Push need keep the
and you'll sign an NDA anyway even though you're a good person and will keep secrets.
is the best. Yeah, even though our friends still sell NDA, I mean, there is no way around this. Because we don't want people sharing screenshots and stuff, or we'll sue them.
Money to see them Hello, hello, hello! Welcome to episode 27 of Ilya and Arnav's awesome Metacast podcast! Today is July 11th, we are recording on a very warm and nice and sunny afternoon on a Tuesday and night for Ilya over in Miami.
It was 36 degrees Celsius today. It was very warm indeed.
Yeah, and you're sitting without your AC, so let's keep this short.
Yeah, I feel like my desk starts to get slippery because of my sweat.
Right, it's very humid, yeah. It's been okay here, 29, 30 degrees. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice.
It's interesting that you said it's Ilya's and Arnab's or Arnab's and Ilya's, whoever's name you put first, podcast, because just today I changed the owner of the podcast to the company name.
And why did we change that?
Well, I guess we'll transfer in all of the intellectual property that we have created before we register the company and podcast is one of those things
Right. And we also noticed that, so the email address that you put as the owner in your RSS feed, that's kind of public information, right? Anybody can crawl that RSS feed and find that. And we found that somebody started sending us a newsletter about podcasts into that email address that neither Ilya or I don't remember ever signing up for. So we figured out, oh, this is where it must be from. And then he noticed it.
Yeah, and that email newsletter is, I think, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I think that's what they said on the email. Well, I guess that's because I don't ask anyone's permissions. And they just grab emails from the podcast RSS feeds. And I guess maybe for our listeners who don't know how podcasts are distributed, there is essentially an RSS feed, which is an XML file, that's hosted somewhere on the internet. And it links to MP3 files with the episodes, with the
audio. And then that RSS feed also contains all of the metadata like the podcast name, podcast description, who is it by, and all of the episodes. And then you submit this to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the other apps. And that's what they use to exclude information from us. So we never have to input our email to Apple or Spotify, we just put it into the RSS feed in
our hosting provider, and they take care of the rest. So yeah, they just crawl to that and misuse our personal information, I guess.
It's okay, now we've changed it. We realized thanks to them that it was that address. But that's okay. So what is the agenda of today? We're going to talk a little bit behind the scenes about the app we're making and the podcast space, the tech that we're working on. And if there is enough time, we'll go a bit into what kind of tools and what subscriptions we use right now to
produce this podcast. And if there's more time, we'll talk about other stuff like threads and books and a book that Ilya is writing.
In the last episode, I suggested that we do at least one improvement every time we record a new episode. So you really took this seriously, right? So you just did like an overview of what we are going to talk about so that people stick around.
I did, I did. Did I tell you about it or not? No, you didn't. Yeah, okay, but I thought last time when we were recording, I thought that's what we're missing because to keep the engagement high, I do think like you need to tell them what we're going to talk about, especially if it isn't a guest episode.
And our listeners will now really be introduced to how messy our planning is, because when you were listing all of those things, I'm like, you should have stopped at item number three, because you're not likely to be able to cover all of them. But if you don't, that will be in the backlog.
But like we have said before we are always over prepared So there's more more things than what I said on the list, but we'll probably not get into it
Yes, okay, let's dive into this.
Alright, how about you start Ilya? Take up the first one, yeah
I think people might have wondered why are these dudes doing the podcast about podcasting? And the reason why we are doing this is, you know, obviously because we like podcasting and all, but that is not the primary reason. The primary reason is that a while back we decided that we want to build something, we want to build a product and that product is
in the podcasting space. So we preemptively started working on the podcast so that we, first of all, you know, kind of are more legitimate to the world because we are working on the podcast, we have a podcast because even though I used to have a podcast before, it's in a different language. It's harder to bring up in a conversation, especially given all the political situation right now, because it's that language.
You mean we wanted to become minor podcast celebrities?
Yeah, we want to become minor podcast celebrities so that by the time we launch the app, we have a brand that at least a few hundred people would recognize. But also it would establish us as somebody who has done a podcast for a while. Well, we wanted to launch a lot sooner than we are targeting right now. But now I think by the time we launch, we'll probably be 28-29 episodes in when we launch the alpha, and when we launch the public version, we'll probably be 30 plus episodes in.
Ah, don't don't.
We'll see. Yeah, let's get to the alpha which is right around the corner.
Right around the corner. I think we literally have like two or three development tasks and we have a couple of business tasks, which one is I think like NDA. We need to put an NDA in DocuSign, but it's like, it's like nothing. So but yeah, I guess now you've been listening to us rambling about what is it we are working on?
What are we building and why are we building another podcast app?
Yeah, I guess you said you're building a podcast app. I guess we've been dissatisfied by podcast apps for a very long time. Ever since I discovered my first podcast, which was Internet History podcast back in 2014, I think. Well, as long as it was the only podcast I listened to, Apple podcasts worked just fine for me. And maybe I listened to a couple of other podcasts, so just had maybe two, three podcasts I listened to. The startup podcast was one of them, by the way, which is an awesome podcast by Gimlet. And it
was fine because I listened to every single episode that came out. But now, nine years later, I have like, I don't know, 50, 60 podcasts that I'm sort of subscribed to, but then listen to maybe three or four episodes per week. When I'm reading a book in parallel, if I don't read the book in parallel, I might listen to like 10 episodes per week. But still, all of those podcasts cumulatively produce probably like 200 episodes every week. I cannot possibly listen to all of those. And then those apps, like Apple podcasts,
Spotify, they just start to break when you have some complex, complicated patterns of listening.
You also have different modes of listening. Sometimes I'm in mode of listening to like technology related podcasts, right? I want to learn something or I want to listen to a conversation between two people that I know in the technology world, right? Or sometimes I'm listening to more topical like sports like Formula One or Wimbledon is going on right now. I'm listening to the Wimbledon podcast daily. And these things like, yeah, I can sort of subscribe to everything in these apps, but the experience is very clunky.
experience is super clunky everywhere.
and what it was or what segment it was in. And I think that's our other big use case we want to cover is you should be able to very quickly go back and find information.
Yeah, of the information that you listen to, or maybe the information that you haven't even listened to. So that search and discovery of podcasts is very underserved right now, in our opinion. I really like how you mentioned those different modes and how you can build a different mood and listen to different things. My pattern is a bit different. I may be in a different mood for listening to different things, but I don't consciously think about those.
I just prefer to have a playlist that I can rearrange and just structure things that I want to listen to next.
A single playlist across all types of podcasts that you listen to.
Yeah, across all types of podcasts, which I curate myself. I don't allow any automations into that playlist. I only want episodes that I want to listen to in that playlist so that it never goes out of control. So let's say I am in the mood for listening to Huberman about psychedelics or something, then, you know, I can add a few episodes and listen to them in a row. But then if all of a sudden my mood changes, I just want to add something else to play next. I think the podcast app has this functionality, but I've just cancelled out my subscription because that app has been just breaking all the time.
I don't know what's going on, but it was good until it lasted. I've used it for the last three or four years. It's a great app, but it's just more recently it's been too buggy. I started using Apple Podcasts, which I just totally dislike.
The point I wanted to make about the content, because you said that there is probably more information on podcasts than in videos. I think it's actually very different content. Like I was fixing my pool pump today and yesterday. There was some air in the pipes. Like how do they get rid of it? That video is great for that.
Video is great for that. Yeah. I mean, it would be like weird to have something like that on a podcast. But video, like how-to kind of stuff, you just find it and you watch it and you do what they show you or learn stuff. That's just perfect.
I think instructional videos also they're really good
Yeah, I think for those instructional kind of videos, there are probably more hours of content than podcasts. It's just overall and that makes sense Yeah, but podcasts have different kind of information They are more like at least the podcast that you and I listen to right most of them. They're more like books
Just knowledge based. I'll give you an example. I really like that episode on the Lex Pribben podcast. I think it's episode 365 I might be mixing up the number with Paul Rosalie who is a conservationist who works in Amazon it's a I think three and a half hour long episode where he talks about uncontacted tribes and Conservation at Amazon and ayahuasca know it's very interesting and he also has a book called the mother of God
Which is a 10 hour long book 11 hour. So I listen to the podcast and I listen to the book I would say that the book has more content But it's actually less enjoyable than hearing Paul Rosalie talking about the same experiences in the more condensed form himself
And that makes sense. That's what I meant, I think, by raw conversations, right? So the difference between a book or audio book and a podcast is exactly that, where the book, somebody has thought very deeply about how to produce and write it for the consumer in mind. Whereas a podcast, typically at least the interview style podcast, is more freeform, raw conversation between two or three people.
Yeah, and because it also depends on who's asking the question, right? Because in the book, Rosalie might not have even thought about saying something, but when Friedman asks him the question, then of course he has the answer, he had this experience. But that experience was never in the book. He was talking about some stuff where one person was like, porcupined by the uncontacted tribes and all. It's horrible.
Porcupine, like shot with porcupine arrows
They talk about six foot, which is two meter long arrows with like a foot long the end on it
Oh, so this person was speared to death? Yes. Okay. A mark as NSFW.
Yes, like many, many of those arrows, right? And he talks about how they like open up that person to like see what he ate and stuff. It's just like horrible, horrible stuff. Maybe that's why he didn't put it in the book. Or maybe that happened after he wrote the book because I think the book was published in 2016 or something. So it's been a while. But the thing is, like, there are some things, some things are so raw, you never get them in the book, because people will probably not want to read about that. But like listening to the person speak about that, there's also no room for misinterpretation,
because it's like a live person speaking and there is a way for the host to ask him follow up questions and all that.
I think another great example is the internet history. There is a book and there's the podcast. And the book is, I think, like you and I both liked it, we both love it, but the podcast has so much more information because it's the raw conversations he had before he condensed down that kind of information into the book.
Yeah, I guess curated is the right word for the books, right? And for podcasts, it's like uncurated. But also, there are so many of them. There are 80 million episodes at this point, and it just keeps growing. And there is a lot of gold in those episodes. There's also a lot of junk, but there is a lot of gold.
Which ones are we creating?
I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I would say our guest episodes are definitely gold. But some of our meta-isodes are questionable quality. I think this one is turning out pretty good, I think. But yeah, the point I wanted to make is most of the podcast apps, they treat podcasts as almost like radio stations where only the recent content matters.
It's basically broadcast but on the internet. That's what it is.
You can listen to the old stuff and all, but like they push you the new content all the time. And for shows that I listen to, I can pick up pretty much an episode from 10 years ago, and it wouldn't matter if it was recorded today or 10 years ago, because the concepts that I described there, the things that I discussed, I mean, some of them have some kind of anchoring on the current events, but the majority of content will be timeless. It's evergreen.
I think Tim Ferriss' first or second episode with George Bayskin, where he talks about journaling and meditation and all that, that stuff hasn't aged a single second at all. So you could still go back and listen to that episode that was published probably over 10 years ago, or his interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is, I think, also one of the first episodes of the Tim Ferriss show. It's an absolutely fantastic, you know, I always thought of Schwarzenegger as like
a Terminator, right? It's like a big weightlifter guy. I'll be back. Yeah, I still list him, baby. But listening to him talk about how he ran the construction company, I think back in the seventies or something, when he moved to the US with his friend from Austria, and how they were playing a bad cop and a good cop when haggling prices, and how he sold some apartment buildings, all of that stuff, I never knew about Schwarzenegger. And he's so wise and so
smart. And so I don't know, almost like cunning. Actually, I should go back and listen to that episode again. But the point is, how do you discover those? If all of those apps always pitch you the latest, the latest, the latest. If you follow the Spotify's lead, you will probably just be listening to stuff about chat GPT all the time. Or Twitter. Threads, Twitter threads. Yes.
threads? Twitter threads, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, true. The other, I think, here, you were talking about the Lex Friedman episode where we talked about a person getting porcupined or speared or whatever, right? And you want to share that with a friend. How are you going to do that in today's world with the apps that you have?
So for that specific Lexperman podcast, actually, I don't know if it's an official Lexperman account or if it's some kind of like a fan account, but they do slice up those videos on YouTube, like 10, 15, 20 minute separate videos. There's actually a separate channel, I think it's called LexClips or something like that. It must be must be official. I don't see how he would allow anyone to do that unofficially. So but then you can search for things like, say, Paul Rosalie, Uncontacted Tribes, and then you will get that
specific part. And if you're interested, you can listen to the full episode. But that's on YouTube. And that takes somebody a lot of work to slice those up, right?
And that's not available for the typical podcast.
Yes, but if you take those very very old Team Ferris episodes, which probably don't even have transcripts or chapters If I want to share with you how Josh White King was talking about defeating that older chess master in the New York Central Park Well, good luck I would have to listen to the full episode and then tell you go listen to this episode starting from minute 29 40 seconds because I think probably isn't even on YouTube which supports deep linking, right?
And I don't even know which app you're using because I might be listening to this in apple podcasts But you use overcast so I would have to tell you go find the Team Ferris show episode number two with Josh White King Go to minute 29 43 seconds and listen for five minutes. Good luck. R&B honestly, are you gonna do that?
I mean, if I have half an hour where I am absolutely doing nothing else and I'm bored, then maybe. Because this is way too much effort.
Yeah, I think you would only do this if you left dependent on it. But some stuff that you may be remotely interested in which you might listen for a few minutes if it's easy but with so much effort? No.
and online If you have any questions, please feel free to ask anything if I want it.
Yeah, do you ever go back to the
those notes? Depends on the topic. So for example, a thing that I'm listening to right now is about tennis. And it has a lot of interesting tips about the mental aspects of tennis that was not known to be. So that one, yeah, I actually am going back and kind of re-listening to those segments, because I wrote the freaking like timestamp and everything in my notes.
when you're playing your championship? Championship is a...
But yeah, this weekend I am playing in my first ever tournament. That'll be fun.
I hope that mental stuff that you listen to will help.
Yeah, you use what Telegram bought, right?
or you used to? This is not a cover and this is on 4.1, I'll have to take you only ifrob If we continue to talk, it feels like a great example of what plays out.
Text or voice or both?
In this video… And then so basically I had this huge like a log of all of the activity that I wanted to save. So what I would do is I would send a link and the note to the bot and then bot would save this into Quip. And then every now and then I would go through that log and kind of rearrange the notes and maybe add them to a separate file and longer use that. But another cool thing I had there was all of those notes were also stored in a DynamoDB database.
If database is the right word, is it database? Can I whisper something?
No, it was not our engineering.
No, it was not our engineering. Well, the thing is, it would have been easier to use MySQL database, but then I would have to run a server. Right, and pay for it for the whole month. Exactly, yes. Because with DynamoDB I paid pretty much nothing. I think it was always been in the free tier.
maybe pennies if you use a lot of data?
Yeah, exactly. But what I did is I had a copy of all of those notes in the database, and every day at 10am, CloudWatch went and triggered another Lambda.
over engineering? No, no, no, no. But it was very cheap.
It would grab a record from the database and send it to me. I call this function the random idea. So basically I would send it ideas from what I heard on the podcast and it would feed them back to me one by one every day and I also had a command if I wanted to...
feels like a moment from the past.
Yeah, if I wanted to see like a bunch of random ideas, I could just like click that whatever that slash command and then it will send me more of those if I wanted to. But the point was that I had this system that A allowed me to store notes, and B allowed me to get back to them randomly just for inspiration, which was fun.
But you had to write a Lambda function for that, set up a telegram bot, a DynamoDB, I don't know what else, yeah.
Yeah.
He also had to type stuff. Yeah, forget the average person, even I won't do that.
It was a time when I was really interested in chatbots. Well, guess why? Telegram was just the easiest chat client to experiment with. You just get the bot token and you just start communicating with it through an endpoint. It was very, very easy to program.
Okay, so we've talked like I think four or five aspects of like the podcasting experience that sucks today.
I think I know the name for this episode. Why podcasting app sucks.
Okay, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I like it. I also like that we finally arrived at the name of the episode like 29 minutes into the episode. Great. But yeah, no makes sense what I was saying is we're not saying that there are No apps that do this. There are apps that handle the playlist management very well. There are apps that handle the Knowledge part very well. There are apps that connect to Notion and Google Docs and you can like share stuff
There are apps that pay podcasters money for being exclusive on their platforms so they get used more often.
But we're not happy with any of them so That's called scratching our own itch, but the other thing is podcasting has been I won't say Exploding, but it has been growing steadily over the last five six seven years The listenership has increased quite a lot the number of podcasts the content the quality also I feel like has increased so we are thinking that there must be other nerds like us who love podcasts and want these things so Let's go
Yeah, so I guess at this point, all we can say is stay tuned because we've listed a bunch of problems and as you know, product people, we work backwards from the problem. It would have been easy to just say, oh, this is the app that we are building. But we always begin from what are we actually solving for, and then working backwards from there. You know, in a typical Amazon fashion, we actually even had the PR. I don't think we did the FAQ, but we wrote the press release, which
crystallized what we're working on and we just kind of abandoned it.
And just like I think non-funded corporate projects like this one or unfunded projects, we do want to get validation for this idea very quickly. So we're going for like a quick alpha. It won't have... What's your guess? Maybe like 30% of the features that we eventually want is in the alpha? Or maybe not even that?
I think it depends on whether you consider priority 1 and priority 0 to be part of alpha. So we've had a bunch of features we want to ship in alpha. We mark them as P0 and P1, P0 being like a blocker priority. So it's like without that alpha doesn't happen. And P1s were like, when we launch alpha, before we go into beta, we need to address the P1s
for alpha. And I think a lot of P0s just became P1s over time. So we reduced the scope. I think with that reduced scope that we will give to very first few, maybe five people max, like the very first batch of testers, it will probably be, I would say 30 to 40%. But if you complete the rest of the P1s for alpha, then we'll probably be at like the
80%. For the app. Yeah, for the app. But then the remaining 20% will probably be the most expensive and long things to build, which will be crucial for the long-term success of our app. I guess for the long-term sustainability of the app. Yeah. Anyway, so if you know us and we know you, or you're really passionate about podcasting and you're a good person who can keep secrets, you can reach out to us.
and you'll sign an NDA anyway even though you're a good person and will keep secrets. Yes.
Yeah, even our friends will sign an NDA. I mean, there is no way around this It's just like we will establish this process. Everybody has signed an NDA. I think I think that's perfectly reasonable
That's the standard, yeah.
Because we don't want people sharing screenshots and stuff or we'll sue them.
Where will you get the money to sue them?
Well, I guess you'll threaten to see them. I don't know what the NDA is for, to be honest. It just feels like protection, but obviously we're not going to sue anyone. But it's like, it just puts a bit of more formality on. It means that they've heard that they shouldn't be sharing this outside of our closed circle.
Yeah, so we'll go from there stay tuned and we intentionally talked only about the problems and nothing about what we're actually building to solve those problems. So stay tuned for that. I don't know if we'll talk about it on the podcast itself or maybe only on the app side of it if you sign on as a alpha tester, but yeah, we're excited.
Eventually, we will talk about all of that on the podcast, because we didn't launch this podcast for nothing, right? We launched this as a marketing channel, so we're gonna have to talk about it. As we were building the app, and as we were designing the interface and trying different things, because remember, we are scratching our own itch. And we've been using the app for a few weeks ourselves now. I use it pretty much exclusively to listen to podcasts. At this point, it feels so interesting when you like design an experience, even just the
basic experience of playing the audio. And you're like, why is everybody doing it this way? There is a better way of doing this. And then it just, yeah, just do a different thing.
We don't know better, according to us better, but certainly different way of doing this.
Yeah, it's a unique opportunity for us. I think like when we design something or when we build something It's like tailoring this to our own taste And we believe we have a pretty good taste in this regard. So hopefully Well, at least some percentage of population will resonate with our taste and hopefully we'll get somewhere with this
Alright, do you want to talk a little bit about the subscriptions or keep that for another time?
actually wanted to bring up the screenshot that we had on my screen. I mean, we're not going to share the screenshot, but I was cleaning up some old photos. Oh, maybe actually that can touch it on subscriptions a little bit because I can tell you the reason why I was picking up my photos. So once upon a time, photographs were taken by cameras with film. So I always liked pictures, even though I didn't take any of those film photos like
my father did. I scanned a lot of those pictures and I put them into folders on my disk and then I had a digital camera and all of those. All of the photos I've accumulated since 2005 or so when I got my first digital camera. They were neatly structured in folders. There is a year folder and underneath that there is the date with an event folder and then there are photos in there. Sometimes even the files will have names.
You're basically like your Monica from Friends.
embraced this change. Hold tight. But just access. You can use Google Photos as like a viewer for your photos. Client. As a client, yes. For the photos that are stored on your Google Drive. Which means I get to keep my pictures on the disk in the folder structure. And still have a great kind of viewer like with cloud access and all of that from Google Photos. Search and all that. It's been maybe like six months, maybe a year, maybe two years. I don't remember, but then I get an email.
It's shutting down. It's shutting down, yeah.
I didn't even know but that was the first thing I guessed.
setting down that particular feature? And because it was like, unintuitive for some people or whatever. I would say they didn't make it intuitive enough. It's their problem. But anyway, they blame the people. And what happened is they took a copy of everything that was previous in Google Drive, and put it into Google Photos. So you don't defect from Google Photos. So you keep using it. But then guess what? I had like, 80,000 photos now. So I had, you know, maybe like 20 gigabytes, 30 gigabytes of pictures in the
in both Google Drive and Google Photos. And that was kind of a moment for me where I'm like, I can't trust anyone with my pictures. Because even think about like Apple Photos, they're very good about like stuff. But what if they have a crash on one of their, well, I guess, multiple servers, and then things just go away? My pictures are nothing to them. But to me, they mean a lot. But then I kind of let it slide. And so I have all the pictures until 2016 in neatly organized folders on my hard disk in Google Drive. And everything after
2016 is just a photo stream on my iPhone in Apple Photos. So if I want to access my photos, after 2016, I use Apple Photos. If I want to access the previous ones, I have to actually go and find them on the disk. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to bring all those old photos into the Apple Photos. But at the same time, I wanted to have a copy of all of my Apple Photos only photos on my hard disk as a backup. So I was basically going through all of those old pictures, just removing kind of screenshots and all this kind of shit that I don't need anymore. And then
copying those pictures year by year on my hard disk without sorting them just to have like a backup. When were you doing this? Like recently? I spent like five hours in the night instead of sleeping. A couple of weeks ago. Yeah, that's how I got through like 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, I think, like five years in about five hours, because I just wanted to get it over with. But then as I was going through that I discovered the screenshot of a chat.
of this beautiful chat messenger called Chime.
Amazon time, yeah. I hear Jenny and our other former teammates now laughing about this, but yeah. So once upon a time, Amazon used to have its own chat client, which it tried to sell to people, but I guess people were smarter than they thought.
To be fair, it was a great video conferencing thing, but sucked as a chat messenger.
to try to make our yogurt cold. Find the channel careers Don't over entrance to eat no cereal, frank t
That's pretty insulting. No, no, I think it was AWS Chatbot has an integration with Slack and Amazon Chime when we launched it, right? And the only reason it's Slack and Amazon Chime is because Chime is also produced by Amazon.
Yeah, but his tweet was snarkier than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Okay, so in a screenshot, which was I think from four years ago, it's a message from Arnaab to me. And it says at some point, in brackets, maybe eight years down, maybe we'll do some startup together. Long term, I want to do something like that. But I love the job here at the moment to seriously think about that smiley face. So yeah, and I was responding to you that yeah, you know,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. When was this? This is when you were leaving Amazon.
From Metacast Inc.: 23. Why podcast apps suck, the And now it's happening. Yeah.
Yeah, and in between too, you and I have... Sometimes when I went to Seattle for work, I would meet you for coffee and we would chat and these kind of things would come up, but we didn't act on it until now.
Yeah, I actually do remember like you stopped by Seattle right after we moved to Vancouver, I think. And we were chatting about different ideas of what we could do if we were to leave. And I think none of those ideas. I don't think we had any confidence in those ideas to like really take a plunge. One thing you said in your one of the messages in this chat is you called our jobs, golden handcuffs. And I think that's another term for this is golden cage. I think that's definitely
how I feel about this. Because working those companies, you can, in theory, downsize your lifestyle, save up quite a bit, and then be financially more secure to like leave your job, or maybe retire sooner. But I think what happens is, you know, we get the houses, we get the cars, we get private schools and all this shit, you know, and I will not I shouldn't call it shit. These are very good things. But they conflict with financial freedom, because you like put those golden handcuffs
on yourself. You like get used to things that most of the world's population live without.
No, I think very much and it's very hard to take those off.
It is very hard because it means you have to say no to some things or you know or you continue the same lifestyle just money just keeps draining and then you don't have a very long runway.
It's not bad. I actually enjoyed working in like a big company for years and years. I was there for like 12 years over two stints and I loved it for the most part.
Yeah, yeah. It's just, I guess, at some point, maybe at some age, you just come to like, yeah, there are better ways to spend your life than doing what you're doing, especially when things get tough. Tough as in like, you don't enjoy what you're doing anymore. And I was actually talking to somebody, and if you're listening to us, hello, you know who you are. He and I joined Amazon at the same time because we went to the business school
together. We both did the internship, we both joined at the same time, same year. He's still with Amazon. He works on Kindle.
So now you've pretty much given away who it is. If you enter the same school, you join at the same time, he works in Kindle. It's okay.
Okay, so what he said is back when we joined in 2015 or 2014, there was fire at Amazon. What? There was the fire phone. Remember the fire phone? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not what I mean. He said like Amazon was on fire. You know, it was like people were on fire. People were like really caring about stuff. He and I, we were just remembering some of the things that we've been doing. We really cared about the work we were doing.
And if you remember, we organized a couple of those big conferences about chatbots. Like now I wouldn't be doing this. And he and I were basically reminiscing like, did we just become jaded with age? Or the company just lost some of that fire?
I think it is a huge company so there must still be good pockets and bad pockets and passionate people and not passionate people. But yeah, I mean this is why there aren't many companies that are like 30-40 years old and still going like a startup.
Yeah, I've been thinking about like if I'm in a situation where I have to look for a job again, I might go back to Amazon. I can definitely see myself going back there more than any other kind of big tech company.
So let's not do too much shit talking about Amazon then.
to be honest, I mean, I can shit about some of the Amazon's products like Chime as a chat client, because I think it was a horrendous product. Well, I would say it was underdeveloped.
I mean not just you, right? Everybody, like internally, there were lots of... this is actually one of the good things about Amazon is things are very transparent and people were complaining across like levels and divisions and different orgs and all that.
They launched too soon and didn't invest enough in improving the quality. We worked with people from that team and also worked with the management of that team. The team was under a lot of stress and also I want to be fair to the people. So it's not like people were doing shitty work. It's just under constant kind of stress and under resourcing underfunding for the numbers.
There are people they had, they did an amazing job, yeah.
Yeah, it did an amazing job, but it's just like compared to what else was on the market already. You can't be so below the expectations and still succeed, and I think that's what eventually failed them. But they had great technology for video.
But it's also not just the implementation, I feel like the design itself. That chat experience felt like it was from the IRC days, like from 90s.
Yeah, indeed. Anyway, so I think we didn't get to talk to any of the other stuff, which means we don't have to make up topics for our next episode.
Well, no, our next episode is actually going to be an awesome guest episode, which we're recording next week. Unless it gets rescheduled, which could always happen with famous people. But stay tuned, that's coming soon.
researching AVP pin and yeah, let's bring up some difficult stuff in the interview yeah so next time what are we gonna talk about? well if you wanna know what we're gonna talk about next time rewind back to the beginning and uh
We did cover the first topic out of the three or four. Two through ten. Other topics for the next episode. Or the next few episodes more likely I think.
for the next episode. I actually really like how this goes because I don't feel the pressure of talking about like the last episode or stuff so we keep putting new podcasting topics, but we're into the kind of entrepreneurship and careers and
Yeah, plus I think the other thing that has happened is early on in our episodes, we would actually go on for a good couple of hours and talk about all these things and produce like maybe a one hour 40 minute episode. And we heard feedback. It's kind of common sense. Yeah, like nobody has time to listen to a one hour 40 minute episode every week. So cut it short. So we try to cut it to like about 30 minutes.
Yeah, unless you are like Lex Brim and talking to Elon Musk or something. Or Joe Rogan talking to Elon Musk and smoking weed. Nobody's gonna listen to this. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Right. Okey dokey. See you next week. Yeah. Bye bye. Oh, where can people find us?
See, we don't have the checklist in the doc, that's why, okay.
We got so chill, I was writing the book today, right? And I was actually writing about checklists. And I remember actually what I wrote there. I wrote that if you have done the same thing many, many times, and you're doing this automatically with muscle memory, there's actually a higher likelihood of you forgetting to do something. Because on autopilot, you may just forget about it and it will never even occur to you. That's why you need a checklist. And that's exactly what we
did right now. We've recorded what, 25, 26 episodes so far. And yeah, we've gotten too relaxed. No discipline.
So I think we need to add one more thing into our checklist. Add the checklist to the episode notes. Okay, cool cool. Yeah, so where can people find us?
Hello at Metacast podcast.com, which is also now the email that you put into our RSS feed so that I don't spam our other company address.
Yeah, and if you have thoughts on like what kind of podcast you listen to, how you listen to it, if you're dissatisfied like us with your podcast listening experience, send us a quick email, or you know one of us, just reach us on all the other channels that we are on, and we'd love to have a chat about it.
Yeah, if you like, you know, you see the, you see the podcast and Apple podcast Spotify or somewhere else, and you won't be like, why can't it do X? Send that X to us because we want to know about the problems in the world of incumbency and Apple and Spotify dominating, I think 70% of all listenership. I think we could do that bright light that actually solves the problems because the only thing we do is the app and this podcast. We don't have to care about music and selling iPhones.
those small problems that don't make any money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. All right. That was awesome. Thank you. Bye. Bye.