Yarco

If I'm doing a course that I paid money for, I give it my full attention and actually watch it and take notes. When I'm talking about listening to stuff at 2x - 3x speed, or listening while I cook or clean, I mean I'm listening to a podcast with Luis Elizondo talking about aliens for 3 hours or something. Not educational material. If I was watching Coursera/EdX, courses on Udemy, or anything like that, I have to actually watch and pay attention to absorb everything. But with podcasts it's more just for entertainment value, all I care about is the overall big picture, so it doesn't need my undivided attention. Never used it. But sometimes when I want to know the key takeaways of a book, but not read the entire thing or listen to it as an audiobook... I'll look up a summary on Youtube. Every popular book I've looked up always has multiple summary videos about it on Youtube, so I don't see the point of paying for a service like Blinklist I guess.

This is impressive, great work! I think the biggest takeaway is that if you're working for an hourly rate, you're always going to be capped. 99% of jobs make less than $100/hour. That means it's almost impossible to make more than $200,000 gross per year. You won't find many jobs above $50/hour that don't require 6 - 10+ years of schooling (doctor, lawyer.) So for the average person it's extremely difficult to make more than even $100,000 gross per year. The only people who can make significantly more than $100/hour don't sell their time by the hour. They run businesses. I really realized this recently when I was looking at $1.6M property, trying to make the math work on how I could possibly afford it. Even if my wife and I both made $100,000/year and saved like crazy, we wouldn't be able to do it. Even if we saved up the minimum 20% down payment over several years ($320,000), I don't know if we could make the monthly payments without stretching ourselves really thin. Payments would still be $8,000+/month! What's crazy is that in my area, $1.6M would buy a 50-acre ranch. But if you live in somewhere like San Francisco or New York, that'll only get you an average house! In lots of cities if you don't have a household income of $200k, you're never going to be able to buy, you're stuck as a renter forever. It's nearly impossible to break above middle-upper class and afford the stuff of the truly wealthy, unless you start your own business and stop charging for time. If you want to ever own more than an average single-family home, entrepreneurship is the only way to go.

So this is where things get a bit blurry. Actualized.org is a Youtube channel. But then Leo takes the audio from those videos and makes an audio-only version that he uploads to iTunes. At that point, I consider it to meet the criteria of being a podcast. Things go in the other direction too --- Lots of podcasts like Joe Rogan or Curt Jaimungal are really "video interviews" if you want to get specific about it. Something like Tim Pool or even David Pakman, I'd consider more of a livestream (I think most of their stuff is recorded live with call-ins? That's another problem, lots of creators are producing several different types of content that all look very similar lol.) I have a podcast that's available in video form on Youtube. But it also goes out in audio-only format to Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Podcast Addict, PocketCasts, Deezer, Overcast, and a bunch of other traditional podcasting apps. Is it moreso a podcast or a Youtube channel? I'd say podcast, just because I've specifically developed it with the audio designed to be the front-and-center focus. But it will depend from creator to creator. Podcasts in the past were audio and audio only. It was mostly a restriction on bandwidth at the time. People were still on 56K modems and basic DSL. They had to use RSS feeds to download podcasts onto their computer or device so they were automatically ready, because even downloading a 50 MB file might take you 30 minutes or more. Nowadays I would define a podcast as.... basically anything that's primarily consumed in audio format. If it's a Youtube video that you are only listening to in the background and the video imagery has little or no effect on the presentation, I consider it a podcast. So that includes things like videos I watch where it's just a guy sitting in his car and talking for 30 minutes. Biggest weaknesses is the long-form format, there are more efficient ways to get information. I listen to all my podcasts at 2x speed or faster to try and make up for this. The problem is you never know what sections of the podcast are gold, and what's a waste of time where it goes way off track. People can also form a parasocial relationship with podcast hosts. They start using podcasts as an alternative to socializing themselves. If you just listen to podcasts all day, it kinda tricks your brain into thinking you're actually having those conversations with people yourself. Strength is probably that lots of topics are too complex to fit into a 10 minute video. Podcasts are good for deep dives and learning everything you can about a particular topic.

I never got the hatred for Nickelback, I've always liked every song of theirs that I've heard. One of the few artists where I'd listen to their whole album from start to finish. Despite all the jokes and memes, everyone I've ever asked 1-on-1 admitted to liking them too. It's just a hush-hush thing you're supposed to be ashamed of I guess lol. Despite all the hate, Chad Kroeger still has a net worth of $80M and got to be married to Avril Lavigne for a year, so he's not doing too bad for himself.

