Roots of Reality: Volunteer Researcher and Long-Form Writer for a Big History Podcast

I have been a volunteer researcher with the Roots of Reality podcast since September 2025. The show is a Big History project hosted by Ben Baumann that runs from the formation of the universe to the present and is, per ListenNotes, in the top 2.5 percent of podcasts globally.

The honest scope of my role: I do research and content writing for the show's articles and social media. I am not a host. I do not interview guests. I do not appear on the podcast. The earlier description of my involvement on this site overstated the scope; this case study is the corrected version.

What a "volunteer researcher" actually does is the part worth writing down, because the title is doing very little work on its own.

The standing assignment is to take a topic, do enough scholarly reading on it to be honest, and produce two artifacts: a short social-media post that survives the 280-to-500-word format without losing its accuracy, and, when the topic warrants it, a longer article that can stand alone.

The internal pipeline tracks each topic across five fields: the topic, the social-media draft, the source list (one to three peer-reviewed or institutional links per claim), a flag for whether it merits a full article, and a status (Not Started, In Progress, Needs Clarification, Finished, Posted). I work the queue from the top. The "Needs Clarification" status is the one I have come to value most. It is the field I use when the source material disagrees with itself or when a claim that sounded settled in a popular article turns out to have a live academic dispute behind it. Marking it instead of guessing is the discipline.

The work that has gone live falls into three running series.

The premise is simple. A symbol or gesture that means one thing in one place often means something different, or the opposite, somewhere else, and the difference is not trivia. It is the difference between a Western tourist and a deeply offended Greek bus driver.

Pieces I have researched and written for this series:

Each post is short. The discipline is in the citation. Every claim has to map to a scholarly source the host can verify before it goes out. The hardest editorial call in this series is when a popular source and a scholarly source disagree on a basic fact. The thumbs-up gesture is a clean example: the cross-cultural offense claim shows up everywhere online with the same six countries listed, and the citation chain often dead-ends in a 1996 Roger Axtell book that is itself a secondary source. The post does not go out until I can find the primary ethnographic reference, or it goes out narrower than the popular version with the regions I can actually defend.

This is the series I am most willing to point at, because it is where the social-media research scaled into a full investigative article that lives elsewhere on this site.

The series originated as a set of seventeen social-media posts debunking common claims about book challenges in North American libraries. Each post took one widely-circulated claim ("most book challenges come from concerned parents," "libraries don't have standards for selecting age-appropriate materials," "books are still available elsewhere, so removal isn't censorship") and walked through the data and the legal framework that contradicts it. Sources came from the American Library Association, PEN America, Unite Against Book Bans, the Freedom to Read Project, the Miller test, the Canadian Charter, and case-specific reporting from CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the New York Times.

Some claims took half a page. Others, the ones with a longer history or a more specific data argument, kept growing until they did not fit the format anymore. Those became the spine of Dismantled by Design: The Truth Behind Modern Book Censorship, an investigative essay published December 23, 2025, on the coordinated infrastructure behind contemporary book challenges in the United States and Canada. The piece is on this site under the Blog section. The research that backed it lives in the social-media series.

A second long-form piece for Roots of Reality grew out of related research on Indigenous policy: Debunking Denialism About Canada's Sixties Scoop Policy, published November 20, 2025. Same template. A historical revisionist claim, taken at face value, walked back through the documentary evidence and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission record.

Both essays are mine. Both were produced in the volunteer research role for Roots of Reality, and both are also published on this site as long-form blog posts, because they stand on their own outside the podcast's social channels.

The third running series leans into my day-job background. The premise is that public coverage of AI confuses several distinct things: capability, autonomy, deception, productivity, and consciousness. Each post takes one of those and traces what the actual research literature says.

Pieces I have drafted:

The bar on this series is higher than the symbols-and-gestures one, because the claims are technical and the audience is mixed. A wrong line about a transformer architecture in a 400-word social post will be caught by exactly the kind of reader Roots of Reality wants to keep.

The pattern I have noticed is that the AI series benefits most from the day-job overlap. When I write about prompt-engineering performance, I am writing about the same kind of evaluation methodology I argue about with product managers at metricHEALTH. When I write about emergent abilities, I am translating a paper I would read on a Tuesday at work for an audience that is not in the meeting. The translation is not a chore; it is the part of the writing that forces me to find out which sentences I actually understand.

The day job at metricHEALTH is healthcare data engineering. The translation muscle, taking a clinical or specification-level concept and making it readable to someone outside the room, is the same muscle the volunteer research uses. The difference is the room.

At work, the audience is clinicians, product managers, and integration partners, and the writing exists to make a system land. For Roots of Reality, the audience is a global Big History podcast's readership, and the writing exists to keep public history honest. Both rooms reward the same instinct: read carefully, cite primary sources, write the simplest sentence the evidence allows.

It is also the part of the week I am not getting paid for. I do not need to pretend that is incidental. The volunteer hours are how I keep the writing muscle attached to topics I get to choose, on a publication I respect, with editorial standards I have to clear before anything goes out. The fact that the host happens to be a historian whose work I would read anyway is the part that makes the time worth it.