In today’s fast-paced digital world where a plethora of information is easily available, tons of varying and clashing opinions on all sorts of topics are floating online. Author, mathematician, and political commentator Dr. James Lindsay has dedicated his career to leading an intellectual rebellion to address the most problematic trends in academic and cultural discourse. Joining Paul Swaney, he discusses how to maintain intellectual rigor in the age of social media, the unbreakable relationship of politics and media, and how to not lose your ability to think critically. Dr. James also shares his transition from academia to entrepreneurship, the origin story of his platform New Discourses, and how he handles attacks at all fronts.
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Intellectual Rebellion: From Academia To Entrepreneurship – James Lindsay’s Journey
We’re talking with Dr. James Lindsay. I had a great dinner, getting to know him. Anyway, thanks for coming down to St. Petersburg, Florida, and being on letter up with us. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me. It’s has been fun.
Transition From Academia To Entrepreneurship
Could you do me a favor and walk me through a little bit about your academic background, which set the stage for you to go on this journey that you’ve been?
I went to college, and decided I wanted to major in Physics way back in the ‘90s, back when college was still college. I got a degree in Physics specialization in Nuclear but not that it matters because I don’t remember any of it. In 2001, I did a Master’s in Mathematics. I finished that in ‘03 and then I went on to the University of Tennessee and did a PhD in Mathematics that I finished in 2010, which means I know how to do some research and I’m not a stranger to the academic literature.
I don’t know how much your readers are going to know about my backstory or how much you’re going to tell them, but we’ll just jump in. As far as my story goes, I eventually became frustrated with the academic literature and feminism with all things a few years later, dot, dot, dot. I left academia after I finished my PhD. I was like, “I’m done with this place. I don’t like the institution. I don’t like the bureaucracy. I don’t want to spend my life in this trap.”
I got out, which is not the best. It’s not what you do if you’ve spent thirteen years getting an advanced degree, but I did. I ended up studying feminist academic literature because these people are annoying as hell and they cannot believe this. The things that we’re saying in different checkers and philosophy.
I was writing some philosophy with some guys and I couldn’t believe what they were saying. I started to read their academic literature to figure out where it came from. I was like, “This stuff’s nuts.” I knew how to read academic literature. I knew what academic journals are and all that like highfalutin PhD stuff is because I had one in math. Communism is a little easier than that, let’s just be real. I’m just selling math.
The thing that’s interesting there is you made a hard pivot and consciously decided, “Something out of the best my life.” What were you thinking when you went through that like the emotional process?
For leaving academia? I graduated in 2010. It was probably ’08 or, it might’ve been ’07 looking back, but I was in one of our grad student-teacher meetings with grad assistant. I taught classes for them in the Math department. You folks teach stuff under calculus. It’s all intro freshmen stuff. I’m not teaching real math for engineers or scientists or whatever.
They were like, “Get these kids through. Keep them happy. Don’t break their spirit. Don’t lose their scholarships in particular. Don’t fail too many kids. If you need to fail more than one per class, you probably need to be able to come to the office and justify. Show us why you have to fail a second student.” I thought, “This is math.” Math is hard. I get it. This is the service course math. This isn’t the real math or these kids are not going to go off and be engineers, 90% or 99% of them.
I think one of my students did change and got into math, but most of them don’t. I was still like, “I don’t like this. It’s bogus. I don’t want to teach if this is the environment.” I understood the finances and why they were trying to keep people in. I understood that tuition’s going radically going up. Now it’s, “I’ll coddle these kids and keep their scholarships so we can stay on the state lottery money or whatever it happens to be.” I’m like, “This is a corrupt system.”
I had this integrity issue that I didn’t like. I had a second issue that basically boils down to not liking the bureaucratic nature of the university itself. I just didn’t want to be in a bureaucracy. That was a personal thing. I wanted to do something more interesting than that. The third of all is personal like personal life doesn’t stop because of professional life. It’s a real thing. I have my kids and they were about to start high school. Technically, they’re stepdaughters, so they’re a little older that matches my age going to grad school. I married into them and they were about to start high school when I’m finishing my doctorate.
It’s like, are we going to jump around city to city for the postdoc cycle? These kids are going to go to three high schools and be the new kid twice? Are we going to not do that? Am I going to leave to go on my postdoc circuit and figure out how to make the family work for not being home? What I decided was I’m just not going to finish with academia. I’m going to figure something else out.
You made a decision cautiously. You weren’t running towards something. Not that you were running away from academia, but you drew a hard line and said, “I’m going to do something else.” You got a blank sheet of paper. How did you figure out what to do?
My wife talked me into it. It’s funny. People make fun of me when they find out what I did because you get a PhD in Math. I became a Massage Therapist. I landed a business working with my hands. My wife and I together ran a small business for years. I’m not a massage therapist anymore. I retired my license a few when this all got busy with the stuff I do now, but I wanted to help people and I had hurt myself.
We were talking that I used to fight. I did jujitsu and all this stuff back when nobody knew what jujitsu was yet, back to UFC 06 or whatever, when they used to number them in order. I hurt my back bad in training one day. I wasn’t even fighting it. It was super lame. I was doing the so-called teeter-totter drill. For years, it plagued me all through my twenties.
On and off, it would just spaz out on me and it hurt. I couldn’t get out of some days. It’s like, “Dude, in my twenties, I’m crippled.” I met this guy and he did the massage therapy. It’s called trigger point therapy and fixed my back like basically fixed it. You don’t fix it in like one. He showed me and did it to me. It helped a lot. He told me to buy a book and learn how to do it. I taught myself how to do this to myself because it’s expensive to go again and again, so I fixed my own back.
My wife was like, “You already know how to help people. A lot of people have serious chronic pain problems and you’re good at fixing them. Why don’t we do this and figure out what else later?” It turns out I liked it. I thought, “Maybe this is what I’m going to do. Who cares? I’m working with my hands. I walk free time. I could do study and research and get free time.” That’s how I get writing the philosophy that leads me to discover the feminists to ruining it. The story doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but it all does make sense.
All the entrepreneurship stories all tied together at the end and they’re all the thinnest thread. My founder at the old place I worked at told me the story about they didn’t have enough money to make rent or they paid the rent, but they didn’t have movers. They’re pushing shopping carts across the threshold of a bank building that they stole from the local supermarket. I love those stories.
Mine goes hard like that later too, as it turns out and then we can skip forward to the part where I run a small business now that puts out what I think is an analysis of what’s happening in the world, so I sell information. I don’t sell it as a product. I have books but I don’t have like, “Sign up for a subscription or whatever.” It’s like crowdfunded as Patreon, subscribe star or YouTube subscribers.
I’ve made this company and it does well. When I first told my wife that I thought that the stuff that I was studying in feminist gender studies, critical race theory, and all the things that people know about now but didn’t know about in 2016 or 2017. I went to my wife and said, “I think this stuff’s going to like the end of the world. It’s like taking over everything. Can I quit my job as a massage therapist and dedicate my life full-time to studying and exposing it?”
My wife is a very practical woman. She’s also female. We’re old school like that. She said, “Can you make money doing that?” That’s her reply. I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “You have eighteen months to figure it out.” It turns out, she is truly female. Eighteen in girl math is fifteen when you’re not making money. Months later, she’s like, “Where’s the paycheck?” No joke. I borrowed $2,000 from my friend and wrote myself a bogus salary check for $2,000, and paid him back three months later.
Did she know this?
She knows now. She didn’t know it until about the second of those three months. I knew stuff was starting to work. I knew the money was going to be there but we were right at the edge. It’s not quite shopping carts I borrowed from the grocery store, but I was like, “Can I have $2,000 and pay myself with this real quick? I’ll pay you back literally.”
What I’m hearing you say, though, is you were so convicted in what you were doing that it wasn’t like you were to make that conversation with him and borrow some money, but you just knew the money was coming in.
I knew it was coming at that point but I worked for fifteen months to build out the platform and it had started to generate revenue, which just hadn’t generated enough revenue to justify it paying us yet. It was paying for the people’s lights on and keep the website running. It wasn’t paying us.
That’s why I said all the stories are the same. People just love hearing them. You have a sports spouse.
That helps.
The Origin And Growth Of A Community
It’s critical. You have a supportive spouse. You guys have made a decision you’re going to take eighteen months in running in this. What is day one? It sounds like you got an idea. Where was your Twitter at then? Was this 2016?
No, that was 2018. That was in the middle of my infamous grievance hoax papers project.
Can you tell everybody what that is a little bit too?
We skipped an important part of the story. Long and short, I was a massage therapist. I started to write these different articles. I was at something in Scientific American with a physicist and a philosopher. I had some stuff in Time Magazine. I was trying to write. It was mostly a hobby, but if I made some side money, some of those articles are like $500 to write or whatever. That’s cool. $500 is pretty good to write something.
I was doing that and then you get ransacked by these feminists, so I started to read their academic literature. They were ruining everything. My friend, Peter Boghossian, and I decided these people are right for an academic hoax. We write this trial balloon hoax paper, which what had happened was they published a paper that the Science of Glaciology, studying glaciers has to become feminist or else all the scientists are sexist, they have to use feminist art and all this crazy stuff.
If I tell you how crazy this feminist glacier paper is, I tried a little bit of dinner. It’s like, the more I tell you, the less you can believe that it’s real, but it’s real. They were like, “The scientists look at these photographs of glaciers, but there’s a woman who paints pictures of glaciers but they don’t study her paintings.” It’s like, “What?” I saw this and we were like, “We got to hoax these people.” Peter and I decided after that paper, we’re like, “Let’s write something.”
Something we had just read, again, if I can tell you, you won’t believe this. It was in the leading gender studies journal, which is called Gender and Society. This was like 2015 or something. The paper was something to the effect of menstrual blood as a social construct. I’m just like, “Why don’t we write the penis as a social construct?”
We wrote this paper called the Conceptual Penis as a social construct. We said penises are best thought of as a male attitude rather than an anatomical organ. They cause all the problems in the world, especially climate change. We wrote this stupid 4,000-word paper. It ends up through a series of misfortunes getting published in a predatory journal. This makes it extremely controversial.
What’s a predatory journal?
A predatory journal is one that will publish anything if you give them money to publish it. It’s paid to publish and they’ll publish anything you send them as long as you give them some money. It turns out, we didn’t give them any money. They literally are so sloppy they forgot to bill us and just publish it anyway and then we refused to pay them afterward. We get this out there and then people say, “That’s controversial, A, B, C, and D. You have to do this if you want to prove the point you’re making the feminism and gender studies at the academic level. It’s this corrupt inter-progress.” Which we all take for granted now, but that was big news in 2017.
We said, “We’ll do A, B, C, and D.” We initiated this project that we called the Grievance Studies Affair by the end of it, and we wrote twenty more papers. We sent them to leading journals like Gender and Society. Gender and Society did not accept the paper we sent to them, for the record, but we sent out twenty papers. Seven of them were accepted. One of them won an award for excellence, and some of them were published. They explored the relationship between dog sex at the dog park and human rape culture.
They have lots of very sexual themes as you might imagine now that we’ve seen what the weirdo left has been doing for the last few years. We rewrote a chapter of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book, where he’s organizing the Nazi party, chapter twelve of the first volume, which is the last chapter of that. We rewrote that as like, “Feminism needs to be now.” That got accepted by a feminist social work journal and is like, “What’s going on.” In the middle of that, one of our papers was about education.
We said that we’ll work it out. What we need to do is find out which kids have privilege and we’ll just abuse them out of the privileges of educational opportunity. We’ll use compassion. This is at the leading feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia. The peer reviewers wrote back and said, “We love your idea that you cannot use compassion because that might recenter me to privilege kids.” I was like, “This ends in genocide.”
You gotten the feedback and needed to go harder.
Everything coming out of academia has real-world consequences. Share on XI sat down and thought about that. That’s when I went to my wife and I was like, “This ends.” I was doing it already. I wasn’t building a platform. I was writing these fake papers and I got this feedback. I literally became convicted. I was like, “This could tear society apart. This logic and it’s in schools and in everything.” I went to my wife. I already told that part of the story, I asked if I could quit my job and expose this as a career.
You’ve heard that part of the story. On day one, what that looked like was we finished the grievance studies affair. I had my media tour. When we launched the grievance studies affair, my Twitter was at 8,000 followers. It’s currently at 535,000 followers. After the paper project became public, it went up to 11,000 followers. Turns out Joe Rogan heard about it. He is a big deal. He had us on the show to talk about it in 2018. It was a funny episode. It went up to 80,000 following going on Joe Rogan.
He had me on again in 2020 and it went up to 200,000, to 250,000 basically overnight. I grew so fast that Twitter locked me on my account because they thought it was bot activity after I went on the second time. In the meantime, it’s day zero or day one. What I did, I started to have this media presence. I started to have a growing Twitter account in the high tens of thousands of followers, not quite a hundred thousand yet. I met my business partner because he saw a lecture that I gave on YouTube.
He calls me and said, “We need to build a platform around what you’re saying.” I was like, “I don’t know if I want to get into all this. It’s not complicated.” We go out in middle of the night and then he drove me out to Vegas for like a weekend of meetings in some one of the fancy hotels. We had this nice weekend, and talked over the possibilities and said, “Let’s think about it.” That was in March of 2019.
In July of 2019, we met in Manhattan and did another series of meetings. That was the next thing. We decided there like, “Let’s build something to get the message out.” We made a series of videos on it on the skyscrapers on 57th, like with the Chrysler building background. They were iconic. It changed some important conversations, but that was a trial bullet in making those videos to see if we made high production value stuff. Wouldn’t there be a market for it? Would it move the needle? The answer turned out to be yes. We’re like, “It’s on October.” We started, and filed the paperwork to build the LLC. It’s called New Discourses.
This is that fifteen-month run. Is this going to work? Is it not going to work? We officially launch in February of 2020. In the last weekend, we go to the Trump DC. We’re in the hotel. I gave a talk in the Lincoln Library room, with a bunch of White House people, DOD people. I told them this is in February 25th or something like that, in 2020. I’m like, “I think Gregory’s theory is very bad. Here’s what it is.”
This was right before COVID locked down.
This was like two weeks before. We’re there and we didn’t know yet. This is when we officially launched the website to the public. I had written all this. I knew I had to bank material, so I wrote about a hundred articles before we published the website. There were tons of stuff ready to go like a library for people. That was my idea, make the library for people. We have this meeting in DC.
I told the them Gregory’s Theory, “This is what it is. I bet you, within six months, it’s going to be a cultural revolution kickoff in America using CRT about race. It’s going to be like the Chinese cultural revolution tearing down streets and all that.” They laughed at me. It turns out that they three months later and I was dead on the money.
I wish I has a theory about this. Would that reaction have happened hadn’t we not been locked down?
I don’t know because you’re so bottled up. People were so anxious but it’s hard to say because I’ve seen this pattern. This was the same thing that the Chinese did in the 1960s. A lot of people don’t know, but Mao disgraced himself and lost a lot of his power in 1962. We don’t have to get into the whole history, but a great leap forward and probably the biggest government-made disaster that’s ever happened, human failure ever.
He loses all his standing. He’s still technically chairman, because he’s a dictator. He loses all of his standing. He’s got a premier, Liu Shaoqi, that’s running things. He’s just 1962 to 1966 plotting, “How do I get my power back?” He basically whipped the youth into a frenzy and launches the Cultural Revolution in June of ‘66. What kicked it off was what’s called a Red August, which you can guess when that was.
I was watching the current play out. It’s like you’re watching the media and it’s Michael Brown, then it’s Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. It’s like one after the other, I feel and they’re ratcheting it up. I read CRT. I knew it was Marxist. I was like, “It’s only a matter of time until this like blows up and boils over.” The George Floyd scene was like, “That looks bad.” It turns out, it wasn’t quite what we all saw that went super viral at the end of May that year but it looks bad. I think the COVID lockdowns contributed, but I think they were agitating for that.
That’s the way this works. You spread pine needles or leaves and stuff. Spray it with lighter fluid and you wait for the spark. Anyway, George Floyd dying turned out to be great for my career because I had a library about what was happening and I just published. That was the risk I took. The bed was this is going to be very relevant information for people. In the meantime, I had just finished my book, Cynical Theories, which sold now over 500,000 copies.
It got a lot of people’s attention because everybody wanted to know what the world was going on. That came out in August of 2020 right after George Floyd died. Rogan had me on July 1st, 2020, right after George Floyd died to explain what was going on. That’s where I jumped from probably about a hundred, 100,000 to 250,000 followers on Twitter right away. That was the second time I went on the show.
I’ve been on four times now, but I took a risk and bet that this information was going to be relevant and important. I tried to tell people but they didn’t want to hear it and they didn’t believe me. Not to be corny because it’s like your world. I don’t want to entrepreneur you but it’s like I had an idea. I believed in the idea. People couldn’t see the vision. I pressed with the vision. I didn’t give up on the vision. I got laughed at for the vision.
Who was your biggest naysaying that you thought would have been a supporter?
I called them the very smart people. It’s like, “We write for the Atlantic or New York magazine.” That crowd used to be respectable and now we’re all like, “You folks were like literally wrong about everything.” Now, we strongly get to suspect you might be a propagandist. It turns out that I was a left-leaning academic. I thought that like edgy, intellectual, dark web, centrist with some variation, smart commentary class was going to be all behind me. They were like, “He’s crazy. He lost his mind.”
Literally, that’s what they called me crazy. To this day, I still get called crazy every time I put something edgy out there. They’re not edgy but it’s something people aren’t ready to see yet. I knew that the thing that I was chasing was real. I’d been reading their academic literature for a very few people I had been for years. I’ve been seeing its implementation in universities and schools and what’s downstream from that. You’re not supposed to quote Hitler apparently, but Hitler said, “He who owns the youth gains the future.” It’s like it’s only a matter of time because people were saying, “These kids, they’re just college kids.” It’s 2015.
I said that in 2005 that they’re just kids.”
