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Hello, Odyssey. I'm Bob. And I'm Jesse. Welcome to the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast.

Jess, let me ask you a question. Do you have a favorite birthday memory?

Huh. Well, actually, just a few months ago was a great birthday. Had the whole family over, the kids and the grandkids. We grilled some steaks, played some games, and it was just really fun to be around family and just have a good time. How about you?

Well, I'm not sure if it's my favorite, but the one that stands out is when I was five or six, I got sick at the last minute and it was too late to cancel the party. So I spent the afternoon inside my house listening to lots of other kids having fun in the backyard. I learned a valuable lesson, Jesse. Even when it was all about me, it wasn't all about me.

Yeah, that's an interesting memory, Bob.

But there are a lot of other people in the midst of a big birthday celebration right now.

Oh, yeah. And boy, are there plenty of birthday memories to look back on with this one. The United States is 250 years old this month. We're contributing to the celebration with our two-part Odyssey episode, The Measure of a Patriot.

We'll talk more about that episode and the team that created it in a minute.

But first, here's the latest news. The Blackard Chronicles, Book 8, Dark King Dominates, is now available. In this latest novel, Dr. Regis Blackard sets his sights on taking over the centerpiece of Odyssey, Wit's End itself, and he uses lies, scandal, and sabotage to get what he wants.

This book adapts the audio album Darkness Before Dawn, one of the most pivotal storylines in Adventures in Odyssey history.

There are so many classic moments there. The battles between the bones of wrath and the Israelites, Tom's fight to keep his job as mayor, and, of course, Eugene's salvation. I wonder if we learn any more about Lieutenant Shaw. Bob, it's not about you, remember?

All right. You can relive all those moments and more that weren't revealed in the audio show in Dark King Dominates. It's available at the Focus on the Family store. We'll have links on our website. And now, getting back to America's birthday... Club members already heard The Measure of a Patriot Part 1 last week. This adventure tells the interlocking stories of three different patriots who are critical to America's first birthday and to the very fact that there's an America at all.

Let's get the inside story of this episode and some hints about part two as we sit down with writer Abigail Geiger and sound designer Zach Schneider.

Zach, Abby, great to have you back in the studio again. It's great to be here.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having us.

Let's dive right into this. This is exciting. some Adventures in Odyssey episodes are the result of an assignment. Others come from pitches or ideas from the writers. Talk about Measure of a Patriot. Where did that one come from, Abby?

This one actually had kind of an interesting start to it, something that I'm not quite used to, because it really started because I was looking into what would it take for me to get a history degree. I love history, kind of a big nerd. I love to learn, and I've always been a little bit disappointed that I didn't go to college. And so I started looking into like, can I do this on my off hours? And obviously you guys in the studio can see I am very pregnant. So that wasn't like the most reasonable option at that point. But I had talked to Marshall Younger about it at one point. And so he came back to me later and was like, hey, we've got the 250th anniversary of America coming up. Would you do the show for that? And of course, I was like, absolutely, because that was something that I would I was very excited to do and to dive into.

There are hundreds of Patriot stories. So why these three? What was it about these that really made you zero in on them? And had you considered others, maybe?

Oh, we considered a lot of different stories. I think we started off with Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Blackwell, like Martin Luther King. I went through a whole list of different ideas. and we really came back to, we want it to be people from the Revolutionary War. We want it to be people who were in the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And I already had that Benjamin Franklin story in mind. I had read a book about him and I really wanted to do this story. And so I held on to that one from all the way from the beginning, no matter what changes we ended up making, which were a lot, there were a lot of different changes and a lot of different ideas that went through. But that became kind of the central point for me, the Benjamin Franklin story. And then after that, it was kind of a side of research that you don't really think about that much, which is looking for stories where you end up reading a lot of different art.

You end up going on a lot of different rabbit trails and trying to find which is the best story here that really touches something in me that I want to tell that relates to the theme of this kind of central story that I had.

