154 - What is Wrap Rage?

I need you to close your eyes and not open them until I tell you to. I'm going to need you to trust me on this. Thank you. Just keep them right there.

OK. Let me fingers my whole nup destined. I don't know. OK, well, it was too.

Your answer is correct. Let's see if you flinch when I do this. No. OK, cool.

That was one inch from your nose with karate right there. I don't believe it. OK. It was give or take an inch.

OK. I need you to tell me what this sound is, right? Don't guess prematurely. I'm going to open something.

OK. OK. That's a potato chip bag. Woo.

See if you can tell a potato chip, ready? Yeah. I hate this. No, I can't.

I can't tell. It's a Frito. So it's right. Frito.

So you can tell by the opening, right? You can tell by the opening. I'm going to open something else now. OK.

You told me what this is. What was that, Tommy? That's a naddy light. That's exactly what it is.

It's a generic beer. No, it's a can. Specifically an aluminum can with a pull top tap. The rim is perforated just enough where it can hold the pressure inside the can, but not so much that it ruptures under the pressure until you actually apply the leverage there with Archimedes.

Interesting thing about that tab. Anyway, my eyes are still close. Keep it on. This is really fun.

Dude, I would have said maybe soda and you just like what you just did the thing that you do. This is good. This is why I do things like this. It's a class one lever.

The pull tab is a class one lever, and then it changes. What does it change to? Let's see. One, two, three, FRE.

So class one lever, this is odd to be doing this in my eyes. You're fine. Keep them close. A class one lever.

One, two, three, FRE fulcrum reaction effort. So for class one effort, the fulcrums in the middle, for class two lever, the reactions in the middle, and for class three level, the effort is in the middle. And so it changes from a class one lever, meaning you're pulling the tab and it's pushing down on the little can thing. And then it goes to a class reaction.

I don't know. Maybe it goes to a class two. I don't know. I just know that the nature of the lever changes, the pull tab, bends in the middle, which is cool.

Anyway, what are we doing? Awesome. Awesome. OK.

I'm going to open something else. This is a little different now. Little different. What am I opening?

That popped. I'm going to reassemble this. Now I'm closing it. OK.

Now I'm going to reopen it. It's a pop top. I know what this is because we were talking about it in the other room. I see what you're doing now.

That's Pringles can. Oh, good guess it is not that. It's a roll of film. That's a roll of film.

OK. It is a pop top. It is a pop top. You're absolutely right.

But the of the section is smaller. I think that Pringles can stay there. I have more than that. OK.

This is interesting to me. That's a bag. Yeah, I'm sorry for all of that. I should have thought of that.

OK. New item. OK. Do it again.

Just put it back on. I hate that. It feels like there's. I'm not done opening.

OK. OK, that was the Pringles can. No. Wait.

What happened? Wait. Something ripped. Can you do it again or is it one time?

I can't do it again. Somebody in the third chair knows. I'm back in the container. Oh, I know what it is because it was in the back of my truck.

Tennis balls. There you go. Those are tennis balls. And so you you pop the top and then you peeled the metal.

Yeah, you rip the metal open to it. And it was pressurized. That's why I sounded like a when you opened it. Yeah.

And if you don't get that you have dead tennis balls and it's not much fun to play. OK. Next up. This is I got to hand it to you.

This is more fun than I thought it would be. I thought you were just going to like, I don't know. This is cool. This one you already guessed.

You anticipated this one. OK. Yeah, that's your Pringles. OK.

All right. That's it. OK. OK.

You can open your eyes. Thank you. The exercise doesn't work. Here's some Pringles.

Oh, thanks. Yeah. Do you want to drink too? I'll go zero here.

No, I'm good. So it wasn't a nanny light. It was a coke zero. That's right.

You would never drink a nanny light. I mean, try to be a bro. But it was kind of fun, right? Like, actually hearing these things and having to really focus because this is a soundtrack of your life.

We open and close stuff all the time. It is incredible how integrated our lives in the era of mass production and industrialization. How did you bring all that in the room? With the packages.

I was hoping you wouldn't ask. My pants. But keep eating those Pringles. I just really didn't want you to see what I was bringing in or it would ruin the exercise.

Did you really bring? You hit all that from me. Yeah. Am I that distracted?

You are. It was not difficult to just wait till the certain rhythm of OK, we're doing this now. I know exactly where Dustin's brain will be. I can move a horse in here and try to get away.

So just wait until that moment and then came in with ludicrously expanded pants. And you just did not care at all. I'm glad I did. I could have put my fists on my hips and just surge at you again and again, while having conversation, put a knee up on a table like a pirate on the front of his ship and made chit chat.

So I'm sorry, you were making a deep point. And I just realized I had been taken. Have you listened to the program before? Oh, it's kind of over there.

Had conversations with me before. Yeah. But we do. No, but I'm not that deep point.

It is. Or maybe it's deep. There's packaging is a way bigger part of our lives than we would like to think. There is a anticipation and reward thing that we know is built in to our rhythms and our human brain.

And packaging is part of that process. You get used to hearing a thing that you associate with an activity with a part of life. And you were able to conjure. I mean, you could tell the difference between this cream and the Fritos with your eyes closed.

And when I reached back here and touched this bag, you could tell the difference between a plastic grocery bag and the Fritos. That is such a finely tuned algorithm. You could do that with your eyes closed. And you were right on everything.

We'll disappoint you. You missed on the film canister. Like, come on, man. I was kind of lobbing you on there.

I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to open a book. What book do you think it is, Matt, with your eyes closed? Oh, that's the holy word of God. That's not, I could never miss that.

And you missed on the film canister on the phone. That's rough. But your level of accuracy was startling. And the way you could break down, you could picture the mechanics in your mind of what was happening.

And so it wasn't just that you were used to the sound. You even had some sort of intuition as to what was making the sound. How many other things do we have that are really at the most basic level packaging that informed the little joys and the little rhythms and the little headaches of our life? Are you familiar with the concept called haptic feedback?

I think so. That's what they introduced them. Like my old droid incredible was the first one. I think they did that.

I bought it at Best Buy. I opened it up maybe 2008, something like that. I started pushing buttons. I was like, whoa.

It wiggles. It's like my old Nintendo controller. It's telling me something happened. I don't know.

Is haptic feedback only fake? Or is that term referred to any kind of feedback you get from an item you're operating with? So I think if I'm understanding correctly, it's the use of the sense of touch to provide feedback to the user. For example, I remember being in an airplane and I was learning how to fly.

And I do not have my pilot's license. I stopped just short of that. But I wanted to learn how to fly. And so I went far enough to do that.

And I remember flying. And they're like, do you want to use the new glass cockpit with the MFDs, the multifunction displays? Or do you want to use this one, the old radio in the cockpit? And I was like, I'll do the new one this time.

It costs about $10 extra. But I'll do it. I remember being in the air flying over Huntsville and a wind gust comes up. And I'm in this place where I have to change the radio frequency.

You always fly first. But you've got to communicate as well. And so communication is important. I'm going from the changes happening because of where you were traveling, not because of the wind.

It just happened that they occurred at the same time. So I have to change a radio frequency from whatever it is to something else. So I put my hand up near the touchscreen. And I go to type in the button that's like change radio frequency, type in the numbers, and then hit Enter.

And then I realized that because of the way it was built, I had to take my attention away from it. They call it being outside the cockpit, or being inside the cockpit. So I was looking ahead, and I had to go inside. I had to go inside the cockpit and look at the buttons, because it's a touchscreen.

And I had to tap the buttons. And because of the wind, my hand was moving all over inside the cockpit because it was like turbulence. And I couldn't put in the numbers. I had a similar situation with an old school radio back in the day.

And it was very knobby. And it had like clicky knobs. And you flip the switch. Oh, I'm going to hit this button.

And that's what my channel A is going to be on. I hit this button. And I'm going to be on channel B. And I'm just going to click, click, click.

And that tells me I'm turning it because I can feel the clicks. And it was in that moment when I was in turbulence trying to enter the buttons. I was like, man, I really wish this was a simple system with haptic feedback. And I could understand it better.

I know that silly, but as a consumer, we get all these things. And we have to open them. Pringles can. It's pretty simple to operate.

And I know what to do. And I would submit that more often than not, a bag of chips go stale, whereas what would you call it? It's a tube of Pringles, do not? I agree.

Yeah. Yeah, because you have to roll that bag up and go find a clip somewhere. And so especially with your humidity, we have a longer shelf life out west in the dryness. But you're absolutely right.

If I see a thing at chips and I know it's been there for a while, we're in trouble. If I see a thing at Pringles and it's like five brand designs ago from when Clinton was in office, I'm like, yeah, that's probably still fine. Let's pop that open. We're good.

I think it's interesting. So I think the design of this stuff matters. And not just because of ease of use, but because of how obvious it is to use. Is that what you're getting at here?

No, it's intrigued by it. And the thing that started, it was looking at that Pringles can sit in there and thinking about exactly what you were thinking about. That's a very unique design. They sort of solve the problem.

And then straight up truth is what I did next. I'm going to have time to record the best in later today. Also sitting right over there is this fresh box of tennis balls. I got to hit these around with my daughter.

That one can's not open there. It's very similar to a Pringles can, isn't it? I'm going to make the best of these things a secret. And I'm going to use this engineer brain to tell me which designs are great and which designs are middling.

But credit to where credit is due. Wasn't it Georgetown this about how neat a Pringles can was recently? Yes. I think it's cool.

Yeah. Let's say I go visit somebody else's church. Been around this for a long time. Dude, I don't want to walk in there and be like, I could have gone better.

Especially if something's awesome. I can't help but notice that. Like, oh, I see what you're trying to do there. See how you're trying to serve people.

I see why you arranged things the way you have. You can't turn off the professional brain entirely, even when you're just there to enjoy something. I'm sure even as you go through life just seeking to enjoy things, you can't turn off the engineer brain on packaging. What has stood out to you that's most impressive?

Well, there's a reason I can't turn that off. When I was an engineering intern growing up as a little Wii engineer, I worked at McKe Foods in College of Dail, Tennessee. And I worked on Little Debbie Snack Cakes. And there were two sides of the engineering workforce.

There was product, people making the actual cake. And a lot of these were food engineers from, there's a school in Michigan, I want to say it's, I forget what it is, but they're really good at that stuff. And then there was another one that was packaging engineers. So we had product and packaging.

And they were equally as important. I worked on the product side. So I got to slide down into the basement. There's like this old, wise engineer.

And they're like, oh, you're going to go to the research and development. Yeah. I hear he's working on a new Apple turnover. And so I go down there and there's a sky.

And he had this Apple turnover device. But he had made a design that this one little blade would come down and snip two little crescents in the top of the Apple turnover. And this other thing would flip the crescents over and it would turn a normal looking Apple turnover into a bear face. We went down.

Yeah. They had this product that was like, it's a bear face Apple turnover? Yeah. And they had some cute names.

Like an o-zone, like a large megafauna land animal carnivore? Or like naked? What? No, no.

It was just the face of a bear. Like a teddy face. Like a teddy face. Yeah, a teddy face.

Yeah, a teddy bear. You can see why that would throw me off. You don't mentally just go right to, you know how Apple turnovers always look like bears? I've never thought that before.

It took me a minute. Well, it was interesting because he made two little crescents at this precise angle, flipped that batter over, and then revealed the Apple jelly below. That became the eyes. And then the little squirt of Apple jelly that was from, you know, weaseling out from under the top of the turnover.

That was like the bear's smile. But the genius of what he did is when he flipped those things over for the eyes, they became little, humpy ears of top. I'm sorry, this doesn't translate well to microphone, but it was amazing. It's hard to understand what you're describing.

I'm not going to lie. Did that make it to market? I think it did, really. I'm not sure.

I think it did. That'd be Apple turnover bear pals. Little, okay, I'm going to keep guessing while you Google it. Apple goober bear dippers.

You always like bear piles. You really like the blumps. Clump Mickey foods. It's because of Burger King.

Burger King just makes, they just take everything from the make train, throw it in an oven. They're like, there, it's our chili cheese, Fritos, maple syrup, bacon dippers. It's going to be great, not Joe Bacon dippers. I can't find the name of the product, but it was great.

I absolutely loved it. It was genius. So that was the kind of area that I hung out in while I was there. But there were these packaging engineers.

It was amazing because one of the things I did is my job was to design a better way to slice the rice crispy cakes. Okay. When I first got there, they used ultrasonic knives. So imagine a sheet of rice crispy treat going down on a conveyor belt and it's three feet wide.

And you've got all these ultrasonic knives just pointing straight down vibrating so fast and it's such a small amplitude, you can't see them. But at the microscopic level, you can imagine that as soon as the puffed rice comes in contact with that blade, it would just obliterate it. But it's not moving big enough to see. That's what they did.

