The (Ongoing) Vegan Storybook Project & Reflections on University (in China & Canada).

do you envisioned on your children's
book getting published after you get back to Kendra I want to do that ASAP you know i mean the children's book thing I mean I guess the shortcut is if I just you know if I just pay money out of pocket for an artist I was trying to talk in a more organic way you know to two artists who are vegan like artists who would care about the project you know on the one I could just save up money and pay for it myself or I could try to do a fundraiser or ask you know as people that contribute on Kickstarter or something but it would not be a lot of money you know if it's a couple hundred pages so a couple hundred dollars per page it's not a very long book but you know if you just want to directly hire a professional to illustrate it but no I'd love to move ahead with that absolutely ASAP the audience for it in Chinese is much larger than the audience for it in English both because more people speak Chinese but also because more parents want to raise their kids vegan or just with us sit with a sympathetic Henderson animals and what's what's really big in China is not veganism it's meat avoiding behavior what's really big here is not veganism but Val arising avoiding meet regarding people who refuse to eat meat as virtuous culturally there's a big big market for the message that's in that book and as mentioned I've seen Chinese people react to that story because I wrote it in Chinese and presented it to two different Chinese teachers and some other context and a lot of Chinese people find the Chinese version of the story very emotionally moving like it has a big impact on them and most i just mentioned this is interesting to me most the chinese people they get about halfway through the story before really realizing what it's going to do to them and then it has this kind of sinks in you know they mean they don't they don't see it coming maybe it's more predictable in english but obviously for me it's very gratifying to see that these are chinese adults responding to it that way so you know there's this a little bit of poetry and the way the chinese is written and sure it'd be great to see that reaching an audience of Chinese kids to do you think that earthworms ever want to see the sky sometimes sometimes they do sometimes they climb up on the grass sometimes they wiggle up to the top of a mud puddle do you think they want to see the Sun the moon and the clouds as we do I don't know do you think the birds looking down ever want to see the world underground as earthworms do they see the same sky every day perhaps sometimes they imagine there is another world below where the earthworm's fly to sitting on the street lights looking down they imagine the earthworm sitting on their own little lamb pool looking up from a world turned upside down when birds fly over the lake do you think they want to see the world below the water as fishes do do they imagine there's another son and another moon down there under the water for all the fishes to see in the sky they see the Sun the moon and the clouds so they imagine the fish of their own world with their own son at the bottom of the lake I suppose when the fish come up to the surface what would they expect to see some seaweed or octopus floating by another ocean upside down above them in the sky yes I suppose so earthworms want to see the sky the birds want to see underground and the fish want to see another ocean in the clouds what about the pigs and the cows what do you mean I think cows want to see the sky but they live their whole lives inside millions of cows live in factories and never see the sky I think pigs want to see the sky but millions of them in the factories live their whole lives inside waiting to die when they look up they see only a metal roof and when they look down they see only a concrete floor perhaps they imagine that the world outside has only a middle sky and the forests and fields are made of cement and steel even earthworms want to see the sky and that is the title of the book even are thorns want to see the sky aah buh new CN do you think in some ways learning is a little bit of a lost art especially in the newer generations has it has it really gotten worse though it's so easy to slip into that mentality that things were better in the past what did you have in mind though I mean did you have something specific in mind in terms of declining levels of that was those my way of kind of asking you about remember you talked about how in the video that you had seen I think was a news reporter but now that somebody come to the usually something had happened on the University campus some kind of violence or something like that and you would have thought about that about um because people go to university right now whether or not but they're not they're interested in learning like how at some other time this individual not be right at a university yes not really interested on some level yeah I don't know if you remember that comment actively but that's literally what I was thinking yeah no I mean I remember that column over really well and I mean you know I've seen all those extremes in both Canada and China in China the vast majority of people do not get to choose their major university so I mean you see all these examples even in China of people who don't want to learn who aren't motivated who didn't choose their major who resent it who are a qualified nurse would have no intention of working as a nurse another young woman and she she was forced to major in Vietnamese as a language she spoke English really well she wanted to learn English but the government has signed her to study Vietnamese for someone else would be a wonderful opportunity for her she just sleepwalked through it she didn't want so I mean you see all these bizarre I earnings but on the other hand in China I mean the Chinese are famous for this culturally you meet people who want education so badly to have so much positive motivation who really want to learn who really want to improve themselves like you see a member of this is memorable this is from Taiwan a security guard who was standing there all loan you had the most boring job in the world standing in front of you know an elevator door in a an apartment building as a security guard and he was practicing very assiduously practicing Chinese calligraphy you know alone and nobody's watching while he was working a security guard you know you meet people who wrote I their care about history or you know literature what have you so you see all those extremes here but you know to give a really brief answer I mean you know in Canada because you've probably heard this from you in other videos my experience the university is completely uniformly negative completely negative I have nothing positive to say about any university was at in Canada and it really is the tragedy of my adult life that I've been unable to get an education and able to get ahead because the university is so bad in Canada and you know the department I was just in the Asian Studies department I completely assumed okay so i'm interested in asian politics i'm in a department that's full of people who study eight politics in the area it must be easy for me to meet people i thought that come on my youtube channel I thought I'd meet other people interested in politics of Asia and we you know do a podcast or do a conversation on camera or something I didn't meet a single person interested in politics of Asia out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students there and I started to figure out why the reality of ninety nine percent of the students around me was that they came to Canada and they wanted to major in chemistry or medicine biomedical sciences or something that would earn a lot of money like economics some of them want to major in business and then they weren't smart enough they weren't hard-working enough or their English wasn't good enough so they had to drop out of that major and somebody said to them look kid you don't speak English well enough to get ahead in chemistry but Chinese is your first language so why don't you just measure in Asian Studies that'll be easy for you because you're already fluent in Chinese or Japanese is your first language etc etc so I was surrounded by people who did not want to learn now there are a million other problems with that program it's terrible that university is a disgrace beautiful campus beautiful library you know the actual buildings are beautiful the climate is beautiful garden is beautiful but as a university it's garbage but then within that in some ways I was in the absolute most depressing place to be because I'd be in a classroom were not even one other student was actually interested in what the professor was talking about so I in this to its depressing himself with the professor's to so like I'd have a class on the history of communism in China like horrid political history in China this is history with a body count weird i am a millions of people being killed we're talking about like some of the details i remember the the professor broke almost broke down crying he had tears in his eyes giving this lecture where he was talking about cannibalism people murdering each other and eating each other in the recent history of china last couple decades non ancient history 20th century in china talking about revenge killings and you know uh cannibalism and he was getting a bit emotionally broken down and i remember i SAT there and I just turned around for a minute to look at the other students in the class and the other students have their laptops open and are like you know doing surfing facebook not even one other student in the class gave a on any level it was just absolutely zero interest in this you know basically fascinating lecture from somebody who's a world expert in this topic and at that moment he was speaking with great passion and emotion like I think anyway I think you would find it interesting if you would never knew nothing about China if you happen to be sitting there any basically intelligent person would have found this particular lecture at least shocking at least interesting you know what I mean but you I had to realize these students do not want to be here the reason why they're not going to learn is that they don't want to learn so yeah that is on a huge scale a crisis of our modern education system and part of the tragedy of it is of course that these are also people who are spending thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands of dollars getting an education that is hollow and that they can't use and they they won't use