Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People did Cool Stuff your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's good things happening, which is a particularly funny thing to say this week.

But if you're listening in the future, I've had to do this bit like so many times where I'm like, well, if you're listening to the future, clearly this was a crazy week.

But it's twenty twenty five, so you have no idea what a week I'm talking about unless you're listening next week.

Anyway.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I have a guest this week, and my guest is Bridget Todd.

Hi, how are you?

Hi?

Margaret?

You know, things are happening.

Life is happening, as you alluded to you.

Hm, it's been a lot this week.

If you're listening at a different time, you probably have no idea what we're talking about.

I'll assume there's a lot going on whenever you're listening to you.

Know already by like next Monday when this comes out, Like, who knows is something else going to happen?

Genuinely truly, who knows?

Yeah, Well, we're not going to tell you because obviously this is a really good moment to just talk about history.

But first I want to introduce this week's producer, well always one of the producers, just not always on air, is Ian.

Hi Hey, Margaret Hey, Bridget hi Ian excited to be here.

Yeah, it's a wild time we're living in.

But you know what, let's learn about something cool and positive right now.

So let's do it.

Yeah, it's mostly about stuff that later got used for bad, but it doesn't get Actually that's not true.

I think this is a genuinely positive week.

Ooh okay, cool stuff with only minor setbacks along the way.

Our audio engineers, Eva hi Eva hi.

Eva hi Eva, thank you for editing this episode.

Yeah, and our music was produced for us by Unwoman.

So this is a nice, calm, peaceful week to record a history podcast.

Obviously we can all take a break and think about things that happened a long time ago.

And I was thinking, well, I'm gonna have Bridget Todd on the show.

And for people who are listening who don't know who you are, you are the host of the show.

There are no girls on the internet, which is confusing because there are girls on the internet.

But I think it might be irony.

Yes, it's that.

I mean, every time I am asked about that title, I kind of regret it because it's sort of an inside joke with myself.

It's also a mouthful, but that is the name of the show, and there are girls on the internet.

There's everybody on the internet.

We're all represented here, there, everywhere.

I think it's a good title.

I liked long titles, and I think that the irony is clear and present.

It's just it's much like making a joke out of someone's name.

You like, you've probably heard a million times though, but there are girls on the Internet, so I already regret trying to make that a bit.

And the acronym is pretty fun too, Tangoti is fun to say.

So yeah, that was intentional.

I knew I wanted a show name that you can make into an acronym that you could like say out loud, Margaret.

Do you get the same thing?

Also having a long podcast title.

Oh, what I get is that no one remembers the title.

And I meet people and they're like, I love your show.

I listen every week to cool people who did to do cool things, and I'm like, you know what that's on me?

It cannot hold it against anyone that they can't keep that straight.

Yeah close enough.

Yeah, yeah, I'm happy that people listen.

I don't really care if they know the title or not.

But you do a lot of work around telecommunications.

I think it's fair to say, well, we're going to talk about the history of telecommunications, because we're going to talk about the history of radio.

That's what we're going to talk about this week.

Ooh hell yeah.

This is very much in my sphere of interest.

Cool.

I thought that that was possible, and so I'm excited to talk about it.

Last week we talked about the history of pirate radio, because what happened is I started researching the history of pirate radio, being like, clearly, this is where all the radicals are, this is going to be the really interesting part of radio history.

And there was a lot of really cool stuff there.

And then I started running across public radio and like open source radio technology as a whole separate thing that I got really excited about.

So this week that's what we're talking about.

We were talking about the history of public radio, and we're talking about the guy who actually invented radio, who isn't who everyone says invented radio because you'll be shocked to know this.

He wasn't a white man.

I am not shocked to know this, but I'm please all the same.

I want to add something if that's okay, which is, yeah, please do.

The reason why I'm kind of geeking out about this is that I am such an audio girly.

I'm such a like radio person.

And the reason why I'm a podcaster is because I grew up in a house where my parents always had an PR on, always had public radio on.

In the car, we had public radio on.

My parents donated to public radio.

