Brain Soda Podcast - Episode 8 - Yahoo! They’re Pirating the Dodo Bird!

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

On this week's episode we'll be discussing the evolution of the the website Yahoo!, the dodo bird, and Queen of Pirates Grace O'Malley!

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Brain Soda podcast. We'd like to thank you for joining us here today. I am your host, Kyle, and here with me, as always, are my co-hosts and cohorts, Brad How's it going? and Frog. Errr. We're here today, ladies and gentlemen, to talk about Yahoo's Rise and Fall, the Dodo Bird, and the Pirate Queen.

To start, gentlemen, Yahoo.com was founded in 1995, developed at Stanford, by Jerry Gang and David Filo. So what did it start as? Originally, it was developed as something stupidly called Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web. So it's like a search thing? It starts off as like a search engine and news aggregate, like most other things were. The internet in the Wild West, early pioneering days of its public use, right?

So very early 90s, some mid 90s stuff, right? It's mostly about becoming people's landing page. AOL kind of cornered the market for a long time by providing an internet use provider. Net Zero was another company that did stuff like that. So those disks, if you guys remember those old CD disks that would be floating around would not only provide access to their service, but the browser in and of itself, right? So later on, they end up kind of taking over and becoming the most visited site. They were more frequently than not the landing page for people.

Another thing that we'll talk about as to why they were successful, Frog, you say currently you use their fantasy football, right? That's part of the appeal. That was part of the appeal and AOL was big into it too, but Yahoo is who we're talking about today. And they still use some, like the stock market, I guess is very big, they're still too. Yahoo Finance, right? Yeah.

What we're going to talk about overall and in general is a lot of projects that I feel like once I introduce the premise to you, you'd be absolutely amazed that Yahoo was one of the first people to develop them and when they did. But first guys, I want to talk about just the simple fact, like any website that existed at that point, they crashed in the late 90s, early 2000s, they had an initial public offering of their stock in 1996. These guys blew up to the point where at that point they went from a stock of like $118 per share to going to $4 per share.

Wow. That's pretty good. Like a complete downhill drop off. They weren't getting some good stuff on Yahoo Finance at the time then, I'm sure. Well, and here's another funny thing about that too is like, what you think about, they did online retail as well. So like Amazon. So they could have been like, Amazon is another.

Is this like a Blackbuster Netflix story? Well, I want to, let's get to what I referenced earlier. So we just talked about how Amazon is an online retailer, Yahoo wasn't in this space as well. In 1999, they launched something called Yahoo Briefcase. Have you guys ever heard of that? I have not. Okay.

Do you guys, did you guys use Yahoo? Is it like earlier on, like I guess the time you're talking about, because like I used it as mail. I actually use Yahoo Messenger a lot too. I didn't use, well, I used AOL too, but I used AOL more than anything else. At that point, that's who we provided our internet through those discs. 1999, Yahoo Briefcase, you guys have not been familiar with it. They offered cloud storage, even on files that had photographs up to like five megabytes.

Oh man, that's some good storage back then. In 1999. Actually, that's probably pretty good storage. In 1999, so just to go over what we use typically, how do we share files between the three of us? Google Drive. Yeah. Exactly.

And I think they actually have a five gigabyte thing. So it's almost like they just upped it by, you know, to the next denominator. Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's talk about this in 2001. They bought a company called Lodgecast and then they started their own freemium music streaming service where you could play up to like a thousand songs for free or for four to hours a month.

You could listen to however many songs you wanted and unlimited skips. So they just pretty much had their hands in everything. Cause yeah, Spotify and Pandora, it sounds just like that. Amazon. Amazon has their own music. Yeah. Yeah. That is a good point to jump back to the point we were making earlier.

I think Amazon is succeeding and capitalizing in places that Yahoo didn't. Overall, and in general, maybe that's what it is. Or maybe they were just far too early to that space. I mean, I'll be honest, man. I don't know how much music I really could have streamed off my internet set up, granted again, rural Michigan. You're honestly blowing my mind because I thought I always thought of Yahoo as like a more of a Google type thing.

And to me, it's sounding more like Yahoo is kind of more of almost like an Amazon slash just, I mean, I would say Amazon, like an Amazon precursor. It's very interesting that you bring up Google because in 1998, Brad, they had an offer to license out some search engine software. They were probably at this point going to become within a few years the biggest search engine on the web as well. But they could have bought Google for like a million dollars in 1998, they were approached by couple times.

