Sometimes great conversations just happen spontaneously, organically, without any work.

But usually not.

Usually they take some work, often a lot of work.

And recently I had a great conversation that had taken a monumental amount of work.

Even just to line up the logistics took a monumental amount of work.

It was a conversation with James Lindsay, the mathematician and author and cultural critic who's become a firebrand with an overarching,

planet-encompassing mental philosophy about what's going on in the culture wars,

that they're driven by a neo-Marxist, almost apocalyptic cultural takeover,

that he has very intricate theories about how it operates,

and some think that James has gone off the deep end during the pandemic

with dark visions of a new global order.

But I wanted to talk to him for exactly that reason,

because he had been so astute and he's clearly so intelligent that I wanted to understand

where he'd gone off the rails if he had.

Now, all of this is something of a diversion because this episode is not a James Lindsay episode.

I was using an audio recording platform called Zencaster,

and theoretically it's supposed to upload the guest's audio and deliver it into the cloud in

real time but when we went to retrieve James's audio there was about a minute of audio and

the only minute was the first minute of us chatting.

So if you'd like to hear just a taste of the hour and 45 minutes of spectacular conversation

between two, I would like to say, moderately intelligent people with very different ideas

about what's going on in the world,

...