Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And we have a
Speaker 1: special guest today, a special topic. Yes, i As Zactar.
Speaker 1: This is your life, except you're the one who's going
Speaker 1: to have to tell us about it because I don't
Speaker 1: know enough about your background. My good friend i As
Speaker 1: has agreed to join the show. Welcome back to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jonathan, it's good to be back. I was
Speaker 1: like talking to your listeners because I do find them
Speaker 1: to be some of the smartest people on the planet.
Speaker 1: This is true. They consistently tell me how wrong I am.
Speaker 1: And it's only smart people who can pick up on
Speaker 1: all the mistakes I make. Uh no, you're You're right.
Speaker 1: They are. They are really smart crew, and I love
Speaker 1: them very much. And i As and I have known
Speaker 1: each other for around a decade now. I think it's
Speaker 1: been about ten years since we has met. Probably a
Speaker 1: little more than that. Actually, it's something like that. Time
Speaker 1: has no meaning anymore, so it's probably a decade or
Speaker 1: twelve decades. It's hard to tell. That's true. Lasted about
Speaker 1: seventeen years, I think. But we first met I think
Speaker 1: back at a c E S you were, I believe,
Speaker 1: working with tech TV at the time. Tech V. Tech
Speaker 1: V that's it. That's what I meant at tech TV
Speaker 1: is something I've never joined. I think I joined the
Speaker 1: spiritual successor to it at one point, some people call it,
Speaker 1: but tech V with Randall Bennett, who used to work
Speaker 1: at and Gadgets worked at cen At, started his own
Speaker 1: video network and I jumped on board and we were
Speaker 1: we had a little space, I think, and it was
Speaker 1: in CS in the North Hall, I want to say.
Speaker 1: And then this guy Jonathan Strictly shows up and we
Speaker 1: hit it off and I couldn't get rid of me since. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, listeners you probably know I A's Best from
Speaker 1: the hit podcast podcast Without Pretense, a show that he
Speaker 1: and I and Eric Sandan sporadically recorded for sometime. We
Speaker 1: threatened to bring it back, but that kind of I mean,
Speaker 1: let's be honest, Pandemic really did a number on everything.
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's there's still the threat that that show
Speaker 1: could come back. If you're a fan of family friendly entertainment,
Speaker 1: do not listen to podcasts without pretense. I totally agree.
Speaker 1: It's not for the faint of heart. It's not for
Speaker 1: those who love certain media conglomerates. It's not for people
Speaker 1: who like swear words. If you don't like swear words,
Speaker 1: I would avoid that show unless you want to just
Speaker 1: count how often we swear on the That show itself
Speaker 1: can live on its own. I will not touch upon
Speaker 1: it again. But I as I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: you because you have had a long career in the
Speaker 1: sort of area that I work into in tech communication,
Speaker 1: although yours has had very different styles than my own.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to start off by talking about how
Speaker 1: did you get into the field of working in like
Speaker 1: tech video production and tech podcasting and that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: How did that all get started? Well, the story that
Speaker 1: is a long and uninteresting one, so you can jump
Speaker 1: ahead at any time, you guys, if you're listening to this.
Speaker 1: But it turned out that I loved technology since I
Speaker 1: was a little kid, and my dad was a gadget guy,
Speaker 1: and my mom would yell in him like, hey, don't
Speaker 1: spend that, don't find those gadgets because you gotta send
Speaker 1: your kids to college. And so I used to just
Speaker 1: be obsessed with gadgets growing up. And then I was
Speaker 1: in law school at the time, and I just was
Speaker 1: writing a lot of blogs. I was doing a lot
Speaker 1: of writing in general, and I got a job writing
Speaker 1: at the Apple blog, which I don't think was with
Speaker 1: us anymore. It's part of Giga Home. And I started
Speaker 1: writing blogs about Apple stuff, and then I started writing
Speaker 1: my own blogs on tech things that are beyond Apple.
Speaker 1: And there was one point where I reached studying for
Speaker 1: the bar exam for New York State, and I was
Speaker 1: studying about eleven to twelve hours a day, something crazy. Basically,
Speaker 1: if I was awake, I was studying for this exam
Speaker 1: because it was a two day exam at the time.
Speaker 1: New York is the second hardest a state to pass,
Speaker 1: not like Passachusetts or or in Danielson. New York has changed,
Speaker 1: I believe it's now three days. And so I was
Speaker 1: studying like crazy, and I needed a creative outlet. And
Speaker 1: so while I was studying, I took these breaks and
Speaker 1: I would do an audio podcast with my best friend
Speaker 1: Rob called Killing Time, which is on and off still
Speaker 1: for like now ten to fifteen years. I've been doing
Speaker 1: this ridiculous show. It's just an entertainment show, just talking
Speaker 1: about stuff that wasn't it wasn't being covered because back
Speaker 1: then this is the starter podcast. I saw Leo Laporte
Speaker 1: had moved to his own thing on Twitter. I saw
Speaker 1: this show called Hack five. I was watching this guy
Speaker 1: named Darren Kitchen. I'm like, you know, these guys are
Speaker 1: doing podcasts. I think I could do that, and so
Speaker 1: I started recording audio stuff on my own. I figured
Speaker 1: out how to do with an old I believe this
Speaker 1: was an iMac, one of the first Intel ones, and
Speaker 1: I call my friend up, we'd record it and I
Speaker 1: put it out. And this is the very early days
Speaker 1: of podcast asting. So I turned that into a job
Speaker 1: at one point because I was also still finishing law
Speaker 1: school and I just got just past the bar, and
Speaker 1: I was going to go into the field of law,
Speaker 1: which because I'm a first generation American, so my folks
Speaker 1: will be a lawyer, be a doctor, I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be a doctor. So I got the law degree
Speaker 1: and I entered a field. I think it was around
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, two thousand seven, and the entire
Speaker 1: market for lawyers dropped, so all of these people coming
Speaker 1: out of school were competing with high level. People were
Speaker 1: being paid a lot, we were competing for the same jobs,
Speaker 1: so this was an absolute nightmare. So I was looking
Speaker 1: for positions while I was still doing my audio podcast,
Speaker 1: and I started messing with video a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And during this time, I got a job at a
Speaker 1: place called Gadgetel and I ended up being their editor
Speaker 1: in chief. And as editor in chief, I'm like, let's
Speaker 1: make videos, and I want to be in them because
Speaker 1: I'm in charge. So I started making videos with the
Speaker 1: people there, and I found other video outlets with Will
Speaker 1: Harris and Justin Gainer over a channel flip, which I
Speaker 1: believe got bought by Condie Nast in the long run.
Speaker 1: So I started doing videos around then, and that's where
Speaker 1: it all really started, because I was going bonkers and
Speaker 1: just losing. I was just losing my patients in general
Speaker 1: because I was studying so much. I just needed a
Speaker 1: creative outlet, and that was audio and video. When you
Speaker 1: were studying law, I want to say that there was
Speaker 1: a point where I had you on an episode where
Speaker 1: we were talking about patent law. Am I remembering that correctly?
Speaker 1: That is correct? Because I did study intellectual property. It
Speaker 1: was a field of law that I am and still
Speaker 1: am interested. I was interested, and I'm still interested in it.
Speaker 1: But due to the fact that so many of the
Speaker 1: cases were so it was like splitting hairs. It was
Speaker 1: making me really really agitated, and I thought, Hey, if
Speaker 1: I was every going to die at a job because
Speaker 1: of a heart attack, this would be the thing. So
Speaker 1: I veered away from intellectual property just because I was
Speaker 1: just getting so amped up about why does this pac
Speaker 1: Man game make sense? That this Pong game isn't infringement?
Speaker 1: And I just I got two worked up. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I can't, I can't do that. So I did do
Speaker 1: a bit of intellectual property class work. Never practiced that,
Speaker 1: but it did show up on an episode with you
Speaker 1: talking about intellectual property, and I believe video games was
Speaker 1: a large chunk of that. Yeah, I should probably have
Speaker 1: you back and we can have a discussion about patent
Speaker 1: trolls in general and the one in particular that was
Speaker 1: threatening the entire podcast industry for a few years, because
Speaker 1: that was back in the yeah, back in the days
Speaker 1: when when tech stuff was part of Discovery Communications and
Speaker 1: there were just these crazy lawsuits getting thrown around, and
Speaker 1: we could kind of dive into how that all worked.
