Episode 100!

Transcript

Every so often you need to step back and take an assessment of where you’ve been and where you are going.

This is the 100th episode of the podcast, so I figured now is a good time to take a one episode break from the normal content to give you the backstory of how the show came about and how it works.

Learn more about Everything Everywhere Daily on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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To steal a line from Public Radio, this episode is sponsored by listeners like you.

I just wanted to thank everyone who had taken the time to listen to the show, provide feedback, leave comments on Apple Podcasts, and especially those who support the show over at Patreon.com.

Podcasting doesn’t have the immediate feedback that other mediums do. You put out an audio file, but then it can be hard to hear back from people or get reactions. Podcasting doesn’t have comments or like buttons.

So, thank you to everyone who is listening, and I hope to keep you informed and entertained for a great while longer.

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The genesis of this podcast is several-fold.

I began working on the internet back in 1994 when no one knew what they were doing and the online future looked very bright.

People predicted that this new technology would allow people all over the Earth to learn any subject and have all the information in the world at their fingertips.

This is actually sort of true. The problem was, no one really anticipated that most people weren’t really interested in learning anything.

Thanks to the internet, there are now more people who believe the Earth is flat than there was 20 years ago. We’ve become more polarized, there is more disinformation, and social media has become extremely toxic.

I don’t think anyone really predicted all these negative consequences of the internet. I certainly don’t remember anyone predicting it.

So in part, this show is an attempt to provide something which can better people. There are plenty of podcasts who will try to tell you how to become rich, or thinner, or better looking. I figured there was a space for something which could just help people learn something new about the world every single day.

As many of you probably know, I sold my house back in 2007 to travel around the world. This was before social media was a big deal before there was such a thing as YouTube stars, and before the term influencer was coined.

I didn’t travel to take selfies, rather I traveled because I loved learning. I was the kid growing up who would read the encyclopedia. Today, I can still get lost for hours reading things online and going off on tangents. A skill, which is now extremely valuable.

When I started traveling, my goal was to do a video podcast giving the backstory about the places I visited. I wanted to talk about the history, geography, geology, and everything else that most people might not know about the places I visited

Video cameras in 2007 were not great. You still had to get cameras with tape in them back then. The first iPhone had been launched, but you couldn’t really use it for video like you can now. I produced a few videos, which still exist online, but soon gave up after spending several days on an island in Fiji trying to import video from tapes onto my laptop.

Fast-forward over a decade to two years ago. I’m still traveling around the world. My primary business is my travel website and travel photography.

I came up with the idea of reviving my plan back from 2007, but this time in the form of a podcast. The plan was to do a weekly show about random subjects each episode. My first episode was going to be explaining how the Mona Lisa became the most famous painting in the world. I read several books on the subject. Watched several documentaries. I read biographies of Leonardo DaVinci. My notes for the show kept growing and I realized I was going to have a show that was over 2 hours long.

Some people like Dan Carlin can get away with doing extremely long shows. I’m not sure most podcasters can. As the research swelled, the podcast just got put off, even though I had the artwork, show music, and everything else ready to go.

In March 2020, as all of you are very well aware, the coronavirus began to take a serious toll and everything began shutting down. For people in the travel industry, it was devastating. This multi-trillion-dollar global industry vanished within weeks. Consumers weren’t traveling or spending money on travel. Companies weren’t marketing. They were just trying to stay alive.

I’ll be honest. It devastated my business. My income dropped by about 95%.

I began to think of what I could do. One of my first thoughts was reviving the podcast idea.

However, this time I took it in a different direction. Instead of doing really long shows on a single subject, I thought about doing the opposite. Doing frequent, short shows on a variety of subjects.

When I pitched the idea to several of my podcasting friends, the response was pretty much universal. They all said……that is going to be a lot of work.

Well, sure. But to be honest, not really that much more than working on really long shows, and because I wasn’t really doing anything else because travel has pretty much dried up, I certainly had time.

I had the cover art, the name of the show, and theme music already picked out. I just needed ideas for shows.

In June, I spent several days coming up with ideas for episodes. I created a list of about 125 show ideas, and I’ve been working off that list ever since. I keep adding to the list and taking items off after I complete episodes.

Sometimes, in the course of researching something, I’ll come up with a whole bunch of show ideas. If the themes are similar, I try to spread them out so I’m not doing similar shows back to back.

The time it takes to create a show can range from 2 hours to 6 or 8 hours, depending on the topic, how long the script is, and how much research I have to do. For example, this episode that you are listening to right now was easy, because I didn’t have to research anything.

Some shows are much easier to make than others. Big shows, which cover a broad topic, are more challenging because they require more research and I have to figure out how to whittle everything down to fit into a show of this length.

The recording itself is pretty simple. I have a Rode Podcaster dynamic microphone that goes directly into my desktop computer. I record and edit everything in GarageBand. I record in segments. I record the introduction, ads, and outro separately and in a single take. The body of the episode I record in what I call Live Editing. I just read the script until I flub up or want to say something in a different way. I just back up the most recent paragraph break and start from there.

I then assemble the separate parts together in GarageBand almost like Legos and save it as one complete file. I run the file in a program called Levelator and then compress to mp3, which is how I then load it.

Do I work ahead? As of right now, the answer is no. If you see an episode pop into your podcast player, I probably just finished recording it. Working ahead is the goal, but when you have to get a show out every day, producing matter more than anything else.

The theme music for the show is called “Big Epic Choir” and was composed and performed by Sergey Osipov. The piece is actually much longer than the short clip I use on the show, but for a short, daily show I couldn’t have really long intro music because everyone would just skip over it.

The rights to the music, which I did purchase, came from stockmusic.net.

As a special bonus, for this episode only, I’ll play the complete version of the song at the end of the show.

Where do I come up with ideas for the show? I get this question a lot, but honestly, this is the one that I worry about the least. I’m sure if I sat down for a day I could easily double or triple the number of show ideas I have on my list.

There are some ideas I had to abandon because they just wouldn’t make for good shows. Some great ideas are very visual, and I don’t think that they would make for good podcasts. For example, a show on flags would be interesting, but talking about flags without showing any flags would be sort of frustrating and confusing.

What do I do when I’m not working on the show? For the first month, I spent a lot of time making sure the show could be found everywhere. I got on every podcast directory and made sure the show was on every platform possible. It took weeks to get approved for places like Spotify and Pandora.

Now, I have the challenge of marketing the show. Just letting other people know that the show exists. This is a huge challenge, but I’ve started the process of gathering data to find out what is most effective. Finding communities of people who love to learn and are curious is more challenging than it sounds.

This is something that probably could consume almost all of my time, but I do have to actually, you know, make an actual podcast every day, which limits how much I can do.

Do I do everything myself? Currently, yes. Absolutely everything from writing to recording, to editing, to promotion is all done by myself and no one else. This is partly out of necessity and part out of strategy. It will probably be a while before I could financially justify hiring someone else, so that makes it a solo operation for now. But I also believe that I should know how to do absolutely everything myself before I try to expand and get help.

What does the future hold for the show? The current plan is to keep chugging along. However, because I have written scripts for every show, and I have audio recordings for every show, there are many ways I can repurpose it.

At some point, I will probably convert the audio files into YouTube videos. I’m sure I’ll need help with that. I’ll also edit the scripts and compile them into books which I’ll probably put up on the Kindle store. I could also bundle the best of episodes into a physical book made out of dead trees if I can find a publisher.

At some point, once all the virus stuff is over, I’m also going to run some tours, probably starting in Europe.

Because of the high-level contacts I have in the tourism industry, and my travel experience, and all the research I’ve done, I have some great ideas for tours that would get people really behind the scenes to see some things in places like Rome that almost no one knows about or ever gets to see.

So that is how Everything Everywhere Daily works. Once I finish this paragraph, I’ll save the file, put all the parts together, upload it, and start working on episode 101.