November 20, 2024 • 41 mins
After 16 and a half years, I will be stepping down from being the host of TechStuff. We'll talk more about the future of the show soon, but today's episode is all about the history and evolution of the little podcast that tried to demystify technology, critically examine the industry, and make tons of puns in the process.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are You So. Once upon a time in mid
two thousand and eight, an editor and a writer for
(00:28):
the website HowStuffWorks dot Com were approached by their boss
about launching a podcast that would focus on technology. At
the time, most folks didn't know what a podcast was. Now,
the media form had been around since at least two
thousand and three or two thousand and four, depending upon
whom you asked, But the concept was this podcast would
(00:50):
serve as a kind of brand extension for the website.
They would reach new audiences, and each episode would tie
back to articles on how stuff works dot com. The
hosts would encourage listeners to go to the website and
to read the articles as well as, you know, just
browse around in general. There was no monetization plan for
(01:11):
the podcast itself, not initially anyway. That would come much later,
and it was really just kind of a new type
of marketing, a brand extension for the website. The editor
and the writer agreed to give it a shot, So
the two went into a little used room that had
a very odd shape. So the house stuffworks dot Com
office took up an entire floor in a building in
(01:33):
a neighborhood called Buckhead. That's a fashionable neighborhood in Atlanta.
That's where a lot of money is in Atlanta. It's
mostly known for having lots of office buildings as well
as a mall filled with shops that sell stuff at
prices that are way too high for my wallet and
perhaps most notably for us, it was also the location
(01:54):
where the owner of how stuffworks dot Com happened to live.
The quote unquote studio wasn't a perfect rectangular room. It
actually had some odd angles to it. And in one
corner of this room there was this alcove like thing.
It was almost like it was a closet, but there
(02:16):
was no door separating it from the rest of the room.
Someone had hung up a curtain to cover the entrance
to that little alcove, and that alcove would become our
podcast studio. A table inside this little alcove was nestled
between shelves. The table was just large enough for two
chairs to sit on either side of it comfortably. You
(02:36):
could smash three in if you had to, and on
the table were a couple of microphones and two sets
of headphones. The producer would actually sit at a desk
that was inside the larger room, but on the other
side of the curtain, so they were not in the alcove.
They were on the opposite side. And it was a
bit of a weird approach because there was no visual
(02:58):
contact between producer and hosts. But all in all, this
strange little setup worked. There was very little noise coming
in from other areas of the office unless the sales
or marketing teams were celebrating something, which always did make
quite a bit of noise, and the recording space was
isolated from the exterior walls, so you didn't get stuff
(03:19):
like traffic noise. Those two geeky, nerdy newbies to podcasting
were Chris Pollette and yours truly, Jonathan Strickland. We sat
down and we recorded a half dozen or so test episodes.
Those early ones were absolutely unusable, but eventually we got
(03:41):
to one that emerged from being awful to it's not
so bad, and so that became our very first episode
of tech Stuff. The episode was titled how the Google
Apple Cloud, computer will Work. It was based off an
article that Chris Pollette had written for how Stuffworks dot
com and it originally published back on June tenth, two
(04:05):
thousand and eight. It was just six minutes and eight
seconds long. That is a heck of a difference from
tech Stuff episodes today. Now, to be clear, tech Stuff
was not the first stuff show to launch. That honor
technically goes to a podcast called brain Stuff, which was
(04:25):
originally hosted by how Stuffworks dot COM's founder, a guy
named Marshall Brain and yes that's his real name. Brain
Stuff episodes were really short back then, like sometimes only
a couple of minutes long. This was followed by what
would become the most popular show in the Stuff library,
Stuff you Should Know. Fun fact, my co host Chris
(04:47):
Pollette was an original co host of Stuff you Should Know. Though,
of course, the program would really find its footing once
it paired Josh Clark with Chuck Bryant. The third podcast
to launch was what would become Stuff You Missed in
History Class. I seem to recall that the original title
for that podcast was fact or Fiction. And then there
(05:08):
was tech Stuff. The shows launched just a few weeks
apart from each other. It's not like Stuff you Should
Know had a huge head start on us. And what's
cool is that all of these shows are still publishing
today now. Stuff You Missed in History Class has been
through a few different host pairings over the years, but
Holly and Tracy have helmed it since twenty thirteen. I
(05:29):
argue that once you get past a decade hosting a show,
it's safe to say it belongs to you. Brain Stuff
now has Lauren Vogelbaum as the host. Episodes typically come
in at around ten minutes each, and of course Tech
Stuff has been through several changes as well. Chris Pollette
left the show in early twenty thirteen, and then the
aforementioned Laura and Vogelbamb stepped in for a couple of
(05:51):
years to be co host, and then she too left
the show in twenty fifteen, and since that time, Tech
Stuff has been solo hosted by yours truly as dropouts.
Sam Reisch might say, I've been here the whole time,
but that's going to change too. Yep. The final constant
(06:11):
of tech Stuff will be departing in the not too
distant future. Specifically, the plan is for the handoff to
happen on January tenth, twenty twenty five, where I will
no longer host this show. That's assuming we stick to
our schedule that we have in mind. But you know,
schedules can change, so that date could move around a little,
(06:32):
so don't hold me to it. Maybe it's not going
to be January tenth, but that's what we plan. Right now.
Tech Stuff is going to continue. Tex Stuff's just going
to have new hosts, and I'll talk more about them
in a future episode. You'll learn all about them. They
are veterans, they're not, you know, fresh faced newbies to
the podcasting game, and they're incredibly accomplished in their own right.
(06:56):
But that's for later. And I want to be clear
about this. This was actually my decision. In case anyone's
worried that I was shuffled off my own show. No.
In fact, I've been thinking about transitioning away from tech
Stuff for a few years now. I would have loved
to have done it last year, but at that time
I was publishing five episodes a week, and frankly, it
(07:17):
was just impossible for me to do that much work
and also engage in succession planning or search for potential
new hosts. But then something happened at the end of
twenty twenty three that really convinced me it was time
to figure out a solution, and that was I had
a big ole health scare. So on December thirtieth, twenty
(07:38):
twenty three, I developed a migraine. And I've had migraines before,
but this one was worse than any I had ever
had previously. I could not lay down, I couldn't find
any comfortable position. I could not shake it, even though
I took my medications. So I told my partner and
we headed to an urgent care center, where they took
my blood pressure and found that it was dangerously high.
(08:02):
I mean like super dangerous. I was in stroke territory.
So I was immediately sent to the emergency room, where
I was given some drugs to bring down my blood
pressure and some other drugs to treat the migraine, and
I returned home once the migraine had sort of subsided.
But a few days later, on January third, twenty twenty four,
(08:23):
I again started to feel awful, and this time we
went straight to the emergency room. By the time I
got there, I was incoherent. I could understand what people
were saying, but I could not speak. It was the
oddest sensation. I remember. I was put into a wheeled chair,
but not you know, like a wheelchair, and I was
wheeled to a room in the er, and then the
(08:45):
following eight hours of my life are gone from my memory.
I have absolutely no recollection of what happened from that
point forward. My partner would later tell me that I
was given a lumbar puncture, but I have no memory
of that, and also told me about a nerd who
was apparently incredible and really kind and looked after me.
But I have no memory of this nurse, like nothing.
(09:07):
I don't know her name or what she looks like
or anything. My next memory is being in the hospital's
intensive care unit, and I actually had to stay in
that room for two days, and I saw a whole
bunch of different doctors in that time. Everyone was really
keen to figure out why my blood pressure was so high,
and ultimately the determination was that it was a convergence
(09:28):
of factors. One was I put on a lot of
weight since the pandemic. Like leading up to the pandemic,
I was in good shape, the best shape of my life.
But I really fell apart once the pandemic hit and
I wasn't walking as much and I didn't go to
the gym anymore. I also have sleep apnea, which probably contributed.
I also had a huge honkin kidney stone in my kidney.
(09:51):
As it turns out, I was also probably a contributing factor.
