Summary
This week, there’s chaos with robot bans on flights, and a New York school’s AI teacher gets canceled for looking a bit too human.
We discover Google’s earthquake alert system, hear about a wild Katy Perry concert mishap, and learn how AI companies are quietly destroying rare books.
Plus, there’s a crazy AI escape attempt and some Kickstart or Dropkick gadgets you won’t believe.
All this and much more in this week’s episode.
Links
AI Teacher Bot on Hold
Older and Rare Books Consumed
ChatGPT Escaped
Kickstart or Dropkick – HEONE-X
Kickstart or Dropkick – PixelMug S1 Series
Teeth Decay Fix
Katy Perry Stuck in a Bottle
Show Transcript
This transcript was generated by an AI and may not be100% accurate. It pays to listen to the podcast, but if you have questions about any of the information found here, please reach out to us.
Sam [00:00:09]:
Hello and welcome to episode 591 of the Chris and Sam Podcast.
Chris [00:00:26]:
I’m Chris.
Sam [00:00:26]:
And I’m Sam. This is your weekly fix of randomness, technology, and life. We are the palate cleanser in between other things in your life. Work, family, World War II podcast with Tom Hanks. If all of that’s getting a bit too much, this is the podcast for you.
Chris [00:00:44]:
We are the podcast floss between your meals.
Sam [00:00:46]:
That’s it. Yep. 30 minutes every week, randoms, technology, and life. And, uh, there’s a lot of stuff going on this week. Been super busy with, uh, Mistyflix stuff. stuff. If you don’t know, running a film festival, there’s a lot to do.
Chris [00:01:03]:
And Sam is the chief of operations. So he does all of it or he’s responsible for all of it.
Sam [00:01:10]:
I’ve got a system in place. If they want me to do something, they have to email me.
Chris [00:01:14]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:01:15]:
Otherwise I just read messages like at nighttime. I don’t read them during the day because there’s no point. No, it’s really good though. We’re so far ahead compared to last year.
Chris [00:01:24]:
Yeah. So we had the AGM the other day and it was really, really good over the weekend. And Yeah, I was pretty impressed with things. I am looking forward to seeing who got in and who didn’t get into the nominations for the actual festival itself. Um, cause I’ve got a friend who’s nominated something and I’m curious to see how that went. Uh, I haven’t actually seen his film, so I don’t know.
Sam [00:01:47]:
So we’ve got, uh, by the time this podcast comes out, the, um, selected films will already be announced. Yep. And then they’ll get judged a bit later on.
Chris [00:01:56]:
Yeah, obviously judging.
Sam [00:01:57]:
So that’s cool.
Chris [00:01:58]:
So I got to ask something.
Sam [00:02:01]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:02:01]:
Oh, so I’ve had a busy week as well. I was doing the medical thing yesterday. Yeah, you were. And I was doing the—
Sam [00:02:07]:
You were getting free medical advice by the sounds of it.
Chris [00:02:09]:
Yeah, I did ask one or two questions. And then I went to support a local play, which was last night, which was really good.
Sam [00:02:18]:
Okay.
Chris [00:02:19]:
Called Daylight savings.
Sam [00:02:21]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:02:22]:
So it was at the Meteor. About 3 or 4 of the people I do work with, like at the Improv, were there acting. Matty was on the keys.
Sam [00:02:32]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:02:32]:
The other Matty, Matty Ginger Matty, was stage manager. So I said hello to him. Kate Prestige was there. She was doing a review on it.
Sam [00:02:41]:
Oh my gosh. So it’s all go. Was this opening night or something?
Chris [00:02:44]:
It was opening night.
Sam [00:02:44]:
Oh, okay.
Chris [00:02:45]:
That explains it. Yeah. And it was surprising because all of them were like, what’s wrong with your leg? Because I think it’s the first time most of them have seen me with a cast.
Sam [00:02:53]:
Most people have not seen you and they do not understand how handicapped—
Chris [00:02:59]:
Decreted.
Sam [00:03:00]:
I was going to say that, but I think handicapped or limited mobility you have currently.
Chris [00:03:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. Because I went to the pub on the weekend. You wouldn’t have, I don’t think I told you about that. We had a crazy—
Sam [00:03:11]:
You told me you went.
Chris [00:03:12]:
Yeah, we had a karate club sort of reunion thing. And so I walk in the door and Carl’s looking past me to see something and he goes, Chris, what’s up with the cane? So yeah, that was a bit like that. Anyway, so I have had a busy, busy week, but I did want to ask you, I wanted to kick off with, did you feel this earthquake?
Sam [00:03:35]:
No.
Chris [00:03:36]:
No, neither did I.
Sam [00:03:37]:
Did your phone go off though?
Chris [00:03:38]:
No.
Sam [00:03:39]:
Okay. ‘Cause Android phones, the more up-to-date ones, not whatever you’re running right here.
Chris [00:03:45]:
Not el cheapo.
Sam [00:03:47]:
So apparently Google has an algorithm or something like that. And it knows where a bunch of phones start moving by themselves, sends that back to Google servers and works out, oh, it’s an earthquake. And then it pumps out this alert system, like ahead of the earthquake for some people.
Chris [00:04:04]:
Yeah. So it sort of. Figures out, oh, it’s there, and it starts ringing around it.
Sam [00:04:09]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:04:09]:
Which is pretty cool.
Sam [00:04:10]:
So budget Android users, you’re dead. iPhone users, you’re having a comfy sleep.
Chris [00:04:17]:
Most budget— well, most Android users, again, I mean, it’s giving you 2, 3 seconds notice. And I don’t think Hamiltonians know how to handle an earthquake anyway.
Sam [00:04:28]:
No, they don’t. No, they don’t.
Chris [00:04:30]:
Of course not. I mean, I grew up in Wellington. Earthquake drills was an almost weekly thing at school. Like you would do a, definitely a monthly thing. You do earthquake drills every month because it’s just a ticking time bomb. The whole city’s a ticking time bomb. One of the reasons I never went back.
Sam [00:04:50]:
Talking about that though, earthquakes in general, I’m going to try and find this as I’m talking. So if you go to AF8, af8.org.nz. It’s a website all about the Alpine Fault magnitude 8. So the Alpine Fault in the South Island, which covers a lot of it through the Alpine region.
Chris [00:05:13]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:05:13]:
They’ve built this website because they believe that it’s going to be at least an 8 on the Richter scale. And this website’s really cool. Like somebody mentioned online and I was looking at it and it’s like a GIS layer with animation on top. And as you scroll down, they explain everything really, really well. And they’re really, all these people in that area are preparing for the AF8 Alpine Fault earthquake. And it’s going to happen within the next 50 years, they seem to think. And it’s, they’re preparing for the worst, but they could have a different scenario. They’re just not sure how it’s going to work.
Chris [00:05:46]:
How far would that translate up the country? Because it wouldn’t be very localized. I mean, Wellington’s going to feel that pretty hard.
Sam [00:05:52]:
Everyone will.
Chris [00:05:53]:
Everyone will.
Sam [00:05:54]:
Yeah. And they’ve got different scenarios and things you can experience and all that. But as you scroll down, it’s all interactive. You can click on things. It’s really cool.
Chris [00:06:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. Tsunami would be interesting.
Sam [00:06:06]:
Oh, so actually this is an NCEA Level 1 geography resource. There we go. That’s why it’s so good. You gotta try and teach these children something.
Chris [00:06:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s very cool. I will check that out later on.
Sam [00:06:18]:
Do you know who had a really, I don’t know, terrible time? Maybe one of the world’s preeminent astronauts. Oh. Katy Perry got stuck in a giant bottle.
Chris [00:06:30]:
Yes, I do know this story. I just never clicked with her being an astronaut.
Sam [00:06:33]:
What are you on about?
Chris [00:06:34]:
How do you not know?
Sam [00:06:36]:
Of course she’s an astronaut. She was in the Bezos penis rocket and she kissed the ground as all good astronauts do. And she was at a concert and for whatever reason she thought it was a good idea to get in this giant inflatable Zorb-like but bottle-shaped contraption.
Chris [00:06:53]:
They called it Katie Aid.
Sam [00:06:54]:
Yeah, yeah. Of course she would have been all in on that. And the idea was she was going to be in it and then the whole thing was going to crowd surf over to a big straw. That did not happen. They just took her away for a bit and she pleaded and yelled and she’s like, no, go me that way, go that way.
Chris [00:07:12]:
And they’re just mucking around. I’m like, what do you expect? Honestly.
Sam [00:07:17]:
It’s so good.
Chris [00:07:18]:
Oh, that’s so good.