So we used the same line to make this new cereal bar that contained cranberries. I think we've talked about this before, but imagine if we've talked about this part. Oh, we're not. So imagine what would happen if you have a rigid rice crispy that's coming in contact with an ultrasonic knife.

There's an impedance there. Like, do you know what the word impedance? That initial resistance that has to be pushed through? Yeah, kind of like a, you know, it's how rigid or how the ability of something to absorb power.

I don't know. Just imagine what happens if that. It's measured in Hertz. No, it's Henry's I think, but that's electrical.

This is a mechanical impedance I'm talking about. Okay. A dehydrated cranberry coming along and it hits that ultrasonic knife. What's going to happen?

I promise I'm going towards packaging. Okay. But what's going to happen with that cranberry hits that ultrasonic knife? I would assume that it would disrupt the union between the vibration of the knife and the thing that it's trying to cut.

The same thing that happens when I'm working a sawzall and I get into a knot on a branch that I'm cutting or something like that. It's going to gum up. Sure. Yeah.

So it kind of comes up. So my job was to figure out a new way to cut this new product. And we came up with a very elaborate pizza slicer type mechanism. But in order for the pizza slicer to work correctly, we had to do it on top and bottom.

And we also had to, you take a three foot wide thing. It's probably less than that. You cut it up into these slits and right before you put it through the guillotine that chops it up into the link to the bars. You know, you have to like fan out the rose a little bit.

But anyway. Oh, okay. So it's like traffic that goes to wider lanes all at once in one direction. Great.

Interesting. Okay. Sure. So that moment right there, that's the end of the product, engineers job.

Nothing else. Like the product is made as soon as it's chopped up in the guillotine, wider lanes in the traffic, chopped up in the guillotine, then it's the packaging people's problem. And at Little Debbie, even if you're buying, I'm just thinking out loud here, even if you're buying like a 10 pack of stuff, it's all individually wrapped inside that box. They individually wrap everything, right?

They do. They do. So then at this point, how do you do that? What do you do to take, let's say you've got a little Rice Crispy cake moving down the line and you've got a three inch gap.

And then you have another one and a three inch gap and another one. How do you put those in bags? Yeah, here's what I would do. I would have it go on to a, I'd have a flipper, like a little spatula, right?

And then I would have another device that swings in like a fully stretched out plastic sheath, right? And it's not sealed up yet. It's just slid onto that flipper or in between a double layer spatula flipper. So the plastic is what that oatmeal cream pie is about to slide onto, but the plastic is wrapped around a flipper.

Then what I would do is I would have that flipper swing the whole thing over and in doing so, the plastic wraps around it and there's a heat stamp on the back side. So one side of that gets that little rigid plastic melt air seal. And the rest of it, maybe three sides would have to get it. How do you seal the heat?

Like there's a little iron that just stands out on that. I understand how you seal between the three inch gaps. But how do you, how did you wrap the plastic around the cake? You didn't describe that.

Well, the wrapping in, I've had 10 seconds to think about this. So might need a little bit of tweaking here, but I'm imagining that the conveyor belt ends, right? We're on a rubber conveyor belt and here come marching all of these little bits. Let's just assume it's one for the sake of clarity.

Here comes this oatmeal cream pie, right? It slides off of the conveyor belt and it drops onto what I'm picturing is being kind of an elaborate shaped spatula that has been loaded by another machine that slides on the plastic that is going to be flipped and wrapped around it and heat sealed shut. So it slides down this other device. The act of flipping it over completes the wrap and then the spatula pulls out and then that heat stamp can come down and nip whatever sides need to be heated together.

So the act of getting it off the conveyor belt and on to the one that then rolls it into boxes could be the moment where you could double the value there. We're moving it to another conveyor belt, but we're also getting the wrap around it. I've never designed an assembly line before. I can't imagine how many problems there are with what I'm saying.

No, it's being very polite. No, it's a very interesting problem, isn't it? Yes. It's super interesting.

So the name of the game is to reduce the number of moving parts. I had a freedom. I'm sorry. We're recording a thing.

It was right there. You can eat the freedom. That's fine. So reduce the number of moving parts.

So the way they usually do something like that is they take that and you have the advantage of seeing my hands make this motion. So imagine the plastic is hovering over the top of the product and you kind of like bring it in as for sake of making it simpler. We widened out those lanes and we chopped up the things. And so we have one line, like one straight line of traffic of Rice Krispy Kakes.

The first thing you have to do is you have to separate them. So you have to get that gap in there. So you've got to make sure that I have a consistent gap between these things. And there's many ways you can do that.

You could make an assembly line or a conveyor belt move faster. And so just imagine like a conveyor belt of uniform things moving in like bumper to bumper traffic. And in the next row, it's like in Mario Kart where you get those little arrows and you go faster. We go, OK.

Let's say you speed up like 10%. Well, as soon as one Rice Krispy Kakes hits that faster conveyor belt, it's going to do a little burnout. It's going to go a little bit faster. And that's going to give you a little bit of gap there until the next one comes in.

And there's all kinds of little tricks you can do. You can actually slow things down by putting a paddle in front of it and moving the paddle. And then you can use optical proximity sensors to measure the presence or not presence of a cake. And you can say, right?

And it gets crazy. So all I'm picturing here is a place where inexplicably, the hero and the villain in a summer blockbuster would end up landing on while it's active and having to fight to the death while these cakes are being cut and packaged. All the commotion just adds additional stress. One strand up and open cream pie box at the end.

So you're measuring the presence or not presence of a cake. You know the velocity of the conveyor belt. Therefore, you can calculate the size of the gap. And you can calculate the length of the cake.

Let's say I'm moving at 1 meter per second. OK. If I detect with my through beam laser sensor, OK, there was something there for one second. Then I've got a 1 meter long cake.

Oh, hey, that's too much. Right. Yeah. So we're all OK.

All right. Yeah. So we're going to reject that one. So we'll have a little paddle flip that one off the assembly line because that's a quality control issue.

But if it's like 20 milliseconds, I'm making all these numbers up, then that gives me a certain length, right? Where do the ones that get flipped off the thing go? They recycle that they go to agricultural sources. And so they feed them to livestock.

There's no making it again. Yeah. And it doesn't go to the office of the 48-year-old man child, Chubs McKee, whose only job there is to just eat the rejects. Actually, everybody there was extremely healthy.

It was very interesting. Everybody's extremely. They sponsor an Iron Man. Rocky just did a McKee Foods Iron Man.

Really? In Nashville, I think. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.

McKee Foods, they get back to the community. They're a great company. I was very excited. I'm sorry for what I said about the hypothetical obese morbidly obese 48-year-old child of the McKee's.

Chubs McKee. Doesn't exist. I now realize he doesn't exist. And I feel like a fool.

No, they're actually a fantastic family. When I was there, Deborah McKee, Little Debbie, I actually ate lunch with her. Really? She was head of manufacturing at the time.

Did she wear that hat? No. Dang it. Really cool person.

The whole brand is named after her and just not an ounce of arrogance or anything. She's just extremely humble. Really cool. We have gap-sized these cakes.

You wrap the plastic around the top. Around the top. OK. And then on the bottom, you have two rollers that are rolling and zipping it together with heat.

Yeah. It would be rolling. That's better. So my strategy required three.

They're just rolling the bottom together, wrapping it around from the top over the sides. And now on the bottom, you're just rolling it together with heat. And that's why those chips, if I had to guess, on the backside, is there like a little seam on the back? Yeah.

Yeah. So that's the seam where it goes together. And then the top is rolled together with heat. Yeah.

And then they come in and they chh chh chh. What's neat is there a separate process? OK. I got to explain it.

I can't show you the same time. You cut it the same time. But oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You think about it.

You think about the way an oatmeal cream pie is packaged. Is it heat sealed on both ends? And then there's a fold that's sealed underneath? It's sealed and cut at the same time.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is, OK, I'm holding up this small free-dose bag. It's a snack-sized bag. This is clearly heat sealed at the top of the bag where one would open it. This is clearly heat sealed at the bottom of the bag where one would not open it unless you'd done screwed up.

But now we turn this thing over and we have a seam on the back. That if you look here, there's about half an inch seam that runs top to bottom from the top heat seal of the bag to the bottom heat seal of the bag. By the nutritional information, it's double thick as you feel it. Clearly, that's the fold point.

And zip together. To make this sealable. When I picture how little Debbie does this, I picture a flap here on this free-dose bag. This is completely sealed shut.

