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
S2E5 - Tape: Tough, Tested, Tenacious
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In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Tape: Tough, Tested, Tenacious, Renee and Marc explore the humble roll that holds the modern world together.
What starts with a strip of Deltec Purple in an art project turns into a deep dive into adhesive history. From early gummed paper and Depression-era Scotch tape to duct tape in wartime garages, tape quietly proliferates through the 20th century, evolving from simple packaging fix to engineered material.
Along the way, they unpack how tape actually works (backing materials, pressure-sensitive adhesives, shear vs peel), why 3M’s Richard Drew mattered, and how tape went from desk drawer convenience to something specified in CAD models.
Modern tape isn’t just sticky; it’s structural. From high-strength acrylic bonding systems like VHB that replace rivets and welds, to tunable adhesion used in semiconductor manufacturing, tape has become an engineered solution to tension, vibration, heat, and time.
It’s temporary and permanent. Disposable and structural. Invisible and essential.
All on a roll.
Featuring the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast Players' song "(Tape) A Sticky Saviour
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
Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, Renee. How's it going?
Renee:Hey, Marc.
Marc:You know, one of the kids is an art student. Your namesake, Ella Renee.
Renee:My namesake?
Marc:I know. She liked that. So a couple weeks ago, she's working. This is what the inspiration for the episode is. So a couple weeks ago, she's working on a canvas. And of course, you know, art student waiting to the last minute. She's got to get something done. And she's working on a canvas. It's really pretty. I'll have to send you a picture. It's all these triangles, and she did some color and color kind of color matching in theory. It's all warm colors. It's neat. But because she wanted it perfect, she had to use a bunch of masking tape. So she's using masking tape, lots of mask sections all over the place to get all her clean lines and stuff. And then, of course, she runs out of tape.
Renee:Oh, no. What a bummer.
Marc:I know. So, of course, you know, she comes over and says, Dad, I need some tape. And of course I knew exactly what she meant Where did it go Where's my purple tape Oh no I lost it Oh no Like seriously where's my tape Oh, this, oh my gosh. I was going to even show you the purple tape. But yeah, so I knew she wanted exactly the Dell Tech purple masking tape. It's low tech, very easy to tear, very precise. I could have given her, I've got Satami a 10 millimeter tape. I've got, I've got Scotch tape over here somewhere. I've got vinyl tape. I've got pinstripe tape. But it got me to thinking that tape isn't just tape. It's a way to bind something or to protect it or to hold it in place for a little while. And it shows up in places from art to fixing a kid's toy, right? Remember I was putting the tape on the books or whatever, to keeping planes in the air or even satellites in orbit.
Renee:This is starting to feel a little like the rubber episode. You're not going to tell me society collapsed if tape stops working, are you?
Marc:Okay, so when I wrote the script here, I always said, no, I think we'd survive. But, but I kind of think actually maybe, you know, it might be really bad if we didn't have tape. But I think it would definitely cause some short-term pain. Tape is still doing more work than most of us ever think about. So, hey, folks, welcome to another episode of the Nostalgic Nerds podcast, where we talk about technologies, past, present and future.
Renee:So when most people hear the word tape, they think about Scotch tape. That's what I think about clear tape. The roll in the dispenser that's probably been in the same drawer for years. Mine has like chunks of dust and dog hair on it. Yeah. Yeah. It has a very specific feel to it. It's slightly frosted. It's smooth, but not slippery. You can see it when you're looking for it, but once it's on the paper, it mostly disappears. And it tears cleanly in a way that feels oddly satisfying. My favorite part of it is you can write on it with a pen.
Marc:Oh, yeah, I didn't even think about that. Yeah. It's one of those things you don't really think about, but you already know how it behaves in every situation.
Renee:Scotch tape also wasn't the first adhesive thing. tape. Before it, tapes tended to be made for specific jobs. You know, gummed paper tape for sealing boxes, medical adhesive for bandages, which, by the way, I'm horribly allergic to. Found that out. Yes. Like medical tape gives me second degree burns. It's awful. Chemical burns, like it's terrible. And then masking tape came out of paint shops. So it's worth pausing for a second and talking about what tape actually is because it feels simple, but it isn't. At the most basic level, tape is two things combined on purpose. There's a backing material and there's an adhesive. And both of those are doing very specific jobs.
Marc:The backing is the part you see and you touch. It's paper. My favorite is washi paper. It's like a really thin Japanese paper is my favorite. But plastic, film, cloth, foil, foil tape is awesome, foam tape. The choice affects how the tape behaves, whether it stretches, whether it tears cleanly, whether it handles heat or whether it fails actually pretty quickly.
Renee:And then there's the adhesive. Most modern tapes use pressure-sensitive adhesives. They don't need heat or water or curing. You press them onto the surface and they stick. Not because they harden, but because they flow just enough to settle into tiny surface irregularities.
Marc:Which is why pressure helps. You're not activating anything. You're just improving the contact.
Renee:Exactly.
Marc:You know, when you rub it, you rub it.
Renee:Well, right. When you're doing, yeah, when you're wrapping gifts, you got to, it's got to blend in. Otherwise it looks, yeah, you got to, I agree. Yeah. That's the only time I ever use that stuff is to wrap a gift and I want it to be good. How sticky a tape feels depends on the adhesive chemistry, how thick that adhesive layer is and how it's paired with the backing. A thick, aggressive adhesive on a soft backing behaves very differently than a thin, low-tack adhesive on a stiff film.
Marc:I love adhesive chemistry. And this is sort of a side here. Yeah, I know. I love adhesive chemistry. Because, okay, the same people we're about to talk about invented tape, or most tapes, invented the sticky notes, right? You know, the post-it notes, right? And it's an adhesive that failed. It failed at its job. It wasn't a very good adhesive. But for tape, it's really good. But tape ends up being a whole range of trade-offs. How much it sticks, how good that adhesive is, how long it stays. Have you ever seen scotch tape that's decades old? It gets all crusty. Yeah. And then what happens when you remove it?
Renee:Scotch tape comes out of a practical problem. In the 1920s, cellophane was becoming popular as packaging material. It looked good. It let you see the product, but sealing it was awkward. Glue is messy. Heat sealing wasn't always practical. Cellophane tape solves that. A transparent backing with a pressure-sensitive adhesive lets you close the package cleanly without hiding what's inside.
Marc:Can you imagine trying to glue cellophane?
Renee:No. No, it would be terrible.
Marc:So tape, you know, it's not designed as a household fix at first. It's a packaging solution.
Renee:Right. It's developed at 3M by Richard Drew. Shout out to Richard Drew, who had already worked on masking tape. The goal isn't maximum strength. It's consistency, something that sticks reliably, doesn't make a mess, and doesn't damage the surface underneath.
Marc:Which already puts it in a different category than glue.
Renee:Yes. And once it's available, people start using it for things it wasn't designed for. Mending papers, repairing books, fixing small household problems. The timing lines up with the beginning of the Great Depression when replacing things isn't always an option.
Marc:Was your family, like, you know, when something broke, did your dad was like, you know, go get the tape? Was he that?
Renee:Dude, we had every color of duct tape known to man. And it did everything, everywhere, all the time. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Marc:So the use of tape broadens pretty quickly out of the Great Depression.
Renee:Yes. And once it's available, people start using it for things it wasn't designed for. Mending paper, repairing books, fixing small household problems. The timing lines up with the beginning of the Great Depression when replacing things isn't always an option.
Marc:So the use broadens pretty quickly.
Renee:It does. You don't need tools. You don't need skill. You don't even need to be sure it's the right solution. You can always just try it.
Marc:And if it doesn't work, you just peel it off.
Renee:Right. Over time, the product gets refined, more consistent adhesive, better backing. Dispensers make it easier to tear with one hand. It becomes something people keep around because it's generally useful.
Marc:So I want to go to Richard Drew here and Scotch Tape because, you know, he's like he's our hero for the episode here. So Scotch Tape comes out of 3M at a time when they're very much a materials company. They're still a materials company, but like, you know, abrasives, coatings, adhesives, the tape's not really a category yet. It's just one application of materials they're already working with. You know, remember paper backing and the adhesive. So Richard Drew is the engineer behind masking tape and then scotch tape. And that work keeps him close to real production environments, paint shops, packaging lines, and places where people handle materials all day and care about clean results. The cellophane tape grows directly out of that. Pairing a transparent film with an adhesive that behaves predictably takes a few years of refinement. Adhesive formulation, backing consistency, and eventually the dispenser itself. So when Scotch tape becomes a consumer product, it's the result of incremental development rather than a single invention moment. So years later, Drew also leads work. So, you know, he's well into tape here. Also leads work at 3M on magnetic recording tape. So, you know, it's not a sticky tape, but it's a different type of tape. I just thought it was cool that the guy that invented masking tape and scotch tape was also the one that led the 3M magnetic recording tape work. And that shows up a lot.
Renee:Can I just say, I just looked him up and, man, he looks like a guy who invented tape. Really? Yes.
Marc:I didn't look up a picture. I didn't look up a picture. But I imagined glasses And the comb over. Exactly.
Renee:You got it. You nailed it. You nailed it.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So magnetic recording tape shows up much later in the 1940s and solves a different problem, the coating of flexible backing with magnetic material that can move smoothly through recording equipment. By then, Scotch tape is already well-established in homes, while magnetic tape goes on to reshape radio, music, film, and eventually computing. And we talked a little bit about tape and film in that, but we can get to some other time. So, but from my perspective growing up kind of later, It feels like there's this moment in the middle of the 20th century, and it kind of coincides with that whole space age, you know, swoopy chrome and all that, where tape suddenly shows up everywhere. I don't know if that's actually true or if it just looks that way in hindsight.
Renee:Well, after World War II, you do start to see tape branch out quickly. New materials become available. Manufacturing scales up. And everyday life fills up with things that need to be assembled, insulated, sealed, or held in place. Electrical tape. Okay, that's another bunch of tape we used to have hanging around the house. Yeah. Tons of electrical tape. Electrical tape becomes necessary because wiring is suddenly everywhere. Homes, appliances, car. Medical tape that I can't use. It evolves at a time, at the same time, and pushed in a different direction. Hospitals need a way to secure dressings and tubing without damaging skin, which leads to gentle adhesives and breathable backings. You also get duct tape, again, in my house. We had tons of it. Tons of it. Coming out of the war. Cloth back, strong, terrible by hand, or teeth. That's how I used to do it. My teeth were tools. originally designed for sealing aluminum ammunition cases, right, and making quick field repairs. After the war, it follows soldiers' homes and ends up in garages and toolboxes. And in NASCAR, they call it, you know, 200-mile-an-hour tape, right, because it can hold a bumper on at 200 miles an hour. Ta-da!
Marc:So by the 50s and 60s, you don't really have tape anymore. You know, when you think about tape, it's the scotch tape. You have this growing set of tapes that look and behave very differently, shaped by the problems they're meant to solve. And you could use the tape to solve many other problems. A lot of the problems are new, right? Electrical appliances, mass-produced consumer goods, cars with more wiring. Can you imagine all the wiring harnesses in the cars that are just flown around if you didn't have the tape to wrap it up?
Renee:I agree, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Marc:You're a big automotive wiring person, right?
Renee:I love cars. I'm not going to lie.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:I do. I love them.
Marc:Homes with more systems, it starts to feel like a tape boom, not because, you know, suddenly tape exists, but because everything else is getting more complicated.
Renee:By the latter 20th century, tape has quietly spilled into dozens of categories.
Marc:It's probably pausing here, just taking a stock of how many different kinds of tape exist by this point. And it's not, you know, it's not to catalog everything, but it gives a sense of the range. So we just got a little list real quick.
Renee:So you start with the ones people recognize. Packaging tape, designed to seal boxes and survive shipping. Masking tape, paperback, meant to come off cleanly. Okay, the only time I ever use it is when I'm painting, right? I want clean edges when I'm painting, so painter tape, right? Electrical tape, stretchy and insulating for wiring and irregular shapes. Okay, I used to go through, and this is why we had so much of it. This is how much of a nerd I am. You ready for this? I was in the color guard in high school. So flags, right? So I had a flagpole, and the flagpole had to have electrical tape.
Marc:All the way up
Renee:There, right? And then wherever your hand went on the pole, on the pole, it had a whole lot of electrical tape to make a bump so that every time you grab the actual flag, you knew where to stick your hand. So you were in the same place as we cheated like that. But like that's why I use so much of it as a kid. And then there were tapes people use without thinking about them. Again, that awful medical tape that I can't use designed to stick to skin without damaging it unless you're Renee, I guess. Drafting an artist taped, tuned for paper and delicate surfaces, film and photography tape, stable, non-reactive over time.
Marc:Yeah. And then there are tapes most people just, like, never see directly. Clothback utility tapes that are strong and terrible by hand. Foam tapes used for spacing, vibration, dampening, and mounting. Foil tapes, aluminum or copper for heat and shielding. Oh, let me tell you, I love copper tape. It is so cool See, I like aviation tape.
Renee:I like aviation tape. It looks suspiciously like duct tape, but it's made of aluminum. No, it's not. Like, it's rad. It's why your plane doesn't have to be, like, decommissioned for service, because they can just tape stuff down. And as crazy as that sounds, it actually works.
Marc:I know. You know, well, you know, sometimes I see people say, why are they taping that on there? They're like, why are they putting duct tape? Oh, look how awesome duct tape is. It's like, no.
Renee:No, no.
Marc:It's not duct tape. That's literally aluminum with a super strong adhesive on it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. So.
Renee:By this point, tape isn't one thing. It's a family of materials, each tuned for how long it needs to stick, what it needs to stick to, and what happens when you remove it.
Marc:That's still not exhaustive. Once you get into manufacturing, electronics, aerospace, conservation, you're talking about dozens and dozens of variations for very specific uses.
Renee:So when we say tape, we're really talking about the whole toolbox of solutions that just happen to come on rolls.
Marc:All right. Before we go to some more modern and a couple of kind of tape use cases. All right. I have a distribution center story, but it's not my story. It's your story.
Renee:You should tell it, though. No, no, you tell it. You tell the story.
Marc:Okay. All right. So distribution center, we're at the dot com. You know, we always talk about the dot com, cooking dot com. And, you know, you got to wrap gifts. Not only do you got to wrap gifts, but you got to, you know, put the little thing in the envelopes and, you know, the gift cards and gift receipts and all that stuff. But you can't, you know, like you can't wrap the gift in a whole roll of tape. You got to use a certain amount of tape, you know.
Renee:Three pieces of tape. You use three pieces of tape to wrap a gift.
Marc:Keep going. Yeah. And you can't use, you know, yeah, your three pieces have to be the right length, too. Like, you can't, you know, you can't go overboard with the size or too small. And, you know, can you imagine, like, what happens? And I remember people running out of tape, you know, on the line. And then, you know, it just stops. You know, ah!
Renee:Well, we were gift wrapping. It was Christmas. And we were gift wrapping a lot. And most of it was stand mixers. And so they were really big.
Marc:Pretty big.
Renee:And ridiculous, right? It was a ridiculous gift wrapping assignment.
Marc:I love that paper, though. I really like that paper because it was, like, it was at that silver.
Renee:It was so heavy.
Marc:It was so heavy. Yeah, it was really heavy. I like that stuff. But, okay, so all I remember about that was, you know, Renee's working the line, and, you know, she's got the card, she puts it in the envelope, licks the envelope, which, not exactly tape, but it's like tape, right?
Renee:It's an adhesive.
Marc:It's an adhesive on a paperback. She licks it, closes it, goes down the line. And then, go ahead. Okay.
Renee:And then somebody yelled, who licked this?
Marc:Yeah. Like, not just who licked this, but who licked this? Like, with anger and fury. Like, just, yeah. Anyways, I know. It's funnier when, like, when we're there together, not like.
Renee:And we were working 16 hours a day, right? Like, and only sleeping in eight-hour shifts. It was terrible. The whole thing was terrible. But, like, why wouldn't you want it closed? And it was quicker than stuffing it back in behind the thing. Like, what are we doing? Granted, I should lick it, right? That's gross. But we could have used water stamper things. Like, we didn't have, I don't understand any of it. At the end of the day, like, that was crazy. And here's what I'll say. You know, if I send you a birthday card, I lick it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Like, I sort of like the taste of the glue. It's like, I don't know what, you can't do anything about that.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know.
Renee:And if you want to clone me, you have the DNA. Yeah, you can do it.
Marc:There you go. There you go. So.
Renee:One more time. Wrapping any gift only takes three pieces of tape.
Marc:Do you really think so? Three?
Renee:Yes. I only ever use three pieces. I pride myself on it. Three pieces of tape.
Marc:I guess. Okay. Give me your tape rundown here. Your three pieces. Where do you use it?
Renee:So you. So you take it around and you put one piece to close it. You put it on one end. You fold it over like a little origami. And you put one piece there. You flip it over. You do it on the other end. You put one piece of tape there. You're done. Three pieces of tape. You're done. You wrap the gift.
Marc:So you don't put a piece of tape to hold the paper to the box as you flip it?
Renee:I find that to be a waste of a piece of tape, to be fair. I just think that's just a waste of a piece of tape.
Marc:Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Alright, so once you get past the mid-century period, tape starts showing up in places that don't really line up with the mental model most people have. If all you know is scotch tape on wrapping paper, a lot of modern tape use actually feels kind of counterintuitive.
Renee:Big shift is that the tape stopped being just a temporary helper and starts become part of the finished product. In electronics, for example, tape is everywhere. Inside phones, laptops, and tablets, it's used to insulate components, manage heat, hold connectors in place, and prevent parts from rubbing or vibrating against each other. Most of it is never meant to be removed. It's designed to stay there for the life of the device. If you took it out, things would fail faster or stop working entirely. The same pattern shows up in aerospace. Tape is used during composite layups to position fibers and layers before they're cured. It's used for very fine masking work, for thermal management, and for vibration control. Some of the tape comes off later. Some of it is never supposed to.
Marc:So in those cases, tape isn't a placeholder for something else. It's the actual solution.
Renee:You see that clearly in medical setting as well. tape isn't just holding a bandage in place. It's securing tubes, sensors, and dressings for long periods of time, often on fragile or compromised skin. It has to stick reliably, but it also has to come off without causing damage. I mean, does it have to? It's always fun to watch someone be like, you know, almost cry, especially guys with hairy arms when you're tearing the tape off. And they're like, like, there's something kind of fun about that, right? That requirement alone creates a huge amount of specialization. There are cases where tape replaces things people expect to be mechanical. In automotive and construction, high-strength acrylic tapes are used to bond panels, trim, glass, and other components. And some applications, they replace rivets, screws, or welds. Not as a shortcut, but because tape distributes load differently and it handles vibration and thermal expansion better than rigid fasteners.
Marc:I think the cyber truck is built just with tape. Not in a good way.
Renee:Oh, so you think those panels that are adhesively, that's just big tape.
Marc:That's just probably double, it's like double-sided tape. They just stick it on their slap.
Renee:That's why it comes off when they're driving down the road.
Marc:Yeah, exactly. It's not waterproof. So, which is, it sounds wrong, right, until you remember how much testing goes into some of these tape use cases.
Renee:Right. These aren't improvised fixes. The tape is specified, validated, and treated as a structural component. At the other end of the spectrum, you have tapes designed to be deliberately temporary. Conservation tape, drafting tape. Oh, drafting tape. It's almost useless except that it holds the paper down to the drafting table until you don't want it anymore and it doesn't rip the paper. I forgot all about drafting tape. Modern washi style masking tapes, their job isn't strength, it's predictability. They aren't meant to hold something in place. They're meant to hold something in place briefly and then come off cleanly without residue or damage. So modern tape isn't moving in a single direction. It's spreading outwards. Stronger in some contexts, gentler in others. Permanent here, very temporary there. And a lot of it only makes sense when you stop thinking of tape as one thing and start thinking of its behavior that you can tune. Like it's definitely something that it's the right tool for the right job when you pick the right one.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that brings us to the future of tape. It's so silly, right? The future of tape. And this is where it really stops looking like office supplies and starts looking like material science. So if you zoom out, there isn't one big breakthrough everybody's waiting for. There's no like AI, you know, tape or anything like that. There's no single next tape that does everything the way people, you know, talk about the next battery chemistry or next processor node or something like that. What's happening instead is refinement along very specific dimensions. So one of the biggest of those is adhesive chemistry. Okay. Which is what I love. Most modern tapes still rely on pressure-sensitive adhesives, but those adhesives are being engineered much more precisely than they used to be. How quickly they wet a surface, how they behave under constant load, how they respond to temperature cycling, UV exposure, humidity, or chemicals over time. What that leads to is tunable adhesion. Instead of one fixed level of stickiness, the tape's behavior depends on how it's stressed or what it's exposed to. Some tapes, programmable tape, isn't that awesome? Some tapes are designed to hold very strongly under sheer, but release more easily under peel. Others are engineered to lose adhesion only when exposed to heat, ultraviolet light, or a specific solvent. You already see this in semiconductor manufacturing. Temporary tapes hold silicon wafers in place during cutting or processing, then release cleanly when triggered without stressing the wafer or leaving residue. That's not experimental anymore. It's a practical solution to a very constrained problem. Hold firmly during the process, then let go cleanly when the process is done.
Renee:So the tape isn't just sticking or not sticking. It's responding to how it's being used.
Marc:Yeah, exactly. That's like, that's so cool. The goal isn't, this is really nerdy. So the goal isn't.
Renee:It really is. I just, yeah.
Marc:The goal isn't maximum adhesion. It's predictable behavior. So another major area is backing materials, traditional paper, cloth, and simple plastic films are being replaced or augmented with more engineered substrates, multi-layer films, reinforced polymers, extremely thin backings that can form without stretching or stretch only in one direction. So in electronics in aerospace, backing thickness is measured in microns. You care about dielectric properties, thermal conductivity, outgassing, and vibration behavior. At this point, tape isn't just holding something in place. It's part of the electrical, thermal, and mechanical design of the system. That's why tape starts showing up in CAD models and simulations. It's specified up front, not added later on the factory floor. Manufacturing pushes this even further, and assembly becomes more automated. Tape has to behave consistently when applied by machines rather than people. That means predictable unwind force, precise edge control, no stretching or tearing, and adhesives that behave the same way at high speed as they do by hand. This is why so many industrial tapes never show up in consumer settings. They're designed to run thousands of times an hour on automated lines under very tight tolerances, where inconsistency becomes a failure mode. So at the other end of the spectrum, from tunable temporary adhesion, you have tapes designed to be structural from the start. Again, this stuff is really cool. High-strength acrylic bonding tapes, like 3M VHB, are a good example. Those are used to bond automotive trim and panels. So that's probably what was used on the Cybertruck, except they probably bought the, instead of the 3M, they bought the M3.
Renee:Or they just waited until it expired. They're like, it's cheap. Let's buy that.
Marc:So in this case, they replace rivets, screws, and welds. Not because it's cheaper or easier, but because they behave better over time. The adhesive layer is viscoelastic, which means it absorbs vibration and accommodates thermal expansion. Instead of concentrating stress at a few fixed points. In those applications, the tape isn't a workaround. It's a primary structural element. It holds parts together, seals against moisture and air, and stays in place for the life of the product.
Renee:So in one case, the tape is designed to let go on command, and on the other, it's designed to never let go at all.
