I'm a man with a certain set of skills. Just not useful ones.

Hey, Heat. Hey, hey. Ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary, welcome to um my streams that I do occasionally, I guess. For today, uh June 7th, 2025. Hi, I'm your host Tristan. I run the YouTube channel, Step Back, and the podcast is probably not aliens. Um, you know, when they're active and making stuff, uh, I, uh, stream every so often so that you know that I'm alive and, you know, to, uh, to keep supporting my work. You have, uh, you have but to watch videos, watch streams, go to my Patreon, whatever it is. You know, I know that I'm not, uh, it's a Saturday night. I'm not expecting a huge turnout. Um, maybe if things are not uh if things are super quiet, maybe we'll uh we'll call it a little bit early. But that's okay. I uh I just wanted to do a little bit of a drop in to make some uh content because I had a quiet Saturday night and um yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So, hello. Hello everybody. Um happy to uh happy to be here. So, uh, normally what I do, um, on these streams is that we kind of open up with a little bit of a do a little bit of a preamble like I'm doing right now. And then we're going to kind of do uh stuff that are called the wins where people share their W's and they share, you know, the things that they have been uh proud of that have happened in the last month or so, things that they've been successes that they've had, big or small, you know, things that they feel good about. That's sort of the thing that I always try to go with. And uh yeah, that's one of the things that we're doing today. Wow, that was um certainly not the strongest of openings, but uh honestly, there are nine people here, so you know, I am uh not too concerned.

Um, yeah. How's everyone doing? Who's in the chat tonight? Who's here to say hello? very tired. Yeah, me too. I had uh what's it called? Very um I had a I had a big day today. I had uh you know there's a big event in our neighborhood that I spent part of the day working at and enjoying. Uh nice weather. Went to go see friends. Um fun day, but overall just a very um very hot, lots of time outside, lots of time carrying heavy things, three-year-olds. And um yeah, the house just quieted down and you know, I'm happy to uh to have been to to be doing something a little bit more relaxing like hanging out here and talking to you guys. Um and yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff to get into. Like uh I guess I should give like a little bit of a project update. That seems like that would be a smart thing to do. Um, so new things. What are the new things that I'm up to? Um, currently I'm currently working on a freelance project uh that I am I've been working on basically since January. Uh, and it's going to be finished in about two weeks, a little under two weeks. And once that's done, uh, a lot of my free time, my 5 to9 goes back to everything else. But, uh, I have been working on a new stepback video. The only thing that has caused the new video to be put on ice briefly is that uh is one this freelancing project, but two um I got a really good uh lead on a uh like a really good interview with an expert in July or I should say I had a really good interview setup to do an interview with a really like with a Berkeley professor uh and she was totally on board to be in the she's totally on video, but she wasn't going to be available until July. So, I had to kind of put it aside for a little bit and pick it up a little bit later, but it's not forgotten. Plus, with like the podcast, um the podcast is still going. We just are at the moment trying to find nights where Scott and I can actually get together and record because again, I've been really busy with all of this stuff. So, uh everything is in, you know, the process of being made. Um, you know, things move at different paces based on time and availability, but uh I like this video is turning out really well. I think I've got like a really good set of experts and I'm really excited to do that. And once I actually get um this last interview done, then I'm like pretty much finished all the other research and I'm going to start working on the script. And the thing for me is that my process is that once the script is done, then the video making um you know machine starts to really pick up. And I have a bunch of other video ideas that I want to entertain in the near-term future uh that I might work on when like time comes up. But um just at the moment I have had uh work has like completely so I was in crunch time for this uh freelance project and my outside my regular nineto-five job also has been uh really really rough on me lately just because um we're short staffed and so I've been doing a bunch of work that I'm really not good at and I don't really like doing uh And it's been like, you know, very overloaded. We don't have enough time, don't have enough resources. So, I'm just like completely like I spent the last like 3 weeks like completely burnt out at work and then coming home and trying to spend all of the you know, all of the normal recovery time that a sane person would take, I am taking to finish

this freelance project because it has to be done very soon. Uh, and I've been uh, you know, hammering away at both and I am just, um, just a [ __ ] husk a little bit. Uh, but once they're all done, then it's going to be about well, then we're all then we're going to be about, you know, getting um I have a couple things that I want to do in the near-term future. I want to work on a uh an episode for It's Probably Not Aliens on K21 18b. Uh the the so-called planet with life on it that has been uh discovered a couple about a month ago. I feel like the the real hype on that has already been kind of uh over overdone, but I think it's interesting uh thing to talk about. Um there's also talk about me uh doing uh starting a substack. Uh this is something that I have been I floated to people on the Stepback Discord and they have seemed pretty uh happy with it. Uh there's a little bit of like you know some tension because some people don't like Discord for some of its policies but at this point it is so much the default for any like independent writing based content that it basically is the only place you can really do it. Uh so uh at some point I'll be making a Substack and I have an idea to put it up make a lot of articles free and then the paid articles I'm thinking of making like the member articles something like uh more um how do I say it? The the takes I have that I think I am I want like the least popular on the internet. you know, the ones that I know that like I'm going to need a group of people who are understanding and like, you know, have like a little bit more thinky about for me to talk about. Um, like I've been working on this big AI article for a little while now. Uh, a lot of people know that I have a set of AI beliefs that are kind of outside of the online left mainstream that uh I've been wanting to articulate for a while, but I have been um hesitant to just because, you know, people are so uh people are being so reactionary about the topic that uh I have kind held off instead of actually like you know instead of actually getting into it but I will at some point I do need to I do want to talk about articulate it and hopefully that'll be like an example of a paid article but uh writing might be like a way for me to uh make content that actually will like you know perform or that I can make content on a timeline that I can actually keep up with um between you know these step back videos which You know, ever since I had to quit doing Stepback full-time, I've been really like obsessed with wanting to make Stepback videos and keep trying to make them, but just like the time and energy that I have um actually have like ex to to give to it is so uh limited. Uh, and so I spend almost all of my time feeling like really guilty and really like um frustrated that there's just like not enough um that I just do not have the the [ __ ] hours and I energy to just go to work, come home, child care, dead, you know, put kid to sleep and then in that like you know two hours that I get that is like my only free time of the day to spend it then, you know, reading, researching, writing, that kind of stuff. So, especially because a good amount of that time is now taken up with like this freelance video editing and all this other stuff. So, yeah, I'm trying. trying. Um, yeah, got another video that I also did a whole bunch of stuff on that I'm pretty into doing. Um gosh, but I do have some step back videos that I want to make. Um I want to make a video on these are the ones I'm just sitting on as possible video ideas in the future. I want to make an idi fluoride. I want to make a video on um on French specifically about Africa and the French language and the sort of future of humanity and how French and uh French

is going to be one of the more prominent languages in the future and that we need to really be uh need to really think more about the French language and the African continent in a lot of ways because that's going to be like where all of the major stuff in the future is going to play out. Um, yeah, I also have video about why I don't like strategic voting. Uh, video about North Korea. Um, yeah, you know, I have stuff that I keep doing. So, I do keep trying. Uh I'm also hopefully uh I'm not you know no guarantees but I have a job interview coming up in uh about two weeks that I'm also like uh if I get it hopefully my life will be a little bit more sane because I won't have to do things like work on a Saturday morning or have random meetings that are like you know from 5 to 7 p. m. or and stuff like that. So I'm uh I'm hoping that you know that it'll change things up a little bit. Anyways, that's kind of the state of the projects. I have some other things that I've been wanting to play with like you know, I've been trying to draft out the idea of making a uh a little like role playing game about the apocalypse and you know, a couple other things, but that's not important. Um, all right. Let's take a look at uh how uh chat's looking for um when it comes to W's. Uh Medenmath uh ran a slow casual 5K every single day in May. Holy moly. I was able to work from home, so I was getting up at roughly 5:00 a. m. to jog as the sun came up. That is really cool. I walked a 5K a few weeks ago. That was fun. Um and yeah, but yeah, being able to run it is pretty intense and also just man jealous of the freedom you have there. Um Tarbo is getting is has started a two-month paid leave from your job for mental health. That's awesome. taking care of yourself and the fact that you have a job that is willing to give that to you is pretty good. Uh, have I read any of Jason Kivvito's work? I think he has the perfect guest for your podcast. Um, that name has I do not recognize that name, so obviously not. Um, Jason Kito, I know that people ask me to do uh to have mini Minute Man on the show a lot. Is that who this is? No, it's not. Okay. Interesting. Um, fun dino effect. One of the silliest names for a dinosaur was given to a soraod named Whoa, come on. All right. Gallia Mopus, which means needs helmet because the fragile condition of the type specimen's brain is interesting. Um, I find that my takes on AI all up with Alex Aillas. I do love that like the AI like teosphere is extremely funny because it's like if you go on like twitter. com or or blue sky uh or like you know browse around Tik Tok you find like people who are like absolutely uh absolutely like you know this is the worst thing to has ever happened. we will personally crucify and fle alive anyone caught using the evil uh degenerative AI. And then you like go to like an like somewhere in the real world where humans live and you are and like your boss is like should you should be using AI to do those uh to use do those meeting minutes, man. You're wasting a bunch of time. So, oh, am I still medicated? Yes. Yeah, I'm still taking the vance to kind of keep the brain keep the brain going. Um, struggles real. Yeah, good luck with the job interview. Thank you. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm excited because it seems that I've somehow stumbled into a career in communications and this job is at an actual communications company, which means that like instead of me being a person with

absolutely no knowledge of communications who has been dropped into an organization that only has space for one communications person. So, I have to kind of just be the department for a job that I have no clue how to do. Uh, I would be working with people who actually know what they're doing and hopefully uh learn how to do this career that apparently I'm stuck doing. So, that's fun. Um, fluoride French. Tristan, I'm an American. You have made me afraid for poorly understood reasons. I Yeah. Well, the thing is like I want to talk like the thing about with fluoride is like how fluoride like the reason why people are against fluoride or water fluoridation or however you want to call it is because it's a government service and like conspiracy theories are fundamentally a uh born of a mistrust or a dislike of government service and it feeds into rightwing narratives because the right always want to get rid of government services. And one of the ways that they have been able to effectively do that is by uh essentially just, you know, uh encouraging conspiracy theories that make people have a growing mistrust of the government. But fluoride is one of the most amazing cases of like actually you the government can do things. the government can successfully, you know, um make changes to your life that can improve things. Um water fluidation is like one of the great examples of that. such a it's such an easy fix and it does so much to help with oral health. And also just like how much people don't realize how like it's also fits into the whole idea in a way that maybe like vaccines might be too polarizing about where like um we take it for granted because it's like you know in our it's so it's been a thing that we know we've had for our entire lives and we don't realize just how bad like just like how like we don't realize how bad a world without vaccines is. And that has led to us like you know uh starting to think that vaccines are bad and then leading to measles outbreaks and kids dying and all sorts of stuff. Um but the other thing is like for example the example that I'd probably use in the video is that my mom uh grew up in uh a rural farm like basically in the middle of nowhere. literally like until she was five, she lived in a log cabin like um like very like like rural rural Saskatchewan. Um and uh and grew up on wellwater. And uh because she grew up on wellwater, her entire adult life has been marked with like with dental issues. Um, her brother, I mean, he he's he passed away a few years ago, but her brother, her younger brother in his like late 40s had dentures um because he didn't have any teeth because of the fluoride situation. There was no fluoride in his water. And like yeah, like my mom was always in and out of the dentist with like root canals and fillings and all those kinds of things um because her teeth were really chalky. And like uh people don't realize like how big a deal fluidated water is because we've really never known the world without it. And the French thing is just the fact that like there's a couple things I want to talk about that which is one um Language barriers are real and there are entire worlds like this world has multiple worlds in it and we are just completely checked out because of language barriers and like I know we live in Canada or I live in Canada. Most of my audience lives in the US. most of which are which you know primarily uh speak English. And so the Anglosphere is like the world we know. like we are more intimately familiar with politics of places like uh like the UK and Australia and New Zealand and the United States because those are English-speaking countries and uh the like you know the the places like you know like like South Africa is a country that we're well aware of because it used to be an English like used to be a British colony. Same with Israel. Um and so like that is like the

geopolitics that we like acknowledge and that we think is like you know what we are familiar with. But the thing is that uh and this is the thing that we've you know not experienced in many a generation. Um probably like this is the first time this has happened probably since like the 18th century. But we're going to be moving to a world where English isn't sort of the language of the most powerful empires which means that like you know in the decades to come you know like Mandarin Chinese like we don't like we get so little like really straight and solid information about what's going on in China. And one of the main reasons is because uh you know people by and large don't know Mandarin. Um, and those even though who do like they might know it at a sort of low proficiency, so they can't like keep up with like the news and Mandarin and stuff like that. Um, and so you're locked out of like, you know, China, which is probably going to be like, you know, all things considered, is going to is already like the world global superpower. Uh, and yet, you know, they have a spa they have a space station. I have no idea what happens on it. They have uh they're they just built like a huge nuclear power plant and I didn't know anything about it and I don't know any details even now. Um, and one of the things that I am kind of clued into because I do have some uh French proficiency is like French like the French the franophhone world is its own world and that like if you live in like France, you actually have a pretty good knowledge of like well like not to the extent of like you know like a lot of things but like in the French, the French speaking world has its own sort of culture and politics and stuff and we um we do not really like get to know a whole lot about those countries and those cultures. And this is you know like you know that you know the so what uh is that if you look at the population growth trends of most countries uh in the sort of next like 50 60 years pretty much every country on earth is uh slowing down its population growth and we're probably going to be in a space where most countries have negative population growth by 2100. 00 um to the point where like we're at 8 billion right now in 2025 and most demographers have kind of come to the consensus that 9 billion somewhere in 9 billion is probably going to be the peak of the human population before it starts going down. Now that being said, there are a few countries where population growth is still high and is expected to grow over the next few centuries. Mostly because we have a we know of a pretty standard process of like where a country starts off as a primarily um rural uh agricultural uh you know underdeveloped country and then goes through a period of industrialization and like massive increases in like standards of living and and social services and all those kinds of things. And that leads to a cycle that people see of like large population growth. And then as you sort of settle into an industrialized society over the decades, uh as children become more of a liability than an asset, it starts to level out. And also as like you know, women's rights and when this happens, women's rights tend to increase and tend things to get better for women and there's more choice over reproduction and the population starts to even out and then it starts to go down. But um many of the countries that are going to go through that big population boom that comes with like development and stuff like that are French-speaking countries. The countries that are expected to go through that in the next few decades are countries like uh Mali uh Congo um Sierra Leon and Kotivo and like you know like all these countries are in Africa and they're all going to go through this process and the sort of uh language of business there language of international communications in there is all French. And so I thought that it would be good for people to, you know, for a video understand what's going on in sort of the franosphere and also what we're going to expect in the