Yeah. One of the neat things about the Bible is that it does not whitewash the saints, right? They're not stained glass saints. They've got flaws. They've got problems. And yet sometimes when we look at our patriots, we want to do that in America. and you wanted to sort of show the Founding Fathers as real people with some real challenges and some flaws. At the first draft, there was a question about some of them owning slaves. How did you not only resolve that, but then make it part of the story's theme?

For me, that actually was the most important thing right off the bat, because that is something that you see so much in today's culture. Either the Founding Fathers are like these brilliant saints who are on these pedestals, or they're the most diabolical villains in history, you know. Depends on who's telling the story, right? Exactly. And so it's either good or evil, and people are just not like that. The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But that doesn't mean that someone who has sinned, who has flaws, can't be used by God. And so that was something that I really based the foundation of this story on. And I really fought for because I wanted to show the human side of these people. And God continues to redeem and use people who have significant flaws. For me, it's a cheat to pretend that our founding fathers were so perfect, but it's also revisionist history to try and claim that everything they did had no value because of these flaws that they had.

And Abby, this one took longer to write than normal. So why is that? Beyond the fact that, of course, it was a two-parter, why did it take a little more extra effort and extra time to get this one just right?

Yeah, it definitely did take a lot longer for me. And there were a couple of reasons for that. First of all, I was in my first trimester of pregnancy when I was writing this. And so basically those first three months for me are all about survival. It's all about like I'm on autopilot and just like as fast as I can get home and get into bed. That's the best way to do it. But also there's just so much more that goes into a history show. There's so much more research and you can't quite get into the flow state with a script in the same way because you have to check what you're putting in. You can't make things up as you go along. And there has to be this double checking. I had like 15 tabs open on my computer that I had open for months to double check. What were they saying in these moments? What were the specific details of things that were happening? Because I really wanted to be very accurate. And so it's a little harder to get into that. I wrote 10 pages today and it was awesome. And it's like, oh, I had to check every other line to make sure that what I was saying was accurate.

So how long did this one take? And what's like the normal pace in creating a script for a similar two-parter?

For a similar two-parter, it's usually, I want to say, a month and a half, maybe two months. This one took the full three months, and I was pushed up against my deadlines every time.

Wow.

And I usually am very good about, I'm, you know, a week or two ahead of my deadlines. And I've got, you know, I'm sending things out, and they're like, oh, wow, you got this already? And no, this one was like, yep, I'm going to get it. You need it tomorrow at, you know, 10 a.m. It's going to be there at 9.59. Don't worry, Marshall. It'll be done.

Right. I promise. So, Zach, do you have an equivalent? You know, Abby there with the 10, 15 windows open up on her computer to get everything just right, fact-checked. Do you have an example of this show maybe why these historical episodes take longer?

Yeah. So for sound designers, it really comes down to the availability of the sounds that we have in our library. i mean part of that is like the environment right so if we're in colorado springs and if you walk outside you're gonna hear cars driving by pretty much anywhere you go because it's the city so what did they not have in 1770 cars so anything we record like here outside has to be you know we have to find special ambiences that don't have any sort of city noise that's all very sparse so But then I wanted it to feel a lot of those places that we visited were cities, both London and then like other places in Boston. And so it was like we needed to have that busy feeling, but it couldn't be the busy feeling of today. It had to be the busy feeling of 250 years ago. Yeah. So that was like, OK, well, I got to find good horse sounds like horse and carry.

