Where Erin Janus, Nina and Randa Went Wrong: the life of the mind.

it will not be a surprise to any of you that i'm making a video today talking about the life of the mind you might be wondering how i'm possibly going to justify the title of this video however mentioning aaron janus nina and randa in the same sentence as the life of the mind just two days ago there was a very memorable broadcast from aaron janice's instagram about 100 other human beings witnessed this along with myself she commented during this broadcast that somebody somewhere should record it and download it i don't think anyone did uh aaron attended a political protest and she engaged in ranting and exhortations that i could best compare to the presidential campaign of kanye west if you're not familiar with this genre you could look up right now and come back to the channel kanye west slavery rant at tmz offices it was this level of incoherence and let's be clear what we're talking about is a combination of ignorance stupidity self-righteousness and almost messianic self-confidence a sense of purpose and objective that they're not just saying something you know being stupid happens to people and being ignorant happens to us all we're all born ignorant and if you don't have any real experience of being stupid you probably is not a very good memory because we've all been through that too but the combination of that with this messianic ranting sense of self-confidence that's what brings back for me memories of kanye west and witnessing this i don't know monologue it wasn't wrong she was talking to other protesters at this protest this very very strange broadcast from aaron janus now not surprisingly many people in that audience audience of about 100 people they don't know aaron the way i do and you guys may have guessed as much as i have criticized aaron on this channel i've also respected her privacy that's true of everybody it's true even of durianrider and freely i know private things with them i've never said on the internet and i never would say i have my own code of honor about these things a lot of people in the audience do not know aaron the way i know aaron and they were insisting that she was high on drugs during the process so many people were saying this and some of them were like attributing their conclusion to particular things one guy was saying look at her tongue someone else said oh you can tell by her eyelid movement or something no no she this this is her in a manic state on a you know high on drugs and you know i was trying to find a nice way to say it and i think i did i didn't say anything offensive but i i wrote a comment saying no guys if you know aaron this this is what she's like stone cold sober this is her sober with no makeup and no hair i don't mean no hair in this no no no effort put into her hair makeup this is the real hero janice this is what she's what she's like so she by the way she responded to that she wasn't really offended but she insisted in response to some of those comments in the audience that no she she wasn't on any drugs and she hadn't she wasn't hung over and wasn't had anything else now you know a man slipping on a banana peel in a vacuum is not comedy you know what makes it funny is the context you place that you know so if it is the president of the united states who has just been lecturing the vice president and we know in the audience the vice president is actively engaged in a plot to assassinate the president states in order to replace this is a this is a tremendously tense situation and exactly the issue they disagree on which is the reason for the plot uh this is what they're confronting each other about in a whole hallway with tremendous seriousness and then the president slips on a banana peel and then he begins furiously pointing at his different aids and demanding to know who ate this banana now you've got comedy right it's the it's the contrast between these incongruous elements now what makes this example of aaron janus worth talking about today whether you think of it as comic or tragic frankly um it isn't just that she's stupid it isn't just that she's slipping on a banana people it isn't just that she's ignorant it isn't just that she's wrong you know the tragedy from my perspective is you can see she's really reaching out for the meaning of life she is reaching out to have a more meaningful life and the reason why she's at this political protest and the way in which she's reaching out to and talking to these other protesters and the way in which she's reaching out to the audience this is someone who wants to have a meaningful life and the meaning of life and living a meaningful life it has everything to do with politics at every scale i was just saying my girlfriend earlier today i've started learning spanish i'm at level zero in spanish so i'm thinking more about places like mexico that weren't on my mind so much lately mexico in terms of its climate and geography ought to be paradise it ought to be one of the most wonderful places on this earth you could possibly live i could say the same about malaysia i could say the same about indonesia why don't you want to retire in indonesia why don't you want to go on vacation to malaysia how do you feel about mexico okay the reason why mexico is not paradise is political it's political and cultural you may feel powerless at first when you're thinking about politics and culture but the main message of my channel again and again and again is that what you have power over is the culture of one it's the politics of one one person you political change begins with you and even if it ends with you even if your pico culture picoculture meaning something much much smaller than a subculture even if your pico culture and even if your political movement has no adherence except you yourself by striking out your own direction this way but deciding to live your own life in your own terms politically and culturally rather than compromising with rather than living life that's derivative of the the politics and culture that that surround you right that's how you secure for yourself you know the way to a meaningful life you may not have the option of leaving indonesia you were born and raised in indonesia the only language you can speak is bahasa indonesia this kind of thing you financially whether you were born in indonesia you were born in malaysia you were born in mexico and you may well say you don't have the power or the talent or the resources to transform the culture of this nation of millions of people that surrounds you right and i don't have the power or resources to transform canada i don't i don't think i can influence the future of canada even as much as i can influence the future and politics of laos a tiny communist dictatorship i used to i used to live in oliver was asking me that the other day i had a little bit of influence in laos partly because it's just such a tiny such a tidy country um you could meet people in government pretty easily there um you know i may be completely powerless right but it begins with the politics of one it begins with the culture of one it begins with you and how you're gonna live your life now gotta say the only area of discourse i know people speak in these terms is fashion people talk about being a fashion victim as opposed to having your own style you know that you are someone who doesn't choose to follow fashion you are asserting what ought to be in fashion by the clothes you wear and you know i mean there are people like this there are people who are quote-unquote taste makers rather than followers now obviously fashion is the most shallow and insipid nonsense and why bother [Music] but i'm pointing out um you know i don't know of any discourse like that that even extends to reading books you know that no no no really you shouldn't be reading the best selling books or the most popular books the books that other people think are interesting or profound or even the other books people think are politically important that actually in the same way that you should be someone who sets the trend someone who changes fashion someone who challenges fashion with your own sense of style you know that you should in the same way be challenging the norm in your in your culture and by the way you should be doing it even when it involves taking risks um there was a time when having spiky hair was a kind of risk and an active rebellion as stupid as that now sounds i know maybe somewhere in the world certainly in myanmar myanmar the government's very restrictive about men's hairstyles one example is this maybe there is still somewhere i hate to use the term because it is somewhat racist but you know the mohawk hairstyle for example you know there was a time when this this was what job could you possibly have if you had more perhaps today it's the opposite perhaps many jobs require you to have a mohawk as a as a hairstyle but you know this is i'm pointing out this is an incredibly shallow theater or workshop for cultural change or a laboratory for culture you think of it as a set of experiments right a laboratory for cultural change the world of fashion the world of style the world of trends well why is it we think so little about this outside of that strange uh shallow world you know [Music] we have this great term to be a fashion victim to be a victim of what happens to be in in fashion what's what's the opposite of that fashion hero [Laughter] you know we don't have a concept of being an intellectual victim of being a political victim of being a cultural victim that's exactly what you are to be honest all of us up to a certain age and a certain stage you know that's that's what we were and there was a stage in which i had no idea how to live a meaningful life i had no idea how to educate myself about politics and nobody else was going to help me i had no idea how to be an intellectual i remember oliver all of us in the audience now oliver was shocked when i told him this is this is many decades ago this would have been the 1980s uh i remember watching uh the films of woody allen woody allen made some relatively pretentious relatively intellectual films with little little bits of political commentary in them because i was trying to figure out what what do real intellectuals do real intellectuals watch and appreciate the films of woody allen quite a number of french and uh italian avant-garde filmmakers i also also watched that time in my life and it's all garbage i mean like in this i was a i was a fashion victim you know how how are you gonna figure out uh this came up the other day for totally ridiculous reasons both melissa and a friend of mine on instagram were asking me about my history with chess yeah i do have a history with actually formally studying chess and playing chess i figured out it's no different from a video game i really don't regard chess as any more intellectually sophisticated than playing virtua fighter two i i didn't say virtual fighter one i said virtual fighter two guys that's it's a more sophisticated game the virtual one you know um so you know this this ended up with me you know abandoning chess as vanity of vanities why did i why did i get involved with chess right there was this compelling cultural illusion this is what this is what men of genius do even you know this is what people with real intellectual refinement do that they sit down and and play chess uh now you know there were many others and also the idea that a real intellectual smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol was very much built into the culture and at that time i have to say chess was politicized in the 1980s the face-off between the soviet union and the united states of america there was really the sense that there were the the geniuses representing the soviet union representing communism and the geniuses representing western democracy and they came together to play chess to decide who had more geniuses i guess you know um just as in our times people come together to play street fighter 5 and uh call of duty and uh rainbow six uh just as in our times uh world of warcraft and other fine fine games determine the future and fate of nations you guys may not know but there's a very very famous um very very famous ping pong match in the history of china that was very important uh politically for the history of china in the united states and people used to use the terms ping pong diplomacy and ping pong politics but if you said that today people would assign some other meaning to it okay so you know you look at someone like uh aaron janus and i'll tell you how i feel about it and you know i may be wrong on this on this particular issue i may be wrong when i look at aaron janus when i look at nina and randa i don't see someone who is biologically different from me i don't see someone who is doomed by fate or by an innate biological condition to forever be uh intellectually inferior i don't now you know maybe i'm wrong you know in the case of uh nina and randa they could have any number of health conditions they've never disclosed to the public i can imagine they have any number of disabilities you know it's it's possible they have some kind of serious learning disability i don't know about but even then many of the learning disabilities of our time are medically unreal and there are a lot of diagnoses in our time like depression that are popular but have have no scientific basis partly speaking well you know i i you know in this very simple sense at this stage i have to disclaim maybe i'm wrong and you know i think some people uh could write in who have real disabilities and could talk about look i appreciate this philosophy or your preaching but there's no way they can practice it because they really are born with some combination of you know debilitating uh health problems or or physical physically real medical abnormalities i had one longtime viewer of the channel who had uh an abnormality in her brain that showed up on x-rays and mri scans and it was slowly killing her too she talked about her struggle to lead a life of the mind and to be an intellectual with a very real um physical impairment so it exists um and as i've mentioned many times i do have one half-brother who was born severely mentally disabled and i i understand i mean in his case it's brain damage you know in simplest sense there's a sense in which you know you this advice to say it falls on deaf ears is another statement it's it's something that's not going to be applicable to everyone's life but i've got to tell you um whether we're talking about males or females on youtube most of these people i really do regard as my equals i regard them as people were born with in this sense as much innate capacity ability talent as i had and one of the reasons for that is i remember how stupid i was okay i remember what it was like being stupid and ignorant and brainless i i i'm not i mean i think a lot of people get deluded about that they get deloaded deluded about the progress they made and and how they they made it like i can say to you straight up there was a time when i was as stupid as nina and miranda you know i grew out of it and part of what we're talking about here is simply the question of why they haven't now i'm going to deal with something at this stage that i don't want the whole video to be if you guys have we can talk about whatever you guys ask questions about whatever your whatever your own concerns or problems are frankly and living the meaningful life we're going to read this to you from a really lousy translation of seneca this is the ancient uh roman philosopher and playwright really is a playwright sack all right i i've warned you already translate the translation is lousy greetings from seneca to his friend lucillus continue to act thus my dear lucillus set yourself free for your own sake gather and save your time which till lately has been forced from you or filched away or has merely slipped from your hands make yourself believe the truth of my words that certain moments are torn from us that some are gently removed and that others glide beyond our reach the most disgraceful kind of loss however is that due to carelessness furthermore if you will pay close attention to the problem you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are while we are doing ill i don't like the doing ill this could be a better translator but i continue a goodly share sorry terribly english language a goodly share while we are doing nothing and the whole while we are doing that which is not to our purpose what man can you show me who places any value on his time who reckons the worth of ej who understands that he is dying daily for we are mistaken when we look forward to death the major portion of death has already passed whatever years behind us are in death's hands therefore lucillus do as you write me that you are doing hold every hour in your grasp lay hold of today's task and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow's while we are postpo while we are postponing life speeds by nothing lucillus is ours except time i i can go on we are entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing so fleeting and slippery that anyone who can will oust us from its possessions for me so i did read uh seneca when i was very young and i was so young that i'm aware that i've forgotten it um i should i should make time i really don't have time to do more of this reading now if i reread seneca i will probably have to examine the extent to which all of my later philosophy was actually influenced by seneca by that one author i think in many people back when i was engaging in debates about video game addiction and quitting video games i think many people were just astonished at my attitude towards time well i wasn't the only one and you know i mean it's easy for me to say i've always been like this well when did i first form that idea about time it's very painful for me to remember to be honest i can remember when my attitude changed and it's it's it's not something i like to think about um but there you go there's one touchstone in my intellectual development and someone else who you know again it's not that's largely stated in terms of regret of looking back on your life and realizing to what extent you you squandered the opportunities that you had i raised it here for this reason you know with the exception of people who have innate disabilities that really impair them intellectually i do actually think of myself as equal to other people not as being born with some special advantage for that same reason i take it very seriously when people make the decision to own a dog now the two things are how much time and how much money do you think it takes to be an intellectual how much time how much money do you think it takes to to develop in this way obviously nina and randa have the time obviously he never had to have the money they're wealthy and lesser people but not everyone is in need and randa's position not everyone is in aaron genesis position you know admittedly um [Music] if you own a dog some people in this audience own several dogs have you ever thought about putting a clock on how much time goes into that dog you probably wouldn't be able to measure it in one day or one week or one month you probably have to measure it over a whole year how often do you shampoo the dog how often do you get its hair cut how often you take it to the vet how often do you walk it feed it pick up its poo you know that a lot of stages go into caring for just one pet there are other reasons why i'm morally opposed to pet ownership by the way so oh oh oh so like cleaning up after the pet like when they make uh yeah so you see melissa knows um so yeah i knew a guy he was a bodybuilder he was a vegan bodybuilder and he cleaned all of the fur out of his whole apartment every day first thing in the morning he had this completely spotless apartment he was a very heterosexual guy i mean a lot of what he talked to me about when he was out chasing women but i remember saying to him look i've seen those pictures of your apartment i understand why there's this rumor that you're secretly gay because it's so it's so clean it's so tight like the way you keep your it's just mind-blowing and he taught he replied he talked me through his schedule and cleaning up the fur cleaning up the mess you know they break things okay um i wouldn't be talking about this if i think if i thought it didn't make a difference if i thought some people are just born with no talent and are doomed and determined to be idiots their whole lives and again i've already made the concession you know some people are so severely [ __ ] some people are born mentally impaired where their their options are very limited in life i get it but with that aside um whether you're talking about aaron janus nina randa or you know ali hardesty another youtuber of coming on or anision or anyone else you know you think you think it doesn't matter this time you're putting into uh taking care of uh taking care of a dog and again something you do every day so it takes at least minutes if not hours out of your day every day and i see it here yeah sorry i just i see people who are putting in the time walk their dog multiple times per day every day you know we see that surrounding us that that kind of culture well what if you spent those minutes developing your mind pursuing the life of the mind i don't even have to have to fill it in for you you know now many video games today not all many they'll actually give you a clock it's surprising that so many video game programmers do that because it must discourage people from playing games that when you log in and log out because you've played this game for three hours today and a total of 300 hours this year you know you must some people must feel guilty looking at that i don't know must regret what they're doing well you don't get a clock on walking your dog right now another one keeping it all the way real you don't get a clock on quarreling with your girlfriend quarreling with your boyfriend i've been through some relationships you know and all the hours you're putting into talking to this person about their emotional problems or just who does the dishes whatever you whatever you fight over whatever you quarrel over you know what i mean if you put a clock on that right well you could be developing yourself again i if if i were a fatalist if i were a pessimist i wouldn't i wouldn't even think this way because you look at nina you look at randa you look at aaron janice and you just think oh well that's it this is the lot you're born to in life so go ahead walk your dog play video games play uh counter strike go online you know whatever play speed run mario 64. whatever you do go ahead and waste your time because there's nothing better you could be doing anyway there's no no progress that you're that you're capable of now this live stream from you know aaron janus it brings up a number of other illustrations of what the the our culture encourages us to be childish our whole lives long i remember reading a description of japanese culture from over 100 years ago i'll just digress to mention i was very interested in the books that were written by europeans describing cultures in asia at an early enough stage that the stereotypes weren't established yet so to give an example uh people who came from i was gonna say people who came from the dutch people who came from the netherlands uh to sri lanka their encounter with sherlock at that stage you know and they didn't have any preformed notion of what you know the people are culture sri lanka like their description of i read a little bit from the portuguese at that time there wasn't that much available in english translation and i couldn't read portuguese portuguese explorers but the very first british people and someone to set foot in some of these places and encounter the culture and how they described it how they reacted to it and also to describe the politics by the way you know and to describe the religion buddhism and so on what was that outsider's perspective at that stage before those those stereotypes have been formed anyway i remember reading um a description of japan and it wasn't it wasn't that ancient this one was more than 100 years ago and this guy uh said of the japanese you know um they are doomed to imitate us in all of our excesses no other culture uh could be more childish and no other culture could be more obsessed with playing at being serious sober mature and profound this