Version History: Hoverboards

25:00It's going to get safer and better or it's just going to get weirder. And for a minute, it just got weirder. To your point. So people started modding these things. companies now that there had been like more time to actually rev the product and ship the stuff and more people were manufacturing it there were all these weird new ideas about stuff you could put in it uh like speakers which i remember being just a full nightmare of a idea uh yet somehow like deeply appropriate like this thing is so garrett i mean it already was essentially like a party speaker on wheels so like making it a party speaker on wheels was like yeah yeah that That tracks.

25:35Yeah. That tracks. Yeah. And I remember seeing, like, increasingly crazy light shows coming out of the side of them. That lasted for a minute. And then the third thing happened, which is it all fell apart. But we need to take a break really quickly. And then we're going to talk about what actually happened to Hopper Bords. We'll be right back.

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27:07But the big thing, to your point about holidays from before, the big thing that happened was Amazon stopped selling all of the hoverboards, like all at once. And we all know that's the only way to buy anything these days. I mean, kind of. It was really interesting because I went back and was looking at the beginning of the story. There was this run of people buying them on Alibaba and a lot of like drop shipping stuff happening from some of these factories in China. And then all those factories just started selling directly on Amazon. And so that became the place everybody bought hoverboards like for a long time.

27:40And then Amazon just essentially overnight just stopped selling them. And so you just couldn't get them. And this happened like at holiday season. So a lot of people had them already. But now they are a safety risk that is being broadcast to everyone as a huge safety risk. You literally can't buy one. And the whole thing just kind of just poof disappears overnight. There are people trying to make that happen either more slowly or reverse it. so Razer the scooter company buys that original 2013 patent from Shane Chen in 2015 and decides to simultaneously go make safer more legit versions of the hoverboard they start to get the UL certification they start to go like take more care of the batteries and start to actually like build these things in a safe way and they go just sue the pants off of everybody else who is making hoverboards everybody's suing everybody and then there just becomes this question of like is any of this different enough to be defensible.

28:40And as far as I can tell, overwhelmingly, the answer became somewhere between no and nobody cares. And I think that just seemed to be the end of the story there is everybody picked these fights forever about these patents, and then just kind of decided, it's too much work. Our court system does not move nearly at the speed of sort of viral, viral anything let alone viral like product you know just that was never going to be something they could sort out in time for this thing for it to matter for this product and it was just always destined to come out of fashion before a judgment came from some district court judge true well i found myself wondering like the i think the thing that there's no coming back from was all the safety stuff right like there was just no it got so bad and so publicized that i think Like even now, I suspect everyone's first association with hoverboards is explosions.

29:35Yeah. And there's just no coming back from that. But I do wonder, because if you rewind to the beginning of 2015, again, this whole story takes place in 12 months, which is insanity. But if you rewind back to the beginning of it, there was a real sense this thing is huge. Everybody's into it. It's a good idea. It's a fun product. People like it. But there is no brand that's going to work. And I think it was Joe Bernstein in BuzzFeed that compared it to JetSki, where it's like there are lots of ways to move around on the water. There's only one JetSki. And if you could have been the one to come in and be like, okay, screw Iohawks, screw Funky Duck, all these dumb brands, we're going to be the one.

30:15Like the sort of brand name, the Kleenex of the space, that that was going to be massively, massively valuable. And it's sort of sad to me that we didn't get to see that. It could have happened if they didn't explode and they didn't catch on fire and people hadn't died. We could have gotten to a point where there might have been some sort of incumbent, whether it was, you know, Ile Hawker or Mark Cuban's thing or whatever it was that could have emerged eventually had there been more time, I think. And but because there was this like hard stop at, you know, explosions, it didn't really get there.

