TechStuff in the Time of Coronavirus

new episode for you guys. But at the same time, I honestly just didn't have the time to do my full research dive and writing course for an episode of

tech Stuff. So instead I thought we'd do a peek behind the curtain episode and I could talk about about how are podcasting has changed since the time of quarantine, like the idea of the stay at home stuff and how we at I Heart and the former stuff media crowd have had to pivot in order to continue to make podcasts and what that actually means and and uh, I think it's a pretty great story, just one example of how people all over the world are adapting in

this time of coronavirus. And I don't mean to suggest that the way we adapted is in some way, you know, extraordinary compared to others, but rather just kind of give an insight into how things have changed for us. But to do that, you know, it wouldn't be a Tech Stuff episode if I didn't dive into history. And those of you who have listened to Tech Stuff for a long time, some of this might be familiar to you.

I've covered it in some previous episodes of tech Stuff, but that was years ago, and I want to talk about how the show got started and what it was like recording at the beginning, and then eat into its evolution, into what it was like just before the coronavirus crisis happened, and what it's been like since. That has been part of our lives. So to begin, we go back to two thousand eight. Now that year, Uh, that was when

I was working for How Stuff Works dot com. Technically I've been in the same job since two thousand seven, but the companies have changed. It's a weird kind of situation. It's like sitting in a car seat and the car around you keeps changing, but you've never gotten out of the chair. Well, back in those days when we were launching podcasts, the idea originally was that we were going to have a brand extension for how Stuff works dot com.

And but by that I mean every episode was supposed to tie back to an article on how stuff works dot com. If any of you listen to stuff you should know, and you've been listening for a long time, you know that. That's how they built their episodes. They said, you know, you can read more at how stuff works dot com at how such and such works. Well. Tech stuff was the same way. It was challenging because I don't know if you guys know this, but technology changes

pretty darned fast. So we would have topics on the website that we're about tech, but they would get out of date pretty quickly. I mean, I remember doing a podcast about video gaming PCs, and at that time I had never even built a PC. I had worked with them quite a bit, but I hadn't built one, and I had not fully appreciated just how out of date some of the references were. But trust me, my listeners, let me know. Since then, I have gotten a little

more education on the subject. But we would try and take these articles and then flesh out a podcast around them. We didn't want to just repeat the article. We wanted to kind of be supplemental to the article and direct people back to the website. Now, what we learned in those early days at first was that one the the limit we had put on ourselves, which I think originally

was ten minute limit, was way too short. And you guys know me, I can barely introduce myself in less than seven minutes, which doesn't give you a whole lot of time to cover the actual topic at hand. So we learned quickly to expand that. Originally I think we

pushed it to twenty minutes, and then thirty minutes. Then eventually we said this just needs to be as long as it needs to be, and text stuff gradually averaged out to around forty five to forty seven minutes per episode, sometimes going much longer, sometimes a little shorter, but that's about where we ended up. Well. We also didn't monetize our shows at that time. There was really no way

to monetize them. Advertising on podcasts had not yet really become a big thing, didn't have any sponsors or anything like that, so really we were just trying to convince people to come over to the website and read the articles. But as I'm sure all of you have experienced, in one way or another. That's a big request to get somebody to stop doing what they're doing on one platform or device and go to a different platform or device

to check something else out. Because back when we started doing podcasts, it was before you really used smartphones as your main method of listening to podcasts or you know, smart speakers or anything like that. You typically we're downloading podcasts to a computer and then transferring those to an MP three player. Yeah, this is back in the ancient

days of two thousand eight. And with that it meant that by the time you were listening to it, you were listening typically unlike an iPod, and there was no way to navigate to a web page on the old iPods. This was really before you started seeing that kind of support built out on the iPhone. The iPhone had just come out the year before. As for the recording process, I can tell you what that was like, because it was.

It was pretty jang ki in those early days. We had an office space in an area of Atlanta called Buckhead, which is a kind of a i'd say an upper class area of Atlanta, a lot of expensive stores and stuff. I can't stand Buckhead personally. That's just my own personal opinion, not a big fan of that part of town. Anyway, we had an office there and in that office actually it was it was an entire floor of an office building.

