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Justin and Jason talk about the response to the wives show, Justin’s new life in Pasadena and his new contract at UberMedia, how Jason is going to spend his half of the podcast donation money, the latest on Jason’s math and science academy – Catalyst, why Justin is excited about intermittent fasting, the recent scientific reversals on salt, sitting posture, positive thinking and fluoride, why Justin wants to pay Jason to work on AnyFu, deploying real-time systems code at Uber, how Justin moved Pluggio to a Rackspace Cloud Database and why he thinks growing Pluggio’s revenue is so difficult, whether App.net has any chance of disrupting Twitter, engineering bacteria to survive on Mars, the discovery of the Gauss cyber weapon, why Algebra isn’t necessary, why Jason thinks most textbooks are inefficient, and the stark contrast between electronics hobbyist books and introductory electrical engineering books.
I have been doing intermittent fasting for a few month now and have lost 8.5kg/18.7lb. I’m on a daily fast with a feeding window from 8am to 14:30pm. It’s really works, but there are times that are really really hard. No pain, no gain I guess.
On weightlifting: I have started a linear progression program(adding weight each time you do an exercise/lift) when I started fasting. It is really awesome how much progress you can achieve in very little time when add weight each workout day and a great motivation.
As a beginner I would recommend Starting Strength http://startingstrength.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ:The_Program . I would hire a personal trainer to teach you the lifts, if you decide to do it.
Since you were talking about reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/leangains and http://www.reddit.com/r/fasting are really awesome resources on this stuff.
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional at this dieting/weightlifting stuff, just talking about my experiences.
@Chris thanks for the info. I am doing 3 days p/w right now but I have been thinking of doing the time window method of 5pm –> 10pm as I would might find that easier than the 3 day fast p/w. Great to hear about your success. Do you limit yourself in any way during your feeding window? Or is it anything goes? What’s the worst that you eat at those times?
@Justin – Re Pluggio: It sounds like you’re focused on the competition. Most products bringing in revenue have plenty of competition, even Bidsketch 🙂 Mine are extremely aggressive, funded, and some are even targeting my users (spamming them). I recently had a founder of a very successful product in a competitive niche tell me how surprised he was at how competitive things are in my space.
Feels like every day I get an email from someone showing me a new competitor. Also, I get several new feature requests a day and it’s not slowing down.
All this to say that these are common things to have to deal with and it’s not what is going to result in success or failure.
Whether you can get traffic and convert that traffic into paying customers is really what it comes down to (once you have a good product people will pay for). You’ve done a great job at converting visitors and Pluggio really is a great product. But who is your ideal customer and where do you find more of them?
Of course, it’s certainly not a bad idea to move on to another product (like AnyFu) where you can use what you’ve learned and make use of certain advantages that you have over others in the space.
@Justin I try not to eat to much carbs. So rice, pasta, potatoes, bread are all off the table(literally), but this is where the “really, really hard” part comes in. Sometimes you just can’t resist and want that burger. On those days I try to shorten the feeding window and eat that burger before noon and fast the rest of the day. This happens maybe once a month.
Here is what I’m going to eat today:
Breakfast: 2 Bananas and protein shake (30 grams)
Lunch: Veggies with fish
2pm snack(end of feeding window) greek yoghurt with fruits
What has helped me a lot to stay sane while doing this is having what some would call a cheat day(I call it reward day ;)). Saturdays everthing is off limits. Pizza and beer ftw.
I haven’t listened to much of this podcast yet but can I just say that you should totally do all of them face-to-face. The sound quality is WAY better as is the interaction between you two now that the regular Skype hiccups have been taken out of the question. Also, the process is no doubt a little smoother now you can both react to each other’s body language!
It only took you 200 frikking episodes! Keep it up 😉
@Justin: I’m nearly a month in with intermittent fasting…
I was eating some chocolate one day and looked at the back to see how many calories a single square had (35 calories). That night when I went to the gym I watched the display on the stair machine to see how easy it was to burn off a single square of chocolate (and I’m talking tiny 1 inch by .5 inch). 16 flights of stairs – It wasn’t easy at all!
