Show Update: MCS100
My how the time has gone by. Literally at the 100th episode of The MCS1 Show. I can't beleive it. I'm not saying I ever thought we would get this far, or wouldn't get this far, but here we are and man I am excited to give a speech, share stories, and announce a ton of things of awesome things that have been in the works for months but we are ready to announce!!!!
First of all thank you! YOU! YES YOU! The listener, my the bottom of my heart and I'm guessing Caleb's too thank you! Since the beginning we have always wanted to make the show something different that people could enjoy. We have always been open to listener feedback over the years as well. We have taken those suggestions and used some that worked, and even sometimes some that didn't work but we tried anyways.
So thank you! It means a lot to us to have loyal fans that really care about me and the show. I enjoy the personal feedback that I have gotten from people. Ranging from comments such as "I haven't talked to you in forever but I feel like I talk to you every week cause I listen to your podcast" to people hounding me for an episode when I don't release one on Tuesday. And most importantly, people putting up with that god awful podcast refresh due to maintenance from out shitty RSS feed (which I really hope one day to fully fix).
I wanna take a moment and talk about the history of the show. Cause there's been quite a few people that have come on in the last year and also, there's a TON of behind the scenes stuff that goes on that people have NO IDEA about! First I wanna talk about how the show began. I don't think I've ever told this story before so I'm excited.
Back in like 2011 I read a book by Adam Carrola titled "In 50 years we'll all be chicks". It was hilarious. I read the crap out of that book. It was his humorous take on society and it really resonated with me. Over time I thought about writing a similar book, but my views on society. I started outlining tons of different topics ranging from the educational system in the US, social norms that seems super fucked up, and things that just flat out pissed me off.
Later that year I was hanging out with Jordan Huey, who was starting up an online radio station for Provo music and podcasts called "This University Life Radio". His idea sounds pretty cool. He was talking to me about podcasts. I had been familiar with podcasts but I didn't know a ton at the time. I looked at it like talk radio that you could download (which is essentially what podcasts are). He then asked me something that would basically lay the ground work for the show. He asked "Do you know any podcasters that would be on my station?" I told him I didn't, but... I would be interested in hosting a show for his station. At the time I think Jordan thought I was crazy, and now I'm sure he still thinks I'm crazy, but regardless he agreed to it!
About one month before launch I went to Shayne Barker's wedding. I rode with Caleb, who at the time I had hung out with like 2-3 times. He asked me what I was up to, you know standard small talk stuff. I told him about the show and he seemed really excited just hearing about it. I asked him if he wanted to be on it and obviously he agreed. We would later meet up with Barry who was our producer for the first half of season 1 of the show and record at his place. He is the announcer for season one and two before we moved over to Robotic British chicks. So that's the story of how the show began.
Let's talk about how the show ended for a bit then came back. This is the gap between Season 2 to when we started doing episodes based speficially around themes. So about the time season 2 ended I was getting swamped with stuff. I was trying to wrap up my capstone project at my university and was dealing with tons of other crap involving my undergrad at the piece of shit university I was attending. Eventally, Caleb and I just kind of fell out of touch because we both got busy with life.
One day I was randomly contacted by someone who used to be my neighbor when I lived in student housing. This guy worked a businessman and marketer. He moved to Utah to experience it's "culture" like many Mormons often do. He somehow found my show on-line I think through my facebook posts. He loved the show and wanted to produce and really have it take off. We talked for a few weeks about bringing the show back on the air. This is when we started uploading the episodes to Spreakerr. Now despite this producer being successful he wasn't too keen on paying any money for hosting. Back then hosting was like $100 a year, which to a poor college kid was kind of a lot of money, but to this guy it should have been nothing. It should have been a red flag, but I was so obsessed with finally getting the show to take off that I decided to let it go.
A few months went by. He told me about how he needed a quick on the spot sample to share with some investors that he knew. The product of that was the 15 minute "Vegans" episode we did in season 2. I never heard what became of the meeting with these "investors" but I dismissed the whole thing because he was paying for hosting and bought The MCS1 Show dot com domain. More than anything I wanted the show to have a website, the producer however thought differently.
The producer came in from out of town to have a big meeting with Caleb and I. Casey William Walker was also at the meeting since I knew his role on the show would be starting soon. The meeting was supposed to be so that everyone could meet and the producer was going to lay out what he was going to be offering us. Spoiler alert, it did not go well. The short version is we were promised a lot of access, eventually. We were also going to be given an app for the show. But we didn't need nor want a freaking app, we wanted a website. We also weren't going to be paid for the show either. It the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals. I'm not sure what the producer's plan was, but it triggered Caleb bad. He wasn't down for this deal at all. The deal was off and we eventually broke ties with the producer.
We decided we wanted to reband and rename the show. We recorded about 3 episodes of the new show called "Vox Eternem" meaning voice of the outsider in latin. It didn't really flow well and for some reason we just didn't have the drive to continue down that route. We honestly waited until the Domain name "The MCS1 Show dot com" was up grabs (so about a year after the deal fell through) and used that to host our website.
I started doing more direct themes rather than seasons. Mostly in the event of if the show went away again. I relaunched doing a few interviews and the happy valley hate series with Casey William Walker. Eventually, Casey got kind of busy and engaged, so it was hard to get him back on. Luckily for me, Caleb's life was beginning to free up again and we were able to continue the show. So that's some of the story of why the show has been so off and on.
Now for the grand finale, the announcements... About every year we try to do something that does not quite fit with the shows dynamic. These types of things are usually done to "test the waters" for our listeners. We have had mixed reactions with some of them such as the "At the movies" series and "the white trash bash". This year we wanted to do something that we were more certain that the fans would like. I am happy to announce that we are going to have a redux series. In this series Caleb and I will revisit old topics that we covered during the 1st two seasons of the show. We will follow up on these topics and also see if our views have changed. We may even hear more of our beloved staple the "you don't even know" guy."
The next announcement is something that has been in the works a long freaking time! For years we have been trying to figure out how to make money of the show. We've joked about having sponsors "Fidel, if you're listening" and at one point we even thought about opening a patron which is a crowd funding type of platform. But none of that felt right. It just wasn't what I wanted for the show. I didn't like the idea of the show's views being controlled by advertisers. It didnt' feel authentic I wanted something that the fans can enjoy without me feeling guilty for plugging something (speaking of which go buy my damn book).
I am happy to announce that we are starting up a t shirt line. We decided to partner with thread-less t's. There were many t shirt companies we could have gone with, but we chose thread-less because some of my favorite t shirts have come from them. They make excellent quality t shirts and we are super pleased to be working with them. Now, the t shirts. Many of you are probably expecting a "The MCS1 Show" shirt. I hate to be the bear of bad news (rawr) but no such shirt exists at this time. The type of shirts we will be launching will be based around show themes and the things that we talk about. We want our fans as well as people who have never listened the show to be able to wear these shirts.
These shirts are awesome. Every shirt I release is something that I would wear (minus the color scheme effects on some). I don't want to release new designs for purely for the sake of selling shirts. I want to release shirts for the sake of building around the various themes of the show. Over time I want to start working with different artists to design some amazing shirts. I'm not an artist myself, but I have tons of t shirt ideas that I'd like to release but am not artistically creative to compose on my own. - MCS1
But today we are announcing 5 shirt designs that are on the market right now! These can all be purchased here: MCS1's Shop