But in that office space we had one medium sized room kind of in the middle of our office space that was closed off. It actually you know, had floor to ceiling walls and doors and everything, and it was an oddly shaped room. It wasn't like a perfect rectangle. It was had weird angles to it, and we usually used it to shoot video and stuff in there, although we didn't do very much of that. This was before

how Stuff Works was producing very many videos. We were mostly focusing on writing articles for the site, but occasionally we would shoot stuff in that space. Well, that's where they decided to make our little recording studio. The room had this odd alcove in one corner where it was like a closet, but there was no door to it, so it's just an alcove and we were using it for storage, and that's what we decided to turn into

an audio podcast recording studio. Not ideal, but we fit a table in there, a small table because there wasn't

a whole lot of space. A couple of chairs, a couple of microphones, a couple of headphones, and then we hung a sound dampening curtain across the entrance of that alcove to shut it off from the rest of the room, and on the other side of the curtain, in the actual rooms space, we had a production computer, a Mac computer, where a producer would sit as we would record and monitor the recording to make sure that nothing was going wrong.

And so back then, my co host and I, Chris Pallette and I would sit down and chat into the microphones and it would get recorded to this production computer. And back in the day are our producer most frequently was Tyler who is now an executive producer over with

I Heart. Occasionally we would get Matt Frederick, who you might know from stuff they don't want you to know, uh, And once in a blue moon, Jerry would sit in, but that's only if she really had no other options, because she was very important back then more so even now, and I didn't have a whole lot of extra time in her schedule. But occasionally she would fill in if if no one else was available, And so that's how we would record. We would sit down and do that

and there were very few edits. Usually we would include our goofs and mistakes and we would just correct ourselves within the context of the actual episode. Um, we didn't do the beeps thing that some of us have since started to do, where we indicate it within the audio form, we make a beep noise because you can actually see it in the wave form. Uh, you see the the shape of the wave form, and says, oh, well, that's clearly where something's messed up and you can go and

fix it. We just kept on going. So if you listen to those early tech stuffs, you will hear that we were using, I believe sure microphones, which we have stuck with for the most part, but that that studio space wasn't meant to be a studio space. There was hardly any baffling, baffling being sort of sound absorbing foam to help cut down on things like echo and and reverb and stuff. Uh, and it just was what we had. Eventually we had to move into a smaller office space

within the same building. We no longer had the full floor. We had about maybe a third of a floor lower down in the building, and that really caused pain in our podcasts. We were still doing podcasting, and occasionally we're even monetizing them at this point. But now we had a different recording setup. Instead of being in an isolated room in the center of an office space, we had an actual office. It wasn't designed to be a studio

at all. It was designed to be the office of somebody fairly important because it was a corner office with windows on two wall. Now, I'm sure any of you out there who have had any experience with sound recording no that it is not ideal to record in a room that shares a window to the outside world. There's

a lot of noise that can come in. We were located just off of one of the many Peach Tree streets in Atlanta, but in this case, it's the Peach Tree Street, and you could often hear traffic noises and occasionally a whistle as a local character known as Baton Bob would march up and down the street whistling on a whistle and waving at people. So, yeah, if you want, if you want to smile, just search Baton Bob Atlanta and you'll get to see the the ambassador of smiles

that I'm talking about. Not ideal, but that's what we had to work with then, so we would record again

using sure microphones, using headphones, so decent hardware. We did eventually end up covering all the windows with materials like like foam, absorbing foam, baffling foam, which probably meant that from the outside we looked like there was some sort of highly disturbed individual who was occupying that particular office space because the windows were blacked out from that that space on both sides, and that helped cut down a

little bit on noise. But even to this day, if you listen back to some of the podcasts that were recorded during that era, you might occasionally hear traffic noises. You might even hear a siren, although most of us would pause our recording whenever an emergency response vehicle was going down Peachtree Street, which happened at least three or four times per recording session, so that again was not ideal. But at the time we were not a podcasting company either.

