Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey the every one, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks the future and says, well, get
Speaker 1: out from that kitchen and rat all those pots and pants.
Speaker 1: I'm Jovin Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, yeah, kitchens, future,
Speaker 1: what how will these two things collide? Are we all
Speaker 1: cooks around this table? I'm the cook in my family.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm a baker, not a cook, but I'm
Speaker 1: the cook in my household. Also, but so so. Baking
Speaker 1: is is certainly a part of the whole cooking subset
Speaker 1: of food creation. I'm actually not very good at that.
Speaker 1: I'm good at all the other kinds of cooking, but
Speaker 1: not at the baking. Oh, it's much more orderly. I
Speaker 1: I the freedom of cooking drives me a little bit crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the difference between baking and cooking is sort
Speaker 1: of like the difference between being a chemistry lab researcher
Speaker 1: and a soccer player. Well, as we have established, we
Speaker 1: are recording this as the World Cup is still going on,
Speaker 1: and UH and I have determined that the rules for
Speaker 1: soccer allow you to team at least forty seven people
Speaker 1: on the field at a single time. This is just
Speaker 1: based upon my own observations. I haven't actually looked into
Speaker 1: the rules, so I'm gonna go ahead and say sure.
Speaker 1: But getting into getting into what we actually gathered here
Speaker 1: to talk about kitchens before we talk about the stuff
Speaker 1: we we have in our notes, One thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to mention is that the kitchen of the future is
Speaker 1: one of those things that gets gets looked at fairly frequently,
Speaker 1: and it can be a lot of fun to go
Speaker 1: back and look at what past predictions of what future
Speaker 1: kitchens is in stuff that's now in our past, why
Speaker 1: they would look like do do you know? So? Earlier
Speaker 1: today we were all watching this video from the All
Speaker 1: Know What year was seven, and it was predicting the
Speaker 1: kitchen of nineteen that's exactly right, ninety nine and it
Speaker 1: is a rawlic we uh frolic. It was a looking
Speaker 1: good time. Yeah, it was if you like your misogyny
Speaker 1: with with Peppie jazz tunes. Yeah, it imagines that in
Speaker 1: the future you won't have to do any work to
Speaker 1: prepare meals, but mom's still in the kitchen. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: not allowed to leave that room. Don't don't take that
Speaker 1: away from women. That's all we have that in valium,
Speaker 1: apparently because she looks so happy. Yes, she would contact
Speaker 1: her family with the very personal touch of turning on
Speaker 1: an enormous bank of television monitors to check in, and
Speaker 1: her husband, the loving man that he was, made specific
Speaker 1: demands on what the meal should be for lunch. He's
Speaker 1: so grumbly that she won't make him a cheeseburger. For
Speaker 1: her son. She tells her son that lunch will be
Speaker 1: ready in two minutes, so he starts counting down the
Speaker 1: seconds because you know, kids are adorable. Well, it's the future,
Speaker 1: so it's a robot son. I guess that actually makes
Speaker 1: way more sense now. It certainly didn't seem all that
Speaker 1: life like so at any rate, the the episode goes
Speaker 1: on some stuff that they predict is kind of interesting
Speaker 1: because it's stuff we're still talking about today. Well, it predicts,
Speaker 1: for example, the miracle that in the future all meals
Speaker 1: will be pre frozen in advance. I was going to
Speaker 1: actually talk about one that was true Joe, which was
Speaker 1: that the the idea that he had the computer that
Speaker 1: gave the nutritional value of a proposed meal, and it
Speaker 1: said this is four calories above what was suggested, so
Speaker 1: you should really think of an alternative. And here's a suggestion.
Speaker 1: That's actually something that we see with apps right now
Speaker 1: you can put in what you were going to make.
Speaker 1: And so that part was actually realistic. The part about
Speaker 1: all the food being frozen, I hope is not a
Speaker 1: realistic view of what the future is going to be
Speaker 1: because I like to have some fresh food once in
Speaker 1: a while. Yeah, well, I was just commenting on the
Speaker 1: bizarreness of how they seemed to see this as a
Speaker 1: really great thing. Well, it's the idea was that for
Speaker 1: the convenience, right, And it was all automated in the
Speaker 1: video and the video she she essentially said what each
Speaker 1: person was going to eat, pressed a button and then
Speaker 1: magically this frozen food went through a microwave all at
Speaker 1: the same time and then came out on a very
Speaker 1: institutionalized looking trade you know, it's got a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1: And then this white cardboard barge of food comes out
Speaker 1: to serve up the gullets of the family and they
Speaker 1: and did you hear they said they had the the
Speaker 1: color coordinated disposable plates like This was very much a
Speaker 1: make and throw away kind of culture, which is something
Speaker 1: that you would have seen back in the late sixties
Speaker 1: but not so much today. It was specified in a
Speaker 1: in a different video. Walter Cronkite also wound up on
Speaker 1: this set at some point, and there's another video with
Speaker 1: him talking about this amazing kitchen of the of the future,
Speaker 1: and and he specified that the plastics that the plates
Speaker 1: were made of would get mel to down and made
Speaker 1: into new plates for the next so there would be recycling.
Speaker 1: So there was was recycling. Also, I love personally melting
Speaker 1: down plastic in my own home. So there's nothing like
Speaker 1: that smell. As we have learned as we've worked with
Speaker 1: the three D printer we now have in our office,
Speaker 1: the smell of burning plastic is in fact a very
Speaker 1: soothing odor Um tried the new model with lead plates.
Speaker 1: So and Joe, you pointed out something else that Walter
Speaker 1: Cronkite said that that got you kind of chuckling about
Speaker 1: the the interface that you would use to uh to
Speaker 1: in the kitchen of tomorrow. Right. I can't remember what
Speaker 1: was it. I said it was the punch cards. Joe,
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, you'll plan your meal or your you'll
Speaker 1: enter your meal preferences with a typewriter or punch card.
Speaker 1: So the point that Joe was making, and it's something
Speaker 1: that we need to point out too before we get
Speaker 1: into any of our predictions, it's that often the predictions
Speaker 1: we make about the future are based on extending out
Speaker 1: what current technology is capable of doing, and some things
Speaker 1: we end up going way off the rails thinking about
Speaker 1: stuff that may not really be within technologies uh scope
Speaker 1: of being able to do, and other things are going
Speaker 1: to be far too conservative because it's based upon interfaces
Speaker 1: that we're familiar with now and we don't anticipate what
Speaker 1: that next breakthrough is gonna be that's going to completely
Speaker 1: change things. Yeah, it is pretty funny the way we
Speaker 1: just we can't level our expectations for the future. We're
Speaker 1: always being way too optimistic about some things and not
Speaker 1: even closed to optimistic enough about others. Right, So some
Speaker 1: of the things we're gonna talk about today will it
Speaker 1: will include a little bit of criticism and skepticism about
Speaker 1: a few of the items because they're ones that it
Speaker 1: may turn out the technology is not sophisticated enough to
Speaker 1: really deliver upon the promise, may not within the next
Speaker 1: couple hundred years. Yeah, hey, okay, I don't want to
Speaker 1: leave the nineteen sixties yet. I want to I want
Speaker 1: to take us back in the way, back to predicting
Speaker 1: the future in the past machine, right, okay, okay, so
Speaker 1: that's a very specific machine. Actually not that wouldn't be
Speaker 1: exactly right, not predicting the future, just talking about the
Speaker 1: miracle of technology. Sure. Uh. Some nights I found this
Speaker 1: ad copy from a newspaper ad that was running in
Speaker 1: the late sixties, like nine sixty nine for a microwave oven,
Speaker 1: and I just want to read you this copy. The
Speaker 1: indoor Outdoor Miracle Worker cook or derves in seconds a
Speaker 1: five pound roast in thirty seven minutes, a baked potato
Speaker 1: in four minutes. The amazing Amana radar range microwave oven
Speaker 1: cooks with microwave energy, faster and cleaner than gas or electricity.
Speaker 1: Though I assume you have to plug it into the wall.
Speaker 1: But it's not an electrical right the Yeah. Uh. What's more,
Speaker 1: it's portable, so if you're having a cookout, you just
Speaker 1: wheel the radar range to the patio and plug it in.
