Original subtitles

♪

My name is Johannes, and I have a problem.

I like Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Even worse, I use it at least once in all of my films.

Why?

Because it was part of the soundtrack

of a TV series called Cosmos,

and it is burnt into my existence

like an emotional cobalt bomb.

I first heard the melody in 1982

in a place called Austria.

This is what Austria looks like.

Austria is primarily known for music and mass murder,

a culturally challenged country

deep in the Heart of Darkness of Europe.

My last name is long and complicated,

Grenzfurthner.

"Grenze" means "border,"

and a "furt" is something like a shallow creek or ford,

like that charismatic U.S. president.

So in English my name would be Johnny Borderforder.

Has an exciting ring to it, don't you think?

English is the lingua franca of late capitalism,

so I decided to stick with it.

Everything in German sounds like a war crime,

and everything in Austrian German

sounds like a war crime served with whipped cream.

♪

I was born in 1975,

a year that is known for the end

of the Vietnam conflicts,

a geopolitical proxy war that, in the long run,

brought us great plot elements for films

like Joe Dante's Piranha

and the very underrated Jacob's Ladder by Adrian Lyne.

Microsoft was founded,

Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish,

and a guy named Spielberg released a blockbuster

about a Great White one,

and I'm not talking about Richard Nixon.

I was an only child and grew up in the countryside.

If there's a bright center to the universe,

I lived in a place - Stockerau.

Stockerau's claim to fame

is providing Austria with its first Catholic saint,

a poor Irish guy who was hung as a spy

because of his, quote, "strange appearance."

When his corpse wouldn't decay

and the tree they hung him on

started to bloom in mid-winter,

the Stockerauians gladly reassessed

their impromptu flash mob.

They built a cloister and a kindergarten.

I can still smell the red beet they served me there.

The Body of Christ for vegetarians.

That was me, age 6.

Elton John.

Woschi Woschi Wau Wau,

the doggie that never pooped.

I loved Neil Armstrong,

and turning dirt into moon dust,

and battle cruisers,

and helicopter crashes.

Books and comics were the best thing ever.

♪

I was a huge fan of Richard Scarry,

and I constructed submarines

to explore the Mariana Trench,

but I also built tree houses

that grew into huge post-apocalyptic mansions.

I accidentally killed a chicken with a chemical experiment.

I hid the body in a fodder silo.

My family still thinks it was the fox.

My childhood took place in an interesting time--

"interesting" in that old Chinese-proverb sense--

the gloomy heydays of the Cold War.

♪

♪

We only had two TV channels, can you imagine?

But my dad had the consumer power

of a real Baby Boomer,

and obtained a VHS video recorder as early as 1980,

I assume to watch porn.

I was, without knowing,

part of the first generation of the information age,

a native of the radical technological

and societal shift

that's now called "globalization."

A completely hollow term,

but sometimes even hollow terms cast long shadows.

I was a good observer.

I learned a lot about basic biology

from Grandpa Zucker,

like after slaughtering pigs,

the stray cats always ate the testicles first.

I also spotted that our neighbor's hallway tiles

had the structure of LCD characters.

I never managed to unsee this fact.

My grandmother always used to stay:

The kids gave me nicknames like "UFO-Hannes."

That certainly created a level of isolation,

but also one that let me look for creative ways

to deal with my obsessions.

I compiled my own cut-and-paste popular science books

on the really bad Xerox machine

of the Volkspartei Niederösterreich,

or I made short films.

Well, I guess I started the genre of docuploitation.

I wrote stories about exotic diseases

like "brain-aquaplaning,"

and not to forget a play called The Hole In The Andes.

A couple of scientists who do research

in the mountain range of the Andes

discover a hole that goes right through Earth.

One of the scientists accidentally falls

into the hole, and the high speed of his fall

and the high heat transform him into a zombie.

On the other side of Earth, he is catapulted into orbit,

where he attacks spacecraft.

An excellent example for bad science in science fiction,

but I think I could sell it to Michael Bay or other members

of the Military-Entertainment Complex.

My mother Hermi was always supportive

of my strange interests, and my Dad always said,

"Well, Hermi, that's what you get

when you raise an open mind."

I'm still not sure it was meant as a compliment.

♪

♪

I'm not into sweat suits anymore,

but damn, I still like my baseball caps,

and setting stuff on fire.

I was eager to impress,

but also jealous about the popular kids.

I was forced into being a rebel.

My rebellion manifested itself

in a perverted interest in cryptozoology,

conspiracy books, and all the bullshit

that Erich von Däniken ever spat

into the face of humanity.

And when I was 11 I became an atheist.

I guess because I started masturbating.

But over the next years I got more sophisticated.

I devoured cyberpunk novels

and loved to watch Robocop and...

Edison Carter vom Sender 23, M-M-M-Max Headroom.

I goofed around with a friend's Commodore 64,

but getting my first IBM computer was a blast.

I learned English by playing Sierra Online adventure games,

and I was fascinated with GW-BASIC.

And when I was 13, I joined the FidoNet data network.

Electronic data communication was a wonderful way

to finally get in contact with strange folks

from all over the planet.

And I learned the proper term for what I was--

a nerd!

I felt at home in a world built by outsiders,

harvesting mailing lists and text file archives,

enjoying ANSI art.

I even created my own.

Not as elaborate, but, ah, what the heck.

And of course I joined endless debates about modems

and Akira and tokamak reactors...

and smut.

Oh yes, my nerd world was full of white dudes.

I didn't have a girlfriend--

guess why--

and I was definitely too scared

to do anything to change that,

but the reality of your body hits you hard, bro,

especially when it takes a three-hour-long

long distance call to fucking Germany

to download your first low-res porn.

I couldn't really wait until the image

was fully displayed.

I climaxed after the first couple

of grey pixels were shown.

It was quite magic.

I still have a fetish for grey pixels.

♪

I don't want to be too Lacanian about it, but...

A lot of desire got externalized.

For example, I was part of a small gang,

and we played many pen and paper role-playing games.

I really liked my character.

I mean, look at my frickin' character sheet!

♪

I even did double entry bookkeeping for my gold coins.

Hindsight is always 20/20,

especially if you play games that require 20-sided dice.

You can do what you like.

It's only bad when you don't destroy the evidence.

♪

♪

The promise and dangers of technology

really interested me.

When I was 17, my wish to do something meaningful grew.

If I couldn't get a date,

at least I could change the planet.

I really wanted to start "monochrom,"

an online message board, but also magazine,

about the stuff that interested me:

cyber-topics, politics, and fringe culture,

and I found friends and comrades

who joined to make it happen.

And we found victims for articles and interviews.

Folks like HR Giger,

Kathy Acker, who were really great,

and Blixa Bargeld,

who turned out to be major butthurt.

Techno-utopianism, my ass!

I became a leftist.

You couldn't leave the future to stupid libertarians.

Cyberpunk made me a punk.

Hasta la victoria siempre!

Never forget!

And let anthropomorphized kiwis

puke evil provitamins on Jean-Luc Picard!

Monochrom was born,

and it never died.

Monochrom's credo was and still is

to find the perfect Weapon of Mass Distribution

to spread an idea.

What started as a fanzine

experienced a Cambrian Explosion,

and we started working in many different media.

Robots, games, interventions, musicals...

And so I turned from being some nerd

into some artist.

I'm 40 years old now,

and monochrom, my baby, is 22 years old.

Only imagine, it can now legally drink in the U.S.

So, looking back at my life's journey,

it occurs to me, why not going on a real journey,

a journey from the west coast to the east coast of the U.S.?

To visit nerdy places and nerdy people

that inspired and shaped me,

but also having interesting conversations

with other nerds about nerd culture in general.

So please, join me on my little three-week-long

transcontinental tour de force.

♪

Traceroute is a road trip, a pilgrimage,

an inquiry, a palimpsest

to chase and question the ghosts

of nerdoms past, present, and future.

I teamed up with two good friends:

Jenny Marx from Germany

and Eddie Codel from California.

Eddie and Jenny at Tanagra.

Johannes, his arms wide.

We get a white rental van and stockpile on good spirit.

♪

San Francisco is known for free love and free markets,

a fantastic realm of endless opportunity

and homelessness.

The cultural center of what Barbrook and Cameron

called the Californian Ideology,

a town saturated in playful dissent

and positive corporate thinking.

My childhood memories of SFO

are the nightmarish game Manhunter 2,

the adorable serial killer film Time After Time,

and certainly Star Trek IV,

the one about breaking and entering

a nuclear vessel in Alameda

and kidnapping two whales.

My friend V. Vale lived in North Beach

for a long, long time.

He is a famed publisher and documentarian.

I remember vividly when I first laid eyes

upon his Industrial Culture Handbook.

Vale touched my 15-year-old brain.

It was a consensual bad touch.

City Lights Bookstore, where I once worked.

- Oh, you did? - Oh, yeah!

- Yeah? - Yeah, they funded

- my first publication! - Really?

- Yes. - What was that?

- Search and Destroy. - Search and Destroy!

Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg.

What do you think have all subcultures in common?

Because you have been witnessing

many births and deaths of subcultures.

I think all countercultures, subcultures,

whatever you wanna call them, movements such as this,

they've always been started by nerds.

I mean, you have to have a lot of solitude,

you have to be used to being alone,

you have to be used to being against the grain,

you have to be used to society not approving

of the way you choose to live your independent life,

because there is no creativity in the absence of revolt

and the absence of revolution

and the absence of rebellion.

People just don't realize that

when they're reading the history books.

Just a very few people are responsible

for any new emerging counterculture,

and to me, a culture has to be composed

of everybody participating and creating,

not just consuming.

And because of this,

the future will always be created

by nerds in subcultures.

Well, well!

Are nerds the driving force of dissent?

Or just a bunch of hyper-consumers?

Hmm, leaves me with an excellent case

of cognitive dissonance.

Maybe a stroll around City Hall

helps to clear my mind.

♪

♪

Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1978.

The post-Watergate era found America depressed,

and Philip Kaufman told a haunting sci-fi tale

about how the Hippie generation grew up,

got absorbed and co-opted,

and led the U.S. into the dark ages of Reaganomics.

Few films left me more hopeless,

yet more determined.

So, whenever you check your Facebook status

or plan your week-long escape to Burning Man,

please remember that the cultures

and countercultures of Silicon Valley

were made possible only due to exploitation

of the immigrant poor plus defense funding

and subsidies for corporations.

Adam Flynn is very aware of this.

He grew up in the small town of Yuma, Arizona,

the real-life equivalent of Night Vale.

Now he lives in the Bay Area as a philosopher for hire.

Good, 'cause there are no apps for that.

Cyberpunk, for me, like punk, is a very wide thing.

I mean, who were the cyberpunks?

So, like, 13-year-old boys like me,

it's a very privileged subculture,

because it's usually people who had access to technology.

Women and minorities and queer people

have always been in geek culture,

but they've been made invisible.

Now suddenly geek culture is mainstream,

like the only reliable things keeping Hollywood afloat

are superhero action movies from comic books.

All of these things are trying to be a big tent,

but the people that used to be part of the small tent

feel like, "Oh, someone's stolen my country."

Geography creates mindsets.

- It's, like, undebatable... - Sure!

- ...I think, yeah? - Yeah!

You feel super alienated,

but you find somewhere out there something

that is--that you can connect with

and that you have this sense of "One of these days,

I'm gonna shake the dust from my heels

and go to the big city and find my people."

You know, so much of video games,

so much of comic books, are based on this sense of

a kind of, you know, wish fulfillment

and power fantasies

or the sense of, you know, in playing something very hard

or going through and mastering the secret knowledge,

this shared hardship and discipline

that you have gone through and mastered.

Absolutely, man, I see that camaraderie, let's say,

the camaraderie of nerdom,

especially potent in role-playing campaigns

when you, like, sit around a table

for hours and hours and hours

and master and fight monsters or whatever,

and you do it together.

I had my first date, the first date of my life,

was in a role-playing game.

Wait, like, your character was having a date?

Yes, the character was having a date,

but that was for me like my first date!

It was so--he's laughing, yes,

and you should!

I truly believe

that two things are true about humanity:

We are a sexual species,

and we are a tool-using species.

The rest is pure speculation.

So we make our way to the hackerspace Noisebridge,

known for tinkering and social drama.

That's where we meet an old activist friend of mine.

Hi, my name is Maggie Mayhem!

I'm a lifelong nerd, and I'm a sex worker.

When I think about how I define myself as a nerd,

I think back to a lot of really important moments

in childhood.

For one thing, I never really had a thing for dolls.

I did have a thing for batteries,

and I loved being able to design my own types

of electric circuitry around my room.

I had lights, I had bells, I had booby traps,

I had everything I could think of.

I went from nine-volt batteries

and eventually graduated up to bigger ones.

I think even, at my shining glory,

a car battery that I was using

to power all kinds of things.

I had a console that let me program in BASIC,

and it reminded me of the Catholic teachings

that I was getting at school, my small parochial school,

about how on the first day God created light

and then He programmed the rest of the universe.

And that's how I felt with my whole sandbox

where I could just do anything.

I went down to the library

and I learned how to use the internet,

and one of my early lessons was not to tell anybody

that I was a nine-year-old girl.

Just no one will believe you, and if they do,

they don't have anything good to say to you.

So I pretended I was a teenage boy,

and that worked for a really long time.

It worked until I was a teenager.

As soon as I hit puberty,

I guess either through implied

or maybe even sometimes explicit statements,

I kinda thought being a woman meant giving that all up.

And sometimes, now that I'm older,

that's really frustrating,

because I still love technology, and I'm still a nerd,

and I still have all kinds of great equipment around,

and I'll go to do something or I'll have an idea,

and I sit down at my computer

and it's like it's a language that I forgot.

And I can't make the words come to my lips.

I can't quite program the way I used to remember, you know?

I mean, on the internet, looking at source code

of HTML on a website was like an upskirt view.

It was exciting, it was a chance

to figure it out just by watching

and piecing it together, and I think that sex workers

have always had a relationship to technology.

Either sex has been a driving force

in how technology has played out

in regards to whether or not Beta or VHS was gonna win

on how they carried porn,

or even the fact that the Consumer Electronics Show

in Las Vegas is one of the number one

sex work destinations.

I remember the first time I ever traded sex for software.

It was about 2005,

and I was a student in Santa Cruz.

I remember meeting so many software engineers

because we could share all kinds of conversations,

we could have a really good time together.

We had so much in common,

and we could work out barter arrangements.

I think sex workers have been carrying

all kinds of innovation and maybe help spurring it.

Maybe there's always been a relationship

between hackers and hookers.

At the same time sometimes now it feels like

it's a little bit more hostile.

You know, we've been alongside technology the whole time,

and yet we're being written out of the Terms of Service.

And sometimes I wonder if there's ever gonna be

the people come out to say that they were johns,

that they were clients,

that they, too, are allies to sex workers,

that they know that we're human beings,

that we deserve rights and that there is a difference

between trafficking and consensual sex.

But I can come out, and I'm hoping that the nerds

who like to have a good time with me

might come out, too.

Bravo!

And as a little thank you,

we present Maggie with a mug

that Jenny and I created.

The Venus of Strapondorf.

Always remember...

Josh Ellingson is a wonderful illustrator and designer.

When I first saw his illustration of Carl Sagan,

I was hooked to his work.

I asked Josh to bring some of his designs.

That's Dirty Martini, a Burlesque performer

from New York City, and she's standing there

in front of the Mercury rocket that's taking off.

And that piece was featured in outer space on the ISS.

Richard Garriott, one of those internet millionaires

or video game millionaires, actually, took it up

as part of an art show that he put together.

There were eight other artists in the show,

and it was just kind of a crazy privilege

to be featured on the Space Station.

The space tourist takes your art to space.

Garriott is an interesting character

because he's one of the many, many nerds nowadays

who kinda made it-- he's like a billionaire.

- Oh, such a nerd. - Growing up as a nerd

in Flint, Michigan, was probably not easy.

Yeah, and I definitely felt different, for sure.

Like, growing up, like, I was always

into something really hardcore,

and some of my friends would be into it for a while.

You know, I didn't get into, like, sports

or popular music, really.

So I guess it was-- I felt weird and different,

but I didn't know that it-- I don't know,

I guess I kinda picked on nerds or thought I was better

than the nerdy people or whatever, but--

So you were like--kinda almost like a social cannibal

or something because you were a nerd,

but you were picking on nerds?

Yeah, I didn't know what the hell I was--

what was going on, and I would wear--

I would try to be cool, like, I don't know.

Like I said, I thought I was cool.

So when did you come out as a nerd?

I don't know, 10 years ago or maybe 12 years ago

or something, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm just a nerd."

Like I'm just--yeah.

- I think we should get drunk. - Yeah, let's do it, man.

Okay.

And I sit at the bar and put bread in his jar,

and say, "Man, what are you doing here?"

The term "nerd" got popularized

by sitcoms around the time I was born.

The etymology is a bit unclear.

Some say it got invented by my old hero Dr. Seuss,

some refer to various slang origins,

and even Philip K. Dick

claimed to have coined the spelling.

Doesn't really matter.

What matters is how this new archetype

is embedded in the guts of neoliberalism.

Dare I postulate that the Revenge Of The Nerds

is cognitive capitalism itself.

We walk down Hoff Street, and...

- Hey! - Oh, hello!

- Abie, good to see you! - Johannes, good to see you!

- So you're a therapist. - I am.

I think, first of all, it's important to think

about the many different types of nerds that there are.

I think it's not just technology.

Anybody who is really into something,

anybody that has a focus and an intensity

about any particular topic is a nerd.

Our culture doesn't necessarily value

all of these interests, right, so you come into school,

and you found this really cool thing,

and you wanna show everyone, and they think,

"Ah, that's stupid, why are you into that?"

That's the beginning of that kind of trauma, right?

And it can also go the other way around

where you start off with the idea

of you're just a little bit different,

like many of us were, and you're ostracized,

and the way that you deal with that trauma

is by finding something,

a passion that you pour yourself into like that.

And so the nerdery can be-- it's a response to the trauma

and a way of dealing with the trauma

of being an outsider, so it kind of goes both ways.

You know, if you're just playing guitar chords,

that's one thing, but then you start to be a--

you become a rock star, that's a different thing.

If you're coding in your room, that's one thing,

but then you get hired by Google,

that's another thing, right?

So I think when that crossover happens

and the sense of self in the world

doesn't catch up with it--

so it's almost a kind of social dysmorphia

where you still feel like you are completely powerless,

but you don't realize that you have suddenly

become very powerful, and it's easy not to realize

the impact of your actions on, you know, the people around you,

the planet around you, all that.

Now sleepy time.

♪

Bye-bye, San Francisco.

A drive over the Bay Bridge

offers a good view of the giant cranes

at the Port of Oakland,

and that triggers two of my passions:

intergalactic oppression and logistics.

Many fans think that those cranes

inspired the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars.

Well, nope.

George Lucas himself dismissed that claim.

Walker designs were actually inspired

by garbage trucks,

but what always stuns me is a different fact.

One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century

is the shipping container.

In 1955 a guy called McLean

realized it would be much simpler and quicker

to have one standardized container

that could be lifted from a vehicle

directly onto a ship or a train

without first having to unload its contents.

That fundamentally changed the world.

Nine billion tons of cargo across our seas each year

in an evenly distributed system

that would be a ton for each person on the planet.

