 I've spent over a year now working on this project in the background trying to achieve a rather absurd goal. But why? Well, because I fear for our future, and I wanted a way to cook a chicken. There's a lot of concern right now about the rise of AI and what that means for workers in new fields that is poised to threaten. Every time a new form of automation comes for a new area of jobs, comparisons are frequently made to similar events in the past, most notably the Luddites. A movement of the early 1800s, they rose up against the early mechanization of textile production, which they believe threatened their livelihood and standards of living, whose name is now synonymous with backwards-facing and resisting progress. In a larger historical context, this is generally true and people moved on to new jobs and careers. From this video, I wanted to look at another sect of population that was impacted by automation, who never truly recovered. And of course, I'm talking about the working dog. The dog was first domesticated at least 30,000 years ago when early humans persuaded them with lucrative job contracts. In the years that followed, canines enjoyed a wide berth of employment opportunities from security services, pest-controlled technicians, hunting guides, courier services, ranch assistants, and as the focus of this video, the unique profession of the turn-spit dog. Generally humans have been able to move on to new jobs as automation removes previous ones, but that's not the case with dogs. Throughout history, as automation increases, dog unemployment rates have gotten higher and higher. Most dogs today are unemployed and face zero opportunities for ever getting a job, leaving them with nothing to do but lay around and are often forced to even beg for their food. And believe it or not, there is not even any unemployment benefits for dogs. So in light of this new wave of automation, potentially giving many of us a similar fate, I thought I would do my part to fight back and see if we could bring back at least some jobs for dogs. So I'm going to attempt to bring back the professional turn-spit dog and get these poor creatures back on their feet with steady employment and have them cook me a chicken. So I did something really dumb recently, I accidentally washed my car keys. Now I no longer have a working fob to lock and unlock my car remotely, and I feel like I've traveled back to the 1990s. But fortunately I just happened to get in touch with the sponsor of today's video, Car Keys Express, who offer a super simple solution to this problem. I don't even need to track down the dealership or even leave my house, it's called SnapKey. It's the new way to replace car keys from your phone. 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The turnspit dog is a specific breed of dog that was bred in the 16th to 19th century for one single purpose, to rotate a spit of meat over a fire in the kitchen. They would continuously run in a small wheel, which would rotate the meat consistently as it slowly cooked. However, as most things seem to go, more modern machines eventually replace this profession, and the entire breed of the turnspit dog has gone extinct. So if I want to bring back this profession, I need to first build the mo wheel. So I actually started this project over a year ago and had this plan of building progressively larger projects in succession to explore intern forms of animal and natural power and kind of figure out things as I scale up. Starting first with the small dog wheel that could be repurposed as a small water wheel, then I'd build a larger water wheel and eventually scale the dog wheel up to a human-sized wheel. Needless to say, while I did start this project first, I've now completed all of those other projects before this video could be finished. All right, so the first step and basically the main part of making this actual wheel, basically going to be two circles to then connect together, put some kind of platforms on there to walk on. So the biggest challenge is going to be making basically straight wood into a circle. So I decided to go with a 10-sided hexagon. So I ended up deciding to go with a 10-sided hexagon. So I went through and did a bunch of particular cutting and sawing and chiseling to make 20 of these identical little shapes here. And my hope is they're going to overlap a little bit and fit together. So hopefully offer a decent amount of strength and hopefully all my math and angles and everything are correct and this will work out. So I think I'm going to glue everything together first with some high glue and then finish drilling the holes. Then everything should fit together a little bit better. All right, so we've got the two wheels all glued up and held together. They're solid pieces now. They were solid pieces, but obviously not very strong as I very clearly just demonstrated. Not much holding them together. Going to add a little bit more strength by drilling out pegs between each one. And this will kind of help prevent any shifting and probably add some additional glue onto everything, especially the parts that just broke. Hoping to give us a nice long pegs to give the strength of the full thing and then they'll run through into these boards, which will then connect the two wheels on a pretty decent cylinder then. I