I just sat down to play and sing. And here I was like, I don't really want to play. I just want to have a Huggly guitar. So I was sitting down with that classical guitar, placing my hands on it and just hugging it. And it felt good. But the inside I had at that moment is that I have these guitars and I have this drum kit, which I barely play. Sounds like my deliscoes.
Hello and welcome to Metacast, the podcast about podcasting, where we are talking about podcasting. I guess. Today is a special day because today we are also recording video. We still remain committed to audio, but we just want to experiment with video and see how it performs on platforms like YouTube. We should also upload it to Android, which is now a Spotify for podcasters.
And see how it performs on Spotify. We just want to play with video. Well, I want to play with video like Earth, Arnav, it'll play with video as well. So one thing that we should really keep in mind, Arnav, today is that if you say something that's visible on the video, we might have to explain to people who just listen what we are talking about. Like if I say, oh, nice t-shirt. Well, now I have to explain that you have this nice t-shirt with an Orcas tail from which state park?
Let me stand up so you can see it. People can listen because we just see it now. Yeah. It's a nice t-shirt. It's from Line Kill Point State Park in Washington State, Northern part of Washington State. And people on video can actually see the Orcas in the water. And it really is like that, where that's a place where you do a short, very short walk down to the water shoreline.
And you used to be able to see Orcas right by the water. The Orcas of this area, the Pacific Northwest, they're undergoing some challenges. They are not visiting that area anymore and their numbers are decreasing too. Oh, such a set start to our meta-suit. Yeah. But it's the it's reality. So talking about video, I wasn't feeling very good. I have a headache going on and stuff.
But Ilya said, hey, let's put on some nice t-shirts. I'm going to wear my Metallica thing. They have your full fighters. And for the life of me, I could not find anything related to music anywhere. And there I did donate a whole lot of t-shirts about three, four months back. So maybe I did that. I don't know. But this is a nice one. I really like this shirt. Nice. I really wanted to wear our Metacast t-shirt, but I couldn't find it.
But it's only been like a week that we've done it. Maybe it's just been in the dryer somewhere or in the dirty clothing bin. So yeah, I wear the Metac Lica shirt, which is the next best thing for this podcast. I know you said videos, so we can't edit easily and stuff like that. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed behind my head or whatever. But we do have another dog. I usually have my dog with me. We are also babysitting or dog sitting a dog.
So we'll see how this goes. How much anything we have to do or not have to do. This is the perfect episode to showcase the dogs. Maybe they'll come in at some point anyway. And I have this awesome setup right now. So basically I spent a couple of hours today with my son setting up this room. It kind of kept him occupied while I was doing that. So I have two lights that I've had for maybe seven years that really light me up.
And those who watch the video, they can see how actually cool it looks much better than I thought. I'm using my iPhone 14 Pro. The smaller one, not the maximum. Fancy. Yeah, to record the video. So basically I have a selfie stick with a tripod right behind my laptop. I'm looking at it right now. And my Mac is using my iPhone's camera to do the recording, which is just mind blowing that it actually works. Oh, yeah. That logs recently, right? With iOS 16 or then the latest Mac update.
Occasionally it gets triggered like I'm in a work conference call and it starts to show people contents of my pocket or something. Because it just turns on the phone camera for some reason automatically automatically. Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why it doesn't. I don't know if it's a Google Meet or if it's some Apple stuff. I have no idea. But it works really, really nice. I was comparing it to two of my HD webcams today. And the quality is just, I mean, you can see the quality, right?
It looks so much better. Yeah. And your background too. Now that you say it, you have like a very tastefully placed drum set and your guitar in there. When you first start joined this session on Squatcast, I first thought that looks like one of those zoom backgrounds almost. You know how you're sitting in a snowy cafe or like on the beach? Right. Yeah. It looks so good. But it's all real. Or at least I believe it's real. And to make it even more real, I can actually tell people to listen.
That's a crash symbol. No, it's a right. It's a crash. And we didn't sound that in that day at all. We promise you. Yeah. So I have this drum kit. Actually, that's interesting thing since we start talking about music. Yeah. I was out in Peru, like in the jungle, it retreat. And I really wanted to play the guitar. And one person there had a guitar with her. So I grabbed the guitar from her and I just sat down to play and sing and realize like, I don't really want to play.
I just want to hug the guitar. So I was sitting down with that classical guitar, placing my hands on it and just hugging it. And it felt good. But the inside I had at that moment is that I have these guitars and I have this drum kit, which I barely play ever. I maybe play this drum kit maybe 10 times in the last four months. And my guitars play like once a month, twice a month.
Sounds like my telescopes. Yeah. I was filled guilty about it though. Right. But then what that moment in Peru made me realize is that it's actually okay to have a musical instrument or any other kind of thing. Just being placed on the wall where you can see it and just enjoy the sight of it. And that's just okay. Like you can buy whatever a Monet picture for like thousands of bucks, right? Or maybe millions of bucks.
And all you do with it is enjoy. Why can't I enjoy my 500 dollar guitar like that? Yeah. Yeah. Talking about enjoying, I think you were missing AWS too much, right? So you put on those EC2 looking blocks behind you. So for those people who are listening behind me, I have those sound absorption panels in the shape of a cell. We will do a squad shot so you can see those on the picture. So yeah, put those on the wall so that they reduce the echo in the room, the reverberation room.
I think people who are not used to AWS or cloud may recognize like they're basically honeybee nest shape. Yeah, I brought some really awesome honey from Peru, but that's it. We all was done with it. Talking about all that, I think we should at least say what episode the cats it is and let that start with that. So that's a tricky part, right? When we recorded our last meta-sode, which was meta-sode, I think it's what's episode 11 that comes out next week.
But today is March 12th when we record this. It's March 12th and this episode is coming out on 5th of April. Yes, this episode will come out on April 5th and this episode number 13. Yeah, 13. So when we recorded our last episode, we said that we were looking forward to the Sounders FC guests from the Sounders FC podcast. And that was supposed to be our episode number 12 that recording got canceled for now.
Hopefully it will be rescheduled, but now since the season just started, it may be rescheduled like in the 2024. I'm going to be surprised, right? So they said like how much should we talk about the future given how unknown the future is? Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. And we record like at least a month or a month and a half I had to. So things changed quite a lot. Yeah. So instead of Sounders FC people, our episode number 12 was with Ronak and Guang from the software, Miss Adventures podcast.
So actually, I know how I'm going to call this meta-suit. I'm going to call it the podcasting Miss Adventures meta-suit. It's going well. Yeah. Yeah. I listen to half of that episode today. I think it's a very good episode. I'm going to give edits to be done though. But one thing I wanted to just call out right away just to give our listeners and viewers now some context.
Our process is such that when we record an episode with guests, then I would usually put all of those tracks together, mix them without edits and send them to our naps so that he can listen to those. And I would also listen to them occasionally. And that helps us prepare for the meta-suit recordings. Meta-suit is a meta-episode about previous episodes and just podcasting in general with no guests.
But this time what we did is we just went to squadcast the tool we use for recording and downloaded the mixed version as a cloud recording, which kind of serves the needs that we have. We just need to listen to something that's very rough. Quality doesn't matter, we just need to listen to the content to remind ourselves what we were talking about. However, the quality of that cloud recording is just absolutely horrible.
Especially Gwangs because he was in Mexico City. His latency was probably higher than ours who were in the US and Canada. But the podcast quality will be great because it's only recorded locally. It's just such a great showcase for why you need to record locally versus rely on like Zoom or other tools. And we're going to do a bit of details behind this. So we are using squadcast to record it.
Squadcast, it's like Zoom. You're on a Zoom call. So you can see everybody and you're like talking at the same time and you're recording. Squadcast is recording everything locally, but also pretty much real time uploading it into their cloud. So we had four people on the last episode. So there would be four individual audio tracks of those four people in squadcast. You can download all four tracks individually.
This is what Ilya used to do in preparation for our metasodes. When we do the metasode, we want to listen to the full episode so that we kind of remember what we talked about and we bring in interesting points from there and all that. And so what Ilya would do is download those four tracks and then stitch them together and there would be like time drafts and all that and you'll have to adjust and maybe do some first layer of editing at the same time.
This time we decided let's not wait for all that and it takes a lot of time. Let's just use the cloud recording. That was the first realization I had is how bad the quality is especially for Guang. He would sometimes say things that drift away or there's a different pitch to it towards the end of the sentence. Yeah, lots of crackly noise. Basically, like what you hear in log distance calls over any kind of messenger, right?
Because they try to compress the audio so much that there's so much lost frames, I guess. Data was data. Yeah. And I think the other effect of that was also when we had four people talking and all four streams are like simultaneously there's some audio coming in from it.
It was almost impossible to understand what's being said. And this is the amazing thing once we actually download those individual local recorded audio streams and do the amazing sound editing when you folks, the listeners or the viewers of this when you hear that episode, you won't know any of that. I still don't know any of the details of the process, but the whole thing is amazing.
Yeah, actually right now I hear a bit of static in my ears. So I don't know where the static is coming from. So I guess we'll have to figure out if Misha can edit that. Yeah. And yeah, I will see. So talking about Misha, I think that was one of the things I want to quickly bring up. Do you want to tell us about Masha and Misha? Masha and Misha. Yeah.
I think we talked briefly about both of them in the previous episodes. First of all, both of them will be listening to this. So I guess we should say hi. I'm Misha. Hi, Masha. So Masha is the sister of my wife who is currently a student in a university in St. Petersburg in Russia. And she studied in foreign languages, one of which is English.
So yeah, I offered her a little gig to help her make a little money and help us produce her podcast. She has just done with our episode 11. I showed her how to edit things in the script, like how you remove things that you don't need. It shouldn't be there like filler words, pauses that belong and stuff like that. So yeah, she is doing that in the script while also practicing her English and getting the first job on her resume.
Actually, I'm yet to listen to the results of her work, which I'll listen to tomorrow and assuming everything is good. I'm going to take what she's edited and sent it to Misha for audio engineering where he would apply EQ, been equalizer, remove breaths, all this kind of stuff that's more like technical. Yeah. So basically she's our editor, content editor, yeah.
And he's our sound editor, yeah, like some engineer coming back to Ronan and go on episode the point I want to make about that cloud recording. Because basically what you get in cloud recording is what you hear while you talk is like what's been streamed and the quality just absolutely horrible, which we don't notice as we speak.
But if you listen to that, it just becomes apparent. So I did your podcast, I guess there's no quick and dirty way. You just have to actually do some work and or spend money to make it sound good. So in that episode, Guang's he's like traveling or no, he's actually living in Mexico City right now. And he's apartment actually lost power while we were recording.
So he was gone from the stream for a little bit and then came back again after maybe about 10 minutes or so. And after the recording, Ilya, you and I had like, how the heck are we going to edit all of that sync it. It's going to be so much work. I'm wondering we haven't done the editing yet, but I'm wondering how hard it would be to process and what really have to do.
I guess here is logistics. So we have one long file for both of us because we were during the entire time. Then we have Ronax file, which started the same time as ours, but finished sooner because he had to drop. And then we have two files from Guang, one of them starts with everybody else. And then there was a small gap because he was absent for maybe a minute. But then his file ends were our files end because we finished recording at the same time.
So I think what I'll be able to do is basically all the four files will start at the same time. So it will be easy to think. I mean, it's like synch by default. Then Ronax file will just end wherever it ends doesn't matter. But then the second Guang file, I'll sync to where our files end. And that will hopefully give us that gap in between. But I think what I'll have to do is I'll have to actually go through the speaker transitions in that episode before I send it to much.
Because I think it will be a bit too much for her to edit with all the love and stuff. Yeah. Given the score, like second episode, I think it's a bit too much. Yeah. When I was listening to the metasod, we also spoke over each other quite a lot. I don't know how this script is going to handle that. That'll be fun. Oh, it's such a pain as to handle this in the script because you have to switch between the text mode and proper multi track mode.
And that proper multi track mode leaves much to be desired. It's not powerful enough compared to like a reaper and other tools where you can just like quickly do something in fraction of a second in this script, you might spend 10 seconds to do the thing I could do in one second in the reaper. Right. So if Guang had dropped one more time, that middle segment. So he joined and it's sync to when we start.
And the last segment would be sync to when we end makes sense. The middle one. How would you put that in? Would you have to listen to the whole thing again and again to figure it out? I think so. Yeah. Well, the way this could work because mostly only one person speaks at the time. You hope so.
You know, when you ask question and one person responds to you will have that place in audio where let's say three of our tracks yours mine and run acts. We either have silence or we have just tiny blips, maybe like laughs or some filler words like right or yes or whatever. And then Guang's file would have some speech. They would like more or less match in terms of the length, like length of silence in our tracks versus length of speech and his.
I could align it that way. It doesn't have to be perfect. Some of the worst things I had to deal with previously is syncing video with audio because if you have different what they call the hurts one is the frame rate frequency frame rate. I think it's a frame rate. Yeah. I think my camera was recording at 44.1 kilohertz and my audio was recording at 48 K.