So even though Lucas was not inspired by it,

the container-shipping network

is the true backbone of the Global Empire.

Sending stuff efficiently from one point to another

is a fascinating subject.

One of the big players is FedEx.

And FedEx has one of the best logos ever created.

You ever realized that there is an arrow

in the Ex?

No?

Look there, there it is!

Lindon Leader created this masterpiece

of negative space in 1994.

Leader learned from an unsung hero himself.

His first job was working for Saul Bass,

the guy who created the AT&T logo,

made posters and title sequences for Hitchcock,

and directed a movie

about intelligent ants who talk math--Phase IV,

the first film to depict a geometric crop circle,

and it was an influence on the pranksters

who started this phenomenon.

Time to get some hard drives for backup.

You know, Jesus saves...

Fry's Electronics is a chain of big-box one-stop stores.

They sell everything tech-nerd-relevant.

They even sold porn when that was still lucrative.

♪

♪

We have our loot,

but we are also late.

We have to make it to Santa Cruz before sunset.

♪

She is a media theorist, artist, and technology writer.

But she worked in many odd jobs,

one of them was recording engineer

for Jimi Hendrix.

Sandy is considered the founder

of the academic discipline of transgender studies.

...a real lost boy...

We have to work on that a little bit.

The most fascinating thing about what happened

is everything Bill Gibson talked about came true,

plus the things that he only thought about

that he didn't really think would happen.

And the worst aspects of them

turned out to be kind of the average.

You know, that's what everything is now.

And as happens with every movement

or period or whatever, everybody grew up--

you know, we had a fantastic time,

it was a tremendously powerful time.

A lot of wonderful things happened,

people developed, and finished,

and moved on with really wonderful technological things

and societal things, and then it all went to shit.

It got ground up in the great capitalist grinder,

and now we have post-- lost boys.

- We have post-post. - We have post-post lost boys.

And it's all okay,

because we're all still doing it.

I mean, the street found its uses for technology,

and it found its uses for the social furnishings

that those technologies produced.

♪

He took that interest and creative energy

of hippiedom and dropping LSD

and channeled it into what is Apple now,

and you're just like, nobody should ever take LSD anymore!

LSD is a tool that can do anything.

If you are Steve Jobs, it will make you Super Steve.

It would make you Super Johannes.

Super Johannes, like running a death camp or something.

Now, broiled scallops in a tourist trap.

I always loved the great dichotomies of life:

PLAYMOBIL and LEGO,

dinosaurs and things that dinosaurs eat,

trees with leaves and pine trees,

cats and mice like Tom and Jerry.

But as someone who grew up in Central Europe,

I never understood how a mouse can live inside a wall.

Walls are made of bricks!

Walls are not hollow.

Way later I came to understand

that U.S. American houses are made of wood,

and the walls are really hollow.

♪

Sandy's car has so many nice bumper stickers,

so we decide that our van needs one, too.

Let's live dangerous and break our rental car contract.

♪

I realize that I lost my passport.

Shock!

I track it down at the scallops-serving

tourist trap.

- Yeah! - Perfect!

Makes me happy.

The Peace of Westphalia

gave us the concept of the nation state,

and we all have to play by its strange rules.

♪

Carl Sagan's take on humanity,

exploration, and pathos is still engrained

in my thinking and doing,

and when I find out that our route

takes us by the spot where he shot

the famous opening scene of Cosmos,

I can't help but knock on some doors...

- I have information! - Oh, yeah?

...hoping to get access to that piece of magic grazing land.

And really, we get an interview!

Well, my dead grandfather bought this property

around 1910, and he ended up with it

mainly because he couldn't afford property

in the Salinas Valley

where it was all the good planting land.

So he came out here and had a few cows,

and then through the years, people felt it was much nicer

to live by the ocean and the views,

and so it became more and more valuable,

which then attracted more people

and, you know, eventually Cosmos

and many other filming companies showed up here,

and actually wanted to take advantage

of the views that we have here on the flats,

because it's one of the only flat pieces here on the coast.

So Cosmos showed up in the last '70s,

and I didn't really know

exactly what they were going to do,

and they stuck this guy out there

who I didn't know a whole lot about,

and he had his little deb.

Since then, they've come back and filmed the sequel to it

and, you know, that's where we are today.

He was standing here and holding a dandelion,

and the dandelion would turn

into the Spaceship of Imagination--

Yeah, and he picked the dandelion

- over there, I think... - Ah, wonderful!

...'Cause that turns into a bunch of field

of dandelions and poppies, so...

♪

Pee and literature break at the Henry Miller Library.

♪

I like driving, but realizing that we have

a journey of 7,000 miles before us makes me shiver.

It reminds me of the strange societal consensus

of steering tons of machinery at high speeds

to get milk or drop someone off,

and we don't consider this strange!

We just accept it from an economical perspective,

although we know how deadly cars are.

The age of self-driving cars is dawning,

and we will look back at this behavior

and shake our heads.

Henry Ford's decision to pay his workers

$5-a-day-wages was not one of welfare.

It was that he realized that he should pay his workers

sufficiently large sums so they could afford

the products they were making.

He wanted to expand his market.

For Google, self-driving cars will be entertainment

and communication hubs.

I sit in my car while it drives me around,

and what do I do?

I consume media and make calls.

I literally become a captive audience

for advertisers and services that want my money.

Whoever controls that aspect

will have many happy shareholders.

♪

L.A. feels like the aftermath

of a giant WikiLeaks release.

The truth is out, in black and white,

everyone knows it, it's blatantly clear

that everything is wrong and bad

and can't get any worse,

but nobody really cares.

I appreciate this attitude.

You can't make fun of L.A., it's beyond parody.

It's like Henry Kissinger

receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

♪

We are on our way to the botanical gardens of UCLA.

Whenever I go to a botanical garden,

I think of killing people with a spade

and American Airlines.

And that's because of Douglas Trumbull's

1972 eco-sci-fi film Silent Running.

A couple of space freighters are carrying domes

with the last remaining ecosystems,

and Bruce Dern is one of the caretaking astronauts.

When the crew gets the command to destroy all domes,

Dern freaks out, kills his colleagues,

and flees with all the bunnies and cactuses and stuff.

The political message is a bit woo woo,

but the space freighters

featured big American Airlines logos,

and I still remember it.

Best product placement buck ever spent.

Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist

who does exciting projects.

I guess I always thought of myself

sort of a cross between a ballerina and a scientist

when I was five, and I realized at that point

that I wasn't going to be a ballerina pretty early on.

As a young nerd she liked the soothing fact

that there was always an answer in science.

Turned out to be a bit of a misunderstanding.

So you're also doing art projects,

and one project is about cheese.

Could you tell us about that?

We realized that the chemistry of armpits

and sweat and body odors and foot odor

is very, very similar to the chemistry of cheese.

Um, and so a lot of the smells and flavors of cheeses

are really similar to the smells and flavors

of the human body, it turns out.

So, you know, you can have Limburger cheese

that smells like feet,

Swiss cheese can have a kind of sweaty smell,

and that's 'cause the bacteria

are making the same kinds of molecules,

and the bacteria themselves are really closely related.

So the project was to kind of, again, decontextualize,

reframe our kind of emotional understanding

and kind of disgust at microbes

and the kind of ickiness of them.

We created our own cheeses

using bacteria from the human body, including yours.

You were one of our very kind donors.

I think I had, like, armpits,

and I think it was also crotch.

I think you did provide us a crotch sample but I'm not sure--

But you don't know what--what specific...

I can't remember now.

But it failed.

It--yeah, I didn't do a very good job

sort of aging the cheese, so that was one thing

I really learned about--about microbes.

There's a real craft element to cheesemaking

and you have to really nurture the bacteria

to grow the right way.

So your cheese, in particular,

I had to go to a conference,

so I was like, "Okay, I'll set up the cheese.

I'll put it to kind of age in the cabinet

that I had been using, um, and I'll come back

from the conference, it'll be ready."

And then I come back home, and the house smells terrible

like it had just gone very, very bad.

I fucked up your house.

Anyway, it ended up okay, but I opened the cabinet,

and the cheese was moving

because it had little maggots had laid their--

like, flies had laid their eggs inside the cheese.

It was very, very bad.

So your cheese was a very striking example

of kind of the visceral disgust

that you can experience with biological organisms

out of context and the kind of signal

of how you really have to care for things as they rot.

Can it get any worse?

Yes.

♪

Calm down, calm down.

I just don't want you to fall asleep, dear audience.

Time to visit my buddy Sean Bonner

and his wife Tara, and son Rips.

They have an impressive collection...

♪

- Sean. - Johannes.

Sean, Sean, Sean, Sean.

So, we are both born in 1975,

so we are pretty much the last generation

with an inbred angst

of total nuclear annihilation, okay?

As kids, we didn't know that it was weird, right?

Like, there was nothing unusual about going to school

and your teacher saying, "Okay, when the nuclear bombs

start dropping, hide under your desks,"

you know, and do this sort of stuff because you're a kid,

like, "Oh, okay, well, that's what you do."

I was 11 years old and you were 11 years old in 1986,

and that was a kind of bad year for modernity

because, first of all, Chernobyl blew up

and secondly, the Challenger explosion happened.

Goddamn O-ring.

I don't worry too much about the established rules

and setup of things because I sort of--

I sort of always approach that as that's--

Whatever--whatever is an existing process

to do something is the old way.

That's kind of something that sort of sticks with me

in everything that I do, and I think it probably is rooted

in all of this sort of stuff.

We were very, very anxious in finding out

that everybody was okay really quickly,

and once word started coming back in

about what was happening at Daiichi,

and the word that I was getting from everyone in Japan

was that they didn't know what was going on

and they couldn't find any information.

