Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Evo Terra!

Evo is the host of the Podcast Pontifications podcast, a podcast about… podcast pontifications. In this show, he talks about the things that you should be thinking about when starting your own show or talking about the podcast industry in general. With 16 years in the podcast industry and his first ever show in 2004, Evo is a powerhouse when it comes to podcasting, as host of show number 40 from the very beginning.

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Transcript

Evo Terra: [00:00:00] That’s the other real challenge is what works in the West doesn’t always work everywhere else in the world. Just because it works in America, great, but that’s one thing I learned after living in Southeast Asia for two and a half years. The culture is different, the assumption is different, the process or the governments, everything is vastly different.

So it is going to be a challenge and I’m not sure if ASEAN is going to be able to, if they are currently surmounting the challenge or what else was happening but it’s not easy that’s for sure

Norman Chella: [00:00:38] Hello, hello. Norm here and welcome to Podlovers Asia, the show where we talk about everything related to the Asian podcasting scene, interviewing hosts, producers, and those who have amazing, insightful thoughts about the podcasting industry and who better to talk about the podcasting industry, both globally and from an Asian perspective. Than Evo Terra.

Evo is the host of the Podcast Pontifications podcast, a podcast about podcast pontifications.

In this show, he talks about the things that you should be thinking about when starting your own show or talking about the podcast industry in general. Coming from over 15-16 years in the podcast industry with his first ever show in 2004. Evo is a powerhouse when it comes to talking about the podcasting industry,  being host number 40 out of the 900,000 shows active out there right now.

From starting up a podcast to manually modifying an RSS feed to allow for shows to be downloaded so that people can burn it into their CDs. Remember CDs? Evo is one of the most knowledgeable about podcasting scene. So I reached out to him and got his take on what is happening right now.

In this chat, we talked about his origin story, how he started up the show and shared it with truck drivers who burned seven CDs into their trucks for long distance driving.

To his time in Bangkok, Thailand for two years, continuing his podcasting career.

Thoughts on privacy and why he doesn’t mind compromising some of it in order to get the better experience online. And I played a game with him, a hypothetical situation where we tried to grow the Asia podcast market

Anyway. Plenty of fun, laughter and amazing insight from him. So let’s dive into my chat with Evo Terra of Podcast Pontifications.

Evo Terra: [00:02:35]

oh, I’ll hit it now, so you get my side.

Norman Chella: [00:02:37] I’m always like to do, I always like to do it naturally. Like, just go right into it.

Evo Terra: [00:02:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s fine by me.

Norman Chella: [00:02:42] splice the parts, uh, however we see fit. So

Evo Terra: [00:02:45] there you go. Yup. Good call. Good call.

Norman Chella: [00:02:47] less of an interview, more of a chat, really.

Evo Terra: [00:02:49] Yeah. That’s always better. Yeah. I never have liked the shows Norm that.

Norman Chella: [00:02:54] Hmm.

Evo Terra: [00:02:55] You know when, when you do an interview with someone as the interviewee, when I’m an interviewee, I honestly don’t like it when someone says, okay, ready to go. Okay, we’ll start the show, and then they spend 10 minutes doing the opening of the show with me waiting on the line.

Why are you doing that? This is not live radio, right? You can do that in post just like you’re trying to do right now. Have the conversation and then later put that into that. Anyhow, many of the things that bothered me about podcasting, but yeah. I’ll try not to be too much of a curmudgeon today.

Norman Chella: [00:03:25] Okay. Well, let’s try not to be too much of a curmudgeon, but what else is bothering you about podcasting? Just a little bit. Just give me, give me a, give me a teaser of why.

Evo Terra: [00:03:34] Oh man. You know when you’ve been in the game as long as I have, you find all sorts of things that annoy you. I think the thing that’s annoying me most right now isn’t podcasters. I love podcasters.  I’m annoyed by the app developers. I’m annoyed that app developers just don’t make it easy for new people to consume content.

They also, they, the app developers are very random with the sorts of things that they will support and won’t support.  The way content displays in one app will be vastly different in the eyes of another. It’s almost like a very different experience depending on which app you use.

I mean, imagine if Firefox behaved vastly differently for just a regular human, if the webpages you viewed on Firefox looked horribly different when you went on Chrome. I mean, you’d throw the internet away cause it’s like, well hang on, this is a different experience. But that’s what we have with the podcast apps.

They are just, they’re not following good standards. Um, they kind of march the beat of their own drum.  I get that they can, that’s perfectly fine. But man, the functionality should kind of feel the same, but it takes me, it seems like, you know, 5 to 10 minutes to relearn how to use these apps when I switch back and forth.

Which is weird because if anybody should be able to figure it out quickly, it ought to be me. But no, it takes me forever to go through that. So what’s it like for a regular person who’s not been in this for, you know, 16 years? I don’t know. That irritates me nonstop.

Norman Chella: [00:05:05] I do get that. I try to test a new podcast apps once in a while, especially when the current app that I’m using, I don’t want to name names, but the current app that I’m using is missing one key feature that lets me organize my shows that I subscribe to and I’ll be like, Oh, okay, maybe I should try a different app.

But that means that you are now tagged or, I mean, I don’t wanna say tag, but you are now in the eyes of the new app, a new listener. Therefore, you are given like different discovery tools or different recommendations because they need, still need to take time to warm up to figure out what kind of shows are aligned with you. You have to import your shows to a certain degree. Sure. That’s okay. But there are limitations. I don’t know if there’s a need for say standards in app design for podcast listening or something else,

Evo Terra: [00:05:52] Yeah, there are, but go ahead.

Norman Chella: [00:05:54] there are, yeah. Yeah. But for me, the biggest one is, um, my listening experience. Maybe it, this might be different for you, but my listening experience differs for when I’m listening from my phone. And then I move to my laptop and then I listen to web.

Because the design to transition from listening from mobile is so different that I actually have trouble doing that transition.

So, as an example, my routine is that I go to work. So I’m listening to my phone and then after I put my phone away, like I lock it in the locker because I get distracted. Cause I’m, I’m a, I’m an idiot. I, I have really bad attention span. And I,

Evo Terra: [00:06:31] You can recognize that that would take an extreme measures.

Norman Chella: [00:06:33] I’m that self-aware and that desperate for concentrating.

Uh, and. I want to get access to the same playlist, the same shows, the same episodes, and continue my listening experience from web. How are your listening habits? Do you get that, kind of barrier coming up?

Evo Terra: [00:06:51] Not for me because I, I rarely listen without my mobile phone. Almost 100% of my consumption takes place on the phone and on the go. I envy the podcast listener who can put one ear bud in and do their job while they listen. That is so not me. I, there are a lot of things I can do when I listen to a podcast.

I mean, this is a found medium, right? I mean, I found a time and medium. We’re not stuck doing one thing. I’ll do that. The only thing we can do is listen. No, no, I can, I can, I can clean the house. I can, I can drive my car. I can, you know, go take out the trash. A lot of things I can do when I listen to podcast, but I can’t work and listen to podcasts because I just can’t, I mean, my brain just will not let me do that. I’m, I’m, the entire episode or two will have gone by while I’m working and I have no idea what was being said. And that has even switched programs. So for me, it’s all mobile all the time. The only time I listen on my desktop or on my laptop is when someone says, Hey, you should check this out.  The thing I’m doing at that time is checking out a show. That’s it. But the rest of them, it’s all mobile.

Norman Chella: [00:08:01] Okay. So all listening to laptops is active listening for you

Evo Terra: [00:08:04] Yeah, exactly.

Norman Chella: [00:08:05] limited to mobile. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. Have you noticed that kind of listening behavior ever since the last 16 years that you’ve been in podcasting? Because I’m curious, yeah.

Evo Terra: [00:08:15] Yeah. I’ve, I’ve never been able to do it. I used to run an agency and I had about 90 people in the agency that worked for me. And, um, of course I got all of them listening to the podcast because, you know, of course I’m really looking to listen to podcasts

and. And many of them would do that and tell me about this great show that they just listened to. It’s like, wait a minute. You were supposed to re update all of the ad bids for like 750 ads last, you, you did that and listen to a podcast? Yeah. Did you screw everything up? Because I would screw everything up doing that.

Because there’s no way I could split my brain that way. But you know, everybody’s brain works differently. And so mine is, uh, yeah. When I focus on something, it’s what I focus in on. It’s so bad Norm. When my wife and I are watching television, some throwaway show, we’re watching television. If she asked me a question, I will quite angrily grab the remote control, hit pause, turn to her and say, yes.

And then back up after I’ve answered the question five, you know, five or six seconds and replay the point. Yeah. I’m weird about the way I consume content.

Norman Chella: [00:09:21] Yeah. For anyone listening, if you are designing a podcast experience. A note that we have quite a variety of listeners because, because, yeah, because you have active listeners, you have passive listeners, and you have different levels of attention span, and people try to format their episodes a specific way, either short form or long form or put all the pre-roll all the way into beginning, or try to. You know, do a call to action as fast as possible or try to format as fast as possible. I do want to dive into how podcasts evolve over time and to catch up to speed.  Pretty much lay out all the experiences that you’ve had, being, I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, podcaster number 40? Is that right?

Evo Terra: [00:10:03] I had the 40th podcast. Yes. Yeah.

Norman Chella: [00:10:05] Okay.

Evo Terra: [00:10:06] yeah. 40th podcast at the time. Yeah. Isn’t that something to say?

How Evo started Show Number 40

Norman Chella: [00:10:10] That is a, that’s amazing cause you’re in a two digit like group right, out of the 900,000 shows out there. It’s insane. So let’s do a little time travel back to 16 years ago and go back to the time when Evo found about podcasts and decided to start one.  What compelled you to actually start show number 40?

Evo Terra: [00:10:36] Well, I will tell you that I found out about podcasting on October the 12th 2004 and I know that it seems weird that I can remember the day, but I can, yeah, October the 12th 2004 my partner at the time, and I’ll explain what that means in just a moment. Sent me an email saying, Hey, there’s this thing called podcasting.

And my first thought was, wait a minute. Why would this dude be sending me anything about something new? That’s not his job. That’s my job to find the new stuff, not his. So I promptly ignored it, and then the next day I looked at it back again and did a little investigating on what this whole podcasting thing was.

And by the next day. We had a podcast. Now, the reason I could have gone that fast with it is because the two and a half years prior to this, my partner and I had been doing an internet radio show.

Norman Chella: [00:11:32] Oh, okay.

Evo Terra: [00:11:33] And that internet radio show was also a syndicated show. We syndicated it to six different terrestrial stations here in the United States of America, as well as XM satellite radio.

We’re taking our show. So we already had an audience listening to our content, but you know, distributing on that internet radio station plus six terrestrial, kind of hard for everybody to sit down and listen to that one time. So we had decided that, I think the year before that, you know what we’ll do?

We’re already sending out these CDs. I kid you not. We were sending CDs to radio stations, including XM satellite radio that had our show on it each week. While we’re doing that, why don’t we. Put the,  real player that was a very, very old player back in the day on our website. We’ll just point to an MP3 file.

We can load up an MP3 file up on our server as well. Let’s just do that and people can just click play. We already had a blog. This was prior to WordPress. We were using movable type. Was the name of the blogging platform we were using back in the day. So we had a blog that had a player to an MP three file and we had an audience listening.

That sounds an awful lot like a podcast. The only thing that we didn’t have was the enclosure tag, and I’m going to get geeky for a second. The enclosure tag is what goes in the RSS feed, and it’s what makes podcasting work and all it does is it points to that MP3 file and your link. So all I had to do, and bear in mind.

I might have a degree that says computer information systems, but that doesn’t mean I know how to program. Um, I hacked into the word movable type  system and faked the enclosure cause I knew what the MP three file location was. So I hacked into it and created the other bits to go into the RSS feed to make it work, hand-coded it for, for ever to get that done.

Yeah. So for us, we had everything done. That’s all I had to do was, fake and an enclosure tag and it works. So that enabled us to move pretty quickly to become the 40th podcast. And also we brought in a big listener base to it. So, you know, not only did we have the 40th podcast ever, we also had the number one science fiction show because we had a built in audience, we brought into podcasting and we just, Oh, okay, we’ll listen this way now.

And a, and it worked.

Norman Chella: [00:13:46] How are people listening to your show that time?

Evo Terra: [00:13:48] Oh my God.

Norman Chella: [00:13:49] Yeah. Cause I mean we didn’t have listening apps or not even a smartphone.

PAUSE

Evo Terra: [00:13:55] You’re right, we didn’t have our smartphones. So let me tell you the pain that we had to go through for the first few years of podcasting. So if you found a podcast to listen to, and you would go to Podcast Alley, by the way, because iTunes didn’t have podcasts on it back then, you would go to Podcast Alley.

That was the de facto directory of choice and that’s where  the ID number for our show was 40 so, and they were just incrementing each one so that’s why we were the 40th show. Anyhow, you would go to podcast alley or you go to somebody’s website and they would place the RSS feed. This is the link to the RSS feed, which we still use today.

No change in that one. But what you would have to do is you’d have to copy that RSS feed. You would then have to. Either open if you had it, or if not, download a piece of software, a podcatcher client on your computer. Didn’t work on phones because phones back then, they made telephone calls. That was about it.

So, uh, you had to download this special podcatcher onto your desktop. Um, I liked one called iPodderX. There was also a, I think, what’s a iPod juicer? Juice was another one. So anyhow, you would download this piece of software. You would then give the RSS feed to this software and it would run a batch job.

Every 24 hours or so, checking to see if any new episodes were available of that feed. When it found a new episode, it would download the feed and put it in a directory on your computer to which you, the listener would then have to take your MP3 player, not your phone, your MP3 player, plug it into the USB cord of your computer and then physically drag the files over onto your MP3 player to listen.

That’s how we had to do it

Norman Chella: [00:15:40] oh my God.

Evo Terra: [00:15:41] For a very long

Norman Chella: [00:15:42] long time. So, okay.

Evo Terra: [00:15:45] Even when Apple put in the summer of 2005. ITunes 4.7 Apple made it a podcast directory as well. So we could just submit our shows there. And if you had, if you are a Mac user and you had iTunes and every Mac user had iTunes, that was it you just subscribe there.

So it would save that step. However, you still had to physically transfer the file to your iPod or other MP3 player, because it wasn’t until the iPhone came out in, I want to say 2007, 2008 one of those two. It was, yeah, yeah. When they were actually integrated in the same app. So then finally, you know, so again, two and a half years you had to, we had to do it the hard way.

Norman Chella: [00:16:26] Oh my goodness.

Evo Terra: [00:16:28] Yeah, it’s amazing podcasting even worked. It’s amazing. We didn’t all go, this is dumb. I’m just gonna listen to the radio instead.

Norman Chella: [00:16:36] I liked that there were listeners willing to do the manual work of dragging it to what their favorite, sorry, not, not their favorite device, like

listening. Listening. Yeah.

Device. Well, yeah, but like not their smartphone, but like their listening device. Yeah. Oh, that’s, that’s pretty cool. I

Evo Terra: [00:16:53] yeah, Yeah. A lot of people. We had a bunch of people who were truck drivers that liked to listen to our show. Um, and so they, the truck drivers, they would just burn CDs. Burn stacks of CDs and that’s how they would listen. Yep. Yeah. They would just make them, their pod catcher client would run and don’t quote me on this, but I think they were smart enough to have smart folders in them that wouldn’t go over 74 megabytes or whatever.

The maximum length of a wave file you can put on a CD would be, cause there’s a certain limitation for what CD sizes can be. Unless you do the MP3 format, which some most CD players in cars in 2004 and 2005 wouldn’t recognize MP3 CDs, only the WAV CDs. Right? So this software was smart enough to know, okay, this will, you could load everything up and it was okay to burn your CDs.

Great. You need seven CD rewriteable to make this happen. And it would sit and burn them for you. And that would be your listening.

just

Norman Chella: [00:17:48] Bring a stack of CDs into the cars and listen to it.

Evo Terra: [00:17:51] Isn’t it crazy? So weird. So it worked.

Norman Chella: [00:17:56] Wait, so if you were 40 and if you are a podcaster number 40 did you get into contact with the other 39 in the beginning?

Evo Terra: [00:18:02] Oh yeah. We all knew each other. Yeah. I mean,

Norman Chella: [00:18:03] Ah, okay.

Evo Terra: [00:18:04] The

Norman Chella: [00:18:04] biggest

Evo Terra: [00:18:04] listeners we had were ourselves. Right,.some of my close friends I still have today are podcasters from, from back in those, those early days. At the time, I had an hour and a half commute each way from my house to my job. One and a half, 90 minutes, 90 minutes.

So, and that was every single day, five days a week. So I could burn through lots and lots of content, all the time. So that got me, I think I had at one time, I had listened to every single show that was out there. I didn’t continue to listen to all of them cause I didn’t care for some of them. But at one time I had listened to every podcast that was, uh, that was available at the time.

Norman Chella: [00:18:39] I will want to be in a meeting where the first 40, 50 hosts would come together and talk about that, that period.

Evo Terra: [00:18:47] Oh man.

Norman Chella: [00:18:48] I was not really exposed to even the word podcasting at the time, uh, all the way until. Maybe 2012 and 2013 even then, I wasn’t really a regular listener. I was one of those, um, YouTube listeners, right?

Like there will be a show on YouTube. And then from there, I just associated the word podcast with YouTube until I find out the difference. And I changed my behaviors there. So I really like it. I really like it. That,  your listener behavior was already normalized in that, Oh, okay.

It was a commute. And then you can listen, listen through all these kinds of shows. If you fast forward a little bit, when did you start building the next few shows that you did independently? Or is that a transition where, cause I know that you do a few shows now,

Evo Terra: [00:19:30] Yeah.

Norman Chella: [00:19:31] Podcast Pontifications.

Evo Terra: [00:19:32] I’ve got quite a few that I’m on. So here, here’s the kind of Genesis of things. So I gave a talk recently at a conference, and I’m going to another one this next week, and I’m giving a presentation and in the presentation, um, I answered the question, how many podcasts have I been on and the number’s 19 by the way. I have, I’ve either been the host or the cohost of 19 different podcasts over the last 16 years.

I think five of them, one, two, three, four, five of them happened probably within the first year, year and a half of podcasting. Because when we started that show, we used it and the shows are no longer available. Most of the shows are all dead now. I think all, I think only five or only five are remaining, which is good because I said some things in those early days, which should not.

I hope no one has burned CDs if you’re, but I know many of my friends do, so I hope I stay friends with them so they don’t release some of this stuff.

Norman Chella: [00:20:25] Any a truck drivers out there, uh, would like to send me the CDs of…

Evo Terra: [00:20:29] I have dirt on trucker Tom, though. He will not rat me out, so that’s good. Um.

Yeah. So the most of the shows we started doing, we built a network automatically because we had this big group of people listening to our scifi content. We thought, well, heck, let’s make more. And so we reached out to people that we’d already connected with through our radio show, and we said, do you want a show, do you want a show, do you want a show?

I mean, it was kind of that way. And we built a network of shows. Many of them were sci-fi related. Not all of them were Scifi related. So we helped, you know, get all of them started. My partner, Mike was doing the audio engineering for most of the shows. I was on the technical and more the strategy side and how things worked.

So we built a lot of them that way. And, and that’s how that began. And then in 2005 I started a company called podiobooks.com which blended podcasting and audio books, because back then in 2005, Amazon sold physical books. Amazon didn’t sell eBooks in 2005 and if you were an independent author, the only way you could get your book printed would be to go to get some big publisher to be interested in your book, which was very, very hard to do.

We didn’t have back then, the option to just upload your word doc to Kindle and it would automatically convert it into an ebook. So these authors that I had been interviewing for this scifi show we were doing, it was a book focused scifi show. I called several of them, I’ve become friends with over time and said, you know, I know you’re always struggling to find a new way to get people to know about your work, because you know you can’t get a publishing deal.

So you’ve gone with some small press, so you can only get a handful of books, and they’re very expensive. There’s this new thing called podcasting. I don’t know what the right thing is, but you know, you should look at it. So I said that to a whole bunch of people, and it was just a few weeks later that I started getting phone calls from one of the guys, Tee Morris.

He’s the coauthor of Podcasting for Dummies with me. Tee called me and said, I think I want to record my book as an audio book and give it away for free. It’s already been through its sales cycle. I got a new book the second, you know, the sequels coming out. What do you think if we did that? I said, sure.

So we started. You know him sitting down behind the microphone and doing what you and I know as a podcast, but he was just doing a serialized audio book at the time and right after he hung up the phone with him, I think I had two other phone calls that same day from other authors who had the same idea at the same time.

So I knew there was something there since there wasn’t a way to get it into Kindle. And so podiobooks.com was born and I think in our hay day. We had around 750 books that were available as a podcast. Each one was its own individual podcast feed. We were pushing out somewhere in the neighborhood of two, two and a half million downloads every single month, which was a lot, you know, A huge amount and lots and lots of people did it.

And the thing I’m most proud of is it launched the career of so many writers who weren’t able to make a really good living after giving their work away. They were able to, some got really, really big deals and now have gone on to be full time writers. Many of them got  other publishing deals. I know people who’ve got script writing deals.

Many of the books were optioned for movies, so it worked really, really well until Amazon decided to start selling eBooks. And now instead of spending a hundred or so hours putting together your podcast, audio book, you could just push a button and make it into an ebook and give it away for free or 99 cents.

And, uh, that kinda changed the game once, once Amazon entered into the space as of the ebook world. But, but that was a lot of fun too.

Norman Chella: [00:23:58] Is podiobooks still active now?

Evo Terra: [00:24:00] I shut it down in 2015 I actually, I sold it and rolled it into another company. Many of the books are still available. You can still search for podiobooks and you’ll still find quite a few of those books.

But I  sold to a company called Scribl, not Scribd, Scribl and S C R I B L. Dot com cause you know, why would you want to have all the vowels in it? Anyhow, scribl.com, you can still get many of the books available. They’re still living for free and all your podcasts, listening apps as well. So have fun with that.

Yeah. So, so that, that, that was 700 books.  I don’t count that in with the other 19 shows that I have done. But. I left the network we started, did my own show for awhile, then did a whole bunch of other ones. When my wife and I started traveling the world back in 2015, we started doing a show, that is now in its fifth season, although mostly pod faded.

But  I have two episodes waiting on my computer for me to get back to and just haven’t done it yet.  I actually am the host . I’m a paid podcaster. I have a couple of hospitals that pay me to host their shows for them. So I record episode,  I interview their doctors or their other affiliates.

And in fact, I have a recording session tomorrow scheduled with someone where I’m interviewing. Um, I think a, a child psychologist that they work with. Um. So I’ll be doing that. And then of course, you know, the kind of the starring jewel in the crown would be Podcast Pontifications my show that instead of telling you what to do with your podcast, I tell you what you should be thinking about for your podcast so you can make a better show and make podcasting better for everybody.

Norman Chella: [00:25:32] And I am a huge fan. I’ve been following it far for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. It’s a whole bunch of pontifications per episode and it really deep dives into like one thing that you should be thinking about. And I don’t always, I don’t always agree or disagree, but it’s nice to have that kind of moment where after I listened to the episode, I think about it the whole day and then, you know, craft my own, perspective on it. Uh, which is always good because I always like having discourse or discussions on specific things in the podcasting industry. I always like to see that happening, at least in Asia.

There is minimal, effort for that, and I really want to push that. So it’s quite a fascinating, and I know that, Oh

Evo Terra: [00:26:16] yeah, no, no, I was, I was going to say thank, thanks for saying that. I mean, I, I the I, the idea is to get people to think, and again, I’m not telling you what you should think. I’m telling you what I think, and hopefully you have, you know, your own thoughts. And people would write to me and say they find  themselves for most of it, nodding along with me, but every so often they will shout at their, you know, phone because they disagree with me completely.

And that’s fine. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. So I’m glad that you’re doing what I had hoped someone would do. Listen to the show. Thank you for saying that.

Norman Chella: [00:26:48] Yeah. Really. And if our dear listener here is listening to this episode right now, I highly recommend that you check it out if you want to be at the forefront of the podcasting industry, especially with things happening, uh, recently. I do want to ask before we go a little bit too far away from that.

You said that you’re hosting a podcast for hospitals. Right.

Evo Terra: [00:27:11] Yeah.

Norman Chella: [00:27:12] so is that like a private feed,  just for the people working in the hospital or is

Evo Terra: [00:27:16] Actually, no, actually, no, it is a, it’s publicly available. I, these are tiny shows. Uh, they’re not designed to try and get a huge audience by any stretch of the imagination. Most of their listeners, happen on the website of the hospital or on the website of that particular clinic. This is really much more of doing some audio for when people have specific questions. My job, since I am not a medical professional, I, I declared at once that I was going to be premed, but I don’t even think I made it into my first class before I said that it’s too much work.

Um, so I, I certainly am not, uh, not any sort of medical professional, but my job as the host is to play the part of the layperson, which I am, who might have questions about that procedure. So I’m the stand in for the audience. I’m asking the questions that somebody might have about what do we do with childhood obesity? How is musical therapy useful,  in modern medicine these days, these sorts of things. And so, yeah, it’s a, it’s, they’re very short though, like maybe 10 minute episodes and you know, me, Norm, I’m a fan of the 10 minute episode. It fits. It fits me in a big way, but they’re quick, easy. You know, we’re not going super deep because these are questions that regular people have and they want to try and, you know, the idea here is I’m just, I’m asking the questions that they would, and hopefully they go, Oh, okay, that’s, that’s for me.

I want to get more information. And then they dive deeper into them the information.

Norman Chella: [00:28:43] Is there a specific reason why they chose podcasting? Like, cause it was quite unexpected for me to hear that a hospital or I’m not sure if it’s specifically a hospital or a public institution would. You know, target specifically the medium of podcasting as opposed to say a video series, right? Where you’re in front of a camera and the professional is in front of a camera.

You want to put a face to the kind of advice or wisdom…

Evo Terra: [00:29:08] You know, I wasn’t the person who set it up, so I’m not sure what their thought process was going through it. Um, so somebody came in and probably, you know had a conversation about  you’ve got a lot of options that we could do here. I mean, the great thing about doing it on audio versus video is that there’s a little less work when it comes into the a little less equipment to buy.

I mean, it’s a microphone and when I’m talking to doctors, I’m talking to doctors while they’re like in between rounds.

So, you know, getting a, getting a doctor to show up at a studio ,is tough to do. Right? And I’m, and I’m having a conversation with them most of the time on their phone because, you know, sitting down with a big fancy SM7B microphone just isn’t in, most hospitals don’t have those things set up.

So I think they wanted it quick and easy to deal with. And there’s also plenty of research that shows that the consumption rate or retention rate, if you will, for audio is vastly superior than it is to video. You know, video has what I call the 90 10 rule, and that says that 90% of your views will have left after 10 seconds.

Norman Chella: [00:30:16] Ah.

Evo Terra: [00:30:17] And that’s pretty real when it comes to video. Yet, as we know in podcasting world by looking at our stats from either Apple podcast or Spotify Podcasters Dashboard, when someone begins listening, there’s an 85% chance they’ll listen all the way through, or they’ll listen to 85% and cut off when the credit roll begins, right?

So that’s vastly different. You know, people choose to listen to podcasts, but with a lot of the video views are. You know, like I said, the 80 20 rule, 90 10 rule, or the other thing is you find a lot of video views happen with the sound off and automatically played in the feed if it’s on places like Facebook.

So those big views people get a little inflated on the video side, but a little more real with podcasting

Norman Chella: [00:30:59] Okay, cool. So quality wise, it can be a bit questionable. Right? So as opposed Like a loyal listenership which would be much more I would say something that I would trust a lot more I think there were stats on  when listeners would drop off, I think it’s like first few minutes and then halfway through and then right before um

Evo Terra: [00:31:19] But each podcast or we can all pull those out our own stats from that Apple podcast we’ll show you exactly where somebody listened and when they stopped listening and even if they come back So you get a you get a lot of really good information. We get out of there and every one that I’ve seen always shows that the listener retention is way better than viewer retention.

Norman Chella: [00:31:38] Do you trust Apple podcasts as the defacto source of data like that or is there other dashboards that you can think of that would really help. So for example, the reason why I ask is because we have third party analytics like Chartable and then we have other dashboards specifically for their platform like Spotify for Podcasters um that have different levels of granularity when you’re looking at different data sets for How well is your show doing.  It depends on who you are as a host and how much do you care about your stats right I mean your metrics can be different depending on who you are but, is Apple the best place to check that? And the reason why I asked is because in Asia not many people use Apple uh devices Oh People do use them but the penetration rate is not as high

Evo Terra: [00:32:22] Yeah Way more Android Yeah yeah Way more Android You know us us in America you know something like 58% of all podcast consumption these days happens on an iOS device an Apple device. But as soon as you go overseas That number starts to flip because you’re less iPhone crazy as we are. Although I’ve been to the many of the Apple stores in like Hong Kong and several ones in Bangkok and like I can tell you that the people are pretty crazy for them there too but still not not to the same extent as as they are over here.

To answer your question specifically, the only companies that will have listener retention data, like did somebody actually listen to this episode? Only the apps have it and the only apps that are exposing it right now is Apple Podcasts and they expose it only to the person that owns the feed, and Spotify. They’re the only ones that expose that data so Overcast which is very popular and a wonderful app. Marco build a really great tool there. They are not exposing that level of listening data, although they could but they’re choosing not to for whatever reason Yeah and I don’t know

why. I

Norman Chella: [00:33:25] about to ask do you think there’s a good reason why?

Evo Terra: [00:33:27] Um I Marco is heavily privacy and Marco runs Overcast and he is heavily focused on privacy, and I think he’s just concerned with that.  I think it also could expose the actual very few number of people that use other apps, you know and they might be concerned that you know that it might really demonstrate that their apps really aren’t as big as they had hoped that they would be It gets it could be a business decision to hide that.

But you mentioned Chartable, I love using Chartable. I use Chartable on my show and all of the client shows that I produce. Uh because it’s very good data, it’s presented in a way that is nice and actionable. So it gives me nice benchmarking, I love all the things about it Chartable as well as they’ve got some really cool ad tech features or building in which I’m kind of excited about which probably regular people  don’t care that much about it. But that it kinda trips my trigger and I just like what they’re doing how they’re getting some aggregate information, So really really good information coming from those guys.

So yeah you really have to rely on the Apple Podcast app, Spotify has it as well so you can get some of that data from Spotify. But the thing is, it’s only a slice. Apple only knows what the listener behavior to your show was if they were on an Apple device. If they’re on their desktop listening, nothing. If they’re using another Android device you do you don’t get that data. So it’s it’s only what they can track.

But still, you know it’s a certain percentage. Over here it’s a big percentage, but I think even in Asia as long as your view count or use the right term, as long as your listenership is big enough you know it’s probably going to account for a 10 20% of your listens and statistically that’s relevant. I mean when we do surveys we’re not calling 10% of customers, we’re calling 0.2% of customers to get a relevant data sample and when they’re doing that kind of stuff.

So I think it’s really good information as long as you’re using it properly And the idea here is only use that data to make sure that you understand when people stop listening the content of your episodes and then change the content of your episodes to reverse that behavior.

Norman Chella: [00:35:28] Yeah with intention for improvement Right And I get the standpoint of privacy cause I had this chat with Rob Walsh of Libsyn a few episodes ago about attribution and the issue of privacy in Podcasting and being able to maintain that level of privacy.

But then there are a lot of companies that I didn’t want to name any names, but the have some shady business tactics or the way that they look at it is that they have essentially turned listeners into data like the most objective form of data, or turned us into numbers essentially. to maximize the amount of impressions or to maximize the amount of overall RoI which in this case could be ad impressions or ad sales via whatever the links would be. Tracking becomes enabled.

I’m curious so, I read the article on SquadCast recently about your talk with the SquatCast team. Amazing talk, and I saw the section on the need to see podcast hosting companies evolve over time and that having different layers of…I call them micro companies, so micro companies essentially are companies with one defined feature that is layered on top. So there they are not a competitor, they are a compliment to whatever large companies would be.

Where do you see that going? Because we have different levels of attribution, different levels of the line between someone’s privacy being leaked or someone’s data being kept for a long time. Maybe do you have any thoughts on… Can we still maintain our privacy when podcasting or listening to podcasts?

Evo Terra: [00:37:08] Well so I’ll give you a probably a very different answer than Rob gave you. Because I, Rob Walch and I know each other and have for 15 years so we’re good. But we’ve got two very different takes on the way that it works.

My take, when it comes to this it goes all the way back to the late nineties when the president of Sun Microsystems stood up at a conference and made this statement: Your privacy is an illusion.

And it’s like wow what does he mean by that? And so I I’ve kind of gone down that road as kind of my guiding principle uh of that. You know, we have to think about how there’s lots of nuance when it comes to this one but. I am of the belief and I need the people like Rob and I need the people like Cory Doctorow who’s a major advocate for privacy, and others and I need the Marco Arment and all the people.

I need them working really hard on their side making sure that people like me who are much more permissive of things don’t go too far and we don’t let things slip. But I really like it that when I go search for something ,that the search results are tailored to me

I like it when I ask for movie times, I don’t have to worry about getting movie times and choosing theaters and stuff because it’s smart enough to know where I am, right? I like all of those things that make the internet for me better. I like going to Twitter which is my social media of choice and seeing results that I probably do care about not just because I happen to follow somebody but because they’re talking about a similar topic to me, I like all of those things. I also understand that there’s a dark side of those things. Cambridge Analytica is a big problem of that which you know kinda screwed up our elections over here. We certainly are seeing some bad actors and I’m not discounting any of that. So again that’s why we need those people that are over there.

I’m willing to make some tradeoffs personally I’m from what is complete privacy to what is giving data so that the things actually just work and function better. Now also you have to remember, I came out of running digital advertising agencies for the better part of 15-20 years and everything we do in digital advertising is dependent on the ability to track someone, as terrible as that sounds.

You know we need to know when where you’ve been so that we can put an ad out there that says, Hey don’t forget to buy this thing and I know those seem annoying and sometimes they certainly can be, but a lot of it is a lot more subtle than that and it’s not manipulative. It’s just more  the content you put in somebody less advertising and more relevant to what you clearly were looking for.

So, all of that being said I think there’s room. And I know we have a lot of people that are concerned with some new privacy regulations like such as the GDPR in the EU as well as CCPA here in America, that’s the California Consumer Privacy Act. We definitely have some concerns as companies are trying and governmental bodies trying to reign this in and that totally needs to happen. But I see no reason they can’t coexist.

I will say that giving up an IP address isn’t in my opinion a violation of privacy. Because your IP address kind of leaks out all over the place anyhow and I get the argument that says yeah but I didn’t officially authorize that to happen, I get that argument. I just don’t care because I don’t think it’s really that big of an imposition to have an IP address  gone down the chain.

Norman Chella: [00:40:28] That’s a really fascinating take on it. Now that I’ve heard your side and now that I’ve heard Rob’s side, that’s like two sides of the spectrum.

Which on yeah On on the issue Oh okay It’d be it’ll be interesting to hear a discussion between the two of you on this talk cause uh Rob is quite adamant.

Evo Terra: [00:40:47] We’ve had them, them in private. I don’t think we put them, put them on stage yet or not, but uh, yeah, there’s definitely, definitely that’s a way to look at it. But anyhow.

Norman Chella: [00:40:58] Yeah. Okay. I’m sure we can probably have that sometime in the future cause I would love to listen to that

Evo Terra: [00:41:04] I am surprised. I’m surprised when Rob and I, we see each other two or three times a year at different podcasting conferences and no one’s ever said, Hey, you two should get up here and fight this out. That would be a lot of fun. I would, I would like to do that. Oh, great. Now that I’ve said it out loud,

Norman Chella: [00:41:16] not saying fight, right. I’m

Evo Terra: [00:41:18] Oh, I’m saying fight, we’re going to take blades, we’re going to cut each other, and yeah, the last man standing.

Norman Chella: [00:41:25] Podcast movement, fight or die. It’s, it’s like this underground match. And from going through all this with this many years in podcasting I want to I want to play a little game with you cause  this is something that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while when we were booking this call uh as someone who has seen this from the very beginning let’s do a hypothetical situation So I’ll give you my take right. So the hypothetical situation is this.

We have all these countries that have normalized podcast listening behavior in many different ways So for example the US, you have a lot of podcasts listeners, the UK, Australia, and EU to a certain degree. And you can see that from many different factors like for example the amount of apps that are available the listenership, the amount of data that is available from iOS and also from all your dashboards that can basically show the location of all your listeners, no matter where you’re based in around the world from Nepal or whatever. You can tell that there’s a certain percentage that’s always US.

I’m worried about Asia. So Asia is a very interesting market in that we like to call it one region, but there’s so many different countries and there’s so many different barriers. I am under the current impression that there is an Asian podcasting market but we are years behind, sure, that’s perfectly fine. But the hypothetical situation is this, we are so fragmented that we don’t know our own shows, our own thought leaders, our own podcast companies and networks, and the majority of the influence of the medium in educating people or raising awareness about it is mainly done by broadcast companies or by companies overseas tapping into the market.

So I’d like to have your take on as someone who has started from 2004, 2005, how would you grow a podcast market from the very beginning?

Evo Terra: [00:43:33] Well it’s not easy Um but  if we can let me let me say focused on Asia for a moment and if as anyone can tell by my voice I am not Asian Uh however.

However I do know a little bit about the Asian podcasting market and most of that comes from the couple of years I spent as the cohost of the Bangkok Podcast when I lived in Bangkok, Thailand. And yes I am Farang So yes, but nonetheless I was there. And we, we tried to get going a community of podcasters in Bangkok, because you know 14 million people on that city, there’s a lot of people that are there.

We were able to get the um the Western people who were living in Bangkok as ex-pats doing podcasts together we will get together socially. But we had a real tough time cracking into the Thai market. We had a handful that would come over and we had plenty of Thai listeners to our show because we gave them the perspective of two Farang that live in town, One one very longterm guy Greg Jorgensen who’s still there today. And 20 years I think Greg’s been and the new cohost, Ed has been there I think 22 years even longer than that. So they get a good advice out of that.

But we had a real tough time as I said cracking into the Thai marketplace. That’s for a lot of reasons you know, one every country has their own language except English, because you know English is a pretty common language across all of those. As you mentioned, we say Asia as if it means one thing but South Asia is different than Southeast Asia.

Big time right I mean cause South Asia means India and Southeast Asia is the eight countries in that area was that eight? Is eight countries in Southeast Asia? Whatever the number is right, yeah yeah right.

You to the South and in Thailand, Vietnam and all those, but again each one of those have their own individual languages which makes it real tough to get to. But I think if anything you should be looking to an Eastern Asian country as your go-to and that’s South Korea.

South Korea has the single largest penetration rate of podcasting last year, 58% of the people in South Korea listen to podcasts on a weekly basis. That’s an insane number right? That’s crazy time. So South Korea has a very robust Podcast ecosystem built up and they’re mostly South Korean shows,. Which is kind of nice. Contrast that to China, you’ve probably heard the number as I’m sure many of your listeners have as well that the Chinese podcasting market is a $7 billion industry.

And if you heard that or not. That’s true but not really true because most of the people who are spending the money on these podcasts in China, they’re really more distance learning programs than they are true podcasts. So people are paying per show to get educated. They’re not paying their hard earned money to listen to the Chinese equivalent of the Joe Rogan Experience, I mean that’s not what’s happening over there so it’s a vastly different market.

That’s the other real challenge is what works in the West doesn’t always work everywhere else in the world. Just because it works in America, great, but that’s one thing I learned after living in Southeast Asia for two and a half years. It is vastly different, even though everything felt and looked the same and most street signs were in English and that was all wonderful and people wear the same clothes that I wear all the time. We just take our shoes off, I take my shoes off now as well. But the culture is different, the assumption is different, the process or the governments, everything is vastly different.

So it is going to be a challenge and I’m not sure if ASEAN is going to be able to, if they are currently surmounting the challenge or what else was happening but it’s not easy that’s for sure

Norman Chella: [00:47:16] Plenty of interest especially in Southeast Asia. We’ve

Evo Terra: [00:47:19] Yeah.

Norman Chella: [00:47:20] tapping in, essentially trying to define the market in terms of what communities are available. So I’ve set up a meetup in Malaysia for example and that caught a lot of interest from a few companies. They’re are quite large, let’s just say they’re very well known in the podcasting industry and  they see the need for it.

I boil it down to two things: One is that we’re lacking enough technical data to really decide whether or not a company should really tap into the market to like invest in it.

Um, and I, I came to the conclusion after like, interviewing a couple of guests and, reaching out to people for coffee and, you know, figuring out what their problems are, et cetera. And why are people, lacking in terms of, say, confidence or taking the risk into actually investing into certain shows.

Because we lack technical data, the next best thing would be to try to create a community, which I think is what you were trying to do, especially in Thailand, because form a community, that’s when you can maybe get data or from a community, at least that’s where we can reiterate and figure out what’s the next step, what to do next.

Because at least we can collectively put our brains together and think like, okay, how can we make the Thailand scene much bigger, much more inclusive, right. With multi-lingual shows. Um, and break down the barriers between different languages because we’re all just trying to create great content.

Evo Terra: [00:48:40] Yeah. I think you can put your, I think you’ve put your brains together. I think you’ve put your bodies together. I think you put your shows together and you package the whole thing up and you say, this is what it can be. Whether it’s just in Malaysia or where it’s across the Southeast Asian region or everywhere.

What can you do? But to me, I think it, it starts small. It starts locally. So are you in, are you in KL? Is that where you live? Kuala Lumpur? Yeah. So I think, yeah, you put together the, much like I’m doing here in Phoenix, Arizona. I’m trying to bring together the Phoenix podcasters and on a monthly basis, just for a social event,  it’s a PHX podcast club.

PHX was the airport code for Phoenix, and we meet socially once a month just to talk about things. No agenda, no plan. Occasionally I’ll share some thoughts and we’ve got a few other people that come and share ideas, but it’s just to be social because it’s that beginning of that social that builds a bond.

Friendships get made. Ideas for businesses come out of that. We can, maybe we can bring a conference, maybe you can attract some of the big companies over there and you can go to Australia. You know, you’ve got Whooshkaa in Australia,  you got Omny Studio in Australia, you got, I forget who else is down there.

So there’s a lot happening now in Australia and that’s a much easier flight to get people over to, cause they’re used to showing up in your place all the way. So bring in those and start making your area look attractive to them first and then maybe the larger world picks it up after that.

Norman Chella: [00:50:01] Yeah. There are a lot of conferences coming up in Australia that are podcast centric and with that Podcast Ranker as well, uh. which is, yeah, it was Triton. Which is fantastic. They are great people. I have met them for coffee and they are interested in Malaysia. So, shout out to the Triton team for being awesome and really encouraging it.

Especially with Indies trying to band together to create this initial space. I liked that you said that it’s bottom up, the bottom up approach is a much more important cause I, I see that as something that can be shown as evidence for people to say, Hey, we do have activity happening here. Um, and maybe we can have something happen.

Like in terms of more people coming in or maybe even a conference, which I hope to be able to build over time.

Evo Terra: [00:50:51] great. Well, if you need a guest, you know, I haven’t been, I’ve been almost two years since I’ve left Southeast Asia.  I need to go back, uh, in a big way.

Norman Chella: [00:50:59] plans, I will definitely just ping you out of nowhere and say, Hey, do you want to come back to Asia for a bit.

Evo Terra: [00:51:07] Sweet. Cause I’m looking forward to, with a 24 hour plane ride. That sounds like fun. Let’s do that again.

Norman Chella: [00:51:11] Oh my goodness.

Evo Terra: [00:51:12] It’s such a long ways, such a long ways. Yeah. But that’s okay. No, I, uh, I, I certainly do, do miss it. My, my very poor Thai skills are, are fading rapidly. I’ve got a Thai restaurant here in town that I go to about once a month, and I, um, I forced them to listen to my horrible Thai, but because I’m like trying to keep a hold of some of it at least.

Norman Chella: [00:51:34] No, it’s good. You keep trying. It’s okay. Also, I interviewed Greg, uh, recently, like this week or last week. Uh,

so hopefully that episode will be out soon, so

Evo Terra: [00:51:42] Yeah, he’s a good guy. He’s Canadian, but other than that, he’s an okay guy. So

Norman Chella: [00:51:46] That’s That’s the reason. Right, uh, Evo, we are coming up on time, but I will, I mean honestly, I would love to chat with you so much more. Cause it’s just so fascinating to see this growing.

And I mean, even if you are all the way in Phoenix, Arizona, I still think that your thoughts on the Asian podcasting scene, is amazing and valuable. So I do want to ask you two questions, one is, what would you like to see more of in the Asian podcasting scene? You personally.

Evo Terra: [00:52:17] Oh, what do I want to see more out of the Asian podcasting scene? So. As, as your listeners probably know, you know, we’ve said it before, you know, when we say Asia like there’s one thing, but, but there’s a lot, right?

And I think there are some amazing opportunities to tell stories of  not the culture of Malaysia, because I’m smart enough to know that you’re 90 different cultures built up in that country. You know, much like there’s that many split and trial and error and whatever else, right? There is not, we think of these as monolithic blocks. It’s just not the way it is.

But I think it’d be a great for people to tell use podcasting to tell the stories and let people experience the stories and the music and the history and the sounds and even the sights to that particular matter.