Podcasting was becoming more important and it was starting to generate more opportunities, both for the company as a whole and for some of the hosts in particular, and that was great, but at that point our focus was still

on the website. At that stage, we were working with Discovery Communications that was our parent company at the time, and so things were different, like we were mostly working on to make sure that we were in alignment with our parent company, and that also explains why if you go back and look at those episodes, even across all the stuff channels, you'll start to see things like uh topics that maybe we wouldn't have chosen on our own,

but they were in alignment with what the parent company wanted. The easiest example I can give of that is the Shark Week themed episodes. It was easier for maybe the History show to really focus on Shark Week or even stuff you should know, but for tech stuff, Shark Week proved to be a bit of a challenge figuring out how to talk about technology with sharks beyond things like it's a cage and it protects you from being bitten.

That got that got to be pretty complicated. I think on our first attempt we ended up talking about Bruce, which was the nickname for the mechanical shark that was used during the filming of Jaws. That was the way we got around it. So that for a long time was how we recorded episodes. It was either in that one alcove or it was in a corner office where we were doing our best to try and isolate all

the outside noise. But things would change dramatically when we ended up relocating from Buckhead to a different part of Atlanta and neighborhood called the Old Fourth Ward, and we ended up in a a space in the brand new Ponce City Market. I'll explain more about that in a second, but first let's take a quick break. So we ended up moving across town. For one thing, we got sold off.

Discovery Communications sold how Stuff Works dot Com to a company called Blue Cora uh and then in turn, Blue Cora spun off uh info Seek along with how stuff Works dot Com, and we became part of a company that eventually became known as System One. And that's about the same time that we were relocating over to Old Fourth Ward into the Pont City Market space. When we did that, it was super cool, but it was also

incredibly challenging. And it was challenging because we had to set up brand new studio space in this office and at the time, Pont City Market was still being built out, so our office space was complete, but there were entire floors of Pont City Market that we're being converted over, and to understand what Pont City Market is and and the enormity of that challenge takes a little more history. Pont City Market started off as sort of a store

and distribution center for Sears in Atlanta. It was located right next to railroad tracks. In fact, the tracks are still there, they're no longer active tracks. And there was even a section of track that split off from the main track and became a little section just in front of Pont City Market, so that a train car loaded down with stuff for Sears could detach, move down this section of track, be unloaded, and then moved back to join up with a train. So it's a really important

building and it's enormous. It's a couple of million square feet of space, as I recall, and there's like nine floors of it. It's huge. But Sears left that building unoccupied for a long time. The Atlanta City government had a small amount of space something like ten of the building, but it remained vacant, and then eventually it was bought by a development company that decided to turn it into

office and retail and loft space. So if you want an extremely expensive loft in Atlanta, you could get one at Pond City Markets, outside my price range, to be honest, but that's where our office moved to. We built out two studios originally, and we eventually named them Bowie after David Bowie and Eno, so they're named after musicians. We would later add two more studios. Originally they were both video studio was one was a video studio for sets and one was a video studio for backdrops like a

white psych or a green screen. Uh, those became prints and buyork. And so if you've ever watched any of the How Stuff Works videos where there was like a little kind of study sort of look to it, like like you're sitting in a study, that was that was in one of those studios. And all the old forward thinking videos where I was in front of like a white background, at least the later ones, those were shot in the other studio, but we converted those into audio

studios eventually. Because Stuff Media, the podcasting arm, split off from how stuff works dot com. How stuff works dot Com remained with System one and the Stuff Media group we split off, we stayed in the same office space. In fact, we cohabitated that office space for a while with the how Stuff Works people. They eventually moved out and got a different space, but Stuff Media remained there and we ended up getting what are called whisper rooms

for those audio podcast rooms. Now these are like recording booths um and so it's a recording booth sitting inside a larger room. And on the outside of the whisper rooms, we've set up desks where we have the production computers. Those are Mac computers where we record to those those

computer systems. Inside the whispering rooms, we've got tables, chairs, the microphones still using sure microphones and headphones um and we have uh, individual little volume controls for our our headphones so that we can arrange that to our hearts content. I'm slightly hard of hearing, so I turned mine up, but that would blast the ears off someone like Lauren. So luckily we all have our own individual controls. We don't have to, you know, have one master control for

all the headphones. Uh. We close off those doors we record our episodes. The audio goes through a mixer in a couple of studios. There's actually a physical console mixer and then a couple of studios use a virtual mixer. But in either case they're doing the same general job. That is, they allow the producer to set audio levels, so if one person is just naturally louder than another, you can drop their level down a little bit so that way you don't have a big jump between the