You’re wrong. That’s the thing, everybody thought they’re going to go out into the real world. The real world is going to smack them around and they’re going to grow out of this nonsense. It turns out, no, they’re going to grow up and go to go out into the real world, take their ideology with them into all of these careers and into HR. They’re going to become Jenny from HR and ruins everybody’s life.
They transformed to the real world around them because they were so intolerant to work with them and so convicted to their ideology and I saw this coming. Again, in 2014 or 2015, I’m like, “This is an emergency. Let’s write fake papers.” In 2018, I was like, “This is going to end in genocide. Let’s do something. Let’s throw away your whole life on this risk.” Come 2020, I was so convinced of what I was seeing. It was like, “I just have to stick to my guns,” then it blew up and took off. By the end of 2020, I’m running a company that’s pulling close to six figures a month.
For you and your business partner and some constant support, right?
Yes.
Turning The Vision Into A Monetary Strategy
That’s amazing. That’s always a theme left or highly convicted in your idea. You some people probably telling you you’re an idiot. At what point though, you have to be optimistic as an entrepreneur. Hopefully, optimistic. At what point did you transition from being, “I believe in the vision to this will work to I can monetize it” on that eighteen-month timeline?
It was close to the end. At the end of a year, I still couldn’t see it. Luckily, this is why it’s sometimes very helpful to go into business with people. The folks that I went into business with had done this before with other groups. They’d help them build platforms. Usually, what they had done in the past with other groups was help them build a website presence get high production quality podcasts or video or whatever, and then let them loose.
With me, we had a different program. We were going to work together. That was always the plan from the one week incorporated. The plan was at least for five years, which comes up in 2025. We thought that this was going to be like a partnership. They were able to buoy me along at the points where it was looking. I was like, “I’m not a nerd. I just wanted to get information out there.” Almost, I didn’t care if it succeeded or not.
To put it in business lingo, I had to bring this product to market but it wasn’t. It was like a vision and I had to tell people stuff, or Old Testament prophet stuff. “I don’t care what happens. I have to say this stuff.” They were like, “No, this will work. We’re going to get the model built. We’re going to make some videos. We’ll get high production quality. We’re going to get subscribers.” The subscriber model works.
We’re going to diversify. All the eggs aren’t in one basket, so we’re not just going to open up a Patreon or whatever company with crowds on it. We’re going to open all of them and give people as many options as possible. That way, if say, Patreon or YouTube doesn’t like what I’m saying, that’s a hit but it’s also marketing for me. They know I’m so controversial. That never happened except on Facebook. I got kicked off of Twitter and Facebook for 50 different points, but Elon brought me back.
You were one of the chosen few like the Babylon B that got brought back?
I was. I was out for five months on through 2022 from my X account. Elon brought it back. How did I got getting attacked? I’ve only maybe a couple of times in my life ever been attacked like I got attacked and got led back on X. That was a dark hour. They went after me.
Who’s coming after you? Is it anonymous or is it anonymous- anonymous?
No, not all of them. Who I got kicked off for was I was taking on these transgender advocates and a lot of them are like New Yorkers or whatever. That all seems a little embarrassing to talk about it out of my normal context of edgy and conservative leading politics, which is funny because I’m not even conservative but I popularized. I didn’t invent the phrase groomer to refer to these people who were, in my opinion, ideologically grooming children into a sex and gender-based ideology and sometimes sexuality-based ideologies, what we now call Gender Ideology.
I was just like, “Okay, groomer.” Spinning off of okay groomer. There’s just a glib flip and they didn’t like being call groomers. They eventually got the rule changed at Twitter so that people who were using it would get kicked off then they got me kicked off for doing it a few months later. When I came back, it was them and their associates who attacked me because now I was back on there. It was the most vicious smear campaign. There was this picture I took with a woman at an event and she happened to be an actress, so here’s me hanging out with this blonde and having fun. She was involved in that NXIVM sex cult thing.
What’s her name?
Nicki Klein. She’s wonderful. That’s crazy. NXIVM was not okay. I’m at this event and we’re hanging out when we take a couple funny pictures from all the internet. I saw that picture thousands of times a day for weeks and weeks. I was never a legend that I was part of this cult. It’s like, “Have you ever been to a conference? When people are hanging out and they take pictures of you.” She was some chick from Battlestar Galactica that looked cool. Apparently, they tried to destroy me like smear me that I was involved because I said, “Okay, Groomer,” to the advocates.
They came back and were like, “You’re a groomer because you’re involved in this sex cult.” I’m like, “I’m not involved in this sex cult. My life is cool, but it’s not that cool.” Anyways, that was nasty but they had this vision. They believed that this was going to work and they were right. They knew how the growth curve would look. They were a little more optimistic than reality, but they weren’t far off. The numbers started to rash about and then, and it’s like I said, the George Floyd dying and me having the library, which is what I had bet on all along. Eventually, the library of this information is going to be very useful for people.
You can have a strong working knowledge of something just by reading and taking the time to look up every single specialist term you come across. Share on XIt’s interesting like you’ve got a product ready to go to market. When you saw that catalyst, did you go like, “We’re going in?” Was there already a plan that got lined up?
I had written these academic papers. I looked into the belly of the academic beast. I had this broad sweeping but shallow knowledge of what was going on with the academic stuff. I write cynical theories and we go a bit deep but not super deep to a variety of these domains. It’s six different domains then I thought, “What in the world do people need to know about what’s happening?”
I had this long conversation with my business partner late in 2019. I said, “I need to start creating a library of critical race theory for people because I think it’s accessible. They need to understand that the stuff coming out of academia has real-world consequences.” I remember I’m convinced that this is the unraveling of society at the mainstream, which maybe that was hyperbolic.
Maybe after the last five years, people think would that wasn’t crazy at all. It seems that we escaped the worst of that, but I was utterly convinced Old Testament prophet style. It’s like, “You need to hear this and I’m going to just put it out there.” I also was pretty convinced, as I said. I take critical race theory because I was like this is the one that they’re going to push hard first, so I made a bet on that.
As I said, I figured that if I’m going to build a library, I needed to write like crazy, so fifteen hours a day probably. I was reading CRT stuff, and writing synopses of the things I was reading of basic level Pop books like Kennedy stuff, hard academic stuff like Cheryl Harris, Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw like the real Richard Delgado. The real stuff and just writing synopsis, here’s this term they use, what do they mean by it, how does it show up in the early return or how does it apply.
I don’t want to oversimplify it but it almost sounds like you built a field guide. Was that the idea?
It was because of one of the products when I made on the website initially, I don’t know if anybody likes Tolkien fans, but allegedly Bilbo Baggins and Tolkien is writing translations from the Elvish. I called this project translation is from the Locush. It’s like an homage to that. That’s what it was. It was like a field guide to leftist activism and the academic underpinnings behind it.
I didn’t have a gut feeling but I had this hair on fire, “People need to know this emergency belief to produce this as fast as I could.” Luckily, these folks knew how to build a slick-looking website. They know how to do documentary-quality sound and video if they have the resources to put behind it so it can make some slick-looking stuff. We built a good product.
It’s interesting to beat up the fantasy metaphors. It’s almost like you were building a defense against the dark arts to acquaint people because they just get screamed at and called idiots.
That’s exactly what it was. There was a point at which I was looking back at Harry Potter for a little while. You get that one scene where it was in the sixth one, or the Half-Blood Prince or whatever, where the set where Snape gets to be the defense against the Dark Arts teacher. He comes in and it’s this first day and everybody’s scared of him being the teacher thinking he’s evil and all this.
He gives us like tie-in to the dark arts. He’s like, “The dark arts are ever-changing and invincible.” It’s like this whole like, “He likes these things.” I know the moment and I was like, “I resonate with that.” They do just. “CRTs bad,” and they just changed their name. It’s cultural and responsive teaching. This is on CRT.
Keeping Up With The Huge Demand
The whole cultural catalyst has been very interesting to watch crescendo and decrescendo over the years. A little bit of a pivot, so you get vision, a plan, and you’re executing. You’re in the valley of despair because it’s at fifteen months. Talk to me about coming out the other end, not just when you did feelings.
This is fantastic. I go on Roggan on July 1, or June 30, something like that. First of all, I got to fly out there during COVID like to Los Angeles.
This is pre-COVID in Texas.
This is in 2020. It was like five people on the plane or whatever. I’m walking around. I flew from Washington, Dallas to LA. I was in Washington Dallas airport. I was like, “Everything’s dark and closed.” They had like one market terminal open. Even the vending machines were shut down. Everything. They had all the metal gates and the lights were off. I’m walking around like, “Am I allowed to be here?” Anyway, I go on a road trip and I tell this story about how I had so much stress from what I was seeing and told this thing. I had so much stress.
The funny part is Rogan wrote to me, so I didn’t finish the story and then I’ll tell you why. I was telling them as like, “My left eyelid has been twitching for months all the time.” It was twitching from stress. I learned there’s a word for that. It’s called blepharospasm and I’m like, “I have this.” Rogan cuts me off and I didn’t get to tell him the punchline. For months afterward, I get all these messages, people worried about my eyes and my stress levels.
The punchline of the story that I never got to say on this huge stage was, probably two days after George Floyd died, my eyelid stopped twitching. Here’s the moment like I can pinpoint the moment with a physiological response, where I went from the valley of despair to, “Oh.” I knew it, as soon as I noticed like, “My eyes aren’t twitching. My stress is way lower.” It was like because other people can see it now.
I wasn’t that concerned about the prospect for the business alone was. We’d invested $100,000 or whatever to try to build the thing. My wife is like, “It’s time to make money.” We were at that point, by the time George Floyd died, I think that is the month when I gave myself the bogus the check. I had this moment where it’s like, “People are going to see it now.” My stress went down and it became, “Now we grind.”
That just worked.
“Now we make the product. We make products as fast as we can.” I was publishing two articles a day most days. Sometimes, 3 or 4 articles a day and I was writing all of them. I go back and look at them and see how many typos made it to the actual publications because I was just, “No time to edit. Let’s go. Next article, we’ve got to cover the next thing.”
Stress is down, but you’re working way more.
If it was like a product, like if I invented some cool, awesome lemonade or whatever, all of a sudden, you see it catch on. No crap. Now it’s selling and I’ve got to make a lot of it. It’s like they used to talk about it and curse me upon a name or whatever but like these little chocolatiers or whatever like, “These little boutique chocolate shop in Chicago.”
Oprah Winfrey is like, “This is the best chocolate ever.” It shanks their business because they cannot make it as fast enough to fill their demand all of a sudden but you’ve got to work like crazy. I had the thing and I was making the stuff. Now, there was a huge demand for it and I was like, “I’m going to keep up with that.” Even in the electrical buttons, the domain. It was like to keep up with it. Plus, we were in COVID. Nobody was doing anything.
People were reading, watching videos, listen to podcasts so fast. I was doing interview after interview. I was cranking out articles and reading in between as fast as I could, but the stress now was different. It was like meet-the-demand stress instead of, “Am I going to destroy my life and make my wife mad at me stress?”
Constantly Turning Up Content
We were talking to escrow for growth for things. It’s the demand that has killed more businesses than the lack of a good idea. You’re not worried about being solvent anymore and having to pay the bills, but then you go, “Can I keep doing this?” For me, unrelated to the question. How do you keep turning out content? It seems like there’d be an end to that pit.
I wonder almost every day like, “What am I going to talk about next?” It turns out, I always think about it for whatever reason. My mental model is the cookies on the shelf. Which shelf you put the cookies on? Is the bottom shelf or the top shelf? I’ve always pictured five shelves and I’m like, “I’ll put them on the fourth shelf.”
It’s always that interest to take the fourth shelf product and turn it into a spate of 30 seconds. Easier to grab. I’m not very good at it, but I’ve been catered to the fourth shelf because I’m on the fourth shelf. I don’t have the huge dynamic range to go over below that. It turned out that writing not the same thing, but similar stuff in different wording or in a let’s focus on this. I write this one article or whatever, and then there’s a section in that article.
Let’s write an entire article based on that section that expands it, simplifies it, or whatever. Those are the skills that, weirdly enough, you pick up when you teach introductory level courses in college. When you teach mathematics to people who will never study mathematics seriously, but you have to figure out how to get them through that class. You have to figure out how to tell them like add fractions. It’s like 75 different ways in order to get through to people who somehow may get to college and not be able to add fractions.
You basically figure out what to inculcate with different ways.
I did a episode specifically about this is. If you are out working in the world and if you are reading, then you have something to say. If you don’t have something to say, either go do something or go read something, period. The same thing is going to be true in other domains. It’s like momentum builds momentum in a sense. Doing something is where you get your ideas. Meeting people is where you get the connections that make you meet other people.
I think about the young people I’ve talked to that are like, “I can’t figure out anything in my life.” It’s like, “You don’t do anything.” Go do anything. Anything at all. Pick up some skills, and learn the ropes in a bit. Who cares? You’re slinging frozen yogurt or whatever. You’re learning how to deal with like management. You’re learning how to deal with it. You’re learning how to deal with customers. Whatever happens to be right. Get out in the world and do something. As my friend Chris Elston says, “Good things happen when you go outside.”
It was an expectation you had a summer job when we were in the ‘90s. It was just a thing like you go to a summer job. I feel like now people think they need to go off in a field and meditate and their life decisions will come to them.
That’s so totally wrong.
It’s so weird to think exactly that.
There’s like that main character syndrome. There’s all these syndromes, and there’s probably a name for this but it is. I know a lot of young people who are under 30, who believe that whatever they go start doing it is like their forever thing. If they pick the wrong thing, they’re screwed for their whole lives. I don’t know if they watch too many movies. I don’t know what they did that’s fried their brain. When we were in the ‘90s growing up, it was like I thought of summer jobs or going to mow lawns or whatever. Everything was like the steps. It was like a stair. You’re going to climb stairs to get up.
The whole point was not to mow lawns forever. Some people go off and make great landscaping businesses because they are good at it, like it, and it’s lucrative. For a lot of us it was like, “No, the point is to get enough money to be able to get the things that we want and to get an appreciation for that.” Maybe I don’t want a sunburn this week or maybe I want to work inside. It was like getting experience, dealing with people and with problems and getting skills. I find people lack of that mentality now.
My mom kicked me out of this house in the summer. I was like 12 or 13 to move furniture in the North Carolina heat. It was the expectation that I was going to sit around the house. Now, I’m starting to stop and it’s a little bit of tech bro. We people are like, “You can just do things.” I don’t know think and I don’t know if it’s just young people, but they conceptualize like, “Go do anything and you’ll meet people and good things will happen.” I don’t understand why there are lots of people.
You must be doing something new and advancing something at all times. Otherwise, you are stagnating and falling into a spiral. Share on XIt’s like if you have the slightest amount of reflectiveness in the organization, and I’m not an organized person. I have so many people that are like, “You’re a mathematician. You’re background in Science and Math. You’re an artist. You act like an artist, messy like an artist, and think like an artist.” How did I have stuff to write? One of my rules was if I cannot think of something to talk about, it’s because I’m not reading because of COVID. Nobody was going anywhere.
I have a million books about CRT or papers I could go read. What I started to do was make lists of every specialist term that I came across. After I’d read the thing, I would go look up every single specialist term and try to write out what every single specialist term meant. Do you have any idea what a comprehensive knowledge of a field of study or thought you get by trying to understand every specialist term?
It can be about microphones. You look up just the manual microphone and it’s like, “You got to have this transponder or I don’t know what’s in a microphone.” You’re like, “What’s that?” You go look all those things up. You can become a domain expert and stuff just by looking up words. Not to the point where you’re doing something, but you can have a strong working knowledge of a thing just by reading and then taking the time to look up every single specialist term that you come across.
I think it’s 50% of people haven’t read a book or something like that. Somebody asked me like, “What do you think moderate success do?” It’s like, “I read all the time.” Particularly when I was like 21 or 25. It was like a whole week minimum.
You got to read. I’d rather be out racing bikes and jumping them into stuff. Not so much my 40s but you know what I mean. I’d rather be out doing something. I don’t love to read. I don’t have the joy of reading. Some guys do. A lot of people do but I don’t.
How is you’re academic? You said you don’t enjoy reading.
That was in math.
Fair enough, but you force yourself to read. I think we said earlier, we have 25 books here or whatever.
Somewhere between 25 and 50 books, it’s hard to count because with the stuff that I read. A lot of times, you have to read the same thing over and over again. You don’t get it the first time. You read Karl Marx, you don’t get it the first time. You’ve got to read not just between the lines but through the lines, and around the lines. All over. It’s using weird terminology. You’ve got a lot of thinking to do to tear apart like philosophy or whatever.
Keeping Yourself Accountable In Consuming Content
How do you keep yourself accountable to make sure you’re consuming content? I could see that you could make it very easy to just go speak and talk but then your funnel will be empty in about eighteen months and making it a coverup.
No, it’s not right. That’s about the timeline.
How do you keep yourself disciplined to keep that funnel fed and keep consuming content because it gets hard?
I’m not always as good at it as I need to be. The thing is, I tend to run into some piece of information. Sometimes, it’s something I see on social media or I read somewhere else or just in an article that somebody sent me, or I have a conversation with somebody. You just pick up something. We call them rabbit holes or whatever.
You have to be careful with the rabbit holes sometimes. For the last couple of years, somebody suggested to me something to do with Mao Zedong’s reign in China. There’s so much to learn about that. I’m like, “I’m not learning that.” I remember, though, early on, I was talking about the post-modern philosophy. That’s folks like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, these weird French philosophers. There was a period of time in which I had read a lot about postmodernism, but I had not read the postmodernists themselves.
Finally, when I had this conversation with myself, I was like, “If you don’t go sit down and read that you’re a fraud.” I went and started to read them and slogged through some rough reading in order to get my head. Some of it, I understood very well. Foucault’s not that hard to read. Derrida’s is not possible to read fully in English. I’ve heard he’s hard in French and doesn’t translate all the way.
You slog through it and I had a day where I said to myself, “If you don’t, you’re a fraud.” You’re running your mouth about stuff and your knowledge. You’re as right, but you’re as deep as a mud puddle. You got to go get your legs under you. This is the same thing. With Mao, I started to write a book about how the woke politics and the COVID policy that we just dealt with in terms of the political stuff, not the specific medical parts, derived from things that Mao Zedong did.
I hit a point where I was like, “I needed to write another chapter but I don’t know what happened specifically enough in the Cultural Revolution to write this chapter. I have to go read the history of the Cultural Revolution.” I’m reading books about and from the Cultural Revolution. I get this weird little book somebody gave me. That’s a firsthand account of a Red Guard and it’s cracked.
It’s like the gospel of a Red Guard.
It’s like her diary. She’s like nineteen or something writing this diary and it’s hard to remember. You’re not reading about it. She’s in it. She was like, “We’ve got to remember Dao Jing or whatever.” This is a big example of one of the propaganda campaigns. Here she is. It’s like, I’m reading the history book and then I’m reading it and I’m like, “She believes all this crap.” At some point, though, you do, you have to reckon with yourself. I also watched, not any shade on him. I like Jordan Peterson, but I watched Jordan when he would do this huge book tour for 12 Rules for Life.
He went and he was speaking and selling out in stadiums 5-6 days a week sometimes for months. All of a sudden, he’s saying the same exact stuff over and over. Other people are starting to edge into the market that he had commanded. As you said, it’s maybe 12 months or 18 months. It depends on your sector. All of a sudden, your competitors get an edge on you. If you’re looking around and you want to make a contribution, whether it’s in philosophy and academics, or the business world, you better keep your edge up and be trying to figure out how to innovate.
One of my favorite stories about this is when the iPhone first dropped, Nokia’s CEO was like, “Call me when you sell after the other one was like a million or two million cell phones a year.” It was done three years later or whatever it is. It’s not perfectly known, but so on.
You got it. You cannot rest like that but it is hard. At one point, in ‘22 and ‘23, I was traveling so much but where it slipped was what I was doing to cheat or to capitalize on my time was that I was reading on my flights. All of a sudden, I decided I was tired. I didn’t want to read on my flight. Finally for the first time ever, caved in and bought the WiFi. I was using the whole like, “No, we’re going to save money. We’re going to egt through. I’m not paying $12 or whatever for the WiFi for an hour on a plane that doesn’t even work right.”
I bought the WiFi the first time. All of a sudden it became my only read on planes where I don’t have WiFi. It’s like, I saw it a bit in my productivity. I had to figure out like, “I used to read primarily on planes,” and I was on a lot of planes. Now, I’m not. How do I fix this?” I don’t have the discipline to stay off the WiFi. Social media is the worst thing for everybody and everything. I can talk about that, but I started to just dedicate like, “No, you have to read.” You have to sit down. I’ll go out on my porch or whatever where there are fewer distractions.
I’ll leave my phone in the house and I’ll slog through a few chapters of a book or whatever it is, or I’ll take my laptop and take an article out there and read it and make notes. You have to get away from social media. When I got kicked off Twitter, I became so insanely productive. I was excited to research. I was reading like crazy. I was writing some of the highest-level stuff I’ve ever produced.
Unfortunately, I was also leaving my audience in the dust. I was going faster than I could keep up with the developments. I think it’s instrumental in me being able to do what I do now. Within those months, I coasted on that for longer than I should have after I got back on Twitter. My wife even saw it and she’s like, “Your productivity sucks.”
Building A Network Outside Twitter
It’s interesting, you built this other network. When you were off Twitter, you were focused on content. What happened to your subscriber growth? Without Twitter, it’s defeated as much. Do you mind if I ask this question?
It’s very funny because I had a huge following on there. Three times my next biggest thing at least and so by far, my biggest outlet. Twitter was also a very high-engagement social media platform, especially for the stuff I was doing. Elon had implemented his policy of external links being suppressed or whatever. You could drive traffic, which doesn’t work as well on there anymore.
Ironically, I saw a huge subscriber growth because the quality of my product went up. Social media has some utility to drive content and engage with supporters or fans or clients or whatever going on. It’s such a productivity drain that those two forces cancel out. I saw my subscriber numbers did better when I wasn’t on there than they did before or after with the exception of the initial growth first when Floyd died.
Let’s do the social media thing first. Social media is bad. I’m on Twitter too much. It has been insanely helpful for me. We’re getting people bringing investment opportunities. I have to do the DMs but it’s a time sock.
Rogan says, “Post and Ghost.” I think he’s mostly right.
These aren’t established stuff.
That’s the hard part. I know. I joke because it sounds all like populist or whatever. When like I’m a man of the people. I like to get in a mix-up with everyday smaller towns or whatever. I like to do it. I like to spend a little time doing that. It has returned. I have very high loyalty. I have people that go out and recommend my stuff and send it to people. That’s a lot of growth in my market that way. It’s probably the primary way I grow now.
I’ve mostly saturated through like if I go on somebody’s show. Yours is different because this is completely outside of my wheelhouse but if I went on like Megan Kelly. Everybody watches Megan Kelly already knows who I am. I’m not reaching a new audience. I’m not expanding my basis. They either like me or don’t like me already. They’ll love the show and whatever, or they hate me because I’m on there and yell at her. It’s a different growth strategy I have to be because it saturated the mass media market that I’m in.
That’s what I thought it would be interesting to have some discussion about because our Venn diagram very much overlapping, even though I pretty much fall right at the center. People plugged into entrepreneurship. To your point on social media, I don’t know if this is true, Taylor Swift did this. The rumor is that she responded to every single human for years on Tumblr personally way back in the day.
You get crazy loyalty if you know that. I can tell you from personal experience. I interact with a lot of people who a lot of folks at my level I feel like pretentious saying things like that won’t interact with like they did. I don’t know if they’re condescending or whatever, but I interact with them like they’re my friends or like they’re people that I’m interested in, and crazy loyalty.
With a different product, I put on a workshop in Dallas a few months ago. We announced it three weeks before and it had 100 seats. It’s sold out. People flying in like short notice, and build the room for like a weekend or whatever. I can do that. That’s because I built this high loyalty relationship with my followers, which has been pretty good.
As I’ve been trying to figure it out because I’m not a techie, I’m seeing them including you’re way batter off having 5,000 engaged people than 100,000 people as a vanity metric.
The second you have three political parties, the two of them will form a giant coalition to beat the third one, and eventually merge into one. Share on XYes. The vanity metrics get you so far, but they only get you so far.
Balancing Social Media And Real Life
Social media has a downside. How do you balance that with the rest of your day?
Badly. I’m not going to lie. The new Twitter payout system has made it worse because I know that to me going and screwing around on social media, I don’t make a ton of money on Twitter, but I don’t make zero. I know that’s all based on engagement numbers. If I go screw around and put out some engaging stuff, more stuff is more engagements and more engagements is more money.
It’s not a huge portion of my income, but it’s not trivial. It’s made it worse in terms of that balance. What I’m boomeranging back to over the last couple of months, it’s like I’ve got to go deep if I want to. I’m trying to think of like the right metaphor because I like the talk and the analogy of the metaphors, but it’s like, you’ve got to nourish the roots somewhere. You’ve got to be deeper roots.
I think X/Twitter is very echo Chambery now. It’s not very fun and negative a lot. I thought it was more fun when all the leftists were over there saying stupid stuff and people in the right world and they’re saying stupid stuff. Everybody’s dunking on each other. It’s this whole dynamic. It doesn’t feel dynamic anymore, but that’s helping. The fact is that it’s straight-up discipline.
What is your rule? I listened to Ben Sparrow one time and he said, “I had to take off my phone.” If you wanted to be on the Twitter, he had to put it on his laptop only. What’s your strategy?
I am massively restricted in my notification space. I don’t get push notifications. It’s not nearly as interesting. I have my notifications for all social media very restricted. I have it set only to a very limited amount of my push notifications from X. Basically, no other social media sends me any push notifications. That helps a ton. The other thing that I’ve noticed over the years and this is a useful thing to think about, I use social media more when I want to pretend that I’m predominantly.
I’m making money a little bit. I feel like I’m contributing to the cause or whatever it is. I’m getting my ideas out there. That’s my business. I’m selling products in a sense, but I’m not really. When I have something that I’m interested in, like say it’s the history of Mao’s China or whatever happens to me, and I’m reading because I want to read it.
I read this book about a woman who in her teenage years became a Nazi. She gives an account by roughly 1960 way after the regime falls apart of why she thinks she ended up getting pulled into that. I read this book and it’s fascinating. When I’m doing that, it doesn’t matter on my notifications anymore. This is an interesting lesson. I’m engaged and I forget that Twitter exists. It’s like if you’re doing engaging work, the balance takes care of itself, but if you’re not doing engaging work, if you’re in the build rooms.
The train winds aren’t blowing. Maybe you’re a little bit down, a little bit depressed or stressed out, or whatever. Social media allows you to pretend you’re working or pretend you’re being productive when you’re not, at least in my field. It’s like this weird negative spiral. You don’t have a lot to do, so you go on social media, and now you’re not getting anything done. You’re like downward spiraling, you’re hoping social media is going to provide you the impetus, and it never does.
You’ve got to go find something, you got to go look for something worth reading, worth getting into, or worth working on a project that’s worth investing in. Everything starts to spiral up when you do that. You start to notice that pattern and that’s helped a lot. You have these natural cycles. Whether you’re making a new product, you’re making a new push or a new ad push, or whatever it happens to be.
You have these cycles where it’s like, “This is new and fun. The dopamine’s kicking. You’re rocking. You’re going, engaged, and into it.” It hits that grind and the grind’s okay for a little while and then it’s like the diminishing returns show up. You’re like, “I don’t know what to do next. I’m bored with this.” That’s when I find myself getting sucked into the social media tornado. The best thing is just to be able to notice that you’re doing it. It’s like fake productivity.
It’s immediately gratifying, too.
It’s just fake. I don’t mean fake like those all propaganda. It’s fake like you’re not working. I work in information and then media. You’re still not working.
It’s interesting, particularly for selling your media. For you to say social media is not working because you’re not building content.
If I get a wild idea and do a long thread, I’m working. If I’m there cutting up a little bit, I’m hanging out. I’m hanging out with people I don’t even know, which is a little bit weird but you’re right. You do get contacts. I found out about that book because somebody recommended it to me on something I posted on Twitter. There’s a give and take there, but the thing is you have to be able to stay productive. I cannot speak for other people, but I think it generalizes.
You’ve got to find something that engages you. I hate to put it in such stark terms because usually, stark terms are wrong, but you’re either growing or you’re dying. You’re either doing something new and advancing something or else you’re stagnating and falling into a spiral. It’s a doomsday spiral. The bad part of social media and maybe this is the way to phrase that, when you get the spiral, social media is like a whirlpool. It pulls you in further and gives you a false sense of productivity, etc.
You called it the balance. You got to find them. If that’s a part of your thing, you’ve got to find them, that sweet spot where you’re putting out productive stuff. That’s where good posting goes. He gets stuff off of posting for sure, but he doesn’t get stuff off of huge engagement but super established. That’s also going to be a moving bar over time. You’ve got to look for that balance and not get lazy about it.
What’s Next And Holing The Line On Beliefs
What’s next for you? You got more work you can do with the world is saying. Do you find some baby James that you like to sponsor or do you expand your sphere? It doesn’t look like you’re going to stop and talk soon.
I’m not going to stop. The baby James project is something that we’ve been at. It’s funny you bring it up. You’re not the first person outside of my group to bring it up. We’ve been talking about it for about a year, looking at how we might be able to build that model out to bring people. It’s organically happening. At some point, you’re like, “Why don’t we formalize this and like make it work?” Instead of it just being, “I have my James Lindsay aid stuff in social media.” I’d repeat and share my stuff. Why don’t we see if we can mentor and get these people working at a higher level and then build a structure to where it all pours into growth.” I think that’s likely.
From the outside in, I’m not a media person. It just seems so obvious because I’ve seen people and as able as possible, they’re doing similar stuff to what you’re doing that don’t seem to approach it with the same level of rigor. Is that fair?
That’s totally fair.
Which leads me to my next question, you’ve held the line on your beliefs months ago. Somebody said you’re pretty dogmatic in one way of thinking. Fast forward, you’re getting it from both sides now and you’re getting it from other sides. Was that surprising or were you ready for it then? What’s that like because it’s a new set of entrepreneurship challenges?
We’ll talk about just generic entrepreneurship. I have a friend and I shouldn’t name who he is. He’s a very big entrepreneur. When I say very big, I mean like eleven figures. We had this long talk about all this stuff some months ago just randomly. We’re buddies. We talk about stuff and I was like, “What is business really? What is it?” He’s like, “You have to identify some valuable, unrecognized truth about the world, and then you have to hype a bunch of people up about it.”
This is the part that’s relevant to your question. The status quo realizes you’re doing it and they attack because the status quo doesn’t want to be disrupted. It doesn’t matter what the status quo is. We’ll use an example. Mom-and-pop shops get taken over by the big box Walmart and taken over by Amazon. These are three different models like the disaggregated go to whatever store you go. The hardware stores over here, and the grocery store is there or whatever. Walmart put them all in the same building economies of scale.
Amazon is like, “Why do you need a building?” This whole progression of these competitors. The thing is, each one of those, when the new kid on the block comes, it’s going to be disruptive. It’s going to be like, “Heck no.” If you’re in the big business world, you’re going to have regulatory manipulation to try to keep you from being able to grow. All kinds of problems. The thing is, you’ve got to be able to stick to your guns and work very hard. I did not expect fully to be attacked by both sides, although I did.
I’ve attacked primarily the left. We’ll just use this left-right paradigm even though it’s not ideal. I’ve gone after the leftist academic underpinnings, and philosophical underpinnings for years. That was my bread and butter but I’ve also been for 4 or 5 years aware that there’s an ugly side on the right too. You cannot give that a pittance. What I found is the left was an emergency and let’s say like you got a building on fire. You have this like little brush fire over here that’s not a problem. Every time you’re like, “It looks like it’s growing.” People are like, “Shut up. The building is on fire.”
It’s very hard to divert resources to it. People aren’t interested and don’t want to hear it. I’ve gone after this radical side on the right a little bit for years. I got poor feedback and probably shouldn’t have gone harder, but months ago I noticed, “This is going to be a real problem.” I came out and I fully expected them to get mad. I fully expected the radicals on the right team.
What I did not expect was that the mainstream conservative apparatus would effectively see me as a turncoat in a subversive in my, “You’ll attack your friends, too.” No, these people aren’t my friends. You’re attacking your friends, too. I was not prepared for the broadly right-wing space. Again, to speak in generic terms that aren’t quite right. Which goes from the most moderate all the way to the most radical huge swath of different views.
I did not expect that entire thing to decide to circle the wagons like super tribally and say, “No, we have an ecosystem here and now you’re disturbing our ecosystem, but the status quo will not be disrupted as it turns out, even if it’s like incestuous, or it’s got these other problems.” That took me by surprise. I knew the radicals would be bad. I did not know that the mainstream would also become afraid of me and be mad.
Try the use the word tribalism. That would be disappointing if that wasn’t what you’re doing to center of that because there’s no fat space for the attack. It’s just it’s pure emotion and we got to have it in a bigger group than possible.
This goes in other domains, too, like the example of Uber. That’s a cunt. It’s a disruptive technology, whether you like the idea or not. It turns out, there’s a valuable unrecognized truth there. At some point, there was no Uber analogy. Here’s your valuable unrecognized truth. I want to order a taxi with my phone. That’s it. I don’t want to have to find a phone number or call a guy or figure out a service.
I just want to be able to push a button on my phone and the taxi shows up to where I am and takes me to where I want to go. I want that. That’s fantastic. I would love this service. Whatever you think. When Uber came onto the scene, do you think the taxi services or limo services were happy about this? No, all of a sudden, they started circling their wagons. I don’t know if you remember those fights. It would have been like in ‘15 or ‘16. Talk about some ugly stuff.
Trying to get Uber to O’Hare Airport like that taxi medallion went down 50% in price. That time was anarchy.
It was a total attack, and they almost damaged the company irreparably. They did not want Uber to get big enough to compete with what they had. To this day, I’m still like, “I don’t necessarily like Uber all that much. Why cannot I call a taxi on my phone without dialing a phone number?” There’s Lyft, but it’s like, “Why don’t the existing taxi services adopt similar technology?” Anyway, the point is, when some new disruptive, whether it’s narratives that I’m explaining or concepts that I’m putting out there in the information media space, or Uber displacing the taxis or it’s Walmart displacing Mom-and-pop or Amazon displacing Walmart.
When something new comes on the scene, you can expect there to be a lot more pushback than you might expect. It might come from places you didn’t expect and then you have to face a question. The question is, do I fight for this or do I quit? Do I keep filling before I go into my shell? Uber is going to be on the margins, but we’re not going to go to the airports or whatever. It’s this different. No. If you want to grow, you’re going to have to fight. You’re going to have to stick to your guns and continue to bring your invaluable, heretofore unrecognized truth into the world.
I forget in a sentence. It’s like, when you’re going to hell, keep going.
Do not quit. If you are doing something stupid, do something smarter. Share on XI was talking with a Jewish guy that I’m friends with a couple of months ago and, as you said, I’m getting put through it now, so I’m going to attack by all sides. I’m never been attacked but this is the only thing that eclipses when I got back on Twitter a couple of years ago. I’m going through it and he’s like, “You know you did the right thing, right?” I’m like, “I think I did.” He’s like, “The feedback I’m getting is a little unclear.” He says, “In our religion, we have a belief that when a man performs a service to God, Satan attacks, tries to destroy his reputation and financially and God watches to see if he’ll remain faithful.”
I was like, “Why’d you curse me with that? There’s a lot to adopt.” I thought about it and it’s like, no, it’s true. I’m not saying this stuff because I think I’m wrong or somebody’s paying me to say it. I’m saying this stuff because I think it’s true. I cannot waver and we’ll see how that proves out. I feel like for entrepreneurs, you’re going to have that. You’re going to get it. I know some of the stories around Uber. It’s just like I brought up the taxis, but a lot of people don’t know that they got attacked by the society for the deaf or something like that.
They come up with this technology. They have deaf people be able to make their rides or whatever, and they showcase this technology to the society for the deaf. They basically did like an extortion racket. They’re like, “Give us a huge donation and we’ll endorse your product.” They’re like, “We can maybe give you money later.” That’s not what this was about. The site for the deaf like turns on.
I had no idea.
It’s not the society for the deaf. It’s some organization. I don’t know the name of it, so let’s be very clear about that. I’m not trying to slander it that there is a society for the deaf. It’s some specific organization. It’s not called that. Anyway, they turn on the leadership of Uber. They try to run an extortion on them and then they come out and start running all these articles about how Uber is bad for deaf people and all of this crazy stuff. It’s discriminatory when they’ve invented the technology that facilitates this tremendously.
In the world, you’re going to hit these weird unforeseen challenges. You’ve got to figure out in a sense like, I don’t want to call whatever society is Satan, but you’ve got to figure out if you’re going to waver under that attack, or if you’re going to stick to it. It doesn’t matter if you believe in God or if you take it as a metaphor. You want to think like maybe the invisible hand of the market is watching if you failed.
Do you fail? Do you fold or do you stick to what you’re doing and innovate and figure out how to get through this next hurdle? I’m not that big of an entrepreneur, but I think that’s the story. You bring a thing, and you finally get up against the status quo. It attacks, and you either figure out how to innovate, adapt, get around it and grow, or you stay locked in the shell that you’ve been given. Maybe you’re happy there and run a medium sized or small business or whatever. That’s fine. It’s dignity, leading, and respectable work, or you get crushed and go away.
There’s this HBS article that this talks about different people with different stages of companies on the size and the scale. Very few people as Zuckerberg that can go from their dorm room to mega company and he’s still at higher Sheryl Sandberg to figure how to monetize.
Also, maybe other people. It’s funny.
As you’re getting attacked out, I don’t see you wavering the form. It’s clearly there. Where does this whole cultural journey settle out in the next five years?
I don’t know. I’m nervous just to talk more domain-specific to what I do rather than entrepreneurial stuff. Not to quote Joe Biden or whatever, but he said the country is at an inflection point. A lot of people think that went away when Trump got a lot of dividends. A lot of people think it’s like much worse. Even if you’re in that group that thinks, “Trump selected, everything’s fine.” We’re about to be tested a whole lot more than people think.
The size and scope of the changes. Look at what they tried with COVID and some of the things that they tried to implement. They even got some years, or decades, and trillions of dollars that are not just going to go away. Nobody invests trillions of dollars and then the election doesn’t go their way. They’re like, “This is not how that works. I am feeling the cultural war is going to become uglier and nastier.” It’s very clear that we now have monsters on both sides.
They are going to play off of each other. They always attack their nearest neighbors. We have the possibility for a moderate left to reemerge because the radical left is so discredited. Meanwhile, is the radical right going to consume the conservative movement the way that the Justice Democrats consumed the Democratic Party in 2015? It’s possible.
Do we know it’s four parties?
I don’t think so. There’s something to do with election theory, and I forget how this works. This is something I used to teach with Tom. There’s something about election theory that you end up with the number of viable political parties you have comes almost all the way down to the voting scheme like how you authenticate who won the vote. We have what we call first pass post, is what we use in federal elections.
In Alaska, for example, have now switch to ranked-choice voting. That’s a different voting scheme. You don’t have to get into the details of what they are, but different voting schemes enable a stable circumstance of different numbers of political parties. First passing the post enables two political parties the end.
If there is a new political party, what will happen is one of the existing political parties will die and reconstitute within it very quickly. There might be one election that’s weird with three viable contenders. A lot of people are like, “We have another political party.” You don’t understand. The second you had three political parties, it makes all the sense in the world for two of them to form a giant coalition to beat the snot out of the third one, and then eventually emerge into one.
That’s what we saw in the French elections.
I don’t think we’ll see that but what I think what we’re going to see is a rapid intensification of the culture war in ways to some of the radical departure from what we’ve seen for the last 4 or 5 years, but it’s not going away.
Does it get more grassroots? The media is going away in the way it used to be. They have applications for influencers now to go to the press corps. Does it go away or do you reconstitute new mainstream media?
I think there’ll be a little bit of both. I worry about the democratization of the alt-media space. The reason is, I don’t know how much it costs to buy a CNN anchor but I bet it costs a lot less to buy an influence of 150,000 followers.
That’s true.
I bet it costs a whole lot less.
That’s in my mind.
I bet it costs like four cool cocktail parties a year and a few thousand bucks a month. You own a 200,000-follower account on Twitter. We’re now talking like, to have somebody that’s working for an outfit like CNN, who’s on the dime, that’s an apparatus that you’re working with.
It’s millions to get Scarborough to do what he does.
Comparatively, you can buy scads of influencers and then bot networks that are going to go create false appearances of popularity like pennies on the dollar.
Did you ever see the show the Black List? Do you what I’m talking about? Probably not. There’s a show about all that’s like cabal. There was an episode called the troll former. I think this was back in like 2010 or ’11. It’s about this guy that’s in the room and was orchestrating social media. I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing that’s ever going to happen.”
That’s literally what’s happening. A bunch of accounts are starting to be discovered. We’ll use a Democrat one and then we’ll talk about like 1-1s, too. A few years ago, there was this Democrat account that was a obnoxious called Erica Marsh. Erica Marsh was this pretty blonde girl. It looks suspicious. First of all, all the messaging was perfectly fresh out of the can.
Secondly, it looked like you don’t need to stereotype. I don’t mean to alienate people, but there aren’t a lot of these pretty bubbly blonde girl Democrats. The picture that didn’t match the story. There’s no purple or whatever. Erica Morsh turned out to be a stock photo. Erica Morsh doesn’t exist. It had like hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. She had a humongous engagement that was amplified by bots and everything else. It totally fake and astroturfed. Not even a person. it didn’t exist.
The same thing, we keep finding out now one after another. Every few days, another one seems to leak out. They’re usually anonymous, but not even always anonymous right-wing accounts. I’m not talking about somebody who’s on the dime. I’m not saying like, tenant to media scandal where Russia put $10 million. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about that guy is a Pakistani claiming to be the America first voice or whatever. It’s like, not only do we have this we-are-the-fake-news now problem where it’s easy to buy influencers.
How do you know the account that you’re dealing with isn’t just CCP? How much money does the CCP have to make verified accounts on the X and pretend that they’re unlimited? I know that their military influence campaign budget is $16 billion a year. All they put out is memes maybe. How many of them are run by foreign influence operators or networks? It’s like we have some enemies in the world that’s in the United States or any other Western or any country. I don’t know what to think about this.
We cannot trust CNN because they were pulled around by the advertisers and have all this weird agenda money and are by USAID money now. The collusion with the federal government was not up enough. Now you have influencers who don’t declare anything. We see it in every political campaign. I think it should be a law, frankly. I’m a huge free speech guy, but I think there should be a law that if a political campaigning is paying you to tweet in favor of your political campaign, you have to disclose.
That just seems reasonable common sense.
It’s humongous how much these influencers are being paid by political campaigns. It’s like, I don’t know what I think about this massive democratization of influence. I don’t see your typical influencer on social media. I’ve now come to be as cynical about that person as I know what the anchor on. Pick your favorite one, Fox, or MSNBC. I don’t care.
That’s super interesting. CNN covered the first goal four until the year of 2005, I would have taken anything CNN says gospel. It’s getting to the point now where I don’t believe anything I read, and it’s exhausting. It is exhausting being skeptical of everything.
I don’t even know how to do my own research on some stuff. I think that this is going to be there for a very crazy period of time where we don’t know what’s real and what’s fake and the propaganda. Think about the motivated activists. Do you think like Russia, Qatar, Iran, or China want Trump to have an easy time or do they want all kinds of like roiling, foiling culture war underneath them from the United States from both sides or even other factions?
Advice For Entrepreneurial Journey
That’s how you distract somebody getting their head so they cannot work. Last two questions. Number one, what advice would you give to somebody going on an entrepreneurial journey?
As I said, there are two pieces of advice. The easy one is don’t quit, but that’s stupid advice. If you’re doing something stupid, you should quit and do something smarter. Don’t quit. You cannot know you have a good bet, but when you’re pretty sure you have a good bet, don’t quit. Stick to it. It’s rough. You’re going to get it.
When you want to build, start on the foundation of what you already know. Do the work like you are learning it again. Share on XThere’s the everyday challenges and then, when you get successful enough, there’s a whole new set of challenges where you’re now disrupting something that doesn’t want to be disrupted because it is an ecosystem. The first thing though is as I said, entrepreneurship boils down to two ingredients as far as I can tell and I’m not that big of an entrepreneur.
I think you are. We disagree. I think it’s an entrepreneurial spirit.
I’m culturally entrepreneurial. The first ingredient is that you have to have that, as my friend calls it, this valuable, unrecognized truth. You have to have something that people want. You got to have the idea that people to want it, but you have to have a product, whatever it happens to be, or whatever domain it’s in that serves people so that they will voluntarily give you money for it.
You’ve got to have your good idea. You’ve got to refine your idea. You got to test your idea. You got to bang your idea against reality because for every millimeter, your idea is off of truth. You’re in trouble. That’s the millimeter. That’s going to be the crocodile rolling you under the bay when you’re done later. You get your idea right. When you see that vision and you have that bet. When you take the bed, you take the bet.
You’re like, “Honey, can I quit my job and risk everything?” Whatever amount that you’re willing to risk and you risk it. It’s what it is. It’s all risks. I saw this cartoon one time, like a political cartoon where it was for business. I wish I had seen it more recently because I could get it right. It’s like how people think the world works. It shows this guy like huddled down and saddled. It’s got all these bags on it. It’s like work. He’s like trying to walk up a hill and it’s obviously not getting anywhere. It’s how the world works or how success comes about or whatever. It’s something like that.
It’s like this staircase in the sky like golden stairs and every stair says risk. You’ve got to take the risk, but you got to think smart risks. You don’t jump off to the side. You have to see that vision. You’ve got to take that leap of faith and put the work behind it that brings it a face that works instead of the same as the Bible. You have to put the energy behind it to make it come to be. Don’t quit, but you get your idea straight first. The way you try to get straight first is you bounce it. You have to come up with it and you bounce it off reality because one millimeter off the truth and there’s your market cap right there. That’s the story of the dollar.
There are people that aren’t going to see your vision. I agree with you. You got to get feedback with everybody. How do you personally know who to take the feedback from and to reject, they’re like, “They don’t get it. They’re not getting it.”
It is subtle. That’s the hardest part probably. A friend of mine told me a story one time about one of his first entrepreneurial ventures. We used to have very many good successful ones, but one of his first ones is like the thing. He knew it. It’s the thing. If everybody got into it, it would be great. It’s like if you’re going to lift weights and you put your weights. You have some dumbbells and you put them in the closet so they’re not in the way but there’s like one extra step to get them out, so you never lift weights.
His idea had that barrier to entry for the consumer. It’s a fantastic product if people would do X. The thing never got off the ground. It never took off. At some point, the answer is that you’ve got to be optimistic about yourself, but you’ve also got to be humble enough. Get out of your own way to see where something’s not working and say, “This isn’t working.” It’s great though to have some trusted people around you who will tell you when you’re messing up.
It’s so much more valuable. All these people want, “Yes, sir.” He looks at Trump, he’s president, and all of his stories are like, “He came to me,” and he’s like, “Sir.” I get you have to do that because he’s president, but if you’re the president of the company, you don’t want that. You want the guy who’s going to tell you, at least some dude in your board or somewhere was going to tell you, “If we do this, this might happen or this will probably happen, and here’s why.” You need to nourish that.
If it’s a firm with a board, a good board makes or breaks the ship. You’ve got to find the trust of people around you, but you’ve also got to be able to find people who are going to look you in the face and tell you what you don’t want to hear when you think you have the best ideas and slice braille.
It would be the best thing ever if everybody would just because they’re never going to do it. I think it’s a matter of having that and having humility to be able to say, “No, maybe I messed up. How do we readjust for that?” As I said, with that case, for my friend, he scraps that idea. He said, “Let that one go.” It’s going to be something different. It’s tough.
Most Impactful Books James Has Read
My last question I ask everybody. What book has been the most impactful on your life that you’ve read?
I wish I knew that one was coming.
You can give me three.
I’m reading fantastic things like Mike. That’s not a good answer to that question. The Communist Manifesto is not a good answer. They’re not. Those don’t measure because I report on them. They’ve been very impactful, but not the content. You got me on the spot. It’s like I can see a book and I’m like, “That’s the book.” I cannot think of what it is.
We can link back to it when you get to other answer. What about something you’ve read that’s been impactful and shaped like a decision-making process or helped you build teams or something like that, or think about a team and relationships?
It’s very fresh. I’m impacted by having read that book. It’s called Account Rendered by this young woman that became a Nazi. It’s got that shine. It’s not the most interesting book I’ve ever read. The beginning, the end and the middle are a little bit sick. Not so much about like how to work as a team, but the perils and pitfalls that come along with getting swept up in that mentality. It’s more like having the courage to be able to think for yourself in defiance of the masses running off in some crazy direction.
Again, I’ve worked in a space where I never know if I’m just chasing the new latest, the current thing. Who knows? Have I been booked into some Russian propaganda? I don’t know. It’s hard to know, and I live in that space. The courage to think for yourself and to go against the grain is a sharp reminder of how important it is to be able to, all of a sudden, be like, “We cannot go this way. We have to do our own thing.” I do encourage people to read that book for other reasons.
There’s a value in being disagreeable. I think 75% of the five factors are agreeable to people. I think the guy who infringed them is now going to treat stomach ulcers disagreed with everybody and proved it wrong by giving himself a cell. Do you know the story? It feels like he went against academia.
He gave himself the H. pylori bacteria and then the antibiotic to create it.
Everybody called him an idiot.
That’s right. Here’s an interesting answer. This is totally not what I would have thought of, but I’m sure I’d taken something better. Something that’s extremely impactful for my mentality for how to approach problems is weird. I’ve made this apocryphal. I think I’ve changed the reality on this a little bit because I came up with my own thought off of it. When I was in grad school, there was these series of books and analyses, which was like grown-up calculus.
They’re written by this guy, Walter Rudin. The main one is called Real and Complex Analysis and it’s green. Some people call it green, and then there’s a little thinner blue book, which we use in our textbook for advanced calculus. It’s called Blue Rudin or Baby Rudin. Nobody needs to go read Walter Rudin’s Math but the Baby Rudin book, the blue one. This little thin blue book has a chapter before the first chapter, which I think is the apocryphal part. I call it chapter zero, but I don’t think it’s called chapter zero in the book.
I think of this as a chapter zero mentality. That stupid handful of pages about the exponential function that he put in front of his introductory text about analysis, because the exponential function turns out to be so crucial to understand analysis became the basis for how I do almost everything. I refer to it as the chapter zero mentality. The chapter zero mentality is what Rudin explains, “Why have I put this bonus mini-chapter at the beginning of my book?”
He says straight off, “If you’re using this book, you should already know this.” When you want to build, you start on the foundation of what you already know and you’ve done the work there like you’re learning it again, and you incrementally build out from there. If you want to learn analysis, you start with the exponential function. You already know that. If you want to use a simpler example, let’s say that it’s a math book you’re teaching your kids or whatever, algebra two or one.
Your kids doing pretty good on chapter one, but cannot do chapter two. You go back and you do chapter one together from the beginning all the way through, then you go to chapter two and you do every single chapter in order. This is the mentality. It starts with what you already know you’re good at and work on it as a foundation like you needed to brush out.
I fit in everything that way. This probably is the most impactful book toward my methodology and it’s not what’s in the book. You cannot go read the book and get this message. It’s just what I took out of having seen this idea of a preliminary remedial chapter. Start in the remedial. If you build that foundation and they mentally move out, you can basically learn them to do anything.
Some people that I’ve seen, you can pick them apart very quickly. You could tell that based on go okay. You’d go back to the landing like there’s nothing beneath them. It’s in the entrepreneurship space.
That’s the thing. It works for a while. It works until it doesn’t. At the end of the day, what’s going to get you there is fundamental. You ask any martial arts guy or whatever. What they’re going to tell you is you don’t win fights usually. You would see the video on YouTube or Instagram. Somebody does some crazy flying thing and wraps your legs and throws the guy. Usually, you win with very basic rigor to the simplest thing that you’ve done 200,000 times. The fundamentals are going to get you through way more than the fancy hype stuff.
Contact Information And Closing Words
James, it’s been a pleasure seeing you. I appreciate making the trip down. Where can everybody find you on social media and your website?
My website is NewDiscourses.com because people have a hard time. We’re having a discourse and it’s like new ones. They have a social media presence of its own, @NewDiscourses on basically everything. The show is called the New Discourses Podcast. It’s everywhere as you go find it. It’s a little black symbol with a silver brain on it. That’s my logo. I am @ConceptualJames, everywhere except Facebook. Even though Zuckerberg allegedly, is free speech now, I’m still not admitted back into the halls of Facebook.
Hopefully, you’ll get there. Thanks a lot for coming out. It was nice to meet you.
Important Links
- Dr. James Lindsay on LinkedIn
- Peter Boghossian
- Mein Kampf
- Hypatia
- New Discourses
- Cynical Theories
- Nicki Klein
- 12 Rules for Life
- Communist Manifesto
- Account Rendered
- Real and Complex Analysis
- James Lindsay on Instagram
- New Discourses Podcast
- @ConceptualJames on X
About James Lindsay
An author, mathematician, and political commentator, Dr. James Lindsay has written eight books spanning a range of subjects including education, postmod-ern theory, and critical race theory. Dr. Lindsay is the Founder of New Dis-courses, an organization dedicated to shining the light of objective truth in sub-jective darkness.
Dr. Lindsay is the co-author of “Cynical Theories: How Ac-tivist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identi-ty―and Why This Harms Everybody” and is the author of “Race Marxism,” as well as his newest book, “The Marxification of Education.”
Dr. Lindsay has been a featured guest on Fox News, Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, and NPR, and he has spoken at the Oxford Union and the EU Parliament.