An Update On The Future Of THC

00:00 All right, well this is exciting. I have officially completed 15 years of doing the Hireside Chats and knocking out hundreds of great interviews and covered the who's who of conspiracy goodness. And I think it's finally time that I retire the traditional interview only structure and open it up to a bit more of a wider variety of material most of which would be things I present you guys on my own so put me in coach! And it does stem from some pretty insane messages from the universe or my higher self or whatever it is. Well, I had a guest ditch me at the studio and I did the Charlie Kirk presentation and another guest pull out and I went forward with the knife of God work anyway in both cases they brought in a ton of subs and

00:50 maintain some of the highest ratings of the year. So that's a pretty strong signal right there, so I said okay i'm going to keep doing my five interviews a month and try to squeeze in that extra stuff where I can and honestly my plate is very full producing the five interviews a month trying to come up with great guests and then trying to come into those interviews fully prepared books read and all that so I kept pushing back the extra stuff I would want to do Then we come to the events of last month, December 2025. Look I've been in this a while. I know to make sure I'm always ahead of schedule with interviews especially in the holiday season 15 years I've been able to do it

01:37 But just in December, I had one guest suffer a massive medical emergency thoughts and prayers. And that interview couldn't happen. I had another guest canceled the day before because he had better opportunities and then popped up on three other shows that week not even mad at it but it does make me less enthusiastic about doing an interview myself because you've already done all the shows That's fine. But then I had another guest show up, start the interview and then as soon as we got to the first question they froze up and said they were just too nervous and asked if we could call it off no shade at anyone do what you gotta do not even mad at it but all three of these situations were actually quite rare when I think about it in all this time I've never had a guest clam up

02:32 I understand, I get nervous doing my own show sometimes. And when I think about it too much you can tell in my cadence and if I have a big guest to talk to, I definitely can talk myself into nervousness but this all came right at the worst time of year and made it really hard to get December done on time and left me a big hole in January so again pretty strong signal trying to get my attention i'm talking to my wife and getting all this anxiety in complaining that i started the show so i could have total freedom over what i do for work, and i felt like i did for a long time no daily alarms no nine-to-five know bosses etc.

03:17 i have commitments each month that rely on other people that i don't really know who don't really know me and don't really care about what i have to get done. So sometimes i do have to scramble and say yes the interviews that i no won't be the best because five is the number, And if I go through the publishers who have relationships with, they can guarantee it's going to get done. So sometimes my pool of what I can choose in a pinch gets quite small and I told my wife, I was thinking about going down to four interviews and doing two presentations a month one for free and one plus. It was her genius idea to say why make a big announcement about a small change and lock yourself into another rigid structure when you could just say

04:05 five free hours of content a month and five paid, a month and just do whatever you want for that content. And it felt quite freeing to even think about it that way because listen the interview format is a bit played out more so than it was when I started 15 years ago i used to really get a charge of highlighting researchers who couldn't get out there on other shows. Now there's really no shortage of places anyone can get an interview so you have me asking everybody for two hours with one paywall than everyone else is asking for just one it's harder sell, use to be

04:50 i have passed on a lot of great interviews because they can only give me one hour and that doesn't work for our format, i don't use ad so i can just check some ads in there and call it today now if i say im gonna step up into my own solo stuff. Various presentations what i might just call book reports of great works weather the author is either dead won't do interviews or doesn't even speak english in a couple cases to come to mind And I have a lot more freedom over making sure. I meet my commitments to plus people on my own time by myself, I don't have to stretch lighter content to conformed two hours. I could easily do a one hour interview and just put them out as part of the free offerings

05:34 The cascade of benefits really is just hard to cover in full. I also wish we could get more into the paranormal stuff and deeper dives into certain bizarre cases, I'd like there to be more magic related material a lot of things but paranormal research is a little stale these days Those are the kinds of interviews where after an hour we're sort of just spitballing about the same old ideas and possibilities. And the magic community is kind of notorious right now for having really backwards politics, and I just don't want to get into all that."

06:11 There are also times where I come super prepared. I set the guest up well and they don't deliver or they're just very dry in their presentation, or they have a thick accent or a bad mic cheap mic sometimes they don't even let me talk or they over explain really simple concepts that we should be well past after all of our time in the game. I can think of a few interviews where I actually stopped to guess to say hey this is the advanced class like we can kind of move along But it is what it is. I will be forever grateful to the amazing researchers, I've been able to interview but we all know it doesn't go well every time

06:53 Honestly, I just look at all the great stuff on the bookshelf behind me or the thousands of bookmarked weird threads and odd things have accumulated over the years. All the links... And I think to myself how it really is a damn torrent deluge exploding water fountain material that I guess I had in mind for some hypothetical project like a book but this is the project! And just because I can't get an interview doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to give you an hour or two bit on this and make it just as compelling as a real interview. Oftentimes, I think better and totally on my own time! So if you're willing to do the old Aladdin trust jump with me here and compromise in the premise of what the THC schedule has always been then we'll have a great time

07:39 So the free feed and YouTube and Spotify, all the publicly available places will get five free hours of stuff from me every month. Because you can't silo yourself off behind a paywall And ya gotta feed the top of the funnel as the digital marketing people tell me. Then the plus fee will have all that stuff AND 5 more hours of material no need to subscribe to two feeds And I hope you've just come to trust me and look forward to the changes. I want to fall in love with my job again, and this has certainly given me the special tingle. I am going to drop the idea of some stoner pun sub-branding and probably just use very clear labels like book report or special presentation plus bonus

08:24 Because I want people who like a certain thing to be able to search that term in their podcast apps and get all the content of that type. I think that makes sense I might even try to do a big show every month that goes into smaller things happening and playing news clips and going over crazy threads that i find maybe it's an hour or maybe i do 10 clips and threads, five are free and five are paid. That is something im considering also. I might even call it culture scrying just the old carlwood feeling around in the zeitgeist for the things we find interesting then presenting them

09:05 There's not a lot more to say i am super grateful for all the great guests and listeners and we will still have a lot of interviews. But most of the plus members have stuck with me for many years because they like me in the way I do things, and I think I can step up and give them more luckily i have the plus rating system and numbers don't lie in terms of subs and i think i can be pretty objective about how it's going and let's give it a year and see if THC is better off or worse off. I can always drift back to the traditional format if people don't like my own stuff, but every signal I'm getting from whatever is sending signals is telling me that this is the move. People just aren't compelled to sign up for plus for an extra hour of this guy or that who's on 50 other podcasts even if they consider my interviews to be better

10:00 So i'll do some things that are much harder to replicate and much more under my creative control. Alright so that is it that is the big announcement and the pivot that I'm making and i will see you on the other side in fact already have the first two presentations in the works and At least one of them, free or plus is what you will see next. Brace yourself and thanks again for sticking with me as long as you have cheers to a beautiful THC future and I'll see on the other side.