 And on that note, we can hand over to Emily. Welcome to SOAS, Emily. Thank you so much. I feel like a newbie here because SOAS is something that I've been hearing about for a very long time. By very long, I just mean for the length of Ghosts Out of the Media. I've been hearing SOAS, SOAS, SOAS, SOAS. Our guests have been on SOAS. Sam actually worked with us for a whole year. He and I started the Taiwan Take podcast together. And then also, I mean, Brian, we've been talking since I got back to Taiwan about two and a half years ago. And SOAS just kept coming up. And actually, we have another producer of ours who also did at least a summer session as well. There's a lot of alums. So I actually feel like a newbie, but thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting to be here. And I think obviously I would have loved to meet everyone, but I see there are 43 people here online. So I'm quite excited about that. So normally, when I start sharing these things, I try to get a sense from the room how many people have actually heard or listened to any podcast in general who are regular- Right, right. But in reality, it's- And who listens to our show. So I was gonna, you know, given that I'm looking at the theory of you, I'm just gonna hope it's, you know, 100 for a hundred percent, right? But to give everybody else a slight background of me, so I was born in Taiwan, grew up in Taiwan until when I was in middle school and then I went over to the U.S., bounced around between different states, eventually stayed in the U.S. for college. I really wanted to study journalism, but my college said that's a trade. You don't study journalism, study something else. And later on, you could practice journalism. I said, okay. So I did art, which is sculpture and video production. But meanwhile, I would intern at Newspaper. So one of my first internships was actually at the Taipei Times. At the time, Taipei Times has just started. I was at the features desk, and the features desk was really great at the time. And is it a version towards speculation? These are, we have writers who went to Columbia J School. We have writers who, multiple of them actually, and they love writing stories. It's the features desk, right? You're not writing business. You're not writing politics or the parliament. It's features writing. How much fun does that get? So that was absolutely great. The next summer, I interned at a free weekly. Free weeklies aren't really around anymore, but that's kind of like the predecessor to a block site now, I guess, right? Kind of like the village voice, for example, of Taiwan. And then I got introduced to, that's a different type of tone and style of journalism. Eventually, I did documentaries, that public television, I did animations, I did news, videos, and corporate video. It's a piece with a beginning middle end. It was about two and a half years ago, I decided to give up video. It was super moff and it was very, very expensive. And editing is a pain. Color correction is a pain. At the time, what I noticed was that there was a trend on podcasting. A lot of people were getting their information about whatever they were interested in on podcasting. Especially there was a lot of content about Japan, a lot about China, quite a lot on Korea. A lot of people who were studying Asia would use podcasting. And there was very few information coming out of Taiwan. Of course, at the time already, Brian Harvey started, New Bloom, there was Karagolan and all the different publications that Brian talked about, they were there, they existed. But podcasting was an empty space. So I thought, well, here we go. Then let's fill the space. So that's kind of how I started. The goal at the time, we had two goals. One, well, big major goals to connect Taiwan and the world really. So there was a lot of ways to doing that. One of our solutions became the Taiwan Take podcast. Taiwan Take was something that was launched November of 2019 right before the presidential election. And this was something that we always knew we were gonna do, but we didn't rush it because we were working on the environment, there was another show on cannabis. But then we kind of realized the thing is covering Taiwan. So Brian was talking about journalism, covering Taiwan before COVID, before this rise of Taiwan in the past year. International journalists would tell you that Taiwan was only interesting once every four years, when there's election, when there's missiles, and maybe TSMC. And there we were looking at election. It was the perfect time to launch this. And the truth was I had a lot of friends who were asking me about Taiwan. They asked me about what the attitudes of Taiwan's or anything from pop culture to trade, to entertainment, anything and everything. And I think, so I really wanted to make it into a gathering place and say, look, yes, I want to, I think that I know some great people who are experts in particular subject. I want to point them to you. That's when I got an email from a particular Sam Robbins who was a Master of Students at NTU at the time. He told me about this vision he had for a particular podcast. And I read that as I go, this is what, like we're working on this right now. So it was great. So he hopped on right away and then a month later we launched the first episode. And that was with Keras Templeton at Stanford who just happened to be in Taiwan at the time. So we had an amazing researcher. We had me producing and we needed a journalist. And amazingly found an amazing talent and veteran journalist who was, she used to be bureau chiefs at Reuters and Dow Jones in Beijing, Singapore and Taipei. She was somebody who could view trends in a very big picture way. So I think in terms of podcasting, I mean, it's not a solo activity. There is actually a whole big team that goes with it and none of this, right? And then later on, we had many people who joined the team and the podcast wouldn't be the way it is today if we needed everybody on the team. And so I think it's definitely a collaboration project. So I think for anybody, for all of the kind of the 43 people listening right now, if you want to launch your own podcast, find a buddy who thinks the same way as you, but also different. You also want to have somebody who thinks differently. And so when you come together, you can have something that's quite one plus one equals three kind of idea. Find buddies and work on this together. And maybe you're better at researching the other persons, better at hosting than you work together and produce something that you can then evolve and grow with later on. So I'm going to talk a little bit about kind of challenges and some of the best practices of where we've walked away with. I also liked audio because audio is really flexible. It can be very soothing in terms of how you talk or it can get you really, really excited. And I think audio more than anything else, there's such a bigger emphasis on storytelling. Sam talked a little bit about this. And I come from a place where growing up, my father is a academic PhD, but for most of the time, I had no idea what he actually studied. It was a mystery to me. It took me many years until I finished school. I came back to Taiwan and I go, what do you do? What do you actually do? But growing up, we watched a lot of movies, a lot of movies. And there was always this big emphasis on, okay, this is the end of the film. What did you learn? What was the message? Is this interesting? At the very beginning of the film, it was always, you don't kind of always make a point to say, oh, this is the great setup. Oh, this gets me intrigued. Oh, I have no idea what they're trying to say. So as a point, you know, 35 years of that, what it did was that the emphasis on like, yes, there is, you might have an expert at hand, but how are you going to tell their story? It becomes so important. So we did a, so Sam and I, we did a really fun episode with Lefnachman. A while back, it was about Taiwan studies. For anybody, so I would encourage everybody to listen in, actually. And Lef, if you're familiar with Lef, he is very prolific on Twitter. He gets quoted a lot on Taiwan events, on Taiwan news. And when we're crafting an interview with him, there was a lot of like, okay, well, he gets quoted so much. What do we want him to say, actually? So when you're interviewing public figures, it's really fun because you get to do so much research, so so much research. And then you get to be familiar with the way they talk so you can craft your interviews around them. Or you know that they're typical question that he's already answered for particular normally, and you can then work off of it and then you build on it, right? We should be building on every other interviews that other people have always done. So I think interviewing public figures is so much fun that way. And, but if you don't, if you are interviewing a friend who has a really great story, then your research is then following your friend, following her around for a long time, talking to them a lot and trying to get that same sense, trying to get that research from them personally that you can't get on the internet, right? Well, so for Lef, there was what he comments on, how he comments, the valuable contributions he's made in news over the last two years, but then he also had this other really interesting story about Taiwan studies. And so when we were crafting that interview, it was figuring out what is that story, but then also how do you tell that? And style, right? So we're making or yeah. So sometimes you'll hear what they say about the hero's journey. So there's always, there was something they wanted to do and then they went ahead and did it and there was a success, but there was a setback. But then there was success again, there was a setback where you kind of, it keeps you on the toe and keeps you gripping and it keeps you listening. I think that is even more, that's more important even than writing because for writing, for blogs, for news, I can skim, I could just kind of skim through it, but for audio, you're gonna lose the listener. So there's a lot about how do you craft that? And I think for me personally, I listen to a lot of other shows that do really well and it's all for me, when I listen to it, it's always a study of, wait, how did they do that? Wait, I'm still hooked, how did that happen? Why it's 40 minutes in, how am I still hooked? So Guy Ross over at NPR, no. Guy Ross, Guy Ross who does how I built this, he also did 10 radio hour, he does this beautifully. He does business interviews, but he can interview a really famous person who you think you know everything about them, but he'll interview them in a way that you've never heard before. So I listen to him a lot and just try to figure, oh my gosh, wait, this is how you tell their story? Interesting. And you kind of also get that narrative arc. And there's another way that if you're doing interviews, one thing that picked up from a lot of great interviewees is they don't ask the obvious, which is kind of anti-tuitive because sometimes you tell people ask the obvious questions, right? But what I mean is for a lot of facts and figures, we get the host to state the facts on their own. Because the host can state the facts in a way that we want to shape the story arc. So we keep the story moving. You state that fact, and then you get them to comment on their experience, on their opinions. It counts in the longer piece too, but when it's long- Not only they could say. So I found that really important for a set up is that don't ask them, you know, don't ask Sam. Sam, so after so as where did you go? Right, like we know he went to Taiwan, right? So we move the story along. Sam, after so as you went to Taiwan and did NTU, what happened, what did you do there, right? Then you're kind of snowballing, rolling along. And let's just like, we listened to a lot of Terry Gross on NPR. Terry Gross is from the Philadelphia Public Radio. Excellent interviewer. Listen to the way she sets up interviews. She always sets up interviews in a way, which again, what Guy Ross does for the arc, for the narrative, Terry Gross does it for the beginning where you listen to, you can kind of go through this, you can do this exercise where you pick episodes, only where you know the guest. And then listen to how she sets them up because it's always in a really interesting way that you never thought, oh, wow, wait, what, I didn't know this about that person. And immediately you're hooked. So thank for interviews, that's really important, these two things to have a really good set up so that the audience is hooked, so that you're sold, you sold the audience on what the episode is about. And the ones to get into the episode, making sure that you have a really nice narrative that tells the story of either this guest or the topic, whatever it is, and move it along. I think there's obviously challenges sometimes, it's sometimes it's really hard to do that. For example, we did a couple of episodes ago, it was about disinformation. I mean, how do you craft a narrative of, ah, with disinformation, right? So it takes a lot of experimenting sometimes also. But thankfully we had a really great guest who was a great storyteller as well who's incredibly articulate. A couple of other challenges is when you run into accidents actually is a huge challenge working with people with accidents. And what I've found is you just have to really know your guests. And so that's when pre-interviews becomes really important. You become familiar with how they might respond to you either it's your visual cues, your body language, or just the way you phrase certain words in a way that they know immediately what you mean and then they'll answer kind of fully to the question. It can be quite hard. Editing around that could be hard too, it can be tricky. But I think every time I run into something like that, I feel like, okay, great, this is a challenge, I'm gonna take this on. And then when we come out I have a better editor later on. I think talk to a lot of people because when you're crafting an episode, I think this goes the same for block posts and also articles, journal articles, for anything as well, anything you're working on, right? Test those out with the people around you because I found that to be really helpful because questions they have are gonna be questions you have or maybe they'll point out blind spots or maybe it turns out there's a particular section where you're super interested in and they're not. And everybody tells you that's really boring. But you're like, no, no, I just, I really wanna know what Sam eats every day. I think this is the most important thing about Sam's daily life, craft Sam's story in Taiwan. But then that means if I see something like that, then I know where to spend extra time crafting that, not even that narrative, but just making it so interesting and selling it because if your friend who you're interacting with in real life is bored, imagine you're listening, right? They're gonna go, what is this? And then they turn it off. So I think testing it with a friend is really, really, really, really important. And I think there's a term where we, I only learned later on, called science communicator. Science communicator, this happened in context of our environmental show. So we were at a conference last year, last February in Seattle, and kind of everybody's talking about how to be a better psychom, how to be a better psychom, psychom. We're like, what is this thing? Well, it turns out there's a lot of scientists who their job later on become, it's communication, but they're using science and they're teaching it to, maybe it's the general public, maybe it's adults, but maybe it's kids. Their task is to decode science, which is super hard to me, in a way that's very accessible to students, to kids, to general public. And we actually learned a lot from listening to science shows and science shows for adults, science shows for students as a way of, how do you talk on a podcast and assume nobody knows anything? Because you need to, you have to, you have to assume they know nothing. Or a group of people, sometimes. You have to assume that they don't, you assume that they don't know who you're talking to, you assume they don't really know the topic, you assume they don't know where you're going to arise. But then that also brings me to the challenge of how much do you contextualize? That was something else we had to work out over time, you know, when I, during the interview, when somebody said, and may see, do you say mainland affairs council and then give it a whole description and then how many acronyms are there? That is a huge, initially we explained everything. Later on, I think we found ways of getting around so we didn't have to, so we don't even come across acronyms like that. Or we realized ways of where the host could already set that in the questions. Or we found ways to say as soon as they, what you can do is pick up because podcasting, we don't do it live. And so when somebody said something and then you said, hold on a second, I'm gonna come back and define this term. And that is okay too, that is okay too. And that's also what I love about podcasting, is it is not live, you can edit so much and you can read you, you can edit. Most of our interviews, it takes about... That's gonna be quite so good. And that helps me kind of think about that kind of... 40 minutes. We've had other interviews that run really long. I think there was an interview with a... Into book, but I think... Sends, that went on for two hours, so maybe more. But he gave such a great story. So we kept all 59 minutes. I try to not go over one hour. That is my mark. And I don't like to see one hour. I think... And psychologically when you see an interview that's one hour, I think that's quite tough. In an upcoming show that we're developing, we did eventually go over one hour. But try to let that happen. Yeah, be concise. Yeah. And one thing about ending, somebody touched on this already, I think Sam did, is have an ending that brings you to a different place. Totally, totally agree with that. Which for all of our episodes, we try to have the ending... You want it to be rewarding for people. It's been 40 minutes. It's been 45 minutes. You want them to say, oh, that would be great. Yes, that was time well spent. So I also spend a lot of time on how you end. So I think these are just very, very simple tasks, simple tips on if you wanted to give podcasting a try. But then once you get into kind of a more advanced, and then there's a lot of other things you can do, you can play up, you can experiment with style and tone and do different experiments between different episodes, which becomes a whole lot of fun. Yeah. Fantastic, thanks all three of you. That was really fascinating. Kind of one of Emily's points kind of shows the potential of that kind of out of the blue email from Sam. It led to so much, which is really encouraging.