think I broke pretty much every bond that I previously glued. They left them a little too long and driving them all the way through was a little bit too difficult. But I think we basically have the rough structure here. And I just got to add the other wheel. Probably tap everything a little tight again with the glue hold. Hopefully we'll have a solid wheel. Got it together. The holes do not align perfectly, which is not great. Try to be very careful on my math and use a good template. But there's enough variants and some primitive tools. They're not the easiest to use. So we have a wheel like object. That's the biggest and most challenging part of this build. I debated a lot of different ways to do this without using any nails and just all wood. And this seemed like the best strategy for something strong with just a few pins. But I feel like there's definitely things I could have done better. Woodworking without nails is not something I have a thunder experience with. And hopefully it's strong enough to support a dog. It is feeling pretty solid. Glue hasn't even dried yet. So yeah, I'll let this dry up and then start moving on to the next step, which will be putting some platforms in here and the base it'll spin on. So I got pretty much the whole wheel constructed now. Good thing we realized some safety concerns. I'm sure as you breed a specific dog, they're comfortable with the wheel and they're not going to freak out and jump out. But since I'm still training them in, I'm a little worried they might try and stick their body through one of these holes here and so don't want to do that. Make sure this is as comfortable as possible for our four-legged helper. Also a little worried the wood is kind of smooth, a little hard to grip. There's some gaps. We make a few modern adjustments to this to make it a little safer. So we got some artificial grass to put on top of the wood on the inside to line it and that'll get a nice soft surface to walk or trot along. And then about some plexiglass panels here. You're going to cut them and fit them, cover all of the holes. So once our four-legged friend is inside there, they will be both trapped and cozy. Then just a process of trying to figure out how to train them to walk and spin the whole thing. Looking at other drawings, I think there's a little bit lighter duty. I feel a little bit of an issue because I've been trying to build this in a way that doubles as a water wheel in the future. So this might take a little bit of force to you to actually spin. With the wheel now constructed onto the next problem, finding a dog. Now I know what you're thinking. Andy, you famously have a cat. You've been watching for a friend for the past 78 months. You know, at this point, this might be my cat. So why not just use her? And I think that comes down to the nature of the relationship to these animals. Dogs were domesticated and employed by humans for thousands of years. Cats, however, were the independent entrepreneurs of the world. As humanity developed agriculture and started storing large amounts of grains, cats saw the free market demand for a pest control service and swooped right in there to open up shop. Since then, they domesticated themselves along with their new roommates, humans. Ultimately, this ancient contract between cats and humans is still honored today as my roommate continues to protect my grain supply. But doing an actual job, like powering a wheel, not a part of that original deal. So I'm going to have to find a dog. Fortunately, there's a dog park near me. And if you're quick enough, you need just an egg one for free. I started my first game. They're acquainted with the wheel and comfortable with it. Take them out. Got Holly here. She's been doing this for a few days now and she's getting kind of comfortable with it. Once I got her spinning a little bit, she did okay, but she's a little uncomfortable now, I think. So just the whole uncertainty of it moving and the floor suddenly becoming the ceiling. It's a little scary. So she's been running away whenever we try to train some more. So got this velcroed, the opening here. We can easily kind of access it. So I can put her in there, let her get used to it again, and then slowly start spinning it and just kind of bribe her with a lot of treats. And hopefully, hopefully you can get her a little bit more comfortable. Then after that, it'll be a process of, once she's comfortable with that, getting her to actually spin it herself. She's ready to go. You ready? Like working as well as I'd hoped. She's not quite like naturally flowing with it and just going into a trot. She's kind of resisting it and just sideways walking. She can definitely make it move on her own. I think she understands how to intentionally do it though. After multiple attempts, things didn't seem to be working. I think being locked into a small space was freaking her out and preventing her from getting used to the actual wheel and moving it on her own. As she seemed to just focus on trying to find a way to escape. So the next step, I bought a cheap cat wheel that was all open and didn't have to be closed off. I figured I could get her used to the operation of this wheel and then switch her back to the one that I made. Training on this new wheel had some initial promise and got her to start