00:00SPEAKEROkay, I'm going to test your knowledge of material science and maybe physics.
00:04SPEAKEROh yeah, let's go. I love this.
00:06SPEAKERGetting excited?
00:07SPEAKERYeah, hit me.
00:08SPEAKERNow, of course, granted, I could have probably just Googled this in about five seconds,
00:11SPEAKERbut what's the point of doing anything in a straightforward manner when you can turn
00:14SPEAKERinto new content?
00:15SPEAKERYeah, that's the meaning of my life.
00:18SPEAKERSo with that said, does rust hinder conductivity?
00:22SPEAKEROh, boy, that's a fun question. So rust is iron oxide, right?
00:28SPEAKERThis is harkening back to the old Whiskey Media panel of experts days here.
00:32SPEAKERI'm just querying my personal Wikipedia here.
00:34SPEAKERI don't think that rust impacts connectivity. I don't think it completely removes it,
00:39SPEAKERbut I think it definitely is more resistive than just a piece of iron.
00:43SPEAKERInteresting.
00:43SPEAKERThis is a guess, though. I don't know for sure.
00:46SPEAKEROkay, so what happened is we have a wall clock, an analog wall clock in the bathroom.
00:50SPEAKERIt's just kind of a cheapo.
00:51SPEAKERA $10 IKEA special?
00:52SPEAKERYep.
00:53SPEAKERPerfect.
00:53SPEAKERAnd I noticed it had stopped and I thought, you know, we didn't change the battery that
00:57SPEAKERlong ago and it's been maybe a small number of months.
01:00SPEAKERAnd I pulled it off and it's in the bathroom.
01:03SPEAKERFirst of all, San Francisco, like we're not far from the water here.
01:06SPEAKERThere's fog constantly. Like it's just a humid area in general.
01:10SPEAKERLook, the like normal relative humidity here when it is like 60 percent.
01:14SPEAKERIt's always humid.
01:16SPEAKERAlso, that bathroom has no windows.
01:18SPEAKERYep.
01:18SPEAKERSo you have a fan in there?
01:20SPEAKERYeah, there is a ventilation fan.
01:21SPEAKEROkay. Do you use it?
01:23SPEAKEROh, yeah.
01:23SPEAKEROkay.
01:24SPEAKERAll the time, like daily every time we shower, but then we have a standing, we have a floor
01:28SPEAKERstanding dehumidifier, the wheels around as well.
01:31SPEAKERSo I point the dehumidifier at the bathroom on a regular basis.
01:34SPEAKERAnyway, point is the clock had stopped.
01:36SPEAKERI pulled it off, pulled the battery out and the terminal on the positive end of the battery
01:40SPEAKERand also the positive part of the battery itself had both rusted.
01:44SPEAKERWas it rust?
01:45SPEAKERWas it like red rust or green corrosion?
01:48SPEAKERNo, it was not corrosion.
01:49SPEAKERIt was also, doesn't, doesn't the corrosion usually come out of the negative side?
01:53SPEAKERI don't, that I don't know.
01:54SPEAKERUsually the corrosion is a bane.
01:57SPEAKERYeah, no, it's awful.
01:58SPEAKERI, but, but no, I sadly have seen way more alkaline battery corrosion in my time than
02:04SPEAKERI wish I had.
02:04SPEAKERAnd this was definitely not that.
02:06SPEAKERThis was absolutely.
02:07SPEAKERThis is rust.
02:08SPEAKERIt was visually indistinguishable from rust.
02:10SPEAKERI'll say that.
02:10SPEAKERSo less batteries can corrode in a way that looks just like rust.
02:14SPEAKERNo.
02:15SPEAKERLike it was, it was on there in a way that I could not just wipe off with alcohol.
02:18SPEAKERSo I'm quite sure it was actual rust on the metal.
02:23SPEAKERAnyway, I was just curious and it's not that I care.
02:24SPEAKERIt's just one AA battery, but I was just curious if the clock was not going because there was
02:29SPEAKERtoo much rust on the battery or because the battery is actually dead.
02:33SPEAKERProbably the rust is impeding the signal and, but, but like, I would guess the battery is
02:39SPEAKERalso probably dead if it's rusty and corroding.
02:42SPEAKERI don't know.
02:42SPEAKERThat's weird.
02:43SPEAKERI don't know why you would get rust instead of corrosion.
02:45SPEAKERThat's that's, I mean, I know there's moisture in the air cause of the showering, but that's
02:48SPEAKERa weird one.
02:49SPEAKERAre you saying there's something untoward going on in our bathroom?
02:52SPEAKERI mean, what if it's a, what if it's a, what if you have a bathroom of null time and just
02:56SPEAKERtime stops in there and that's why the clock stopped.
02:57SPEAKEROh no.
02:58SPEAKERWait, what if my shower dispenses time fall and not rainfall?
03:02SPEAKERLook, hold on.
03:03SPEAKERNo, no, let's not.
03:04SPEAKERDon't bring any of that stranding nonsense into this podcast.
03:07SPEAKEROkay.
03:07SPEAKERIs this a strand podcast?
03:09SPEAKERNo, it is not.
03:10SPEAKERI was referencing Cliff Simak, Clifford Simak's seminal book.
03:15SPEAKERI think it's the way station.
03:17SPEAKERHold on.
03:17SPEAKERI'm looking.
03:18SPEAKERIt's a, it's a 1976 book.
03:22SPEAKERIt's one of my favorite science fiction books of all time.
03:24SPEAKERAnd God, his Wikipedia page is so long.
03:27SPEAKERHe wrote so many books.
03:29SPEAKERYeah.
03:29SPEAKERWay station.
03:30SPEAKERIt's about a guy, a civil war soldier who's recruited to maintain like an interstellar
03:36SPEAKERway station and inside his house time stops.
03:40SPEAKERThat's how they keep him there.
03:41SPEAKERThat's how he keeps his job.
03:42SPEAKERWait, that sounds like your bathroom.
03:45SPEAKERIt sounds perfect.
03:46SPEAKERWell, I mean, look, the good news time stops in your bathroom.
03:49SPEAKERThe bad news, it only stops while you're in your bathroom.
03:51SPEAKERSo every minute you're out of your bathroom, you're closer to death.
03:53SPEAKERDoes time freeze for all of existence while you're in the know, just for you, just in
03:58SPEAKERthe bathroom, but everybody else continues aging and moving forward.
04:01SPEAKERYou can move forward through time without, without aging yourself, but you have to stay
04:06SPEAKERin the bathroom.
04:07SPEAKERDo you have bodily functions that continue to function while you're in there?
04:11SPEAKERYou're in the bathroom.
04:12SPEAKERYou're good.
04:13SPEAKERIt's covered.
04:13SPEAKERDo you have to eat?
04:15SPEAKERTake some fish in there.
04:16SPEAKERTake some canned fish.
04:16SPEAKERYou'll be fine.
04:17SPEAKERI don't know.
04:19SPEAKERLook, the trick is you just have to dip out for a minute, grab some stuff and then go
04:22SPEAKERspend a couple of days in there.
04:23SPEAKERAnd it's, you know, each, each time you do that, you're adding days to your life.
04:26SPEAKERAnd so I'm just gonna have to like move all my computers into the bathroom so I can have
04:29SPEAKERas much time to tinker as I want.
04:31SPEAKERI mean, look, you need to take whatever you just have to do.
04:34SPEAKERIt's gotta be done, man.
04:35SPEAKERYou got to get it, get in there, just hunker down and don't think about it too much.
04:39SPEAKERIf there's one room in the house where you have to do what has to be done, it's the null
04:43SPEAKERtime bathroom.
04:43SPEAKERYeah, the null time bathroom, time slows down.
05:14SPEAKER[Music]
05:15SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:18SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:18SPEAKERI'm Brad.
05:20SPEAKERSo I have bad news for you, Brad.
05:22SPEAKEROh.
05:23SPEAKERWe and my family have been playing a lot of peak over the last few days.
05:27SPEAKERWait, what's bad news about that?
05:28SPEAKERThat sounds fun.
05:29SPEAKERWell, so you know how when we play peak, we have conversations about what we're going
05:33SPEAKERto do and we talk about like what we're carrying and we converse and strategize a fair amount?
05:38SPEAKERSure.
05:39SPEAKERSome people in the chat maybe thought too much when we were playing over the next later
05:42SPEAKERstreams, my daughter's strategy is just go up and don't think about it too much.
05:47SPEAKEROkay.
05:48SPEAKERAnd she fills, she does it with effectively one slot.
05:52SPEAKERShe has two slots dedicated to Bing Bong and the Bugle Bugle.
05:57SPEAKERAnd she just goes up the mountain and like she got to the ice planet, to the ice world
06:05SPEAKERalmost immediately.
06:06SPEAKERI was just waiting for the part where this is a more effective strategy than what we
06:09SPEAKERdid.
06:10SPEAKERWe got to the, we got to the fourth biome, like the first game that we played together
06:14SPEAKERlast night.
06:15SPEAKERShe's an absolute monster.
06:17SPEAKERYeah.
06:17SPEAKERIt's incredible.
06:18SPEAKERYou know, I tried a little bit of that, that one stream, remember when you told me to go
06:21SPEAKERon my way and I did, and then I'd kind of got, I got to the top of the mountain like
06:25SPEAKER10 minutes faster than you guys.
06:26SPEAKERUh huh.
06:27SPEAKERYeah.
06:27SPEAKERAnd then what happened?
06:28SPEAKERYour hubris.
06:29SPEAKERThe game has ideas about people who leave their party behind.
06:33SPEAKERLook, I appreciate that, but yeah.
06:35SPEAKERSo anyway, I was-
06:36SPEAKERThe angry spirits of the mountain claimed me.
06:38SPEAKERYeah, I was, uh, I was chagrined because all the advice I had imparted upon her turned
06:43SPEAKERout to be bad and I should just use her strategy of just go up and don't think about it too
06:47SPEAKERmuch.
06:47SPEAKERMan, I got to get in there.
06:48SPEAKERI'm about to leave town for like three weeks almost.
06:51SPEAKERIt runs great on the Steam Deck, man.
06:53SPEAKERWell, I'd have to get a Steam Deck.
06:55SPEAKERHey Brad.
06:55SPEAKERBut yes.
06:56SPEAKERYou should get a Steam Deck.
06:57SPEAKERMaybe.
06:58SPEAKERWhat if I got a Steam Deck 2 someday?
06:59SPEAKERThere's not gonna be a Steam Deck 2 until there's new consoles, man.
07:02SPEAKERThat's fine with me.
07:03SPEAKERAnyway, I have to leave in like two days, so I'm going to be away from this PC, but
07:07SPEAKERnow you are really making me want to play some solo peak.
07:10SPEAKERYeah.
07:10SPEAKERI've been playing mostly Death Stranding, but I kind of actually do want to see how far
07:15SPEAKERI could get in peak by myself.
07:17SPEAKERI think it's harder with people than it is without.
07:19SPEAKERThat is 100% what my expectation was and was kind of borne out by that 10 minute interlude
07:23SPEAKERwhere you sent me off because you guys were stuck and I just kind of booked it up there.
07:27SPEAKERI mean, what do you lose?
07:28SPEAKERYou lose the ability for somebody else to hoist you up when you're about to not make
07:32SPEAKERa climb.
07:32SPEAKERYou lose slots.
07:34SPEAKERYou lose food and you lose utility slots, but that's pretty much it.
07:37SPEAKERWell, when you have extra people, there are an equal number of hunger timers added in
07:41SPEAKERproportion to the extra numbers of inventory slots.
07:45SPEAKERSo if you were burning resources just as much as you were adding resource capacity, peak
07:49SPEAKERis an awesome game.
07:50SPEAKERIt is really like I've been saying this for years, but I think Landfall is secretly doing
07:57SPEAKERthe smartest thing given the current nightmare situation in games where they build a bunch
08:04SPEAKERof, they do game jams, they do regular game jams.
08:08SPEAKERThey take the most promising stuff out of there and then they ship a game based on those
08:12SPEAKERgame jams that are like minimum viable with just enough stuff around them that they work.
08:16SPEAKERAnd then they see how they go.
08:18SPEAKERAnd they've released like 15 games or something ridiculous, some enormous number of games.
08:22SPEAKEREach one does a little bit better than the rest.
08:23SPEAKERAnd even ones that like don't land at first, find an audience eventually.
08:27SPEAKERLike rounds was kind of a slow start and now it's got like 5,000 reviews.
08:32SPEAKEROh, I didn't know they were the rounds people.
08:34SPEAKERRounds, they're stick fight.
08:35SPEAKERThey're totally awesome battle simulator, totally accurate battle simulator.
08:38SPEAKERThey did tabs as well?
08:39SPEAKERThey did tabs.
08:40SPEAKERWow.
08:41SPEAKERThey did like they have an archive.
08:43SPEAKERThey have a Landfall archive title that's like a bunch of their prototypes and weird
08:48SPEAKERstuff that they've done over the years even.
08:49SPEAKERThat's cool as hell.
08:50SPEAKERI did not know they had that kind of a track record.
08:52SPEAKERThey are incredibly prolific.
08:54SPEAKERNobody realizes this.
08:56SPEAKERAnd they make their games are like universally awesome.
09:00SPEAKERAnd they like just don't do the hard, like this one has a generator for the world, which
09:05SPEAKERis a hard thing to do, but they don't have any like AI or anything else that's hard to
09:09SPEAKERgo with that.
09:09SPEAKERSo they do like one hard thing a game at most and then go from there.
09:14SPEAKERSo is it every 24 hours it generates a new set of mountains for everybody, right?
09:17SPEAKERIt's the same mountain for everybody every day.
09:20SPEAKERYeah, so the thing that's happening now is that the speed runners have gotten a hold
09:23SPEAKERof that game and are starting to do seeds so that they have the same one.
09:27SPEAKERThey're content warning, Brad, the cluster truck.
09:31SPEAKERWait, they did content warning the lethal company like with cameras that we played that
09:35SPEAKERwas hilarious?
09:36SPEAKERYep.
09:36SPEAKERI am.
09:36SPEAKERYep.
09:37SPEAKERLike is Landfall my new favorite developer?
09:39SPEAKERI'm telling you, nobody knows that Landfall is their favorite developer and Landfall
09:43SPEAKERkicks ass.
09:44SPEAKERThat's really good.
09:45SPEAKERI got to look them up and read a little bit more about them after this.
09:48SPEAKERThe story going around about Peek is that they only started development on it in February.
09:53SPEAKERThis is this is their way.
09:54SPEAKERAnd it sold a million copies in a week.
09:57SPEAKERIt's they're like the anti-institification because when you go look at the comments,
10:01SPEAKERthe people are like, hey, man, why in the Steam forums, people are like, why are there
10:04SPEAKERwhy is there no new content plan for this?
10:06SPEAKERWhy is this going to stop here?
10:07SPEAKERAnd they're like, well, we just make games and then release them.
10:09SPEAKERWe don't do live service nonsense.
10:11SPEAKERYou can pay $8 for our game and then that's it forever.
10:15SPEAKERAlso, eight bucks, you know, like it's like my my game group is slowly coming back together
10:19SPEAKERafter some months apart.
10:20SPEAKERAnd I can't wait to tell them, like, hey, go get Peek because it's eight dollars.
10:23SPEAKERLike even people who have families and don't want to like spend seventy dollars every time
10:27SPEAKERwe pick up a new game every two weeks, like who's who's not going to spend eight bucks
10:30SPEAKERon something like that?
10:31SPEAKERWell, and the thing that they do is like they built a perk system for rounds and then that
10:36SPEAKERshows up in later games.
10:37SPEAKERThey built the procedural stuff for content warning and that shows up in Haste and Peek.
10:41SPEAKERAnd like, I don't know, it's just super smart.
10:44SPEAKERThey're really smart people.
10:46SPEAKERAnd when I said that they have 20 games, I meant that they have 17 games and then they
10:50SPEAKERalso have a whole bunch of games in that Landfall Archives thing, which is which is really cool.
10:54SPEAKERCool.
10:54SPEAKERThat's cool.
10:55SPEAKERAnyway, Landfall kicks ass.
10:57SPEAKERAgracab also good.
10:59SPEAKERYeah.
11:00SPEAKERWhat are we doing this week, Brad?
11:01SPEAKERWe're dipping back into the magazine archive, actually.
11:04SPEAKERI was kind of shocked to find that it's been just about a year since the last time we did
11:08SPEAKERan old issue of a magazine, which was a next generation at the time.
11:13SPEAKERYeah, and in classic fashion, classic fashion, rather, we're going back to December 1996,
11:19SPEAKERback when the Internet was new.
11:21SPEAKERWindows 95 was a year old.
11:22SPEAKERWindows 98, just a glimmer in the eyes of Bill Gates.
11:27SPEAKERAnd Microsoft was the enemy.
11:29SPEAKEROpen source was something that nobody was talking about.
11:33SPEAKERReally, nobody worth talking about.
11:35SPEAKERI mean, it was nobody was talking about it.
11:37SPEAKERIt seems like from this magazine and like the concept had even been coined at this point
11:41SPEAKERor as like probably just around the time, I mean, Linux was like four years old at this
11:45SPEAKERpoint.
11:45SPEAKERYeah, open source was like new was around at this point.
11:49SPEAKERYes.
11:51SPEAKERTo put things in perspective, this magazine's mention of Unix-like stuff is to talk about
11:55SPEAKERlike Berkeley, like BSD.
11:57SPEAKERYeah, BSD.
11:58SPEAKERHave we said what the magazine is?
11:59SPEAKERIt's wired.
12:00SPEAKERYeah, it's it's it's pre Conde Nast wired, which is an important distinction, because
12:05SPEAKERafter after Conde Nast bought wired 98, it became much more of a lifestyle magazine.
12:11SPEAKERAnd this was just this is just a weird mishmash of a magazine.
12:14SPEAKERIt's it's fascinating.
12:18SPEAKERIt's very representative of the early time that we picked this one because it has a cover
12:23SPEAKERpicture of Neil Stevenson standing on top of a big concrete plug in the middle of the
12:29SPEAKERocean with a manhole cover on it.
12:33SPEAKERAnd the cover story is Neil Stevenson, the hacker tourist, travels the world to bring
12:37SPEAKERback the epic story of wiring the planet.
12:40SPEAKERYeah, he basically this is like literally like a 50 page cover story almost about him
12:45SPEAKERgoing to Asia and kind of witnessing the laying of what at the time I think was the longest
12:50SPEAKERundersea telecommunications cable in the world.
12:53SPEAKERYeah, it was it was a it looks like it was about a 20,000 word article, I guess.
12:58SPEAKERI didn't count.
12:59SPEAKERI will say before we get into this, yes, I was struck by the cover photo of him standing
13:04SPEAKERon this whatever this concrete pillar in the middle of the ocean is.
13:08SPEAKERI will say this was the second episode of or sorry, the second issue of Wired that I
13:12SPEAKERpulled.
13:14SPEAKERThe first one had the first one had a picture of Richard Dawkins on the front with the with
13:19SPEAKERthe header, Bad Boy Evolutionist Richard Dawkins, Selfish Genes and Hot Means of a Nude Mask.
13:25SPEAKERBut yes.
13:27SPEAKERDecided to skip the one with the Richard Dawkins cover story.
13:29SPEAKERYeah, we skipped that one.
13:31SPEAKERThis is like this is like a 280 page book magazine.
13:36SPEAKERI think I think by their page numbering, it's like 302 or something.
13:39SPEAKERI mean, it is the December issue, which I mean, I assume that's big.
13:43SPEAKERThat's like an industry wide phenomenon, right?
13:45SPEAKERThat your December issue is full of extra advertising.
13:49SPEAKERYeah, December issues were usually bigger than the end of quarter.
13:53SPEAKEREverybody spending their budgets for the end of the year.
13:55SPEAKERBut it's it's weird.
13:57SPEAKERThis is so this is an era when I was picking up Wired at like the school bookstore sometimes.
14:03SPEAKEROK.
14:04SPEAKERBut only if it was something interesting.
14:06SPEAKERAnd I like Neil Stevenson.
14:06SPEAKERI'd read Snow Crash and the Diamond Age probably by this point.
14:09SPEAKERBut Cryptonomicon wasn't out yet.
14:11SPEAKERAnd and Snow Crash was a thing that people were kind of super into.
14:16SPEAKERBut it was weird to me that Neil Stevenson was writing nonfiction for this, even though
14:20SPEAKERsince then, obviously, he's written a bunch of essays over the years and
14:23SPEAKERRose Zodiac and a bunch of other stuff.
14:25SPEAKERYeah.
14:25SPEAKERLike I almost think of him as some kind of journalists.
14:28SPEAKERI started to say like Gonzo journalist.
14:30SPEAKERI don't think that's the right term.
14:31SPEAKERBut like he is he is as much a reporting and nonfiction kind of guy as an author of novels
14:37SPEAKERto me, I feel like.
14:39SPEAKERWell, so, OK, I think we should just get into it.
14:43SPEAKERI don't.
14:43SPEAKERDo we want to start with the Stevenson cover story?
14:46SPEAKERI mean, before before we get into that, I mean, you mentioned that you bought Wired
14:49SPEAKERback in the day.
14:49SPEAKERI never really read much of it, except, you know, if I came across it in like the lobby
14:53SPEAKERof the doctor's office or something like.
14:55SPEAKERWell, you had a cool doctor.
14:56SPEAKERI mean, OK, I don't know that it was actually there, but that kind of place, you know, a
14:59SPEAKERplace where periodicals might be out for perusal, you know, or maybe even at the bookstore.
15:04SPEAKERLike I picked it up occasionally and thumbed through it, but was not an avid reader.
15:08SPEAKERGranted, I was in high school at this time.
15:10SPEAKERWell, this was this was a period of time when Wired was was like, if you didn't live here
15:15SPEAKERin California and didn't know people who did this kind of work, this was like the only
15:19SPEAKERglimpse you got into what working on the Internet was like.
15:23SPEAKERYeah, there's there is so much what feels like kind of like light sort of hacker ethos
15:30SPEAKERor there's like a bit of an electronic frontier foundation, digital libertarian kind of vibe
15:36SPEAKERto a lot of the writing in this.
15:37SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
15:37SPEAKERLike a lot of it feels like it came straight out of like Berkeley, California.
15:41SPEAKERThere's a lot of digital libertarian bullshit.
15:43SPEAKERThere's a lot of like hints of the well in here.
15:46SPEAKERYeah, to be clear, I'm not talking sort of latter day, like what you might think of as
15:49SPEAKERlibertarian now, I'm talking more of the like information yearns to be free and so do people
15:54SPEAKERkind of thing.
15:55SPEAKERYou know, it's like like like privacy and freedom from corporate influence type like
15:59SPEAKERthat type of libertarian.
16:00SPEAKERYeah, it's the it's the pre-neo con taking over the libertarians, meaning fuck the poors
16:07SPEAKERlike versus like digital hippie type stuff, I guess is really what I mean.
16:11SPEAKERYeah, so but like so flipping through this, the overarching vibe that I got is that
16:19SPEAKERthey had a whole bunch of interesting people that they got together and gave them the permission
16:24SPEAKERto write about things.
16:25SPEAKERAnd since it's like a 300 page magazine, they clearly had a shitload of money coming in.
16:30SPEAKERSo they were able to spend a ton of budget just getting weird, weird, interesting people
16:34SPEAKERand weird, interesting stories written.
16:36SPEAKERAnd it's the kind of magazine that doesn't kind of exist anymore.
16:40SPEAKERLike this this kind of publication.
16:42SPEAKERIt's funny because like you see it a little bit in stuff like like like what Patrick is
16:47SPEAKERdoing over at Remap sometimes and what the aftermath folks are doing.
16:51SPEAKERAnd like like reader funded publications now are picking up this kind of mantle where they're
16:56SPEAKERjust writing about shit that they think is cool or interesting or important.
17:00SPEAKERAnd in corporate media, a lot of this stuff went away.
17:04SPEAKERAnd like you wouldn't like this.
17:07SPEAKERSo I think the initial pitch for this magazine, this is from a Wired article from 2013 celebrating
17:14SPEAKERthe issue zero one zero one of Wired as they used to give it Wired version numbers back
17:19SPEAKERin the day.
17:20SPEAKEROf course.
17:23SPEAKERThey the the people who wanted to do this, they invited Kevin Kelly, who was the first
17:29SPEAKERexecutive editor of the book and executive editor in Wired terms, was basically the person
17:34SPEAKERwho decided what who led the editorial team.
17:37SPEAKERBasically, it's not like an editor in chief situation.
17:40SPEAKERAnd their pitch to him, their elevator pitch to him was like, we want to make a magazine.
17:44SPEAKERWe're trying to make a magazine that feels as if it had been mailed back from the future.
17:48SPEAKERAnd then they pulled John Battelle, who is a Berkeley journalism grad who proposed Rolling
17:54SPEAKERStone for the digital age.
17:55SPEAKERWait, did they click, did they literally use the words Rolling Stone because I wrote in
17:59SPEAKERour notes document.
18:01SPEAKERI'm just going to read my note here.
18:02SPEAKERI didn't read much Wired at all.
18:03SPEAKERWhat exactly was the intended tone and target audience?
18:06SPEAKERI'm imagining the initial pitch was Rolling Stone, but for computers.
18:09SPEAKERSo and in this context, I assume Rolling Stone is talking about like the Jan Wenner editorial
18:15SPEAKERyears of Rolling Stone where they were where it was like the the the magazine that covered
18:19SPEAKERthe counterculture and music and rock and roll.
18:21SPEAKERRight.
18:22SPEAKERIt's like it's like a marriage of music and lifestyle and politics and culture.
18:26SPEAKERAnd yeah.
18:27SPEAKERSo so yeah, John John Battelle went on to do a bunch of other stuff.
18:30SPEAKERAnd Kevin Kelly is has a great he has a great podcast and newsletter called Cool Tools and
18:38SPEAKERdoes like annual book reports where he writes about like the people come on and talk about
18:43SPEAKERrecommend things that they like.
18:44SPEAKERI've been on it a couple of times.
18:45SPEAKERIt's really fun.
18:46SPEAKERKevin's great.
18:47SPEAKERThat's cool.
18:49SPEAKERBut yeah, so and they all felt like it was impossible was the thing that Kevin says in
18:54SPEAKERthis article is that they felt like it was it had to be true believers and it had to
18:58SPEAKERbe because because the thing that they were trying to do to make a new magazine in this
19:02SPEAKERtime period in the 90s was felt impossible, which is really funny now, because like now
19:06SPEAKERit's actually impossible, whereas then it was just, you know, really hard anyway.
19:11SPEAKERAlso, like you talk about, like getting people of some stature writing for it, obviously,
19:15SPEAKERlike Stevenson doing the cover story here.
19:17SPEAKERLike I was not familiar with this name, but there's an article about digital surveillance
19:20SPEAKERin here by David Brin, who you seem to be familiar with.
19:23SPEAKERI think he's a science fiction author, right?
19:25SPEAKERYeah, David Brin is like he's he's a science fiction author from the 80s, kind of that
19:30SPEAKERtime between like the golden age where it's Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke and those folks
19:35SPEAKERand like the more modern stuff that came later.
19:39SPEAKERAnd David Brin, one of my favorite David Brin stories is about a black hole, like a
19:45SPEAKERtiny microscopic black hole that falls into the center of the earth and just it's bad.
19:50SPEAKERDo you read that?
19:51SPEAKERWait.
19:52SPEAKERYou have a look of revelation.
19:54SPEAKERThe book is bad or the events of the book are bad?
19:56SPEAKERThe book is great.
19:57SPEAKERThe events of the book, it's not great for humanity.
20:00SPEAKERMy jaw dropped open because I have I have run that thought experiment in my head many
20:03SPEAKERtimes what would happen like would would a would a microscopic black hole in the middle
20:07SPEAKERof the planet just begin accruing the matter and becoming less than microscopic?
20:11SPEAKERThe book is called Earth.
20:13SPEAKEROK.
20:13SPEAKERAnd yeah, it's an artificially created black hole.
20:16SPEAKERIt came up a lot when the Large Hadron Collider was coming online for weird reasons.
20:20SPEAKERThat's 100 percent the reason that I have thought of that exact phenomenon.
20:23SPEAKERI have to read the book.
20:24SPEAKERYeah, I don't know.
20:25SPEAKERYeah, it's available.
20:26SPEAKERYou can still get it.
20:27SPEAKEROK.
20:27SPEAKERIt's there.
20:28SPEAKERI will look for that.
20:29SPEAKERBut like there is a there is a post 1996 presidential election article in here by John
20:34SPEAKERHeilemann, who is like all over politics and political coverage in the kind of later period,
20:41SPEAKERlike in the Trump era.
20:42SPEAKERLike I've seen him all over the place for like he did.
20:44SPEAKERHe did like game change and and a lot of the.
20:48SPEAKEROh, yeah.
20:48SPEAKERPulled it like bigger political coverage of the last like 15 years.
20:52SPEAKERAnyway, to your point, you know, there are a lot of like notable names in here in a much
20:56SPEAKERmore 90s context, which we'll get into.
20:59SPEAKERThere's a lot of people who were interesting then who ended up being kind of famous later
21:04SPEAKERon.
21:06SPEAKERSo can we can we talk about ads first?
21:10SPEAKERBecause 90s ads are wild.
21:12SPEAKERYeah, as always.
21:13SPEAKERBut but not in a not in a like 90s video game magazine way, though.
21:19SPEAKERThere are some 90s video game ads.
21:20SPEAKERThere's a Duke Nukem 3D ad here.
21:22SPEAKERYeah.
21:23SPEAKERBut I mean, they're not like extreme and in your face in the same way.
21:25SPEAKERIn fact, actually, like that was I think the ads in this are what inspired me to write
21:28SPEAKERthat note in our doc about like who was the intended audience for this thing?
21:32SPEAKERBecause there are ads in here for I'm just going to look at the notes here, like Rockwell,
21:37SPEAKERthe company Rockwell that made modem chipsets as an ad in here about their modem chipsets.
21:43SPEAKERThe opening ad in the first page of the magazine is a Mercedes Benz ad.
21:47SPEAKERRight.
21:48SPEAKERSo so they get as esoteric and technical as ads for modem chipsets right next to there
21:54SPEAKERis a shocking amount of liquor.
21:56SPEAKERThere's cologne.
21:58SPEAKERThey're like pieces like, you know, like watches like it's just it's just it's the
22:02SPEAKERweirdest mix of like super nerdy technology and like basically like Playboy or like GQ
22:07SPEAKERstyle, like men's lifestyle magazine kind of stuff in here.
22:10SPEAKERLike like I I had such a good time trying to imagine who the target was for all this
22:15SPEAKERstuff and kind of not being able to come up with an answer.
22:18SPEAKERThe liquor ads with a bunch of attractive women drinking martinis and smoking cigars
22:22SPEAKERis maybe the most 90s thing I've ever seen.
22:25SPEAKERSure.
22:25SPEAKERYeah.
22:25SPEAKERBut I mean, it's like like there's an absolute ad, like there's there's like I said, cologne
22:29SPEAKERads and then and then there are like Packard Bell ads or like ads for video conferencing,
22:34SPEAKERlike a nascent like primordial video conferencing hardware.
22:38SPEAKERIt's just it's such a weird mix of stuff.
22:40SPEAKERThere's a Scrabble CD-ROM.
22:42SPEAKERLike who who is who is buying a Scrabble CD-ROM game and also like like a three thousand
22:48SPEAKERdollar watch that reads this magazine?
22:50SPEAKERI don't know.
22:50SPEAKERIt's it's really weird because like the presentation of the ads is different.
22:53SPEAKERThere's monitor ads that are just like a standard Viewsonic monitor ad back the back in the
22:57SPEAKERback that's like, hey, we have sixteen point seven million colors in a VGA port.
23:01SPEAKERAnd then there's a Samsung ad right in the beginning that has like a male model in a
23:06SPEAKERblack turtleneck, a black mock turtleneck, rather, holding up what looks like to be a
23:11SPEAKER17 inch CRT monitor with one hand, which is impossible.
23:15SPEAKERLike there's no way he's actually doing that.
23:17SPEAKERProbably not.
23:19SPEAKERThere's there's this Vio ad.
23:22SPEAKERVio is a Sony PC desktop PC brand.
23:24SPEAKERAnd it's like got this weird high concept shoot of a guy standing on something kind
23:31SPEAKERof floating over a sea of competitors or something.
23:34SPEAKERI don't understand what's going on in this picture, but it's weird.
23:37SPEAKERAnd then and then, like I said, it's like there's an ad for the Microsoft natural keyboard
23:43SPEAKERthat's just a picture of a hand, a big giant picture of a hand and a little tiny picture
23:47SPEAKERof the keyboard.
23:48SPEAKERIt's like these are made for each other.
23:49SPEAKERYou'll if you like if you if you have hands, you're going to like this keyboard.
23:53SPEAKERIt's it's weird.
23:54SPEAKERI I'm there's an SGI02 ad in this magazine, Brad.
23:59SPEAKERYes.
23:59SPEAKERWhat is that about?
24:00SPEAKERLike who is buying an SGI02?
24:02SPEAKERWho's buying a multiple 20, multiple tens of thousands of dollars workstation that reads
24:07SPEAKERthis like they were just like I assume that that when they went to an ad, when they went
24:12SPEAKERto the advertising, advertising salespeople went out to the companies for this.
24:16SPEAKERThey were like, hey, what's your ad strategy for magazines?
24:19SPEAKERWe don't have an ad strategy for magazines.
24:20SPEAKERAnd then Wired just took dump truck loads full of money to run these ads is my assumption.
24:25SPEAKERYeah, that is a seventy five hundred dollar workstation in 1996 dollars.
24:28SPEAKEROh, OK.
24:29SPEAKERThat's pretty cheap then by SGI standards.
24:32SPEAKERRight next to two pages after I'm sorry, one page after a Compaq ad, two pages after a
24:38SPEAKERMicron ad, like your very standard beige box like commodity PC is being advertised in here.
24:44SPEAKERLiterally one page before a seventy five hundred dollar Unix workstation.
24:48SPEAKERWell, and it's really funny because like.
24:50SPEAKERAnd again, and I can't stress enough, there are Bacardi and Absolute ads for this thing
24:55SPEAKERas well.
24:55SPEAKERLike it's so weird.
24:57SPEAKERI was surprised that the booze ads were here because I thought that was a Conde Nast thing
25:00SPEAKERand it is it seems to not be.
25:03SPEAKERThere's a Glenn Finnick ad like it is like literally every 10 pages.
25:05SPEAKERThere's another liquor ad.
25:06SPEAKERIt's just such a strange mix.
25:08SPEAKERThere's a Web TV ad.
25:10SPEAKERThere's an Apple.
25:11SPEAKERI think this is an Apple ad.
25:12SPEAKERI can't tell like early on a page like 10 or 12 or something that just has a bunch of
25:17SPEAKERwhat looks like PC games.
25:19SPEAKERYeah, it is.
25:20SPEAKERIt is an Apple ad.
25:21SPEAKERThere's an extremely tiny fine print that does say copyright Apple computer.
25:24SPEAKERAnd there's like a little Apple logo, a little Mac OS logo.
25:27SPEAKERBut it's just like, hey, we have games here.
25:29SPEAKERZork Nemesis.
25:30SPEAKERYou don't know Jack Virtual Pool Wing Commander for the price of freedom.
25:36SPEAKERYep.
25:36SPEAKERIt's it's it's really bizarre.
25:37SPEAKERAnd then and then the next page, I couldn't tell if this was an ad or it's just it's just
25:41SPEAKERlike some weird Kai's power tool art for this David Brant article that we'll talk about
25:45SPEAKERlater.
25:47SPEAKERYeah, there's yes, it is a strange mix.
25:50SPEAKERSo a couple more.
25:51SPEAKERI mean, we should get into the meat of the issue.
25:52SPEAKERBut there's another Apple ad for a Performa in here as well.
25:56SPEAKEROh, yeah.
25:57SPEAKERLike I think was that like pretty, pretty like Lost in the Woods era of Apple.
26:00SPEAKERIs that a Windows OS 8 or something?
26:03SPEAKERProbably Mac, maybe OS 7?
26:05SPEAKERMight have been 9.
26:06SPEAKERBecause this is remember, this is like a year before they brought Jobs back.
26:08SPEAKERSo this is like Apple kind of teetering on the edge.
26:12SPEAKERIn here.
26:12SPEAKERAnd last last ad I'll bring up, I just landed on a Windows NT workstation 4.0 ad.
26:18SPEAKERNow, that is an ad that spoke to me.
26:22SPEAKERMy my favorite of the bad ads is the Packard Bell computer ad that's like, hey.
26:27SPEAKERThis computer is ready for video conferencing if you bring your own camera and or camcorder.
26:32SPEAKERHow would you hook that?
26:33SPEAKERIt had a capture card.
26:35SPEAKERIt has a TV tuner card with it.
26:37SPEAKEROh, so was it like analog video in?
26:39SPEAKERIt was probably analog video in or my guess is that you could buy.
26:42SPEAKERSo I had a hop hog card at that time that you could buy a special
26:47SPEAKERcamera that you plugged like an S-video thing into.
26:51SPEAKERI had a guy who was like, I want a TV tuner for my computer.
26:53SPEAKERI was like, OK, I got it.
26:54SPEAKERAnd then I got it.
26:55SPEAKERI built the computer for him with that in it.
26:56SPEAKERAnd he was like, this this tuner card, I can't hook it.
26:59SPEAKERI can't change my cable channels with it.
27:01SPEAKERI can't get HBO on it.
27:02SPEAKERI was like, OK, well, give me the card back and I'll give you some of your money back.
27:06SPEAKERAnd so then I had a TV tuner card.
27:08SPEAKERSure.
27:09SPEAKERIt wasn't very good.
27:10SPEAKERI guess it had to be analog at that point.
27:11SPEAKERThat was that was pretty like widespread digital video acceleration.
27:15SPEAKERThere was no USB at this point.
27:17SPEAKERYeah.
27:17SPEAKERAnd also no USB.
27:18SPEAKERYeah.
27:18SPEAKERSo so anyway, I just I am just I am just so baffled that there is.
27:24SPEAKERThere is a magazine that is advertising both McCarty and Windows NT workstation in the same
27:28SPEAKERpractically one page to the next.
27:30SPEAKERThis is a strange thing.
27:31SPEAKERHere's here's just to give you a picture of the time.
27:36SPEAKERThe first letter in the letters section, which is at the front of the book for some reason,
27:40SPEAKERis is somebody saying John Perry Barlow is right about one thing.
27:45SPEAKERThe Washington's official Washington's cluelessness about cyberspace is definitely frightening.
27:51SPEAKERSome things never change.
27:53SPEAKERYeah, certainly.
27:54SPEAKERI got a little nostalgic looking at the emails.
27:56SPEAKERSorry.
27:57SPEAKERTechnically, it's a letters page, although basically all of them are emails because it's
28:01SPEAKERa wired audience.
28:02SPEAKERYeah, I got I got a little nostalgic just going from person to person and noting that
28:06SPEAKEReverybody had a different domain in their email address.
28:09SPEAKERAlso, they published people's email addresses.
28:11SPEAKERYes.
28:12SPEAKERAlso, everybody who wrote in just had their their personal email address with their letter,
28:17SPEAKERwhich is like you.
28:19SPEAKERI mean, honestly, that really is kind of emblematic of the vibe of this whole magazine,
28:22SPEAKERwhich is that like, well, it's two things.
28:25SPEAKERIt's a little naive about the early Internet.
28:27SPEAKERYou know, it's a little it's a little bit like like ideologically like information needs
28:31SPEAKERto be free, like like the Internet is going to enable like a new era of human communication
28:35SPEAKERand liberty or whatever.
28:36SPEAKERAnd like publishing all of these email addresses is part and parcel with that.
28:40SPEAKERRight.
28:40SPEAKERBecause, of course, you're going to want all these people to be able to have a discourse
28:44SPEAKERwith anybody who wants to talk to them about what they wrote.
28:46SPEAKERRight.
28:47SPEAKERI can't imagine the kind of people that would send an email to the people who wrote into
28:51SPEAKERwire.
28:52SPEAKERThat is probably remarkable.
28:53SPEAKERBut like no thought at this point about like privacy and potential for abuse or spam or
28:58SPEAKERwhatever.
29:00SPEAKERBut, you know, Netcom.com.
29:05SPEAKERCoil.com.
29:06SPEAKERHere's a GMU.edu address.
29:08SPEAKERIME.net.
29:10SPEAKERPonzi with two Es.net.
29:12SPEAKERHere's a Juno address.
29:13SPEAKERLike I just remember when everybody had different email providers and there were more than like
29:17SPEAKERthree.
29:18SPEAKERWe should send emails to all these people and see who has still has this address.
29:22SPEAKERYeah, we should.
29:22SPEAKERIt's a bad idea.
29:24SPEAKERHey, you know that you can schmooze globally 24 hours a day on www.talk.com.
29:30SPEAKERA part of the hot wired network.
29:32SPEAKERI wonder if talk.com is still part of the hot wired network.
29:35SPEAKERIt's probably a porn site now, if I had to guess.
29:39SPEAKERI don't actually know what this is.
29:41SPEAKEROh, it's for sale.
29:42SPEAKERInquire about this domain.
29:43SPEAKERIt has a phone number on it.
29:45SPEAKERThere you go.
29:46SPEAKERAnyway.
29:47SPEAKERYeah.
29:48SPEAKERSo, okay.
29:49SPEAKERAds, ads are weird.
29:50SPEAKERThere's an ad for 50 millimeter, like full format film at the back of this magazine.
29:53SPEAKERI don't understand it.
29:54SPEAKERAnd they talk about pointcast.
29:56SPEAKEROh, that's not it.
29:57SPEAKERThat shouldn't be an ad.
29:58SPEAKERSo that's a, that's actually a, that's actually a story to talk about.
30:02SPEAKERAnyway, hold on.
30:05SPEAKERCan we talk about that domino, the Lotus ad calling domino wacky, a site you can build
30:09SPEAKERa bunch of wacky websites with domino Lotus domino, the thing that made notes work, not
30:15SPEAKERa wacky piece of software by any stretch of the imagination.
30:19SPEAKERYeah.
30:19SPEAKERI'll I'll publish our Google doc along with this episode, which I haven't done in a while,
30:24SPEAKERbut we have page numbers called out for basically every ad and thing that we have just discussed
30:28SPEAKERand we'll continue to discuss.
30:30SPEAKERI guess we should say this is the December, 1996 issue of wired.
30:34SPEAKERIt's or in the numbering par net parlance, it's zero four dot 12.
30:39SPEAKERYes.
30:39SPEAKERI will link to the archive.org page with this magazine and a downloadable PDF.
30:43SPEAKERAnd also, like I said, post, post those notes.
30:46SPEAKERIf you want to follow along on specific stuff we're talking about, those will both be in
30:50SPEAKERthe show notes for this.
30:51SPEAKERHere we go.
30:52SPEAKERWhere do you want to start?
30:53SPEAKERDo you want to start with the Stevenson cover story about, about the flag fiber?
30:58SPEAKERWhat does the flag stand for?
31:01SPEAKERThe fiber optic link around the globe.
31:04SPEAKERIt's like weirdly colloquial.
31:05SPEAKERYou would expect it to have like a much more, I don't know, technical wordy kind of meaning,
31:12SPEAKERbut also that sounds like something named by exactly the types of people who were writing
31:16SPEAKERfor and reading this magazine at the time.
31:18SPEAKERWell, okay, so the, the whole premise of this story is they sent Neil Stevenson noted cyber
31:25SPEAKERpunk author.
31:27SPEAKERYeah.
31:28SPEAKERHacker tourist is how he describes himself in this.
31:31SPEAKERYeah.
31:31SPEAKERAround the world.
31:32SPEAKERHe kind of goes out of his way to like coin the term hacker tourism.
31:38SPEAKERHe's there trying, like if, if there's, there's nothing that wired is more famous for than
31:44SPEAKERtrying to coin new terms.
31:45SPEAKERDo you remember shot jacking Brad?
31:47SPEAKERI'm sorry, what jacking?
31:49SPEAKERPod jacking.
31:50SPEAKERPod jacking?
31:51SPEAKERYeah.
31:51SPEAKERYou lived in San Francisco in the early 2000s when iPods were all the rage.
31:55SPEAKERPod jacking was the act of walking up to somebody on the train and unplugging their headphones
31:59SPEAKERand plugging your headphones or plugging their headphones into your iPod and you plugging
32:03SPEAKERyour headphones into their iPod.
32:04SPEAKEROh man.
32:06SPEAKERIt was like pre-Zune squirting, but you know, with physical contact that feels vaguely abusive.
32:12SPEAKERThis is so painfully tweety that we need to just move on.
32:15SPEAKERYeah.
32:16SPEAKERYeah.
32:17SPEAKERAnyway, here's the Stevenson quote though.
32:19SPEAKEROur method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense, but what might
32:23SPEAKERbe thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism, travel to exotic locations
32:28SPEAKERin search of sites and sensations that would only be of interest to a geek.
32:32SPEAKERYeah.
32:33SPEAKERLike look, there's some real Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolf, new journalism business in here,
32:37SPEAKERGonzo journalism, new journalism, whatever.
32:39SPEAKERI mentioned Gonzo journalism earlier.
32:41SPEAKERI guess that is actually appropriate here, but I mean, like he dug pretty deep.
32:44SPEAKERLike he went to Thailand and observed a lot of the actual workers doing a lot of this
32:48SPEAKERwork, which sounded incredibly gruelingly backbreaking.
32:52SPEAKERThis feels a little bit like Ford Prefect works though, right?
32:54SPEAKERLike, Hey, I wanted to go to Thailand for a few days.
32:57SPEAKERSo I got wired to pay me to write you a 20,000 word piece about it.
33:01SPEAKERAnd also it's kind of interesting.
33:02SPEAKERNot even a few days.
33:03SPEAKERI think he describes what is it?
33:04SPEAKERThis is like, this was a two month trip that took him to six continents.
33:08SPEAKERThat's a long trip.
33:09SPEAKERThat's a pretty good trip.
33:11SPEAKERFour, six countries in four continents, I believe is what it was.
33:14SPEAKERYeah.
33:14SPEAKERNo reason to go to Australia with fiber.
33:16SPEAKERYes.
33:17SPEAKERNobody on Australia.
33:18SPEAKERI mean, Antarctica rather with fiber.
33:20SPEAKERYes.
33:20SPEAKERBut, but the flag, the, sorry, what was it?
33:23SPEAKERThe fiber link around the globe.
33:24SPEAKERFiber optic link around the globe, which would technically be to flow ag to full ag.
33:33SPEAKERThe, the story describes it as being scheduled for full deployment in September, 1997.
33:39SPEAKERAnd the second I read that, I was like, Oh, this thing never got finished at it.
33:42SPEAKEROr like, I'm just, I was just bracing for something to have gone wrong here.
33:44SPEAKERBut I looked it up and sure enough, like this thing came online by the end of 1997.
33:48SPEAKERAnd at the time, at the time was like, I think this, this, this story says it in a
33:54SPEAKERsomewhat pithy way that like, Oh, it's the longest engineering project in human history.
33:57SPEAKERBut I think it actually did set some records for cable length at the time.
34:02SPEAKERIt was what, 28,000 miles long?
34:04SPEAKERSomething like that.
34:05SPEAKERI don't have all the numbers in front of me.
34:07SPEAKERI didn't write down all the numbers.
34:08SPEAKERBut I do have the speed in front of me though, which was the most eye-opening part to me.
34:12SPEAKERSo there's two ways to rate the speed they talk about in the article actually.
34:16SPEAKEROkay.
34:16SPEAKERCause for telecoms back then you, you, you considered speed as the number of analog phone
34:22SPEAKERcalls you could, a wire could carry.
34:25SPEAKERAnd in this case, the flag could carry 120,000 phone calls circuits at 64 kilobits per second,
34:35SPEAKERper circuit, which seems like a lot of phone calls.
34:38SPEAKERHow much data is that in modern terms?
34:40SPEAKERBrad, I think we had slightly, or this article uses slightly different math than what I found
34:45SPEAKERon Wikipedia about the flag, but they both, they both are roughly in the same ballpark,
34:49SPEAKERwhich was 10 gigabits per second.
34:52SPEAKERYeah.
34:52SPEAKERSo there's a fair amount of overhead for signal boosts and for like, like making sure there's
34:59SPEAKERerror correction and stuff like that.
35:00SPEAKERSo the practical terms is a little bit under eight gigabits per second is what this article says.
35:06SPEAKERAnd who knows, maybe I wonder if there were maybe like signal standard upgrades over the
35:10SPEAKERyears that maybe led to some of that overhead being reduced.
35:12SPEAKERI don't know if that might be why the Wikipedia article sites, a slightly faster speed.
35:17SPEAKERAnyway.
35:17SPEAKERI mean, the thing that blows my mind is obviously 10 gigabits was insanely fast, especially
35:21SPEAKERfor a global undersea cable in 1996.
35:26SPEAKERI can now schedule installation of 10 gigabit service into my apartment like tomorrow.
35:32SPEAKERWhy haven't you done that, Brad?
35:34SPEAKERI look, we've been over it, man.
35:35SPEAKERYeah, I know.
35:36SPEAKERI'd have to, I'd have to replace all of my gear.
35:38SPEAKERI don't know what I would actually use it for.
35:40SPEAKERAlso, I metric and imperiled.
35:43SPEAKERI did, I pulled a beagle on this.
35:46SPEAKERIt's 28,000 kilometers long, not 28,000 miles long.
35:49SPEAKERSo a little bit shorter.
35:50SPEAKEROkay.
35:52SPEAKERStill, I mean, you know, like I know, I know it's maybe a little trite to be like, look
35:55SPEAKERhow far we've come, but like, it's seriously like hitting on that exact number of the 10
35:59SPEAKERgigabit number when I saw that is just so crazy to me that it's a lot.
36:02SPEAKERYeah, that was 30 years ago.
36:04SPEAKERThat wasn't like a massive engineering project undersea cable.
36:07SPEAKERAnd now that's just like branded a relatively advanced residential connection, but still
36:11SPEAKERa residential connection.
36:12SPEAKERWell, okay.
36:13SPEAKERSo there's two things that I thought were really interesting about this article.
36:16SPEAKEROne is, one is the jump in technology.
36:19SPEAKERThe other is like how much time they let Neil Stevenson go off onto Neil Stevenson tangents.
36:25SPEAKERYes.
36:25SPEAKERCause there's like a whole big section in here about how important rubber is to modern economies.
36:30SPEAKERYep, this whole thing, this whole article just reads like a Neil Stevenson novel in
36:34SPEAKERMicrocosm, doesn't it?
36:35SPEAKERIt kind of foreshadows a lot of the, maybe not the actual stuff, but like you see a lot
36:40SPEAKERof Cryptonomicon in this cause like this trip, I think I'd be curious to see if this trip
36:46SPEAKERrepresents the kickoff for Cryptonomicon for him in some way or some part of research or
36:50SPEAKERsomething.
36:51SPEAKERYou think he was doing some stealth novel research in line with this article?
36:56SPEAKERI think people like Neil Stevenson probably are always thinking about stuff like that.
37:00SPEAKERFair.
37:00SPEAKERThat's fair.
37:01SPEAKERI haven't read Cryptonomicon in like 20 years probably, but I remember thinking it was incredible.
37:08SPEAKERI remember thinking it was remarkable and it's been since like 2005, since I read it
37:11SPEAKERprobably.
37:12SPEAKERThere's some like very specific undersea cable stuff in that or no?
37:16SPEAKERI remember some label stuff at least, and then a lot of like cryptographic stuff.
37:21SPEAKERThere's undersea cable stuff.
37:22SPEAKERThere's a lot of stuff about the Philippines, oddly.
37:26SPEAKERThere's a lot of stuff about other parts of Southeast Asia.
37:28SPEAKERBecause remember it takes place in both World War II and like modern day 90s.
37:33SPEAKERThe other thing that was interesting about this is there's an infographic map of all
37:39SPEAKERof the existing undersea fiber optic cables in 1996, which is kind of hilarious by today's
37:46SPEAKERstandards because like I can actually count the number of lines that go between New York
37:50SPEAKERand like the Western Europe, right?
37:53SPEAKERSure.
37:54SPEAKERIt's like nine maybe, eight or nine.
37:57SPEAKERYeah, and yeah, it's wild thinking about that.
38:01SPEAKERSo anyway.
38:02SPEAKERShould I assume, I mean, I don't know if you've seen in a current map, but can I assume that
38:05SPEAKERthat number has increased exponentially?
38:07SPEAKERJust assume that everywhere that there's one line here, there's a giant thick band that
38:12SPEAKERyou can't count now.
38:13SPEAKERSure.
38:14SPEAKERYeah, we've run a lot of fiber over the last hundred years, over the last 20 years.
38:17SPEAKERYeah, that makes sense.
38:18SPEAKERI mean, the crazy thing about the flag run is that it's still in use or at least that's
38:22SPEAKERhow Wikipedia describes it as in the present tense as still being used today.
38:28SPEAKERBut I don't know at a speed like that.
38:30SPEAKERI don't know actually what it would be good for.
38:31SPEAKERI mean, I guess you can still lease that capacity to other people that might be able to make
38:38SPEAKERuse of it.
38:39SPEAKER10 gigabits, 10 gigabits, man.
38:41SPEAKERYeah, I mean, 10 gigabits is still not nothing when you're talking like international communication.
38:46SPEAKERI mean, I was thinking of it in terms of like, how many times could you subdivide that for
38:50SPEAKERcustomers?
38:51SPEAKERNot that many at this point, but if, you know, maybe if it has like some dedicated or specialized
38:56SPEAKERuse, it's still worth selling that capacity.
38:59SPEAKERWell, so this was, I think I'm not, I hit 20.
39:02SPEAKERWe should do a fiber optic episode at some point, because it's kind of interesting.
39:05SPEAKERYes.
39:06SPEAKERWorldwide fiber network.
39:07SPEAKERI've been, I've really been fascinated by undersea cables for a long time.
39:10SPEAKERLike it kind of combines my fascination with telecommunications with that of like shipwrecks
39:16SPEAKERlike the haunting quality of the sea floor.
39:19SPEAKERWell, and there's a whole, my gut, if I remember right, is that this is before the huge boom
39:26SPEAKERof fiber laying.
39:27SPEAKERCause it was viewed as kind of like building the infrastructure of the railroads or the
39:32SPEAKERphone network again, type gold rush that then resulted in an incredible amount of oversupply.
39:38SPEAKERSo the prices tanked.
39:39SPEAKERSo there was a lot of dark fiber for a long time.
39:41SPEAKERInteresting.
39:42SPEAKERAnd I think that this is before that happened, but I'm not a hundred percent.
39:46SPEAKEROh yeah.
39:46SPEAKERIt would have to be, I would think in 96.
39:50SPEAKERI don't know.
39:51SPEAKERIt was happening around this time.
39:52SPEAKERI think it was, I think that was like 98, 99, 2000.
39:54SPEAKERStick wild to do these projects is the thing.
39:56SPEAKERSo like this was a multi-year project.
39:58SPEAKERThis was an enormous undertaking.
40:00SPEAKERHe talks about them.
40:00SPEAKERLike he spends a lot of time talking about how long it took the people in Thailand, I
40:04SPEAKERthink to make manhole covers for the, for the different like node stations where the
40:10SPEAKERfibers would terminate.
40:11SPEAKERAnd then you'd have access points for routers and stuff like that.
40:14SPEAKERI guess.
40:14SPEAKERI don't know.
40:15SPEAKERYeah.
40:15SPEAKERThere's a fair amount of good photography in this piece as well about some of the stuff
40:21SPEAKERwe're talking about.
40:22SPEAKERYeah, big equipment sold again.
40:25SPEAKERI don't know if I think we've said this, but this is literally like a 50 page magazine
40:28SPEAKERstory.
40:29SPEAKERIt is, it is incredibly long.
40:31SPEAKERAnd there's like pictures of divers.
40:33SPEAKERLike it's, it's worth reading.
40:34SPEAKERIf you're into this stuff, it's, it's a, it's a strange, like it's, it's not a piece
40:40SPEAKERthat you would ever see put in like a commercial published magazine, right?
40:45SPEAKERLike the Atlantic wouldn't run a 50 page thing about all the stuff that goes into making
40:50SPEAKERfiber.
40:52SPEAKERI don't know.
40:52SPEAKERThere are many print publications that have that kind of space or would dedicate that
40:56SPEAKERmuch space these days.
40:58SPEAKERI mean, it just keeps going and going and going and going and going.
41:02SPEAKERIt's like a novella basically, but you know, nonfiction.
41:05SPEAKERYeah.
41:05SPEAKERAnyway.
41:06SPEAKERYes.
41:07SPEAKERThere's if we're ready to move on, I mean, there's like, there's a whole battery of
41:12SPEAKERshorter pieces in this issue that I feel like kind of presage a lot of what we're seeing
41:17SPEAKERin modern times in terms of the way that the development of technology has gone.
41:21SPEAKERLike you can see, you can see a lot of the seeds of our modern ills sown here.
41:27SPEAKERI thought when you put the section header in here, I thought, I thought this is like,
41:30SPEAKEROh, this is the, this is the fuck around phase of the, of the internet.
41:35SPEAKERAnd you know, now we're finding out.
41:37SPEAKERYes.
41:38SPEAKERI mean, here's a piece about AI, but I mean, they use obviously AI means something very
41:43SPEAKERdifferent now.
41:44SPEAKERWell, I mean, it does and it doesn't, right.
41:46SPEAKERI mean, back then it was algorithmically driven.
41:48SPEAKERNow it's machine learning driven.
41:51SPEAKERBut still, I mean, they still both are referring to autonomous computerized systems.
41:55SPEAKERBut there's a piece in here about about one of the early AI based financial trading systems
42:01SPEAKERis how they refer to it.
42:02SPEAKERI mean, this is the neural network one, right?
42:05SPEAKERYes.
42:05SPEAKERThis is, this has got a weird like quasi sci-fi lead in on it because they're talking about
42:11SPEAKERa there's a woman in here who Christine Downton, a star analyst at the British investment house
42:18SPEAKERPareto partners limited is how they describe it, but there there's, there's a lot of flowery
42:23SPEAKERsci-fi language in here about them effectively uploading her mind into the machine kind of
42:27SPEAKERthing, which is like not very instructive as to what they were actually doing here.
42:31SPEAKERCause that's obviously not like literally what happened.
42:34SPEAKERI mean, okay.
42:34SPEAKERSo there's two things to note here.
42:36SPEAKEROne is that the lead for this is maybe the most sexist thing I read in this whole issue.
42:42SPEAKERThe other is that, yeah, this is the beginning of agentic trading where they, the machines
42:48SPEAKERstarted doing the trading because the people couldn't go fast enough anymore.
42:52SPEAKERRight.
42:52SPEAKERRight.
42:53SPEAKERBut yes, they mentioned trying to find the, the, there it is.
42:58SPEAKERLots of money in most of the contents of the AI toolbox expert systems, case-based reasoning,
43:03SPEAKERneural networks, genetic algorithms have been thrown at this problem.
43:07SPEAKERSo, you know, so these were all new CS concepts back then networks were like we had, we had
43:16SPEAKERmodeled the behavior of neurons and Petri dishes to build a neural network models that
43:22SPEAKERran on Silicon very slowly.
43:24SPEAKERAnd you would use those to, to do, to deduce patterns from things to, to sort as like a
43:30SPEAKERsieve basically, right.
43:32SPEAKERElsewhere on page two 52, there is a short interview with a quote neuro philosopher.
43:37SPEAKERI mean, I guess that's a real discipline.
43:39SPEAKERNot a real thing.
43:40SPEAKERNo, his name is Paul Churchland, but they opened the inner interview.
43:43SPEAKERHow close are we to machines with human level intelligence?
43:46SPEAKERLike, again, I feel like a lot of this stuff here, we are just exactly almost 30 years
43:52SPEAKERlater has become it's, it's all gone from, from highly theoretical and like good fodder
43:59SPEAKERfor interviews and magazines like this to all sort of like pressingly real.
44:04SPEAKERWell, kind of not real in the sense that it works the way that it was envisioned to work,
44:09SPEAKERbut real in the sense that it has, it is, it is having like massive outside influence
44:13SPEAKERon the development and direction of society.
44:15SPEAKERRight.
44:17SPEAKERThat's true.
44:17SPEAKERYeah.
44:18SPEAKERAnd, and like the answer, his answer 50 years, at least from 1996, probably not wrong.
44:25SPEAKERYeah.
44:25SPEAKEROkay.
44:25SPEAKERSo we've got about another 20 years by his reckoning.
44:28SPEAKERI think some people would probably disagree with you on that.
44:31SPEAKERYes. There is, there is a piece in here that already in 1996, I mean,
44:36SPEAKERhow old is the worldwide web at this point? Like three years old, wasn't it?
44:40SPEAKERThree years old, 93.
44:41SPEAKERYeah.
44:42SPEAKERBut in reality, like really two is before people started using it.
44:45SPEAKERI mean, 96 is the year that we got internet access at my house.
44:48SPEAKERSo like pretty early for a lot of people here, but like there,
44:52SPEAKERhere's a piece already proclaiming effectively the death of the banner ad,
44:56SPEAKERor at least the uselessness of the banner ad on, in web advertising.
45:01SPEAKERAnd basically talking about people looking to find more ways to extract money from the web.
45:07SPEAKERAnd again, landing on some nascent concepts that you might think sound very familiar.
45:11SPEAKERWell, I was going to say like the banner ad was invented theoretically.
45:17SPEAKERWell, there's some controversy around it now is my understanding in 1994.
45:20SPEAKERSo the banner ad is two years old at this point.
45:23SPEAKERSure.
45:23SPEAKERRight. By Hal Riney in San Francisco,
45:25SPEAKERthat big blue building up on the corner of Greenwich at Fisherman's Wharf.
45:30SPEAKERThey were an ad agency up here.
45:32SPEAKERSure.
45:34SPEAKERWell, this article is basically talking about companies desperately,
45:37SPEAKERfrantically trying to find ways to move beyond the display ad.
45:41SPEAKERSponsorships is one thing they land on, you know, like companies buying out
45:45SPEAKERwebsites and forming specific brand deals and that kind of thing.
45:49SPEAKERThe much more salient part of this is the description of DoubleClick,
45:54SPEAKERwhich I think was probably pretty new at this point.
45:57SPEAKERYeah.
45:58SPEAKERLike, and in fact, this, this article was like probably the first time a lot of people
46:02SPEAKERhad heard of DoubleClick, I would guess.
46:04SPEAKERLike, I don't actually know that much about them, but I thought that,
46:07SPEAKERI thought that it jarred a memory when I saw the name and sure enough,
46:12SPEAKERthis description of what's here, I'll just read this.
46:15SPEAKERAdvertisers want to know about the age, income, and interests of individual users.
46:19SPEAKERThis allows them to make the perfect offer, quote unquote, to promising customers.
46:22SPEAKEROne way to hone their attack is through DoubleClick and New York advertising
46:25SPEAKERnetwork that serves both websites and advertisers looking to reach web walkers.
46:30SPEAKERHow does it work?
46:31SPEAKERLet's say the last time you went online, you clicked on pages about travel,
46:34SPEAKERsurfboards, and Hawaii.
46:36SPEAKERThe sites alert DoubleClick software, which notes that those packets of data
46:39SPEAKERwent to your internet address.
46:40SPEAKERThe software begins to build a profile of your characteristics,
46:44SPEAKERincluding email address, location, and consumer interests.
46:47SPEAKERAfter DoubleClick software has scanned your profile and gathered enough clues
46:50SPEAKERto guess that you might be interested in a Pacific cruise,
46:53SPEAKERit instantly uploads a customized ad all within milliseconds of your signing on.
46:58SPEAKERSo had they gotten, they hadn't gotten to the point yet where they made it an
47:01SPEAKERad sales auctions yet, which then was like the other side of the race
47:05SPEAKERto the bottom for advertising.
47:08SPEAKERWell, DoubleClick famously ended up getting bought by Google and like was,
47:16SPEAKERbecame the backbone of their advertising network.
47:18SPEAKERReally?
47:19SPEAKERYeah.
47:19SPEAKERI thought, I thought they were a competitor.
47:21SPEAKERI thought that Google developed its own form of this type of tracking.
47:24SPEAKERI did not realize that this is literally where it all started.
47:28SPEAKERYeah.
47:28SPEAKERDoubleClick DoubleClick got bought by Google for what seemed like a ridiculous
47:32SPEAKERamount of money at the time, but now is probably one of the all-time great
47:36SPEAKERvalue buys.
47:37SPEAKERYeah.
47:37SPEAKERYeah.
47:38SPEAKERThere's language elsewhere in here about which feels very quaint.
47:41SPEAKERI feel like at this point about the need for I'm trying to find it.
47:46SPEAKERIt's a quote from somebody at the EFF, the electronic frontier foundation
47:49SPEAKERabout effectively the need for privacy and consumer rights to be informed
47:53SPEAKERabout the usage of all this data that's being collected, which just feels
47:58SPEAKERnoble, but hopelessly naive by today's standards.
48:01SPEAKERAnd then the other, the other side of it is they talked about the rise of
48:04SPEAKERwhat we now know of as influencer culture, where, you know, they were
48:08SPEAKERtalking about building what at the time we probably would have called
48:11SPEAKERadvertorial sites that were unfettered by editorial concerns where sponsors
48:19SPEAKERcould interact directly with the editorial content and get their message
48:22SPEAKERdirectly to consumers and the best possible way.
48:25SPEAKERAnd they had examples of that stuff.
48:27SPEAKERNope.
48:27SPEAKERKind of grim.
48:28SPEAKERYeah, it sure is.
48:29SPEAKERThe last piece I've got in this in this little sub heading of, Oh God help
48:35SPEAKERus.
48:35SPEAKERThey saw it coming.
48:36SPEAKERIs that, is that David Brin piece about surveillance?
48:39SPEAKERYeah.
48:39SPEAKERSo about, about the rapidly miniaturizing cameras that were about to be
48:43SPEAKERinstalled on every street corner and in every building and what would be
48:47SPEAKERused with all of that footage and like which, which authorities would have
48:50SPEAKERaccess to it and how, how oppressive with the surveillance state be and so
48:55SPEAKERforth.
48:56SPEAKERWell, so it's actually, so I think the impetus for this was a couple of
49:00SPEAKERcities in the UK aimed surveillance cameras at places that, that were like
49:05SPEAKERtroublemaker hotspots.
49:07SPEAKEROkay.
49:08SPEAKERDid that make the news?
49:09SPEAKERWhy do I feel like I remember?
49:12SPEAKERIt was the beginning of the UK surveillance state as you know, the most
49:15SPEAKERsurveilled island in the world at this point, I think.
49:18SPEAKERYeah.
49:18SPEAKERI mean, obviously also, I mean, yes, like, you know, with the, in the wake
49:22SPEAKERof like 1984 and Brazil and stuff like that, I'm sure that the news media of
49:25SPEAKERthe nineties blew this up.
49:27SPEAKERWell, so the David Brin thought experiment is imagine two societies,
49:32SPEAKERone where cameras are ubiquitous and control, but both where cameras are
49:36SPEAKERubiquitous rather.
49:37SPEAKERYes.
49:38SPEAKEROne where they're controlled by secret police, you know, the 1984 view and the
49:43SPEAKERother where everything, all the footage from everything is accessible to
49:47SPEAKEReveryone all the time.
49:48SPEAKERSo everything becomes reality TV, which hadn't been invented yet at this point.
49:52SPEAKERReally.
49:52SPEAKERI guess, I guess real world was around, but we hadn't hit survivor and all that
49:56SPEAKERstuff yet.
49:57SPEAKERCorrect.
49:59SPEAKERYeah.
49:59SPEAKEREverything's everything's the citizens are watching each other and keeping
50:02SPEAKEReverybody nice and honest.
50:03SPEAKERNow we've managed to make a real reality that was much worse than either.
50:09SPEAKERWell, maybe not worse than the police state one, although maybe the
50:13SPEAKERsurveillance capitalism model that we've embraced as a society is, is almost as
50:19SPEAKERbad as the, Hey, we have the secret police watching us all the time.
50:22SPEAKEROne.
50:24SPEAKERMy favorite quote from this is the cameras are getting smaller and cheaper
50:28SPEAKERis the gist.
50:29SPEAKERAnd then he says, can civilian models be far enough?
50:32SPEAKERCan civilian models be far behind?
50:34SPEAKERAnd yeah, like people put nest cameras and, and even worse cameras in their
50:40SPEAKERhomes, even the kids everywhere, all the time.
50:43SPEAKER15, 15 years after this issue, pretty much.
50:45SPEAKER25 or 30 years after this year issue, almost.
50:48SPEAKERNo, no.
50:48SPEAKERI mean like 15 years after you were starting to see things like nest
50:52SPEAKERproliferate.
50:53SPEAKERYeah.
50:53SPEAKERI, this, this issue is making me feel like an old man yelling at clouds,
50:57SPEAKERBrad.
50:57SPEAKERKinda.
50:58SPEAKERYeah.
50:58SPEAKERI mean, I don't, I don't know.
50:59SPEAKERLike I'll give them credit for writing about what we're about.
51:02SPEAKERLike I said, what we're about to be a lot of like relatively pressing
51:06SPEAKERintersections between technology and society.
51:10SPEAKERRight.
51:11SPEAKEROh, look, if the goal was to make a magazine that felt like it was shipped
51:16SPEAKERfrom the mail to you from the future.
51:19SPEAKERNice job.
51:19SPEAKERI guess they did it.
51:20SPEAKERYeah.
51:21SPEAKERGood job guys.
51:22SPEAKERYes.
51:22SPEAKERThere was a, there's a short piece in here about John Gage that I thought
51:25SPEAKERwas pretty interesting.
51:26SPEAKERI mean, of course I would.
51:29SPEAKERHe is a former founder of Sun Microsystems, but.
51:32SPEAKERYeah.
51:33SPEAKERBut it sounds like I just, first of all, I didn't, I don't think I realized
51:35SPEAKERthat some of the founders of Sun were like quite literally people who helped
51:38SPEAKERcreate BSD at Berkeley.
51:42SPEAKERThis guy's role at Sun later on was director of the science office is how
51:46SPEAKERit's described.
51:47SPEAKERI mean, again, he was like the fifth employee, so he could kind of write his
51:49SPEAKERown job description at this point, but the story is full of him, like
51:53SPEAKERinterfacing with world leaders, like the, the president of Egypt, for example.
51:58SPEAKERAnd like, you know, like there's, there's just kind of an anecdote in here
52:00SPEAKERabout the reporter hanging out with this guy and he's getting calls from the
52:04SPEAKERoffices of multiple countries, prime ministers or presidents or whatever,
52:07SPEAKERbecause he's like involved in like information and green policy around the
52:11SPEAKERworld.
52:12SPEAKERWell, this, this has got to be, this is during the time where he's like, Hey,
52:15SPEAKERwe got to get on the internet, right?
52:16SPEAKERIt's it's literally, it's literally when that episode of the Simpsons aired,
52:21SPEAKERwhere Homer is like, I made an internet company and then Bill Gates came to my
52:24SPEAKERhouse and beat me up as a result of starting an internet company that nobody
52:28SPEAKERunderstood. Right? Right.
52:29SPEAKERYeah. All these politicians have no idea what the hell this thing is. And they
52:32SPEAKERjust know they have to call somebody. And at the time, if you wanted a web
52:36SPEAKERserver, this is before Apache and lamp took off, you probably called sun
52:40SPEAKERbecause that's what sun sold, right?
52:43SPEAKEROr, or next or SGI. I mean, maybe not an SGI for a web server, but then, you
52:48SPEAKERknow, the point is you were probably calling one of these big iron workstation
52:51SPEAKERand server companies. Cause that's kind of all there was.
52:53SPEAKERYou're buying a $50,000 machine from sun most likely.
52:56SPEAKERRight. Right. You were serious.
52:58SPEAKERYeah. Like the, the, the, the, the deck of this article is why is John Gage,
53:02SPEAKERa bearded old Berkeley troublemaker hearing the corporate flag for the
53:06SPEAKERPentagon's favorite computer maker? Like it's just an interesting look at,
53:09SPEAKERat this guy being that style of, of, I mean, Berkeley troublemaker, I feel
53:13SPEAKERlike is about as evocative, evocative a phrase as you can come up with or what
53:17SPEAKERthis guy's politics probably were. Paints a picture. And then there's the
53:21SPEAKERquote from Paul Sappho that this is the thing that leapt out at me, who is the
53:25SPEAKERdirector of the Institute for the future, which was a whole kind of Berkeley
53:29SPEAKERhippie think tank at the time. John's what anthropologists would call a
53:34SPEAKERshaman and there's more quote, but I just stopped there. That tells you the
53:37SPEAKERwhole thing. It's not good. That's like some pre-Shingy kind of stuff.
53:41SPEAKERWell, but they were always, there were always these people around at that time.
53:45SPEAKERYeah. Look, he's a nice guy. Be nice to Shingy.
53:48SPEAKERThat's fine. I don't, I know absolutely nothing about him other than the kind of
53:53SPEAKERcaricature that grew up around him online. Let's, let's be real. The phrase
53:58SPEAKERdigital profit maybe does not do itself any favors.
54:00SPEAKERIt's not, it doesn't help. But like, it's the thing you have to remember is at
54:04SPEAKERthis time in the internet, people didn't understand this thing. They needed
54:07SPEAKERpeople who could explain it to them. They wanted friendly, likable people to
54:10SPEAKERdo that, which is how you ended up with the shaman and digital profits and all
54:14SPEAKERthat nonsense. Totally. But, but, you know, again, I found this interesting,
54:17SPEAKERlike, like I said, with the general tone of this magazine, like this type of guy
54:21SPEAKERis very consistent with what it seems like the politics of Wired probably
54:25SPEAKERwere at this time. It was kind of an optimistic libertarianism that doesn't
54:30SPEAKERreally exist in the modern, modern context. Yeah. But I mean, that, that was
54:33SPEAKERthe predominant vibe about the internet through pretty much all of the nineties,
54:36SPEAKERright up until like the dotcom explosion and everybody started making a lot of
54:39SPEAKERmoney on it. Right. It was like, Hey, this is going to be free. This is going to
54:43SPEAKERfree human consciousness. You're going to have access to the sum total of
54:45SPEAKERknowledge in your house at all times. The people involved in like the John
54:51SPEAKERgauge made a buttload of money on sun, unless, unless he held the stock too
54:54SPEAKERlong. Right. We talked about Java a little bit, which was funny because like
54:59SPEAKERJava, this was, this was in the decline for Java. This is when sun was talking
55:03SPEAKERabout doing a dumb terminal, sorry, thin clients. Yeah. It would be the future
55:10SPEAKERof computing. And then it turned out to not so much be the future of computing,
55:13SPEAKERbut anyway, but it sounds like, it sounds like he was one of the big backers of
55:17SPEAKERJava at the company, which seems a little, I know about Java and its kind of
55:24SPEAKERportability and kind of run anywhere ethos, like that seems consistent with
55:28SPEAKERsomething that a guy like this would probably be behind.
55:30SPEAKERWell, they just needed 10 more years of hardware advancement and just-in-time
55:33SPEAKERcompilers for Java to really be good at this time. Java was pretty bad kind of a
55:37SPEAKERpunchline. Yeah. I mean, I, yes, I remember, I remember exactly how reviled
55:41SPEAKERJava was for a long time at this point. Do you want to go, like there's some
55:48SPEAKERrandom small stuff we can hit? Sure. There's upon page 54, there's a Seymour
55:53SPEAKERCray, the founder of Cray computers, super computers, Obit. Yes. That full on
55:58SPEAKERfull on white shirt and tie with not a pocket protector, but a pen clipped into
56:03SPEAKERhis breast pocket. It might as well be a pocket protector. Standing in front of a
56:07SPEAKERvery large computer. Yeah. Talking about submerging them in, in coolant and stuff
56:13SPEAKERlike that. Their gadgets section was called fetish, which continued for the
56:17SPEAKERnext, I think it probably is still called that. I don't know for sure. It's a cool
56:22SPEAKERlamp on page 85 or 65 rather. Sorry. Fetish. Fetish. Yeah. Let's see, do we
56:31SPEAKERwant to talk about jargon watch, which is another classic wired segment section
56:36SPEAKERthat it continued for a long time. Yeah. Most of these I thought were a little
56:39SPEAKERbit eye rolling, but one of them really jumped out at me, which was poured per
56:42SPEAKERpillow. It's always eye rolling. So I, my theory on these is that they would have
56:48SPEAKERone thing that was real and then they just made up a bunch of shit in the
56:51SPEAKERoffice that they thought was funny. Yes. Some of these, okay, well you worked at a
56:54SPEAKERmagazine, you would know better than anybody how much of the content is just
56:57SPEAKERfabricated. We did not fabricate content at maximum PC. Sometimes we would put
57:02SPEAKERstuff in because we thought it was funny and very stupid. Yeah. And somebody would
57:05SPEAKERsay it to somebody, but we did not just make, like, I don't want to name any
57:09SPEAKERgames magazines, but there were games magazines that had columnists that
57:13SPEAKERweren't real. Oh, well, hold on. We did have Dick Matthews, who was, who wrote
57:16SPEAKERthe windows tips for idiots column, who was a fabrication, but the tips were
57:21SPEAKERreal. I see. Sometimes you just need a pseudonym. Nobody wanted to put their
57:25SPEAKERname on that one because it was mean. Okay. Well, I mean, okay. Like, do I
57:29SPEAKERactually think there were people in 1986 going around and using the term
57:32SPEAKER"asmosis"? No. Which, which is the process through which some people
57:36SPEAKERachieve career success by sucking up to the boss? Probably not. Right. I mean,
57:40SPEAKERmaybe. Port Propello jumped out at me though. I would believe that somebody
57:44SPEAKERin like university IT actually used this phrase at the time, "a goal set by
57:48SPEAKERuniversities seeking to install network connections in the bedrooms of every
57:52SPEAKERstudent on campus." Like that one to me is actually like an interesting
57:56SPEAKERinflection point, like sign of the increasing ubiquity of network access and
58:00SPEAKERinternet access. Right. Because like, when did you get to college? I mean,
58:04SPEAKERthere was no, there was no need for residential networking ports prior to
58:08SPEAKERwhat, 1994-ish, let's say? '95 is really when it most, like MIT and technical
58:15SPEAKERschools had internet in dorms before that, but like network cards were really
58:19SPEAKERexpensive when I went to college. Right. So even, so I went to NC State,
58:22SPEAKERwhich is an engineering school, like as I quite connected for the time, it was
58:28SPEAKERprobably more connected than most universities in the country. I still
58:32SPEAKERended up in, there were like three dorms on campus in '98 when I moved into a
58:35SPEAKERdorm there that did not have wired internet yet. I would have not moved
58:42SPEAKERinto that dorm. I didn't have a choice. It turned out that's just where I got
58:45SPEAKERstuck. I got out of there after one semester, I found, I knew somebody in a
58:50SPEAKERdorm that had a wired internet access that was moving out and like did
58:55SPEAKEReverything I could with like university residential services to make sure I was
58:59SPEAKERable to take his spot. It's funny. Yes. No, I never had dorm internet. I,
59:05SPEAKERwhen I went to work at the university, we had, we'd just gotten on the internet
59:09SPEAKERtoo. And you know, the, the gigabit backbone basically for research
59:16SPEAKERinstitutions and universities. And it was, that was fast, but we were still
59:21SPEAKERconnecting to the main network with like 10 base, two, 10, 10 megabit
59:26SPEAKERconnections. It wasn't like, we didn't like the world on fire. I mean, 10
59:30SPEAKERmegabits in the late nineties was still pretty goddamn fast. That's true. Okay.
