#Authortube #Writertube #Booktube (Advice Nobody Wants to Hear)

this video is in part made as a reply to a particular question from a particular long-time viewer and supporter of the channel and it's in part a response to the genre of booktube videos authortube videos writertube videos here on youtube which is a really strange demand you guys may have no familiarity with this may be the first time you've even heard about this phenomenon or some of you may have already listened to innumerable hours of this kind of uh content what struck me immediately in turning my attention to the authortube writer tube sub genre is that i'm seeing again some of the same evils that were familiar to me from the world of vegan diet advice vegan weight loss fitness advice that kind of thing and also strange and exotic as it may seem the videos encouraging you saying that you can learn a new language in just six months maybe you can learn a new language in just six weeks if only you follow these few special pieces of advice if only you will buy my ebook and use my special tools if only you'll hear through my special reasoning if only you'll follow my guidance there's this sort of unbelievable emphasis on method on craft now these are three completely different fields different provinces different types of human endeavor right okay so you think about diet fitness weight loss it's one type of endeavor how much does craft matter how much does technique matter how much does methodology matter in that field and in what way in what way does it matter right like even you think it was like doing a push-up i did 150 push-ups today not not quite 200 my usual i did 150 pushups a day if i had done the the technique slightly differently there were so many youtube channels selling you on this if you'll do the push-up in exactly the way i do it then you know the size of your chest muscles will expand more or something you know a slight difference in technique how much of a difference is that going to make compared to for example the difference between doing 100 push-ups and doing 200 but like if you have one guy who does 100 push-ups with perfect technique another guy does 200 push-ups but with sloppier technique you know who's going to win this race in what not i'm not just asking the question does method matter at all how much does it matter in what way does it matter right when you're turning to something like learning a language right all these people are trying to commodify methodology they're trying to commodify a trick a tip a technique a 12-step guide these seven simple steps sometimes all they want you to do is watch the youtube video and like share and subscribe so that's as far as hook goes but very often there's a further step of monetizing you know this kind of advice now today we're not talking about either of these we're talking about so shout out to william again yeah 200 pushups a day is my normal thing so today was 150 was my second workout i did a first workout at the gym and then the second time i went 150 just just so you're all up to date um okay if you're talking about writing are we talking about craft are we talking about method are we talking about technique and to what extent are we talking about much more uncomfortable subjects like the life of the mind and what's never talking about who you are in terms of the story you have to tell and why you would be the person to tell it and not somebody else lots of guys have been to cambodia like literally millions of people go on vacation to cambodia every year i don't i don't know the numbers we could look it up cambodian tourist bureau okay okay why would you be the guy to write this book about cambodia right if your answer is method if your answer is technique that's not a very good answer is it see this is the kind of topic i love to record videos about it's shallow and it's deep at the same damn time i once saw an interview with a professional boxer this was after his retirement it was also an interview with some of his coaches some of the guys who worked with him during his glory days i do not remember this guy's name and it's probably for the best i don't because i'm probably getting some of the details wrong here and some of you who are fans of boxing will know right away who i'm talking about from this anecdote but the story there may be different levels of fabrication and mystification and myth-making here but the story as i was told was that this guy he was a very large very strong african-american who had been working in organized crime his whole life and he had just recently moved up to being a professional assassin being a professional hitman to doing paid contracts to kill people for a living what he did before that i can't imagine but this was a kind of promotion for him he had never been trained in boxing he had never been trained in any sport he didn't have a prior background in football or something else like this and he went into one of these gyms one day where there were really serious coaches really serious trainers who'd worked with olympic athletes and he gets into the ring and he starts throwing punches and they're amazed and they say right away it's his first day in the gym he has no training he has no experience the main thing people said about this guy and i remember they had a quote from muhammad ali about him was just he punches hard you know apparently he really threw his whole body weight into every punch he just punched with all the strength he had him he had no training and no coaching and on his first day in the gym the coaches and trainers were saying look we can sign you up we can make you a professional boxer and you're going to be in the top ten you're going to be one of the greatest boxers like you know you may not be number one but you are gonna be a contender in the top title fight so they could tell right there right this guy hadn't even done the jogging he hadn't done the jump rope he hadn't done the speed back he'd done nothing okay you know what had he done he'd gotten used to punching people so hard right punching people to save his own life in situations of self-defense and punching people like he wanted to kill them the difference between a great boxer and an amateur boxer is it method is it training is it technique is it you know most people most of them say oh yeah oh yeah and you know you have to start training when you're 12 years old and between 12 and 16 you have to build up these skills really what about physical size what about physical strength what about brutality what about some of those attitudes that maybe we don't want to think about go into really punching someone with all the strength in your body holding nothing but you're really hurling yourself at someone with this kind of ferocity what if that's not a technique okay i'm not saying training and technique have nothing to do with success in boxing i'm challenging you to think how important is this and in what way is it important right now those aspects uh methodology that's what we can monetize especially now in the 21st century oh any of you guys in the audience if you haven't already had this this idea start your own youtube channel here are the 10 techniques that will make you a champion boxer here are the 10 you know speed bag methods and here are the heavy bag methods and here's here's how you should do push-ups here's exactly the angle at which you wanted to push you can get really fussy with really particular techniques that will give people some kind of tiny edge or advantage right and and no one's going to say no one's going to say hey if you want to be really great at boxing you know guess what maybe you're born with it or you're not right like just in terms of the dimensions of your body right no one say hey you know what you know what it really takes to be a boxer getting out there and actually literally being a killer actually knowing what it's like to fight for your life maybe that's what hell maybe that's the technique that helps the most nobody wants to think that through now there are some of you in the audience who think this is a really obstruct allegory for what i'm saying about writing how to be a great writer or a great novelist whether it's fiction or not some of you think wow it's really a big stretch the imagination to see how this applies to the craft and technique of writing and some of you know exactly what the [ __ ] i'm talking about without me having to draw the dotted lines right who's gonna write who's gonna write this book about cambodia is it gonna be the guy with the best technique or is it going to be the guy who was a real killer literally or figuratively you figured out who has the story to tell and then who's going to be able to who's going to be able to tell it right but you see we can't monetize that right so in terms of a hashtag booktube hashtag authortube hashtag writertube in terms of what's being monetized here on youtube whether it's vegan diet and weight loss whether it's you know under these different headings right it's methodology it's technique that's what we can mystify and that's what we can commodify and that's what we can claim is the difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful this cup this merch this is the difference between yeah there were a lot of italians that are frankly about that about that vulgar some time ago uh this is off talk but it's right on topic i looked up the man who was quite literally the first bodybuilder in the history of europe and um it's an interesting story in in many ways he was a jewish immigrant or a jewish refugee and his judaism is much much concealed as you can imagine due to anti-semitism in europe at that time and um when he first started doing these exercises first started doing these demonstrations of public shows what people said understandably was nobody had seen physique like this nobody had seen muscles like this really popping off of the human body since the statues of ancient greece and rome now if you don't know this in a time before photography even there were plastic replicas of all the greatest statues from ancient athens and rome that were distributed throughout europe so you might think only a small number of people could actually travel to athens this is true small number of trophies but the most famous statues especially those that were men rippling with with muscles they do they look like bodybuilders those ancient greek statues those were seen in all the cities of europe i mean berlin paris even some small university towns one of the reasons being that you know artists would want to sit and and copy them they'd