Welcome to Running: A FEVER. My name is Michael Davis, and this is a show about fitness, diet, and medicine. My goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life right up to the very end. It’s all about livin’ long and lovin’ life.

Recently I was preparing for our upcoming 500th episode and thinking about how I got started in podcasting. And I realized that this year marks 20 years since my first podcast. It wasn’t Running: A FEVER, though.

The show was called Everything Money, and my idea was to give personal financial advice to people who would call in to an 800 number. Unfortunately, nobody called in, and the show ended after only six episodes. There is currently a podcast called Everything Money, but it has nothing to do with me. In this episode, I play a clip from one of those original episodes.

I talked for about 20 minutes in that episode about gold, debt, and credit scores. It’s interesting to hear myself say that gold was at an all-time high of over $600. It was recently over $6,000, so yes, things have changed.

I had a website, everythingmoney.org, and you can still see its skeletal remains, along with a few blog posts, on the Wayback Machine (link below). That domain has changed hands a few times since then, of course.

I remember being inspired by the first podcast I ever listened to, Free Talk Live, which started as, and continues to be, a syndicated radio show. I haven’t listened to it in many years, but I recently looked it up, and it turns out one of its original hosts is serving a federal prison sentence in a cryptocurrency case. Anyway, that was the first time I had heard of this thing called a podcast.

My other inspiration was a radio show simply called The Money Show, hosted by Harry Browne. Harry’s claim to fame was writing the book How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation, published in 1970, which correctly predicted massive inflation and the devaluation of the U.S. dollar. People who followed his advice became very rich. Later he ran as the Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States in 1996 and 2000. He favored a conservative strategy of investing in equal weights of gold, stocks, bonds, and cash. And Harry Browne actually died during the short run of my first podcast, in March of 2006.

I thought podcasting was a cool idea. I had always loved radio. I hung out at the local rock station when I was in high school, where most of the DJs were high school students or recent graduates making minimum wage. Then in college I was a DJ and later programming director of WRNV, the student-run school radio station. So the microphone and I were already friends.

YouTube was barely a year old, and I had never even looked at the site, much less published on it. Podcasting itself was in its infancy. At the time there were far fewer podcasters relative to listener demand, so I think I had plenty of listeners, even though none of them were calling my 800 number. I opened each show by playing a big chunk of a popular song. I remember using one of Elvis Costello’s songs, with no idea about copyright issues. In radio, that wasn’t much of a concern, because stations play those songs anyway.

I’d like to say I’ve been podcasting for 20 years, but I really didn’t do anything for the next 10 years, until I teamed up with Tom Rohr and started the Padua Podcast Network. Still, it’s cool to be able to say I was one of the early hosts, back when there were only tens of thousands of podcasts and single-digit millions of listeners in the U.S. Today Spotify says it has about 7 million podcast titles, and Apple lists about 3.1 million valid shows, counting both active and inactive ones. Even so, according to The Podcast Host, fewer than 500,000 publish an episode at least every 90 days. We’ve come a long way.

So there’s a little history about your host. I hope you enjoyed this look into my podcasting past, even though it has nothing to do with fitness, diet, or medicine. You can expect more of that in the next episode.

There are a few references I used for this episode, and as usual you can access them all at https://runningafever.com/484.

Until next time, if you’ve got the fever, keep it burning, and if you don’t, catch the fever, and I will see you next time on Running: A FEVER.

References

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