All right, here we go Back after some technical difficulties, but I got it done I totally forgot I have to use a special version of OBS. I forgot why I am installed it, but All right, so I actually took the moment to fix some other things that I knew would break and that's how these streams are It's mostly just troubleshooting streams whenever I do do a live stream The first 30 minutes has to be me fixing things You know as much as I make fun of people who have like tech teams who do all their work You know there is a reason like I do kind of need a wagey some time to do stuff for me I mean I'm probably the only guy in the universe on YouTube who is like doing everything Who has a channel as large as I do and I still do everything myself Like and I'm still running off of just my personal computer because I don't know It's not it's not a career for me. I'm not interested in this. I'm just making it up as I go, right? Okay, so in the interim I Got a couple Messages to read I think so Joshua Sinsen so Monero and says hey Luke Have some freshly mined XMR How do you strike the balance of using the internet to discover things but not needlessly wasting time there as an example? I waste time on 4chan regularly However, I also discovered your channel or website browsing 4chan. Okay, I didn't expect that and I wouldn't have otherwise Like really so okay a lot of people will look back at their past and this goes for anything If I tell you like you need to browse the internet less or play video games less, right? I mean here's how I used to think of things if someone told me not to play video games I would be like oh my goodness. Well, I learned all this stuff about Geography and I don't know stuff, you know different things from like civilization in games like this You know what? I mean there you always look back at bad things or even neutral things or Time-wasting things and you can see the small ways that they benefit you, but the real thing you're losing is like the opportunity cost So would you have found my channel otherwise? I mean You could like I don't know like I will go ahead and say that most people who find my channel Do not find it on image boards or anything like that and I Happily avoid I know that if I were trolling the internet all day Looking for new new stuff to consume. I might find a needle in the haystack But in general, it's just kind of a waste of time But I would say in general if you're on the internet, you know if you're wasting time or not I will just I'll just tell you that like if you are just Scrolling through the same feeds all the time and doing something If if you like sit down and like five hours later, you're like, whatever I've been doing for the last five hours, right?  So I don't really find it to yourself about when you're wasting time And for the most part, I mean, you know browsing 4chan. Oh, you might learn something on 4chan. You might learn something on reddit But by by and large is just you shouldn't be doing it, right? It's just wasteful. You know what? I mean, it's an opportunity cost like you could be there are more Productive ways of finding things now if I decide between 4chan and reddit, of course I would choose 4chan because it's like less curated. It's less like top-down engineered So you're more likely to run across things that are more unique, right? But I would say in general like if you're spending a lot of time on any of these sites It's just a bad idea. So I mean that goes without saying and I think most people frankly just have a sense of that It's just again being honest with yourself about when you're wasting time Actually since it's more a Monero and says a follow-up as I see it the trade-off For using the internet for discovery is that you risk wasting a lot of time, which I felt I certainly have at times I've I'm having a hard time determining whether it is worth it though I find it difficult to balance and FOMO tends to affect me Depends on what FOMO is. I don't know if are you talking about that like finance like if you're trying to Jump on a cryptocurrency or something.  It's mostly just an issue of opportunity costs like if you are browsing the internet in lieu of doing something productive or if you're If you're following up on trivial things when you could be doing something more important, right? That's something you need to avoid, right? And again, you kind of know I think most people have this sense of this, right? so a Donation for a $5 donation from me because I had to check the donation thing Yeah, I actually switched over a lot of my email addresses to a new server and so in the break time when I was fixing OBS I had to I went and checked all that Actually, I was probably check if I'm actually still am I streaming? They probably should have actually I just press the let's stream button. I don't actually have YouTube pulled up Let's look at the chat and see if people are talking as if I'm I don't know. It's just usual inane comments can't tell okay. Yeah Okay, I think they're watching. All right comment from CD cap since of $5 says Oremos Et pro per fides, which is an illusion to I can't say who the perfect ones are on YouTube But that's an old prayer they used to have in the the Catholic Church and they removed it in Vatican II you used to like pray for like the The conversion of the Jews, but nowadays you can't pray for the conversion of the Jews because that's that in itself is Any Semitic, you know It's funny An anonymous I say I think this is from the last stream anonymous sins in So Mineros and points me to what is this? Oh It's like a Minero mining a decentralized Minero mining pool. It's not really a full sentence But it's P2 pool I guess a lot of Minero people probably know about that and he asks does Lindy press have international delivery? Yes, if your country shows up On Lindy press as a destination place. Yes, it can deliver there Which is basically everywhere except for I think Lulu is not fulfilling orders to Ukraine and Russia right now But I don't know why either way it will stop you like if if the site is set up so that if they can't deliver there It will stop you from ordering Pull this up Okay Mr. Based for 2069 sins in a little bit of Minero Salam alaikum brother. I am learning the Arabic script for the Quran Do you have suggestions on learning Latin non-Latin scripts? Only I would say that you have to make sure I mean specific advice for learning scripts You just have to sit down and practice and learn it The only thing that I would add to that is make sure that you are 100% good on the script before you try and learn the language Like really learning a script is a different category from learning a language and it will it will be an Inconvenience for you if you're focusing like if you don't fully know the script while you're learning the language or something like that That's why in Chinese, you know, I recommend the John de Francis series because it separates It like they have two series of books One is only on the characters and one is only on the language and the language is like written in pinion Like it's written in Roman transliteration So you learn the spoken language at you know at its own pace and you learn the characters at their own pace now Chinese is a specific case where you really need like the the writing system is so different You really need two different series of it But for other languages like Arabic or like Indian languages where you just have a different script Which is kind of alphabetic or abjad in the case of Arabic it's I would just make sure you absolutely know it Know the script before going on to the language But you know an Arabic is a weird case because It's a language that is uniquely like it has a writing system that is uniquely bad for its language because There are vowels, of course, you know, they have this ablouting kind of stuff. They have you know, what do they call it? What's the word in it? What's the word in Arabic for it? Where you have like a trichonsonal roots and you change the vowels to change the meanings What there's a word for that in Arabic? I totally forget what it is It's so obvious. I think the binion is what they say in Hebrew for it something like that I think a lot of linguists will refer to it by that But yeah, so Arabic is weird because vowels are so morphologically important and how Syllables are syllabified, but they basically just write consonants and you don't write vowels and it's just kind of a pain So I'm looking at the chat Oh, yeah, so on YouTube don't give chats on YouTube because I don't really read those because they're hard to read I Will look at the chat right now. Why use a tiling window manager the layouts often seem kind of pointless Well, I mean a lot of the depends on what you mean by tiling window manager I mean using one in general Will change your life, right? But yeah, I mean some of the layouts in DWM are kind of superfluous like I have what like eight different ones bound to different keys if I really want and 90% of the time I'm just using the default one nice like sometimes I'll use So I have like t is the default one and then capital T is like the default one But with the master on top and I use that sometimes if I want to have a like more wide window if I need to see longer text so like I wouldn't say they're useless But some of like some of them have very niche use cases and I probably use them less than other people a lot of other people will switch to different like Layouts and stuff, but I definitely like the ability to do it Um Sean says what are your thoughts on chess if you don't play it. Are there any strategies games? You do like chess is I really like chess. In fact, I'm I'm low-key. I wouldn't say like I'm good at it But I know I have ascended past like a normal person in terms of like chess abilities I'm definitely not able to like challenge people who are actually really good at it like, you know people on the internet or whatever But I I got into it within the past year like all the different strategies behind it and like rules of thumb and stuff like that And I'm always looking for people to play chess in real life because I only believe in real life I don't believe in playing online But like I'm better than everyone else. I know there's like one or two friends of mine who can beat me You know one out of three times or something or maybe less than that but Um Like in general I'm better than everyone else. I know but I wouldn't say that I'm good at chess Because you know, I just I'm around a bunch of normies who are just like really You know aren't that into it, but I actually really enjoy chess and it's chess is like one of the best games I actually have thought about doing a video on the history of chess because there's not a video on YouTube on that like There's superficial things But I mean like how his chess changed because the chess that we play now or the chess that was played even 500 years ago Was not the same especially compared to chess of 2,000 years ago and like India or something like that It's kind of an interesting historical thing Stuart says any thoughts on the framework laptop as a modern equivalent to the old-school think-pads The lack of track track point is a bummer, but I think it's a winner in pretty much every other aspect I mean, I I don't know specifically the framework laptop. I've probably been shown it I've been shown a lot of these old-school equivalents of think-pad kind of things But yeah, as you say the track point the track point not having a track point is just it's not a computer to me I don't consider I'm sorry.  I'm not gonna use that as a mouse I'm just it's it's degrading to do and I know that normies have gotten used to using it and it's mainstreamed and Trackpoints you don't see them anymore, but they are so much superior Like it's not it's not it's not even a question for anyone who has used a track point for like half a week They have realized. Oh, these are drastically better than anything else So the fact that if it's if a track point is not on a computer, I consider it a desktop Okay, you might call a little laptop you might take it around but when I when I have when I have to deal with the track pad I'm like, please can you get a USB mouse for me because I'm not gonna be able to do this It's just so annoying like you have you have it a track point right Right in between all your fingers in the optimal position for a mouse You can easily type and move your mouse simultaneously That's why I have this keyboard because it has a track point. That's why I have the laptop So I have and why would you screw that up? Why would you move it to somewhere where you can't touch? Oh, now I got to go down here and it's just so dumb. It's just so pointless So yeah, they might be doing great things.  I I'm not interested and that's not this isn't even even like a snobbish thing This is just anyone who's used it Will never look back. You're never gonna look back. It's not a question. So mounted scopes Says any opinion on the rust language First-class docs crates and the obvious features of save code make it seem appealing Well two things about rust even without I don't know any rust, but two things that I can't help notice about it firstly Despite okay, I will say rust is like a cult. It's the only language that's really like that rust people are always doing things in rust They're rewriting things in rust. They're doing all this weird stuff in the rust and I want to say Stalman had a post on rust a while ago like why it's like It has some like built-in proprietary libraries or stuff like that that I don't know. I maybe it's rust I don't want to get it wrong But there are questionable things behind it behind it, but I'll just say rust people But I mean if I were to use languages if I were to write a computer program Well for simple scripts, obviously I would never use Python I would just use shell, but if I'm gonna write a program write it and see or write it and go Okay, that's that's about it And I've always had that opinion even before I knew any see or go just because those are the language like see is lindy It's highly lindy and it runs fast and it does things well and go It's kind of like it's a newer language, but it preserves. It's still it still runs fast.  There's just shell. There's see and there's go and nothing else I'm really interested in so rust people in particular. They're very they're always trying to push like Luke Why don't you use this? Oh my goodness the use this program It's written in rust as if that's some advantage over using some other language that runs faster than rust or I mean rust I think you know runs pretty quickly like it's comparable to go I think but um, I don't know I don't know why people are so evangelical about it And yeah, I mean all the all the people behind a lot of the people behind rust I don't want to say all of them, but many of them are your typical dyed hair SJW types and I'm not quite sure why that is but I will just say that that is like a giant warning sign for me But uh, yeah, so I'm not interested in rust any more than I'm interested in. I don't know Lisp or something like that. I mean well Lisp is like I mean it Lisp is not a very fast-running language. In fact, I want to say Lisp is like almost as slow as It's it's probably Python slow or something like that depending on I mean people study Lisp for like academic reasons Same reason they study like Haskell how serious of a language it is. I don't know Vietnamese person since oh, you know what? say in the YouTube chat if the Manera chat things are appearing on the the screen on I don't know if you guys can see them But you should be able to see notifications. I have not been checking that so say it in the chat and I will hopefully see Vietnamese person since in some an era thoughts on the electric universe theory It's the idea that electromagnetism plays a much bigger role in explaining the universe It denies stuff like dark matter and dark energy rather stuff like dark energy is to just unidentified plaid Plasma also the theory does not deny the existence of gravity. I mean I have read into that kind of stuff I mean I do have I think I talked about it. No, that's not it That's a book. I talked about in the last podcast episode. Oh, I should say For not related fans, you better be subscribed to the RSS feed because I have put out an episode That has not appeared on YouTube. So there's one came out a week or so ago, right? Okay, yeah, the money our donations are showing up. That's good I think I've talked about it in some live stream or something But like the Electric Universe people I didn't read the Big Bang never happened a while back And I think that's kind of in the same. I mean, this is more like plasma cosmology But they have some of the same touches to it. I will just say with both of those theories plasma and Electric Universe theory The stuff that I have found online is not very Like they don't really spell things out like if you look this crap up on YouTube It's people saying just like nothing it's them just saying oh well Tesla said this and blah blah blah and here's all these Generalities it's like there's no meat behind it as far as I'm concerned. That's not me saying there's no meat behind it I'm just saying the resources that I've touched. I have not seen anything very substantial, right? and of course dark matter and dark energy like I Mean you don't need to explain those because dark matter and dark energy are totally fake Like they're they're like they don't exist.  I May have talked about this in the fire a band episode of not related But yeah, so I don't know that much about electric University if you have a good resource on it You can send it to me and I'll look into it, but Chaos thing says what are your thoughts on tattoos?  No respect for people with tattoos Unless you come from a culture of tattooing like if you come from like Polynesia like they have an astound long-standing tradition of I don't know you tattoo things on your body like It's I don't know it's a thing that they do It's a thing within Western culture is one of the best indicator of like just an unstable person Right it is one of the it is very it's kind of a very bug man thing to do because it's taking something Often like a pop culture thing and then literally writing it on your body like making it become part of your literal body It's just totally nuts so Tattoos are not respectable and there's actually a deeper esoteric level the tattoos I wanted I've been meaning to do a video kind of talking about this Let's just talk about the system. We'll use words like the system now the system wants you to get tattoos And it doesn't just want you to get tattoos It wants you to do many things that involve you making a non revocable commitment to Things you know what I mean and what I say by that is I mean here's something that happens very often in our culture Right in America. We have all of these like here's something that happens all the time on universities, right?  Oh my goodness and Oh, we have we all get mad about this kind of thing and there's this public outcry and people go out and do protests And they're all engineered by you know The usual suspects and all these NGOs and blah blah blah and then of course a week later They look at the camera and they realize.  Is it and remember when Trump got elected and like there was someone I forget what it was someone was like Maybe like making there was some kind of anti-semitic Phone call I forget what it like prank calling or I forget exactly what it was But Trump said this some may he made some like passing remark like well Maybe it's just like you know Maybe it was someone who was Jewish who was trying to get attention and then like all the media is like oh my goodness That's anti-semitic and then like a month later. It's like.   That's how it works And it's the same thing all of this is the talk about tattoos It's the same thing with tattoos right because tattoos are a way if they can if if you end up with a tattoo You are gonna be committed to that thing that you got tattooed about right very few people regret their tattoos Right not because they're getting something that's good tattooed on them But because once you get something tattooed you feel emotionally Tied to that thing forever like you have to be proud and you have to endorse that thing forever, right? So that's why tattoo don't tattoos are all screwed up now again in freakin You know Polynesian culture cultures where there's a long-standing tradition of tattooing like life Accomplishments or something like that, you know that might be different. Okay, but in our culture tattooing is like Immediately like that is a trashy person that is a consumed product person that is someone who you know I would not trust and unless they are constantly apologizing for that the tattoos they got It's just a trashy thing in our culture to get a tattoo. It's a vapid thing to get a tattoo, you know So yeah, I mean when I and this actually often happens when I see like an attractive girl in public It's like oh, she's pretty attractive. Oh, I see there's a little tattoo like on her arm or something like that It's just like I don't know now.  