A Conversation with Iyaz Akhtar

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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? 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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? 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 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

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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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

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.

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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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. 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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, 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 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.

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, 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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? 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows