Welcome to Bytes in Balance, the podcast where we navigate the wild world of software engineering together. I'm Dan, and this is Demian. We have been juggling code, themes, and sanity for over 35 years combined. From junior devs to principal engineers, we have worn every hat in the industry. In this podcast, we're sharing our journey, lessons learned, and mentoring tricks to help you find your own balance.
It's not just about the tech. We dive into people, psychology, communication, and all the messy bits in between. Think of it as group therapy for the digital age. We bend, swap word stories, and share what we think is solid advice. Sometimes we even bring guests to shake things up. This podcast is our way of tackling the stress, burnout, and growth pains that come with the job. It's as much a balancing act for us as it is for you. Grab a seat and let's navigate this madness together.
You'll find some interesting links in the episode description if you want to learn more about us or the topics we discuss. All right, let's get started. Welcome folks to this episode of Bites in Balance. We have now here our first guest for our podcast, Ilia Vesdelev. Ilia is an ex-Google and ex-Amazon, but most important, he is the co-founder of Metacart.
which is a podcast application that reimagines the way we listen and consume podcasts. I am actually very excited with Metacast because before it, I was not a heavy podcast consumer and I am getting now more into it. And Ilia is also the author of The Pragmatic Podcaster, which is a book that was very helpful for this podcast to get started and launch. And I think the moment that clicked that, hey, I think we have to have this conversation.
was when I step into this LinkedIn post that you make about feeling gaming addiction. And you started with something like, hello, my name is Ilja and I am a gameaholic. And then you tell the whole story of why that came on. And I read the story and I felt incredibly identified with it. because I have gone through same or similar things. You describe how these games use even strategies for catch gamblers to suck gamblers into casinos and stuff like that. So I think it was great to have that.
conversation shared experiences i have my own on that sense probably van has their own yeah you know i actually learned from somebody else who also read that post that there are clubs of anonymous gamers like you have alcoholics anonymous and then you have gamers
clubs like that where people share strategies they support each other etc because the gaming addiction i think is real at least it was real for me twice because i went through this experience twice in my late teens and also in my early 40s Yeah, that's been one of the most interesting things for me. So I'm kind of lumping gaming and social media together. I want to talk about both of them here. How they've been different things at different times in my life. I remember when I was maybe...
13 or 14 up until I was like 17 or 18, I played a lot of computer games. I was really into it. I would have called myself a gamer. And then at some point I felt like this was really unhealthy. I sort of blamed this on a lot of other problems in my life at the time. It was overweight, needed to get out more, whatever.
Now, 20 years later, I go back and I don't have much time to play video games, but it's a totally different experience for me. I'm playing with my kids. I'm playing different kinds of games and I'm getting different things out of it. That's been really interesting to analyze. For me, the harder addictions to break are the scrolling, the social media, and that kind of stuff. Gaming doesn't have the same hold over me as it did when I was younger.
I think also gaming changed quite a bit. When I was a teenager in late 90s, you had to have a computer to play a game. You had to sit in front of a computer if you wanted to play with other people. So I was playing Quake. Quake 2 was my thing. I took the third... spot in the local championship, but I was number one from my city. So I consider myself the best gamer in town.
after because the first spots were from people who came from another place but then i also had a clan and we did the team championships so my clan took the first spot in the region and i was 16 at the time maybe even 15. to play games back then you had to have a computer you had to have
time or you had to go to a computer club to play with other people now you can just pull up the phone at any inappropriate time and spend your life doing that and we can get into my recent story of that how i lost myself for a few months
Yeah, that's definitely true. You know, I think we're the same era, right? I was in a Counter-Strike clan. The same thing. Like, I was 16. It was a bunch of guys. I'd never met them in real life. But there was some camaraderie. We were going through shared challenge together. And there was all of that aspect that was pulling me in. But as you said, there was fricking... This was something that I could do for long periods of time once I got into it, and my mom would definitely remind me of that.
But it wasn't something that I could just pull up on my phone while I was waiting at the bus stop. Phones didn't even exist at the time. That is the aspect that scares me nowadays, especially about my kids. I'm interested to hear about that aspect of it. All of us have kids of different ages.
And the fact that mobile games are essentially like little mini casinos, they incorporate gambling mechanics and all these kinds of things, that scares me. And that's a totally different kind of thing than the gaming that I grew up. Well, in my case, because of the country I grew up, internet maybe was not as developed or something like that.
Like I actually had to get my computer, put it under my arm, throw a keyboard and monitor whatever. Maybe I did not have a car so a friend would need to give me a ride and we all would go to
someone's apartment and install there all the computers and put a local network and play there. They would call them LAN parties. So at least there was a one-on-one interaction. The big thing was like, okay, how do we configure the network? And probably it was the first time that I faced some technical aspects related of code to configure a network to solve this problem. Now, as you say, it has changed. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It is in your pocket always.
I struggle with my son. My son basically spends a lot of time in the computer. I control this. There is a social aspect to it because he plays games where he interacts with other friends and other kids on the game and I have the phone very under control with parental controls or whatever and I think it's the right thing to do.
the parental controls is a very interesting thing like then you mentioned there is also the aspect of social media addiction the doom scrolling but there is also youtube that also recommends you a bunch of junk I remember when I moved to Florida, my wife was away and I was just sitting ready to go to bed and I started watching some videos. And maybe because it was a move from Seattle to Miami area.
I started getting a lot of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, these kind of videos, which I never knew who these people were. Before I knew it was 2 a.m. I think it all started, well, I'm wearing a Metallica t-shirt right now. I was watching some James Hetfield short.
James Hattel is the front man of Metallica. And then somehow it evolved into all of these ultra-right shorts and I just couldn't unglue myself from those. And it was so weird. Like at the time I was 37 something, 38, and I couldn't resist. And now I can see it with my kids too. Even my six-year-old, he knows how to use YouTube perfectly. So it's not just gaming. It's also all of those short bits of content, dopamine inducing experiences that are everywhere, not just gaming.
