IT Social Hour: Makers of Big Iron Bits Preview Season 2
The makers of "Big Iron Bits" share their excitement for Season 2, with a special from from the Techutex Technologies team
Andy Wig:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of IT Social Hour. I’m Andy Wig. I’m the senior editor of Tech Channel. And today we are talking about season two of Big Iron Bits. And to do that, we’ve got on the program today, the two members of the Broadcom marketing team that brought this mainframe mockumentary series to life. It’s Keeley Estrada Mohler and John Kaplan. How y’all doing? Hey Andy.
John Kaplan:
Good. How are
Keelia Estrada Moeller:
You doing
Andy:
Today? Thanks for having us. Yeah. Yeah. I’m doing good. I’m excited to get a preview of the highly anticipated season two of Big Iron Bits and welcome back to IT Social Hour. We have a couple of return guests here. Very exciting.
John:
Yeah. Thank you. We appreciate the honor of a return appearance.
Keelia:
We’ve been immersed in the Big Iron Bits world for the whole week here. We’ve been actually filming, so your timing is perfect. We’re right living in the moment.
Andy:
Nice. Where are you at exactly?
John:
Right now we’re in Melville, New York, which is about 30 or 45 minutes outside of New York City.
Andy:
Okay. You’re on set? We are. Putting it all together. We’re
Keelia:
On set. We just took a break here at the middle of filming today.
Andy:
Okay.
Chaz:
Just wanted to pop in and say hello. How you doing, Andy?
Andy:
Chaz. How’s it going?
Chaz:
How are you?
Andy:
Doing good.
Chaz:
Hey.
Andy:
You’re looking good, Chaz.
Chaz:
Chaz, I just want you to know that I was so inspired by you on our last IT social hour that I wanted to bring this to the team. I want you to meet the team.
Andy:
Oh my goodness.
Chaz:
Yeah. This is Joan. We are co-guides.
Joan:
Boss.
Andy:
The boss.
Joan:
Hi. Chaz said that you two had emailed about us being guests on the podcast. Well,
Chaz:
You’re probably busy, you didn’t get it, but definitely we emailed
Andy:
Back and forth. I missed
Chaz:
It. Yeah,
Andy:
That’s okay. You’re welcome. You’re more than welcome.
Chaz:
Listen, I was so inspired, like I said, and I had some ideas. I would like to pitch something to you for another podcast perhaps. Yes. Maybe it’s like five individuals. They work in an office and they are just really enamored by the mainframe. But then things start to go a little awry and we’re going to call it till quantum come.
Andy:
Oh, yes. So Barbara-esque.
Chaz:
What do you
Andy:
Think? I think that’s a good hook.
Joan:
We can workshop it. Let’s. Yes. Yeah.
Chaz:
Okay.
Andy:
I love the creativity and the willingness to put yourself out there like that.
Chaz:
Thank you. What have you
Andy:
Been up to? Why don’t you give me an
Chaz:
Idea of another podcast you might want to start and we can help you.
Andy:
You want to know? If I was ever going to rename this podcast, I would call it The People You Meet in IT. That’s the podcast I would start if I was going to start a new one.
Chaz:
It’s a long title. Maybe we can shorten it, but I like the idea. I think we all like the idea. The people you meet in IT. PYM. PYM. P-Y-M-I-T.
Joan:
P-Y-M-I-T. P-Y-M-I-T. Yeah. IIT. Okay. I could just join you since I’m actually the leader of the group. So I think that might be better because we’re trying to work on productivity, especially with Chaz to just get work done. And we’ve been getting a lot of work done since Joan has joined. It’s been so much fun having another woman around the office. Joan. Chaz, you’re different.
Andy:
Joan’s keeping everybody in line and
Chaz:
Trying,
Andy:
Yes.
Chaz:
And you can see –
Andy:
I love a
Joan:
Challenge.
Chaz:
Why it’s a great team. Clearly I’m leading them in the right
Keelia:
Direction. Has anyone seen Chaz?
Chaz:
That’s me. Andy, I got to go. I’m so sorry. You’re in good hands with these two though. Okay?
