2013: Part 2 Growing Globalization of Podcasts and Electric Cars

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to episode five of My Digital Life for June eighteenth,
twenty thirteen. This is part two of the globalization of
podcasts as we continue on the topic that we started
last week. And this week we have Nicole Simon who's
out of Berlin, Germany, and she's going to share her
thoughts about international podcasting. And then I'm also going to

(00:24):
give an update on my Nissan Leaf in my experiences
with the Leaf. It's one hundred percent electric car. And
I just want to forwarn you look out. This is
a long episode ahead. It should be well over an hour,
so you know, take it in chunks if that's what

(00:44):
you need to. But if it's too long, I understand.
I'm Rob Greenley and thank you for downloading and just
possibly clicking and playing this episode from the website at
Rob Greenley dot com. I can certainly be reached at
Rob at Rob Greenley dot com or on Twitter at

(01:05):
Rob Greenley. And that's the last name of spelled g
R e E n L e E. The show is
also in iTunes and in the Windows Phone podcast area.
It's also on Stitcher and SoundCloud. I managed the podcast
on Windows Phone for Microsoft, so if you are a
podcaster and you are not in the Windows Phone podcast directory.
Send me an email to podcasts at Microsoft dot com

(01:30):
and would be more than happy to help out there.
So let's jump in and do a quick rundown on
the topics for this week. And I gave a little
teaser for that earlier. This is going to be part
two of the Globalization of podcast discussion with Nicole Simon,
who is a very early podcaster and social media consultant
out of Berlin, Germany. Nicole is very familiar to the

(01:53):
podcaster community here in the US, and we're continuing this
topic from last week, and I'm going to get Nicole's
views on native local languages and podcasting, and she's going
to talk about, you know, a whole lot more stuff too.
The conversation is rather along, it's about an hour, and

(02:13):
here's a little clip from that.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
I was the fifteenth October of two thousand and four.
I was on the Engadget website. I pressed play on
a webplayer and it hit me after fifteen second, Oh
my god. I can have free English content as much
as I want in the topics I want because I'm
interested in tech, I'm interested in the nerds stuff and

(02:36):
I can. I can, Oh my god, I can have
hours and hours of audio input. And I started really
listening for I would say two years, several hours a
day to all kinds of podcasts, and I was happy
and my English was getting better. And then I moved
over this is where we met, for example, to meet
those kind of people. I was part of that crowd.

(02:56):
I was just living on a different continent. But then
going on, it became more and more easy to engage
in this kind of language. And nowadays I'm so bad.
I can't go to the movies because they all still
show dubbed movies. I only watch DVDs or I watch
American television through VPN services. And I live in an

(03:16):
international world. I live and think in English, and I
actually have friends go to me and say, you're German,
You're supposed to at least try to speak German.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well, I'm also in this episode, and it's actually going
to come up first is I'm going to share my
thoughts on having driven an electric car or my niesan
leaf for the past two years. It's going to be
a quick rundown on my observations and thoughts and sharing
some stats. I have a twenty eleven Nissan Leaf. My
car is like one of the first two thousand cars

(03:48):
Leafs made. It came out of Tokyo, Japan, just prior
to the big earthquake that hit Tokyo back in two
thousand and ten. I can't remember exactly if it happened.
I think it was twenty eleven. I actually I used
a quick charger for the first time this past week,

(04:09):
so I'm going to talk about that, and also the
sounds that the Leaf makes. There's a lot of confusion
about that and people don't quite know what that sounds like.
So I'm gonna play a little clip from that. And
I also got a software update from the dealer this week,
so I'm gonna share a little bit of that as well.
Before we jumped into the main topics of the show,
I wanted to share some of my digital highlights of

(04:30):
the week. These are things that have kind of sparked
my my attention and focus a little bit this past
week around the kind of digital media side of the fence.
I started live video streaming using a one hundred and
forty nine dollars dropcam. Now these are becoming the hot

(04:52):
and bothered kind of kind of device out there. You
can go check it out at dropcam dot com and
give you lots of detail on this. I'm actually using
it as a you know, streaming just playing around with
it in my backyard, animals that come into my backyard
and things like that. It's it's not a real cool application,

(05:12):
but it's it's it's really taught me a lot about
this kind of set up a camera that's connected to
your Wi Fi network and you can stream anything from
you know, eagle cam to a security cam if you
just want to put it on your back porch or
on your front door so you can keep an eye
on the front part of your house. It's it's all
kind of cloud enabled. It enables you to actually DVR

(05:35):
your live stream and with the one hundred and forty
nine dollars price, it comes with unlimited live streaming. So
it's actually a really really good deal, but you do
have to pay a monthly fee if you want to
use like the DVR capability. Like they'll store up to
fourteen days of a video and you can go in

(05:55):
actually into the online software and cut out snippets of
your live recording and save them to your local hard
drive and you can share them. You can also get
an embed code that will put a player onto your side.
And if you want to see what this looks like,
just go to my blog at Rob Greenley dot com
and check it out. And I also have been exploring

(06:16):
a new live streaming box this past week. It's made
by a company here in the Seattle area called Paladin,
and it's at your Paladin dot com and that's spelled
p a l A d i n dot com. And
they're going to be actually be on the New Media
Show this coming Saturday, so if you want to check

(06:37):
out more details about these guys. That's basically a really
small compact Windows PC that basically runs wirecast software live
streams software on it that allows you to do multi
camera video productions to record or live live stream. So

(06:58):
it's definitely worth checking out out. It's going to be
on the New Media Show this coming Saturday at nine
am Pacific Standard time noon Eastern time if you want
to check it out. So I'm going to have the
founder of the company on the show to give a
give a live demo of how it all works. It's
a competitor to the whole kind of live stream TriCaster thing,

(07:22):
but it's a much more compact device. So it's definitely
worth checking out if you're a new media creator, if
you're a podcaster that's doing a live video, or if
you want to do like mobile events and things like that,
need a compact box to be able to do that.
So let's go ahead and jump into the main topic area.

(07:42):
And that's that's my Nissan Leaf. So I wanted to
start off and talk about EV's here or one hundred
percent electric vehicles, since there is this kind of this
gray area that happens out there. When people talk about
this topic, they tend to talk about EV's in the
context of Leaf and Volt, while Volt is a range

(08:04):
kind of extender kind of electric car, so it's not
really an electric car. So what I'm going to talk
about today is a car that has no gas, no oil,
has very minimal maintenance, and that's a Nissan Leaf. And
I've had one since since June of twenty eleven. I
have a blue Nissan Leaf. I've got about eighteen thousand
miles on the car. My experience has overall been very

(08:28):
very good with the car. Have had very low issues
with the car not working or having problems or the
common perception is that you know the whole range anxiety thing,
though I say that range anxiety exists, right. You have
to think about this car every time you drive it,
how far it's going to go, whether it's going to
get there, am I being too ambitious? And how far

(08:48):
I can go based on the time of the year.
So you really have to be intelligent about the car.
It's not the electric cars haven't gotten to a point
where you can just just like a gas car. You
can just drive and drive and if you need to
get more gas, you just put It's not quite that simple.
It's fine for most driving. The other real positive aspect
to it is that there's very little dealer service that
you need. The only thing that really have to do

(09:10):
to the car is tire pressure, rotate the tires, replace
air filters, wiper blades, your washer fluid, break fluid, and
occasionally get a battery check. So there really isn't much
maintenance you have to do this car. It's not like
you're changing oil filters and the oil every few thousand miles.
You just don't have to do that kind of stuff.

(09:30):
And I also just charge the car in my garage.
I have a two hundred and twenty volt charger made
by a company called Blink and which was free to
me because I was a very early early buyer of
an electric car, which there was a federal program that
was subsidized to install the first group of installations of
EV chargers into residential homes. And now they're expanding into

(09:56):
parking garages and in front of walmarts and and other
kind of retail shopping mall theaters that kind of stuff now,
and we're starting to see that stuff really kind of
grow and develop. So and I got a tax credit.
I paid about thirty four thousand dollars for the Leaf.
I paid for it in cash, and I also got
a seventy five hundred dollars federal tax credit for the

(10:18):
car as well, and also did not have to pay
state sales tax, So that basically knocked off about ten
grand right off the top of the cost of the car.
It actually is a really good goodbye. I bought a
camera back three years before that, four years before that,
and paid more money for a camera, so it actually
is a really good deal. The range of the car

(10:39):
is about fifty five to seventy five miles. It depends
on the time of the year. That range varies quite
a bit based on how cold it gets here in
the Seattle area. I would say in the winter time
I get probably more in the fifty range, and in
the summertime I get closer to seventy five or eighty.
So the battery is temperature sensitive and that does make

(11:01):
a difference. The other part about the car is that
it's silent. It's very smooth, and I wanted to also
play here a little snippet from my experience in the
car and play for you the sounds that the car
makes when it drives at low speed forward. There's been
a lot of debate around being safe for pedestrians, and

(11:22):
I just wanted to play for you the sound that
the car makes going forwards and going backwards. So let's
play that clip. Well, I am in my Nissan Leaf
right now, and I wanted to give you kind of
a in the car audio experience here. And what I'm
going to do is I just got in the car
after picking it up from the Nissan dealership and getting

(11:47):
a software update, So this is we'll just kind of
give you an audio experience of what it's like to
get in the car and turn it on and drive away.
There's not a lot of sound involved. It is a
pretty silent car. But I will actually leave the frontal
noise that the car creates, its kind of this whining

(12:07):
sound on and then I'll actually also back up too,
and you'll be able to hear all of the sounds
that are associated with this car. So I'll turn on
the car right now and you'll hear some music that's played.

(12:29):
So what's happened is that the car has booted up
and the music is played, and I am in the car,
and we'll close the door now. I'm gonna roll down
the windows so you can actually hear the driving sounds
that the car makes. I'm gonna put it into drive
right now, and i'm gonna put it into Eco mode,

(12:52):
and so I'm gonna drive forward here. I don't know
if you're gonna be able to hear it really well,
but I'm gonna stick the microphone out the window. But

(13:16):
I'm gonna back up now, and you're gonna hear the
backup sounds at the car makes mm hmm, all right,

(13:36):
So those are kind of the the sounds that are
involved in driving a Nissan Leaf. I'm gonna hop on
the road and turn off the recorder now so I
can drive safely. So last week I used my a
quick charger, which is called a Level three it's like
four hundred plus vault charger. And there's more and more

(13:58):
of these faster that are being installed along the major
freeways and at dealers and those kind of places where
you can charge your leaf fully charge it within well
up to eighty percent within thirty minutes, And I think
that's a huge evolution of this is being able to

(14:19):
charge these cars fast, and more and more of the
cars like the Ford Focus. The electric version of the
Ford Focus can do a full charge in like three
or four hours off of a two hundred and twenty volt,
so they're starting to chip it down. The Leaf is
more in the seven to eight hours range, so the
newer version of the twenty thirteen Leaf is more in
that range. It can charge fully charged within three to

(14:41):
four hours. So and really you don't have to charge
as much as people think you have to, because you
never drive the car fully down to zero, and you
don't really want to do that anyway. Most of the
time you're at like forty or fifty percent, so you're
really only looking at a couple hours charging every night,
so it's it's not as big of a deal as
you would think. So I wanted to play for you

(15:02):
a little audio clip of me actually using a quick
charger for the first time, and I kind of kind
of audio described. This was actually done with a video camera,
so the audio that you're seeing or listening to here
will be supplemental to what was seen on the video.
So let's play that clip. So I am using a
what's called a quick charger fast chargers, the first time

(15:25):
that I've actually used a quick charger to charge the car.
It should be pretty quick, but as you can see,
it's got quite a quite a rope to it or wire.
It's pretty thick. It goes up to this charging unit
Nissan Zero Emissions. It has this screen and it's kind
of hard to read it, but it's showing currently it's

(15:48):
charging at sixty It's got sixty six percent of an
eighty percent charge, so when that reaches one hundred percent,
it means that the car will have an eighty percent charge.
So I'm currently at about about a fifty percent charging
in the car right now, and it should get it
up to eighty percent probably within about ten or fifteen minutes,

(16:12):
probably because it says I've been told that it will
charge an empty boundary up to eighty percent within thirty minutes,
so I'm assuming it'll charge pretty quickly. So you back
up and get a get a view of this charging station.
For those that haven't seen one of these before, it's

(16:34):
it's interesting. It's actually sitting right next to a level
two charger, which is a two hundred and twenty volt.
So this charging station here is it's a four hundred
and forty volt charger, and what I understand, these things
are about seventy thousand dollars to actually buy one of

(16:55):
these fast charging units. So that's my car getting charged
with a fast charger. So we'll see how it's already
gone up like five five percent just in the last
minute or so, so it's happened fast, all right. Yeah,
it was really interesting using that charger, the four hundred

(17:18):
plus vault level three charger versus the two hundred and
twenty Vault one. It's completely different charge port. The front
of my leaf has two charge ports on it. One
is for two twenty and one ten and the other
one is like twice the diameter, and it has different
kind of plug configuration. That's for the four hundred plus
quick Charge fast charger, and that was actually an upgrade

(17:41):
that most of the early Nissan Leaf buyers got for
their cars, and so it was great to actually finally
use one. I haven't had to because I've just been
operating my daily life with my car off of my
two hundred and twenty Vault charger in my garage, which
has been really, really convenient. My Leaf has a capacity
of twenty four kilowod hours of power, so I was

(18:04):
only plugged in for like ten or fifteen minutes, and
so it was really an interesting experience. Up here in
the Northwest. All of our actually a large percentage of
our electricity up here in the Northwest comes from hydroelectric.
Our electricity rates are a lot less than a lot
of other places in the country. And there was a
an NPR story that came out here recently. I guess

(18:25):
there's a there's a website out there that tracks what
the cost comparison is between a gallon of gas and
the gallon kind of equivalent with electricity, and the cost
per kilowat hour for electricity here in the Seattle there's
about seven to eight cents per kilowat hour, so that
kind of equates to basically a gallon of gasoline kind

(18:49):
of equates to eighty four cents of electricity. So you
contrast that to a typical gallon price for gasoline, and
it's about four dollars, So you're looking at a comparison
between four and eighty four cents on that. So it's
a significant savings in money to drive electric car. Plus

(19:09):
you're not putting out as much CO two. The actual
vehicle has zero CO two that it puts out. Now,
obviously there's some CO two created in the production of
the vehicle as well as the generation of the electricity
if you're using like coal fire plants and that kind
of stuff, or gasoline or natural gas powered electricity plants,
but mostly electric electricity we get here in the Seattle

(19:32):
are in the Northwest comes from hydroelectric which is just
basically flowing water, so there is no CO two generator
from that. So I also wanted to play a little
audio clip from a little video that was created by
Scene at by Brian Cooley who does the podcast series
on Cars, and he basically ranked the top five evs

(19:58):
currently in two thousand and thirty teen and wanted to
play that here for you. The Leaf is still the
highest ranked and best selling mass produce electric car the
top five list Brian will run down, which is really
really interesting, So let me play that for you here.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
We're going to rank these guys by their range on
a charge and their miles per gallon equivalent. That's kind
of the MPG rating for an electric car. We'll also
tell you where they fit on the price scale. Let's
go number five, the Toyota Rav four Electric range one
hundred and three miles MPGe seventy six prices at a
little over fifty grand base. Now, this is the new

(20:34):
Rap four Electric, not to be confused with that kind
of warmed over one that they did original. It's the
only crossover on our list, by the way, and it's
a real fresh entrant on the market. It impresses us
as the only non Tesla product that has a Tesla powertrain,
nice pedigree, handles well, and that range of three digits
over one hundred miles is the only time you're going

(20:55):
to see that until we get all the way to
number one. Especially impressive. Can say this is also the
tallest thing on our list. Number four, the Fiat five
hundred e range of eighty seven miles MPGe one hundred
and sixteen prices out a little over thirty two grand. Now,
this recent entrant comes in with as you saw, great
numbers on range, MPGe, m price, a nice trifecta. It's

(21:17):
more refined, better handling, and more fun to drive than
a standard Fiat five hundred. Charge time is just four
hours or so if you've got a to forty outlet,
But I slot the Fiat at number four because on
a one ten outlet the charge time is glacial twenty
four hours for a full battery charge. You'll have taken
the bus to a Ford or Nissan dealer and bought
something else by then. It's also a little too small

(21:40):
for most Americans to take seriously, and the same still
goes for the Fiat brand at this point. Number three
the Ford Focus Electric range seventy six miles MPGe one
hundred and five prices out just under forty Now. Pushing
forty grand makes you say for a Focus, But the
car looks great. It's tecked up as Fords often are,

(22:01):
and leverages the underpinning of what is already a great
conventional compact car. Plus It's got a very sporty demeanor
along with its Green one, and it can do a
real fast charge full charge in three hours in change
on a two forty outlet, which can mean hours less
on the teeth than its competitors. The chief one beating
number two the Nissan Leaf Range seventy three miles MPGe

(22:25):
one hundred and fifteen now pricing at under thirty grand.
That's part of why swapped out the Leaf and the
Focus on this list since the last time we did it,
because of a massive price cut that now makes the
Leaf the cheapest ev that seats five. Now, the Leaf
still looks like Barney, it's biased toward a smooth ride
more than a sporting one, and it charges more slowly

(22:46):
onto forty than that Focus. But the new lower price,
lower cost to charge and run, and at least the
availability of a four hundred and eighty volt charge if
you can find one, are all compelling to this market.
Before I get to number one, I can tell you
it will not be the Chevy Volt or the Fister Karma.
As important of electrified cars as they are, they aren't

(23:08):
strictly electric cars. They are range extenders. That's a separate list.
Once there are five to compare. Oh on the next
time we do this rundown, the pending Chevy Spark EV
may bump somebody off of it. Our number one electric car,
hands down is the Tesla Model S. Range two hundred
and eight miles, MPGe eighty nine, base price a little

(23:31):
over seventy grand. Now it's the first ev to end
car of the year. It's also like the highest rated
car Consumer Reports is ever looked at. It looks hot,
goes like hale, has great range, and you can even
option that range up to two hundred and sixty five miles.
It's seventeen inch central cabin screen rewrites the rules of
cabin tech. On the other hand, the former base model

(23:52):
it's got about one hundred and something miles of range,
was just killed off. So now you start at over
seventy grand, and if you want the two and sixty
five mile range, just started a little over eighty grand
and up. Still, this car doesn't just accomplish an electric conversion.
It converted the market to be ready for an electric
car that really aspires. We cover electric and electrified car

(24:16):
innovations all the time. That's SEENEAD oncars dot com. I'm
Brian Cooley, thanks for watching.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
So yeah, that was a great rundown by Brian, and
I definitely thank Brian for offering that top five lists
because it really gives a really good crisp view. The
Model S Tesla is the number one, and that's that's
an amazing car, and then number two is the Nissan
Leaf like you ran through the twenty thirteen Nissan Leaf.

(24:45):
The Ford Focus Electric is number three, and number four
is the Fiat five hundred E and number five is
the new Toyota Rav four. And I guess very soon
GM is going to have a one hundred percent electric car,
the Chevy Spark. So those are the top ones that
are on the horizon here, and I'm actively out there

(25:07):
right now. Have an open mind about evs and go
down to a dealer near you and give a test drive.
I think you'll like what you see and you'll also
be changing our future. The next thing I want to
get into is talking about at some point here in
the future of solar panels, because I'd love to power
my car with solar panels. So who knows that could

(25:29):
be a topic for the future here. Well, let's go
ahead and jump into the main topic of the show
this week, and it's part two of the globalization of
podcasting and what it means for podcasting's future. I wanted
to expand on this by getting a second voice here.
I want to play my conversation I had with Nicole Simon,

(25:51):
who is a social media consultant and author and very
early podcaster who lives in Berlin, Germany. Now, like Karen
Hoague from last week, Nicole is a very well known
podcaster here in the US and has been a strong
kind of proponent of podcasts in Europe and has been
doing that for many, many years. She's going to talk

(26:11):
about kind of podcasts and the whole language conversation that
we kind of started up last week with Karen. So
let's go ahead and play that interview. Nicole, Welcome the show,
Thanks for joining.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Me, Happy to be there.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
You're doing some social media and marketing consulting work, and
I guess you have some books and some things that
you've been putting out here recently. You're calling me from Berlin, Germany,
which is really exciting, and your audio quality is fantastic.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Thanks joving absolutely and it's so strange to hear you
say from Berlin, because I lived for twenty years and
lubeg and finally make my move here and it's like, yeah, yeah,
I'm really here. That's fun and I can talk to
you in Seattle and it just had to be the evening.
So we get to adapted on the time zones. If
there's anything I would like to change throughout the world,

(27:04):
it's just freaking time zones because they screw up everything.
So are you nine hours ahead? Are you nine hours behind? Yeah?
But besides that, I'm happy to talk to you.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
But somehow we still manage, right, and things. Things still happen.
It's just oftentimes they are in weird hours of the
day for each of us. Right, absolutely, So I actually
met you, I guess at various podcasting events. You flew
to the United States and dove in and got engaged
in what was happening here in the North American side

(27:35):
of podcasting. I guess, getting engaged at that level so
early in the game, when I'm sure podcasting wasn't really
much of a phenomenon in Germany in the early days.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Actually it was so people who know that that podcasting
started in the summer of two thousand and four, and
I actually came onto this whole podcasting thing because of
language learning, and it's something which I have since recommended
to many people because that's basically the only way in
whatever content you're interested in to get around the clock

(28:09):
input in audio so you can listen to the language,
get used to everything. And it's very funny because as
children here in Germany, you're brought up on British English
or what our German teachers do as British English. But nowadays,
thanks for podcasting, I have so much of an American
accent that is not unusual for the Americans here to
ask me how long I've been living in Germany because

(28:31):
my German is so good. And that's the point when
I look at them and say, I am German, and oh,
but you don't have that bad German excent in English,
and he sa, yeah, that's thanks to podcasting. No, we
talked a little bit previously, and in my case, I'm
a typical German and it helps, probably especially for international understanding,
to see with the language is what that means when

(28:52):
you grow up in Germany. I'm forty two years now,
and when I grew up, everything in Germany is still
to this day is dubbed every movie every television show,
there's no international radio, every book you can buy, and
back then when I was a teenager, if you wanted
to buy a simple paperbag which would cost six dollars

(29:13):
or something, I would pay here the equivalent of fifty dollars.
So not achievable for any kind of teengers. We are
brought up. We're brought up by our teachers, who are
of course German, and we get taught English. It's our
first foreign language. Usually starts in fifth grade. And as
I have the highest education in school possible, I had
a total with one year repeat. I had a total

(29:35):
of ten years of English and school. But when I
left school in ninety one, for ten years I had
a rejection phase of English for some reason. It's one
of my biggest regrets. So then two thousand and two,
I actually wanted to know if the guy kissed the
girl I watched the TV show, wanted to know how
it moved forward. I knew it already ran in America,

(29:58):
so I started looking around and found something, and then
I got engaged into movies to train my English again.
I got curious, and I also realized started reading and
it was very hard for me because even though I
had this foundation of ten years of English that was
ten years ago, and it's hard. If you don't have
the vocabulary, you rather prefer the German. But for some

(30:19):
reason this time I came into it and so I
was trying hard to battle my English understanding. Reading was hard,
but it was okay and Sunnily, I found a whole
new world of people. I'm interested. I'm a deep tech person.
I belonged mentally in the Silicon Valley crowd, and Germany
in many cases, was so far behind. And then suddenly

(30:43):
podcasting came along. And the interesting part is I read
it in two thousand and four. There was some reports
in German, but it never clicked. And I do have
a very bad memory, but I can totally remember. Sitting
in my office. It was the fifteenth October of two
thousand and four. I was on the Engadget website. I
pressed play on a web player and it hit me

(31:03):
after fifteen second, Oh my god, I can have free
English content as much as I want in the topics
I want because I'm interested in tech, I'm interested in
the nerds stuff, and I can, Oh my god, I
can have hours and hours of audio input. And I
started really listening for I would say two years, several

(31:24):
hours a day to all kinds of podcasts, and I
was happy and my English was getting better. And then
I moved over. This is where we met, for example,
to meet those kind of people. I was part of
that crowd. I was just living on a different continent.
But then going over, it became more and more easy
to engage in this kind of language. And nowadays I'm

(31:45):
so bad. I can't go to the movies because they
all still show dubbed movies. I only watch DVDs or
I watch American television through VPN services. And I live
in an international world. I live and think in English.
Have friends go to me and say, you're German. You're
supposed to at least try to speak German with us,

(32:06):
And it's becoming more difficult because English really is an
easier language, and it all goes back to the separation
of the languages. As a German, some people now start
to go international. They go starting to look around and
not just use it as an holiday thing, and they
are excited. For example, if they can find free content online,

(32:28):
they sometimes even pay for it, for example through companies
like Audible or similar like that. But it's a hard thing.
Only Amazon and Co. Made it possible that, for example,
you can buy DVDs which I also have the English track.
That is a big change because before you only could
buy the video cassette with the one track, and I

(32:50):
would have been German or you would have had to
add imports. And most companies only still provide German content
and you have to go through bigger length to get
the English content or other foreign content. And the amusing
part is that actually Audible is one of the few
companies at all which provides you also access to the
English part of the library here in Germany. So I'm here,

(33:13):
if I'm sitting here and I have Love Film, which
is the Netflix from Amazon, I only get German. I
only get the German television shows and everything, so I
don't use them. I use the American Netflix. So all
of that podcasting in a way was for me my
entry drug into When you hear me speak English now
very fast, most of that comes from from podcasting.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah I can. I mean you speak English very very well.
I have to. I have to have to credit you
for being a second language. I think it could easily
become your your first language, which is I.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Mean, yeah, in Berlin you can get along without without
really speaking a new German. And we also make a
lot of fun of our English friends here who have
been living here sometimes for two or three years. And
then he goes, so, how's your German coming, and they
go And I love it because this I can participate

(34:09):
through the internet through I just watch the WUEC and
I also watched the Google Ioki note and I was
tweeting with my friends at the same time. And I
was sitting here in Berlin while it was happening at
the most Cone Center. And the only strange thing is
when they tell you, oh, yeah, now go to lunch.
Lunch it's nine o'clock in the evening, and we have

(34:30):
a chance suddenly to participate on the rest of the world.
And there's a saying I always misattributed. I think it's
not good. It's somebody else. It's Wittgenstein. I think they
say the limits of my languages are the limits of
my world. And I think that's totally true. Everything which
I can go with in English or in German, I understand,
I can participate. And for the rest it's actually a

(34:53):
little bit more complicated though, tools like on Facebook, there's
a translation button. I have Frenzy in Poland who insist
on speaking Polish on Facebook. I can actually translate it
a little bit, So Babel is getting closer. I curse
every single time when I use my Nexus, because while
the Google recognition is good in German, I have certain

(35:16):
things I just want a call and pronounce in English,
or I have English research, and they don't like me
to be bilingual. They like me to be single monolingual,
so I still have to train it a little bit.
But I'm also not the normal case. But it's getting better.
And suddenly, even when I was sitting in lubec I
only we've moved recently to Berlin. Even when I was

(35:38):
in a smaller town like BlueBag, I suddenly had access
to the world. And that's also and I still think
that podcasting has the biggest part of it. It's still
my favorite form of consumption. And I'm set mentioned to
you that I actually have to have more podcasts because
here in Berlin, suddenly I have more communing times through
public transport, running out of podcasts all the time, So

(36:02):
I'm out there and trying to figure out new stuff,
which is exciting.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, and I think, you know, as content comes into
the podcasting area, it is becoming more more global. But
I've been noticing an interesting kind of observation that I've
been hearing from others about, you know, content creation versus
kind of consumption as you look kind of globally, and
what I keep hearing is that content creation tends to

(36:30):
be more linked up with with language. Right, So in
certain countries are basically all all all countries if you
think about Mandarin and German and you know, all all
these other languages you know, around the world, people primarily
speak those local country, local country languages as their primary right.

(36:54):
So when they produce content, they are most comfortable probably
recording a podcast like this in their native language, right So,
But on the other hand, the consumption side, if they
have a second language, they're probably like, you know, a
lot like you, or they can listen to English and
they can get access to a world of content on

(37:15):
you know, in North America and it's coming out of
you know, other parts of the country. They can consume
that content. So I guess there's a little bit of
a of a struggle there. I guess is the future
of podcasting going to be more linked up with different
languages around the world. So if you think about the
size of China and how China is starting to show

(37:37):
up in the top five ranked most downloaded podcast countries, right,
it's number four already and it's starting to ramp up.
And other countries like Japan and Korea are also rising
up and they're already in the top ten. So you're
starting to see these these languages that are very global,
right and have lots and lots of people out there,

(37:58):
and more and more people that will be able to
consume that local language content. What do you think is
going to wind up happening? Is English going to maintain
its dominance in podcasting or do you think that from
a content production standpoint that other languages are going to

(38:19):
start dominating this from a content provider perspective, and is
there going to be an audience for that stuff if
people are listening mostly to English content.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
I actually started when I heard that fifteenth of October,
and I started my own podcast somewhere in the middle
of November. And it took me that long to get
started in podcasting because I needed to secure web server
which was safe against download numbers. I had a full
gigabyte of quota, and from time to time I would

(38:57):
help other podcasting friends who had become more popular, who
had bandwidth issues back then, and I said, I can
host some of your clients, some of your files and
a problem. And when you asked me to talk to you,
I said, okay, I haven't had a published broadcast since
two thousand and seven, and that is like nearly six

(39:17):
years ago. That's bad. But at the same time, I've
always been in that mindset of content producer. And as
you said, I'm a consultant. I teach a lot. I
love teaching normal people how to use these tools and
a variety of things. And there's one thing, and I'm
mixing five things together, but I'll get to them one
by one. Most podcasters hate all other kinds of media production,

(39:42):
and it's their downfall. They just want to do audio
and for example, don't want to do show notes or
don't think about where else they should publish it. And
they say, basically they want to be radio moderators and
want to be on radio. That's the basic behind it.
If you are a more and media producer, you have
to understand and there's a word producer in it. And

(40:05):
I when I talk to my clients. I always call
that you need to leave the point of the consumer.
As a consumer, I can say I hate video. As
a producer, I have to say it doesn't matter if
I hate it or not. What's my audience? What do
they want? And in my case, for example, when I
talked to journalists and they asked me, can we do

(40:26):
a video, my first answer is yes, And I hate
video because I'm producer mindset, it doesn't matter what I want.
And I was involved in something called the European Podcast Award.
I had to leave that just because of time, but
we're still on very friendly terms and I look fascinated
at it. And we have local editors there because most
of the people produce in a local language, and I

(40:48):
only as a SAD speak German and English, and we
have people in French and an Italian and all the
other big countries and also the smaller countries. And as
you said, they are more comfortable in produce using something
in their own language first, because the fluency who somebody
like myself has needs to be trained. And most people,

(41:09):
well they can understand English, cannot necessarily speak English. Often
they have accents, they have wordflow, plot problems, so that
is a hesitation, and then it's embarrassing. The smarter a
person is, the more embarrassing they find it if they
speak simple, and if you don't have a big vocabulary,

(41:30):
you have to speak simple. Hi, my name is Nicole.
I come from Berlin. And that's embarrassing if you're an
intelligent person. So you need to get over this. And
the same when you start podcasting at all in any language,
you have as oh my god, how does my voice sound?
How is that? And this is like doubled when it's

(41:51):
a foreign language unless you're really confident. And I have
the advantage. I knew that people like my voice, and
I was back in two thousand and four, only one
of the few German podcasters. I also am a woman,
and I'm talking about tech. I knew I had a
kind of audience, and they told me years later year
in the beginning that English was okay, but well, your

(42:14):
voice was nice. That was fine for me. The reason
to start podcasting, by the way, was to have a
reason to speak English. Because of my daily life, I
didn't have no reason at all to speak English, so
that was my speaking of English. The part what you
said about the difference between production and consumption. If I
want to start something, I will naturally think about the

(42:37):
local language because I'm more safe and and I feel
more comfortable. I know the words. It is not so
much effort. And I can also talk to an audience
which I know over the years, especially through my listening,
through my watching of movies and TV shows. I also
build up pop culture knowledge, so I can talk to
you about I know what Kansas means, and I know

(43:00):
what the red Shoes means, and I also know some
other things. And that learn lowhand currently still is in
the bettery Ford clinic. That's a whole different world. And
if I'm not engaged in that, I also feel hesitant
because if I do talk about things, I might not
be using the right stuff. That's the flip side for

(43:21):
the For example, American producers, if they would start sometimes
to think about that a lot of their audience comes
from the outside, maybe they wouldn't be so so specific.
Like my standard example for that is don't say, oh,
think about your for one k, but how you could
say think about your retirement. Both would be understood, but

(43:43):
your international audience would say, oh, retirement, because Americans very
often are so obnoxious. We learned that for one k
is that retirement thing. But at the end of the day,
that's something why more consumption is done. You only have
to have a passive understanding. Most of them want to
learn language about that, and also that's maybe another missing part.

(44:05):
I have a lot of offering in German for tech,
but quite honestly, I like to listen to the Silicon
Valley level and that's not what's provided here. So I'm
looking out the higher quality. And to be not nice
again to you, you have a league of soccer players
and take the take the best team you have and

(44:25):
send it to the World Cup. Chances if you if
you get to the half final, that would be a surprise,
because I'm sorry, because you're not that good. It's like,
by any chance could happen, but you are not that good.
Because the level which is played here in soccer or
football as we like to say, is so much higher

(44:46):
and so much advanced that you can try as much
as you want, you get the old stars and they
still king. As in your case. So in converse, when
I listen to tech podcast, even though language is German
and even though they might be clever people, I can
listen to the source. If I'm interested in fashion or whatever,

(45:07):
I probably will watch directly stuff from New York Fashion
Week and not what I have around here in Berlin.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
So that is.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
Important, is the thing you're talking about something where somebody
else is offering it at a higher quality content wise,
then you might have a harder time for people to listen.
If you but somebody in an audience where you talk
to what I like to call normal people, whether the
language of English is not as high, you have a
much better chance of producing in local language. You have

(45:37):
the research in English, you can listen to the English
stuff and you translated. Germany is quite known for their
copycats in startup land, and that's not very much that
we are just copying in ideas and executing them better.
It's also adapted to the local market. And adapted to
the local market means, for example, in applications, I have
the right time zone, my week starts on money and

(46:00):
not on Sunday. It's all the little things, and so
depending on the audience you're targeting, it can make so
much more sense to go for a local thing. If
I listen, for example, to a TV show a podcast
which talks about the current things in America and I listen,
for example, to Framerate, they talk about cable cutting, they're

(46:22):
talking about HBO, they're talking about the new seasons. It
took me a while to even learn that you have
seasons in America, for example, now everything has stopped, everything
has finished, that you have your reruns. Because here in Germany,
when we have an American television show, it's just shown
and we were wondering, why the hell do you always
have a Christmas episode or a Halloween episode. Well, because

(46:46):
you know when it's going to air, and you know
it's going to be the right time, we have them
in the middle of the summer and this kind of stuff,
so we go back to the point of consumption. Is
also the exotic window into the world I can get
to experience other ideas. There was a feedback I was
always getting when I said, why the hell do you

(47:06):
listen to me? It is like I like to talk,
like to train my English, but just out of curiosity,
why And they would go, well, you have a different
perspective on things, and you have a different viewpoint, and
some of that we haven't thought about before. So that
is something where you start listening to others and say, hey,
I can have a window into their world, how their

(47:28):
daily life is. I learned through podcasting, for example, how
bismal the American healthcare system is. As one podcaster told me, well,
I'm really feeling sick. Sick. I think I have broken whips,
but I need to wait until I can get into
the er because I otherwise cannot pay to go there,
and I can't even go there for coughing medicine. It's

(47:49):
like what And that gives you a different perspective on
the international part. So content production, especially if you want
to make earn money, for example, you have to go
local language because you will not get any local advertisement.
To go anything international, that's not going to work.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah, So the whole aspect of content production versus consumption,
I think is a different situation. Yes, But I also
wonder about, you know, the huge languages around the world,
like Mandarin and other languages, I mean even even German.
What is the future of consumption of podcasts coming out

(48:31):
of those countries. Is it going to need to follow
the same paradigm somewhat of what's happening here in North
America where it's put out as English, or are we
going to see big podcasters come out of like China
that will be in Mandarin, that will find global success,

(48:55):
just not in the English speaking countries, or it will
just be people this speak Chinese in all countries around
the world. So it becomes kind of a different kind
of a market for podcasting compared to what we've seen today.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Professional interest besides, how much interest do you have that
there are suddenly five million podcasts in German? You personally, I.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
Don't have a lot of desire to listen to because
I don't speak German. So it's so it really comes.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
That's exactly it comes again. The limits of my languages
are the limits of my world. I don't care what's
happening in India, and the only thing I care about
Indian is like Indian food, and I really love it.
I don't care about Mandarin, even though as far as
I understand, the Chinese languages have the problem if you
didn't learn them as a child, Really we as Westerners

(49:46):
lost the hearing, the hearing that we can differentiate the language.
I also sound sensitive, so different kind of screaming doesn't
work for me. So for me personally and for everybody
who's listening, the question is a metal question. If you
want to be a producer and you want to have

(50:06):
world fame and you want to grow, and then you
need to look at market and say, Okay, maybe there's
one billion Chinese. That's a great potential. But those one
billion Chinese have a monthly earning off and I don't
on the market blah blah blah. H I go to
Germany and find some German. They are not that many Germans,
but at the same time there's a huge market. So

(50:26):
that's a different discussion than Hey, me myself. I want
to do something, I want to experience something, And that's
an important question I personally, I thought about it in
the past because it has become very often a statement, Oh,
look at China, everybody is going to speak Chinese, and
I think, no, my world is going to be English

(50:47):
and German and anything which automatic translation will be doing.
And especially because I am in to tech, my world
will be focused around North America, most pecifically the West Coast.
So it depends always what kind of audience do you
want to reach. If you want to reach a general audience,

(51:08):
you could say I'm going to Italian, French and German.
At the same time we make same content production, have
then locally translated it, and we have one time effort
and have it doubled in four languages English, Italian, French
and German or whatever, and have it adapted. That could
be a great content strategy if it's just a personal
or semi professional podcaster. I adapted a long time ago,

(51:31):
once I reached that level of fluency. All my communication
is in English. If you see on any of them
on my channels a German thing, it's because I did
it on exit And my Facebook is English, my Twitter
is English, My Google Plus, where I write is English.
My podcasting sometimes when I do it, is also in
English because I know and there's many friends of mine

(51:52):
who mix languages, who go partly English partly German. But
you see that and you see a German here, you
see Polish there, you see something you don't know someplace else.
You don't speak those languages. It annoys you and your
unsubscribe or you unfollow and everything. And this is why
I tell you I keep everything one hundred percent English.

(52:12):
So you're happy because I'm coming to you in a
language you speak, because you, on the other side, are
my quote unquote market. Because I want to talk to you.
I want to engage with you, and that's not not
the German audience. And I struggle very much with it
because basically I have a split personality, especially professional wise.

(52:33):
I do have a name here in the German market.
I have, as you said, I have a book and
I have a readier training which by for example, I'm German,
and I have to redo them completely in English. Because
of the examples and everything, every kind of effort I
can put into marketing. For example, I'm looking more towards
English because I can hire somebody from anywhere of the

(52:54):
world as long as they speak English. I have the
world as my customer base. In theory, my tax account
and told me I'm allowed to make business with the
US and with Switzerland and the West of the European
Union more tax laws. He doesn't know. So I have
the world at my feet, but my tax account and
is telling me I cannot do business with the West.

(53:16):
So we're moving to a global world where we speak
clusters of languages, and the real life things haven't really
caught up with that. Legislation still is very much located
in the local areas. Like I have to buy my
DVDs from the UK to get my English language. I
cannot buy them in America because it's the wrong region code.

(53:38):
And podcasting has this beneficial thing because most of them
are free or there's no mechanism to pay them for.
Most of them are free available through itones, and everybody
can can use them or some other player wherever you
get it from, and it's accessible from everywhere, and is
I think the part where podcasting also drew so much.

(54:00):
Being somebody who has been around in two thousand and four,
I remember the June of I think it's June or
July of two thousand and five when Apple switched on
iTunes and we had a strong community going on, very grassroot,
but that community was not solified enough to withstand the
not eight hundred but eight thousand pound gorilla of iTunes.
I mentioned before, I lent my gigabyte of bandwidth, and

(54:24):
there were some people. It was end of the month
iTunes was started, and he said, yay, iTunes is coming
in podcasting, and two days later they said, and my
quota is gone. And it was like the second of
the next month, like three days later he said, yay,
it's gone again. Because suddenly the masses came along and
said yay podcasting, and this is something where podcasting never

(54:47):
has recovered from. And this is also I think why
it's still a little bit step childish because it never
had the chance to grow enough strong enough. Except for
certain exceptions. I love how the quality production of most
of the podcast has gone up. That's also hindering for
some people because it's not just me and my headset anymore,

(55:07):
but it's I. I complimented you before on your great
sound recording, and I paid a lot of attention to
that myself. When we have that, and it's so amazing.
There are so many different aspects and it's so fragmented
at the same time, and it's it's hard to see
where it's going to be in the future. I just
know one thing, audio for me, in whatever form it

(55:28):
comes along, is part of my daily life. It's the
topics I'm interested in, and I'm into the tech stuff
and everything, and whatever other topic you might have. You
can go out and find something to your interest based
in the languages you are interested in, and this is
why it's great that is produced in the local languages.
Maybe you want to learn French or Italian and you

(55:51):
can go and probably find your tech podcast in Italian
if that is something you're interested in, and that's awesome.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Yeah, I think. I mean the choice is really what's
so powerful about it, and it is free. Though I
think that there's probably going to be a movement towards
a little bit more monetization on kind of paid podcasts
at some point, but I think it's just it's just
a matter of time before it kind of a certain
subset of content moves in that direction, and that the

(56:20):
platforms will support monetization on. It's very similar to like
an audiobook model, is why I think where it will
wind up at some point. But I do still come
back to this language thing though. Huge growth in content
production in places like China or in Spain or are

(56:45):
probably not going to impact me directly and my consumption
of podcasts. I'm looking at it more from a global
perspective and how that might impact kind of overall podcasting
and how it's going to grow. And I I really
am strongly starting to think that language is going to
be the key driver of success for the overall podcasting

(57:08):
in general.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Well, you have a part, and this is something where
I don't try to be mean but it's nice to
make fun of Americans once in a while because especially
and I put in the UK in a similar world,
the monolingual English speaking world has a hard time understanding
that there's a West of the world. And I always

(57:31):
call it a stepchild syndrome. I am, I'm a stepchild.
You're the real child. And I always get told, well,
not for you. So you have some famous podcasters as
go oh, we have a competition and everything, and it's
awesome on the US for those few states, and it's like, hey,
I'm listening too. I have my own reach. I can

(57:51):
bring stuff out. I make recommendations about the things you
can buy in the US. I regularly buy in the
US every time somebody like myself comes over. We have
people before we send out. I buy my stuff on Amazon,
get it delivered to a friend who then brings it
to me to the hotel where we meet, and then
I bring it back. We usually have an empty suitcase
with that because we bring so much stuff back because

(58:13):
the exchange rate is so great, and we have this
kind of stuff where we go around and as you said,
the language part, is it going to impact you personally? Know?
Except you want to learn something new, but you are
as the receiver a kind of set. And I wanted
to say about the monetization. Many people always think you
have to do payment for that kind of stuff. I

(58:35):
think it's a great thing if you have advertisement, if
you have some kind of other why other ways I've done,
for example, podcasts in the past. I like to do
pre conference podcasts, and my benefit my payment out of
that for putting in that kind of work was, first
of all, I got to talk to a lot of
interesting people. And I'm an introvert, so it's harder for

(58:59):
me to talk to people, which you probably wouldn't be
listening to this, But it's not hard for me, and
I'm not shy or anything, but it's an effort for
me to say and work a room or anything. By podcasting,
I have people passing me by, turning around and say,
you're only call right. I recognize your voice, so I
put something in. I get a feedback, and I can

(59:19):
also tell you let me, for example, as a podcaster,
give me sometimes reasons to do demographics. I can tell
you something about myself. I'm mildly willing to give you
some information as a podcaster, and then you can tell people, well,
we have an international audience. We have an audience from
thirty to something. This is their school degree, and blah
blah blah. You came back to the question and leading

(59:42):
up to that, if it doesn't concern me personally, should
it concern me on a global level that changes are
done because the audience is just so much bigger, for example,
in China or in India. And I think yes, because
if I'm an international company and I say, well, I
have money you spend on a podcast or on some
other way, and there we have a billion Chinese or

