00:00SPEAKER- Hey Brad.
00:01SPEAKER- Hello.
00:02SPEAKER- I'm about to blow your mind.
00:03SPEAKER- Okay, I love to have my mind blown.
00:05SPEAKERThat's why I do this podcast, as a matter of fact.
00:07SPEAKER- We should have called this mind blowers.
00:08SPEAKERI feel like that might've gotten a different audience though.
00:11SPEAKER- It's too early on a Saturday for that.
00:13SPEAKER- So did you know that the Switch Pro Controller
00:15SPEAKERhas a blue light on it?
00:17SPEAKER- What?
00:18SPEAKER- On the home button.
00:19SPEAKER- Wait, no.
00:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
00:21SPEAKER- You modded that in.
00:21SPEAKER- Nope, that's a factory standard.
00:23SPEAKER- What, can I, hang on, can you just monologue?
00:25SPEAKERI'm gonna go get mine, I'll be right back.
00:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so I plugged in my Switch Pro Controller
00:28SPEAKERthe other day to charge it on my PC,
00:30SPEAKER'cause I was playing Mario Golf in here on a stream.
00:33SPEAKERAnd when I went to pick up the Switch Controller,
00:36SPEAKERI was shocked, shocked, I tell you.
00:40SPEAKERBecause I looked over at it,
00:41SPEAKERand there was a blue ring of light around the home button
00:45SPEAKERon the right side of the Switch Pro Controller.
00:47SPEAKERApparently, so I did a little research.
00:50SPEAKERI'll have to do this again when Brad gets,
00:51SPEAKERoh, he's back, thank goodness.
00:53SPEAKERI had to do a little bit of research
00:56SPEAKERto find out what's going on,
00:57SPEAKERbut it's been there forever.
00:59SPEAKER- I'm back.
01:00SPEAKER- I told everybody.
01:02SPEAKER- What's been there forever, the blue light?
01:03SPEAKER- The light has been there forever.
01:05SPEAKERApparently, Ring Fit uses it on the Joy-Cons
01:10SPEAKERif you set an alarm.
01:12SPEAKERSo if you set an alarm,
01:13SPEAKERthere'll be a little blinky blue light
01:14SPEAKERon the front of your Switch.
01:15SPEAKER- Wait, an alarm in Ring Fit
01:17SPEAKERor an alarm on the Switch itself?
01:18SPEAKER'Cause I didn't know the Switch could do alarms.
01:20SPEAKER- If you do an alarm in Ring Fit that's like,
01:22SPEAKERI wanna work out at nine o'clock every day.
01:23SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
01:25SPEAKER- And then when you go and look at the Switch
01:26SPEAKERon your entertainment console,
01:29SPEAKERthe little blue light will be on on the Joy-Con.
01:31SPEAKER- Oh, wait, the Joy-Cons have it too?
01:32SPEAKER- The Joy-Cons have it too.
01:33SPEAKER- What, hang on, I gotta get my Switch.
01:35SPEAKER- Are you kidding me?
01:36SPEAKER- No, okay, fine, I'll resist,
01:37SPEAKERbut the battery's dead in my Pro Controller.
01:40SPEAKER- Well, I mean, so that's how I,
01:42SPEAKERI literally played Mario Golf
01:44SPEAKERwith some friends the other day on a stream,
01:46SPEAKERand they were like, hey, you need,
01:49SPEAKERI was like, I'm gonna play with the Pro Controller.
01:51SPEAKERSo I plugged it into my PC,
01:52SPEAKERand as it was charging, nothing.
01:54SPEAKERAnd then when it got to the end of the charge,
01:55SPEAKERthe blue light came on.
01:56SPEAKERI was like, what the hell is this?
01:58SPEAKER- Wait, but I've never,
01:59SPEAKERI've charged this Pro Controller many times
02:01SPEAKERand then never used it.
02:02SPEAKERI've never seen that blue light, what?
02:04SPEAKER- Apparently the 9.0 firmware for the Switch enabled it.
02:07SPEAKER- Oh.
02:08SPEAKER- You can turn it on, maybe at some point,
02:10SPEAKERSteam Controller support switched it on.
02:13SPEAKERThat's all I can figure.
02:14SPEAKER- Well, I was just about to say,
02:16SPEAKERwhat do you think's gonna happen
02:17SPEAKERwhen I plug this thing into my PC?
02:18SPEAKER- It's gonna not turn on for a second,
02:20SPEAKERand it's gonna turn on for like one second,
02:22SPEAKERand it's gonna turn off until it's fully charged.
02:24SPEAKER- Well, that's underwhelming.
02:26SPEAKER- I mean, I didn't tell you,
02:27SPEAKERI didn't say this was a good cold open.
02:28SPEAKERI just said I had a cold open.
02:30SPEAKER- Wait, hang on.
02:31SPEAKERWe're setting up Pro Controller.
02:33SPEAKERWindows apparently knows what a Pro Controller is.
02:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:37SPEAKERIt's so weird that everybody talks to everybody now.
02:40SPEAKERLike, hey, I hooked my PS5 DualSense
02:43SPEAKERup to my phone the other day,
02:46SPEAKERand everything works.
02:47SPEAKERThe touchpad works, the click buttons,
02:49SPEAKERall the stuff that normally didn't work
02:50SPEAKERon iOS Controller support now works.
02:53SPEAKERAnd like it just, I was like, this is cool.
02:55SPEAKERThis is very useful.
02:56SPEAKER- I can't say that everybody talks to everybody
02:59SPEAKERbecause I don't know if you saw
03:00SPEAKERthat Sony put out a Linux driver
03:02SPEAKERfor all of their controllers,
03:04SPEAKERbut still has yet to release a Windows one.
03:06SPEAKER- Wait, no, there's a Windows one
03:08SPEAKERthat comes when you install the remote connection utility.
03:11SPEAKERThat remote play from the PS4 app only works
03:15SPEAKERif you have a DualShock or DualSense, I believe.
03:18SPEAKER- Right, but I don't know that they,
03:19SPEAKERI don't think they, but it's not a full driver.
03:21SPEAKERI don't think it fully enables everything.
03:22SPEAKER- No, that's what I'm saying, is that like the...
03:25SPEAKER- They don't need to, because Steam does that.
03:27SPEAKERLike that's the whole point.
03:28SPEAKERLike the Steam Controller mapping stuff
03:30SPEAKERthat they did for the Steam Controller,
03:31SPEAKERwhich we don't need to talk about the Steam Controller.
03:34SPEAKER- Look, it's not about what they need to do.
03:36SPEAKERIt's about what's polite to do.
03:38SPEAKERThey wrote a Linux driver,
03:39SPEAKERbut they didn't write a Windows driver.
03:40SPEAKERThis is just...
03:41SPEAKER- You're saying it's a pointed decision.
03:42SPEAKER- Look, if there is any podcast
03:44SPEAKERon which we can discuss passive-aggressive
03:47SPEAKERdriver release strategies, it's this one.
03:50SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:20SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod, I'm Will.
04:22SPEAKER- I'm Brad, and I am happy to report
04:24SPEAKERthat this pro controller is still doing nothing.
04:27SPEAKER- Mission accomplished.
04:28SPEAKER- Yep.
04:30SPEAKER- So, hey, big news.
04:32SPEAKER- Uh-huh, what's that?
04:33SPEAKER- This is your birthday week.
04:34SPEAKER- Oh man, is that big?
04:35SPEAKERDoes that qualify, is that what qualifies
04:37SPEAKERas big news these days? - I think it's big news.
04:38SPEAKER- I don't know.
04:39SPEAKER- The festival of Brad starts now.
04:41SPEAKER- I mean, you're older than me, so maybe you know better,
04:44SPEAKERbut I feel like I've passed that point
04:46SPEAKERwhere you stop getting excited about your birthday
04:49SPEAKERand you start to dread it, or you just didn't.
04:50SPEAKERMark's another step on the path to--
04:53SPEAKER- Wow, wow.
04:56SPEAKER- I'm sorry.
04:57SPEAKER- It's Saturday morning, man.
04:58SPEAKER- I'm sorry.
05:00SPEAKER- How do you pour coffee for this?
05:01SPEAKERNo, it's--
05:02SPEAKER- Look, here's the thing.
05:04SPEAKERI was on your path for a long time,
05:06SPEAKERand then I had a young child enter my life,
05:08SPEAKERand I'm gonna go ahead and tell you,
05:10SPEAKERbirthdays, Mother's Day, Mother's Days.
05:13SPEAKER- They're fun again.
05:14SPEAKER- Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day.
05:18SPEAKER- And Flag Day.
05:19SPEAKER- Mm-hmm.
05:20SPEAKER- Like, we celebrate 'em all.
05:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:22SPEAKER- We just get in there.
05:23SPEAKERWe get up in there.
05:24SPEAKERLike, sometimes we'll be like,
05:25SPEAKER"Hey, you want some Flag Day cupcakes?"
05:26SPEAKERI'm like, "Hell yeah, I want some Flag Day cupcakes."
05:29SPEAKER- I mean, if you think about it,
05:30SPEAKERevery day can be a holiday if you want it bad enough.
05:33SPEAKER- Yes.
05:34SPEAKERSo anyway. - Let me see.
05:35SPEAKERHold on, hang on.
05:36SPEAKERWell, we're doing it.
05:37SPEAKER- Uh-huh.
05:38SPEAKER- Okay.
05:38SPEAKER- Are you gonna look up and see what the days are?
05:40SPEAKER- Oh, wow, are there not actually enough
05:42SPEAKERto fill every single day on the calendar?
05:43SPEAKERI'm looking at, this is according to timeanddate.com,
05:47SPEAKERholidays and observances in the United States of 2021.
05:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm gonna guess.
05:51SPEAKER- There are gaps.
05:52SPEAKER- National Funnel Cake Day?
05:53SPEAKER- There are gaps.
05:54SPEAKERThat's the thing.
05:55SPEAKERYou always hear about National Funnel Cake Day
05:56SPEAKERor, you know, there's something going on.
05:58SPEAKERIt's like, "Ah, it's National Ground Beef Day."
06:00SPEAKER- Okay.
06:01SPEAKER- Like, something is always, also,
06:03SPEAKERplease let me know when it's National Ground Beef Day.
06:06SPEAKERThat is one that I will happily celebrate.
06:08SPEAKER- Wait, I have an idea, Brad.
06:10SPEAKERThis is a good idea.
06:11SPEAKERLike, I've been studying some podcast history
06:13SPEAKERand I realized that other, like,
06:16SPEAKERI'm not gonna say which podcast,
06:17SPEAKERbut other famous podcast made some big nationwide moves,
06:21SPEAKERcampaigns, if you will, to get placed in films
06:25SPEAKERsuch as DreamWorks' "Trolls 2."
06:27SPEAKER- Oh, yes, I've heard such whisperings.
06:30SPEAKER- And it, like, I think it got them noticed
06:32SPEAKERin really big places because they swung big.
06:34SPEAKERThey went for the fences.
06:35SPEAKERThey were like, "We wanna be in 'Trolls 2.'"
06:37SPEAKER- That's right, you gotta take your swing.
06:39SPEAKERYou gotta shoot your shot.
06:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so, like, my first thought was,
06:43SPEAKER"Brad, we should try to get in 'Trolls 2' too."
06:45SPEAKER(chuckles)
06:47SPEAKER- Does that, is also known as "Trolls 3"?
06:49SPEAKERIs that what you're saying?
06:49SPEAKER- No, I meant "Trolls 2" also, I guess.
06:53SPEAKERLike, we should try to get into "Trolls 2."
06:54SPEAKER- Suggesting we time travel to appear in a movie
06:57SPEAKERthat already released years ago?
07:00SPEAKER- No, okay, you're thinking,
07:01SPEAKERyou're thinking in a 20th century way
07:03SPEAKERwhen people released movies and then they never changed.
07:06SPEAKER- This is like a linear fashion.
07:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we need to engage
07:10SPEAKERwith the director of "Trolls 2"
07:14SPEAKERand establish that they need to do a director's cut
07:17SPEAKERthat features those other guys,
07:19SPEAKERbut then also you, and this, I think this might be,
07:22SPEAKERI've moved beyond this idea now.
07:24SPEAKER- When "Trolls World Tour Special Edition" comes out
07:26SPEAKERis what you're saying.
07:27SPEAKERAre you saying we should replace existing actors
07:30SPEAKERor they should create new scenes with new characters
07:32SPEAKERfor us to appear in?
07:33SPEAKER- I don't wanna create strife.
07:35SPEAKERLike I said, I've moved beyond this idea now
07:36SPEAKER'cause I think that, I think, like,
07:38SPEAKERbecause of the time travel aspect
07:40SPEAKERand/or the probably not gonna be a director's cut
07:42SPEAKERof "Trolls 2 World Tour", I think I have a better idea.
07:47SPEAKERI think we should try to get a day.
07:49SPEAKER- Okay.
07:50SPEAKER- I think we should try to get Brad and Will
07:51SPEAKERmade a tech pod day or maybe just sweatpants day.
07:54SPEAKER- Okay, oh, now we're talking.
07:55SPEAKERI think that's got universal appeal.
07:57SPEAKERI mean, maybe, I do think that sweatpants
08:00SPEAKERhas a bit of an image problem.
08:02SPEAKER- Yeah, right?
08:03SPEAKER- I think that sweatpants imply a certain kind of,
08:06SPEAKERno offense to any sweatpants wearers
08:08SPEAKERand we have a Twitter account that has the word sweatpants.
08:10SPEAKER- I'm wearing it right now.
08:11SPEAKER- Well, I never wear sweatpants.
08:12SPEAKERI'm just gonna say, I think that that particular garment
08:15SPEAKERhas a certain slovenly quality associated with it.
08:17SPEAKER- What?
08:18SPEAKER- I'm sorry to say that.
08:19SPEAKER- I have some that are fitted.
08:21SPEAKERThey have pockets, they have a back pocket.
08:23SPEAKER- I am not passing judgment here.
08:25SPEAKERI'm just talking about what I think
08:26SPEAKERthe cultural perception is.
08:28SPEAKER- So I do agree with you.
08:31SPEAKERI think there is a cultural perception problem
08:33SPEAKERwith sweatpants in America today.
08:34SPEAKER- I think if you drop the pants,
08:35SPEAKERI think like national sweats day.
08:38SPEAKERHow about, what about this?
08:39SPEAKER- I don't wanna, no, nobody wants sweats day, man.
08:41SPEAKER- I should have been in marketing.
08:42SPEAKERLet's do a little marketing exercise here.
08:45SPEAKERHow about national comfy clothes day?
08:49SPEAKER- No, that's, look,
08:50SPEAKERI think we have to make a definitive stand.
08:52SPEAKER- Who doesn't like the word comfy?
08:53SPEAKERDoesn't that just like, I'm getting a double thumbs up
08:56SPEAKERfrom the doorway here at the suggestion of comfy clothes.
09:00SPEAKER- I do, but here's the thing.
09:02SPEAKERWomen's sweatpants went through this already.
09:05SPEAKERThey rebranded it as yoga pants
09:07SPEAKERand suddenly they're socially acceptable everywhere.
09:09SPEAKERPants are worn.
09:10SPEAKER- Or like leggings, that's such a, that's a classy term.
09:13SPEAKER- Yeah, men don't have that.
09:14SPEAKERWe like, we have track pants, but they're not warm.
09:17SPEAKERThey're not cozy.
09:18SPEAKERThey're functional and they help you run faster, I think.
09:22SPEAKER- It's true.
09:23SPEAKER- Wear them to the track.
09:24SPEAKER- For all the running on the track that we do.
09:25SPEAKER- I mean, look, I'm all about the track pants,
09:27SPEAKERbut I think we should like write a letter to the president,
09:32SPEAKERget a campaign, maybe get a change.org petition going
09:35SPEAKERto find and find an empty day,
09:36SPEAKERmaybe around the week of your birth.
09:39SPEAKERI don't know.
09:40SPEAKER- Yeah, all right.
09:41SPEAKERWe'll keep that in mind.
09:41SPEAKER- And see if we can get a national designation
09:43SPEAKERof national sweatpants day.
09:48SPEAKER- All right, I like where you're going with this.
09:50SPEAKER- All right.
09:51SPEAKER- Yeah, before we get to the business at hand,
09:52SPEAKERI will just say that in Googling for Trolls 2,
09:57SPEAKERI accidentally ended up on the Wikipedia page
09:58SPEAKERfor the 1990 horror comedy film Troll 2.
10:02SPEAKERAnd if we can't get into Trolls 2,
10:04SPEAKERI would absolutely settle for Troll 2
10:07SPEAKERas a consolation prize.
10:08SPEAKER- So the funny thing about this is that the director
10:10SPEAKERof Troll 2, the horror movie, not World Tour.
10:14SPEAKER- Claudio Fergasso.
10:16SPEAKER- Claudio Fergasso, he'd fit right in here.
10:18SPEAKERI feel like that.
10:19SPEAKERI don't think Walt Dorn who directed Trolls World Tour
10:22SPEAKERis gonna take our calls.
10:23SPEAKERI'm afraid, Brad.
10:24SPEAKER- Do you think Claudio Fergasso might though?
10:27SPEAKER- If he's still alive, probably.
10:28SPEAKER- Is he still alive?
10:29SPEAKERHe's not that old.
10:30SPEAKER- Perfect.
10:31SPEAKER- He's, well, he's 70.
10:33SPEAKER- That's older than I was expecting.
10:35SPEAKER- Anyway, I'll just real quick,
10:36SPEAKERI will say, according to timeandday.com,
10:38SPEAKERthere are a lot of openings.
10:40SPEAKER- Well, there we go.
10:41SPEAKER- I genuinely thought there had to be some goofy holiday
10:44SPEAKERfor every single day on the calendar.
10:47SPEAKER- Well, that's--
10:48SPEAKER- Well, this one, actually, looking at this,
10:50SPEAKERthis is pretty widely observed ones.
10:53SPEAKERThese are all the serious ones.
10:55SPEAKER- Well, I think all we have to do
10:56SPEAKERis get a proclamation, right?
10:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm not seeing Funnel Cake Day.
10:58SPEAKERLet me just see.
11:00SPEAKER- What do you think the process is for this?
11:02SPEAKERWe call our representatives?
11:04SPEAKER- They're not tracking food days here, I believe, so.
11:07SPEAKER- Oh.
11:08SPEAKER- There might be actually more competition than I thought.
11:09SPEAKER- That's a list of lies.
11:11SPEAKERWell, look, we can double up.
11:12SPEAKERI'll share with Funnel Cake Day.
11:13SPEAKERI don't care.
11:14SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
11:15SPEAKER- Sweatpants day.
11:16SPEAKER- Beef Day stands alone, though.
11:21SPEAKER- Wait, there's something cold open.
11:22SPEAKERI don't have to pause.
11:23SPEAKER(laughing)
11:24SPEAKER- Just finish the, let's do the episode.
11:27SPEAKER- Yeah, we should do the episode.
11:28SPEAKERI was gonna say we should,
11:30SPEAKERI wanna talk about the Steam Deck a little bit,
11:31SPEAKER'cause I think it's a really weird, good, neat,
11:34SPEAKERI don't know if it's good,
11:35SPEAKERbut I think it's weird and interesting,
11:36SPEAKERand the choices they made are very interesting,
11:38SPEAKERand it's cool.
11:39SPEAKERBasically, a little PC in a $400 box.
11:42SPEAKER- That's the reason it's cool.
11:43SPEAKERI have zero interest in playing handheld PC games,
11:46SPEAKERbut as a reasonably well-specced PC
11:50SPEAKERthat can just hook up to a keyboard and a mouse
11:52SPEAKERand a monitor, it's pretty neat.
11:53SPEAKER- As somebody who has a desktop PC set up
11:55SPEAKERin the living room for my daughter to play games on right now
11:58SPEAKERI'm very excited about it.
11:59SPEAKER- Okay, I can see the appeal there.
12:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
12:02SPEAKER- But yeah, it seems like a neat, weird thing.
12:04SPEAKERI don't know, we'll see.
12:06SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe we should dig into it in the future.
12:08SPEAKER- Yes.
12:09SPEAKERI'm curious what people think.
12:10SPEAKERSo if you have thoughts,
12:12SPEAKERpeople were talking about it in the Discord some.
12:14SPEAKER- It really has dominated discussion on our Discord,
12:17SPEAKERon the Nextlander Discord, on forums, Twitter.
12:21SPEAKERIt sure is a hot topic, it seems.
12:23SPEAKERI'm kind of surprised.
12:24SPEAKERPeople really like playing handheld video games.
12:26SPEAKER- So I love laying in bed playing video games.
12:29SPEAKERThat's why I'm excited.
12:30SPEAKERLike that's why this is an exciting product for me.
12:32SPEAKER- Okay.
12:33SPEAKER- But like I do that with streaming right now in the house
12:35SPEAKERand that works well like 99% of the time.
12:37SPEAKERIt's only stuff like Hades
12:39SPEAKERand stuff that requires really precise timing
12:42SPEAKERthat I can't play with the five milliseconds of lag.
12:45SPEAKER- Interesting, I have a lot of nerve issues.
12:47SPEAKERI don't know if like I'm using very poorly
12:50SPEAKERergonomicized devices, is that a word?
12:52SPEAKER- You gotta get grips for your Switch, yeah.
12:54SPEAKER- Yeah, like I've tried playing Switch in bed
12:56SPEAKERand my hands end up going numb after 10 minutes.
12:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I bought a thing at Target that was like $12
13:04SPEAKERthat clips onto the back of the Switch
13:05SPEAKERand gives it like big knobbly Wii U console style
13:10SPEAKERgrippy things.
13:11SPEAKERIt's almost like having like controller prongs
13:13SPEAKERto grab onto.
13:14SPEAKER- Now hang on, are you laying fully prone
13:17SPEAKERand holding it kind of above your head
13:18SPEAKERor are you propping up on pillows
13:19SPEAKERand like holding it in your lap?
13:21SPEAKER- I prop up on a pillow.
13:22SPEAKER- Okay.
13:23SPEAKER- I kind of like, look, if I'm being honest,
13:24SPEAKERI'm laying with it resting on my belly
13:28SPEAKERand then I'm just looking down.
13:29SPEAKER- It's like a built-in.
13:31SPEAKER- It's like I have a shelf.
13:31SPEAKER- TV tray.
13:32SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
13:33SPEAKER- Okay.
13:34SPEAKER- But what's the real topic for today, Brad?
13:36SPEAKER- My birth, no, not my birthday.
13:38SPEAKER- But we did this year.
13:41SPEAKER- Yeah, when is your birthday?
13:42SPEAKERWas it May?
13:43SPEAKER- It's May, yeah.
13:44SPEAKER- Was it May?
13:47SPEAKER- You wanna know my kindergarten teacher
13:48SPEAKERand my first pet's name now?
13:51SPEAKER- Yeah, what is it?
13:52SPEAKER- I'm not telling you that.
13:53SPEAKER- Wait, do you actually use those?
13:54SPEAKER- No.
13:56SPEAKER- I mean, I probably did at some point, but anyway.
13:59SPEAKERSo, but we're celebrating the year of your birth today.
14:01SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, we did this for the week of your birthday.
14:05SPEAKERWe went and looked at a bunch of the tech and science
14:08SPEAKERand similar topics of the year you were born,
14:11SPEAKERwhich was 1975.
14:12SPEAKER- Yes.
14:13SPEAKER- And we thought we would do the same thing for me.
14:16SPEAKER- I think this is a grand idea.
14:17SPEAKER- Which is 1979, people seem to like that episode.
14:19SPEAKERI hope that my perception is correct
14:21SPEAKERthat people were into that 'cause it's really just a way
14:24SPEAKERto talk about a fun grab bag of historical stuff.
14:26SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I was gonna say, if people like this,
14:28SPEAKERplease let us know, either tweet at us
14:30SPEAKERor post on the Discord or whatever,
14:32SPEAKERbecause, look, it's not an infinite well
14:35SPEAKER'cause there's only a finite number of years.
14:37SPEAKER- Well, it depends on how broad you want
14:39SPEAKERto make the term tech, because I would say
14:42SPEAKERthat there were probably periods in the 1600s
14:44SPEAKERthat had a lot of very interesting technology of the time.
14:47SPEAKER- We could do, I think we could do half centuries.
14:49SPEAKER- Okay.
14:50SPEAKER- Centuries maybe.
14:51SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty inarguable
14:55SPEAKERthat the pace of technological progress
14:57SPEAKERhas increased exponentially in the last century, right?
15:00SPEAKER- So that means as we go back in time further,
15:03SPEAKERthe amount of time that we lump in with each other
15:06SPEAKERwill increase at a reverse exponential scale?
15:08SPEAKER- Yes, the tech innovation density falls off commensurate
15:13SPEAKERwith your movement backwards through time.
15:16SPEAKER- So what, so if you missed that episode,
15:18SPEAKERwhat we're gonna do is kind of do quick hits
15:21SPEAKERon the things that we thought were interesting
15:24SPEAKERfrom a technology or culture standpoint?
15:27SPEAKER- Yeah, anything that kind of fits
15:28SPEAKERin the wheelhouse in the past.
15:29SPEAKER- Like tech culture fits, I think.
15:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:31SPEAKER- From 1979, the year of Brad's birth, happy birthday, Brad.
15:33SPEAKER- Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
15:37SPEAKER- Celebrate.
15:38SPEAKER- Yay.
15:39SPEAKER- Look, we should celebrate.
15:41SPEAKERI, look, I used to be one of, I used to be one of you guys,
15:44SPEAKERbut celebrate the small days.
15:45SPEAKERIt's good, it's like sweat pants tech day.
15:47SPEAKER- I have, at the urging of,
15:50SPEAKERat the urging of my lovely partner,
15:51SPEAKERI've gotten in the habit of taking my birthday off
15:53SPEAKERevery year, which is good, 'cause I don't,
15:55SPEAKERI never take enough time off.
15:57SPEAKERI took like almost zero time off last year,
15:59SPEAKERbut I did do that.
16:00SPEAKER- Look, you don't want to be one of those grumpy,
16:02SPEAKERlike I have, I had two grandfathers, as many people do.
16:05SPEAKERSome people have more.
16:07SPEAKEROne was a grumpy guy who worked every day
16:10SPEAKERuntil he was no longer able to work his entire life.
16:13SPEAKER- Okay.
16:14SPEAKER- The other was real fun.
16:15SPEAKERWe did like, he like had a bazillion hobbies.
16:18SPEAKERWe went to flea markets together.
16:19SPEAKERHe taught me how to bowl, all sorts of good stuff.
16:21SPEAKERWe had good times.
16:22SPEAKER- Oh, that's a grandpa.
16:23SPEAKER- I don't remember the work grandpa very much,
16:25SPEAKERexcept for him yelling at me for being,
16:27SPEAKERyou know, like a weird nineties kid.
16:30SPEAKERThe other one, spent a lot of good time with.
16:31SPEAKERSo, you know, be like the good grandpa, Brad.
16:34SPEAKER- Can I ask, I don't, I don't want to.
16:37SPEAKER- You want their mother's maiden names?
16:38SPEAKER- No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
16:39SPEAKERI don't want to delve too much into your family history,
16:41SPEAKERbut which one was married to the computer?
16:45SPEAKER- The fun one.
16:46SPEAKER- Okay, that checks out.
16:46SPEAKERThat's what I, that's what I would have assumed.
16:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:49SPEAKER- Okay.
16:50SPEAKER- So, okay, so our first topic,
16:52SPEAKERspeaking of computers and things that are now
16:54SPEAKERcomputer related and weren't at the time.
16:56SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:57SPEAKER- Brad, tell me about the Walkman.
16:58SPEAKER- Yeah, the reason it's at the top of this list
17:01SPEAKERis because it's the first thing that came up
17:02SPEAKERwhen I started searching for like,
17:04SPEAKERwhat was big in tech in 1979?
17:06SPEAKERIt turns out that the release,
17:07SPEAKERthe first release of the Sony Walkman is right up there.
17:10SPEAKER- You can't look, you can't say this,
17:12SPEAKERwe just put this in the order in which we found him.
17:14SPEAKERYou gotta say, well, we thought about this.
17:15SPEAKERWe thought this one was really
17:16SPEAKERa more important, interesting way to start.
17:17SPEAKER- Sorry, I didn't fully fill that in,
17:19SPEAKERis that that's the order it naturally landed on here.
17:21SPEAKERBut then we looked at this list again
17:22SPEAKERand we're like, you know what?
17:23SPEAKERWe should start with that.
17:24SPEAKER- Yes.
17:25SPEAKER- There's a reason that that is at the top of this list.
17:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, so prior to that time there were,
17:30SPEAKERso transistor radios were a thing in the '60s,
17:33SPEAKERwhich, you know, transistor radios made the radio portable.
17:35SPEAKERSo it was like a little pocket size thing
17:37SPEAKERthat usually had a strap and an antenna that poked out.
17:40SPEAKER- By portable, you mean battery operated
17:41SPEAKEReven at that time? - Battery operated
17:42SPEAKERand you could carry it around, yeah.
17:44SPEAKER- Gosh, I mean, I don't wanna go off on a million tangents,
17:46SPEAKERbut like what were batteries like in the '60s,
17:48SPEAKERlike disposable batteries?
17:49SPEAKERLike were they not too different?
17:52SPEAKER- Same sizes, they just,
17:54SPEAKERsometimes I think they were wrapped in paper or cellulose
17:57SPEAKERor something instead of metal.
17:58SPEAKER- Same chemical composition generally.
18:00SPEAKER- Probably not, 'cause they held dramatically less energy
18:02SPEAKERthan the modern batteries.
18:04SPEAKERSo there's probably a whole episode there
18:07SPEAKERin the history of batteries,
18:08SPEAKER'cause I mean, that's an interesting, but yeah.
18:11SPEAKERSo the Walkman added the cassette player, right?
18:14SPEAKER- But as far as I could tell,
18:15SPEAKERI tried to, 'cause I didn't wanna just crash in here
18:18SPEAKERand be like, it was the first portable tape player ever,
18:21SPEAKER'cause inevitably then you could find something else.
18:22SPEAKERBut as far as I could tell,
18:23SPEAKERthere was not a portable music device prior to this
18:26SPEAKERthat lets you play recorded music.
18:28SPEAKERIt was just portable radios.
18:30SPEAKER- There may have been, I feel like every time,
18:33SPEAKERI feel like with this conversation
18:34SPEAKERwhen "Guardians of the Galaxy,"
18:34SPEAKERor when "X-Men First Class" came out,
18:38SPEAKERbecause the character in there,
18:41SPEAKERwhat was it, "X-Men First Class?"
18:43SPEAKERThere's a movie that's set in the '60s.
18:44SPEAKER- It was "Days of Future Past."
18:46SPEAKER- "Days of Future Past," probably.
18:46SPEAKER- The one with the time, not time travel,
18:49SPEAKERbut the time, the flashbacks.
18:50SPEAKERI haven't seen a lot of the X-Men, the recent X-Men movies.
18:54SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the right choice.
18:56SPEAKER- I might've seen that one though.
18:57SPEAKERYeah, what are you getting at?
18:58SPEAKERI think there's a character that listens to it.
19:00SPEAKER- Yeah, to a Walkman and the movie is set
19:02SPEAKERa few years before the Walkman exists.
19:05SPEAKERIn the conversation around that,
19:06SPEAKERI believe that there was a German electronics company
19:11SPEAKERthat made a portable cassette player.
19:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it's possible.
19:14SPEAKER- But it wasn't a mass market product.
19:15SPEAKERIt was really expensive.
19:17SPEAKER- Right, so one of the things I found
19:18SPEAKERin reading about the Walkman is that the prototype for it
19:20SPEAKERwas derived from the Sony Pressman.
19:23SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the Pressman.
19:24SPEAKER- Which was for somebody's previous favorite portable,
19:27SPEAKERno, the Pressman was for journalists.
19:29SPEAKERIt was a portable tape player meant for recording
19:31SPEAKERinterviews and stuff like that.
19:32SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.
19:34SPEAKER- And they kind of adapted that into...
19:37SPEAKERI mean, obviously the Walkman was huge
19:38SPEAKERfrom a technological standpoint
19:39SPEAKERand from a lifestyle standpoint,
19:40SPEAKERbut I feel like the kind of marketing blitz,
19:43SPEAKERthe cultural institution that it became,
19:45SPEAKERWalkman became like, I mean, you tell me, I had one.
19:50SPEAKER- It was the desired brand.
19:51SPEAKERAll the other things were garbage.
19:52SPEAKER- The thing I was gonna ask though,
19:53SPEAKERand this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy,
19:55SPEAKERis did the term Walkman get into Xerox and Kleenex territory
20:00SPEAKERof just like, that's what people called
20:01SPEAKERtheir portable tape player, right?
20:02SPEAKERLike it was close, right?
20:03SPEAKER- I think they were careful about it.
20:05SPEAKERSony was.
20:06SPEAKER- Not Sony, I mean, culturally, right?
20:08SPEAKER- Yeah, it depended.
20:10SPEAKER- It was very well known, at least.
20:12SPEAKER- It was like your mom calling your Sega Master System
20:15SPEAKERa Nintendo, right?
20:16SPEAKER- Yeah, kind of.
20:17SPEAKER- The thing for me, there were two things for me
20:19SPEAKERthat were notable.
20:20SPEAKEROne was that it was the first time
20:22SPEAKERthat wearing headphones out in public,
20:25SPEAKERlike wearing headphones in public was weird.
20:27SPEAKER- Okay, sure, I could see it.
20:29SPEAKER- Like when I got a Walkman and I didn't get one
20:33SPEAKERuntil they came out with the waterproof ones,
20:34SPEAKERages, like years in the future.
20:38SPEAKERAnd I had to like literally save money
20:40SPEAKER'cause my parents were like,
20:41SPEAKER"We're not buying one of those damn things."
20:43SPEAKERAnd it was absolutely fascinating
20:46SPEAKERbecause like I could listen to whatever music I wanted,
20:48SPEAKERlisten to the radio when I went backpacking,
20:50SPEAKERI took it with me 'cause it was waterproof
20:52SPEAKERand I could listen to music at night.
20:53SPEAKERLike it was cool, but it was also like an isolating,
20:58SPEAKERit was one of the first times
20:59SPEAKERI remember feeling alone in public.
21:01SPEAKER- Sure.
21:03SPEAKER- So.
21:03SPEAKER- Yeah, which is always a strange feeling.
21:06SPEAKER- They were banned from my school
21:07SPEAKERfor a long time from my high school.
21:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I could see that, I could see that.
21:09SPEAKERSo wait, did you have one of the sport ones
21:11SPEAKERif you had a waterproof one?
21:11SPEAKEROr was it one of the like day glow yellow and orange?
21:15SPEAKER- And note pads.
21:16SPEAKER- Wacky looking ones.
21:17SPEAKERWalkman Sport was like a big brand into itself.
21:19SPEAKER- Oh, well, so it was walk, yeah.
21:21SPEAKERThen they were bright, like fire engine yellow.
21:24SPEAKER- Right.
21:26SPEAKER- And they had different kinds of headphones.
21:30SPEAKERSo they had like prototype earbuds, but they were still,
21:32SPEAKERthere was an arch that went over the top of your head,
21:35SPEAKERlike a normal pair of headphones, but they collapsed.
21:37SPEAKERThey folded up into four.
21:39SPEAKER- Oh, I remember those, yeah.
21:40SPEAKER- And they would get really small.
21:41SPEAKERBut instead of having speakers that sat on top of your ears,
21:44SPEAKERthey just had these things that went into yours.
21:46SPEAKERWe didn't have a name for them at the point.
21:47SPEAKERLike we didn't call them earbuds
21:50SPEAKERbecause nobody had thought about that.
21:51SPEAKER- But also probably terrible for your hearing.
21:53SPEAKERWell, not that I guess current earbuds are not much better.
21:55SPEAKER- I was, I mean, that was the other thing.
21:58SPEAKERThis is gonna ruin your hearing.
21:59SPEAKERI mean, I do have constant tinnitus now
22:01SPEAKERand I've lost mid range hearing, but yikes, yikes.
22:03SPEAKERProbably not connected.
22:05SPEAKER- I had one of the classy kind of standard black ones
22:07SPEAKERand I think it might've had a little LCD on the front.
22:09SPEAKERI forget, but it was my first tape player, I think.
22:12SPEAKERI'm pretty sure, like my own.
22:14SPEAKER- Did you record music off the radio?
22:17SPEAKERYou remember doing that?
22:18SPEAKER- Not so much off the radio.
22:20SPEAKERI'm trying to, I did do that some,
22:21SPEAKERbut I think it was more from like,
22:24SPEAKERI might've duped some stuff
22:25SPEAKERfrom like a friend's CD player or something.
22:28SPEAKERI don't, you know, I think I caught some stuff
22:30SPEAKERoff the radio here and there, but like-
22:32SPEAKER- We would, we got really, my mom was like,
22:33SPEAKER"Here's how you do this.
22:34SPEAKERLook, you call the radio station and you're like,
22:37SPEAKER"Hey, when are you gonna play the song that you wanna hear?"
22:39SPEAKERAnd they say, "We're gonna play it at the three o'clock hour
22:41SPEAKERsometime between three and 3.30."
22:43SPEAKERLike, "Okay, thanks."
22:44SPEAKERAnd then you just sit there in front of the thing
22:46SPEAKERfor 30 minutes and every time the song ended,
22:48SPEAKERyou'd press record and then you'd roll back
22:51SPEAKER'cause there was a foot counter on the tape recorder.
22:54SPEAKER- Okay.
22:55SPEAKER- Then you'd roll back to know where to rewind
22:56SPEAKERif you didn't get the right song.
22:58SPEAKER- Oh, okay, I was gonna ask what you do with all the chaff,
22:59SPEAKERbut if you were-
23:00SPEAKER- You just keep rewinding over and over the same spot
23:02SPEAKERso it makes the tape real bad.
23:04SPEAKER- I was gonna say that wore out the tape pretty fast, right?
23:06SPEAKERLook, longevity wasn't really a concern in this case.
23:10SPEAKER- Sure, sure, sure.
23:12SPEAKERYeah, that was something I read about
23:15SPEAKERor that was pointed out in my reading about this
23:17SPEAKERwas that it was also kind of,
23:19SPEAKERobviously the Walkman was not the only thing
23:21SPEAKERthat brought this on,
23:21SPEAKERbut it did kind of give rise to mixtape culture.
23:23SPEAKERLike it was the first time people could really,
23:26SPEAKERI mean, maybe eight tracks had that to a degree,
23:27SPEAKERI'm not sure.
23:29SPEAKER- I think you could record eight tracks,
23:30SPEAKERbut I don't know that anybody did
23:31SPEAKER'cause I don't know that they sold blank eight tracks.
23:33SPEAKER- Right, 'cause that's the thing,
23:34SPEAKERlike cassettes were so much more mass market
23:36SPEAKERthat this was really the beginning
23:37SPEAKERof like people making their own mixes
23:39SPEAKERand kind of cobbling stuff together that way.
23:41SPEAKERIt was just a huge thing.
23:43SPEAKERHave you ever, I had never seen the original,
23:46SPEAKERthe very first Walkman before.
23:48SPEAKER- Is it the one with the orange puffs?
23:50SPEAKER- No, it's like, it's mostly blue and gray.
23:53SPEAKERI got it, the specific picture on Wikipedia is my favorite
23:57SPEAKERbecause it's so weathered.
23:59SPEAKERLike whichever one they got ahold of is extremely used,
24:02SPEAKERwhich really just, do you see it?
24:04SPEAKER- I'm looking right now.
24:05SPEAKER- It is so, first of all, it looks like that sharp X68K
24:10SPEAKERfrom Metal Gear Solid 5,
24:11SPEAKERlike just that era of late '70s, early '80s,
24:15SPEAKERJapanese industrial design in consumer products,
24:18SPEAKERconsumer electronics.
24:19SPEAKERIt's like, it's so rugged and like faux industrial.
24:24SPEAKERAnd again, this one in particular is very beat up looking.
24:28SPEAKERIt just looks so awesome.
24:29SPEAKERI kind of want one, zero use for it.
24:33SPEAKER- This is the design that the cassette player transformer
24:37SPEAKERwas based on too.
24:39SPEAKER- Oh God, no, that's probably-
24:40SPEAKER- It's sound screen, or sound wave.
24:42SPEAKER- Sound wave, hang on, I gotta look up sound wave now.
24:44SPEAKERIt's not exact, but I think it's like-
24:46SPEAKER- It definitely, like the buttons, where they are
24:48SPEAKERon the side.
24:49SPEAKER- Let me compare.
24:50SPEAKERThere's definitely commonalities.
24:51SPEAKER- Like the color scheme.
24:53SPEAKER- All the sound wave pictures you find are him as a robot.
24:56SPEAKERI need to find-
24:57SPEAKER- Oh man, I can't believe I never realized that.
24:59SPEAKER- Sound wave as a tape deck, I need to compare.
25:02SPEAKERWell, let's see.
25:03SPEAKER- I think I got sound wave before I got a Walkman, probably.
25:06SPEAKER- They're not, oh, yeah, definitely, absolutely.
25:10SPEAKERWell, they're similar.
25:11SPEAKERThey're definitely similar, like the color scheme for sure.
25:14SPEAKERThe color scheme is exactly the same.
25:16SPEAKER- That weird slidey button on the bottom
25:17SPEAKERfor the volume in the base.
25:18SPEAKER- Yes, that slidey button is there,
25:20SPEAKERbut it's specifically the mostly blue, somewhat gray
25:23SPEAKERlittle accents in yellow.
25:24SPEAKERThat is exactly the design of the first Walkman.
25:26SPEAKEROh, it looks so awesome.
25:29SPEAKERI wonder, I wonder, hang on, I shouldn't do this.
25:32SPEAKER- Don't do it.
25:33SPEAKERYou have to decide before the episode goes up
25:36SPEAKERif you're gonna do this, is the thing.
25:38SPEAKER- What?
25:38SPEAKER- Like if the moment the episode goes up,
25:40SPEAKERthe eBay situation will get dire.
25:43SPEAKER- Well, I typed original Walkman into eBay
25:45SPEAKERand I'm not seeing anything.
25:47SPEAKERSo it may not be a thing you can get.
25:50SPEAKER- It's entirely possible.
25:51SPEAKERIt would be the TPS-L2 is what you're looking for.
25:54SPEAKER- What is it?
25:55SPEAKER- TPS-L2.
25:57SPEAKER- Let's see.
25:58SPEAKERWell, that is a common Google search, TPS-L2 for sale.
26:02SPEAKER- Uh-huh.
26:02SPEAKER- Let's see, here we go.
26:04SPEAKERI should really just...
26:09SPEAKERThat looks counterfeit, I'm not sure about this.
26:13SPEAKER- Look, you don't wanna get a bootleg Walkman.
26:15SPEAKERThat's the kind of the Iowa stuff.
26:18SPEAKER- eBay listing for 1995.
26:22SPEAKER- Yeah.
26:23SPEAKER- I don't know about this.
26:24SPEAKER- You might have to go to a collector.
26:25SPEAKER- I don't know about this.
26:26SPEAKER- You might have to go, you might have to know somebody.
26:28SPEAKER- There's a lot of service manuals online.
26:32SPEAKER- It's a pretty serviceable piece of equipment,
26:35SPEAKERI would guess.
26:38SPEAKERSo the next thing, speaking of music.
26:42SPEAKER- Yes.
26:43SPEAKEROh, sorry, real quick.
26:44SPEAKERI mean, we will transition into this,
26:45SPEAKERbut the last thing I wanted to mention here
26:48SPEAKERwith the Walkman was the Wikipedia page
26:52SPEAKERfor it cites a marketing, I'm not sure if it's a textbook.
26:56SPEAKERIt definitely, it's kind of a marketing
26:59SPEAKERand academic study in marketing.
27:01SPEAKERLike, I don't know if it's actually out of curricula or not,
27:03SPEAKERbut it very much reads as a like deep dive
27:06SPEAKERthat argues that the Walkman was instrumental
27:08SPEAKERin introducing Japanese culture into the US in the 80s.
27:12SPEAKER- Oh, I can see that.
27:13SPEAKER- Which like, you know, like the 80s
27:16SPEAKERwere when the enormous economic boom in Japan occurred.
27:20SPEAKERLike we talked about this a little bit before the episode,
27:22SPEAKERI think like you were a little older than me,
27:23SPEAKERbut I think the 80s is probably
27:25SPEAKERwhen like Japanese consumer electronics
27:26SPEAKERbecame like the thing to get in the US.
27:28SPEAKER- It's when, so prior to the 80s,
27:31SPEAKERthere were some American manufacturers,
27:33SPEAKERbut it was mostly like European
27:34SPEAKERwas the kind of premier brands for electronic stuff
27:37SPEAKERis my understanding.
27:38SPEAKERAnd then the rise of Sony in the 80s ushered in
27:42SPEAKERand the idea that stuff made in Japan was good, right?
27:46SPEAKER'Cause prior to that, it was kind of like,
27:48SPEAKERyou'd get an inexpensive Japanese calculators
27:50SPEAKERand stuff like that, but transistor radios
27:52SPEAKERand calculators pretty much.
27:54SPEAKER- Yeah, like by the time I was old enough in the late 80s
27:56SPEAKERto care about brands of television,
27:57SPEAKERlike Sony was the thing to get,
27:59SPEAKERlike it was inarguable that you wanted Sony.
28:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, and they, the thing that they did
28:04SPEAKERis the thing that Apple has actually lifted,
28:09SPEAKERwhich is they never, like there were never deals
28:13SPEAKERon Sony stuff.
28:14SPEAKER- Sure, sure.
28:15SPEAKER- Sony was always a premium brand.
28:16SPEAKER- That continues to this day with their TVs and stuff,
28:19SPEAKERfor sure, I mean, you know, it's well documented
28:20SPEAKERhow much Steve Jobs idolized the founder of Sony.
28:25SPEAKERBut anyway, like, and then the last thing I'll say
28:27SPEAKERis there's an ad for the original Walkman
28:30SPEAKERon the Wikipedia page that like the design of that ad
28:33SPEAKERlooks like it's like straight out of Blade Runner
28:34SPEAKERor something.
28:35SPEAKER- Yeah, those triangles are amazing.
28:38SPEAKER- So it feels like a lot of things were informing
28:40SPEAKERa lot of other things design-wise at that time, for sure.
28:43SPEAKER- I mean, it was an interesting, yeah, interesting period.
28:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so yeah, Philips demonstrated the compact disc
28:52SPEAKERto the press for the first time in 1979.
28:55SPEAKER- I feel like if you're less than like 30 years old,
28:58SPEAKERyou're going, what's a cassette tape at this point?
29:00SPEAKER- Sure.
29:01SPEAKER- And then--
29:02SPEAKER- If you're less than, what, 18?
29:04SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like my daughter knows what a CD is,
29:07SPEAKERbut only like theoretically she's ever seen one.
29:11SPEAKER- 18 is probably a little old, yeah,
29:12SPEAKERit's probably like very young children.
29:15SPEAKER- I mean, I don't know, anyway, compact discs,
29:18SPEAKERyou know, it's a disc that held 72 minutes of digital.
29:22SPEAKER74, thank you, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, please.
29:26SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
29:27SPEAKER- I put that in the notes here.
29:29SPEAKER- It's in the notes.
29:30SPEAKER- I knew that.
29:30SPEAKERNo, I mean, I knew this little factoid before
29:33SPEAKERand I had forgotten it,
29:33SPEAKERthat that's literally how they arrived
29:35SPEAKERat the 74-minute length of the CD,
29:37SPEAKERwas they wanted something that could accommodate
29:39SPEAKERthe entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
29:41SPEAKER- So do you think that they changed the bit rate
29:43SPEAKERof the audio, the Redbook standard to fit that?
29:47SPEAKER- I don't know.
29:48SPEAKER- Like they wouldn't have changed the disc size, would they?
29:50SPEAKER- I don't know, who knows what they started with first.
29:53SPEAKER- I mean, probably the legacy of the CD
29:55SPEAKERis that it established the disc size going forward.
29:58SPEAKER- Well, that's probably, that's for sure
29:59SPEAKER'cause DVDs are the same size, right?
30:00SPEAKER- Yeah, everything's, game discs, DVDs, Blu-rays.
30:03SPEAKER- I would bet that the size of the disc
30:05SPEAKERwas a lot more variable
30:07SPEAKERthan the density of the information on the disc.
30:09SPEAKERI bet that like how the information was stored on the disc
30:12SPEAKERwas a lot more subject
30:13SPEAKERto what they were capable of at the time,
30:16SPEAKERif that makes sense.
30:16SPEAKERLike I bet they knew how much density they could fit
30:19SPEAKERand the size was something that they could fiddle with.
30:21SPEAKEREspecially because I found in looking into this
30:25SPEAKERthat apparently the laser disc had existed since 1972?
30:29SPEAKER- Yeah, laser disc has been around for a really long time.
30:32SPEAKER- That's crazy to me because in my mind,
30:34SPEAKERlaser disc came along in like the mid nineties or something
30:36SPEAKERas like, oh wow, look at these giant CDs
30:38SPEAKERthat hold movies now.
30:40SPEAKERI had no idea the laser disc design
30:42SPEAKERactually predated the CD by like a lot.
30:45SPEAKER- Oh, well yeah, 'cause most of the laser discs are analog.
30:47SPEAKER- Right, so that's the whole thing I've never quite
30:49SPEAKERunderstood is the analog digital split.
30:51SPEAKERLike I guess maybe it was just like coming to CDs first
30:55SPEAKERin my mind as a child.
30:56SPEAKERLike if it was on an optical disc, it was digital.
30:59SPEAKERAnd I never understood how analog video was being stored
31:02SPEAKERon a disc that used lasers.
31:04SPEAKER- It basically uses light
31:06SPEAKERinstead of to do record groove type thing, I think.
31:08SPEAKERI can't remember.
31:09SPEAKER- I mean, that makes sense.
31:10SPEAKERLike obviously records are analog.
31:12SPEAKERLike, you know, light can be measured
31:16SPEAKERin an analog fashion, like it makes sense.
31:18SPEAKER- But I think there's also digital laser disc formats
31:20SPEAKERthat came on later.
31:21SPEAKERLike there's like laser disc is complicated.
31:23SPEAKER- And that's what DVD was.
31:24SPEAKERLike obviously DVD was digital video.
31:26SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
31:27SPEAKER- 'Cause it's literally what it stands for, but.
31:28SPEAKER- Digital versatile disc, Brad.
31:30SPEAKER- Is that actually a scene?
31:32SPEAKER- I don't know that they ever actually confirmed
31:33SPEAKERone way or the other.
31:34SPEAKER- I've seen, okay, Wikipedia says both for DVD.
31:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:38SPEAKER- But I actually wrote a little question here
31:40SPEAKERin the reverse, which was, could CDs have been analog?
31:45SPEAKERLike, why did they have to be digital?
31:48SPEAKER- I think that they digital was a.
31:50SPEAKER- Did it store more?
31:51SPEAKERMaybe it stored more.
31:53SPEAKER- Well, huh.
31:55SPEAKERI would assume that you could fit more data
31:57SPEAKERinto the same tracks with digital.
31:59SPEAKER- That's my question, because if analog video
32:03SPEAKERon optical disc technology already existed,
32:05SPEAKERI don't see why it couldn't have just been analog audio.
32:07SPEAKERThe reason I ask is because like,
32:09SPEAKERyou don't hear about it so much these days,
32:10SPEAKER'cause everything is digital now.
32:11SPEAKERLike they lost that fight.
32:12SPEAKERBut do you remember back in the day,
32:14SPEAKERlike a lot of audio files, like music connoisseurs
32:17SPEAKERwere very up in arms about the rise of digital music?
32:20SPEAKER- Records just sound better, man.
32:21SPEAKER- I mean, it's beyond that.
32:22SPEAKERI mean, like just the analog digital argument, you know?
32:24SPEAKERIt's just like the argument was like digital,
32:26SPEAKERand I guess it's true, like digital recording
32:28SPEAKERis losing information, right?
32:30SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yeah.
32:31SPEAKER- Because of the way it samples discretely
32:34SPEAKERfrom the moment to moment.
32:35SPEAKERLike you are technically losing information
32:37SPEAKEReven if the average person can't hear,
32:38SPEAKERbut you would see people say like,
32:40SPEAKERoh, it sounds colder, it's not the real thing.
32:43SPEAKERI mean, I feel like some of that's probably people,
32:45SPEAKERperson to person bias,
32:46SPEAKER'cause I don't think most people have hardware
32:47SPEAKERthat'll let them hear the difference in that.
32:49SPEAKER- Right, this seems very much like an audio file argument.
32:51SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean,
32:53SPEAKERthat was the conversation for a lot of the time.
32:56SPEAKERYou never heard that with tape though,
32:57SPEAKER'cause it turns out the resolution of tape's pretty low.
32:59SPEAKER- Yeah. - The cassette tapes.
33:01SPEAKER- Right, it was analog,
33:02SPEAKERbut it was so crappy that who cares?
33:03SPEAKER- Yeah, and had a lot of noise for some reason.
33:06SPEAKERI don't understand that exact case.
33:08SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
33:09SPEAKERThe last thing I'll say about CDs is that in my mind,
33:11SPEAKERthey still feel like magic, even though they're basically
33:13SPEAKERobsolete technology now, because part of it,
33:16SPEAKERpart of that is like, it's a thing I grew up with, right?
33:18SPEAKERLike CDs became big when I was, let's say,
33:24SPEAKER10, 11 years old when they-
33:25SPEAKER- Only 10, yeah, that's why I started to remember.
33:26SPEAKER- About 10, 11 years old when music CDs started getting big
33:28SPEAKERand then CD-ROMs and game consoles that use CDs
33:30SPEAKERcame along like a handful of years later.
33:31SPEAKERSo I was right in that nostalgic sweet spot
33:33SPEAKERfor them to feel cool.
33:35SPEAKERBut also the other thing is they were so vastly superior
33:39SPEAKERto all of the things they replaced.
33:41SPEAKER- You could skip.
33:43SPEAKER- Like dude, skipping,
33:46SPEAKERanybody who did not grow up with records and cassette tapes
33:50SPEAKERand then experience that transition to CD players,
33:53SPEAKERlike the idea of hitting a button and going straight
33:55SPEAKERto the song instantly that you want, fucking mind-blowing.
33:58SPEAKER- Shuffle.
33:59SPEAKER- Shuffle, like what?
34:02SPEAKER- You can just say, artist's intent doesn't matter,
34:04SPEAKERjust listen to it however the random algorithm says.
34:07SPEAKER- But also just like quality and storage capacity, right?
34:09SPEAKERLike the quality of the music that it sounded
34:11SPEAKERso much better than tapes, like when you got games on CDs
34:14SPEAKERor even when like writable CDs came along,
34:16SPEAKERlike you could store so much more than your avatar drive
34:19SPEAKERor floppy disk or whatever, like obviously there were
34:22SPEAKERproblems with like, you know, they were pretty slow.
34:24SPEAKER- Scratches were a problem.
34:26SPEAKERYeah, it was like 120 kilobits a second, it's real slow.
34:28SPEAKER- Trying to like loading times were a big deal,
34:30SPEAKERthat kind of sucked, but like the storage capacity
34:32SPEAKERand quality and stuff like that, like it was such a leap.
34:35SPEAKER- Well, and the other big thing is that listening to it
34:38SPEAKERdidn't degrade in its quality.
34:40SPEAKERLike listening to a record, listening to a cassette,
34:42SPEAKERyou'd eventually wear them out, they'd start sounding worse
34:45SPEAKERand worse and worse, but it didn't happen with a CD.
34:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
34:50SPEAKERThe McDonald's Happy Meal debuted in 1979
34:53SPEAKERfor the price of $1.
34:56SPEAKER- $1.
34:57SPEAKER- $1, I debated whether we should try to get
34:59SPEAKERinto like food supply chain stuff around this
35:02SPEAKERand how they could sell a child's meal for a dollar,
35:05SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera.
35:06SPEAKER- It's a big subject.
35:07SPEAKER- That's a big subject, that's like a whole episode.
35:08SPEAKER- Yeah, and also a dollar was worth a lot more in 1979,
35:11SPEAKERit turns out.
35:13SPEAKERBut yeah, the Happy Meal when I was a kid,
35:15SPEAKERI remember when Happy Meals came out,
35:16SPEAKER'cause at first we were suspect of it,
35:18SPEAKERand then we went on a road trip
35:19SPEAKERand my parents were very excited at that point.
35:22SPEAKERBut you got a hamburger or a cheeseburger,
35:25SPEAKERa handful of fries, and I think a small Coke,
35:29SPEAKERor they had the orange high seed that's not fizzy
35:32SPEAKERat McDonald's back then.
35:33SPEAKER- I see, sir.
35:35SPEAKER- Orange drink, you just asked for orange.
35:37SPEAKER- I want to see, doo, doo, doo, doo.
35:40SPEAKERI'm trying to find.
35:41SPEAKER- I don't know if they had toys in them
35:42SPEAKERat the beginning either.
35:43SPEAKER- That's what I'm looking for.
35:43SPEAKERI had that in front of me and I lost it.
35:46SPEAKERI don't know if the original one sold with a toy.
35:51SPEAKER- So around that time, collectible glasses
35:54SPEAKERwere very popular for good for movies.
35:56SPEAKERLike when Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back came out,
35:58SPEAKERyou would get glasses.
35:59SPEAKERBatman, McDonald's had these amazing embossed Batman,
36:05SPEAKERwhichever one had Jim Carrey and Arnold.
36:08SPEAKEROr, no, it was the Arnold and--
36:12SPEAKER- Mr. Freeze, was that Forever?
36:14SPEAKERNo, that was-- - Freeze and Uma Thurman.
36:16SPEAKER- Was that the George Clooney one?
36:17SPEAKER- That was Forever, yeah.
36:18SPEAKER- George Clooney one was, I think that was Batman and Robin.
36:22SPEAKER- Anyway, it was the one with Arnold and Uma Thurman.
36:25SPEAKERThat one had amazing embossed glasses.
36:27SPEAKER- They were great.
36:28SPEAKERI think I used to have some Return of the Jedi
36:31SPEAKERprinted glasses that were amazing that are all gone.
36:35SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:36SPEAKER- You know what?
36:38SPEAKERInflation calculator says a dollar in 1979
36:40SPEAKERis equal to 374 today.
36:43SPEAKER- It's about what a Happy Meal is like, 450, four bucks.
36:46SPEAKER- Let's see.
36:48SPEAKERMcDonald's menu prices as of July, 2021, Happy Meal.
36:53SPEAKERWow, no, they're undercutting it.
36:57SPEAKERA four-piece chicken nuggets hack,
36:59SPEAKERexcuse me, chicken McNuggets Happy Meal.
37:01SPEAKER- Yeah. - 329.
37:03SPEAKER- Huh, it's more than that here.
37:04SPEAKER- Ham, oh, sure, I guess it's by,
37:06SPEAKERI don't know what region this is by.
37:07SPEAKERThis says 249 for the Hammered Meal.
37:09SPEAKER- That's probably like average
37:10SPEAKERacross the entire state of the country
37:11SPEAKERor wherever this person lives.
37:12SPEAKER- Sure.
37:17SPEAKER- Like other weird things
37:19SPEAKERthat ended up having some real deep repercussions,
37:22SPEAKERthe US and China established full diplomatic relations.
37:25SPEAKERApparently up until this point,
37:28SPEAKEReverybody was still P.O.ed after the Korean War.
37:32SPEAKERAnd we had limited diplomatic relations
37:36SPEAKERand basically, Nixon went to China.
37:42SPEAKER- Yes, only Nixon could go to China.
37:43SPEAKER- Only Nixon could go to China, apparently.
37:46SPEAKERI still only vaguely understand what that means.
37:48SPEAKERBut the point is, that opened up trade
37:52SPEAKERand all of the things that have driven
37:54SPEAKERthe massive explosion of the Chinese economy
37:58SPEAKERand the proliferation of Chinese manufacturing
38:01SPEAKERover the last 40, 50 years.
38:04SPEAKER- That event arguably, I'm sure, led in large part
38:06SPEAKERto the current kind of import-export dynamics
38:08SPEAKERthat we have today, right?
38:10SPEAKER- Without that, that wouldn't have happened, yes.
38:12SPEAKERIt also has to do with the one China policy in the US,
38:16SPEAKERwhich is a whole other thing
38:18SPEAKERthat we probably don't need to get into.
38:20SPEAKER- Multiple cans of worms.
38:21SPEAKER- This decision left Taiwan, the Republic of China,
38:25SPEAKERin a weird,
38:28SPEAKERRepublic of China?
38:30SPEAKERROC?
38:31SPEAKER- I don't know a ton about 20th century Chinese history,
38:33SPEAKERbut yes, I believe that's where the Nationalists
38:35SPEAKERkind of fled to Taiwan after the Civil War.
38:39SPEAKER- Yeah, so, but basically,
38:42SPEAKERwe don't recognize Taiwan as a country.
38:44SPEAKERThe choice we made was,
38:45SPEAKERwe're not going to recognize Taiwan as a country,
38:48SPEAKERand the choice China made was,
38:49SPEAKERwe're gonna allow them to continue working with them.
38:52SPEAKERThey just can't recognize them as a country.
38:53SPEAKER- Yeah, do you have any insight into why Taiwan
38:56SPEAKERis such an epicenter of semiconductor fabrication?
39:01SPEAKER- I think it's just where people were doing that.
39:03SPEAKERThey were doing a lot of manufacturing of electronic stuff,
39:05SPEAKERand therefore, somebody there was like,
39:08SPEAKER"Hey, we should build some fabs.
39:10SPEAKERThis stuff's gonna be important."
39:12SPEAKERAnd it's 'cause it's where TSMC is.
39:14SPEAKER- Right, that's why I ask primarily,
39:15SPEAKERbut also like a ton of most,
39:18SPEAKERif not all of the motherboards, I think.
39:20SPEAKERMotherboard companies and designers and so forth
39:22SPEAKERare based there.
39:23SPEAKERLike, it's a real hub for PC building.
39:26SPEAKERI mean, like, I'm sure it's just like,
39:29SPEAKERrandom circumstance, the way that Silicon Valley came about,
39:31SPEAKERand any like hub for a specific industry.
39:34SPEAKER- I mean, that would be my guess.
39:35SPEAKERI don't know.
39:36SPEAKERI would be interested in digging into that
39:37SPEAKERin a future episode.
39:38SPEAKERI think that'd be a cool thing to find out about.
39:40SPEAKER- I mean, this is the stupid shit that I spend my time
39:43SPEAKERlooking into on the weekends,
39:44SPEAKERbut like, I've gone down the rabbit holes
39:46SPEAKERof looking into what happened to like ABIT and DFI,
39:48SPEAKERand some of those like-
39:49SPEAKER- And they got bought, didn't they?
39:51SPEAKER- No, I think they kind of dissolved.
39:53SPEAKERSome of the like, DFI still exists,
39:55SPEAKERbut they only make like industrial grade stuff now.
39:57SPEAKERThey got out of the consumer market, like,
39:59SPEAKERbut some of those legendary old
40:00SPEAKERmotherboard designers, manufacturers,
40:03SPEAKERand like, you can, I found,
40:06SPEAKERI found an old blog from like 10 plus years ago
40:09SPEAKERof some person who went to the DFI office
40:11SPEAKERto try to figure out why
40:12SPEAKERthey weren't making gaming motherboards anymore.
40:14SPEAKER- Wow.
40:15SPEAKER- And like, interrogated the receptionist.
40:17SPEAKER- That's not okay.
40:19SPEAKER- Asking, or wanted to see a company representative
40:21SPEAKERto find out what had happened.
40:22SPEAKERAnd like, they concluded that most of the gaming board
40:25SPEAKERdesigners had jumped ship or gotten poached
40:28SPEAKERby other companies.
40:29SPEAKER- Well, when Acer started, they poached a ton of people,
40:32SPEAKERis my understanding.
40:33SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:34SPEAKER- Scene drama.
40:35SPEAKER- Yes.
40:37SPEAKER- We got some nuclear, nuclear business.
40:40SPEAKER- Good.
40:44SPEAKER- 1979 was the year that the Three Mile Island incident,
40:47SPEAKERthe most, most dangerous, most released,
40:52SPEAKERmost serious nuclear accident
40:54SPEAKERon the United States territory happened.
40:56SPEAKER- I didn't know it was that early.
40:57SPEAKERI thought that was more mid 80s around the Chernobyl time.
41:00SPEAKER- No, Chernobyl was like 86.
41:01SPEAKERThis was, so this was, you know,
41:05SPEAKERrelatively minor as these things go.
41:08SPEAKERThere was a valve that got, that basically got stuck open
41:11SPEAKERand drained a lot of coolant from the reactor
41:14SPEAKERand released, you know, nuclear reactors.
41:18SPEAKERThe Three Mile Island design is a high pressure
41:20SPEAKERnuclear reactor, which we don't really make any,
41:23SPEAKERwe don't really make nuclear reactors anymore,
41:24SPEAKERbut we really stopped making pressurized vessels
41:27SPEAKERafter Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
41:31SPEAKERAnd what happened was the closed loop
41:33SPEAKERwhere the irradiated water that actually touches the,
41:37SPEAKERyou know, the uranium in the reactor,
41:41SPEAKERthe water mixed in with the open loop
41:43SPEAKERwhere the water goes, you know,
41:44SPEAKERthrough the steam turbines and all that stuff
41:46SPEAKERand then gets sent out into the atmosphere.
41:49SPEAKERAnd as a result, there was a fair amount
41:51SPEAKERof radiation released.
41:52SPEAKERThere was, it's the normal,
41:54SPEAKERif you've watched the Chernobyl show on HBO, thank you.
42:00SPEAKERIt's less, it was a less serious chain of human errors
42:06SPEAKERthat led to a less serious effect
42:09SPEAKERbecause at some point somebody was like,
42:11SPEAKER"Hey, this doesn't, something's not right here."
42:12SPEAKERAnd they were like, "Oh, there's no water."
42:13SPEAKERShit, half the reactor core has melted.
42:16SPEAKERWe've got to turn this off.
42:17SPEAKER- Great, did anybody die?
42:19SPEAKER- No one died.
42:20SPEAKER- Okay.
42:21SPEAKER- Yes, no, the ongoing, the state of Pennsylvania
42:26SPEAKERdid a multi-year, like 20 year study
42:29SPEAKERto see if there was an increase in cancer deaths.
42:32SPEAKERNothing like that was found.
42:33SPEAKER- Really, I didn't know it was that benign.
42:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a relative, like, look,
42:39SPEAKERthere's no such thing as a good nuclear disaster.
42:40SPEAKER- No, no, of course not.
42:41SPEAKER- But it was pretty much the best case.
42:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:44SPEAKER- And as a result, it led to a bunch of reform.
42:46SPEAKERSo it was important in that regard.
42:51SPEAKER- The next nuclear incident is the Vela incident.
42:54SPEAKERI just learned about this one the other day.
42:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and then I had never heard of it
42:57SPEAKERuntil you brought it up for this.
42:58SPEAKER- So, you know, we had this nuclear nonproliferation treaty,
43:01SPEAKERwhich is basically everybody who had nukes at the time said,
43:03SPEAKER"Yo, nobody else can have nukes, it's a bad idea."
43:06SPEAKER- Right, also say it.
43:06SPEAKER- We're good, we got this.
43:08SPEAKER- Say it three times fast.
43:09SPEAKERNuclear proliferation, nuclear proliferation,
43:11SPEAKERnuclear proliferation.
43:12SPEAKER- Nuclear proliferation, it's a lot.
43:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a lot of syllables, shit.
43:18SPEAKERBut there were countries that wanted to have nukes
43:20SPEAKERthat didn't have nukes and they started working together.
43:22SPEAKERSo South Africa and Israel, allegedly, I guess.
43:28SPEAKER- It's never been verified.
43:30SPEAKER- Okay, well, let's tell the story the other way.
43:33SPEAKERWe had satellites on orbit called,
43:39SPEAKERwhere is it, here we go.
43:41SPEAKERCalled the, it's called the Vela satellite actually.
43:43SPEAKERSo, and it was set up to detect,
43:46SPEAKERthere's nuclear explosions release two distinct flashes,
43:48SPEAKERone's very short and then several milliseconds later,
43:51SPEAKERthere's another longer flash.
43:53SPEAKERAnd it's like, there's no other source of this flash
43:56SPEAKERin the natural world.
43:57SPEAKERSo if you see, if you have a satellite
43:59SPEAKERthat's pointed at half of the earth
44:00SPEAKERand they see a flash like this, then you're like, okay.
44:03SPEAKER- Pretty safe bet.
44:04SPEAKER- Probably the nuclear explosion just happened above ground.
44:09SPEAKERSo the Vela satellite detected one of these flashes
44:12SPEAKERin the Prince Edward Island between South Africa
44:16SPEAKERand Antarctica and then the official U.S. policy
44:22SPEAKERwas basically, yeah, nothing happened,
44:26SPEAKERjust a weird, something weird happened there, I don't know.
44:29SPEAKER- It's just unexplainable.
44:31SPEAKER- Can't answer all these questions.
44:32SPEAKERYeah, it's unsolved mysteries.
44:36SPEAKERProbably based on data from seismologists
44:39SPEAKERand like undersea hydrophones and all that stuff,
44:43SPEAKERprobably was South Africa and Israel
44:46SPEAKERdetonating a nuclear bomb above ground,
44:49SPEAKERdoing a bomb test, it looked like a three kiloton bomb.
44:53SPEAKERBut because we had just signed
44:55SPEAKERthe Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
44:57SPEAKERand we didn't want to have,
44:59SPEAKERwhich included automatic sanctions for anybody
45:02SPEAKERthat violated it who didn't already have a bomb,
45:05SPEAKERwe didn't, we just acted like nothing happened.
45:08SPEAKER- Just trying to look the other way
45:09SPEAKERfor strategic geopolitical reasons.
45:12SPEAKERThat's very consistent in our principles.
45:15SPEAKER- Yeah, how would this ever bite us in the ass
45:18SPEAKER40 years later, anyway.
45:21SPEAKER- Somebody wrote in,
45:21SPEAKERwe were talking about the ARPANET recently.
45:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:25SPEAKER- DARPA, government classification, stuff like that.
45:27SPEAKERI wish I had written this down.
45:29SPEAKERSomebody wrote in talking about
45:30SPEAKERkind of standard declassification protocols
45:32SPEAKERand I want to say it's 50 years
45:34SPEAKERunless there's a good reason otherwise.
45:36SPEAKER- Are you just gonna say we're gonna find out
45:38SPEAKERthe true story behind the, maybe it was aliens.
45:40SPEAKER- That's right, you never know.
45:42SPEAKER- You know, if it turns out that it's aliens,
45:44SPEAKERI want the day that they discovered that to be sweatpants.
45:48SPEAKER- Can you say it was not aliens wearing sweatpants?
45:50SPEAKERNo.
45:51SPEAKER- You can't prove a negative, Brad.
45:52SPEAKEREverybody knows that.
45:53SPEAKER- I know that.
45:54SPEAKERThat was the joke.
45:55SPEAKER- I know.
45:57SPEAKER- Okay.
45:57SPEAKER- I just didn't want people to think
45:58SPEAKERthat we didn't know that.
45:59SPEAKER- Okay.
46:01SPEAKERSometimes I assume a lot about what people--
46:04SPEAKER- I trust our audience a lot.
46:04SPEAKER- I think we, our audience, yes.
46:06SPEAKER- Yes.
46:07SPEAKER- But sometimes--
46:08SPEAKER- We're past the 30 minute mark,
46:10SPEAKERso nobody outside of the audience will listen this far.
46:12SPEAKERWe can say anything we want at this point.
46:14SPEAKER- That's a good point.
46:15SPEAKERSometimes you can't assume too much
46:16SPEAKERabout what people think you do and don't know, though.
46:19SPEAKERWhen you, let's say, are joking about something
46:21SPEAKERand they take you seriously.
46:22SPEAKERAll right, a couple of extremely,
46:25SPEAKERlet's see, we talked about the Altair 8080.
46:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
46:28SPEAKER- I'm sorry, it was the Altair 8800.
46:30SPEAKER- 8800.
46:31SPEAKER- I got that back, I'm staring at--
46:33SPEAKER- You got 18 numbers in front of you right here.
46:35SPEAKER- Way too many products.
46:36SPEAKERYou know, back when microprocessors and integrated circuits
46:39SPEAKERwere just named after numbers and not--
46:41SPEAKER- They hadn't hired a marketing agency yet.
46:43SPEAKER- Not catchy terms like Pentium and Core.
46:47SPEAKER- Pentium means five.
46:48SPEAKER- I like Core, I think Core is a good name.
46:50SPEAKER- Core means center.
46:51SPEAKER- Pentium, I always thought was a little cheesy.
46:54SPEAKER- I like Pentium.
46:55SPEAKER- Not only did I not like the name very much,
46:57SPEAKERbut I was also just incensed when they did it
46:59SPEAKERbecause I loved calling things 486 and stuff,
47:02SPEAKERlike it's so tech.
47:04SPEAKER- And also the socket change after,
47:06SPEAKERjust after the Pentium was a bummer.
47:08SPEAKER- That's actually, that is a,
47:10SPEAKERI think that is a legitimate point
47:12SPEAKERthat it got harder to keep track of what was what
47:15SPEAKERafter they started branding arbitrarily.
47:17SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like they,
47:19SPEAKERso for a while on the Pentium series,
47:21SPEAKERthey stuck with the open socket seven architecture
47:25SPEAKERand then they moved to the slots,
47:26SPEAKERwhich they didn't let anybody else use, so.
47:30SPEAKER- Anyway, we won't dwell on these too much
47:32SPEAKER'cause we're not computer engineers,
47:33SPEAKERbut the Intel 8088 debuted in 1979,
47:37SPEAKERwhich became the basis for the very first IBM PC,
47:40SPEAKERwhich, you know.
47:42SPEAKER- Became the basis for literally every PC ever.
47:44SPEAKER- Goes without saying how influential that was.
47:47SPEAKERAnd the Motorola 68000 also in 1979,
47:51SPEAKERwhich like right up there was the basis of the Macintosh,
47:56SPEAKERthe Sega Genesis slash Mega Drive, Ooh, Amiga, Atari ST,
48:00SPEAKERlike the 60, like a bunch of Japanese computers
48:02SPEAKERthat didn't come like the, again, the Sharp.
48:04SPEAKER- Sharp, yeah.
48:05SPEAKER- X68K as you might imagine, use a 68K European computers,
48:10SPEAKERlike I said, I mean like the 68,000,
48:12SPEAKERespecially if you keep up with things like the Mr. Scene,
48:13SPEAKERlike it's everywhere, like it's right up there
48:17SPEAKERwith these early Intel chips and like the Xilog Z80
48:20SPEAKERand stuff as like one of the main microprocessors
48:23SPEAKERthat you see being recreated or emulated
48:24SPEAKERall over the place these days, it was huge.
48:27SPEAKER- Well, and this is also interesting
48:30SPEAKER'cause it's from the time before DOS for the most,
48:35SPEAKERlike IBM PC ran DOS, but it was before DOS
48:38SPEAKERwas the monolithic, you know, it was the way you computed.
48:42SPEAKER- It's ridiculous how much all this stuff overlaps
48:44SPEAKERbecause I, in reading about the CD yesterday,
48:47SPEAKERI saw Gary Kildall referenced.
48:49SPEAKER- Oh, really?
48:50SPEAKER- Because later in life, he started a company
48:52SPEAKERtrying to put things like encyclopedias
48:54SPEAKERand government documents onto CD.
48:56SPEAKERGary Kildall. - Is he the discarded guy?
48:58SPEAKER- No, 'cause he actually died in 1994.
49:00SPEAKER- Oh, bummer.
49:01SPEAKER- Of an accident, but you might know him
49:04SPEAKERas the bearded cohost of the computer chronicles.
49:07SPEAKER- What?
49:08SPEAKER- You might also know him as the guy
49:11SPEAKERwho was writing the operating system that IBM was using.
49:15SPEAKER- Before DOS?
49:16SPEAKER- Yes. - Before MS-DOS, wow.
49:17SPEAKER- If you go on his Wikipedia page,
49:18SPEAKERthere was like a very fateful meeting that he missed
49:22SPEAKERwhere IBM wanted to license his operating system for the PC.
49:27SPEAKERAnd like- - Crap, wow.
49:29SPEAKER- And like the deal didn't come together.
49:31SPEAKERHe was not present for the meeting that day.
49:33SPEAKERAnd so then they went and met with Microsoft instead.
49:36SPEAKER- Man, that would haunt you.
49:37SPEAKER- And like the Wikipedia page says
49:40SPEAKERthat he literally, he sold like two companies,
49:42SPEAKERlike he was wealthy.
49:44SPEAKERIt's not like he wasn't successful,
49:46SPEAKERbut his Wikipedia page literally says
49:47SPEAKERlike he flaked descended into alcoholism later in life,
49:51SPEAKERlargely because of what happened with Microsoft.
49:54SPEAKER- I like, I can't imagine missing something, wow.
50:00SPEAKERYeah, that would haunt you.
50:02SPEAKER- Also, apparently from what I was reading,
50:04SPEAKERlike Bill Gates was not particularly kind
50:07SPEAKERabout that whole situation at the time.
50:11SPEAKERAnd like in the press, in his statements to the press,
50:14SPEAKERlike apparently like according to what I read,
50:18SPEAKERlike he was off handling other business stuff that day.
50:21SPEAKERAnd so he was not there for that meeting.
50:23SPEAKEROther company representatives were,
50:25SPEAKERbut Bill Gates like went around in the press later saying
50:27SPEAKERlike, oh yeah, he missed that meeting
50:28SPEAKER'cause he was on vacation or something.
50:29SPEAKERLike he was just like kind of an ass about it.
50:33SPEAKER- And the thing is like IBM was a big deal
50:35SPEAKER'cause they did servers and mainframes and stuff like,
50:37SPEAKERI mean, mainframes and shared terminals and stuff like that.
50:42SPEAKERBut like in the PC space, IBM before the PC wasn't huge.
50:48SPEAKER- No, of course not.
50:49SPEAKER- Right, like there was no PC space.
50:51SPEAKER- I think that it was also implied
50:53SPEAKERthat Kildall thought that the PC,
50:55SPEAKERthe IBM PC was not gonna be that big a deal
50:57SPEAKERbecause they were not big in that market.
50:58SPEAKER- Well, and they were gonna be overpriced.
51:00SPEAKERIt was the other thing.
51:01SPEAKEREverybody knew, like, yeah, anyway.
51:03SPEAKER- Anyway, that was a huge tangent,
51:04SPEAKERbut like you see the same names, the same concepts,
51:07SPEAKERthe same tech popping up in overlapping spaces
51:09SPEAKERall over the place here.
51:10SPEAKER- Small, small world.
51:12SPEAKERSpeaking of small worlds, CompuServe launched
51:15SPEAKERin the year of your birth, Brad.
51:16SPEAKER- So yes, as a consumer service, yes.
51:20SPEAKERBut I was shocked to find out that CompuServe
51:22SPEAKERwas actually founded in 1969.
51:25SPEAKER- People probably know CompuServe now
51:26SPEAKERbecause it was one of the early like nationwide ISPs
51:29SPEAKERor at least larger than local ISPs.
51:31SPEAKER- Yeah, like I know our audience skews older,
51:33SPEAKERbut I do wonder, are we in a spot
51:35SPEAKERwhere we'd actually just need to like define
51:36SPEAKERwhat CompuServe was?
51:37SPEAKERLike it was basically, I even saw references to this
51:40SPEAKERfrom press at the time that it was kind of described
51:42SPEAKERas one of the other big three besides America Online
51:45SPEAKERand Prodigy. - Delphi or Prodigy, yeah.
51:48SPEAKERThe thing about CompuServe, the thing about these,
51:51SPEAKERso at this point, these in the late '80s, early '90s,
51:56SPEAKERI guess, these services would kind of connect people
52:00SPEAKERto what were kind of like big BBSs.
52:03SPEAKERThey were like large scale BBSs
52:04SPEAKERthat then you could also access the internet on later.
52:08SPEAKERNot obviously in 1979, but I didn't understand this.
52:12SPEAKERWhat did people use this for?
52:14SPEAKER- So CompuServe was founded as a subsidiary
52:17SPEAKERof a company called Golden United Life Insurance.
52:20SPEAKER- Oh yeah, G-U-L-I, of course.
52:22SPEAKER- Of course, like this is such a weird origin.
52:24SPEAKERLike apparently they founded it partially
52:26SPEAKERto be kind of like to provide computing services
52:28SPEAKERto their own company, the life insurance business.
52:32SPEAKERBut then they also started expanding it
52:33SPEAKERinto renting out computing time.
52:35SPEAKERThis was back when computing like time sharing was a thing
52:39SPEAKER'cause you were just signing into mainframes or whatever.
52:43SPEAKERThey built that up as a business as kind of a B2B service
52:46SPEAKERto rent out computer time to other businesses.
52:50SPEAKERAnd then from what I gathered reading about this,
52:52SPEAKERthat network built up slowly across the country
52:54SPEAKERto the point that they then decided to roll out
52:57SPEAKERa consumer service in the evenings
52:59SPEAKERbecause all those computers were sitting there idle
53:00SPEAKERin the evening, not being used by businesses
53:03SPEAKERwho were not operating at night.
53:04SPEAKER- So you could get like a dumb terminal and hook it up
53:06SPEAKERto a modem and get timeshare on one of these machines?
