Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

With that, the first question comes from Lenny Zuriff. He asks, how long does it take to produce one episode, to include all the research you have to do?

The amount of time it takes is totally dependent on the type of episode it is.

For every episode, I have a rough idea of what I’m going to say before I even start. I have a running list of episode ideas that I write down when I come across them. When I write an idea down, I have a kernel of an idea of the story I want to tell.

The smaller the story, the easier it tends to be to write an episode. For example, if an episode is about a single person or a single event, it is much easier to write. Episodes that have a larger focus are more difficult to write because I have to condense an enormous amount of information into a small amount of time.

In some episodes, I’m trying to condense a subject that could be someone’s lifetime work down to about 10 minutes. That means making decisions about what to put in an episode and what to keep out.

With that being said, I’d say the average amount of time it takes to write and record an episode is around four to six hours. Sometimes it takes less, and sometimes it takes more.

I will often select an episode based on how easy it is to write and how much time it will take. I have several episode ideas that have been staring at me for, in some cases, years. I really want to do them, but they are just daunting in how difficult they would be to write.