There's no relief to it. Oh, I see what you're saying. It doesn't dangle. You can almost open it up like the first page of a book.

And so you can open it by that method, or the way I opened this free-dose package here it is by the mic. I pinched at the top on either side of the heat seal, and I just pulled it open. So that's a key-bone. I'm sorry.

I have something to say about that potato bag. So my question is, was there a separate step for folding that little flap that I'm describing that you would get on a clear plastic wrap, a snack cake? Yeah. Yeah, there's all kinds of, yeah.

You would fold the plastic around and pinch it together at the bottom and enroll it and heat seal it at the same time. So it's pinched and I'm imagining a zipper. So three heat seals on an opio cream pie. Top of the package, bottom of the package.

So there it doesn't matter which is. Actually just two. There's your zipping it together on the back. And then when I heat seal, this, if you imagine the three-inch gap between them, as soon as I heat seal this one, it's closing the bag that's further down the line, but it's also providing the start point of the next one.

So it's one operation. It's timed correctly so that it happens twice on the front in the back. I've got a big picture question, first you have an observation about the Fritos package. Yeah, I'm sitting here looking at that potato chip bag.

It's more challenging. And the reason is, you remember in baseball cards, sometimes you would have error cards? Yes. That's the holy grail of my childhood.

Yeah, find it. You got to get those. Right. I'm with the one with Billy Ripken swaring on the butt of his bat.

Not that. Those were like misprints. But I mean, like, have you ever seen some that were offset when they're printed and things like that? No, to me, that's a misprint.

The Billy Ripken, that's an error with the very explicit naughty word on the butt of the bat. The one you want, and this is unfortunate, is one that has that, like the full F bomb on it, but the one everybody had in their collection was one that just had an after the fact, like Photoshop black box. Like, why the heck is that there? And then you really notice it, because that's there.

So to me, an error card, they made a mistake in production with what they sent to print, and then it printed properly to their chagrin. A misprint would be where the card is off-centered, and there's no additional value to that. You just got a bum card. If you got a sloppy misprint, something that happened at the end of the run, like tough luck.

You can't take that in to sell it for any money. A misprint. Okay, that's what I'm thinking then. Okay.

So when I look at that Fritos potato chip bag, it's got eke invested in that thing. They have printed that. And what I noticed is on the backside, flip around to the back, sir, you have to make that heat seal hit at certain positions. Otherwise, that bag is going to be printed strange.

So do you see those little black marks of their little tabs and stuff? Yeah, like there's some kind of indicator marked here at the very top of the back. That's an indexing mark. On the scene, indexing mark, that sounded more sophisticated than indicator.

And then I'm seeing these ink dots down here at the bottom. I don't understand what those are for. Yeah, they, so while they're printing this stuff, printing the packaging, they have to make sure, if they have an error, and like, oh man, the color's off, they can instantly look at those dots, and they can be like, oh, our grain's not squirting. Oh, yeah.

Dude, I've looked at these my whole life, and never known, why you got those little ink circles on the bottom of packages like this. The Pringle Scan doesn't have it. That's interesting. Well, it's printing on cardboard.

That's probably got to be your difference, right? Well, I would think they would do some kind of quality control printing and stuff. But there's so many things that go into making this stuff. And oftentimes, it can be equally as challenging to an engineering team as making the actual product.

I think it's fascinating. I don't know. Imagine how hard it'd it be to make this Pringle Scan. Like it's a cardboard tube.

It's got an aluminum top and an aluminum bottom. They have to seal and be fresh. So I would never made this. I would think they pressure test this.

But they probably make it, they print it. Oh, look at this. Look at this. If you look at the spiral wrap on the Pringles can, you can see that the printing is wrapped around the tube after the fact.

It's not perfect. It's like if you try to wrap a gift at Christmas time, and you're like, I'm going to line up the reindeer. But you don't quite. And so the next is just like a quarter inch gank.

That's what you got there. Interesting. I mean, obviously we knew this. We could figure this out.

But they're printing the wrap, which must look like one long strip. Like the wrap on a tennis racket. And then they're putting it over the top slightly, overlapping with each pass and a spiral going all the way up the can. So that can inside probably looks like the inside of a scottow.

Yes. And then it has that wrapping over the top. I'm just thinking about how interesting this is to me and how much it must not be fun to listen to. I think it's fascinating.

I disagree though. I think it is fun. I'm not an engineer. I theoretically shouldn't care.

