Podcast Idea: Worldbuilding
Can a horse-sized flying creature grab and carry a human's weight while flying? How do you make an anatomically correct city-leveling monster? If North America and Latin America unified into one country, how would the highway system work? These are the kinds of questions that fiction writers must answer, and sometimes they turn to the web to do so, asking for advice. On Worldbuilding, we connect actual experts (or, as close as we can find to experts) with writers asking questions on the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange forum. A historian of technology tries to figure out how to build a phone charger 500 years ago. A biologist tries to design anatomically correct, color-changeable eyeballs. On each episode they work together to build a (mostly, sorta kinda, maybe) plausible world.
Host: Rose Eveleth (yes I’m making myself the host this is my newsletter get over it!!!)
Executive Producer: Rose Eveleth
Sponsor: Stack Exchange
Comps: Imaginary Worlds meets How To!
Sample Episode 1: What's the most profitable use for an elemental transmuter?
Entrepreneur and shark Marc Cuban helps @Stephen try and figure out how to make the most money possible with a machine that can make any element you want? How do you maximize your profits via elemental conversion? What’s the most valuable element anyway? Should you just make a shit load of gold? What happens to supply chains and business models when the rare Earth elements you need for things like electronics can be made in a machine?
Sample Episode 2: Could dragons be explained without magic?
Evolutionary biologist Dr. Michelle Johnson helps @Sheraff figure out whether or not dragons could ever evolve without magic. What would the pressures have to be to create giant winged lizards (again)? What are some similar creatures throughout evolutionary history? And what traits are beyond evolution’s grasp?
Audience: A show for nerds who don’t necessarily identify as nerds. Sure, some of the audience will love fantasy and sci-fi, and some will be the pedantic type who “fact check” major motion pictures for their physics. But the show will also bring in people who like puzzles, fun facts, and interesting thought experiments. They love the Wall Street Journal A-hed stories and like debating whether cereal is a type of soup at parties.
If you have a podcast idea that you’d like to see me turn into a Podcast Idea, send it my way! rose.eveleth@protonmail.com, or just reply to this email.
Bonus Podcast From Twitter
Hosts, sponsors, and guests have not signed on in any way. I’m making stuff up here!
This newsletter is for fun. Ideas belong to their initial creator, credited here as Executive Producer. Don’t be a dick and don’t steal these ideas. If you love a show, and really want to get it made, get in touch with the person who came up with it.