26. Change is the only constant

I actually don't understand why, but they have two different ways of getting royalties. You can get like 70% or 35%. And I don't know why would you get 70% if you can get 70%. Can I guess? Yeah. I think there's probably two different orgs building those two features. Hello and welcome to Metacost. And I'm your host. Let's do it again. No, it's okay. So unfortunately, we had an interruption to our program from our host Arnav Degov from Sanju Vancouver.

And we've been fiddling with our equipment for like half an hour now, trying to get everything correct. And you were also late. Well, it's like 7.30 in the morning, man. Yeah, but it's also my fault. Because I didn't tell you that we will be recording video. Yeah, we had decided to not do video, right? After the last one. Yeah, after our last one.

But let's first, I guess, talk about why it's an even episode. And there is no guest. Or is there a guest? No, there is no guest. Just the two of us. Not a visible one, at least. Yeah, and not the one that can speak. No. We've been trying to get a guest on our show. We have a couple of folks, really, really cool folks lined up. I'm so excited. I'm so excited about them. Yeah, I don't want to name the names just yet. But these are two people that I really admire.

I think both of us do admire both of those people. But they have busy schedules. And so they kind of spread out. And we reached out to a few more people. And at some point, I'm like, it's just too much stress to have people scheduled for every other week. And we are now heads down on working on our product. And it's just not, it adds a lot of stress. I'm so excited about that, too.

Yeah. And then we also got a couple of emails from, actually, one particular email that we'll read a bit later, which encouraged us to maybe do more of our metasodes. So basically, from now on, at least until we change our minds, the show structure will be as such. Season two. Season two, yeah. So we'll basically do, just the two of us, what we used to call metasodes.

Basically, they will continue to be metasodes because we will be talking about all of the meta things, about what's going on with our company, with our lives, podcasting in general. We will try to keep it anchored on podcasting as much as possible. But there will be a lot of other interesting things that we will talk about. And then whenever we can get a guest scheduled, a good guest, then we will have a guest episode. But we are also, I think, upping a notch on our guest list, right?

Yeah, so I think we've climbed the first level of the ladder where we're going for, like, bigger and bigger, more famous people now. Yeah. So, yeah, let's see how it goes. Stay tuned. Yeah. And not to diminish the people who have been on our podcast. But, yeah, I feel like that will be the next stage for our growth. That's what I hope. Yeah. It's when those people will share. They have large audiences. And, yeah, super exciting.

Yeah, I mean, not to diminish at all because they are foundational to it. And, in fact, in the emails that you send out, you call them out that this person was here or Justin Frankel was here. So, yeah, it's been pretty cool. Oh, actually, we did have some big names, too. Yeah. Because the first person you mentioned was Justin Frankel. Yeah. And I think we have heard previously, too, from other people, two consistent pieces of feedback. One is people really enjoy the Metasodes.

And the second thing is the episodes are very long. So, we're going to try to keep it to about 30 minutes actual after production. Let's see. Yeah. And if you have any feedback for us on this front, please send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com. Yeah. Actually, let's go to that topic, Arunap.

Let's just go and read some of the feedback that you received. Talking about feedback, we have been asking for this, like, leave us a rating and comment forever. And we have received, like, emails or messages through WhatsApp or Signal directly to either you or me from our friends and network. But I think after we published the last episode, which was about our Google and Amazon and leaving that and starting something new, there was some incredible emails that came our way.

So, we're going to read a couple of them. And we're going to read a few quotes. Do you want to go first or should I go first? So, by the way, we tried to use ChatGPT to do the summarization. And it took away some of the magic from that emotion. Yeah, I think you should go first with the email that you summarized. But I'll add a bit of personal story there. I woke up, I think it was about a week ago. Yeah, I wasn't in a very good mood and all.

And the first thing I read that morning was that email from Mo. And it just made my day. So, yeah, go for it. Similar, I think. I read it late at night. And I had come back from playing tennis. If you remember, Ilya, I told you I didn't play well that day. And I was a bit depressed with everything. I was tired also. And then I, just before going to sleep, I thought, okay, let me check. And that email was amazing. I immediately sent it to you. And you saw it in your morning, I think.

Okay, cool. So, this was from Mo, who's a software engineer from Vancouver. He found our show via Brian McCullough when he talked about it in the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. Brian was in our episode too. So, Mo has been listening to pretty much all the episodes so far. Yeah, he said that once he heard Brian, he went and checked out our episode. And then he was interested. So, he went back and listened to the first episode as well. Right. When we only had two episodes. Right.

Okay, so here's what he had to say. A few sentences I'll quote from there. From the very first episode, I have been captivated by the content and the passion that emanates from the Metacast podcast. I want to express my heartfelt appreciation for the inspiration that the Metacast podcast has provided me. And later on, your contributions are making a difference, not only in my life. And then he goes on to, like, talk about a few more things.

And finally, I am honored to be a fan since day one and look forward to continuing this incredible journey alongside you. I wish I could read the whole email, but it had so many things in it. And this really made both of us. And this really made both of our days. So, thank you, Mo. I actually pasted it to a Google Doc where we keep track of all of the feedback. It's over one page long. It goes beyond one page. So, it's a very long email. It was very thoughtful.

You know, very inspiring for us to read that, to see that things that we do resonate with people. Because the thing with podcasting is, you just record your show into the void. And unless people write back. I mean, we see the numbers, but numbers don't mean anything. It's those little pieces of feedback that really matter. So, I'll also do a very short summary of the other email that we received from a person whose name we will not say. He is our friend.

We used to work together at Amazon. And he said that... To keep it even more mysterious. Yeah. I already spelled that part. So, he said that he listened to those two episodes because it was a two-part episode. And it was so insightful and deep that I listened to it one more time. I personally have never listened to the same episode twice within such a short time frame. So, yeah. Thank you. And he said that many things that you both spoke about resonated with my own feelings and views.

Like me doing more and more things that I do not love as I climb higher in the career ladder. Crippling fear before taking the leap of faith, financial planning, and so on. And he said that it was reassuring to hear some of my own experiences I'm currently going through as your past experiences. So, he's almost like reliving his future experiences. I don't know. It's interesting to hear that. Similar path as we were on, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's a bit younger than us.

And probably that's the kind of... He's a few years behind. And that's what he says. I think I'm still a few years behind, but very close, in that path on the lake. Yeah. Go ahead and check out the episode 24, part one and part two. That's where we bring that concept of the pathless path, where instead of following a route that somebody else paves for you, you are on the lake and you're free to go wherever you can as long as you have financial freedom to do that, I guess.

It's a big part of what we discussed, too. Oh, and one thing he said at the very end of the email, I'd like to just thank you both for getting vulnerable. And I think it's an interesting point because it's not easy for many people to get vulnerable just in general in life, even with those that they love. But even more so when you're sending it out into the internet. Yeah. And even more so with video. Well, that unluckily we didn't do with video. That's true. Yeah. So, yeah.

Check that out. Yeah. No, those were great. And I think these kind of feedback... We received a few more, too. We won't read out all of them. But it's been, I want to say, almost overwhelming, the amount of thoughtful feedback that we received after those two episodes. So, thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen to it, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And if you have something to say, don't hold back. Send us an email.

Even if it's just a couple of sentences, we'll be happy to hear from you. And if you want to publicly leave a comment, then, you know, if you subscribe to our Substack, you receive those emails whenever we publish, you could just reply to that email. I didn't know that feature existed. That's pretty cool. So, you can just reply to any email from Substack, and that will become a comment on the post. Is it going to be a comment, or are you going to get this as an email?

It's going to become a comment in the post. Nobody has left it yet, so we don't know. Maybe you can be the first one listener. Yeah, help us test this. So, yeah, speaking about the videos, you know, I kind of caught Arna by surprise today by telling him at 7.20 a.m. that for our recording at 7.30, he needs to be all dressed up and all to be in the video-appropriate attire.

So, this is the best I could do with my hair in, like, 10 minutes, 15. I took 20 minutes, though, yeah. You were 20 minutes late, yeah. Yeah. But also not shaved or anything. It's all good, yeah. So, yeah, but we're keeping it real. I think as long as the hair is not dirty, I think that's fine. But the reason why we wanted to do video, or I wanted to do video, I guess is the right way to say this. YouTube. Because YouTube promotes video content just randomly to people.

And I think we're missing out on that potential by not doing the video. Video takes quite a bit of time to produce. The previous episode that came out on July 5th, where we talk about all of the gear and give a lot of tips for podcasting. So, that one we wanted to do as a video episode because we show a bunch of things and we also want YouTube to promote that. It took me, I think, a good three or four days, pretty much, like, working sort of full days to produce it.

It was a lot of effort, but I was also learning the tool while doing that. And I was also taking a lot of notes, which probably, like, added another 30-40% of time. So, for this one, it's going to be a test because we are not going to put so much effort into this one. I'll try to just maybe cut out just the parts that we shouldn't have said. But otherwise, just leave it unedited. And then we do the regular edits for the audio part of it. Right.

And because we are being vulnerable, we will not cut out anything because there's nothing we wouldn't say. Yes. I think the first two minutes, though, we were fiddling with the equipment. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. We'll have to cut that part out. Yeah. Last time, how long was the actual recording? It was two hours and six minutes. Okay. And what was the post-produced episode length? One hour, 29 minutes, and 36 seconds. Okay. So, we cut out, like, 30% of it. A quarter.

But we also inserted some, like, I think, audio and all that into it. Yes. We inserted a bunch of audio clips from our previous guest. I think that's pretty cool because I was able to bring maybe 10, at least, audio clips from our previous recordings, which, thanks to Descript, we have transcripts of all of those recordings. So, I could easily find those parts because I remembered them, but I wouldn't be able to find them without the transcript. So, I brought them in.

Yeah. It took a bit of time to edit those in, especially that I was learning the tool. I was using Descript for that episode. But, yeah, I think it came out. I would say I'm not in love with it, but I think I've done a pretty decent job. So, I haven't seen the video fully because you finished it two days ago, I think, and I was out of town anyway. But the audio one sounded great. I loved it, actually. Yeah, and that's the thing about Descript that I wanted to talk about.

So, previously, what we were doing is we were making content edits in Descript. And for those of you who don't know, Descript is a tool where you import, you know, your audio files or video files. I think they're leaning more towards video at this point, towards video creators. And then it gives you Transcript.

And you can manipulate the Transcript, remove parts from Transcript, and it removes that part from the audio or video, which is really cool because it makes visual the editing of audio, which is inherently non-visual. Yeah. You can even change words in there and it'll, like, create it in your voice and simulate the video. I don't know if you've tried much of that. We should try it once, actually, and then we produce, like, a full paragraph of synthesized speech and just see how it sounds.

I think I have a great idea. Yeah. All of your ideas are great, yeah. You don't need to qualify your ideas. I know they're always great. Okay, great. We should do, like, a recording of maybe 15 minutes of talking about our topic. Then take the audio transcript from Descript, feed that into ChatGPT to, say, make this, like, a stand-up comedy or something else. Feed it back into Descript and see what happens. Okay. And then they retire. Shh. Yeah.

So, but what we were doing previously, we would take the raw recordings that were kind of chopped in Descript, and then we would send them to a sound engineer who would, you know, apply a lot of sound engineering magic to that. But because this one was video, I didn't want to produce, like, an extra audio thing. And also, the tools that we use for audio, I don't think they're compatible with video, so you would have to split the tracks, audio from video.

That would be a lot of extra overhead. So, instead, I gave a try of the Descript's studio sound feature, which just, like, automatically makes your audio sound good. Oh, wow. So, it produces, like, the whole episode in one go, or what does that feature do? Or does it, like, individually edit all the segments? It's applied to the whole track, to the whole kind of underlying audio track. So, and that was actually one of the problems. You cannot disable it on a specific segment.

You are either in or you are out. And what it does, it removes background noise. It, I think, brings the volume up. It applies compressor. It removes the popping sounds. And the difficulty I experienced there was we had some of the parts where somebody turned on the shower in your house. And you could clearly hear this on the recording. But after we applied studio sound, there was just silence there because it took it out.

For that particular thing, I had to take the file, go to Reperb, cut that piece, insert it like a layer, like an additional sound layer. Because we had path dependency on the shower noise. Like, we talked about it on the episode. Yeah, I think it turned out actually pretty decent in terms of audio quality. I was listening to the new episode this morning as it was published. I think it was actually sounding good.

The only thing I had to do, I did it for my track, but next time I should also do it for your track. I removed the echo and the reverberation using iZotope because Descript cannot do this yet. But I think at some point that we'll be able to. So, yeah, we'll try this a few more times, see how it goes. Because, I mean, obviously it's cheaper because we can just use Descript and, you know, not have to pay somebody else to do the work. Who's been awesome, by the way, Misha, he's in Germany.

If you have sound engineering needs, contact Ilya and he'll get you connected. You've been working with him for a few years now, right? For a couple of years, yeah. Also, his contact details are linked from our previous show notes in Substack. But, like, just purely pragmatically, I would say the sound quality that Descript produces is not the same as what Misha can do with his chops, right? Of course, yeah. But now that Ilya doesn't have a job anymore. Yeah, that's one thing.

But also, it's 80% there. There are some areas where, like, the volume would be too low, like, there is too much compression. I could hear that. Yeah, and you can't individually tweak those things. You can't, no. But I think for now, especially that we will start doing video, we will see how it goes. And, yeah, we'll go from there. But I was impressed. I was impressed with the quality of Descript's sound effects.

And, you know, we've made a lot of fun of Descript since we recorded our first episode in October or November, I believe. To be fair, it was not instigated by us most of the time. It depends. But I've seen that growth of Descript over time. And, wow, I'm impressed. I'm impressed. I wish it was actually faster. It's a bit slow in terms of, like, the user interface. And I have, well, the Mac that was latest a year ago. So it's a very powerful machine.

And I still feel like it's very slow. Well, I guess relatively slow. But it still saves us a lot of time. What about the video itself? Does it do any sort of magic to the video? I haven't really gone that deep yet. But what I found really helpful, you can add things like, for example, for those sections where I brought clips of other people talking. I inserted the cover of the episode instead of the video. You can replace those. I think they call them scenes.

They're almost like frames. You can add new scenes. You can add some GIFs and stuff. I've not played with that. But it's very powerful. And when you insert those clips, of course, they're from different people, different episodes. So it's going to sound, like, totally different. How did the overall sound, studio sound thing work? Because that applies to the whole episode, right? Not individual segments. Well, it applies to tracks, right? So your track has its own studio sound.

My track has its own studio sound. But I did not apply any effects on the inserts because they've already been post-produced by Misha. So they were already at a good quality. If they were raw recordings, I could have applied studio sound for each of those inserts separately. Okay, so that's episode 25. It came out as of this recording today. Fresh off the kitchen. Yeah. So for you, it came out last week. For those of you who are listening.

Yeah. But for us who are recording, yeah, it came out just a few hours ago. Yeah.

So, and you are doing a few more things with that episode, right? Taking it further. Yes. So the original plan was that I also write a book summarizing all of the things that we've said in the episode, but a lot more. There is a lot more that goes into that. And actually, I think I found the name for the book, which I would like to call. And I will not say how it goes, but I'll keep it as a surprise.

So the idea was I wanted to make it a simultaneous launch kind of the episode and the book. And I fell way behind schedule with that video production. So I'm not even close to being ready with the book. So let's hope it comes out when this episode comes out. If not, under this episode and show notes, there is a page where you can subscribe to get notified when the book comes out. And I'm pretty sure it will be an awesome book, but we'll see. What kind of book?

I mean, sure, it'll be awesome. What kind of book are you trying to go for? Oh, it's like a textbook, you know, like boring stuff that you get in university. Oh, so it's going to be like $80. Textbooks are like $160. Well, you can rent it for a semester for $70. And then it will be like all over with like highlighter markers and stuff. Now, so I'm taking a lot of inspiration from the book by Jason Freed and David Hanemar Hansen called Rework, which is a book about entrepreneurship.

But the structure of it is such that every chapter is no more than, I think, two and a half pages long. Like very, very short chapters, very punchy. So I'm going for the same style. But I'm also thinking about how can we demystify podcasting? There's a lot of steps that you have to take to create a podcast to even launch your first episode. There is like, you know, the cover art, the music, the post-production, the recording, the microphone, the room. All of that stuff, it's overwhelming.

But it's overwhelming when you look at this as a black box. But if you look at it as a, like a roadmap, and I think about it in terms of day zero, day one, and day two. And day zero is like, how do you prepare for, like before you even record? What microphone do you buy? Like what kind of room you need to prepare? Your cover art, things like this. Like thinking what your podcast should be about. And then day one is, it's a recording day. Like how do you record?

How do you test your equipment? How you work with the guests? And then how you take all of that post-produce and publish. And then day two is, how do you make improvements on your process over time? So basically the point there is, how do we get you as quickly and cheaply as possible? Minimal amount of work to be able to publish it, yeah. Yeah, very pragmatically, right? Yeah, actually I think that's what Jason Fried and DHH's work is about. It's about being pragmatic.

And the book, The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the inspirations here as well. It's like, how do we give you the right tools at the right cost with minimal effort? I mean, we don't own any of those tools, but like how do we give you advice? And then you can just follow that advice and get your podcast out in a week. So yeah, that's what the book is about. A friend was asking, hey, you guys started a podcast. I'm interested too. He wants to do something in the world of finance, right?

And he was asking all these. And I said, wow, what a timely question. Our episode is coming out tomorrow, talking about this. And then Ilya is also doing a book very soon. So this is going to be like a PDF or a short, quick book on Gumroad or something? Or how are you thinking about publishing and distributing it? I think it will end up being maybe like 150, 200 pages book, but not very dense because I want to keep it playful, playful with images and all.

Playful, practical, I think, right? Like we're going for the practical information and that's it. No life stories, unlike our podcast. Right. The thing with practical stuff is it can be very boring. So I want to make it practical and playful at the same time because it should feel like play. It should feel like fun to do your podcast. And so reading the book and getting in the Jordan should also feel very fun.

As far as distribution, I think we will start with something like Gumroad, but we'll need to see what their commissions are. Yeah, 30%. 30%? Yeah. I think they raised it to like 30% last year and there was a lot of outcry over it. Maybe we should look at something else. So yeah, we have some time. I also looked at Amazon publishing. They have, I actually don't understand why, but they have two different ways of getting royalties.

You can get like 70% or 35%. And I don't know why would you get 35% if you can get 70%. Can I guess? Yeah. I think there's probably two different orgs building those two features. Oh, right. They didn't align. Yeah. But this is very true, right? We are drifting a little bit off, but very quickly. Your org hierarchy tends to show up in your products. And this is, I think, the truest in Amazon and AWS of all places. It's a conveys law. Yeah, there is even a law for that.

It's basically like if you look at any big company's product and look at, the menu of items they have on their website or in their application. And it doesn't make sense. That's because it's owned by different orgs. And the interface tends to represent the org chart. Actually, there is an expression that we use at Amazon in our org. I think we call it shipping the org chart. And we were saying that we shouldn't ship our org chart, yet we were still doing just that. It gets hard.

I mean, to be fair, right? Like these are big teams and working on conflicting priorities. And yeah. Anyway. So I looked at Amazon.

And the thing I didn't like there is that they can sell your stuff at promotional prices, including like giving it for $0 at Kindle Unlimited, as far as I understand. Without you having any control over it? It doesn't sound like it. It's not a legal advice. But like from my skimming of the very complicated table, it didn't seem like that. And they were given some examples like, oh, let's say you save your book for like $5.99. And we decided to sell it for like $2.99 for promotional time.

So your royalty will be like $0.20 per piece. And then there are also examples where like your royalty is zero. It sounds like it might be a good way to like distribute it very far and wide, but may not be efficient in terms of actually getting something out of it. Yeah. The thing that attracts me with Amazon is that they can also print it for you. But then I feel like Amazon, you'll probably get screwed unless you have very large volumes.

And what I've heard in terms of success stories, I think people who do those like novels. So imagine things like Wings of Fire, like the children novels. And there are, I don't know how many, like 20 of them. And they just come out every few months in one. I think if you're in this kind of game where you have, like the content is fairly easy to produce as long as you have the right kind of skills and idea. And you just keep churning it. And lots of kids love it.

And kind of the new generations of kids grow up and they also buy it. You know, it's like saving diapers. There are always new babies and you always have to sell diapers, right? So maybe it works just because of sheer volume. But I don't want to follow that path, at least not yet. Yeah. This is a one-off book anyway. Yeah. But yeah, I think I'm learning some pretty interesting skills while I'm doing that.

I'm also reading a couple of books in parallel. One is called Make It Clear by Patrick Winston. He has a video called How to Write on YouTube. It's a one-hour lecture from MIT. He's a fascinating communicator. Well, I guess he was. He passed away, I think, 10 years ago or so. Yeah. Lots of ideas coming from his book as to what we can apply to ours. And also another book that I'm reading is Design is Storytelling by the person whose name I forgot.

It's also a lot about design, how you make, how you tell a story with the visuals. Talking about books, quick detour. The two books you suggested over the last couple of months, I'm done with the Apple one, Insanely Simple. And the Instagram one I just started, the No Filter book. The Insanely Simple one was awesome. For bits of it, I felt like, okay, this is going a bit more towards Apple marketing than actual reusable advice. But there are so many insights and great advice in the book.

I loved it. Yeah, and just to give it to our listeners a bit of more context. So the guy, this guy, I'll say his name escapes me. He was a marketing director at the agency that worked with jobs on both Next and Apple. And he basically takes the concept of what being simple means and breaks it down in terms of kind of anecdotes and stories from his interactions with jobs and how Apple does marketing, how Apple does product development.

And it turns out, doing simple things is actually very difficult. Because in a big company, you always trend toward making things more complex and more complicated. Like we were just talking about the conveys law and shipping the org chart. Well, guess what? Try to make it different when you have a company of 100,000 people or even more. It is very difficult when you're at this scale.

But Apple somehow is able to make most products such that they feel like they're built by the same company, by the same team. Like I was at the Apple store yesterday. Everything just seems so, just feels so seamless and connected. Okay. My dog agrees. The dog just barked. And I'm not sure if Studio Sound will filter it out or not. Yeah, we'll see. I think he's also trying to tell us that the recording is going far too long.

One thing I wanted to also briefly touch on. I recently listened to an interview with Mr. Beast. And I guess for those of you who are not teenagers and kind of, I guess, older folks. Because I had no idea who Mr. Beast was. I had heard the name, but I have never seen any of his videos. Yeah. I discovered him accidentally. I think there was some exchange of stuff between him and Elon Musk or something. I'm like, okay. So, oh, Elon Musk commented on his thing. And I'm like, okay.

So, the guy must be a big deal. And then I looked deeper into this. I think he has 120 million subscribers on YouTube. He's like the most subscribed to creator on YouTube. And he does a lot of videos where they like, whatever, destroy houses and they give away a lot of money. Insanely successful videos. Like, really catchy. In the billions of views. Like, millions of dollars to produce. He's very successful. It's just, I guess, not my cup of tea in terms of the content.

I watched one video just out of interest. But he himself said that most of his audience, if he were to guess at the average listener, that would be a teenage boy that plays video games. That would be his guess. So, he was on Lex Friedman podcast a few months ago, I think, or a few weeks ago. And it was very interesting to hear how kind of Lex asked him questions and they broke down some of that success.

One thing that really stood out to me that Mr. Beast said is, like, your first hundred videos are not going to perform well. Unless you, like, hit some kind of, like, luck. And he hit some kind of, you know, success that's not common. So, he said, like, yeah, your first hundred videos will be, like, whatever. But when you do every subsequent one, make one thing better. Analyze what you do. Make that one thing better. Get into the world.

Next one, get one thing better, etc. Keep the good ones. Yeah, yeah, obviously. Yeah, you keep things at work. But then you improve every time. And I think I want to apply the same practice to our podcast as much as we can. So, I think we already improved our video quite a bit by using the iPhones instead of our webcams. And if you check us on YouTube, you will see the difference. Well, I mean, there's still quality. There is nothing to compare with. But the quality is really amazing.

Also, I think sticking to this schedule, making the episodes shorter, I think, is the thing that we are practicing today. So far, we have been successful. We're, like, 30 seconds over what we decided we'll record for. Yeah, but it will end up a much shorter episode than the normal, like, one hour. Yeah, although we had, like, more than half of the topics on our doc we didn't cover. So, maybe we'll do it in the next episode.

And I think for the next one, the improvement that I'll bring is I'll come shave. Looking a bit less haggard, I guess. I think you're cheating right now. Because that's not really an improvement. Well, I guess, unless somebody complains. Well, it is for me. Maybe, yeah. Because I'll actually be thinking, what can we do better in terms of maybe the flow? Or maybe how we bring the topics, how we tell the stories better. So, how do we actually grow as podcasters?

Yeah, I think, as in most things in life, you can just get better by shaving, you know? It's an important first step, man. Shaving is a very important tool. It might feel you more confident and all that. I mean, I don't want to diminish that. But what I'm saying is, like, you're not going to get from zero to one by shaving. One last thing I want to point out. Right behind me, if you're watching us in the video, is a t-shirt, which I decided not to wear today, but I put it on the wall.

It's a Metacast t-shirt. Yeah, the t-shirt that Arna was wearing. We produced a couple of those t-shirts for ourselves. But if you like our show and if you want to support us, we will publish a link. It will be a shop on Teespring. And you can buy the t-shirt and support us. It will arrive in maybe, I think, two weeks or so is their producing time. So, once you order it, they will take the t-shirt, put it in the press, and then this thing will be painted with dye.

And, yeah, it would be using the PNG that I put on the side. And then it will be put in a box or in a pouch, right? And send to you wherever you are. And you will receive it, unpack it, and you can wear it and proudly display that you're a fan. Send us a photo. Yes, send us a picture or give it to someone. So, yeah, and, you know, obviously, half of the money that you pay will go to Teespring because it takes time to produce and shape and all logistics.

But for the rest of the profit that we get from this, each of us can buy a coffee. It only works at scale. It doesn't work at, like, our scale. But if you want to support us, it will mean a lot to us just to see some sales, some numbers, and also, yeah, see your pictures, tag us on Instagram or whatever. Yeah, show your appreciation that we will really be happy with that. Which t-shirts are you putting up? The one behind you? Yeah, that's the one that we've been wearing.

Are you doing the Minor Podcast Celebrities one? I love that one. Oh, yes. Yeah, let's do the Minor Podcast Celebrities one as well. So, yeah, actually, we'll put a few of those t-shirts in different colors, too. And, yeah, feel free to get whichever one you... I think that one was from our episode 17 with Jenny, who is one of our friends and also listener of the show, or was. I don't know if she's listening right now. If you are, shout out to you, Jenny.

But she did a hilarious segment calling us Minor Podcast Celebrities. So, maybe we should just insert that sound clip right here, too. It is probably, like, more of a one-way connection going on. But it is fun to, you know, listen to Minor Podcast Celebrities who I know. And we can post a picture of that t-shirt in our sub stack. So, if you haven't checked our show notes, yeah, just click on that link. There will be a picture.

Oh, by the way, one thing I started doing also as of a couple of episodes ago, as of episode 24, I think I started doing that. That was one of the improvements. I added chapters, timestamps, and the topics that we were discussing. So, YouTube actually magically picks those up from the description and processes them. Oh, from the description? Cool. From description, yeah. I thought you had to do it manually, but no, it just takes it from description. It's really, really convenient.

I don't think any podcasting apps do this. I think for podcasts, the RSS spec has, like, you have a specific format you need to put that in. Oh, man, okay. So, but it doesn't do it automatically. Yeah, I don't think so. Which is, I think, a fixable problem. And we can talk about that in our next episode. Yeah, along with other things we're fixing.

Yes. Yeah. Oh, by the way, if you are still here, after all of our self-congratulatory and pushing commercial stuff on you in the last 30 minutes,

tell us what podcasting app you use and what you are happy about in that app and what you are unhappy about in that app. So, yeah, we can do a little user research here. So, yeah, just send us an email. Just a couple of lines, you know, what you like in your app, what you don't like in your app. What do you think could be better? Give us some ideas. I mean, not that we don't have ideas. We have lots of ideas for how to solve some of those problems.

But we want to validate that those problems exist beyond our own imagination. And if you don't have time to write down all of those things in an email, but you would much rather prefer like a 15-30 minute chat, let us know. We'll be happy to sit down, chat about that too. And maybe even we'll show you what we're doing. Yes, ahead of time. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Also, if you feel like sending us a voicemail, how do people do that?

Who doesn't like sending voicemails, right? Yeah. Speak your voicemail after the beep. I mean, I think you can record like an audio note in your phone and just email it. And then we can play it. So if you want your stuff, you saying something, be played on our podcast, then you can send us something brief like a voicemail. You can just play it here. All right. And with that, I think we are seven minutes over time in terms of what we decided to record. And let's go to date. All right.

Thank you. This was awesome. See you next time. Thank you. See you next week. Bye.