop.
- LA Time Hop.
(laughing)
- Okay, Matt, what have you brought for us this week?
(29:32):
- So this one piggybacks a bit off of Scott's,
but just imagine you're sitting in your house
and you look out in your backyard
and you see that just annoying possum
sitting out by in the field.
Or you have chipmunks running around
you're like, what in the world?
How am I, you're in all these chipmunks or
your neighbor's dog runs into the yard and
you're like, get that thing out of there.
(29:53):
This is the drone relocate, animal
relocation service that drone just swoops in
out of nowhere, snatches that thing up, takes
it wherever it needs to go.
If it's the chipmunk, yep, that might go to
your neighbor.
If it's your dog, who knows where that might go.
But it's, it's the ethical way of, of
(30:15):
relocating animals.
(laughing)
- All right, all right.
- Whoa, I'm just picturing a dog
like flying down the street in my neighborhood.
(laughing)
(imitating dog barking)
In a net.
- Oh, sorry, I thought it was a coon.
(laughing)
- Okay.
- 100% autonomous, AI driven the entire way,
(30:36):
no human input.
- This is just a bodyguard.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So the occasional dog might go flying away,
but it's the cost of doing business.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- Dude, I would totally drop a stuffed animal dog
in Scott's yard and call this service
and it's just a little stuffed animal flying in the air.
And then of course in Louisiana,
(30:57):
I'd shoot the shit out of it.
I'm sorry.
(laughing)
Oh no.
It wouldn't work out there.
- In prototyping, our AI has picked up on small children.
So, you know, we're still finding some bugs right now.
(laughing)
Remember the balloon incident with the kid?
- Oh yeah, right.
- Several years ago.
(31:18):
- It's like the balloon thing.
- Let's escalate that.
- My New York time hop just pushed that notification to me.
I was supposed to be really mad about that.
Balloon boy.
- That's right.
So I think like, so animal services probably
are like extremely underfunded.
You know what I mean?
Like this would totally work kind of to that end.
Like why not just replace all that funding,
put it into like an autonomous drone program
(31:40):
and just like, like, let's say, you know, sure.
It's not surveilling everybody's yards.
Let's say you call 911drones.com or whatever.
I call them, right?
The dot com.
And then they swoop in and they pick up the animal.
Roadkill too.
Skunks, dude.
They need to go.
Roadkill.
(32:00):
Roadkill's a good one.
Yeah.
That's gotta be somebody's job, right?
They don't just let the vultures take care of it.
If it's like a full deer, can we bring it somewhere for processing?
Yuck.
Autonomous car drone.
That's where the car drone comes in, you know?
- What is an autonomous car drone?
Like an RC car with a Raspberry Pi in it?
- It's a Waymo.
It's just a Waymo car with a harpoon at the front.
(32:23):
- Vacuum.
(laughing)
- Shing, just drags the...
(laughing)
- J-Mo with the harpoon.
- Yep.
- And neighborhood cats are a pain too, right?
- 911 drone, get this other cat out of here.
- You could go onto this service's website
and contribute your dog or cat's information to it
(32:46):
so that the drone knows where to deliver it back to.
So that when your cat is a few blocks away,
it scoops it up and brings it back home.
-It scans the chip in the ear. -That's fantastic.
-Looks up the address in a database and brings it home.
Hopefully, it haven't moved and updated.
-For every lost dog poster that you see on there,
that's one opportunity for your drone bodyguard
(33:07):
to be the hero of the day.
People would pay a lot of money to find their dogs.
- It's true.
- That's a good idea.
Just scours the neighborhood for it.
Sorry, is this a different topic?
- It's a pivot.
- It's the same.
- A little less hostile.
- It just keeps bringing you dogs
that kind of look like yours until you find the right one.
- They're literally microchipped, Scott.
(33:28):
You have a chip reader on there.
- No, no, we're doing this purely on vision
and nothing else.
- Is this your dog?
Good God, that's a skunk.
- A couple of bugs, it's fine.
- He drops it off at the same spot I found it.
- Oh my God.
- I'm just picturing a very freaked out skunk
flying by, spraying everywhere as it's going.
- It takes their dog, the neighbor's dog,
(33:49):
puts it in a little kennel someplace,
and then when that person calls and says,
"Find my dog," yep, we got it.
Charge 'em with getting their dog back.
- It's a hostage fee.
- Oh man.
- We'll blackmail 'em, I like that.
I don't imagine this service trolling the public streets
looking for lost dogs.
(laughing)
Maybe just your property.
- Why not? - Yeah, why not?
(34:10):
You've got a lady dangling from the drone,
holding onto a leash, and the dog is in the drone.
You picked it up on the walk.
(laughing)
- Okay, but like, so you know those people
that do the drones with the glasses,
and they can go super fast?
- Yeah.
- Through like hoops and stuff?
- The VR racing stuff, yeah.
- What if you just had like an outsource company, right,
(34:32):
that all they did was, there's like five dudes in a room,
and they just jump into different cities
where they have those drones and they're like,
find this cat, right?
They got a little picture in their glasses
and they just zoom through.
Yeah, you got like a swarm of five
and they go block by block through an entire city
(34:53):
in 20 minutes 'cause they're wicked fast at what they do
and boom.
- That's fun.
- And like nobody's gonna complain.
I'm sure they have that we haven't incorporated those like VR goggle drone racers into like search and rescue operations
I'm surprised it feels like that's a like we're trying to find that one little girl who's lost in the woods
(35:14):
We got to get the drone racers going on here. That's faster than any is that a thing now Pat? That must be
Yeah, not that not the FPV stuff in that would definitely from above
Sure, sure, but the FPV side. Yeah, I mean you can't see through trees or thermal so absolutely there we go
- Oh, do with the ducking and weaving,
like they're in Endor, that's great.
(35:35):
- They're on a drone.
- Slice the girl's arm off when they finally found her.
- She was like that, I swear.
- Local girl beheaded by rescue.
- Guys, so like how much are people paying
for like pest removal?
Like my dad, I'm sorry, I'm only experiencing this
from like skunks in my actual like parents' place.
(35:58):
He literally would pour, he's like,
I'm just gonna pour bleach down this like hole underneath my porch.
Oh no.
Cause, well, I mean, it's not that they're scared away.
They're scared away, right?
They're not actually in there, gonna go out for the day, but then they come back home
and it's like, "Oh, smells like bleach in here.
We ain't gonna stay in here."
Right?
But that's his solution, right?
What if there was a drone service that just like hung out, monitored, waited for that
(36:21):
skunk to come in, scooped it up.
Like people, like...
(laughs)
People pay a lot of money for skunk removal
and like nuisance skunk removal.
And if you're not killing the animal,
like that's already a huge win and you drop it.
- You're just giving it a freaking it the hell out.
(36:42):
- Yeah, like you can even just,
it doesn't have to be flying there the whole time,
you could literally just place,
you could just Amazon ship the drone,
it just sits on there,
monitors with their 360 camera, okay,
skunk zoom out and then it travels three miles out.
- Could you sell these things as piloted
and less AI and more real to like a pest control,
(37:05):
animal control, municipality department?
Is this something that there'd be any demand for I wonder?
- I know a guy who can sell drones to a municipality.
- Call him.
(laughing)
- Give him a call.
- I think he's on this call.
- I bet they're underfunded and they would be like,
yeah, we don't answer half our calls
because they're just like chipmunks or something, right?
- But we'd love to buy your drone.
(laughing)
(37:27):
If you take off half our workload,
like they don't care, right?
And you charge, you just, you invoice some people,
you just send an invoice in the mail for like 50 bucks
for the drone to swing by, right?
- No.
(laughing)
- People get grifted way easier than that, right?
Like, but.
- That's right.
Well, dear listener, we know that you're listening to us
(37:47):
while battling for your life against that possum
in your backyard.
So thank you very much for spending the night with us
and we hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you very much, Matt, for joining us.
This was a lot of fun.
- Thanks guys, absolutely.
- Our website is Spitball.show.
There you can find links to our YouTube channel,
other social media, email us feedback, comments, ideas.
We'd love to hear from you.
We are podcast@spitball.show.
(38:09):
And that's also how you can follow us
on the Fediverse, such as Mastodon.
We are podcast@spitball.show,
and we're on BlueSky at spitball.show.
Our subreddit is r/SpitballShow.
Our intro/outro music is Swingers by Bonkers Beat Club.
Please, if you wouldn't mind,
If you have a minute, that one friend of yours who has like 12 cats and they're always going
over into the neighbor's yard and stuff, send him a link to this episode.
(38:31):
We would love to have them as a listener.
And leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever it is that you listen to us on.
We're famous now.
We should tell them we're famous now because we have so many views and downloads from PocketCasts.
That's true.
Shout out to PocketCasts.
Right!
Yeah!
Listen to us, especially on PocketCasts, where we've been recently featured in the new podcasts
and tech category list right on the Discover page there. New episode's coming out in
(38:55):
two weeks. We will see you then.
I'm Scott, I'm Russell, and I'm Leo. This is Spitball!
Welcome to Spitball, where three law-abiding lunatics 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!
(00:25):
Anything that we say is yours to keep.
And Russell, I believe that you brought our guest this week.
Yes, we have Matt Rybar here.
He's the founder and president of the Michigan Public Safety Drone Association and leads
efforts to integrate drone technology into Michigan's public safety sectors.
Thank you so much for being here, Matt.
(00:47):
Welcome.
Thanks, Russell.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.
As we do every week, we got to get started off with a game.
in honor of all of the times that you have lobbied for the rights of drones.
Drone kind in front of our Michigan legislature. I've written a little game. This time I'm gonna be calling it "Law or Lore".
In "Law or Lore", I'm gonna give you a Michigan either state law or municipality law,
(01:10):
and all you got to tell me is, is this a real ordinance or is this something that I made up?
For example, did you know that in Michigan it is illegal to seduce or debauch an unmarried woman?
And that's a five year felony.
That is still a legal thing on the books today, which is pretty great.
That's true.
Yeah, it's true.
So I know a pizza guy that owes me five years of his life.
(01:34):
In prison.
Anyway, we got to start, as we do every time with with our guest, Matt.
Matt, is this true or not?
Within the Detroit city limits, it's illegal to let your pig run unless
It has a ring in its nose.
-Lore.
Definitely a lore.
-That's a real-- that's a real lore.
[laughter]
-Wow.
(01:55):
-You can't let your pig run within the city limits unless they're wearing a ring,
which is a practical requirement.
-There's a new business.
-I was about to say, new product idea.
-Pig rings.
-Absolutely.
-Or old product.
-Pig rings.
-Head on down to pigrings.biz.
[laughter]
That's great.
Russell, across the whole state of Michigan, is it illegal to sell cars on Sunday?
(02:16):
Absolutely. We are a we rest on Sunday out here in Michigan by the Bible Belt.
That is true as of 1953. Did you know that? It's unlawful for any person, firm, corporation,
even second hand. You're not allowed to sell the car to grandma or whatever.
Wow. Crazy.
Amen, brother. Sorry. You can edit that out.