future. Like one of the things that I always think is really cool is that French is going to become one of the most widely spoken languages on Earth. Um it it's possible given that sort of demographic transition that's happening that uh that French will become a more widely spoken language like there will be more people in the world who speak French than English uh by the end of the century possibly you know if everything goes according to predictions um which is quite wild because English like English domination of the world has because the last two global empires have been English-speaking countries um has been pretty dominant since basically like the 1800s or sorry not the 1800s the 1700s actually and so uh this is a huge change for like the world and uh I don't know I think that means that for the future we probably should be more aware of what's going on in countries like Congo in countries like Kotiwa in countries like Mali and also know what the sort of politics and dynamics are of those because the anglophere is fairly uninformed and I don't know maybe I can also push that people should probably learn a new language because uh whether it's Mandarin or French uh these are languages that people should that will be like the more you know the more dominant languages on earth and that if you want to you know be successful be a well-informed person they're important to know and it's probably one of the reasons why Canada is making a really big push for more franophhone immigration. So, you know, let's see. Big Brother, help improve dental health. Must be a conspiracy. Yeah, exactly. Um, it's a big trend these days of people wanting to tear down the fences without one checking why they're built. Man, that there you go. That's actually a very good um that's a very good quote. I feel like I want to steal that. But I like that there's Yeah, there's a big Yeah, people who want to tear down fences but don't understand why they were built in the first place. Good call. Does the video about French uh discuss the sapier warfare hypothesis that language uh points of cognition? Maybe. I don't know if I want to get too deep into like the language itself. The only thing about like lang like about the mechanics of language that I do want to talk about in that video is that um unlike English, French does have rules. Um like I know that English has rules but French has a like governing body. There is something called the Akad Mi fals uh in France that sort of dictates the rules of what proper French is to look like. And the thing about it is that it had uh the academ is um is compared to a lot of other languages uh that have similar types of institutions is actually rather conservative. Uh French has uh been very hesitant to add uh new words. um which means that French the French vocabulary is actually quite small especially compared to English where I think that uh French has about a vocabulary of about 125,000 words while English it's like north of 500,000. Um but French also has some arcane grammatical rules and has a number system that is absolutely [ __ ] crazy. uh that are very overdue for modernization. But uh the Akad France has been you know against doing that. Uh so that you can say that you know Jay-Z has 420 and 19 problems but a [ __ ] ain't one as an example. Um and if you know French that's a funny joke. Um but what's happening what's going to happen too in the decades to come is that the population of French speakers outside of France is going to become so much more numerous which you know there already way more people who speak French who live outside of France than who live in France but um the sort of like relevance like France like French is becoming a more powerful uh language, but France isn't becoming a

more powerful country. And so what we're seeing and there's actually like some work to be to do this uh is that there's a sort of like the African countries that are, you know, um using French to collaborate and talk to each other are kind of developing their own rules for the language. And as time moves on, they'll become more of the de facto way that French is spoken rather than the proper academ style. And so the language is going to go through a major shift which is important to do because French has a lot of weird problems like because of that arcane rule that I just that arcane set of um of standards because of the academ it's its grammar is very complicated and uh it means that and anybody who studies French can tell you that there's a uh large and widening currently gap between how French is written versus how it's spoken. And it's very easy to become uh to be able to read and write in French but not be able to speak it and being able to speak French but not being able to read and write. Uh and so and the thing is that a lot of these changes like that like you know like these uh these this sort of African dialect of French uh could nudge the language in a lot of directions to make it a more functional useful language and kind of loosen France's grip over it. And there's sort of an interesting like, you know, French is the language these countries speak because of the, you know, because of France's colonization and in taking the language back for themselves are almost like taking it away from France. And I think there's something kind of interesting and cool in that. And so there's something to talk about there that I think will be really interesting, but that's sort of a direction that I want to go. Um, and yeah, then just like the the French-speaking world is going to be more like maybe I don't think I've I only have done one video on it, but like one of the things that I kind of every so often want to do is just drop everything and dedicate my life to helping out Congo. Um, I am like I have like a slight sort of place in my heart uh specifically for the DRC that um that not a lot of other countries have. And I'm like I I I I'm as you know as I'm learning more French and getting better at it um that's one of the things that I uh that I want to like look into. So yeah, let's see. Hey Tristan, this is my first live stream. Just wanted to say I love your content and hope to catch your live. Sending all the best to you from Carrie on top. Well, that's nice to say. Thank you. Uh you have this if that is your actual name, that's my dad's name. My dad's name is Carrie with a K. So I've already I already like you cuz that. So take that however you want. Um Tristan's hot take of babies exist is a little too much for me to get behind, but I'm open to evidence. Yeah. Yeah, babies do ex I What's it called? Just today we were hanging out with a couple of our friends who just had a kid like two weeks ago and they had their like little two-week old son and he was just like a little tiny baby and it's like oh my god yeah babies exist. But yeah uh obviously like you know the there's an overall uh demograph like the overall demography of the world as we are changing from you know the long duray uh change from a uh you know industrial to post-industrial world or whatever you want to call it. uh or you know just the the underdeveloped parts of the world because of colonization finally having their own time to tr to go through these transitions. Um does mean that yeah like a lot of the world the population growth is slowing down. Um this is why everybody who like [ __ ] about overpopulation um are I made a whole video about why I think overpopulation is a racist myth. Um but um they don't have anything to worry about. 9 billion is like the highest that it's going to go and then it's going to start going down. Um we'll probably have fewer people in 2200 than we have now. Um because yeah, like the amount of babies per person is going down and obviously like it's never going to get to zero.

Um but uh it'll but you know like a certain rate of child bear of child having is going to result in a like it's going to stabilize at a certain point and I don't know exactly what it's going to stabilize at but um it's a big problem for uh economies that are based on constant economic growth. But, you know, if you don't have an economy based on constant economic growth, I mean, if we had a uh an e economy based on constant economic growth, we're not going to survive the 2200 anyway. But we are but if we do you know either like buy into degrowth or you know uh like you know increasing automation and all sorts of stuff in order to live more sustainably then like our population the global population going down and balancing at some much lower number is not going to be as painful as we think. And uh the Malthusian argument that we're going to overrun the world's carrying capacity is not a thing. Um we're not we're we're nowhere close to the sort of um amount of people that the planet can hold. And the issue of the world is not like most the vast majority of the human population consumes a tiny amount of resources. The issue isn't that there are too many people. The issue is people who live uh lifestyles like you know like ours in the west. Um because you know my lifestyle uses the resources of like you know thousands of people in the global south and that is the problem not the fact that there are thousands of people in the global south. Um, yeah. So that's that industrialization has a tendency to extend life expectancy as fertility rates decline. Yeah. So we're also going to be living longer and so our population is going to skew older and and with fewer people. So like the future that we're all going to face is the kind of demographic problems that Japan has, Korea has. The only difference is that those countries are suffering because they have low immigration. Uh the rest of the world if one of the smart things they can do with to fight an aging population is to uh open up immigration and also to encourage immigration from the countries where there is still population growth happening. And right now that's mostly the Middle East and subsaharan Africa. And so and in the Middle East it's starting to slow down. So um specifically like the big diaspora like you know how like in our world today we're we we've like lived through you know the Indian diaspora. There are Indian communities all over the world. Uh there's you know there's Chinese communities all over the world because of immigration. The next big one we're going to have is like congalles Nigerian uh you know Ivory Coast uh Nishair. Nijair is another country that is go that is going to have a big population growth. um you know all of these countries are are going to go through the population boom and then we're going to also uh going to have them um like a lot more people who immigrate uh to places around the world are going to be African rather than like you know from other places um in case you wanted to know what the future's going to be like and a lot of them are going to have French as their first language. I assume Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish would overtake French. Um, potentially. I never said that. I never said that they would. uh French was going to overshadow Mandarin. I just uh I think that French is going to overshadow English. I think that as we're seeing the United States go into uh decline and um and that like you know the sort of hedgeimonyy of North American and European power starts to wayne that like cuz like today if you were to ask what the most popular language was on earth it's actually bad English. Lots of people speak bad English. Um but uh a lot of people won't be as pressured to learn English in school like you know in countries where English isn't the main language when like you know there are options like Mandarin like French that kind of thing. And so uh French I think will just become a larger language than English. I don't think it's going to be the most spoken language on earth. Um and even then I think it's g it's that's a that's a guess and

