Hoverboards: So hot right now

Walking. So old-school, right? It's like if you want to go across the office or down the street or to the other side of the building You have to use your feet like it's the Middle Ages. It's so it's who has the time, you know what I mean? Well, I have a better way. They're hoverboards. They're those two-wheeled Self-balancing scooters and they are all the rage from the verge and Vox Media This is version history a show about the best and worst and Strangest and most important products in the history of technology. I'm David Pierce and today we are going for a ride a Definitely dangerous and potentially explosive ride. Stay tuned Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for every moment with long-lasting battery life and built-in intelligence You can stay focused on what matters most Dell technologies built for you Dell comm slash Dell PCs Once upon a dismal day Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray although he had big ambitions His socials lacked creative vision that bad maybe vamp it up a tad. I have an idea Bob launched Canva and got into gear create the video in the vampire theme and make it the funny as a mean It went viral Bob's business All right, we're back. Let's talk hoverboards Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Sean. Okay, and is here. Yeah, band is back together This is exciting. This is very exciting First let's just talk about Relative hoverboard expertise Andy you have a confession to make I believe This is very shameful for me to admit But I have never actually written on a hoverboard at some point that's a choice you made it was because we had one in the office Yes, it was it was always there other, you know co-workers were blasting around I was writing about it very frequently and yet I still have not Put my dainty little feet on the platform. So You know any regrets. I know a none none at all now for sure zero regrets about that Actually, I feel better about it today every day that goes by I feel even better about the think of how much more complicated You're commute to bring your kids to school could have been if you had stuck with the hoverboard That's right my first ever hoverboard experience. I first I will never forget this moment I got it on Amazon took it out of the box and I was in Oakland In my apartment and I was like, okay, my living room is tiny. It was like 800 square foot apartment I don't have any room to ride this thing. I'm gonna take it down to the street First mistake I was like very early in the hoverboard world at this point It's all like I didn't know how any of this work. So I take it down to the sidewalk I went I don't know 18 inches into like the line between two of the blocks on the sidewalk and just Absolutely launched myself into traffic like like in the middle of the road Eight seconds after getting a hoverboard and then I was like, all right. I'm in it now So we're very lucky to still have you here with us. It's it's a small miracle Shawn. What about you? Have ridden have not stuck with it. Okay expertise would be a word I wouldn't use like would you would peak Shawn on a hoverboard? Would you roll around this set? Oh, no and not feel and feel comfortable not destroying without breaking all over the cameras? No, okay. No, give me a wide open space, you know, put me on an airport runway. Oh, yeah I could probably cruise a gymnasium a recently paved airport runway. I could probably cruise pretty well Okay, that's I mean that comes for something. Yeah, so what I'm hearing is I'm the best at hoverboards This is a great way to start but we all covered this pretty aggressively I was at wired at the time you two were both at the verge during like the entirety of the hoverboard craze You were both like Covering it a lot is my memory of it, right? Like it was it was a huge story in a way that is I think very easy to forget now There are so many parts to the story that I hadn't remembered until I was looking back like it's not just about the product It was about what we called it. It was about who was riding it. It was about this Celebrity craze of all of them probably getting paid to ride them or just like thinking they were cool and There were all that I mean it was just there was To me It's also like a harbinger of what was to come with sort of the trade war stuff that we've been in over the last couple years of sort of rapid production and and domestic manufacturing in China and It's it was a deeper story than I remembered all the safety implications Yeah, it was sort of where I came into the story was once like they started exploding Catching on fire was when I was like, oh, this is you know more than just your average like cheap product out of China That people are really into it's there's something else going on here. Yeah, I think this was also I had forgotten Kind of the beginning of the like last mile Trails where everyone was obsessed with this idea that like what we're going to do is not just have hoverboards But we're going to reinvent the way that you move Small distances which seems insane to think about now But I was like I was all in on this idea at the time and there were like we were doing weird electric skates There were a bunch of different skateboard ideas You ended up covering boosted board for like forever after this all of that Maybe not starts with this but kind of starts with this This was like the beginning of the idea of like what weird stuff can I put under my feet that are going to make it fun To move around the office warehouse neighborhood. What have you? And weird times. Yeah, I still have a bunch of those things at my house It was I mean it was a more optimistic time, right? We were watching google's little Sort of cutesy autonomous vehicle for the first time navigate some streets We were thinking about electric aircraft and all this stuff everything was in the concept phase And so these became sort of the first tangible things of like this is what the future will be like and as far as how you're Going to move around I think that was one of the reasons that fueled all that stuff and it was also I honestly I think there's an element of the tesla piece here where There