As a nearly complete project, this show represents an enormous amount of effort and discipline. It’s been a serious creative commitment. Sustaining any single format for eight years is achievement enough for me.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/07/19/2519-landing-sequence/
Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Landing Sequence
I’m flipping switches and tapping dials, I see landing lights reflecting in the distance already as we begin our final approach.
Reflection is the best word that describes the last few months. How does one even begin to land the biggest creative endeavour of one’s life thus far?
90% of all podcasts ever created never made it past Episode 3, another 90% quit before episode 20. Completing this project places it in a statistical range of less than 0.1%.
After eight years, I have developed some understanding of these statistics.
The most important lesson may sound obvious: for any artist, finding and maintaining rhythm is the challenge that must be faced week after week, year after year.
I’ve stressed this on the show many times. Committing to, and attending to a creative process is important; but re-attending to that commitment, is essential.
When you begin, you imagine that producing a weekly show would be straightforward, I certainly did.
Even if I kept the concept simple. Everything: sit down; write; edit; record; edit; had to fit inside a single frantic hour. Then breakfast while the file bounced for upload.
After the first fifty episodes I was hooked; at one hundred, exhausted.
So I switched to a longer production period. A draft on Thursdays, a re-draft on Fridays, and the recording and posting on Saturday, it opened things up. But over time a new pressure emerged: the edit.
I learnt to sculpt sentences, rearrange paragraphs, test the rhythm of a line over time, instead of against the ticking of a clock. But effort crept upward and benefits tailed off.
Quality, is a curve that flattens quickly. You must learn to spot this pivot point.
Years ago I made an episode called The Doing, where I divided the creative process into three. The Dream, The Doing, and Done. When I started making this show, and at the time of writing that episode, I still preferred The Dreaming, and the having Done.
The Doing (the graft rather than the craft of creating) was the obstacle.
301 has been a relentless bootcamp in spotting the pivot, and has taught me that the real goal of the creative process is to simply be done, enough.
All long-term artistic endeavours also need a container. Fixing the length at 301 seconds—inspired by off hand comment Warren Ellis all those years ago—defined the content. Making it weekly was another constraint.
It wasn’t until 2023, well after I’d dropped the manic production period that I realised the wisdom of seasons. And broke production into four blocks of ten.
Ten episodes, a mini-break, then ten more.
A huge reduction in both creative and cognitive load.
301 started at the beginning of the second wave of podcasting. At the time I genuinely believed that more and more short shows would emerge. Things with their own shape and container. But the opposite happened: shows got longer and runtimes stretched.
A five-minute weekly essay was genuinely novel in 2018. In 2025, with every newsletter platform now sprouting a podcast feature, it’s not so much. It’s also way less effort to turn on zoom and record a bro-cast for 2 hours than writing and recording and editing a weekly personal essay.
As a nearly complete project, this show represents an enormous amount of effort and discipline. It’s been a serious creative commitment. Sustaining any single format for eight years is achievement enough for me.
Knowing that this iteration of the show’s format is coming to a close, I have been experimenting more.
For a while now, each episode has started life as a voice note – it’s transcription, the zero draft. Then a first pass becomes draft one, then another, followed by a final edit for word count before recording. Recently however, I have just been recording the second draft in a single take, and editing that raw audio to the final version.
This year, three episodes have been skeleton scripts, recorded off the cuff and edited. Dan Carlin records Hardcore History just from his notes; exposition as jazz. A notion that has been rattling around my head. Whatever is coming next, freed from the time box, I want to chase that energy.
The machinery of the programme has evolved: from raw one-hour sprints, to more relaxed multi-session drafts, to the recent experiments. And each phase has taught lessons for what’s coming next
Keeping the container but dropping the speed-run may have improved the work, but it doubled the effort. Again, more work often yields diminishing returns. Constraints save you, and your process will set its own priorities.
The video version of the show only exists only because it fits neatly into my process. And despite gathering a small audience on YouTube, it has clarified my priorities. I realise I have no desire to become a YouTuber, it’s not for me.
The flight plan for our next journey already contains a long lecture on creativity, accompanied by an eight-thousand-word zine to release whilst I work on what’s next. Audio and print will become the twin pillars of my creative life.
New issues of “Start Select Reset” will appear for sale on my blog in limited numbers, and of course in the hands of paid subscribers.
I’ve learnt so much about writing and performance, rhythm and production, and, above all, about myself over the last 300 episodes.
So with the landing gear down, I’ll save my thanks and final reflections for touch down next week.
I’ll speak to you then.
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