There was nobody monitoring any of this stuff,

and that the sort of institutions

and organizations that you would expect

to be on top of that

really didn't have any idea what to do

and they weren't doing anything.

The world supply of Geiger counters,

essentially, sold out in about 24 hours.

There was nobody--nobody buying them before that

and then everybody buying them after that,

so the entire supply chain died up immediately.

What you need for a functioning market

- is a good crisis. - Yeah, exactly.

The example that I use a lot is, like, if you wanted

to find out what the weather was in Los Angeles right now,

and the best thing you could get

was an average for all of California.

This device collects a radiation reading

every five seconds and ties it to a GPS point

and then uploads it to a server

that's shared for the entire world,

so now we have just shy of 30 million data points

covering the entire world.

This is more data than every other organization

who's ever collected radiation readings combined.

- Wonderful. - It's been pretty fantastic.

Yes, it is, and we will take it on the road with us.

Yeah, absolutely, I have one for you

so you can map out the entire route.

We'll strap it onto our little Town & Country

and find out what is out there.

Yeah, totally, you should, you should.

Let's check out the L.A. River.

♪

We have to get to Griffith Park.

The fastest route is the wormhole in Sean's beard.

♪

This tunnel is very dear to me.

It goes right into my heart.

Thanks to Hollywood

and its love for cost-efficient wizardry,

I'm standing at the entrance of three marvelous universes.

This tunnel is the portal to Toontown

in Who Framed Roger Rabbit,

a movie about the destruction

of the public transport system by private car companies.

It's also the scene of the wonderful hoverboard sequence

in Back to the Future II,

set in the distant future of 2015.

And most important:

it's the tunnel into the bowels

of mutual assured destruction,

the entrance to NORAD, in WarGames from 1983.

Home of WOPR, a supercomputer

that almost turns the world population

into sizzling hamburgers.

WarGames was very influential.

For the first time ever, it presented the trope

of the lone, intelligent hacker

to a mainstream audience

and created a whole flood of keyboard jockeys.

For me, WarGames offered the first glimpse

into understanding the obscene

and absurd power structures of society.

We don't need experts,

we need people who are willing to play.

Thirty years later, hacker culture is still too white

and too male and mostly made up of highly educated,

extremely well-paid people

who think they're being oppressed.

What about a nice game of dialectical materialism?

♪

On the way to 4267 Roxbury St., Simi Valley.

I need to show you something.

Damn, we are too late.

Now you can't see why we are here.

But I will give you a hint.

♪

Hiding in the suburban darkness behind me

is the former estate

of the Freeling family of Poltergeist fame.

♪

In the 1970s, Raymond Williams postulated

that the real innovation of television

is television itself.

He calls this "flow."

An experience where all the different program elements

and styles form a mesmerizing emotional pastiche

for the viewer.

There used to be an end to this "flow."

Sometime came the inevitable nightly signoff.

Snow.

I remember from my childhood how that was a moment

of terrifying stillness and clarity.

It is no coincidence that Poltergeist

used this phenomenon as a plot device.

After the American national anthem, the broadcast is over;

the snowstorm sets in, and the eerie voices

of the damned start calling.

♪

♪

The first American towns I knew by name

were New York City and Pasadena,

the latter because of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

birthplace of the Viking probe

and other fine goods of interplanetary gadgetry.

It's 10:00 p.m.

Let's try to sneak in.

Hello, honestly, we're just tourists

and wanted to check out JPL.

Can we go in?

Okay, that didn't work.

Frustrating.

Let's get hammered in the hotel bar.

Suddenly, there is a strange image appearing

on the rear-view monitor.

We stop to check what's going on.

♪

Jack Parsons was an explosives hobbyist,

science fiction enthusiast,

and Crowleyan occultist.

He was also one of the earliest people to focus

on practical rocketry.

In the '30s, rockets were a crazy science fiction idea,

so it took people who had an entirely different concept

of what was possible to make rocketry

a practical reality.

Although, his only experience in the field

was working in an explosives factory,

Parsons hooked up with a group of Caltech grad students

trying to build working rockets.

After ruining one lab in 1937,

the team known as the "Suicide Squad"

were sent out to the Arroyo

where they could only damage themselves.

Many things did explode,

but somehow they did not blow themselves up.

Parsons' designs became the foundation

of modern solid-fuel rocketry,

and the location of their tests

became the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The Suicide Squad's leader, Frank Malina,

became the director of JPL.

This combination of occultist and technologist

blowing things up in the dusty foothills

made sense in the context of the freaky technoculture

of Los Angeles which was a heavy blend

of boundless optimism and cosmic paranoia.

It was in this context that someone like Jack Parsons

could be one of the inventors of modern rocketry

because why the hell not?

And it was in this context

that a pulp science fiction author named Lafayette

ended up performing Crowleyan sex magick rituals

with that same amateur rocket scientist

in a Pasadena mansion.

L. Ron Hubbard went on to use

some of Aleister Crowley's religious symbols

to create his own Church of Scientology.

Jack Parsons was killed in a mysterious explosion

in a Pasadena garage in 1952.

He has a crater named after him

on the dark side of the moon.

Today, JPL controls a team of Martian robots.

♪

I like palms...

♪

A century ago, the iconic street tree of Los Angeles

was not the palm.

In the 1920s and 1930s,

L.A. was busy building its modern grid

of automobile boulevards,

and the city was looking for standardized street trees.

Palms held out the promise of symbiotic infrastructure:

they could provide beautification

without dropping fruit or buckling concrete.

Now palms stand for glamour and celebrity.

A symbol was born.

♪

For longer than I exist,

the name Stan Winston has been synonymous

with iconic fantasy characters.

♪

Stan Winston Studio continually set new standards

of excellence and innovation.

♪

After Stan's untimely passing in 2008,

Matt Winston co-founded

Stan Winston School of Character Arts

to preserve Stan's legacy by fostering creativity

in a new generation of character creators.

I grew up consuming all the stuff

that your father was working on

like The Thing or Aliens or Jurassic Park.

You were living in a household with your father

who was creating and really doing all this stuff,

so you were probably sitting there eating pizza

and your father would say, "Ah, Jim Cameron,

he wants this and this, I don't know."

I don't know, is this also like part of that?

Yeah, I was very fortunate to be around

when Jim Cameron would come and work with Dad

and they'd do tests for alien queens

and, you know, you'd think it would be,

"Oh, humdrum, this is what I grew up around."

It was never humdrum for me.

I was always totally excited by it and around it

just like you were 5,000, 6,000 miles away.

It was the same for me.

I was--I'm still the biggest nerd for this stuff,

and I just got a closer insider view of it,

but it's really the same thing.

You know, we both are--love, you know?

- Heart to heart. - It really is.

I mean, I still--I get a big grin on my face

every time I go to a special effects shop

and I see an artist working.

I'm wearing--look at that.

I'm wearing an Aliens Colonial Marines cap.

- And it never gets old. - It never gets old!

It never gets old, and I'm the same as you.

Wait, I'm dragging it here.

Look at this, the Weyland-Yutani,

Weyland-Yutani bag on my frigging backpack.

And I was--just happened to be lucky enough,

I get to go onto the set of Aliens

and help puppeteer the alien queen.

Ah!

But I was as excited as you were.

I was never like, "Ah, a day at work with Dad."

It was always like, "Holy crap, this is so awesome."

That's wonderful, that's wonderful.

So little outview, what do you think will be

the next five, ten years of special effects?

Where will the--the really interesting stuff go now?

Um, I--I believe that there is

a pendulum swing back to embracing

lots of techniques for making movies.

I think after CGI came along,

everyone was so excited by this brand-new toy

that they used it for everything,

and I think there's a new generation

who want to see us come back to using everything

and I think that's where

the industry's headed and that's where the magic

comes back to movie making.

No one gets into the movie business

to go to a big empty stage

with green walls and people in green.

No, you get into storytelling because you like--

You want to lick the Terminator.

You want to lick the Terminator.

He's actually licking the Terminator.

Yes, I am, I am.

This is what nerds do, it's fine.

Just don't lick the zombie head, um...

I can put my finger up his nose, like I can do this.

You can, and you can't do that with pixels.

I can actually lick the nose.

No, please stop licking our stuff.

- Okay, I'll stop. - Thank you.

We'll remove that in post.

It's okay, we'll remove it in post.

The wonder of special effects.

Now another good example, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

- Did you see that? - Of course!

Old-style stop motion.

Great, it's magical to watch.

The Boxtrolls.

So I think we're getting back to variety.

That's what I think the next ten years holds.

Thank you so much--hug, hug!

Oh, don't lick me though.

No, I don't lick you, I don't lick you.

I know he's gonna lick me.

Oh, he licked me!

He just licked me!

Stop licking people, you crazy Austrian!

No licking? What does he expect?

We are in San Fernando Valley!

I got so excited that I forgot to ask Matt

the most important question:

Why do they send a high-tech killing machine back in time

that can't speak proper English?

An 8-bit problem?

Escape from L.A.

Our next destination:

The El Mirage Dry Lake Bed in San Bernardino County.

♪

Ouch!

The lake bed is an interesting place

of speed and stillness.

It is mostly used in car commercials and yoga videos,

but it also was a testing ground for rocket cars.

Is this the right turn?

♪

Reminds me of the waltzing truck scene in Convoy.

♪

After 45 minutes driving around in dusty nothingness,

we are getting a bit worried.

♪

Oh, look at that jet engine right there.

There's the gate.

Okay, so what do we do?

I don't see any human being and--

Back up?

...and that's the last thing you want to do.

You want to...

Okay, welcome to El Mirage, California.

I'm into race cars.

We are damn lucky that we run into the mayor of Dry Lake.

Well, he is not really the mayor,

but everyone calls him that way.

And rightly so.