Good Friday. Well, thank you blessings every one I should have opened the stream more and it is good Friday, so we should be celebrating that at least those Westerners of us I said in the The beginning of this thing about cars all of the words they're talking about I don't know any of these words. It's just like I don't know in one ear and out the other Guns are kind of the same way, right? People are typing F in the chat.  Oh Okay, it was probably just bad internet for a second What was I saying? So yeah, I might eventually get into guns and learn how they work But it's just it's not a big interest to me right now, but I do think absolutely It's really important that you know people have firearms and stuff Because it's one of those things where like if you're if you're gonna be self-reliant Even if you're not living in a place where you think you I mean you I expect never to have to use a firearm in my life, right? That's the ideal But when it comes down to it you shouldn't like it's it's pretty crazy to think Oh, I think the government should have the right to use lethal force to defend me But I shouldn't have that right or I shouldn't have that ability. I think that's kind of a silly thing So it's very I think I think they're very important, but I don't really know that much about guns and I'm not that interested um System de enjoyer says any thoughts on the america first movement.  I don't really Like I don't really consume product on on the internet I mean, that's not to say anything bad about them. They seem good I have friends that watch their stuff. I just don't um, you know, I'm not I'm not big in the pot. I don't know if you can tell like I will talk about sublimated political things But I'm not really big into specific politics things or I don't know. I'm more like an abstract guy I'm not against. I'm not against anyone who's doing that kind of stuff though. Um As long as you're doing it tactical Eric sends in some manero just saying z woe based Um Mr. Based for 2069 sends in some manero I just I just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to is linux is in fact gnu linux Or as I've recently taken to calling it gnu plus linux Linux is not an operating system unto itself But rather another free component of a fully functioning gnu system made useful by the gnu core libs Uh, well, thank you. Thank you for that post now Now we all know Did I ever do a video with that copypasta? I know I did a couple videos of copypasta I don't know if I ever did that one Stuart says tattoos are clearly cringe, but are they more or less cringe than having a bunch of of piercings Piercings are basically the same. I mean piercings are just 3d tattoos. They're the same thing I don't really see them as being different I I do think there's some piercings that you can get away with like I had I don't know depends on what it is Now obviously ear piercings are pretty normalized, but I will say I have respect for any woman who doesn't have her ear pierced I will I have instant respect for anyone the the the small highly conservative minority of women Who are so I don't know. They're they're even beyond ear piercing. They're so modest that they don't even pierce their ears I have supreme respect for those women Um, but you know, I don't look down on girls to get their ears pierced because that's basically everyone But as it comes to other piercings to abnormal piercings, I will say I had a girlfriend who Was pretty normal And she didn't have a belly button piercing. It was a very subtle one, right? I mean it and she didn't like wear it out in the mid-drift, but she did have a piercing there but um In general even that I would find suspect, but of course any like Nose piercings like, you know studs or anything like that pretty cringe Um girls with like the things just like that like sometimes that's okay But in general it's it's always bad. It's always bad It's just like an issue of how how much worse like when I see a girl with like a little side Not like not like a ring through her nose, but like the little side study thing Like that like I look at that as less bad as a tattoo, but in general they're the same thing as tattoos All right, let me check the uh chat for sec No one's saying anything important Lench had email server guide win. Uh when I feel like it and when I'm confident Well when I'm confident in how to modularize it and give, you know, full proof recommendations for everything What's wrong with tattoos and piercings?  All right, so um bj says are you planning on finishing your phd? No Do you have uh an interesting thesis idea? I mean sure I have many I mean all the papers I wrote on I thought were very interesting, but um Yeah, I have no intention of finishing a phd because it's too much work And there are two like I know that it's not going to go to anything Um, it's just not worth it. There was like when I first started when I physically left my department before I like Officially left like when I left Arizona I didn't think about putting like a binder dissertation out Just like a collection of some of my papings papers edited with like themes and stuff like that um, but even like a like, um Or well, I thought too about doing a more traditional dissertation project But um, I was pretty burnt out not really I shouldn't say burnt out I was sick of the whole system at that point and I was more like Oh, well I'll go through the emotions like I'll pretend to eventually work on this and maybe if I feel motivated to do What I will um, but yeah, it was just not it would have been a waste of my time. So, you know Um, thankfully I did not do that Well, I mean, I don't want to say that you know if it would have been super easy to do In the sense of like it wouldn't have wasted my time that I was doing other stuff with Um, it wouldn't have been bad to get a phd. Although I do think it would have been a Um, I would say I think given my experience with the University of Arizona. I think it would have been Kind of dishonorable for me to have a degree from them Like I would have kind of been like a badge of shame Like I kind of wish I had just finished my phd at UGA instead Like because I thought when I was at UGA and I was about to finish my masters I thought about maybe I could just like You can transfer into the phd program and just finish it there. But I was like, ah UGA. It's not like a big linguistic school I'll go to somewhere more famous and talk to more famous people and blah, blah, blah, but that that's kind of superficial um You know, I had more of an intent of actually, you know, I wasn't totally A blackpilled on the state of universities then I was just kind of like oh things are kind of bad But oh I can make do but you know, that's kind of delusional Real donates ten dollars. You mentioned once That you thought math was very useful. I actually really love math But have stopped studying it because I've found very little use of anything I didn't learn in college Or before to most situations even in software. What do you find you what do you find it useful for? Also, you're not actually 200 pounds. Are you? um So when it comes to math, well, I don't know I don't know how old you are, but I kind of feel like the more I get into more like doing things like proofs are super useful doing uh like Having calculus level knowledge of things and having like, I don't know. I feel like programming And math there's a lot of symmetry in I mean, obviously in programming You usually you talk through things and like loops and stuff as opposed to like summation notation or things like that But I guess that is that is kind of high school level math, but I do think theoretical math Maybe you were listening when I was talking about math Like people wanting math for like economics degrees like people when I was looking at going into Graduate school for economics, right? A lot of the schools would prefer math degrees Just because they had a lot of the more prerequisite knowledge Um, I I will just I don't know. Maybe it's just I run across things all the time where there are these highly rarified things in math like very obscure proofs that are very Useful, maybe you just haven't run across that. I don't in your life situation in mine. It has been very useful Um, but maybe maybe if you studied math in college You learned a lot of things that weren't I don't know. We're more niche and you didn't run across so I don't know Um, also, you're not actually 200 pounds. Are you? Um, no, well, I'm actually getting close to 200 pounds I've been putting on weight, but uh uh, I actually look back at the videos where I want to say like back in 2000 Or like 2019. I was like disgustingly gaunt. I was like unhealthy. I looked ridiculous. I can't even Um, I'm basically a normal the well the thing is in america.   I mean like they're not muscular.  You know what I mean?  That's all he says. All right. Thank you Um Farzan says, um Are you pro tech or anti tech or pro low spec tech or what what is that pro tech or anti? What does that mean? It's like saying are you pro? I don't know. Are you pro? I can't even I can't even think in terms that simplistic. That's just It's like saying are you pro internet or against the internet? So I haven't thought about that So oh people are saying f again I guess that yeah, see I I just have outages of like two seconds. So there's no big deal But by the time that I see people posting f's we're already back So actually it's still kind of yellow on my side Is the library section on your website still being updated? It's one of my favorite places for discovering interesting books Um, I have not bought as many books recently, but I've also not updated in a little bit a lot of these books I have laying on the ground.  