 All right welcome everyone to not related episode number zero in fact I don't really think this is actually going to constitute a real episode But I wanted to put out a little Informational not just for the people who already know who I am and might be subscribed to my YouTube channel But just for anyone who wants to know what this podcast is about long story short It's going to be about a lot of different things a lot of different topics a lot of big-brained Topics as the logo of the podcast suggests That's a little bit satirical in case you guys have no sense of irony, but in this podcast Well, actually I should give the background why I'm actually doing this people have been nagging me for a couple of months now to do A podcast for a lot of different reasons And I finally decided that might actually be a good idea Now for the past two years, I've been putting out YouTube videos Most of the the content of those are on things relevant to technology system administration system configuration on You know Unix based systems, which is frankly not the kind of topic. I mean, you know if anyone knows me that is not Even in my top 20 things that I like it's something I do for YouTube I do enjoy it. I do enjoy putting content like that out But I always wanted to branch out on YouTube But the thing about it the thing about the me the not just YouTube but the general medium of video is that It's very hard to do video editing Lots of you probably know this and there were a lot of topics I wanted to do videos on that or at least put out content on that I realized that making a video on it would require a lot of effort like if I have something that is 30 minutes long if I record this informational thing that's 30 minutes long and now it's not a screencast Mind you, I would have to do 30 minutes of video editing which actually takes you know for me takes about three days of working on stop Yeah, I would probably say I'd say I'd say for about 10 minutes of video. It takes me like a whole day to do it So I'm not the best video editor. It's not something I enjoy. It's not just something I do slow So I really wanted to just be able to put out content easier And I realized there's this crazy idea called podcasting which everyone was telling me to do that I should probably actually Look into so I actually have show notes for the first couple of episodes already planned out But I wanted to just wanted to tell you guys what exactly I have in store What the idea is behind the whole thing now as I said, it's gonna be you know big brain topics I think it's not really well I should say my view on a lot of podcasts and this isn't meaning anyone who does podcasts, but a lot of podcasts out there. I suppose You know the thing about people now is it nowadays is that you have to have this constant stream of information going into your head or Your mental silence would just drive you crazy That's how people are nowadays and that's why people like podcasts a lot of times They just want to hear someone talking in their ear Doesn't even matter. What about sometimes they just want to hear someone talking in their ear and that's what they need to survive and I'm sort of giving into that, but I want it to be a little more contentful than I think a lot of this stuff out there And I don't again. I don't mean this in a condescending way at all But I guess my perspective is I I'm sure a lot of you guys who are listening to this especially on YouTube know me already You're already my YouTube subscriber But there's a very small portion of my life that I actually put on YouTube not very much about it people I guess would have a skewed view of who I actually am and what I actually do Some people might know that for example, I am in a linguistics PhD program If you were still people would know about that that doesn't even matter to me that much I should give everyone a I guess a little background before I explain What precise topics we're going to be talking about in the first couple of episodes? My name is Luke Smith. If you can't already tell that wherever you're seeing this video or audio I should say, you know, I guess when I first started getting into Academic II things or things that I guess were a little irregular was in high school in high school Somehow I got it in my head that I wanted to learn Classical languages. I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and Sanskrit which I know Sort of in that order. I know Latin best and Sanskrit least So I started studying ancient languages. I wanted to learn about the reconstruction of early human history I wanted to learn about languages in themselves. I wanted to learn about I guess sort of human society at the boundaries of our awareness and Early human cultures and things like that. So that's an interest I had in high school and I'd skip sociology class to you know, where would I go? I wouldn't go behind the high school and smoke weed I'd go into the library and I'd read this exhaustive biblical commentary with you know the original language and stuff like that because that's the kind of stuff I was interested at the time. Now don't get it in your head that I'm a linguistics person Given that I've said that and given that I am actually in a linguistics PhD program right now When I went off to college my degree was actually in international economics and modern languages and I focused on various topics. I got concentrations in International trade, economic history, those are the things like I was more interested in economic history And I also got minors in Chinese and Spanish. I was in Yeah, trying to think if there was anything else. I had an interesting undergraduate life I'll just say that And I went off at once I got my degree. I had this I there was a fork between me Oh the fork in my life It was a three-way fork and I had the decision do I want to go into economics for graduate school? Do I want to go into linguistics for graduate school? Or do I want to have a real job and actually contribute to society and of course? I didn't choose that which I actually regret you know Don't go to graduate school. Don't even go to college everyone all my subscribers should know that I am very much against going to college It's a seriously a waste of your time even if you're like me and you you know got to go to college for free with the Hope Scholarship Anyway, so I went actually to a Linguistics program and I went to the University of Georgia there. They have a very powerful historical linguistics program It's actually just one man one man Jared Klein very interesting fellow But that's enough to have a good historical linguistics program study gothic a little bit of Sanskrit I didn't actually take the Sanskrit classes, but Indo-European kind of stuff That's what I did, but I actually while the time in the time. I was there. I actually got interested more in I Don't want to use the term modern but more contemporary approaches to linguistics, which when I say contemporary I mean it in the bad sense. I took classes in syntax and I sort of had this terrible idea that everything in the field was horribly wrong and I naively Got into my head that I wanted to go into syntax or formal Linguistics generally just to right wrongs and get things right. I thought of it sort of is buying low and selling high I thought the field had a lot of obvious errors, and I think I had the naive idea that those could be Fixed as if there's no academic ego behind them but that's what I ended up going into I wrote a Dissert or a thesis I should say a master's thesis on external possession It's just the kind of linguistic construction But they arguments with my thesis aren't particularly important. Maybe I'll go and do it later, but then I went to a PhD program at the University of Arizona, which I'm not going to talk too much about that to be honest but I will say my interests changed in that period and I became more interested in the evolution of language in the human species as a as a Biological entity as in how you know the actual biological architecture between behind how we can process and understand and produce language But also more generally how languages have or how language affected human evolution and that's something that I've also been interested in and I think I have my own theories That you know totally rewrite the field as every academic has of course or at least all the Remotely interesting ones not to demean anyone out there But I have my own ideas and that's not necessarily going to be the content of the podcast But I just want to give that background just for those guys who don't know I guess about my academic background. Now, what am I going to cover in the podcast? Generally now in my time, I've read a bunch of books. I've mold over a bunch of concepts Either in economics or cognitive science or psychology or linguistics or whatever or just general history general whatever and A lot of them have been sitting in my brain for a couple years now and I'm not the kind of person who reviews a book or reviews an idea and then Makes pronouncements immediately and make you know goes with whatever my first Reflexes are but I think it's about time where there are some books or ideas that I think have been an influential But also unsung in a lot of fields and I want to give them voices So for the first couple episodes of this podcast I actually want to talk about some of those ideas and some of those books that I think are extremely important now This podcast is not going to be a book review podcast Although a lot of the episodes are going to be sort of like that not not really in book You know about non-fiction books specifically as books I don't really care about the the book itself But the idea behind it and in the greater context of it So for the first couple of episodes, that's what I'm going to focus on Now for episode one if you've kept up on my blog I think I've mentioned this a couple times but for episode one. I want to talk about a very Book that I think is very fascinating and it's something I'd like to hear a lot more you know from different cognitive scientists because it's an idea that I think is very fascinating well, let's just say viscerally pleasurable in how bizarre it is but also very Defensible on scientific grounds and that is the idea of the bicameral mind. It's an idea Popularized by Julian James. Well, he invented it. He didn't just popularize it But he wrote a book called the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind And that's going to be the topic of the first podcast episode I'll go ahead and say that what this is on what the the general idea of the book is that Consciousness as it appears to us the internal world that we have or we perceive things is not something inherent to our brains But it's something that we learn. It's something that's almost cultural And it's something that actually didn't exist in not just early humans, but early literate humans one of the claims of the book and the idea is that Early Greeks early Hebrews early Sumerians were not in fact conscious and a lot of their social structure actually reflects this so Stay tuned for that in the first episode and that I think is going to set the stage set the tone for some of the episodes later On now as I said, there are going to be other topics for example I want to talk about some books and economics for example one of my favorite books and economics is Joseph Shumpeter's Capitalism socialism and democracy. That's a topic. I want to have pretty early on I'm gonna have books on history and other things just to get that out there now again I'm not going to keep myself just the books I might actually have guests on who might be academics in a particular area or I might just even Potentially in the future have a co-host if some such worthy person presents himself But that's all in the future. I'll just say for now I'm gonna be putting out these podcasts and I don't know how regularly I think I'll either do weekly or bi-weekly or bi-weekly, you know every other week But really whatever time schedule I can work out. So Anyway, I hopefully that'll give you an idea what the podcast is actually going to be on and I think the format I'm actually going to approach it is probably I'm going to have show notes I'm already starting to make show notes for the first couple episodes I'm gonna go through them sort of monologuing them when I get tired. I'm gonna take a break. I'm gonna come back I'm going to read Emails from other people relevant to previous episodes. Maybe read donations I will put my email address and you know donation PayPal whatever In the video description or whatever other medium you're viewing this on But I'll put that there and after I read Donations or emails all go on your fur part to and finish up whatever talk pick I'm talking on And I'm hoping that each of the episode is going each of the episodes are going to be contained within themselves and Be enjoyable as entities in themselves for people who are watching either on YouTube or elsewhere Now I might have said this earlier, but I'm not leaving YouTube. Don't worry. I'm not gonna quit doing that No, I haven't put up a video in the past two weeks or so I've been very busy not just on preparing the stuff for the podcast but other things there's again I have a secret project that I'm working on. I don't want to tell people about it But don't worry about that. I'm still gonna be putting up YouTube videos and I'm going to be putting up all these podcast episodes as YouTube videos now I highly recommend you subscribe to the RSS feed that is in the video description or wherever else Be sure to subscribe to that But if you are a YouTube subscriber, you will see these pop up whenever I have a new episode and Yeah, that'll be about it. So anyway, if you have any suggestions good suggestions They have to be good ones. You can feel free to email me at Luke at Luke Smith that XYZ If you don't get a response, don't feel bad just because I get so many emails even now even before starting a podcast I get a lot of emails But that that's gonna be about it. So I'll see you guys next time I'm gonna start preparing the first episode when I get the chance and I will see you guys then