Try, Learn, Iterate

Last week I managed a day on 4 hours of sleep due to launching 3 satellites for work at 2:40am. Between then and now I recorded two demo podcast episodes in Pittsburgh and found out that Exist With Initiative had been granted 501c3 status, tax exemption from the IRS. Though excited about both, my brain immediately went into, “what can I do now that we’re here”.

The podcast went really well, much better than I expected. I sent the 12 hour meeting invite/agenda broken down into time chunks to my friend who is doing the editing (and who’s house we used), and he guessed 12 hours would likely be excessive. It made me think of the first time that I ran a time critical cargo loading demo for the Dream Chaser spaceplane - scheduled for one day and took three. You think you know the equipment you need, you think you know how long it’ll take, and you think all the people that you need are there. Equipment set up was going fine until we learned that a USB hub wouldn’t do well for connecting the two mics and headphones. I called the local Best Buy that didn’t have the audio box we needed in stock, so I ordered one for delivery in a few days. We were lucky to have a friend that makes music in his free time locally, and he had a box to lend us. We drove to his work, got his key, drove to his house, got the box, and drove back to where we were recording (snagging coffee on the way).

We integrated the equipment, I downloaded recording software, and we spent 20-30 minutes testing and adjusting the audio. I briefed my first guest on the high level format we would use for the conversation, and I noticed talking was uncomfortable. We were basically on the same side of the long length of a table, so my head was turned to see him (though not directly), and I had to talk out of the corner of my mouth so the mic picked it up well. We rearranged the cords, rotated the table, moved the mics a thousand times, and finally started recording the first episode. Looking back I think the mics would’ve looked better on the other side of the table as long as we routed the cables underneath the table. Learn and iterate.

I decided to change the name of the show on the drive to Pittsburgh after asking a friend for ideas that felt more appropriate based on how I planned to begin each episode. Until that conversation I’d been calling it Casual Decisions in my head. This is what we recorded:

“Hi my name is Reed Antonich, and this is a gentle reminder that one of the initial conditions for getting to exist is that we have no idea why or how. Welcome to the Kinda Existential Podcast, where I, a perceiving arrangement of atoms, gets to ask other perceiving arrangements of atoms about their experiences living on the planet Earth, a rock that floats around a ball of fire in the sky. We’ll talk about values, gratitude, and many of my favorite questions.”

Once we have the edited episodes, I’ll have to decide if I want to post them or not, decide if I want to change the formatting of the episode, then schedule more time to record more episodes. Forming an LLC comes highly recommended, and I’ll have to open another business bank account. So much documentation. Luckily the process isn’t foreign to me after all the nonprofit stuff. This time I know that I can dual purpose my registered agent’s address as the physical address of the LLC also (despite what the internet says). I guess the moral of this story is to

learn by doing, then iterate.