Polyglot Youtube: a Scam Within a Scam.

is this the future of architecture is this the way architecture is going to be studied is this the way people are going to matriculate to and earn their credentials to be architects wouldn't it be possible for there to be globally a sudden wave of super popular architect youtube channels where they say you yes you if you put in the time just 15 minutes a day just one hour a day whatever it is if you put in the time if you buy the books if you buy my book if you sign up for my course if you watch my youtube videos you yes you can be an architect maybe you can even be an especially gifted architect one of the greatest one of the most influential architects of your generation or in the history of the world the funny thing is that's much more plausible than doing what we're now doing with language education on youtube i think everyone in this audience if you really just stop and think about it and if you can't visualize this you can do a quick google search look at a pdf of what's inside a university-level architecture textbook you know okay if you're gonna put a swimming pool on the roof then you have to think about the weight of the swimming pool and how that's distributed throughout the building you can say it's not rocket science but the truth is even rocket science isn't rocket science we could have a sudden wave of teacher self rocketry videos on youtube where you get familiar with the physics and the engineering involved in building miniature rockets in your own backyard in theory you could create standardized exams so that people can actually go into the rocket science industry with what they've learned on youtube what they've learned by signing up and buying the ebook buying the course so on and so forth as as wildly implausible as it sounds in our culture to be a self-taught architect or a self-taught rocket scientist that's much more plausible than being self-taught in any one foreign language let alone five foreign languages eight foreign languages so on and so forth i think what's happened on a huge scale globally not just in english-speaking cultures not just on youtube is that the whole world is excited to see something that was formerly expensive and hard to get become free or incredibly cheap and instantly available easily accessible okay language education for centuries was very very expensive and even if you had the money it was inaccessible not everyone growing up in ireland had the option of studying latin like even not going back to ancient times here we could we'd go all the way back to the dark ages you know you could you could ask yourself let's say you were a lad growing up in ireland in the 10th century and you want to learn latin 11 12 13 14 15 we could work through century by century what were your options and this is going to sound crazy guys but if you think every monastery taught latin you're wrong if you think every monk in every monastery had the opportunity to learn latin you're wrong it's one of the reasons people would pardon me it is one of the reasons people would sign up and go and live in a monastery was the hope of advancing their own education and learning especially latin and by the way ireland is one example romania is another you know eastern europe history of christian christianity archangels but even in the 19th century in the 20th century the possibility of learning latin the possibility of learning greek these things you competed for them opportunities were scarce and they were expensive and it was a huge sacrifice in your own life to do it now the history frankly of learning any other language is much shorter where you live right now i have viewers all over the world so wherever you live right now for how many centuries has it been possible to study chinese you might be shocked at how recently it became possible to learn the chinese language where you're living wherever it is i had a conflict with a professor here and this is a long story that i'm going to make short and it went on all night i mean we went out to dinner and we know that we became friends but it began by him being furious at me because he stood up and he said to the class that the history of asian studies in western academia began with the american army being in japan and world war ii and then uh the next step was the creation of a asian languages unit at the university of chicago there was a department first in the 1950s this this is the and um i said it's tell me tell me something are you claiming that before world war ii nobody in europe had studied sanskrit are you claiming that there is no tradition of classical chinese studies of translations of chinese and you know i was just an undergraduate student in the class he was furious he was he was so angry at me and he was really denouncing and attacking me and then he gradually figured out like over like 15 minutes into the that i was really the most brilliant student he'd had in the last 10 years or was whatever his career hasn't been i was the most brilliant he was gonna have he flipped and he started really that that night we talked for several hours that night but he didn't take until the next day he realized wow i'm mad at this student and actually i should be really appreciative of what the students pray in the classroom you know but the point is um this myth he was presenting if you actually look into it like if you live in chicago at what point did it become possible for anyone to learn chinese in chicago latin has a longer history right at what point did it become possible to learn japanese in chicago you what this professor was saying even though i ridiculed it even though i criticized him and he felt ridiculous which is the point of a good ridicule you know um wherever you live if you live in milan if you live in uh madrid if you live in you know athens greece when did it become possible to study any of these languages you might be shocked at how short the history is now i'm pointing this out for several different reasons it's unbelievable how conservative our universities are if you go to any university and ask well how do you teach chinese the answer you're going to get is this is the way it has always been done and this is the way it always shall be really really so um pimsleur audio cassettes how long has that technology sitting down with an exit multiple choice tests using a photocopier and playing an audio cassette or an audio cd re this is your ancient continuous tradition so language learning methods that require you to have an application on your cell phone to look up chinese words using handwriting recognition yeah uh-huh how many years aren't there some professors here right now who are old enough to remember the methods used for the attitude is this is the way it is always being social so must it be uh forever more there's this unbelievable conservatism that's hard to chill at universities language education was four centuries incredibly expensive incredibly hard to qualify for hard to access hard to come by and it was one of the distinctive marks of being a member of a social and political elite not just in europe not just in america how would you look at the history of turkey the ottoman empire and what being polyglot meant there and seriously those guys knew six totally different languages to be a polyglot in the turkish empire and the ottoman empire but that was not easy the number of languages you had to master and then what came with that was a certain station and status in society how about how about the british empire in india how about the french empire of vietnam language education has always been linked to grandiose imperialist projects including the status of latin within europe the status of ancient greek within europe but guys i've done a lot of research in just the last couple of years but the history of the american revolution including kind of notorious figures like benjamin franklin and thomas jefferson you know names that have become famous and names that have been forgotten people who've disappeared from history what made a gentleman in that period of american history officially there was no aristocracy right what they believed in was natural aristocracy it's a really powerful concept in this united states of america and thus to some extent in the history of the whole world oh natural aristocracy if you were in the army were you a soldier or were you a gentleman okay knowledge of latin was crucial to your claim to being a gentleman in that period the period let's say 50 years before the american revolution and 50 years after right [Laughter] how much latin did these guys really know i'm incredibly cynical about that frankly i think if you just read the books they've left behind carefully or read the letters that let find carefully i think they understood less latin than i understand french nevertheless right this is a this is a colony on the outermost cusp of the empire a colony actively engaged in slave trading actively engaged in genocide against the indigenous people and just a colony where life was dirty you know you got your hands dirty something really stays with me from the autobiography of benjamin franklin just the description of going from one city to another within the thirteen colonies as these them were later the united states america just getting from philadelphia to uh new york or from boston to philadelphia it was an adventure you risked your life and you got your hands dirty and there were no flushing toilets and things you know like life was dirty how do you how do you lift yourself above you know the blood and the filth of what life was in the american colonies language education was crucial all right obviously to some extent i'm ridiculing this but to some extent how did governor morris become the most powerful man in the united states of america and he was in any given time if you make a list of who who are the most powerful people in american politics governor morris is going to be in the top five and he might be number one he was one of the most powerful political figures in the united states america certainly in new york city certainly in new york state you know this guy was tremendously powerful he became one of the most important people in the history of the french revolution too long story i can't get into yeah his claim to speaking french was crucial for other people their claim to speaking spanish was crucial and for other people still you see this even in what's written about them quite apart from what they wrote themselves their claim to knowing latin their claim to know in greek these were really serious symbols of status privilege and authority and they were purchased at great price i'm gonna digress to tell a story that's not a digression at all i think so melissa's here off camera melissa let me know if you've heard this story before on youtube i think i have never told the story before on youtube but i might have told it to you in real life all right so i knew an old woman with gray hair who was a devotee of the buddhist religion so she was a white western woman who had lived an extraordinary life let's let's be real here you know to say someone is of above average intelligence what's your definition of average and above average i mean it's kind of but this was this was not a stupid woman at all and she had lived in several different continents in the world and had seen many things and done many things in her in her time she was an experienced interesting person not a genius studied several languages not a genius just just saying she i think she was a person of above average intelligence but as even this anything will show in some ways she was she was struggling with the finitude of her own intellect and energy you know she had grown gray in years by the time i had this conversation with her quite quite likely she's dead now and i think about it i haven't haven't googled her before telling this anton and she said to me angrily she said when i was with the peace corps doing humanitarian work they gave us a short course for the tagalog language language of the philippines and that course made it easy they gave us a course tagalog for dummies and that simplified everything and done it got rid of all the grammar and got rid of all the complexity and you know made it so a child could learn it and then we just practiced that again and then we went out and did this humanitarian work and we all spoke tackle yeah you could all say where's the bathroom what do you mean by you spoke that could you read the newspaper and tackle you know leaving that aside and she said to me angrily she said why can't you make a book like that for pally why can't you scholars use scholars of ancient buddhism why can't you give me a short course in pali why can't you give me pali for dummies why can't you take this language and this literature in this philosophy and make it easy so that everyone can learn so someone like me can learn and i said this and she was really angry now i could digress here to talk about the psychology of why she was so angry i do think in part she was someone who had accomplished remarkable things with her life just remarkable explorations as zarya indicated at a young age she was with the peace corps and went to the philippines and a few other places in southeast asia she'd done humanitarian work i think she'd claimed her share of mountains both literally and figuratively but when it came to language learning she didn't understand she couldn't accept why does it have to be so hard she had the world's greatest motivation to learn the pali language specifically which is that she thought that pali was the sacred language of the scriptures of the buddha and she has a religious fervor for this you know so you can't ask someone to be more highly motivated to one language but she had found i don't know how many times she tried in trying to learn the language she found again again it was just impossible for her anyway so she was really angry and i think that anger reflects years of struggle and disappointment and you know her own awareness that she's a talented hard-working person she has some intelligence to bring to this and some humiliation and frustration that despite her intelligence and despite the depth of her religious conviction and and fanaticism frankly wasn't enough this was still just too hard for her to do and i remain completely calm and my sense of humor has changed a bit over the years but with the laconic sense of humor i had at that time i said to her easy are you you want you want it to be easy you know i was speaking softly intentionally together to you know kind of why why would it be easy i said tell me something you ever read aristotle can you make aristotle easy [Laughter] you want to read aristotle in ancient greek is it going to be easy if i could take aristotle and make it easy would you want to read that version of aristotle if it's gonna be i can do that for you take aristotle i can break it down i can make it easy i can give you aristotle for but it's not gonna be aristotle anymore is it shakespeare why can't shakespeare be easy it wouldn't be shakespeare anymore if it's easy right you know you want to be able to read philosophy in this language you want to be able to talk about and debate like epistemology and ethics and metaphysics in pali that's the level like you don't want to ask where's the bathroom you know what like sure any language if that's all you want it's phrasebook where's the bathroom i'm thirsty i'm hungry okay you know basically any language in the world that's gonna be pretty easy okay you know um why why would that be easy it can't be easy and if it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing it wouldn't be worth doing at all and again it's too good for credit she uh she calmed down you know and um she saw the truth in what i was saying and i don't think that was easy for her to accept she was an old woman and i think she was facing up to the possibility that she was going to die and go to her grave without ever reading the sacred word of the buddha siddhartha gautama you heard of him now you know the truth is she could have learned pali at that level within five years it's just if english is your first language poly is not that hard sanskrit is not that it's not you know five years of hard work sure totally and she had more than five years to live she totally could have done it but it's not easy and i'm not gonna make it easy for you nobody is going to make it easy for you right now religion brings in other dimensions to this but i think what i said in the first 10 minutes this video you can still see would apply to the sanskrit pali so on and so forth something incredibly expensive incredibly difficult to access right then the internet suddenly seemingly makes it available for free makes it accessible to everyone right so i mean books that genuinely like you just couldn't get before you could not get a copy of these books at any price books that were incredibly expensive forms of education that only a few of the most famous universities in the world could offer like harvard school world religions and uh sorry harvard school of world religions used to be famous harvard's school divinities um cambridge and oxford you know just a few where can you learn sanskrit where can you learn pali right there was the tantalizing sense that language education was now cracked open and made available to all at the click of a mouse button or maybe for three easy payments of 5.99 instead of thousands of dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars years of your life lost to an authoritarian institution right big fundamental turning point in history or was it you know what happened to cinema didn't happen to language education what happened to recorded music you know vinyl albums look at the cost of a vinyl album look at downloading an mp3 a music file from the internet legally or illegally there's a cost to both the internet's not completely free right but you can have every song the beatles ever recorded right with a few mouse clicks again even legally even buying these things and paying the fee for it's not that much money right um it seemed to people that this was happening with language education now why the excitement why is this scam even possible like you can't scam people if they don't want something from you and they don't think it's attainable right like i can't really scam you through education in architecture there is no architecture scene on youtube and there could be it's easy to it's so much easier to learn to be an architect are you kidding me right there's no scene on youtube for teaching yourself law teach yourself how to be a barrister how to be a lawyer it's so much easier dude what the [ __ ] do you think is harder than learning chinese what the [ __ ] is harder that what needs more help than that you know um it became possible for this scam subculture to evolve right because it was thinkable because the fantasy was believable let's get into briefly what the what the fantasy is i anyone in the audience can comment i do see your comments coming in but melissa you also count as a member of the audience you know you asked me if i remember you telling that story yeah first time that's been on on the tube yeah um you know if you become an architect what do you think that's going to do for your sex life i like real talk real talk you know well it could be it could be art history you know melissa remembers we took this walk around an art gallery and she was shocked melissa was making some bumpkin comments about how she had no understanding of these paintings and i was i was shy and i was able to like give a lecture on each no no i know who painted this i know what its historical significance is i know what school of art this comes from i can i can talk for you you know 15 minutes or something these paintings like no i have a background an artist just like well to the right people that's sexy you know being able to give a tour of an art gallery you know i think there are a whole lot of women who are looking for a man who's an architect or something like an architect right i think there were a whole lot of women like let's let's say you work in construction let's say your actual job is mixing and pouring cement okay but what if you had the same education as an architect like your actual job is still pouring cement but you did a self-taught architecture degree i mean the number one fantasy fueling the polyglot phenomenon on youtube and across the internet is the fantasy that you will get laid it is the fantasy that you will be appreciated and desired by members of the opposite sex or if you're gay members of the same sex oh pardon me across the world somewhere whether that's in japan china thailand uh what have you and i have seen videos pointing out that even within the muslim world or obviously women have a lot less sexual liberty even within the muslim world and the study of languages that exist only in muslim majority countries you can still see this sex tourism element you know forcing it forward see that's that's clearly one part of the fantasy reciprocal with that though maybe we have to recognize language no longer has the power that it had for ben franklin right like again i don't think ben franklin could read a sentence in latin or greek i don't i think his language it's completely phony it's this myth people made up about him and he probably encouraged the myth to a significant extent also because he wanted to present himself as a man of letters and an esteemed statesman and all these things and he had no formal education whatsoever his whole life story is very well documented and if you read his autobiography you get to read about just how little education he had he worked with his hands he was an auto died act we cannot say also you know but he wanted to be perceived as a great scientist a great statesman so on and so forth and he was you know to whatever extent he was creating a myth the myth was very convincing for people and a crucial element of the myth was that he could read latin and greek does anyone give a [ __ ] in 2022 if you can read latin and greek all right oh guys i don't exactly suffer from low self-esteem when i was in university when i was a teenage male