He has the demeanor of a Mad Maxian warlord,

and he sells car parts on eBay.

This is a fiberglass replica of a 1929 Ford.

Supercharger and this is the fuel injector.

The car weighs 5,000 pounds.

Oh, that's lead.

Yeah, lie down in there.

Woo!

'Cause you're not--you're not really steering this thing.

You're just hoping that it goes straight.

Whoa, Jesus...

H. Christ.

I'm in the middle of nowhere, as you can tell,

but I really enjoy this, you know, this kind of living.

Hear the noise in the background, you know.

But over the years I've seen all kinds of movies.

Clint Eastwood's been out here,

uh, they did some Star Treks out here.

A lot of times, if I see a movie

and then I may know somebody working on it,

and I'll go out and that's always fun.

Yeah, you know, see the crew and hang around with them,

and, of course, I go bum a little free food.

Bum up to the roach coach, you know.

Hey, the movie people eat well.

You know, they'll have burritos for breakfast,

they'll have roast beef sandwiches,

and then they'll have steak for dinner,

and there's always the craft person there.

Thanks, now I'm hungry.

The lake bed is featured in the opening sequence

of Knight Rider,

but my favorite movie shot here

is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

Across the 8th Dimension from 1984.

A brain surgeon, speed car racer,

rock star, alien defender epic

with one of the best bare man breasts

in the history of bare man breasts.

It's a remarkably enthusiastic,

good-natured movie for nerds

at a time before nerd culture was mainstreamed.

It sadly fails offering

a single interesting female character.

♪

Heroes and heroines are our demise.

We don't need them.

We can't change the world without thinking as a group,

as a system.

Retelling and fetishizing the hero narrative

is deadly naïveté, perpetuating a belief

that "exceptional people will save us."

No, especially not Elon Musk.

Can you see us drive away?

That's because we are in the process

of accidentally leaving our GoPro behind.

♪

The next step on our little journey

on Damnation Alley is Las Vegas.

Nothing should be here but dust.

Vegas exists due to an overlap of weird factors.

Trucking routes, the mafia, the military,

and the entertainment business.

Vegas is gorgeous hyperreality,

but most of the stuff people like here

is not my cup of tea.

I don't gamble, and I don't like Penn & Teller.

I'd rather be locked into a basement

full of Philip Glass recordings.

But I'm no party pooper.

♪

Let's go to the outskirts

and visit my friend, Kristina Amerson, for a coffee break,

and let Eddie fly his drones.

He hasn't flown his babies in two days

and that means severe withdrawal.

♪

We spot an interesting RV.

♪

It belongs to Kelly Poots.

He repairs CB radios.

Back when this was really booming,

um, a lot of people used it and they repaired it,

you know, that's the-- the component level,

if something broke, then you fixed something

inside the radio.

And nowadays, everything, if it breaks,

you throw it in the garbage, you buy another one,

and that's, unfortunately, that's the way the whole world

is going through a bunch of stuff.

But I see the last--at least three or four years anyway,

that people are really afraid of terrorists

and government and weather

and things going on in the world,

and these still are 12-volt.

They hook up--when something happens,

these are garbage, you go in the--boom, you're done.

These, you can still communicate

at least five, ten miles

without any kind of technology.

And everybody just had 'em because it was convenient.

The economy crashed, everything went south,

and now we have a whole different crew of people

driving the trucks

that don't even know what a radio is.

You know, they see this, "Oh, okay," you know,

and they don't know what--

Like the guy that was just here.

He come to the door and he says,

"Oh, my radio's not working."

I said, "Well, bring it in."

"What, I've got to bring it in?

I don't understand."

In retrospect, only those technologies

that prove functional for a culture

and can be integrated into everyday life are left over.

We need to talk more about the fascinating underworld

of Dead Media, about the abandoned branches

of the tree of media creation,

from cuneiform tablets to Apple Newton,

from passenger pigeons to MySpace.

♪

Something draws me northwest.

I crave ice cream.

♪

While Eddie is a bit too energetic

and floods the bathroom...

I finally get my ice cream.

I think we are very close.

Dirt road.

Follow the dirt road.

♪ Follow the dirt road ♪♪

♪

Somewhere beyond this gate is Area 51.

Nobody really knows what's going on inside,

but the reality of military life

is certainly far more hilarious

than anything Roland Emmerich could ever come up with.

My friend, Trevor Paglen, does a lot of research

to make this hidden world visible and more accessible.

- Uh, wonderful. - Good to see you, Johannes.

I'm surprised that it's actually working,

so, um, good to have you and, please, tell me

a little bit about the blackness behind me.

Okay, so Area 51, right by where you're standing,

is inside a much larger restricted area

called the Nellis Range,

and the Nellis Range is a giant restricted military,

um, area in Nevada

that's about the size of Switzerland.

Area 51 is basically a black facility.

But there's other places as well

like the Tonopah Test Range, for example, is in there.

On the southern border is the Creech Air Force Base

which is where they fly all the drones

around the world from via satellite uplink.

The military loves patches.

Almost everything it does has patches,

even, oddly enough, programs, units, and activities

that are officially secret.

It says, "Classified Flight Test,"

and it has this alien eating a stealth bomber.

And this stealth bomber has

this weird sigma symbol in here

and what that represents is invisibility, right?

So that's when they're doing a radar cross-section test,

this is what they're looking for

in a stealth airplane, something approaching invisibility.

Um, the--here's the numbers, the 509.

The 509 is the 509th bombing squadron

whose lineage goes back,

actually, to Roswell, New Mexico, which is, hence,

where this alien figure comes from.

It's kind of talking about Roswell,

but then also Area 51 is an alien.

You see this a lot in patches associated with Area 51

where they use aliens a lot in their patches.

And if you're a conspiracy theorist,

some people interpret that as like, "Oh, my God,

they have aliens at Area 51,"

but, you know, the other part of it

is that they've appropriated that image of the alien

and incorporated it into their own mythology.

Here at the bottom it says, "Gustatus Similis Pullus,"

and what that means is, it says, "Tastes like chicken."

It's government-funded fraternity humor on crack.

♪

Long drive to Phoenix is long.

♪

Time enough to ponder.

Did you know that if you removed all nerve cells

from your brain and laid them out

end-to-end in a straight line, you would die?

We are super excited.

We are visiting the headquarters of Bad Dragon,

flourishing producers of fine fantasy sex toys.

Only a few nerdverts have that privilege.

The location is kept a strict secret.

It's wonderful to be here, and what we can see

is a huge variety of dicks.

- Oh, yeah. - Bad Dragon started

as a WordPress blog about your endeavors

of creating molds and doing do-it-yourself prosthetics.

When we started out, like, basically what happened

is I was working 14-hour days between university and a job,

and it was all in front of the computer,

and 14 hours a day in your house

studying and doing computer stuff,

you know, it gets very boring, and I wanted to get out

and, you know, do something and learn some practical things

and, you know, learn some new skills or something

and take up a hobby.

And so I what I did is I decided to try sculpting.

And so what I did is I went and bought some clay,

some air-drying clay, hobby clay, right,

from the art store, and took it home

and said, "I'm gonna teach myself how to sculpt,"

and I decided I was gonna go sculpt dragons

and fantasy creatures and all the rest of this,

and I had great aspirations of I'd have this new hobby,

and then proceeded to find that the only thing

I could sculpt with any degree of competency

was dragon dildos.

And what was funny was I, you know, just sculpted stuff,

you know, you squidge it around, "Oh, that's kind of

sort of a dragon dick, you know,"

and then shared it with your friends

and, you know, posted pictures online,

and people saying, "Hey, so when can I buy one?

When's this toy coming out?"

And I'm like, "Really, really, you want this?"

Now Bad Dragon is a thriving company

employing over 40 people, who have a lot of fun

while really doing groundbreaking work.

Every day they use thousands of dollars worth of silicone

and ship hundreds of toys,

many of them custom-made pieces.

The sex toy industry is a very uncanny environment,

and Bad Dragon doesn't even try to compete

with the harsh reality

of dildo-producing sweatshops in China.

Varka and his fellow cocksmiths are nerds

and have a very imaginative perspective on designing,

manufacturing, and promoting.

Werewolf strap-ons?

Basilisk vaginas?

Shut up and take my money!

Nerds like assembling in clans

that always end up in tribal warfare scenarios

that are very, very unhealthy.

Now add gender and sexuality

and you usually end up in a toxic wasteland.

The story of Bad Dragon and its message of openness

and acceptance is telling a different story

and a super encouraging one.

Johannes, what the hell are you doing?

I think he was just laying down.

Yeah, I'm just laying there, yeah.

Okay, and, now, bring the dicks.

♪

I feel like I'm in San Francisco again,

seeing some performance art

and wondering, "What the hell is going on?"

Ah, you don't get it.

Let's go to Olive Garden.

It is a fascinating example of corporate culture.

Its menu is entirely based on customer statistics.

It offers as Italian food

what Americans think Italian food is.

It's a gastro-empirical feedback loop,

and it knocks us straight

into a well-deserved Alfredo coma.

♪

What does my subconscious

want to tell me?

Maybe the physically impossible promise

of unlimited breadsticks

haunts my skeptical mind.

Or maybe it tells me

that we should go to Flagstaff

and check out Meteor Crater.

♪

"The world's best preserved

meteorite impact site on Earth."

♪

Meteor Crater is the result of a collision

between an asteroid and our planet,

before Bruce Willis could stop it.

♪

This is an impact simulation using impact.

And we're not allowed to do "Arial" photography.

I wonder if we can use Helvetica instead.

♪

We make a stop at the dinosaur tracks near Tuba City.

♪

Very impressive.

Our Navajo guide, Virgil Secody, is very helpful.

West side of Tuba City, right here,

is a little town on top, that's where I'm from,

but back here, we've got some corn fields on top.