want to learn from the example how to do how to draw how to paint how to sculpt uh so and so forth you know so it was quite commonly seen but of course everyone wondered there were athletes you know there were military men but there were no men with these tremendous muscles you know popping off their body this guy the first bodybuilder in history of europe he was also the first hit author to write a book telling you how you could have six-pack abs he wasn't just a bodybuilder he wasn't just a showman because there had been strong men before him where they performed on stage lifting heavy objects he did that he did that also right but for him the main step forward he took was not lifting heavy things on stage which she which he did it was just posing and flexing you know wearing a loincloth right and he also sold photographs of himself but the posing and flexing on stage that was new and then he sold you a book and the book explained the technique whereby you could develop your musculature also and then then he sold you equipment he sold you devices with springs so you could help help build up your your strength just mentioned the guy was completely utterly non-vegan and he died of heart attack at quite an early age so despite his amazing uh physique he had a very high meat diet and he he collapsed and died but still still young and in the in the beauty and vigor of the youth as i recall he stopped by the side of the road to push a cart out of a ditch and um he was famed for his feet of strength he could lift a horse on stage anything like that um the cart wasn't that heavy but he uh he got out to help someone with a you know some kind of card or carriage that had gone off the side of the road and you can imagine he wasn't warmed up it's the perfect time to have a heart attack got out and rolled up his sleeves to push this card out of a ditch had a heart attack uh collapsed and died at this point this was literally the first bodybuilder but already this pattern that i'm criticizing the video of taking the leap from my personal accomplishment my personal beauty etc to monetizing that through a book selling you advice and then equipment and so on right it was already ongoing uh it didn't uh didn't take a whole lot didn't take a whole lot of time to uh to develop over over decades or centuries okay so i have a message uh i have a question from over the audience melissa is here just off camera she can uh interrupt my uh my flow at any time she can uh overturn the flow of conversation and guys i am seeing your comments as they come in if you have something tremendously intelligent to say you can also overturn the flow of my monologue at any time so a long time viewer and supporter of the channel who just uses the nickname cedar writes in quote this is kind of related to learning pali but it's more of a general question about the life of the mind so if you don't know pali is an ancient language it is now a dead language but it is closely related to the living languages of india so it is not so different from marathi in modern india but it is it's an ancient dead language but has some application in modern languages of india today um i continued the quotation how do you balance your intellectual interests for context my main ambition in life has always been to become a writer fiction and non-fiction i also know there's no use being a writer if you have nothing to write about i don't want to be someone who works for years honing my craft only to write shallow and empty books so i'm trying to figure out how to chuckle sorry you see the way in which i uh uh foreshadowed uh the the the questions and issues that are placed in this email um he doesn't want to spend years of his life owning his craft only to write show one of your books quote so i'm now trying to figure out how to juggle the advancement of my craft with the dispelling of my ignorance and within that there are many individual research research projects i could take up how do you approach having broad interests when do you just read a few articles when do you read a few books and when do you decide to devote years of your life to something as you did with the study of buddhism so again melissa may have slandered about this melissa has been this has been sprung on her as a complete surprise you guys in the audience may or may not have signed us to say about this but i'm going to start by responding to the very first part of that message all right he says it's a question about being a writer it's a question but the life of the mind and then he says how do you balance your intellectual interests when i was still in high school i had the breakthrough i had the realization there is no such thing as balance all right balance doesn't exist all right balance is always a scam it's always a form of self-deception or of someone else deceiving you right there is no balance now uh i'm going to give you a couple of examples here so you know where i'm coming from especially among the british you always find british men who don't really want to commit to the woman in their life their girlfriend frankly could even be their their wife there's a man and he's with a woman he says well you know i only spend so many hours with her and then i spend a certain number of hours hanging out with the guys or watching football or going to football games or and when you get to know him well when he trusts you enough it may be that what he means by hanging out with the guys is actually going to bars and nightclubs where he's attempting to pursue other women or it may be that he's actually pursuing and sleeping with other women even if it's occasionally a couple times a year british culture very different from america this way french culture same thing but frankly on another level i think honestly if you got to know the different countries of europe you could now insert an analysis about italian culture ukrainian and russian culture you know what do you mean by balance i can tell you with the british what it always comes down to is that these men don't want to feel that they're losing something of themselves they feel that their own status is elevated by having a kind of disdain and scorn for the woman in their life rather than really loving her 100 you know rather than really devoting themselves to that relationship now don't get me wrong i'm not here saying uh monogamy is a prerequisite for all good things in life if you just search for the word monogamy on my channel you can hear me philosophizing about this from six different versions not i'm not saying that at all um but my point is if you don't look at this in terms of balance if you instead look at the relationship and say look bro what if you give this relationship 110 what if you give it everything you've got you give it everything you've got to give and if that's not enough or it doesn't work out then he can say to her look i did all i could i gave everything i had to give and more so now if this isn't working out we got to break up we got to move on because i've got nothing else to get put yourself in that position as opposed to frankly you half-ass it as we say in plain english you go kind of 50 percent and then you try to stay cool and low aloof and keep your options open as we say in plain english you try to [ __ ] around and then there you are weeping when the relationship uh falls apart and you know the relationship may fall apart because she meets another guy who's more handsome than you or it may fall apart for all kinds of different reasons it may fall apart neither one of you knows why it fell apart i have a friend who's going through divorce right now i feel i know exactly why that couple fell apart but that's another story but you know like uh you know have you thought about giving this absolutely 110 you know the most intensity the most and what would that be just even visualize it right now notice the whole way i've structured this discourse i'm not promising you'll succeed on the contrary right up front i'm talking about the possibility or the probability of failure you can give this relationship give this woman 110 of everything you have to give and it ends in failure but when you walk away you walk away with the knowledge i gave this 110 right okay so any of these interests for any period of my life do you think i had a balanced approach to the study of buddhist philosophy no i gave it a hundred and ten percent my dude so when people say to me if if anyone were to say to me oh you know you could have gotten a phd in buddhist philosophy i can say no no no no and i went to england and i met professor gombrich and i became friends with madame philliozat i i knew all the leading figures in the field and everyone was so impressed with me in my research all kinds of people told me i was a genius and i was the future of buddhist scholarship and i published all these provocative articles i did all this research well it was oh no no my dude i gave it 110 i knocked myself out i know what's possible and what's impossible i know what i've got to give and i know when i've reached my limit of what i've got to give right like that's that's subjective what's possible in that sense and then i know objectively what's possible in the rest of the world i know might do just briefly about a scholarship i know what's possible in sri lanka and i know what's impossible like i know what's possible in thailand you know it's impossible to i know what's possible in cambridge england oxford poland like you know what i mean all around the world not just canada united states or something i got to know what was possible impossible i gave it 110 and then when it is done it is done homie and i don't look back on that as like 10 years of my life in which i was half-assing it or you know or in which i had you know some other interest or something or oh you know well you have to have balance like what do you mean balance between playing world of warcraft you know playing some [ __ ] video game for six hours at a time and and you know reading books for three hours no no balance no balance between social life and research no balance between video games no balance but i didn't watch sports during those years no no no i was really committed to doing that 110 now i can go through a whole bunch of other examples in my life and you can say the same thing um you know when i worked on korean ojibwe as languages first nations languages american indian languages a hundred and ten percent i was once actually really upset with my with my ex-wife now she was my wife at the time she was trying to get me to do a research project on buddhism i remember the room we were in and everything so vividly essentially don't don't you understand like that is over for me i'm not a scholar of buddhism anymore don't you see me knocking myself out like i'm i'm going to the library every day i'm putting in the hours to work on korean egypt i'm starting a totally new career which also entails its own political obligations its own kind of ethical and moral uh quiddities shall we say you know i'm really committed to korea ojibwe first nations both this is what i'm doing now and from my perspective that's what i'm doing with the rest of my life like i can't believe you're trying to rope me into this research project on on buddhism in asia i forget buddhism in china buddhism in taiwan it was it was something like that you know it's like you you don't understand me at all she didn't understand me no no balance i'm not trying to do vote no you know no that's it it's absolute total give it 110 and look if you think that ends in tragedy because already we only got two examples on the table if you think oh well at the end of that process you're in this tragic ruined condition of saying i worked so hard i gave it everything i had to give i poured my heart into i poured my mind i poured my efforts into this language this area of study and also these these linked political aspirations humanitarian aspirations you know altruistic aspirations like aspirations make the world a better place you know okay you gave this 110 you poured everything you had to pour into this right um isn't it sad isn't it tragic now that you have to quit and that you give up and go on what's sad what's tragic is when you half-ass it right when you give it 50 instead of 110 when you don't really commit when you don't really push your own limits right you don't find out what's possible and impossible for you subjectively and in the world objectively whether that involves universities or humanitarian projects whatever it is whatever the outside contingencies and requirements are that make things possible or impossible in your life right if you don't give it 110 then you will never really know now i think for most of you it's easy to see how this applies to sports like if you don't train with a hundred and ten percent of ferocity how should i how should i put it um if you don't absolutely give it all you have to give then you'll never know what you're capable of in the sport you'll never know what's possible and impossible for you in the sport um maybe it's harder to see how that applies to being an author being a writer the life of the mind and that's why we're having this discussion right now um but no i don't i don't believe in balance and as i'm indicating here also i don't think it's likely that the constraint or the limitation you're gonna run into is technique you know like i don't think it's likely that what's gonna halt your progress is that you're doing the push-ups slightly wrong slightly less than optimally if you're doing 200 push-ups a day you're doing 200 push-ups a day if you're only doing 20 push-ups you're doing it with perfect technique are you this is not going to make the difference you're not no melissa do you want to jump in you're like i mean for you you've lived such a different life than i have so you know yeah i know but look there was a time this isn't so i'm not going to mention anything that's secret you know there was a time when you took on a totally new career path going into a specialized form of of nursing so this is nursing for people with disabilities in speech it's a ton of work a ton of study and like look you know by all means disagree with me wrong when you quit so you did all this research and all this work and you took courses and things to prepare for this new special career and when you decided against it you were 100 certain no this is not the career i want it's not growing so i just said it may seem like you have no experience with this book but i think that is an example you know but yeah no i i there's a lot there's a lot to think about [Music] you know at a certain point you know you have to and it's a different kind of regret right like i'm not saying there's no regret one or the other you know do i regret moving to cambodia sure sure but when i was in cambodia gave it 110 i was learning the cambodian language history politically i'm sorry i would say but you know i have lots of those examples my point is even someone like melissa you you can actually relate to that i think even your engagement with music classical music playing instruments i think it's a similar sort of thing where you gave it 110 until one day you figured you got to give it zero no well thank you thank you for saying that that's that's flattering um yeah um i you know i'm not very self-critical so i i can think of ways i could have really put more into my study of music when i did uh i can think of ways that i i should have been more dedicated to the study of speech pathology when i was interested in that and when i was researching that and pursuing that so i mean from my perspective now at age 29 i'm very critical of how i spent my my youth uh so you know i appreciate you saying that but you know um that was with that career decision you know i went through a series of just deciding you know i'm gonna i'm gonna do this 100 percent and then quit you know multiple different times you know so yeah i just say it's it's you know the agony it's not like you yeah well you say that i think i think you know it's of course it's not the same nothing else is studying pali nothing else is studying korean nothing else is studying a gym but nothing else is studying chinese i get it but still and nothing else is being a creative writer nothing else is writing a novel whatever you want to say but still i do think there's at least a point of comparison there where you you know to some extent the agony you know where was we said yeah for sure um yeah i think something that uh in the question that i found interesting is that you know there's no point in being a writer a good writer if you have nothing to write about um that's just something i think you would have a lot to say about because you know you've lived an interesting life and you do have you do a lot to say and you know you could you could write a lot and i i remember various people like suggesting that you write a memoir because of this and every time you've basically said well i'm not interested in writing a memoir so yeah maybe you could i'm just curious about that decision you know your decision has not been to write about your travels in just a self-indulgent way you know whenever you write about your or talk about your life on youtube it's you know you have a point well i relate this back actually something you quoted from me melissa recently quoted one of my own statements on twitter so i now haven't used twitter for several years but my what i said in the past on twitter is still there you know um so this is useful for the topic of this video but it doesn't it's not related to the question sent in from a viewer um but i had a statement on twitter to the effect that you know no writing is not about what you have to say to yourself it's not a process of self-examination or self-reflection writing a story writing an essay writing a book you know idi is actually about communicating to other people it's not writing a diary it's not talking to your therapist and i do think that's as simple as that misconception is it's one of the most prevalent misconceptions and you know to give an example the poet rilke uh rilke has a book um letters to a younger poet letters to a young poet it says advice to a an author he started you can imagine it's still this day it's a best-selling book it's telling people what they want to hear especially from a kind of judeo-christian uh theological perspective and it's all about you know looking within you know man you can't you can't learn this from anyone else you can't learn how to be a writer from other people's criticism or respond to what people are no man it's just about looking within and your own feeling and your own sorrow and your own love and this this is a totally self-indulgent solipsistic and diaristic form you know of of writing uh so you know my my whole approach to writing fiction and non-fiction you are writing i am writing for an audience like i am writing for a client i am writing to spec you know it's very much my approach and you know again you guys now can read my writing you can criticize it my writing does contain anecdotes about my relationship with my father my writing does contain anecdotes about my relationship with my my first wife but you will see those reflections are really used to exemplify and explain the thesis the political point i'm making it's it does have an emotional effect on the reader but is by no means self-indulgent soul obsessed or diaristic you know that is really being said you know for you so you know um there are many aspects of this look could i have written a book at age 21 you know before i had gone out to see the glory of cambodia or whatever you want to say before i'd done these other interesting things in my life you know this this will come back to this will connect to uh the advice i'm going to give to this this person is writing in you know i i think the main stumbling block wasn't uh the main thing that would have made it impossible for me to be a good writer at age 21 but made it easy at 31 and even easier at 41. actually doesn't have to do with experience it doesn't have to do with being an interesting person which is a complex concept and only partly may be derived from experience because again plenty of guys have been a cambodian plenty of people spent time in cambodia laos in thailand most of them are not interesting people um they're people who've been to all the same places i've been and you know they have nothing interesting to say no interesting stories to tell about it um you know i really think the main stumbling block was just that i had never given voice to i had never verbally spoken through the things i would need to write about so already at age 21 right i'm deeply unhappy with democracy in canada i'm deeply unhappy with the university as an institution with high school as an institution with the police with you know well indeed with parliament with city hall with ecology i'm deeply unhappy at 21 with the genocide of our indigenous people with the fact that the indigenous languages are going extinct and nobody seems to care nobody's going to do anything about it it's a whole long list of things i still care about today and