loud person and the quiet person. I tend to be a little quiet, so they boost me up a little bit, so that's odd. I'm not used to being quiet. But my voice gets you can hear it now. My voice is getting worn out the more I talk. Of course, this is the third episode of tech Stuff that I'm recording today that explains that. And like the studios that we had back in the Buckhead space, which were again just you know, kind of a rigged studios, these we

ended up using a lot more phone baffling. We were able to have a lot more control over the space. We made sure that the windows and doors that we used in those spaces kept the noise nice and isolated, so you don't have a lot of bleed over. People can actually chat outside the rooms, and it's not terrible if they start getting into a really animated conversation that

can sometimes bleed over into the audio. That we are hearing as we record, and in that case I have been known to jump outside and gently suggest people take their conversation elsewhere. I'm very um genteel about such things. We record into Audition. That is the software we use at the office. It's a Mac based and so that allows people to do things like isolate microphones. Uh. And Tari, when she's recording me live at the office, use this

audition to put little markers down. Whenever I make a mistake or have a terrible sound come out of me, like if I have to sniff or cough or something, she can put a little time marker on the recording so that later on she can very quickly navigate to those markers and make those edits um. And it just makes things a lot easier. That's why she likes to listen live while I actually record. And then if Tari has to say something to me, she has a microphone

on her side and can communicate to me. It doesn't get sent to the audition file. It's it's not going through to recording, but I can hear it in my headphones and then I can respond to it. Um. So that's generally how things worked at Pont City Market. Oh, I should also mention, so we have Bowie, Eno, Prince and York text stuff almost always recorded in Eno, at least over the last couple of years. Stuff you should know, records in Bowie and sometimes I would record in Bowie

two occasionally. If you watched back in the day when I used to stream live on Twitch. Um, that was when we were using the Bowie studio. And that one is unique among the different studios and all the other studios. The producer sits at a table or desk that's outside the actual recording studio and so they communicate over a microphone to the people inside the studio. You know, Bowie

rather is the only one that's different that one. Uh The producer actually sits inside the recording studio along with the talent. So when Josh and Chuck were recording in the office, Jerry was also in that same room with them, so all three of them would be right there. And that is the the one difference to all the other studios. They have the producer isolated from the people inside the booth. And uh, I just thought that was interesting. I don't know,

you know how that came about, but that's how it works. Uh. In the case of Eno, there is a big window on the side of the studio where the producer's desk is, so I can look out the window and star, although usually there's a giant display that's you know, eclipsing most of her. And that's generally how it worked in the office.

We would sit down inside those studios and record. The whisper rooms have a little bit more space in them than either Eno or Bowie do, and so podcasts that have more hosts in them tend to record in one of those. Like when I would go into record with Ridiculous History, Uh, it was usually in the Buyork studio for example. But that's that's how things worked pre coronavirus,

and then everything would change. Oh, I should also add that was also when we started to see a more regular use of ads, when we were able to actually monetize podcasts. In fact, that's the only reason stuff Media

was able to exist in the first place. We had reached a point where the podcasts could be monetized and make money that was on a level that was, you know, comparable to what the website How Stuff Works was making, and that's what made it possible to spend Stuff Media off into its separate company, And part of the reason we were able to do that is because we have a sales team and an ads team, and they worked together to be able to get potential ad reads for

the various shows. And typically hosts have the opportunity to review the ads that will run on their shows, not always, but usually, and we have a chance to say yea or name. So if we find something truly objectionable, like let's say that for some reason Sarainos wanted to run an ad on my show, if it were still around, I could say, yeah, no, not really, not really a big fan of that one, and it would just go away.

But if it were something that I don't have an objection to, then you know, I might do the ad read myself. It's frequently how we do it, and then we do a recording session, usually of just ads. We don't typically record ads live in a audio recording of an episode. We can do that, and it has happened in the past, but more frequently these days we do separate recording sessions so that we can really hone in on getting the ad just right, and then we can

insert it into episodes later down the line. Uh. I know that a lot of people don't really care for ads, they find it irritating. But seriously, without advertisements, we don't have a way of making revenue, and without revenue, there's no reason for us to do the shows because we can't. We can't recapture the cost it it takes to make the shows. So the ads are what make the shows possible. And our goal is to always choose companies that we like and ads that we don't object to, and then

