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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my weekend of watching football was not as enjoyable as I had hoped, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned during season 2 of Fringe.
Today’s fun fact: If you’re a Doctor Who fan, last Saturday’s episode referenced the Bootstrap Paradox. In case you’re curious about the Bootstrap Paradox, here you go:
A Bootstrap Paradox is also known as predestination paradox or ontological paradox. The term “bootstrap paradox” refers to the expression “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”; the use of the term for the time-travel paradox was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein’s story By His Bootstraps. It is a paradox in the sense that an independent origin of the events that caused each other cannot be determined, they simply exist by themselves, thus they may be said to have been predestined to occur. The predestination paradox allows time travel to be self-consistent, similar to the Novikov self-consistency principle. Some works of fiction, for example Somewhere in Time, have a version of the paradox where an object from the future is brought to the past, where it ages until it is brought back to the past again, apparently unchanged from its previous journey. An object making such a circular passage through time must be identical whenever it is brought back to the past, otherwise it would create an inconsistency.
In a 1984 interview, Heinlein stated that he got the idea for By His Bootstraps after an old, bald man with a moustache accosted him one morning outside his house, just as he was returning home from the Navy on leave. According the Heinlein, the man, who he vaguely recognised as a family member, suggested that he write science fiction stories, and offered him the detailed plot of By His Bootstraps as an idea to catalyse his writing career.
What I learned yesterday.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast or my other podcasts for a while then you probably know my podcast story. Just in case you don’t, let me give you a brief recap. I first started listening to podcasts in 2005 or 2006 because I was looking for other people who were wanting to know more and talk more about the TV show LOST. I then started calling in to The Weekly LOST Podcast with Cliff and Stephanie Ravenscraft, and thought it was really great to be able to interact with them and other LOST fans.
At the time, I was working as the eCommerce Director for a bookstore chain, and most of the members of my team were geeks just like me. In the spring of 2008 FOX aired a teaser trailer for a new show they would be premiering in the fall. That show was called Fringe. I remember that when I got to work the next day after the trailer had been shown that my geeky co-workers were as excited as I was about it. We talked about it for several days and discussed the various things that had us intrigued. Among the intriguing elements to the show was that it was a show created by JJ Abrams, the man famous for making LOST and Alias.
One day as I was talking to one of my co-workers named Jason, he tossed out the idea that we start a podcast about Fringe. We could get in on it early, we could geek out, and have a lot of fun. He also mentioned the idea to another one of our co-workers, Courtney. She liked the idea too.
From there it was pretty much settled that we would start a podcast about Fringe. Over the next couple of months we spent our spare time talking about the podcast. We came up with ideas for segments, ideas for what to name the podcast, started creating a website, and trying to contain our excitement about this new show.
I was the most tech savvy of the group, especially when it came to audio gear and websites. I had built a few websites before, and I felt pretty comfortable building a website for what would we would call The Fringe Podcast. However, the audio gear was not exactly my forte. While I knew more than the other two guys, I didn’t know enough. I enlisted some help from a local friend named Adam, and my LOST podcasting friend, Cliff Ravenscraft. Together, they helped me get the best gear that we could afford. We all put in about $100 and got the gear for the podcast.
Fortunately for us, the PR team being the show was in high gear as they were teasing out video clips, hiding clues in various websites, and giving us a lot to speculate about. The more we learned about the show, the more we realized that there were some scientific elements that we were clueless about. Courtney asked me if I knew anyone who had a scientific background, and I thought of my friend Clint.
Clint had a background in molecular biology, forensics, and other sciency stuff. He was also a big fan of LOST and JJ Abrams, so he agreed to come on the podcast and help us make sense of the science stuff. Little did I know at the time that he would end up being a permanent host of the podcast.
Our first several episodes were recorded before the show ever premiered and the four of us would try to glean every ounce of insight from every corner of the internet. By the time the show premiered on September 9, 2008, we were already 8 episodes into The Fringe Podcast.
Over the next several months, we, just like the writers and producers of the show, tried to find our way. We tried to figure out what we were doing, where we were going, and what the best format was for our show. We figured out internal things like how we would prepare our show notes and outline for what we would discuss. We tried different segments for our show, and some of them ended up getting eliminated. We also developed our method for including the massive and unexpected amounts of listener feedback that were being sent in. It seemed that our little podcast, recorded in my living room, was picking up steam and getting popular.
We also started getting requests to record our podcast live and allow people to chat with us while we did it. We had to figure out if that was a thing we were capable of doing, and if we could pull it off. We started off by streaming audio only, as none of us had a webcam. Once we were able to acquire a webcam, we started live streaming every episode. That decision turned out to be a very effective way to create even deeper and more tangible relationships with our listeners.
Life was good.
In the spring of 2009 my wife and I broke ground on a new house. By that time I was so in love with podcasting that I made sure that our new house would have a dedicated space for my podcasting gear. We continued to think about ways we could improve our show for season 2, and tried to keep as much content flowing during the summer hiatus. Before we started the season, I came up with a new intro theme, set to the music of The A-Team theme. I had no idea that that music would be retired before the season even got to the midway point.
In early December of 2009, just after episode 8 of Fringe season 2, Courtney and Jason resigned from the podcast. They each had their own reasons for leaving. Courtney was working 2 jobs and we were recording the podcast on her only day off. She simply couldn’t get all the personal stuff done that she needed to get done and the podcast was causing her to make sacrifices that she didn’t want to make. Likewise, the podcast was causing Jason to spend time away from his family, and he felt like he needed to reprioritize the activities in his life.
When they resigned from the podcast, I was surprised. Their resignations didn’t come at the same time. Courtney let me know about her decision right after we recorded episodes 215 and 216. Jason let me know a few days later, just as I was starting to get my head around how we would continue without Courtney. So one week we were a podcast with 4 hosts, and then by the time we sat down to record the next week we were a podcast of two hosts.
I had a terrible feeling that our podcast was about to go down the tubes.
Here’s what I learned.
Much to my surprise, our podcast did not go down the tubes. In fact, it got better. Don’t get me wrong. The fact that we got better is not in any way intended to be an insult or belittle Courtney and Jason in any way. They were good podcasters. In fact, I recruited Courtney to be a host for the TV Talk network.
What I mean is that the dynamic of our podcast changed as a direct effect of having only 2 voices instead of 4. We were more organized, the conversation flowed more freely, and our audio quality improved. When there were four hosts, we had difficulty trying to fit everyone’s opinions into the show and still keep the show at a reasonable length. When we were four hosts, we had a difficult time avoiding situations where hosts were talking over each other. Because Clint lived down the street from me, he didn’t have to call into the show via Skype. This mean that our audio quality was instantly better.
Clint and I had a good chemistry. Since we were in the same room, we were able to look at each other while we spoke, and have a genuine conversation about the show like two friends would. The show became tighter, more focused, and had a better flow. When season 2 came to a close I realized that we had somehow become a better show by simply narrowing down the number of hosts from 4 to 2.
This taught me that change can be a very good thing. Sometimes things change and it’s out of the blue. We’re caught off guard and our initial reaction is to panic and think that we’re doomed for failure. However, that’s almost never the case. Change is a great opportunity to reevaluate things. Change is a great time to make improvements based on the knowledge you’ve gained up to that point. Change is a great opportunity to make a difficult situation into a winning situation.
So don’t be troubled by change. Change is inevitable, and sometimes, it just might place you on the fringe of a breakthrough.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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