Speaker 1 0:01

well, happy new year's Scott. Thank you very much. Yeah, wait a minute, it's not the least, dad. Oh, you mean when this?

Speaker 2 0:07

is when this releases. Yeah, it's new year, happy new year, yeah police Navidad.

Speaker 1 0:11

What is the?

Speaker 2 0:12

Spanish fleece dos años nope fleece, dos ackies in Spain.

Speaker 1 0:18

I don't know, really know in South American Mexico, but in Spain they say they say on no che buena, no chip when it means New Year's, new Year's Eve no cheboy, no chip.

Speaker 2 0:31

The night, the good night okay yeah, what you wait?

Speaker 1 0:37

no, chip way. No, no che vieja, no che vieja all night, the old night.

Speaker 2 0:41

Yeah, no, che vieja, oh, yeah, oh, because like the year is dying.

Speaker 1 0:45

Yeah, so you can say when no che vieja means means happy new, happy new year's night, or whatever. Did you have a good?

Speaker 2 0:51

have a good new year's in Japan they say okay, oh may, or which is short for a Kimashite Omedito, which is like here's the new who's in, here's the New Year, congratulations, you know. Nice, but they just go okay, okay, oh man, you're like yep, back at you nice, that's good.

Speaker 1 1:10

I learned in Spanish the difference, the importance of commas. Why? Because you can say fleece no che vieja, which means happy new year. Yeah, please, not you, yeah, how. Or you can say please, no che vieja which means what does that do is? Happy night, old woman that's kind of suggestive and as you get older.

Speaker 2 1:32

You can use them interchangeably you can use both.

Speaker 1 1:34

Yeah, that's true, he talked to your wife.

Speaker 2 1:36

Yeah, you like happy night old woman and also happy new year goodbye. She's like this, my one time a year. I get, I get them both.

Speaker 1 1:45

Yeah, so it's the new year 2024. Yeah, how are you feeling about, about it? How are you what's? Exciting and you got a resolution, you got a or a theme.

Speaker 2 1:54

Some people do themes but if you tell your resolution, don't, if you tell it, it doesn't come true, it reduces, it won't that's wish.

Speaker 1 2:01

That's birthday wishes.

Speaker 2 2:02

That's different oh, I've been using those reverse always share.

Speaker 1 2:05

Oh, you share your birthday wish well.

Speaker 2 2:06

On my birthday I make wishes for myself to be a better person and then, like for my new year's resolution, I'm like I'm gonna get a Ferrari give me, give me a bag of money. I hope I find a bag of money yeah, that's my new year's resolution is finding bags of money this year, but my birthday wishes are very reasonable so if you've done that this year, are you coming?

Speaker 1 2:24

are you flipping back to the regular way or?

Speaker 2 2:26

you, I guess now that you tell me not to you're gonna keep doing it the way you do it not to do wishes on New Year's. I guess I'll switch back some people do themes.

Speaker 1 2:35

It's kind of cool like a year's theme is health, because then they can kind of, as they go through the year, they can always kind of touch stone back to that theme. But if you say a resolution, you know, then there's kind of like oh, I could succeed, I could fail I had the reverse version of that a few years ago.

Speaker 2 2:50

I had one year be. The theme of my year was like I was an adult, I'm a grown adult and I was tired of not liking mayonnaise.

Speaker 1 2:58

I look at the. I'm see. I see a tiny tent over here yeah, I see figurines. If you see toys yes, superhero comic books.

Speaker 2 3:06

Adult. When you say fully grown, I think you should just say I am an adult. What do you just?

Speaker 1 3:10

just save yourself. Don't say fully grown adult.

Speaker 2 3:14

I'm a whole ass man.

Speaker 1 3:17

I'm legally an adult, am I?

Speaker 2 3:20

actually I am, I developmentally an adult. Some people in official capacities might see me as a person of the major standing, exactly no longer minor. That that count as a bill by alcohol. I can rent a car 26 now I forget what I was going on for Congress.

Speaker 1 3:37

Are you 35, are you 30? 25 Congress right yes, 30, senate.

Speaker 2 3:42

35 is senator president. Oh, president, 38.

Speaker 1 3:46

Yeah, you go oh, I'd like to announce right now my bid for the 2024 well, I got a problem for you.

Speaker 2 3:53

You're 38. That is half the age of the two leading candidates true, less than half.

Speaker 1 3:58

I mean you are, you are you need to double.

Speaker 2 4:02

You need to double the atom in order to reach the 70 something.

Speaker 1 4:06

So I didn't drop. I need to quintillion times the the amount of money to that's true.

Speaker 2 4:12

That's really ends a thousand. No, chili is chili at chili on kind of take advantage of people in shake hands and make money, that's press the flesh, that's it but, I was gonna say the. A few years ago I decided my theme of the year would be I was gonna learn how.

Speaker 1 4:27

I was tired of not liking mayonnaise and so I was gonna be like 20 2017, by the end of this year, I'm gonna learn how to like mayonnaise.

Speaker 2 4:34

Because I shouldn't. Why would I not like it? It's just eggs and vinegar, yeah right, like I like those two things. I just have a hard cut against mayonnaise when I have seen it for ever see. I would say I'm okay with mayonnaise now sometimes. I don't like opt for it. I don't put it on a burger relationship with your father, tear a crumbled.

Speaker 1 4:54

It crumbled to nothing. 2017 wasn't wasn't about improving the relationship about mayonnaise.

Speaker 2 4:59

I want to improve my relationship with the one thing my father always told me was like no son of mine is ever gonna like mayonnaise whoa, or else there's a trauma you're gonna be out. There's the origin of the mayonnaise trauma oh, do you think that's related why I didn't ever grow up liking? Oh, I never put those together, I realized therapy the best.

Speaker 1 5:18

Help me with. Help me really improve my relationship with mayonnaise. What's your theme for this year? My theme? I don't have a theme. I don't do resolutions or themes why are you asking?

Speaker 2 5:26

I don't know it's very other people do okay talk podcast.

Speaker 1 5:30

How clever of you. I don't do either those I don't know. I mean, this is gonna sound.

Speaker 2 5:33

I don't know, so you don't care what I just do.

Speaker 1 5:35

I I met such a high level of output at all times okay to set a resolution is like I'm constantly setting resolutions and then doing them and like succeeding at them, so I don't. I don't need like I don't have like a time of year where I'm more productive. That's insane to me.

Speaker 2 5:49

I'm just you're like, I don't even keep a track of my, my my, my time because the next time I run a mile it's gonna be faster, yeah, why? Even? Why is dwell in the past I wouldn't say that I'm good at anything.

Phonetic English and Improved Literacy Levels

Speaker 1 5:59

I just do a lot of things. Let's put it that way I just bad at everything, but like, do it a lot.

Speaker 2 6:04

Jack of all trades, master of some quantity, not quality, what they always tell you, that's right, that's what they say so wait, let's do, let's do a solution.

Speaker 1 6:19

Actually, we got to do this because it's actually a big one.

Speaker 2 6:21

Okay, okay, literacy literacy solution, or we got a fix, okay, yeah, okay, guess, literacy could be a solution to a lot of problems, right.

Speaker 1 6:30

So we think of California. Yeah, a lot of problems, right, literacy could be the solution to what like hey, read democracy science, everything right, yeah, huge literacy is amazing, also just happiness. People are happier when they read. Okay, guess, okay. California is like this educated state. Right, you look around? There's always talent density in the legend okay, okay, what's the?

Speaker 2 6:50

literacy rate in California yeah, it's gonna be something low. I'm gonna shoot low with my guess.

Speaker 1 6:56

I'm gonna say 65% higher than that okay, the lowest in the country is 71 71 is the lowest. Mississippi now literacy rate.