30:52And we're still kind of in a place where there's a million different brands and they are still available. And they're a lot safer, obviously, now than they were before. But I feel because there was that disruption in sort of like right in midstream as this thing was getting going, it kind of prevented it from happening. I think that that moment, too, it was a reset moment because not only was there a safety threat, even people who didn't really care much about that couldn't really buy them as easily all of a sudden. And I think that that gave people enough space to realize, like, what really is the utility of this thing?

31:26You know, you talked earlier about this idea that was sort of really in vogue at the time of like the last mile thing. You know, you're going to take a, you know, a train somewhere, but you're going to have that last mile to your destination. Should it be an electric bike, an electric scooter, electric skateboard or something like this? But I think people started to realize in that sort of hangover moment of like, does this really actually work like that? I mean, you can take these things down like a sidewalk, but like if there's a bump, you're kind of doomed. Yeah. You know, and it's like it really, you know, we talked earlier about sort of we were joking about like, could we even ride it in this studio space?

32:04Like it really is a thing that only works that well on like the shiny floors of Justin Bieber's mansion or an airport, I guess. But like for real actual transportation, they are not as useful as I think any of those early companies, marketers, whoever would have really wanted people to believe. And there were some attempts at making a changing that a little bit. But it's tricky when you're dealing with self-balancing stuff, especially any even if you're the wheels can handle it. You're going to run into trouble if you're going over sort of uneven surfaces because it's just naturally going to throw off the inputs that you're giving into it.

32:39And it just spirals a bit out of control. And so it's I think the most competent version of that that we've ever seen is eventually the Segway nine bot one that really has it's essentially a shrunk down Segway with no stock to like lean on with your hands. And that is like something that actually probably works in those settings, but is definitely more cumbersome, not as easy to carry around on the subway or wherever like these were. What is the problem that we're solving with this walking? Yeah. Like I think walking is fine. I don't see walking as a problem. You know, I understand that. Disagree.

33:15But no, I mean, like, if that was the problem, because otherwise it was just a novelty and it was just for, it became a punchline eventually where, like, you know, characters on TV. If you saw a character on a show or TV on a hoverboard, it was like that person's a clown, right? Like, you know, it was like John Ralphio from Parks and Rec or something like that. Like, you know, like that it was meant to signal that this is like an unserious person. Yeah. And so that's I think it quickly sort of became associated with less of the utility and more sort of like the jokey like which is funny because around that same time the same sort of aspersions were being cast on people who are using the earliest versions of like the electric kick scooters that we see around a lot of major cities.

33:56Yeah. But that has utility to it. So now people care less probably still some but less about how weird they look if it just gets them somewhere and quickly. Yeah. And this was never going to solve that problem. Yeah. I mean, and again, go back to sort of the world at that time. It's like you were talking about. We were like, okay, robo taxis are going to take me everywhere. The hyper loop is going to change my life. Like we were in this phase of it's not going to be that long until you don't own a car anymore. It was a thing a lot of people would have you believe at the time. And in that world, something like this that is like I just need to quickly get to the coffee shop makes a lot more sense.

34:34I own more cars than I did in 2015. And it's like amazing to me that none of the car companies like try to buy like hover tracks or like because that's what they did with the scooter companies. Right. They like they saw like Ford and others saw an opportunity. They're like, we have to get a piece of this. This is going to be huge. And I think because there was that that disruption sort of like mid cycle as this thing was just gaining momentum, like escape velocity. It was getting there. Like you could have had like GM swoop in and like buy one of these. I'm dying. I'm like dying thinking about like the 30 page slide deck that someone prepared for Mary Barra at GM of like, here's why we should acquire Iowa.

35:13And then they start exploding. She's like, get out. The future of transportation is the hover track. I'm going to invest a billion dollars in cruise instead. Yeah, you could argue which one of those went better. I'm just saying. So anyway. OK, so the story here basically ends with you can still go to a store and buy a hoverboard, which I will be honest. This is not a thing I knew until I was researching this. They're pretty cheap. By all accounts, they're pretty safe. They're just out there. They're mostly now called Hover Tracks. The whole thing is owned by Razor, but I think Shane Chen kind of got his...