59:34SPEAKERSo the wired and tired is still, is in here, but they hadn't added the expired
59:39SPEAKERyet, which is really funny. Cause that's another classic wired segment. They
59:42SPEAKERhave pages that this is on page 47, I think for the magazine print, not the
59:49SPEAKERPDF, the PDF it's 53. Ah, yes. And it's things that are wired the onion
59:55SPEAKERmillennium, the TV show with Lance Henriksen, I believe. Wow. The onion in
1:00:00SPEAKER1996. Uh-huh. Those are two real things. Now Satan's punch. That's not a real
1:00:06SPEAKERthing. Never heard of that before. Peak bagging. I don't know what that is.
1:00:12SPEAKERMedical marijuana. I've heard of that and windows on the world, which is, I
1:00:16SPEAKERbelieve the restaurant at the top of the world trade center. Okay. Sure. VT 100
1:00:20SPEAKERalso on the wired category. VT 100s are always wired in my book. Mario, Mario
1:00:27SPEAKERon the, on the thing, personal marimba transmitters. That's a wireless radio
1:00:31SPEAKERstandard. If I recall a tired, the baby bells, cheap airlines, home pages,
1:00:38SPEAKERSonic. Sorry, Brad. What kind of Sonic? I believe the hedgehog of the hedgehog
1:00:44SPEAKERvariety, I guess plugging. I don't know what that means. Cigars. A lot of ads
1:00:49SPEAKERfor cigars in this, in this magazine or featuring cigars, network computing
1:00:54SPEAKERarchitecture. What I look, I, I'm, I'm just reading it. I'm not, I'm not
1:00:58SPEAKERwriting it. Uh, millennialism, which I guess is being worried about the end of
1:01:03SPEAKERthe century, the upcoming end of the century. That's that's, that's what that
1:01:07SPEAKERwould have meant at that time. Yes. Oh, Gatorade Satan's much must be some
1:01:11SPEAKERsort of exercise beverage. Cause Gatorade is lined up with it. Kind of these, I
1:01:15SPEAKERthink are supposed to go together. Marinol marijuana windows, CE versus
1:01:21SPEAKERwindows on the world. Yeah. This is, this is a weird, this is a weird layout
1:01:25SPEAKERfor this. Um, what else we got? Uh, can we talk about the, well, there's a
1:01:32SPEAKERstory about Romero leaving ID on page 92. I swear we did not engineer this to
1:01:36SPEAKERyet again, talk about Romero leaving. It's like the third or fourth time it's
1:01:40SPEAKERcome up on this podcast. It has a pretty good quote for what it's worth after
1:01:46SPEAKERRomero, uh, they, they attribute Romero's exited ID, uh, to exhausting job of
1:01:53SPEAKERcreating quake. One of the design Maven's mind bending medieval romps. Uh, and
1:01:58SPEAKERthen he says, Carmack repeated, we rebuilt the engine cause he was
1:02:01SPEAKERunsatisfied with it. And the Mike Wilson quote says, John Carmack won't put out
1:02:06SPEAKERanything that's less than the best. It can be frustrating writing art in that
1:02:11SPEAKERsituation. Okay. So there you go. I mean, that, that is, I mean, we talked
1:02:15SPEAKERabout the Romero book last year, but like that is kind of the story that that
1:02:18SPEAKERbook tells as well. Right. That, that engine is, I mean, even Carmack, I have
1:02:23SPEAKERseen in recent last couple of years saying that like he actually bit off more
1:02:27SPEAKERthan he could chew with the quake engine. And yes, it did delay the project
1:02:31SPEAKERgetting out because they didn't have a finished engine to build the game on.
1:02:34SPEAKERBut here's another, here's another good quote. No sooner were the last few
1:02:39SPEAKERbugs worked out on it's hot August release quake than Romero announced. He
1:02:42SPEAKERwas leaving to launch his own company tentatively called ion. Romero's
1:02:46SPEAKERexuberant personality that sometimes clashed with Carmack's more introverted
1:02:49SPEAKERstyle and all out emphasis on tech. Even so the decision stunned colleagues.
1:02:55SPEAKERIt was a surprise says Tim Willits and it designer who worked closely with
1:02:59SPEAKERRomero. He talked about it, but leaving it is a big deal. I thought they,
1:03:04SPEAKERI think they probably knew Brad, probably. I think we know now.
1:03:08SPEAKERI just appreciate that they went and by they, I mean, wired went and talked to
1:03:13SPEAKERsome clay quake clan people. Romero's abrupt exit worried quake addicts and
1:03:20SPEAKERincreasing number of whom are joining multiplayer clans or teams, which
1:03:23SPEAKERstaged death matches and trash talk by elaborate web pages. Already there are
1:03:28SPEAKERmore than 200 clans with names like dark requiem damage incorporated and the
1:03:32SPEAKERrevolting Cox, who I think, I think the revolting Cox went by Revco or at
1:03:37SPEAKERleast that was the plan tag. Right. That was it. You remember that? Like,
1:03:42SPEAKERdid you ever see clan people? I mean, anybody could name themselves, whatever
1:03:46SPEAKERthey wanted on a quake server. Like you could change your name at will, but
1:03:48SPEAKERdid you ever see on like pub, did you play all the pub death match? Did you
1:03:52SPEAKERever just see random people with clan tags on a DM servers? Oh, so I played
1:03:58SPEAKERon, there were a couple of rocket arena servers that you knew that if you
1:04:02SPEAKERwent on, you'd see people that were people like, like famous people. Yeah.
1:04:06SPEAKERLike people from yeah. Like famous, big quake, famous, famous, famous in the
1:04:11SPEAKERquake clan world. I should, I should be specific or explicit here. I'm trying
1:04:15SPEAKERto think like I've, I, most of those, most of those names are lost to time
1:04:20SPEAKERfor me at this point. I mean, scary comes to mind, Steve Gibson, who now,
1:04:23SPEAKERor, you know, was a gearbox for a long time founded Shaq news before that. But
1:04:26SPEAKERlike, there were like a lot of people who, like you knew in the clan scene,
1:04:30SPEAKERif you followed wake and played a lot of it back then. Yeah, exactly. There
1:04:34SPEAKERwere a lot of, there were, there were famous, there were popular servers that
1:04:37SPEAKERwere kind of hard to get into or that were private and you had to know people
1:04:40SPEAKERto get in. Yeah, I was never that connected. I just pretty much like
1:04:43SPEAKERserver browsed and hopped on whatever looked good. I just pub stomped and
1:04:47SPEAKERmoved on. There were, there were, there were also a lot of scrim servers that
1:04:51SPEAKERyou would like if you had a five player team or six player team or whatever,
1:04:54SPEAKERyou'd jump into scrim pages on on F net or under net and set up scrims with
1:05:01SPEAKERother teams. So yeah. One other quick gaming hit real quick before we wrap
1:05:06SPEAKERthis thing up here, probably the last ad from me, this just jumped out at me
1:05:09SPEAKERin an ad for a game called ZPC. You ever heard of this? What was the game? ZPC.
1:05:15SPEAKERNo, I've never heard of this. I don't know what it stands for. I'd assumed
1:05:18SPEAKERthat stood for something. Apparently it was a, it was a first person shooter
1:05:21SPEAKERapparently built on the marathon two engine. There was a marathon. I guess
1:05:25SPEAKERthere was a marathon too. Oh yeah. Wow. Which actually does that mean that was
1:05:29SPEAKERa Mac only game? No, it came out on windows actually. So I guess they, I
1:05:33SPEAKERdon't think I realized that they ported marathon based games to windows at any
1:05:36SPEAKERpoint. I thought marathon, didn't marathon come out for windows? I don't
1:05:40SPEAKERthink so. Did it? I don't remember. I always thought the first two marathon
1:05:44SPEAKERgames were Mac only. No, it totally did come out. Wow. Wow, man. I don't know
1:05:49SPEAKERhow I missed that. Well, the studio that made this game made a bunch of
1:05:53SPEAKERgames. They made Zork nemesis, spec ops Rangers lead the way spec ops Ranger
1:06:00SPEAKERteam Bravo. Oh, is that, Oh my God. That's zombie studios. It's zombie.
1:06:04SPEAKERYeah. Oh, I had no idea covert operations essentials. Um, there's a bunch of
1:06:10SPEAKERspec ops games in here. I think I might have been through the studio at least
1:06:13SPEAKERonce actually. They were active. They did, um, black light retribution,
1:06:19SPEAKERblack water. That's a saw to then saw classic like three 60 era games.
1:06:26SPEAKERIf I haven't been to the studio, I've at least met with developers from the
1:06:28SPEAKERstudio at, um, on different, well, different games of some sort. And they
1:06:34SPEAKERdid, they did America's army, the U S army funded game. I did not know this.
1:06:41SPEAKERThey were the developer of America's army co-developer commissioned. It says
1:06:46SPEAKERby the United States armed forces wild somewhere, somewhere COVID co-developed
1:06:50SPEAKERwith the U S army development team and others were made with other game
1:06:53SPEAKERdevelopers. Yeah. That's crazy. I didn't even, I didn't even notice that
1:06:55SPEAKERconnection. The reason I brought this, this ad up outside the fact that this
1:06:58SPEAKERwas a marathon based game. And I thought that was crazy. And again, I'd never
1:07:01SPEAKERrealized that marathon eventually came to windows. The ad has pictures of
1:07:06SPEAKERlinen, Hitler and Jesus Christ in it. Yeah. It's a wild ad, which feels, it
1:07:12SPEAKERfeels very, uh, feels very wired. Like feels very targeted at this type of
1:07:16SPEAKERaudience. Yeah. It's it's like, look, it was a simpler time. I don't think
1:07:22SPEAKERthey really thought what they were doing, putting pictures of Hitler in ads,
1:07:25SPEAKERbut maybe who knows? Yeah. Anyway, um, real quick, before we go, yeah, early
1:07:31SPEAKERball, I know you've been assisting to talk about worldly ball. Look, there's,
1:07:35SPEAKERlike I said, there's a history of finding a stupid story and then acting
1:07:39SPEAKERlike it's a real trend. And this is, this feels like one of those to me.
1:07:42SPEAKERAnd then does this just by coincidence, give the editors of the magazine an
1:07:46SPEAKERexcuse to go partake in the thing that they want to go write about?
1:07:49SPEAKERI would say probably that's true. So a worldly ball is a sport that uses what
1:07:54SPEAKERlooked like bumper cars and like a highlight whack mallet or scooper
1:08:00SPEAKERthing. And you drive around in the bumper cars in teams of five or six
1:08:06SPEAKERpeople, I think up to five players per side. And you try to wang the ball
1:08:11SPEAKERthat's bouncing around the bumper car floor into a tiny hole on one end or
1:08:16SPEAKERthe other of the worldly ball field ballot arena. I don't know what it's
1:08:22SPEAKERcalled. Um, I've literally never heard of this. I don't think that it is a
1:08:28SPEAKERthing that people more than one location ever engaged with.
1:08:32SPEAKEROh my God. I was sitting here looking at these photos and listening to
1:08:35SPEAKERdescribe this. I was envisioning this as like, I was like, it sounds like a
1:08:38SPEAKERreal life fusion frenzy mini game. That sounds great. And then I skimmed
1:08:43SPEAKERhalfway down, uh, the Edmonds, Washington worldly ball facility attracts a fair
1:08:48SPEAKERamount of its clientele from Microsoft's nearby office campus.
1:08:51SPEAKERWhat a weird coincidence. There you go. Okay. This is like, this is,
1:08:55SPEAKERthis is bill Gates. Favorite bumper car game. Well, it's, I mean, look,
1:08:59SPEAKERit's halfway between fusion frenzy and halfway between hyper blade. Do you
1:09:02SPEAKERremember hyper blade specially hyper blade was cyberpunk rollerblading
1:09:09SPEAKERwhere you had to like death sport where you had to huck a ball into a little
1:09:12SPEAKERhole off of your rollerblades. So, uh, anyway, worldly ball, uh, sadly,
1:09:18SPEAKERworldly, I would play worldly ball right now. That looks pretty good. If I'm
1:09:21SPEAKERbeing honest, look, I can see the appeal. Um, that's the last thing I've got. I
1:09:26SPEAKERdon't know if you've got anything else, but, uh, this, this Nicholas Negroponte
1:09:29SPEAKERkind of what's, what's the magazine term for the like final page editorial
1:09:33SPEAKERcolumn, the back page, the back page, uh, yeah. He writes about, um, laptops in
1:09:42SPEAKERhere. Yeah. I kind of mobile computers were novel at this time where laptops
1:09:47SPEAKERhave been and what he wants out of them in the future that I thought had some
1:09:50SPEAKERinteresting historical factoids in them. He talks about his, um, I mean, he's a,
1:09:54SPEAKERhe's a writer. So like, this is more of a word processor really than a laptop,
1:09:57SPEAKERbut he does describe it as his first portable computer, which was a Sony type
1:10:01SPEAKERquarter in 1980, which ran on AA batteries. Those things were cool. These
1:10:07SPEAKERwere like journalists use those. Yeah. They were really neat. So one line, it's
1:10:12SPEAKERa one line word processor. So you had to type a keyboard with a little tiny
1:10:15SPEAKERscreen above it. That was like one 80 column, probably with wide. Yeah, sure.