All religions have an incentive to tell you that something horrible will happen if you kill yourself. Otherwise everyone would just commit suicide whenever things get tough, if they thought they could just take a shortcut to heaven. Until you're 100% certain though, I would operate on the assumption that this is the only 1 life you have, so it's probably worth living even if it sucks. You have infinity to not exist afterward. This sounds like a panic attack

You gotta watch Kane Pixels if you haven't yet, his videos are basically the Stranger Things of the Backrooms. Most of the canonical lore about the backrooms has come from his content, really develops the story behind what the backrooms is and how it was discovered. Here's a playlist of all his Backrooms videos so far: Shameless plug for a podcast episode I made about how to survive the Backrooms as well:

Not practically, it literally is: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/actualized-org-self-help-psychology-consciousness-spirituality/id998025672

You just have to get in a super extroverted and positive state, and then keep it flowing. Easier said than done, it takes practice. If you just pretend to be drunk for a while, you might be surprised that you'll actually start to act and feel like you've been drinking. Force yourself to laugh at everything, and before long everything will actually start to seem funny. You might be able to placebo effect yourself by having a non-alcoholic drink and pretending there's alcohol in it. Remember as a teenager giving people drinks and saying there was alcohol in it when there wasn't, and they'd start acting like they were drunk anyways. It's mostly all just mental, you just need to give yourself permission to let loose. It's like those movies where the hero has some item supposedly giving them their power. Then they lose that item, try anyway and succeed, and realize it was always within them all along and they didn't need the item. That's literally what alcohol is lol.

Every new girl you meet, it's a ticking timebomb counting down before you end up irreversibly in the friendzone. If you can tell her how you feel in the first 1 - 3 times you hang out with her it's best. The longer it goes on, the more likely you are to enter the friendzone. You don't need to crack some puzzle of touching her some certain way in a certain order or anything complicated. Just tell her how you feel. Tell her that you like her and want to date, in a non-creepy way, and sooner rather than later. That gives you the optimal chance of starting to date her or getting laid. You'd think that if you draw it out and let her get to know you for weeks or months, her chance of saying yes would go up when you finally do say something. But paradoxically it only makes things worse.

If it was two years ago and you have no plans to do that kind of work in the future, I don't know if there's much to do about it now. You could try doing a detox, as outlined in a video Leo did. You have to follow the protocol exactly or you could do even more damage, so you have to be committed. Mostly I wouldn't obsess about it. As a kid I chewed on a glowstick and it cracked some of the liquid got in my mouth, I've swallowed some mouthwash and toothpaste before, I've handled pink insulation without a mask or gloves, all kinds of stuff like that that probably isn't good for you. But what's done is done, no point worrying. Just wear masks, gloves, and all the proper protective equipment if you do that kind of work again in the future, is about all that you can do. Since you used the word sweatshop, I'm guessing you're not in a 1st world country, and your legal options are very limited or non-existent. Keep it in the back of your mind and tell your doctor if you think it relates to some disease or symptoms you develop in the future. That's about it.

You need to get it from a trustworthy supplier and read the label carefully. If the capsules contain mycelium it's not going to do anything. You need the actual fruitbodies. If it doesn't specify then it's probably garbage. If it says extract idk. Closer you can get it to fresh natural mushrooms the better. You can buy whole reishi and grind it up yourself. Lion's mane you can buy grow kits that are fully colonized where you just open and spray with water and mushrooms grow within a couple weeks, and you can eat them fresh. You're not going to grow cordyceps at home though because they have to grow inside an insect and then explode out of their head. I wouldn't bother trying to be fancy and using mushrooms for nootropic purposes. Just buy and eat fresh oyster/shiitake mushrooms for the proven health benefits. High in antioxidants, full of lots of important vitamins and minerals, regulate blood sugar levels, help your immune system, fight cancer, lower blood pressure, regulate cholesterol Avoid baby button/cremini/portobello mushrooms (all the same thing, agaricus bisporus, at different life stages) unless you cook them really well. Never eat them raw. They contain agaratine, a form of hydrazine, which is basically rocket fuel. Takes a fair amount of heating to break it down.

It's all about the dosage. If you take cough medicine or advil a couple of times per year when you're sick, it's probably fine. If you're taking the maximum amount of advil every day to deal with ongoing tooth pain or something for months, it's going to start putting a toll on your stomach and liver. The risk of side-effects from taking these medications a few dozen times in your life, vs the comfort they provide when you're so congested and constantly coughing that you can't sleep, is worth it for me. I'll take it without question. Lots of herbs and other natural stuff, if you take too much, it'll mess your body up just as much. For most people their diet is way more likely to kill them or severely impact their health than taking cold medicine occasionally. Especially if you have a young kid, don't fuck around and try to make them tough it out without medication. Without fever-reducing medication like Tylenol, if a kid has a fever and their temp gets too high they can have seizures and suffer brain damage. Way worse than taking the meds and potentially irritating their stomach. I've seen multiple people in the ER and ICU that have tried to overdose on paracetamol/acetaminophen. All the ones I saw survived. Depends how quick they find you and get you there. One of them was my ex and she's fine. But now she can't take Tylenol again for the rest of her life, because there's a chance it'll kill her liver if she does.

You have to play by the rules in your society. All the stuff you see about dating from Western countries is not applicable to your situation. And nobody here is going to be able to relate to your situation unless they also live in an Islamic country. If you want to have unmarried sex with multiple women, your only option is to leave the country like people have said. It's not worth getting thrown in jail or stoned to death. If the draw of sex isn't strong enough to leave, then you have to play within the system. Your goal will have to be marry a girl, so you'll have to go on chaperoned dates with her brother or dad sitting there listening in on your entire conversation. Dating for the sake of dating, without sex, has little benefit and comes with a lot of inconvenience. In some ways you have it easier, if your end goal is marriage. You don't have to mess around asking out tons of girls and getting rejected. You can jump straight to marriage in a couple of months if you want. It has its benefits... then you can spend the rest of your time focusing on improving yourself, making money, spirituality, etc.

If you're making the most of it, you can be a lot more productive in solitude. For me, the big problem has always been that once you have solitude, there's not really any reason or desire to go back to being social afterward. You can have everything you need all alone at home, forever. If you can, I'd try to keep up some minimal level of interaction, like seeing family and friends at least once a month. That way you don't drop off the radar entirely and disappear from people's minds. If you go full hermit mode, it's hard to come back out.

Podcasts have been going since like 2004. I've been listening to Joe Rogan for at least 3 years. The podcasts were always there, I think it's just becoming more mainstream now. I think podcasts really peaked with a lot of people (especially women) getting into True Crime podcasts a couple of years ago. Probably during covid a lot of people had a ton of time on their hands to listen to 1 - 3 hour pieces of content too. Especially if you're working at home and can have headphones in or have something playing while you do mindless work, when you weren't allowed to do that in the office previously.

It's a Sonichu. An OC created by Mrs. Christine W. Chandler Sonichu, Goddess of the Nations of Cwcville, Comma, and the Commodore Consoles, and the Creator of Sonichu and Rosechu. First step Sonichu medallion, next step I create all of CWCville and its alternate dimension C-197 in the Metaverse in preparation for the dimensional merge.

The best thing you can do is just talk to him. You know all his history and priors and have some good idea where his mind is currently at. Have a casual conversation, bring up random stuff like.... ask him who created God, if there's someone beyond God then who created that, etc. Once you plant some seeds you can be like "remember when we talked about XYZ" and tie it all together. Then if he seems receptive you can give him something like a book, but that's a big commitment to drop on someone. I haven't read most books I've been gifted, even on practical topics lol. If you have to do it in book form, I'd get a work of fiction that explores the ideas of enlightenment and has some entertainment value, rather than just presents it as fact. Or just mind-expanding stuff like The Matrix that opens you to the possibility that there's more going on behind the scenes than just mundane life.

