In this quick episode, I share what has been going on with the podcast and why I haven't been uploading. The truth is, that I am taking a step back from the show. I explain why and what comes next. Part of the episode is me reading off a post that I wrote, which you can read below.
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I think it’s time to let go of my podcast.
Episode 1 of the Hardcore Self Help Podcast aired on 3/16/2016. Nearly 450 episodes later, I think it might be time to let it go. When I began the show, podcasting wasn’t cool. This was before Huberman Lab and Diary of a CEO. This is before every influencer had their own podcast. I certainly wasn’t one of the first podcasts, but I was in the cohort of podcasters that were influenced by Pat Flynn, Cliff Ravenscraft, and Daniel J. Lewis. Podcasts were the up and coming way to generate an audience and scale your craft. For me, this was a way to bring mental health content to the masses.
In 2014, I released my first book, Hardcore Self Help: F**k Anxiety. I wrote this during my pre-doctoral internship at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. The book was written and published in a matter of a couple weeks, driven by my frustrations with the mental health field following my wife’s hospitalization (more about that in my TedX talk). Since the market was not yet saturated with potty-mouth self-help books, it was a hit and quickly became my primary source of income.
With the popularity of the book came emails and direct messages asking me questions. As someone who was working toward becoming licensed as a psychologist, it was important that I didn’t give out direct advice to people in a private forum unless I had an established care relationship with the person. That’s when I realized I could make my childhood dreams of having a newspaper advice column come true by starting a podcast.
Truthfully, this was not my first foray into podcasting. I tried to start a podcast about the 90s with my friends called The Good Old Days, but that failed to launch. Then I had a podcast that ran for a good while called The Voices Among Us, in which I interviewed unhoused people on the street about their lives. Those experiences meant that I had the tools and knowledge necessary to launch the Hardcore Self Help Podcast.
And man, has it been great. I have had the opportunity to answer questions about anxiety, relationships, sexuality, school, neuroscience, medications, abusive families, PTSD, depression, bipolar, autism, mushrooms, ketamine, queerness, blackness, multiculturalism, gender identity and so much more.
I’ve been able have great conversations with Seth Godin, Dr. Andrea Letamendi, Kati Morton, Gary Bishop, Dr. Anna Yusim, Tiffany Jenkins, Jenn Harris, Dr. Patrick McGrath, Tony Weaver Jr., Dr. Judy Ho, Dr. David Burns, and many others.
And yet, as the years of the podcast march on, the interest is waning. I will always have pride for being something of an O.G. in the mental health podcasting space, but as my wife said recently, it’s important to make room for other voices and to not force something that isn’t working. I wouldn’t say the podcast isn’t working, but it certainly isn’t what it once was. At one point in time, I was getting enough listens to garner thousands per month in advertising revenue. These days, I’m lucky if an episode hits 5,000 listens in a month. To be clear, that is still a substantial amount, but for the hours that I put into the podcast, the decline in listenership over time becomes hard to justify at a certain point. Here’s a graph from my podcast hosting platform so you can see what I mean: