Hey guys, it's Kate. As you can probably hear I'm at the airport, but I wanted to hop on before today's episode to quickly note that we recorded this episode before the recent developments where Elon Musk-Rock AI generated sexual images of children. We will talk more about this at a later day. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, good for you. Please enjoy the last days of your holiday. But that news makes this episode's core idea even more apt. So please

enjoy and happy new year. Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And today our guest is Charlie Worsell, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who also hosts the technology podcast Galaxy Brain.

Charlie, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Charlie and I used to work together, and I typed way back when, and then I was like, what was the year?

And it's 2022, which is actually not way back when at all.

That was only three years ago, but it feels like another lifetime.

But despite working together, I don't actually think I know the answer to this question,

which is the question we ask all first time guests, which is what was your first internet memory?

It is supremely wholesome.

Like, so, so ridiculous.

We got the, I want to say it was 1994, I think, and it was President's Day around that time.

Or no, it was Martin Luther King Day like when like it was that

long weekend it was really snowy out and I got permission to like install American online it took it

like a day to boot up so that's Sunday night and then Monday morning I was like I'm going to go check

this thing out and there was a short video clip of the I Have a Dream speech. Oh my God. Literally, I was like, what's this? And I was like, cool. Like, content aside, I was like, you can watch a video on the internet. And it was like, it probably took like six hours to load, you know, that 15 second clip of him. But I was just like, I'm in, I'm in. We can consume video. So, but it ended up

being as wholesome as you could have ever expected. And it was just totally downhill from there.

I was saying it's so funny that like what you did is like, you know how like college brochures always make it

look so picturesque like you did what like the college brochure for the internet was which is like

opening it up and looking up an inspiring speech about civil rights it was just up on the

homepage but like literally 40 minutes later i'm sure I was in like a chat room

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