Wesley Yang fields questions about the art of essay writing, how essays get turned into books, his observations on the New York publishing scene, his move to Substack, and how he currently thinks about social media.
Wesley Yang fields questions about the art of essay writing, how essays get turned into books, his observations on the New York publishing scene, his move to Substack, and how he currently thinks about social media.
In this Q&A, Angela shares everything she's learned since writing Kill All Normies and several controversial articles since then. We learn about why she's not on social media and how it's still possible to have intellectual influence without being on social media, and many other things.
Author and retired philosophy professor Nina Power answered questions on the state of academia today, writing blogs vs. books, and how to protect your mental health when internet mobs attack.
Michael Gibson of 1517 Fund takes questions on how to think about venture capital, for indie thinkers working outside of normal paths: Which types of projects should raise money, how to connect with investors, how to not sound like a crank, and why more intellectuals should build startups.
This routine includes only the 4 quickest and easiest edits that have the greatest impact on your podcast audio: Noise Reduction, Loudness Normalization, Compression, and Truncate Silence.
How to make an efficient and foolproof podcast intro (or outro). Obtain and import a music track, record your intro monologue as a second track, then use Audacity's normalization, compression, truncate silence, and auto-ducking effects.
Screencast (30m). Build an RSS automation in Convertkit, with two advanced tricks. Add custom sharing links so readers share your posts more, then add a custom unsubscribe link so people can opt-out without leaving your list altogether. Assumes a blog, podcast, or Youtube; and a Convertkit account.
At the end of this tutorial, you will have a nice web page for your mailing list and subscribe forms automatically embedded at the bottom of your blog posts. This tutorial assumes you have a self-hosted Wordpress installation (Wordpress.org, not Wordpress.com).
To build an email list, it really helps if you can offer people something interesting, attractive, and valuable as a gift. This tutorial shows you how to use the free tool Canva to create stylish PDFs for this purpose.
You have a project idea but you're not making progress. You feel overwhelmed or confused about how to proceed. You're unmotivated because you can't see how everything will come together. You need a plan. This workshop will show you how to make one.
.png)
The Indie Thinker sits at the intersection of academia, agile tech startups, and the media business. Principles: extreme evergreen, inputs are outputs, quantity is a quality all its own, redundancy is a virtue, flywheels, lateral networking, doing things that don't scale, and seizing moments.
This seminar outlines some strategic principles — and specific tactical suggestions — for anyone planning to write an indie book in genres of "serious non-fiction" (philosophy, science, history, etc).
Where should independent intellectuals publish? This series helps you answer this question! Areo Magazine's center of gravity is liberal universalism. The most common reason for rejecting submissions is bad writing. They publish authors on the Left and Right, though their authorship leans Left.
An ontology of intellectual production for the internet: Content (text, audio video), Machines, Buckets, Sites, Routines, Operations, Projects, Sprints.
The podcasting system I’ve optimized over a few years. The quantity vs. quality tradeoff — Diminishing returns of audio quality — Tools, sequences, workflows — Recording on Youtube — Auphonic — Patron delivery — Libsyn, Wordpress, Overcast, Zapier — Operations management.
.png)
A guide for politically vulnerable professionals or professionals dissatisfied with the intellectual and creative constraints imposed by their institutions. Why you should have a content strategy, even if you don’t need one (yet) — What kinds of content, on which platforms? — Workflows.
You need to obtain a planet first. I was braced for this to take longer than it did. Only took about 18 minutes (minus breaks to do other things). All I'm doing is following https://urbit.org/using/install/.
I don't recommend auto-blogging automated transcriptions because they are not quite good enough yet. This Zapier automation refers to the Ulysses writing application because it's the one I use, but it will work just as well for any writing app that can work with text files in a folder.
How to setup an automation in Zapier to process voice notes on your phone. All you have to do is record voice notes in Voice Record Pro and choose the "Save to Dropbox" option. Then Zapier will send that audio file to Descript and generate a transcript.
Tubebuddy is a paid plug-in for improving the experience for creators on Youtube. Here's my upload process using the Tubebuddy functionality.
Alfred is a launchbar utility that will make your research and production workflows more efficient. This tutorial suggests a few initial settings and highlights some of the functions I use the most every day: Clipboard history search, spelling look-up, and merging copied items for rapid information
If you need a website/blog but you're not sure what platform to use, this will be a good default solution for many indie thinkers. It's one of the cheapest and easiest ways to create a professional website while retaining customization options and room to grow.
Transcribe and edit your voice notes into blog posts and podcasts.