This is gonna be inside baseball.
Over the last two and a half years, I have recorded 178 episodes of my podcast. I have spent countless hours (I cannot begin to stress how many) editing it, promoting it, wrangling guests, managing the Discord server, and beyond. Well over 200,000 people have tuned in.
This show has been my life for basically a quarter of a decade. And I am now considering ending it.
In 2020 I had to scramble to soft-reboot it, 149 episodes in, after my co-host #1 left the project under pretty hostile circumstances. It took an incredible toll on me at the time, and it made things weird for the show, because one of its two major elements (the hosts) was gone. One of the two things that made it what it was, just wasn’t there anymore. That whole era of the show’s backlog has someone completely different on it than there is now. People who listen to current episodes, like it, and start from episode one are always going to be left confused. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
I was fortunate enough to pick up my creator friend #2 as a replacement, and then for him to bring his creator friend #3 on as an addition. The show survived despite the blow, and arguably got a lot better. The only downside of this era was that it was two people coming in to an established project with its own goals, rather than two people who helped conceive of that original idea and care about it on the same level I do. A little bit of magic is lost there.
Now, in 2021, #2 is having to step down. And while #3 is now a friend of mine, his motivations for coming on were to support #2, and he feels weird about sticking around without him. (Totally fair, by the way. While #3 and I have developed our own friendship since then, I get why he’d feel this way.)
It’s like... yeah, I could do another reboot and massively fuck with the premise of the show (at least in terms of its hosts) for the second time. This will be the case even if #3 stays, though to a slightly lesser degree.
But, creatively and logistically, do I want to do that?
I’ve built a fanbase from the ground up. It’s not massive, but it’s sizeable, especially for a podcast. I realize this is going to sound pretentious, but it’s 100% true: If I killed it off now, there are a decent amount of people who would probably end up going through serious grief. And if I’m being honest, I would too. This has been everything to me for such a long time.
But keeping it going feels weird, exponentially more so now that this is the second major regime change. Being the lynchpin next to a revolving door of co-hosts is a lot of pressure, and it gives the listeners zero expectation of some consistency that I think is deserved. I keep getting people invested in the roster and then having it change entirely on them.
I guess if they can do that without complaint for sports teams then they could do it for me, but part of me is just thinking now might be a good time to call it.
The problem is, I have the content creation bug in me and I can’t not create something. It’s in my bones to the point where I get antsy when I don’t do it. I’m not interested in a “civilian” life.
So then the question is, what would I do instead? I have no answer for that.
