Back in 2019, which seems a quaint pre-pandemic time much longer than just seven years ago,

I went to Orlando, Florida to attend a podcaster convention. It was a good time, though

brutally hot and humid.

No one went outside much.

Instead, we all stayed indoors listening to panel discussions and keynote speakers

about the exciting and still relatively new, in quotation marks, medium of podcasting.

There were ample opportunities to learn more about the craft and the industry, as well as build community among your peers.

But of course, I'm a history podcaster, so I was most interested in finding more of those people.

Luckily, there was a history podcaster meetup scheduled one evening.

I decided to go, but found it a bit difficult to locate the group.

We were meeting outside a restaurant in a giant food court pavilion inside an even more giant convention center, and it got confusing.

It took me a while, but then I spotted them, a table of three or four older gray-haired white guys.

Now look, I myself am an older gray-haired white guy. I'm the

stereotype of the suburban American father with an interest in history, but I've got to tell you,

I was a little disappointed to see that the history podcasters meetup was this one note.

And they looked a little miserable, too. No one was saying much. So I decided that this was

maybe not the group for me. I turned around, and that's when I saw it. A tiny little placard on the

table behind me, history podcasters meetup. Now, this was a different group, varied in every way,

young and old, male and female, professional,

and hobbyist.

If memory serves, it was still all white, and statistically, that's just going to happen with

small sample sizes.

...