Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - One Year Later....

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

On July 1, 2020, a world traveler who was grounded by an international pandemic made the business and personal decision to launch the podcast he wanted to listen to. One year later, he’s celebrating the one-year anniversary of his podcast. Learn more about years, anniversaries, and the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast on the one-year anniversary episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 1st, 2020, a world traveler who was grounded by an international pandemic made the business and personal decision to launch the podcast that he wanted to listen to. One year later, he's celebrating the one-year anniversary of his podcast. Learn more about years, anniversaries, and the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast on the one-year anniversary episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR.

This episode is sponsored by you. I want to give a shout out to all my supporters over at patreon.com. There are various levels of show support and I'm really appreciative of everyone who throws a few bucks my way each month to help keep the show going. If you haven't checked it out, there's merchandise available at higher tiers, including stickers, t-shirts, and hoodies. Also, you can even get access to my list of show ideas where you can contribute your ideas directly. If you want to join the list of show supporters, just go to patreon.com slash everything everywhere. Once again, that's Patreon, p-a-t-t-r-n-com slash everything everywhere.

This episode might seem sort of disjointed, but everything has to do with the theme of this podcast, one year anniversary. So with that being said, let's start with the idea of what a year is. The definition of a year is simple enough. It's the time it takes for a planet to complete one orbit around its star. Different planets have different lengths of a year. A year on Mercury only takes 88 days, and a year on Neptune takes about 165 Earth years. Believe it or not, there is more than one way to measure a year on earth. Humans have traditionally measured a year from solstice to solstice. What they were measuring wasn't the earth going around the sun, because many early humans had no clue that the earth was going around the sun. They were just measuring the length

of daylight and the position of the sun in the sky. This is also sometimes called a tropical year. This tropical year is what we base our calendars on, and I think most people intuitively understand it. The official definition of a tropical year is 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds. However, a tropical year doesn't really meet the definition of a year as I just gave it. It isn't measuring the Earth making one full orbit around the sun. It's measuring the sun's position in the sky, which is not quite the same thing. If you remember back to my episode on Milankovic cycles, which I literally just republished yesterday, there's something called axial procession, that is the wobble in the tilt of the Earth's axis. If we measure the Earth's orbit not based on where the sun is in the sky, but rather where the Earth is against the background of the stars, it's called a sidereal year.

A sidereal year is approximately 20 minutes shorter than a tropical year. When we measure the time it takes for other planets to orbit the sun, we are almost always using sidereal years. There's also another definition called an animalistic year, and that's anomelistic, not anamilistic like an animal. This measures the time it takes the Earth to go from its extreme points in orbit. Because the Earth doesn't orbit the Sun in a perfect circle, it's the time it takes between its closest or farthest points in its orbit. This too isn't the same as a tropical or sidereal year, because the closest and furthest points in the orbit are moving around the sun in a process called procession. And again, I'll refer you to the Milankovych cycle episode. An animalistic year is a bit under five minutes longer than a tropical year.

Okay, so we've tackled the concept of a year. Next, we need to address the concept of anniversaries. The word anniversary comes from Latin and the word anniversarius, and it is made up of the words anus, which means year, and versus, which means turning. So, if you ever want to be that person, and someone says they're celebrating a six-month anniversary or a six-week anniversary, you can smugly tell them that it is impossible because an anniversary literally means an annual celebration. Weddings and birthdays are the anniversaries that are most commonly celebrated. In the case of weddings, there are traditional gifts which are usually given.

There are different lists out there for what gifts are supposed to be given based on what year anniversary is being celebrated. The traditional one-year anniversary gift in the United States is paper. And in the UK, the traditional one-year anniversary gift is cotton or paper. The supposed modern gift for a one-year anniversary is a clock, and therefore I suppose an ultra-modern gift would be an atomic clock. The whole idea of having different gifts for every different year of an anniversary is a rather new invention. It only goes back to 1937, and, surprise, it was created by the American National Retail Jewelers Association. So we've covered what a year is, and we've covered what an anniversary is. Now we'll finish the topic by discussing this podcast.

The idea for this show actually goes back a few years. The initial idea was a weekly or bi-weekly show that went super in-depth on a single topic. Similar to what I do now, but fewer and much longer shows. I had actually created a list of episoded ideas and began doing research. I found myself with enough material on the first show to do like a two or three-hour program. The first show was going to be explaining why the Mona Lisa was the most famous painting in the world. A show that long is difficult to create, difficult to produce, and most importantly, difficult to keep someone's attention. I had already paid for the artwork and the theme music, but I decided to put the project aside and just focus on my travel website and doing travel photography.

When the pandemic hit, it hit me really hard because I had all my eggs in the basket of the travel industry. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the entire multi-trillion dollar travel and tourism industry could just disappear overnight. Yet, that's exactly what happened. People stopped traveling. Travel companies stopped all advertising and marketing campaigns. People even stopped researching or thinking about travel. Moreover, I had some high-level contacts at travel companies, and when I was talking to them, I realized just how bad this was going to get. As it so often happens, you don't change what you're doing unless you're placed in a position where you're forced to change. The pandemic gave me the opportunity to rethink everything I was doing, and what it was going to do going forward.

I thought about why I enjoyed traveling so much. It wasn't the traveling per se. Believe it or not, I actually hate long flights. I didn't particularly care about hotels and airlines. I never wrote about most of the things that are the subject of most travel content. I really traveled just to learn, and that's why most of my travels were centered around visiting historical sites. I realized that traveling wasn't the end in and of itself.

it was just the means for me to explore and learn about new things. I went back and revisited my podcast idea. The idea of a two-hour show might work for Dan Carlin, but it probably was going to be very difficult to launch a show like that. I figured maybe I could do a 180, and instead of doing a really long show, which other people are already doing, maybe I could do a shorter-form show and release it more frequently.

Moreover, I figured I'd be uniquely suited to do such a show. I have a pretty broad education. I'm extensively read about far too many subjects, and at top of all that, I spent 15 years traveling around the world, picking up information and stories everywhere I went. I pitched the idea of a daily show to some of my friends with successful podcasts. They all pretty much said the exact same thing. It sounds like a great idea, but it also sounds like an incredible amount of work.

Well, I wasn't doing anything else, so the work didn't scare me. I sat down and created a list of 100 show ideas, and I just got to work. I published for the first show on July 1st because it marks the midpoint of the calendar year, so it made it easy to track analytics. Since then, it's been difficult to get the show out some days. I've published enough episodes now that I can post past shows if I can't get a show out on a particular day, but I try to avoid doing that more than a few times a month. I currently have a list of 416 show ideas,

and the list is growing faster than I can produce shows, which I suppose is a pretty good thing. As for the podcast itself, I guess it's done a lot of, okay for its first year. I had two-thirds of a million downloads in the first 12 months. From the statistics I've seen, I think I can safely say that the show is in the top 5% of all podcasts, but determining the size of the entire podcast sector is more of a black art than a science. But tomorrow, I'll be back recording and getting to work at year number two. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thorpe. Instead of doing an entire episode

of questions and answers, I figure I just answer questions at the end of the show as they come in just as I read podcast reviews. So, today's question comes from 10-year-old Enid, who's a fan of the show? Her father sent me her question, which is, what is a normal day for you? Well, Enid, since I started doing the podcast, my days have become really weird. Because I need to get a show out every day, I find myself staying up later and later every night. I now usually go to bed at around four or five in the morning. The last thing I do before I go to bed is record and post the podcast. And I am literally recording this at 4.30 in the morning. Because I go to bed so late, I also get up really late. I do try to go swimming every day at my local YMCA, and I also try going for a walk for about

30 minutes. Writing and researching a show will usually take me about three to six hours, depending on the show subject, and how distracted I am while writing it. I'm going to try and get my sleep schedule back to normal if for no other reason that I'm not getting as much sleep as I should. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at gary at everything-everywhere.com, or you can send me a direct message on Twitter or Instagram.