The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

No sooner had I talked Heath into doing this thing weekly than I started pushing to do an hour long show as well.  The way I figured it, I was always having trouble shaving the last three minutes out of the program, so why not just do the easy thing and add 27 minutes instead?

Luckily Heath is a little more level-headed than me and talked me into taking a step back and realizing just how much work I was about to bite off.  Sure, sometimes we had to lose a funny joke and sometimes we had to push a skit a few episodes ahead, but in the long run, pushing that 30 minute time limit has worked really well so far in keeping us fast paced and succinct.  If we tried to switch to an hour long show, we might have to vamp a lot of time and overall we might add 10 or 15 good minutes but at the expense of padding the show with 15 or 20 mediocre or even crappy minutes.

So needless to say, when I suggested that we make episode 10 an hour long special, Heath was skeptical at first.  But then I showed him all the good stuff we had.  We’re starting the Holy Babble segment with our Genesis discussion, I’m debuting a new atheist song, we’re chocked full of good headlines plus Heath has a hilarious skit that he’s been working on that I really don’t want to deprive the world of any longer than necessary.

When we set out to fill up a show, 10 of the 30 minutes are already taken up.  Between the sponsor, the intro, the diatribe, the calendar, the feedback and the outro, there’s only 20 minutes to fill in any given show and we have to divide that up between the headlines, the interview (or the panel discussion) and, much of the time, a skit or two.  In this week’s show we’d have been left with about 15 minutes to split between the headlines and the panel discussions and given the slate of stories we’ve got this week, we could easily go 15 minutes just on those.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for Heath to see eye to eye with me on this one.  There was just way too much content to try to squeeze it into a thirty minute show.  And if we bumped half the stuff to next week, we’d have to postpone the very awesome, exciting interview that I’m doing later this week.

So hopefully you have an extra half hour for us this week because we’ve got a lot to talk about.