When we label people, we either extend them beyond what these people really are in that
specific capacity, or we diminish them by chopping off important parts of who they are.
That analogy, I think, is how I think about labels these days.
I just don't want to put any labels. I think the only valid label about me is my name.
Hello, welcome to Metacast, the podcast about podcasting.
This is episode 11. It is a Metasode, or Meta episode, where we talk about our experience
running the podcast. And today we are going to discuss what went well and what didn't go well
in the last recording that we had with the Hearts in Taiwan hosts, Annie and Angela. And I'm Ilya Bezdilev,
and with me is Arnab Deka, my co-host from sunny Vancouver, where there was a lot of snow today.
Yeah, I started that day. We were going to record this at 7am, I think, my time. But I woke up at
6.30 and saw the amount of snow and said, okay, I need to go out and shovel. We live close to a
school. So I feel like I have to do it every time it snows.
So in Canada, there is a rule that you have to clean the sidewalks in front of your house,
is that how it works?
It's not Canada, dude. It's in the US too. Maybe you just...
Well, not in Florida. I've never heard about this law in Florida, man.
Yeah, yeah. Not in Florida, but that's probably because it doesn't snow. Just wait maybe five
years. The way the whole climate change and everything is going, you start getting snow there. Yeah.
Oh, we had a very cold winter, actually. It was plus four Celsius, which is like 38,
I think, Fahrenheit is how low it was in December, I believe, just before Christmas. Man, it was so
cold. That's pretty much like Vancouver or Seattle, Pacific Northwest kind of weather for the winter.
Yeah, I think we didn't get to talk about this. So I have this air conditioner unit that is both
heater and AC. Basically all of the units in my house, they are these dual purpose heaters and coolers.
On one of the nights, my heater in the bedroom started to emit smoke, you know, and smell of
burnt plastic, kind of burnt wires. Oh yeah, I remember.
I thought it was wiring, maybe it got overheated or something. So yeah, I spent half a day figuring
out... Well, we had to sleep in another room, but then I was figuring out with the electrician
what was going on and all that stuff. What eventually I did is I called the AC guys, they came in, they
disassembled the unit and they found a bunch of junk on the heater coils. So apparently in the 12 or 13
years of this unit's existence, nobody ever turned on the heater. Because they told me the coils are like
new, but apparently there was some junk that was left by the installation workers. It was not glued well.
And when the heater was turned on, the glue melted and the junk, some kind of like tape or whatever,
it fell on the coils, it burned, and then it sent it through the system into the ducts.
And it took probably over a week to get rid of the smell in the bedroom.
Wow. So this is when it was cold in Miami?
It was cold, yes.
So the heater automatically turned on.
Yeah. And the guys who came in, they told me that it was the coldest winter since 1996.
It's also crazy how quickly you get used to living in the warm climate.
All right. So let's get to the podcasting stuff. Because that's one thing that I wanted to discuss
about the last episode. I was editing it yesterday, and I think we didn't get to podcasting stuff.
In an hour, I think the first hour of the episode is all just to talk about the culture
and other stuff. It's interesting because also Annie and Angela are really nice people to talk
about this. They know a lot about this. But what I was questioning is, let's say somebody who runs
a podcast about sports or something. They want to listen to us to learn more about how they can make
their podcast better to learn about other people's experiences. And here we are talking about Chinese
names and Taiwan independence and all that stuff, which is interesting, but it may not be interesting
to that particular person. I don't know. Maybe to a big part of our listeners, actually, it's not
going to be interesting because that's not what they came here for. And it might actually turn them off.
It actually goes back to something we discussed early on. What or who are we doing the podcast for?
Right. And in my head, we're still doing this for ourselves because it's fun. We're learning things.
The number of listeners that we get are not like enormous. Right. So I don't really care as much.
Keep talking. I look up how many listeners we have.
Yeah. So this is one thing that I really like about our podcast is every podcast where we have guests,
the podcast turns into a bit like their podcast. Yeah.
Right. And as a listener, you start to see different styles and voices and opinions
in every episode, which is not very common in podcasting. It's usually very typically,
very tightly controlled by the single host or sometimes a couple of hosts. So I actually really
liked it. It was a very deep episode in some ways. We discussed a lot of deep things that I would not
have even ventured to say out loud, much less publicly in a podcast. And there were lots of personal
opinions, stories. I really liked it. But I do get your point. If people are listening to this podcast
with the hope to learn and grow as a podcaster, then you probably didn't get much of it. You kind
of turned it off after a while. And if you are one of those, leave us a review or send us an email
so that we know what kind of content we're looking for. I think until then, again, Ilya,
give us the numbers. But to me, it's like we're doing this for ourselves and it needs to be
fun and we need to grow ourselves with it.
Yeah. I think you're bringing up a very good point about doing it for ourselves.
It's just the product manager in me, my ego. It's like, oh, how did we make it more popular
so more people listen to it? But I think you bring a very valid point. So talking about the stats,
I'm looking at Anchor where we host our podcast. And so far we've had 1200 plays across all of our
episodes. Most episodes are in the range of 90 listens. Brian McCullough one was like 400 or so.
Yeah. Brian McCullough is 420. Jake and John then is 154. That excludes YouTube. That's just the
podcasting apps. And between you and me, we are not even sure if it includes all sorts of podcasting
apps or not. Yeah. The metrics around podcasting. Maybe we should just do an episode around this
sometime. Yeah. Maybe we should do like a breakdown of all of our stuff and write up a newsletter and
also talk about it on a podcast. Yeah. One thing I would like to ask our listeners, because we do have
people who listen to the entire episode. So far we have not got a single message from anyone on any
platform except for maybe our friends. So if you're listening to this, send us some feedback. We don't
care if it's a review, five star, one star, it just doesn't matter. Just send us an email at
hello@metacastpodcast.com or reach to us on Twitter or Instagram. It would be really nice to hear from
someone because we've been broadcasting into the ether. And yes, for sure, you and I have a lot of fun.
But as I was editing the last episode in the last few days, I didn't enjoy the edits. And I'm like,
okay, so I'm doing the work because recording is fun. Editing is work. I'm like, what am I doing this
work for? On that point, you have been talking about creating a masterclass or something like that
about creating a podcast, right? And that goes from the very beginning to editing and post-production
and all that. If that's something that would be of interest to our listeners, drop us an email or,
you know, our website, metacastpodcast.com. If you go there, then all the episodes will show up.
You can leave a comment there or you know us on Twitter, Instagram, all sorts of ways.
So yeah, it's a nice plug for the course. I've not started writing it up yet, but we've talked about
it for a while. So yeah, let's get into info business and make some money with our podcast.
And we could talk about that course too, if we end up launching this. So we record this at the end of
February, the episode will probably come out at the end of March. Let's talk about the last recording.
It was over a month ago when we did the recording of the Annie and Angela episode.
We edited it a few days ago.
Jan 28th.
Jan 28th. Okay. Actually a month ago.
Yeah.
So we had a bit of time to digest things and approach this kind of impartially.
I would like to start with some of my takeaways. Maybe we can go one after another and alternate.
The first thing I have written down is how Annie and Angela, they are really transparent in their
podcast. They really talk about their stuff, their children, their parents so openly. And when they
came on our podcast, they were talking about those same topics very openly as well, which for me was
like, wow, you're really putting yourselves out there. And that was very encouraging, especially
given some of the cultural aspect where they were saying how their culture, the culture where they
grew up. It's like, you have to be an A+ student and all that. I think being vulnerable is almost the
opposite of being an A+ student. And unless you want to be an A+ student in being vulnerable to the
world, you know what I mean? Yeah.
So yeah, it was very, very encouraging and heartwarming too.
Right. I think just generally the whole episode, I think I already said it once,
but this was my top feeling too. I really loved recording it. First of all, talking with them.
And then when I listened yesterday, it was such a flowing, nice chat, going deep into cultural
things with personal opinions from all of us that I really liked it. I never thought that we would
record that kind of an episode on this podcast, but hey, we did.
Yeah. I also like how they actually posed questions back to us. I remember when I asked them, what does it
mean to be Taiwanese? I think she brought it back. Like, what does it mean to be Russian or what does it
mean to be Indian and how we fit into that culture? So that ended up being more of a conversation as
opposed to an interview. It was nice. Yeah. Let me take the next one. This is sort of related to
that first one too. In the episode, you should listen, by the way, if you have not heard listener
and you're listening to this episode, go listen to that episode. We talked about who do you identify
as, right? And you and I both answered that question. And then later on, I was thinking
about it more that people identify with their nationality, race, or ethnicity. They also identify
with their work. They identify with their religion. I don't want to rehash the whole topic, but now that
I've said all those things, who do you identify yourself as? And I have a second, I think more
interesting question there. How do you keep connected to other people that you identify with?
Is it a question for me? Yeah. I've recently done two spiritual retreats where I had an opportunity to
meet some really interesting people from the walks of life that I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.
And also I had the opportunity to really let my ego go through the experiences that I had.
So answering that question, on one hand, it's actually very easy because I sort of know who I am now.
I can feel who I am, but putting this in words is difficult because up until maybe six months ago,
before I went to my first retreat, I really identified as a Russian guy from technology background,
who is also a musician, a parent, a bunch of labels. And I didn't really engage with many people outside
of the Russian community in the US, except work, obviously it's work you engage with whoever you
work with. But then going on that retreat was so interesting because there were so many people from
different countries who I really connected with. I actually made a really good friend who is from
England, currently lives in Switzerland, which I thought wasn't possible because of my culture. I thought that
Russian culture is my culture and that's going to be like that until the end of my days, which
I was proven wrong and it feels great. It's kind of a long-winded answer to your question, which isn't
even an answer, I guess. But I don't even know who to identify myself with or how to identify myself as.
It's just, I am who I am in the moment. Identification almost feels meaningless. It's like a shortcut.
If you are in a certain environment and people want to know something about you, you can use some
identification like, oh, I work for Amazon or Google or something.
That facet of yourself.
Yes, because in a professional environment, right? Or maybe if you're like in a multicultural
environment where people talk about their ethnicity, I can say I'm Russian, but that's just such a small
aspect of my personality or your personality for that matter. It's almost meaningless. It's
almost like I don't want to say this. So one last thing before I pass it back to you. Have you heard
of the Procrustian bed concept?
No.
There was actually a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called The Bed of Procrustis or The Procrustian
Bed. I forgot how exactly it's called. The story goes that somewhere in ancient times,
Greece or Rome or whatever, there was a guy named Procrustis who would invite all travelers to his
house as they were passing by. And he would treat them and give them meals and wine and all that,
and give them lodging for the night. The catch was that he had just one bed that everybody had to
fit in. If you were too short, they would stretch you so you fit that bed.
What?
Yes.
What do you mean stretch you?
I guess when people are tortured, they're being stretched. So basically they would tie you to the
bed and stretch you so that you actually become the length of the bed because you're too short to
fit in there. But more easier to understand if you're too long for the bed, they would
chop the parts of your body that make you too long.
Oh my gosh.
I thought you were going to say they would make you fold your feet in or something.
No, that's too humane, you know? So the whole point of the story that Taleb makes there is
that's what we do with labels. When we label people, we either extend them beyond what these people
really are in that specific capacity, or we diminish them by chopping off important parts of who they are.
That analogy, I think, is how I think about labels these days. I just don't want to put
any labels. I think the only valid label about me is my name.
Yeah. Especially I think in today's world where everything is so connected, right? Maybe in a
world, maybe 25, 30 years ago, you lived in a place where most people around you were like you.
Today, it's not like that anymore. Especially like you go online and you have all sorts of
communities you are part of, right? And those really shape who you are. And that's part of
your big parts of your identity. I love that answer.
Yeah. You can show different facets of yourself in different communities. If I go and play the
guitar with a bunch of other people, I don't have to talk about work, for example. So what's your
answer to that question?
I was similar. I think you put it in a really nice, crisp way. I was struggling to come up with
one way to define what my internal projection of myself is. I was thinking all these things like
your work or your nationality. I'm not a very religious person, so that's not a big one for me.
Those are very common, but also like what kind of things you like to do. I'm big into sports. You
know that. Actually, our next episode that we are recording today will be something about that. We'll
talk about it when it comes to that. Very excited.
A Saunders football club.
Yes.
That's a big deal, man.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I stay connected with a lot of soccer and all that through Reddit. I love playing sports. And
till the time I was in Seattle, I used to play cricket regularly. Here, I'm not playing much anymore,
but I'm playing tennis quite a lot. The things that I like to do, like hiking and all that,
all of those make who I am. Like you said, it's not like one thing you can say that defines who you
are.
Speaking of labels, when you said cricket, I had this flashback to my time in the jungle
where you had all these crickets going up at night.
Right. Yeah.
By the way, you were in Peru, right?
Yeah.
Yes. We can leave that discussion for some other time.
Yeah. Let's not go too far.
But yeah, that was a great trip. The listeners, if you're curious, you can send us an email. We can
talk about that one-on-one. I'm not just quite yet ready to discuss this on record.
One thing you mentioned is discussing sensitive topics that you wouldn't otherwise maybe bring
up on the podcast. Like we wouldn't bring up those topics in our episode, talking about race,
especially me being a white guy. I think there's a lot of risk bringing up some of those sensitive
topics about race, for example, or gender that I can't fully relate to because I'm not living
through that experience. So I can only relate to that intellectually or through experiences of others.
And as I was listening to our recording, I was asking questions. And at some time I was like,
am I going overboard? Am I clashing too far? But I think it ended up being on the borderline.
It was okay. But I was really happy for the opportunity to actually have that discussion
with somebody on the record because I can almost guarantee that there will be other people like me
who are interested in these topics, but are afraid to be canceled or something for asking those questions.
Right. I never imagined having an episode like that. But once I started listening to the Hearts in
Taiwan podcast, I knew that our recording with them is going to get into all of those things.
And it was awesome. Yeah. So the next one, this is more of a logistical question is they talked about
how their schedule is very irregular. In the first season, they tried to do like once a week,
but now they basically do one whenever it's ready. Now they're on a break anyway. They're going to launch
in the first season three sometime soon, hopefully, versus something like our podcast, which we try to
get it out every Wednesday in time for your commute. In fact, Ilya, you have auto-scheduled all of that.
So it's ready at 3:00 a.m. Pacific or 6:00 a.m. Eastern every Wednesday. What's your take on that?
That's how I've been doing my other The Russian podcast, the interview podcast. Sometimes I would
have an episode every two or three weeks, and then we'd have a break of three months, just whenever
my time permitted, whenever the scheduling of my guests permitted. I think it's important to really
realize what you do it for and who you do it for. If you just do it for fun, actually stretching yourself
too much to do like weekly schedule or bi-weekly schedule. Specific times might be a bit too much,
and you just stop enjoying it. I guess any job, hire it, yet you do. You enjoy it up to a point,
but then at some point it just becomes like Monday 9:00 a.m. and you're like, "Oh,
shit. I really don't want to go to work." And that's not the feeling you want to get about your podcast.
You really want to enjoy it every time you do it. And then if it's less regular, so be it. What I'm
really curious about, is that hypothesis even valid? That people listen to your every episode,
unless you are a news podcast or sports podcast where it's really time sensitive. There's just so
much content these days that what I usually end up doing with podcasts is I discover a podcast and I'll
binge on it until I no longer want to binge on it. And then maybe I'll listen to an episode every now and
then. I don't listen to every episode of every podcast I'm subscribed to. I would just look at the
titles. If the title interests me, I'll listen to it. If not, I don't. Angela also mentioned that
their most listened episode is episode number one, because people often listen to the first episode.
Actually for us, outside of the Brian McCullough episode where he gave us a lot of publicity,
the second most listened to episode is our first episode. So maybe there's something in that theory
that people do go back and listen. And we have a friend of ours who just binges on our podcast in
the order, right? I think that's what she said she does. So yeah, that schedule, you know,
it's kind of nice to have a reminder on somebody's phone that, Hey, like we have a new episode so that
they can be reminded of our podcast, go into the app, maybe listen to the episode we published three
weeks ago. I don't know how much it really matters.
I feel similarly, if your podcast is big enough that it's earning you significant revenue,
or it's something like sports or news where that periodic publication is really important,
right? Like a sports thing. If you're a podcast about a sports team, then you better have an episode
after their game. Because if people are listening to you, then they would like to hear the feedback and
all that. Sometimes maybe even before big games, and you have to have that other than that. Yeah,
I don't know how much of that building habit thing matters because I like you said, I also listen in
that same pattern where I find out a podcast, I binge listen to a lot of episodes. If I really like it,
then I subscribe to it. But not every episode that's going to come out from that podcast now on,
I'm not going to just listen to all of them. Because over time, I've collected maybe like 100 podcasts at
this point. But some, let's say like Hard Fork or Decoder or Science Friday, depending on what that
topic is, I do listen to them again and again. I'm thinking about the Tim Ferriss episode,
Tim Ferriss podcast. As much as I like Tim Ferriss, I think he publishes an episode every few days
and they're pretty long. It's just impossible to keep up. And also not all of the people are
interesting to me personally. I mean, they're very interesting people, but just the topics may not
resonate with me. My actually favorite episode of the Tim Ferriss show, two of my favorite episodes,
the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was still the governor of California maybe 10 years ago.
It's an amazing episode. We will link it in show notes. Absolutely amazing. I always thought of
Schwarzenegger as being like this big dude playing Terminator, but he is actually very, very smart,
very entrepreneurial. And he talks about how he was laying bricks European style when he first immigrated
to the US. All its stuff is just so fascinating. I have not heard that episode. It's probably like
2012 or something. And then Josh Bateskin, I think he has two or three interviews with Josh Bateskin.
Tim Ferriss' show is the only podcast that has interviews of Josh Bateskin, who is a chess prodigy
and a martial arts champion. I really love the guy. But if I were just listening to the latest episodes
of Tim Ferriss, I would have never discovered those old ones. So really, podcasts are a library of that
old content that's timeless, which is absolutely fascinating. I want to bring up one more thing.
This is not specifically related to the previous episode, but it's related to Taiwan. After we
recorded that one, I was listening to the Decoder podcast. That's from The Verge. And they had an episode
on January 31st called Inside the Global Battle over Chip Manufacturing. Oh, it's because TSMC or something?
Yes, yeah. That is such a fascinating episode. Like at the high level, I knew that yes, semiconductors are
mostly manufactured in Taiwan, but I didn't know how much long-term view the Taiwanese government had in
the 1980s. Long before semiconductors and the importance of all this today.
We need to give a little bit of context of the semiconductor industry so that people understand
what they are. Yeah, yeah. So if you have a cell phone, if you're human, you probably have a cell
phone right now. I mean, if you're human and you're listening to this podcast, you probably have a cell
phone right now. Then that chip inside that probably has been made by a company called TSMC in Taiwan.
They're basically the most globally dominant foundry of semiconductors right now.
Do they also make semiconductors for Apple?
Yeah. Okay, wow.
I think Apple only gets it from them. And there are basically two companies. One in Netherlands,
that owns the IP about how to make this kind of technology. And TSMC is the one that is able to
do that in practice. Manufacture the semiconductors.
Manufacture, yeah. And I'm not going to be able to do a good job of explaining all this, but
go listen to that Decoder podcast from January 31st. It's an amazing one. What I wanted to highlight
there is the strategic bet that the newish Taiwanese government took in the 1980s,
looking at like, we are going to be the dominant one in manufacturing semiconductors. And it's a big
investment. It's a very heavy investment that you need to do to create something like that.
They almost paid more than 50% or something like that of the initial TSMC budgetary requirements.
But today, look how that turned out. It's not just the economics and the jobs and
everything that TSMC is driving, but the geopolitics. So that episode does a great job of talking about
it. But now that AI is becoming more and more dominant, there's a lot of restrictions of what kind
of chips we will allow China to make or touch or US or Russia and all that. And there is a lot of
geopolitics going on in that space. Part of this is what's keeping Taiwan totally independent too.
Oh, it's because they own the platform, essentially, those processing units that are very expensive to
If you were to just screw TSMC, we just want to produce that ourselves, it's probably billions of
dollars that we're talking about. And also decades of experience that other companies would not have.
Yes. But I think the thing here is like, the US cannot afford to not let Taiwan be independent
anymore. They have to.
They have to.
I don't necessarily want to venture into geopolitical topics, but I get what you're saying. Because a big
part of the development of the knowledge economy is based on the availability of those chips for
computers and cell phones and other devices.
Yeah, it's a great episode.
I can also tell something about Taiwan that's more playful.
We were once flying with, I forgot which airways it was, I think it was Japan Airlines or something,
from Seattle to Taipei, which is the capital of Taiwan, and then from Taipei to Singapore.
And one of the flights that we were flying with, I think it was Air Taiwan, a Taiwanese company.
So by the way, they have absolutely fabulous airport, like massage chairs for free, some indoor gardens,
indoor jungle. It was 2016. It was really, really nice. The plane that we flew on, I think it was a plane
from Taiwan to Singapore. It was a Hello Kitty plane. And for those of you who don't know what Hello
Kitty is, how could you not know what Hello Kitty is? It's like these cute cats. I don't know if it was a
cartoon or something. So the whole airplane was painted in Hello Kitty. The interior, the seats
and all of those covers on the seat under your head and stuff, Hello Kitty everywhere. They brought us
lunch and it was in Hello Kitty boxes with Hello Kitty napkins, Hello Kitty silverware. It was just
absolutely fascinating branding that they did. I don't even know what Hello Kitty is originally. I just know
it's a bunch of stuff with kittens. I just know the stickers. They're so commonplace.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was my exposure to Taiwan. Nice. I know there are planes like that for
Disneyland, for example. Right. But that would be fascinating to go on a Hello Kitty plane. It would
be actually fascinating to go on a Star Wars plane. Oh, is there one? I think I saw pictures of those.
Yeah. I forgot which company it was. I think it was United or something. They had these really,
really nice Star Wars planes. I actually think they had two. One red, one blue or whatever the colors are.
Especially if they simulate warp speed travel and port holes and all that as you're flying,
that would be amazing. You would just hope they don't break any guitars.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Guitars? No. What?
So there was a guy, it was maybe 10 years ago, a guy with his band.
Oh yeah. Yeah. You should totally tell this story. Yeah.
Yeah. They were traveling on a United flight somewhere for like a gig. And he was looking
out the window of the airplane and his guitar, his Martin guitar, which cost 2,500 bucks,
a very expensive guitar, was just tossed around an acoustic guitar, which is very fragile. And then guess
what? It got broken. He described this experience in an article. He just couldn't get them to pay for it.
Right.
They would just give them credits or some other bullshit that didn't matter for a musician
whose instrument was broken. So he wrote a song called United Breaks Guitars, which we'll link
to in show notes. And that song just went viral, absolutely viral. So Martin actually gave him two
guitars for free. And then he probably made a bunch of money too with that. And then United actually
wanted to pay him back and he told them to basically just go screw themselves.
He really capitalized on a bad experience, turned it into an opportunity.
Okay. Going back to Annie and Angela, one thing I wanted to call out is they mentioned how they
aspired to be like a couple of other podcasts that they liked and they want to model after those.
And that's exactly what we heard from Jake and Jonathan. That's exactly what we heard from
Brian McCullough. All the upcoming podcasters, including ourselves. We all had something we
wanted to emulate at least partially or combine multiple ideas from other podcasts. I think it's
just a great advice to anybody who's just getting started. Don't try to be super unique because
uniqueness comes from the content, but the format and some things that you do, as long as they resonate
with you, as long as you can remain yourself while doing those things, while saying those things,
I think it's totally cool to just be a bit of a copycat and then you find your own voice by
doing this and evolving further. So I thought that was a fascinating observation.
Yeah, it makes sense. It lets you basically take on things that work well, that you know works
well already, that you personally like, and then bring in and focus on the uniqueness on your content
and not on all the logic, the music or the style of presentation and all that.
Also speaking about logistics, it was interesting to hear Angela break down
their costs for the apps that they pay and how much they don't want to overspend on a podcast.
And I think this is where actually the regularity of the schedule comes in. Because if you publish
something every week, then you know that whatever monthly subscription you pay, let's say it's going
to be distributed across four episodes. But if you do it irregularly, then maybe you don't use the
subscription to a squad cast or something for two months. And then you feel like you're wasting money.
Yeah. So I think when you have a regular schedule, that is more justified. But also what I personally
discovered is some tools, yes, you have to pay for them. Descript, for example.
Right.
We could live without Descript. It costs us about 20 bucks a month at this stage, but it helps me do
the show notes a lot faster. Also the Annie and Angela episode, I did it fully in Descript.
Descript. I mean, the content cut. Then the sound engineering will be done by Misha, by our sound
engineer. So you didn't use the iPad app, I forgot the name, Ferrite? Ferrite, yes. I wanted to use
Descript to see how that will work in terms of editing things. Because the thing is, when you edit
in Descript, I can see "oom" and "um" and all its stuff with my eyes, I can just cut it. Whereas in Ferrite,
I have to listen for it very carefully and then remember to cut it. So Descript is more effective
that way. But still, I ended up spending maybe five hours to edit two hours of audio. Actually,
it's not too bad. It's like two and a half X time. But I'm pretty confident with the quality of the
edits that I did because I removed a lot of filler words, false starts, all that kind of stuff that
was very easy. It also took a little bit of more time. And maybe you can read my quote.
Did you manually cut out the filler words and all that or let Descript identify and just say cut
out everything? I did it manually because Descript doesn't always identify the boundaries correctly.
I did it once automatically for our first episode and I had to redo everything after that. So I
wasted probably like an extra hour, hour and a half by relying on AI too much.
Right. The quote, I'll say this on record, but let's see if we want to keep it or throw it out. But
what you said, forget the context, but I think...
The context was that you said it was a great episode. I said that I felt it was too long.
Yes.
But maybe because I listened to it so much.
I may have a bit of a skewed perspective after having spent three hours for the first 15 minutes
fighting Descript. Man, it's bugs and slowness are infuriating.
This was a fair comment at the time. Because what was happening is as I was trying to edit Descript,
what it doesn't do a good job at is when you have multiple tracks, in this case we had four tracks,
and you have a false start. Maybe you start talking while Angela didn't finish talking yet.
Oh, and that happened a lot in that episode.
Yes. Yeah. And you just shut up really quickly, right? But it's still on the record.
And Descript uses sort of linear time. I can't just edit your part out because it's all just merged with
Angela's part. So I have to go to what they call the sequence editor, which is similar to a regular digital audio workstation,
where it shows multiple tracks. And in that version that I was using, I would try to use a slicer tool to slice the audio.
And it would just hold for 10 seconds. So I would have to close that, open it again. Then that slice would appear on the track.
And I would have to manually adjust things. It would hold again. For every single one of those cuts,
I would spend almost a minute, which was absolutely unacceptable. Because you're only as good as your
tools are. It's good comparisons. Imagine you're typing on the keyboard and it takes a few seconds for
the letters to appear on the screen. It would be just absolutely infuriating.
And on top of that, you would lose track of what you're trying to do.
Exactly. Yes. And you also get emotionally worked up while doing that.
Yeah. In all fairness, I think it was the day before yesterday, they actually updated the app.
So there was a new version of Descript and it told me there was a new version available. Click here to restart.
I restarted and it was all working perfectly. Somebody else supposedly reported this or maybe
they discovered themselves and they fixed it really quick. Imagine if it was a software by Microsoft or Apple.
Well, we will get a fix in 2024.
Yeah. I had an interesting bug with Apple yesterday, but I won't go into the details.
I don't think it'll get fixed soon. I did leave them feedback, though.
Oh, I don't think they listened.
Oh, one last thing is talking about logistics and all that and on the topic of feedback. In the episode,
we talked about the check police. We instituted a new mechanism for us to be more mindful that we
have a checklist and we need to abide by it. And we called that role the check police and you did it.
And I think that was really helpful, right?
Yes.
So the next episode we're going to record later today, I'm going to be the check police.
We'll see how it goes. I'm very emotionally connected to that topic. So we'll see how much
I remember and all that.
Yeah, it will be very interesting recording because I'm emotionally not connected at all.
The biggest question I have is why Saunders FC, why they use the word F, the football club?
All of my life, I was calling soccer football because actually in Russian language,
we call football football and the American football, we call American football.
There is no term for soccer because it's just football in our language.
So why don't they call themselves SC soccer club? Because they're in the US.
We can ask them, but I think this is tradition. Most soccer or football clubs,
they tend to have FC or something like that.
Soccer sounds like a bunch of dudes running around in socks around the field.
No, I like the word football too more.
Yeah, because you kick a ball with your foot. We can talk about that with Kelly.
And you know, the American football, it's more like a hand egg.
Yeah, I actually really like throwing the American football egg with my son. It's an interesting
sport. I just wouldn't call it football. I think New Zealanders or Australians call it rugby.
Rugby. Rugby. Yeah. I don't know what rugby means.
Although it's different. It looks very similar from the outside.
Yeah, the mechanics are similar, but the game and the rules are very different.
So good to know. It's like hockey and golf, right?
Wait, hockey and golf. I didn't even connect the two together.
I guess you hit a ball with a stick. So, yeah.
You should watch that movie. I think it's from the late 90s, maybe 2000s.
Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler, yeah, where he was a hockey player who started playing golf and he would
hit the ball. And I don't think you could pull it off in real life, but it was a hilarious movie.
Yeah. Okay. All right, then we'll see you next week. Don't forget to subscribe.
Please, please. Actually, I don't care about ratings anymore. Send us some feedback because
I'm curious to see the people behind those numbers. 87 doesn't make a difference at all. But if like
three people write back to us saying something, that would be great.
No, I'm actually amazed that approximately 90 people listen to this podcast every week,
which is amazing. I didn't think that would happen. But yeah, it would be awesome to get
some feedback to see what's going on well and what you'd like to see more of.
You know, I think the podcast experience is more like an e-commerce website where just some random
people come and buy your stuff and pay you money, but exactly you don't get any money for the podcast.
Whereas what I would like it to be more of is a farmers market experience where people come to us,
listen to us, and we have a conversation. I think that ability to have a conversation in
podcasts is really missing. So yeah, please send us something. Okay, I guess see you next week. Bye.
All right, bye.