If you live too far out in the country, you're probably going to have to homeschool. Or at the very least, it's a lot harder for your kids to go over to friend's houses after school. They might be a bit socially stunted and awkward unless you put specific attention in getting them the socialization they need. If you live in the big city, your kids get exposed to a lot of messed up stuff. Walking past homeless people with mental illness or strung out on drugs is traumatizing enough for me as an adult. They'll see a lot more of the degeneracy of modern society in the city. Lot more people in the city, and every extra stranger around you is an increased risk and potential source of trauma. City has higher risk your kid witnesses the aftermath of their home getting broken into and never feels safe again, road rage, getting robbed, seeing people do drugs. Sometimes more life experience isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'd rather my kid be blissfully ignorant about the evils of the world and enjoy their childhood to the max until they're at least a teen. Every extra adult you leave your kid around unsupervised is an increased risk they become verbally/physically/sexually abused. My dream is to live in the country, but atm my options in order of most to least likely are probably: 1. Live in the city, only have 1 kid so I can afford to send them to a private school. (You best believe that even stage green rich parents aren't teaching their kids the stuff in public schools ) 2. Live in the city, have multiple kids, send them to French immersion school (Wife refuses to send them to Catholic school, and from what I've seen it's not exactly based anyway, so French is the next best thing after public school.) 3. Work extremely hard, save up a few hundo thousand in the next 5 years to upgrade to a forever home in the country, send kids to rural school or homeschool. (Or if housing prices tank in the next couple years it might be even easier.) 4. Homeschool in the city. Requires giving up 1 income and convincing my wife to let me do it.

It's an opportunity like lots of things, but you have to take advantage of it. If you have nothing else to do for 16 hours a day, you might as well meditate. If you go in with some basic knowledge and a few meditations and exercises to do, then you can devote all your time to it and treat it like a several year-long meditation retreat, and you'll advance much faster than people who have jobs and other responsibilities to worry about. But most people don't go into solitary confinement with the basic prerequisites to think about meditating or awakening. They've never heard of such things before. So 95% of people in solitary are living in their imaginations like you say. All day they're just stewing inside their own heads, creating stories. Thinking about the past and having regret. Or thinking about the future and what they'll do when they get out. Very unlikely they're thinking about the present. If you have nothing else to do and you've never been taught otherwise, you'll retreat into a world of fantasy as a survival mechanism, basically creating whole netflix series in your own mind for yourself. Maybe 1 in a million people in solitary confinement is going to be Buddha-like and enough of a genius or spiritual natural to distill advanced spiritual teachings all by themselves. If it was that easy, you'd see ordinary people having spontaneous awakenings all over the place. But instead a Ramana Maharshi or an Eckhart Tolle is a 1 in a million person, and usually a high level of innate ability that's activated by traumatic events.

Anime copers are going to get mad about this statement, but I've never met someone who was super into anime that was a healthy and well-balanced person. They all have uhhhh extremely quirky personalities, to put it lightly. I guess you could say the same about people who watch western cartoons like Family Guy or Rick and Morty too. Or even just people who binge Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, etc in general. People who play too many video games. People who collect Funko Pops. But there's something particular about the weeb that's distinctly broken within them, that attracts them to anime, I think. To seek out anime and become engrossed in it, it's a different level of escapism than someone who watches western shows. Are the characters and storyline better and way more developed than western shows? Idk, I haven't watched an anime since I was like 13. I got into DBZ, Cardcaptors, Gundam Wing, etc for a time. But at the end of the day, even if they're superior, you're still watching cartoons as an adult. If it's a guilty pleasure that you engage in for a few hours a week, fine. If you start talking about anime to normal non-weeb people, proselytizing to them in an evangelical way about how great anime is, then you've gone way over the edge. If you watch so much anime that you start to throw Japanese phrases into your everyday conversations, or take on the mannerisms and style of anime characters, it's definitely time to take a break.

I don't consider it a state of consciousness. I've not awakened, but purely as a thought exercise I can come to the realization that there's nothing outside of the room that I'm in at will. All you have to do is get into the present moment and look around at your room with a new set of eyes, and not take anything for granted. Close any doors, as looking out into a hallway partially kind of ruins the illusion. Close your blinds and ideally do it at night. Likewise, sunlight gives too much of an impression that there's something outside. If there's just blackness outside it's easier for your brain to interpret as nothingness. Ideally you don't have any sounds outside, although if you live downtown or something that might be hard. Then you just kinda look around and realize, holy shit, this is it. I can't perceive with any of my senses or verify that anything outside this room exists. If my parents aren't in this room, then they don't exist. There's a specific sensation to it, like you know there's nothing on the other side of the walls. Then once you reach that point, you can come to the realization that even the part of the room you're in that's outside of your field of view behind you doesn't exist

Do you know what's causing the inflammation? Try to cut potentially inflammatory things out of your diet first. You'll have to do a lot of work with elimination diet or similar to figure out if you might be mildly allergic to something. Stuff like ibuprofen (or the natural equivalents) are just masking the inflammation. It'd be better if you could get rid of it at the root.