description of the playfulness of japanese culture and the childlike quality of japanese that you're encouraged to be like a child your whole life that today on the internet you know today with the the availability of japanese pop culture you know the west is easy to see but this is at a time when japan had no electricity yet you know this is kind of amazing and also the fact that his judgment was that the japanese were going to imitate everything going on in europe and the western world wow this guy had their number that showed up in japan evaluated the whole uh the whole culture anyway it's interesting these are not really not explorers you know you're past the exploration stage these are people who are going and really uh doing kind of anthropology uh extramuros kind of thing extra bulgy not pardon me anthropology not defined as such um you know it is a little bit different for a man and a woman it's a little bit different if you're beautiful or plain if you're handsome or ugly you know so i hesitate to say especially for good-looking women but there is this tremendous cultural pressure on you to be childish you are encouraged and rewarded for being childish um partly because it makes other people feel safe you know it makes other people feel relaxed makes other people feel there are no expectations on them and if you go around in this culture being a serious intellectual well i could digress into how badly or treated even at cambridge university even at oxford university even at london school of economics certainly at the university of toronto on terrible universities have spent time out here you know why can't you just relax bro everyone else is just here to party everyone else is just here to live lives of live a life of totally reckless self-indulgent totally brainless self-indulgence that's what most people are doing on university campuses even the most elite and most expensive and if you're the one guy who's actually living life an intellectual a lot of people react to that negatively um i'll be interested to hear if switzerland turns out to be any different oliver uh as the years go by maybe we'll uh maybe we'll get a contrasting perspective and maybe we'll get everything no it's just i know the swiss like to drink too the swiss also know how to know how to party but you know my feeling about many of these people um and i would include men like james aspie in this you know it's not just women i could include men like james aspect men like anissia and that little kind of man you know for our purposes here when you look at aaron janus when you look at um nina and randa i see people who have been encouraged to keep this childlike behavior child like in success including you know singing and dancing on the internet like you're a child you know really childish childlike activity being encouraged and being and being rewarded and then you come up to this breaking point you know you come up to this breaking point in your life where under whatever circumstance either by your own choice your own volition or due to circumstances beyond your control it's put upon you that you suddenly have to make the leap to really thinking and talking and acting like an adult thinking and talking and acting like an intellectual like a person of real substance you know aaron janus nobody else was filming her to embarrass her she's embarrassing herself she's the one filming and broadcasting this and here she is holding forth on 20th century politics you know what what am i going to say just to summarize what she was saying she was she was claiming that there's nuclear war coming that there's about to be a nuclear war with china he's talking about politics being russia in the united states she she was narrating as incoherently as kanye west but she was covering the big issues in in politics now i've got to say something i'm not saying this to insults uh aaron i'm not i have met people at cambridge university england who were just as ignorant as that people who were in the phd program some of them had just finished the picture i have met people at that same level of ignorance master's degree and phd at elite universities and i have met people stupider than that elite level m.a phd university and i have met people crazier than that um to what extent craziness comes into it you know kind of a complicating factor and interesting questions to what extent what we're talking about here maybe stupidity and ignorance maybe they look a lot like insanity just when you have someone who's only prepared to behave and act like a child in a culture that encourages childishness and childlike behavior and then all of a sudden there were adult expectations that were intellectual expectations why can't you step up you know we all know why you can't step up right like we say someone is an idiot we talk about being an idiot but it's a process more than it's a product you act like an idiot now because you have been living like an idiot for the past five years and just to bring nina and iran into this make clear why i'm making this parallel isn't here you guys may not know this but nina and miranda have been in their own struggle to lead a more meaningful life they signed up to go back to university they're identical twins one of them was clear that what she wanted to do was psychology the other one wasn't clear what her major was going to be at all they made a whole bunch of videos saying okay they decided they're motivated they're going back to university they're going to hit the books by the way they dropped that at university in the past both of them and you know mysteriously all those youtube videos have disappeared if there's still one or two of them up i apologize but to my knowledge they went back and deleted or do listed those youtube videos we've never had an explanation for why university just didn't happen and in terms of timeline that wasn't um related to current mask wearing concerns we'll put it this way to be as vague as possible um there's before um before these uh these measures uh happened that did close down some universities so i'm sure it's not for that reason probably they tried i found it was all a lot harder than they were expecting to be and they got sheer sheer speculation on on my part and you know we know for a fact that nina and miranda have heard my critique of them they've responded to it at different times i've also had interaction with their father so nina and randa know about my youtube videos about them i can't say they've seen every single one but they've seen enough they've seen several and their father knows about it he's probably watched every single one just knowing his character and he's interacting me we've had email back and forth you know over the years her father their father is also a very dark character well so here's another kind of breaking point in your life right what did they do with their time for the five years leading up to their attempt to go back to university and hit the books to my knowledge they worked as fitness instructors um you know they did these sexually provocative videos on youtube my normal example is the lick my body challenge uh the twin yoga challenge the twister challenge you know they did that was their period of popularity and success their youtube channel now is a you know it's a ghost town and it's it's a failure now but you know in the past when they were successful it was doing these sexually provocative videos very often in collaborations on other people's channels they spent their time singing songs and doing dances and doing fitness instruction and talking about the the food they eat and talking about a curious they live these really brainless child-like lives and right now they are about 29 years old if they're still 28 so i don't know their exact birthday 28-29 and they're looking ahead to turning 30. and i get it they tried to go back to university and they can't go back they're not intellectually prepared they're not i would say emotionally prepared i think they're not even ethically prepared there are ethical components you know to life in mind well again it's not just that they are idiots you know it's not just that they are stupid they're acting like idiots because that's all they've been practicing i mean for five years you've been living like an idiot you've been choosing to live this way and now here are the consequences and the probably consequences nobody ever talks through with you nobody ever said to you look if you keep living in a childish way this way one day you're going to wake up and you're 29 years old and you realize not just that you are an idiot you don't know how to be anything else you know um oh anyway they have things in common uh sorry there's another example i want to bring in here if you guys don't know who matt dillahunty is um i've made several videos criticizing matt delaney matt dillahunty he is considered an intellectual so the irony is is very different um from my perspective he's an imbecile but people people do not admire matt dillahunty because of his body uh nor because of his singing ability both aaron janus and nina miranda come out of a musical background this may also be an issue maybe part of their downward spirals as big part of what led them up to this point in their lives and by the way these are these women are all about the same age so aaron ballpark same same age as nina sorry sorry if i'm off some of that um but she'll also be looking forward towards 30 uh soon enough so sorry if she's actually 27 i apologize not not not far off in age and all prominent leaders in the vegan movement well i'll tell you something very interesting about matt dillahunty it's always just been astounding to me how ignorant he is how clueless he is how uh immature he is i you know [Music] why would you be surprised by someone being stupid well in his case he's been a major leader in the atheist movement for like 15 years so you know like even if even if you started off being an idiot it's kind of like well yeah but you've had years and years to work on this you've had years and years in the spotlight with a lot of kind of encouragement and you know you've had every opportunity to develop yourself intellectually even if it's just over the last 15 years and not over the whole 50 odd years of his of his life you know what it is video games matt dillahunty was a ranking league player of competitive video games already in the 1990s he has been a lifelong video game at it and still as an old man now he live streams himself playing video games for many hours and for him it's especially the so-called first-person shooter where you're walking around and shooting people in the head again and again again this is somebody's put all these hours into video games it's a lot so sorry you know [Music] when you think about it in terms of time i can't say everybody has the time necessary i can't say everybody has the talent necessary most of us do the vast majority of us whether you're looking at the video game habit in your life or the dog you're taking for a walk and picking up the poo after you know most of us really do have room in our schedule we could make for the life of mind and i'm going to go on to talk about some commitments in the life of mine are incredibly time consuming learning a foreign language especially a really alien language like uh korea ojibwe chinese japanese thai laosh and cambodian a huge number of hours can just go into learning one uh foreign language that can take all the time you've got but by the same token having just one girlfriend can take all the time and energy you've got and some of you have two girlfriends and three girlfriends you know what i mean uh like you know there are other things that are going to come into that i'd remind you guys some of you will remember that some of you won't um it was a an unintentionally hilarious video attacking me um so this is an obscure youtuber and i somehow found the video and i think i used a clip of it in a video of my own channel this is a couple months ago and this is a british guy who's got the british accent and he was attacking me because he felt my criticism of video games was unreasonable and the main thing he was pointing out was that i had music from video games in my video saying that you shouldn't play videos therefore my argument it was an incredibly stupid argument but i'm sorry i don't know how much of this was in the the video as i edited it or i forget if i shared the link on patreon or what but you know the main thing this guy attacked me for i wouldn't be surprised if when he's off camera he's anti-semitic because it really sounded like the standard anti-semitic conspiracy theory thing um he was attacking me for being born rich and claiming that the only reason i was so learned the only reason i had a university degree yeah it's some university degree i've got let me tell you sorry i don't know what he probably imagines i have some kind of university education i don't have um i have a bachelor's degree from the university of toronto people you know the only reason i'm so erudite and the only reason i've studied these languages and i know all this ancient history is because my parents are rich and have connections and that they pulled strings to make this possible now again sorry just his phrasing of it it did sound like he's been reading some anti-semitic stuff on reddit it sounded like the standard kind of jewish conspiracy you know a view of the world now there are a lot of things wrong with it and some of them are really worth unpacking even just in this limited context by the way okay some other people in the vegan community some other vegan youtubers have attacked me in those terms sometimes it was explicitly anti-semitic and sometimes implicitly but yes many other vegans um to name one one who was really messed up about it you know uh joe vegan he was also british there's a connection there i remember he he i think felt very inferior because of his low level of educational attainment and um he really i remember it in emails from him um don't yeah i guess we talked about it verbally too over like skype you know um i remember him really really in this strange vitriolic passionate way saying like the only reason you've learned chinese is because your parents are rich like they bought that for you the way your parents buy you a car or something the only reason you're smarter than me is because you're you're rich you know rich men need to understand how poor men work and poor men need to understand how rich men work you know the two sides need to understand each other [Music] some people live their lives where they've never really had any rich friends they've never really had any rich enemies either it's they dehumanize the rich and they think they live on the other side of this of this wall of this gated community if you'd known any number of rich people you know do you have any idea how ignorant how poorly educated how fatuous 99 of rich people are i mean if you would physically go inside the ivy gardens of cambridge of oxford or harvard university you name it of the most elite universities even there that's not all the rich people plenty of rich people don't choose to go to those places but like you can be in the most elite settings with the most privileged people and you know they they look up to kim kardashian like that you know kim kardashian is born ranch you know there are like the relationship between being rich and the life of the mind just if you knew more rich people you wouldn't think this way now i had one friend who was uh not jewish he had no jewish background in his family but i remember he he dealt with plenty of anti-semitic people and his favorite method of ridiculing the anti-semitic people who very often believed that everyone with jewish ancestry is a genius is like you know if you took one beach vacation in tel aviv if you would just go to a nightclub in tel aviv israel and get to if you just knew more jewish people your illusion that they're all geniuses that they're all part of this computer like you know this can this can this can be challenged just on that empirical basis like if you knew more rich people you might question the advantages and disadvantages of being born rich yeah well you know the actual work that's involved even even with the example of learning chinese so it's a great example but in some ways it's a unique and misleading example no being wealthy you have no advantage in learning chinese and spend some time around those people you can meet a lot of pampered rich kids and that's exactly what they can't do you know they might have a millionaire father who says hey look you know you've kind of been a lazy wasted spacer in here i want you to go and learn chinese you can contribute to the family business in the future um that's a lot like nina and randa trying to go back to university that's a lot like aaron janus suddenly trying to be a politically well-informed substantive intellectual you will find that they're often kind of worse prepared that all they know how to do is be is be childish they can't meet the challenge in it and it falls apart um this is this is one part of that but the other part i i uh i hinted before that i was going to talk about this you know being an intellectual how many hours do you need in the day maybe if you just didn't have a dog maybe the time you were spending walking a dog and grooming a dog and cleaning up dog hair and dog vomit there you go you know that counts that can really be enough to develop money so the amount of time you need if you really think about how much time do you need if you've got the will right um well how much money do you need there is an author whom i grew up referring to as only david thoreau but apparently only the quebecois call him that uh in his own life apparently his name he was called thorough we have names american names thorough and thoroughgood and thorough thorough this and throw that so um his actual name when he was alive was not parole but uh only david brings out the french the brings of the bad french accent in me to remind you all this is called a balacial i do have a separate channel with a spanish name though you know i have derebar el tiello there is already a spanish spin-off for this channel i'm i'm at level zero on spanish group i can't conjugate the verb to be or to have aesthetically it's a very appealing language spanish at least on paper anyway so how much money does it take to learn spanish do you think this stuff is the privilege of the rich you know so uh only david toro i remember him lamenting that to buy a serious book in his time was like six months worth of wages for a label now in the context of him saying this he meant something like thucydides he meant uh hardcover books from ancient greece and rome this is the kind of serious book he was talking about but um obviously it was reflecting on the the actual wages earned by a farm laborer or something and the part of america was we was living he said well obviously the vast majority of people can't become learned men just because of the cost of books i remember i was stunned to read that where i was in toronto at this time this was very much pre-internet the internet was coming into existence step by step but there i had no ability to read a book at that time on a computer get a book for free and read it but on the one hand of course there were libraries but toronto at that time was sort of this great center of bargain bin secondhand books and even just mass-produced new books that were really really cheap you know 1.99 for a new book and when you went to i mean i'd go to these sales where it was the library getting rid of the books they didn't want anymore and there were sec i've taken a list of these i went to those second hand bookstores you know that i took you to but at that time probably it's probably because it's before the internet now on the internet those books i think are sold more efficiently over different websites uh including amazon you know so sold uh before the internet all they could do was kind of dump all these books together and and put them in front of you and uh yeah i mean almost everything was just unconscionably cheap i mean how could paper be so cheap and this made me keenly aware before i'd read that from henry david thoreau that his reflection on how scarce books were in his own life and i always looked around thinking like you know do you people realize movies were expensive than going to see a movie in a theater you know for the cost of two people going to see a movie like you could have a whole library of books from the amount of money you spent on one night's entertainment going out to the movies movies were a huge waste of a huge waste of money at that time i don't know if that's gotten better or worse the cost of actually going to a movie theater seeing a movie in that in that format so you know it was just laziness it was just self-indulgence you know money did not come into it i mean today even if you don't own a computer you can download all the greatest works in the history of mankind onto your cell phone you could uh some of them you can buy for 99 cents you can't if you want to do it but well you know project gutenberg the availability of a free e-text and you know in many of the fields of study i've been in whether it is cree ojibwe chinese japanese chinese japanese uh cambodian you know pali you name it all of the best resources were free because all of the best research was done already 100 years ago just being real with you like most of the books i really valued they were not the new expensive books they were books from at least 50 years ago uh some 100 years ago oh well yeah so there's a well this yeah this is from this is from the communist period it's a memorable little book yeah yeah but well babe i mean i think you can imagine like with a country like laos um the french colonial period is what produced these big gorgeous impressive books and that stuff it would either be public domain it would be free or almost free and also frankly india sri lanka it was basically british empire books anyway i am i am digressing but you know um the allegation that the life of the mind that developing yourself intellectually that this is an elite pastime in the 21st century nothing could be further from the truth i've known a lot of rich people they grow up lonely they grow up you know frankly more susceptible to and more damaged by drug addiction and alcohol than the poor you know most rich people grow up very neglected by their own parents they grow up being raised by filipina nannies or other you know household servants those are the people who cook for them and and care for them to a limited extent and they grow up going to schools where everyone else is also a rich kid with you know flagrant amounts of illegal drug use and drinking and and recklessness and so on um it is it is very very rare to meet a wealthy person who has cultivated their mind he lives a life than mine in any sense and you know beyond that and again these people are hard to meet if you go out and meet people who really have lived life of the mind and who have as i said earlier they've kind of lived with their own politics lived with their own culture the politics have won the culture of one if you can ask them politely to what extent was lack of money and obstacle to you i'm i'm being real with you i think most of the time most numbers say no not at all no this this stuff it didn't really cost me anything um and you know i just say you know i have been an intellectual when flat broke i have literally been an intellectual when i woke up in the morning and chopped firewood and there was no electricity you know you boiled water so you could drink it over over firewood i've i have been intellectual and conditions of extreme poverty with no sorry i think i already mentioned no electricity it's kind of a big deal and i read with a flashlight zipping up the mosquito netting you know i have been an actual an intellectual in very very hard conditions and i've been in a lot in intellectual condition where i was poor enough that i really didn't know i was gonna pay my rent you know two or three months down the road where my life was really an immediate economic struggle that way i have been an intellectual when i had a newborn baby in my arms and i was it was a certain stage it was good exercise it was uh uh cradling her and getting her to sleep you guys might think i mean it's normally shown on tv is this right no it's a big motion babies really like to be swung