NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING.

If you’re one of those newer listeners – hey there! Thanks for checking us out. Hopefully we don’t screw this thing up too badly. I’m sure the previous paragraph is instilling in you a tremendous sense of confidence.

If you’re one of those older listeners, you probably have more than a few questions. We’ve been answering them for the past few days, and they mostly go something like this:

So is this basically just your old show, but with a new name?

Nope. This isn’t an “Evil Dead/Evil Dead II” or “Spider-Man/The Amazing Spider-Man” type deal. Or a “Cheers/Frasier,” or “Happy Days/Joanie Loves Chachi” type thing, either. It’s not a sequel, or a remake, or a  spinoff. It’s a completely different show that has the same two people at the center of it. The previous show was a rambling, conversational free-for-all that played out like a box of foul-mouthed kittens batting a never-ending ball of yarn through a maze. This show is a lot more focused; specifically, on discussing big news stories on both the front page, and the entertainment section.

Will any of your previous regular guests be coming along?

Nope. Maybe at some point in the future, there might be a show or two in which we have some old friends do a special guest spot, if that’s the way this whole thing ends up evolving, but for now, the focus is on us, This isn’t a commentary on our previous guests in the slightest: In fact, most of those guests could announce they’re starting their own shows in the next month or so, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see their shows outranking this one on iTunes almost instantly.

Will anything from the previous show be coming along?

Aside from the hosts, their particular senses of humor, and the phrase “Welcome to that whole thing,” nope. That includes Bobby’s long out-of-date nickname, any previous segments the show used to do, and the Midnight Movie series. The blaze that destroyed the previous show consumed all those things as well.

How often will you be updating?

The show will go up once a week, on Monday afternoons. It’s possible we could expand out to two shows a week, but that depends on what sort of groove we settle into, and whether we end up needing a second show in order to run through all the things we’d like to run through in a week. For now though, we’re expecting this to be a weekly show, which will run anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour.

Seriously though, this is just a cheap stunt to junk the name, isn’t it.

Nope. At some point, we realized the last show had gone as far as it was going to go. We weren’t the only ones that realized it, either, considering the shrinking listenership. The ideas we had to maybe shake things up would have essentially broken the show. So instead of frankensteining solutions onto the old show with scotch tape and popsicle sticks, it was decided the best bet was to just end the show, and if the will was still there after a couple months, to start over fresh.

The fact this would also get rid of the troublesome name was not the major factor… but it didn’t hurt a hell of a lot, either.

So why didn’t you just say this was what you were doing in the first place?

Because it was never really a guarantee we’d do another show, and we didn’t want to tell anyone anything unless we knew for certain it was going to happen. It was still a possibility that after a couple of months, one or both of us might wake up one day and go “You know, not having to do a show feels pretty nice.” Obviously, it didn’t work out that way – in fact, we both started getting antsy about doing something together after around three weeks. Still, all apologies if you feel like you were swindled/hornswaggled/hoodwinked and/or bamboozled by the death of the old show. We really tried our best to make it as clear as possible that we were retiring that specific show, not that we were going away forever.

So how are you planning on making this anything other than just another one of the million News/Comedy shows – you know, the ones hosted by actual newspeople/comedians – that I can subscribe to on iTunes?

Well, it’s easy to reduce any podcast to “it’s just another (fill in the blank)” considering there’s like three million podcasts out there. The thing we’re hoping sets us apart from similar shows is, well, us; the stories we choose, the angles we take, and the way we discuss them is hopefully what grabs new listeners, and keeps the current listeners listening. That’s basically what we have to do: It’s not like name recognition is going to help us out, so it’s a matter of making that particular shortcoming not matter so much, Being consistently good and funny, way more frequently than “just another(fill in the blank)” show, is how we have to justify this new adventure.

Obviously, this means we’re depending a LOT on word of mouth. We kinda have to.

If there are any other questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below, and they’ll be answered.

Thanks again, and talk to you soon.

In December of 2012, Cort Webber and Bobby Roberts took their almost 10 year-old show, cortandfatboy, to a sun-dappled, pastoral meadow, to spend what time it had left running free with all the other retired talkshows. Or at least that’s the nice way to say it. The other way to say it involves an air-hammer, a closed door, and six-foot-deep hole.

After a couple months in which Cort watched his life pass him by while producing shows at a terrestrial talk station, and Bobby earned his blu-ray spending-money at one of Portland’s alt-weekly newspapers, the duo decided that not only did the podcast game still need them, more importantly (and truthfully), they needed to be back in the podcast game.

Hence: Welcome to That Whole Thing, a weekly hour-long news program, blending “serious business” type stories from the front pages of the internet, with goings-on from the wonderful world of pop-culture; all cut with the sort of silliness, satire, and sarcasm they’ve infused into almost every subject they’ve approached in their combined 20+ years of broadcast/podcast experience. It’s not the conversational free-for-all you’re used to from these two, but a more focused (ish) look at the biggest stories of the week through their uniquely Portland perspective.

This new show premieres February 1^st, 2013, and new episodes – sponsored by purveyors of all things pop culture Things FromAnother World and distributed by Portland Podcast Godfather and creator of pdx.fm, Robert Wagner – will update every Monday thereafter.

To subscribe directly to the podcast via iTunes, use this link

To subscribe directly to the podcast via rss feed, use this link

Questions? Comments? Shrugging Indifference? Contact welcometothatwholething@gmail.com, find us on facebook at facebook.com/welcometothatwholething, or twitter.com/thatwholething