The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

Every once in a while, Renee and Marc go back and talk about things from previous episodes that have changed over the last year or so. In this episode, they decided to share that conversation with everyone else. Mostly because things that they predicted in previous episodes came true. What prognostications did they make? Tune in to hear all about it. But, as usual, they pulled together a song that represented the episode. And it seems that everything they talked about this week ju...

The Gas Meter. Wait, what? We're doing an episode about gas meters? That's pretty nerdy even for Renee and Marc isn't it? Yes. It ticks all the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast check-boxes. It's invisible infrastructureIt's got a neat historyCool, science-y stuffReplacing with new "smart" techWhat do you know about the gas meter in your basement, or on a wall on the side of your house? Come have a listen and learn a bit about this invisible piece of tech that did its job for 180 years before an...

Tune in Thursday for this week's episode all about Gas Meters. You know we love invisible infrastructure and the gas meter is one of those things that worked for 180 years with very little change...and now natural gas is fading out very slowly in residential use and the meter infrastructure is changing too. Ok, maybe gas meters don't sound fun...but Renee and Marc always bring the laughs and this week is no different. Lots of great knowledge this week. So, this week's bonus song, "Never Broke...

What started out as a text from Marc's brother turned into an investigation into the hundred year history of monosodium glutamate and how that turned into a durable insulating film for high-end processors. The umami taste gave us critical microprocessor coatings. Crazy. So, coatings for chips...and chips. This one is a bit weirder than what we normally cover, so you know it's going to be fun. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and M...

What does MSG have in common with microprocessor coatings? You'll have to listen to our new episode "Chips and Chips" coming this week to find out. Renee and Marc dive into the strange world of food and CPU coatings this week and that's the inspiration for the song. There was a time when MSG was vilified. It was so demonised that restaurants would put signs in their windows saying "No MSG." But you know what? MSG is in every savoury food you love. It's not going to kill you. Humans have been ...

A bowling alley looks like the least engineered place you can spend an afternoon. Rented shoes, sticky floors, someone's name spelled wrong (or rudely) on the display. Underneath the grime, neon, noise, and beer stains is four thousand years of arguing about pin dimensions, a materials-science arms race, and enough instrumentation to describe your delivery as a set of physical parameters. Before 1952 the cost of running a lane scaled with the number of people bowling, because somebody h...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the history of bowling technology. Pins, pinboys, automatic pinsetters, rubbers, resins, polymers! Oh, so much chemistry and mechanical engineering. But this week's lively soul/funk groove is all about the dreaded 7-10 split. Hope you're enjoying our new Season 3 house band. Lyrics below. [Verse 1] Eight went down Eight Went Down I heard 'em fall Heard Them Fall Two still up Two stand wide On the left On the right [Pre-Chorus] That lane is quiet Men stan...

For most of history, the top floor was where the poor people lived. Nobody wanted to climb four flights, so the ground floor was the good address and the attic was the punishment. Then a man in Yonkers built a brake, stood on a platform in front of a crowd, and had someone cut the rope with an axe. The car dropped a couple of inches and stopped. He said "all safe, gentlemen," and the shape of every city on earth changed. Otis didn't invent the elevator. Hoists and lifting systems go way bac...

Have you ever entered a full elevator car just to ride the elevator one single floor? Did you feel the judgement? Did you feel the shame? This week's song is a begging, pleading, song about that unforgivable sin. The single floor elevator ride. Renee and Marc are back this week after some time off with a brand new season that starts tomorrow. Our first tech topic is...wait a minute, this can't be right...elevators? Elevators. Huh. OK. Interesting. Tune in tomorrow for the Season 3...

Happy One Year Anniversary! Marc and Renee want to thank you for a great year of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. We've been on a bit of a holiday with the summer months, but people are still listening. This is just a bit of a behind the scenes and a little discussion about Orcas, Bruce from Australia, Numbers, and a few flubs and redos. Just a bit more context on our discussion on numbers and listening stats...while a "big" episode a few months ago might have a couple hundred l...

Renee and Marc grew up in a prime time for television. School House Rock. Newhart. Saturday Morning. Must See TV. Somewhere in the twentieth century, a box arrived and everyone in the house started facing the same direction. For a few decades, half a billion people could watch the same moment at the same instant. Then the box multiplied. We cover the story of how TV changed the culture. This isn't a typical TV story though. Because we're us, we jump into the details of the tech as well ...

Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. All about Television. But the nerdy science-y television stuff. So, we had to do a song all about the way a tube TV manages to keep the image in sync. Snaps, triggers, latch, return. It was just begging to be a snappy, poppy, funky song. Lyrics below: [Verse 1] Picture starts to drift Rolling on the glass That beam won't fire on time Vertical hold is slack Phase is off the mark Every sixty-three, we're gon...

Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time. A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set a shivering centrepiece on the table and let the room see what you could afford. Then it came in a box for pennies, and everyone could have the shape. This week one wobbling dessert travels from aristocratic showpiece to grocery aisle novelty, and we ask what...

Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again. That special temperature is a just a bit below average body temperature. Right around Ninety-Five degrees F. So, that's our song this week. Sorry we're running a bit behind. Schedules and production issues collaborated to keep us a bit late. Enjoy the song and the episode when it comes out. Lyrics below. [Verse...

Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened. For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teach...

Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow. But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that went missing. So, today's song is all about the one that slipped out the lint trap to freedom. Song today....

For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed. Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answer was a lacquer made from nitrocellulose, the guncotton left over from First World War explosive...

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry. Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose. Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish. Lyrics below: [Verse 1] Slow it down Colour runs Leave it now Leave it once A line ...

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet. Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to cool yellow fever patients in 1840s Florida and died bankrupt. Jacob Perkins patented the first vapour-comp...

Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow. Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator. For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the avocado green tank in a neighbour's garage. This week's song is all about...

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy! The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through, is a remarkable engineering achievement. Rome had running-w...

Tomorrow we talk about a piece of tech that was millennia in the making. The humble flush toilet. We have a special guest coming in to record on this one to help us with the story. But you can't make a song about flushing toilets without thinking about the things that water washes away. Physical and emotional. So, this song is all about flushing things away. And the little trap that keeps the bad stuff from coming up and stinking up your life again. Lyrics below [Verse 1] End of a long ...

Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were. At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhattan left ceremoniously in 2022, with a press release, like a retiring quarterback. In between, the booth bec...

Tomorrow's episode is on pay phones. A technology that was once essential until mobile phones became ubiquitous. There's a lot of history (and nostalgia) that Marc and Renee love to gab about. So tune in tomorrow for the full episode. But...you can't talk about pay phones without talking about paying. The scene...small town, unfamiliar territory, sun going down. You need to get out of here and your cousin Susan is the only person that is close enough to come get you. But you have one slightly...

First things, first. We have merch. Silly, yes, but available here. Now onto the show... Have you ever pressed your face to the window in a plane as a kid and stared at the wing thinking flying shouldn't work? Have you ever sat in seat 23B with the baby crying five rows up and perfume getting reapplied three rows over and wished for just forty minutes of respite? Of course you have. Passenger jet aviation is one of the most transformative things humanity has ever built, and most of us experie...

Next episode is all about the development of passenger planes. So, this week our song is about that emotionally stressful situation that air travel has turned into. The bare feet where they shouldn't be. Loud talkers. Hogging the arm rests. Passive aggressive travelers. It felt like a blues song in A Minor. But mashed together with our Season 2 house band's yacht rock groove. Lyrics below. [Verse 1] I boarded last, no room in the overhead bin Lord, I boarded last, no room in...

Have you ever sat at a red light at 2 AM with no traffic in any direction and waited anyway? Have you ever rolled through that same red light 2 AM and felt vaguely guilty about it? Of course you have. The traffic light is the most obeyed command in human history. Rarely enforced (unless you're in the UK like Marc). No officer in sight. Just a coloured light on a pole, and a near-universal agreement to stop when it's red and go when it's green. This episode traces the humble traffic sign...

There are songs and poems about the red and green lights. But what about Amber? Shy. Fleeting. Amber has a job too. This week's episode is about traffic lights and it felt appropriate to cast our gaze at the glowing amber hue and dedicate this week's song to the lesser-loved traffic light colour. [Verse 1] Three seconds is all I get Between the start and the stop You look at me like you know What I'm trying to say Brake a little early Gas a little late Either way you're answering ...

Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389? So do we. There used to be a thing called knowing where you were. It lived in a spiral-bound atlas in the back seat, or in the head of whoever was driving. The Thomas Guide assumed you'd figure it out. The TripTik gave you only the path. GPS skipped pa...

Tomorrow's episode is all about the transition from a world where maps were an everyday driving tool to the world we have now with satellites buzzing overhead telling us exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go. And because this is a podcast about things we miss and what we learn, we learned that keeping maps current is a big job! Things change. Roads change. And...GPS changes us. As we depend on GPS, our spatial skills degrade. So, that's the idea for this week's song. Places ...

Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type? So do we. The best games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parser. Mario did it with a question mark block. The machine showed you what it was. You figured out the rest. T...

Do you remember green screens? Blinking cursors? Games with words instead of photo-realistic massively multiplayer open world shooter role-playing sim games? We do too. Zork was original. Creative. And extremely well-designed. So, this week's song is an ode to Zork. Resource management. Wandering the unknown. Maps. Frustration. Triumph. Self-evident gameplay. See if you can catch all the Zork references. [Verse 1] Brass lantern on the counter Half an hour left to burn Mailbox near...

In 1882, Edison opened Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and started selling electricity by the meter. He built the grid, built the appliances that plugged into it, and then tried to build an electric car that would charge off the whole system. The car was never the product. The car was a device that generated demand for his platform. The battery failed. Gasoline won. And for about a century, the car became the most personal object in American life. You chose the colour. You chose the e...

Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and Highway The episode is about cars. But...cars as instruments of platforms. Edison partnered with Ford to produce electric cars so he could sell more electricity. It failed and what we got (in the US at least) was a car culture. A century of cars representing freedom and self-expression. And now? Cars are becoming the mechanisms to sell recurring revenue. Heated seats, OnStar, performance upgrades, intelligent features...all come with ...

Does your thermostat know when you're approaching your own front door? Does your watch know you're stressed before you do? When your car rewrites its own software at 3 a.m., do you know what changed? In 1982, a group of Carnegie Mellon grad students wired a Coke machine to ARPANET because they were tired of walking down the hall to find warm soda. Two questions. Is there Coke? Is it cold? That was the entire revolution. Marc and Renee trace the line from that hallway to the world we live in n...

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...there's something to be said for the promise of a smart home where the comforts of home learn an...

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 can intervene. The battlefield moved from silos to servers, but the core problem is the same one WarGam...

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 for the episode channels that choppy, rapid-fire, feeling, and a longing for the Phosphor Glow of the earli...

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, the first national security directive to treat computer hacking as a real threat. A teen movie became 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 analog tones of the 300 baud modem. Awww, 80's nostalgia before we get to the part where AI-driven warfare opens us up to ...

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 let them down. From there, the path is disturbingly straight. Neopets gave the egg an economy. Kids ...

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 heartbeat on a plastic chain You never asked for much [Verse 2] I named you on a Tuesday, gave you...

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 millions of Google Books pages. Nobody told you. A UC Irvine study put the total at 819 million hours...

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 ballad. So, a ballad it became. After that, the lyrics only took me a few minutes to write. Chose D Minor,...

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 as holes in a stack of cardboard you carried with both hands. And it shows up again in neural networks,...

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, mechanical beat. So, we gave it a dactyl rhythm with a punchy chorus and final bridge. So, en...

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 transition away from a century of filaments and discharge lamps. Today, semiconductor light sits insi...

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. So, that's what this week's song is about...the shift between the perception and the harsh reality under the fan...

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 America. This is a call back to the 80's and to Dan Rather as a human. His famous "Courage" sign ...

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 optimised. So what changed? It wasn’t simply ideology or journalistic standards. It was infrastructure. P...

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 century, evolving from simple packaging fix to engineered material. Along the way, they unp...

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 expectations we take for granted today. Along the way, they unpack rechargeable myths, lithium’s rise, supply...

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, and how engagement-driven incentives quietly rewired behaviour as the internet grew. What emerged wa...

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 built you out of borrowed code Midnight blue and blinking gold Every page a little wrong But you never said I was wro...

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 feels like believing today. Spoiler: it’s not a bug. It’s a feature… from 1975. We'd love to hear...

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 hand Watching every line Static on the wire Voice coming through Paid a little piece of me Every tim...

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 fundamental: water. From rivers that powered early industry to modern data centres that use millions of gallons...

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 brain cells Thinkin’ fifteen moves ahead But the smartest thing I’m learnin’ Is it really just wants t...

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 You’re the armor on which we spin Bridges hold and engines hum You’re the reason we overcome [Prechorus]...

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, from trees. In this episode, Renee and Marc trace the unlikely journey of rubber from indigenous ...

Just a bit of fun from Renee and I. If you're a listener, you know that Marc believes that double-entry bookkeeping might be the most important technological innovation ever. But...just maybe...he's willing to concede that the venerable Shipping Container might be up there with double-entry. It's silly, heavy, and catchy. Have a listen. Here are the lyrics: [Verse] Steel walls rise Fortress of trade Born to conquer Empires made Stacked like giants Towering high Bridging oceans Pie...

Everyone loves fast delivery, but nobody loves thinking about how it works. In this episode, we dig into the overlooked story of logistics: the steam engines that kicked it off, the wars that reinvented it, the barcodes and warehouses that scaled it, and the robots now trying to keep it all from breaking. A practical, funny look at the global machine we depend on every day. “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because ...

Come for the canals and railroads. Stay for the part where Marc and Renee admit AI might just be the next overbuilt mess we rely on. In this episode, we explore the historical patterns of infrastructure bubbles, revealing how emerging technologies often spark both excitement and economic pitfalls. We analyze past transformative advancements, such as canals and railways, highlighting how they initially fueled industrial growth but ultimately led to speculative investment and significant losses...

Come for the canals and railroads. Stay for the part where Marc and Renee admit AI might just be the next overbuilt mess we rely on. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts. Merch is available on the site too. It helps cover ...

Cinema is built on technology, from the shape of the very first movie frame to the LED walls and AI tools used today. In this episode, Marc and Renee explore how film evolved in both sight and sound, and how the industry kept reinventing the moving image every time audiences drifted toward a glowing box at home. They walk through the widescreen battles of the 1950s, the triumph of magnetic sound and 70 mm spectacle, the rise of Dolby, the shift from mechanical projection booths to digital ser...

Hollywood has tried every trick to keep us in the dark, from anamorphic lenses to lasers and LED walls. Renee and Marc unpack a century of cinema tech and ask what's the next spectacle that will draw audiences? Tune in tomorrow for the full episode. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nost...

Just a bit of B roll from Renee's story about Russian's listening in to her recording. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts. Merch is available on the site too. It helps cover the cost of the podcast.

Renee and Marc break down the evolution of authentication in recent times. RSA tokens. The rise of mobile authenticators. The not-so-long, painful reign of SMS codes. They move through SIM swapping, behavioral biometrics, and the shift toward systems that study how we type, move, and interact. They dig into trust, privacy, and the growing gap between convenience and control. The conversation pushes toward the future: digital agents, intent-driven identity, and a world where authentication fad...

Marc once again drags Renee into a museum. This time the “Hall of Money." Five thousand years of humans trying (and mostly failing) to automate trust. From clay tablets that doubled as IOUs to Renaissance double-entry bookkeeping, colonial funny-money, credit cards born of embarrassment, and machines that now pay each other while we sleep, this episode follows money’s long journey. Along the way: Marc confesses his favourite room at the British Museum, Renee recounts the chaos of American “C...

Warning up front - we discuss some ethical conundrums and situations with tech. There's one mention of suicide and we talk about the Manhattan Project. We're respectful, but we just wanted to put it out there. Every breakthrough in technology brings the same old question: just because we can, should we? In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Marc and Renee are joined by tech ethicist, Chris McClean, for a time-traveling look at innovation’s moral blind spots...from Gutenberg’s...

Printers used to be the villains of the office...loud, cranky, and prone to eating your best work right before a deadline. But somewhere between the screech of a dot matrix and the hiss of a resin vat, something changed. Printing got interesting. Really interesting. In this episode, we trace the unlikely glow-up of one of tech’s most unloved inventions. From the early days of line feeds and perforated paper to the high-precision world of additive manufacturing, we explore how the humble print...

Welcome to the second half of our big-top breakdown, where the circus goes digital, and the clowns have ring lights. Wait...did we just call ourselves clowns? Marc and Renee dive into the wild world of influencer culture, brand risk, and the not-so-distant future of agentic commerce — where your shopping bot might be negotiating with another bot for the best deal while you sleep. It’s a world where authenticity is currency, trust is optional, and your favourite influencer might not even...

Step right up and join Marc and Renee in this captivating episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast where they embark on an exhilarating journey exploring the interplay between the magnificent world of P.T. Barnum's 19th-century circus and the high-tech realm of modern digital marketing. With a shared passion for technology and culture, our hosts unpack the evolution of marketing from the dazzling spectacle of the circus to the sophisticated algorithms that now dictate the digital advertising la...

This is Part 2 of our 2 part Theme Park episode! Roller coasters and databases have the same issues: concurrency, throughput, and panic when things go wrong. Theme parks are basically enterprise technology, just with more churros and slightly fewer COBOL programmers. Join Renee and Marc on another thrilling episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast where we discuss the adventurous and thrilling theme park technology space. As always, we start in the past with the origins of modern parks and ride...

Roller coasters and databases have the same issues: concurrency, throughput, and panic when things go wrong. Theme parks are basically enterprise technology, just with more churros and slightly fewer COBOL programmers. Join Renee and Marc on another thrilling episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast where we discuss the adventurous and thrilling theme park technology space. As always, we start in the past with the origins of modern parks and rides and soar all the way to modern day before we di...

From Clippy’s awkward pop-ups to agentic AI plotting your next conquest, Marc and Renee laugh through the evolution of digital assistants. Annoying, nostalgic, and now maybe just a little too smart. Hop on the nostalgia train! This week on the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, hosts Renee and Marc whisk listeners away on a whimsical exploration of digital assistants, from the often-beloved but clunky Clippy to the advanced AI tools redefining corporate enterprises today. Dusting off memories of the la...

Hold onto your tabloids! This week on the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Renee Murphy and Marc Massar explore the wild frontier where technology meets misinformation, tracing the outrageous claims that have captivated audiences across decades. From Bat Boy's tabloid fame to the chaotic spread of urban legends, the duo examines why we’re drawn to sensational headlines like a moth to a flame. They dissect the evolution of misinformation—from humble magazine racks to the sprawling digital web of consp...

To answer the burning questions from the episode - Could you buy dogs from the Sears catalog? Yes. Could you buy narcotics from the Sears catalog? Yes. How does Renee pronounce "downtown?" Well, listen in. By the 1970's Sears represented 1% of US GDP and two-thirds of American households shopped at Sears. Like for like, if you look at Amazon's US revenue (because Sears was mostly US in the 1970's), then Amazon is about 1.7% of US GDP today. Significant, but not orders of magnitude out. What h...

Tune in for hot takes, cold fronts, and a 70% chance of questionable metaphors. In this episode, Renee and Marc of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast take you on a trip through the evolution of weather forecasting. From the nostalgic days of dialing up forecasts to today’s AI-driven, hyper-local predictions, they reminisce about how technology has revolutionized our weather-checking experiences. Join them on this techy trip as they reveal the incredible shifts in weather forecasting and how we’re h...

Great Scott! 150 NFL Football Stadiums running at night - all at the same time. That's how much energy a new Wyoming AI data center is chugging. 1.81 Gigawatts. Just think what Doc Brown would say about that. Join Renee and Marc on the Nostalgic Nerds podcast as they dive into data centers consuming 1.5% of global electricity with a growth trajectory to double electricity demand by 2030. Are we heading for an AI winter? Can we keep up with the demand of AI constantly chugging more and more el...