It's So Hard To Say Goodbye

series is going to continue on. We really appreciate all you fans out there who have been sending us messages all this time. Uh, And we didn't want to just leave with like an episode and then have nothing happened. So this is kind of our goodbye episode. We wanted to spend a little time thinking about some of the topics that we talked about in the past and kind of just going a little bit stuff about the episodes

we've done so far. First, before we even get started, I want to play this tiny clip from the very first episode of Forward Thinking's audio podcast called forward Momentum. Welcome to Forward Thinking. This is how we introduced ourselves in that very first episode. Greetings, everyone, Welcome to the very first episode of Forward Thinking. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I am joined by two phenomenal people,

two of my favorite people the whole wide world. And I'm going to have the first one introduce herself to you right now. Hey, I'm Lauren Vocalbon. I'm the co host of another technology podcast called tech Stuff. I am Joe McCormick, and I'm a writer for the Forward Thinking video series Excellent and so this audio pod. Okay, so we livened up a bit since then, did Yeah, it was my very reserved You were a little reserved, but

I mean you were. Joe had just started podcasting when he joined UH and we started doing the Forward Thinking Audio podcast and now you're a pro. So, yeah, that was year. That was your first time podcasting ever for that first episode, was it? Yes? It was. So. I thought we could touch a little bit on some of the topics that we've covered, talk about some of our favorites, and just some other like behind the scenes type stuff

in a very short kind of farewell to the fans episode. Now, we've recently done episodes where we talked about three D printers again and driverless cars, We talked about that in an episode like two back, so I don't want to even touch on those because we've already just covered them. But the very first topic we covered on Forward Thinking was the Internet of Things, which is no big surprise. It's a huge topic, very buzzy. It was especially buzzy

right that very moment. Yes, it's still still buzzing right now, but it was one of those things where there was the topic was just starting to get some momentum in the public consciousness. Although I think there are still a lot of people who don't know what the Internet of things means. But recent stories have you know, been uh

continuing to develop around the Internet of things. The basic idea being that you have all these different devices that can connect to the Internet and share information in some way or enact change in your environment in some way. Um. But one of the stories I wanted to mention is

that apparently that also means creating lots more security vulnerabilities. Yeah. Yeah, You've got a ton of stuff connected to the Internet, to make sense, Yeah, and not all of it is as protected as your notebook or yes, and you're less protected items. People are still terrible at passwords, right, So One problem is that you've got a lot of Internet of Things devices that don't have any password protection at all.

Another problem is that some of them have hard coded passwords, meaning that if you get access to what a company uses as the hard code password for that particular product, it's open season. And then a lot of people just never bother changing the the standard password that comes like with a router. For example, I got a new router, and so I went in and changed the password because

the default password was password. Do you remember when we did the story about the baby monitors that we're being taken over by hackers from all over the world to watch it on other people's babies and talk to them and like yell at them and tell them to start crying. Yep, that's not not cool. Uh. And I think that was because of unchanged default passwords. Yeah, yeah, it exactly was.

What What wasn't there a story about like like utility centers, like like river dams or something like that having the software in them that had unchanged passwords. There were there were stories of there were stories of they were using

baby monitors to control the damns. There were stories of of code found in some of those systems where it was clear that foreign agents had managed to infiltrate the systems of various important utility companies across the United States and put in code that was not meant to be there, uh through whatever. Who knows how it got there. It could have gotten there by a thumb drive or you

know anything. But the reason why I bring up Internet things in particular is that recently there was a story that I saw in tech Dirt about a security researcher named Brian Krebs who was the target of a directed denial of service attack a di DOS attack, where apparently he was being hit by a six twenty gigabits per second of traffic to the website that he he has. That's a lot of gigabits. Gigabits, Yeah, when a Google Fiber connection is one gigabit per second and that's way

faster than anything I have. Six twenty is massive. And the they suspect that the a lot of this traffic came from Internet of Things devices like digital video recorders and routers. This means that the hacker who was perpetrating the attack and captured lots of devices out in the wild essentially made them work for him. Or her. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much. So. Uh, there are other issues with Internet things,

like the concept of privacy. We've talked about this before, the idea that if you have an environment that's going to react to you and change according to your preferences, it has to know about you in order to do that, which means you give up some of your private to see, even if it's not your name or any other kind of demographic information about you, it starts to learn your preferences, which alone is a very valuable database of information for

lots of different companies. And as it turns out, just if you want an Internet of things that is customizable and personalized, then you have to Yeah. Yeah, so that's growing concern. All that being said, I still think the Internet of things concept is really cool, but um, you know, it's we we need to be really aware of how we develop and implement that technology in order to do it responsibly. Some of the other cool things we talked

about in those early episodes. So I was going back through and I was looking at all the different titles and stuff. I reminded I was reminded that how much I loved the episodes we did about time. Oh that was fun. Yeah, talking about how time is dependent upon your context, right, your frame of reference. So if you're traveling super fast and and some one else is on