(02:36):
That's right. Scott, in East Lansing, Michigan, there's an ordinance that says all buildings
with elevators of at least three floors high must play "wax cylinder music recordings or an equivalent."
I hope that is lore. I don't know if Spotify has wax cylinder recordings.
Or an equivalent. Spotify would count? Are you saying that's made up?
(02:57):
That's lore. Yeah, I made that up.
Okay, very good.
Matt, in the city of Grand Haven, it's illegal to leave your hoop skirt abandoned on a sidewalk.
That's a law. Absolutely.
That's a real law.
I think Matt wrote that one.
1890s.
There's a wire problem in Victorian fashion, I guess.
And there's a $5 fine, which I guess would equate to about $165 today.
(03:22):
That means that a whole city, a council meeting happened to say, "Yes, that law gavel slams."
Absolutely.
It's time.
Write that into the law.
We have suffered under this tyranny for too long.
Scott.
Harper Woods, Michigan, it's against the law to paint sparrows and sell them as parakeets. Why?
(03:44):
Lore, please be lore. That's a real one. Oh my god. Extremely specific city ordinance. That's right.
Not in Holland! Not in Grand Rapids!
Every law is here for a reason and I just want to know what happened to that one. I know, me too.
Russell, in the whole state of Michigan if you declare bankruptcy
100 chickens are exempt from collections agents. Oh my that's true
(04:08):
It is true and not only that way by law a debtor is entitled to retain 10 sheep 2 cows 5 swines
100 hens 5 roosters and sufficient feed for 6 months
So I guess you can keep your own homestead or your farm and get back on your feet quickly
My mortgage just got more confusing
(04:31):
One more time through Matt in the city of Rochester, Michigan
There's an ordinance requiring that all bathing suits to be inspected by the city's chief of police before use. That's a law
Absolutely. There is a law so I couldn't find a direct citation for this one
But there's a bunch of like 10 wacky laws in Michigan articles that all say that so I think that used to be a law
(04:53):
And that it's not a thing anymore
But yes
It absolutely was and I think it harkens back to like Victorian sounding like make sure it covers decency
Standards or something, but yeah wacky Scott Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
There's an old local law that prohibits smoking in bed
Sure, I think that sounds reasonable for the UP. That is very much true. Is it my freedom?
(05:18):
In Sault Ste. Marie only you can smoke in bed next door to the what it is outside my bed my choice
That's right. And lastly, Russell, in Marquette, Michigan, in the UP, you may not be a tourist or
guest and view an Aurora Borealis without a license. Oh my, please, lore. Please, lore.
(05:40):
Yeah, I made that one up. Okay. Oh good, what a lord. Oh my gosh.
Very good. I think that means, Russell, you got all three, am I right? I think so.
- Ah, it's just, you know, how I roll most days.
(laughing)
- Russell, why don't you kick us off this week?
What do you have for us for a pitch?
- Oh, great, yes, happy to.
So...
- Or do you need to sober up first?
(06:02):
- Or think of an idea.
- Or think of an idea first.
- No, I got my idea.
Okay, this idea.
- What do you got?
- Little interesting, okay?
Maybe this exists, maybe it doesn't,
but so the idea is called Caterizer.
Basically, it takes any existing mom and pop shop kitchen
or like, you know, little restaurant
(06:24):
and we help set up the catering for that business, okay?
And so what this does is we reach out to,
like we're hyper local,
we reach out to like five or 10 mom and pop shops
that are doing really well
and figure out a catering strategy,
centralize operations for those five
to like have a commercial kitchen that's supposed to make a hundred like 300 chicken sandwiches for
(06:50):
that one catering event right which may not be possible in a current restaurant situation
so we are like the outsourced ghost kitchen that basically takes your recipe takes your brand and
caterizes your kitchen right don't worry about literally you don't have to do literally anything
(07:10):
You just say, I want this.
We take a cut.
We caterize.
Done.
That's it.
This whole pitch was you wanted to use the word caterize that you just coined.
I get it.
That's a good word.
Checking copyrights right now.
Yep.
Russell's got it.
Caterized.
Are you imagining individuals or existing established businesses
(07:34):
coming to this with their recipe?
Existing established businesses that are already killing it.
the ones that are doing super well,
they've been in business for like maybe two or three years, right?
So you want to kind of find the new ones and just take,
not take, expand, right?
Their, their business. Yeah. That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you market to that group? That's hard.
(07:57):
Like you're already doing exactly what you're doing now and you're killing it.
So why don't you give up control of making that to this other company and hope
that it works out? You know, that's a tough pitch.
Well, in theory, you're going to the ones that aren't doing catering right now.
They just can't like they've thought about it.
They've probably done some bulk orders, but they've probably turned down
those types of arrangements, right?
(08:17):
You got to drive some fear into them.
You got to give them a call to be like, Hey, I'm having a wedding coming up.
I need, you know, 400 orders of whatever by this date.
Can you do that?
Oh, you can't.
Okay.
Then hang up.
And then Russell comes in the next day with his service.
Hey, I help you do large events.
Whoa, I got to call this other guy.
I called me yesterday and all of a sudden I'm buying my own stuff.
(08:38):
(laughing)
- So I think I was at a place,
I was at some restaurants in Madison.
It was like a breakfast joint
and they have a really good lunch,
they have an incredible menu.
And I think there were somebody that was coming in
and asking about catering.
Like, "Hey, we wanna do this breakfast brunch event."
(08:59):
Like, "Hey, we don't do any catering."
There was like 150 people.
And it's probably because, right,
they're trying to run their existing restaurant.
So, I mean, I get it, right?
