Lera Boroditsky: How Language Secretly Changes Your Personality

24:17I just got an honorary doctorate you know what you treated it's like you were in court right and then you asked the defendant on the stand you asked on the night of the murder Mr. Watkins what were you doing between the hours of 6pm and 8pm and then as Mr. Watkins was about to say something Eugene shouted From the gallery Was just like Nothing Now as I was saying

24:53We're talking Okay so There's two parts To what I want to say We're talking to This other friend of ours And then We're talking about How his wife grew up With three other siblings Right Yeah Then the other siblings Spoke a different language because the mom insisted that they speak this language. Then the other ones did not speak that language. And we were trying to figure out how different they are as human beings. But I've also realized with us, when we speak English, we become more structured and we know what to say. But then when we switch to Zulu, we are more mischievous and humorous. Like him and I, we just go, and then we come back again.

25:25So to your point, it's almost like a persona that comes on based on the language and what it reminds you of and where you draw it from. Because there was never anything traumatic about us speaking the way we, it's actually very nostalgic. But I would even argue this on top of that. I think what I found is the language itself, like language itself contains information, right? And this is what I'd love to learn from you on an expert level is, the way I understand it is when I think of words that I speak in every language, the word itself comes with information encoded within it. So beyond like the, just the word, like the meaning of the word.

26:03So sort of to your question, Dave, It's like, I find that the, okay, so let's say, for instance, I miss you. Let's say a sentence like, I miss you, right? Never say those words to me. Yeah, but when I say, You see? So like, I miss you, it has its meaning. But then, It's more like to remember somebody. Yes, yes. And while they both share the same space, if they want a diagram, you would say, yes, missing someone and remembering them. but it actually like means something different. Being hungry in some languages is very different to being hungry in other languages when you look at the words. And I often think to myself, it might be because those peoples had a different period of hunger that influenced the making of their word for hunger.

26:49And then these people had a different period of hunger. And so their word for hunger doesn't contain the same like gravity. Yeah, it doesn't have the same level of like gravity in hunger. Is that like even in the right ballpark? So what you're pointing out is that every language is its own complex system. And all the words in that language relate to other words inside that language. They exist in relation to another. Yeah. And so when you try to translate to a whole other system, there's never going to be a perfect translation because you might pick a word that's kind of similar, but it lives in a set of relationships to other words.

27:25The shape of the whole system is different. So it's like saying, you know, what is the equivalent of a rook from chess in ice hockey? Well, there isn't an exact equivalent because they're two different systems. They have different kinds of players and different rules and so on. So there can never be a perfect translation because each language is such a complex, interconnected system with hundreds of thousands of words that have to relate to each other and are covering the entire conceptual space that people in that language group want to talk about. So that process of translation where you feel unsatisfied when you want to say something in another language and you're like, oh, it's not exactly right.

28:07That's because you're now using a completely different system and it's not going to be exactly the same. So Chinese Dave, I was about to ask you a question. So Chinese Dave can never be English Dave, is what you're saying? Well, fundamentally, they're going to be different systems of thinking. But for a bilingual, what's interesting is people who've learned both Mandarin and English don't act like monolinguals of either language. They act like a blend of the two. That's right. More like a Mandarin speaker when they're speaking Mandarin, more like an English speaker when they're speaking English, but never quite like a monolingual of either.

28:46So once you learn a second language, it's adding something to your cognitive system that you can't just turn off completely. Also, in different languages, we meet sort of like similar characters. If you know people from different languages, I mean, like, so let's say you have Russian friends and English friends. You'll have an English friend who is happy-go-lucky and, you know, personality-wise, but a Russian friend is also happy-go-lucky personality-wise. Does that make, so it's almost like how much? I think it was confusing because you said Russian and happy-go-lucky. lucky yes i think your example didn't help us yes because if you said like if you said like russian and like like hardcore then i would be like i know exactly what you're talking about because i think i i understand your question completely i just think you threw us off by saying russian i did throw you i did throw you off i don't think i've ever met a happy go lucky russian i did in fact i had a i had a friend it's not typical for eastern europeans yeah but this is i had a friend who said something to me like one of the craziest things ever russian guy who said to me because I was making a joke with him And then I was like I was like Oh of course you I said that's racist But of course you'd be racist You're Russian But this was a complete joke Amongst friends And then he said Yes but we are Because our language is like that And then I was like What do you mean And then he said to me That in Russian I don't know how to He said something like The prejudice towards colors Is more apparent in Russian Than it is When he's speaking English And I was like I don't even understand What that means But it stuck with me forever He said yes the way we speak about color is is is that like a real thing or was he just trying to hide his racism um i don't i well i speak russian i don't uh i can't immediately connect a linguistic fact to that claim yeah you must because i mean you never people just say things to you you can just say because now he was russian what was i going to do fight with him be like you're lying you that's not a thing but i didn't but i can confirm that eastern europeans are not happy-go-lucky as a standard personality trait.