35:47He got his piece. He won in the end. He sold the patent. They're still called Hover Tracks. They're still out there. I want to talk about two more things before we get to the version history questions. One is during all of this, you, Sean, had an actual experience with an actual hoverboard. Yes. That's one of the crazy things, too. I feel like this was a thing that we set aside because it was such a weird moment. But I think another element of why these things took off was because it was just like hoverboard mania for a few years. Because there were all these other companies at the time trying to do.

36:22We were coming up on 2015 was what? The 30th anniversary of Back to the Future. The date, in fact, of the future. so you know there were all these people who are like gearing themselves up to be like all retrospective about back to the future and the hoverboard and uh and and so i think people were just ready for it and all these other companies there was this company called hendo there was or arcs packs i think was the one that was actually behind that and there were there were all these they're coming up with weird ways to try to make all air quotes here make hoverboards that worked and it was like you know they would be okay this one hovers with like magnetics over like non-ferrous metal surfaces okay cool like and they remember they were science projects yeah exactly you could just take it anywhere that they're yeah there was one for a while oh man the name escapes me but there was one where it was actually from a a space company i think their name was arca space and and they were trying to do almost like a ducted fan one that had like 40 or 50 or even more like little ducted fans which looked like a nightmare to ride because like you're basically balancing on like an airboat like a small airboat and so there were all these things and then the big one that i remember was there was the sort of uh hoaxy video that tony hawk did where it was digitally edited to make it look like he was actually riding a hoverboard and it had been created and here it is and it was just some viral stunt for something else and it It was like that was the moment where that was happening like alongside all of this stuff, just sort of fueling the mania.

37:59And then the craziest one of all of them was like all of a sudden we got a call one day from a PR rep who worked for Lexus. And I pick up the phone because I'm one of those crazy people that picks up every phone call that I get, even if it looks like it's going to be spam because you never know. and they were like hey like we were doing this thing in Spain and we want to know if you're interested and they were describing it and it was this whole thing about doing a real hoverboard and we weren't really sure of all the specifics but it looked like we were looking at some of the stuff that they were showing us and it was like this looks like legit and I remember just like still on the phone like scouring the office looking around like where is Sam Sheffer we need to get into spain and it was like right around fourth of july too so i remember just being like i'm sorry if i'm blowing up your holiday but like you should go to spain like you're welcome there are worse things to be told over anyway and it was like you know again it was another one of these things where it was very science experimented they basically just built an entire skate park that had magnetic rails underneath most of the park and it was you know it was similar to if you ever seen those things where there's like a super cool piece of some material and it kind of like uh you know hovers over a base of some other material it was essentially that but they had balanced it out well and they'd worked with some skateboarders and they they went through all the work to make it really work but within its own limits and it was i remember he had so much trouble getting it to work because it's in spain it's very hot it was the summer the materials they were using had to be cooled to a certain temperature if it went above it they had to swap out the board but you know he was able to you know even all those constraints like set those aside he was able to ride a skateboard on a skate park that hovered and it was like a really cool moment like we filmed a really good video about it and it was like such a fun weird thing again it was just a stunt um but it was like all that was happening at the same time that all this stuff was happening which was like fueling the mania of this product but also even just the idea of calling them a hoverboard in the first place.

40:10Yeah, and this one actually hovered. I have a clip of that video, which, if memory serves, was one of The Verge's most successful and viewed videos ever. Still to this day, I think, almost. Truly wild. Here it is. It hovers off the ground like a proper hoverboard, but as I'm sure you've guessed, there are some big caveats, like the track it needs to run on, which is crucial to how the thing works at all. The board must be resting upon a portion of that same track. It's designed well, but it looks like all the liquid nitrogen coming off it just like makes it look even worse nothing about this is real but it's sick vertically with the center of the board so it's i mean it looks like it's on the ground tightrope and if your balance is perfectly distributed on this thing you end up scraping the ground with the undersides of the board it took me like 15 minutes just to glide a few feet oh yeah you can kind of see that's a good angle that was where the heat was working against them too where it was like the hotter it was the the less whatever the force was, was working.

41:06So I remember him telling me that he was struggling with that part of it, and it took them a minute to really get one with just the right amount of, like, the liquid nitrogen or whatever it was to get it to hover enough for him to really try and ride it. I rode one of the ones on the metal surface at a Hyperloop event, as it were, in Texas. SpaceX had this big Hyperloop competition at Texas A &M University, and like one of the vendors that was there showing off like their products was one of the, I forget which one it was. I think it was the Hendo one. It might've been the Hendo one. But I remember the funny thing about that was they made you hold hands with somebody while you were on it.

41:43So I'm like, this is the most like nursery school demo I've ever done in my entire life. I'm holding hands with this man as I ride on a actual - I like that you rode a hoverboard, but you've never ridden a hoverboard. A hoverboard, yes, I know. That's one of the weird things about me. I also like that that's like what the future of the Hyperloop should have been. Yes. Like just put up rails and let us all hoverboard from San Francisco to LA while holding hands. Well, they're all about magnetic levitation at Hyperloop Inc. That's exactly right. So, okay. And then the last thing we have to talk about, which is the only thing that matters in this entire thing.

42:14All of this has been a waste except for one important question, which is why the hell are these things called hoverboards? They don't hover. Yeah. Fair. Point taken. But they are hoverboards and they just are hoverboards. There was never any other good name to call them. We ran through a few of them already, like self-balancing scooter, just nothing that really rolls off the tongue. Where that comes from, I don't even really remember. Again, there was this sort of cultural thing happening, like I said, at the same time where hoverboards were in our mind in a way that they hadn't been in years prior.

42:54And so I think it just became a good shorthand for it. And again, like I said earlier, if you're not looking at what somebody is doing and you're seeing their like torso and head coming at you, it looks like you're hovering. It looks like you are floating at me as a specter about to like, you know, it's just, yeah, I get it. So I want to see if we can rename this thing very quickly. Knowing what we know now, is there a better name for this thing? I mean, I kind of agree with Sean that you can't really beat hoverboard in terms of like the cultural. But it doesn't hover. The connotations that it has.

43:29Rolly board. Rolly board. No bad ideas. Go. Glide ride. Glide ride. Can we just call it a scooter? Spin doctor. Yeah. There you go. Glide ride is actually very good. It's nothing, but it's very good. It's nothing. Spin doctor is good. I like spin doctor. I can see somebody selling it as the spin doctor. Yeah. The company is called something. Brand name. Yeah. For sure. Tilt-o-whirl. Tilt-o-whirl. This is all making me like hoverboard more. ass blaster you fall out your ass zoom scooter foot there's probably something with foot right foot wheel foot mobile that's going to get a whole other demographic interested in it the foot demographic fine it's hoverboards this didn't go at all how I was hoping it was going to they're called Icarus wings unironically touch the sun I stand by Glide Ride.

44:29I feel good about that one. Glide Ride's pretty good. Glide Ride is like, I think we just came up with a bunch of good company names. Like when we're going to bring the hoverboard back, we're going to call it the Glide Ride. Here's the thing. I mean, you noted that the hoverboard's still around. I was at my children's talent show earlier this year. And amidst all of the terrible renditions of Frozen Songs and Pink Pony Club and all the other things that were going on, And two kids came out on hoverboards and did a hoverboard dance to some song I'd never heard before. I think it was like a Minecraft song or something like that.

44:58This was recently? This was like a couple months ago. And they were wearing like glittery spandex like outfits and they killed it. Shout out to Nico and Brooks. Those kids - We're sure you're listening. Were amazing. And it gave me some solace because this is not Gen Z or millennials or anyone. This is like Gen Alpha, right? The kids are still into them. Have we come all the way back around so that they're vintage? It's like 80s glam, millennial cringes back, right? Well, we're all a thousand years old is the main takeaway from this episode of version history. All right. Oh, one coda to this story before we get to the version history questions.

