PodQuiz: Trivia That Can Crush Your Dreams of Being a Jeopardy Champ

 Did you know that the long-running TV game show Jeopardy has a 27 million weekly audience? Every night, millions of families sit down and challenge each other to answer the show's trivia questions before another family member. Serious bragging rights are at stake here.

Millions more head out to Pub Trivia Nights and challenge strangers to do battle on trivia knowledge. Usually, the winners take home a modestly-priced gift card. However, it's the bragging rights that count.

Trivia is about small facts, but is certainly big business. If you haven't heard about it, let me introduce you to PodQuiz, the weekly trivia quiz podcast.

The format is deceptively simple. "Each week there are twenty questions, some music as an interlude, followed by the answers. Get your Friday fix of trivia every week"

 The podcast has been recording and releasing episodes for nearly 20 years and 1,005 episodes at the time of this review.

   James Carter is the host of PodQuiz weekly trivia quiz.

He is also a blogger, walker, geek, and host of Starring The Comp. I could not find much else on Carter, other than my observation is that he is the exact opposite of Elon Musk. Where Musk makes everything about him, Carter is content to let his trivia podcast take center stage, as he seems comfortable in the background. It's refreshing.

In a June 2024 interview with Waveform, Carter explained that "In

 the early days of podcasting, it was an amateur affair with no professional or corporate involvement, and podcasts were informal conversations among friends."

Carter was initially interested in the technology behind podcasting and the delivery of audio via RSS, which led him to start PodQuiz. The show
has maintained a consistent format over the years, closely following the traditional structure of a pub quiz, as Carter has not felt the need for major changes.

PodQuiz started as a hobby inspired by trivia segments on other early podcasts. Carter uses a simple setup with Audacity and a USB microphone to record and edit PodQuiz, which takes him about an hour and a half to two hours for each episode. To avoid burnout, he approaches PodQuiz as a hobby and spreads out the research and preparation work over the course of a week, totaling around eight hours per episode.

In the Waveform interview, Carter said, "I put thought into creating questions and categories with varying difficulty levels to engage listeners with different levels of knowledge on a given topic."

So what are some of the categories? There are four on each episode. Five questions for each category.

Here's a sample of recent episodes: 

June 13: Music (Sax Solos), Postage Stamps, Quantities (Quickfire), and Pandas

 May 16: Music (Connections), Printing, Flowers (Quickfire), and Transport.

Here are a few questions. Let's see how you would do?

 1. What animal was part of a thought experiment by Erwin Schrödinger in which that animal is both alive and dead until actually observed?

2. The infinite monkey theory postulates that a monkey hitting a random key on the typewriter in infinity will eventually type the completed works of what author and playwright?

3. Name the year of the Hindenburg Disaster?

4. Name the country where Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie was born -- France, Poland or the U.K.?

 Finally, Carter has a music interlude between the questions and the answers. The music is not a tune streamed two million times on Spotify. Instead, you'll hear Thought Experiments by Alex Kult, Post A-Priori by Apache Tomcat, and Eric and Magill with a song called Vegetable Gardeners. No Taylor, Drake, or Dua Lipa. 

I like the musical choices. They're unique and interesting. 

On occasion, Carter enables guests to devise questions for a category they are passionate about. For example, in episode 1002, guest Winston asked about pandas. WTF! 

If you are a trivia fan, check out PodQuiz. It's not fancy, but it is the best trivia show in the podcast universe. It will humble some and reward others, based on your skill in trivia.

ANSWERS:

1. Cat

2. William Shakespeare

3. 1937

4. Poland