If memory serves correctly my first podcast could have been as early as fall 2006, my freshman year of college, when I had a job as the campus mailman. This required that I walk around campus a few hours each week delivering letters and magazines to various department buildings. I would pass the time on these mail routes by listening to an episode or two of a favorite show. I continued listening to podcasts after graduation, filling my ears while commuting, running errands, or completing household admin, and as I look back I could see why you might say podcasts have been an ever-present fixture throughout my adult life. A few of my favorite shows from the early days remain in my current lineup - notable examples include EconTalk (which debuted in 2006) and More Or Less (a show I likely picked up when Tim Harford began hosting in 2007). Bill Simmons, who entered the podcast world in 2007 with The BS Report, also remains a regular listen.
But over fifteen or so years there have been many more examples of shows that have come and gone. The ones that stick out in my memory are not the shows that I abandoned due to waning interest (Radiolab, The Moth, 99% Invisible, among many others) but rather those that stopped producing new episodes. The first one I can remember is Brainfood Dude, an hour-long podcast that reviewed other podcasts - each weekly episode featured a few highlight segments from various podcasts. The final episode aired almost exactly ten years ago today. I don't remember the exact details of this last show, just a vague recollection that the host, Michael J. Franz, cited how a new job (as a teacher?) made it impossible for him to put in the necessary work for creating the show. Brainfood Dude was an invaluable source of new shows for me - other than occasionally checking podcast rankings, I didn't have another way to discover new shows.
There is a chance that I learned about Common Sense from one of those episodes, another favorite podcast that joined Brainfood Dude in retirement a few years ago. Dan Carlin's decision in the fall of 2017 to end his monthly current events program remains the biggest loss in the history of my listening habit. In his "final" episode, Carlin shared that he no longer had the energy to produce regular shows, citing the present political climate as one challenge but also mentioning that he was just getting older. (I say "final" because Common Sense has returned one or two times each year since it "ended", these episodes seemingly going up whenever the mood strikes Carlin.) I eventually filled the void with Middle Theory, a show hosted by Micah Hanks, who maintained a weekly schedule until just a few weeks ago when he also announced a schedule reduction for his podcast. Hanks, like Franz and Carlin, cited the impossibility of maintaining the workload necessary to keep up with the schedule for the show. I anticipate Middle Theory will follow the Common Sense example of airing a few times a year whenever Hanks feels the need to record another episode.
The obvious connecting thread of these examples is the way each host reached a point where he could no longer meet the demands of producing his show. But this raises a question - what were the demands? My understanding is that each program operated on its own terms, with no contracts or outside obligations forcing the hosts to produce episodes. The specific answers would obviously vary by show, but there is a shared reality that at some level the hosts imposed their own demands onto themselves. You can see this if you consider how the breaking points are measurable not with a single metric but rather in a combination of metrics. Brainfood Dude, for example, ended not because Franz didn't have time for producing a podcast, but because he didn't have enough time each week to produce a weekly hour-long podcast. Common Sense and Middle Theory both opted to reduce schedules, implying that the issue was not just about energy level but more specifically the energy level available per month or week given a fixed length for each show. This leads me to a possible answer - the demands on the hosts were driven by the length of each show, which necessitated a certain amount of work in order to complete a show. What I don't understand is why each host felt obligated to show some loyalty to this detail. At some level we all know the initial decision about length was made by each host on his own, so as audience members we should agree that these hosts are well within their rights to change the length as they see fit. In these selected examples, the hosts opted instead to reduce the schedule, even driving it down to zero in Franz's case.
This leaves open the question of whether it would have been a better decision to record shorter episodes. However, I don't think this is a natural way to think about such problems. The way people retire, for example, has a similar element - one week you work forty hours, the next week you are done. I don't know many examples of people who, starting at age sixty, work a little less per year until they gradually reach zero hours a decade or two later. It seems that when we reach these crossroads where energy levels are suddenly short of requirements, we lean toward making a culprit of the schedule rather than reducing the intensity within the schedule, as if the schedule itself is some kind of fixed universal law. It's almost like we constantly imagine ourselves on one kind of treadmill or the other, where the only options are to keep going or step off. I think of this as form of schedule tyranny - our minds lock into the idea of making changes to maintain the schedule such that we forget the fact of having a schedule is subject to change.
The tyranny of the schedule manifests in many other examples. For example, I always wonder how many aspiring marathoners land on the injured list after blindly churning out the mileage scribbled into their training plans, some of which offer little guidance to inexperienced runners in terms of how to listen to their bodies and notice signs of overtraining. I also suspect that many nutrition plans work within the framework of the three square meals - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - which rule out the possibility that the number of meals could be adjusted (in either direction) to the benefit of improved health. My own experience with TOA has exposed me to a version of this issue in the context of writing. When a friend started a blog a few months ago, my only advice was to resist the temptation for setting a schedule, with my exact words something like "the worst thing for a blog is a schedule". Again, the issue in my mind has something to do with the effect of a schedule on sustainability, burnout, and energy levels, all of which need the right attention whenever someone is embarking on a challenge.
I suppose my advice reveals my understanding of the decisions made by those podcasts. If I had a weekly or monthly show with thousands of listeners, I would feel the pressure to keep up with expectations. I know I've been guilty of it myself on TOA, sometimes wrapping up posts in the wee hours just to meet a self-imposed deadline of one sort or the other. The reason I advise others to avoid scheduling is because I've come to see it as the fastest route to consistent mediocrity. This may not be obvious right away - in fact, for many beginners the external framework helps them get going. The challenge is separating completed work from quality work, which I think is a skill too advanced for those in the early stages. I think back sometimes to nights at the college library where I would see a few classmates rushing to meet a deadline or cramming ahead of a big exam. We were taking advantage of a certain energy that comes with the urgency of an approaching deadline, but we never figured out a way to determine if our eventual output represented our best work. In a one-off setting such as a final exam, there were no future reference points to reveal whether we had met our potential or had fallen far short. Even with top grades, you wouldn't know if your study process had led to your best work. In my mind there is a possibility that these experiences reinforced the reward of finishing over the satisfaction of completing the highest quality work, and I think a similar problem confronts beginners in creative pursuits.
I believe everyone eventually reaches a point where the relationship between completing work and skill improvement begin to separate from each other. In this moment, it's no longer good enough to just write, baby - you have to develop an understanding of your deficiencies so that you can deliberately work on the necessary skills. This became obvious to me over the course of several years on TOA. Initially, the idea of posting on a certain schedule helped me get through specific challenges for beginners - writer's block, committing time to the craft, editing and proofreading, and so on. It's a fact that some of my best posts were wrapped up at midnight, or later, because my invented schedule had set the publication date for sunrise. But over the years enough mediocre examples accumulated in my finished work that it became clear how a schedule at times forced me to prioritize posting ahead of quality. This feeling should be familiar to any writer - just go back to something you finished and note the revisions you would make today. If you feel the whole thing could do with a renovation, you probably should have spent more time on it.
For me, the only reason I would have posted such work comes back to the ever-present influence of the schedule. It's kind of like that old adage about the importance of showing up - of course it's impossible to succeed unless you show up, but just showing up isn't sufficient for success. The way I see it, the structure of a schedule is only helpful if it makes you show up to your work, but after you arrive the schedule quickly loses its relevance. The most helpful thing for improving the quality of your work is to separate the process from the influence of a schedule, especially if a schedule forces you to rush or compromise for the sake of completion. I suppose another way to express all of this is that you can write without posting, but the problem is when you post without writing.
Ultimately I think this consideration underscored the decisions made by those three podcasters. The reasons they shared undoubtedly explain tangible factors related to stopping their shows, but I suspect at some level they knew their shows were dropping in quality (or were about to if they kept going). For them, the shows required a certain level of effort not solely from the perspective of finishing the episode but also to meet a personal quality standard. As a listener, I can attest to this fact - I believe Common Sense will be one of the very best podcasts I'll ever hear, and Middle Theory had its own moments of supreme quality. When you make great work, you know when you've made average work, and I think this is what it came down to - for those hosts it was the inability to meet a personal standard that made it necessary to walk away.
I guess this leaves me with one unanswered question - why not then find an output that would maintain the quality level? Could Brainfood Dude have worked as a monthly program? What about Common Sense episodes that were fifteen minutes long instead of an hour? These examples reflect personal decisions about which I can only speculate, and of course there is the possibility as noted earlier that this thought never crossed their minds. However, I think I can look once again at my own work for a possible explanation. The challenge I've struggled with at times on TOA is the confusion of the craft with the output. At some level what I am doing here is writing, but once you involve a medium it becomes something different - on TOA I'm not just writing, I'm writing essays. If you add a schedule to the equation then it changes again - I'm writing essays posted daily (in 2018) or writing longer essays that are posted on Sundays (in 2021). If start printing everything I wrote and placing those papers between two covers, then I'm writing books; if this led to some kind of contract, then I'm writing a book series. It's an inevitable problem in a way because any activity is inevitably altered by the setting, which means the setting always exerts some influence over the activity. You might say you are relaxing, but if you are relaxing on the couch then it's different from relaxing in a hammock. The problem with writing as an activity is that the activity of writing changes the writing, which changes the author's relationship with the writing. I suppose this forms my hypothesis about those podcasts ending rather than restructuring - at some point the structures of those shows became so intertwined with essence of the work that the podcasters could no longer envision the work happening outside the existing structure.
This conclusion may be fair enough, but I think it represents a sort of missed opportunity. Why not try a different structure, just to see what happens? The point is underscored by the fact that opting to step back was essentially a death rattle for these shows, which meant the end of the creativity inspired by the work. In my mind, this was brought about in the roundabout manner of scheduling tyranny, and it never felt necessary. At the heart of change is always the fear of the unknown, and as creators this fear lurks in the white space of a new page or the silence ahead of the next word. We are used to confronting this fear. But there is something different when we face the fear of a changing structure because the structure was our ally - we showed up on schedule until we could look the unknown in the eye, and the looming deadline forced us to bring our skills and gifts into the work. And yet, we never realized that the structure of the schedule subtly undermined the relationship with the work. Being able to make a change in such situations is critical because in some ways it's a matter of survival, just as it always is when we must change, and the only thing at stake is our loyalty to our own abilities.
This is why I can't work out if there was wisdom or folly at the heart of those podcast decisions. The demands the hosts placed on themselves meant it was wiser to stop rather than continue, for the path ahead made it impossible to create their best work. But could they have rediscovered themselves within a revised structure? Ultimately, they knew best for themselves, and because of this I think they chose best for themselves. We should all be so lucky to see such realities for ourselves, to know when loyalty to the self is more important than loyalty to the external; we should all hope that the courage necessary for stepping away does not fail us in the moment of need, and that we have the strength to step back in when we must go again.
