After the Sunset: What's Left Behind from Life as a Podcaster

At the same time we were bringing the Nerd Journey Podcast to a close, I received a message from a friend who had just launched his own podcast. I found myself closing an e-mail message to him like this:

Congrats on the beginning of the journey. You’re in for an amazing ride, and you will learn so much along the way that you never realized when you started.

How does running a podcast change you even after it ends? What are the lessons that remain?

Even though the reasons for bringing Nerd Journey to an end in January 2026 remain the same (full details in this post), I could not fully see then how the podcast changed me over time. In order to truly describe that change, we have to start at the beginning and walk through the journey. So…let’s take a trip.

Beginning as a True Novice

Thinking back on John White’s suggestion that we start a podcast together (sent in a message the weekend before I started a new job in late 2017), it’s easy to say now that I can’t imagine saying no. But I often wonder what made me say yes at the time.

My only exposure to podcasts was as a consumer, and I didn’t really start listening to them until 2016. It started with vBrownBag sessions I’d listen to on the long drive to work that helped me prepare for and pass the VMware VCP-DCV certification. Around that time I also found the two shows that will remain my all-time favorites - The Geek Whisperers (Amy Lewis, Matt Broberg, John Troyer) and Datanauts (Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks). I was no podcaster…not like them. What would I have to contribute to a podcast?

John, on the other hand, didn’t just consume podcasts. He had spent time as a co-host for the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast and had thoughts of starting his own show. He and I became fast friends after meeting virtually in the Spiceworks community and then in person at the Spiceworld conference in Austin one fateful year. It was John who told me about what sales engineering was as a career path, John who encouraged me to pursue it as a next step after my years of systems administration, and John who ultimately helped me get a sales engineering job at VMware in late 2017.

I wasn’t an expert in the show’s topic area either - career progression in technology. What did I know about career progression, really? I was afraid of sounding like a dummy on something anyone I knew could listen to. What’s clear now is that there were two things John was telling me in asking me to be a co-host. First, he thought we would make great collaborators on an interesting project (which we absolutely did). Second, and something that I don’t think hit me then, he had confidence that I could play a valuable part in that collaboration. Being asked to do something like this is both an honor and a vote of confidence. So despite the fear and a lack of knowing what to expect, I said yes to collaborating with a friend and someone I greatly respected.

Contributing as a Beginner

When you’re a beginner, you don’t realize how many unknown unknowns will show themselves along the way, and you don’t understand the breadth of the ecosystem into which you’re stepping. To launch the show, technical decisions had to be made about the recording platform (eventually SquadCast), editing software (Audacity), where we would host the site (WordPress), how to ensure the podcast was discoverable on multiple platforms, and several others. I leaned on John’s expertise and recommendations for all of those as well as the type of microphone I would need to sound decent. My only contribution for about the first 100 episodes was co-hosting, helping with topic brainstorming / guest ideas, and marking suggested edit points while writing the show notes. John did all the editing and episode publishing for our weekly releases after the show notes were complete. It was John’s suggestion fairly early on to start writing the show notes in markdown rather than plain text for the ease of pasting into a new WordPress post. That optimized the workflow a little bit for him and afforded me the opportunity to learn markdown.

Working with a co-host for me was fantastic. While John and I would make a rough outline of what we wanted to discuss and who would lead the discussion in specific sections, we did not like to script talking points with the exception of the intro and outro. Any time he was talking gave me time to listen and think about what I would say next. What I began to notice is I’d get ideas or make a comment that came to me in the moment during our on-air discussion that never crossed my mind before we hit record. It was the back-and-forth dialogue that supported this pattern of momentarily entering a flow state, and the end product almost always turned out better as a result. That, for me, was both addictive and energizing.

Creating content gives you more ideas for other content. It’s like an idea factory. So many times after John and I had recorded an episode on a topic, one or both of us would get ideas for ways we could explore that topic at a deeper level, from a new angle, or even something adjacent to it. All ideas were documented to use for future shows, and we never ran out of them during the show’s 7.5 year run of almost 370 published episodes.

Estimating how many on-air minutes a discussion will take is pretty difficult. John and I have technical backgrounds, and we value depth of subject matter. For episodes that were just John and me, we would discuss a planned topic until we had achieved a suitable amount of depth and then move on to the next one. The back-and-forth dialogue we had on the air in my opinion is what generated greater depth than we had outlined before hitting record. When we started interviewing guests, the element of depth naturally followed us. We went deep into each guest’s career journey or the topic(s) they joined us to discuss, and that’s why you see a trend of multi-part episodes with guests. There was usually more of what the guest brought to the table than a single episode could hold.

Just as ideas for topics continued to build on one another, ideas for guests followed a similar pattern. Guests started with people we knew or knew of who had something to say that would fit the show’s mission. We had to make sure these guests understood what we were asking them for (time commitment) and what we wanted to talk to them about (including questions we might ask). It wasn’t just asking them to show up and record. We did everything we could to make it easy for people to say yes to being a guest. While John and I were comfortable being on a recording (thanks to the practice we had already done), part of the role of a podcast host is to set the guest at ease and help them tell their story. We always wanted guests to know it was our intention to make them look good, and that’s part of the reason we encouraged every guest to review the audio before it went live. If they requested a specific edit that we might not have otherwise cut, we cut it (no questions asked).

Becoming an Editor and Producer

When John needed to take a break from the show, my only experience and base of knowledge was what I’ve described above through 112 episodes. My choice was either hit pause with John, or fly solo until he had time to return (which he intended to do). I chose to fly solo. Even then (early 2021), what we were doing mattered enough to me to keep doing it regularly. This choice brought with it new, forced learning opportunities and new responsibilities.

After John walked me through his normal workflow from edit to released episode, I finally understood how the pieces of the overall system fit together. The turn-by-turn directions were there to follow for the most part, but the roads were unfamiliar to me. The tools and processes representing the remainder of the system were well defined. While I had gained competence in the parts of the system I owned to this point, I needed to gain competence with the rest. Each episode presented a new chance to use the system end-to-end.

Editing was very slow at first. It took time to learn about everything Audacity could do. Every raw recording had a separate audio track for each person. I had to learn about noise cancellation, normalization, and a number of other techniques to apply across all tracks that would ultimately be mixed into the final MP3 file for release. For example, if there were several seconds of silence, how much of it should be cut so the conversation still sounds natural? It was a similar judgement call for filler words. You will never realize just how many filler words you use until you listen to a recording of yourself. It’s, you know, completely humbling. I left some of the filler words in but probably cut 85% to preserve the quality of the final product.

My unstated intention from the beginning of taking over as editor is now clear - focus on quality. It was initially about preserving the quality we had developed while John was doing the editing. I didn’t build the system, but I wanted to make sure it was maintained. After all, it was the system that delivered that weekly published episode. After gaining competence as an editor, I began to wonder if maybe I could improve the quality. I didn’t know how exactly to accomplish that, but this focus on quality was calling me to go deeper. And it wasn’t just that I should go deeper into editing.

Sometime during this period the show notes changed. They became progressively more detailed over time. Listening to audio to make show notes and suggested edit points is one thing, but when you are also doing the editing, the amount of time you spend with a single stretch of audio increases dramatically. It breeds an entirely new level of familiarity with the content. The goal of show notes was always to highlight things discussed during the recorded episode and share the links to resources we discussed during a show (books, contact info, blogs, other podcasts / videos, etc.). They eventually also became a place to showcase some of the most thoughtful quotes from our guests during conversations and link to other episodes covering similar topics or ideas. It was as if the show notes became my own form of commonplacing, something that paved the way for a form of indexing and curating the overall catalog.

A Mobius Strip of Content Creation and Consumption

Being a podcaster changed the books I chose to read and the way I extracted lessons from them. My normal favorites had been nonfiction works like biographies or something related to personal development. I continued to read these types of books but didn’t stop there. I would read books that podcast guests recommended during interviews. There were also books we decided to read and review on the show. I began to see the widely applicable career lessons from the lives of musical artists, writers, athletes, well-respected business and technology leaders, and other historical figures. I started to read books about podcasting (Make Noise by Eric Nuzum), creative work (The Practice by Seth Godin, Working by Robert Caro, Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami), and interviewing (Talk to Me by Dean Nelson). The books I read fueled some of the questions I asked or points I made on the show at the same time the show itself was driving what I selected to read. I really enjoy audiobooks and have a habit of jotting down notes as I listen, so the act of commonplacing definitely translated into this area too.

It’s one thing to extract lessons and insights from one specific recorded interview at a time, but what if you could extract generalized lessons from the content as a whole? John and I began to wonder this very thing and started brainstorming ideas for conference presentations. Our target audience was the technologist (not so different than us), so we naturally began with technology conferences and meetup groups like VMUG. One of the most difficult things we did was structure those first few presentations, and without John’s help, I would have become frustrated and lost in a sea of content and lessons. John’s idea was rather than force a structure on the content we had, let the content reveal the structure to us. Our goal with the presentations was to amplify the advice from discussions with our guests and present it in a consumable way combined with concepts and ideas from some of our favorite books in this space. All we had to do whether our presentation was virtual or in-person was finish in about 30-45 minutes while keeping our audience engaged, right? Each time a form of this presentation was given (10-12 times by my count), whether we were presenting it together or I was doing it solo, the podcast had more released episodes to mine and more lessons to share, lending itself to an iterative process of refinement. It was a little different every time but in a good way. I am so thankful that John and I got to present together in person at VMware Explore 2022 (more on that here) and many other times virtually. Also at VMware Explore 2022, I got to do a Nerd Journey style interview with a technology executive I had worked to support as my customer to extract the lessons from her career in DevOps. I’ll never forget the times former show guests, some of my customers, and a VP I worked for came to hear the presentation delivered live.

While we were adding WordPress tags to the post for each released episode, I think it was mining the show’s holistic content that drove me to want to add more tags over time. The categorical searchability of the content is one of the biggest reasons we were able to create topical resource pages on the site like the Layoff Resources Page (my creation) and the Career Uncertainty Action Guide (John’s creation).

Understanding the Greater Ecosystem

Seeking depth led me outside the system and into the same place it had in my own tech career - straight toward community and the ecosystem beyond. I found a Dallas Podcasters meetup group, and while I had been to technology-focused user groups in the past, it would be my first focused on podcasting. Several people who attended these meetups were podcast hobbyists like me, but there were a significant number who either had a podcast as a marketing arm of their own business or who were seeking to monetize their show in some way. Everyone I met, regardless of their level of expertise in podcasting, was welcoming and helpful. The thing I really appreciate about meetup groups is that most presenters ensure their content is accessible to people at various levels of expertise. It was here that I learned about the PodNews newsletter curated by James Cridland, here that I heard about specific podcast conferences like Podfest and Podcast Movement, here that I was introduced to specific audio enhancement tools people were using, and here that I met people like Larry Roberts who happened to be a great fit to guest on our show.

I also have to mention the r/podcasting community on Reddit. There are so many helpful folks who hang out in there, and you just might come across someone who makes a great guest for your show like Richard Russell. I asked several questions there and over time started to contribute answers.

Just like being a podcaster changed the books I read, it also influenced the podcasts I consumed. Of course there were podcasts about podcasting! Why wouldn’t there be? The two favorites I would cycle between were Podcast Marketing Trends Explained with Jeremy Enns and Justin Jackson and Podcast Insider hosted by members of the Blubrry team.

Attending Podcast Movement in August 2025 was one of the coolest things I did during the show’s run, and it was re-energizing to meet so many others dedicated to the craft of podcasting. I talked to vendors and learned about interesting tools and podcast platforms. I met new people. I remember sitting in a room with people who were veterans in the podcast industry for a special viewing of Age of Audio, which is a fantastic film detailing the history of podcasting. At a conference like this the first question you get asked is about your podcast. There was one specific gentleman I spoke to who stopped me when I said I was a hobbyist podcaster. He told me based on the work we had done with the show and the fact that I came to Podcast Movement, I wasn’t just a hobbyist. I was a podcaster. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but who knows. If running a podcast on an interesting topic became part of my job someday, that sounds like it would be really fun.

Optimizing the System

Exposure to the greater podcasting ecosystem was a driver for tinkering with the show’s production system. You can tinker with new tools and processes to see if they actually make the system better, faster, or more resilient. But the system still has to produce the desired outcome while you are optimizing it. Big architectural changes could introduce operational friction and process delays. The depth of editing, show notes, and tagging metadata were localized optimizations to improve the quality of the show and its content even though they added some time to the production process. The next set of optimizations changed the system architecture and were also focused on quality. The constraint remained what it always had been - spare time and the weekly release schedule.

Every podcast has a name and description that serves a singe purpose - telling potential listeners about your show to help them decide if it is for them. The podcasts I’d been listening to pointed to big opportunities for improvement in this area. The show’s description needed a complete overhaul to make sure it really addressed our thesis and the intended audience we wanted to serve. John and I worked together to iteratively refine and crystalize it. We needed to go into the depths in the show’s description too. Then we used this exercise as fuel to record an improved trailer episode that has been pinned to the top of our site ever since.

A lot of shows start as audio only but later add video. Some start as video only. People would ask us about it, but I never wanted to add video because I think it would have made production more grueling. There’s an “optimization” that didn’t make sense.

Filler words were always something that needed cleanup. I tested tools to pull those out automatically based on AI detection algorithms, but to me it was easier to do it in Audacity one by one to control the cleanliness of each cut point.

Auphonic is an incredible tool for eliminating background noise, reducing breath sounds, and having consistent audio levels even if one person did not have their mic volume loud enough when you hit record. I started running each raw audio track through Auphonic before editing in Audacity to begin with the cleanest audio possible. That was easy to fit into the system because I knew exactly which settings to use to get to the right audio quality we needed. I don’t remember the first episode when we used Auphonic specifically, but part of me wishes we had been able to go back and run the back catalog through it too. We never made it that far.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to come up with the right episode title (or I could at least). I had learned a great deal from John about using generative AI just in our continued off air conversations. Over time I developed a better and better generative AI workflow that used the show notes and our optimized show description as input. It would suggest WordPress tags, identify major themes from the episode, help me brainstorm episode titles and descriptions, provide multiple options for the SEO description, and give me ready to use prompts for generating a few different featured images and episode artwork. My favorite insight from this prompt was the suggested flow improvement that would run after every brainstorming session. As it turns out, I never took suggestions for the episode description as a starting point. It was better if I wrote the first draft of the episode description and then reviewed the suggested improvements to it before deciding on the final version. Using this prompt was a nice way to get my brain ready to record a short intro and outro for each episode. With the episode title and description finalized, I’d usually be able to make a quick outline of what I wanted to say, add in my own recommended related episodes, and go record it. This optimization, though focused on quality, saved time as a byproduct.

Redlining and Frustration

Something changed. It was harder to get through the system. This is the point of the show’s run where editing started to drive me insane. New features and capabilities were added to Auphonic over time, and I’d tinker around with them to see if they improved the audio quality. Some did. Others didn’t make a difference. It also felt like our recording platform (Squadcast) got better or changed a little bit. I started to hear quirks in the raw audio that didn’t get removed when I ran them through Auphonic (like breath sounds and plosives / sibilance). I tried turning all kinds of knob and couldn’t get rid of them in post-production without tighter editing. I tried to prevent that from happening for just my audio feed but hit dead ends. I adjusted my mic position (with pop filter and wind screen) many different ways and still heard them. At one point I considered replacing my Presonus Studio 24c with something different to see if it would make a difference, but I never did. I could only tinker and test so much each week to try and improve that. Maybe you never heard these noises if you listened because I edited most of them out, but they only got louder in my head over time. All of this was happening as work and home responsibilities were on the uptick. It’s easy to see why I couldn’t get ahead of schedule in the last 50+ episodes now.

There were late nights and early mornings. There were days where I paid dearly for the extra time spent the evening before. Frustration and feeling exhausted are not a great combination. I was definitely in denial about how hard it was to get an episode out the door.

For a long time, each week I would write up some kind of post to share a current or past episode on social media to see if we could reach more people with what we were doing. I would write them on my own (no AI assist). Near the end I had to stop that part completely to focus on getting a release out on time. There was no capacity to do it any longer. I needed to spend the time elsewhere.

Capacity in general became the constraint I couldn’t engineer around any longer. The focus on quality made certain things nonnegotiable. My stress level was higher than I realized. There was no choice but to surrender. I had to accept that my spare time wouldn’t allow me do it any longer. John and I finished the show strong, and I’m still proud of how we showed up together at the end just as we had in the beginning and so many times along the way.

Reclaiming What Was Lost

Those first several weekends after the show ended were strange. I tried to keep busy with other things. The bullet train had stopped. The system I had learned, maintained, and changed…the very system that drove the release train…sat silent, unused. I remember sitting down in free moments and wondering, “what do I do now?” After all, the ending was intentional. I chose to walk away. And yet, I still felt lost. That’s some kind of paradox. My family could see it even if they never said anything about it. There were waves of grief, gratitude, and solitude.

About a week after the last episode was published we received an e-mail from a longtime listener thanking us for what we had done with the show and wishing us good luck with whatever was next for each of us. Reading that message nearly brought me to tears. It reminded me of some encouragement Alex Sanfilippo offered to all podcasters back at Podcast Movement 2025 - even if you took the time to create a podcast that only 1 person listened to and found useful, it’s still worth doing. We knew people listened based on the stats, but we didn’t always get feedback. This wasn’t from someone who just listened to one episode. This person chose to go on the journey with us. Getting that feedback meant someone else cared as much as we did, as much as I did. Someone thought what we had done was helpful. Right then, after the sunset, was when I needed to hear that we had made an impact on someone.

Now that I’ve written this so many month after the show’s ending, it’s easy to see what we decided to do was the right decision. We never could have sustained it, and I don’t have any regrets about the decision to end the show. The thing that never once changed was what the work meant to me and the value I personally drew from doing it.

I listened to something very insightful from Jay Shetty right after the show ended about the idea of reclaiming what was lost. At various times in our lives, for one reason or another, we might lose access to something we love. But, if we can be clear about exactly what we miss, there may be a way to re-discover it. I’ve thought about that so many times since first hearing it. By choosing to end the show, I lost access to the very system that transformed ideas into published episodes, the system that was a vehicle for learning…the system that changed me. Now that we’re past the sunset, is there a way to re-discover what I miss the most about my experience as a podcaster?

• I’ve been able to learn from John since even before the show began, and I don’t want that to stop. We are life long friends. He setup a weekly call for us to check in and of course talk about career-focused topics (which naturally come up). There have been a few times during our conversations when I’ve thought “we should have recorded that.” But I know we can’t go back there right now.
• Talking about career progression and extracting lesson from others is still something I love, and the podcaster in me will always be there even if there’s no microphone or intention to record. I can conduct interviews, little by little, question by question, in any conversation whether it’s part of my professional or personal life. And I can still hear mouth noises on Zoom calls.
• Being part of the show helped me extract lessons from guests, but I also spent time contemplating, interacting with, and internalizing those lessons. I know this part of the learning process can continue beyond the system it was once part of, even if I’m not sharing the learnings on a podcast. I can still share the lessons learned through various mediums if I want, and it doesn’t have to be once per week or on any pre-defined schedule.
• Running a podcast gives you a reason to ask for someone’s time for a specific discussion, and it’s a great professional networking tool. I can continue to strengthen existing professional connections and make new ones even without the show. All I need to do is make it easy for people to say yes and give them an idea of the type of discussion I’d like to have.
• My favorite discussions were those focused on the role of principal engineer / what the principal title means in our industry, the decision between the individual contributor career path and the people management career path, and looking at every aspect and angle of layoffs in tech. These are still topics that fascinate me.
• I loved the elements of depth in what we did. Depth of subject matter still calls to me. In a world of AI summaries, I still want to develop greater depth in something.

So if you ever get asked to be part of a podcast and you say yes to doing it consistently, be prepared to walk away changed in an amazing way. I know I did. The change is a gift.

“Time, effort, and money spent by the former you is simply a gift…a gift from the old you to the you of today.” - Seth Godin, The Knot

This post took far longer than I thought it might to write, but I realize how much I needed to do it to remind myself of what happened, how I grew, and to gain additional closure. Special shout out to Michael Osborne and John White for reviewing this and providing feedback before it went live.