I don't know if it's going to overtake it. And no, you know, Spanish could also work, but span but the sp the thing is that Spanish-sp speaking countries are also seeing population uh decline and uh and stagnation. So like Latin America had its sort of population peak uh several decades ago and it is also now hitting the point where it's going to start slowing down and going um they're going to start getting into a place where they're not even above replacement. We're not there yet, but we're getting there. Oh, great. We're rolling going to have to watch Jerry Lewis movies. So when we meet somebody from our new Lingua Franco's homeland, they'll be able to talk to them about something that they're interested in. Hey, there's upsides, too. You don't have to deal with Jerry Lewis. We'll Lewis, but we can also deal with like um actually like right before the stream started, I was watching the movie uh Mars Express. And I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but it [ __ ] rules. And um I have been um hovering around the uh the bond dons. I don't know if anyone bond don bond dans bond dime. That's it. Um which is the kind of French word for comics. Um like about 10 years ago, people were like, "Oh, French comics are going to like overtake like French comics hitting the comic book scene is going to be like when uh when manga hit the west, right? Like it's going to be like this huge thing. " it didn't end up being as big a thing, but um but French animation and French comic books are like a really wellestablished uh thing with like their own sort of style and there's a lot of interesting stuff. And one of the things that's really cool that comes out of that that scene is that um France has a fairly strong arts funding scene. And so like there's a lot of like French like movies and film and or I guess this there's a lot of French like you know cinema animation comic books literature all that kind of stuff that is made more through like incubator funds and like government programs and like things like you know can like the festival has like they have their own sort of thing that like funds like small indie projects. And so like France's arts scene, media scene has a lot more of like, you know, people making cool things that are like kind of they don't have to hit a marketable demographic. They're kind of more interesting, experimental stabs in the dark and they don't necessarily rely on like, you know, trying to make a fuckload of money as fast as possible. Um, and so when I'm seeing like like uh I just like I said I just ended up watching the movie Mars Express which is really cool and it reminds me a lot of um the sort of vibe that I used to and really enjoy in anime but has kind of gone away in recent decades. Like I really like I I'm not like a you know huge like I'm not a giant anime fan overall. Uh I you know there's nothing specific about anime that I enjoy but there is like you know there is anime stuff that I enjoy but I'm not like a person who like will like something just because it is anime if that makes sense. Like I approach anime films and shows in the same way I approach any other show. Um, and you know there and I have found that uh I really enjoy like of the anime that I do enjoy it's much older stuff like things like the movie Akira and like uh like Ghost in the Shell and like Pat Labbor and like even like sort of 90s Gundam shows and stuff like that. I have I enjoy that kind of stuff more than like modern day stuff. And I felt like, you know, watching Mars Express, but also some of the other sort of French animation stuff that I've been watching, I it feels more like kind of like that kind of like late 80s, early 90s anime feel than like, you know, anime feels like today. So, if you're interested in trying something out and you don't mind watching movies with subtitles, Mars Express, pretty cool. Um, too late for W's. No, Matt, you can give me W's anytime you want. Feel free to steal the fence thing if you want. It's like a common saying after all. Ah, okay.

Not going to lie, I don't like having a literal hierarchical body defining a major language. Yeah, that's true. Although like you know like French is especially conservative but like German has one and German actually like German the German like sort of academy that manages the German language is actually fairly um they're fairly modern and they they allow for like they typically change their language to make things easier and more accessible like um you know and that kind of stuff. And like for and also like um you know an example like I always think about like how Mandarin like one of the biggest things in Mandarin that has changed everything there is pinion um and pinion is like you know I wouldn't be surprised if pinion became almost like a uh like I could imagine that if we live in like a world where China spends a good amount of time being like the hegemonic power that rules you know is like the most powerful country on earth that a lot of the world that you know uh spent a lot of time under Anglo-Hemony that uh that Mandarin in pinion is going to be a fairly common uh like form of communication. For those who don't know, pinion is basically a um a way of writing uh Mandarin that is done with um with accented uh Latin characters rather than like the sort of you know simplified Chinese character system. It was originally designed so that um Chinese people could write uh easier like on their phones and stuff like um if you ever like a Chinese person on their phone, they'll usually have like a sort of like a keyboard just like mine uh and then they will write in the opinion of the thing that they want to say and it will convert that opinion into the symbols that they then read. It's interesting thing. One wonders how this will affect Creole speakers. Yeah, I mean English has pigeon um which is a similar concept. So kind of like how Mexican Spanish is the default even above Spain Spanish. The real academia delingua Espanola is much more lean about new words, though. Yeah. The the French version is just particularly conservative about these things. Last month, my sister went on vacation. I got to the apartment all to myself for almost a whole month. Nice. Popping in to send some love. Always happy to see you, stream. And thank you, Don. Dant rump 901. That's awesome. I think I'm the freedom of space. Yep. I remembered there was a time when I lived in Quebec that I um that I had uh I had an apartment in Quebec where I had three roommates. Uh so rent was extraordinarily cheap. I think I ended up paying like 150 bucks in rent or something crazy like that. Um because this is also like over 10 years ago and it was Sherbrook so it was not an expensive town and we were in the like cheapest part of Sherbrook. Um but um so our rent was really low and I had three roommates. Um but all of them had not stayed for the summer but we had to pay because of how Quebec works. Uh in Quebec you pay your lease and the lease goes from July to July or the July to the end of June. Um, and so, uh, we had it for the summer and so like the we were between two school years and on we had to so we had to lease the place starting in July if we wanted to stay there for the school year that was going to be like September until you know until April the next that following year. I decided to just move to Quebec early and focus on at that point I was working on writing my GREs. So I was just gonna move there and um and you know focus on studying over the summer because I was like this is an apartment I'm paying for anyway so I might as well like live there. Um anyways uh when I had all my roommates were out like they didn't live there so I had the entire apartment to myself and that was pretty cool. I like that a lot. Um, and so like, uh, I remember I did things like the number one like most degenerate thing that I did, uh, because that situation was that, uh, the washing

machine became my laundry hamper. So, I would just like throw my dirty clothes in the washing machine when I was done wearing them because then when it was full, I could just turn it on. And also because I was, you know, a uh a 22 year old or whatever, I also I probably used my dryer as my dresser. You and your comrades got to march in the Mayday parade in Ottawa and even got to speak with someone unionizing at one of the local animation studios. That's pretty cool. That's very cool. Um, let's see. I got scrolled down. Um, got to see Sinners, which is a W of a movie. Can't remember which one that is. I was going to go to the movies the other day. Um, except that the time didn't work out, but I was kind of intrigued by the movie Bring Her Back. It seems like it's apparently a pretty good movie. Um, but I haven't been to the movies in ages. The last movie I saw in theaters was um Deadpool, I think. Yeah. To show you how often I go to the movies, the last movie I saw in theaters was Deadpool 3. Then the last movie I saw before that was Elemental. And I think was like Chun. What was that? Um Shang Oh, what was that? What was that movie called? The Legend of the 10 Rings. What? 10. Shang Chi. Oh, no. I think at some point I also end up seeing like I This is the thing. I when I like typically I only go to the movies when I'm like, "Ah, what else are we going to do? " I guess like let's see if a movie is playing and then I don't know anything that's playing because I haven't watched any trailers. I'm like, "I guess we'll go see the Marvel that is in there. " The only like actual movie that I like in recent days that I like sought out to go see in theaters was um was Deadpool. um just because like you know I thought it was going to be good and it was so I got I enjoyed that but I'm not much of a movie guy as a lot of you know but I wanted to see I did want to see um uh Brer Back. It looked really good. Um, yeah. Anyways, uh, and I've heard that the 28 Years Later might actually be good, too, when it comes out. Do I have thoughts on Mars colonization? Um, yeah. I don't think it's gonna going to happen anytime soon. Will humans go to Mars? Uh, possibly. I mean, in like the in like the, you know, eternal length of time. Sure. Um, I wouldn't be too uh surprised if we kind of kept to the estimation that's been around for most of my life, which is that probably sometime in the 2030s someone's going to go to Mars. Um, if I were to hazard a guess, it's probably going to be the Chinese just because America is kind of going through the the process right now of dismantling the entire country's infrastructure and uh put all of its bets in a rocket company that uh like the latest like SpaceX's made like one good rocket and then their next project, this new Starship uh project doesn't really seem like it's designed to turn into a functioning rocket. It seems like it's designed to just milk the government for as much money as possible. So, like, you know, I don't know. Like, it seems like the the the NASA attempt to go to uh go to space again is probably not going to like happen anytime like it's probably not going to go anywhere anytime soon. My guess is that next year's moon mission is pretty much dead in the water at this point. Um, and so I'm get so I think like you all of our hopes are like I think 2032 the Chinese plan on putting a person on the moon and building a base uh in the sort of mid 2030s and then I think that like maybe we'll see something by like

the late 2030s of somebody going to Mars. Uh, as far as colonization goes, uh, Mars has a lot working against that and not a lot working for it. Um, Mars has uh toxic soil, no atmosphere, uh, heavy radiation, and then on top of that doesn't really have a whole lot of reason for people to go there. like Mars as a place for people to like as like a science thing like will I think that like maybe optimistically there'll be like a little science you know like kind of like what we have with Antarctica most optimistically I think that something like that on Mars is like is possible probably even likely but like colonization I doubt just because like there's no reason to there's nothing there's not really a lot on Mars that we want. Um I would argue that if there's anything that Mars is going to like actually be like, you know, if the only thing that would be close to Mars colonization would be building something in orbit because what we actually would want resource-wise is the asteroid belt that is after Mars and uh having a sort of refueling station on Mars would be good for that. But like actually like going down the Martian gravity well, we don't really have a whole lot that we actually want or need that is from the Martian surface like that we can't get way more of. And just the asteroid belt is a little bit further on. Hopefully that was enough to the Mars thing. You're going to volunteer help to recognize uh my org at an anarchist bookf fair that PM press will even be at. Very nice. Poverty exists because we can't not because we can't feed the poor because we can't satisfy the rich. Very true. Yeah. The whole [ __ ] with like um with Palunteer and um US is kind of creepy right now. I don't exactly know where that's going at the moment. Uh the United States is missing a big opportunity with not helping Africa. That is going to be the next booming economy and the Chinese are taking big advantage of it which is a good thing. Yeah. Uh yeah. The US has not invested in like its future by making relationships with these countries. Um, but China has and like you might have seen that like there was a bunch of countries that had like these sort of coups happen in subsaharan Africa in the last couple of years and a lot of them were throwing out leaders that were basically more cozied up with like France and uh moving towards ones that are more cozied up with like Russia/China and and you're going to like that's going to be more of like the thing that we're going to see in the future. Uh, I love your videos about the white power movement. Do you plan to do any more? Um, I mean, I've wanted to and then it kind of got stalled. The la What happened was that the last video I made in that series did very poorly and that sort of killed the momentum for me. And then I also tried uh and I did a few even interviews to that extent to try and do research into making the next one which would have been about the white power movement during like um during like the war on terror and the Bush years uh before going into the Obama years. But the thing is that actually like after um after the Oklahoma City bombing, there was a big decrease in like membership and like activity in the white power movement that really kind of went dormant until Obama. And so, um, like it's kind of like I'm kind of I kind of ran into like a difficult story to tell about what to do after Oklahoma City and then picking up like picking up we're kind of going then onto the thread that leads to the white power movement as it is today where it's like a very different beast. And so I mean if I can find a good angle, if I could like if I it's not a thing that I'm officially going to write off, but at the moment I don't have any plans to push a new part of it quite yet, unless something like really good comes up or like a really good idea comes up. Your tabletop friends bought you an Xbox Series X. You can play Marvel Rivals with them as a late birthday gift. That's really nice of them. Holy

crap. On the subject of immigration, hot take, Canada needs to pull out a safe third country agreement yesterday. Yeah, definitely for uh for the US. Most African countries speak French. Yeah, a good at least uh a maybe not so much by population, but by um by like the amount of countries definitely. Um, Nigeria doesn't really speak French and Nigeria is like right now like it's like what the second or third most populous country on Earth. No, not second. It's like the third or fourth most populous country on Earth. It's very close to the United States in population, but I can't remember if it has uh grown bigger than the US yet. Um, and that kind of skews the numbers a little bit because Nigeria is an extremely populous country. Nigeria is like going to be like the sort probably most powerful country on the African continent if it isn't already. feel like French music is becoming more popular in the angle sphere. Yeah. Oh yeah. If you want an example of the sort of bonds and like how big it's gotten, um like freaking a bunch of the studios that worked on Arcane were all French like French studios. Um, Arcane had like Arcane the Netflix show had a really good uh showing of like French animation and French animation styles. Um, and yeah, as someone pointed out like French music is already becoming much more popular. Um, that is true. French music is really good. France really invests in its artists. So, there's a lot of really good French like music, movies, TV shows, that kind of stuff if you're like, you know, if you have the language to to appreciate it. But music kind of transcends language and there's a lot of really good stuff there. So yeah, if you ever want to listen to some good French music or good music uh like I remembered uh some of the first ones, let me just give I'll give a few examples. Um there's a really good band named Sion Dao. Um they have a band called Madelion that's really good. They have a uh they have a song called Problem. Yeah, something like that. Um, there's also dance. I'm just gonna put a list here of like what I got right away. Like, um, that's a really old one though. Um, yeah, there's a lot of really good French music and it's coming more. I think think um one of those um Oh yeah, like in Arcane, one of the one of the biggest songs from Arcane is My Enemy. Seemed like half the shows I watched on Teleune growing up were French co-productions with a Canadian studio. Yep. Well, Canada's a bit different. We have a bit more of a connection with French stuff. 21st Century Start learning Mandarin Chinese, buddy. Yep. Have I ever seen Fantastic Planet? I saw it last year. It's on my list of things to watch. I assumed it was like pigeon or creel for Chinese. pinion is defin it was Chinese um was like sort of a way for Chinese to adapt to cell phones specifically like T9 texting and stuff like Yeah. Let's see. What political persuasion do I consider myself these days? It's a very good question. Um, I'm a little bit uh so I'm a little in some ways I'm a little bit in the woods.