Andy:
All
Chaz:
Right.
Andy:
Good
Chaz:
Seeing you, Chaz. Great meeting you again. You keep smiling, handsome devil.
Joan:
Thank you, Andy. It was nice to meet you. We’re going to get back to work trying to fill them in. All
Andy:
Right. Thank you. Great talking with you all. All right. You
Joan:
Too. You too. I w see you later.
Andy:
Good
Joan:
Luck with
Andy:
Everything.
Joan:
Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Joan.
Andy:
Bye.
John:
Look at
Andy:
That.
John:
Great for you to get to catch up with the team.
Andy:
Yeah.
Keelia:
There’s a little
Andy:
Surprise.
Keelia:
Changes over here. A
Andy:
Lot going on. A lot going on over at TechUtex/… Well, I think there’s another company. Where’s Joan from again? She’s from another company too. Anyway, we don’t have to – You’ll find
Keelia:
Out, but she’s a Silicon Valley darling, if you didn’t catch that
Andy:
Already. Yeah. I might have seen something about a Silicon Valley hotshot coming in. And that’s part of what we’re excited about with season two, I guess.
John:
Yeah. Season two is going to be fun. In season one, we had that really nice development of Chaz from not understanding the mainframe to really falling in love and embracing it. And through the course of the season, using this show to break down some misconceptions and stereotypes of the mainframe. And in season two, we’re really…
Keelia:
Yeah. They were joking about being co-guides. Joan is coming in as Chaz’s boss, but really Joan is coming in to push mainframe modernization and new initiatives to keep up with the latest technologies, which is something that mainframe orgs are really genuinely faced with today, especially with so many things changing so quickly. We have the second updates. We have Frontier AI, we have automation, quantum, Y2Q. And so with season two, you do start to get a little bit more granular and you see more glimpses into the technical side of the mainframe world. Whereas season one, we were a little bit more surface level and it’s not going to ever be too much, but we did want to take a little bit deeper of a dive to actually bring light to the things that our customers and our ecosystem are faced with every day today.
Andy:
And so with season one, you wanted to basically build awareness of the mainframe just in general. Did you feel like you accomplished that? I mean, I think the numbers were looking good as far as viewership, right?
John:
Yeah. And more than awareness, I think what we accomplished, which we’re very proud of is that rally in the ecosystem. We had a lot of positive feedback from customers, from people at events that they just felt really energized by seeing a show like this put out that speaks to their lives, even if it’s in a exaggerated way. I think the number of people that have shared it, including Keely and myself with others to let people that aren’t part of this world, our family members or friends say, “This is the world we live in. These are the kinds of people we work with in a humorous way.” So that was pretty fun.
Keelia:
That’s exactly it. I have loved seeing the reactions of mainframers in the ecosystem because they’ll watch it and they’ll say, “This is so right on. I know a Larry, I know an Alice, I know a Chaz, I know a Ravi.” But I think for me, the really fun part has been exactly what John said. I can share this with my family and my friends and show them a little bit about the world I work in every day. They had a watch party, right? They had a watch party. My family had a watch party and they were just going and binge watching the new episodes. Every time one went live, I would have to send a link to the group chat. I think it’s made mainframe accessible. And so people don’t even know that they’re learning about the mainframe, but they are.
Andy:
And so these people, you’re kind of bringing them along. So these people who are maybe just learning about mainframe basics last season, they got diving a little bit deeper and quantum frontier models. Anything else you’re digging into?
John:
We touch on modernization. We hit on –
Keelia:
Automation. You’ll still see elements of the knowledge transfer because that is something that we are still needing to stay on top of. But there’s just a lot more technical, more granular topics you’ll see throughout season two with that light touch of humor because we don’t want to turn people away, but we do want to be technically accurate always.
Andy:
So I want to get a little bit into what it’s like to put this thing together. You’re on set right now, second season. So I imagine you all kind of know each other a little bit. What’s it like coming back for season two and being in the middle of it all on set with everyone and all
John:
Together?
It’s been a lot of fun and you’re right, being in season two, we had a lot of things worked out in season one. How does the camera move? What are the characters and their styles and how they interact with each other? So those things kind of got sorted in season one. Season two has been folks that you get close when you’re on set with each other for a week at a time, multiple times a year. You get close and there’s some bonding that happens through that because people are putting themselves out there when you’re in front of camera or even the crew, they’re putting themselves out there with their technical skills. And when you do that, it’s vulnerable. You have to be comfortable with the people you’re with and being willing to accept adjustments and feedback in a constructive way. So it’s been nice.
Keelia:
I think when you spend so much time with one another too, you also learn about personality types and you learn about what are your strengths and what are areas you might be able to support others or bring your expertise to the table. So we’ve all spent so much time with one another that we know when something happens, okay, go get John, go get Josh, go get Michael. We know who to go to for different processes. We have it down to almost a science at this point, and we also trust each other too. That’s a huge part of working on a project like this, is trusting each other to get the work done in the way that it needs to get done. The last thing I’ll add to this is we have been having Broadcom SMEs and SMEs across the ecosystem on the show, and some of the cooler conversations I’ve been privy to are the folks who have been featured in an episode actually talking to one another about the process and what it was like for them to be on set and relating to each other.
And so just being able to have that conversation before a new person steps onto the set almost puts them at ease because you’re being vulnerable. Well,
John:
It’s
Keelia:
Not
John:
Their day
Keelia:
To day. Their wheelhouse. It’s
John:
Not something they maybe have ever done before.
Keelia:
Right. Even though they’re playing themselves, they’re still on camera and that’s a new thing for a lot of folks.
John:
A big difference too in season two is we do a lot of work with our writer, Josh. We give him the topics we want to cover and then he adds the narrative hooks, but then he needs to talk to our subject matter experts and get some background to get the technical aspects in it. In season one, when no one had ever seen what this is, they were giving feedback, but they didn’t exactly know how to provide it. How to envision it. But now that they’ve seen 12 complete episodes, they know what we’re asking of them and why it’s exciting and what’s going in. It’s not really a huge lift for them. Now that it’s been successful for one year, we’ve had a much easier time, I’ll say, getting people’s attention to kick in and help us out with it.
Keelia:
Yeah. Josh has been great because we bring creativity to the table and we go through the review processes internally and get the right stakeholders and SMEs involved, but Josh is really the brains behind the humor and what makes this so successful, we actually have him – Let’s slide him in. Let’s slide him in because he has some great insights on what it’s been like to put this together.
Andy:
Hey Josh.
Josh:
Hey, how are you?
Andy:
Good, good. How’s it going?
Josh:
Nice to meet you. Good. Yeah.
Andy:
We’re just trying
John:
To surprise you from all angles here
Andy:
Today. Yeah, this is amazing. Yeah. You guys are really making me think on my feet here. Josh, did you know anything about the mainframe when this project started?
Josh:
Yeah, so I had a little bit of experience just working. My background is in agency work and doing content and ads and stuff like that. And so I had actually worked with John previously at an agency where we had… IBM was one of our big clients and so had done a little bit of mainframe work. The stuff that we do now is definitely, there’s a lot more nuance and depth to the stuff that we’re covering now. Before it was more like we’re helping to launch a new product or something like that, and we learn enough so that we can get into it. But there’s a lot more, like I said, a lot more detail and a lot more nuance about all the different things, whether it’s security or automation or managing digital certificates or whatever it might be. So I have definitely gotten into a little bit more depth doing this.
There’s a little more brand
John:
Awareness
Josh:
Before. Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Andy:
Is it hard to make things still funny when you know you have to cover these things in a little bit greater
John:
Detail? That’s why we hired Josh, because he’s so good at that.
Josh:
I think that’s kind of the fun challenge of all of it, to be honest, is we don’t want to end up with episodes where somebody comes into a room and just delivers a lecture. That gets old very quickly. And granted, there has sometimes been some element of that, but it’s like how can we either make that lecture be funny and the situation around it be funny, or how can we put the information that they have to deliver into another context or something like that so that you still bring in the humor that way. So it might be that, for instance, in season one, we had some of the messaging delivered via a song that Ravi had written, things like that. I think that’s kind of the fun dance of it all. It’s like how do we resist the urge to just have somebody come in and just spit out some information and find either a crazy context or a reason why they have to say that or have them reveal that information in a way that is in itself kind of funny or different?
Keelia:
Even
Josh:
Today,
Keelia:
We were sitting at a table between takes. We had some downtime and the three of us just started brainstorming what the premise of an episode would be. And it started with Josh asked us, “Are there any core messages that we want to get across?” And so we told him, and so that was kind of a baseline. These are some things we could highlight. And from there, we were just kind of bouncing ideas of what are some humorous themes that could cure the episode that aren’t going to turn the audience away from each other. And so Josh brings that creative humor to the table. He has these new fresh ideas, and then we follow that lead and think about how can we tie that to that underlying theme.
Andy:
I suppose, yeah, there’s kind of a needle you have to thread, I imagine, where you want it to be funny and to be funny, it probably has to be a little bit weird and goofy. So you want to be a little bit weird, but that’s too weird, I guess. How do you feel that out? Because I mean, it’s a mission-critical computer system. It’s very serious stuff. So how do you kind of – Sometimes
Keelia:
You have to go to the too weird to get to the right middle ground because if we don’t even think about those huge big ideas, we’re not going to go beyond our comfort zone. So there’s kind of a middle point.
John:
And there’s been a few that we get down and then we say, “Yeah, no, let’s toss this one out and try again.” But honestly, only a couple over the course of two seasons.
Josh:
Yeah. My sensibility is definitely tend toward weird a little bit. In the best
Keelia:
Way.
Josh:
Yeah. And so yeah, I think it’s a matter of figuring out, like you said, there are definitely things that are too weird and that don’t make sense, but if we can figure out a way that the weirdness feels believable, then you can… Or at least partially believable to where then it’s not so weird, it’s just kind of a bizarre situation, but it’s not so weird that it can’t live in the real world.
John:
Josh, I think we definitely live in the bizarre, not the weird. I think that’s more accurate. We live in bizarro world, mainframe bizarro world.
Josh:
Or eccentric. Eccentric. The characters are eccentric and they do eccentric things, but we all have stories of people who have done weird stuff or weird things that we’ve seen. It’s just we’re kind of – Exaggerating. We’re putting a spotlight on it and making it a little bit bigger, kind of drawing it out a little bit more.
Keelia:
And honestly, the technical subject matter experts have been really good about relating the bizarre and eccentric to the real world. So we will explain these bizarre ideas on how we’re going to introduce a topic like quantum or like digital
Andy:
Certificates
Keelia:
And say, “Picture this, read this script. Now tie your world together and tie this episode theme together. Does this make sense?” And they’ve been
John:
Really
Keelia:
Great at it. They’ve been great at it. They’re like, “Well, I would maybe say this, but this makes sense and here are some parallels and that’s
Josh:
Been great. The other thing I’d say is that looking back on season one, I think we did a pretty good job of starting slowish, not too much weird and sort of introducing the weird so that now when we get to later in season one and this season two, we’ve already established that some bizarre… There’s some eccentric people and some strange things happen in this office and they take things a little bit too far and they do a little bit too much. And maybe if people have been watching, they don’t have to suspend their disbelief quite as much because we’ve already kind of got the train rolling a little bit.
Andy:
Yeah. I guess it’s like, well, it might be weird, but would Chaz do it? He gives you a lot of leeway, I suppose, for being
Josh:
Out there. Well, that’s the whole thing with narrative is if you can believe that a character would do something, then it doesn’t matter what they’re doing. If you buy that that character finds that to be a natural course of action or they think it’s needed to do whatever they’re doing, then it’s okay.
John:
And to the credit of our actors, they’ve really embraced their characters and decided who and what they are. And there’s very often on set that someone goes, “I don’t think I’d say that as Alice,” or, “Chaz wouldn’t say it this way. Is it okay if I do it this way?” And nine times out of 10, yes. It’s very rare that we’re like, “No.” So it’s really great that they have found who those characters are. And even when Josh has written a great script, they’re just like, “My character would do this differently.”
Keelia:
They become the characters to the point where we joke about we just call them their character names while they’re on set. Don’t even need to. And not their government names. And they’ll call each other Alice and Ravi and Chad. They’ll call each other their character names because they become the characters during filming because we’re here for so long and they know the characters so well at this point.
Andy:
Yeah, I suppose, I mean, is there ad-libbing going on at all? Oh, absolutely. There is?
Keelia:
Okay. You would be astounded at how these actors can even throw in a technical ad lib line. Sometimes they’ll say something and we’ll just look at each other like, “Where did they get that?” They’ll look things up. They’ll do research to really get into the character. And they’re
John:
Usually pretty
Keelia:
Right. They’re usually on point. Occasionally
John:
We have to correct them. Or tweak
Keelia:
It. But
John:
They’re usually pretty. And those are some of the funniest moments.
Josh:
I think a lot of… Going into it, I think we expect them to do some ad-libbing, to be honest. I mean, I think those are the moments when some of the best stuff comes out because it’s genuine and it’s sort of off the cuff. So we do stick to a script and many of the lines are some variation of how they’re written. But when I’m directing the cast, they feel free whenever they have an idea to either just do it or we talk about it first and then they do it. Or they’ll say,
John:
“Hey, can I try something? I have something. Let me try
Josh:
Something.” Yeah. But there’s a definite openness in the whole production for people to feel free to contribute if they have an idea.
Andy:
Did you think that you would have a season two, Josh, when you started season one? Did you arc it out for two seasons?
Josh:
So not necessarily. I think by the end of season one, we thought we probably would do a second season, but we didn’t know for sure, obviously. But I think from early on, and they can talk about it a little bit, when we started this, it was kind of specced as a pilot. We’ll just try a few episodes. But I think pretty early on, after we started getting through some scripts, there was a lot of buy-in on the Broadcom end to say, “Oh no, we’re just going to jump in and just do it.” And so at that point, I think that once we started to get midway through season one, it felt like there was probably going to be a second one. But yeah, it all just snowballed once we got started.
John:
Yeah. Josh is accurate in what he’s saying. After we saw the first couple scripts, we did table reads internally to feel them out and gain some buy-in, and it felt really good pretty quickly. We decided let’s just go ahead and do a full 12 episodes. I think as soon as we started seeing some edits, we were –
Keelia:
We were pretty sold. We knew it would be good.
We hoped. But then you started seeing the performance and the numbers as we released each episode. From a marketing perspective, this is still a pretty unique idea, especially in this sector. You don’t see really anything like this in the IT industry. You just don’t. And so it was experimental and we had to look at how it was performing before we could think in the long term about what this would look like down the road. There absolutely was a certain point that we were 95% sure that a season two would happen and tentatively started planning in that direction, but we always had backup plans to end the season and just have it be – Season
John:
One had a nice complete arc. Yeah,
Keelia:
It did. And
John:
We left a cliffhanger that if we weren’t going to do season two –
Keelia:
We could have moved it. Moved it.
John:
But it could have been encapsulated one season, but we felt pretty good about two.
Keelia:
We felt they had the legs for another season, for sure.
Andy:
And you had to make things fresh, you got to reinvent some things or bring in new characters, which you did with Joan, who you met earlier. Maybe can you give me an idea of how that conceptualization worked out? Did you know you wanted to have this… Did you know the archetype you needed to bring in?
John:
We had a lot of discussions about it, but we certainly wanted to bring in some fresh personality and energy to what we could do with the writing. And we pretty quickly landed on that we wanted a female leader to balance out some of the masculine energy. And we landed on the idea of her coming in from a Silicon Valley kind of more startupy shop and how that would balance out with mainframers. And one thing we didn’t want to do was repeat the arc of season one of making her need to buy into the mainframe again, because that would just feel redundant. So she comes in as a believer and is proud of what the team has done and wants to encourage them to go further.
Keelia:
And then to circle back to making this really relatable and applicable in the real world, having a new boss come in and take over is something that happens every day. So whether that’s a Chaz who didn’t appreciate the strengths of the mainframe or whether it’s a Joan who does and pushes those initiatives and those new technologies to make the mainframe as modern as possible. So that’s something that happens every day. So that’s just yet another element that we folded into the storyline to make it as realistic as possible.
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, I think just from a sort of a narrative and character perspective, Chaz in season one on kind of a high, and so it’s a matter of how do we create more obstacles for him and the team in season two? How do we bring them down and give them things that they’ll need to work on, somebody that’s going to hold them accountable a little bit more, just introducing some new challenges for them as we kick off in season two.
Andy:
I’m excited to see how Chaz handles the quantum topic.
John:
It’s a fun one. We filmed that this week. We
Josh:
Just
Keelia:
Shot that today. We just shot that today. It was a good one.
Josh:
I think in a lot of… At the beginning of season two, there’s definitely a little bit of how do we navigate around the new boss? But Chaz’s, I guess I’ll say sort of fanboy moments about the mainframe kind of come through a lot too in season two as well. Just again, sort of showing where he started and then where he is now.
Andy:
I mean, he was very much on board at the end of season one, and so he’s even, I guess, even more on board in season two. He
Keelia:
Just keeps getting better.
Josh:
Yeah. Chugs him along.
Andy:
Just even more over the top, I imagine. That’s very cool. Yeah. But he looked like… I mean, he was in a very sharp suit when I saw him earlier, and it seemed like it was a different cut from the suits he was wearing in season one.
John:
He found his fit this year.
Keelia:
Yeah. He went and got some tamaring done.
John:
It was intentional last year, but we were kind of riding a stereotype, but yes, he has some good looks this
Keelia:
Year. Yes, he does.
Andy:
Okay. Anything else you’re kind of excited for people to see in season two? I don’t know if there’s any surprises to tease or anything like that or…
John:
I think in season two, Josh came up with some really clever narrative rappers that vehicles to share the messages. There’s some really, really fun ones that I just think are great.
Josh:
I’ll say too, I think we got some really great performances out of our Broadcom guest stars that have really stood out. And even it’s happened even today where they threw in some sort of ad lib line that ended up being really funny. We’ve had that on a number of occasions. And so yeah, there’s been some really great Some really great performances from the Broadcom crew that I think are going to be really fun this season.
Keelia:
Yeah, and I’m just excited about how accessible we were able to make, and funny too. We were able to make technical topics be… It’s what you just said, how did Chaz deal with a quantum episode? You would be surprised at how funny we were able to make something like quantum computing and preparing for it. And I think it took so much creativity to do that, but it’s a different format even than season one. We don’t do everything exactly the same way. There are unique storylines. There is new ways to bring in guests, and I love that it has become an extension of season one and not a replication of it.
Andy:
Yeah, I mean the show, it has to be evolved, just like the mainframe. It’s new features. Yeah. So I think to end things, I wanted to ask, I wanted to poll you, I guess, on what character you identify as. I think last time when we talked about this last year or last season, we talked about… Everybody knows Chaz or Larry or Alice. So I’ll start. I’m going to say I’m an Alice, the optimistic peacemaker. I feel like that’s kind of me. I try to be pretty diplomatic and pretty gentle. So yeah, I’m going to go with Alice, but what about you all? Kelia?
Keelia:
Yeah, who wants to start?
John:
All right. I was close to saying Alice, but I think I’d be a Joan. And I don’t want to say too much about her character, but she’s also a peacemaker, but she also has to be a leader. And I think there’s a really interesting line there and I think that is probably who I’d be.
Keelia:
Well, you took my thunder because I also identify as a Joan. Wait, is she
John:
Just our new favorite actress? That’s why.
Josh:
We’re
Keelia:
Not showing any favoritism though. But I mean, I don’t want to spoil her character too much, but she is a leader, but she has personality and she’s relatable and she unifies people. And it’s hard to do both of those things or all of those things at the same time. If you say Joan, I’m going
Josh:
To lose it. I don’t know. It’s hard to say what I identify with necessarily, but I really like something about the character of Ravi, just because he’s really kind of bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but he’s also a little bit of an old soul, I think, in a lot of ways. But he’s really excited about the mainframe. He really wants to make it his thing and just exemplifies this, I think, hopefully new attitude toward it a little bit, that you can do new things and you can be young and be into it and that piece of it. I like that he and Chaz, I think both really have a lot of emotion to what they do too, which I think, I don’t know, just draws out their character a little bit.
John:
I was going to say, I was thinking Ravi for –
Keelia:
I was thinking Ravi too. We should do this with the whole crew.
John:
Ben’s a good… I just do want to give shout out to our crew. You mentioned them earlier, but we’re working with this fabulous crew up here in Bellville. They are awesome and they have also embraced what this series is. They’ve talked about how it is so different than the other corporate stuff they work on and they are just truly great.
Keelia:
Yeah. And being on set for five days, you’d think that it would get old, but it doesn’t because we just have so much fun together. We just keep getting to know one another and we joke around and we know when it’s time to focus and when it’s time to joke and have conversations. They just are so great and smart and on the ball all the time.
John:
Yeah. Michael from Crescent Beach Productions is top-notch and he’s assembled a great team.
Andy:
Yeah. You got to run a type ship at the same time, keep things loose, right? I imagine if someone’s having a good time, it comes through on video. If you having a good time onset, maybe that kind of bleeds through. I feel like you hear about that kind of thing with various productions. Anything else you want people to know about Big Iron Bits? November something is the release date, right?
John:
We’re going to drop middle of November and then last year we’ll go every two weeks and it should be a lot of fun and we look forward to sharing it with everyone very soon.
Keelia:
Yep. Very excited to show it to the world.
Andy:
All right. Well, great. Well, we will look forward to that. We will be waiting with Bated Breath for every episode. At the same time, everybody out there, you can find the Tech Channel stuff, more mainframe stuff, stuff about Big Iron Bits and everything else at techchannel.com. So go there and find that subscribe button to hit our newsletter, hit that, and you’ll stay up to date. So you got to get that little blurb out there. But yeah, hey, all of you, this is great. Josh, I’m really glad you could join this too. This was a fun surprise.
Josh:
Yeah, excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks, Andy. We appreciate it. Surprise.
Andy:
Love it. All right. All right. I’ll talk to y’all later.
Keelia:
Thanks, Andy. Bye.
Andy:
All right. Cool. All right. Well, we’ll end it there. All
Keelia:
Right. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Andy.
John:
Hey, we just thought it’d be fun to throw you off with all the special guests. Yeah, I love
Andy:
It. We though
Keelia:
All the guests would be more interesting than just John and I do.
Andy:
We have
Keelia:
People here.
Andy:
That’s very cool. Yeah, I was just talking to Lisa and she was like, “Oh man, that would be cool if they could have some of the actors on or whatever, some of the guests.” And here you go. We weren’t
John:
Sure if it was going to work out with timing, but we actually wrapped early today. It just worked out. We wrapped about 30 minutes before we started and we were like, “Hey guys, come in and crash the interview.” And they were all down with it.
Andy:
Yep. Go mess with Andy.
John:
We
Andy:
Actually
John:
Sat down. We did.
Keelia:
Yep. We were like, “Should we tell him?” No. We wanted your reaction to be genuine.
Andy:
You got me. Yeah, you got me. I think it makes for good radio, good podcasting.
John:
All right. Well, let us know. We’re around if you need anything, but thanks for doing this.
Andy:
Yeah. You guys are going to be at Tech Exchange?
John:
Yes.
Andy:
Okay. I’ll probably see you down there then.
John:
We’re going to film our season finale.
Andy:
Oh, you are doing that. Oh,
John:
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We’re doing that MTE, not Tech. I’ll be at Tech Exchange. I won’t. Yeah.
Andy:
Okay. All right. Well, I’ll see you down there, John. All
Josh:
Right. Cool.
Andy:
Nice
Josh:
To meet you, Andy. See
Keelia:
You,
Josh:
Man.
Andy:
Take care.
Keelia:
Bye. Bye.