The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

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,...

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 ...

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 chai...

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. Nob...

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. Aft...

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 ...

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 rh...

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 filame...

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...

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 ...

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 i...

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 ...

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 th...

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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 qui...

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
...

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:...

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
Wat...

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 ...

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 ...