Speaker 2 7:04

This is like percentage of people you get. You get a hundred people theoretically read.

Speaker 1 7:08

How many of those people can read like anything or well, almost everybody can read like their name and like stop sign yeah, like you know they can parse out like very simple text, you know, but I mean like someone can sit down and read a book, read and comprehend, like they could buy my book and read it okay.

Speaker 2 7:25

Caging of the American mind I had a browse. Or any of the.

Speaker 1 7:29

Or any of the many books motivate future of good, okay yeah, so the answer is 72 72, so the lowest in the whole country is 71 percent. Where?

Speaker 2 7:41

is that we're 71, I think it's Mississippi, okay, and then we're second right on the hill.

Speaker 1 7:46

For you is the second worst literacy in the country. Now, why is that? Is that?

Speaker 2 7:53

there's a couple reasons. Multiculturalism is that education is a couple reasons.

Speaker 1 7:58

One reason for sure. So the reason I know all this is because I was just recently kind of volunteering to help this literacy startup okay and I worked with them for like about a month on and off and help them with a lot of stuff. They were having kind of teamwork problems and sort of blah blah and I helped them with AI stuff because they didn't really know how to use AI to like improve their product okay anyways, I helped them with a bunch of things, but as I was helping them, they were helping me understand and learn a ton more about literacy and the problems of literacy in our country.

Speaker 1 8:27

Until I started working with them, like three months ago I don't work with them anymore, they're they're off to the races. But up until I started working with them, they I thought literacy is like a solved problem, right, like I just thought literacy you get your phonics, you get your alphabet, you learn to read and yeah, and I written.

Speaker 1 8:43

I thought 98% literacy. You know, I thought literacy was high, right, okay, this is. I want to disabuse everyone of this idea. Literacy is not solved. It is a massive problem. If a, if 28% of Californians can't read a book, like, sit down and read a book, that's a huge problem. Yeah, like you can't run a democracy with 28% and that's just California. All the other state, there's five, ten other states that are all below 80%. You know you can't run a democracy, much less an advanced economy, with people not reading.

Speaker 2 9:20

Yeah, I mean because I think of it more. I thought of it more as like a polio thing, where it's like right yeah, it's mostly mostly eradicated, illiteracy is mostly gone. And then it pops up here and there and you go, oh oh, kind of whack it back and get it down. Yeah, no, but no, this is a massive, huge population.

Speaker 1 9:35

I mean 28% of the population. I mean it's not 50%, but it's 28%, it's millions of. Yeah, that's crazy, yeah, yeah. So here's the solution turns out that the main problem that people get stuck on is just is just just phonics. Okay, it's a stumbling block. Really early on it's a stumbling block specifically in English or just in English. Okay, now another language is the languages. I love English, but we stole a lot of things from a lot of different languages.

Speaker 2 10:05

So our rules of like how to spell stuff and how to pronounce stuff, yeah, are all over the map, yeah, so here's the solution?

Speaker 1 10:12

phonetic English. Okay, we need to. We need to. And I'm not saying, oh, we should just do this as a convenience factor. I'm saying we need to go to 99% literacy, and the only way we're gonna get there is if we change our damn written language to be phonetic so you want it to.

Speaker 2 10:29

The words are spelled how they sound yeah.

Speaker 1 10:31

So, for example, I will write the whole description of this podcast in phonetic English so you can just look at the description for an example, for an extended example. Okay, but like the word phonetic would be F-O-H-N-E-T-I-C phonetic. Okay, right, so there'd be no, you can't misspell that. Everyone knows like a long oh if you put an H after it.

Speaker 2 10:51

It turns it into the long vowel yeah and then that's so very so.

Speaker 1 10:55

There's some phonetics, but it's our some phonics, but it's very simple yeah there's no like like. The word through would be just TH-R-U, through, there wouldn't be O-U-G-H. The O-U-G-H is like a stumbling and it confuses people.

Speaker 2 11:10

Yeah, yeah, right and that's it.

Speaker 1 11:12

And every spelling, if it sounds the same, would be spelled the same. There's no like different spellings for the same and there's no like receive I before eat no it would be R-E-S-E-E-S-I-V receive you know R-E-S-I-V receive. Sound it out, write it out exactly done, yeah right it would be completely fine.

Speaker 1 11:34

And when you, I'm not doing it perfectly into the mic, but I've got it all worked out because I have trainings or linguistically, so I'd have it all worked out, exactly the phonetical sounds and then exactly their spellings. It's kind of like in Chinese. I've been learning a little Chinese and in Chinese they have Pinyin, which is the romanization of the pronunciation of Chinese right, and it's perfectly phonetical. And so you, you cannot miss speak and you cannot miss spell Pinyin, chinese right, but you can and 38% of Californians do you know get tripped up on the spelling of English and everyone just acts, all these like white liberals, you know, these hyper or these hyper educated people, they, they, they piss on people who misspell right. And I've been a bad spell in my whole life, so I know this. I've misspelled things in articles, and then people just throw away my whole writing because they're like I found a typo in it, I misspelling.

Speaker 2 12:29

I mean, it's a typo but a misspelling it reflects on you as the right.

Speaker 1 12:32

It's a totally classist BS thing. That's a holdover. I think it's a holdover from the origins of English. So the origins of English were the Anglos, the French invading the Saxons in England. The English isles were the Saxons and the Anglos from France invaded and then they took over. So the Anglos were kings, the French were the kings and then the Saxons were the peasants' slaves, essentially Landed landed sort of slave serfs.

Speaker 2 13:03

And they were like we were making you spell your words With the Latin, the French With the.

Speaker 1 13:08

French spellings, which were all bananas. They weren't Saxon, they didn't sound like Saxon speech. And then that French melded down into the Saxon language and that created English. That's what English is is the blending of Anglo and Saxon, of old German, Saxons, old German and Anglos French, which is from Latin, and that's why in English, 40% of English words are French, French origin.

Speaker 2 13:35

You can kind of hear that I mean Anglo French, angl-len-sh, anglish.

Speaker 1 13:40

You can go English. There it is. It's a squished together version.

Speaker 2 13:42

Yeah, exactly, I'm sure that's how that happened.

Speaker 1 13:44

Yeah, sure, and if you think of German as De-a-dee-doss, de-a-dee-doss, which is all their words for the Right, but if you hear someone who's like a second language, germans their second language, and they never really figured out the De-a-dee-doss, they just say de For all of them, for all of them, oh. And it sounds like the Okay. So if you basically mash a bunch of other languages into English, especially like French, like Latin languages, you get it's basically just taking old German and mashing French into it.

Speaker 2 14:13

you get English. So Japanese has this strength too, because it's that's the language I'm familiar with, and so it has. It's a phonetic, syllabic language, and so if you hear a word, you're like, oh, I know how to spell that I know how to spell that. Because I may not know what the Chinese symbols are, but I know how to spell it from hearing it, because there's no like surprises when it comes to spelling these words. It's always how it sounds.

Speaker 1 14:37

Yeah, and when you do that, you eliminate the biggest barrier to people learning to read.

Speaker 2 14:43

Now. I think long-time listeners of this podcast will have heard you say something similar when you like. Yes, I talked about it a little bit. You talked about putting English into Hangul.

Speaker 1 14:51

Yeah, I use Hangul Right, that's what I'm, the Korean.

Speaker 2 14:54

Cause you were. You were railing, then you could do that. You were railing, then you were like English is spelled weird. We need to fix it. We absolutely need to fix it.

Speaker 1 15:01

And well before. But then when I said that that was before I learned all about this, I was like a year ago I said that yeah, yeah. And then I thought I was being kind of goofy, cause I thought it was just be a convenience factor, right. But then I learned no, this is not a convenience factor, this is an absolute like mandate for our society. We need to change our language, written language, so that it is phonetical.