What you get is like it starts fine, but then it just starts drift over time. And I think I was doing like some musical instrument kind of stuff like playing a guitar and recording that. So within the five minutes, I was doing that. There was drift. I forgot what I had to do, but it was just so infuriating. Right. That's it to edit that.
The other thing was also it highlighted to me the importance to have isolated audio tracks because there were quite a few times when I was listening to the cloud recording, which is that quality we know already. Where people are like somebody's laughing while somebody's trying to say something. And I can't understand what they're trying to say anymore or three or four people are talking at the same time.
This is where if you have isolated tracks, you can suppress the volume of those other tracks and give boost to the one of those tracks. One interesting thing about that recording is that we were saying just how great squat cast was. We were giving it all the praise deserves. And then after finished recording, we thought we lost the files. I even had to open the support ticket to squat cast. The problem, however, was that the user interface was a bit confusing.
It was showing some kind of like a line or something that I thought meant that it's 100% done. But as a support person explained to me, if you see the line, it means that it's still processing that just wasn't clear to me. And we can freaked out for a second because the files weren't uploaded. Then they were uploaded, but we just couldn't download them for some reason. That didn't happen to us before I think because we didn't check right away when we recorded video.
First of all, we recorded video and I think because we did video, we just took a little longer. Then we were checking it right away and I think that also contributed to our anxiety. Plus there was a lot of drifts and all that, not drifts, but thinking like Guang Rob came back again. There were multiple files and things going on. Then I think Guang closed this browser window too and then you send them an email and he opened it anyway. At the end of it, I think it was all perfect.
Yeah, at the end of it, it's all just fine, but we freaked out for a moment. Actually, to be fair, it was quadcast, so everything worked just fine. It's just user interface that could have been a little bit more intuitive there. And their support, they responded within 10 minutes, 15 minutes, very quickly. And that was awesome. I think within an hour, we had everything sorted out.
One thing I wanted to bring up about the podcast is I think that one turned out more as a discussion rather than an interview. Because they were all secure and how we record our podcast. Actually, it ended up being less of us just asking questions, but more of us asking questions, but also them asking some of those questions back to us. Because they were all secure. So yeah, that was pretty cool. I really liked the vibe of it. I was listening to the episode I really liked.
I was very engaging. I can't believe that it was one hour, 20 minutes, but I didn't know when I started listening. I mean, I know when I started listening, but I didn't know that it literally was so quickly. It was very engaging. You actually finished listening to the whole thing? Yeah, in one session. Oh, wow. Yeah. I'll listen to half an hour because that's just how much I had to drive today. No, I went for a dog walk. I was listening at about 1.1x, I think. It was a long, beautiful sunny day.
Sorry, it was a long dog walk. I didn't think that I would finish it. There's a point about five minutes before the end where we say, oh, we have to wrap up. That's when I looked at it and I think, wow, yeah, it was very engaging. Well, it's good. It's good. I found it to be very enjoyable. One thing I found a bit jarring about that cloud recording is that the volumes of tracks were so different. I think Guangs was a very loud compared to Ronux.
So I was driving ahead to turn the volume knob back for a little bit. Because I almost had to listen to the max volume when Ronux was talking. Then Guang would come in, or one of us would come in and do just too loud. And I would have to take a look back. And my car, it's a good car. But the volume knob is just absolutely infuriating because it could be better. It's not too sensitive enough, I think. You have to really turn it many times, many oscillations to make it quieter.
Two cores, the steps. Yeah, the steps are maybe too grander because I actually want them to be more cores-grane. Yeah. The other thing I want to call out is how they talked about how it was really nice to receive an email from you. Ereging your email. They could really see that you actually know their stuff. You've listened to many episodes and it was a very nice email and they actually praised you for writing that email.
Because they also said how many emails they get, like people asking just to be on the podcast and some ads or whatever, right? Yours was very different. And I just have this flashback to back in October, I think. I first started emailing people. One of the tasks we had was to come up with a template and then we quickly scratched that because the template wouldn't be any good. If we reach out to people, we actually have to know what they do.
Just from a purely pragmatic perspective, there's the chances of getting the response. It has to be an email that touches something personally, right? The template just wouldn't cut it. One of the emails, I forgot which one it was, but I spent an hour writing a three-paragraph email. And well, I got yes. So it was worth it. I guess could us to us for writing those awesome emails that get people to respond and come to our podcast.
