Meta: This Substack is now called 'Geography is Everything'

I'm reorganizing my various geography things!

Geography is everything! From the deer to the trees to the town to the mountains! Photo by Caleb Jack on Unsplash

“Why am I getting an email from something called ‘Geography is Everything’?” is something you’re probably asking yourself right now. Well that’s because this is actually the Substack newsletter formerly called ‘Geography by Geoff’! Over the last few weeks, I’ve taken stock of my burgeoning geography media empire (that’s a joke btw) and decided that things weren’t flowing as well as I’d like. So I got to thinking and figured out how I could do things a bit better.

Prior to today, I had two primary geography brands:

1. Geography by Geoff, which encompassed my YouTube channel and this Substack.

2. What If Geography, which was the name of the podcast that I co-host with my colleague Hunter Shobe (more on that below!).

But this set up didn’t make sense. For one, Substack is a great place to host a podcast and engage with your community but this was branded after my YouTube channel which was crazy! 😵‍💫 And so… rebrand!

What’s happening to ‘Geography by Geoff’?

So, first things first, Geography by Geoff (the YouTube channel) is not going away. If you like my content on YouTube, awesome! I love making those videos and will continue to do so for basically eternity. The ‘Geography by Geoff’ brand will basically encompass all solo geography projects of mine. Which, for now, is just the YouTube channel, but it will likely grow in the future.

The takeaway here is that, if you see a ‘Geography by Geoff’ branded piece of content, that’s a solo project of mine whether it’s on YouTube or something else.

So then what’s ‘Geography is Everything’?

The new podcast and Substack branding.

‘Geography is Everything’ is the new brand for everything that myself and Hunter do together. This includes our podcast, which has also now also been rebranded to ‘Geography is Everything.’ This means a few things, starting this week:

1. Hunter will start helping me with articles here, and even publishing his own! He’s an actual professor so his material will probably be better than mine. 😅 We’re still figuring out the cadence of Hunter’s articles, but you can probably expect more articles from this newsletter. My own articles will still be published once per week on Tuesdays.

2. Our weekly podcast (formerly called ‘What If Geography’) will be posted here every Wednesday. This will be in addition to it being posted on YouTube as well as whatever podcast app you use (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) so you can continue listening there, but Substack podcasts episodes will be without ads (at least for now) and you can comment directly on the episode. Win-win!

3. A Substack-exclusive ‘Geography is Everything’ mini episode series will be published most Fridays. These will broadly be around specific geographic concepts or terms that we usually use in our normal episodes. We’re hoping to get these to a once-a-week publishing schedule as well, but it might start slow. Again, these episodes will be exclusive here!

Why rebrand the podcast? And what’s happening to the ‘What If Geography’ brand?

The old podcast branding

I owe a lot to the ‘What If Geography’ brand. It helped me start my YouTube channel and then it helped Hunter and I start our podcast. “What if” questions are a great way to frame things and really set a tone and format, which are two things that are very challenging when you first start out making content. But you can only do so many “what if” questions before you start running out of obvious speculative answers, or you start repeating things you’ve already said. At the end of the day, Hunter and I really just want to talk about geography, and how geography is literally everything.

As such, we’ve decided to cast off the “what if” aspect from our podcast entirely. We’re now completely unhinged to talk about anything and everything but through a geographic lens. This means that our episodes will be a bit more concise because we no longer have to dedicate 15+ minutes to speculation — we’re constantly striving for the under 1-hour episode run time — and we can talk about everything. For example, our next few episodes are about regional dialects, skyscrapers, and the potato! We’re really, really excited to talk about the potato! 🥔

As for the brand ‘What If Geography?’ Well, it’s being retired. We wish it well! You can, of course, always revisit our old podcast episodes to listen to some what if speculation (or some of my old YouTube episodes). But there’s no intention to carry it forward in any meaningful way.

Are you going paid?

The short answer is not now. As of today, we’re not going paid. Everything will be free for the immediate future.

The longer answer is that we probably will be offering paid subscriptions to this Substack newsletter in the near-ish future. Hunter and I are investing a lot of ourselves into this Substack and our podcast. This means that we’ll likely start gating off some of the new content over the next few weeks. I don’t have a specific timeline, but the goal is to offer dedicated fans some exclusive content.

But here’s the compromise: the main podcast episode that’s published every Wednesday will always be free to listen to on YouTube and various podcast apps. This will likely include ads, of course, but it will always be available. Additionally, the Tuesday articles that I publish will also remain entirely free. So everything you’ve currently been enjoying will stay available to you whether you ultimately subscribe in the future or not.

The Substack-exclusive mini-episodes of our podcast as well as the ad-free podcast experience, however, will become exclusive to paid subscribers. Additionally, future articles outside of the Tuesday article will also be for paid subscribers on a case-by-case basis.

As we get closer to offering up paid subscriptions, Hunter and I are looking at every possible avenue to make sure it will be worth it, while also not throwing up gates on stuff you already enjoy. It’s a balancing act, of course, so we’ll always be looking to reassess as needed.

If you have questions I’m happy to answer them them in the comments!