Podcastnik Team

Pete Collman Travel with Pete! From DC and Atlanta, Pete now lives in Prague. Visit the Czech Republic with Bohemican, or see the world with Past Access. Check out Pete’s photography. Contact Pete	Travis Dow Besides podcasting, Travis makes candy and paints. He grew up in Munich, Germany, and Oregon. And lived in Prague for 10 years where he started podcasting with Pete. Other Projects Paintings dowsart.com nsaykafarms.com	Judith Strußenberg Living in Regensburg, Germany, Judith researches German heirlooms and brings them to life. here. Other Projects (German) Sunday Moaning
Imad A Syrian refugee translating German history into Arabic for other refugees. Imad is our hero, and is still not in safety. Listen to his story here.		Der Buddler Creator of the Secret Cabinet, archeologist and often museum curator, Mirko (“Buddler” means “digger” in German) could raise our academic standards—instead we get high falutin dick jokes. here. Other Projects (German) Angegraben

The Podcastnik Story

The Podcastnik story officially starts in Prague, the Czech Republic in February of 2013, when Travis Dow and Pete Collman sat down to record back-to-back episodes of the History of Alchemy Podcast and the Bohemican Podcast after work.

Pete and Travis sat down with their work headsets, printed-out episode outlines, and started googling Garage Band. Pete had moved to Prague to be with his family and sucked up the culture and history (as all of us expats in that beautiful city tend to do) and wanted to share Czech culture with his friends back home. Travis was a ghost tour guide for a season—which means stories of alchemists and crazy emperors in Prague, had really gotten into answering tourists’ questions on history and alchemy on the walks between stops on the tour. He had taken that passion to answering questions on Reddit’s AskHistorians and setting up historyofalchemy.com. Both Pete and Travis are history buffs that spent their time on coffee breaks chatting history from the 30 Years War (local history in Prague) to the American Civil War and really anything on long-dead people from Sumeria to Japan. We would compare notes on documentaries and send each other links to neat history stuff. Travis had a habit of listening to history-based documentaries while falling asleep, and when he ran out of his usual listening content, he entered “history” into iTunes to see if there were any good podcasts out there—and found Mike Duncan’s History of Rome.

Right around the time Pete became Travis’ co-worker at their shared place of business (both were technical writers at the time), Mike Duncan had done a special episode where he answered listener’s questions on what it actually takes to start a podcast. This list mirrored the instructions for baking a cake. First acquire an editing suite like GarageBand (and maybe some default loops for an intro), second, purchase a Blue Yeti microphone (there are better, cheaper ones, do buy Blue), line-up a hoster for your show content like Lybsin (but don’t necessarily just go with them either, we’re just telling the story here) , and finally bake at 360 degrees and voila. Now you have a working podcast.

Really? Dang—we can do that. Within a couple weeks (or even days) of Pete working at the company, Travis was like “Hey, do you listen to podcasts?”. Travis was already a full-blown addict by then, evangelizing Irish history podcasts and the History of the Crusades to all who would listen. And when Pete, a journalism major with an NPR voice and tons of history facts floating through his head agreed to team up with Travis, the foundations of a podcast friendship were created. It was just a few weeks after that Pete and Travis took their work headsets, booked a meeting room in the office when everyone left, and recorded those first episodes.

For two years we’d sneak up to a meeting room on a different floor (hoping to not run into anyone), see how long we could go before colleagues figured out that we were recording, and using the office to do it. we upgraded mics (the first ones were horrible $6 microphones, but eventually we sprang for a Blue) and figured out GarageBand shortcuts, started using Twitter, Photoshop, iMovie and the tools needed to set up websites and start to spread the word. Listeners started to find Pete and Travis and point them to the facebook groups where we were being mentioned (thanks Andrew Mence!).

Those were just the first two podcasts (out of more than 10 projects over the years). Eventually Travis took on the History of Germany in two languages. It grew to three when Imad started translating the show into Arabic for Syrian refugees living in Germany. Judith Strußenberg joined the History of Germany to help with the research and recording. The two languages started to diverge for the individual audiences. As a way to practice German, Travis started translating Das Geheime Kabinett from Mirko Gutjahr (aka Der Buddler) as “the Secret Cabinet”—which has been podcastnik’s most-downloaded show recently (as of early 2020).

When Travis moved to California from Prague in 2015 he started “Americana für Euch”, a podcast on US culture and history in German. Pete went all in on “Past Access” based on his adventures and experience of traveling in a wheelchair. A video series on YouTube with the highest production quality Podcastnik has to offer to date. Travis took some of the personal “Americana” stories and started “Podcastnik” YouTube and Audio channels. Which is where we are now. “Past Access” and “Podcastnik” being their passion projects, all projects are kept alive in some way. Travis gave lectures on Alchemy in Nürnberg and was on stage a few times in Germany over the years talking about some Americana, like Don Rickles or Coca-Cola. Pete has given lectures on crazy ol’ Rudolf II and the Early Modern Period of the Czech Republic in baroque rooms full of academics.

Both Pete and Travis had significant life changes throughout the years. We met Judith just as her life was being turned upside down, and Imad is still a refugee—who as an atheist and bi-sexual—is still far from safe where he lives in Cairo. Travis bought a farm and lives in the woods in Grand Ronde, Oregon and Pete spends every spare moment on Past Access.

Podcasting has been an amazing journey so far. This endeavor is the thing that has been a constant over the last years—the listener and fellow podcaster community being a source of support over that time. And now when we look back over the years since 2013, with over 500 episodes and millions of downloads, it all feels surreal. At times we are overcome with gratitude when we let it all sink in. Yet we still feel like we are just getting started. Check out “Podcastnik” and “Past Access” on YouTube, and “Podcastnik” on iTunes or wherever podcasts are available. We would have given up a long time ago if it wasn’t for you, so keep in touch!