It was just a thing that was in the background of my childhood and young adulthood.

And I genuinely do not think I would be a podcaster now if not for grow going up immersed in public radio.

It's such an important resource that we have.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how everything this year is just me accidentally researching the history of stuff they're trying to take away from us.

Yes, you know, a while ago is all revolutions, and then this year I'm like, it's the basic infrastructure of our society that actually is worth maintaining, you know.

And it's interesting because we're well, I'll get to this, okay, but first I want to talk about what is radio because I love context.

The ability to communicate over distances has been wildly important technology since forever.

The faster and more losslessly we can communicate, the more we can organize ourselves and accomplish things, which of course also means accomplishing bad things like the ability Communication systems are a very important part about exercising power at distance, and so the ability for states and empires to exist has a lot to do with communication systems.

Besides the point a little bit, there's all kinds of ways that people have communicated over distance.

I'm not going to get into the history of all of them because I didn't research the history of all of them.

But you know, you have like horns and smoke and all this kind of stuff.

But my favorite is semaphore.

You ever heard of semaphore?

I have not.

Semaphore is what ships do where you have flags.

Yeah, it reminds me of color guard, which I did when I was in high school.

Oh yeah, you're basically doing semaphore.

Yeah, early telecommunication was color guard.

I say that as if I'm joking.

I'm kind of not that actually is what it is basically, and so people would use windmill like towers to communicate over long distances.

You set them up at different distances so they can see each other, and you can transmit a signal that way, right by having the different arms do different things.

The most famous example of this in history is of course, the signal fires that Gondor lit to request aid from Rome.

I was literally thinking of that.

We were talking about signals over long diest.

Oh, like the fire's and Gondor okay, great, that's aw.

Exactly okay, And you know, but that was only a binary form of communication.

They're either lit or unlit.

Semaphore towers, which you know obviously were developed after the Third Age of Middle Earth, are much more useful for a lot of this.

Semaphore towers were used for like stock prices and all this stuff that I have researched at different periods in my life that are not this one.

They're not in the script.

Then you get the telegraph, which changes the fucking world using a code called Morse Code invented by a guy named Morse.

Although after researching the rest of this episode, I feel like if I like dug into it, I'd be like, actually, he didn't invent it, some other.

Guy, but yeah, probably yeah, yeah, probably a traditionally marginalized person and he just got credit.

Yeah, exactly.

And I don't know anything about Morris.

I did not research this part of it.

But the first telegraph message transmitted over any real distance was between DC and Baltimore and it was May twenty fourth, eighteen forty four, and that message was what hath God wrought?

WHOA What an intense message to be the first thing it transmitted.

Yeah, for the first one.

Yeah, I feel like it's a real classy way to do it.

And people use telegraph to control railroads and then spread news.

But people were like, yeah, but what about without wires?

And some folks starting in eighteen twenty were like, huh, if you run electricity through a wire, it makes magnetic waves.

And by eighteen sixty four someone was like, you can actually pick those electric magnetic waves up from far away.

But they weren't very good at that part of it yet receiving Actually it was the harder hurdle for people to cross.

And a guy named Hertz, after whom the measurement of waves is named, was like, also, yeah, they travel at the fucking speed of light.

Isn't that cool?

Almost every version of who Invented Radio comes down to a pissing match between Tesla, who didn't invent radio, and an Italian guy named Wielmo Marconi.

And almost every article you will find, and I started writing this script based on all of the articles I found that say, good old Wielielmo Marconi invented this.

He's the guy who commercialized it.

He's the guy who tried to make a lot of money off of it.

He did invent some radio things, but he was both a successful inventor and grifter behind.

Every rich white guy inventor is an inventor, not all three of those things, often two of them.

It's often like a rich whitey.

I was just thinking, I mean, I know, you're talking about stuff from history, but not a damn thing changed.

I feel like I could name some inventor grifters today.

I know, I don't even have the research in front of me.

The motion picture was Addison, who gets the credit for inventing motion picture.

It was a guy who worked for him, So it was a non rich white guy.