But I do for a couple of reasons. One is because I like the epistemic humility side of it. I can't make that. When you said that, that really hit me.

I've got those stupid cans. How special is an empty bag of fun sized Fritos? It's not. It's worthless.

You dispose of it as no value, no artistic merit. It is utter chaff. Yet, if the world were deprived of all the Fritos rappers by some apocalyptic event, and I was one of the rare survivors out on the road, protecting what's left of my family, and some mysterious stranger came along. And we're like, I will let you into the vault where everyone survives.

But we lack one used Fritos fun sized wrapper. Bring me one such bag or make it yourself. And you will be admitted into the post-apocalyptic arc of survival. We're staying outside because I can't make that.

I simply cannot make that thing. It is an engineering and artistic achievement that I take for granted that's in front of my face all the time that I throw away callously. And yet I can't do it. I can never duplicate that.

That's really interesting how much goes into all of these things and in a disposable item society, which we live in or maybe a little bit trying to graduate from, we have a very odd relationship with these packages and the images that are on them. So one, I think that's really interesting. Two, I think this conversation is really interesting because I wish I'd ask you questions when your eyes were closed. But I'm going to ask you again now anyway.

I think we have a Pavlovian relationship with these sounds. Oh, yeah, absolutely. For me, that sound of opening that tennis can and rolling out those tennis balls, I can hear and feel the difference between a used tennis ball and one that still has those fuzzy, the fuzzy, the tiny ridges and the fuzzies on it, the packaging, the labeling, the presentation, in a way, I'm supposed to be inflicting myself on it. But there's a feedback loop that you don't think about, tell you, think about it.

It's inflicting itself on me as well and wiring me to absolutely love that. And maybe there's a product, maybe like your mom gave you Ipacac or something when you were a kid. And you're like, just the sound and shape of that bottle makes me want to gag. People have those kinds of associations as well.

I think it's really interesting because of how present packaging is, how much it's clearly shaping and affecting us and how little we think about it. I think Apple does a really good job of this. There's clearly a lot of thought that goes into what will the experience be like when you open the phone? That experience has been somewhat diminished for me recently when I realized, oh, they don't even give you the charger brick anymore.

Yeah, that's something. That is actually figured out. Yeah, figured out or just pay us more money. Yeah, it's pretty easy to see how that decision worked.

But the act of opening a phone and the cardboard is so precise. And I don't know what the finish is. They put on the box itself, but it's like a matte finish with a slight hint of a rubbery texture too. It's really nice.

Yes. You know, you have to hold the box open, but there's just enough air that can go through it so that it just kind of drops out. It foams like a board game. It does.

It's really enjoyable. It's like opening a treasure. And I think that's what those designers are going for. They want you to want that feeling again.

They want you to be sad once you've opened it. Because now you don't get to open it again. How often do you put it back together and open it a couple more times after the fact just without thinking. Because like, dang, that felt really good.

Why? How many phone boxes do you have? I don't know. I don't know if I keep the phone boxes.

OK, you're weird. I have every single one going back to like my droid incredible that I referenced earlier. I don't know what I'm going to do with them. I keep thinking I'm going to keep flies in there, like different categories of flies as I accumulate them for fly fishing.

I got them all. They're just such wonderful boxes. And I don't really use boxes per se. That's not a thing for me.

But I'm going to someday. And then what am I going to do? Go back out and buy a bunch of phones so that I have those? No.

Every time we move. Hey, can we throw these away? I think I'm going to use them. What do you use them for?

Stop with your danged inquisition woman. There's a, please stop saying these things to me. You're exposing me to the prod that I am. I just want the boxes.

Yeah, it's interesting. If you were to make a product right now, let's just come up with a fake product. You're going to sell a, I don't know, what are you going to sell? I'm always the one who comes up with a random thing.

And I want to see what your brand does. You're going to sell a court of dippers. They're just dippers. Oh, they're dippers.

Yeah, they're not any kind of dippers. They're just dippers. What do you dip them in? Things that need dipping.

This is why I handle this part of the program. OK, dippers. We're making dippers. Yeah, so the problem with these is that they're kind of like cashews, but you open the package and you get a few and then you close it.

But you don't do it very often. Maybe twice a week. Oh, OK. Yeah.

Infinite shelf life on these different. Oh, look at this. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah.