Dig into the historical connections behind everyday life

Andrew is a lecturer in media studies and history with past positions at King's College London and University of Glasgow. Alicia is a puppeteer with credits from Marvel, Sega, and LNER. We both worked together on a project to help teach medical students in London how to be better doctors through arts education practices.

There is something deep within both of us to explore that sort of "outside of the box" approach to pretty much everything in life. Which is the nutshell of Seemingly Unrelated.

Every episode looks at something completely ordinary (eg. mini-golf, The Three Little Pigs, spelling bees) and follows the historical data to uncover something impactful or revealing (eg. origins of the debate on trans athletes, the defeat of the Roman Empire by the Parthians, the growth of South and South East Asian immigration to the United States since 2000).

Andrew has all the research and narrative on hand while Alicia sits in for the audience asking probing questions and providing fun insights.

The tone is light even when topics like slavery come up. It really is the answer to the question 'why is history so boring?' Because history has nothing to do with dates and names and everything to do with understanding why we do what we do everyday.

Our listeners tend to be university educated, and in search for ongoing learning to satisfy their curiosity. The kind of people who actually went to class or at least liked to hang around and soak up thoughtful chat with other students. The gender divide is 50/50 and the age range is about 1/3 in the 25-40 year old category with the 17-25 and 65+ taking up equal numbers in 2nd place. The UK and India are our largest markets with Ireland in 3rd followed closely by the USA.
 

Andrew was a podcast critic for the AV Club's Podmass column in the early 2010s as well as the host of Podcast Squared (a podcast about other podcasts). Alicia just loves listening to any kind of podcast she can get her hands on.

The format felt natural for the subject because it definitely needs more time to breathe than can be covered in a 60 second Tiktok video, and the conversational aspect of sharing personal experiences or asking questions about the nature of the subject are really important. There are plenty of factsheets and lectures to tell you want to think about these topics but Seemingly Unrelated opens the door to asking you what you think about it.

The goal in a broader sense was always to find those 'a ha!' moments and to get the listeners to have their own 'no way, what?' experiences. There's something magical about doing this work and building these stories out and it is deeply satisfying to see someone furiously googling while listening to learn even more about the subject.

From a practical standpoint, there's never been an interest in earning much off the show, just enough to sustain paying for editing and marketing services so neither of us needs to pay out of pocket.

The show started in October 2024. The first recording session was in August of 2023. Just over a year of back and forth over what works, what doesn't. We initially recorded 10 episodes so that we had a lead on the release schedule. We continue to adhere to that logic and currently make seasons completely before setting about to release them.
 

The first batch of episodes was funded by Andrew out of pocket, the next patch through a generous donation from a listener. Season 3 was put together with some additional funding Andrew was able to drum up combined with Patreon subscriptions. The next batch of episodes has grant funding from the University of Glasgow although that may not be sufficient to cover the entire cost.

One episode takes:

• ~30 hours to research
• ~5 hours to script
• ~2 hours to record
• ~8 hours to edit
• ~2 hours to release (show notes, bibliography, exporting and upload etc)

Roughly 47 hours per episode split between three members of staff. For a single season, which includes 7 regular episodes, 2 bonus episodes, and 7 interviews that comes out to: ~450 hours.

We all integrate podcasting into our jobs. For Alicia, it's another creative outlet which she can use for her credits and to promote her puppetry work and research. For Andrew, this is how media gets made and how research gets done so any lecturer should know how it works.

Cost wise, we look at 10,000 GBP to put a season together. Season 1 was much less expensive as we figured out the rhythms but it had no marketing, and far less lead up and editing time.
 

Aside from personal satisfaction, the professional benefit for an academic and an artist is immediate. This is our brand. Andrew can be seen as something other than an ivory tower elitist generating obscure knowledge and Alicia can be seen as a serious researcher applying her arts trade to academic pursuits.

We have no sponsors. Not that we are against the idea necessarily, there just has yet to be a need to pursue any and neither of us is very experienced in that field.

According to our Podscan analytics, we have around 1200 listeners on a regular basis. This matches the analytics data I can see across various applications and from our host site. This is up substantially from season 2 where our listenership was roughly 300 regularly. The reason for this is likely down to more consistency in branding of our Season 3 content and a theme which is more relevant to the current news cycle regarding gender.
 

Tools: Riverside.fm to record as we all live in different places. Microphone for me is an SM58 run through a Behringer U-Phoria UMC22 USB audio interface. Alicia uses a Rode wireless lapel set up which is helpful for her live performances with puppetry as well. Episodes all contain video (Logi 1080p webcams) so that we can have subtitles for the HoH and d/Deaf community. Editing therefore is done on Adobe Premiere Pro.

Episode Prep- Andrew is in charge of pre-production. Conceptualization is fully in his hands and he generates ideas for seasons and episodes through his persistent exploration of books and other cultural artifacts. The ideas are pitched to Alicia and producer Naomi who help to narrow the research parameters and Andrew begins a literature review on each accepted subject. The literature review informs the potential guests for interviews (authors of material researched, people who resemble the subjects found within the literature, etc) which then passes responsibility to Alicia and Naomi to reach out to guests. 

Questions for interview subjects are informed by a thematic analysis of the literature as well as any additional resources Andrew needed to better understand the core subject. Once interviews are conducted, the narrative should be clear based on Naomi's review of the interviews and Andrew's themes. Alicia is then responsible for the conditioning of the narrative into an approachable draft script.

Recording sessions include a dry run rehearsal of scripted material, then the script is recorded, a discussion follows about what topics are the most interesting to explore in depth based on personal experience and additional material in the research report. The discussion then flows naturally without a script.

In the edit, Naomi is in charge of a first draft, Andrew and Alicia provide notes, Naomi produces a 2nd draft, Andrew finalises.
 

I think...poorly? I have no idea how anyone finds the show. We have socials (insta, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, Youtube shorts, Substack, Linktree, all of it) and they have small followings in terms of subscribers but the engagement numbers don't match our listenership.

We've been putting the show out on things like Podnews and Listen Notes so I imagine that explains it a bit. We're not the people to give advice on marketing, more of a production focused group.
 

Just care about the subject and the audience more than anything.

So much talk is about "owning" the audience and really, if that's what you want to do, don't start a podcast. Get a job that involves marketing. You might go crazy with the amount of work it takes to do all of that AND make a show regularly.

Every season, we all have such a blast doing the research, doing the production, making the episodes, having a revealing and fascinating chat, and getting any feedback or engagement from the audience. That's what pushes the show forward and it's really essential to making a podcast work.
 

@SeeminglyUnrelatedpod on all the socials
Youtube.com/SeeminglyUnrelated

The big one is Patreon.com/SeeminglyUnrelated or www.seeminglyunrelatedpod.com

We do a lot of bonus material on the Patreon. New episodes every month, early release on all seasons, the full length interviews instead of the snippets in the regular episodes, etc. It's a lot of content for $5/month and it comes out every month even between seasons so really the best would be if you sign up for a free trial, give it a test, and then stick around for more episodes and seasons as they come.