Long-time listeners might recognize this story.

We did a version of it years ago.

The original narrator for this piece joined forces with one of our competitors,

and together they have been aggressively poaching our catalog to make videos.

So we've decided to start removing his name and voice from our podcast.

This is damn interesting.

On the 12th of November 1971, in the Presidential Palace in the Republic of Chile, President

Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly

improbable conversation. Beer was a world-renowned cybernetician, and Allende was the newly elected

leader of the impoverished Republic. Beer, a towering middle-aged man with a long, dark beard, sat face to face with the horn-rimmed,

mustachioed, grandfatherly president, and spoke at great length in the solemn palace.

A translator whispered the substance of Beer's extraordinary proposition into Allende's ear.

The brilliant Brit was essentially suggesting

that Chile's entire economy, transportation, banking, manufacturing, mining, and more,

could all be wired to feed real-time data into a central computer mainframe, where specialized

cybernetic software could help the country to manage resources, to detect problems

before they arise, and to experiment with economic policies on a sophisticated simulator

before applying them to reality.

With such a pioneering system, Beer suggested, the impoverished Chile could become an exceedingly

wealthy nation.

In the early 1970s, the scale of Beer's proposed network was

unprecedented. One of the largest computer networks of the day was a mere 15 machines in the

...