Yeah, it's been very hard for me. This is a controversial decision in my household. I just banned YouTube entirely. I know there's tons of useful stuff on there and sometimes we'll go on there and watch a specific video, but... I couldn't stand watching my kids go sit there and just go from video to video to video into like weirder and weirder stuff. They weren't getting, luckily, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro stuff.
i don't even want to go into it it's all kinds of bizarro corners of youtube again it was really hard for me to articulate the problem that i had with it but i think a big part of it is the short content, you get constant little dopamine hits of something new. It's not even something good. It's just something new and different and your brain just wants to keep.
watching it i think it's similar with the scrolling the whole infinite scrolling paradigm there's never a point that you can be like okay i got all the news for today i can go close the app it's just constant it's just ongoing i think that's one of the damaging aspects of it yeah if you remember instagram circa 2011 2012 before they had the infinite scroll you basically watch through the feed of the people you subscribe to which are mostly your friends and relatives
And 10 or 15 posts later, you're done. There's nothing more to see there. Now it's not the case. Now it's the same thing as YouTube shorty or TikTok. You just keep getting new stuff.
Right. And the way that they do that, you know, it used to be, as you said, just the people you subscribe to or follow or whatever. The way they keep that infinite is by injecting stuff that is content creation from quote unquote influencers or just other people that have similar interests, but basically injecting stuff.
That's what frustrates me. When I go through Facebook, I just look at it. It's all a bunch of people that I don't know. And I realized if I'm reading stuff, I get angry about it. And I'm like, wait, why am I getting angry about a bunch of stuff that written by people that I don't know? Maybe some people that I know reacted to it, but like, it's just fake.
It's the era of the recommender engine. If you kind of like this, you may like this, and if you like this, you may like this, and so on and so forth. I read once that some of these social media actually prioritize this controversial topic. Because if you get angry, if you have these feelings, you're going to interact more and you're going to get more engaged with it than if you get other type of feeling. So they have come to this way of actually prioritizing this type of comment.
Back in the day when PR was super relevant, so all of the scandals with celebrities, all that stuff, it raised their popularity even if it was presenting them in bad light. But now there is no bad engagement. if you walk in the shoes of the social media companies it was just engagement and any engagement is good because it's advertising Yeah, that makes sense. I went through a similar situation with YouTube, by the way. Dan, I didn't know you had banned YouTube.
I stopped using YouTube like for two years altogether completely because it's the same thing. The sad part is that there are so many useful things and interesting, really interesting things. That's a downside. But you start watching something interesting and two hours later you realize that you have wasted two hours of your life watching whatever other things got in the way. So I managed to quit for two years and then I tried to re-engage with a way more mindful approach.
And it has kind of worked. I want to circle back to the parental control stuff because I started talking about that and then I lost my train of thought. So kids watch YouTube and we tried this thing called YouTube Kids.
And if you put the YouTube kids on, it's just all kiddie cartoons that there are there. Kids are not interested in that kind of stuff. They always interested in something else a little bit older than that because the stuff he's interested in, like who's going to win a shark or a turtle. I'm talking about my six year.
Or who is stronger, an orca or a shark? And then there is this violent video from National Geographic where an orca hits a great white shark. It hits the shark, it breaks its ribs, and then it eventually pulls it down and suffocates. This stuff, it wouldn't be on YouTube.
but that's the kind of videos actually i'm totally fine my kids to watch because that's very educational right but then at the same time if they watch the adult youtube app then they get all of those minecraft influencers and all you hear there is scream one and a half hours
So Demian, you just kind of shared a little bit about what you're trying to re-engage in a healthier way. I feel like I've gone through a little bit of that. I don't want to jump into too many political topics, but honestly, when Trump was first elected in 20...
That hit me really hard. I finding I was spending lots and lots of time essentially doom scrolling, constantly reading up on what are the implications now of this and all of the articles and what's going to happen. And then as things were happening, it took me years to realize how unhealthy it was.
It's hard because I'm someone who wants to be an informed person. I want to read about what's happening in the world. You know, and I wasn't reading like bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory kind of stuff. It was like mainstream news. But even then, it got me at least very trapped in this cycle of feeling crappy about the world.
and then scrolling a lot and finding a bit of an escape. Even though I'm reading about bad stuff, it's still providing a little bit of dopamine hits as you scroll through and read stuff. Sometimes you read good stuff. but you're still stuck in this cycle of constantly glued to your phone every time you have a spare minute.
At various times, I've tried to disengage. It hasn't really worked that well. But finally, last week, I decided to just completely delete. I go on Reddit because there's all kinds of useful information. I subscribe to all these interesting subreddits with all of these niche topics, and that's great.
But then, of course, like any other social media app, they take what you're currently interested in and then they suggest stuff and then eventually build this infinite scrolling feed that has some of the stuff you like and then a bunch of other stuff that they're trying to push on.
And it's very seductive. You start out just reading about whatever topics I'm interested in, programming, Minecraft, RVs, whatever. And then eventually it just drifts into all these new stuff and I'm stuck in that same cycle.
Last week, I completely deleted the apps off my phone. I noticed the first couple of days that anytime I had any downtime, even if I'm just sitting in my office waiting for another meeting, I have like 10 minutes, I'll pull up my phone and I'll go to where the app used to be. It's almost like muscle memory now. That's helping me to realize how much I was relying on it for just like... oh, I have three minutes to kill. I'll just sit down and do that. And that's not healthy at all.
In my case, that started in a very similar fashion in Venezuela with all the political turmoil, etc. And that's when I remember quitting Facebook. and eventually Twitter. Twitter was a platform that we would use to organize political movements and do that type of stuff over there, or one of the platforms.
I quit Facebook at the beginning because it was like I found myself falling in fruitless discussions about some political aspect that you know how these things start escalating in comments and so on and so forth. And I get very obfuscated in those things. I found myself like... what am I doing? I started blocking people and following people and eventually ended quitting.
And Twitter was something like that. I was a little bit involved in the university political movement, et cetera, back then. And something went awfully wrong that we were used by another faction. It got really, really bad. And then that day I was like, you know what? So I started doing photography and going to Instagram, you know, just to share my pictures. And eventually I found myself more focused on the likes than actually in something else. And I was like...
what am I doing? It's not that I'm learning from looking other photographers in Instagram, because it's not that you spend time with a photographer, you just start scrolling over and over. And I am just connecting somehow my worth as photographer with the likes, which doesn't make sense either. So it was, you know, okay, gone. And I say it easy, by the way, and it was not, right? It's like I went through all the process that you described for weeks, probably. Like, what is it? Where is it?
and find myself even translating this from one app to another. Like, okay, what is the next book? I love books, by the way. What is the next nice book or some topic that I can buy in the Amazon app? And it was like, no, what am I doing? So Amazon app, gone. I'm sorry to jump in, but it's so funny because I do the exact same thing. I deleted Reddit and Facebook completely because I'm tired of them. But I still have LinkedIn for my work, ostensibly.
the linkedin feed is horrible it's awful i never in a million years would like want to spend time on that but i find myself recently like scrolling the linkedin feel like what the this is awful but it's because i just felt like i needed something to scroll You need a substitute for what you gave up. Yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah. That's the last stronghold for me. I am in LinkedIn just for some type of professional value. Questionably, but... Yes, this is the hard thing about all of this. It's hard to completely detach yourself from all of it. There's some value and they know this. So I completely quit Facebook.
but that's kind of a luxury because i'm married and my wife is on facebook and so she is still connected to all of our family if i wasn't married i wouldn't be able to connect with anyone who's like over 40 without having a facebook account
There's Reddit. There's all this awful stuff that I get through there, but then there's also all this useful information that's on there. LinkedIn. I get job connections. It's a job profile sort of place, but then it's also an infinitely scrolling social media feed of horrors. They know this. Yeah, I kind of went through what both of you describe. I never was really much addicted to content.
I never had television. I mean, we had television, obviously, when I was a teenager, I mostly watched MTV because I was.
big into music but when i started living by myself at age 20 i had a television but we would just connect the computer to the television and watch movies so we would never watch news or any stuff like that so i'm 41 right now my entire adult life i only had a tv subscription for about a year and a half because i think it came with the apartment that i lived in but otherwise we always chose our own programming and it was mostly long form movies and
maybe some programs so that you can find on YouTube, some Apple TV subscription, all that kind of stuff. But when the Russia-Ukraine situation started in 2022, and from there, my entire family is in Russia. It was very uncertain. Everything was very uncertain. Now it's more certain than it was three years ago. But in the first few months, we went home every summer.
And it's like, what are we doing now? So there was just so much anxiety. And all of my friends who were also from there, we all were just constantly in telegram scrolling those news channels and watching YouTube videos. And then some point I realized again, it's like 2 AM and I'm watching a video of a guy who published daily sort of 30 minutes videos on YouTube.
basically just talking trash about everything that's going on like propaganda essentially right and it's like the same thing over and over and over again every night and because i think his new videos were coming up at night u.s So that's why I was like watching them immediately after they were coming out. And at some point I'm starting to gain weight because I'm eating all sorts of junk. I'm weak. I'm not getting enough sleep. I'm tired all the time and I'm always anxious.
And my work went to shit when I was doing this. And at some point I just like removed telegram from my phone entirely. just stopped consuming this but i think i was so fatigued from this that it felt like a relief i think i was doing what you were doing i would go and try to find that up where it was but it wasn't there and i think i would even tap uber or whatever took its place right
I also had a blog on Instagram and it was in Russian and Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, like the Russian speaking part of the world. At some point, Instagram became like a text blogging platform. So people would write very long text posts.
I think it's 4,000 characters, but then they would put a picture to the front cover and then all the texts that wouldn't fit into the description, they were just screenshotting the notes up and put them as images. So you have a picture and then you have 2,000 characters. And then everything else is in the carousel, right? Another nine pictures of tech.
So we were basically long form blogs there. And there were all sorts of people writing about all sorts of stuff. So I was writing about product management on Instagram. And it sounds bizarre to somebody who is not from that culture, but it's just how it got sort of misused there. It became a feature. No, I've heard about this. It's very interesting to me.
Do you know why that was convenient? Was it just that the people at the time happened to be on it, or was it used for some reason? I think people were on it, and Facebook wasn't as popular in Russia because it had its own VK, which is an equivalent of Facebook.
So I missed that because I was in the US at the time. So I missed that whole rising of that trend. I just became a user of it. So I was posting a lot and I started to gain a lot of followers immediately. So I think at the height, I had about 8,000 followers. Not that many, but some of my posts would get like a thousand likes.
More people than listen to this podcast, by the way. Yeah, sure. So I would get a lot of engagement on my posts. It was resonating. But like you were saying that, man, I started to obsessively check the likes. And it's like, is it taken off? I published it in five minutes later, I checked the number of likes. Two minutes later, I'm checking number of likes.
2 a.m i wake up to go to the restroom or something i'm checking the likes i'm no longer able to fall asleep after that and then i post something to stories people start writing back to me i start to respond and it was just very stressful i mean i met a lot of great people through that countless hours of just being unproductive because I would be on Instagram all the time.
But also it was so anxiety-inducing, especially when things don't work out the way you expect. Or maybe you touch a controversial topic and get all sorts of crap from people in comments and you want to prove all of these random people on the internet wrong. You know how it goes on radio. Sometimes you just can't let it go, especially if it's in public comment. I removed Instagram multiple times and I would always come back and I even bought an iPad so I could post.
because it wasn't possible to post on the computer. So I bought an iPad and I run Instagram in compatibility mode so I could like post from it, but I would never use it on my phone. But eventually Instagram always made its way back. to my phone yeah i think it's the russian ukraine situation that finally got me off
social media for a long time. And I no longer feel as addicted to it. But I think there are two aspects. There is the addiction as a creator and addiction as the consumer. And sometimes the mix up because if you go to Instagram to check your likes, you may also get caught up in the feed.
It's like a double whammy experience. What you describe is what I went through. I got to the conclusion eventually in which if I want to keep growing as photographer, I need to get out of this. It's as simple as...
It's getting up at 2 a.m. and looking, does this thing have a like? Oh, nobody liked my picture. How awful that is. It's really interesting to hear both of your stories, because Demian, you described you were never into gambling. Same for me. I grew up with a very religious background, and one of those things they drilled into me. like gambling is evil. I don't have all of that with me anymore, but I still walk into a casino and I get this feeling like I should leave.
I never worry about that. But then for me, it's other things, the content addiction or getting caught up in political arguments or political situations or whatever. It's interesting how there's always something that pulls you in somewhere. I think there are a lot of commonalities between three of us, which is very interesting. There are mechanisms operating behind this thing that actually influence people in similar ways.
One that is interesting is the political aspect of it. I think all of us somehow had gotten caught into this somehow by the political aspect of this. It's like we're aware of our surroundings or political environment and worry about what's going around and it's somehow a way to consume news and try to understand what's going on and we fall in that trap.
Yeah, it's a hard balance to have. There's this whole meme about doomers and it's this sort of like Generation Z or maybe even our millennial generation pessimism about the world and how it's bringing people down. I don't know. Some of it feels like there is something to that. One thing that I'm trying to do is trying to be more intentional about things that I do. So if I am going to read the news.
say like to myself, okay, I'm going to read this news because I want to be informed, not because I'm bored and I have five minutes downtime and I need to have some dopamine. Like, oh, I'm going to engage with this post on Facebook because it's my old friend from college and I want to reach out to them. Not because, oh, it's some random person that I don't know posting an inflammatory opinion.
by giving up YouTube for two years and then coming back is that I think is changing the models from push these things are getting pushed to you to pull to basically you are the one that being intentional i think that's a great way to put it that go and decide about this thing what are you gonna do what are you gonna look what are you gonna consume and when i think that has been the change for me Yeah, only sort of plug for podcasts as a whole.
And that's also what I like about Telegram, by the way. In the old television days, the TV was structured as channel. So you tune to MTV, you get the music videos. You go to CNN, you get the news, etc. So you know what kind of content you are getting into when you are watching the channel. Essentially a podcast is a channel. So you subscribe to a podcast. Basically, you know what you're going to get. And if you don't like it, just unsubscribe. And so when you consume podcasts.
It's not like on YouTube. You go on YouTube and you can get the short with the James Hetfield playing on stage. And the next video is about the killer whale killing a shark. And the next one is a Minecraft influencer screaming. Whatever your kids are watching, right? You get all of those stuff in the recommendations. And it's just...
an infinite dopamine hit because it's also random but also interesting because it's based on your watching habits whereas in podcast you know if i go to the lax treatment podcast i know what to expect from those or one of my recent favorites is a podcast called Talk is Jericho. Chris Jericho is a famous wrestler, but he is also a musician. So he interviews all sorts of famous musicians on his channel. People like Ozzy Osbourne, very, very famous, very big name.
So I'm just binging on his content. But it's all long form and I'm choosing what I want to listen to. Like it's not pushed on me. And Telegram is designed in a similar way. There are channels, you subscribe to channels and they are maintained by authors. And if you don't like them, you just unsubscribe. There is no feed.
so that's the difference between the feed-based stuff and channel-based stuff and i personally prefer the channels because i think channels help you engage more consciously you can just unsubscribe from a channel and then you don't get maybe like the political maybe you only have the music and tech channels and then you don't necessarily get dopamine hits from there because it's mostly just knowledge and like healthy
Whereas with the feed, it's just a lot harder. Like, I'm not interested in this stuff. It still keeps pushing you this stuff until you dislike it 10 times. I don't know how those feeds work. But I feel like we lost that control on most social media and podcasts. Telegram and maybe some other things that I'm not thinking about are the last frontier of the user being in control of their time. Because like what you were saying, Dan, being more conscious and aware of what you're doing.
It doesn't work for me. If somebody writes a comment that I react to, I can get very irrational and emotional. And I know that I should sleep on. And then in the morning, it will not matter. But my hands, they typed the response. And then they entered this endless argument that next morning, I really regret. I admire your self-control. I don't possess. I don't want to claim I've solved it here, right? Neither do I, by the way. I solve the problem by deleting things and not having them.
And when I interact with YouTube it's like, okay, I'm mindful about the mechanism, but I get you. You mentioned Telegram a lot, and one of the things that I did is like, because what am I losing when I disconnect from Instagram? That was the other question. It's like, I also have a lot of friends in Instagram, and sometimes I chat with some of these friends, or sometimes you know what's going on in the life.
of somebody some friend and it's like okay what am i losing i'm losing that when i removed this application it was like how am i going to replace this and i switched to whatsapp i'm going to make an effort to consciously reach two people
It's not that, you know, 200 people circle that was in Instagram, but it's like, okay, who do I really, really care and want to establish those relationships and those connections and do a mindful effort to reach to these people and have one-on-one conversations. And that was a way for me, but I uninstalled everything. I can't. I fall in the trap. Yeah, we're talking about Instagram and social media just in general, especially Instagram stories.
is you post something or somebody else posts something. And if people are interested, they respond and you can have a conversation one-on-one with that person. to start the conversation, which you don't have on WhatsApp. Like if you text somebody on WhatsApp, you have to have.
something to text them about. Unless it's your friend, but if it's like your close friend, you're probably chatting very often anyway. I met tons of great people through Instagram by just posting a random story and then somebody would write to me and then I would respond. And some of those people, I met them in person, in real life, at events. I would say my circle of...
acquaintances. I wouldn't call them friends necessarily, but my circle of acquaintances is probably 70% from the people I met on Instagram and on Telegram through my channel in common. And I don't have a huge following. And maybe it was also part of that, me being able to build a relationship with people. But it has the potential to be really, really good for actually enhancing your real life.
if we don't fall into the traps of how many people viewed that story and how many people sent me the reactions, as opposed to actually three people wrote to me and I had a meaningful chat with them. That's actually more important. A thousand impressions is just a number. On that same topic, just because I'm curious, do you find that setting a goal of having those meaningful interactions, does that change how you interact with people or do you change how you engage with comments?
I'm just curious what strategies you use. Because for me, it's easy. I don't really post stuff on social media, and I don't really have people reaching out to me. I absolutely can see how that's a need because the older I get, the more important it is for me to maintain friendships and make connections and things like that. So I absolutely see the value. I just don't get that out of social media specifically.
that would be really hard for me to balance the positive aspects with the addictive or negative aspects of So I had a similar thing with TikTok. I was like, everybody's talking about TikTok. I installed TikTok and 10 swipes in, this stuff gets really, really good. Really relevant, really good stuff. Their algorithm is just incredible. But then like you were saying, I was just someone with zero posts.
zero friends or followers, whatever they call it. I was just consuming like YouTube. That's probably the situation you're in in some way, right? then yeah, it's easy to fall into the trap and not getting any meaningful response. If you're also a creator or if you post, if you like posting and people are meeting you that way, yeah, there is that balance.
but it also makes it hard to remove the app from the phone. So Demi, like you were describing, I had this issue where I had this urge to remove my Instagram account. How am I going to reach out to those people? I don't even know their real name sometimes.
well i know their first name but i don't know their last name i don't have their phone number but eventually i switched to telegram i basically just posted that i'm gonna not maintain this instagram account anymore i'm gonna just post on telegram channel if you want to you can follow me there and then a bunch of people migrated there And unlike Instagram, on Telegram, people are using it as a messenger.
So when you chat with people on telegram, you get their phone number. If they share it with you, they're not going to. just quit Telegram. I found that it establishes more meaningful connection than Instagram because it's sort of more intimate. Fewer people write to me on Telegram, but I think the relationship that we built is more meaningful. And also the way Telegram organized comments in the very old days, there was a chat group.
that's attached to your channel and then somehow when you post a comment on the repost it gets into the chat room into the group right now the mechanics is different but the old mechanics legacy mechanics still there in addition to my channel i have a chat group with 250 people or so
of which maybe 20 are regularly active. So sometimes we just have those group discussions like in the very early chats in late 90s about all sorts of random topics. And that's what I like about that social media that doesn't have a feed.
So basically I would post something on Telegram and somebody responds to me, something relevant. And then because people are in chat, they just start talking to each other and something irrelevant comes up and then it starts another thread, which is interesting in its own right. There is something inherently good about social media, but one of my strategies to not get too worked up on social media, like you were asking them is I try to not post anything controversial.
because I don't want any negative stuff. I have banned people from writing bad stuff within the chat because I also want to hold the space for the people who are in there. But I think you have to like this kind of stuff, like holding the space for people and all the things. We are digressing from the addiction aspect and starting to talk positive things about social media. It's not supposed to be positive. No, no, no. This makes a lot of sense.
If you think that social media implies the word social, and social to me implies some type of value for society, if you think about it that way. And I think there are valuable things in this tool. And I think the problem or what humankind needs to figure it out, it's like, okay, what's next? How do we solve this problem? I'm thinking here at this point, you know, as engineers, product thinking in the terms, like...
What does it look like? What does the social media that is actually valuable in that sense? That it's economically sustainable because you ultimately have to pay for the servers and so on and so forth. How does that look like?
Maybe I think that's what we are getting into right this like it didn't know who all these features that telegram has I have seen similar things in discord i belong to a photography group in discord and it's not exactly what you describe but it's a more reduced amount of people type of chat that is very interested in something it's much less addictive there are no likes involved
It sounds very similar to that, right? So I think it's like, what's next? Because I think that's what also our listeners want to think or understand. It's like, what are the strategies? We have gone through this. What are the strategies that we have used? And some of those we have talked. And then it's like, okay, what's next?
I mean, there's two things. What are the strategies that we personally use to sort of protect ourselves from this? But if you're talking about what does it take for the whole industry to improve things? I don't think it's a technical problem, really. I think it's a social and government problem, ultimately. I mean, maybe we don't want to get into that, but maybe if we treated some of these things similar to the way we treat gambling and other addictive things.
You're describing all these ways where social media platforms are less addictive and are more valuable. The cynic in me is sitting there thinking, well, yeah, that's why they'll never make any money. And the big platforms will continue to get more and more addictive and employ more and more psychologists. and smart technical people that are all trying to get how do we make this slightly more addictive? That's what they're doing.
Well, I was reading this morning this phrase of Charlie Munger that says, if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. If you think about current social media, what are the incentives? The incentive is making money. Okay, that makes sense. But how do they make money through? It's through engagement. How do they get engagement? So the game is get engagement at any price. You don't care about whatever harm or not that you are doing.
We fall in the trap of free things. Remember when Gmail came out, it's like, is this thing free? What? or Google writes this thing free. We're trying to understand what the hell is going on here. And same happened with all the social networks. And we now understand what's the business behind and what's going on behind there. And I think
if we fall in the trap of using these free products, then basically that means that we are not the customers, we are the product. Maybe that little bit where things need to go it's like how much would you be willing to pay for something for a social media that network that is it doesn't work like this
And I can tell you that maybe you can make this happen paying half a dollar a month. If you manage to get a billion people there, that could be enough. I don't know. I'm making just some crazy numbers here. But maybe the model has to go into that direction. Maybe it's too late. People are too used to the free things.
yeah but i also feel like people starting to wake up like dan was saying the gen z and also the millennial so we are getting more skeptical more aware but again i don't know if it applies to the whole population but at least people in my circle they are more conscious of this at least they try to be Yeah, maybe we just don't hear from people who are spending all the time doomscrolling because they're not engaging in this discussion.
I don't know, I'm just generalizing, but maybe more like higher educated, well-earning people who can spend time thinking about that, they do think about that. And maybe it also comes when you have your own kids. You don't see yourself doomscrolling, but you see them doomscrolling, and it hurts.
Yeah, it hurts a lot worse to see them do it, for sure. It's like seeing your child smoking, right? You might be a smoker yourself. Well, I'm not. But I know if I saw my child smoking, I would be just furious at that. Well, you can get cigarettes in the first place if he's under. From that perspective, I don't know if that bill was passed or not, but in Florida, they want to force social media companies to not allow minors under 14, I believe.
to use social media i think 14 to 16 they would have to have parental permission to use social media i don't know how enforceable it is but overall that trend because then also you mentioned the government right and policy because i think we need that i don't think kids younger than 12 or 14 should be on instagram and i think algorithms should be adjusted
to that type of population. I think because they are not mature enough to make the decisions for themselves. And then we basically let a for-profit corporation make decisions for our children. I know it's crazy because I'm looking back at myself when I was addicted to doom scrolling. And as I was like 32, 34, what chance does my future 12 or 13 year old have?
on these platforms so yeah i'm a little skeptical and cynical about how much will actually be put in place and how much social media companies will actually change But in terms of things I can do and things under my control, I would discourage my kids from using social media until they're 16 or so. The impact for damage is so high. Again, you're just providing this conduit for some corporation to shove content into your face all the time. So it's just not necessary.
Yeah, and it's ultimately what I did with my kid, right? It's like, nope, there are parental controls. These applications don't exist. Yeah, YouTube is DNS black hole in my house. The other social media apps, they're not on, so I don't have to do that, but I'll figure out some way. And I don't know how widespread this is. I am seeing in my household, it's a blended family. So we have from 23, 22 years old, 21, soon 18 and 15. So this is the range of ages that we have.
You see some type of level of awareness. It's not that they are blindly into social media. They start to think and sometimes they come with interesting answers about this type of things. They are aware of that. So I wonder if this is also a generation that's going to start shifting into another direction and demanding other type of things. You know, I'm just saying I'm not going to be in Instagram because.
whatever then as new generations shift into that direction companies are going to have to start thinking in a different way maybe maybe i'm being too optimistic I notice a difference in the next generation in their ability to talk about and process their emotions. My son, who's sick, Sometimes I'm really impressed by his ability to like, he gets upset, he goes into his room, he cries, and then he comes back and he's like, yeah, I was upset because someone said this.
And it's like, damn, dude, you're six. It took me 30 years to learn that. I do wonder if some of that will help them. Because I've been to therapy a couple times in my life, and that was massively helpful in helping me sort of unpack a lot of how I thought about myself.
So I hope that I'm giving them at least better skills than my parents are great, but my parents' generation overall gave to us. I'm hoping that we sort of do a better job and that will protect them a little bit, but that's all I can do. I think we've talked a lot about social media here and the intentional ways that they're rigging the algorithm and the feed and things like that to keep you engaged, keep you angry.
I'm sure similar things are going on in gaming. Ilya, what about that game was particularly sucked you in? Had you had that experience before or was this something unique about that? when I had this experience of really getting addicted to the point where I was sneaking out of the house to like put the garbage out so i could play an extra five minutes
at the elevator or I would go grab a coffee and I would play around the corner so that my wife doesn't see me doing that because she is a very nonsense person in that regard. I also didn't want my kids to see. because it was almost like smoking because I knew it's bad. I knew they would look at this and would think it's normal. And I didn't want to show them what bad example I was. I think in the past, I'm talking about the games like Quake.
Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft, the original Need for Speed games, they were all skill-based. Like if you played Need for Speed, the racing game, you would do whatever, like 16 laps, and you would actually spend 10, 15 minutes doing the race. Like skill was important. It was difficult and you had to work at it and practice. I never had the patience for racing games specifically, but I know first person shooter games and all those things. Yeah. It's that element of like.
That other person beat me because they're better than me. If I practice a little bit more and I work a little bit harder, if our clan has better teamwork, then we're going to beat them. Exactly. And by the strategy and all. We were playing Deathmatch and Quake too. I was doing this for three years or so.
multiple hours every single day to the extent that I started skipping school. So that was the bad effect of this. But it was all like we were playing the same map with different people. If you lose, it's because other person is better. There is no artificial anything involved in there.
It's just like everything is predictable. The weapons appear in the same place after a certain number of seconds. The only random stuff was where you spawn. If the other person beats you, you blame it on lag. We played on LAN, right? So there was no lag. Because I didn't have the internet. This summer was very stressful for me because we were in the company and just a bunch of stuff was going on.
Also, we were one year into the startup and I felt lack of accomplishment in a way, right? Because it took a lot longer to build. We haven't shipped yet at the time. And I'm like, I wanted to play a computer game 20 years after my teenage experience. And I downloaded the Need for Speed game from Electronic Arts, Need for Speed No Limits. Actually, it was originally released for the consoles in 2014 or so, and then it got ported to the phones. Great graphics.
Really nice cars. I loved everything about that game at first. And it made it very easy to win those first races. It almost felt like too easy. But then over time, the difficulty started ramping. what i noticed really quickly is that races there were like 30 seconds 40 seconds a minute max So it was sort of snackable, unlike the earlier game. They call it the rep, the reputation. To enter certain races, you need to have a certain rep. To get the rep, you need to win some other races.
And for that, you need to have a certain type of car or a specific car you need to win, or a car has to have a certain, they call it PR, performance rating. And then you need to get certain spare parts for that. For spare parts, you need money. Or you can buy them for gold, which is another type of currency in there.
it just starts to suck you in because you really want to win that race but you don't have a good enough car so you start to play those other races it's called grinding right when you just play the other things just to get those spare parts that you don't need to get the money The interesting mechanic that I found the most difficult for me to resist.
is when you replay those races to get those spare parts that you need you actually don't know which part you're going to win it's one of the three and one of them is probably one that you need the other two are there could be money and there could be like another part some other thing that you get from it. And it looks like a casino. So you win the race and then you're presented with three choices.
You just pick one of the three boxes and you either get that part or you don't. And then I noticed... my own feelings when I was getting ready to click that box and I would get the part I would get excited I wouldn't get the part I would get angry I would release it again to the point where I was just grinding all the time they also have fuel so you can't just race all the time they have these fuel points that
I capped at 10, every 10 minutes you get a fuel point. So you could at max do five races because each race takes two fuel points. And then you have to wait another one and a half hours before you can race it again. And that makes you check back in every two hours.
So this whole mechanic, those dopamine hits from the casino effect, that sort of competitive angle from wanting to win that race, so you need a better car, so then you play the casino, and then you want to do that more frequently because you run out of fuel, so that you check back in every two hours. On some days I would have five hours of Need for Speed. They have a bunch of other things there as well.
that just made me so fatigued, but I still kept playing it. And then I also joined the Reddit because it gets really difficult after you reach rep. like 70, 80, whatever I was. I remember seeing that post from a guy saying like, today is my last game playing the game. And I read it, it was like very long post, one page, maybe two pages of text.
where the guy was like, I lost my life. I don't talk to people. I have this constant anxiety. I wake up in the middle of the night so I don't lose those feel points. And I'm like, that's me. I'm reading about myself. I'm probably just like a couple of steps behind this guy. but i still kept playing for another few days after that until i just started to hate myself so much that i just
Every now and then I have the urge to install it again to just do just a few races. But I'm realizing it's like giving beer in the fridge when you are an alcoholic. I just can't. And the good thing for me is that the game is three and a half gigabytes. I don't want to spend my traffic. I don't want to wait. So I never installed again.
It really has all of the aspects of something to be addictive. It gives you small elements of some sense of accomplishment. As you're grinding away, like five minutes here, it gives you the sense that you didn't just waste those five minutes. You got some reward for it. it forces you to always check in periodically you can't put it down and be like i'll look at this next week or i'll look at this tomorrow or something you know has something that pulls you back in
It has the gambling mechanism of there's some reward. It could be something really good or it could be something not so good. And you describe the emotional rollercoaster of like, if it's something good or if it's something not good, it really ticks all the boxes, doesn't it? Yeah, the negative aspect of those, there's also the, I don't know if you've heard this term, the casual game.
Those are the games, like the Flappy Bird, that you just pull up from your pocket, play them three minutes, put it back. I actually read a book. It's like a short booklet, rather. It's called Designing Hyper-Casual Games, something like that. really, really short read. But the TLDR is that
You can hook into their dopamine circuits, into their psyche, and then just keep them addicted, keep them rewarded, keep their dopamine coming, and then they will play your game, and then you can make some money with that. So that's the TLDR of that book. And I was reading that. It was so cynical. because that's how the game developers think about that that is for speed game they optimize it perfectly i have nothing but utmost respect for them as psychologists and developers
But as a user, I'm pretty sure there are probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people like me who are struggling to quit it. I also spent money buying some cars because I just couldn't. Grinding another month, let me just spend five bucks and buy that car.
There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with Demian. All of us got sucked into different things at different times. And we're all ostensibly adults with responsibilities and rational thinking. And all these games actually replicate the same pattern, the same pattern that you see in Candy Crush or you see in other games.
so it's not only one it's a well-established pattern and we react to that pattern as we are supposed to react as humans yeah i think what happens with those games i noticed in me both when i was playing them in my teens and also now it damages your actually i think doom scrolling is the same thing the moment you feel some difficulty maybe coding it's like oh let me look at
It teaches you that it's okay to never be bored. Yeah, and never struggle, right? But sometimes you do need to sit and look at that blank page for a while to actually figure something out. But if you always get distracted, then you just never get anywhere. And I just actually noticed that I got so much more productive after quitting the game. I read a book about ADHD a while back called ADHD Advantage.
And I reread it last week. I hit every check mark on that list. So I never was officially diagnosed with ADHD, but I feel like I'm probably seven out of 10 on that sort of self-assessment. For people with that kind of trait, it's even more damaging. You just get nothing done when you play the game. But I wonder how much this context or this environment has actually brought us there. Because I can tell you something, it's like my capability of focusing, it's not the same as it was 20 years ago.
Sure, I'm older than 20 years ago, but something has changed. Are you saying it got worse, you mean? Yeah, I have one-tenth of the capacity of focusing that I had back then.
we are in a world in which there is a constant distraction one thing after the other and we had got used to never be bored as you said and i see that also in my kids they have to always be on doing something connected to something or I like to say that boredom is the mother of creativity and I think there is a connection between those two things. kind of impossible everything is boosting your phone is boosting there's always ice cream close by
I've also been thinking in terms of the ADHD that has been on my mind heavily because I lost capability of focus. What I'm wondering is that it's a trait that we have, as you say, Ilja, or it's a trait that the context in which we live has actually pushed us toward? Yeah, there's probably a bit of both. I've always been this kind of person who gets easily bored, which is the core of ADHD, but also when something is interesting, you can hyperfire.
to the extent you know i'm seeing those guitars behind then right when i got my first guitar at age 16 it was during the summer break between school and university i was waking up at nine and i would have breakfast play the guitar and put it down at like 10 p.m. and then i would not have lunch in between and i would have a cramp
that is also the flip side of the ADHD trait. But you have to be like really into it. More recently, I mean, we're diverging a bit from the addiction topic, but because I felt so much distraction, because I think the game trained me to always be distracted and always seek for these distractions.
At work, I started to do a lot of random things. Like I would just chase every squirrel I see like a dog. I started to notice that I'm very unproductive. And when I was working for a corporation, it was fine because I was still getting paid, right? But in a startup, if you do that, nothing gets done.
I actually took this month, the month of November, as a month where I do nothing but code. I mean, I do some things here and there, like I respond to customers, but overall, my goal is to produce at least one PR, a small PR per day, or, you know, iterate one. So basically at the end of the day, I always have this sense of accomplishment that I've sat down for like four to six hours, just completely immersed in code and produce something.
so i've been in this mode for two weeks now and it just does wonder
But I have to switch off my phone. I'm going to a cafe so that I don't get distracted by my kid at home or my wife. Because my wife never understands. I'm like... there is no such thing as a quick question when somebody is in the flow because that quick question just derails you for an hour and she's like yeah but it's just a quick question i'm just tired of having that argument so i just go somewhere else to work put my headphones on and
Again, I could sit for four to six hours without even going to a restroom. It's not healthy, but at the same time, I get a lot of that. I feel like that's the opposite of what we were discussing. I think all of us need to do more of that. Yeah, that sounds great, honestly. I want to do that. Yeah, and sometimes you might feel like a victim, especially when kids are at home. I would always get distracted. And at some point, I'm just like...
Well, there would be nothing to eat if you actually don't make this startup a success. So whether you want it or not, I have to make an executive decision that I'm not. which means we have breakfast together and then I leave. You know, I always come back before 5 p.m. or so, sometimes sooner. But the thing is like, I decide when my workday ends, as long as it's not. Yeah, it might hurt the family. I felt a bit of guilt at first doing this. but then I think the output just speaks for itself.
Yeah, you're being intentional about your level of distractions around you. And it also sounds like you've set up something where you're constantly feeling some sense of accomplishment. You're closing these PRs. It's like paying off. So you see the benefits of disconnecting and being able to focus, you get stuff done.
actually it's a good point there are dopamine hits from addressing that comment from my cto arnab who is also from amazon where he was like i would do a quick change and he would force me to refactor and then i would spend another day but then i look at the code i'm like wow code I wrote with his help.
yeah well while we're talking about intentional strategies to deal with this i think being intentional and recognizing like oh, I accomplished something and looking at that, that's one of the things that I try to do is like if I took away Reddit off my phone and instead of scrolling, I replaced it with reading a book.
on my Kindle, I can look back and say, hey, I read a book over the last couple of days. That's an accomplishment. That's something good. And I can take that and channel that into doing more things that I want to. And you can market it as rather than Goodreads, which gives you that dopamine hit. Oh, no. I don't do that. I don't do that. It's all private.
Interestingly, it's moving from these low time cycles of 60 seconds raise, five minutes dopamine hits, etc. to these longer term cycles where there is some more accomplishment. That's also where we need to move. It's like, hey, reading a book is a longer process, but it could be in the long term way more rewarding than those five minutes phase that this type of games and things ultimately get you distracted from the other.
Yeah. Hey, this has been a super interesting chat, hearing all of your stories. Again, it's really interesting because the specific things that challenged you are not things that I struggled with, but then like... All of us had different experiences and had different things that sucked us in and realizations that we came to. I think that was a really interesting part of it. Yeah, I agree. I mean it has been a great conversation.
It was expected, but I'm also shocked to see all these commonalities that we have found. I think that's a very, very interesting thing. Thank you, Ilja, very much for coming and for having this conversation. I really appreciate it a lot. I remember the first time that we talked was part of my strategy of getting out of...
a bunch of things. It's like, okay, I'm going to reach one person that I don't know every month, and I've been doing that, and you were the second, something like that. So that was great. I appreciate that conversation, and I appreciate the connection. If you want to close, tell us a little bit where folks can find Metacast. Can I just first say that this was very therapeutic?
I really enjoyed that discussion. Also hearing that you struggle with the same things. You know, it just makes you feel like... okay so it's not just something wrong with me it's all them pushing all this content on us in the feed right it's all of us man it's all of us yeah it's the best of us who struggle with it and the world is doomed. No, I'm just kidding. But also, I feel there is a bit of hope that we are more conscious about this. We are having this discussion.
really good. I really appreciate spending this time with YouTube. It was really nice. As far as where people can find us, metacast.app. is the app that we build. It's a podcast app that has transcripts. Basically, what we optimize for, we want to build the best podcast app that helps you learn from podcasts. Podcast is a huge amount of knowledge. There are 75 million episodes that have been published.
The podcast apps try to push you the latest in the biggest, but there is so much gold in the long tail. And our goal is to make all of that discoverable. We are still very early. Download the app on metacast.app for iOS and Android and check it out and join our subreddit at r slash metacast app. where we happily engage with all our customers the amazon way we want to hear back from people and build the app that really works for everybody for everybody in our target
Interestingly, podcasts are a nice alternative to the never-ending scrolling of social media and YouTube that we have been discussing. Exactly. Yeah, it's long-form content that you mostly consume when you're doing something else. Nobody just sits down and listens to podcasts. You are doing dishes or you're driving or you're running. You can't distract.
And that's what I love about podcasts. And there is nothing to look at. You just listen and get inspiration, get knowledge, all sorts of good things that you can get from podcasts. Yeah, and we also have a podcast called Metacast Behind the Scenes that you can get at metacastpodcast.com. All right, I'll just thank you very much. Thank you folks for listening and till the next time. And that's it for this episode of Bytes in Balance.
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