was all this talk at the time about The rapid acceleration of development of electric motors of battery technology The miniaturization of that the lowering of the cost that's going to revolutionize the kinds of things you can build because they're no longer cost prohibitive And so it was just all of that stuff got swept up into what became this weird This weird thing that we called the overbought I think it's also sort of like there's a germ of like influencer culture That like kind of birthed out of this as well Like we didn't really have like there wasn't like profession like a professional influencer Yeah, this thing would have had numbers on tick top shop seriously In like it was like we needed to have the celebrities be the ones to like introduce us to this Weird gadget right as opposed to just like all of the you know Eventually what became you know like influencers as we know them today So I always thought that was really interesting totally Okay, so this was a weird one because most of the things we talked about on the show sort of start in one obvious place Hoverboards very much do not let me just sort of lay out the like two Parallel histories here and we can sort of talk through it. So on one parallel history. We have this guy named shane chen Who is an inventor? Lives in the pacific northwest has been into like right of believe things for forever And in 2013 He files a patent for a thing called the hover tracks with an x at the end So, you know, it's cool And he called it a two wheel self balancing vehicle made with independently movable foot placement sections And like the thing that made it new and not a segue was that it had essentially two distinct platforms Both attached to a wheel and you could move them independently, right? And so the whole thing was like you you push them forward and it goes forward you push them backwards And it goes backwards you push one and pull one and it turns and so that that was like his big technical change He set up a Kickstarter for this thing He had he has said since that he had this idea in 2011 Patent sit in 2013 Does the Kickstarter in 2013 Raises like a little over 80 thousand dollars from I think it was 162 backers on Kickstarter, which is Fine numbers. Congratulations. See how he did it. It hit its goal See you getting in on the ground floor on hoverboards like you're living that billionaire lifestyle these days, you know That's what you want to be you want to be one of those original seed investors. Well Well Our boy Shane Chen might have different feelings than that But let me just this is the most like 2013 Kickstarter video ever. So let me just play you a short clip from the Kickstarter This is my latest dimension It's called hover tracks Because he has two wheels so he can stand still and You put your feet on here You lean forward you go forward lean back You come back and you press one foot forward and one foot back you spin Or you can make turn when you're moving forward And this is very convenient and Very portable I love this because he's like this is the most like I invented a thing and I have no idea what it's for video of all time Yes, do you want to back this on Kickstarter? Take all my money, please. Yeah, exactly. So okay. So all of this is happening Patents it starts to ship it out. There were some delays because of poor shenanigans But like shipped a bunch of things to actual people in the world and in America That's one version of the history the other version of the history starts in China with this company called chic robotics, which is one of the like Big factories in China have a lot of like little tiny house brands. So there's like a million companies inside of this one factory Chic robotics is one of them They start making what they call self balancing scooters that look a lot like everybody chains hover tracks in August of 2014 and these I did a story about these a million years ago in which I went back and looked through Went back when this is a thing you could do every youtube video that had ever been posted about these things All the way back to the beginning and the very first one I ever found was from august 2014 of a device called the smart s1 From chic robotics. So chic robotics makes this device. They take it to the the largest trade show in china It's a big hit One of the stories of these things kind of over and over is that One of the ways they grow is by like taking a bunch to a convention center somewhere And then just like have people ride them around sure and they become this like weird viral phenomenon over and over I think we all had this experience at ces one year It was just one of those things where they just showed up and it was you know That was I think ces is it's most fun is when there are people who are sort of at the edges and don't aren't part of the Whole machine of sort of setting up a schedule and like getting people meet and they just have a fun idea And they're like and this thing, you know to your point about it catching people's eye in spaces like that There's something so unsettling about seeing the top half of a person moving Without bobbing up and down and I think that like honestly I think that's a small part but an important part of like why this thing caught so many people's eyes because if you see Someone moving like that you're like what is going on right one? It's like a few inches off the ground So you're the tallest person in the room all of a sudden and you're just kind of slowly moving towards everyone like it's it is deeply like alarming So okay, so chic makes this thing And their version of this story is relatively straightforward like chic makes a thing finds a bunch of distributors those distributors put Logos and stickers on it and they you know change the manufacturing a little bit and they start to ship it all over the world Those are the two versions of the story shane chen who we should point out was Outdoing this earlier publicly Uh what he says is that what chic did was basically look at his Kickstarter page Take the photos and the video and reverse engineer Their product out of it. This is the thing that is very hard to know It has been litigated endlessly Which will come up over and