45:41Can I share with you what our good friend Shane Chen has been working on recently? Oh, please. Yes. I have a clip that I would very much like to share with you. So this is a product. It is simply called Shane. Shane, a revolutionary new car, embraces the laws of physics in an unexpected and invented way. Large parallel wheels automatically shift relative to the car's body to keep Shane in perfect balance during acceleration and braking, making it stable and safe even at high speeds. A capability not previously possible. Suspended motors and regenerative shocks are housed in the wheels. Maneuverability and parking are easy thanks to two-wheel differential speed control, which eliminates the complicated steering system of today's cars.

46:28Pure electronic steering makes it a better self-driving car. Shane is practical and efficient for everyday urban and highway driving. The only way I can describe this to you is as hoverboard but spaceship. It's like a frog car. a better self-driving car why is there so much parking in the desert my question is like well one of my questions is is this something he's been like building towards or is it a new idea like is it is it is the dream to always make a car with two wheels named after himself i mean i do sort of like the idea that you can you can go all the way back to all of his inventions and they just get bigger and more expensive and then they end up being a spaceship on self-balancing wheels.

47:18Are we thinking of the SUV version of this at some point? The three-row Shane. I do like that he was like, two wheels. That's it. That's all we need for everything in our lives is just two wheels. This four-wheel stuff, that's bullshit. We need to just narrow it down to two. Did you see how easy it was to park? I mean, come on. That's a dream. All right. Shane, I'm glad you did it. Congratulations. The dream is alive. You won the end, Shane. You sent me the Kickstarter link. I want to back it. I think so. Yeah, we'll do that with this episode. All right. We need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and do the version history questions.

47:55We'll be right back.

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49:14All right, we're back. It's time, as always, for the eight questions we ask about every product we cover on this show. Question number one, weirdly tricky in this case. What was the best thing about hoverboards? Sean, you go first. I like the content like you know just like all the celebrity bs and like you know people you know unboxing videos at christmas I feel like there was just such a a moment that we've talked about of like this becoming like something you could read about or watch for days on end and that it got to like local news you know you've got local news penetration where you're just like you know Someone in like Peoria, Illinois' local station talking about hoverboards.

50:00It was just - I do think hoverboards probably got to like 100 % brand awareness at some point. It's like Coca-Cola, iPhones, hoverboards. It was right up there for a while. Yeah. Not for good reasons, but it was there. That's a good answer. I like that. Andy, what do you think? I think it's like how they didn't overstay their welcome that they, I mean, like for not by choice, like they flamed out literally, but I feel like they didn't stick around and And, like, we didn't have to go through, like, multiple cycles of, you know, the boom and bust of it all. They just came. They made their case for themselves.

50:34And then they started exploding. And then that was the end of it. And, yeah, they're still around. But they're not as big as they were. I think that more products should be, like, sort of, like, the original Office where you just, like, three seasons and you're done. And that's it. Like, end on a high note. High-ish. You know? It ended on a note. End on a note. I'm not defending this take at all. It's just a take. It's a good take. I like it. I think for me, the underrated thing about these things is I think they got the size of the thing kind of right. One of my problems with all of these last mile-y things, the electric bikes, the electric scooters, all these stuff, they're just enormous.

51:15And I had one of the Ninebot scooters for a while, and the thing weighed like 45 pounds, three feet long, really annoying to carry around. and there was something about like you could just kind of pick up a hoverboard and carry it with you and it was it was too heavy in a way that i actually think like the year three of hoverboards they would have figured out how to make it lighter and it would have been more compelling for it but like there was something about just the basic shape of the thing that i was like all right if we're going to do the last mile thing this is about the shape of it that feels right to me um all right question number two is going to be much easier because the answer is explosions uh What was the worst thing about hoverboards?