Speaker 1 15:29

Because, it will make it so that some poor kid can just go to the library and learn to read. He doesn't need like tutoring, he doesn't need like training, he just need or she or he just needs to just read. They just sit and read and they can just found out the words and read and then it just makes sense to them and they'll become hyperliterate just by just so long, as then have the time to read Right and obviously the inclination and the time. There's still barriers to reading, but there's not a mechanical barrier.

Speaker 2 15:58

Well, it makes it so that if you can talk, you can read. Yeah.

Speaker 1 16:01

Essentially Right. And if you have books around you and you but most people that go to school there's some books around them and the teachers are like sit and read. If you just told kids to sit and read, they would become literate. But now, if you tell kids to sit and read, it's just a bunch of things. They can never really figure it out because it doesn't, because they can't, because right, yeah, there's.

Speaker 2 16:22

So you can't encode and decode from language. Well, you can't like just give a kid a book and have them intuitively figure out how does this work?

Speaker 1 16:28

decode it eventually figure it out, it's violence against the youth and it's inherently classist and it's inherently I think it's inherently just because of structural racism. It's inherently racist. If there weren't structural racism then it wouldn't necessarily be racist. It would just be violence against poor people and people without access to oh, that's totally fine, that's fine. Well, yeah, I wouldn't be racism, maybe classism or something, but I'm just saying because we have structural racism that's caused racial class divides, it's racist too inherently, so it's just all around just horrible.

Speaker 2 17:07

Now I have two big questions that come to mind. First of all, you spoke about libraries. Are we gonna have to double the size of libraries so that we keep the old version of what? If I wanna go and read let's give them kindles. I wanna go read Steinbeck, but in the original English, not in this new version of like oh you, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 17:26

I know how to read English, English I wanna read Hemingway?

Speaker 2 17:29

No, we need the new one Written in that.

Speaker 1 17:32

So the cool thing about this is that so much of our world is digitized that all you need is an app that converts it. But so, and then you can just take anything that was written in old English.

Speaker 2 17:44

What would you call this old English you would have? The library would be separated into old English books and new English books. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 17:50

And you would say no, it's way better to write these in new English, because there would be the, so that you are losing something. You know, anytime you change something, you lose something. You gain something. So what you're gaining is very, very simple universal literacy. What you're losing is you might lose some of the kind of signs or signals for what the root of a word was, so like. If you see pH and it's an F sound, it's almost always a Greek word because it's the letter phi.

Speaker 1 18:19

Greek letter phi like the word physics or the word phonics or the word you know, whatever, or the word psychology. There's a PS, that's a big sign, that's a Greek word. So now, if it's just S, psychology, you know, S-A-I-S-A-I-C-H, psy-c-h-r-k-o-l-g Psychology then you'd be like you kind of lose that it was a Greek word. However, what percentage of the population knows that it's a Greek word and cares? Almost zero, very little. Those who do aren't going to be blocked by the spelling being differently.

Speaker 1 18:55

They're going to learn that it's a Greek word some other way, without needing to be reminded of it Every single time they see the word. Right, like I'm going to learn, like I'm a Greek scholar, I'll learn that psychology is a Greek word.

Speaker 2 19:07

I've also learned you learn-.

Speaker 1 19:09

It has a lot logi in it, which is so clearly the word logo, so it's so clearly a Greek word or just in like in learning you learn.

Speaker 2 19:15

yes, psychology, psychologist.

Speaker 1 19:17

These start with a P.

Speaker 2 19:18

You know it sounds as starts with a P Knock. Sounds like it starts with an N starts with a K. You just memorize-.

Speaker 1 19:23

Not anymore. You just memorize things in your English brain. Well, you get tutored to, you get taught that. But if we had this, you wouldn't. If you had phonetic English, you wouldn't need to be taught any of that. You could just figure it all out just by sitting with a book by yourself.

Speaker 2 19:37

Okay, so that's the library question. Here's the other question. Okay, you come from a land where people say, let's say the word bag B-A-G. You come from a land where people may say bag, bag, yeah, bag.

Speaker 1 19:49

And then other places they might say bag or bag, you know like there's a lot of variety of accents and pronunciation Teeny variety. Teeny variety. But like you need a different English, it's not like Germany where you go like you go, or some other country where you go, one village over, and they there are places in America where it's hard to under, like if you go from.

Speaker 2 20:07

Cajun like Southern deep Louisiana and then go up to like way, northern Maine. Those are like very different uses of English.

Speaker 1 20:15

I feel You're right. Okay, so would there be some kind of standardization? We would have to standardize it, but it already is standardized.

Speaker 2 20:21

Yeah Well, there's like a non-accented English that we accept Non-regional dialect yeah.

Speaker 1 20:26

We'll have CNN do it. You know the other problem with this that I've learned because I wrote out a bunch of text written out this way yeah, and-. One problem with it is it looks really dumb. Yes, it looks like someone, like a caveman wrote it.

Speaker 2 20:41

Well, I was gonna say it looks like a really cool 16 year old writing lyrics to their new emo song. Exactly so it looks dumb California with a K. Yeah, yeah it looks dumb.

Speaker 1 20:54

So I think there does need to be some. I wrote like a hard version where it's like literally no, like no phonics you know, and it looked really weird. And then I was like, okay, what if we brought back some phonics like adding an H to lengthen the vowel, and that started to make it look less stupid.

Speaker 2 21:15

But then you're moving away from the full functional yes Version that you were shooting for, but it's so simple?

Speaker 1 21:20

I don't think. I think the rules are so simple that you could pick them up, because, like three rules, okay. And then I started to see also, like you said, the difference between a K and a C and I kind of think like it looks really stupid if you write California with a K.

Speaker 2 21:34

Yeah.

Speaker 1 21:35

Right and it looks really stupid if you write where there's a C, you do a K and K or a C. So it's like maybe we just preserve that there's two letters that look really different but actually have the same sound.

Speaker 1 21:45

Oh, slippery slope, slippery slope, I mean yeah, it's a slippery slope, but I think I don't think it is a slippery slope. I think you're just trying to like make it so that it's palatable to be adopted, okay, while still achieving the goal, which is to make it so that anybody can pick up a book and if they know the alphabet and they know how to speak English, they will, with very few barriers, get to just reading. Yeah.

Speaker 2 22:10

Basically, four year olds spell words the way they hear them, and then you're like, oh, you're right, you're wrong, you're right, yeah, exactly In the new system. You're like, yeah, exactly right.

New English and Phonetic Spelling Benefits

Speaker 1 22:18

Or you're like oh, or it'd be like Spanish, where it's like, oh, it's actually a, it's actually a double L instead of a Y, or like, oh, it's actually a V instead of a B, like in Spanish. There's a few little places where it's like, oh, no, you use the wrong. Or like the. In Spanish they also have the accents and the native speakers get confused about where to put the accent Right. But in English you wouldn't have to do that. You know, you just put it wherever. You just do that yeah and then yeah. So you could do a phonetic language and it would be awesome for English speakers.

Speaker 1 22:46

If we really wanted to make it so good, you would actually put the accent in maybe on like the three syllable words or something You'd put, a little thing that would show the accent, because then you know how. You know how when you read a word a bunch, and then you try to say it and you say it wrong.

Speaker 2 23:00

Yep, you're looking at an idiot.

Speaker 1 23:02

It's usually because you put the wrong, the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable, you know. So if like words had the accent. But I guess you can look it up online too. So, yeah, that is the solution for the 2024.

Speaker 2 23:16

And we're gonna have to.