rotating it herself. Beginning to keep doing it continuously proved to be a bit too much of a challenge. After she had her fill of treats, she just became just interested in going much further. In the end, I was left with the conclusion that this dog might not be the best match. A larger one that's more energetic, that's more food motivated, might be a better batch. So let's go back to the dog park and see if I can snake something a little bit bigger. A larger dog requires a larger wheel, so I quickly put together a brand new wheel. I made it kind of a hybrid between the previous one I made and the cat wheel that I bought. This time allowing one side to be completely open so that the dog doesn't feel trapped. This ended up requiring some modern equipment and hardware to make a roll smoothly though. After several training sessions, things started to look very promising. Rex picked up the new assignment pretty quick and was much more motivated to keep going. After several sessions, I finally started to get him to keep moving continuously. So I thought it was time to put this apparatus in the test with an actual chicken and see if we can start cooking. So first up, let's forge the actual rotisserie that will connect to the dog wheel. In so-so, I would say, some days are really good. He seems to get the hang of it. Seems to want to know he's supposed to keep running. Other times, he just doesn't want to do it and he just wants to treat. And I think if you want a dog, that's kind of dumb. Rex here isn't necessarily the smartest dog, but he is smart enough to know that if he's in the wheel, he's not really going anywhere. So he's only going to do it if he is getting to treat. Is it that this dog is scared of fire? He did really good, verified to be anywhere near it, and does not want to run in the wheel. So we're going to go for one more try with another chicken on there. Hopefully, we got some improvements. We added a pulley system to the rotisserie. Put the fire a little bit further from the dogs, and we'll also have a smaller fire that they are hopefully less afraid of. That's why I have both of the dogs with me today. So we can double dog this wheel. Surprisingly, they like to run on it together, which does not seem comfortable. But my hope is at least one of them will be food motivated enough to maintain it. And I can just kind of keep feeding them. I really want the dog to do this on its own, but that doesn't seem to be working out. So I think I just got to be constantly feeding them food. I'm going to get a fire started, load up our chicken, and get going. About half an hour of trying to get the dogs to run on it, and I'm going to make some results. We have a cooked chicken, even with the fire very low. Can't feel any heat or smoke. This time Rex was still too terrified of the just concept of a fire being that close to him. Holly, however, was a real trooper. The only problem is I made the wheel for Rex, so it's a little bit too heavy for her. I technically did all the work and had to manually hold the treat in front of the dogs. But in the end, I think, I can say, I didn't actually cook this chicken. She did. But she wants my chicken. Yeah, you cook that. Let's give it a taste. See if we cooked it well. See how good of a cook these dogs actually are. Oh, burger chicken. Barely had to do anything to cook it. Yeah, you earned this. What's that? Fruit to your own labor. Good job, Paul. So this was not quite the slam dunk of the result I was hoping for, but after years of training multiple dogs, I think I'm going to have to call it close enough to success. These dogs are literal pockets of infinite energy that I hoped I could harness, and who knows, possibly solve the energy crisis. Only small goals here. Instead, I ended up taking a large amount of time and rebuilds and so many treats. Just trying to motivate these dogs to even move the wheel, I think they've gained a lot of weight. It is unfortunate that the turn spit dog went extinct. It certainly feels like some dogs are just born to run on wheels and do it instinctively, but none of the countless dogs that I tried with had any trace of that still in them. So I think I'm just going to take the lazy view of a lot of employers today and just declare, nobody wants to work these days. Clearly the problem is the workforce and not my methods or incentives. Dogs a day are just entitled and lazy and lack the work ethics of past generations of dogs. The world is doomed. But in truth, I found it just a lot easier to buy a dog costume and pay my assistant Theo to run the wheel himself instead. The hours of training, building wheels and dog treats added up to a lot more than what I could just pay him. And Theo loved it. So I don't think I quite unlocked this source of free energy. I think we can take this as a precautionary tale for our potential future. The more jobs we give away to automation, the more our future might turn into the lives of dogs a day, where we give up working long days of employment with backbreaking work and find ourselves transformed into unemployed, living leisureful lives full of safety, love and belonging. That is a dystopia that might be waiting for us. And who would want that? Thank you again to all of my supporters on Patreon. 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