#128: Learning Chinese, Future of Education, Reading and Writing with Will Mannon
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chiwi Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. My guest today is Will Manon. Will is the course director of Rite of Passage and passionate about online education. In his free time, Will enjoys exploring language, literature, technology, history and philosophy. He lived in China for six months and is a comfortable Mandarin speaker.

In today's episode, we discussed how to learn Chinese as an adult, cohort-based course, reading and writing. I hope you enjoy the show.

As I mentioned, I showed our interview with my parents and they praised your vocabulary. So I'm very curious, what motivates you to learn Chinese? A few different things. First of all, I started studying in college, gosh, almost nine years ago. And I was really bad at it, but I went to China after one year.

In about two weeks in Shanghai, after about two weeks in Shanghai, I had a conversation with a shopkeeper. She was selling a fan. I bought the fan. I asked her where she's from. She told me she's from Shanghai. She asked me where I was from. I said, DC. We talked about our families. The whole conversation lasted two minutes.

within that moment, it was the first time I actually communicated in Chinese with someone who wasn't my teacher. I was so excited. I was with a bunch of students. I got back on the bus. I couldn't stop talking about this moment. And they're like, "Will, you just bought a fan. What's the big deal?" I was like, "No, you don't get it. We spoke Chinese."

That was eight years ago. Ever since then, I've just been captivated learning Chinese. I think on one very simple level, learning the language brings me joy. Like when I was a kid, I loved learning trivia facts. I was on these trivia teams where it's like Jeopardy game show. And I

I think learning Chinese is sort of like each word is like a trivia question, but trivia is fun, but it's sort of useless, right? If you know all the world capitals, that's fun, but it's not useful. Knowing Chinese, I call it applied trivia. It's like useful trivia. I've always loved trivia. So I think that's one reason.

The other thing I'll say, I've just always loved, I guess I have a heart for the world. I've had maps in my room since I was five years old. And I view, if I can learn Chinese, it's like a key that unlocks the whole world. Chinese people live everywhere. I can learn so much about the world. So kind of these two reasons, applied trivia and it unlocks the world.

What's the most culture shock you encountered in China when you're living there? Did you find anything very different from where you come from? Yeah, let's see. I think learning about the education system in China. I was in Taiwan four years ago and

I heard about Bushiban. Yeah, yeah, yes. We call it cram school. We don't have that in America, really. Not really, right? My understanding, they told me in Taiwan, they'd go to high school from 8 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. They have an hour off and then go back to school for two or three more hours at night.

They'd go to cram school on the weekends. They'd go to cram school in the summers, right? I think in America, we have more balance where if you're a high school student, my school was from 7 to 2. And at 2 o'clock, we were free for the day. I know, 2.20, we were free for the day. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, right? But you don't do nothing. You go and play sports. Every high school has all these sports teams. You have clubs, julepoo.

I won't stop inserting Chinese words, but you can join clubs. You can hang out with your friends on the weekends. You play sports games, hang out with your friends in the summer. You go to summer camp, swimming, archery, tennis, all these activities. And the kids in Taiwan hadn't done a lot of that stuff because they spent so much time. In the summer, they weren't swimming at summer camp in the lake. They were learning physics. And I just thought,

it was so oriented towards academics that there actually wasn't a balance. I understand that's changing. I think they've actually started to eliminate Bushiban, but that was the thing that was most different when I was in China. Yeah. Have you found that Chinese students are more competitive in many areas since they were being taught at...

at a young age, you need to be stand out to beat your peers. That's how this culture developed. Yeah. I would talk to Chinese students who were at my school, University of Virginia, right? They were foreign study abroad students at Virginia. They would tell me that, I'd be like, why did you come here instead of go to school in China? I'm going to school in China. And they'd say, well, it's

so competitive in China. In America, there just was a lot less of that hyper-competitive culture. I don't know if that's from parents. I don't know if that's because there's so many people in China, but from what I heard from them, it's hyper-competitive in China. Yeah. I remember when I did my college entrance examination, I was competing with 10 million people

I think only 20% will get into the college. So it's very competitive. But I'm so glad my parents are not like typical Chinese parents. They never sent me to Bushiba. They let me choose. I so appreciate that. I bet. I mean, we talked about this last time we spoke, but probably it's got to be a big reason why you travel and you make all these friends all over the world, right? I feel like you've broken from the typical path.

And I bet a lot of that, there's this debate of nature versus nurture, right? Are you just born that way? Or is that the way you were raised or the way you're nurtured? I think it's obviously both, but I think a big part of that is your parents probably not putting you on that typical bushi bun. Yeah, I think so. Many people think when you become adults, it's so hard to learn a second language.

So what's your experience on learning Chinese? Because I'm very impressed by your vocabulary and all the grammars you use. Well, thank you. I still have a long way to go, but I like it because in a sense, it's hard to learn a language as an adult, but in the information age, in the age of the Internet,

It's not that hard. I guess it's simple, but it's not easy, right? You just have to spend the time. And there's so many opportunities to spend the time, right? I can go to YouTube or my podcast player and find limitless, just infinite content I can consume in Chinese. I can go to this website, italki.com.

I can talk to hundreds of Chinese teachers for $8, $10, $12 an hour. It's very simple, but the part that's not easy is to stay consistent and stick with it. Chinese is such a hard language that it just takes many, many years of consistency to become fluent. I want to eventually become completely fluent in Chinese. I know I'm still several years away, even though I work really hard. So the path is there.

