Day 34: Podcasts that bring no value

Backstory:

I got a message late last night and read it this morning about two shows that I was producing. One was XPQuest, honestly a show about nothing at all except a couple guys that blabber on about RPGs. The other was a pet project called Chromatic Bits, where I covered video game music that I loved.  Both projects were published on iTunes under the xpquest.com RSS feed.  The question I received was “whats up with the shows?” from the guy who runs the podcasting network. I hadn’t published a show in nearly half a year. I took a deep breath and replied honestly, that they should probably be shut down.

I was struggling to find something to get rid of today since I hadn’t done any decluttering yet. When the opportunity presented itself I decided to purge myself of these 2 shows. It was fate that brought this decision about.

I honestly loved the idea of podcasting. I still do. But, with these 2 shows I felt like it was always a hobby, so I never committed to putting out decent content. Mostly it was hours of fart jokes and 2 gamers just being gamers. Not horrible if you were into it, but in the end I could count the listeners on 2 hands.

The concept of podcasting sounds wonderful too. It still has this guerrilla radio aspect where it puts the power back into the amateur’s hands and not some corporate giant. I self host too out of my basement, so besides some domain registration fees there is no cost, other than time.

And time was my downfall. I always found it easier to play a game instead of making a show talking about us playing a game. Also recently with my journey to simplification and minimalism I swear, these shows seem more like a fancy organizer chest. Its stuff for my stuff, so to speak. Its bad enough that I spent time playing video games, then I spent even more time putting on a show talking about playing video games. It was so meta.

The honest statement is, its was the editing part that killed it for me. Spending 1 hour a month getting on a show to co-host would be an easy breeze, but the 2-3 hours after the fact editing and publishing was a drag. It was work.

The plan:

I am giving away the show. Worst case it just gets shuttered and fades away into obscurity. Best case, someone else decides to run the show and edit it with or without me.

Going forward I am never saying I won’t podcast again. But I certainly want to produce something that brings value to my life, and my families life too. The idea of a side hustle that brings in money or some other form of value sounds nice. But that won’t be XPQuest.

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After the first few years of podcasting I realized that there are shows worth saving. There were several shows that were so well produced that I ended up saving them and revisiting them more than once. Overtime I had entire hard drives filled with interesting shows that eventually dropped off iTunes. I started self hosting these shows internally in my house in the form of a simple Plex server, but it wasn’t until I made my new show XPQuest that it struck me: why not just host all these old shows for others to enjoy again?