The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S1E17 - Built on Rubber!
Quick note - a few audio drop outs here and there. Tried to edit around them, but nothing too serious and you'll get the gist in all the spots with issues.
Rubber is one of those materials we almost never think about, right up until it fails. From tyres and medical gloves to seals, gaskets, and global logistics, modern life quietly depends on a substance that still comes, quite literally, from trees.
In this episode, Renee and Marc trace the unlikely journey of rubber from indigenous use in the Amazon, through the boom and collapse of Brazil’s rubber economy, to the accidental discovery of vulcanisation and the rise of a global industry built on a single species of tree. Along the way, they explore the colonial economics and ethical costs of the rubber boom, the fragility of today’s supply chains, and why the world remains dangerously dependent on Southeast Asian plantations.
Drawing on firsthand experience touring rubber plantations in Thailand and research into modern alternatives, the conversation moves from tree sap to tyres to the future of latex itself. From aircraft tyres and hospitals to dandelions, desert shrubs, and genetically engineered crops, the episode looks at how rubber is being reinvented before its weaknesses become unavoidable.
Disruption to natural rubber could trigger cascading failures across medicine, sanitation, and global trade, this episode asks a simple question with unsettling implications: what happens when the quiet material holding everything together disappears?
Featuring the song "Elastic Hearts"
Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.
email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com
Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that all the tires on every vehicle have cracked, not gradually, not politely, but all at once. Cars, trucks, buses, planes, gone. And while you're processing that, the hospital down the streets starts rationing gloves because their next shipment never actually arrived. The water treatment plant reports leaks because their gaskets have failed. You can't drive over that bridge anymore because rubber components are failing and can't be replaced. Everything that depends on rubber, which is nearly everything, begins to unravel.
Marc:Wow. So every bad headline you've ever seen, compressed into a single Friday.
Renee:Modern life rests on a material most people never think about. And today, we're going to talk about it.
Marc:Okay, so we've been on this whole kick around logistics and shipping and, you know, just, I don't know, industrial tech and railroads and boxes, all that sort of thing. And, and it just, and I was, and I ended up watching this, this documentary about rubber and I thought, wow, that's really cool. It was a whole documentary about Fordlandia, which was Ford's attempt to create like a functioning village or city in the rainforest in Brazil. And they told the whole, yeah, I know your face is like, what? Yeah, why? So that's what led me here because we've been talking about trains, planes, and automobiles and.
Renee:Shipping and logistics and all of that. And then I watched this crazy thing and I thought, well, we need to talk about rubber. And I agreed because I'd been to Biosphere 2 and saw that big rubber bladder that was, you know, hanging in that room where it helps the entire ecosystem breathe. Yeah. I've seen some cool rubber. So, okay. So welcome back to the Nostalgic Nerds podcast, the show where we dig into the technologies that quietly prop up society. Rubber is one of the purest examples of that. It's ancient, essential, and almost invisible until it breaks.
Marc:Its story is bizarre. It begins with tree sap, like literally tree sap, and ends with global infrastructure. And in between, we've got chemistry experiments that have gone wrong, international smuggling, because of course, colonial economics, disease outbreaks, and one moment where an entire nation's economy collapsed. Rubber should have its own Netflix drama series. I would watch the heck out of that.
Renee:Oh, right. Remember that Simpsons episode where Lisa's in the classroom and they're watching a story about sand,
Marc:Sand, sand.
Renee:Yeah, this is one of those.
Marc:Oh, you know what? That would be a good, like, we should troll through the Simpsons episodes and go through and see. Because they do, like, the meat industry. They do. And sand. And, like, there's a whole bunch of those. Troy McClure.
Renee:There's a ton of them. Yeah. Vegetarianism.
Marc:Yeah, a whole bunch of them. Vegetarianism. Yeah. That would be funny. That would be funny. Okay. I'll put it on the list.
Renee:It's going on. Every time we do one of these, we've got six more things to do. We just talked about Viking history, like the technology of Vikings. We're killing it today.
Marc:Yeah, definitely.
Renee:Natural rubber starts with latex from the Hevea tree? What is that?
Marc:You know what? I don't know how to pronounce it either. So, yeah, Hevea.
Renee:Okay. You guys, if there's a correct pronunciation, just throw it our way.
Marc:Throw it out there.
Renee:Make sure it's absolutely phonetically spelled. Otherwise, we'll make this mistake again. Indigenous communities in the Amazon were using it for centuries in ways that were ingenious and perfectly adapted to their environment. The waterproof cloth shaped containers made balls that bounced unlike anything Europeans had seen. Rubber was flexible, resilient, and seemed to defy the material. Hey, hang on. So they figured out how to create a rubber ball and use it for games.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:What were they using before that?
Marc:I don't know. Fruit? Heads? Heads. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they just didn't.
Renee:And they impressed the Europeans. That's not easy to do. Yeah. I'm just going to put it out there. That's not easy to do to impress the— Well,
Marc:You know, but when Europeans tried to industrialize rubber, the materials just—it just refused to cooperate. So, yeah, I don't know if you've seen it before, but it's kind of temperamental. In warm weather, it gets sort of sticky and gummy, and in cold weather, it becomes brittle and, you know, kind of cracks and breaks apart. It expands and contracts unpredictably, attempts to make shoes or coats out of it, Look promising until the seasons changed and everything basically dissolves. The world wanted rubber, but rubber wanted nothing to do with the world. So, so, so basically, you know, seeing how rubber actually comes out of the tree changed my perspective. So I went to Thailand, I don't know, a couple years back. It was one of these total boondoggles, right? It was, you know, all the people from the leadership team of a particular company, I won't name. And we all got on planes and we all went to Thailand and we all hiked through the jungles of Thailand because it was leadership and, you know, made teams better and all that sort of stuff.
Renee:And a death march sounds like a good idea.
Marc:Yeah, totally. It sounds like a good idea. But seeing, and we went, we walked through a rubber plantation, which was kind of cool. So I saw how that worked, but it changed my perspective. I toured that, you know, plantation thinking that there'd be all this machinery and pipes and some sort of industrial choreography. But what was there is actually completely different. And I don't know if you've ever seen it, but, you know, basically workers, they move from tree to tree with these little curved blades. They make really precise cuts on the bark. And as soon as that cut is made, the latex began to gather in these kind of tiny drops. And it flows down the side of the tree and collects in a little cup. It's really calm. It's like kind of meditative. You stand there and you watch the level of the cup rise by a few millimeters over minutes. Nothing about it feels industrial or scalable in the way we picture global commodities. And yet, this is how the vast majority of the world's rubber begins. A slow drip, a tree that needs consistent conditions, and some worker, some dude with a steady hand just cutting the bark of the tree. It feels delicate, you know, Delicate enough to fail at any moment, and yet the modern world depends on it.
Renee:It's one of the strangest mismatches in technology. We build aircraft tires, water treatment systems, and medical supply chains on top of a living organism that is annoyed by too much rain or too much heat or too little heat and basically any form of attention. There's a tension built into rubber's entire existence. So think about, so it's, it's concentration risk, right? So if you think about it, like, like, like literally, if everything depends on, and now we've made in it, we've made the statement that pretty much a lot of things depend on, space shuttle does not get into the, without an O-ring, which is nothing but rubber, right? Right. So like if everything comes down to, you know, sealing a gasket, creating situations where transportation is easier, like all of that stuff. This is a concentration on material that we go back to over and over to create these gigantic industries like and airplanes and, you know, that we do all this devices, that we do all this stuff. Like it is a huge, huge. So if you think about it from a risk perspective, right, that that there's a tension built into rubber's entire existence. The fact that it is the raw material for so many other things and so many other industries creates a constant, like those industries are probably ignoring that. And I would say they probably don't ignore it. They sit there and say, well, no, duh, we all get it from the same place and it only grows one place. I mean, I guess that's what's happening. I mean, nobody just goes like, what? No, I don't see that over something that big. I'm pretty sure Firestone in their 10K in item 1A, which lists all the investment risk, I'm pretty sure in there it says somewhere, I'm going to look it up now, it says somewhere, you know, this only grows in one place in the world. If that place is subject to climate change or any kind of, you know, terraforming or tearing down of those environments for any other purpose, we're going to lose. We're not going to be able to exist as a company. Like, I'm sure they talk about that, but then that's an existential risk. How do you manage that? How do you manage that? That's crazy.