And what's cool about this is like ad hoc,
you don't have to pay.
It's like if you're a restaurant owner,
you have to pay for a commercial kitchen to do that.
There's this one restaurant that I was talking to years ago
(09:21):
that was like, yeah, like we make literally like 300,
500 tamales to order.
We do that during the day.
We don't open and do breakfast or lunch during the day
'cause we're literally making tamales all day, right?
Like all day.
And so you would just, um, yeah, that's, you'd do it in a different kitchen.
They would rent out other kitchens.
Like, why do that?
I'll just do it all for you.
(09:41):
You could like borrow a chef from the original company.
Like, Hey, I need, I need one of your sous chefs just for the day.
Tell me, does this taste like what you make?
Great.
Ship it.
No, they just use like, now they can make like, I don't know how they make
tamales, but like now you can use like 40, like 10 burners instead of the four.
Yeah, I guess.
And then we would, so like, what's different about this is we would go like
(10:01):
nationwide with it.
We'd be a national brand that would, that would trust and we could ship over overseas.
Oh, you're not white labeling your service.
You're not going to be the fulfillment that like, I don't know, local
Mexican restaurant comes to you and you start doing that.
You're not going to like pretend that you're more poised from them.
You're going to call yourselves the like the caterizers and the caterizers menu
(10:23):
is different every month, depending on what restaurant you're partnered with or
whatever.
I thought you were taking their branding.
I know.
Yeah, me too.
I'm more of an.
Well, I was more thinking like a national, like we would be a national brand to those restaurants.
So when they go to the national convention, right, the kitchen convention would be.
Well, what if you were something that the average consumer recognized?
(10:44):
That could be interesting.
We're like, oh man, sort of like the soup of the day, but I'm the restaurant of the week.
And this week we have whatever for weddings, but next week it's your host in that party.
I don't know.
I like that a lot.
If there's like the most famous restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia,
the most famous mom and pop shop, I would try that.
Hell yeah.
What are they most famous for?
(11:05):
This dish.
I'd try that up here.
That'd be great.
I'm having that grad party or whatever.
Let me have in caterizers.
They'll have something interesting from Louisiana.
Yeah.
It's like door dashing across the country, but there's only one option each week.
That's really fun.
That's actually genius.
Oh my gosh.
Right?
So like the most famous kitchen, like the most famous restaurant in
(11:27):
like Louisiana, like a New Orleans.
Right.
All right.
We're going to make the best Cajun meal.
Yeah.
We're just going to make it all over the place.
They just gave us, they just sent us the recipe and we procure and do everything
and take a ton of the, you know, all the pre-orders purchase boom and just turn it
(11:48):
around.
I love it.
That's just a bunch of free advertising for them too.
And the next time you're in New Orleans,
you gotta try it again if you liked it.
- Is this naive in saying photographers
love being paid in exposure?
Like, are there restaurants out here who are like,
"There's no way in hell I'm giving you my recipe.
"I don't have any control over you."
Like, I feel like this might be a hard sell to it, yeah.
- I'll sign an NDA, whatever, right?
(12:09):
Like, we just make everybody sign an NDA.
- You have to accept the cred, for sure, yeah.
Once you are something that consumers know,
then you have a little bit of sway in the negotiation.
- Dude, if I did like an in and out,
Not in and out, but in and out pop up in the Midwest.
Like, you know how much money I would make for just one day of, I would, I would.
(12:31):
Yeah.
There'd just be no way I could fulfill all the orders for in and out.
But if you do something a little smaller scale, maybe a little less famous, it
up and down, it would pan out.
Dude.
Yes.
Yeah.
Throw some door dash drivers in there.
You know,
I think your key to value proposition for your books is doing it big though.
(12:52):
You don't take DoorDash orders.
You take minimum 200 quantity orders.
Yes.
Right.
And maybe that can be-
Whole businesses, right?
Entire block of, uh, what's your restaurant?
What's your restaurant that you guys want to have?
What, like, what is the best restaurant?
All the West coasters talk about like, oh God, Whataburger and In-N-Out
and Shake Shack and stuff, and we don't have any of that stuff in here
(13:15):
in Michigan, up in the Midwest.
We're just now discovering raising canes and Popeyes and stuff.
It's like, there's so much that we're missing out on.
-We didn't have Sonic on the East side in Detroit.
We would get commercials for Sonic all the time growing up, but there
was just no Sonic in Michigan.
That really pissed me off.
-Yes.
-Well, Caterizers will be at your door this year to sell you all those.
(13:39):
-For me and 199 of my closest friends and family.
One week only.
I only wanted one In-N-Out burger, not 160.
(laughing)
- Buy a deep freezer.
- Buy a deep freezer.
(laughing)
- I love bulk prepared secondhand recipe In-N-Out burgers
(14:00):
that are in the deep freezer for a few weeks.
That's peak culinary experience right there.
(laughing)
- Hell yeah.
Just throw it in the air fryer, all right?
- Yeah, that's right.
(laughing)
All righty, Scotty B, what do you got this week?
- All right, I have a drone idea
that I have been saving for Mr. Rybar here.
(14:22):
So, we recently had rain in our area
and this entire summer,
I have felt like we haven't had any mosquitoes.
And then all of a sudden there's mosquitoes everywhere
and it's really pissing me off.
And so I'm wondering, can we make a drone product
that will, after a rainstorm,
go around and just like poison every puddle so that larva can't like spawn there.
(14:47):
Every small body of water, it could just detect and go in and drop like a little tablet.
Apparently there's like things that don't affect the environment at all, but they just make it so
larva can't develop some kind of protein.