So who's the next guest that's coming that like reading the email that you sent? Oh my God. A finger crossed that nothing gets canceled or anything. We are getting Justin Frankel, who is the founder of Winam, which is the app that I get the goosebumps. But maybe after my early 20s, teens and early 20s, I used Winam to listen to MP3 files. I assume you used it too in India. Yeah. I mean, I think everywhere. I was listening to the interview of Justin Frankel with Brian McCullough.
He wasn't Brian McCullough's inter-adhesive podcast in 2015. The audio quality is absolutely terrible because they recorded it in the conference room. And it's actually pretty hard to listen to. I feel shameless about asking maybe some of those the same questions that Brian asked. Because his quality is just so hard to listen to that we could give listeners the same question about quality. And we could call out Brian when we talk about that.
When I was listening to that, Brian was saying that everywhere in the US, in all of the dorm rooms, people who are reading Winam play files, they download it from the internet and Napster and all that. I don't think it was just the US. When I was in college, we had a land like that too, so that everybody could get access to everybody's. You didn't call it pirated music because that term did not exist. That was the way to share music. You just put it on a land and everybody gets it from there.
Every single person had Winam running there everywhere. Yeah, Winam was awesome. But even more importantly for our field, Justin Frankel, after he was done with working for AOL, American Line, after it acquired Winam, he went on to found Cocos, which is the name of the company. We will have to ask you about the name of the company that way. And that company created Ripper. He said, I created Ripper in that interview, so I'm curious how much code he actually wrote himself.
I will be surprised if he wrote most of the core code, at least of the early versions. So yeah, Ripper is the digital audio workstation that we use. I mean, I've used for the last seven years or so. All of our episodes are produced in Ripper. Actually, Misha posted a message in one of the chats with other podcasters saying, hey, you're interviewing this guy. I have questions sent them to me. So he's going to send me some questions later today.
We will see some, hopefully some questions from the field, you know. So I'm super excited about that. And another one that's upcoming is Viman Hookout podcast. We already have it in our calendar. So unless things go wrong, we will have that as well. And one of the things we're talking about in the Rona Kedguang episode is when you get started, people just say yes and come to your show and spend time with you and just help you out. And it's not just for podcast, right?
When you're earlier in your career, if you just ask, most people will say no, but some people will say yes. I don't think most people will say no. If you know how to ask it, I think most people will say yes. Actually, it's a good point. Yeah, some people may not see your stuff because it goes into some kind of spam and email or LinkedIn. If you get too many, I guess you have to be very careful about what kind of level of people you ask for things. It has to be appropriate, both for you and them.
Yeah. Right. Yeah, like somebody I know recently, he posted on LinkedIn. He said something like, I want to start a podcast and I want the first guest on my show to be like Friedman. Can anybody connect me to like Friedman? I let her pink. So very able to connect to like Friedman. He's like, no, and he sent him some messages he'd reply and nobody could connect him because that person is just so high in hierarchy, social hierarchy, I guess. Or podcasting hierarchy.
That it's a gas almost impossible for folks like us to get him unless we actually know someone who he would know really, really, really well. And we just do us a favor, you know, we have to actually do that person a favor, not us. This is just something to keep in mind. Even if you are in a career situation, if you just send a message to Vice President at Google or something, you will probably not get a response at all.
Whereas if you send a message to an engineer at Google, you actually might get a response. The exception to this, I think very well generic rule is Elon Musk. And I think if you send a tweet to him, he will respond. Oh my god. So I start using Twitter again. So by the way, you should promote our social handles more. So our not social handle is impossible to spell. So it just looked for it in the show notes. Mine is just my last name.
It's actually meant to be very easy and it's the same one everywhere. It's because I wanted it to be AR and maybe my first name, but the only place where I got that was GitHub. And everywhere else, I believe there's a person called Arnaud Nandi or somebody else. They basically got it everywhere else. And people mispronounced my name quite a lot. So they pronounce it with a zero in the nine right? Yes. Well, talking about Elon Musk, I think.
Yeah. You know what I'm talking about his first child or I don't know which child, but one of their names is. Well, you should look it up, but yeah, it's very different, unique. Getting back to it, most people in India, my name is pronounced as Arnaud. Right? Whereas where I come from in Assam, it's pronounced more like Arnaud. So I wanted to add that a little bit while trying to get a unique handle that I could get everywhere. The one that I got was like Doorknob, but you cut the D. Okay.