The path is actually pretty simple, but it's not easy because it just takes so much time. So you have to have a really strong motivation. I think what helps me is that if my motivation were only external, extrinsic,

I wouldn't make it because that's not enough. But my primary motivation is internal. I just love learning Chinese. I can't fully explain why. I can give you reasons. I liked trivia as a kid. I like to talk to people. I can't fully explain why, but I know I have it. I wrote an article on my website of an uncommon fire. I feel like I have this fire within that I just must learn this language.

I also have external motivation, right? If I learn Chinese, I can have a podcast and build an audience. I can have work opportunities, right? But those are secondary. The primary motivation is this internal fire.

And that's what's going to get me there. It resonates with me a lot in terms of writing. I have the external facts, like I can use my writing to find a good job, open the door for more opportunities. But I think the internal, I have the eager to express myself. I need to write. Yeah, nobody pushed me to write, but I just want to write and vary consistency. Exactly, exactly.

This idea of, there's often things we feel we should do and there's different reasons we feel we should do those. Maybe it's pressure from your parents or from your friends, right? It's just somebody gave you advice one time that you should do this or you should do that. The thing, dip into philosophy for a minute, but there's this idea of mimetic desire, right? I don't know if you've heard of it before. Yeah, I've read up all of that. Very good. Yeah, Gerard is very popular on Twitter now, the mimetic desire. All that means is that

You see what people around you are doing and you say, oh, well, they have that. I guess I want that too. I sometimes think about Twitter, right? I see all these people build these big Twitter audiences. I don't have a big Twitter audience. Sometimes like, man, I really want a lot of Twitter followers. Then I'm like, why? Like, I think that's, it's all shades of gray, but I think that's mostly a mimetic desire of mine. I want the pride and I want to keep up with the peers.

What I love about Chinese, I know it's not a mimetic desire because no one else that I know in my life speaks Chinese. I know it's pure because it's from this internal place and it's not a thing I should do. There's all sorts of things I've been told I should do. I should write more about building online courses, which I enjoy, but I don't write enough. I don't write as much about that or I should...

do this, I should do that. The things people tell me I should do, I still don't do. Studying change, which no one has ever told me I should do, I do it and I can't stop doing it. So that's a really good signal to me that I'm doing the right thing. It's coming from the right place. What's the biggest reward you are getting from

learning Chinese because you know even you have the internal motivation but if there's no reward you I don't think you will still continue doing it for long term when I study Chinese every day is Christmas what do I mean by that I'll explain it's Christmas season uh when I was a kid Christmas was the best day of the year you

You got presents. And when you're eight, you don't have any money. You can't buy your own presents. So you got all these presents and you're so happy to get these presents that you could then use all year. And I would sometimes get sad because once you grow up, you don't feel as excited about Christmas. I mean, I'm excited about Christmas to see my family and to go home and take time off work. But I don't get so excited about the gifts that I get.

Cause I didn't go buy anything. You know, the gifts don't get me as excited. It was like sad. I was like, I'll never have that feeling of like excitement around getting gifts on Christmas ever again. And then I thought about it some more and I realized every time I go to Chinese class, I learn new words. Right. And when I learn Chinese,

a word, it's the first time I've ever heard that word before in Chinese. And then I can use that the rest of my life. I'm going to speak Chinese the rest of my life. Every day, I get these gifts of these new words. They're almost like new toys, wanzhi. I can go use. Yesterday or the other day, I learned tiao zheng. It means to adjust. I'd never heard that before. I knew gaibian, to change. I knew

Similar words, but that's a new word. Think of other examples. Way meow means subtle, right? There's one today. I think it was like, well, now I'm forgetting. I have to get studying my notes. But anyways, you learn these words and I feel like there are these gifts that I can always use. It's almost that feeling of like being Christmas every day. So that's the reward. I mean, there's other rewards. I just mentioned off air that I did an interview today with

friend who's a movie director. It's probably the best interview I've ever done. That's a reward publishing that. But the daily rewards is what keeps me coming back because it's just so fun to learn these new words and then be able to use them forever. Yeah. Wow. It's like lifetime rewarding. Yeah. Because you can use this all the time. We met each other through the rite of passage. How did you get involved with this very popular online writing course? I was working as a software salesman

And I wanted to start writing. I always liked writing. I had some free time. My work wasn't as challenging as I'd like. So I took a writing class at UCLA College nearby in Los Angeles. It was online. It was okay. It wasn't great. There was no Zoom. It was all asynchronous. Then I heard about this course, Rite of Passage. It looked really interesting. So I enrolled as a student and

in May 2019 and took the course for five weeks. And it went well, I wrote a couple articles. I then found out because I had bought the premium version, I was able to enroll for free again that fall. So I took the class again. And when I was in the class a second time, I sent David, the founder and the teacher an email saying, "Hey, I really like your class, but I have a few ideas how it could be better." We hopped on a phone call. He said, "I like your ideas, but I need someone to help me with this. Do you want to work with me part-time?" - Wow. - I said, "Sure, sounds great."

So I, you know, just worked with David part-time. I was selling software by day, working on Rite of Passage by night and on the weekends. Very busy. I would go to these sales conferences in Arizona and work all day. And then you're supposed to go to this dinner, but I would skip dinner because I had to run a live session. So anyways, after about...

Six weeks of working with David, the course was going well. I was driving to work and we'd always talk in the morning, like 7 a.m. We would talk to plan before work. And I was driving to work and David called me back. And I'm thinking, why is David calling me back? We were just talking. And I picked up, he goes, hey, Will, it's David. Tiago, his business partner, is on the line.