Speaker 1: But that'll I'll save that for a future episode. So
Speaker 1: you you get this editor in chief job and you
Speaker 1: start making, you start making videos. I love this too
Speaker 1: because as someone who's become executive producer in the same
Speaker 1: way where I launched a podcast, because I realized I
Speaker 1: had the authority to do it, so I did it.
Speaker 1: That's how, That's how Large Nerd Drunk Colleider it got started.
Speaker 1: If you guys out there have listened to you of
Speaker 1: those episodes, Um, it was a show that my friend
Speaker 1: Ariel and I were doing on our own, and then
Speaker 1: I had the chance to bring it over here, and
Speaker 1: I kept on there was there was talk of bringing
Speaker 1: it on for like two years, and it just never happened.
Speaker 1: Then I realized, wait a minute, I'm an executive producer.
Speaker 1: I can make this happen myself. So I I identify
Speaker 1: strongly there's a couple of different parallels in our career paths.
Speaker 1: So what happens next? Where do you go from there?
Speaker 1: After you've got this editor in chief gig. So I
Speaker 1: do that for a couple of years, and that's not
Speaker 1: that's completely wrong, that's wrong entirely. I did that for
Speaker 1: a couple of months that's right. And then Randall Bennett
Speaker 1: offered me this job because he was having me on
Speaker 1: as a guest a lot of some of my videos
Speaker 1: on Gadgetel, and he was like, Hey, I think I
Speaker 1: want to interview for this this thing I'm doing, Like
Speaker 1: I said, okay, and he did a startup called tech
Speaker 1: V tech v I, and I eventually was offered a
Speaker 1: position as managing editor of the startup. Now would be
Speaker 1: a step down, but it was. It was purely video,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, screw it, let's do it. Let's
Speaker 1: go ahead end see if I could manage to do
Speaker 1: this now. At the time, I don't have I have
Speaker 1: a son now, but I didn't have a kid then,
Speaker 1: so there was I was much more. I wasn't as
Speaker 1: risk risk of versus I am now and switching jobs.
Speaker 1: So I just completely left my job at Gadgetel, wound
Speaker 1: up a tech V started doing video with Randall and
Speaker 1: we're talking about doing daily videos. And this is somewhere
Speaker 1: in like two thousand eight or so, so internet speeds,
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly great. Everything was in one man operation
Speaker 1: at the time. So in my my part, my house,
Speaker 1: that is, I had my prompter set up I built
Speaker 1: my own prompters because everything was much cheaper to build
Speaker 1: back then versus now. Because as YouTube has grown and
Speaker 1: everybody can make content, the amount of equipment that's available
Speaker 1: now for cheap is just mind blowing. But when I
Speaker 1: was doing this in two thousand eight, I had to
Speaker 1: build something. A thirty five dollar prompter was made out
Speaker 1: of heavy wood and the most expensive parts were the brackets.
Speaker 1: So I set up my own prompter in my in
Speaker 1: my office home office. I would write up my scripts,
Speaker 1: I read camera, I've send it, I do the editing myself.
Speaker 1: If I could do it live, we did it live
Speaker 1: to not live to take, but live to digital, I guess.
Speaker 1: And then we published it. So we published two or
Speaker 1: three times a day, which was a really unusual pace
Speaker 1: for the time because usually people are setting up and
Speaker 1: then you've got your scriptwriting, you've got your research, you
Speaker 1: got this, that and the other thing. And I was
Speaker 1: pulling out two to three pieces of video content per day.
Speaker 1: So that's got that got me to tech V and
Speaker 1: then Randa wanted to kill the company because it wasn't
Speaker 1: going anywhere. He said, this is not reaching the level
Speaker 1: where I wanted to reach, and so I'm just going
Speaker 1: to close the doors. And so I said, oh, crud, no,
Speaker 1: what do I do? So at that point I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well do I want to give law another shot? I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll give a law another shot. Because the market it
Speaker 1: changed a bit, and I managed to get an interview
Speaker 1: in Plantation, Florida with the I R S of all things,
Speaker 1: because I studied tax law. That's true. I passed the
Speaker 1: bar in New York, and I have a master's in
Speaker 1: tax law, which is completely relevant to what I do now,
Speaker 1: completely relevant. So I I go to this interview and
Speaker 1: I bombed the interview flat out. To this day, I
Speaker 1: remember the question I should have answered truthfully. They asked
Speaker 1: me this question of what do you do when you
Speaker 1: go too far in the wrong direction? And I wanted
Speaker 1: I should have just told them the truth of like,
Speaker 1: I don't ever do that. When I start feeling like
Speaker 1: something's off, I immediately talked to somebody else and I go, hey,
Speaker 1: does this seem right? This is the way it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be gone? Because this isn't seem right. I'm from
Speaker 1: New York and we have signs for delayed green lights.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have that elsewhere in this
Speaker 1: country or anywhere else, because we're so impatient to New
Speaker 1: York that if the light hasn't changed immediately after the
Speaker 1: other one has, something's broken, people start going. So we
Speaker 1: need to sign delayed green light. So when I in
Speaker 1: my reality run into a thing where I think I'm
Speaker 1: kind of going the wrong way just by a hair,
Speaker 1: I'll talk to somebody, either they're above me or to
Speaker 1: my side. I'm like, hey, does this seem right? If
Speaker 1: I just answered that question truthfully, none of this would
Speaker 1: have happened. So I bombed that interview. I start looking
Speaker 1: for jobs like crazy. I go through six months or
Speaker 1: seven months of unemployment. This was horrible for me, So
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to figure out what to do. I
Speaker 1: start doing my own show again. I'm like, Okay. After
Speaker 1: a while, it's bubbled up in me, like you gotta
Speaker 1: do this show called this Old Nerd. It's a video
Speaker 1: podcast I did. And this is before YouTube is huge.
Speaker 1: It's there's a lots of different video streaming sites. There's blip,
Speaker 1: there's YouTube, there's daily Motion, there was vo there was video,
Speaker 1: and there was there's obviously some of those are still around.
Speaker 1: So I started doing this show, and then, of course,
Speaker 1: since I did the show, I ended up getting a
Speaker 1: job at PC Magazine. Now this job was not video,
Speaker 1: this was a featured writer, and I had to spin
Speaker 1: my video to trajectory to explain to them why I
Speaker 1: wanted to do this. A hundred days goes by and
Speaker 1: I quit. So the reason why I quit was I
Speaker 1: got an offer from Twitch in California when I was
Speaker 1: at CS. I was at CS for something. I forget what.
Speaker 1: I forget him it was for gadgetel or it was
Speaker 1: for it was for um tech v or PC mag
Speaker 1: I don't even remember which thing was. At this point,
Speaker 1: I was somewhere is It's kind of ambiguous. I get
Speaker 1: this offer from twit to be on tom Merritt show
Speaker 1: called Tech News Today, and I get the offer, and
Speaker 1: I have to tell this company that I persuaded after
Speaker 1: weeks and weeks and weeks to hire me, to let
Speaker 1: me go, so I equip within a hundred days. The
Speaker 1: editor in chief you know who you are, didn't talk
Speaker 1: to me for two weeks after I quit. I was
Speaker 1: still at the company for seventeen days. He would not
Speaker 1: speak to me, and I was assigned absolute garbage pieces
Speaker 1: like I didn't write these features about the most excellent
Speaker 1: pets in tech or animals and technology. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: because Boo was really big at the time, Like, this
Speaker 1: is obviously not to my skill level, but I'm on
Speaker 1: my way out, so I'm gonna make some fun with this.
Speaker 1: So if you ever look at PC mag and you
Speaker 1: see anything written by me about animals and technology, and
Speaker 1: that's why. So I get this job at Twitch, and
Speaker 1: I have to pick up my life and move. At
Speaker 1: this point, I have a young son, I have a wife,
Speaker 1: and we move over to California, to a little town
Speaker 1: called Pedaluma in northern California. And it is a bumpy start.
Speaker 1: I started working with with Tom Merritt, Sara Lane, Jason Howell,
Speaker 1: leoo Port, and a whole bunch of other people, and
Speaker 1: it was a complete, uh mind bender for me because
Speaker 1: I used to watch a lot of these people on
Speaker 1: tech TV, and I used to watch Tom all the
Speaker 1: time on set and I started working with these guys.
Speaker 1: So that goes on for a little bit and someone
Speaker 1: pleasantness happens, which leads me to see net which we
Speaker 1: can get into that at some point. Yeah, So so
Speaker 1: backtracking a little bit, so I would always run into
Speaker 1: you at C E S. That's that's when we would
Speaker 1: spend whenever we saw each other in person. Of the
Speaker 1: time that we have spent time together, it was because
Speaker 1: we were both at C E S UH, and we
Speaker 1: would go grab a meal or something or just hang
Speaker 1: out and like make snarky comments about people in tech
Speaker 1: and each other. UM. A lot of ribbing going on
Speaker 1: at C E S. And I remember distinctly the C
Speaker 1: E S before you got hired onto twit because I
Speaker 1: was sitting down with Tom Merritt. Uh. And Tom is brilliant.
Speaker 1: He's one of the best in the business. Just phenomenal,
Speaker 1: hard worker. I his work ethic is to a point
Speaker 1: where I can't even like when I complain about my
Speaker 1: workload being too heavy, I sit there and think about
Speaker 1: what Tom Merritt does on a normal week, not even
Speaker 1: a heavy week, a normal week, and it just puts
Speaker 1: me to shame. Tom had he was He wasn't seen
Speaker 1: at Left Seen Net, joined This Weekend tech or twit
Speaker 1: and started tech news Today, and I was chatting with
Speaker 1: him and he was talking about he needed to find
Speaker 1: a new co host. He I could tell he was
Speaker 1: feeling out, like who I thought might be a good
Speaker 1: co host. And I said, well, I'll tell you the
Speaker 1: guy I would grab. I mean, he just started a
Speaker 1: new job, but I'd grab I as A's who I'd
Speaker 1: go for if I you had to have a tech
Speaker 1: co host. At the time, I didn't need a tech
Speaker 1: co host because I still had Chris Palette. I do
Speaker 1: not have Chris Pallette anyone. I'm just saying, I as,
Speaker 1: if you need another gig tech stuff, tech stuff could
Speaker 1: always use another co host. But but no. But I
Speaker 1: told Tom, I said, yeah, I would talk. I would
Speaker 1: definitely I would chat with I s because he knows
Speaker 1: his stuff. He's got a very strong perspective, his his
Speaker 1: background in law is very helpful in that regard as well.
Speaker 1: And uh, and he agreed. He was like, you know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that, but I was kind of
Speaker 1: trying to see if anyone else was having the same
Speaker 1: sort of thought process. And I think shortly thereafter you
Speaker 1: got approach to move over to twit. So I was
Speaker 1: another time where I wasn't, like, you know, terribly surprised
Speaker 1: at the thing that happened. I was very pleased to
Speaker 1: see it come through. And obviously, uh, you know, moving
Speaker 1: all the way across country. There's always the the just
Speaker 1: the stress of moving, all the culture change that's there
Speaker 1: as well. You have the culture of the the new office,
Speaker 1: which is a very different thing in LEO Reports world.
Speaker 1: And so how how do you remember how long you
Speaker 1: were at TWIT? I was at twit for almost three years.
Speaker 1: It was about two years and likes say eight or
Speaker 1: nine months, but that place was it was something magical
Speaker 1: over there because we got to do some really fun stuff.
Speaker 1: It was very experimental. We were alive all the time,
Speaker 1: So that I thought was really important when it came
Speaker 1: to getting to know people. Because it's one thing when
Speaker 1: you're talking on a podcast and you're explaining how a
Speaker 1: patentrol is doing something or this technology is going to
Speaker 1: change the world or this is complete garbage, but people
Speaker 1: don't get to really know who you are. And in
Speaker 1: these live streams where we would just be shooting the
Speaker 1: breeze or post show pre show stuff, the audience really
Speaker 1: got to know us, and I got to know the audience,
Speaker 1: so like I don't think of the audience anymore like
Speaker 1: they're my friends. I'd still talk to a lot of
Speaker 1: these people today online and I forget that I knew
Speaker 1: them from the chat and that's also why how new
Speaker 1: people have seen it. Like I flat out I was
Speaker 1: in the chat room all the time. That's how Tom
Speaker 1: knew who I was in the first place, because when
Speaker 1: I was editing whatever I was doing, I would have
Speaker 1: seen that videos up live and I would just be
Speaker 1: in the chat room like, oh, that's not right, here's
Speaker 1: what's going on. And that's actually partly what got me
Speaker 1: noticed was that I was giving corrections for the for
Speaker 1: the podcast buzz out Loud as it was going on,
Speaker 1: heavily researched, and if I was wrong, I would own
Speaker 1: up to it. But it didn't happen a lot. And
Speaker 1: he's oddly enough that parallel. Something he did how he
Speaker 1: got his job at tech TV was that he was
Speaker 1: frequently in the forums of tech TV, and with something
Speaker 1: would go wrong, he'd write something about it and he
Speaker 1: got noticed by Leolaport, so he ended up a tech TV.
Speaker 1: So this is very similar, these these two career paths
Speaker 1: of how that happened. So I completely lost track. We're
Speaker 1: talking about other than I used to it for Tom
Speaker 1: and that was really fun. Yeah, No, and I love
Speaker 1: I love. I haven't been on a show with Tom
Speaker 1: in years now, I haven't chat with him in years.
Speaker 1: We kind of kind of lost touch. But anytime I
Speaker 1: got a chance to do that, it was always a
Speaker 1: great joy, mostly because I mean Tom would do so
Speaker 1: much of that work too, write like, he would do
Speaker 1: so much of the initial research that you could go
Speaker 1: ahead and try and do some research on your own,
Speaker 1: but he covered those bases so thoroughly that it was
Speaker 1: more like, well, what do you think about this? Well,
Speaker 1: Tom's drive in the driver's seat. I just have to
Speaker 1: sit in the passengers and like point out stuff occasionally.
Speaker 1: So it's fantastic. Well, so you're at You're over at twit?
Speaker 1: How did the transition from uh without having to get
Speaker 1: into messy details, how did how did the transition away
Speaker 1: from twit? How what happened next? Well, there was there
Speaker 1: was a big pivot point where Tom was going to
Speaker 1: move to l A. The the company was in North
Speaker 1: cal and he was gonna move to SoCal and this
Speaker 1: became what was thought to be untenable, which is kind
Speaker 1: of hilarious if you think about because he's remote and
Speaker 1: remote stuff can't work with hosts. You can't possibly do
Speaker 1: a show remotely with people, and so Tom was not renewed.
Speaker 1: This contract was not renewed, and I was passed over
Speaker 1: for a position that I'm gonna This is like the
Speaker 1: first time I'm saying this. I was passed over for
Speaker 1: a position that I was told I would get. I
Speaker 1: was told to yeah, you'd get this, it should should
Speaker 1: this happen, and completely got blindsided and I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm gonna go. So I started pursuing seen net now,
Speaker 1: seeing that I had been applying to since probably about
Speaker 1: two thousand two. I mean since it was a thing.
Speaker 1: I was like, I love seeing that it's got the
Speaker 1: coolest tech reviewers. I always wanted to know what they
Speaker 1: think and I want to know what's going on. And
Speaker 1: I applied there. Thankfully, I had a lot of people
Speaker 1: and I've grown a lot of networking at this point,
Speaker 1: and tom Merritt was backing me up, and people at
Speaker 1: s net knew me from the chat room. Lindsay Turnin
Speaker 1: knew who I was because she would be in the
Speaker 1: podcast and she was a VP at this point. Now
Speaker 1: she was the e I C. Of sen So people
Speaker 1: knew who I was when I applied for this job.
Speaker 1: But this job was not in video. This was front
Speaker 1: Door editor, and that what that means is when you
Speaker 1: go to seen net dot com, there is there are
Speaker 1: stories up there, and that's not generated by algorithm. That
Speaker 1: is somebody programming it. You'd programmed the door, That's what
Speaker 1: they would call it. And so I'm like, okay, I
Speaker 1: will go to see it because it will be different,
Speaker 1: and I will say, seen that is incredibly professional. Reading
Speaker 1: to that as you as you would like, and it
Speaker 1: is a fantastic place to work. But within about six
Speaker 1: or seven months, I was kind of losing my mind
Speaker 1: not doing any video, and so I told my boss
Speaker 1: is this. I'm like, hey, I want to start doing
Speaker 1: some videos and they said sure. We what we were
Speaker 1: really wondering what took you so long in the first place,
Speaker 1: because we thought within three months you'd say something. You
Speaker 1: got six months through. I think I lost that bet
Speaker 1: is when my boss said, and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's great. I'm really glad that you guys were willing
Speaker 1: and you were you knew I was gonna switch over.