a good long a good long way in your arms but you know i have been an intellectual while caring for a newborn infant you know i've been an intellectual in all kinds of different circumstances not just the one you see you know right now on your screen and i mean you know so i guess i did i'm just being honest with you i guess i did buy the cheapest spanish dictionary i possibly could how much better is the dictionary that cost twice as much like you know really i mean from my obvious it's from my limited perspective as someone learning at levels you know we're not talking about doing advanced research on spanish etymology or something i know there are some other oops there are some other resources you might need if there are some other research purposes you've got but you know um you know i know just being with you i know what it's like to be an intellectual when you literally don't own a desk you don't own a table it's hard that's there's still one article of mine on the internet that has typos and it's because i didn't have a table you know like i kind of went right i had i typed it i was lying on the floor i just mentioned so there were some weird typos in that that wouldn't i'm not saying i make no typos by the way but having a having a desk having a table uh that circumstance would help you know but once you have a desk once you have a table what difference does it make if you have a table of plywood a table of oak or a table of solid gold um whatever it is you want to learn whether it's a language politics history you know you you can buy a pen for a dollar ninety-nine you buy a pen and probably get one now for 25 cents you buy it you can buy the cheapest pen in the world you can buy a solid gold fountain pen you can buy a platinum foundation is it going to help is it going to make you any smarter it's going to help you learn chinese to buy a really fancy pet again sorry economics whatever whatever you're trying to learn having a solid gold desk having a solid gold pen is that really gonna help you out now look it's not the topic of this video oh good some people are shocked that i'm learning spanish be shocked cope with it um talking about money sorry it's not the topic of this video and i am happy to respond to your your comments as i just did uh but this whole subject unfolds in the shadow of the failure of organized education and it has taken me a long time to accept just how broken just how bad university education is i just talked about this with my mom the other day and it's one of those things most people they they say it but they don't really live with the implications they don't really live according to that conclusion they've come to after so many years of bad experience they usually say oh yeah the universities are all bad it's all [ __ ] don't waste your time and then they turn around and tell you to sign up for a course so they say oh you know you should go to the university or i can help you i say no no wait you just said a minute you have to really live with the implications of how of how of how bad it is how failed it is um if you believed there was a university anywhere in the world that could help you learn chinese and tuition cost a million dollars your perspective on life would be very different from mine because i know as a matter of fact there is not any university anywhere in the world that will help you learn chinese for any price not for a million dollars and not for five thousand dollars not at the cheapest there is no help and i i say this under other headings there is no professional help now i can't say this about every field of clean endeavor because i don't know every field but you know many people told me before i went to college to study baking how to bake bread in case you guys think i'm using baking in some abstract philosophical sense no i mean taking dough and water and yeast and making bread that's what i paid to study it was a really expensive college too wasn't the cheapest college building so many people i talked to in the field said don't do it just teach yourself how to bake bread it's going to be a rip-off it's going to be a it's going to be terrible and i couldn't believe them i have experience with so many fields philosophy politics anthropology history there's so many fields where i could say something similar you know um well you know i couldn't bring myself to believe it about bread this is bacon bread come on well guess what they were they were right you know but this idea um that it takes time you don't have is false this idea that it takes money you don't have is false and then linked to that idea about money is the idea that it requires an institution that you don't have access to either because you don't have time or because you don't have money or you believe in some conspiracy theory there's a conspiracy keeping you out of that keeping out of that institution so you know guys i mean look this is brief we'll come back to the video i taught myself how to read and write pali a language very similar to sanskrit with a flashlight under a mosquito net in a third world country while working part-time jobs like i had other jobs to pay the rent right nobody helped me no teacher no buddhist monks helped me no professor helped me no i rode my bicycle to the [ __ ] library and i did the work nobody you know and my access to the internet was very limited too because i was in a third world country at that time and at that time actually so i just say this is mostly paper and pen and flashlight and then i start meeting these people with phds and they all know less than i do and i say to them and i'm not i'm not mousy in some cases i said it this directly straight to their face i can't believe you squandered this opportunity you had the library i never had you had the wooden desk i never had you had the desk lamp i never had you had all the conditions to support you in this kind of scholarship for years i never read any of that and you are a bumpkin ignorant piece of [ __ ] compared to me compared to what i mentioned to you again i had to work jobs and i had jobs i did i was busy i had jobs and i and i had a girlfriend oh there's the big there's the big regret a lot of my time when the girlfriend i had during those years it was awful a lot of my time and energy was heartbreaking and terrible i would have been better off alone or whatever would have been i would have been better off doing almost anything else in that department but i had a horrible girlfriend that took a lot out of me um you know look i've had that conversation with people face to face and i've had it by email and someone was like well look i've been spending less time wishing i could have that desk and that desk lamp and that library card and that institutional support and that institutional education and here you are you squandered it it's one thing for me to say oh there's no advantage to being in a phd program there's no advantage to being an mma program there's no advantage to having access to uh an academic library an academic supervisor or a professor or that kind of structure it's one thing to see that it's another thing to really live it to really internalize it and really accept it and once you do that's why you start looking at aaron janus as your equal that's why you start looking at nina randa as your equal that's why you start looking at ali hardest the as your equal james aspie any of these people and think hey you could do all the same things i do the grass isn't green on the other side there isn't any institution that can help you there isn't any amount of money that can help you and you don't really need any more time than you've already got you know the the free time you've already got what a stellar ray i i look at these people as my equals who are squandering in a sense the same opportunity i had or or an even better opportunity than i had you know and i you know i mean this like you know again i looked around at all these people in in buddhist studies this is just one example i could now give a whole series of examples but a whole bunch of different fields like including like anthropology you know and you know with it look any intelligent hard-working person working completely on their own in the 21st century can learn more in two years than you would learn doing a phd program and when you put the phd and ma together you're lucky if that's six years i mean the real number of years people spend getting a ph.d anime it's often eight years and 10 years you know the real number of years of their life it takes up there's a lot of jiggery pokery and how the years are calculated but yeah and you can meet people who took 15 and 20 years getting their phd but if you add together the years for an and phd and there's a sense in which we all know why the problem isn't knowing it the problem is accepting it the problem is internalizing it the problem is really living with the consequences and this leads to a kind of radical egalitarianism paradoxically combined with what i'd call voluntaristilitism she's got a burp what a strange phrase voluntaristicism okay you know if you have a democratic forum this is easiest to visualize at the level of a city or a small town say okay we're gonna have we're gonna have some more direct democracy we're gonna have people show up and debate what we should do about things like parking regulations and suit all the boring things government does we're gonna have some more direct democracy oh yeah and it's egalitarian in theory anyone can participate but not everyone does and let's just say there isn't even a formal exam you have to write but if you show up at these events to talk about sewage treatment and you haven't done the reading and you haven't done the research you don't know what the technical terms mean you haven't been over the blueprints you haven't invested that level of work you will be shamed and humiliated and ridiculed for sure let's let's just say that you could imagine a democratic system where you actually have to study and write an exam to show yeah look i know enough about sewage treatment to participants but let's just say it's just shame and ridicule that you came to the connex you came to city hall to participate all right my point is this you could have elitist systems that don't exclude people oh yeah anyone can participate but not everyone will it's voluntary it's voluntarist in just this limited sense volunteerism word that's had many meanings in many different periods of time the the will is a word that's had many different meanings periods of time too okay so um that's the paradox paradoxical sense in which what i'm saying here is both more egalitarian and more overtly elitist now sir you guys will know look you know i got love for all these people but i also have contempt for them there was an anarchist who followed this channel so closely for more than five years but let's say five years i might be more like seven or eight years there was this guy and he was an ideological anarchist and i was very kind and encouraging to him despite the fact he's a jackass i can't guess you know well here's the thing you know i was i was kind of encouraging him for the whole five years the whole eight years whatever was you know whatever my opinion of him was at the beginning of that period of time you know five years is enough for somebody to learn a lot and on any one of these issues that he was you know speechifying on the internet that he was speechifying to me about by the way too you know he this guy cared a lot about the syrian civil war was very much ongoing in those years it's not really over yet but still that was when the the red hot bullets fly uh in the syrian civil war you know so he has all these stronghold opinions it's like look bro i'm looking at you over five years and you're not getting any less ignorant you're not getting any better informed you're not getting any more sophisticated something's really wrong here now again i think uh matt dillahunty is a great example of that whether you're talking about five years or like 15 years in this case what's what's how is it possible this guy's a public intelligence looking forward and you're not i'm not seeing growth and not seeing development you should be having breakthroughs all the time you should be able to say wow you know i i view this chapter of history profoundly differently fundamentally differently than i did just two years ago now that i've done this reading or this research or now that i've compared it to this you know now i see and feel about this in a totally different way i did the life of the mind you're challenging your own ignorance more often they're challenging other people's on youtube you mostly see people you mostly see me challenging other people's ignorance well i do challenge my own you know i'm in that sense i'm turning a corner on issues uh all the time um [Laughter] is there a separate conclusion to this thesis um you know uh my point is this you know at some point both for ourselves and others like on a one-to-one basis ourselves and people we know is individuals and when you scale it up and you start talking about a community as a whole you start talking about a culture or society as a whole you start talking about millions of people in aggregate at some point you have to stop blaming lack of time at some point you have to stop blaming lack of money at some time at some point you have to stop blaming the institutions whether it's a lack of institutions or low-quality institutions at some point you have to say no it's on you and and this great question because it's on me too it's all up to me right it's all up to you as an individual and in recognizing that there aren't any insuperable barriers or obstacles for me as an individual or for matt delante's individual or for uh this anarchist guy i'm leaving a name as individual or for richard vegan gaines or for nina and randa or for everything in in recognizing that right in denuding the situation of these uh familiar excuses that oh you couldn't learn that without going to university you couldn't learn that with some special advantages in life you weren't you weren't born with uh and so on and so forth you know you're then left with this stark realization that the intellectual elite we're talking about is voluntary you know nobody chose them they chose themselves nobody appointed them they are self-appointed and nobody this generation nobody trained them nobody educated them either they educated themselves or they just plain remain podunk ignorant now look i gotta say i've known a lot of people inside phd programs and there are people who've told me they learned more from me than they learned from their phd supervisor you know i and that's it's not a great boast you can look at most people their relationships their phd supports they learn they learn very little i mean think about you could come to my youtube channel you could watch hundreds of hours of lectures from me how many hundreds of hours did you did you actually talk to or listen to your your phd supervisor it's not it's not that that great of both seen in that context but obviously you know i was married to someone with a phd my first wife my my ex-wife i know she learned more from me than she learned from her phd supervisor i mean i i know whether or not she'd say that now or whether or not she said it in the past or whatever i went through that process with her and i think you can imagine like it's a reasonable comparison what is the value of being married to someone and being in love with someone who's an intellectual and who lives in the same apartment with you and who talks to you every day about what you're reading and your research and the article you're writing in your next research proposal now by the way i did not um i did not teach her chinese my ex-wife i did not teach her cambodian or paulie i did not teach you any language there's nothing really tangible the simple of that but those discussions every day some of them are in your apartment some of them are while you're at the library some of them are in reading and giving feedback on the chapters of her phd thesis or whatever like in a sense if i didn't contribute more to her intellectual development you know then her phd i'd be a terrible person like what you know what's wrong with you of course it should be on again these things are kind of easy to say um if they're really hard to live with it's hard to take seriously um and live with the implications of uh these these kind of all too obvious observations about how little education matters how little time and money matters and then you know what so look this comes back to you so i know it seems like a long time ago now i read you that quote from seneca seneca is saying all we have is time and you know the greatest way is to look back on your life and realize that you're already more dead than alive your life is more than halfway over and more than half of your time it's either time you've squandered yourself or it's time as he said so other people have filtered from you other people have robbed you of other people so all feelings i can relate to i say i was probably influenced by that when i was 11 years old or something figure out when i read seneca exactly probably did shape the way i viewed a lot of other things this life went on where i got this mentality that time really matters um but you know once you accept that once you accept that it's on you what attitude should you take toward james aspie what attitude should you take towards nina and miranda what attitude should you take toward aaron janus the tragedy of the situation at least with aaron nina miranda is that you know some part of them wants this some part of them wants to be an adult who is taken seriously precisely on these political issues and we could even say precisely on the type of political issues my youtube channel tended to be obsessed over over the last eight years you know like this is exactly what they want i i've seen aaron janis standing up and giving a lecture uh you know at a vegan conference i'm sure i've seen it on video nina and randa know what it's like to stand in front of a podium and mostly they do this joking girly thing of pretending don't take me seriously and i i do think many men live the same way i do it's not a strictly gender-coded problem it's not just a problem women have it's not just a problem good googling people a lot of men will get up at the podium and try to joke around and say hey don't take me too seriously um kind of boyish you know joking behavior but in these cases you know they whatever you spend 29 years living like an idiot and then you hit some kind of breaking point or in some kind of context you realize what you really want us to be is to be taken seriously to have exactly this kind of this kind of capacity acumen intellectual substance you know uh so on so forth okay so i'm gonna read to you guys if you uh if you saw this on instagram before you got here or you read one part of it in the uh in the description of this video you already know where i'm going i got a uh i got a letter from a viewer of the channel and by the way i assumed this was an older gentleman i see there's someone at least 50 years old when i got the the message it's not not worth saying why um but he wrote back later and specified that no he's he's about 19 years old he's actually quite a young man melissa do you want do you want to jump in is it just a good break point where i'm not ready yeah okay no but is there anything you want to say about any issue you're unlikely to have another opportunity to speak okay something that i was thinking when you were speaking was that when i was in university i was shocked when i went from studying science classes uh i was enrolled in science courses and then i switched to being an english major and i was spending hundreds of dollars on my textbooks when i was taking science classes and in this sense i understand why the idea comes to mind that education is expensive by default because when you take these courses it's really 250 dollars for a textbook uh in chemistry or psychology for example and then when i started reading english literature the majority of the books were two dollars online you know so i would order all of my textbooks and uh for under one hundred dollars jane eyre 199. yeah well by virginia woolf class all of those books were a dollar each or something you know so i look i know you don't you don't learn the same material but in learning languages um you know i had to i had you hold up that that chinese for beginners 50 cents the like three editions ago version of the textbook that they're teaching chinese right now at university of victoria yeah that was like 40 dollars for for an old edition you know it it isn't necessarily about getting the best and not not it's not about um getting the most recent or like the state of the art i just want clever saying melissa he is here talking about the perception that learning costs money the perception that the life the minds cost mike that's very different from the actual cost it's just just a footnote but i mean what she's saying is true this is why people perceive it as expensive perhaps perhaps some people it's seeing but the only thing that is though i do think it's mostly the excuse-making mentality and an imperfect parallel but a real one some of you may know fat people and they say oh well if i were rich like you i'd be thin if i could afford to exercise yeah yeah you know just to be fair some sports do require a lot of money if you a sailboat sailing costs money you know i i think fencing sword fighting costs my life i think some sports aren't but if you're talking about diet and exercise and weight loss i mean i think we all know that is really an excuse making magnets but a lot of fat people do that a lot of people blame and hate others and say well you're thin and i'm fat because of poverty worse as well i i think that's the most fun i don't think muslims mentioned with the perception that this is uh this is expensive i'm sure but i really did like that you know i really do appreciate the conversation about the cost of time in your life yes and ultimately it costs nothing to ask a question it costs nothing to look for answers from people that you know uh however um there's something in the value of being able to decipher what is a useful textbook or a useful uh website being able to to determine whether this is a good use of your time that it kind of has to come from going through the process maybe of you know questioning examining is questioning your own life and it's really you know this idea of the life of the mind includes questioning and examining what you're doing with your time i really think that's a fundamental thing so i i agree with that i just i just don't think money helps i don't think university helps i mean i think what you're saying is true but sadly you you can meet people who've had elite again cambridge oxford et cetera who never got that you can meet people who never had any formal education who get it that the the term i like to use is doubt i talk a lot about doubt in a positive way being able to doubt things and question things but you can have all of your textbooks handed to you by a professor at a university or you can be you know you could be someone who never wants university but who also just uncritically receives books the reason it doesn't really question sir if you guys didn't see i said on instagram recently um you know books are written by complicated people with complicated motivations there's no such thing as a simple book about the history of world war ii oh i just want a simple introduction in the history world there's no such thing as a simple book on ecology i think ecology is a great example just like can you get anything about ecology that isn't propaganda you know that isn't pushing several different agendas in the same book frankly you know what i mean i as a vegan you guys will some of you will relate to that whether or not you're vegan someone or that you know but you know books are written by complicated people with complicated motivations the authors themselves may not know those motivations but you as a person buying and reading the book you may be even more to see but yeah that kind of doubt um that i i'm just popping in to say that's not something you can buy it's definitely not something you receive from organized education yeah sure yeah i i have a couple things to say there in response but i've now asked several different people who majored in environmental