That's where my grandpa's ranch at.

I come from back there.

How far would you actually find tracks here?

Well, in this area, it's probably like

a quarter acre right here.

Full of bones and then tracks everywhere.

During the summer, there's a bunch of people stopping.

Everybody took off 'cause it's kind of cold,

so it's just me and him, that guy,

we're still waiting for some customers.

In the end, he asks for a donation,

and we gladly help.

Another reminder that the socio-economic status

of the region is dire.

We leave behind a little warning

for all the colonialists

and creationists for that matter.

Monotheism is a dictatorship.

The number of the beast is one.

Come here and get your well-deserved face-melting!

♪

Bilingual Navajo speakers were recruited

during World War II by the Marines

to speak Navajo language as an unbreakable code,

and it helped the U.S. win the war.

Teddy Draper, Sr., one of the Navajo Code Talkers,

later commented that when he was going

to boarding school before the war,

the U.S. government told him not to speak Navajo,

but during the war, they wanted him to speak it.

A precise summary of the problem,

amplified by the fact that the only Code Talker Museum

on the planet is in a Burger King,

with the biggest exhibit

being a printout of Nicolas Cage.

♪

No idea how, but we make it to Durango, Colorado,

a former mining and smelting town turned tourist mecca.

A lovely place full of wonders.

Not only because my good friend,

Ryan Finnigan, lives here and creates crazy tech art

like Benny the Booze Organ,

or this floating speaker system,

or a machine that turns itself off.

Ryan runs CarbonForm Design,

and creates new techniques for metalwork,

like etching photographs and similar glorious things.

Durango is very Wild West.

♪

Fap, fap, fap.

We check out the Powerhouse Science Center,

a former electric power plant that lit up Durango

even before New York City or Chicago.

It was designed by inventor, futurist,

and kind of mad scientist, Nikola Tesla.

Yes, this guy.

One of my favorite nerd battles of all times

was the "War of the Currents."

Industrialist Westinghouse was promoting

Tesla's alternating current, AC,

while Thomas Edison tried to sell direct current, DC.

Edison toured the U.S. on a PR campaign

and killed cats and cows with AC,

just to discourage people from using it.

His desire to disparage the AC system

even led to the invention of the electric chair,

even though he opposed capital punishment.

A man with priorities.

Twitter tells me that a truly great one died yesterday:

Terry Pratchett.

One of the few fantasy authors who was a knight

and owned a greenhouse full of carnivorous plants.

You will be surely missed.

♪

What a sunny day.

We drive out to Smelter Mountain

and strap one of Sean Bonner's Geiger counters to a drone.

And there is a reason for that.

The Durango Uranium Mill was a uranium recovery plant

set up secretly in 1943

to produce uranium for the Manhattan Project,

the project to create the first atom bomb.

The area underwent clean-up,

but can we trust the government?

Hmm, let's send in a probe and get some measurements.

♪

What a picturesque view of Lake Nighthorse.

Let's turn the drone and check out the dark side.

I wish this pile of gravel

would turn into a giant creature

and use our drone to take a selfie.

Okay, we have enough data.

♪

They must have done a really good job

of keeping it in there.

Well, seems okay.

Taxpayers' money well spent.

Today is the nerdiest of all days:

Pi Day.

♪

Ah!

♪

The rest of the night is blurry

and I dream of a spirit named Jeannie

who torments an astronaut.

♪

Durango has a weekly atheist meet-up,

and I'm talking about real atheists, not agnostics.

Agnostics are like vegetarians who eat fish.

We meet our host, Ryan,

in front of Durango's Cowboy Church

during Sunday morning service.

Maybe I could talk a little more broadly

about kind of the differences between

the foundational thinking methodologies

that kind of span over into religion and science also.

Um, so, I mean, obviously, the foundational difference

is that if you're starting first from a conclusion

and moving backwards, always attempting to find evidence

to support your position,

like religious mythopoeic speculation models,

um, comparative to scientific empiricism

where you start with evidence, you observe,

find evidence, and then infer from that evidence

what seems to be the best explanation offered thus far,

which is always an approximation,

and the value of your position is not in the conclusion,

not in what your ultimate belief ends up being.

It's in the way in which you got there.

It's the process, it's the methodology.

The conclusion is always potentially fallible.

It'll always change based on new evidence

as anomalies occur

and you're forced to reconsider that new evidence.

Whereas from a top-down structure,

um, where you start with the conclusion,

you're always susceptible to confirmation bias.

You're always gonna just attempt to find evidence

that just supports your position

because the value in your conclusion

is in your conclusion and not your method.

For instance, there was a classic debate

just recently between Ken Ham and Bill Nye,

it was all over the internet, on creationism,

and at the end of it, one of the questions was asked was:

what would change your position?

Or what would change your mind?

And Bill Nye said, "Evidence,"

and Ken Ham said, "Nothing."

And that's not the type of thinker that you want

functionally in a democracy aside of you voting

because when we start facing

much more complex moral dilemmas

in the near future with AI

and the types of moral dilemmas that are going

to be brought about by advancing technology,

we need to have a healthy debate.

Christianity is a death cult gone horribly wrong.

♪

I experience a moment of ontological panic.

♪

Today is a day about death,

but not in a bad way.

♪

I'm the least spiritual person ever,

but this place is awe-inspiring,

and unknowing future generations will definitely

mistake this place for a place of worship.

Metal flowers who listened to dead stars.

What's also dead is our cell phones.

The VLA is such a sensitive receiving system

that it could detect a cell phone's radio signal

at the distance of Jupiter.

♪

Trinity Site, the location of the first nuclear explosion,

is not far from here.

Now we know where all the uranium from Durango

got turned into thermal radiation.

A couple of miles down the road is Blanchard Rock Shop,

selling beautiful geological wonders.

One of these wonders isn't geological per se,

but a unique man-made artifact:

Trinitite, the glass formed

by the first nuclear explosion.

Allison Cameron runs the rock shop with her husband,

but she bought if from the Blanchard family

in the early 1990s.

Mr. Blanchard, the founder of the shop,

was a kind, and freedom-loving, and adventurous man.

He had a rattlesnake pit that tourists threw coins into,

and he climbed down every day to get the money out.

Just the right kind of guy to venture into a nuclear test site

to harvest Trinitite to sell.

They made it a national historic site,

which made it a federal offense to remove from the site,

to remove the Trinitite.

So you can go out there once a year now--

it used to be twice a year, but now it's only once a year,

the first Saturday of April-- and see the site,

but you're not allowed to pick it up.

It is a federal offense to remove it from the site.

It'd be like going to Mount Rushmore and chipping

on George Washington's nose or something.

But I, fortunately, have a whole bunch of it,

and it's some pretty rare stuff to have.

This is my favorite piece of it.

Ah, oh my, look at that, May I touch it.

Oh, beautiful.

Most of 'em are flat, because what happened when the bomb

was detonated, it says it fused the ground.

It did, but it didn't.

What happened is it liquefied the sand in the air,

and then it splattered to the ground like paint.

So most of the Trinitite is gonna be flat,

not three-dimensional like this so much,

but it's gonna be flat and the bottom side

is going to be sand.

It's gonna be sandy, where the top is gonna be glassier.

Oh, wonderful, so, and how much

of the Trinitite did he carry out?

- Not enough. - I guess, how much

- would that sell, let's say? - That piece there,

I would sell that piece for about $5,000.

In 1992, Mr. Blanchard told his wife

that he would shoot himself.

She said that he should go outside,

because she didn't want a bloody mess in the kitchen.

Five minutes later, she heard a shot from outdoors.

He was in charge of his life.

He did not want anybody controlling his life.

He didn't believe in being a burden to anyone.

He didn't want the government taking care of him,

and didn't want his wife taking care of him.

So he decided to kill himself on June 30th of '92,

and it's kinda an interesting story,

because I have a lot of connections with this place

before I ever even knew it existed.

I almost died on June 30th of 1987.

♪ We'll meet again ♪

♪ Don't know where ♪

♪ Don't know when ♪

♪ But I know we'll meet again

some sunny day ♪

The first American in space was Ham,

the Astrochimp.

Ham was known as Number 65

before his space flight, and only renamed Ham

upon his successful return to Earth.

His final resting place is at

the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo.

Well, let's say Ham's final resting place

minus his skeleton.

That is somewhere else.

♪

Remember E.T., the friendly alien?

E.T. died a horrible death in shame,

and was buried in a mass grave.

Believe me.

This is the Atari video game mass burial site.

In 1983, Atari got rid of all the unsold copies

of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial",

one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming,

by dumping them in a landfill.

The end of several eras.

♪ Some sunny day ♪

♪

Gotcha!

Ufology is the perfect religion

for the troubled postmodern age.

It's a convincing blend of a strong belief in technology,

of helplessness and masochism,

spiced up with a full-grown inferiority complex.

♪

Driving through Northwestern Texas feels a bit

like time dilation, and I fear the world is suddenly

ruled by apes when we stop at a gas station.

♪

Austin is great, and I have to say this

because my ex-wife is coproducing this film.

South by Southwest Interactive is happening,

the biggest techie culture event in the U.S.,

and the streets are swamped with badgers.

That's how the locals call the thousands

of festival guests very fittingly.

It feels like a citywide start-up swinger club.

We meet cyberpunk veterans Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling.

Old friends and collaborators, and Bruce was the first person

I interviewed for monochrom in 1993.

I hosted a conference on the-- well, like an online forum

for Mondo 2000, the magazine

that was published at the time.

And people kinda showed up who were sort of in this mode

and thinking about these sorts of things.

And there was a guy who called himself The Alien who showed up,

and he started talking about how he was a cyberpunk.

I didn't really think of it as a thing you could be

or as a political movement or anything like that.