Speaker 1: With radar range, you're always set for an instant dinner party,
Speaker 1: and you haven't stood over a hot stove, suffer catd
Speaker 1: in smoke, or scrubbed a single pan because radar range
Speaker 1: heats only the food, never the chef. See radar range
Speaker 1: in action at your Amano dealers. If that doesn't make
Speaker 1: a believer out of you, it's a miracle now, you know.
Speaker 1: The microwave was really seen as kind of a miracle device.
Speaker 1: You know how it was invented? Right? Or how how
Speaker 1: the right? Yeah? Yeah. So there's a fellow named Percy
Speaker 1: Spencer who was working with radar tubes. It was his specialty,
Speaker 1: was what he was working with. And he realized that
Speaker 1: while he was working next to one radar tube, the
Speaker 1: candy bar he had in his pocket had melted, and
Speaker 1: he got him to thinking about what might be going on,
Speaker 1: and he realized that was an interaction of the microwaves
Speaker 1: agitating molecules inside the candy bar and making them vibrate
Speaker 1: essentially and warm up. And that became the basis for
Speaker 1: the microwave oven and uh, and it really was considered
Speaker 1: sort of this miracle technology. There was no open flame,
Speaker 1: there was no heated element, and yet you would put
Speaker 1: food into this thing. You'd hear maybe a fan going
Speaker 1: off to help distribute microwaves and maybe uh fan away
Speaker 1: some some you know, steam and other stuff coming up
Speaker 1: from the food, and it was magically hot, like it
Speaker 1: had cooked magically to be To be fair, I'm still
Speaker 1: pretty impressed by microwaves today. I mean I grew up
Speaker 1: with them. I've always had one as far back as
Speaker 1: I can personally remember, and that's I mean, it makes
Speaker 1: my food warm. That's great. Well, it is pretty great
Speaker 1: if you want to like defrost something quickly or left over,
Speaker 1: if you've got a frozen dinner, like if you're if
Speaker 1: unlike the the pictures of the future where everything is
Speaker 1: frozen and it's wonderful, most of us are thinking about, well,
Speaker 1: you we will depend upon a frozen dinner because it's
Speaker 1: economical or it's efficient. It's not because it's a miracle
Speaker 1: of modern gore mat cuisine. Right. I want to point
Speaker 1: out in this ad copy I just read that the
Speaker 1: incredible tone deafness about what we like in food and
Speaker 1: uh and how the esthetic dicks of food and social
Speaker 1: gatherings fit together. So they're imagining you want to make
Speaker 1: a roast, I guess like a like a red roast
Speaker 1: or something a five pound roast in thirty seven minutes.
Speaker 1: So you want to put the roast into the microwave
Speaker 1: and just turn it into a moon rock, or or
Speaker 1: you you're having a barbecue, they say take it out
Speaker 1: on the patio and barbecue withrowave, because that's exactly like
Speaker 1: cooking a burger on an open flame, exactly replaced the grill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not the only technology from back then that was
Speaker 1: greeted with wide eyed enthusiasm and and awe right, I
Speaker 1: mean there are other technologies that entered the kitchen. They
Speaker 1: got incredible amounts of response. But you know today we
Speaker 1: just look back and say, really so uh sure. Well,
Speaker 1: like in when the single armed water faucet hit the market,
Speaker 1: it was big news. You didn't have to have you
Speaker 1: no longer were you slave to two knobs for turning
Speaker 1: on your water. You can now you could have a
Speaker 1: single control where you can go from boiling hot to
Speaker 1: ice cold in the span of a micron. But but honestly,
Speaker 1: probably every single appliance that we use today, refrigerators or
Speaker 1: blenders or toasters or toaster ovens or whatever, whatever, we're
Speaker 1: probably at one point marketed as the whatever thing of
Speaker 1: the incredible future. Before we started this, I made Joe
Speaker 1: watch a tex Savery cartoon, The Home of the Future,
Speaker 1: which obviously was meant as a spoof on that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff and is completely outrageous, and at the same
Speaker 1: time you think, yeah, this is dead on. This is
Speaker 1: exactly the way that those sort of items had been marketed.
Speaker 1: And some of them, you know, some of them turned
Speaker 1: out to be pretty cool and they stuck around. A
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff that's been marketed as the kitchen
Speaker 1: of the future has not panned out to be practical
Speaker 1: and has not been widely adopted. Yeah, some of my
Speaker 1: favorites from the nineteen fifties and sixties include tractable motorized
Speaker 1: appliances so that all of your surfaces are streamlined. Just
Speaker 1: like if you want to blend something, you push a
Speaker 1: button and the blender comes up out of the countertop
Speaker 1: or back out from the wall or something like, etcetera.
Speaker 1: That'll be fantastic when it breaks. See, I would just
Speaker 1: want I would want that, But I wanted to be
Speaker 1: like young Frankenstein's style, where you you know, you you
Speaker 1: move the salt shaker and then suddenly the wall pivots
Speaker 1: and then there's your blender, and that's what I want.
Speaker 1: You climb into it occasionally Indiana Jones and his dad
Speaker 1: are there. Also motion activated appliances, because if I ever
Speaker 1: flail like a muppet, as I do basically every three
Speaker 1: and a half seconds, I really want that to turn
Speaker 1: on my oven. That sounds amazing. I'm sorry, I just
Speaker 1: had a horrible image, but it's you, you cooking, and
Speaker 1: you like catch your sleeve on fire on the stove,
Speaker 1: and as you're flailing, all of your appliances are coming
Speaker 1: or you just do the thing that happens to all
Speaker 1: of us. Sooner or later, something you are cooking ends
Speaker 1: up setting off the smoke detectors, so you start fanning
Speaker 1: the smoke detect to try and get the smoke to
Speaker 1: clear out, and meanwhile you're making all your appliances go
Speaker 1: completely bonkers. Microive starts cooking dry. Yeah, I can see
Speaker 1: why they didn't catch on. Also also waterproof appliances so
Speaker 1: that you can just like, you know, pressure wash your
Speaker 1: entire kitchen. I am in favor of that. Oh so
Speaker 1: it's like those uh those public restrooms in Europe where
Speaker 1: the door just closes and then it sanitizes every surface exactly,
Speaker 1: best not be in that restroom and that happens, you
Speaker 1: will you thought some things you will never forget. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whenever you walk into a room and you see a
Speaker 1: drain in the center of the floor, you know some
Speaker 1: serious stuff's about to go down. Yeah, it's either it's
Speaker 1: either like a slaughter house or it's an elementary school bathroom.
Speaker 1: Welcome to your abattoir of the future. No, but, but some,
Speaker 1: but some of these ideas are absolutely legitimate. Like one
Speaker 1: of the ones that I was also running into and
Speaker 1: my research a lot today was this crazy concept for
Speaker 1: electronic photo heavy recipe cards that you can just pull
Speaker 1: up whenever you want them. And I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's an iPad or d dot com essentially the Internet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there are tons of apps obviously as well. Some
Speaker 1: of them are specifically geared towards living a healthy lifestyle.
Speaker 1: They might be part of the fitness app that will
Speaker 1: give you ideas for recipes that will help you on
Speaker 1: your on your plan to either lose weight or gain
Speaker 1: muscle mass or whatever it may be that you're doing.
Speaker 1: So that's one of those that actually has panned out.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like we were talking about that video
Speaker 1: at the very top of the show, the bit about predicting, Hey,
Speaker 1: this particular meal that you have planned doesn't meet your
Speaker 1: nutritional guides that you have set up. Therefore you might
Speaker 1: want to think of this other thing. That's pretty cool
Speaker 1: that some of those things are starting to pan out. Now.
Speaker 1: I think we should transition to today and start making
Speaker 1: our own wild and crazy predictions that people in the
Speaker 1: future will make fun of. Okay, let's do that, but well, no,
Speaker 1: let's actually let's do that, but let's also try to
Speaker 1: introduce a little bit of levelheadedness and say maybe maybe
Speaker 1: not where we feel it's warranted. But I think the
Speaker 1: main thing I want to get at first is how
Speaker 1: the Internet of things, this concept we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: will apply to the kitchen. And we actually already talked
Speaker 1: about the kitchen a little bit back when we were
Speaker 1: doing our original podcasts and video about the Internet of Things,
Speaker 1: but we wanted to go into more detail about that today.
Speaker 1: And some of that just means keeping track of what
Speaker 1: you have and what you don't have, right, That's one
Speaker 1: of the basic things the Internet of things. Whenever you
Speaker 1: see anything about a refrigerator, for example, almost always. One
Speaker 1: of those is inventory control, where it keeps track of
Speaker 1: exactly what you have in there at any given time.
Speaker 1: So if you have decided, hey, I would love to
Speaker 1: make such and such tonight for dinner, and you put
Speaker 1: that in, it can actually cross reference your fridge and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if you want to make that, then you need to
Speaker 1: go to the store and also pick up these two
Speaker 1: other rest two other ingredients to make that dish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I think that's a great idea. We should probably
Speaker 1: do a brief aside, just for those who have not
Speaker 1: seen our previous Internet of Things content, to define the concept.
Speaker 1: The Internet of Things means we just take the same concept,
Speaker 1: but a smaller proportion of all these things you interact
Speaker 1: with our virtual documents. A lot of them are real
Speaker 1: appliances and objects and things in your environment. So you're
Speaker 1: the lamp and the refrigerator, and the stove and the
Speaker 1: couch and the lock on the front door are all
Speaker 1: communicating with your computer and your mobile device, right and someone.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'll even just be communicating with one another, and
Speaker 1: you don't ever have to get into any kind of
Speaker 1: control situation with your laptop or mobile device at all.
Speaker 1: These could be completely automated devices that are relying on
Speaker 1: input from sensors and then based upon some change in
Speaker 1: the environment, they react in a in some ways. So
Speaker 1: for example, you walk through the door and all your
Speaker 1: lights come on, or you know, it turns to a
Speaker 1: certain time at night and certain lights either dim or
Speaker 1: go out, that kind of thing. It's all basic stuff
Speaker 1: that we've seen gradually evolve over the last few years,
Speaker 1: and now we're getting to a point where we can
Speaker 1: seriously start plating this technology in all all sorts of things. Right,
Speaker 1: So to get back to what you were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: you can immediately see how this could be really useful
Speaker 1: if if you just had, say, a refrigerator that talked
Speaker 1: to your to your phone and new was able to
Speaker 1: somehow know what was inside it. So you're on the
Speaker 1: way home from work. You know you need to go
Speaker 1: to the grocery store, but you can't remember if you
Speaker 1: already have eggs, and you can just check. You can
Speaker 1: just check the app on your phone. The refrigerator comes on,
Speaker 1: scan says, yes, you have four eggs in The refrigerator
Speaker 1: may even be able to tell you whether or not
Speaker 1: the stuff you have is still good. It may say
Speaker 1: you know what you want to buy in some anyway
Speaker 1: because these seven weeks ago. Yeah, it makes me think
Speaker 1: of the King of the Hill thing, where you would
Speaker 1: get a little text from your on your phone and
Speaker 1: say there's some milk in the fridge that's about to
Speaker 1: go bad, and about three seconds later there it goes yeah,
Speaker 1: And this isn't all that far off in the future.
Speaker 1: LG is currently working on a system that would let
Speaker 1: you text your appliances and like talk to your appliances
Speaker 1: as though they are living things like the Brave Little Toaster.
Speaker 1: You'd be going like, hey, fridge, do we have any
Speaker 1: eggs and it could answer you, or hey, oven, let's
Speaker 1: cook a pot roast and it would pre program itself
Speaker 1: for optimal pot roast temperature. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can see this being in fact very easy to do
Speaker 1: if if you're talking about packaged foods, because package foods,
Speaker 1: I think would be pretty easy to encode r F
Speaker 1: I D into the package, which some people are incredibly
Speaker 1: resistant too. But I'll talk about that in the second. Right.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, I'm not saying we necessarily should do this,
Speaker 1: but uh, if you so you put the new coffee
Speaker 1: creamer in the fridge. The box it comes in has
Speaker 1: our f I D. The fridge knows that there's coffee
Speaker 1: creamer in there and when it came into the fridge
Speaker 1: for the first time. So that seems easy. It seems
Speaker 1: harder though, how you might manage things like meat and produce.
Speaker 1: Maybe you would just put those in a package. Also
Speaker 1: though that then you're talking about increasing more and more
Speaker 1: plastic and stuff like that, exactly like, how do you
Speaker 1: how does the fridge know what is in it? And
Speaker 1: are different ways of going about that. There's the r
Speaker 1: f i D chip like you were saying, which some
Speaker 1: people say, well, there's a couple of different concerns there.
Speaker 1: One is for people who just don't like that kind
Speaker 1: of technology period, They find that to be invasive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because essentially, who else knows that I have this stuff
Speaker 1: in my fridge? And it doesn't matter whether the stuff
Speaker 1: in my fridge is something that I should be ashamed
Speaker 1: of or whatever or or you know, worried about. It's
Speaker 1: that on principle, no one's business but my own is
Speaker 1: what you know, that's that's my fridge. You do have
Speaker 1: no business knowing what's in there? Right? Oh sorry, quick
Speaker 1: diversion again. Just if you don't know r F I
Speaker 1: D radio frequency i D. So it's sort of like
Speaker 1: having a bar code that you can identify with a
Speaker 1: radio signal. Right, And another concern is that by including
Speaker 1: r F I D you end up increasing the cost
Speaker 1: of the items because they have to incorporate that into
Speaker 1: the packaging. And you know, anytime there's a big change
Speaker 1: in packaging, whether it's you know, it might be something
Speaker 1: that's mandated by the Food and Drug Administration, if there's
Speaker 1: a discovery that a certain type of packaging can be
Speaker 1: dangerous than obviously this plastic we've been using and everything
Speaker 1: is leaching chemicals exactly, so now you gotta change everything. Well,
Speaker 1: that can mean that the cost of the item may
Speaker 1: go up, so there's some people who object on that basis.
Speaker 1: You could have something where it would be more for
Speaker 1: packaged foods, things that already have like a barcode on
Speaker 1: it where you scan the code before you put it
Speaker 1: in the fridge, either with an app on your phone,
Speaker 1: or maybe the fridge itself has a little scanner. Imagine
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be hard for the fridge to do it automatic.
Speaker 1: You just have to have a scanner that you could
Speaker 1: have the code face and it goes. Really, I mean,
Speaker 1: anyone who has used a scanner at one of those
Speaker 1: grocery stores like a self service thing knows they're incredibly fast.
Speaker 1: But it means that you do have one extra step
Speaker 1: besides just grocery shopping and then putting everything in your fridge.
Speaker 1: I could I could envision some kind of weird, sort
Speaker 1: of creepy technology that would let you while you're scanning
Speaker 1: your items out at the grocery store, it's a message
Speaker 1: out to your fresh sure and says, hey, these are
Speaker 1: the things that are about to come in. Or perhaps
Speaker 1: some kind of system of the cashier at your grocery
Speaker 1: store could send you home with a little R F
Speaker 1: I D. Packet of like, hey, this is how much
Speaker 1: meat you bought and how many vegges you bought and stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So I think all of these are possibilities.
Speaker 1: It's it's really the point we're making is that the
Speaker 1: technology for the interconnectivity is there. It's the implementation that
Speaker 1: is the question, right, yeah, uh yeah. Part of the
Speaker 1: question with a lot of these things we're going to
Speaker 1: bring up today, I think y'all will probably agree is
Speaker 1: a lot of them seem like they could be cool
Speaker 1: and could be useful, but they all also would be
Speaker 1: expensive and at least at first and difficult to implement.
Speaker 1: So sort of the question is not just can we
Speaker 1: do it, because in most cases I think it's easy
Speaker 1: to do it, just is it worth it? Is it
Speaker 1: worth going through all the effort to do this? Does
Speaker 1: it actually save you that much energy? Time? Energy? Right?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it truly convenient enough for it to
Speaker 1: be worth the investment? Yeah? Uh so? I want to
Speaker 1: talk about another possibility with the Internet of things in
Speaker 1: the kitchen, which is communication between devices for the preparation
Speaker 1: of food. Sure. So, for example, if you have picked
Speaker 1: a like you want to make a lasagna, and you
Speaker 1: have sent that message to your fridge, say that's what
Speaker 1: I want to do today, I'm gonna make lasagna, and
Speaker 1: your fridge is looked at the stuff that's in there,
Speaker 1: and it's told you, hey, by the way, you need
Speaker 1: to go and buy some some tomatoes, you need to
Speaker 1: go buy some garlic, everything else. You're good to go.
Speaker 1: You go to the store and you buy that. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the fridge is also talking to the stove and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, big boss Man is gonna be home in
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes. Let's go ahead and start preha heating
Speaker 1: so that it's ready to go once the he's back
Speaker 1: and he's ready to put the lasagna in the oven.
Speaker 1: And so that's you know, one of the ways that
Speaker 1: this could happen where you have this intercommunication between different
Speaker 1: devices that work together. Uh, and because they're all on
Speaker 1: the same page, they can make sure that all the
Speaker 1: sayings are proper for whatever it is you want to make.
Speaker 1: That's the idea. Personally, I'm a little nervous about the
Speaker 1: idea of my oven preheating when I'm not in the house,
Speaker 1: like you accidentally, like you butt dial your oven. I
Speaker 1: want to cook. I want to cook a cake of
Speaker 1: uranium in It's preheat to five thousand degree. Please begin
Speaker 1: self cleaning right, and then you go inside like why
Speaker 1: is it so hot and on fire? Um? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: there are some definitely definite things you've got to think about.
Speaker 1: But it's a neat idea. The idea of these separate
Speaker 1: devices that usually are their own thing to have no
Speaker 1: connection with each other other than the fact that they're
Speaker 1: all involved in some form of the food production process.
Speaker 1: Now they're actually working together. You could even have stuff
Speaker 1: like uh sinks working together in various ways. I'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that later. It's not just
Speaker 1: you know, the obvious fridge and oven kind of pairing.
Speaker 1: It could be other things as well, and that's pretty neat.
Speaker 1: Although the big limited limitation there is that, as far
Speaker 1: as I know, no one has come up with a
Speaker 1: like a third party standard that these devices used to
Speaker 1: communicate with one another. In other words, if you want, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want these, if you want these appliances to
Speaker 1: talk to each other, you have to buy all of
Speaker 1: them from the same source. So even if you love
Speaker 1: one company's refrigerator but you love another company's oven, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to take advantage of this interconnectivity
Speaker 1: because they're talking to different languages. You would have to
Speaker 1: buy them all from You have to make a compromise
Speaker 1: on either the fridge or the oven and buy them
Speaker 1: both from the same source. Or I think clearly Android
Speaker 1: needs to start programming these cream sandwich and but Android
Speaker 1: butt nest. So there is a chance that we're going
Speaker 1: to start seeing some Google based stuff that would allow
Speaker 1: third party manufacturers to use that kind of operating system,
Speaker 1: meaning that as long as you had that operating system
Speaker 1: operating on on the multiple things in your kitchen, they
Speaker 1: could talk to each other. So while while you're making
Speaker 1: a clever joke, it's also very much in the realm
Speaker 1: of possibility. Although okay, one application of this is the
Speaker 1: idea of remote controlling, which is a thing that exists
Speaker 1: right now, like on on the market. I mean, the
Speaker 1: the idea of being able to if you know, if
Speaker 1: you put something in your slow cooker at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the day and you're like, oh, it's three pm,
Speaker 1: I'm going to turn this up to high to do
Speaker 1: whatever it needs to do, right, and then when you
Speaker 1: come home, delicious meal is cooked. Um, that's cool. There's
Speaker 1: great idea. There's a there's a digital thermometer on the
Speaker 1: market that will ping your phone when your food is ready.
Speaker 1: Also amazing that Yeah, that's not even all that advance,
Speaker 1: but I can see how that last when you mentioned,
Speaker 1: might be one of the most useful of all. Not
Speaker 1: necessarily for when you're out of the house, but let's
Speaker 1: say you've got a roast going and you want to
Speaker 1: be outside or somewhere else, you know, and and so
Speaker 1: it just pings your phone and says, oh, it's come
Speaker 1: up to right internal, it's safe for eating. You want
Speaker 1: to come here if you happen to be, you know,
Speaker 1: making a Thanksgiving dinner and you want to when the
Speaker 1: turkey is ready and you know you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of things going on all at once. It's very useful, uh,
Speaker 1: And you don't have to worry about accidentally cooking something
Speaker 1: for too long and making it all dried out and inedible,
Speaker 1: like the way almost all of my big meals turn
Speaker 1: out small meals. I'm great at I'm sorry. Well, what
Speaker 1: about what about other applications here? Well, okay, so we
Speaker 1: just talked about how the Internet of Things could give
Speaker 1: you data on your food, but what about data about yourself? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is kind of going back to that idea of
Speaker 1: having things like fitness apps. So yeah, we have apps
Speaker 1: right now that you can wear and they tell you, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, you took this many steps today. That wasn't
Speaker 1: many steps. Maybe you take more steps, you burned that
Speaker 1: you burned approximately this many calories and you can enter
Speaker 1: on the internet your food consumption and it can tell
Speaker 1: you that really wasn't enough steps for that cheeseburger that
Speaker 1: you ate. Right, So they're they're already today food diary apps.
Speaker 1: You know, you have an app where you can put
Speaker 1: in the food you eat and it's supposed to help
Speaker 1: keep track of your your nutritional consumption. But the problem
Speaker 1: with things like that is they rely on you, the user,
Speaker 1: and we're not very good at keeping up with stuff
Speaker 1: like that. I mean, it relies on you to remember
Speaker 1: to update it with all the stuff and also be
Speaker 1: honest when you're updating it, and it requires a lot
Speaker 1: of motivation on the part of the user, right, the
Speaker 1: user has to be motivated to continue to put in
Speaker 1: this information. We find that the more we automate this,
Speaker 1: the more likely someone's going to stick with it because
Speaker 1: it's something that is happening passively in the background. They
Speaker 1: don't have to actively enter in that information. The more
Speaker 1: you ask of the user, the more dedicated they need
Speaker 1: to be for them to stick with it. Yeah. Of course,
Speaker 1: now you get to a certain point where it's like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, how exactly would that work? That might
Speaker 1: be a harder question to answer, Like how does the
Speaker 1: app get the data, the nutritional data on all the
Speaker 1: food you're eating? Right? You know, right? How does it
Speaker 1: know exactly what you're preparing proportions, right. It's it's an
Speaker 1: easy thing to do with prepackaged food because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I put this microwave thing in the microwave and then
Speaker 1: I ate it. That's pretty cut and dread. But it
Speaker 1: also might be an interesting thing that if this were
Speaker 1: a big enough deal in the future, restaurants could help
Speaker 1: cater to it. Right, So like a restaurant menu might
Speaker 1: say like, okay, you're about to order this, scan this
Speaker 1: QR code with your phone, and this will update your
Speaker 1: food diary with the nutritional information of the thing you're
Speaker 1: about to eat. Although restaurants do frequently partner these days
Speaker 1: with those those food diary apps and give you the
Speaker 1: nutritional content, the hypothetical nutritional content of whatever they're making.
Speaker 1: That's that's very do something like that. I know of
Speaker 1: one fitness app where you could put in, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: various popular food items from from Normally it's like a
Speaker 1: national chain restaurant. It's usually uh, you know, maybe some
Speaker 1: of the more notable restaurants would also participate, but you're
Speaker 1: in really good shape it as a national chain. And
Speaker 1: if you really want to see a fitness app, go
Speaker 1: boz erk tell it that you just ate a blooming
Speaker 1: onion by yourself and it'll it'll, it'll just wait a minute.
Speaker 1: So you do that every day at lunch, I'm curious
Speaker 1: what happens. Well, have you seen that scene from Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi where job of the Hut is revealed
Speaker 1: for the first time? It's essentially my life. I am kidding, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: I've never seen you eat a bloomen onion. No. I
Speaker 1: like to go into a very dark place when I
Speaker 1: do that, both mentally and physically. It's alone time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which which place is it that has a steakhouse? What's
Speaker 1: the one at Chili is called? That one's the awesome blossom?
Speaker 1: Would you like to what are the other fried onion dishes?
Speaker 1: You can tell us, you know, let's not go into
Speaker 1: my personal life too deeply. Let's let's let's transition to
Speaker 1: something else. How how about what if? What if I
Speaker 1: have all this cool technology in my kitchen and I've
Speaker 1: got all these great ingredients in my kitchen, but then
Speaker 1: I remember I don't know how to cook. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is an idea I came up with that It sounds
Speaker 1: this might be the most far fetched of all of these,
Speaker 1: um but it's not totally impossible. I want to talk
Speaker 1: about real time cooking instruction. Um. So I've noticed that.
