Spotify also has a very unique differentiating feature, which is that it tries to combine podcasts with music and I hate it because of that.
Yes, so it's differentiating but not necessarily valuable.
Hello and welcome to the Metacast behind the scenes podcast where Arnav, my co-founder and me, Ilya,
talk about us building a new podcast app called Metacast. We have not shipped yet, we are in close beta right now, so we do not disclose secrets and the features on the podcast.
We just talk about how we build things and how we think about certain decisions, but the big reveal is not come yet.
It will be a bit later and then we'll start talking about the features and other stuff as well.
Anyway, Arnav, welcome to the show. Welcome to our own show. Yes.
It's just the absolute happy to be here.
Cool, cool, cool. Yeah. All right. So what are we going to talk about today?
Just the usual things, things that we are improving in an episode after episode. This one will be brief.
We will do a few updates about what we've been working on and we'll share what we're listening to and what we're reading right now.
I'm super excited about that part, so hang on till that part.
Or if you had our app right now, you could quickly search for it and skip right ahead to that section, but we'll save the best for the last.
So we were supposed to record an episode with our employee number one, Cheney today, but life intervened and we couldn't.
So we are doing this improvised rumbles out where we will just rumble about a few things, but we did jot down a few topics and let's see how it goes.
I think it will be pretty interesting.
I have always wanted to do improv and people told me like you should try improv, so let's see how it goes. Okay, let's start with things we improve or we are improving, right?
I feel like we are last few episodes. We're consistently putting more and more focus on not rambling too much and staying on topic because that's important for people.
I was excited. I will not personally, I feel like we're doing awesome, but there's still scope for improvement for sure, but I feel like generally we are very conscious about not rambling very far off or for too long.
And on top of that, of course, I'm like, shape, hair is looking fine and lighting and everything, so all of that is good. Yeah.
So a week ago, we released the episode 40 with tram line vlogs, we did never did a plot and a shy.
I was in this episode and I noticed that we didn't introduce name by names or even if we did, I forgot exactly if we didn't introduce them by name or not, but when they started talking, they didn't introduce themselves.
By the way, I haven't heard it yet because even though listeners of this episode are listening one week from now in recording time, the episode with tram line just came out like this morning.
So I haven't heard it yet, but I remember while recording, I don't know if you got that feeling or not, you and me both tried to like, pokes them into saying their names multiple times and saying like, okay, Niva Rita, why don't you introduce yourself and things like that.
Did that come across or there is some of that there? Yes. I don't remember to be honest as it was like very early in episode, but I just remember noticing that I think actually was the only one who actually said his name himself.
I think it's important to have people say their names. Hey, this is our not by the way. Welcome to show man. Awesome to be here.
So the first thing we wanted to talk about is differentiating features in products versus table stakes features. And here is what it means. Let's stick with the podcast app example.
So we have a few differentiating features that are really awesome. We've been using them for months at this point ourselves.
Oh, you mean our podcast app, not the app called the podcast app. No, no, no, I mean, all of the other apps, if you look at them, they pretty much have many differentiating features at all.
So to me, like most of the podcast apps, they just commodity and some of them are worse than others in terms of UX and UI, they differ.
Generally speaking, they offer the same kind of features and you can do the same things pretty much in all of them. Yeah, yeah, like overcast is different in that it allows this sophisticated playlists.
I love overcast, yeah. Yeah, I don't, but it's just not my cup of tea, right? It may be an app for like engineers or something. I don't know, maybe I'm typecasting it, but I have so many playlists.
I love like the whole automatic like, okay, this episode comes out. It'll put it in that playlist and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
So this is a differentiating feature of overcast, right? So Spotify or Apple or any other app I looked at, they don't have anything of that level sophistication in terms of playlists.
But if you look Spotify versus Apple, there isn't really much difference there. I mean, Spotify added transcripts to a few shows that they host that makes them different from the others.
So that would be a differentiating feature. But otherwise most of the apps are pretty much the same thing. You find an episode to play, you press the play button and then they play it for you.
Spotify also has a very unique differentiating feature, which is that it tries to combine podcasts with music and I hate it because of that.
Yes, so it's differentiating, but not necessarily valuable. Yes. Yeah. So differentiating feature is something that makes your product unique. So we have something like that in our app.
And that's what we've been focusing all of our energy on in the last few months. So we've made sure that we build and well, I wouldn't say perfect in this area at this point.
There's still some UX improvements to be done, but the framework for that part is like laid out. Yeah. Yes. And we launched this in close beta where we pretty much had bare bones up where you can find the podcast, but then you can use those differentiating things.
