Trek Geeks
Since 2015

The Story of Us

It all started with a question…

Picture it. Boston, Massachusetts. 2014.

Longtime friends Bill Smith and Dan Davidson went to a Star Trek convention together for the first time, having not seen each other in a decade.

At one point during that weekend, Bill leaned over and asked Dan a simple question.

“Hey, do you think you’d ever want to do a Star Trek podcast together?”

Dan’s thoughtful, considered response came back immediately.

“No….. what’s a podcast?”

Literally. That was his answer.

And with that, an empire was born. Kind of. Honestly, it took a lot of convincing.

Bill Smith and Dan Davidson in a convention hall, mugging for a phone camera, Dan pointing off to one side
The convention that started it all: Bill and Dan at TrekBOS in 2014

In the beginning…

Trek Geeks: A Star Trek Podcast debuted in January 2015 with a single episode. Bill and Dan lovingly refer to it as “The Hostage Tape,” and if you listen closely you’ll notice that Bill never introduces himself. They had no idea what they were doing. Some would say that’s still true.

The point of view was clear from the start: Star Trek discussed through the lens of a friendship that’s now 30 years old. The goal was for listeners to feel like they’d walked in on a conversation in a living room or at the end of a bar, insults and all. Nothing about it is performed.

First-time listeners occasionally thought Bill and Dan hated each other. That’s the part that best exemplifies the brotherhood they’ve built.

Over the last decade they’ve talked with Star Trek icons including Nana Visitor, Andrew Robinson, Jonathan Frakes, Jeri Ryan, Anson Mount and Scott Bakula. They’ve also gone where most podcasts don’t, talking openly about how individual episodes have affected them, about their own mental health, and about the fact that Star Trek has quite literally saved their lives.

In 2017, Trek Geeks was named a Parsec Awards finalist for Best Speculative Fiction Fan or News Podcast (Specific). In 2018, they hosted their first convention panel, and they’ve since been invited guests at Star Trek: Mission Chicago, the official Star Trek convention, as well as Creation Entertainment’s annual Trek to Vegas.

They also helped spark one of the largest humanitarian efforts in Star Trek fandom. The annual Trek Talks telethon, created with Star Trek: Enterprise’s John Billingsley, has raised close to $500,000 for the Hollywood Food Coalition across its first five livestreams.

To mark the 10th anniversary in 2025, Trek Geeks expanded into video with Thursday Night Geeks, live on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram every other week.

Building a network

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that other passionate Star Trek fans wanted a creative outlet of their own. Trek Geeks became a network, with shows produced by fans and friends across the United States and Canada. The brief was simple: talk specifically about what we love in Star Trek, and spread that joy.

That expansion made Trek Geeks the largest fan-produced Star Trek podcast network on the planet, with a dozen shows actively releasing episodes. Those early additions included:

Trek Geeks was serving corners of fandom that had never had anything made specifically for them, and the response was extraordinary.

Ten Trek Geeks hosts crowded together in front of the network’s banner at a convention booth, several of them giving the Vulcan salute
Trek Geeks, one and all: (Back row, L to R) Dan Davidson, Johnson Lee, Mike Thurlow, Mike Bovia, Ron Wrobel, Bill Smith, Jamie Rogers. (Front Row, L to R) Yvette Blackmon Tom, Tamia Harper, Emilie Bovia.

Saying it out loud

In May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis.

What followed, for a lot of us, was weeks of fury with nowhere to put it. You watch something like that happen. Then you watch it keep happening. And the feeling that settles in isn’t only anger, it’s uselessness. Star Trek had spent 54 years showing us a bridge crew that had put all of this behind them, and here we were, still arguing about whether it was a problem at all.

So we said something out loud. On June 1, 2020, Trek Geeks published a statement on Black Lives Matter, written by Bill, Dan and Barry DeFord of PoliTreks. It committed the network to an annual contribution and to bringing more voices from people of color into our content.

A statement is the easy part. We knew that while we were writing it. Read it here.

The best decision we ever made

Eight months later, Bill and Dan did something no other Star Trek podcast network has done before or since: they handed their show over. For Black History Month 2021, they invited African American podcasters to host Trek Geeks, giving up control of the network’s flagship. The idea was to put whatever standing they had in Star Trek podcasting to work getting exposure for voices in fandom who deserved a much larger audience.

The first show they approached was brand new, and called SyFy Sistas. The episode they recorded focused on Uhura and the legendary Nichelle Nichols, who played her.

Bill and Dan listened to it and had the same thought at the same time: the SyFy Sistas had to be part of the network. Dan has called it “the best decision Trek Geeks ever made,” and he’s not wrong.

Trek Geeks and SyFy Sistas became the cornerstones of a network that was changing.

Subrina

We lost our dear friend Subrina Wood to pancreatic cancer in 2025.

Subrina co-hosted SyFy Sistas and was a bright light in this community. She led with joy, she was infectiously enthusiastic about everything she loved, and she had a way of reminding all of us that fandom is supposed to be fun. Through the Sistas and the wider Trek family, she built bridges and helped a lot of people see themselves reflected in the universe we love. She is missed every single week.

The SyFy Sistas Legacy Fund honors her belief in imagination, education and community, and it’s the best way we know to keep that part of her going. Her memorial has more, including the way she described herself, which is better than anything we could write here.

Trek Geeks’ second decade

The network looks different now than it did in 2021. Some shows wrapped up or stopped production as life got back to normal, and Bill and Dan have welcomed a lot of new people into the family since. Today, Trek Geeks and SyFy Sistas are proud to share the network with:

Every one of them brings a different perspective to a franchise built on Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, and we’re thrilled to have them here.

None of it happens in a vacuum. FanSets presents the Trek Geeks Podcast Network, every show, every week, and they signed on in 2016, back when there was no network to present and Trek Geeks was two guys and a microphone. Ten years on, with no end in sight. If you’ve ever walked a convention floor and come home with a pin, you already know their work, and we’re lucky to have them.

No one talks Trek like we do.