I probably should update it sometime soon, but I don't I haven't really updated my website at all recently. I'm moving servers around Anyway, I've been moving. I think I mentioned I've been moving my email servers been moving all this other stuff uh, so I haven't really been thinking about uh, and I oh wait did I say it in this stream or did I say it in the like Stream that I started and then stopped I forget I put so I've been making changes to base.cooking. I've been adding things to base.cooking, right? So after a year I was like ignoring the repository for like a full year because it was too hard to manage because it had some crappy static site generator that kept breaking and I just got sick of it And it was like I don't know. There was too much traffic on it And I was just or traffic in terms of people wanting to add stuff and change stuff and I was just like screw it I'm gonna ignore it and I'm just gonna maybe I'll fix it later. Well this week. I actually in earnest I learned hugo. So I learned how to I've used hugo before it's a static site generator written in go Um, and I used it like five years ago to make some simple sites for some people But I it was only then now that I was like, okay I'm gonna actually learn this because I know it can do tagging And I really want tagging for my own personal website, but I also especially you want it for base.cooking That's one of the things I use that static site generator for that was so bad um But I um, what is I gonna say? um So yeah, I I rewrote base.cooking in go or well in go using hugo I should say So you can go to base.cooking Subscribe to the rss feed because I'm not now actually started putting up new recipes I think I added four today that people had submitted like a year ago And I will add more and I will make a lot of changes and it's just a lot better now. It's just infinitely better so okay Uh far as enough says Have you read the book anti-tech revolution by uncle ted? Um, I have not read it in full However, I do actually own that book. I have it because someone sent it to me at some point Some company that prints them. Where is it? Oh, yeah here. They sent me two books technological slavery by him And the anti-tech revolution Why and how and so this is by who is it's fitch and madison publishers? They sent me these for free And they said I didn't have to do a review on them or anything So actually this is the first shout out of my channel. They're getting they sent me these like two years ago But no, I've never actually read anti-tech revolution or I may have like Looked at a section of it that was like referenced somewhere, but no, I haven't read them as a thing so I'm gonna put these back up before they Become just more of those books that are sitting on my desk right now My desk is just accumulating more and more books that I'm doing stuff with BJ says I'm in a master's program. This is uh, he was talking before about phd Uh, candidacy and all that kind of stuff. I mean a master's program in economics We were learning about malthus in one of our classes We had this assignment called the gift of the dying the tragedy of aids and the welfare of future african generations It was about how aids is good for africa because the africans who survive can consume more product Even some of the liberals in my class were creeped out Yeah, that's pretty bad. Even if liberals are creeped out. Yeah I mean so the not related episode which I have not put on youtube I might eventually but you have to go to notrelated.xyz and subscribe to the podcast um But yeah, that was actually on malthusianism and like the idea like the idea that the world is overpopulated and You know the bill gates kind of people um, uh, paul erlich all that kind of stuff, um Yeah, that that's pretty funny though like mal like economists have a weird Relationship with malthus like I feel like most of them like kind of dismisses things nowadays um, I did not learn about him Uh, at least in my undergrad At all like I don't I didn't hear his name dropped once but you know when you read other economists and stuff They'll talk about him in passing But I don't think people take him like the population stuff too seriously now because there's a sense in which obviously there's something wrong with the Like the the model is not so direct as he anticipated But yeah, it is it is nutty like these people nowadays who the population control people um like bill gates who on one side pretends to wanting to be desperately um intent on saving you from the highly deadly coronavirus that people now forgot about Um, which now apparently doesn't exist after ukraine um, but uh on on the other side on the other side He's very worried about the world being overpopulated very interesting combination of beliefs, but um there's a lot to say about this people, but um Daniel Hayden, uh, since in ten dollars. I think this is on what is this been known or something? I don't know if I have I don't know if there's a message. Oh, okay. There is a message Have you ever personally known someone with an anxiety disorder? What advice would you give them? I'm not convinced that there is such a thing called an anxiety disorder That has symptoms other than saying that you have an anxiety disorder. I mean It's not it. It's not a thing like how do you tell if someone has an anxiety disorder if they say they have one, right? um, actually when I was in uh Back when I lived in the bug man city and I lived in a miserable place and had a miserable life or you know Not that miserable all the life, but um, there was underlying existential dread um, I I remember in college when I lived in Atlanta I had like kind of panic attacks like not not a frequently But I remember I had the Spanish class I'd go to and I would randomly have like panic attacks Now that is when you think of things that are characteristic of me a panic attack is the last thing in the world That you would associate with me But weirdly enough there was this brief period of time where I had this and it's just you know It's just the psychological thing. It's just a psychological rut that people get in of oh like panicking And then panicking about a panic attack. I'm like the least panic person In the universe, but for this very brief period of my life again living in the city this miserable city where Uh, it was just terrible and for whatever reason I just got not even nervous about the class Like I didn't give a crap about any class in college But it's just one of those psychological holes that people get into either way like they're not serious things Like the thing about that like what I call that an anxiety disorder.  It's just like when you have like when people are not Self actualized.  Let's let's rephrase that when people aren't living normal human lives You never know what their psychology is going to throw at them.  And that's what anxiety is. Oh, I have everything I need But oh man, I need some struggle in my life. So let me like invent this thing in my head Okay, that is ultimately the only thing and when I look at by myself when I had that kind of anxiety I don't wouldn't even use the term but when I was having this kind of panic attack That's ultimately what it was my brain was freaking bored. Like I was going to this class.  Um, you know, I was just wasting my time phoning it in That is like a great example of my brain just being freaking bored And trying to entertain itself with nonsensical problems, right?  So Yeah, start. Yeah, stop start lifting bro As eldonte says that's correct No, really though, like all of these psychological problems psychological problems I mean the best way of wording it is it's just people's brains trying to entertain themselves Because they don't have real problems in their life Or no, I'm not trying to say like having real problems is a good thing But they don't have, you know, in the kazensky terms, they don't have the power process They're not like accomplishing things. They're not accomplishing real things.  They're they're having miserable lives and You know, they I don't know they're going nowhere. So, oh, yeah, their brain Creates this like fake problem That they're going through and that that is the essence of the panic attack because the panic attack is literally just something that Happens when you're panicked about having a panic attack. That is like peak peak Get me out of where I'm living. I'm in a crappy. I don't know life environment, you know, so And luckily I moved out of there, but actually I just got over that But, you know, I still lived in the city for a couple more years um So another comment from a vietnamese person, I'm not fully sold on the electric Uh universe theory I just thought I'd explain dark matter better and wanted to know your thoughts on it Anyway thoughts on race mixing you can ignore this for youtube if need be Like are you against it on a mass scale social engineers are against it in general? Uh, well, I mean, I'll keep it youtube friendly. I would say in general Like well, we'll keep it in also christian terms like I don't think it's a sin But I think it's ill advised like I would think it Like I would think of it as being kind of um, I'm not I'm not gonna explain my reasoning on youtube But I will say I think it's kind of like marrying like a third cousin. That's kind of like how I would consider it Like it's ill advised, but I'm not like You know in a mass phenomenon It's clearly bad and it's clearly worrisome that like the media is like forcing this on people because obviously they have Ulterior motives and we don't need to talk about that on youtube because we can't Um, but yeah, like at an individual thing like if I knew someone like marrying someone of a different race It's not like inherently bad, but it might be like because because you're you're You're separating like it's best to be married to someone you have a common cultural and and biological Uh commonality with right? Um, and I would go into more The biological side ever go more into that but we can maybe if we do a pure tube stream um But We could at least say on the cultural side. It's it's a weird thing. It's a weird thing to like um, not just to raise a child but to um to to kind of merge families in a way that I don't know doesn't give a cohesive background to your children and um, and it's kind of a bug man thing And once I became like when I used to have lots of girlfriends who were not white Like when in my college years I man I had like I I don't know like I dated like every race under the sun But when I became less of a bug man and more like real. Oh, okay. I got to think about Uh marriage and settling down and things like that you very quickly race mixing becomes like not even a temptation, you know what I mean like um, anyway, that's enough about that so Talk about curd denialism. That's now.  I'm not gonna talk about curd denialism I'm gonna check donations and then I will check the chat if you don't have any um Aliens are subterranean. What are people even talking about? Messes up genetic resistances to endemic diseases and it's hard for your kids to find an orino Yeah, I mean I mean there are things like that, but that's not the real like there are there are little reasons like that not to you know do race mixing or whatever but um but of course the normie the the thing that the normie puts out is this like Fake idea of like high hybrid vigor. Oh, yeah, if you look at dogs dogs, which of course There aren't races of dogs. There are breeds of dogs We basically like mutilate dogs to be these genetic abominations Because we want them to look funny and then of course when you hybridize dogs, they're much healthier That is not the case in humans. That's like Like human races are all long-standing existing groups that can survive in the real life um Thoughts on the pentagon report saying ufo's account for unplanned pregnancies.   Listen, their vpns are the stupidest thing in the universe. Okay, there's flat I'll go ahead. I'll shoot my wad on this video. I'll go ahead and tell you on this live stream I'll go ahead and tell you what the video is going to have in it Why are vpns dumb? Do vpns protect your privacy in any way whatsoever? No, they don't because here's what happens Okay, you have an isp that gives you internet. Okay, mine is soy link Okay, so soy link sees what connections that I make On my on their internet, right? Obviously, right? Now, of course, they don't see what I'm doing They do see what sites I connect to because everything nowadays of course is over https basically So if you know You know, let's say you go to based off cooking Your isp knows that you went to based off cooking But they don't know what recipes you're looking at because the the pages you go to That is done over an encrypted connection, right? So they might see your isp can see the sites you're going to but they don't see like anything, you know the specific stuff, right? Um, so uh firstly a lot of people have the idea that your isp can see every little page you go on and that's just not true Like they can see in general what what things you can like what sites you connect to and blah blah blah But like specific stuff nowadays with https and just general encryption on the internet That that's not an issue. Okay. Now.   They have information about you Um, so now you have this extra layer of abstraction and of course a party And now in my case, it's soy link in your case. It might be this vpn They still have all your internet connection, right? They still have all of that kind of crap, right? It doesn't make a difference Now the real reason vpn exists you might have all vpns are all over the place every free all beauty pie tells me to get a vpn Everyone's telling me to get a vpn Why is everyone recommending them because they don't actually do anything, right? They really don't like and of course people in the comments are probably already saying They're also probably freaking honey pots because a lot of governments including the united states have these laws where Companies like that if they get subpoenas from the government, they can't even tell You that they are subpoenaing your information, right? So the government knows oh all the privacy oriented people They're all using vpns, right? So we can just tap the vpn and get all the information, right?  So it's not an improvement there, but the real reason vpns are shield is because What's happened is there are all these freaking data centers out there People just buy computers. They buy all these servers to do different things Oh cloud computing all this garbage People spend thousands of dollars To to to you know have basically server farms to do different things But eventually, you know when they have nothing to do with their machines. They're like well shoot How can we make money off of these machines? Oh, I know let's route internet traffic through our machines for no freaking reason In other words, let's just use them for the cash cow, which is a vpn We'll tell people oh hide your internet traffic from your isp By giving it all to us pay us to give it to us And we'll just route you through your servers pay, you know five dollars a month for literally nothing And we can have you know on one little server that costs us, you know Five dollars in a power bill we can make hundreds of dollars Thousands of dollars who knows how much they're making right, you know They can make a huge amount of money on this So this is where vpns come from they're like a giant cash cow that offer nothing in terms of privacy Like if you if you just like if you really want that level of privacy I mean well if you want to subvert your country's block list, you can use a proxy or you can just use tor Uh, you know to do specific things But like vpns are are useless for privacy. They don't do anything It's very they are like the biggest placebo ever They don't I mean if anything they are increasing your your attack vectors And they're you're just giving money to some server farm guy who had nothing to do with this server Like that's it. He's just routing your traffic through you. I mean you're writing your traffic through him for no reason It's pointless, you know So yeah, vpns are totally pointless Um, like you can probably imagine some specific use case As for why you want to route your traffic through it But you could just host one yourself or something like that, right? It's not like I don't know. It's it's it's the most normie thing in the universe.   Well, I I actually gotta stop the steam steam steam I gotta stop the stream sometime soon probably within the next 30 minutes because I'm gonna have company over Um anonymous says what are your thoughts on the growth of cloud computing In the lat in the next decade. Do you think there's a future? Where consumers are limited to mid-range hardware that only servers to connect to FAA in G. I guess that's facebook apple something amazon Uh netflix and google cloud computing servers think google side. Yeah. Yeah, um I think it's super worrisome I mean the most annoying thing is people More than ever like hardware has never been cheaper in terms of storage space and all this kind of stuff And it's never been easier to get files But cloud computing is just like insane and I don't know like I really think that people should go out there more Oh, I'm an activist for having files on your own computer as opposed to cloud computing I think it's really worrisome. You should do basically zero computing in the cloud Um, you know that that's just I don't know So I don't know where it's going to be the direction is definitely to Cloud computing because that's what all of these companies want They want all of your data.  It's it's crazy But it's work.  Well Broke boy. That's pretty sad. Um I'm not going to give you life advice.  Uh, listen the reality is especially when you're young um You got to do what you got to do like, you know, I didn't enjoy what I was doing for like my early 20s My work or anything. I mean even the jobs I've had recently.   Okay start there like try to be annoying In terms of oh this guy's so imp.  I don't really know where that Con is coming from It depends on what you mean by nostic. Uh, they're they're definitely not nostics though I mean most liberals are probably nostics in some way, but Um, but that's a very I'd say a much more abstract um A level uh simp since in 750 any hot takes on cognitive science personally I feel like most theories about cognitive science are just those stories Also, also how tall are you?  I mean, that's what that's basically what it is I mean cognitive science I mean, it's not a real field like there's neuroscience and they can do I mean neural science is basically just like feeling how hot the brain gets and trying to guess it You know, what's going on there Whereas cognitive science is like, I mean, it's it's kind of like this interdisciplinary nonsense field where it's like Oh, well, you just kind of name drop different things and there's not like a systematic way of looking at things So cocci is like I don't know. It's kind of like I I guess when I was in my phd program I was kind of like the cocci guy like I was one of those cocci people But it's really just kind of a generalist thing like there's no Systematis me is systematic to it and theories about it are just hit and miss because most of them are from like Oh, here's a guy who has a background in linguistics or here's a guy Who has a background in psychology and all of them kind of cater their things to their own, uh, I don't know purposes And how tall am I? I don't know normal height like normal. I don't know I'm just below six foot like I'm probably This time of day. I'm probably 5 10 in the morning. I'm 5 11, but um, I guess since my height starts with 5 I'm a manlet. So that's how it is. That's how it is on the internet and also in real life Uh Farzin says what are your thoughts on religious conversions if a non-christian converts to christianity is that cringe or based? I mean, obviously I would consider that based um Yeah, I don't know why like yeah, I mean religion is not just like cultural I mean, well if you think religion is true by definition, it is not just something cultural now There are cultural aspects to religion it would be cringe if you like Abandon your religion to become like some kind of freaking reddit atheist That would be cringe. I would view islam as as an improvement on that But um, yeah, of course. I mean, I believe christianity is true. Therefore. I believe any conversion to it is good Um, could you do it in a cringey way? I don't know. I mean I don't know of it, but um Yeah, 5 11 manlet king king of the manlets. I know I've heard the worst of it like that too I'm gonna I'm gonna add my cousin right here because he's um now. He's taller than me But he's also like he's at that point where he's like 5 11.99999 And he constantly is talking about how important it is to be six foot and how important it is to be You know, he's like he is like i'm actually not the king of the manlets. I'm prince of the manlets. Okay I'll say that because he is like That perfect. It's it's it's that like fourchan Manlet mindset where it's just constantly thinking about height And he brings it up all the time. So he he actually deserves the crown of king of the manlets But I mean probably in the morning. He's probably anonymous sends in some xmr. He says hello luke. Are you mining xmr? No, I'm actually not Uh, not right now. Uh, I've actually never Never really tried to do it. Um, maybe I should but yeah 99 IQ is definitely IQ lit king of the IQ lits I actually really know it shouldn't be that it should be higher than that because let's be real I mean probably most people talking about IQ. They have higher than average IQs in general like including redditors Um, although I really think redditors are probably averaging around 100 But I would say like king of the IQ lits is like Maybe around like 125 I mean, I don't know.   