Rebuilding after burning $38K on a podcast nobody heard

I confessed here about quitting my $95K engineering job to start a podcast. Burned through $38K and ended up taking a job paying $17K less. That was a year ago. Since then I've been grinding. I negotiated two raises by documenting every project I shipped. I took on freelance dev work on evenings and weekends. Started a side project that's generating $400/month in passive revenue. I've rebuilt about $21K of what I lost. Not there yet, but the momentum is real. The podcast stays dead though.