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A thought-provoking journey into the depths of the human condition, the evolution of technology, and the shifting landscapes of culture. This podcast challenges conventional wisdom, explores emerging ideas, and dissects the forces shaping our lives—from artificial intelligence to art, from history to the future of human intelligence. Through deep conversations, bold insights, and a relentless pursuit of understanding, we break down the complex interplay between innovation, identity, and meaning. Welcome to a space where thought meets action, and where every episode is an invitation to see the world—and yourself—differently.
Welcome. Welcome to the Discourse Podcast. My name is James McMillan, and I've showed up. I've shown up. There were a lot of reasons why this wasn't going to happen.
Speaker 1:Still are some I could subscribe to. But I think what's helping me get through that and begin to deliver this, to open this space up, to set that signal, is because this is something I've carried with me for a long time. The idea that making a space for people to question everything, to have conversations about only topics people can really come up with. We can't just grab them from the Internet. We can't chat box the questions.
Speaker 1:We can't do any of those things. We have to live and exist completely through the the visceral human experience to formulate these kinds of conversations. In reality, I waited. Right? I didn't just jump right into this podcast.
Speaker 1:Oh, I saw a few cool people on my on my feed via the algorithm. No. This is this is nothing like that. This was I waited because I thought I needed to be very perfect, to have it completely figured out, to understand from the from the block of buying all the equipment all the way down to the SEO funnel and the whole marketing strategy. Right?
Speaker 1:The whole slick slides and slick animation on the that's what I was waiting for. And to be extremely clear and to be super transparent with you, that in fact was not clarity. That was chaos. So what shaped my perspectives around starting a podcast? Right?
Speaker 1:Well, one, the algorithm. Seeing other young and specifically, right, black intellectuals. Also, knowing them, right, interacting with them, knowing how they think, knowing how they feel, knowing what they give off of their body and what they experience in their own universe and how they communicate and articulate that. That that is my perspective. And I know for everybody out there who's gonna be a stinker.
Speaker 1:Right? Because I think the moment you start saying black thought, things are gonna start getting weird. Well, let's really break that down. Why does black thought need more space? I can't breathe.
Speaker 1:I literally can't breathe. I'm in places and spaces sometimes. They're not specific to any particular day or moment or whatever. I'm in spaces and places where I can't breathe and I need more range. I need to be able to take my thoughts really to the to like the existential precipice where we're about to fall off of the cliff of even just the ethereal itself.
Speaker 1:We're we're way down the path. That's what I need. That's what feeds me. That's what drives me. So that is why I'm doing this.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna get too deep in the weeds about, you know, this is this is episode zero. It's a way for you to get just a a glimpse of what there is to come through this. It's not really, you know, the time for me to get super down deep and dirty about the topics and the granulars about where I've come from and what I've done, but I'll give you just a bit of that. Right? So as somebody who's navigated systems, let me be super clear when I say this.
Speaker 1:The way I lived my life prior to the age of 25 was purely out of survival. Everything I did, everything I observed, the things I looked at, the things I watched, the things I planned for was purely out of survival instincts. So imagine a person like me, what I was experiencing was I was living inside the tension, like I was inside the tension. I was I was along every piece of that thread between culture and my own intellect. I realized the discourse I wanted didn't exist.
Speaker 1:The questions I had, the way I wanted to approach life, the things I had to reach back for, I had to reach across two intellectual patterns or two cultural patterns or two narrative patterns about who I was, several really, because at different times, there were different in airy relationships. Right? I had to reach back through those in, like, this quantum way just to evaluate my condition. So this is me building that discourse now. This is me building that space.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start with three episodes. These episodes are gonna be the absolute framework, the pillars if you will. Right? The upholding basis that I'm coming from. That these I guess they wanna say keywords or genres or whatever.
Speaker 1:Whatever way you wanna frame all of this, this is the these are the three episodes that that information is coming from. Episode one, modern tribalism. Episode two, the polymaths. And episode three, the meta man. These are the foundations.
Speaker 1:They're not even really topics. They're just foundations that have set the base for how I want to start having discourse. So if you're here, you're probably like me. Systemic. Right?
Speaker 1:Very layered. Multidimensional. Bruh, we might not even be from this universe. Right? And extremely curious.
Speaker 1:This is your space too. We're building something that is looking directly at the future. I said that I would give you a bit about myself. So there will be a a pretty decent amount of people that hear this and will already know who I am and what I'm like and what I'm about. But that's not the goal to just reach those people and to be satisfied with that reach.
Speaker 1:My reach is much larger than that. So for those people, this is your first time interacting with me, I'm not going to go all the way back to the Midwest. Right? I'll leave that as a cliffhanger. You can probably find me on the Internet, figure out where I'm from.
Speaker 1:People do it all the time. I'm here to give you just a glimpse of the things that make me who I am today from a more specific cross cross sectional point that's only no more than about seven years in the past. So I've served in the United States Air and Space Forces, And that time shaped a lot about how I see structure, how I truly understand what leadership is and what it's about, and then, of course, systems. Right? And some of these, if not all of these words, are basically buzzwords in the business tech.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're just buzzwords. Right? But they really have meaning for me because it allowed me to understand how things moved and why things were moving. But before that, right, so before all of this, you know, stacking of knowledge and intuition and and and outward facing intellect, I I was a struggling music producer. I'm I still am a struggling music producer.
Speaker 1:Right? Chasing sound. Something you can't see with your eyes, something you can't taste with your mouth or feel with your hands. You can only feel it with your body, create visually what it looks like as you're hearing it through your ears. That's what I was chasing in life.
Speaker 1:Extremely esoteric. Right? But I look back at that part of the journey and I realize it taught me how to listen and to listen with more than my ears, to listen with more than my eyes, to listen with everything, listen with the entire experience. And from that, really understanding how to find that that that meaning in chaos. Right?
Speaker 1:All of that air moving around you, all the particles and blowback and like all of that about sound helped me recognize patterns, textures, and and really like the truth of the noise. How we were going to use something to put it all together, make the noise systematic, make the noise really move. My only one person right now is gonna know what I mean by this, but it was really boom cattic. It was a lot of booming and catting going on in a way that was a spiritual experience for me. So that was me prior to that was just prior to the military reaching back a few years.
Speaker 1:Right? Then I had to look at that the whole military journey. Okay? Chaotic. Wild.
Speaker 1:People say the chair force or what's the space force do? There was a lot of mind work in those jobs using a lot of mental capacity. And that was where I began to get sharp. I learned how to lead. Right?
Speaker 1:Take up an arm, take up a cause, take up a teammate, and start going. I learned how to analyze. And then I also learned how to trust evidence but also use my instincts. So maybe that's where people will start to see, like, the planner in me or the strategist in me. Sometimes I abstract away from the lower level tactical things in life and I say, okay, can this even be accomplished by the time that I expire?
Speaker 1:And if it does, how can I create it so that it can happen in a time span in which I can see and generate a net benefit from it reasonably soon? And that just that goes to everything in life. That goes to everything in And I think that that's how you create value. You you evaluate things on a time scale so big that no one's gonna benefit. You figure out how to draw it down to a point where it's like, yo, hey, I'll pay extra for that.
Speaker 1:I'll pay extra for that. So what about James right now? Right now, I'm in a extremely transformational season in my life. I'm currently a student, right, pursuing two pathways, master in business, so MBA, and a master in information systems, so science based quantitative aspects. Talk about a cognitive shift.
Speaker 1:The whole paradigm is shifting. Right? This is a place where I'm starting to awaken old senses. At 31 years old, I'm talking about waking up old senses in myself via an academic pursuit. So the ways that I used to think when I was a kid, I used to walk down the street and I used to tell myself these, like, made up military tales.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe I've always been, like, a sort of combatant or maybe I just thought like a military strategist. Right? I used to there was one in particular that I, was thinking about earlier before I started recording this, and that was I I'm on this prairie. I'm from the Midwest.
Speaker 1:Right? You guys will obviously figure out where that's at. I'm from I was on this prairie, and there were some maneuver warfare capabilities, like, section behind me. And we're in this long, like, row, so there's probably, like, 15 columns. Right?
Speaker 1:I'm talking about, like, I I I think, Fury, they had a scene like this similar to Fury. Right? And I'm out in the open prairie. I'm lined up in front of one of the assets and I'm looking looking over and I'm like, yo, that bush is looking kinda funny. Right?
Speaker 1:It's like moving a little bit and I'm like, yeah, that's intuition. I'm like, I'm we're gonna have to, like, put eyes on that. Well, lo and behold, we were in ambush and they maneuver warfare systems. Right? Armors, heavies, tanks, you know, that mechanized infantry, you know, heavy plated armor on the mechanized infantry.
Speaker 1:Right? That stuff is disabled, and we're out there basically playing hero. We're out there basically, like, charge. Right? But that was when I was a kid, bro.
Speaker 1:I was probably, like, no older than 12. Right? That was the kind of stuff that I I was in it's playing inside of my mind. Right? These, like, very chess like game theory warfare thoughts.
Speaker 1:And they were never as dismal as I think that stuff comes off. They were very creative. I feel like that's a whole subgenre, like made up military tales. Right? But not to get way off from the main point, these old senses through academic pursuits are teeming with life now.
Speaker 1:The senses themselves are connecting via the synapse pathways. Right? My brain is a start is starting to associate certain old dormant thought patterns with new extremely advanced complicated and critical thought processes about what it means to be alive. That's what it's doing for me. Right?
Speaker 1:So all this go to school, become a doctor, become a lawyer, I'm be the first person to tell you, please don't do any of those things if you don't want them. I went to school. I got a undergraduate degree online. Let's talk about online. Right?
Speaker 1:In interdisciplinary studies. Maybe that's like the token military degree for a guy who doesn't know what he want a guy or girl who doesn't know what they wanna but actually, it was the most beautiful experience I ever had because I almost got into that when I went to the University of Saint Thomas. Almost did the same thing because I have so many curiosities, but what's happening now is I'm starting to weaponize my own curiosity. My curiosity is serving as a base in which I can pull and draw an arsenal of things, which makes me as effectively a metahuman. Right?
Speaker 1:More on that episode. So where are we heading? This is this is an interesting one because I think a lot of people say you need a plan, you need a purpose, you need a path, you need those are very definitive like I gotta sit down and draw the plan like and like, but didn't you say you're strategist, James? No. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But there's something about real time strategy and planning and preparation to execute a proposed strategy. And I'm one of the in the field strategist type. I'm looking and I'm observing actively as dynamics occur in front of me. Things are variable. There's a lot of variability in the way that something can occur and you can either play through it from the beginning right before it ever happens or you can play through it right when it happens right in front of you and certain aspects of your reactions will warrant and cause certain effects.
Speaker 1:But that's just the game I like to play. That's just the game I wanna play. So where am I headed? I feel like I'm heading to a space, like like a quadrant. Right?
Speaker 1:So say we're we're at zero. Right? On the x and y axis, we're at zero. And there's just like this curve. But there this like there's this like asymptote at a certain point where we're never really reaching the next observable point where we're touching, like, the framing of it all.
Speaker 1:Right? I don't feel like that's a necessary place to go, but I feel like every point along the way is exactly where I should have been, and those points ahead of me are where I'm supposed to be going. A aggregate sum of where I am right now is leading me further along the curve. I'm looking at the spot I'm in now, and I'm like, well, the curve just keeps going up. And, obviously, the incremental changes in the margin of return gets tighter.
Speaker 1:Sure. But that just means more execution. That's why I like in real time strategy. So the skills that I have, the scars that I bear, the systems I've built, these are all for me to create value for thinkers, doers, planners, strategists, all of the above and many of of of and alike and kin. Right?
Speaker 1:To create value and space for those people along with them, People who move to the world not with all of the answers. I was just talking to the homie. We stay on this topic. My boy Davion Bailey. Check him out.
Speaker 1:Everybody wants to be right about everything, But have you run out of questions? So this is the discourse. This is where all of that converges. If you found this podcast to be just as amazing as I've designed it to be, please listen on your way to work, listen on the dev floor, listen in the project management agile meetings, put me on wherever you play and however you play podcast. I thank you so much in advance.