I think anyway, whatever, one of the people who was left out of this story, not every verse the story.

Obviously I did not do all of this whatever.

I eventually found more interesting research about an Indian scientist named Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.

And I was really sad because I'd done all this research about Marcroni and he's like a real mid guy.

I'm not excited about him as a person.

Jaggaedis fucking rules as far as I can tell.

Haven't found a negative thing about him yet.

And I even go through all the like check marks about like well where were they politically, Like well, how does he treat him?

You know, you're the diving deep.

You're like, I want the backstory.

If there's tea, I want to know about it.

Yeah, totally when I eventually do my eventual spinoff, which is basically a version of your favorite problematic the old Tumblr page, but then just about historical figures.

Jagadish was born on November thirtieth, eighteen fifty eight, in Bengal, in a part that was then India but it's now Bangladesh.

Jaggatish grew up the child of privilege.

To be sure, his father was high up in the British colonial government of India.

The Indian civil services and so worked for the colonizing folks.

But his dad one was part of a Hindu group that specifically was against the caste system.

And also instead of sending Jagadish to an English school, which is what the children of privilege were supposed to do, he was sent to a vernacular school so that he could grow up speaking Bangla, his traditional language, and his family was committed to preserving Indian culture in the face of colonization.

But do you know what comes into the middle of things to change them and try and make money off of them.

I could not even imagine advertising, of course, Yeah, much like the ads that you're going to listen to now.

And we're back, okay.

So Jagadish at vernacular school, his classmates were of all different classes and castes, and they were Muslim and Hindu alike.

And one of his best friends was Muslim, which is abe like still a big deal today.

There's a you know, huge amount of tension in South Asia.

So one of his best friends was Muslim and another one was a fisherman's son, and he talked his whole life about how he thought the Hindu versus Muslim conflict in South Asia was bullshit, and he talks about how he learned to love the natural world from his friend who was raised by a fisherman, and so just he was like, which is a little bit of a like rich kid gets to hang out with the poor kid and like learn stuff.

But like yeah, he's like, oh, going outside is like actually kind of fun, Like it's nice.

Yeah, yeah, they're right about this whole going outside and getting some sunshine thing.

Yeah, obviously everyone's just choosing to be a fisherman.

I can't imagine any other society.

Yeah.

So Bo's grows up and he goes off to London to study science, and then he comes back to India and he starts studying microwaves, which were called I think millimeter waves at the time, and two years before the Italian guy takes all the credit for it, he publicly demonstrates the existence of radio waves.

And he does it with like flair.

I think he sets it up so that the receiver once it receives it's like it goes through multiple walls and does all this stuff and then it triggers a gun that goes bang.

Okay, not what I was expected.

Yeah, I know, pretty badass also.

But yeah, very dramatic.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he which is funny too, Rick, because it's like he didn't get famous for it, and you would think, oh, because he just sort of quietly only cared about the science.

Like no, he's doing public expositions, he is traveling the world.

He just he is from the wrong country, he's the wrong color, and he's not trying to make money off of it.

And it sounds like a flair for pageantry.

Also oh yeah, yeah, absolutely to quote write up from Interesting Engineering dot Com.

Quote to aid in his studies, he invented almost all of the basic components of microwave systems, and when we say microwave we mean millimeter waves, we mean radio waves in this context, and he didn't patent almost anything.

Decades later, he was convinced by one of his friends to apply for a patent or two, but he didn't want to capitalize on it.

He invented much better radio receivers, and twice two different times in his life he like dramatically improves radio receivers because for years what people have been using before was called a coherer, in which little bits of metal would be held in a tube and then as conductors pick up radio waves.

It would cause them to stick together and that would create enough conductivity for the electricity to move through it.

I am absolutely I did okay in science class, but I am an art school dropout.

That all sounded right to me.

I also did bad in science, but two like DC science students combined.

That's like, we know we're doing Yeah totally.

And after this coherer it worked, but you would have to reset it every single time it picked up a radio wave, which is obviously not a very effective system.