30:47It's only an idiot would be happy in a world such as it is today. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. The proper state. Wow. Wow. We just met. Reflective melancholy. Wow. Reflective melancholy. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. I hope that explains it. Perfectly. Wait. So you speak Russian? I speak Russian. Why do you speak Russian? I grew up in Ukraine and Belarus. Huh. And so, wait, in Belarus, don't they speak, oh, I'm going to expose myself. I always thought it was like Belarusian. No, Belarusian is how I've always said it. Both Russian and Belarusian are spoken in Belarus. Okay, okay, okay. But it was mostly Russian when I lived there.

31:34Wait, so did you grow up speaking Russian? I grew up speaking Russian, yeah. Ah. And then at what age did you start speaking English? When I was 12. Wow I don't pick it up at all Normally I can hear When somebody has like Eleven and a half No really That's when I Genuinely I can normally pick up When somebody Started speaking Especially English At a much later Because there's like Little small ticks That they'll give away In the language Where you're like Oh no that's from That other language But you don't have that at all I went to spy school You say that as Could be very true Could be completely true Absolutely true we've just got to say as a disclaimer right now A, that's probably a joke and B, if it's true, we had nothing to do with this we didn't know we did not know at all what language do you dream in?

32:23you know the language I dream in changes a lot depending on where I am so for example, I speak Spanish badly but if I'm in a Spanish speaking environment I start dreaming in Spanish and all of that din in my head immediately switches into Spanish and frustratingly, the din in my head is so much better Spanish than the Spanish I can speak out loud. My French in my head, accentless, perfect. When I try to speak it out loud, totally different. But I think that the language you dream in can switch very, very quickly, even for languages that you don't speak that well. At least that's what happens for me.

32:58So I've always thought, and this again is just me in my own amateur scientist world. Amateur? I've always thought, thank you. Did you call yourself a... Thank you, Eugene. You're very kind. I'm not just too high by the way Yeah yeah it's very high I'm an idiot So I've always thought that The reason The languages you aren't necessarily The most fluent in Are fluent in your brain Is because your brain actually Does know those languages fluently But the tongue can't achieve them fluently Because remember language exists in two places It exists in your mind And it exists in your mouth So sometimes you can You can hear perfectly You can dream it perfectly and then when you speak it your tongue is like okay let me put it this way imagine yourself doing a backflip right now just imagine it you know how many girls would have I love that in your world that's not you've kept like grade 6 standards for getting girls is that how we got here in the first place grade 6 standards oh man so imagine yourself doing a backflip just literally try it now imagine yourself doing a backflip.

34:07You can, right? Now do a backflip. Do it. It's impossible. Imagine how many girls would lose if we tend the backflip on a podcast. No, but what I'm saying is I always feel like language is the same. I think there's a lot of language that we really do know in our heads without even realizing how much of it we know. Someone will speak something. So you'll go like, oh, I don't speak Spanish well. But someone will speak Spanish and be like, wow, I understand so much more than I thought. Well, there's comprehension and there's production and those are two different skills. Okay, what I'm talking about.

34:38Wait, wait, break it down first. Production part. Production is being able to actually speak. So that's the being able to do the backflip, being able to dunk a basketball. I can understand when someone else dunks a basketball. I can't myself dunk a basketball. That's the production part. Okay, got it. Whereas in language, you have a lot more practice doing comprehension because people are speaking all around you than you do production, actually speaking the language. so the reason that we feel like we understand a language a lot better than we can speak it is just an imbalance of practice you have a lot more practice trying to understand it than you actually have producing we hear it more than we speak it is english really the easiest language to speak i've always heard it referred to as the bastard tongue and they said makes it the easiest language to learn why are you looking at me like that they call it the bastard tongue they I've always heard English referred to as the bastard tongue because it has all these other languages in it and when you speak because it is such a bastard tongue you can now it's no longer they say you can speak you can speak it you from what I understand you can speak English the worst and still be understood the best versus most other languages you can butcher it you can completely butcher it and still get away with it yes that is a good point because English speakers are used to hearing English spoken so many different ways because there are so many second language speakers of English.

36:06There are other languages that no second language speakers even attempt, right? So very few foreigners attempt to speak Albanian. And so Albanians, if you go there and you try to speak Albanian, they will look at you funny like, what are you even trying to do? Because they aren't used to people speaking it badly. Yeah, they've never heard someone speak it badly. You either speak Albanian or not. Whereas English, you hear, there's so many second language speakers, many more second language speakers than first, than native English speakers. You've heard it every which way. So your range of understanding has had to broaden.

36:43What you allow as the possible hypotheses of what someone might say has to broaden. That doesn't mean it's the easiest to learn. That just means that the ears that it's falling on, especially people in urban areas, So we're in New York, right? Here in New York, people have heard people speak English in all kinds of ways. There are certain parts of the country you can go to where you won't get that same kind of grace because they just haven't heard all the different accents and all of the different speeds at which the language can be spoken. I like that. So here's the question I have for you then.

37:20in the world we're living in today is it possible that we are all fighting with each other i say all but i mean let's just say people online slash whatever is it possible that we're all fighting with each other just because we don't understand each other and i mean like language wise as opposed to we actually disagree like i mean like half of the political fights happening online you know half of the arguments that people have with their family members people have in romantic relationships. Could it be that a large number of those just come from us not speaking the same language to each other, even though we think we are speaking the same language?

