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