Didn't they get approached a second time? There's a second time. At least at least that I was able to find, but in 1998, two other Stanford graduates approached them to license out their innovative search engine technology, which would later turn into Google. And by like 2006, mind you, Google had already surpassed them in visits search engine results. So would Google have become, I mean, I guess it probably would have, but maybe not though. Let's go to that second time.

Maybe they would have because in 2002, they offered $3 billion to buy Google. So now they were in the opposite position of wanting to buy and capitalize off the work that they had just passed up for a million dollars four years earlier, right? So apparently that kind of stopped when they were not able to reach what they were holding out for Google was five billion. So literally an extra $2 billion and they could have owned Google in 2002. And then they're supplanted by them in like 2005, 2006 ish. And then I want to go back to our long list of Yahoo failings, I guess we can call them.

In 2008, Yahoo came up with something called Yahoo Live and you could upload or live stream video. That sounds really familiar. Hey, I wish there would be a cool YouTube had already been purchased by Google, I think at this point. Okay. So YouTube was like what 2006 ish, wasn't it? 2006 was when I think the website blew up and became one of the most popular sites on

the internet. But I want to say it like 2008 is when Google bought YouTube. I could be wrong. But yeah, you could even live stream though that I think is the biggest thing like Twitch is rivaling YouTube in that space currently right now kind of coming up, catching up for all that lost ground that it would have between the two of them, right? Does Twitch have like Twitch is like exclusively live streaming, I think, I think. But I think you can replay old live streams that somebody have had perhaps.

I've never used Twitch. I'll be perfectly honest, but regardless and then that actually rebranded itself over a number of years and you may have actually touched your hands on this one, Brad. So in 2011, it becomes restructured and rebranded from live to Yahoo screen. They geared more towards video on demand and original content. They even signed community back to a season after it was canceled. I think I heard of it, but I did not sign up for it. No.

Yeah. I don't know. Like, I mean, it's crazy to me that there's all these Yahoo things because like thinking about Yahoo, there always has been a lot of like different things they have, you know, but it just seems like they really missed a lot of opportunities or maybe they tried them and it just wasn't time or they didn't implement them right or, you know, from what it sounds like. Right.

I mean, like you and I have talked about when you look at what Google does today, when you look at what Amazon does today, those are the formulas for the two biggest internet properties on the planet, right? And you could make the argument that they are now taking the blueprint that's laid out here and actually practicing it well. And does that mean, does that mean that it was too early for Yahoo's blueprint or does it mean that they failed to capitalize on certain elements within it? I think an argument could be made either way.

So Microsoft in 2008 was going to buy Yahoo for $44 billion plus $44 billion to buy Yahoo in 2008 though. When were they offering $5 billion to Google again? 2002. In 2002, they didn't offer $5 billion to Google. And then within a couple years, I mean, to be honest, that's probably part and parcel as to why you would buy Yahoo is to compete with Google. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So that's what Microsoft tried to do. And then about 10 years later, a little less, Verizon had bought Yahoo and AOL. And they bought Yahoo in and of itself for less than $5 billion, like $4.83 to be exact. What about a $150 million gamble? Full terms. Yeah. On what?

What's the bet? What's the bet? What's the bet? What's the bet? That you can bring a bird back from extinction. I would gamble you could do it at this point between all the genetic research and money that's probably been thrown around. I don't want to bet on what science can do.

Well, that's the bet that a group has given a business called Colossal Biosciences to try to bring back the dodo. Okay. How did that out? Partially because of humans. I mean, it was definitely because of humans. It's a perfect example of human-caused excursions. Not us.

Yeah. But also, I mean, I guess recent evidence has showed that it's also because of invasive species and stuff too, but it's because we brought them there, though, to begin. The first time that the dodo was seen was in 1507 by these Portuguese sailors that were sailing around the eastern coast of Madagascar. It wasn't until around 1600 when Dutch sailors actually landed on this island. It's just this tiny little island, again, on the east side of Madagascar. It's on this tiny little island called Mauritius.

Over on this island, there's just a few species of birds that actually ended up landing there long ago and finding a nice island to live and, you know, found good food and all that and then ended up evolving to having no flying capabilities. So they're kind of stuck on the island. And one of these birds was the dodo. Yeah, wait a minute. Hold on. Why would you gamble $150 million on this bird that evolved to not be able to fly off

an island? That's true. That's my point. Yeah, I mean, like that, if we're talking about it as a gamble, if we're talking about a gamble, I don't know about putting my $150 million on that tree. I mean, it's not so much they're like gambling on it. It's just that they're like investing $150 million. Like it's one of the things that we definitely cause to go extinct.