Speaker 1 23:17

We're gonna get maximum literacy. We're gonna fix the damn country. You think Donald Trump could be elected if we had 98% literacy? Not a chance.

Speaker 2 23:25

Zero chance If everybody's spelling words the way they sound. See, you could start this off by writing your next book.

Speaker 1 23:34

Oh, I wanna release my books in this language.

Speaker 2 23:37

What would you call it? New English, new English?

Speaker 1 23:40

Yeah, I'd call it New English.

Speaker 2 23:40

Okay.

Speaker 1 23:42

Or the New English spelling.

Speaker 2 23:43

People are gonna think you're talking about like Boston, Like you're talking about.

Speaker 1 23:46

Boston, new English.

Speaker 2 23:47

Hey, it's written all this is New English.

Speaker 1 23:49

We always talk about the Patriots, yeah we're gonna put you, put up your dukes.

Speaker 2 23:54

I don't know, is that what they say?

Speaker 1 23:55

Yeah, exactly New English. I guess I'd just call it yeah, new English spelling.

Speaker 2 23:58

So you would write a book in New English to extol the virtues of New English?

Speaker 1 24:02

Yeah, and articles and stuff. Actually, the way to do it would be, I think, to make a Chrome plugin or a Firefox plugin like a browser plugin which converts your whole browser into it, oh my gosh. And then you could just turn it on and it would just all load convert it.

Speaker 2 24:15

The first day of reading news on the New English. It'd be hard. Your brain would be breaking constantly.

Speaker 1 24:22

But I've been playing around with it, not a ton, but maybe for like three or four hours, because not hard, it was a super simple project to do. But I start. I wrote a bunch with it and then remember it started as not looking really stupid and so I started to make some shifts to make it seem less stupid. But once I got it to where it stopped looking really stupid, I was like this is cool and you read it and it doesn't look. So it looks kind of punk, it doesn't really look stupid, but it's gonna punk.

Speaker 1 24:51

Very interesting, yeah, yeah yeah, I didn't bring any examples. I'll show you. I'll check them out later.

Speaker 2 24:56

We'll stay in touch.

Speaker 1 24:57

We can start messaging on what? Well, the problem is all the auto-complete. You need to make a new.

Speaker 2 25:01

The auto-correct is gonna be like. You didn't mean this. You're calling him stupid S-T-O-O-P-I-D. Sorry, you're wrong.

Speaker 1 25:08

Yeah, s-t-o-p-i-d would be just the way it is now Stupid spelled phonetically, it's in S-T-U-P-I-D oh perfect. Yeah, yeah, because the I is the short I.

Speaker 2 25:18

If you want the long.

Speaker 1 25:19

E sound, you gotta do two E's.

Speaker 2 25:20

I didn't know if you had to go like S-T-E-W or something Stupid no, no, it's not that.

Speaker 1 25:26

They're still diphthongs.

Speaker 2 25:28

Okay. So they're still diphthongs and there's still some like flex, would vowels still have like a long sound and a short sound? Yeah, and you can do that with an H right, so you can put an A. H is not a vowel, A-H is a oh okay, and then A, just A, is a right. E-h is a Okay, just an.

Speaker 1 25:45

E is a. They're almost all a. They're schwa, what are called schwa vowels.

Speaker 2 25:48

Schwa vowels the upside down E.

Speaker 1 25:51

I know what a schwa is. Yeah, I actually started off putting the upside down E in for the schwa's, but it was too weird and it was everywhere. I mean it's like every sound is a schwa so there is. I'm still preserving some phonics, but it's sort of like it's intuitive phonics.

Speaker 2 26:07

Schwa is like the like, the umami of sounds right, like it's indefinite. You're like it's in everywhere, but you can't put your finger on it, like what is it exactly?

Speaker 1 26:17

Yeah, it's just E it's like, it's just.

Speaker 2 26:22

It's like a. It's the best part of every yeah, e.

Speaker 1 26:25

E the E, it's just E yeah.

Speaker 2 26:31

It's the sound you get when you hit like when you fall off of something and hit the ground.

Speaker 1 26:33

Isn't it funny, the word schwa doesn't have a schwa in it.

Speaker 2 26:37

Does it not?

Speaker 1 26:38

Schwa is a diphthong schwa. It's U-A schwa, but it'd be schwa if it was the diphthong yeah. So if people want to get more educated on all this phonics stuff, they can listen to this amazing podcast called Sold a Story.

Speaker 2 26:52

Solutions from the pot, solutions from the multiverse. I couldn't even, I couldn't even jump it with our own podcast.

Speaker 1 26:57

They can listen to this amazing podcast. Solutions from the Multiverse. No, it's called Sold a Story, Sold a Story Sold a Story.

Speaker 1 27:04

Sold a Story, yeah, and it's the history of what's called the reading wars. Okay, and I can verify. I listened to this podcast first without doing any research and I was like I don't know who this person is, I don't know if any of this is really true, and it seemed a little bit there is a little bit of a political angle which I can tell about, okay. So I kind of was skeptical about it a little bit when I first heard it. But then I went and actually researched, like Google Scholar, like research, like cited peer reviewed journal articles. This podcast is 100% correct. She's very even-handed actually.

Speaker 2 27:39

And that is what sold to store. Sold a story. Sold a story Like I was sold a story. We were sold a story. Is it like a certain episode of it or just the whole? It's the whole.

Speaker 1 27:47

It's a mini series and it's, like you know, eight episodes or whatever, and it's really engaging and interesting and basically it's about what's called the reading wars which happened. I did not know they were happening but it happened in the 90s.

Speaker 2 27:58

See I can get drafted into that kind of war. I don't want to get drafted into like the Vietnam or the World War II.

Speaker 1 28:03

You're gonna have flat feet and still be in the reading war you can draft me into the reading wars.

Speaker 2 28:07

I'm pretty sure that I can pick one side of them and I also don't feel like I'm gonna. How do you fight a reading war? Maybe?

Speaker 1 28:14

I should just read. You should read as hard as you can In the direction of your enemy.

Speaker 2 28:18

When your enemy is reading a book, you walk over to them and slap the book out of their hand into the ground.

Speaker 1 28:23

They're like what it's slaps like little big boys, or maybe it's just like you get a team and everybody has to prove like that they read and you try to maximize how much your team read and whichever team reads them.

Speaker 2 28:31

You're talking about a book club. I believe that's just a book. No, this is competitive reading. Those are just a book club.

Speaker 1 28:35

How much can you read? Competitive book clubbing. Competitive book clubbing. Okay, here's a solution from the multiverse. Oh, no, mini solution. Sidebar Book clubs are stupid.

Speaker 2 28:45

That's not a solution. No, sorry.

Speaker 1 28:48

That's the problem. The problem is book clubs are stupid in my opinion. You can't get everybody to read the same book. And everybody who thinks I went to a book club and we all read the same book no, they didn't, I promise you two thirds of the people there didn't read it.

Speaker 2 29:00

They just like they just.

Speaker 1 29:01

Googled a review of it, and then they just made up, it's all fake Like school.

Speaker 2 29:04

Yeah, it's fake.

Speaker 1 29:06

But here's a good book club replacement. So if you have a book club and you think everyone's reading the book, they're not. But if you replace it with everybody just read whatever you actually want to read, what you actually are reading, even periodicals or whatever. And then every week or every whatever, whenever you meet, everybody just shares what they read. So they're okay, still a book club reading club, you know, but now everyone actually read what they. No one's gonna lie, no one's gonna say, oh, I read, I read Moby Dick last week.

Speaker 2 29:40

Really cool. But well, I read everything Shakespeare wrote this morning, so I'm pretty good on that.

