A retrospective on filming a science podcast

2.5k words, 12 minutes reading time

1. Introduction

2. Why make a podcast?

3. Preparation

4. Filming

5. Editing

6. Feedback

7. Will I do this again?

Introduction

It's been just about a week since I’ve published my first podcast, which was an interview with two brothers (Corin and Ari), both of whom are running a molecular simulation startup called Rowan. All in, the podcast required a solid few weekends of studying, three hours of filming, and 15~ hours of editing for it to all come together. While it wasn’t the most challenging thing I’ve created for this blog (that honor probably goes to my molecular dynamics post), it was by far the most emotionally stressful.

I want to write about why I made it, preparation, filming, editing, the feedback I got, and whether I plan to do more in the future.

Why make a podcast?

I’d wanted to cover Rowan for awhile on my blog. The basis of the company felt like an interesting scientific idea that not many people knew about or even understood, which is exactly the type of material I want to cover. But the more I tried writing about them, the more I got stuck. The way I explained their thesis, their workflows, and so on felt uninspired. Lazy. I couldn’t independently do justice to what they were working on, it was too far out of my own wheelhouse.