So life and entrepreneurship is a mixed bag of the rose and gold and the dull greys and the deep blues and all that. I think dull is not very common, but there is definitely some shades of grey. Hello, and this is take two of the intro of episode 66 of the Metacast Behind the Scenes podcast.
I'm Gilev Bezdilov. I'm Arnav Deka. And why is this take two, Arnav? Because I have an annoying habit of interrupting just as you were starting to speak. Yeah, but we wanted to say Happy New Year. This is probably the first time you're hearing from us in 2025. Oh my God, it is unbelievable. 2025. I still remember very vividly celebrating year 2000. And it's been...
quarter century ago. I know. It didn't like really dawn on me for a few days until my daughter one day said, do you realize that a quarter of this century is gone? And I'm like, whoa. Yeah. Does she ever ask you questions like, oh, I didn't realize you were that old. Does she ever say this kind of thing to you?
No, but she knows how old I am and she continuously references that. For us, I think it happens mostly in the tech context where he asked me if I played the games. He showed me screenshots in the Google search from Wolfenstein and Doom. And I'm like, yeah. So he's like, oh, I didn't realize you were that old. Yeah, okay.
Well, for me, it's more like she would say something and I wouldn't understand what that means. And she would say, okay, this means that. And you're too rude to understand this. Right. What are we talking about today? We are going to give a quick update. We have a nice update coming up.
as we are recording. So it should be in the app stores by the time you are listening to it. And I think the meat of the episode is we're going to review 2024 and especially some of the challenging parts and kind of merge that into what our plan is for 2025. So before we go into the app updates, I would like to read a couple of sentences that we received from a user.
We asked the user why they use the app. And there was like a half a page of very thoughtfully written, you know, it was very positive email. It was one of the better emails I've received generally about anything. It was very well crafted.
praise for the app that didn't feel flattering. It just felt very good, right? Yeah. And it was rooted in actual things the app does. Like sometimes, you know, people, you ask, what do you like? And they'll say something very shallow, which shows that they haven't actually used it. And that usually happens before they pitch you like construction services or something. Yeah. Well, those are like, they have no clue what you do. But some people at least know that you do a podcast or you are writing an app and they give you something very shallow about that.
So what he wrote is the transcript feature is so, so handy. And it allows me to skip portions of a podcast that are relevant and allows me to skip to keep. I think there is a grammar here. Grammar issues. But the point is that it allows to skip the irrelevant parts of the podcast and skip to the key portions or even skip episodes altogether if there isn't any information relevant to me. And he also said that the transcripts.
transcribed very quickly. Other apps take five to 10 minutes. And Metacast takes about a couple of minutes. And actually, I suspect he didn't discover Listen Later playlist, because otherwise, he would feel like it's instant. So we need to actually respond to that email and
Tell them about this. And also, I don't know if all our people who are listening to it actually know that feature, because in Metacast, if you add an episode to your Listen Later playlist, if you're a paying customer, it is immediately transcribed and ready for you when you listen. You don't have to wait even those two minutes. So then he also said that the bookmark feature is very handy and he can copy paste the content to Apple Notes.
with a timestamp, which is super helpful. I mean, we do need to improve here quite a lot, but this is already helpful. Actually, the sentence that I personally enjoyed the most is the aesthetic is clean, simple, and straightforward. And I prefer the dark theme by default. The logo is also cool for what it's worth because we've been debating the logo for quite a bit. I mean, we kind of like it, but also the history of that logo is 15 minutes of fiddling in canvas.
It's like there's nothing special about it. And in this part, when this person talked about how clean, simple, easy it is, they also talked about an unnamed competitor. We leave it like redacted, the name. And that is one app that you and I tried. And it has a lot of AI features, really cool features. But the UX is very complex. Like I'm almost always lost in where I am, what I'm trying to do.
doing something else the app wants me to do rather than what I wanted to do. Yeah, because I think our app does one thing really, really well. And that one thing is to let you listen to podcasts, get the knowledge you need from them easily. Yeah, I personally really, really enjoy that part of the app. Yeah, and the last thing he said is that the subscription price, actually he would be willing to pay.
even more than what we are charging. And we are charging 20 bucks per year right now. And he saw that we lowered it from 50 to 20. And personally, he would have been fine to pay 50. But also it sounds like from the email that he actually works in a field that requires him to consume a lot of information. So that's probably partially a professional tool for this person, which is actually an interesting angle. Maybe we should look at whether
There was a marketing opportunity or maybe some sort of discounting opportunity, partnership opportunities with people who work in similar fields. So that's like research, newsrooms, all that stuff. Cool. Anyway, so that was very long. Praise for ourselves. We received a few more, but we'll keep those, I think, later on. We'll just wrap up this segment and move on to the new things that are coming to the app. So the first thing, which...
Actually, I didn't realize it was sitting for so long and we didn't ship it for like over a month, I think. Let me give you a bit of a pretext. I think it was two, three months ago, we ran an analysis. We looked at the funnel, like people enter the app, what happens afterwards? And what we found out is 59% of users never go past the intro screen. And we were like, what? So people download the app, they see the intro screen.
And they do nothing. They never even open the actual core part of the app. And to be clear, if 60% people see the website and then don't install the app, I think that's totally understandable. What we are saying is they discover the app from somewhere, either the website or somewhere else. They install the app. They open the app.
And then they never proceed beyond the first screen. Yeah, the trouble here is like they actually opened the app. And there were a bunch of other steps where people fell off afterwards. But we were like, okay, so this is the leakiest part of the bucket that we have here that we need to address. It's almost irrelevant what we do in further steps. To improve further steps, we need to fix this first one. And I don't know if you remember the numbers from back then, but from what I remember...
We can, I think, be open about it, right? Like our monthly active users are between about 500 to 700. And what we saw is about 500 new people discover the app somehow every month, which is great, right? But 60% of them never make through the first step. Yes, we were draining those users. We don't know the actual reason. We will confirm it with this release, I think.
with the idea that all of the users should be authenticated. And over time, as we shipped the beta, we discovered that a lot of people actually don't want to create an account. So we introduced a guest account. But part of our flow was that you create an account or you sign in with a guest account. And the language we had for the guest account was almost asking you not to create a guest account and create a proper account instead. It was very scary. Not almost.
we wanted to discourage people from creating a guest account. So it was very scary, yeah. Yeah, apparently people exited the app at that point. That's our thesis, right? So what we did instead is if you're a new user and you install the app for the first time, there's just a big getting started button.
and you tap on it and it automatically creates a guest account for you. Or if you maybe remove the app or you sign in on a different device, there is a sign-in link there as well. So if you do have an account, you can sign in right away. We removed that initial friction from getting started. And yeah, we are looking forward to taking a new cohort of users and seeing if there is a measurable improvement in signups. And we hope there is.
I am realizing now that we probably need some sort of a hook to ask them to sign in at a later point. Because I suspect a lot of people will do this anonymous account thing and never discover that they can or should create an account afterward. And why should people create an account? Because I think that's a reasonable question.
Yeah, because if you don't create an account, the data that you have, like the playlist that you have or the podcast that you follow, they are connected to a guest user, which is not connected to you. So if you delete the app or if you switch to another device and you say, oh, I want to get started, it'll create a brand new like.
account. You have no way of returning back to that guest account. So to praise ourselves a little more, it's actually truly anonymous. Basically, if you write to us and like, hey, I installed the app now, I can't sign back in. It would be like, you're out of luck. You're so anonymous. Even we don't know how to identify you. So that's one of the big features. The other one is the long promised following playlist or the inbox of episodes that's coming now.
So all the podcasts that you follow, new episodes from that will show up in this new playlist. It's kind of like your incoming queue inbox.
The way we designed it is you can quickly go through that list. There is a one tap way to add episodes to your listening later. So you go through the inbox, you see, oh, this is a good episode. I want to hear it. You add that listen later plus thing, and then you move on and then you say, okay, I'm done with this inbox. Just clear out everything else. Yeah, especially not to email inbox, I guess.
I think for people who follow three or four or five podcasts and listen to everything, for them, it will probably be just a convenient way to access those new episodes. For people like us who follow, I follow, I think, 70 podcasts, I think you follow even more than that. 92, I know now because of this feature, we can see how many podcasts I follow. Yeah, and just today I was clearing up the inbox and I had 70.
two, I think, episodes in there, or 80 episodes, it was a lot. And it happened three or four days. It's impossible to listen to all of them. But I picked
two of those episodes, added them to listen later, and then just cleared the rest. The side effect of this feature, or I guess a feature of this feature, is that now you can also see all of the podcasts that you follow. Because previously, for technical reasons, we only displayed 30 podcasts. Well, actually, we still only display 30 podcasts on the home screen. So if you follow more than 30, you only see the 30 ordered by the latest episode. Yeah, latest episode.
And now we added this view all button and also link at the top. If you tap on that, you can see all of those podcasts and you can see the new episodes from those podcasts. You can go to those podcasts and unfollow them if you no longer want to follow them. So yeah, it fixed that paper cut that was.
I think annoying to people who are more of a power user type of people. Many people have asked, like, where can I see all the podcasts I follow? And we're like, wait, you can't yet. It's coming soon. So it's finally here. Update the app if you haven't. And this inbox, all the episodes that land in here, automatically we remove them after 14 days. So you don't have to clear them if you don't want to.
add things to your listen later and do nothing and they'll drop off after 14 days. And like we said, the other benefit of adding it to listen later is that those episodes will be transcribed and ready for you like when you play them. And even if those episodes are removed, like if you haven't checked it for a month, you can still see those blue dots on the podcast on your home screen and see the...
episodes that are new since you last visited this podcast. The data is not lost. It's just the convenience of quick triage is lost after 14 days if you don't check frequently enough. But we realized that even when we kept episodes for 30 days, we realized that for power users, it will be overflowing very, very quickly. Way too much. So that's why we made it shorter. We may actually make it even shorter still if we get feedback that it's too much.
It could be a bit FOMO-inducing when you see those episodes and like, oh, I need to go through the list and list is like endless. There are also a bunch of minor tweaks here and there with the UX. I don't think we will even be able to list them all. It's just like every time we make changes to the app, something pops up and we just fix that. The transcript generation, I think that's something in this version. It's completely redone because it...
It takes only a few, like 30 seconds to max one and a half minutes or so right now to transcribe. So we redid that UX, made it less scary. All that, yeah. And then the web app. Yeah, so we've started to pay a lot more attention to the web app in the last month, I want to say, maybe last two months. Because what we start to realize is SEO is very important. Search engine optimization is very important.
It's hard to get on the first page of Google, but if you do, it's a massive source of potential users that you pay nothing for, right? Because you already paid with your investment in the app. So yeah, so we started to do a lot more on the web app and we've updated the site's design. We've added testimonials to make it more attractive, more selling. And we also started to...
refactor some of the pages so they load faster, so they are more discoverable by the search engines, so we can start to get more traffic. Just today, actually, we've added an audio player. So people, if you share a link from Metacast, I have seen some people who don't listen to podcasts, and I would share something on my social media. I would ask them which app they use to listen to the podcast. And they're like, I listened on the web. I'm like, why would anyone listen on the web?
And the response is that I don't listen to podcasts, but I wanted to listen to what you shared. And it was easy to listen on the web, so I did. And I'm like, hmm, it's an interesting use case. So it's one of the reasons why we added the player on the web app too.
And also, we don't know how it's going to work because it's not merged yet. But we've also added the audio object. It's like a special data for Google. So we'll see if that gives us any extra ranking benefits. And then I think you added a light theme also, but we have not released it yet. The light theme is an interesting thing because I didn't realize just how much.
harder it is to design for a light theme if you already have a dark theme that you're attached to. Because anything you do in a light theme just feels dull and uninteresting. So we do have a light theme that works for pretty much all pages except home. It looks so unimpressive that I'm reluctant to ship it yet. Do you remember in the app, this is I think before we opened up the beta last year, we had the light theme in the app.
Did we have both light and dark and it was like automatic? I think it was because I think you were using mostly light because I believe you have automatic dark mode. I have dark mode all the time, so I never really used the light mode. The reason why we dumped it is that it just was hard to maintain both light and dark. Yeah, and we'll probably bring it back at some point, but we haven't heard anybody really say like, I won't pay for this app if it doesn't have light theme yet. But also we have heard...
Other people say that they like the dark theme by default. And our dark is not like extreme dark. Actually, it's something that I learned when I was working at Google. There is a difference between light theme and night theme. For us, it came up in the context of Google Maps because night theme has a special contrast ratios that's suitable for looking at the map to get complete dark, right? Whereas dark theme is just an aesthetic thing.
So ours is a dark theme, not a night theme. Okay, cool. Now let's do the hardest part of this episode. I think this came about when you and I had our first sync of the year. For the most part of December...
You were out for the first two weeks and then I was out for the first two weeks. We didn't get to talk at all to each other. We kept working on our own things. That's also why we haven't released actually in December. We're releasing all of that work now. But December 30th, we had our first, well, it was actually technically it's the last sync of 2024, but it was more like 2025 sync.
We had a lot of hard discussion about where we are, what's happening. And so we thought this would be a good topic to discuss in the behind the scenes podcast also, because it's not all rose and gold. Even Apple knows that.
A rose and gold, like colors of the new iPhones or something? Yeah, I mean, if it was all rose and gold, then they would have ditched all the other darker colors, but they have kept dark blue or the dull gray. So life and entrepreneurship is, I think, a mixed bag of the rose and gold and the dull grays and the deep blues and all that. Actually, I think dull is not very common.
and entrepreneurship, but there's definitely some shades of gray among the roses. And some dark. What's the saddest thing that you want to talk about today? So, yeah, I think Jenny had to leave us. She's no longer working with us. And we don't want to get too much into the personal stuff, but something happened where...
She decided that she needed to move back to the U.S. She was living in Costa Rica and it was very easy for her to not actually earn actual money and still get by and work on something that she really liked on. But having moved back to the U.S., she...
needed to get a job. So she got a good job. I actually had a chat with her just like three, four days ago, and she's doing well. But yeah, that is, I think, the saddest, biggest kind of gray, black. Yeah, we're giving colors to emotions now, but that's how I felt. Startup Life is a zebra. Actually, as an aside, I've been watching Madagascar.
the first one from 2005 with my younger kiddo on Sunday. And the zebra there, he asks if he's black with white stripes or if he's white with black stripes, right? So I'm not sure which kind of zebra we are at this point, but this was definitely one of the darker ones. I guess we just want to say thanks to Jenny. She's been with us for just over a year.
She shipped some great features, actually playlists work. I think a lot of that was her work, the downloads. I think a bunch of other things I might be missing right now. But yeah, she did a lot of work for us. Those are the things she built herself. And then in every one of our syncs, I always look at her as a very mature, kind of reasonable kind of person, right? So she would always have, we would be discussing things and she would always have a very,
different perspective of looking at that same thing and bringing in, like, have we thought about this or that? And that completely changed our conversation. So we're going to miss that part of it. Sometimes she would listen to us chat about things and she'd be like, but why are we not doing this? And you're like, sure. And she had this very nice...
style of no nonsense, no bullshit, where she can just interrupt and say something so reasonable that it's like, you thank for saving the time for everybody. So I really enjoyed that part of working with her. And I think over the last one and a half, two years of this journey,
You and I are becoming, I for sure am becoming more and more pragmatic. I thought I was already pragmatic, but it's nowhere near the ruthless level of pragmatic we are starting to become now. But I thought Jenny always had that where we would be debating like, oh, but if we do this feature, we'll have to think about the edge cases there. And she would like three people are using that. Do we really care about that? And we'd be like, yeah, makes sense. Let's not spend three more days working on this. Just ship it like that.
So yeah, thank you, Jenny. We know you're listening to this. Good luck. And maybe we'll work together again. Sometime, yeah. Sometime. With that, Jenny leaving, we knew that our productivity would go down a little bit. And yet, we have a lot of work in front of us for this year.
The other discussion Ilya and I had is both of us, I think at the end of 2025, so at the end of this year, it would be two years of us not making anywhere near the amount of money we were making back at our jobs in Amazon and Google.
Right. Maybe three years. Three years. Oh, that's right. Oh, my God. Yeah. At the end of this year, it'll be three years. Yes. And we thought that is not going to work for many reasons. Right. Some of that we have talked in the past already, but it's like family and there's the future to think of and all that. So we kind of looked at this is the year of like, basically, we have to make it happen no matter what.
Or, you know, I would even phrase it a bit differently. We need to do the most, everything possible to make it happen. And if it doesn't happen, then it becomes like a side project or something and we move on to something else. Not in VC-backed style startups where you move something else and shut down the whole thing. Even if we had to move on, it would be more like, you just keep working on it in our free time, right?
But it's like, it can't be a project forever without money. So, and that was the hard discussion that we had, right? And we don't want to be pessimistic, but I guess it's an interesting thing, right? When you first get started, like, oh, like we start, we are going to get, you know, all these accolades, rose gold, actually lots of gold and lots of dollars, right? And there was a hockey stick growth.
And then the reality happens. I think for most startups, the reality is not what you fantasize about when you get started. And neither it was for us. So far. So far, yeah. I think that's a dilemma, right? Is it not taken off or it's not taken off yet? Like, how do you know, right? Yeah, you never know. And that's why we're saying we have one more year of working on it.
and trying to make it take off. We have not gotten to the point where we are actually happy with the product yet. Like put in another way, think about this like this. We're trying to go from point A to point B. Our journey so far has been a car drive, right? And it's not like a flight. It's not taking off super fast yet. At the same time,
You and I were looking at our growth numbers, like monthly recurring revenue and all that. Before looking at all these charts, I had expected that it would have flattened out. Between October and December, we got a lot of energy coming in and there were a lot of subscriptions. But what we're seeing is there is a...
Good percentage of people discovering the app every month. Good number of people, you mean? Good number of people, yes. We know 60% of them don't even get in, and hopefully that'll get changed with this new update. But of the ones that do, we are seeing about a good, healthy 10% conversion to premium.
And our growth, MRR-wise, it is linear and it's upward trending, not slowing down in a way. So there is encouraging stuff in there, but this is still nowhere near the kinds of money that we could get at by working for like a big company. Right now, we're just around $80 monthly recurring revenue, which is...
On the business itself, it is, you could say, profitable, like technically. Our monthly costs are higher than 80. Remember that one provider that we pay over 100 bucks every month? I think our break-even point in terms of our infrastructure cost will probably be about 150, maybe 180 bucks. Maybe 200 because we also pay to sell. Yeah, I think it's about $200. I think to your point, it is growing. And I think...
We get sign-ups for trials or even conversions pretty much daily now. Whereas it used to be like you could go for a full week with no sign-ups. I mean, sign-ups as in premium sign-ups. Subscriptions, like, yeah, subscriptions. And the funniest part is that we have no idea where people are discovering us from. And this one person who sent us all of those accolades, he said that he was just looking for a podcast app. He downloaded a dozen of them from the App Store.
And he liked ours more. So people might be coming from the App Store if they're looking for podcast apps. Maybe our SEO for the App Store improved. We don't know. Actually, we need to look if those come mostly from Android or from iOS. Because if it's just one, then it might be the App Store thing. I was looking at it yesterday. There isn't a big discernible trend between the two. We are getting like...
equal-ish numbers of premium subscription conversions in both iOS and Android. Interesting. Okay, so then it's unlikely to be the App Store thing. Then it's probably Reddit because I don't see anywhere else where they would be coming from. Yeah, yeah. Or it is the kind of people who are liking our app are really like podcast connoisers in a way, right? If you were to say, they have tried out other apps already. They don't like them. That's why they're trying out.
And that field we know is always going to be small, that it's a niche area. But it's good that people are discovering it. You and I started looking at like, where are people coming from? And this App Store side of it is a bit hard to understand where people are coming or what are they seeing. But what we saw is our Google Trends. Again, these are still small trends, but...
Some of the, actually the OPML blog posts that you wrote about, that includes Spotify and Apple and all that. That one is getting a fair number of Google search hits.
Right. So people search for like OPML export Spotify or something like that. And we are actually our blog post is one of the top things in that first page of Google right now, which goes back to your point about if you can get something into the first page of Google search results, that being brings in a healthy amount of traffic. And now these are people who have never heard of Metacast before.
They don't know who we are. What is this? So they read this blog post. And I'm assuming some of them are curious enough to discover what is this thing. And dig in. It's a very well-written blog post. Those people might be actually making a very good podcast app. I think it's very hard to tell exactly where the traffic that we are seeing is coming from. But our hypothesis is that SEO is...
more rewarding than trying to grind the social media train more and more. Remember how much excitement we had about Blue Sky when it first came out? I haven't used it since then, really, because there was this initial wave of, oh, this is cool. And then I'm like, I don't know. Generally, I'm not having fun with social media, except for my personal Instagram account. I'm not really having fun.
at all. So from that perspective, even SEO feels sort of more natural to me, I think. And also in the past, actually, I was able to get two websites into number one Google Spots, but it was like 2009, 2010-ish. So the game was different back then. But I think the rules are still the same if you write good quality content and you have all the proper...
SEO, the pages are fast, the tags are correct, you look at the trends, all of that stuff. Well, I think more and more people are saying that those things are not true anymore. The fact that you write good content and you follow the rules means you'll rise to the top is not true anymore, apparently. But it was never enough. So you also need to have backlinks, right? So you need to write good content that's also shareable. Yeah. But what people are saying is,
Just backlinks and domain rating and all that, those are all parts of like the matrix, right? What people are recently saying is these things don't matter as much anymore because Google has fundamentally shifted to prioritize content from bigger content producers. And AI-generated search results is also like weighing in heavily into that.
I guess we'll have to try it out and see because what we are saying is at our very small scale, the one blog post that is popular is bringing us eyeballs. Yeah, so I think this year will be interesting for us. Stay tuned. We'll be telling you every couple of weeks about how it's going, what's happening, what's not happening. And I think it's going to be an interesting year for us to figure out, can we get that?
crazy kind of, well, not crazy, but a more sustainable kind of growth? Or is it the linear growth we're looking at, in which case we'll have to figure out what do we do? And there are many things on the table. And I think as the year rolls by, we'll talk about those options in more and more detail.
The change in the work ethic that we had, I mean, you kind of alluded to that, that we've become more pragmatic. I think part of that probably stems from that very, very frustrating pull request, code review, that it was like the clickable timestamps, which ended up being like, what, a two-week-long code review process with like 50 commits. It was a difficult time.
For me, at least, it was a very good learning opportunity for me because you gave me a lot of good feedback, but also it felt so painfully slow to do that, right? So what we came to independently is that maybe we should be a bit more gung-ho about just shipping stuff. Fewer code reviews, maybe sometimes even no code reviews, but we specialize. So you are working on the app primarily, and I work on the web app. I mean, I'm still looking for...
some guidance from you, especially for parts where I'm not sure about myself. Yeah, but I think you already know most about Next.js. Maybe. Actually, one of the things that I wanted to call out, I bought a ChatGPT subscription in mid-December, and man, it changed my workflow. Some of those Next.js or Tailwind questions, I would have to crawl docs for.
gives me answers right away. I think copy-pasting codes from ChatGPT, I think, is a very bad idea. But copy-pasting snippets and editing them, that actually works. And asking, like, pasting code and asking questions about it or asking general concepts, like, how do I do this? Give me four ideas, right? And then diving into some of them more and more. Those are really good, yeah. Plus, one more thing is the...
web dev ecosystem, especially like React and Tailwind and all of this, there is a lot more content on the web about them than building mobile apps, whether it's with Flutter or Swift or something else. So the information in ChatGPT tends to be definitely
way better than asking Flutter questions. Flutter, I almost always have to do a double take and then say, well, that's not right. Let's focus on this specific part and then we start to get somewhere. So let's wrap this episode up. Let's start with what we are listening to. I'll go first today. So Australian Open is going on. I was very low energy today because I was awake from...
3 a.m. till... I mean, I've been awake since 3 a.m. I didn't go back to sleep after that. Because of Alkaraj and Djokovic, that was an insanely good quarterfinal match. So what I'm listening to is I'm consuming a lot of tennis content right now, as always, during these kind of Grand Slams. Other than that, I got my daughter into the Red Rising series. I don't know if you've read that. I think I've talked about it on our podcast before. It's not exactly sci-fi. Like the science in it is very...
Like they have aircrafts that can fly at super high speed, that sort of stuff. And there is an all day travel between Mars and, you know, Ganymede has a colony and Pluto has a colony. And there's like this whole civilized humanity has expanded everywhere, basically, right in the solar system. That's the level of science in it. It doesn't go beyond it. But it's a social and political take more like.
I would say a mix of like Game of Thrones and Hunger Games or even Harry Potter, some of that kind of elements. Going to an institute and learning how to be a...
person in real life, that sort of like really gritty, very interesting politics and that sort of stuff. And I thought my daughter would enjoy it. So I got her the first book. She likes to read. She doesn't like to listen. But the audio books are fantastic because of the narration. But yeah, she's really enjoying it. And then I thought, huh, maybe I should re-listen to these books too. So I'm in the second book out of the six book series right now. If I was a kid,
I would probably also not like listening because reading is just so much faster and you have time. Yeah. Now it's like, if I don't listen, it means like I don't consume the content. That's as easy as that, right? Right. There is no time to read. There is no time to read. Even though I personally prefer reading most of the time. Cool. Is there anything else you wanted to share? Yeah. So it's interesting you mentioned the sleep because I've been thinking about sleep a lot because we traveled after the New Year's and when we came back, we were jet lagged.
like super jet lag so we would go back to sleep at like 8 p.m then 9 p.m now we go to sleep at around like 10 10 30 11 max and i wake up without an alarm in the morning and i also give myself a bit of time to just lie down and come to senses as opposed to you know jumping and like running around like crazy like i would usually do with an alarm clock and it feels good so and so the formula
I came to is like the systematic deprivation of sleep to maybe squeeze more work adds so much misery to life the next day and the following days. It's almost like those a couple of hours of extra, whatever you do in the evening is not worth it. It's almost kind of similar to drinking alcohol in the evening. As I'm getting older, actually, like I'm feeling worse and worse the next day. And I'm like, okay, so...
Sometimes I'm like, I'm thinking about tomorrow and I'm like, this extra glass is not worth it. And I started thinking about the similar way about sleep after I started getting a lot of sleep. And I'm really enjoying it. I'm trying to keep in that trend because I'm also more productive in the morning. Actually, I'm able to do more when I'm not sleep deprived. And it's probably true for most people. Again, your situation is different when you fly or stuff like that. But systematically...
I don't know, watching TV series until 3 a.m., that would probably be a very bad idea if you have to wake up at 7. Yeah. So on my end, I've been reading a couple of books. Actually, I'm reading The Pragmatic Programmer. I've never actually read it before. I've only listened to it before. And that is the kind of book that if you listen to it, you miss a lot of depth. I think it's a book to be read. And then maybe listen to just to refresh the memory.
I think it's a great book. And I'm also reading the original edition from 20 years ago, 25 years ago, which has some really weird stuff in it, in terms of like writing artificial languages for business tasks. I don't know, just stuff that's no longer applicable, I think, maybe except for some COBOL ecosystem.
I do have the audio book for the newer version, which is revisited, but I'm reading the original one and I was like, should I buy the new one? I'm like, okay, I'll read the original one because the ideas are still there. And I'm also even enjoying reading some of that old stuff because it puts things into a different perspective. Like it gives some of the historical context, which I'm really enjoying.
Yeah, so the other book that I'm actually listening to is, it's a Russian book, but it has been translated to English as well. It's called, in English, Little Golden America. So in 1935, two of Russian, I think they're journalists, like authors, they were commissioned by the Russian government and sent to the US for four months to tell the Soviet people about the United States.
So those two guys, I think they were called humorists because they write like very sort of satiric style. So they travel the U.S. and they tell you how great the Soviet Union is because of how bad the U.S. is, right? So that's like the silver lining in the book. But some of the cultural features of the United States that they pinpoint there, they're so apt.
And it's still true to this day. They're describing the things. They went to this cafeteria where everything just seems so mechanical. It's like industrialized food production complex where there is nothing humane left about the whole process of consuming food. And that's exactly how it is today, actually. What I'm finding surprising is just how some of the things that I found defumanizing about the US culture now,
They were true like 80 years ago or 90 years ago at this point. Incredible. But that's also, there's a spectrum, right? What you're describing, if you go into a MACD, that's like obvious to see. There is no human connection. Like it's a factory, right? It's a factory that produces food that you push into your mouth. But you go to a smaller neighborhood cafe, there is a big difference. Yeah, for sure.
Somewhere in the middle is something like Starbucks, which is also a factory, but there is a bit of human connection and somebody smiling and talking to you. There is a spectrum. I think where this is, is the big ones, the MACDs and all that are the huge ones that make money, right? Because that's how, like money is everything. And that's another silver lining in the book is like Americans only do what makes the money.
And I found that book to be so hilarious, but also the language. They had this one thing that I almost memorized. I'm trying to translate it now to English, but they were saying things like, that every traveler knows this feeling where you enter a new city and you see those streets, you smell those smells and you see those sights. And you could live in that city for like a year, but that first impression will always be with you.
None of that can be said about American cities. The punchline is like, oh my God. But they make a caveat that there are cities that are different from others. But then your average city that you drive by on a road trip, they are all the same. If you drive by the strip malls in every city, you go to a MACD. I don't know. I mean, maybe most of the Western world. But for example, in India, you wouldn't.
Every place would be pretty... I'm not saying it's a good thing, but every place would be completely different from every other place. You wouldn't be... Like in US, if the weather is the same, and I drop you in a strip mall in Portland, Oregon, or in a suburb of Chicago, or in Fort Lauderdale, you wouldn't know.
Yeah, where you are. You just go to CVS because it's the same everywhere. You have food there. Actually, they were talking about drugstores. So I assume those are Walgreens and CVS. So they used to sell dinners. And they would be like dinner number one, dinner number two, dinner number three, dinner number four. So that is no longer there. But you could easily imagine that, what they're describing.
Anyway, so these are the two books that I'm reading. In terms of the podcasts, just a very brief mention, we'll link this in our show notes. Justin Jackson from Transistor FM sent out an email in his newsletter a couple of months ago about founders over 40. And he linked three podcasts in there, three podcast episodes in there from other people, where people talked about stepping out from their startups or retiring or just chit-chatting about.
how different it is to the startup when you're over 40, because kids are growing up, the financial obligations are different and all that stuff. So I think that made me think a lot more about the trajectory that we have. And that was a big sort of context setter for the conversation we had about finances too. Actually, one of the podcasts from that list, Bootstrapped Web, which I really enjoyed for the last year or so, they are stopping the podcast.
So I just listened to that episode today. Yeah, it's Brian Castle and Jordan, I forgot his last name. Yeah. So actually, Brian Castle is starting a podcast with Justin Jackson. It's called The Panel Podcast. Yeah, it's not started yet. Actually, in the episode I listened to today, that last episode, Bootstrapped Web, is where they announced the thing. But yeah, it was just interesting to observe some of those founders where you start listening to them and it's like all excitement, right?
The reality hits the fan over time and they talk about it. And then things just change and people move on. And it's all just part of life, I guess. Yeah. So on that mixed colored palette note, we bid adieu and we'll see you next time. Wait, before you go, before we go.
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and pay for premium because that helps us keep doing this. If you have any feedback for us, hello at metacastpodcast.com. That's an email address. All right. Bye. All right. Bye.