Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseTo mark the 500th episode, Daniel gives a tour of the podcast's history and production process, including candid interviews with the co-hosts, Sean Carroll and other podcasters.
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Terms apply here everyone, Daniel here. Today's episode is our five hundredth episode of the podcast. Thank you so much to everyone out there who's joined us on this wild ride to explore the beauty and mystery of our universe. Those people who feel that buzzing need to know the truth about the deepest cosmic questions, and who share my hunch that humans are capable of figuring it all out. I always wanted to share with all of you the incredible feeling of satisfaction I get when something clicks into place in my mind. It's been my absolute pleasure, and here's to many more moments of deep insight. Everyone is curious about how things work and how it all comes together, especially you since you're listening to this podcast right now, and over the last five years that we've been on air, we've spent a lot of time talking about how the universe works and how particles are woven together to make our reality. But did you ever wonder how this podcast works? How a physicist with a full time job puts up two episodes per week with his co hosts and guests. How lots of people working together weave all of their efforts to make this podcast a reality. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at ucar Mine, and I'm a podcaster. I usually don't list that in my introduction to episodes, which is kind of weird because that's actually how most of you know me. Very few of you out there know me in any of my other worlds a particle physicist or university professor. Those are the worlds that occupy most of my time. You all mostly know me through this podcast, and today I want to meld those worlds a little bit to show you how I ended up becoming a podcaster and how it fits into the rest of my life and how the podcast comes together. So welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, in which we explore and explain the nature of the universe, from the smallest tiny little bits out there to the whole nature of the universe, black holes and cosmic strings and everything out there. We tagle the biggest questions and we try to break them down and explain them to you if you're new to the podcast. The note that today is not a typical episode. This episode instead is something of a celebration and self reflection. We've done five hundreds episodes of the podcast now, that's two a week every week for about five years. Along the way, we've had highs and lows, and moments of laughter and moments of tears, and we'll share a lot of those with you today. But mostly I did want to use this episode to celebrate what we've accomplished here, and to do that, I wanted to pull back the curtain and let you in on the process of how the podcast is made. So today's episode will not be a deep dive into physics, but into the podcast itself. I hope that's interesting to all of you out there. While each episode is mostly about physics, I find that listeners also usually respond positively to our occasional personal comment like when I talk about white chocolate versus dark chocolate, or complain about having to help my son with his chemistry homework. And so I hope there's interest out there in getting to know the team behind the podcast and how they do what they do. I think it's pretty unusual to put out such a high volume of content with such a small team, and I want to show you how we do it, what a joy it is to do, and what it means to all of us, because it wasn't always obvious that we were going to get here five hundred episodes in. For example, here's a frank comment from a listener along these lines. He's a friend and a fellow particle physicist, Brian Field.
I believe I saw a fellow podcaster who had retweeted that there was going to be a new podcast by the people that wrote to you know, we have no idea, you know, a sort of thing. These books that I enjoyed, and so I got kind of got in on the ground floor, and as a professional scientist myself, I was very surprised to find how great they were, how high level they were.
And I have to admit that my.
First thought was, well, these are great, but there's no way they're going to be able to keep this level of discourse with this many topics for any amount of time. They're just going to run out of clever things to say, They're going to run out of topics. They're going to cover it all. But you know, while it lasts, this is going to be great. And it was right that it was great, and I was wrong about everything else. And I hope that this is just the beginning and that it continues to be a great source of science news in the future. And I'm just so glad that it's part of my life keeping Keep up the great work, guys, And from your number one friend, Brian, talk to you later.
Brian didn't think we could keep it up, have enough clever things to say for all those episodes. Well, I'm glad to say that we proved him wrong. That five hundred episodes of Bananas and Black Holes later, we've kind of found a rhythm and a team that works together well and puts out two episodes a week without fail every week. But let's start at the very beginning. Before we can talk about how an episode is made, I want to tell you the story about how the podcast itself came to be. Like many podcasts, Ours came out of writing a book, the book that Jorge and I wrote together in twenty seventeen called We Have No Idea, and that book grew out of some earlier collaborations, ones that frankly eye there thought could happen, because while you all probably know Jorge as the co host of this podcast, I first knew him as the famous cartoonist behind PhD Comics, and he certainly had no idea who I was. It's kind of a miracle that I got to work with such an internet celebrity at all. He was a clip of me during a presentation we gave at Harvard telling the story of how Jorge and I came to work together. Hell hard one. It's been a real pleasure working on these projects with Jorge. Not only is he an amazing artist, he's also really modest. So, for example, I have to correct the story a little bit that he told you because he leaves out some important details. When I thought about explaining physics using cartoons, I thought that would be a lot of fun. But I don't have the artistic talent to do it myself. Who could I get to do this? And my wife is also a fan of PhD comics. She said, well, why don't you email Jorge Chom And I thought, well, you know, Jorge is not just some cartoonist, right, He's like in academia and in research, he's world famous. You can't go to a lab that does research and not find one of his cartoons on the wall, because he's really captured, you know, the experience of being a graduate student and the suffering of research and all of these things. So it's like just emailing a famous person, right, So she says, why don't you email Jorge Chom And I thought, sure, And then I'll call Brad Pitt and ask him to make a movie value right, like while we're at it. Right. So I still haven't hear back from Brad, but I did get to write this awesome book with Horage, which is a lot of fun. So after I cold email this internet celebrity, Jorge and I amazingly started out making videos where I would explain the particle physics and he would make these incredible cartoons to illustrate and clarify the ideas. Then in twenty seventeen, the cartoon is behind the webcomic XKCD had a massive best selling book called what If, which if you haven't read, you should, and his agent reached out to Jorge to see if Jorge was interested in also doing a science comic book to blend explaining science and comics and you know, explaining physics using cartoons was kind of jam So Jorge called me and said, hey, I think we could write a book about particle physics, and I said, I don't know, let's find out what's involved. I'm a physics professor. I don't really know anything about publishing. Well, it turns out to sell a nonfiction book is pretty weird process. If you want to sell a novel, you typically have to write the whole thing and then sell it, unless you're like Stephen King and have a track record. But for nonfiction, you don't actually have to write it first. You just write a sample chapter and an outline. So we did, and the whole thing came together kind of shockingly fast. I remember sitting down and bang out the first draft of a sample chapter during my daughter's gymnastics practice one Saturday morning, and it just kind of flowed out of me. You know, all these thoughts and ideas I had about dark matter and how little we know about the universe and how much there was left to discover, and how exciting that was, and the opportunity and the thrill of all that just sort of like flowed onto the page. I sent it out to Jorge, who whipped it into shape. And made sure it was clear and relatable in that way that he's so good at. And then he drew his wonderful cartoons and sent it off to the agent, and just like two weeks later, we had a very flattering book contract. The whole thing was like really a whirlwind. Then of course we got to actually write the book, which took about a year, and it was a lot of fun. Jorge and I had lots of conversations about what to write about and how to write it. We talked about science, send me jokes and had a lot of fun, and you know, I learned a lot just in trying to explain particle physics to somebody who's really smart and ask good questions. So many times Jorge would like back things up and say, a whole lot of second, what do you mean we don't know what mass is or we don't understand space, And whole chapters of that book came into being from his questions. And then of course the book came out and we went on tour to promote the book. That clip you heard earlier is from our presentation the book talk, and this is something you need to understand about how that book talk came together. That's kind of shaped all five hundred episodes of the podcast that followed. Let's just say like it wasn't very highly prepared. Basically, we waned it every time. Personally, I wanted to plan it, to lay it out and nail it down, because I'm kind of a planner the way I balance everything in my life, you know, an overwhelming academic job, a family, a podcast, a TV show, book writing is vie staying organized and getting things done in advance. But for the book talk, we just kind of had a rough idea of what we wanted to say and we went for it. Kind of terrified me, but you know what, it went pretty well. All in all. We gave that talk more than fifty times across the country. In the UK, we give that talking fields and auditoriums filled with a thousand people, or the tiny bookstores with a handful of eager listeners. And because it wasn't superscripted, every single time, it really was different. There was always like some new joke or a new twist. Maybe Jorge would like draw a silly doodle of me making fun of me. While I was speaking, the audience would roar with laughter while I was totally clueless, or I'd make some dumb physics dad joke to earn a rueful chuckle. It turns out that we kind of had a knack for a spontaneous humor and we had a good chemistry together. We were just more natural and sincere when it wasn't tightly planned, because we just had fun talking and joking about science, and that's where the podcast was born. Two guys at a company called Stuff Media reached out to us about launching a podcast. This is like twenty seventeen, a few years after podcasts had started to take off, but before they were like really huge, before everybody had a podcast, so it wasn't really something on my radar yet, but I thought it was an intriguing idea. The guys that stuff Media thought that we had what a take to make a podcast work, so to understand what they saw in us, I recently sat down with Will Pearson, one of the guys who originally recruited us into the podcast world, to hear about why he thought our podcast might work and whether it's turned out as he's planned. In the time since his company was bought by iHeartMedia and he now runs their podcast division. That's pretty impressive. I mean iHeart is the biggest podcasting company on the planet, which means Will is basically the worldwide president of podcasting. He's an important guy. But when we spoke, he wasn't actually able to use his usual quiet space for highqua qual of the audio recordings because his thirteen year old son had and I'm quoting him here, a very important gaming session. Here's my conversation with Will. Well, thanks very much, Will for going to have a candid conversation with me. First, introduce yourselves to our listeners. You're one of the many people behind the scenes that makes this happen, but they don't know you, So tell us a little bit about who you are.
Yeah, and Will Pearson, I run the podcast division here at iHeart. I was actually part of a company called stuff Bedia or maybe more publicly known as how Stuff Works a few years ago, and we were acquired by iHeartMedia or iHeartRadio to come on board and run the podcast division here. But you know, we had come out of a world of podcasts that we're all very general knowledge driven.
Cool. Well, let's not understate your job. I mean iHeart is like number one podcast company in the world and you're heading up the podcast division there that seems like kind of a big deal.
It's you know, it's one of those things that because it doesn't happen overnight, you really don't stop to think about it. But yeah, I know we're to bragg.
Awesome. Well, podcasts are everywhere now and everybody listens to podcast and sort of a big deal. But take us back to like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen when our podcast started. What was a podcast landscape like back then? What kind of things were you looking for?
I think, first of all, the thing that drew me to the podcast base, because that's right around the time that I had joined Stuff Media, as I mentioned before, was around twenty seventeen, was the fact that it was a medium built off of knowledge based shows. Like we started seeing the biggest shows in the category were really shows where people were coming to them because they wanted to learn, They wanted to walk away feeling a little bit smarter from whatever they were listening to. You could find a great podcast for those, and that podcast sort of stripped away the layers that you find in most other medium and get down to the very basics of a conversation.
Awesome and So why did you reach out to us? What did you see in us? Why did you think that Daniel Jorge explain the universe it might be a good fit for your company.
Well, I mean, first of all, it was a category that I've long been interested in, you know, the idea of helping a general population or curious minds better understand the universe, better understand astronomy. You know, as a kid, was the nerd that was obsessed with you know, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and everything I could get my hands on. That sort of made this category accessible, and I just felt like that there was a larger population that would be interested in this as well. You know, we saw with the success of our House Stuff Works line of shows that there really was a hunger for good audio in the general knowledge space. And when we saw we have no idea, we really felt like, Okay, here are two guys that get it. You know, when it's a rare moment that you find super smart people that really know how to communicate with a general audience, it feels like we're all in it together. Didn't feel like you're being lectured to, It didn't feel like you were just you know, had the pleasure of just being with somebody that was one hundred times smarter than you were. Like, you guys obviously are incredibly intelligent, but at the same time, it just feels like you're getting the chance to listen in on a great conversation. And we felt like there was that opportunity to create a show.
With you two in a way that could do that.
And fortunately, the first time we heard you guys in a pilot when we said, you know what, we think this could be an interesting podcast. Let's have a conversation about it. The first time you guys ever recorded. Not to say that it was perfect, but like you immediately knew something was there, so we were super excited about it.
Wow awesome, And you know, we've done five hundred episodes now and the show has evolved and you know, gained its own inside jokes and all sorts of stuff. Would you say that it's like different from what you might have predicted it turned into five years ago, or is it mostly what you were looking for?
I mean, I would say, fortunately, it is what we were looking for, because you know, we try not to be too prescriptive when we bring on a new podcast. We know at the core what we were looking for was something that could help curious minds better understand the universe and also to feel like they were being entertained when they listen to something. And if you can find the right blend there sort of walking that line in a really smart way, I think, you know you've got a hit show on your hands. And so we didn't know exactly what it was going to sound like, but the vibe and the sort of effect of the show was exactly what we were going for. So no, I think the show is exactly what we wanted to be. I had no idea that it would run five hundred episodes, but that's been part of the beauty of shows of this type is that listeners fall in love with the hosts, with the concept and just stick with it. And so so it's been a blast to just watch it. I didn't know that it would be as big as it is because it felt like, Okay, this is a category that maybe will be a little more niche. But you know, you've got hundreds of thousands of people listening to every single episode, which is just amazing.
It feels like a huge privilege to me that all those folks aren't trusting us with their time and energy, So I'm really grateful. Well, thanks very much, Will for sharing your perspective and for having that faith in us to create this thing. I'm always touched that so many people who make these shows happen were themselves inspired by something earlier. It's just like feeds forward. You know, you were inspired by Carl Sagan. You help make something which I hope will inspire somebody else out there and make something else beautiful.
Oh, I appreciate that, And congratulations to you guys. It's no big surprise to me that you've been successful, but I love it. I love that we get to partner with you guys, and look forward to being back on for episode one thousand.
All right, awesome, Thanks very much, Will. So Will thought that Jorge and I had a chemistry together and a n act for explaining this stuff, and decided to give us a chance. But you might also wonder, and many people have asked me this, what made me want to do this? I mean, I already I had a more than full time job as a physicist, and I've young kids at home, and most academics are already like drowning in work and emails. Why take on this other new thing. So when we come back from the break, we'll talk about that, and we'll hear from other physicists in the podcast space and why they do it, and I'll take you through how we go from idea to episode twice a week in a way that doesn't break my calendar or ruin my marriage with big wireless providers. What you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dig your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless build to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash Universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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If you love iPhone, you'll love Applecard. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield when you open a high Yield savings account through Applecard. Apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. Okay, we're back with our special behind the scenes episode or the podcast to give you a glimpse into the origin of the show and how it's put together. But I haven't told you yet. Probably the most important thing to me, at least, which is why I do the show. It wasn't because I liked talking science with the joorge, though of course I do, or because it was a fun new adventure, which it was, or because I might make some cash, though I have nothing against cash. Deep down, it's really because I just wanted to share my joy with you all. There are these moments when you study physics that an idea clicks in your mind and you're just shaken with the power of it. A veal is pulled back and you have a new view of the entire universe. You thought it working like this, but then it turns out you were looking at it backwards or upside down, or missing ninety five percent of the picture, or trying to read it in the wrong language. And when you see it the right way, it connects in this beautiful way that makes you want to like shout with joy and whispering reverence. At the same time, I'm not personally a very religious person, but those moments of deep understanding, those are the most spiritual moments of my life. When I feel like I've glimpsed something deeply true, I've seen behind the scenes, you know, when you realize, oh, light is a wiggle in these fields, or oh, electricity and magnetism is just one big idea clicks together, or wow, group theory describes a relationship between the particles. Or wow, forces only exist to preserve the gage symmetries of that group theory. Or oh, our laws only apply to the current phase of the universe. Or wow, there isn't one single clock for the universe, there are infinite series of clocks, a new single history of events, or oh my gosh, the speed limit of the universe comes naturally from this new way of thinking about space. All of these moments which I had as I was learning physics were so delicious, and I wanted to share those because they're wonderful. They're like drinks from the cup of the universe oracle. And I felt like there's a lot of great science communication out there, but this wasn't out there yet. I didn't find these moments that sheer joy, that deep understanding in the pop side books I read, or in the podcast that I listened to, And there are a lot of great podcasts and books out there, but none were doing what I thought needed to be done and saying it in the way that I thought it should be said. I've heard once that startup founders are often people who are annoyed that nobody's doing something the right way, so they feel this deep need to start a business to do it right. And frankly, that's kind of how I felt. I wanted to share these moments in physics and do it in a deep way, one that doesn't gloss over with the same tired pop side analogies and doesn't say, trust me, the math works, but I can't explain it any further. I wanted to really communicate the intuitive understanding that the math gives us. And I also felt a little bit like it was part of my job. I mean, I'm a professor at a public university, and I wanted to help share this joy with the public, not just with the students who happened to end up in my classroom. This is something that belongs to everyone, and I hope that my way of talking and thinking about it might click with someone out there and encourage their curiosity or inspire them to study physics and help humanity crack this giant puzzle we call the universe. The way Will had been inspired by previous generations of science communications. It didn't turn him into a physicist, but it motivated him to put money and resources behind another educational physics podcast. So yeah, it was going to take some time, and you'll hear in a bit about how we try to run a streamlined operation. But for me, the fundamental motivation was that I feel super lucky to get to do these things for a living, and I wanted to connect with people out there whose lives took other paths but still felt a yearning to understand and wanted more of that joy of deep connection with the universe. To understand whether this was like a typical feeling or podcast origin story. I reached out to some fellow science podcasters to ask them about why and how they put their podcast together and how they got started. Here's Sean Carroll, well known author and podcaster. Well, actually, let me let him introduce himself.
I'm just a person trying to understand how the universe works in various ways and trying to share whatever I figure out with other people. So my title is hilarious. My official title is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. So that's a mouthful and it captures the fact that here at Johns Hopkins, I serve both as a physicist and a philosopher, and at Santa Fe I can think about complexity in the wider world. And of course, in addition to my day job as a professor and researcher, I also write books and give talks, and I have a podcast called Mindscape.
I also talk to Dan Hooper and Shalma Wegsman, hosts of Why This Universe, another my favorite podcasts.
I'm Shuma, I'm of us two co hosts of Why This Universe, and I also edit and produce it. And so I guess a little bit about me. My day job right now is actually I work in video games. My backgrounds and physics obviously, I have a master as I started my PhD, but I left academia to pursue some like more media related interests of mine.
I'm Dan Hooper. I have a research position at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, so this is kind of the US premiere particle physics lab. And I also have a professorship at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at University Chicago. So I teach some classes, I advise grad students that sort of thing, and generally just through research on kind of the interface of particle physics and cosmology, so some hy energy astrophysics, some early universe stuff. Dark matter is kind of the thing I'm most known for. Those are the sorts of things that keep me up at night.
So then I asked John why he spends his very valuable time on a podcast.
Anytime that someone asks why I do something, the honest answer is because I think it's fun, unless it's something that I just literally need to do for other obligation purposes. So when I wrote a book of mine called The Big Picture back in twenty sixteen, it was about many different topics, including philosophy and neuroscience and biology, and I got to, you know, email big names in different fields and say, hey, could we chat. I'm writing a book.
You know.
The book was sort of a license to get me into their offices and have them give me some time. And then the book went away. I finished with it, and I no longer had a reason to call people up and talk to them. And so someone pointed out that if I had a podcast, I could do that, And so really, for me, my benefit of the podcast is that I get to talk to a bunch of people who are very smart and interesting in very different fields.
And here's Dan and Shelma answering the same question.
I mean, I love it as a way to keep my foot in the physics store, in the physics world all, you know, stay really like on top of physics.
Yeah, so, I mean, I'm always been a person who has like their main, you know, day job, and then a bunch of side projects. I'm a side project guy. So in physics that might be writing books, and I've written several. I'm in the process of finishing a graduate level textbook now that's my current side project. I play music, so I'm always in a band or two and plank shows and working on that. And some years ago, like I just was a big consumer of podcasts. I listened to a lot of them, and I thought there was space in the podcast you know ecosystem for something different in the physics science area.
I also add Katie Golden, who you know as a frequent guest host on this podcast, how she got into.
Podcasting, actually had no idea I would was going to get into podcasting. I had always kind of secretly wanted to. When I started listening to podcasts, it just seemed like so fun to have these kinds of conversations. So I got into comedy educational writing for a online magazine called Cracked, and then after that I kind of just like got approach to come up with an idea for a podcast.
Because you're a funny person, because you're a writer.
Yeah, I mean it's because I kept harassing people until no.
I yeah.
Actually, well, actually the whole way I got started in comedy writing was a Twitter account, which sounds kind of lame.
Oh yes, the the well Born Twitter Bird parody count two podcast pipeline.
Exactly exactly. It's actually it's a very bizarre.
Path one that I I. It was not like a grand scheme or a grand plan. I never planned at all. It was just, hey, I like this thing, and hey I like that that thing, much like a small bird getting distracted by shiny objects.
Well, you know, I actually did some research for this interview because you and I actually know a few people randomly in common. Oh really, I spoke to somebody who went to college with you. What and she said, quote, Katie seemed very quiet in college, so I was sort of surprised when she became a podcaster.
She's great, who said this?
This is my friend Jane Baldwin was a professor here at U see her line.
I know Jane Baldwin. What the heck? I was a bridesmaid with her. What the heck?
I am? Wow, this is I was not expecting to like have basically a Jerry Springer moment here.
And I asked Sean what keeps him going after several years of podcasting.
I have a lot of support I got I have both the ads and you know, Patreon supporters, and so now I get paid to do the podcast, and so the I say this as a joke, but it's it's totally true, Like the money that comes through to there keeps me going at the podcast. Like I could much more easily give it up if I just you know, I like doing it. So I'm not trying to imply that I want to give it up. But sometimes it's work and I have other things to do.
And yeah, it's a good point. We all have other things to do. Sean and Dan, like me, are also full time physicists. I personally run a research group of around twelve thirteen people, meaning I'm responsible for finding funding for them and leading their research and guiding their careers. And we're a pretty productive little group. We put out ten to twelve papers every year. Top of that, I teach three classes here at u SEE Irvine, which is no small time commitment. And you might have heard that Jorge and I were also creating and launching a public television science show during this time. So when we were thinking about taking this on, I wanted to make sure that I could do it while managing everything else going on. For me, that meant leaning heavily on what we learned during our book talk, which means winging it. The podcast was going to have to be unscripted, relying on us to say interesting things in the moment, based on a very rough outline, and relying on our editor Corey to clean it up and make it all sound good. You'll hear from him in a minute what that's like and how hard it is. I think that this makes our podcast different from a lot of others that you might listen to, this American Life Radio Lab. Most of these podcasts are scripted. They write down what they're going to say. Here's a conversation I had with Joel Werner, supervising producer on the very well produced podcast Science Versus. So thanks very much for having a chat with me. First, I want to ask you to introduce yourself. What are your titles, what's your background? How do you describe yourself?
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. My name's Joel Werner. I'm a science journalist. I've been a science journalist for a long time now, over a decade. I'm the supervising producer at Science Versus, and before that I worked at the ABC, the Australian ABC SO, which is like the BBC for the bottom side of the world. Well, not like the ABC in America.
There's no top side and bottom side.
This is true.
As soon as I came out of my mouth, I was like, wow, this is bait tour to someone like you.
So you're a science journalist at heart. How did you get into podcasting and how did you end up working on Science Versus.
Just earlier this year, joined Wendy and the team at Science Versus, which is as Science Versus has been one of my favorite podcasts for a long time. So yeah, big dream to come and work with that team.
Well, that's so exciting when people get to like live their dreams. So tell us about the team there, because our podcast has a very small team. It's basically just a couple of hosts and editor and our producers don't like get very involved in the creative stuff. The sense just from looking at your website you have a much more extensive team over there. How big is what are the various roles? How does that all work?
Yeah, it's a bigger team than I've ever worked on before to make a show. So Wendy Zuckerman, she created the show. She's the executive produce. So she's the host. She's our north star.
You know.
I feel like Wendy lives and breathes science versus and really kind of understands the program brief like so deeply, which is really great coming onto a show. It's wonderful to have someone who just understands the DNA of that show like Wendy does. Blithe Terrell is our editor. So blithe so it has that sort of like really zoomed out editorial eye over literally everything to do with the show. She's kind of like the stop gap for any of those tricky editorial moments. And she just also like kind of is the glue that holds the team together.
What's a tricky editorial moment? Ah, good question.
Let me think about one from my episode. Okay, so I did an episode about AI and in a storyline that didn't actually end up making it to air. There was a question about whether I could make one of my sources anonymous, so all of that kind of stuff. Then there's a team of producers. So, like I said, I'm the supervising producer. We have a couple of senior producers, Merril Horn and Rose Rimmler. Michelle Dang is a producer, and then we haven't we've had an intern Ari Nadowitz as well. So yeah, like kind of a big production team as well, and usually, like produces, Wendy and the producers each kind of lead an episode.
So tell us about how an episode comes together. I was listening to the Startup podcast about how Gimlet Media came together, and there's a moment there where Bloomberg calls Gimlet Media shows quote obsessively crafted and highly produced. Tell us what that means.
Yeah, that's true, that's very true. So like from yeah, like how the sausage is made right, Like, let's start start at the beginning of the production line. So we're kind of in that moment now, like we're in between seasons at the moment, So everyone's working on pictures for the new season, and so that's a lot of firstly like idea generation, Like I'm sure all of the producers, like I have a list, I have a kind of rolling Google doc of story ideas that I want to cover, and I'm sure all the producers have something similar. And so then it's kind of like pitching something to focus on. It might be like there's something in the zeitgeist, there's something happening now as there is, and you're choosing it. There's some really interesting research choosing that going and chatting to a bunch of people. So I'm working on a story idea at the moment, I probably emailed about like I don't know, like twenty ish people yesterday. I'm lining up a whole bunch of conversations over the next few weeks, like doing all of those background chats to develop a pitch. Then we pitched that idea to the team. The pitch either gets like green lit, that sounds great, go ahead, it gets rejected, we don't like the idea for this reason and go and find another idea, or there's an amber light as well, where it's like, yeah, we think this could work but like you might need to do X, Y and Z to get it across the line.
So does that mean that you're doing a whole bunch of interviews before you even know what story you're telling. You're just like going out there and doing basic journalism like what's going on here? Looking for a story to emerge?
Yeap, doing background interviews like reading papers, like reading lots and lots of papers.
And are you recording those background interviews? Do they ever end up in the actual show?
Like? Not for me? I'm sure there have been instances where a background interview has ended up in the show. But for like the AI episode I did last season, I interviewed up with the twenty people on background, and then I probably did formal interviews with about five of those people, and about three of those interviews made it into the show. So there's a lot of a lot of work going on behind the scenes. It's the classic, you know, like the duck on top of the water looks very calm, but underneath the water the legs the legs of swimming frantically.
So does that mean that you you've done all the research to get sort of the rough outline of the story, and then you do the sort of final interviews those interviews, are you trying to get people to say the things you need them to say to tell the story you want to say, or are you still doing some.
Exploration like a bit of both, a bit of both. Like usually by that stage, well you know the story that got Green liit. I'm terribly bad at phishing in interviews. So I'm a big tangent explorer, and if there's any I'll follow any loose thread and just pull and pull and pull in any interview. So it's about getting that information on tape, but it's also about, like, especially for a show like Science Versus, it's trying to get those moments captured on tape. So more than information, it's about like trying to have a moment that's funny or enlightening or meaningful or like something that one of those we call them like lean in moments, right, So you're trying to kind of like have those very human moments that as as a podcast you're like, oh wow, okay, this is getting juicy. Now I want to know what's going on, And so we're trying to trying to get those moments on tape because that's the thing you can't. Like we can go and read a paper and we can write a few lines that fill in a factory point that we need, but you can't manufacture those like kind of very human moments that you have in interviews.
And then the episode itself is structured with all these interviews. But then there's a lot of narration. Wendy does some you know, talking to the audience. Is that part scripted? Is that written before she reads it? Does she ever go off script?
Yeah?
So basically, like once we've done the interviews, we have like hours and hours of tape, we go and edit that tape and structure it out in like how we think the interview is going to go. In the past, how it happened was that like Wendy and the producer would then write script for her to read. But this season, we've changed the way that we work and we're now doing all of that in conversation. So it's not like it's not scripted scripted. It's like we'll have dot points, we'll go, Okay, this is what we want to achieve in this section. But then like you and I are speaking now without a script. Sorry to break the illusion for anyone listening that this isn't heavily scripted, but yeah, like and then well we'll go through and we'll we'll like have that conversation and again trying to capture those really human moments.
Wow, And so you boil down a huge amount of information into these fairly compact episodes. Well, it's great to hear that the climate of podcasting is moving towards conversation because we can't do scripted podcasts. We don't have the time, and we're also not very good at reading scripts. I mean, nobody could write the kind of terrible jokes that we make anyway. They only work if they're spontaneous. Tell me about the process of vetting the episodes, because you've talked to a bunch of experts and then you boil it down and we all know that, like the process of explaining science in general public involves, you know, simplifications and approximations. Do you then go and make sure that your final output doesn't make the experts queasy? You send it back out to them and ask them for opinions.
I mean, I think as a science journalist, like the biggest strength of Science Versus is just the depth of research that the show engages in so like everywhere I've worked has always had quite rigorous fact checking, Like you kind of don't put anything out with at least getting you know, another expert in the field, an independent expert to vet the person that you're talking to and to kind of like you might give someone a call and go, look, these ideas aren't super fringy, are they, you know, just to kind of look for those red flags, but for science versus Like I mean, there's a citation count at the end of each episode. We're routinely referencing like hundreds of research papers literally everything in the show, Like as we're building the script where footnoting and you can see these scripts. There's a link to the transcripts in the show notes of each episode, and so you can go through and see like literally every point we make has to be backed up by some piece of research. And then we have an independent fact checker for each episode as well. So they come on for the episode for a week. They're not connected to the team, they don't like, you know, they're not part of the kind of production process, so they come in cold and they're a professional fact checker. So they go through the script and they look at the referencing, and they ask really hard questions and they put they push us to be kind of really definitive about everything that we're saying and how we're supporting it and and yeah, like I said, it's the it's the thing that Science Versus does that no other show I've worked on, Like I've worked on a bunch of shows, and like, nothing else has ever come to the level of fact checking that this show does. And yeah, I'm really proud to be part of it now because it's you know, I think it does that thing that that science does so well. It kind of brings an evidence base to the thing you're trying to explain to the world. And yeah, yeah, I think I think this show does it really well.
Yeah. Wow, congratulations, that's an amazing process. It sounds like it's more deeply vited than probably a lot of the papers you're relying.
I was joking to my wife. I was saying, like, Wow, every episode feels like a litter review thesis. I'm like, should we just go and get a PITHD Now.
Well, thanks for all the work that you do and for Science Versus and for taking some time to talk to me. It's been very educational look.
Thank you for your podcast as well. I think the more science podcasts we have in the world, the better. And yeah, it's a real pleasure to come and chat to you today.
Wonderful, thank you. So, as you heard from that conversation, they have a big team. They do huge amounts of background research and piece the episode together from an enormous number of hours and hours of conversation. But we can't do that on this show. We just don't have the staff or frankly, the free time. We're literally just recording two guys having a conversation about science that I roughly sketched out, and then leaning heavily on our editor to clean it up and pull it together. Mindscape, Sean Carroll's podcast is even more extreme. Sean told me he's just a team of one. He does it all, from research to editing. Here's Sean talking about how an episode comes together.
Forgot the part where I do research. You know, sometimes I don't need to when I'm talking to someone who is in my field and I can just talk with them. But if I'm talking to someone in economics or neuroscience, I need to read their book or whatever. Hopefully that doesn't take too long. If it's too much, then and I won't have them on in the first place, and then I edited together. It's usually not that much. I'm not even listening, honestly to the whole podcast. I just don't have time or patients to do that, but I will listen to enough of it to get a feeling for the audio quality.
So Sean just records natural conversations and edits them together. Dan and Shawma from Why This Universe have a slightly more involved production process.
In my desk drawer my home office, I have a list of like maybe future Why This Universe episodes from these brainstorming sessions. But then like I'll pick one of them and I'll spend a week or two kind of researching it. Some of these things I already know a lot about, and like researching it really is just kind of like writing down my thoughts and like I put it down, like just type a bunch of things down in a word file, and I kind of use that as notes.
Yeah, often I'm like asking questions. I'm trying to kind of predict what people's reactions will be, where confusions will come up.
You know.
Sometimes we'll say something and I'm like, wait that like might confuse people based on things we've said in the past, you know, things like that, and then I we like discuss ways to clarify things, add things. I like give myself notes so often I am the parts that I add in. I often add in after this conversations.
So now you've heard a little bit about the production process on other podcasts, from the one man show of Mindscape, to the small team of Why This Universe and the large team at Science Versus. So now let's get into the nitty gritty of how an episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is made. First, I find a topic. I have this file on my computer, which is just a raw list of ideas. Every time I get a flash of inspiration, or hear about a new cool result, or get a suggestion from a listener, or think about a moment when I was a student where understanding you just click together and I felt like I learned something deep about the universe. They just go on the raw ideal list. I probably add like five ideas every week, but not everything on that raw list makes it out of the show. Then, at the start of each week, I look through the list and I pick three to go into the official rotation. It just depends on, you know, what I'm in the mood to talk about or think about or feel inspired to explain. So for example, this week, the three on the top of the raw pile were these questions one what is a maser? Two? How were neutrinos discovered? And three is Helion's fusion technology realistic? And honestly, I don't even remember putting those questions on the list, but they sounded good to me, so they went into the back of the rotation. The next step is to get the listener feedback. This is one of my favorite parts of the podcast. Early on, I I just wanted to get a feeling for what the general public might know about a particular topic and might want to hear about, so that I could pitch the show at the right level make sure I didn't go too shallow or too deep. So at first I was just walking around campus here you see Irvin and asking people the question of the episode to see what they said and what they knew. You know. The responses were always wonderful to listen to and often way off, but they were always entertaining and listeners really responded to this segment a few wrote in to say that they wish they were on campus when I was walking around so they could get a chance, and so I started occasionally including listener responses via email. Then, of course, the pandemic hit and campus and everything else closed down, and so I reached out to a bunch of listeners over email to invite them to participate, and started to solicit volunteers on the podcast, and suddenly we were hearing from people all over the world. I loved it. It was like a little glimpse into all of these people's lives, people who were listening to our podcast and wanting to talk back to us a little bit. And now, of course you see Irvine is open again. But frankly, I prefer to be pulling our listeners because I love that it makes the podcast be too directional. I get to hear back from you, and you all get to hear a little bit from each other. So I send the questions out to whoever volunteers that week, But the questions I'm asking people one week won't appear on the show for months and months. Sometimes listeners respond within a day, sometimes they take weeks or months to get back to me. And so while listeners feedback is trickling in for an episode on the back of the rotation, I start working on episodes to record that week, taking two episodes from the front of the rotation. The episodes we're going to record that week join the back of the list many many weeks ago, so I already have listener comments to help me shape those episodes. The number of topics currently in the rotation between the front where episodes are being recorded in the back, where new episodes are being added and listener are being queried, is about one hundred episodes. That's about a year's worth of episodes I already have roughly planned out. I need that kind of buffer in case something else happens in my life. That all my attention because I never want to be scrambling to come up with episode ideas. So this week, at the very front of the rotation are these questions one why do moving objects look shorter? And two how do we measure the mass of the Higgs? The next step for me is to write an outline. This is like two pages, and I usually organize it in a few sections, starting with like, what is the thing we're talking about? And then how does it work? And ending with what does it mean? But the outline is not a script at all. It's just a few bullet points with what I think are the most interesting bits, some basic science explainer. And when I'm preparing an episode, the part that I think most about is not the physics, not like how does it work? But how to explain it? Try to think about the analogies I'll use to convey these ideas. I'll try to think about how to walk people through so the ideas click together in their minds and really make sense. And then I try to anticipate what Orge might ask, what might be confusing or need another analogy to back it up. At this point, after so many years of talking to him, I have something like a little mini simulated Hooge in my brain, and I ask simulated Jorge to suggest what real Hogey might ask me, so I can try to prepare myself. And then I think about ways to answer those questions without just saying, look it's in the math, or trust me. Try to think of ways to really convey those ideas, because to explain something in a clear way that's simple and understandable, you have to understand it, like two or three, or four or five levels deeper, so you can come up with analogies that capture that intuitive understanding, but don't oversimplify it and don't mislead anybody. Preparing the outline isn't always a lot of work. Sometimes I can sit down and write it down ten minutes. If it's something I know back to front, like the Higgs mass episode, I know all about how we measure the massive particles. I think about it every day. I'm deeply engaged in it, so that just took a few minutes. Really. Sometimes if an episode is more complex and it's on a topic that I don't think about every day, like when we talked about spinning black holes or black holes with electric tresarges, then I'll go and talk to somebody in my department here at you see Irvine, who knows more about it, and a frequent target of my questions is my colleague Arvind, who knows a lot about black holes in general relativity. But I also walk down the hall and talk to condensed matter experts when we talk about things like band gaps and superconductors and semiconductors, and that part is super fun for me because I'm interested in all these areas of physics, and I haven't always had an opportunity or an excuse to dig into them. So it's really a pleasure to carve out a little bit of time to read some papers on these other topics and educate myself. For me, the hardest part of preparing an episode is the cold open, those first few moments of the podcast where we introduce a topic and make a couple of jokes. That's the only scripted part of the podcast, and that's why it's so hard. Coming up with a new, silly way to start the podcast after hundreds of episodes can really be a challenge, and so for me, it's always the last part of the outline I write. So I prepared the outline and I send it to Jorge or to Katie or to Kelly the night before we record, and you'll hear from them in a minute about how they prepare and their process and experience. Then it's time to record an episode. Jorge lives in Pasadena, Katie lives in Italy, and Kelly lives in Virginia, so we're never sitting together in the same room. Instead, I call them up when we have a conversation and we each record our audio locally. Personally, my setup is a nice microphone, the sure SM seven B, which I'm told is the same microphone that Michael Jackson used to record Thriller, not of course the same microphone, but the same model. During the pandemic. I used to record at home in my closet, but now record here in my office at UC Irvine. So we sit down and we start recording, and the outline is there to give the other host an idea of where I wanted to go, but we never feel limited by it. Sometimes we only get halfway through it because we spend most of the episode on the what is it part or backing up to explain something subtle and basic but really important. And you know, I love that my co hosts do this, that they take us off the outline when something needs to be explained, because I feel like often they're standing in for the audience, making sure to ask a question when I haven't been clear enough, or when something seems obvious to me as a physicist but really needs a few more dots to connect in the minds of listeners. And lots and lots of listeners have written in to say very specifically thank you to Jorge and Katie and Kelly for asking the exact questions they had in their mind when I explained something. So I think the unscripted nature of the podcast is key. It makes those conversations real, and also it makes it a lot less work to prepare. It also makes for moments like this where I'm trying to steer us back to the physics without much luck. What's going to happen, what's likely to happen in the next hundred years, million years, or billion.
Years, m or the next hour. I mean, I don't know where this conversation is going.
To be honest, the podcast does seem kind of unpredictable, doesn't seem to matter too much what I write in the outline.
Well, I think that's what happens when you put too unstable people and try to create a stable system here.
And a lot of my favorite parts of an episode are those spontaneous parts, you know, the jokes that we come up with along the way. None of that is scripted. That just bubbles up out of a conversation that we're having. When I introduce myself, I always say I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and then I add something else which is silly, and that's always just made up on the spot, and then we riff from there for the whole episode. I got a question about our joke writing process from somebody on Discord who said, quote, although you guys may get heckled for all your jokes, I would like to know how much of that is scripted in advance and how much is on the fly, and how you come up with your joking themes to tie into what otherwise would seem a completely unrelated physics concept. Well, it's a good question, and it's always spontaneous, it's not scripted, and it's just something that comes out of our common sense of humor and having fun together.
You know.
An example are these jokes who make about bananas. I'm always joking that Jorge is a huge fan of bananas, and that's mostly just me teasing him. Back when we used to give those book talks, Jorge would always disappear for five minutes before we were supposed to go on stage to have a banana and a drink and gather his thoughts. He had this routine, and so I would tease him about it. And the first time I did it on their listeners, responded to it, so we just kind of leaned into it and sort of made it a thing. And that's how all the humor on the show works. It just sort of like bubbles up randomly and naturally, and we follow it wherever it leads. But you know, so far, I've just been talking about my experience, and a crucial part of the podcast is that it's a conversation. It's not just the one person narrating. So I sat down with my co host to hear about their experience on the podcast, and this was a different kind of conversation that I usually have with each of them, not with their podcast physics question asking persona, but with the real them. All right, thanks very much. We're going to answer a few questions about your experience on the podcast. And this is sort of a fun conversation because now I'm talking to like the real Joorge and not like the podcast Jorge.
What do you mean there's only one? Wait? Are there too? Do you know of another?
Right?
Well, I know that the way you have a conversation on the podcast is not always the same way you have a conversation in real life. Sometimes you ask me questions about things that I know you already understand because you're standing in for the listeners.
Well, I mean, I think, uh this, I consider this a real conversation. You know, I don't think this is a fake conversation. And we're the only difference is we're sort of having this conversation in front of a crowd. You know, it'd be no different than like if we were on stage in front of an auditorium or you know, having a conversation for a video or something like that, where it's like a real conversation. But you know, you have also have to keep in mind that there are people listening in.
And I also chatted with Katie Golden.
Are you going to play real hardball with me? Ask some real like who are you really?
I'm going to unmask you in this interview, Katie, We're going to do a Scooby Doo moment. No, I'd love to ask you first of all to introduce yourself. Listeners might know you as Katie who's a co host on the podcast, but you're so much more than that. Tell us who are you, Katie?
I contain multitudes?
Yeah, I mean I am very very lucky and very happy to occasionally co host on the show. It's really fun for me given that I do not have a background in physics. I actually have a background in psychology and evolutionary biology. I have another podcast called Creature Feature where I'm the one in charge. I'm the Daniel of that show.
And of course I talked to Kelly Wiener Smith.
Thanks for inviting me, but now you got me kind of scared.
What are you gonna ask me about? Of course I wasn't trying to put them on the spot. I just wanted to know how they prepare for each episode. Here's what they had to say, Daniel.
I work out, you know, I go for like a three mile run for recording. Just imagine like a Rocky style montage where I'm like pull ups, getting a punching bag, drinking is a green smoothie. Then I'm meditating, I climb up a mountain, I clear my head, and then I go and record.
While Yeah, it's a whole process. Your dedication is very impressive. It's almost a full day.
Yeah.
No, you know, you send me the outlines the day before are recordings, and I sort of read them. I go through them and I sort of get a sense for what we're talking about.
And here's Katie, I read it because I want to have a sense of where it's going. I don't want to start you on tangents that don't end up going back to our topic. If the topic has something to do with the life sciences, I might do a little bit of refresher just so that if the topic comes up that I'll kind of have ideas for good questions about it. Or if it's something where I read the notes and I'm so lost I cannot even conceive of what's about to happen, I might try to do some extra research.
And Kelly, I would like to say that I do some prep, but I would be lying. I don't do any prep besides reading the outline that you send me ahead of time. And partly that's because when we were discussing whether or not I would be a regular co host for this podcast, we agreed that my responsibilities would include just reading the outline and showing up. And I was making this decision at a time when I was feeling kind of overwhelmed with various projects in my life, and so I started off by doing exactly what we had agreed on, and I've kind of stuck with that. So I'll do a little bit of prep. I'll read the outline ahead of time. I'll think about whether or not I know an anecdote or you know, some funny story that might relate to the topic that I can sort of try to wedge in there. But in general, I don't do much more prep than that. Except for the episodes where we interview sci fi authors, I read those whole books and I think about what would be an interesting thing to talk to the author about, and so I do do more prep for those, But for the you know, more typical episode, I do pretty much nothing.
I also asked each of them about what's going through their minds during the episode, what their.
Process is most I just asked you a question, and then I serve Instagram. No, I'm totally just kidding. No, this is a that's an interesting question. I guess it is a sort of a full body thing for me. You know, I'm thinking about what you're saying. I'm thinking about what I can say, what questions I can have, what questions the audience might have, what's coming up ahead, where we are in terms of time, and whether or not, you know, maybe we need to take a hard right or hard left on whatever we're talking about or move on. So I'm definitely sort of it's a full mental engagement, I would say, I would, you know, I don't think about the process that much. I just as I said before, I just think of it as a real conversation we're having in front of an audience of people.
In general.
I just read the notes and then really try to listen attentively, and you know, just think of questions that come to me, like what am I curious about hearing more clarification on and I assume that's hopefully what the audience is also interested in learning about. So just listening with rapt attention, which is not hard when it's such interesting material.
Well, I think you're really excellent at that, like listening carefully and stopping me and asking a question when something doesn't make sense. And I'm always imagining you're standing in for the listeners who have also lost and confused with my complicated jargon. So I really appreciate how you do that.
I speak for all the confused people.
I think that's that's I'm president of the confused people.
Well, so you know, in the role of every person, I'd like to tell you that what I'm thinking is okay, what is an audience member likely to be thinking in response to Daniel's explanation and what follow up question should I be asking? But honestly, physics requires like one hundred and twenty percent of my brain, and so all I'm thinking is do I.
Understand what Daniel is saying?
And lucky for me, you are very clear in your explanations, so the answer is usually yes, I understand what Daniel is saying. But sometimes what I'm thinking is, Okay, this question that I have is probably profoundly stupid. How do I find a way to ask it that makes it sound a little bit intelligent?
Maybe?
So yeah, I guess mostly I'm just sort of listening and trying to, you know, just have a conversation with you about physics. And it's a conversation that has rails, you know, since we've got this outline that sort of keeps us on track.
And I was also curious what each of them thought the listeners might not understand about the process since they only hear the finished product.
Uh, that's a great question, I guess. Just I wonder if people know how that it's edited right.
And of course you should all know that this podcast is edited, and we'll talk to the editor in a moment about what it takes to clean up all of our ums and aws and long positive while we check our facts or think again about how to explain something.
Here's Katie Well I hiccup all the time. No, I think that.
I mean, one thing I think is interesting is that they probably don't hear how thoughtful you are in terms of thinking about how to phrase something. So like you will really think about the best way to describe or phrase something, and.
You do a really good job of it.
I think from the listeners perspective, it just sounds like you're having a casual conversation, but you're really thoughtful in terms of I guess, giving the best explanation of something.
And Kelly, I hope that they are surprised to find out that the conversation is sort of outlined ahead of time, because I think we try really hard to make our conversations feel natural and for them to actually be natural, but you know, to sort of have a final destination that we're hoping to get to. But the thing that might surprise them the most is that at the bottom of the outline you always write pale blue dots and then in like parentheses or carots, inspire humanity here. And even though you've you've figured out everything else in the outline, all the important facts are there, you leave that part to figure out on the fly. And to me, that's the part that I would be most likely to plan ahead of time, because I am just I guess they don't think of myself as being inspirational on the fly particularly particularly well. But you know, at the end of every episode, I see that we're just about at the inspire humanity here part of the outline, and I always just you know, sit with baited breath waiting to see what are you going to be able to come up with on the fly to inspire the audience? And you you always you a great job. So I'm guessing that most people don't know that the inspirational parts are totally off the cuff.
I personally love that pale blue dot moment in the outline. That was Will's original idea to end with a moment of inspiration. But it's hard sometimes to think of something meaningful and sincere to say like in advance, so I usually just let the conversation inspire me. And so that's the recording process. Well, it's time to take another quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk to our editor, who we've been working with for years and who has listened to countless hours of our yapping, but whose voice I had never heard before this conversation after the break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being green house gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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We're back and we talked a bit about how the raw substance of the podcast is put together. We're spontaneous and we're unscripted, and that relies on us to be clever and interesting in the moment, but it also relies on an editor to weave it together and make it sound good. Now, let's hear about how it gets polished into the final product that you hear. I called up our editor, Corey, who does this magic for us, and until this conversation, I had never spoken to him on the phone or in video or in person. I don't even know where he lives. Here's my chat with the mysterious Corey. So thanks very much Corey for having a chat with me about how the podcast comes together. But we're giving people a little bit of a behind the scenes view. So first, I'd love if you introduce yourself to the listeners, because though you're a crucial part of the show, they have never until now heard your voice.
My name is Corey Nolan.
I have worked in audio for gosh, about twenty years now. And I got into podcast editing about three or four years ago with iHeart as a freelancer and was given Dana and Jorge explain the universe.
And that's been are we going on three years?
The podcast five years old? Yeah, So tell us a little bit about the process. What's it like for you? You get these files from us, and how do you weave that together into something, you know, a finished product for the listeners.
Well, you guys get a lot of the credit because you stay so far in advance. I mean you put out two hour long shows a week. I mean, that's that's a lot of content. You know, you deliver those files you and Jorge do or Kelly or Katie and whoever's guest hosting, and they just kind of go through a workflow, a process of just kind of cleaning it up, which you you know doesn't doesn't usually take that much. With y'all's audio, y'all got it really nailed down, but sometimes it takes a little bit with guests.
Mean neither you have to like clean it up or process it or balance it or what happens there?
Well, yes and yes, and so there's one phase of it that is sort of a take out the room noise phase. That's an initial process that's sort of again, you and Jorge are pretty consistent now and you don't have a whole lot of background noise happening. But it helps if you're you know, you're in a room with wild air conditioning or something like that. So it just kind of removes the extra stuff that you don't want to hear and be annoyed by. And then from there, you know, it goes into the software and the program, which is an Adobe program that's kind of the standard for podcasting, and and we just yeah, we line it up and then it's it's just a matter of cutting and and then you have your own like I go through.
And have you know, Daniel has his own like effects.
Chain, Oh wait, what are the Daniel effect? Is there like a button there like make Daniel sound smart?
You do that just fine? Which is actually maybe skipping a little bit ahead. Is one of every once in a while, I'll come across people who listen to the show and they think I'm really famous and also think I'm really smart just by association, and I have to explain to them that it's not that's not the case. Uh, yeah, you, I mean, you know that's just comes from the years I did, I did music for still do some music, but just listening and trying to find what even though you are recorded well and you have good equipment, you know, there's just some shaping that needs to happen to kind of fit your voices specifically, and because y'all record the same way unless somebody gives me a heads up, Like Coregey changed his setup a few months ago, but it just kind of went going back and just kind of fine tuning it to where it's still putting out the sound that I think is good and right. You have such a good low end voice that there's stuff that like you want to kind of beef up and bring out so without overdoing it. Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of fun to that part of it.
So tell me about the editing process, because when we're recording, sometimes we'll stop repeat ourselves, but sometimes we'll just talk for minutes and minutes. What is your process there? You're listening to it very carefully and trying to like remove any stumbles or fluency breaks.
Yeah, I mean, as mentioned as an our podcast, and so there's there's a lot of content, and it's different for you and Jorge. I think the way as I've done this and kind of learned better how to show personas through edits, yours are very succinct Orges. I think it kind of matches the way he talks to kind of for it.
To not be like that.
Now, there's things that have to be edited on his, probably just as much as they are on yours. But as far as how it comes across, we're not trying to make y'all sound exactly the same, because it's just not your speech comes across and how your personalities come across. But yeah, you can't do anything else when you're editing a podcast because you have to be paying attention to every little thing. And even though I might miss one or two and listening to something in the end, there's a lot of little breaks and things like that that really have to be lined up. So it takes your full attention to do it. And even at that, you know there's still there still kind of needs to be an oversight kind of process, like we have to make sure that nothing else was missed.
Something I've always wondered is how much you're listening to the content, like the physics of it and how much you're just listening to the words and the fluency in the language, like are you digesting the physics also or is your whole brain required just to like make sure that everything is sounding smooth.
Well, there is also another question of how much am I am I capable of understanding the content? And I will say, and I've said this to you all over email, like I think y'all do a fantastic job of making this available and accessible to average people. I do think that your audience in general are not generally average, and so me if I am me being an average person, I there are certain concepts that I just don't I don't follow along, so I may I may make it as far as the content wise, and following may make it to you know, twenty minutes in, and then it's then it's a give it over my head. But there are some others, like you know, like listener question episodes. I really love those because that's a little more you know, children ask those questions the last time, so can I can kind of play in that ballpark? And you guys come up in my conversations like if I'm hanging out with friends or sitting around campfire or whatever.
They just have made me think.
And you know, the answers that you guys kind of come to you are really thought provoking and really big picture stuff. So you know, it just depends episode two, episode depends on what you are going into. But I will be honest and say that it's off and over my head.
So does that mean that you're able to edit it and make it sound good and smooth even if you're not understanding? That seems like sort of a superpower.
Yeah, yeah, let me have that. Let me have that superpower.
So how long does it take for you to process one episode?
If you are not counting the pre process, like, I'll take a day, and you'll know those days because I'm saying, hey, I email you, I need this file or need this file, and trying to get ten to twelve episodes just kind of knocked out. And that's where I'll go through and do that remove noise process and just make sure everything is in the correct folders.
And at that.
Point when I actually then go in, because it might be another few days before I bust into an episode, I usually say that if an episode ends up being forty minutes, it's about four hours so it's about an hour for every ten minutes of final content. And you know, by comparison, you know, forty minutes for you y'all may have recorded, it may have taken you fifty five minutes or something like that. So there's there's usually you know, ten or fifteen minutes something something around that range that's being removed. Maybe not quite that much that might be, but still it takes Even if those are just small second or few second increments, they just you know, they happen a good bit along the way, so it just takes a little bit of time.
So I have a question for you from some of our listeners. I pulled some folks on discord to ask them what they wanted to know about the making of the podcast. You know, there's been some listener feedback about my chuckles that I'm always laughing at hojooryes jibs. Yeah, and so the question for you was, how many Daniel chuckles do you have to edit out or do you have to sometimes go in and add more chuckles to meet the required chuckle quota?
Yeah, you know, actually I like that part of it because I like crafting y'all's conversation because sometimes when you're editing.
It doesn't always. I mean, the laughs are real and they're.
Happening, but they they may be a little bit delayed, or it maybe like you're you may talk over each other for a second, and that's just not how. We don't leave that stuff in on these episodes. We clean that up and so like it's kind of fun to like move your laugh right, like as the peak of the joke is falling off, and kind of like Daniel's laugh has moved over. It's just a timing thing. Again, it doesn't change like what actually happened. But I actually kind of enjoy that, And there are I would say there's probably more times that I'm removing Daniel's laughs than having to add them in.
No, no, oh, I can't help. But it's just so much fun to chat with all of our hosts about science. All right, Well, last question for you is what do you think listeners might not understand about the process from just hearing the finished product that goes into it.
I mean, this isn't so much on my end, but honestly, I'm not just trying because you're you know, technically my boss. I am just really impressed by the In addition, to the other jobs that you have the ability to handle this much content then to keep coming up with content. I, for example, did a podcast with a buddy of mine with music and some other cultural things, and we did.
Ten episodes and like that was it?
Like coming up a content was like, I mean, we may have have kept doing it, but it couldn't have done two a week. I couldn't have done to it and out. Yeah, So your ability to process that and to mind that out of the world, and I think that you probably would give your listeners credit for that too, for sure. I just think and if you don't want to take full credit and that, I would say maybe generally, there is a whole lot that goes on that makes these happen before it ever gets to me. You know, what I do is a task, you know, at the end of the day. But as far as how this show thrives, and I think it is thriving, I think it does well. And I think that really comes from just a whole lot of work on the back end before I ever even see a file. And then, you know, I do think maybe if I were to bring myself into that, you know, there are some times you just have to be on your toes, and you have to be able to adjust to what is happening in the world.
And I think maybe.
On my side, if I were to give myself a little more credit on that, it would be you just have to be willing to adapt.
And my life is on the road.
I spend a lot of my time on the road, and so a lot of that is either happening in a hotel room late at night, or maybe even you know, and stops along at the airport.
And we try not do that.
We try to plan out, but there are a lot of things that do need to happen because they're just important to the show. And so I think that a lot of the reason why the show is so good is because you just have a lot of people that care about the content and care about it operating a high quality. That's not just talking about me, that's to Tyler and to the whole crew that's around this program.
Well, I think you should take a lot of credit because we love the editing that you do, the way you stitch together our raw stuff into something that sounds so smooth and good. It makes us all. Let me know, we're talking about you edit out all of our Wikipedia breaks. Thanks for that.
Am I supposed to edit out the reference to the Wikipedia breaks.
Now we're keeping that in. We're keeping that in. Okay, good, Thanks so much for the candid conversation. Really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Corey talks about his editing process there, but I thought it'd be useful for you to hear an example of him doing his magic. Here's a raw clip of me and Jorge talking.
To be the difference between ten to the forty nine truckloads or ten to the forty eight truckloads, which is still a lot of truckloads, which is a truckload of truckloads.
It's still a lot of trugloads, yeah exactly. And we try to be and we try to be careful about these uncertain and we try to be careful about what we don't know. But there's always room for surprises here. It is after he cleans it up.
Be the difference between ten to the forty nine truckloads or ten to the forty eight truckloads, which is still a lot of truckloads, which is a truckload of truckloads.
It's still a lot of truckloads, Yeah exactly. And we try to be careful about what we don't know, but there's always room for surprises, right, And so in that clip you hear me starting and stopping again, trying to think about the best way to phrase something, and you speak differently if you know you're going to be edited, because if something doesn't come out right, you back up and you try it again, because you want the best possible way to say something. If you're speaking live, of course, that would be a very awkward way to speak. And so when I'm speaking in public, I don't rely on an editor. Of course, I just speak naturally. So the last step in the process is the review and the fact checking. We don't have a huge team like they have its science versus. Corey just sends me a draft of the episode. If it's a topic I'm not one hundred percent confident in, I will send it to some colleagues who are experts and ask them to review it to let me know if I've goofed up. Because while I want the podcast to be very accessible, it's also super important to me that it's accurate and that nothing I say is misleading to you. Occasionally I'll have to re record something and Corey will patch it up. Very rarely, an episode requires major surgery because an expert tells me that I've misunderstood something or explained it in a misleading way. That happened, for example, with the quantum computing episode. Usually, though the episode is all good as it is and ready to post, probably eighty eighty five percent of the episodes don't need any further work or trimming. But we record episodes pretty far in advance. We try to keep about two months of buffer between recording episodes and posting them. That's like sixteen to twenty episodes. And you know, that gives Corey flexibility to edit when he's available, and it gives us a chance to take breaks when we need to, which means that by the time you hear an episode, I actually haven't thought about it in quite a while. But then it's out there and it's up to all of you to listen to it and to react. And we get lots of fun comments from listeners, all of them world about the show. Here a few comments sent in by listeners.
Hey, Daniel and Jorge, thanks the opportunity to let me come in about the show. This is Bob Pokers in my seventies, live in Silver Spring, Maryland. Been a listener for a couple of years now. I generally listen to science podcasts, and this is my go to podcast for some of the more esoteric stuff about science. A real plus about the show is that I email Daniel, not regularly but pretty occasional. I guess in the last couple of years I've probably written about ten or twelve times, and it's nice that he gets back to me and answers every question I've got, and often will lead me to a previous episode that covers a topic I've got a question about, or to an article that also covers it. In Layman's terms, I love the show. A long time listener, I keep planning, keep on listening for as long you've got the podcasts.
Good eye on Callum from Tasmania, Australia in the Land down Under. I'll discovered the podcast a few years ago after googling the words physics and podcast, and I've been quantumly entangled ever since. I have a deep itch for knowledge about the universe that only Daniel and Jorgey can scratch. Daniel delivers his profound knowledge and insights into physics in such a captivating and passionate way that makes you refresh the podcast daily in anticipation of a new episode when I can't sleep at two am because I'm pondering the effects of time dilation or how a Fineman diagram can help illustrate a virtual photon interaction. I know Daniel and jorgey are just an electromagnetic interaction away.
While we certainly can't explain the entire universe yet, Daniel and Horhe do a wonderful job painting that picture for all of us. Hey, I'm Joe, one of the many beastless speculators heard at the beginning of episodes, So why is this podcast at the top of my listening preferences? Simply put Daniel, Jorge and They're engaging guests take topics from the seemingly mundane to mind bogglingly complex, and bring them down to Earth for all of us in a fun and accessible manner. I've learned more from this series than all my formal classes, but more importantly, it fosters an ongoing curiosity for literally every aspect of our universe. In some way, we're all scientists, all physicists, each with unique insights and questions into this vast thing we call the universe. Having the opportunity to contribute is a fun way to share knowledge or ignorance okay, mostly ignorance on a huge range of areas that inform our collective understanding of what makes it all tick. Thank you to everyone involved. Stay tuned for more.
Hello, Daniel and Joche and the team around the podcast. I always enjoy your podcast. We questions are the very small like quirks to the biggest and hardest questions in the universe. No questions to strange and weird. You take them on any ways, with great and understandable in planatias and comparisons with every day Feemina, you're in your my curiosity about how the world works. Keep up the amazing work. All best Nicholas and Sweden.
Hi, Hore and Daniel. This is Robin from Alberta, Canada. I love that you use your podcast to explain so many interesting things to your listeners. There are endless, deep, fascinating questions out there to be explored, and your podcast is an accessible and approachable way for all kinds of people to learn about these topics. I like the person on the Street segment at the beginning of the podcast episodes because it highlights just how many people think about and are curious about these different science topics. I think it also encourages people to be free and feel comfortable about exploring these topics that they would like to know more about, regardless of how much they currently know. Thank you for all the hard work and chocolate and bananas over the years.
By you and your team.
I look forward to learning new things in upcoming episodes.
And some of the comments I get over email bring tears to my eyes, you know, like the listener who, at sixty years old, was inspired to go back to school and get a degree in astrophysics. Or the listener who had a stroke and relied on the podcast to keep his mind nimble while he worked through months of recovery. Or the listener who had trouble talking to his teenagers until he discovered the podcast as something they could do together and talk about. And lots of moments of laughter, Like the listener who said that he loved the podcast but he listens while he makes dinner and often ends up burning it when the topic gets really juicy. His family keeps asking him to turn it off, but he refuses. Or the eight year old listener who asked if it was possible to blow up. Mars made me wonder if I needed to write back to his parents maybe before answering that question. And of course there are people who listen to the episode while falling asleep because my voice makes them feel cozy and tired. That's cool, you know, whatever works for you. And then there was the moment when I complained about chemistry and helping my son with his chemistry homework and how I wasn't really a fan of chemistry at all. And I got a bunch of email from chemists and chemistry professors and chemistry teachers who are offended that I was negative about science. And you know what, they were right. There's so many different areas of science, and all of them are fun in different ways, and they suit different people, and we should only be positive about everybody's joy for science, because we're all different people and we all have different joys. And I said something on the podcast, I apologized for my careless slander of chemistry. And then I was pleased to hear back from some of those people. Here's a quote from one of them. She wrote, I'm a chemistry teacher. I wrote to you earlier to complain about your attitude towards chemistry, and I want you to know that I appreciate your apology and your efforts to do better. See we can all learn. But every day I also get emails from listeners, sometimes just a few, sometimes dozens, and like I say in the podcast, I answer all of them. It is important to me to be accessible and that the curious public out there has ways to ask academics good faith questions motivated by curiosity. And often people are amazed that I actually do respond, that they're really hearing from me, and I'm really happy about that. It's nice to think that I've had some impact out there, helped some people understand science and given some people an opportunity to ask their question and to get a specific answer to the thing that they were wondering about. And sometimes I wonder about the scope and the breath of our listenership, wondering if there are people out there in academia or even in physics who are listening to the podcast. So I did something very unscientific, and I asked two random people in my research group in Chase if they were aware of the podcast and if they listen to it. Do you guys listen to podcasts? Yes you do. What are your.
Podcasts not since I moved away from Orange County because I don't spend half my day in the car anymore.
Okay, cool son. My random question for you is are you aware that I do a podcast? I am aware? You are aware?
Okay?
Do you ever listen to it? No? You never do? Okay, I am aware, and I still don't listen to it.
I'm sorry.
Great, cool, awesome, thanks very much. So that was kind of humbling. Then I was wondering how the podcast has impacted other people in my life, like my family, if they felt like it made me too busy, or if they didn't like that I sometimes talked about them on the podcast. Here's a conversation I had with my wife and my daughter on that topic. Usually, when I interview you, you're anonymous because I'm just asking you a question for like a person on the street. But why don't you introduce yourself to Viginia.
I'm Hazel, he's my dad.
I'm Katrina Whitson, and I live in Irvine, California with my husband, Dana Whitson.
All right, so the dog does not speak here.
Our dog Pipizza is here too, for the record, Yeah.
Thank you. So. My number one question for you guys is like, what is it like for you that I have this podcast? Is it like whatever doesn't matter? Is it cool? Is it embarrassing? What's your experience?
I mean, it's not like it affects my day to day life. I think it's kind of cool there's like people out there. I also think it's cool that other people agree that you have a soothing voice.
It's not just me.
He used to pull me crazy for that.
I used to call you what you like?
I do not have a soothing voice, and now I have people to back me up. I see so he's giving me a disapproving look. You can't see it, but he issue.
You used to fall asleep to my podcast well before I knew that other people didn't.
Then the least debating way possible.
How at you a chair?
I mean, I'm really proud of you for this. It's I think it's amazing you have this following. I brag about you regularly. I feel like it's really cool you've built this thing up. And I love hearing the stories about people who like reinvigorate their interest in science. It gives me hope for education and having people have the chance to like remake their lives using knowledge. I think it's really cool. It's just like it's a force for good out in the world, and I'm just so glad the world has you in your soothing voice.
So sometimes I interview you guys for the person on the street if like need somebody and I don't have time to collect stuff online. You guys like being part of the podcast. Is that embarrassing or is it fun? What does that feel for you?
I don't usually know the answers, so I hear my voice and I'm like the one they got it completely wrong. But I think it's cool. There was one time you talked about it. You talked about the lollipop I found in the closet you got when you got your degree, and I actually like it, And.
You said, no, I don't mind if I include little personal tidbits in the podcast.
No, I think that's cute.
Haven't you bet? It hasn't made your life for fun? Or is it embarrassing?
I think it's really fun.
I love getting to hear about who you've been interviewing, because like it's often you know, like you know, you interviewed my post doc or my student and then I hear their voice on the podcast, and sometimes you do ask me questions, like right when I'm in the middle of something else, it's like the morning rush and you're.
Like, so it's dark matter, what are quirks?
He made me late to school a bit and then he texted me why are you late to school? And I had to answer it was.
It was a very sweet moment with all the service of public science communication.
All right, anything else you guys, do we get to share some favorite moments?
What are your favorite moments?
Well?
I just well I love.
Hearing stories from listeners. And during the pandemic, instead of doing a man on the street interviews, like when you were out in the world, you were getting them as recordings and sometimes I got to hear them and I remember like just really fun moments people had shared with you, like these Australian housemates who were like all giggling and answering your questions, and I feel like there was music involved somehow.
Did you feel like you wanted to be part of that house?
Yes, I did.
And when we went to New Zealand last year, one of your listeners was so kind and gave us a ton of advice that we totally followed and that was amazing, And if I remembered their name, I would say it right now with that he was so kind and I don't know, it just brings out the good in people.
It's like made the world a better place. And I'd like to end this special episode with what the podcast has meant to me. It means the world to me to know that I can share that joy, that there are people out there who are hearing it and feeling it. I love having an excuse to learn about areas of physics I never otherwise had time to dig into. I love having to think super carefully about my own understanding to make sure it really clicks in my head well enough to explain it. And I love having joking science conversations with Jorge and Mkatie and Mkelly. And I really hope that the podcast has helped you share in the joy of science. Thank you all so much for listening.
Hey, it's hore Hey from the podcast, and I'm super excited to announce that my new book, Oliver's Great Big Universe, is available to order now.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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