ATP503: Podcasting and The Democratization of Storytelling

Speaker A: Asia Tech Podcast, Voice of the Asian tech ecosystem. You weren't expecting this Asia Tech podcast in 2021. Four years on, my name's Graham Brown. Now, you may not have listened to all the 500 episodes that precede this one. However, you may have heard of Asia Tech Podcast and you may be asking, why is this back? Well, it's only back for a special episode, which is really to respond to the people that I meet who say, what happened to Asia Tech podcast? You did 500 episodes and then you stopped. Well, I want to give those people an, um, answer as well as take you on a little journey today. Talk about what happened in those 500 episodes and also where we are today. Because, folks, we live at a very interesting time. We're seeing this democratization of storytelling. It's a flourishing. And the great thing about it is it's happened before. It's happened many times before in history, and it follows a similar pattern. So I want to talk about those patterns today and what's happening in tech in Asia and storytelling. So I started Asia Tech Podcast four years ago, and at the time there were really only two other podcasts in tech in Asia. Imagine that, 4 billion people. And he had Bernard Leong's Analyze Asia and you had Tim Romero's Disrupting Japan. And that was it pretty much for the whole of Asia in 2017. Forgive me if I've missed anybody out, but more or less about that time, I know, for example, China Accelerator started around that time, 2018, a bit later, and then there was a whole flourishing of tech startup related podcasts starting in 2019, 20 and now in 21. And I've. What I've done is I've collected these podcasts. So I want to document and give these podcasts the, the platform they deserve. So if you want to go to tech podcast.Asia Tech Podcast, uh, Asia. There is a regularly updated feed of the best tech podcasts in Asia. And mine as well is in there. But I'm just one of them now. Thank God. There are many people who are stepping up to the mic and telling the story of probably one of the biggest changes in our lifetime, which is the Asian century, the growth of Asia, the Asian middle classes. I talked about this in Asia Tech podcast. You know, 2/3 of the world's population, 2/3 of the world's middle class population will be living in Asia by the end of 2030. That's a combined value of about $30 trillion. And that's twice the size of the US economy today. That's just the middle class. And of course you have China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and I suppose you can include Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific part of Asia Pacific, you have all of that innovation happening at scale 10x what's happening in California today. And really one of the most exciting parts of this is people talk about digital transformation and yet really what is digital transformation? And it's happening probably at the fastest and most disruptive speed in communication. Meaning that companies really do two things. They innovate and they communicate. So they make stuff and then they sell stuff. And innovation is well established now as not being a job title or a department. It's everybody's business. You don't have an innovation manager anymore, do you? That's old fashioned. You don't have an innovation department anymore. In the same way we'll see this disruption of communication. Communication is no longer executive privilege. Communication is no longer a department. Communication is everybody's business. And this is what I call the storytelling organization. Now by default, startups are storytelling organizations. The two co founders are out there on LinkedIn, on social media, telling the story. Or they should be. If they're not, then how do people know about them? And the same challenge now awaits brands, corporates, how do we build the storytelling organization? And this is where technology comes in. Because technology takes on a pathway which is established throughout history and human history, which is technology disrupts, technology democratizes. Let's take for example the printing press, the Gutenberg printing press. Now we've got to go back a few hundred years here. Gutenberg family, they were actually minters, meaning they minted coins. So they made these machines that pressed coins, silver coins, and they would stamp them and that's how you made coins in those days. They were a Jewish family of minters and younger Gutenberg, he saw that technology and realized that I could use that with what was called movable type. I mean this is still a term we used in technology today in frameworks like WordPress Movable Type as this idea that you could take these blocks and then ink the top of them and then lay some parchment on top of that and press down the handle and then you would print the paper. And what a fantastic concept that was. And interestingly, at the time nobody really knew what this could do. Nobody really knew what this technology would do for us. And that's why the church, who were, uh, let's put it into context, who were the main patron of storytelling of the era, meaning that they would commission high end manuscripts. There were, these would be like departments, there were Departments inside churches and monasteries, in particular, called scriptoriums. And monks would write with quill and gold leaf on these beautiful manuscripts. And some of them are still available today, like the Book of Kells, which sells for millions. And they were handwritten by monks who would spend their lifetime creating this beautiful art. Like, they would do the drop caps, or one monk would do, maybe illustrations, or one monk would do the leaf, or one monk would do maybe the vines that threaded through the text on the paper in front of them. And there were teams, huge teams. These were hugely expensive. So the volume of books back then was very small. If you had a book, it would usually be chained to the pulpit of a church. Because they were so valuable and because they were limited in distribution, they were written in Latin. So what did that mean? It meant that if you, as a farmer, had a dispute or you had transgressed it, maybe some moral code, maybe you had an affair with somebody or fathered a baby somewhere in another village, then the priest could read out to you what you needed to do. Oh, well, you need to atone, uh, for your sins, my son, and pay the church 20 pieces of silver. And where does the moral authority come from? It comes from that manuscript. And yes, it's written in Latin. So a farmer can't read that. He just has to take the moral authority of the priest verbatim. Now, that means that the lack of supply of storytelling and the control of storytelling isn't just about access to stories. It's about access to reality. Because if that's what it says here, that's what you believe. And if I control here, I control what you believe. Now, where does the church and the printing press come in? Interestingly, the church was one of the original sponsors and patrons of the press because they realized, actually they could print pamphlets and they could distribute pamphlets, maybe with moral teachings or news to the masses. And so they realized, actually, this was pretty good as a communication technology. And yet what happened was, is by virtue of the technology being distributed to the masses, the masses, particularly the educated masses, started learning how to use this technology and thought, well, in fact, actually, these printing presses, they are, uh, no, not necessarily, you know, the prerogative of the church. I can use one of these as myself, if I'm slightly wealthy and I've got an opinion, I can print. And that's what happened, that the educated elites, the opinionated, those with resources and time, started printing their own material. And that's where it started getting out of hand. Because the material they started printing wasn't the Official narrative. In some ways, it would be critical of the Church. And most famously, Martin Luther nailed his print onto the door of a church, and that was his proclamation and protest against the Vatican. Because at the time, the Vatican were taking a lot of money from normal people for penury, for this punishment for what was written in the Bible in those manuscripts in Latin. You had to pay a lot of money, bribes to the Church. So he protested against this corruption. And then the protesting became a movement, Protestant movement. And that was the beginning of the Reformation of Europe and the modern world. The Reformation being the really the departure, or in modern technology terms, the disintermediation of storytelling. Because before the Reformation, only those who were elite and powerful and pious could tell stories. And yet after the Reformation, what happened was this perfect storm of technology and ideas came together. There's a very interesting riff in the Reformation that I want to share with you, and it's really important for understanding Asia today as well. Firstly, nobody called it the Reformation at the time. That happened later, with hindsight. So the Reformation was a. Looking back on an era of events really, you know, you. You were in the middle of it, and these events were happening everywhere. Nobody says, wow, this is the Reformation, and it's kind of happening now. Like, you've got the Asian century, you've got digital transformation, you've got the disruption of industries across the board, you've got these storytelling technologies which are being democratized, and you've got the rise of an Asian middle class. Now, at the time, nobody joins the dots. Nobody says, this is what's happening, folks. This is the defining decade of our lifetime. They just say, well, there's a bit of AI happening here, and you've got China and you've got data and you've got podcasts, and you've got this authenticity thing, and you've got Covid. Let's just kind of just treat this all as a mess, which is what happened in the Reformation. Nobody has hindsight. Everybody sees events, and everybody's an actor, uh, inside that story. Nobody's actually stepping outside of the story and looking at the COVID of the book and saying, that is what it is. That's where we are now, folks, in 2021, and why I wanted to do this episode of Asia Tech Podcast. You know, if you go back to the Reformation, that printing presses were, uh, one of the most disruptive technologies not of that era, but of our historical narrative of human history. And there are lots of perfect storms. It's not just the changing nature of the human relationship with The Church, it's not just growing education, it's not just the technology. For example, printing presses like the Gutenberg's were owned by largely Jewish families. And so it was the Jews who made the first printing presses. And that's important because they were also the people that dealt with money before. Because money was seen as dirty and somehow unpious in medieval times. And that's why, you know, if you look at religions around the world and you know, caste systems around the world, those groups that were kind of outcast take on that kind of work. So these Jewish families that were once involved in coining money then became the, the, you know, the owners of printing presses. And when the Church started finding out that contrary opinioned elites funded by uh, you know, printing presses that were owned by Jews were producing this material which was