21. All Things Tangential a.k.a. Memesode

Let me ask you, so some podcasts do a copypasta intro and outro. What do you think about that? Lazy fuckers. Mark is explicit. Mark is explicit, yeah. Hello, and welcome to Metacast, and I'm Ilya Bestelov, and with me is my co-host, Arnab. Hello, hello. It's awesome that you introduced me, Ilya. Yeah, I mean, how could I? It's tit for that, right? You did it two previous times, and I'm like, okay, so I have to do it now. So let me, like, immediately talk about this.

This was one of the things I was going to talk about our previous episode. I did the intro. We kind of switch up. Sometimes you do the intros, sometimes I do it, and I did it. So I did the intro for episode 20 last week, which was with Justin Jackson of Transistor FM, and I was very conscious because the last few episodes, we've been talking about, like, how we forget to introduce the other host.

So this time, I don't know if you noticed it or not, but go back and listen to it, Ilya, and listener. I was very careful to specifically mention you and the guest, but I forgot to mention my name. So that's like when you overthink things. Yeah. When you get, like, fixated on one thing, I think it becomes, like, tunnel vision. So it's like, I shouldn't forget to say Ilya's name. I shouldn't forget to say Ilya's name, right? And then, yeah, you forget everything else.

I just said I, but I didn't say my name. So, yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you.

So some podcasts do a copypasta intro and outro. Like, some of the popular podcasts that I listen to, they do it. What do you think about that? Lazy fuckers. Mark is explicit. Mark is explicit. Yeah. Yeah, so I did read this as, like, a recommendation in one of the articles, or maybe I heard somebody say this because it, like, helps you save time. I think, though, that it starts to get old very quick if you hear exactly the same intro. So people just start skipping through the intro.

My opinion is that better shows, they do the intro different every time. I mean, they record it every time. And then they may say things that they don't say otherwise. So actually, it's also enjoyable to listen. It's part of the experience. Because I think when you start to insert free, canned things, worst case scenario is that, let's say you have hoarse voice today, but in the intro, you have normal voice. How is that transition going to sound?

The ones that I listen to, they make it explicit that this is the intro. Then they play some music or something. Then they say, okay, today we have blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I agree. Like, I feel like I skipped through it too now. I just know, like, okay, first 30 seconds are that. So I'm just going to skip through it after a few episodes. Yeah, like Tim Ferriss, for example, right?

So he has this music playing and then some voice in the background says, like, whatever, Tim Ferriss, excellence, improvement, whatever it says there, right? And it plays for, like, 20, 30 seconds. I just skip it. I feel like the way we do our podcasts, I copied this from the post-life podcast, because theirs was the best. Now ours is second best. I really like that idea where the first thing you hear is actually somebody is talking. And then some quiet music plays underneath that.

And when they stop talking, and then the music starts to play, like, full-blown volume just for a few seconds, and then that music starts to fade out. And then you, like, people come in and say, like, hello, this is Metacast, whatever. If you listen to any old episodes of PostLite, because I haven't listened to any of the new ones, but, like, any episode before, I'll say 300, they all start the same way. I just don't know how the new ones are. I also haven't listened recently.

I used to also listen to the first, yeah. But here's the thing, actually, about podcasts, right?

So there's a, I guess we could say it's a corporate podcast. So they run an agency called PostLite. Two guys, Paul Ford and Rich, the ID. They run a digital agency out of New York. And they use this podcast as the promotion tool, marketing tool. Great podcast, really loved it. I think at some point last year, both of them stepped down from operating positions. I think Rich was the CEO and Paul was the president or something. I think now they're just co-founders and two other people.

I think their name is Gina and Chris, I believe. So they took the founder's positions as a CEO and president. And they also do the podcast now. But the reason I listened to the podcast was because I like these two particular people, Paul and Rich. I mean, Gina and Chris, they're great too. But the vibe is completely different. This happened to me recently in a Formula One podcast. I'm trying to remember. Oh, it's called WTF1 Podcast. And WTF1 is a big brand.

These two people grew the brand. And I don't remember exactly what happened. But they used to make the podcast. Well, there were three people, actually. Two guys and a girl. And it was a hilarious, fun Formula One podcast. I think recently, like last year, they switched to another four or five people. And again, see, this is where I tried it for one episode. It was so different from the previous ones that I was like, OK, it's not the same anymore.

It probably is still great, but it's a different podcast. To be clear, it's not worse. It's just different. It's very different. It's probably as good as before, but it's different from what I was listening to. And when things like that happen, you almost feel like fork it off as a new podcast or change the name or branding or something like that. And I think people keep the same podcast feed because they have already got listeners and subscribers everywhere.

But at least maybe change the branding or name or something. Yeah, I agree. It kind of reminds me of some of the music tastes.

So if you take a band like Metallica, for example, they have very distinct period from 1983 to 1986, or I guess 1988, the first four albums, which is very thrushy, very fast, very aggressive. Then they have the Black Album. It kind of made them into mainstream, where you have all the Ender Sandman and other songs. Then you have 96, 98 with Load, Reload, which I guess half of the population who listens to them loves, the other half hates.

And more likely than not, people who really like the early albums, they don't like the later ones, right? But it's the same people, but the format just changes. Right. But at least I think in this, there is a transition. So for similar, I think music, it's very common where Nirvana, the first few albums before they got popular, that's like completely different kind of music. Yeah, I don't like the first one, I think one of two albums.

I really like the albums when they started to go mainstream, nevermind later. Right, right, like in utero and all that. Most people don't like them. It's a very different kind of music. I think U2, they have like gone through a whole arc of different kinds of music over the years, right? But the thing there is, it's the same people. So you actually see that it's an evolution of their music.

Whereas in a podcast, if you swap out the people who talk in the podcast suddenly to another one, you don't see that natural evolution that like these are the same people, they're trying to do something else now. It's like, okay, the whole thing is swept out for something else now. It's just the name is retained. Yeah, it's actually interesting. I'll give you an example of two music shows that I went to back in Seattle.

The first one was Guns N' Roses. But the opening act for them was Alice in Chains, a local Seattle band, one of my all-time favorites, but their lead singer, Lane Staley, he died in 2002, I think, or 2003, a long time ago. So they now have a new guy who they performed with. And here's the thing, like I was really looking forward to Alice in Chains, but there you go. There's this guy on the stage singing my favorite songs. It's just not the same because Lane Staley was Alice in Chains.

I mean, the other guys are all very important and all, but the voice you can't substitute. But then the other show I went to a couple of years later was Judas Priest. I mean, those guys started in 1970 or 71, I think. The singer is the same as Rob Halford, an old gentleman. I think he's probably like nearly 70 at this point. But half of the other members of the band, they retired and they now have younger folks there who are maybe like in their 30s or 40s playing the guitar.

The other guy, I think, plays the bass or drums. And it's okay. It still sounds like Judas Priest, right? Because they communicate through the medium of musical instruments, but the voice, yeah. Can I do another tangent from here? Yeah, go ahead. Into a meme.

Do you know that meme where the car, there's a car at the highway like exit and the highway is like going straight on the left side and there's like an exit marked like something else that's swerving off to the right and the car is like screeching from the left to the right. I'm getting to the point slowly, but do you know that meme? No, I don't, but I see it every day on Florida's highways. Maybe Florida is a meme. Yeah, it's one of the Florida men. Yes, it's the Florida men.

Who are a meme. Yes. Anyway, do you know the meme I'm talking about? No. Okay, we'll just put this in the show notes and I'll show you later after this. But I feel like our metasodes tend to always have this in the beginning where is this a metasode

or are we taking an exit into something else? Like because we've been talking about music and something else the whole time so far. So let's get back to it. Let's get back onto the main street. Our metasodes sometimes can be like roads in Dubai because there if you miss an exit, it might take you half an hour to get back onto the highway.

Yeah, I think our bonus episode 7.5, that was originally when we sat down to record that it was going to be a metasode, but it turned into something else and we decided it's too good. So let's just release it. Yeah, it was just like a one-and-a-half-hour slice of a three-hour reporting. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, welcome to our world, listeners. The world of randomness. Again, not randomness, open-mindedness. Yes. And freedom to explore.

So one thing I wanted to quickly mention, our URL for the podcast. So we have a website hosted on Substack. We registered metacastpodcast.com, but with Substack, you cannot use a second-level, top-level domain. Yeah, you need a subdomain. You can just do like HTTPS metacastpodcast.com. It has to be like www or something else. And www always seemed so lame to me. It's like so late 90s. And we also weren't sure if we were going to use the main point, something else.

So we created newsletter.metacastpodcast.com. And I think over time, I started to kind of hate it a little bit. It's like such a long URL. And also our newsletter is more than a newsletter. It's like a website. So we actually changed to www. Metacastpodcast.com. Right. But we have metacastpodcast.com forwarding to this. Yes, metacastpodcast.com and also newsletter metacastpodcast.com. I set up 301 redirects to www. I think our site was down for maybe 30 minutes.

Yeah. I got an email saying it's migrating. Yeah. But even after you said it, it's fine. We still had to wait for another email for changes to take effect. So it actually made me curious. Like for us, it doesn't matter at this point. But imagine if you had lots of visitors. Let's say if you had this visitor a minute. So if you have a half an hour downtime, 30 people will not see the site. You won't be doing this. But how do you manage that? I mean, I guess not with Substack.

Not with Substack. Is there a way to manage this better? Yeah. I mean, if you own the whole infrastructure, then you can. I mean, yeah. If you own, yes, you can. But if you host on Substack and if you want to migrate a domain, is there any way to have a downtime? Oh, well, I don't know on Substack. Yeah. I guess. Could you create another Substack on www.metacastpodcast.com, copy over all the content and then do a redirect? Yes, you can.

But then you have to pay 100 bucks extra for the domain. Right. Okay. Anyway, cool. So last week, we had Justin Jackson, spelled as Michael Jackson.

Yeah. Finally, 15 minutes into the episode, we start about this. Great. Yes. Yeah. I think it was a great episode. Yeah. I loved it. It was one of the episodes where we could just sit back and relax because Justin was talking 95% of the time. I listened to it yesterday or two days ago. It was very insightful, actually. His depth of knowledge and breadth of knowledge and understanding of the history. I really enjoyed listening to it, actually. Me too.

And I feel like we talked about it in the episode itself. We got through less than 20% of what we had in our items to talk about. So I think we want to do another episode with him at some point if he has the time. We'll see. Talking about time. This was the second one of those, I think, podcasters that I had reached out to. I remember one of those episodes. I forget which one. Wait. Which one was the software misadventures? About episode 12 or so, I feel. I think it was 12.

Yeah. So that was the first one of the invites that I had sent out saying, hey, we're starting a podcast. You want to please come on in? Please be guests here. They were the first ones who replied after three months. Justin, I've been like hunting Justin through Twitter for, I don't know, like nine months now. To be fair, I mean, so he's an indie developer based in BC in Canada. So last year when I left my job and I was kind of trying to figure out what should I do?

What would life be if I started down that path? He was one of the people I reached out. And so he replied to a lot of things before. So he and I already had a conversation going on through like Twitter DMs for a while. But I think this topic of like, please come on our show, be a guest, that probably on and off going on for six months. Easy. Finally, one day he said, yeah, let's do it. And then we're like, okay, let's do it. Here's our calendar.

But then I think he eventually said, hey, can we do it tomorrow? And you and I both figured out a time to do it. We did it. I'm glad we did it. It was awesome. And I think he is one of those people. First of all, very busy. He does a lot of things, including running a million dollar plus company with just five people. And he's the he's one of the co-founders. Right. And he does a lot of social media and like newsletter and podcast. He produces a lot of content. YouTube videos.

Yes. He produces a lot of content. So I totally get how he's busy. And I also feel like he's one of those, you know, Jake and Jonathan are very second episode. One of those people who are very fourth episode are very fourth. All right. Our very fourth episode. Okay. But he's I felt like he's one of those people who are when they're in the zone, they enjoy what they're doing. Right. And they don't try to schedule too many things too far out ahead in the world.

And I've been trying to do that with my life with less success. But it's a nice place to be in. Yeah, I agree. So this episode will come out in early June, which by that time I will have left my job. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. So I'm on vacation now while still kind of being employed as we recorded this. But yeah, we will talk more about that. Very soon. After I've left my job. Yeah. We will share, I guess, why.

