Referring mainly to co-hosted shows, Pilar talks about planning in advance when you might stop your show. She talks about this episode of The Writer’s Well, co-hosted by previous host of this podcast, who appeared here:
She also talks about the commitment she and her co-host made to En clave de podcast, and her last episode with Facilitation Stories, which was episode 59.
If you’re thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host – click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, and welcome to Adventures in Podcasting. My name is Pilar Orti and this is episode 43 and it’s day five. My notes are wrong.
I better get this right. It’s day five of NaPodPoMo where I am podcasting here every day. And today, as opposed to yesterday, I really am going to try and keep it down to ten minutes.
So at the end of yesterday’s episode, if you were listening, I talked about a podcast I recommended which has stopped, and I’m not sure why. So today I’ve picked up this trello card which says is it time to quit your podcast. And what I wanted to share with you is how two other podcasters talked about stopping their shows.
So J Thorn and Rachel Herron are two writers and podcasters who I respect very much. And in fact, J Thorn has an episode in Adventures in Podcasting. I interviewed him.
It was great. I put the link in the show notes because I can’t remember straight away which episode it was. And Rachel Herron is a lovely writer and podcaster and they’re very entrepreneurial.
J is a great podcaster. He’s done loads of shows. And in episode 193 of The Writer’s Well, J talked about his podcast that he’d set up with his two friends.
Now, I’ll stop here just to tell you a bit about these shows. The Writer’s Well, if you, I was going to say, if you’re into writing, you might want to listen to it.
It depends, because it might be one of those shows that needs to be current. And they’ve stopped. So the feed is still out there.
Every now and then they’ll come and record a show. And of course, you can listen to their episodes, which are quite evergreen, because they’re about topics about well being for writers. They ask each other a question and it gets very personal.
It’s really nice. I think if you’re a podcaster, have a listen to at least one or two of these episodes to hear the dynamics and how personal they are and how you connect or not with that. And if you are a writer, you might want to listen to them.
And then J Thorn also had another show with one buddy friend, and then he started another show with an established writer, and then they merged it. So the three of them were co hosting. And then Jay and his friend left that other show, which is still going on, called The Writers Ink.
And them and a third person set up a new show, which has also stopped. Now, I think it stopped in July 2023. And I haven’t caught up with why that was, but I just thought this was interesting context to understand where this is coming from in this episode of The Writer’s Well, where J and Rachel came back to the feed to just catch up with each other and the audience.
J talked about this new podcast where they said they had discussed when they set up the show their kill criteria, as in, when would we stop this show? We’ve got this show, it’s great, we have so much energy for it, but we know that at some point, probably, we will want to stop the show. So when do we stop the show? I’ll read from my notes, if one of them decides he’s not enjoying it anymore, they will kill it.
Also, they don’t bring any guests. So if one person can’t record, they don’t record. Listen to this.
And if one of them dies, the other two have to come back for one episode to make fun of the person who died. It might seem a bit bleak, but I think, to be honest, it’s such is life. So I really like that.
And I think that the phrase kill criteria comes from a book called Quit by Annie Dukes, who I haven’t read and I don’t know if I recommend. But it’s interesting, when you start a show, you never think, well, you do think that it might be that it’s too much and you don’t want to do it, but usually, especially if you’re working with someone else, it’s really exciting to start a show. How I’ve approached this is, well, how we started with En clave de podcast.
We said we commit to ten episodes and then we decide whether we continue, because both Craig Wealand and myself had done enough podcasting by them to know that it’s a lot of work, and so you can’t just start. And then it’s really difficult to have the conversation of, I don’t want to do this anymore. So at least you say, let’s get to X, and when you get to X, you decide, and we got to 20 and then we had to stop.
Also, you’ve already had the conversation about the fact that you might have to stop, but it’s really difficult to stop a podcast even when you’re doing it on your own. Like I stopped Word Maze, but I don’t think I had a final episode.
I think I had a kind of final episode for Spain Uncovered. Can’t remember, it’s just difficult to do that. But I recently had a last episode with a show that’s gone on, and I will talk about the show in the future, but I wanted to talk about doing the last episode with the show.
And this is a show called Facilitation Stories, which I used to co host with Helen Jewell and Nikki Wilson. And it’s a show that’s part of a community. And so there were three of us doing everything.
It was great fun, but at some point I drifted away from the community, I drifted away from the topic, which is facilitation, as in helping groups to get to an outcome. And very sadly, I think I’m getting a bit emotional even now. I said, I can’t continue, it’s not right.
And also, I have to put my time into something else. One thing I don’t like to say in life is I don’t have time because luckily I do have time, but I need to decide where my time goes to. So at some point, I will decide that I need to put the time into something else or I need to stop putting the time into something.
So I did that last episode and what we did, the first thing they said is, right, well, we’re getting on a call and we’re interviewing you. Pilar said Nikki and Helen, and that will be your goodbye. It also means we can let the audience know that it’s going to be a bit different because, of course, there’s a change in co hosting.
Even though the three of us were rarely on a show on an episode together, there’s still that dynamic and it was great. If you want to listen to that, I can’t remember the number of the episode, but it’s the episode from September 2023 of Facilitation Stories. And you know what? I think it was like a luxury for a podcaster to be interviewed for their last show on a show on a podcast, because it’s the best exit interview.
You get to say everything you want to say, but you get to say it with friends. So that was really great. All right, and I’m just going to give a shout out to someone who might be listening.
And my friend Pinar, she’s got a show that she needs to get back to. It’s a show about wine in Turkish. So I think there cannot be that many shows like that.
And I know that she had well, she probably still has because the show’s still out there. She has a very engaged audience. So, Pinar, if you’re listening, just get yourself behind that microphone, please.
And then once you’re behind it again, you can come and tell us about it in Adventures in Podcasting. Listeners, if you want to have a conversation on the show, let me know. I will start doing interviews again.
This is one of the reasons of getting back onto Adventures in Podcasting and doing daily episodes, is I want to get this show going again. And I do enjoy very much talking with guests on it.
if you are a podcaster and want to talk on the show together, or if you want to say hello, I would love to hear from you. My name is Pilar Orti. Thank you for listening.
I’ll speak to you tomorrow.