over again throughout this story But it it tracks like that the place that I've landed is like the thing that we Have in the united states looks more like that one from chic than it does The one the hover tracks that shane chen made the year before and then whatever happened Everybody else ripped off their intellectual property right so as soon as even this stuff comes out And as soon as these things start to get manufactured, they are just immediately everywhere Uh and so like when they first came to the us, which was pretty quick they came My recollection at least is not sort of as as there was not one product that showed up and then a bunch of knockoffs all It was all knockoffs right from day one Yeah, which was just weird and they all had the weirdest names There it was it was always like some sort of like bizarre combination of english words that didn't really seem like they Made sense together like car wind feels Another sort of harbinger of what was to come. I feel like this is a proto version of like the alphabet soup Like amazon best that we have today of like, I'm gonna buy an electric toothbrush this one that's called x9 z to be Free looks good. I will say to the hoverboards credit one of them was called funky duck with a ph and that's very good Um, so we did we we made a Clip of some of our favorite hoverboard brand names. Let me just play this for you This is a swag way. This is funky duck. This is hover traps. This is the epigo classic This is the mono rover two carl lifestyle isle hawk the hoverboard 360 This particular model is called the lee ray self balancing scooter. Uh, they also call it the uh, the dream walker Oh That's ominous. Uh, I was like my favorite version my favorite version of this story is uh, I believe it was funky duck sent one of their scooters to soldier boy Uh, which is a very 2015 sentence to say And then like like days later soldier boy starts selling a board. I believe it's called the soldier board Yeah, because why not literally and the picture is just him standing on the board that funky duck sent him Yeah, which is just this is just where we were at the time I love it. It was you know a cambrian explosion of the same thing The thing that They were always amazed me is that none of these things looked any different from the next one. They all looked almost identical Like you put you line them all up together And you would have a difficulty like applying brand names to any of them because they just all looked the same And what was funny is every one of the companies Would hate that characterization right because they were all like oh well a we have big plans for the second one Get ready as soon as we know what that is And where we're gonna get the idea from all kinds of stuff on funky duck too Like you're not even gonna believe it But then they would all say you know everybody else is using Shotty batteries and they're not doing any safety testing and they don't care But we are the ones doing a good job And I mean down that line of what you're describing every single one of them would have said that to you Which is just which is just delightful. But anyway, so these these companies Start suing each other and and pointing fingers at each other. You have funky duck and isle hawk both of which I guess are Distributing chic robotics, which may or may not be knocking off The hover tracks. This is like I lose my mind trying to explain the layers of this And so everybody just starts to fight but meanwhile This thing is everywhere like my memory of it is essentially Overnight all of a sudden like this went from being a thing I had never heard of and never cared about to being like Front and center in pop because it's also hit right around the same time. I feel like I'm remembering correctly that Instagram really became a place for celebrities to post that wasn't the case for a while I remember it was just sort of like You know artful pictures and filtered whatever and your friends because you were coming Well, you weren't coming from facebook, but you know, they bought it eventually but uh This idea that we were getting a glimpse of the sort of polished version of a celebrity's home life And all of a sudden into that comes like some of the first product to your point earlier Just like this was sort of like proto influencer marketing like celebrity influencer marketing where they were getting these products and Dangle in the front of our face. I remember other ones being like, you know, luis hamilton riding some sort of like electric surfboard There's a lot of this stuff happening at the time, but this was certainly the most viral I went back. I did a Really really unnecessary instagram deep dive to figure out who was the first celebrity to post a hoverboard Who do you think it was? Oh gosh, paul gmadi No, uh I yearn for that In his like full john adams garb Love that. I don't know. It's a really. That's a good one. He's very famous And I love his music unironically John mayor Justin Bieber. Okay. Okay. Justin Bieber Uh, I think historically speaking kind of gets a lot of credit for like single-handedly making hoverboards a thing And the more I research it the more I think he's right, but here let me just play you. This is the very first video I could find this is from may I believe 14th of 2015 this is this is like the the celebrity birth of hoverboards And it's just him spinning around taking one foot off which is a fairly advanced maneuver I mean, is it him? Well, look at those pants. Look at those shorts and then he fell off. I'm just saying The caption in that video is something like I died right after this. Yeah, sure I even though we didn't see his face. I know that this was floppy hair era It had to have been right. Was that question? Yeah. Uh, uh, how much truth I don't think it was your beeps no Beeps body double a lot of work in 2015 on a hoverboard. It was gmati But I love that clip because a to your point This was like early instagram video when like no one would be caught dead making that low quality. Yeah It wasn't even a good vine. Let alone a good instagram. There's no music. No, it's too long He spins in a bunch of circles. He falls nothing funny happened. Yeah But that