So they called up and asked me to co-host Attack of the Show on G4 a few weeks ago, and I said, “sure!” And then I started to think about what that entailed…and then I realized it was live….oh boy!

I say this a lot, but you never appreciate how hard something is until you try to do it yourself. Hosting, especially a live show, is officially in that bin for me now. I didn’t even realize all the moving parts that doing a show like this entails, or I might not have said I’d do it, haha! Not only are you reading from a teleprompter the whole time, but you have a thing in your ear for people to talk to you in, you have TONS of copy to try to deliver (hopefully believably), you have to stop talking when the video rolls, you have to adlib, but not TOO much to get off track in timing, AND you have to figure out what camera to look at when they change angles! WHILE YOU’RE TALKING! That was the part I was most nervous about, but a nice stage manager waves furiously at you to change your eyeline, so it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. But imagine changing eyeline WHILE you’re READING something, and picking up in the same sentence on a completely different reading surface. And making it seamless. ACK! New respect for all hosts out there!!!!

Thankfully my co-host Chris Hardwick (@nerdist on Twitter) was a gentle soul and VERY experienced and we genuinely had fun together. The producers and crew were totally cool, and the experience actually turned out to be fun. It was only the second time in my LIFE I’d read off a teleprompter (first time was E3 for the Xbox announcement), so I’m pretty happy with not having a HUGE freak-out moment. Dare I say I had a bit of fun? Ok, I will 🙂

Here’s the embedded intro clip from the show, and you can watch a few of the other videos on their website (including the Looong clip I did on Gadgets where I got very nervous about talking a lot by myself, haha. I did it perfect in the readthrough too, GRR! Such is live TV).