And I said, oh boy, here it comes. I pull off to the side of the road and offered me a full-time job to run both right of passage and another course building as the course manager. And I was, you're supposed to act not so interested for salary negotiation. Well, maybe I'm a great person, so I'll consider this. Be cool, yeah. Be cool. I did the opposite. I said, guys, I'm thrilled. I want to start immediately. Let's do this. It was just...

I was so enthusiastic because I knew it had really changed my path in life. I was just thrilled. So that was November 2019. I worked with Tiago and David for about a year and a half. And starting this summer, I went full time, just focused with David and with Rite of Passage. So we've run something like seven or eight cohorts now. And it's early still. I have to remind myself it's still early. We're in this for the long haul, but it's going well.

Yeah, I was a part of cohort seven and I still keep in touch with many students from that. I do feel like it's the future of learning is so different from what I learned in university, which I hardly remember anything. And I didn't keep any contact with my university classmates. But from this cohort course, I do find, oh, I find my tribe, my community.

all the like-minded people I want to stay in touch with. So what's your perspective that distinguish right of passage from other online course? It's a cohort based course, like you mentioned, which is very different. Most people still think about online learning as something that you do alone at your own pace. That's because for the last 10 years, sometimes we call it education 1.0. That's what it's been.

What that means is there's a class on Skillshare or Udemy, or sometimes a MOOC, a massive open online course. And you, it's sort of like a bucket that you're pouring knowledge into. If you think about it, that's how that type of learning views the education process, right? It's just, here's this information and you just consume it and then you learn it. And never finish any MOOC. Right. Yeah. That's what happens. People buy these courses and lose motivation, don't finish.

and then feel guilty because they spent money and didn't finish. So what's great about right of passage as a cohort based course, a couple of different things. One it's time bound. You enroll in the course and there's a very intense five week period. And then the course is done. So it's great. It's this real urgency to bring your all throughout the entire five weeks. Number two, you're not alone. You learn within a group. So a cohort means right. You know, right of passage seven, you were a student. We had 300 students, uh,

who enrolled together and we were attending courses attending live sessions together we had mentor groups these sort of smaller groups where you get to know people you attend those together you learn things in class but then you don't just receive information you use the information live on the call right so if the teacher might teach for 15 minutes and then you go into a breakout room on zoom as you know and you have two other students and you have to grapple with these ideas and

Put them into your own words. And that's where the learning really happens when you're grappling with information, not just receiving the information. We do live exercises where you have a five minutes and a stopwatch and you have to write a little paragraph and then go into a break room and prepare what you wrote with your peers. So it's a much more active process. There's just a lot more urgency. And that community serves as a forcing function to make sure you actually complete what you paid for it.

The community, we sometimes say, is a place where if you leave, people pull you back in. If you are taking a MOOC and you quit, nobody knows except for you. If you're going to write a passage for two weeks and then you quit, people are like, hey, where's Camelia? She's in my mentor group. I saw her on Lifesize. They'll shoot you a message and say, hey, where are you? So that's at a high level what makes write a passage different. Yeah.

And it makes this cohort-based course format different. I mean, there's more details we get into with right of passage specifically, but that's why this cohort model of education works so well compared to what came previously. So each cohort will be slightly different from the previous one based on your

- Yeah, we gathered tons of feedback from students. Hundreds of people submit survey responses, sharing what they liked about the course and how it could be better. So we do these planning meetings. David and I did ours for cohort eight this past November where we get together in person,

We map out all the course curriculum, say, okay, what parts do we keep? What are we going to cut? We map out the student experience. What are we going to keep? What are we going to cut? And before that meeting, I spent hours and hours brainstorming

going through all this feedback, writing down the highlights, sharing those with David, and then we use that student feedback to determine what we're going to change for next time. So for example, this past cohort, it went really well. This is actually the first time we don't have to completely restructure the live session. We have these 12 classes and we're going to mostly keep them the same. But we got this feedback that, hey, you do a great job teaching us how to write, but you don't do as good a job of teaching us how to distribute our ideas once we've done

And what that means is, okay, well, they have a fair point. We're going to change one of our live sessions a little, add some more details. David's going to record a 20-minute video about how he shares his writing. And then we're probably going to add a special mentor group that only focuses on distribution and that runs only in the second half of the course, right? So we get some feedback. We're like, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, let's make a change. And we've just done that now.

This is now the eighth time. So over time, you just refine the course and it just gets better and better. Yeah. I feel like distribution is one of the most challenging part with all the students. What are the challenges or common traits you found facing students in terms of online writing? Yeah, I think there's four, at least this cohort, cohort seven.

