Half Life Show

5: Starting Something New

Dec 03, 21 | 00:39:42

Subu
Man, I'm feeling so exhausted. The last couple of days have been pretty rough. So my kid brought back some bugs from a school and infected all of us. So we've all been sick, and as if these bugs they bring from school is not enough, what happened last week was we went to the post office and you know how, anywhere you take them, they make that place their playground. And so he was running in and out of this automatic sliding doors at the post office. So the first couple of minutes everyone there at the post office, that was a huge line. And you know, they all found it cute. Oh, look at this toddler playing around so cutely and all that. So once we finished our business there, the guy didn't want to come, right. He just wanted to keep playing. And they call it the terrible twos for a reason. Because if you don't let them what they want to do, and this guy obviously endlessly wanting to keep running in and out of the sliding door, which is really annoying everyone at that point, he becomes this wet noodle, right? It collapses to the ground and becomes overly dramatic and makes a huge scene. And this guy decides to become a wet noodle and collapse on this really dirty rug at the entrance of the post office. Oh, that's nasty. Yeah, yeah. Really nasty looking back, okay, falls on it. He's rolling around on that. And he's he's rubbing his cheeks all over the rug. And I'm like, man, so finally I somehow dragged him, scoop him up and I take him to the car, and I'm trying to console him. I put him in the car seat, and then I give him a kiss on his cheek. And a few seconds later, my lip starts swelling up and I panic. I'm like, Man, my tongue is feeling a little thick. And I quickly drive home and I eat some anti histamine medication. And I started feeling better, but it's equivalent
Vikram
to you kissing the post of his rug. That's what you did. Stuff is rug.
Subu
Jesus Christ. Yeah, I really had something that was definitely traumatic. So you know how, how parents carry this EpiPen, right? This anti allergy pen for kids. I think I'll have to carry an EpiPen for myself with my kid around. So we're getting ready to release a podcast, right? It's been pretty exciting. I should say. I've been working on the graphics, I really liked the way the cover picture. And graphics are coming out. And you've been neck deep in editing the podcast and producing the audio. It's been pretty good, right?
Vikram
I never thought I like editing audio as much as I do. But honestly, I have spent sufficient amount of time learning how to record and edit music. And now it's paying off in podcast editing, because I use Reaper to do the editing, which is the best software ever.
Subu
They call it a DAW right?
Vikram
Digital Audio Workstation.
Subu
This podcast is sort of a strange thing, because it's our first serious project since Black Earth and Black Earth disbanded in 2006, when most of us, you know, came to us to study, I tried to get us into making you know jingles for ads that didn't really go very far, you've tried to get all of us to record a second album multiple times. But that also really didn't go anywhere. Yeah, after 15 years, we've sort of landed on this podcast as our next project. Really,
Vikram
it's a new outlet for creation, right. One of the common themes we share, I guess in our lives is that we have a significant focus on creation, rather than consumption. We do watch movies and read books and things like that. But we do spend a considerable amount of time in creating. So this is our next big creation project.
Subu
You know where that part of that habit comes from?
Vikram
I don't know what
Subu
I was telling one of my friends about our podcast, and he asked me, So where does most of the time go, it has the prep take most of the time or the recording or the post recording and editing part of it. Then my wife Nidhi jumps in and tells him dude, most of the time goes in this fellow listening to his own voice after recording. And she's like, I didn't know, you're such a narcissist. So I think I think the narcissist in us makes us produce more content than consume, I guess.
Vikram
There is a happiness in creating something on your own. When I made music by myself, at home, I used to play the same song that I played like 100 times over. Keep listening to the same thing. The same thing when I wrote papers in grad school or anything like that, keep reading your own paper over and over again. Why do I do?
Subu
Yeah, man. We have a couple of episodes recorded so far. So any free time I get? I end up I pop up on the thing on my For one, and I started listening to one of the two episodes, and I've listened to it so many times, I don't know what I'm looking for, right. But I keep listening to it. And I enjoy more and more every time I listen to it. I think I got to reflect a little bit and question my qualities. There's something wrong there.
Vikram
I'm glad that we like our own podcasts. I hope everybody else likes it, too. But honestly, we just doing what we know, right? And what we think constitutes a good podcast. We are not podcast experts. We haven't done this before. So part of it is like just making the jump into it and seeing how it goes. As long as you and I are having fun doing this. We hope everybody else does, too.
Subu
Yeah, yeah, I don't think we have. We have defined what success is for a podcast, we haven't really looked at it. From that point of view. One of the primary reasons we are doing it is sort of for posterity, I think, because I mean, I want to record our own stories. And just have it around. You know, we don't look, we don't think of ourself as bloggers or YouTubers. So we're not going to go walking around with a camera anyway. So I think this is the for our introverted nature, I think the podcast sort of works the best.
Vikram
What do you think? Is the the learning curve to get started on a podcast? How difficult is it for somebody like us who has never done a podcast before to get started? What would you say is required to do that?
Subu
If you make a checklist of all the things that you need to know, we check off a lot of the pre requirements. For example, if you have knowledge of say, graphic design of website design, you know, you do need a website for your podcast, right? So that's one aspect of it.
Vikram
Hold on with the website thing. Let's say somebody doesn't know how to make a website like me, I don't really know how to make any websites, I'm pretty sure I can learn how to that's a learning curve. I don't want to scale. What would you suggest somebody should do to get a website if they can't make one? Yeah.
Subu
So these these days, I mean, it's really easy because you have the services like Squarespace and Wix and you know, web flow and all of these, or even a WordPress site. And it's, it's a lot easier now. But let's, let's look at it this way. So if we make a checklist of all the things that is required to make a podcast, right, let's say that list has 10 things, the more number of boxes, you can check off, the lesser the inertia to get started with a podcast. So I think in our case, we checked off about six or seven boxes out of the 10. Like, for example, you know, graphic design and web web design I'm taking care of, I don't have much experience, editing audio, or using one of these DAWs, digital audio workstation, so you have been producing music, mixing music, you're very comfortable with that. So that's like a big step. That is easy. So I think we checked off a good six or seven boxes out of the 10. And if you are unfamiliar with all of these 10 tools that are required, the easiest way to reduce inertia is just paying someone for it, right. I mean, these days, you have Fiverr and Upwork, you can pay someone to edit the audio for you to bring up a website so that you can continue maintaining it. So I think if you are, depending upon your experience with the podcasting tools, the easiest way to get started is finding someone on Fiverr or Upwork, I would say $15, an hour kind of thing, and then basically take it from there. So just reduce the inertia as much as possible and get down to recording. One of
Vikram
the other things, I would say that we have a checkbox you already mentioned, the web design and web, you know, graphic design aspect, which you take care of. And you mentioned how I can do audio editing. One other thing that we are generally comfortable with, and I believe it checks one more box for us, is the fact that we know how to handle audio gear in general. Because I've always been recording music, you know, plenty of music recording in the sense of microphones for making drums. So we understand all the terminology related to microphones. So once we get let's say the hardware worked out, and we are able to record on riverside.fm, which is a website that we signed up for, for, I believe, like nine or $10 a month. And it allows us to record two hours of audio per month, right? Yeah. Then we need a domain name. Right for the show. Yeah, we needed a name for the show,
Subu
which is probably the one the thing that we spend most the time at deciding the name is probably the hardest thing that's hard, because you come up with a good name. And then there's no domain name for it. It's all taken.
Vikram
Yeah. Always the creative aspects takes the most time. It may seem like the other stuff is hard. But when you get down to it, there's enough information what nobody can tell you what to do is how to put what how to put content out or what to call your website, what to call your podcast. So that's kind of hard.
Subu
Yeah. And, you know, the thing and this is something that you got to decide for yourself, right? I mean, in the sense that if you go and ask friends feedback. Usually, they also, you know, want to tell sounds good. So it is, it's generally hard to get critical feedback. Luckily, I have a couple of friends who just say, say the way it is. And I, for example, the first time when I sent them the first cut of our cover image cover photo, for our podcast, they pretty much tore it apart. And game gave me a pretty good feedback, actually. So it's always good to have friends who are assholes to you.
Vikram
Perfect. Also, I think any content you put out there is better than no content. Because out of the 7 billion people on planet Earth, you only want a very, very, very small fraction of those people who will listen to you, it's a lot of success, even if you can get a small fraction of the population to listen to what you have to say. And I'm pretty sure that of all these people on earth, there will be some people who are interested in, in hearing what you have to say, there should be some people like you, right? So what we have learnt is that don't overthink what you want to say or what you want to do. And don't worry about it being something totally new. Go for it. It's fine. Yeah, yeah.
Subu
And don't worry about being successful, right?
Vikram
You put your twist on it,
Subu
yeah, you put your twist on it, if you never start, you will never know if it's going to be successful or not. There's this guy called Kevin Kelley. He was like one of the editors of the Wired Magazine, and then a pretty prolific guy. And he wrote this very popular blog post a long time ago called 1000 true fans, which essentially says that, look, you don't need a million people or you don't need like a 2 million followers or whatever on YouTube, I mean, you what you really need is 1000 true fans. And then when you set up something like Patreon or one of these accounts, then they really will encourage you to create content, and you can even possibly make a living out of these 1000 true fans.
Vikram
How do you define a true fan?
Subu
One of the projects I started a few years ago was this technical blog that I run. And when I started off, I didn't think much of it, right. I mean, like I just wanted to put down on paper, the technical things that my job related things that I figured out, I put it out in the world is a very technical articles that are sort of hard to read. But the reason I wrote it is because I couldn't find that information anywhere easily. So I sort of stitched all this together and decided that, hey, there's a place in this world for this article to exist. Within a month. It was incredible, actually, I mean, you know, Google being Google, it did a good job, putting my website up there, because it's sort of unique content. And a lot of people started reading it, subscribing to my newsletter, and even writing me emails. I mean, I still get a like an email once a week that people ask me, Hey, I love this article. It's so clear. And it's its students, it is profesh experienced professionals and a lot of people. So this kind of interaction, definitely I would call is like no sign of a true fan. And at this point, my website is reaching, I think it gets about 10,000 readers per month. And out of that's amazing, is all this from something that I didn't really have any expectation of becoming big, I just put out some useful content. And I can see these people communicating and emailing me on a regular basis and giving me their thoughts. So I think that it's clear that these people are vested in my project with their time, to me that I think is a sign of a true fan, because that's how I reciprocate to some of the podcasts that I listen to. So there, you know, there is this podcast called The unmade podcast, then there's this other one called as cortex, I like them so much that I am a part of the membership. I'm invested in them with my time, I think that's probably the biggest way I can show my support to them.
Vikram
We should definitely link this article in the show notes. The other thing that I always hear on YouTube and stuff from other YouTube content creators, some of them say that you have to put out content consistently for a year or two. If you do it two times a month, then in a year, you have 20 to 24 episodes. If you do it for a couple of years, you're close to 50 episodes, even then you have only 50 episodes. And now you can start thinking about whether is a success or not. At that point, you have nothing else to do but put content out there. Because if you don't keep putting content out there, there is no way this is going to take off. So one of our goals, at least for the short term is to just keep creating content, do it because we want to do it and then see how it goes. But we have to stick with it long enough.
Subu
We also have to refine this craft right I mean, we are new to podcasting we have to refine this craft the initial few episodes will be raw and not so great. And I the very first episode we recorded I listened back to it and then telling you how it Why does it seem like I have I'm having a constant seizure as I talk to the whole hour I mean because And because I was so conscious of what I'm saying, and I kept stopping and restarting statements, and you showed me a snippet of your editing and there were so many cuts, it took you so much time it took me like, What two hours to edit 15 minutes, I think to cut out all my stutters and all my seizures.
Vikram
It's not uncommon that 45 minutes of actual audio takes about seven hours to edit, it's not uncommon. And then that 45 minutes probably reduces to 35 minutes based on content, edit, and removal of empty spaces. So that's the amount of work it goes in just into the editing aspect of one episode to make it sound good because you have to put in intros and outros. So it's a significant amount of time investment, even for a single episode, which is why I was saying like, two episodes a month is enormous. Because we don't do this full time, we have to find seven hours just for editing. And this is not even saying, you know, creating YouTube clips, or other web design aspects, there's a lot to do.
Subu
And we already tried to hire someone pay, we tried to pay someone to edit our audio. And while the person did a good job, it wasn't entirely to our liking. I mean, it's clear that we will need to edit our own audio so that we can, so that it comes out the way we want, essentially. And it's up to the quality that we want it to be. So unfortunately, so unfortunately, you don't have an option. So become you're going to be stuck, you're going to be stuck with me and my seizures, and
Vikram
it's fine, no problem. You can get good at editing, a lot of shortcuts and lots of YouTube videos that people are so good at this. So I'm just learning from them. So it's going to go from seven hours to hopefully only four hours at some point. Because we are going to get better at talking to we know exactly what the output is, when we say something. So in our mind, we start to say it in a way that reduces, right? No pressure. So what people are hearing in this podcast is not entirely the way we recorded it, it is edited. So if you ever feel like you're not a good speaker, or you can't nearly speak as fluently as we do, don't worry, we don't either. We do it, it's all handled. We make it it's all handled in post, as is a lot of things. Yeah.
Subu
I mean, it is like if you it is a production, right? I mean, this is not they're not necessarily doing like a live interview or anything. It's okay. I mean, music is produced, you know, a lot of your news and other stuff was also produced. And so everything is a lot of stuff, good content is scripted, so that it's presented in a digestible way. And you know, your listeners are keeping keep the focus and doesn't really waste the time. So that's essentially what we are also going for. So editing is required.
Vikram
We do script it to what level you think so we come up with a general topic. Yeah. And we list out a few points we want to say about it for ourselves, but we don't discuss it with each other before the episode. And we talk about it live, and see how it rolls out. We found that it's a lot more natural, doing it this way than scripting it a lot more because then it becomes very robotic and tiresome to listen to. When you know that everything has been pre decided it's not spontaneous anymore.
Subu
It's not spontaneous. That's a problem.
Vikram
What we want to hear is our own conversation, like the way we would talk about it in a regular way. That's what we want to put out there. Not something that's highly curated and predetermined. Yeah,
Subu
part of, you know, making the making the show or being at the podcast. Lively is the spontaneity and, you know, the whole call and response. Like, you know, you say something that and if I'm, if I'm not anticipating what you're going to say, if you're prepared, and if it's scripted, then I'm purposely going to anticipate what you're gonna say. And then I'm not necessarily paying attention, but the nice thing with spontaneity is that, you know, I can say, you can say something and I can make a wisecrack. Yeah, that's the whole point.
Vikram
Both approaches, right. We tried it, we tried scripting some stuff out. And we tried like winging it, and we tried recording both and saw which is like, more interactive, which is more listenable?
Subu
There's a happy medium. Yeah,
Vikram
there's a happy medium.
Subu
So I think we've spoken about the tools and everything and what it is to start a new project but I think apart from just knowledge, right I mean, apart from the knowing the tools itself, one more big cause of inertia one more big thing that stops people from starting a new project is you know, this feeling of, you know, what is the point what is the what is even the point, right? I mean, like for example, if you take a podcast, there are a million podcasts already right? And even for us who are for the both of us who are avid pot as listeners, that's maybe 30 minutes a day, when we can listen to something, you know, when you're maybe doing the dishes or doing the laundry or something like that. Or maybe after the kid goes to sleep, and that 30 minutes, there's already a premium on it. I mean, in the sense that have like 10 different podcasts that are waiting in queue, I have a couple of audio books waiting to be heard. So there's already a ton of content I can choose from in the limited 30 minutes or 45 minutes I have in a day. And this is not unique to me that I have to assume that this is how it is for most people out there. So for sure, yeah. And so in this kind of situation, it can you can conclude yourself that man, what is even the point, why am I doing this, then, if this argument were true, then no one should make any more new YouTube channels. Because you know, there are enough YouTube channels out there. Like if you if you take one category of channels that I watch, are these tech reviews of new tech products. You know, there are already YouTubers with many millions of followers who do this tech reviews. If you if you live with this argument that man what is the point even then you will never start it. But then there are a ton of new tech YouTubers coming out every day. Of course, what has changed is when Linus tech tips and one when MKBHD and Unbox Therapy started off like eight or 10 years ago, the bar was lower. I mean, if you look at their earlier videos, then you know the production quality is low. And they're clearly just trying to figure things out. But now, you can still start a tech YouTube channel. I mean, it is still there is value in it, if you're passionate, and if that is what you want to do. But the bar has risen in the sense that your core production quality is going to be good, you can make some crap. That's about it. I mean, but if stuff is good, then people will come.
Vikram
Is it that you have to find a niche for yourself? Like one thing you mentioned about your blog was that it was a highly technical area that not many people would ever write about. So what you did there was you found a niche for yourself that nobody was in that space who were writing like you did. And that alone got you a fair amount of viewership per month. And what would you say your mail mailing list subscription is right now.
Subu
I think there are about 900, about 900 people subscribe to my mailing list. So you
Vikram
are already close to the 1000 true fans. I don't know I mean, they may not be spending money on your product, but at least you got nearly 1000 people to sign up. Just because you found your niche. So one can find a niche. If you have something that only you know that others don't we face this all the time, there's always this curse of knowledge, I think it's called the curse of knowledge. Where just because you know something, it seems easy to you. And then you believe that it's not worth putting out there. But it's not so for a lot of other people who are trying to figure out what you are. So you have to overcome that curse of knowledge. And there's another syndrome, which we have to fight called the imposter syndrome. Because we always look up to people, right? We have this really smart colleague or this really awesome friend who's doing this awesome stuff. And like, I don't even know half of what the guy over there does, I know people better than me at this, what makes me qualified enough to create content and teach people about this kind of stuff, when I myself am in this level of mediocrity. So you start to believe in your own imposter syndrome. So these are two things one has to overcome before we can start creating content. Because whatever you know, is just fine. Some people would love to know what you know. And that's why you put stuff out there, right?
Subu
The example of imposter syndrome that you gave right now is exactly what I went through. When I started my website. I was being mentored by another senior colleague at work. And he, I felt like I knew nothing about what I was writing. Right? It's just that my senior colleagues, I mean, he's in his 50s. And he's not going to, he's not interested, he has other things to worry about. He's not going to start a website and write an article or anything. So it started off as me just trying to make a record of the things that I have discovered. And because I I know how hard it would have been to learn about these technologies without the senior colleague who taught me based on his experience, right? So there are people who know a lot more than me, but in my case, I was probably the only one clearly who was willing to write it out and take the effort to put it online.
Vikram
That itself helps a lot of people because it's a considerable amount of effort to consolidate what you learned and put it down and when you do that, it helps you by yourself, right? When you teach somebody how to do it when you write it down, or speak about it in a podcast or a YouTube video, you learn a lot more about it. And now this is a great medium to get feedback on this stuff, too. Will somebody will say, Hey, have you written about this topic? And you're like, oh, man, I never thought about that. So this is a great way to get ideas for yourself to write, I had the same thing, because there's all these programmers out there that are so good. And I can do not consider myself a programmer by any means. But this year, I decided, one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to create some open source code, I'm going to just do it in my area of technical expertise. I would say there's only a small fraction of people who know both Python programming and like RF electronics like I do. So I decided to go and contribute my know how to this project for open source RF. Engineering. Yeah, in by an
Subu
RF is the physics and electromagnetics of circuits, right? I mean, to summarize, in a short sentence, yeah,
Vikram
it's just radio frequency communication. I know all the stuff that Yeah. And you know, I know this, like the beginning of this year, beginning of goes on between your phone and the cell phone tower, that radio communication, 2021. I remember you telling me that man, if there's one thing I want out of so it's just radio frequency communication stuff. And there is somebody who started an open source project, to do analysis for this form of engineering. And I decided I will just go and write something there. I mean, my first contribution was very hard. For me, it was a lot of effort. And the first time around, I was like, oh, man, this is so hard. And I never did my next contribution for quite a while, then I decided, let me just do it. Again, I know how to do this stuff. Why don't I just go? Why am I worried about the programming part of it? If it's wrong, people will tell me it's wrong. You know, it's, what's the big thing, I'm going to go fix it after that. People tell me I'm wrong. Great. I'll go learn out of it. And so now I've gotten into open source development, which is very rewarding for me. And I'm getting better at programming and stuff to the win-win. So never hold back and think what you know, is less. this year is I want to contribute to an open source project, right. And it was very clear from you're looking at your face, it was very clear that even though those these words came out of your mouth, I could see your face and you didn't believe that it will happen this year, it was very clear that you didn't believe you said this is what I want, but you didn't believe it would happen. And it just since you had this idea in the mind, and you saw this, okay, small little openings in here, this project makes sense. Since something in you made you seek this project out, this whole thing manifested. And what else I should say is that now that I got familiar with the workflow that a lot of people are using out there, to develop software, and I kind of got into it, because I had to, I wanted to contribute to this open source project. I actually use this approach and all the stuff I learned by doing open source contributions at my workplace, and that people really loved at my workplace. So I didn't want to do open source contribution, because I'm going to become a better at my job or something like that. But it so happened, that what project I started ended at work by myself, because I got the experience from this other thing was super well received this year. And it really helped out career wise, too. So sometimes it's all about doing things and things connect in ways that you don't imagine. If you never try doing something, then the connection would never be made in your mind. You know, you don't get some ideas if you don't try a few things. So I mean, always try those
Subu
positive reinforcement loops. I mean, when you do something and something else unexpected that is favorable, favorable to you happens elsewhere. I think that those kinds of realizations are, man, I look for those kinds of moments. They're so freakin amazing.
Vikram
It's amazing. It's amazing when things start to come together.
Subu
There's one mistake that I used to make when it came to starting. I don't know if I should call it a mistake. But okay, there's one. One habit I had, I used to start new projects every month, or sometimes every few weeks, right? So I used to start a project. And within a month or two, I abandon it, because it loses its novelty. As quickly as I got interested in this idea. I mean, it could be building a specific website for some product, or it could be building some circuits that did some funny stuff, like or build a robot or whatever it is, right? I was very big, big on it. And I would come up with an idea on a weekend, I would spend a few weeks of really hard work, say building up this robot. And then I would discard it because I'm like, Man, the novelty is done. There are some benefits to that kind of an approach. But very quickly what ended up happening is I did get disenchanted with my habit because my my projects would all be half baked, and nothing would see the light of day. So I had like 10 just abandoned websites, because I would just lose, like, you know, I would lose interest in it very easily. So sometime in 2017, I decided that, look, instead of starting 20 different projects, this year, I'm going to do one project at a time, the first two weeks are going to be our first month is going to be interesting. And after that, it will go become boring, but I'm going to live through the boring parts and do the boring aspect of you know, making the website public and telling people about it and selling it to people. Essentially, if this rings a bell with you, where which is, you know, you're just starting projects and abandoning it. If you see through it to completion, I think there is a lot less a lot more satisfaction,
Vikram
you have to overcome that plateau you hit, you have that initial bump of interest, and you do all the work towards that. And then you hit that plateau, where you're like, I don't know what else to do, where it's just boring. Now you have to stick through that until you hit the Next Level correct of awesomeness in your project.
Subu
Yeah, and the next level of awesomeness is when someone you know, you have told enough people about it, because especially shy folks like us, that's where we you know, we get nervous, like we start the project, but then we don't tell anybody about it. And then But then if you get past that point of making a publicizing your project, then there'll be some folks who will love it, and you know that, okay, you know, you get positive feedback. And then that is really, that's good for you. That's good for your confidence. That's good for the future projects that you build, you learn a lot of, you know, people come and say, This is great. But hey, you know, what did you think about this?
Vikram
What do you think about publicity. So you said, you have to publicize your project. Often times when I made music or whatever, you know, creation, what ends up happening is that we tell our family, we tell our friends. And it kind of goes nowhere after that. Because our immediate circle of people are only so many and you can't be expected of your friends or family to go and then market your product for you. Let's say it's this podcast show, we're going to tell our family, they're going to tell our friends about it. But do you really think they're going to tell anybody so it dies within the first circle? So that is something that in my mind, I have no idea how we're going to do.
Subu
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so you know how I was telling you, I came up with the list of 10 things that you need to know in order to make a podcast essentially right. And I said that the checkoff maybe about six or seven out of the 10 and one of the boxes that we can't check but which we need to learn about is essentially sales and marketing. I mean, marketing and selling a podcast in some ways. With podcasts, you know, podcast itself tend to be like an hour or two hours, the each episode is very long, and most people don't have that kind of an attention. One aspect of podcasts that has become very popular, and it may have been made popular by Joe Rogan podcast, which is creating sub clips like making clips, short two, three minute clips off an episode like, like extracting a specific interesting tidbit or an idea. Basically marketing that or publicizing those snippets is a lot easier than the whole podcast episode. So one of the things we can do is, we know that WhatsApp and WhatsApp forwards is very popular among the Indian community. So I'm hoping that if a piece of content, like if a two minute piece of YouTube video that we extract out of our podcast turns out to be interesting, it may go viral, people will find it funny, they find it funny, they very these days, like making WhatsApp forwards is a very low, low barrier item for especially Indian parents. And, like, we have to make good content. That's number one of all the clips we make, hopefully, some clips will go viral. And then when you know based by then we'll have enough of a back catalogue that someone can look us up and then go back and listen to the rest of the back catalogue. And that's how we become popular.
Vikram
Like you can put short clips. I think that's one of the things. People's viewership of a particular video really drops after a few minutes. attention span has been decreasing consistently over the years and the first few minutes is all you really have to make an impression. So if your clips are a few minutes, 10 minutes probably in this case, it's enough. The second thing that you mentioned here was the discovery aspect of it. YouTube has the recommendations. And it's just easily shareable. You can share a YouTube link on WhatsApp or on any text message. It's so easy. Even now podcasts aren't that easy to share. It's normally not. So that discovery aspect makes YouTube an essential host for marketing your podcast creation.
Subu
So we will be everywhere we will put will, will be on all of the usual podcast apps, we will be we'll have our podcasts and clips up on YouTube as well. We'll make it as easy as possible for people to find us. And yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm very excited. See, the thing is that the are the are times that we are growing up in Bangalore right, especially in the 90s, this sort of pre internet really, and it's very exciting. I mean, the 80s and the 90s. It is, I kind of feel like, ever since the Internet has become what it is now. There are some elements that are lost from the some, big elements that are lost in the pre Internet era. And I think that like basically experiences that you know, you you just hung, we like hanging out with friends, was something different. I mean, we didn't hang out. And we used to hang out outdoors, right? I mean, even in college and stuff like that. We just it was hanging out, hanging out meant something different then, as compared to today. So I just want to Yeah, remember all of the stories?
Vikram
Yeah, I think that's very nice to document for ourselves. And maybe there are some people out there who are wondering what it was like to be us, you know, two people from Bangalore, India, around the pre Internet era days, it was probably the internet era, for the United gate getting started kind of came late to India, right. And so we really didn't have access to cell phones as much as we do today. So maybe the younger folk, or the younger population who listens to us would be like, That's interesting. That's how they live their times when they were as old as I was. It's so different from today, maybe it's a peek into our world that people will appreciate. And we hope they like, it can be interesting, I hope.
Subu
Yeah. And also for the people who have our age, right. I mean, it will be like a nice reminder, because the stories and our our stories are not unique to us. That's how life was in India, generally. I mean, not specific to Bangalore, I mean, anywhere in India, if you're a college student in the 90s and early 2000s, your life was a certain way. And I'm hoping that we will hit some sort of a nostalgic note in our audience who are of the same age as us, and give them some good remember, remind them of some good memories.
Vikram
Yeah, so nostalgic note in people who are our age and have our geographic background. But for people who are not from our geographic background, because this podcast is listeneable to all over the world. Maybe people in other countries will be like, Oh, that's how people in India lived. Or like, that's the experience because a lot of our colleagues work with international people all the time. Like, we work with people of all nationalities, but we have no idea how their life was growing up. I was least recently, I was listening to Trevor Noah was interviewed about his book that he wrote, I forgot what the book is called. But if I remember, we should link it in the show notes. He was explaining his life as a South African boy growing up in South Africa. And it was fascinating the way he said it said it was a very rough place to grow up. And it was completely different from what anybody here is used to. But for me, it was not a big deal. Because that's all I knew that was life. It is not a different life. That is just life. So it is so interesting to hear him talk about his younger, younger days in South Africa growing up. And the social problems of the time, you know, there was race problems and all that in South Africa. So he describes all that and how it affected both himself and people around him. So it was really good listening to that. So I'm hoping that what stories we have to tell are also interesting to some of the people who will listen to this podcast.
Subu
Thanks for listening. You can find transcripts and show notes at www.halflife.show.
Vikram
We'd love for you to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. And also write to us on Twitter @halflifeshow