Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

FatYankee asks, Sometimes your episodes correlate with the release date. Some are a history of the holiday, like Canada Day, but others correlate in a broader sense, like American Flag history on July 4th or a father/son-themed episode aired on Father’s Day.

How do you decide which special days get such an episode? Do you limit these types of episodes so as not to become a daily history podcast? I love these types of episodes and hope you add a Count Chocula episode in time for Halloween. Thanks, Gary, this podcast is my first listen to every day.

FatYankee, you basically nailed it.

There are only a few days on the calendar that are meaningful to people, and most of them are holidays. There are a few days people remember when something historic happened, but as you get further away from the event, we tend just to remember the year it happened.

In the case of holidays, it would be sort of weird to do a history of Saint Patrick’s Day in September. It makes a lot more sense just to release the episode on Saint Patricks Day.

However, I don’t necessarily want to be straight-jacketed by having to have every episode associated with a particular date on the calendar. Many of my episodes have nothing to do with any particular date. Some topics from ancient history have no dates associated with them that we are aware of.

There is also a marketing angle to doing that. Some podcast directories, like Apple Podcasts, will promote podcast episodes around certain holidays, and people often search for those episodes on those dates.

So, yeah, sometimes I do release episodes associated with a specific day, but that only happens a few times a year. If anyone has a suggestion for a particular holiday or national day in your country that you think would make a good episode, don’t hesitate to send me your suggestions.