So like we're trying to bring it back, right? No, in all honesty, it is a noble, awesome cause. To be honest, yes. It is. We just, we killed it within 80 years. They didn't even taste good. It's just that they had no predators, right? So they would just come right up to the humans and be like, oh, hey, look at this new animal

on the island. You had never seen him before. And it became like a nuisance animal and people were allowed to just wanton murder it. Not nuisance. Not a nuisance. Just like, oh, well, I'm hungry. You know, I've been sailing. I'm a sailor.

Right. I'm stopping at this island. Look at this bird. They're just walking up to me and better let me eat them, you know, and yeah, they killed them off really quick. Yeah. Just straight up. Yeah, I'll just cook it.

They're a little bit bigger than a turkey. They're about, it just looks like a buzzard type thing, man. I was going to say, like, why would you want to eat it? Yeah. But I mean, you know, I mean, it's, you got a turkey. You're going to die. You know, if you were just to see a turkey and you have not even know what a turkey looks like, you'd be like, you eat that thing, you know, the weird face and everything that

thing. And you eat a lot of sea foul goose and feed dock. Yeah. I mean, like, yes, it kind of has like a big beak, you know, and like, like it's like British brown, like, or the beacons, you know, or a bill, I guess. And they're like these little tiny wings and a big head weighs about like 50 pounds, though. So there's got to be some meat on there, you know. Right.

Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So like, all right. So this tea, like, okay. So what extinct, right? And like, we over, you know, people have known about it, like you guys know about it, which is surprising because like it's an animal that's extinct and like, I mean, I guess it's like a saber-toothed tiger or a woolly mammoth or something.

It's one of those animals that like people just know about because we killed it off, unfortunately. But. Well, I mean, to be honest about it, was it probably one of the more notable extinctions that happened before we really started to emphasize those happening more as a culture? I guess it was just because of how easily it went extinct, I think. I think because. And I would almost think the fact that us as a society didn't talk about those things

until like, sealing, right? Yeah. Yeah. All whaling and stuff like that. So this team, what they're going to try to do, they have the reconstructed genome of the Dodo. It was like, it was pretty hard to find that because they don't, we don't even have like a full body of it, I guess.

But they have the reconstructed genome of it. So that's like the DNA, the genetic, like essentially the code of exactly, you know, like the code of how to program, you know, to build this thing. You know, to kind of put it in like a robotic way, in a sense. What they need to do though, is they need to use a surrogate. Closest relative to that is a bird called the Nicobar pigeon. And this is kind of a cool looking bird. Like it looks nothing like the Dodo.

It's kind of. Yeah. So how is it it's closest relative then? I mean, things like, you know, it just depends on like the closest living relative, right? It could be a long lineage and they divert here way, way back. Yeah. Exactly. Oh my God.

This is beautiful. Yeah. It's beautiful. Like it looks almost like a pheasant, right? So, so it doesn't look like a pigeon though. When you think of a pigeon. That's not what I think of. Well, the head.

I can see it in the head looking at the picture. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So the problem with this is, is that like we've cloned things, right? You know, Dolly, Dolly the sheep was the first. Yeah. That's what I was thinking.

That's like 97. Exactly. We've cloned mammals before and it's easier to clone mammals because we do what's called the somatic cell transfer. And what that is is that, so like the cell, the egg cell has a nucleus and we can take that nucleus out and then insert the genetic, you know, the genes that we want in there and into, to like essentially create a new nucleus and then give that little shock. And then that creates, that makes the egg think that it's been fertilized and then boom.

So a bird egg is like huge though. You know, it's not like a human egg or even a sheep egg. Like those are little microscopic things. The nucleus of a bird egg is also microscopic. However, the yolk is not microscopic. So it's very hard to find that and to be able to like keep it alive, right? You can't just like, look, put the yolk under a microscope or essentially, yeah, you can't put it underneath the microscope.

Like it's hard to work and it moves around. The nucleus moves around on that yolk, you know? So because of that, there's not really a way to do what we do with mammalian cells. Like we can't really like fertilize it like that and take out that nucleus and put a new one back in. So what these researchers have done or have thought to do on this, it's been kind of thought to do with a, they've done it with chickens and stuff like that. They have looked into doing something that's called primordial germ cells.

And those are cells that are like destined to become like part of the testes or ovaries, right? Gonads, essentially, right? Stem cells, but for genitals. Essentially stem cells, yes. But not, yeah, their distance become gonads, yes. So what they're going to do is they're going to inject these cells into the developing embryo when it's still like very early on before it has those cells.

And that's going to replace what would, you know, the cells that would have been developed. And from there, the, this pigeon is going to grow up and it's going to be just like a normal pigeon, but it's gonads, you know, they'll have a male and a female. They will have the gonads of a dodo. They're going to hermaphrodite a bird. Essentially, they're going to make, no, not a hermaphrodite, a chimera. What? Yes.

Wait, what? Like a magical mythical creature? Kind of. In a way. Well, I mean, I guess that's what it's called. There is a mythical creature. Right. Oh, okay.

So then if those two birds mate, then they theoretically should make a dodo bird. That's why. For real though, like, A, you're taking this small, almost unworkable surface and turning it into like this gene bath that can be able to produce replicating cells, awesome. It's going to take time. It's not going to be like just a one thing. It's going to be a multi-generational thing. Wow.

That is just solid, bro. To have the ingenuity to start work on that, to get to the end result that you're talking about over those generations is pretty sick, man. That's so cool. Wait, is there a time frame for this? No, it's just, I mean, maybe there is like a goal or something. I don't know if there's, you know, there's no deadline. But they don't know how long this process takes.

They might. They vary, well, might internally, by them going generationally, it could take a number of years just inherently on what does it take for one of those birds to get up age, right? That as well. They're going to have to make small incremental change. Yes. They're going to have to make small incremental changes with this type. But however, it seems possible because they've done it, well, just with chickens though, from

one like different breed of chicken to another, and they're trying it with another different type of bird or prairie bird that went extinct. But yeah, I know it's promising. They could start going down some, they could start going down some dark paths with that. You could. Well, the thing is, is that, like, we already have them, the mammalian things, yeah, we already have that. We could clone things with mammals, but it's hard to do with, like, to grow.

It's really hard. And to do it, I mean, just like rest your fears a little bit. Like we said earlier, Dolly the sheep is a mammal that was produced and known to the public in 1997, while it is, like, really shady that, like, you haven't heard of it since then. It also, like, makes a lot of sense because imagine how long and how much money had already been invested in that as a genetic science accomplishment. Like, yeah, it's probably so difficult to do that, like, we're only just now starting

to come to where it's more feasible to even attempt or work on projects of that nature and doing them on smaller scales. Like right now, you're with this. That's amazing. Well, just real quick on that. I think, I think if there's one thing that I could just do, it's gonna sound weird if I think if there's just one thing I could do, it would just be to go through and, like, lift the roof on, like, all the scientific, biggest scientific labs in the world and just

take a freaking peak, just see what's going on and be great. It would be wild. It would be. Every little hidden basement that you could think of that just isn't even thought of, like, what are you doing in there? Trust me, there's a lot of, like, just a lot of overworked people that just are using a lot of pipetting one liquid into another. I bet you that's what a lot of lab has.

For solvents and solutions and just seeing what the result is, yeah. Yeah, that's really what does that work in a lab and that's, like, yeah. That's pretty much what a lot of labs are. Yeah, but I want to see the results. I want to see what they're thinking. I want to see what they, what are they doing. There's got to be some crazy labs out there, I'm sure, like, government was and stuff. That nobody knows about.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, bro, let's hear about this queen of pirates. The amazing Grace O'Malley. You guys know about Grace O'Malley? Anything about her? I, I have not.

I have not heard of her, no. I only know about Sean O'Malley. So she's actually kind of written out of the story books for most pirate stories, I should say. So there's not, like, a whole lot of information on her, but there's enough to give you a gist of what type of person she was, and it's a ruthless savage, a beautiful ruthless savage. So where was she, what did she hail from? So she was born off the coast of Ireland.

She was kind of born into wealthiness. Her, her father, her family, they owned quite a bit, the Irish coast, and kind of did a lot out in the water, and that's kind of what gave her her interest in, you know, taking command of her own ship. What she later did, she, she became captain of the Lady Ellen, but that's for down the road. Her father was often on the water quite a bit. So at the age of 11, she immediately took to one to set and sail.

Oh yeah, she just, she wanted it, all of it, everything that the water had to offer. And she did. Once her father died, she pretty much actively took the Lordship by land and sea pretty much. And just kind of, so here's a little story that this is kind of what attracted me to this chick and was like, I want to know everything in there, know about her, but, which isn't much. But she was, she was, so there was a, there was a battle going on and she was pregnant with her son while at sea.