Sorry about that. Sorry to roast you Hey, you're a standard deviation smarter than Normies, right that counts for something, right? I mean the the issue with IQ is just as long as it doesn't make you arrogant Like if you if your IQ is 110 And you know that your IQ is 110 and you don't pretend to be someone who's like 140 you're gonna be fine Okay, I really gotta stop the stream in a second. I also drank too much caffeine. I'm kind of like Jittering. I don't know if you can tell I'm kind of like Getting hype IQ below 150 is low because enski had 167 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what uh, which what we could say the cutoff is Maybe we could put it higher, but I also don't know like as things get higher with IQ things get a little fuzzier um Because people will just put out like wild numbers Uh, especially what the most absurd thing is when people like try to estimate Historical peoples like IQs, which is the stupidest thing in the universe all right, anyway Also, like I'm not entirely like I'm not entirely sold it like IQ as a whole line is a real thing But you know people who deny it outright are kind of Silly Okay, don't look we doesn't look like we have more donations. Okay.  My computer is going so freaking slow. I wasn't even moving things around For most of that so I didn't see how slow was moving, but um Yeah, see my bottleneck now is not internet my internet speed is good my cpu usage That is the thing that's always the problem now. I'm also freaking hungry. You know what? I didn't really eat anything today, but I guess it's but no I did eat a little bit It is supposed to be a fasting day for the west so I should probably do that. Oh my goodness Oh, okay. I might just stop the stream like without logging into youtube. I'll just check Check donations see if they're last ones Manlineal sent in some minero says nice haircut boomer. Thanks. You like my new Oh, yeah, I changed the thumbnail. Dang it before it was the mulatto perm Yeah, I need to get a mulatto perm. That's what I need Then my hair would be very much bussing Okay, I'm just gonna turn off this room. I'm gonna I'm gonna say that's the end because it's like lagging so much on my side So I don't know how it is All right. Thanks everyone who showed out. Um, I I'm gonna be busy all Easter week Uh, I might do videos might do vlogs. Oh Go on peer tube. I've put up videos that I have not put on youtube recently Because I'm too lazy to put things on youtube. So I don't do it Like I'll upload them to peer tube and then I'll be like I'll release them on youtube in a couple days and then I'll forget about it So, you know, whatever So check out peer tube. It has more stuff and the wait, I don't


October is in full swing which means it's officially Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Right here on BU's campus students are doing their part to spread awareness. I'm here at BU's George Sherman Union where multiple student organizations are here to raise money for breast cancer research and spread awareness. So this week we've been sitting in the link all during the week and handing out stickers and flyers, all basically certain breast cancer pink related items so people can start getting a word out that we should be aware about breast cancer. Gamma Phi Beta and Kappa Sigma ended their Breast Cancer Awareness Week with a kickball tournament to raise money for Susan G. Coleman. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. Not only does this month spread awareness but it also touches the hearts of those most affected. It was really hard to go through it not even as person happened to but to see someone else go through it. We really appreciate that awareness is being spread about it and just helping more people get through it and surviving it. So I absolutely love that everyone wore pink on Wednesday and just really showed their support throughout the week and especially a kick for a care. All the BU organizations raised over $5,000 for breast cancer research last week. Everyone can expect many fundraising events in the coming weeks including concerts, 5Ks, parties and much more right here in Boston. For BU TV 10, I'm Jenny Iyer-Domin.


My name is now hosting this shit, six years strong, it's like we're another six more, you know what I mean If you want to hit me up, all my links are on screen right about now I'll say with Don't Flop, here's an app, Don't Flop with the hashtag, hash six B-U-W with your opinions on this battle and all the others This is a non-judge battle, so make sure in the link at the edge, click through and take one second to avoid whatever you think you want, it's on our official website Thanks to everyone loving it Alright, final two MCs, I'm introducing this weekend A debut on my right hand side, all the way from Boston, USA Make you feel welcome, chill and joy! Every single time coming through, final MC of the weekend And on the left hand side, first international clash from our dude from London City You know the name, make some noise for C-Majors If you haven't seen the on-mill battle, two of the title match, make sure you click through all that shit Alright, we chose off-camera C1 the flip and you wanted to go first It's round number one, final battle, six birthdays, C-Major, let's go Yo, can you say this?   Anybody?


Hello. So we're going to start with a presentation by Renata. And then we'll have a little talk after she gives a little presentation. So welcome, Renata. Thank you, Mika. Hello. My name is Renata. It is wonderful to be back at Slush. I've been coming to this incredible conference since 2016. And I'm going to start with a little bit of a product story. I know this doesn't look like the products you're used to. But this is myself and my baby brother Ruben celebrating Norwegian National Day. I'm half Norwegian and half Dutch. And not long after this photograph was taken, we moved to the Netherlands. Our fashion taste took a toll for the more colorful, I would say. I think that's what I still under it to wear today. Ruben and I had a pretty remarkable life growing up. Our parents separated when we were two and four years old. And so we really grew up together. We moved between our parents in different countries. We lived in Norway and the Netherlands. We moved to England, but we were always together. And in fact, we didn't just learn to speak similar languages together. We also fell in love with technology together. In this photograph, you can see us making ringtones. Ruben was an engineer. I was essentially his product manager. He is a PC. I'm a Mac. We talk to each other about everything and anything. Except we can't talk to each other about anything anymore. In fact, I was in Norway this past weekend to commemorate the 10 years since he passed away in an accident. This is a story about the magic of social connection. I was incredibly lucky to have this one person in my life that I was able to share everything with. We shared the hula hoop of life together, as you can see in this photograph. We were so incredibly close. And I actually didn't realize until I learned to live without him the last 10 years how special it was to have this connection. Some of that I could fully trust. And I've become incredibly interested since that moment in what it takes to feel close to someone, what it takes to build trust. And I've realized in that time that most people don't have one single person that they can trust and not feel judged by and confide in. In the last 10 years, we've entered the most lonely decade in human history. And I have come to believe that we face two great battles in our lifetime. The first is the climate crisis. And the second is loneliness. And I think this is a problem that we're still just waking up to. Now, the irony is that in the last decade, I have actually dedicated my life to working on social connection in various forms and shapes. The reason I started coming to Slush is I spent five years at Apple building the App Store business, connecting people all across the world. I actually ran the App Store in the Nordics for a number of years. I then went to work at Headspace, which is a leading mental health and mindfulness app. And then I spent two years at Tinder, most recently as CEO, connecting people all over the world. And yet, as of the last two years, the world is lonelier than ever. In the US, four in five young people feel lonely. In Finland, the Red Cross recently published a study to say that 61% of Finns feel lonely sometimes for all of the time. So what is going on here? Well, I found that a company called Meno earlier this year, which is dedicated to helping people master the skill of social connection because the good news is social connection, feeling close to people like I did in that hula hoop, is a skill that can be learned. And our focus is on providing personalized relationship mentoring advice. Meno is a personalized relationship mentor. That means that it will help you with any kind of relationship. Yes, romantic too, but also friendship, family, work. Maybe you were here in the audience with some colleagues. I think Nico Rosberg is here at the conference. Maybe he could have used Meno to help him make better friends with Lewis Hamilton back in the day. It is private and secure, crucially. And many people have asked me, is it like the movie Hur? Is it a fake girlfriend that is going to help me not feel lonely? No, it is quite the opposite of that. I think the best comparison that I've come up with is that Meno is more like the Remy in Ratatouille, except instead of helping you make amazing soup or pancakes, it's helping you practice the skill of social connection and amazing relationships like in a flight simulator before going out to do this in the real world. As I mentioned, we're focused on 18 to 25-year-olds right now because they really need this the most. They had their social skill development interrupted by the pandemic. I've spoken to dozens of young people in the last year who spent two years on Zoom staring at pixels when they should have been out in the playground flirting, shoving people around and learning about these things. This is where we're starting, but I do think everyone can and could use Meno. We've been in beta for a few weeks. We've been testing the app in particular in the U.S. We have a few very happy customers, and I think what's been really intriguing is that it isn't actually purely lonely people that are finding value in Meno. Here is someone called Andrew. Andrew is the king of his frat house. He's super popular, he's got loads of friends, but he didn't have the confidence to do the one thing that he wasn't recognizing about, which was to ask a girl out that was in their friendships group. He said something to me that I keep hearing, if you're my age now, anything you'll say will be everywhere at the same time, all at once. He was terrified of taking this one step, and he ended up working with Meno to ask the girl out. They went on three dates, it didn't work out, but he was so proud and so happy and so confident, and Meno has actually helped to take a very different approach to his friends ever since. We've built an amazing team with the help of our investors. The team that you see here has worked previously to build Headspace, Julingo, Tinder, the App Store business and so on, and we are deeply passionate to helping people improve their social skills. Now all of this started when someone called Andrew Ng who you may have heard of called me up about a year ago and predicted that large language models, like chatJPT, would quickly become a very powerful way to influence these types of things. So we've been working for this more than a year, and I spent a lot of my time in the last year on campuses building this with people in the real world, but I have some exciting news today. Today we're launching Meno in the first country in the world ever, Finland. I dream of a world in which there will be no more social anxiety. Our product is an anti-loneness. It is what we're experiencing here at this conference. I love coming to Slush because I have made some of my best friends. Two of my investors are Tony Fidel and one of the leaders of Spotify. I met them both here at Slush. Finland is one of the most innovative countries on the world, and I want your feedback before anyone else. So I think 30% of the attendees here are Finnish, so make a Finnish friend if you're not on the Finnish app store. Please go and download the app and let me know what you think. We want to build this with you. So thank you very much, and let's talk about Meno. Thank you. How exciting. So all the Finns out there can download this, so the rest of us have to wait, I suppose. And you are Finnish, but you're not on the Finnish app store. I'm not on the Finnish app store, so unfortunately I cannot get it. I love passion projects, passion startups driven by passion, driven by background. This is definitely one of those things. It feels like almost like your entire life is building up to this thing. And it's really going to... You giving that presentation was so nice to hear. I really want to dig into this AI versus human. We've talked about this, and I've seen you in other presentations where you don't like it when people say it's like her, the famous movie with Joaquin Phoenix, and it's really how important the human aspect is to this. And what is interesting to me is like, people don't think about human and AI together, but this is exactly what you want to do. Can you talk a little bit deeper about that, how that works and what you're thinking? Yeah. So the truth is I genuinely reached a point a year and a half ago where I had become somewhat disillusioned with, to your point, I'd spent almost 20 years in trying to use technology to build social connection, most recently at Tinder. And I simply didn't see the solutions that we had making enough of an impact. I think really all of that has changed now with the emergence of, in particular, national language processing and large language models. And the reason for that is it's really allowing us to build products that follow the way that we speak and think as human beings. And that's also the reason that I'm launching this film today. And to be clear, I want to set the expectation, we're very early stage, but we want to be able to design this for the questions that you will have, for the types of journeys that you want to take yourself on. We do not have to create this prescriptive path the way textbooks used to do it and then most apps of the last 15 years where you would take someone through lesson one learning finish, lesson two learning finish. Now there's a two minute onboarding and then you can really go into any relationship topic or goal that you have and we'll be learning from you and we'll be building for you. So it's going to be actually supporting what people really do and who they really are. So it's not like some kind of like rote thing, it's actually really human in a way you're saying. Yeah. Fantastic. But not a fake human being. Helping you with your real human relationship. You're right it to me, okay. So competition. Is there a competition for this? You hear about chat bots and all this stuff going on in the AI. There's all these personal assistants. I have as an investor I've seen so many. Yours is a very, very different approach. So do you actually see that there's competition for what you're doing? It's really interesting. So we are creating a bit of a new category in a sense. So it's part education, it's part AI, it's a whole bunch of different things. I think what we hear the most and what we see with our current test users is that people are really using it instead of three different things. One, and this is slightly controversial, I do think that something like Meno could and should replace dating apps. Dating apps currently help you meet strangers when one of the most exciting things about Gen Z, 18 to 25 year olds, is that they're mostly meeting their romantic partners and building close relationships from community and from their existing friendships. And so by working with Meno to build empathy to help you be a better friend, to help you move from a situation to a relationship and then invest in that relationship, I believe Meno will eventually replace dating apps for most people. Secondly, I think a lot of people are already using Google or chat GBT to ask for questions for relationship advice. I mean, who's ever Googled a question, use chat GBT to analyze a text message. I see lots of hands going up. There we go. And there are several challenges with that because it's not necessarily private. It's not personalized. If you Google something, it's not going to be just for you. Meno has memory. So instead of you just asking a question and it giving you an instant answer, we can also use the context of things that you've been discussing for months or maybe years if we look at the future and say, hmm, I spot a bit of a trend here. This always happens once you've been on three dates with people. Maybe we should think about that being a thing that we really work on together. And lastly, Meno drives the conversation. If you use chat GBT or if you use Google for relationship advice, then you have to be the one driving the conversation. And you know what? That can be a little bit tricky. So instead, we have what we call dynamic prompting for those more technical folks in the audience or empathy mode. And we're actually the ones asking you questions so that you can really, really express yourself. The last thing is I do also see what we're building is an antidote to the fake girlfriends, companions, and so on that we're seeing emerge. There is a product, for example, in China that has more than 500 million users. And I do worry about a world in which people will find more comfort in a fake AI boy for no girlfriend that always is exactly what you want. But I don't really think that is the healthy thing. So I'm going to put my VC head on here for a minute. How will you know when you've hit that kind of unlock moment? You go to market strategies. There's so many apps out there. There's so much noise. And how are you going to get users and when will you know that it's taking off? Do you have metrics you're looking at or what is it? It will be when I start getting messages on Twitter and on email from people that say you've changed my life. I've been very fortunate to work on a number of businesses where that's happened. In the case of Headspace, I sometimes met with cancer patients who used Headspace to take them through a very difficult time and recover. Of course, in the Tinder context, I met a number of people that met the partner of their life. But I truly believe that Mino has the potential to have a much bigger impact on way more people. So my Twitter handle is just at Renata, so dear Finns, as in when Mino changes your life, please let me know. Maybe you'll be product market fit. That's very cool. So actually it's on X, not Twitter anymore, but just having that bit here. So you're deep into the AI world and there's been a lot of discussion around the pitfalls and the dangers of it. Do you have guardrails in place? So how do you think about that? Or does that not really affect you because you're more of a narrow focus? But I suppose it does because you're dealing with real humans and their emotions. So how do you approach that? It's actually the very first thing that we deployed. So LLMs that are public do have natural guardrails built in already. However, so one of my close advisors is Megan Jones Bell. She was the Chief Science Officer at Headspace. She's a trained family therapist and she's now Clinical Director of Mental Health at Google, so she's been very deep in this work for quite some time. And so what we've designed is our own custom guardrails. So for example, in Finland, if you download the app today, if you do talk about, for example, thinking about self-harming, then we select different local organizations that we will point you towards. Over time, we're already working with different mental health professionals. For example, on college campuses as a one to also personalize the responses because if someone is in a difficult headspace, the hardest thing typically is to actually take that first step. To send that text message to a friend to say, I'm really in a dark place. I really need help. But nothing can ever replace real human beings being there for you in that moment in time. So we have guardrails. It's a critical thing to have in place and that really escalates these types of things to organizations, NGOs, et cetera, that can provide clinical care and support. So I want to touch on something in your slide deck, and we had a little discussion backstage about this. You feel that the two biggest threats to humanity, to all of us, is climate change and loneliness. And I said, well, climate change affects 100% of us, but I don't think 100% of people will be lonely. So for me, if you ask me, I say climate change and income inequality. That's what I would say the two things are.  I think it's one thing to exist on this planet and that is, of course, the climate crisis if this world becomes too hot or too cold for us to live, breathe. That is an existential crisis. But there's also something about being human. And I think what makes us human is that we're social animals and social creatures. There's been a 30% decline in the number of people that are in committed relationships in the last 30 years. So that's not just people getting married less. People are also not cohabitating, living in communities in the same way. One in seven people now don't have a single friend. And all these trends are staggering and nothing has made them better. They just keep on going down. And genuinely, this May Flatten Out of You Forward project in two, 300 years will all be single. We won't have children anymore. We won't have new friends. That's the end of humanity. If you follow that curve, yes. If we follow that curve. Got it. I'm going to switch gears completely here. There are a lot of founders in the audience and this is your second startup. There's a bit of a gap between the first one and this one. I'm curious what made you want to do it again. The first... I mean, I think like most founders, I never really wanted to be a founder, but I just kept on running into problems that I didn't see anyone else solving. So I just let to go and do it. The problem I wanted to solve the first time around, I created my first company exactly 10 years ago, pretty much in 2012. And at the time, it was the year when apps really started becoming mobile-first businesses. So that was the year that Tinder was launched, Uber was launched, Instagram was launched. And at the time, in Europe especially, there were very few people who were great mobile developers and designers. And so I built a company that was essentially a startup for hire where people could come and build their first product with us and then go off and rebuild that. With Meno, because frankly, you know, I've come from running a $1.7 billion organization. I had several corporate jobs. I worked with what I go to running a 10-person company where next week I'm painting walls, by the way. Monday, that's my schedule. I'm painting the walls for a new office. What made me want to do it again is I really, really believe that this is the most important problem that I can make an impact on. Like I said, for me, this and the climate crisis are the two biggest battles we face in our lifetime. I don't think I'm the right person to work on the climate. I do think I can make a difference here. And critically, the people that are behind this, so Andrew Ng, who's truly one of the leading minds in AI, so we have access to incredible science. And in addition to that, our seedband was led by Rulof Bota, who's the head of Sequoia. He contacted me not long after we founded the company, and I looked him up online before meeting. He'd been talking about this problem as well since 2012. And so there are a number of people that have seen so much between those two guys, like they have seen thousands of companies and so much in terms of technology, and the fact that we're all coming together to really try and make an impact. And this is a really hard problem. I'm basically insane to do this, as is my team. But I think we just have to try, and we have to keep trying. I really hope that many other companies will also try. We're going to need a lot of different things to come together here to actually make an impact when reversing this curve. You make it sound like it was Sequoia came in, 2023 is a brutal fundraising environment for startups. Was it as easy as that? You're just in the right place at the right time? Or even a bigger question is, is it easier the second time, you think? Or what is your kind of view on your founding the company? Like how was that process for you? I didn't raise VC capital the first time around. I think the thing... I did ask Rilof this after we closed the deal, and by the way, there are many Sequoia people here in the audience tonight. They've been amazing. It's been incredible to work with them. And I think the big thing was... I think there's a lot of excitement about AI right now. There's a lot of excitement about the technology. I think what they saw in me was that I was talking about the problems, and I have had many experiences of actually building these types of companies and making an impact through culture. So for example, when I was at Tinder, I initially ran the European business. We did some really cool stuff where we partnered with Love Island, some of these reality TV shows. We made the Tinder app the first way in which you could swipe right in order to appear on the show. And we had a million people in the UK applied to be on the show in 10 days. A million people. So I think the fact that I was so focused on the people and the problems, and I actually made this deal with Andrew, because he contacted me on October 21, where are we now? No, 22. And I said, I really want to spend some time still in the real world before we start coding. And so I spent time with incredible people, with Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to some communes. I really started studying community social connection behaviour change in the real world first. And I think most people that have been pitching are focused on the technology. And let's remember, it's been a year since OpenAI started getting us all very excited. But I'm yet to think of one single product that has made a real impact on a consumer problem. We're still very much excited about the technology phase. And that's great. I didn't think I would see another moment like this having grown up with the App Store. And it's an amazing time to be alive, but we haven't found real powerful use cases yet. And I think that's what they saw in me, and that's why they're supporting me. So what's been hard in the last year? Hiring tech. I think the hardest thing has been making decisions about who to hire, where to hire people. I think I definitely lost some time. I think we're still trying to figure out what the right models are. And to be clear, I've really come down on the, you know, what we need to be in real life. And so that meant getting a new visa, moving to the U.S., properly moving to the U.S. this Monday. So this is why on Monday we're painting walls. But I think still a lot of us have been figuring out the right way to operate. I think that's been the hardest thing, yeah. Because you're already sort of, you're actually formally moving, I think, on Monday, right, from Paris to San Francisco. You ever lived in San Francisco before? I have, in 2008. Oh, you have before, okay. So you have a little bit of a community there. So I think moving is all about the community. You have your work community. How have you found San Francisco so far? Because people hear kinds of, just a quick, like, is it as bad or is it as good? I lived in San Francisco 19 years, so I'm a little biased. But I left five years ago. I'm curious, how do you feel about it? I was terrified. I'm not sure I can relate to it. I've spent the last year living in Paris, which I adore. But I've really loved it. One, I think it's such an open welcome and community. I live next to the park and go go running. But in particular in terms of this work that we do, given that we're working on a really difficult problem and something that's very mission-driven, I think the energy, the positivity, and the can-do attitude is really unique. So I'm very excited to start my San Francisco life on Monday. Fantastic. All right, well, I hope people download it and try it, and I assume you want some feedback. Absolutely. So it's Nino and I'm at Renata on X. Thank you, Renata. Thank you, Minka. Thank you.


One of the things I struggle with when I want to do consistent self-tape practice is choosing the monologue or scene I had that kind of like decision paralysis in high school and college and now that I'm a working actor so I texted a bunch of my family and friends and I was like whatever they send me I'm gonna do like I'm gonna choose from these I only need 24 so we're gonna do it. I really want to make this a fun activity like something that I can do even during the holidays where I'm having to work and go to family events and things like that so to make this more Christmassy for me and for you I have an advent calendar up there that I'm gonna fill up with the title of the movie or tv show I'm just gonna put it in that random and that morning of I'm not even gonna know what I'm gonna do that way I'm not thinking about it I'm not like oh I should go memorize I just grab it and I'm like okay this is what we're doing today set a 15 minute timer because because we're gonna go we're gonna do it I'm trying my best to make this as simple as possible because it's a lot it's 24 and I know if I make it too complicated I'm I'm just not gonna do it I am not gonna try and memorize I'm gonna give myself 15 minutes per monologue or scene to prepare it any way that I want if I memorize some of it great fun but I'm trying my best to get past the threshold of when you're practicing yourself tapes of like wanting to make them perfect for self-tape auditions that I'm actually sending in of course I'm gonna do more and memorize and get feedback things like that but for this self-tape practice I just want to find a way that during December where historically I do almost no acting that I can still have a little bit of it and a little bit of practice and then maybe just maybe for self tape may 2024 I'll be in the rhythm of it more and I'll actually finish it I have five scripts so far I've spent about an hour looking for scripts and I think I'm doing okay because in the past I feel like I've spent more time I have one monologue I have a scene from a hallmark movie and a couple of scenes from the office so for today because I do want to get started on this that's gonna be enough and I'll continue I have the advent calendar here and I know where I'm gonna get these scenes and monologues from so I'm gonna go ahead and fill this up I really need to continue to look for that tonight though because I know like I know like I know if I don't choose the script and print them out and have them ready this is not gonna get finished this is just not gonna get done