is not traveling super fast. From your perspective, traveling super fast, it looks like their life is just whishing by, and from their perspective, it would look like you are barely moving at all within the frame of one. Yeah, that that episode gave me a headache, I remember, because it was all like time is relative, literally relative to your frame of reference. That's why we say that. I know some people take that to mean that time does not exist,

to which I disagree. Yeah, I saw a recent article about people suggesting that time was merely a construct in our minds. It was essentially our brain's way of making sense of things, and that times arrow doesn't point in one direction because if you start looking at massive calculations on the galactic scale, they are reversible, whether time travels in one direction or the other. So it may just be that at our very tiny local level, we have to have time going in a specific way or else

things don't make sense. And like what but what I think? Time definitely does exist, but it's possible that the present does not exist. I get presents all the time. We also talked about some pop culture stuff. Two of my favorite episodes We've ever done. Yeah, those back to Back to the Future part two, parts one and two where it was back to Back to the Future to part two. That was my favorite title ever. Those those were some great episodes. Yeah, that's where we learned that everyone will

have a fax machine in every room of their house. Yes, many people would be Michael J. Fox. Did we rate that true? I think we said that was a good one, right, it might have been. I it's been a long time. The what's the pizza disc where they stick a little pizza disk? You really know how to hydrated pizza? Yeah? Yeah, and half of the pizza had just had bell peppers on it, and I was like, what is wrong with you?

You know? One of my favorite episodes we ever did was the one about the future of talking, the future of speech. Maybe not the future of talk. That's not how should put it? Language the languages that we speak, because languages change over time. They evolve over time just like organisms do, but on much shorter time scales and

in very interesting ways. One of my favorite classes I took in college was the history of the English language, learning about how English has changed since you know, the year eight hundred, and it has changed dramatically since then, it very much. Yeah, an English speaker today without a lot of training could not read Old English Anglo Saxon would need to have You would sit there and say like,

I'm pretty sure this is Germany. Yeah, yeah, And and we we also got to to read a bunch of of of different bits of language from from uh, like a hundred years in the past, each time like seventy years in the past, something like that. We jumped back and back and back until the old English thought yeah, yeah, yeah, it's my favorite. Hailing did the h for the Middle English?

Yeah yeah, okay, fair enough, Okay, No, So we we talked about how language changes over time, and we tried to think, okay, well, looking at how language has changed in the past, can we make predictions about the future. We made a few, but but we weren't able to make all that many predictions about how English is going to change in the future, because I don't know, it's hard to predict things like this. But I went back to see if there had been anything interesting published on

this topic since our podcast came out. And Son of a Gun. One really interesting article I read was from The Economist and it was published just about a month after our podcast came out. This is the problem there, and it would have been a great resource for us because it was really interested interesting. So it pointed out one thing about English that is going to be highly determinative of how it changes in the future, which is that about two thirds of the people who speak English

in the world are not native English speakers. More people speak English as a non native language than as a native language, and so it's possible that English has actually used more as a kind of lingua franca around the world then it is as somebody's default speaking language. And

there's no real sign of this reversing. So what does this mean for the future of English and uh And the article pointed out that linguistics researchers have short they've sort of shown that bigger languages that you know, incorporate more speakers, tend to become simpler. As a language is spoken by more non native adults, it's likely to lose unnecessary bits and rules such as grammatical inflection. Jonathan, you

know this from the history of English. English used to have different versions of the same word depending on what grammatical role that word played in English, and some languages are still like this. Well yeah, like English used to have different words or you as a singular you, and

you as in a group of people you. In fact, if you get down to it, it had you you too and all of you guys, which we we in the South still have because we have y'all, and that that's a totally different type of that's true all y'all, which is way more people than just y'all. Oh man, I love all y'all. Y'all is a good word. I think all English speakers should adopt y'all. But but anyway, so the example that that is given in the article of the grammatical inflection changing would be who versus whom.

So it's the same word, but it changes whether based on whether you're using it is the subject or the object and the sentence. English used to have this kind of thing for all kinds of words, and most of these have already gone away, and whom is probably going to disappear as well. But we can expect similar types of streamlining of the rules of language. And in a good way to figure this out is to listen to

a adults trying to learn to speak English. Whatever is tripping them up the most, say like verb tense aspect, which is where there are three different forms of the present tense. So like, uh, let's say you know you've got a saw and you're sawing a board, so you say I saw. You can also say I am sawing. You can also say I do saw. You're no matter what you're sawing? All the what? What is with all these different tense cases? This is stupid. We're probably going

to lose stuff like that. I'm okay with most of that. Yeah, we we can also expect dialects and pronunciation to continue to change. All the Northern cities shift in how we pronounce American vowels that we mentioned that in our old episode. And another interesting thing they pointed out in this article is is sort of eui isms, which is how we're the meanings of words changing based on words in English being misused because similar sounding words means something different in

another language. Yes, so they give a great example of this. I'm just going to read a quote from the article. Quote. For example, European Union bureaucrats are likely to use the English control to mean monitor or verify because controller or controllery in have this meaning. In French and German. Other

examples are assist for attend and actual for current. Yeah, control being used to mean monitor a verif I could cause some real confusion right now, Yeah, yeah, because you use that in just the you know you're talking about like let's say, let's say that you're talking about monitoring the behavior of a crowd. If you're talking about controlling the behavior of a crowd, that has a totally different meaning, right yeah, yeah, And I'm sure it could lead to

those kinds of confusions. But but yeah, I don't know that that was really interesting to me. I don't know, maybe this is more interesting to me than it is to other but trying to imagine just how the very words we speak will be different. Well, and we had so many episodes that kind of we're spokes connected to this concept, right. We had the ones where we said, well, how do you create a language that people will be

able to understand ten thousand years from now? Right? How do you create ways of alerting people to your intent when you have no way of knowing how how the language is going to evolve change, Maybe even the language you're using is completely eradicated by the time, and and you need that for certain things like telling people, hey, this is where we stored all our nuclear waste. Don't go in here, exactly touch it, don't put it in your eyeballs. It's going to be dangerous for longer than

your language exists, and exactly on eyestalks. That's a great way of saying that. We also had an episode about how would we talk to aliens? Like, we really did focus on language in quite a few episodes. And and possibly because we're in English major, I was about to make the same reference. Yes, the fact that we're English majors probably had something to do with that, but it's it is a really interesting to think about, the thing

to think about. I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where we only uh communicate in references and metaphor the way that Star Trek Next Generation episode everyone likes but is actually secretly terrible um dead the Star Trek episodes, Yes, Darmak so Picard beams down to a planet he's down with an alien leader. They do not the universal translator will not translate what the guy is saying, and the guy only speaks in um in in references to things that are relevant in his culture.

So like if he wants to say right if well, sadly no, or interpretive dance would have been great too, but neither is true. So so if he wanted to say, you and I need to work together in order to overcome this challenge, instead he would say like Darmak and jannad at Tanagra, that would be because in his culture that references a story of two powl who used to be at cross purposes, but who then work together to

overcome a third problem. Uh, that would be. But the issue I have there is that unless you have a language, you cannot build the stories that you then use as

reference to communicate your ideas. Well, maybe they had a language and they forgotten and now, but how do you That seems like a really inefficient way to teach people how to communicate, like talking you to a baby, like once they get to the point where they are beyond making the actual sounds like all right, now, I gotta teach you an entire sentence to mean this general idea that that can be applied to anything that falls within

that general idea. I can imagine that maybe if all teaching of language is done with visual aids, like if they don't just have books that are just text, but everything is like captions accompanying images. Yeah, maybe, sure, Sure. There was an interesting play by by Johnny Drago that happened here in Atlanta that positive um that that in some not too distant future are archaeologists would would find scraps of of of what we know today's human language and call it proto emoji. I both love it and

hate it at the same time. That's fantastic, Jonathan, what's your favorite emoji? I mean, poop, It's always going to be the answer. I'm a big fan of the alligator. I don't know why. Sometimes I just send my wife an alligator, very very rarely. I mean the closest I I use are still emoticons. I don't tend to use a lot of emojis. Some some of the chat stuff will automatically translate an emoticon into an emoji. Was so mad about that, Like, if I wanted an emoji, I

would have put it in there. I just wanted to colon end up, you know, a closed parentheses. I didn't want it to be like this weird gaping smiling thing. Uh, but I'm old So, okay, I've got another favorite episode. Okay, you don't want to tell us about your favorite emoji? Oh you did? You did? Alligator? Like alg it? And I like the devil. I like I like the I like the cat, not the cat face, the kind of

disdainful cat. Yeah, yeah, cat frowning upon you. Yeah. I don't know how a cat that's like less than a centimeter manages to still look disdainful. It's like a cat's superpower, pretty sure. Disdainful cat and devil or suck it petting? All right, what any other favorite episodes you want to cover? Yeah? There was one I remembered that I had a lot of fun thinking about, and it was the one about

what happens when a robot breaks the law? Where we were covering a couple of stories about computer programs that had had had done something autonomously that required the attention of law enforcement. Now, it's not any big problem to imagine what should be done when a robot does a essentially performs a directed action that it was program to do, and then it breaks the law. Right then you would you would argue whoever, whomever programmed the robot would be

at fault. Yeah, but what about when when robots or computer programs autonomously do something that has harmful legal repercussions, but nobody directly told it to do that, It's just emergent behavior. Uh. And so I really remember thinking that was a very interesting problem problem to think about, like what it makes you consider, what is the nature of

legal and moral responsibility? Who really should bear it? And then also I know that you guys did an episode without me about robot personhood, which I think sort of revisited this topic, didn't. Yeah, definitely, it wasn't on purpose. We wanted you to be there. You just weren't there for whatever personal reason you had for not being there that day. We weren't like, let us exclude Joe from this episode. That's when I was out of town for something I would imagine so um but but yeah, yeah,

the episode was called Our Robots Electronic Persons. It was from July of this year. Um, And we did it because the European Parliament had released a proposal for civil laws that relate to robotics um and very much so talked about section of this proposal discussed possibilities for robot person right. Essentially, this was a committee that said, we got together to think about these things that we've been saying we should think about for quite some time, and

