James’ Daily Emails

Awhile back I featured the great John Lee Dumas on the This Is What We C.R.A.V.E. podcast. Among the things we discussed was how John’s massive financial success with his podcast in the 2013-14 timeframe caused people to (erroneously as it turned out) assume that having a podcast was the secret sauce to making gobs…

Who do you get mad at when you realize you’ve believed something that is either blatantly false or you’ve been misled in some way? Do you get angry at the person who misled you? Or do you get angry at yourself for believing the falsehood or the lie without really questioning anything? I guess both…

My friend Tom Woods is publishing a book containing stories shared by his followers about their experiences living through the Covid lockdowns and attempted transformation of how human beings interact with one another. Although I can’t say I suffered any true hardship, I did have some interesting experiences I’ve been wanting to put into writing.…

“Hello darkness, my old friend…” Everybody knows the iconic Simon & Garfunkel song, but do you know the amazing story behind the first line of The Sounds of Silence? It began 62 years ago, when Arthur “Art” Garfunkel, a Jewish kid from Queens, enrolled in Columbia University. During freshman orientation, Art met a student from…

Dear friend: In yesterday’s email, I gave a few examples of how “working for free” is a good thing; and today I want to talk about why it’s not such a good thing. As always, this is one man’s opinion, so ingest these words with a hefty grain of salt. As with just about everything in…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard people railing against the idea of “working for free.” My experience with this has mostly been with musicians who get indignant about the idea of a coffee shop wanting halfway decent musicians to play at their joint so they can “get some exposure.” “Down with them,”…

I came across this story on social media this morning about the great Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947, that reminds me a lot about how we entrepreneurs are – or need to be. It was written by one of Jackie’s teammates, Rex Barney, and I…

A couple weeks ago I wrote about a documentary we watched about the Flat Earth movement, and how the common belief in a single idea, as wrong as it may be, united all sorts of people from all walks of life. It shows the power of community and how we all crave fellowship with others…

When I began the This Is What We C.R.A.V.E. podcast in January 2023, people would often ask me, “What’s your podcast about?” It’s a completely honest question, although the answer I’ve developed in the intervening time would probably be overkill in a short conversation setting. In the past, it was pretty straightforward. I had shows “about music.”…

Years ago, MSNBC had a show called Hardball hosted by Chris Matthews. Matthews had this reputation for being this red-in-the-face, no-nonsense type of interviewer who struck fear in the most grizzled of political veterans in the DC area.  But if you were to watch the show a few times, it was obvious Matthews was more…