Amid all of the excitement around this week’s announced Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and The Adventure Zone shows at the Balboa Theater, many attendees noticed something: This didn’t leave a lot of room in the schedule for Chris Hardwick’s annual Nerdist Podcast Live taping.

Today, on a Facebook Live video, Hardwick confirmed what many had thought: There won’t be a podcast recording this year, and he won’t be performing his usual stand-up show at the convention either.

“We’re breaking tradition this year,” Hardwick said of the decision to skip his nightly shows this year. “It just started to get to be too much. My days were like 15 hours long, I was moderating 10-13 panels, which was fun, but it’s also stressful because you don’t want to fuck up the panel in front of 7,000 people. In front of folks like Marvel, or Star Wars.”

Hardwick’s schedule is always jam-packed — not only does he moderate more panels than basically anyone else at the convention center, but he also helps run the Conival offsite (though there’s been no word this year on whether that will be returning this year, but Hardwick’s presence isn’t as required there, so it seems likely to return). He’s also currently busy getting ready for his ID10T Music Festival.

Not only was it hard to fit everything in, but Hardwick explained that booking the guests was also usually a last minute scramble.

“Booking the podcast for SDCC, I would get chest pains. When you’re trying to book people, no one really confirms who’s even going to Comic-Con until like two weeks before. So we would announce, like hey, we’re doing a podcast at San Diego Comic-Con! And people’s first question was, “Who’s the guest? I don’t want to buy tickets unless I know who the guest is.” So we just never knew until the last couple of weeks. There were a couple of years where I was like, oh. We’re just not going to have a fucking guest this year. And then it always at the last minute worked out, but it was very stressful,” Hardwick said.

However, he didn’t rule out the possibility of returning in the future, adding that, “maybe we’ll be back next year with Matt and Jonah.” And he also mentioned that he will be at Comic-Con this year, so you can probably at least expect to find Hardwick on the Hall H stage a few dozen times.

With no Nerdist, no Nerd HQ, no Entertainment Weekly Con-X, and no SherlockeDCC happening this year — it’s going to be interesting to see what happens to the offsite scene. But there’s usually something waiting in the wings to take their place.

Are you disappointed about Hardwick’s news? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to @SeanCena for the heads up.