Arnaud. Yeah. So Arnaud. Let me try to spell it back to you. So it's zero, R, nine, OB. Yep. Right? Yeah. Okay. I can never spell it. You did good. Yeah. I just told you first name, let's say on Instagram. And it matches your nickname to your alias. What do you call it? Yeah, user name. User name. Yeah. So what's yours? It's the left. So it's just my last name, which also will be I guess hard to pronounce or remember for people who don't know the language.
Because actually in Russian language, it means somebody who does no work like lazy person. Yeah. Which is quite an opposite of how I see myself. But yeah, so for Russian speakers, it's easy to remember. I'm really curious about how that last name came to be now. For multiple generations, I probably had a slacker somewhere. Because my dad, my granddad, also very hard working, my great granddad, very hard working. I mean, who better the same family name.
So it must be my great, great granddad or before beyond that. Yeah. It's like somebody in 19th century. But speaking about the reason why I brought it up is I haven't used Twitter for a long time and I wanted to promote it already. So I posted it there. And actually, it felt good to tweet. I don't know. It just somehow it felt good. And then it wrote something like, I'll give it a fourth try. And then I wanted to tag Elon Musk just to see what happens.
And then I'm like, if he responds, I don't know if I want Elon Musk to respond to me because it might just happen to me. Well, there's nothing like bad publicity, right? There's some bad energy about bad publicity. No, no, I'm kidding. Yeah, there is absolutely bad things about bad publicity. Yeah, yeah. I'm now watching this show, Super Pumped. I think it's what's called about Uber. Have you watched that? No. Oh, it's on HBO, I think, right? Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So they've got a lot of bad publicity. I mean, Uber. And oh my God, it's just so awful. And a lot of it deservedly for all of it, deservedly. I can't expect that. But yeah, first some terrible things about Uber. Actually, I personally only used to work a couple of times. I always used lift. I only want to have good vibes. One quick thing. We actually got our first reading. I think in Spotify, one of our friends told us that she gave us a reading.
Great. Thank you. Yay. And I also got a bit of private feedback. Somebody emailed me saying that they're really enjoying all our episodes. And it's like they hear my voice and they know me from like a long time back. Right. So they're really enjoying it. But at the same time, the metasodes are very long. So I think maybe aiming for 45 minutes to an hour or something like that might be good. And we're about 42 minutes in. So I just wanted to drop that in.
So I also got some good feedback from our friend James. Let's say hi to James. Actually, James is listening to his send us a note. That's how he does. If you listen to James sent the message a couple of days ago, saying that he would enjoy the primers out about Sandman. And I've been trying to sell him on Sandman for the last three years. I think the comics are the audiobook or the comics and the audiobook. I mean, first in comics, they're then an audiobook.
Because I think first time I tried to sell him on the Sandman, the audiobook hadn't come out yet. So it was all about the comics. Yeah. And he said that our primers. So it finally convinced him to listen to the book, the audio version, which was good. It's like impact. You know, influence. We should probably do a second version or second revision of the primisode at some point. I'll just add like I won't take more than 25 seconds. I promise. But I'll see something about the Sandman.
Hopefully we won't go this time on a tangent. Okay. By the way, for people who did not know about this in one of the episodes, I forget which one. Ilya and I started recording a metasode. But we basically spent like an hour and a half talking about Sandman and comics and other stuff, where we decided, okay, we'll make this a primisode. And that became our episode seven. Seven point five. Seven point five. Yes. Because which is not prime. But anyway. But anyway, about the audiobook, right?
So after we talked, I watched the show on Netflix. I haven't finished it, but I watched quite a few episodes. And I started listening to the audiobook too. The thing that I got was if I know the content very well, either from having read the comics or having watched the show, the audio series was amazing. But when I drifted the audio part to more than what I had already seen on TV, I had a very hard time keeping it all in my head about who's speaking, what are they talking about?
You have to know the content for that audio book to make sense, I think. Oh, it's interesting. Because I already had all these images from the comic books. And to your point, the plot is very complex. All these multiple dimensions and all these characters. And the same characters being represented in different shapes and sizes and genders or whatever. Actually, not gender. The gender is always the same in the comic books, but changes their appearance in names depending on the time.
So yeah, we can totally get it. I think it goes best with comics because it's a one-to-one match. Yeah, and I think that includes your 25 seconds. Yes. So what were some of your takeaways from that episode that we recorded last month? I think the part that I enjoyed the most was hearing guan's things about working from different places, living in different places. And I have always wanted to do that, but I have a kid and a dog who keep me rooted, happily rooted into this place where I am in.
But I think otherwise, I probably would have tried to do something like that too. So I really enjoyed talking to him about that. And talking about Mexico, I am going to Mexico this coming week for a short one week break, really excited. The first time I went is last year, and I really like the culture and the language and the people. So I started basically a journey of picking up Spanish. I won't say I'm even at the intermediate level at this point, but I do know the basics now.
And this time when I go, I am hoping to have a lot of conversations all in Spanish. Let's see how it goes. So next time you start an intro to our episode, you should say, Hala, Hala, Hala, see. Come with that. Yeah, I knew we would drift into the career discussion with these guys, so it was really interesting as always.
Sometimes, you know, like when I talk to folks who are like single and have no children, maybe I'll say younger than I am, I would be like, this is the prettiest travel you can, right? Or leaving different places, like before we had our first child, we lived in three or four different countries. Because it was easy. We could just move any time we wanted. I mean, any time things had to align, job and all that, and immigration. But there was no school to take care of.
There was no house to sell or anything like that. We didn't even have cars. So you just like pack your stuff, can you lend lower the keys back and off you go. But now, with the remote work, you can also just travel and work from anywhere. During COVID, actually, I spent so much time working from other places like Hawaiian, Florida, I mean, before we moved to Florida, I also spent a few months in Russia. That was just so liberating.
I could never go back to an N5 in the office again, even if you're from massage or whatever. Like, I think my freedom is to know. I can sell it for the in-office stuff. I think at the same time, though, there is something to be said about what Ronak brought about, like the face-to-face connection. And once he said it, I realized I'd never thought about it that way. When you're fully remote or during COVID, everybody would have felt this.
You start your day, let's say, with a meeting and you end your day with a meeting. Those meetings immediately start with the agenda. Whereas if you're in person, you're maybe walking to a conference room together with somebody. And you're talking about life. That sort of connection is very hard to make in the remote world. Yeah, I agree. I was solving so many problems in hallways when we were in the office. You just go to grab some water and you meet someone and chat with them for five minutes.
And you no longer need a meeting. You just solve your problems that way. It's only when you really have to get the entire team together or something. Then you get everybody in the room. I also remember just how many things were solved because our entire pod was sitting in the same area. Yeah. And it was a small team. It was a small team, too. Yeah. So you were just like, hey everyone, or just send a message and chat. Like, can you come to my desk or something?
And then you just talk to everybody. It was just so good. Yeah, we didn't have to plan for happy hours. We just bring drinks to the office. And then just at the end of the work day, we just started. Yeah, it was just so easy to do. And I missed that. I missed working in a very small team in the collocated space. I think towards the end of my job at Amazon, I was working with about four and a half different teams. And one of those teams I was working pretty much a lot with.
The other ones were like more, I won't say formal, but like more hands-off kind of work. Towards the end, I had started making some progress into this where basically figure out my calendar or molded it in a way that allows people that they know that between this and this time, he is available. And I'm just going to send a message and I used to be able to make some time on the fly like that. And that felt great. And it helps those engineers quite a lot.
Because before that, I think my calendar was scheduled in such a way that you would basically have to schedule something like a week or two weeks after. And if I force people to do that to schedule a meeting with me like two weeks after, they're never going to come and discuss those interesting immediate problems. I started enjoying it towards the end, the way I had set it up.
Yeah, one thing I really like how it's set up at Google is that it's kind of the best practice or common practice to make the calendar events editable by anybody who's invited to them. So basically if you have a one-on-one with somebody and then you need to move things around for whatever reason, they can do it even a few schedule it or some group meetings. Somebody else can just reschedule it if it doesn't work or if it works better on some other day, which creates more churny in the calendar.
But at the same time, it reduces the churn in communication because things just move around and it just works itself out. Yeah, I really like that aspect of it. It also moves that churn to the person who needs to move it. Because otherwise that person will contact the owner of the meeting saying like, hey, I can't make this. Can you find it? And then now it's the owner who has to communicate with everybody to figure out a new slot.
Right. Yes. Let's conclude this. I was watching a couple of videos on lighting today for like how you like do good lighting for your video recordings. I was clicking links for the equipment that one of these people shared and I was looking at these lights. It's like a light bulb in a box kind of thing. It's like almost a thousand bucks. And you need two of these and you also need a colorful strip behind you so it's all colorful and good.