Sam [00:07:19]:
I’m surprised they didn’t go down the road somewhere where they’re out of the stadium. Yeah. So I thought that was quite funny.
Chris [00:07:25]:
She did get there in the end. It all worked out, but it was apparently quite a bit— I haven’t watched the video.
Sam [00:07:32]:
Well, they weren’t expecting it.
Chris [00:07:33]:
Just gesticulating quite obviously within there and going, no, get me to the straw!
Sam [00:07:40]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:07:42]:
Which I just thought was hilarious.
Sam [00:07:43]:
Have you heard of silver diamine fluoride?
Chris [00:07:46]:
Nope.
Sam [00:07:47]:
I don’t know what it is, but apparently it can stop cavities in young children without drilling. They just sort of paint it on.
Chris [00:07:54]:
Oh, okay.
Sam [00:07:55]:
University of Michigan’s doing this. They’ve done a trial. It’s a low-cost liquid. This is already sounding like there’s probably going to have some weird side effect we don’t know about for 20 years. But they did a trial. They put a small sponge tip thing. The only drawback— what do you think the drawback is to this thing? So they put it on the kids’ teeth.
Chris [00:08:12]:
It’s poisonous.
Sam [00:08:13]:
No, and it’s their baby teeth, so I guess it’s not too bad. Like, they’ll fall out at some point. It permanently darkens the decayed area of the tooth is the drawback. So you might have like really weird looking teeth maybe.
Chris [00:08:27]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:08:27]:
But it’s the baby teeth.
Chris [00:08:28]:
It’s the baby teeth. That makes sense. Um, yeah, no, I’m not anti that. Although, how are they going to get away with that when people are still bitching about fluoridation of water?
Sam [00:08:38]:
No, that’s when they become adults and they’re crackpots.
Chris [00:08:41]:
No, I’m talking about their parents.
Sam [00:08:43]:
Oh yeah.
Chris [00:08:43]:
You know, like, ooh.
Sam [00:08:46]:
So they did this with 830 children, 6-year-olds. That’s a pretty decent study size.
Chris [00:08:51]:
Actually, speaking of kids, this is a bad segue, but it cracked me up. So in New York, a New York school has paused the plan for its deployment of a human-like AI robot teacher.
Sam [00:09:13]:
Hang on. So they were all in on AI, And someone sold them a robot?
Chris [00:09:17]:
Yep.
Sam [00:09:18]:
Oh, hang on. Does it look like a human or is it just like one of those survey things?
Chris [00:09:21]:
That is the robot.
Sam [00:09:22]:
He’s showing it to me now. The reason they’re not deploying it is because I don’t, it looks like an adult sex toy.
Chris [00:09:31]:
It is made by a company that does adult sex toys.
Sam [00:09:34]:
Oh, good.
Chris [00:09:35]:
That is why it looks like that. Because I looked at the image too, because of course at first it’s not a, it’s a human-like robot. It’s totally the hair and its skin and all that.
Sam [00:09:45]:
It’s like one of those life, yeah, like real-life doll things, humans.
Chris [00:09:48]:
Yeah, yeah. And so when I first saw the photo, I thought it was a human because I was expecting, you know, the tin android thing, right? And then you look at her again and you go, oh no, that’s the robot. Oh, she’s well endowed. That’s what might have been my second thought. And then reading it, it’s like, um, includes, uh, Da da da. The reason the teachers and local residents raised concerns, including the maker’s ties to a company that produces hyper-realistic sex robots, uh, sex bots. So they had approved this nearly $60,000 purchase of this robot.
Sam [00:10:24]:
Someone did. And they’re like, don’t worry, children.
Chris [00:10:29]:
Janet.
Sam [00:10:30]:
Don’t worry, kids. After school, I’ll be taking Miss Robot Home with me.
Chris [00:10:36]:
Yeah, well, no, they were going to— Sally was going to be a stationary robot with long dark hair, would enhance the education of high school students studying robotics and technological fields.
Sam [00:10:47]:
Oh, okay. So it wasn’t teaching normal stuff. They were using it in a different—
Chris [00:10:51]:
No, they’re going to use it in robotics.
Sam [00:10:53]:
That makes even less sense. They need the metal robot.
Chris [00:10:56]:
Yeah, why don’t they have— yeah.
Sam [00:10:57]:
Because hang on, what? This thing’s covered in realistic human flesh.
Chris [00:11:03]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:11:03]:
You’d have— oh, it makes no sense.
Chris [00:11:05]:
No, I know.
Sam [00:11:05]:
Anyway, so they paused it.
Chris [00:11:06]:
Anyway, it cracked me up. It cracked me up. And actually on that same card that I made that note, I also made the note, do you realize that United and Delta have now banned humanoid robots from flights?
Sam [00:11:20]:
Well, what are we going to do now? I’ve got one on order.
Chris [00:11:23]:
But in my head, I’m like, what led to this ban? Did somebody come in, buy 2 tickets and take their robot and then sit it in a seat?
Sam [00:11:33]:
Well, in theory, There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?
Chris [00:11:36]:
I don’t know. Well, there is now.
Sam [00:11:38]:
No, but if you— no, the biggest problem would be batteries, I reckon.
Chris [00:11:41]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:11:42]:
Because if it can move by itself, it’s powered by a giant battery pack, I’m assuming.
Chris [00:11:47]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:11:48]:
That, I’m assuming that’s the only problem.
Chris [00:11:50]:
I would, I would, I would be, I wouldn’t be surprised if they said, oh no, the robot has to sit on the window seat in case of an emergency so people can get past it. Like, maybe aisle thing. That makes sense to me, right?
Sam [00:12:02]:
Because they probably—
Chris [00:12:04]:
if everybody’s running for their lives and there’s a fire, screw the robot. It can stay in the window seat and I don’t want it in the— between me and the exit.
Sam [00:12:12]:
But they probably, yeah, but like you can’t, I’m assuming also like you’re in an emergency, you’re not second-guessing the weird looking person and going, are you a robot? And it’s not going to follow your commands because it doesn’t know what the code words are.
Chris [00:12:25]:
Yeah. And I don’t think this was. looking for realistic looking robots. I think this was— I’ve just seen the female thing that you showed me for a skull. You know, I don’t think the DeltaWines were even thinking about that.
Sam [00:12:41]:
They’re not. They are now.
Chris [00:12:43]:
They are now. Actually, did you see the MMA style league that they’ve got in the— is it Korea? I think it’s Korea.
Sam [00:12:52]:
Is this the little robots that try and beat each other up?
Chris [00:12:54]:
They’re not little. They’re all like 5’8, 5’9. Every team has the same robot, so it’s the same build, the same—
Sam [00:13:01]:
Okay, great.
Chris [00:13:02]:
And the difference is their programming.
Sam [00:13:05]:
Good. Yeah, that’s cool.
Chris [00:13:06]:
And they do kickboxing.
Sam [00:13:07]:
Oh yeah.
Chris [00:13:07]:
And there’s this— this was a couple of weeks ago, I saw this video, and this thing does a spinning kick.
Sam [00:13:13]:
Oh yeah.
Chris [00:13:13]:
It smacks its head and its head falls off, and it’s still fighting until the cords go too far and it drops off, and then it basically can’t see, and then it just falls But it was, it was pretty freaky, honestly.
Sam [00:13:25]:
Talking about our robot overlords, have you seen this video of this 5 miles per second quadruped?
Chris [00:13:32]:
No.
Sam [00:13:32]:
So, you know, the robot dogs that Boston Dynamics make, this is similar looking to that, but it’s got wheels. I’m going to share this video and I’ll try and explain it, but this thing’s going all over the place. It can go 5 miles per second while carrying payloads and navigating challenging terrain.
Chris [00:13:46]:
5 miles per second?
Sam [00:13:48]:
This is not sped up, this video I show you. Look at it. Imagine that coming after you with a gun on it.
Chris [00:13:53]:
I know. So what I have seen, somebody bought one of those, I’m pretty sure, or no, it’s not quite that one, but it’s got the wheels thing and put a chair on the back for his dad. And his dad was, um, into hiking and then he had an accident and broke his back and he can’t do that and made a wheelchair. Like he spent significant amount of money doing this and he had to program it because it had to get the thing and it still falls over every now, but he can go onto a hiking trail because it’s got the wheels. So it’s fine on the, um, on sealed roads, but it can just walk when there’s, you know, rough terrain and you get it walking upstairs and all that sort of stuff, which is pretty cool.
Sam [00:14:33]:
I mean, that’s a good use for it, but I think it’s, we’re only like, I, I’m listening to this World War II with Tom Hanks. It’s really good and depressing at the same time. I do believe like whatever the next huge war is we have will be drones and robots. And it would be like that scene in Terminator.
Chris [00:14:50]:
Yeah. So on this, while we’re going down this track, have you heard about the, um, ChatGPT 5.6 escape?
Sam [00:15:01]:
Uh, I maybe just the title or something like, I don’t really know. You tell me about it. Cause I don’t really know what happened.
Chris [00:15:08]:
So last month or this month in July. So by the time this comes out, it’ll be last month. Um, OpenAI disclosed an unprecedented incident. where its latest frontier model, the GPT-5.6 SOL pre-release, they put it in a sandbox and they gave it a, uh, what do you call it? A hacking competition. They, they said, right, you need to figure out how you deal with this program. So a sandbox, for those that don’t know, it’s not plugged, supposedly isolated. It can’t get out, can’t touch the real world. And they populate the world with some data and some bits and pieces so it can And do what it’s meant to do.
Sam [00:15:45]:
And they sort of watch it, I guess. Okay.
Chris [00:15:47]:
So the SOL model suddenly just creates all these mini AI bots, because that’s what agentic AI does now. It doesn’t do it all itself. It just creates a bazillion bots.
Sam [00:15:58]:
And they’re all doing different little things.
Chris [00:15:59]:
And they’re all doing different little things. And so they’re like, oh, what’s it trying to do? What it decided was, nah, the best way to get the high score, because we want to get the high score, is not to do what they think we’re going to do. The best way is to figure out how to get the answers. And I reckon the answers would be in this other company called Hugging Face. And so it sent all these things, bots off to find mini exploits in the sandbox and escaped the sandbox, plugged, managed to switch some switches to get it to connect to the internet.
Sam [00:16:36]:
Hang on, hang on.
Chris [00:16:36]:
Got into the internet.
Sam [00:16:37]:
No.
Chris [00:16:38]:
Hacked into Hugging Face.
Sam [00:16:39]:
This is Skynet.
Chris [00:16:40]:
Yeah, hacked into Hugging Face, which is a totally other company, like nothing to do with these guys. Hugging Face, at the time, there were reports of Hugging Face going, we are undergoing a severe attack. Like, we don’t know what’s going on here.
Sam [00:16:56]:
They’re probably thinking it’s the Chinese or someone.
Chris [00:16:57]:
They managed to figure out who it was and then let OpenAI know, oh, your model’s hacking us. And they’re like, oh, what? Oh, it got out. You can just imagine these guys sitting around having a coffee, waiting for their thing to do the thing. Oh my God. Anyway.
Sam [00:17:14]:
So hang on, but it physically or wirelessly or something has to have an internet connection just in general.
Chris [00:17:22]:
Yeah, but it figured out a way to turn the pages on.
Sam [00:17:25]:
Oh no, but can they run it without any, they must be able to run it without any connection to the internet.
Chris [00:17:29]:
Yeah, you’d presume.
Sam [00:17:31]:
How scary is this? That’s so scary.
Chris [00:17:33]:
High level scary. So Carl first put me onto it when I caught up with him for a coffee last Friday, I think. Yeah. And then, um, and then I did a little bit of research and it’s, it’s actually big news on the, on the interwebs. But yeah, so you put that together with that super fast robot on wheels and guns and drones, we’re screwed. We’re so screwed.
Sam [00:17:53]:
I think the only benefit for us is we are a small island nation and whatever robots we’ve got here will pale in comparison to the quantity that can just go everywhere else in the world unless they can fly planes with their sex bots. Damn it.
Chris [00:18:13]:
Okay.
Sam [00:18:14]:
Uh, no, that’s not good. Oh no, it’s broken my brain a little bit.
Chris [00:18:19]:
No, just go back to your happy place. Think about Sally the AI teacher’s sex bot. I mean, teacher.
Sam [00:18:24]:
That’s not my happy spot.
Chris [00:18:26]:
That’s your happy spot.
Sam [00:18:28]:
I dread to think what you’d be doing if you had money. I’ve seen your AliExpress stuff. I’ve seen the cheap stuff you buy. Imagine that at another level. You’d be like, this is a vacuum cleaner.
Chris [00:18:41]:
I’d be like, why has it got teeth? Okay. All right. That’s so wrong what you’ve just said there. So wrong on so many levels. It’s cracking me up a lot though. Okay. I’ll tell you about something else that’s a little less serious. Well, less seriously serious, I think.