all kinds of women wanted to [ __ ] me that was really my experience my experience really was pretty much being the top of the food chain and we could could get into the reasons as to why that is and maybe that reflects something really pathetic about these women like i'm not saying it's because i'm so great maybe it reflects something really pathetic about the other men who were my de facto competition whether or not i wanted to compete with them right like there were a lot of women who were tired of dating a schlemiel who sits on the couch couch and watches sports on tv people men whose lives revolve totally around uh sports and action movies and video games in which you shoot people in the head again again like whatever it is like to some extent it's the other man to some extent i'm not saying this reflects anything anything great about me i but guys i don't think i grew up in a culture where my social status even in this sense would be improved by knowing latin or be improved by nome greek where it would be improved by knowing french not at all in canada it's allegedly bilingual country nobody gives a [ __ ] if you speak good for nobody it's it's pitiful the state of bilingualism is good nobody cares won't improve your sex life in any way and you know i'm using sex life really as a relatively easy tangible standard for a more complex analysis of your standing in life politically you know like you guys know i politically i was involved i used to go to city hall i was involved in the green party i went to different kinds of political events do you think my social standing was in any way tied to my ability to speak latin greek french my knowledge of frankly any literature like whether you think that ancient greek literature like in that sense that we're you know being well-ready no and look you can do a whole discourse about this what's happened on the left you know the rise and fall of marxism marxists didn't value knowledge of latin or knowledge of greek and even in the post-marxist era you know the effects of marxism are indelible on our political climate that's really what killed the respect for the greco-latin tradition it died with marxism nobody in the post-marxist era you know defines their own importance and worth in terms of being well-read in ancient latin and greek sources and nor anything else there wasn't some other canon of literature that replaced it i'll see nobody gave a [ __ ] whether or not i could speak french nobody thought it was like a requirement to be a kind of upwardly mobile erudite person to be have a high level of ability in in french i think this is still true throughout canada you know and and beyond that okay so now now what do you want you want to talk about chinese you want to talk about sanskrit look what we're going to talk about what other languages matter you know and you know yes it's easy to say oh you know americans and canadians were just such a such a culture of uh i don't know lunch bucket rednecks or whatever oh we're such an unrefined culture of knuckle draggers or something it's easy to beat up on ourselves i think this is really a global phenomenon you know i don't think this is peculiar uh to the united states of america and certainly what do you think it's better in australia what do you think you know what what does language have to do with with social status well i'm pointing out the world that existed uh around the time of the american revolution benjamin franklin blah blah blah that has died that social significance given language however what the youtube polyglot phenomenon illustrates is the emergence of a new fantasy right now i mean sorry because the old one it's also a kind of fantasy like i literally i think millions of young men around the world for a period of at least 150 years they read about benjamin franklin and they studied hard at school because they wanted to be something like benjamin franklin one day millions of young men he was an icon for several generations and millions of young men studied science and studied latin and studied greek because there was a sense in which they wanted to be like benjamin franklin not exactly the same like this is what it is to be a distinguished gentleman who's taken seriously despite being born poor and being a workman earning your living in a manual trade you know with your with your hands you know so anyway i just say i do think he had that that kind of there was a kind of fantasy now for what percentage of people did the the fantasy uh work out well i'd point out that fantasy is based on working your way up within the culture you're born into that's interesting in several different ways i think the prevalent fantasy now that the whole polyglot youtube scam preys upon it both feeds and feeds upon is instead fundamentally an escapist fantasy right the escapist fantasy is that you can run away to japan and be somebody special and be something special right you can teach yourself japanese and you can run away to japan and start a new life now is you in this equation what if we're talking about a young man born and raised in morocco muslim family muslim-majority culture it doesn't really matter if i say morocco or i say indonesia frankly but let's stick with morocco what if you're a young man born in morocco and growing up you watch these cartoons that show you a society in japan just implicitly it shows you how profoundly different japanese society is mural and i know all those cartoons the cartoons that are for children made in japan there is a heavily censored version of them for the muslim world and to my knowledge the biggest single market is malaysia like they think okay we're gonna do this version we're gonna censor it we're gonna have a malaysian version for malaysia but i believe they're distributed throughout all around the world people end up seeing them in saudi arabia and all over the place you know regardless of what the actual marketing intent is what the economic rationale is for making these especially sensitive versions but you'll notice um generally speaking of the muslim culture through the world there are some things that are taboo like uh showing your bare feet to another man and they'll be blurred out they'll blur out the feet of the character they're like what what's why would any you know like you know you understand if it's nudity or something why would you blur out the feet so there you can tell if you're watching the quote unquote the muslim version of a japanese culture but okay what if the kid you're talking about grows up muslim in a muslim majority household society etc in morocco and he has this vision of a different life in a different society in japan the first time i really thought about this so i growing up i had black friends there were a lot of black people in the specific neighborhood in toronto i lived in that's not true of all of toronto and it's not true of all of canada really it's just that neighborhood we did have a lot of black people and you know i saw that there had been in the 1970s this big interest among black people in kung fu movies so these were mostly hong kong kung fu movies a little bit of interest in japanese culture among black people but mostly hong kong chinese culture for that generation 1970s generation and then i saw that it did kind of died out like people generally the black people they'd love they'd cease to be fascinated by east asian culture in this way the kung fu craze kind of came and went and then dragon ball z was translated into english and dragon ball z specifically with urban black people and urban latino people hispanic people and there was a separate spanish translation of that wow you could see their huge response to the huge enthusiasm for this for this cartoon and for them now this is japanese culture being commercialized okay so again i did have a couple black friends growing up and also i had just black acquaintances and there were a lot of black people around me okay and i knew young black people high school and university who had very powerful escapist fantasies and it is understandable like they they wanted to escape canadian society they wanted to escape their own family in toronto they wanted to escape canadian culture generally and then the subculture within canada that they were born into and didn't have a choice about right and you know again like and sorry most of these people sorry i knew each black person was a different story but yeah a lot of them the family is very very christian this very domineering you know christian household you know you know but regardless of the particular religion obviously some of them were raised in muslim families too and so on and so forth but you know being born into this culture you fundamentally don't like japanese culture presented an enticing alternative a present presented something for a fantasy life to latch onto in a way that cuba didn't in a way that the soviet union didn't in the in a way that mao zedong's china didn't and they all tried they all tried there was a huge movement to try to convert american blacks to communism and to convince them that the workers paradise and socialism that have they had perfect equality for the races and you wouldn't be oppressed in russia the way you were in the united states you can read about it many books have been made a couple documentary films too i think uh you know about black americans who actually went to the soviet union and lived there permanently some of them now their grandchildren are alive you know who are now whatever three-quarters russian and one-quarter african-american or whatever the story is the different cases you know um there were you know there were versions of an earthly paradise presented to african americans and in case you've forgotten malcolm x you know there was a whole generation also of black radicals who were the wishful thinking they were engaged in was that there was a better society quite literally in saudi arabia that converting to islam and then going on the hajj going on a pilgrimage to mecca and medina seeing the center of the muslim world seeing the status of black people in that society in contrast united states america that that was supposed to be the the escapist fantasy right and this also of course entails language learning right yeah look okay i'll be self-critical for a second a second here we've got some comments about learning pali and so um okay was there an escapist fantasy for me in running away from canada to thailand laos cambodia myanmar sri lanka you know sorry they might as well be one place from my perspective because the life i was going to lead involved all of them want to move to this is was there an escapist element no for me personally the answer is no i don't have to get into a big monologue about my own psychology and motivation but but i can tell you this the fantasy for me was that i was going to have colleagues you know was that i was going to know other intellectuals variously doing research humanitarian work etc that i was going to know people and live my life with people and that they were going to be sober hard-working people because i grew up in a language part of