i already cared about them at age 21. and be with you a 21 i already was an interesting person i already had interesting things to say about that right at a minimum i had something interesting to say uh negatively in terms of a demolition of other points of view right there's something i could i could contribute as a writer whether or not i had something so much to say positively is another is another question do you need more life life experience of that right um i think it's really very artificial to separate writing from speaking this way uh is this a digression that's not a digression at all why are romance novels so terrible modern romance in modern novels not talking about 19th century or 183 2003 why are romance novels so terrible they're written by people who have no real experience with love for an audience that has no real experience in love it is absolutely a for-profit industry consisting of the blind leading the blind i mean it's this kind of mystification for the sense of mystification and think about how differently any of these books be written it was really written by someone who had a lot of this kind of experience of being married being divorced having gone through those things and then writing about that in a in a really realistic and useful and and cautionary way um well when you go through those things when you have just having the experience whether that's going to cambodia or falling in love and getting married and then later getting disenchanted and getting divorced you know okay but what goes along with that if you're not a nebbish if you're not a shut-in right is talking about it and not talking about it once and not talking about it twice talking about it ten times talking about 20 times sorry about 100 times right like how many times sorry because i just say flashback i had a friend when i was still in university who was an immigrant from syria so his parents immigrated from syria when he was a toddler or a baby i forget but he was very small he had basically grown up in canada spoke english as his first language but he you know syrian immigrant family could tell their whole story um they lived in a small town in ontario not not in the big city okay and i remember one of the first times i ever tried to verbalize what was so wrong with the university in the class with that like look the whole system is broken and this is torment and i want to drop out of these classes or i want to commit suicide like it's that bad being in this university it's so terrible i was trying to articulate it to this guy this is really possibly the first time i tried to tell anyone and his response as a syrian immigrant who had never been to university himself was 100 hostile 100 contemptuous and dismissive you know he absolutely could not believe that the university was anything other than a wonderful privilege that rich people were enjoying and that he was not enjoying now okay we can see it in that we can confort him that he wasn't capable but the fault lies with me i couldn't verbalize it i couldn't explain it to him in a way that would get through to him what it was that was so terrible about these these university classes now sure obviously he was hostile he didn't want to listen some of it's on his end but you think about what a challenge that is so how is challenging you know i'm jewish he perceived me as jewish too he didn't perceive me as white he perceived me as jewish in some context these are two very different things but here i am a relatively privileged jewish canadian he's a syrian immigrant and he feels like he's being excluded from going to university i'm not going to tell his whole life story here it's not not really true his p is actually his parents are wealthier than mine it's that guy i do i do know his family story but that we're saying actually his parents were quite wealthy they were they were wealthy but unsophisticated he can't go to university and he doesn't get along with his parents he's got his own situation here you know all he can do is feel envy and resentment towards me and in downtown toronto he's literally walking past the university often enough it's not far away you're seeing these architectural monuments or anything this is this wonderful institution he wishes he could be inside right what a challenge for me as a creative writer think about it as a composition can you write an essay can you write an epistle you know can you write a monologue as a stand-up comedian that's going to reach that audience that's going to reach someone that say hey look i know you think there's something wonderful happening in the university but it's so bad it's so awful i want to drop out of these classes or i want to commit suicide like it's really that bad the oldest university is that terrible you know can you like this is a huge challenge right now sorry again just thinking through the first several times i had to verbalize that kind of critique uh to someone you know sometimes you're talking to a professor sometimes you're talking to your parents or your grandparents you know but you're talking to people and their idea of the university may be from the 1960s their idea of a university may be from the 1940s right they have a whole different in as much as they know what a university is they may not have thought about it for a really long time right and it's just all the different kinds of ignorance and arrogance and reluctance you're going to encounter in just trying to explain universities in canada are awful now i said i just wrote a book in many does anyone know how many pages of my new book no more manifestos are specifically about the the the the con specifically about the complaint that universities in canada are awful there are quite a few pages in there saying that and you guys can read the book and then you can tell me you know how uh how how how bad a job did i do how did it uh how did it work out you know but anyway i made the effort and it was it wasn't act it was a challenge as a as a creative writer but this is what i'm saying so i am answering melissa's question here and it it connects with uh answering the question from from the viewer you know i don't actually think that going to cambodia made me an interesting person living and working in laos maybe however you know i did verbalize to people in cambodia to people in laos to people in united china i did explain to them how [ __ ] up canadian society is you know that's a really interesting challenge like think about that as an exam as a challenger writer i've mentioned this before i'm probably going to mention it again in future when i was in laos i met and spoke to people who literally thought that australia and europe were very close together because they had only ever seen a two-dimensional map of the world and they thought the map of the world worked like pac-man the arcade game pac-man or if you go off one end of the map you teleport together they literally thought the reason why australia was full of white people was that it was a really short trip from the south of australia to like the north of england you could just go whoop and reappear that was how you could do boat travel this this is the level of ignorance of the world we're talking about and you know so to to sit and talk with people often in their language in a foreign language but even if it's in english in a really foreign culture and explain to them look i know you've heard some things about my country some of you have heard my country is hell on earth you've heard it's this horrible imperialist capitalist you know a terrible place not that often did you encounter people but by the time i was there most of the communist propaganda had kind of gone into style you know okay and maybe you've heard that it's paradise and the streets are paid gold and everyone's wealthy you know what i'm going to try to communicate you this really sophisticated cynical view of the world you know what the problem is that the education system is hollow we have universities but they don't work we have parliaments we have ostensibly democratic institutions many more so we're saying if you think about it in terms of just the talking just the verbalization just the analysis just the conversation just convincing others of your point of view right in that sense those journeys that time right that made me a better writer and it made me better at doing what we're doing right now in gaming models um you don't have to go to cambodia to do that okay i think the reason why so few people in the 21st century are capable of writing anything fiction or non-fiction is that they are drug addicts who stay at home playing video games like period if you if your life revolves around smoking marijuana and playing video games you will never develop as a writer it doesn't matter if you do that in canada or in cambodia i mean it doesn't you can go to the north pole in the south pole you can go go to the antarctic and back and the whole time you're smoking marijuana and playing video games you're never going to develop in this way right but you know in case you haven't noticed implicitly i've also been breaking down the barrier between speech and writing you know if you can say it in a monologue you can write it in a book right if you can compose what you're trying to say the story you're trying to tell you can say it into an audio recorder and play it back to your own voice right if you can overcome that challenge then you can be a great writer now and if you can't what the [ __ ] you gonna write about just just to put a human face on that make it easier for it to understand what i'm what i'm saying here um hypothetically let's say you have a cousin who you got who got married and and then let's say just one year after he got married he got divorced and nobody told you why what happened and you started around different members of your family you know you asked your grandmother oh hey my cousin ed you know i i heard he got married but then seemed like just a few months later what what happened you get your grandmother's perspective okay and you talk to your older sister or you talk to this person that person you get a few different versions of events and then finally you talk to him you talk to ed you get a whole long story from it oh and now let's say just by happenstance a few months after that you bump into ed's ex-wife and then you hear her side of the story what if you take that constellation of different version of events right different versions of events and you bring them together and now you want to tell your story you want to tell the story okay can you record that as