Editor’s Note: The Triangle-based entrepreneur and futurist Marshall Brain, the creator of “How Stuff Works” and the author of the new book, “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats“, is now a regular WRAL TechWire contributor.  Today’s column features a Q&A with the co-founder and editor of WRAL TechWire and author of The Skinny blog, Rick Smith, as an introduction to the topics Brain will cover in forthcoming columns. 

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – In our 20th year, WRAL TechWire has covered many entrepreneurs, founders, startups, and topics.  We’re thrilled that Marshall Brain joins a strong bench of regular contributors to the publication in 2022.

WRAL TechWire co-founder and editor Rick Smith caught up with Brain, and a lightly edited Q&A transcript follows.

Marshall Brain, creator of ‘How Stuff Works,’ joins TechWire’s growing list of contributors

WRAL TechWire Editor Rick Smith (Smith): Get asked often?

 

WRAL TechWire contributor Marshall Brain (Brain): The most common question I have been asked over the years: “Is Brain really your last name?” Yes, this is the name on my birth certificate. My parents are from Springfield, Ohio and Brain is a real name around town. If you go to Springfield today, you still will find the Brain Lumber Company there. In the 1860s my great-great-great-grandfather started the Brain Lumber Company and now, 150 years later, it exists and has its own Facebook page.

Smith: Were you always a science nerd growing up? What got you interested?

Brain: My father was a science nerd, and either by genetics or osmosis he passed it on to me. When I was little, we lived in Huntington Beach, CA and he worked at McDonnell Douglas as an engineer on the Apollo moon missions. He also liked to make things. He built his own radio and amplifier system with an enormous speaker for block parties, cobbled together our garage door opener from spare parts, made electric bubble machines for kids, and loved to put together Heathkit stuff.

Smith: Did becoming immersed in science and learning did come easily? Naturally? Or was it hard work like it is for 99% of the world’s population?

Brain: Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

But I am curious, and I do like to take apart and fix things. In my 30s I realized that I enjoyed writing and started writing technology books. It seems like it came naturally, and could almost be considered a compulsion.

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Making science a career

Smith: When did you decide to make science a career?

Brain: I studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate in college, so that was the official start career-wise.

Smith: What’s your proudest experience as a scientist—maybe the transportation system you helped design at NCSU? (Will it get built?)

Brain: Proudest experience? Is “having four kids” a science?

Probably not, but being able to watch four kids grow from tiny babies into adults has been amazing. I am pretty proud of that, even though they did all the work.

Is “staying married for 28 years” a science? That’s more like a miracle given that Leigh is married to me, but I am proud that we have hung in there together through a lot of both joy and misery.

Is “getting to teach thousands of students at NCSU” a science? I am proud of that too, and so grateful to be able to contribute in some small way to their lives.

Most other stuff kind of pales in comparison to those three things. Writing “The Doomsday Book” was an act of science, and I am proud of that too.

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So, how does stuff work?

Smith: “How Stuff Works” – what a brilliant concept for bringing technology to the great unwashed. Where did the idea come from and how did you turn it into a company – then a career?

Brain: HowStuffWorks started as a kind of experiment. After I finished my eighth (?) book, I wanted to try creating something on this newish thing called the World Wide Web. It was a fresh, innovative new medium with the big advantage that I could release articles every day (unlike a book, where you have to write the whole thing before releasing it).

I decided that I wanted to write articles on how things worked for my 16-year-old self, because it had been really hard in that era to get good information on how things worked. So the first thing I wrote was an article called “How Car Engines Work”, and I illustrated it with some simple animated GIFs, and I made a logo for the site and I put it on the web and… no one cared.

No one read it.

But I really enjoyed writing and researching the article. So then I wrote another article, and maybe it was “How Pendulum Clocks Work”. And then each week I would try to write an article and post it on the Web, and really for a long time no one cared.

Like half a year.

But I really enjoyed writing these articles because I was learning a lot from researching to topics. And then one day a person with a pretty big following found “How Water Towers Work” and really liked it, and that was the start of an amazing organic growth cycle for the site.

HowStuffWorks turned into a company because, about 2 years after I started it, the site won “The Coolest Site on the Internet” award, and—I will never forget this—Robin Leach presented the award to me at a big ceremony in New York City.

Suddenly everyone knew about HowStuffWorks.

There is a professor over at Duke named Aaron Dinin who interviewed me in January for his podcast called Web Masters. That episode should come out one day soon and it tells more of the story.

‘Preserving a free and open Internet: A platform for innovation, opportunity and prosperity’

The emergence of the internet

Smith: Let’s talk the internet—when did you grasp its significance? What turned on the Brain bulb?

Brain: The early Internet, like in the 1980s, was OK, but it did not feel that significant. People could use it mostly to send email and transfer files. But only people at universities and some government/military agencies were actively connected. It was not very easy to use, nor was it available to most people outside of universities or the government. It was very much a niche thing.

Smith: Then came the web—your first thoughts?

Brain: The early Web in the 1990s, even though it was very simple, felt amazing. I remember being blown away the first time I downloaded a Mosaic browser and pulled up a page. Suddenly “the internet” could be useful to anybody, and in a million different ways. And then it got more and more and more and more interesting as new sites came along every day. It was one of those rare things that kept getting better and better.

But at the time, many of us missed the full potential I think. Let’s also go back to the “not the brightest bulb in the chandelier” part. I was there at the start of the World Wide Web, and I had a master’s degree in computer science, and so did a lot of my friends. I or any of my friends could have invented YouTube for example had we been more perceptive. Same for a lot of other web sites. In the same vein, I also did not buy thousands of Bitcoins in 2010 when they were like 20 cents each. This leads me to wonder: what is sitting right in front of our faces today, either in its seed form or not developed yet, that I am completely missing?

That “Web Masters” podcast I mentioned, one of his episodes is an interview with the founder of MetaCrawler (Eric Selberg). MetaCrawler was one of the first search engines in the 1990s. And he says that for the first version of the MetaCrawler, they used a normal desktop computer of that era and sucked every web page on the web into it to create the index. Meaning every web page in the entire world fit into one normal desktop machine! That shows you how tiny the Web was at the start. It was really just a toy, but an amazing toy full of potential. Once it reached critical mass, as we all know now, the web exploded.

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Doomsday

Smith: Fast forward three decades – your new book “The Doomsday Book” is amazing – entertaining, informative, and downright scary. Why did you decide to write it?

Brain: We read all of these uncomfortable headlines everyday about things like impending wars, giant forest fires, packs of robotic dogs, climate change, hypersonic missiles, floods, droughts, collapsing governments, volcanoes… and many of them sound scary and depressing. A common reaction is to put ones head in the sand and try to ignore all the doom and gloom. One day I decided that, instead of avoiding all of it, I wanted to jump into a pool filled with these doomsday scenarios. I read like 800 articles, books, etc. And out of that immersion came “The Doomsday Book”. The goal: to fully comprehend everything that could attack and/or fully destroy humanity. To comprehend all of it, and therefore understand how fragile things really are, is truly humbling.