here's what we concluded. And they had some suggestions, but nothing that was definitive. Right. It wasn't like this was going to be enacted into law. Yeah, it was more like, we really should have a committee that's thinking about this thing, that can create something that can be enacted into Right, here's here's a here are some basic ideas that we could head toward. But we're not suggesting this is the end goal. Rather, these are the sort of things that

these dedicated committees should talk about. It was a meeting calling for more meetings, yeah, but they were also being more They're also calling for people who were experts not just in the technology, but also in social social law, things that would be important to make sure they could roll out also throughout the entire European Union and not They didn't want to see a future where various countries were taking their own approaches to this and creating an

incompatible system within the European Union. So it was actually

a very a very forward thinking proposal. There were some segments in it that did kind of lend themselves to at least some simple jokes about the idea of robots, like robots getting paid a salary, for example, But the whole purpose of that was not to pay a robot so that the robot is motivated to do a good job, but rather to have a fund so that if that robot ever were to do something that would cause harm or damage, then money from that fund could go towards

compensating the injured party. That sort of idea, So it was really an interesting thing to look into. I really, I really enjoyed that episode. Both of those episodes yeah yeah, UM. A lot of my favorite ones over the years have have of course been the medical ones. That's kind of one of my beats, Like I'm I'm so excited whenever we get to talk about things like vaccines or pain, or blood or bacteria. Um. I was not in a few of these. I know that because I listened to

so many in preparation for this episode. Uh so so so those those have been some of my favorites, and of course medical technology is advancing all the time. I honestly didn't check to see what exactly we said about things in all of those episodes. I just wanted to be like, oh, man, wasn't it great when we talked about the future of Blood. Wasn't it Blood was fun?

I think I think Blood the Blood was the one that I think we released it with a technical error where my microphone was turned off and they were hearing me through y'all's microphones. We had to re release it. That sometimes happens. Yeah, sure, technical difficulties do in fact occur, although for for the for for very much the most part, Mr Noel Brown and Mr Dilan Fagan do excellent work. Yeah,

he is waving at us right now. Another one, as I was scrolling through archive, was the one about US search results in swaying elections, because that was one that I I love it when I'm completely flabbergasted by things that I learned here around the house to works offices, and and that was one that I had no idea

about and it was so surprising to me. And the concept is that we all rely on Google so so much and so trustfully that um that the first what is it for search results or I mean, depending on the size of your screen, I suppose that show up in your immediate field of vision are basically what what opinion you draw about something that you don't know about, right, you don't, You don't. Very few people go beyond even

what is above the fold. If they do scroll down, they even fewer will go to page two for example of results, and and to go beyond that is essentially unheard of. So uh, if you are able to position your results so that they appear in those first couple of links, you are in really good position to have people check your stuff out. So if you have to believe it to to to believe that because it is that high in the Google search, also that of worthwhile

news sources. Yeah, Google has built its reputation on having very reliable search results. So part of that then lens this idea that whatever links you see have inherent credibility to Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, and and this is a story that we've seen resurface as we lead up to the elections here in the United States. Uh, just a couple of weeks ago, I saw a story where the same sort of idea was being brought up. In fact, I think one of our pitch meetings for How Stuff Works,

someone brought it up on a Monday editorial brainstorming. And when I heard them, like, I'm pretty sure we covered that like a year ago. Yeah, yeah, so so I guess as the elections are coming up as of this recording, do do actual research, don't do Google researches. What dive into at this point is anybody still forming their opinions of the candidates though, well, the presidential candidates maybe not, but local local candidates. Yeah, good point. There are many

local candidates to be to to take into consideration. I think I think a majority of Congress members are up for reelection here, so uh, I don't know. Maybe if y'all have some opinions about how things have been happening in this country, check that up. Rock the vote. Don't write my name in for anything. I don't need that level of response to everything. Luckily, not every state is allowed to do that, so I'm not going to become the governor of everywhere. That would be real awkward. Yeah,

I can't split my time like that. Other other favorite episodes are, of course the food episodes, and we've had some great episodes about food um uh. We had that really early couple of episodes about the future of protein um in which we mentioned that we mentioned that lab grown burger. This was and and at the time carried a thousand dollar price tech um, which we all agreed was a bit steep for a burger. Yeah, even even

for one grown in a lab. I think that'd be a bit dear for me, as just just three years later, these things cost eleven dollars and thirty six cents to produce. Phenomenal. Now you're talking about Atlanta high end burger joint price ranges. Oh yeah, yeah, there are burgers sold in the building we're in right now that cost more than that. Yeah,

that's true right downstairs. Yep. But so that was fascinating the borg chef y'all, uh, including our very like I think still our favorite moment and all a forward thinking when you guys looked up recipes, Um, you never did cook and we still can just not just not on this audio show. Snack stuff sometimes snack stuff two, Yes, that was it that on a cooking show. There was some like some like dumpling that just mustard green dumplings. Actually the filling for the dumplings was just pure olives.