was huge and then it just absolutely took off. So like here's just a small percentage of the list of people Wiz Khalifa nick Jonas zed kendall Jenner JR smith who I don't know if you guys remember this if you're basketball fans rode one in the tunnel to I believe the NBA finals And it was like it was like a like a national news moment millions of people watching jr smith Just like potentially injure himself all the way to the locker room Nicki Minaj Nina agdal the model david orteez cream benzema the soccer player scrillx who he came very well known for his hoverboard 2015 yeah, that should have been my guess. Uh, yeah, and then all of the late night hosts Yes, this was like a staple of late night all the jimmy's jimmy's and james's and all of them um And so like this was this was like a huge thing and the thing that I had forgotten was How short a period of time that actually was yeah, because this is basically so like beaver posts in march And then we spend kind of may june july august culturally obsessed with hoverboard. Is this 2016 2015? This is literally this is all this is it's this whole story is one year long. It's nuts I also remember like it was either 2015 or 2016, but like whatever uh year the holidays came around It was insane. Yeah that like every kid was like I want one of these so bad Like that's the only thing that I want mom and dad and it was like everywhere like it was like, you know rushing to get you know, wherever you could get one You know people fighting over them at black friday deals like it was and there were absolutely no problems with these things sitting under flammable christmas trees None at all none at all. What a good segue that is So all of this happens and then uh, what do hoverboards start doing? They start exploding Which is where andy comes into the story. Do you remember any of the like early versions of this story? I remember being very like You know panic panicked like this is a problem Because yes, they started exploding. They were catching on fire. There was some deaths. I think associated with it Like it was it was bad. Yeah, and it's it's useful to remember that these things are huge Which is like it's not like if you're even your phone battery exploded because this is just before No, it's a no shenanigan like yes really like we were actually so prepared for the note seven Because of hoverboards. So right this is actually hoverboards are we're learning moments for me in multiple ways One was this is where I first learned what ul certification is. Yes same important Because we spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not post this sort of fire stuff starting Whether or not each individual company had gotten ul certification most from hadn't and how important that can be Um, and then and you know that was just a big that was a big one. Yeah. Yeah, ul certification is another thing that uh One of those you're like why I wish I had never needed to learn about this, but here we are I'm glad it exists and I hope I never think about it again. Yeah, okay. I have a couple of clips I would like to play for you of uh hoverboard explosions because What are we here for it? It's not hoverboard explosions. It's a gock Hoverboards are red hot in more ways than one there has been another reported fire involving the popular Self-balancing scooters. I came down the sidewalk not even probably a hundred feet and it exploded. It said boom But how do they explode so well? We take a battery from a 90 cell phone and make it power a motor designed for a small car Safety officials saying all the hoverboards sold in us. Oh my god are unsafe strollers Company to continue to sell hoverboards that they know do not comply with the standard And since not a single one has been certified as safe the consumer product safety commission warns Consumers risk serious injury or death if they're self balancing scooters ignite and burn Well, and as soon as that came came down Um, uh, like everywhere Started banning them right at the mta The all the airlines banned them. Walmart was like pulling them off the shelves Pulling them off the shelves you couldn't go through tsa security with one if you had it like it was just sort of like It was a free-for-all and then nowhere was would allow them to have them anywhere Yeah, like almost immediately. Yeah, there were just it fully just remember that there were like they took You remember at the time they were all those mta Sort of helpful hint things on the subway with like the sort of simply drawn Figure people like the cartoon people. Yeah, and they had ones for the hoverboard. There's like don't bring this on board I think they're still up there Probably in some yes and I remember it would some of them would be animated on some of the video screens and it would be like You know big x over like guy trying to bring a like little simply drawn hoverboard on in the subway Like I lived in this city for like, you know 20 years and I don't think I ever saw anybody I think I saw some people carrying them But I've never saw anyone use one on a subway I'm just wondering like how the physics of that work if you're going back and the train is going forward Are you just standing still if you're riding the hoverboard? How does that work? See that I would I would give somebody a dollar for that on the subway It's like Yeah, absolutely, especially if you can like spin up through the bars with the We haven't even talked about the ones that have like built-in speakers and lights Yes, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. No, this this is the right time because this was like That was the other thing it was time for funky duck too, baby. There you go Well, so they're at this point. They're basically one of three things is going to happen Uh either this whole thing is going to die It'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 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 an idea Yet somehow like deeply appropriate. Yes, this thing is so gary I mean it already was essentially like a party speaker on wheels. So like making it a party speaker on wheels was like, yeah That tracks. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and there I remember seeing like increasingly crazy light shows coming out of the side of them Uh 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 hoverboards. We'll be right back Security program on spreadsheets new regulations piling up an audit dread. It's time for vanter Vanta automate security and compliance brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82 Less manual work clearer visibility faster deals zero chaos call it compliance or call it calm clients Get it join the 15 000 companies using vanter to prove trust Get started at vanter.com slash calm Hi, I'm brunet brown and I'm adam grant and we're here to invite you to the curiosity shop a podcast That's a place for listening wondering thinking feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree But we almost never disagree and we're always learning. That's true You can subscribe to the curiosity shop on youtube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every thursday All right, we're back. So end of 2015 It all kind of goes sideways Everything's exploding like the hoverboard was sideways I fell off the hoverboard metaphorically and literally in 2015 um But 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 um and And we all know that's the only way to buy anything these days. I mean kind of It was like 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 And 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 More either more slowly or reverse it Uh, so razor the scooter company buys that original 2013 patent from shan chen in 2015 and Decides to simultaneously go make safer more legit versions of the hoverboard. They start to get the the u l 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 suing everybody And then there just becomes this question of like is any of this Different enough to be defensible. Yeah, and 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 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 our court system does not move nearly at the speed of uh, 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 even now I suspect Everyone's first association with hoverboards is explosions. Yeah, yeah, and there's just no coming back from that But I do wonder because if you if you rewind to the beginning of 2015 Again, this whole story takes place in 12 months, which is insanity Uh, 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 it's a good idea. It's a fun product people like it, but there is no Brand that's gonna work. Yeah, and I think it was joe Bernstein in buzzfeed that compared it to jet ski where it's like Right, there are there are lots of ways to move around on the water There's only one jet ski 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 gonna be the one like the The sort of brand name the 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 iohawker or marqubans thing or whatever it was that 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 and and 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 a bit because there was that disruption in the mid in like 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? You 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 gonna take a You know a train somewhere, but you're gonna have that last mile to your destination Should it be an electric bike an electric scooter electric? Skateboard or something like this But 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 like it really is a thing that only works that well on like the shiny floors of justin beaver's mansion or 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 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 And 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 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 like these were what is the problem that we're solving with this walking Yeah, like I think walking's fine I don't see walking as a problem. You know, I understand that disagree But no, I mean like if that if that was 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 on a show or tv On a on a hoverboard. It was like that person's a clown, right? Like that You know, it was like a John Ralphio from parks and rec or something like that like, you know Like that it was it was meant to say the signal that this is like an unserious person Yeah, uh, and so that's and 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 Asperions were being cast on people who were using the earliest versions of like the electric kick scooters that we see Around a lot of major cities. Yeah, 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 it again go back to sort of the the world at that time It's like you were talking about we were like, okay robo taxis are going to take me everywhere Uh The 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 Right because 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. Yeah makes a lot more sense I 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 begin a piece of this This is going to be huge. Yeah, 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 dying I'm like dying thinking about like the the 30 page slide deck that someone prepared for mary bar at gm Of like here's why we should acquire iohawk And then they start exploding and she's like get out the future of transportation is the hover track I'm gonna invest a billion dollars in cruise instead Yeah, you could argue which one of those went better. I'm just saying So anyway, okay, so the story here basically ends with you can still go to a store and buy a hoverboard Uh, which I will be honest is not a thing. I knew until I was researching this They're pretty cheap by all accounts. They're pretty safe. They they're like they're just out there. They're mostly now Uh called hover tracks The the whole thing is owned by razor, but I think shane chen kind of got his 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 shan 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 we set aside because it was such a weird moment um, 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 We were coming up on 2015 was what the 30th anniversary of Uh back to the future the date in fact to 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 and and so I think people were just ready for it and all these other companies. There was this company called hendo. There was Our 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 ferris metal surfaces Okay, cool. Like and they remember there were science projects. Yeah, exactly You could just take it anywhere that there. Yeah, there was one for a while Oh, man, the name escapes me, but there is one where it was actually from 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 air 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 stuff for something else And it was like that was the moment where that was happening like alongside all of this stuff Just sort of fueling the mania and then the the craziest one of all of them was like all of a sudden we got a call one day from a a PR rep who worked for lexus And uh, 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 cheffer? 