Big announcement at the beginning of this weeks episode for all you Revolutions podcast fans
— Mike Duncan (@mikeduncan) December 16, 2024
And if you listen to the first 2 minutes of the episode below, you can hear what it is.
...if you didn't listen, basically Mike Duncan is announcing that he's now coming back to do more seasons of Revolutions.
This isn't a complete surprise. Mike Duncan had always left open the possibility of coming back to do more episodes. In 2022, someone had asked him about doing the Spanish Civil War, and Mike Duncan said on Twitter, "No, but also...yes. Revolutions is ending with Russia. But the model is such that in five or ten years I can always just up and decide to do another series. And Spanish Civil War is high on that list." (Those tweets are no longer available because Mike Duncan periodically deletes all his old Tweets. But I had saved them in an old blogpost.)
Based on that old Tweet, I had been expecting that Mike Duncan would come back to do an odd season here or there in between his other projects. But I am very pleasantly surprised to hear that he's coming back to do the series full time.
The revolutions that Mike Duncan mentions specifically in this latest episode are Ireland, Algeria, Cuba and Iran, so presumably those are the ones that are in his mind right now. I'm also hopeful that he'll cover many more: Turkey, the Spanish Civil War, The Chinese Revolution, Vietnam, etc. But we'll see. Mike Duncan will ultimately do what he wants to do.
(I always find it a bit funny when people get on Twitter or go in the comments and insist that Mike Duncan cover this or that revolution. Fans can get so entitled sometimes. I guess that's the Internet for you.)
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As much as this is good news, it does throw a monkey wrench into my neat little plan to listen to the Revolutions Podcast straight through one or two times and then to do a review of the whole series.
But then, that's podcasting for you. Many podcasts don't have a neat end point--they just keep going indefinitely. And I've reviewed many podcasts and Youtube series on this blog that were ongoing at the time I reviewed them (e.g. here, here, here, here).
So here's what I'll do: I'll continue my project of listening to the entire Revolutions Podcast all the way through. (I'll probably listen through twice.) This will include any new episodes that come out between now and when I finish the project. Then, I'll give a general review of the whole podcast at the state it is when I finish listening to everything.
Then, I might come back to do in-depth listenings of later seasons, and post separate mini-reviews of them, the way I did with the first 10 seasons. But I'll do this in between checking out other podcasts I am interested in.
I reserve the right to skip over any seasons of Revolutions Podcast I'm not particularly interested in (e.g. Mike Duncan's 12 episode appendix at the end of season 10, and Mike Duncan's fictional Martian Revolution). I'll listen to them when I do my run-through of the whole series, but I won't do separate reviews of them.
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In the interim, when it looked like Mike Duncan had finished the Revolutions Podcast, another podcaster had stepped in to fill in the gap with 20th Century Revolutions.
As he states in his first episode, he is explicitly influenced by Mike Duncan, and planning to pick up where Mike Duncan left off.
I've not made a project of listening to his podcast thoroughly (because I'm still busy finishing up Revolutions), but I've dipped in and out of a few episodes, and it sounds like he's doing really good work on this. I've been planning on doing his podcast after I finally finish up with Mike Duncan's Revolutions.
His analytics on Youtube are really low at the moment (only a few subscribers, barely any views on each episode), so I hope he doesn't get discouraged and quit.
A few weeks ago, I commented on one of his episodes:
It's a pity these videos don't have more views. You're doing good work here. I think a lot of podcasts just take time to find their audience. Keep at it, and I'm sure you'll connect with your audience eventually. It may take them some time to find you, but I think they'll find you eventually.
...I meant it as supportive and hopefully he took it that way. (He never responded, and I'm not sure whether or not he appreciated the comment. I hope he didn't feel like I was rubbing salt into the wound by drawing attention to his low numbers.)
I also have no idea what his analytics are on other platforms. To be fair, a lot of podcasts do really low numbers on the Youtube platform (Mike Duncan included), but presumably they have better statistics on Podcasting apps.
Anyway, I have no idea how this guy feels about Mike Duncan coming back in to cover the same field he's currently covering. Hopefully he doesn't give up. (It'd be really great to have both of them cover the same subject area. Then we can have 2 perspectives.)
You can show support for 20th Century Revolutions by doing all the usual social media things: subscribing, liking their videos, etc.
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