Chris [00:18:58]:
Some people will be upset about this.
Sam [00:18:59]:
Okay, way to frame it.
Chris [00:19:01]:
AI firms are quietly buying and destroying millions of printed books, millions of printed books to train their AI models. So one of the reasons for this is 2 major reasons. First reason is they’ve already scanned the web and pulled all the stuff off the web. But the other thing is that books were expensive to produce, right? And so they had proper editing and proper checking and proper— so the older books that are not available on the web now, but are still in print, they want to use that. And—
Sam [00:19:34]:
Is that for information or it’s a good dataset to train?
Chris [00:19:37]:
It’s just to train their models on. So basically, I guess in the— I haven’t read this article properly, but in the taking the data out of the books, they’re destroying the books.
Sam [00:19:50]:
Okay.
Chris [00:19:51]:
But yeah, person was, uh, in a rare bookshop and, um, he’s like, why has this person just ordered 70 books from us of this thing? And I looked into it and found this out. It was like, cancel the order.
Sam [00:20:05]:
We’re not, we’re not going to be part of it.
Chris [00:20:07]:
Yeah. We don’t want to be a part of it. We want to destroy rare books.
Sam [00:20:10]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:20:11]:
Just for the sake of—
Sam [00:20:11]:
And that’s tough, eh? Because like, if you don’t know that’s happening, you’d just be like, oh, okay, here’s a book order.
Chris [00:20:17]:
Yeah, exactly. Um, so there’s this, um, ISBNDB. ISBN is the International Standard Book Number.
Sam [00:20:26]:
Yes. Database.
Chris [00:20:27]:
DB is database. Yeah.
Sam [00:20:29]:
I know.
Chris [00:20:30]:
They’ve called it that.
Sam [00:20:31]:
Um, and, um, and is this showing books that have been scanned or books that are rare or what’s it doing?
Chris [00:20:38]:
That’s, that’s the guys that are buying them, trying to put it together to, to create a database of, of, um, print books. So yeah, anyway, so there’s a rise of people that are pretty— I’ll read this tweet out. I’m a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston’s largest used and rare bookstore, and I’m building an AI tool for use for used bookstores.
Sam [00:21:03]:
Okay.
Chris [00:21:03]:
We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I don’t know.
Sam [00:21:11]:
But if they’d drop fed that and done like one book at a time, it would have done.
Chris [00:21:16]:
And they probably had done already.
Sam [00:21:17]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:21:18]:
You know, and they don’t know. Um, so yeah, but they’re, um, AI companies are bulk buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, shredding the originals.
Sam [00:21:29]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:21:30]:
Um, and yeah.
Sam [00:21:32]:
Oh, craziness in the world today.
Chris [00:21:35]:
But I mean, it means that you might be able to sell your secondhand books For a little bit more money.
Sam [00:21:41]:
Yeah, but at what cost to the human civilization?
Chris [00:21:44]:
Who cares if I get my cash?
Sam [00:21:48]:
Oh no.
Chris [00:21:49]:
No, I know.
Sam [00:21:50]:
Kickstart or Dropkick for you this week.
Chris [00:21:52]:
All right.
Sam [00:21:53]:
I’m going to start with the, I don’t know, it’s in capital letters, H-E-O-N-E. So I don’t know if it’s Hione or Hione.
Chris [00:22:02]:
Yeah, I was going to say Hione, but—
Sam [00:22:03]:
Dash X. That’s what you get. And this is, I’d, uh, okay. It’s the Automatic Hovering Tethered Intelligent Aerial Light. You know how—
Chris [00:22:16]:
Sorry, I’m like, all I can picture is one of those Chinese lanterns on a string. Like, that’s, that’s what’s in my head.
Sam [00:22:24]:
It’s a bit more high-tech than that. So you’re out and about, you’re outside, you’ve got to do some work for some reason in the dark. You’re having a picnic, a barbecue, and you’re like, I need more light. So you get one of these things, uh, and it’s a giant box that goes on the ground, which is the battery pack, I guess. And then coming up from that on a cord is a drone that just flies above you with lights on.
Chris [00:22:47]:
Eh.
Sam [00:22:48]:
It seems like too much effort. Like, you’re just there and this thing’s just flying over you. Don’t worry, the light’s working well.
Chris [00:22:58]:
Yeah, because you think you could just hang something from a tree branch or something.
Sam [00:23:02]:
Oh, the brightness is adjustable. It’s got all these protections and all sorts. Um, you can use it for camping. You can use it for sports events. You can use it for security if you want. Um, and you’ve got this—
Chris [00:23:13]:
you have the security. Somebody comes along with some scissors, snip.
Sam [00:23:17]:
Hey, hey, they haven’t thought about that. And they said like, You know, classic lighting fails you. Camp lights hanging from the tree, blocked by the tents, dark area, easy to trip. So it’s a smart tethered aerial lighting and power supply system designed to overcome the limitations of traditional lighting. It combines a highly stable tethered drone with a powerful mobile power station to provide outdoor lighting. It just sounds stupid, but don’t let me put you off.
Chris [00:23:47]:
I’m sure there are some edge cases that this makes perfect sense.
Sam [00:23:51]:
There is.
Chris [00:23:52]:
But they would be edge cases.
Sam [00:23:53]:
Well, I believe there’s something similar to this for emergency services.
Chris [00:23:58]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:23:59]:
Like a big version, disaster relief, because I think it can look at everything that’s happening around it and provide lighting and mapping and things like that.
Chris [00:24:09]:
Yeah. Earthquake, and particularly in low light situations overnight and stuff like that.
Sam [00:24:14]:
That’s right. And when your bloody AI teacher bots wandered off, Send up the light. I’m still laughing about it. That’s so stupid. Anyway, this, hang on, if we’re going to back this thing, I’ll tell you how much it is first. For the basic one, which is 50% off, uh, so super early bird, uh, Kickstarter special, uh, $1,500 New Zealand dollars. You can buy a lot of torches, lanterns, light sticks, all sorts of stuff.
Chris [00:24:45]:
Especially at AliExpress. I think I just bought a little mini torch because I had to fill in the order and like, what else can I I’ll get that little tool.
Sam [00:24:51]:
The normal price is $2,600. Okay. So that’s what it is.
Chris [00:24:55]:
How much were they after?
Sam [00:24:57]:
They want $8,000 and they’ve got 13 days to go.
Chris [00:25:02]:
Ooh.
Sam [00:25:03]:
So it’s a very low barrier to entry for something that’s quite expensive. That’s not good usually.
Chris [00:25:10]:
No, because it’s like, oh, cause all we did was we got a battery and we got a drone and we tied them together.
Sam [00:25:17]:
We’re onto something. We’re onto it.
Chris [00:25:19]:
Yeah. It’s like, it’s like 2 magnets at a piece of tape.
Sam [00:25:25]:
Pretty much. A bit more, bit more special.
Chris [00:25:28]:
Slightly higher tech.
Sam [00:25:29]:
Tweaked it.
Chris [00:25:30]:
Um, yeah.
Sam [00:25:30]:
So, um, so they want to raise $8,000.
Chris [00:25:32]:
I would not be surprised if they got the 8 grand already.
Sam [00:25:35]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:25:35]:
Uh, and I, and I’ll tell you why I say this.
Sam [00:25:37]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:25:38]:
Because I think these are some people that have plenty of money that, um, are like, oh, we’re going to do this Kickstarter. This is going to be amazing. We’ll make billions of dollars. And they’ve managed to talk some friends who also have way more money than they really need or deserve. And they have got them in there. So I would say this is, uh, well over the $50K mark. I’m going to say $100K. They’ve got $100K.
Sam [00:25:59]:
They’ve raised $40,000.
Chris [00:26:01]:
Ooh, I’m so wrong again, but I still like my reasoning.
Sam [00:26:06]:
Okay. Now the next one, you might be all about this. I’m not sure actually. I believe this is the second version. They’ve made it better. Pixel Mug S1 Series, the most playable mug ever. So it’s a giant mug with that LCD LED screen around it.
Chris [00:26:25]:
Oh, so not, not like an inset square screen, but the, the surface is a screen.
Sam [00:26:30]:
Yeah.
Chris [00:26:31]:
Right.
Sam [00:26:32]:
Uh, turns the mug you already reach for every day, which is their mug, it’s customizable. You can swap between pixel art, games, reminders, weather, timer, New mini features, whatever you want. Oh, this is taking forever to load, so I can’t show you a picture. But, um, yeah, you can play little games on this mug that you can drink from. They’ve made it a bigger mug.
Chris [00:26:50]:
Is it a touchscreen mug? How do you play games?
Sam [00:26:53]:
Yeah, lots of questions.
Chris [00:26:57]:
Um, I mean, I, I get that. I get the idea of, you know, I want my mug to look like this on a— it’s a Monday morning, make it look grim. Every Monday it’s gonna look grim. So that— I get that. Yeah, the playable or the interactiveness on the show.
Sam [00:27:09]:
Don’t know. This is the world’s Weirdest loading. I think they’ve got a mobile version of Kickstarter that sometimes doesn’t represent the main website. Yeah. But not all the time. Only sometimes. Oh, here we go. So it’s just, um, I think you play it on the computer and it’s beaming it to the— Oh, I see.
Chris [00:27:29]:
Maybe.
Sam [00:27:29]:
It’s using it as a screen. But you can get, um, pictures, put them on the app and it’ll pixelize it and put it onto this cup for you. Um, and like I said, this is version 2, so they’ve worked out some bugs and stuff. I don’t know, you’d have to be very careful to wash it, maybe? I can’t imagine.
Chris [00:27:46]:
I can’t imagine it being dishwashable.
Sam [00:27:48]:
No, no, no, not, not, not, not for this price.
Chris [00:27:52]:
Um, hang on. So I, I don’t like, oh geez, like you’d have, I’d have to have loads and loads of excess cash before I’d spend it on that. Honestly, I don’t really see the point.
Sam [00:28:10]:
So the Ultimate Pro Bundle, or you’re looking at around $200 US to $119-ish.
Chris [00:28:19]:
Yeah.
Sam [00:28:20]:
For that. Okay. So they want to raise $8,600, exactly the same amount as the flying light drone thing.
Chris [00:28:29]:
Okay. Right. Right.
Sam [00:28:30]:
They’ve got 23 days to go. Very similar.
Chris [00:28:34]:
Okay. So the use case for this is way higher than the drone.
Sam [00:28:38]:
You’re going to use it every single day. You’re not going to be like, I wish to fly the drone inside the house.
Chris [00:28:42]:
Yeah. You’re going to use that all the time.
Sam [00:28:44]:
You’re going to use it all the time.
Chris [00:28:44]:
And, um, and it’s way cheaper per unit than the drone. I mean, it’s still $200, but, um, but it’s way cheaper than the drone.
Sam [00:28:53]:
I think someone said in the first version, they would send a picture or something to their partner’s mug. So you’d be like, you’d be there drinking and be like, hey, or whatever.
Chris [00:29:04]:
That’s pretty cool. There’s some cool things you could do with that. Yeah. Novelty factor alone, $200. There are penny pool with loads of money. Yep. I’m going to say that one’s at $150 grand.
Sam [00:29:15]:
$421,000.
Chris [00:29:16]:
Nice.
Sam [00:29:17]:
Getting up there.
Chris [00:29:18]:
That’s pretty good. All right. Well done.
Sam [00:29:21]:
We’ve come to the end of the podcast. Cool. We’ve covered some amazing topics. We’ve had a lot of fun. We hope you have as well. And you can tell someone about it. Hey, just forgot to tell you, you know those, um, have you come across the fundraising things where you buy a line on someone on the back of someone’s t-shirt? Have you done that?
Chris [00:29:42]:
No, no.
Sam [00:29:42]:
So every now and then these kids are bloody going to Jamboree or overseas or something and they get a t-shirt made and they’ve got 20 spaces for lines and you, and one is a dollar, but it’s the smallest and 20 is $20 and it’s the biggest. Yeah. Anyway, TCAS.com on the back of some rando child’s t-shirt for $17.
Chris [00:30:02]:
Are we doing that?
Sam [00:30:03]:
Are we? We’ve already done it.
Chris [00:30:03]:
Already done it.
Sam [00:30:05]:
They’re going to Jamboree and they’re going to be wearing this. TCAS.com. Yeah. That’s how we’re going to get some more listeners. So anyway, check that out. Uh, until next time, I’m Sam.
Chris [00:30:15]:
I’m Chris.
Sam [00:30:16]:
See ya.
Chris [00:30:17]:
Bye.
Excerpt
Earthquake alerts, robot teachers causing a stir, airlines banning humanoid robots, and Kickstarter gadgets that spark debate—plus, the wild story of Katy Perry stuck in a giant bottle.
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