Marc:Right. And both of those come out at the same underlying shift. Tape is something you engineer deliberately, not something you reach for at the end. There's also pressure coming from sustainability, and this is one of the harder problems. Tape is a composite by definition, backing plus adhesive, which makes it difficult to recycle. You can't just melt it down and start over. So there's active work on biodegradable backings, bio-based adhesives, and tapes that can be separated cleanly during processing. So the future of tape isn't about novelty. It's about precision, more specificity, more context awareness. Tape doesn't get replaced by some miracle material. It gets more engineered, more intentional, and more deeply integrated into how systems are designed from the beginning.
Renee:Wait, do you think we'll ever, like, instead of, like, using, I don't know, rivets and buildings, we'll be like, no, no, wait a minute. We got this roll of tape. Do you think we'll ever get there?
Marc:I don't know about buildings. I mean, you do have adhesives and tape-like stuff in buildings today. But it's not like they're load-bearing. I don't know. I don't know. Load-bearing tape? I don't know. But, you know, in a car, you smack a car, it's got to withstand a lot of force.
Renee:Right?
Marc:Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't look at VHB in building context. I don't know.
Renee:That's weird.
Marc:We did talk about 3D-printed, right? 3D-printed buildings. I wonder if there's adhesives in those kinds of scenarios.
Renee:That's crazy. Yeah, and I guess the most... The newest thing I've seen people doing with tape is, for some reason, and I still haven't, I don't understand why, people are taping their mouth shut at night while they sleep. I have no idea what this is about. I don't know why.
Marc:They're doing it.
Renee:Oh, my God, it's a thing. Go Google it. Like, they actually sell it. It's called mouth tape. It's ridiculous. Some people were using, like, duct tape for some reason. Yes. Other people were using, like, Band-Aids because, like, that makes more sense. to keep your mouth shut while you sleep. Like, what are you worried about? Is it snoring?
Marc:Spilling state secrets? I don't know.
Renee:I don't know. Like, bugs crawling in your mouth? Because I've got to tell you, that hardly ever happens. It hardly ever happens. I don't know. It's so weird. Yeah, that's the most recent use I've seen of it.
Marc:Where is that happening?
Renee:I don't know google it dude it comes in yeah it comes in different like like there's companies that make.
Marc:It i could see this the
Renee:Whole idea is it it doesn't take off your mustache when you peel it off.
Marc:Right that's the whole point i can see this in asia you know there's this thing and you know like fans don't sell well in in uh korea because there's this you know this kind of urban myth or urban belief that, you know, fans will, will like, you know, suck at your soul or something like that. It's not that, but it's something like that. So I can see that, you know, in Korea and you could have your house fan going in the bit and use your mouth tape.
Renee:Oh, like it won't escape any other orifice.
Marc:I guess. I don't know. Yeah.
Renee:Oh, that's so weird. Anyway, you guys, if you're using mouth tape, you might want to let Marc know he has no idea it's happening in the world. I know.
Marc:I've never heard of that one. I did a whole recent, I did a ton of research on this, so I didn't see that. at all.
Renee:Like it's a thing. It was definitely a thing on TikTok for a while. Like everybody would talk about it. And it's the same people who use like that, that tape on their nose to hold their sinuses open. Like they're into doing this too. I don't know. I don't know why you would do it. Right. Like, yeah, that's it. That's it. That's what they're doing. And then they're going to sleep. I don't understand it. I don't understand. So next time you pull a piece of tape off of a roll, you'll probably not think about polymers or adhesive chemistry.
Marc:Which is, unless you're me, which is exactly the point.
Renee:So the rest of you have let your brain go to think about bigger things than, what Marc thinks about on a daily basis. So thanks everyone to listening to the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. Like, share, subscribe, all that stuff. Send us feedback at nostalgicnerdspodcast at gmail.com. Marc, thanks for a fun conversation. It was at least as fun is rubber.
Marc:I, you know, I mean, rubber's hard to top. Yeah. But yes, it was fun.