Speaker 1 29:47

So people will actually come and say I read this really interesting article or I read this book and it's really impressive and it's making me rethink this, that and the other. It'd be a very interesting conversation because everyone would go around and some people would share, some people would be like I didn't really read this much this week. Fine, they still get to enjoy hearing everybody and no one has to lie to each other and say that they read something, that they absolutely just skimmed or read a review of Well and then, like I'm imagining in a regular book club, when somebody is talking about their interpretation, you start logging in like oh, I disagree with that, Exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 30:19

I wanna remember your comment on that and you're not like listening anymore.

Speaker 2 30:22

You're cataloging your response.

Speaker 1 30:23

How wrong they are.

Speaker 2 30:24

Yeah, but if it's like a, new book that you're like I didn't read that novel. Or I didn't read that nonfiction book, I'm just gonna listen to what you're like, I'll ask you questions about it, but you're the expert now.

Speaker 1 30:34

Yeah, they're the expert, you're the person who read the book and you get to say, wow, that sounds really good, I'll read that book. Right, you get to like word of mouth situation. Yeah, word of mouth situation, like wow, I never really thought that.

Speaker 2 30:46

Like, okay, I was gonna be like what book club hurt you? Cause you came out of the gates high on book clubs.

Speaker 1 30:53

But showed me on the doll where they read you but like, but this makes sense, like I would do a book club where you're just reading your own thing and encourage you. This could have been a whole episode. I wasted it. Damn it, all right. Race, race, race. Look, good luck everyone, but you get to this time. But yeah, you get to like. You get to read what you wanna do. You're encouraged to read Whatever you wanna read, yeah.

Speaker 2 31:13

In whatever version of English, new English old English. You gotta read the new English spelling and then you get back together and talk with other people, having read stuff but it doesn't have to be the same thing. You're not like reading this thing going. I hate reading this thing. It feels like homework.

Speaker 1 31:26

Yeah, yeah, or like I didn't like this whole part. If I had met my druthers, I would have never chose to read this book. It's like no.

Speaker 2 31:32

Or if I wasn't reading this for a book club, I would stop right here and be like I'm out.

Speaker 1 31:36

And if by chance you chat about books that you wanna read in the future and then other people, like maybe one or two people, are like I truly want to read that book. Then read it together and come to the next book club and you three can all kind of share to the group, to the rest of the group. Fine, easy.

Speaker 2 31:55

I mean reading a book with other people. It's not like going to the movies with them we're not experiencing this in the same pace, at the same time, at the same start, same finish? People have very different interpretations.

Speaker 1 32:05

Reading is so different, very different. Some people like it, some people don't. I mean sure, with movies you think, some people like it, some people don't, but less so People are like it was a movie, it was good. I mean people like movies inherently but some people like really don't. I can't get through a lot of books, but I can get through almost any movie.

Speaker 2 32:21

Well, you generally, don't you generally take a movie in one or two books. I almost walked out of Maverick, though I hated.

Speaker 1 32:26

Maverick, so much.

Speaker 2 32:26

You're the only one. You're the only one. I'm not the only one. But like a movie is not like I heard, the best theory ever about Maverick Work through at your own pace. You don't work through it at your own pace. It's just what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 32:36

It goes at the pace of the movie, it's delivered to you at a certain speed.

Speaker 2 32:39

And a book you can read fast or you can read slow, and the amount of time it takes you to get through a book is vastly different than someone else. I read slow, All right. So what did you figure out?

Speaker 1 32:48

about Maverick. What did you think about Maverick?

Speaker 2 32:50

What did you think about the best theory about Maverick? You love talking about Maverick on this podcast.

Speaker 1 32:55

He's dead. Who's dead? Tom Cruise? Maverick is dead.

Speaker 2 32:57

No.

Speaker 1 32:59

Maverick is dead and it's all a fevered like an afterlife. Afterlife, have you heard? This theory I've not heard this theory. Okay, because how does the movie start? He's doing like the supersonic plane and he goes beyond like where you're supposed to go, and it starts to like really rattle and go crazy.

Speaker 2 33:13

And then it just like blacks out. Yeah, the plane like disintegrates, it just blows up and he's dead.

Speaker 1 33:18

And then he's like I don't know what to do with the movie. Is it a dream? Is a dream, it's afterlife, and that's why it's great, right, okay, he goes from being this like loner, like dead end fighter pilot guy to like being called back into the service where his like enemy, like his rival, is dying and his feet and dying and he needs to like save him, then his rival like apologizes to him and like begs him.

Maverick-Centric Storytelling and Simplified Chinese

Speaker 2 33:42

And then like he I'm so sorry, maverick, you're right about everything. I'm so sorry about you, the one person Right. And then what is?

Speaker 1 33:49

it A mission that like a bunch of young people just are totally like looking up to you, to like give them your knowledge, and like then there's this imaginary enemy.

Speaker 2 33:58

Everyone wants to be you, everyone wants to smooch you, and you have a good.

Speaker 1 34:01

You have a motorcycle and you get to the thing and there's the woman that you've always loved, that you never got to connect with. Now you're actually get together with and you have this relationship with. It's heaven, it's not real, okay. This makes me like the movie. I could get behind this If this is the real thing, then I like the movie. Maverick dies in the first four minutes.

Speaker 2 34:18

And then the rest of it is his brain creating a Maverick-centric story for him Cause he wrote like the thing about Maverick, the movie is that it's not a movie full of characters, it's a movie full of Maverick, and then everyone else only exists to inform the character of Maverick. They don't have their own, like when they go behind, like when they walk out of a room and, matt, we follow Maverick they just kind of stand still like a robot and wait, like Westworld For them to come back and then they activate again.

Speaker 2 34:48

They don't have lives of their own, Like the lady that you're talking about. She's like I'm so glad you came back because my whole existence is about loving you, Maverick. I don't have like my own life or my own things. Like those are secondary.

Speaker 1 35:00

Sure, I have a kid and a job and like a business, Whatever.

Speaker 2 35:03

I'm going to throw that all the way as soon as Maverick needs something, because my existence is about informing Maverick the character.

Speaker 1 35:09

That's a good read. I like this. I heard it on YouTube. I can't cite it because I can't remember who.

Speaker 2 35:14

I read it's just one of the YouTube. Youtube is a fever dream as well. There's not that many people on YouTube, but they'll probably find it pretty easy. Yeah, that's pretty limited job.

Speaker 1 35:20

I think it's called like the dead Maverick theory or Maverick heaven.

Speaker 2 35:23

I like it. Yeah, that's good. See, then I like the movie Okay.

Speaker 1 35:26

Because then I'm like, yeah, cool, because then all the insanity is explained, like all the stupidity, and insanity has an explanation which is solipsistic, like kind of heaven experience that he's having.

Speaker 2 35:36

I love when people get these like giant theories and then they come up to the filmmaker and they say it to a wanting the filmmaker to be like yes or no, and the filmmaker is just like yeah, whatever you want, man.

Speaker 1 35:45

Whatever I like it when they give ambiguous things, they don't go like no, do you know, like a grand theory that you think is like the best grand theory.

Speaker 2 35:51

I mean, I don't know that. I think it's the best. I remember getting sucked into the Jar Jar Binks as a secret Sith Lord thing for a bit, for a minute of that.

Speaker 1 36:00

Do you know that the actual the whole Star Wars is being run by R2D2? No, there's a theory that.

Speaker 2 36:07

R2D2 is driving though.

Speaker 1 36:09

Like we think, luke is in charge.

Speaker 2 36:11

No what? Luke is in charge or.

Speaker 1 36:13

Obi-Wan or Luke. We think like, oh, it's Obi-Wan or Luke, or the Force or something. No, if you watch the movie, if you watch from New Hope, R2D2 is pulling all the strings. He's the one who gets, he's the one who you know has the thing to go to the princess Right, and then, and then his thing is broken. Yeah, it's broken, and it only shows a little bit and it just says Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Speaker 2 36:35

Yeah.

Speaker 1 36:36

And then they find Obi-Wan Kenobi, and then he shows the whole thing. All of a sudden he can show the whole thing.

Speaker 2 36:39

It's really Kenny Baker's in there.

Speaker 1 36:41

He's just controlling. And then when they destroy the Death Star. Who's flying the plane? Who's flying the plane?

Speaker 2 36:49

They're like wow, luke, great shot. And R2 is like no, I did that yeah.

Speaker 1 36:53

Luke's like the Force. Help me, luke. Your tracking computer is off. I got this, I got the Force. It's actually R2. R2 is like. No, your tracking computer is still on. I'm running, I'm doing the tracking. Now I'm gonna pull, I'm gonna shoot it.

Speaker 2 37:07

We need a phonetic language for R2D2's language.

Speaker 1 37:10

You're right yeah.

Speaker 2 37:11

Cause that is impossible to write at. Like, how do you? They've made novels of Star Wars stuff and comic books. How do they write R2D2? I've never read any Star Wars, I don't know. Do they just write like tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet. Yeah, I think they do that. Oh that.

Speaker 1 37:29

So here's the other thing about the phonetic language. So some people might say so, the Chinese, the communists.

Speaker 2 37:34

Some people might say the Chinese are communists.

Speaker 1 37:37

Well, some parts of China are communists, that's true.

Speaker 2 37:40

They're not shy about that. They're very not shy about that.

Speaker 1 37:43

Although they're actually super capitalists, For communists they're incredibly capitalistic. They're communists who like making money.

Speaker 2 37:49

They just love making money. We shouldn't even call them communists.

Speaker 1 37:51

They're clearly not. They just love making money.

Speaker 2 37:54

And they have like terrible inequality. And they're capitalists who like sharing money. I don't know what. The opposite of that. I don't know what it is.

Speaker 1 38:02

But anyways, they change their characters to simplify them. Okay, and they simplify the characters. So like a character that have like 40 strokes or whatever, only has like 12 in the simplified.

Speaker 2 38:14

I was going to say there's simplified Chinese and there is traditional Chinese. So Taiwan still used traditional but mainland still uses Japanese, still uses the kanji. Branched off far enough ago that they use the traditional Chinese. So like when I go to China or when I'm looking at Chinese, I can get a sense of some of the characters, but some of them I'm like oh, this branched off and they've now simplified that radical to I mean, this is all Asian language nerd stuff.

Speaker 1 38:40

But they simplified that radical to a different radical that they use now to make it fewer strokes or whatever, and the research that I've read about that says you know, they did it as a kind of like anti-intellectual like simplify it so that the people can learn to read easier thing and research shows that it doesn't improve.

Speaker 2 38:57

It's just a new version to learn. It's not like-.

Speaker 1 39:00

Yeah, it doesn't just cause you do like 20 fewer strokes, it doesn't actually really. It's still. You're still learning a character and you memorize a character. The way you memorize Actually the way you memorize a character is the way you memorize someone's face.

Speaker 2 39:12

Use the same part of your brain. It's a picture. Yeah, it's a glyph.

Speaker 1 39:14

So you actually do it with facial recognition. Really, the part of your brain that is for facial recognition is what lights up when you read a character. Or a word when you memorize a whole word. Shape in English.

Speaker 2 39:24

Yeah.

Speaker 1 39:26

That also is the facial recognition part of your brain, so, anyways. So people might say, on that research about the simplified characters, we shouldn't do this phonetic English. But it's not the same I would, I would, I would-.

Speaker 2 39:38

You're keeping our letters.

Speaker 1 39:39

I would say well, we're keeping our letters, we're simplifying it in a way, but what we're really doing it is just making it so that someone who can speak and who knows the alphabet can figure out how to read on their own largely, I mean it might help to have a sort of tutor, sort of encouraging you and sort of unblocking you.

Speaker 2 39:54

Well, you'll have to learn the 26 letters and how to apply them in.

Speaker 1 39:59

you know, and how to read left to right, and all that stuff I also think that some of the common beliefs in our culture of like who is smart and who is not, people think like I've had this debate with a lot of people because I'm of the belief that intelligence is like almost this identical across people and everyone is like no, you're wrong. And I'm like, how long have you been teaching people? Like, how long have you been an evidence-based educator? You know, because they have never met you know. I mean I don't want to pull rank, but I kind of do want to pull rank. I want to be like wait a minute.

Speaker 2 40:34

You know, so you're coming in there going. My theory is that you are just as smart as me. And they go well, I don't think that's right. And you go. Well, let me tell you how much smarter I am than you, so that you should believe no, not smarter.

Speaker 1 40:44

Just let me explain why. People are almost equivalent. Intelligence, I mean it drops off fast to like mentally handicapped people, but that's like a total, categorical separation. It's not like there's this long tail like a gradient down to like mentally handicapped people. It's like functional neurological human being, and then it's like kuchunk not functional neurological. Yeah, like a fully like a handicap, like you have an arm or you don't have an arm. It's not like everyone has arms, but then there's a gradient down to, like little, you know, malformed arms.

Speaker 1 41:20

No no, everyone just has arms. And then some people have little malformed arms you know, or whatever you know handicap or some kind. Yeah, that's visible right the problem with human beings is we can't figure out the invisible stuff. The visible stuff is really obvious to us.

Speaker 1 41:32

Like race or, you know, color of skin, blah, blah, blah. But the invisible stuff. You need to use science to actually figure it out. The way we figured out magnetism, which is invisible, and gravity, which are invisible, the same thing intelligence is invisible. So you need science to figure it out. And when you do the science, you find out that intelligence is almost the same across people and the differences between.

Speaker 1 41:52

When there are apparent differences in intelligence, you can then pull back the layers of how did that person get there? And you find, oh, it's usually because of their environment or because of some circumstances, and one of those circumstances that is universal in the Anglophonic world and the English-speaking world is our dumb ass writing system. And so if you're in the English-speaking world and you think some people are just stupid and other people are really smart, you might just be describing that some people, like you know the 75% of people or 80% of people who had access to like good education that gave them teachers who tutored them and took care of them, and their parents were at home helping them overcome phonetical difficulties as they read those people all end up really smart because they unlock reading at like seven or eight years old and that leads to this huge explosion of knowledge growth their whole life. And the other people? They got tripped up by phonetics when they were eight or nine and that blocked them off from learning a whole bunch of stuff for the next 30 years of their life.

Speaker 1 42:52

So when you meet them when they're 35 or 38, you think this person's a genius, this person's an idiot by nature and it's like no, not by nature. Not by nature. They both just have arms. One person went to the gym and bicep curled every day for their whole life for 30 years. The other person, like, sat around and played video games for 30 years. They're not. They still have arms.

Speaker 2 43:12

You know, the muscles are the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, and we do this thing where we value some intelligence is way more than others. We're like oh, you're the reading, writing, math person, then your intelligence is valid. And someone who can't do that, we're like oh, you're just not that smart, Even if they were like to pick up an instrument or a paintbrush or something and do an amazing thing. You're like oh, you're actually a genius. It's just this one section that you don't take to.

Speaker 1 43:37

And even that I don't even really believe in. So I think that the person who, like, is really good with the paintbrush or something it actually, if you look at their life, what you'll find is they've been swinging that paintbrush around a lot. Oh, it's experience. Everyone can learn how to.

Speaker 2 43:51

I'm in that camp where you can learn people can learn how to draw and paint and learn how to play music and it's not like just a natural. Certainly natural talent helps some people stick to it in the early stages and not give up. Very good point, yeah.

Speaker 1 44:05

There is such a thing as talent. It's important at the beginning but it's not actually determinant of success. I mean it just.

Speaker 2 44:13

I think it helps humans like to do stuff we're good at. And so if you're initially good at something, you'll, stick you'll do it more. And then doing it more is the key.

Speaker 1 44:22

Doing things more is how you get better at it, I think there's also what people don't recognize a lot and again I like to communicate to people that education, just because you've had 15 years of education, you actually don't understand education, as everyone listening to this just hear me loud and clear you do not understand education just because you went to school.

Speaker 2 44:43

Yeah, okay. You have to be an educator and you have to be no, no, no, that's not true. I drive a car, so I understand how to fix a car, exactly how to fix a car. Yeah, you're a mechanic because you drive a car. I can build an engine and I drive a car, of course.

Promoting New English Spelling for All

Speaker 1 44:54

Right. So the next time someone's like telling you about education and you're like this person's full of shit, just check in. Are they a teacher? Because if they are, you should just listen. You should just listen to what they're saying. Like this heart surgeon doesn't know crap about heart surgery. I think heart surgery should be done this other way.

Speaker 2 45:15

I've gone through the heart surgery from that receiving it Right. I've gone through it from the doing it, so we're the same thing now. I've watched a lot of heart surgery in YouTube videos. We both did through a heart surgery.

Speaker 1 45:23

Exactly so, anyways. So my point is my point is not just that I'm speaking from authority, but that you can also look this all up on Google Scholar. You can look up the evidence-based research that shows this.

Speaker 2 45:34

You want people to write dumber so that we are all smarter Exactly dumber.

Speaker 1 45:38

Sometimes you gotta get dumber before you get smarter. Oh, very clever what I wanna do is preserve democracy and prevent Donald Trump from getting reelected, and I think this is a solution and we have control over it. We can promote New English spelling and have a credible belief that that actually will promote and support democracy and science. Like everyone's like. Why is there such a backlash against science Bitch? 28% of people can't read English. Of course they don't trust science. They've never read science textbooks. They've never read science journal articles.

Speaker 2 46:12

They don't know science. You're like look, here are these peer reviewed studies and they're like I'm not looking at that. What are you talking about? Exactly like why I can't read.

Speaker 1 46:19

How much research can someone who can't read do? Zero, Very little yeah unless they go on YouTube and have some expert.

Speaker 2 46:27

But then YouTube's full of psychos saying using the internet, you're gonna need to spell things and write them out. Well, not on.

Speaker 1 46:34

YouTube. Well, I guess you'd have to type out the query.

Speaker 2 46:37

Well, not, you can click and you can speak it and you can say what you want.

Speaker 1 46:40

Yeah, so there are ways, but you're gonna get a bunch of psychos and there's no way for you to really verify and validate without reading. So yeah, and you're probably not. You're just not even gonna develop those qualities of mind.

Speaker 2 46:51

If you didn't read so you're saying we switched the phonetic. It's not even phonetic anymore.

Speaker 1 46:57

I got sweary this episode, the spelling I got sweary because I was so mad. I think you even got me to swear a little bit. Yeah, I said bitch and ass.

Speaker 2 47:04

Let's say it again. Well, I guess, because it animates me and makes me you would have to spell them differently in that. How do you spell ass in your new English?

Speaker 1 47:14

language.

Speaker 2 47:15

I think the same because I keep running into words and you're telling me they're spelled the same.

Speaker 1 47:20

Well, it might be a, because it might be a h ass, a h s s.

Speaker 2 47:26

And then if you go to England Because if it's one s, it'd be a, this is perfect. If you go to England, they say ours.

Speaker 1 47:30

I think we'll use z for zz sound.

Speaker 2 47:32

So what do we?

Speaker 1 47:34

s would be a h? S yeah.

Speaker 2 47:36

Do we need England and the UK to adopt this as well, Like right now? The only difference is they. No, that'd be us they would use.

Speaker 1 47:43

So it is a s, a s s. No, it'd be a s because a z would be as Okay, a z would be as, because you got the z sound.

Speaker 2 47:52

But what I'm saying? Like England right now, they just put an extra u in and otherwise we're pretty identical, like labor color, yeah. Do you expect them to follow along with us, or is this purely in America?

Speaker 1 48:01

So this is the interesting thing. I actually think so. We didn't even talk about it at the end of the podcast and I have I haven't really shared the coolest thing about this. Do it English. The English language is an enormous unifier globally, right? Enormous in spite of our spelling being totally bananas, right.

Speaker 2 48:22

Isn't that a function of our just like our weird egotism as Americans to not learn other languages? And so other countries are like, I guess, if you're not gonna learn anything, other than English.

Speaker 1 48:32

We will learn some English for you. It's kind of a critical way of saying it. I'd say it's because we invented, like all the important technology of the 28th century.

Speaker 1 48:41

Oops, you know there's an inflated way of thinking, adventure, I mean we invented the internet and computers and all this stuff, you know, and then and then now all of media is mediated through computers in the internet, and so it's all in English, and I mean, maybe I haven't researched it. Also, we bombed the rest of England, you know, europe into snidereens, I was gonna have a more positive thing.

Speaker 2 49:01

It was like the export of media that we've got that culture with music and movies and TV. I mean, that is an ambassador of English to the to the world in a huge constant.

Speaker 1 49:13

We also just have like a giant. I mean, if you think of the American, just America is unique in how extraordinarily large of a unified market it is. Like Japan is probably the next biggest I can, or China is obviously huge but China is still developing. I mean Japan and America are the two largest developed unified markets.

Speaker 2 49:34

What do you?

Speaker 1 49:35

mean by unified You're putting unified in. Well, the European Union just unified so they can actually just like trade across borders. So now it's like what?

Potential Phonetic English Alphabet

Speaker 2 49:42

even they have linguistic barriers, and so it's not a unified thing.

Speaker 1 49:45

America has had 300, like 250 years of like unified trade language, like all in one place, all contiguous. Yeah, it's mental. I mean that that really is pretty amazing in the historical. Most countries are like little tiny countries with their own language separated from everything else. We're like this giant thing that has its one language, unifying it largely. I mean people speak Spanish and Tagalog and stuff, but you know, usually people can speaking there's just a second language or as a first language. That unifies the whole thing. And then trade is unified across the whole thing and currency unifies the whole thing. It's pretty amazing, just in its size.

Speaker 1 50:22

But let me get back to the language thing, which is as a soft, as soft, not just soft power in terms of the power of America and the promotion of American values, like democracy and voting and you know, and also the promotion of the value of science. I mean America is a scientific society, psychological society, scientific society, and we export these things largely through media and are what we've written down scientific papers, movies, right. So if English adopted a phonetic language, a new English phonetic alphabet spelling, it would even further like push and cement and accelerate the pace at which English could become the permanent global lingua franca of the earth. I think it's actually one of the only things standing in the way of it, like sweeping globally as like just the obvious way Is this spelling weirdness.

Speaker 1 51:17

Yeah, this throws everybody off. Like you're like I'm going to learn English. Okay, well, hang on to your frickin seat, because get ready to memorize that there's two C's in this word, or two L's in that word and by the way, if you misspell it, you are immediately written off as like dumb, dumb, entirely unserious.

Speaker 1 51:34

Yeah, jesus Christ, like you have to learn to spell it. And so it's this huge barrier to learning English and having English continue to be this dominant, powerful and, I think, positive force. Because one thing about English is that people are sometimes like, oh, america is like an imperialist country and therefore, you know, english is a sort of imperial, not, not true actually?

Speaker 2 51:56

not true.