51:53The content. This was sort of more of the Wild West days of like influencer marketing. And we didn't really know, you know, Kendall Jenner wasn't posting hashtag ad under her posts yet, you know, like that kind of stuff. And it was like there was more than just the hoverboards or all these like electric surfboards and stuff. And it just it was such a weird time of like, you know, how much of the truth are you telling us here? and and you know like i just that part of it always felt really weird to me okay if i if i give you 51 of the celebrity hoverboard content was bought and paid for in some way are you are you going over over you think yeah i mean that's so sad even if i i say over but like with the caveat of like including there were probably instances where people were getting them for free but they were probably expecting something in return at some point.

52:49Yeah. Justin Bieber probably did not buy his Iohawk on Amazon. Yeah, definitely not. So yeah, definitely over. I don't know if they were cashing big checks from any of these companies necessarily, but yeah, there was something going on. Yeah. What about you? What was the worst? I mean, aside from the human toll and the destroyed property and all of that, I don't know. Probably the name, I guess. it's like you know because we did there could have been we did have hoverboards and then this sort of supplanted that and now we can't talk about the concept of hoverboards without thinking of these things first as opposed to the much and even your children's you know that whole era is tainted now too they'll grow up in a world never knowing the joys of back to the future yeah they're going to watch back to the future too and be like that's not a hoverboard and you're just going to die inside right there in front of them That will be the day that I turn into the guy from the end of Last Crusade.

53:42So Andy's answer is the intergenerational trauma. Yes. That's good. All right. Well, it's the explosions. You're both wrong. Question number three. Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple had made it? Could Apple have made hoverboards work? Apple would have done a secret Project Titan-like project to develop their own hoverboard for 15 years and then abandon it after spending$8 billion. and decided would you be surprised if you learned that there was a hoverboard just embedded into the trunk of the Apple car the timing kind of works specifically where you plug it in I'm sure there was the question is could Apple have made it successful yeah oh man no because Johnny Ive would have made it like a single plank of wood and it wouldn't have worked and it would have come preloaded with just you two the you it would be about blasting out the party speakers on the side yeah yeah i think i'm also saying no i think there's like it would have been safer if apple had made it i have a lot of faith in apple's ability to make batteries the safer on the battery side maybe not on the riding side well right and industrial design probably sure better but still it would have been white and depending also it would have been it would have been like five grand and it would have not sold like the the vision pro of hoverboards.

55:05Here's the tagline. Not what we're about, I don't think. Question number four. If you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? You're going back where the three of us just became hoverboard distributors. It's April of 2015. I would put a stock on it and I would call it a segue. I don't know what I would have done differently. I think maybe I would have started with the party speaker angle. That would have been like the first thing like this it's not alone it's not enough it needs to be like more than what it is i would have tried to make it like rugged and sporty in some way yeah like you mentioned the they started doing the ones with like the bigger wheels a little easier to maneuver i think especially at the beginning uh you never experienced this because you're a coward and never tried it uh but the first most people had a bad first experience on a hoverboard and and the question was if you were willing to try it like three or four or five times to kind of get the hang of it but there's like researching this episode i saw the same clip so many times of you the people who stand on the thing and then their legs start wobbling because it takes a minute for your brain to realize okay it's i actually don't move my legs the whole point of this is that i don't move my legs it's all like it's an upper body thing most of the time but they get on and you just sort of wobble back and forth and then fall off and hurt yourself spectacularly but they had started to do things with like bigger wider wheels slightly more sort of stable things and try to make it like more outdoorsy yeah and i just would have gone straight to that be like this is not a commuter tool this is like purely fun to do like shocks like having some sort of like shocks yeah like just absorb the what if it could go on the sidewalk and not try to throw you off every time like i would have just started there uh i would have probably given at more than two wheels.