And then it just flies back home and returns.
It just keeps doing that until there aren't any mosquitoes in a hundred yards around me in any
direction.
And that's the entire idea.
Wow, honey.
I feel like ever since we hired Scorched Earth,
(15:10):
there's been no single wildlife pest outside.
I haven't seen a thing living or dead.
- I did a little bit of due diligence on this,
and there are environmentally safe ways
to kill mosquito larvae that don't affect most wildlife.
- What about humans?
What's the effect on humans?
(15:32):
- How's that well water treating you?
- It's a naturally occurring bacterium
that specifically targets mosquito larvae.
- That's cool. - And like some kind of,
most kinds of flies.
- And living human cells.
- Anyway, I wanna poison the water supply using drones.
(laughing)
- I see nothing wrong with it, absolutely.
- Okay, we got approval from the Senate.
- Yeah, the president says so, the drone association.
(15:56):
- Dude, I mean, we, like, why not?
Just like, let's just, why don't we sew it into the clouds?
So why don't we just put that chemical--
- This isn't that much,
Let me narrow the scope a little bit.
This is kind of like when you have pest control
like spray around your house, right?
Like you have a small scale, you sort of make a barrier,
but it's your nearby--
- Yeah, I don't want to disrupt the entire ecosystem,
(16:17):
just my lawn.
- I think the follow-up product though
is a mosquito zapper on that drone.
It kills the larvae, then it flies around
the little zap ranges.
(laughing)
Zaps from out of the sky.
- Our bug zapper is just not active enough.
It needs to chase them down and kill them.
(laughter)
(16:38):
- Psh, psh, psh, psh.
Just buzzing around.
- Great marketing. - That's awesome.
- Whoa, what's that?
Is that a bird, a plane?
No, that is the mosquito's--
- It's an electrified, electric fence
combing through the air.
- This could be sold with caterize.
You clean up the event before the guests show up.
(17:01):
- Couple different niches here, but you know what?
but marketing says they go great together.
(laughs)
- So like rain barrels, I will say Scott,
being in the stormwater industry,
the rain barrels, there's like tablets you throw in
to prevent mosquito larva.
It's like a thing, it's totally real.
- Put it on a drone, drop it in a puddle.
- Just everywhere. - Everywhere.
- But like for real.
- Everywhere you detect water.
(17:23):
- Like why do we let mosquitoes live?
- Bats.
- That's right, pure silence.
- If you're an environmentalist, please write in to us.
- Or don't, I think I know what that email looks like.
(laughs)
podcast@Spitball.show. We'll take all of your hate mail. I guess my question to you Matt
is that within the realm of possibility can a drone one detect water, two drop a
(17:44):
small object, three return home, and do it again? I don't see any problem with that.
That's actually very feasible. How about the legality of that? Let's not talk about that.
Okay what state should we be doing this in? Probably Texas. Louisiana just passed a
that they can shoot drones out of the sky without any issues.
(18:07):
So it's federally illegal, but they said screw the feds
and we're going to do our own thing.
So that might be a good place.
Turn the frickin' frogs gay with your tablets
that you're dropping from the sky.
We're going to make some conspiracy theories come to life.
Can I send another drone to kill a current drone?
Like if I see one, can I have like a hunter seeker drone?
This is my drone drone.
My drone drone.
(18:28):
My anti-drone drone.
There's ones out there.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
-A little kamikaze drone action?
-I do have a kamikaze drone in case Scott's drone
comes over to poison my water, my iron dome.
-Leo just loves the mosquitoes, man.
He's been farming them for years.
-I remember what I was thinking.
Okay, so in my parents, when I grew up,
(18:50):
they would literally have a truck come by
and they would spray for mosquitoes.
You guys have that? -Yes.
-Do we have that here? -Yes.
We were talking about it on the other side of the state we did.
-What chemical is that? -It's just bleach.
- Who knows?
But whatever Scott is dropping on my puddles
is probably gonna be made of the same chemical
that just goes literally on like a truck
(19:10):
that just take a hose and spray it in the direction
all over the playgrounds, all over the trees.
Like we don't give a single about that.
At least Scott's is a little bit more precise.
Like yeah, that puddle, no.
You know, that little pool of water, drop it, right?
-No, right now we're totally cool with trucks just spraying the shit out of everything.
(19:35):
We should at least be-- -Scott's is the environmental solution.
-Yes, exactly right. -I'm just picturing sitting outside
with a lemonade and a drone comes up and drops a little tablet in it and flies away.
[laughter]
-We sent a letter in the mail, Scott.
[laughter]
Don't go outside from 6 to 9 PM for the spray, the drone spray.
(19:56):
-8 AM to 8 PM.
I mean, what's so different?
Like, Scott, yours is actually way safer
than those trucks driving by and just fogging
the whole neighborhood, right?
So it sounds scary on paper, but like--
It said it was even--
whatever BTI that I was looking at
says it's even harmless to bees.
So I'm like, OK, great.
(20:16):
This is a good one.
Let's try it.
It comes in tablet form.
OK.
The bees could go too, though.
Let's kill them all.
You know what?
Screw it.
We'll go back to Leo's scorched earth.
(laughing)
- Why use chemicals, Scott?
Why don't you just drop a bunch of frogs
and tadpoles in all these ponds?
- There is a dot earth TLD.
You could have scorched dot earth
(20:36):
if that's not taken already.
- Whoa.
Dude, that's definitely taken.
- Yeah, it must be.
- What eats mosquito larva?
Is there like an animal, I mean, that's probably like a--
- Larva, I don't know, but--
- Minnows, like crazy.
What if you dropped just a minnow?
