This week Jonathan and I end our sixteen month podcast known as the Libertarian Dime. After sixty-eight episodes done in sixty-nine weeks, generating around a hundred hours of content, we lay it to rest. We met a lot of great people, some of which became friends, I learned how to interview even when unprepared, and I honed my production skills.

We worked hard. Since April 30th of 2008, I haven’t missed a week. Jonathan only missed one because of a last minute emergency. We worked around birthdays, holidays, and trips. No one can accuse us of half assing it, that’s for sure. I thought the best way for the podcast to generate listenership was to have new product every week until we were established, so that’s what we did.

And there lies the rub. The listenership. We never really caught on like I hoped, drawing a smallish but loyal audience. While I mastered the technical aspects of the podcast, I never did figure out how to get us to the next level. The free market has spoken though, and it’s time Jonathan and I listened. We have nothing to be ashamed of, though, as our total downloads can be expressed in the tens of thousands, but in order to have real impact, we would need to be bigger. That might be possible except for the other reason we’re ending the show.

Burnout on politics. In an ironic twist, doing a Libertarian podcast means spending large parts of your life each week worrying about government, the very entity I want out of my life. This past Thursday it all came to a head inside my brain, and I started the push to end the Dime, only to find out a couple days later Jonathan was already going that same direction. It’s not easy to do a political podcast every week, especially one focused on a minority philosophy. So before we come to hate the very podcast we created, we accept the burnout, and move on.

I’m going to be taking a break for a while from podcasting, while I work on other ideas. Jonathan and I already a list of ideas for projects we’d like to work on, and some of those will commence once we’re rested. I’ll try blogging more on non-political topics. There are a myriad of things I’d like to work on, and after showing that I can dedicate myself to an endeavor until it’s logical end, I feel better about working on these new things.

In closing, the Dime will always have a fond place in my memories. I never in my life did anything outside of work that generated so much content, connected me to so many people, and was consumed by so many people. I’d like to thank all of our guests for their support (except you BJ Lawson), because I really did learn a lot from them. I’d like to thank Jonathan for signing up for such a nutty idea of mine to do a podcast. And lastly, I’d like to thank my wife Kelly for all her support starting from day one.

And as I say, or rather, used to say, on my podcast: With that, I’m calling it a night.

(crossposted from http://www.ldnetwork.tv

Note: Show is on Tuesday this week, 2/17 8:30 PM CST

Shane and Jonathan welcome author Adam Shepard to the show to talk about his book, Scratch Beginnings. From the book’s description:

Adam Shepard graduated from college in the summer of 2006 feeling disillusioned by the apathy he saw around him and incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous works Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch—books that gave him a feeling of hopelessness over the state of the working class in America. Eager to see if he could make something out of nothing, he set out to prove wrong Ehrenreich’s theory that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom, and to see if the American Dream can still be a reality.

Shepard’s plan was simple. Carrying only a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using previous contacts or relying on his college education, he set out for a randomly selected city with one objective: work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.

But from the start, things didn’t go as smoothly as Shepard had planned. Working his way up from a Charleston, South Carolina homeless shelter proved to be more difficult than he anticipated, with pressure to take low-paying, exploitive jobs from labor companies, and a job market that didn’t respond with enthusiasm to homeless applicants. Shepard even began donating plasma to make fast cash. To his surprise, he found himself depending most on fellow shelter residents for inspiration and advice.

Earnest, passionate, and hard to put down, Scratch Beginnings is a story that will not only inspire readers, but will also remind them that success can come to anyone who is willing to work hard—and that America is still one of the most hopeful and inspiring countries in the world.

Show Links:

http://www.scratchbeginnings.com

Reason.com gave us a shout out here for our interview with Nick Gillespie:

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/130076.html

Just feels pretty damn cool to see our podcast up there.

Update

Just for posterity, I took a quick screen shot of the reason.com website to see our podcast up there. Click on the image to see it all:

On this past episode of the Libertarian Dime my co-host and I had the absolute thrill of interviewing Nick Gillespie of Reason.com and Reason.tv. It was a lot of fun, and he brought a certain intellectual gravitas that we haven’t had on so far. Since I initially screwed up the time at which I was supposed to interview with him, I was very glad that Nick was gracious enough to quickly reschedule the next day.

It is really amazing, when I think about it, all the cool people we’ve had the chance to talk to (and will talk to), just from doing the podcast. It’s also hard to believe that we’ve done 30 episodes, and it becomes more enjoyable each week we do it. It’s also spawned a lot of ideas for things to do, outside of the podcast that neither Jonathan nor I have thought about doing in years. The Libertarian Dime is really starting to achieve the vision that Jonathan and I had nearly 20 years ago but had no idea how to do.

Now that the election is over, we will be diving deeper into libertarian topics or topics related to the core philosophy of libertarianism. Look for shows on topics you probably won’t hear anywhere else in the libertarian spectrum. Well, I think so anyway.

Now for some show links:

http://thelibertariandime.mevio.com
http://www.mevio.com/shows/?sId=17755&mId=5563159
http://m.podshow.com/media/17755/episodes/131979/thelibertariandime-131979-11-08-2008.mp3

[cross posted at http://www.ldnetwork.tv]

Somehow Jonathan and I have managed to do 25 episodes of our podcast, The Libertarian Dime. Read about it here. I made a big deal about episode 10, but, hell, 25 is a MUCH nicer number. We’ll be making some small changes, all for the better I assure you.

Well,

This evening I uploaded the 22nd episode of The Libertarian Dime. The number “22″ doesn’t have any significance that this skeptic knows of, but I was curious about one thing. How much content have I produced?

Turns out, including episode 22, Jonathan and I have created 30:36 hours of content. That is the equivalent to 83 episodes of a typical TV sitcom, 42 episodes of a typical TV drama, and 20 movies. It’s all been unscripted (as I’m sure is painfully obvious to the listener) so I when I think about it, it kinds of hits me of how much actual content we’ve generated. I am by no means exceptionally prolific as a podcaster. While our shows have ranged from 49 minutes to 150 minutes, we only do it once a week. It’s a enough work just doing one podcast a week.

What has surprised me is that we’ve only gone one week without doing a podcast. Only once. No breaks. We worked around my birthday. We’ll work around T-day, Xmas, FSmas, and New Years. We have no choice now.

In an experiment that I think we’ll keep doing, we are doing another live show for The Libertarian Dime tonight. Details can be found here:

http://www.ldnetwork.tv

I have the new design and logo up at www.ldnetwork.tv (courtesy of Kelly). It’s a start. We’ve been having such great shows lately, the website has taken a backseat. Still, we’ll be keeping show notes and links there, as well as midweek links that we like.

is that I have too have interviewed Michael Shermer on my show. It was a great thrill to interview one of my favorite authors. Sure, there were a couple other podcasters at TAM6, who have had big time guests like Shermer on all the time, but my podcast is pretty new. I’m only eleven episodes in, and still learning the medium.

Listening to the interview again, I see places I could have done better. I realize I spoke a mile a minute, though, my memory is that he had some place to go quickly, so I didn’t have too much time to delay. One thing I’m glad didn’t happen, is that I didn’t have a “You’re so awesome” interview. I tried to ask questions I really wanted answers for.

The interview was included in our 11th episode of The Libertarian Dime, but if you don’t want to listen to all that, you can download the interview here.

Enjoy!

Well, I’m back from TAM6, and it was probably the best overall TAM for me. The speakers were consistently interesting and I did get my interview with Michael Shermer. Because of his schedule and the setup of the conference I was only able to get 10 minutes, however, that is as many minutes as he appeared on The Colbert Report. I also found some new ideas for upcoming guests, and I hope some of those guests will be on in the near future.

I will write a guest by guest summary sometime, but for now, I will just say, it was one of the best times I’ve had learning about things ranging from real crime scene investigation to a spoon bending lesson from Teller. Just a great conference all around.

So, in short, episode 11 of the Libertarian Dime will have my interview with Shermer and our usual opinions on current events. TAM6 also made me more determined to keep going with The Dime, and to expand our offerings. And while I’m at it, I will need to plug my podcast again: http://thelibertariandime.mevio.com.