Speaker 1 51:56

So the research on this is that Mandarin and Russian, for example, are imperialist languages. They come in and they stop you from using your native language. They're like you cannot know. You can no longer have schools in Sheshwani's or in Tibetan.

Speaker 1 52:13

You have to have all your schools and all your governmental briefs and everything has to be in Mandarin or Russian will do the same thing. You can't have you know your Kazakh language. You have to do everything in Russian. Those are imperialistic languages that blot out, culturally extinguish and erase other cultural languages. English, however, does not. English becomes a second language. That then gives you access to the whole world market and science and everything else.

Speaker 1 52:39

So people are at home speaking whatever language they want. They're in their communities speaking whatever the language they want, and then they learn enough English to like tap into other things. Maybe they learned it at school or they learned it you know whatever. You can see this in Chinatown in San Francisco. You walk around Chinatown. Nobody's speaking English. They're all speaking Cantonese and Mandarin yeah, and they. But then you walk up and you say, oh, I want these vegetables, and you're like a white guy.

Speaker 1 53:05

They start talking in English, because they can sell you things in English, but they are speaking Cantonese.

Speaker 2 53:10

They don't talk to you in Mandarin.

Speaker 1 53:13

They don't. They read me pretty. They got me from pretty far away. They, they peg me.

Speaker 2 53:17

Okay, you're not passing. I'm about a foot taller than everybody. I mean, I always mess up my spellings on stuff, so I would be willing to adopt this. What? Here's my question Names what do we do with names?

Speaker 1 53:31

If you bring in a name from yeah, like if you're rewriting the theory of relativity. I think we got to leave it.

Speaker 2 53:37

We're going to write the theory of relativity in new English, but when we put Einstein's name on there, we we spelling it the same way. That's a good question.

Speaker 1 53:45

This is good. You brought up a good issue. I mean, I'm, I'm people love their names the way they are.

Speaker 2 53:49

I'm hitting edge cases. These are not like common.

Speaker 1 53:52

I think what you do, I think what you do is you'd write the name as it was historically. And then you would in parentheses, right the spelling, the phonetic spelling, Okay, so that people who are reading it would know how to say it Gotcha. Yeah, I mean we would. People would have people who got fluent in English who wouldn't have gotten fluent reading English because there was no phonetic alphabet. Once they got fluent in phonetic English, they would very easily pick up.

Speaker 1 54:18

Transfer over oh yeah, there is this old English spellings, and I know a lot of those because I've become so literate that then I get. I encounter a lot of you know old English books and then I know their spellings too. But if you never get fine, you know funk, you know literate then you'll never unlock anything. You'll never unlock any of those.

Speaker 2 54:37

You're like I used to take my pen and quill and dip it in the ink and write laugh out loud on my papers, and now I can just type LL, right, right, exactly, completely, I've adapted.

Speaker 1 54:49

So yeah, so that's, that's my new solution for the new year, just just know that new in.

Speaker 2 54:54

OO or new, and you and you know, like new me new.

Speaker 1 55:00

Oh, but new me is M E Y, new me would just be, and you M E.

Speaker 2 55:04

You have to respell your own currency.

Speaker 1 55:06

Yeah, and when you said me like me, you and me, it'd be M E E.

Speaker 2 55:10

We would have so many of these conversations If you like. Anyways, you have to standardize the spelling.

Speaker 1 55:15

But yeah, make it's fanatical, okay.

Speaker 2 55:17

Teach it to kids. I mean, you don't? Actually have to teach it to kids because that's what we teach out of them.

Speaker 1 55:22

Honestly, I think you could just put this in web browsers and children would just learn it from surfing the internet.

Speaker 2 55:27

Oh, this is how I mean. This is the pathway my daughter went from the new, the new, whatever the new ideas on education are like don't correct her spelling all the time, Just encourage her to keep writing, and then eventually she will correct it herself.

Speaker 1 55:41

Which brings us full circle Quantity over quality. There you go. It actually is better. It is better to do quantity over quality Cause you're like do you understand what she means?

Speaker 2 55:50

Yes, well then, good, the. The meaning has been transferred. That's the main purpose. Dialing in on like. This word is spelled with an O, u, g, h or a C, like it just discourages, it just makes them feel like they did something wrong and slows down the progress that they were already making. Yeah, cause you're what you want is fluency.

Speaker 1 56:06

Yeah, going for fluency.

Speaker 2 56:08

Right.

Speaker 1 56:08

If you're constantly stutter, stopping them from from going along, they'd never gain that fluency.

Speaker 2 56:14

Yeah.

Speaker 1 56:14

And they get, just get filled. It's like if someone was trying to play a piano and sure they were making mistakes, but they're practicing you wouldn't just every time they made a mistake be like stop playing the piano, change, play it properly every the first time let's go over that, yeah, yeah. They'd never gain like the fluency of moving their fingers across the piano smoothly.

Speaker 2 56:31

You know, like I missed that note this time, but I'm going on and then next time I play this I'll remember that note I missed and try not to Greater fluency. Right, but I'm not stopping.

Speaker 1 56:39

Yeah, but if you had the phonetic alphabet, people would have fluency almost immediately, or not immediately, but you know, within a few couple of days of practicing a few, an hour or two a day, they'd be like really fluent. They might be a few little bumps in the road, you know, but but but it'd be like Spanish, where it's like is it a B or a V? I mean, it'd be like so simple. This would also actually the other. Okay, here's the benefit that I know we got to stop, but this is the benefit that is probably the best benefit of all, almost all the words would be way shorter For now.

Speaker 1 57:09

Yeah, all the texts would be way shorter. Like we said new would just be and you through would just be THRU, Right, They'd all be shorter, which means texting would be so much faster because you could do BOOM. Boom BOOM out right because you wouldn't have THRUGH through. I mean, you'd never you'd never say that.

Speaker 2 57:27

Well, it's kind of I was going to say this earlier it's kind of like stenographers in court who have a. If you've ever looked at the machine that they use, it's not like a normal keyboard. Right, they're using phonetic, they're using sounds and stuff and they're writing stuff, not in shorthand, that's a pen and paper thing.

Speaker 2 57:42

But they're writing something where you have to be a stenographer to like then go back and read back your series of like, your series of what you're hearing sound wise to be able to decode it back in. But it's a whole. It's a whole different way of writing the language down. Yeah, that is supposed to be more efficient, more you know, but it's a special thing Like. This would be a version of that, but not a specialized thing that everyone uses and could benefit everyone. Literacy, Literacy Well, new literacy.

Speaker 1 58:10

Thanks everybody for listening to.

Speaker 2 58:14

So everybody step one throw away all your books. Step two wait for, wait for us to write all the books again.

Speaker 1 58:20

Well, you can just go to the description of the podcast right now and you can read the whole description in, in. In.

Speaker 2 58:25

In new new English spelling. That's a commitment that Adam is making for himself.

Speaker 1 58:29

It's super easy, it's super easy to write it. Yeah, and I should make a. I should make a browser plugin to fix it Multiverse.

Speaker 2 58:38

Would any of our title need to be changed? Oh yeah, oh man, okay, solutions S O.

Speaker 1 58:43

S L O S O H, so for the long O.

Speaker 2 58:47

Oh, really Okay so.

Speaker 1 58:48

H L? U shun T I O N. That's gone. That's gone. That's stupid. T I O N S H U NS, H U NS, H U N. That's the shun now.

Speaker 2 58:58

Okay, yeah, I'm, I'm ready to shun some people. Shun them, that sounds all right, but not you, the listener.

Speaker 1 59:04

No, you guys are great.

Speaker 2 59:05

We're not shunning any of you guys, we want you to come back again next week. All right, thanks everybody. Happy New Year. See ya, bye, bye you.