Taking the Show Down

Here’s a sad thing to post, but it must be posted nonetheless.

Before podcasting was huge, I wanted to create podcasts so badly. Before StartUp, and Gimlet Media, and Serial, podcasting was more like old-school YouTube. It was smaller, and the ceiling on what you could do with it was a lot lower. Corporate sponsors were practically unheard of. Podcast networks were more like Geocities web rings.

You started a round table style podcast because you had friends, and beer. You started an interview-style podcast because you wanted to be like Ira Glass and Glynn Washington.

You started a podcast because it didn’t seem too silly to do so.

Podcasting has been one of the most fulfilling hobbies I ever had. I won’t claim to be the best at it, or even in the upper tier, but I was certainly competent at it, and I got up to speed quickly.

Things were rocky at the outset. I bought a mixer, rather than an audio interface. Who would have imagined there was a difference? (The difference, since you asked, is that a mixer will mix the stuff you put into it down into one track, which makes isolating vocals and editing separate inputs completely impossible). Not only that, but my Behringer mixer’s DAC blew out on me in under 6 months of usage. The company offered to look at it for me if I sent it in. The facility was just down in Cincinnati and I wanted to take it, because back then I was so much more of an anxious person that I was nervous at the prospect of trying to ship something, especially a big and potentially expensive something.

Adam and I recorded about seven episodes of the show before I ever released a single one. See again, how much more anxious of a person I was back then. I’m not sure anything scared me like the notion of hitting Publish on the first episode that would go on to represent the show. Every single episode up until the 2015 Christmas Special was cut together from scratch at least twice, because it took me so long to figure out what the presentation…the narrative voice or lack thereof…would, or should sound like.

I don’t know if Tech would care for what became of the podcast, or if he’d have any opinion at all, because Tech is an enigma, and very cool. But he gave me priceless advice about how to use my audio hardware at the outset that informed my understanding of this stuff forever after. I thought about releasing that audio, but never did. (Incidentally, I also meant to release audio of Brooke’s father, secretly recorded over a dinner, espousing conspiracy theories about Qanon and blue beams…I may still do so one day.) But it always meant the world to me that a friend (I think he’d probably say acquaintance, which would be fair) let me use his music in my show, and did so even after I brought him the shittiest pitch on earth (“you’re like, literally the only person I know who produces music”), always meant so much to me. Then, for me to find out that he was among the most well-known vaporwave (or vaporwave-adjacent) acts in a genre I grew to really love was just…I don’t know, it was like being given a Magic the Gathering card by a cool older brother before he moved away, and getting into Magic the Gathering years later and finding out he’d handed you a Black Lotus or something.

I spent a lot of time editing video (crappy video) in high school, and some people, including me, have wondered aloud whether I made the right choice in not following multimedia as a career trajectory. That YouTube would blow up the way it did, and for me to feel I’d missed the boat, was always a nagging fact that echoed around the recesses of my mind. Multimedia was probably always going to be another missed opportunity and waste of potential, just like all my other wouldabeen hobbies. But then, there was podcasting.

I don’t know how many shows we did, because I didn’t end up re-posting all the classics in the ‘second run’ of GBU, and because I don’t have ready access to a backup hard drive right now to compare files. I know it was more than 55, and probably more than 60. 70 isn’t entirely off the table. And that’s insane. More than half-way to a 100 episodes, (almost) each one over an hour in length, featuring multiple voice tracks, with musical stingers and segues, spliced in clips from films, and a show that, albeit clunky, had found its sonic identity pretty early on.

As I said, I cut and re-cut those first six episodes or so over and over again, and all the while I was too afraid to press Publish. That year, I insisted on doing a Christmas show, because I have always loved Christmas, and I spent all day cutting it together on Christmas Eve. And then, I was paralyzed with the now-or-never moment. “If I don’t release this today,” I thought, “I will have to wait until next year because if it won’t make any fucking sense to release after Christmas has come and gone.”

And so I published it. And, because it was otherwise the finest episode I’d assembled in what would become the new and permanent format of the show, I also released the Rogue One episode (episode 7, I think) a few days later, around New Year’s. This, despite the fact that none of the original episodes had been released yet. It was just in medias res, with the released episodes referencing things the audience (as it were) had never had the opportunity to hear.

In that moment, and in many before and after, I was forced to do, and in the doing, outgrow a little bit of anxiety. I have come to find in my adult life that anxiety is like a medusa’s head of possible outcomes, paralyzing you with the threat of all the different results that may come of your actions. The safest thing is to stay inactive. But it is also the most horrifying thing because you’re still stuck there, staring down all the snakes.

The metaphor breaks down a little here, but if you collapse those many possible realities down into the one true reality in which you live, by seizing one choice and claiming it as your own, for better or worse, you make the multi-headed threat vanish. There is nothing left to be anxious of, because you’ve chosen something, and moved into that life, and, hopefully, earned some confidence doing so. This show made me a more confident person. From the moment Adam and I, well drunk, staggered up into the recording room for the first show (where I had arranged the hardware and sat with it, unused, for months in my paralysis), to the moment I overcame my fear and released Christmas Special 2015, to the day I told Adam to kick rocks because we were fighting, to the day I rebooted the podcast without him, and then to the day I got over my anxiety of dealing with the situation and re-opened the dialog to discuss our misunderstanding, to asking him back after staking out the show’s identity as something I intended to fully claim as my own…until, now, the day that I have to take it down from the Internet for a second time.

I’m not saying GBU is over. I don’t think I could ever say that. But I’ve been paying to keep it hosted for the last three years despite never producing any new episodes while I was in college getting my degree, and while I was planning a wedding, and while I am now planning for the arrival of my first child. That cost adds up, and now, Libsyn is raising their prices. What’s more, they have paywalled some of their statistical features, and made their interface antagonistic to show hosts trying to manage their files. Let me be clear about this: Libsyn is enshittifying, and even though that isn’t the one and only reason I’m pulling the show, it absolutely was the final straw.

I may set up a virtual web server someday to host the show for a lower cost. Then, I could set up an RSS feed and point the podcast distribution apps to that feed. But the fact is, I don’t know when I’ll have time to podcast again. It used to be that my pride and joy of a GBU tradition was the annual Christmas episode, in honor of the holiday miracle that got the show out the door in the first place. Even if it was the only thing I published in a year, I wanted to get that Christmas episode out. Until the show slipped into indefinite hiatus, the only year I ever missed was the year Adam and I broke up. But the first year I missed in the ‘second run’ of episodes was so busy for me that (I was staggered to say then, as now) I didn’t even notice Christmas come and go without the episode getting out.

Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I felt it somewhere along the line, before or after. I’m sure I pouted to my now wife about it. I’m sure she said “well, let’s just get the gear out and make it happen!” She said the same thing to me tonight.

I told her that I didn’t want to set up all the hardware. I didn’t think I had time. I certainly didn’t think I had a place to do it. It just didn’t seem worth the effort.

She countered that we could do it at my mom’s house, like I had in the past.

I pointed out that it’s been so long since recording, that most of the hardware is still in the Rubbermaid bin we took to my mom’s house to record Christmas Special ’22. The obvious extrapolation there is that, “well, it should be easy to get over there, then, if it’s all in the bin!” But to me, the meaning of the bin was different. It was a symbol of the way in which the show has been completely de-prioritized in my life.

I’m proud of how I spent the last three years. I grew a lot. I chased, and secured, a degree in Cybersecurity, and I fully established myself in the IT field I’d only just begun when you may last have heard about it on the show. As I said, I proposed to my long-time girlfriend and partner, and we were married this past Summer. Near the end of the honeymoon, we began to suspect we were pregnant, and when we got home and tested, our suspicions were confirmed. The backdrop to all of this has been that I’ve also undergone two reconstructive surgeries to push back against my lifelong struggle with congenital flat feet.

Friends, I’ve been busy, I’ve been tired, I’ve often been laid up with knee scooters and crutches and casts, I’ve been trying so desperately to pump myself up to finish college that I probably lost touch with reality about how much a person can realistically expect to accomplish in their life, and coming out the other end of it, I’ve been processing a lot of big ideas about my relationship with technology, and archivist tendencies (let’s call it data hording), and over-extending myself in terms of projects, hobbies, and ambitions (oh, I started a side business, as well), and especially now that I have a child on the way, I’ve just had to ask myself, really: “how much can you do? What is reasonable? You must sleep so much, work so much, keep up with house chores, and you only get a few small hours in the evening to make of them what you will. And now, you have a baby on the way. So, really, how much can you do?”

I’m not writing with the answer. It’s going to be a lifelong process of finding my limits by bumping into them (and trying to have the good sense to step back, rather than over those lines when I’m faced with them).

I don’t know if podcasting is within the scope of my limits, now, as I approach fatherhood, and the end of my 30s. But I don’t think it is. Not right now. Not any time soon.

Maybe I’ll find another outlet. I like to write reviews on Letterboxd, although I’ve gotten lazier and lazier about it. I also like to keep this blog going, for the occasional revival of the Annual Exploratory Christmas Endeavor. I told my wife how much joy that always brought me, and she had never even realized it was a thing. That’s how far afield I’ve wandered from the days when this podcast was a focal point in my life: my wife and partner of nearly 6 years didn’t even know I used to marathon my way through Christmas movies just for the spirit of the challenge.

I also have a small presence on YouTube, although it has nothing to do with movies, and I won’t be referring you to it here. A lot of GBU was recorded with a sense of comfort in Internet anonymity that I don’t need following me anywhere else. That’s how I feel about my YouTube channel, too, even though it’s nowhere near as racy as GBU could sometimes get. The Internet is a precarious place, and you don’t know what might follow you home if you over-share. I only bring YouTube up, because I have long imagined I could sit in front of a smartphone camera and shoot the shit about movies the way all these other assholes do. Not to be the next Christ Stuckmann or YMS, but because it’s fun to create. It’s fun to be heard.

Oh, I loved this podcast. I love that you can hear different eras of my life in the recordings. Different eras of my understanding of film (cringe-inducing though that can sometimes be). I don’t want it to end, and so again I refuse to say firmly that it is ending.

All I know is I can’t keep paying that enshittified company to host my files anymore.

For now, let me just express my gratitude.

I’m grateful to Adam for forcing me outside of my comfort zone, and into being a version of the podcaster I dreamed I could be. As I’ve long described him, Adam is a known chaotic element, for better and worse, and this stroke of chaotic energy changed my life for the better.

I’m grateful to Tech and James of Death’s Dynamic Shroud for permitting me to use their music. Two cooler guys you could never hope to meet. And, not that you asked, but my favorite DDS song is 내 마음은 떨고 . I don’t think I ever played it on the show but it’s a 100% banger.

I’m grateful to everyone who ever came on the show. Some are my best friends to this day. Some I no longer speak to as circumstance carried us out of each other’s lives. At least one I can think of, I no longer speak to for reason of pure malice, but I was glad to have that person volunteer their time and be a part of the episodes in which they appeared. I am especially grateful that when I went to reassemble the show, I had such beautiful, wonderful people to rotate through as cohosts with me. And one of those rotating cohosts was also the brilliant mind behind the second version of the show’s cover artwork, including the Christmasy nighttime variant and the Evangelion-exclusive variant. (Oh, and thanks to, I believe, Joe L. for the original artwork, which was also exceptional in a totally different way.)

I’m grateful to my mothers for sitting in on two Christmas episodes with us. I never would have dreamt something like that at the outset, but that kind of wholesome family spirit is, in spite of all the swearing, very much a part of who I am and something I was overjoyed to represent on the show.

I’m grateful to Scarlett for making the FocusRite 18i8, the interface that carried the show for ten years after the Behringer mixer died. That fucking machine has never once protested or misbehaved, and I’ve been using it as a solid-state DAC and amp for my studio monitor headphones for the last three years.

I’m grateful to Audio Technica for making really excellent, entry-level hardware like microphones and headphones that get the job done at a fair price point.

I’m grateful that Apple still sold (I don’t know if they do anymore) Logic Pro in a lifetime license instead of some horrible freemium subscription.

I’m grateful my backup drives never gave out on me.

I’m grateful we were able to record at least one successful remote show during COVID. It was like having friends in the room with me.

I’m grateful for fan favorite, Listener Eric, a delightful person as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, who is sweet and thoughtful, a film student, and the only person who ever wrote us fan mail. If we ever sounded like we were poking fun at Listener Eric, we were only poking fun at ourselves for having only one dedicated fan. But we couldn’t have gotten a better one, and I still enjoy following him on Letterboxd.

If I keep going, I’ll only get tired and sad, and I want to end on a high note.

I think the show has like, a 30-day cooldown on being deactivated, so if you want to get the files, now would be the time to do it. It might be less. After that, the only remaining copies will exist in my own backup archives, like the Disney Vault, and they will only come out again when I decide the time in my life is right to do so.

If you’ve been around for one episode or all of them, one year or the whole decade, and whether this is your first post on this blog (welcome!) or the last one you’ll ever read, I just want you to know that I value your attention and consideration seriously. We have done everything we could to entertain ourselves, and, we hoped, you, too.

Until next time.

Brian