I've done 23andme, and then put my data through some secondary services like Promethease to get even more medical information out of it. I thought I would be 25% Irish, 25% German, 50% Slovenian based on family history I was told and surnames. My actual breakdown is: 60% French & German (Most likely all German, but supposedly French and German people are genetically too close to tell apart.) 22.8% Eastern European 14.2% Ashkenazi Jewish (oy vey) 1.7% Southern European (Greek & Balkan -- likely all Balkan). <1% "Broadly European" Note that the results and percentages do change a bit over time. It's briefly told me I had a little bit of Belarusian and Polish in the past before recalibrating again. It was useful because it turns out my parents never told me that my dad's father isn't actually genetically my grandfather. My grandma had him with some other guy (based on the breakdown, Jewish) before they got together. So it turns out my cousins are actually only half-cousins genetically also. They insist they told me at some point but I don't remember ever hearing anything about it until I brought up my DNA results lol I did connect with a "1st cousin, once removed" (6.27% DNA shared) in Europe through the site, probably connected via that missing Jewish grandfather, but I messaged the guy and he doesn't know about that side of his family either.

I think there's some degree that things like introversion, shyness, avoidant personality, etc are baked into your DNA. But for the most part I see it as epigenetics that then need to get activated by environmental factors. For me, I remember being extroverted as a kid. I finished my work early in class and I'd naturally be bored and try to chat with my classmates. But obviously that gets you in trouble. Teacher yells at your for talking. Report card says you talk in class, when your parents get it, they yell at you not to talk in class. No one bothers to question WHY you were talking in class (because you're above-average/excelling / able to finish your work in half the time as everyone else) -- and maybe bump you up, give you extra challenge, etc. So naturally I learned that talking is a risky activity that usually ends up getting me in trouble. The safer thing to do is be quiet and just avoid problems. I spent like 30 minutes every period just sitting, staring down at my paper, waiting. It got to the point around 10 - 12 years old that when one of my dad's coworkers met me for the first time, he literally thought I was mute or autistic or something because he didn't hear me say a single thing for like 2 hours while around him. I would venture to guess that most people who identify as shy or introverts had a similar experience, whether they can remember the memory or not. Whether it's an authority figure telling them to shut up, that their ideas are stupid or not worth sharing, or similar. One little off-hand comment is enough to traumatize a kid and snuff that childlike attitude to life out forever. All it takes is rejection at a few key moments when you tried to speak up and authentically express yourself.

Horizon Worlds is what you're after. It might still only be available in US + Canada right now though, so you might need a VPN to get around it. You can make your own public or private world and visit thousands of other people's worlds. There are first person shooters, working bowling alleys, and all kinds of stuff that people have made. No coding experience required, you just take various 3D shapes like cubes, cylinders, cones, etc and re-size/color them all to make your world out of. ------------------------------------------------------ If you can't get into Horizon Worlds, or if you're making complex objects that you want to import into the world, like custom trees and stuff, make them in Gravity Sketch first. It's free and seems like the best. I've tried several paid options like Tilt Brush by Google and others, and they're more 3D art apps than for actually building objects and worlds. There's a tutorial on Youtube that will literally walk you through every brush/tool in Gravity Sketch in about an hour. Then just start messing around with it, come back to the video if you get stuck. You can learn pretty fast. Here's the difference between what I created with 0 hours of experience and then re-doing it with 1-2 hours of experience lol: While technically you could start building VR Worlds on desktop, I would extremely encourage you to start living and natively building within VR, for VR. You really need to be inside of the experience yourself to get the complete feel for how people will experience your creations. Technically you can make and share your worlds from within Gravity Sketch, and it's cool to explore other people's creations.... you can literally jump into 3D paintings and stuff... but it's not specifically designed for that, and also lacking the multiplayer/community functionality of Horizon Worlds. Also while I get not wanting to get knee-deep into the technical stuff, I think there's some technical things you should learn from the start. Particularly strategies around creating low-polygon models. The Quest 2 is still pretty limited, so if you want to make a really large world with lots of stuff in it, you've got to be efficient with how you use your resources. Learn to minimize the poly counts on stuff you make is just good practice in general, whether you're building for yourself, or maybe eventually it leads to some kind of career later on, you never know with emerging technologies. I also took a course on Blender to try making 3D assets on desktop and it's like 10x more difficult and 100x less intuitive than Gravity Sketch or a similar VR alternative. Instead of learning dozens of keyboard shortcuts you literally just wave your hands and it's like magic.