So this is episode number 3 of Metacast.
Yay! It's all ready!
3. The Metasode 4. The Metasode
Maybe we should have started with an intro. Well, we can get to the intro after this part. This is going well.
Yeah, that's what's so matter about this. Like we forgot to add an intro and screw it, let's just go with the flow, right? But I guess let's learn from this, or just right now, we need to have a checklist. Yeah. And also for these episodes, I think it should be totally cool for us to go on all sorts of tangents. Yeah. I really like the Jack and Jonathan show, how they just go rumble about stuff. We will probably contain it to more podcast-y things.
But there could be topics that are relevant to podcasting. Like talking about checklists, right? I don't know if you read the checklist manifesto book by Atul Gawande. Have you? Yeah, I have. I actually haven't read it. But I know kind of the key premise there, which is like, lots of people were dying from anesthesia back in the 60s, I think. And somebody looked at why do airplanes not crash, it's like a more complex undertaking. And then they realized that people use checklists.
They start to use checklists in airplanes in the Second World War period when they invented the B-52, whatever that bomber was, this huge flying fortress.
was pretty complicated to operate from start to finish.
I think the first plane actually crashed. Pilots just got confused and they invented checklists, or started using checklists. So then the anesthesiologists adopted checklists as well. And then the mortality rate from anesthesia reduced to nearly zero after that. So we should also use checklists for our show so that we should use the board mortality rate for listeners.
I mean, it's not just medical or the airline industry, right? It's everywhere now. Like in our jobs at Amazon and Google, we use checklists for pretty much anything that was critical. You're doing something in production, you write up everything, including like, what will you do if things go wrong? How can things go wrong and all that. So, of course, for our podcast, we don't need to go through all that, but we do need to write down, okay, start with an intro.
Right, yes, start the intro. Finish with asking people what they sell, what podcast they make.
Alright, let's do the intro now. Five minutes into the episode.
Yeah, let's do an intro. Why don't you start this time?
Sure, yeah. Hello, listeners. So this is Metacast episode three. I'm your co-host, Arnab. And with me here is...
I am your co-host Ilya Bezdelov and I'm so happy to... It sounds weird, right? I want to say I'm so happy to be talking to you, but I'm always happy to be talking to you right now. But I'm also happy if somebody is listening to this podcast. So yeah, what we wanted to chat about in this episode is... We've recorded the first two episodes. The first one was basically me talking about my experience of doing the other podcasts that I have.
I mean, it was like Arnab and I were talking, there was a bit of an intro, but that was like...
your experience with your podcast, which is in Russian.
Yeah, then the second episode we did was with Brian McCullough. We did an interview. Brian McCullough is the host of Tech Meme Right Home, which is a daily show that runs down news from tech industry. And he is also the author of the Internet History Podcast, which is my all time favorite 500 hour audiobook about how the internet happened. And the book too. Yeah, he also wrote the book with the same name. So these were really cool episodes. We also recorded the third episode. But this is so
meta. Let's not talk about the third episode yet, because this is the episode about the first two episodes. And then we do another recording to talk about the third one.
We won't go into the third one, but I think this thing was heavily influenced by the third episode. Let's pretend it wasn't.
We won't go into the details of the third episode, right? But the one quick thing I would say is the style of the Jake and Jonathan episode, as well as the recording our chat with them that was so fresh and natural and like, basically just flowing that we thought, yeah, we can actually do these weekly things. Reflecting, right? Like these will be our own reflections on what's going on. How is it going? What's not going well? Yeah.
Yeah, and I also feel like we have that chemistry. In case if you haven't listened to the first episode or if you forgot that very important detail. Arnab and I worked at Amazon for five years. We started working in 2015. I mean, you started a little bit earlier than me. Yeah, actually a long time earlier than me. But I think the first week my manager was like, meet Arnab. He's awesome. He has like, you know, similar ideas to yours and stuff.
So we met the first week and then we worked basically nonstop for five years together. We were sitting next to each other, like talking, going on hikes, talking about podcasts. So yeah, let's see how it goes. And I actually feel like it will be fun to listen to both of us talk, especially as we get more comfortable with, you know, podcasting.
I think like from the first episode itself, there has been a sea change already, right? Like, I wouldn't have been comfortable just speaking without, like, we haven't even written down what we're going to talk about today, except maybe you have a few 10 bullet points. Well, I have.
you have. I caught you off guard. Gotcha.
I have four lines that I've written down. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have been comfortable doing that. And yeah, I think the chemistry is definitely there. We haven't even started putting in our dad jokes yet. So it'll only get better from here.
You had a dad joke with the word meta a couple of days ago, which I didn't get for like a minute. What was it? Do you remember?
I think you were saying something about recording it and I said it doesn't matter anymore.
Yes, it doesn't matter. Yeah, so we have to say that we are not affiliated with meta. Yes, we are the good guys.
And I think this also came up in our third episode, which is a good thing, right? Like we had not, we thought about that name. Actually, do you want to talk about the names we considered and all that?
So actually one thing I want to talk about before we start, and it's something that I think it was Brian, actually, yeah, that's one of the learnings that I got from the Brian's episode is there might be a bit of echo coming from me right now. And I don't know what sound quality actually will be. I'm using Blue Yeti mic, I usually use another mic, and I'm also sitting in my office, I usually do it in the closet. And I bought this thing, I forgot how it's called, but it's like a foamy thing around my mic that I'm trying to use to suppress the echo.
But I still hear a lot of echo in my ears. So we'll see how it goes. One thing I just wanted to really quickly mention is the concept of room tone.
Have you heard of it? No, I haven't. Just as you're getting into that, right? Like, essentially, all the three episodes so far, you may have seen some pictures already, if not, it'll be
are now two episodes. Remember, pretend we haven't recorded the fourth one. Oh, that's the fourth one.
Well, this is the fourth one we're recording, but it'll be produced or published the third one. Yeah. Right. Yeah Take it with a grain of salt or like margin of error Whatever the episodes that we have recorded so far We've both been sitting in our like closets and surrounded by clothes and Ilya talked about this in the first episode a little bit where?
the all the clothes absorb a lot of the sound so it doesn't reverberate and cause the echo Uh, so we finally decided we saw that other people who were coming to their our guests were basically well one person was using airpods
Right? Yeah. And my first episode I was like, never have to use AirPods. And here it is, Jonathan Courtney is hitting his AirPods and he's like, I'm too lazy for this.
And I think none of them were in like their recording studios and all that too, but the sound quality seemed pretty good. So Except the AirPods. Except the AirPods. Yeah, the AirPods were pretty Yeah, disrupting but based on that we decided okay, let's try graduating from our closets So we can like actually sit on chairs and use our computers while we record. So this is us. Yeah So, okay, you were going to talk about a very important Concept when I budged in with this
Yeah, some people are obsessed about room tone. So what room tone is, is like when nobody's talking, when there's silence.
In that silence, there was some tone coming from the room. Like I'm in Florida, actually, there could be some lawnmowers outside my window, or there could be like an airplane flying by or some like, ambient noise from the fan, right? Or just whatever heaters, some kind of like tone coming from the room. So some people obsess about the room tone so much when they cut stuff out, and they have to leave a pause. They actually have that room tone, basically take like the record.
a silent part, they feel it in part, then they replicated in those pauses, which probably makes sense if you listen to a podcast in whatever, like Sennheiser, you know, headphones that cost like 1000 bucks or something like in the absolutely quiet space. But if you listen to stuff in the car or in your airports or like while doing dishes, I don't think it matters. However, I don't know why I started this, maybe because I wanted to mention
Metalica. So I watched their masterclass and they were talking about the room tone. They did, I think they said they did like 20 takes of the room tone for one of their songs, where they had like a pause. So that, you know, it sounds great.
I think I mean for music it probably makes sense right because you are listening with those high quality headphones or at least a big part of their listeners are for podcasts it's probably more like casual listening so yeah it's fine plus you were talking about like your room the one thing that
you and I were talking about just before recording maybe we should just catch up with that is you are using a blue yeti microphone I'm using one too this is the thing that you recommended to me you want to shame me again for this right no no no I already did that in the first episode
but no I think this is a pretty cost effective frugal frugal microphone like I didn't have to spend 400 and listeners probably already know but I don't have a job right now right I left my job and working on something else on the side so all of these things matter to me what we found out is
that we're using the same microphone and same kind of equipment essentially right like same macbooks and all that but there is almost no echo from my room but there is some echo from Ilya's room and that's probably because of the shape and volume of the room itself that's causing it
Yeah, so my room is very spacious. It has very high ceilings. It's 44 meters. I'm too lazy to convert this into feet. It's pretty high. And I also don't have any carpets or any pictures on the wall or any curtains. It's basically a box made of reflecting material. Right. And that's why I'm using this foamy thing. Let's let's see how it sounds. I'll do kind of my, you know,
work next time. Like this time, I just wasn't was in the rush. And also, usually I use my other mic SM58, Shure SM58, which is a vocal mic. I forgot if we talked about that last time. We did in the first episode. So that mic is like a proper cardioid mic that doesn't pick up a lot of stuff outside of the like immediate vicinity of like you talking to the mic. It's used in concerts. So like, that's why you have like 60,000 people singing to a meta Likka song.
And, and the mic doesn't actually pick it up. Because it only picks up the voice of the singer.
By the way, we should not be worried about Metacast, the name reflecting on meta. I mean, if we do, then Metallica should be really worried because they come off as like licking meta.
Metal Licky. Do you remember Napster? Yeah. So for those listeners who are less old farty, and are now benign or less geeky, Napster was a thing for sharing MP3 files, music files back in I think late 90s. Yeah. Where essentially you could install the Napster app on your computer and tell it this is the folder with my music. And then other people could download the music from your computer when you were online. And then you could download music from other people.
And that's how I downloaded a lot of stuff being like the remote part of Russia and East Tiberia. That was my access to music. Obviously it was all pirated. This is like before Torrance? Yeah, probably Napster inspired Torrance.
You said 90s, I think that was accurate in the US. In India when I was growing up, this was going on well into the 2000s.
Yeah? Yeah. I think I was using it in the 90s. Like the dial up, it was it was also very expensive. Yeah. But my my desire to listen to music was so high. I still have one of those MP3s I downloaded. It's available on Spotify and everything now. But it's so dear to my heart. I just have it somewhere like old hard drive, just because it's, I don't know, there's something about that file. That really makes me feel, you know, nostalgic. With the point about metallic
though is that they sued Napster and Napster shut down because of them. I will never forgive.
I remember the dial-up speeds and downloading lots of music that way where you have to also look for a good source, right? So Napstar would show you like, how many people are connected to this host and how many people are downloading and you want to pick something that has a good history, but not like 25 people connected to the same same computer essentially at the same time, right? So you do a little bit of research, and then start the download. And then at least
in my case with my slow internet, it's like basically go to bed and next day wake up and see if it completed. Napstar was pretty cool in a way that it would also like figure out that it got interrupted and like start the download again or restart from the beginning. Yeah, was fun day. So
I had many uncomfortable discussions with my parents about the bills though.
Yeah, the internet bills were fun. Me too. Why I brought that up is, so this is like, imagine downloading one song one night. So you're compiling your collection like that way slowly over time. So when I went to engineering school, like college, we call it or university, as you would call it here in North America, the first thing was like, once I got a computer, we took out the hard disk, put it in somebody else like a college senior, their computer,
attached it there, and like transferred over their whole music collection. And this is how like it all spread all over the campus, probably viruses and all that too. But that's how music was transferred. And this is before like land and all that, that we set up.
Yeah, not only music, actually, I'll say it implicitly. So if you want to listen to the Internet History Podcast, one of my all time favorites of that show is the history of internet porn, and how it helped develop the technology. I would like streaming and storage and cloud. For all we have, we should thank porn.
To be fair, it's not just those things. The Internet porn industry has been kind of the trendsetter for a lot of technical innovation. From what I remember, I don't have anything researched right now, but from what I remember, the wide usage of credit cards online is due to that. The other big one was some of the early encryption technology and all that is also there. It also definitely came from the defense industry, but a lot of the early usage and popularity was...
Maybe they are also watching a lot of his image fans' vampers.
All right. Hey, so we don't have too much longer. Let's chat about our first two episodes, maybe, and the reflections and stuff. Yeah, let's
Yeah, let's chat about the first one actually. Sure. I wanted to ask you that question. I already asked you that question. You already gave me your breakdown, but I would like to listen to it again on the record. It was your very first ever recording of a podcast of your voice, like long, long form. How did it feel afterwards, like listening to it?
Yeah, so surprisingly, so we did a few few passes with the raw recordings and then I listened to it after the post-production again too, right? So I'd say you told me that the first time you heard your voice it was very weird, right? And when in the past I've done like conference talks and all and
then they would put it up on YouTube and I found it very weird like is that how I sound? That's so weird like yeah it's almost bad but this time surprisingly maybe it was the equipment or something like that the raw audio quality itself was like pretty normal and I felt like yeah this this kind of jives with my mental image of how I sound and it works well but whatever magic you did with the post-production after that I mean it sounds amazing.
I removed all the mouth clicks. Yes
Mouse clicks and also I think you probably use some equalizers and things like that or yeah yeah.
I think for me, the sound itself is like, it doesn't matter as much, like even if I listen to my voice in AirPods or with like, post produced audio. In the beginning, it was really hard to listen to that. I just didn't like the, you know, the timbre, the tone of my voice, and also like the pattern of how I speak. So what I found actually interesting with this particular podcast with our first episode is that I
was always, you know, I've been speaking English for a long time, right? So I learned it in school, and I've been working outside of Russia for most of my life. So I was speaking English, even though I speak Russian at home all the time with my family. But I always had this thing that my accent, it's like, I tried to work on it, tried to sound more like a native speaker, but I don't. And I think what the podcasting helped me do in the last month or so as we were doing this, I came to terms to the
accent. And it's like, I don't know, it doesn't sound too bad, I guess if the content is good. I need to speak slower, though. But otherwise, I think it's okay. So it actually helps me it's almost like therapeutic, you know, like listening to my voice in English, it helps me accept myself more.
On the topic of accents, I think we've talked about this in the way back. There are some podcasts with like two co-hosts where I have a hard time distinguishing who's speaking. Right? Because they're both... We are not that podcast. We are not that podcast.
There are a lot of American and Eastern European people in that space. And it's, I want to say mostly American sounding voices on most podcasts right now. At least the ones that I hear. And I actually like it. I think this is a positive of this podcast. And it also probably, or hopefully inspires other people to jump in, even if your like accent or whatever is not natural or American or whatever. I'm doing air quotes, and I didn't say it. But yeah.
Good point actually. I was talking to a friend. He's from Belarus. He speaks Russian too. And he's doing videos on YouTube where he talks about the system design, like interview prep kind of questions for engineers. And his channel is pretty popular. He's like in, I think in tens of thousands of views for his videos. And he was in the course and I was talking to him. I'm like, how do you feel talking in English? He also has a strong accent.
And he's like, he actually told me, I guess exactly what I told you. He also helped me overcome that. Because he said that people like my content, and they just stopped noticing the accent. And some people actually wrote to him that they even like his accent.
That's a unique flavor. It might be a bit of a thing in the beginning as you listen to a new show. Maybe the accent puts you off right in the beginning. But if you listen to a few episodes, you get used to it, then you start actually enjoying it because of the uniqueness it brings.
Yeah, so I just have to say this because these episodes will be a bit random. So we used to live in, actually both of us used to live in the Seattle metro area. So just before I moved from there, we lived in Kirkland and I was going to grab a pizza from a place like once a week probably. And there was this woman there, her name was, oh man, whatever, what's her name? Every time she would see my name, she's like Ilya Kuryakin. You don't know what it is, right? No. No. Okay.
So I had the boss back like 10, 15 years ago. He was from Wales, age of my parents. Okay. So apparently back in think 70s or 80s, there was a show where there was a Russian spy named Ilya Kuryakin. So for probably like three years of my career that I worked for this guy, for Linden, he would just call me Kuryakin.
So it was so much in their head that they hear Ilia and they immediately think about Korea.
Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. And it was like kuryakin like with like very strong, thick Russian accent. Anyway, it's a bit of a tangent. One thing I wanted to ask you about, which you told me and I laughed a lot about. Remember when I sent you the fully produced episode? Yeah. And you turned it on in your car? Oh, yeah. Your parents, your wife and your daughter? Yeah.
What's what happened? We should have recorded these episodes right then and there, but I'm trying to recollect. Yeah, I was just like laughing my ass off. No, I'll try to recollect but you fill in if I've forgotten anything. And so yeah, we were going on a long drive somewhere, about like a four hour drive. So I thought, okay, hey, why don't I put this on and we can all listen to it. And you all can give me feedback about how it sounds and all that. We listened to about 20 minutes of it.
And I think my wife was like, wow, this sounds really good. I felt so too, right? The post produced one with all the music and everything sounds really good, professional. And she was like, yeah, it sounds really good. And she was getting the topic too, right? But I think...
Thanks for watching!
And then my parents I think were, oh yeah my dad was like I didn't understand anything and I think my daughter was already reading a book right in the backseat and then I asked her like hey how's it going what did you think and she was like I don't know I was reading a book or something like that yeah did you remember did I maybe say something else or it's been a
The first time you told the story it was funnier, but I'll take this one too. Because I think that time, the first time it was so fresh. So fresh, it was so good. Yeah, I had a kind of similar experience. To bootstrap all of the podcasting platforms, I created a teaser episode, I took about three or five minutes of the content, added some music. And I listened to it many times, I thought it sounded good. I started to earn up. He's like, it's probably a bit too much.
It's a bit too long. I was like, what are you talking about? It's like really cool. So we also go somewhere. It wasn't a long drive, but here in Florida, everything ends up to be a long drive. So I turned on that teaser episode. Just wanted to get some feedback from my wife. Not the best idea. She's very direct. Okay, so and so I turned on and she's like, yeah, it's like, why do you just keep talking?
Actually, it should have ended like two minutes ago. And actually, let's do this. I'll insert the whole teaser episode at the end of this episode. So that people can listen to it. And then maybe actually tell us if it's too long. I think it is. Because after I listened to it after maybe a month, I'm like, this is way too long.
It was about 5-6 minutes, right?
Yeah, it should have been like two minutes, but I thought we had so much good content. I just couldn't resist it It's like bad product management, right? You just want to stuff your Your stuff with features and that becomes bloatware. So we had a bloatcast Bloat zone so Yeah, so she basically said it was too long My son was like just like turn the volume down. I want to read my book Same. Yeah, I have kids about the same age. Yeah, they like you go to the backseat. Yeah Yeah, yeah
So, couple of things that you mentioned that might be interesting to new podcasters. One is bootstrapping all the podcast platforms. Can you tell us about that? Like how long it takes? Why do you have to do it that way?
Yeah, I think I mentioned this in the first episode as well, but I'll repeat. It takes time for your RSS feed of your podcast to be discovered by podcasting platforms. I think there is also approval process potentially on some of the platforms. I use Anchor.fm as a hosting platform. And then I added our feed to Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Spotify picks it up automatically. The thing I want to optimize for is when I did my first podcast, I published an episode
and it appeared on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And I'm like, hey, listen to it, to my audience and Instagram. And they're like, wait, it's not in CastBox. Like, wait, it's not in the index music. Wait, it's not in Google Podcasts. And I'm like, shit. And it took probably about two weeks for the first episode to finally appear everywhere. And it was super annoying because people use different kinds of phones, use different kinds of apps.
So it's harder to kind of advertise when it's not warm, it's not oiled. But the cool thing about the subsequent episodes is, you know, second, third, fourth is that they appear on those platforms within 24 hours or so. So I would usually publish it. And then, yeah, like I publish it in the evening, my time. And the next morning, it will, it will already be
almost everywhere and I'll announce it. So yeah, that's something to keep in mind. And we were thinking whether we should publish the first episode or do like a teaser. And I thought it would be a better idea to do like, I think it's called Trailer.
Apple podcast, Spotify, everything shows it as a trailer.
Now in retrospect, like I could have done a shorter trailer and I just don't feel ambitious enough to redo it. I'll just probably just remove it, publish the first episode whenever we are ready to publish, which will be in January. I mean, which was in January. Because you're listening to this probably in the end of January.
This time too, I was looking at all these like when does it appear in Spotify and Google and all that it took at least good two three days to appear everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly why I wanted to address that. So also, when we published our Brian episode a week ago, so Brian hopefully repost this, because he told us that he will advertise it. And when people do that, you really want it to be on all platforms.
Yeah, and I think one important thing about Anchor FM that you touched upon, so we won't go into details now, but you don't want it to manage everything for you. You just want it to be the proxy for the RSS feed. If you don't know what I'm talking about, and you want to hear more, listen to the first episode. Ilya goes into details in there. And that's very important if you ever want to take it out from Anchor at some point in the future.
Yeah, actually if you listen to us rambling up to this point and you haven't listened to the first episode Well, yeah, go listen to you. You'll like it Yeah, uh, it's called it's called actually actually we don't have a name for that episode yet. I think I initially wanted to name it dirty secrets of Clean sound kind of uh doing the dead joke, but you know, it's dirty and clean. Um
Actually, I don't know what we'll name it. We need to figure out I know these guys jake and john do they do these catchy names Like click click betty, but I think our podcast is more informational than theirs So I mean we should do
They do clickbaity catchy names, but you almost never know what's going to happen in that episode because of that, right? Like, so for example, when you showed me their podcast about a year back, I think I looked at the episodes and I'm not going to listen to like all 200 immediately, right? But I wanted to catch up on Oh, let me look through some of these episodes and see what they're about. And there was one about like, why Spotify UX sucks, or something like that, right?
And I said, Oh, this will be interesting. Let me go listen to it. There was like, maybe three minutes talking about Spotify in that hour long episode. And it was completely about something else, which I really enjoy their show. And this is like, typical to how they produce their shows. So I finally got around to understanding, okay, this is how it goes. I can't really use the episode titles for understanding what it's going to be about.
All right, so we have about five minutes. And I think we've gone through maybe half of my list. Yeah. And we can talk about that in our next metasode. Actually, I was worried we will run out of topics for this one. But we haven't well, because we don't have enough time. Because I have to run to meeting now. One thing I wanted to quickly mention is when we record the first episode, I was mentioning this script, the tool for like transcribing audio and editing is as
text. But actually, I didn't, I hadn't used Descript by the time we were recording it. So I used Descript to edit the first episode and also the episode with Brian, I think it's a great tool. I probably barely use 10% of its functionality. To be honest, I, you know, for those of you who haven't, who don't know what I'm talking about, like Descript, you import your audio files in it. And it shows you the text transcription, like a document. And underneath, you have the standard
waveform of the audio. And you can edit either you can just cut words from text or you can cut out audio just like you're doing any audio editor. And the cool thing though, is that in that waveform, on top of it, it actually shows the text, it assists you in editing the audio. So for example, I see that there is like an arm. And I can just remove that part of the way for without listening to it.
like in a word processing tool.
No, no, like in the audio editor, but because it has these things above. Basically, I do just like I would just what I would do in audio editor, but the text helps me be more efficient. Okay. And that's what I found. Like, I actually don't use the word processor functionality of JavaScript. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Because actually, remember Brian mentioned that he has stutter? Yeah. And he does. I did notice it as much as we were talking,
but as I was doing the production, it happens quite a bit. And then cutting it out sometimes can be challenging because audio kind of overlaps. And then when you do it in the text processor, it creates this kind of clipping sounds like between the audio segments. So I actually have to resort to editing audio instead of using their flagship feature. So I guess I have mixed feelings about Descript at this point. I'm super positive, super helpful.
But I feel like it would have been a lot helpful for me if my audio editor, like Reaper that I'm using, had the functionality to transcribe the text and put it as an overlay on top of the waveform. Yeah, then we could be doing it even more efficiently because Reaper is a lot faster when it comes to like user interface.
Right. The one thing that about Descript that appeals to me is, well, I haven't used it like you, but you can actually edit the text like you're doing in a word processor, right? And it'll automatically do that to the audio. I don't know how well it works, but it looks super cool. You can even like, if you want to insert a word or something like that, it looks like you can just type that in and Descript will automatically generate a natural sounding filler word for
that using your voice and tone around that speech. I don't know how well it works, but.
I came across an Instagram ad a couple of days ago that says, let bots write blog posts for you 10x faster. And I think somebody on our show, I think it was Brian who mentioned that those auto-generated blog posts. I hate them man. You know, they're just annoying. So imagine you have a bot-generated text for you and then you paste it in the description and then you have an auto-generated podcast.
And then you use another bot to auto-generate music for you. And then you end up producing this artificial thing that people like. But where is art in it? Where is that human?
The blog post auto-generated the thing is it's so formulaic and repetitive that it gets boring very quickly.
Yeah, I bet. Yeah, we have to wrap it up.
I actually really like doing this without any agenda and things like that, and I think we have quite a few things to talk about still.
I could have gone for another hour. Yeah easily easily. Okay, so what I'll say is that next episode is gonna be with Jake Knapp and Jonathan Courtney of the Jake and Jonathan or Prodope Breakfast Club fame. They are absolutely amazing. I'm almost predicting that it will be one of our most enjoyable episodes Like for a long time just because of the chemistry that these guys have so yeah, listen to that next week
Actually decide which day we publish it on but listen to it next whatever day we set up a podcast on. Yeah
I think the interesting thing about that episode was that they didn't have time to do an intro call with us, right? So we jumped straight into the recording and it was so enjoyable, maybe because of it.
Probably because of it, yeah. Yeah, I guess we have to say goodbye, right?
Yeah.
Alright, talk to you next week! Hit subscribe if you haven't yet!
and leave comments if you have feedback for us let us know yeah all of the good stuff yeah you
Yeah, you can contact us using the contact details in the show notes, which we don't know what they are yet. By the time we use the episode, they will be in there. So that's the thing about audio. Like you can say things that you will then later regret. Maybe that's why the script helps because then you could just type the email address and it's pronounced with my voice.
But yeah, anyway, nice seeing you right now. Talk to you later. Yep. Talk to you later. Bye. 6 minute teaser or whatever, how long it is that... Hi everyone, thanks for tuning into our podcast. That's the very first episode of Metacast. It's a podcast for podcasters about all things podcasting. That's why we call it the Metacast. We think this podcast will be interesting to aspiring podcasters and also current podcasters and everybody who is a fan of podcasts.
My name is Ilya Bezdelov. I'm a fan of all things audio, podcasting, audio production, audiobooks, music, you name it. Outside of this podcast, I work as a product manager at Google Maps. I'm also a hobby musician, and I host another podcast about people in technology. And the co-host of Metacast is Arnab, my longtime friend and a former colleague.
Hello everybody. Until this summer, I was working with AWS and then recently I left my job and I'm experimenting with a few things. One of those things is around podcasting. So I thought, hey, why don't I jump right into the podcasting space by trying to co-host a podcast?
I started my other podcast about a year ago and you know I hit quite a few challenges and it wasn't easy. So I can totally empathize with people who are sitting now listening to this and maybe scared to start the podcast or don't know where to begin or think they don't have the skills or don't like their voice. We are going to talk about all of that today.
Yeah, and this is more or less the format that we'll be following for our future episodes too, where we'll have a guest, maybe your favorite podcaster, and we'll learn about their story and the tips and tricks and stuff they use.
One of the things in the podcast that's very, very important is the pace of speech. If you shorten pauses too much, the speech starts to sound unnatural. It's more efficient, but it's not very effective, right?
Yeah, when you asked me to get this mic and I put it on, I was surprised to hear the amount of background noise that it picks up. If there's a washing machine going on in the basement, which is two floors below here, it still picks up the background noise from there. It's crazy, yeah.
Dude, if you have a fluorescent light, it pick up the light noise.
He invited me as a guest on his podcast and I'm like, I don't know. And then we recorded it. I listened to the result and I'm like, okay, actually my voice sounds fine. It's just fine. Well, the trick there was that they edited quite heavily, but listening to that gave me a lot of confidence that even if I don't like my voice, even if I don't like my pattern of speech, that actually can be adjusted with post production. And also, it's not as terrible.
The thing is, when you speak, you hear yourself speak through the inner ear as well as the outer ear. So there is some transmission of vibrations going on inside your skull and stuff. And when you listen to yourself on recording, you listen with your outer ear only. And that's why it objectively sounds different, because you listen to it through a different listening device, so to speak. I guess some of the things that I dread if I record an episode with someone and it's really really bad.
Like how do you go back to the guest and say, well you know what, your story wasn't really exciting.
Listening to your own thing for hours and hours again and again to improve it. But I guess that's how you get used to it and get better at it too.
I guess one important thing to accept that's how everybody hears your voice. Everybody. My guests, though, they record it on their phones in a sock. The iPhone has a pretty decent microphone. I had to leave the whole thing I wanted to cut, because there was like path dependence, where later content depended on the previous content.
So we can't remove clam chowder from this episode now. That's what you're saying. I don't think we can.
And now I'll play an audio clip of just the mouth clicks that were removed from the previous few sentences.
Now hearing you talk about what you do for post-production, it seems like they did not do anything. They would just basically upload it. So they would say things like, oh, let me take a sip of coffee and then actually take the sip of the coffee with the slurp sound and all that.
One of those principles was the experience should feel like fun for everybody. Fun and enjoyable for me in the first place, because I don't want to be unhappy doing this podcast. And for my guests, I want it to be the highlight of their day. I want them to finish the recording and be excited for the rest of the day, right? Energize. And then I also want it to be fun to the listener. I want them to take something useful, but I also want them to just be delighted by the experience they get.
One thing I would have done differently now is probably I would have published a teaser episode just to kind of oil the machine so to speak so that all the accounts get approved. And that's exactly what we've just done. Please subscribe, stay tuned, the podcast is coming soon.