And suddenly people like this guy were starting to show up

saying that they were cyberpunks and that this was a reality

that they were living or expected to live,

and it's like, "Wow, you know?"

That was super fun, and I remember when I left the U.S.

and was hanging with the Milanese cyberpunk underground,

guys from ShaKe Press, or "Shake,"

And you know, these were guys who were like

Milanese anarchists, but they'd been reading a lot

of cyberpunk, and they'd sorta decided to like,

carry it into daily life and their normal, you know,

'80s, Italian, left-wing drop-out world

of, you know, squats, and bicycle repair shops,

and you know, socialist communes.

And I thought, "Okay, you know,

like, the genie's out of the bottle.

These Milanese kids are just like all over this."

And they had names like Wrath of Valvole and Goma.

A lot of the effective cyberpunk writing was very critical

of American politics because it was basically Canadian.

The last thing I wanna get to before they take our chairs is--

No, no, you're welcome to 'em, we gotta go anyway.

I have a present for you guys.

So, it's a project I did with Heather Kelley,

and it's called Dogs Playing Dungeons & Dragons.

- Dogs playing D & D, yeah. - It's fantastic.

- You can put it somewhere. - I'm gonna commemorate it.

- Arf, arf, arf. - Needs to be online.

- You're welcome. - Thank you, thank you.

- Making a mess here. - Oh, no worries.

It's kinda like a Stonehenge of chairs, I really like...

Steve Jackson Games is based in Austin.

They created one of the best pen and paper

role-playing systems, GURPS.

Part of the series was a role-playing

scenario book for Cyberpunk.

The company got raided by the Secret Service,

because they thought it was an actual manual

for cybercriminals.

Fantasy and reality can short-circuit in odd ways,

especially if you add incompetence.

In the case of the Steve Jackson Raid,

it ended in the confiscation of their computers,

and a minor uproar in the alternative scene.

But a short drive north and we can visit a location

where incompetence really led to a horror scenario.

The Branch Davidian Compound near Waco

was the stage of a 51-day standoff

between the church members, the ATF,

and the FBI in 1993.

It ended in the death of most of the Davidians.

I'm leaving behind some Kool-Aid.

You think that I'm getting my cult metaphors mixed up here?

Well, no.

The Kool-Aid is for the public, who drank it in big gulps

by accepting the official story too easily.

The Davidians were surely nuts,

but it was also one of the biggest fuck-ups

in the history of law enforcement.

♪

Oliver Stone's movie interpretation

was probably too blown up,

but I will never forget this quote from the film.

"What is past is prologue."

A motto to live by.

It's actually from Shakespeare's Tempest,

but I never read that one.

♪

Driving, driving, driving,

and we have only one thing that keeps us sane,

talk radio.

And we are so focused on it that I miss a call.

I check my voice box.

Howdy, Johannes, it's Dan Wilcox, AKA danomatika online.

You should be just pulling up into my hometown

of Huntsville, Alabama.

Remember that's Hunts-vull, not Hunts-ville.

You don't wanna say it Yankee style.

Growing up there was pretty interesting, it's like living

in an island of engineers in a sea of rednecks.

Yeah, and you should be just coming in on, I assume, I-565.

You should be rounding the corner and seeing

the giant lit up space penis, that is the Saturn V

from the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

Spent a lot of time there.

I went to space camp when I was eighth grade.

Yeah, growing up there was pretty interesting.

It's a big Department of Defense town

with a lot of defense contractors,

and a very large army base called Redstone Arsenal

which has Marshall Space Flight Center from NASA on there.

A lot of amazing smart people, my dad being one them.

He was an aerospace engineer, and for some reason,

it makes me think-- he worked for a long time

on this huge project called Safeguard

which was an anti-ballistic missile defense system

deployed in the mid '70s, and it was only deployed

for one month, and then it was taken off

due to the SALT II treaty.

So I guess it totally did its job, right?

Pretty amazing that-- you know, back then,

that was a time when the United States actually built

huge, amazing large-scale systems,

and hey, now we build apps.

But whatever, at least we can talk to each other on the phone,

except that you're not picking up, but whatever.

Go drink a beer under the Saturn V.

Talk to you later, ciao.

And certainly we do.

♪

We enjoy some very decent

German-ish sausages and beer.

The whole museum is a shrine for Wernher von Braun,

who is one of the best examples of the horrors

and wonders of the 20th century.

His rockets sent people to the moon,

but he could only do that because he worked for the Nazis

building V2 rockets to destroy London.

Well, more people died in the labor camp where they built

the V2 rockets than did in London.

"Through Hardship To The Stars" is not just a saying.

It's a curse,

but there is something like symbolic karma.

Remember the shiny American flags,

the message of triumph of a system

of living over another?

While the $5.50 nylon flags

are still waving on the windless orb,

they are not flags of the United States of America anymore.

All material experts have no doubt about it,

the flags are now completely white, faded.

The beautiful outcome of the indifference

of years of cosmic bombardment.

♪

From the darkness of outer to the darkness of inner space.

No, not Martin Short's gallbladder,

but Mammoth Cave in Kentucky,

the longest cave system known in the world.

Last time I was here, I was 11.

I remember I asked a park ranger where I could buy ice cream,

and he sent me to the bathroom.

I guess my accent got better since then.

♪

African Americans played a vital role

in the development of cave tour routes.

Stephen Bishop was one of the lead explorers

of the cave system, he was a slave.

He gained his freedom in 1856, and sadly died a year later.

But his legendary mapping work laid the foundation

for future explorers.

One of them was Will Crowther, a programmer and caver,

who wrote the first text adventure game,

Adventure, in my birth year of 1975.

Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking

for a way to connect with his two kids.

So he wrote a text-based cave game based on

many of the locations that Bishop discovered and named.

The game triggered a global chain reaction.

Most importantly, inspiring Roberta Williams,

the godmother of graphic adventure gaming.

A lone woman in a male-dominated field,

and one of my absolute heroines.

An interesting arc of oppression, exploration,

personal loss, and creation,

and deeply rooted in the troubled history of the U.S.

♪

Guess where I am.

♪

Beautiful Pittsburgh.

Birthplace of Michael Keaton and chemical mace.

Look close, focus on my underpants.

Can you see the 3D dolphin?

In fiction, Pittsburgh is the origin

of the Videodrome signal.

In reality, it is known for being one of the few cities

that made a successful transition from a steel-based

to a knowledge-based economy.

Both equally cruel.

Wait to cross technology.

Do you know this fellow?

He created one of the most interesting

political mythologies of pop culture.

George Romero and his radical consumers, the Zombies.

We drive to Monroeville Mall,

location of Dawn of the Dead from 1978,

to chat with leftist critic and computer game designer,

Paolo Pedercini.

I think the ironic part of this history

is that the shopping mall indoors

was actually devised and invented

by, yes, a Viennese architect

who escaped from Austria during World War II

and seek refuge in the United States.

And he tried to essentially

counter the suburban sprawl.

He tried to bring some lessons

from Europe, I guess, to recreate the social--

the social context of a market,

of a square.

And through times,

he kind of realized how his original concept of

recreating a piazza and sort of like bringing people together,

creating a cultural center, not just a consuming center,

he kinda realized how it kind of failed as a project.

We are talking about like a public space

while there is a security guard here

probably trying to shut us down, because this is a social space.

It's meant to be a sort of simulation of a square,

but it's actually a very private space,

and they're gonna kick us out in five minutes, you know?

I think there is a strong connection between

this kind of space and geek and nerd culture

because geeks find their own communities online essentially.

I think there is a strong connection between

living your teenage years

in kind of an isolated environment

that you depend on the car transportation.

So you are always with your family, always in your--

in your domestic environment.

Security is tight, because a couple of months ago

a teen girl fight turned into a giant mob.

Wow.

That's even more terrifying than zombies.

If you are 15 and want to rebel against your parents,

there is a store for that, Hot Topic.

A reminder that we shouldn't fear the end of the world,

but its never-ending decay.

Watch children.

We flee to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

The center of this community is a rodent on welfare.

Punxsutawney Phil, known everywhere because of a film

that took the world by snowstorm, Groundhog Day.

The never-ending loop of small-town life

that brainwashes a cynic into true love

is one of my favorite conservative plots.

Only beaten by Ghostbusters, a film that honestly tries

to convince us that a free market can save the world,

and that Environmental Protection Agency inspectors

don't have penises.

Oh, the Euro is worth less than the dollar,

for the first time in recorded history.

Greece, ♪ I got you babe ♪♪

♪

Boston, Massachusetts.

We visit the makerspace Artisan's Asylum,

and in front of Stompy, a 4,000-pound,

six-legged hydraulic robot,

we meet my good friend, Kit Stubbs.

Kit has a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon,

but will not talk about robots at all.

Kit decided to change careers and work in the field

of sex tech and sex education.

Disclaimer, our Canon's SD card committed suicide,

but monochrom's Evelyn fixed the footage in post.

The stereotype of nerd doesn't include sex, or does it?

It's a double-edged sword though, because on the one hand,

you have the, like, poor nerd who can never get laid,

and on the other hand, you have a lot

of nerd cultural stories

in which the nerd, through persistence, gets the girl.

And it's the horrible sort of entitlement culture

where if you just work hard enough, you know,

the person that you want will suddenly fall for you,

which is just absolutely horrible.

What I have found is that a lot of geeky people,

who are interested in thinking about different kinds

of problems, find sexuality fascinating.

So I self-identify as a sex geek,

and I know a number of other folks who do as well.

And so what you're just taking is you're taking

all that passion, right, of how you love something,

because nerds, we get into a thing and we love it,

and we talk about it, and we make our own creations

that are inspired by whatever fandom we're talking about.

You can do the same thing with sex.

