A visit to podcast Mecca -- the TWiT Brickhouse studio

Zen and the art of podcasting

I visited Podcast Mecca last week -- Leo Laporte's TWiT Brickhouse broadcast studio in Petaluma, California.

I got there just as Leo was starting Windows Weekly, Episode 373. There are several sets in the studio, and Windows Weekly is broadcast from one in Leo's office.

The start of the program

Here are some random impressions of my visit.

Seven of us were crammed into the office, facing Leo, as he did the show. There were two couples and three fan boys. (My wife was wandering around Petaluma -- not interested in coming in). The audience demographic surprised me -- several of us had gray beards. That was just the people in the room -- Leo's dog Ozzie was also a member of the office audience.

My first impression in seeing the small set/office was of clutter -- all sorts of geek brick-a-brack, old tech books, and tons of monitors, mobile devices, keyboards, cameras and lights. A box with a Harry's shaving kit was also on Leo's desk -- ready to be shown in a commercial.

Leo's cluttered office/set seen through the window

Leo is super friendly and informal -- "flirting" with the small audience in his office. One of the guys had a full beard, which his wife didn't like. Leo teased them and, after the show ended, he gave her the shaving kit. (I overheard one of the staff complaining that he had given away their only kit).

It seems like Leo is just shooting the breeze with his co-host (Paul Thurrott in this case), but he is watching monitors showing the co-host, chat room, on-the air stream, topic rundown, queued stills and videos, his large-screen Mac, etc. He juggles all this effortlessly with his right hand on the console shown below.

Leo controls the show using the console on the right.

Leo multi-tasks during the program. The console on his right has a button that toggles the studio on/off the air and he is constantly going off the air to do things like unpack a new phone that arrived during the show, fiddle with a tablet, order lunch, eat bites of lunch, yawn, drum his fingers on the desktop, etc.

At first, you wonder if he is bored or not paying attention while off the air, then he toggles on and offers an astute comment or asks a good question -- he is attentive to the on-air conversation at all times.

Leo fidgets a lot, but is not nervous -- he seems totally relaxed while he rolls around or bounces on the large rubber ball he sits on. That relaxation shows through in the show.

Leo is meticulous -- after unpacking his new phone or the Harry's shaving kit, he carefully repackaged them during off-air moments. He (and therefore TWiT) does things properly, without loose ends.

As soon as he finished Windows Weekly and posing for souvenir photos, Leo switched his attention to the upcoming episode of This Week in Google -- he had switched context as completely and quickly as when he went off-air for a bite of lunch. He seems laid back, but is focused and mindful.

The guy is a total broadcasting pro.

The TWiT studio is also highly professional. It is filled with workstations for monitoring and controlling broadcasts and editing video.

There are several sets and control stations in the studio.

There are other sets -- for groups of in-studio participants and other shows. A few minutes after the end of Windows Weekly, Leo had moved to another set where he was preparing do This Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani. As shown here, the audience sees Jeff and Gina in monitors behind Leo and he sees them on monitors behind the audience.

Leo on a different set, ready for This Week in Google

Leo's professionalism was underlined at the end of Windows Weekly. If you are a TWiT fan, you are used to the format in which programs begin with a brief summary of the upcoming episode, its title and a short promo for each of the sponsors. As soon as the show went off the air, Leo asked the chat room to suggest a show title -- and then extemporaneously recorded what would become the intro to the show when it was posted online. No effort, totally natural and done in a minute.

If you are interested in seeing a state of the art podcasting facility and having some fun, I heartily recommend a visit to the TWiT Brickhouse. The technology and buzz are reminiscent of the pre-slick, early days of live television, when you felt the sense of good humored, spontaneous experimentation and often saw the technology -- the cameras, cameramen, lights, etc. on screen.

It felt like the early days of live television.

Just in case you think I am making this up -- check out this picture with Leo after the show -- wearing the obligatory TWiT fezes.

After the broadcast

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Update 8/10/2014

I've noted Leo's ability to multitask and remain present in the on-air conversation. I just listened to TWiT 468, the episode recorded the week after my visit to the studio, and Leo confirmed my observation by discussing his attention deficit disorder (ADD). He told his on-air guests (who also claimed to have ADD) that when he is on air "I've got people in my ear, i've got things going on -- I just took a walk around the block while you were talking ..." (About 1 hour 10 minutes into the recording).

He and the guests seemed to agree that having ADD was helpful in their work in tech journalism, and Leo wondered about causality, asking

Are ADD people naturally attracted to tech or, and I think there might be some evidence for it, is all of this stimulus making us all a little bit ADD?

There is some evidence that the latter is true -- -- I know it is for me -- but I am not sure about the former.

This focus on ADD and multitasking reminded me of a biography I'd read of the writer D. H. Lawrence, who was said to be able to write and carry on conversations at the same time. (Conversing and drawing at the same time is pretty easy -- try it). Was Lawrence a super ADD multitasker? Is Leo? Is the Internet giving us all a bit of ADD?

Podcast Afterthoughts -- brain inertia

If you are thinking about something or working on a problem and take a break, your brain keeps at it subconsicously. We all come up with ideas and solutions to problems while showering, sleeping, running, etc. Your brain has inertia.

Similarly, ideas pop into our heads after a good conversation. I have been having weekly conversations about tech topics with my colleagues on the podcast, Yet Another Tech Show (YATS), and, as with any good conversation, I think about it afterwards.

Podcast comments allow us to continue the conversation after it has been recorded, but they are mostly driven by users and are often superficial. Maybe the podcast show-note format should include links to afterthoughts by the participants.

To play with the idea, I jotted down some afterthoughts from our last podcast (YATS 15).

YATS 15 afterthoughts

During YATS 15, we spent a lot of time talking about the features of different phones and tablets, but I think that is only of interest in the short term. In the long term, phones and tablets will be commodities like PCs. I don't care whether I have a Dell or HP laptop because the software I use runs equally well on comparable configurations of either.

Today we fuss over phone and tablet features, but we are headed for a future in which much of our software and data is in the cloud, leading us to worry less about the features of our phones and tablets and more about the offerings of our cloud service vendors and about vendor lock-in.

We only touched briefly on services and lock-in during YATS 15, after noting that Microsoft had announced free Office 365 accounts for educational institutions. Schools now have two free cloud service choices -- Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. Students will learn to use one or the other and be somewhat locked in after graduation -- like a free sample of a drug.

The first level of lock-in will be familiarity with the programs and user interface. The differences between Google Apps and Office 365 will diminish over time, but user familiarity will remain important. (Although the user interface gap between Mac OS and Windows has diminished since 1984, many users are reluctant to switch).

Program features and file formats also lock users in. Let's consider word processing for example.

I did my first word processing with unit record equipment. You punched your document into 80-column cards and ran the deck through an accounting machine that was wired to print them. If you made an error, you removed the bad card, re-keyed it, and ran it back through the accounting machine.

When PCs came out, I got a copy of Electric Pencil, the first word processing program for the Altair. Next it was Magic Wand then WordStar. WordStar was fast and did everything I needed. I was satisfied with WordStar, but reluctantly switched to Microsoft Word when a client told me I had to deliver a report as a Word document. I still use Word because nearly everyone else does.

But, like WordStar and Word, the Google Docs and Office 365 word processors create incompatible files and both are incompatible with Word -- Déjà vu all over again. (I still have the manuscripts of two books and a ton of reports and articles stored in the venerable WordStar format).

There are two general ways out of this kind of lock-in -- file conversion and standards. I wish I had a program to convert my old WordStar files to Word files (or that Word could import/save WordStar files), but I don't. Word for Office 365 and Google Docs word processor could be built to import/save each other's files, but different and evolving feature sets would make that tough to maintain and the companies probably would not see it as good for their business.

Standards may be de-facto, created by a dominant player, or open. In this example, we have three important file formats -- desktop Word, Google Docs word processor and Word for Office 365. Desktop Word is a de-facto standard today, but its dominance will decline over time as we create more and more cloud documents. Open standards are good for interoperability and fostering competition, but they may retard progress if adopted too early and companies (like Apple) might ignore them for business reasons.

Well, enough about word processing. I don't know how akk this will all shake out, but I do think that cloud features and interoperability will be more important than device features in the long run. (Don't forget, I am only using word processing as an example -- the same goes for other applications).

One last point -- during our YATS 15 conversation, it was suggested that today's phones with multicore processors and maybe 2 GB of RAM and 64 GB storage might be powerful enough for anything we want to do with them, but I don't buy that. It reminds me of a consulting job I did for WordStar. They were about to introduce a new version (WordStar 2000) and I could not convince them to build it for 64 MB of memory -- they were sure that 32 MB machines would be around forever. While I believe that device differentiation will become less important in the future, the power of our phones and tablets will continue to grow as we invent new applications.