For the first time, we did a midpoint check-in call. We're halfway through the course. We sent an email to students and said, hey, if you're feeling behind, if you're struggling, join this call on a Tuesday afternoon. So about 50, 60 people joined. On that call, we had four different categories of where people are struggling. We said, either you are scared to publish, you don't have enough time to publish, you're having enough time to write, you're having trouble meeting people in the course, or

And you're not sure what to write about. Like you can't generate ideas. And so we had these four breakout rooms and students got to choose which room they wanted to go on. And then mentors were there to support them in those different areas. So yeah, it just depends on the person. Some people just don't even know what to write about in the first place, right? They can't even think of ideas or other funny problem. They have so many ideas, so many things they're interested in. They can't decide where to start. Other people don't,

just are able to write, but then they just aren't comfortable with sharing their work. Like they'll have 10 essays that are all half finished, but they can't get anything over the finish line out into the world. You know, the one thing I will say, the people say they have no time. I mean, that's always, you have to hear the excuse, but then what's the real reason under the

use, right? That's surface level is I have no time. But unless, you know, I don't know, you're working three jobs and you have five kids, like most people have, say, at least an hour. It really means you're not making the time because you're scared or you're nervous or you're not prioritizing. So after that midpoint call, the most popular group of challenged students was not enough time. So we just started doing a call that I led every day, 11 a.m. Eastern. We call it the writing gym. And, you know, we just said, hey, hey,

Hey, as the course director, I'm going to be writing every day for an hour. And here's my Zoom link. And you guys can just join and write with me. And we'll do that every day, every weekday. And we did that for two and a half weeks, the rest of the course. And every day, 25 or 30 people showed up and would write. So I think that helped solve that not enough time issue because sometimes you just need that extra nudge, extra forcing function. Like, okay, just come for an hour and write for one hour today.

And students would say, like one girl did that, and then she said afterwards, it's amazing what one hour can do, right? It's just you keep worrying about not writing, you just come and do one hour, it can really change how things look. Yeah, I think once you make the commitment, then you stick with it. There's no excuse. Like when I did the cohort seven, I was living in Portugal. I still live here. And it all started at midnight.

Because I'm such a person, I like to get to bed around 10 p.m. So it's such a challenge for me. But I thought, no.

since I've made the commitment, I need to stick with it. We so appreciate that dedication. That's just amazing that you did that and that people do that. Like it just means so much. And hopefully you got a lot out of the course because you were. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Do any of those challenges of those four challenges or any others, like were any of the, those really present for you when you're going through the course? Like what was your biggest, what was your biggest challenge?

Yeah, I think my biggest challenge is I don't have a good positive feedback loop. Because you know, every time I publish something, people...

will say, Oh, I love I like your article. I love it. I love that is all the compliments. There's no constructive feedback for me to improve. I'm very confident in writing in Chinese. But when it comes to writing English, I don't think I'm the same level as me when writing Chinese. So I do want to improve.

So when I joined the rite of passage, then I go to the community to provide the feedback. And sometimes it's very harsh, but I love it. Yeah, I think that's the biggest takeaway. That makes me happy. I hope that's the case because we always tell people, don't be too nice. True, true. Being too nice isn't helpful. You know, everybody can improve. Everybody can improve, right? David, he's this...

Teacher, everybody looks up to. He's a great writer. He gets feedback all the time on his writing. Not to mention, you know, Paul Graham is one of the most popular online writers. A whole different atmosphere than David. And he, every article has at the bottom, thank you to...

five, six people who all gave feedback. So it never ends. That's always part of it. I do want to continue to find the group of people we can exchange articles, help each other to improve. Yeah, it's very important. So what's your writing process like? I like to write in the morning. I find I'm most clear in the morning. I...

I am streaky. So sometimes I'll have a period of time where I write a lot and then say the last three or four weeks, I've been doing a lot of Chinese. I haven't written that much, but during right of passage, I started writing a lot. I would actually, before I did the writing gym with all the students, I was meeting with Michael Dean. He was a former student who's now a part-time teacher with right of passage. So Tim and I would meet every morning at 7:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 AM Eastern. He's in New York. I'm in LA and we would

We write together for an hour and I was mostly focused on writing what I call daily thoughts. They're these shorter pieces, three, four or 500 words where I can write it. Sometimes I can write and finish one in a day. Sometimes it sort of takes two days, one day to write, one day to edit. I'll write it and then I'll publish it both on my website and then on Twitter. And I do screenshots of the essay, usually two screenshots and then publish that on Twitter. And I think that's how I get the most

eyes on my work because my website audience is not so big. My Twitter audience, it's not huge, but it's decent. And so I get some good, decent feedback on all the articles, but a few, I got some really good feedback on. So yeah, it's sort of writing in the morning, maybe writing for a day and then sitting on it for a day, refining and then publishing.

So I've been doing that more lately as opposed to writing a long 1500, 2000 word article that I spend a month or two on. I've done those, but I've lately been more excited about publishing the shorter form content because I have a big list in my Evernote of all these things I want to write about. And it's just nice to knock on one every day or two. So yeah, that's sort of how...

how I think about my writing right now. I always think it can be better. I have a lot of things. My process is so far from perfect, but that's where I'm at. So what are the topics you normally write about? Is there a common theme? Good question. I like to write about observations. I guess two things, like my life and then the internet, how the internet and information and media landscape is changing. I always come back to those, really to that topic. And then it's either from a

big picture perspective or how it affects my life specifically. I just find it so interesting. I can't get enough of that topic about how we lived for thousands and thousands of years in a world of information scarcity, right? Where you had morning newspaper, maybe 30 minutes of news on TV at night is very limited information. And just in the last 10, 15 years,

The entire world has been transformed by abundant information, infinite information. And there's great things about that. And there's terrible things about that. And how do we

navigate that both as individuals and as a society? How is this information abundance transforming our internal and external landscapes? That's my favorite topic by far, and that's the one I've written the most about. And it's hard. I struggle with this constantly. I waste time on my phone. I get distracted by small things. I

