This A-Profiler we bring you Ryan Ozawa, a self-proclaimed geek who has gained a following through The Transmission, a podcast he and his wife host in Hawaii, which is dedicated to the TV show Lost. We caught up with Ozawa at the San Diego Comic Con to find out how he got started in podcasting, what he does when he isn't podcasting, and to find out what his parents think of his notariety.

Your site URL:
www.hawaiiup.com
www.hawaiiup.com/lost

Are you full-blooded Japanese American?
My dad is full Japanese. He's nisei, I'm sansei. On that side, we're from Yamanashi prefecture. His family side, my dad was born in an internment camp in California. He's a katonk, technically the word for a local born on the mainland. His father, or my grandfather, started a church on Kauai then built a church on Waipahu that is still there. When we have events its held in Ozawa hall. I'm quite thrilled about that.

My mom's side is half-Japanese so that makes me three-quarters Japanese and that last quarter is a mess of things but includes native Hawaiian, which I'm very proud of, but everything from Norweign to Spanish to Chinese and other things in there.

How did you start podcasting?
Podcasting really kind of came into existence in 2004. At that time it was Dave Winer, Adam Curry, couple of really old school geeks. Adam Curry actually an old school MTV VJ. They started playing with this technology and I followed what they were doing on the web and thought it was kind of interesting.

There was a group in Honolulu that got together every month called Bytemarks and we just talked about whatever geek news going on and somebody said "this is podcasting, what do you think? And the best part is anyone can make it." We just started playing with it right then and there. That night, in fact, I got my $7 microphone from Radio Shack, plugged it into my PC at that time, and gave it a shot.

You've been doing this since 2004?
Right, pretty much since it existed. Definitely one of the earlier folks to get into it because it really was folks following Dave Winer and them and playing with it back at that point. What they were doing was testing something called payloads in RSS feeds and very esoteric, geeky sounding stuff I know but that was, is still the core of how audio is still delivered in a podcast so that's what we got into.

How did The Transmission evolve?
That's interesting. I started a podcast about Hawaii. I'm from Hawaii. Live in Hawaii. Love Hawaii. And even before the internet on gopherspace, one of my hobbies was writing up news reports and posting it on gopherspace. This predates the web. So people from Hawaii at universities around the world, or military installations, would log on to gopherspace, read my news headlines and really like being in touch. I did the same thing using audio and my wife thought it was very geeky and very strange so I decided to suck her into it. I said "you don't have to talk about anything except what you want to talk about" and she wanted to talk about TV, she wanted to talk about movies, she wanted to talk about books.

Right around that time Lost came out and we watched it and we liked it and because it's filmed in Hawaii we started talking about it. After 2 or 3 episodes of talking about Lost on my Hawaii podcast, we got two kinds of feedback: God, I love Lost it is great that you are there. Talk about it more. And then there were people who said I liked it better when Jen talked about other movies and TV shows and books - that's enough with Lost. The natural step at that point was to do two separate shows. We would just talk about Lost on one show and Hawaii on the other. As is the case with many artistic enterprises, that off-shoot, that branch became the major part of what we do.

Do you have any idea about the size of the audience for The Transmission?
Yeah, we got our web site shut down, we got threatening bills from our web host. It was really the beginning of this for everybody and serving large audio files was not something people did regularly. We had the right time, right place issue which was when we started our Lost podcast that was the same month that Apple said our ipods will now support podcasting and our music store and movie store will now sell Lost television episodes. All of a sudden the iTunes store became a one-stop shop for Lost and I like to say that we kind of benefitted from people who went to iTunes and typed in Lost and got us instead of the actual show. The first time we did it we started at 14,000, we got as high as 24,000 listeners or downloads a week before we took a break.

What caused you to take a break and what caused you to come back?
Podcasting is generally a very casual thing. A lot of people will just sit in front of their computer and just say what comes off the top of their head. A lot of them are very conversational. Some of them are very rambling. What we strived for in our show was to have a very tight, very focused show. We didn't talk about ourselves. We didn't say "hey, how was your day?" We said "we are going to talk about x, y, and z" and we had very detailed outlines.

Basically the production of the show, the one hour we would put out a week, would probably take six or seven hours of planning in advance, plus the hour of recording, plus two or three hours of editing, plus the hour and a half it would take to upload at that time. I was staying up overnight and with a regular day job and Jen being an overworked mom it started to really take a toll on us. Right around that time the show start to kinda frustrate us a little, we had a really bad week, and it just seemed that we could either put out a show that we didn't really believe in, we could just go through the motions, or we could just say we felt we did a good job up until this point and leave on a high note. We specifically said we really liked what we've done and we don't think we could sustain that so rather than give you a half-assed show, we just stopped.

We still kept a good portion of our audience because we would always write about the show every week. We would still get 100 to 200 comments on every blog post we would write and when season 4 started we're sitting in front of the TV and said "you know, this is good, good again. Good enough that we can sit down and have conversations about it." So, we just started back up.

Did the shorter seasons encourage you to get back into it?
Yeah, knowing that it was only 16 episodes helped a lot and also knowing that the show had an endpoint which is what we had coming in. One of our fears was, especially when we were bleary-eyed and recording at 11 at night and editing and being up all night, was that we could be doing this for 10 years. This could be another, I don't know, MASH or something. We were really worried about that. When they said we got three more years, we said okay, we can at least know we are going to survive this.

Have you had fans ask you Lost questions that would seem more appropriate for the producers of Lost?
I think they understand that they are listening to fellow fans and that what they are listening into is a conversation of people just like them wondering what is going on, loving the mystery of the characters, the jokes, and talking about them. There is this subset of folks, I suppose, especially because we podcast from Hawaii that think we might have more information than other people do and in a way we do, I definitely benefit a lot from the ability to go down to where they are shooting and watch them shooting and see a character dressed as a certain profession and say "ah, turns out this character was y or z" or see what happens before it airs - weeks, months before it airs. As far as what they are up to we definitely don't have that information. So, most people, when they ask questions, they are asking as fellow fans.

Outside of the podcast, what do you do for normal work?
My day job is a cubicle dweller in the back office of a real estate data company. Not even a real estate company but an MLS company that basically makes its business, it's a non-profit technically, selling listing data for realtors. My piece is doing web sites and stuff and helping them with marketing. What I specifically brought to this company was to get them into social media, playing with blogs, and stuff like that so that's been kind of fun but it's really the smallest part of who I am. Most people don't know that I have a day job, they figure that I'm just a full time geek.

What do you like to do on your free time?
I think that would pretty much be it - being an obnoxious geek online. I've been really into online communities since before the web, since usenet, since gopherspace, and then starting message boards, had a dial-up BBS forum that way. That just sort of extends into my adulthood. I like to see all of the tools people use to connect. I'm really passionate that technology can bridge geographic distances, cultural differences. I love, even on my podcast, where people will listen to me and they'll say "oh, I thought you were a white dude" or "we didn't know this about Hawaii" or "we didn't know this about other places in the world." I just love that kind of connecting and breaking barriers and defying expectations. That's what I like to do on the web.

What do you parents think of your whole online celebrity?
Celebrity is a strong word. Notoriety, I prefer. They are getting comfortable with it. I would say my mom has known since I was a kid that I have been a bit of an obnoxious twerp so that I just sort of continue that does not surprise her. My dad, more traditionally Japanese, father of a priest, more conservative family, there was some discomfort when I was first on the web and I was publishing an online journal about my experiences - good days and bad days with my girlfriend then, now my wife. You know, a little personal, too much information, and rightfully so, I share information about my kids and there is always that balance of what is safe or not. I think they are coming to terms with my openness, my radical transparency on the web.

The primary story I like to tell is that my dad is politically active in Honolulu, lot of movers and shakers knew who he was, so I spent most of my childhood walking around and someone would go "oh you're Walt Ozawa's kid" because he was known in the community and I wasn't and that was my identity. That always annoyed me. Now it has gotten to the point where my dad will walk around and they'll say "is your son Ryan" or "oh, you're Ryan's dad" so I consider payback there. Turnaround is fair play. It's great that he's now having to deal with my notoriety.

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This issue of A-Profiler is brought to you by Nelson Wong.
Special thanks to Ryan Ozawa.

Photos used with permission.
Copyright retained by original copyright holder(s).