a youtube monologue how many takes do you need okay you need a minute to think about it right and your version may include the incongruous contrast between what one person said and what another person things that just don't make sense to you right what was it that happened and you may have a strong sense of who your cousin was in high school and you may now be questioning how much did he change in the few years he was in university or in the one year of his marriage in what ways is he a different man from the man you thought he would turn out to be you have some you have some questions now you have a story to tell right my point is it's not the craft of being a writer but it's not technique it's not methodology can you tell that story right can you organize all the different plots and subplots right the different things the audience you're going to conceal and reveal to the audience as it goes can you make that into a story that's in some way perhaps it's slightly philosophical perhaps it's meaningful perhaps it's instructive perhaps it's comedy right perhaps it's really just funny the funniest way possible whatever the story is you you have to tell um people will never develop the ability to do that smoking marijuana and playing video games and that's we this is an epidemic in our society now my grandparents generation they were not angels they were terrible people in many many ways my grandparents generation generally and my grandparents as particular people terrible people many ways however they spent their time sitting around playing cards and talking with the other people like just the number of hours those people spent talking right on their way to work on their way from work while sitting around playing cards talk was a huge part of their lives telling stories was a huge part of their lives so what have i been doing on this youtube channel for the past five years maybe for the past eight years by now right i'm getting real though i already think i was a great writer at 25. i didn't have a way to make money out of it so it didn't do a whole hell of a lot right i think already by 25 i had everything i needed in terms of technique or skill to be a great writer by 35 i had more than enough right but it's kind of interesting what happened in my life between age 35 and age 40 i spent hundreds and hundreds of hours talking and storytelling right and you can too [Laughter] all right so point one the first part of my reply to this letter was i don't believe in balance right i don't recommend balance for anything sky you know don't search for a balance in your intellectual interests right if you're actually interested in something why aren't you committed to it 110 and maybe you're not that interested in it you know maybe that's the answer maybe when you maybe if you try to commit to 110 you can't maybe that tells you something about yourself maybe that tells you something about the thing you're you're interested in you know there are languages i studied for a short period of time i studied korean at two different points at least maybe three points two different points they were called now i studied the korean language i started learning korean right why i had good reasons i could tell you all the reasons i want to learn korean but they were incorrect all right i wanted korea to be something like cambodia you know i wanted korea to be a war-torn country you know with democracy contending against communism right it's not completely crazy casey didn't know north korea and south korea are still in a state of war you know it's not completely off-base right but you know what i figured out was in effect korea could never be for me what cambodia and laos would be you know this is way back i studied korean before i committed to studying cambodian before i started getting involved in cambodian laws right so i'm just saying it wasn't crazy but like well you try to do korean you commit to 100 and then you start to figure out what it is you're getting into and maybe it's wrong for you right and again you may also figure out things about yourself you may figure out why it is you person so another example i've never wanted to commit 110 to being a visual artist to being a painter or illustrator but i have written children's story books and i have many times wanted to be able to illustrate my own children's storybooks right and i have a certain level of skill as a kind of cartoonist i can draw okay all right um i have bought books in the past i've bought pens have bought materials to sit down and start getting serious about improving my ability in illustration it's a lot of hours it's a lot of you really want to do this you know what i'm saying and i'm not looking for a balance guys i'm not looking for a hobby right either i'm 100 in or i'm 100 out like either i care passionately about illustration enough i'm gonna draw the best i possibly can i'm gonna improve my skill level in illustration and drawing and i'm willing to publish this book with my name on it with my pictures in it right like that's that's your reputation of the line rest if these drawings are not good or not good enough right it's it's your beatrix potter moment right it's not a hobby it's not a game right it's a hundred percent commitment or it's nothing then we're just talking about children in storybooks here but that's true in effect you would ruin a good storybook with lousy illustrations right nobody would ever take your the quality of your writing seriously because of the low quality of illustrations if you're not in it absolutely 100 so you know that there is no balance i feel like balance in this sense is a biological metaphor and people don't stop to think how misplaced the comparison to biology really is in these situations okay how much protein do you need in your diet as opposed to how much fat how many grams of carbohydrates all right the classic macronutrient breakdown fat protein carbohydrates you can talk about this as a balance this is what we talk about biological factors guess what [Laughter] what we're talking about here today has nothing to do with balance balance it's just like toto generate inappropriate this is a totally different category of things right this is a it's an error in reasoning to think you can apply it to this this category or genre of things entirely you know all right so i continue reading his question here quote for context my main ambition in life has always been to become a writer fiction and non-fiction why all right now if i were talking to this guy face to face i don't know his age he could be 19 he could be 49 i don't know doesn't matter if i'm talking to him man to man this is where it's going to get real uncomfortable and real intimidating right why why is it the fantasy of being a writer that has always appealed to you of working in silence and isolation and then publishing and being adored and celebrated by millions doesn't that tell me something kind of ugly about you you don't want to be a stand-up comedian huh you don't want to have to write jokes for an audience and then get on stage and find out what's funny and what's not the hard way huh you don't want to be a radio talk show host right you don't want to be a youtuber you don't want to do research and political commentary on youtube you don't want to be a politician you don't want to help people you don't want to be a policeman why why why why why why right and if you wanted to be a writer why wouldn't you want to be a filmmaker well you say fiction and non-fiction oh so you're too good to do documentary filmmaking why so what and just saying because his statement is that he always wanted to be a writer always you never wanted to be a fireman you never want to be a police officer you never want to be a statue really when you really think about it maybe what you really wanted was to be a stand-up comedian but you figured out that you're too shy or you're too awkward you're not handsome enough you're not charismatic enough and you retreated to this fantasy of being a writer maybe maybe and but for someone else maybe it always was the fantasy of being a writer right one of the crucial aspects of being a writer is that it is a lonely life you work alone and nobody understands you and then the fantasy is the fantasy is that like george rr martin you end up fabulously wealthy and surrounded by fans and women adore you even though you're fat and ugly and old right that's that's the fantasy what percentage of get to live that fantasy and look guys i'm living my dream i mean probably 1 000 people are going to read the book i just published man i'm trust me i'm elated all right like and that book okay let me let me ask you this the year 2022 if you were going to make a top 10 list the 10 most important books about veganism published this year i'm a little bit biased where do you think i am now some other genres it's hard are you going to write are you going to be in the top 10 for the the fantasy and science fiction books too that's really that that's hard bro okay let me tell you i'm i i know i'm in the top ten most i didn't say most popular books about veganism the most important books published about veganism this year the most important books published this decade okay i know i'm going to be in the top i know i am in the top 10. who's my competition at this point gary francione retired gary yarovsky an idiot and retired you know earthling ed you know who's who's out there to compete with me for book of the year or or book of the decade who else is in that top 10 list right now again i know my writing it's profoundly unpopular it's unpopular for profound reasons it's unpopular not because it's poorly written because it really has a jarring disturbing message people don't want to hear right i am not uh lamenting that i've sold fewer copies of my book than how not to die by dr greger uh followed up by its sequel how not to diet oh shout out to the skinny [ __ ] diet oh how many more how many more copies could i have sold if i'd written this kind of book right no no my dude if i sell 1 000 copies i'm elated i'm delighted i'm over the moon and guys if i sell 200 copies i still know i wrote this book that was tremendously important within this this new genre right like you know that's that's where i'm at i'm happy about it okay but this gets it something else that's interesting here which is that i don't think of myself as a writer i don't think of myself as an author you know and i would never say this for myself sorry i don't want to show this guy's name on screen i would not say this by myself i wouldn't say oh i've always thought of myself as a writer like as my career or as my identity or something like that right you know um [Music] and look i mean again i say if i were talking to someone in person this is where it can get a bit confrontational this is where it can get a bit intimidating where you're really asking why now melissa had an interview uh recently you had a you had a phone interview where they were asking i'm just going to be vague about what the job was but they were asking why do you want to do this job i felt i just found it really funny you know um they basically said you why tell me why you wanted this job and don't say it's for the money you have to have some lofty or purpose or ambition for why you want this job uh you know i was in the room well you know why why do you want to be a writer or why do you think you want to be a writer you know obviously it's not for the money why you know why and you know maybe the answer is is something wholesome and good but maybe it's a little bit dark you know maybe the reality is that you want to be adored and famous and you don't want to do any of the things that famous people do to earn that adoration and acclaim you know what i mean you don't want to have to get out you don't want to get on stage and face the the cheering and also the booing of the crowd you don't want to have to work for them but you don't want to go through all the things that musicians go through so on and so forth maybe there is a specific reason why being a writer you know really appeals to you now uh in the 21st century uh published media books on paper magazine articles anything like this they are no longer a leading indicator they're a lagging indicator so i just said hey probably one thousand people are going to read my book it's one dollar by the way this is another reason why i can be assured it's going to reach pretty large audience very cheap book you can get it from amazon for 99 cents in europe and so on um maybe a buck 30 in canada it's a little bit different this way okay you know um you know obviously you're not doing this for the money [Music] those people if it's one thousand people they're reading that book because they already know me because they already trust me or because they have some kind of curiosity about what i'm gonna say based on youtube based on this medium right here right a greater and greater percentage of books are published in that way today right it's published because the interest in the book has already been created by something on social media or otherwise outside of the book something that's happened in real life so it's happening broadcast media some other creative art form and that's very much the opposite of the way the world used to work it used to be that you published a book first and then it got made into a movie now in a lot of ways you got to get out and make the movie first so that people read the book so he says fiction or non-fiction so any of you in the audience this is great advice do you want to write a book let's just say about ecology let's say specifically about an ecological disaster there's a specific river or a specific valley a specific forest and it's it's ruined it's wrecked it's and okay the only way you're going to sell that book is by making a documentary movie first and then publish the book and say on the cover here's the book with the same title as or tied into the hit documentary movie and i'll be honest even if the movie is a flop your ability to get a mainstream publisher to publish and distribute this book and give it a chance give it a shot of reaching a larger audience it's completely going to hang on the documentary movie so most of my audience are vegan you know uh cowspiracy any of those if you published cowspiracy the book to come out accompanying the documentary movie you have a hit documentary movie then it's then it's gonna sell but if if you just have a book by some guy about some ecological disaster how many copies are you going to sell right today in the 21st century the answer is is practically zero this is what i say i'm slightly misusing the terms leading indicator and lagging indicator in their economic sense but i'm saying you know the leading medium is now no longer writing so what sense does it make to want to be a writer if you're basically talking about a derivative art form right you know um what is it there's this overused uh joke that writing about music is like dancing about architecture if you haven't heard it i've heard that a hundred times you know oh well what's the point writing an article about music right writing about music it's like dancing about architecture you know it's kind of very arch ridiculous sense okay look you know the reality is in the 21st century right you can write a book about dance any kind of dance imaginable how has dance changed in cuba over the last 20 years with the collapse of communism you know okay you can write a book about dance you can write a book about architecture you know any of these things but today right you you're gonna have to make at least a hit youtube video if not a documentary movie about dance you're going to have to get out and dance you can do a reality tv show you're going to get to have to get out and do the thing itself right in order to have a book that sells that's attached to it right i would say that for the most mainstream of interests let alone when we get into the more esoteric and more political interests because i'm someone writing for a minority with a minority without minority right um [Music] so look you know real talk um [Music] what if i wanted to publish a book about buddhism right i got 10 years in the game and but it's not enough i've got to go and make a documentary film i could make a documentary film that completely consists of interviewing former buddhist monks buddhist monks who lost their faith reflecting on their past doesn't have to be a hit like whether it's like it's on netflix or it's on hulu or something but we have a documentary film and it's called buddhism colon lost faith you know buddhism colon all is impermanent even buddhism that's the title you know okay and it's just talking to these guys and translating bringing together their experience and examining like and what are the effects of buddhism on these these people's lives okay now you've got a book deal now you've got a book that can sell and i'm not saying that's a hit movie right that's not going to be like the next bruce willis movie or something right but the fact that you produced it the fact that you can show it you know again i'm not just writing about dance i'm actually getting out there and dancing if you can see it on youtube you can see it on film right and now i'm going to go that's the era we're living you know and just saying you know look some of you in the audience are just sitting there with your arms crossed like yeah we know already for some of you it's not surprising the sense in which it's surprising is if you have grown up with this idea of being a writer being a writer as something separable from just being no no you get out and you actually do buddhism and then you know you lose your faith in buddhism and then you make a film interviewing other people lost their faith in buddhism okay now you've got something and now you can write it up right and apply this to everything sorry whether it's dance or architecture or anything else you've got to go out and do architecture do a great film just talking about what a ripoff you know going to college to study architecture is you can you can interview disillusioned architecture students people dropped out and people used to be architects and quit to do some other job talking about a lousy line of work architecture is how people think it's a great line of work and stairwell sorry it's just parallel the example okay and now you've got now you've got a basis for for a book that will sell but you see being and doing and knowing in this sense now are not separable from from writing this idea of being a writer um and that's why to me it's just slightly strange it's not totally observable strange to then to then have the sentence in the message quote i also know there's no use being a writer if you have nothing to write about right now again um i already established earlier in this monologue writing is not diaristic writing is not about self-expression writing is not about reflection it's not about introspection writing is about communicating something to a reader writing is about communicating period there's nothing else going on there you know like if i make that film it's not about what buddhism means for me it's about what buddhism means for you and i'm going to stuff it down your [ __ ] throat i'm going to tell you what buddhism ought to mean to you and if you if you started watching this film with a different set of beliefs about buddhism i want to totally break you down and shake you up so by the end of watching this movie buddhism doesn't mean to you now what it meant to you before right if any of you have read my books you will know the feeling i'm talking about i got a compliment from jj mccullough the other day i think i got out him on this it was interesting the way he phrased this is not the way i think about writing he said that when he reads my book when he reads my finished writing he says right away he feels this sense of confidence that i get across in my writing he says the same confidence he feels not listening to my monologues interesting compliment i can take a compliment is it is it confidence you know obviously he completes it's just a compliment he just meant it to to flatter me or to thank me for the the book once he started reading it you know i i get it but i think in the context of what i've said to you it's it's not really confidence we're talking about at all right if you've actually gone out and seen these things and done these things and being these things yourself like i have been buddhist and now i'm an exponenti you know i've been there i've seen that i've done that right it's not it's not about confidence anymore and again it's sorry this is what i want to say i think the contrast is between what he perceives as my confidence and the lack of self-confidence someone has when they're instead engaged in diuristic writing uh self-analysis self-examination self-indulge this this kind of thing this uh pouring your heart out this you know uh where where you're you're talking about your own feelings for yourself as opposed to saying look whoever you are in the audience i have something to say to you and this is you know this is why it's so important that's i think