Net @ Nite - will someone please shut Leo Laporte up?

Since installing a stereo in my car that accepts auxiliary input, I've been listening to more podcasts during my commute. Gone are the days of burning an hour's worth of podcast material onto a CD-R every day; now I just plug in my iPod and drive. Yes, yes. Welcome to 2002.

I used to subscribe to Inside the Net, which I enjoyed for Amber Macarthur's thoughtful interview style and the news about fun emerging web services that I'm too lazy/busy/lame to find for myself. Amber liked to drop a question in an interviewee's lap and let them answer it (more or less) in full before jumping back in to prod the conversation forward. The format of the show wasn't revolutionary, but it was good information and easy to listen to.

Nowadays Inside the Net has been rebranded as Net@Nite. The show is recorded before a "live" studio audience on a VOIP service called Talkshoe and features both MacArthur and long-time tech pundit Leo Laporte. I have nothing against Laporte in general – he's good at making technology concepts accessible to mainstream audiences, and at chatting up tech "celebrities" like Steve Wozniak while going over the news of the day on his own show, This Week in Tech (aka TWiT). His style is all wrong for Net@Nite – or at least it would have been for Inside the Net. Leo's personality steamrolls over both MacArthur and the guests unless they have an aggressive style of their own, which is particularly annoying when one just wants to sort out the subtleties of a technological issue.

One guest whose appearance was particularly wasted on a recent episode was John Gruber's. Gruber writes Daring Fireball, which is one of the most contemplative and sophisticated technology blogs on the web. Asking Gruber to comment on the iPhone shortly after its announcement was the right move, but subjecting him to Laporte's jokey interview style was not. Gruber struggled valiantly to articulate what he thought Apple's strategy was with the iPhone and with future versions of the iPod but Laporte interrupted his train of thought every few seconds.

John Gruber: Steve Jobs has explicitly stated that he sees this more as an iPhone -- or iPod-like device than as a computer or PDA or --

Leo Laporte: It's less of a phone and more of a -- well, not even just an iPod but he called it an internet communicator.

JG: Right, and one way -- you can think of it that way. Think of a device, let's just call it, say, the next generation iPod. If hypothetically the next iPod is exactly like this iPhone except it doesn't have any of the phone features, you know if it has wi-fi --

LL: I hope the have a -- that's one other thing I was saying is I really hope that they do do a touchscreen iPod, I mean -- wouldn't that be a nice iPod? Might be a better iPod than it is a phone!

JG: Right. I mean, so imagine a device with the exact same -- I mean, even if you imagine that it, you know -- don't even think about hard drive storage space, just think, you know, flash-based storage, just like this. Four gigabyte, eight-gigabyte. It would be the exact same specs, other than the phone features --

LL: No, I want one with a hundred-gigabyte hard drive.

JG: Well, I'm just saying though, for the sake of argument . . . .

And so on. Gruber tries to explain that philosophically the iPhone may be better thought of as a next-gen iPod with phone features than as a smartphone designed for heavy voice and internet use, but it takes him several minutes of struggling up-stream against Laporte's interjections to get the thought out. It's a shame, really - what other interesting points might Gruber have made if given the chance? (John is well-spoken and friendly in person -- if you're going to SXSW interactive this year drop in on one of his panels to see for yourself.) Judging from this performance, Leo Laporte has forgotten that a radio host's job is to ask good questions and get out of the way for the answer. Being friendly to your guests is fine. Obfuscating the topic is just bad podcasting. So long as Mr. Laporte is muddying things up on Net @ Nite, I think I'll be getting my tech news from some other show. Sorry, Amber.