critical of the Church, the Church very soon started cracking down on this technology and they started banning printing presses. Which is very interesting in terms of the effect that that had on the shape of the world. Because what then happened? If you imagine that the strongholds of the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Europe at the time was southern Europe and particularly Italy, Greece maybe and then Spain, these were the local, these were like the hubs of Catholic control. And then what happened was the Jews fanned out, they were exiled because they couldn't run their businesses. They were excoriated, they were, you know, people would curse them in public for being seditious and you know, the promoters of dissent and booted out. And it's not the first time it's happened to the Jews. So they were booted out of their homes and they would take these printing presses on horses, pack them up and their livelihoods on their back, literally. And they would then go from these places of hate to new homes in north Europe. And that's why the Jews gravitated to London, the Netherlands, Germany, Paris. And they became the new homes of both the Jews and the printing presses. So these became the new hotbeds of technology. And we see these shifts, we see similar shifts. You know, it may not be driven by similar factors, but people leave and they start and they take technology to new places. And that's happening in Asia, for example, even happening within the US and it's also why historically, if you look back at uh, the printing presses, the home of the Reformation in liberal democratic thought and Protestantism and the idea that came with the Age of Enlightenment that followed and um, the scientific era, which was that no longer did things just appear like if you were of the pre age of Enlightenment. You believed that, for example, you know, something like a pixie would manifest in the woods and you would believe in things like mists and magical smokes. Things just happened. There wasn't any science to speak of. You know, when there were bubonic plagues that wrecked havoc like Covid across the world, they didn't understand, they thought it was a curse. Or you know, the only slightly scientific hypotheses that they drew at the time were that these pestilences were somehow related to smell. And you know, of course if you had like a cesspit, it stinks. Or if you have rotting bodies, it stinks. And so they thought these bad odors were somehow the carriers of disease. Which if you think about it is kind of right. But they didn't have the technology and the understanding to be able to say actually it's bacterial virus. It's also why you see those uh, costumes of the era which look like a man wearing almost like a stork, like, or pelican like bill made out of leather on his face, a little bit scary. You know, that's where it comes from. It was an anti plague mask. That would be the uniform of the guy who went round and knocked on the door and said, bring out your dead. And he had this long like, you know, 2 meter long plague mask or a meter long plague mask. And the reason was, is it kind of gave him fresh air to breathe in. And in that mask inside the beak would be filled with like lavender and posies, like good smells. Because they believed that good smells would counteract evil smells. And that's why in ancient days, in medieval times, they would put like lavender bouquets outside their house or in the home to counteract what they didn't know as disease. That was the world. And that also shaped our relationship with storytelling. It just happened. This is what God said and therefore this is how it is. And only when people started questioning that and started believing ultimately, which was the core of the democratization of storytelling, being that mankind was the owner and almost storyteller of his own destiny. Those ideas didn't exist pre reformation and pre age of Enlightenment. And they came from those hotbeds of liberal democratic thought. London, Paris, Amsterdam, these were the ground zeros for technology of the time. You know, coffee shops and salons in Paris where people got together. And in the coffee shops of London, you know, you have to realize at the time, pre coffee shops, most people uh, were drunk all the time. And there's a good reason for that being that, uh, you know, you you have to have water every day to survive. And, um, you know, most cities at the time didn't have any form of reliable sewage or at least water supply particularly. And that meant that the only way that you could get reliable and pure water, which wasn't diseased, was if you were living in a city. Because this wasn't a problem. Hundreds of years before when everybody lived in the country and had natural water supplies in the city, this was becoming a real problem with disease. The only way you could get it was if you lived in Europe, it was alcohol. Uh, if you lived in the east, it was tea. And that's an interesting, uh, you know, cultural split over time that in Asia they drunk tea because they boiled water and therefore they could sterilize the water. And in the west, they didn't have access to tea at the time, that came much later. So the only way they could sterilize water is with alcohol. And so you had these two sort of cultures growing over time and over hundreds of years. It meant that in some way our internal bacterial flora evolved. And it's why also that, you know, uh, Asians. And I can say that because, you know, my family is Asian, my wife's Japanese, my son's half Japanese, half English. I suppose that, you know, when, uh, many Asians, when they drink, uh, alcohol, their face gets flushed and they turn red. And, um, you know, one of the reasons is they don't possess the quantity of an enzyme inside their gut which breaks down alcohol. And therefore they get this red reaction in their face. And that's happened over hundreds of years. And so, you know, you can see how embedded that was in our culture because they were tea drinkers and Europeans were alcohol drinkers. That's why you don't really get red face unless you're really, really drunk. It's interesting, when I was living in Japan and I got sunburnt, um, because I'm quite fair skinned and I'd go red and like they thought I'd been drinking. So this would be like, you know, 12 in the afternoon and I was at work in the office, and they're like day jobber, which was kind of the Japanese for are you okay? Meaning, like, what have you been up to? You know, And I look at myself in the mirror and it looks like I'm drunk. When I was fine, I was just a bit sunburnt. So basically that was coffee, its introduction into Europe. Because what happened was coffee became this tool for people to come together. And coffee shops sprung up all over northern Europe because what Happened was in these coffee shops was, you know, people of all levels of society could come together and sit side by side and drink coffee and they would read the news. And this is the beginning of Lloyd's List, Lloyds of London, the first, uh, sort of real insurance company, which inevitably funded, in a VC way, not only the exploration of much of the world, but also the East India Company and the imperialization of the world. They would read, uh, these circulars which were made in local printing presses, and they would have the news of the day, um, investment opportunities. For example, this ship is heading out to the Spy. Silence. And it needs investors. It will take two years, but this is the returns on your investment if you put your money up. Now, that's no different from VCs today. I know there were also this growth in other forms of print. There would be, for example, the Spectator, which I'm, uh, not sure if it's still going in the uk, but it was sort of like a critical, um, publication. And the reason why it was called the Spectator, because it was written about this individual called the Spectator, who would observe high society, you know, the posh upper classes and what they were doing and then comment very, um, cynically and sarcastically, um, satire of what was happening, very critical of the king and the royalty. And these publications became seditious. And so this became this huge outburst of storytelling that everybody had a voice. And these ideas that were evolving, that were dangerously seditious, like democracy, were now coming out of this perfect storm of coffee shops and print and liberal democracy, liberal democratic thought, I would say. No coincidence that Benjamin Franklin hung out in the coffee salons of Paris with Procope and Robespierre, the fathers of the French Revolution. Benjamin Franklin was a bookseller. He imported books from the old world into the new. That was his job. That's how he made his money. And it's no coincidence that that's where he got his ideas from. So technology always disrupts first and then democratizes second. And we're seeing this really fascinating democratization of storytelling globally, particularly here in Asia. You know, I'm seeing young people take to podcasts for the first time. And there's a real advantage in, uh, podcasts for young people over traditional media, because traditional media doesn't give them a voice. And that's particularly true of minorities, women who don't have such a loud voice on traditional media. For them, picking up a microphone and getting started is all that it takes. Now, you are your own printing press. I'll give you a couple of examples locally, um, the number one podcast on Spotify here in Singapore is. Okay, let's go. It's a great podcast done by a bunch of young Malay guys. Now, if you're not of the world of Singapore, you have to understand a little bit about the history of Singapore, that there's a lot of different races here. It's very harmonious. You got Malays, you have Chinese, ethnically Chinese, uh, who came from the south of China, um, like Hokkien, Kien area, um, Cantong. You have also the Tamils, big community here who, um, originally called the Clings. You know, they would be the traders that came from south of India and to Singapore and followed the monsoon wins every year. And obviously you have more recently people from all over the world like myself, many, many different people. Um, the Malay community tends to be quite conservative, and therefore it doesn't really have a voice or doesn't want to have a voice, doesn't express itself so openly as other communities do, particularly about, you know, um, slightly risque subjects like relationships and sex and, you know, like, uh, opinions about community leaders and so on. And therefore, you know, okay, let's go. Really just dives in and just gets straight to the point. A bit like Joe Rogan. It gets straight to the point. It's done in a more comedy style. But, you know, again, Joe Rogan's a comedian, um, using comedy really to disarm, uh, and help people understand really the key issues of the day. And then you also have, for example, like, I just pull out from TechPodcast Asia. I'm looking at one of the recent episodes here from Indo Techno Podcast, which is focused on Indonesia. Now, not a lot of people know much about Indonesia apart from Bali. Uh, you know, I was in Indonesia in 1995 when Suharto was still in power, for those that remember him. You know, I loved Indonesia at the time. It was one of, you know, the people are amazing. Such, uh, a rich country, diversity culture, like, amazing. And, you know, the times I would spend like, you know, in Yogyakarta, like I went to the court in Yogyakarta and watched like gamelan performances like these late night wayang gulit puppet performances that go on all night. Amazing times. And there's so many stories inside Indonesia waiting to come out. You know, think of that. The population itself, it's what, 250 million or more? Um, is that right? 