- Hello and welcome to the Hard Reset 2022 Gift Guide.
Please like and subscribe so we can share
this whole series with you.
I'm Nick, I'm one of the co-creators of Hard Reset
and we put together this gift guide
because as we research Hard Reset
we're constantly finding interesting products or ideas
that we like to be able to share with people.
Some of those make it into the show and some don't
but each of these products has been selected
because we think, like all the Hard Reset topics we cover,
that they invite you to rethink something in your life
from the ground up.
So stick around as we talk about each of these products.
We're gonna talk about our experiences with them
and who we think they might be a good gift for.
Also, keep watching to learn how you can win
one of these awesome gifts. (dramatic music)
(wrapping paper rustling)
(engine whirring)
So we put together a gift guide.
We're gonna have five different episodes,
one on food, one on learning,
one on the metaverse, one on books,
and one on personal technology.
The first episode we're doing is all about food.
So growing it, cooking it, eating it and understanding it.
And if you wanna win one of these,
leave us a comment down below that tells us
which one of these you think
will have the biggest impact on the world.
We're gonna pick our favorite comment from the top comments
and we're gonna give that commenter
probably one of these gifts.
One of this one, I think.
Maybe not this exact one, we'll send you one from Amazon.
We're not crazy.
I've used this one, so you don't want it.
Okay, let's get to the gifts. (wrapping paper rustling)
Food is a universal thing.
We all eat.
If you don't, you should try it.
It will make you a lot less grumpy.
We've covered a lot of different food topics on Hard Reset
because how we grow and consume food
is so impactful on our lives and on the world.
So the first item that we're gonna talk about
is this indoor vertical garden.
Yes, a home vertical garden.
Now we've covered vertical gardens on Hard Reset.
They're usually big warehouses
full of racks and racks of produce.
This is one that you can actually have in your house.
It's got little pods that you pop in
and then it uses AI to automatically water your plants
and make sure they get the right amount of light.
So even if you live in a tiny basement apartment
that only gets direct sunlight
from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm in the summertime
you can still grow your own lettuce and tomatoes
and peppers and chives and cucumbers and mint.
You get the idea.
Why is this a Hard Reset gift?
Well, we think that this is super cool
for some of the same reasons we think
commercial vertical farms are cool.
Think about the vast amount of the earth's surface
that humanity has taken over to use for growing food.
What if we could use less of the earth's surface
for growing food and distribute food production
so that it's closer to where people consume it,
like in urban areas, or with something like this,
even inside people's homes?
So there's big ecological benefits to this.
It wouldn't hurt for everyone to be able
to grow their own food at home.
Eating more fresh vegetables
is pretty much objectively good for you
and growing your own vegetables is a surefire way
to make sure you eat more of them.
For this product, we really love the overall design.
It's pretty easy to build and set up
and it looks great as is.
We haven't had it long enough to produce our first crop
but so far we love how it pretty much manages itself
and lets you know when it needs something
or when the food is ready to be harvested.
It's also a nice compact design.
It only has about two square feet
at the bottom that it needs
so you can fit it even in a small apartment.
Now, this is not a small gift.
The setup you see here
costs about $850 just for the hardware.
That's an investment.
After that, you can either subscribe
and they'll send you prepared pods with seeds in them
or you can source your own seeds and soil
and grow them on your own.
Either way, there are potential long term savings
compared to buying produce at retail prices
but it's definitely not a small purchase.
So if you're going to get this for someone
make sure you really like them.
Maybe even love them.
As for who to give this to,
well it's a great gift for someone like me
who likes the idea of growing their own food
but it's really really bad at taking care of plants.
I cannot count how many of my wife's plants I've murdered.
Not outta malice, but sheer incompetence.
An intelligent garden like this can make it easy
for even someone like me to grow food.
(wrapping paper rustling) The next gift on our set
is this molecular gastronomy starter kit.
Now, if you're not familiar with molecular gastronomy,
it's basically a Hard Reset for how we think about cooking.
Molecular gastronomy is all about
approaching the preparation of food
through the lens of chemistry and physics
and being extremely precise about how you prepare your food
in order to create very specific flavors
and textures and experiences.
Think about using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream
out of avocados, I don't know, crazy shit like that.
It's usually found in super high end dining experiences,
but anything that allows you to rethink something familiar
from the ground up has Hard Reset written all over it.
This is a super fun kit that makes it easy to dive in
and try out some of these techniques.
It comes with everything you need to get started
and it's kind of a fun thing to do with your whole family.
There's a kit for culinary experimentation
as well as one for mixology and cocktails.
As for how much it costs, you're looking at about $70,
which is a lot cheaper than a meal
at one of those fancy molecular gastronomy restaurants.
We'd say it's a perfect gift for someone
who has a culinary wild side and likes to cook.
This could get them to break out
that sous vide machine
that you got them last year. (wrapping paper rustling)
The next thing I wanna talk about is this.
Apparently, apparently you can buy home distilling kits
on Amazon, I did not know that
until we started putting this guide together.
The reason I didn't think you could buy a still like this,
and I want to be very clear about this,
is because distilling liquor
is 1000% illegal in the United States
without a permit from the Tax and Trade Bureau.
So definitely don't do that or encourage others to do it.
That said, the hardware for distillation is totally legal
and has a lot of totally fun legal uses.
William Faulkner once said
that civilization begins with distillation
and he was probably right in more ways than one.
Distillation is one of the core technologies
that has allowed human civilization to flourish.
Of course, distilled liquor is mainly associated
with its recreational or ceremonial uses,
but it was also pretty important for purifying water
and acting as an early sterilizing agent.
So you can distill a lot more than just alcohol.
