On this website’s 10th birthday, I’m planning for the next decade

It was 10 years ago today when I launched this website with a simple announcement on Facebook. When I started, I was very unclear about what I was going to do with it. If I had never had lunch with an old friend, it never would have happened.

Tom Briscoe had been the editorial cartoonist for a newspaper I had owned and he and I got together for lunch one day in the spring of 2011. He told me I had to start publishing a blog. I gave him all sorts of excuses about why it was a bad idea, but he somehow talked me into doing it anyway.

For the first couple of months, the content was all over the chart. It was mostly bad. By summer, I had settled into writing something that was heavily political and I gained a nice little following that amounted to a couple thousand readers a day.

My big break came when something I wrote — some original reporting from an event I happened to cover — was shared on a popular national political blog called Instapundit. From there, the piece was picked up by conservative and libertarian radio shows around the country, including that of the late Rush Limbaugh. I had 30,000 readers that day — and many of them stayed with me.

For several years, my audience was growing and I was getting unexpected invitations. I was interviewed by talk radio shows in places as different as Alaska, Indiana and England. I was a guest on numerous podcasts, too, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that all I was doing was preaching to an audience of people who already agreed with me.

After a few years of heavy political coverage, I became disillusioned with writing about politics. I slowly shifted to a much more personal direction that was inward-looking and psychological in nature.

Most of what I’ve written in the last seven years has been a direct reflection of where I was psychologically and where I was trying to go. Some of the reflections have been darker than others, but I’ve always tried to be as honest and vulnerable as possible.

I’ve been working on a new project — which I mentioned about a month ago — and I had hoped to have it ready to launch today on the 10th anniversary of the site. But I tend to be wildly overoptimistic about how quickly I can get complicated new work done, so it’s not ready.

Although I’ll still publish some of the sorts of things I’ve been writing here in the future, much of my focus — especially in video — will deal with how to be prepared for the changes that are coming to our world in the next few years. That means it will be part political, part sociological, part economic and part logistical — and completely pragmatic.

I believe we’re heading for some rocky times in the world of the next few decades. I know that a lot of other people see the same thing, to one extent or another. I want to publish something that will be helpful to others who similarly see dark days coming — and who are trying to figure out how to be personally prepared to face a world which might very well fall apart.

The things I’ve been writing here for the last six or seven years have been for myself more than anyone else. I haven’t cared whether I had an audience or not. With the project that comes next, I will be trying to build a commercially viable audience. If I’m successful, it will allow me to produce all sorts of content full time, so I have a lot riding on this bet.

I appreciate those who have been with me for the last 10 years. I don’t know where the next decade is going to take us, but I hope I’ll be making something that will still have you coming back in 2031. So plan now to join me then — to celebrate 20 years online.

Thank you for being here. I appreciate every one of you.