Submit a Show Topic

Futurelings! Welcome to the other side of The Omnibus. Are you ready to share your knowledge of the arcane? Ready to make the case for the inclusion of your discovery, your pet esoterica, in the time capsule of That Which Shall Be Preserved? We welcome you!

The criteria for submission is simple, but not easy. Longtime listeners will know it is not enough simply to have an anecdote, you must have a story. The example we often give is that of Lazăr Edeleanu, the Gilded Age Romanian chemist who was both the first to synthesize amphetamine and the inventor of modern oil refining. Fascinating! He ticks all the boxes of an Omnibus entry except… there’s nothing else to the story. He did some other stuff too, he lived in Germany and was Jewish, but none of that factors in. He was a chemist who did chemistry and his story fits on a 3x5 card.

Ken and John plowed through, and rejected, dozens of these in the last eight years: Turold the Dwarf, Bass Reeves, Jimmy the Raven and many more. Other stories seem too complicated to convey in forty minutes. John tried a few times to understand The Time Cube or tackle The Swiss Cheese Model of Accident Causation without success. Maybe you can do it?

Once you’ve prepared your case, co-hosting The Omnibus Project will be fun! Talking to John, EXPLAINING THINGS TO HIM, is deeply gratifying. Ken was entertained for eight straight years and he's best friends with Matt Damon! Will John sidetrack you with seemingly irrelevant anecdotes about a rumored walk “across Europe?” Certainly he will. Will he ask unexpected questions about your submission you have to scramble to answer? Yes, also. That’s part of the fun!

So fill out this form to submit your proposal. If accepted by our crack team of reviewers you’ll be scheduled for a video call with John. After that (and some judicious editing to take out all the parts where you frantically search for an answer to a question you didn’t anticipate) your contribution will become another entry… in the Omnibus.