And just talk about, I guess, jobs in big tech and why we decided to take leaps of fail. Did we take leaps of faith or we took a leap of faith? Getting very grammatical now. By the way, when you said it, at least I heard leaps of fail. Well, I guess failure is part of the process, even though I hope we minimize that by putting faith in what we do, in what we leap into.

So I was really excited about him going to the history of the RSS feeds and how they became part of iTunes, how Steve Jobs was personally talking to some of the people who were behind the RSS. Yes, I think we should interview Steve Jobs for one of our episodes. Yeah, man, that'll be fun. I actually don't think it would have been fun to have Steve Jobs in a podcast interview. I don't know. He must have been on some podcast episodes, right? I've never heard one. I don't know.

I mean, I've seen a lot of videos of him, but they were, I think, more like presentations. Yeah, that's what I've seen too, like post-produced. Yeah, I guess he was too busy to give interviews. Yeah. Also, I should not give too many opinions about something I don't know much. So I'll just shut up at this point. I think when he was still alive, it was the TV era. So I guess podcasts were still pretty small, even though majority of podcasts are very small.

But then even more so, it was like a novelty. And I think TV was a big deal back then. But the reason I brought up interviewing Steve Jobs, I was just wondering what the reaction would be. Many years ago, actually, it was back when Steve Jobs was still alive in 2011, Bork passed away. I was visiting a friend and their teenage son was starting to learn how to play the guitar. And he was playing some Nirvana stuff. And I don't remember how exactly it happened.

But I told him that something like that when Cabane was still alive or something. And he was like, wait, wait, wait, like he died. I'm like, okay, there you go. Yeah, he's been whatever. He died in 1994. So it's been almost 20 years since then. I think I didn't know. So I wouldn't be surprised. Wait, it's been 30, almost 30 years. By now. But like when I talked to him, it was almost 20 years by that time. Wow, that's crazy. He must have maybe just started with Nirvana. Maybe, yeah.

Yeah. Like, for example, the Alice in Chains. I didn't know that he had passed away. Oh, you didn't? No. For some reason, I always look into biographies. I'm always curious. Actually, Alice in Chains, I read a book on them. It's actually a very interesting story, like very heartbreaking. This guy's, Lane Staley's girlfriend was a drag addict. I think, heroin. And yeah, now we definitely have to mark this as explicit. And then, so she was like in and out of rehabs.

And basically, she pulled him into this. And yeah, eventually she died. She died first, I think, at the rehab. And then he become depressed and all. And he would just be in his condo in Kirkland, Washington, which is like across the lake from Seattle. And then he eventually died there. And I think a few days later, he was found. It was like not a great scene.

So yeah, those bands, like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, they all have pretty screwed up childhoods and adolescences, depression. That's why their songs are so aggressive and edgy. And I think it resonates with lots of other teenagers in the same situation or similar situations. And in case, coming to Steve Jobs, though, I've been studying Apple quite a bit recently. I always had a fascination with their products. And previously, I read a couple of books about Steve Jobs.

One of them is Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs. And in the last month, I've read the biography of Johnny Ive and the book called Build, which is written by Tony Fadell, who was the creator of the iPod at Apple and also the creator of Nest. And another book is called Insanely Simple by Kendall Segal, I think the name of the author. He was a marketing agency's director who worked with Jobs. So yeah, I read all those three books in sequence.

And I'm just so fascinated with Jobs and his personality, how really deeply he cared about the products that were built. You know, from all of those accounts, he was a bit of an asshole. But he was so, because he really cared. Yeah, that's why I said, I don't know if it would be a good podcast guest, like to give his opinions. He'll be like, oh, you guys, your podcast sucks. It's shit. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, you told me about the two books. I started Build. I'm about 30% through it.

It's awesome. The other one, Insanely Simple. I think that's queued up in my library on a hold. So we'll see when I get it. It's a really good book. One of the better books I've read in the last couple of years. Talking about interviewing Jobs, I think we are going to do a Primeesode sometime soon, in the next few weeks. So I won't go too much into it right now. But one of the books I'm going to talk about in there is, this is the second time I'm listening to this book.

I love this book, but I won't tell you the name right now. What? Yeah. I'll tell you when we record a Primeesode. But in the world of that book, we could go back and go and interview Steve Jobs. I read something about time travel. Time travel is one aspect of it, but there's a lot of fun stuff going on. We'll talk more when we do the Primeesode. I'm planting a seed for the future here.

Now, since you touched on the topic of time machine, I recently came across a video of Christopher Lloyd, who played Doc Brown in Back to the Future. With Michael J. Fox, who played Marty McFly together. And Michael J. Fox, he has had Parkinson's disease for almost 20 years, I think, at this point. And yeah, it looked actually pretty sad because I think his symptoms were showing. So he was twitching and all. And Doc Brown stands next to him, I guess, in good health and all.

Yeah, it was kind of pretty sad to see. I was a fan of that movie. I still am, right? Yeah. I watched that movie with my daughter and my wife again last year. That was the first time she watched it and she loved it also. I was so happy. All the three movies. Yeah. I mean, what's not to love about the movie? It's just so good. Yeah. By the way, there is a documentary, I think, about Michael J. Fox. Or it might have been about the whole three movies.

I haven't watched it yet, but it's on Apple TV+. About an hour and a half documentary. That might be fun. Oh, interesting. I saw there was a documentary about DeLorean. It's an older one. I think it was from before Apple Plus existed. I haven't watched it yet. This one is called Still. S-T-I-L-L. Cool. I need to check it out because I'm a big fan of that movie. There is a book called We Don't Need No Roads or something. Or We Don't Need Roads.

It's one of the famous phrases that Doc Brown says. I think it's part two. Everything's flying around. Yeah. DeLorean flies away. By the way, if you look at this scene today, it looks so lame. It's like as if somebody held DeLorean with their hands and moved it. And then hands were just erased. It's just so unnatural. Yeah. So the book actually is very good. It talks about a lot of scenes and some accidents that happened on the set.

So it's like a behind the scenes of the second movie or all the movies? All the three movies. Okay. What's it called? We Don't Need Roads. Okay. That would be cool. It's really cool. Yeah. I got it from the library maybe seven, eight years ago. Listened to it. It's really interesting. Especially things like why they chose the DeLorean.

I saw a piece of video somewhere where somebody was saying that Doc Brown doesn't ride a fucking Mustang, which implies that even a Mustang, it's not good enough for a time machine. That's why it was a DeLorean, which itself has a very infamous story. I think the company went bankrupt and all. Anyway, coming back to podcasting.

We've been testing a new process for tracking our episodes because we've got so many moving pieces to do an episode. We schedule a guest. We record. I pass it off to Masha, who does the edits. And then it comes back to me. I listen through it, do some more edits if I need to. Then I pass it to Misha, who does all of the sound engineering stuff. And he passes back to me. Then I do some listening.

Then in the meantime, I also compose a Substack post, pull all the links, pictures, publish it on Substack, publish it on YouTube, publish it on all of the other platforms through Anchor, Spotify for podcasters. And then we also promote this. It's like seven or eight groups of steps that are taking place. And if you have multiple episodes going on at the same time, it's really easy to get lost in all that. So we created a GitHub issues based project.

I think it's called a GitHub project in our account, where basically we have this Kanban board with all of those tasks that we move around now. And I have a set of templates that I create. Basically, I run it around the script. You run it and say like episode 24, and then it creates everything for you. Yeah, it creates like all of those seven issues in five seconds. And each issue is created with a template so that all the links to like Google Docs and all that is pre-populated.

Yes, correct. Yeah. And also like after we create things, we add the comments and resolve issues. So their history of what we've done and all of the links, it all stays there. I remember you wanted to do similar thing in Notion. I know some people are absolutely crazy about Notion. Do you think we could have done it more easily in Notion? I was happy with Notion before you and I started working on this podcast and stuff.

And there is a pretty sophisticated task management kind of thing with databases and so forth. And Notion has an API. So I think it would probably be possible to like create templates like this. It definitely has templates. But I haven't done that myself, like creating to-dos automatically, tasks automatically. At the same time, we are way more used to Git. I mean, we have been using Git and GitHub for years now. So the whole project workspace thing makes sense. It's very intuitive.

It's also a bit like more classical task management things like Jira and all that, right? Notion, I think the biggest hurdle that you had, and after you said it, I kind of felt, oh yeah, that's true, is the editing you were not happy with, the block-based editing. And I felt that after you mentioned it. Yeah, and the gist there was that every paragraph is like a block in Notion.

And especially, I think, with bullet lists, you can select multiple and then just move them around to the keyboard. And at some point, I'm like, okay, so like the basic functionality doesn't work as I expect. So go back to Google Docs. Even though Notion, I must admit, it's easier to organize things in Notion because you have everything in the same place. Yeah, it's like a drag-and-drop wiki. Yeah. In Google Drive or Google Docs, you have everything in files, essentially.

And I think it's very hard to discover the URLs and all that. In Google Drive? In Google, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Unlike a wiki where the hierarchy of the documents is implicit in the URL itself. Right. Yeah, actually, I remember when I was doing my MBA, we had a person who used to work at Google. She was on the workspace team. I think she was doing like enterprise deals and stuff. So it was 10 years ago.

And back then, Google Drive had some really rudimentary folder management capabilities. And I remember I was talking to her. I'm like, this is just not what people are used to in terms of folders. If you want to have a nice hierarchy of things, so you can easily locate things that you're working on. And she's like, yeah, who needs folders? You just put everything in the same thing and you use search. Well, guess what?

50 years later, Google did add a bunch of the folder management capabilities. But still, if you're in the doc, there is no indication as to which folder it's on. I mean, there is one, but like you have to click a few things and discover that. Till you showed me, I did not know that, wow, that I can actually navigate to the folder from the doc. That was like a mystery for me. Yeah, it's not easily discoverable. Yeah. We've recorded enough content.

We can stop. I want to talk about one more thing about the Justin Jackson episode. I love the conversation around the decentralized podcasting ecosystem and the benefits and the cost around it. And I was just imagining how different video would be if YouTube had not like basically become YouTube that quick, that fast. Right. And if it was like something like federated, like podcasts are.

Yeah, it actually makes me think about the technology there because to render the one hour of audio, you only need a few minutes of computer time. And pretty much any computer can handle it. The same length of video would probably take, I don't know, maybe at least half an hour. Yeah, especially like 20 years back when YouTube became big, it was really expensive. It was very expensive. You would have to have a very powerful computer to do that. But then you upload to YouTube.

YouTube does all that kind of conversion and codecs and all that stuff. Oh, also think about the formats, right? Yeah, audio is pretty much all MP3. They're also like whatever the flag. I think Apple has its own like AAC or something. But MP3 is pretty much the standard. On video, you have MOV, you have MP4, you have a bunch of different codecs. Do you remember this thing called DivX? D-I-V-X? I don't even remember what it was at this point. I remember it was a thing.

That's how I think pirated movies were basically shared around. And do you remember like to actually to play a file, I think you had to select which codec it was on. So if you didn't know the codec, you have to like download the codec or... And sometimes you would have to download the codec. Yep, yep. You had to be really technical to even play video back 15 years ago. Whereas with audio, you just do Winamp and it plays your files.

Yeah, and if you don't know what Winamp is or if you're on the start, you listened to our episode 14 with the creator of Winamp, Justin Frankel. Yeah, so I feel like the technical part of video is probably what partially led to a success of service like YouTube because they took all of the heavy lifting away from the users. Right, but like Apple did with podcasts, they made it easy and popular to create podcasts.

Well, not create and host podcasts, but at least to subscribe to podcasts and listen to them. But they decided, I mean, this was a significant decision that they took to keep the RSS spec and keep it all in there. They could have gone that same route, right? And like built something of their own, like a podcasting thing within Apple only. So here's the thing that you will find out from the build book, if you listen to it. I mean, you might have already listened to this part.

Apple was on the brink of death when they were launching the iPod. So I think they were not in a position to actually build something of their own. They didn't even know if the iPod would be successful. So they wanted help from everywhere around, the ecosystem around, yeah. Yeah, so they focused on their core competency, which is like a player.

In a nice case, very miniature and easy to use and stuff. I never had an iPod, but my uncle had. It was neat. It was really nice. Yeah, it would be nice to have somebody who worked on the iPod that was close to those decisions to be on our podcast. Tony Fidel, maybe? Very soon. Coming soon. So Tony Fidel, if you're listening to our podcast, come to our show. We are big fans of your book. And also, I have three Nest thermostats in my home.

Wait, you have three different Nest thermostats? I have three different air conditioners. What? How big is your house, Ilia? What are you doing running a podcast? My house is not bigger than yours, but you have X number of floors stacked on top of each other. And I have the same space spread over the ground because it's a single-story house. I mean, it's a spacious house, but it's, I would say, 80% of the house are on the same floor.

To optimize this, you need to have different units, different air conditioning units. So one single, that makes sense, yeah. So I have one Nest thermostat and one AC unit, but I have two additional, you know, you can get those thermostat sensors from Nest. Yeah, yeah. So I have two of those. So the main thermostat is in the main floor of the house, but I have two sensors, one in the basement and one in the bedroom.

So that allows me to program the Nest app to say, like, at night, use the one in the bedroom to regulate the temperature and measure what the temperature is. Whereas during the day, use the one in the main floor, that sort of stuff, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. But yes, between you and me, we have a lot of Nest devices and sensors and cameras and stuff. So Tony Fidel should definitely come on to this podcast. Yeah, like there's no reason for him not to.

And he was also talking about how bad the Honeywell thermostats were. Oh, I did hear that part, yeah. I replaced three Honeywell thermostats, which were, I couldn't figure out how to use, I mean, I could figure out how you like you adjust the temperature up or down. There is one mode, auto mode and off, I think. And after I installed Nest, I feel like the schedule, not the schedule, like the pattern of when AC starts became much more intelligent and I can make sense of it.

This was one of my favorite parts so far from that book is the decision making that went into why it's like that. And Honeywell probably is still one of the industry leaders in that, right? Nest is probably still nowhere close. Because they were the big giant in the room, they had all these technicians who are like Honeywell experts.

And so even if they could, they would not release a product that would let you basically operate all of this machinery without a technician because that would disrupt a huge part of their story. So they give you devices that are difficult to use so that you have to call people and pay them to resolve whatever issues you have. Yeah. And they are Honeywell experts.

And this is something that Nest had to, I think, tackle because you can't get every technician or even a significant percent of technicians to move out of Honeywell and take out your like new startup thingy. So they wanted to make it DIY. And I love that chapter, that part of the book. Yeah. I remember a couple of episodes ago, I told you about that air conditioning servicing company that were pushing me to replace my units that were still working.

Yeah. Actually, that same guy, I told him that I want to replace my thermostats with Nest. He's like, no, no, no, don't install Nest because Nest will screw up the motherboard on the AC. He almost became aggressive when we were talking about this. And it actually scared me because I'm like, what if I install it and it actually screws up the motherboard on the $10,000 piece of machinery in my attic? But then I talked to a friend of mine who has installed Nest himself.

And I'm like, just screw it. I'll do it. I mean, I disassembled the thermostat. I looked at the wires. I found a video that replaces exact same Honeywell thermostat with Nest. And I did exactly what I saw in the video. But the way Nest did it, I just love the experience. If I need to set up a new complicated thing like wiring and all, I'm never going to go into that. But the whole selling process, it asks you like, what do you have? Take it out. Like your current thermostat, right?

Take out the thermostat control panel and see what RDs the wires here. When the Nest gets shipped to you, it comes with your personalized instructions of this is how you wire it exactly. And I just loved it. Yeah. And it also has all the tools that you will need. It has a screwdriver. Did you get to the part about the screwdriver? Yeah, yeah. How the screwdriver became like a symbol of the Nest. And yeah, that was amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like, I guess, just to recap this story. When they shipped their first, whatever, test version to people, many people were upset that they didn't have the right tools to do the installation. And they just could abandon these or it would take them too long. So they included the tiny screwdriver that cost a dollar or two dollars, which added to their cost.

But then basically, once you take that control panel off, you have no excuse not to finish the project because you have everything you need at your hands. I guess unless you have some like weird stuff with your wires and you have to like do something with the wire. But yeah, I guess in my case, I didn't have that problem. But Nest Thermostat is pretty expensive. I think they're like $250 a piece.

I mean, I got that with the top model, but I got them at a very steep discount during Black Friday last year. Yeah, I think I also got it a few years back at some sort of discount thingy. Yeah. I think I got my first one with a Google discount, which was maybe like $150 or so. And then the other two from Amazon with a Black Friday discount probably was half a price or so. It was really good. But yes, like I spent probably like $500 on three thermostats, which is not cheap.

The part that I really liked about that is once you installed it and everything is done, you're done with that screwdriver. But it's such a well-manufactured, beautiful screwdriver and it's handy and it's small that you kept it around. And this turned into one of their marketing channels that they had not, I think, originally anticipated. That it would just sit in your toolbox somewhere and you would pick it out and you'd remember, oh, Nest, I love this thing.

And maybe it will spark some conversations with your neighbor or something like that. Yeah. And actually, I think because of the origin of Tony Fadell and also a bunch of the other employees from Apple, actually the whole Nest experience feels like it was created by a company who actually cares about its users. Yeah. All right. It's 15 minutes into our 30-minute episode. Let's wrap this up. Yeah. Let's wrap this up Apple style in the very nice packaging.

So what podcasts would you recommend there now?

What have you listened to in the last week or so? I actually have a anti-podcast thing to share with you. The anti-podcast podcast? Yeah. Well, no. So you remember how in one of our early episodes we talked about not using AirPods to record a podcast? Yeah. I'll share this podcast with you. Maybe we'll even inject it into this, our podcast or something as an example of what happens when you use AirPods. Probably not. It's too much work. But yeah, go on.

Okay. So this is a sports podcast. And I listen to it for the content, not for the production quality. And they're honest about it, too. They don't put much into it. They record it and then they release it. Like this was recorded yesterday and it was released yesterday. And it's a conversation probably recorded on Zoom or something like that, where one person is wearing AirPods. The quality is horrendous. Like you can barely kind of sometimes understand what they're saying.

There's a lot of echo and things going on. Maybe not just because of the AirPods, but it definitely added to it. And at some point, their sound just disappears and it's silence. And when that happens in a podcast, you're like, what the heck is going on? Did my app crash or like my phone? Is it alive? What's going on? And just as you're about to like unlock and figure it out, it comes in. Oh, hey, hey, my AirPods died. Yeah, of course. And then they come back on.

And I don't know what they were using after. Maybe a phone, maybe a computer. But the sound is so much better. You could see the difference between the AirPods sound and the one after. It's so much better. And that is a perfect example, I felt like, for not using AirPods to record a podcast. I'll share the clip with you. You figure out if it's easy or hard, whether to add it or not. But I don't want to name the podcast and everything. I just want to share that specific clip in there.

So, yeah, I guess we conclude this with the book, reading, listening, it's called No Filter. So that podcast probably used No Filter as like raw experience of recording audio. But the No Filter is the book about Instagram, how Instagram was founded, how it was sold by Facebook, and also how it got different under Facebook management and the founders left. And I think they even participated in things like hashtag delete Facebook.

So they definitely weren't super excited with the direction where the company was taking. Yeah, I've listened to a couple of hours so far. It's really good. Very engaging. But podcasts wise, I was listening to a bunch of episodes of This Week in Startups. It's a show that actually Jake and Jonathan in our fourth episode mentioned. This guy called Jason Kalakonis. He also does the All In is the other podcast. And This Week in Startups is the other one.

So I listened to an interview with Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and also to an interview with Aaron Levy, the CEO of Box. The Brian Chesky interview is really, really good. It changed my perception of Airbnb a little bit because actually Johnny Ive, the Apple's famous designer, his design firm now works for Airbnb or with Airbnb. There's a new Brian Chesky episode in the Decoder podcast that I'm waiting to listen to. Oh, interesting. I should listen to that too.

So yeah, but he referenced Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs multiple times during that interview. And because I was listening to all of those books about Apple, these stories really resonated because there was recency there. So yeah, it sounds like Brian Chesky took some patterns, some inspiration from Steve Jobs. Like Airbnb wouldn't do any projects that he, as the CEO of the company, cannot kind of keep track on, which to me is like, it's a bit crazy, right? For a company of like 2,000 people.

I think the definition of project might be key there because it's not possible for him to be involved in every single project. And with that, I'll see you next week. All right.