Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ryan & Kevin Johnson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ryan & Kevin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
The mission behind “The Almost Presidents Podcast” , as we say at the beginning of each episode, is to look at American history through the lens of the loser. It’s a common maxim in history class that history is written by the winner, the conquerer, the person or peoples left standing when the dust settles. As a result, many important people and movements get lost or forgotten. Our objective is specifically to shed a light on those forgotten or lesser remembered politicians who ran for the highest office in the land: that of United States President. We’ve found on our journey that these men and women have often contributed much more to history than unsuccessful election campaigns. Their stories are often a window not only into their personal biographies, but into broader historical, social, and political events. For example, in our first season on Robert F. Kennedy, our narrative quickly expanded to encapsulate the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, labor unrest, among other events, and introduced (or re-introduced) us to important figures like Senator Joe McCarthy, John Lewis, and Caesar Chavez.
In our second season on Samuel Tilden, a Reconstruction-era Democrat (which is currently ongoing), our narrative envelops Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, the formation of the Jim Crow South, and the corruption of machine politics in Tammany Hall. Our podcast unveiled for us, and we hope our listeners too, connections to the modern day about race, violent political divisiveness, and more.
Our unique lens of looking at history through the eyes of the Almost Presidents has given us the unexpected opportunity to not only have a one of a kind American history podcast, but has given us the privilege of humanizing and spreading awareness of many of the Americans who have been forgotten by history simply because they didn’t tread the halls of power.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We are Ryan and Kevin, 2 brothers who co-host “The Almost Presidents Podcast”. Ryan has a degree in Literature and teaches English as a Special Education Teacher.
Kevin is a former High School Physics teacher who currently works as a data analyst.
While “The Almost Presidents Podcast” may have started in June 2022, its origins can be traced back to our common love of history. As a commuter to college, Ryan used the commute to expand his historical horizons by listening to great history podcasts like “Hardcore History”, “History on Fire”, and “The History of Rome”, among others. During his college years, Kevin became affiliated with the social justice department and from that developed a general interest in politics.
While talking about these interests on a hike, we realized they fell into an alignment that could turn into a fun hobby/passion project. What if we took our love of history and politics and created a podcast about them? We soon found that getting a basic grasp of the technical aspects of creating a podcast wasn’t too difficult and we were already skilled enough at reading and researching, and additionally we had the rapport the comes with being brothers that we just had to find a way to translate when on the mics. All we needed was a an angle, a unique approach to history and politics that would make us stand out, was specific, but not too specific as to limit the depth the breadth of what the podcast would become.
Partly inspired by reading presidential biographies and being gripped by the campaigning process, we came up with idea to podcast about the men and women on the losing side of the election. What we found fascinated us to this day and quickly became “The Almost Presidents Podcast”.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When we initially came up with the idea to do a history/politics podcast, we planned to be a generic history podcast. We wrote down topics of interest, everything from Operation Paperclip to the biography of the man who created Wonder Woman (which, believe me, is an INTERESTING story). We planned to cover each topic, creating just as many episodes as we needed to do so, before jumping to a completely different topic, connected only by the fact that they were historical and of interest to us. We spent a year reading and writing, producing over 80 pages of script, before abandoning this path before recording a single word that we’d written.
We realized we needed something a little different than just history, not just for branding purposes and for standing out among the crowd of generic history podcasters, but we also wanted a single topic we could really get into. We wanted a topic big enough to podcast about for as long as we wanted to have a podcast, but specific enough to run against the grain.
The solution came in the form of “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein, which Kevin read on audiobook. In discussing the book, President John F. Kennedy’s younger brother, Bobby, emerged as a figure of interest. Bobby Kennedy is probably best known for his political assassination, closely followed by his inspiring 1968 campaign for the presidency. Many still wonder to this day, what if he had lived and been the second President Kennedy? We realized that every presidential campaign contains as many “what ifs” as there are candidates in the race. And what if we told their stories? This enabled us to pivot from general history, to a specific view of history: the lens of the loser.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
Very early in our podcast journey, our friend, former teacher, and fellow podcaster who co-hosts “History Teachers Talking Podcast” laid out the basics we’d need in order to record, edit, and distribute our podcast.
In order to record and produce our audio, we use Zencastr, a mostly free website that’s easy to use.
For the longer, more painstaking process of editing the audio, i.e. determining what to keep, what to take out, where to remove the “ums”, “likes”, “you knows”, loud breathing and/or coughing, Audacity is a free tool which brings us to the cusp of our final product.
After Audacity, we combine everything from our theme music, the episode, segments, social media reads, etc. on Garage Band.
When we have a finished audio file, we use Anchor to distribute it to our listeners on most all podcast platforms.
But all of the above mentioned is only half the work we put into the podcast. Another sizable portion is our social media outreach. An app we highly recommend podcasters use, sheerly for how much time it saves, is Business Suite. This app combines our podcast’s Facebook and Instagram profiles, allowing us to post to both social media platforms simultaneously as well as schedule posts. As our podcast journey continues, we look forward to taking advantage of more of what the Business Suite has to offer.
For researching purposes, to find good books about history, there’s a very good subreddit called r/AskHistorians which has a list of recommended books on a variety of topics. When you’re researching topics as specific as we often do, these professional historians can not only recommend good books, but bring to our awareness incredibly helpful books that we wouldn’t have otherwise known existed.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @thealmostpresidentspodcast
- Facebook: The Almost Presidents Podcast
- Twitter: @AlmostPOTUSpod
- OEmail: thealmostpresidentspodcast@gmail.com