1:10:20SPEAKERAnd you, you could, if you were a reporter, you could sit down and you could
1:10:24SPEAKERwrite your thing and then you go to a pay phone and you could fax it or modem
1:10:27SPEAKERit to your assigning editor. That was, that was the part that really blew my
1:10:31SPEAKERmind. I mean, it's like he said, it ran endlessly on four AA batteries. It had
1:10:34SPEAKERthe one line screen. It was one of those like eight way LCD screens. Yes. It only
1:10:39SPEAKERwon or sorry, it only weighed like three pounds. He says three, three and a
1:10:43SPEAKERquarter pounds or something. But the thing that blew my mind was like you
1:10:46SPEAKERsaid, it has what I guess would have been like half of an acoustic coupler,
1:10:50SPEAKERright? Because it could only upload. It could not download. It could not receive
1:10:53SPEAKERinformation. It could only transmit information. Oh, that's, that's
1:10:56SPEAKERinteresting. I didn't, I missed that part. The type quarter expected a market with
1:11:01SPEAKERjournalists. And for this reason, the modem only uploaded, it literally had
1:11:04SPEAKERjust one suction cup for attaching to a telephone mouthpiece. That's wild. Yeah.
1:11:09SPEAKERSo it can only send, which I thought was really cool. I mean, he goes on to talk
1:11:14SPEAKERabout, you know, laptop form factors and what different companies have been doing
1:11:17SPEAKERwith them. Another interesting factoid that came out of this that I've found
1:11:21SPEAKERinteresting though, is that he said today, flight attendants, flight attendants,
1:11:25SPEAKERdon't ask me what's on my lap referring to, you know, the ubiquity of laptops.
1:11:30SPEAKERThey asked me if it has a CD-ROM in which case the FAA says I can't use it in
1:11:34SPEAKERflight. Wait, why couldn't you use a CD-ROM in flight? I wonder presumably the
1:11:38SPEAKERsame reason they made you turn your phone off for so many years, which was just
1:11:41SPEAKERconcerned about interference with instruments, I guess. Or maybe the disc
1:11:45SPEAKERexploded and sent shrapnel flying through the cabin. I guess, I don't know. I mean,
1:11:49SPEAKERhe mentions in the same paragraph, he says forbid that laptops should be fully
1:11:55SPEAKERprohibited as they were for a while on Korean air. So apparently there was a time
1:11:59SPEAKERwhen at least one airline literally wouldn't let you use a laptop. It's, it's
1:12:02SPEAKERfunny because I think the first time I saw a laptop was when I was a freshman in
1:12:06SPEAKERcollege. One of the kids on my floor had a, had a, like a, what was probably a
1:12:10SPEAKER$6,000 Toshiba black and white laptop in 1993 instead of the desktop computers
1:12:17SPEAKERthat everybody else had. Interesting.
1:12:20SPEAKERYeah. The last thing I want to say is that on page 216, there's a mention of
1:12:23SPEAKERPointcast, which is my favorite dopey 90s internet thing, which was push. It was,
1:12:29SPEAKERit was imagine if the internet, but it could push stuff to you instead of you
1:12:33SPEAKERhaving to go to a webpage to find it. So Pointcast used, I think V space in the
1:12:39SPEAKERV blank part of the TV signal to send little bits of data over the air and you
1:12:46SPEAKERcould get like alerts when news happened. So it went away almost immediately
1:12:52SPEAKERbecause, and then we replaced it all with phone notifications 10 years, 15
1:12:56SPEAKERyears later. So yeah. Yep. Last, last little thing. I mean, it's the very end
1:13:00SPEAKERof this last laptop column that I was just talking about to wrap things up
1:13:03SPEAKERhere. I mean, you know, again, I'll kind of give this magazine credit. Like they
1:13:06SPEAKERsaw a fair amount of stuff coming here. Like he's talking about what he wants
1:13:09SPEAKERout of new laptops and that, you know, says like they should not get too thin,
1:13:13SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera. I do have one new requirement, something that planes and
1:13:17SPEAKERboats have and cars soon will. I want my laptop to know where it is at a basic
1:13:23SPEAKERlevel. This means knowing about time and time zones. However, I mean something
1:13:26SPEAKERmuch more refined, including the ability to correlate longitude and latitude with
1:13:30SPEAKERcities so that my laptop will know what town it's in, what language to use,
1:13:33SPEAKERwhat local telephone numbers to dial and what protocols to use for net access
1:13:38SPEAKERlink that kind of got there. Right. Not necessarily, maybe not necessarily
1:13:44SPEAKERtriangulating the same data that he's talking about necessarily. It's a lot
1:13:46SPEAKERmore like geo locating by IP and stuff like that. But like you kind of take it
1:13:50SPEAKERfor granted that your devices are going to know where they are now. Right.
1:13:54SPEAKEROne of the things that I thought was funny about this whole issue is that the
1:13:58SPEAKERidea of GPS as a tool for nerds pops up multiple times. Like Neal Stephenson
1:14:02SPEAKERtalks about putting GPS coordinates in for each of the stops on his on his
1:14:07SPEAKERhacker tourism tour. In the John Gage article, rather, they talk about giving
1:14:15SPEAKERhim a laptop with a GPS receiver and a cellular modem so they can know where
1:14:20SPEAKERhe is for a conference. So they had a map on the wall that had where is John
1:14:24SPEAKERGage and it would show where he was at any given moment. And then he lost the
1:14:27SPEAKERlaptop three days after he got it. So it stopped updating. Right. It was probably
1:14:37SPEAKERin '97 or '98 even, much later than this. I got a serial port GPS adapter that
1:14:44SPEAKERyou put some AA batteries in and you could hook it up to a laptop or a Palm
1:14:48SPEAKERPilot and grab your GPS coordinates from wherever you were. You didn't have a
1:14:52SPEAKERmap. You just got latitude and longitude. You had to then take a paper map and
1:14:56SPEAKERlook at the latitudes and longitudes to figure out where you actually were with
1:14:59SPEAKERa ruler usually. But you could tell. And this was even before GPS. This is when
1:15:05SPEAKERit was still artificially inaccurate and they were still making it wobbly for
1:15:08SPEAKERmilitary purposes. Oh, wild. I forgot about that. Yeah. So anyway, it's weird.
1:15:15SPEAKERI enjoyed this one. I enjoyed going back in. I am reasonably sure that I bought
1:15:19SPEAKERthis magazine when I was in college and I think, yeah, this exact issue because
1:15:25SPEAKERI really like Neal Stephenson after reading The Diamond Age. And I also think
1:15:30SPEAKERthat I cited the neural network article, or if not this one, then another one in
1:15:37SPEAKERmy senior thesis, which was about the rise of the transition from biological
1:15:44SPEAKERneural networks, which we were using to model artificial neural networks that
1:15:48SPEAKERran on Silicon. Wild. Do you still have that thesis? I want to talk about it.
1:15:52SPEAKERIt's not available. It's not available for reading in 2025. Do you still have it
1:15:56SPEAKERthough? It's not available for reading in 2025, Brad. Yes. I'm not asking to
1:16:00SPEAKERread it. I just want to know if it still exists. If people know that it's there,
1:16:04SPEAKERthen it'll, it'll come out. I don't want that. It's not good. There's an extended
1:16:08SPEAKERsection about commander data in there. It's bad. It's a bad, it's bad writing.
1:16:13SPEAKERNow I have to read this. Well, you're never going to find it. Maybe we should
1:16:18SPEAKERdo an episode about some of our former work sometime. Nope. Never going to talk
1:16:22SPEAKERabout this one again. Man. I know. I mean, I brought it up and now it's out
1:16:27SPEAKERthere. Yeah. Yeah. I also really enjoy going through this issue. This, this one
1:16:31SPEAKERwas like, nostalgic is not the right word, but this, this evokes, this issue
1:16:36SPEAKERevoked a time and place for me in a way that even some of those older like
1:16:39SPEAKERgaming magazines did not because it taps into so many more real-world currents
1:16:43SPEAKERabout what was going on around technology. I think. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it, this is a
1:16:48SPEAKERlifestyle piece more than anything, right? Yeah. It's it's it's weird. I don't
1:16:54SPEAKERunderstand why, like, I don't, there's a lot of stuff about this that I don't
1:16:59SPEAKERunderstand. Right. It's a weird, it's a weird place in a time. And I, I can't get
1:17:04SPEAKERin the head space to figure out why things were like that. And, and I don't
1:17:08SPEAKERremember why, why we used to do that. My camera's all fucked up. Sorry. I don't
1:17:12SPEAKERknow if we can, I think we have to end this episode. Your camera has been
1:17:15SPEAKERpanning around your room for the last like 30 seconds. Yeah. I've tested out a
1:17:19SPEAKERnew camera and it's, it has a gimbal on it and I don't think I like it. I think
1:17:23SPEAKERI'm actually going to send it back because. Is it one of those, is it one of
1:17:26SPEAKERthose, like, supposed to be motion tracking your face kind of thing? It's
1:17:29SPEAKERthat the lights were off and it was unable to tell where your face was. What
1:17:32SPEAKERwas going on there? It's a little dim. Yeah. But it keeps zooming in on weird
1:17:36SPEAKERplaces when I, I have a preset, maybe it got twisted. I don't know. This is
1:17:39SPEAKERterrible audio content. It's trying to paint a word picture here. Yeah. It's
1:17:44SPEAKERlook, the, when the robots take over the world, the world gets weird. Yep. This
1:17:49SPEAKERseems like as good a place as any to wrap it up. Right. I think so. So yeah,
1:17:54SPEAKERDecember, 1996 issue of Wired Magazine, 04.12 in the versioning scheme. The
1:18:00SPEAKERlink to the PDF and our show notes that have page numbers for all of the
1:18:04SPEAKERdifferent things we talked about will be in the show notes of this episode. It
1:18:07SPEAKERreally, really feels like a journey back in time. And there's like, you can
1:18:13SPEAKERsee the forks on the road of the internet that came later from, from where
1:18:18SPEAKERwe're sitting right here. It's still like, I'm going to say that I've said
1:18:22SPEAKERit before in retrospect, trading free hot takes for letting people run
1:18:27SPEAKERarbitrary code on your computers. Probably a mistake. I think you're
1:18:30SPEAKERprobably right. But you know, what's not a mistake is supporting publications
1:18:35SPEAKERthat you like. That's right. So if you, if you like this podcast and you want
1:18:38SPEAKERto support it, that's the only way we make money on this. It's a listener
1:18:42SPEAKERsupported endeavor, and we appreciate each and every person who supports the
1:18:46SPEAKERshow. We sure do. These hot takes are free, but we will not arbitrarily run
1:18:50SPEAKERcode on your computer. Yet. If you give me an opportunity to run some arbitrary
1:18:53SPEAKERcode on your computer, I might take it. But as long as the listeners keep
1:18:57SPEAKERsupporting the podcast, we don't have to do that. That's right. You can go to
1:19:01SPEAKERpatreon.com/techpod. Again, that's patreon.com/techpod where for five bucks
1:19:07SPEAKERa month, US dollars, you get access to our monthly patron exclusive episodes
1:19:13SPEAKERand the fabulous tech pod discord, which is full of beautiful nerds, just like
1:19:17SPEAKERyou. That's right. I witnessed someone in the network channel just today
1:19:23SPEAKERinstalling log to Ram on their raspberry pies and getting a nice crash course
1:19:27SPEAKERfrom some people and how to do that correctly. And I saw that too. I was in
1:19:32SPEAKERthere too. I see people learning and helping each other. It's users helping
1:19:38SPEAKERusers. It's the part of the internet that seemed like it was going to be a
1:19:40SPEAKERgood thing in the nineties and it still is in the 2025. We have the last good
1:19:46SPEAKERcorner of the internet right here. So you can go to patreon.com/techpod, find
1:19:50SPEAKERout how to join there. We appreciate each and every person's support, but we
1:19:53SPEAKERespecially appreciate our executive producer to patrons, including Jason Lee,
1:19:58SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank,
1:20:03SPEAKERtwinkle twinkie, David Allen, James Kammack, and Pantheon makers of the HS3
1:20:08SPEAKERhigh-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much. Thank you. And on that note, we
1:20:13SPEAKERwill see you next week with another edition of the tech pod. That's right.
1:20:17SPEAKERI'll be out of town so I can't promise what the tech pod will be, but we'll
1:20:20SPEAKERfigure something out. I'm excited that I might get to see the duck again,
1:20:24SPEAKERbut until then, please consider the environment before printing this podcast.