- What if the drone dropped a bunch of minnows
into that puddle so that at the end of a day,
you had hot baked minnows all over you.
(20:58):
(laughing)
- Everyone wants this service.
Hey, no mosquitoes, baby.
- At least there's no mosquitoes, honey.
(sad violin music)
- All right, Leo, what do you got for us this week?
- All right, a simple task for us this evening, gentlemen.
We need to solve the political divide in this country
and fix the news outrage cycle, okay?
(21:20):
No problem.
- Perfect. - Easy.
- Here's something I've been thinking a lot about.
the news outrage cycle fuels itself on these stories
that both left and right-wing people hear
and get in a big tizzy about,
and then forget about for the next thing.
Three weeks later, nobody's talking
about that thing anymore.
So I want to build the news outrage cycle reminder,
(21:41):
which sends a thing, a push notification,
maybe once or twice a week,
or maybe even more frequently,
that's, "Hey, do you remember that thing
"that you thought was so urgent and important
and the thing that really bothered you four years ago,
three years ago, six years ago,
that's not really that important anymore, is it?
On the right wing side,
(22:01):
you've got your Bud Light boycotts from a few months ago,
and you've got your, oh God,
the Harvard plagiarism scandals or whatever.
On the left side, you've got your changes to like,
I don't know, the Hollywood strike
or whatever the heck's going on this week, right?
And then we forget about them.
What if I was put everything into context?
Maybe you even grab some current news stories and like throw them next to this and say, "Hey, this looks like it's about as important as that caravan of Hispanics that was coming across the border that you were really worried about four years ago, but really wasn't even happening."
(22:33):
I think everything needs to be contextualized so that we see ourselves in that funhouse mirror and maybe chill out a little bit. How's that?
Holding a mirror up to society is very scary, Leo. We don't want to see ourselves. I do really like this idea, though.
If you register yourself, you can even use like advertisements, put an ad on
NewYorkTimes.com or FoxNews.com and say like, "Hey, I see this story is really
(22:59):
important. Do you remember when those three other stories were just like this
and nothing ended up happening?" I'm not advocating for complete apathy, but
maybe tonal, I don't know, bringing everything down by a little bit.
So that's all.
Well, so like one, I have never forgotten when Obama wore that tan suit.
I will never forget that.
I think about that every day, so I
(23:20):
don't think that app will work.
Yeah.
But no.
Well, this would be pushed too conservative to say,
remember when the war on Christmas
was the thing you mattered the most, or Obama's tan suit,
or whatever.
Red Starbucks.
And it ended up not being a big deal.
Red Starbucks cups.
I think that was Starbucks that made it up.
But you know, this makes sense.
It's like the throwback, right?
Like the throwback feature you get on your Snapchat.
(23:41):
It's TimeHop mixed with the New York Times app.
[LAUGHTER]
That's--
That's really good.
What a self-realization.
Like, oh, that-- wow, I was so--
I was heated about that topic, wasn't I?
Exactly.
I'm not claiming that this is something that only one
side or the other does.
Like, this is a problem for all of society,
(24:03):
I think, at the moment.
I really like this video.
Free Britney.
Guys remember this?
Like, that was a--
I mean, whether-- what left--
Free Britney.
I still have strong feelings on that, Russell.
Oh, yeah.
Free Britney.
No, I mean, that was like a huge deal.
Like, I don't even--
- Might be a little too far back, right?
- Is that too far?
I don't even know.
- I don't, maybe not.
I don't know.
- But like perfect time hop, like, oh wow, yeah, I forgot.
(24:24):
We were really, everybody was fighting about that,
weren't they?
You know?
- Kony 2012, am I right?
- Right, that's right.
You forgot about that.
Who gives a shit now?
But like, damn, people were heated about that time.
- It ended up not even being like a real story.
That's the thing.
these things are just red hot fire 24/7 news coverage for a day or two or three
(24:46):
and they a week a month later were proven to not be true at all or to be
highly exaggerated or taken out of context so like what if we had this
service providing like a little bit of a Snopes.com thing but far in the future
where everyone's cooled down and you get the like the follow-up closing the loop
(25:06):
satisfaction of conclusion to each one of these stories maybe that would help
tone everyone down a little.
- Oh yeah.
It'd be kind of cool to revisit like a story,
you know, four years later and be like,
all right, I have a fresh perspective.
- I would honestly love to hear the conclusion
of all of these, whatever it is.
- I think Hacker News or Reddit or something
has a view the front page as it was
on any particular given day.
(25:27):
And that's always really interesting too.
Like do the Fox Newses and New York Timeses
of the world have that?
I don't think they're incentivized to.
- No way.
- Nope, new stories, new fear.
- I guess so.
- Dude, that's a great way.
Like you could sell this as like a service to like New York Times subscribers.
You know, you create the tool and then now like imagine that's ad revenue that
(25:49):
reusing the same article to get more clicks on their site, like literally they
do very little and now they're making the same amount of money.
Like, oh yeah, let me reread that article I read four, five years ago.
Like, oh, I have a different, well, like it's kind of cool.
Cause you have a different perspective on it.
Cause now you know what you know.
You have closure, you have an ending.
(26:10):
Probably not, but--
- You know what this could be?
This is a really good premise for like a sub stack
or a blog of some kind, a paid newsletter,
where once or twice a week I'm getting a newsletter
and hey, kind of like those Twitter accounts
that are like this day in World War II,
where it's following along in real time,
like this day six years ago politically or whatever.
Like we pick one really important story
(26:31):
that totally fizzles before it got its day
to find conclusions.
- That'd be so, actually, yeah.