me i grew up in a cultural context dominated by drunks and drug addicts and so again you know this is obviously for many african-americans it's part of their experience growing up i just heard an interview with an african-american where he was he was reflecting on his life and talking about how much it how much it really damaged him to grow up surrounded by drug addicts in the way that he did but doesn't mean you can be white you can be any ethnicity and grow up and recognize wow almost everyone around me is some kind of drunk or drug addict so just that just okay i can go to another country learn another language and i can be part of a community this is literally a religious community that is defined by you know a commitment to sobriety and a certain kind of intellectual endeavor you can call that an escapist fantasy but at any rate it was a fantasy i think it's not quite the same as what we're talking about here but yeah i was gonna say a lot of us a lot of us are born into a culture we fundamentally want to escape from and then the marketing of polyglottery and of easy instance cheap or free language education on the internet fits into this fantasy life of the 21st century adult you know really it's worth pointing out it's not just young people yes you know what you see on youtube is predominantly young people you think there aren't middle-aged people signing up for this fantasy you think there aren't people in retirement i think it gets to people at every every age and every stage of life and that's where a lot of the money will come from as older people who want to turn over a new leaf and lead a feed a better life lead a different life so and so forth um anyway this type of escapist fantasy has come and gone again and again whether it was pushed by a religious ideology or a secular political ideology like uh communism you know and i think that this scam within a scam this polyglot youtube phenomenon it's kind of successfully put together several of the most intoxicating elements of that kind of escapist fantasy intentionally or unintentionally like even if it's mirror happenstance and it's ended up creating a subculture that's qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything that's happened with teach yourself architecture teach yourself uh law or even teach yourself math right now let's be clear i've mentioned this before but i once saw a book for sale on amazon it was just advertised to me i was not searching for it about teaching yourself advanced math um and you know the book description it said hey you know you don't need to enroll in university courses to build up the skills you need to do advanced algebra i think i think was both algebra and calculus i forgot in this book so you know this experienced professor and math educator gives you a series of explanations and exercises you can do every day and within two years or something you can learn everything you should have learned in high school and then go much further and really understand advanced mathematics like imagine i just kind of sat there thinking about it you know because i in that case i completely believe it like i completely believe that just for a person of average intelligence without that much work if you put in the work every day you can build up your ability in math nobody does like that is not even one in a million it is incredibly rare as a hobby for someone to even do long division let alone advanced trigonometry or something you know nobody does that there is no scene on youtube monetizing the fantasy that you yes you can teach yourself to be really good at math and the irony is you can the irony is that works like i totally like there's no doubt in my mind you can do that you can you can get good at math right and instead there's this really powerful fantasy uh connected to language education and again no matter how expensive you think this is internet-based youtube-based language education it is pennies like both in terms of time in terms of money these are really low costs compared to what traditional language education was whether inside the university or otherwise how do you calculate the cost of going to live in a monastery in order to learn a language how do you calculate the cost of joining the army in our language like this even if it's some scenario in which you don't pay anything the loss of years of your life and the contractual obligations in exchange so the the uniqueness of the language learning fantasy again that it's so unlike architecture that it's someone like math and so with everything else even if so look one of the differences if you get good at math who's going to sleep with you who's even going to flirt with you like how is this going to improve your sex life and again i'm interested in your sex life as an indirect indication of something much more complex and political about your social status your social standing so like you know i used to i used to lobby city hall all right if you go to city hall is being good at math going to open any doors for you like i'm saying i don't even think knowing french will here in canada like being really bilingual influential no one's gonna say oh wow and knowing latin or no in greek it won't nail but it did a couple hundred years ago right if you went to city hall and you were a hard-working assiduous person who could really quote latin and greek that was extremely esteemed that really was significant for your status at city hall right but as i say sexual status is an indirect and imperfect token of this nobody believes they can get laid by hitting the books and really getting good at math right okay but what about architecture all right even architecture right learning about architecture art history it seems like nothing else can be commercialized in quite the same way language education can be and that language education has so i'm going to take a moment and read your comments guys if you want to type something you want me to see it that's a good time to and melissa if you want to jump in and tell me i'm wrong about everything hit me okay it's a question do you think for people like ben from franklin that this played a role in their sex lives yes yes absolutely and ben franklin did sleep around we know a fair bit about his sex absolutely absolutely um you know at that time it was really a man's world but you know his status in gentlemen's clubs his status in different royal scientific societies and so on had everything to do with his being able to front on uh knowing these languages sure and even his being sent on that mission to france um you know sure you know but but i mean both the appearance of his area edition and the reality of it sure had everything to do with this yeah go on you yeah one of the things that he was ugly no offense but is it too soon is it too soon to admit that ben franklin was both fat and ugly okay can we no is it too soon and he had kids out of wedlock on you right yeah one other thing i wanted to ask or at least to talk about is i remember maybe a couple years ago first thinking about this because you brought it up to me and i was i felt stupid thinking wow how did i not how had i gotten to like i don't know 27 without really thinking about the origin of the term bachelors right what does this mean like okay i have a bachelor's in english right okay well there are there's like obvious right so what's the etymology and why why is that the term we use rather than something else right yeah so it relates to this idea you're just saying that he was never a member of gentlemen's clubs right yes yes bachelor's clubs young men young educated men yes right and he continued to be as he became an old man too yes yeah yeah yeah no but i mean you know this is a he lived in a time before or even telephones and so on but very literally the places he was allowed to sit the tables he was allowed to sit at and so on sure and again that was entirely self-taught that was entirely through his own he had no he didn't even have high school he didn't even have primary school it was just through through self education yeah so no and think about how different his life would be if he just remained a an illiterate worker someone who just worked with his aunts so it changed changed everything yeah now anyway it's an extreme example and i am not out here making such promises but i i'm saying that that that was a fantasy i think for innumerable uh young men born in disadvantaged circumstances that they too could be in some way like benjamin franklin that kind of upward mobility including sexually that that could become possible for them through hard work oh and by the way he had his own best-selling books full of those types of aphorisms um so he published a calendar that was not really a calendar in our sense i think it's now referred to as benjamin franklin's almanac and he had these pithy statements of worldly wisdom about being scholarly and sober and hardworking and saving your money and so on and yeah so he you know didn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what the ben franklin formula for success was so there's some there's some questions here about specific languages i don't mind answering them just because they're brief but it's not really the top of this video someone asks if it wouldn't be easier to learn sanskrit first and then work on pali so to do sanskrit first and then pali why don't you learn italian first and then learn spanish be depressing as hell and the resources you have for sanskrit are religious as hell so you know you will probably lose interest and never get there um i have never met one person who gained advanced stability in pally by working on sanskrit first i have met and i have seen evidence of a lot of people who had phds who claimed they had ability in pali who never got over the hump that separates censor from pali but you know am i gonna is it impossible no of course not you could learn italian first and then learn spanish but if you're really passionate about learning spanish learn spanish like it doesn't make sense my point is here italian and spanish are similar languages of course but it doesn't make sense to study italian first to help you with learning spanish if you want to learn italian and you learn italian you know anyway sorry that's a short answer but that for someone watching this video that might be important and obviously that can apply to a lot of other languages well look sir we have korean mention next is it easier to learn japanese first and then learn korean is it easier to learn chinese first and then learn korean if what you want to learn is korean like it would just be madness to suggest any other language um as a means to uh learning korean so you know it's a it's a generalized problem but i mean you know if you it doesn't make sense to me if you say yes if you tell me that you're so passionate about learning korean that you learned vietnamese first that's just what sense does that make what you're gonna learn korean avaya chinese japanese vietnamese it doesn't make sense and that does i mean i know people are putting those positions institutionally i've mentioned the story before i knew a young woman and she had been forced to learn vietnamese in order to learn cambodia because that was more profitable for her university they could make more money that way so you know but no it's don't don't uh don't reason your way into this don't make excuses to the point where this seems to make sense because it really doesn't make sense so we have someone in the in the audience who's in vancouver shout out to distant vancouver far away exotic vancouver and he says he or she says um he's teaching korean moms english as a second language seems to be korean people who are already living in canada and he says they want to advance too quickly they can't even sit through an academic english class they want to go to college to immigrate but can't put in to can't put in the effort to memorize advanced vocabulary i mean it's it's interesting because people can nail through the cellular phone through computer technology generally they can cope with living in a foreign country in a foreign language without ever really learning that language forever right in a way that they couldn't in the past because you know what what do you really need to be able to say you go to the grocery store and you say i'm looking for tahini and you don't know the word for tahini in the language but you can use your phone you can live in a kind of constant reliance on computer translation you can get by and these korean moms they may have been living in canada for years i don't know he doesn't give back on how long they've been here but you could live in canada for 10 years 20 years 100 years and never really learn english while you know your cellular phone your laptop computer etc while google translate uh helps you get by so certainly you know i just say um [Music] you know many parts of the world india is probably the best example the importance of knowing english has decreased not increased you might think oh that's paradoxical are you really saying that 50 years ago the english language was more important in india than it is today yes that's exactly what i'm saying you know it's possible now to live your whole life just speaking tamil in a way it wasn't 50 years ago there was a lot of pressure within india like people who never planned to leave india still needed to learn english or learn a certain amount of english to get ahead within india and that's decreasing and disappearing but certainly you know and look i obviously i could live in japan now without ever learning japanese i have footnote i have actually studied japanese university but obviously i could get around japan just using my cell phone and so on and so forth so yeah um you know computer technology enables education but to a much greater extent computer technology enables ignorance now um i remember the difference you know i remember when i was a child and it was really respected for you to remember precise historical dates and precise figures and how that kind of knowledge came to be despised when it was instantly available through google nobody needs to know the exact year something happened anymore from memory but before google before the internet if you didn't know the year something happened what are you gonna do walk to a library find the right paper book on the shelf take down the paper book right there there was really a value placed on not just generalized memorization but being able to summon up very specific information from your own memory now actually another example that was the role of a lawyer one of the main things that was prized about a lawyer was remembering the specifics of laws and even the section code and title like oh no under 14e it says this that was what was really valued about a lawyer so today that's disappeared also so again computer technology enables education it also disables it it enables people living without education it undermines it undermines the value of certain types of knowledge certain types of expertise i've seen that to a massive massive extent you know so another sorry this is a very simple question but it's a great question from henry gann shout out to henry henry says quote who learns languages who reads book who reads books i remember looking at statistics and this is very much pre-internet this is in my youth for how many non-fiction books per year people actually read in different cultures around the world so it was basically a study like how many books do people buy then how much how many of those books are fiction how much are non-fiction and at that time the country that read the most books in the world was south korea they were the most actively literate culture in the world i do not know if that's true today at all i do not know to what extent those statistics exist today to what extent that's really knowable and i just mentioned non-fiction is also a bit misleading because non-fiction includes technical manuals it includes things you have to buy for work that it's not really what we think about when we say reading non-fiction you know the tax code is non-fiction you know um so you know you'd need fairly detailed statistics however obviously with the the advent of purchasing books on the internet in principle it should be easier to know precisely what kind of books people are buying um but you can also just survey people and try to get honest answers about how much they're reading it is not a minor or trivial thing to say that the vast majority of people read nothing unless they are compelled to read it whether that is compulsion by a university classroom it's compulsion by their employment their job requires them to read something or compulsion by a religious authority figure like when you take the bible out of the equation how much reading is anyone doing per year and the answer is practically zero almost nobody is reading anything and you know look what are you doing with the next five years of your life what if you wanted to challenge that what if you wanted to change that in a way big or small you know i used this example 100 times i don't think anyone reacts to it positively look at what mothers against drunk driving accomplished you know what if a small organization could really change culture could really change the law could really change the world you know like it's not that edgy it's not that provocative i mean defund the police is pretty [ __ ] edgy and provocative and you saw how many millions of dollars were donated well what if and you know and by the way if you haven't seen my videos about it i am a critic of the defund the policeman i do not support the defund the police movement but anyway it's still an interesting and important example in our times um you know obviously the giles jean in france a very edgy a very provocative movement who really wants to donate money to support that movement when they're smashing up uh you know shops and restaurants and and tearing up uh the paving on the street and so on pardon me i'm also i mean i'm a critic of the geology zone but i also sympathize that they are fundamentally a pro-democracy movement so i have a mix of criticism and praise for moving like that but okay if what you really want is to improve the quality of education in our society if that's really what you want to do if you want to take a society of semi-literates you know and really improve the quality and quantity of reading people are doing the intellectual caliber of your society look at the difference that uh mothers against drunk driving made and ask yourself in the next five years do you think you could make a difference like that i think you have a shot and i think you have a shot whether you're in madrid or you're in mongolia like this is not i'm not stereotyping americans here this is not an american problem i've i've lived in england okay like if you think the british are more intellectual than americans you're wrong i would say less so just being real with you the intellectual caliber of people and anyone's at a lower level than the united states of america so some of these questions are really really short and simple but they are actually kind of interesting to me um from clouds quote do you think language learning is generally the most difficult intellectual endeavor so i'll answer first but mostly you might have so said with this like a really shallow answer is that seriously what is harder than learning a second language a third like really what's harder okay this is what i have to say about it um one learning a second language is unnatural and this is not an appeal to language fallacy we have a certain very finite evolved capacity to learn language that begins while breastfeeding as an infant to learn language just by listening and observing as a small child we have no innate capacity to be polyglots it is a very unnatural thing to think in just two languages let alone three four five eight twelve languages right you are really working against nature now again not an appeal to nature fallacy um with physical fitness uh if you uh if you want to be lean and muscular there's a certain point at which that is natural you're working with nature like if you just if you just jog if you just eat a healthy diet and go jogging you are going to look muscular to some extent athletic to some extent lean to some extent right if you want to look like arnold schwarzenegger if you want to look like a competitive bodybuilder or into something unnatural you're really not evolved to have muscles hanging off your body that way the way you know the most the most successful bodybuilders in the world were and for i think for everyone it's unachievable without the use of steroids like that at that level of competition that level of size and mass you know so it's unnatural by more criteria than one but even if even if you were born with some genetic anomaly that allows you to gain that much muscle just through exercise without use of of drugs you know things can be natural up to a certain point in the spectrum and then become unnatural meaning up to a certain point you're working with nature and then beyond a certain point you're working against it so why is learning a language so difficult this is one part it is fundamentally unnatural waking up at 5 30 in the morning to hit the books and study a language is unnatural it's never going to be natural it's never gonna feel good never all right jogging can feel good swimming can feel sports athleticism can feel good you know this is always gonna cut against your nature okay the other thing is this um if i'm having an in-depth conversation about the history of buddhism history politics philosophy the amount of time i have to think about my answer just like just in a conversation it might seem like i'm answering really quickly but if you measure the number of seconds i actually have pretty long i listen to the other person and i sit there thinking and i you know i get to put together a reply the challenge with spoken language any language including your own first language that you may still be improving your ability in for decades i speak english better now than i did 10 years ago and i'm a mean old man you know melissa you were starting with that earlier today just her ability and verbal communication has improved and so on you know in her first language even you know okay when i speak chinese if i go back to speaking japanese lotion tai cambodian okay it's so fast listening comprehension and speaking ability and putting together a sentence and speaking it it's so fast it's it's fast compared to weightlifting at the gym i can do 30 push-ups and then sit there and rest for a few seconds you know what i mean and i can think about what exercise i'm going to do next and you know it may seem ridiculous but to compare to physical exercise but you can you can space out and slow down physical exercise right and with language there is no space and no time either you can answer instantly and either you can listen and like have listening comprehension instantly or not at all right so these are these are two different categories within which i think yes language learning is the most difficult intellectual endeavor i'm going to give you a third maybe i can keep going so i don't know melissa feels some kind of way about this i was talking to a colleague a guy who's also a youtuber and who also does language education on youtube specifically and he's a much much bigger channel than mine as people say more subscribers and more viewers than i do and he was saying just kind of casually like oh you know these days it's so easy to make a friend on the internet and have people help you study the language people help you through you know skype or other teleconferences oh you know you just make friends they help you study lunch and i i said to him i wasn't being mean but i was being very serious but like what are you talking about like you can study a language for 10 years and never have one person really help you like you can wander in the desert for years trying to find one friend one colleague one person who cares enough about you to help you with the language and you know that can be learning la ocean and laos it can be learning chinese in china and whether it's on the internet or in real life like it is just not the case that people will help you for free and the work involved in language learning it's it's very difficult and you can ask yourself right now do you want to help someone else learn english for free really you know it's it's incredibly rare so this is another category of of unique and special difficulty that pertains to language and i can only compare it to theater alright if i really want to do shakespeare i can come here on youtube and start doing monologues from shakespeare right but there are some aspects of theater where i must have other people i have to have a group of people who can work together so a special difficulty with language learning is having encouragement participation help from other people now i'm just being honest i don't know how much that's true with math maybe it is true with math too maybe you really need to work with other people like maybe that helps a lot with math i just you know i'm just saying hypothetically like the the social component the cooperative component and even the competitive component with language learning it's crucial and i've learned languages totally alone several studied several languages i worked really really hard totally totally alone it's horrible so that is a special difficulty that adds on to to language learning as an intellectual endeavor and there's no doubt all three of these difficulties they fuel the enthusiasm the feeding frenzy for language education and polio lottery here on on youtube this is part of what's going on people don't want to be alone yeah melissa on the microphone that's it yeah i just wanted to say that okay when i was young i remember the specific kind of humiliation that i felt when i said the wrong word and the mockery from my brothers uh and how that made me forever remember one word or another and that's part of the process of learning language as a child and learning a second language you're subjecting yourself to that same process again as an adult when you are more emotionally developed so i think in this sense i've been able to cope with that better uh and also just the people that i've worked with have been nice enough not to you know be cruel to me about it but in a sense that is the really difficult thing that i don't feel as embarrassed about not understanding concepts in chemistry yeah but when it's about language and when you know the very fundamental thing about being human is being to understand being able to understand conversations around you and um being able to understand this have this understanding between two people and when there is a disconnect there uh it's it's really difficult in a way that learning chemistry or learning physics is not yeah i i have difficulty with that comparison because i just don't have enough experience with chemistry and physics like i'm just being honest i don't feel i can agree or disagree with you with that last part of it how it compares to chemistry and physics because i'll be honest with you i feel like it would have been easy for me to study chemistry or physics if i had a brother who did it with me and like an older brother i could frankly could have been a younger brother if i had someone else encouraging me and involved in that and asking questions back and forth and discussing it you know i feel like that could be a huge part for me subjectively of working on chemistry or physics as opposed to just being completely alone with the dry facts of the textbook you know so you want to say more on that maybe like you know me um um you you may you may disagree with somebody well i guess maybe i could ask a question so is it about um you know there i feel like there are two elements here so one is the the collaborative process the difficulty of learning a language alone right and the difficulty of learning comparing that to the difficulty of writing physics alone and then there's the element of humiliation right yeah i think look i'm just opening the possibility maybe that's something language learning has in common with other forms of learning including chemistry and physics rather than obviously i i still do think it is important for language learning i'm just not i just i'm challenging the assumption that that's a unique aspect of language yeah yeah that's yeah so so anyway babe you know i i do feel that uh fear and humiliation are major parts of the experience of education i've talked about that recently and people ignore the importance of that at their peril i think i mean look if you imagine language students on a spectrum some are kind of egoically invulnerable they don't get embarrassed they don't feel fear and trepidation they don't feel humiliated by getting something wrong or whatever and that mets people like that you meet people who are the proverbial goofball you meet the guy who's just totally self-confident and suave even when he mixed up the word sit and [ __ ] you know you know like he moves a chair and says can i [ __ ] here and everyone laughs at him and he's still completely like you can really have language learning errors that ridiculous you know um in every language that kind of there's something like that in every language two words you can get you can get mixed up you know um you know so you can have the person who's totally self-confident and and reckless over to someone who's who's very conservative and very fearful and very careful in everything they say and certainly if you talk to people who've taught english as a second language in japan they talk about that a lot with their students because well it's so hard for me to get my students to try things and speak and answer questions because they you know uh with with japanese the way they will express themselves is that they're trying to be polite obviously that's really an untranslatable cultural idiom what what politeness means in japanese is totally different from what it means in english culturally not just in terms of vocabulary but you know um across that whole spectrum there are people for whom language education doesn't work there are people who put 10 years into it and they still just suck at the language they still are just terrible at it you know so it's not the case a million youtube channels will tell you oh just be a goofball just be self-confident just be outgoing just go and talk to people like me as if that's the secret to language learning and it's not you know and there probably are some youtube channels maybe you know alexander as an example who say beast very studious work at your desk be this scholarly reserved character and that that's the way to develop ability and language but i i just say across the whole spectrum you meet people who who failed at learning their target language but yeah um [Music] fear and humiliation is a huge part of the subjective experience of of education and learning and fear of being wrong and yeah i mean i i really do think it's you know i think it's certainly something nobody on polyglot youtube wants to talk about nobody commercializing this kind of education and profit from it wants to talk about and maybe you know sitting alone at your desk with a dictionary watching japanese anime may be part of the problem is that you aren't experiencing that fear and risk and humiliation and pressure maybe the lack of that is part of what's wrong with this particular form of uh you know commercialized polyglottery commercialized language education so i i've already answered this question in part brunner asks in the audience what would you say is the main difference between the study of language and learning skills like math or architecture that makes one of them learnable on the internet and not the other so i've already given about five different answers for this i think i think you probably asked this question before i gave many events but let's relate this to what melissa just raised you know do you have anyone in your life who will tell you that you're wrong when you're wrong you know in in speaking a language you know language does involve making mistakes and correction you know i mean part of language is like stand-up comedy you only know when it's funny because you actually took the risk and got it on stage and presented it to an audience now i am not sorry i've said it as i say maybe five different criteria whereby language acquisition is really special it is really different from these other things so i'm not if you haven't seen that part of the video go back and watch it i think those criteria are more important um but math you know if the equation you did was right or wrong like math you can literally just turn to the answers at the back of the book and you know language is not like um and even with the language as easy to learn as spanish italian french people live making the same errors again and again and again for decades for their their whole lives you know certainly i've seen that even in english if you have people wrong in in their first language or if they speak english a second language and they never improve and they never get better now yeah that this is one of the differences from math and architecture you