Um, I still have, you know, I still have a pretty firm like anarchist streak to me to the point where like, let me see if I can show you like, you know, I still have I still have a lot of affinity for anarchists and anarchism. Um, I would say is that I still stick with it, but I would say that my um, as far as emphasis goes, my emphasis is definitely leaning more on the red than the black these days, if that makes sense. Um, like still I still consider myself like, you know, in an ideal world, I'd be an anarchist. And I think that an anarchist society ultimately will be the most like stable next evolution for like the fundamental process of human organization. But um lately I have been reading a lot more of like Marx theor Marxist theory and um I'm just like I'm getting I'm in the anarchocomunism. I'm finding myself more uh more stuck into the communism part than the anarchism part for now. Mostly uh you know as we're entering into a world where uh where you know Chinese communism is going to be like the sort of growing uh default left-wing ideology at some point. um you know not in the west but uh in most of the world like sort of like uh sort of Chinese style communism is going to become more of a thing then like I I I fundamentally think that that's a better economic system than the one that we have in the west you know the capitalist one but um I do obviously not enjoy that like you know that is a system that also has a uh fairly low respect for human rights and and I think that you know I can't I just can't shake like you know my cultures uh emphasis on wanting freedom and autonomy and all sorts of stuff. Um, not that I'd say that those are like, you know, universally universal things across all cultures, but um, I do think that, you know, I think that there if like we live in like sort of I just long for the days, I guess, you know, I long for the day when like the difference between anarchists and and you know, Marxist, Leninist, Mauists, or whatever it is you want to call yourself, when whenever like that distinction actually has any real point to it whatsoever. Um, man, long for those days. Um, at the moment, I don't really see much point in like us fighting over the best way for us to get to the, you know, in a more the most ideal situation down the line when at the moment we're still fighting like capitalism at its core, which we're not really going to h we're not going to be able to have, you know, anarchism without uh without getting rid of capitalism first. And at the moment like most of my like political energy is getting very frustrated with liberals, like neoliberalism and like uh just like the sort of um like the the like we're getting kind of like distracted in like the sort of way that politics is going right now because it is like you know the people and stuff in power but like I think that like Trump coming into power and sort of um you know the very close call we had with Pierre Polyv here is that like I think that neoliberalism and the sort of like you know uh Davos World Economic Forum uh system is collapsing. it's falling apart and uh what it gets replaced with is you know if the choices are going to be you know following the west into uh racecentered fascism or following China into a authoritarian uh you know communism I'll take the authoritarian communism over the fascism any day of the week. Um and um you know so amongst the choices there but you know when it comes to like how do I what is like the ideal way for humanity to be organized I mean I would say that like we probably need to do away with the concept of states because states seem to cause more problems than we solve. And I feel like we just like we learn just like we should have learned during World War I uh with monarchies like you know during World War I we learned that the monarchy state gives too much power to just a few people who are not trained for the job and I think we're entering into that state where like uh states today you know with like

Donald Trump and stuff like that are showing that like giving uh giving any like sort of organized body this much power over others is a dangerous prospect and is ultimately self-defeating. And I hope that could be a thing that we can actually like, you know, address at some point in the future. But uh but we're a kind of I feel like we're collectively as a as a planet very far away from that conversation and I don't want to waste my energy um you know too much. Took a kid see the Minecraft movie and it was a [ __ ] experience. That's most recent movie I see and I wish I hadn't. Yeah, Mars colonization is a Musk pipe dream not worth discussing until we learn how to do cold fusion. Yeah, cold fusion is not a thing that's going to happen, but um hot fusion looks like it's going to happen. I did see that um there was a there was one there was a uh there was a company that was making like a fusion that was working on a fusion powered engine that could get the uh the trip to Mars reduced to like weeks instead of months which could very much change the math on all these things. Um, I don't understand wanting to colonize anywhere in space. If we had the technology to do so, we should have the technology for Earth to be fine. Yeah. I mean the thing is like on you know along a time scale we'll probably end up like our we can tell through like anytime we do technological advancement that we have a larger uh need for energy and there are some there's some stuff you know there's some like you know natural resources in space that uh that our future will kind of depend on like the minerals there's a lot of minerals that are very abundant in the asteroid belt that are very rare on Earth's surface and much easier to get. So like it would be worth it to to do that. And also like we're going to get to some point where like the amount of excess heat made by a lot of industries in our current world is going to be enough to actually, you know, cause a heat problem on Earth. And so at some point in our future, if we're going to keep developing technologies, we're probably going to need to transfer some of the things that we do like our industries into space, which is going to require, you know, all sorts of stuff. So, I'm not like I don't think that like, you know, writing off doing stuff in space is a is a thing. I'm too I think there is some value to it. Don't go to Mars. Feed the poor instead. I would honestly argue that you can do both. Like I would say that like things like the things that we're going to do like example if we were to make a sort of scientific outpost on Mars uh the things that we would discover technologically that we would develop in order to help uh in order to make a like you know self- sustaining presence on that planet happen. um the discoveries could, you know, change the way that we do things here. Like I think that those kinds of engineering problems do pay dividends back home. question. Are you aware of the current protests going on in LA right now against the ICE agents? Is positive change finally happening? I am aware of it. I don't know any details. I just know that it is a thing that is happening. Again, I haven't really been um at my computer in the last two days, so I don't really know too much about what's going on. like I haven't had time to really um keep up on the news today. So, I don't know the details of what's going on. I'll be honest. Um because, you know, everything is unfolding so fast. But I hope it's but I mean the

from what little I've heard it seems optimistic. That's good. I don't know exactly because I also know that the US has been having massive protests all the time and it doesn't seem to do anything. So I don't know if this is like different from all of those like you know trying remember what that movement was called but there was some kind of like thing that was going on when Trump got into office that was like where they're having like massive protests around the country every weekend and it didn't really seem to do anything. I have no idea. Um, besides being hyper capitalist, the USA is far too Christian to be considered genuinely civiliz. Oh my goodness. You loathe arcane. The capacana is atrocious. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's no real walking your way out of that one. But also, it's very pretty. The characters are very interesting. It's honestly like I I liked Arcane if anything just for like I barely understood what the story of it was. It was just such like a um like the animation was so good. The music was so good and uh some of like the you know animation stuff done was just so like captivating that I almost watched the show on that alone honestly. How will Quebec benefit from a growing diaspora? Will immigration spread outside of just Montreal? Uh, I think so. Um so RD um one of the just last week the new government outlined its immigration priorities and I do actually like work in Canadian immigration and one of like the big pushes that Canada is trying to do right now is um is in franophhone immigration outside of Quebec. Like if you are a franophhone who wants to move to Canada and wants to live somewhere that's outside of Quebec, it's actually very easy or at least it's not. It's a lot your your pathway gets a lot easier. um like there's a whole initiative to create franophhone friendly cities outside of Quebec and um to like a lot of cities are being put under more pressure to have a uh more friendly French like h have a more friendly franophhone services and like have more like um have French just be better represented. So yeah, um I expect that uh you'll see in the coming years that uh more Canada is going to be getting more French over time. Like uh we have more French like already um the government starting to put more emphasis on French as a language that is in more places. And I'm hoping that if that trend continues that we're going to see like, you know, more like uh like I live in London. London already has several French schools and I imagine we're going to see more and that um a whole French school system that is, you know, that right now is very small outside of out, you know, where we live, but like I think it'll go places. I think there's I think there is something. Let's see. Way too many Canadians either think the Liberals are the leftwing party or that they won't do any neoliberal thing. Yeah, that's why I think that's a problem. Like I think to like in Canada the political enemy that needs to be actually like focused on for our efforts to defeat is the Liberal Party. um without getting rid of the Liberal Party, there's no chance for the left to make any progress whatsoever in uh changing can Canada for the better. Same with the US. I think that like you can point to a lot of Trump's victory as a failure of the Democratic party and that if the left is going to make any is going to have any success in America and that things are going to be made any better, the number one enemy that needs to be defeated is the [ __ ] um is the Democratic party. the Democratic Party is uh an absolute is what is standing in the way of success and by doing so by actively trying to push back against the left they are essentially handing the country to the right and I do think that if um if we made the effort known that like you know in the US the Democratic party is the main enemy that we should be fighting

um then if they can be defeated then defeating the Republicans would be child's play Because the main reason why the Republicans keep winning is because the Democratic uh offer is nothing. The Democratic Party's like only ideology seems to be elitism and people [ __ ] hate it. It was only uploaded by bowling down to the whims of the NGO's benefit. Libertarian once asked me why we should why we wouldn't find the prospect of having my own personal lava tube on Mars thrilling. I unfriended don't waste time. I mean the thing is that Mar like the moon does have a purpose like people living on the moon is definitely a thing that could happen because if we are going to have like space-based industry which we could do and would make some sub some industries would actually be a lot easier in space and if we're going to you know to feed our economic engine if we're going to start mining asteroids or comets or like you know sending ships to the asteroid belt or whatever the moon is a natural place to do that. Plus, um, if fusion power becomes a thing, which, you know, signs are pointing to that we're like closer than people think, um, that the moon has uh access to helium 3, which is a uh it's a substance that nuclear reactors produce like the entire world produces less than a kilogram a year. And we need uh like it's a required substance in the process of the way that we do fusion right now. And so the moon could very well be a place that we go to get fuel. And it has a lower gravity well than the earth. And so it's a good place to like set things up for people who then want to go, you know, set go off to other places. So, and it only takes like, you know, a couple days to get there. The good parts of why I hate it so much. I think it's a dangerous piece of media. It's like how I can't overlook the harmful tropes in anime in order to enjoy it. All right. I feel like uh season two of Arcane doesn't look so great on the cops and if anything like the cops are like kind of the villains in season two to the point where like you know the person not to like give too many spoilers of that of season two of Arcane, but like the cop character keeps doubling down on being a cop and in doing so becomes is basically a [ __ ] dictator and only redeems herself by basically breaking out of the system. So there is that live in a system with a CFB and fairly strong federal presence overall. There's a lot of French people here despite it being on the west coast. Ah, you live in the stone store of the French school and your kid school has a strong French immersion program. Yeah. See, I'm so late. You actually caught my stream for once. Well, welcome if you're in Europe. Oh my goodness, you are up late. I missed doing this full-time where I could actually do streams during the day when Europeans were actually awake. I miss very much just being a content creator. Holy moly.

Um, the moon rules. Hey, how are the new glasses? I love these glasses. I feel like they fit me so well. Like they are they suit my face so well. And I feel like um before this I had uh actually they're right here. So these were my um so before you know before I transitioned these were the glasses I wore before and these feel like this feels very 2010. This feels very 201s you know this feels very like the age of the hipsters and the uh and the band fun and all that kind of stuff. Uh, and it felt very like this is Tristan in his 20s. Um, and I didn't really think I think that it was time for a shakeup. And this look um feels very me in my 30s and I feel like I really I like the way that these make me look. They from the second I was trying on new frames and I saw and I had put these on, I was like, "This is wonderful. I love these glasses and I want to keep with it. The circle lens is uh I knew it was going to be a bold choice, but I have not regretted it for a second. If you need a narrative hook for the postc period, um Alex Jones would be a good useful lens. He embodied the uh the propaganda shift both in format and rhetoric. Yeah. I guess the story of post Oklahoma City farright is basically uh it uh becoming more and more normalized and more focused on consciousness raising and then sort of being absorbed into the Republican party. um by the time we get to now where like you know white supremacists basically run the United States. So another note on these glasses and it makes me look like I'm a 1920s German scientist. Like I look like I'm going to make some sort of major discovery in quantum mechanics. Oh, yes. I have a cat that is alive and dead. That's I'm not very good at German pronunci German accents or anything. I gotta work on my German accent because I'm um I'm running this D and D campaign, like a short D and D campaign that's kind of based on like noir 1920s prohibition stuff. And one of the characters that I'm introducing, one of the villains of the of the campaign, uh she's this teling scientist who has the circular glasses and uh I'm trying to find out what her uh name is again, but my guess is that I'm going to try to give her something like a German accent because it kind of fits the sort of science like mad scientist vibe. type that I'm going for. I don't think her name is very German. I'm trying to look it up what her name was again because I wrote it down somewhere. Um, let's

see. Gosh, I want to find the name because I was very happy with the name. Her name is Adrienne Sorenson, a Teling scientist and physician who invented a uh machine that extracts the magic out of people. It's a very fun campaign. It's only supposed to go about six sessions. And uh so we're about the halfway mark in it now. All right. So what else? Uh, we've got about a little under 20 minutes left to talk. Is there anything else that we need to discuss or chat about? I see that the chat has kind of slowed down somewhat as I dipped into trying to find the name of a random uh tling NPC from a game I'm running. But I just wanted to share Adrienne Sorenson because I feel like that's just such a cool name for an NPC. I did a thing lately where I've been um I've been uh I'm I feel like lots of creative people do this so it doesn't seem like it's that uh that uh out there but I just collect names I like now and I just use those uh whenever I can because just a lot of names I like and um and I just sort of want to use those because they're Cool. And Adrienne is definitely one of the names that I was waiting on using. And same with Sorenson as a surname. You think you lost your magic around 5 years ago? Yeah. Well, the the plot of the campaign, like the the main thing of the campaign, it's called Prohibition Arcana, and the whole plot of it is that after a major magical disaster in the sort of city state that they live in, the uh the the there was a law put in place called the Arcane Volstead Act that banned uh the use of magic spells of any kind and the use of like magic items and like the creation of potions and all that kind of stuff. Um, and it's had been uh it's been a very uh detrimental law for a lot of people. Uh, fairies who used to sell fairy dust no longer have that industry anymore. Um, they carved out exceptions for uh for holy magic and so like clerics can still practice and for and magic used for medicinal purposes. But um yeah, if I could travel to any time and place, where and when would I want to go? I'm trying to think of like a big like there's kind of two answers to there's like two ways to answer that, right? Like or I could think of three ways to answer that. One, which is probably not the answer you're going for, is like you'd want to travel to some kind of like hinge moment in history so that you could change it. like you know go kill Hitler or something like that. Um the other is like answering what historical event you would love to try to observe personally so you can know what happened. That one I have less of a good answer for. Um, just because like I can't really think of like a whole lot. uh immediately of like a

think of like uh immediately of like a specific event that I would want to see up close and personal. many of the most like, you know, one of uh important events in history were um pretty bad places to be, you know, like wars and [ __ ] Um and then the other option is like and the other way to answer that is like what time period do you think you would like your life would be better in? I don't actually I feel like uh the average person today even the person kind of struggling lives a better life than a king lived like 300 years ago. And you know doubly so if you're like you know uh like you like your life is way better today than it would be you know 100 years ago for everybody but like doubly so if you're like you know a woman or if you're uh LGBTQ plus or if you're you know not white. Um but um yeah like that. So like there's a lot of different ways to answer that. The other Oh yeah. So if I could go to any point in history, I just want to wander around cool places on normal uninteresting days and observe how life worked. Yeah. I mean, it'd be really cool to um hear like some of like the most important like speakers and like political movers in history. Like, you know, to see like an example like Lenin or Karl Marx speaking in person. Uh would kind of be a cool thing to witness. They were known for being like, you know, really animated and really like powerful speakers. Speaking on like, you know, it ideas that would then go to shape like all of history, right? Um or, you know, to uh to help John Brown. I don't know, man. Man, that'd be a good alternate history couple alternate history scenarios already that stick out like oh, everyone knows that I try to do like I when I try I sometimes do like alternate history speculations and I try to find interesting ones that are like not the sort of like same handful that people do. I wonder what would happen, what an alternate history would look like if like um if John Brown had not been captured when he tried to uh when he stole all or he tried to steal a bunch of weapons and hand them to slaves that they could break away and get free. I wonder what would happen. Um or um there's a bunch of other ones that kind I think about too like uh what happens if like the council of Na ended inconclusively and they didn't actually come to a set books of the Bible or like uh one that I think always makes people really upset is um if you if uh the battle of tours if uh the if uh what's it called? I can't remember what his name is. Uh King is like Richard um Charles Martell. Yeah. If Charles Martell had and his paladins had lost at the Battle of Tours, what would have happened? you know, um, that was a pretty important battle, so that sticks out. And then, um, there's another really good one. I'm here for the extended uh, John Brown timeline. Yeah, space fairing and terraforming Mars are a waste of time and resources. I think that well ter like terraforming Mars is a is uh I don't know if that's going to be possible if it's ever going to be worth the cost. It's a pretty that's a pretty beefy one. But um but I will say that like uh that like space fairing and stuff like that like I said the technologies that we would develop to do things like that would have like benefits to the rest of the world. And I do think that um interesting challenges like that do instead of like the idea that people think that like money is the thing that like spurs innovation. I think that

interesting challenges spring innovation and the innovations that like space fairing would have would change would would make would improve life on Earth immensely and then on top of that the resources would also not be bad either. owe So, we got about 10 minutes left, which we do. The Vikings who visited Finland gave smallpox to the natives. They had 450 years to build up immunity before 1492. Would there have been enough time in the like between the Vinland ra the Vinland Vikings and Columbus for that immunity to spread all the way across the continent cuz the people the pe the the I don't even know if we actually know who the people are. of the scrailings as the um as the Norsemen called them. Um they were in Newfoundland and the indigenous people of Newfoundland were fairly isolated from the mainland. So not entirely isolated, but you know, much like Newfoundland is today, fairly isolated. Um and so I wonder how long it would have taken for that kind of thing to travel. Favorite D& D campaign that I participated in before? um that I've run or as a player because I have GMD a lot more campaigns than I have um played. Um probably the favorite one I ran was a was like what we call the unicorn, which was a level one to 20 campaign that I ran with a group of my friends that took place over a period of about uh little under four years. And uh yeah, and it was uh it was like it ran from 2018 until 2021 and uh was pretty dang cool. I was pretty proud of that one and had a lot of cool stuff happen. And we actually did play a level one to level 20 campaign. Uh, as for the ones that like I actually like was a player in, I've only really been a player in two campaigns that actually came to fruition or actually like finished. Uh, one was Curse of Strod, which I enjoyed a lot actually. Uh, the other was um was a homebrew thing where we were kind of in this post-apocalyptic setting. I like that one a lot because I played a uh neurode divergent lesbian with uh who liked technology and guns. Um and the final boss fight of the campaign was uh interrupting a wedding against a demon. So that was fun. And now I'm running a uh I'm running a campaign that's been going for almost like it'll be two years this fall. And it is a uh it is about a isolated town in the middle of nowhere that uh keeps itself secret because what it is it's called refuge and it is this place where uh people who are considered part of the monstrous races uh go to get away from like the violence of being in the sort of fantasy world where like you know heroes are always trying to kill you or you know like and so like it's a town that's primarily made up of uh of orcs, nles, goblins, and uh cobalts. And the mayor is a beholder. And the whole idea is that it's like this town that intentionally keeps itself in this like pretty hard to access isolated place. And then the players are all like I think um it's a five person party right now. We've got um uh two cobalts. Oh, sorry. Two orcs, a uh a goblin, and um a ley, which is kind of like a plant person, which we've kind of made as like the one of the like indigenous cultures around, and a frog

folk person, who is another one of the indigenous cultures around. And um that whole campaign is about like the hard work of multiculturalism. Like it's about how to find identity and how to uh build how to build a community with like different cultures and so far people are really like we're having a lot of fun with it. There's some fringe theories. The Vikings sailed all the way to Central America and had contact with the past classical Mayans. Oh boy. It's just like how um I mean things like this do happen like uh somehow a Roman tri got like you know like uh lost at sea and because of the ocean currents eventually it uh washed up in the Amazon and so people caught under the impression that like oh the ancient Romans like ended up in um ended up in Brazil and it's like uh Okay, that that campaign with the multiple species thing, I think um I like that setting enough that I'm actually considering like making a published um campaign setting of it because I think it's cool to have a setting where like the main characters can be like nles and uh goblins And on top of that, like you protect yourself. The main that turns out the main villain of that campaign are turning out to be the Yuant T, which is kind of fun, too. The specific thing that I like about that this new campaign that I'm running is that um one of the sort of events that set into motion the Yuant T becoming powerful again was actually a thing that the players in that 1 to20 campaign did at the end. So like what they thought was a success uh is leading to the um is leading to was is what led to the Yuanti Empire kind of becoming powerful again. And the whole idea is that refuge which is the name of the town uh is located in like a place that used to be part of the Yuanti Empire. So the Yuanti are like this is our land. We're going to take it back now that like our empire is no longer in decline. and they have to defend it against the attackers and stuff and you know all sorts of fun stuff like that. It was the 80s is a very fun uh is a way to just say a lot of things like why were things like that? It was the 80s. things sucked in a very specific way back then. Yo, how much do you guys want to The one thing I am I did see that happen and I'm curious about what happens is like if Trump is Trump actually planning on like cutting all funding like federal funding to California, a state that pays like a lot of into the federal system. I'm like, "Oh god. Oh, is Gavin Newsome gonna do anything? I don't know. Gavin Newsome kind of sucks, so probably not. It'd be kind of wild if Gavin if uh if what's it called? the Trump thing about trying to block off funding to California results in California seceding or something or trying to secede. That'd be wild. Anyways, I'm trying to like catch up very briefly on what's going on uh with the federal government with the thing in uh LA and I'm don't know what's going to happen though. Seems like the National Guard is uh is being used, which is what the

hell. Anyways, it is 10:00. It's time for me to wrap it up. Um, you guys have been great. This has been a really good chat as always. Uh, I hope that you guys had a good time. This is a pretty chill stream. A good way to spend a Saturday night. Um, yeah, guys, be cool. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Enjoy. I guess I'll come back sometime in early July for something. But yeah, thanks for everything and see you guys around.