This Week I Quit Podcasting

I’m getting too old to have a long “someday/maybe” list. It’s not that I don’t have enough time left on earth to try new things. But there are pipe dreams I’ve carried with me from year to year for more than two decades, and I find myself no closer to bringing them to life this year than last.

I was reminded of this when the domain name renewal came up for Seventeentrees. Domain renewals are the tombstones of dead projects. They feel like the last thing we let go of when we finally give up on an idea. I’ve often bought domains as an act of faith. A space where a dream might grow. Then, years later, with a simple click on a screen, the dream dies.

So this week I let go of the domain names I’d registered for a podcast that ran for a short time between 2018 and 2021.

Podcasting: My Part In Its Downfall

When The Society for Film (2013 to 2016) podcast ended, I found myself wanting to start another one. My hope was to emulate the kind of podcast where a few creatives—artists, makers, musicians, writers—would discuss their craft and their work.

But I never found collaborators for that.

So I looked for posts from this blog that could work as solo podcast episodes. As I wrote previously, I was fascinated by

“…the idea of living well and in harmony with nature. The connections between ecology and spirituality run deep for me. Whether it’s visiting a Shinto shrine in Japan or a Shaker village in New England, I’m fascinated by the way people’s beliefs shape how they experience nature.”

Seventeentrees was a way to stay active in podcasting. Editing podcasts is fun but challenging work (I made a video about my workflow). The services available to distribute podcasts and gather analytics on them are ever-evolving. I wanted to be ready if an opportunity came along.

It didn’t.

When I wrote about quitting Seventeentrees in 2021, social audio looked like it might be the next big thing. For a hot minute during the pandemic, Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces had vibrant audiences. Then everyone went back to their lives.

Podcasting is in such a weird place right now. It’s never been more popular, but it feels synonymous with a kind of unhinged political discourse. And even the podcasts that aren’t partisan pap are so often long, rambling, largely unedited conversations—as if the hosts are relentlessly fishing for an improvised line of semi-coherent opinion that they can clip and share on social media.

Chasing Authenticity

These unedited conversations might be the hallmark of authenticity as we understand it today. The spirit of the age. The reason why podcasts have evolved the way they have.

But I wonder if there’s something else at work. It’s easier to talk for an hour or two than to sit down and write. Rather than honing words in tiresome solitude, it’s easier to get your point across if you give yourself endless passes at getting it right. It’s easier to produce a podcast if you decide not to do much (or any) editing.

And it’s easier to have someone explain their work to you, to tell you what it means, than to struggle with it for yourself, making meaning through your own time, effort, and wrestling with the limits of your own knowledge.

Going Back To The Beginning

A lot of people now think of a podcast as a rambling, casual interview. I’ve been a little guilty of making that generalisation myself in this essay. But that’s just a reflection of the way the technology—and the algorithms that shape what we listen to—has rewarded a certain kind of product and shaped expectations.

It’s a bit like how we were conditioned to believe a song should be a certain length because that’s what used to fit on one side of a seven-inch vinyl single.

Back when I started listening to podcasts, they were a new feature on iTunes. And the podcasts I found were all radio programmes formatted for digital distribution. They were golden voices recorded with good microphones and radio-standard production values.

I fell in love with podcasts because I’ve always been in love with sound. I love the human voice. And I love the technology that is used to record it. I always have.

Back Before We Began

In high school, we had creative writing assignments. Ms Caldwell, my Grade 8 English teacher, encouraged us to explore other formats for our ideas. For the first big assignment, I hand-bound a little sci-fi novella. It fell apart, so I had to put it in a standard folder. Instead of regular feedback, Ms Caldwell gave the novella to four students who read it and gave me verbal feedback on what they liked and what they wanted to see developed.

For the second assignment, I handed in a cassette with a radio play.

I was a huge fan of the original BBC radio version of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. And I’d almost memorised Jeff Wayne’s audio adaptation of The War of The Worlds after listening to the vinyl through headphones in my bedroom so many times.

So I wrote a script about punks and new wave gangs fighting on the streets of a post-nuclear-holocaust London. After many battles, a group of Rastafarian priests emerge and negotiate peace. Then everyone sings along to the last remaining copy of Stevie Wonder’s Master Blaster.

The whole thing was recorded in one day. A friend came over to help me with character voices. I unplugged my dad’s prized hi-fi (without his consent) and hooked up a bunch of cassette decks, microphones and turntables—and somehow managed not to blow anything up. Everything was bounced and mixed on the fly. Dialogue was narrated while dropping the needle on background music. The final touch was spray-painting a cassette case cover. I even scratched an anarchy symbol into it with a rusty old knife.

Ms Caldwell said nothing and just smiled when I put the cassette on her desk. A few days later, she played the radio play for the class. I got an A. But the grade wasn’t really the point.

The Power of Quitting

I write these little This Week I Quit essays because they’re useful markers of change. It’s not just the individual acts of quitting. It’s also that quitting seems to come in clusters during certain seasons of life.

And this feels like a season when I’m inclined to rebel against my circumstances. I feel a deep disquiet about the way the world is changing. I want to quit with intention. I’m wondering how many of the unfulfilled dreams I’ve dragged along with me over the past 20 years really have a place in my future. And I want to break out of the creative frustration I’ve felt since closing my studio and leaving Japan in 2019.

In a way, quitting is less about closing things down or giving up than it is about making room for new growth. When we quit well, we discover something about ourselves. And that self-discovery is like a map that helps us navigate the way forward.