(01:00:05):
we have just two hundred and eighty million US citizens.
Let's go with the Chinese. Then it could be relevant
also for big language clusters like Spanish or like English,
because maybe those people then say, well, I have an
easier time going to that audience. And also there's a
part when certain changes are happening, like it's great that

(01:00:29):
the app economy is coming out of Silicon Valley, but
in traditional mobile sense, America is something which I have
fun with every single time I'm over there, every time
I make a photograph of some advertisement where they call
it least dropped calls of all the providers drop calls
in Germany happen when you drive on the Autobahn with
two hundred and you have a phone conversation and you're

(01:00:51):
changing towers, and even then you don't have drop calls.
So there's different technical standards and there's different movement towards it,
and it seems totally unrelated. But there was a big
article on supply change management chain management from Apple and
they actually said, well, we produce in China because we

(01:01:12):
have customers worldwide, and why not produce in China, especially
when there is a scale we can get if we
need thirty thousand workers today additional to what we have
in America. We don't even have it all over America
in China, we just go over to the next company
who has them. And there's this outcry from the Americans,

(01:01:35):
for example, to say, oh, it has to be produced
in the US because otherwise, And that's the point when
I say, well, there's a global world and we have
money too. And by the way, are you realizing what
it means if you think in local terms? And this
is why the keynote from Apple was so interesting, because
the MacBook pro is going to be assembled in the US,

(01:01:58):
which probably just means putting three pieces together, but suddenly
it has the label done in the US. And by comparison,
if I, for example, look at the market. You were
again talking about the global perspective. If I speak here
in Germany English, and you need a producer for your podcast,
or you need somebody to do something for your podcast,

(01:02:19):
everything is virtual. I can do that from here. I
may have different living costs, and suddenly there is a
movement from the international side and the international production levels
because maybe I'm fully trained and it doesn't really matter.
For example, if I only speak Chinese and I just
need to clean up your audio and get all the
ams and the ooms, and if you pay me two

(01:02:41):
dollars an hour, I'm richly paid. That is a different
perspective on global So it's great and relevant to look
at these global movements and pay attention closely to them
to identify the chances. Hey, maybe I can do something
in a different language and have more, more reach or
more But also the parts where it's about going to

(01:03:02):
different markets. And there's one tip. If you really have
a successful podcast, for example, and you have the content,
because it's always about the content, do start, for example,
talking to others and make alliances with them and say,
for example, to the German, Hey, we're going to help
you out with the content. We produce the stuff, we

(01:03:23):
make stuff for you, we make bumpers or whatever, we
make them a little bit more international, so they are
also consumable by a German. And then suddenly could you
could have an international reach with somebody producing the same
thing in German and just reading show notes or whatever.
And it doesn't matter that you don't speak German, because
then it's your brand which can grow and go international.

(01:03:47):
So there's a lot of chances and opportunities, but first
you have to realize that there is a world out there.
And I love your numbers, especially talking on the Chinese part,
because today they speak Chinese, but tomorrow they could also
listen in English and again become my customers. It's a

(01:04:08):
running joke with Americans, and there is the same version
of making fun of Europeans, for example of not going
out in English. So I can provide you with them
as well. But saying, have you ever looked at your numbers?
Have you ever looked at your numbers of how much
of the traffic is coming from outside of the US,
And have you ever thought about what it means that

(01:04:29):
you treat them like stepchilds. Well, I think that you
don't acknowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
That the trend that we're seeing here is the consumption
side in China is really starting to take over. And
I could see within the next maybe the next year
or two, that China rises up to the number one
position and displaces the United States from a consumption perspective
right just because of sheer numbers. I mean, I think

(01:04:54):
that there's more people connecting to the Internet now over
their mobile phones or tablets or whatever in China than
the entire population in the United States right now. So
clearly you can see that the path that that's on
is going to be is going to take them up

(01:05:14):
past the UK and pass the United States to be
the number one consuming country for on demand media content.
And it's going to impact more than just podcasts. It's
going to impact music. It's going to impact all sorts
of stuff, depending.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
On what's everything blocked or not.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
Blocked by the big Chinese red firewall.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Yeah, and you have a point in there, And this
is why I asked to start basically with my story
of rejecting English till two thousand and two. Really rejecting
it and then getting back into it. And I would
say by by like six years later, by two thousand
and eight, I had roughly the fluency I have today.
So I got back into that. But I had the

(01:05:55):
big advantage. I only had to recover. I only had
to recover and learn vocabulary because the groundwork was laid
and we always had in the back of our mind
that there is a bigger world out there and it's
English speaking, so that it was a given which I
was growing up with. So for me, it was always
clear there was more to see outside. Imagine me being

(01:06:16):
a little village. I always knew that there was a
big town and the challenge I see with the American
market and to a degree with the UK market, but
they are on a little island, and that's special in itself.
I love it when I talk about the Central European
stuff and it's like, yeah, what's that Central European stuff?
That's very different now. But the Americans are growing up

(01:06:40):
with we are the world and it sounds maybe harsher
than I mean it, but there is the sense of
like we are the top of the food chain, and
you never came to the idea that there might really
be something else out there. And every time I'm in America,
I watch television and America has a huge size, and
that's part of the problem. The news start with what's

(01:07:01):
happened locally, then your state, and maybe the country, and
if it's something really, really big, then maybe you'll get
a note of two seconds of oh, there's the rest
of the world. Because in American, in is someplace in
a world, but everything is so American focused that you
grow up with this understanding of this is like everything
there is so for you. The idea of China or

(01:07:24):
somebody else coming is going to send you from going
to put you into more challenges than for me. Take,
for example, a pupil who always or a student who
always has been bad grading by and I'm not saying
he has a three level because you're American. I'm going
to say he has a sea level sea level to
D level. That person has learned failure all of his

(01:07:47):
life and knows how to deal with it, knows he
needs to get at least a C to get something
like college or whatever. He's used to that. And this
is me knowing that there's another language world out there.
You basically are the a student who for the first
time suddenly gets an F in a very important test.
You're screwed. You're screwed because you have no coping mechanism.

(01:08:09):
You don't understand what's happening. You suddenly get views from
your parents and you don't. Really this is I'm not exaggerating,
this is what happening in the mindset of that kind
of people said, Oh my god, and you are much
You're falling much harder and have a much harder time
to get back from that. This is why we sometimes
hear when really good students get suddenly a bad note,

(01:08:31):
they kind of fall into depression and really go off
the whales because they are hit so hard and it's
so unexpected. And I think something not similar, but slow
roughly along those lines could happen to you if you don't,
for example, pay attention to what's happening in China, and
you said something very important the consumption and China is

(01:08:53):
going through a mobile and if I'm a producer on
a global scale, I need to realize I need to
observe to be the producer, not the consumer. The consumer
and American market who has a bad network and has
data cabs or whatever I need to look at this
Chinese market and say, if they are going like this
today and that's working, what does that mean, for example,

(01:09:17):
for the future. Here German Telecom has just made very
many enemies by threatening net neutrality because they're imposing a
data cap of two hundred gigabytes that seems ridiculous to
most people currently. And I watched last year Wimbledon through
BBC streaming and the Olympics and I used one hundred
and thirty gigabytes in a month. But still there's a

(01:09:39):
lot of stuff coming and they're preparing for the future.
You may not hit the two hundred gigabytes now, but
give HD television through streaming on the internet. And as
you know, most of the Netflix stuff is making by numbers,
forty percent of the American web traffic in the evenings
as far as i'm and if you look at the futures,

(01:10:02):
and Netflix's video has nothing to do with podcasts, but
you have so many similarities that you need to look
to the big brother like television, like streaming like Netflix,
and you need to look to the other countries like
China or some other things to say, wait a moment,
they're coming from mobile and then you look around. Most
people nowadays don't consume anything through their desktop. They have

(01:10:25):
their tablets, they have their mobile phones. That's the point
when you start looking around saying, okay, do we have
any working podcasting clients who actually do this kind of
downloading who support multiple devices. It doesn't matter if you
have an iOS device or an Android device. You need
to think in multiple devices, how does my stuff look

(01:10:47):
on the different platforms? Do I maybe provide different options
for subscribing. One of the things I like of the
Twitter network is they provide audio, and they also provide
different versions of video, and you can do live streaming.
If you want an awesome I would like to listen
to the Gilmore Gang, but the only way to get
that is to subscribe to a weekly video which is

(01:11:09):
a gigabyte back for an hour, and I just want
to listen to the audio. I'm not subscribing to that.
So looking at things like China is mostly mobile, we
all have mobile phone, where is the shift? And then
again we come to please look at your numbers, and
most people are very surprised when they look at the
statistic and realize most statistics have a setting for at

(01:11:30):
least when you look at stuff like Google Analytics. They
can tell you how many Android visitors you have, how
many iPad visitors you have, And most people never look there,
and suddenly they realize, oh, shoot, twenty five percent already
coming to a website through mobile devices. Most of them
are iOS. And our player on our website.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Is flash and it does super and.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
It doesn't play, and it doesn't see. And this is
again where I see with many of the successful pot casters,
this is what they understand. I need to provide texts
so people can the search engines can scan the text,
send me visitors. I need them to have a website
which is confined enough that anybody who comes through anything

(01:12:14):
like a link from a friend, like a like from
a Facebook, a tweet or whatever, they come to my
web page, they come to my player and say, oh
this is interesting. This is, for example, why you're never
linked to an audio file. You always link to a
blog posting. And they could come from anywhere. So what
is this podcast about? And maybe they want to listen
through a mobile device. Maybe I have different options, different

(01:12:35):
variations of that, and I hopefully have at least a
simple I just thought about it today because I was
walking and looking at my stream of podcasts I have
in there, and I think I have twenty podcasts on
my mobile device, and I actually five of them don't
have cover art. And the people who have cover art,
the good ones, is which I can just roughly look

(01:12:57):
at and I know, oh, this is where I want
to click on when it's all the small little details.
And this comes the global perspective again. In the past,
you wear the single person who did something in your
small village, and suddenly everybody can reach your customers or
reach your listeners. And this is what I call and
this is sway and till I'm a consultant. This is

(01:13:18):
what I call the airback principle. You're bringing out a
new car, that's awesome, But if you tell the market
you don't have any airbags in it, that's interesting. But
nobody's going to buy your car because people are used
to having airbacks left, right, center and whatever. So in
terms of podcasting, I expect great quality. I expect good

(01:13:38):
download numbers, good download speed. I expect it to be
an image. I expected to some degree to be shown
notes and so on. And this is where the global
perspective comes in again. If the world suddenly has access
to your listeners, and you're just going by and not
being great with that, and suddenly somebody comes from the
outside in does it better. And there's a flip side

(01:14:01):
to the local produced content. The local produced content and
local language usually is of a lower quality content wise
than what we have internationally because they don't have to
try so hard. And I'm always looking forward when the Americans,
most of them, finally get their act together and say
there is a market one hundred twenty million Germans speaking
in Europe alone, Awesome, we want that. Then they come

(01:14:23):
in like the professionals, and they pull out all the
stops and do all the professional stuff, making the local
ones look old to that degree. And so it's a
highly interesting thing to watch it from both of the sides,
like from the German side as well as from the
English side. So this is exciting. This is what you

(01:14:44):
call popcorn. You just sit back and say, okay, let's
watch how that works, and then move on from there
and say, okay, your mobile example has an equivalent in America,
and that's the consoles listening to American podcast I know.
Then in America, consoles have a lot of connection to
the TVs, have apps, in there. You have your Netflix,

(01:15:06):
you have your Hulu, and you have some other stuff.
And as far as I know, I think it's is
it Stitcher or what is it? What you have on
the consoles to access podcasting? There is something well.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
It depends on which console you talked me. You're talking
about Xbox. It does not have any podcast app currently
in it today, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
The step Child Audio again, but but I think some
of some of them have have something.

Speaker 1 (01:15:30):
So Yeah, Stitcher is in cars and in phone apps
and things like that is primarily where they're at today.
And they also have a website too that you can
play off of it as well.

Speaker 2 (01:15:44):
Yeah when when and now I come, I'm the normal person.
I don't have a desktop anymore. This is about watching
trends again. But suddenly everybody goes to the entertainment center
and says, okay, I don't have my radio station anymore.
I have my entertainment center. And then this is why,
as a podcaster, I need to have a look at
what's happening with the consoles and who can we support

(01:16:07):
to finally also have maybe podcasts on there. And this
is also about spreading your stuff everywhere who might want
to listen to it. And this is where it would
be great if more people would work together and say
not I want to play in my own little sandbox,
but work together and say, dear Microsoft, dear Sony, we
want you also to provide that part with the audio

(01:16:31):
because we have content. This is then again where usually
those console providers say, well, there's no business model behind it.
This is when we go back to podcasting slightly being
the step child, not so grown, not so big as
a video. But at the end of the day, and
that ties back to the question I ask you about
your languages. Do you really care you personally how much

(01:16:54):
video content is out there? And if you're like me,
you probably will say, nah, I don't I do video.
I watch video some things, but my main consumption is
not YouTube. My main consumption is my audio. So I
would use even a console maybe a little bit for gaming,
but also I would never use it for TV because
I don't watch TV. So give me, give me audio.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
Well, I mean a lot of people, especially younger people,
will get like maybe an Xbox or or you know,
a PS four, PS three to put in their their
living room and they may have a studio apartment or
something like that and that is their like their radio, right,
it could be their radio. And actually one of the
most popular apps on the Xbox console today is Pandora,

(01:17:40):
So it does kind of speak to that console concept
of being kind of the center of your entertainment in
your home per se, not so much when you're out
of the house, but I mean clearly because you're totally
away from it. But but yeah, I mean, I I
think that that the con is important piece to this,

(01:18:01):
but but I do think that mobile is is far
more important. And yes, and I also need to speak
you know, I speak a lot about Chinese and kind
of how they're going to sit at the number one ranking.
But if you look at all the other languages of
the world, you know, the Spanish and Russian and French
and all those, there's hundreds of millions of people that

(01:18:23):
speak those languages.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
The question gets back to and they still and they
still prefer those languages. And if you take out the French,
who are kind of special about the language, out of that,
then actually you also have the part where even in
the future, as much as I like the Babelfish and everything,
and as much as I do daily talking in English,

(01:18:47):
German will still always have a different meaning to me
than any other language. Sorry I interrupted, And.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
That the bigger perspective is that I wonder though in
each of those countries, is the bigger media companies or
the state run kind of media in each of those
countries will they produce content in English and in the
local language. Now, granted, it's probably more difficult for a

(01:19:13):
small content provider to produce two different versions of their show,
one in English and one in local language. But will
the bigger media companies in those countries do both? Because
they have the resources to do that, and maybe they
have a desire to reach a global audience more than
maybe a local podcast or might.

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
Yeah, and you had and I'm a bad girl because
I had my mobile phone lying next to me, so
I checked my email because I can listen to you
and still look at my email. But I do have
a point with this. I got a message from Facebook
that day. Actually, now I'm finally also supporting hashtags new
with Facebook, and Facebook is a great example. I loved

(01:19:57):
it when Facebook started to become bigger. And I saw
that in America, of course, and I had a relevancy
and they were trying to get speaking Igcy in Germany
and they were told, yeah, you can come at one
bitch big digital conference and you can have that room
over there and then you can have a conversation and blah.
And they said no, we want to do the keynote.
And the conference organizers went why because we have Facebook,

(01:20:19):
where the world leading network, and he said yeah, but
not in Germany. We had a competitor, a copycat coach
studifod set which was really like the German audience was
on one of those networks and Facebook was like, eh,
something people do who also had American friends or international
friends similar to that. We don't use LinkedIn. We have

(01:20:40):
a different network here and you have a second profile
on LinkedIn for your international contacts. And they were shocked
by that. And Facebook is nowadays the number one network
in Germany. And that only changed and started since they
actually started to have their interface in German, because for
it was in English, was not easily understood, was not

(01:21:05):
usable for most people who don't have affluency in English,
and they are hesitant against English they used, and the
other one, which looks completely the same, is available in German.
Think again about the podcast I have a tech podcast
in English? Or just take something I have a cooking
podcast or whatever, or in science fiction podcasts in English,
or I have the same in German. The one in

(01:21:26):
German has roughly the same content. I can understand it.
But I'll go to the German one. But if the
other thing also comes in German, sadly I will switch
over to the more international one because they will have
better stories, more interesting guests and everything. And this is
what you said with your second point, the international companies
will they be producing internationally only if they have an

(01:21:48):
international mindset. And if you have an international mindset, you
don't go out and you go out and make the
work correctly the first time. And I call that the
basement prens. Imagine you actually have built a house and
it doesn't have a basement, and it has a flat riff,
and suddenly you have the idea you want to have
a basement. That's going to be maybe impossible and very

(01:22:11):
expensive because you didn't plan it from the get go.
If you had planned from the get go, you had
a kind of basement, not very built out, the dry
walls on the wall still, but you had a basement.
At a later point, you can make it pretty. And
this is when you plan say okay, we have this
English speaking podcast, we're also going to have that in
French and in Italian, and we need to have those

(01:22:34):
steps for translation. We need to have graphics, we need
to have this, we need to have that. If you
plan it correctly, lay it all out, you know how
to streamline this kind of process and say okay, we
need this, we need that. At that point we can
go to that direction. And for example, the people always
go and say Microsoft is so slow in releasing, for example,

(01:22:57):
their operating system. What most people don't know is when
for example, Microsoft is releasing something, they're releasing in like
I don't know how many languages, and we're not just
talking about the big languages like French, German, Spain or whatever.
I once worked and there, like like's if it's spoken
by three people. I always select customer with my old company,

(01:23:20):
and we would get I would get every single month,
like twenty five disc with fifty five version of languages.
But that takes time if you want to translate it
good and properly into all of these languages, So it
costs you a little bit time. But those international companies,
I know, for example, the Huffington Post wants to go locally.
Here in Germany, they've been searching for people left and right.

(01:23:43):
But the problem then usually is a cultural one. It's
not the production process. They could do it. You write
your American stories and then you just let them translate. Awesome, right,
you know who Ariana Arianna Huffington is, and you know
who Kobe Bryant is, and you know who all Like
Baldwin is the German maybe knowing who all Like Baldwin is,

(01:24:03):
but who's this Kobe? And isn't that a beef? So
you also need them to think internationally in sense of Okay,
if I go, for example, into the local market, what
do I have to do and adapt content WI so
people understand it. But if you plan that properly, and
the big companies who have their resources, if they have

(01:24:26):
the mindset, they will build a house with basement and
an empty roof so they can go full force. But
it takes a little bit of a different thinking sometimes.
For example, when you say, oh, you can watch us
live at five pm Western Eastern time or Central time,
I know by now what time that is in my

(01:24:48):
time translation, because I know you don't give me the
exact numbers. I also can translate ounces. I can translate inches.
It would be so much easier. For example, if you
have a production podcast. I know I'm talking video again.
I like to watch cooking videos. I can't cook. I'm
still hoping to learn cooking through videos. And there are
so many degrees of fahrenheit, and there are so many

(01:25:11):
ounces of something. It would be so easy for the
people to just have on the screen. Also the grams,
also the celsius. That would be so easy, and it
would increase their audience by so much. It's the little
things always which make that. But no, those production companies
that thinking they have the resources, if they come from locally,

(01:25:33):
like a German company for example, the same naivete and
the same not knowing that there's a world outside applies
to them. They go, well, we could go international, but
we are market leader here. We don't want to play
catch up in the different countries, so we stay in
our core market. And for example, the agencies and the

(01:25:54):
advertisers are not willing to support the international content. If
a German company comes out and hey, we want to
do something international, how about you American company give us
the money, they will look at that and say, our
American headquarter is handling that we come to you, but
you don't come to us. So there's this different way
to get the payment from who is taking the lead

(01:26:17):
on this kind of production. And that's moving slowly towards
a more international thinking, absolutely even from the local language markets.
But it's still going to take some time. But it's interesting.
As you mentioned, also, the consumption is different. Normal people
who lived all their life in their language bubble suddenly realize, Hey,

(01:26:37):
there's a world out there. And I have my friends
who are living now in Australia, and I have my
other friends I met in the vacation and they're in
America and they are all on Facebook and they are
talking about this and that TV show I'm interested in.
Let me check that out. So we are becoming more
global in this sense. And this is not going to
be English. As an American, I always like to say

(01:27:00):
say that English is for me, at least currently the
Lingua franca did the language everybody agreed on that we
are talking about that and in this language, and that
is many confused. That's not imperialism, that's just the thing
we all know. It could be an Esperanto, it could
be French or something else, but by chance it actually
is English. That's the kind of stuff I love talking about.

(01:27:22):
So this is more or less a problem to find.
It's not an easy topic to and we live in
a complicated world and the reflection of that, there is
no one solution to that, there is not one answer,
and it's something we will watch in the future. And
for example, you mentioned the China statistics, and I have

(01:27:45):
no interest in China, but now you spark my interest.
Now I will pay close attention to you. I don't
know where you actually posted to say, Okay, maybe he
can get me some of those China numbers, and vice versa.
I'm the one writing the German perspective sometimes something on
the European perspective. Then sometimes people come to me and say, way,

(01:28:05):
I saw your comment on that. And this is how
we truly become to a international understanding and truly start
to become more of a world and not just countries.
And as much as we have still many problems to
get over, I think we are slowly transcending towards something

(01:28:27):
where there is going to be not the world peace,
but something hopefully in that rough direction.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
And I'm looking for all we stick that the rest
of the world is joining in on the conversation and
going to be more included in the online media world.
And I think that that's a good thing, but it
is going to be shocking to a lot of people
in the United States or the English side of the
fence to figure out how to kind of take that

(01:28:58):
all in and be able to to manage it right.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
And you should do it in slow doses. And one
of the comments I very often get, and maybe that
as the last point, when they say, well, all people
I meet from Europe, from Germany, from whatever, they all
speak great English, like you, And that's the point. The
others are not talking to you because they don't feel
confident enough, because they feel stupid, because they can't express themselves.

(01:29:24):
So that is why sometimes the idea arises, well, they
can speak English anyhow, so what's the problem. Most of
the people still don't do English well or other language
as well. People who are really fluent in more than
one language are not that often. And I do get

(01:29:45):
kind of flag here. For example, I talk to a
German on from my Twitter account, I do also answer
in German in English, and then I get something, we
are both German. Why are not speaking German. That's stupid,
and you get attacked, for example for being international, for

(01:30:05):
bringing stuff over and saying well, I saw this and
this is where I have my conversations, or even saying hey,
I was in America, I was at a conference. I
spoke to these people. Oh yo, just want to show off.
So you have to have a sick fix skin to
some degree. But most people i'm meet who like myself,
we say, well, they can talk as much as they
want because the other side is much more more interesting.

(01:30:28):
So just be more a little bit more inclusive and
start looking around trying to find the people like me
and say, okay, I'm interested. I don't know, let's take
something which is totally off the job. I'm interested in
somebody in Africa. You don't need to start speaking Swahili
or whatever language is actually in there. You will find
interested people who have reached the international level who will

(01:30:52):
be happy to talk to you in English, in fluent English,
and get you a different perspective on it, and it helps.
I've never learned so much about my own country and
even my own language then since I started going into
this English sphere, because suddenly I see differences suddenly I
ask myself, Hey, why is it this in German like that?

(01:31:14):
Why are we behaving here like this? I see a
difference in my behavior. So going into a second language
also means going into a different reflection about your own country.
And even if you're old, you still can learn vocabulary.
My tip for that always is podcasting all the time,
and the biggest thing you can do is flashcard with
vocabulary and then just embrace the podcast. You can have,

(01:31:37):
take children books which you know in which books you like,
or TV shows you like, and do them in the
different language with the subtitles of the different language. Just
be prepared. That's sometimes really bad and then you realize
why all of us are actually trying to watch the originals.
But it's easy to do, and you can even do
it if you're like very old, and if you're sixty

(01:32:00):
you can start and learn a different language. It will
enrich your world. I don't think it's going to be mandering.

Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
Probably be Hey, I wanted to ask you what what
would be or where would be the best place for
people listening to this to to read up on you
and learn more about you.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
But actually I think the easiest way is for me
to get in touch, like, for example, on Twitter, that
would be Nicole Simon, and I do actually when I
blog nowadays, and this is also an interesting change. I
don't do it anymore on my blog. I mostly blog
on Google Plus and have my my things there on Facebook.

(01:32:39):
So if you just go to Nicole Dshsimon dot eu,
I have the links to all of the other places there.
And thankfully I'm usually early enough to get Nicole Simon
as a user name. Yeah, so, and that is that
is quite a quite a feed because there are so
many Nicole Simon's out there, but most of them are
much slower than I am.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
Thank you very much for sharing all your thoughts on
the show with me.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
Absolutely, and I love I love especially also the feedback
of people when in their own ideas and what they
see and also their perspective like if, for example, you're
in America and what's your what's your perspective on what
you heard? And I think this is great that you're
actually taking on this task to having these different voices.

Speaker 1 (01:33:20):
All right, Well, thank you so much for spending so
much time with me today.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
It's great, absolutely, and thank you for asking me.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
Take care all right. That was a great conversation with Nicole.
I know it was a little long, but there's a
lot of great stuff in that conversation, and I'm really
thankful to Nicole for spending so much time with me
on Skype from Berlin, Germany. So thank you, Nicole. So
I'm also going to add links to the topics that

(01:33:50):
I've discussed in this in this show on my website
as part of the blog post at Rob Greenley dot com. Yeah,
I also wanted to add some comments here that I've
appeared on my blog for last week's show. The first
one here is Jamie Davis, who runs a podcast a
network called Medicast, and that's meediccast dot com, and he says, Rob,

(01:34:15):
thanks for the information and analysis. I didn't know China
was moving up so high in the stats for all podcasters.
I thought it was just me because my shows are
medical in nature. It's a good observation. I think a
lot of podcasters had that observation about realizing that China
was going to become such a big influence in this space.
So thank you so much Jamie for the comment on

(01:34:37):
the blog. I certainly appreciate it, and as you can hear,
I love getting your ideas and your thoughts on the
show here, So please send me an email with your
thoughts or just go ahead and post a comment to
the blog here and I will definitely get it on
the show here. And if you want to send me
an MP three, I'd be happy to play that on
the show as well. To go ahead and send that

(01:34:59):
to Rob at Rob Greenley dot com. Well, that's it
for this week, and my name is Rob Greenlee, and
thanks again for listening to my thoughts here. I also
host the new Media show every Saturday morning at nine
am Pacific Standard time noon Eastern Time with Todd Cochran,
CEO of Raw Voice. You can watch it live via

(01:35:20):
video at a live dot Geeknewcentral dot com. And I
definitely want to hear your thoughts, so please send me
a tweet at Rob Greenley or just do it in
the comment area of Rob Greenley dot com. So, and
if you're a podcaster, shoot me an email to podcasts
at Microsoft dot com and I'll get your podcast in

(01:35:41):
the Windows Phone catalog. So thank you very much and
we'll talk to you next week.

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