Episode 2001: A Podcast Odyssey

Podcast Transcript

Let me provide fair warning that this episode will be the longest in the podcast’s history, for reasons that will become obvious.

Before I get into things, there is something I need to address that might become an issue for those of you who are still pursuing membership in the completionist club.

I’m calling it the E2K bug, although it really isn’t a bug per se.

Now that we are past episode 2000, some podcast players have issues when encountering podcasts with more than 2000 episodes.

In particular, Apple Podcasts, which is far and away the most popular for people who listen to this show, will only serve up the 2000 most recent episodes of a podcast.

Obviously, if you are using Apple Podcasts, which statistically speaking, 50% of you are, this is going to be a problem if you are trying to listen to every episode.

I understand why Apple does this, because most shows with this many episodes are usually news shows that do not have evergreen content, and the more episodes a show has, the larger the RSS file.

So, until this episode, episode 2001, goes up, I won’t know whether embedded episodes will function for episode #1.

If they do, then everything will still be available on the website.

If not, then I’ll find some way to make the earliest episodes available, as they aren’t going anywhere.

I’ll let you know the solution soon, but suffice it to say, all episodes will be available somehow.

Next order of business is that some of the very early episodes, the ones I recorded during he first six months of the show, I’m going to be redoing.

The sound quality of these early episodes was poor to be generous, and the content was pretty scant. So I’m going to be redoing both the scripts and the recording to bring these episodes up to par. I’m not going to be labeling these any differently; they will just appear.

I’m not going to do them all at once, as there are far too many new episodes I want to do.

Next item on the agenda. I’ve been talking about doing various things like selling merchandise for years, and I’ve never done anything about it.

The reason why everything gets put off is that my top priority every day is getting the next show out the door.

Well, now that I finally have some help with script writing a few times a week, I have more time to work on these other projects. I’ve actually started, and I’ll have some more information for you shortly.

With all that out of the way…..

2000 episodes is a lot of episodes.

If you take only the content from each episode, average 12 minutes per episode, and multiply that by 2000, you get over 16.5 days of straight audio.

I estimate that I’ve written over 3 million words writing scripts for every episode.

If you multiply the number of times episodes have been downloaded, which is over 55 million times, it is over 1,255 years of audio.

When I started this podcast, I had no clue who would be listening. I figured if I talked about subjects that I found interesting, other people would too.

It turned out that a lot of people were just as curious about the world as I was. I don’t think that we are the majority, but it turns out there are a lot of us than I thought.

None of you has to listen to this podcast, yet you do. Completionist club aside, you don’t get a degree or a certificate for listening.

Many people, most people, attend college for a degree and don’t care about learning. They take blow-off classes and take useless majors to take the easiest path.

All of you are willing to take the time to learn, without any expectation or reward other than knowledge itself.

Whether or not you know it, that is a very rare thing in this world.

I also want to give a big thanks to all of you who listen. Every day, I’m amazed that there are people who not only listen to every show, but some who have listened to every show two, three, and in some rare cases even four times.

All of you allow me to have the greatest job in the world, where I can learn about things I’m interested in and share them with the world.

Now, I promised I would give this episode to you, the listeners, and I was surprised by the response I got.

So the rest of the episode will be your messages you shared with me.