Like you can do the recent, which is six years ago.
You could do one that's 60 years ago, 600 years ago.
If they had that.
(laughs)
- You believe these women and their rights to vote?
- Right, like that could have been a thing.
Just that article that was really popular.
- This got a lot of clicks in 1925.
(26:53):
(laughs)
- Right?
How cool would it be?
I guess like I'd be more interested in reading
about history, let's say, through a service like that.
Right?
Like you said that's an existing service where I can just like get live tweets of World War two. Oh, yeah
There's this going it was a Twitter thing
I don't know if it's persisted into the post Twitter era
(27:16):
but it was like this day in WW2 and it was
like the Allies have just taken this small town in the west of France because it just happened to be like following along in
Real time but X number of years in the past
I would love to follow General MacArthur's Twitter in real time as it's going.
That would be incredible.
It was like briefings from the front.
(27:36):
Here's the little bit of progress that was made that one day.
Here's this little tiny thing that happened, but in real time.
And you got like historical photos and stuff.
It's cool.
I'm really curious how people would react.
Like I feel like you're just going to start some movement accidentally of just people
seeing I am forced to see this story that I was hoping to be gone from my mind at this
point and now it's back again and I have to think about it again.
(27:58):
There's some eating your medicine with this thing and I'm not quite sure how to give sugar. Oh, no, I love that
It's fantastic. But is this something that people would seek out and want like is this just gonna be awful?
Is this a good experience? I don't know. I I think you're right though
It's gonna open people's eyes to be like, oh my god. I am ingesting so much shit right now
Maybe I don't have to eat shit all day. That's the
(28:20):
It's captivating. I could be cool to see an article like like knowing what the top of our
News cycle is this week this day and then finding a rhyming article from like let's say a hundred years ago, right?
Yeah, and then just being like whoa, like this is a new story, but it was from 1920s and it sounds like relevant today
Right. They say everything comes in cycles
(28:42):
So it'd be cool to watch the cycles go over and over back and if journalism really is dying
Then there's probably a lot of really good writers out there who are looking for a new
Angle a new pivot a new side project or something, right? Yeah
easy like easy Twitter like creation Instagram like follow right and then you just
You literally look at what's trending figure out the history news article post about that and tag
(29:08):
What's the name of this bad boy Leo? Oh
New York time hop time
That's pretty good Chicago times hop
- LA Time Hop.
- Right?
- Yeah, exactly.
LA Time Hop.
- LA Time Hop.
(laughing)
- Okay, Matt, what have you brought for us this week?
(29:32):
- So this one piggybacks a bit off of Scott's,
but just imagine you're sitting in your house
and you look out in your backyard
and you see that just annoying possum
sitting out by in the field.
Or you have chipmunks running around
you're like, what in the world?
How am I, you're in all these chipmunks or
your neighbor's dog runs into the yard and
you're like, get that thing out of there.
(29:53):
This is the drone relocate, animal
relocation service that drone just swoops in
out of nowhere, snatches that thing up, takes
it wherever it needs to go.
If it's the chipmunk, yep, that might go to
your neighbor.
If it's your dog, who knows where that might go.
But it's, it's the ethical way of, of
(30:15):
relocating animals.
(laughing)
- All right, all right.
- Whoa, I'm just picturing a dog
like flying down the street in my neighborhood.
(laughing)
(imitating dog barking)
In a net.
- Oh, sorry, I thought it was a coon.
(laughing)
- Okay.
- 100% autonomous, AI driven the entire way,
(30:36):
no human input.
- This is just a bodyguard.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So the occasional dog might go flying away,
but it's the cost of doing business.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- Dude, I would totally drop a stuffed animal dog
in Scott's yard and call this service
and it's just a little stuffed animal flying in the air.
And then of course in Louisiana,
(30:57):
I'd shoot the shit out of it.
I'm sorry.
(laughing)
Oh no.
It wouldn't work out there.
- In prototyping, our AI has picked up on small children.
So, you know, we're still finding some bugs right now.
(laughing)
Remember the balloon incident with the kid?
- Oh yeah, right.
- Several years ago.
(31:18):
- It's like the balloon thing.
- Let's escalate that.
- My New York time hop just pushed that notification to me.
I was supposed to be really mad about that.
Balloon boy.
- That's right.
So I think like, so animal services probably
are like extremely underfunded.
You know what I mean?
Like this would totally work kind of to that end.
Like why not just replace all that funding,
put it into like an autonomous drone program
(31:40):
and just like, like, let's say, you know, sure.
It's not surveilling everybody's yards.
Let's say you call 911drones.com or whatever.
I call them, right?
The dot com.
And then they swoop in and they pick up the animal.
Roadkill too.
Skunks, dude.
They need to go.
Roadkill.
(32:00):
Roadkill's a good one.
Yeah.
That's gotta be somebody's job, right?
They don't just let the vultures take care of it.
If it's like a full deer, can we bring it somewhere for processing?
Yuck.
Autonomous car drone.
That's where the car drone comes in, you know?
- What is an autonomous car drone?
Like an RC car with a Raspberry Pi in it?
- It's a Waymo.
It's just a Waymo car with a harpoon at the front.
(32:23):
- Vacuum.
(laughing)
- Shing, just drags the...
(laughing)
- J-Mo with the harpoon.
- Yep.
- And neighborhood cats are a pain too, right?
- 911 drone, get this other cat out of here.
- You could go onto this service's website
and contribute your dog or cat's information to it
(32:46):
so that the drone knows where to deliver it back to.
So that when your cat is a few blocks away,
it scoops it up and brings it back home.
-It scans the chip in the ear. -That's fantastic.