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 were worse things to be told over the fourth of july and it was like you know Again, it was another one of these things that was very science experiment. 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've ever seen those things where there's like a super cool piece of some material and it kind of like You know hovers over a base of some other material and it was essentially that But they had balanced it out well and they had 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 Yeah, and this one actually hovered let me I have a clip of that video which if memory serves was One of the verge is most successful and viewed videos still to this day. I think yeah, it's 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 I mean it looks cool because it's designed well, but it looks like all the liquid nitrogen coming off It just like makes it look even Nothing about this is real, but it's sick I mean it looks like it's on the ground 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 So I remember him telling me that he was struggling with that part of it And it was it took them a minute to really get one with just the right amount of like the liquid nitrogen Whatever it was to to get it to hover and our friend really try and ride it I I wrote one of the ones on the metal surface. Oh, yeah at um at a hyperloop event As it were in texas A space x had this big hyperloop competition Uh at texas 8 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 have been the hendo one But I remember the funny thing about that was um, they made you hold hands with somebody while you were on it So I'm like, this is the most like yeah nursery school Demo I've ever done in my entire life. I'm holding hands with this man as I ride on I like that you wrote a hoverboard, but you've never ridden a hoverboard. Yes. I know that's the that's one of the weird things about me I also like that that's Like what the future of the hyperloop showed it then yes like just put up rails and let us all hoverboard from San Francisco to LA while they're all about magnetic levitation At hyperloop ink. It'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 all 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 they they just are hoverboards There is never any other good name Yeah to call them, you know like we ran through a few of them already like Self-balancing scooter, you know just nothing that like really rolls off the tongue and then you know, I I 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 and so You know, I think it just it became a good shorthand for it and again like to the what like I said earlier If you're not looking at what somebody's doing and you're just seeing there like Torso and head coming at you. It looks like you're hovering like 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 shan that you can't you can't really beat hoverboard in terms of like the Cultural That it has rolly board No bad ideas go glide glide ride glide ride. 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 Spin doctors good. I like spin doctors. I can see somebody selling it as the spin doctor. Yeah, the company is called something brand name Yeah, for sure tilt. Oh world This is all making me like hoverboard Ass blaster You followed your ass zoom scooter Foot there's probably something with foot right? Yeah foot foot wheel footmobile That's gonna get a whole other demographic. Yeah interested in it. Listen the foot demographic All right fine. It's hoverboards. This sucks. 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. I feel good about that one glide ride is like I think we just came up with a bunch of good Company names like when we're gonna bring the hoverboard back. We're gonna call it the glide ride 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 two kids came out on hoverboards And did a hoverboard dance to some song I never heard before. I think it was like a minecraft song recently This was 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. We're amazing And it gave me some songs because this is not gen z or millenials or anyway, this is like gen alpha, right? These are the kids are still are into them They're we have we come all the way back around so that they're vintage. It's like 80s glam Crinch is back, right? It's Well We're all a thousand years old. It's the main takeaway from this episode of version history All right, let's oh one coda to this story Uh before we get to the version history questions Can 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 invention 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 pure 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? Yeah My question is like wow 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 like a reading it an sub version of this Three row Shane I do like that. He was like two wheels That's it. Oh, yeah 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. Dream is alive. You won the Kickstarter link. I want to back I think so. Yeah, we'll we'll do that with this episode Uh, all right, we need to take one more break and then we're gonna come back do the version history questions We'll be right back Releam your lab bucks on free bet spins are even cash in for real money That's satisfaction from lab brux and for extra satisfaction. Here's the teas and seas. Let's rock This week on Net worth and Chill, it's my birthday and I'm turning 32, so I'm sharing 32 life lessons I've learned that have actually changed my perspective. These aren't the picture perfect Instagram infographic versions, these are the real, hard, uncomfortable truths about money, career, relationships and everything in between. I'll explain why choosing a rest day is non-negotiable or your body will choose it for you, why you should never take advice from anyone you don't wanna be and why nobody is actually looking at you so you should just go for it. Plus I'm breaking down why you should always negotiate your salary, why individualism is making you broke and yes, why you should try eating a popsicle in the shower after a bad day. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. All 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. Like the content, just like all the celebrity BS and like people unboxing videos at Christmas, I feel like there was just such 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've got local news penetration where you're just like someone in like Peoria, Illinois, local station talking about hoverboards. It was just, I think that's not very good. I do think hoverboards probably got to like 100% brand awareness at some point. It's like Coca-Cola, iPhones, hoverboards. Like it was right up there for a while. 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 my choice, like they flamed out literally, but I feel like they didn't stick around and like we didn't have to go through like multiple cycles of the boom and bust of it all. They just came, they made their case for themselves and then they started exploding and then that was the end of it. And yeah, they're still around and, but they're not as big as they were. I think that that's 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. Highish, you know? It ended on a note. And on a note. I'm not defending this take at all. It's just a take. It's a good take. 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 problem with all of these like last mile things, we've, you know, the electric bikes, the electric scooters, all these, they're just enormous. And they're like, I had one of the nine-bot scooters for a while and the thing weighed like 45 pounds. It's like, you know, 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 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 gonna do the last mile thing, this is about the shape of it. That feels right to me. All right, question number two is gonna be much easier because the answer is explosions. What was the worst thing about hoverboards? The 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. Yeah, 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, how much of the truth are you telling us here? And you know, like, I just, that part of it always felt really weird to me. If I give you 51% of the celebrity hoverboard content was bought and paid for in some way, are you going over or under? Oh, over, you think? Yeah, I mean, even if 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, you know. Yeah, like Justin Bieber probably did not buy his I.O.Hawk on Amazon. Yeah, definitely not. So yeah, I would definitely over. Yeah, I don't know if they were cashing big checks. No. You know, from any of these companies necessarily, but yeah, they definitely were, 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 you know, 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 common. And even your children's, you know, that whole era is tainted now too. They won't even, they'll grow up in a world never knowing the joys of back to the future too. Yeah, they're gonna watch back to the future too and be like, that's not a hoverboard. That's the exact words. And you're just gonna die inside. Exactly. Just right there in front of them. That will be the day that I turned into the guy from the end of last crusade. And his answer is the indie generational, intergenerational trauma. Yes. That's good. That'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 decide if it worked. Like would you be surprised if you learned that there was a hoverboard just embedded into the trunk of the Apple car? That no, the time kind of works. Like a space specifically where you plug it in. Like I'm sure there was a need to plug it in. The question is, could Apple have made it successful? Yeah. Oh man, no. Okay. Because Johnny, I 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 two. Yeah, it would be blasting out the party speakers on the side. Yeah, no. 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 that don't. Well, safer on the battery side, maybe not on the riding side. Well, right. And industrial design probably sure better, but still I think. Yeah, it would have been white and... It also, it would have been like five grand and it would have not sold. Like the vision pro of hoverboards. For your feet. Yeah. There'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. Like that would be like the first thing. Like this, it's 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. Like you mentioned, they started doing the ones with like the bigger wheels, a little easier to move. I think especially at the beginning, you never experienced this because you're a coward and never tried it. But the first, most people had a bad first experience on a hoverboard. 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 the people who stand on the thing and then their legs start wobbling. Cause it takes a minute for your brain to realize, okay, it's 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. 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 on it to absorb the bumps. What if it could go on the sidewalk and not try to throw you off every time? Like I would have just started there. I would have probably given it more than two wheels. And maybe take out the motors and call it, call it his papers. 