19. Promoting Our Podcast on Social Networks (Metasode)

Wait, are you saying we received a review that you're going to read now? Yeah. I mean, you were surprised at the quality of these reviews. But yeah, let's go for it. Hello, and welcome to Metacost. And this is Ilya, your host. And with me is Arnab from sunny Vancouver, where it is crazy hot today. Yeah, I think temperature wise, it's not that hot. It's like 22 degrees Celsius, but it feels like it's burning outside. And there's already some wildfire reports in BC and also.

It's a crazy start to the summer. Today is only May 2nd. Yeah, I'm in Florida, right? So we are starting to get that crazy hot season. It's starting to get really, really hot. And hurricanes? Yeah, hurricanes will come later. Actually, there was a tornado watch a few weeks ago. I was driving to Miami from where I live, just north of Fort Lauderdale. And I was approaching the Fort Lauderdale airport on the highway. It was like actually blue skies. It was pretty nice.

There was a sign that says Fort Lauderdale airport closed. And then a couple of miles afterwards, it started to pour so much. I was driving maybe 30, 40 miles per hour. Barely seen anything. It was just incredible. I saw the news about that one, like the whole flood in the airport and all. Yeah, the airport just got flooded. I think it was closed for two days. And Fort Lauderdale is a pretty large airport. Not as big as Miami, but it has a few terminals.

So yeah, but speaking about crazy hot stuff, I saw this ad on the street the other day.

I was driving the highway and there is a woman in a suggestive pose. And she looks like a woman from the Playboy magazine in the 80s or something. And the text says, your wife is hot. Call Air Around the Clock. So Air Around the Clock is an air conditioning servicing company here in South Florida. They're pretty popular. I actually called them once and didn't like their service. So it's an anti-ad for them. I don't like that ad, by the way.

It's so old school, chauvinistic, male focused. It's like a strip club kind of thing, but like on the billboard. Tone down strip club. So they tried to push me to buy a new unit because my unit is kind of old. Wait, how did they get hold of you? No, so I had an issue with my AC. AC just shut off. Their billboard worked. You remembered their name and you called them. And I'm like, my wife is hot. So I need to call them.

Actually, no. The previous owner of the house was using this company for servicing. And their sticker was on the unit itself, on the AC unit. So I called them and the guy came in same day. It was all good. Very nice customer service over the phone. And then the guy is like, oh, your AC is 12 years old or whatever. And like the useful life is 10 years. So let's order you a new one. And just so you know, the new one is like 10,000 bucks or so. It's not cheap, right?

Yeah. I'm like, no, thank you. I'll wait until it dies and then we'll figure it out. It was a year ago, by the way. But then the same week, his supervisor calls me. He's like, hey, this is Marco, whatever his name was. And let's place an order for your new unit. I'm like, no. Don't call me again. And then I found another company, which is like a small. Actually, I asked somebody who lives in the same community, like, which company would you recommend for like AC servicing?

And she recommended me a local company, like local owner. They just have a few people working there. And it's a perfect service. Good pricing. Talking about these kind of ads. Do you remember in Seattle, there was a plumbing company and they had their ads all over the backs of buses? Stop freaking call beacon. This is like, it's imprinted in my head. Stop freaking call beacon. No, stop freaking call beacon. It's like beacon plumbing. Like, you know, Beacon Hill in Seattle.

Yeah. Yeah. So beacon plumbing, but the ad is like, stop freaking call beacon. Okay. So now we'll make this episode explicit. I just have to mention this now. Yes. So there is an ad by a company in Australia that makes and repairs decks. You know, in the house, you have like a patio deck. And in Australian English, they pronounce deck like a dick.

And then these guys tell us all sorts of things like, you know, if your wife is not satisfied with your dick, you know, call whatever the dick company. You know, it's funny the first time you watch it, then it just gets, it gets old very fast, but it's very memorable. Right. It's a similar style of ads. Well, talking about ads, I think this is a good transition into more saner topics of analytics.

Yeah. So what are we discussing? We, last week we had Potter, Christian and Antoine from Potter. And it was, I think, interesting. I learned quite a few new things. I was also, I mean, I knew that podcast analytics is pretty rudimentary, but I was amazed to hear how rudimentary and there's basically nothing unlike like web analytics and mobile analytics and all that. So, to be honest, I knew how bad it was.

I guess I didn't realize you could extract so much from the bad data that you have, which they can by like matching it with other data sources and bringing more insights to it. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. I really enjoyed learning more about that. Yeah. So, what were some of the highlights? How about you start? Okay. Mine was, I think, I was impressed.

I think they mentioned it themselves in a humble way, but still, that they're a small team and they do seem to have outsized productivity for that small of a team. And from our chat, I realized it more and more as we chatted that they said some things like, oh, we don't think about our roadmap more than a month ahead, right? Or like we talk to customers and figure out what to do and then we do it.

Which is a very different way of thinking about products than what you tend to see in like bigger companies with longer roadmaps and visions and all that. But I think they do really live and breathe the mom test kind of philosophy, which Christian also talked about. Again, the low-code, no-code style of building things that they talked about. Like, basically, talk to customers, see what gaps are or what inclination of gaps you're seeing.

Build something quick, prototype around it and see if there's anything there or not. Yeah, I think it's a great, scrappy, lean startup mentality. Yeah. And to your point, in a big company, they would be like, this is our vision and we'll just steamroll to that vision for the next three years. That's whether it still makes sense in a year or two or not. Right. I think in a bigger company, you do have more established pathway or where you're trying to go to.

So some of those things like visions and tenets make sense, right? You have tenets and they guide your decisions. There's also more people and there's more disagreements about decisions, critical decisions. So these tenets and visions help you figure out, are we going towards that thing that we all agree we should go towards or not. In a smaller company, especially in this early stage, I think you don't really know what you're going for. So I like their approach. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So one of my highlights from the conversation was when we discussed the different ways to promote the podcast and how to grow the audience.

I think we got a couple of tips. One of those I'm actually going to use right now. So they suggested, not only they, but also Annie and Angela from the Hearts in Taiwan podcast, is to read reviews that we receive. And that would, in theory, encourage people to leave more reviews. Wait, are you saying we received a review that you're going to read now? Yeah. I mean, you'll be surprised at the quality of these reviews. But yeah, let's go for it.

So I'll first read the review from Apple Podcasts. So Apple Podcasts, but there is no name on the review. Okay. So whoever you are, it says it's a meta meta world. Wait, what country is it from? It must be the US because I'm logged into the US. Okay. Yeah, basically I just pulled up Apple Podcasts on my phone and I have a US App Store account. Yeah, it's like an App Store or iTunes. So the title says, it's a meta meta world.

It's obviously five stars because all of our reviews so far are five stars. And it says, great concept and execution for the first few shows out of gate. Can't wait to see where you take it. Exclamation mark. So I don't know who this is, but I guess they meant first few episodes, not shows. And also they forgot the in front of the gate. So it must be non-native speaker then. So let's see. Let's try to guess.

Our friends, this was non-native speaker who doesn't listen to podcasts that much. Wait, I'm going to come off as a very naive podcast creator now, but where the heck do I see this? Because I have no clue where to see it. You go to Apple Podcasts, you find Metacast.

Yeah. So if you want to listen to our show, in case if you're listening to this, I don't know, on YouTube or somewhere, you go to whatever the podcasting app of your choice and you type Metacast, the podcast about podcasting. You scroll all the way down below the episodes, you have ratings and reviews. Interesting. It's below the episodes. Yes. So luckily we only have 20 so far or whatever, 18. I'm seeing two. Oh, so this must be the Canada app store and I'm not seeing any reviews.

Yeah. So weird. Are there any ratings? Two ratings. Five stars. So it's you and your wife? Well, I don't remember rating it myself, so it's probably two other people. You should also write your review. You'll read it next time. Yeah. Okay. So I'm done with our Apple Podcasts reviews. So let's go to YouTube. So on YouTube, I go to YouTube studio and I can see all of the comments that people left. And the first one says, very informative.

Good start, Arnab. So I must be your friend. It's submitted by somebody named Health Watch. Okay. So I think that I know he's my friend. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then the other person says, wait, wait, wait. Are you going to read all of our reviews in one episode and then have nothing for the next one? Dude, we have three more left and they're like, like a single sentence. Okay. But I just want to be done with this.

So the next one says, Meta Ilya and then a heart emoji submitted by Badma. Actually, I mentioned him in our last episode with Poder. It's the guy who sold his company to Yandex. So yeah, he's a friend of mine and he listened and left a comment. What does Badma mean? No, it's his name. Okay. Like B-A-D-M-A? Yeah. Badma. Is it a common Russian name? I've never heard this name before. It's not a Russian name. So we, in Hearts in Taiwan episode.

So if you haven't listened to this, I think it's episode 8 or 10. I think it's 10. We talked about my origins in the Buryatia region of Russia. So that's where he's from. I was a Russian native living there, but he was like a native native there. I guess unlike many people living there, his parents didn't choose a Russian name for him. They chose a like ethnically native name.

But yeah, when he was here in the US, he visited me a couple of times and I took him to a party of Wharton students. People called him Batman. Like Batman, but like Batman, you know. It was fun. Yeah. Okay. So then the next one comes from Marshall Alvaro, who also sent us a heart emoji and the word promo SM. Okay. I don't know why YouTube didn't filter this out as spam. I guess I'll downvote this. Man, you started so well with a heart emoji. Then it turns out it's a spam.

Okay. Thank you. So then the last one, actually, which is not by our friends. It's a comment on the Justin Frankel VNAMP Reaper episode from, I actually can't read this. I think it's South African or something. I think it's Ian Gerlio. I can't pronounce this. Apologies, Ian. Apologies, Ian. Yeah. So remember, Justin Frankel's website is 1014.org. That's where you can read his pictures of nature. You can read his pictures? Yeah. On his blog, it's mostly pictures of nature.

And music. So, and this guy says, 1014. I'm pretty sure this means LOLs, which makes a lot of sense. So yeah, this was actually an interesting, of all the comments we received, this one actually invites a conversation or at least it triggers a thought, which is really cool. And I think that fits with Justin's personality profile, especially his young personality profile. Who would have created that website? Yeah. It's because it's before LOL was a mainstream term. So that's all.

These are all the reviews we've received outside of... Next time, let's read stuff we've received personally, right? Yeah. So if you want to review B2B Red in our show next time, please leave us a review. But make sure you use the correct punctuation. Otherwise, I'll call you out on that. Run it by chat GPT first. Yes. That's what Ilya means. Yeah. Yeah. And so the Reddit post that you did for the Justin Frankel Winamp episode, that had a lot of interesting conversations.

Maybe in a future episode, we can talk about that. That thread was great. It's actually on my list of topics to talk about today.

Okay. Because I want to talk about different ways we promote our show and what works, what doesn't, at least from what we've seen so far over the course of the last four months that we've been running this. Yeah. Let's just go one by one, right? So we've been posting on LinkedIn, I think every single episode. And we started with just posting links. Then I tried doing things like I would add a picture, but link would be just in the text. Then I also tried posting videos three times.

One of them was Ronak from the Software Misadventures podcast, talking about Kelsk Hightower. I think that's what he was talking about. And then there was Kimberly Jacobs from the Women Who Code episode. And there was two of us discussing our setup. So those three videos got extremely low engagement. Very few impressions, like just a few hundred compared to just pure text posts. Or like images. Or like images. Yeah. So it sounds like LinkedIn deprioritized them in feeds.

Maybe people skip videos and maybe they don't watch them, even though they were all with subtitles. But whatever it was, based on our very limited sample, I just don't feel like spending more time on videos, at least for LinkedIn. Oh, so what worked really well is the episode about VNump. I actually took a couple of things that I found myself interesting about VNump itself.

And I posted them as like, even if they don't listen to the episode, they may still find this post interesting, insightful. And that post got over 20,000 impressions. And just for the record, I have just over 2,000 followers on LinkedIn. I mean, connections and followers who are not connections. Which means that it went way beyond our networks. Because you probably have about the same number. Wait, you're talking about Reddit post or? No, I'm talking about LinkedIn post.

LinkedIn post, yeah. Yeah, LinkedIn got 20,000 impressions. Right. And I think it got over 200 likes. I never got more than like 20 on my LinkedIn posts. Well, I guess actually on LinkedIn, I think if you announce a new job, then those tend to get a lot of likes. Because that's what LinkedIn is for. Yeah. And it's probably prioritized very highly too.

Yeah. But also like, what I found surprising, some people at work would say like, they would mention something about my podcast, our podcast, I mean. But at the same time, I don't see them liking our posts because I would usually like check who actually liked them. So I think there is a cohort of people who look at posts, but they don't like them. They don't leave any comments, but they read them.

But I think when it comes to joke posting, so they want to congratulate you and then they leave a reaction. So we need to make our podcast congratulations so people congratulate us on releasing it.

So going next, Instagram. I mean, I started from zero. I quickly got maybe like 150 followers from my other account, mostly Russian speaking folks. We did a few reels. Some of those reels got pretty decent number of views, like 3,000 or so. The other ones were more like in the 400 to 600 range, but no reactions really, no comments except for friends. And it just feels like maybe Instagram is not the right place for us or it is not yet.

Our content feels a bit too niche for kind of the general Instagram audience. Because if you look at like reels that are popular, either somebody is talking about whatever, like how they lost fat, I mean, like knowledge-based content or some inspirational stuff. Or really funny stuff. Or really funny stuff or like really controversial stuff from like Joe Rogan or something. Or what's his name? Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro. You live on the left coast. You may not know who they are.

No, I know the names very well. I once actually watched like for a full hour of like Ben Shapiro's videos. I'm like, oh my God. Okay. I don't want to discuss them here. It's not this kind of podcast to discuss it. But in any case, so those get very popular. So Instagram, I think I'll just stop doing it for now. I don't have time for that. Yeah, I feel like Twitter has both. One is the lack of engagement, but also it doesn't get any views at all.

Like you and I combined, I mean, it's nothing big, but we still have like 800 to 600 people or accounts following us. The impressions it gets is like double digit. It's crazy. It's like maybe because I disliked some of Elon Musk tweets or whatever. Did they report him? I made fun of him a few times. Maybe, I don't know. But anyway, my tweets seem to go like, sometimes I post something.

I don't really care about these numbers, by the way, but Twitter, the app does show you on your post very prominently, like how many impressions it got and all. Something like 25 impressions. There's just no way that is possible. So, yeah. So, but now this leads me to, there's also Facebook, which I think we did a couple of times.

Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like my parents' generation is very engaged on Facebook and like my mom posts there almost daily and really deep thoughts and posts. And there is a lot of engagement. But there's just something about the UX of the platform or maybe it's just like when I go to the, my home feed, there's just random stuff that I keep saying, I don't want to see these kind of things. And like, it just keeps coming back again and again.

So, I kind of have been turned off of Facebook. Yeah. There's actually a very good article that we will link from the show notes called The Ancientification of TikTok, which talks not about TikTok. It talks about Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon. And TikTok obviously talks about all of these platforms. The thesis of the article is that platforms first bend backwards to do all they can to lure users and creators on the platform.

And once everybody is sort of tied, I wouldn't say locked in, but sort of locked in, then they start to extract value from it. And all of the value goes to the platforms. And then the platforms become kind of shitty and you end up in a situation like you said, right? You just get all sorts of nonsense content. I remember 2007, 2008 when I first started using Facebook, I had maybe like, I don't know, 50 connections and I knew everybody personally quite well. It was great. I loved it.

And it wasn't just pictures and videos. It was also just text. People would say some things. It was just nice. Yeah. So Facebook is like dead. We're not doing Facebook. By the way, the end shittification of TikTok. I think that's the article that Jenny introduced to us or shared with us a while back. And just a callback. Jenny was on our episode 17. 17 was two weeks ago. That was a metasode, but with a guest. And yeah, so go check out. It's prime metasode. Prime metasode.

Yeah, go check it out. Actually, it was one of the more enjoyable episodes to listen because the dynamic there was just very similar to our metasodes, but Jenny added something extra to it. I really loved it. We are saying go listen to it, but we are recording this on May 2nd and that episode hasn't come out yet. It'll come out tomorrow. It will come out tomorrow and it's all fully scheduled. But anybody who's listening to it, it has already come out. Go check it out.

Episode 17. It was fun. Yeah. Three weeks ago. Okay, but that brings me to Reddit, which we had not used until a week ago or two weeks

ago. So we posted an announcement of our episode with Justin Frankel, the creator of Reaper and Winamp on Reddit. You know, we were always concerned about Reddit because what if we just get whatever kicked out of band or like downloaded for self-promotion? Reddit is, I think, the platform where self-promotion is boo-booed the most. Yeah. Unlike like some other platforms that start with an L, a platform that will be LinkedIn in. Yeah. Where it's all about self-promotion.

Reddit doesn't want self-promotion, right? Like it wants stories and stuff like that. And so, Ilya, you and I, we discussed, should we post it or not post it? But I think in the end, you did a really good way of like bringing out some of the insights from it and then posting a full-ish article, a post in there, rather than like, hey, we did an interview. Here's the link. Go check it out. You mean full-ish? Full-ish article? Full-ish.

I think there's no good way to say what you want to say. Look at it, glass half full. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I think that was great. So yeah, talk about that post. That was great. Yeah. So actually our process was, because we were so sort of uneasy, we didn't want to be like booed. I typed that post in the Google Doc and then we, you know, Arnab gave some feedback, some suggestions, I think a couple of iterations later. I mean, we did it pretty quickly within an hour or so.

So we had a pretty decent post, which we, I posted on the Reaper subreddit. And 14 days later, so it was 14 days ago, we got 153 upvotes, 100% upvote rate, which means nobody downvoted this. It has 100,000 views. Wow. It's like, I've never had a post anywhere that I created that had like 100,000 views and I earned, because like, I never posted anything on Reaper before. My account is like 12 years old or something, but I never posted anything before.

And I got 77 community karma out of this. I don't know what this means, but I guess supposedly the more, the more, the better. Yeah. And there are comments. I don't know how many, I guess visual count is maybe like 30. Yeah. And actually it is a very civil discussion. Some people say like, oh, this is awesome. I'll go listen. But the most important discussion is somebody made the point that Reaper is created by just two guys.

And if something happens to them or if they like don't want to do it anymore, what's going to happen, what's going to happen, right? There is no succession plan. Yeah. And then there is like a whole discussion on that, which even Justin participated in. So I loved it. And then you also posted on me now. I posted it on our music, which has like 32 million members or something like that. And I think this wasn't too bad either.

So nothing like, I think the one that you got, this got 14,000 views, 80% upvote rate. So not bad. And 26 comments. Oh, cool. Yeah. I mean, I think of all the social networks, these two were the most engagement and like actual discussion, right? Like good discussion that I've found anywhere. Yeah. So was it on Reddit where somebody pointed out that you were using language incorrectly? Oh, yeah. So what I started with was, remember Winamp?

It was pretty much the soundtrack to my teenage years, right? And so I think that was the first comment. But since then, it is not the top comment anymore. It's like way lower. It got lots of downvotes, I think. It was, well, what does it mean? Pretty much the soundtrack to your teenage years. So I said, well, like you basically lived and breathed Winamp. So that's what I mean. And I think that person was like, well, that doesn't make any sense.

It's weird to say that Windows Media Player was the soundtrack to my... Anyway. He said like software cannot be soundtrack. Yeah. Soundtrack can only be music that's played through software. Well, we don't know he, he, she, they. Yeah, he or she. Yeah, whatever. As I was reading this comment, I'm like, what an asshole you are. I'm like, why would you do this? If you don't like something, just keep going, do something else. It's like, why write this? It's toxic, in my opinion.

It's not toxic. I mean... I mean, if he said something like, or she said something like, your language is technically incorrect. You should have said it differently. I would say it's still useless, but it is constructive. But that language that this person used, it's just like, as if, whatever. I mean, I've been on social media long, long enough publicly to not take offense at crappy comments. Yeah. But yeah, Reddit, Reddit for the win.

So we need to figure out how to do more of this. Because Justin Frankl, I think we lucked out in a way because he's created software that's a really big deal in the industry. And also Winamp is like a big deal. But he himself is not very public. So if he had his own like account, would constantly give interviews, our posts wouldn't matter. But because he only gives interviews every now and then, every one interview is like treasured.

Especially about Reaper, because I think people remember him from Winamp, but like Reaper is more niche. But very passionate community. Very passionate community. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like there was no single negative comment in that thread, which I found really surprising. So out of that thread, we got 250 plays on podcasting apps. I mean, not all of them came from Reddit, but on average, we get less than 100. So for this one, we got 150 more. We get like 90 to 100 or so on average.

I would say the median is probably around 70. Okay. So yeah, it's probably like 180 more. And also on YouTube, which we usually get like single digit views, we got 317. And we got seven subscribers after watching this video, which is cool. Oh, so I want to talk about YouTube as well.

So YouTube, it's a pain in the ass to produce. Not too much work, but like it's just like extra work. What I'm doing is I'm creating an audiogram in Descript. It just takes time to like put an audiogram in, export, upload to YouTube, format text for YouTube. You know, it's like, it takes a good hour or so. But the cool thing about YouTube is that it can be shared independently from which platform the person is using. It can be watched on the web.

It can be watched on any kind of phone, Android, iPhone. So I keep doing YouTube. Because actually when Jonathan Courtney did the reaction to our episode with him, episode four, we got 334 views, which is not bad. That's because he shared the YouTube link. Yes, correct. But yeah, I think the Winamp episode was our second most listened to episode.

The highest one still is our second episode with Brian McKellar, because he talked about that episode in his podcast, which if I remember, it gets what, like 50,000, 60,000 views per episode. I think 30,000 to 40,000. Per episode. Listens, yeah. And we got 450 downloads from that, which is pretty sizable. So yeah, I guess that brings me to the next topic about promotion. We did not really have much success with people sharing.

Or I guess we did not have consistent success with people sharing our interviews with them. So Brian, Jonathan, Courtney, they shared our content and it got pretty good engagement. Other folks, when they shared our content, we didn't get much, I guess because they don't have the same following as the other two. And by the way, even Women Who Code retweeted our tweet and we got like three likes on that or something.

Maybe just Twitter put it down or like our content is not interesting or maybe their followers are not as engaged because they have 300,000 followers. Anyway, what I also think, you know, it's cool to have folks like Brian McCullough or Jonathan Courtney who just tweeted to their audience. And then we got a lot of views from that, a lot of listens.

It's also cool to have people who are famous like Justin Frankel, but are not sort of popular in social media, as in like they're not on social media even. So people seek them out and they find our content instead of their content. I think that Reddit thread is good for search engines. I will not be surprised if you talk again next year, it will be like 500,000 views. Yeah. Cool, cool. That was a long segment about promotion, but I think it's an important one. It's good.

And I keep talking, like, I don't know if I can say this, but like we have like an internal plugin at Google that shows you the percentage of time you talk in the Google Meet meeting. Okay. So I think the Game Squadcast had this plugin. It would probably show that I was talking like 80% of time today. That's okay. I think this was a good topic, yeah. But I'm not done yet. Okay. What's the next one?

So next one, it comes as a sort of tangent from the last episode. You know how I've been saying, do not use AirPods for podcasts. And then last week I showed up on the recording wearing AirPods and right now I'm also wearing my AirPods. So here's the trick. I use the AirPods as speakers, but I record using the microphone. And the reason why I like using AirPods is because they are small. Like my face pretty much looks like I don't wear anything at a certain angle, right?

Unlike me who looks like a bear right now, I guess. Like a bear. With my big headphones around me. Yeah. We had Blue Angels here last weekend. So you look like a fighter pilot. Oh, cool. Thank you. Really, really, really cool. Yeah. So I think it's okay to wear Bluetooth headphones as long as you use a separate mic for recording. And AirPods probably have the lowest latency of any headphones if you use them with a Mac. Right. With a Mac, yeah. Yeah. So AirPods are really cool.

But I think to reiterate, don't use AirPods to record because we had two guests so far who had AirPods or just one? I think we had Kimberly and John and Courtney. And Kimberly's audio was not that bad, but Jonathan's was really bad. Maybe she had like a Pro or something and he didn't. Jonathan's was much worse. I don't know why. Plus, it's just like your voice is not focused on the microphones when you're wearing AirPods.

Yeah. So the other thing is, I think it was during the Women Who Code recording that I noticed that I think they were muting themselves. And I think when you do like a Zoom meeting or Google Meet meeting in a corporate environment or any kind of environment, I guess muting yourself is a good... Etiquette. A good etiquette, right? But during the recording, you actually want to capture the reactions like laughs and stuff.

Right. So, yeah, I feel like it's actually good to not mute during the recording. Yeah, unless you have excessive noise, which can be distracting. But if you like record in a normal environment, yeah, I would say just don't mute. Yeah, I very rarely mute myself on these recordings unless like my dog comes running or my kid is shouting or something. But on typical Zoom meetings, and I haven't had a multi-person Zoom meeting in a really, really long time now.

But when I did, I would be pretty much on mute, except when I'm almost like push to talk kind of mechanism. So that's a good tip. Yeah, the feedback that you get, the laughs, the emotions, I think those are important for a podcast. Yeah. Because I feel like when there is laughing in the podcast, as a listener, sometimes I laugh along. Maybe not with the same intensity as them, but it at least makes me smile.

Especially if the personalities really resonate with me and if they say something not even necessarily funny. Actually, I just finished this book called The Power of Moments that Jake Knapp and John Courtney recommended on the fourth episode of our podcast. It's a good book. Like the TLDR there is that people remember peak moments in the experience, like the peak moments, like the worst moments.

So like averaging the, let's say, satisfaction of the Disneyland visit throughout the day is not an accurate depiction of the actual satisfaction. Because people will remember their whatever crazy roller coaster ride, and that will be the highlight of their day, and they will give the whole experience at nine. Even though, I think as John Courtney pointed out, they would be like stepping over somebody's vomit in the toilet sometime in the middle of the day, right?

Waiting for a bad cold burger for like 45 minutes, yeah. Yeah, and stuff like that, right? Or crying kids. So that insanely great moment really makes the whole day, right? So the thing that they mentioned in the book, which I found insightful, there was a study. The researchers went on the university campus or college campus and eavesdropped on students' conversations. Noted when they laughed, and they noted down what they said before the laughter. Right.

It's kind of a creepy research study, I guess. But what they found out is that only in 20% of the cases, something funny was said, and laugh was a response to something funny. The other 80%, it was just like a regular conversation, nothing particularly funny in that. People just laugh when they acknowledge when people say something or whatever, right? I forgot what exactly the conclusion there was, but the point is like we not only laugh when it's funny.

We laugh a lot just as a part of regular conversation, right? And when you hear those laughs, I think you sort of become more part of the conversation as opposed to a passive observer. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, that was a fake laugh. You should have muted, man. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. But see, that fake laugh made us laugh. So. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, that's true.

Okay. Cool. So I want to ask listeners, whoever is listening, if you can remember, tell us which episode made you laugh the most so far. And I'll ask you, Ilja, before I tell you which one so far. It made me laugh the most? Yeah. I think it's the episode with Jenny. Yeah. Yeah. I think so far the ones that have been released, I would say the Jake and Jonathan one.

But I also have a hunch that the one with Jenny coming out tomorrow, or if you're listening to the actual episode, the one that came out three weeks ago. Yeah, that one. But I haven't heard the post-processed one, unlike you have. So that's why. Yeah. I listened to the post-processed one, and I laughed a lot, especially the parts where she was giving us feedback, like those micro-influencers begging for feedback. Yeah. Oh, that was just so good. Yeah. Cool. Looking forward to it.

Or I guess looking backward to it now. Yeah. So let's take an arc to something else.

What's new in technology these days, man? What's new in technology? Well, except for like chat GPT and bird and everything else? You just got it. I said, let's take an arc. Oh, okay, okay. All right, all right, all right. Yeah. Tell me about arc. Noah's arc. Noah's arc. So there are two animals of each kind on it. Yeah. It's going to save the world. Now, we've been playing with this new web browser called arc by the browser company, which is a really cool browser.

I'm still trying to get used to some of the shortcuts. Who introduced it to you, Ilya? I think this guy whose name is like Dorna, but without the K or something. Without the Dora. Yeah, without the D, yeah. Yeah. Who got you a beta invite? Same guy, I think. Okay. Cool, cool. So, yeah, tell us more. Like, how did you discover arc? I think I saw it somewhere on Reddit. I want to say Reddit, but might have been Twitter or Reddit.

But I've been hearing about arc for a while now that everybody loves it and all that. And one day I was chatting with somebody and they said, oh, I use arc and I love it. And that was the first time a person that I knew was using arc and endorsed it. I was like, I gotta go get it. I signed up for the beta and waited, I want to say a couple of weeks and then got an invite, got it. So, till now, I had a pretty sophisticated browser setup. And you used what? You used Microsoft Edge, right?

No, I'll tell you, you'll be surprised. Maybe even you will be surprised. I use, and I'm not kidding, I use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Edge. Oh, you actually use Edge? Yes. Do you have Windows machine? No, Edge, I used to use for ChatGPT, for the Bing chat mode on a Mac. So, Microsoft released the ChatGPT chat mode on Bing only on the Edge browser. You can't interact with it anywhere else. So, I used it for that. But there is a version of Edge for Mac?

Yes. They released it because of the ChatGPT integration. Oh, that's smart. Okay. Yeah. But primarily, I would use Firefox for everything, like DevWork and all our Google Docs and stuff like that. But there are some things, especially video meetings and all, that work really well in Chrome. So, I would use Chrome for that. But I generally try not to use Chrome for anything else because of all the data that is being sucked in by this massive company that employs you.

And then I would use Safari for my personal stuff, like my bank and email and stuff like that. And guess which one is my default browser? Safari? Aha. My default browser is called Finicky. Okay? Okay. But it's not an actual headed browser. That was a trick question, by the way. Gotcha. Okay. Go on. Finicky. Finicky is a script or a program that you can write patterns, regular expressions. But for non-technical people, you can write patterns, right?

If the link that is being opened is like HTTPS slash colon colon squadcast.fm, then open it in that browser. Or if it is my bank, then open it in that browser. If it is Firebase, which I'm using for development, then open it in Firefox. So, you can like script it like that. And because I was using four different browsers, Finicky was the thing I was using to like navigate. It was my router. Right. And did you, what was the entry point? Was it Alfred?

No. So, Finicky, I had set up as the default browser at the OS level. So, Finicky would get every link that is being opened anywhere. And then I would set up override rules. Like if it is squadcast or Google meeting, then go to Chrome. If it is this, then go to Safari. Otherwise, fallback is Firefox. Interesting. Okay. So, now Arc is your default browser? Well, it's still not my default default. I still have Finicky, but I removed all the rules from Finicky.

So, it all straight goes into Arc now. And so, I think Chrome has these profiles. Firefox has some sort of profiles. Safari has profiles. But none of that is as well executed as Arc, I think. But none of them don't suck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to make Firefox work, and I love Firefox. I've been a long-time Firefox user. I need the tab bar add-on and how many other add-ons, I don't know. But this is awesome. The part that I love the most is the... So, I'm a programmer.

I'm a scripter, not a clicker. People won't get this inside joke. This probably goes back like 10 years at this point to a conversation we were having back in Amazon like 10 years back. Right, yeah. Yeah. I love the command T, which is like an Alfred or a Silver Search, that sort of powerful thing, where you type that and you can do any action you want from inside there. Kind of like an IDE. Yeah. You can press command T and you can type whatever you want and it offers you suggestions.

You can do search. You can go to a tab. You can run a command from there. It's very cool. I'm still getting used to that. The thing I'm annoyed about the most is that one of my most used keyboard shortcuts from Chrome doesn't work and that's command shift A. What is that? It's a shortcut to switch between actively open tabs. Okay. Do you know about control tab? Try it out. You will be amazed, my friend. Control tab.

Yeah. No, so shift command A in Chrome just gives you a drop down of all of the open tabs and you type there. It gives you a text box. Oh, so command T does that? It's command T. Yeah. But just like that shortcut is wired into my muscles. Yeah, I'm like unlearning this and it's sort of hard. But yeah. The other thing that I find, I think we need to fix this. So I had this setting in Chrome that when I click on the file, when I download the file, it asks me for the location.

So it's almost like always does like a save as kind of thing. Because like I don't necessarily want to save everything into downloads. Let's say if I download all of the files from Squadcast, I just want to save all of them directly to the folder where I'll be processing them from. It doesn't have that. So I have to like first save to downloads and copy paste. Yeah, it's a bit of extra annoyance. But I actually send to them that feedback. So we have a few beta invites still left.

So if you leave us a review and send us a screenshot because otherwise we will not know who you are. Hello at metacastpodcast.com. We can send you a beta invite to ARK while supplies last. So be quick, do it right now. Right. Or I'll just whisper to people, okay? Or if you don't want to send an email, but you have a blue sky invite, you can email that to me directly, to Arnab. And I'll send you an ARK invite in exchange for a blue sky invite. What's your email? Arnab.deca at gmail.com.

Don't tell Ilya. Oh my God. So you're not going to get a lot of spam to that email? Well, I already get a lot of spam. Yeah. I guess pretty much everybody's Gmail is their first name, last name. Except for a few people who have some random numbers. Somebody I know. I asked him what 14 in his email means. It's like his name and then 14. Age when he started it? I think it was lacrosse or something. Some American sport that I don't know actually what lacrosse is.

But I know that kids play lacrosse in school. So it was his number on his team. I think most people would just put either their year of birth or the year they registered the email address. Like, yeah, my email would be like, it was basically 2006. I think something whenever I registered Gmail.

What was your very first email address, do you remember? My very first email address? I think it was, so I was working for a company. It was actually my very first job. And we had our own server on which we ran everything. All of the IT stuff there. And mail server was running on the same server. And it was like literally a computer under somebody's desk. The entire infrastructure of that company was like dependent on that one. It wasn't even a server.

We called it a server, but it was a computer plugged into the end of that network. With Sticky saying like, don't unplug this. Yeah. Actually, let's save this for a moment. The business of that company was like, you call a local number, a phone number. And you can ask about a certain business. So like, where I can buy flowers in this neighborhood or something. It's like 411. Maybe. It was like 2003. It was 20 years ago. So before that, yeah. Yeah, it was 20 years ago.

You would not have internet at your hand to just find the phone number of the company. You have to like call or like flip through yellow pages. It was essentially like yellow pages kind of thing. So then you would call. The operator would pull up the software that I developed where you can type the search parameters. And it gives you, it gives the operator the details. And then she gives it back to the caller.

And I say she because like all of the women there were very stereotypical, but like everybody in the call center was female. So the URL of that company was 223-223.ru. And 223-223 was the phone number without the area code because like you would only call from your like landline. So you didn't need an area code. And my email was, I think, ib at 223.223ru because, you know, my initials. And they used a software called The Bat to download emails. Do you know that software?

No. The Bat, no. No. So it was like Outlook Express at the time. And it was like shitty. Like it was really shitty. And The Bat was really, really good. It had like a nice yellow bat on the logo. Right. My first actually email program was not even a GUI. It was called Pine in Linux. But that was like crazy. When I got to university, I think I was using that. Anyway, before I get to my email address, 411, that's actually before, well, before internet.

I think it's like 1950s or something. It's been going on since then. So that's a number in US and Canada. You can call. I don't know if it still exists or not. But you could call and ask anything about local information. It was pretty awesome. It was like ChatGPT. Yeah. ChatGPT order form. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So before the internet, it was really popular. Anyway, so going back to my email address. I remember this was 97 or 98. I think 1998. I'm really hoping it's something obscene.

It's not, unfortunately. But it's very random. Because I didn't even know what an email is or what would I do with it. But the first thing, and this is before, like, I think in today's world, we know UX patterns and all that, where we need to educate the user about at least quickly, like, what is this thing before you ask somebody to sign up for something or they would never sign up. But back then, nobody tells you what an email address is.

The thing to do is, like, you go create your email address or register one, right? I use Hotmail. I think Hotmail was the big one at that time. Wait, Hotmail existed in, like, late 90s? I think, yeah, it was. Oh, wow. I think so. I feel like it's 1998 or sometime around that. I was in high school. Okay. And it was. It was launched in 1996, by the way. I just checked out. Yeah. So, I was, like, a new user of it, I guess, just two years in.

Anyway. So, yeah, I don't know what an email address is. So, I think I remember just trying out, okay, maybe random or random is taken. Right? So, I just, like, put in a lot of characters, random. And then, like, A-R-X-I-I. X-I-I because I was in the 12th grade at that time. So, X-I-I, A-R for our noun, it's just to fill up, like, okay, I need to make something unique because I don't even know what this thing is.

And then, that, until about 2004 or so, when I moved to Gmail, that was my primary email address, random A-R-X-I-I at hotmail.com. I find it interesting you had email, like, in late 90s. I did not have an email at that time because I think the only email, I didn't know about Hotmail, but the only email I could get, I would have to pay my internet provider for some email. You didn't have Hotmail and all that was there, right? Free email. I didn't know about it.

Maybe in Russia, it was not popular or well-known. Yeah. Anyway, so, for those six, seven years, anytime somebody asks, what's your email address, I would have this long conversation about what the heck it is, how to spell it, and why is it that? Random A-R-X-I-I. What was your gaming nickname? I don't remember. I didn't have one consistent one, I think. Okay. What was yours?

So, I had an obscene one. Because, like, I was, I don't know if I should say it, like, a pro gamer, but I was doing, like, championships. I was, like, obsessed. I was only playing one game, but I was playing obsessively. I took, you know, first places and I had a clan and all that. If Twitch was a thing, you would have been a millionaire and I would not have been able to talk to you today. Maybe. I was 20 years too early for that. The game for the record was Quake 2.

And my nickname was Voodoo, you know, V-O-O-D-O-O. But it was initially that. And it was Voodoo.38 because 38 was the code of the region. In Russia, all the regions have their code that's written on the license plates. So, like, 38 is my home region. And my clan was, like, 38 Squad. And so, that's why I had this kind of .38. Everybody in our clan had a .38. But then I went to university and I wanted a different nickname. And in Russian, so you could take that name Voodoo.

And if you add, like, a Russian twist, it's like Voodoo. It's like, I don't even know how to explain this properly. If you were in Russia and you were, like, a little boy, I would call you Arnabchik, which would be, like, a gentle way to address. Yeah, like, in Spanish, you do an Ito. Yes, exactly, yeah. Like, Arnabito, yeah. Iliato. Voodoo is ito.

And then, like, because I was listening to a lot of heavy metal and ICT in particular, his band Body Count, he had songs about decks with Australian accent. Strya. Yeah. Yes. So, that's why I spelled Voodoo as, you know, with the word dick in it. And when I was, like, 17, that sounded really funny. You still have something with that? I have an email address, voodoo.gmail.com, which I use for just spam.

Because I remember, like, maybe six months ago or something, I asked you, what's your email? Where do I send this? And you said this. And, like, what the heck is this? Yeah, it was really weird to actually spell this out to somebody here in the US. Yeah. But, yeah, it is what it is. Cool. Okay. So, this has been, I think, more like a prime episode feel. Very nice chat between friends. I don't know how it'll come out when it comes out as an episode. We'll see.

Yeah, I think the latter part of it, yes. The first half, I think, is actually a lot about the podcasting stuff. Cool, cool. And I need to not forget to mark this as explicit. Yes. There was a lot of stuff here, yeah. Yeah. All righty. So, Arnab, if people want to contact us, what do they do? They send an email to randomarxisa at hotmail.com. No, no. Are you going to get an email if people send it to you? Do you have a redirect? I use the one password app. That one, I said.

That one, that one, yeah. So, I still have the password there. I don't log in, but I should after this episode. But, yeah, they should email us at hello at metacastpodcast.com. For me, no more Instagram, no more Twitter. Just find me on LinkedIn, Ilya Bezdelev. And, yeah, read some insightful stuff from me. If you write to Ilya on LinkedIn, you have to end it with thoughts, question mark. That's the only way you'll get a response from Ilya.

I find it so obnoxious when people say, like, thoughts. I mean, if you send something to me and I say, like, thoughts, that's fine. But, like, when some random person is like, oh, I would like to hear your thoughts. And it would be something, like, so weird. Like, oh, I see you run a podcast advertising agency. And then there is, like, a bunch of nonsense stuff in the message. And then something like, what are your thoughts on this? Or can we connect?

And my reaction is like, what are you talking about? I don't have a podcast advertising agency. Oh, this is something like, oh, I see you have an exciting career in, like, XYZ, which I have, like, no relations to. Yeah. Did you go check out LinkedIn Lunatics on Reddit? I haven't yet. Please do. Sort by top and then have an hour and a half of fun in your life. It's insane. It's a sinkhole. That's what they're saying. I mean, that is Reddit. So is Reddit because, like, you read it?

Yeah. Like, I have read something. Yeah, I read it. You read it. Okay. Yeah. All right. We recorded it. We recorded it. We can stop, I guess. Thank you, Arnav, for joining me for this wonderful meta-sode. See you next week. Yeah. See ya. Adieu. Bye-bye.