Well, she ended up finding a way to go get this baby out of her. And then within an hour later, she popped back up after Algerian pirates ambushed her ship. They boarded her ship. She wrapped that kid up in a blanket, popped up on deck and was like, yo, ain't gonna happen. And she led to the victory and the capture of their vessel and took that over. Bro, wait, so did she have a sea section or did she give birth? Like she's like, I can't break my water dog.

We're going right there on the ship. That's insane. During the battle before it probably, right? During? Well, yeah, before, I think, I'm guessing immediately before you spot it on their way out there. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And then they're like, yo, I'm sure it takes quite a while for ships to meet up in the 16th century. Probably. Yeah. Yes. And to have a baby too. I mean, it's not for her. It was.

She's like, oh, get this girl. We got to fight. Yeah. I got, I got, I got a battle. You know, she, but she, yeah, she wrapped up the kid up and so, wow, dude. Yeah. That is such a harrowing and like that ass female moment that like, which we could never know.

We could never know what it'd be like to like, yeah, that's, I mean, it's, I was like, dude, I want to, I want to know everything about her. So anyways, in that kind of, I mean, a lot of people looked at her as a hero, but also a lot of people looked at her as just like a pirate of the seas, just a savage, a scurvy dog. If you will. Yeah. An outlaw.

It's a frog. Like, I mean, how long was she a pirate? Like, did she live a long time? Was she pirating? Like, just, and where did she pirate at? She pirated off the Irish coast and she, off the Irish coast. She, uh, well, she, she lived to be like 70 something years old. It doesn't really get into her death.

Yeah. Not the life expectancy I would have for a pirate. No, cause it was, it was around 1530. She was born and she died around 1603 in early, early seventies. You know what I mean? Okay. That's great. The, even in the Irish coast, I didn't even know there was pirating off the Irish coast.

That's pretty crazy. Yeah. I didn't really either. And that's, that's the Atlantic ocean. I mean, for anybody that doesn't know. So, um, what she ended up doing was she ended up marrying into wealth. Her husband had like, I think a thousand thousand or something cattle and quite a few other different things.

So she married into wealth while he ended up dying and the people that killed him took over his castle, she ended up going back and killing all of them and taking over the castle for their self and she set up other little castles along the coast and essentially baited ships in and kind of like when she seen ships coming in, she would float out to them and be like, you're either paying to pass or we're taking your ship, you know, and that's kind of how she lived out the rest of her life until they took her son like Queen Elizabeth was like, we've had enough of this chick. Queen Elizabeth sent out people to kidnap her son to kind of swing her in.

Well, she ended up coming in and talking to Queen Elizabeth and she kind of did like some disrespectful stuff to the Queen. She was like, she didn't bow to her, she didn't kneel, she didn't, I, yeah, it's crazy. I didn't know that there was like a pirating community. She had castles and everything on Ireland. It's crazy. I always, like I said, I always thought it was like a more about like a lot of stuff. So the million dollar question frog, if you were to cast a film based on even just the

events that we were talking about right now, who would it be? Hang on, I got to think of her name. I know what it is. So she, I mean, just like an Irish lady, there's not a picture of her is there. So it's just a redheaded Irish lady. I mean, yeah, you can really do it with anybody in some box dye, to be fair. I would agree with that. Yeah, but they're statues of her.

That's true. Yeah, I saw the one. Yeah, I guess there's some statues of her. So this is going to sound completely terrible because the British and the Irish have such a bad history. But I think actually looking at her statue up close, I think, hang on. You know, this is probably a weird pic, but I would say Liv Tyler. I could see Liv Tyler.

Tilda Swinton. So I think if that's if that's my answer, it's going to be Tilda Swinton. Tilda Swinton. Yeah, I could see that. She's God, right? She's God and frickin Constantine. Yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about now.

Yeah. No, I think she played really good. She may be Irish. Is she British or is she Irish? I thought she was British. OK, my bad. That's really cool. Man, that's really cool from I did not know there was Irish pirates, let alone

an Irish pirate queen. She was dope. Yeah, Kyle, you want to leave us out? And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to thank you for joining us here as always on the Brain Soda Podcast for a frog for Brad. I'm Kyle, and we will see you next weekend. Bye. Blame me, Blame.

Hey, everybody, it's Kyle here from the Brain Soda Podcast, reminding you to find us on Facebook. Listen on Spotify, Google, Amazon, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Ah, Brain Soda.