You can also distill essential oils
and other things like that, or really just water.
This kit is about a hundred bucks and it's pretty flexible.
It's not super easy to set up
'cause the instructions were really poorly translated,
but figuring it out with a friend or family member
is a great bonding experience.
I tried it out by making distilled water.
I took a small piece of the Pacific Ocean
and distilled it down to pure water.
What I was left with was salt,
another cornerstone of civilization.
And since it was ocean water
I guess there's probably some fish poop mixed in there,
but still...
Get it? Still.
This is a perfect gift for anyone who's interested
in the science of food, cooking, or distillation.
And also this main pot can still be used
for things like home brewing,
which is actually very legal. (wrapping paper rustling)
So this down here is Lomi, a little home composting unit.
Basically, you put your food scraps
and other compostable materials into it
and it turns it into dirt.
On the surface, it might seem strange
that you need an appliance
to turn home food scraps into dirt,
but composting is actually pretty complicated.
Different temperatures and oxygen levels
can impact which microbes thrive
and the Lomi manages all of that by breaking food down
and controlling the temperature and moisture levels inside.
There's huge conservation benefits to this
and we think it's a Hard Reset
for how we think about our waste.
Lomi is helping people capture value from their waste,
getting us closer to a circular economy.
So if you lived on a colony on Mars
you'd never dream of wasting your food scraps
by burying them in a landfill somewhere.
You'd be cycling all your scraps back into new food.
We don't currently live on Mars
but there's no reason to think differently about our waste.
I love the design and the simplicity of Lomi
and it's super easy use.
The output is also super awesome.
You're basically making really good dirt
that you can use in your own garden,
maybe even in your own home vertical garden.
So the molecules and nutrients
that we're able to preserve from this
can have real lasting impact
and even feed us down the line.
Lomi is not super cheap.
It's 500 bucks and it's definitely a gift
for someone who's close to you.
But it's a perfect gift
for anyone who's interested in gardening
or looking to reduce the amount of waste they put out.
It's also fun for families
to learn about how these processes work
and how our food economy impacts our lives and the world.
So in full disclosure Lomi did provide this unit to us
to test and evaluate.
Now, that didn't change our evaluation
or our review or recommendation,
and any problems we have with it we would've let you know
but we really do just think it's a cool product.
(wrapping paper rustling) This imposing book
is "Modernist Cuisine at Home"
by the folks at the Cooking Lab founded by Nathan Myhrvold.
You might know Mr. Myhrvold from his involvement
in a lot of patent lawsuits,
but he's also done amazing things in the world of cookbooks.
Now, the first cookbook that he came out with
was called, "Modernist Cuisine,"
it was a five volume book, cost about $500, I wanna say,
and it was incredibly beautiful
but this is a more affordable and approachable book
that they've put out recently.
It's not like a condensed version of the bigger one.
They actually have original content for this
and its own thing.
So it's definitely a worthwhile investment.
It is expensive, it's about 80 bucks,
but it's a really, really lush book.
I love pouring over the photographs
and learning about how food works at the molecular level,
really understanding how we cook from the ground up.
One of the most amazing things they do in this
is they're constantly doing cross sections of things.
So they'll cross sect a bowl of salad
so you can see how things work.
They do this with appliances
so you can see how mixers work
or how heat spreads across the surface
of a wok or a frying pan.
These cross sections really make visual some things
that we've always sort of understood intuitively
about cooking but never really had a visual way of seeing.
I highly recommend this book.
Pick one up for someone in your life who likes to cook
and probably a good idea to get it
for someone who will cook for you.
Also, make sure that they have room in their library.
It's not small, it's large enough
to stun a burglar with or crush a small animal.
(wrapping paper rustling) So the last item
in this episode is more of a stocking stuffer gift.
These are compostable straws from New Light Technologies
made using air carbon.
We actually covered this company
for one of our other series
and we love what they're doing.
Basically, they're taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and using it to create biomaterials that act like plastics
but will still compost in nature.
We also love their cutlery and they even make plates,
but the straws are really the thing.
I cannot tell you how sick I am of paper straws.
They're fine in an emergency
but you cannot drink a milkshake through a paper straw
before it completely falls apart.
And if you drink the milkshake fast enough
that the straw doesn't fall apart,
then you're going to get a terrible ice cream headache,
which nobody wants.
And metal straws are not a lot better.
They're a pain to wash and they hurt your teeth.
Now, my concerns on this topic are totally frivolous,
but for people with disabilities the bans on plastic straws
can have a very serious impact on their quality of life.
The reason I think this is a Hard Reset is
because we need to think differently
about our waste products.
Just like we need to compost more,
we can think about things like carbon dioxide as a resource,
we can use it to make things of value.
Instead of just treating it as a pollutant,
maybe we should treat it as a commodity.
But innovations like air carbon mean
that we can have the upsides of plastic straws
without destroying the planet.
These are available at Target online for about $3 a box
and they're also used by some restaurant chains.
You can give them to anyone who wants to take their time
enjoying their milkshake. (wrapping paper rustling)
So, we hope you enjoyed this episode on food.
Food is one of the most important things in our lives.
It literally is what makes up our whole bodies.
That's kind of weird.
I'm made up of a lot of hamburgers and milkshakes.
Oh, anyway, so a gift that opens up someone's eyes
to the possibilities of eating differently
could literally change who they are from the molecule up.
Come back for our other episodes on learning,
the metaverse, personal tech and books.
And make sure that you like and subscribe
so that we can keep you in the loop
and share more news and stories about people and ideas
that are changing the world.
Laura, do you wanna buy any of these gifts?
- No. (Nick laughing)
- I didn't convince you? - No.
- Let's go ahead and cut.