uploaded March 8, 2022
youtube
bitchute
Okay, I think we’re going through. I figured I’d do yet another livestream now that I have internet. On the days where I don’t have anything to do at the end of the day, I might as well do a livestream, or at least until I get sick of it. I’ve done like three in the past two weeks or so.
So once again, we’ll do it like last time: we’ll just talk about whatever. I don’t particularly have anything big to talk about in this one other than minor details, things I’m working on, and other things like that. Let me put it in the chat so those of you who are Monero users can donate with Monero. You’ve always been able to do that, but now you can actually get a super chat; it’ll pop up on the screen and stuff. The link is xmr.lukesmith.xyz, which I just posted in the chat. Maybe I will actually pin it, just for the record, because I don’t want to make you guys use fake fraudulent Federal Reserve notes to donate. Might as well use fake internet money instead, you know.
And temporarily I have the slow chat off, so you can talk as much as you want, but once the chat gets too big I’m going to turn slow chat back on. All right, so first things first: the Not Related episode I did last week on BS jobs was actually bizarrely popular for an episode of Not Related. Usually when I put out a Not Related episode — which, of course, I guess I started back in 2018; the podcast website is notrelated.xyz, by the way — I never expected to get that many views from it. It’s always had a hardcore smaller audience, but the last episode I did was pretty popular in terms of how many people watched it and how many new people it reached. It definitely resonates with people, the concept of having a fake job, right? Because everyone in the world nowadays has worked some kind of job where you just know, “Why am I doing this? This is so pointless.” Most of them are, but that’s just how it is.
I don’t know if there are many people here today. I think it might just be because of the time I’m doing it; I guess Europeans are kind of asleep. ABCDEF says, “Can I Venmo you?” Yeah, you actually can. My email address is luke@lukesmith.xyz. Rudy Hill says, “How long we been going?” No, I just started. A million years ago I did a stream with Rudy. I don’t actually know if he’s still making videos or anything. Not lagging, actually in sync — what is this? Yeah, it’s crazy. Of course, the bandwidth I have noticed with Starlink — obviously I can stream 720p — but the bandwidth isn’t 100% consistent, right? So there will be times during the stream where it kind of jitters or stutters or whatever it is. But I can deal with that.
Tyler donated and said, “Luke, I came for the tech content years ago, but your life advice and rants really inspired me to improve a lot. Boomerangs and Not Related are actually my favorite pieces.” Well, that’s good. Weirdly enough, I do fewer boomerants than I used to. That used to be the easiest video to make because I just got my phone and went outside. But in my opinion — I mean, you guys know me if you’ve been on the channel for a while — I always feel bad about repeating crap over and over and over again. One thing about YouTube, and I’ve complained about this before, is that people always want novelty. They always want the same stuff over and over again. Well, that’s the opposite of novelty, but they want things that you just did, you know what I mean? That’s what the YouTube algorithm wants. As far as I’m concerned, most of the boomerangs, I’ve kind of gotten them out of my system, so I don’t feel like I need to do them over and over again.
I will say there are so many YouTube channels, including those that are close to me in terms of topics, that will do the same stuff over and over again, and I just can’t do that. I have thought about redoing, not in terms of rants but in terms of redoing a LaTeX series, because really nowadays I don’t even use LaTeX; I use Zettlr, which basically is the same thing, but it’s better for handling Unicode characters, and that’s what I use for the Lindy Press books. By the way, I got one in the mail today. I actually didn’t make a cover for this, The Secret of Secrets. I think I mentioned this, but I’ve already found a couple errors, and I think the text is too big. I’m going to shrink down the text. I’m using 12-point font, and when you’re using 12-point, it’s just too big for things like this. It’s like school-paper tier. If you put it in a book, it just looks too big. So that’ll cut like 10 or 20 pages off of this if I put it down to 11-point.
So I’m actually going to do a couple tutorials. Within the next week I might actually do — I might not do a LaTeX tutorial, but I might go through how I make the books on Lindy Press and how I do that, just to show my workflow. Really, when I’m digitizing text, or when I’m taking a text that’s been clumsily digitized, how do I fix that up? And it’s mostly using Vim, although of course I’m writing in LaTeX, so that’s relevant there. So I will do some things in LaTeX, but most of it is actually Vim magic. There’s a lot of that stuff. Another thing is I kind of want to do a video on lf, which I’ve been using — you know, that’s the file manager. It’s basically like Ranger, but it’s better because it’s not written in freaking Python; it’s written in Go. And actually just yesterday I think I finally pushed the changes to get image previews in lf, which theoretically I could have done within the past year or two, but it was kind of hacky. Eventually, like just in the past week, I got some emails about it, so I was like, because it is doable.
So the bottleneck I sort of feel like is not actually the bandwidth now; it’s my CPU. I really need to get a capture card and maybe use another machine to stream, but it’s always me doing everything on the same computer. It used to be whenever I did livestreams I would just complain about doing livestreams the entire time I did them because it’s so difficult. I know that there are streamers who do it every day like it’s nothing, but...
Luke, have you completed the Byglottic version of Meditations yet? If so, when will it be on Lindy Press?
I was working on it. That’s kind of low priority for me, because there are other Bygotic texts that I think are more important to do, that are more scholarly. Meditations is basically just guys’ reflections; it’s not too philosophical. I mean, it’s philosophical in the kind of normie sense of the word, but it’s like the hardcore terminology you don’t necessarily need the native language for that. So yeah, I did say that I might do that later, but there are other things I want to do first.
Another option, actually, you know, I could just do a still-picture livestream. I’m already — I forget my FPS that I’m streaming in. I wonder if I’m streaming at like 20 FPS or something. I forget. I was just like, “Oh, I want to cut down on bandwidth,” or whatever. Shoot, okay, what was I going to change? I’m going to turn off this freaking background thing because that actually, weirdly enough, I mean you probably noticed that the background image is like slowly moving. I’m going to pause that. I’m just going to disable that. No, I don’t like it. I’m not going to turn it off; I’m going to let it go, and I’m just going to pause it. Where’s the pause button? Because, you know, it’s funny how data storage works, but if you have like minor pixels just slightly moving around, that actually is extremely — I don’t know, that takes a lot more bandwidth than you expect. So I’m just going to freeze the background and we’ll go with that.
Let me check donations. So again, donate with XMR if you have it. Of course, you can go to donate.lukesmith.xyz. It’s all in the freaking — oh, it’s probably on the side of my... you know, whatever.
George says, “Gardening channel recommendations? How much of your own food do you produce?” Right now, none basically. I mean, later in the year I’ll be growing tomatoes and pickles and sweet — this year I really want to do sweet potatoes, and I would want to grow enough that I don’t have to worry about it. And then certain types of tomatoes — I think I talked about on the other stream, like San Marzano — I just love those freaking tomatoes, and I want to grow some. And then some other things. And I’m actually getting chickens this year. My brother said he’s going to get me freaking chickens.
Have you considered raising your x264 preset to something faster now that you have more upload? I don’t really have more upload. Well, okay, I’m not using ffmpeg if that’s... I’m using whatever OBS is using, which I’m not sure what the default is. I haven’t really screwed with their settings that much. But yeah, I still feel like I have a big bottleneck in upload. It’s not quite consistent enough. I mean, if I’m streaming off my phone I can stream 1080p no problem if I’m in a place with good reception. And my internet here is good — I mean, it’s good for uploading videos, it’s good for watching stuff and consuming product and downloading big things — but when you’re doing a livestream where if every five seconds you don’t have a constant connection, it’ll kind of jitter or something, that’s kind of an issue. And there’s nothing much I can do about that other than... soiling has to get better, or I guess I could probably... yeah, I need to have a permanent mount for it because I’m basically putting it outside every day and then taking it in when I go to bed, which is kind of funny, but at least it’s convenient enough that you can do that.
Okay, are we back? Are we back? Tell me if we’re back. If you see me, say buttercups. Buttercups is the secret word. Put it in the chat if you can see me. I want to see buttercups in the chat. It’s going to take a second. Great, people see it. I don’t have to log on to YouTube to do all that stuff. I found the culprit the other day. I’m pretty sure the real culprit is freaking PulseAudio and/or PipeWire, and I forgot to stream correctly. I have to kill PipeWire/PulseAudio because the audio will take — that was the issue last time. I totally forgot about that, so that’s just what I did.
All right, so let’s see now. What was that last comment that I got? I think it was just someone talking about that. Yeah, someone just said, “Yeah, you got... you’re frozen.” Actually, now that I’m going to move to my bigger screen, since I think that’s the issue with the...
Okay, alrighty, much better, hopefully much better. Buttercups was my MKUltra go code? Is it? I hope you don’t shoot anyone.
Thoughts on Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, e.g. compassion being equivalent to people just having value as a cog in the system?
I don’t know. That’s not how I interpret his writings on Christianity, which I think a lot of people think Nietzsche is more anti-Christianity than he actually was. When he talked about Christianity, what he was really talking about was modern European liberalism, which he viewed as being a function of Christianity because it was modeled off of a Christianity without God. So most of the stuff he says that people interpret as being against Christianity, it’s not really about Christ or his teachings or anything specific other than some vacuous idea that when Europe became cupped it was because of Christianity. It was like a super slow burn, like a thousand years after becoming Christian then things go bad or something.
Thoughts on barefoot shoes?
What do you mean barefoot shoes? There’s no such thing as a barefoot shoe. Go barefoot.
Leaders need a Terence McKenna-style awakening.
Oh, cringe.
Please lower your bit rate.
Oh yeah, that’s what I should actually do. I forgot. Yeah, I’m at some extreme bit rate. That’s what it was. What’s a good bit rate for a 720p stream? Put that in the chat and I will change it, because I remember YouTube was like, “You’re uploading at a pretty high bit rate.”
Do you like Burzum’s dungeon synth or black metal? I saw you had a folder in one mp3/ncmpcpp video.
Yes, I do have Burzum, like all the songs, but I don’t like the black metal crap. His more recent stuff is much better where it’s just more like ambient kind of sound. Ambient music is usually trash, but...
Okay, let’s see. Because it looks like most people said... shoot, where’s the freaking menu? Well, the delay... yeah, you can’t just click on little... okay, anyway. Luca, I’ve donated through your website. Did you get my donation? I donated one dollar on accident. I don’t know, but you can keep it. If you donated one dollar, I think my website automatically filters out low donations. I want to say the minimum is like either three dollars or five dollars; I forget. So I don’t know if it gave you a confirmation message. That’s an error because it doesn’t go through if it’s lower than that.
Have you seen Dan Olson’s video on crypto and NFTs? He has a very black-pill take on both and would prefer to kill off blockchain tech as a whole. Dan Olson, I don’t know who that is. Maybe I’ve seen that video. I don’t know. Depends on what his take is; it might be stupid, it might be... I mean, there’s definitely a lot of dangerous crap when it comes to blockchain. Most cryptocurrencies are basically people trying to harm the world, I mean in one way or another, like creating monitoring technologies and unnecessary digitization.
What is the software you use for Monero donations? I mentioned that in the other video. It’s a thing that a guy wrote. It’s actually on my GitHub. If you go to my GitHub and look up Shadow Chat, it’s not originally written by me, but it’s a group Go script where you can have a view key on a server and it’ll monitor the blockchain, and when you get a donation it’ll send you a notification. If people have done it, I don’t think anyone has donated XMR this time, but you should get a notification below — like there should be a thing in the livestream saying, “Oh, Billy donated this much,” or something like that.
Shoot, am I... okay, I’m going to briefly stop the stream and start it up with that lower bitrate. Okay, should be back, I think. Yeah, looks like I’m back. If you can see me, I don’t know, do you have a sensor button? What was that? If you guys can see me, just say so. Say guitar in the chat if you can see me, because I don’t want to get back on YouTube and see if it’s actually working.
Will you ever take Nano as a crypto? It’s really interesting technology, while not as private as XMR. I really enjoy...
I’m familiar with Nano and I’m familiar with the block lattice stuff. I’m not totally sold on it, but I think it’s a... I like Monero. Obviously it has technology that you need for privacy and stuff like that, and I think what it lacks is, in general, what all proof-of-work currencies lack, and that is somewhat like not having to use a blockchain, right? So I know Nano has this block lattice thingy, which is more... I don’t know, we don’t have to worry about the same problem, but it’s kind of proof of stake and it has some other things that I’m not sold on. But I don’t think I’ll ever accept it. I mean, I’m going to stick with Monero and Bitcoin. Anything else I just don’t trust and I don’t want to deal with it. I’m not interested.
I feel like my computer is running sluggish again even though I killed PipeWire. It’s worrisome. It’s a little worse than... guys, it’s weird because I feel like the last stream I did was pretty consistent. I’m going to turn that off. We’ll just have a black background, nice and simple. And maybe, you know, I should just get like one of those soy-tacular pixelated avatars or like some kind of furry image to use for my face instead of this. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about people complaining about there being lag because it would just be still, right?
One thing that I need on my channel is I need a new profile picture, right? Because I hate the profile picture I’ve had. I’ve hated every profile picture I had. And I actually told people in my real life that I know in real life, and I was like, if you ever get a candid photo of me that I can use as like a YouTube profile picture or something, I’ll just give you a hundred dollars. Because it’s going to be worth more than a hundred dollars for me. I just kind of wish I could have that.
Yeah, you know what I mean by furry images, right? Because there are all these YouTubers where, like, they’re commentary tracks. It won’t be like me when I’m walking around or talking at the camera. What they’ll do is they’ll have like this furry — usually some kind of animal or something else — and it will... they’ll just have like five expressions. You know exactly what I’m talking about, mind you. They’ll just be like five expressions. It’ll be like, “I’m a contemplative furry,” or “Here’s a... oh, I’m an excited furry,” or “Oh, I’m like...” and so they’ll flip from the different pictures and they’ll do like a narration of something. And that’s video editing, which even that much video editing is too much, too difficult.
VTube? Yeah, VTube is... I think I know what that is. That’s when there’s like some kind of a... there’s, I don’t know, there’s a moving picture where it’s talking. I’ve seen crap like that.
ThinkPad is overheating with video encoding? Yeah, I mean, that is what it is. Although the thing is, it shouldn’t really be... I thought I deliberately decided... oh shoot, maybe I’m using the VAAPI thing, the VAPI thing. The VAAPI, theoretically that’s supposed to make it easier for you, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not. VAAPI codec? Yeah, yeah, I have no idea. I’m basically doing the best I can.
The video seems really smooth. If it’s smooth to you, that’s great, because on me my computer’s just running slow, so maybe I should complain about it. I shouldn’t. You know, if I were a good e-celebrity, I wouldn’t spend all my livestreams complaining about how difficult it is to livestream. Let’s actually talk about something else. Oh shoot, use an anime picture instead? I could do that.
Turn on x264 preset on fastest? I mean, it is that no-bs setting, because I know that’s an ffmpeg setting. I don’t really know how OBS freaking works. If it’s a graphical program, I don’t know how to use it. That’s my eternal problem. That is my absolutely eternal problem. All right, talk about Brandon’s gas prices. Yeah, actually, you know what, I will say this on gas prices. Usually, and I still endorse this, but I will just say it’s very funny when I meet a boomer. I remember it was a little after the election but before the inauguration. I was at some gas station and I was filling up or whatever, and this boomer just walks up to me — I don’t know why, I think I had like an orange boomer hat on or something — and so this boomer comes up to me and he wants to be like, “Well, once Ban gets in there, the gas prices, they’re gonna be so high.” And I have always felt like gas prices are the stupidest thing that boomers complain about because listen: your country is being destroyed from the inside out. The amount of social and spiritual corruption going on in this world is horrific, and for someone to be like, “Well, I’m voting against the Democrats because they’re going to be hard gasps,” that’s the reason? Of all the reasons, it’s going to be for gas? That is the stupidest thing in the world. That’s such a boomer take because it’s a boomer who doesn’t want to stand up for anything that’s actually important, so they’re going to stand up for this kind of notional inconvenience. It is an inconvenience to pay for gas. It is a pain, but that’s how it is.
But what was I going to say? Oh yeah, I will say today I was actually going to drive to a town. You know, around here there are no towns around, right? So there’s no city within 20 miles of me. I don’t know, maybe a little less. But I wanted to go to the grocery store today, and so where I was going, I was going through a really small town first and then I was getting to a bigger town that would have bigger grocery stores, right? So I was driving through and then I saw a gas station, and I guess it’s the first time in a couple weeks that I’ve seen gas prices, or at least taken note of them. And around here they were like lower, maybe $3.20 or something a couple weeks ago, but I passed by this gas station and it’s $4.20, and I’m just like, how did it go up that fast? And at that point I was like, you know, screw it, I’m not going to that grocery store. I just pulled into like a dollar-store kind of place and got groceries, and that was it.
Christianity is cringe donates $5: "Islam is based."
Whoa, cringe.
Brandon’s gas prices are benefiting me. I own oil stocks. Well, that’s great. But yeah, and I feel like in the past year — well, for most of my life I have been so anti-car. I’ve always hated driving. I hate driving any amount. And it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve actually driven about as much as a normie drives, but I feel like I need to cut back down on it now that it’s so expensive.
Rudy says, “I would pay six dollars a gallon if it meant Satan wasn’t swallowing up the world.” Yeah, that’s exactly what I say to people when this happens. It’s like, please let me pay $40 a gallon for gas if I can live in a sane society. Then it’s like, how... and to them, you know, if it were an either-or question, would they accept the social subversion for cheaper gas? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think a lot of them, frankly, would. Or really, it’s just people being cowardly. They don’t want to stand up for... they can’t say the things that I can’t say on YouTube right now. You know, like they can’t say sensible things, right? We’ll just say that.
So, you know, they’ve got to say gas prices. Oh, Gospel says, “Screw that, man.” You know, liberals back in the day... so, you know, liberal social sciences — they’re very funny because sometimes, I mean, firstly, a lot of social sciences, of course, their methodology and everything is so crap, and it’s just them making up studies to get the results that they know are going to come if they give these particular stimuli their response to people. It’s like people producing studies for propagandistic reasons. Okay, that basically is how it is. So in some of the concepts of leftist academia, especially the social sciences — that’s what I’m thinking of here — have filtered into mainstream culture. So now these people will talk about white supremacy. That’s a concept now; they’ve memed that into existence. People unironically use that word now. Everyone laughs at it, but people still use that word, right?
But one example way back in the day, they had this other concept and it didn’t become popular enough, but it’s called symbolic racism. So the concept of symbolic racism in leftist academia back in the 70s, 80s — I’m not quite... or maybe even the 60s — what symbolic racism is is the concept that, of course, my political enemies, they’re all racists by definition, obviously. And if they have any motivations that are not racial, there must be some racial intent in it, right? So wanting low gas prices in a liberal’s brain, that would be racist. That’s symbolic racism, right? Because it arguably, for the same reason that I just said, like boomers are cowardly, they’re not going to say anything based and red-pilled about race or gender or any of that kind of stuff. They’re not going to do that because they’re pansies. They’re not going to do it. But they will complain to no end about gas prices or like the classic issues back in the 60s that were kind of like racial, right?
So, you know, in America — I guess Europeans might not be familiar with this — but in America there’s this really weird time in the 60s where, I don’t know what exactly was the justification or the reason for this, but a lot of cities decided, here’s what we’re going to do: there are white kids in our cities that usually live in these places, and there are black kids in these other places, and just for lulls we are going to bus some white kids into the black sections and we’re going to bus black kids into the white schools. Now why was that okay? It was universally unpopular. Everyone hated it because it’s like kids are going to these schools with kids they don’t know, who aren’t like them. It’s not fun for anyone. Everyone hated it. It was universally hated, right? But it was one of those things that liberals tried to meme so hard, but for any sane person they’re like, this is just stupid. Why? It’d be weird enough to ship your kid to some other place for some weird reason, for them to actually be near someone that they were like, but to do the exact opposite, it literally just looks like trolling, you know? Either way, this is an example in the academics of the era. This is what they call symbolic racism because it’s like, “Oh, well, they can’t be overtly racist about something, so they’re just saying, ‘Oh, well, why should the government do that?’ But it’s really secretly they just don’t like other people.” My goodness. It’s just the stupidest thing.
Getting a little based on the stream here? No, we’re not really getting based. This is just like normal stuff.
Extra Mundane Suns donates $5: "Long-time Zoomer watcher switched to your larp two years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I was wondering what your hot take on Protestantism is. You seem to really favor more Catholic or Orthodox denominations from what I’ve seen. What makes Protestantism pale in comparison? Raised non-denominational, by the way."
Well, the thing with Protestantism is really just like a heretical sect of Catholicism. I mean, the complaints that I’ve had about the Catholic Church in other streams — like how they perceive how doctrine advances or develops, right? The Orthodox is like, okay, Catholics, they’re too liberal in terms of they systematize theology too much, and it got to the point in the 14-1500s where things got so extreme that basically Protestantism really begins as the exact opposite of it, where they basically throw away all theology, they throw away all tradition, all church tradition except for the tradition of what scriptures they consider legitimate. And they create this religion that is... there’s no unifying form behind it. There’s no form of tradition or anything like that. Protestantism, I mean, I don’t really take it that seriously. There are some Protestants who maybe say interesting things, but in general it’s just the reaction to a straw-man Catholicism, that’s what I’d probably say.
I think once you’re more familiar with historical Christianity, Protestantism is just kind of goofy. It’s kind of like a debilitated... I mean, these guys drink — like they don’t believe in the Eucharist and they drink grape juice for it. You know, it’s like, what are you going to say? I want to say there’s like a C.S. Lewis, or he said it — no, it’s not a C.S. Lewis quote — maybe it’s a Chesterton quote where he’s like, “To be informed of history is to cease to become Protestant.” And I think that’s like Protestantism: you have to remember that Orthodoxy is primeval basically; it goes back to the earliest church. And Catholicism, for the most part, they do have that view that we have to add, we have to expand doctrine and understand more, but in general the practices go back to the early church. Protestantism is a culturally dependent religious model that’s basically based on modern American culture, you know what I mean? And how individuals interpret the Bible divorced from everything else, divorced from how people have to interpret it throughout the entirety of the church, right? So that’s why you have Protestants who will deviate in so many respects from the rest of Christianity. They’ll say things like, “Well, you shouldn’t baptize children.” Now Christians for 2,000 years have baptized children raised in Christian households, right? But the Protestants will develop their own views that kind of ignore the entire history of the tradition and therefore the reasons that people do things, and in favor of what they kind of feel. They’ll just look at the Bible and squint their eyes and say, “This is kind of how I feel it works,” right?
And most Protestants out there who are making arguments for Protestantism, they are attacking Catholicism. They’re not attacking Orthodoxy or just general unmarked traditional Christianity. They’re attacking this straw man of Catholicism, and they think that everything else has to be Catholic when that’s not the case. During the Reformation there was a period where Lutherans, or sometimes I want to say maybe even Reformed churches, were in communication with the Eastern Church, but they refused to make some concessions and come towards Orthodoxy. And so that’s where we get the world we have now.
JN donates $5: "Modern conservatives are still liberals. Only Christianity is based. Retake Constantinople and restore the Roman Empire."
All right, yep. Yeah, now we just need a Constantine the 12th. That’s all that’s lacking.
So the stream’s still good. I can’t actually tell. I haven’t even looked at...
What’s your thoughts on Adventism and their prof...
No, I don’t have any thoughts on Seventh-day Adventism. I mean, again, it’s just another Protestant sect. I’m not really interested in it. So like all Protestantism is naturally fragmented because there’s nothing unifying it. I mean, the reason you have a million different denominations in Protestantism is because there’s really nothing there. There is no singular authority or guide for what they’re supposed to believe. Now, some say it’s the Bible, but I think any sensible person realizes that the Bible can be interpreted in many different ways, right? So it’s not like a really... I don’t know, like it’s very easy. Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox can look at the same passages and interpret them in a different way.
Any thoughts on sedevacantism? I mean, I’ve said sedevacantism is like the only sensible way to be a Catholic at this point because, you know, you just have people in... I mean, the popes, quote-unquote, nowadays just are so different from what the Catholic Church has traditionally taught it’s not even an issue. If you’re a Catholic, you basically have to be a sedevacantist. That’s really all it is.
Someone’s complaining about bots in the chat. Man, just ignore him. Actually, okay, I’ll turn on slow chat since you guys are complaining. It’s a lot of work — a lot of work to click two buttons. Well, it’s really a lot of work to click two buttons when you have to go to YouTube and every single freaking click is like five hours to load. Where’s the edit thingy?
There we go. I hope you're happy. All right, what was I saying? I'm talking about instead of vacantism, but we talk about set of vacantism too much. Thoughts about MGTOW? JK. Yeah, everyone asked about MGTOW, and I always give the same opinion: it's stupid.
Do we need friends? Yes, you need friends, but internet friends are not friends, so just go ahead and clarify that one.
Did you do your duty and get the vax, Luke? Of course I didn't. I'm not even gonna joke about that because I feel like some people would, I don't know, if I said ironically that I got it, I think there are some people who would totally miss it.
Hey, Luke, what's your IP? My IP changes all the time.
Yeah, the funniest thing in videos is when people literally know nothing about tech and you do something using an IP address on a local network, like 127.0.0.1 or some obviously local 192.168 whatever. I will literally get emails from people saying, oh my goodness, your IP is out there, blah blah blah, which is like, even if your IP leaks, it literally means nothing. The worst thing you have to do is unplug your router and plug it back in and get a new IP address. I'm not hosting anything from my house, so it really doesn't matter.
Okay, really enough. There are actually more people talking now that I put slow chat on, I guess that's the good of getting rid of spammers or something. But okay, I don't see any donations.
I probably should have been a smart person and actually made that link I put up there clickable. Or is it clickable if I click on that? Yeah, no, it doesn't work.
Hey, Luke, how many houses did you buy in crypto land? Oh boy, is that video still up? I think they, I don't know, I think maybe they took that down. It was pretty funny.
This guy says, are you still planning to make that video about people that are only able to think in full sentences? Sounded really interesting to me. Yeah, I mean, word cells, right? That became a meme recently, and I think it's a great meme. I always used to call them word thinkers, people for which they can't, I don't know, it's hard to explain because I don't think in words. They're people who only understand things through language, so they can't understand anything unless it's explained to them, and they don't understand things unless they can speak them out. They don't really have concepts in their brain aside from words, and they think that their concept, they're usually argument people. They like debates, because in their view, since language is reality, then if I can get someone in a linguistic hole, that means that I somehow win. It's stuff like that. They're kind of people who might hear some passing remark. I know this on YouTube: if I say something dismissive about, let's say, in the last podcast episode, I don't remember what specifically, but I think I said something dismissive of, like, ancoms or something, and there were multiple ancoms who, obviously a lot of antcoms and frankly ancaps think like this too, they're kind of word thinkers. They would respond to this passing remark, kind of dismissive remark that I'm obviously not looking to talk to you about this, but they will respond with this diatribe of word thinking where it's like, here are all these reasons that this should be true and blah blah blah. It's not like a good argument in the sense that it would convince someone, but it's one of those things where people make an argument so that it kind of looks good in logical form. Oh look, wow, this guy is talking a lot and listing reasons for things, blah blah blah.
Now, in real life, most arguments like that, this goes in any, this is why I don't like talk like a rational person. Because in real life, if you're a really rational person, you realize that the main problems with the way people look at issues are not in their reasoning but their prior assumptions, their premises, how you generalize things. That's really where the problem is. The problem isn't in the logic. It's not that people out there are illogical. That's not the issue. But a lot of word thinkers have the idea that they are right and that they have this prior, anyway. But also word thinkers, or word cells, the whole idea where the concept originally came from is the fact that a lot of times people will divide intelligence into two categories: there's verbal knowledge and then there's spatial or verbal reasoning and spatial reasoning. So I will give you my opinion, and this is also the official opinion of the internet: spatial reasoning is real intelligence. You can't fake it. If you're a shape rotator, you know that you have spatial reasoning abilities. You can't fake it. You can't try really hard to learn more of it. Hey, if you can't imagine things in four dimensions, you can't imagine things in four dimensions, right? Whereas verbal reasoning is often just something culturally dependent, and I don't think it really correlates with biological intelligence. I'm sure you could show me some statistics that say there is some relation, but I think it gets confounded with the other category. Either way, a word cell is someone who is a verbal reasoner, but they're not really good at spatial reasoning because if they were, they wouldn't be so focused on words. They'd be focused on concepts, on unifying principles and things like that. If you're a spatial reasoner, if you're actually an intelligent person, usually you spend most of your time trying to make your thoughts comprehensible to other people. That's a struggle, and that's a legitimate struggle if your thoughts are more complex than language. That's what you do. Whereas word cells, what they do is the opposite: they want to seem smart, so they take their simple ideas and make them flowery in language so it sounds complicated. It's like Orwell. Orwell talks about the degradation of language, not just that it's being stupid, but actually that it's becoming pretentious because people are beginning to use smarter-sounding words just for the purpose of them sounding smart. I think one he talks about is, you know, a normal human says "use," a word cell says "utilize." Utilize means the same thing as use; it's just a word that you use to sound smart. So if you're a word cell, you want to use language to sound smart, but if you're actually an intelligent person, you have a complex idea and you want to use language to make it seem stupid, to make it so other people can access it.
Of course, I will say that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who can't explain what they're thinking is super intelligent. That's not what I mean. You might just need to read more. You might need to be more familiar with how to creatively use the English language. I feel like I don't communicate that well. But I will say, if you think and you don't think in words and you have complex thoughts, that's not a bad thing. A lot of people back when people were talking about the NPC meme, I was a little uncomfortable with it because a lot of people would bully, quote unquote, NPCs because they don't have internal monologue. Now, I assume most people can think in words, okay? But I do not have a constant talking to my, like, I do not think entirely in words. That's an ability. It's not something you always have to do. And it's weird when that whole NPC meme started, a lot of people would look, oh, what, you don't have a constant stream of words in your head all the time? That's freaking weird. That seems a little strange to me. I feel like that's something that you would learn from TV if you're watching, I don't know, a TV show where a character is verbalizing their thoughts. I don't feel like that's an actually real thing.