So for the first half of twenty twenty four, I
measured time in doctor visits. I think I had five
different doctors that I had to see on a rotating basis,
and visits were sometimes as little as a week apart,
or once in a blue moon, I would have two
different doctor visits in the same week to two very
(10:13):
different doctors. I ended up having to have surgery to
remove the kidney stone. So if I ever really seemed
out of it this year, now you know why, it's
because I was dealing with this stuff. Now. One of
the big changes in twenty twenty four for tech stuff
is that we reduced the number of shows we published
per week. We went from five episodes to three. Really
it was more like four episodes to three, because if
(10:35):
you remember back when I was doing five a week,
I was publishing classic episodes on Fridays, so that wasn't
really a heavy lift, but going from four to three
was a huge change for me, and it was really
important for me to reduce work stress because stress was
another contributing factor to my blood pressure, and that change
gave me a little bit more time to do what
I had wanted to do for a few years, which
(10:55):
was to figure out a way to transfer tech stuff
to a new team that could take care of it,
that could take tech stuff beyond my contributions and hopefully
to much greater success, while still staying true to what
I think is the underlying philosophy for the show. It's
the same as it's been for the entire run of
(11:16):
the show, which is that tech stuff. Yes, it's about technology,
but the guiding principles are a combination of compassion and
critical thinking that those two things should guide the show
no matter how it's tackling tech. But this would also
mean that I would be able to move on from
tech stuff and focus on other things while still remaining
(11:38):
at iHeart Podcasts. I'd be doing more executive producing work,
and you know, with more than two thousand episodes of
this show under my belt, it is time for me
to move on. I think some of y'all would argue
I've overstayed my welcome, but I'm not leaving just yet.
I'll be recording episodes through the end of this year
and into the beginning of next year. But I didn't
want my departure to be a huge prize, so I
(12:01):
thought this episode would be a good opportunity to let
you know that changes are coming in the new year,
and also to look back over the history of tech
Stuff so far and reflect on what has happened. Also,
just to be clear, I'll still be working for iHeart Podcasts,
in case you missed me saying that earlier. I'm just
not going to be the host of tech Stuff anymore.
I might occasionally pop up here or there on various
(12:23):
other shows. However, you never know, so I'm not going
to do a retrospective of how tech has changed over
the years since tech Stuff was founded. I'm actually going
to do that later in January, when I'll be chatting
with the new hosts for tech Stuff. Instead, I thought
I would talk about how the show itself has changed
over the years, So we're going to spend some time
(12:45):
thinking back on the origins and evolution of the Tech
Stuff podcast before we do that. However, let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, all right.
(13:06):
So I mentioned in June two thousand and eight we
launched tech stuff. At that time, HowStuffWorks dot Com was
part of Discovery Communications. That's the company that now is
part of Warner Brothers Discovery. So Discovery had acquired how
stuffworks dot Com in October two thousand and seven. I
had I was there for that. I joined how Stuffworks
(13:27):
in February two thousand and seven. I remember getting a
DVD box set of Planet Earth as a kind of hey,
you just got acquired. Here's a present gift. But the
idea was that how stuffworks dot Com would help Discovery
establish a digital presence to extend beyond its reach on
cable TV, and podcasts would be one tiny part of that.
The website would be another. But this would just be
(13:49):
the beginning, and HowStuffWorks dot Com ultimately would just be
one component of this strategy. Discovery would also acquire other
platforms like Revision III and Source Fan. And you may
be aware that all of the platforms I have mentioned
are no longer under Discovery. That's what we call foreshadowing.
It tells you how things ended up going So anyway,
(14:11):
we started publishing tech Stuff in two thousand and eight,
and the episodes were intended to just be a few
minutes long. They were supposed to be kind of a
summary and analysis of articles that you could find on
the website, so every episode was supposed to relate back
to an article on the website. But Chris and I
quickly ran into a real problem because tech changes fast. Now.
(14:34):
Ideally you would have staff who would be dedicated to
reviewing and updating articles on a sort of rolling basis
as things change within the tech sphere, but we didn't
really have those resources, and in the meantime, we were
having to write and edit new articles for the tech
channels all the time, so there was no time to
go back and revise things constantly, which meant that a
(14:57):
lot of the tech articles on the site we're pretty dated.
For example, there was one article that was about how
to build a gaming computer, and that article referenced ports
and cards that hardware manufacturers didn't even bother to include
on PCs anymore because the world had moved on to
other standards. And so after just a few months of
(15:17):
publishing tech Stuff, we were told we could cover any
tech topic we wanted to, and there didn't have to
be an article on the site for us to reference
in order to create an episode. So that was a
huge relief. Now with that change came another big one.
Our earliest episodes were meant to be around five minutes long. Now,
remember this was before monetization, so there were no ads
(15:41):
running against those early episodes in those days. Now that's
a different story. Now if you go back and listen
to those episodes, now you're going to hear ads. But
I'll get to why that is in a minute. Chris
and I were still struggling to be able to say
anything of merit in just five minutes. For one thing,
we're both jokesters. Chris actually was the one who was
(16:02):
more heavily into making puns than I was. But for
some reason, that reputation got saddled on me. Not that
I dislike a good pun, I love them, and I
love a bad pun even more, but we found we
were bumping up against that five minute time frame and
it just wasn't really working. So eventually we were told
the episodes could be ten minutes long, and then later
(16:24):
fifteen minutes long, and then not long after that, we
were told Hey, just make the episodes as long as
they need to be in order to cover whatever topic
you're talking about. Chris and I aimed to try and
keep our episodes under thirty minutes if we could, and
under twenty five if that were possible. And you contrast
that with the average episode these days, which typically times
out at around forty seven minutes or so, and you
(16:45):
see how drastically things have changed now. I think originally
we were publishing either one episode or two episodes a week,
but we would go back and forth, like I can't
remember now. I guess I could go into our publishing
platform and look at the publication day and just figure
it out that way. But this changed a lot in
the early years, like how many episodes we would publish
(17:07):
a week. We're trying to find that sweet spot, like
is two too many? Is one enough? Should we look
at doing three? Typically we were around two a week,
as I recall, but later on it would go up
to three, and then for a few years it was
a grueling five episodes a week schedule. The reason if
that largely comes down to ad inventory, and we might
(17:29):
as well cover that. I mean, so podcasts, you know,
obviously are a lot of podcasts anyway, are ads supported,
Not all of them. Some podcasts are a labor of
love and aren't monetized at all. Some podcasts are behind
a paywall, so you subscribe for a certain amount per
month and you get them. Some are sponsored, so that
deal is a little different from ads. But a lot
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are ads supported, and you typically figure out how many
ads will will comfortably fit within a pot, or sometimes
uncomfortably if we're being honest, those are not my decisions.
By the way, I have never been the one to
make the decision on how many ads per ad break
we should have for our podcasts. I have to abide
(18:13):
by the rules. I don't make the rules. So once
you figure that out, like how many ads can a
podcast hold within a certain amount of time, then you
have an inventory that you can sell to advertisers, and
your goal is to sell as much of that inventory
as possible. But sometimes you get a little a little
over zealous. Maybe you sell more inventory than there actually is,
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which means you have to create more inventory, and there
are different ways of doing that. One is you add
more ad spots per break, so instead of having one
ad or two ads, you might have three or four
maybe even five ads per ad break. Another is adding
more ad breaks per episode, so you say, well, we
used to say every thirty minutes put in an AD break.
(18:58):
Now let's say every fifteen minute you put in an
AD break. That's another way. Another way is you start
adding more episodes, you have people recording more, or you
might do a combination of all these things. And if
you notice, Tech Stuff was one of those combo shows
where we were publishing five times a week with you know,
fairly long episodes and lots of ad breaks. So that
(19:19):
ended up being a big reason for the way tech
Stuff evolved is that it was the money side of
Tech Stuff. You know, you can't just do this for free.
Podcasting does cost money. You have hosting fees, you have
the salaries of the people who work on the shows,
so there has to be a way to monetize or
else you're losing money on the deal and that's just
not a business, right. So that in large part shaped
(19:42):
tech Stuff for quite some time. So we get down
to five times a week, and then we scale back
to three times a week once I have my little
medical whoopsie as I like to call it. But for
a really long time we didn't have any ads at all,
but no one did really. I mean, there might have
been a few podcasts that were monetized, but by and
(20:04):
large most were not. Podcasts were so new and seen
as being such a niche form of media that no
one had really established a model for advertising or sponsorship
for those shows. In the early days, Rarely Chris and
I would get a request from our boss to do
an episode about a specific topic, and it would turn
out that the request was part of a larger ad
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deal that had been made for the website houstuffworks dot com,
and a podcast episode was kind of thrown on top
as sort of a perk for that ad deal to close.
But that was the exception, it was not the rule.
Ninety Nine percent of the time, Chris and I got
to pick our own topics and there was really no
outside interference, which was great. We would each do our
(20:46):
research separately for our episodes. We wouldn't share notes or
anything until we got to the studio, and then Chris
and I would have a conversation. It was mostly unstructured,
and most of the time it worked out great. We
usually ended up leaving some off unmentioned, just because the
flow of conversation didn't allow for every little factor tidbit
we had researched. Once in a while, however, things just
(21:08):
didn't work. I remember there was one recording session where
Chris and I struggled through a topic. I can't remember
what it was at this point. It's on the tip
of my tongue, but I just can't quite remember. But
I do remember that at the end of the recording session,
we looked at each other and just kind of said,
that was terrible, and we made a very hard call.
We decided to go back into the studio to scrap
(21:31):
the original recording and to have the conversation all over again,
and luckily our producer agreed to do that. I don't
remember who was producing that particular session at that time.
Our original producer was Jerry, who is famous for being
the producer of Stuff You Should Know. But we also
had other folks. We had Tyler Klang, who now is
a leader in production at iHeart Podcasts. We had Matt Frederick,
(21:54):
one of the hosts of Stuff They Don't Want You
to Know. Noel Brown, one of the hosts of Ridiculous History.
We also produced several episodes of tech Stuff. Ramsey Yunt
served as a producer, was a phenomenal producer who booked
a lot of really cool guests for Tech Stuff. And
then I have my current and awesome producer, Tari, who's
been taking care of me for years now. Anyway, back
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to the evolution of Tech Stuff, I'm not sure when
we first started to monetize the show. I don't remember
what year that was. I do remember it wasn't a
frequent thing for the first few years, like some shows
would get ads and some wouldn't. Eventually, though, advertisers began
to recognize the potential value of podcasts, and sales teams
were able to start making ad deals for them. Our
(22:38):
early ads were baked in or embedded ads. That means
we would just record the ads directly into the show
recording itself. The idea was that those ads would just
be part of that episode from that point forward. That's
different from the way web advertising typically works. You know,
usually a web advertising deal is to last for a
certain number of impressions or paid and then once it
(23:01):
hits that the ad deal concludes, and at that point
the web administrator can sell that same advertising space to
someone else. Initially, that wasn't really a possibility with podcasting,
but later on publishing platforms would introduce dynamic ads. These
would be digital markers that you put in a recording
and they designate where an AD needs to go within
(23:24):
that recording. So you then record those ads separately, and
then those ads can swap out as one deal concludes
and a new one starts up. So if you've ever
dived into a back catalog of one of our shows,
whether it's tech stuff or something else, and you thought, hey,
that's weird, I'm hearing the same ads I would hear
if I was listening to yesterday's episode, well, that's why
(23:45):
it's this dynamic ad insertion. But yeah, in the early days,
we didn't have dynamic ads, so they were recorded directly
into the show. I think someone actually had to go
back manually and cut out those old ads in order
to introduce new digital markers to previously existing shows. That
had to be a heck of a thing to have
(24:06):
to do. Our early advertisers were ones that all podcasters
weren't working with. You know, you had brands like Meandes
or Blue Apron or Casper Mattresses, and we loved working
with these folks. They were really enthusiastic about using podcasts
to reach customers. They really believed in the medium, and
they made great stuff that we really liked, and so
(24:27):
it was just a really good match. Now, over time,
as our shows grew and the business evolved, as well
as our corporate overlords changed over we'll talk more about
that extensively in a bit, we eventually tapped into larger,
more established companies as advertisers. That's not to take anything
away from our earlier partners, whom sometimes we still get
to work with, which is awesome. It just widened the
(24:49):
spectrum of the types of advertisers who were working with us,
and we had really big company names purchasing ad space
or sometimes working with us to create sponsored episodes. That
was an enormous change industry wide. Other changes were happening
behind the scenes and probably weren't quite as evident to listeners. So,
(25:10):
as I mentioned, Discovery Communications acquired how stuffworks dot Com
back in two thousand and seven. That deal didn't go
so swell for Discovery in the long run, I'm afraid.
So back in two thousand and seven, Discovery paid two
hundred and fifty million dollars for house stuffworks dot Com
a princely sum. Seven years later, in twenty fourteen, Discovery
(25:35):
would sell off HowStuffWorks dot Com to another company, this
one called blue Cora, for just forty five million dollars.
That's a big old ouch when your your selling price
has dropped by two hundred and five million dollars. Yikes. Now,
In the years between two thousand and seven and twenty fourteen,
there were some other changes, some of which were painful.
(25:59):
One change was that our office was relocated from occupying
a full floor of the building we were in to
a little less than half a floor. So obviously that
was a big downsizing, and part of that relocation meant
the room that we had been using to record in
needed to be repurposed. So the podcast studio ended up
moving into an unoccupied office. Actually, technically it office hopped
(26:23):
a couple of times to different offices, and it made
recording a real challenge because the offices had windows that
faced out to the exterior world, and obviously the exterior
world could sometimes be a bit noisy. I actually remember
at times when we sat down to record, we would
be able to hear Baton Bob as he blew his
whistle and marched up and down Peachtree Street outside. Now,
(26:44):
if you don't know who Baton Bob is, well, that
wouldn't surprise me. He's a local personality, is a good
word for it. He's an ambassador of fun and joy
and a force to be reckoned with here in Atlanta.
So there are some episodes of tech stuff that, if
you were to listen really carefully, you might actually hear
the Toon Bob blowing a whistle way off in the background,
(27:05):
because even though we were on like the fourteenth floor
or something like that, you could still hear them. In general,
traffic noise in the light became a real nuisance in
this era. We would also later relocate to a lower
floor in that same building, which just made it worse
because we'd be closer to the traffic. Now, tech stuff
continued to change too. There were other growing pains. For one,
Discovery Communications would occasionally require us to do episodes that
(27:29):
were aligned to some Discovery programming. I'll never forget the
first time we were asked to do a Shark Week
episode because there wasn't a whole lot of tech related
to sharks that we could talk about. I mean things
like you know, tracking pods and stuff were pretty low
tech and easy to explain, and shark cages aren't particularly
high tech either, but we made the best of it.
(27:51):
But yeah, those were some growing pains, but a lot
of other big changes were coming. I mean, Chris Pollette
left the show in twenty thirteen, and Lauren Vogel Bomb
came on at that time, and other things at the
house Stuffworks dot Com office sometimes got a bit rough.
I'll explain more, but first let's take another quick break.
(28:21):
So before the last break, I talked about how things
at house Stuffworks sometimes got a little dicey. That's because,
like in September, we would often end up having some layoffs.
Sometimes the layoffs would be small and sometimes they were
more extensive. September was just a rough time of year,
and I believe personally that's because Discovery would be heading
into its final quarter for the fiscal year and would
(28:43):
be looking for ways to cut costs in order to
maximize shareholder value. And Discovery was a publicly traded company,
so cutting costs would be a great way to boost
If revenue wasn't doing great, then cut costs and things
look better. And one way to cut costs is to
cut jobs and I remember there was one year in
particular where the editorial department was called into a meeting,
(29:05):
and once we all got into the meeting room, we
noticed that a good number of us, like at least
a third, maybe half, of the editorial department wasn't in
the meeting room. And then we were told that those
folks have been let go. And I additionally noticed that
nearly everyone who was left was someone who was currently
working on a podcast. There were a couple of exceptions,
(29:26):
but most of us were working on at least one podcast,
and I found that interesting. At the time, I was
still actively writing articles for the website in addition to
hosting tech stuff Now. Around the same time that Discovery
sold us to the company Blue Cora, the house Stuffworks
dot Com offices relocated out of Buckhead entirely and we
(29:47):
moved into new spaces in a building called Ponce City Market.
This was in a neighborhood in Atlanta called the Old
Fourth Ward. So for the first time, we were able
to plan an office space with podcasts studios in mind.
From the get go, we weren't repurposing a space to
become a studio. We were building studios from the get go.
(30:08):
And initially in that space we had two audio podcast
studios and two video studios. This was during the whole
pivot to video era of online content creation. Eventually we
would end up converting those video studios into two additional
audio recording studios. We actually assembled whisper rooms inside those
(30:30):
video studios, which meant you would open a door to
what was once a video studio and you'd step in
and you would see that inside that room was a
tinier room, you know, a little free standing recording studio.
Those whisper rooms were really quiet, but they were also
kind of stuffy, so actually preferred recording in one of
the older podcast rooms if possible. Blue Cora ended up
(30:51):
being a very odd fit for us. The company was
mostly known as a tax and wealth management service company.
Last year it actually changed its name to Van Tax,
but at the time it was blue Cora, and we
went to it and none of us are really sure
what it would mean, And it turned out we didn't
have to worry for too long because Blue Cora had
a division called Infospace. In fact, originally the company was Infospace,
(31:15):
but Infospace became associated with a specific service and then
ended up creating a parent company organization called Bluecorra because
it didn't want to have confusion with other properties that
the company was acquiring, how stuffworks dot Com was nestled
under Infospace. In twenty sixteen, Bluecorra sold Infospace and how
(31:36):
stuffworks dot Com along with it, to another company called
OpenMail for the princely sum of forty five million dollars.
And you might say, huh, so Bluecorra sold house stuffworks
dot Com for the same amount of money as what
they paid back in twenty fourteen, But that's not totally
correct because Infospace was a huge honk of that deal.
So in other words, this was a really demoralizing time
(31:58):
to be part of how Stuffworks done. It had gone
from being this prize of a content company in two
thousand and seven, which sold for two hundred and fifty
million dollars, to being part of a package deal for
just forty five million. Anyway, open Mail then renamed itself
as System one system with the numeral one all one word.
So for those keeping track tech stuff existed under the
(32:21):
regimes of well, there was a Web Content Group, but
after that there was Discovery Communications, Blue Cora via Infospace,
open Mail slash System one, So I hope we're all
caught up. By this time in twenty sixteen, I was
the solo host of Tech Stuff, though I would often
reach out to my peers and colleagues to get guest
co hosts to come in, and folks within the house
(32:43):
Stuffworks family would join in. Sometimes. That included Holly Frye
and Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, Ben Bolan, Noel Brown,
Scott Benjamin, Joe McCormick, and Robert Lamb. They would occasionally
help me out and join the show from outside our network.
Folks like Shannon Morse and tom Merritt, Veronica Belmont, I
(33:04):
as actar, Jason Howell, Ashley Esketa, and Moore have joined
me as guest co hosts, and I owe them all
big time. In fact, folks like tom Merritt and Jason
Howell and Veronica Belmont were all huge inspirations to me
before I even started podcasting myself. I had been listening
to them podcasts for a couple of years before we
launched Tech Stuff. Of course, the changes didn't stop with
(33:26):
the open mail system one acquisition. Another huge change happened
in twenty seventeen. This one would actually split houstuffworks dot
Com up into two different entities. One of those entities
was the website side. That one would stay with System One.
The other half, the podcast division, would spin off to
become a subsidiary called stuff Media. Now, up to this point,
(33:49):
I had been working in both divisions while also doing
stuff like hosting a popular video series called Forward Thinking,
which was part of a big sponsorship deal with Toyota.
But at this point my care moved with the media company.
I became part of Stuff Media. While we stayed in
the same office space as the house stuffworks dot Com folks,
we technically worked for two different divisions, and that would
(34:11):
change even more the following year because it was in
twenty eighteen that we got word that iHeartMedia was acquiring
Stuff Media, and the house stuffworks dot Com folks moved
out of our office space. That was really sad for
a lot of us. We had all grown really close
over the years, but they had to move out, and
Stuff Media would become kind of a nexus for Iheart's
(34:33):
podcast initiative, what we now call iHeart Podcasts. Now, to
be clear, iHeart was already producing podcasts at this time.
The company owns hundreds of radio stations, and lots of
those radio stations were already converting their broadcasted programming into podcasts.
Either they would release a full recording of a complete broadcast,
(34:53):
or they would cut it into a kind of best
of cut. Stuff Media would sort of become a strategy
central for Iheart's podcasting arm, and the stuff legacy shows
like Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class,
and tech stuff would become flagship shows on that network.
And there were a lot of other stuff shows that
launched in the years before the iHeart acquisition, So we
(35:17):
had shows like car Stuff, Stuff Mom Never Told You,
Stuff they Don't want you to know, which actually I
named that show, which is a fun little fact, and
lots more other stuff shows and non stuff shows had
launched over the years. Now I can honestly say that
out of all the corporate moves I was part of
since joining how Stuffworks dot Com back in February two
(35:40):
thousand and seven, the iHeart acquisition was by far the smoothest.
It was a natural fit, far more so than Discovery
Communications had been, and to me, it made way more
sense than the Bluecorra infospace deal. We continued to work
out of Pont City Market for a couple more years,
but our lease was coming up, and something else what
happened that would become a catalyst for another relocation. That's
(36:03):
something was, of course, the COVID pandemic. So our office
shut down on March thirteenth, twenty twenty. And I know
that because every now and then I would have to
go back into the office. It would be completely empty,
but I would have to go in there for some
reason or another. And one of my colleagues had a
desk calendar on his desk and it was set to
(36:25):
March thirteenth, twenty twenty, and it just stayed on that date,
which was a sobering reminder. You'd be walking by in
like October and it would still say March thirteenth, twenty twenty.
It's just rough. Eventually it became clear that we were
going to let go of the Pont City Market space
and that we would relocate so that we would be
working side by side with the iHeartRadio Atlanta office, with
(36:47):
the actual radio folks of iHeart. Now, that move took
a while. It took actually a long time longer than
we had anticipated, in order to set up the space.
That is not anyone's fault. I should add because the
Pan and Dimmick did such a huge number on supply chains,
that's no surprise that stuff like construction took a really
(37:07):
long time. But now in our current space in Atlanta,
we have the nicest audio recording studios I've ever had
the pleasure to work inside. The Crown Jewel is one
studio in our office that has multiple high definition cameras
positioned around it. All of those cameras are controllable from
a producer workstation that has a broadcast television studio kind
(37:29):
of set up where you can do live switching between cameras.
It's super cool. Now most of the time I record
tech stuff out of my home office because it's just me.
I mean, it seems a bit extravagant to take up
a whole studio when it's just one guy talking into
a microphone. But soon that time will come to an end,
and I'm really excited to see where tech stuff goes next.
(37:51):
Now I don't want to spoil the surprise just yet,
but as we get closer to January, I'll talk more
about the team that's going to be the new stewards
of tech Stuff. As I mentioned, It is a team
that already has an impressive history in media. They have
a long list of accomplishments, far more accomplished than I am.
So tech stuff is in great hands. It's going to
(38:14):
go to places that it never could under just my
own stewardship. But as for me, I'm not really going anywhere.
I'm going to remain with iHeart Podcasts. I will be
an executive producer. You might occasionally hear me pop up
on Ridiculous History. I play a character called the Quizt
on Ridiculous History. Haven't been the Quiztor Cush. It's been
(38:35):
like a couple of years now, But if we can
ever get our schedules to work out again, I'll be
popping back up there to make their lives a living hell.
Outside of iHeart, there's a tiny little podcast called large
Nerdron Collider. We used to have it on the iHeart network.
It's independent now. You can seek that out if you
want to hear me chat with my friend Ariel about
(38:56):
geeky movies and television shows and stuff like that. We
typically cover like geek news and give our perspectives on it,
and we have very different perspectives, so it's a fun conversation.
You can check out that show if you like narrative
fiction podcasts. I would absolutely love it if you would
check out the show Kadi Womple with the Shadow People. Yes,
(39:17):
it's a very silly title. It's a whimsical title, I
guess I should say. And it's a show that was
created by my friend Shay Lee and I edit that podcast.
So if you listen to Kadi Womple with the Shadow People,
all the soundscaping and stuff is done by yours truly.
Plus once in a while, I lend my voice to
a couple of characters. And I've written a few episodes
(39:39):
for the show. And who knows, I might end up
working on some other series as a host in the
future with iHeart. We'll have to see. There are no
current plans for that, but it's an open door, so
I might be doing other shows, probably limited run shows,
because I do plan on taking on a lot more
executive producer duties in the years to come. But I
(40:00):
don't plan on getting out of the game entirely now.
As I mentioned, I'll still be recording Tech Stuff episodes
through the end of twenty twenty four and into the
very beginning of twenty twenty five. So you're not rid
of me just yet. But yeah, I wanted to take
this opportunity to announce that this change is coming so
that it doesn't take you by surprise, and to get
you excited about it. This isn't something to be upset about.
(40:22):
This is something to be excited about, because I was
really worried for more than a year. Now that I'm
just repeating myself, and I don't want to do that.
It does a disservice to you, the listener. You deserve
better than that. You deserve to have fresh perspectives that
are able to dive deep into the tech topics that
are important to us today and to really demystify them
(40:45):
and to analyze them and kind of turn them over
to see what makes them tick and how they interact
with us and how we in turn shape technology. And
I have full confidence that that is going to continue.
So that's it for today's episode. It's a different kind
of episode of tech stuff, but we'll be back to
the normal stuff for at least another like month and
(41:05):
a half before things get really weird. Then we'll see
where it goes. I hope all of you out there
are doing incredibly well, and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
(41:25):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are You So. Once upon a time in mid
two thousand and eight, an editor and a writer for
(00:28):
the website HowStuffWorks dot Com were approached by their boss
about launching a podcast that would focus on technology. At
the time, most folks didn't know what a podcast was. Now,
the media form had been around since at least two
thousand and three or two thousand and four, depending upon
whom you asked, But the concept was this podcast would
(00:50):
serve as a kind of brand extension for the website.
They would reach new audiences, and each episode would tie
back to articles on how stuff works dot com. The
hosts would encourage listeners to go to the website and
to read the articles as well as, you know, just
browse around in general. There was no monetization plan for
(01:11):
the podcast itself, not initially anyway. That would come much later,
and it was really just kind of a new type
of marketing, a brand extension for the website. The editor
and the writer agreed to give it a shot, So
the two went into a little used room that had
a very odd shape. So the house stuffworks dot Com
office took up an entire floor in a building in
(01:33):
a neighborhood called Buckhead. That's a fashionable neighborhood in Atlanta.
That's where a lot of money is in Atlanta. It's
mostly known for having lots of office buildings as well
as a mall filled with shops that sell stuff at
prices that are way too high for my wallet and
perhaps most notably for us, it was also the location
(01:54):
where the owner of how stuffworks dot Com happened to live.
The quote unquote studio wasn't a perfect rectangular room. It
actually had some odd angles to it. And in one
corner of this room there was this alcove like thing.
It was almost like it was a closet, but there
(02:16):
was no door separating it from the rest of the room.
Someone had hung up a curtain to cover the entrance
to that little alcove, and that alcove would become our
podcast studio. A table inside this little alcove was nestled
between shelves. The table was just large enough for two
chairs to sit on either side of it comfortably. You
(02:36):
could smash three in if you had to, and on
the table were a couple of microphones and two sets
of headphones. The producer would actually sit at a desk
that was inside the larger room, but on the other
side of the curtain, so they were not in the alcove.
They were on the opposite side. And it was a
bit of a weird approach because there was no visual
(02:58):
contact between producer and hosts. But all in all, this
strange little setup worked. There was very little noise coming
in from other areas of the office unless the sales
or marketing teams were celebrating something, which always did make
quite a bit of noise, and the recording space was
isolated from the exterior walls, so you didn't get stuff
(03:19):
like traffic noise. Those two geeky, nerdy newbies to podcasting
were Chris Pollette and yours truly, Jonathan Strickland. We sat
down and we recorded a half dozen or so test episodes.
Those early ones were absolutely unusable, but eventually we got
(03:41):
to one that emerged from being awful to it's not
so bad, and so that became our very first episode
of tech Stuff. The episode was titled how the Google
Apple Cloud, computer will Work. It was based off an
article that Chris Pollette had written for how Stuffworks dot
com and it originally published back on June tenth, two
(04:05):
thousand and eight. It was just six minutes and eight
seconds long. That is a heck of a difference from
tech Stuff episodes today. Now, to be clear, tech Stuff
was not the first stuff show to launch. That honor
technically goes to a podcast called brain Stuff, which was
(04:25):
originally hosted by how Stuffworks dot COM's founder, a guy
named Marshall Brain and yes that's his real name. Brain
Stuff episodes were really short back then, like sometimes only
a couple of minutes long. This was followed by what
would become the most popular show in the Stuff library,
Stuff you Should Know. Fun fact, my co host Chris
(04:47):
Pollette was an original co host of Stuff you Should Know. Though,
of course, the program would really find its footing once
it paired Josh Clark with Chuck Bryant. The third podcast
to launch was what would become Stuff You Missed in
History Class. I seem to recall that the original title
for that podcast was fact or Fiction. And then there
(05:08):
was tech Stuff. The shows launched just a few weeks
apart from each other. It's not like Stuff you Should
Know had a huge head start on us. And what's
cool is that all of these shows are still publishing
today now. Stuff You Missed in History Class has been
through a few different host pairings over the years, but
Holly and Tracy have helmed it since twenty thirteen. I
(05:29):
argue that once you get past a decade hosting a show,
it's safe to say it belongs to you. Brain Stuff
now has Lauren Vogelbaum as the host. Episodes typically come
in at around ten minutes each, and of course Tech
Stuff has been through several changes as well. Chris Pollette
left the show in early twenty thirteen, and then the
aforementioned Laura and Vogelbamb stepped in for a couple of
(05:51):
years to be co host, and then she too left
the show in twenty fifteen, and since that time, Tech
Stuff has been solo hosted by yours truly as dropouts.
Sam Reisch might say, I've been here the whole time,
but that's going to change too. Yep. The final constant
(06:11):
of tech Stuff will be departing in the not too
distant future. Specifically, the plan is for the handoff to
happen on January tenth, twenty twenty five, where I will
no longer host this show. That's assuming we stick to
our schedule that we have in mind. But you know,
schedules can change, so that date could move around a little,
(06:32):
so don't hold me to it. Maybe it's not going
to be January tenth, but that's what we plan. Right now.
Tech Stuff is going to continue. Tex Stuff's just going
to have new hosts, and I'll talk more about them
in a future episode. You'll learn all about them. They
are veterans, they're not, you know, fresh faced newbies to
the podcasting game, and they're incredibly accomplished in their own right.
(06:56):
But that's for later. And I want to be clear
about this. This was actually my decision. In case anyone's
worried that I was shuffled off my own show. No.
In fact, I've been thinking about transitioning away from tech
Stuff for a few years now. I would have loved
to have done it last year, but at that time
I was publishing five episodes a week, and frankly, it
(07:17):
was just impossible for me to do that much work
and also engage in succession planning or search for potential
new hosts. But then something happened at the end of
twenty twenty three that really convinced me it was time
to figure out a solution, and that was I had
a big ole health scare. So on December thirtieth, twenty
(07:38):
twenty three, I developed a migraine. And I've had migraines before,
but this one was worse than any I had ever
had previously. I could not lay down, I couldn't find
any comfortable position. I could not shake it, even though
I took my medications. So I told my partner and
we headed to an urgent care center, where they took
my blood pressure and found that it was dangerously high.
(08:02):
I mean like super dangerous. I was in stroke territory.
So I was immediately sent to the emergency room, where
I was given some drugs to bring down my blood
pressure and some other drugs to treat the migraine, and
I returned home once the migraine had sort of subsided.
But a few days later, on January third, twenty twenty four,
(08:23):
I again started to feel awful, and this time we
went straight to the emergency room. By the time I
got there, I was incoherent. I could understand what people
were saying, but I could not speak. It was the
oddest sensation. I remember. I was put into a wheeled chair,
but not you know, like a wheelchair, and I was
wheeled to a room in the er, and then the
(08:45):
following eight hours of my life are gone from my memory.
I have absolutely no recollection of what happened from that
point forward. My partner would later tell me that I
was given a lumbar puncture, but I have no memory
of that, and also told me about a nerd who
was apparently incredible and really kind and looked after me.
But I have no memory of this nurse, like nothing.
(09:07):
I don't know her name or what she looks like
or anything. My next memory is being in the hospital's
intensive care unit, and I actually had to stay in
that room for two days, and I saw a whole
bunch of different doctors in that time. Everyone was really
keen to figure out why my blood pressure was so high,
and ultimately the determination was that it was a convergence
(09:28):
of factors. One was I put on a lot of
weight since the pandemic. Like leading up to the pandemic,
I was in good shape, the best shape of my life.
But I really fell apart once the pandemic hit and
I wasn't walking as much and I didn't go to
the gym anymore. I also have sleep apnea, which probably contributed.
I also had a huge honkin kidney stone in my kidney.
(09:51):
As it turns out, I was also probably a contributing factor.
So for the first half of twenty twenty four, I
measured time in doctor visits. I think I had five
different doctors that I had to see on a rotating basis,
and visits were sometimes as little as a week apart,
or once in a blue moon, I would have two
different doctor visits in the same week to two very
(10:13):
different doctors. I ended up having to have surgery to
remove the kidney stone. So if I ever really seemed
out of it this year, now you know why, it's
because I was dealing with this stuff. Now. One of
the big changes in twenty twenty four for tech stuff
is that we reduced the number of shows we published
per week. We went from five episodes to three. Really
it was more like four episodes to three, because if
(10:35):
you remember back when I was doing five a week,
I was publishing classic episodes on Fridays, so that wasn't
really a heavy lift, but going from four to three
was a huge change for me, and it was really
important for me to reduce work stress because stress was
another contributing factor to my blood pressure, and that change
gave me a little bit more time to do what
I had wanted to do for a few years, which
(10:55):
was to figure out a way to transfer tech stuff
to a new team that could take care of it,
that could take tech stuff beyond my contributions and hopefully
to much greater success, while still staying true to what
I think is the underlying philosophy for the show. It's
the same as it's been for the entire run of
(11:16):
the show, which is that tech stuff. Yes, it's about technology,
but the guiding principles are a combination of compassion and
critical thinking that those two things should guide the show
no matter how it's tackling tech. But this would also
mean that I would be able to move on from
tech stuff and focus on other things while still remaining
(11:38):
at iHeart Podcasts. I'd be doing more executive producing work,
and you know, with more than two thousand episodes of
this show under my belt, it is time for me
to move on. I think some of y'all would argue
I've overstayed my welcome, but I'm not leaving just yet.
I'll be recording episodes through the end of this year
and into the beginning of next year. But I didn't
want my departure to be a huge prize, so I
(12:01):
thought this episode would be a good opportunity to let
you know that changes are coming in the new year,
and also to look back over the history of tech
Stuff so far and reflect on what has happened. Also,
just to be clear, I'll still be working for iHeart Podcasts,
in case you missed me saying that earlier. I'm just
not going to be the host of tech Stuff anymore.
I might occasionally pop up here or there on various
(12:23):
other shows. However, you never know, so I'm not going
to do a retrospective of how tech has changed over
the years since tech Stuff was founded. I'm actually going
to do that later in January, when I'll be chatting
with the new hosts for tech Stuff. Instead, I thought
I would talk about how the show itself has changed
over the years, So we're going to spend some time
(12:45):
thinking back on the origins and evolution of the Tech
Stuff podcast before we do that. However, let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, all right.
(13:06):
So I mentioned in June two thousand and eight we
launched tech stuff. At that time, HowStuffWorks dot Com was
part of Discovery Communications. That's the company that now is
part of Warner Brothers Discovery. So Discovery had acquired how
stuffworks dot Com in October two thousand and seven. I
had I was there for that. I joined how Stuffworks
(13:27):
in February two thousand and seven. I remember getting a
DVD box set of Planet Earth as a kind of hey,
you just got acquired. Here's a present gift. But the
idea was that how stuffworks dot Com would help Discovery
establish a digital presence to extend beyond its reach on
cable TV, and podcasts would be one tiny part of that.
The website would be another. But this would just be
(13:49):
the beginning, and HowStuffWorks dot Com ultimately would just be
one component of this strategy. Discovery would also acquire other
platforms like Revision III and Source Fan. And you may
be aware that all of the platforms I have mentioned
are no longer under Discovery. That's what we call foreshadowing.
It tells you how things ended up going So anyway,
(14:11):
we started publishing tech Stuff in two thousand and eight,
and the episodes were intended to just be a few
minutes long. They were supposed to be kind of a
summary and analysis of articles that you could find on
the website, so every episode was supposed to relate back
to an article on the website. But Chris and I
quickly ran into a real problem because tech changes fast. Now.
(14:34):
Ideally you would have staff who would be dedicated to
reviewing and updating articles on a sort of rolling basis
as things change within the tech sphere, but we didn't
really have those resources, and in the meantime, we were
having to write and edit new articles for the tech
channels all the time, so there was no time to
go back and revise things constantly, which meant that a
(14:57):
lot of the tech articles on the site we're pretty dated.
For example, there was one article that was about how
to build a gaming computer, and that article referenced ports
and cards that hardware manufacturers didn't even bother to include
on PCs anymore because the world had moved on to
other standards. And so after just a few months of
(15:17):
publishing tech Stuff, we were told we could cover any
tech topic we wanted to, and there didn't have to
be an article on the site for us to reference
in order to create an episode. So that was a
huge relief. Now with that change came another big one.
Our earliest episodes were meant to be around five minutes long. Now,
remember this was before monetization, so there were no ads
(15:41):
running against those early episodes in those days. Now that's
a different story. Now if you go back and listen
to those episodes, now you're going to hear ads. But
I'll get to why that is in a minute. Chris
and I were still struggling to be able to say
anything of merit in just five minutes. For one thing,
we're both jokesters. Chris actually was the one who was
(16:02):
more heavily into making puns than I was. But for
some reason, that reputation got saddled on me. Not that
I dislike a good pun, I love them, and I
love a bad pun even more, but we found we
were bumping up against that five minute time frame and
it just wasn't really working. So eventually we were told
the episodes could be ten minutes long, and then later
(16:24):
fifteen minutes long, and then not long after that, we
were told Hey, just make the episodes as long as
they need to be in order to cover whatever topic
you're talking about. Chris and I aimed to try and
keep our episodes under thirty minutes if we could, and
under twenty five if that were possible. And you contrast
that with the average episode these days, which typically times
out at around forty seven minutes or so, and you
(16:45):
see how drastically things have changed now. I think originally
we were publishing either one episode or two episodes a week,
but we would go back and forth, like I can't
remember now. I guess I could go into our publishing
platform and look at the publication day and just figure
it out that way. But this changed a lot in
the early years, like how many episodes we would publish
(17:07):
a week. We're trying to find that sweet spot, like
is two too many? Is one enough? Should we look
at doing three? Typically we were around two a week,
as I recall, but later on it would go up
to three, and then for a few years it was
a grueling five episodes a week schedule. The reason if
that largely comes down to ad inventory, and we might
(17:29):
as well cover that. I mean, so podcasts, you know,
obviously are a lot of podcasts anyway, are ads supported,
Not all of them. Some podcasts are a labor of
love and aren't monetized at all. Some podcasts are behind
a paywall, so you subscribe for a certain amount per
month and you get them. Some are sponsored, so that
deal is a little different from ads. But a lot
(17:51):
are ads supported, and you typically figure out how many
ads will will comfortably fit within a pot, or sometimes
uncomfortably if we're being honest, those are not my decisions.
By the way, I have never been the one to
make the decision on how many ads per ad break
we should have for our podcasts. I have to abide
(18:13):
by the rules. I don't make the rules. So once
you figure that out, like how many ads can a
podcast hold within a certain amount of time, then you
have an inventory that you can sell to advertisers, and
your goal is to sell as much of that inventory
as possible. But sometimes you get a little a little
over zealous. Maybe you sell more inventory than there actually is,
(18:37):
which means you have to create more inventory, and there
are different ways of doing that. One is you add
more ad spots per break, so instead of having one
ad or two ads, you might have three or four
maybe even five ads per ad break. Another is adding
more ad breaks per episode, so you say, well, we
used to say every thirty minutes put in an AD break.
(18:58):
Now let's say every fifteen minute you put in an
AD break. That's another way. Another way is you start
adding more episodes, you have people recording more, or you
might do a combination of all these things. And if
you notice, Tech Stuff was one of those combo shows
where we were publishing five times a week with you know,
fairly long episodes and lots of ad breaks. So that
(19:19):
ended up being a big reason for the way tech
Stuff evolved is that it was the money side of
Tech Stuff. You know, you can't just do this for free.
Podcasting does cost money. You have hosting fees, you have
the salaries of the people who work on the shows,
so there has to be a way to monetize or
else you're losing money on the deal and that's just
not a business, right. So that in large part shaped
(19:42):
tech Stuff for quite some time. So we get down
to five times a week, and then we scale back
to three times a week once I have my little
medical whoopsie as I like to call it. But for
a really long time we didn't have any ads at all,
but no one did really. I mean, there might have
been a few podcasts that were monetized, but by and
(20:04):
large most were not. Podcasts were so new and seen
as being such a niche form of media that no
one had really established a model for advertising or sponsorship
for those shows. In the early days, Rarely Chris and
I would get a request from our boss to do
an episode about a specific topic, and it would turn
out that the request was part of a larger ad
(20:26):
deal that had been made for the website houstuffworks dot com,
and a podcast episode was kind of thrown on top
as sort of a perk for that ad deal to close.
But that was the exception, it was not the rule.
Ninety Nine percent of the time, Chris and I got
to pick our own topics and there was really no
outside interference, which was great. We would each do our
(20:46):
research separately for our episodes. We wouldn't share notes or
anything until we got to the studio, and then Chris
and I would have a conversation. It was mostly unstructured,
and most of the time it worked out great. We
usually ended up leaving some off unmentioned, just because the
flow of conversation didn't allow for every little factor tidbit
we had researched. Once in a while, however, things just
(21:08):
didn't work. I remember there was one recording session where
Chris and I struggled through a topic. I can't remember
what it was at this point. It's on the tip
of my tongue, but I just can't quite remember. But
I do remember that at the end of the recording session,
we looked at each other and just kind of said,
that was terrible, and we made a very hard call.
We decided to go back into the studio to scrap
(21:31):
the original recording and to have the conversation all over again,
and luckily our producer agreed to do that. I don't
remember who was producing that particular session at that time.
Our original producer was Jerry, who is famous for being
the producer of Stuff You Should Know. But we also
had other folks. We had Tyler Klang, who now is
a leader in production at iHeart Podcasts. We had Matt Frederick,
(21:54):
one of the hosts of Stuff They Don't Want You
to Know. Noel Brown, one of the hosts of Ridiculous History.
We also produced several episodes of tech Stuff. Ramsey Yunt
served as a producer, was a phenomenal producer who booked
a lot of really cool guests for Tech Stuff. And
then I have my current and awesome producer, Tari, who's
been taking care of me for years now. Anyway, back
(22:15):
to the evolution of Tech Stuff, I'm not sure when
we first started to monetize the show. I don't remember
what year that was. I do remember it wasn't a
frequent thing for the first few years, like some shows
would get ads and some wouldn't. Eventually, though, advertisers began
to recognize the potential value of podcasts, and sales teams
were able to start making ad deals for them. Our
(22:38):
early ads were baked in or embedded ads. That means
we would just record the ads directly into the show
recording itself. The idea was that those ads would just
be part of that episode from that point forward. That's
different from the way web advertising typically works. You know,
usually a web advertising deal is to last for a
certain number of impressions or paid and then once it
(23:01):
hits that the ad deal concludes, and at that point
the web administrator can sell that same advertising space to
someone else. Initially, that wasn't really a possibility with podcasting,
but later on publishing platforms would introduce dynamic ads. These
would be digital markers that you put in a recording
and they designate where an AD needs to go within
(23:24):
that recording. So you then record those ads separately, and
then those ads can swap out as one deal concludes
and a new one starts up. So if you've ever
dived into a back catalog of one of our shows,
whether it's tech stuff or something else, and you thought, hey,
that's weird, I'm hearing the same ads I would hear
if I was listening to yesterday's episode, well, that's why
(23:45):
it's this dynamic ad insertion. But yeah, in the early days,
we didn't have dynamic ads, so they were recorded directly
into the show. I think someone actually had to go
back manually and cut out those old ads in order
to introduce new digital markers to previously existing shows. That
had to be a heck of a thing to have
(24:06):
to do. Our early advertisers were ones that all podcasters
weren't working with. You know, you had brands like Meandes
or Blue Apron or Casper Mattresses, and we loved working
with these folks. They were really enthusiastic about using podcasts
to reach customers. They really believed in the medium, and
they made great stuff that we really liked, and so
(24:27):
it was just a really good match. Now, over time,
as our shows grew and the business evolved, as well
as our corporate overlords changed over we'll talk more about
that extensively in a bit, we eventually tapped into larger,
more established companies as advertisers. That's not to take anything
away from our earlier partners, whom sometimes we still get
to work with, which is awesome. It just widened the
(24:49):
spectrum of the types of advertisers who were working with us,
and we had really big company names purchasing ad space
or sometimes working with us to create sponsored episodes. That
was an enormous change industry wide. Other changes were happening
behind the scenes and probably weren't quite as evident to listeners. So,
(25:10):
as I mentioned, Discovery Communications acquired how stuffworks dot Com
back in two thousand and seven. That deal didn't go
so swell for Discovery in the long run, I'm afraid.
So back in two thousand and seven, Discovery paid two
hundred and fifty million dollars for house stuffworks dot Com
a princely sum. Seven years later, in twenty fourteen, Discovery
(25:35):
would sell off HowStuffWorks dot Com to another company, this
one called blue Cora, for just forty five million dollars.
That's a big old ouch when your your selling price
has dropped by two hundred and five million dollars. Yikes. Now,
In the years between two thousand and seven and twenty fourteen,
there were some other changes, some of which were painful.
(25:59):
One change was that our office was relocated from occupying
a full floor of the building we were in to
a little less than half a floor. So obviously that
was a big downsizing, and part of that relocation meant
the room that we had been using to record in
needed to be repurposed. So the podcast studio ended up
moving into an unoccupied office. Actually, technically it office hopped
(26:23):
a couple of times to different offices, and it made
recording a real challenge because the offices had windows that
faced out to the exterior world, and obviously the exterior
world could sometimes be a bit noisy. I actually remember
at times when we sat down to record, we would
be able to hear Baton Bob as he blew his
whistle and marched up and down Peachtree Street outside. Now,
(26:44):
if you don't know who Baton Bob is, well, that
wouldn't surprise me. He's a local personality, is a good
word for it. He's an ambassador of fun and joy
and a force to be reckoned with here in Atlanta.
So there are some episodes of tech stuff that, if
you were to listen really carefully, you might actually hear
the Toon Bob blowing a whistle way off in the background,
(27:05):
because even though we were on like the fourteenth floor
or something like that, you could still hear them. In general,
traffic noise in the light became a real nuisance in
this era. We would also later relocate to a lower
floor in that same building, which just made it worse
because we'd be closer to the traffic. Now, tech stuff
continued to change too. There were other growing pains. For one,
Discovery Communications would occasionally require us to do episodes that
(27:29):
were aligned to some Discovery programming. I'll never forget the
first time we were asked to do a Shark Week
episode because there wasn't a whole lot of tech related
to sharks that we could talk about. I mean things
like you know, tracking pods and stuff were pretty low
tech and easy to explain, and shark cages aren't particularly
high tech either, but we made the best of it.
(27:51):
But yeah, those were some growing pains, but a lot
of other big changes were coming. I mean, Chris Pollette
left the show in twenty thirteen, and Lauren Vogel Bomb
came on at that time, and other things at the
house Stuffworks dot Com office sometimes got a bit rough.
I'll explain more, but first let's take another quick break.
(28:21):
So before the last break, I talked about how things
at house Stuffworks sometimes got a little dicey. That's because,
like in September, we would often end up having some layoffs.
Sometimes the layoffs would be small and sometimes they were
more extensive. September was just a rough time of year,
and I believe personally that's because Discovery would be heading
into its final quarter for the fiscal year and would
(28:43):
be looking for ways to cut costs in order to
maximize shareholder value. And Discovery was a publicly traded company,
so cutting costs would be a great way to boost
If revenue wasn't doing great, then cut costs and things
look better. And one way to cut costs is to
cut jobs and I remember there was one year in
particular where the editorial department was called into a meeting,
(29:05):
and once we all got into the meeting room, we
noticed that a good number of us, like at least
a third, maybe half, of the editorial department wasn't in
the meeting room. And then we were told that those
folks have been let go. And I additionally noticed that
nearly everyone who was left was someone who was currently
working on a podcast. There were a couple of exceptions,
(29:26):
but most of us were working on at least one podcast,
and I found that interesting. At the time, I was
still actively writing articles for the website in addition to
hosting tech stuff Now. Around the same time that Discovery
sold us to the company Blue Cora, the house Stuffworks
dot Com offices relocated out of Buckhead entirely and we
(29:47):
moved into new spaces in a building called Ponce City Market.
This was in a neighborhood in Atlanta called the Old
Fourth Ward. So for the first time, we were able
to plan an office space with podcasts studios in mind.
From the get go, we weren't repurposing a space to
become a studio. We were building studios from the get go.
(30:08):
And initially in that space we had two audio podcast
studios and two video studios. This was during the whole
pivot to video era of online content creation. Eventually we
would end up converting those video studios into two additional
audio recording studios. We actually assembled whisper rooms inside those
(30:30):
video studios, which meant you would open a door to
what was once a video studio and you'd step in
and you would see that inside that room was a
tinier room, you know, a little free standing recording studio.
Those whisper rooms were really quiet, but they were also
kind of stuffy, so actually preferred recording in one of
the older podcast rooms if possible. Blue Cora ended up
(30:51):
being a very odd fit for us. The company was
mostly known as a tax and wealth management service company.
Last year it actually changed its name to Van Tax,
but at the time it was blue Cora, and we
went to it and none of us are really sure
what it would mean, And it turned out we didn't
have to worry for too long because Blue Cora had
a division called Infospace. In fact, originally the company was Infospace,
(31:15):
but Infospace became associated with a specific service and then
ended up creating a parent company organization called Bluecorra because
it didn't want to have confusion with other properties that
the company was acquiring, how stuffworks dot Com was nestled
under Infospace. In twenty sixteen, Bluecorra sold Infospace and how
(31:36):
stuffworks dot Com along with it, to another company called
OpenMail for the princely sum of forty five million dollars.
And you might say, huh, so Bluecorra sold house stuffworks
dot Com for the same amount of money as what
they paid back in twenty fourteen, But that's not totally
correct because Infospace was a huge honk of that deal.
So in other words, this was a really demoralizing time
(31:58):
to be part of how Stuffworks done. It had gone
from being this prize of a content company in two
thousand and seven, which sold for two hundred and fifty
million dollars, to being part of a package deal for
just forty five million. Anyway, open Mail then renamed itself
as System one system with the numeral one all one word.
So for those keeping track tech stuff existed under the
(32:21):
regimes of well, there was a Web Content Group, but
after that there was Discovery Communications, Blue Cora via Infospace,
open Mail slash System one, So I hope we're all
caught up. By this time in twenty sixteen, I was
the solo host of Tech Stuff, though I would often
reach out to my peers and colleagues to get guest
co hosts to come in, and folks within the house
(32:43):
Stuffworks family would join in. Sometimes. That included Holly Frye
and Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, Ben Bolan, Noel Brown,
Scott Benjamin, Joe McCormick, and Robert Lamb. They would occasionally
help me out and join the show from outside our network.
Folks like Shannon Morse and tom Merritt, Veronica Belmont, I
(33:04):
as actar, Jason Howell, Ashley Esketa, and Moore have joined
me as guest co hosts, and I owe them all
big time. In fact, folks like tom Merritt and Jason
Howell and Veronica Belmont were all huge inspirations to me
before I even started podcasting myself. I had been listening
to them podcasts for a couple of years before we
launched Tech Stuff. Of course, the changes didn't stop with
(33:26):
the open mail system one acquisition. Another huge change happened
in twenty seventeen. This one would actually split houstuffworks dot
Com up into two different entities. One of those entities
was the website side. That one would stay with System One.
The other half, the podcast division, would spin off to
become a subsidiary called stuff Media. Now, up to this point,
(33:49):
I had been working in both divisions while also doing
stuff like hosting a popular video series called Forward Thinking,
which was part of a big sponsorship deal with Toyota.
But at this point my care moved with the media company.
I became part of Stuff Media. While we stayed in
the same office space as the house stuffworks dot Com folks,
we technically worked for two different divisions, and that would
(34:11):
change even more the following year because it was in
twenty eighteen that we got word that iHeartMedia was acquiring
Stuff Media, and the house stuffworks dot Com folks moved
out of our office space. That was really sad for
a lot of us. We had all grown really close
over the years, but they had to move out, and
Stuff Media would become kind of a nexus for Iheart's
(34:33):
podcast initiative, what we now call iHeart Podcasts. Now, to
be clear, iHeart was already producing podcasts at this time.
The company owns hundreds of radio stations, and lots of
those radio stations were already converting their broadcasted programming into podcasts.
Either they would release a full recording of a complete broadcast,
(34:53):
or they would cut it into a kind of best
of cut. Stuff Media would sort of become a strategy
central for Iheart's podcasting arm, and the stuff legacy shows
like Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class,
and tech stuff would become flagship shows on that network.
And there were a lot of other stuff shows that
launched in the years before the iHeart acquisition, So we
(35:17):
had shows like car Stuff, Stuff Mom Never Told You,
Stuff they Don't want you to know, which actually I
named that show, which is a fun little fact, and
lots more other stuff shows and non stuff shows had
launched over the years. Now I can honestly say that
out of all the corporate moves I was part of
since joining how Stuffworks dot Com back in February two
(35:40):
thousand and seven, the iHeart acquisition was by far the smoothest.
It was a natural fit, far more so than Discovery
Communications had been, and to me, it made way more
sense than the Bluecorra infospace deal. We continued to work
out of Pont City Market for a couple more years,
but our lease was coming up, and something else what
happened that would become a catalyst for another relocation. That's
(36:03):
something was, of course, the COVID pandemic. So our office
shut down on March thirteenth, twenty twenty. And I know
that because every now and then I would have to
go back into the office. It would be completely empty,
but I would have to go in there for some
reason or another. And one of my colleagues had a
desk calendar on his desk and it was set to
(36:25):
March thirteenth, twenty twenty, and it just stayed on that date,
which was a sobering reminder. You'd be walking by in
like October and it would still say March thirteenth, twenty twenty.
It's just rough. Eventually it became clear that we were
going to let go of the Pont City Market space
and that we would relocate so that we would be
working side by side with the iHeartRadio Atlanta office, with
(36:47):
the actual radio folks of iHeart. Now, that move took
a while. It took actually a long time longer than
we had anticipated, in order to set up the space.
That is not anyone's fault. I should add because the
Pan and Dimmick did such a huge number on supply chains,
that's no surprise that stuff like construction took a really
(37:07):
long time. But now in our current space in Atlanta,
we have the nicest audio recording studios I've ever had
the pleasure to work inside. The Crown Jewel is one
studio in our office that has multiple high definition cameras
positioned around it. All of those cameras are controllable from
a producer workstation that has a broadcast television studio kind
(37:29):
of set up where you can do live switching between cameras.
It's super cool. Now most of the time I record
tech stuff out of my home office because it's just me.
I mean, it seems a bit extravagant to take up
a whole studio when it's just one guy talking into
a microphone. But soon that time will come to an end,
and I'm really excited to see where tech stuff goes next.
(37:51):
Now I don't want to spoil the surprise just yet,
but as we get closer to January, I'll talk more
about the team that's going to be the new stewards
of tech Stuff. As I mentioned, It is a team
that already has an impressive history in media. They have
a long list of accomplishments, far more accomplished than I am.
So tech stuff is in great hands. It's going to
(38:14):
go to places that it never could under just my
own stewardship. But as for me, I'm not really going anywhere.
I'm going to remain with iHeart Podcasts. I will be
an executive producer. You might occasionally hear me pop up
on Ridiculous History. I play a character called the Quizt
on Ridiculous History. Haven't been the Quiztor Cush. It's been
(38:35):
like a couple of years now, But if we can
ever get our schedules to work out again, I'll be
popping back up there to make their lives a living hell.
Outside of iHeart, there's a tiny little podcast called large
Nerdron Collider. We used to have it on the iHeart network.
It's independent now. You can seek that out if you
want to hear me chat with my friend Ariel about
(38:56):
geeky movies and television shows and stuff like that. We
typically cover like geek news and give our perspectives on it,
and we have very different perspectives, so it's a fun conversation.
You can check out that show if you like narrative
fiction podcasts. I would absolutely love it if you would
check out the show Kadi Womple with the Shadow People. Yes,
(39:17):
it's a very silly title. It's a whimsical title, I
guess I should say. And it's a show that was
created by my friend Shay Lee and I edit that podcast.
So if you listen to Kadi Womple with the Shadow People,
all the soundscaping and stuff is done by yours truly.
Plus once in a while, I lend my voice to
a couple of characters. And I've written a few episodes
(39:39):
for the show. And who knows, I might end up
working on some other series as a host in the
future with iHeart. We'll have to see. There are no
current plans for that, but it's an open door, so
I might be doing other shows, probably limited run shows,
because I do plan on taking on a lot more
executive producer duties in the years to come. But I
(40:00):
don't plan on getting out of the game entirely now.
As I mentioned, I'll still be recording Tech Stuff episodes
through the end of twenty twenty four and into the
very beginning of twenty twenty five. So you're not rid
of me just yet. But yeah, I wanted to take
this opportunity to announce that this change is coming so
that it doesn't take you by surprise, and to get
you excited about it. This isn't something to be upset about.
(40:22):
This is something to be excited about, because I was
really worried for more than a year. Now that I'm
just repeating myself, and I don't want to do that.
It does a disservice to you, the listener. You deserve
better than that. You deserve to have fresh perspectives that
are able to dive deep into the tech topics that
are important to us today and to really demystify them
(40:45):
and to analyze them and kind of turn them over
to see what makes them tick and how they interact
with us and how we in turn shape technology. And
I have full confidence that that is going to continue.
So that's it for today's episode. It's a different kind
of episode of tech stuff, but we'll be back to
the normal stuff for at least another like month and
(41:05):
a half before things get really weird. Then we'll see
where it goes. I hope all of you out there
are doing incredibly well, and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
(41:25):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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