Speaker 1: So as I said, I'm the cook in our house
Speaker 1: and and a lot of times I want to try
Speaker 1: a new dish. But that's a lot of times it's
Speaker 1: just easier to do something you've done before that you're
Speaker 1: familiar with. You know, I know all the steps. When
Speaker 1: you're trying a new dish, you spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time going back and forth. So I'll be doing what
Speaker 1: I'm chopping something or cooking in the pan and like,
Speaker 1: oh man, I need to go look at my computer,
Speaker 1: like how much of that was I supposed to put in?
Speaker 1: Or how long was I supposed to cook it for? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it keeps You have to keep going back and forth,
Speaker 1: and that really sort of interrupts your rhythm, and and
Speaker 1: it's hard to get a good feel for it the
Speaker 1: first few times. It really you have to make a
Speaker 1: meal a good number of times before you really start
Speaker 1: getting comfortable with it. Um. Another thing is that cooking
Speaker 1: a lot of times involves techniques that are not very intuitive.
Speaker 1: They're difficult. You gotta practice as them, and you don't
Speaker 1: always have somebody looking over your shoulder like you're in
Speaker 1: chef school, right, going, going, No, No, that it's not
Speaker 1: coating the back of the spoon. It's not ready yet.
Speaker 1: You need to keep cooking it longer exactly. So I
Speaker 1: was wondering if a kitchen full of smart devices could
Speaker 1: actually give you real time cooking instruction. So maybe instead
Speaker 1: of downloading the recipe, you download the I don't know
Speaker 1: whatever file extension is for real time cooking. You upload
Speaker 1: that to your kitchen, and then it's ready to go.
Speaker 1: It's your coach now, so it tells you what you
Speaker 1: need here and what you need it's going, what are
Speaker 1: you doing, Dave, You're supposed to have hats now, and
Speaker 1: and depending on how sophisticated it is, could maybe even
Speaker 1: give you feedback right well. And there are some suggested
Speaker 1: uh social apps for this kind of thing where it's
Speaker 1: not automated, it's actually other people. Uh. Some of them
Speaker 1: are made to be these kind of weird social gatherings
Speaker 1: like eight. I saw one that was a concept of
Speaker 1: a bowl and you could put various ingredients in the
Speaker 1: ball bowl, and then the bowl would allow you to
Speaker 1: connect with other people who have the same kind of
Speaker 1: bowl and the same ingredients in it. And then have
Speaker 1: conversations about what you were playing on doing with said
Speaker 1: ingredients and how you're going to prepare it, and maybe
Speaker 1: you change your mind. You want to prepare the way
Speaker 1: this other person is preparing it, and you can have
Speaker 1: this interactive cooking experience remotely. I don't know how realistic
Speaker 1: that is. I've also seen um I've also sorry. What
Speaker 1: I imagined is you get the bowl and you put
Speaker 1: like eight onions in it, and you say, I plan
Speaker 1: on eating these like apples. What about you? No one,
Speaker 1: unless someone else has eight onions in their bowl, it's
Speaker 1: not going to connect anyway. So it'll just be you
Speaker 1: by yourself, crying and eating onions, which is what I
Speaker 1: do on Tuesday nights anyway. The point being that, I've
Speaker 1: also seen a lot of technology saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: using things to to connect with actual chefs where you
Speaker 1: could get one on one time. I don't know how
Speaker 1: realistic that is, because that's a that's a huge time
Speaker 1: demand for experts, right, how do you get the experts
Speaker 1: to debty lots of money? Yeah, for like the next
Speaker 1: six hours, you're going to sit here and whatever anyone
Speaker 1: wants to cook, even if it's macaroni and cheese. You
Speaker 1: were going to be here and tell them how to
Speaker 1: do it. Um, that's a possibility as well. But I
Speaker 1: see this happening in a in a combination of ways,
Speaker 1: both the automated way that you were suggesting, Joe, and
Speaker 1: in this kind of at least there there are a
Speaker 1: lot of pushes to move to a social kitchen, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk a little more about that a little bit
Speaker 1: later too. I just want to say that I really
Speaker 1: don't want my kitchen to become a new source of
Speaker 1: chat roulette like that. That is absolutely what I don't want.
Speaker 1: I imagine that most of these will allow you to
Speaker 1: have a select group of people that you connect to
Speaker 1: if you weren't wanted to do so, and not force
Speaker 1: you to connect with with with naked cowboys also like
Speaker 1: to chevrolette. Like half of them are trolls. They're just like, no,
Speaker 1: you put the eggshells in Yeah, no, put them on
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah they add fibers, great, Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be awesome. Well, Uh, did you want to
Speaker 1: say anything else about this, Joe before we transition to
Speaker 1: the next point. No, I actually did. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to follow up. I think I mentioned briefly, But one
Speaker 1: thing I think that would be the hardest thing about this.
Speaker 1: Say you had some kind of automated system in the
Speaker 1: kitchen that would give you real time feedback, is, um,
Speaker 1: how does the kitchen keep track of what you're doing? Like,
Speaker 1: how does it actually know when you're doing something wrong?
Speaker 1: That seems like it would require a fairly sophisticated I
Speaker 1: don't know if it'd be visual identification with cameras or something.
Speaker 1: I think the most likely answer to this would be
Speaker 1: not to try and build out your kitchen with such
Speaker 1: sophisticated technology that could easily take keep track of what
Speaker 1: you were doing, but rather have an interface that was
Speaker 1: maybe voice activated. So you've got perhaps a display in
Speaker 1: front of you that you're working on, and you're doing
Speaker 1: whatever the step is, and once you're done, you say next,
Speaker 1: and then it tells you what the next step is.
Speaker 1: That to me makes more sense than trying to build
Speaker 1: in an automated system that detects when you're finished. Right,
Speaker 1: So it might be less less complicated, less giving you feedback,
Speaker 1: but more we're just kind of coaching along. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the feedback would essentially be when you serve
Speaker 1: the dish to another human being and seeing whether or
Speaker 1: not they're able to choke it down. Yeah. So moving
Speaker 1: on to other stuff that we might see in the
Speaker 1: Kitchen of tomorrow. This is one that was briefly shown
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the video we saw. I think
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that the video we saw was
Speaker 1: an excerpt because it felt like it. Yeah, it felt
Speaker 1: like it ended rather prematurely. But the home garden inside
Speaker 1: a kitchen, this is something I've seen several times where
Speaker 1: in the video we saw from nineteen sixty seven, it
Speaker 1: was just a shelving unit that had a bunch of
Speaker 1: plants on it, and the the domesticated mother, the poor
Speaker 1: woman who is still entrapped in the kitchen, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that everything is automated, ends up picking some flowers
Speaker 1: for like a little center piece. But the idea has
Speaker 1: persisted about being able to grow herbs and vegetables within
Speaker 1: your kitchen so that you have fresh ingredients right at
Speaker 1: hand whenever you like. And there's still lots of different
Speaker 1: ways of implementing that. One of the ones I saw
Speaker 1: was there's a company called Electrolux, and if you ever
Speaker 1: want to see crazy concepts and prototypes, electro Lux has
Speaker 1: them all the time, and most of them, I'd say
Speaker 1: a good number of them. The design ends up being
Speaker 1: incorporated into various technologies down the line, but you hardly
Speaker 1: ever see an actual like one to one product product.
Speaker 1: The concepts are usually pretty kind of kind of Jetson's
Speaker 1: e but one of the ones I saw what it
Speaker 1: looked like a microwave oven, but it was in fact
Speaker 1: a little home garden and had a ultra violet light
Speaker 1: inside of it that would provide the light needed for
Speaker 1: plants to grow. It could be temperature controlled, it could
Speaker 1: actually control the intake of water so that you have
Speaker 1: an ideal growing environment for whatever you have in there.
Speaker 1: And then you just grow herbs so that you can
Speaker 1: use fresh herbs whenever you're cooking, which is a cool idea.
Speaker 1: I've also seen growing walls these or walls that actually
Speaker 1: have yeah, like herbs or vegetables on them, and in
Speaker 1: fact it's all really cool. One where it was proposed
Speaker 1: that not only was it a growing wall, but it
Speaker 1: would use gray water from your sink to be the
Speaker 1: water for the plants, so you're not wasting as much water,
Speaker 1: you're actually reusing water. And uh and and depending upon
Speaker 1: that instead of just washing it down the drain. Just
Speaker 1: for the aesthetics of the cooking experience, I think it'd
Speaker 1: be nice to have more plants in the kitchen and
Speaker 1: growing wall and stuff like that, because cooking outside is
Speaker 1: really nice. I like being around nature. But there's one
Speaker 1: major problem or to actually it's a weather and bugs.
Speaker 1: You're here in great things when you're cooking here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: The weather that, especially in the summer months, can mean
Speaker 1: that you have either incredibly violent, although usually brief, thunderstorms,
Speaker 1: or you just have insanely humid hot days. Yeah, where
Speaker 1: you thought, wow, this is really nice for the maybe
Speaker 1: the first minute and a half, and then after that
Speaker 1: you think this was a miserable experience. I never should
Speaker 1: have done this. But another thing that we talked about
Speaker 1: briefly was the idea of the kitchen as a gathering place,
Speaker 1: which I don't know about you guys. A lot of
Speaker 1: the parties I go to, they tend to everyone winds
Speaker 1: up in the kitchen. Yeah, the kitchen becomes like the
Speaker 1: place where most people spend a lot of time. There's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite parties to go to that's like
Speaker 1: the that's the location everyone ends up in the kitchen.
Speaker 1: When you have thirty people in the kitchen that's designed
Speaker 1: to hold five, it gets pretty cozy. But the idea
Speaker 1: of the kitchen of the future maybe to help facilitate
Speaker 1: that further, to make to make the kitchen UH have
Speaker 1: certain integrated features that make it more of a natural
Speaker 1: gathering place. And in the video I talked about a
Speaker 1: couple of these kind of like you know, a speaker
Speaker 1: system where you can have different kinds of sounds that
Speaker 1: compliment whatever the the event is, whether it's a a
Speaker 1: romantic dinner or maybe you're just by yourself and you
Speaker 1: want to do a little dance while you're making your food,
Speaker 1: or it's a big party and you want to have
Speaker 1: some lively music playing. And there are other elements to
Speaker 1: it as well. Then there's this virtual social interaction that
Speaker 1: I am you know, we mentioned it earlier. I am
Speaker 1: a little skeptical of. And the reason I'm mainly skeptical
Speaker 1: of it is you guys know that when uh, you know,
Speaker 1: video phones were first starting to become a thing, everyone
Speaker 1: was predicting like, oh, this is going to be the
Speaker 1: phone of the future. All right, Well, we now have
Speaker 1: that technology integrated into practically everything, whether it's a smartphone,
Speaker 1: a laptop, computer, whatever. And maybe I'm just not the
Speaker 1: right demographic for this technology. I don't know about you guys.
Speaker 1: But whenever I accidentally pressed the FaceTime button on my phone,
Speaker 1: because it's always accidental, I'm like, turn it off. They're
Speaker 1: gonna see my hideous face. Yeah, a really violent reaction.
Speaker 1: I have never I have never used video Skype to
Speaker 1: talk to someone casually. Whenever I've used it, it's in
Speaker 1: order for me to do to do an appearance on
Speaker 1: a podcast for example. Um, I've done that several times.
Speaker 1: I've used Skype or Google Hangouts as a video chat
Speaker 1: for or for work purposes, or for appearing on a podcast.
Speaker 1: But I've never done it just to you know, call
Speaker 1: up my buddy. And part of that is because, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to stage my calling area
Speaker 1: so that it looks so it looks the way I
Speaker 1: wanted to look. Every time I make a call. I
Speaker 1: feel like, what's the point of a phone if you
Speaker 1: can't be secretly naked or even or even overtly naked,
Speaker 1: but at least they can't see you. And furthermore, I
Speaker 1: think that it is probably a technology that younger generations
Speaker 1: are more willing to adapt than us old fogies. That's true,
Speaker 1: and I'm still and maybe it is because of my age.
Speaker 1: I could be biased just because my age, uh that,
Speaker 1: but I still find it kind of interesting and uh
Speaker 1: unbelievable to think of these social features built into a
Speaker 1: kitchen and really being used that frequently. But maybe that's
Speaker 1: just because when I'm cooking, Like when I'm cooking, I
Speaker 1: don't want anyone else in my kitchen at all. It
Speaker 1: is a constant source of irritation if someone comes into
Speaker 1: my kitchen and while I am cooking, because it means
Speaker 1: that at some point or another, and probably at multiple points,
Speaker 1: are gonna be in my way? Are they going to
Speaker 1: be distracted? So maybe it's just because that's also my
Speaker 1: method of cooking. Maybe if I were someone who liked
Speaker 1: to have lots of long conversations and interactions while I
Speaker 1: was cooking, this would be something I would crave. So
Speaker 1: it's very possible that I'm just coming at this from
Speaker 1: a biased opinion. In fact, I'm kind of curious. I
Speaker 1: want our listeners who are you know who are also cooks,
Speaker 1: to let me know if they really would think that
Speaker 1: a social Like a virtual social interaction feature built into
Speaker 1: a kitchen would be something they really want. Do you
Speaker 1: want to have something like maybe a wall in your
Speaker 1: kitchen that could also be a a FaceTime type display
Speaker 1: where you could talk to someone else while you're cooking.
Speaker 1: Is that something you would like? Or are you like me?
Speaker 1: Where you're you just you know, you want all human
Speaker 1: beings to cease to exist until you're finished cooking, and
Speaker 1: then they can come back. Um, I'm just curious. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I think it's time to talk about smart surfaces. Him. Uh,
Speaker 1: it'd be a nice change of pace. Let's talk about that. Okay,
Speaker 1: the surface of the moon pretty smart. No, no smart
Speaker 1: surfaces for the kitchen. Uh. So this is an idea
Speaker 1: I sort of had based on something I saw on
Speaker 1: the internet, which was this proposed idea for something called
Speaker 1: the new Trima cutting board. Now this isn't a real technology,
Speaker 1: it's more just kind of like an imaginative design project. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but it it made me think about the idea of
Speaker 1: smart cutting boards and smart countertops. I mean, how cool
Speaker 1: could that be. I really don't like using measuring cups
Speaker 1: in my kitchen. I mean, obviously I have to sometimes
Speaker 1: to get proportions right. But um, a lot of recipes
Speaker 1: call for weighing, right, sure, weighing things And also that's
Speaker 1: also you know if you have a scale that's taken
Speaker 1: up more space on your counter, and it's another thing
Speaker 1: to deal with, and it's it's also way more precise.
Speaker 1: I will put this in, especially if you're baking, if
Speaker 1: you really want to be a chemist about it, you
Speaker 1: should be weighing rather than measuring in a measuring cup,
Speaker 1: because measuring cups are inherently flawed. V versus versus. Wait,
Speaker 1: if you want to be a soccer player, you'll just
Speaker 1: eyeball it anyway. Uh. The idea I was thinking about
Speaker 1: was cutting boards that weigh ingredients for you. So I
Speaker 1: mean you're preparing them on the or a countertop, either
Speaker 1: one a smart surface that's pressure sensitive. It's got digital
Speaker 1: feedback on it, so maybe any part of it or
Speaker 1: just some parts of it can display feedback and you
Speaker 1: can create your little pile of diced vegetables or of flour,
Speaker 1: of butter or whatever it is, and it will tell
Speaker 1: you exactly how much you've got there. You don't need
Speaker 1: to be keep moving things between different containers and then
Speaker 1: cleaning containers to to measure them. It's all right there
Speaker 1: on the surface that you're using. Another thing about a
Speaker 1: smart surface, like a smart cutting boarder countertop, would be
Speaker 1: the ability to help you clean it. It could identify,
Speaker 1: you know, here's where there's some chicken juice. You might
Speaker 1: have missed that. Uh, and it could maybe even clean itself,
Speaker 1: right if it had built in UV radiation. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of concept designs that are kind
Speaker 1: of incorporating the features you're talking about now. Granted they're
Speaker 1: all again concepts. It's all things like wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: awesome if we had this thing right now? From what
Speaker 1: I can tell it, I don't think anything about that
Speaker 1: is is you know, way out there. It seems all doable.
Speaker 1: Just the question is making it affordable. It's mostly the
Speaker 1: material science. I would think of having something sturdy enough
Speaker 1: to be a countertop or especially a cutting board, that
Speaker 1: is also going to be delicate enough to have that
Speaker 1: kind of sensory technology inside. And and I have like
Speaker 1: even you know, a lot of these incorporate at least
Speaker 1: the concepts incorporated display, so it's like you're cutting on
Speaker 1: a display. Then you have to make sure that whatever
Speaker 1: the tempered glasses is incredibly scratch resistant because obviously a
Speaker 1: cutting board you're gonna be doing a lot of cutting
Speaker 1: on it. So yeah, there's some there's some material science challenges, definitely.
Speaker 1: There is also a concept, and it might have been
Speaker 1: from the same project, that that some cutting board like
Speaker 1: this could evaluate how fresh the food on it is,
Speaker 1: like whether or not it's decaying a little bit, like
Speaker 1: like maybe you want to get a different cut of salmon,
Speaker 1: buddy like sort of stuff like it might look out
Speaker 1: for certain I don't know how it would do that.
Speaker 1: I guess it look out for certain chemical registered chemical. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean again, it's one of those where we talked about, oh,
Speaker 1: it would be easy. It just has to look for
Speaker 1: this thing. Uh, you know, we don't necessarily have the
Speaker 1: implementation of how it would look for that thing. But
Speaker 1: it's this is the sort of stuff that engineers can
Speaker 1: look at and say, is this a feasible feature, How
Speaker 1: would we build this into a piece of technology, and
Speaker 1: how would we do it in a way that was
Speaker 1: practical and affordable. These are these are big questions and
Speaker 1: right now some of these questions may be unanswered because
Speaker 1: we just don't have an answer for it yet. Right. Uh,
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk a little bit more in a minute
Speaker 1: about nutrient scanning and determining the real contents of a
Speaker 1: food if that's possible. But first, I see another interesting
Speaker 1: note about in SINC dishwashers. Yeah, this is just uh
Speaker 1: in sync, not the boy band we're talking about. It's
Speaker 1: inside a SINC. Oh oh, I thought you were talking
Speaker 1: about hiring them to wash your dishes. That I hear
Speaker 1: they are available, most of them aren't really doing much, right.
Speaker 1: I was gonna make a joke, but then I realized
Speaker 1: that all the jokes I know, I don't know any
Speaker 1: of their songs, so I'd just be quoting a random
Speaker 1: boy band song. Anyway, the in SINC dishwashers, it sounds
Speaker 1: it is what it sounds like. There's a sink that
Speaker 1: you can put down a an application there where it's
Speaker 1: actually working as a dishwasher. It usually can wash a
Speaker 1: small load of dishes within about five minutes. It really
Speaker 1: takes like the elbow grease element out of washing dishes,
Speaker 1: where if you don't have a full dishwasher and you're
Speaker 1: usually are only washing a couple, then it's it makes
Speaker 1: things easier. Um and There have been several concepts that
Speaker 1: were demonstrated even at things like c S, but have
Speaker 1: never made it to market, so that's a constant hope.
Speaker 1: One of the ones I looked at was on tree Hugger,
Speaker 1: and they were talking about it because it would be
Speaker 1: a great way of conserving water. It's not doesn't use
Speaker 1: as much water as a conventional dishwasher, and you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry like if you are someone who only
Speaker 1: uses a few dishes, because maybe it's one or two people,
Speaker 1: then you don't want to be running a dishwasher all
Speaker 1: the time. And then at the same time, you don't
Speaker 1: want dishes just to keep piling up until you feel
Speaker 1: like you've justified, you know, running the dishwasher. This it's
Speaker 1: kind of a solution for those folks. Um it's mostly
Speaker 1: been vaporware so far, but there's even been one and
Speaker 1: this was the one that's on tree Hugger that incorporates
Speaker 1: sensors that could detect if your dishes were still dirty
Speaker 1: or even if your produce still need to be washed.
Speaker 1: If you put produce into one of these, it could detect, well,
Speaker 1: are there any signs of bacteria on the produce? Are
Speaker 1: there in any signs of chemicals there, and if you
Speaker 1: hadn't washed the produce enough, it would alert you saying no,
Speaker 1: you need to keep washing until until you produces clean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I thought that was a really cool idea. Also,
Speaker 1: Smart Faucet's kind of similar concept. G has shown off
Speaker 1: a concept like this. They showed off the concept it's
Speaker 1: at Ces as well. But again it's a concept and
Speaker 1: the idea is that for one thing, it'd be able
Speaker 1: to tell how hydrated you are based upon a finger scan.
Speaker 1: So let's say let's say that you've just come back
Speaker 1: from all those people who can't tell if they're thirsty.
Speaker 1: Let's let's say that you're you've been fairly active and
Speaker 1: you're trying to make sure that you are hydrated, especially
Speaker 1: if you're about to go out again. Then it might
Speaker 1: be a good idea to check and see how you're doing.
Speaker 1: And you, you know, put your finger against this thing.
Speaker 1: It scans you, tells you whether or not you're hydrated,
Speaker 1: and if it's not, if you're not, just drink some
Speaker 1: more water. But it also had some other features like
Speaker 1: it could dispense ice cubes directly from the faucet, so
Speaker 1: instead of you having to have an ice maker or whatever.
Speaker 1: It was this huge like round faucet that could dispense
Speaker 1: water or ice cubes or or yes, customized liquids. You
Speaker 1: could actually have it hooked up to. Yeah. Like now,
Speaker 1: in that case you would I'm sure there would have
Speaker 1: to be some some unit underneath the the sink itself
Speaker 1: where you would hook up something, whether it was soda
Speaker 1: or juice or whatever, but you would have a button
Speaker 1: that would dispense whatever it was. Does it dispense salt
Speaker 1: if you're overhydrated? Know that they we have those, they're
Speaker 1: called salt shakers. We didn't have to make a dispenser
Speaker 1: for it. Um, But yeah, it was another cool thing.
Speaker 1: And then there was an interactive cook top that Whirlpool
Speaker 1: showed off at CES two thousand fourteen that acted as
Speaker 1: a touch screen display as well as a cook top
Speaker 1: right right, using induction cooking, so that you can just
Speaker 1: have a flat surface, flat glassy surface, right And you
Speaker 1: have to have, of course, the right cookwear for induction
Speaker 1: cooking to work. But it does mean that you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about the actual surface heating up. It's
Speaker 1: it's heating up the uh, the pan or rather than
Speaker 1: the surface exactly through induction. And so then you have
Speaker 1: a touch screen display that's right there that can again
Speaker 1: kind of give you that step by step approach. Like
Speaker 1: we were talking about with the cutting board. What if
Speaker 1: you moved from cutting board to cook wear. Well, at
Speaker 1: that point it may not be convenient anymore for you
Speaker 1: to look over at the cutting board and say, all right, well,
Speaker 1: how long am I supposed to stir this? I've been
Speaker 1: stirring it long enough. That could all be incorporated into
Speaker 1: one of these interactive cook tops. Or if you just
Speaker 1: really need to browse Pinterest while you're cooking, I mean,
Speaker 1: look at all these things that look way better than
Speaker 1: what I'm making. Yeah, that's that's another one. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different opportunities for these smart surfaces. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I want to talk about something that we sort
Speaker 1: of hinted at a minute ago, which is nutrients scanning.
Speaker 1: So this is telling you what sort of ingredients, what
Speaker 1: sort of nutrients are in any particular type of food.
Speaker 1: It could be I mean, that's the question I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask. Is it possible? Is it possible to have
Speaker 1: a device that tells you about the food you're about
Speaker 1: to eat, even if it's not something that came prepackaged
Speaker 1: with information from the manufacturers, or if it's something it's
Speaker 1: something that you yourself have not made that you don't
Speaker 1: know what's in it, or it's something you made but
Speaker 1: you just don't you know, I combined a bunch of ingredients.