And what we started hearing from people right away is, well, how about downloads, how about playback speed, how about search that can search not just podcasts, but also episodes playlists.
Well, I should playlists. I don't think we've heard many people ask for you and me. We have been asking for it of ourselves. That's that's true. Yeah. But we have very high tolerance for our app for the reasons.
So these are the table stakes features. You can't launch a podcast app where you cannot skip to the next 30 seconds or something. You cannot launch a background playing in our app right now.
Right now you cannot skip 30 seconds forward or backward in a car because we need some more configuration to do there. We basically added the minimal amount of background audio so that you can play it and pause it, but that's about it. You can't do anything else in the background.
That's a difference between an MVP and MLP. So minimum viable product is something that works. It showcases, you know, what you're trying to do and it's like minimal. You invest minimum engineering resources and time and building this.
I think that's what we shipped in close beta. It was an MVP. And as we quickly started learning, people want those table stakes features because we are not operating in the vacuum. People already listen to podcasts in other apps. And to replace those apps, we have to provide the features that those apps have, at least, you know, the basic ones.
And that's where we just didn't do that right away. And we've been kind of catching up on that for the last couple of months, basically building out the basics. It's an interesting chicken neck problem, I guess.
On one hand, when you start doing the validation and close beta kind of environment with people under NDA, you don't want to overengineer things. You just want to give them the minimal thing that you're working on so that you can test it.
You can actually prioritize the differentiating things and get feedback on that part. Exactly. Yes, because like people will not adopt our app for like how well the playback speed is right.
That's an undifferentiating thing. Yeah. Every car has wheels. If Tesla didn't have a wheel, nobody would buy Tesla, right? Right. Or a windshield.
Yes. Actually, a white person, I think, would be with one. You can drive without wipers. Well, until it rains. And that's what we had without our people can use the app until we go to a place where they don't have internet.
And then they just simply doesn't work. It doesn't matter if it has differentiating features.
Another kind of quick example is so most podcasts apps once you say like, okay, this is my favorite podcast. It'll track it, right? And it'll refresh it and it'll kind of like keep up with episodes as they launch so that when you go into that in your app, it's ready or it'll even have notifications for people who like notifications.
We didn't build any of that. We said, okay, you have to actually go visit the podcast and that's when we will check if there's a new episode and it'll maybe take like 10 seconds for new episodes to show up because we spent most of our time in the differentiating part.
I really like how you put it like you go for MVP first, then you do your validation. If it looks like, okay, this is something worth going for. Then you go towards MLP, which is minimum launchable product.
Interesting. I've never heard launchable before. MLP is a minimum lovable product.
Loveable product. Okay, maybe launchable is a bar even below that.
No, it's actually interesting because I think MVP is what some companies launch with and it falls flat. I mean, Amazon has had plenty of examples like this.
So MVP, something you give to your diehard fans like friends and family or if you have like existing users to some like really, really tolerant people who really love your product. New feature, maybe a new clunky feature, but it's a new thing that nothing else can do exactly.
But MLP, something you launch with publicly. I think the reason is saying that you only get one attempt at launch, which I think YC has been talking about how it falls.
When you launch for most people, like nothing big happens anyway. So you have multiple attempts to launch. But I think you maximize your chances of success if you launch something that's not just minimal crappy thing, but something that actually people can fall in love with.
Right. And I think just being totally honest, this is a thing we are expected to struggle with coming from big tech.
Even though we just said Amazon launches things pretty much too early, there's still so many things, so much thinking going into that that we simply don't have that time for in a small three person company.
Right. But we have the freedom to just do it like today in Slack. I look at Slack and Janie is like, oh, I fixed this HD mother rendering issue on iOS.
I'm like, what? Yeah, yesterday it was still a little shit. I mean, it's still not ready for shipping, but it will probably take a few more hours to like be fully tested and buttoned upright.
But it's something like in a big company to take a month to just align on priorities. It'll probably take us maybe an hour or half an hour to align on the UX on this.
But in a big company, yeah, it will probably take a month because you have to get stakeholders like other people to buy into that and all that. Yeah. And some of them people who have nothing to do with us at all, but they just somehow need to plug it into the decision making process.
And because it doesn't scale a lot of times, right? Because they are plugged into the decision making up so many things that they're super busy.
So the only time you can find with them is like a month later. After Thanksgiving, actually, no, there's Christmas. So it's January.
Yeah.
And then that just kills the passion for doing things quickly. Exactly. Yeah. So that's what I like about our process of lack of processes.
You can just do something and this thing that we're working on right now. I think we can just talk about that. Right.
So we have a list of podcasts. And if there is a new episode, we need to show some indication that there is a new episode since you last visited it.
So the conventions are like red dots or blue dots or some kind of like a tag on it, like a pill.
And we could have agonized over UX in Figma. But instead, you just tried a few options. I mean, full disclosure. We don't like any of them. So we'll play some more.
This is the cool thing, right. What if we built this all in Figma? Everybody said thumbs up. And then you build it. And you're like, okay, looks like shit. You know, we just don't like it. It doesn't feel right.
And then all of that approval process was just for nothing. It was wasted. So that's something that we avoid as a small company.
So how long did it take you to build this feature?
I want to say, yeah, I've been taking you two weeks to write a design talk for this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how it would scale and all that. So about on this topic of like new things versus replacing what people already have.
Like Jason Fried had a really good post. You shared it with me. The gist is that typically for new companies, he likes to call them businesses not startups.
The focus is on like, how do you run it? Right in that. But otherwise their business or a startup is the same thing. Right. I'll use those words interchangeably right now. But I think what he's talking about is when a startup creates something.
They focus very hard on the differentiating part or the newness of it. What new things are you doing that nobody else can do right now.
But you also need to think very deep about what would it take for people to switch to your thing because there are habits and routines built in people's heads.
And so how do you compare to like in all these existing thing? And that's essentially what we're saying differentiating features versus table stakes. And how do you prioritize and put how much importance to like which parts.
Yeah, so there is a really cool concept Maya. It's M-A-Y-A. Like the civilization in Mexico. Yes, like the civilization. Yes, it means most advanced yet acceptable.
It's going to relate to this topic. So there is this book. I think it's called the hit makers or something like that. I'll have to look it up. It's about innovation. I think there is a lot about music there. Music, but also just generally introducing new products to the market.
So this concept Maya was introduced by an industrial designer back I think in the first half of the 20th century who designed a lot of things.
The point of this thing is that you want to provide people with the most advanced things, most new features if you're doing speaking tech world. But it should still work with their mental models.
You can't go too far and turn upside down what people are really doing. And I think these kind of jives with this topic of if you focus too much on the newness, you may create something that just doesn't plug into the existing socket.
And this concept Maya combined with this Jason's more than layman terms thing that I think is recipe for creating products like you have to always think what are the current habits, how are we going to replace them.
And the table stakes is the term for what is this foundational set of features that has to be present that you can't sometimes you can't even change you have to like keep what it is, introduce new things.
And then once people adopt your product and you can slowly start changing the other habits they have around it.
We need to move on from this, but I'll say one more thing because this is like exactly what we're talking about maybe two, three weeks back when with our friend of ours.
We were talking about the whole existing podcast app UX and how everything is like focused on podcast shows and then going to find the episodes and how there could be a totally different.
Let's just simplify it and say in Netflix like UX for podcasts. I don't think we're giving too much away, but what we decided is like that would be too much of a leap in one go.
Yes, especially for those people who already have a habit. Yes. So that might be a future evolution for us or somebody else who is listening feel free to steal this totally right, but it's not an easy thing to build, but you could totally forget about the current podcasting like how you find shows and all that and rebuild that from scratch, but it would be hard to get people who are already using podcasts to switch to it.
Yeah, I think there are two models, right? So there is the radio concept basically there's certain programming on certain channels podcast is nothing more about the channel, right?
And you just subscribe to a channel and instead of listening in real time, you listen offline, asynchronous.
And Netflix model is it just guesses what you want and feeds it to you and we'll figure something out to make it really awesome.
Yeah, so let's talk about other than these table stakes, what else have we been working on last few weeks? So we applied to YC second time. What's YC? YC, it's an incubator where 400 to 300 startups go in and it's a three month program where you get to network with other people, you get to network with alumni of YC and companies like Airbnb,
like Instacart and many, many others who we know like Dropbox was perfectly think coin base, some of that really, really big consumer brand names came out of YC.
So it has this powerful network of people and connections that can really help propel you startup.
I think if you're in that startup incubator kind of space, it is the thing that most people try to get into.
Does the hard work of start up incubators?
Yeah, and I think we should double check, don't quote me on the specific numbers, but I feel like last time around when we also applied, which was summer, 20, 23 cycle, right? That was the last one.
There were, I want to say 12,000 or so applications, like 12,000 startups or ideas or people that applied and they picked 100 something or maybe 200 something max.
So that's the kind of like, yeah, like Harvard startup incubators. Yes.
So we applied the second time to them last week.
Yeah, and they also give you $500,000 of which 125 grand.
So the investor right away, they get 7% of the company and then the other 375.
It's a safe.
It's a safe. Yeah, so whenever you get the next round of investment, where you actually have a valuation.
They will get the preferential terms at that. Yeah, they will basically automatically invest this money into that round with that valuation.
But they give you the full money upfront.
They give you the full month upfront. Yes.
The money aside, I mean, the money is also pretty significant, right? Like 500k for like, let's say, two or three people.
It could easily fuel you for maybe a year or more than a year easily, depending on where you live and what your life style is.
It removes a lot of uncertainty. It allows you to work on your idea for longer, refine it.
But I think the biggest part of YC is the network, the alumni that you get access to and all that.
Also fundraising is a very big part of YC. YC culminates in so-called Demo Day, where startups pitch to investors and many startups get funding this way.
So we applied, we are really interested in the network and just the ability to grow faster.
And then that also gives us an option to raise funds if we need to.
Or I guess it raised as much funds as we need to.
But I think in terms of where we want to go, it's not necessarily in the next three months,
we want to raise VCE funding, grow the company to 20 people or something. We want to be sustainable, right?
Go slow about it, but build a solid business based on revenue and profits and cash flow basically, rather than like VCE infused money.
Exactly, yes, yeah. We want to be cash flow positive.
I think the option this gives us is if you really start to take off and maybe you made some mistakes and assumptions.
You find raise or die. So we leave ourselves an option to take that kind of decision.
There are a few things that we want to do that would really elevate what we're building, right?
But that requires significant resources.
Yes, like we are talking about millions of dollars.
Yes, and this opens up a quicker path to that.
Okay, that's a great thread. Let's put up a pin on that for now.
Tell me this. I feel like one of the best values out of YC, whether you get in or not or whether you go for it or not, is the application itself is awesome.
It makes you think very clearly about what you're building, why you're building, and why you are the right people to be doing this.
Yes, when we applied the first time, I felt like it helped us resolve some of the chaos we had in our heads and make things more succinct.
Now, as we were doing the second time, and I was using the previous application as an inspiration, some of the stuff I copy-pasted, but most of the stuff had to rewrite, because I'm like, it's all over the place.
Even though at the time we felt like it helped us structure our thoughts more, so I think our second application is much more succinct, but much more clear about the value by the right people and all that.
And I'm pretty sure actually if we do this again in six months, we will narrow it down even more. This is an awesome exercise to just help you think through ideas.
I feel like it's almost like a business retrospective, like a twice a year business retrospective of where you are, are you still heading to the right place?
Are you still the right group of people to do this? And I want to say that we should probably be doing this, whether we get into IC or not, the chances are minimal anyway, but whether we get in or not, whether we go for it or not, I think it's a valuable thing to take those questions and kind of like review it at least once a year.
It's like you're annual physical with your doctor, I think.
Oh, it's part of the application process. You also record the founders video because a one minute video where you introduce yourselves, your product and just summarize what you're working on and why.
And the first time we did it, we did it over two half days, when I was in Vancouver.
We were together physically here in Vancouver, yes.
I think we had at least 20 takes.
Oh, 22 or 23 is what we finally settled on.
So the ones that we actually saved and there were many, many more takes that we abandoned mid recording and never saved so they don't have a number.
This time we did about like five, six takes, I think.
Yeah, no more than that.
Also, I think last time we struggled to fit it in one minute, I think this time we made it.
Actually, I think we made it like one minute one second.
It was because of the delay in the latency in transition.
If we were recording this in person, it would have been like 58 seconds or so.
But also, I think it kind of shows that we're getting more clarity.
Didn't talk about stuff that doesn't matter right now, which we did in the other one.
Right.
So aside from that, what else did we do?
You built a landing page for us?
The lesson about it.
Yeah, built is a very strong word for what I did into ours.
So there is a service called card, C-A-R-R-D dot C-O, I think is there, you know.
It's a landing page website builder, which offers you a bunch of templates.
And what we needed basically is we wanted to start collecting emails from people who are interested, but not interested enough to subscribe to our newsletter or to follow us.
So basically just random people who might be interested in the new podcast app.
So the website is very simple.
It just has our logo, a bit of description, and a form to collect emails.
And a few more not-so-bad-sactions that you can scroll.
It talks a little bit about the team and why we're building this without disclosing the feature details.
So we wanted this site to look pretty, to be very clear, but also to be cheap.
We didn't want to spend like $10-$15 a month on the website at this point.
So I think you found this site.
I don't know.
How did you find it, by the way?
Did you hear it about it somewhere?
Chat GPT.
Oh yeah, okay.
Actually it's Chat GPT more.
I use it pretty much for everything right now.
Okay. So it was a very simple process.
I think it's $50 a year, and you can host like 50 websites.
And I also found the coupon code and read it.
And it ended up being like $30 a month for the first year.
And it will be $15 next year.
It literally took me two hours to do the whole thing.
I already had all of the artifacts, like the logo, image, and all that.
So I just needed to like recombine things, type some text, and then connect it to our domain.
I mean create a DNS records in Google domains, a recent piece.
And it's still alive.
Actually that might be a great Halloween decoration this year.
Google domains.
Yeah, it's cool.
Okay. Yeah, Google podcasts as well.
So if you use Google podcasts, go to metacast.app and put your email in the description.
And put your email in there.
And you will get notified when a much better app than Google podcasts will become available.
And for now just stick to Apple podcasts or something like hate it and then come back to us.
Yeah, so that was a very nice experience.
The only downside of this is like your whole domain gets locked into this one page experience.
We needed to place a privacy policy on our website.
And there was just no way to add a page to this domain at this point.
So we had to put it elsewhere for now.
But by the time we launch, we'll have to rebuild the landing page.
And we'll probably use something like Jackylo Hugo or what's the other thing.
It's host like a static page in there.
Yes, static website generator.
All right.
And then we also we talked a little bit about this in our newsletter.
So we won't go too much into details.
But aside from all these table stake features that we're building, one interesting thing we added is Netflix actually started this philosophy called chaos engineering.
Just inject errors and problems, chaotically everywhere in your systems.
They do it in production.
AWS everybody does Google all the big players do it now in a chaotic fashion, even in production.
But in a controllable manner.
Yeah, just the idea of case engineering is that there is a chaos monkey.
I think that's what Netflix calls it that randomly kills servers in your infrastructure.
And then in production.
And basically you have to build the systems in a way so that they're resilient to random failures of random servers in your infrastructure.
So they take it really seriously.
It's in production.
It's like if you get it wrong, it will affect actual users.
Right. But we don't even have integration tests right now, right?
We actually don't even need that.
Right.
At this scale, but what we wanted to do is as we build the app, we are using like our one gigabyte internet lines while developing the app.
Everything is super fast, but our actual users are going to see slower networks.
They're going to see errors once in a while.
So we wanted to build some sort of a notion of that.
And we took inspiration from the scales engineering thing.
And pretty simply like put in something in our app that will when you're in the debug mode, when you're developing, it'll randomly throw like delays or errors and things like that.
Yeah. And so we are able to see what the experience is like when you lost the internet connection or when there is a random error on the server when you were trying to log in, for example.
And what we were able to identify, I think there was an error where it was basically dead end because there was a screen that didn't have a backpacks.
It just had some error in there and basically we wouldn't be able to test for this because we would be able to simulate this on an actual device.
Right.
And also like when you build a feature, you build all the error handling like in case of an error and show this and all that, but you never really revisit that.
And then you change things around in your app, other places.
And that screen might not work anymore.
Even if it's the loading spinners that UX and things like that, it's good to be able to see that once in a while.
Yeah. You saw that some spinners were showing as ellipses as opposed to circles.
Yes. And they were not aligned and things like that.
Yeah, they were misaligned.
But we never saw this because things were just happening so fast on the real device, even known 5G.
But then when you actually inject that delay and you see this for a couple of seconds, then you're able to see, OK, this looks really weird.
And then you fix it.
So the point we want to make here is we applied concept from DevOps to customer empathy UX.
And UX, yeah.
So basically, chaos engineering helps us make our UX better.
So it's less about resilience and more about, do you really know what's going to happen if you users have not perfect conditions.
Actually, I remember very clearly, when I was working in a Amazon, I used the audible app.
And in that building, we worked in black food.
One of the exits was going through a basement.
So I was entering that basement as I was starting to play a book.
And for some reason, I started to play a book required internet connection.
So I entered this basement.
And then this spinner just gets stuck there for like all the time I was walking to the basement.
And when I came out, then it started working.
But it was so frustrating because it spent probably like a minute without what I wanted to do.
It was just stuck with no way to fix it.
And I remember reporting this to the audible team.
And at the time, I didn't know if it's still the case.
They gave a free audio book to anyone who reported an issue.
I mean, internally, if you should have not been reported by somebody else previously.
So I reported it to them and they gave me free audio book.
That's actually like a meta point, right?
It's a very cool way to dog food.
If you can give some freebies that don't cost you much, people listen to audio books.
And they find bugs and they can report them.
Why not give them an audio book?
I was happy it was like, whatever.
We could actually have that like our premium tier and all that, right?
Like we could do things like that.
Where if you report a bug that we don't know about, yeah.
Yeah, we could give like, I don't know, discount it next month or maybe like a free month or something.
We could figure something out, yeah.
With books, they're just so easy because there's a specific token that you can give.
You give it credit, people use it for it.
I think that concept that they created, I think it's just brilliant, that you give people what they want.
And they give you what you want.
But also I think this error that you're saying would happen in our app too.
And a lot of apps that play audio.
If you walk into a basement without internet, while you...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
That book was downloaded.
Oh, okay.
So that's the problem, right?
It's downloaded.
You expected to work under any conditions.
Right. But what I was going to say is, regardless, like, it's not that the problem doesn't exist.
It's that the developers should feel the same experience as your users.
And not a ideal laboratory environment when they're building their app.
Exactly, the happy path.
Actually, that's why for everything that we design in Figma, we always have an empty state.
That's one of the points into this toolset.
Okay, so talking about audio books, tell us about what you're reading and listening to.
Yeah, so I've just finished the Dark Forest, which is the second book in...
I'll put you to the name, I think, Sisyshin Liu or something.
That's the name of the person, Sisyshin Liu.
He's a Chinese author.
It's a sci-fi novel, second book in a 3-body problem, trilogy.
That's where they try to learn flea, it is heading towards Earth.
At what 0.2% light speed or something like that, but that's still insanely fast.
So it will take them 400 years to reach Earth.
And at each point nobody knows what's going to happen.
They may decimate the whole human race, make them into slaves.
They have no idea. They just know that the danger is happening in like 400 years.
And it's so interesting how they start preparing now for something that will happen 400 years in the future.
You've read all the books, right?
I haven't read the last one yet.
Oh, I was just about to give you a huge spoiler. I will skip.
No, I don't want to give any spoilers here because the Dark Forest book ends very unexpectedly.
And even the explanation for why it's Dark Forest, I think if I said it now, it will spoil the book.
That's one of my most, I think, favorite sci-fi book series is that the 3-body problem, Dark Forest, and what was the last one?
Deaths and...
Deaths and, yeah. So definitely get through all three.
The second one already starts to get kind of abstract because you're talking about like multi-dimension physics and folding a photon.
11 dimensions I think that's what he was talking about there.
11 dimensions folding a photon into that and all that.
But the last one, my god, it gets abstract. I won't give you any spoilers, but...
And it's a bit slower than the other two.
But it's amazing.
What I really liked about these two books, the 3-body problem and the Dark Forest that I read, I actually liked the Dark Forest more.
Yeah, the 3-body problem is interesting, it's a bit mind-blowing, but the Dark Forest, there's so much wisdom in there.
And philosophy, this alien philosophy is...
And the way he says it, it's like, yes, this totally makes sense. This is what will happen if you have like multiple civilizations going on.
He got a bunch of awards for this and I think for good reasons. It's been five years since I read 3-body problem.
There was a five-year gap for me between the books.
I've read these three books like three, four times back to back, back to back.
This and I think Bobby verse, because they're also very dense.
Especially the second and the third book took me a lot of really sense to kind of understand the abstractness of it.
Some of it is just mind-blowing, right? Like you have to listen to it again.
Yeah, with Dark Forest, I started with the paper book, but then I was traveling to Washington DC for the weekend and I got the audio book from library.
So I kind of have listened half read. I think I prefer reading because it's too dense for listening for me.
Yeah, so on this topic, this is a three book series, right?
It's called the three body problem series. Very famous. Go. It's coming on Netflix by the way. Next year.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I so I hope they don't destroy it. Talking about Netflix, we have talked about this in the past.
It wasn't Netflix, Apple TV, but foundation, Isaac Asimov Foundation. I love that. And I did not like the TV series much.
So we'll see. So what, what you've been up to?
In terms of audio books, so I went through about 30% of the Elon Musk biography by Isaac Walter Isaac.
Walter, Walter Isaacson, sorry. Yeah, by the way, it helps me build empathy with Elon Musk.
I kind of don't like where he's heading in with his decisions and just generally as a person.
But this book helps me put into perspective a lot of things about him. And I am really enjoying that book.
But while listening to the book, there is a place where he talks about his childhood and a camp that he went to and reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
How it shaped him like fundamentally about some things. And I was immediately like, man, it's been so many years since I last read it.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is also like a book that I've read maybe four or five times so far. But it's one of those classics.
It's just my kind of queries, Zanie, sci-fi, mix of humor and absurdness that I was like, I have to go start this book again.
So then I dropped the Elon Musk book about 30% into it. And I started with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm about 25% into it now.
Cool. I think I'm halfway through the Elon Musk biography. I think there's so much darkness in there in this whole thing.
I think at some point I felt like it started to affect me when I was listening for like an hour or even two hours a day on walks. I'm like, this is just too much.
And that's when I switched to the death end. And I didn't pick up the Elon Musk biography again.
But to your point about empathy, I don't want to be Elon Musk.
When he was launching his rockets and building the Tesla's in late 2000s, it's when I first learned about him.
I'm like, oh my god, this man is like my hero. I want to be like him. I wasn't even 30 then. But now like reading about his personality, I wouldn't want this kind of existence for myself.
Yeah, I want to make my millions some other way.
It's very traumatic in a way. You have to read the book to kind of get into what we're talking about. But I feel like his whole life has been very traumatic.
The author Walter Isaacson and not Isaac Walterson does a really good. I think I'm getting the sense already. I'm about 20% into the book.
But what he's trying to say is, yes, there's a lot of darkness, trauma.
And that leads to his character being this megalomaniac kind of character, right?
Evil genius that you would see in Pixar movies, maybe something like that, brilliant, but there is a darkness in there and you can't control it sometimes.
I feel he's fundamental, not evil. He's dark. But it's like these darkness is inside, but fundamental what he is doing for the world, I think is good.
But it goes that darkness sometimes goes out of control and it affects other people.
And then here the world evil and thinking about like a villain, right? He does stuff on purpose, like bad stuff for him. The bad stuff, especially people who work with him is a byproduct of all of the other things he's doing.
But I think what he's trying to say is without one, the other would probably not exist.
Yes. It's kind of similar with jobs as well. Isaacson also wrote the jobs biography.
Yes, all of that was amazing. I love that book. Yeah. Cool. What other things are you listening to podcasts, movies?
On the plane, I had no idea that there was a movie about Blackberry. It's on my Apple TV. It's been thrust to my face for the last month and a half now.
I watched TV just generally. I was only a United plane and you can select which movies you watch. So it has direct TV thing. And Blackberry was just showing one of the channels at the time, turning it on.
With ads? You saw ads? No, no, no, maybe United pays them so that it don't show ads. Or maybe there was some ads in the beginning, but there were no interruptions during the year.
So yeah, it's a movie about Blackberry and how these two genius guys create the first smartphone. They actually, if I'm so correctly, they invented the push notification concept where the phone acts as a server.
And then your email server can send a request to your phone server. And that's how email gets delivered with the push mechanism, whereas previously you had to pull for emails all the time.
And it would really can just network. Like we're talking about mid 90s at this point, late 90s. So network bandwidth was a major concern.
If there are any super young listeners listening to us before iPhones, Blackberry was the thing. Every person with, I would say managerial or leadership, but pretty much anybody with any kind of office job had one in the corporate world.
Yeah. And they just show how that develops the higher this business guy. He is portrayed very kind of comitically. He's like almost to violent.
I don't know what the real person was like, but that character he's shown very, very violent way. Like somebody who doesn't really know how to work with engineers. He like he also demolets up.
So this kind of is a funny part of this whole thing. And then they show how Blackberry grew and how it became the fact of standard for smartphones for office workers until iPhone came up.
And then there was a lot of denial and hubris. They would be like, do I want people want this thing? Yeah. Looks like a toy. Yeah, like he doesn't even have a keyboard. And how this crumbled. And then there was also the SEC investigation. It's a drama.
Well, the thing is like, I didn't watch it. I read it because I was also entertaining my son at the same time. Wait, how did you read? It's a movie, right?
A subtitle. Okay. Okay. So you were not listening to it. Yeah. I was watching the movie. I wasn't listening to it. So that kind of limited my enjoyment. I kind of got the gist of everything.
But I want to watch it again now with sound. It's a great movie. I like those kind of movies like the upper thing. I think it's called super pumped.
Super pumped on HBO. Yeah, that was awesome. Then was there something similar like that? There was one on the office space company. We were. Yeah. I genuinely like biographies of people that kind of fictionalized social network is a good one.
So yeah, Blackberry is totally worth watching. So I'm going to watch this movie. Cool. Cool. In terms of podcasts. I'd say the usual like hard for anything drops. I like if we did. Okay, great.
This is my evening walk. So hard for always. I love their new episodes. I want to reiterate all of it. Just go listen to it. The latest episode of software, Mr. Ventures was awesome.
The one with us? No, that hasn't come out yet. That'll be even better. But the latest Nathan Mars. Yeah. But I would say this podcast trying to remember who told me about it or where I read about. Oh, Reddit. Reddit. Yeah. So we want to get political or pick sides.
But I wanted to dive deeper into the whole Israel Palestine thingy in this podcast called Wiser World. What she does is she does one episode a month.
I should have done more homework, but I feel like she has some sort of a history or education professor kind of background. And she has a research assistant amazing episodes. Right. So the whole Israel Palestine thing. She has three parts on it.
Each episode is about 45 minutes to an hour or so. And she starts like we all know the gist of it. It like starts thousands of years back. The birth of three of the biggest religions today are in that same place.
And that's where it starts from, but also goes through all what happened during the Roman civilization, what happened during the Byzantines and the Ottoman Empire after that World War One. And basically gives you all the historical context.
You need to understand what's happening right now. I absolutely loved it. Finish it in like over two days, basically end to end to end. This is all that I listen to. I loved it. Right.
So she has a lot of episodes on like Mexico and Spain and all that. So I'm going through those. Those are all my favorite like places. I have been to Mexico a few times.
I'm learning Spanish and I want to get like more and more into the culture. So Mexico and Spain are next on my radar. The first thing she started with is I believe a three part on Russia. So maybe you do that and see if you like it. You'd probably have a way more information. But you would see like this is meant for like somebody without
any information about the place. But let's say you want to visit that place. What do you need to know? That's that style. Yeah.
Oh, interesting. So I wanted to add this to favorites, but then I realized that my phone is used for recording of this podcast. So we need to web version of our app as AP. So you can add it on the web version. It would synchronize to your phone. What other app can do that?
Or a desktop version. Oh, a desktop version. Yeah. I guess Spotify can do that. But like I don't use Spotify for podcasts. Yeah. So I think it's enough for today. Yeah. That was awesome. It is only 15 minutes over time. I think we did pretty good staying on track through all these topics. Yeah. But as you were talking about podcasts, I just realized I've not listened to podcasts for about. We call maybe a listen to some random episodes here and there. But not like consistently.
So more recently, I've not been listening to like specific podcasts. I've been listening to things that I find. Just somebody recommended the podcast from LinkedIn and I just find it and I'll listen to it as opposed to like following a specific show. Well, I guess rework is the only one that I really listened to almost religiously.
Did you ever listen to the reply all podcast? Oh, yeah. When it came out, I was listening to every new episode. So I didn't. I wasn't into podcasts back then. And I tried once.
There are like, I don't know 400 episodes or something, right? So there's no way to know which ones are the episodes I would like right now. So I just punted on it. I tried to listen for a few episodes and just gave up, right?
Recently, there was a Reddit thread on what are the best episodes of reply all. And I was like, yes. So I've added all those things and I'm going to listen to those episodes.
So you're going to continue listening to them? Yes. That's the inside joke because we don't have a playlist functionality. So we miss you some of our other features as if playlist right now.
Okay. There was one episode of reply all that I remember where exactly I was. I was going down in the elevator from the fireplace market down to the street level. As I was listening to this in Seattle, it was like 2016 maybe.
So there was an episode with somebody who was deeply depressed. I think it was like an anonymous guest that they had there. And I was like experiencing something like that in my life at that point. And I remember that phrase that she said that the guest said that she felt guilty for not using her depression for creating art or something like that.
And that phrase, it's been almost like what seven or eight years, it still haunts me to this day because I've created some of my best art while being in that state. I know exactly what she means, right? But then the interesting thing there is for me that was the outlet for many musicians. It is an outlet they depressed and they create music.
But like it doesn't have to be an outlet for everybody, but there was this expectation set by the society. It's like if you fucked up, you're supposed to create great great art. And she was falling for that. Maybe it was a heat. I don't remember. I think it was a shame. But now I have no idea how to find the episode.
We let it to the show notes too, but maybe you'll find it there. Yeah, but I think after a while, she'd be able to find it in our app. Yeah, true. Okay. Yeah, that's a good wrap up. Please, if you like listening to our podcast or don't like it, but you're still heard so far. Tell us why send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com. If you want to support us, go visit metacast.app. That's our new shiny landing page that Ilya has set up.
And you can find more about us there and give us your email will only email you and the app is ready. Yeah, and we also have an email newsletter that comes out every other Friday. It's at metacastpodcast.com. That's where you can put your email address and we'll email you every other week with some of the things we discussed in the podcast, some of those things we don't. They're kind of more succinct. But no ramblings. No ramblings for sure.
So if you don't like the ramblings and you want like a written format, maybe 60% of the things we discussed on the podcast, there's definitely a Venn diagram intersection. You'll not get the books. You'll not get the podcast recommendations. Right. But I love that newsletter. If I may say so myself, I don't write it. Ilya writes it. I sometimes contribute a little bit to it. I love it. Thanks. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. India. This was awesome. You're.
You're welcome. Did we shoot it again sometime? Yes. All right. Okay. Ciao. Bye. Ciao.