Marc:Well, you know, I'm sure, like you said, Firestone, you know, or name any tire company, right, or rubber production company, like name any one of them, then you're right. They're going to have it as a risk register of some sort i i don't doubt that but then what about you know i don't know anybody that like does amazon have rubber you know rubber production in their risk register maybe they do because they're giant and they're big and all that but you know it's it's like a couple of steps removed right they depend on.
Renee:Rubber would honda do it
Marc:Yeah i don't know.
Renee:Dirt bikes like is that like we can't get rubber like to have you thought about that like i don't know i will have to honest to god at this point i want to query you know ai and just be like you know create a model it's like bringing back everybody who uses rubber but doesn't talk about it in their 10k like i i can't imagine it's not i can't imagine it's a lot right yeah i think they accept it as as a risk they have to just
Marc:Okay, so let's talk about one of the most dramatic economic collapses in industrial history. So here we are, late 19th century Brazil, and it's the heart of global rubber production. By the 1870s and 1880s, the Amazon basin supplied nearly 90% of the world's natural rubber. Profits are huge. Profits are enormous, right? So there's cities like Manaus exploded with wealth. And I just I love studying these sort of, you know, boomtown kind of, you know, scenarios. I'll have to go back and read more about these guys. But I just think it's really cool. The Manaus Opera House, for example, was built with imported marble and European chandeliers. Streets are paved and electrified. And in fact, it's one of the first cities to be electrified is a boom that looked unstoppable. But it was built on a dangerous assumption that the resource itself was permanent. Plantations were dense monocultures of genetically similar Havaea trees, which meant that they were perfect targets for disease. People did not understand how devastating a fungal pathogen could actually be.
Renee:The rubber boom is such a classic bubble. Money poured in, infrastructure went up, everyone assumed the upward trajectory was natural, but the industry had deep cracks. The harvesting system was inefficient and extremely labor-intensive, and much of the indigenous communities were forced into debt bondage, relocated or stripped of autonomy. Entire regions were reshaped to feed the global appetite for rubber, and none of them were visible to the markets profiting from it.
Marc:Yeah. And then this collapse hits. Around the turn of the 20th century, South American leaf blights, microcyclists, Yulia, began spreading across plantations. By the 1910s, it had crippled commercial rubber production. The blight tore through the Amazonian monocultures at incredible speed. So plantations, they die, just whole plantations gone. Export revenues evaporated, prices crashed. Manaus, which went from one of the richest cities in the hemisphere to a symbol of collapse overnight. Brazil went from global dominance to near irrelevance in a single generation.
Renee:Out of Brazil in 1876, were growing happily in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Because the blight never reached Asia, those plantations became the new industrial base for global rubber. The geography of the entire industry flipped. Overnight, the economic center of gravity moved from the Amazon Basin to Southeast Asia. And because the labor structures there were more tight, production costs were lower, and the market stabilized around the new suppliers. Does that sound familiar? That sounds so familiar.
Marc:Yeah, it does sound familiar. How many examples can we throw out that look exactly like that?
Renee:From last year. Like from last year.
Marc:Soybeans, anyone?
Renee:Right? Thank you.
Marc:Yeah, I know. So basically, this means Brazil's collapse was not just a biological event. It was an economic realignment. We talked about this in the last episode, just like, you know, when it happens, it happens and it doesn't, doesn't go back. Yeah. Prices fall, investment moves, shipping routes shifted, and an entire region lost its primary source of wealth. It remains one of the clearest examples in history of how supply chain concentration can make even the richest commodity system catastrophically vulnerable. And it makes that quiet moment in Thailand that I had even more striking, Watching latex drip out of a tree, I realize how naive it is to treat rubber as an industrial constant. This is a natural material with natural vulnerabilities, yet we build systems that assume it will always be there. It's humbling and honestly kind of a little alarming.
Renee:Which makes the next chapter of the story feel even more miraculous because someone figured out how to tame this chaotic substance and turn it into the backbone of modern engineering. Charles Goodyear is one of those figures who biography reads like a cautionary tale and an inspirational fable at the same time. He became obsessed with stabilizing rubber. He poured money into it, wrecked his finances, and experimented relentlessly. He convinced he was close to a breakthrough everyone else believed was impossible.
Marc:I went way deep in the rabbit hole on Charles Goodyear. But yeah, he did spend just every penny he had. But one day, he accidentally drops a mixture of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove. And instead of melting, the rubber transformed into something flexible and resilient. That moment, that was vulcanization. So chemically, it's the formation of crosslinks between rubber's polymer chains that prevents them from sliding apart when heat or cold hits. It took rubber from being this sort of capricious material to something that was actually kind of predictable and strong.
Renee:And once that happened, the world rushed in. Tires, belts, seals, hoses, insulation, waterproof materials, vulcanized rubber became one of the foundational materials of the 20th century. Yeah.
Marc:You know, you're a sewing person. You know, the original Singer sewing machines, do you know what the belts were made out of?
Renee:Yeah, they were rubber.
Marc:No, they were leather.
Renee:Actually, no, they weren't. Yeah, the first ones were leather, but I had one like that. And so you'd have to constantly be tightening the leather because the leather stretches. And once it stretches, you can't run the main gear anymore. Like the flywheel, it won't run. So, yeah. And so it eventually gets replaced with a belt, essentially, that looks exactly like the one in your car. It looks exactly the same.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. I have some of the old leather belts. The leather, you know, they're just like strings, basically. It's kind of crazy. So tires you know are become the obvious place to start but and you know the the it's just sort of this magical synergy right the timing around cars and vulcanized rubber right like would we have a car boom if we didn't have vulcanized rubber you know and and would we have vulcanized rubber without the car boom like this it's just this weird, Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to use this.
Renee:It's like everything else, though.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah.
Renee:We've talked about, right? We like this technology meets a moment that we didn't know we had. And we go through these as human beings. We go through these efforts to, like, leverage it any way we can. And in that, we created tires and gaskets. And do you know what I mean? And and grips on things. And yeah, and I think it just goes back to everything else we've ever talked about. Every time we talk about this, we say, this was the technology of the day, and we took it and ran with it over and over and over again. So those are two technologies of the day. And you're right, without one, we don't have the other, right? And, yeah, it's history. And the rest is history.
Marc:I mentioned tires, but, you know, you've got other things as well. Hospitals rely on rubber for gloves, syringes, valves, tubes. Construction uses it for waterproofing membranes, expansion joints Electronics use rubber for insulation, shock protection Water treatment systems depend on rubber seals Industrial machinery uses rubber to manage vibration and protect components It's literally in everything that we do.
Renee:And if rubber disappears, the failures would cascade through every system we take for granted. Dr. Katrina, a professor at Ohio State and expert on latex production, says the society would collapse within months if natural rubber production stopped. And the more you map the dependencies, the more it makes sense. Tires are only the first domino, the real condition, sanitation, and basic infrastructure. It's a startling reminder of how deeply rubber is woven into our modern life. Nearly all natural rubber still comes from a narrow band of Southeast Asia. It's the same species of a tree grown in similar plantation structures with similar vulnerabilities. If the leaf blight that destroyed Brazil ever got to Asia, it would take out global supply chains just as quickly in Asia as it did there.
Marc:Yeah. Climate change is adding more stress. Rubber trees do not like unpredictable rainfall or big temperature swings, and both are increasing. Fungal pressure grows with warmer nights. Storms damage bark. On top of that, most production is done by smallholder farms who face volatile prices and difficult working conditions. Every part of the system seems pretty fragile.
Renee:Synthetic rubber is important, but it cannot replace natural rubber in high-stress application like aircraft tires. Natural rubber still has unmatched mechanical properties.
Marc:And this is why researchers are exploring alternatives. Gwaiule, Gwaiule, it's hard to, I'm not sure how to pronounce it. It's a desert shrub that produces latex and can grow in harsh, dry conditions.
Renee:Ooh, I'll put some of them in my yard.
Marc:Yeah, there you go.
Renee:I'm in a harsh, dry condition.
Marc:Yeah. It's like, oh, will it grow in Palm Springs?