know i mean there are more so look why is it such a powerful fantasy the escapism involved in learning a new language i think it is because people have the apprehension or the intuition that learning a new language changes who you really are not just how people perceive you which it does it does change that you're perceived as a different person even if you just speak spanish let alone chinese japanese more challenging language changes the way people perceive you okay it changes the way you think it changes the way you feel it changes the way you talk about your life obviously it changes the way you live um in a in a very intimate moment-to-moment way it changes who you are now whether you think that is shallow or profound it's a tremendous change now any one of you in the audience wherever you're living i think i can say this safely there probably is a minority of people where you're living you speak spanish you know sorry like even if you're in london england watching this you're in glasgow scotland there's a spanish minority uh you know a spanish-speaking minority within london england okay but obviously a lot of you are watching this united states canada what if for two years you took up a challenge this could be a great youtube channel only speaking spanish when you wrote say your own home that you wouldn't say a word of english you'd only speak in spanish one thing is gonna change is who you talk to right you're gonna start living in a totally different community even if i only spoke french my life would be totally different here right but i think you can begin to imagine so look you can watch the news in spanish you can read the newspaper in spanish like you can do everything in spanish anywhere in the world now basically and again frankly even if you live in beijing china even if you live in taipei there's a spanish minority there really is i've seen it in taiwan there is a spanish speaking minority there a lot of them are from the caribbean islands but they whatever they speak spanish wherever they're from maybe they're not from european continental spain um [Music] okay whether you can imagine or not some of you will already know exactly what i'm talking about you will think differently you will feel differently you will dream differently living in spanish for two years right so it's a big change um and you know i'm willing to say it's shallow rather than profound but there's nothing else like it you know someone makes a joke in the ocean and you laugh and find it funny you know when you laugh in that split second you don't think about it for five minutes and figure out well it's funny later you make a joke like you know so me when i first make make a joke in lotion people laugh and find it funny because so maybe this is shallow it's a it's a big change when you find yourself struggling to remember the word for something in english you know english is your first language but that's not the language you can't remember it's it's a big change architecture is not like that math is stuff like that okay and you know i think a lot of people feel like learning a new language in some ways replaces their personality the different people respond to this challenge in different ways i think so look this is provocative i think overcoming your accent is not difficult i think if you grew up speaking russian i think you continue to speak english with a russian accent because you're retaining your russian identity because you're holding on to this sense of your personality and who you truly truly are that's rooted in russian because you've made a decision that you're going to keep dreaming in russian thinking in russian feeling in russian even if you speak english five days a week like you for you were living in the united states of america for 20 years and you still speak english with the russian accent one of the most dramatic of this is french that phonetically there is no reason for french people to say this is as this is this is the way frank the vast majority of french people mispronounce english constantly their whole lives it's not difficult to overcome with really very slight effort they could learn to speak english without a french accent with a neutral like what have you you know that's easy all right but you choose not to do it because you don't want to lose your sense of identity i don't mean i don't mean nationalism i don't mean a political identity i mean personal identity there's a sense of who you really are that's attached to that language that you don't want to let go of and you know sorry there are people born and raised in canada but they still have a spanish accent like they went through all levels of schooling only in english never in spanish but they still have a spanish accent and korean and chinese and and they never they never get over it you know so yeah architecture is not like that you know um the study of math is not like that if if there's anything else like that i don't know what it is and yes language is powerfully linked to your sex life language is powerfully linked to religion you know language is very often powerfully linked to social status career who you think you are who you want other people to perceive you as you know look guys i mean it doesn't mean a whole lot to me but when i was at the pinnacle of my ability to speak lotion it was very moving and very strange for me to witness lotion people saying that i was one of them that they said that i was loud they weren't flattering me they weren't saying it to me it would be like i'd be in a room with five lotion people and one of them would say to another oh no it's okay he's one of us oh no he's lotion like he's he's i've only worked in the language for a couple of years at that moment i could really speak quite well like just my you know within a limited vocabulary i could i could really pronounce and use the language well and it certainly it created the illusion that i was much more fluent than i was that i had much more advanced fluency than i did um you know in some ways that was very touching i wasn't there for that i didn't want them to embrace me as their brother or something or accept me into their culture or their nationality um it reflects a lot about who the lotions are lotions will accept you in a way the japanese never will you know there are different elements to that um but yeah beyond the question of how people perceive you and treat you uh the the way in which you think and feel from moment to moment changes with the study of language and even if that's easy the difference between french and english is easy the difference between spanish and english is easy and the difference between speaking english with a french accent and speaking english without a french accent it's really easy it's not like learning chinese right it's not like you know even when it's easy even when you're looking at a language transition that's easy in this emotional and psychological way it's still hard and as i say this probably is linked to the escapist fantasy um talk about a nerdy white american guy who has no charisma in america he has no charm in america but he feels that by speaking japanese he can become charming you know he can be charming in the japanese language and you know what's really [ __ ] up maybe he's right like maybe when he tells jokes in japanese everyone laughs and when he told jokes in english nobody thought he was funny maybe he's wrong maybe you get to japan you're speaking japanese and you're still a dork and nobody likes your jokes and you know but for enough people that there is a kind of transformation again not just in your status not just in how people perceive you but in how you think and in some sense and who you really are and look sorry again real okay so guys this is a real choice i have to face what if i stop everything i'm doing i learn hebrew and i start living in israel right legally i have the right to do this because of my bloodline right everything would change for me okay what if i stop everything i'm doing and we go to a i don't know some spanish-speaking country in latin america that'll have me el el salvador do you think i can get a visa i think el salvador might be desperate enough for foreign investment at the moment that i could i move permanently to el salvador and spanish becomes now look my point is not that i would ever be perceived as an israeli living in israel i would never be perceived as salvadorian living in el salvador i'd be perceived as an outsider but i would be speaking that language every day and i would be i would have a totally different life politically emotionally personally and in so many other ways the thing is for me that's not an escapist fantasy like for me there's really nothing positive about that but for a lot of people it's intoxicating um the possibility of that and the reality of it is intoxicating for them also you know i mean is it putting a mask on or is it taking a mask off right uh if you go and start a new life in japan if you go start new life in el salvador and for a lot of guys it's taking the mask off i've met men who went to brazil who went to colombia again the language isn't learning portuguese learning spanish it's not that and these guys they were not reading in portuguese or spanish it was just spoken communication they weren't reading literature or politics or history but you know they felt like they were set free and that this is who they really were i'm alluding to quite a lot of darkness there that i'm not actually going to describe yeah so very another very astute comment from henry gann quote is it not is it not ironic that the technology that was supposed to bring us together is actually contributing to our vulcanization um okay from my very first contact with the internet that was what i perceived i perceived the primary significance of the internet being vulcanization in its political sense so look my both of my parents were communists they were not moderate communists they were extremists other communists regarded them as extremists they were more crazy more extreme than the majority of communists at that time [Music] my parents they had no choice before the internet they had no choice other than joining a mainstream communist organization well you know within canada there were we still see we still see posters on the street today for the for the communist party they're still recruiting okay well your choice is either you join that party and you put up with their version of communism or you're alone you're an outsider you're shut out you shut the door on them and uh churches even small cults you know either you join this church or you have no church maybe there are four different churches in your neighborhood maybe there are 15 but this that's it you have a certain number of choices what i saw on the internet was whoa now you can join thousands of different communist groups now you can join many many thousands of different churches now every conceivable ideology is being catered to as a niche market and many ideologies that are as yet inconceivable will be catered to and yeah i saw i saw really extreme and eccentric forms of buddhism communism fascism what have you that all of them were able to gather their their community of followers and indeed start making money wasn't wasn't always about money but whether it was about money or so yes i've got to i agree but from my perspective right from the start that was what you saw and you also saw the way in which that balkanization reinforced people's sense of self-confidence and dignity in doing things that otherwise would have been shameful various illicit forms of sex well now that you have an online discussion forum where you get to meet and talk to other people who regard your particular sexual predilections as normal like it's normal within that one facebook group or that one reddit group whatever it is right now that you have an internet forum of some kind where your form of drug use is reinforced as normal right and so on for religions political tendencies so on and so forth so yeah you know i was kind of horrified around 1997 when i first started thinking seriously about the internet and what the effect was in the world it would have but you know i'll give you a real specific example how to take the discarded brake pads from a truck and turn them into a wind power generator you could learn that instantly on the internet before how would you even find out that was possible let alone get a step-by-step guide with diagrams how to take discarded brake pads from a truck and fit them onto this thing and make a generator well you know i that you know i was involved in ecology i was interested in wind power generation i saw stuff like that and i got it i was like wow okay so this is how it's going to change the world by really you know deepening the divisions between these different cult-like groups but also deepening the groups themselves deepening their access to information so and so even if it's just completely pragmatic information like that henry gann comments quote my own abject failure learning a second language even spanish tells me that it is easier to learn organic chemistry you know we can we can order teach yourself organic chemistry from amazon right we could do a whole series of youtube videos thumbs up if you'd support that idea if we do a whole series of youtube videos organic chemistry for dummies we can do an organic chemistry we have to check is that title already taken is there already a book called organic we can just start doing organic chemistry the equivalent of polyglot videos on youtube study with me videos we're going to do a whole thing for organic chemistry about how you can go from zero to hero in organic chemistry and you can do it with us i think there's gonna be any money in that i think do you think i'm gonna get laid doing that i think i'm gonna be able to cheat on my girlfriend through teaching organizations maybe so maybe i'm wrong maybe you'd really maybe you'd really get a following of people who want the encouragement and really value you talking about your own struggle to master organic organic chemistry but yeah um i think that's an example where there's no real barrier to entry whereas with language learning we really do rely on these institutions that haven't changed that much in 200 years um and we don't yet have a substitute for it but the popularity of these forms of the internet is very much based on catering to the fantasy that those institutions have become obsolete whereas they have not great question from clouds so melissa i don't think you've ever heard this clouds asks quote i remember you said you had considered mongolia instead of cambodia was the language a major factor in your decision to go to cambodia and southeast asia instead of ongoing so i don't know if i've ever talked about this um mongolian was quite accessible to me where i was at the university of toronto i mean i could get all the books i needed and audio recordings and so on and i was i was really able to do quite a bit of study you know there's studying a language and then there's learning about the language you know so it wasn't wasn't that i was directly studying mongolian as a language but i was learning about the language and the theory and history and for example what the relationship was between mongolian and the languages of india and languages of china and where the vocabulary came from and you know linguistics rather but i was able to do quite a lot of reading about mongolian and start learning also the history of buddhism in the country this kind of thing and you know there was one professor teaching mongolian at university of toronto at that time and i think because of that professor because of the kind of vestiges of the idea that there'd be a department for mongolian studies at university of toronto um [Music] there was a photo exhibition there was an exhibition of artistic photography from mongolia and i stood there looking at these pictures of the barren lifeless desert and feeling like i was staring into the jaws of death i like desert i quite specifically like the desert of nevada new mexico the united states desert is actually kind of appealing and beautiful to me as a climate i've been there a couple times i've seen that you know but i remember those photographs and looking at those photographs and thinking this this is where you're choosing to go for the rest of your life you know and in case you haven't guessed these photographs were not trying to make mongolia look horrifying they're trying to make it look beautiful you know i remember looking at that and you know had to admit to myself um i don't eat meat i don't drink alcohol these people their culture totally revolves around eating meat and drinking alcohol you know this is their freezing cold climate this is you know but that was the turning point was seeing the the photographs of that exhibition you know and it's it's very interesting that it had that effect on me because i actually do love the desert i quite like desert but i remember there were photographs of wells that had gone dry i don't think i'm misremembering that you know when there's a well maybe a thousand years ago or 500 years ago it produced water but now it's just a hole sinking into the desert and there's nothing there but dust you know and um yeah i mean i felt a certain kind of fear you know and i think i made the right choice see in the years since i've met many many people who became mongolian specialists mongolian experts and this one guy i didn't know him well but i i knew him well enough he had been a sober vegetarian before he went to mongolia to do his phd research when he came back he was a pot-bellied meat-eating alcoholic he had ceased to be vegetarian and ceased to be sober and you know for what for all the dust in mongolia [Laughter] yeah javier says that uh in his culture people will mock and humiliate you if you use the right accent and other people start to feel insecure uh so this is a huge issue it's just not the topic today but you know social linguistics and a huge issue within chinese too how comfortable are people with you speaking different languages and different dialects and different accents and you know this is one of the huge differences between england and the united states of america americans are much more accepting of you your kind of accent neutral basis and you know in england how much money you have is totally tied to your accent you know it's horrible the the class stratification of accent in england and things yeah but no no it's a huge issue the the mockery and so on but obviously i mean part of the fantasy of going to japan is that because you you look like a foreigner they'll be so accepting of you and you by the way there's some truth to this if you meet people who are ethnically japanese but who grew up speaking only english and then learned japanese a second language the way they are treated in japan is much worse than being a white person or a black person who is japanese and if you talk to people who are ethnically korean but who grew up only speaking english then learn korean as a second language they're treated really badly in korea you know whereas a white person or a black person you learn korean it's very different so yeah yeah some some of those issues of judgment on on accidents and so on okay so so larry has a series of comments and he says quote maybe that's why the very act of language learning got promoted to such a status as it could be seen as a side effect of the monotone i think he means monotonous but monotone fair enough monotone in a poetic sense a very monotone and habitual consumption of foreign language media this means watching uh anime from japan and this kind of thing well larry i disagree with you in a strange sense i think that everyone who learns a language wants to change their life the only exception i can think of is someone who is already married to someone like you get married to a filipino woman and then you can't communicate you try to learn tagalog to communicate with your wife and those people are very rarely motivated enough to learn a foreign language you know where you're like where you're trying to learn a language just to keep things the same you're trying to learn a language that your wife won't divorce you or you won't can stop fighting with each other that that's very rare but i just say um actually learning a language japanese chinese or any of these it will always proceed from a conviction of something has to change nothing is going to change unless i get off my ass and change it i'm going to learn japanese or i'm going to learn chinese or i'm going to learn italian or whatever it is and following through with that doing all the hard work for hundreds of hours over many years um there's some kind of change people are aiming at and frankly i think that's why this is all worth talking about you know um i think a lot of people want change some people want political change some people want personal change you know a lot of people want to change the culture they're living in or the political system they're living in if you were born and raised in indonesia it's much easier to fantasize about learning japanese and running away to japan than it is to fantasize about how to create democracy and atheism in indonesia isn't it easier to run away to a country that's already predominantly democratic and predominantly atheist look even russia i mean even running away from morocco to learn russian and go live in russia i mean i know russia it's divided between atheists and christians but still wow compared to life in morocco compared to life in indonesia moving to moscow right now would seem like paradise hey you get to be surrounded by atheists you know secular modern people with with modern attitudes so you know again it doesn't have to be learning japanese it's just the main example i'm using here um people want change and learning a language is very hard but compared to changing the political system in the country you live in and compared to changing your own life in the country you live in learning a new language will seem easy it's easier than the other ways to get to uh that kind of change and thus it's the basis for such powerful escapist fantasies you