Speaker 1: So I was offered the Top five gig, which was
Speaker 1: pretty awesome because Tom used to do it and Donald
Speaker 1: Bell did it, and I used to sit next to
Speaker 1: Donald Bell and we would work on scripts. Essentially, he
Speaker 1: would say, you've got any ideas for top five the yeah,
Speaker 1: give me a second, and I throw some stupid ideas
Speaker 1: at him and he'd make some great video with it.
Speaker 1: So that was fun, and even the show has kind
Speaker 1: of been on a on a hiatus, mostly because of
Speaker 1: my own laziness and the pandemic and everything. But I
Speaker 1: started getting into the video side that way. At seeing that,
Speaker 1: then I kept pushing to be on the video team.
Speaker 1: They split my job in half. They go, okay, so
Speaker 1: you'll be half on edits half on video. And then
Speaker 1: I concocted a plan where I could fully move over
Speaker 1: to video because I trained my successor. I go, hey,
Speaker 1: would you mind doing this job? And she's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would love to do this job. I want this job.
Speaker 1: What took you so long? So she starts working on
Speaker 1: this this side. The company goes to me, Hey, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't know if we can take you off the door,
Speaker 1: because you know it's it's a hard job, but we
Speaker 1: don't know if we could train somebody. I go, do
Speaker 1: you know I've not been doing the door for the
Speaker 1: past two weeks and this other person has been doing it.
Speaker 1: How's everything going, And they're like, oh, it's going great.
Speaker 1: Go well, why don't you put the job, give Caitlin
Speaker 1: that job, give me the video team, and they put
Speaker 1: me on the video team. So I've been on the
Speaker 1: video team now for five six years. I've been at
Speaker 1: the company for almost eight years. At Sena, we've had
Speaker 1: a lot of different approaches when it comes to video.
Speaker 1: We need shows, we don't need shows. We need faces,
Speaker 1: we don't need faces, we just need voices. We need this,
Speaker 1: and so there's all of this attempt to respond to
Speaker 1: the market at sen A. That is interesting because one
Speaker 1: of the weird things about Seen that is that there
Speaker 1: isn't a lot of other places to go up. Seen
Speaker 1: is like at the top. And I'm not saying this
Speaker 1: because I worked there. I'm not saying this because I'm
Speaker 1: trying to say oh, yeah, well I have no career
Speaker 1: ambitions or anything like that. It's more of that This
Speaker 1: company gets tons and tons of views on every single
Speaker 1: piece of content we do, video or audio or written,
Speaker 1: because it really has been around for over twenty years.
Speaker 1: The biggest issues that has is like, well, that's an
Speaker 1: old person's brand. Seen at is old. It's old it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is old because it's been around for a really
Speaker 1: long time, but it's it's got some great people there.
Speaker 1: So being on the video t him has been just excellent.
Speaker 1: I'd say good nentime excellent. But like everybody's jobs, there's
Speaker 1: that five percent real Like do I really have to
Speaker 1: cover best Air Pure Fires today? Yeah? Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make the best video for this though. I'm telling you what,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have fun with it. My script is gonna
Speaker 1: be full of jokes that doesn't make any sense, but
Speaker 1: I'm telling you I'm gonna do And there is a
Speaker 1: video by the way way I do Best Air Pure
Speaker 1: Fires and it's a hoot. Well, i AS, if you
Speaker 1: ever want to know how Gooseneck trailer hitches work, I
Speaker 1: gotta how stuff works article I can point you toward.
Speaker 1: Uh I am. I am more than familiar with that
Speaker 1: as well. We're gonna take a quick break with our
Speaker 1: conversation with i AS and we'll be right back. So
Speaker 1: can you talk a little bit about like what what
Speaker 1: is your job? Like we were talking before we started
Speaker 1: recording that job. Idols can get kind of fuzzy and
Speaker 1: vague in our field, like there there's a point where
Speaker 1: you can have two people who have on paper the
Speaker 1: same job title, and then when they talk about what
Speaker 1: their job is, you realize, wow, there's not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of common ground there. They can be vastly different
Speaker 1: experiences and job accountabilities and that sort of thing. So
Speaker 1: kind of kind of walk through what it is that
Speaker 1: you do typically, uh, during a week at seen a Well,
Speaker 1: my main thing is to make videos and that sounds
Speaker 1: pretty simple, but it's not. You've got to think of
Speaker 1: topics that will resonate with the audience. And if you're
Speaker 1: pitching something that's gonna go to YouTube, it's got to
Speaker 1: fit within the YouTube channel that's got its own strategy.
Speaker 1: If you're pitching something for sena dot com, that's got
Speaker 1: a different strategy because you can be a little bit
Speaker 1: more wide. YouTube has this. They have a method of
Speaker 1: recommending stuff. The algorithms that you've probably seen videos but
Speaker 1: like the algorithm moved us or whatever. That's a big key.
Speaker 1: So in my in the course of the week, technically
Speaker 1: I'm a senior video producer, which is a weird title
Speaker 1: because I don't produce other people's content. Not yet. This
Speaker 1: is something I've been thinking about for the long term.
Speaker 1: But the title doesn't really match what I do. I'm
Speaker 1: an on air talent. I pitched my own videos. I go,
Speaker 1: this is what I want to do, and here's the
Speaker 1: timeline where I can get it done. If it's a
Speaker 1: news story, I can do that usually within a day.
Speaker 1: I was tasked with a Richard Branson story. I don't
Speaker 1: know when this is gonna air, but at the time
Speaker 1: Richard Branson, at the time recording of this, Richard Branson
Speaker 1: is trying to get into space before Jeff Bezos to
Speaker 1: be the first billionaire in space. And I'm doing I'm
Speaker 1: researching this to make sure I can have a well
Speaker 1: told story of why this is happening. So I do
Speaker 1: like the vast majority of my own research. It's rare
Speaker 1: that I'm handed research on somebody else. I'm not a
Speaker 1: talking head. I am not handed a script from somebody
Speaker 1: who just says here read this. I write my own scripts.
Speaker 1: I at this point, since in the pandemic, I run
Speaker 1: my own camera, I run my own prompter, I run
Speaker 1: the lights. I have everything set for myself and I
Speaker 1: then uploaded to an editor so I get that review
Speaker 1: the videos see if everything matches and then we'll publish it.
Speaker 1: I also write the headlines and the descriptions. Those can
Speaker 1: be tweaked based on search engine optimization, and those things
Speaker 1: can change. But I've have a pretty heavy hand when
Speaker 1: it comes to this because I do not like when
Speaker 1: titles change, which wholly change the meaning of the video,
Speaker 1: or they don't, they don't really mesh with the video.
Speaker 1: So I really keep an eye on that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff because I don't want to mislead the viewers. If
Speaker 1: you're watching one of my videos, my big keys, I
Speaker 1: want you to walk away smarter. I want you to
Speaker 1: have clicked for a reason. I hope you get the
Speaker 1: answer right away. I will say that one of my
Speaker 1: favorite things, which wasn't one of my favorite things at
Speaker 1: the beginning, was reading through YouTube comments, which on a
Speaker 1: good day can be pretty bad, and on a on
Speaker 1: a great day is not so bad. So it's it's
Speaker 1: it's there's really not a great range of things there.
Speaker 1: But I was really reading all of these comments with
Speaker 1: something Tom Merritt told me a long time. It goes like,
Speaker 1: just look look for a kernel of actual so thin
Speaker 1: you can improve on. If there's something there, then work
Speaker 1: with it. If there isn't, then you can just throw
Speaker 1: that comment aside. So one of the things that I've
Speaker 1: done differently in my videos is that within the first
Speaker 1: like eight seconds the video, I'll tell you the answer
Speaker 1: to something. If it's like, you know, like what's the
Speaker 1: best what's the best phone of the years? Like, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you the first four seconds, like the iPhone is
Speaker 1: the best phone in the year. I'm gonna explain why,
Speaker 1: Like I don't make you wait. I don't want to
Speaker 1: waste the viewers time. So my actual job is making
Speaker 1: these videos happen, make sure the content fits, the brand,
Speaker 1: fits the channel, helps us continue working with the YouTube
Speaker 1: algorithm where our stuff kind of makes sense. So that's
Speaker 1: that's kind of what I do. That's about what I do.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you bring up the algorithm because that's, uh,
Speaker 1: that's it's just like s e O or search engine optimization,
Speaker 1: and that it shows how beholden content creators are to
Speaker 1: the platforms to which we publish. Right. This is why
Speaker 1: Bernie Burns, who was a co founder of rooster Teeth,
Speaker 1: used to say that there was no substitute for having
Speaker 1: your own platform, because at least then you know the
Speaker 1: rules aren't going to change arbitrarily and force you to
Speaker 1: completely change your strategy in order to remain competitive. Whereas
Speaker 1: when you're publishing on a different platform like YouTube, if
Speaker 1: there's a change in the algorithm, suddenly what was working
Speaker 1: great yesterday isn't trending at all today. It's not even
Speaker 1: not even a blip and uh. And that's something I
Speaker 1: think that is applicable to just about everyone who's listening,
Speaker 1: whoever wants to make any kind of content. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to make anything where you're putting it
Speaker 1: out in a saturated market, knowing about these algorithms and
Speaker 1: at least kind of having an understanding of how they
Speaker 1: work is absolutely instrumental in getting a foothold in those areas.
Speaker 1: Same thing with podcasts, like all the different podcatching uh
Speaker 1: services out there have their own method for identifying and
Speaker 1: promoting material. Often it will promote whatever is proprietary first,
Speaker 1: So so if it's a if it's Stitcher, then it
Speaker 1: might be Stitcher exclusives get get first priority. But you know,
Speaker 1: knowing that is helpful just because I think it helps
Speaker 1: you set expectations. It also helps you reconcile the fact
Speaker 1: if it takes a while to take off. It may
Speaker 1: not be that you know, you're not doing a good
Speaker 1: enough job or your content isn't interesting. It may literally
Speaker 1: be people just haven't found a way to find you yet.
Speaker 1: So this is a thing that big companies struggle with too,
Speaker 1: seeing that being one of them, I mean, how stuff works.
Speaker 1: When we were part of Discovery, this was a big
Speaker 1: deal to which we were always really focused on search
Speaker 1: engine optimization. We saw a lot of traffic coming in
Speaker 1: from Google searches for a lot of our articles, and
Speaker 1: whenever that algorithm would change, it would drastically change that,
Speaker 1: which then changes revenue models. It just has this cascading
Speaker 1: effect through the entire business. So having that kind of
Speaker 1: approach and knowledge is really important. And having two different
Speaker 1: strategies for something about how it might perform on c
Speaker 1: net versus on YouTube. That's also a big deal. And
Speaker 1: you you touched on this a little bit, but can
Speaker 1: you talk about uh, you know, not that I want
Speaker 1: to go back and think about twenty too much. But
Speaker 1: once the pandemic hit, once the once things started going
Speaker 1: into lockdown, and once people started to try and look
Speaker 1: at how to pivot to maintain operations in this you
Speaker 1: know now pandemic world. How did that unfold for you guys?
Speaker 1: When did when did? Like? Do you remember when the
Speaker 1: Senate Office is essentially shut down? Yeah, it was around March,
Speaker 1: and I believe there was one confirmed case and one
Speaker 1: of the CBS buildings at the time. I believe it
Speaker 1: was maybe at the Broadcast Center ont S, so not
Speaker 1: in our office. And based on that and all the
Speaker 1: news coming in, they said, Oh, we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: try something we're gonna do. If you Friday, you can
Speaker 1: work from home and then we'll let you know if
Speaker 1: you're coming back. We'll probably come back in two weeks,
Speaker 1: which turned into into forever. So they told us then
Speaker 1: that okay, we're gonna work from home. And so I
Speaker 1: was in a panic in general because I am in
Speaker 1: a small New York apartment. I got this apartment because
Speaker 1: I like the outside, which doesn't didn't exist essentially, I
Speaker 1: couldn't use it anymore, and we came to shooting and stuff.
Speaker 1: I had to become very creative as to how to
Speaker 1: shoot in this space. Mm hmm. So I know that
Speaker 1: on ours like we closed down March thirteenth. And the
Speaker 1: reason I know that is because I've been back to
Speaker 1: the office about a dozen times, and there's one desk
Speaker 1: calendar that ominously just stays at March thirteen, twenty perpetually
Speaker 1: Friday of the thirteenth. What a day. Uh So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it's interesting because I don't do video obviously, which
Speaker 1: makes it way easier for me. Right, I'm only doing you.
Speaker 1: I just have to make sure that I'm not getting
Speaker 1: too much bleed over from outside. I imagine that for you.
Speaker 1: Setting this all up in a in a New York space,
Speaker 1: which I think we could charitably call cozy, it was
Speaker 1: a little presented its own challenges. Like you just mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that you run everything. You run the camera, the prompter,
Speaker 1: all that stuff because you have to. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can't have people come in during a pandemic to to
Speaker 1: help run tech for you. So, uh, can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about sort of the setup you use,
Speaker 1: like what what what's the sort of equipment you're using
Speaker 1: in the space that you have in order to be
Speaker 1: able to to do what you do. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: used to have camp quarters ten ad P camp quarters
Speaker 1: around just for old videos I I used to do.
Speaker 1: So I set up one of those things immediately I
Speaker 1: found some prompters made by glide Gear because as I
Speaker 1: was doing research, As I said before, it's so much
Speaker 1: cheaper now to buy then build, because I was just
Speaker 1: I was floored by seeing how many options as I had.
Speaker 1: It's this company called glide Gear. They're not paying me.
Speaker 1: They didn't give me a free one. I found their
Speaker 1: stuff on Amazon at that was really cool. It seemed
Speaker 1: really simple. I bought a glide Gear teleprompter. You've got
Speaker 1: to provide your own screen. I had experience doing that
Speaker 1: with tech V, so I knew exactly what I needed
Speaker 1: to do. I had Presentation Prompter as my teleprompter software,
Speaker 1: which feeds another monitor, which works pretty well. Because that
Speaker 1: is because it's also a monitor, I can when I
Speaker 1: have to do any group video calls for like live streaming,
Speaker 1: I can put that right to camera, so I'm not
Speaker 1: looking down, I'm not looking to this side when it
Speaker 1: comes to that live streaming kind of thing. Generally, I
Speaker 1: don't use it for anything but those two things. So
Speaker 1: I got that set up pretty well. Then it came
Speaker 1: to lights. Now, back in the early days, I was
Speaker 1: using halogens because they were the cheapest, but they were
Speaker 1: super hot and it wouldn't die with those so thankfully,
Speaker 1: because again things have changed. I got to get some
Speaker 1: LED lights and they were really good. Newer makes a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of really good, low cost devices, and so
Speaker 1: I got a bunch of their LED lights. I had
Speaker 1: set up my there's only two point lighting. I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to be doing three point lighting, supposed to be able
Speaker 1: to have a hair light. I couldn't do that, just
Speaker 1: because I needed to find a space. And now the
Speaker 1: space to shoot in my apartment we have a loft
Speaker 1: that runs a good portion of the apartment and it's
Speaker 1: about at highest fifty two inches salt, which is shorter
Speaker 1: than I am, which is a little annoying. So I
Speaker 1: had to figure out how to make this space work
Speaker 1: on camera. So I created one set and I had
Speaker 1: this really great backdrop, but the problem is it was
Speaker 1: all bricks, and the bricks are great except my skin
Speaker 1: tone and the bricks were kind of washing out and
Speaker 1: that was kind of a problem. So then I created
Speaker 1: a second studio and that had a lot of work.
Speaker 1: A lot of this was I want to say tetricy
Speaker 1: because it was more like Mane of those puzzle games
Speaker 1: where you have it's a little piece of plastic, and
Speaker 1: you have the numbers in them, you've got to arrange
Speaker 1: them properly. But to move one thing, you gotta move
Speaker 1: like three things. That's exactly what it took to make
Speaker 1: any space work in this in this loft, So I
Speaker 1: had to come to terms with whether or not I
Speaker 1: was keeping things. I was throwing things out regularly. Could
Speaker 1: I find a camera that fits? How am I going
Speaker 1: to make this work? Because to my original studio had
Speaker 1: a floor seat. I got a little video game seat
Speaker 1: that could sit on because there was no way I
Speaker 1: could fit a chair in here. Any proper chair, I'd
Speaker 1: be bonking my head. So I measured everything out. When
Speaker 1: I built a second set up. The chair I found
Speaker 1: was something for changing brakes. It's eighteen inches tall, that's
Speaker 1: got big wheels you can move around on it is.
Speaker 1: It's super comfortable. No, but at least I look seated
Speaker 1: because I am seated. I knew about backdrops, so I
Speaker 1: got myself a After doing a lot of research, I
Speaker 1: got myself a white brick background, which apparently people thought
Speaker 1: was was real, which is great because it's not. I
Speaker 1: had a steamer, so I steamed the heck out of it.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no wrinkles, and staples are all where
Speaker 1: the fake mortar would be. So I had to do
Speaker 1: a lot of that, and that was in a super
Speaker 1: hot room and I'm on my back and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to staple these things. I'm adding everywhere, staples are falling
Speaker 1: when they hit something hard. Not fun. So I did
Speaker 1: all this building up stuff, building it out. Got a
Speaker 1: desk that sort of fits. But the thing about the desk,
Speaker 1: there's always something weird about this space that when I
Speaker 1: put my arms on it, it looks like my arms
Speaker 1: are huge because they're closer to camera, because the height
Speaker 1: is wrong because none of the heights are standard in
Speaker 1: this you can't sit in an eighteen ent high seat
Speaker 1: at a standard desk. So a lot of this has
Speaker 1: been trial and error, trying to figure out what fits
Speaker 1: on camera, obviously making things look neat on camera. Everything
Speaker 1: beyond the camera is a mess. Like this is like
Speaker 1: where my luggage is for trips which I don't take anymore.
Speaker 1: This is where my where my books are. This is
Speaker 1: where like like with storage for the apartment is winter closed,
Speaker 1: like that's where they live up here, but they have
Speaker 1: to be off camera. So all of that it was
Speaker 1: the long wited answer of how I set this thing up.
Speaker 1: If there's the camera, and there's the prompter, and there's
Speaker 1: a desk and remote. Remotes were really important to me
Speaker 1: on this. I had on my Canon camera. It was
Speaker 1: all remote controlled, so I don't have to keep you
Speaker 1: going behind it. And as the ceiling is low here,
Speaker 1: one of the biggest issues is being able to see
Speaker 1: the top of a camera because it camera to be
Speaker 1: really close to the ceiling, so I can't see the buttons.
Speaker 1: I can't do anything. So the remote are really, really,
Speaker 1: really important to me, so I did everything of remote.
Speaker 1: The lights are on a remote, the cameras on the remote,
Speaker 1: the power to all these sections are on remote, so
Speaker 1: I can tell Google to turn them on and off.
Speaker 1: Just because I know when I climbed down that ladder,
Speaker 1: if I forgot something, I'm gonna be fierce. I got
Speaker 1: to climb up the ladder again and then squirrel around
Speaker 1: press buttons. I'm like, I'm not doing that. So a
Speaker 1: lot of investment and smart etletts as well. So that
Speaker 1: was a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, and
Speaker 1: I'm down in one studio space and I kind of
Speaker 1: like it. It works pretty well, and there I kind
Speaker 1: of want to tear it all down again because it's
Speaker 1: not working exactly the way I want it, but I
Speaker 1: know that's gonna be for the future. Well, was there
Speaker 1: like a long interruption between when you were predy sing
Speaker 1: videos in studio too when you were doing it at
Speaker 1: home or was it pretty quick? Were you able to
Speaker 1: turn it around fairly quickly? I think I had my
Speaker 1: first video back up and running within about a week.
Speaker 1: So I had, I had the prompter and everything. I
Speaker 1: had ordered this stuff when I when I heard the
Speaker 1: rumor we were leaving, I ordered stuff like on Wednesday,
Speaker 1: And then when Friday showed them like, oh yeah, you're
Speaker 1: gonna spend Friday at home, all my stuff showed up.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then when I find
Speaker 1: out we're not going back. By Wednesday, I had everything
Speaker 1: running again, and I figured out the shot, figured out
Speaker 1: the composition of everything. I had to buy something from
Speaker 1: the hardware store across the street because I couldn't get
Speaker 1: something in time, So I paid a lot of money
Speaker 1: for this really cheap led thing, which I know I
Speaker 1: could have got on Amazon for like half the price,
Speaker 1: but I needed it now, so I shot with that
Speaker 1: got the videos out, and that was a huge learning
Speaker 1: curve too of like what videos do people want to see?
Speaker 1: How do people are like do they want to be distracted?
Speaker 1: Do they want to be informed about this? Do they
Speaker 1: want to think about fun things you can do at home?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to think about, hey, look this
Speaker 1: TV should be cool. Let's just talk about tech like
Speaker 1: nothing has changed. That was an adjustment period. That's really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about that, but I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess technically I did sort of the same thing, except
Speaker 1: of course I did it in podcasting. So for me,
Speaker 1: the really difficult transition was I had to plug a
Speaker 1: USB microphone into this computer and then I already had
Speaker 1: the the mic stand because we used to record podcasts
Speaker 1: about pretense at this very same space where I'm at
Speaker 1: right now. So so it really wasn't that difficult. In
Speaker 1: other words, what I'm saying is my experience was vastly
Speaker 1: easier than yours, except that it does come down to
Speaker 1: like how do you determine what what content to create? Right?
Speaker 1: And in my case, um, my listeners are great. They
Speaker 1: typically reach out to me on Twitter and I don't.
Speaker 1: I didn't get a lot of messaging about hey can
Speaker 1: you kind of shy away from stuff that's more COVID related,
Speaker 1: or hey can you really focus on COVID? So I
Speaker 1: just kept going as is, which I mean, if you
Speaker 1: look through the history of tech stuff, it's it's pretty
Speaker 1: much the entire Jonathan just does what he wants to do,
Speaker 1: is what that really comes down to over the last
Speaker 1: say five years or so. UM. But I'm so impressed
Speaker 1: that there was essentially one week of adjustment before things
Speaker 1: were coming out again, because it's so much more involved
Speaker 1: doing video than doing audio. And you know, I guess
Speaker 1: one benefit is that you and I both typically do
Speaker 1: a lot of solo host work, which means that we're
Speaker 1: not dependent upon anyone else's schedule. If there's a technical issue,
Speaker 1: usually it's it's easier to track down what the problem
Speaker 1: is and solve it. Obviously, when you have multiple people,
Speaker 1: especially when you're all doing it remotely, you've increased the
Speaker 1: likelihood of technical problems, and then you have to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: where is the problem originating from, how can we identify
Speaker 1: what it is, and how do we fix it? I
Speaker 1: as and I have a little bit more to talk about,
Speaker 1: but before we get to that, let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe we did this out by talking a
Speaker 1: little bit about some of your favorite little memories related
Speaker 1: to stuff you've done with tech, whether it was with
Speaker 1: snet or twit or whatever it may be. Like, are
Speaker 1: there any moments that kind of stick out either as
Speaker 1: being just like, I'm really proud of how that turned out,
Speaker 1: or this ended up being really funny, or let me
Speaker 1: tell you about the time I completely beefed it on
Speaker 1: camera or whatever. Well, the first thing that comes to
Speaker 1: mind was I was giving a tour. Now, if you
Speaker 1: go to a scene at their booth and at CS,
Speaker 1: the company has tours for really big, fancy, big wigs.
Speaker 1: And it was my first year giving tours, and there
Speaker 1: was a very very large company that I was leading.
Speaker 1: And I won't mention that company, but you're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to figure out. So as I'm walking with them,
Speaker 1: I take this company to l g S booth and
Speaker 1: I told them that this is the coolest thing I saw. Now,
Speaker 1: this company is a very very large competitor to l G,
Speaker 1: and they were very mad at me for saying that
Speaker 1: this was the coolest thing now. LG at the time
Speaker 1: showed a rollable oh, let television that fit into a
Speaker 1: box essentially and rolled out and it rolled back in.
Speaker 1: And I thought this was fascinating, as did many people
Speaker 1: because this was one of the coolest things people had
Speaker 1: seen at CS. Now CS has gotten to the point
Speaker 1: where people are like, oh yea, and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: this was super cool. So this company got really really
Speaker 1: mad at me, started yelling at me, and I had
Speaker 1: a little microphone on on my face and they can
Speaker 1: all hear me with the little headsets, and so one
Speaker 1: of the gentleman decides to yell at me into my
Speaker 1: microphone so everybody can hear. And they're all saying that
Speaker 1: you know, you are biased against our company and you
Speaker 1: don't give us good reviews, and this, that and the
Speaker 1: other thing, which is the furthest thing from the truth.
Speaker 1: But because this company makes great products, I'll say it
Speaker 1: right now again, good luck finding out who the competitor
Speaker 1: to l G is. A competitor to l G that
Speaker 1: just viciously doesn't like LG. So uh, that part was
Speaker 1: amazing because I got yelled at so much and I
Speaker 1: was so disliked. I didn't have to give a tour again,
Speaker 1: and people were asking me, how do you get out
Speaker 1: of the tours. I don't want to give the tours.
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is what I did. I didn't need
Speaker 1: to do that. But they got really really mad because
Speaker 1: I was telling the truth. I said, this is the
Speaker 1: coolest thing, and you guys don't have this, so like,
Speaker 1: it's not my fault, you don't do this. So that
Speaker 1: was one of the biggest things that I remember. I
Speaker 1: will say one of my favorite memories as well was
Speaker 1: being at the seen Net stage and sitting at the
Speaker 1: desk and ready to you know, there's prompters going and
Speaker 1: there's people there and I remember back when I think
Speaker 1: it was you, me, Derek, a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: were just kind of sitting there in the audience has
Speaker 1: seen it and just watching people like okay, we're just
Speaker 1: sitting there and watching like you we a little wave
Speaker 1: to camera, and there's Fattiamo kid. We're all hanging out.
Speaker 1: And then I'm now on the stage. Like I used
Speaker 1: to be the guy in the audience. Now I'm the
Speaker 1: guy on the stage and that was really cool because
Speaker 1: I do they're doing my makeup and talking to like
Speaker 1: stage makeup. So there's like this cake stuff on me,
Speaker 1: which I don't wait are normally, so it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this looks really good. I'm doing all this stuff, I'm
Speaker 1: reading the prompter, and this really easy chatting with everybody.
Speaker 1: It was super smooth. It got I Also, there was
Speaker 1: a point where I realized it became very normal for
Speaker 1: somebody to be jamming something in my ear. My friend
Speaker 1: Brian van Gelder, he's the he was like the stage tech,
Speaker 1: and so he'd be putting an if be in my
Speaker 1: ear or taping something to my back. And there's one
Speaker 1: point where I'm like, when did this become normal? Because
Speaker 1: this is really weird. So to take a photo a selfie,
Speaker 1: it's me like kind of smiling, and he's this weird out,
Speaker 1: like why are you taking a photo of me jamming
Speaker 1: something in your ear? It's because like, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: normal for me. Because as much as I've been doing
Speaker 1: this now for almost fifteen years maybe more, it is
Speaker 1: still really cool to have these moments where I get
Speaker 1: to talk to people and tell people, hey, this is
Speaker 1: some really cool technology stuff that you should really check out,
Speaker 1: or like, you know, this sounds like a great idea,
Speaker 1: but it's not so being able to like share the
Speaker 1: information that I have access to is really really fun.
Speaker 1: So all of that, anytime I do a video, like
Speaker 1: I said, I try to make sure the audience walks
Speaker 1: away smarter, like I really love doing that stuff. But
Speaker 1: those two moments for C Yes anyway, they stand out
Speaker 1: a lot because again I've really ticked off that company
Speaker 1: and and there's people jam stuff in my ears. Those
Speaker 1: are like just two of them, but there's there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot more, but that those are the two that
Speaker 1: popped out of my head the fastest. So so a's
Speaker 1: c e S typically c NETS Booth I believe is
Speaker 1: outside of the upper floor of South Hall if I'm mistaken.
Speaker 1: It was until I think two years ago we switched
Speaker 1: to West as our main one because we used to back.
Speaker 1: If you guys don't know, there used to be a
Speaker 1: competing show. There was a Consumer Electronic Show and then
Speaker 1: the A v N Show, which is an adult video
Speaker 1: show and I'm not making that up. And so you
Speaker 1: had this very strange mix of people that your tech
Speaker 1: nerds and porn stars and they were they will they
Speaker 1: would often have for A v N. They would often
Speaker 1: have a special where if you had a membership to
Speaker 1: C E S you would get like a complementary one
Speaker 1: for the A v N one. So I know a
Speaker 1: lot of people who would do both. I I never did.
Speaker 1: I was I felt like it was just there would
Speaker 1: just be a bald man blushing so hard he would
Speaker 1: pass out. That's all it would be. Well, since they
Speaker 1: used to occupy the Sands West, and when they left
Speaker 1: several years ago, c S expanded and West became this
Speaker 1: kind of wild no no, no pun intended wild West.
Speaker 1: It was really all these weird little gadgets, little companies.
Speaker 1: Because the main show was in the Las Vegas Convention Center,
Speaker 1: so you had your big name companies that aren't there
Speaker 1: any more. Microsoft used to be there either with the
Speaker 1: giant Xbox thing. I think High Sense replaced them. There's TCL,
Speaker 1: there's Samsung, there's LG there's Panasonic. Everybody's over and Sony.
Speaker 1: They're all in in in Las Vegas Convention Center. But
Speaker 1: West started getting all these weirder and little things that
Speaker 1: were really fun to cover, gadgets, more oddities, and so
Speaker 1: that grew and grew as as the space was open,
Speaker 1: and so we moved our stage from South to West.
Speaker 1: I believe it was two years ago, and it was
Speaker 1: really really fun. I got to be an anchor over
Speaker 1: there for a while, which was just super fun. That's
Speaker 1: that's so cool. Like I haven't I haven't been to
Speaker 1: a C E S since they relocated the stage, because
Speaker 1: I do remember going and seeing your image on one
Speaker 1: of those enormous screens right like like right there at
Speaker 1: the booth Like that was to me. I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: I as this maide a man, his face is like
Speaker 1: three stories tall. That's amazing and um and I always
Speaker 1: thought that that was just like and I knew you
Speaker 1: were gonna be super busy, so I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to I have such a loose schedule
Speaker 1: whenever I met C E S that I can easily
Speaker 1: take up someone else's entire time if they let me,
Speaker 1: So I didn't want to do that while you were
Speaker 1: very busy working. I always felt the same way when
Speaker 1: you know, we were just hanging out at the scene
Speaker 1: at booth before you worked there, when we were just
Speaker 1: you know, like you mentioned, oh, I also want to
Speaker 1: say something else in case my listeners picked up on it.
Speaker 1: I as mentioned our friend fat emo kid that is
Speaker 1: his handle, So yeah, I don't think that he's saying
Speaker 1: there was a fat Emo Kid sitting next to us.
Speaker 1: It's Eric who goes by fat Emo Kid, whom we
Speaker 1: love very much, and so I just wanted to just
Speaker 1: wanted to point that out as well. Yeah, No, this
Speaker 1: was this was great. I mean we've had like some
Speaker 1: crazy adventures, maybe not crazy, we've had some goofy adventures
Speaker 1: at c e S. Like there was the year where
Speaker 1: Eric was I think he even registered the domain CEOs
Speaker 1: from the back of Jonathan Strickland's head, where he was
Speaker 1: just going to stand behind me with a camera and
Speaker 1: just followed the back of my head or not. I
Speaker 1: think that was the other thing, because we were taking
Speaker 1: photos of people. If anybody it was bald, there was that.
Speaker 1: There was I believe Carpets of c S was one
Speaker 1: of them. I don't know that was hours of somebody else's.
Speaker 1: There was the time where we wound up in the
Speaker 1: We went through the employees entrance of a casino because
Speaker 1: we just couldn't get across because you know, if you're
Speaker 1: on this strip, it looks like everything is connected and
Speaker 1: it's not, so it's super difficult to get across. To
Speaker 1: be fair, We asked an employee about how to get in,
Speaker 1: and the employee just pointed at the side door, which
Speaker 1: was an employee's only entrance, and the first the first
Speaker 1: stop as we walked in was the security desk. Yet
Speaker 1: that and that was not super but they were nice.
Speaker 1: Wasn't what those movies were like, Oh, you're gonna break
Speaker 1: your your thumbs. It's like go out that way and
Speaker 1: you can go where you need to go. Oh thanks,
Speaker 1: that was for the next Yeah, they clearly they knew
Speaker 1: that we were clueless and idiotic, so they were very
Speaker 1: kind to us. These were great moments. And that LG
Speaker 1: television you were mentioning, that was one of those things
Speaker 1: that I thought was fascinating when I first saw the tech.
Speaker 1: I mean, we had been promised oh LAD screens for
Speaker 1: a few years at that point, but mostly the old
Speaker 1: LAD screens that we saw were like six inches in
Speaker 1: size and like you could see where they would show
Speaker 1: off how it could bend in everything, but there there
Speaker 1: was no real practical way of create manufacturing them at
Speaker 1: a scale that would be that would make any sense, right,
Speaker 1: Like it would just be astronomically expensive. That LG TV
Speaker 1: was astronomically expensive, but but at least it was no
Speaker 1: longer in the you know half a million range. I
Speaker 1: think it was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars if
Speaker 1: I recall correctly. But uh, still a little outside my
Speaker 1: own price range for entertainment centers. But well, my question
Speaker 1: to you, than I asked, is, uh, if you could
Speaker 1: be on an episode of tech Stuff and cover any
Speaker 1: one topic, what would it be because I'll invite you back.
Speaker 1: Oh that's not fair, because I would pick a topic
Speaker 1: that I don't know anything about. I could do anything
Speaker 1: that means I knew I knew about it, versus like
Speaker 1: what could I actually be prepared for? Oh, man, I
Speaker 1: think I don't want to see five because I think
Speaker 1: you're right, You've done probably a thousand of those things.
Speaker 1: So I'm also the host of The Restless One, say,
Speaker 1: a show branded by T Mobile about five G technologies.
Speaker 1: But if you want to talk about five G, I
Speaker 1: can chat about it. It's more that there's so much
Speaker 1: there's so many nuances to it that even to this
Speaker 1: to this day, it's still kind of a mess, such
Speaker 1: that like does your phone do five G? Does it
Speaker 1: have that can handle sub six in this and millimentary wave?
Speaker 1: It's like what does that mean? Because nobody thinks about
Speaker 1: that when they think about four G, Like my phone
Speaker 1: does this because it has fifteen radios, you don't think
Speaker 1: about it. So five g's got the same thing. But
Speaker 1: it's not something that's really talked about in the ads
Speaker 1: for these companies because honestly, it can be. It can
Speaker 1: just glazier eyes over because it's like it's not that interesting,
Speaker 1: but it's super important. So five G in general to me,
Speaker 1: has been really interesting, even maybe even home five G.
Speaker 1: Like I've been testing a T mobile. They're not paying
Speaker 1: me for this T Mobile gateway because my wired speeds
Speaker 1: in my New York City apartment they're not very fast,
Speaker 1: and I don't have options. And with the advance of
Speaker 1: five G speeds in theory, I should be able to
Speaker 1: get faster speeds and more competition. That's why I love
Speaker 1: five G in general, Like any company can be a
Speaker 1: five G provider while they're whether they're reselling somebody else's
Speaker 1: bandwidth or not. But there's more competition and I'm not
Speaker 1: locked to a certain provider. So five G is the
Speaker 1: first thing I'm thinking of, and then I'd have to
Speaker 1: think about the second one, because maybe how the most
Speaker 1: boring topic of all H d C p my least
Speaker 1: favorite thing. That's stupid handshake between I think it's what, um,
Speaker 1: it's not what is the HD Standford's not just high definition?
Speaker 1: Is it? Oh? I wouldn't be able to tell you that.
Speaker 1: I just did a full I just did a full
Speaker 1: series of tech glossary episodes about acronyms and initialisms, and
Speaker 1: once I finished that, I erased them from my brain
Speaker 1: high band with digital content protection. This is what's known
Speaker 1: as the handshake between one HDM my device to another.
Speaker 1: And that is really, really, really a no go because
Speaker 1: it breaks stuff all the time. If you do anything
Speaker 1: like video game capture or like hook up one a
Speaker 1: c and my cable to an adapter to another as
Speaker 1: my cable to make a longer one that could break.
Speaker 1: I'd love to talk about that, just because it's so
Speaker 1: so dumb. That's the decent stand for it is. It's dumb.
Speaker 1: Stop doing this. Well, maybe what I'll do is I'll
Speaker 1: invite you on for a couple of episodes. We can
Speaker 1: do one about five G and talk about like the
Speaker 1: three broad flavors of five G and what does it
Speaker 1: actually mean? Yes? Uh, And we can talk about you
Speaker 1: know again, like you you say there's a lot of misunderstanding,
Speaker 1: largely because the messaging around five G is complicated. Right,
Speaker 1: it's hard to get across in a way that's quickly digestible.
Speaker 1: What five G is capable of doing. Everyone just thinks of, oh,
Speaker 1: it's five. It's like spinal tap. It's five. It's one
Speaker 1: better than four, and it's more complicated than that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I'll get you on for maybe one where
Speaker 1: we talk about stuff that is supposed to work in
Speaker 1: tech but sometimes makes things more difficult than it would
Speaker 1: have been if you hadn't used that technology at all,
Speaker 1: because there are some options there, right, Like there's some
Speaker 1: things where you can say, here's something that was created
Speaker 1: to solve a specific problem, and here's how it made
Speaker 1: that problem worse, perhaps in a totally different way. I
Speaker 1: think I tweeted something similar about Android being like Ralph
Speaker 1: Wigham sometimes like I think it's helping. I'm gonna turn
Speaker 1: low power battery on, lottle little power on. It's like
Speaker 1: you just turned off all my stuff in the background.
Speaker 1: I'm not getting notifications for this because you think it
Speaker 1: makes sense to turn off email put that to deep sleep.
Speaker 1: It's like I have to go into the settings and
Speaker 1: then undo your helpful thing. Yeah sometimes it thinks helping,
Speaker 1: but no, yeah, yeah, that'd be fun to talk about.
Speaker 1: I watched your video about the latest build of Android
Speaker 1: when it was going into beta testing, and you it
Speaker 1: was it was the day of and you uploaded your
Speaker 1: dio and he was like, well, this isn't working yet,
Speaker 1: like the idea, like the color palette that's based off
Speaker 1: of your your whatever background image you've chosen, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I want to let you know. I also
Speaker 1: installed the beta after I watched your video, and now
Speaker 1: my phone just randomly freezes and then I have to
Speaker 1: turn the power button off and it's not supposed to
Speaker 1: be better. But I also would like to say this
Speaker 1: my one of my favorite comments about that video was
Speaker 1: dude doesn't know Android because it has a built in
Speaker 1: screen recorder, And to that, I replied, it doesn't work
Speaker 1: in the data like I kept trying and it kept crashing.
Speaker 1: So I did something crazy by downloading a third party
Speaker 1: one because the first party one was buggy. So if
Speaker 1: I tried to record with it, try to make a
Speaker 1: video for people, and it's like, oh, I keep breaking,
Speaker 1: So I really needed to use the third party one.
Speaker 1: So I know I Android a bit, but I also
Speaker 1: know and stuff doesn't work. Yeah, so that's that's when
Speaker 1: I'll have you on. We'll talk about how tech doesn't
Speaker 1: work occasionally. I as thank you so much for coming
Speaker 1: on the show and for giving some of your valuable
Speaker 1: time over to the beloved text stuff listeners. I'm sure
Speaker 1: they appreciate it. Where should they go to see your work? Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be very very very self promotional. Go to
Speaker 1: Twitter dot com slash I s I y a Z.
Speaker 1: That's me, not not that, that's me parts just I
Speaker 1: y e Z. I tweet about my my day. I
Speaker 1: tweet about what I'm covering, what videos I'm doing. Occasionally
Speaker 1: I'll tell you about stuff that has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with technology, so be aware of that. If you're interested
Speaker 1: in barbecue sauce, I might be talking about it there.
Speaker 1: But also go to YouTube dot com slash s net
Speaker 1: because we're doing some of the best stuff we've ever
Speaker 1: done and it's showing up there. We're doing some long
Speaker 1: form stuff, we're doing some experimental content. I'm really proud
Speaker 1: of our team and really proud of the stuff we're
Speaker 1: putting out there. So go to s net dot com
Speaker 1: or YouTube, dot com, slash s net and see all
Speaker 1: the stuff there and follow me on Twitter please excellent
Speaker 1: And guys, if you have any suggestions for topics that
Speaker 1: I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you
Speaker 1: can always reach out to me on Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for the show is text Stuff h s W. Because
Speaker 1: while I'm no longer part of how stuff works, it's
Speaker 1: always in my heart. They surgically implanted it, and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon, yea. Tex Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows