The insert credit gaiden experiment. (Patreon)

(brandon:) The episode we just posted is the last gaiden we have in the pipeline here.  I hope to do a couple more which are just essays, but I have no time, so we'll see when that happens. It was an interesting experiment but I'm not sure what we'll do with it going forward, and I wanted to solicit opinion. It's hard to get honest responses to this because people want to be nice, but here's my feeling:

1) these are fun but since they deviate so much from the core of the podcast, maybe they shouldn't be in the main feed. Episodes like the new john linneman one feel like they do fit the vibe, but maybe not the jeremy interview?
2) since it's all deep cut stuff maybe it makes more sense to keep it for patrons, and expose some of the bigger/better ones to everyone in the future? that might make it more challenging to get good interviews though, if we limit our audience to ~900.
3) adding gaidens means almost double the work for esper and a fair bit more for me, but it's hard to see if they increase our audience or are ultimately kind of recursively for the superfans.
4) 1 per week is probably too much, even with the best stuff? I'm not sure how frequently people actually listen to podcasts.

I'm not totally convinced these things are achieving my goals, but they do add a little something, so I'm uncertain. The whole idea of this was to potentially increase the breadth and reach of the podcast, but interviews and obscura might not be the way to do it, in retrospect! So I'm soliciting your opinions as folks who listen to this podcast regularly. What do you think?

Should it be patrons only? Should we continue to do them whenever we've got them? Any input will be useful!