So Joggaty invented a better coherer, which was made with mercury an oil and an iron disc and stuff that is over my head and pretty regularly on the show, I start reading about a guy who seems cool and then is kind of a dick to the people he loves, but Jagadish early on in his life, as he's invented all this stuff, he marries one of the earliest and most important Indian feminists, a social worker named Lady Abala Bos.

Their titles come later.

He gets knighted in the nineteen ten sometime, and then even that right, I've occasionally covered like people from colonized areas who become knights on this show, like there's this Irish guy who you know, became a knight, and I'm like, oh, that's kind of complicated because right like if someone was like, hey, you can be a knight, I'd be like really torn, right Yeah, although the Wikipedia list of people who refuse knighthood is like just kind of cool.

That's all the people who are like, man, I want nothing to do with the United Kingdom, fuck you.

But even that right to like spoil something's going to come later.

Like he was like, oh, absolutely, I'd happily be a knight as he continues to like hide revolutionaries and like euse the fact that he's this important scientist to advance the cause of independence in India.

Awesome.

Yeah, but radio wasn't this man's passion.

I was all said to be like, oh, there's this guy invented some stuff.

Right, this is like a side project for him.

Oh my gods.

Yea, it's like he's like learning this stuff.

He cares about it now.

His passion is that he wants to prove that all living things feel, and even more than that, he actually is really into proving that there's not a huge difference between living and non living matter and that everything is in flux all of the time.

But he wants to prove specifically the main thing that he's like known for besides inventing radio, is he wants to prove that plants have response to stimuli, that they can feel pain, and that they have what amounts to emotions, that they have a nervous system.

And so he studied how plants react to stimuli.

Have you ever heard this stuff about like the whole plants can feel?

I have.

Yeah, I have to say, I'm so curious how this just became his thing.

You know, it's like, I'm gonna invent radio on the side, but my true passion is pointing out that plants feel stuff.

What I think it comes I read it didn't end up in the script.

I read a bunch of different things about him, and I think it comes from that he was like, while doing radio stuff, he got really interested in just like all of these different things putting out different kinds of like waves and different kind of ways of essentially communicating that we can't hear.

Okay, that's interesting.

And so he was kind of like, what else is under there?

Oh?

Interesting?

And he also it was a kind of spiritual thing for him.

Too, and this is part of why it gets ignored in the West.

For like one hundred years, people are into it again.

But for like one hundred years people were like, we're just gonna ignore this guy.

So the same year, in nineteen oh one, we're gonna get to it.

But in nineteen oh one, Marconi, the Italian guy, is gonna do this like elaborate hoax pretending to transmit radio waves that people still think is real.

And and Bose presented evidence of plants responding to stimulus, and he wrote, quote, all around us, the plants are communicating.

We just don't notice it.

He also was like into the idea that like, harsh music makes them grow unhappy, and happy music makes them grow happy, and that plants that are spoken to kindly are happier.

And this is stuff that's like this is debated today.

There's like mixed studies.

There's some studies that are like, oh, yeah, there seems to be some evidence around that, and other ones that are like.

I've heard this stuff today, and yeah, when you describe it that way, it does make more sense how his interest in radio is connected to these positions about plants.

Also, I feel like it's classic audio nerd podcaster of like, I have these very specific interests that I'm resuming on the side, it's like every podcaster I know that's their mo Yeah.

Absolutely.

I feel like podcaster, like writer, is one of those things where it can't be your only interest because you have to do it about things.

You have to care about things.

You know, right, Yeah, like what's the podcast about?

Yeah?

And Okay, So.

His idea is very ahead of his time.

He's very into plants, but he's also very into radio, and he's seen as one of the founders of the open source movement for like modern telecommunications because of the fact that he would refuse to patent all of his things, and he wanted just to advance knowledge, right.

And it's interesting because you get this like with radio and the Pirate Radio episodes, we talked about how there's kind of a three way fight over who owns the airwaves.

Is it owned by commercial interests, is it owned by state interests, or is it owned by the public, And those are like kind of the three possible polls.

And so in some ways, by really just wanting to advance knowledge of radio, he's kind of help laying some groundwork for what becomes public radio.

