Christian messaged me this morning saying that we are a really good podcast interviewer and team. So, good to us, yay! Nice, that's from you because I was keeping quiet most of the time. We talk about the behind the scenes stuff, how we build the company, how we make decisions. The drama, the intrigue, the suspense. Yeah, it's a very fun podcast. And as you can guess, we never do pre-recorded interviews. We always improvise on the fly, which makes this recording very fun.
Well, it makes it fun for us. Hopefully it makes it fun for you too. Yeah, if you actually want to share your feedback, you can always send us a note at helloatmetacast.com. We don't get enough good words from people. Well, we don't get enough of any words from people. So, yeah, send us some. We do get words every week or so we do get from like friends, family, people, sometimes we run into. But not enough, yes. We want more validation, send it.
I want to have a problem that's a good problem to have. I want my inbox to be just overwhelmed by positive feedback about this podcast. We are not there yet. In any case, we are about to ship the app. You can go and sign up at metacast.app, enter your email and when the app is available, we will email you.
Or go to metacast.com and sign up for our newsletter, where we also actually talk about the same topics as we are talking about on the podcast. But in a written, more structured form, it's written mostly by me without it's actually his suspense thing. Yeah, what are we going to talk about today? We all took a bit of time off during the holiday break and we're going to talk about the feeling of the guilt postification and maybe a bit more around that side.
And then we're going to end with talking about our new podcast called Builders Gonna Build, which came out last week. Yeah. And if you've been following us for a while and you listened to the last episode, you know that we had an emergency episode last week, where we talked about the new podcast.
With my sound effects like, yeah, yes. So today we want to talk about why we made the decision to do this. And actually in our right app that we will do along with this podcast, I even want to share the doc that I wrote that we used to make a decision. I cut out some of the names and numbers from there, but otherwise, I think this doc is good to share so you can actually take a glimpse into how we make the decision.
But anyway, let's go to our first topic before we go to our first topic. Can I interject with something that we were talking about on Slack, like half an hour ago. This is like the warm up intro, right? Today is January 24th when this episode is you're listening to it, hopefully on 24th or after, but we are recording this on January 17th.
And on the night of 16th here in Vancouver, we had a pretty big snowstorm. So there's a massive amount of snow outside and like a good citizen, I always make it a point to like shovel all the snow from the sidewalks because. Oh, can I ask something? Yeah, interject the interject. Yes. Does the government obliged you to clean your pavement? I believe in the US also. It's the same. You are supposed to take care of the sidewalk in front of your house. And there's a lot to abide.
I mean, nobody's enforcing it or giving tickets, I suppose, but I do live next to elementary school. And so there are a lot of kids walking here in the mornings and we are on the base of a mountain, which is more like a hill. So there's a bit of slope. So if I don't do this, this area becomes like really slippery and a bit more selfishly, I guess. If you don't shovel, then what happens is people start walking on it and it compacts the snow, which makes it super heavy to shovel later.
It becomes a slippery slope. Yes. Yeah. I mean, if I don't do it, we didn't say a few hours of the snow falling and people start walking, especially with a heavy amount of like foot traffic, you'll get during school hours. It's going to become like lifting concrete tomorrow. And I had that experience once. So I do it as a good citizen. And you get some math today, actually, to calculate how much snow you move. I'll have to tell you this. Expose you, man.
So your first calculation was, so I moved through the half tons of snow today. And then, no, I also like immediately said that doesn't sound right. What's going on? Let's get into it very quickly. Because we get three to five times as snow, I don't do this often enough. We're not in Toronto or somewhere in the Eastern US where you do this daily. So when I do it, it feels like a lot of work because our house is on the corner up to streets. So there's like front as well as the side and the back.
So there's a lot of sidewalks. I wanted to do like, how much work am I actually doing every time this happens? So I walked around. So that was the first measurement. It's about 200 meters. So all through that. So much. I'm shoveling. Then it's about one meter wide. The sidewalk. So I'm doing about that. So that's 200 multiplied by one square feet. So 200 square feet still. And then it's about a feet of snow. We did get a lot of snow yesterday.
I think that's about like 0.3 meters or so 0.35 maybe something like that. So all in all, the surface area that I did was 2100 square feet, which is like a very nice, I think three bedroom apartment in San Francisco or Seattle or New York, like a large three bedroom apartment, that amount. But then Ilya said, Hey, why don't you calculate the density and then the volume and you'll get the actual weight of it. So I started with that.
And there's a way I ask for that is because like shoveling three bedroom worth of snow just doesn't fit my mental model. I'm like, give me the number I actually can understand. Right, which I still don't have, but I'll tell you why. So I went to chat GPT, of course. And I said, Hey, how much was the density of snow that falls on local cities in North America. And it gave I think 15 pounds per cubic meter or something like that.
So using that calculation, it comes to like 3.5 tons of snow that I removed this morning in one and a half hour. And then we're like that doesn't sound right. So I dug more into it. So that density is probably the density of snow or rather ice in glaciers, which has been compacted over like thousands of years. If you like people walk on your slippery slopes, it will get more compacted for a thousand years without shoveling yes.
Yeah. So that's wildly off way too much. Then I went to like a side effect paper. I was like, I don't trust chat GPT anymore. Let me look this up myself. I looked up a paper and it said 0.15 to 0.45 grams per cubic meter. Okay. So that's very extremely light. I guess it's snow that you can find in the air. I suppose something it's snowflakes. Yes. It's not snow. So what I have is not snowflakes and it's not glacial ice.
It's somewhere closer to new form fallen ice, but it has compacted a little bit, right. So you know what I'm going to do after we record this. Take an average. I'll do the scientific method. I'll go out with a known volume jar. I know like a little I'll take that ice from there. I'll go measure my weight without that jar and with that jar and see how much it is and we'll know the density of the snow and then we'll calculate how many kilograms of snow that I shovel today.
Yeah. And you can follow this podcast because in the next episode you will reveal what do they say in this TV shows that the one watches anymore. Yeah, there will be a reveal of the answer. I loved to hard. I think I'm getting a cramp almost not because of the shoveling because of the laugh. You really feel guilty for taking so much time on the podcast. Talk about snow.
Because that's a good segment our next topic. I wanted to do this. It like a couple of minutes, but like everything it went on our life of its own. But unlike our episode 7.5, which became a discussion like this and never ended. And then we decided to release on its own. Let's now stop this snow mega then topic and go back to guilt. Guilt is a funny slash not so funny thing. Right. It's hard to control. It just comes up.
And it is for me like solos me whole and start to get anxious. I don't like the feeling of guilt. But it's also a feeling that I find very hard to get rid of. It's not just I can magically think it away. So I have to work through guilt in order to reduce it. The specific moment that we discussed in our Slack channel and we wanted to chat about on a podcast.
I think it was this Monday. My kids don't have school. I think it's worth a little king day. My wife needed to take them somewhere. And then my younger one wasn't feeling well. So I was faced with a decision. Right. Do I take my older one to the fair because he wanted to meet his friend who's also coming there and all that. And maybe try to work there out of a coffee shop or something.
Maybe I can drop him off like our friends and then work from a coffee shop. Or I stay home with my younger one, which means I don't work at all or nobody goes anywhere. And I just go to my office. I work. Kids are unhappy and I feel guilt for not spending time with them. So and I started to feel these two guilt. Right. Do I choose the guilt of not helping my family or do I choose the guilt of not doing the work or like not pitching it enough.
Then I remember to your words that you said a while back why are we doing this for aren't you doing this for living the life being able to just say, well, you know what today my family needs me and I just go to the fair with my kid and completely unplugged disconnect actually have the fun time and maybe come back work some but I may be not I don't have a day fully back in meetings and all that ultimately actually the younger one said that he is fine because he didn't want the world to go without him.
So he went, you know how he goes with five year olds people just wasn't in the mood, right. But then it also made me realize that when I was at the big company, I would have something like that come up. And I have like six meetings in my calendar, which I would have to like cancel or like take calls from the car or ask people to move it. And because there's like five other people in that meeting that can only happen in like three weeks now.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you have somebody whose calendar is like fully packed and all that. And then I would feel guilt. You feel bad for the people who needs that meeting. Yes, I guess for me it's actually I would probably feel more like what would they think about me right what do you think I'm like a slacker or you know all that I think that's where this was coming from.
Or if I would tell my family that I cannot help them today, then I would feel guilt about not being able to help. I would be distracted work anyway. So it's like you're seeking on two chairs. You don't help on other side and you feel unhappy, right. That's a prompt for this discussion. That's what kind of triggered this topic for us. Right, right. So when I came back from India, it took me a good like four or five days to get back into the flow of work.
And I think just like last Thursday or Fridays when I finally started getting into it a bit more this week I'm feeling much better, much more productive, excited. But that break was amazing, but also overwhelming in some ways, right. You're just not easily able to like come back into work as you would from a shorter break or maybe a different kind of break.
So I was feeling a bit of guilt and I talked about that on Slack too. I mean, this is why we are running this kind of a company where it's okay to tell people that you know I'm feeling guilty about this and people are like generally both you and Jenny were like yeah, you sure tell you.
Come back to the meeting. Where are you? But yeah, that's why we're running this kind of a company because when we also work unlike how I felt about work at Amazon, I was always super passionate, but not like middle of the night passionate where something would come up and I would like I have to write this down or I have to do this right now.
So exciting because the next days obligations are always on your mind, you can't at the middle of the night while working in my previous job at Amazon decided I'm going to work on this for three hours now because I have to wake up super early tomorrow and I have like a 8 am meeting and I don't want to move that meeting because it would be unfair to the person who has set it up like three weeks before.
Whereas now we don't have like that kind of scheduling and all that I really enjoy working with a very small team like two people basically and what who was three are you excluding because you said two people. Well, I work with two people. Are you working to be okay? Yes. Well, two and a half ish right now because we also have like person helping with our website.
So, what about that already or we will talk about that at some point I guess. I think we talked about it. Somebody wrote us and asked for an internship and we said yes. Right. Right. Right. Right. But yeah, it's kind of like you and Jenny is what I spend most of my work time with, but what I'm saying is it's not like I have a 8 am meeting every day next day morning and I if I feel like working at night, I would do it.
And that's the difference. I think that kind of working style also makes you feel okay about having this kind of like guilt and saying, hey, you know what I can't do anything today. It makes it okay. For you, is it about like putting in the hours? Like how do you quantify this if you do not hours. I think it's the feeling of getting things done. Like yesterday.
Okay. So the next episode we're going to talk about Apple rejected our data. We'll go into the details in the next episode, but because of that, we decided, okay, we need to add this one feature like really quickly. And I said, let's do it right now. Maybe it'll take a day or so. And we didn't like half a day. I had the feature working. Right. And being able to do things like that gives you that energy that helps you.
And then you know, I think dissipate some of the guilt or negative energy that comes from feeling like I can't do something today because there's all these other things going on. Yeah. During your break, did you feel guilty at all or no, no, I was in the moment. I mean, to be fair, I still am. I think it was amazing because we talk about our immigrant journey back in like episodes 24 part one and part two.
But for me and my wife, it's literally been close to like 20 years, right, as immigrants in US and then Canada for the last five years. And so every time we go to India, we would have like a visa interview to come back to the US. You would have to get a stamping on your each one visa.
And because we were both on each one piece, we would always have a stamping. That's in a different city. You go spend three days there, wait for your passport. And there's the additional stress of maybe it gets rejected. And then you're stuck there. So that was always there this time when I went to India, it really felt like a vacation, like I had a wonderful time, friends, family. And then when we came back, I don't know if we talked about it. We got our Canadian citizenship also last week.
So yeah, so a lot of like great things, but a lot of like things that are overwhelming in some ways emotionally. It's hard to like take out that stuff from your head that's been there for like many, many years. I don't know 17 years, 20 years, you have not thought about this. And suddenly like all of this comes back. So yeah.
Yeah, I think part for what also maybe helps with not feeling killed is because we decide that basically for in our company is like you can take any vacation you want nobody's going to stop you right. How will we stop them like stop paying them? What would we do? I think right now this policy works when we just have three people who nobody gets any money right. We will see how that goes further on. But overall, I think there is this idea that people will self regulate.
Yeah, if you need that time, take that time. Yeah, yeah. But also sometimes like if you want the time sometimes like you don't necessarily need the time, but maybe you want them. One thing that is a quick detour that I've always really disliked about working for a corporation is like counting those days. You will like a big, big counter.
You're doing this accounting or like my child is sick. Do I take a vacation day or something? You always have to do this math because otherwise like for me when I would go back home, luckily we didn't have to stamp visas and all that. But it would take two, two and a half days just to get the destination. You can't even go for two weeks. You have to go for like three weeks to feel comfortable. Also the jet lag is like right now it was 11 hours difference.
It is very taxing. One of the else in the children like because literally the jet is taxing for a long part. Yes, yes. Yes, you don't have much runway when you go to vacation like that. And then you have to be like I have to return on this date to work because I don't have more days. And you would really prefer to maybe spend three extra days just to get more recovery or maybe use a cheaper flight or maybe more convenient flight and all that.
So I always kind of disliked that part. So which I'm happy we don't have to do anymore. Especially you can work remotely if you need to. Well, everybody is remotely anyway. And I feel like on the whole this is the better thing long term for our company as well like for the product. Ruthless thinking about the product shipping it and all that. I think this is actually the right thing. If your head is not in it, take the day off.
Because when you do come back, you come back with like full intensity at that time. Yes, that's right. So actually I haven't finished my thought. I think what helped is that during the Christmas New Year's timeframe, we were just like, let's just all of us take the time off the same time. And then you just know nobody to work in anyway. So there is no social pressure at all. So without that, would you have felt guilty? Yeah, I'll have to get really naked right now. I'm talking metaphorically.
Because my wife was out of country for a couple of weeks in late November or December, then I was out for a couple of weeks, like completely off the grid for the first couple of December. And then I came back like three days later, you live to India.
And then I also went back to the US for a while. Because when my wife was out, I wasn't working at 100% because both of the kids were on me. And even at the end of the day, I was just dead tired. And I had to wake up early next morning. So I couldn't really contribute as much as I wanted to.
And I felt like I wasn't contributing enough by my own standards. And then I was completely out. So basically, I had four weeks where two of them were disrupted, two weeks were completely offline. Then you guys left. And then I really went to work with like insane intensity. And part of that, I think, was to overcompensate. I think that was maybe part of the internal drive. But then my wife was like, so what are we doing for New Year's? I don't know. I'll probably be working.
But then I started to feel this kind of guilt toward the family. They've been putting a few little lot of stuff. We're not taking vacations and all that because they're not making any money. So we decided to take a road trip to Savannah, Charleston and St. Augustine. Overall, I think we drove about 2000 miles in about five days or so. You listen to a lot of podcasts in there. Yes, that's true. And I'm like, I'm not going to be working those days. So what?
But overall, I think I took kind of disproportionate time of compared to the rest of the same. I don't think so because for the current time period of our company, I feel like Jenny and I basically we are coding all the like features, right? And you jumped in, you're making great progress on the coding side. But back then in November, you were not. And we didn't really need like day to day CEO, I don't newsletter or content CEO.
Yes, we didn't need a day to they CEO at that time. But I think let's say maybe in February, maybe that equation does change. Yeah. But then again, why are we doing this? We're doing it for ourselves, for our families, for our friends, right? If we are like going to hold ourselves to the same shackles that we did earlier on, then why are we taking this extra risk of like not earning money and trying to do this ourselves?
So I am playing we are not building a unicorn and changing the world. I don't think we were ever building a unicorn. We were pretty clear from the beginning, right? I just don't know if my statements came out so rassic enough. I mean, if it does become a unicorn, we are pretty clear that we want to work in small teams. If it looks like, oh, this is like a massive ship that's about to take off, at least me and I feel like you too would like, okay, let's get out of this.
Let's get our money or whatever out of this and take off because from my past experience, I don't think I function very well. App 60 or 80 people size when I'm working with them for my own mental health. Yeah, I feel like this sweet spot is probably about between five and 10 to people. I want to say the most fun I have had is right now for sure there's a lot of freedom and lots of velocity in what we're building.
And lots of interesting decision making really enjoying it. Similar thing was in AWS when you and I we had maybe four or five people on the small team. We were making like similar decisions and then it became like the bigger successful thing like 60 people and then we're like, okay, plan basically meetings all the time. I felt there was also a difference between 60 people total and 60 people within a 50,000 organization.
Because you get all of that massive overhead. So yeah, I feel like for me at least that's my feel right that the sweet spot will be between five and 10 people closer to five, I would say. But also depends like so if you get a lot of support requests for example, like hiring a support person would be like totally worth it right. But I say people I mean engineers and other functions will probably try to outsource as much as we can rather than hiring FTEs.
I think the top is probably like 30 people is where I would probably steal the whole comfortable. But then beyond that I was reading these stories where they would be like 30 person team growing to like 300 in a year. That must be very exhausting. Yeah, I was a painful but there is a tendency to glorify pain, no pain, no gain and all that stuff, you know, exhausting. I think is the right word. And also it's chaos.
Yes, it's total chaos. Yeah, for me to I think the sweet spot will be maximum of about five to eight people, but I can stretch myself and still be happy and still be like mentally healthy.
Till I want to say maybe 15, 20 people that I'm working with beyond that. Why did I leave Amazon right like I wanted to build things I feel like beyond 15, 20 people if I'm working with them, then most of my work would be actually helping or guiding or design review and sort of thing and not being able to build myself anymore. So I was saying that at this scale, you're not going to build what do you mean? I didn't get that joke.
It's a good segue into builders going to build podcasts. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Yeah. So builders going to build our topic number two. As we talked on our emergency episode last week. This is getting a bit old now, even for me, I don't know about the listeners, but I'm just having the blast. I'm so enjoying it. In a few of the court, the unscheduled CEO podcast where he has this machine that basically
expressed the button and he makes a sound in the podcast. The roadcaster first few episodes were super fun. Yeah. Yeah. So I really enjoyed that part of him like feeling with stuff. So I have money to buy a roadcaster. But I have a go for 100. Who can make the same noises. Yes. The first episode of Jonathan Courtney's I think he did a few episodes only then decided to shut it down. But the first episode literally was him trying to figure out his recording instrument.
Actually, he did release a couple of episodes just recently. And there was one, I think late December or earlier January is when he published the one that I listened to. So it's a bit of a detour, but it's relevant. I promise he was building in public there. Because he said exactly a year ago, I said, my goal is to go from seven digit to eight digit revenue, like whatever triple the revenue. And he's like, like, did we achieve this?
And there was some funny music and couple of minutes of waiting. And he's like, fuck no. And then he goes into details of why not and all that. It was very naked and very transparent. I really liked it. So let's talk about like why we launched the podcast. It's actually an example of how we make a decision in this company. Here is the premise. We started the podcast as a podcast about podcasting.
We were not going to that. I think we talked about that talking with John and Courtney and Jake nap in our second recording. They said, well, you guys, you can't publish every other week. Do you weekly? But we were like, it's a lot of work to like schedule a guest for a weekly podcast. Exactly. Yes. And he's like, yeah, just rumble every other week because that's what they didn't their podcast. They just rumbled every single week.
Let's have this whole idea of one week we rumble one week. We have a guest came from and then eventually it shifted from talking about podcasting into a model, entrepreneurial stuff. We renamed the podcast to metacast behind the scenes.
But it kind of bugged me a little bit, but not strongly enough that we mix up this kind of building public stuff with conversation some random entrepreneurs and working professor is a great interview. But it can be be jarring to listen to the episodes in succession. You know, success.
Yes, secondly, in succession, yeah, which is a great TV series, by the way, but okay, back to your. And then go on who is a host of software, this adventure podcast, they were in our episode 12 of 14 of 16. I don't remember anymore. We've kept in touch. Right. And we also went on their podcast a couple of months ago.
And then go on key and I talked and he's like, I think you guys need to split out the interviews and the separate podcast mixing up to topics. It's just I don't know. And I've been thinking about that for a couple of months. And then I'm like, yeah, maybe we should do it. So I wrote a doc.
And I feel like our ramblings originally were literally like a rambling will just pick up whatever the heck topics we wanted and like talk about it. But more recently, I want to say the last two, three months, it's been about building our company and the decisions were making order challenges were facing order successes that we're having.
And I think that's when we decided, okay, this is Metacas behind the scenes, right. And we started seeing a bit of like connection to our fans. I want to say fans basically right friends, family, people who use the app. But basically they have a direct connection to us.
We've heard from people that they like listening to that side of the podcast. The guest episodes on their own. I feel like they do great. Depending on the guest, like Jason freed episode did great, right. But then people who are just checking out that podcast episode.
Why would they stick around to listen to all this other stuff about this internal details of a small company that they neither know or care about. So that makes sense. Initially, I didn't really feel one way or the other. It's going to make that much of a difference. But quite literally in today's recording as we are talking about it.
I am feeling there was always a pressure to do this metasode episodes in a way that would make sense to like a random stranger to me at least today. I'm not feeling that at all because I know that only our fans are going to listen to this stuff, not shit stuff.
And the interviews are going to be on a completely separate feed. We are going to be great interviewers hosts and all that and we'll talk about that there. So that pressure is gone with that comes all these like jokes and emergency podcasts. We we we sounds and all that. I'm feeling so much better recording it.
I was actually exactly in feeling right now. Not just before, but now you basically vocalized what I was feeling. I'm good at vocalizing. We are much clearer about the audience now because that was the problem right. The positioning who is it for previously thought about like how can we make our behind the scenes episodes.
It's such that they're useful to a random entrepreneur who could learn something from us. So like one to bring your home and be like at the earlier stage even then we are. And now I don't feel like that at all. Now it's just the diary of us building in public. If you user of the app, if you just like our personalities connect with us, right. You can listen to that. But there is no pressure to conform, like you said, to the overall theme, which was kind of muddled by the interviews.
And then only builders going to build podcast. So that's going to be like we are going to over prepare as usual, right. Like stick to the topics. So basically the way we want to make things there is like if somebody listens to our interview with Christian, so like to make them interested in listening to the next episode, listen to other episodes. By the way, interjecting Christian messes me this morning saying that we're a really good podcast interviewing team. So could those to us. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You can listen to the episode, you know. Yeah, that's what we said. He was listening to it already. That's when he I think sent it to me saying I'm having a lot of fun and you are a really good podcast interviewing team. Nice. That's probably because I was keeping quiet most of the time. We have episodes like that where you take the lead and I'm interacting once in a while. But sometimes I take the lead. And I think it goes well. I liked it. Yeah.
Actually, it's interesting. Metapoint a couple of things we discussed on today's episode are the things that we didn't talk about. So and we are just having this discussion for the first time explicitly on this podcast. And that's also an inside look into how we communicate because that's just how we talk a talk faster when I don't record. And I don't make like these emergency sounds normally just believe me. You make other sound. Okay, that sounds wrong. Okay.
Yeah. Okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about the dog? Right. So basically what we were seeing is there is not a lot of traction on the podcast. And like you said, when there was a guest episode like Justin Frank, all the Jason Freed, the numbers would just go through the roof and then come back down to where they were.
Maybe single digit improvement, right. So which means like people weren't sticking around. And also I noticed a lot of duplication of work that I was doing with a newsletter and the podcast because they were going on different cadence. We would release the podcast every week. They were basically like two completely separate streams of recording and writing. But I'm like, how do we rationalize the lead? So I started to dog.
You know, it comes from my time at Amazon, like when in doubt, right dog, which is actually true, right to get clarity when you have model thoughts about anything. Maybe this is the last thing that Amazon leaves with us. But I love this like start writing it and things become so clear. Yes. Yeah. I know some people dread writing because I feel like they're not good writers and all. I wrote my first book when I wasn't even seven, I think.
Now when I go back to my parents place and I found that it's a school notebook with the loony tunes on it. The plot is just absolutely terrible. But it's so cute. You know, that actually I was writing a book detective story in there. You had loony tunes in Russia like this is in the 80s. Actually, no, because I turned 7 in 1990. So it must have been maybe between age 7 and 10 when they first started to enter the country.
So the line is junior, whatever they call the smaller ones, not the box bunny, but the smaller versions of them like their grandchildren or something. So I never shied away from writing. I always liked writing. So when I came to Amazon for the first time for the internship, I was like, wow, I felt like I found my home.
I found the place where I could express thoughts in a way that works for me. And obviously because we're all from Amazon, we all share the same love for the good parts of Amazon culture, including writing. So yeah, I started writing. But unlike Amazon, so at Amazon, you would write prose. You generally don't use bullet points.
Unless bullet points are like two or three sentences each, you just use bullet points for formatting. But otherwise you don't just list a bunch of single double word phrases in a bullet list. You express your full top in a sentence. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I don't do that anymore here because basically what I needed is just to offload what I had in my mind to the paper. And also like as you're doing this, you're starting patterns.
And sometimes you start writing a sentence, even like, huh, how do I feel in the blank? And then you go dig for data or like you express your thought in a way that makes the sentence make sense, which you can do with bullet points by the way. So I wrote this dog in like 20 minutes before we met to discuss it. Well, we didn't have a meeting to reveal the dog. That would be too much. We just had our sink. I think it was one of the weekly sinks that we had.
And I'm like, yeah, I have this topic. I laid down my arguments and proposed what we should be doing. And then both you and Jenny, I think you had a couple of comments or questions and then we're like, yeah, let's just go for it. We made a decision like that 20 minutes for writing a dog that wasn't even proofread and then I talked through it.
But I think it was logically it makes sense, right? Like I was describing five minutes back. But today I'm actually feeling the benefits of it. I think in hindsight, you did a great job articulating it through the dog. I did not catch that thing that you actually expressed that pressure to conform, which I think was always lurking, which when we are recording, we're feeling it now. So or we are not feeling it now.
For me, at least it was always subconscious, I think, right me too. I think, yeah, I think you really dug it out. That was I think last Wednesday. So it was exactly a week ago when we made the decision. And then earlier today, the building is going to build podcast was published the first episode. Well, to be fair, we already recorded the Christian Selic episode under Metacast brand.
And we had to add new intro and like do some tweaks to make it to work. But the whole thing of like coming up with the cover image, creating an account on Spotify for podcasts, there's very hosted. Because I don't want to pay for this just yet. So it's all free YouTube, all of that substack. It took me probably one full day spread across three days, calendar, I'm just so amazing how fast it is to start the podcast.
And as a specialist in starting a podcast because from your acclaim of having written a book about this, I would be surprised if you said it'll take you like a week because when I was reading that book, I don't know a lot of the details, right. You manage everything about the podcast, but it was pretty clear that, okay, so these are the steps and I'm just talking about the book.
Yeah, the book is called the pragmatic podcast. There you can get it on Amazon for I think 10 bucks. I think it's a current price for Kindle version. Actually, somebody in India when I was there asked me about starting a podcast and I shared the book and they said, I forgot to tell you because I was there. They said they loved it.
Yeah, every now and then we get this $10, $15 payments from Amazon into our account. So which means some of these by that book. But there were no reviews. So if you read the book, let us review. I'll ask him. All right. So what we'll do is we'll publish that doc in our newsletter that comes out with this podcast. That's not a change, right. So now actually we put together the topics that we want to discuss on the podcast.
And then after we record the podcast, I will write them up in a newsletter. It's a current narrative, right. That's it both places. And I feel like if you're really into us, I mean, you as a listener, I would recommend actually reading the newsletter in addition to listening to the podcast. Because when I write more stuff comes up and it's I think much more clear than this is more like a fun raw version of it.
I play by play. Yeah, the emergency sounds. Yes. The writing I love reading it myself, even though it's the stuff that we have probably discussed a few times already. I love reading it. The clarity is awesome in there.
Thank you. Even though like in the last one, I really messed up. I put together a timeline of how things happened. And then I added to the timeline. What ended up happening is like in the email because I corrected it on the web version. But in the email, you have something like March 2022. November 2023. Yeah. And then August 2022. Yes. Yes. It was November, but in January, then August 2022, like previous year. So it just doesn't make sense. And once the email is out, it's out. You can fix it.
Cool. All right. Let's conclude this with the topic. I no longer going to feel guilty about because readers are going to read every single episode we end with what we are reading or listening, what kind of made an impression on us in the last couple of weeks. Let's alternate. I'll start with my first one. Well, I don't have more than one.
So I've not been listening to many podcasts this week. I mean, last couple of weeks, I did listen to the rework podcast where they talked about their Apple kerfuffle. Yeah, 37 signals. They created Hey calendar is a new app that they've created and they submitted it to Apple and Apple rejected it because the Apple doesn't do anything. Unless you have an account.
Yeah, the app doesn't do anything. They claimed. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like exactly the same thing as a calendar. Hey, email app. I've been just following that. I really enjoyed that episode. I forgot the title. I think it's called Apple again or something like that on the rework podcast where it's basically like half an hour rent by DHH.
I'm probably excuse me from this because DHH is just so passionate about this. It was actually funny because in today's post, I get the post by email from both of them. Jason was talking about the Apple VR thingy. To be honest, I didn't even read the post. I'm not interested in this, but I saw that was about the Apple VR thingy. And then DHH's post was about that Apple should learn from the anti-trust case for Microsoft.
So like left hand is praising Apple that the right hand is like just bashing it, destroying it. Anyway, so it's a very cool episode that I think people should listen to. There was actually one nugget that's not about Apple there because they spent a weekend working on a feature that made the app look like it does something to Apple. It passed approval afterwards. But then DHH was getting a bit of crap on Twitter, I think for like,
oh, you guys like you work to weekend. How about it doesn't have to be crazy to work and all that. And he actually explained it very well. He said that you know what's worse than working on the weekend. It's building something for a year and then seeing it being rejected for like a bogus reason, like an unclear reason by a gatekeeper. And he's like, of course, we worked to weekend to like just get it out and get a satisfaction from seeing it in hands of customers and all that.
He said in different words, but the gist of it is like I said, right. And that was very inspiring. So that's pretty much the only podcast I think I listened to this week. I started reading the Children of Dune, which is the third book in the Dune trilogy by Frank Herbert. So it's not a fan fiction. It's also by him. It's by him. Yeah, it's a last book in the trilogy. So the first book is the Dune that most people would have read.
Most people who are interested in science fiction, the second book is about how polarity is becomes like a religion. And then the third book is about his children. And I just read maybe 40 pages or so. But what really struck me from the first pages, I'm like, okay, so I'm getting this book at exactly the right time. You ever get this feeling? I'm like, okay, so this book is almost like a godsend for you at like this specific moment.
And the first pages, this guy is still girl, who was the sidekick of polarity is the fremen guy. So he contemplates killing children of Paul. I'm not spoiling anything. It's just a been introduction, right. And he thought the things used to be so much simpler. Now it's like so complicated and should I just like end this now.
The parallel address from that is just the world at large as we're living in right now the pace of technological change is just jarring with AI. And it also got me thinking about my parents who were born in early 60s. They first started using the internet in late 90s. I think maybe even early 2000s. So they were already like in their late 30s early 40s.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a telephone until I turned 12, I want to say. If you want to call someone, you had to go to a friend who has a phone to make a call to call our grandparents. We had to go to a postal office that had a telegraph and they had a international calling booths where you go to an operator, you give them the number, they call that other place.
And then they tell you like go to booth number five. And then you go there and you're talking and you pay by minute. And then you had a black and white television with no remote control until I was like seven. Then you got our first color TV when I was seven. So my parents have seen all that. They were probably feeling a lot of the internet, the way we're feeling AI right now. Because for them, the world was just changing when the internet really got traction, right.
I read something just yesterday, very relevant to this forgetting where I read it from. I'll try to dig it up if we find it will put it in our show notes. But essentially that generation like you're in my parents, they had an easier transition going into computers.
Then they're having with smartphones, even those smartphones are way easier to use compared to like computers early computers because they have made that transition once and making this kind of a huge transformation in your head about how things work technology works twice is apparently insane, the heart. We don't feel that way. So I think it was an A16z podcast. I remember that Mark and recent said that.
I read it on something recently yesterday or said not in a podcast, but possible. Yeah. I don't think it's what his idea. So it must have originated somewhere else and he just localized on a podcast. It just got me thinking how they were describing there in the book. I mean, Frank Herbert was describing the book. What was coming to their society. They do and became like a garden with all that. I hope I'm not spawning much. But it was very different.
If you remember the framing world, like the desert people, they terraformed the planet and all that. The political system has changed. So also now what we have it all the wars going on and all this stuff. I really want to finish the book because I want to know what it ends with because that might be the way our world is going to develop. Harbin, you're for for our own. Yeah. It just feels so much instability because things have accelerated so much in various fears of our life.
I read the only the first book. I have not read the second one even makes me want to pick it up. The second one doesn't have much action. It's very deep. There is a lot of theology there. I think I really enjoyed it. It's really good. So yeah. And the last thing I would brief my son and I watched back to the future. The first two parts. So he was not really fond of watching any of the old movies because he watched home alone. He's like, oh my god, he's like so boring.
Then I really wanted to hook him on the back of the future because I'm like, this is different. I think he was reading something where there was like a time travel paradox and I told him about back to the future and the paradox that's in there and he got really interested.
He's like, okay, let's watch it. And so we start watching the first 10 minutes. He was like, this is so boring. And then when the action starts, he really got into it. We watched the two parts and he can't wait to watch the third one. So I'm so happy to have created another convert. I remember watching that with Pahee. I think maybe she was nine year old at that time. She had the same initial reaction. This looks so old.
But we all had such a blast. We watched back to back to back twice or three times. Over two or three weeks. It was so fun. Yeah, I think it was the end of the first part in the beginning of the second part. There is a flying DeLorean. She's like, oh my god, this looks so fake. Yeah, the action is totally. Yeah. Okay. So I haven't been reading or listening much. So Australia and Open started this week. I'm a huge tennis fan as people probably know who listen to this podcast.
I've been like awake at night watching it because it's in Australia. The big marquee matchups of the day happen in their evening time, which is late night or time like 12 or 1 a.m. Start here in Vancouver. So I've been doing that. Other than that, after coming back from India, I think our builder is going to build is the first episode that I've started listening to. It's awesome.
Yeah, it's a great pick so far having fun. We have had some beautiful like brutally cold about beautiful weather here. So I've been taking a lot of photos walking around with Boomer posting it. I usually maybe post once a month or so on Instagram. This is like every day I'm posting and today we have this beautiful snow happening. So there's probably more coming and found some new wish type of music that I had not been listening to when I was in India.
I've still like listening to a lot of that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's not been much audiobooks or podcast recently. Oh, I've also been listening to a bunch of audio messages in the last few days because I've reconnected with a very old friend of mine who went to college with together, having Captain Taj for the last three years or so.
Yeah, we are having some theological discussions. Last message he sent me was one hour long. It's like this long. So I would go for a run, I would listen to it almost as if it's a podcast. I would take notes on some of the things that he mentioned and then I would record back to him like another like two half an hour messages and we maintain multiple topics in parallel.
He wouldn't be able to have this level of depth in the discussion phase to phase because you were just run out of stamina, I think. But if you do it across multiple days and you actually have time to think about what the person said fully they just everything that they said so far and then record your response.
I think that creates for a very interesting. I know almost almost a genre because this discussions you can actually listen to them almost like a book right like a podcast. I'm really enjoying that part. It's almost like your private podcasting to each other. Essentially yes. Actually, my wife made up this term like she has a friend who would sometimes send her like a very long message. She laid it night so my wife would get it in the morning and she's like, oh, it's my morning podcast.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's wrap it up. So if you enjoyed our new podcast, well, I guess our new found freedom to say what the heck we want. Please give us a review and the star rating. Hopefully good one if you didn't like it. Just send us an email instead and people can email us at hello at metacarspodcast.com. Actually, this is what I would say. If you don't like this format, just unsubscribe.
Give us perhaps a rating that subscribers because it's going to be like this. Yeah. If you like only the interviews, then subscribe to the Builders gonna build podcast. And it's very short in speed URL. Builders going to build up is so surprised. Nobody has taken this domain. I bought it for like $14. When you shared it with me, I thought maybe there's something wrong with the way the letters are because you know how like remember that experts exchange.com. Remember that fiasco?
So there was a really famous website before stack overflow. Basically people ask technical questions and people answer that was called experts exchange. So it's like dot com era website. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So literally the website was experts exchange.com. But when you write it out, it is especially when you look at the URL. What jumps out is expert sex change.
It was hilarious. Like they launched it and it became a meme. I think. Yeah. So fun. Yeah. So builders gonna build dot com or just type builders gonna build in any app. I was surprised. There is no podcast with the same name. The URL was available. It's even gonna be Googleable at some point. If you're really into podcasting and you listen to podcasts a lot, you would like to get a better experience. Listen to podcasts check out metacast at metacast.app.
If you're listening to this at the time, this is published, it's not yet available. But you can enter email and we will send you an email when the app is released. And if you really, really wanted right now, then subscribe there and then send us an email to Eli or me or to hello at metacastpodcast.com will get you into the beta. I think the email will be published. I think it's a team at metacast.app or hello at metacastpodcast.com. Hello at builders gonna build dot com.
So you've got a lot of emails. Yeah. Wherever. Yeah. You have many ways to reach us. So please reach us. Okay. Cool. I re-enjoy this. Are now. Let's do more of this in the next coming months. Me too. It was fun. All right. Let's close it with the... Let's try to do this in the union song. Okay. Okay. Okay. One, two, three. We owe. We owe. We owe. We owe. Bye. Bye.