incorporate those in our shows. Some weeks it's more challenging than others, but that's always our goal. So we don't do it just to throw ads at you. We don't do it because we're swimming in slag. Most of us aren't. UM. Once in a blue moon, I might get something where I get to try it out first, so that way I can actually talk about it with sincerity. What I'm doing an ad, But it's not like I'm surrounded by products from all the major companies all around me all

the time. If that were the case, UM, I probably have a lot more guitars, but I don't. So that's how things worked pre coronavirus. When we come back, I'll talk a little bit about how things have changed since we started working mostly from home. But first let's take a quick break for one of those ads. I was just talking about March Friday. That appears to be the last day that most of us were in the office. Some of us kept going back a little bit after that,

but not much more after that. Georgia is where we are located. And for those who have followed, you know that Georgia has had a real rough time of it, and part of that is because leadership in Georgia really dragged its feet about issuing stay at home orders. Not in Atlanta, we actually got those fairly early on, but the state of Georgia, certainly that was not ever really a big push. So most of us weren't coming in

after Friday the thirteenth. I can say that definitively because I have had to go back to the studio a couple of times since then. I'll get to that. And when I was there, I saw on my co worker's desk a desk calendar and the last date that was showing was March thirteen. Grim reminder of how things used to be. Well. We had to pivot very very quickly. We were all recording podcasts. It was hard to do

without having access to the studios. We weren't sure how we were going to manage doing this when we're all remote. But fortunately we have a very dedicated team of people who were working very hard to make sure we had the assets we needed that included microphones. So most of us, I think, ended up with an audio technical a T two thousand five USB mike. This style of microphone is a dynamic microphone. That means it's directional. It's not a

condenser mike. You can find condenser mics things like the Snowball and the Yeti, both from Blue Microphones. Those are condenser style microphones. This one's directional, which means that if you start to wander off to either side of the microphone, your volume is going to drop. Because the microphone is really designed to pick up sound in a cone that extends out from the end of the microphone, you're supposed to maintain, you know, a fairly close distance to the mic.

We also have pop filters. These are a little round filters that have a a gauze like material. It's it's like almost like panty hose. In fact, there are people who have made pop filters using Penny Ho's and the chief purpose of that is to stop puffs of air when you start hitting things like pas. Like if you've listened to some of the episodes that came out shortly after Lockdown, you'll hear a lot more popping peas, or

they'll be a lot more prominent. I'm using the word words that have p's in them way too much right now, But there are a lot more prominent in those early episodes because it was before I had put my pop filter in place. Now I've got it there and you can still hear it, but it's not nearly as a big of a punch in the in the ear drum as it used to be. The a T two thousand five USB mike. This is not an AD They didn't

get AD space or anything for it. But it's a microphone I particularly really like because it does have an XLR output, so you can hook it up to an XLR cable if you wanted to put it to a physical mixer and then connect that to a computer. But also has the USB port so you can connect it via USB to a computer directly. And it's actually a pretty decent quality microphone. It's not at the same level as the professional microphones we have back in the studio.

And I'm sure if you were to listen to episodes back to back from one that was taken in the studio to one that's done at home, you'd be able to start to hear that. But it's it's decent, it's really good. It's it's amazing to me how these style microphones have improved over the last five years or so. And uh, we tend to record into various recording software. I use Audacity. Audacity is a free piece of software and you can use it to record multiple tracks to

a single recording. Um, it's really handy. It's a little bit it's a little bit tough to to learn how to use all the different features. It's got a bit of a learning curve to it. But it has a lot of stuff in it that is really helpful for podcast recording. For example, there's a noise removal tool where what you'll do is you'll capture room tone room and we would do this in the studio too, because it's

it's a very standard approach. But room tone is just letting the microphone pick up the sound that is native to whatever the recording environment is there might be a hum from air conditioning or the noise from the fan from a computer or something like that, and you just let the mic record for you know, ten seconds or so, and then you use that as a sample, and the software what it does is essentially looks for frequencies that match that sample and remove it from the finished recording.

