Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Episode 100

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every so often, you need to step back and take an assessment of where you've been and where you're 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. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satire. But it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends,

family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. To steal a line from public radio, this episode is sponsored by listeners like you. I just wanted to thank everyone who has taken the time to listen to the show, provide feedback, leave comments on Apple Podcasts, and especially those who support the show over on 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 button. So thank you to everyone who's listening, and I hope to keep you informed and entertained

for a great while longer. The genesis of this podcast is severalfold. 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. That part is actually sort of true. The problem was no one really anticipated that most people weren't interested in learning anything. Thanks to the internet, there are now more people who believe the earth is flat than there were 20 years ago. We've become more polarized,

there's more disinformation, and social media has become extremely toxic. I don't think anyone really predicted all of the negative consequences that the internet would bring. 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 that will tell you how to become richer or thinner or better looking. I figured there was a space for something that 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 were things such 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 from cover to cover. Today, I can still get lost for hours reading things online and going off on tangents, a skill which is now actually very valuable for a podcast like this. When I started traveling, my goal was to do a video podcast, giving the backstores. story about the places I visited. I wanted to talk about the history, geography, geology, culture,

and everything else that 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 technically, but you couldn't really use it for video like you can now. I produced a few videos, some of which are still 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 a travel website and doing travel photography.

I came up with the idea of reviving my plan from back in 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 da Vinci. My notes for the show kept growing, and I realized that I was going to have a show that was over two hours long. Some people like Dan Carlin can get away with doing extremely long shows. I'm not sure most podcasters can. I'm not sure I wanted to.

As the research swelled, the podcast just got put off, even though I had the artwork, the 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 started 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 or advertising. They were just trying to stay alive. I'll be honest, it devastated my business. My income dropped about 95%. I began to think of what I could do. One of my first thoughts was reviving the podcast. However, at this time, I took it in a different direction. Instead of doing really long shows on a single subject, I thought about doing the exact 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 that much more than working on really long shows. And because I wasn't really doing anything else, because travel had pretty much dried up, I certainly had the time. I had the cover art. I had the name of the show. I had the 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 shows. 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 two hours to six to eight 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 super easy because I didn't have to research anything. I just wrote it. Some ideas are much easier to make than others. Big shows which cover broad topics like The Discovery of Fire 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 active recording itself is pretty simple. I have a road podcaster dynamic

microphone that goes directly into my desktop computer. I record and edit everything in Apple Garage Band. I record in segments. I record the introduction, ads, an 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 I want to say something in a different way. Then I just back up to the most recent paragraph break and start again from there. I then assemble the separate parts together in garage band, almost like Legos, and save it as one complete file. I run the file and run the file a program called Levelator, and then compress it to MP3, which is then how I loaded up to the internet. 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 it every day, producing matters more than anything else. The theme music is called Big Epic Choir, and was composed and performed by Sergei Azapov. The piece is actually much longer than the short clip I use in the show, but for a short daily show, I couldn't really have long intro music because everyone would just eventually 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 podcasts. Some great ideas are very visual, and I don't think that would need the best for an audio format. For example, a show on flags would be very 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 that the show could be found everywhere. I got on every possible 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 in something I'll be doing for a long time. 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 far more challenging than it sounds. This is something that could probably consume all of my time, but I do have to actually, you know, make a 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 partly out of strategy. It will probably be a while before I could financially justify hiring someone else, so that does make 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 is the future hold for the show? The current plan is to keep chugging along. However, because I've 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'll probably convert the audio into YouTube videos. That is something I'm sure I'll need help with. 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 episodes into a physical book made out of dead trees if I can find a publisher. At some point, once 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 really get people 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'm speaking right now,

I'll save the file, put all the parts together, upload it, and start working on episode 101.