The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

New episode this week - "Warm Coke and the Internet of Things." This weeks episode is all about the Internet of Things...it starts with warm Coke at Carnegie Mellon and promised a future where technology has faded into an invisible mesh supporting humans with quiet technology. What we got was a surveillance state where our habits and choices are product-ised and sold back to us.    But.....

In 1983, NORAD gave a president four minutes to decide whether to end the world. That was the Cold War's gift to the future: the principle that speed matters more than thought. In part two, we pick up where the missiles left off and follow that logic forward. The four-minute window became millisecond cyberattacks, algorithmic trading crashes, and autonomous systems that act before any human c...

We hope you're enjoying the WarGames is a Documentary 2-parter. If the first part was all about that nostalgic glow of the early 80's hacker aesthetic, then the second part is all about the anxiety that came from mounting technological weaponisation. Faster alerting. Faster decisions. More information. The pressure to keep humans in the loop, but operating at machine-speed. So, the song...

Remember when the scariest thing a computer could do was call another computer? In 1983, WarGames handed a teenage hacker a modem and a direct line to NORAD. Ronald Reagan watched the film at Camp David and asked his Joint Chiefs if it could actually happen. A week later, General Vessey came back with the answer: it's worse than you think. Fifteen months after that, Reagan signed NSDD-145, th...

S2E11 is out tomorrow. Here's the theme song for the episode "Phosphor Glow." Renee and Marc both love the movie WarGames and since we're going to break the episode into two parts - a part about the movie and a part about how the movie is actually a documentary for modern AI warfare - it just felt right for this song to be about that green phosphor glow of the CRT and the analo...

The Tamagotchi (たまごっち) was a three-button egg that beeped when it was hungry, beeped when it was bored, and beeped when it was dying. Renee killed three of them. She's not proud of it. But somewhere between the guilt and the tiny pixelated tombstone, something shifted. We started practicing emotional responsibility for machines. We carried them, named them, and felt genuinely bad when we...

It must be kismet, because we didn't plan to talk about digital Egg Friend's right around the beginning of spring and Easter right around the corner.  Just a little love song to our Egg Friends. That we let die. Be sure to listen to the end.  Lyrics down below. [Verse 1] I carried you in my pocket to the morning train Fed you in the bathroom while the coffee stained Three buttons and a h...

CAPTCHA was supposed to keep the bots out. A simple lock on a simple door. Instead, it became one of the largest unpaid labour operations in the history of the internet. Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and every time you clicked a traffic light, a crosswalk, or a bicycle, you were labelling training data for Waymo's self-driving cars. You digitised the New York Times archive. You transcribed...

The song conveys that angst of clicking CAPTCHA and feeling neglected, feeling used. At the end, we had to prove we were real. But our work wasn't to prove our humanity, it was to fuel someone's product. Betrayal and anguish are appropriately earned my friends. After Renee and I recorded the episode it was clear that we both had some anger and frustration about CAPTCHA. Renee suggested a...

Henry Ford didn't invent the car. He turned building one into a series of motions so simple that no single worker needed to understand the whole machine. Frederick Taylor went further, timing every bend and lift until the factory floor ran like arithmetic. Efficiency stopped being personal and became architectural. That same instinct showed up in punch cards, where your entire program lived a...

For this episode, how could we not write a song about punchcards? But, the whole episode is about patterns, optimisation, and mostly reduction. Commands, programs, data...all reduced to holes on card stock. So, the lyrics hit at that concept of processing and dithering without getting sappy or trying to convey loss. No, this is about the machine chewing data.  It needed a snappy, rhythmic, mechani...

In S2E7, The Age of Tiny Lights , Renee and Marc trace the story of LEDs from a childhood electronics kit with a single red indicator to the decades-long effort to make blue light viable. What began as dim, specialised components required breakthroughs in crystal growth and materials science before becoming practical at scale. Once blue was possible, white light followed, and with it, a steady tra...

As with most of our songs, the point is to be a bit absurd. Who writes a song about Vulcanised Rubber, or Shipping Containers? Nobody. But that's why it's fun. So, this week's theme song had to be about Blue LEDs. The Blue LED is harsh and cold and difficult. A simple phosphor coating and it changes. Warmth, softness, glow. Hiding underneath...it's still that same harsh blue. ...

Episode 6's bonus track. When we started recording the episode about News tech, Renee called for a moment of silence for Dan Rather. And I found it sort of funny and silly at the time. Which was fine. But when it came time to write the lyrics and music for the song for the episode, I knew it had to be about Dan Rather. Or maybe, about the time in which Dan Rather was present in the minds of A...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, S2E6 – Who Controls the News?, Renee and Marc examine the machinery behind the headlines. There was a time when the news arrived at a predictable hour, delivered by a familiar face, framed by a studio camera and a glowing red light. It felt intentional and limited. Today, information moves constantly, personalised, accelerated, filtered, and optimise...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Tape: Tough, Tested, Tenacious , Renee and Marc explore the humble roll that holds the modern world together. What starts with a  strip of Deltec Purple in an art project turns into a  deep dive into adhesive history. From early gummed paper and Depression-era Scotch tape to duct tape in wartime garages, tape quietly proliferates through the 20th cen...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast , Renee and Marc dive into the quiet power of batteries. A technology we depend on constantly but almost never think about. From early chemical experiments to modern lithium-ion systems, they explore what batteries really are, why controlling energy release is so difficult, and how energy density quietly shaped the devices, behaviours, and expectation...

Thanks for listening. Please rate and share with friends and family. It really helps! In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast , Marc and Renee reflect on the internet we lost and the early promise of a global commons that rewarded curiosity, wit, and genuine insight. They explore how identity, scale, and memory shaped early online communities, why empathy felt possible in smaller spaces, an...

Ok, nerds. If you're a consistent listener, you know we've been creating companion songs to the episodes.  This episode's song is a longing lament to one of the Internet's lost loves - GeoCities. GeoCities was where the ugly world wide web was born. And it's gone.  So, enjoy a little love lost song about a piece of the Internet We Lost. Here's the lyrics: [verse 1] I...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, S2E2 – Blue Boxes, SIM Swaps, and the Myth of Secure Phones , Renee and Marc go from the days when long-distance calls were timed with a stopwatch to a world where your phone number quietly doubles as your identity. Along the way, they unpack Blue Boxes, SIM swaps, eSIMs, SS7, and why modern phone “security” is mostly about trust… and who the network...

S2E2 - Blue Boxes, SIM Swaps, and the Myth of Secure Phones In this week's episode, Renee and Marc dial through the history of telecom fraud and hacking. But more importantly we even talk about some things you can do to protect yourself.  Here's a companion song for the episode. The Long Distance Blues [Verse 1] Mama said “Keep it short Every minute costs a dime” Clock on the wall Second...

The first song for season 2 - The AI Gigawatt Thirst Trap In our very first episode, we talked about electricity usage in the new class of gigawatt data centres. But we also wanted to talk about the other resource that is being slurped up by data centres...water. So, here's Season 2's song to go along with our first Season 2 episode. Hope you enjoy it.  [Verse 1] Got a warehouse full of...

We're back with our first episode of Season 2 - The AI Gigawatt Thirst Trap. It was nice to have a little break, but Marc and Renee are back in the studio recording. Season 2 promises more infrastructure, more laughs, more music, and more nerdiness. In our very first episode of Season 1, we talked about AI’s growing appetite for electricity. This time, we turn to something even more fundament...

Elastic Hears (Oh, Vulcanised Rubber) [Verse] Born from heat and sulfur’s kiss A miracle we can’t dismiss Tougher than the strongest thread Holds the world where we tread [Chorus] Oh vulcanised rubber you keep us alive Stretching and snapping you help us survive From tires to soles to seals that don't break You're the bond in the world we make [Verse 2] Rain won’t rot you fire won’t win...

Quick note - a few audio drop outs here and there. Tried to edit around them, but nothing too serious and you'll get the gist in all the spots with issues.  Rubber is one of those materials we almost never think about, right up until it fails. From tyres and medical gloves to seals, gaskets, and global logistics, modern life quietly depends on a substance that still comes, quite literally, fr...