250, I can't remember. But, um, you know, it's. It's a big country. It's almost the size of the U.S. and 50% of the population is under 30, which, you think about it, it's insane. It's much higher. Like US is like 39 in 40%. In Europe, where a lot of the countries are older, like Germany, it's in low 30s. So 50%, uh, of the population is under 30. Think about that. Think about what that creates as a sort of a dynamic force within the country. And that's why Indonesia is a passion about politics and music. And you know, you have this real dynamic tension between very traditional orthodox voices. Like maybe if you go out to the west of Indonesia and Sumatra, and then the more sort of progressive voices, like if you go to mainland, um, Java, most young people don't wear hijabs, even though they might be Muslim. Um, yeah, and they drink as well. You go to any nightclub in Indonesia, you see young Indonesians drinking. So there are many stories. And you know, there's a lot of dynamic tension about storytelling. And if you go back to the Indo techno podcast, just as an example, they've got an interview with the team manager of an Indonesian esports team. Now she herself is an influencer. Uh, and just think about that female young influencer. Uh, now there's many aspects you can pick out on that. Firstly, in Indonesia there is a big, big esports community. The data shows that at least 50 million people are, ah, gamers of some sort. 50 million in, ah, Indonesia. And there's an interview with her on a podcast I think about, you know, firstly, somebody like her, huh, has a voice which 20 years ago in Indonesia wouldn't have happened 30 years ago for sure. And secondly, she's young, which is great. You know, it's like young people having a voice. They're using technology to express their opinions. And thirdly, even this term influencer, think about that. You know, when I grew up, there wasn't such a thing. There were actors and there were editors and that was it. And the editor told us what we would pay attention to, like music or food or holidays, vacations or news. We listened to the editor, we trusted the editor. And yet now we have this thing called influencer, uh, which really is the democratization of storytelling. Once again, in the old days we had professional models, now we have influencers. Anybody can be a model. Where is the qualification? You just had to be reasonably good looking. And even the best models aren't necessarily the best looking. You know, you think of people like Kim Kardashian, for example. You know, that goes to show that the technology first disrupts then, then secondly democratizes storytelling. And, uh, the Beauty of a world in which we have decentralized storytelling is that everybody has a story to tell. You know, I graduated with an AI degree in 1995, and I'll tell you this is that there's being ahead of the market and there's being too far ahead of the market today. You know, it would have been, hello, world, here comes an AI graduate. Work at Facebook, work at Google. Back then, nothing. So my careers advisor suggested I, uh, go and teach English in Japan, no joke, because she didn't have a clue what AI was back then. And so I went to Japan to teach. And what that really taught me was communication. It taught me how to read people. It taught me how to communicate to people through difficult circumstances, through resistance. You know, it's that bit where you walk into a restaurant or into a store and you try and order something, and then you kind of gesture and you, I'm not getting through here. And then, you know, maybe you stamp your feet and walk out and then. Or worst is, you choose McDonald's because it's low risk. Point is that if you learn to communicate in these scenarios, you can also learn to communicate in every scenario. You can also teach brands to communicate in every scenario. Rather than stamp your feet and do what you've always done, order the McDonald's, which is traditional advertising, why don't you try and tell your story in a more authentic way? Use all of these technologies we've talked about today, the modern printing press, to give your people a voice, give your leaders a platform to tell their stories. You know, when I came back From Japan in 1998, we were in a world of big phones, Netscape Navigator, uh, AOL cds, that kind of thing. And I wanted to start a business, but didn't have a clue. I wanted to tell people a little bit about Japan at the time. And I realized actually there was some value in telling people about how young people in Japan used mobile phones. Because, put it into context, at the time, people had brick phones, you know, these large, large phones, um, big, black, ugly things. And yet I'd seen in Japan, Japanese high school girls use, like, these dinky little things, pink and, like, decorated. And I saw them texting. And then when I started talking to mobile companies like Vodafone and these large networks, um, in the uk, knocking on their doors and saying, hey, I've seen the future. And, you know, this is what they told me. They said, we don't do kids. And that was the world. Back in 1998, their view of technology was very myopic it was very much focused on what they knew from their markets, whereas I had seen what happened in other markets. And I wanted to teach people that, to say, look, actually, you know, it's not like we're different here. These are global, human, universal trends, communication, storytelling. And so back in 1998, where we were hustling, knocking on doors, I think it came, like, to one Christmas where we were about to give up the business, me and a friend who started this business together. And we were just about to give up because we didn't have much luck. It was really hard. And then we got a call around Christmas time, and the call came in and they said, we love your research. We love your report. We want to buy it. We're not a mobile company, but everything you say in it about technology resonates with everything we want to learn about our customers. And that company was mtv. And they saved our business because they became our best customer over the course of 12 years. You know, we sold to MTV, we sold to all the major, uh, mobile networks, mobile phone manufacturers. We sold to governments, we sold to the EU, we sold to Visa, MasterCard, Disney. They all bought our research. And it was all about, how do you, as a brand, use this technology, mobile phones, to communicate your story in a more effective way for this generation? So I was kind of used to the rejection, which I'm seeing in the early days of podcasting here in Asia. You know, we sold that business in 2012. And then I went and traveled the world for four years. And I think the one thing I learned for all the people that said, oh, why do you want to travel the world? Like, you know, what about your son, his education? Uh, what's he going to do about schooling? You know, we were living on tropical islands, man. We were, like, in Lanzarote. We were in Okinawa. Uh, we lived on Cyprus. Uh, I spent time traveling. We literally went around the world, starting in the uk, traveling all the way out to Japan, New Zealand, Fiji. Uh, we went to California, Florida, Hawaii, Samoa. Uh, and then all those islands that I mentioned, Thailand, back to Japan. We had an adventure, a real adventure, living out of three suitcases. People thought you were nuts. Why are you doing this? Like, you could have a really nice house and a car. Uh, you know, I remember I sold all my shoes. I, uh, threw them away, actually. You know, I bought all these nice shoes over the years. I threw everything away, and everything we owned was in three suitcases. Three people. Me, my wife and my son. And we went and traveled the world for four years. And if I learned one thing, it was that success is a story you can write yourself. You know, in the old days, we didn't have the technology to both access alternative narratives and, um, write our own. But now we have Clubhouse, Discord, podcasts, social media. These are the printing presses we of our time. Now the challenge is, what will we do with them? Will we use them to tweet? Will we use them to regurgitate everybody else's nonsense? Or will we use them to tell our own story? Because, you know, I found and my journey through Asia Tech podcast, 500 episodes. And documenting that story, talking to people, learning people's stories is everything in life is storytelling, you know, and if you want a better life, tell a better story. And start with picking up a microphone and talking, talk to somebody, learn about their stories, and then you learn that, uh, what's possible? Just like with the printing presses in the day, only when started the. Only when people started consuming what's possible did they understand what they could do for themselves. And I feel that we are at the very early, early stages of the Renaissance. I wouldn't call it the Renaissance, because that's the wrong term in historical context. The Reformation. The Renaissance was pre Reformation. That was the more religiously driven narratives. The Reformation was the disruption of thought, storytelling, communication, and what could be possible that led to the Age of Enlightenment, which was a new way of thinking about humankind and our relationship to the institutions of power that's coming next that will be driven by these new forms of storytelling and artificial intelligence. So full circle there. Well, that's why I wanted to tell the story of Asia Tech Podcast 503, because it's been four years since I started this podcast and it's taught me so many things. So many things. You know, I think that beyond building an audience, beyond being recognized for doing Asia Tech podcasts, I remember walking across the street in Fukuoka, like, which is not a main city in Japan. It's off in the island of Kyushu, walking across the street, and some guy walked across the other way. He stopped me in the middle of the crossing and said, hey, you're that guy that does that podcast. Wow. Think about that. But beyond all of that, it was the lessons learned. What did I learn in this process? Who did I meet? I met Tony Fernandez. I met Rod Drury from Zero. You know, I met some great people. And, um, as they say, the best way of learning is teaching. So I put the challenge out to all of you there. Firstly, if you want some ideas, if you're in asia, go to TechPodcast Asia and see what everybody else is doing in this space. Telling stories. And if you haven't started, now is the time. Because, you know, like, you have a website now, right? And so in the future, everybody will have a podcast. No, podcasts are to people what websites are, uh, to businesses. So now is the time to get started. Thanks for listening to Asia Tech Podcast 503. Hopefully this was a conversation starter and a thought starter. If you want to contact me, find me on LinkedIn Graham Brown. And if you want to drill down a little bit and get the right guy, Graham Brown Podcasts. Who knows? There may be a future episode. Stay, uh, tuned. You've been listening to Asia Tech Podcast. Find out more at ATP Show.