Speaker 1: I don't really know the full nutritional profile. Can you
Speaker 1: have a device that looks at some food and says, okay,
Speaker 1: here here the main ingredients in it. Here's how much
Speaker 1: salt it has. Here's how many calories, here's the saturated fat,
Speaker 1: here is you know, vitamins, and it breaks it all
Speaker 1: down for you. Sure is that possible? This would be
Speaker 1: important before we get into the possibility. This would be
Speaker 1: important for anyone who is one concerned about specific dietary
Speaker 1: issues like allergens. That would be a big one. Right. So,
Speaker 1: let's say that you have ordered out and you got
Speaker 1: this food coming in and you realize, oh, I didn't
Speaker 1: think to ask if this was made with peanuts or
Speaker 1: something along those lines. And there's one way to find out,
Speaker 1: but that's a hard way, and I don't really want
Speaker 1: to go to the hospital again. Right, and frequently, the
Speaker 1: way I mean traditionally, the way that we find out
Speaker 1: what exactly is in stuff like food, is that we
Speaker 1: burn the hell out of it and then analyze the ashes, yes,
Speaker 1: or or or the light that has given off one
Speaker 1: wallet burns. Yeah, that's a spectroscopy where we end up
Speaker 1: mass spectrometry right, yes, specifically yes, where we ionize something
Speaker 1: by bombarding it with electrons and then analyzing it. That's
Speaker 1: not really an option for a dish that you plan
Speaker 1: on ingesting. Also not something that you might necessarily have
Speaker 1: convenient in your kitchen. You may not have an advance laboratory.
Speaker 1: I don't think that that kind of thing is going
Speaker 1: to be used in homes anytime soon. But interestingly, you
Speaker 1: don't atomize your food before you eat it. You you
Speaker 1: you found that's the next level of food snobbery, right, Joe.
Speaker 1: But you found an interesting device that supposedly, at least
Speaker 1: the claim is that it can give you some information
Speaker 1: about the food that you have in front of you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the device is called the tell Spec and it
Speaker 1: is if you you can go look it up online.
Speaker 1: And they've got sort of promotional videos and they've got
Speaker 1: a website. They had an Indigo Go campaign which they
Speaker 1: campaigned I believe for a hundred thousand dollars and they
Speaker 1: far surpass their goals, so they got a lot of
Speaker 1: funding and they say they're moving toward having this available
Speaker 1: for consumers. And it's called the tell spec. It is
Speaker 1: supposedly a device that allows you to analyze the nutritional
Speaker 1: profile of food by aiming a little key chain thing
Speaker 1: and it looks almost like a garage door open. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little thing you hold in your hand and
Speaker 1: it communicates with your smartphone. Okay, so here's how it works.
Speaker 1: You take the thing and you aim it at the
Speaker 1: food you want to analyze. So it shoots out some
Speaker 1: light a bunch of photons at the food, and then
Speaker 1: photons come back from the food, and the photons that
Speaker 1: come back, the energy of those photons will help tell
Speaker 1: you something about the atomic and molecular composition of the
Speaker 1: food you have aimed it at. And then once your
Speaker 1: receiver gets all of that data, it goes and communicates
Speaker 1: with something called cloud Analysis Engine. This would be a
Speaker 1: thing hosted by the service itself. It wouldn't be on
Speaker 1: your phone, uh, and they would sort of compare the
Speaker 1: profile that you've just uploaded with all of the data
Speaker 1: they have about different types of foods and organic compounds,
Speaker 1: and say, what are we probably looking at here? So
Speaker 1: it's saying like, yeah, there's peanuts, there's some rice based noodles,
Speaker 1: there's uh, some tamarind. You're probably eating pad tie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're probably eating peanuts tamarin. Like, it'll tell you
Speaker 1: those things, I think, or and come back and say
Speaker 1: it and the nutritional content of all of those things
Speaker 1: is this and this and this right supposedly that is
Speaker 1: how it will work. Now that sounds pretty incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: really incredible. Some people would say it sounds so incredible,
Speaker 1: how could it possibly be true? Uh? We read at
Speaker 1: least one interesting critical analysis of it right over at
Speaker 1: review dot com. They talked with some experts in the
Speaker 1: field of analysis and discussed whether or not this was
Speaker 1: a real listic implementation, whether it was realistic to use
Speaker 1: the it's called a Raymond or Raman spectroscopy, and that
Speaker 1: the the critique was that one, it will essentially give
Speaker 1: you information about whatever the light happened to hit. So
Speaker 1: if you happen to be eating a food that's homogeneous
Speaker 1: all the way through, then you're good to go, because
Speaker 1: it's going to give you an accurate reading. But if
Speaker 1: it's something that's a mix, like maybe you're having a
Speaker 1: salad or something, then whatever it happens to be hitting,
Speaker 1: that's the information it's going to get back. If there
Speaker 1: are other elements in that food that we're not in
Speaker 1: that scan, then it doesn't have the information there. It
Speaker 1: can't tell you about it. It can't tell you really
Speaker 1: about a pie. If you try to scan a pie,
Speaker 1: it will tell you about what's in the top of
Speaker 1: the crust, that's right. So you might say, you might say,
Speaker 1: like butter and flour and eggs, and I don't know
Speaker 1: what else is there. That's it, buddy, And you might think, wow,
Speaker 1: that sounds like a terrible pie. But it's because it can't.
Speaker 1: It can't penetrate beyond that, so you're just getting whatever
Speaker 1: is at the surface. Right. But with that caveat, they
Speaker 1: did say, based on the expert they talked to, that
Speaker 1: it does seem like this is doable, like you can
Speaker 1: actually use this technique to get a realistic profile of
Speaker 1: what the organic compounds you're looking at are. But there
Speaker 1: is another thing we should note, which is that it
Speaker 1: will probably rely heavily on that thing. I mentioned the
Speaker 1: cloud analysis engine because it has to go talk to mom,
Speaker 1: It needs to go compare what it found to what
Speaker 1: the computer back at home base actually knows about different
Speaker 1: food profiles. Right, So if you have something like a
Speaker 1: truly exotic ingredient that hasn't been profiled, or perhaps resembles
Speaker 1: a different profile, then you might be essentially confusing the system.
Speaker 1: Or it might be that there's a lot of variation
Speaker 1: even within common foods. Um so. According to in April
Speaker 1: piece on Bloomberg business Week, the company currently has profiles
Speaker 1: of fifteen hundred foods in their database, and they plan
Speaker 1: to expand that to a million profiles. So, you know,
Speaker 1: don't know, but if if they really do that, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm just scared that they will get to the point
Speaker 1: where people can point those things at me and then
Speaker 1: they'll come back and just say jerk face or or
Speaker 1: job of the hut, or or like or like Lauren
Speaker 1: is made of twizzlers. Yeah, yeah, that could be terrifying. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I think if they scanned you, they'd get bloom and
Speaker 1: onion blossom, thank you, sorry, sorry. And so the one
Speaker 1: last question is are we going to have food replicators?
Speaker 1: And we already talked about that. We did. So if
Speaker 1: you're interested in the idea of food replicators, go back
Speaker 1: and listen to the podcast Lauren and I did about
Speaker 1: food replicators from April fo Yeah, basically it's unlikely, right,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't stop people from trying. No. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think you can make a food replicator, be
Speaker 1: my guest, especially if you if you surprise us. All
Speaker 1: there's a Nobel prize in that. Please go for it,
Speaker 1: don't hold back, and I will personally buy you as
Speaker 1: sandwich or at least replicate you one. So yeah, probably
Speaker 1: won't have food replicators, maybe ever. Definitely not anytime soon.
Speaker 1: But you know what, we will have three D printed food. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean we've got that now. It'll it'll be it'll
Speaker 1: be gloriously mushy. Yeah. What I'm imagining is the great
Speaker 1: three D printed food adhesion failure problem where you're trying
Speaker 1: to print a pizza, but the pizza keeps peeling up
Speaker 1: and turning into a pizza ball that rocks back and forth.
Speaker 1: While so it's awesome, it's still okay. Yeah, that actually
Speaker 1: sounds kind of good right now. Pizza ball. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can tell that Joe has been playing with a three
Speaker 1: D printer and had a lot of hands on experience recently. Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna wrap this up. We realize that this has
Speaker 1: been a particularly long episode, but that's because, you know again,
Speaker 1: Kitchen of the future is one of those things that
Speaker 1: people have really been fascinated by for for decades. Everyone
Speaker 1: likes to predict, and it's because a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of proactivities centers in and around the kitchen. So
Speaker 1: are we correct with our guesses? Who knows? If you
Speaker 1: guys have any predictions of your own you want to
Speaker 1: share with us, join us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus.
Speaker 1: Our handle at all three is f W Thinking and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
Speaker 1: thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,