Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The first one comes from Jordan on the Discord Server, who asks, You’ve been doing this podcast every day for almost five years now, how has your process improved since you first started? Do you have go-to references for your research or a template narrative structure for an episode or something like that? Are there some episodes from early on that you wish you could redo now that you have a reliable system?

My system for writing episodes is much better now than it was when I started. I’d say I can write a full episode in half to a third of the time it took me when I first started, and the episodes are longer than they were.

Much of this has to do with the fact that I’ve done so many of them, before I even start writing, I develop an outline in my head for how the episode is going to be laid out. The arc of the episode will be different depending on the subject, but I’ve done enough of them now to have an idea how most subjects should flow.

Are there early episodes I wish I could redo? The answer is yes. When I do encore episodes, I almost never do any from the first two years of the podcast anymore. I just don’t think those episodes are at the same level of the shows I’m doing today.

I’m actually considering going back and redoing these shows. They wouldn’t be encore episodes, rather theyd be a more fully fleshed-out version. I’d probably label them as redux episodes, as it would include a lot of new content.

The big reason I want to do this is because many of those early episodes were some of my favorite ideas for shows.