Renee:The Kazakhstan dandelion has— That's all I need to know,
Marc:Yeah. Well, you know, I know that weeds grow really well in, you know, California, having lived there a long time. So the Kazakhstan dandelion has latex in its roots. So maybe you can grow some dandelions and, you know, there.
Renee:There you go. I can start my own rubber production.
Marc:There you go. Done. Yeah, I'm sure your neighbors would love that. So these dandelions and this desert shrub, they both offer geographic diversity that I think we kind of desperately need in this particular use case.
Renee:Then there's biotechnology. People are engineering disease-resistant rubber trees or trying to insert latex-producing pathways into other crops. Wait, are you saying one day I'll be able to just wring latex out of corn? Like, that seems crazy to me. But hey, if that's how we're going to solve it, okay.
Marc:Tamaco. I don't know enough of it. Yeah.
Renee:It's Tamako. It's Tamako.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah. This is exactly what I'm saying, yeah.
Renee:Yes, that's exactly it. And on the circulatory side, tire recycling and default devulcanization are improving and reducing dependency on virgin rubber. So we reuse it, right? We don't have to go back to the rubber tree plant and tap it one more time.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, true. But I mean, you know, after a while, the devulcanization process is like, it doesn't work anymore. So it's like, you know, plastics, you only get so many times out of it, I think. But yeah, yeah. No, wouldn't that be cool, though? You know, you could grow your, you could grow your corn and rubber at the same time, you know, like, or, or that would be.
Renee:Forget ethanol. Forget all of that. Forget high fructose corn syrup. We're going after the rubber. We're going after the... I want latex coming out of that corn. That would be weird. That would be weird. Wouldn't that be a weird thing to just kind of create out of nothing or out of something genetically? That's too weird for me.
Marc:That is too weird.
Renee:Wait, so let me ask you something.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Renee:What's your favorite thing made of rubber? I mean, do you have anything? Like, I just bought... I got to tell you something. I have a dog who likes to suck on stuff. She's weird. Oh, right. Sure. Like, yeah. Yeah, Lily's just like... They say Frenchies do it because it makes them feel better. So I just thought, I can't stand her sucking on the corners of stuff. I just can't handle it anymore. So I bought her a bunch of rubber binkies. Oh, okay. So now my dog sucks binkies. But it could be... Every time I see that binky in her mouth, I laugh. So there you go. That's my...
Marc:What's my favorite thing i don't know i i guess i've never thought about what my favorite rubber thing is i but i mean i don't know tires i like tires you know i.
Renee:Guess right like that's a good one it's a
Marc:Good one yes i don't appreciate for sure i i have a box of you know gloves in my because i you know spray paint and you know get messy so yeah rubber gloves yeah sure but But, I don't know, very utilitarian.
Renee:Like, that's a pretty amazing thing, too.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:I like shoes.
Renee:Because it used to be wooden or leather shoe bottoms, right? Like, this idea that... That's a pretty modern way of looking at a material, right? Yeah, your vans.
Marc:Well, there you go. Things made of rubber. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Love my vans. So maybe, yeah, there you go. Maybe vans. Maybe vans is my favorite thing made out of rubber. Yeah. So rubber is entering the phase many legacy materials go through, right? So the source is stressed, the risks are visible, and innovation becomes necessary. The future is likely to be a mix of new crops, better chemistry, and smarter recycling.
Renee:So rubber, it turns out, is one of those invisible technologies that holds the world together. It is the story's ancient, strange, and absolutely central to modern life.
Marc:And because it has worked for so long, we forget how close it always is to breaking. This is a material that needs reinvention, resilience, and alternatives if we want to carry this into the future.
Renee:From tree sap in the rainforest to bioengineered dandelions, it has been quite a journey.
Marc:All right, which means it fits perfectly into our Nostalgic Nerds podcast episode.
Renee:So thank you, nerds, for listening. hit the like subscribe if you haven't like this subscribe share it with your friends we're happy to do it thank you thank you thank you to every one of you that turns it and listens all
Marc:Right hit us up on email nostalgic nerds podcast at gmail.com thank you very much.
Renee:All right thanks Marc see you later