Imagine being a word processor. Yeah, that chair looks insanely comfy. Where can I get one? Yeah, it just came with the house. I actually really hate this chair. I mean, it looks nice. It does look comfy, and it does feel comfy. It's awful for using as a desk chair. I need more ergonomic workspace. My desk height is terrible. Let's actually see what my desktop is. It's just like the worst for me. It's 28 and a half inches. That's how many centimeters is that? What? Is that centimeters? I don't even freaking know. That doesn't seem right. It's coming. Okay, yeah, that is centimeters, so that's 68-ish centimeters, and then this chair is like super low. Luke, do you still have the throwing rock? How large is it? You want me to get the throwing rock? I can show you the throwing rock. I'll go get you the throwing rock. This is how I work out. I'm gonna, I wanna see what you guys are saying about word cells. I'm gonna get the throwing rock because it's right outside.
All right, this is the rock. I'm not quite sure how big it is. Let me look at the picture.
There it is compared to my head. I'm not quite sure how heavy it is, but it's good exercise. I don't want to throw it around in here and screw up my floor, but yeah, it's a good rock. So that's what I use for exercise. You just go out, pick it up in the morning, walk it around the yard, put it above your head. Actually, that's not very safe, right? But you know, just carry it around, throw it around. When I have guys over, I'll be like, bro, hey bro, you want to play throw the rock? You want to play throw the rock, bro? Play some rock, bro. So that's what I do.
Yeah, thanks guys, it is a nice rock. I brought the rock from out of state. When I found this rock, I was like, I know that this is going to be the rock. I found it. Actually, no, no, where did I find it? Maybe it's not out of state.
Oh, okay, so here's where I actually found it. I found it in Georgia Southern University. I went to my brother's frat house, and it was in the backyard or something like that, I think that's what it was, and I liked the rock so much I was throwing it around. I was like, I'm going to take this rock to your house, and I'm going to throw it. Okay, it's good, we're gonna play throw the rock. So I forced him and some of his frat boys to play throw the rock. And then it stayed at his house for a while, and that's when I was living in Arizona. Then maybe a year later, when I left Arizona, I actually came back and lived in that town, and I picked up that rock and I was like, this is a rock, I'm going to use it. I kept it at my house, and then when I moved out here I was like, you know, I'm bringing the rock. I put it on the U-Haul. I brought this rock. It's a good rock.
Oh boy. Luke, you think ever since you got Starlink you've been on the internet too much? I'm actually not on the internet necessarily any more than I was before. These nights when I'm doing live streams, these are nights where I just don't have anything else to do, and a lot of times I would use the internet if I were online, but I'd be doing something else or maybe something more productive. I might be working on a script. One script I need to work on now is for my freaking books, right? So you see again, Secret of Secrets. I haven't designed a cover for this. They have this auto, you know, on Lulu where you can auto-generate a cover, which I kind of don't like. It's okay. This is one of the auto-generated covers where you pick a picture and there are a couple of different formats to use, but I want to make a script that can do this automatically and give me more complex backs. I kind of don't like the facts. So I've been working on the ImageMagick script that can do that automatically.
Can you crush a man with that rock? Yeah, you could definitely basically kill someone with this rock if it fell on someone's head. Forget about it. Are you a dog or cat guy? No, you shouldn't have pets. I mean, you've probably seen on my videos there is a cat that lives at my house that I insist is not mine. I feed it. It's my brother's cat. He's never taken care of it. They just left it at my house. So it might actually be inside. I don't know where it is.
Most autistic rock story I've ever heard. Hey, it's a good rock. If you don't, you wish you had this rock. It's a good rock.
What date estimate for when the Secret of Secrets will drop on Lindy Press? Very, very soon, because that and the Alchemy Reader, well, the Alchemy Reader might be a little more, but here in the next episode are not related. I want to talk about both of them. I'm kind of double dipping, right? My two projects are going to be on the same page. Also, I can probably sell more of them if I do a podcast episode on them. But this one is basically done. I just need to design a cover, and there are one or two things I wanted to change. I think I mentioned earlier on this stream that I'm going to change the text size. Oh, and there's like a graphic that I need to fix somewhere. Yeah, I kind of screwed this one up. I gotta fix that graphic. It's supposed to be like a circle with words pointing to other ones. Try to think what else. So one weird thing about this is one thing I couldn't find for this book.
So I will say, I don't know if you guys know, you probably know Styxhexenhammer, you know that guy, like he has a YouTube channel and stuff. So one thing that he used to do, he used to actually reprint books like I'm doing. So he did it the lazy way and he also did it the cheap way where he would just take, I think, PDF scans or maybe digitized copies and just use Amazon's crap. He doesn't use LaTeX, he doesn't format them all nicely, but he'd sell them super cheap. He actually has the Secret of Secrets on sale, but I will go ahead and tell you his sucks and mine is better because he's using like the, I mean, he probably doesn't know any better, like at all, but he was using the English version that was translated from a Latin version that's literally like half of the text. There are some Latin manuscripts where half of the text is omitted, including some of the more esoteric stuff like the onomancy sections. It's like divination based on a person's name and some of the potions and other things. There's a whole bunch of things that were omitted in a lot of Latin texts, whereas this one is based on the earliest Arabic that we have and it has basically the whole thing. The only thing that it is lacking is something that I've never been able to find. There's a section on talismans where there are some Kabbalistic symbols that I couldn't locate because the version that I was using basically just said here are some Kabbalistic symbols and they didn't include them. But you know, it's fake anyway.
Oh yo, the story of the Jew and the Zoroastrian. That's a good one, right? It's basically a story about how a Jew and a Zoroastrian meet each other. It's supposed to be about how you pick an honorable minister, and the Jew says to the Zoroastrian, here's my religion. I worship God, and my God says that I'm supposed to be nice to all of my religion mates, but no one else. I'm not supposed to care about you. I'm supposed to own you, right? And the Zoroastrian, he basically is the cuck philosophy, because he's like, oh no, I gotta be nice to everyone. And the whole story is basically the Jew says something like, oh well, then you should give me your camel and your water and all this kind of stuff, and the Zoroastrian's like, oh okay, yeah sure. So the Zoroastrian basically keeps cucking out for the Jewish guy, and he ends up stealing all his stuff. So the Jew goes off with his camel, and then the Zoroastrian just destroys, like, this guy took advantage of it obviously. But eventually he walks, they're walking in the desert, and he finds the Jew has fallen off the camel and he's broken his leg and he's dying. And the Jew's like, oh, you have to save me because that's your religion, right? You do good for everyone, right? So the Zoroastrian is like, you know what, you're right again. I'm gonna do what's most noble, and I'm gonna take you any—so he takes him to the city to get medical care, and then the Jew dies. The end.
And the Zoroastrian, the whole point of the story, right, the Zoroastrian eventually gets promoted to some big minister because the government hears how honorable he is or whatever. Anyway, it's supposed to be a story about even if you cuck out, a lot of Zoroastrians cuck, like, you know, he kind of gets taken advantage of, right? But if you're being noble, you will be rewarded, right? So I guess this book is anti-Semitic. I don't know what that is, but anyway, I'm trying to think what else is in there. Yeah, a bunch of stuff. You'll just have to see when I do a not related episode on it. That's like one of the weird stories in it, the Jew and the Zoroastrian. I translated it as Zoroastrian in the Arabic original as a fire worshiper, and when they said fire worshiper they usually interpret that as Zoroastrian. There are a couple terms that I modernized or gave more unambiguous English readings of, but for the most part I kept it the same. This was actually translated, I want to say, in the 1920s from Arabic and it was published. Thankfully now it's in the public domain, so...
Okay, oh, I think my chat froze. Hopefully we're still there.
Did you win a Zoroastrian walk into a bar? Yeah, well...
Lindy Press humble bundle? Yeah, yeah, I guess that's what it is, but the other thing is like I got all these books on like 99 completion. You know, I gotta finish them.
Do you take requests for Lindy Press? Yeah, I do, but I mean it takes me a long time to do everything, like to make them all. Do you speak Arabic? No, I don't speak Arabic. This is someone else's translation, but there are a couple terms in that case where he basically didn't translate some words and I wanted it to have a more natural reading, so I'd go through, okay, how should I translate this? There are other cases like that. For example, the Arabic original has the word rumi, which at the time, well, a lot of Latin texts translate that as Italian because it's related to the word for Rome, but I think I want to say I translated it differently in different contexts. It really refers to Eastern Rome because that's how the term was used in Arabic at the time. It's talking about the Eastern Roman Empire and kind of really Asia Minor as the geographical place, so there are a couple of cases.
People, someone said XMR donations aren't going through. I do have an XMR donation. Sorry, I haven't read them in a while. Luke and Joy are sent in some XMR: what's your opinion on the idea that capital is a positive feedback loop and that communism was a cybernetic reaction, although ineffective, to the phenomenon? Nick Land's perspective as far as I know. Also trying to get my brother interested in cybernetics.
Well, it depends on what you mean by cybernetic reaction. I mean, cybernetics is a kind of... I don't know, I'm not familiar with Nick Land's view on this particular issue, like what you're really looking on, so I can't really give you an opinion on it. But I mean, Schumpeter definitely has the idea that capitalism is kind of a positive feedback loop. I think I may have talked about that in the podcast I did on capitalism, socialism, and democracy. His idea is that capitalism is distinct. I mean, this is similar to Marxist ideas, but obviously in terms of politics Schumpeter was kind of the opposite of Marx. But the idea was like capitalism is a social structure that's kind of an anti-social structure, where it consists in renovating how the world works and constantly changing things. It's not based on stability, it's based on change.
Extra mundane since then, five dollars. Thanks for the answer. We'll definitely think about that more in the future. That was Cardinal Newman you quoted there. Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds right too. He used to be a Protestant who converted to Christianity to Catholicism. I have his book, On the Development of Christian Doctrine, which actually talks about what I just talked about. It's a really small book. Maybe it's on the shelf over there. I don't know, but yeah.
Teague says, what's your opinion on music? What kind of music do you listen to? Is it a good idea to listen to music all the time? Is modern music or certain types of music detrimental to one's mental state? I don't listen to music. I don't really understand why people listen to so much music. I don't get it. It's not an addiction. I definitely feel like people are weirdly entranced by it, and I think it's kind of weird. It's almost like it's so alien to me why people obsess about music that I can't even understand what's going through someone's head who's listening to music all the time. From my view, music is almost like a psychic deadener. It kind of destroys your mental space. It's sort of like listening to a podcast all day. There are people who do podcasts five days a week where it's just them talking and people just listen to these people talk for hours on end. It's nuts as far as I'm concerned. I just consider it, yeah, I mean, I just feel like people do that so they don't have to think something in their own brain, like if they're perturbed by the solemnity of solitude. It's a little strange to me.
Vince says, hey Luke, I've been using LARPs on my laptop and I at least want to give a little. I had a question with VPN, so more specifically now Starlink, as I don't trust my ISP with my data. I currently use Mullvad, but now there's some good choices out there. No, there's some good choices out there. I only really use Mullvad because I send cash in the mail and they add money to my account. Do you use any VPN in specific? No, shouldn't use a VPN unless there's something specific. VPNs are almost like insane. VPNs have taken over the internet, but they do. I mean, if you don't trust your ISP with your data, I don't know why you would or wouldn't, but you are not changing your trust level by using a VPN. You're now just paying some other party to have your browsing data instead. VPNs really make no sense unless you are specifically trying to avoid some local block on you, right? Like, oh, there's a site that's blocked in my country, in which case you could just use a proxy or something else. The real reason VPNs exist is not because there's a reason to use them. It's really just there's so many cloud computing server systems out there, they just don't know what to do with their computers, so they just say, oh, let's route internet traffic through us and charge people for it and say it has something to do with privacy when it really doesn't. You're literally just paying someone to have your internet data as opposed to someone else. So unless you specifically, for most people, VPNs are absolutely useless, worse than useless. They cost money and they're liable to be honest. I wouldn't trust your ISP per se, but it'd be even weirder if you gave your data to someone who says, oh hey, if you care about privacy, give us your data. I mean, that smells like kind of a honeypot thing. I don't really think it's like a planned honeypot. It's just one of those...
After you're watching you—oh, excuse me.
Matteo says, after watching your video about identifying with his job, I remember this. I worked at this company and there was this guy which only talked about web programming and his personality was totally based on this, to the point that he went to work in person just to talk to others during work about personal web projects. His contract was fully remote and his biggest achievements were doing his great wagey job and receiving Twitter responses from framework creators. Cringiest guy I ever met there.
Yeah, I can imagine a bunch of wageys on Twitter kind of like that. So yeah, a lot of people are like that. It is nutty. I don't quite understand it.
Use VPNs for torrenting? I mean, even torrenting, I never use a VPN or any of that crap. I guess I'm not torrenting anything. Even in America, which allegedly cares the most about copyright laws, listen, I know people who get dozens of those copyright notifications: oh, you downloaded this movie, oh, you better be nice and not do that again or we'll turn off your internet. Listen, it's part of the law that ISPs have to send those things out, but there are ISPs that will send out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those before they turn your internet off. Realistically speaking, I've never in my life heard of anyone who lost their internet due to torrenting or anything like that. And yeah, way back in the day, back in like 2004, you might get sued by, I don't know, Marvel if you torrented a Marvel movie. I mean, they didn't exist back then, but nowadays they realize that's like really bad press if you do that, so...
Yeah, I’m hoping the XMR donations are still working. I guess we got two of them, so never mind. It’s probably just like on the other stream — I put Monero in the title, so a lot of people specifically came to give Monero or something.
Would you download a car, Luke?
Yeah, I actually would if I could.
How to not be a degenerate? By not being degenerate. I don’t know.
Since watching YouTube is wasteful, why is your content on it? Or is it not? Either way, why is it there?
When I say watching YouTube is wasteful, I mean most people on YouTube are just there for hours doing nothing, constantly clicking related videos and passively consuming infotainment. That doesn’t mean every video on YouTube is bad. A lot of videos are there for a reason — they inform or do something else like that. It’s really the user who has to not use YouTube in an addictive way. If you’re sitting around all day watching the same crap, that’s weird. So when I put videos up, it’s not as if they become tainted because they’re on a site people watch a lot. I like to imagine that most of my videos tell people that real life is not on the internet, real life is not YouTube. That’s why I don’t mind taking months-long breaks from YouTube like I did a couple months ago.
I’ve had a very severe YouTube addiction since I was maybe six or seven. It’s funny to think there are people so young that YouTube existed when they were six or seven. YouTube was 2005, I think.
Why do you say owning pets is bad? What is the function of a pet? There are many reasons to have animals around — that’s what a farm is — but pet ownership is the idea of having an animal in your house just to do nothing, just to look at it, just to have fun with it as some kind of decoration. It’s really just people who aren’t having children. In the same way that the internet is a hyperreality that gives you the simulation of having friends, pets are the same kind of thing. A lot of times people are using them because they have some vacuousness in their life that would be better filled in better ways.
Autistic take? Yeah, autistic reasoning, yes. I am beyond the normie hordes who think with their emotions. I am autiste.
What are your thoughts on systemd? I don’t know. I haven’t used it in years. I’ve been on Artix for who knows how long.
Why did we domesticate dogs? Well, many dog breeds exist for a reason, but there are many that don’t. There are dog breeds that are just cruel abominations that men have artificially selected, like pugs that can’t even breathe properly and slowly asphyxiate during their life. That’s sad, and I don’t know that pet ownership gets you anything good. Would you ever work at YouTube? No.
Pope Francis agrees. Lol, pet parents are not real parents. Wow, first based thing Pope Francis has ever said.
Let me check donations.
Uh, I don’t think there are any new ones.
If anyone has any trouble with the XMR one, just put it in the chat. I’m always paranoid about testing anything cryptocurrency-related because you have to send transactions and crap.
How do you obtain Monero privately? That’s my issue with bothering to — I mean, what do you mean? There are dozens of sites where you can swap any other cryptocurrency for Monero. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to monero.how, which gives you a list of swap places. You can search for BTC and find converting Bitcoin to Monero. Even things like ShapeShift and Changelly — I don’t think you have to sign up for them, though you should double-check. You can just send another currency for Monero. If you don’t have a KYC exchange for Monero, even if you obtain Monero non-privately, once you move it around it’s private, right? Of course, maybe you just don’t want to buy it through a KYC exchange. I know there’s some KYC exchange where you can buy Monero, but I don’t know about it.
I did mention it earlier in the stream, but I’ll mention it for everyone: I did an interview with Kevin Wadd, who’s a Monero YouTuber. We recorded a livestream over the weekend, and I think it’s going to be up on his channel, and then I think I’ll put it up on mine. He has a smaller channel than mine — I want to say he’s under a thousand subscribers — which surprised me because I’ve seen him multiple places. I know he was on Monero Talk and some other things.
Do you like whole milk Greek yogurt? I mean, I make myself — I don’t know what I mean. I don’t like skim milk Greek yogurt because skim milk isn’t even milk.
How long was the gap between you deciding to move into the country and you actually moving? That’s a good question. I probably decided around 2016, and I probably moved out in May 2018. So maybe it was only two years. It seemed like a whole lot longer, but I guess I did buy rural property in 2018. That’s when I did it. It was a very long decision, though. I thought very slowly about it. I moved several different places before moving out into the middle of nowhere. Once I was set on it, I did it, and I’m glad I pulled the trigger where I did. I don’t want to turn people off from doing what I did, but it’s more difficult now because prices have gone up. You can still do it, though. It’s still a good investment. Around 2016 I was like, screw it — things are so bad, I don’t intend to stay at the university much longer. I ended up staying longer than I expected. By January 2018 I didn’t even know where I was going to live. You guys can check my channel because I did videos on this stuff way back in the day. I did a video and a stream when I was in Tennessee looking for land and other places looking for land, but I eventually made my decision and pulled the trigger on it.
Was losing your hair a very painful process? No. Maybe I should do a video on that, because when I still had hair I probably really cared about it, but I don’t really care about it now. It’s a bit like when I was young, in my early 20s, and I could tell I was going bald — I was very worried about it. I was like, oh my goodness, this is going to be really bad. In reality, once you shave it, it’s better than holding on to it. There are realities you have to come to grips with. You are going to look like a different person. I don’t look like I used to look. That’s just going to happen. You’re not going to look like yourself. It’s even weirder when I shave all my hair here. There are benefits too — minor benefits — but losing your hair is bad. I consider it bad. I would like to have hair. But it’s best not to be butthurt about something you can’t control, or worse, do fruitless things to try to drag it out. That’s extremely stupid. Now I’m totally content. When I first started shaving, I would shave basically every day. I didn’t want to have any hair because I thought it would make me look old or something. Shaving your head completely is better. Screw it — I don’t even think about that anymore. Who freaking cares? It’s been so many years of me not having hair that I don’t think about it. I’m saying that because I know there are guys who are balding who give way too many craps about it. I have thought about doing a video on it just because, whatever. Bald equals high T. That is true. If you’re not balding, you’re basically transgender, which is funny because there are many transgender people who are balding.
You don’t need to come to terms with it — just ask Tim. Oh yeah, he wears a beanie every freaking day. That would be cringe. I’ve always been anti-hat, even before I started losing hair. Hats are stupid. If you go back to my old videos, back in 2018 when I moved out into the country, there was a period where I would wear glasses on my head all the time. That was like a reflex, but I’m sort of thinking maybe it was me wanting to have hair — like I want to have something on my head. It just looks stupid, frankly. I was like, yeah, I’m going to stop that. I actually lost those freaking — well, I didn’t lose them, the mail lost them. I sent those highly expensive sunglasses back in to get fixed, and they freaking lost them in the mail. Stupid.
Is Luke Smith even your name, or is it a pseudonym?
Ooh, that’s a good question.
I’ve seen the pic of you with a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.
Yeah, that’s a good one. I used to have that on my website — that’s probably where you saw it. I used to have maybe a dozen pictures of me at different periods, just random pictures, just to do it. I don’t really anymore. I kind of want to depersonalize my website. Even having one picture is maybe a little much. I might want a better profile picture — a more current, better-looking one that doesn’t look like a dweebish one like the channel icon I have now. But I have so few pictures. For someone who has much of his life recorded on video, I have so few images of myself, and that is actually true for the past 10 years of myself, because you guys know I’m not a cell phone person.
Glasses-on-head Luke was the best Luke. Well, there are draws to it, but I kind of think it looks dorky. What I do think is really bad in that period is when I only grew my hair right here. I was so freaking gaunt and frankly ugly because I was so skinny, and I had this weird hair and the glasses. I just looked back at it like, dude, I look so stupid. Weirdly enough, I look kind of younger and better now, frankly. It’s really because I put on weight. I’m actually close to 200 pounds now, which is — I used to be super skinny, but now I’m finally putting on weight that isn’t too bad. It’s the rock. It’s partially the rock.
Did you fix the transmission seating stuff? Yes and no. There was a period where I got it working, and then I tried something again doing it the same way and it didn’t work. I’m convinced that no one ever — well, let’s see if it works now. Yeah, it’s not going to work. Nope, it’s stupid. I think it worked once when I added the files before I added the torrents to the folder they’re supposed to be in. The reason I wanted that is because you guys can go to not-related.xyz, and I’m finalizing some changes. I’ve basically entirely moved the thing off of Libsyn, and I just haven’t changed the RSS feed yet. I’m going to in a second, and I want to provide torrents for all of the episodes of Not Related. Once I finish a season, I want to have a torrent for the whole season too. If you go to the website on a desktop, I recommend pulling it up so you can see the cute stuff I have. I’m using a new rec file that might actually be worth doing a video on. It’s cool because it’s a file format that’s kind of like a database and kind of like a text file. It has some of the benefits of both. I have a script that goes through it — that’s where I keep all the information about my podcast episodes — and it auto-generates this website. You’ll see the different episodes, they’ll have time codes and readings. Not all the episodes have time codes yet, which I need to do, and not all of them have readings, but all of that is automatically generated whenever I run the script. The script also auto-generates the RSS feed too, so that’s pretty cool. That’s something I’ve been playing around with using GNU rec files.
Still talking about heights.
Are we talking about girls or boy heights?
I’m 14, 5'11", and 210 pounds. I do powerlifting, but whenever I meet someone and tell them I’m 14, they’re surprised. Is the world becoming more soy, or do I live in the wrong universe?
I mean, you might live in the wrong universe, but it’s also becoming more soy. It’s actually really funny to look back at pictures of old people and just how weak we are compared to them. It’s vegetable oils and sugar and all that crap that makes people die at a slow rate.
What kind of notes do you make for Not Related? Your delivery seems off the cuff but still very structured.
That’s an interesting question. It’s been different. At the beginning I had a lot more notes and I did a lot more cuts. I would talk for five minutes and get nervous and have to stop, or I’d talk about something else, or I’d run out of breath. But now I’ve evolved as a person more, and it’s easier for me to talk for longer instances. Nonetheless, it’s pretty easy for me to write one or two five-bullet-point notes with maybe sub-bullet points, and I’ll remember all my anecdotes and go from there. In this last episode I may have broken it up — I broke it up at the break, obviously — and I think before the break there was a break in the middle of that or somewhere near the end of that. I think I re-recorded the ending as well. So I guess you could say I had four songs, four audio files, three breaks. The last one was really just because I wanted to add and change some things.
Are your fuel prices going up, Luke?
Yeah, I just talked about that. Gas went up like a dollar in the past week. It’s crazy.
Would you marry someone older than you?
Nearly impossible to imagine.
No, I mean, especially if you’re 18 and getting married, I don’t think it’s a big issue if a guy marries a girl that’s a little older than him. If you’re really young, maybe. But if you’re mid-20s or further, you should marry a girl a little younger than you. If you’re 40, you should marry a girl significantly younger, like 30 or less. Varg’s old recommendation was that men should get married at 30 to women who are 20, and I kind of agree with that. It’s a good thing. Obviously nowadays it’s a little weird if you have age gaps, but it’s less weird in a place where I live. Especially if you’re not a coomer — if you’re not dating a girl to have sex with her, if you’re dating her to marry her, it’s a lot less weird if you have some kind of age gap. That’s the issue: a lot of people on the internet will talk about this weirdo stuff like age of consent, and the reason that’s questionable is because they’re all freaking coomers and they’re just interested in having sex.
Yeah, but no — girls who are 30 have a chance of getting married, but it’s probably going to be to an older guy, some old divorcee or something. It’s funny: when you get to 30, I remember back in high school there were girls like, oh yeah, she was cute, why didn’t I ever make a move on her? And now they’re 30 and it’s like...
Just date a college girl when you’re 70. I don’t know. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
I don’t know if I support that. I would say now, like, I’m not comfortable — well, I don’t know.
Lmao, date a girl? Cringe.
Yeah, that actually is true. When I say date, I mean consider them as a marriage partner. I don’t mean take them out on dates. The whole concept of “here’s my long-term girlfriend” is basically the worst thing you could possibly ask for.
Yeah, if you’re not intending to marry, you’re just Tinder users in denial.
I’m a big fan of your blog. One of my favorites was the one about hermeticism, asceticism, and the hermetic answer. How long does a typical post or essay take to type up?
That’s the funny thing: all of them basically just take an hour. It’s just an issue of if I don’t complete it in that hour and I put it off, I’ll get to it later — and then I usually don’t. So it doesn’t take that long. It’s just sort of off-the-cuff things, and a lot of times I’ll start writing something and then realize, ah, this is better as a video. But I do feel like I should write more for it.
Let me check donations. I haven’t checked them in a bit, sorry.
Luke Skywalker sends some XMR: "Have you heard of multi-signature, specifically k-of-n threshold Schnorr multi-signatures on Bitcoin after the Taproot upgrade? Sigs are aggregated and look like any other regular transaction."
Yeah, I know about that, but I think it’s funny that people will say that’s some kind of big privacy gain for Bitcoin. Normie Bitcoin maxis will hear that and be like, whoa man, we have privacy, blah blah blah. But in reality it’s just what you said: okay, so there are these transactions and they all kind of look like the same type. You’re still seeing the same movements from the same accounts, from the same everything else. So people definitely exaggerate what Taproot does. It is an improvement, but not the privacy improvement a lot of people think. It’s a very minor privacy improvement.
Bretta Thundberg sends in some XMR: "Justin Murphy debate win."
Yeah, I don’t know. Justin Murphy, for those who don’t know, there was a thing where we were going to do an interview — like an in-person live interview. He was going to come to me and we were going to go somewhere. It would be a public event, but that never ended up happening. I think the onus was on him to email me when he was going to be around. He said he had family within a hundred miles of me, which isn’t that close or something. If he decides to come, he can do that. It wasn’t supposed to be a debate, though. It was supposed to be something mostly egocentrically focusing on me, because usually what he does is interview people.
I ended up converting my Nano to XMR. What do you think the midterms are going to sway in November?
Any way I look at it, I can only see it going red. Even if you look at the prediction markets right now, all of them heavily favor the Republicans — something like an 80% chance of them winning the House, 70-something percent chance of them winning the Senate. It’s pretty extreme. I fully expect it. I’ve had this conversation with people: the presidency is almost more of a liability at this point for whatever party controls it. Everyone in America knows the presidency is kind of a rhetorical position, a vestigial symbolic position of the ruler of the country, and you have very little say over what’s going on. You can sign bills, you can veto bills — that’s still very powerful — and the biggest one is being able to appoint Supreme Court justices. But the idea that the presidency changes the nation is very questionable. In fact, Joe Brandon being president is really, really bad for the Dems. If Donald Trump were president right now, it would be much better for the Democrats. That would mean multiple things. First, this midterm they would win, because pretty much every time you have a midterm, the incumbent president loses. That’s nearly universal in American politics. The other people are motivated, they hate how things are going, they get out and vote. The people in control are apathetic. So if Trump were president, that would be going against him. Then you’d have all this other stuff: Afghanistan, the Russia crap, gas prices, inflation. Frankly, Joe Brandon didn’t cause that. It’s fun to blame him for it, and maybe he exacerbated things, but the whole lockdown Trump initiated is the problem. That’s the proximal problem. Whoever got elected in 2020 was sitting on a time bomb. That’s often the case because when you’re president you don’t have much control, and then when bad things happen — which they will happen — you get blamed for them and your party loses. So I’ve been telling people: if there’s no decent Republican candidate this next time, a lot of people say Ron DeSantis is going to run and he would be a good president, but I don’t want him to be. It might be better for another four years of the Brandon administration. That’s just what I’m saying. It might be tactically a better decision. This is actually what I said in 2012. Back then I was more like a libertarian, and if anything I leaned Democratic. I was super blue-pilled back then. It was ridiculous. In 2012 I was like, okay, I’m not quite sure how I feel about Obama. If I like him, I should vote for him, but if I don’t like him, I feel like he’s going to make things so insane that it’s clearly going to cause some kind of reaction, so I think I’ll vote for him either way. That’s what I did, and I was hoping that in 2016 there would be some really comical reaction — and there was. Wow, that paid off. Either way, that’s how it is.
Anomalous Anonymous sends in some ERA: "Hey, I’m a Europe guy in my early 20s. I spent the last year working on and off wagey jobs and I hated it. I’m now jobless and don’t know what to do. I’m good at IT, but I’m in a city where there are no IT jobs and I don’t have any money to move. Advice?"
Well, the thing with IT jobs obviously is you can do them online, especially nowadays. I’m not quite sure how the job market is in Europe in terms of how you look for a job or how you find it, but a lot of the time, especially nowadays at least in America, lots of people I know have gotten jobs working remotely. I don’t want to be like, oh well, why don’t you just put your feet on the pavement and go find a job, but there might be something to say that you could probably find an IT job doing that. The wagey jobs depend on what your wagey job is. If it teaches you a useful skill, it’s always good to have. In my mid-20s I was working for like ten dollars an hour doing carpentry stuff, which was really more so I could learn how to do it. Technically I was only getting paid ten dollars an hour. I only worked there for a couple months, but there’s no shame in having a low-paying job or some kind of wagey job. You just want something that is going to teach you a skill. The big problem for a lot of people is they think having a job means food service or some kind of non-productive BS job. I don’t want to say food service is a BS job, but if you’re doing something that’s pretty replicable, you’re not really getting anything out of it. If you’re burnt out working on jobs, a lot of the time it’s because you’re working stuff like that. You’re not doing things you can learn in. The other advantage of wagey jobs is you can pretty much join and quit them when you want. I know things are more complicated in Europe — there are legal things like unemployment crap, and so a lot of times it’s harder for people to take employees on because they might have to give them severance packages. I’m not quite sure how it works in different European countries. I would just say be very open and be serious about looking for things online. But if you do have to settle for a wagey job, make sure it involves real work with your hands or something. Don’t get an office job. You’re not going to enjoy it. You might think it’s the easy way out, but it’s not going to be enjoyable if you’re in your early 20s. If you don’t really know your direction in life and you don’t have a plan, I don’t think there’s any harm in choosing a job based not on how much money you’re going to get, but on what it’s going to enable you to do in terms of making you a more competent person. That’s my reaction.
Hi So GL sends in some XMR: "Hi Luke, thank you for your work. Until recently I was a Reddit atheist. Now I want to get involved with Christianity. Any recommendations to get started?"
You should go to your local church, obviously. Physically plugging into people is number one. If you’re asking for readings, I don’t think that’s the best way, even for intellectually edged people. You just have to be involved. I remember getting an email from a girl, and she was like, Luke, I see you tell people to go to church even if they don’t even believe in God. I don’t know where I said that, but I don’t disagree with that. Even people who are kind of curious should go. They need to experience it. They need to see if they’re going to feel the call. That’s an experience they need, even if it makes no sense to them. You might get it later once you’re involved, but that’s step number one. Christianity is not something you just spontaneously decide; it’s something you participate in. So you can’t do this thing of “I’m going to be my own church, I’m going to do it my own way.” That’s like hyper-Protestantism. I’m not even saying don’t go to a Protestant church, because if that’s most comfortable for you, as long as you’re not some kind of hyper-liberal Protestant or whatever. But you want to do things that are comfortable for you at the beginning. The most important thing is getting your foot in the door and making yourself open. So make sure you’re going to church and being responsible for things there and being involved with people, including people who are not your age.
This is an aside — this isn’t even just about going to church, this is actual life advice. One thing I think a lot of people nowadays lack is that we’ve grown up in grade school, so we’re always around people who are like one year apart from us in age. That’s actually really screwed up because you get used to only talking to people your age. So what happens a lot of times when people go to church? “Oh, they’re a bunch of boomers.” “Oh, there’s no one my age.” “Oh, there’s only one girl and she’s not even attractive.” That’s the kind of stuff people say as if you’re going to church to meet an attractive girl or something. When I was back in Statesboro, I went to church there, and there were some guys within 10 years of my age, but they weren’t exactly my age. There were guys younger, more like college kids, and then guys a little older than me who had kids. There was no one exactly my age, but what that actually gets you is you talk to people who are not your age, which is always valuable. That is one thing people nowadays are lacking. We grow up in grade school where your social group is people within one year of you. You don’t know someone 10 years older than you who’s gone through the kind of thing the last guy asked me about getting a job or whatever. That’s the kind of thing a directionless millennial or Zoomer asks because they’ve only been around people their age. So if you go to church, be sure to meet people who are not your age. You’re probably going to meet that a lot of the time. Now I go to a church where there are actually a lot of people my age, and that’s not a problem. It actually wasn’t the case when I started going to that church. You should not tether yourself to being around people of your exact age.
I don’t know how I got on this tangent talking about this question, but...
Anonymous, Cincinnati thoughts on the Steam Deck? It’s a handheld PC console.
Yeah, I know what it is, and I’m not interested. Unless it’s like the Steam Deck — it’s proprietary DRM software that is deliberately there to limit your use of games. It’s DRM crap, so I’m not interested in it. I don’t care. I recorded a video about this — I should have said something like this in that video. A lot of people in Linux or open source or security or hardware, any of this kind of stuff, they like the technology. They come to free and open source technology and think, oh man, Linux is doing all this great stuff, it gives you all this privacy and security and all this kind of stuff. A lot of times people forget what their actual end goal is. The purpose of using Linux is not just using some new brand that I can identify with. That’s stupid. It’s a free and open source platform where I can do things on it. It’s a more extensible environment. You can get more stuff out of it. There are all these benefits to using it. So I’m not really interested in software coming to it that subverts those principles. Steam is software that should not exist. The games out there already exist; they can run on computers. Steam is software that is deliberately designed to sell proprietary software to people so that they can run it without their control. There are other companies that do this good stuff legally, like GOG, Good Old Games. They sell you copies of games — actual copies of games, not something downloaded in some silly program. They give you the game. It’s still often a closed-source game, but it’s actually something on your computer that you don’t need to be logged into, and you can copy and put on another computer. So are they making as much money as Steam? Probably not, nearly certainly not, because DRM makes people a lot of money. They make a lot of money restricting proprietary licenses and stuff like that. But I’m just not interested in it.
Land Chad, but for real life.
Yeah, I should do that. Too bad landchad.net is already taken. Maybe I’ll get lamechad dot I don’t know.
You can’t be a failed anything at 19, weirdo.
I don’t know what that was in response to, but it is kind of funny. That is true — if you’re 19 and you think your life is over, you’re crazy.
Have you heard of the YouTuber The Distributist? His critiques on modernity seem right up your alley.
I’m aware of his existence, and I think someone told me he watches my channel. I don’t know if he’s bigger than me or smaller than me now. I think he used to be smaller than me, but everyone’s channel is bigger than mine because I took like six months off. No, everyone’s grown bigger — Mental Outlaw’s bigger, even freaking DistroTube has a bigger channel than mine. What a joke. Yeah, I know he exists. I haven’t seen his videos recently. I don’t know if he got banned. A lot of people I know, I thought the same thing about Keith Woods until I looked up his videos and saw he’d just been shadowbanned. He’s still on YouTube.
I haven’t really looked at his stuff that much. I’m not really into political commentary. There may have been a period in my life where I was, but I kind of have a belief that politics is a reflection of physiognomy and you can’t really convince someone to be a different physiognomy. Unless you’re telling them to work out, maybe they’ll get high T and become based. But in general I kind of believe in predestination when it comes to politics, so I’ve never really felt it useful to talk about it in front of people because soyboy’s gonna soy.
What about your neglected project-based cooking?
I haven’t added anything in a while, but it’s not like it’s degrading by virtue of me not adding stuff. I think I talked about it last stream: I’m actually going to go through and get rid of a lot of stuff and make it more based, more targeted to specifically good diets and stuff.
Mental Outlaw is just as based as you, Luke.
Oh yeah, I’m sure. And we’ll never be in the same room together for some reason.
Love to see you and Keith Woods chat.
Well, if we did, I have to admit — you know, this is such an American thing to say, but I really find his accent bemusing. I don’t even know where exactly he’s from. I guess he’s a northerner or something. I don’t quite know, or maybe Irish. I don’t know. It all sounds the same to an American, right? It just sounds like he’s always eating something, like he’s talking with something in his mouth. I don’t know where he’s from exactly. But yeah, it’s fine. The thing with that — this goes for everyone — my channel has never been branded with something, so it’s not a political channel, it’s not a cryptocurrency channel, it’s not even a technology channel. So it’s always weird if I do something together with someone because it’s like, hey, here’s Luke, he’s like this dude. Actually, that’s what happened when I did that interview with Kevin Wadd, which again should come up next week or something on his channel. He was like, how should I introduce you? And I was like, dude, I don’t freaking know, man.
What are your thoughts on sugar?
Don’t eat it. If you want to know what my thoughts on sugar are, there’s that documentary — what is it, Sugar: The Bitter Truth? Just watch that. That’s classic. Even normies know about that now because it went so big. Just watch that. Don’t eat sugar. I deliberately get things without sugar in them — no sugar added, none of that stuff. The less sugar you eat, the better it is.
Okay, let’s see. Let me get that one already.
Okay, BJ again. Donates five dollars. Which branches of economics would you say you have the best foundations in? I saw you write a paper on game theory, and I remember you trashing finance once.
Well, finance is not really economics. I mean, I don't consider it economics; it's like a different field. When I was doing my undergraduate degree, finance was like the business school kind of stuff. I guess economics is in business school, but I think of economics as being more theoretical. It can be something like game theory, where you're analyzing behavior, but it's something either more theoretical or maybe sometimes more political. Finance is more applied stuff, and it's more of an alchemy, right? That's why George Soros wrote that book, The Alchemy of Finance, right? Because they're not real principles going into finance, especially stock market crap. It's mostly just people throwing paint at a wall, basically. So finance is not economics.
I was very interested in game theory. Technically, I have—where are all my degrees? They're over there. I'm not going to get them. I have a couple specializations I did when I was in undergrad: one in international trade and one in economic history. I was very interested in economic history. I basically think mainstream economics is kind of stupid, obviously. I think everyone does. So a lot of the theoretical stuff, I kind of dismiss. Oh, the Solow growth model? Yeah, that's a bunch of crap. But I am interested in the history of economic thought, because it actually exposes you to more things than just mainstream economics, mainstream neo-Keynesian crap.
So I guess you could say I'm interested in economic thought generally. And yeah, I was particularly interested in game theory. I don't know what paper maybe you saw. The linguistics paper I did on game theory? I'm trying to think what economics papers on game theory I published on the internet. If you look really hard, you can find some economics things that I've written way back in the day, but I basically disown all of that because I was too much of a Keynesian. It was actually right after I graduated that I started looking into things more, having a more consistent view on things, and that led me to more principled libertarianism for a period. But a couple years later I was like, yeah, libertarianism is one thing, but I think it's kind of silly, and I moved away from that. Moved away from ideological autism, I guess. So if you wanted me to say something specific about economics, I don't have anything.
Muslim sent in some XMR. Do you run out of dating prospects living in the country again? Dating's not a thing. Marriage prospects, think about that. Don't talk about dating. None of this "I want a long-time, long-term girlfriend" crap. Do you run out of dating prospects living in the country? If you run out of options, will you move elsewhere?
Well, I'm not going to divulge any of my personal life, but I will say in the abstract: are there bad dating prospects in the country? I would say no, not really at all. One is you're exposed to a different caliber of girl. There are some trashy girls out here, but I would say in general there's more signal and less noise in terms of girls. The more you get involved, the more you will realize girls are all over the place. You might not go in public. They might not be at the coffee shops. They don't do that in the country. You might not be able to just go to a restaurant and meet a girl or chat up a girl in the library or something like that, but they're out there. If you're involved in a local community, you absolutely will be running across girls all the time.
The only worrisome thing for some guys might be the fact that a lot of girls get married really early. So if you're like 40, you're either going to marry a 20-year-old, which theoretically, if you're 40 and you know her family, that might not be too weird. But girls get married really early, so you should know that you're going to be dealing with younger girls. If you're older, you might want to worry about that. But if you're in your 20s or early 30s, I wouldn't worry about it.
People freak out about that. It's weird, especially because people will be like, "Oh, I can't find a girl, and it's going to be even harder if I move to the country." It's like, dude, if it's hard for you now, just go ahead and make the plunge, better your life, and deal with it across that bridge when you get there. That's what I would say to people. I think a lot of times this isn't just about girls; it's about anything. People will make excuses for being too afraid to take the plunge that they know they need to make.
Joseph sent in ten dollars. Time to get Pete-pilled on sugar. The key negatives related to sugar are excess starch, glucose, and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Sucrose is generally just fine and not fattening. Check out Ray Peat article here.
Okay, I'll look that up. Prima facie, that seems like a plausible thing. Polyunsaturated fatty acids, they're bad. Starch, glucose—maybe that is the thing. Maybe sucrose is forgivable, but I don't know the particulars. I'll put that in my notes to take a look at.
Luke, what's your note-taking software?
Well, I use standard output to put in a file called notes in my home directory. That's my note-taking software.
Sean says hi. Luke, do or did you study advanced mathematics at all, such as group theory, analysis, number theory, etc.?
I know a very little, a very small amount of number theory, but I never formally studied mathematics, and it's one of my biggest regrets actually. My general recommendation for people is to not go to college, especially if you're paying for it. But if you have nothing to do and you're there and you're studying something, math is basically one of the best degrees you can get. Some programs, depending on the university, if it's a really good university, philosophy also might be good. But a lot of times philosophy is super crap at some universities. Math is a fantastic thing to major in. When I did my degree in economics, my first regret was, oh shoot, all the graduate programs say they'll accept economics grads, but they really want math grads. Math is fantastic. It's similar to computer science in that it will expand your knowledge of specific formal things, and doing proofs is just beautiful.
I had a girlfriend who was a math major at some point, and I just loved to do her proof homework. It was just so great. I was begging her, "Hey, can I look at your problem sets?" Anyway, I don't have a really deep experience with advanced mathematics, and I really regret that. If I get the chance, I might look into it if I find a good resource. But I do recommend mathematics to younger people. Don't dismiss it. It can be so useful for so many other things. It's like what I say about Latin: Latin seemed very useless when I learned it, but it's been so useful in everything. Mathematics is 100% like that, probably times ten at least if you get into really deep mathematics. Even the superficial stuff I know, I'm always finding generalizations that I can use in other things.
BJ says, what do you think about the Weston A. Price Foundation? You linked to one of their videos, The Oiling of America.
That was the instance with the sugar, The Bitter Truth, and The Oiling of America is another good documentary to check out. I didn't know that was Weston A. Price. I'm less familiar. Everything I've heard from them is good. All of it's pretty based and red-pilled, but I'm not exactly sure what their whole spiel is, so I'm not going to give a full-throated endorsement. But in general, when it comes to diet, I would say they're a pretty good eye in the right direction.
A Europe guy again: I plan to work in IT. I did an internship recently in IT and I was told I had the knowledge to be hired, but they weren't hiring. The problem with remote jobs is that most companies don't do that here. PS: 250 characters max is hard.
Sorry about that. I didn't know that was a max in the software. I might change that, Eric, if you're watching that, get on it. I should probably change it myself. I should know enough Go. This is the only program in Go that I've ever had to manage, and it's actually a very elegant language. It's fast too. It's not like one of those soy languages. Go, even though it's Google's language, it's a really good language.
So, I don't know. It depends. I hope that the company said, "Oh, well, you have the knowledge but we're not hiring now." I hope they have your resume still, like one of those "we'll contact you when we have an opening" situations. I hope they weren't just being nice. But I don't know. One thing that I would encourage is, I don't know if you're one of those guys who kind of feels like your balls shrink up when you feel like you're going to be rejected, but I would encourage you to overcome that and just throw applications out to everything you could possibly get. Anything.
I also don't know what kind of IT stuff you do. There are always ways of making money online. What I really should do, because I get so many freaking questions like this where people ask very specific life things about IT and how to make money and how to get a job, where I'm not fully qualified to answer all of these questions, but what I do feel like there needs to be is some kind of course or norm for people who know about tech and IT but want to make money online or want to freelance things or host services for people. I should probably do something like that. Maybe that's something that Land Chad could do, like on landchad.net. Maybe I can make tutorials about how you could host some kind of virtual services for companies and rent them out and stuff like that.
I don't know that much about that because I don't know a lot about virtualization and containerization, because I usually hate the stuff because people will use it for individual uses, which I don't like. But I think learning something like that would probably be really nice if there were a site that aggregated all that so that someone could come on who has tech knowledge and could set up a VPS for someone else and have them pay royalties for you setting up some VPS for free for them. But yeah, that's actually a good idea now that I think about that. Maybe I should do something like that: actionable things, like here you could go to a business and set up a website using these technologies and have them pay you some amount of money every month for hosting this. I don't know. Now I'm just thinking, as your specific case, Europe guy, man, I don't like—there is a point where I have to say you got to make your own decisions. I don't know the particulars of where you can get a job. I just don't know. You're in a different country, and this applies to a lot of other people who ask me about job stuff. I can't tell you all this. I should be more dismissive. I always want to be caring when I get comments like that, but there is a sense in which I got to be a little dismissive because I don't know. You got to make these decisions.
Let me put it this way: I was in the same position when I was younger. But I've been lucky with jobs, lucky with the internet, that I can be here and get XMR donations. I think that's cool. But a lot of it, when you're younger, I didn't think that I would be able to leverage any of this kind of stuff. So if you're directionless, just think about honing your skills and learning things that will expand the circumference of things that you can do.
Surprised you let Go because it compiles to giga binaries.
Oh, does it? I have to check that out. I mean, it's not the size of the binaries that's the problem. As long as it's not crap like app images or whatever—I think that's ridiculous. App images can still be fine; they're better than snaps and flat packs, which no one should ever use. But the size of a program itself doesn't bother me. What does bother me is when you have app images where they're duplicating content that exists elsewhere on the system. I don't know if Go is doing that, but as far as I'm concerned, Go is fast and it's easy to read code. I don't know Go, but I can still look at it and be like, oh, okay, I know what this is doing. It's pretty intuitive.
He doesn't answer the YouTube chat question.
Sorry if I missed you. I mostly focus on donations on my own platform, which are over there. If I miss the super chat, I'm sorry.
Hey, I was thinking about doing that with a small business and hosting their stuff on Amazon buckets for pennies.
Well, I'm kind of anti-Amazon. I wouldn't use that, but in concept, sure. That stuff is probably—one thing I've realized about the internet is that it's actually easier to make money than you think. Even Lindy Press, that's my new way of making money, and it's worked pretty great. I just regret not doing that years ago because I had the idea of doing it and I kind of put it off. I was like, oh, I can do that later. Nah, man, you can make things happen. I am thankful I did have a guy help me out writing the code for it. He actually wrote it in Python, which I'm still not a big fan of, but I'll deal with it. I just regret not doing that before, because the work, the law tech work I was doing basically for myself anyway, it's easier to monetize things on the internet than people think. And I am glad to have a YouTube channel because I kind of get free advertising. I can say, hey man, go buy this.
Go literally statically compiles your dependencies and contains the full runtime and garbage collection.
Well, there are reasons to have static binaries and stuff. Actually, technically that's the most suckless thing to do, right? I want to say, didn't they have some OS that was perfectly static binaries and stuff? But I want to say when I did my video on snaps, snap packs, and flat images, whatever they are, I want to say Kai Hendry did a video talking about that. But what he said is the real problem is actually dynamic linking and all that kind of stuff, which is kind of true. There is a sense in which the Go way of doing things and the static binary way is better for certain things.
What software did you use for XMR donations?
Go to my GitHub and look up Shadow Chat. It was not written by me. It was written by someone who I think wants to remain anonymous. I referred to his handle in the last stream; it's Eric, but he's a Monero guy. I don't actually know who he is, but it's really good stuff. You can just run it on a VPS, and it checks. You just give it a view key for a wallet, and it will check whenever you get a donation. It sends me emails with what people comment and stuff. I need to freaking mark these as read so I don't keep—okay.
Tyler says, do you believe in the techno-anarchist philosophy?
Obviously, there are memes about techno-anarchism, but I will say I'm not totally anti-technology. My view is that technology has to be adopted at an extremely slow and extremely conscientious rate. It has to be something you are constantly thinking about the social ramifications of. I'm not one of these singularity people who thinks tech is going to take over human life and replace the human body with technology and transhumanism. Transhumanism is just anti-humanism. We're creating a world that we're psychologically not adjusted for or physically not adjusted for, and I think human society has to be based around the needs of humans. That shouldn't be an insane thing to do.
I feel like a lot of technology is submitting humans to a technological future or ideological principles. You have to be subjugated to this idea of freedom or this idea of equality or this idea of this, that, or the other. It's using an ideological, technological ideology to control people as opposed to controlling your technology with the constraints of humanity. In most cases, I think people should not use technologies for— I recorded a video about this where I kind of talk about this: people who care about privacy and open source and free software and stuff like that get so fixated on the technology, ignoring the fact that a lot of times you shouldn't even be using digital technology for a lot of things. That video will come out tomorrow morning in a couple hours.
My view is real life is the real life, and you shouldn't use technology in lieu of your real life. However, when you do use technology, use it wisely, and you should use the best free and open source encrypted stuff for everything. We can slowly build a technologically advanced society that could explore the galaxy or whatever, but it has to be done—everything has to be watertight. It has to be something that humans, that is built for humans. And if we can't build it in a way where humans can survive and thrive psychologically and physically, then it's not worth building. You're just destroying mankind based off of some delusion of techno-futurism. Technology and ideology becomes this cancer that is going to destroy the human race and subjugate it. That's lame. So I'm not a techno-anarchist. What I'm saying now should not be considered techno-anarchism; it should just be considered being a sensible person.
Okay, I see a super chat. I'm catching this one. What's your opinion on modern China?
It'd be much more based if there were still emperors. But modern—I mean, a lot of people will be like, "Oh, America sucks," and it does suck, and all Western governments are insane and satanic and all that kind of crap. But I'm not one of those people who automatically elevates China or Russia. I do think China and Russia, especially nowadays, are playing geopolitically. I hope that they play more of a countervailing role to America. However, that is not to state my endorsement of anything particular about China. China is ultimately just a different culture. They value different things than I value. As an American, as a white person, as a person who comes from Western culture, I have different values than they have. What I perceive as the appropriate level of freedom is different from what your average Chinese person has. There are many cultural differences that you can have between different cultures.
When I went to China, I actually really liked it. I really liked living there and experiencing it, mainly because you're free from all this stupid crap you have to deal with in America, the cultural revolution in America. Do I like China as a culture? Would I like to live there? Am I Chinese? No, I'm not Chinese. But there are many things that I could admire about it. I don't know if I even know Chinese well enough to watch TV. I definitely can't read very well anymore. My Chinese reading abilities have decreased significantly. So I'm less plugged into it than I was ten years ago.
But if you're asking something specifically political about the modern Chinese government, I don't know. I do think it's stupid that Taiwan is like an independent country. I think China should just assimilate it. It'll probably eventually happen. They should have just done it when Russia invaded Ukraine, because what's the American government going to freak out about? They're not going to go to war everywhere. They ended up not going to war over Ukraine. I hope they don't. My goodness, that would be so stupid. That would be the dumbest thing in the universe.
Luke, I'm a physics student, so I really like math, physics, and philosophy, but philosophy is cringe in college, and I'm planning on taking a bunch of math and physics. Is theoretical physics cringe?
Well, it depends on what theoretical physics is. I'm always the advocate of views that are not expounded within the university system, because I do think that there is a self-confirming, incestuous, naturally—this is just naturally how it is—a lot of academia naturally kind of blots out certain viewpoints, not because they're necessarily bad, but just because they're off the radar. They're not comprehensible with the typical frameworks. So it depends on what theoretical physics there means. Do you mean something specific in academia now, or do you mean something as opposed to it?
I will say on theoretical grounds, this goes for any kind of theoretical framework: its problems are always going to be at its foundational level. That's always how it is. You create some new theoretical framework that's based on these assumptions, and 60 years go by, many careers have been made, much blood has been spilled on it, and then someone realizes, oh, the foundations that went into it were actually faulty, and all these years we've been wasting our time. That actually is how it works. That's how it's been for hundreds of years. That's how Einstein physics, you know, in a couple years, are going to be like, oops, we misunderstood relativity wrong in this respect, and the whole system is screwed up and our entire interpretation is messed up. I have an essay on my website kind of about this: physics is fragile.
So I don't know. It's your call. I don't actually know what theoretical physics in a university right now looks like. It's probably different from department to department, but I have never really been directly involved in a physics department, so I can't tell you. You might know more than me.
Nah, Taiwan needs to annex China.
No, well, Taiwan is definitely cringer. I mean, I don't support communism, but the Chinese government is clearly—it's no longer communist. In fact, Taiwan is frankly more culturally communist than China is now.
Luke, have you heard of the Nick Bostrom postulates? What do you think about them?
I've never heard of them. I'm going to put them in my notes file, and I will look at those later.
DC Pagan says, what file systems and storage frameworks do you use? I am reading the BSD FreeBSD handbook and studying ZFS, GEOM, a bunch of other acronyms, and I am intimidated at joining the dark side. What are your thoughts on Michael Warren Lucas?
I don't know who Michael Warren Lucas is. I don't know if he is a BSD guy. On file systems, I will just say I am a boomer and I just use ext4 because that's the default. I've never really looked that much into it, and I should. I definitely should. But a bunch of other people are using that, and I'm just going to deal with it for now. It's never given me that big of a problem. If I see some reason to switch over, I might.
Lukini plans to bring back the forums or some other form of it?
Unlikely, but I have brought up the idea of using either Movim or something like that to put my blog in, which allows more user interaction, and I have thought about doing a forum for not-related, but I'm not quite sure.
Mark says, love your recommendation of Michael Thomas's courses. Any other resource you find useful for acquiring German for anglophones? Native Catalan speaker.
I would not say—I can kind of read German, but I would not say I speak it sufficiently for me to say, "Oh, use this to learn German." I've never really been motivated to learn German, so—
A Jew sends in some XMR. Whatever happened to getting rid of your YouTube by the end of 2021?
Yeah, I did say that. I'm postponing it. I functionally did stop doing videos, really. Realistically speaking, my YouTube channel stopped in 2018 when I moved out here. That's when it actually stopped, because before then, you might remember, those of you who have been on my channel for a long time, I would post videos every day. Right now it's like, oh, I'll put up a video when I feel like it.
I did not say I was going to get rid of my YouTube channel by the end of 2021. What I did say is that I'll just set it and forget it, and I'll move to Peertube as a primary platform. I should force that a little more because I haven't really told people to like, comment, and subscribe over there. But if you guys don't know, go to videos.lukesmith.xyz. All my videos are there off YouTube. I want to use that as a primary platform, and I have done live streaming there now.
The reason I'm still using YouTube is—I should have said this at the beginning—one thing I want, my next step, is I want to have an email list, a mailing list. The reason I want that is I want it to replace YouTube notifications. I want to be able to give people notifications when I put up a video on Peertube, including live streams. Live streams are time-sensitive. The reason I'm still streaming on YouTube is because I just started this up on YouTube. Everyone gets a notification and people are in the chat room within like five minutes. That doesn't happen on Peertube. I've done streams on Peertube; it doesn't notify people actually until I publish the video, so I have to put out an RSS feed thing or whatever. It doesn't work as well.
So I need kind of an email mailing list that would help a lot. That's really the one technological thing. Other than that, I just need to recommend it more, and I've just talked. I always feel bad about shilling things like, "Oh, go subscribe on this other site," but I really should just get used to it and do it, because shilling that is much better than continuing to use YouTube. But I never said I was getting rid of the YouTube channel. I was just saying I'm phasing it out, and I'm still phasing it out. I phase it out by not doing videos on it for a while. I guess. And I shouldn't even say I should totally get rid of it, because I really just want to move people over to other platforms, because I was glad when I did that not-related episode and I actually saw I got lots of subscribers, lots of new people watching. So there is—I can still use YouTube for good. I hope. I might be coping. Tell me if I'm coping. No, don't say that. You're just going to put cope everywhere. But I think that I can still use YouTube for good, because frankly all of you guys know me from YouTube. Every once in a while I will find someone who found out about me from somewhere else, but most people know me from YouTube, and I got to do something about that.
It's a massive chair.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You're probably looking at this chair like, oh my goodness, Luke is like severe manlet. It actually, in real life, doesn't even look this small. I think it's the angle because the camera is—if I go over here, see, now I look freaking huge. Right now over here I look like a manlet. It's literally just the camera. It's like a fisheye. Yeah, now I'm like freaking—oh, I'm massive, dude. I'm freaking like a hulk of a man. I should be doing my stream over here. See, now I'm mogging myself, right? Look at this. Oh, the virgin left side of the chair, Chad right side. Yeah, I'm freaking huge over here.
I'm coping.
It's a discussion about quantum stuff. I take exception to nonsense. Quantum math is very hard to understand in a physical sense, but experimental evidence shows it to be a good theory. String theory is probably cringe, though. Yeah, I'm not quite sure what I think about what he said. I'm not paying attention to this discussion going on in the chat, but I will say I was often very surprised that quantum mechanics does — you know, there's actually a classic YouTube lecture on quantum mechanics. I forget what it's entitled, but it's given at Google back before Google was big. But it's a guy talking about the fact that even simply with light filters that make light polar, you can more or less prove or experimentally show quantum phenomenon, and that kind of blew my mind because a lot of times when you first look at quantum phenomenon you automatically assume that it's all faking, right? Oh, this is like some kind of statistical fluke or people are looking at their experiments wrong. But so yeah, quantum phenomenon.
But I will say I do kind of take the Einsteinian approach, or the ensignian view, that yeah, we're gonna find some way of — like there's some underlying principles behind them. Yeah, the 5'11" left side of the chair versus the six-foot right side, brutal mug. Yeah, yeah, I need to sit on this side. Yeah, I'm mogging the left side, Luke. He's cringe.
What's your thoughts on simplified versus traditional Chinese? I do feel like simplified Chinese is not really that easier than — I guess it's fewer strokes, but I kind of feel like it's a waste. Like, why even have a different system? I mean, it does simplify some things, right? Makes it easier to write, I guess. It makes some things easier to perceive. But if you were really serious about reforming Chinese orthography, you would just write it in freaking pinyin, you know? And there are some documents saying that Mao actually wanted to do that, and I unironically admire the traditionalism of Chinese writing, and I think it should still be taught to Chinese children. However, realistically speaking, it would have been a good thing if they moved over to pinyin. That sounds crazy, okay, it sounds nuts. And there is a big difference in China now for Amerimuts like me, right? The difference between our written and spoken speech is not that much. It's bigger in Chinese, so there's a sense in which maybe you could use pinyin for spoken language and Chinese characters for more written language. But either way, I just kind of feel that it would have definitely made things easier. Of course, Chinese children learn characters fine. They're not brainless like American students who are just freaking lazy and don't want to learn anything. Chinese children learn the 6,000 characters they need to be able to read in newspapers and many more characters.
So Zakir, I think that's how his name is pronounced, do you believe the whole Bible is true? If so, what do you say about creation in Genesis 1? Also, do you believe in miracles in the present day? Miracles in the present day, I don't. I mean, listen, even if you believe in a materialistic world, you have to concede that there are some phenomena that are beyond normalcy, right? So of course, even if I were an atheist, quote unquote, I would more or less have to say that there are some things that are functioning well. Maybe I'm talking as if you're speaking in Latin, because in Latin the word for miracles just means something amazing. It doesn't necessarily mean something supernatural. Let me step back and answer that in English. Sure, miracles happen, can happen. I don't magically believe everything that is claimed to be a miracle. In fact, I probably assume that 99% of them are nonsensical. Even if something — there have been things even in the past year to me that have happened to me that I would are kind of miraculous, but I don't even really think of them in those terms. But the whole Christian view of miracles is not that miracles are only something where God reaches into the world and changes something. They can also be synchronicities, coincidences that happen for merely physical reasons, totally scientific reasons, and it's just a coincidence, but it's a coincidence with divine providence. It's like if your kid is gonna find — I don't know, I'm trying to give an example — it's like something that was gonna happen anyway, but you have consented to it or kind of made it happen. It's providence. That's a word for it. Maybe you're not familiar with that term.
As it comes to the Bible, true and literal are two different things. There are many things in the Bible that no one thinks is literal. Revelation is clearly metaphorical. A lot of prophecies, a lot of the funny visions, they're not literal. And as it comes to Genesis 1, it's one thing to say, yeah, do I believe God created the heavens and the earth? Yes. Do I believe that Genesis 1 and 2 are supposed to be exact and accurate descriptions of what happened? Not necessarily. You could believe that. I'm actually not bullying young-earth creationists anymore. I think there's a case to be made for it, actually. But if you're willing to look at it, however, in the history of Christian thought, if you look at people who were Christians looking at this issue, Augustine, for example, he didn't believe the first couple chapters of Genesis were, you know, that the world was created like that. I think his take on it was God created the entire universe instantaneously, and everything sort of has the form it has now and it persists. He didn't have this view of God creating things in multiple days. So that kind of clumsy literalism is something that a lot of American Protestants believe in because once you've been severed from that tradition of the Orthodox or Catholic Church that goes back millennia of people talking about these issues, then the only option you have is to say, oh my goodness, well, the Bible says literally this, so I have to believe literally this. In reality, there have been many times and places where that wasn't necessarily the expectation that this is something that literally is happening. When you look at textual analysis, when early Christians or Hebrews were looking at texts, a lot of times they looked at things, even things that might be flaws or misunderstandings, they looked at those as being providential. So I think the whole idea that young-earth creationism and all that kind of stuff is something that you could believe, but it's definitely not necessary. It's also not like — I know this is a big stumbling block for people because it's like the meme that materialism gets put on you, like, oh dude, evolution goes against this and all this kind of stuff. I will just say, once I started believing, creation became a very little issue. It's not something that I think about. And it's a perfectly sensible thing to say that God created a world with continuity. If he creates a deer, a scientist can look at it and say, oh, it's a 10-year-old deer, even though it's not 10 years old, it's just been created. Or a rock or stream or things like that. All of them, their existence implies a history, so to create these things you implicitly create a history for them. You understand what I mean? So it's a sensible thing to say that God could create a world where there are fossils in the ground. People will say that as if it's like a knockdown argument or whatever.
BJ donates $5: "Old school wed pins and buttons win."
Yeah, I got lazy and I haven't made more of them. I should. I really should. So Black, a Black person, sent in some Monero. You seem to have some sympathy for the Third German Empire, the Third Reich, for example. Last stream you referenced their polite and reasonable interest in the Danzig Corridor. Will you ever explicate your full views on this topic?
Well, I mean, I think you could just read a history book if you want to know. The point I was making is when you look at any kind of propaganda system, and we were talking about the Russia-Ukraine thing, all that Americans know about the issue is that Russia invaded Ukraine. Why did they invade Ukraine? Was there some violence happening before? Was there some issue? Were the Ukrainians doing bad things? Americans have no clue because what the propaganda system says is it blots all of that out and says only look at this thing that makes the Russians look like the big bad villains. Now, does that mean I automatically think that Russians are not villains? I don't know. I don't know about the issue. It actually doesn't concern me at all. I don't care. In fact, many times there are two people who are in the wrong. So I said the same thing about World War II. Americans were told the same things about Hitler: Hitler's just invading all these countries for no reason. No, he annexed Austria, which of course voted to be annexed. It was consensual, right? Germany and Austria were basically the same culture. And then the portions — and then also people said, oh man, he won part of Czechoslovakia and all these negotiations. Well, it wasn't like some foreign territory, it was a portion of it belonging to where Germans lived. So does this mean that, oh my goodness, now you're saying Hitler didn't do nothing? No, but you can look at these issues and say, oh clearly I've only seen one side of the story and maybe I shouldn't get emotional about Ukraine because I don't freaking know anything about it and I've been deliberately shown only one side of the story. So as it comes to Russia and Ukraine or Germany and Poland, I don't know enough historically what's going on. In fact, I don't even think the history in terms of something that happened 100 years ago is necessarily a good representation of what's going on. I don't make that assumption. I can't look at these things, especially issues where most of it's gonna be propaganda. I don't think it's proper for a person to pontificate about them. So what I'm pontificating is ambivalence and skepticism of people who are trying to build ideologies based on these narratives. That doesn't mean I'm actually saying big-brain centrism either. I'm just saying when you look at Russia and Ukraine, even if Russia is in a sense an aggressor, I know that what I'm being fed is not the full story. That's what a sensible person should reach.
Not caring about Ukraine is extremely based. There are a bunch of similar wars that people don't care about, and before last month no one even cared about Ukraine anyways. Yeah, that's exactly right. This Ukraine stuff has been going on at least since 2014 and we haven't heard about it because Ukraine is America's ally, right? Or the Ukrainian government that they installed in 2014 that is doing bad things, killing people, right? I saw someone post this meme also where it just lists out all these conflicts where tens or hundreds of thousands of people have died since the 1980s, none of which you ever hear about, right? And then people are just snoozing throughout the whole thing, and then Ukraine is at the bottom and there's someone going nuts. That's how it is. One thing I used to have, this essay — I almost published a book back in 2014. That was way before I had a YouTube channel. But I made this. One reason you fundamentally can never trust a journalist is because what a journalist, or even a historian at some level of abstraction, has is this old saying that Michelangelo, when he created David, the sculpture or something like that, someone asked him, oh, how did you make a sculpture that great? And he said, oh, it's easy, you just cut away all the parts that don't look like David. So what the media does is they have basically a giant slab of marble in the sense that, going on in the world, there is so much that you can cut any narrative you want from it, anything you want. If you want to create the narrative that the police in America are hunting down and killing Black people, you can do that. If you want to create the narrative that Black people are hunting down and killing white people, you can do that. It doesn't matter. You can make these narratives because narratives are formed of anecdotes. This is not me saying everything is true or nothing like that, but what I'm saying is when you're talking about people who control information, they have the ability to take that slab and carve into it anything they want by omission. They omit all the things they don't really care about and they throw what they want you to see in front of your face all the time. That's how they do it. The media can lie without lying because what it can do is it can take the complex events of the world and it can focus you in on some that will lead you to false assumptions while ignoring everything else, while ignoring all the contradictory information, and that is what it does. That is exactly what it does. It gets you focused on these particular issues that are disproportionate and they have nothing to do with anything. They just get you fixed on that and you can't look at anything else and you fall. This is how they get people. So now everyone has to have an opinion about this Ukraine thing that has nothing to do with them. I was talking to a relative who had lived in Ukraine for a period, and she was like, listen, I was there and I still don't freaking know what's going on. It's not my business. I have friends there, but I know this issue of Ukraine versus Russia, I don't know about. And that's correct. She was right to say that. That's what people need to understand: these things that are put on the news, they are not put on the news to inform you. They are put on the news to be the assumptions that lead you to the conclusions that they want. It's stupid for them to say you're not allowed to believe this, you have to believe that, because then people will know they're being brainwashed. But if they put a series of tactical events and other issues in front of your face, they can lead you to make your own decision to say what they want you to think anyway. That's how it works.
Okay, I'm about — I almost need to turn on the AC. It's actually getting warm here. It's probably 80 degrees in here. Let me check my — you know, actually, a Vietnamese person sent in some Monero. All these different races of people sending in stuff. I don't know why they name each other. I assume it's the same guy. Hey Luke, what's your favorite boba tea? Your answer will determine how masculine or feminine you are. Honestly, every time I go there I can't. They all sound like crap to me. I actually get taro a lot of the times. I guess that's pretty traditional. That's not very fair. I don't get freaking mango juice or something. I don't know. Or maybe they do have mango juice there. Maybe that's Lindy. But I usually have taro, or sometimes I will actually get coffee. I will be clear: I do not endorse consuming product of boba tea. It's just if I'm doing it, that's what I'm doing. I guess I talked about this in a stream the other day, but yeah, is taro masculine or feminine as a boba tea? I really think any boba tea is necessarily feminine. There are some things like only women go there, right? Only women go to get boba tea. Yes, I went. I guess I'm transgender now. And the same thing — there used to be near the campus I worked at this juice place, you know, like they have smoothies and stuff. And every once in a while I drink so little sugar there will be occasionally when I'm like, oh, I need some fructose. So I would go to the smoothie place and I couldn't help thinking that all of — I felt embarrassed to order anything. Firstly, I'd be the only man there. Well, let's just say I wouldn't be the only one with XY chromosomes. But I would go there and all of the things were named these embarrassing womanly names. It'd be like berry splooge on my face. I don't know, just stupid, weird things. Or like a protein booster, like health, something that presupposes that's healthy for you or the reason I'm getting this is not because I want to consume product but because I care about my health or something. That is just silly.
Brad says, please check my super chat. I can't. I'll pull up the super chat. I'll try and pull up the super chat window. The thing with it, the reason I have all those donation things over there aside from the fact that YouTube takes most of your money when you give a super chat is it so freaking hard to look at super chats you've missed viewer activity? Let's see. Yeah, it doesn't even show. If you click on them afterwards, it doesn't even show. Oh my goodness, I've been going for three freaking hours. I need to stop this. I need to stop this. All right, let me — okay, so we'll keep going a little longer, but it is freaking hot in here. Oh, I have a fan. I should turn a fan on. Okay, it'll cool me down. That'll cool me down. I'm the only one in the house tonight, so I don't — you know, I always feel like if you're the only person in the house it's always a waste to use AC. You should just use a fan. I mean, most people in America, they have fans and they don't even use them.
What was the verdict on taro? Is that masculine or feminine? I really feel like none of them are masculine. What are your thoughts on the Palestine-Israel conflict since there are many peoples being so emotional about Ukraine when there's a war for more than 70 years in Palestine? I mean, I do feel the same way. I don't like talking about things that I'm not directly related to, but it seems a little bit more like I feel a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians because they kind of got this hard — the whole thing was forced on them, right? I mean, the whole Israel, let's move these people here, it was really forced on them. And I've heard a lot of bad things that the Israeli government does. Again, I don't automatically believe things, okay? But if I were to pick a side, I'd definitely pick the Palestinian side. But that's not to act — this is not even an endorsement, right? That's just my what I've heard about it. It seems like Israel has done some pretty regis things.
You can get canceled for questioning the Israeli-Palestine conflict? It is literally a religion over here. I don't think that you can get canceled for that, frankly. Now, if you're a politician, you got to bend the knee to Israel all the time. But normal people, no. Of course they're always like, oh my goodness, anti-Semitism, you question the Jews about anything, that's terrible, that's like a hate crime. Yeah, they do say that. However, there's always been that portion of the left that is anti-Israel, and for that reason other people can also be kind of anti-Israel. They can say like Israel's doing bad things, right? So I don't think that's the case. I think that, well, yeah, a lot of universities will still have kind of anti-Israel stuff going on. I don't think it's like a fully canceled position. Now, questioning — can't even say that on YouTube, so I'm not going to. There are other things you can't question that may or may not be relevant to Israel and Palestine. However, the specific issue of Zionism, you can absolutely question it. You will be canceled in a lesser sense. Like, CNN doesn't want to have Noam Chomsky on if he's talking about Israel and Palestine. Well, Noam Chomsky just drones on about a bunch of stuff like he'll just start talking and it won't stop. But yeah, in general they will want more pro-Israel stuff on the media and they will usually go for that. But I do think that there is definitely still a place that you can question the whole Israel-Palestine thing. Still in politics, there's no question. Everyone's like, oh my goodness, they're going to shut you down. No, this is not — the thing about the Israel-Palestine question is that it's not even relevant to anything racial about Jews because, again, the leftists who are anti-Israel are like the biggest race cucks. They hate white people just as much as everyone else. In fact, they hate Israel because they think Israel is white. They're like Israel as white colonizers. Because of that, speaking against it — and mind you, freaking George Soros is basically Israel-skeptical. A bunch of the big — I don't want to talk about whatever. There are some things I can't say on YouTube. I'm not afraid about talking about Israel and Palestine, but still I give no endorsement. I'm not giving a full-throated endorsement of Palestine. All I'm saying is from what I know it usually seems like I guess the Palestinians, for however bad they are, I kind of sympathize with their plight a little bit more. And I do have Middle Eastern friends who will try and give the big-brain take in the Middle East because obviously most of the Middle East is like screw Israel, right? But I've had Middle Eastern friends who kind of like, yeah, well, Israel's bad, but Palestinians, they actually suck, man. They're pretending to be persecuted when they're really not. They do all this fake news stuff. And sure, whatever, I don't know about it. That's all I'm gonna say.
Jews aren't like Luke, 2022. I mean, Jews do not perceive themselves as being identical to whites. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say. Or maybe if it's rhetorically convenient for them they will or not. But the point is, when a leftist says something like, oh Jews are like white colonizers, that is obviously not the same thing as Europeans settling in some uninhabited land.
This stream includes the Jew and the Zoroastrian Hitler, Israel. We've touched all these hot-button issues, but frankly I haven't even said anything like even that YouTube could ban me for. What have I said? Nothing even controversial.
Alchemical Sufi sent in some example thoughts on tarot cards: based esoteric alchemical symbols or vectors of demonic possession? Also have you heard of Meditations on Terror: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism? I have not heard of that book. I haven't heard of that. Are they based esoteric alchemical symbols or vectors of demonic possession? Realistically speaking, neither. Firstly, tarot cards are just used as playing cards in a lot of European countries. They're nothing. I mean, actually there are interesting games you can play with them. So it's only — I think maybe in Europe there's this association, but in America there's this association with the occult and you have palm readers and stuff like that who will read you fortunes and stuff. I think it's nonsensical. I don't think it's really Lindy. It's kind of a recent development. It's not actually related to alchemy, so far as I know. Is it demonic? Not necessarily. I don't know. Maybe. Anything can be freaking demonic nowadays, you know? But I mostly think of it as being cringe and just kind of rolling. I do actually have a tarot card deck just because I wanted to learn some of the games to play, but whatever.
Zakir, I read his name before. I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so sorry if I'm pronouncing it wrong. He sends in ten dollars. I drink taro milk tea. I'd say it's one of the more masculine of the boba options out there. Anyways, where would a modern churchian go to learn about the early church traditions, beliefs, etc., relatively colored by modern philosophy and lenses?
Well, honestly, there are a lot of people nowadays who — there are a lot of Orthodox and Catholic people nowadays out there online. I'm trying to think of some that would be adjacent to me. I mean, there's like Roosh V who does Orthodox stuff, but he does a lot more and he'll blog about books he reads and stuff like that. It might be worth looking at Roosh V. But in general, for me, this maybe isn't good for everyone or maybe this is an ideal for everyone, but I got into it reading stuff like Thomas Aquinas's Summa, which is another Lindy book that I plan on publishing. Not his entire Summa because it's way too freaking big, but I was thinking about publishing a book just on sexual ethics, like Aquinas on sex. I think that'd be a good idea. There's interesting stuff in there. Actually reading some of this stuff, a lot of it isn't hard to read and you can get a lot from it. In the case of Aquinas, Aquinas might be a little late. I mean, he's not early church, but he's still building off a similar worldview. He has more of an Aristotelian worldview, but he does have this nice way of writing where for any theological issue — I don't know if I'm lecturing the choir on this — for any theological issue he actually starts, you know, let's say does God exist? So he'll start with the question, does God exist? Then he'll make a couple arguments against God existing. He'll be like, oh, it seems God doesn't exist because this reason. Then he'll go to scriptural authority and then address, basically make a response and respond to each of the arguments in kind. So for each of the five arguments against, he will make his arguments. That's how the Summa is constructed, and it goes through a lot of different issues, like literally everything. Summa, like as a summa in medieval Latin, that more or less was the highest work on any topic. It basically tries to encompass everything about a topic. So the Summa Theologiae covers everything theological. So I would just recommend reading stuff from people of this period. I think also historical knowledge — if you're into history, I guess when I got into traditional theology I kind of had known more about how the church had different interpretations of things like baptism than my church growing up. So, why did this person postpone his baptism to the end of his life? Well, it's because their interpretation of baptism was that when you get baptized, like in the Catholic Church, baptism remits sins, so it might be best to get baptized right before you die so you don't have to go to a priest afterwards and stuff like that. Anyway, I would just recommend read early stuff if you can get into it. It might be kind of obtuse if you're unfamiliar with it. But there are people on YouTube and elsewhere who do Orthodox and Catholic stuff and things like that. I would just stray away from Protestants. Not all Protestants are bad, but I will just say they will have a presentist bias in a lot of their stuff. I would read Orthodox; it's probably the best. It is definitely the best according to me, and a lot of other people. So yeah, just keep your eyes peeled on that. If you do want Catholic stuff, there are — what is it? What's the set of vacantest chapel in Florida? I think there are YouTube channels like Roman Catholic Media and they have some pretty good sermons and lectures and stuff. You can check that out too. But Orthodox is probably better. Just search for that, I guess. The only person I mentioned was Roosh V, who's a lay guy, but whatever.
Apostolic Fathers Holmes is interesting. I actually haven't read that many of the Apostolic Fathers myself, so a lot of the stuff I read you probably notice even though I lean more to Orthodoxy I've probably read more Catholic and medieval stuff.
Brad says, thoughts on the Western esoteric tradition intro is interesting. Takes last stream on alchemy. How do you feel about Renaissance Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and its extensions into the 19th and 20th century occultism?
The more modern it is, the more nonsensical it is. Hermeticism — I mean, alchemy is like a Hermetic worldview, and Hermeticism of course dates back to around at least the time of Christ, according to lore. It dates back way later, or way earlier. But yeah, all the later stuff like the John Dee and afterwards I think is kind of nonsense. Kabbalah I just kind of dismiss. Around the 15th and 16th centuries a lot of people just kind of did occultism as a meme, and really even the term occultism I think is nonsensical and I think people shouldn't use it because alchemy in the Middle Ages or Hermeticism, they were not thought of as these dark arts or anything weird. They were thought of — I mean, alchemy was just chemistry. It was just how you look at physical stuff, you analyze physical stuff, and Hermeticism was just the philosophical view in the same way that Platonism and Aristotelianism is. It's in many ways analogous to philosophies we're familiar with. I know in that episode, not related, I did talk about how Stoic philosophy is similar to Christian theology, but Hermeticism is the same. It's kind of the same thing. The Hermetic corpus, if you think that it's written after Christianity, it's definitely the case that it was influenced by Christian thinking. You read the cosmology, or the cosmogony I should say, and basically it has a cosmogony very similar to the Christian view where God creates the world, but what extends first from God is the Logos, and that has meanings in Neoplatonism as well. But obviously in the Christian theological tradition that's Jesus, or Jesus in his pre-incarnate form. Anyway, all of that stuff is an alias. I would just say the later stuff, Kabbalah, Renaissance stuff, it might be worth looking at. There's some stuff in my alchemy reader that is gonna — I almost put a Ficino work, but I couldn't get the freaking license for that because, again, I think I complained about it in the last stream. Someone put a restrictive license on it. But I do think I have some stuff from Paracelsus. So he is like 15th century, but that's about the latest stuff. Most of the stuff I have is like early medieval where things are less — it's like less occult stuff, it's more like science and philosophy. That's more or less what it is. So I'm not a big fan of occultism or any of this weird stuff. I think it's kind of nonsensical, but alchemy, at the time, was considered just a sensible science. And I think if people understood it correctly they would understand, oh, it was a sensible science. It kind of still is. You can look at things from that direction, but whatever.
Okay, let me check donations. Okay, don't see any. Okay, I think I've talked about enough so I think I'm gonna go home. Go home? Why did I say go to bed? We've been gone for freaking three hours. Oh, I see, hold on, I see some YouTube super chats.
So someone whose name I can't see because YouTube CSS is mentally [unclear: h__h] said, oh actually I can probably get rid — let me get rid of this. I can't get rid of that. Okay, someone says I can't see your name, sorry, but you say I remember you citing someone who said to just open a normie newspaper and see how much they screw up reporting on your particular field of expertise, so that's the Murray Gell-Mann effect. So the Murray Gell-Mann effect is the fact that if you read anything specialized in a newspaper about something you know about you're going to realize how [unclear: h__h] the journalist is and how they get everything wrong, every detail they arrogantly state, and they're wrong about absolutely everything. And you look at this and you're like, wow, this guy's totally stupid. Journalists are [unclear: h__h]. And that's on a field you understand. And then you turn the page and you read something about Russia and Ukraine which you don't know about and you automatically assume that, oh well, they must be telling the truth about this. They must know what they're talking about. So that's the Murray Gell-Mann effect. And the reality is everything in media, if it's there, it's there to deceive you or it's there put by someone who doesn't understand who is doing the job. I mean, journalism is a job where your power is maximized given your ability. You have enormous amounts of power and basically you don't know what you're talking about. It's like your responsibility is so low but you have so much control over what's going on. That's what's most egregious about journalism.
Nick says, share your thoughts about slavery in academia. Oh yeah, I didn't know if you meant like slavery. Oh yeah, I love slavery. I don't know how long I want to talk about this because I'm getting tired, but yeah, academia sucks. It's like being in a big cult. It's the exact opposite thing of being intellectually liberated. Just don't do it if you're anyone who cares about things. If you care about the issues you're studying, you should not go into academia because you will just get frustrated and you will realize how little they care about any of that crap because that's not what academy is about, and you will be a slave to it.
Rob says, Luke, have you read anything by Bishop Ryle? If so, what is your view of him? I don't know who that is. I have not read anything by him. Okay, I gotta call it quits. We've been going for three freaking hours. This is the longest stream. This might be the longest stream I've ever done. I didn't expect it to be a long stream. I thought it was going to be on. In fact, I started later than I expected. Originally I thought about trying to do a stream in the middle of the day, maybe so Europores could be in, but they could do without it.
Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go take a leak and I'm gonna come back and read the last donations, then I'll leave. I'm leaving. Usually I say, oh, I've been streaming so long — or streaming so now I'm getting words mixed up. I really am. My brain is deteriorating while streaming. But I was going to say I usually stream so long that my nose starts to itch and then I'm like, okay, now it's time to go. I don't know why my nose starts to itch, but I'm going. I've been going and talking so long my mouth is kind of getting numb at this point. I've been talking too much. My throat is fine. I don't know, it's been moving my mouth too much.
A mouth-numbingly long stream. Yeah, that's right. All right, let's see last donations. Oh, here's an email, but it's not a donation, it's just the freaking spam one of the most annoying annoying things. Epic. So, you know, the registrar — now if I recommend someone to use Epic with a link or whatever, they have an affiliate link, but unfortunately I don't get paid for it. It's just like they give you a little credit or something. They give you like some amount of store credit, which means nothing, but I'll let people click on it. You know, it saves me a little money. I don't need it. I think I reserved my domain name for like the rest of my life. I don't need it. But the annoying thing about Epic is every time you recommend — like someone clicks your link, they send you an email about it and I don't care about it. I wish that — I even contacted support because they don't give you the option to turn off these emails. I contacted support saying could you please give me this option, could you please stop sending me these stupid emails? I don't want to hear about it. It is nice to see all the sites that people are buying because they've seen my videos, okay, but I don't really need to see that. It's just a lot of emails. It's like literally — I would estimate when I first did those videos about setting up websites, let's actually see. So let's go in here and then we'll see Epic affiliate. Oh my goodness, yeah. So in the folder that I created, let's see, one of my old mail archive folders around when I first started doing those tutorial videos, there are 15,371 people who bought websites over the period of a year or two or something like that, right? And unfortunately I've been getting paid — you know, I got a little bit of credit for that. Not like it matters. I'm glad these people are making websites and I'm glad that there are 15,000 websites that are on the web because I helped someone get websites. That's great. But I didn't need those 15,000 emails. Epic, could you please turn that off? Could you please actually — what even? Yeah, see, and they use their support email for it so I can't just block it because if I need to use Epic support, you know, whatever. Screw it.
And another one. Oh my goodness. All right, geez louise. Let's see what domains they are. I wouldn't read them out on stream, but let's see what people are buying. Okay, a lot of people buy their own names. All right. Let me look at the chat. I don't see any more domain donations, so I might just call it quit.
Favorite apocrypha? Enoch, which by the way you can buy onlypress.net. Oh yeah, the Book of Enochs, or the Books of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees comes with three Books of Enochs: Enoch 1, Enoch 2, and Enoch 3. That is including the Book of Enoch, the Slavonic Enoch, and the Hebrew — or what did I call it? The Hebrew Enoch. They're called different things. Either way, good book. It has double columns, and the double columns, you know, they're hard to sell in the abstract, but these actually look really nice. It ended up very readable. It actually helps economize, you know, when you have a different verse on each line. But either way, you see, look at this LaTeX magic where it had — wait, is this like the final copy? I want to make sure that there are no screw-ups on that. But yeah, I mean, you got the chapter sides over there. All of this is LaTeX. Oh man, I love LaTeX, right? It's so great. It makes my life so much better. But yeah, it comes with the Books of Enoch, including — look at this nice title. I love LaTeX so much, man. I just love it. It's really Garamond, the font. Isn't that so fantastic?
Filter by keyword unique to those emails? Yeah, I mean that would be what a smart — see, like a smart person who knew about systems administration and email and stuff like that and servers, he would do that. But, you know, I'm evidently [unclear: h__h]. Yeah, well, to be honest, I guess I didn't block them because every time I was like, okay, no big deal, I'm just getting more emails. And it is kind of nice to see the domains that come in just to be like, oh, this domain, you know, here are all the funny domains that people buy or whatever, because I can see that. I only see first purchases.
Do you have an Odyssey like the book The Odyssey? Yes, I do. It's over — or are you talking about the website or the video site? I do have one of those too. You can just search me. I'll be there.
I bought the Enoch and Jubilees for my mom. She's enjoying it. Hey, that's cool. That's very cool. That was actually the first book I sold when I — before I even mentioned the site on YouTube, one of my friends bought this. Not a friend I expected to buy this, but I just mentioned it to some people. I bought it and he was my first real purchase, so I'm very happy about that. I actually really like looking at this again. The two-column thing actually worked out really well. I should probably use that for other things also. The Book of Jubilees, that's like — that's kind of like a commentary on Genesis, sort of. It's like talking about Genesis from another perspective, more or less.
Linux Libertine is better than Garamond.
Do you want Nvidia to open-source their drivers? Do I want them to give me billions of dollars? Yes. Yeah, I want a lot of things. They're not gonna do it. I can't imagine them doing it unless there's some economic reason for them to do it. I've heard about people trying to petition them, which just seems kind of silly.
Lunu XMR Forever sent in some XMR. What's your favorite John Zorn record? I don't know who that is. I don't know who that is, sorry. You guys know I don't know music.
Have you watched Esoterica YouTube channel? Dude is based. Is he? See, I don't know. Whenever you see esoteric stuff I just automatically assume it's unbased. It's probably pretty cringe. I mean, I say that, you know, again, like I'm publishing an alchemy reader thing, but yeah, all this magic crap and all this occult stuff I think is nonsensical. As I said in the last stream, Roger Bacon, who I have a pretty good work by him in here called The Nullity of Magic or The Non-Existence of Magic — I haven't actually, different translations call it different things. It's originally written in Latin. This is English. All this is English. But the point he makes is, well, he drew the dividing line basically on a Greek word, depending on which disciplines use this word that means divination versus something else. By the way, it's not important for us. But he did, I guess I agree with him in his analysis in that things like alchemy should really be looked at as a proto-science and it had a systematic worldview. It was often couched in obscurantist words, but fundamentally it was a physicalist science that didn't try to summon demons, which a lot of these esoteric people — it's just a bunch of faux spirituality, kind of anti-Christian, of I don't know, it's just a bunch of — I mean, not even anti-Christian, like, oh, I'm spiritual but not religious people. It's either inane or it's demonic. I don't know which is worse. Maybe it's both. But I'll look at this channel though. He might indeed be based. I'll have to see. I'll write it down. I'll put it in my notes thing. I'm not gonna dismiss him out of hand.
But I will just say, and oh yeah, the guy asked a little bit ago, like what about later esotericist crap? All like Theosophy, I think is nonsensical. The woman who founded Theosophy is like crazy. And it's just like Freemasonry basically. Freemasonry is all we have to show for all these years of Hermeticism and alchemy. It's just like this freaking religion that's supposed to be every religion and whatever, and I don't endorse it.
Luke, what's your favorite food? Also what's the point of life? Meat. That's about answer the both questions. That's a joke. Yeah, meat. I don't know what else to say. Meat and to bring glory to God. Those are your two questions.
Is using Shopify doms — is there a better alternative for lots of products? I mean, yeah, Lindy Press originally was gonna use Shopify, which I'm glad it's not. But I had a guy help me write some software for it, so thankfully I don't know if there's like a one better product that I could recommend. I'm not quite sure.
Okay, I know I said I'm gonna call it quits. Usually if I say I'm quitting the live stream that means I will quit the live stream in one hour, and I think an hour has come. I'm done. Yeah, I'm done. I'm just gonna go sleep here. Oh yeah, the other thing about this chair — oh yeah, oh that feels good. I'm just sleeping here. Maybe I'll just sleep on stream. I'll just forget to turn off my camera. Okay, one last check. I should check super chats too, just in case there's something else. No, I don't see anything new. Sorry if I missed any super chats. I tried to get them all, but that's all I can do. Gotta go to bed. Got to go to bed. I am. Are you gonna have a stream schedule? I might. I've been thinking about that. I might. I've actually thought about doing Monday in the afternoon, maybe like so basically maybe a couple hours before I started the stream. I've also thought about Fridays or weekends, but I can't necessarily guarantee that. I probably have too many social arrangements. It sucks. But it depends on the weekend. I might prefer to do one on Friday or Saturday if I can, but Monday might be a good idea. So all right, so I guess that's about it. I'll see you guys. Thanks for donators. Remember, get some XMR if you haven't gotten some already, and that — sorry, I was reading something else. I'm so tired. Yeah, get some XMR. That's the best way to donate. You can use donate.lukesmith.xyz or whatever if you want next time. But either way, I am planning on doing another episode of Not Related this month. And aside from that, yeah, that's about it. Thanks for everyone for showing up. I gotta go to sleep. It's way too late. It's almost eleven.