Why Am I Not Appearing in Public?

I am proud to look like a hillbilly and NOT as an “academic,” but my looks wouldn’t prevent me from appearing in public.

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Not long after starting out this three-year-old stack¹, several sources started to ask me for an interview, preferably a live one. That sort of thing is good publicity in a world full of semi-illiterate people (about 30 percent of US high-school graduates exhibit such problems). Why did I refuse? After all, as a former professor, I often lectured to hundreds of people, so publicity itself doesn’t bother me.

Okay, here are a few reasons:

1. Didn’t want to become easy to replace by AI.

2. My audience comes from people who can read, write, and are able to make their own decisions, all of which are dying breeds. Why should I address those who can’t?

3. As a former professor of Linguistics and Communications, I know how easy it is to decontextualize what I say, so I can be easily misrepresented. Moreover, “reporters” love to embarrass their sources.

4. The interviewers themselves can direct the conversation into abortive topics and/or they can compartmentalize² my findings. Not interested.

5. As I am keeping tabs on changes, my current stance sometimes changes (although I prefer not to say anything until I’m relatively certain), and I could be spectacularly discredited even years after making a public statement, because most people wouldn’t know about my latest thoughts and, considering how silly I may have sounded, wouldn’t be interested anymore.

6. Shooting made me half deaf over 40 years ago, and I am still not good at lip-reading. In fact, my wife sometimes gets a kick out of what I hear instead of what she says, and it’s not (always? :) ) intentional. Well, cheering her up makes me clown around sometimes, but I am not interested in doing that for an audience.

7. Whatever the interviewing source is, as long as they accept comments, I can be flooded by trolls/bots in quantities that I might not be able to handle (I am having enough problems with those already).

In general, whatever receives much publicity is nearly inevitably a digression, a limited hangout, or a red herring:

1. After three years, I still haven’t seen any other authors on Substack who provides a detailed annual report of their traffic and revenue, as I recently did in

This which resulted in my traffic becoming even more limited than before:

2.