Show people what your place can be. Videos are great, don’t get me wrong, but there is something really primal about putting headphones on and listening to the sounds of somewhere else. Some of the most powerful episodes that I did in my episode when Sheila and I were traveling around the world was just letting people listen to what it sounded like in this various place.

And we got a huge amount of feedback from that. So just let people around the world experience it. Cause you don’t, you don’t understand how some dude in Iowa is dying to hear what life is like over there. And so just do that. I think they’d like it a lot.

Norman Chella: [00:53:42] So more soundscapes, more ways to do like immersion, right. In these countries. Okay. Okay. Let me, let, let me try to send that idea to a couple of people I know across Asia. I mean like across, at least across Southeast Asia, cause I knew a few, I know a few podcasters around here maybe they want to try to build the idea. Interesting.

Evo Terra: [00:54:02] got at least one listener right here. That’s easy.

Norman Chella: [00:54:05] I’ll say, I’ll send a show your way once they’ve made it and  oh yeah, I did. I did have one more question actually, but, I have this one thing that I had to ask. If eyes are windows to the soul, then your podcast playlists are the windows to your thoughts. So Evo, what is on your podcast playlist?

Evo Terra: [00:54:23] So I looked before we got started, and I am currently subscribed to 158 different podcasts.

Okay. So I don’t have time to go through everything that I listen to, right. So I, instead of doing it that way, I’m going to tell you how I listen. So here, here’s, here’s my routine of listening. So I subscribe to six different daily podcasts.

That means they release an episode every single day, Monday through Friday, six of them that I listen to, and I almost always listen to all of them. Sometimes I’ll maybe skip halfway through if there’s a topic I don’t really care that much about, but there’s six of those. So that’s my daily listening.

Also, I try to fit in two or three times a week from my smarts playlist, and these are thing like, uh, Reply All from Gimlet Media and my friend George Rob does the Geologic Podcast, very, very smart, smart thinking show. Um, uh, uh, 20,000 Hertz. Amazing, amazing shows. Especially if you’re into podcasting.

You’ve got to listen to 20,000 Hertz and how sound right? These are shows that designed to make me a smarter person. Usually try and dip into those three, maybe four times a week, and listen to those. Uh, also the weekends as well. But Sunday. Sunday is dedicated  to podcast fiction. Only thing I listened to on Sunday are fiction, drama, audio, drama.

High cast. Or you know, just single solo narrator, but just stick with the fiction side. So that pretty much encapsulates what I do. And then occasionally I try and dip in and listen to the other podcasts about podcasting, but I’m finding less and less time for those.

Norman Chella: [00:55:58] I mean, you already have one of the most prominent podcasts about podcasting ever, so I think you’d be, maybe you’d be a bit tired hearing about podcasts, about podcasts when you’re…

Evo Terra: [00:56:08] I do like, I do like to keep up with what the, what the others in the world saying my friends. It’s always good to have a, to have a level check, right? Because you know, you could sit in this little bubble. I can sit in my studio behind my big microphone here and just say what I want, but I need to know what other people are thinking about as well.

Norman Chella: [00:56:25] Definitely. And also,  if we want to reach out to you or contact you, ask you about anything specific,  and about anything in this conversation, where can we find you and how do we do that?

Evo Terra: [00:56:38] So you can always email me. Or I’m also on the Twitters. I’m on Twitter most of the time, as Norm will attest too. That’s my, that’s my social media of choice. Uh, evo@podcastlaunch.pro reaches me. Uh, I’m @Evo Terra on Twitter. If you want to see pictures of my face,  usually with food or a pipe or something else stuck in it, you go to Instagram. I don’t have an Instagram account. My face has an Instagram account. Um, yeah. Uh, Evo Terra over there as well. And, uh, yeah, the podcastpontifications.com will have links to all that stuff.

Norman Chella: [00:57:14] I need to follow that Instagram account.

Evo Terra: [00:57:17] It’s a lot of fun.

a lot of fun.

Norman Chella: [00:57:19] Also. Now that you brought it up now. Now I’m curious, do you, as, as someone who is into podcasting and someone who talks about podcasting and essentially breathes it, uh, is, is Twitter pretty much the best social media to get involved in podcasting?

Evo Terra: [00:57:35] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s still still by, by far. And it’s, I think it’s because they matriculated at about the same time, and podcasts started in 2004. Twitter started in 2006 but we dominated it pretty quickly. So yeah, I mean, even though there are plenty of people, you know, there’s, there’s lots of other social channels out there, but the podcast Twitter is a very deep and robust,  community.

So yeah, you could, that’s a good, it’s a good place to go.

Norman Chella: [00:57:59] Yeah. Cause I noticed that,  it’s either for me, it’s, you know, Twitter or LinkedIn and it’s always, between those two people are willingly wanting to talk about podcast, and I’m not a Facebook person, so I don’t really know how it is, but to each their own.

All right. Thank you so much, Evo. Uh, it’s a pleasure hearing about your side of the podcasting story and yeah, I’ll talk to you. I mean, I’ll just tweet at you on Twitter or

Evo Terra: [00:58:24] We can find each other.

Norman Chella: [00:58:25] in anything. Yeah, yeah. I’m always on there as well. I will talk to you soon.

Evo Terra: [00:58:30] Cheers buddy.

And that’s it. My chat with Evo Terra of podcast pontifications always making you pontificate, or is that how you pronounce it, pontificate about many different things in the podcast industry, and I liked his take on the Asian one. To be honest, I actually didn’t know that he was trying to build a podcast community in Bangkok and seeing these barriers, seeing these observations and hearing his take on how to do things there.

It’s really nice to hear another perspective of the Asian podcasting market, especially from Evo.  I really want to take these observations, these discussions, these features into my notes and plans for when I try to build the Asian podcasting community here over time. And maybe we can get Evo right here in Malaysia or in Bangkok, wherever. We might have either a conference or a talk or meet up, uh, whichever, whatever.

But. Either way. Thank you so much for listening. You can always reach out to Evo on Twitter and via his email. I will link it in the show notes below, as well as all the things that we talked about. Evo is a great guy. Always open to talking about podcasting in any way, shape, or form. So do reach out to him.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can reach out to me on Twitter @Podlovers Asia, or by my personal Twitter @Norman Chella and for all ratings, discussions, et cetera. You can always check our lovely Podchaser link and I will link all of these in the show notes right below. Enough about me.

Have a great day. Stay warm. Stay lovely. Wherever you are listening to this amazing podcast, did I just, Oh my goodness, I sound so narcissistic saying that. Thanks for listening and I will see you in the next episode. Norm out.