science type degrees for recommendations for introductions to ecology and none of them want to recommend anything to me because they all were able to see that what they were required to read for their courses was just crap same thing even with nutrition nutritional science yeah just this example yeah oh yeah well just given that we have been able to think these things through over time um so the other thing i wanted to say is that the conversations that i heard on the news um maybe it was it was more progressive news that i was listening to maybe five or six years ago well it was about the value of education and you know bernie sanders was all about making education less expensive because everybody deserves to have a bachelor's degree everybody deserves to have this opportunity um and there was the concept that i grew up with was you know you can't or you you ought not to um critique people for being uneducated because you don't know their circumstances perhaps they grew up poor and and this is really getting to the opposite conclusions that you don't need to be wealthy in order to to build up this ability to have doubt you know to examine your life life around you um one book that costs 20 could be invaluable to you um one book that cost two dollars yeah sure or one one book you download for free on the internet but yeah but i'm just thinking of uh in particular uh anatomy of an epidemic this book that's discussing psychiatric uh medications you know oh you mentioned that book i quoted you guys from uh seneca uh so an hour ago less than one dollar however i don't like the translation i might pay more for a better translation but that one is less than one dollar yeah but you know this that anatomy of an epidemic book talks about people who grow up in poverty people who grow up in foster going in and out of foster homes they are poor you know they are so poor but they still are prescribed these psychiatric medications they know something's wrong but they just don't understand it you know so just one book like this can really change your perspective your perception of even just you know what medications you've been taking your whole life sure you know i it sounds stupid but it's not what is medicine what is science you know what is politics those are really big foundational things and uh and at university you're not going to get that you know no no no no nobody's gonna nobody's gonna do the thinking for you and no one's gonna ask the questions for you on the contrary the main thing you learn at university is uh conformism is uh you know to to unquestioningly follow the dictates of authority figures and to repeat back to them their own opinions this is the professor's opinion so if you repeat that back on the exam and in your essay if you mimic the professor's opinions that's looking ahead i do write about this in my forthcoming book no more manifestos a considerable part of the book possibly too many pages of the book are condemning university education but yeah actually philosophy of education is one of the major themes of the book it's a long book though it covers a lot more than than just that uh i said um you know you guys may not know this book but uh machiavelli machiavelli is famous for the book the prince but he has another book that's called discourses on livy so the title machiavelli is the author the title is discourses on libby and i said to melissa the title of this book would better uh it should instead be uh everything i know about politics that is worth saying that i have learned during my lifetime you know like loosely linked to a few odd quotations from libby like that's that's what the book is call it commentaries on livia's discourse oblivious it's ridiculous um yeah in the same way you know no more manifestos in many ways it's everything i have to say about politics that's worth saying um [Music] i it makes me feel like i never want to write another book in my life or another book of this kind children's books creative writing other kinds of writing other kinds of filmmaking and things i want to do but i'm not planning for this to be a long series of books on politics i feel like i feel like this is it and maybe maybe for this decade and maybe for this maybe for this 40 years maybe when i'm 80 [Laughter] maybe the next book on on political philosophy to me okay so as much uh anticipated here's this email i received from a viewer of the channel he says quote greetings eisel i've been watching your videos in which you criticize easy methods of language learning and encourage original research i can agree that if i took up these practices for five years they would change my life for the better and possibly equip equip me to make a positive difference in the world yet as a beginner in both of these fields i feel somewhat daunted when i hear you talk about professors that knew less about their field of expertise than you did when you talk about false fluency period so i just um mentioned something implicit here you know already in about the year 2000 i thought university was terrible uh in the western world at least there was this terrible failure and that one shouldn't go around encouraging people to go back to university and you might not guess those to me but i was very reluctant i was very hesitant to encourage someone like vegan gains to go back to university you know like you know i know how bad and disappointing and demoralizing discouraging uh university in canada is and university in most of the western world is so not someone who goes around uncritically lauding or recommending university education i'm very very hesitant to do so however i have met a few people and you know richard might be one of them games might be one i have met a few people who were at such a rudimentary level of education and sophistication we thought wow like doing a ba could really help you out there was one guy who was briefly my roommate it's not worth telling the whole story but briefly i was you know sleeping in the same apartment as this guy and i remember like saying it out loud to myself like wow i've never met someone before where i would recommend they get a ba and like i would recommend this guy get a ba in english literature like any subject like just for this guy to sit down and go through the practice of reading a book and writing an essay about it again and again again this guy is so [ __ ] up he would benefit from doing that now you know i don't know i mean maybe i'm wrong but i mean you look at richard you look at what he actually did with the last five years of his life maybe it would have helped him i'm skeptical because i know how bad the universities are it's not um put it this way the fact that you know aspirin works doesn't mean you rep you recommend it as a cure for all illnesses they're all people aspirin is good for some people under some circumstances well university i think helps fewer people than aspirin especially in in our in our in the english-speaking world uh put it that way but just point out you know another another recommendation i made to richard much more passionately and earnestly with none of these concerns was instead that he take his money and fame and go to syria you know and go get involved with refugee camps on the syrian border going in some humanitarian role get involved in the syrian civil war this was a couple years ago at that time syria was where the red hot bullets fly you know syrian civil war still not over yet but the different phase of that of that history now i said this for various reasons it has to do with who richard is as a unique person it has to do with syria it has to do with richard's own engagement with islam uh you know atheist critique of islam and so on and so forth i can say without any hesitation that you know specifically for this particular man at this particular time and again he has wealth he has he has options not all of you may be in a position to pack up and go to uh go to syria you know and also he has a bit of a tough guy complex you it's really subtle you might not have noticed this about richard but you know he has a lot of problems related to masculinity and strength and violence well you know get out in a war zone see how little a difference big muscles make in a in an epoch when the only muscle you need to kill somebody is a working trigger finger this is you know change your view of a whole lot of things but sure and by the way i'm not suggesting he would go to syria and come back with some deep appreciation of islam that he'd come back being pro-islamic or something but his view of islam would change he would gain some kind of nuanced sophisticated you know view of islam now five years is a long time what if richard had taken my advice it's over five years ago that i made my most notorious criticism of nina and miranda the criticism they made a video responding to we know they saw it right it's more than five years ago i was in kunming i remember where i was what if nina and randa had taken my advice it's about five years ago i started criticizing aaron janus what if janice had taken my advice and i'm i'm saying this is emphasized i didn't tell these people to go back to university james aspie i didn't tell him to go to university or i don't know in his case if it's go back or go in the first place i i i've never heard him mention that that's out of his life if he has any universities i you know i did not tell him do this aaron janus need miranda they they are not university graduates they don't have university education um [Music] my point is i'm actually giving very challenging very specific recommendations these people for how they can struggle their way out of their own indolence you know into the life of the mind and at this point 2022 i'm not merely saying i don't think that's going to be university for everyone i'm like really saying i don't think it's university for anyone like i don't know if anyone is going to benefit from from uh university because i haven't asked so far but if you were an hour and 30 minutes in if you have a second hit the thumbs up button by the way it helps more people find the video after it's published it also helps more people find the video and join in the conversation while it's well it's going on and if you guys think i'm at a level of spanish to interact with you in spain you must come on i've got like a couple days of spanish under my goals level zero people level zero spanish i guess they were so they were so impressed by my conjugation of the bevel yes that's that must be what it is two beves yeah frida is encouraging me yeah well think about how much spanish i can learn in just six months as opposed to how little chinese melissa is gonna learn melissa is working hard on chinese but the progress you make in chinese is so incremental compared to the progress you can make with a uh with the language like like spanish yeah anyway so this is the problem alec uh in the audience says alex says quote i think both a liberal arts degree with an exchange year or humanitarian work in africa or india would be good options for vegan gains compared to what he's been doing there's a problem with the last clause of your paragraph there's a problem i mean anything's better than being a video game addict anything's better than being a drug addict you know um you know but again i hesitate to say that like you know i think it's also uh i think it's also easy to say for nina and randa they would have been better off going to university but i i don't say that i really know i really appreciate how bad and how demoralizing and how heartbreaking university can be for me and for them too like i really i don't dehumanize them that way and you know again they won't have the same intellectual pretensions or intellectual ambitions i did when i went to university but nevertheless you know whatever their hopes and dreams are they can have their hearts broken by going to university too so i'm i'm really genuinely uh sensitive to that and look guys i mean look i went to learn chinese at a university and i can't [ __ ] teach chinese i went to learn how to make bread at another college and they couldn't teach how to make bread like this is not philosophy like you know think about just most of chinese it's just repetition it's mostly memorization and encouragement i mean it's it's really compared to a lot of other things it's so simple you want to do politics of cambodia it's not so simple you know hey hey hey hey what side was america on in the cambodian civil war hmm i've met professors with phds who didn't know the answer to that question their phd and specialization was in cambodian politics cambodian history that was all they didn't know which side america was on this is in the 1970s you know like hmm uh there was oh god there was another guy who published a book on cambodian buddhism and on every page of that book there were quote-unquote howlers it's old british slang you know what i like to call santa claus errors you know like errors at the level of you don't realize santa claus wasn't a figure in the bible you don't realize santa claus and jesus christ are two different people like that ignored that was published by a major press and still this day it's the main book on cambodian business anyway i could i could go on and on with this but look see again some of these things they're easy for me to say they're hard to live with when i look at these other people whether they are professors or phd students or people who people who have phds and did something else didn't become a professor i have to recognize that they are the product of that same institutional educational system that i'm openly telling you gives you no advantage compared to just taking two years and working really hard on your own like if i'm saying that i have to live i have to accept that well why would you expect this guy to know more than you can live in a tent story why would you expect them to know more than you could know just by living in a tent for two years you know like that you said that earlier so now you gotta deal with the implications of that yes whether they're professors uh or otherwise and again by the same token then you can't turn around and say to richard vegan gaines well richard why don't you just go back to university you'd be so much better off and again i know i get it you know compared to what he has been doing you know i i i'm not i'm still not willing to say that um i'm not willing to be glib about that i know how really life-ruining and heartbreaking university education can be and we're not even dealing with the the economics of it here okay i will continue reading this uh email from a viewer named jez um so he says yet as a beginner in both of these fields i feel somewhat daunted when i hear you talk about professors that knew less about their field of expertise than you did or when you talk about false fluency i was wondering if you ever made a video that specifically discusses your research process or the process you you use to teach yourself languages would it make sense to familiarize yourself with the etymology and grammar of your own language first or is that irrelevant so uh i obviously i'm going to answer this question now but i just mentioned i have made videos talking about the language learning aspect in the past but they're specific to each language so i know i've made videos talking about learning pali i know i've made videos talking about learning chinese um [Music] and i have made videos talking about the critique of a discussion of the philosophy and practices of learning languages so maybe he didn't find the answer he was looking for but that's different videos have approached that issue in in different ways and i think most of the stuff about research those are in videos that are about the meaning of life that just think they don't have research in the title they say hey guess what the meaning of life is and then research is like eight tenths of what i talk about in the answer so that's all i'd say i mean baby you remember this i'm not addressing the audiences babe melissa is here but babe i think you you'd agree with that that there were a lot of the videos talking about the meaning of life and how to live a meaningful life they get into they get into research and what is research um research isn't just something that happens in a lab coat kind of thing so that's that's where i think that that kind of material is hidden uh but anyway i'm not giving this as an excuse or failing to answer the question now but i just say it's it's been discussed in from different angles uh in different videos that way um i returned to reading the email quote i get the impression from watching your videos that whatever methods you use work very well i haven't heard many people who can talk so eloquently practically and meaningfully about the subjects you do i was unable to find any videos of this nature but i was wondering if perhaps you had someone who was unable to locate thanks and he gives his name uh jazz so um the reply i sent him i wasn't going to reply to you guys now and i told him i was going to do a live stream it's possible he's in the audience now i know what time zone is honor i'll see you tomorrow but i wrote back and said i'd be happy to make a video or live stream talking about this but the reality is that i have a lot of experience with failure failure is in all caps and people seem to miss the point that i'm not being self-pitying when i say that i failed and failed and failed like failure is an important part of the process to talk about you know and that my current success success in quotation marks perhaps acumen or ability would be a better phrase is really the result of a lot of failure i i'm not saying that i learned from failure only but i think it is a very important thing to talk about and you're never going to hear that from professors you know and even like to be fair even if you have a really good personal trainer who's helping you lift weight to the gym they're not going to talk a lot about failure they're not going to talk about mistakes they made or misconceptions they had about weightlifting or injuries like self-inflicted injuries because of things that's probably not how they're going to present you know the learning process of gaining expertise in in bodybuilding or fitness for you you know uh but of course most of what we know about fitness and most we know about nutrition and most of we know what works in sport a lot of it does come from failure you fail and fail and fail uh before um uh before well i can't even say before you succeed you develop acumen you develop expertise you develop um you know capacity in large part through failure but sure we're not only going to talk about failure in this video and i do think there have been quite a few videos about the philosophy of failure talking about failure and regret and reflecting on that not only in relation to research but research and language learning you know being a part of it um so i can say uh we're talking about a method honed by failure i suppose you could say that's that's what i wrote in this message a meth honed by failure quote i have several fans of the channel who are starting a pardon me i have several fans of the channel who started watching as teenagers and are now becoming scholarly young adults in their 20s and i wonder how much different their lives will be just because they won't repeat my failures um baby you want to jump in i said you feel like it again there's another reason i think i need to read again just the question part yeah you want me to read you go read it from the top okay look at your voice for change i've been watching your videos in which you criticize easy methods of language learning and encourage original research i can agree that if i took up these practices for five years they would change my life for the better and possibly equip me to make a positive difference in the world yet as beginner in both of these fields i feel somewhat daunted when i hear you talk about professors that knew less about their field of expertise than you did or when you talk about false fluency i was wondering if you ever made a video that specifically discusses your research oh so the question that's sorry that is the question isn't it yeah uh would would it make sense to familiarize yourself with the etymology and grammar of your own language okay um well where are you going with this mosaic i think it's just i mean i understand i know the the feeling it's daunting to know that there aren't very many people that you can look up to or that you can look to for guidance on any topic really that you have to come come to this yourself and and i remember in one of your videos that you were discussing not not having a religion but in a sense making your own like making your own philosophy on life not not following any one ideology but like coming up with your own uh sense of you know what your philosophy is based on what you've researched and what you've ultimately what you've tried and failed again and again so i you know i just i just want to say like i sympathize with with his position here where he's like in a good you know he's a beginner and you have to realize that there is there are very few experts that you can really trust yes yeah so do you think you can be more specific about what's daunting so i just know coming from a christian background you know you want to think that like people have answers and like you know that's that's a very good thing but is that is that what are you really saying that what's daunting is that there are no authority figures to look up to and you expect there to be authority figures to tell you yeah maybe that's your answer i can even think how i used to view uh medical doctors how i used to view authority figures in the government just you know uh i can remember the perspective that i had even in my even when i was 21 22 23 24 where i felt very intimidated thinking that other people knew a lot more than me i just by default assumed that i was ignorant i was stupid but as little as i know you know i don't put i don't think of myself as that brilliant of a person um i i'm stupid in a lot of ways still it's still very ignorant of a lot of a lot of topics but still when i am aware when i have conversations with people where i am more knowledgeable just about just getting back to that topics psychotropic medications it's just it's hard for me to to recognize it it was initially very difficult for me to cope with that because i thought that older people were more experienced and that older people had more knowledge than me but i don't so then the the responsibility like then falls on you that you have to be the voice like you know trying to help people understand when you know you didn't want to be in that position look unfortunately it's kind of a crappy meaningless song but there is this song be your own personal jesus there's no one else to be jesus for you you know um your situation is peculiar melissa so is the position of nina and miranda at some point in their lives nina and iran have had to look at their father and realize this guy doesn't know jack [ __ ] now their father presents himself as an expert and he is he's a kind of community leader i mean oh sorry if you don't know who nina miranda's father is he literally he stands on stage he hosts colloquia he introduces the speakers sometimes he's the main speaker himself you know but nina and his father they will have seen crowds of people applauding him you know sometimes they did the intro music they sang or danced and their father comes on stage they have seen their father having shaking hands with some of the greatest scientists some of the most respected scientists in the vegan community anyway you know certain scientists and doctors who've published books they've seen him interviewing and being received and treated this way and it must be a very strange break with these fundamentally trusting hierarchical conformist attitudes for nina and miranda now as they get closer to 30 i don't know maybe they're 28 29 years old now and realize this guy is just a crank this guy is if you don't mind me lapsing into german a talga nix nics this guy just does not pull his own weight um and already i'm sure for nina and miranda as they get closer to 30 at 29 years old they must feel that their father doesn't know anything that they don't know themselves that there's really not a whole lot there they okay maybe he knows how to assemble a radio you know i'm not saying there's absolutely nothing but you