So that way you can eliminate or at least reduce the audio of whatever the room sounds like. So Audacity has that capability to um. It has the ability to do lots of stuff like I can do reverb things like that, not that I ever would for an episode of tech stuff seems like that be a bit much, but you can do that. So if you want to record stuff, I do recommend checking out Audacity. Like I said, it's free to use. There are also a lot of different plugins you can get that can add more features

to Audacity. I used to do that a lot before I was recording podcasts with with how Stuff Works, So that was that's that's kind of the approach I take. I set up my microphone, I start Audacity recording, I let it record for about ten seconds, and then I record my episode. Stop the recording. I then go through, remove any long pauses, and maybe do some minor edits.

I then save the project. I convert it to a wave form and I save that to drop Box because these files tend to be pretty large, and I share from Dropbox over to Tari. So Tari can then download a wave file and then she can import that into Audacity and make edits and do things like attach things like the theme music. Have it, but go into the right um, the right the right format so that everything

is proper. You know, we've got the opening and closing theme, We've got the ad breaks, all that kind of stuff, and then she can then publish it and then you guys get it. So now, uh, that's how I record because I do a single host show, so mind's easy. There are people who obviously have more than one host in their show, and for them the process is slightly different. Uh, they will record in one of several ways. They actually

there's there's not one single way to do this. So I'm going to talk about a couple of different approaches and the pros and cons to each of them. Some people will use a service like zen Caster or squad cast, and these services are somewhat similar, and it's really fascinating

how they work. So everyone logs into an online session using whatever tool they're using, and they can hear each other, and depending upon the service, they might be able to see each other too through webcams, and as they uh they can start recording through this session. But as they start that recording, the recording is not going over the internet directly to the cloud. Instead, each person is recording to his or her direct device, their computer. So it

looks like you're just having an online video call. You're all chatting and having your conversations as you record, and it's almost like you're in a studio. It's just that

you're doing this over video chat. But what's actually happening is that each audio track is recording to the individual computers and then at the end, the computers upload that recording to the cloud, where the service will then put it all together so that it's all synchronized and you have a nice master recording of separate tracks for each person.

That is phenomenal to me. That's like magic to me, because it means that the quality of the recording you get is the best that it possibly can be, because it's the going natively to the computer. It's not like an internet phone call. If you've had a lot of Internet meetings, you know that even just a little bit of Internet you know, hiccups will cause delays. You might have someone's vocals drop out. There are a lot of problems.

But because this is initially recording to your local device and then gets uploaded, you get a much better quality recording that way, and then it gets uh put together in the cloud and the producers can take that and do the edits that they need to. They can download a sound file and go through the editing process before publishing it. That's one way that people are recording their

shows if they have multiple hosts. Another way is that they will use some form of internet communication tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams or uh Skype or whatever in order to have the call. They might even record that that call so that they have sort of a scratch track,

that's what we call a reference track. But they will record their individual audio locally, so they might start up an Audacity file, for example, or a voice memo file or something along those lines, and they will record themselves locally to their machine, and then once it's all done, they will share their recording to the producer of the show, who then has to take all these recordings, synchronize them,

and put them all together. This is potentially very complicated if people are recording at say different bit rates, you can have real issues with synchronization, like you can have it where audio will drift a bit and eventually you can get to a point where someone is answering a question before the person who's asking it has even finished asking the question because the recordings haven't quite lined up properly, and it requires a lot of fine tuning adjustment to

get it fixed. It's a lot of it's a huge headache. If everyone's recording on the same bit rate and everything, you you bypass that, but it doesn't always happen. Sometimes people just don't notice their settings, so it still remains. One of the big challenges is which way do you go.

Do you use the zen caster type approach where everybody is in the same virtual space and then eventually their audio gets uploaded to zen Caster and the producer can pull it down, or do you record each track individually send that to the producer who then has to assemble the podcast out of that way. Tari is lucky for tech stuff. She's unlucky in a lot of ways, but

this way she's very lucky because it's just me. So she just has to get the one audio file from me and then she can edit that and send it on. So that's easy on that level. Uh. It's one of those things where I didn't really appreciate it till I had to deal with it. I've done a few episodes where I've done some interviews, and that's where you start coming into potential problems, whether it's an issue with the software running on another person's machine, or their internet connection

or your internet connection. I mean, there are a lot of things that can cause issues. Now. I mentioned that I have gone into the office a couple of times since we shut down in the middle of Mark and Uh, in those cases it was because I was recording episodes of Smart Talks, the IBM series that I um I am one of the hosts for, and Smart Talks is a really important show. I talked to really important people.