We'll be like texting somebody and then just be overthinking this dumb little text, like so much, you know, these little words that's so built up in your mind. And so that's the bad side, but the good side, I mean, here we are 6,000 miles away having a conversation that anybody will be able to listen to forever. I can learn Chinese sitting in my living room, talking to tutors all over the world. I like to say when you publish an article, it,

covers the entire globe seven times in one second at the speed of light. So there's these amazing mythic, almost unbelievable things about the information age. And then there's these

frustrating, insidious, terrible things and navigating those two. I mean, I could write about that for a lifetime. I really love that topic. Wow. So how do you filter your information? As you mentioned, there's an abundance of information. And sometimes I finally struggled because I'm very curious. I want to learn everything. But sometimes I just feel overwhelmed. Yeah, I share that same feeling. I've gotten more

much more strict with what information I consume. There's just a few moments I can point to in my life that were turning point moments. So in 2016, I deleted Facebook. And before that, I spent so much time on Facebook. It makes me sick. I would be terrified to know how many hours I spent on Facebook in my life. There was just a moment in 2016, I said, I've had enough. I deleted it.

I've never had Facebook since. I've never made an Instagram, right? Twitter was a big one for me where I would spend so much time on Twitter, even after I deleted Facebook, and I would read about sports and politics. One day, September 2018, I spent three hours just on Twitter. I felt so sick after that.

I purged my whole Twitter. I unfollowed everything related to sports and politics. And to be honest, that's how I ended up following David. That's how I learned about Rite of Passage. It changed my whole life. So those like sort of turning point moments have been big for me. Lately, I was spending, even this year, spending hours and hours on YouTube because the YouTube algorithm is so effective. It just gives you these videos that you can't see. Keep watching. You probably do that too, right? You just get addicted to like, oh, but another one and another one.

So my final turning point moment this September, 2021, I was so sick of watching YouTube one night. I retrained my algorithm. So for an hour, because I wanted to learn Chinese, but I was spending too much time watching standup comedy or sports. This is true. For an hour, one night, I stood in my kitchen and I just only clicked on Chinese language videos for an hour.

It took that long. I kept refreshing and then I would click the sports or comedy videos, say I'm not interested in this. And then I would click the Chinese video and it took an hour. But after an hour I had retrained my algorithm. So now my YouTube only shows me videos in Chinese. So now I

If I want to go to YouTube, I have to practice Chinese. And so that's helped a lot. So I guess my point is I've had these different turning point moments that help me refine the information I consume. I'm still working on it. I still scroll Twitter sometimes, but I've gotten a lot better.

It's so funny you can remember the exact date and the year. That's cool. Because for me, I deleted my Facebook, I think in 2017, maybe. Then I deleted my Instagram this year. Wow. Do you feel like you're missing stuff, not having it? Or how has it been not having Instagram? Not really. I think I just feel sick because on Instagram, I feel like I just sent some photos and then I got a lot of compliments. It's

like add any value to my life. I was a point. So yeah, I deleted it at the beginning of the first week. I feel, do I miss something? I want to know to look at the Instagram story, what my friends up to, but now no, if they want to find me, they will find a way to contact me. I used to work as a social media specialist. So I know all the algorithm. So sometimes I teach my friends how to train their algorithm.

You know, they all use TikTok. I never download TikTok. I know I will be like nonstop swiping it. But I teach my friends how to train the algorithm so they won't get affected by just sitting there all day long. Very cool. Wow.

What did you do as a social media specialist? What did you do specifically? Yeah, so I create the content on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Chinese Weibo, WeChat. And sometimes I create a Facebook advertisement. Basically, you target people who want to buy your products. So I know how the algorithm works, how we can manipulate people's behavior.

That's why when I watched that documentary, Social Dilemma, wow, that's exactly what I told my friends before. Yeah, they're really powerful, right? It's like the most brilliant engineers on the planet know exactly what buttons to push to get you to keep clicking. It's like swimming upstream, right? It's like the whole river of society is flowing this way. And to fight back, you can do it, but it's hard. It's like swimming upstream in a river. So it takes hard work to...

protect your time and attention. True. It's so hard to use your willpower to, okay, I only watch one hour. No, that does not happen. Yeah. No, it's like environmental design, right? It's the same reason I don't buy like a lot of chips because if I buy chips and cookies, like I know myself, I'm going to eat them. When I go home, Yes.

You know, my family has a lot of chips and cookies and I eat healthy all year and I go home and I'm right back to it. So it's not about my willpower has gotten better. It's just you have to define your environment as

assuming your willpower is non-existent. It's so funny. I just talked with my friends that I'm not buying snacks anymore because I know if I bought it, I will eat it. I'm all better to not have it. I noticed that you got so many books in your background. Did you read from very little? How is your reading habit form? I loved reading since I was young. I read Harry Potter when I was in second grade.

I'll be honest. I was really proud of myself. I was eight. I was pretty young to read Harry Potter, but I loved those books. It was just so interesting. The stories were so exciting. I knew like – I still know every book, like how many pages it was because I was so proud. I finished this like big, long book and book four is 734 pages. I won't tell you all of them, but I just loved Harry Potter, but I would read all sorts of books as a kid, Star Wars books, mystery books, boxcar children. And so –

I loved reading all throughout my life. In college, I read less. I think I was busy. I mean, I did the official reading, but I didn't read for fun very much. After college, my work was not so demanding. I had a lot of free time and I got back to reading. And I've just really spent a lot of time reading the last three or four years. It's relaxing. It calms my mind. You can just...

I mean, we can talk about both nonfiction and fiction, right? Nonfiction, you can just learn these mental models about the world that help you be successful. But fiction is so, it's just so rich. I think it enriches your life to, you know, hear the stories from different times in different places. So, and then the other thing I love reading biographies and memoirs, right? And you can almost...

You can only have one life to live, but by reading someone's memoir or biography, you can see the world through their lens. And it's almost like you get to test drive what it's like to live other lives. So all those different categories I really enjoyed. So can you recommend a couple of books from each category? Let's start from a biography and memoir. Oh, boy. Yeah, let me think. I had a couple of books prepared, but...

biography yeah this one right here so this is the book that really got me back into reading um barbarian days a surfing life so the the author is a writer for the new york times um and he's he's excuse me the the new yorker magazine and he's traveled the world covering apartheid in south africa and war in the middle east all that but when he was young when he was in his 20s

he traveled the world surfing. He loved surfing. He grew up surfing and he talked about

being in California and Hawaii, but then he goes to Fiji and Indonesia and Sri Lanka and the East coast of Africa. He surfs all around the world. So I love the book for a few reasons. One, he was just describing surfing in such a beautiful way, right? He would say that he'd get up before work and go surf at 6 AM and he would catch the inner curl of the wave. And then he would finish surfing and, and walk to work with his mind on fire with the infinite.

It's like, oh my God, what a- So beautiful, yeah. His prose was just phenomenal. But I also loved it because he was in his 20s. And in hindsight, it seems like this guy figured out life.

He surfed 10 years, then he became a writer and he's made all this money. Must've been a great life start to finish. But in fact, the entire time he was surfing around the world, he was filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. And I relate to that. I'm in my twenties now. And there's oftentimes I'm filled with self-doubt and uncertainty and seeing someone like this who has lived a great life

felt the exact same way that I feel now reassures me and makes me feel better. Yeah. That's the thing. When you read a biography or some other writer's sentimental words, you feel the resonation and you know, okay, they also went through these kind of hardships or have these feelings. So I will be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I can do others. Do you have any biographies? I'm just curious. I want to hear if you have any, uh,

I recently finished Isaac Asimov. I don't know how to pronounce his name. Yeah, the science fiction writer. I found out he has that delusional confidence just to push him to keep writing and use his imagination. Because sometimes I feel like I have too many ideas, my imagination may be too wild.

I should probably just put myself into reality. Don't use too much imagination. By the way, I read his works. I said, yeah, yeah, I need to follow my bliss. It's very rare to have this imagination and I need to put them into a story. Yeah, it almost gives you permission to follow what lights you up when you read. Because often we're surrounded by

you know, a lot of people just day to day life who aren't necessarily following that burning passion. And that influences us, right? It's like, well, maybe I should just calm down a little bit and just watch the TV show and just chill out a bit and not go so into these weird, crazy ideas. But when you read other people's biographies who did exactly that, it gives you permission to pursue your own wild and crazy ideas. So I very much trust that. Yeah.

I also listened to a podcast called the founders. This guy, he reads biography and autobiography, then summarize each book. So sometimes if I heard his episode, then Oh, this story sounds interesting. So I will buy the book and then read. So how do you find your

resources to read? Do you just randomly pick up the biography? It's not random. Boy, I love looking for books. Every year going back to 2016, I have a bookmark folder on my computer I call Book Warehouse. Especially when I was selling software, I had so much free time. I had all this time.

Like in the afternoon, just like, what are you going to do? I'm just going to like look for books. And so I would have all these folders of books and a lot of nonfiction. And lately I've been more into fiction, but this book warehouse, I just have like dozens, if not hundreds of titles. And I would, I have a rule. If I finish a book, I can go buy another one. So then, and sometimes I break the rule and just buy them anyways. But often, you know, if I finish a book, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to the book warehouse, look through and buy something. So through that, yeah, I spent a lot of time reading like

lists of like aggregated lists of top books. Right. And again, like novels and biographies are lately what I've most loved to read. And so I really spend a lot of time looking at those lists. So I have a very good sense, even in my own head, what I want to read or what books I'm aware of that I haven't read yet. So that's sort of how, um,

I'll take YouTube. I'll look at YouTube book reviews and certain channels like the School of Life has videos about really interesting things. Yeah, right. And you can find ideas that way. So kind of a mix of all that. But I have no shortage of books that I want to read. Yeah. Do you worry about you won't have enough time to read everything? Because I always buy them. My book list is so long. I don't think in my lifetime I will be able to finish them.

You won't and I won't. And it's a beautiful thing, I guess, right? You know, 10 lifetimes or way more than that to read everything. Yeah, I mean, I think that's,

what makes the books you do choose so special? Because there's this infinite selection. And like, at most, you'll maybe read tens of thousands of books. I don't know, like, this guy, Tyler Cowen, he's maybe read 100,000 books. He's read so many books. But, you know, there's only a finite number that any one person can read. So I think that the ones you do choose, there's something very special about that. Like out of everything that ever was, this is what I chose. And man, it was good. Man, I'm thankful I chose it. So yeah. Do you reread any books or?

once you down, you were down. Not much. The people I hear from who are great readers often talk about rereading. I've reread a few things. There's this essay, Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's about like seven pages. That is like the greatest thing I've ever read. And I've read that dozens of times. But yeah,

you know, there's letters to a young poet was a really powerful. I read it like a year ago and I've reread that, but like longer books, novels, I haven't now, I think I will go back. You know, I've,

certain novels I love or even like a book like this uh barbarian days it's so beautifully written that I do want to return to them but I don't spend that much time rereading uh because like we said there's so much other stuff out there that I and I feel I need to get to not saying that's the right way to be there's probably wisdom in rereading the best books over and over but I often keep looking for the next thing yeah

Yeah, each person has their own different reading method. I know Tim Ferriss stopped reading all the new books

I think since two years ago. For me, at the moment, I start to reread something I read when I was little. Ancient philosophy and methodology. Wow. Any book in particular you've reread a lot that you really liked? The most reread book I got is called A Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. That's the only...

That's the only book I travel with. Oh my goodness. Can you see? That's so funny. What do you love about it so much? I just resonate every sentence. That's so rare. I can't like, oh my God, that's me. That's me. That's me. Because I want to highlight everything. This writer, I don't know if you heard about him. I have. You know why? Because Michael Dean from Letter Passage. Yes.

I swear that's his new favorite writer. Oh my God. I cannot believe that's the book you just suggested because he is obsessed with Pessoa. He's been reading him. Pessoa wrote under like 70 something different names. You know what? I told him because we were in a break room together, just the two of us. That's right. He told me that. I forgot. Oh my God. That's unbelievable. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh my God. I'm so glad that Pessoa become his favorite writer. He was writing the writing studio this other course and he mentioned Pessoa a lot to the students. And he is now building his website where he's writing under these different personas. I don't know if he's going to do seven, but at least a few. And he's inspired by Pessoa to do that. And so I just, yeah, it's super interesting that that's... Oh, that's good to know. Yeah.

So glad because I always tell my friends, oh, read Pestewa, read Pestewa. And people are saying, oh, no, what's that? Never heard about him. He's not that famous compared with Hemingway or others. He's not. But the Book of Disquiet is like on a lot of best novel lists or like, I don't know. It's up. I think that. But he's totally not. He's a different. He's a lower tier. He's not nearly as famous as the Hemingways. But I think he's.

Per your recommendation as well, I would like to check him out. So I'll let you know. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I moved to Portugal because I want to learn the language so I can read his original context. Interesting. I remember you mentioned you were studying Portuguese. How interesting. Wow. How did you first come across Pessoa? I'm really curious. I can't remember how.

Maybe I read his poetry before. I can't remember how I did. Then I started to look for his other works. Then I found the book of Disquiet. I think the first time I read it, I didn't have that strong feeling. Then I

last year during lockdown when I reread it that I found so resonating because he kind of living in Lisbon for his whole life but he create all this fantasy world so he doesn't need to travel what was the most resonating book you've read Emerson's work yeah yeah Emerson is is up there it's uh

It's just remarkable. I read that for the first time in college. I took a 19th century American literature course. And I wrote in the margins of that book. Because I used to watch TED Talks. I loved TED Talks when I was 19. I was like, I want to improve my life. I want to watch TED Talks. They're fine. Right. TED Talks are fine. But some are really good. But I read Emerson and I wrote in the margins of the book, this is so much more powerful than any TED Talk or internet advice. It's like, that's all secondary. Right.

And this is like the primary source. It's like going straight to the source. What he writes about in Self-Reliance is about –

sort of reifying your individuality, right? With every force in society tries to make you conform and just be the way other people are and just sort of go along with the way things are. And he says, he says, no, like the power in you is new in nature and none, but you knows what you are capable of until you have tried.

insist on yourself, never imitate, right? Like you should, the way you should look at the world is like, I, I'm like the sun. Like if I observe something, it's a fact like the sun. I don't have to get others permission to view the world a certain way. It's all about,

How do you view the world and sort of shake off inherited tradition? And he was writing in the 1830s and 1840s in America, where America was a young country. And most people in America still look to Europe. They say, well, how does Europe do it? How does England do it? Right. Or how does Christianity, what does Christianity say we should do? All that.

He said, reject all these notions of inherited wisdom. What do you think? The power in me is new in nature. And I have quotes hanging on my wall, right? Oh, wow. Five pages of self-reliance quotes on my wall. I can read them, right? For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure, right? If you don't conform, if you make a Kiwi Journal podcast in English and Chinese and your friends say, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?

Why are you talking so much about Pessoa? Well, it's a beautiful thing that you are because it matters to you. And if it matters to you, that matters. And you need to share that. And so for somebody, I'm so struck constantly by how perceptive and brilliant people from hundreds of years ago were. In some ways, they were more brilliant because they had so much time and so few inputs and distractions. They could have these rich insights into life.

And I think people nowadays don't think about the past so much. And they just assume people in the past are old and dead and we're dumb. But guys know, like I'll go read novels or essays from 150 years ago. And I'm like, this is better than anything that exists today. Any TV show, any content, this is richer and better, but it takes patience. You have to know it exists and find it and give it time. But I'm, I keep going back to it because it's just, uh,

the most powerful ideas I've come across have been from people who are, who died a long time ago. Yeah. It's great. I'm halfway through his book. I didn't start it. Hey, cause I did an English and American literature back to university. I did read him before, but before I was so innocent and naive, I didn't realize how powerful it is. But this time when I reread it, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you're a, it resonates. Yeah.

He's an incredible author. So in terms of nonfiction book, what was your recommendation? Yeah, good question. Let me look at my list and think of a...

Well, you know, one thing, I guess we talked about philosophy. Is that nonfiction or does that count? I don't know. Yeah, I think it's a nonfiction. No, I know. It's sort of, yeah. There's other nonfiction books. Flow is this really amazing book, one of my all-time favorites. But I had this book prepped to talk about a bit, but it's the Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Human. Ah, yes, yes. It's really short, but it really struck me because he has this idea that

All you are is what you do. All you are is your actions, right? Because often people will say, well, I have all this inherent potential and I could be really great at this. Or I would have been a really great singer or athlete, but this thing happened and that happened and I wasn't. But I had the potential inside me. He says, no, no, no.

People always say that. Right? It's natural. I've known that through my whole life. There's things I'd say, oh, I could be a straight A student. I feel like it. He says, no, that's all BS. It's just what you do and that is who you are. That's this existentialist point of view. And people used to criticize the existentialists. They say, you're really pessimistic. And he said, no, no, no, we're not pessimistic.

We're optimistic, but other people can't handle the sternness of our optimism, right? Because you can have a type of optimism that's like,

everything's great and we're all happy and it's all great. And that's not a very deep optimism. His point is that the existentialists, they're optimists, but it's a stern optimism. It means you have full control of your life. That's a tremendous amount of responsibility. You can do anything and whatever you do is exactly who you are. So optimistically, because you get to choose, you get to decide exactly who you're going to be in life.

But it's the stakes are high because if you choose badly, you only get one chance. If you waste your life, if you don't do something that adheres to that individuality we're just talking about, that's, you know, can be viewed as perhaps a sad thing. So it's a very,

stern type of optimism. But I find that very invigorating because it sort of empowers you to go carve a path through life that you want to carve. And in the days of the internet, it's so much easier to do that. So I think it's the perfect book. It was written 75 years ago, and it's the perfect book for...

for this day and age yeah i do feel like nowadays a lot of writers they just take some old ideas kind of rephrase it in today's context especially for when i read the daughter which is 3 000 years old yeah sure i feel like oh all the wisdom loutzer has already expressed it why we bothered to still write it

I know. You just read the old book. That's enough. Yeah. I know. Sometimes I think about that. There's this idea of the Lindy effect, where if a book has been around for 2,000 years, it's not by accident. It'll probably be around another 2,000 years. Or if a book's been around two months, is it going to make it 2,000 years? Probably not. So good. I don't know. Any other philosophy books you've read that really stand out to you? I'm curious when we're on the subject, like what philosophy books you've read.

I guess Tao Te Ching, you just mentioned, that's been a big one for you. I quite like Albert Camus. Yeah, I think his philosophy is absurdity. Me too. I'm serious. What specifically? Like a specific book or specific idea of his that really stands out to you?

Yeah, the Sisyphus. Yeah, life of Sisyphus. And also the outsider, because I read them in Chinese. I think it's called outsider. Oh, stranger. Yeah, stranger. It kind of gave me a faith. I choose what my path is, then I stick with it. I don't need to care about others. I mean, it's not like indifferent to others, but I need to follow my place and...

Leave my own term. I do find it very powerful. It is powerful. Yeah, I like his books too. Well, from my view, it seems that you're doing just that. Thank you. That's great. I even wrote a long article, 6,000 words about my philosophy. It's called Flowism. Flowism? I'll share with you. I'll pull that up. I would love to read that.

That's really neat that you've written that. Like that takes a lot of effort and concentration to write. And I feel like I have articles like that in me, but I haven't written them yet. So I want to read that. I'm very curious to see what you say. Yeah. Once you finish, please share with me. We can provide feedback to each other. Yeah.

And last question. Sure. What do you get most excited about in the future? I want to build a Chinese media empire. I want to be the Mandarin-speaking Joe Rogan. That's what I'm most excited about. The exact conversation we're having. This is such a beautiful conversation with all these ideas we're excited about. There's so much...

sort of shared, so many shared interests. And that's exactly what I do. It's what you're really doing, right? Here you are in your fucking language talking about ideas. I want to do this exact same thing in Chinese and explore ideas. Like I have sort of two things, right? I have all these books I've read, all these ideas I'm very interested in and excited about. And you can say, maybe my top level interests are history, literature,

and philosophy, and then I also like tech and business and other things, but all those topics. And then I also love learning Chinese. We spent the first 10 minutes talking about that. To combine those two, where I can create media and have interviews and conversations in Chinese while talking about my favorite ideas, I can't imagine anything more exciting. That's perfect. That's my dream. That's my dream. I'm working on it every day.

And that's my dream. You know, I don't know if it's two years, five years, 10 years, but that's where I'm working towards. So yeah. Yeah. I can feel your passion. Yeah. It's so funny. I find the old blog post I did like 11 years ago. Right. I read the goal. I set up to myself from 30 to 40. I need to build up my media empire. I just found it so funny. Yeah.

Yeah, when you mentioned it, I said, oh my God, I feel that the fire come up. I need to focus on that. That's why I'm doing bilingual content. Yeah, we got to stay in touch. We're on a very parallel path. It's amazing how many similarities there are between what we're both looking to do.

So we just got to keep working together. I don't know, see where it all leads, but it's just, I can tell you, you get the vision. Like you can see why that's so exciting. I mean, you're doing it. You're steps ahead of me, right? You have a hundred and something podcast episodes and blogs in both English and Chinese. It's just great. So yeah, I just think there could be nothing more exciting than exploring the ideas you're most excited about. In both languages, but in Chinese, which would be so wonderful. Great. Cool.

Cool. That's a good ending. Thank you, Will. Thank you so much.