that's what he's reading as confidence is that fundamentally my mode of writing is transitive rather than reflexive it's not self-referential and self-examining it's you know it's it's examining you and it's communicating on you and it is trying to change your mind it's trying to change you as a reader in that sense it would not be too much to say that all of my books are an attempt at a transformative experience for the reader um i'll just say sorry my father was a fool it was he was wrong about practically everything but it's interesting to note he he had a very similar idea um you know when he made museums and he wrote the text that was going to go into the museum when he was designing and creating a museum his objective was to transform the attitude of the visitor the attitude of the reader he said he wasn't trying to burden them with information with facts with data it was that they show up and see the museum and then they fundamentally leave with a different attitude with a changed attitude it's an interesting conceit i think my father was a terrible writer finds his books really hard to read put it this way i find i find it impossible to force myself to read his books i find him so so badly written but i think you know he was onto something with that idea of what the relationship is between author and an audience and maybe that's what's being perceived or misperceived as confidence okay quote i don't want to be someone who works for years honing my craft only to write shallow and empty books so that to me is the ultimate riddle of hashtag booktube authortube hashtag writertube what you see again and again is this fetishization of craft fetishization of technique commodification of method and then you know trying to propound one particular set of tips one particular technique one method as being the secret key that's going to unlock success for you very similar to diet and weight loss gurus and this kind of thing i saw one video that was claiming um revisions are bad never revise your right this guy no you know you do an outline you write the whole book no revisions if you make revisions it'll only make the book worse you know that's that's his technique and someone else is probably making a video saying oh you have to do at least 10 revisions and get 10 different people to read your book give your feedback and do it here's the secret to success one method one technique or top 10 methods techniques but you know my perspective of being real with you my perspective is craft is nothing you know technique is nothing i i for me it comes back to that allegory of the boxer i had right at the beginning of the video which is you know you know either you have what it takes to compete or you don't either you have what it takes to get in the ring and punch someone in the face and get punched in the face you know either you've either you've got it or you don't um now you know some of you may be thinking well that's easy for you to say some of you may be thinking well that's easy to say because you're a good writer or you may be thinking it's because i always have me a good writer no i have always appreciated reading books reading primary sources written by total outsiders people with very limited literacy in english frankly i just give an example i read a book written by a military commander in cambodia who fought in several successive wars his english was very poor i read a book i read several books written by cambodian refugees i've also read just sort of straight interview transcripts with different kinds of cambodian thai and lotion survivors of different kinds of disasters frankly um you know even primary sources from your history of europe some of the research i did on russia the quality of english is very poor the quality of composition is reported i've read accounts again whether it's from kind of soldiers or refugees i've read a lot of war material this is not the only example back when i was married to an anthropologist i read a lot of anthropology a lot of that's in broken english and so on you know like you know you can be sorry one book i read that's very memorable to me um is the account of a tribal person in myanmar he really grew up in a remote tribal group where they still practiced animism and had ancient beliefs and you know anyway different types of frankly ritual self-mutilation and what have you you know not great stylistically not great in terms of craft so it's it's fine like i get it someone might see this oh well you're saying craft is nothing but that's just because you're like gifted at writing or that i'm that i'm skilled because i have so many years of practice i do have many many years of practice as a writer and you know like okay maybe there's some like like i see your critique some extent but my response to that is say no i think actually i regard craft as nothing partly because i have read things written from a cree and ojibwe perspective from a burmese perspective from a cambodian perspective and just from like a soldier in world war ii's perspective from people who really had no craft at all and i got to tell you when you get in the ring either you have what it takes to knock them out or you don't you know what i mean you have a story to tell and guys uh you know uh there's this really kind of prurient demi mod of true crime writing you know there's this whole demi-monde of actually autobiographies of prostitutes and now thanks to youtube you can just watch direct videotape of prostitutes talking about their lives very often now i'm not generalizing hashtag not all prostitutes some of those women have formal literary education some of them write in a very uh inflected and style i'm sure but many of them obviously their ability as a writer or their ability as a as a rec hunter you know they are they are speaking in very blunt and artless ways but still you know so i'm saying actually what i what i see is having real literary quality what i see as being good writing uh doesn't doesn't rely on on craft um look so guys even right now the research i'm doing right now for the book i could hold this up it's a book it looks like any other the research i'm doing for my own book i'm reading a lot of material from the american revolution and the guys who directly participated that including soldiers you know including people who committed atrocities with their bare hands um really not just in war but torturing people and so on and so forth and again you can imagine a lot of that the quality of writing is very poor but it's still tremendously moving or tremendously important so again this isn't uh isn't as simple as saying english as a first language versus uh versus english as a second language and so forth so have a comment from the audience here go figure says quote your critique of technique would apply to the entire self-help industry oh yes so he says their channels are riddled with one method after another that doesn't work out for them maybe the most extreme would be speed reading i don't know if you're aware of that scam of teaching people speed reading that's probably the single most extreme example of this um [Music] yeah i don't know um [Music] i think i think there's an interesting question of whether self-help is the purest or the most impure of the forms of creative writing but i'll say this with a certain degree of skepticism you know it's possible you really could be you could learn to become a better writer by reading really awful self-help books and i think if you if you reflect on what i've said in the last one hour you'd see why i'm saying that because self-help it's very much written often paragraph by paragraph page by page chapter by chapter it's written to have a direct effect on the writer that's pardon me a direct effect on the reader it's written so that every page in every paragraph is going to transform your attitude so that you maybe you just read that chapter and you put the book down and say wow i used to see things this way and now i see them this way so i don't read self-help books at all i don't but you could even criticize me by saying i i have this in common in my writing with self-help books that i want this very impactful style where i'm reaching out to you and every chapter it's really going to change your way of thinking you came into this chapter with one set of assumptions you leave with another you you read this book you sat down to read this book as one person you stood up after you finished it and you're a different man you've you completely changed my room that is what i'm going for so yeah the self-help industry in some ways it's it's the worst of all forms of of non-fiction writing but in in some ways right i'm conceding the point that you might you might learn to be the best kind of writer by examining the ways in which that's that's awful um [Music] all right so i'll finish maybe more to say about this babe melissa sitting off camera quote so i'm trying to figure out how to juggle the advancement of my craft with the dispelling of my ignorance and within that there are many individual research projects i could take up how do you approach having broad interests when you just read a few articles when you read a few books and when you devote years of your life to something as you did with buddhism so melissa here is uh tell me melissa for how many years have you been studying chinese yeah devoting years of your life to something it can creep up on you did you when you uh when you first got dressed in chinese were you thinking uh this would be a five-year 10-year commitment was that was that how you felt do you sit down and think hmm this looks like it's going to take about 10 years ago how did you at what point did you realize i mean yeah i don't know if i had an impression of how long it would take based off of you know you advanced so rapidly in chinese just in a period of seven months or something when you're living in china um no i i mean look i you know i moved to china in 2017 and um it wasn't really until 2018 that i started taking it seriously and yeah i know i i um it's really this past year that i've been going as hard as i have with chinese and i yeah i mean i i think the more i think about it you're probably right in terms of this right idea of balance and broad interests right uh because i do have broad interests i am interested in a lot of different historical political philosophical economic topics and you know how much have i actually read of any of these subjects you know um i would probably have been better off if i would have really just for one month devoted myself to reading like and finishing one what you know my focus on one subject one book rather than trying to you know piece together all these different research interests and yeah so i i am try i try to remain open-minded about learning and i i am just pointing out when you first started talking to me so when we got together you were 24 right you said openly that you had no idea what it was like to really commit to something like this for many years right i'm pointing out already now you do now you know what it's like you know but i'm also pointing out there wasn't some simple fork in the road you know i you could say there were many forks in the road and many points of reconsideration or or what have you but depending on how you count it we could say you are five years into chinese you know what i mean now what we we can also say just as another example you're reading of ancient greek and roman stuff what have you got you've got uh plutarch yeah have you got plutocrat i bought her this beautiful copy of plutarch that can be yours for anyway these are these are not those but this is a famous uh series of editions the lobe editions of the classification so but she's still reading stuff from grace room it has been at least three years but probably four years that you've been reading four years for reading stuff from from ancient greece i'm just putting this in the context of that question now you may not have thought this would be a four-year project and and it may go on it may it may be ten years you may read material from greece and rome for ten years that would not be you know if we now predict another six years and at some point you've read it all or whatever you know now you know it's not part of your life though anymore it's possible uh with chinese at what point will you know enough chinese again uh ten years would be a probably a conservative estimate you probably could we're just like no no at some point you're just completely fluent in chinese you don't have to work on anymore possible it could be 20 years you know like you know um my point is to challenge this idea you know how do you know when you're interested in something you're committing to it from years i don't know how old this guy is you know and again i try to present these videos when i think this is still meaningful if you're 49 or 59 why i think you know it is but for most of us already at age 29 melissa is in a position to reflect on how these kinds of commitments how it can become five years real quick you know yeah i just say i sorry keep going back to your example of um you know you really were studying buddhism for yeah yeah intensely uh did you read you know maybe this is dude did you read anything from ancient greece or ancient rome during that period great question no nothing no no i mean you know uh so no during that period of my life you know it wasn't just buddhism but i was reading the ancient history i was reading the modern history i was reading the colonial history in between in between ancient and modern i was reading how all those things were connected so you know like just use one example so how france conquered laos how that relates to the more ancient you know origins of buddhism and history of those countries and what the culture was like before the french got there and then the anti-colonial struggle and getting into the modern period and getting into comics so that was a lot to read you know so no i was consumed with and and just to give an example i mean india was not my research focus but still i read several books about politics of india and still to this day it always seems to me embarrassing that i know more about india than other white people and it's like well guys this wasn't even in my top 10 research interests but i seem to know more about india than everyone else around me including university professors but like you can imagine so history and politics of india different periods of time so i'm just saying buddhism for me was not just buddhism another great example is just slavery so i wanted to know the whole history of slavery how it was connected to buddhism in different periods of history how it was collected connected to politics i want to know the legal history of these countries what was their legal system before europeans arrived and started conquering them what was their legal system after europeans left you know etc so again political and historical but yeah buddhism is a part of it but i had a lot to read and a lot to study i know i mean that that that those things along with studying the languages and along with having to get a job and pay my rent and buy my groceries that was a whole life it was an all-consuming yeah research interest and fashion yeah no no no it's good but i mean you're asking this but you know no for many years you know anything like aristotle and plato it really disappeared from my life that's a good you know thing to highlight there were other things i was interested and cared about that really that really disappeared from my life yeah yeah i was just trying to remember what else in his yeah so anyway um yeah i know i i i don't know if but that is a conglomeration of a lot of different subjects that you just you know you weren't just studying the uh you know ancient uh scripture right yeah inscriptions that whole time but i did also i did also in study ancient stone inscriptions and manuscripts and ancient sacred texts and yeah religion of losses i did all that also yes yeah yeah but the modern languages too yeah yeah so look i was just making the point i mean you know like like i'm challenging the question the question was you know how do you know when something's just a minor interest or whether it's something you you commit here's your life too you know but i mean i think you can see why that question wouldn't come up to me because it wouldn't come up for me it wouldn't come up in that way it wouldn't be a problem it wouldn't be problematized in that way right i'm all commitment all the time you know [Laughter] just just keeping it real i mean either something is worth doing or it's not you know i don't garden i don't watch sports i don't think about a balance between gardening and watching sports and the research i'm doing or the publishing i'm doing and look i said before i've never really had a period of time when i thought of myself as a as a writer you know like like thinking of yourself as a novelist where that's your that's your identity but i think the truth is my generation and the next generation coming up after me we didn't have the luxury of thinking ourselves as as writers i i never had the luxury of even surviving by publishing newspaper articles when i was in cambodia when i was in laos and so on and specifically when i was in cambodia this is for different reasons but partly because of freedom of speech so when i was in laos laos was a total communist dictatorship cambodia there was some freedom of speech some and um [Music] you know when i was in cambodia many many people said to me after sometimes i've targeted me for a short period of time but sometimes i've talked to me about politics like an hour they say wow well look you're amazing you know all this stuff just as i've described now sort of history and politics and what have you and i was very articulate talking about so you should be publishing articles for you know i don't know whatever they said the times of london or you know they'd named some some newspapers and i'm like no no no like no it's it's actually impossible for me to earn money as a journalist it's actually impossible for me to earn money as a as a writer so you know then you're into a period of time when the question is what are you and who are you [Music] independent researcher well what if you do research nobody wants to pay for what if you're doing research that tells people things they don't want to hear um you know what if you're telling truths that are too terrible to tell whether that's that's buddhism so you know for me i could never have my identity my sense of self-worth or anything else you know attached to the life of a writer or the identity of a writer that was just not possible for me and my generation yeah go on yeah i could just say that in my experience of having chosen english as my major yes right diversity i had people ask me are you going to become a writer and i had to answer no for these reasons essentially because there was no way to earn money as a journalist they didn't even have a degree in journalism at my university right uh which is probably the only area that i would have been interested in as a writer is journalism non-fiction is kind of this kind of area of writing uh so look i you know you have far more experience with writing than i do and um i i just it is a shame it is a shame that you can't earn money these days uh as a writer and you know i have to think about what the future is with um you know what and yeah i just have to say i think i think you're probably you know hitting the nail on the head if you want your writing to be uh you know recognized you have to do something else whether it's youtube making a documentary film or you know dancing uh being a performer making a reality tv show or something like that seems to be how you know you have to go out and do something real right right and that creates the interest in your book yeah and you know this has always been one of the fundamental uh paradoxes of the publishing world was paying in advance paying someone to write a book that doesn't exist yet you know paying an author paying a journalist to go to a country and do research and write articles that don't exist and you don't know what you're going to get but there was enough money in the game decades ago that that that sort of thing was possible or thinkable and now understandably it's unthinkable who wants to pay for a book that doesn't even exist yet and who wants to publish a book that doesn't already have an established audience where you can't prove from the success of a youtube channel or a documentary movie or something that this is a book people we're going to buy so and by reading a comment that's already been posted to patreon and i think i currently have this comment posted on goodreads appropriately enough i said publishing is dead self-publishing on amazon is the present and the future if you're a creative writer and admittedly i am you can learn to cope with that reality or you can spend the rest of your life bitterly resenting that you can't get paid the same way authors did in the 1960s the internet changed the world and now we have to figure out how to change the world using the internet