56:53And maybe take out the motors. Shane is crying. He's hearing about this. I was imagining three wheels and it's like a triangle that you stand on. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. I like this. We call it the pyramid. And it just takes you along everywhere you're going. Or you know what? Eight wheels. Whoa. Fuck it. You know? Fuck it. We're doing eight wheels. Are we going longer or just more wheels? No, I think, you know, like in octagonal shape. Okay. And you can go omnidirectional. So like a stop sign with wheels. Like a true platform. Yes. Like a class eight hoverboard. Like a true platform that you're on and you know instead of just leaning forward or backward you can kind of go Did you have those things in elementary school?

57:35That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah they had the wheels and you would sit on them and hold the handles and like launch yourself around the gym. You're talking about one of those. Kind of. But double the wheels. Yeah. And you stand on it. That's the best idea I've heard all day. I love it. We just we fixed it. TM TM. us mark cuban get at us uh what thing about hoverboards the experience of riding them or the things themselves would you still want to have today what last miley gadget would you make out of a hoverboard oh i see i mean i rode a lot of electric skateboards and i mean honestly a lot of those were trash too but the booster board was really good there was a thing called z board for a while z board was really good and that was that one actually is maybe the closest analog to this because the z board unlike boosted and a lot of the other ones didn't use a remote it had foot pressure pads on the front and back of the skateboard i don't think i ever tried that one i mean the first version of it was very heavy i don't know that i ever actually rode the second one outside of maybe a quick demo at ces but the first one i had for a while while i lived in queens and like rode it around that was great i actually really loved that it was like self balance it it wasn't about i mean it was just a skateboard it was like a pretty heavy like big wood deck like longboard with the motors and stuff underneath but you would you would speed up and slow down by applying pressure to the pads on either side and it was the closest that that form factor ever got to something like this that's cool that's what i was going to say too is i don't i don't know about the self-balancing but the the sort of lean to go and lean back to stop thing i actually think is pretty intuitive it was really fun uh and and works pretty well i mean that's i I think that that's key, like essential to like the delight of the product, why so many people were attracted to it, because they felt like they were doing something right.

59:18Like the machine was kind of doing it for them, but they were like balancing on this in like a way that was unexpected. And that's so much about that sort of simple movement of your body that I think is very cool. All right. Question number six. Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? I mean, yeah, if they didn't explode, I think they would have probably continued. I think they would have like petered out and like leveled out at a certain point. But yeah, I think minus the explosions, you could have like, you could very well see like a lot of, you know, even more mainstream adoption.

59:55Do we think there's any world in which they get up to like electric bike level? Speed? No, like penetration. Yeah, like if I'm. I mean, I would argue that hoverboards had more penetration than e-bikes did in some respects. For 10 minutes. Yeah. No, you're right. But you're right. But I think what I'm thinking of is like there is an age that every kid gets to, right, where they're like, I want to bike. Yeah. And I think, is there ever a world in which hoverboards ascend to something like that level? You'll like this. No, not in the United States. Like if this country or any of its cities were really oriented around pedestrians versus versus cars, then actually, I think this thing would have had a pretty good crack at it.

1:00:37But like the infrastructure is just not there. Like I said, it's like a pebble on the sidewalk is just going to throw you off of this thing. And if there were more spaces where you could take these kind of like personal mobility things, then, you know, on smoother surfaces to get around an actual city, then maybe there really would be. But that's just not how this country is built. yeah i think i agree with that that there is if if a lot of like the alternate timeline would start in like the 1800s in order for this thing or even further or like back to the future like even further into the future from now where it's like the the sort of you know that that meme of like this is the future we could have if only for x you know and it's like the glossy city with like all this stuff like it would have to be something like that yeah we're riding through the hyperloop tubes on our hoverboards.

1:01:29Our last mile off the hyperloop tubes to go to work at the AI training facility. Yes. The futures we've lost. Question number seven. Could you make hoverboards a thing again? Now? I think so because I think that we are in that era where there's no boundary in terms of how much time has needed to pass before you can feel nostalgic about something. Everything has just collapsed and it's like you can feel nostalgic for 2016. You can feel nostalgic for 2020 if you want to. It does feel like people can reach back and take what they want and sort of cherry pick and cobble together their own kind of memories about what the past was and how it was better.

1:02:13So I do think that there could be some, you know, like give it to Benson Boone or whomever and he does a backflip off a piano onto a hoverboard at the Oscars or something like that. You are making me remember there was a run of hoverboard dance crazes during all of this that was like people doing wild synchronized hoverboard dancing. Sure. Yeah. We could absolutely bring that back. At my child's school at their talent show. We could absolutely bring that back. I think without a lot of trouble, we could bring that back. We could make that happen again. All we need to do is get one. It's probably Benson Boone now.

1:02:45If we get Taylor Swift on a hoverboard, it's done. I say we call Soulja Boy. I'm sure he's still got some song. What are you doing now? He's got some stock back in a warehouse somewhere. Oh, yes. He's got a closet full just stacked to the ceiling. Nothing but soldier boards. Unopened boxes, yes. That's what we should call him. I mean, Soldier Boy nailed it out the gate. He did. Soldier board. Yeah. And he would easily get into business with us on this, I'm sure. So that's great. Okay, we're good. All right, new revenue stream. We made a lot of money in this episode. This is great news. Last question.

1:03:17Do hoverboards belong in the version history Hall of Fame? The rules for the Hall of Fame are nebulous and vibes-y, as all Hall of Fames are. But I think the rubric, to the extent that it exists, is just, did this thing matter? Like, in the annals of technology history, were the hoverboards sort of capital I important enough to belong in the Hall of Fame? I do think that there was, you know, like, there's a universe in which, like, you didn't have hoverboards. maybe you didn't have e-bikes or e-scooters or skateboards and all the other sort of mobility devices that have like been way more successful than the hoverboard ever was.

1:03:57Like you needed to have this kind of like kitschy toy product to come first and also show us, you know, sort of like the capacity that China has in terms of manufacturing products and seizing upon things that have become popular in other countries and just like flooding the zone with this kind of stuff. And then changing their factories the next week to make like e-cigarettes or whatever. Right. Exactly. On a dime. Yeah. So, yeah, I do feel like that there is like a version like, you know, like the hover. We needed to have like the boondoggle of the hoverboard in order to get like these much more utilitarian e-mobility devices that are actually last mile devices that are worthwhile.

1:04:40And but it also it's frustrating because we learned nothing from the hoverboard as well, because those products all exploded and flamed out and did horrible things to people. and we didn't learn from the hoverboard that we need to make these things safer. There need to be safety standards around the construction of these batteries, especially, and I wish that we had. Yeah, like part of that explanation makes me think that no, it doesn't belong. It's like saying the pitcher who taught the other pitcher how to be better than him belongs in the Hall of Fame. And it's like, I'm not sure that's right.

1:05:13But I do think everything you just said is true. And also it was such a moment and it burned so bright. Like that was the thing that really came back to me in prepping for this was it was so huge Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the president. Let's just keep that in mind that year That's what all of us were thinking as the hoverboard was gaining traction Yeah, it was like first woman president hoverboard. Nope. That's not the world. All right I think we're gonna put it in the Hall of Fame just because Shane Chen needs a win We're doing it for Shane You don't want to put the Shane in there? Well, so here's the question though is are we putting the Sheik Robotics?

1:05:49S1 or are we putting the Hover Tracks? We're putting a vague recreation of a patent application in there. The cartoon version of a hoverboard goes in the Hall of Fame. I think so. I like it. I feel good about it. That is it. That's it for the show. Thank you both for being here. This was very fun. We're going to go read Hoverboards and see who gets injured first. As ever, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And the best way to support all of this and everything we do is to subscribe to theverge.com. That's it. Thank you so much for being here.

1:06:22See you next time.

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