I mean, he's obviously laying the groundwork for any radio right, but the idea that this should be a public good.

He's doing some of that groundwork.

As he gets older, he continues to invent new radio things.

He uses semiconductor junctions whatever they are, to detect radio signals.

So this is the second time that he completely changes the way that people receive radio waves.

He writes science fiction.

His best friend was a poet who fought for Indian independence, but was explicitly an internationalist, not a nationalist, which is already like, if you're fighting for independence from a colonized country and you want to be a nationalist, I am not giving you shit, you know, But if you want to be an internationalist instead, that's like even cooler from my point of view.

Yeah, When he gets hired as a professor at a college in Calcutta, he realizes they're not giving him like full professorship, and they're only giving him a third of the salary of his white peers, which is I think this is the only time that this has happened in history.

I can't think of any other examples.

Yet, it certainly never happened to me.

Why would it I can't imagine it.

I've never noticed any disparity, so it clearly isn't happening.

And so he refuses his entire salary and protest, which is one of those things where you're like, doesn't that just help the other side, But it actually after three years of him refusing the salary, the school caves and starts paying people equal.

Wow, So doing this actually got pay equity for everything.

Which is like literally him using his class privilege in a positive way because he can take it on the nose and like go without pay for three years.

Apparently, I'm starting to.

See what you mean about this guy.

Very rad guy.

And I've only found a little bit about this anyone who's famous for something other than politics.

People don't talk about their politics, right, and so I've only been able to find one thing, and it's mostly saying like, hey, people don't really talk about his politics.

But he and his wife would use the fact that the British government trusted them to hide Indian revolutionaries and independent activists in their home because no one will go look there because he's a sir.

You can't go into his house, you know, And all along he's kind of like a wing that scientist guy, right, And when he eventually opens his own school, the Bows Institute, he said at it's opening quote, I dedicate today this institute not merely a laboratory, but a temple.

The power of physical methods applies to the establishment of that truth, which can be realized directly through our senses or through the vast expansion of the perceptive range by means of artificially created organs.

And so he's just basically he's like, we're going to try and discover truth, which we can't totally do, but we can do it with science and our senses and making new senses through machines.

And I'm like, that's kind of cool.

Yeah, that's badass.

Yeah, that's cool.

When he was in his seventies, he was still traveling the world people that plants have a nervous system, and he basically like hit this point where in the West people are just dismissing his ideas about plants because they blend with spirituality and are like, this isn't science, and he is applying the scientific method, but it's like also he's seeing like and so therefore and making statements that people are like, oh, I can't totally back whatever.

People are just being like, everything is not cold, weird Western science, so we don't have anything to do with you, you know.

And so for generations his work was ignored.

But it's having a bit of a comeback now.

Yeah, he's not the guy who gets credit for radio.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I do feel like he sounds like somebody who was really ahead of his time, because a lot of these ideas, as you were saying, are I've heard today.

I've heard this idea of talking to plants, playing nice music to plants.

I do not know what the evidence is there.

I couldn't I couldn't speak to it.

But it's interesting that these ideas that were sort of talked about as sort of crackpot dismissed against this backdrop of really not accepting spiritualism today are sort of much more commonplace.

Right, and like and some of the stuff that he is talking about, you can scientifically say where you like, well, you can actually study the plant's reaction to stimuli.

Right.

You can't then say, oh, it's because you said something nice that the plant is doing well.

And Yeah, I just like this guy, but he's not who gets credit for radio.

Do you know ads don't get credit for radio either, but they're tightly connected in so really, I don't know, here's ads and we're back.

So there are people who took radio and capitalized on it and did some of the actual inventing, as far as I can tell.

The guy that I originally thought i'd be talking about, And so I was just speed running the radio history because it wasn't interesting me and getting to the other parts.

But then I discovered this whole other subplot and got really excited about it.

Whatever.

Marconi is the guy who's famous for it, this Italian aristocrat wheely Elmo Marconi, and he was like, all right, let's do something with all this radio stuff.

In eighteen ninety nine he presented real telegraphy with radio waves.

Real, Hey, I'm going to communicate something over distance with this.

He did it four years after Jagadish, and then in nineteen oh one he claimed to transmit across the Atlantic from the UK to New York City.

And I wrote this in my first version of the script because every I don't know if you've run across this.

Whenever I researched a history thing, every like pop version of a history is just wrong.

Yeah, it's so frustrating because it shouldn't be, because, like I'm still doing a pop history.

I'm not a historian, right, But it's the easiest, laziest version of the story, or not even lessarly laziest, the version of the story that everyone hears.

That makes a nice, clean story.

Yeah, I completely agree with you.

I'm so happy that we have people like you who are committed to telling the real story because oftentime, the real story, even if it's more complicated or more nuanced or messier, it's just as juicy, just as interesting.

Yeah, Like him being kind of a grifter and an inventor kind of makes him more interesting.

Otherwise he was just like a rich Italian dude.

I was like, I discovered the radio, I'm wonderful, you know, definitely, And he kind of did, right, Like I think he's sending messages more than just make gun go bang, right, And so he sets up to transmit from the UK to New York City and articles say, and then he did.

But the thing is, it was probably a hoax.

And if it wasn't a hoax, he was just wrong because he was the one listening to the headphones in New York City.

In nineteen oh one and was like, aha, I can hear the transmission, right, and no one else put on the headphones to hear it.

I can't believe they let that shit slide.

And also the whole thing he was transmitting was I think it's the Morse letter s, but it's just a dot, you know, like Morse codes like dots and dashes, right, and so it was just a dot, that's all he was transmitting.

So any like interference or noise could have sounded like that, right, But realistically he probably just like straight up lied or maybe he thought it was gonna work and he like waited there for a long time and he was like, uh yeah, yeah, yeah, there it is, you.

Know Elizabeth Holmes style, right, Like I thought I could get it to work.

It didn't work, but you know, a for effort, I try to fuck it.

And modern analysis of how he did this transmission using that same technology as like, nah, that wouldn't have worked.

As a write up by the public radio station WSHU put it, quote, atmospheric conditions would have made propagation at this frequency nearly impossible, even using today's sensitive receivers and modern transmitters of far greater power than Marconi's station produced.

He's just sort of pulling a fast one here.

And it is this moment that is like the history book, and radio has made it.

It's nineteen oh one and it has crossed the Atlantic, you know.

But they are already transmitting things by radio, originally Morse code.

By nineteen oh six, someone transmits music by radio.

By nineteen ten, there's entertainment broadcasting.

The first commercial radio station in the US was in Pennsylvania in nineteen twenty, and until the TV hit the scenes in the nineteen fifties, the radio was kind of the home entertainment of choice for at least Americans.

Marconi was kind of a dick and a grifter.

At one point he was making this claim that his radio waves couldn't be interfered with.

He was like, it's secure this way of transmitting, it'll be fine.

But by nineteen oh three, when he's making this claim, it's kind of wild how fastation moves.

Even one hundred years ago, people are like, oh, everything's so fast with the internet.

By nineteen oh three, there's other people doing this at the same scale that he's doing it, right, And so by nineteen oh three, other people have been working on this stuff too, and so they're like, yeah, that's not true.

Radio isn't secure.

What are you talking about.

And so rather than just say hey, he's lying, instead they did the first wireless hack, the first pirate radio broadcast, and the first act of telecommunications trolling all at once.

Oh my god, Oh my god, that's awesome.

I got really excited about this part.

This is why I was going to include the history of radio at all.

Was this moment.

So Marconi set himself up three hundred miles away from I think London, and was going to transmit messages to his associate, a scientist named John Fleming, who is lecturing for the Royal Society, which is a big deal because it has Royal in the name, and it's a society.

It's one of the like sciencey things.

And Fleming is giving this whole lecture, and then the Morse code receiver at the back starts receiving words which it's supposed to.

It starts receiving first the word rats over and over again, and then rats, rats rets, and then it starts in on a dirty limerick to make fun of Marconi.

Oh my god, and I've only found the first lines of this limerick, which was there was a young man from Italy who diddled the public quite prettily.

Not the first recorded it sounds like it.

Sounds like it.

And so while researching this, I workshopped what a full limerick might have been with my friends.

This would have been a perfect transition, but we've already done with them, so I'm not going to do it.

What we've got for the full dirty limerick, that is a tie, just me and my friends making it up, and also the dirtiest thing I'll probably ever say on air.

There once was a young man from Italy who diddled the public quite prettily.

He faked a message in Morse and got on his horse and sucked him myself off quite literally.

And if he needed an ad break, it was gonna be.

He faked a message in Morse and got on his horse and cut to ads immediately.

That would have been good, That would have been what I wanted to pull off.

But yeah, that's this.

And so this hack was done by a guy named Neville Masculine.

Hold on mask Elin, his name is fucking masculine, just leaving me not knowing to pronounce this guy's name.

It's m A M A s k E l y n E masculine, Neville masculine who ran a competing wireless service and was also a stage man magician.

So a fucking stage magician did this.

I love all the theatric that explains all of the theatrics and pageantry involved in all of this.

Yes, absolutely well, because like early science and like stage magic weren't the most dissimilar fields, you.

Know, right, Yeah, it was just this is such a non sequitor.

But I was watching that Nathan Fielder show, the rehearsal the season about flight, and I was so interested to learn that in the early days of people trying to do aviation and like learn how to fly and make flying machines, all those guys were also like showmen and comedians, and so it was like, like I looked down upon trade aviation before it was a thing and it was associated with like showmanship and entertainment and comedy.

It's just interesting how science and I don't know, intentional spectacle is all sort of overlapped.

Which is cool because it's like, and maybe I say this because I'm in you know, pop history, not academic history, but like I think it's cool that how do you present these ideas to the public.

Has always kind of been part of it, even if it does lead to an awful lot of grifters.

I mean, there probably is a straight line from that sentiment to people like Elon Musk making big shows of what their technology can do, or like Sam Altman making a big show about what their technology can do, only to be like, oh, well this was all a lie.

Yeah, or even the like big huge like announcing the new Mac products and it's like iPhone thirty four and you're like, is it different than iPhone thirty three and they're like.

Yeah, they literally just had one that was like that.

Yeah, it's like the battery last longer.

She's got a new hat.

Totally so much pageantry and everyone gets really excited, and I'm like, all right, you know whatever.

I like being entertained as well.

But I do think it's interesting that the stage magician was the one who was like, I mean, he's he's pranking, right, but he's the one being like, no, this is because you lied.

This is because you're a grifter.

I'm calling you out for that, you know.

And the way that they did it is that they they just sent out a more powerful signal from closer, which is all that it takes to overdo a radio signal is transmit something more powerful from closer.

And so now radio exists.

And one of the biggest questions at the beginning of radio was who's going to own the airwaves?

Is it corporations, is it the state?

Is it the public?

And Europe the answer was generally the state.

We talked about this on the Pirate Radio episodes because we focused on Europe and how like commercial radio and like rock and roll only really hit because Pirate radio commercial stations played and they were like, Hey, we want to play pop music and we're going to do it with ads and all that stuff illegally or skirting the law.

Like some of the first ones were basically people parking boats outside in international waters outside of England.

In the US, will be shocked to know the answer from the beginning was like corporations, but all along there were people who were also like, no, it's us, It's the public who should own this.

And you will be shocked, absolutely shocked to hear that I am the most excited about the last of these three about public ownership.

You might be shocked because I work for iHeartMedia, who owns iHeartRadio, which is basically a rebranding of Clear Channel Communications, which has since the nineties basically bought up every possible radio station it can legally own without being in trouble for creating a monopoly, which during massive deregulation in the nineties, meant more and more stations, currently a total of eight hundred and fifty five stations, which is more than three times the second biggest radio network, Odyssey.

And then in twenty eighteen, iHeart acquired a podcast network and that's who I work for.

But thanks genuinely thanks to the umbrella of cool Zone Media, there is no interference on what I can and can't talk about besides like what will get me sued or arrested.

Anyway, Margaret, iHeartRadio was a wonderful company.

I don't know what you're implying here.

There are a wonderful company.

We all love them.

What's funny is that, do y'all know what clear channel means?

Does it have a meeting?

It does?

I didn't know this.

Clear Channel is AM radio stations that are given like monopoly over an area so that there's no interfering airwaves happening in that area.

Wow, pretty bold to name your radio company that.

Oh my god.

Okay, yeah, I did not know.

It's okay, it's totally different company.

And so I like public ownership of the airwaves the best, and that is the hardest one to get.

Basically, state owned radio was the norm in the Eastern Bloc as well as the UK with the BBC, while privately owned commercial broadcasters with the norm and much of the rest of the world.

State owned radio has proven to be fundamentally conservative most of the time, while corporate owned radio has reached for the lowest common denominator of content over and over again despite having free speech.

But as for what people are going to do about that, one answer is to create public radio, which means, of course, to talk about public radio, we're going to talk about a Buddhist, Catholic and Arco Pacifist poet who spent his youth as a hobo and is mostly famous for being the godfather of the Beat poets, even though he hated the beats of course, naturally, of course, and to talk about that guy and public radio, we'll do it on Wednesday.

That's my Cliffhanger, very strange man, coming soon.

I'm so excited.

I kind of had a feeling that all of the voices and stories behind public radio were unique and interesting.

But I'm happy to find out that I was right.

Isn't it like it's interesting?

I have this thing where whenever there's like a public good that seems obvious, like libraries is my main example of this, I take libraries for granted, right, I'm like, well, of course we have libraries.

Yeah, But the idea of trying to pitch the American public, or specifically the American government on libraries today, if they didn't already exist, would be impossible.

Like, hear me out.

Here's this place.

It's like a store, but everything's free and you just have to bring it back.

But if you don't, it's not a big deal and you're not going to get arrested for it.

Like yeah, And they're like, so how do we make money on that?

Here's the thing, Like, you don't.

It's just for people.

It's just good for people.

I'm sure there's studies that prove it makes the economy stronger.

I don't know a thousand percent.

No, I mean, what's more punk rock than the library?

Shout out to my public library.

Not that long ago.

I needed a soldiering iron, and I only needed it for one small thing.

I could have gone to Amazon bought it and then had it just be junk around my tiny apartment forever.

Yeah, I was able to borrow one from the public library.

So they have a lot more than just books.

They have all kinds of things you could need.

Yet I do.

It's such a good idea, and public radio is such a good idea, you know, And it's yeah, it's one of these things that I take for granted.

I'm like, oh, of course there's NPR everywhere, but then you realize that, like in a lot of rural areas where I live, NPR is like the only actual source of news, you.

Know, and when we I mean not to get on my soapbox, but when hostile fascist administrations cracked down on that, it's not an abstract thing.

You are making it harder for those communities to stay informed about what's going on.

Right totally, And yeah, rural communities, poor rural communities are going to be hit are already being hit incredibly hard by the stripping of all public good.

But obviously we don't care about the present here.

This is totally just a history show we totally don't do this so that people are aware of how hard everyone had to fight to have the good things and how hard we should fight to keep them.

And how easily they can be taken away if we don't really protect them intentionally.

That part I didn't.

I also took for granted as a kid, you know, I took all that for granted.

But I don't anymore.

Yeah.

Same anyway, Well, you got anything you want to plug here at the.

End, Yeah, you can listen to my podcast on the wonderful iHeartRadio Network.

There are no girls on the internet.

Please check it out.

Hell yeah, what else should we shout out?

There's now new feeds for a whole bunch of the shows on cool Zone Media, including cools on media, book Club now as its own feed.

If you want to hear me, read you stories, and ian you guys think you want to plug?

No, you nail that.

I was going to call out the feeds, but you beat me to it.

So yeah, we're great.

Just a great episode and keep enjoying the content, people, and.

I'll see you all on Wednesday.

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