Last week Leo Laporte did a Gov 2.0 special show on TWiT with Tim O'Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka, a must-listen for programmers who want to use their skills to make the world a better place. It opened with this Code for America spot, which features Tim, Mark Zuckerberg, Caterina Fake, and Biz Stone. The Code for America fellowship application deadline has passed, but if you want to use your coding skills to help our government make better policy decisions, you can do so by contributing to ThinkUp.

Advertisers don't believe it's worth advertising to smart people, because smart people don't pay attention to brand. Smart people make an actual choice, they can't be tricked or convinced. They research. So we can't sell ads to a network for smart people.

Then Leo said, "Suddenly television makes sense, doesn't it?" to a great big laugh.

Watch the whole talk for an interesting look back at Tech TV, how and why it failed, what Leo won an Emmy award for, and what led him to founding his own online network. You'll quickly see why my other TWiG co-host Jeff Jarvis calls the TWiT Network "the model for the new media model."

When you write and talk about technology professionally, you're always tasked with explaining things in simple terms--which is useful for more folks, but forces you to dumb down things and sometimes even leave out interesting details. In fact, one of my favorite TWiG moments happened episode 4, where I started to explain that you had to "cron a job on your server" and then stopped myself and apologized for being so geeky. "Oh that's fine. We're all geeks here," Leo assured me. I nearly did the happy dance. What a relief to talk comfortably about technology and assume your audience is smart enough to keep up. That's what Leo's doing at TWiT--deciding not to dumb things down (AND making money doing it).

For more on Leo's philosophy and ambitions with TWiT, check out this (unembeddable) interview he did at Mixergy.