in the end podcast

How to End Your Podcast: Writing a Perfect Outro No One Skips

Writing or recording a podcast intro can make you feel pumped up. But when you finally reach the end of your podcast, you feel exhausted and your patience drops down. So much that you just want to finish things on an abrupt note.

Results? You miss the opportunity to make your listeners wait for your next podcast or hit the “subscribe” button.

When you end your podcast, you need to summarize your episode with takeaways. You must encourage them to take desired actions.

As a podcaster, you invest more in writing a gripping intro. But you often ignore outros and rush towards the end.

Recording a podcast is a tiring process, but your podcast outro shouldn’t bear its cost.

Do you also want to change this habit? Then stick to the end of Cleanvoice’s guide on how your podcast outros should look like.

What is a Podcast Outro?

A podcast outro concludes what you have shared so far in the podcast. It includes thanking the listener, summarizing your episode, and a clear CTA.

A solid podcast outro triggers an urgency in your listeners’ minds. It makes your audience feel they will miss out a great deal if they don’t come back to your podcast.

Why Your Podcast Outro is Important?

A good podcast outro converts your listeners into subscribers, pursues your listeners to share your podcast far and wide, and promotes your website and social media channels.

It also encourages your audience to provide positive online reviews and makes your listeners return for future episodes.

A good outro helps you show your gratitude to those who stay through the entire episode. It makes your listeners feel that you appreciate their support.

How to End A Podcast?

The final minutes of your podcast must leave a positive and lasting impression on your listeners. A good podcast ending is key to boosting your conversion rate.

Before you record the one, have you included the following factors while writing your outro script?

1. Thank Your Listeners

It’s your chance to build a relationship with your listeners. Show sincere thanks and appreciation to your audience as the show draws to a close.

Example outro dialogue: “If you’ve made it this far, I just want to take a moment to thank you for listening right through and to express my gratitude for following yet another episode of [name of show].”

2. Recap the Episode

Once you’ve thanked your loyal viewership, make sure to summarize the episode. Include key takeaways and keep it crisp. Present these key points as bullet points and make it easier for your audience to skim your content.

Grab this chance to remind your audience of the value they gain from tuning in to your show.

“So, in today’s episode, we discussed how to write a compelling and well-structured novel with key ingredients being the three-act structure, appropriately placed turning points, and the use of the hero's journey where appropriate.”

3. Be Intentional

A vague outro will not only lose your listeners’ attention but will also make them skip the end. Hence, it’s important that you outline your outro, and reason out each segment.

Think about how you can word your summary and CTA so that you can improve your relationship with your listeners.

4. Encourage CTA

Adding a clear CTA or call to action, which converts, is a non-negotiable part of your podcast outro. This is where you encourage your listeners to take follow-up actions after listening to your podcast.

Whether you want your listeners to subscribe to your podcast, sign up for a programme, visit your website , or follow your social handles, having a specific CTA helps you convert more.

A strong podcast outro CTA includes:

• Encouraging listeners to follow your social media.
• Promoting your website.
• Asking listeners to sign up for your newsletter.
• Mentioning your book and where to purchase it.
• Requesting your listeners to leave a review.

“Don’t forget to check out our various social media channels, including our Facebook and Twitter pages and YouTube account.”

5. Teaser for the Next Episode

Don’t forget to give your listeners a clear reason to return to your show for the next episode.

Design a structure for your podcast show. This will help you share what your listeners should expect from your next episode.

Create hype and tease the upcoming episode to increase the chances that your listeners will subscribe.

“And in the next episode, we’ll discuss how to market your e-book in the digital age.”

6. Create a Unique Sign-off

A unique sign-off sets your podcast apart from the competition. Word-play with a slogan or use a unique way of saying ‘goodbye for now’.

It may even relate to ‘an inside joke’ only your loyal listeners will understand.

7. Credits Roll

Last but certainly not least, ensure that you include any necessary mentions at the end.

For example, include the names of your guests, co-hosts, and perhaps, any behind-the-scenes crew members(e.g., editors). And don’t forget to thank them. You can also encourage your listeners to check and follow your guests' social media handles.

If you have a Patreon account or similar, shout out to your key patrons.

Treat your credits roll as a way to pay gratitude to all those involved in creating your episode.

“And once more, a big thank you to our guest Dr. Julie A. Clark from the Medical University of Anchorage. Also, a big shout out to the show’s top patrons Azaria Rich, Ezekliel Mcintosh, Cody Blevins, Zaria Burnett, and iceflyer99xd, and a thank you to all of you for tuning in.”

Tips For a Unique and Strong Podcast Outro

Structuring your podcast outro but not sure how to make it unique and strong? Here are important tidbits to keep in mind.

1. Make Your Outro Seamless

Your outro must have a seamless flow. Ensure it sounds natural.

This is not simply a matter of scripting it right but also ensuring you remove unnecessary silences. You can achieve this automatically using Cleanvoice’s AI-powered silence remover . Don’t let your audience feel awkward.

Keep the outro short, sweet, and to the point, and ensure it doesn’t go beyond 30 seconds. This may mean running it tight for around 29.5 seconds.

Practice your intros and outros ahead of each show if you don't want to stay tongue-tied during your recording.

“Well, I just want to thank you for joining me once more. Today we looked at how ancient Roman aqueducts functioned and the fascinating engineering behind their construction. For more details, check out our latest blog, which you can find on our website, www . castironvisions .com! In next week’s episode, we’ll explore the intriguing history behind the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge… And before I go, I just want to thank Lucy and Bill, and all of you for tuning in. Stay hopeful and stay mighty. See you again soon.”

2. Choose the Right Outro Music

Include a good outro track or some sound effects to make your outro crisp, smooth, and enjoyable. Pick outro music which aligns with your podcast theme and fits right with your content.

You can find a wide range of royalty-free podcast outro music on websites such as AudioJungle, PremiumBeat, and Musicbed.

3. Ensure High Sound and Production Quality

Nothing irritates your listeners more than bad audio quality.

You can have the best podcast idea in the world and well-known guests, but without high sound and production quality, you’ll never reach a large audience.

Tip: Ensure clean and professional audio all around, from intro to outro, using podcasting tools of sufficient quality and a solid editing tool.

Use Cleanvoice to benefit from a range of AI audio cleanup features that can automatically remove silences, filler words, mouth sounds, background sounds , and more. Provide more quality to your audience and save your time, so you can focus more on the creative side of podcasting.

Everything is well that ends well and the same goes for your podcast.

In today’s guide, we explored how you can craft the end of a podcast in various steps. Write a crisp and engaging outro and increase the chances of your listeners coming back to your podcast.

Though it’s good to add these seven points in your podcast outro script, it’s not necessary to always add all of them. After all, every podcast is different and has a different motive.

However, some elements will always prove necessary (e.g. thanking your listeners, key takeaways, and clear CTA).

At Cleanvoice , we know the major challenges of podcasting. That’s why we’ve introduced a range of AI-powered features to automate many of the tedious parts of the editing process. This can make the post-production stage more efficient.

Avoid wasting hours editing your podcast. Get rid of filler sounds, mouth sounds, dead air, background noise, stuttering, and more using Cleanvoice. Check the pricing right now and make podcast editing the easiest task.

Bonus: Example of podcast outro script

Refer to this template of a podcast outro. Use this and write yours.

And that wraps up today’s episode on “how writing clear headlines shoots up your SEO and earns you more clicks.”

Before we sign off, I would like to thank you for your support and thanks for tuning in.

Let’s quickly recap today’s episode. Remember, the headline is the gateway to your content. So, reflect your USP in the headline. Add keywords in the beginning. And use tools like Coshecdule or Hemingway to make it crispier and more pursuing.

If you loved today's episode, then don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast and never miss an episode. Sign up for my newsletter and follow me on social media for more free SEO tips.

And a shoutout to my amazing team: [Producer], [Sound Engineer], and [Research Team].

Stay tuned for next week’s episode on “how your website’s technical performance affects your SEO”.

Till then keep writing clear headlines, and watch your SEO soar!

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Atul Gawande

What matters in the end.

Last Updated

May 2, 2019

Original Air Date

October 26, 2017

“What does a good day look like?” That question — when asked of both terminally-ill and healthy people — has transformed Atul Gawande’s practice of medicine. A citizen physician and writer, Gawande is on the frontiers of human agency and meaning in light of what modern medicine makes possible. For the millions of people who have read his book Being Mortal , he’s also opened new conversations about the ancient human question of death and what it might have to do with life.

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Image by Anthony Wallace /Getty Images, © All Rights Reserved.

Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He’s also Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He was recently named the CEO of Haven, a healthcare venture spearheaded by the leaders of Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. He’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and is the author of four books, including The Checklist Manifesto  and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End .

Krista Tippett, host: What does a good day look like? This is the question that transformed Atul Gawande’s practice of medicine. He’s a citizen physician on frontiers of human agency and meaning in light of what modern medicine makes possible. And for the millions who have read his book Being Mortal , he’s also opened new conversation about the ancient human question of death and what it might have to do with life.

[ music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating ]

Atul Gawande: The conversation I felt like I was having was, do we fight, or do we give up?

And the reality was that it’s not do we fight, or do we give up? It’s what are we fighting for? People have priorities besides just surviving no matter what. You have reasons you want to be alive. What are those reasons? Because whatever you’re living for, along the way, we’ve got to make sure we don’t sacrifice it. And in fact, can we, along the way, whatever’s happening, can we enable it?

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being . Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he’s also a professor at Harvard. He’s also CEO of Haven, a new healthcare venture formed by Amazon and other large companies to remodel the U.S. healthcare system. He took a break after his first two years of medical school to work as a campaign strategist for then-governor Bill Clinton. He’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and is the author of four books, including The Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End .

Atul Gawande grew up in the Appalachian foothills of rural Ohio near the West Virginia border, feeling more than a little out of place with two Indian immigrant parents. When we spoke in 2017, he described an early life steeped in the Hindu practice he still calls defining for his identity.

Ms. Tippett: I have actually found it’s very hard to speak — I think this is true in general of religion, that it’s hard to speak about it — but I think that that’s true especially with Hinduism because it is so much about practice. It is so wide-open. It’s not ideas. Do you know what I mean?

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, it’s so embedded in the culture. The line between how do you treat your mom and your dad and how are you supposed to grow up and your ways of praying — it’s seamless. It is not easy to separate it. For example, I grew up that you never put your foot on a book, because a book is spiritual, and it’s wisdom, and it’s meaningful. So if I ever put a foot on a book, I had to apologize to the book, put my hand on it and apologize. I grew up doing that, and I cannot, to this day, put a foot on a book. It’s just sacrilegious. It is dishonoring not only the book but everything that matters behind it. And it’s inseparable. It’s a way of living and a way of praying, I suppose.

Ms. Tippett: It’s a whole different way of putting the words “sacred” and “text” together too. [ laughs ]

Dr. Gawande: Yes. [ laughs ]

Ms. Tippett: I love that. I have read you for years, but somehow, I had never picked up — I was fascinated to learn that you actually wound your way into being a surgeon through politics. [ laughs ] And I wonder, do you think of the doctor in you and the part of you that was drawn to politics and campaigns and policy and process — are those two different sides of you, or do you have a sense that these things are intertwined?

Dr. Gawande: I feel like they are not separate. They feel very intertwined. I’m still getting my feel for how I think about it that way. One way was, I grew up in a family of doctors, and there is a certain way of being part of the community that I grew up with. My parents, in a rural town in Ohio, were very much part of the civic life. They were members of the rotary club. My father became the president of the rotary club, and then my mom, as soon as the ban on women being president of the rotary clubs, as soon as that lifted, she challenged locally and became the president of the local rotary club.

That sense that you are, as a clinician, a physician, part of the community, that you’re contributing, has always been there. What I love about medicine is the idea that it has this core, thousands-year-old commitment to the idea that all people have equal worth and deserve equal dignity and that we’re enacting that and trying to serve that every day. But that has larger connotations than just whether you are getting the same surgery that some mucky-muck is getting.

Ms. Tippett: This whole matter of our mortality, I was looking at the — just thinking about the title “Being Mortal” and the fact that that is a fact, that being alive is a fatal condition, that we all do have a diagnosis that we will die, and that you just experience again and again and write about how — and yet, that people are almost always surprised. It’s just so fascinating about us. And do you think — is it that we don’t let it into our consciousness, that we haven’t gotten to the point where we can, or that we resist that?

Dr. Gawande: I dove into that topic because I was as confused about it as you are. [ laughs ] First of all, I didn’t know what it meant to be a good doctor for mortal beings, the question of what does it mean to be competent with people who are going to have problems you cannot fix? And also, how do you become competent and great at it if you don’t know whether the problem you’re dealing with, with certainty, is one they’re going to die from or not? And the situations that disturbed me the most were ones where someone would come in, they’d have a condition that I knew was incurable, a terminal cancer, but we don’t know, is it going to be a year? Is it going to be three years? Is it going to be five years? And therefore, we start trying —

Ms. Tippett: And that bar keeps moving all the time now.

Dr. Gawande: That’s right, we have new technologies, and so we’re going to start trying stuff. And then I have so often been there when we said, “Let’s try that one more thing.” And they’re in a bad situation. And we say, “Should we try surgery? Well, yes. We have to give it a try,” and then they never wake up again. And then you see the suffering that has come from that, because we never once talked about the fact that their life might be mortal — is mortal. I didn’t even know how to begin to have that conversation, and they never woke up. They spent the next couple weeks in the ICU, and then we unplugged the machine. They didn’t get to say goodbye. They didn’t get to say, “I love you.” They didn’t get to say, “I’m sorry.”