surges and then like cobblestone streets which we don't have many of those anymore so like that kind of thing is like i'm looking for those to really fill out my sound palette a lot of the other parts of the process were pretty similar especially like dialogue editing was basically the same the foley was more or less the same although it made some changes there but it was mainly the sound effects that really were the challenge of okay if trying to find the right

ones to make everything work. You mentioned the cobblestone streets, which I don't know that we have cobblestone in the Foley Room. Yeah, we don't. No. So how did you do some of those practical effects that you need to, rather than going to a sound effect server that says something about like 1700s Boston, what can you do about the buildings and about the different steps and so

on? Yeah. Well, like Abby, I did a little bit of research, much, much, much less research, but some research into these places that are referenced in the script and i looked at photos of how they are now and like pictures of what they used to be like so i tried to gather as much information as i could of what it would have been like to really be there and then made my creative decisions based off of that there are certain things you just can't really do like how many steps it would take to get from the front door to like the cockpit which is one of the places that we go. So it's like we had to make that walk in the show, but I couldn't do that exact amount of distance because that's not how long the dialogue was. So you have to make a few concessions here and there for that kind of thing. But I tried to use like, okay, this would have been a tile floor. So we're going to use tile here when I might've done wood or something like that. It was pretty subtle stuff, things you wouldn't necessarily think about, but I tried to use even the room size as an indicator for, okay, this is what this would have been like to actually be there. So just using some of that reference as a creative idea machine. Abby, as a writer myself

and one who's written historical fiction stories for Clubhouse, but of course, you know, 1,600 words, not these two-part scripts, I have to ask about the research because, again, you were looking at different people's lives and digging into them? Was there one person that was maybe easier or harder to find information for? And then how do you know when you have enough information? Because these folks have such rich lives that, you know, where do you stop? Because you could go down that rabbit hole and spend just weeks just doing research. Yeah. The Benjamin Franklin

story was really the easiest for me because I had just finished a big, thick biography on his life. So I knew the story I wanted to tell. I kind of had most of the details already set. So he was easier. And then John Adams, of course, is a great person to write about. He was a very prolific writer. If you go to, like, the Founders Archives online, they have all of his letters. You can find his diary online. And so he has so much information that he can give you. And then you get to Cesar Rodney and he did not write about himself at all. And so it was very difficult to find information about him. And most of the articles that I found had the same basic information. And so it was it was a little bit hard to put together a really solid picture of what happened on that ride and what exactly were the details, because he was he apparently reportedly was a very humble person. He didn't talk about himself much, even when he wrote letters to other people. He wasn't really sitting there describing all these things that he did, which John Adams did. um he was talking about them and about other people and about it was much harder to create a picture of his ride and his life and his personality but uh as to when i know i have done enough research i have never done enough research right i i have right up until the moment that we are finalizing this script together in a room i'm like googling things like what what is this question that I never even thought

about. I remember the week before sessions we were going over the script and somebody came up with a question. I don't remember what it was, but it was like wait, let me look that up really quick. We gotta know. So it was literally

to the last minute. Yeah, and then once this Marshall says, okay, the script is finalized. It is done. We're not making any more changes. I checked with him and I was like, are you sure? And he was like, yes. And I closed all my windows. And that was the end.

When Marshall says, it's enough.

Because when Marshall says you can't make any more changes, then I know I've done enough.

Well, having all of the information, the research in hand is one decision. But then you also had to decide how you want to tell the story because you didn't choose to tell it chronologically. is that? And was there a point at which you thought maybe that was the way you were going to

go? Actually, in this case, I think with three different stories, it would have been harder to tell chronologically because just the way that stories flow, you would have had this action rising and falling. You would have had the weird, we had the climax of this story and then kind of the slow beginning of the next one. And it would have messed with, I feel like the flow of the story. And so it made more sense in my brain to put it all together and to let the stories flow kind of naturally through the rising action together. Again, that's a very difficult process to be like, okay, which scene are we putting in here now?

Well, we went through that when we worked on Out of the Spotlight together with the story of David and Jonathan. But this, of course, we were talking about three different characters trying to weave them all together. You have a real knack for that. And the Imagination Station as a device, of course, gives you the perfect tool for being able to bounce around a little bit.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, you've both accomplished something here that you can be really proud of, which brings us to our TRQ. Do you know what that is, apparently? Can you remind me what's it? Well, for listeners who don't know, a TRQ is a totally random question from a fan. And Femla wants to know, can you remember accomplishing something as a kid that you were really proud of?

