Nov. 7, 2022

Evo Terra: Pivoting to The End

Evo Terra is ending his Podcast Pontifications show. The show has dissected all points of the podcast business and there have been moments of punditry, contemplations, skepticism, and at times political positioning. This show along with a selection of others have been my "go-to" shows to learn more about what is happening in podcasting.

In this episode you will find out what Evo is up to next. We also discuss the value of Podcast 2.0 . We also talk a lot about fiction podcasts, audiobooks and narration which should give you an idea of what Evo will be doing next. Speaking of Podcast 2.0 and Value-for-Value, we have pivoted ourselves and are entertaining your support with Boosts. We are so new to it we have no idea what we are doing or talking about but this marks the first episode where we are swimming in the Boostagram swimming pool. (We started by downloading and listening to podcasts using the Fountain App

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Evo also gave us one last podcast pontification on Twitter and announced he might be doing Twitter a little bit less and is involving himself with Mastadon.

A thanks to the people who support the show each week and allow it arrive on your phones for free.

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Transcript

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:00:00
Alexa: Play podcast pontifications.

Alexa (VO) 00:00:03
Playing podcast pontifications from Amazon music. Here's- You have reached the end of Podcast Pontifications.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:00:16
Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush about this. What you are listening to right now is the very last episode of Podcast Pontifications that I will make. 

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:00:16
No!

Tara Sands (VO) 00:00:33
The Sound Off Podcast. The podcast about broadcast with Matt Cundill... starts now.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:00:43
We had Evo Terra on our show back on episode 202. That took place back in May of 2020. He was the host of Podcast Pontifications, a short form podcast that talked about podcasting in a form of contemplation, perspective and opinion. I say was because in his most recent episode, Evo announced that his show will be no more. And for someone like me who has been listening and learning from Evo since 2016, I'm left wondering, what the hell am I going to do now? Evo is a podcast Hall of Famer who knows when to pivot. He's going to tell us in a moment what he's pivoting towards, and he joins me from his studio in Phoenix, Arizona. Well, I'm not big into change, and so when an episode comes out of Podcast Pontifications that says, that's it, it's ending, I honestly feel, what are we supposed to do now, Evo? What are we supposed to do?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:01:40
Fend for yourself, Matt. No, I'm kidding. I love change. But then again, you know that about me because you read or you read Podcast Pontification, so you know that change is a big part of me and who I am. So it's exciting. But yeah, it's a new wide world out there with one less rambling voice. On a weekly basis, at least. 

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:01:40
You say rambling voice. I think there are people out there who like to pontificate. Or also, I was trying to think of the word because you used it in your Twitter thread.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:02:10
Punditry.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:02:11
Be a pundit.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:02:12
Yeah.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:02:13
So you're getting out of the pundit game.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:02:14
Getting out of the pundit game. At least on the regularly scheduled pundit game. I guess that's one sort of way to do that, because it's not like I'm going to stop having opinions about podcasting. I mean, I still like to refer to myself as podcasting's professional contrarian, and I'll continue to do that. I'll continue to raise issues and engage where I need to engage and come up with alternate solutions, and also point out hypocrisies when I see them. I'm just not going to do that each and every week on Podcast Pontifications anymore.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:02:46
What was the moment when you said, this whole podcasting thing is getting super complex?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:02:51
I've said that for a while now, but I think it really started hitting about this time last year, honestly, when I started seeing things really starting to- I'll use the word fracture, but I don't mean that in a bad way. I just started seeing more pockets that were developing more and more, which isn't anything new. I mean, being in podcasting for as long as I have. Podcasting has always been a little bit of an echo chamber. People like you and me and the listeners to the show. We all consider podcasting an industry, and we go to these events and clearly we are a big industry. But there are plenty of podcasters in your same city. In my same city. Who have no idea what Podcast Movement is. Who have no idea that other podcasters are in this with them, and they don't even know about hosting companies. They're just not as up to speed. You don't have to be a part of that. So that's always been the case, but over the last year or so, it's just become really more noticed by me, I guess is the way I want to say that, and just something that it makes it really difficult for me when I saw my job on Podcast Pontification, which, as you know, is to make podcasting better, it was harder and harder for me to come up with topics that were germane to most podcasters because these new factions are breaking off, which have their own ways of doing things. And it just became more brainpower than I wanted to spend to try and come up with something that was watered down, that I had to have lots of buts and caveats involved with it. So, yeah, that's a long way to answer your question. It says a year ago. 

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:02:51
What does it mean to niche down? Because it's something I've been thinking about doing with this podcast. We're the podcast about broadcast, but what is broadcast really anymore? And why, if it's a podcast about broadcast, do you so often have podcasters and people in voiceover and audiobooks? And why do you have all those people on your podcast as well? So what does it mean to niche down?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:04:46
I really think it means understanding the fact that as things continue to grow, we sometimes even specialize. Although part of me hates saying that. There's an old saying I like to quote, and it's that specialization is made for insects, not for humans. And that's true. I mean, I am very much a generalist in all things. I've got a lot of knowledge in a lot of different areas, but I don't necessarily go deep on too many things. Okay. Podcasting would be one of them, obviously. And I think that when shows start like yours and mine have started, when I think about Niching down, it's like, okay, I was doing this big thing, but now inside of this big thing, these bubbles are growing and they are somewhat different from another one. So let me go grab onto one or more of those and start really narrowing down the focus. And sometimes it's less about narrowing down the focus and more about stopping the idea of continually broadening the focus. I don't have a lot of information to give people on subscriptions for podcasting and subscriptions and podcasting is growing big time. It was an afterthought for the last ten years or so. But this year it seems, thanks largely in part, I think, to Apple making it a built in process and to spotify to some degree that's different, but I don't have a lot of practical experience with that. I can give some general ideas, but I'm not running a show that has tens of thousands of listeners that is worthy of getting hundreds or 200 or so subscribers. So there's no help there. And that's not a matter of me niching down, that's a matter of the industry continuing to grow bigger beyond the original idea that I had. And my job is to recognize that and say, okay, if I can't do that, then I can't cover all of podcasting. Maybe it's time to get even more focused.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:06:25
Yeah, I don't think you'd be able to really speak to whether or not a subscription podcast works unless you actually have one yourself.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:06:31
Yeah, exactly. And the same thing when it comes to growth. How do you grow a show to reach tens of thousands of people? I don't know, I've never actually tried to do that, but there are plenty of people who have done that, so I knew right away, look, I can't cover everything, so let's just be more specific.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:06:49
But here you are with a podcast that is a little in the past called Podcast Pontifications, whereby you might be able to come up with a subscription model so we could go back and get some of those old episodes.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:07:00
Yeah, that's very true. That's been a model of subscription before there were subscription models. I know a lot of authors who podcasted previously, and even like Dan Carlin is an example of that from Hardcore History, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet. He sells his past episodes as digital downloads. I think it's only the last five or six shows are available. His episodes, if you don't know, last 3 hours, but he'll take them off the feed and then make them available. So that's always worked for a while, but now there's this new model to where we have windowing with content, to where new things are available, but only on these two platforms and then they go to everyone else. And how is that whole thing managed? And it's a mess, but a good mess.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:07:40
So if we could have music in podcasts, I would suspect that maybe you would have finished off the last episode with Closing Time, with the lyric, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. So what is your new beginning?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:07:57
Yeah, so I was trying to be clever with that and you're right, I had all sorts of musical ideas in my head, but again, I didn't really want the attorneys to come after me. So this is the end of Podcast Pontifications, but the start of the end, and the end is something I cooked up not long ago that shines a light back on fiction podcasts, audio dramas, radio plays, whatever you want to call them, once they've reached a conclusion. Now, the reason I'm doing this, Matt, is because I listen to more podcast fiction. So stories from individual authors who are narrating them to me, or full cast productions. I listen to that content more than anything else, and I have for forever. I mean, since I started in podcasting, that's one thing I helped start off back in 2005 was convincing a bunch of authors to start releasing their books as podcasts. So I helped to get that started and it's become my true love. That's what I listen to more than anything. But as a listener, one of the other things I know about me is that I like listening to things at my own leisure, not necessarily at the leisure of when the producer of the content has those episodes available. I want to just go mainline or binge that content. And that's the way I like to listen to things. That's the way I like to read things. I like my books to be complete. I usually wait watching television series until I know that they're done. That's just my preference. And in the podcasting world, you know, all of the marketing for a podcast happens when a podcast starts, because you want that bump, you want that initial group of people subscribing, telling their friends so that you can keep that train rolling and rolling and rolling. Well, that's fine for a regular weekly recurring series, but it doesn't work that well for a fiction podcast that has a definite endpoint. Whether that's five episodes later or 15 episodes later, no one is really out there pushing the shows that have reached a or the conclusion. And so that's what I wanted the end to be. It's the first time I think someone's really done that. It's pointing a light back at those shows that have finished, because now is a good time for people like me. And I found there's a lot of people like this now who like to wait until everything is available before they begin the journey.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:10:06
So I guess I'm not surprised that you're getting into this because you're an author yourself. Of a number of books, my favorite, of course, being the one about the beer and sausage diet. I look at audio books- First of all, I do voiceovers. I'm voice talent. But I find audiobooks is completely different than doing corporate narrations or acting out in a video game or any of the other things. I just find audiobooks to be, like, it's a separate bucket that sits over there. And at the same time, in podcasting, I look at audiobooks as being- maybe you could put them up in a podcast form, and maybe you could charge a subscription or, you know, it cost to download it. And then I also look at Spotify making a purchase of Findaway, which I thought was quite interesting. I sometimes see audiobooks on Spotify. So how do audiobooks and podcasting, how do they mix? And I didn't even mention Audible either.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:10:56
Yeah, and that's been a fun journey that I've also been on because I've seen that mixture. So I'm going to take you all the way back to 2005 for a second, Matt. Remember, this was before Amazon Kindle existed. In 2005, Amazon sold physical books, lots of other things, but physical books, no one- well, very, very few people were reading ebooks back in 2005. So I mentioned previously that I encourage a lot of authors to go release their books as audiobooks, but there was no ACX, which is the Audible whatever, the services that let people get their books on Audible pretty quickly. In order to get on Audible, you had to pay a narrator to do something which was expensive, or you had to already- And also you had to have your book previously published with one of the big five publishers that were out there. If you had self-published a book, you didn't really have much of a chance of getting your book available on Audible. And Audible was really small at the time. In fact, the audio book market was really small. This is back when you could go to a truck stop and buy a book on CD, except it was really a book on CDs because a CD will only hold 74 minutes worth of audio. So these truckers were buying literal boxes of CDs so they could listen to audiobooks as they were driving around. So that was what happened in 2005. And then podcasting comes along. We're going, hang on, there's an obvious play. Let's release some of these books as podcasts. And we'll do single narrate or just read it straight. And we were trying to be faithful to the audiobook world and as you know, doing voiceover work. Audiobook people, people who like audiobooks have very specific ideas of what an audiobook should contain. And that is whatever. The book contained the exact same thing. Read the front matter, read the book, read the chapter headings, read figures, and then read the back matter. They want the full, exact experience. And that's the state of what we started in 2005. But we saw right away with podcasting, it was different. We didn't have to follow those exact models. We could do things like put a musical score behind, and nobody who's listening to a podcast, we're going to complain. Now. Audiobook listeners would complain about it, but the podcast audience is like, hey, this is a new idea. Well, let's fast forward 18 years where we are today, and now we have these full cast audio productions that have 60 different actors that are making more of a movie for your readers than anything. And even the single narrator stuff has now become so soundscaped with different filters that are applied to them. Things you just couldn't get away with. In the audiobook world, there's freedom in fiction podcasting, freedom to do whatever creatively makes sense for you as a creator. And to me, that's what's so exciting is that, yeah, all of these new people are coming in and saying, this is a medium that I can apply my talents to, whether I'm a writer, whether I'm voice talent, whether I'm a soundscaper, whether I'm a mixture of music. All of these things can come together and make almost a new art form. It's not a new art form, but it is almost new because we now have a platform that we didn't really have previously.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:13:59
What's fascinating stuff, because I've spoken to a few people who do audiobooks, and they will often assume the role of the characters in the book. But I'm like, well, how do you remember what each character sounded like as you do this stuff? And so you can see how you can get tripped up and why this takes a lot of time to do. But you also mention movies and some of the best podcasts- It was Mark Ramsay, he said, if you can make this sound like a movie, if you can make your podcast sound like a movie, and if you can make- we talk about the trailer. If you're to have like a big trailer for your podcast and it's got like, sound design and a nice voice and you can sell it in a particular way, I mean, I know we talk about- it can sound like audio, but we really want it to sound like a big movie.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:14:41
Yeah, well, the word I like to use is immersive. When you're listening to fiction podcasts today, in 2022 as of this recording. Most people who listen to fiction podcasts today are assuming that cinematic, that immersive experience, because you just want to be plunged into the world. And again, even if that single narrator, even if it is the author of the book themselves, reading it, still using voice effects, using great soundscaping and scoring can really, really make that pop more than ever before. So what we see in podcast fiction and fiction audio overall, I think, is a trend toward the more immersive experiences, which I count as a good thing. Although the bad side of that is that becomes harder. The bar continues to be raised higher and higher and higher, which means it's difficult for people who either don't have the ability or don't want to have the ability to get there, to play at that field. And, well, that's part of the reality of people making the things that they want to make. If that's where the bar is, use your choice to jump over it or crawl under it. It's up to you.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:15:43
In just a second, more with Evo Terra. We're going to unpack more from the world of audiobooks and fiction podcasts. And Evo still has a few more podcast pontifications left in the gas tank, including a solid take on Podcast 2.0, which we are now getting into ourselves. There's more. There's always more, including a transcript of everything Evo and I have said, on the episode page at soundoffpodcast.com.

Mary Anne Ivison (VO) 00:16:13
Transcription for the Sound Off Podcast is powered by Poddin. Your podcast is an SEO gold mine. We help you to dig out. Start your free trial now at Poddin.io. 

Tara Sands (VO) 00:16:13
The Sound Off Podcast.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:16:28
So if you're an author- Would you recommend that an author read their own audiobook or to go and get talent to do it? And considering also at the same time, I guess this would make it a two part question. Why is it that every time there's like talent reading the book, there's a one star review? Because they don't like the talent reading the book, or a five star review because they like the talent reading the book?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:16:48
Yeah, I mean, we're stuck in that same question that we've faced forever in podcasting and also forever in radio, which is, do I have the voice for that? I don't know. Diane Reams has a pretty good voice for radio, even though you wouldn't think she has a voice for radio. And Ira Glass, and you look at a lot of the NPR people. So, yeah, there's that question mark. I personally like it sometimes when the author reads their own book, because- I have a few friends of mine who have done it for a long time. There's one, I can think of his name as Nathan Lowell. And Nathan, it just sounds like a warm blanket wrapped around me when I'm hearing Nathan read. And in fact, when I read his books, he's written a few series that he hasn't released in audio form. When I read his books in print, I hear his voice, because I know exactly what he sounds like. And so that's a lovely, lovely thing. But look, not everybody is set up to make a fantastic- they're just not great presenters. They're good storytellers on the page, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a good storyteller from your mouth. And I normally don't harp on this too much for regular podcasting, let's call it, because, look, there's a lot of things that you can do there and I'm certainly never going to tell somebody that they shouldn't try a podcast. But it needs to be- I always think about the listener experience, right? If the author is capable of giving a good listener experience by reading their own words into a microphone, then absolutely go for it. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to have a deep radio voice announcer. You don't have to be those ways. It just has to be a pleasant experience. And so if people like listening to you read, author at your live events, then absolutely, you should totally take it up and see if you can narrate your own your own book. It's hard, but, you know, people might like the words coming from you as opposed to someone else. But expect that one star review because you didn't hire a professional actor, whatever.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:18:40
Who are you going to hire to narrate your autobiography?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:18:44
Well, the good thing is I do not write fiction and with an autobiography, it would have to be fiction for me anyhow. So I actually did narrate one of the books I wrote, I think a nonfiction book I wrote. And I realized that's pretty hard. Only six episodes and still, it is a really, really hard thing. Luckily though, I don't write fiction I don't have a talent for. I tried it once and I'm atrocious. But if I were a fiction creator, and again, I am not, I would likely go the route of something like the team behind Midst. There's a great podcast called Midst, M-i-d-s-t, Midstpodcast.com, and it is narrated by three different people and they kind of take turns. Think of like the Three Fates from like an old Shakespearean style of storytelling. That's how it's done, and it is mind blowingly good. Again, also with lots of soundscaping and various things. So I think if I did have something that was fiction, I probably wouldn't try to make it into your standard audio drama, your standard radio theater. I would probably do some weird hybrid model that made everybody go, the heck is that guy thinking? Just for fun.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:19:48
You're still going to be doing podcast consulting, though, with simpler media. Correct?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:19:54
Absolutely. Yeah. Simpler Media is what pays the bills. Running a newsletter where I'm talking to people, what great fiction podcast they should listen to because they're complete, does not pay the bills very well. But yeah, no, I have a production company, Simpler Media, and we make podcasts for businesses around the world.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:20:10
And your name came up a few weeks ago when we had Brian Barletta on. You're working with Sounds Profitable.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:20:15
I did for the longest time. I got Brian started on Sounds Profitable way back in the day in early 2022. For a year and a half or so, I edited almost every single article that Brian had written, but Tom joined the team and that was very exciting- Tom Webster of Edison Research fame- and now Brian have teamed up to make Sounds Profitable into this wonderful thing that's going well beyond the newsletter. But that was happening about the same time I was looking at- podcasting is getting too big for me. So it's been about three months since we ended the official relationship, but we're all still friendly and we still do some things together when we can. It makes sense. But yeah, good stuff at Sounds Profitable if you want to know the business side of podcasting.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:21:00
So for those who are out there looking for either a podcast consultant, what are some of the red flags that they should see when they're looking around to hire a consultant?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:21:10
Yeah, probably if they call themselves a podcast consultant. No, I'm kidding. Although only a little bit, right? So with podcasting, your challenge is how do you find somebody who has the relevant experience that you need. Look, you don't have to have somebody with 18 years experience like I do. There are some fantastic consultants who have only got three or four years of experience because they know the new current stuff. Somebody with 18 years of experience may not have kept up with the latest and greatest and what's new in the podcasting world, and in fact, many have not. That just becomes the territory, right? So I think part of it is having a body of work that they're happy to show, that they have some sort of information that they're providing to the people outside of just what they tell you on their page. Take a look at the things that that consultant is producing. Are they saying things that you think make sense, or are they just regurgitating the same stuff over and over again? Watch out for the cheap ones. I think, honestly, because you don't necessarily know how great that information is. If they really know what it is that they're doing, and they shouldn't be ashamed to charge appropriately for it, then you shouldn't be afraid to pay for that. So I wish there was an easy litmus test to say this is a good consultant, and this one was not. But there just isn't. It takes due diligence, like anything.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:22:31
So the last time I saw you, we were enjoying beer diet in Dallas. There was a large group of people and they were surrounding Adam Curry. And I was with Avery and we were all talking and she said to me, he seems important. Why is Adam Curry, and more specifically Podcast 2.0, important?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:22:48
Yeah, well, I think there's two different answers on that, aren't there? For those of us that have known Adam since the early days, as you know, and I'll just repeat it here in case the listener doesn't understand this. If it was not for Adam Curry and another guy named Dave Winer, we wouldn't have podcasting. They put their brains together in the summer of 2004 and gave us what we now today call podcasting. And there are others who will refute that. There are others who came before, and that's fine. But even then, Adam together did that. And more recently, Adam has come along in the last couple of years or so and started this Podcasting 2.0, which is, if not a reimagining, it's certainly a- kind of a, here's what's missing. Here's what we didn't continue to extend, and very specifically, what they didn't continue what we didn't continue to extend was the RSS specification, which is by definition, extensible. We can put new things inside of it. Apple has done a little bit here and there. I know that the crew from Blubrry and Raw Voice had done some early work that didn't really get adopted. But with the Podcast 2.0, they're really trying to change that. In fact, they are changing that. They have been the first group which has come along and made a true impact that benefits everybody in podcasting, not just their own app or directory like we had when Apple made their changes recently. So I think the Podcasting 2.0 movement is something that every podcaster should be paying attention to to a certain degree. The problem is right now it is all extremely technical. There's not a lot of information of Podcasting 2.0 that's digestible by normal human beings. It's ran by a lot of tech geeks and unfortunately, a lot of crypto geeks, but mostly tech geeks. And it's a little confusing. But I think what we're going to see over the next- I'm not even going to give a timeframe- unit of time. We'll see more of the Podcasting 2.0 changes roll through to your podcast hosting company. And you should be jumping on board when your podcast hosting company sends you an email and it says, we've added these Podcast Index or Podcast 2.0 tags to your dashboard. Go change all your episodes. Do it. Go change all your episodes. Because the more we podcasters adopt these tags and these tools, the more pressure that app developers will have to incorporate them as well. So all of our hard work can be seen enjoyed by the listeners on the other end.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:25:08
See, this is why I love having you on the show, and it's because you explain things so well. You have explained things so well to up and coming podcasters like myself over the years. I think I binge listened to you back in 2016, some odd, and I felt like I was catching up with all the podcast information I had missed over the years. So thank you for explaining things so well.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:25:28
You're welcome.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:25:29
I have a question, though. I'm going to ask you to pontificate one more time. Instead of just letting your podcast sit on Captivate and it disappears when it disappears, why not just move it to Anchor, where it lives for as long as Anchor lives, for free?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:25:45
Oh, man. Anchor. Yeah, that's not going to happen anytime real soon. I'm fine with people who use Anchor, although I'm getting at, you know, I've kind of been up and down on the fence on this one. And now that I'm focused on fiction podcasting, I actively tell podcasters, do not use Anchor if you're a fiction podcaster for one reason. Most fiction podcasts, I almost would say all, but I'm sure there's an exception. So I'll say most. Let's say the vast majority of fiction podcasts are designed to be listened to from the start. Not from the last episode, but from the beginning, the very, very first episode. And every other podcast host, and I mean this literally, every other podcast host, lets the podcaster set a tag which says serial or episodic. And for a fiction podcast, it's serial, which means listen to the first episode first, as opposed to episodic, which means present the most recent episode first. Anchor doesn't do. It. Anchor is the only podcast hosting company- Well, with the exception of SoundCloud, which I don't even barely refer to them as a podcast hosting company- they do not let that be changed. You can set season numbers, you can set episode numbers, but you can't set the serial tag, which is mind blowing because Anchor's owned by Spotify, Spotify just bought Findaway, as you mentioned. They're going to be presenting audio stories that are designed to be listened to from start to finish. And you can't with their built in hosting platform, you can't do it today. So, no, I will not be moving over to Anchor anytime real soon.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:27:07
It's Podcasting Cemetery. Don't you know?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:27:09
Well, that's the problem with free hosting, isn't it? And especially Anchor really made the problem even worse. Because it's not just free podcast hosting. It's pick up your phone, say three words into it, hit upload. So are those shows podcasts and a lot of people actually pontificate on? I'm not going to worry about that. I mean, there's probably just seem to be garbage information that's out there, and I'd like to see a lot of that stuff cleaned up. But hey, what are you going to do? There's over 4 million podcasts now. If you want to clear out a couple of hundred thousand, fine. A couple of million fine. Still too many for any one person to listen to.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:27:42
I'm always excited to have somebody who's in the Podcast Hall of Fame on the show, but I'm also excited when I have somebody who has a blue Twitter checkmark. And you've made it vocal that you're not going to be paying $8 a month to keep it. So I ask you this question, and one more thing to pontificate about, and that's if the Soundoff Podcast Network were to sponsor your Twitter account blue checkmark, would you keep the check mark or would you just dump it on principle?

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:28:08
It's probably a dump on principle. I mean, I appreciate the $8 offer you just extended right there, Matt. I appreciate that. 

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:28:08
You can charge more.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:28:17
Well, that's the thing. I will charge you a whole lot more. I got that Twitter verified mark 2014? Whenever they started, when they made it available, I keep up to speed on a lot of things and I applied right away, which was a little bit challenging for me, but surprisingly I still got it. They gave me the verified mark and it was wonderful. Yeah. But now the rumors of being, oh, yeah, now it's going to be a privilege to pay and anybody can be verified. It's really not a verified mark anymore. It's becoming more of a- would you like to pay to have this badge on your profile. It seems a little too pay to play radio for me, and I'm just not going to play in that game.

Matt Cundill (Host) 00:28:51
Evo, it's been great to talk to you again and to catch up. It was great seeing you in Dallas too, and I hope to see you again soon.

Evo Terra (Guest) 00:28:56
Yes, I hope so as well. Matt. Thanks for having me on, my friend. And have an enjoyable rest of your day.

Tara Sands (VO) 00:29:01
The Sound Out podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill. Produced by Evan Surminski. Social media by Courtney Krebsbach. Another great creation from the Soundoff Media Company. There's always more at soundoffpodcast.com.