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 your new eight wheels. Are we going longer or just more wheels? No, I think you know, like in octagonal shape 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 back where you can kind of go in there. Did you have those things in elementary school? That'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. I mean, we just, we fixed it. It's Christian. Mark Cuban, get at us. What thing about hoverboards, the experience of riding them or the things themselves, would you still want to have today? What last mile 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 this thing called the 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- Was it self-balancing? It wasn't balancing. 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 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 gonna say too. I don't know about the self-balancing, but the sort of lean to go and lean back to stop thing I actually think is pretty intuitive. It was really fun. And works pretty well. I mean, I think that's key, like essential to the delight of the product, why so many people were attracted to it, because they felt like they were doing something. Like the machine was kind of doing it for them, but they were like balancing on this in 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, 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 very well see a lot of, even more mainstream of adoption around this. Do we think there's any world in which they get up to like electric bike level? Speed? No, like penetration. Oh, adoption? Yeah, like if I'm to... I mean, I would argue that hoverboards had more penetration than e-bikes did in some of the specs. 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 a bike. 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 cars, then actually, I think this thing would have had a pretty good crack at it. But like the infrastructure is just not there. Like I said, it's like a pebble on the sidewalk is just gonna throw you off of this thing. And if there were more spaces where you could take these kind of like personal mobility things, then on smoother surfaces to get around an actual city, then maybe there really would be, but that's just not how this country's built. Yeah, I think I agree with that. That there is, if a lot of, like the alternate timeline would start in like the 1800s in order for this thing to work successful. Or like back to the future, like even further into the future from now, where it's like the sort of, that meme of like, this is the future we could have if only for X. 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. Our last mile off the Hyperloop tubes to go to work at the AI training facility. Yes. The futures we've lost. All right, question number seven, could you make hoverboards a thing again now? I think so, because like, yeah, I think that we are in that era where like there's no boundary in terms of like how much time has needed to pass before you can feel nostalgic about something. Like everything has just collapsed. And it's like, you can feel nostalgic for 2016. You can feel nostalgic for 2020 if you want to. Like it does feel like that people can reach back and take what they want and sort of cherry pick and like cobble together their own kind of like, you know, memories about what the past was and how it was better. So I do think that there could be some, you know, give it to Benson Boone or whomever. He does a back flip 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. My child's school at their fellow 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, like it's probably Benson Boone now. I would say we call Taylor Swift on a hoverboard. Like it's done. I say we call soldier boy. I'm sure he's still got some stock. 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 sold on open boxes. Yes. That's what we should call him is just, I mean, just sold it. He nailed it out the gate. He did. He did. Soldier board. 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 for the first. This is great news. Last question. Do hoverboards belong in the version history hall of fame? The rules for the hall of fame aren't nebulous and vibesy 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 to which like you didn't have hoverboards. Maybe you didn't have e-bikes or e-scooters or e-skateboards and all the other sort of mobility devices that have like been way more successful than the hoverboard ever was. Like 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. So I'm changing their factories the next week to make like e-cigarettes or whatever. Right, exactly, on a dime. 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 mobility devices that are actually last mile devices that are worthwhile. And, but it's 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 safer 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 picture who taught the other picture how to be better than him belongs in the Hall of Fame. And it's like, I'm not sure that's right. But I do think everything you just said is true. And also it was such a moment and it burns 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. We were like, first woman president, hoverboard. Nope, that's not the world we live in. 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 wanna put the Shane in there? Well, so here's the question though, is are we putting the Chic Robotics S1 or are we putting the hover tracks? We're putting a vague recreation of a patent application in there. Like the cartoon version of a hoverboard goes in the Hall of Fame. I think so. All right, I like it. I feel good about it. All right, that is it. That's it for the show. Thank you both for being here. This was very fun. We're gonna go read hoverboards and see who gets injured first. As ever, you can watch all 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 TheVirgin.com. That's it. Thank you so much for being here. See you next time. ["Virtuals of the Vigil"] Version history is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kieffer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Schertleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new version history podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive. Quality hair repair without the price tag. Try it now. Her balls. Lessons. Service repair to smoothness, nourishment with the regimen use versus non-conditioning shampoo.