Oh. Oh, I know. I read The Little Women, the full book of The Little Women. And I was very proud of myself because it was so big. And I read through. I didn't read, like, part two, but I read the first part of it. And it was a very big, chunky book. And I was probably 10 or 11. And so for me, that was a big deal. Oh, yeah.

Actually, yeah, that reminds me of when I first read The Lord of the Rings, because my parents' rule was you had to read the books before you could watch the movies. And so I was young enough at that point where the movies had come out and I wanted to watch them, but I couldn't until I read the books. So those were actually some of the first full-length novels I ever read, which they weren't exactly easy. So I was pretty proud of myself for that.

It's a great sense of accomplishment for having read something that might have been a little intimidating. I think maybe something our listeners can adopt and pick a book this summer.

Yeah, definitely. I like it.

Well, thank you, Fame Love, for your question. Appreciate it. So let's jump into the recording sessions, right?

The scripting's done. Everything's ready. You're in California. What do you guys remember the most from that? I heard someone lost a tooth or something. And there was like a battle of hiccups going on there.

So both the characters of Wyatt and Sophie are played by actual kids. And so Dawson, who plays Wyatt, he's such a professional young man. Yeah. But he got the hiccups during the recording session and he felt so bad about it. Because, you know, when you're trying to record your voice, the worst thing in the world is that for like five seconds. So he felt really bad. But we were like, it's OK. Just, you know, drink some water. sit down we can keep recording when when you're better but yeah he felt he felt really bad

it was it was so fun to have the kids in the studio I I wasn't there I was Marshall directed this one and so I was listening in back in Colorado but it just it brings a different energy when we have little kids in the studio and uh it was so cute because they were so professional and they're interacting with these adults who are amazing actors who've been doing this for you know many many years and they're being very professional and then emerson who plays sophie she just out of nowhere she goes i just have this loose tooth and it's so annoying it was so cute it was so cute and she was so much fun to have in the studio they bring a different energy and a different like feel to the this show that is supposed to be all about kids. And I just I love when we've got kids in the studio who are playing actual kids because so many of our kids are just played by adults, you know, as as they're they have that youthful voice. Right. But it's just such a treat when we have kids in the studio and they bring a

different energy. Yeah. So was there a particular line in the show that each of you stood out for

you as a favorite, Abby? Yeah, I have a very favorite line in this script, and it's one that i didn't have to write myself um it's almost a word-for-word quote from john adams diary i think i found like a synonym for one of the words so that it would be more understandable for our audience but uh it's the line where john adams says this shall be

the most gallant, generous, manly, and selfless action of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of work I have ever rendered to my country. And it's one of my favorite moments because it really, honestly, was very true. Like, it really set a precedent for justice in our country. It was a big deal that he stepped in and did this, but also it shows a side of John Adams that really very often frustrated his peers and drew a lot of criticism his way, which is like his self-importance. He was very aware that he was being very generous.

Politicians have a way of doing that, even today, I think, sometimes.

And it just made me laugh every time I read it. And I was like, I have to get this in the show. We have to show this side of him because it made him so human. And it took him a little bit off the pedestal that sometimes exists with the founding fathers, and it makes him a little bit more relatable and a little bit more – it helps us to understand him a little bit more.

Yeah.

And it was just funny.

I was going to say, and I think the kids' reaction to that too that you added where it was – they were like, wow, he got arrogant really fast. It was like just the perfect reaction. That's also one of my favorite lines from the show. It's just, yes, it's so funny.

And Zach, you worked with Jared DePasquale in creating the musical score for this episode. And you actually collaborated with him on an instrument that Benjamin Franklin invented. That guy invented like everything. So first of all, what was the instrument and how did you work with Jared to create the actual sound from it?

Yeah. So if you listen to the show, you will know that Ben Franklin invented the glass harmonica, which is not something you see a lot of. It was essentially a device that had a bunch of glass bowls on a rod and you turn the rod and you use your hands to play the glass bowls, which if you don't know how that works, maybe some of you have seen this where you can take your finger and basically run it around the rim of a glass and it'll make this humming sound. so depending on the size of the glass object it'll actually change the pitch so when he discovered that he made an entire instrument out of it so Jared and I I did a little bit of foley to kind of get some of that handling sound getting the thing cranking I got a few just like glass dinks here and there to kind of like feel like you're actually touching it and then Jared wrote a piece of music that you hear in the show that is Ben Franklin playing the glass harmonica. And he did that with his own set of sounds that he has of actual glass harmonicas. That's amazing.

Looking back, guys, what lessons from the show were the most meaningful to you personally?

I think for me, it was how I look at history and how I want to be able to learn from it without trying to justify or explain away or clean up who these people were. We forget sometimes that there's so much to learn from history without trying to whitewash it a little bit and make it pretty. And we do this with biblical characters. And we talked about that on the show with David and Abraham and Moses. And we acknowledge that they had flaws and that they were people that had sinned and fallen short of what God wanted them to be. And yet we're still willing to learn from them. And then with historical figures, we either we either toss them aside because they were terrible people or we want to justify who they were and want to forget about the parts that that were not as pretty, that were not as easy to reconcile. style and and so that for me was a challenge to look at history for what it is and to delve deeper into what was god doing instead of trying to push this person was so perfect that they can be you know learned from and i should copy everything about them it's like no let's let's focus on what was god doing here what how is he moving in all of this and take the focus off of the people And that was really important to me.

Yeah. And Zach, how about for you? Is there anything you applied to your own life? I mean, in addition to the white powdered wig that you're wearing, which looks great, by the way. Thank you. I thought you wouldn't notice.

No, for me, very similar to Abby. It's kind of the point of the show. So listen to the show. Yeah. But it's the fact that Paul says in Scripture, imitate me as I imitate Christ. And so there's this aspect of there are people, there are role models that we look up to and we want to be like them.

And a lot of the times we'll put historical figures like the Founding Fathers in that category of people to look up to and people to behave like, which I think there's a lot of merit to that. And there's definitely some of that to be found in Scripture as well. But ultimately, we're not supposed to be imitating other people. It's Christ we're supposed to be imitating. So we should imitate other people as they are like Christ. But really, if we want to be more like Jesus, then we should try to be like him. And so for me, it's a good reminder of that in this show specifically that we all have flaws and we have our own problems, just like the Founding Fathers did. But it's most important that when we're setting somebody up on a pedestal, we're doing so for the reasons that they are like Christ and not just because everything they did was what exactly we want to be like.

Well, thank you, both of you, for sharing about these powerful and timely episodes and I think a very powerful interview. It was great to have you guys in the studio today. Thanks for having us.

I love how this episode looks at patriotism with both gratitude and humility. It's a good reminder that history isn't just about celebrating, it's about learning. I can't wait to hear the conclusion. You won't have to wait long, Jess. Part 2 releases in the club tomorrow. Can you give us a preview of that one, Chris?

Now in the Adventures in Odyssey Club, Sophie and Wyatt find themselves caught up in historic events, including... That was the Boston Massacre! ...and the race to cast the deciding vote for American independence. Are you still in your way to Philadelphia? Yes. We could be walking for hours in the rain. Then we walk for hours in the rain. Independence is at stake. The story behind the birth of America, now in the Adventures in Odyssey Club.

That's all for this edition of the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast, a presentation to focus on the family.

Visit adventuresinodyssey.com to find out more about The Measure of a Patriot or anything else we talked about on today's podcast. You can also call us at 1-800-A-FAMILY. I'm Bob. And I'm Jesse, reminding you that with God in your life, every day is an adventure.