(link to podcast)

[music]

0:00:12.2 Chris Ronan: Hi everybody, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, my user name is Rock Chalk. I am one of the lackeys who works at Geocaching HQ in Seattle, and today we are discussing a couple of topics. The Geocaching 20th anniversary celebration in Seattle on August 20th. Bryan Roth, HQ’s President and Co-Founder is here to chat about that big event, and Adam from HQ’s community engagement team drops by to talk about a geocaching world record attempt that will take place on August 20th. So let’s get into it first with Bryan and the upcoming 20th anniversary celebration.

[music]

0:01:00.3 CR: Well, Bryan, we are coming up on the Geocaching 20th anniversary celebration. Finally, it’s really going to happen. I think part of me has just wondered, is this really going to take place? And now, I looked at the calendar the other day and I was, I thought, “Wow, we’re under a month now, I really think it’s gonna happen.” And it’s really just so exciting to think about the thousands of people that are gonna be joining us here in Seattle, and I know you must be really looking forward to it too.

0:01:33.0 Bryan Roth: It’s so true, Chris, after so much time, anticipation, just waiting and pushing it back and just dealing with all the complexities of planning and re-planning and re-planning again, it’s close. We’re super excited. I’m hearing from a lot of geocachers from all over the world who have made plans and then canceled plans and made them again, now it’s really happening. And being here at HQ, I know you can feel it too, but the excitement is building and we really can’t wait to welcome everybody to the celebration event here in Seattle.

0:02:10.5 CR: I think if we were to go back, of course, three years when we first started talking about this thing in earnest and then had no idea what was in front of us, what was in front of the world, really. But I wonder if you could reflect a little bit just on the work that’s going into trying to put together an event that everybody will enjoy and all of the zigging and zagging that we’ve been doing over these last few years, and the stops and starts, and I know we’re really thankful to the community for their patience as we’ve had to schedule and re-schedule, but I think we still have such a fun day planned and a fun, really week and weekend planned for everybody that are coming to Seattle.

0:02:54.9 BR: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be incredible. It’s been really interesting going through the planning stages while things are changing, watching the reports from the different governments around the world trying to ensure that not just the locals can attend, but that people from all over the world can come to Seattle and be safe and have a great time and enjoy it, and I think what’s really remarkable is that it’s not just us going through this. I was recently in Prague for the GIGA earlier this year, and then at the Geodoorn event in the Netherlands, and I was at the Camp GoLI event in New York. And all of these Megas and the GIGA had also been pushed back for a couple of years, and so to know the kind of work that we’ve had to do to re-schedule things and confirm the arrangements that we had with the Seattle Center and vendors and things like that, and to know that there are other organizing groups around the world who have gone through the same type of challenge, it’s just really remarkable. And I think it’s something where we’re so happy and fortunate to be able to do something like this and to welcome visitors from all over the world, and at the same time, to see the community doing the same thing to put on great events to welcome people to Prague and the Netherlands and so many other countries.

0:04:23.9 BR: Everybody’s been through a little bit of this, and like you and I have discussed in the past, over the past few years, there have been so many changes in the world as a result of COVID, the way people work has changed, the way people recreate has changed. And we’re not completely out of the woods yet. Thankfully, we’re at a place where we are permitted to do this kind of event, it’s going to be a fun summer in Seattle, and we’ve got GeoWoodstock coming up in Canada, and so the next few weeks are just super exciting and there has been so much work on our side at HQ, from the HQ lackeys, and then so much work by the GeoWoodstock organizing staff, and again, the Prague GIGA organizing staff and so many other groups around the world that have navigated these challenging waters to deliver something that… The ones that have happened yet have been really special, and we’re hoping for a similar outcome here in Seattle, and I’m pretty certain that it’s gonna be incredible.

0:05:30.6 CR: I’m looking at our schedule of events right now, and people can go to the cache page to see that, we’ve got gadget cache creators, we’ve got hearing about the history of Geocoins with a couple of lackeys, we’ve got community volunteer reviewers, we’ll have a Q&A at panel up on the stage, and we’ve got a couple of concerts with the travel bugs and Bugsy Travels & The Ammo Boxes, if you’ve ever seen them, they’re a lot of fun. One of the things I think is gonna be just a blast, is you and your fellow HQ founders who are going to do a Q&A with Elias and Jeremy. I kind of wondered, when was the last time you guys were at a Geocaching event together? It was probably a long time ago.

0:06:14.9 BR: It’s really interesting that you asked. It was a very, very long time ago. So the only time that Jeremy, Elias and I attended a big Geocaching event together, was the Ford Ohm event in Ohm, Germany. I don’t even remember what year it was. But that was many, many years ago, and it was wonderful. It was really great and a lot has changed since that time, and so to get the group back together and get to be among geocachers, I think it’s just super exciting. I can’t wait to do it. And I think you know there’s… As you said there’s so many things that are going to be happening during that day. If I had to say the thing that I am the most excited about is just to have everybody together.

0:07:05.8 BR: There’s so many wonderful people from different countries around the world that have come to us through geocaching and to get so many of them in the same place, I’ve seen a little bit of this like in Prague earlier this year having 7000 plus people together. That was the first event that I attended since COVID, the first mega or giga, and the excitement was palpable. People were hugging each other. There were some tears, there was just… After so long of not being together, to be together once again was just absolutely incredible, and so it’s something for everybody to look forward to. So I got to see Bugsy Travels & The Ammo Boxes in Hellendoorn in the Netherlands a few weeks back and those guys are so much fun. I think everybody’s really gonna enjoy it and The Travel Bugs are a lot of fun with Steve Weeks, and I can’t wait to see that as well, but overall, it’s just gonna be a great time and looking forward to seeing everybody there.

[music]

0:08:11.9 CR: That was Bryan Roth, HQ’s president and co-founder. Learn more about the Geocaching 20th Anniversary Celebration at, hq20.geocaching.com. Next up, a Geocaching World Record might be broken on August 20th, 2022. Adam from HQ’s CE team is here to talk about how you can be part of it. Here we go.

0:08:38.5 CR: Well, August 20th, 2022 is a huge day in the world of geocaching, so much going on. It is International Geocaching Day. It is the date of the Geocaching 20th Anniversary Celebration in Seattle, and there is the possibility of the community setting a new world record on August 20th. And to talk about that, I have invited Adam from each HQ’s CE team to discuss this world record attempt. Adam, before we get into that, you’ve been on the podcast once before, and I was remiss at that time in asking you more about what you do at HQ. Usually, I do that when a person is on the podcast for the first time. So for people that haven’t met you yet or interacted with you, what is your job at HQ on a day-to-day basis?

0:09:31.3 Adam: Certainly, Chris, always a pleasure to be on the podcast. My name is Adam, and I also go by captain_cookie for the geocachers out there who I assume are listening to this. The CE team, I’m on that team, and I have the pleasure of helping out geocachers who have questions about both geocaching.com as well as the geocaching mobile app. If you ever email us at contact@geocaching.com with a question, that goes into our teams, our department, and then we can assist you from there, so I have that pleasure as well as helping to create our content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new, TikTok, which is a big deal for our team this year.

0:10:12.3 CR: And you’ve been in the HQ for what? A little over… Is it been a year already?

0:10:16.4 Adam: Yep, it’s been about a year and a month. So I’m a 13 months old…

0:10:20.3 CR: Okay, wow.

0:10:20.4 Adam: I’m a 13-month old lackey, but it’s been just a true joy to join the team at HQ and join our community.

0:10:28.3 CR: Yeah, and you had quite a bit of geocaching experience before you showed up at HQ, which is always great. You were pretty heavily involved in the game before you came to work here.

0:10:38.3 Adam: I think it’s one of the great pieces about being a lackey to come in with player experience. I think it was one of the reasons that I was hired, one piece of many, but having that experience from day one gave me a big leg up to just understand the mechanics of the game and also to help our community with questions that they have. Already being a player was just a very critical piece of my journey so far.

0:11:04.8 CR: And your team, the CE team, which I should say stands for community engagement. Sometimes we just throw away… Throw around acronyms and don’t explain them. [laughter] The community engagement team has been heavily involved in putting together some of the details about this world record that the community will attempt to break on August 20th. Your team has a pretty funny video that folks can go and find where we can see the genesis of the world record attempt and when it was… I don’t know if that’s a documentary that you guys put together. Adam is laughing. You can’t see it, but it’s not really a documentary. It’s just a funny video, but… [laughter]

0:11:49.9 Adam: No, if it was a documentary, it would be the shortest documentary of all time, but…

0:11:52.1 CR: Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they were just cameras around HQ like that and… It would be extremely boring for the most part, but every so often there would be something pretty exciting that would happen and people can see. Yeah.

0:12:03.9 Adam: Yeah, so the video is now live for our community to enjoy. It’s the story of how the idea came to be. All of a sudden, one of these flashbulb moments at HQ and the high jinks that ensues upon discovery of that moment. Yeah.

0:12:18.2 CR: Yeah, there’s always high jinks whenever there’s an idea at HQ. You know it’s gonna be followed by high jinks. So anyway, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty here. So August 20th, 2022, the goal is to… For the community to break this world record that was set in August of 2013, and what is this record and what is the community trying to do on August 20th?

0:12:45.4 Adam: So back on August 11th, 2013, we had 126,833 people either find the geocache or attend an event on that date, and that’s an incredible number. It dwarfed prior numbers, but now, on International Geocaching Day, 2022, August 20th, there’s a confluence, you might say, of many things going on at once, including the 20th anniversary celebration happening in Seattle. So one of our goals is for our community to have a chance to break that record, just destroy it, if we can, and to help our community have this shared monumental achievement.

0:13:28.3 CR: So as you said, it’s not only the 20th anniversary event here in Seattle, but it’s also International Geocaching Day, so a day to celebrate this game and hopefully, between those things and this extra motivation, it will hopefully get people out to do what? What does somebody have to do to be part of this world record attempt? It’s not about number of geocaches found, it is about number of people who go, not just geocaching, but also find an adventure stop, attend an event, those things, right?

0:14:04.1 Adam: Yep, it’s not about how many caches you can find on a single day, instead, it’s how many unique players are finding a geocache, logging an Adventure Lab location or attending an event on that date. So that means if you have a caching friend who travels along with you, doesn’t find as many as you do perhaps on the weekend, but they come along on that date, that’s equally valuable. So we have another player who may have thousands of thousands of finds, but another player who has maybe 10, finding their 11th cache on August 20th, 2022, it all sums to help our community try and break that record. So that’s a very good point, Chris, it isn’t about how many you can do as an individual, but how many collectively our community can find, how many accounts can find them on that date.

0:14:56.4 CR: And people might wonder what was happening on August 11th, 2013 that caused 126,833 accounts to participate in geocaching, and there wasn’t a… Really, there wasn’t a confluence of things like there is today. It was a Sunday, it was during the summer in the northern hemisphere, which is always busy days, but then it was also part of the 31 days of geocaching promotion that happened back then, so there was a souvenir that you could get every day in August of 2013 if you found… If you went out geocaching on a day. If you went out on the first of August, you got a souvenir, the second, the third, all the way. So that was a pretty popular Month, and it just happens that August 13th was the… Or August 11th, I should say, was the biggest day of all, and now trying to break this record, and there is something, not just pride, but there is something to be gotten as well, if this record does fall on the 20th.

0:16:01.7 Adam: Of course. So for geocachers who find a geocache, attend an event or log an Adventure Lab location on that date, there of course is a souvenir to be earned. However, the kicker here is that our community has to break the record in order for a player to receive that souvenir. So if it wasn’t enough, there’s extra motivation to get friends who are already geocachers, but maybe hadn’t played in a while, or just friends and family who you know have accounts but have not logged in a while. It isn’t about how many caches you can find as a player, but instead how many players are interacting with Geocaching Adventure Lab or an event, and so if we can as a community break the record, then we will be handily rewarded for that with a souvenir.

0:16:53.4 CR: Yeah, and one thing I think is really great about this attempt that we’re making is that if you’re not able to be in Seattle for the 20th anniversary event, this is a chance for… Even if you’re somewhere else, and I’m in Seattle, we’re all kind of part of something together on that day. So I think you’ve motivated me, Adam, I think I’m probably gonna go out on the 20th and I’m gonna do something, and I’m gonna try to be part of this.

0:17:17.4 Adam: Like you said, it’s a total global effort from our community. And honestly, I think that’s just one of the ways that makes our game so special, is that we have the chance as a whole community to come together for this kind of shared opportunity and share the joy of geocaching through this kind of world record attempt.

[music]

0:17:38.8 CR: That was Adam from Geocaching HQ’s CE team. Find out more about the world record attempt on the Geocaching blog, and be sure to get out there and find a cache, attend an event or log an Adventure Lab Location on August 20th. Lots of exciting stuff going on. I hope to see you at the Geocaching 20th anniversary celebration on August 20th, and if not, I hope you’ll be part of that world record attempt on that same day. In the meantime, from me and Bryan and Adam and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.