Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Episode 500!

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Back in July of 2020, a man in the middle of a pandemic decided to launch a new podcast. It would be a daily podcast that would cover, well, everything. It was an ambitious project that everyone told him was crazy to do, but it pushed ahead and did it anyhow. Today, 16 months later, that podcast is celebrating its 500th episode. Learn more about Everything Everywhere Daily on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in July of 2020, a man in the middle of the pandemic decided to launch a new podcast. It would be a daily podcast that would cover, well, everything. It was an ambitious project that everyone told him was crazy to do, but he pushed ahead and did it anyhow. Today, 16 months later, that podcast is celebrating its 500th episode. Learn more about Everything Everywhere Daily on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing.

You can listen to nothing much happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. It's been more than a year, 400 episodes to be exact, since I've done a show that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the podcast and what goes into making it. I figure a 500th episode was a good time to do an update, and every 500 episodes would be a good length of time to revisit the subject. For those of you who don't know the backstory, I sold my home in 2007 to travel around the world for a year or two, and then I just sort of never stopped.

I started a blog when I began traveling where I documented my trips around the world. Over time, the website became successful, but after that, something happened where the online world began to change. Social media became a bigger thing, and people stopped going to blogs directly to follow people. This was a huge change in the Internet. Instead of having a place online where people could go to hear from you, had to go through a third-party company that filtered what everyone saw. The result of this are the things you're probably familiar with, clickbait, sensationalism, and outrage. In the world of travel, where I was, everything became about delivering what the algorithm

wanted. If you didn't do that, nobody would ever see what you created. The end result was that everyone was, and is, writing the exact same thing. Moreover, I never started traveling to visit hotels and to fly in airplanes. Those were necessary parts of traveling. but it isn't why I did it. Yet, that is exactly what so many people are focused on. They'll obsess about which business class seat will lie the flattest, but don't pay any attention to the culture or history of the places that they're visiting. About five years ago, I began thinking about doing a podcast that wasn't about travel per se. The great thing about podcasting is that it's one of the last areas of the internet that isn't governed by algorithms. I came up with the

idea for a show where I'd address different topics every episode. I got artwork and theme music for the show all lined up. My first episode was going to be trying to explain why the Mona Lisa was the most famous painting in the world. I went really in-depth into my research, reading many books and articles on the topic. I had enough notes that would probably have made for a two-to-three-hour show. While I could certainly edit the research down, and would still have been a really long show, and I figured I could only do about one show every two weeks with that level of research. I ended up abandoning the idea and put it aside. Flash forward to March of 2020. something which I never thought would ever happen happened.

The entire travel and tourism industry ground to a halt. Borders were closed, airlines stopped all their flights. Everything in my world came crashing down. Within a span of weeks, all the contracts and projects that I had in the works were cancelled. Traffic to my website dried up because nobody was planning trips anymore. At first, I thought that this would be temporary and that everything would pass in a few weeks. Well, needless to say, that didn't happen. By May, I began talking to some high-level people in the travel and tourism industry, and their prognosis was very dim.

This wasn't going to be over in a few weeks or months. This was going to take years to resolve. I needed to radically rethink everything I was doing. One of my first thoughts was to the podcast that I had abandoned. Dan Carlin can get away with doing five-hour podcasts, but I don't think that such a long show would necessarily work for me. I really liked the idea for the show, but it was the format that I didn't think would be successful. So I thought about doing the exact opposite. Instead of a really long show, maybe I could do more frequent short shows.

I knew someone who had a daily show, and it was really successful. Moreover, I just sat down and did the math, and it all made more sense. I pitched the idea to several of my podcaster friends. They all basically said the same thing. It was a great idea, but it would be a lot of work. Well, with everything else I had falling apart, time was something I had plenty of. So, I went to work. I sat down and came up with a list of 100 potential ideas for episodes.

I developed a format for the show, which I have stuck with for every single episode, and went to work. 500 episodes later, here I am. I've gotten many of the same questions about the show, so I'll take some time to answer some of them here. One of the most popular questions I get is, how do I come up with ideas for episodes? Basically, I keep a running list of show ideas. I just use Google Docs so I can edit it on different computers or on my phone. Whenever I come up with an idea, I just write it down. Ideas will often come from researching other episodes.

One episode might beget several other episodes. Sometimes people give me suggestions for episodes. Some are good, but sometimes they just give me a fact. There needs to be more than just a single fact. There needs to be some sort of story or some sort of arc which explains how something came to be. Another question. How long does it take for me to create an episode? On average, I would say, takes me about five hours to research and write a show, sometimes more, sometimes less. I usually have a rough idea of what I'm going to say before I sit down to write the script for the show, and I will usually have done some casual research before that five hours begins. Another question, do I work ahead? No, I do not. I am literally recording and working on a show up until the moment. I hit publish. If you down an episode at about 4 to 5 a.m. Central time in the United States,

what you are downloading, I just finish minutes before. Yes, and that means I am staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning every single day. Does anyone help me with the show? No, I literally do everything associated with the show and no one else helps me in any aspect of the production. The associate and executive producers of the show are supporter roles over at Patreon, and I'm really happy for their support. I'm looking at you Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett, but all the work is done by me. Can I make a living off the podcast? Not yet, but that is my goal. Podcasting is a really weird business. Revenue does not scale with audience size. Most advertisers won't even consider you unless you are among the top 1 to 2% of all podcasts. I recently spoke to one advertiser who

reached out to me who loved the show and thought that it was a great fit for their company. And it was. They were right. However, they passed because the audience wasn't big enough yet. I suggested they just pay me less money, but that isn't how they think. Right now, all of my efforts are put into getting a show at the door every day and growing an audience. That is one of the reasons why word of mouth is so important to growing a podcast and why you should all tell your friends about the show. There's no one single company that controls podcasting, which is good, but there is also no algorithm that you can game, which makes it harder to grow. Am I going to travel? Am I going to travel again. Yes, but not anytime soon. Right now, this show is my primary focus. I've been invited on

several trips in just the last month, and I've turned them all down because I don't want to take an extended break from the show. It is still a pain to travel internationally with all the COVID testing. You need to take tests within a certain time period. Some destinations might quarantine you when you arrive if you test positive. Different countries have different policies for what vaccinations they will accept, and even the language the vaccination card has to be in. So for right now, I'm happy to just put travel aside and focus on the show. Are there any show ideas that I won't do? There are some episode ideas that I just don't think would translate well to audio.

Many mathematical topics are particularly difficult. I have several show ideas that are math-related, but they tend to do with simple things like the Pythagorean theorem or biographies of mathematicians. I tend to stay away from current events because there are more than enough outlets for that. However, I have occasionally done historical backgrounds on a subject that might be in the news at that time. What does the future hold for the podcast? I have several plans for what I want to do in the future, but all of those take a backseat to growing the podcast right now. It's a bit of a catch-22. To start to bring in revenue, I need to grow the show, but to grow the show, I need revenue

to spend money on promotion. As of right now, I still need to grow the audience of the show by another to 100%. That sounds like a lot, but in terms of absolute numbers, it isn't necessarily. One good recommendation from a publication or on another podcast and it theoretically could happen overnight. However, once I reach that level, it'll unlock the ability for me to start doing a lot more. One of the first things I want to do is hire writers and researchers. This would take a big load off me if I could have a few episodes a week taken off my shoulders. The writing and research is really the time-consuming part of the show. Eventually, I'd also like to hire an actual producer to improve the audio quality of the show. It isn't horrible right now, but there are things

it could be done to make it better. As I have all the audio from my episodes and all the scripts, it would be possible to actually create videos for most of the shows I've done. Doing a proper YouTube video on top of what I'm currently doing to create a show is simply too much work. But I'll have content for hundreds of YouTube videos ready to go once I get to that point. Likewise, I've probably written about 750,000 words for all of the scripts that I've created, and those can be edited and repackaged into e-books.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is the idea of what should a relatively intelligent adult know. There will never be a definitive answer to that question, but I do think there's a body of knowledge that most adults should know. This includes basic facts and ideas from history, science, mathematics, geography, economics, and philosophy. This body of knowledge isn't something that if you don't have that body of knowledge or failure, but rather it should be considered a long-term goal for lifetime learning. And I think this could be the basis of a future book, as well as many future episodes. I've also given some thought to doing special episodes for supporters on Patreon

and possibly some interviews with historians and authors who can talk more in depth about some of the subjects that I've dealt with on the show. There also might be merchandise and, of course, more tours. I'm getting close to announcing prices and dates for the Rome 2022 tour, by the way. Everyone who signed up by email will be notified as soon as I have the information. So, that is the state of the podcast as it sits at episode 500. It's a lot of work, but I enjoy doing it. Reading and researching about a wide variety of topics is something I'd be doing anyhow,

so this is a way for me to channel that curiosity into something productive. Most importantly, I'd like to thank all of you for listening, for taking 10 minutes out of your day to learn something new that you might not have known about the world that you live in. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave you, a review or send me a question. You two can have it read on the show.