00:04:19 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:04:19] S0: You're like the original chat GPT, but you were doing that at age seven. I love it. [00:04:25] S1: Love talking to people, strangers on the internet. I was like a extremely active, one of the top contributors in Yahoo Answers. And I was also very active on the online games of that era. Some might remember Club Penguin or Webkinz or some of the other all time iconic early web games. But for me, that was just heaven. I had so much fun with my friends, making new friends, Club Penguin, making my igloo, the coolest igloo in town. I just thought that websites were the coolest thing ever.
00:04:55 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:04:55] S0: It's funny because we always hear these stories of computers and computing really kind of destroying youth and how it's such a huge challenge for how young folks are not kind of having this sort of origin notes that they could. Like, young folks are not getting the education they need because they're distracted by devices. And at the time when I was growing up, the same was said about television. And your version of working with your computer is like how much television I watched. So when I was a kid, I watched every eighties television show that existed from Love Boat to Three's Company to Different Strokes, and I literally memorized every episode. And it sort of helped me kind of understand how the world through that distorted lens, mind you, worked, and it led me to understand conversations between adults and what people are doing outside of this little town in Kansas. And it's funny because when I hear your story about getting a computer, was sort of the window to the rest of the world in some way. Did any of the folks that you interact with kinda know that you were a seven year old kind of pounding away on the keyboard, or was the Internet so early, it was just hard for anyone to kind of grok what was actually happening?
00:06:19 · Markie Wagner
[00:06:19] S1: No. I don't think they did. And there's this hilarious quote. I forget who says it. On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog. And I love that because no one really knew I could just be bad at writing sentences or something like this. And I would chat with people about so many random things. And sometimes I would pick up the phone and call and say like, okay, have a question. I'm going to call the professor or I'm going to call this person who works in tech because no one in the area that I grew up in or my family works in tech. Or I call tech support or whoever, and they'd pick up and they'd say, oh, hello, like, you know, happy to answer questions. And me and my high pitched, like eight year old voice would be like, hello, I'd love to hear about your research or something so silly like that. And they'd always be so shocked. Like my mom has a story that she'll tell at Christmas or family events where she walked into the living room when she heard me on speaker with, I think, an Apple engineer or somebody who I wanted to, like, know how the iPhone was made or something. And they pick up and I'm like, Hello. They're like, Is this Markie? I'm just so shocked. And so I think it was really powerful because if I had been walking up to Apple as an eight year old, they would have been like, Get out of here. What are you doing here? But by the time I started to know different people, they had already thought that I was at least earnest enough to help a little bit. Right? And so, yeah, I was a very obsessive child. And I think that is kind of the overarching theme. I mean, like you, you sound like, you know, you memorized lines to these TV shows. One of my housemates has every line of Titanic memorized. And I think obsession reveals itself in different ways. He watches the Titanic still, like, all the time. It's so funny. But for me, yeah, it was obsession with the Internet.
00:07:50 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:07:50] S0: Most of us that got computers early, like, started in some kind of gaming. For me, it was typing in games from a magazine and watching them run because they didn't have storage and then when you'd have storage, you'd get games and then you would try to find games from your friends and then eventually, you get into programming. Was there a moment where you moved from kind of using the computer to programming the computer?
00:08:12 · Markie Wagner
[00:08:12] S1: Yeah. I have a very distinct memory. I was sitting on my childhood, like, living room couch, and I go, oh my god. Websites are so cool. I want a website. Like, I want my own website. I have to have my own website. And so I like yelled at my mom, like, mom, I want to, I'm going to go build a website. And she says, as long as it's free. And that led me to building my own little Frankenstein website. The first one that I ever built was a website about my pet hamster, Natasha. Hamstersandus.com, it's still up to this day. And it was nothing special. It was just kind of stitched together, but it was so fun to have a domain that I could send to my friends and family that had pictures of hamsters that I thought were cool and very misguided advice about how to take care of your hamsters that I thought was true. And for me, that was the most amazing thing. And that was something so special. And it would make everyone open it on every device they had all the time. And I would post it all over Yahoo! Answers, of course. Every hamster themed question, it would be like, have you guys heard of this amazing website about how to take care of your hamsters? Oh, Oh man, this gem, this diamond in the rough right here, got to get a load of it. And so attracted a small measly group of users to that, which was just so fun. I just couldn't get enough of it. I built a couple other ones like this built up for selling random stuff on the internet and build them in volume from there.
00:09:40 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:09:40] S0: Yeah. And how did you learn? Like, when it comes to the sort of now you wanted to build a website, like, what was the process for figuring out, like, the HTML or the hosting? How did you figure out how to go from using them to building them? [00:09:53] S1: Yeah. My first v 0.0 website was like a free website hosting situation. And then I said, oh man, this is cool, but it doesn't quite look how I want. And so from there, we'd start using HTML templates, tweaking that a little bit. I kind of learned by changing the code little by little, and then eventually changing bigger and bigger chunks of it to make it look how I wanted. And so, yeah, internet resources, online videos, emailing random people who are engineers saying like, hey, this is my first website. Like, can you help me solve this problem? [00:10:28] S0: Is your day like you go to grade school, come home, turn on the computer, basically stay online for four or five hours, and then just go to bed and repeat? [00:10:40] S1: Yeah, absolutely. That was literally exactly my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't enrolled in any sports or athletic activities. So that was my day. It was like, play my online games. Minecraft entered the picture at some point to play that. It was like this really amazing, like hunger games Minecraft server. That was really fun. And then when I felt inspiration or when I felt like I wanted to just go build stuff too. It was all kind of blended together.