-Looks up the address in a database and brings it home.
Hopefully, it haven't moved and updated.
-For every lost dog poster that you see on there,
that's one opportunity for your drone bodyguard
(33:07):
to be the hero of the day.
People would pay a lot of money to find their dogs.
- It's true.
- That's a good idea.
Just scours the neighborhood for it.
Sorry, is this a different topic?
- It's a pivot.
- It's the same.
- A little less hostile.
- It just keeps bringing you dogs
that kind of look like yours until you find the right one.
- They're literally microchipped, Scott.
(33:28):
You have a chip reader on there.
- No, no, we're doing this purely on vision
and nothing else.
- Is this your dog?
Good God, that's a skunk.
- A couple of bugs, it's fine.
- He drops it off at the same spot I found it.
- Oh my God.
- I'm just picturing a very freaked out skunk
flying by, spraying everywhere as it's going.
- It takes their dog, the neighbor's dog,
(33:49):
puts it in a little kennel someplace,
and then when that person calls and says,
"Find my dog," yep, we got it.
Charge 'em with getting their dog back.
- It's a hostage fee.
- Oh man.
- We'll blackmail 'em, I like that.
I don't imagine this service trolling the public streets
looking for lost dogs.
(laughing)
Maybe just your property.
- Why not? - Yeah, why not?
(34:10):
You've got a lady dangling from the drone,
holding onto a leash, and the dog is in the drone.
You picked it up on the walk.
(laughing)
- Okay, but like, so you know those people
that do the drones with the glasses,
and they can go super fast?
- Yeah.
- Through like hoops and stuff?
- The VR racing stuff, yeah.
- What if you just had like an outsource company, right,
(34:32):
that all they did was, there's like five dudes in a room,
and they just jump into different cities
where they have those drones and they're like,
find this cat, right?
They got a little picture in their glasses
and they just zoom through.
Yeah, you got like a swarm of five
and they go block by block through an entire city
(34:53):
in 20 minutes 'cause they're wicked fast at what they do
and boom.
- That's fun.
- And like nobody's gonna complain.
I'm sure they have that we haven't incorporated those like VR goggle drone racers into like search and rescue operations
I'm surprised it feels like that's a like we're trying to find that one little girl who's lost in the woods
(35:14):
We got to get the drone racers going on here. That's faster than any is that a thing now Pat? That must be
Yeah, not that not the FPV stuff in that would definitely from above
Sure, sure, but the FPV side. Yeah, I mean you can't see through trees or thermal so absolutely there we go
- Oh, do with the ducking and weaving,
like they're in Endor, that's great.
(35:35):
- They're on a drone.
- Slice the girl's arm off when they finally found her.
- She was like that, I swear.
- Local girl beheaded by rescue.
- Guys, so like how much are people paying
for like pest removal?
Like my dad, I'm sorry, I'm only experiencing this
from like skunks in my actual like parents' place.
(35:58):
He literally would pour, he's like,
I'm just gonna pour bleach down this like hole underneath my porch.
Oh no.
Cause, well, I mean, it's not that they're scared away.
They're scared away, right?
They're not actually in there, gonna go out for the day, but then they come back home
and it's like, "Oh, smells like bleach in here.
We ain't gonna stay in here."
Right?
But that's his solution, right?
What if there was a drone service that just like hung out, monitored, waited for that
(36:21):
skunk to come in, scooped it up.
Like people, like...
(laughs)
People pay a lot of money for skunk removal
and like nuisance skunk removal.
And if you're not killing the animal,
like that's already a huge win and you drop it.
- You're just giving it a freaking it the hell out.
(36:42):
- Yeah, like you can even just,
it doesn't have to be flying there the whole time,
you could literally just place,
you could just Amazon ship the drone,
it just sits on there,
monitors with their 360 camera, okay,
skunk zoom out and then it travels three miles out.
- Could you sell these things as piloted
and less AI and more real to like a pest control,
(37:05):
animal control, municipality department?
Is this something that there'd be any demand for I wonder?
- I know a guy who can sell drones to a municipality.
- Call him.
(laughing)
- Give him a call.
- I think he's on this call.
- I bet they're underfunded and they would be like,
yeah, we don't answer half our calls
because they're just like chipmunks or something, right?
- But we'd love to buy your drone.
(laughing)
(37:27):
If you take off half our workload,
like they don't care, right?
And you charge, you just, you invoice some people,
you just send an invoice in the mail for like 50 bucks
for the drone to swing by, right?
- No.
(laughing)
- People get grifted way easier than that, right?
Like, but.
- That's right.
Well, dear listener, we know that you're listening to us
(37:47):
while battling for your life against that possum
in your backyard.
So thank you very much for spending the night with us
and we hope you enjoyed yourself.
And thank you very much, Matt, for joining us.
This was a lot of fun.
- Thanks guys, absolutely.
- Our website is Spitball.show.
There you can find links to our YouTube channel,
other social media, email us feedback, comments, ideas.
We'd love to hear from you.
We are podcast@spitball.show.
(38:09):
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We are podcast@spitball.show,
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Our subreddit is r/SpitballShow.
Our intro/outro music is Swingers by Bonkers Beat Club.
Please, if you wouldn't mind,
If you have a minute, that one friend of yours who has like 12 cats and they're always going
over into the neighbor's yard and stuff, send him a link to this episode.
(38:31):
We would love to have them as a listener.
And leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever it is that you listen to us on.
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Listen to us, especially on PocketCasts, where we've been recently featured in the new podcasts
and tech category list right on the Discover page there. New episode's coming out in
(38:55):
two weeks. We will see you then.
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