A Conversation with Iyaz Akhtar

Iyaz Akhtar joins the show to talk about his career in tech, his friendship with Jonathan and what it's like to have your finger on the pulse of the technology sector.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And we have a
special guest today, a special topic. Yes, i As Zactar.

(00:26):
This is your life, except you're the one who's going
to have to tell us about it because I don't
know enough about your background. My good friend i As
has agreed to join the show. Welcome back to Tech Stuff.
Thank you, Jonathan, it's good to be back. I was
like talking to your listeners because I do find them
to be some of the smartest people on the planet.
This is true. They consistently tell me how wrong I am.
And it's only smart people who can pick up on

(00:48):
all the mistakes I make. Uh no, you're You're right.
They are. They are really smart crew, and I love
them very much. And i As and I have known
each other for around a decade now. I think it's
been about ten years since we has met. Probably a
little more than that. Actually, it's something like that. Time
has no meaning anymore, so it's probably a decade or
twelve decades. It's hard to tell. That's true. Lasted about

(01:13):
seventeen years, I think. But we first met I think
back at a c E S you were, I believe,
working with tech TV at the time. Tech V. Tech
V that's it. That's what I meant at tech TV
is something I've never joined. I think I joined the
spiritual successor to it at one point, some people call it,
but tech V with Randall Bennett, who used to work

(01:35):
at and Gadgets worked at cen At, started his own
video network and I jumped on board and we were
we had a little space, I think, and it was
in CS in the North Hall, I want to say.
And then this guy Jonathan Strictly shows up and we
hit it off and I couldn't get rid of me since. Yeah,
of course, listeners you probably know I A's Best from

(01:55):
the hit podcast podcast Without Pretense, a show that he
and I and Eric Sandan sporadically recorded for sometime. We
threatened to bring it back, but that kind of I mean,
let's be honest, Pandemic really did a number on everything.
But yeah, there's there's still the threat that that show
could come back. If you're a fan of family friendly entertainment,

(02:18):
do not listen to podcasts without pretense. I totally agree.
It's not for the faint of heart. It's not for
those who love certain media conglomerates. It's not for people
who like swear words. If you don't like swear words,
I would avoid that show unless you want to just
count how often we swear on the That show itself

(02:40):
can live on its own. I will not touch upon
it again. But I as I wanted to talk to
you because you have had a long career in the
sort of area that I work into in tech communication,
although yours has had very different styles than my own.
So I wanted to start off by talking about how

(03:00):
did you get into the field of working in like
tech video production and tech podcasting and that sort of stuff.
How did that all get started? Well, the story that
is a long and uninteresting one, so you can jump
ahead at any time, you guys, if you're listening to this.
But it turned out that I loved technology since I
was a little kid, and my dad was a gadget guy,

(03:22):
and my mom would yell in him like, hey, don't
spend that, don't find those gadgets because you gotta send
your kids to college. And so I used to just
be obsessed with gadgets growing up. And then I was
in law school at the time, and I just was
writing a lot of blogs. I was doing a lot
of writing in general, and I got a job writing
at the Apple blog, which I don't think was with

(03:42):
us anymore. It's part of Giga Home. And I started
writing blogs about Apple stuff, and then I started writing
my own blogs on tech things that are beyond Apple.
And there was one point where I reached studying for
the bar exam for New York State, and I was
studying about eleven to twelve hours a day, something crazy. Basically,
if I was awake, I was studying for this exam

(04:03):
because it was a two day exam at the time.
New York is the second hardest a state to pass,
not like Passachusetts or or in Danielson. New York has changed,
I believe it's now three days. And so I was
studying like crazy, and I needed a creative outlet. And
so while I was studying, I took these breaks and
I would do an audio podcast with my best friend
Rob called Killing Time, which is on and off still

(04:26):
for like now ten to fifteen years. I've been doing
this ridiculous show. It's just an entertainment show, just talking
about stuff that wasn't it wasn't being covered because back
then this is the starter podcast. I saw Leo Laporte
had moved to his own thing on Twitter. I saw
this show called Hack five. I was watching this guy
named Darren Kitchen. I'm like, you know, these guys are
doing podcasts. I think I could do that, and so

(04:48):
I started recording audio stuff on my own. I figured
out how to do with an old I believe this
was an iMac, one of the first Intel ones, and
I call my friend up, we'd record it and I
put it out. And this is the very early days
of podcast asting. So I turned that into a job
at one point because I was also still finishing law
school and I just got just past the bar, and

(05:10):
I was going to go into the field of law,
which because I'm a first generation American, so my folks
will be a lawyer, be a doctor, I didn't want
to be a doctor. So I got the law degree
and I entered a field. I think it was around
two thousand and six, two thousand seven, and the entire
market for lawyers dropped, so all of these people coming
out of school were competing with high level. People were

(05:31):
being paid a lot, we were competing for the same jobs,
so this was an absolute nightmare. So I was looking
for positions while I was still doing my audio podcast,
and I started messing with video a little bit more.
And during this time, I got a job at a
place called Gadgetel and I ended up being their editor
in chief. And as editor in chief, I'm like, let's
make videos, and I want to be in them because

(05:52):
I'm in charge. So I started making videos with the
people there, and I found other video outlets with Will
Harris and Justin Gainer over a channel flip, which I
believe got bought by Condie Nast in the long run.
So I started doing videos around then, and that's where
it all really started, because I was going bonkers and
just losing. I was just losing my patients in general

(06:14):
because I was studying so much. I just needed a
creative outlet, and that was audio and video. When you
were studying law, I want to say that there was
a point where I had you on an episode where
we were talking about patent law. Am I remembering that correctly?
That is correct? Because I did study intellectual property. It
was a field of law that I am and still
am interested. I was interested, and I'm still interested in it.

(06:35):
But due to the fact that so many of the
cases were so it was like splitting hairs. It was
making me really really agitated, and I thought, Hey, if
I was every going to die at a job because
of a heart attack, this would be the thing. So
I veered away from intellectual property just because I was
just getting so amped up about why does this pac
Man game make sense? That this Pong game isn't infringement?

(06:56):
And I just I got two worked up. I'm like,
I can't, I can't do that. So I did do
a bit of intellectual property class work. Never practiced that,
but it did show up on an episode with you
talking about intellectual property, and I believe video games was
a large chunk of that. Yeah, I should probably have
you back and we can have a discussion about patent

(07:18):
trolls in general and the one in particular that was
threatening the entire podcast industry for a few years, because
that was back in the yeah, back in the days
when when tech stuff was part of Discovery Communications and
there were just these crazy lawsuits getting thrown around, and
we could kind of dive into how that all worked.
But that'll I'll save that for a future episode. So

(07:41):
you you get this editor in chief job and you
start making, you start making videos. I love this too
because as someone who's become executive producer in the same
way where I launched a podcast, because I realized I
had the authority to do it, so I did it.
That's how, That's how Large Nerd Drunk Colleider it got started.
If you guys out there have listened to you of
those episodes, Um, it was a show that my friend

(08:03):
Ariel and I were doing on our own, and then
I had the chance to bring it over here, and
I kept on there was there was talk of bringing
it on for like two years, and it just never happened.
Then I realized, wait a minute, I'm an executive producer.
I can make this happen myself. So I I identify
strongly there's a couple of different parallels in our career paths.
So what happens next? Where do you go from there?

(08:25):
After you've got this editor in chief gig. So I
do that for a couple of years, and that's not
that's completely wrong, that's wrong entirely. I did that for
a couple of months that's right. And then Randall Bennett
offered me this job because he was having me on
as a guest a lot of some of my videos
on Gadgetel, and he was like, Hey, I think I
want to interview for this this thing I'm doing, Like
I said, okay, and he did a startup called tech

(08:47):
V tech v I, and I eventually was offered a
position as managing editor of the startup. Now would be
a step down, but it was. It was purely video,
and I thought, well, screw it, let's do it. Let's
go ahead end see if I could manage to do
this now. At the time, I don't have I have
a son now, but I didn't have a kid then,
so there was I was much more. I wasn't as

(09:08):
risk risk of versus I am now and switching jobs.
So I just completely left my job at Gadgetel, wound
up a tech V started doing video with Randall and
we're talking about doing daily videos. And this is somewhere
in like two thousand eight or so, so internet speeds,
I'm not exactly great. Everything was in one man operation
at the time. So in my my part, my house,
that is, I had my prompter set up I built

(09:29):
my own prompters because everything was much cheaper to build
back then versus now. Because as YouTube has grown and
everybody can make content, the amount of equipment that's available
now for cheap is just mind blowing. But when I
was doing this in two thousand eight, I had to
build something. A thirty five dollar prompter was made out

(09:50):
of heavy wood and the most expensive parts were the brackets.
So I set up my own prompter in my in
my office home office. I would write up my scripts,
I read camera, I've send it, I do the editing myself.
If I could do it live, we did it live
to not live to take, but live to digital, I guess.
And then we published it. So we published two or
three times a day, which was a really unusual pace

(10:12):
for the time because usually people are setting up and
then you've got your scriptwriting, you've got your research, you
got this, that and the other thing. And I was
pulling out two to three pieces of video content per day.
So that's got that got me to tech V and
then Randa wanted to kill the company because it wasn't
going anywhere. He said, this is not reaching the level
where I wanted to reach, and so I'm just going
to close the doors. And so I said, oh, crud, no,

(10:35):
what do I do? So at that point I was like, Okay,
well do I want to give law another shot? I'm like, yeah,
I'll give a law another shot. Because the market it
changed a bit, and I managed to get an interview
in Plantation, Florida with the I R S of all things,
because I studied tax law. That's true. I passed the

(10:55):
bar in New York, and I have a master's in
tax law, which is completely relevant to what I do now,
completely relevant. So I I go to this interview and
I bombed the interview flat out. To this day, I
remember the question I should have answered truthfully. They asked
me this question of what do you do when you
go too far in the wrong direction? And I wanted

(11:15):
I should have just told them the truth of like,
I don't ever do that. When I start feeling like
something's off, I immediately talked to somebody else and I go, hey,
does this seem right? This is the way it's supposed
to be gone? Because this isn't seem right. I'm from
New York and we have signs for delayed green lights.
I don't know if you have that elsewhere in this
country or anywhere else, because we're so impatient to New
York that if the light hasn't changed immediately after the

(11:37):
other one has, something's broken, people start going. So we
need to sign delayed green light. So when I in
my reality run into a thing where I think I'm
kind of going the wrong way just by a hair,
I'll talk to somebody, either they're above me or to
my side. I'm like, hey, does this seem right? If
I just answered that question truthfully, none of this would
have happened. So I bombed that interview. I start looking

(11:58):
for jobs like crazy. I go through six months or
seven months of unemployment. This was horrible for me, So
I'm just trying to figure out what to do. I
start doing my own show again. I'm like, Okay. After
a while, it's bubbled up in me, like you gotta
do this show called this Old Nerd. It's a video
podcast I did. And this is before YouTube is huge.
It's there's a lots of different video streaming sites. There's blip,

(12:21):
there's YouTube, there's daily Motion, there was vo there was video,
and there was there's obviously some of those are still around.
So I started doing this show, and then, of course,
since I did the show, I ended up getting a
job at PC Magazine. Now this job was not video,
this was a featured writer, and I had to spin
my video to trajectory to explain to them why I

(12:44):
wanted to do this. A hundred days goes by and
I quit. So the reason why I quit was I
got an offer from Twitch in California when I was
at CS. I was at CS for something. I forget what.
I forget him it was for gadgetel or it was
for it was for um tech v or PC mag

(13:05):
I don't even remember which thing was. At this point,
I was somewhere is It's kind of ambiguous. I get
this offer from twit to be on tom Merritt show
called Tech News Today, and I get the offer, and
I have to tell this company that I persuaded after
weeks and weeks and weeks to hire me, to let
me go, so I equip within a hundred days. The

(13:25):
editor in chief you know who you are, didn't talk
to me for two weeks after I quit. I was
still at the company for seventeen days. He would not
speak to me, and I was assigned absolute garbage pieces
like I didn't write these features about the most excellent
pets in tech or animals and technology. And I'm like,
because Boo was really big at the time, Like, this

(13:47):
is obviously not to my skill level, but I'm on
my way out, so I'm gonna make some fun with this.
So if you ever look at PC mag and you
see anything written by me about animals and technology, and
that's why. So I get this job at Twitch, and
I have to pick up my life and move. At
this point, I have a young son, I have a wife,
and we move over to California, to a little town

(14:07):
called Pedaluma in northern California. And it is a bumpy start.
I started working with with Tom Merritt, Sara Lane, Jason Howell,
leoo Port, and a whole bunch of other people, and
it was a complete, uh mind bender for me because
I used to watch a lot of these people on
tech TV, and I used to watch Tom all the
time on set and I started working with these guys.

(14:29):
So that goes on for a little bit and someone
pleasantness happens, which leads me to see net which we
can get into that at some point. Yeah, So so
backtracking a little bit, so I would always run into
you at C E S. That's that's when we would
spend whenever we saw each other in person. Of the

(14:49):
time that we have spent time together, it was because
we were both at C E S UH, and we
would go grab a meal or something or just hang
out and like make snarky comments about people in tech
and each other. UM. A lot of ribbing going on
at C E S. And I remember distinctly the C
E S before you got hired onto twit because I

(15:11):
was sitting down with Tom Merritt. Uh. And Tom is brilliant.
He's one of the best in the business. Just phenomenal,
hard worker. I his work ethic is to a point
where I can't even like when I complain about my
workload being too heavy, I sit there and think about
what Tom Merritt does on a normal week, not even
a heavy week, a normal week, and it just puts

(15:33):
me to shame. Tom had he was He wasn't seen
at Left Seen Net, joined This Weekend tech or twit
and started tech news Today, and I was chatting with
him and he was talking about he needed to find
a new co host. He I could tell he was
feeling out, like who I thought might be a good
co host. And I said, well, I'll tell you the

(15:53):
guy I would grab. I mean, he just started a
new job, but I'd grab I as A's who I'd
go for if I you had to have a tech
co host. At the time, I didn't need a tech
co host because I still had Chris Palette. I do
not have Chris Pallette anyone. I'm just saying, I as,
if you need another gig tech stuff, tech stuff could

(16:14):
always use another co host. But but no. But I
told Tom, I said, yeah, I would talk. I would
definitely I would chat with I s because he knows
his stuff. He's got a very strong perspective, his his
background in law is very helpful in that regard as well.
And uh, and he agreed. He was like, you know,
I was thinking about that, but I was kind of

(16:34):
trying to see if anyone else was having the same
sort of thought process. And I think shortly thereafter you
got approach to move over to twit. So I was
another time where I wasn't, like, you know, terribly surprised
at the thing that happened. I was very pleased to
see it come through. And obviously, uh, you know, moving
all the way across country. There's always the the just

(16:57):
the stress of moving, all the culture change that's there
as well. You have the culture of the the new office,
which is a very different thing in LEO Reports world.
And so how how do you remember how long you
were at TWIT? I was at twit for almost three years.

(17:17):
It was about two years and likes say eight or
nine months, but that place was it was something magical
over there because we got to do some really fun stuff.
It was very experimental. We were alive all the time,
So that I thought was really important when it came
to getting to know people. Because it's one thing when
you're talking on a podcast and you're explaining how a

(17:38):
patentrol is doing something or this technology is going to
change the world or this is complete garbage, but people
don't get to really know who you are. And in
these live streams where we would just be shooting the
breeze or post show pre show stuff, the audience really
got to know us, and I got to know the audience,
so like I don't think of the audience anymore like
they're my friends. I'd still talk to a lot of
these people today online and I forget that I knew

(17:59):
them from the chat and that's also why how new
people have seen it. Like I flat out I was
in the chat room all the time. That's how Tom
knew who I was in the first place, because when
I was editing whatever I was doing, I would have
seen that videos up live and I would just be
in the chat room like, oh, that's not right, here's
what's going on. And that's actually partly what got me
noticed was that I was giving corrections for the for

(18:22):
the podcast buzz out Loud as it was going on,
heavily researched, and if I was wrong, I would own
up to it. But it didn't happen a lot. And
he's oddly enough that parallel. Something he did how he
got his job at tech TV was that he was
frequently in the forums of tech TV, and with something
would go wrong, he'd write something about it and he
got noticed by Leolaport, so he ended up a tech TV.
So this is very similar, these these two career paths

(18:46):
of how that happened. So I completely lost track. We're
talking about other than I used to it for Tom
and that was really fun. Yeah, No, and I love
I love. I haven't been on a show with Tom
in years now, I haven't chat with him in years.
We kind of kind of lost touch. But anytime I
got a chance to do that, it was always a
great joy, mostly because I mean Tom would do so

(19:08):
much of that work too, write like, he would do
so much of the initial research that you could go
ahead and try and do some research on your own,
but he covered those bases so thoroughly that it was
more like, well, what do you think about this? Well,
Tom's drive in the driver's seat. I just have to
sit in the passengers and like point out stuff occasionally.
So it's fantastic. Well, so you're at You're over at twit?

(19:31):
How did the transition from uh without having to get
into messy details, how did how did the transition away
from twit? How what happened next? Well, there was there
was a big pivot point where Tom was going to
move to l A. The the company was in North
cal and he was gonna move to SoCal and this

(19:52):
became what was thought to be untenable, which is kind
of hilarious if you think about because he's remote and
remote stuff can't work with hosts. You can't possibly do
a show remotely with people, and so Tom was not renewed.
This contract was not renewed, and I was passed over
for a position that I'm gonna This is like the
first time I'm saying this. I was passed over for
a position that I was told I would get. I

(20:14):
was told to yeah, you'd get this, it should should
this happen, and completely got blindsided and I'm like, okay,
I'm I'm gonna go. So I started pursuing seen net now,
seeing that I had been applying to since probably about
two thousand two. I mean since it was a thing.
I was like, I love seeing that it's got the
coolest tech reviewers. I always wanted to know what they

(20:34):
think and I want to know what's going on. And
I applied there. Thankfully, I had a lot of people
and I've grown a lot of networking at this point,
and tom Merritt was backing me up, and people at
s net knew me from the chat room. Lindsay Turnin
knew who I was because she would be in the
podcast and she was a VP at this point. Now
she was the e I C. Of sen So people
knew who I was when I applied for this job.

(20:56):
But this job was not in video. This was front
Door editor, and that what that means is when you
go to seen net dot com, there is there are
stories up there, and that's not generated by algorithm. That
is somebody programming it. You'd programmed the door, That's what
they would call it. And so I'm like, okay, I
will go to see it because it will be different,
and I will say, seen that is incredibly professional. Reading

(21:18):
to that as you as you would like, and it
is a fantastic place to work. But within about six
or seven months, I was kind of losing my mind
not doing any video, and so I told my boss
is this. I'm like, hey, I want to start doing
some videos and they said sure. We what we were
really wondering what took you so long in the first place,
because we thought within three months you'd say something. You
got six months through. I think I lost that bet

(21:40):
is when my boss said, and I was like, Okay,
that's great. I'm really glad that you guys were willing
and you were you knew I was gonna switch over.
So I was offered the Top five gig, which was
pretty awesome because Tom used to do it and Donald
Bell did it, and I used to sit next to
Donald Bell and we would work on scripts. Essentially, he
would say, you've got any ideas for top five the yeah,
give me a second, and I throw some stupid ideas

(22:02):
at him and he'd make some great video with it.
So that was fun, and even the show has kind
of been on a on a hiatus, mostly because of
my own laziness and the pandemic and everything. But I
started getting into the video side that way. At seeing that,
then I kept pushing to be on the video team.
They split my job in half. They go, okay, so
you'll be half on edits half on video. And then

(22:24):
I concocted a plan where I could fully move over
to video because I trained my successor. I go, hey,
would you mind doing this job? And she's like, yeah,
I would love to do this job. I want this job.
What took you so long? So she starts working on
this this side. The company goes to me, Hey, you know,
we don't know if we can take you off the door,
because you know it's it's a hard job, but we

(22:45):
don't know if we could train somebody. I go, do
you know I've not been doing the door for the
past two weeks and this other person has been doing it.
How's everything going, And they're like, oh, it's going great.
Go well, why don't you put the job, give Caitlin
that job, give me the video team, and they put
me on the video team. So I've been on the
video team now for five six years. I've been at
the company for almost eight years. At Sena, we've had

(23:06):
a lot of different approaches when it comes to video.
We need shows, we don't need shows. We need faces,
we don't need faces, we just need voices. We need this,
and so there's all of this attempt to respond to
the market at sen A. That is interesting because one
of the weird things about Seen that is that there
isn't a lot of other places to go up. Seen

(23:29):
is like at the top. And I'm not saying this
because I worked there. I'm not saying this because I'm
trying to say oh, yeah, well I have no career
ambitions or anything like that. It's more of that This
company gets tons and tons of views on every single
piece of content we do, video or audio or written,
because it really has been around for over twenty years.
The biggest issues that has is like, well, that's an

(23:50):
old person's brand. Seen at is old. It's old it's like, yeah,
it is old because it's been around for a really
long time, but it's it's got some great people there.
So being on the video t him has been just excellent.
I'd say good nentime excellent. But like everybody's jobs, there's
that five percent real Like do I really have to
cover best Air Pure Fires today? Yeah? Okay, I'm gonna

(24:14):
make the best video for this though. I'm telling you what,
I'm gonna have fun with it. My script is gonna
be full of jokes that doesn't make any sense, but
I'm telling you I'm gonna do And there is a
video by the way way I do Best Air Pure
Fires and it's a hoot. Well, i AS, if you
ever want to know how Gooseneck trailer hitches work, I
gotta how stuff works article I can point you toward.
Uh I am. I am more than familiar with that

(24:36):
as well. We're gonna take a quick break with our
conversation with i AS and we'll be right back. So
can you talk a little bit about like what what
is your job? Like we were talking before we started

(24:58):
recording that job. Idols can get kind of fuzzy and
vague in our field, like there there's a point where
you can have two people who have on paper the
same job title, and then when they talk about what
their job is, you realize, wow, there's not a whole
lot of common ground there. They can be vastly different
experiences and job accountabilities and that sort of thing. So

(25:20):
kind of kind of walk through what it is that
you do typically, uh, during a week at seen a Well,
my main thing is to make videos and that sounds
pretty simple, but it's not. You've got to think of
topics that will resonate with the audience. And if you're
pitching something that's gonna go to YouTube, it's got to
fit within the YouTube channel that's got its own strategy.

(25:41):
If you're pitching something for sena dot com, that's got
a different strategy because you can be a little bit
more wide. YouTube has this. They have a method of
recommending stuff. The algorithms that you've probably seen videos but
like the algorithm moved us or whatever. That's a big key.
So in my in the course of the week, technically
I'm a senior video producer, which is a weird title
because I don't produce other people's content. Not yet. This

(26:04):
is something I've been thinking about for the long term.
But the title doesn't really match what I do. I'm
an on air talent. I pitched my own videos. I go,
this is what I want to do, and here's the
timeline where I can get it done. If it's a
news story, I can do that usually within a day.
I was tasked with a Richard Branson story. I don't
know when this is gonna air, but at the time
Richard Branson, at the time recording of this, Richard Branson

(26:27):
is trying to get into space before Jeff Bezos to
be the first billionaire in space. And I'm doing I'm
researching this to make sure I can have a well
told story of why this is happening. So I do
like the vast majority of my own research. It's rare
that I'm handed research on somebody else. I'm not a
talking head. I am not handed a script from somebody
who just says here read this. I write my own scripts.

(26:48):
I at this point, since in the pandemic, I run
my own camera, I run my own prompter, I run
the lights. I have everything set for myself and I
then uploaded to an editor so I get that review
the videos see if everything matches and then we'll publish it.
I also write the headlines and the descriptions. Those can
be tweaked based on search engine optimization, and those things

(27:11):
can change. But I've have a pretty heavy hand when
it comes to this because I do not like when
titles change, which wholly change the meaning of the video,
or they don't, they don't really mesh with the video.
So I really keep an eye on that kind of
stuff because I don't want to mislead the viewers. If
you're watching one of my videos, my big keys, I
want you to walk away smarter. I want you to

(27:31):
have clicked for a reason. I hope you get the
answer right away. I will say that one of my
favorite things, which wasn't one of my favorite things at
the beginning, was reading through YouTube comments, which on a
good day can be pretty bad, and on a on
a great day is not so bad. So it's it's
it's there's really not a great range of things there.

(27:51):
But I was really reading all of these comments with
something Tom Merritt told me a long time. It goes like,
just look look for a kernel of actual so thin
you can improve on. If there's something there, then work
with it. If there isn't, then you can just throw
that comment aside. So one of the things that I've
done differently in my videos is that within the first
like eight seconds the video, I'll tell you the answer

(28:13):
to something. If it's like, you know, like what's the
best what's the best phone of the years? Like, I'll
tell you the first four seconds, like the iPhone is
the best phone in the year. I'm gonna explain why,
Like I don't make you wait. I don't want to
waste the viewers time. So my actual job is making
these videos happen, make sure the content fits, the brand,
fits the channel, helps us continue working with the YouTube

(28:34):
algorithm where our stuff kind of makes sense. So that's
that's kind of what I do. That's about what I do.
It's interesting that you bring up the algorithm because that's, uh,
that's it's just like s e O or search engine optimization,
and that it shows how beholden content creators are to
the platforms to which we publish. Right. This is why

(28:56):
Bernie Burns, who was a co founder of rooster Teeth,
used to say that there was no substitute for having
your own platform, because at least then you know the
rules aren't going to change arbitrarily and force you to
completely change your strategy in order to remain competitive. Whereas
when you're publishing on a different platform like YouTube, if

(29:18):
there's a change in the algorithm, suddenly what was working
great yesterday isn't trending at all today. It's not even
not even a blip and uh. And that's something I
think that is applicable to just about everyone who's listening,
whoever wants to make any kind of content. I mean,
if you're trying to make anything where you're putting it
out in a saturated market, knowing about these algorithms and

(29:41):
at least kind of having an understanding of how they
work is absolutely instrumental in getting a foothold in those areas.
Same thing with podcasts, like all the different podcatching uh
services out there have their own method for identifying and
promoting material. Often it will promote whatever is proprietary first,

(30:04):
So so if it's a if it's Stitcher, then it
might be Stitcher exclusives get get first priority. But you know,
knowing that is helpful just because I think it helps
you set expectations. It also helps you reconcile the fact
if it takes a while to take off. It may
not be that you know, you're not doing a good

(30:26):
enough job or your content isn't interesting. It may literally
be people just haven't found a way to find you yet.
So this is a thing that big companies struggle with too,
seeing that being one of them, I mean, how stuff works.
When we were part of Discovery, this was a big
deal to which we were always really focused on search
engine optimization. We saw a lot of traffic coming in

(30:48):
from Google searches for a lot of our articles, and
whenever that algorithm would change, it would drastically change that,
which then changes revenue models. It just has this cascading
effect through the entire business. So having that kind of
approach and knowledge is really important. And having two different
strategies for something about how it might perform on c
net versus on YouTube. That's also a big deal. And

(31:11):
you you touched on this a little bit, but can
you talk about uh, you know, not that I want
to go back and think about twenty too much. But
once the pandemic hit, once the once things started going
into lockdown, and once people started to try and look
at how to pivot to maintain operations in this you
know now pandemic world. How did that unfold for you guys?

(31:35):
When did when did? Like? Do you remember when the
Senate Office is essentially shut down? Yeah, it was around March,
and I believe there was one confirmed case and one
of the CBS buildings at the time. I believe it
was maybe at the Broadcast Center ont S, so not
in our office. And based on that and all the

(31:55):
news coming in, they said, Oh, we're gonna we're gonna
try something we're gonna do. If you Friday, you can
work from home and then we'll let you know if
you're coming back. We'll probably come back in two weeks,
which turned into into forever. So they told us then
that okay, we're gonna work from home. And so I
was in a panic in general because I am in

(32:16):
a small New York apartment. I got this apartment because
I like the outside, which doesn't didn't exist essentially, I
couldn't use it anymore, and we came to shooting and stuff.
I had to become very creative as to how to
shoot in this space. Mm hmm. So I know that
on ours like we closed down March thirteenth. And the

(32:37):
reason I know that is because I've been back to
the office about a dozen times, and there's one desk
calendar that ominously just stays at March thirteen, twenty perpetually
Friday of the thirteenth. What a day. Uh So, Yeah,
Like it's interesting because I don't do video obviously, which
makes it way easier for me. Right, I'm only doing you.

(33:00):
I just have to make sure that I'm not getting
too much bleed over from outside. I imagine that for you.
Setting this all up in a in a New York space,
which I think we could charitably call cozy, it was
a little presented its own challenges. Like you just mentioned
earlier that you run everything. You run the camera, the prompter,

(33:20):
all that stuff because you have to. I mean, you
can't have people come in during a pandemic to to
help run tech for you. So, uh, can you talk
a little bit about sort of the setup you use,
like what what what's the sort of equipment you're using
in the space that you have in order to be
able to to do what you do. Yeah, So I
used to have camp quarters ten ad P camp quarters

(33:42):
around just for old videos I I used to do.
So I set up one of those things immediately I
found some prompters made by glide Gear because as I
was doing research, As I said before, it's so much
cheaper now to buy then build, because I was just
I was floored by seeing how many options as I had.
It's this company called glide Gear. They're not paying me.

(34:03):
They didn't give me a free one. I found their
stuff on Amazon at that was really cool. It seemed
really simple. I bought a glide Gear teleprompter. You've got
to provide your own screen. I had experience doing that
with tech V, so I knew exactly what I needed
to do. I had Presentation Prompter as my teleprompter software,
which feeds another monitor, which works pretty well. Because that
is because it's also a monitor, I can when I

(34:24):
have to do any group video calls for like live streaming,
I can put that right to camera, so I'm not
looking down, I'm not looking to this side when it
comes to that live streaming kind of thing. Generally, I
don't use it for anything but those two things. So
I got that set up pretty well. Then it came
to lights. Now, back in the early days, I was
using halogens because they were the cheapest, but they were

(34:45):
super hot and it wouldn't die with those so thankfully,
because again things have changed. I got to get some
LED lights and they were really good. Newer makes a
whole bunch of really good, low cost devices, and so
I got a bunch of their LED lights. I had
set up my there's only two point lighting. I'm supposed
to be doing three point lighting, supposed to be able
to have a hair light. I couldn't do that, just

(35:06):
because I needed to find a space. And now the
space to shoot in my apartment we have a loft
that runs a good portion of the apartment and it's
about at highest fifty two inches salt, which is shorter
than I am, which is a little annoying. So I
had to figure out how to make this space work

(35:27):
on camera. So I created one set and I had
this really great backdrop, but the problem is it was
all bricks, and the bricks are great except my skin
tone and the bricks were kind of washing out and
that was kind of a problem. So then I created
a second studio and that had a lot of work.
A lot of this was I want to say tetricy
because it was more like Mane of those puzzle games
where you have it's a little piece of plastic, and

(35:48):
you have the numbers in them, you've got to arrange
them properly. But to move one thing, you gotta move
like three things. That's exactly what it took to make
any space work in this in this loft, So I
had to come to terms with whether or not I
was keeping things. I was throwing things out regularly. Could
I find a camera that fits? How am I going
to make this work? Because to my original studio had

(36:09):
a floor seat. I got a little video game seat
that could sit on because there was no way I
could fit a chair in here. Any proper chair, I'd
be bonking my head. So I measured everything out. When
I built a second set up. The chair I found
was something for changing brakes. It's eighteen inches tall, that's
got big wheels you can move around on it is.

(36:30):
It's super comfortable. No, but at least I look seated
because I am seated. I knew about backdrops, so I
got myself a After doing a lot of research, I
got myself a white brick background, which apparently people thought
was was real, which is great because it's not. I
had a steamer, so I steamed the heck out of it.
There's no there's no wrinkles, and staples are all where

(36:51):
the fake mortar would be. So I had to do
a lot of that, and that was in a super
hot room and I'm on my back and I'm trying
to staple these things. I'm adding everywhere, staples are falling
when they hit something hard. Not fun. So I did
all this building up stuff, building it out. Got a
desk that sort of fits. But the thing about the desk,
there's always something weird about this space that when I
put my arms on it, it looks like my arms

(37:13):
are huge because they're closer to camera, because the height
is wrong because none of the heights are standard in
this you can't sit in an eighteen ent high seat
at a standard desk. So a lot of this has
been trial and error, trying to figure out what fits
on camera, obviously making things look neat on camera. Everything
beyond the camera is a mess. Like this is like
where my luggage is for trips which I don't take anymore.

(37:34):
This is where my where my books are. This is
where like like with storage for the apartment is winter closed,
like that's where they live up here, but they have
to be off camera. So all of that it was
the long wited answer of how I set this thing up.
If there's the camera, and there's the prompter, and there's
a desk and remote. Remotes were really important to me

(37:55):
on this. I had on my Canon camera. It was
all remote controlled, so I don't have to keep you
going behind it. And as the ceiling is low here,
one of the biggest issues is being able to see
the top of a camera because it camera to be
really close to the ceiling, so I can't see the buttons.
I can't do anything. So the remote are really, really,
really important to me, so I did everything of remote.

(38:17):
The lights are on a remote, the cameras on the remote,
the power to all these sections are on remote, so
I can tell Google to turn them on and off.
Just because I know when I climbed down that ladder,
if I forgot something, I'm gonna be fierce. I got
to climb up the ladder again and then squirrel around
press buttons. I'm like, I'm not doing that. So a
lot of investment and smart etletts as well. So that
was a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, and

(38:41):
I'm down in one studio space and I kind of
like it. It works pretty well, and there I kind
of want to tear it all down again because it's
not working exactly the way I want it, but I
know that's gonna be for the future. Well, was there
like a long interruption between when you were predy sing
videos in studio too when you were doing it at

(39:02):
home or was it pretty quick? Were you able to
turn it around fairly quickly? I think I had my
first video back up and running within about a week.
So I had, I had the prompter and everything. I
had ordered this stuff when I when I heard the
rumor we were leaving, I ordered stuff like on Wednesday,
And then when Friday showed them like, oh yeah, you're
gonna spend Friday at home, all my stuff showed up.

(39:24):
I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then when I find
out we're not going back. By Wednesday, I had everything
running again, and I figured out the shot, figured out
the composition of everything. I had to buy something from
the hardware store across the street because I couldn't get
something in time, So I paid a lot of money
for this really cheap led thing, which I know I
could have got on Amazon for like half the price,

(39:45):
but I needed it now, so I shot with that
got the videos out, and that was a huge learning
curve too of like what videos do people want to see?
How do people are like do they want to be distracted?
Do they want to be informed about this? Do they
want to think about fun things you can do at home?
Or do you want to think about, hey, look this
TV should be cool. Let's just talk about tech like
nothing has changed. That was an adjustment period. That's really interesting. Yeah,

(40:08):
I didn't even think about that, but I mean, I
guess technically I did sort of the same thing, except
of course I did it in podcasting. So for me,
the really difficult transition was I had to plug a
USB microphone into this computer and then I already had
the the mic stand because we used to record podcasts
about pretense at this very same space where I'm at

(40:28):
right now. So so it really wasn't that difficult. In
other words, what I'm saying is my experience was vastly
easier than yours, except that it does come down to
like how do you determine what what content to create? Right?
And in my case, um, my listeners are great. They
typically reach out to me on Twitter and I don't.

(40:50):
I didn't get a lot of messaging about hey can
you kind of shy away from stuff that's more COVID related,
or hey can you really focus on COVID? So I
just kept going as is, which I mean, if you
look through the history of tech stuff, it's it's pretty
much the entire Jonathan just does what he wants to do,
is what that really comes down to over the last

(41:11):
say five years or so. UM. But I'm so impressed
that there was essentially one week of adjustment before things
were coming out again, because it's so much more involved
doing video than doing audio. And you know, I guess
one benefit is that you and I both typically do

(41:31):
a lot of solo host work, which means that we're
not dependent upon anyone else's schedule. If there's a technical issue,
usually it's it's easier to track down what the problem
is and solve it. Obviously, when you have multiple people,
especially when you're all doing it remotely, you've increased the
likelihood of technical problems, and then you have to figure out, well,

(41:54):
where is the problem originating from, how can we identify
what it is, and how do we fix it? I
as and I have a little bit more to talk about,
but before we get to that, let's take another quick break.
I thought maybe we did this out by talking a

(42:14):
little bit about some of your favorite little memories related
to stuff you've done with tech, whether it was with
snet or twit or whatever it may be. Like, are
there any moments that kind of stick out either as
being just like, I'm really proud of how that turned out,
or this ended up being really funny, or let me
tell you about the time I completely beefed it on

(42:35):
camera or whatever. Well, the first thing that comes to
mind was I was giving a tour. Now, if you
go to a scene at their booth and at CS,
the company has tours for really big, fancy, big wigs.
And it was my first year giving tours, and there
was a very very large company that I was leading.
And I won't mention that company, but you're gonna be

(42:56):
able to figure out. So as I'm walking with them,
I take this company to l g S booth and
I told them that this is the coolest thing I saw. Now,
this company is a very very large competitor to l G,
and they were very mad at me for saying that
this was the coolest thing now. LG at the time
showed a rollable oh, let television that fit into a
box essentially and rolled out and it rolled back in.

(43:19):
And I thought this was fascinating, as did many people
because this was one of the coolest things people had
seen at CS. Now CS has gotten to the point
where people are like, oh yea, and it's like, no,
this was super cool. So this company got really really
mad at me, started yelling at me, and I had
a little microphone on on my face and they can
all hear me with the little headsets, and so one
of the gentleman decides to yell at me into my

(43:39):
microphone so everybody can hear. And they're all saying that
you know, you are biased against our company and you
don't give us good reviews, and this, that and the
other thing, which is the furthest thing from the truth.
But because this company makes great products, I'll say it
right now again, good luck finding out who the competitor
to l G is. A competitor to l G that
just viciously doesn't like LG. So uh, that part was

(44:01):
amazing because I got yelled at so much and I
was so disliked. I didn't have to give a tour again,
and people were asking me, how do you get out
of the tours. I don't want to give the tours.
I'm like, this is what I did. I didn't need
to do that. But they got really really mad because
I was telling the truth. I said, this is the
coolest thing, and you guys don't have this, so like,

(44:22):
it's not my fault, you don't do this. So that
was one of the biggest things that I remember. I
will say one of my favorite memories as well was
being at the seen Net stage and sitting at the
desk and ready to you know, there's prompters going and
there's people there and I remember back when I think
it was you, me, Derek, a whole bunch of people
were just kind of sitting there in the audience has
seen it and just watching people like okay, we're just

(44:44):
sitting there and watching like you we a little wave
to camera, and there's Fattiamo kid. We're all hanging out.
And then I'm now on the stage. Like I used
to be the guy in the audience. Now I'm the
guy on the stage and that was really cool because
I do they're doing my makeup and talking to like
stage makeup. So there's like this cake stuff on me,
which I don't wait are normally, so it's like, Okay,
this looks really good. I'm doing all this stuff, I'm
reading the prompter, and this really easy chatting with everybody.

(45:07):
It was super smooth. It got I Also, there was
a point where I realized it became very normal for
somebody to be jamming something in my ear. My friend
Brian van Gelder, he's the he was like the stage tech,
and so he'd be putting an if be in my
ear or taping something to my back. And there's one
point where I'm like, when did this become normal? Because
this is really weird. So to take a photo a selfie,

(45:29):
it's me like kind of smiling, and he's this weird out,
like why are you taking a photo of me jamming
something in your ear? It's because like, yeah, this is
normal for me. Because as much as I've been doing
this now for almost fifteen years maybe more, it is
still really cool to have these moments where I get
to talk to people and tell people, hey, this is
some really cool technology stuff that you should really check out,

(45:50):
or like, you know, this sounds like a great idea,
but it's not so being able to like share the
information that I have access to is really really fun.
So all of that, anytime I do a video, like
I said, I try to make sure the audience walks
away smarter, like I really love doing that stuff. But
those two moments for C Yes anyway, they stand out
a lot because again I've really ticked off that company

(46:12):
and and there's people jam stuff in my ears. Those
are like just two of them, but there's there's there's
a lot more, but that those are the two that
popped out of my head the fastest. So so a's
c e S typically c NETS Booth I believe is
outside of the upper floor of South Hall if I'm mistaken.
It was until I think two years ago we switched

(46:33):
to West as our main one because we used to back.
If you guys don't know, there used to be a
competing show. There was a Consumer Electronic Show and then
the A v N Show, which is an adult video
show and I'm not making that up. And so you
had this very strange mix of people that your tech
nerds and porn stars and they were they will they

(46:53):
would often have for A v N. They would often
have a special where if you had a membership to
C E S you would get like a complementary one
for the A v N one. So I know a
lot of people who would do both. I I never did.
I was I felt like it was just there would
just be a bald man blushing so hard he would

(47:15):
pass out. That's all it would be. Well, since they
used to occupy the Sands West, and when they left
several years ago, c S expanded and West became this
kind of wild no no, no pun intended wild West.
It was really all these weird little gadgets, little companies.
Because the main show was in the Las Vegas Convention Center,

(47:35):
so you had your big name companies that aren't there
any more. Microsoft used to be there either with the
giant Xbox thing. I think High Sense replaced them. There's TCL,
there's Samsung, there's LG there's Panasonic. Everybody's over and Sony.
They're all in in in Las Vegas Convention Center. But
West started getting all these weirder and little things that
were really fun to cover, gadgets, more oddities, and so

(48:01):
that grew and grew as as the space was open,
and so we moved our stage from South to West.
I believe it was two years ago, and it was
really really fun. I got to be an anchor over
there for a while, which was just super fun. That's
that's so cool. Like I haven't I haven't been to
a C E S since they relocated the stage, because

(48:22):
I do remember going and seeing your image on one
of those enormous screens right like like right there at
the booth Like that was to me. I was like, wow,
I as this maide a man, his face is like
three stories tall. That's amazing and um and I always
thought that that was just like and I knew you
were gonna be super busy, so I was like, well,

(48:42):
I don't want to I have such a loose schedule
whenever I met C E S that I can easily
take up someone else's entire time if they let me,
So I didn't want to do that while you were
very busy working. I always felt the same way when
you know, we were just hanging out at the scene
at booth before you worked there, when we were just
you know, like you mentioned, oh, I also want to

(49:03):
say something else in case my listeners picked up on it.
I as mentioned our friend fat emo kid that is
his handle, So yeah, I don't think that he's saying
there was a fat Emo Kid sitting next to us.
It's Eric who goes by fat Emo Kid, whom we
love very much, and so I just wanted to just

(49:24):
wanted to point that out as well. Yeah, No, this
was this was great. I mean we've had like some
crazy adventures, maybe not crazy, we've had some goofy adventures
at c e S. Like there was the year where
Eric was I think he even registered the domain CEOs
from the back of Jonathan Strickland's head, where he was
just going to stand behind me with a camera and
just followed the back of my head or not. I

(49:45):
think that was the other thing, because we were taking
photos of people. If anybody it was bald, there was that.
There was I believe Carpets of c S was one
of them. I don't know that was hours of somebody else's.
There was the time where we wound up in the
We went through the employees entrance of a casino because
we just couldn't get across because you know, if you're
on this strip, it looks like everything is connected and
it's not, so it's super difficult to get across. To

(50:06):
be fair, We asked an employee about how to get in,
and the employee just pointed at the side door, which
was an employee's only entrance, and the first the first
stop as we walked in was the security desk. Yet
that and that was not super but they were nice.
Wasn't what those movies were like, Oh, you're gonna break
your your thumbs. It's like go out that way and

(50:26):
you can go where you need to go. Oh thanks,
that was for the next Yeah, they clearly they knew
that we were clueless and idiotic, so they were very
kind to us. These were great moments. And that LG
television you were mentioning, that was one of those things
that I thought was fascinating when I first saw the tech.
I mean, we had been promised oh LAD screens for
a few years at that point, but mostly the old
LAD screens that we saw were like six inches in

(50:49):
size and like you could see where they would show
off how it could bend in everything, but there there
was no real practical way of create manufacturing them at
a scale that would be that would make any sense, right,
Like it would just be astronomically expensive. That LG TV
was astronomically expensive, but but at least it was no
longer in the you know half a million range. I

(51:11):
think it was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars if
I recall correctly. But uh, still a little outside my
own price range for entertainment centers. But well, my question
to you, than I asked, is, uh, if you could
be on an episode of tech Stuff and cover any
one topic, what would it be because I'll invite you back.

(51:33):
Oh that's not fair, because I would pick a topic
that I don't know anything about. I could do anything
that means I knew I knew about it, versus like
what could I actually be prepared for? Oh, man, I
think I don't want to see five because I think
you're right, You've done probably a thousand of those things.
So I'm also the host of The Restless One, say,

(51:55):
a show branded by T Mobile about five G technologies.
But if you want to talk about five G, I
can chat about it. It's more that there's so much
there's so many nuances to it that even to this
to this day, it's still kind of a mess, such
that like does your phone do five G? Does it
have that can handle sub six in this and millimentary wave?

(52:17):
It's like what does that mean? Because nobody thinks about
that when they think about four G, Like my phone
does this because it has fifteen radios, you don't think
about it. So five g's got the same thing. But
it's not something that's really talked about in the ads
for these companies because honestly, it can be. It can
just glazier eyes over because it's like it's not that interesting,
but it's super important. So five G in general to me,

(52:41):
has been really interesting, even maybe even home five G.
Like I've been testing a T mobile. They're not paying
me for this T Mobile gateway because my wired speeds
in my New York City apartment they're not very fast,
and I don't have options. And with the advance of
five G speeds in theory, I should be able to

(53:02):
get faster speeds and more competition. That's why I love
five G in general, Like any company can be a
five G provider while they're whether they're reselling somebody else's
bandwidth or not. But there's more competition and I'm not
locked to a certain provider. So five G is the
first thing I'm thinking of, and then I'd have to
think about the second one, because maybe how the most

(53:25):
boring topic of all H d C p my least
favorite thing. That's stupid handshake between I think it's what, um,
it's not what is the HD Standford's not just high definition?
Is it? Oh? I wouldn't be able to tell you that.
I just did a full I just did a full
series of tech glossary episodes about acronyms and initialisms, and
once I finished that, I erased them from my brain

(53:47):
high band with digital content protection. This is what's known
as the handshake between one HDM my device to another.
And that is really, really, really a no go because
it breaks stuff all the time. If you do anything
like video game capture or like hook up one a
c and my cable to an adapter to another as

(54:09):
my cable to make a longer one that could break.
I'd love to talk about that, just because it's so
so dumb. That's the decent stand for it is. It's dumb.
Stop doing this. Well, maybe what I'll do is I'll
invite you on for a couple of episodes. We can
do one about five G and talk about like the
three broad flavors of five G and what does it
actually mean? Yes? Uh, And we can talk about you

(54:32):
know again, like you you say there's a lot of misunderstanding,
largely because the messaging around five G is complicated. Right,
it's hard to get across in a way that's quickly digestible.
What five G is capable of doing. Everyone just thinks of, oh,
it's five. It's like spinal tap. It's five. It's one
better than four, and it's more complicated than that. Uh.

(54:54):
And then I'll get you on for maybe one where
we talk about stuff that is supposed to work in
tech but sometimes makes things more difficult than it would
have been if you hadn't used that technology at all,
because there are some options there, right, Like there's some
things where you can say, here's something that was created
to solve a specific problem, and here's how it made

(55:17):
that problem worse, perhaps in a totally different way. I
think I tweeted something similar about Android being like Ralph
Wigham sometimes like I think it's helping. I'm gonna turn
low power battery on, lottle little power on. It's like
you just turned off all my stuff in the background.
I'm not getting notifications for this because you think it
makes sense to turn off email put that to deep sleep.

(55:39):
It's like I have to go into the settings and
then undo your helpful thing. Yeah sometimes it thinks helping,
but no, yeah, yeah, that'd be fun to talk about.
I watched your video about the latest build of Android
when it was going into beta testing, and you it
was it was the day of and you uploaded your

(56:00):
dio and he was like, well, this isn't working yet,
like the idea, like the color palette that's based off
of your your whatever background image you've chosen, that kind
of stuff. I want to let you know. I also
installed the beta after I watched your video, and now
my phone just randomly freezes and then I have to
turn the power button off and it's not supposed to
be better. But I also would like to say this

(56:21):
my one of my favorite comments about that video was
dude doesn't know Android because it has a built in
screen recorder, And to that, I replied, it doesn't work
in the data like I kept trying and it kept crashing.
So I did something crazy by downloading a third party
one because the first party one was buggy. So if
I tried to record with it, try to make a

(56:41):
video for people, and it's like, oh, I keep breaking,
So I really needed to use the third party one.
So I know I Android a bit, but I also
know and stuff doesn't work. Yeah, so that's that's when
I'll have you on. We'll talk about how tech doesn't
work occasionally. I as thank you so much for coming
on the show and for giving some of your valuable

(57:02):
time over to the beloved text stuff listeners. I'm sure
they appreciate it. Where should they go to see your work? Okay,
I'm gonna be very very very self promotional. Go to
Twitter dot com slash I s I y a Z.
That's me, not not that, that's me parts just I
y e Z. I tweet about my my day. I

(57:22):
tweet about what I'm covering, what videos I'm doing. Occasionally
I'll tell you about stuff that has nothing to do
with technology, so be aware of that. If you're interested
in barbecue sauce, I might be talking about it there.
But also go to YouTube dot com slash s net
because we're doing some of the best stuff we've ever
done and it's showing up there. We're doing some long
form stuff, we're doing some experimental content. I'm really proud

(57:43):
of our team and really proud of the stuff we're
putting out there. So go to s net dot com
or YouTube, dot com, slash s net and see all
the stuff there and follow me on Twitter please excellent
And guys, if you have any suggestions for topics that
I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you
can always reach out to me on Twitter. The handle
for the show is text Stuff h s W. Because

(58:04):
while I'm no longer part of how stuff works, it's
always in my heart. They surgically implanted it, and I'll
talk to you again really soon, yea. Tex Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(58:26):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows