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tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. I'll repeat that again at the end of the episode. But let's get onto some of the questions that were sent into me. This one comes from Susan on Facebook, who says, I'm not sure if this is something you can use, but it bugs the hell out of me. Why could you only post photos to Instagram from a mobile device? Most social media sites have web page access as well, but Instagram will only let you leave comments on their desktop interface.

Why does Instagram maintain this lack of functionality? It makes it much harder for those of us in social media to schedule and work with Instagram as a platform. The answer I have for you now This is again kind of my opinion slash guests, because I don't work for Instagram, so I don't know the inside story, but I think it mainly has to do with Instagram positioning itself as

a mobile photo sharing service. Now that means that it is trying to be the photo equivalent of something like Twitter, and a move it to the desktop world would mean that it would have to compete against lots and lots of other photo sharing uh and photo album software suites that are out there, and I don't think Instagram wants to compete in that market. They don't want to be up against things like Flicker or even Facebook, um that sort of stuff. They would much prefer to have this

other niche area really well defined. So creating an app that makes it easy to take pictures and apply filters and share it to a social net work is really really appealing in the mobile space. It's something that the easier it is to use and the more functionality it has, the more likely people are going to adopt it. So that's a lot easier than creating a very compelling service on the desktop. UM that's probably why they're going that way.

It also makes it easier for them to work with other existing social media if it doesn't look like they are um hedging in on the perimeter of those other services like Facebook. So that's my guess. I think it makes it a big fish in a small pond as opposed to being a small fish in a big pond. But I do agree that for those of us who work in social media where we're trying to schedule things out and we're having to manage multiple social media UH platforms,

it's really frustrating. Um I oversee Facebook and Google Plus and UH and Twitter and Tumbler, and every time you add one then you have a new suite of problems that come up as a manager, So it becomes a full time job just to manage the social media on top of creating the content that I do. So I understand the frustration from Christian on Facebook. Hey, tech stuff, I can't remember if I heard this from you guys

or not. However I heard that all the new technology that comes out now, such as smartphones, for example, has already been long and invented. In other words, there's nothing really new, like warp drives or things like that. Everything that is sold to the public is basically just repackaged such as on the iPhone. They didn't just invent fingerprints scanners or touch screens or wireless tech. These things have been around forever. I didn't believe this at first and

eventually started to agree. But now I'm questioning that again, and I'm really curious what tex Stuff would have to say about it. By the way, I love the podcast on Elon Musk and all his business ventures. Well, you know, I talked about this in our last episode a little bit. The thing about inventions is again they are so it's a it's a work in progress. It's not a moment where someone comes up with something brand new that has never been seen before and that changes everything. It usually

is an incremental improvement to some existing idea. It may be taking something that only existed in the world of ideas and making it a real thing that happens. That kind of happened with radio, for example. People had been working with different implementations of radio, but Marconi was the first one to really get one to work, especially transatlantic radio. So these are ideas that come as the result of lots of work with lots of different people working on

the predecessors to these inventions. So I certainly don't think we are at an era where we will no longer see new groundbreaking technology. It may be that we just witness it growing in small steps. But if you look at the technology of today and compare it to stuff from five years ago, it looks like a world of difference. I imagine that five years from now, the technology we have then will be even to the point where the stuff we we the bleeding edge stuff we have today

looks primitive in comparison. Uh, it's hard to see during the present, right, we just see the the incremental changes. We don't see the big jumps. But those jumps are there, they're just hidden by all the little incriminal steps. So one thing I've learned is that you never ever predict that we've reached the end of innovation or the end

of invention. People have done that throughout history. Uh, you know, the like the head of the patent off it's saying that everything worth inventing had been invented, and that was at the turn of the twentieth century. And certainly we've seen hundreds of world changing inventions come out as after nineteen hundreds. So never never say never, never say that

we're done with innovation and inventing. It may just be that the changes we see are so frequent and so small that we can't see the big steps that define different generations of products. So that's my answer for you. Next, Frank on Facebook says, how about a podcast on the media of the tech world? How does how do tech companies compete for media coverage? How do tech news sites

choose which ones they want to talk about? With so many people wanting to make their own gizmas, how do they bring it to the big, bad world out there. So this is a little insider baseball. Technically, if you are a tech news site or a show and you're covering technology, you largely take your cues off what your audience wants to hear. So this isn't necessarily true for every single story you run, but you might see that perhaps your audience really loves Apple, for example. It's an

easy example because generally it's true. It means that you would probably spend a little more time focusing on those stories than on other stories that might be interesting, but your audience doesn't flock to them. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, ever, You want to spread them out, but you you focus your attention based upon what your audience has told you they want

to see. Now, if you have defined yourself as a company that specifically covers technology from one sector, like Android, then obviously you you're going to focus on that. You may end up mentioning other companies as they relate to Android, but that that defines your experience. As far as how you determine which stories to cover, A lot of that depends upon press releases. So tech companies send out press

releases all the time. Sometimes they're embargoed, which means that you cannot release that information until an agreed upon time. The embargo will lift at a certain time, and at that point you can post your story about whatever it happens to be. If you violate an embargo, you run the risk of that company never are working with your

outlet ever again. So if I'm a reporter and I get a press release that's under embargo that has an amazing story about a new product, then my it's my best interest to wait until the embargo is over before posting, so that way I don't burn that bridge. UH. Ask

for how do companies get news out? They often will have a public relations department, or they will hire a PR firm to handle it for them, and what that department's job is is to take the stuff that the company is working on, create press releases about it that spin it in the most positive, exciting way possible, and then send that out to every single tech journalist they possibly can. I am on several of these email lists,

even though I do not cover tech news. I don't have a daily tech news show, although that's a great idea someone should do one of those. Um it's a joke for my friend Tom Merritt. So since I don't cover it, it doesn't really apply to me. But I still am on a lot of these lists. I often will use those as inspiration for UH for podcast episodes down the line. But generally speaking, that's how you get the information about your gizmo to the big bad world.

You hire somebody who can send that information out to all the different outlets that might be interested in your work, and then those outlets will take the ball and run from there. Next from Nate Langson on Twitter now. Nate Lanson is editor of Wired dot co dot uk UH and as a friend of mine, so full disclosure there. He says did you ever own a palm top computer. My personal favorite was the Scion Series three, which I adored.

The three MX had a twenty eight Mega hurt CPU. Nate, I am sad to say I have never owned any sort of palm top computer. In fact, before I got a smartphone, I didn't really have any kind of mobile computer at all, unless you count the scientific calculator I had back when I was a senior in high school, which was programmable and you could make pictures on it, but that was pretty much the extent of it. So I was really slow to adopt cell phones in general.

It was about a year or two after I graduated college before I finally got my first cell phone, and I graduated back in nine seven. So I've been pretty slow to adopt most technologies, which might come as a surprise since I host a technology show. But with the exception of smart watches, I tend to hold off. I don't jump on the bandwagon smart watches. I kind of have a watch problem. I mentioned it in the previous episode.

I have a Pebble smart watch. I've got two other crowdfunded smart watches on the way, and I'm always on the lookout for other really nice smart watches. Usually what slows me down is I'll read the initial review and if I see that the battery life is terrible, then I'll skip it. But at any rate, I've only ever owned one tablet that was a Nexus seven Android tablet. I still have it, but I think I only use it to play Tiny Death Star because I'm still a

Tiny Star Wars fan. I've had three smartphones, the G one, the G two, both by HTC, and the next is for those are all Android smartphones, so you can see what side I better my bread. I'm still rocking the Xbox three six and the p S three. I have not upgraded to a new console system. Um. I follow all the news about all these different devices that keep coming out. I'm well informed about them, but I tend to be very conservative and adopting them because I have

very little spare time. And since I have very little spare time, there are actually games that are on a stack in front of my three sixty that I haven't even taken out of the shrink wrap yet that I need to play. I just finished Battle Block Theater. People. I am well behind the state of the art as far as games are concerned, so I tend to be a little slow to adopt these. I love the technologies, I just don't go out and grab them as soon

as they come out. I did buy a brand new desktop computer that can run current generation PC games, and that's got me really excited, though to be fair, I've mostly used it to play Civilization five because again I'm well behind the curve. And finally, I've got a trilogy of questions from my good friend Ariel. Ariel and I have known each other for more than a decade, and we've done some comedy and some acting together, and we've

got some podcast projects together. So full disclosure, I know her really well too, but she had some great questions because she's a fan of the show, So thank you very much, Ariel. And her first question was, how often do you come across a tech subject that is really hard to understand? What has been the most confusing tech to get a handle on? To talk about? All Right, so this happens frequently. I run into a lot of tech topics that are difficult for me to understand. I

I do. I'm not an engineer, I'm not a computer scientist. When I went to school, I went to school studying English literature with a focus on medieval English lit, so we're talking Chaucer and things of that nature. But I've always loved technology and I've always been interested in it, and I would follow along from my layman's perspective, and I began to educate myself that way. So I'm largely self taught when it comes to the ins and outs

of technology, and I do a lot of research. So while I may not understand a subject when I first start looking into it, I do my best to absolutely understand it the best of my ability before I podcast on it. And if I don't feel comfortable about it, then I won't do a podcast, because I think that that does more harm than good to do a really crappy podcast that misrepresents a technology, or a company or a personality. Uh. And I hope that I have managed

to do that throughout tech stuff. I'm sure there are one or two episodes that are maybe borderline because they're a little um, you know, they were based on things that I felt I had a good understanding of, and I might have been mistaken at any rate. I think that the hardest episodes have been those that deal with quantum physics, because when I went to school, I studied physics, I studied chemistry, has staid biology, but I never got into quantum physics in college. I've read an awful lot

about them. I've read books on the leading thinkers, both the early thinkers of quantum physics and current thinkers, but it's still a largely mysterious world to me. So any of the UH concepts that involve quantum physics, and there are a lot of them in technology, are really tough and require a lot more work on my side to get a good understanding before I feel comfortable enough explaining how they worked to an audience. For example, let's look

at microprocessors. Transistors on microprocessors are on the nanoscale, which means that quantum effects come into play. UH. So this is something that we come into contact with all the time. If you have a computer, you or a smartphone or mobile device of some sort, you have a processor in there that's got elements that are so small that quantum effects have to be taken into consideration. So it's not like it's unusual for me to have to talk about

this sort of stuff. So I have to spend a lot of time understanding the fundamentals and then building on that before I feel comfortable talking about them. Pretty much the hardest subject of them all for me is optical computers, so anything that has to do with photons. Photons, of course, are the the fundamental particle of light. They are massless. They have a relative relativistic mass, which means that when you are using them in relativistic equations, you factor in

a mass. But in in actual physical reality we would say they are massless. Uh. They behave in weird ways. They can interact in weird ways or not interact in weird ways. And every time I do anything that has to do with optics and and it's getting down to that photon level description, it requires hours of extra research on my part um. I find it really rewarding. I love learning stuff, so I'm not complaining. Don't get me wrong, I actually really enjoy doing this kind of thing, but

it is a lot of work. Next, Ariel has another question. She says, what episode are you most proud of and do you feel what do you feel most passionately about. I love all my episodes. They're like children. I can't pick between them, but I particularly love the episodes where we explain how something actually works, as in the physical workings of a piece of technology. I find that really satisfying. For one thing, if you're explaining how something actually works,

there's a beginning, middle, and end. Uh it is it is there, there parameters you work inside. It's not an open ended question, so it makes it really easy to focus on specifically what you need to explain. It also comes with a challenge because how do you explain how something works in an audio format where you don't have the benefit of visual aids. That means that I have to come up with interesting ways to explain concepts that might not really be easy to imagine without some examples

or metaphors, that kind of thing. So I really enjoy that that challenge. And uh also, because it isn't open ended, you don't have to worry about fuzzy stuff around the edges. You can just give the specific facts of how the technology works and then maybe spend some time about why it's important. I always think that's a good thing too, And in fact, that's really what I'm most passionate about

is the social impact of technology. That's it really gets me fired up, and that can be anything from enabling people to communicate during times of duress or turmoil, like what we saw with the Arab Spring, or how social problems can be reflected in the technological sphere, like things

like racism and misogyny. I mean, these are serious issues and it's we see it both just out in the world old in general and within the world of technology, whether it's uh, you know, people using devices for raising awareness or using technology to try and suppress people from being able to express themselves. These are big, big issues, and technology plays a very fundamental role in these issues. So a lot of times the big story isn't about the tech. The tech is one piece that fits inside it.

But I find that the tech is an interesting point of access to get into these conversations. And I do expect in the future to have episodes really looking at some ways that technology and social issues have have have worked together or have clashed, particularly over the last couple of years. So I hope that my listeners will really enjoy those episodes because I think it's a really important part of what technology is doing today. At any rate,

I love talking about all this kind of stuff. Like I've said, I love learning, So when someone gives me a request about something, I don't know much about that. I get really passionate about because it means I get to learn stuff, and really I learned something new every single week here at How Stuff Works, and it's one of the benefits of the job. It's one of the hardest things about the job. And Ariel's final question was you used to be a writer for How Stuff Works.

What was it like transitioning from writing to podcasting, Which is a great question because I don't know if everyone out there is aware of this transformation. Um So, back in the day, people used to say, well, what's it like being a podcaster as your job and my response was, I podcasting is not my job. My job is a writer for How Stuff Works. I also podcast on top of being a writer for How Stuff Works, And for the first six years of my career here at how

staff Works, that was the truth. That was what my job was. I wrote articles that got published to the website, and on top of that, I would record episodes of tech stuff, primarily UH and then occasionally do other things. But then about two years ago, things changed and I became a podcaster and video host and I haven't written a full article for the website in two years. I've done some updates, but I haven't written a how blank works article in two years, and it's a big change.

So to understand how big a change it is, I thought it'd be fun to kind of go through what my schedule would have been like way back in the day. So when I was a writer, my week both began and ended on a Friday. It would end in the sense that I would turn in a work assignment. Usually there'll be two articles, normally one long article and one shorter article would be due each week, so Friday was the day I would turn them in, but it was

also the day I would get my new assignment. So originally I had two weeks to research and write an article based on that assignment grant Atually that narrowed down to one week, So I would get a assignment on Friday and it would be due the following Friday, which sounds like it might be harsh to cut down the preparation time in half, but it turns out Parkinson's law is mostly right. So Parkinson's law is kind of a joke.

It's a tongue in cheek law, and it says that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So, in other words, if you are given a task and you're told you have five minutes to complete this, and it would take a reasonable person five minutes to complete it, and you you do the job, it takes you five minutes to do the job. But if you're told you have two hours to complete this, the work that you could complete in five minutes magically expands,

so it takes the full two hours before you're finished. Again, it's a tongue in cheak joke, but it turns out to be kind of true because my time was cut in half, but I was still turning in articles every week instead of every two weeks. In fact, I was turning in twice as many, so it was um it was really hectic because I also had podcasts on top of that. At the time, I was also recording podcasts on Friday morning, so Friday was a big day for me. It was when I would turn in old assignments, get

new assignments, and record text stuff. I would get into the office at seven am and by nine am or nine thirty we would go into the studio and record, and then my Friday's were really pretty jam packed. Today things are different, uh, now I primarily research episodes for tech Stuff. I researched episodes for Forward Thinking UH, and then I record all of those. So that's four podcasts typically per week. I did UH five this week, but

that's unusual, So normally it's four episodes per week. I record twice on Tuesdays and twice on Thursdays, and then on top of that, I might have to do a video for the brain Stuff series, which if you guys haven't checked out, you should definitely go look at brain Stuff brain stuff show dot com or go to YouTube and search for brain Stuff. The shows there are great. I'm just one host. A lot of the other How Stuff Works hosts are also on that show and we

rotate through, so check that out. I might shoot episodes for how stuff Works YouTube channel, so if you haven't checked that out in a while, you should go look at that because there are a lot of different videos coming up from again the hosts of How Stuff Works that cover all sorts of topics. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, you should check that out. UH. This is a lot of work. I mean, it's it's a lot of research, it's a lot of recording. The

nice thing is that. For the Brain Stuff shows, for the most part, those episodes are written by someone else, which makes my job so much easier. I just have to get in front of the camera and say what I'm supposed to say. But for Forward Thinking and for Tech Stuff, both the video series for Forward Thinking and the audio I do a lot of the writing, I do the recording, um, and for all of Tech Stuff, I'm doing the writing and recording. So a full week

is mostly made up of lots of research. Also scheduling, because now that I don't have a regular co host, I have to figure out how to fill up my recording times, and a lot of the fellow How Stuff Works hosts have been very kind to volunteer their time and sit in as guest hosts. You're going to hear

more of them in the future. UM. I have plans for people from Stuffy miss In History, Class, Stuff Mob Never Told You, and even Stuff You Should Know joining me in the studio for various topics, So keep an ear out for that. But that, of course, scheduling takes up a lot of time too. I have to coordinate my schedule or the studio availability with whomever is agreeing to be on my show. That also applies to people

who are outside of How Stuff Works. I've got several people who have given me attentative agreement to be on the show, but I have to schedule all those folks out That takes a lot of time too. So the job is very different from what it was when I accepted it eight years ago, but it's still incredibly rewarding and incredibly challenging. Those two things go hand in hand, I find, so I very much enjoy it, but it is a totally different world. So thank you so much,

Ariel for those questions that are fantastic. Um, I look forward to getting more questions from you guys out there. If you ever have anything that, uh you feel it's just a quick interesting question, either about technology, or maybe it's about podcasting, or maybe it's just about me, then go ahead and send it to me. I can't promise that I'm going to answer all of them, who will largely depend upon what you're asking, but I will certainly

read all of them. You can email me My address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you could be like a lot of the folks were in these two episodes, you can contact me on social media site. So Facebook and Twitter and Tumbler all three have the handle tech stuff HSW attached to our account. Go and visit them. If you haven't liked the Facebook page, you should definitely check that out because we're posting much more frequently over there now and getting a lot of

really interesting conversations going on over there. So check that out for me and I'll talk to you guys again. Really system for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has staff works dot com