And all these cameras that cost like two and a half thousand bucks. I'm like, oh my god, it's actually pretty expensive to be a creator on YouTube. If you want to produce those really high quality looking videos, maybe think about, do you first get popular, start making money. And then buy the equipment or actually these days you have to first buy all that equipment.
So you actually stand a chance to become popular because in the era of high quality appearances, you might just be dismissed because you don't look well on video obviously. There's probably a good middle ground there. First of all, your content or whatever you're making has to be good. If it's not, you've wasted all that money and you may not know whether people like it or not before you produce it.
And in case so actually the cost of the things that I'm using right now, I think looks pretty decent. I think the most expensive thing that I'm using right now is a drum kit. Which I think it was about two thousand bucks. It's a very nice Yamaha stage, something drum kit that I don't play. But I just like to look at it. The lights I'm using, they were 70 years ago, they were 200 bucks for four lights and this kind of the green screen thing and all that stuff.
They kind of on the cheaper side. And it's pretty much it. So I feel like actually you can be creative and achieve some of that with lower price equipment. And also like using the iPhone, I'm surprised actually how good the recording is. I'm really really surprised. So yeah, we'll see how that comes out. And I'm not using anything other than a lamp light that I've basically there's a wall behind me, which is a brightly colored wall.
And I've made the lamp focus towards the wall so that I'm getting some glow back from the wall into it. That's pretty much it. There's a lamp here. And I'm using a blue Yeti mic put on top of the, let me actually show some of the dogman books. Dogman books. Yes. That's it. Yeah, actually it wasn't even so funny if James instead of saying that he got cooked on sandman if he said he got to cook on the dogman. Yeah, I guess his kids are too grown up for the dogman at this point.
Yeah. And my older kid no longer the rich dogman. Yeah, my younger one is too small for it yet. Same here. I mean, my younger one is a dog so he doesn't read dogman at all sadly. But yeah, this is why I'm using the books as a stand for the microphone. All right. So let's end with that. And they want to you usual speech about give us a five star review. People should know it already, but if you don't then yeah, leave us a five star review. Send us feedback.
If you're not comfortable leaving it there, just send us an email. We are both on hello at Metacast podcast.com. And you can find all our other links in the show notes of this episode. No, but you sent us an email. Yeah. In the hello at thing, right? But people have reached out both to you and me through email and signal and all that and giving us feedback. These are all people that we know. Yeah. I think the time when somebody actually shares our content somewhere. Would you like yes.
It's like somebody who doesn't know as well who we don't know. Actually enjoyed it and shared it. I also feel a bit actually tired today. I think this episode is kind of a slow zone. Also, I think the fact that we decided to do video maybe made us a bit conscious and we kind of spoke slowly and all that we'll see. I'm so happy. Conscious. I'll have to show it now to the camera. But this bottle, it's a contigo bottle. People who listening, it's like this bottle looks very used.
It's because I've had it for maybe six years. I just love this bottle so much. It said no machine washing on the hand wash. But like, I'm not going to wash my bottle like by hand every day. So I washed it in the washing machine and that's why all that paint just came off. I don't care. But now that we are doing the video, they made me drink less. So that bottle always with you? Yeah. I mean, you would have seen it when we were working the time.
Why I bring that up is I'm leading slowly towards a Spanish word job this time. Okay. The level has been raised. So contigo in Spanish means literally with you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The cool thing about this bottle is I'm going to have to show it in the video, but people can just look it up. So this bottle, it has a button that you press and it opens the thing here that you drink from. And it also has a lock. So if you press it lock, the button will be pressed.
So you can drop it into your backpack and it won't spill. But also when you want to drink, you just press the button and just sip from it. And there are no straws or anything like that that I generally don't like because you have to wash them. There's like bacteria in there. I don't like that. So this stuff is just so ergonomically, I don't know, it's better than any bottle I've ever had. I think I've had four of this in my life so far, but I lost three of them.
Same kind of feeling like you that this is always with me. It's a hydroflask. It's a roller kind of thing where it locks and doesn't leak and there's no straw. It's so simple. I love it. There are no promotions, right? We are not getting paid by hydroflask or contigo. It should be nice to pay for a little bit of contigo. Okay, cool, cool, cool. I guess if you watch the video, that was something. Somebody would literally say something. Okay, if the engineers they might, yeah, well, do that.
All right, see you next week. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.