know in terms of what's really important what what really matters in life now you know i know melissa's parents i'm not going to turn this into a discourse on melissa's parents but i think you get the point that's a real contrast to both how you view your father as a child now you know your father doesn't have any such claims you've never seen your father standing up on stage of being an expert now in in my case it's an interesting contrast to both of those because i saw people who celebrated my parents as great experts and i always laughed at it i knew what idiots they were i knew what a sham this all was i'd seen my parents on stage i'd seen people politely applauding i thought honestly i've never seen a crowd that was really thrilled by my parents so uh okay yeah here come the experts all right i gotta listen to this really i'm just being honest with you i've never they're probably at some point they've had a crowd that was warmer but i've never seen my parents really received by a crowd very very warmly and you know i'm aware i'm very cynically aware of how little they know and frankly they're limited their limited reliability let's just say you know um now anyone else could also just read my parents published work and come to a pretty cynical assessment of them but not a lot of people read books um my parents have published many many books i just mentioned individually and collectively and some of their co-authors on some they wrote they wrote separately so i just want to say like you know i would presume that nina and miranda went through a challenge now some people they look up to religious authority and they figure out these guys don't really know anything i don't know or they realize how small the gap is you know what i mean um i guess i'm kind of surprised that this i'm not shocked but i'm surprised this is the aspect you're drawing attention to as being daunting um [Music] so in a lot of religions you know you can't know anything you can't be an expert unless you can read sanskrit unless you can read greek unless you can read latin unless you can read pali unless you can read classical chinese right like there's some very clear demarcation such as language ability reading ability in a sacred language and that's what separates the experts from the hoi ploy that's what separates a rabbi from the average man in judaism can you actually read biblical hebrew most rabbis can't biblical hebrew is not easy to read even if you know modern hebrew by the way it's not that easy to read and understand biblically but in case obviously the the bible is a heavily studied text so you get a lot of translations and a lot a lot of help with faking it uh i knew one hebrew scholar he was not religious so i got some interesting perspective one biblical scholar who did hebrew specifically um that was what he did his phd oh but you know once you realize oh i could learn that much latin in like two years you know you and i both worked on greek most and i both study greek briefly what do you look greek if you're just talking about reading greek reading philosophical ancient greek two years is a long time being able to speak and converse and do original writing in modern greek five years that's not two years it's just the the being able to use the modern languages that that rapidly it's a different kind of being able to read ancient greek on the pitch two years easy shouldn't say it's easy [Laughter] two years of hard work okay and you can so now what's what's the gap between me and you what do you know now both with uh biopsychiatry you know antidepressants psych meds um antipsychotic the giving of medications for mood disorders shall we say trying to cure things like depression through through pills you and i both know when there are studies about kind of how many minutes of instruction the average medical doctor md has on this so in in the united states and canada md it means a normal family doctor not a specialist not an expert but it's more than 12 years of education you know and you can break down like oh this is how many paragraphs they read about this and this is how many minutes they were instructed about it but when it's how to handle depression they know depressingly little uh now the one that vegans love to talk about is how little education they have in nutrition that nutritional science and you may not know this there was actually a debate at the u.s house of congress about making it mandatory to have nutritional education it's like home these guys get about 15 minutes of education on nutrition and they really don't know anything you know so uh one could insert numerous anecdotes here but i had a friend she now hasn't talked to me in years or she's an ex-friend and she told me this anecdote about her getting a phone call from a doctor so this was a full-fledged medical doctor in france called her up and he demanded to know how her son was supposed to live given that there is no protein in a vegetarian diet she was vegan but this guy didn't know the difference between vegan and vegetarian like your son's going to die because he doesn't own meat formally university educated so you know look it is interesting to me that that's how melissa responds there to say oh well what's daunting about it you know you must assume these authority figures have something you don't have whether that's confidence or knowledge or experiences well and i mean it's not the main thing we're talking about this video but part of being grown up is recognizing you know no they don't or you know if they do is it two years of hard work is it five years of hard work after which you'll know everything they know or you'll know more than they know yeah yeah no i agree with you that should be if you take an optimistic view of it then that could be empowering no no easy to know and hard to live with i mean i think that's one of those things going on yeah but in the sense it's empowering to know that you yourself can learn more so yeah the optimistic view to take rather it's just i agree with you it's just the process of becoming an adult is realizing that you have to bear the responsibility yourself of learning things and it's it's it falls on you the responsibility is is only on you um [Music] so yeah i mean i i don't need to go into it further but you know uh in this sense i trusted medical doctors when i shouldn't have i should have done the research myself myself you know i should have trusted kind of that uh the skepticism that i had about antidepressants i should have trusted the skepticism that i had about um you know the medications that i took for many years for controlling my acne you know like this this is the kind of thing that i i had my own experience of not trusting realizing i shouldn't have trusted medical doctors and other people in my life i shouldn't have trusted you know so i just say in this way when you started learning chinese or when you first considered the option of learning because you thought about it for several years before you committed to do it what was daunting about that i'm not saying this to contradict you but i would think the answer has nothing to do with what we're doing remember but when you think about learning chinese i don't think you envision that in terms of oh there's this other class of humanity who are doctors and lawyers and judges and experts and priests and they have something special about them whether innately or in terms of education and that's why they can learn chinese and i can't i just i'm just suggesting you to my knowledge i mean creating them wrong but i don't think that was what was done what what is daunting you had like two years of thinking maybe i'm underestimating it it was three years but some of that something like two years and then i was saying to you look do you want to do chinese or not you know long story short but you know but before you you took seriously learning chinese that was a couple years yeah maybe a year and a half i don't know i mean from the very start when i met you you you know you uh gave me this is not about me the point is what was daunting about it for you because i know you can tell them i don't want to get into how wonderful and encouraging i was sorry that's what i'm suspecting she's getting news because it's true from the beginning i was saying look if you want to do this with your life here so but but i'm saying what was daunting about um okay uh yeah i'll think about it but i was just going to kind of think about the timeline because uh you know i i didn't actually start writing characters until yeah or you know writing chinese because when we was when we dropped out of baking school whether it's no it was prior to that yeah it was part of that i'm just saying it doesn't matter um so yeah i just say uh what was daunting about it is just i don't know i i don't know i just trying to become an expert yourself or even reach the level of being a novice and anything it's just you know it takes a certain level of um dedication discipline responsibility that if you don't have it then it's it seems like an immense obstacle but if once you start to try and actually do it and no it's not daunting but yeah okay so i'm gonna give my answer i'm gonna use your phrasing you say it's daunting because it's going to take an immense amount of dedication my answer is what's daunting and the only thing that's daunting is that you don't know how much dedication it's going to take and once you do know nothing's daunting so like i remember saying to my ex-wife marie i've never been less intimidated by a language than i am in looking at chinese you know it's very hard language to learn right well why i had experience with all these other languages i'd done all these other research projects you know what i mean now um i could say the same about politics and history of central asia so it's right now i have i've still never done that language we have a stack of books right here kazakhstan kurdistan uzbekistan history and politics of this this part of the world i'm leaving out several but you know that that part of the world uzbekistan and its neighbors and their relationship to china right the relation between china and russia and central asia i still haven't done any of that research i'm not intimidated by it i'm not daunted by it at all why well it's not because i've studied the history and politics of cambodia or because of studies politics allows or because of study the history and politics of ancient greece ancient rome the american constitution napoleon the french revolution it's not any of those things but i think what's daunting is just not knowing how much work how much dedication how much talent or what kind of townsville that's what i think it is and then when you do know that nothing's daunting now we all know i'm an unusual person like what i'm saying about myself and nothing's daunting and you can kind of tell you can pick up on the on the vibe you can pick up on the big dick energy to use the gross parlance of our times you know you can tell i'm not daunted by this i can take on any of those things and there are a lot of different kind of jobs and real-life tasks i can i i could take on it i wouldn't be daunted by it all right but it seems to me that that not knowing that's really the that's really the problem and right but but look oh okay okay but see enough the problem is the word enough how much discipline so like right now so right now melissa you're right you're at level one two or three with chinese moses made a lot of progress i just i'm giving it a number because what i'm level 3 out of 10 or something i don't know because we haven't tried it but you know she's made a lot of progress in chinese in the last one year okay but as little chinese as you now know like as little ability as journeys still let's say i was given some kind of business opportunity some kind of career opportunity linked to russia say oh wow i've got this amazing opportunity but you and i are gonna have to live for 10 years speaking russian now it's very easy for you to estimate and calibrate how much work would be for you to learn in russian and i think even you can start to feel in your mind what would be like just to do spoken russian like okay i'm just going to work on russian to be able to speak to people as opposed to i want to be able to read the newspaper i want to be able to write an article published in the news like you know there are different levels there are different aspects to this game how much vocabulary and how much depth how much here like now you know i so by the way i also have a sense of how much work it's a lot of work russian is not easy but my point is it's it's finite so then you have a sense of what is what is enough right now look you know um [Music] some of you guys will know exactly what i'm what i'm saying here and some of you won't i've talked about math this way sometimes where like well i don't know how much would have to go into matt well but i kind of do it's in some ways it's a good example sometimes it's not uh you want to master chess don't it's a waste of time don't master chess but you know some of these things have you done enough math that you can think about okay how much time and energy is that gonna get or is that totally intimidating to you is that totally daunting to you because you can't really imagine practicing and building up the ability in a particular type of math so the math that's used for the stock market is very different than the math we use in political science social science statistics you know or the medical science math or you know math used um just to dole out drugs at a pharmacy you know measuring uh concentrations of drugs that this molar math and so on chem math for chemistry you know but do you know enough to know what this is going to demand of you what this is what it's going to tell you that's my thesis almost daunting now i think what you said about authority figures and as i said i think respect for your own father this is kind of classic but for some people it'll be a buddhist monk or a priest or something else what is the definitive you know authority figure i never had the illusion that my teachers knew anything more than what was written down on the book they were reading out from and they didn't really know that much about that it was very obvious to me you know i had a history teacher i liked well enough but he was very open he was a he was a beer drinking sport watching ignoramus and he he barely knew what was in the history textbook you know nice guy you know i just i didn't grow up with the illusion that my teachers were well-informed every diet sophisticated people i i didn't maybe maybe my whole life would be different if i regarded my teachers that way if they'd been the kind of people who could command that kind of respect for me it's just it's a finite number of people we're talking about here you know probably some of them watch my youtube channel i'm not making a claim that no teachers are intellectuals some teachers are intellectuals but it's rare and you may not have had a single teacher really was an intellectual you could you could look up to that you know um you know so look i understand why he's asking here i understand how it's linked for him as a viewer he says it seems daunting when he when i mentioned that there were all these professors who knew less than i did in their field right okay but you're thinking of an abstract professor you're thinking of like a lego man sorry if you the toy lego you get a kind of a man who isn't a particular man he's a generalized example of a human being and you put a different hat on him now he's a fireman now he's a police officer he doesn't have distinctive facial characteristics let alone psychological characteristics uh he's a mechat he's a you know you know you're thinking of a kind of non-specific professor each one of these professors i'm talking about is a unique human being with his own story and you know i've known them on that one-to-one basis again melissa recently went out to lunch with me and one of these professors and she saw how we spoke to each other she saw how well i knew him frankly he didn't know me that way oh and you saw how ignorant he was within that conversation there were so many issues in history and politics where he's not remotely like i might as well be talking to a child i might as well be talking to a high school student you know and it's in his field of expertise and he doesn't know any of this stuff you know i'm totally eclipsing him well that guy has his own story so look i'm not i'm not going to talk about that one professor i'm just going to say about many professors so like there was one professor i had who was an alcoholic you know basically a lifelong alcoholic he had a phd but already that tells you something about him you know there are many of my professors have been communists they live a certain kind of life for that reason they cover their eyes you know i knew this one professor i mean i had dinner with her and had lunch with her but she wasn't she didn't teach my classes she was a professor of tibetan she was a very fat she was a corpulent grossly obese white woman who had married a tibetan man and had a tibetan dog and you know allegedly i never heard her speaking tibetan but i assumed they learned to speak to bed and well enough together the two of them as a married couple and she was this kind of you know pathetic shut-in um you know and i could talk to her about politics of tibet only up to up to a certain level these are really unique characters with really unique backgrounds and many of my professors have right away admitted why they were so ignorant i had one professor tell me his sob story i've still got an email he complained that he was born poor and he had to work two part-time jobs while he was in school and he's a chain smoker and a heavy drinker he doesn't identify as an alcoholic from my perspective as an alcoholic and then he got married and he had a kid right away and so okay so this is your life you smoke you drink you have a job on the side you have a wife who knows what sex life and you have a kid you have all these distractions [Music] i don't want to give away too many details with this guy he he had a learning disability that might as well say he was dyslexic and not a little bit dyslexic he sent me one of his manuscripts for for a book um when he the same way he sent it to the publisher he said hey there's no i don't know i don't know what kind of editing team you're publishing woo every sentence there were these crazy errors in like his dyslexia was really serious okay well that's a unique person that's a unique story and again when i mentioned the communism well some of them had extreme religious views you know they were they were fanatics for one ideology or another just not communism it's something else so you know i i just say i think the way you uh jazz the guy woman so the way you respond to this you're kind of thinking about a generalized lego man professor a placeholder professor and not these unique individuals now some other person making this video would say oh and i'm sure that those professors they were wonderful positive people in their own way who were really good at something and really something there's something else they're really good i homie don't play that you know no i mean most of these professors they were terrible people and a lot of them told me openly about their drug habits and their sex lives and all the ways in which they're terrible people but i mean the single most common vice is just laziness and authoritarianism that once they become an authority figure nobody questions them and they don't question themselves and they stop growing and they stop learning as soon as they possibly can and you know i knew professors who were colleagues of mac's wife and i knew professors who were you know connected to my ex-wife and her journey as well as the ones i've i've been connected to now at what five different universities myself or something and all the universities where i went met professors when i was talking about becoming a student there i was proposing that i get a master's degree and phd at different universe you know i mean melissa you were with me at that university in l.a right you met those professors they're they're they're human beings yeah i guess i would like to say something okay it might be that i was influenced more by the fact that i was trying to get into science and that i was taking courses where i i didn't i had a sense that these people just knew more than me like if i took a class on neurobiology i remember one of my professors he was you know he was an expert in that field and then when i did coursework on speech language pathology i knew that these people you know they had the skills that built up so in this sense like i you know i was still in that mode in my early 20s when i thought that uh professors really were experts and and so on so i i just say yeah right but you've had way more no no but what i'm what i'm talking about is is calibrating that so guys yeah i've applied for many different jobs and looked at going into many different lines or one of them was bricklayer how many months do you think it takes to master the trade of being a bricklayer master the skill of being a bricklayer depending on what country you live in it may be generously estimated at three months and some kind of just three weeks their systems three weeks of training and now you're a bricklayer you know now maybe you pick up a few more tricks uh of the trade over the years but a lot of these things they are simple but even something like that even uh neurology let's just say how many years if you work hard as an amateur in two years how much do you know and one of the one of the reasons why that's easy i know people like to exoticize the sciences one of the reasons easy is that there isn't a language barrier there and there isn't the same kind of deception that goes on in politics history religion you know like i'm sorry but if you want to know [Music] napoleon everybody's lying about napoleon because everyone's got an agenda even if their agenda is just to romanticize it from something the closer you get to the pure sciences in some ways the less you just have to deal with those kinds of really distorting bias i do know i do know scandals it's not digressed into a bunch of anecdotes about how bad and corrupt the sciences are i know there are issues but uh yeah not as intense as religion politics history and there isn't a language barrier if your first language is english imagine if your first language is lotion and you want to do those sciences well first you got to learn english or or japanese you have to learn a language that that those scientists are really taught and studied at but yeah i mean but for you now i mean already neuroscience two years whatever get the books do the work you know sorry i mean you know of course you could i mean well if you disagree with me and say it's five years fine but you know what i mean you get the books and start going through and see see how much in how little there is to learn you'll calibrate what the challenge is how much it demands you i mean to me i mean compared to this stuff we've been taught compared to compared to learning chinese that's nothing you know the level of expertise you know those people have in those sciences that's really nothing i'm sorry another example that people really glamorize is architecture you know and and by the way sorry i have both professionally and in terms of my family i know a lot of stories of anna of of architects ruining building doing something wrong that has consequences where they were incompetent and like i realized architecture it's an important area to have confidence in but there's not that much to know you know like even the math used in architecture you know calculating the load that's each floor has to bear and how the weight is driven it's not that hard it's not that complex and we want to really glamorize this and a lot of those guys what however many years they were in school during architecture but they had two girlfriends in a drinking habit and it's you know the real like as opposed to working for two years passionately on your own you know um you you'd be surprised how little there is to know with any of those trades with any of those specialist fields so yeah and again you can take this um as a positive inspiration and say wow i can do it on my own you can become an expert in architecture you totally can't really um you know and of course it can be incredibly discouraging and demoralizing we realize nobody is going to help me i'm all alone yeah it's really it's saddening and certainly for people who spend a huge amount of a huge amount of money so uh really is commenting that for topics like neuroscience although there's an initial mass of information the main barrier is actually putting the information into context um and certainly he says as soon as he sees applications everything makes sense so ray i know what you're saying but my interpretation is different i think the problem you're describing is that those books are badly written a lot of books in the sciences are very very poorly written and i've been with people also where i'm helping them because english isn't their first language often i mean what you're saying there like explaining something in context that well that's the art of being an author right like how do you how do you describe to someone how to pick their pocket how to be a pickpocket well most pickpockets aren't poets they're not really good at writing a description of exactly how pickpocketing works they can show you but it's a different talent most people in the sciences they're just terrible with that they suck at making it comprehensible so yeah and that comes up i mean for me as someone who cares a lot about politics i often laugh out loud with both lawyers and economists because you know something that's politically important but the person writing about it is a lawyer or as an economist like oh my god they can't they can't put the words together in a way that's going to make sense yeah and i have experienced that in a professional context too professional writing and professional editing so yeah and in case you hadn't noticed not everyone's got the gift of the gab to do what i'm doing right now too so you know no but i i do think that's that's the challenge and you know uh i've known some very stupid people who got phds in in neuroscience um there's one i knew personally so that's my actual story i don't want to tell there are very few things i've kept private in my life um but you know sam harris complete imbecile look up what his phd is in so you know if you think idiots can't get those phds even in a formal setting and would it take you two years to know more about neuroscience more about neurology than sam harris knows i think you could do it in six months you know my point being is samurais is a very ignorant and competent person who does have a phd in that field um so you know uh these things are out there and you know uh all right sorry i i said this aside oh um [Music] we've certainly set we've certainly established the the picture frame very well here now for the picture i'm going to paint you know in response to this so so what a terrible challenge we're all living with being in a world where it's all up to you it all comes down to the politics of one the culture of one standing up and defying the expectations of the society you're born into whether that be indonesia malaysia mexico the united states or europe where you have to stand up and you have to defy the expectations of your parents the expectations of your deceased ancestors the expectations of authority figures where you have to be someone who's willing to wear unfashionable clothes not because you're uh not because you're indifferent to fashion but because you're you're setting your own trend your own sense of style is uh is challenging and overturning the fashions of the time you are someone who is going to transcend the times you live in rather than you know living your life obeying the dictates of the conformist society that surrounds you and you happen to be born in a time when the institutions have no wisdom to offer you they have no help they have no guidance to offer you but on the other hand what used to be the exclusive power uh exclusive privilege of being in that institution it's become readily available via the internet or just on paper you can order books via you can order them on amazon you know this kind of thing it's it's a book but you still got that book through the internet the internet has made book shopping a lot easier and a lot more effective well you know there was a time when there was just one library you could go to to read a particular book just to have access to the tax just have the opportunity to educate yourself and now you can do that in the comfort of your own home while sitting on the toilet you know the extent to which uh that side of has been made easy or can't be exaggerated um i have said though that one of the most precious things is encouragement and this question is not about encouragement this question is about method let's talk about method and we're going to talk about encouragement there are a lot of people making money on the internet giving advice about language learning not any other kind of learning in my opinion i guess i guess i can think of one channel that was doing the same thing with studying for the med medical school exams so there are a few but language learning is a big example there i feel right studying for universities exams studying for med school there are a few other little areas where people are making money out of offering you the secrets offering you the key to success in in this kind of study um and one of the comments i've made again and again is that no matter how bad their advice is no matter how flawed their method is often what people are paying for and what they're appreciating what they're getting from it is just encouragement because that is in fact what they really need what they need is not details on method it's encouragement and with many of these things not all but many you can say well if you're positively motivated enough you're going to learn anyway no matter how bad the method is there are limits we can come up with a method of language learning that's so terrible that it's going to be counterproductive now there are details if you watch the videos there are details of my advice on learning languages and contrast other people's advice and you'll my my advice is not going to make me a million dollars people make people make millions of dollars given this kind of advice the internet well i'm not one of them but just a very technical example one of the pieces of advice i've given is go to the index of your language textbook and memorize all the vocabulary first so you memorize you know just the nouns and nouns and verbs i guess you know so you really can recognize and know the meaning of these words first and then do the language exercises now i'm going to get to live up to my own hype here babe could you pass me the book that's under that keyboard there so i have a very boring language textbook here for spanish this is brand new i think arrived yesterday uh i don't think it has an index i would have to go through i wonder if the vocabulary is listed somewhere i'd have to go and extract the vocabulary somehow okay so uh but that would be an example where i'd be saying okay memorize all the words first then do the sentence forming exercises because then anyway your experience of learning your experience doing this is very very different okay so there's some very unpopular advice i've never heard anyone else i'm just being honest with you i've never that's how i taught myself pally well it's not the only thing i did but i memorized every single word that was in uh at least three pali textbooks maybe more and then i did the exercises and then i read the articles and yes i mean so this is not the only field i have experience and it was peculiar then when i met um people with phds in the field who knew so much less than i did now i'm just being real with you all the people with phds i knew and even the buddhist monks i knew they also hadn't even learned the alphabet for pally they hadn't learned how to read and write the orthography different story so it's kind of amazing how the rudimentary basic elements of learning were being ignored in the 21st century perhaps that's true of other fields um perhaps it's not uh so you know there is this sense in which method is exaggerated in its importance because it's the aspect that you can monetize it's the aspect that i can get you to pay to learn on the internet the different kinds of gurus can say well pay me and i'll teach you the method with this simple trick and then on the other hand method becomes this kind of mask that's worn over the face of just providing encouragement now again very briefly i think all of you would agree this is true with fitness advice like what they tell you is pay me and i will treat you i will teach you the method i will teach you the technique of how to lift weights how much technique is there really most people who are paying a personal trainer it's not method it's not i'm sorry have you ever done squats with the with a bar like you know gee do you know how to do an arm curl do you know how to do a bench press like really you need something you need to pay someone every week to stand next to you while you're doing a bench press well you do need it but not for method you're doing that for encouragement right oh i've got to be at the gym on time i've got to be at the gym at three o'clock because that's when my that's my personal trainer whatever it is you're and you're doing it partly so that you don't let them down and you're doing your best and one of the most common things the person interested they just tell you to lift more they just tell you to try it if you were there alone you wouldn't give it a 100 but because that person is there staring at you you give it a 100 a lot of this you can say about language learning too now i'm going to go back i don't think it's true about life in mind i'll say it so in a second you know i've said this to melissa recently if you join the us army and you go to their defense language institute they do quote unquote open door study and they have a guard marching up and down the hall looking in your door at you once every couple minutes to see that you're studying now you're sitting at a desk you could be sitting there sexually fantasizing you could be you know you can your mind can be one you see they're holding a pen and all you're thinking about is kinky sex or something you know there's no there's no they're not really forcing you to study but you know this is an example now are we going to praise this as as method as methodology again it is a method open door study in the us military it's a method but really what we're talking about here is is encouragement and a lot of people need a lot of encouragement and you can probably say i'm one of these really rare people where i don't or i don't anymore after the alluded to reality of look i didn't start out with all the right answers i failed and failed and failed and i learned through a lot of failure i don't need anyone to encourage me you know just even at this university give me the library card and watch me go i don't even want to help me i can do the research i can write the essay i mean no one has been better prepared for phd level studies than i am including my background by the way as a professional editor when i was an editor editing other people's phd theses like there are all these things i've experienced with it prepare yes but mysteriously there's no way for me to get into any masters or phd program in our incredibly corrupt and broken uh education system but look i i'm in having this brief aside to say well i don't need a lot of encouragement still the little bit of encouragement i do need is decisive it matters and i recognize most people at every age you think it's hard at 19. i don't know this guy's about exactly hp's about 19 the guy wrote this letter to me if you think you need a lot of encouragement 19 how much encouragement you think 65 year olds need if you're 65 and you're just getting started on chinese you're 65 and you're trying to learn about economics you're 65 and you're trying to learn about politics and you're 65 and you're challenging misconceptions you've had since you were 19. a false assumptions you'd oh oh you know you're having to turn those corners it's very uncomfortable it's very difficult people in their 60s need a lot of encouragement to to develop intellectually so it's not it's not just it's not just at age 19 it's not just when you're young that you need that but look you know um i got fan mail the other day and i i responded completely politely and pausedly but i got fan mail about my chinese uh language education uh uh videos so i got uh um someone writing and saying hey i really appreciate these videos you did to help people learn chinese and he had some specific requests uh most of them used traditional chinese he said could you provide also simplified training whatever you see the videos some of them have both some of them but most of the ones i made when i was in taiwan most of them had both simplified traditional i remember dividing the screen so i wrote back in a totally positive friendly way saying hey you know part of me wants to say hey [ __ ] you part of me wants to say do you have any idea how much work it is to make those videos and i get nothing positive back in my life from it you know and i don't make those language education videos anymore for chinese and i it's not just that i'm not planning to i plan not to and there's real bitterness and disappointment in me from my experience with a whole series of languages chinese isn't the only one and what i got back from that study i've made other videos talking about that um so even though i only need a little bit of encouragement and i'll tell you during that time in my life so i was living in taiwan let's say two and a half years ago three years ago some of that two and a half years ago three years ago if i had known one person in taiwan who would have just chatted with me in facebook messages in chinese like helped me improve my chinese by chatting in chinese by the facebook instrument that would have been enough in korea i could have had one person if i had known one person who lived in taiwan and spoke chinese and was a vegan activist i would have been so happy to make youtube videos not just about language education but about vegan activism vegan politics and that one all these other interests i have if i know one person i mean back in my days of doing buddhism if i'd known one person in taiwan there's many years earlier but i was also in taiwan many years earlier so like 10 years earlier if i'd know one person who spoke chinese and cared about buddhism they were a scholar of buddhism or a religious buddhist person and they'd help me learn chinese in connection to buddhism and some buddhist temple or something that encouragement could have changed my whole life with that at that stage right if i'd known one person who helped me with lotion as a language one person to help me with cambodia there never was even one person i got to say this there never was one person helping me before youtube i can't say before the internet because the internet was part of my life before was on youtube but it was a much smaller problem there was never one person encouraging me or helping me before youtube and there's never been one person after i got involved with youtube and this is not a humble brag on the contrary there have only been women trying to [ __ ] me and that includes the women who were shrewd enough and intelligent enough to pretend that they wanted to help me with my intellectual endeavors to pretend that they wanted to help me with studying languages or sometimes other ambitions i had those women also with the passage of time it was revealed they were really just trying to sleep with me they were trying to have sex with me um still good advice if you're trying to seduce me tell melissa seduce me melissa said she was interested in my writing and so but if you're trying to seduce me and you're not an intellectual pretend you know because i'm way more likely to reply to that email if you write to me actually showing interest in my my writing my research my intellectual work study of languages you're trying to help me with something okay so look um my point is this i'm saying this self-critically yes i can describe myself as someone with a very high level of capacity to be an auto didact to be self-teaching self-centered right okay i can describe myself some with a very high level of initiative to just go out and learn things so you know i've been talking to melissa about this it's like look it can't all be my initiative like okay like with me oh you want to know more about the stock market you want to have a career in economics okay bang bang bang i've got the books but i'm rolling on it already and i'm passionate about it even even though it's not the most beautiful theme of i have so much passion and initiative to put into economics real estate law school film school film making like at any given time i have all this kind of passion and initiative that i can pour into many different things it doesn't have to be uh it's one thing i have all i have all this initiative and i'm gonna okay but i would never say i'm someone who doesn't need encouragement these are counter examples where i did need encouragement and i asked for encouragement i was seeking encouragement i needed people to help me and i didn't get it and it had a decisive influence in my life whether or not i'm sad about it now look sorry also within this uh youtube channel's history um i don't i'm just being honest i don't think i emotionally feel any kind of way about this but this youtube channel is called a ba le hilariously mispronounced by nicotto avocado with a long history okay long history of people struggling to pronounce the name of this channel why do you think it was called that because i thought that atheism and religion was going to be the major focus of this channel i have never had any encouragement from any of the other atheist youtubers including ones i reached out to and said hey look i really want to appear on your podcast i really want to talk to you about buddhism and atheism or meditation and atheism there are many different things i'd love to talk to someone else about it i'd love to collaborate with someone else about i never had any positivity back and never had had any encouragement now i'm not going to get into a digression about the toxic relationship between myself and the vegans of the 21st century it would be a little bit more lengthy than just saying i never had anything positive there was a little bit positive but there was way more negative it is what it is but my point is yes even for someone like me encouragement matters so i'm not diminishing that and i'm not uh dismissing it now coming back something melissa said about an hour ago and i said at that time okay i will come back to that later melissa briefly said that part of the problem is just knowing what to read as opposed to knowing what's crap knowing what's biased knowing what somebody's like in order to educate yourself in this way how can you even know what to read or how to read it and that's you know and then we got into the discussion of of doubt you know um and doubting your sources and doubting authority and regarding you know behind all authority is mere authorship you don't regard a book as an authority on a subject you just recognize you know this book was written by a particular person he was a complicated man with complicated motivations and you know you take it from there you know were you really personalize the author of the book and understand even if the author of the book is trying to be as honest towards you as possible and trying to be as helpful towards you as possible he or she may not be that actually there may be many different levels of deception and self-deception involved many different levels of dishonesty i think a great example of that um is the relationship between jordan peterson and a notorious book called hitler's table talk so it's now been proven so hitler's table talk this is kind of uh allegedly the final philosophical statement from adolf hitler what do you know a bunch of crazy nazis produced several very different versions of the text because the nazis were a very eccentric bunch there was it wasn't wonderful unified philosophy in that sense different people wanted to write or rewrite the words of adolf hitler in very different ways and jordan peterson is completely unskeptical and unaware of this peterson just kind of you know um stumbles through this in a very unsophisticated and and unskeptical way well you know like and with this same tendency to rewrite history um you know who are you going to find who's really going to be honest with you about communism in china who are you you know those those simple questions that that kind of doubt and that ability to uh ability to to oh the sensitivity to how unreliable your sources are you know and and developing that and we've already said that's not something you're ever going to get from university it's not something that's going to be handed to you by an authority figure you're more likely to develop it despite university it's realizing that your professors are lying to you realizing your parents are lying to you realizing your priest is like it's more likely to give you that sense of wanting to interrogate these sources and compare multiple sources and figuring out who's lying why who has what agenda you know uh so on and so forth but yeah the extent to which things are unknowable just because of that kind of that kind of bias that's a huge huge barrier and it's not just a barrier to being an autodesk it's a it's a part of the the intellectual life um and this does relate again to the fundamental question of why learn a foreign language that wasn't asked here so i'm a method of learning a language he's presuming already he's motivated so language is not just a method of communication okay language is not just a way of talking it's not just a way of reading it's not just a way of writing it's not just a way of learning okay a language is a way of thinking and a language is even a way of feeling like there are aspects of sentiment and sentimentality that you only understand through language and i think that's why anthropology is meaningless anthropology being the study of foreign cultures and effect cultural anthropology you know it's really meaningless when you don't learn the language when you don't learn to think in that language and feel in that language and perceive the world in knowledge i'll give you a really crude example um but it's a very palpable example some some are quite sophisticated and subtle and it takes some time to flesh out in many many of the languages of southeast asia the way for boyfriend and girlfriend to speak to each other the way for young lovers like for teenagers to refer to each other they are sexualized terms that explicitly say that like the male is an older relative to the female it's like uncle and niece kind of stuff right now it's different southeast asia is a big area and you can look at each language both japan and korea this is east asia not southeast asia this weird stuff uh not quite older brother younger sister they have this very strange vocabulary and it's also interesting that many of these languages and cultures even if the male is younger than the female i mean if people meet when they're in high school or they may be just a few months younger but um it's it's such a common thing in romance in south korea that it's now used as a joke is for the younger man to say to the the female so yes i'm six months younger than you but i want you to call me older brother how much to come because in there that's you know like i don't want you to you know i want you to look at me as a potential romantic partner okay this is built i don't approve i don't i don't approve what can i tell you i mean cultural anthropology is [ __ ] up you know you're looking at all this stuff you know as an outsider looking in if you don't actually learn the language and live life again this is a very crude example right it's a way of it's not just a way of talking not just way of reading natural writing it's a way of learning it's a way of being ignorant it's a way of ignoring things right like language also how it lets you ignore problems lets you conceal problems right but you know the way in which family roles and being older versus being younger age gap relationship the way that sexualized and is built into the languages and is building the culture okay something more sophisticated the whole vocabulary of communist ideology in southeast asia was buddhist during the cambodian revolution during the cambodian civil war it was buddhist vocabulary buddhist phrasing and even buddhist liturgical formulas that were used to teach and preach the precepts of communism it was explicitly taravata buddhist now to appreciate that you've got to study cambodia and you've got it you've got to have i don't approve it's really [ __ ] up right okay but jeff's saying very interesting now already though look i've had the experience of studying that it's not obvious i also studied cambodian lav pardon me i also studied the history of communism and laos the history of communism in china not just the history of communism okay you recognize this wow to an extent that um to an extent that an outsider would be unaware of the way people understood communism in this culture and got committed to this ideology right it happened through buddhism buddhism like an intermediate ideology huh to what extent do italians think about communism in catholic terms today to what extent do white americans in california actually take spiritual terms whether specifically christian or broadly hippie spirituality and think about communism think about marxism think about economics in that way today like the exercise you can see i had a workout doing politics and languages in southeast asia and then i look with a different kind of acumen and insight on our own tradition and i can see right away mmt modern monetary theory modern magical thinking about economics left-wing people sometimes they're left-wing people buying into right-wing hype right the idea of the government giving everyone a salary every month this was right-wing libertarianism this is friedman's idea forget the monthly check from the government what what what do they sell it as now ubi universal basic income right so universal that was a right-wing libertarian idea but now it's been taken up by the left wing mmt and ubi and believing that money is infinite and um the so-called zeitgeist movement i think we just passed the 10th anniversary they were huge on that oh you know now again english is my first language but in a sense the distance i have from that by working on another language and another ideology right that prepares me for looking at that oh gee i noticed you guys are actually using deeply christian or deeply spiritual and magical the way you're describing this the way you're setting this up and teaching this actually you know you're thinking about this in this in this religious way so you know these are examples um my point being there's a lot there you're never gonna really understand or appreciate without working through a foreign language and that encounter with foreign language foreign history foreign politics it very directly deepens your analysis of your understanding of your own history uh language and politics and the the way they interact even if that's only because it estranges you from your own history language and politics it gives you more distance it gives you more detachment it gives you more of a gap uh to work across paradoxical as or not as as that may seem [Music] um you know i've got to say though i don't think you can develop as intellectual by having someone stand over your desk and invigilate you you know so this came up under several different headings in this in this conversation in this video i don't think that coercion or supervision or that kind of relationship to authority i don't think that ever does it for the life of the mind and look let's come back to our original examples um i don't think aaron janus could have developed in that way being compelled being observed i don't think nina and randa could have developed in that way and uh you know i think there's a very simple reason as to why i think that so much of this kind of learning has to do with doubt it has to deal with not overcoming uncertainties but embracing them and exploring them so very briefly if you have an army unit and they've all got to charge at the enemy they've all got to run into an enemy who's shooting bullets at them they're going to actually run over to the enemy side and try to kill the enemy in a time of war there is a sense in which the commander is you know there's nothing to do with doubt or self-doubt or consideration hmm what are the odds you know and many periods of our history this has been a mass phenomenon hundreds of men at a time and thousands of men at a time charging directly into bullets whether they're coming out of rifles or cannons they're firing straight at them and that's that's what war relied upon um what you got a better way to photo or you got a better way to well right now is not the time to philosophize about it you know so i understand there are circumstances where you're getting rid of doubt and where a certain kind of relationship of authority has to do that but you can't really do the opposite you can't coerce someone into doubting and exploring those doubts that that's something that has to come from within so i'm not saying the will to learn i'm not saying the desire to learn i'm saying the free play of of doubt now it obviously applies to these more advanced topics in the life the mind politics history science you know whatever you know and just even ask yourself how do we know that you know this author seems so certain that he seems so convinced but how did he come to that college what's that based on it can be just that kind of doubt you know you know and just even ask is there another school of thought i can i can contrast this to you know challenging the implicitly dogmatic thinking that's often built into textbook writing or into the writing of history uh so and so forth you know um but actually for me even with language i think even in the process of studying a language is that the way chinese people really say that is that sentence written away for that reason is that character written that way for that reason the etymology of chinese characters there's a lot of there's a lot of room for doubt should i you know well the textbook tells me i should think of this word as being equivalent to this word in english but it doesn't seem that way to me is that how i should think of it look like i know this may seem strange but there's actually a lot of self-doubt and exam doubting your textbook and doubting examination then whether you google it or contrast it or ask someone who speaks the language fluently and hold by the way asking people who speak the language fluently that leads to all kinds of false information they tell you oh no never say it this way only say it that way and you know you can get so much so much false information so that that's what i'd say is that um you know obviously most people are lazy most people are not motivated enough and then it's easy to fantasize about solving this problem by having someone else motivate you or having someone else do the thinking for you but even with language learning and even more with the other aspects of the life of the mind uh that's exactly you can never rely on coercion or an expert to to to do this for you it's what you have to do yourself and of course it'd say the same little failure right someone else can't fail for you like it's one thing to say you have to try yourself you you have to have the effort you have to the initiative to try but you also have to have the initiative to get out and fail and then examine those failures analyze those failures learn from those failures right that's really something so you know um and it's something you can't buy something you can't have a teacher do for you or or any other expert can't uh can't provide provide for you in that way yeah so anyway um all right i'm going to read some comments from the audience if any of you guys want to want to comment speak now or hold your piece um you know if so this is a 19 year old approximately right into me asking this question you know if somebody asks you how do you read a book how do you learn i mean i know it's just partly about language but you know what do you what do you say to someone he's asking me about how and mostly i'm answering about why right and i think you guys know i think you guys know i'm i'm giving this you know i'm giving this kind of answer because you know i think that the why matters a lot more than the than the how um [Music] and be honest with you too when i've met people who had the wrong methods i think it almost always was because they had the wrong motivations you know why didn't you question this textbook why didn't you question what you were learning well it's normally because you had an agenda because you had a motivation uh leading you the wrong way and and the maybe the most important part of his answer pardon me maybe the most important part of his question we did talk about at great length and that was the part uh talking about overcoming uh overcoming what you find daunting about it we talk about what exactly is daunting about it and i feel that what is daunting about it is not knowing how much is this going to take with me you know you know another great example that is swimming you can met people who have never swam in their life never learn to swim of course it's daunting you could die you can drown like in five minutes you can die swimming whether it's in a pool or in the ocean that can be the end of your life of course it's daunting you see other people doing it effortlessly but how much is it going to take out of me to learn to swim and if you don't have any experience doing anything like that is this going to be many months of hard work and it's it's just the the unfamiliarity of it pardon me the unfamiliarity of it makes it inestimable and when it's inestimable it's daunting but sometimes i was saying to melissa the fact that melissa has this experience with chinese means that russian would not be daunting for a totally different skill set you know what i mean and the the experience i have with cambodia or uh the relationship studying the relationship between ancient rome and the writing the american constitution that's why it would not be daunting for me to do politics in history of central asia you know so in in that way i think that's that's probably the most important uh part of the part of the answer but if someone actually asked me the question so methodologically how do you study the relationship between rome and the american constitution and even if i say well get out there and fail how do you know when you failed you know it's these are tough questions you know or you're going to live your whole life laboring under the delusion that you succeeded when uh when really you've uh you've failed okay so totally down earth question here marco asks uh marco is curious to know do i study pop culture slang and street speech when studying a foreign language so uh marco okay maybe this is useful people maybe that's not the resources available to me the materials available were very different in these different languages um when i worked on lotion there were very few books written in high quality contemporary lao and i concluded the main thing for me to study was probably karl marx was the writing of karl marx translated into lotion there were not many books written at a really high quality high level of seriousness about politics or anything else i was like well i can read desk habits out in lotion um you know the the when i lived in phnom penh cambodia i was listening to and listening to is mr representation i was very carefully studying rap music in cambodia in kamai and i mean it's very slow process so i got the dvds where you have the lyrics written on screen and they're speaking very fast you're writing it out so you have to pause and write it out and you know the the screen would go to sleep because it's not expecting you to pause you're pausing you're writing out using you're doing the analysis and then learning and hearing and hearing the music back so i mean those are two extreme examples um in terms of what you have to work with right now for contemporary chinese you know the lectures of xi jinping in chinese periodically he gives a lecture multiple times per year he'll give a lecture he speaks very clear very slow chinese melissa was trying to listen to a news report chinese it was mumble city it was totally mumbling i said how can you listen to this well you know xi jinping when he gives these formal lectures to the whole of china you know of course you get the transcription too you can get it with subtitles well i don't mean english themselves you get the chinese written out but he speaks very clearly um you know so that's that's a resource you can use uh but you know and look sorry if you're really getting into it also there's many of these languages the relationship between formal written language and local dialect that can be a big issue so you know do people in the street is the street language of laos the same as the written language depends which street you're talking about because laos is fragmented into 48 different languages and you know uh with chinese could go on a big monologue here very often the language people are speaking is very very different from the language that's that's written so the the theoretical language is very different from the practical launch and then you have to ask yourself how much time do you want to spend on one or the other and what resources do you actually have how is it actually possible for you to study uh one or the other yeah so tough practical questions melissa we have a gap here is there is there something else you want to add or a question you want to raise or else because i i recognize we've partly answered this question and probably haven't but look you know i feel sorry for the actual guy who sent in this letter the main video i'd recommend was why i'm forcing you to read aristotle so there is a video on this channel and it is a somewhat meandering video it is a conversational video it's not a hard-hitting direct answer but you know maybe that shows my reckless optimism that you yes you can read through cities and read errors so i can give i give a specific uh list of exactly what books you should read and you can develop out of that intellectually now for melissa it wasn't easy but you did the work and ultimately you got the results yeah yeah yeah i don't know if i i do appreciate that i had your influence from this art with chinese yeah knew you had already gone through the process of finding resources and finding what resources weren't any good uh so i know earlier you said not to digress into how you motivated me to to study chinese but just from the start you know you introduced me to uh pimsleur things that i could listen to initially to get language exposure so this is and it was also warning her about how each method had its advantages in this venture so you mentioned pimsleur but i remember saying well look if you listen to this here's the problem yeah yeah yes so from the start when you first met me uh you know i had to think about studying chinese and and this process because i had studied german in high school but i knew that it would be a different level of difficulty a different level of seriousness with chinese partly because of the difficulty of the language but also partly because i was living there and because i was living with an intellectual i was living with someone who was going to demand you know a certain standard of you know intellectual ability so i just say um i appreciate that i had your input and i had somebody to guide me along the way and i i know most people i recognize that most people don't have that so i i just say um i i do think that this is a good suggestion though you talk about with the lectures from xi jinping um you know because it's uh this is just pragmatic what resources but i you know i in conversations that i've had uh where you you are involved you know this this idea of uh learning a second language through politics i don't see it very much online so but i i find it really interesting and uh just this morning i was reading you know i was listening to the news in chinese trying to uh learning about these different places that i'm already learning about ukraine and the situation with russia but if i learn it in another language you know that that just brings more into my life and you know i'm someone who enjoys you know talking about politics so i know it's not for everybody but still um you know i think it's a real world application and it's something that you're you're hearing uh in the news every day so yeah that's what happened um you know i mean i think you were briefly alluding to or or touching on something there which i haven't covered at all in this video which is just you know what is your standard for what's good enough and i mean you said there in passing living with living with isil mazar living with a real intellectual living with this particular intellectual you knew you were someone who had very high standards for you and i think we can all agree that part of the problem for nina and randa part of the problem for aaron janus part of the problem for vegan gains richard is that they've lived in a situation sometimes they've chosen to live in a situation but they've been living in a situation where everyone has really low standards for them everyone says oh good for you good for you everyone's happy that you're childish everyone's happy that you showed up where no one's demanding excellence of you and you're not learning to demand excellence of yourself and you know um [Music] if you're the kind of person who wants to know what happened with napoleon i'm sorry but it's a good example like oh you know i was at the airport the other day and there's this best-selling history of napoleon and i bought it and i read it and it was great that's great now i feel like wow now i know about what happened with napoleon you know whether you call this methodology or not no you have to have the attitude of this isn't good enough like you have to be dissatisfied you know you have to demand excellence of the authors you're reading and of yourself and it's not even really just excellence it's just being dissatisfied just knowing this is not good enough this is just some book i picked up at the airport and frankly knowing this this author is lying to me he has some agenda and by the way the the author may just may just be a french nationalist they may just be trying to convince you that france is the most wonderful country in the world a lot of time that's the bias like it's not even something like communism it's not a clear political agenda it's just a generalized sense of wanting to glorify france and glorify napoleon and encourage tourism like really their agenda might be they want you to visit certain historical sites in france and tell you how wonderful those are that can be the agenda you know but um you know the sense of demanding more and you know this isn't the whole story and something's being concealed for me here even if it's through incompetence you know and that's an attitude you can take to reading science textbooks we talked about nutrition before as an example i mean even seemingly boring factual sciences obviously do history politics and to language also you know this is what i'm being told this is what i'm not being told now you know i just say a different person could say well i had nothing to read at the airport and i bought this popular history of napoleon but i'm reading it and i know i know it's not telling me the whole story you know the word slavery only appears in the whole book twice well what about slavery you know what about haiti what about black people let's be blunt what about napoleon's racism toward black people and you know there was this chapter that made a big deal of the fact that napoleon wasn't anti-semitic that he had relatively positive attitudes towards jews but then you know the part that described what napoleon actually did in egypt and what he actually did in haiti in his relationships with slavery and black people and arabs you know it got real vague it got relevant you know huh you know like where you're not satisfied you're demanding more you know um i mean maybe that's what this whole video should have been about like i'm sorry this is just coincidental i'm saying at the end right but i mean what melissa has had with me is someone who was tutoring her in having that attitude so i have mentioned this before but years ago on the channel when we went to greece so we were briefly in athens greece melissa did read and she actually typed out a short history textbook on history of greece so it was it was exactly the kind of book you'd get in an airport to read it it was a joke hey here's the history of grace making it easy for you like it wasn't some kind of incisive hard-hitting book but uh i said to melissa as soon as i started reading it don't you realize the author is a communist and she was shocked melissa knew a lot about communism she studied the history of communism in china it didn't occur to her at all that she was reading communist propaganda about greece and i immediately started giving her examples only a communist would say this or some far left socialist who's almost a communist this has real crazy propaganda elements and you said there were there were many different things about it that were communist propaganda uh but one of the things i asked was don't you notice how strange the pro-turkish bias of this history was like a large part of the history of greece is war with turkey you know ancient modern medieval and every in every period don't you notice he's going out of his way to tell you again and again how pro-turkish he is and i'm guessing this is fashionable on the far left in in greece right now again i'm not just criticizing melissa right i'm showing her so look i'm sorry guys i honestly i didn't think about this till now it's good look it's great most of my videos most of the time is is spontaneous but uh jazz this is the most important part it is this is the most important part of the answering question it goes three hours to get here and you know i think it's true that has to be applied to the language textbooks to the lessons to the reading of history the reading of posts the reading of science to everything is this really demanding thing of of demanding of wanting more of the books wanting more of your professors wanting more of the system if you are in an educational system and wanting more of the books that happen to have come into your hands if you're if you're a self-taught person uh and you know part of what's going on there in my mind is i've said this so many times the channel sympathy is an analytical tool right it's unsuccessful when napoleon accomplished in egypt was glorious and successful okay sympathize with the egyptian perspective right sympathize with the perspective of an indigenous person in haiti well can't say whatever a black liberated slave in haiti someone who was a slave in haiti sympathize their perspective take a moment to to imagine it you know how did they feel about napoleon and even you know the war between napoleon and uh and austria you know oh this was glorious this was all wonderful okay if you were alive in vienna at that time you know how would you have felt how would you felt at this stage and how would you felt this later stage because the alliance has shifted over time i'm not going to fill on all the details here but like you're going to find flaws in the perspective of the narrator the perspective of the author the perspective of the authority figure just by just by thinking that way now you know um the way i was able to learn so much chinese in a short period of time in in kunming was obviously of demanding more of my teachers too and i said there was a conflict in school i said look i'm not doing this i'm not learning this way one of the teachers she wanted to give me lessons about driving a car turn left it was completely boring turn left to the traffic turn right she wanted to do these road exercises i said this is not what i'm paying for this is not what i flew to china for no you know um you know and i i had this program i created my own program where i was writing an essay every day i was doing original composition and talk about that i did do rote memorization of vocabulary but it was vocabulary that was meaningful to my life and you know you practice i was practicing speaking reading and writing every day but it's like no no i'm not doing fill in the blank exercise about red light green light turn left at a traffic turned left at an intersection you know we're not going to it was big it was a big conflict people at the school were really shocked i'm sorry i could discover it was it was obviously very upsetting for the teacher and um yeah i think i think i left a black eye on that institution a lot of ways but they also said i mean you know obviously i was one of the best students that ever had you know i was there i could see i could see my competition i saw people have been studying there for years for like five years and they hadn't learned as much as i learned in five months you know i got to see those differences too um but yeah that's hard because that's that's face-to-face dealing with an authority figure who says that they're in charge and they're an expert in teaching chinese and what do you know and you say well this is what i know that's that's hard when you're alone with the books it's not hard in that way but you have to actively imagine these things you have to actively imagine there is another perspective here that i'm not hearing and you know again sir with napoleon it may seem obvious oh there are two perspectives so i'll give you an example you're trying to learn about the history of the vietnam war babe do we where is that book i've never had time to read this woo yeah remember this remember this still i haven't read one page it's too late to get that have you read one page many of the books you have most has read some bits i'm busy i'm writing a book i don't think yeah i'd love to i'd love to read that book there okay it's really easy to look at vietnam and think oh so there are the pro-communists and they're the anti-communists or indeed many people look at the history of you know think oh there are the communists and then there are the americans allowing yourself to think through first speculatively first hypothetically and then to go out and research and see the other perspective oh no there were some people who really believed that vietnam should be a monarchy i mean it may seem obvious but it's not that obvious what what was the perspective of a traditional monarchist buddhist in vietnam and that there were there were a lot of those oh yeah i guess and i guess they wouldn't have really supported american-style democracy and they wouldn't have supported communism and maybe they kind of felt like modernization in general was bad yeah i guess that must be a significant political voice right and like oh wouldn't there have been people in vietnam who really sincerely were in favor of democracy but who had some kind of sophisticated understanding that there were other countries around like japan like america wasn't the only example look at him we're watching what was that oh yeah i guess so and now again just being able to think about that speculatively being able to sympathize with it be able to think well if i were alive at that time this is what i'd be worried about this is what i'd be thinking if i were living there and then going out and investigating that and getting the other side of it when i was really a kid i mean this was uh i was i was young i was young and naive i remember when i decided to research spain and the role of spain in world war ii and i was very dissatisfied with what i found in english because it was a lot of propaganda from different angles what which side was spain on in world war ii getting at that time getting an honest answer to that simple question what side was spain on in world war ii and step by step month by month you know there was propaganda written then there was propaganda written after that nobody was all that comfortable and facing up to what had happened in world war ii with with spain and you know i did i did figure it out and i remember i researched and wrote an essay about spanish wolfram it's some of the few things i could find they were being honest about was oh well a big part of the concern with spain was the control of metals and minerals minerals used to produce steel and bullets and that was a big thing what the germans and the british were competing over with spain there's more to it than that but i remember you know i'm just being real with you why did i do that i'd already read a lot about world war ii including the history textbooks i was given in canada right and i noticed they were evasive about spain i noticed that you know like they wanted to present the world as neatly divided into two halves fascist and anti-fascist now they were also very evasive about joseph stalin of course they didn't want to deal with him well i'm reading all this stuff and spain is not a small part of europe and the spanish-speaking countries are not a small part of the world and there's a big mystery here out in the open and it's not mysterious because it's hard to know it's because nobody's comfortable talking was already at that stage i'm just being wrong i was very immature and i was very stupid back then i wasn't really much smarter than nina and randa i wasn't you know um but you know i fastened onto that and i i went into that and i tore that apart so you know there's a certain kind of learning that you do maybe by tearing things apart by their seams where it's like look i see the crack in this and that makes me question the whole facade and now i want to know how and why that whole facade was was constructed you know so i think i think that's part of learning that relates back to what i said earlier that you can't get this shortcut by having someone else stand over you and forcing you to study that that doubting and when you get good at it it becomes systematic down it becomes a system it becomes a method but at an early stage it's not i think it really is just uh the desire to have more and it's having high standards and that's why it's so tragic that we have a culture that just cultivates and encourages childishness nina and miranda are not the only ones or people oh just dance dance on instagram dance on tick tock you know enjoy yourself live life and with men it may not be dancing but just drink alcohol just watch sports think about the extent this is childish drinking beer and watching soccer on tv this is not fit for a human being it's not fit for an adult man but this is this is childishness men men may be encouraged to go dance in a nightclub there are some contexts where it's cool for a man to dance whatever you know but yeah um [Music] anyway this business of having relentlessly high standards and asking how do they know that why did they choose to tell me that in that way they being the authors of a book it's not something the people who wrote this book why did they tell me that why are they presenting it that way and you know australia i'll give you an example that came up for me recently we know people taking antidepressants another psychiatrist probably all of you do too you know like you know um you're reading the official fda warning for this this is the american government label the warning for these drugs and it admits to you that the cause and effect relationship of this drug is unknown that the effect of this drug on the brain its efficacy is unknown and speculative you know the etiology of the drug is unknown and the way they word that and the way they present it to you you know where what they are saying is we do not even know if this drug has any positive effects at all and if it does we have no mechanistic explanation we don't even have a chemical theory as to what the cause and effect relationship is that gives you that benefit if there's a benefit that's approved that's being admitted to you right but part of what you got to respond to is the facade and yeah there's a crack in the facade and then questioning why was this constructed in this way i mean i guess you know on a very simple level this is it's a kind of naturalistic fallacy you have to overturn people sign up to study chinese and they act like oh this is the way chinese is taught this is the way i should learn chinese so on for every other language like if you don't question the authority figures involved they don't show up and think um okay about five people had a meeting and decided this is the way chinese would be taught in this institution and why did they decide it this way they're trying to make the most money possible they're trying to do the least work possible uh i have no reason to think they even compared 10 different textbooks they probably took them the most readily available maybe it's the most profitable textbook gee why is it 120 dollars for this textbook they probably didn't look around for one that's a good deal for you maybe they only looked a textbook that would make the most money for them for the university institution right maybe they had no interest in that they didn't do any research about what was an effective method to learn chinese and what wasn't they're not evaluating the student's commitment they didn't think about the difference between teaching chinese to someone whose first language is japanese teaching chinese somebody's first language there's another five people sat down and it may have just been one or two meetings they designed the curriculum for this course very little work you know you don't say you can accept it as if it's just the rain falling out of the sky oh it's raining today some days it rains there's nothing we can do about it this is we just adapt we just live to it these are the conditions as opposed to having that skeptical attitude five people decided this is how chinese is to be taught now is to be learned you know again i grew up going to museums and it's a long story i went to this one museum in ottawa at that time it was called the war museum maybe now it's called the military history museum of canada or something they probably have where they probably gave it a better name but the museum of war museum of military history whatever the hell it's called museum of the army in ottawa canada and while i went around the museum i was laughing and laughing and i admit like it was a it was an erudite sort of laugh i don't say you know i'm laughing because i know the political history and i know what the government is lying about in this museum and just just a bizarre and evasive word it was a really good looking woman picked me up because i was laughing she came over and she spoke to me in french and i replied to her in french but this good looking woman came over and we went out to lunch together didn't go anywhere but this girly woman came over and she was like you know she first said to me in french and then we started talking um she was asking you know why i'm laughing i'm like you know the answer is guess what i'm not an idiot you know what i mean like i'm i'm too sophisticated to take this stuff on the walls seriously but you know okay a lot of people there a lot of people are going to be bored in that museum because they walk into that museum and they regard the circumstances as being like rain and falling from the sky this is the way it is this is history this is the history of world war ii this is the museum this is what i'm supposed to learn you know they sit down in a classroom or they buy a book whether they buy the book at the air at the airport uh bookstore or they take it from a library or take it from amazon oh this is the history of napoleon this is the history of world war ii this is how to learn chinese that may also be a book they're not sitting there and questioning and fundamentally how do i regard that museum i don't regard it as an evil conspiracy right i think you know about five guys sat down in a room and came up with what's written on the wall of this museum i don't think a whole lot of thought went into it i don't think a whole lot of effort went into it you know and probably some of those guys had a phd in history but you can imagine okay this is this is the history of canada um [Music] what do you want to say about the genocide of of indigenous people what do you want to say about those wars it's a war museum um okay we gotta come up with about five paragraphs here on the on the war and the genesis uh they weren't geniuses they weren't putting a lot of thought into it and again sympathy sympathy is an analytical tool what if you were cree what if you were ojibwe what if you were inuit and you're the one reading that and you have some access from stories your grandparents told you to knowing it didn't really happen like that you some some doubt at least you know that this is this is so plausible you know what what are we going to say about slavery what are we going to say about the war with the americans in case you didn't know it was a warfare opportunity in the states which is now kind of politically inconvenient um vietnam what was canada's involvement in the vietnam war and what are we going to say about i think five guys talked about it over lunch and that's part of why this is so much garbage you know now this isn't true of all museums some museums there maybe is a little bit more effort that goes into it um but my point is you know you're living in a world of artificial and factitious things i'm aware it's pronounced factious but if i say fact just it sounds too much like frack just so i'm over pronouncing it as factitious by the way these are things that have been carefully assembled for you and in large part they have been assembled in order to deceive you or in order to reassure you or prevent you asking those difficult questions um now you know my point is not that i go into that classroom to study chinese thinking this isn't how to study chinese i don't go in with the apprehension or convention this is not the way to study change that's not my attitude and my attitude is not there is a real way to study chinese and this is the false way i can't contrast like you know the the the one true god to the false gods that's not my that's not my attitude you know um my attitude is well five guys came up with this method of studying chinese i think another five guys could come up with a better method i think 10 people could come up with an even better method and that's the way i look at all institutions i mean a museum is a great example like okay this is what you chose to tell me about slavery about genocide about the vietnam war and you did that for your own reasons again most of the time it's not a conspiracy most of the time you just said what you felt comfortable with saying and what you thought parents and children would be comfortable with hearing you know and you can imagine some oh well the soldiers fought bravely and everyone tried their best and there weren't too many atrocities or crimes against humanity i mean when you put it in perspective imagine what kind of horseshit is on the wall of this mediocre canadian museum um you know but if you just take this step of seeing that behind all authority there is mere authorship you know there was just one person who wrote this book or five people who worked together and they had their motives and they had their misconceptions and even if their intentions were good even if they thought hey i'm gonna write the best book i possibly can to help the next generation understand what happened in vietnam right that you've got to be in this way looking at it at this artificially created facade and there's something behind the facade there's something else there there's something concealed by it and just as sure as there's something revealed by it you know there's something that's going to be features and it's going to be exaggerated by it and that your role is to know better even at that early incipient stage when all you can do is doubt better this isn't the best way to learn chinese even if i don't know the best way to learn chinese even if i never know the best way to learn chinese still my attitude can be um this is i regard what you're offering me in this institution or what you're offering me in this book it may just be a printed book you bought that this is a kind of cluj this is a kind of um error sats half baked concoction put together by a small number of people in a short amount of time say hey good enough for now try it see if it works you know and some of you might compare this to the history of philosophy of science but i think what we're talking about here is in many ways the opposite of science the history of science is not like this um you know is the world round or is it flat is the world a semi-sphere is it a it's not something imperfect sphere or is it or is it flat you with science you're very often dealing not always you're very often dealing with hard criteria for something being true or false you know etc etc and with history with politics with languages with most of the things that are involved in life and mind with judgments about culture uh you know we're in a field where instead it's it's very hard for people to be honest even when they have absolute best of intentions even when they're not trying to deceive you uh or anyone else yeah so i think i think we did come to a statement about about methodology after all after saying all that stuff about intention and motivation and how important and encouragement uh the reason why as opposed to the the question of how i think that really is the ultimate guide to how to the methodology and you know you have to um sorry so we have someone we have someone in the audience who knows a little bit about the history of spain yeah yeah yeah franco you know visited texas and stuff and it was embarrassing and confusing for people why are we supporting this guy how did he end up on our side what did he do during world war ii yeah yeah and uh well i mean i don't know what's what's more taboo the history of fascist spain the history of the military dictatorship in greece the history of the dictatorship period in south korea the history of cambodia i mean there's a lot of post-war a lot of post-world war ii stuff where america's position no it's not it's not that it made no sense that it's not easy to make sense of what why was america on the communist side in cambodia you know i know most people don't know but anyway um yeah yeah so no spain in that way uh until franco dies of natural causes it's one of the great paradoxes produced by world war ii and a great deal of discomfort uh in retrospect and while it was and what was happening yeah and a lot of left-wing people who want to pose a lot of left-wing people who want to be holier than that a lot of communists who want to make misleading propaganda out of it for other purposes and a lot of anarchists too the anarchist view of astrid spain there's another crazy uh distorting myopic lands to bring to it anarchists have a lot of influence and grace too oh yeah thanks sir i'm glad glad of some people who read read books it's not just fans of nina and miranda that are here in the in the audience today as we passed the three hour mark on this on this live stream um yeah you know i do think you know there's there's a fundamental difference there between seeing yourself in the process of education passively receiving something meaningful provided to you by experts whether those are the authors of books or your professors and seeing yourself as someone who is going to destroy meanings who is going to find those things meaningful see what's meaningful about them and then tear them apart destroy them understand their component parts understand how they were put together understand the way in which they were meant to seem meaningful and the way in which they are in fact meaningless or even are intentionally misleading our propaganda our lies all my life my father said to me that the british empire had accomplished this amazing thing in the abolition of slavery some of you are watching this in france and you can tell me what kind of propaganda you grew up with about the french empire in the aboriginal slavery but my father 110 subscribed to this view that the british empire was morally superior to the americans because of the british empire's history of slavery and from my earliest childhood i can remember not believing him and raising examples to contradict them and say no that's not true you know that can't be true you know that doesn't make sense when i was a child i didn't know a lot of examples but i can give you two i can remember saying but what about jamaica now we had jamaicans in downtown the reason i knew jamaica existed melissa's visited my neighborhood i didn't have a whole lot of examples drawn as a little kid i remember when i learned that sri lanka existed it was because of uh uh of repairman i won't tell the whole story there was one sri lankan man in my neighborhood who who opened like a tailor shop and i met him that was the first time i heard i never heard the word sri lanka or sinalese before um you know what about sri lanka oh gee now we're starting to get a more complex view of slavery it's like the british empire our way because the first thing i looked at foreign how did they abolish slavery there what actually what actually happened oh hmm you know now of course beyond that who created the slave trade in the united states the british empire was a world spanning but you know my father as an adult was still preparing this and like i'm just saying i understand the way in which that's meaningful to him it's not entirely meaningless that's what makes it so dangerous it's meaningful to him because it gives him a sense of moral superiority over the americans it gives him a sense that he was on the right side of history that yeah yeah the americans talk about democracy the americans talk about their revolution in canada we didn't have that revolution we didn't we still don't have democracy we didn't tell any of that but you know oh here's this this great thing you could compensate with we're saying oh but we were the ones who abolished slavery we didn't have this horrible civil war the americans had we were so much more arid in advance and guess what it's not it's not a total lie it's not a total fraud the history of the abolition of slavery the british empire is interesting guess what they had colonies in africa too they had colonies in india it's really ugly once you get into it guys um slavery and then indentured servitude in the british empire oh it's interesting you know but my point is what i did was what my father could never do he becomes captivated by this meaning this pre-fabricated meaning these ready-made thoughts pretty poncey and french i'm over pronouncing that too anyway in anglo-french you know these ready-made thoughts these meanings that have been presented to them by teachers by professors by political leaders but by books by textbooks they say hey here's the way to think here's the understand history and i'm looking at that and saying no i'm to tear this apart i'm going to find out what's meaningless about it what's false or misleading about it i'm going to find out how it was put together and again it's not going to be total fiction most of the time there's going to be some truth and some fiction i'm going to find out what's behind it and you know i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna contrast it to competing myths it's not like a simple thing where you can compare something false to something true the sciences can be like that you know flat earth theory is false you know rounder theory is true some some things in science like that but this is not like the sciences you're not going to be able to just contrast to some other version of events that's true you're going to be contrasting mythology to mythology meaning to meaning and you're going to tear those apart also and see the components they're made of and see how they've been put together and then and only then you can get involved in the creation of meetings yourself where you understand the raw materials you understand what it is you're working with and more importantly you start to understand the motivations of the authors and i know it sounds crazy but that even applies to language textbooks why is this language textbook written this way why does this teacher teach this way you know you know not just politics and history and so on that's when you start to come into the role of being an author on your own and again it's not the point is not to perceive everything as the product of a conspiracy the point is not to debunk everything as propaganda books are written by complicated people with complicated motivations and when you really start learning is when you tear them apart and you start to understand those motivations and you may by the end of your study understand those motivations better than the author him or herself