53:09SPEAKER- That's basically what I gathered from this.
53:12SPEAKERLike I didn't read too much into,
53:13SPEAKERthey're talking about a lot of PDP-10s
53:15SPEAKERand teletype terminals and like that kind of old shit.
53:17SPEAKER- Wow.
53:19SPEAKER- But I guess they, I wanna say they called
53:22SPEAKERthe consumer service micro net originally
53:24SPEAKERand they marketed it at Radio Shack,
53:26SPEAKERbut it was so successful they decided to just rebrand it
53:28SPEAKERas the actual name CompuServe
53:29SPEAKERand then it kind of grew from there.
53:31SPEAKER- There you go.
53:32SPEAKER- And then they apparently were also the first one
53:36SPEAKERof those big national services to offer any kind
53:40SPEAKERof internet access in the form of email in 1989,
53:43SPEAKERwhich is like pretty early.
53:45SPEAKER- Yeah, that's why your CompuServe email address
53:47SPEAKERwas always a big long string of numbers
53:48SPEAKER'cause it was just your user ID.
53:50SPEAKER- I always thought of CompuServe, I never used it,
53:51SPEAKERbut from what I read about it, I always thought of it
53:53SPEAKERas the like very techie, like not very user-friendly one
53:55SPEAKERbecause of things like that.
53:57SPEAKER- That was my read as well.
53:58SPEAKERI just want to straight to dial up shell accounts, yeah.
54:01SPEAKER- Man, I'm very jealous.
54:04SPEAKERI wish I had been into that back then, but let's see.
54:09SPEAKERI copied one thing from the Wikipedia page
54:11SPEAKERI wanna mention here.
54:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:13SPEAKER- They were talking about as they were building up
54:14SPEAKERthat national network, they were headhunting executives
54:17SPEAKERto the recruiting to build that up.
54:21SPEAKERThey're talking about an executive they headhunted
54:23SPEAKERwho left a company called Service Bureau Corporation.
54:27SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the SBC.
54:28SPEAKER- Which was a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation.
54:32SPEAKERLike computing company names from the '70s, '80s
54:36SPEAKERare such nonsense mashups of words.
54:38SPEAKERLike you literally just pick two words.
54:40SPEAKER- Well, but like if you named it today,
54:42SPEAKERControl Data Corporation would be named Slavonis
54:46SPEAKERor something like that, right?
54:47SPEAKER- That's fair, that's fair.
54:48SPEAKERI just, I love how bulky and awkward and nonsensical
54:51SPEAKERthese the Control Data Corporation.
54:53SPEAKER- I wish that this was like a '60s mashup,
54:55SPEAKERlike a Kondaka, Kondako or something like that.
54:59SPEAKER- Oh, don't forget our friends from 1975, Kromemko.
55:02SPEAKER- Yeah, Kromemko, never forget.
55:04SPEAKER- You know, the hottest mixtape of 1975
55:06SPEAKERthat graced the album or the show art of your episode.
55:09SPEAKER- Kromemko.
55:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:13SPEAKER- Bjarne Stroustrup, Stroustrup.
55:16SPEAKER- Sure.
55:17SPEAKER- Bjarne Stroustrup.
55:18SPEAKER- Yes.
55:19SPEAKER- That's okay.
55:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:21SPEAKER- Started working on C++.
55:22SPEAKER- Yeah, in 1979.
55:24SPEAKER- I don't wanna say it was the first
55:25SPEAKERobject-oriented programming language,
55:27SPEAKER'cause it wasn't, there was other stuff before,
55:29SPEAKERbut it was probably the first one
55:30SPEAKERthat was like widely used and is still used today.
55:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it became kind of standard.
55:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:37SPEAKERAnd what that means is basically that prior to this,
55:42SPEAKERyou didn't have the ability to inject other code
55:45SPEAKERinto your applications.
55:46SPEAKERSo there was no way to like include a header file
55:50SPEAKERand stuff like that in some cases
55:51SPEAKERwith just normal C as my understanding.
55:54SPEAKER- You were just replicating every function,
55:56SPEAKERevery function, piece of functionality
55:58SPEAKERevery single time you wrote a program?
55:59SPEAKER- I assume there's a lot of copying and pasting,
56:01SPEAKERbut I don't know for sure.
56:02SPEAKER- I don't even know if, could you copy and paste
56:03SPEAKERthat functionality even exist?
56:04SPEAKER- Copy and paste existed in 1979, Brad.
56:06SPEAKER- Okay, I meant before that.
56:09SPEAKER- I don't know, maybe.
56:10SPEAKER- Well before that. - That's a good question.
56:11SPEAKER- When you're on a teletype terminal,
56:12SPEAKERI don't know if that's actually a thing.
56:14SPEAKER- It's, this is, we put this in A,
56:17SPEAKERbecause both of us bombed out of CS classes in college,
56:21SPEAKERbut it's like, this is one of the things that probably,
56:28SPEAKERthis is why we still teach C in college,
56:30SPEAKERin schools, in CS programs and stuff like that.
56:32SPEAKER- Right. - That would be my guess.
56:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't, I liked the programming.
56:36SPEAKERIt was the math that washed me out of the CS degree.
56:40SPEAKER- I didn't really like the programming or the math,
56:42SPEAKERso it was easy. - Really?
56:43SPEAKER- I mean, I'm good at, I like physics math,
56:46SPEAKERbut the computer math was inscrutable to me,
56:49SPEAKER'cause I didn't understand what was going,
56:50SPEAKERlike in order for me to understand the math,
56:52SPEAKERI have to kind of understand what's going on
56:53SPEAKERon the other side. - Sure, sure.
56:56SPEAKERI didn't love pointers when we got to pointers.
56:58SPEAKERI was like dealing with memory management manually.
57:01SPEAKER- Ooh, wow. - Was not my favorite thing.
57:04SPEAKER- You don't really do that anymore, it turns out.
57:05SPEAKER- No, I know, like I think most high level languages
57:07SPEAKERcompletely, well, especially interpreted languages
57:09SPEAKERhave zero concept of that, right?
57:11SPEAKER- Yeah, you just, you have an infant state machine,
57:13SPEAKERbasically you can do whatever you want, right?
57:15SPEAKERI don't know what, like, we've got a ton of very skilled
57:18SPEAKERsoftware developers on our Discord,
57:20SPEAKERlike I should just go in there and ask them,
57:22SPEAKERbut I wonder how much manual memory management
57:25SPEAKERyou're doing with like Rust and Go
57:27SPEAKERand stuff like that these days.
57:29SPEAKER- My guess is it depends on what your,
57:31SPEAKERif you have really specific workloads,
57:33SPEAKERusually you have to do stuff that's more manual.
57:36SPEAKERAnyway, Pixar started as the graphics group at Lucasfilm.
57:41SPEAKER- Yes, or yeah, I guess the group, well, let's see,
57:43SPEAKERI got this straight off of Pixar's, like our story page,
57:48SPEAKERwhich goes into some history.
57:52SPEAKERI guess the graphics group was a division
57:54SPEAKERof the computer division at Lucasfilm.
57:56SPEAKER- Of course, the computer division.
57:58SPEAKER- I guess they say that George Lucas himself
58:01SPEAKERrecruited Ed Catmull, I'm sure a lot of people know his name.
58:05SPEAKER- He's one of the three founders of Pixar.
58:06SPEAKER- Right, to run the computer division at Lucasfilm.
58:11SPEAKERAnd then the graphics group came out of that.
58:13SPEAKERThis is so George Lucas though, on the Pixar page,
58:16SPEAKERthey list George Lucas's wishlist for the computer division.
58:20SPEAKERWhat he wanted was non-linear editing systems for,
58:23SPEAKERI'm sorry, digital non-linear editing systems
58:25SPEAKERfor film and sound, a laser film printer,
58:30SPEAKERexplorations of computer graphics,
58:32SPEAKERlike he just wanted shit for what he was doing.
58:34SPEAKERThat's like-
58:35SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yeah, that's why you do R&D, right?
58:37SPEAKERIn this case.
58:38SPEAKER- Well, of course, but it's just like, I don't know,
58:40SPEAKERLucas is such a weird figure with a strange
58:42SPEAKERand interesting body of work,
58:43SPEAKERbut like all he has ever done really is just execute R&D
58:48SPEAKERfor the weird ideas he wants to implement in his films.
58:51SPEAKER- I mean, that's, but that's-
58:52SPEAKER- I mean, I know that's everybody,
58:53SPEAKERbut it's like, it's more, he is just such on,
58:55SPEAKERon such an extreme tech end of that.
58:58SPEAKER- So I, my question, my question is,
59:02SPEAKERwell, first off, that's the way film works.
59:05SPEAKER- Well, I know that.
59:06SPEAKER- That's the way film has always worked.
59:07SPEAKER- I don't think I'm, well,
59:08SPEAKERI'm not explaining myself very well here.
59:09SPEAKERIt's more like, a lot of people would argue
59:14SPEAKERthat he kind of lost the soul of filmmaking
59:15SPEAKERin the pursuit of like technical ability.
59:18SPEAKERLike this is kind of exemplified in the,
59:20SPEAKERin the Phantom Menace era,
59:22SPEAKERlike news reports about like, look what he can do now.
59:24SPEAKERHe can take two different actors performances
59:26SPEAKERfrom two different takes and mash them together
59:27SPEAKERand just edit it exactly like he wants.
59:30SPEAKERAnd like a lot of people saw that sort of like the death
59:32SPEAKERof, of, of like, you know, artistic filmmaking or-
59:38SPEAKER- You know what I mean?
59:38SPEAKERUsing machine learning to generate a sample of a dead, yeah.
59:43SPEAKER- That's what I'm trying to get at is like sometimes the,
59:45SPEAKERthe technical abilities get out in front
59:47SPEAKERof the artistic process.
59:50SPEAKER- As Steven Spielberg, or I guess Michael Crichton
59:55SPEAKERfamously said, sometimes we're too busy wondering
59:58SPEAKERif we can to stop and think about whether we should.
1:00:00SPEAKER- Yes, yes, that's the thing.
1:00:02SPEAKERAnyway, the graphics group was conceived
1:00:06SPEAKERto do all that stuff,
1:00:07SPEAKERbut then they started getting more and more
1:00:08SPEAKERinto digital animation, recruited a bunch more animators
1:00:14SPEAKERand so forth, so on and so forth.
1:00:16SPEAKERI didn't know the stained glass light sequence
1:00:19SPEAKERfrom young Sherlock Holmes was made in 1985.
1:00:22SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:00:23SPEAKER- I had no idea.
1:00:24SPEAKERI thought that was way later than that.
1:00:25SPEAKERLike that's super famous as like-
1:00:28SPEAKER- Well, it's their first thing, right?
1:00:29SPEAKER- I don't know if it, was it the first?
1:00:32SPEAKERIt was not the first computer graphics in anything, but-
1:00:35SPEAKER- It was Pixar's first though, I believe.
1:00:37SPEAKER- I guess so.
1:00:39SPEAKER- Or the thing that would become Pixar.
1:00:40SPEAKER- Like that sequence is, okay.
1:00:45SPEAKERThis article defines it as the first all CG character,
1:00:50SPEAKERwhich I guess is true.
1:00:51SPEAKERLike that is a full CG character in-
1:00:54SPEAKER- It's a CG, I don't know that I remember that, but-
1:00:57SPEAKER- Composited into, composited into film.
1:01:04SPEAKEREat a charger, beings.
1:01:05SPEAKER- Yeah, go to hell, charger.
1:01:06SPEAKER- Anyway, that's a very famous effects sequence.
1:01:08SPEAKERAnyway, Steve Jobs bought that group in 1986,
1:01:12SPEAKERrenamed it to Pixar.
1:01:14SPEAKERThen it became-
1:01:15SPEAKER- Set them free.
1:01:16SPEAKER- Yes, then it became what it became.
1:01:17SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:01:18SPEAKER- Lots of weird stuff came out of Lucasfilm Photoshop.
1:01:21SPEAKER- And John Knoll, John Knoll did some weird science
1:01:24SPEAKERat Photoshop at Lucasfilm that became Photoshop.
1:01:27SPEAKER- Yes.
1:01:28SPEAKER- I feel like, and this is a thing that I've always heard
1:01:31SPEAKERpeople in effects industry say,
1:01:32SPEAKERbut I don't know if it's actually true,
1:01:34SPEAKERthat the Death Star, like the little dot graphic
1:01:38SPEAKERof the Death Star in Star Wars,
1:01:41SPEAKERwhere they're talking about how they're gonna attack it
1:01:43SPEAKERand it zooms in and shows the trench.
1:01:45SPEAKERI think that's the first computer generated graphic
1:01:47SPEAKERthat was used in a film.
1:01:48SPEAKER- I've heard similar things.
1:01:53SPEAKER- It's here online.
1:01:53SPEAKER- Hang on, I'm just gonna throw this out there.
1:01:55SPEAKERIf anybody at Lucasfilm listens to this podcast,
1:01:57SPEAKERJohn Knoll is like a top 10 fantasy guest wishlist
1:02:03SPEAKERfor this podcast.
1:02:05SPEAKERI would kill to talk to that guy for an hour.
1:02:09SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, that would be good.
1:02:12SPEAKER- Is it shameless to say that on this podcast?
1:02:14SPEAKER- No, this is the place to get it out there.
1:02:16SPEAKER- He seems like an incredibly smart and interesting guy.
1:02:19SPEAKER- Jim Cameron said that he has the mind of a child
1:02:22SPEAKERand the brain of a scientist.
1:02:23SPEAKER- That's a very James Cameron thing to say.
1:02:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:27SPEAKER- I saw Kathleen Kennedy say something about Knoll
1:02:30SPEAKERthat was much more kind, I would say,
1:02:31SPEAKERlike a much kinder version of that.
1:02:34SPEAKER- Oh, I don't think Jim Cameron meant that unkindly.
1:02:37SPEAKERI think that's a high compliment in his world.
1:02:39SPEAKER- James Cameron, yes, exactly.
1:02:40SPEAKERThat's what I mean.
1:02:41SPEAKERThat's what passes for a compliment from Cameron.
1:02:44SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I mean, so if you don't know,
1:02:46SPEAKERJohn Knoll is a visual effects director
1:02:48SPEAKERwho also has done a ton of other stuff
1:02:49SPEAKERand there's a reason he's credited on Photoshop
1:02:53SPEAKERand it's because he did a ton of work on it
1:02:54SPEAKERin the early, early, early days at Lucas.
1:02:56SPEAKER- But also one of the top people at ILM
1:02:58SPEAKERfor a very long time.
1:03:00SPEAKERSo like he's done enormous amounts of visual effects work
1:03:03SPEAKERand innovation over the years.
1:03:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:07SPEAKERYeah, anyway.
1:03:08SPEAKER- I've watched a lot of behind the scenes featurettes.
1:03:12SPEAKERThat's all I'm trying to say.
1:03:14SPEAKER- Sierra Online?
1:03:15SPEAKER- Sierra Online was founded as Online Systems.
1:03:18SPEAKER- It's a bad name.
1:03:19SPEAKER- In 1979.
1:03:20SPEAKERI mean, dude, we just talked about
1:03:21SPEAKER70s computer company names are all ridiculous.
1:03:26SPEAKER- Did they hyphenate online at that point too?
1:03:29SPEAKERWhat the heck?
1:03:30SPEAKER- Online-line systems.
1:03:31SPEAKERWell, I mean, what did the term online mean back then?
1:03:33SPEAKERLike that sounded fancy and futuristic, right?
1:03:35SPEAKER- Well, with the hyphen though, it seems bad.
1:03:37SPEAKERIt seems like you have to get in line
1:03:38SPEAKERto go do something fun.
1:03:39SPEAKER- It took some time for the hyphen to fall out.
1:03:41SPEAKERAnyway, I don't know if people know
1:03:44SPEAKERlike the kind of basic story of Ken and Roberta Williams
1:03:46SPEAKERwere a husband and wife team that started Sierra,
1:03:49SPEAKERthe company that's kind of credited
1:03:51SPEAKERwith inventing the graphical adventure on PC.
1:03:55SPEAKER- Ken was kind of the business guy
1:03:56SPEAKERand Roberta was the writer.
1:03:58SPEAKER- Everything I've read about this
1:03:59SPEAKERand I was actually just reading this big long vice feature
1:04:02SPEAKERon Sierra recently.
1:04:03SPEAKERSo I got some of this from there,
1:04:04SPEAKERbut like Ken Williams very much comes off
1:04:07SPEAKERas just mostly a businessman who was also a programmer
1:04:09SPEAKERwho wanted to run a successful profitable business
1:04:13SPEAKERand wasn't really thinking about video games.
1:04:16SPEAKER- Okay.
1:04:17SPEAKER- Like he wanted to, he left IBM
1:04:19SPEAKERand wanted to just write business software
1:04:22SPEAKERunder his company.
1:04:23SPEAKERBut his wife, Roberta played some text adventures
1:04:27SPEAKERat the time and like fell in love with them
1:04:29SPEAKERand then started kind of getting him to help her out
1:04:32SPEAKERin trying to make a game.
1:04:33SPEAKER- Wow.
1:04:34SPEAKER- And then they figured out that they could use
1:04:35SPEAKERvery rudimentary graphics in their first game Mystery House,
1:04:38SPEAKERwhich I tried to figure this out.
1:04:42SPEAKERSeems to be the first graphical adventure ever.
1:04:45SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:04:45SPEAKER- Like, did you tell me there might've been something?
1:04:48SPEAKER- I don't know anything before.
1:04:49SPEAKERSo this was just like flat images with text underneath?
1:04:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so I had spent too much time reading about it
1:04:54SPEAKERas I always do, but she drew, they bought some package
1:04:59SPEAKERthat could like overlay line computer line art
1:05:02SPEAKERon like scanned images.
1:05:04SPEAKERSo she drew, hand drew all the scenes from the game.
1:05:07SPEAKERAnd then he used that software to convert those
1:05:09SPEAKERinto like very simple line art images.
1:05:12SPEAKER- Wow.
1:05:12SPEAKER- But they were too big to fit on the floppy disk,
1:05:15SPEAKERthe five and a quarter disks
1:05:16SPEAKERthey were gonna sell the game on.
1:05:18SPEAKERSo he wrote basically into her like a coordinate interpreter
1:05:23SPEAKERso they could store the images just as coordinates
1:05:26SPEAKERthat would draw the lines in on the fly
1:05:27SPEAKERas they were rendered on the Apple II.
1:05:29SPEAKER- As vectors?
1:05:30SPEAKER- Yes, as vectors.
1:05:31SPEAKER- That's a trip.
1:05:32SPEAKER- And to fit them all on the floppy disk.
1:05:34SPEAKER- Holy cow.
1:05:35SPEAKER- And they, yeah, and then they sold enough copies
1:05:36SPEAKERthat they became a real company.
1:05:38SPEAKERAnd then Sierra became one of the biggest deals
1:05:41SPEAKERon the PC for a very long time.
1:05:44SPEAKER- Wow, that's funny.
1:05:45SPEAKER- I love Sierra games.
1:05:46SPEAKER- I was a Sierra game guy.
1:05:47SPEAKER- Were you?
1:05:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I was a--
1:05:49SPEAKER- How interesting.
1:05:50SPEAKER- Chris Murphy and Faz Magoria and Gabriel Knight, maybe?
1:05:54SPEAKER- Gabriel Knight.
1:05:55SPEAKER- I was a Sierra one.
1:05:56SPEAKER- King's Quest VI was the first graphical adventure I played
1:05:59SPEAKERand then I worked backwards
1:06:00SPEAKERand played a bunch of the older ones.
1:06:01SPEAKER- Oh, so I didn't play any of the King's Quest.
1:06:02SPEAKERSo I didn't know,
1:06:04SPEAKERI was almost completely unaware
1:06:06SPEAKERthat different people made video games when I was a kid.
1:06:09SPEAKER- Okay.
1:06:10SPEAKER- You know what I mean?
1:06:11SPEAKERLike I, it wasn't until like "Plan Files" and "Quake"
1:06:14SPEAKERand all that stuff that I was like conceptually became aware
1:06:18SPEAKERthat there wasn't just some factory someplace
1:06:19SPEAKERwhere everybody was churning out video,
1:06:21SPEAKERlike working together to churn out video games.
1:06:23SPEAKER- Sure.
1:06:25SPEAKER- So like the Sierra Lucas divide was very confusing to me,
1:06:31SPEAKEReven in like when I was 18.
1:06:34SPEAKER- Sure.
1:06:35SPEAKER- Because I didn't understand why the Lucas games
1:06:39SPEAKERwere always inscrutable and the Sierra games seemed to,
1:06:43SPEAKERthe puzzle seemed to be at least based in some reality.
1:06:46SPEAKER- Oh, dude, I don't know about that.
1:06:47SPEAKERI mean, so maybe you were better at them than I was,
1:06:50SPEAKERbut as somebody who got in trouble for running up
1:06:53SPEAKERa phone bill to the toll line Sierra hint thing,
1:06:57SPEAKERtrying to get through the end of King's Quest six,
1:07:00SPEAKERI think it was like 30 bucks to be fair,
1:07:02SPEAKERI think of course in the early nineties,
1:07:04SPEAKER30 dollar phone bill was definitely something
1:07:07SPEAKERto get in trouble for.
1:07:10SPEAKER- Well, so I don't think it was, I was in after that.
1:07:14SPEAKERIt would have been like the under a killing moon
1:07:16SPEAKERand that kind of stuff when they started doing all that.
1:07:20SPEAKER- The Tex Murphy was a different company.
1:07:22SPEAKER- That was dynamics, but it was published by Sierra.
1:07:25SPEAKERWasn't it?
1:07:26SPEAKER- So no, that was access.
1:07:28SPEAKER- Oh.
1:07:29SPEAKER- That was, that was a separate thing.
1:07:30SPEAKERDynamics, dynamics did, dynamics was the kind of like edgy,
1:07:34SPEAKERadult imprint of Sierra though.
1:07:36SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:07:37SPEAKER- I mean, to be fair, like Sierra proper put out
1:07:38SPEAKERLeisure Suit Larry and Police Quest and some stuff like
1:07:41SPEAKERthat, but yeah, they were a little more family friendly.
1:07:43SPEAKERAnd then dynamics was doing a lot of like hard-boiled
1:07:45SPEAKERdetective shit and stuff like that.
1:07:47SPEAKER- Yeah, more horror, like horror-y stuff.
1:07:51SPEAKER- But.
1:07:52SPEAKER- What happened? What happened?
1:07:54SPEAKERDid they stop? Did they just retire?
1:07:55SPEAKER- Well, real quick, I was going to say,
1:07:57SPEAKERbefore we move on to that,
1:07:58SPEAKERI wonder if there's like a geographical component to that,
1:08:00SPEAKERbecause when I moved out here,
1:08:03SPEAKERlike everybody I know that I've worked with in games from
1:08:06SPEAKERhere from California was like full on Lucas, LucasArts
1:08:10SPEAKERin the LucasArts Sierra kind of.
1:08:13SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it was the home, you're on home turf.
1:08:15SPEAKER- Exactly, well, they're both in California though.
1:08:17SPEAKERLike graded, Lucas was up in the North Bay.
1:08:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:08:24SPEAKER- And I forget Sierra was down South somewhere.
1:08:25SPEAKER- Like all the stuff that came out of Lucas,
1:08:27SPEAKERI like all the, I assume,
1:08:29SPEAKERI've never actually bothered to look at this,
1:08:30SPEAKERbut I assume that there's a through line from Lucas
1:08:32SPEAKERto like Telltale and.
1:08:33SPEAKER- Oh, definitely.
1:08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, Telltale was.
1:08:35SPEAKER- Definitely to Double Fine and like.
1:08:37SPEAKER- Telltale was literally founded by people who worked on
1:08:39SPEAKERLucasArts adventure maps.
1:08:41SPEAKER- That's what I assumed.
1:08:42SPEAKERBut I wonder, like, I wonder if Sierra had better
1:08:43SPEAKERdistribution on the East coast, because like,
1:08:46SPEAKERI got a copy of, I got a cheap copy of Kings Quest six
1:08:49SPEAKERat Sam's Club when I was a kid.
1:08:51SPEAKER- So that's the thing is all of those things,
1:08:53SPEAKERthose games were available in the game store in my mall.
1:08:56SPEAKER- Right.
1:08:58SPEAKERYeah, that's probably why.
1:08:59SPEAKERAnyway, I'll put the vice feature I mentioned in the show
1:09:03SPEAKERnotes here, because it's all about how they sold the company
1:09:07SPEAKERto a giant corporation that apparently was being run by scam
1:09:10SPEAKERartists.
1:09:11SPEAKER- Oh no.
1:09:11SPEAKER- Which like, I did not know this history about Sierra.
1:09:14SPEAKERAll I knew was that they sold and they're, you know,
1:09:16SPEAKERthe brand is owned by Activision now.
1:09:19SPEAKER- Yeah, it went through like Activision and Vivendi.
1:09:22SPEAKER- It was part of Vivendi, it was part of a company called
1:09:26SPEAKERSendent, like I didn't know that lineage other than that
1:09:28SPEAKERthey got bought by a big company and then got passed around
1:09:30SPEAKERlike that, but.
1:09:32SPEAKER- It's always trippy, but you forget that like Half-Life
1:09:35SPEAKERwas a Sierra game.
1:09:36SPEAKER- Totally, yes.
1:09:36SPEAKERHalf-Life was published by Sierra, but that was after they
1:09:38SPEAKERsold it, that was when it was part of.
1:09:41SPEAKERBut the thing I didn't know is that the original corporation
1:09:44SPEAKERthey sold Sierra to was apparently cooking its books.
1:09:50SPEAKERThis was in the late nineties.
1:09:51SPEAKERThis was like right, this was running up to the Bernie
1:09:54SPEAKERMadoff Enron era.
1:09:56SPEAKERRemember that?
1:09:57SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:09:58SPEAKER- So apparently the corporation that bought them
1:10:03SPEAKERwas cooking its books.
1:10:04SPEAKERThe two people who ran that corporation ended up spending
1:10:06SPEAKERlike a decade in prison for securities fraud.
1:10:09SPEAKER- Jesus. - They mishandled Sierra badly.
1:10:13SPEAKERAnd yeah, it's a really interesting article.
1:10:17SPEAKERAlso a lot of the people at Sierra lost a lot of money.
1:10:21SPEAKER- I'm sure.
1:10:22SPEAKER- Because they all own shares in the company.
1:10:23SPEAKERAnd then the company went completely to shit once it was
1:10:25SPEAKERbought by this company.
1:10:26SPEAKERAnd they all like, like people were banking on that being
1:10:29SPEAKERtheir retirement or, you know.
1:10:32SPEAKER- That sucks, that's awful.
1:10:33SPEAKER- People lost their houses, stuff like that.
1:10:37SPEAKERIt's pretty rough.
1:10:40SPEAKERWell, on that happy note, let's talk about space.
1:10:42SPEAKER- I like space.
1:10:45SPEAKER- In 1979, the Voyager 1 probe made its closest approach
1:10:50SPEAKERto Jupiter, a couple of hundred, 100,000 kilometers away,
1:10:53SPEAKER177,000 kilometers away.
1:10:55SPEAKER- Okay.
1:10:57SPEAKER- Found out that Jupiter had rings, had a ring, has a ring.
1:11:00SPEAKERSo it's ringed.
1:11:02SPEAKER- Maybe this has changed, but I guess those could not
1:11:04SPEAKERbe observed through telescopes at the time.
1:11:06SPEAKER- We can't see them here.
1:11:07SPEAKER- Still to this day.
1:11:08SPEAKERI don't know, maybe with like the space telescopes
1:11:10SPEAKERor the big giant arrays or something, but it's a very faint,
1:11:13SPEAKERlike right around the equator, as my understanding,
1:11:15SPEAKERpretty close.
1:11:16SPEAKER- Okay.
1:11:18SPEAKER- Pioneer 1 also cruised 13,000 miles away from Saturn.
1:11:22SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the first spacecraft to visit Saturn.
1:11:24SPEAKER13,000 miles, pretty close.
1:11:26SPEAKER- 13,000 miles in terms of space, real close, I would say.
1:11:29SPEAKER- I was reading randomly, I didn't realize this,
1:11:31SPEAKERthat Saturn's, this probably goes for every ring system,
1:11:34SPEAKERbut Saturn's ring system has a shelf life.
1:11:37SPEAKER- Yeah, why is that, Brad?
1:11:39SPEAKER- It's only just decay.
1:11:40SPEAKERLike I think the material just, you know,
1:11:43SPEAKERI don't know if it's pulled into,
1:11:45SPEAKERpulled down to the planet or what.
1:11:46SPEAKERI just, it's due to the material dispersing in some way.
1:11:49SPEAKER- My understanding is you need a fair amount of moons,
1:11:54SPEAKERof satellites in order to keep them stable at all.
1:11:56SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.
1:11:58SPEAKER- Because they, like there's a push and pull
1:11:59SPEAKERand like those little moons on Saturn
1:12:02SPEAKERthat live inside the rings basically
1:12:04SPEAKERare what makes the rings have variation,
1:12:06SPEAKERis the current theory.
1:12:07SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:12:08SPEAKERYeah, the thing I read said that they expect the rings,
1:12:11SPEAKERSaturn's rings will be gone within a hundred million years.
1:12:13SPEAKER- Oh crap, I better go see them now then.
1:12:16SPEAKER- I think that's very interesting.
1:12:17SPEAKER- I think like that.
1:12:20SPEAKER- Like that's a blink in cosmological time, that is nothing.
1:12:23SPEAKER- Yes, the permanence of our world is small, is low.
1:12:28SPEAKER- Yep.
1:12:29SPEAKER- I lost my show notes here, there we go.
1:12:30SPEAKERI have too many tabs open, Brad.
1:12:33SPEAKERPluto crossed Neptune's orbit for the first time
1:12:36SPEAKERsince it's a discovery.
1:12:38SPEAKERSo it was discovered in the 20s or 30s, I can't remember.
1:12:43SPEAKERIt was discovered earlier in the 20th century.
1:12:46SPEAKEROn February 7th, it became the eighth planet.
1:12:49SPEAKERFebruary 11th, February 7th, 1979, for the next 20 years,
1:12:53SPEAKERit was the eighth planet for most of, yeah.
1:12:55SPEAKER- Oh, I thought that was just like a brief crossing.
1:12:57SPEAKERI didn't realize they just straight up swapped places
1:12:59SPEAKERfor two decades. - Well, it is a brief crossing.
1:13:01SPEAKER- Well, yes, Pluto takes a long time to orbit, it turns out.
1:13:04SPEAKER- Yes.
1:13:05SPEAKER- So yeah, it'll be that for like another 200 years
1:13:08SPEAKERor something at this point.
1:13:09SPEAKERWe won't see Pluto be the eighth planet ever again, actually,
1:13:11SPEAKERbecause, well, because it's not a planet anymore, Brad.
1:13:14SPEAKER- I got bad news for people, Pluto's not a planet.
1:13:18SPEAKER- Oh, crap.
1:13:19SPEAKERAlso, the first space shuttle was delivered to Florida,
1:13:23SPEAKERSpace shuttle Columbia.
1:13:24SPEAKERI mean, I guess actually the enterprise was,
1:13:27SPEAKERprobably didn't go to Florida,
1:13:28SPEAKERI guess it was they flew it in the desert, I guess.
1:13:30SPEAKER- Columbia was one of the, was the second disaster, right?
1:13:33SPEAKER- Columbia was the second disaster, yes.
1:13:36SPEAKER- Do you know how many there were?
1:13:38SPEAKER- Space shuttles?
1:13:39SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:13:40SPEAKER- Five, four or five? - Columbia Challenger Atlantis
1:13:42SPEAKERDiscovery, Discovery Atlantis Endeavor, five plus Enterprise.
1:13:46SPEAKER- What was the deal with Enterprise, sorry.
1:13:48SPEAKER- Enterprise was a flight bed, flight, a test flight,
1:13:51SPEAKERtest bed for the glide path stuff.
1:13:53SPEAKER- So it never actually.
1:13:55SPEAKER- Enterprise, they put up on the back of the 747
1:13:57SPEAKERand flew it up into the air and then cut it loose
1:14:01SPEAKERto see if they could control it.
1:14:02SPEAKER- Okay, but it never actually.
1:14:04SPEAKER- Never actually went to space.
1:14:06SPEAKER- Okay.
1:14:07SPEAKER- So there was talk that it would go to space,
1:14:10SPEAKERbut they ended up not doing it
1:14:11SPEAKERbecause it was easier to just,
1:14:12SPEAKERcheaper to just build a new one than to retrofit that one
1:14:15SPEAKERwith what they learned from the test program.
1:14:17SPEAKER- That makes sense.
1:14:18SPEAKER- So Enterprise is in, I can't remember where Enterprise is,
1:14:21SPEAKERmaybe it's in Houston.
1:14:24SPEAKERDiscovery is in, which is the oldest orbiter,
1:14:28SPEAKERwell, Enterprise is the oldest,
1:14:29SPEAKERbut Discovery is the oldest one that's been to space,
1:14:31SPEAKERis at the Air and Space Museum at Udvar-Hazy
1:14:33SPEAKERat Dulles Airport outside DC.
1:14:35SPEAKER- I would like to see that.
1:14:37SPEAKER- Endeavor is down south in LA.
1:14:40SPEAKER- Do you know if any of the museums let you go in them
1:14:43SPEAKERin any capacity?
1:14:43SPEAKER- No, you cannot go in.
1:14:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I figured.
1:14:47SPEAKER- We talked about that when we went to Houston.
1:14:51SPEAKERI don't think it was on video,
1:14:52SPEAKERbut the curators, like they go in
1:14:57SPEAKERand they even limit access to like cameras
1:15:00SPEAKERand stuff like that.
1:15:02SPEAKERLike there's incredibly limited access
1:15:04SPEAKERto the insides of these types of exhibits
1:15:08SPEAKERbecause they don't want them to degrade.
1:15:09SPEAKERAnd anytime you put people in there,
1:15:11SPEAKERthey're gonna generate dust and stuff like that.
1:15:12SPEAKER- That's fair, that's fair.
1:15:13SPEAKER- So the one thing that they did do with Discovery,
1:15:16SPEAKERand I think all three of them actually,
1:15:18SPEAKERbefore they put them on display,
1:15:19SPEAKERwas they took a gigapixel cameras into the cockpit
1:15:23SPEAKERand there are gigapixel images of the entire cockpit,
1:15:26SPEAKERall the cabin area, all the living area, all that stuff.
1:15:28SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool, that's cool.
1:15:29SPEAKER- Which is pretty cool.
1:15:30SPEAKER- Yeah, one real quick note about Pluto
1:15:32SPEAKERbefore we move on that I wanted to throw out.
1:15:34SPEAKER- You got Pluto facts.
1:15:35SPEAKER- Here's a Pluto fact.
1:15:36SPEAKERYou made a, I don't know if you know this,
1:15:38SPEAKERyou probably know this, that Pluto crossing Neptune's orbit
1:15:43SPEAKERis one of the reasons it's not a planet anymore,
1:15:44SPEAKERnot classified as a planet anymore.
1:15:45SPEAKER- What?
1:15:46SPEAKER- That's one of the criteria that they came up with.
1:15:48SPEAKER- That's what made it special.
1:15:49SPEAKER- There's only one planet that did that.
1:15:51SPEAKERIt seems like they're just...
1:15:52SPEAKER- It's not a planet, it's not a planet.
1:15:54SPEAKER- We learn a lot about bullying as parents now.
1:15:57SPEAKER- I'm sure, I get it.
1:15:58SPEAKER- Look, I think those scientists bullied Pluto, Brad,
1:16:01SPEAKERthat's what I'm saying.
1:16:02SPEAKER- Dwarf planets are special too.
1:16:03SPEAKER- Wow, okay, they give them a special name.
1:16:05SPEAKERThat's always bad.
1:16:06SPEAKER- Pluto is, Pluto went from the smallest planet
1:16:10SPEAKERto the most famous dwarf planet.
1:16:14SPEAKER- Ceres and Eros are the other ones?
1:16:17SPEAKER- That's not Eros, but it's something like that.
1:16:22SPEAKER- I think there are potentially a lot of them in that class,
1:16:24SPEAKERin our solar system that are unknown.
1:16:27SPEAKER- Yeah, what is it?
1:16:29SPEAKER- Well, we don't have to get into it,
1:16:30SPEAKERbut to be a planet,
1:16:32SPEAKERthe object has to have cleared its own orbit
1:16:34SPEAKERis one of the criteria they came up with.
1:16:36SPEAKER- Wow.
1:16:37SPEAKER- It can't have any other similar objects crossing over.
1:16:40SPEAKER- No justice for Pluto.
1:16:42SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:16:42SPEAKER- You know what was fun is they,
1:16:44SPEAKER1979 is the first time that they televised
1:16:46SPEAKERall 500 miles of a NASCAR race,
1:16:48SPEAKERof a first televised 500 mile race.
1:16:51SPEAKERSo they televised the Daytona 500 for the very first time.
1:16:55SPEAKERAnd that, I think is, hmm?
1:16:59SPEAKER- I can tell you having grown up in a NASCAR house,
1:17:01SPEAKERthat is a long television program.
1:17:03SPEAKER- It is a lot, that's a whole day.
1:17:05SPEAKER- Is that like six hours or something?
1:17:07SPEAKER- I don't know, it takes, they drive 200 miles an hour,
1:17:08SPEAKERit shouldn't be that long, but for whatever reason,
1:17:10SPEAKERit takes a long time.
1:17:13SPEAKERI think this is interesting
1:17:14SPEAKERbecause this was a technological problem.
1:17:17SPEAKERLike being able to run broadcasts for that long
1:17:19SPEAKERand mix the video from that size of a track
1:17:23SPEAKERand stuff like that was,
1:17:25SPEAKERI assume something they couldn't do up until that point.
1:17:27SPEAKERSo.
1:17:29SPEAKER- Big deal for supporting events, live events.
1:17:33SPEAKER- Yeah, well like that and golf,
1:17:34SPEAKERit turns out doing golf tournaments usually weren't live.
1:17:37SPEAKERSo doing it live was, being able to do it live is important.
1:17:41SPEAKER- Probably a lot of listening to the radio before that.
1:17:43SPEAKER- I would assume so, yeah.
1:17:44SPEAKERAnd probably the radio guy wasn't even there,
1:17:46SPEAKERhe was just getting told it was happening by somebody else.
1:17:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:17:51SPEAKER- And the last one, Star Trek, the motion picture,
1:17:55SPEAKERpremiered at the Smithsonian Institute.
1:17:57SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:17:58SPEAKERI didn't know that's where it premiered,
1:17:59SPEAKERI've never seen it.
1:18:00SPEAKER- Someone with the bald lady.
1:18:01SPEAKER- Yes, I'm familiar, but yeah.
1:18:03SPEAKER- It's pretty, the costumes are really weird.
1:18:05SPEAKER- Right, that's V'ger, isn't it?
1:18:07SPEAKER- V'ger, yeah, it's basically the same story
1:18:10SPEAKERas Voyage Home, but without the whales.
1:18:11SPEAKER- Okay.
1:18:13SPEAKER- I want to see it at some point,
1:18:14SPEAKERI would like to get my hands.
1:18:16SPEAKER- What? - What?
1:18:17SPEAKER- I just said, I have not seen it.
1:18:20SPEAKER- What? - Brad.
1:18:20SPEAKER- What?
1:18:21SPEAKER- I thought you were a Trek fan.
1:18:22SPEAKERYou're a TNG guy.
1:18:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm only kind of a selective.
1:18:26SPEAKER- Wow.
1:18:27SPEAKER- There's a lot that I have not seen.
1:18:29SPEAKER- It has a transporter, it shows a transporter malfunction.
1:18:31SPEAKER- I've heard it's horrifying.
1:18:33SPEAKER- It's scarred me for a really long time.
1:18:35SPEAKER- I've read about the movie a bit recently
1:18:37SPEAKERand now I really wanna watch it
1:18:38SPEAKERbecause my impression of it is that they tried to make 2001.
1:18:41SPEAKERThey were trying to make a good movie instead
1:18:43SPEAKERof a "Star Trek" movie.
1:18:44SPEAKER- What I've read about it is that it has a lot of,
1:18:46SPEAKERlike a lot of really languid shots of starships
1:18:48SPEAKERand space and stuff like that and like.
1:18:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:18:51SPEAKER- It's going for that dreamy Kubrick kind of quality.
1:18:54SPEAKER- There's a lot of.
1:18:55SPEAKER- Sounds like a weird mess.
1:18:57SPEAKER- It's, yeah, like there's an opening sequence.
1:19:01SPEAKERThey do this a couple of times later on in the movies,
1:19:04SPEAKERbut there's an opening sequence where they fly a shuttle
1:19:06SPEAKERaround and it's just like model porn.
1:19:09SPEAKERLike spaceship model porn.
1:19:11SPEAKER- I do, I need to see that, that sounds pretty good.
1:19:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I feel like there's a left-handed spanner joke,
1:19:16SPEAKERwhich I can always appreciate.
1:19:17SPEAKERSo yeah, pretty good stuff all around.
1:19:22SPEAKERIt's not a good movie.
1:19:23SPEAKERI think "Voyage Home" is the superior
1:19:25SPEAKERof the giant spaceship coming to destroy us all, "Star Treks."
1:19:29SPEAKER- Sure, I wonder which of the six holds up the best
1:19:32SPEAKERthese days.
1:19:33SPEAKER- Of the six not-TNG movies?
1:19:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:19:37SPEAKER- "Undiscovered Country" probably.
1:19:38SPEAKER- That was gonna be my guess, actually.
1:19:40SPEAKERLike, I know "Wrath of Khan" is the go-to answer
1:19:42SPEAKERfor everybody, but like, and I mean,
1:19:44SPEAKERI'm sure "Wrath of Khan" is still great,
1:19:46SPEAKERbut like it's got a certain camp quality to it, right?
1:19:49SPEAKER- It's the ear thing, there's body horror.
1:19:51SPEAKERLike they still, like it's like they looked at "Star Wars"
1:19:54SPEAKERand they were like, hey, they have spaceships.
1:19:56SPEAKEROkay, we got spaceships, they have camaraderie,
1:19:58SPEAKERwe got camaraderie, they got weird aliens.
1:20:01SPEAKEROkay, we're gonna jam something in Chekhov's ear.
1:20:03SPEAKERDone, perfect.
1:20:05SPEAKER- I feel, I remember "Undiscovered Country"
1:20:06SPEAKERhaving some like really good political intrigue.
1:20:09SPEAKER- Yeah, it's all about the Klingons and bombs
1:20:11SPEAKERand spies and stuff.
1:20:12SPEAKERYeah, I don't know.
1:20:12SPEAKER"Undiscovered Country," I hadn't watched it
1:20:15SPEAKERuntil fairly recently, and when I watched it,
1:20:16SPEAKERI was pleasantly surprised, so.
1:20:18SPEAKER- Wow, I should go back.
1:20:18SPEAKERI haven't seen it since it came out.
1:20:20SPEAKERI should go check that out.
1:20:21SPEAKER- I don't know, probably a bazillion streaming services
1:20:23SPEAKERor whatever the CBS app is.
1:20:27SPEAKER- Hey, you know what?
1:20:28SPEAKERBig shout out to the San Francisco Public Library System.
1:20:30SPEAKERThey have got a bajillion Blu-rays.
1:20:33SPEAKER- There you go, that works too.
1:20:34SPEAKER- They've got all kinds of stuff.
1:20:36SPEAKER- They should set up a Plex server.
1:20:39SPEAKEROn that note, I think we should call it a day.
1:20:42SPEAKER- Okay.
1:20:43SPEAKER- Happy birthday, Brad. - Call it a year.
1:20:44SPEAKER- Call it a year, yeah.
1:20:45SPEAKER- Thank you, thank you, thank you.
1:20:46SPEAKER- If you like these episodes, please let us know
1:20:48SPEAKEReither on Twitter or on the Discord.
1:20:50SPEAKEREither one is great.
1:20:51SPEAKER- Yeah, we would love to like genuinely,
1:20:53SPEAKERwould love to hear.
1:20:54SPEAKERWe have batted around the idea in one form or another
1:20:56SPEAKERof maybe just doing this with other years, so.
1:20:58SPEAKER- As a semi-regular recurring feature.
1:21:00SPEAKERNot like, not monthly, but--
1:21:01SPEAKER- No, definitely not monthly,
1:21:02SPEAKERbut maybe a handful of times a year or something like that.
1:21:04SPEAKERJust pick a year.
1:21:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:21:07SPEAKER- You can do some newer ones.
1:21:09SPEAKER- Yeah, and if you wanna talk to other people
1:21:10SPEAKERabout stuff like the things that we discussed today,
1:21:13SPEAKERthe TechPod Discord is a fabulous place to do it,
1:21:14SPEAKERwhich you can get access to
1:21:16SPEAKERby joining the fabulous TechPod Patreon
1:21:18SPEAKERat patreon.com/techpod.
1:21:21SPEAKERIt's two bucks a month to get in the Discord.
1:21:23SPEAKER- For now.
1:21:24SPEAKER- For now.
1:21:25SPEAKERDun dun dun.
1:21:26SPEAKER- For now and some indeterminate time in the future.
1:21:30SPEAKER- We keep, we're busy, it turns out.
1:21:31SPEAKERIt's challenging to think up new things.
1:21:34SPEAKERSo anyway, you all continue to benefit.
1:21:36SPEAKERThe TechPod Discord, there's a bazillion channels.
1:21:40SPEAKERWe talk about interesting stuff all day long.
1:21:42SPEAKERLike this week was, you said it was Steam Deck Week
1:21:45SPEAKERfor like Thursday and Friday.
1:21:48SPEAKERI went, I was at basketball,
1:21:50SPEAKERmy daughter went to basketball camp this week
1:21:52SPEAKERand I was there watching her play basketball
1:21:54SPEAKERand my Twitter started popping off with people asking
1:21:57SPEAKERwhat I thought about this new Steam thing
1:21:59SPEAKERand I looked at it and I was like,
1:22:01SPEAKERoh man, Valve's gonna sue these people
1:22:02SPEAKERfor using the word Steam in a video game context
1:22:04SPEAKER'cause it didn't look like a Valve page.
1:22:06SPEAKER- You're behind the curve.
1:22:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I know.
1:22:09SPEAKERBut yeah, people are always talking about cool stuff.
1:22:11SPEAKER- Yes, it's a great place to get the straight scoop on stuff
1:22:14SPEAKERlike the nitty gritty.
1:22:16SPEAKER- Both, the straight scoop then the nitty gritty.
1:22:18SPEAKER- Well, like when the Steam Deck was announced,
1:22:19SPEAKERlike people immediately started going out
1:22:21SPEAKERand finding equivalent AMD APUs that are out there
1:22:24SPEAKERso you could kind of start seeing some benchmarks
1:22:26SPEAKERand like actual, you know, real world info on--
1:22:29SPEAKER- For reality.
1:22:30SPEAKER- On how powerful it is, yes.
1:22:32SPEAKER- Yeah, and as always, thank you
1:22:34SPEAKERto our executive producer, to your patrons,
1:22:36SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, The Bunny Fiend, Jacob Chappell,
1:22:39SPEAKERJoel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen and James Kamak.
1:22:42SPEAKERThank you guys all so much.
1:22:43SPEAKER- Thank you very much, very, very much.
1:22:46SPEAKER- And again, it's patreon.com/checkpot.
1:22:48SPEAKERIf you can't subscribe to the Patreon, that's fine.
1:22:50SPEAKERYou know, tell some friends, do a tweet, spread the word.
1:22:53SPEAKERLet us know what you think.
1:22:54SPEAKER- Listen to the show.
1:22:56SPEAKER- Yeah, listen, yeah, keep listening.
1:22:57SPEAKER- Leave a iTunes review.
1:22:59SPEAKER- Oh yeah, iTunes reviews are great.
1:23:00SPEAKEROur iTunes reviews are really, really pleasant.
1:23:02SPEAKERI always love checking it out.
1:23:03SPEAKERIt's nice to see what people think.
1:23:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:23:06SPEAKER- So anyway, thank you all so much.
1:23:07SPEAKERHave a lovely, lovely week, Mr. Shoemaker.
1:23:10SPEAKER- Thank you, same to you.
1:23:11SPEAKER- The Festival of Brad is--
1:23:14SPEAKER- I'm not, it may not surprise you to hear
1:23:16SPEAKERI'm not big on making a big deal out of my birthday.
1:23:19SPEAKER- Well, I'm gonna make a big deal out of your birthday then.
1:23:22SPEAKER- Well, thank you.
1:23:23SPEAKER- The Festival of Brad will live on.
1:23:26SPEAKERI hope you have a wonderful time and need some cake
1:23:28SPEAKERand do some good stuff. - Thank you so much.
1:23:30SPEAKER- We will see you all next week.
1:23:32SPEAKER(upbeat music)