Today we’d like to introduce you to Quincy Shelton.
Hi Quincy, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I started being a fan of talk radio in the mid-90s. At the time, I had a job doing data entry and that allowed me to listen to the radio a lot during my shifts. I listened to everyone from Jim Rome to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Those shows really inspired me to be in a position one day to voice my opinion on things.
The internet afforded me that chance once blogging became popular. I started blogging in 2010 because I also wanted a platform where I could speak my mind on various topics and interact with those who provided feedback. Podcasting wasn’t popular at the time, but talk radio still was. This internet site called Blogtalkradio allowed people to set up free accounts and have 15 minutes of talk time as well as a toll-free number for guests to call in. It seemed like a great opportunity for me to cross “being a talk show host” off of my bucket list. So, in February 2011, that’s where Talk 2 Q started.
I never thought that I’d do more than two or three episodes, but fellow bloggers started listening and other people got on board as well. I scheduled broadcasts from Sunday-Thursday at 10 PM Eastern Time and each night discussed a different topic from relationships to politics. The next thing I know, I’m having repeat callers each time I go on the air and the show really started to grow.
Some of the people who called in regularly over the first year or two became so important to the show’s success that I gave them titles as “Show Legends”. There’s no way the show could have grown as it did without them. They always had opinions that sparked dialogue and as a talk show host, that’s what I needed. Over the years, I’ve had 19 or 20 callers who were dubbed as “Show Legends”, but the original group was: M&M in Mississippi, Buck in Florida, Ray in New Jersey, Crystal Hickerson in Michigan, and Amanda in New Jersey. I could always count on them to call in and help drive the discussions whenever I was on the air and I’m forever grateful to that bunch.
Over the course of my first few years, I started getting callers from all over the country and even some from overseas. Actors, singers, authors, and even other podcasters were emailing requests to be guests on my show. From 2011-2018, I broadcasted 765 episodes and had discussions with over 450 different guests.
In late 2020, I evolved to a video podcast on YouTube (I was audio-only from 2011 until then), but I still do an audio-only version of those shows. My audio podcasts from over the years offer over 2,000 hours of some of the craziest and most insightful conversations that you’ll ever hear about random, but important, real-life topics.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It wasn’t always easy. People would request to be guests on my show and then wouldn’t appear when it was showtime. Luckily, I always had a backup topic, but it still made things difficult on me when it happened. That was probably the most frustrating part of being a talk show host. Not everyone took my show as seriously as I did, and people let me down quite often over the years.
I also got obsessed with numbers. At its peak, my show was getting around 2,000 listens per episode. As podcasting became more popular in Hollywood and celebrities got into it, I saw my numbers decline. I worked so hard to try to compete with them to maintain my ratings, but I couldn’t. Their pockets were so deep that they could reach more people through advertising than I could. I was thriving on word of mouth, but they had ads galore to promote their shows.
Stressing myself daily trying to reclaim the ratings I once had burned me out and ultimately, I lost the desire to continue broadcasting. In 2018, I broadcasted what I thought would be my last episode with number 765.
After two years away, I realized that I’d missed it all. I didn’t miss all of the work, but I missed the fun that came with meeting new people and having healthy and fun discussions with my Show Legends. I promised myself that if I returned to hosting the show again that my approach this time would only be about putting on a good show and not about my show statistics.
In February 2020, just about 3 weeks before the pandemic began, I went back on the air, and I am still going to this day as I just finished episode number 1,015 a couple of weeks ago.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
My specialty was having the ability to find topics that people either thought were not important, were unaware of them, or too afraid to discuss them. Talk 2 Q was known for being a place where everyday people could voice their opinions on everyday topics and that’s what set me apart from everyone else at the time.
The show was not always about me and what I thought. I have always been just a moderator. I have the ability to ask the right questions to retrieve thoughts from people on a wide range of subjects that impact daily living. The platform was created so that others could express their opinions on things. I made my callers the stars of the podcast which is why I named the show “Talk 2 Q” instead of “Listen 2 Q”.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up, I was a sponge. I absorbed so much by simply listening and I always wondered what drove someone to have the opinions that they have. Whether it was from watching TV, listening to the radio, or just having conversations with people, I always paid attention to what they said and wondered what life experiences, or lack thereof, drove them to their conclusions.
Most of the debates I got into early in life surrounded sports as I grew up a big fan of the NFL and NBA. As I matured, my debates did as well to include politics, current events, relationships, race relations, and more. I always enjoyed a healthy discussion on just about anything with differing opinions.
And I never thought about this until now, but I was a content creator in my elementary school years thanks to the influence of my older brother. Growing up, he was a comic book fan and flat-out enjoyed reading which really inspired me to do the same. Like him, I’d create my own comic books and would let my classmates read them at school and leave comments/feedback on the back page. He and I would use a keyboard to mix music together to create our own songs. He would take me with him to the computer science lab on a nearby college campus which gave me my first experience with computer programming. I’m pretty sure that’s why building my website for my podcast was never intimidating to me.
He probably has no idea how he helped to mold me as a future talk show host simply because I wanted to be creative like he was.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.Talk2Q.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/Talk2Q
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/Talk2Q
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/Talk2Q
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCib563gazVHEUrCtTctJCjw
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@talk2qnow?lang=en