And my internet at home occasionally decides it wants to go on vacation at a moment's notice and it'll drop. So rather than risk having that happen while I talk with these important people. I will make the trek into the city to go to Pont City Market, to go to one of our studios and to record there where I can be reasonably sure that my internet connection is as solid as it gets. It's fast, and it's not

likely to drop. And and because there's nobody else there most of the time, uh, there's no congestion on the network. It's just me. Sometimes it's me and maybe one or two other people. I can report that everyone is following very strict processes and rules in order to do this properly. We wear masks, We have antibacterial uh wipes everywhere which we use to wipe down equipment. We have you know, hand sanitizing stations throughout the office so that we can

frequently do that as well. So we take that very seriously. We have a full list of steps that we follow when we go into the studio, which includes wiping down the equipment both before and after we use it so that, um, you know, when you're talking into a microphone, you want to make sure that you've sanitized that microphone so that the next person who uses it doesn't end up getting sick. If you happen to be carrying COVID nineteen and you don't know it. You don't want to infect anybody else.

So we do have those rules still in place. Everyone follows them and it's been challenging. We've got some super cool podcas asks that are coming out of our studio that require us to use the studio space that I'm really excited to listen to. I can't even talk about them now, but let me tell you they are. The people who are working on them are some of the

hardest working and most creative people I know. I am not on this project, by the way, I don't merit that consideration, but the stuff I'm hearing about it is really exciting and I can't wait to share it once it's ready to go. But it's one of those things where they have to go into the studio and so we have to take all those precautions. So when you listen to our podcasts, whether it's tech stuff or stuff, you should know stuff they don't want you to know,

ridiculous history. Keep in mind these shows are being done by people in various parts of the world at this point and on various pieces of equipment, and that we all all had to adapt to that super fast with not really a whole lot of prep time, And to me, it is phenomenal that we were able to keep doing that with a bare minimum of fuss uh, at least

fuss that was noticeable to the listeners. I'm sure there was a noticeable change in the quality of recordings, and in some cases there might be outstanding uh incidents where it's even more noticeable. But overall, I think we've done a pretty darn good job, and most importantly, we keep

delivering the stories that excite us to you guys. So next time you hear a podcast that you really like and you think, gosh, those folks aren't they are not sitting across a table from each other the way they used to, you know, take a moment to appreciate that and the hard work that they do, not me. I

stay here by myself. It's really not any different. If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for Torii, because since she can no longer listen to me record live, she can't make those markers anymore in the audio file. So that means she has to listen to every single episode all the way through and catch all the times I make mistakes, and then do it that way she can't just you know, put in a marker so that she can come back later and fix it quickly. She's

the one who really deserves the props. Me, I'm doing what I always did, It's just I'm doing it into a different microphone. Now. Well, that's a peak behind the curtain of how things are going in the the COVID nineteen world in podcasting. How we were able to to pivot to that and adapt to that with I think the a pretty small disruption to how we do things

in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure that like most of my other co hosts, I'm sure everybody's really looking forward to a time and we can go back to the studio and see each other in person and actually sit across from the table and and have a discussion and not be separated by miles and miles between us. I'm sure everybody, like me, we're all looking forward to that, and I do think it will have an impact on

just the quality of the conversations we have. But my hat is off to all of my peers out there, both within the I Heart radio community and outside it, everyone who's working so hard to try and keep things going in incredibly extraordinarily difficult times, and then, of course also goes outside the realm of podcasting. I know lots of you out there have been impacted in various ways and have been working very hard in your own right to keep things moving, and my hat is off to

you as well. I think we're all in this together, even if we all have to be a part. Wow, that's that's deep. Okay, let's wrap this up. I have to go out and get ready for a vacation where I'm going to be in a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the Georgia Mountains, and I will be contemplating I don't know my toes. Maybe we'll see. Maybe I'll learn to play guitar a little bit more while

I'm out there. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a specific technology, maybe it's a company, Maybe it's a trend in tech. Maybe it's a personality and technology, anything like that, anything tech related or how tech impacts our lives, reach out to me. The best way to do it is on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech 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.