Justin's brain

I've been listening to David Senra's podcast lately. He keeps quoting Joshua Kushner: 

That idea really resonates with me. If you're going after a big goal, like building a product or starting a business, you can't afford to build something average. Why? Because customers don't look for mediocre products; they look for "the best."

So you need to be honest with yourself: can you be in the top 5% in your category? Are you going to be the person who wants it the most?

And then the follow-up question: if you make it, is it going to be worth it? You could be the top restaurant in your town and find out the prize for winning is a business that puts you deeply in debt.

In this episode, I talk about power laws, figuring out what you truly want, why AI is making some rare skills average overnight, and what my friend Ruben Gamez says most marketers are getting wrong about AI. Plus a note from future me: wanting it the most doesn't mean killing yourself working too hard. It means focusing on the stuff that actually moves the needle.

Chapters:

• (00:00) - The Power of Wanting It Most

Mentioned in this episode:

• David Senra episode of Founders
• Ruben Gamez's marketing advice tweet

I've been scrolling Twitter again. A lot of it is driven by this desire (fear?) to stay current on what's happening with AI. 

A lot of people feel the need to capture as much information as possible to get some sort of edge in this new economy that's brewing. Our fear is that if we don't, we're gonna get just bulldozed over. 

A lot of folks are worried about losing their careers to AI. I think that feeling is justified. Like, if ChatGPT can edit your videos, you don't need Adobe Premiere or a video editor. In this example, AI eliminates the services side (which many of us depend on) and the tool side (software). It's concerning. 

And unfortunately, it feels like the answer (in this new economy) is that you can't be average.

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Fear of Missing Out on AI

There's a great quote from a 2020 Hacker News thread:

I keep coming back to this quote.

In software, it's so easy to over-engineer things, to ask "what if?", to try to prepare for every eventuality.

But more and more, I'm realizing, for most things, you just need to walk up and hit the ball.

Chapters:

• (00:00) - The Golf Quote and Simple Sales

Links:

• 2020 Hacker News thread
• Transistor: podcast hosting and distribution platform
• SavvyCal: scheduling service for booking meetings

Last episode I recorded a voice memo on my walk home, dropped the file into Claude Code on my laptop, and said "publish this episode." It normalized the audio, made a transcript, wrote the show notes, uploaded it to Transistor, and published it. Easiest podcast publishing I've ever done.

So now I want to know if I can do the whole thing without the laptop. Just the phone. This one is attempt two: recorded in the Dolby On app, which normalizes right on the iPhone, then handed off to Claude on my phone.

[00:00] One command on my laptop did the entire publishing workflow

[00:53] Attempt two: can I do all of this from my phone?

[01:56] Why Caleb records several episodes back to back. Once you take away the friction, you can feel the inspiration happen. You have a thought, you get it out, you move on. An hour later you have another one.

[02:33] Steven Robles has some magical iPhone shortcut that does a lot of this. I want to try it.

[03:10] Auphonic stripped out the trucks and airplanes behind me, which is impressive because it was loud. What it couldn't strip out is me wheezing up a steep hill in wildfire smoke. Next time I'm recording in the car.

What's the minimum viable podcast publishing experience? I decided to test this out by recording it in Voice Memos on a walk home (with plane and truck noise included). Feels like if you can record a show quickly on your phone and just hit "publish" on it, you're far more likely to actually hit publish.

This episode is the experiment itself: after I was done recording this voice memo, I just handed it to Claude to clean up the audio, write the notes, and publish it using Transistor's MCP.

A lot of my feelings on this are inspired by Caleb Porzio, who has a really minimal workflow for recording his show, Notes on Work. And then yesterday, my friend Chris Enns decided to try publishing a podcast episode every day.

Chapters
(00:00) The friction in publishing
(01:26) Caleb Porzio and Chris Enns
(02:56) Testing the easiest thing

Links:

• Transistor's MCP announcement
• Caleb's Notes on Work podcast
• Chris' Daily(ish) podcast

A lot of people have been messaging me after seeing wildfire footage on the news — so here's an update. There are three fires burning west of us here in the Okanagan Valley, and the lakes are acting as a wall between them and the city. The fires aren't the problem. The smoke is.

Smoke gives me headaches, burns my eyes, keeps me indoors, and wrecks my ability to think and work. So my son and I got in the car and drove out of it — through a mountain pass where the air quality index hit 1,000, over to Vancouver, and onto a ferry to Victoria.

Along the way: a band in karate outfits that put a spell on an entire festival crowd, a full day working in person with my Transistor colleague Josh Anderton, and a walk-and-talk with Mike Vardy, one of Transistor's longest-running customers. Plus a growing suspicion that remote work, which I've championed for years, still has no answer for what happens when you sit beside someone.

Chapters

 00:00 Why everyone's been messaging me
 00:21 Three fires, and a wall of lakes
 00:43 Smoke doesn't respect borders
 00:56 What the smoke does to my head
 01:10 Hitting the road with my son
 01:46 An air quality index of 1,000
 02:10 Over the pass, the air clears
 02:32 The ferry to Victoria
 02:49 The Thoons put a spell on the crowd
 04:05 A day in person with Josh Anderton
 04:28 There's no equal to working beside somebody
 04:59 Catching up with Mike Vardy
 05:34 Don't take clean air for granted 

Hey friends, wanted to give you an update on what we're building over at Transistor.fm. The big thing I'm really excited about is video podcasting.

Transistor customers will soon be able to publish video podcast episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and any other apps that support HLS video.

We have a waiting list here if you're interested -->

We were one of only about five hosting platforms to get an HLS video show working inside Apple Podcasts, and uniquely, Transistor is the only one that also placed the HLS feed inside the RSS tag, meaning independent apps like Pocket Casts and Fountain can also pick up and play those HLS video feeds.

We also just shipped a Ghost integration that connects Transistor to one of the most popular platforms for independent publishers. The integration was born out of a real overlap in customers (like 404 Media and The Lever), and the partnership was sparked by a lunch conversation with Ghost's John O'Nolan at Laracon.

Links:

• Apple's launch of HLS video podcasts
• Does Transistor.fm support video podcasts?
• Transistor's integration with Ghost

This is a clip from The Panel podcast. Listen to the full episode here.

AI coding tools like Claude Code are blurring roles on software teams. As Marc Andreessen said on Lenny's podcast: " There's a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles: product manager, designer, and coder."

Links referenced in this episode:
→ Mark Andreessen on Lenny's Podcast
→ "The Five Stages of Losing Our Craft"
→ Kent Beck's tweet on 90% of skills becoming irrelevant
→ Good vibes, bad vendors

I prototyped a full video podcasting app in a couple of days using Claude Code, and it's completely changed how I think about building new features for Transistor (the podcast hosting product I co-founded).

🔥 Timestamps:
0:00 – Why you should build fake products first
0:27 – The podcast countdown timer experiment
0:56 – Taking on video podcast hosting at Transistor
1:08 – Just start building it
1:47 – Demo: the video podcasting prototype
2:32 – What people actually want vs. what I assumed (HLS vs. simple upload)
3:53 – "Usage is oxygen for product realizations."
4:54 – Live demo: one-click publish to YouTube + Transistor
5:57 – Scheduling episodes and real user testing (the church sermon use case)
6:39 – Handling 15GB video uploads
7:25 – Why everyone should be building fake products
7:49 – Private podcasts → unlisted YouTube playlists
8:28 – The FreshBooks "compete with yourself" story
9:44 – How does this change your product process?
10:17 – Claude Code + Slack: anyone on the team can start a PR
14:05 – YouTube analytics vs. audio downloads in one view
14:51 – Freedom to use a fresh tech stack
15:18 – Night and day: old codebases vs. new ones

★ More about me: ★
I'm Justin Jackson. I co-founded Transistor.fm (a podcast hosting and analytics platform).

I write, podcast, and make videos about bootstrapping, startups, marketing, calm companies, and business ethics.

My blog: https://justinjackson.ca
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/justinjackson.ca

My friend Adam Wathan has a new podcast called Adam's Morning Walk, and in the last episode he talked about how he's thinking about building with AI:

I was listening to this episode last night and it brought up all sorts of thoughts for me. So I opened up telegram and sent him a series of (slightly inebriated) voice memos.

I'm publishing these here in case they spark some thoughts/ideas for you as well.

F-stop example

If you have a response, let me know!

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