Cathode ray tubes, known for being televisions, famous for being CRT televisions. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why cathode ray tubes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks.

Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie.

Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of cathode ray tubes?

I mean, it sounds cool as hell.

I like the sound of it.

Cathode ray tubes, it sounds like a Duck Dodgers sort of weapon where I press a button

and it shoots a laser or alternatively shoots out sort of a little flag that says bang,

but then outside of the little flagpole shoots a tinier gun that actually shoots a laser.

I'm so glad we are both so versed in Duck Dodgers and not what it was based on, which was a very famous but old-timey serial called Buck Rogers.

But we're specifically versed in the Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes parody of Buck Rogers called Duck Dodgers.

I mean, it's the ship of Theseus because now kids are probably only familiar with like the Roblox version of Duck Dodgers.

So it'll keep getting sort of more and more modified until essentially all thought is blobs.

But, you know, yeah, speaking of the youth, cathode ray tubes, that sounds, I'm thinking like this feels

like a mid-1900s kind of thing.

Yeah, and it pretty much is.

And also, like, we're both generationally in the group that had access to cathode ray tube-based

televisions.

And then also they got replaced by LED TVs and LCD TVs pretty quickly.

Yeah, because the cathode ray tube television is the one where you turn on and it kind of go,

like this kind of, bong, bong, bong, bong.

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