Tools

People ask what I use to make the show. This is the actual stack, not a list of things I've heard are good.

About these links. Some of them are affiliate links. If you sign up through one I get a small commission, and in a few cases you get a discount off the normal price. It never costs you more than going direct. I don't put a tool on this page unless I use it or it genuinely comes up on the show, and I've labeled which is which.

Making the show

Riverside

Every remote interview I record runs through this, across TRXL, Confluence, Smarter By Design, and Innovation By Design. It records locally on both ends, so a guest's bad connection doesn't turn into a bad file.

Descript

Transcription and editing. Editing audio by editing the transcript is most of the reason a one-person operation can keep this many shows on a schedule.

Captivate

Podcast hosting and distribution out to Apple, Spotify, and everywhere else. It also runs the private, ad-free RSS feed that TRXL+ members get.

StreamYard

Live streams directly to YouTube and sometimes LinkedIn.

Ghost

trxl.co runs on Ghost. The site, the Leadership Edge newsletter, and paid memberships are all one system instead of three that need to talk to each other.

Notion

Episode planning, guest research, and the databases behind every show. If you've been on the podcast, your prep lived here.

Tools that come up in conversations

I'm not a practicing architect, so this isn't my day-to-day software. It's what guests bring up often enough to be worth a link.

Chaos (Enscape, V-Ray, Corona)

Visualization and rendering. Enscape and V-Ray come up in more episodes than any other tools in this category, most recently with Phil Read on what changes when you can render past what's actually in the design file.

Perk: 10% off your first annual license, up to three seats.

The assistant behind the curtain

Claude

Worth being upfront about, since it touches nearly everything else on this page. A lot of the machinery around the show runs on Claude. Not the thesis and not the opinions, those are still mine and I'd rather publish nothing than hand that over. The assembly is what it does. Transcripts get cleaned up, show notes get built and checked back against the recording, episode records get pushed into Notion and onto this site, and most of the scripts moving all of that around were written with Claude Code.

Four shows out of a one-person operation doesn't arithmetic without something doing the assembly work. This is the something. If you're curious what that setup actually looks like, ask me, it's a longer answer than a link.