And the families, I see that they’re tortured, but then you see, also, when people have those kinds of endings — six months later, families are more likely to have PTSD symptoms and depression. And what I realized is, we were not really talking about death or dying. We were really talking about how do you live a good life all the way to the very end, with whatever comes? That’s what you begin to unpack.

Ms. Tippett: And that’s such a different question than “How do I fix this? How do I cure this?” I’ve spoken to so many people, across the years, who were there at the advent of the hospice movement or have been involved in that. You even write about that. Even when you were becoming a doctor, when you were going through your medical training, it was about how do I fix this? And then death was a failure and that at the point at which somebody was definitely going to die, medicine stopped.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The conversation I felt like I was having was, do we fight, or do we give up? And the reality was that it’s not do we fight, or do we give up? It’s what are we fighting for? People have priorities besides just surviving no matter what. You have reasons you want to be alive. What are those reasons? Because whatever you’re living for, along the way, we’ve got to make sure we don’t sacrifice it. And in fact, can we, along the way, whatever’s happening, can we enable it?

Someone said to me, “I want to take my children to Disney World, my grandchildren. One thing I want to make sure I’m able to do is take my grandchildren to Disney World.” She was telling that to me in the hospital, emaciated, on her last days. She would die 48 hours later. And we had missed that. We had failed. We had never asked her, to know that might have mattered to her, because we could have made that possible for her a month before.

Ms. Tippett: If those questions had been asked earlier?

Dr. Gawande: That’s right. So it wasn’t about do we fight or not? It’s that we missed the fight. The fight was to make sure, among other things, that she got to go take her grandchildren to Disney.

[ music: “Scoliosis + Astigmatism” by Melodium ]

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being . Today, with physician and writer Atul Gawande, the author of Being Mortal .

Ms. Tippett: When you’re writing, you’re often — I feel like there are moments when you really are redefining the purpose of medicine as you learned it — well, in a very modern definition. But you said, “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” And it’s not just about prolonging life.

Dr. Gawande: I ended up devoting a chapter to a psychologist from Stanford that it never occurred to me would be where the direction of the book would go. Her name is Laura Carstensen , and she is the psychologist who’s been following people across the course of their lives. She has a cohort of some 300 people, from ages 18 to 94 when they started in her study, and she’d followed them all the way to the end of their life.

What was interesting to me was that as they got older, they became less healthy — no surprise [l aughs ] — and they had some loss of function along the way. But they also had increasing sense of fulfillment in their life , despite all of that. And some other studies , that after age 65, people were more likely to have love in their life. They were less likely to have anxiety and depression. They were focused less on acquisition and having all the material stuff.

Ms. Tippett: This is another one of these great secrets, that growing old is actually a wonderful thing, and we’re all about fighting aging. [ laughs ]

Dr. Gawande: Right, and where it blew up my whole sense of what I was doing as a doctor is, I thought my priority was your health and your independence. And then that means that I was always lost. What is my goal for people when they’re not healthy anymore or they don’t get to be independent? What she opened up for me was the recognition that well-being was really about getting to what made those people happy, and when they lost that happiness is when they no longer were having some control over their own story, that they were not getting to be the shapers of their own story. That’s what you see in people who are in hospitals or in many nursing homes, not all, where our goal is safety, survival, and health. And that’s why you can gradually lose some functions and have some health issues along the way and yet have great satisfactions in life.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, well-being. It’s very concrete too. Enabling well-being is a very lofty idea. And then you talk about this woman who would have liked to have taken her grandkids to Disneyland, which is obviously a big undertaking, but so many of the stories you talk about are — you have these five questions to ask towards the end of life. And some of them are about your understanding of your illness, your fears and worries for the future, your goals and priorities, what outcomes are acceptable. But the fifth one, which seems to come through again and again, is, “What does a good day look like?” I think about Annie Dillard saying, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” And you tell so many stories about how just allowing those days to have the simple things that give people a sense of well-being, that that is everything.

Dr. Gawande: Yes, and this is the crucial question at any moment that people need help. On average, we will come to the end of life — we actually spend less time in dependency now than we used to, but we spend eight years, on average, in needing the help of others, over time. And answering those questions — I’ve found it’s become my favorite dinner party question too — what is the quality of life that you would live for, if you couldn’t do everything you wanted?

One person would say — my father said, for example, it’s being at the family dinner table with family and friends and being able to enjoy some food and conversation and a connection that way. And then I wrote about the other person who said, “Well, if I can eat chocolate ice cream and football on television, that’s good enough for me.”

And then I met a health minister. We were in his office, and he had all these beautiful pictures of his family in the room, and I said, “What is the minimum quality of life? What is the good day for you? Is it being with your family?” And he said, “Well…no.” [ laughs ] “It’s complicated.” He said, “You know, honestly, if I can just have a good book and some quiet, I would give up a lot to still be able to have that.” [ laughs ]

It tells you so much about people, and that’s the powerful thing.

Ms. Tippett: Well, it does, but it also points out, that’s so low-tech. [ laughs ] The medical options are so complicated and expensive and sophisticated, and these are not unreachable goals, even for somebody who might be quite ill, to have a good book.

Dr. Gawande: Absolutely. And sometimes it does take that medical capability. I wrote about Peggy Batchelder, who was my daughter’s — when she was 13 — her piano teacher, who had a metastatic cancer and was laid up in the hospital for weeks on end. She just was miserable and angry and, ultimately, went home on hospice. And then the hospice nurse had that conversation: What does a good day look like? And then: Let’s have a goal, one good day.

And then they worked on that. At first it was, OK, we’re going to get you in a bed on the first floor, so you don’t climb the stairs. We’re going to arrange for getting dressed and bathed. And after two or three days of that, she lifted her sights. And then she wanted to teach piano again.

The idea that that was possible — it was extraordinary. My daughter had the most extraordinary piano lessons. And then there was a recital, and at the recital, they played Brahms and Chopin and Beethoven. It reshaped my daughter’s life, and that was the legacy Peggy wanted to leave.

My daughter just entered — two weeks ago, graduated from high school …

Ms. Tippett: Congratulations.

Dr. Gawande: And entered Berklee School of Music, because of Peggy. They were together only a couple years, but it made that impact. And that idea — that was beyond us.

Ms. Tippett: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Dr. Gawande: And that took real medical expertise too.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, that collaboration. I know you’ve thought about this too, but you talked about growing up in Ohio. You said, “The experience of a modern old age was entirely outside my perception.” Because of changes in family, in society and mobility, we’re so segregated, we don’t have that experience, so I just think about your daughter, also, the experience that she had with her teacher and of someone dying, living while dying, and having a quality to it, seeing that that is actually a time of life that can have an amazing quality to it.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, I was going to ask what you meant by the “quality.” What do you mean when you use the word “quality”?

Ms. Tippett: Well, a quality of life: that there’s meaning and dignity — not just dignity, but real substance. It’s not just somebody who is in bed dying, that they’re living and doing things that matter to them.

Dr. Gawande: That’s right, and it’s finding your way through that, because there’s plenty that also was not quality — that she would arrive, and Peggy had to work her way through some pain and work her way through some indignity, but then, also, find something really beautiful about that. Or, in another case, sometimes see the struggle for that and have real conversations we’d have at home about why is it so hard and painful, and reaching that place where you could see people in denial about the situation and not being able to talk about it. They’d see families where they wouldn’t be able to talk about anything except “What’s the next treatment we can try?” instead of saying, “All right, what is the next treatment we can try? But also, what’s possible today? What can we do today that also makes sure we’re not missing the chance to enjoy the time we have?” Those aren’t opposed to each other. We start to see these conversations unfolding in multiple generations, and I think that’s crucial.

Ms. Tippett: I think a lot about how some of the ways we grow more wise and sophisticated in our thinking are about innovation and some of them are about rediscovering something we forgot. So there’s a way in which modern medicine is meeting a very old experience. You talk about your paternal grandfather in India. Way before people got sent away to nursing homes, people died surrounded by family and at home.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, that complexity — I describe my grandfather’s death. He got to live to 108 years in that village in Maharashtra, with family all around, and he spent the last 20 years of his life with infirmities that would’ve put him in a nursing home in the United States. But there, he was with family. He was at the head of the dinner table. People would come to him to bless their marriages, to get advice on business decisions — he was respected as the elder and could have that all the way to the very end. But it came at a cost. That was possible because the younger generation, especially the women in the younger generation, were more or less enslaved to his needs, his physical needs.

What India’s going through right now is what we went through in the 19th century, which is — the shift from an agricultural economy was that young people got freedom. But I’m watching, and I wrote about the breakdown of the extended family in India as they advance economically and industrialize, because it involves people moving to cities and following their dreams. You get this complicated picture.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, there’s aging and dying, having a long life, and then there’s — another thing you write a lot about is this modern tragedy of lives that are extended, kind of brutally, with all the best intentions and all the best aspirations and all of our best tools. I thought it was interesting that you note that when you have this process of asking patients about their priorities, you discover what they’re living for — that often, that very same process ends up identifying the limits to the kind of care that people want, that that emerges in a humane and organic and very thoughtful way, in a way that it doesn’t when medicine is just in this battle mode of “What’s the next fight?”

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, this is really crucial, because what we often think is that putting your quality of life as a consideration means you’re sacrificing quantity of life, because I’m thinking twice about whether to have that chemotherapy or undergo that operation. And the evidence is that it’s not the case.

There are many kinds of studies. The most powerful one, for me, was the study that Jennifer Temel, a Massachusetts General Hospital physician, led, which took care of stage four lung cancer patients . They lived only, on average, 11 months. It’s a terminal condition; no one lived past about three years. And what she did was, half of the group were randomized to get the usual oncology care, and the other half were randomized to get the usual oncology care plus a palliative care clinician, physician, to see them early in the course of their illness. It was sort of a radical idea — see them from the very beginning.

And the group who saw the palliative care clinicians from the very beginning did end up stopping their chemotherapy. They were 50 percent less likely to be on chemotherapy in their last three months of life. They were 90 percent less likely to be on the chemotherapy in their last two weeks of life. They were less likely to get surgery towards the end. They had one-third lower costs. They started hospice sooner. They spent more time out of the hospital. They were less likely to die in the hospital or die in the ICU. And the kicker was that they not only had overall less suffering, they lived 25 percent longer.

Ms. Tippett: Oh, my gosh. Wow.

Dr. Gawande: That’s the thing we’re missing out on.

Ms. Tippett: That’s fascinating.

Dr. Gawande: It’s like, if it were a cancer drug, if it were a pill, it would be this blockbuster company, and we’d all want stock in it, the whole thing. [ laughs ] And then when I trace down, like, “What are you guys doing, and how can I do it next week without having to be you guys?” — the answer was, they were just having these conversations: Identify the priorities …

Ms. Tippett: It’s just one person talking to another person, one human being and another human being.

Dr. Gawande: And activating the “My good day is ‘X.’ If I start feeling like my chemotherapy or my surgery is going to take that away from me, and that’s not worth it to me, stop.” And then they stop, and they feel better. And they do better for longer because the other thing it hooks up with is that we, as clinicians, are excessively optimistic about the power of what we’re going to be able to do for you.

Ms. Tippett: Well, and physicians are authority figures. Physicians are some of the people in the world who we just hand over and believe that they know. You’ve said that we imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there’s nothing more they can do, but rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. The scenario that you’re describing, where there’s this conversation and this participation, it’s like it gives the patient or the person their agency back.

Dr. Gawande: This was what has been most transformative in my practice that I did not understand. What a clinician does, what we do with our authority has been a very tense issue over time. By the 1990s, when I was in medical school, we had rejected paternalism, rightly — “The doctor knows best; I’m just going to tell you what to do.” We had replaced it with a belief in the patient’s autonomy and a way of activating that. And the way of activating that was to give you options, to tell you, “Here is your condition. Here are the options: option A, option B, option C. Here are the pros, the cons, the risks, the benefits. Now what do you want to do?”

And then what I found in the real world — that was the way I was taught to exercise my authority, was to give people knowledge and then ask what they want to do with it. But what I found in the real world was that patients would ask back, “Well, what would you do?”

Ms. Tippett: What would you — yeah. Right, because you still know better. You still know better.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, and so what we’re taught to say so that you don’t take away their agency was, “No, no, no. This is not for me to decide; this is for you to decide. Only you know you; I don’t know you; and you have to make the call here around what’s more important to you.” And people felt completely abandoned. It never felt good.

What the palliative care clinicians, when I watched them — or geriatricians — would do is they would go one step farther. They would ask — not just tell you what your options are — they would listen, to ask, “What are your goals? What really matters to you?”

And that idea is that you are a genuine counselor. The only way you can offer wisdom is by connecting what you know and have observed about what happens with various things to the goals that this individual person has. The art of it is, can I extract, can I listen well enough, can I extract from this conversation enough to tell me what you really care about, to give you some guidance along the way here?

That is hard. I had to learn from the palliative care folks. One person said to me, “The family conversation is my procedure. It takes as many of those family conversations, learned with deliberate practice, to be great at it as it takes for you to learn to do your cancer operations. And so think of it that way.”

[ music: “Here I Wait” by Wes Swing ]

Ms. Tippett: After a short break, more with Atul Gawande. You can always listen again and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed, now with bite-sized extras wherever podcasts are found.

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being . Today, with Atul Gawande. He’s a citizen physician on frontiers of human agency in light of what modern medicine makes possible. For the millions who have read his book, Being Mortal , he’s also opened new conversations about the ancient human question of death and what it has to do with life.

