'We Don’t Have Time For This' calls time on live touring as costs climb

A loyal audience, four Sydney Opera House shows sold out in 10 minutes, and 50,000 listeners tuning in each week. On paper, We Don’t Have Time For This has the kind of following most independent podcasters would happily take.

But in 2026, even that isn’t enough to make live touring stack up.

Hosts Gemma Pranita and Kate Reeves will stop touring after their current Know Thyself run, saying rising production costs, last-minute ticket buying and a sponsorship market that has all but disappeared have fundamentally changed the economics of taking a podcast on the road.

It’s a sharp reversal for a part of the business that, until recently, had been one of its most reliable commercial engines.

Pranita and Reeves, childhood best friends who launched the podcast in 2020, have built a fiercely loyal community around conversations spanning motherhood, careers, identity, divorce, dating and the general chaos of trying to keep all the plates spinning.

Their annual live shows grew with them, expanding into national and international touring productions that are less two microphones on a stage and more SNL-meets-cabaret-meets-stand-up.

The rules have changed

The problem, the pair say, isn’t the audience. It’s the economics around them.

Cost-of-living pressures have changed when people commit to entertainment, with audiences increasingly waiting until much closer to showtime to buy.

“It feels like we went to sleep in one commercial world and woke up in a Neverland. All the rules of marketing, of how we promote the show, and consumer behaviour have changed,” Pranita told Mediaweek.

“Where people used to want to have things early, now they’re waiting till the last minute because they’re seeing what they have left to spend that month.”

That might work for the person deciding whether there’s enough left in the account for a night out. It’s considerably harder for the business paying for that night out months in advance.

“When you’re budgeting and planning, and all your bills are due before the curtain goes up, not knowing if anyone’s going to turn up affects the decisions you make commercially,” Reeves tells Mediaweek.

The shift has played out unevenly across the tour. While some cities have sold strongly, the pair said their first Brisbane show had around 200 tickets sold in a 600-seat theatre.

Sponsors disappear

Then there’s sponsorship.

“Where we would normally have three to five sponsors on a project like this, this year we have no tour sponsors,” Reeves said.

For an independent, female-led business mounting a full-scale theatre production, that missing revenue has left Pranita and Reeves effectively playing sponsor themselves.

“The last three years, this has been our biggest commercial activity, and one we could see steady growth on. We can project what we expect to come in and what we can spend. This year has broken every single one of those rules, and it’s meant we’re going in almost blind,” Reeves said.

“Our audience has come to expect this from us, and we don’t want to let our audience down. We want to deliver. So we essentially are sponsoring it ourselves, which is not something we can do ongoing,” Pranita added.

The $500,000 gamble

And “sponsoring it ourselves” isn’t loose change.

The business has fronted close to $500,000 to mount this year’s tour, covering venue deposits, costumes, AV production, flights, accommodation and the team required to put the show on stage.

“It used to be that we didn’t pay ourselves for about eight weeks because that was the runway to the live show. But now the live show takes up months of our year, and we don’t pay ourselves properly in that whole time because we just have so many bills,” Pranita said.

For Reeves, the collision between business cash flow and ordinary life became particularly stark.

“The other day, I had to think, ‘Do I pay the touch footy registration this week, or do we try and pay for the projector screen in Brisbane?’”

Perth has already fallen victim to the new equation, with the team dropping the city from this year’s schedule after it couldn't raise enough capital to make the date commercially viable.

Reeves is also quick to put their experience in the context of a much tougher live market.

“I’m actually quite hesitant to whinge because we’ve done very well. Colleagues of ours and the industry at large are struggling to sell tickets,” she said.

What comes after the curtain falls

The podcast itself isn’t going anywhere.

Pranita and Reeves will continue producing their weekly episodes, while turning their attention to projects in other formats.

“There are a lot of exciting new creative projects in completely new mediums in the works,” Pranita said.

“We are trying to push ourselves to work with other collaborators, to reach a bigger audience and to push ourselves creatively.”

What can’t be quite so easily transferred to another medium is the community that has formed in theatres around the country.

“For two people who aren’t religious, it has become our church,” Reeves said. “It’s a ritual for secular mothers who are doing all the things and need their altar.”

For now, that congregation has a few services left. Then, after years of taking We Don’t Have Time For This from the podcast feed to the stage, the curtain comes down.

The current Know Thyself tour opened in Canberra on August 15, before heading to Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide, with Melbourne set to close the run on September 19.