It's going to be the saltiest salties. Mustard greens were used to line the bamboo steamer. When you right, we talked about how often whatever the identified main ingredient was sometimes didn't appear in the dish or was listed as optional. Oh I love you, Chef Watson, You're you're, You're the very best chef ever um and uh and then oh it's speaking of Star Trek. Is I feel like we have a whole bunch over the past couple episodes here? Uh,

Star Trek Economy from way back in December. Yeah, that was usually economic topics aren't the thing that I'm psyched about. I think that was one of our most popular podcast episodes ever. It was fun to talk about, largely because first we got to address the fact that Star Trek has not been consistent with the way that it's treated its economy. Like essentially, in Star Trek it says money

doesn't exist unless the plot requires it too. Um. But it was also just funny fun to talk about, Well, how would we would it be possible to get to a time when currency and wealth are no longer really a thing, or at least personal wealth isn't. Maybe you know, species wealth idea of having enough resources of energy and all the other needs to distribute to everybody so that

there's no want or or wanting of things. Then um, maybe, but yeah, that was a fun one to talk about, really, to to kind of wrap your head around what would it take for us to get to that point? Uh, And it's it's mostly boils down to lots and lots

of energy and jumpsuits. Jumpsuits as well. Yes, and the Picard maneuver where you stand up and then you you know, or you sit down and then you tug your Also the Riker maneuver, which involves sitting in chairs by swinging your leg over the back of the chair and then sitting down and sometimes getting up the same way but

in reverse. It's amazing how often he does that. Yeah, there's or or or rests the rests the foot on the top of a chair, like like not on the seat of a chair, like on the top of the back like I mean, I understand he's tall, right, Well he needs it's it's a it's a form of dominance. He's called number two and he has to constantly prove himself to everybody else because he's not number one. Ricker doesn't have to prove anything to you. He had to

grow a beard. It was from season one to season two, and it proved to me that he could grow facial hair. He can very nice facial hair. Jonathan preferred him with the beard. Yeah. Also also one of the episodes that you that you were not here with us for Jonathan Bees Future of Bees. What was in my eyes? I'm forgetting Oh man, I wish I had looked this up. I think I think I have the notes open. Maybe I can go check it out. There. There was some

kind of terrible wonderful word that we discovered. Uh, that we discovered a lot of maybe maybe it was just robobies. There were robbies. There was some kind of there was kind of be vitamin. There was a thing they fed bees. No, I mean some kind of like like be steroids to give them powers, give them. Missed out on that one. No, that was that was megabe Megabe. It was called megabee Megabee.

What was megabee? Was that the stuff? Yeah? It was like a little like be like protein shaken kind of Yeah, that you feed, you feed bees to to help keep them through through the winter. Yeah. That and uh, I remember we did a commercial for it. Didn't me it was beef up your nice. Well, I'm sad I missed all the being activity. I'm sad that you missed it to um also, and this is a visual reference because I don't remember how how good the actual episode was,

but we did. We did a spider episode, I think also were you okay okay, But Joe added this amazing photograph into into the notes and let me explain it to you, and then I'm going to show it to

the guys for for visual reference. Um. It's it's a it's a kind of like a close up of the spider with like really pretty blue beady eyes and it's it's like little mandibles and and so it's it's it's very it's sort of like like fish islands, like when you have like a dog that's like right up in a camera and the and the caption plastered across it is Spiber, Spiper, Spiber and this is what it looks like. Dudes. Yeah,

that's that's what I'm nearly. I didn't make it, uh, and and it just it brings me such joy occasionally I just think about it and a giggle. Rarely do we include images in our notes, but once in a while that does happen, and it's typically for our benefit and not for yours. But one thing we have done for your benefit is. While most of the episodes have at least some combination of the three of us in them, we've also had some other folks on our show as well.

Oh yeah, we should give them all a shout out. We've appreciated all of our wonderful co hosts, or get our wonderful guests. Yes, yes, we we had Holly Fry come on and talk about the future of fashion. That one lovely time that Julie joined us for a couple episodes about weather control Julie Douglas. That is um, Raquel Willis talking about gender. Uh. Scott Benjamin and Benjamin Bolan

talking about car computerization. I think it's just called Scott Benjamin Bolan Yes, um, Christian Sager talking about superheroes, also about ruins, the ruins of the future, Oh yeah, yeah yeah um. And also Robert Liam talking about monsters, the future of monsters, like what monsters will inhabit our future. So thanks to all of them for lending their talent and expertise and making our show better and giving us, giving us the opportunity to talk about subjects that aren't

necessarily within our own wheelhouses. But we have so much knowledge available here at how Stuff works. It's actually pretty humbling. It's intimidating as heck. Yeah, that's absolutely a thing that Jonathan you have added to this show is ridiculously penny title honey, titles and references. So I decided to just get a collection of some of the best of the worst or worst of the best, or however you want

to define it. And I haven't shared this with the with Joe and Lauren, although I'm sure you both were scrolling through the episodes and everything. Here's some of the titles that we have used in past episodes. I'm just gonna go through them. We're not going to talk about necessarily what the subjects were. But there was my so called life casting. It's for that MTV generation out there. Uh, no more waking up in a bathtub full of ice artificial organs. Yep ye, your brother, brother, Can you spare

a zero one one zero zero one zero zero? Who wants to live forever? Shades of degray? Uh, it's coming right for us. That was another one. That was the autonomous car trolley problem episode. Oh not not about an asteroid? Oh no, no, you're right. That one was the asteroid one. Yeah. Then there's a four D printing is one d better? Uh do robots rite of electric sheep? Uh play that funky music Android send in the clones. That's the best

Babies in Space Inconceivable, and that was about conception. And and then there was there was Babies in Space That's Heavy, which was about microgravity effects on babies. Uh Quick to the Zeppelin. I just think that's an awesome title. Also, Uh Pew pew laser. Uh. And then there's a That's so random parentheses number generator in parentheses. Uh. Then Finding Nemo that's in E E M O, which was about a nautical facility. There was where we're going we do

need roads. Uh, computers know if you're sarcastic, Yeah, right, our cryonics cool and you have twenty seconds to comply. Uh. Those are Yeah, it's a RoboCop because we did one about robo security. And so that was the quote I used as or the reference I used as the title. And finally, let's let's kind of conclude this with a discussion about one of the most irritating things about this show that I introduced fairly early on, opening up episodes

with song quotes. Why do you say irritating, because whenever I wasn't here. You had to do it, and based upon the entries you guys made, I'm guessing it wasn't necessarily fun. We we enjoy it when you do it, do we always forget until we were literally right in the studio And that happened to me on a few occasions too, as will be apparent when I go through some of the stats. But first I want to say that we when we started the show, we didn't do

that right. That wasn't something that I just did from the very beginning, although it didn't take too long into the existence of the show before I introduced it, but I was. I started by just introducing silly comments about the future in general, starting in the spring, and I would say things like this is an actual quote, welcome to forward Thinking, the show where we look at the future and say can we hear you? And well, that

is kind of what we do, isn't it. Yeah. There was another one where it's like how are you doing? That was we look at the future and say, how are you doing? We're not like Ray Bradberry who want to prevent the future from happening. So, but the one I just referred to the camere year that one came from Hollywood Ruined Holograms that episode, but I hadn't started quoting songs yet. And when I did start quoting songs, I didn't go all in like another episode. I might

just say something weird. I wouldn't necessarily quote a song or might quote a movie. It wasn't until later that I got into doing it frequently, but those early ones, like I was quoting some really uh wonderful pieces of music like Rebecca Black's Friday or they Carli ray Jefson's song called Me Maybe that was one, And I remember when I did that one, I started getting judged by you two. And that's I think what drove me into doing it more free quickly, because it was the trolling

aspect in about half of the episodes early on. I'm like that sounds you're hearing is Lauren shaking her head and me but um uh. The from what I can tell, the first song lyric I ever referenced was put Me in a Wheelchair and Get Me to the Show, which is from the Ramones song I Want to Be Sedated. I'm a big fan of punk rock in general, the Ramons in particular, and other stuff like rockabilly, surf rock, and garage rock, so as well as glam and new wave.

Like a lot of those songs have representation if you look at the full list. Um, that episode that I quoted that song in was Building with Bacteria, which published May. By the time we got two Shades of Degree, I was quoting songs pretty much with every episode. There were a couple of exceptions, but um, there was a time in the summer, late summer of that I kind of stopped and I was doing other stuff. But then I came back to songs, so I decided to do some

something insane. Leaving up to this episode. I did not get a chance to listen to every single entry or intro rather, but I listened to two hundred and seventy seven of them home dang, So it's just a whole bunch o buddy, or your ears hurting. Let me tell you this. I could stand to go the rest of my life without hearing Ben Boland say welcome to forward Thinking, because I heard it. I heard it two hundred and seventy seven times. Uh So, here here's some stats for

you guys. First of all, we know which band I referenced the most frequently they might be giants. It's exactly right. So out of those two seventy seven song entries, which by the way, that that does not correspond to two d seventy seven episodes, there was one episode where I did three song quotes in a go, so that's a little different. Also, there's at least twenty year thirty that

I didn't get to. But out of the two seven I listened to, I quoted that they might be giants song sixteen times, by far by by twice as much as the next leading artist. But I bet you won't guess who the second highest are are. The second most frequent artist would be Prince, not not really Prince. Actually a little bit further down the list, Prince had five total. Okay, I know I did Prince at least twice. Yeah, you did the same song twice, did couple Rain twice in

a row. But uh, you know the Beatles, and we both did Fixing the Hole. We both quoted fixing the Hole, Joe, Um, you and I. So that was why. And I'll talk more about some of the songs that were listed more than once in just a second. Talking Heads and uh Weird Al Yankovic were next at seven songs each. This is not my surprised face. Yeah. Jonathan Colton followed up

with six to be fair. Actually, I guess technically it's no, it's is six because I I quoted him in that last episode last week and I went ahead through that one in Prince would be five as well as Rocky Horror Picture Show songs were done five times, David Bowie five times, Huey Lewis and The News five times. Uh. And there's one artist that we did four times, and it was the same song every single time Game Sticks

Mr Roboto. Um, So every time I did a Sticks song it ended up being Mr. Not necessarily the same line. Did you just forget that you've done it? Yeah? Because I didn't. Here's the thing, this show has been going on a while. The reason why I had to listen to these is because I didn't keep a sheet of

what I had used. I didn't have a list, so I had to go back and make a list because I didn't I didn't have All I was doing was listening for a lyric that I Typically I wanted to try to find find something that was relevant to the topic, although that was not always the case. UM and and when we've been we've been doing this for three and a half years, about a hundred episodes a year. Yeah, yeah,

so yeah, they add up pretty quickly. So here's a couple of other little stats, and then we'll conclude and say goodbye to everybody. About the songs. Uh, if you wanted to know what trend was the biggest in besides you know, the individual artists that were on the most musicals. I quoted more musicals than any other genre. So here are some of the musicals that you may have heard.

Lyrics from Rocky Horror and its sequel, Shock Treatment, Fame, Tommy Mary Poppins, Lame Zaraba, West Side Story, Greece to Bye Bye Birdie, Oklahoma a chorus Line, Hair, Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, The Producers, Jungle Book, Sunday in the Park, next to Normal, and I did Annie last week. So lots of musicals. Uh. Then if you want to talk, we also reference some television show themes. Joe, on one of the episodes, you said, uh, the podcast that looks at the future and humes the

theme to TV's Night Writer. So I was like that that was possibly my favorite because it was the laziest and most awesome. At the same time, I forgot about that. That was definitely a day that we were like, screw this lyric we did. I referenced. I referenced the actual lyrics to the Star Trek theme twice, because there are lyrics to the Star Trek. How about the lyrics to

yub Nub the Ewok celebration Z No. But we did reference Jedi Rocks okay, for the Lightsaber episode we talked about I did the the Alien language for the beginning of Jedi Rocks. Lauren, how did you let it happen that we never did an episode without Jonathan that did yub Nub. I can't. I'm very disappointed. It's not Cannon anymore. Anyway, It's not in the end of Return of the Jedi anymore. The yub Nub is forever. No one can take yub Nub away from us. Other TV show themes we mentioned

our TV music that we mentioned. We mentioned ep up Or, which came from the Jetsons. The Spider Man theme song was referenced. The Mickey Mouse Club theme song was referenced. For songs that we use more than once, um Mr Roboto leads at four, but at three we have. I'm so ashamed of this one bad case of Loving You by Robert Palmer, and we did that three till I'm sorry.

Of my mom's favorite songs, I didn't. We did a lot of medical stuff, and there's only so many songs that have doctor in them that aren't about prescribing drugs for the wrong reason or or mistreating patients. And I'm like, I don't want to go that route. Um Weird Science also three times, Space Oddity three times, Um Marvin I Love You from Marvin the Paranoid Android three times. It is a sweet song Back in Time by Huey Lewis in the News three times, Purple Rain twice, Once in

a Lifetime by Talking Heads was at least twice. Dr Worm was twice from They Might Be Giants uh, and a lot of other ones. I mean, we there were tons of songs from things like Monty Python, uh, Frank Sinatra. We did Come Fly with Me twice, but we also did Fly Me to the Moon, but that was only once,

so Sinatra had some representation. So anyway, Yeah, it was fun just to look over these, and again, there's at least twenty or thirty that I didn't get to now, Jonathan, do you think that these, uh, these talis of song lyrics provide some insights about what we've learned doing this show. I think mostly the insight is Jonathan is really good at searching for lyrics that contain very specific keywords, even if he isn't very familiar with the song. I appreciate

your diligence on this front. I mean there are I mean the fact that they might be giants was he sixteen times tells you that I'm enormous they might be giants fan obviously, and also I used several of their songs more than once, like Nanobots, even some songs that aren't widely known outside of the dedicated fan base where

they might be giants. Um. I think it also shows that I'm a kid of the eighties because there were an awful lot of songs that came from new wave bands, from Elton John Uh, from Pink Floyd, Um seventies and eighties songs. A lot of those and fewer like two of the songs that Joe picked actually the same song he picked twice, Toxic by Britney Spears, Um pick that two times? Yeah, I actually I color coded uh artists that other people picked, which included you know, the Beatles,

Fixing the Whole, Prince's Purple Rain, Huey Lewis, and the News. Uh. Lauren quoted Hip to be Square in an episode I did not. I was very proud of you though. Um Joe. Twice you referenced Blondie also Fantastic Blondie. Yeah, Rapture and Heart of Glass you did both. Oh no, I did Heart of Glass. You did Rapture. Um because you did the man from Mars who was eating cars. Uh. Lauren. You referenced one of the greatest bands of all time, Aqua with Barbie Girl, and it wasn't for the Hello

Barbie episode because I referenced in that one. Uh. Joe. You referenced Bobby pick It twice. Um. Yeah, because he's the guy who wrote Monster Mash. Uh. You referenced Tracy Chapman once. Joe, Um, Lauren, you referenced Jimi Aquai with Virtual Insanity for a VR episode. Joe, you reference Madonna for a material girl for a material science episode. I was so pleased. Lauren. You reference ce low Green with

Forget You Uh once. Um. We had a couple of other things, like nursy rhymes things like or or baby songs like rockabye baby, stuff like that, which also on top of spaghetti Joe, you're a big fan of those. You reference free Falling by Tom Petty Joe. Uh. Steam powered giraffes honey Bee for the Bees episode, Lauren, Uh, I did not know that. I had never heard of steam powered giraffe, and now I know it's a thing. So those are just some of the insights. Uh. And

then I did every pretty much everything else. So I think, I think what we've learned here is that, Uh, in this journey we have taken together, we all have something to be ashamed of. Yes, we all can carry that shame with us and now no longer share it with the rest of the world, at least not in this format. But we have really appreciated did you guys, you listeners out there, We get your your messages whenever we've had an issue with the episodes. The fact that people respond

so quickly tells us that you care. So while it's frustrating to have problems, even on our side, like we don't like to see that either, but to see that it would be awful to have problems and no one say anything because that means no one's listening, right, But we have dedicated listeners who love the show, and so I really appreciate that. And of course there are tons of people who reach out and say wonderful positive things to us, and we appreciate you guys. Oh yeah, we

are frequently really bad at answering those messages. Um and an apologies that you've never been shouting into avoid um or or saying lovely things and to avoid whichever right is. Um. But uh uh we we we tend to get really very quite busy with with other projects around the office here, and uh, many of those projects are going to be continuing. Yeah, we should talk about that. So Lauren, first let people know what other stuff you work on so that they can check that out. Uh now, my hull, what are

my main projects? That's an interesting question that I haven't really thought about the answer to. Um. I'm doing a video series and also a podcast, a podcast podcast called How Stuff Works Now, which is virtually ungoogle able, but I have faith in y'all, um, and I do writing in performance for a bunch of other How Stuff Works video kind of stuff. So so, so watch the house touff works channel in general and and kind of beyond

the lookout. Hopefully, hopefully, sometime relatively soon, I will have a new podcast to talk to you guys about. Oh and those live things, the Facebook live stuff. Yes, uh, snack stuff and uh and et cetera. Um. Usually happens either Monday around three pm Eastern or Friday around three pm Eastern. Lauren, what is snack stuff? Is that like where you eat those cappuccino flavored potato chips. That is exactly what happened sometimes, but we haven't had one of

the cappuccino flavored ones. Yeah. Mr Ben Bowling and I get together on Facebook Live for about forty minutes or so. I'll frequently Dylan subjects himself to whatever we have brought as well, and um we we yeah, so so yeah we we we bring weird snacks and we eat them and we talk a little bit a little bit about them. Um,

it's it's a lovely time. And we get to eat on camera, which is a dream of all of ours to just have all of those great mouth noises and weird expressions that you make when that's occurring broadcast live to the world. Joe, what about you, Well, I am also one of the hosts of the podcast stuff to Blow Your Mind, one of How Stuff Works as other podcast with our co workers Robert Lamb and Christian Saga. We cover primarily science, but also with a tinge of culture, history, monsters, weirdness,

anything to make you squirm. And you can find us at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I also write for How Stuff Works videos, So if you keep an eye out for House to Works, the House to Works video channel where Lauren will be doing things, I

will be doing them there as well. Yeah, I co ho Well now I host a show called tech Stuff, occasionally co host because I grab people all the time to sit in and join and we talk about technology, how it works and how it works on us or with us uh, and those topics can be very technical or they can be really kind of more like on the philosophical side of things. It all depends upon the topic at the time. So you can check that episode,

those episodes out, there's like eight hundred of them. So if you haven't listened to Tech Stuff, you've got some catching up to do. Big back catalog, including stuff that is incredibly out of date, so it's really entertaining. Um, you can also find me hosting other videos occasionally, including how Stuff Works Now videos. I also write for how Stuff Works Now, so check that out. And um, yeah, you never know what else will pop up on And as we said before, the Forward Thinking video series is

going to continue. It's just the audio podcast that we're kind of uh pulling back from so that we can dedicate our time and work on other projects as well. Uh. And again it's not that we don't love you, it's that we have a limited amount of time and so much we want to do. Um. We have had a great time exploring these topics. I want to say, it's been a really excellent adventure to go on with y'all. Yeah, yeah, thank thank both of you for Yeah, it's it's been

a good time. You know. We really got to explore a lot of topics and and look into things that will great a lot more depth than we could with the video series. Obviously, with the video series, they're about three to four minutes long and we really want to hit like the the big bullet points. But in the podcast, we've been able to dive into some research and learn stuff that was fascinating, mind bending, sometimes it was infuriating. It all depended on the topic, and we're so glad

you guys came along with us on that journey. And uh, I guess you can continue to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. I mean I imagine that both of those I'll still be maintaining moving forward. But if you have any suggestions for future audio podcasts, um okay, maybe be on the lookout for some videos instead. Yeah, quite possible. Because this is we were now coming to a conclusion. I honestly don't know how to end this because every episode I say, we'll talk to you again really soon.

But uh, I guess I guess that's that's not you know what, Go back and start at episode one and just work your way through, and if you do that, we will talk to you again really. See for more on this topic in the future of technology visits Forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places.