Ms. Tippett: As I was reading the way you redefine, when you say about medicine, “We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is to enable well-being” — I was thinking about — I was very honored this year to be invited to give the commencement address at the University of Minnesota Medical School. And I was so impressed with the pledge that the students of the class of 2017 had written when they started. And then I think they also give the students the opportunity to rewrite that at the end, but they actually kept the one they had. I wanted to read a little bit of it to you because I wondered, also, if you think there’s a generational shift. I was really stunned. I’ll just read it:

“In the presence of our families, colleagues, and communities, we take this oath in recognition of the honor and privilege of becoming a physician. We arrive at the threshold of our chosen profession, pledging to preserve our humility, integrity, and all the values which brought us to the practice of medicine. We will engage in honest self-reflection, striving for excellence but acknowledging our limitations, and caring for ourselves as we care for others. We will seek to heal the whole person, rather than merely treat disease, committing to a partnership with our patients that empowers them and demonstrates empathy and respect. We will cure sometimes, treat often, and comfort always.”

Dr. Gawande: That’s great.

Ms. Tippett: Isn’t that good?

Dr. Gawande: That last part, in particular.

Ms. Tippett: Isn’t that amazing? And I have to say, it was the day of — there was all this drama going on in Congress about the health care bill and insurance. And it was so wonderful to be with them and see them and read this pledge they’ve taken that they wrote that’s so very different from what I think a doctor of my generation would have written and to see — well, this is the future of medicine. This is it, this care.

Dr. Gawande: I think the place we are coming to is, when you take that pledge seriously, it becomes a really interesting dialogue, because people often are not sure about their goals, or they have contradictory goals. I, for example, will badger my patients about quitting smoking and wearing a seatbelt, but their actions are telling me they want to not wear the seatbelt or want to keep smoking. They’re telling me what their priorities are. So if I’m an effective counselor, I might argue with you about your goals. And that role, as a clinician of all kinds, not just doctors, but it’s nurses, psychologists, teachers, ministers — that is the deeper dialogue.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, but that’s the kind of arguing we do with people we love. That’s also a form of care.

Dr. Gawande: That is when it is health care. [ laughs ]

Ms. Tippett: Right — [ laughs ] well, there you go. Did you know Sherwin Nuland, Shep Nuland? Did you know him personally?

Dr. Gawande: I did. Shep Nuland, surgeon at Yale, read his book, How We Die , which won — I think it was the 1980 or ’82 or something, National Book Award winner, and it just blew the top off my head. That was the book that started me thinking hard about dying and what it means. I read it later — I was in medical school in the ’90s, and I had no idea I would get to meet him and know him then. But when I started writing for The New Yorker and then wrote my first book, Complications , during my surgical residency, he wrote the review in The New York Review of Books and then reached out to me.

It was this great, very special relationship. We met only once, actually, face-to-face, but we weirdly enough, on Talk of the Nation , we ended up doing a regular thing, where he was the senior eminence, and I was but the junior pup doctor, and we would talk about a topic of the day, every few months. It was now and again. But it became this dialogue that carried on. I was such a huge admirer. And someone who was navigating his own difficult paths — he had written about his deep depression and the conflicts he’d had in his life. And so he had a tough life and things he had to struggle through. So that was a very meaningful, influential relationship.

Ms. Tippett: I love thinking about that cross-generational conversation between the two of you. I interviewed him years and years and years ago, and the conversation I had with him was about some of the things he started thinking about later. We actually called the show “The Biology of the Spirit.” And he was thinking a lot about our brains and about what spirit is, and — what did he say — that the human spirit is an accomplishment of the human brain? Just with this awe of — because he went on, after he talked about how we die, about how — the miracle of how much works all the time. How We Live — he wrote that follow-up.

Dr. Gawande: That was the follow-up book, yeah — which, of course, less people are interested in how we live. [ laughs ]

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, less people were interested. And it was just full of wonder. I’m just thinking of that because I want to ask you about this, and I offered that as a way into this idea of spirit, whatever that is, if it is an accomplishment of our biology. But one of the things that I ended up talking with these medical students about was, I really do think — and I want your response — that 50 years from now, people will look back at the way we used to use this phrase, “mind, body, spirit” and think how primitive that was, because so much of what we’re learning is about the distinction between these things — again, however you want to define “spirit,” we know what we’re talking about — but that what we call emotion and spirit are as physical as they are mental and that the brain lays physical pathways and takes bodily direction and that trauma and joy are in our bodies, as much as they’re emotional.

I just wonder if you think about that, because it seems to me that even though — I don’t know that I see you using that language very often — that this runs through your reflection: the wholeness of us, the mysterious fullness of us.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, there’s many ways in which I find the word “spirit” so difficult to understand. I use it all the time. For example, one of the ways I use it is just simply to ask people, after we’re done talking about “How are you doing?” People then tell me about their aches and their pains and what their temperature has been doing and so on. And then I’ll say, “How are your spirits?” Or “How is your spirit?”

That’s one level, but then there’s this interconnected level, the sense of spirit at a kind of — starts to become “spiritual,” the ways in which there’s some sense of something transcendent, at least across all of people, if not beyond that. I grapple with it a little bit towards the end of the book when I take my dad’s ashes to the Ganges, because again, I’m the apostate Hindu, the ultra scientist — and “What’s the data?” But for him and my mother, it was that you bring your ashes to the Ganges in order to allow yourself to be released from the cycle of birth and rebirth and enter the state of nirvana, where it’s kind of like a heaven, is the way I think about it.

But there was, for me, a sense of the spiritual connected to going there on the Ganges in one of those little boats and undergoing a ritual that has been going on for hundreds of years, more than a millennia, at least, probably a couple thousand years, and people coming and bringing the ashes of family members and chanting these same chants and being connected to this whole chain of generations, where there are things that my father completed that came from the generations before him; there are things that he was passing onto me and my sister that we are responsible for carrying on; and that there is something much larger than us that matters.

I end up calling it “loyalty” in the book. I wrote about Royce, a philosopher who was at Harvard in the late 19th century and wrote a book at the very beginning of the 20th century, called The Philosophy of Loyalty . And what it meant was that — he was arguing, we all have a deep need to live for something larger than ourselves. He went through a series of thought experiments to demonstrate it. One of them that really stuck with me was asking, “If I told you, half an hour after you die the world would blow up with everybody you know in it, would that matter to you?” For the vast majority of people, it would matter. And the reason why it matters to people is that it feels like it takes away — that the meaning of your life would be gone, that we’re not all, at core, totally self-interested creatures, that we have things we live for that are larger.

Now, that’s not the only piece of evidence. There’s lots of others that he goes through and then others you can think about, along the way. But that, for me, is part of that idea. It’s the closest thing I come to, to being able to recognize that idea of spirituality and connection and meaning that rises above your own life.

[ music: “You’re So Very Far Away” by Clem Leek ]

Ms. Tippett: Here’s some very beautiful language in your book. I don’t know if this was in the book. Anyway, you said this or wrote this somewhere, that “We are a link in a chain in making a contribution that goes well beyond our own life. And that’s part of what makes dying tolerable. That’s what makes being a mortal creature tolerable.”

Dr. Gawande: Yes, a weird thought came to mind. I just finished, recently, this three-book series by a Chinese science fiction writer named Liu Cixin. It begins with a book called The Three-Body Problem .

Ms. Tippett: I tried to read those books, and I couldn’t get into them. Did you love them?

Dr. Gawande: Did you really? You know what I’m talking about. Oh, my God — I totally fell into them. [ laughs ]

Ms. Tippett: I love the title, The Three-Body Problem . I was really drawn to that. [ laughs ]

Dr. Gawande: Right. The characters are unbelievably cardboard. They have no depth whatsoever. But it has this extraordinary scale of time, partly because, yes, the three-body problem is this other planetary system, which has three suns, and the planet is captured by the gravity of each of those suns. So every day, you’re never sure when the sun is going to come up, what the temperature is going to be, whether it’s going to be 300 degrees or minus-300 degrees, and how long the day will last — all those things — and will it be a habitable climate or not. And the creatures will dehydrate when it becomes terrible, and then, when water appears again, they rehydrate and then continue civilization. It pushes the questions, because what he’s imagining is the extinction of human beings but the continuance of other forms of life and how wide our imaginations go towards bringing those in and making them feel that they are part of our chain of being. Can we have a chain of being that goes on 15 billion years, that go beyond — Earth is extinguished, and humanity is extinguished, but we still feel there is spirit, in some way?

I don’t know, it made me think of that, and I kind of believe in that. I found it really beautiful that it managed to expand my mind, to make me feel that I’m part of life and that even after human beings are gone, that there is meaning in our little contributions.

Ms. Tippett: Sometimes, you are called — I don’t know if you refer to yourself this way — a “public health journalist,” in addition to being a physician, obviously. I’m starting to think of you — I like this language of “citizen scientist.” I kind of feel like “citizen physician” would be a good thing to call you. Do you like that?

Dr. Gawande: The word that I really liked, you used, was “citizen.” What I’m partly trying to do is open the portal both ways, that the world of what happens to you in the course of our average, currently, 80-plus-year existence, is one where the people that are part of that relationship on the clinical side are also people themselves who are journeying through that pathway. I’m fumbling for this a little bit, but the sense that the portal that I hope I open is that I’m speaking not only as a physician to the outside world, but I’m also opening the outside world to us as physicians and nurses and others, to think of ourselves as just citizens and to break down that inside/outside and to make it all kind of seamless. It’s a sensibility, more than anything I’m trying to make happen.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, it’s a porousness, though, too, and it’s a conversation that you’re curating, making possible.

Dr. Gawande: Yeah, and the sense of — I like getting down into the microscopic of the real stories of what happens when human beings care for one another and enter into these kinds of relationships, and you see everything that flows through there: money and jealousy and politics and misunderstanding and conversation, et cetera.

And then, furthermore, we’re this interplay of knowledge and technology and trying to function in a world where none of us have a full handle on it all. We’re inside a system, and we have to have some agency in that system. How do we not be powerless? And how do we shape that thing we’re part of? I’m interested in not only the sense of inside and outside; I’m also interested in the sense of the microscopic to the telescopic and starting to arrive at a way that we feel connected, and we know the meaning and the feelings, as well as the data, about what’s happening.

Ms. Tippett: Yes, and as you write about, this is a sphere of some of the most cathartic, existential, and potentially meaningful moments of being human, of our whole lives, take place in the context of health care. That’s huge.

Dr. Gawande: That’s why I feel like I have the unfair advantage of my fellow writers at The New Yorker [ laughs ]. I live inside this material that is extraordinary every day, and I get to think about all these really confusing, interesting, sometimes distressing things, like, do we have a right to this stuff called health care? Why are the costs so high? Or, why do we itch? What the heck is going on there?

Ms. Tippett: And how does investigating itching lead us to the question of consciousness itself? [ laughs ] It’s what you do.

Dr. Gawande: Right. [ laughs ] Yeah, right.

Ms. Tippett: I want to say too, the question of what it means to be human, a big, ancient question, it actually runs — it’s not just being mortal, but being human that runs all the way through your work. Here’s some beautiful language from the epilogue of Being Mortal : “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone.” The fact that we are limited is something that you come back to. I think you say, “To be human is to be limited.” That has informed the way you have grappled with the definition and practice of medicine.

I’m curious about how this fact, this reality that to be human is to be limited, which is also so hard for us to take in, how that spills over into other aspects of the way you move through the world, how you move through the world as a human being.

Dr. Gawande: The first way that I think about it is — well, two things jump to mind. Number one, in my public health work, it’s about the idea that we’re all so incredibly limited, and yet there are ways that we string together and are almost unlimited as groups of people. It’s the kind of magic of when that happens, when you all start pulling together and then you eradicate polio from the world, which we’re almost on the verge of doing. It’s just fricking amazing when you see that happen and how these limited, flawed — and to me, that was the amazement of surgery. We’re these smart, great people, but we’re all limited and yet can pull off these incredible, risky, complicated operations and forms of care that give people back their lives and give them many years of better life. So that’s one, that’s the first one that I went to.

And then the second direction — it’s quite the opposite, which is that as I walk through the world, I’m constantly combating the fact that I feel the sense of coping with that limitation and being constantly aware of those limitations. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, which in many ways encapsulates me, is a gravestone that reads, “He kept his options open.” [ laughs ] And my way of navigating through limitation is trying, as much as possible, to keep my options open, try to navigate with as minimal risk as possible, which means you don’t accomplish anything. So I’m always fighting that sense of needing to take the leap, despite the reality of imperfection, of mistakes, and push forward, make your bets. I have to make my bet without 100 percent of the information and certainty.

And that’s, in many ways, to come full circle, the attraction to me about going into a field like surgery was very similar to the ones that drew me into the world of politics, which is that the best people I saw in surgery were like the best leaders, politicians I saw — who recognized that we’re limited, that you don’t have all the knowledge, that your abilities are imperfect, the information is incomplete, and yet, there are times when acting is the better choice than not to act. And then you live with the consequences and learn from them, take ownership and responsibility, and move on. That sense of enacting that in our lives feels really important for me to aspire to.

[ music: “Awakening” by Random Forest ]

Ms. Tippett: Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He’s also professor in the department of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and he’s Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He was recently named the CEO of Haven, a healthcare venture spearheaded by the leaders of Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. He’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and is the author of four books, including The Checklist Manifesto and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End .

[ music: “My Only Swerving” by El Ten Eleven ]

Staff: On Being is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Bethany Iverson, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Damon Lee, Suzette Burley, Katie Gordon, Zack Rose, and Serri Graslie.

Ms. Tippett: The On Being Project is located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include:

The John Templeton Foundation. Harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing human kind. Learn about cutting-edge research on the science of generosity, gratitude, and purpose at templeton.org/discoveries .

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org .

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And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community development, and education.

Books & Music

Recommended reading.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Author: Atul Gawande

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

The On Being Project is an affiliate partner of Bookshop.org and Amazon.com. Any earnings we receive through these affiliate partnerships go into directly supporting The On Being Project.

Music Played

Cerebro Spin

And the Heart

Artist: Wes Swing

Into The Trees - Deluxe

Artist: Zoe Keating

Artist: Random Forest

El Ten Eleven

Funding provided in part by the John Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation supports research and civil dialogue on the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? To learn more, please visit templeton.org .

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A philosopher’s questioning and a scientist’s eye shape Enrique Martínez Celaya’s original approach to art and to life. A world-renowned painter who trained as a physicist, he’s fascinated by the deeper order that “whispers” beneath the surface of things. Works of art that endure, he says, possess their own form of consciousness. And a quiet life of purpose is a particular form of prophecy.

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Google is changing the way its popular search feature works, feeding users AI-generated replies to their questions rather than directing them to other websites. The Post's AI reporter Gerrit De Vynck says it could change the internet forever.

At its annual developer conference this week, tech giant Google is expected to tout big changes to its signature product, search. Instead of directing users to a list of websites or showing them an excerpt, Google’s AI will craft paragraphs of text that tries to answer users’ questions directly. 

AI reporter Gerrit De Vynck says the change could have huge consequences for the internet . Because AI chatbots are still unreliable, and because the information feeding the generative answers comes from a range of sources, users will need to watch out for false information. And the new format means that sources across the web –  bloggers, businesses,  newspapers and other publishers – are likely to see a huge loss of traffic.

Gerrit joins us to break down what the changes to Google search mean for users, and why the company is moving in this direction.

Today’s show was produced by Emma Talkoff. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and mixed by Sean Carter. Thanks also to Heather Kelly. 

Also on the show: The Climate Solutions team at the Post has an eye-opening story about the benefits of leaving your lawn unmowed and letting nature do its thing. Read it here .

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Is the Drake-Kendrick rap beef good for hip-hop?

In today’s bonus episode, we break down Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud, the biggest beef in recent rap history.

Body positivity in the age of Ozempic

People are turning to drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight – but where do they fit in the body-positivity movement? Today on Post Reports, what some fat activists think of these drugs and how one doctor is talking about these medicines with her patients.

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Explore our directory of fiction podcasts, audio dramas, audiobooks, and radio plays that you can listen to and enjoy at your pace. With nearly 1,000 listings and dozens of new finales and completions added every week, The End is the comprehensive directory for completed audio fiction shows. Every listing in The End is either a season finale, a complete season, or is announcing a new season returning soon, complete with helpful listening links direct to most listening apps. Enter your email address below and get  updated every Thursday as to what shows have been been freshly added, plus some recommendations for your next audio fiction fix!

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The End highlights an overlooked segment of audio fiction: completed stories. Each issue of our newsletter highlights a combination of audio fiction—mostly in podcast form. Two shows are personal recommendations of mine. Other shows have recently reached a stopping point, and some serialized audio fiction shows are returning soon with a brand new season. Regardless, those who prefer to control their own listening will know what's ready for their own personal all-they-can-eat buffet of fresh and fabulous audio fiction.

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how to end a podcast

Introduction.

Welcome to the ultimate guide on how to end a podcast! If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve embarked on an incredible podcasting journey and now find yourself contemplating the inevitable conclusion. While starting a podcast is exciting, ending one can be equally challenging and important. In this comprehensive blog post, we will delve into every aspect of ending a podcast, providing you with the insights, strategies, and considerations necessary to bring your podcast to a satisfying and meaningful conclusion.

Understanding the Significance of Ending a Podcast

Podcasts have become a powerful medium for storytelling, education, entertainment, and connecting with audiences around the world. Just as in any form of media, a podcast’s ending holds immense importance. It’s the final chapter in your podcasting journey, the culmination of countless hours of planning, recording, editing, and engaging with your audience.

Common Challenges Faced When Ending a Podcast

The decision to end a podcast may arise due to a variety of reasons. Perhaps you’ve achieved the goals you initially set out to accomplish, or maybe your interests and priorities have shifted. Regardless of the reason, there are common challenges that podcasters face when it comes to wrapping up their shows.

One of the primary challenges is determining the ideal time to end your podcast. You want to ensure that you’ve covered the topics you set out to explore, while also avoiding the risk of losing momentum or interest from your audience. Additionally, you may face emotional challenges when bidding farewell to a project that has become a significant part of your life.

The Importance of Planning and Preparation

Just as you meticulously planned and prepared when launching your podcast, the same level of attention is required when ending it. Proper planning and preparation will not only aid in the smooth conclusion of your podcast but also allow you to reflect on your journey and create a memorable and impactful ending for your audience.

By taking the time to consider the various aspects of ending a podcast, you can ensure that you leave a lasting impression on your listeners and maintain a positive relationship with your audience even after your podcast concludes.

In the next section, we will explore how to prepare for the end of your podcast, including assessing your podcast’s purpose and goals, determining the ideal timeline, and effectively communicating with your audience. So, let’s dive in and discover the steps to successfully concluding your podcasting journey!

Preparing for the End

Before you bid farewell to your podcast, it’s crucial to take the time to prepare for the end. This preparation phase will help you ensure a smooth transition and allow you to make the most of your final episodes. Let’s explore the key steps involved in preparing for the end of your podcast.

Assessing Your Podcast’s Purpose and Goals

As you approach the conclusion of your podcast, it’s essential to reflect on the initial purpose and goals you set for your show. Take a moment to evaluate whether you have achieved what you set out to accomplish. Consider the impact you intended to make, the audience you aimed to reach, and the topics you wanted to cover. This assessment will not only help you gauge your podcast’s success but also provide valuable insights for the final episodes.

Determining the Ideal Timeline

Deciding on the timeline for ending your podcast is a crucial aspect of preparation. You want to strike a balance between providing enough notice to your audience and avoiding a prolonged farewell that could lead to disengagement. Consider how many episodes you have left and the frequency at which you release them. It’s also essential to factor in any significant events or milestones you want to cover before concluding your podcast.

Communicating with Your Audience

Effective communication with your audience is vital during this phase of ending your podcast. Your listeners have invested their time and energy into your show, and it’s essential to keep them informed about your decision to conclude it. Be transparent and open about your reasons for ending the podcast, and assure your audience that you appreciate their support throughout the journey. This will help maintain a positive connection and ensure a smooth transition.

Setting Clear Expectations for the Final Episodes

To keep your audience engaged and excited about the final episodes, it’s essential to set clear expectations. Let them know what they can expect in terms of content, format, and any special guests or surprises. Consider creating a roadmap or schedule for the remaining episodes and share it with your audience. This will help build anticipation and ensure that your listeners don’t miss out on any important moments.

Reflecting on Your Podcasting Journey and Accomplishments

As you approach the end of your podcast, take the time to reflect on your journey and the accomplishments you’ve achieved along the way. Celebrate the milestones, memorable episodes, and impactful moments that have defined your show. Sharing these reflections with your audience can create a sense of nostalgia and gratitude, allowing both you and your listeners to appreciate the journey you’ve taken together.

By thoroughly preparing for the end of your podcast, you can ensure a smooth transition, maintain a positive relationship with your audience, and create a powerful final chapter that leaves a lasting impression. Now that we’ve covered the preparation phase, let’s move on to the next section, where we’ll explore how to craft your final episodes.

Crafting Your Final Episodes

As you approach the end of your podcasting journey, it’s essential to put careful thought and consideration into crafting your final episodes. These episodes will serve as the last impression you leave on your audience, and they have the potential to create a lasting impact. In this section, we will explore various strategies and considerations for creating memorable and meaningful final episodes.

Choosing a Format for the Final Episodes

The format you choose for your final episodes will depend on the nature of your podcast and the goals you want to achieve. Consider whether you want to have a retrospective episode, where you reflect on the highlights and key moments from your podcasting journey. Alternatively, you may choose to have a series of interviews or conversations with special guests who have been a part of your podcast’s success. Another option could be to focus on a specific theme or topic that encapsulates the essence of your show. The key is to select a format that aligns with your podcast’s identity and resonates with your audience.

Highlighting Memorable Moments and Episodes

Your final episodes provide an excellent opportunity to revisit and highlight memorable moments and episodes from your podcast. Consider selecting the most impactful and engaging segments that have resonated with your audience. You can include snippets of interviews, discussions, or monologues that encapsulate the essence of your show. By revisiting these moments, you can evoke nostalgia and gratitude in your listeners while reminding them of the value your podcast has provided.

Inviting Special Guests or Contributors

Bringing in special guests or contributors for your final episodes can add an extra layer of excitement and significance. Consider reaching out to previous guests who have made an impact on your podcast or inviting industry experts or influencers who have supported your show. These guests can provide unique perspectives, share their experiences, and offer insights that complement the overall theme or purpose of your podcast. Their participation can also serve as a way to express gratitude and acknowledge their contributions to your podcast’s success.

Creating a Sense of Closure and Nostalgia

As you approach the end of your podcast, it’s essential to create a sense of closure and nostalgia for both yourself and your audience. Reflect on the journey you’ve taken, the lessons you’ve learned, and the growth you’ve experienced. Share personal anecdotes and stories that highlight the impact podcasting has had on your life. Creating an emotional connection with your listeners will help them feel a sense of closure and allow them to reminisce about the journey they’ve taken with you.

Addressing the Future of Your Podcast or Potential Spin-offs

In your final episodes, it’s crucial to address the future of your podcast or any potential spin-offs. Communicate your plans for what comes next, whether it’s a new podcast, a different creative endeavor, or a break from podcasting altogether. This helps your audience understand that although this particular podcast is coming to an end, your journey as a content creator is continuing. It also provides an opportunity to generate excitement and curiosity about what lies ahead, ensuring that your listeners stay engaged and connected to your future endeavors.

Crafting your final episodes requires careful consideration of the format, content, and messaging. By choosing the right format, highlighting memorable moments, inviting special guests, creating a sense of closure, and addressing the future, you can ensure that your final episodes leave a lasting impression on your audience. In the next section, we will explore how to promote and share your final episodes effectively.

Promoting and Sharing the Final Episodes

As you near the end of your podcasting journey, promoting and sharing your final episodes becomes crucial to ensuring that your audience is aware and engaged. Effective promotion allows you to build anticipation, generate excitement, and maximize the impact of your concluding episodes. In this section, we will explore various strategies and techniques to promote and share your final episodes effectively.

Building Anticipation for the Final Episodes

Creating anticipation is key to engaging your audience and building excitement around your final episodes. Start by teasing the upcoming episodes through your podcast’s social media platforms, website, or email newsletters. Share behind-the-scenes glimpses, intriguing snippets, or hints about what your listeners can expect. This will pique their curiosity and make them eager to tune in to the final chapters of your podcast.

Leveraging Your Podcast’s Social Media Platforms

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting and sharing your podcast’s final episodes. Utilize platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to engage with your audience and spread the word about your concluding episodes. Consider creating compelling graphics, videos, or teaser clips that capture the essence of your podcast and entice your followers to listen. Engage in conversations, respond to comments, and encourage your audience to share their favorite moments from your podcast.

Collaborating with Other Podcasters or Influencers

Collaborating with other podcasters or influencers can greatly amplify the promotion of your final episodes. Identify individuals or shows within your niche or industry that align with your podcast’s themes or target audience. Reach out to them and explore opportunities for cross-promotion, guest appearances, or joint episodes. By tapping into their existing audience, you can expand your reach and attract new listeners who may be interested in your podcast’s conclusion.

Encouraging Audience Engagement and Feedback

Engaging your audience and encouraging their active participation can enhance the promotion of your final episodes. Create opportunities for them to share their thoughts, memories, or favorite episodes from your podcast. Consider running contests, polls, or giveaways that incentivize engagement. Incorporate listener feedback or testimonials into your final episodes, allowing your audience to be part of the farewell experience. By involving your listeners in the process, you not only generate enthusiasm but also foster a sense of community and connection.

Utilizing Email Newsletters and Other Marketing Channels

Your email newsletter is a valuable asset for promoting and sharing your final episodes. Craft engaging and personalized emails that highlight the significance of your podcast’s conclusion and provide exclusive content or insights to your subscribers. Additionally, consider leveraging other marketing channels such as your website, blog, or YouTube channel to reach a wider audience. Repurpose content from your final episodes into blog posts, videos, or infographics, creating multiple touchpoints for your audience to engage with.

Promoting and sharing your final episodes requires a strategic and multi-faceted approach. By building anticipation, leveraging social media, collaborating with others, encouraging audience engagement, and utilizing various marketing channels, you can ensure that your concluding episodes receive the attention and recognition they deserve. In the next section, we will explore the essential steps for wrapping up and moving forward after the end of your podcast.

Wrapping Up and Moving Forward

Congratulations! You have successfully navigated through the process of ending your podcast. As you conclude this chapter of your podcasting journey, it’s essential to wrap up loose ends, express gratitude, and prepare for what lies ahead. In this section, we will explore the essential steps for wrapping up and moving forward after the end of your podcast.

Properly Concluding Your Podcast’s Journey

As you approach the final moments of your podcast, it’s crucial to provide a proper conclusion that leaves a lasting impression on your audience. Craft a thoughtful and heartfelt closing episode that summarizes your podcasting journey, acknowledges the support of your listeners, and expresses your appreciation for their engagement. Use this opportunity to reflect on the lessons you’ve learned, the growth you’ve experienced, and the impact you’ve made. Leave your audience with a sense of closure and satisfaction, ensuring that they feel connected to the overall narrative of your podcast.

Expressing Gratitude to Your Audience and Supporters

Your audience and supporters have been instrumental in the success of your podcast, and it’s important to express your gratitude to them as you conclude your show. Dedicate time in your final episodes to thank your listeners for their loyalty, feedback, and engagement throughout your podcasting journey. Consider mentioning specific individuals or highlighting memorable interactions that have made a significant impact. You can also express gratitude through social media posts, personalized emails, or even handwritten notes to those who have supported you along the way. Showing appreciation builds goodwill and strengthens the connection between you and your audience.

Archiving and Preserving Your Podcast’s Content

Preserving your podcast’s content is an important step in wrapping up. Consider archiving your episodes on platforms like SoundCloud, Libsyn, or Archive.org to ensure they remain accessible to your audience even after your podcast concludes. This allows new listeners to discover and engage with your content in the future. Additionally, consider creating a comprehensive library or archive on your website or blog, organizing your episodes by theme or category for easy navigation. By preserving your podcast’s content, you leave a lasting legacy and provide a resource for those interested in exploring your podcast’s topics.

Analyzing the Performance and Impact of Your Podcast

After concluding your podcast, take the time to analyze its performance and impact. Evaluate key metrics such as download numbers, listener engagement, feedback, and reviews. Reflect on how your podcast has influenced your audience, the connections you’ve made, and the value it has provided to your listeners. Consider conducting surveys or seeking direct feedback from your audience to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences and perspectives. This analysis will provide valuable insights as you reflect on your podcasting journey and prepare for future endeavors.

Exploring Future Podcasting Opportunities or Ventures

Although one podcast may be coming to an end, your journey as a content creator continues. Take the time to explore future podcasting opportunities or ventures that align with your interests, goals, and expertise. This could involve launching a new podcast on a different topic, collaborating with other creators, or exploring other forms of media and storytelling. Reflect on the lessons learned from your previous podcast and use them as a foundation for future endeavors. Embrace the possibilities that lie ahead and approach them with enthusiasm and creativity.

By properly wrapping up your podcast’s journey, expressing gratitude, preserving your content, analyzing its impact, and exploring future opportunities, you can ensure a smooth transition into the next phase of your podcasting career. Now that we have covered the essential steps for wrapping up, we can move on to the concluding section of this comprehensive guide.

Congratulations on reaching the end of this comprehensive guide on how to end a podcast! Throughout this blog post, we have explored the various aspects involved in concluding your podcast in a meaningful and impactful way. From the importance of preparing and planning for the end to crafting memorable final episodes, promoting and sharing your concluding episodes, wrapping up loose ends, and moving forward, you now have a solid understanding of the steps required to successfully conclude your podcasting journey.

Ending a podcast is not an easy task, but by following the strategies and considerations outlined in this guide, you can ensure that your podcast concludes on a high note. Remember to assess your podcast’s purpose and goals, determine the ideal timeline, communicate with your audience, and set clear expectations for the final episodes. Craft your final episodes thoughtfully by choosing the right format, highlighting memorable moments, inviting special guests, and creating a sense of closure and nostalgia.

Promote and share your final episodes effectively by building anticipation, leveraging social media, collaborating with others, encouraging audience engagement, and utilizing various marketing channels. Once your podcast reaches its conclusion, wrap up loose ends by providing a proper conclusion, expressing gratitude to your audience and supporters, archiving and preserving your podcast’s content, analyzing its performance and impact, and exploring future podcasting opportunities or ventures.

Remember, ending a podcast is not the end of your journey as a content creator. It’s an opportunity to reflect, learn, and embark on new and exciting ventures. Embrace the possibilities, take the lessons learned, and use them as a foundation for your future endeavors.

Thank you for joining us on this journey to learn how to end a podcast. We hope this guide has provided you with the insights and strategies necessary to bring your podcast to a satisfying and meaningful conclusion. Best of luck in your future podcasting endeavors!

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Tech at Work: How the End of Cookies Will Transform Digital Marketing

What will the end of third-party cookies mean for digital advertising, online publishing, and the open Internet?

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Google is planning to phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2025. Consumers may be cheering the improved privacy online, but what will this huge shift in advertising technology mean for digital advertising, online publishing, and the open Internet?

Tech at Work is a four-part special series from HBR IdeaCast . Join senior tech editors Juan Martinez and Tom Stackpole for research, stories, and advice to make technology work for you and your team.

In this episode, researcher Garrett Johnson and executive Jamie Seltzer discuss the new technologies that are already being tested to replace cookies. They explain the trade-offs and how digital marketers are preparing for this change, as well as share how the online advertising and publishing industries may be affected.

Johnson is an associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Seltzer is global executive vice president at Havas Media Network, where she leads CSA, Havas Media’s global data and technology consulting group.

New episodes of Tech at Work publish in the HBR IdeaCast feed every other Thursday from May 2, after the regular Tuesday episode. Please let us know what you think of the series and which technology topics you want us to cover at [email protected] .

Further reading:

• Privacy-Centric Digital Advertising: Implications for Research (Garrett Johnson, Julian Runge, Eric Seufert)
• The Cookies are Crumbling: What’s Next for Digital Advertising? (Garrett Johnson)
• A New Gold Standard for Digital Ad Measurement? (Julian Runge, Harpreet Patter, and Igor Skokan)

TOM STACKPOLE: Google is planning to phase out third-party cookies sometime next year. These are little files that are stored on your browser as you go from website to website, and they help companies track your identity. So Juan, what’s your take on this big change?

JUAN MARTINEZ: If I were a digital marketer, I’d be panicking right now. But I don’t think consumers will care, they’re not going to stop seeing ads, but the ads will be less relevant. They won’t track you from one website to the other, but they’ll track you within the website that you’re in. So for the average person, this is not going to matter very much, but for the digital marketer, this is going to be a game-changer.

TOM STACKPOLE: Yeah, consumers may not be aware of this, but they’re the reason it’s happening. Let’s hear for a second from Hanne Tuomisto-Inch who works on privacy at Google. She was speaking to Chrome browser developers in a video about this change. She calls cookies identifiers here.

HANNE TUOMISTO-INCH: We have reached a clear turning point where the downsides of the identifiers outweigh the benefits. People are increasingly aware of how their data is used online and their expectations for privacy are growing.

TOM STACKPOLE: So for a long time, users have traded privacy in return for a free and open web that’s paid for by advertisers. Cookies track where you go on the web, they let advertisers serve up personalized ads wherever you go, and the personalization makes those ads more valuable. But now this is changing. Juan, how do you feel about that?

JUAN MARTINEZ: For me, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I don’t want to poo-poo anyone’s privacy concerns, but cookies have been around a while and none of us have really been tormented by anything but pictures of things that we’ve already bought several times. So I’m not sure where the hullabaloo is coming from, but I respect the people who know more about this who say it’s something that they want. I’m just not too concerned about it.

TOM STACKPOLE: I think maybe not surprisingly, I have a different take on the privacy question because I think I feel a little more uncomfortable with just the amount of information that’s out there. Targeted advertising has created all these incentives for how we use the internet and also the internet that is available for us to use. And that may or may not change with targeting going away, but the fact that the internet is really built as a big data factory now, I think has created sort of uncomfortable trade-offs that we’re making as users that we’re sort of getting more aware of.

JUAN MARTINEZ: For me, the question is, how are advertisers going to respond to this? How are they testing it? What are they learning? I don’t think it’s going to totally destroy the internet the way that some people are making this out to be. Not you Tom, but other people.

TOM STACKPOLE: Welcome to Tech At Work , a four-part special series of the HBR IdeaCast . I’m Tom Stackpole.

JUAN MARTINEZ: And I’m Juan Martinez. Every other Thursday we’ll bring you research, stories and advice about the technology that’s changing work and how to manage it.

TOM STACKPOLE: So this week we’re talking about the death of third-party cookies. If you’re a digital marketer, you’re going to hear how others in the industry are trying to adapt to this new paradigm.

JUAN MARTINEZ: And if you’re not a marketer, you’ll get a better understanding of how this huge technological transformation might reshape the open web as we know it.

TOM STACKPOLE: Later on, we’ll talk with an executive at a global ad agency to learn how she’s guiding her clients through this transition.

JAMIE SELTZER: Nobody knows what’s coming, so I think we all have to just accept that we’re all going to learn on the fly a little bit.

TOM STACKPOLE: But first, we’ll hear from a marketing professor who studies ad effectiveness and related privacy issues. He’ll break down the trade-offs of the new technologies that are already being tested to replace cookies. Garrett Johnson is an associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. And just a quick disclosure here at the top, Garrett is advising the UK Competition and Markets Authority on their review of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. The opinions he expresses in this conversation are his own, not those of the CMA. We spoke to him in late March.

So let’s start off with some basics. Could you just kind of explain what third-party cookies are? What are their value and how have they kind of shaped the web as we know it?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Yeah, so a cookie is just a text file that has a synonymous identifier, which allows the web to have a memory. So without cookies, if we put something in our carts online, we would go to the carts and the website wouldn’t remember what’s there. That would be like a first-party cookie. So a cookie that’s set by the website that you’re visiting. A third-party cookie is when another usually vendor that the website’s hired to do some work puts one of these identifiers on your computer and that allows the web to know who you are across websites. So advertisers can see who sees an ad and then subsequently purchases on their website. And more generally, it helps advertisers to target advertising based on a user’s interests inferred from browsing. So this is a fundamental technology to the web and it’s really important for monetizing content. I have some research with some co-authors looking at what happens to the price of advertising when users opt out of cookies and we show that advertising prices fall fifty-two percent. So put another way, with a cookie, you effectively double the revenue that’s coming from one of the advertisements. And so this pays for the free content and services that we enjoy on the web.

TOM STACKPOLE: So often when we talk about third-party cookies going away, that’s couched in the language of privacy. Users are going to get more privacy because this tool is going away, so they’re going to be tracked less as they ping-pong around the web. Why is this happening now? Where is the pressure coming from?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of momentum from different places. I think in general, the bloom is sort of off the rose when it comes to big tech in society. Certainly we see that with privacy regulations, most importantly with the GDPR in Europe, really trying to clamp down on advertising technology.

TOM STACKPOLE: Can you just quickly define what the GDPR is?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Yeah, the GDPR, it stands for the General Data Protection Regulation, and this was started in May of 2018 and it provides comprehensive privacy or data protection reform for not only European residents and European companies, but all companies worldwide that are serving customers in Europe. And so when you have a lot of momentum for privacy, as a tech company, I think what you want to do is you want to show the world that you are trying to do something about this issue, in part because you want to preempt regulation or enforcement from the regulators and make sure that they are satisfied with the progress you’re making.

JUAN MARTINEZ: What have we learned from the people that have been dealing with this for the past six years? What’s the state of play there?

GARRETT JOHNSON: I mean, honestly, I think it really highlights this tension we have between wanting to live in a data-driven economy, but wanting privacy at the same time. So if you get rid of cookies, there’s basically four categories of advertising that takes its place. The first is contextual advertising, then cookie lists replacement IDs, then the walled gardens, and then privacy-centric advertising like Privacy Sandbox. So let’s kind of take each one of those in turn. So the first is contextual advertising, and that just means that a consumer is going to see a finance-related ad on a finance-related website.

Now the second thing is cookie list replacement IDs. So many people have probably noticed that when you go to a website now, often the websites ask you to log in. And that’s because effectively the industry is replacing the cookie ID with a synonymized version of your email address in order to be able to stitch who you are across websites. And if they can’t do that, then often the industry falls back on other signals that your browser is sending out like your IP address and characteristics of your browser that allow the industry to do what’s called fingerprinting, which just makes some best guess of who you are. And then the third thing is walled gardens. So this is companies like Facebook and Meta and Amazon that just have a lot of scale and ease of use and first-party data. And then the last thing is a total reinvention of how advertising works to be on a foundation of privacy-enhancing technologies. So we can talk about Privacy Sandbox, which is the most salient example of that.

TOM STACKPOLE: So the rollout for that has been shifting. We started to see some of that this year. So what is happening there and where is the timeline headed?

GARRETT JOHNSON: So for the Privacy Sandbox, there’s different technologies to help target advertising, to help measure advertising, to detect fraud in advertising. One thing that people need to realize is that Privacy Sandbox is not just this theoretical idea. This has been released in essentially all Chrome browsers since September. And Google got rid of cookies for 1% of users in January of this year, and that’s like tens of millions of users. But I think that as a whole, the industry has been hitting snooze on this problem. The loss of third-party cookies and the move towards privacy-centric advertising is a seismic shift in advertising. I think it is like the asteroid coming towards planet advertising. And so as a whole, the industry is probably under-prepared for these changes that are coming.

JUAN MARTINEZ: And is there any data comparing Privacy Sandbox to third-party cookies? How well do the Privacy Sandbox tools work? Will they replace cookies entirely, do you think? How is it going to play out?

GARRETT JOHNSON: It’s very early days. So I mentioned that Google removed cookies for 1% of users in January of 2024. And this is actually part of an experiment that Google is running in coordination with the British Regulator, the CMA, or Competition and Markets Authority. And what that experiment is trying to do is exactly establish how Privacy Sandbox performs. As a researcher myself, I’m working with different companies to measure how well this is performing. And so I’m working with one company that works with a lot of publishers to sell advertising. And so the experiment has three groups. The first group is just the status quo with third-party cookies. The second is cookie lists, so no cookies. And then the third group is no cookies, but Privacy Sandbox. And with that data, we can see how the revenue differences compare across these three groups. And what we see is that the cookie list group performs about 30% worse than the status quo group, and the Privacy Sandbox group performs about 28% worse than the status quo group. So that’s an additional benefit of roughly six percent. Now, this is as of mid-March. Certainly, if there’s people that are running websites out there in the audience, you may have just audibly gasped. I want to reassure you that this is very early days, and so as we see more companies enter into this space, we should see those numbers change in terms of publisher revenue.

TOM STACKPOLE: Yeah, I have to say that those numbers are… They don’t make me feel great about-

JUAN MARTINEZ: Getting rid of cookies was your idea, Tom.

TOM STACKPOLE: I wanted to talk about getting rid of cookies. It wasn’t my idea.

GARRETT JOHNSON: Oh, are you a cookie-hater or are you pro-cookie?

JUAN MARTINEZ: Yes, Tom is super privacy.

TOM STACKPOLE: I’m a privacy guy.

GARRETT JOHNSON: Ah, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

TOM STACKPOLE: But now there are consequences and I hate that for me.

GARRETT JOHNSON: Well, I like that. I don’t often get to talk to people who are very far on the privacy part of this. So I’m an economist, so I think about trade-offs. And the trade-offs here make this a little bit more of a complicated issue.

TOM STACKPOLE: As long as we’re talking about trade-offs. I’m curious, there are all of these options that marketers are now looking at in terms of ways that they can navigate this kind of uncertain future, which are the contextual, the sign-in, the walled gardens. Can you kind of break down what some of the pros and cons of these various approaches are?

GARRETT JOHNSON: So from an advertiser perspective, if you go through kind of the four categories of advertising post-third-party cookie, the first is contextual advertising. And that again just means we show tennis ads to people that are on websites that are talking about tennis. The problem with that is that we spend a lot of our time on the internet entertaining ourselves and just doing work and generally spending time on websites that are not the most commercially relevant. And so I’m pretty bearish on contextual solutions alone because there’s a mismatch between commercial interest and how we’re spending our time. Then the next one is cookie list IDs. And so one form that this takes is email logins and using email addresses as an identifier in place of cookies. From an advertiser perspective, the challenge here is one of scale. For this to work, you need to be able to have the user log in on the website where the ad is shown and also log in on your own website where they’re making a purchase. And for a lot of websites, I think it’s going to be hard for them to provide a compelling reason for the user to log in. And this benefits large advertisers and large websites that have better relationships with their users for good and for bad, and also advertisers that already have large email data sets. So if you’re a CPG company selling Oreos, then this becomes a bit of a challenge for you, and maybe that’s why Oreos has launched these custom Oreo kind of online offerings to maybe collect some email addresses of Oreo super fans to help them in the world without cookies.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Can you tell the audience what multi-touch attribution is and why, without cookies, it’ll be really hard to measure?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Yeah, so one of the things that distinguishes digital advertising is the ability to measure when a user sees an ad across different contexts and when they subsequently take an action like purchasing. And so multi-touch attribution says, “Okay, now that a user’s purchased, if we go back and look at the 20 different ads in the 10 different advertising channels that they saw along that path to purchase, how should we give credit across those different marketing touch points?” But in order to create that data, you need to know who a user is across contexts, and that’s where a third-party cookie will help you. And Privacy Sandbox provides a solution for attribution called the Attribution Reporting API. What it says is that this sort of attribution data is very revealing of who a user is because we see exactly the timestamp of when they’re seeing an ad, and that they’re buying, let’s say a Led Zeppelin T-shirt for 34.99 at 6:48 on a Tuesday. That’s pretty indicative of who that user is. And so what the Attribution Reporting API does is it tries to provide a way to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their advertising while protecting user privacy in three ways. The first is to add noise to the data so that it’s hard to be able to attribute any part of that data, that advertisers get back, to an individual user. Another is to coarsen the data that advertisers are getting back so that they’re seeing more limited information. And the final is to provide information after some delay. So instead of seeing, okay, somebody purchased this Led Zeppelin T-shirt in size XL for 34.99 after seeing an ad, now the API just writes back that a user saw an ad and then spent something between zero and a hundred dollars on a website. But this is a big adjustment for advertisers because I think the previous way of doing things, though not simple, was more of a kind of turnkey solution. But when you’re getting multiple signals that are delayed and that have noise added to them, I like to use this analogy of sailing. You’re kind of getting a lot of feedback, there’s a lot of levers that you can pull, and you have to be able to make those work in harmony to get you where you want to go as an advertiser. I don’t think a lot of advertisers are that far into understanding this to be able to succeed in that environment yet.

JUAN MARTINEZ: When you talk to digital marketers, are they freaking out about this? What are you hearing from them on the ground?

GARRETT JOHNSON: I mean, we’re talking like an incredible feat of technology that makes this industry exist in the first place and kind of rebuilding this plane while it’s flying to have the foundations of this technology be privacy-enhancing technologies instead. It does take some thinking and some learning to understand how these new tools work. So there’s an adjustment. I mean, part of the sacrifice here is complexity. You can have more privacy, but these technologies tend to be more complex, and so that makes it harder to explain to people in industry and also hard to explain to users, at the end of the day.

JUAN MARTINEZ: A lot of people suspect that the pie will be divided less equally. That the bigger get bigger and the small guys will be sort of fazed out of this. Do you think that that’s what’s going to happen, or will it just be the same as it is now except everybody’s earning less money?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Yeah, I think it’s hard to say. I’ve done research on the impacts of the GDPR. We went and looked at websites use of ad tech vendors before and after the GDPR, and we saw that websites kind of pulled back on the amount of advertisers and ad tech companies they worked with, at least in the short run. But there we saw that they were more likely to kick out the smaller vendors than they were the larger vendors. And so we showed that there was this increase in market concentration that coincided with the enforcement of the GDPR. And so there’s been a lot of research that has investigated the GDPR and that has investigated other settings showing that privacy changes tends to hurt competition, and this is partly why the British Competition and Markets Authority is investigating Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

JUAN MARTINEZ: If fifty-two percent of this revenue is lost, is there a way to regain that money or is it just gone now?

GARRETT JOHNSON: I think that’s the billion-dollar question, billions-of-dollar question for this industry. I think there’s some reasons to think that the market will adjust, and then there’s this notion that, oh, if advertising’s cheaper than we can buy twice as much. Well, the reasons why it’s going to be cheaper is that it’s not creating as much value and it’s harder to measure the effectiveness of that advertising. And so the worry is that we’re going to see a loss in revenue that goes to some of these other channels like connected TV and retail media advertising instead of the open web.

TOM STACKPOLE: One last question. What’s your best cookie joke?

GARRETT JOHNSON: Well, one of the agency trade presses is called AdExchanger , and so they’ve had a few cartoons with Cookie Monster being upset that we’re getting rid of cookies. And so, one of the more memorable ones is Cookie Monster sitting on a couch looking sad and the caption says, “C was for cookies.”

TOM STACKPOLE: Well, Garrett, thanks for joining us today. This has been great. Maybe I will rethink some of my anti-third-party cookie stances. We can change our minds here from time to time.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Now you want everything open source, right? Let’s all see what we got.

TOM STACKPOLE: Just give me a little time before I pick my new thing. But this is great, thank you so much for joining us.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Garrett, this has been great. I learned so much today.

GARRETT JOHNSON: This was super fun.

TOM STACKPOLE: That was Garrett Johnson. He’s an associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Coming up after the break, an ad exec will tell us how she’s preparing for the end of cookies. Be right back.

Welcome back to Tech at Work . I’m Tom Stackpole.

JUAN MARTINEZ: And I’m Juan Martinez.

TOM STACKPOLE: Let’s shift now and focus on how digital marketers are actually preparing for the end of third-party cookies. Our guest is Jamie Seltzer, Global Executive Vice President at Havas Media Network. As the global head of Havas Media’s Data and Technology Consulting Group, she leads the agency’s data products and analytics strategy. And a big part of her job right now is helping clients adjust their strategies to move away from cookies. We taped this conversation with Jamie in early April and we started by talking about how big Jamie thinks this change will be for her industry.

JAMIE SELTZER: It is a massive change. I don’t want to understate how big of a change this is going to be, but I also think that it isn’t the of the world. I think we need to change. I think it’s important, as an industry, that we keep changing because of changes in technology, because of evolution of individuals, consumers wants and needs around privacy. And also, just to keep making the products better. Cookie sort of made us lazy. We got really used to all of the information, all of the things it could do, and that notion that we could find an in-market consumer wherever they are. Without a third-party cookie, it forces us to step back and think about what are the best media experiences for our consumers that help not just sell a product, but help build loyalty and brand love and the things that we sort of forgot about when we went straight for performance and kind of forgot about brand a little bit. So it’s going to be a seismic shift, but it’s also a necessary one that I think we need to work our way through.

JUAN MARTINEZ: And the shift has already started. I mean, in Europe the cookies have been regulated since 2016. Apple and Firefox are blocking them. What have you been learning and how do you target the ads and how do you measure the ads now given where we are with the new technology and the new rules?

JAMIE SELTZER: Yeah, I think the thing to remember in a lot of ways is that cookies were never perfect. They were never designed to do the things that they do now. They were designed to help reduce friction and reduce consumer challenges. But we took it farther than it was designed for. And there’s a significant portion of our media that is already cookie-less. I mean, I think especially some of our direct buys are 85% cookie-less at this point. I don’t think there is a client out there who is one hundred percent cookied. There also probably isn’t anyone out there who is entirely cookie-less yet.

TOM STACKPOLE: I want to jump on something that you mentioned there because I found it really surprising when you said some clients are eighty percent cookie-less. Was that a shift that started right in 2016? Or how quickly had the clients advance to that point?

JAMIE SELTZER: It was slow at first. It hasn’t been a steady, gradual thing. I think there was some panic at the beginning and then from there it slowed down a little bit, partly because Google has postponed the deprecation of third-party cookies a few times. And that slowed down the preparation. It slowed down the testing, and then now, in the last I would say 18 months, things have really picked back up. We have some clients, especially some of our European clients like Hyundai and Kia, who have made great progress in working with us and working with their teams to come up with a plan to test different strategies, to make sure that what they’re doing will work in the future. Or at the very least, we have baselines to measure against so that when we try new things, we can assess success.

TOM STACKPOLE: Let’s talk a little bit about the tools that you’re talking about. What do you know right now about Google’s new Privacy Sandbox? Have you gotten to use it? What is the sort of best case scenario for where it fits in the strategy?

JAMIE SELTZER: Up until recently, it’s been a bit of an unknown for us. We’ve tested via our partners, our publisher partners, because up until recently, the only people who had access to it were publishers, were media publishers. So we are really excited to get our hands on that. I know our teams are itching to be able to play around. I’ll say that testing other cookie-less solutions, non-Google solutions, whether that’s non-cookie contextual, whether that’s identity partners, whatever that might be. We’ve seen some decent results. We’ve actually seen some results that come in on par with cookie results. We’ve seen some that are performing even better. I think caveat of that is that it’s been at a much smaller scale. I think we are cautiously optimistic in the results from Privacy Sandbox because so much time and energy has been put into it, but I also think that it’s not going to be a hit out of the gate. It’s not going to be something that we are running at a hundred percent the minute that it launches. I think there’s going to be a learning curve on everyone’s side. I think there’s going to also have to be a calibration period where we calibrate against what our previous results were. And then the last part is, I think we have to rethink how we define and measure success. I mean, right now we’ve been able to measure, over the last few years, success theoretically through things like multi-touch attribution, knowing that every touch point, everything that I see on my journey to buy that pair of shoes that I bought yesterday is tracked and can be measured, and we can wait each of those touch points in terms of what we believe their importance to be. And that isn’t going to be possible anymore. I’m still going to buy that pair of shoes, but we’re not going to be able to attribute it along the way. And therefore, we have to reset our expectations for measurement. It may not be clicks and reach and things like that. It likely will be things that go more towards what is driving incremental revenue or incremental sales and just sort of more advanced, more scientific and modeled versions of measurement.

JUAN MARTINEZ: You touched on this a little bit before, but in order to enter that new reality, what are some of the tools, the technology tools, that you’re using to sort of measure what you’re going to be doing in six months or a year?

JAMIE SELTZER: It’s funny, we talked years and years ago about, it was sort of like when the cookie got big and programmatic got big and social, it really exploded. And we talked all about multi-touch attribution, and multi-touch attribution meant that market mix modeling was over. It always had a bit of a high price tag. So clients could say, “Oh, well, we have multi-touch attribution now, we don’t need to do MMM.” And ultimately that’s what we’re going back to right now. That’s what Privacy Sandbox is. But the evolution of technology, machine learning, our ability to compute significant amounts of data faster, AI, which is everybody’s buzzword, but it’s been part of analytics and machine learning forever. Those are the kinds of things that have evolved to allow us to do things like market mix modeling better, more quickly, more effectively.

TOM STACKPOLE: Tell me a little bit about how it has changed from sort of the old way it was doing it to what we’re able to do with kind of new tools.

JAMIE SELTZER: So market mix modeling in general is a way to measure the success of any sort of media and advertising on a business goal, usually something like sales of a product. And it works in aggregate. So it’s business results over a period of time and what was the media that was running, what were the marketing activities that were running? And ultimately, you model out the contribution or the impact that each of those has on the business goals. We then use that to adjust our marketing activities. While there’s some challenges with aggregation and with data aggregation, ultimately, it also allows us to see a little bit of the bigger picture in terms of common trends, themes, and it allows us to sort of think a little bit differently about consumers and consumer behavior. And many, many, many of our clients and others that I’ve worked with, have continued to use market mix modeling throughout the years. But it has, as you said, evolved. There is greater computing power, there is greater access to sales data from different industries that didn’t have it before. So especially for industries where a brand or an advertiser, they don’t sell directly to me. So package goods doesn’t sell directly to me, they sell through a retailer. So my favorite, my former client, Colgate-Palmolive, who I adore, I don’t buy toothpaste from them, I buy toothpaste from the CVS, which is down the street from my house. Now, that makes it very challenging for a brand, a CPG brand, to know what I’m purchasing and who their consumers are because they don’t have as much of a direct relationship. So new access to types of data like that through other panels, through other sources, they allow us to be able to look at brands in different ways, different kinds of brands.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Now, I want you to look into your crystal ball for this question, okay. Other than Google and all of your clients, who are going to be the big winners in a post-cookie world? And obviously on the other side, who are going to be the big losers? This is your chance to predict the world without third-party cookies.

JAMIE SELTZER: I mean, besides Google and Meta, those guys who kind of win in most situations, I think anyone who has started preparing for this a few months ago, couple, more than a few months ago, will probably be the winners. There’s been some people who are predicting that Google will never deprecate the third-party cookie because of litigation or because of the regulatory bodies in the UK stepping in and all those things. And so they’re kind of banking on this not changing. I tend to argue that it’s already changed whether or not Google deprecates cookies now or six months from now or 18 months from now or whenever, the world has already changed and we already need to change with it.

TOM STACKPOLE: One of the things I was wondering about is, does this move away from third-party cookies remind you of any other kind of moment in your career? Or is there sort of a useful frame that you’ve been relying on to just sort of clarify how you’re thinking about this?

JAMIE SELTZER: Yeah, I mean there are sort of two that come to mind immediately. The first is when I first started my career, and ad servers really became a big thing. That just saved tons of time, tons of energy, and things like that. But then the creation evolution of programmatic, that was an entirely new way of doing business. And you have to learn something new, which is scary sometimes. There’s so much to do, there’s so much to know. But I also think that nobody is an expert. Nobody knows what’s coming. I mean, even Google doesn’t know what’s coming because they don’t know how everyone is going to use their products and how everyone is going to evolve. And so I think we all have to just accept that we’re all going to learn on the fly a little bit, but also we see the opportunity that programmatic gave to individuals who jumped on it early to companies who started building solutions. I mean, it is a huge opportunity, and I think this, in many ways, reminds me of that opportunity.

TOM STACKPOLE: So if I were a company and I came to you today and I were in a panic and was trying to figure out how to adapt to this new environment, what are the first three things that you would tell me to do?

JAMIE SELTZER: The first thing I would tell any client to do in this situation is figure out where you are now. As in, understand how much of your media spend right now is dependent on cookies. How much of your technology stack is currently dependent on third-party cookies? And the third piece I’d actually think about is what is your legal framework set up for? We talk a lot about technology. We talk a lot about what we can do, technology lets us do and doesn’t let us do. We talk a lot about consumers and what they want, but ultimately, we also have to make sure that we are legally compliant in collecting the data that we want to collect, and that has a legal framework around it. We need our lawyers to make sure that our terms and conditions are clear and we’re giving cookie consent where it is necessary and things like that. So those are probably the first three things I would audit, which is the first thing I would do, is just understand your baseline. And then prioritize, make a list of the things that need to change immediately. So you need to prioritize what it is you want to do based on that audit. That’s the thing that we’re really pushing hard on for our clients right now if they haven’t done it already. And then you build tests and test cookie list solutions or test different solutions like custom algorithms that optimize towards things like attention instead of two others. And so I think it’s really about starting with an audit and assessment, prioritization, and then a robust learning agenda, test-and-learn plan that will help us, based on whatever time you have, get to a better place.

JUAN MARTINEZ: We forgot to ask the most important question.

JAMIE SELTZER: Uh-oh.

JUAN MARTINEZ: What is your favorite cookie joke?

JAMIE SELTZER: It’s not a joke so much as I really, really like it when they always use Cookie Monster. Like somebody had put Cookie Monster and it just said, “Winter is coming.” And so the mesh of Cookie Monster and Game of Thrones really just sort of solidified it for me.

TOM STACKPOLE: Well, Jamie Seltzer, thank you so much for coming on and talking about cookies.

JAMIE SELTZER: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun talking about the end of the cookie in a long time, so thank you.

TOM STACKPOLE: That was Jamie Seltzer. She’s an executive vice president at Havas Media Network.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Next time on Tech at Work , is your team making good use of collaboration tools? Probably not. Slack, email, Zoom, and so many other tools of the norm, but how many of us have really taken the time to figure out the best ways to use them?

TOM STACKPOLE: We’ll talk with a researcher who’s studying exactly that, to get his advice on matching the right tools to the right tasks. And we’ll hear from a former product team leader in the tech industry who will share what she’s learned about how to use communication tools on real life teams. That’s in two weeks right here in the HBR IdeaCast feed, in addition to the regular Tuesday episode.

JUAN MARTINEZ: Thanks to our team, senior producer, Anne Saini. Senior editor, Curt Nickisch. Audio product manager, Ian Fox. And senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. Special thanks to our friends on HBR’s video and social teams, Nicole Smith, Ramsey Khabbaz, Kelsey Hansen, Scott LaPierre, and Elainy Mata. And much gratitude to our fearless leaders, Maureen Hoch and Adi Ignatius. Thanks for listening to Tech At Work , a special series of the HBR IdeaCast . I’m Juan Martinez.

TOM STACKPOLE: And I’m Tom Stackpole, join us again in two weeks.

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The circumstances were set for a heroic Knicks performance. The stuff of legend.

Josh Hart and OG Anunboy both started despite “questionable” statuses, receiving massive ovations during the pregame lineup introductions.

The crowd was electric for the first Game 7 in nearly 30 years.

Except it was the Pacers who rose to the occasion, while the Knicks, depleted to the bones and sloppy, slinked away in their Sunday afternoon 130-109 elimination.

Jalen Brunson’s tremendous season finished in the locker room with a fractured left hand , an injury sustained as he shot 6-for-17 over 29 minutes in a disappointing performance. It was unclear when Brunson broke his shooting hand, but he was subbed out in the third quarter.

He quickly went to the locker room, briefly re-emerged to try to check into the game, but then left the court for good.

With the Knicks needing just one victory to advance to the franchise’s first conference finals since 2000, Brunson combined to shoot under 40 percent in Games 6 and 7.

Only Donte DiVincenzo (39 points) and Alec Burks (26 points) kept the Knicks from getting blown out at home.

The Pacers, meanwhile, poured on the offense while shooting 67 percent. They got 26 points from Tyrese Haliburton, who was celebrating and talking smack all over the Garden court. Haliburton shot 10-for-17, including 6-for-12 from beyond the arc. Pascal Siakam added 20 points.

The Pacers flexed their depth all series and pummeled the Knicks with it in the final two games.

Anunoby, who missed the previous four games with a strained hamstring, did his best Willis Reed impression after becoming a surprise addition to the starting lineup.

Clearly laboring and limping, Anunoby buried his two shot attempts — including a contested off-balance trey.

But he could barely move 10 days after straining his hamstring. Anunoby’s defense was a problem and he was removed less than five minutes into the contest , heading to the bench for good.

In the process, Anunoby probably shed some of the “soft” label that followed him from injury-plagued stints in Toronto. But if his active status was an attempt to intimidate the Pacers or psyche out Rick Carlisle’s squad, it didn’t work.

The Pacers were on fire at the start. Unbothered by the boisterous Garden crowd, they sank an outrageous 76 percent of their shots in the first half — including two-thirds⅔of their 3-pointers — and led by as many as 22 points.

It represented the best shooting percentage for the first half of any team of the last 25 postseasons, according to ESPN.

Hart was more mobile than expected while playing with a strained abdomen sustained two days prior in Game 6. But he couldn’t shoot in his 37 minutes, missing all four of his 3-point attempts before leaving the court to appreciative “Josh Hart” chants.

But the Knicks, like Hart, had nothing left for Game 7.

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4. Understanding EndTimes Bible Prophecy Podcast

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8. End Time Insights Podcast

9. The End-Time Manifesto

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12. Luke21 Radio - Biblical Prophecy with Steve Wood

13. Bible Prophecy Talk

14. Endtimeshofar: Bible Prophecy and The End-Times

15. The Tipping Point with Jimmy Evans

16. The Word with Pastor J. Evans

17. The End Times... with Bill, Ryan, & John!

18. Christ's Church for the End Times

19. Living in the End Times

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How Do You End A Podcast?

You’ve scripted your podcast, and you’re excited about the quality of content to come. Now you’re wondering what to do at the end of a podcast.

Do you say “bye”? Do you play some fade out music and turn off your mic?

You’ll want to assume that if your listener has stayed, listening to your episode to the end, they probably enjoyed what they heard. And you don’t want to ruin that with a terrible ending.

The ending of a podcast is the last impression you’ll leave your listener.

So, what makes a good ending? Let’s get right to it.

Summary of Key Takeaways

Key takeaways are like your “30-second” elevator speech of value.

Your listeners might forget the valuable content you’d discussed toward the beginning or middle of the episode. This wrap-up would be an excellent time to remind your listeners why they stayed until the end with the most critical and interesting points .

It might also be the case that some listeners scrolled through toward the end of the episode to determine whether your podcast is of any interest. A concise and intriguing summary may interest these “skippers” in listening to the entire podcast while retaining them for future episodes.

In either case, you will want to reinforce the points of interest that caused your listener to stay.

Call to Action (CTA)

Your listener stayed with you until the end, consider asking them for a commitment in action. CTA can mean several different things, which are listed below.

But remember, you should make this action as simple as possible and don’t overburden your listeners with too many tasks.

• Blogs of Interest
• Bloopers in edits
• Additional information
• Meeting the interviewee
• Social media groups
• Subscribing to your podcast
• Sharing your podcast
• Subscribing to blogs/emails
• Donating to your podcast or project of interest
• Rating and reviewing your podcast

In today’s social media saturation, people tend to see social validation as a sign of quality and acceptance. Your call to action can help make this possible.

Your call to action is a way of growing your list of followers to reach more listeners. This call to action hopefully engages your listeners with your community and podcast.

If you call your listeners to action, make sure you offer them value if and when they do. You’ll lose their interest pretty quickly if your call to action leads them to some disappointing result.

“Thanks” and incentive

Of course, thank your listeners for their time and tuning into your podcast. Of all the podcasts out there, your listeners chose to listen to yours. Make them feel appreciated. Especially if you are calling them to action.

To keep your listeners intrigued in the next episode, you can lure them with an incentive to stay. Incentives often come in the form of a reveal or the next top topic of interest.

Tell your listeners why they should come back for the next episode. What will you be offering them?

Never forget to thank all parties that contributed to your podcast/episode. Just as you appreciate your listener for their time, you want to thank your contributors for making your podcast possible .

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is to communicate sincerely through the ending of your podcast. Your audience listened because they enjoyed your content, they wouldn’t want to feel like they’re listening to a pushy salesperson at the end of your episode.

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Grace Wethor

If you were diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness, what would you do? How would you live?

Los Angeles based actress and model Grace Wethor was faced with those questions when she was just 13 years old. Grace was diagnosed with a brain stem tumor. Surgery isn’t an option and this type of cancer doesn’t respond well to chemotherapy or radiation. Grace and her mother decided she needed to follow her dream, which led them to L.A. The now 18 year old is thriving in spite of cancer.

Grace talks about her life with journalist and host Cathy Wurzer in this premiere episode of “Living With…” from the End in Mind Project.

How We Heal

How We Heal, a CaringBridge conversation on hope, help and healing, is a podcast collaboration between CaringBridge and End in Mind. CaringBridge is a nonprofit social network dedicated to helping family and friends communicate with and support loved ones during a health journey. End in Mind is a nonprofit dedicated to helping people achieve a level of comfort and mastery with uncomfortable conversations around death and dying. In this podcast, patients and family caregivers talk with Emmy-award winning journalist Cathy Wurzer about how they’ve found their own paths toward healing, regardless of health outcome.

Michael Bischoff

In this episode of How We Heal, a podcast collaboration between CaringBridge and End in Mind, host Brigid Bonner talks with Emmy-award winning journalist Cathy Wurzer about a framework for healing based on a person’s ability to “belong, believe and be.” The conversation centers on CaringBridge user Michael Bischoff, who said living with brain cancer offered a chance for healing, if not cure. Those who knew and loved Michael reflect on the ways in which he opened himself to the love of family and friends, and how he worked to make sense of a senseless diagnosis.

This episode was produced by Palisade Productions. The editor is Jennilee Park.

Living With . . . The Covid Conversations

The Covid 19 pandemic has upended our lives. People are getting sick and many are dying. Beyond the upheaval of everyday living, the virus is shining a bright, harsh light on our mortality.

In this special series of conversations, we talk about planning for the end of life with advance care directives but also explore the larger questions around living and dying.

The Covid Conversations Episode 1

Kate Bowler

Kate Bowler, who is no stranger to the fear and uncertainty around life-threatening illness, is the guest in this first episode. The New York Times best-selling author/professor and podcaster talks with Cathy Wurzer about the fragility of life and our future deaths.

The Covid Conversations Episode 2

Melissa Jones

If you don’t know someone who has battled or is battling COVID-19, you will soon enough.

Melissa Jones, the single mother of two girls, was in good physical shape until she started to feel a little rundown and had a slightly sore throat in March of 2020. That began a more than month-long battle with the virus.

The Covid Conversations Episode 3

Dr. Ann McIntosh

You’re not feeling well. You think you might have Covid-19 and so you head to the emergency room. If you take a turn for the worse, what kind of care do you want? Do you have an advance care directive?

In this episode, an emergency room doctor walks us through end of life planning in a time of Covid.

The Covid Conversations Episode 4

Thaddeus Pope & Art Caplan

So, you’ve written an advance care directive. You’ve made it clear, you think, about the kinds of medical care you want should you get sick with Covid-19 or you’re in the midst of a medical crisis. Will your wishes be followed?

We talk with two bioethics experts.

The Covid Conversations Episode 5

Dr. Carol Bruess & Christy Moe-Marek

The pandemic has cast a hot, bright spotlight on the need for an advance care directive but really, how the heck do you start talking about what you or a loved one wants at the end of life, when you’ve still got a lot of life left…or even if there isn’t?

End of life conversations are fraught with their own set of specific issues. In this installment we converse with a couple of conversation experts.

The Covid Conversations Episode 6

Frank Ostaseski

We saved the best for last. Frank Ostaseski is the co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco and the Metta Institute. He’s the author of the best selling book “The Five Invitations” and his thoughts on death and dying will change your life.

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Phone: 612-440-6715

Mail: End in Mind Project 5865 Neal Avenue North #343 Stillwater, MN 55082

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When and How Should You End a Podcast?

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Everything ends, so here are some tips for deciding when to retire your podcast and how to do it without “podfading.”

When to end a podcast

Should you end your podcast? Here are some tips to figure out if and when.

Because you feel any one of these at a particular time is not a sign that you should end right then. Consider ending when these conditions are regularly true.

1. When you run out of content

Some podcasts have limited material, such as a TV-show-fan podcast. If you're out of content, then you would be wasting time to talk when there's nothing to talk about.

2. When you lose the passion

You've probably heard about “passion” in podcasting so much that you're sick of that word. Because we use our voices in podcasting, a lack of passion will be obvious.

3. When you need to make room for something else

Life changes. It's not always that something gets in the way. Sometimes, you simply get more interested in something else. Unless you have a commitment to fulfill, there's nothing wrong with ending a podcast to free up your time for other opportunities.

4. When you've tried everything else

Whether the work is too hard, you're not reaching your goals, or whatever other reason, make sure you to jump too quickly into quitting.

Here are some past episodes that may give you some ideas for reviving your podcast.

• 7 free and easy ways to give your podcast new life
• 5 reasons your podcast audience isn't growing
• 7 ways to make podcasting fun
• 5 steps to an UNSTOPPABLE vision for your blog or podcast
• How to prevent podfading and podcasting burnout

How to end a podcast

You've decided to end a podcast, but you need to end well.

1. Be intentional (don't “podfade”!)

“Podfading” is when a podcast slowly dies by fading into oblivion. The usual sign is that the publishing frequency starts to become inconsistent and more spread out.

Be intentional by planning your ending. Maybe you'll have big finale, a party, a live show, take call-ins, wrap up with your best content, or anything special.

The point is to act deliberately and finish well.

2. Tell your audience

Part of being intentional is to communicate your plans. Don't leave your audience wondering when or if your podcast will continue. If you mean to end it, tell them it's over.

Finish  well in how you tell your audience. This is not a good time to complain. Even if there were problems leading up to ending the show, don't make a legacy of those problems by dumping them into your last episode.

If you can, tell you're audience that you're ending the show  before you end it. This gives your audience time to send in their finale feedback or something they've wanted to share for a long time.

3. Keep the podcast online

Even though you may stop actively podcasting, your show could still have value and many people could still benefit from it. Leave your podcast online for as long as possible.

Yes, this means continuing to renew domains and hosting, but those costs can often be reduced since you won't need as much with a retired show. With Blubrry or Libsyn , you could downgrade your account to the bare minimum plan and still maintain your entire catalog of episodes and RSS feed.

If absolutely necessary, you could migrate your media to archive.org and your website to something like WordPress.com .

4. Be open to returning

What would make you resume this podcast? Would it be donations, extra time, a returning TV series, or something else?

Don't give your audience a false hope that you may return, but I suggest that you remain open to the possibility of resuming your show when the important conditions are met.

When do you think a podcast should end?

Have you ended a podcast before? Why and how? Please comment to share your experience!

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Daniel J. Lewis

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Great show. I have had 4 or 5 podcast just end without any notice at all. Two of them I e-mailed to ask if/why they had stopped, but only one e-mailed me back. When I end my podcast(which I hope won’t have to be for a while) I will definitely do some of the things you mentioned.

Happy International Podcast Day!

Yeah, I’ve seen a few video podcasts, especially, suddenly end without notice. I’ve also seen several audio podcasts fade.

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Polin’s Love Story in ‘Bridgerton’ Season 3 Part 1 Delivers Glow-Ups, Deception and Some Super Sultry Moments: TV Review

By Aramide Tinubu

Aramide Tinubu

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Netflix ‘s acclaimed 19th century-set “ Bridgerton ” has returned for the first half of its third season, and it’s more lush and enticing than audiences might remember. Season 3 opens as a new crop of debutantes enter the marriage market. As the young ladies prepare to dazzle Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), the latest Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews) gossip pamphlet is being distributed. In Season 3 Part 1, familiar faces are spotlighted, new and evolving friendships flourish and blossoming romances infuse an air of freshness into the show. The catalyst for all this change begins with the metamorphosis of Penelope Featherington (a stellar Nicola Coughlan ). 

Popular on Variety

The chemistry between the leads in “Bridgerton” and “Queen Charlotte” has consistently been praised. Still, there is something about seeing the bond between Colin and Penelope transform from comfortably platonic to yearning and passionate that elevates this journey.  Coughlan and Newton have always had a beautiful rapport, but watching Colin realize he desires Penelope sexually, which is revealed through his fixation on her lips and a newfound fascination with everything she’s doing, creates a sparkling tension throughout Part 1 that threatens to burst off the screen. In fact, during a carriage ride after a ball at the end of Episode 4, “Old Friends,” it nearly does. 

As usual, diversity is at the forefront of “Bridgerton.” This season, the Mondrichs, Alice (Emma Naomi) and Will (Martins Imhangbe), are no longer relegated to the sidelines. Moreover, differently abled members of the Ton are showcased, including a deaf debutant and a wheelchair-bound Lord. This inclusivity reinforces Shondaland and Netflix’s commitment to bringing all six Bridgerton siblings’ love stories to the screen while addressing and representing a 21st-century viewing audience.  

Also, though Polin is kept firmly in the spotlight, new showrunner Jess Brownell and her writers serve up some juicy subplots. They take the time to reveal some of the layers of characters who had previously been on the fringes of the narrative. Francesca (Hannah Dodd replacing Ruby Stokes), the pianoforte-loving sixth Bridgerton sibling, is also making her debut on the marriage market. While she’s just as stunning and poised as her older sister, Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), Francesca has her own unique ideas regarding love and partnership. 

Like Pen, the blonde and statuesque Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen) is trying to snag a husband for the third year in a row. Despite her sour disposition, audiences learn that there is more to Cressida than her snide remarks and competitive nature. Like all of the women in the Ton, the future trajectory of her life depends on her getting a suitable marriage proposal, which is no small feat. As usual, Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) are bending the Ton to their will in the background, but it’s Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell) who gets to do much more than mothering this season. 

“Bridgerton” Season 3, Part 1 marks the beginning of Polin’s electric romance, but that’s merely the core of the story. Going after what you desire is the theme that anchors these initial four episodes. Though various characters approach this tactic in a plethora of different ways, watching Penelope choose herself (and Lady Whistledown) even when she’s uncertain about the outcome is extremely heartening.  Additionally, it’s a reminder that even if you get exactly what you want, it might come at a cost.

All episodes of “Bridgerton” Season 3 Part 1 are streaming on Netflix .

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32 episodes

We're all just stories in the end. It's as true for the Doctor as it is for any of us. Over a hundred exciting stories appeared in the wilderness years, from Virgin Publishing and BBC Books, and it's these we'll be talking about in our book club - but we'll also be talking about our stories too, as fans, as readers, as humans. It would be lovely if you felt like joining us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Doctor Who: We're All Stories in the End Iain Martin

• 27 APR 2024

27. Emotional Chemistry by Simon A. Forward

Join Iain and friend-of-the-show D.K. for a freewheeling conversation about the Eighth Doctor Adventure Emotional Chemistry, written by Simon A. Forward and published by BBC Books in the year of our lord 2003. We ramble over a wide conversational area with unexpected mentions of Terrahawks, Star Fleet and the actress Eva Green, and we have our first meeting with the last companion to join the EDA range, the enigmatic Trix... All kinds of snow, time travel and intrigue await us in this novel, set shortly after the Battle of Reykjavik. Welcome, my people. Welcome. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 30 MAR 2024

26. Ea(s)ter of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale

We're back to continue our journey through all things Virgin New Adventure and Eighth Doctor Adventures. This month, we're going back in time to a quiet village overrun with killer wasps and sentient nuclear bombs (a bit like Professor Bracewell in Victory of the Daleks, odd that...) Join Iain and Kevin to talk about this novel, and how Kevin is coping with all this reading he's undertaking... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 27 JAN 2024

Winter Special - The Specials!

Join Iain and Harry (along with his former partner-in-nonsense Luke, just a homeless ex-podcaster now that WCCY is no more) as they discuss the four recent new episodes of television's Doctor Who: The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder, The Giggle, and The Church on Ruby Road, to prove a theory: that Doctor Who is divisive, that not everyone needs to enjoy every single story, and that none of our individual opinions matter much in the grand scheme of things and no-one should ever feel threatened or triggered just because someone else holds a different opinion concerning an episode, a book, an audio or an action figure from a daft old kids TV show. Get in touch! I'm @seaoftranquillitylane on Threads and @theiainmartin.bsky.social on Bluesky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 29 DEC 2023

Podswap! The Electric Sodcast

Another chance to hear something new while I'm working on the Winter Special, which will be with you in January 2024. Until then, here's an episode of the comedy podcast I make with my podcast husband James. In the Songpoker episodes, we just chat about music, and since it's still Twixtmas, why not delve deep into the story of one of the biggest hits from the 1980's - Do They Know It's Christmas by Band Aid. They're all here: Geldof, (Boy) George, Bono, the Bitter Sting of Tears, Phil Collins and some backing vocalist from Shalamar. Don't laugh. Listen to the Complete Sod here: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1V5Ufa0AGkriiRISMqXB2C Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/electric-sodcast/id1616205466 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 12 DEC 2023

25. Earthworld by Jacqueline Rayner

Iain is joined by returning guest James for a detailed look at the struggling commercial performance of the EDA's and their plunging DWM poll scores in the early noughties, with DATA, STATS and EVIDENCE. Was Paul McGann's arrival in the Big Finish universe a hammer-blow to the BBC Books range? Was Earthworld truly the best choice for a reprint in the 2013 50th Anniversary reissues as the sole representative of the 8th Doctor? Was it a strong first outing for new companion Anji Kapoor? Was it, at least, good fun? Need to buy any New Adventures or EDA's? Contact Kevin: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

24. Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard

This week's episode of We're All Stories in the End sees the unexpected return of Joe Ford, who -alone out of all humanity- was prepared to help out and guest on this episode, where in addition to discussing Dreamstone Moon, we also touch upon why no-one loves Samantha Jones, Camille from Red Dwarf, male pattern baldness, and the varying qualities of the covers produced for the EDA range. Joe's a honey, so put you feet up, press play, and we very much hope you enjoy. Follow us on Threads! I'm @seaoftranquilitylane and Joe is @docoho44 Need to buy any New Adventures or EDA's? Contact Kevin: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• © Iain Martin

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From the Rookery End

40th Anniversary Special: Watford at Wembley 1984

This is another special retrospective episode of From the Rookery End. 

In these podcasts we take an in depth look back at some of the most pivotal moment in Hornets history, having previously covered the 1997 thrashing of our friends up the M1, the breathless Play Off Semi Final victory at St Andrews in 1999 and of course, our tribute to THAT goal by friend of the podcast, Troy Deeney.

Well, they say you never forget your first time, so on this podcast we are going to make sure, by going back 40 years to the day (if you are listening on release day!) to look at Watford’s first ever appearance in the FA Cup Final.

Of course, the result didn’t exactly go to plan (we don’t think this is a spoiler!) but it was still a historic day, and one which is looked back upon fondly by generations of the Hornets faithful. In this podcast we try to encapsulate what it was like to be a Watford fan during that famous cup run, culminating in that sunny day at Wembley in May 1984.

This show ahs been brought to life by a wide range of contrinbutiors, without whom this simply wouldn’t have been possible, so a huge thanks to Olly and Geoff Wicken, Frances Lynn and Adam Cummigs - the voice of Vicarage Road’s Radio Hornet during the 70’s and 80’s.

You’ll also hear from three familiar voices - men who were boys back in 1984 - Matt Rowsson, author Lionel Birnie and our very own Jason Bailey. Thanks to them all for their amazing contributions, which we’re certain you’ll enjoy. It’s 1984, and thi is From the Rookery End.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stanley Grouse's artwork