I then thought about which was easier:
a) Eating chocolate and killing myself at the gym
b) Eating healthy food and not killing myself at the gym
I thought about it more and figured that eating healthy in combination with gym and intermittent fasting is a win-win. It’s been so far so good.
My only advice is lots of water. If I do feel like I’m getting a bit hungry through the day, a cup of tea does the trick. I’ve also cut back on my coffee seeing as that can upset a completely empty stomach.
Now on these cyber weapons… if US citizens ever get infected by them, is there any possibility that the DOJ will step in and charge the DOD with cyber terrorism or at least unauthorized access to a network or computer? And do you think that class action law suits can be filled?
Justin, I did a little solidarity fist pump like i do watching boxing on the bus when you made your offer.
brilliant
@Ruben – Thanks very much for your wise words of advice. I just need to get over it and move on.
@Chris Bösing – Oh rats! I was hoping you would say how much junk food you were eating and alcohol you were consuming! Ah well I guess I do have to work heard at it then and make good food choices on my eating days.
@Alex Gemmell – I’m glad you liked the vibe. When you coming to LA???
@Alfie – Sweet! So what are your results one month in?
@Nethy – Yeah! Thanks man. Jason needs to get his s**t together. Release it already!
Great diet, parenting, back to school and marriage life podcast.
Congrats for the reunion but you may want to chat in Starbucks after the show?
@Justin: I don’t measuring my weight but there is a definite and visible improvement towards getting rid of my spare tire. And that was only in one month 🙂
And what was even more encouraging were all the HN fasting articles in the past couple of weeks. Seeing others do it too made it seem even more possible to stick with it.
A solid discussion, I liked the vibe from you guys being in the same room. The conversation flow and natural inflections are really great. I love how Justin is cracking down on Jason about anyfu. It reminds me of the time my buddy wanted to borrow one of my computers and I told him I would GIVE it to him if he set up a retirement fund for himself. Haha
@Alex Gemmell No way is the sound quality better! Every time Jason spoke above a whisper I could hear nothing but fuzzy static around his voice… and since Jason speaks a lot its VERY annoying. Justin however was crystal clear. Things were smoother though.
@Jason Did you forget to bring your uber mic or something? PLEASE don’t do so, at least for me? It gives me a headache to hear the fuzzy static. Pretty pretty please… ill do anything, heck ill take Justin’s hacking approach and PAY you to use whatever he is using.
I can’t be the only one who hears it.
@Ben Boyter You’re actually right, there was some fuzz on Jason’s mic, but I assume (as you say) it’s because the mic he brought with him wasn’t very good (maybe a spare one of Justin’s?). Justin’s was excellent and that’s probably because his mic is excellent! However, I could forgive that fuzz – I barely heard it really.
Every other aspect of the audio felt better. No Skype glitches/catch-ups, no annoying “Justin’s audio over-dubs Jason’s” and an overall great improvement on talk flow!
@Justin: soon buddy, soon 🙂
@Jason, The Catalyst Project?
Oh, and this podcast should totally be called “Hacking JSON”
😀
@Ben Boyter, @Alex Gemmell – We actually used the exact same type of microphone (the expensive, high-end ones that Justin picked out a while back). The background hiss may have been caused by me sitting closer to the A/C, but Justin is the audio expert, so maybe he has a better answer. We’ll do our best to sort it out somehow.
@Ben Boyter, @Alex Gemmell – As Jason says we both have the exact same setup.
There is a lot of background noise in my apartment. AC fans etc. The background noise is happening all the time but you can’t hear it when we speak because our voices cover it. When we stop speaking you could hear it but you don;t because a noise gate is triggered to cut off sound and bring it to silence when the audio signal hit’s -15db.
So, as Jason’s words end, he goes quite and the gate shuts off the sound with a tail of about 400ms. During the cut-off tail you can hear the background noise (which sounds like a hiss because you only hear it for half a second).
I’m not sure why the effect is more pronounced with Jason than me. It may be because he finds it very hard to stop his mic from rubbing off his cloths due to the way he sits.
The fix would be for us to record in a quite room with soundproofing. I’m not sure that is going to happen any time soon. Another possible fix is for me to find professional VST gate or live signal filter and purchase one. I’ll have a look.
@Ben The effect is much more pronounced when yu listen to the show very loudly. Try to turn down your overall volume by about 20db you will most likely notice that the effect fades into the background and is not very noticeable.
I downloaded the podcast onto my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone and listened with headphones. I didn’t have any problem with the sound quality.
Nice show guys. Good luck Justin in Pasadena – apart the heat, seems a pretty good place to be.
@Alex Gemmell @Jason @Justin I must just be a freak then. No matter what volume I have it set at, even in a noisy environment (on a train or walking along a road) I can still hear it so long as I can hear the voice. I don’t think its worth splashing out on to fix though, id be guessing most people don’t notice. Maybe one to ask the listeners?
Oddly enough I don’t hear it on the Skype versions. Might be the additional distortion or Skype filtering it out? Actually I hear it sometimes, just not as often. Once again might just be down to how my brain works.
Alternate plan, I attend every hard rock concert I can for the next year and damage my hearing to cover the noise 😉
@Ben Boyter It could also be that you have very sibilant headphones…
Dunno… I dont know enough about sound to comment really. I am using these http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-Fidelity-Sound-Earbuds-Reduction/dp/B00125X112
@Ben – I note this review on amazon “These have excellent treble definition – very crisp and sharp. Unfortunatly though, they forgot that music has a low end as well.”
That would generally shape the sound toward all the bad high end hiss…. not your fault, just sayin’
@Justin Ah well that explains it then. Nothing to worry about then really 🙂
@Justin
I don’t know if this will be helpful to you, but a “mantra” that has worked really well for me this year in helping me get in better shape (lost 50lbs since Jan, out of breath walking a mile to jogging 5k) was “Fresh start, modest change” (from my other favorite podcast: http://5by5.tv/b2w/47).
It seems that you are always trying such drastic things – from the juice diet to fasting. For me, that kind of stuff never works. So I tried a “modest change” approach.
I made two simple changes that were small enough that I didn’t really notice. First, I started bringing a sack lunch to work everyday instead of eating out. Second, if I wanted to watch something on TV, I had to be moving on a treadmill. That’s it – no fancy meal plans or hip new workout plan, just two really easy to implement changes.
I’d encourage you to give something like this a try and stick to it for a few weeks, I think you will have much better success than trying such a radical shift in lifestyle.
@Justin & Jason: It’s worth pointing out that I am a developer backer of App.net (hence why I was sending you stuff on Twitter about it last week!). If you have any questions about the alpha version of App.net then feel free to ask me.
Firstly, it’s very much an early/alpha product and has a long way to go. Secondly, it’s definitely going down the route of being a Twitter clone – at least to START with. There is a “global stream” which is much like the Twitter firehose although currently you can actually keep up with the App.net flow because it’s a lot less busy!
Most of the people on the alpha are there to build tools and apps on top of the API. This seems to be the crux of it: building a stable Twitter-like ‘infrastructure’ on top of which developers can build their businesses. They PAY for this infrastructure and so can expect a certain level of service.
Twitter, however, seems to be falling foul of their paymasters and the amount of spam/fake accounts. For example, there was a story during the London Olympics where a journalist tweeted about how terrible NBCs coverage was, posted an email address of an NBC executive and Twitter blocked the account because NBC complained (Twitter and NBC had formed a partnership during the games)! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19061032
This clearly illustrates Dalton Caldwell’s point about what is wrong with Twitter now. Yes, it’s “free” and that’s a good thing, but we’re now seeing the problems associated with “free”.
Matt Gemmell (no relation to me) just posted this on App.net:
“These third-party-client endangering changes to the Twitter API are some of the reasons I’m here on app.net: http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes”
Follow that link to read more…
BTW, I like what App.net are doing with this Twitter-like-clone. People are complaining saying things like “why should we pay for this?” but the way I see it is that they probably won’t have to if they don’t want to. You see, once App.net becomes the underlying “infrastructure” on which developers can build their apps, then there will be businesses that can pay for App.net but then offer a Twitter-like service for free and use an advertising model to pay for it. So users can still “tweet” for free.
In other words, let’s imagine a new company called Tweeter who decide to build on top of App.net’s solid API. They pay App.net for the service but then cover that cost by including advertising and partnerships. They can then afford to offer “free” accounts to users. Tweeter would then be effectively identical to Twitter. Do you see how App.net can under-cut Twitter like this?
Twitter was awesome. Sadly, they are a victim of their own success. They offered a popular new service for free but that isn’t sustainable. Something had to change and they chose the path of advertising which appears to be proving both restrictive and unstable for developers.
But they don’t need 3rd party developers any more. They’ve used them to grow to a global size; they’ve literally outgrown the need for 3rd party businesses. They will now use these companies as advertising billboards to spread their partners’ messages.
@Alex Gemmell Are you sure about the free user thing. I thought for a user to get into the system they would need to become a paying subscriber at point of joining?
@Justin Nope, not sure – that’s the impression I get! I think the $50 per user thing is a bit high and I think they’ll change that. However, my imaginary Tweeter company above I think could happen. As long as I am paying App.net for their service, then I don’t think they care what I do with my application/website. That’s the point.
@Alex Gemmell – Hmm maybe I’m being think, but if your app brings in 10m people that would be a huge drain on the system, but you would only be paying $100.
@Justin I didn’t mean to imply that. I would imagine Tweeter would have to pay extra to add users. Maybe bulk user discounts? Or maybe I am completely wrong and that’s not how it’s going to work! Maybe you can only purchase an account directly from App.net and it’ll be $50 for a year.
We’ll see! Either way, it’s pretty exciting 🙂
@Alex Gemmell – Hmm. Still thinking it through… So I build tweeter, it becomes a huge success, 10m free users join and I pay a much larger rate on app.net because I brought on all those free users. Now there are an extra 10m users in the system that other app.net developers can capitalize on and pull them away from my app Tweeter, but I was the one who paid to bring them all into the system.
Do I pay for them year over year, if so do they have access to all other app.net apps? Or do they only have access to my app. If they only have access to my app then what is the app.net “public” timeline for?
Hmm thinking it through I don’t think that it would be possible for your free user scenario to exist… so what this really means is that in effect all the people building apps for app.net will be app.net affiliates bringing people on to the system.
So if I build an app.net app, I am essentially becoming an app.net reseller. Which, when you think about it, is a little more cynical than something free like twitter. (p.s I did pony up the $100 to be a developer, but just thinking out-loud right now)
It does feel kind of annoying to think that I might create a great system called tweeter, but all my users need to pay app.net to be part of it. Then, as tweeter, wouldn’t I be thinking, hmm I wonder how I can get out of this deal and just have these 10m users as my own users.
@Riyad Kalla – I like the name “The Catalyst Project”, but all the domains are taken and there are a lot of Catalyst Projects already out there (if you ask the GOOG). There are also a few “Catalyst Academies” as well, so maybe that shouldn’t be a factor, but at least I was able to get CatalystAcademy.org.
You know Justin really did just hack you Jason. I think he knew that you most likely probably wouldn’t accept the cash to finish AnyFu. But he got the result in the end, which was for you to focus on AnyFu.
Money is a weird thing when used as a motivator, you definitely don’t want to mix the two market economies. Friends/Money.
@Ben Reyes – I don’t know if Justin anticipated me taking the money or not, but you’re right, the effect was the same. I think he was more than prepared to pay it out, but I guess he got off cheap. Damnit, I did get hacked! 😉
On the topic of what math you should learn to program…
I think people should just learn math *notation* so they have the tools to understand the things they find when they *do* need to learn some specific math for a problem.