You know, there's sex-positive podcasts,

and making their own toys, like I do, or you're going

to Cons and you're talking with people about sexuality.

Like all that stuff still happens.

By identifying myself as a sex geek publicly,

that is a political act in this culture,

because we live in this very sex-negative culture

where sex is this kind of shameful activity

that we don't really wanna talk about,

and yet it's everywhere in the media, complicated.

I'm trying to use my privilege in ways

to help people feel kind of more accepting

of their own desires, other people's desires, and yeah.

Sex geek, it's a thing, it's a great thing.

Kit encouraged a wave of new sex geeks

and the feedback is exciting.

♪

I fear two things:

Shoggoths and Goatse,

and both out of nostalgia.

Here is the tombstone of H.P. Lovecraft.

We are not allowed to film, so please don't tell Pickman.

H.P. Lovecraft loved cheese and hated fish,

was a racist, and died, without any success as a writer,

a horrible death of cancer.

Maybe too much cheese, not enough fish.

♪ It's beginning to look a lot like fish-men

everywhere I go ♪

Lovecraft was very important for me.

He was the first of many idols

that I learned to question and disagree with,

and I needed that to grow up.

♪ I'm beginning to hear a lot of fish-men

right outside my door ♪

♪ As I try to escape in fright to the moonlit Innsmouth night

I can hear some more ♪♪

♪

Is love our true destiny?

No, it's Hopewell Junction, New York,

to meet Jason Scott, computer historian.

Nerds care about history, but until somebody

kind of walks them through what exactly happened,

the stories they'll tell you will be extremely self-centered

and extremely oriented towards their world view.

Okay, so,

currently we're located in the information cube,

which is actually an information shipping container,

which is a shipping container I started renting

a number of years ago when I moved out of my old house

and moved to New York State.

And I had collected all variety of technology,

just various pieces of human and computer culture,

and wanted to store them in some sort of way

that I could then figure out what to do next.

What I've done next, of course, is just amass more stuff.

You stay where you are.

So, here's a Hello Kitty personal pleasure toy.

A Pac-Man energy drink.

This was during the insane energy drink wars of the 2000s.

This was a bunch of Baby Boomers who thought that

they could explain the computer revolution by using

50 and 60-year-old writers.

A bright and disgusting color.

This thing sank without a trace, nobody ever heard of it again.

Sometime around, you know, the '50s and '60s,

we were producing a lot of electronics,

especially post-war, but nobody looked at it

as a pure historical force.

It was just products.

In the same way you might not get worked up

about a traffic cone, or you might not get worked up

about a shopping cart, you wouldn't get worked up

about a computer or a piece of electronic equipment.

And what we've discovered is that, no, it has real

historical value and meaning and where is it?

Floppy disks, if you're a younger kid,

look, it's a bunch of save icons.

What I and others have to do is go through them,

pull out the data that's on them, and store them online

so that later, in 40 or 50 years,

we're still able to figure out what these things were.

The third font disk, this is the second font disk.

This is the first font disk.

This is the disk that lets you read the other fonts.

Manuals to machines or equipment or software

that no longer exists, and this is vital to understand

where we came from in terms of programming,

and what different machines did, and what roles people played.

There's even, to a lighter extent, a patent aspect

to understanding who patented what when.

Minimum COBOL, this is a business language

that computers used on mainframes,

and is still in use in some places.

American civilization and perhaps worldwide civilization

still runs on COBOL.

When somebody says to me like, "I think you have

a hoarding problem,"I go, "Well, I'll take your opinion

and I will carefully stack it with all the others."

We leave, and I'm glad Jason didn't delve too deep.

I feared he would awake the Balrog.

En route to New York, or N'Ork,

as they call it in A Canticle For Leibowitz.

Laughing Squid's Scott Beale

is hosting a Traceroute party for us.

A good chance to record drunk,

nostalgic statements.

It's really weird being mainstream now.

And I used to write down URLs

in my little notebook so I could go when I get back

to a computer to look up the websites.

URL, university tilde user, you know.

So that's pretty precious, I mean, really.

This recent hype

that I call "nerdsploitation,"

because for example, you know,

you have this Big Bang Theory, right?

I mean, it kind of feels weird.

I mean, I definitely think the nerds-nerds-

nerds-nerds-nerds-nerds,

they definitely tend to be the early adopters.

They tend to be way more engaged on a whole.

♪

Baby Jesus, please open my motel room.

♪

Baby Jesus.

♪

To Raymond Rocello and his orchestra,

whose smooth jazz

got interrupted too many times.

Welcome to Grover's Mill, New Jersey,

picked by Orson Welles in 1938

as the location of a fictitious Martian invasion

for a live radio dramatization of--

The "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells.

It caused a mass panic.

I demonstrate.

♪

Concerned citizens even shot a nearby water tower

thinking it was one of the alien invaders.

What is there to learn?

Nothing, but the true lesson of life,

when and when not to give a fuck.

♪

Hello, Washington, District of Columbia!

The Pentagon, always a good excuse

for liberal American self-hate.

Arlington National Cemetery.

We pay our tributes.

♪

But my fondest memory is one of fiction.

The last minutes of the glorious 1970s

paranoia movie, Capricorn One.

NASA fakes a Mars landing, and when something goes wrong

they need to kill off the astronauts for real.

But James Brolin survives, and shows up at his own funeral,

in hyper-slo-mo.

I couldn't believe how cool that ending was.

And I wish I could still believe in such fantasies,

still believe in the great narrative

of truth versus lies.

But it's just a fantasy.

I know that nerds like the story of the lone underdog,

but it's ultimately self-degrading

and conceals the real problems.

It's not the evil feminists, if you're a

It's not evil patents, if you are part

of the fellowship of open-source.

It's not the evil NSA,

if you're a privacy hacker martyr.

All of these are third degree symptoms

and reductionist blunder.

All that exists in and through

and because of capitalism,

a totalitarian economic game that encompasses

our planet since the late 1700s,

and there is no difference if you live in Austria,

Iran, or Arlington, Virginia.

The basic rules are the same.

Capitalism separates us, forces us into alienation

and de-solidarity, and many nerds are just

willing cannon fodder for its next upgrade.

Google Campus is like Logan's Run with free shuttle busses

to visit Peter Ustinov sleep on the street.

They initially set themselves up

as essentially Neverland,

a place where you never had to grow up,

a place where everything was there for you

so that you could spend every waking moment

working for the company.

And for the nerd type, the one that's built up this bubble

of existence and this way of looking at the world

from the outside-- was and continues to be

really, really appealing to them.

The thing that drove me nuts when I went to Facebook

was they had this DJ booth, and they had vodka bottles

with little spouts attached to them so you could

nail down the vodka and do some DJ spinning.

And I was like, "Well, that explains Facebook."

♪

Kind of overwhelmed and a bit in a bad mood,

and this doesn't make it any better.

Well, last day.

In 1955, someone in the film industry

decided to put an explosive under a blood-bag

to simulate a gunshot wound.

This technique is still in use and performers

get hurt by shrapnel all the time.

Steve Tolin is a marvelous special effects problem-solver.

So he created a completely new system based on air pressure.

Eureka, but originally,

Steve wanted to become a biologist.

In my heart, I'm a creature creator above all else.

You know, and I think that that really is because

of the biology foundation that I've got.

So with biology, what you're doing

is you've got the form of something,

and you're gonna try to figure out what the function is.

You're gonna figure out what the hell does this thing--

where does he live, what does he eat, what eats it.

With a creature in a movie I've got the obvious scenario

where they give me a script and they told me who he's gonna eat,

they told me what is gonna try to kill it, how it moves,

where it lives, and so my job then is to totally

reverse-engineer the function of it

into what the form would be.

You wanted to go into biology,

and you do creature effects, you do puppets.

And now you're working for the Jesus nerds,

you're working for a museum for creationists.

So the point that I was just making

is really evident when I'm working with creationists.

I've done it in the past, I've worked for the museum

they built initially, and you really feel like

that kinda sense, in that group of people,

of trying to recreate God's work.

It's much more specific even than what I'm talking about--

I'm trying to recreate what exists, and they definitely

are trying to recreate what they see

as having been created ahead of them.

And they are now recreating a full size ark, Noah's Ark.

They're rebuilding the entire thing, it's gonna be, I think,

3 stories tall and whatever, 500 cubits long.

I mean, it's gonna be a giant place that you can go inside,

and they're recreating everything.

And again, this is what was so fascinating about it to me

because if you look about it in terms of form

following function, function sometimes is,

okay, so how does the thing work?

Like what is the physical part of how it works,

but then there's also the function of like,

how does it function theologically?

You know, and so what's the form in terms of--

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I had always heard your entire life

flashes in front of your eyes

the second before you die.

First of all, that one second

isn't a second at all.

It stretches on forever,

like Hilbert space.

For me, it was eating barbecue-flavored chips

while playing Micro Machines on my AT 386.

♪

Or visiting Skywalker Ranch and touching the real

Holy Grail from Indiana Jones.

Or watching American Beauty for the first time,

and being the only one in the theatre to understand

its true reactionary agenda.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me,

but then I remember to relax,

and stop trying to hold on to it,

and then it flows through me like Russian hydrazine,

and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single

moment of my stupid little life.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure,

but don't worry.

You will someday.

♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ The fucking force ♪

♪

♪ The motherfucking force ♪

♪ The force, the motherfucking force ♪

♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The fucking force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The motherfucking force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The force,

the motherfucking force ♪

♪ My kingdom and my horse ♪

♪ My kingdom and my horse ♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

♪ eBay ♪

♪ The force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The fucking force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The motherfucking force ♪

♪

- ♪ eBay ♪ - ♪ The force,

the motherfucking force ♪

♪ My kingdom and my horse ♪

♪ My kingdom and my horse ♪

♪

♪

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