Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s get right into things. The first question comes from Gavin Wilkinson.

He writes: What episode did you dread doing before you researched/recorded, but then actually loved it the more you dove into it?

When I dread writing a particular episode, it isn’t the subject matter that I dread. If I didn’t find it interesting, to begin with, I would never have put it on the list, and I wouldn’t have considered doing the episode in the first place.

The episodes I dread doing are topics that are interesting but can be overwhelming in terms of trying to explain them.

For example, I’ve been thinking about doing an episode on quantum physics for over two years, but I’m still not sure exactly how I would encapsulate everything into the time limits of the show. I’d probably have to chop the subject up into multiple episodes with an overview episode first.

Likewise, I’d like to do an episode explaining how blockchains work. It is something people hear about, but most people don’t really know how they work under the hood. In this case, it is trying to figure out just how much detail to go into explaining it.

Other topics are just enormous, and trying to condense them down is more of an exercise in trying to figure out what to omit. I did an episode that gave a brief history of the Mongol Empire, and that was challenging for that reason.

The episode on how horses arrived in North America was a topic I found really interesting, but I dreaded doing it for a long time because I felt the topic was daunting.