Episode 3 - View from the 85th Floor

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Broadcasting this week from the Burj Dubai Hotel - the world's tallest free standing building. It wasn't cheap booking a room this high but definitely worth it. Here is a peak out Jesse's room window I took before we headed out for a night on the town.


Before we did the set up for the podcast our producer Tim Boyke (Boyky) and I took a walk around the city and of course he had to be 'that guy' that does the funny perspective shots. I wasn't too keen on wasting valuable blog space for the sake of his sense of humour, but I made a promised this would go up.
This week we talk about global warming and Jesse's recent offer to become the Commonwealth ombudsman, succeeding John McMillan. Of course, should he take such a role, he will have to relinquish his panelist position in TWiU - an important decision and I for one am happy to not be in his shoes.

As per popular request, here is the first of many in our new Bloopers! & Extras series... At this stage it's only a streaming audio. If you would like to have the entire Bloopers! & Extras series, it will be availible this June on the TWiU DVD and DVD collector's edition box set as an easter egg. Keep your eye on the blog for clues on accessing more clips.

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Episode 2 - Unemployment and Globalisation

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Hello listeners! Lots of traveling around this episode - we talk about Jesse's recent fact-finding mission to Crown Casino in Melbourne (gambling, apparently not a good alternative to work) and we're broadcasting directly from Simi Valley, California - home of the Reagan Library. Here's a quick snap of the hotel we've been put up in I got from the outside with my cell (sorry about the quality)

Other topics of discussion include unemployment in Zimbabwe (and the third world in general), my acceptance and upcoming attendance to the annual CIS liberty and society conference (will have live blogging at the event on April 11-13th) and we respond to some viewer emails (including one from surprise celebrity listener Camilla Belle).

We also talk about the human capital project - issuing students loans not backed against existing securitisations, but future income capacities (equity, not debt based). An interesting concept, but still with many holes to iron out, I believe.

Simi Valley, by the way, is awesome and I highly recommend any listeners coming out this way to drop by the area. Sadly, however, our time is limited and we are literally catching a plane back to Canberra an hour after recording the podcast. I'm a little peeved for not being able to go out much but such is the nature of these shows that you can't have everything at one time.

A bit of trivia for this week's episode - we did actually see Camilla Belle on our way to the airport - apparently she's still doing a bit of the promo circuit around Europe for 10,000 BC, and just on her way to the UK. Anyway, she didn't recognise us immediately from the show until she matched up our voices (she had episode 1 on her Ipod). Well she said she was keen for an interview later down the track but to be honest I think it was just a polite way of giving us the thumbs down. We'll see.

Episode 1 - How to be Happy

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Our debut podcast, featuring regular panelists Winston and Jesse. RY and my housemate happened to be in the studio at the time and decided to add a few words too.

Topics discussed include the new CGI blockbuster 10 000 BC, the US election, the works of Aldous Huxley and sham marriages for fun and profit.

Jesse thought the girl from 10,000BC was played by Lindsay Lohan (she wasn't). Listeners, let us know what you think.

In other news, Jesse may be getting a public service job and thus might not be appearing in next week's podcast. In any case, I'll keep you up to date with his employment progress. RY and my housemate Chris were sitting on the couch on the other side of mic which explains why they might not be too audible at times. They were also making occasional inappropriate hand gestures and decided to have a game of pool in the middle of the podcast which was just rude.

On listening to the podcast again, I realise we needed more direction on set issues instead of just saying whatever comes to mind, so I've decided to just have at least a couple of things to talk about beforehand. We'd like to open this up to our listeners on this - let us know what you want to hear.

Toward the end of the podcast you will hear Jesse whisper 'sponsers' to me. Now, I didn't forget, I was just making sure we had wrapped up the show before plugging our supporters, but in any case I'd like to apologise formally right now to Vanguard, AOL.com and Audible.com.

Oh and finally we mentioned a nifty little website that let's you compare your face to which celebrity you most resemble. I look like Jackie Chan and Jesse looks like Ehud Olmert. As promised, here is the site : www.myheritage.com. Perhaps Camilla might want to give this a spin.

Pre-Production and a look at our set-up

Here is a quick look at our studio. We are using two apple powerbooks -  a 12" aluminum model running Audacity to record our podcast and a 15" titanium for on the spot research and when we need to bring up cnn.com really quick. 

We chose Audacity for the show because it's free, open source and advanced enough for what we need. If we went out and bought a $300 professional sound editing program I don't think we'd be able to figuire what half the controls do anyway.

On the advice of Kevin Rose from Diggnation, we went out and bought a Logitech desktop USB microphone on eBay for $49.95. I wanted to just use the internal mic in my laptop but there was some disagreement as to the sound quality being inputed.