37:58I think sometimes misunderstandings happen because we're using language to communicate, and we believe language to be a real thing. So let me give you an example. Suppose we have a word like freedom. Now, language convinces us wrongly that there is such a thing that is freedom, that the word points to. And so if I say freedom and you also say freedom, we must be pointing to the same thing. Oh, damn. But I could be pointing to a different idea than you are. You're pointing at a potato. Exactly. But freedom is a very complex idea and it could mean many different things in many different contexts.

38:36Wow. And so just because we're using the same words, we think we should be talking about the same thing, but often we're not talking about the same thing at all. And even as you shift from context to context, what freedom means, what privacy means, those things will change. And you don't notice that you're now talking about a different thing because you're using the same word. It creates the illusion. The word creates the illusion that it's something real and solid that you're talking about like a potato, when in fact, what you're talking about is something abstract and amorphous. This is crazy.

39:08Do you remember I said this to you back in the day when Trump was still running? and I said to I said this to Dave not that you didn't like know but I remember saying to you at some point I feel like and it was you and I in specifically so we were working at the daily show at the time and Dave and I were there and we're chatting and then we both watched like a rally or something of Donald Trump's and then we said man this guy's really making inroads with people and then some of the people we're working with were like are you crazy there's no inroads being made here he said the dumbest thing ever and then i was like oh i didn't like i didn't hear it like that it just seemed like he didn't use sort of like politician-y words to approach this topic but i think he did a good job of putting his case forward and they're like nope nope nope that was a completely stupid thing that was that was crazy and then i i said to dave we're having the conversation i said ah maybe it's because we grew up in a world where like our parents didn't have English as a first language That we grew up Learning to hear What the person Is meaning Versus the words That they're actually Actually using You know what I mean So when my mother Used to say Or my uncle rather Would be like Put volume on the TV Would be like Put volume Put volume I knew what he meant You know what I mean He meant Increase the volume Do you get what I'm saying So like put volume I wasn't gonna sit there And be like There's no volume To be put here uncle You could have tried it Yeah my friend but we know podcast yeah but but but you get what i'm saying you learn to be cooperate a cooperative listener and understander right you want to actually be a cooperative listener have you tried it no eugene is the most cooperative cooperative listener you'll ever come across do you do you ever think that then okay this is then what i wonder is like cooperative listener but how do you know when you're being a cooperative listener like how do you what if you're cooperating so much that you're just now giving them a message that that they aren't giving the only way to find out if there's a miscommunication is to continue talking right so if I say pass the salt and I get salt and there's more salt on my food a moderate amount of success has been achieved now you may have had a very different idea of what salt is or what it's for, why I asked for it.

41:34We could have had miscommunication on all kinds of levels, but the modest goal of me having more salt on my food has been achieved. But for anything more complex, you're going to have to keep talking. You're going to have to keep asking questions. You're going to have to keep expanding. And so nothing is ever fully communicated in a sentence or a paragraph, right? It's always lots and lots of conversations in families and relationships and political careers. All of these things just have to continuously be developed and examined and built. And there's never an end to it because what you're trying to do is build a very complex conceptual world with someone.

42:14You're trying to build a set of ideas that probably haven't existed before. Like in this conversation so far, we have all uttered sentences that no humans have ever uttered before. Ever? Ever. So we are building a complex conceptual world, a structure that can't easily be replicated in any other context. And the only way to find out if we're achieving understanding is to continue talking, right? To continue examining the parts of the structure and saying, is this what you meant? Is this what you meant? Can I go over here? Someone might object and say, wait a second, that wasn't possible in the world that I had in my mind.

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45:38Side effects may include laughing, cheering, and lots of high fives. I'm no Superman.

45:49So what would you say is like the end, the end, I mean, I say goal, but like what are you trying to achieve with your work? Like what is the, if you could sort of fast forward and travel through time to a place where you have reached the ultimate conclusion and you've discovered it all, what is that discovery? well i i'm fascinated by human intelligence yeah and how lack thereof let's say human i just wanted to see what would happen if she was going to be like you're damn right those dumbasses no she's a professional she's like let's just say human intelligence so humans have accomplished incredible things with their minds we're gifted with these brains that create symphonies and create mathematical systems and create these whole complex societies.

46:41We build them out of really simple physical interactions with the world. So we get photons in our eyes, pressure in our ears. We can press against surfaces with our fingers. And from that, from that physical set of components, we build these incredibly complex abstract ideas. That is incredible. And I would like to understand how we do that. And the more we understand how humans build complex knowledge, the better we can actually make our own thinking, the more complex, more interesting, more abstract the thoughts we can make. you could argue artificial intelligence is another example of that it's another kind of really complex intelligence that is building its own thinking now and that that's another set of questions you could ask okay how is it constructing all these complex interesting abstract ideas AI always confuses me because the argument about AI is people be like it's not intelligence because all it is is a machine that figures out which word would generally come after the previous word based on likelihood yeah that's what your brain does yeah that's my problem then i go but isn't that what our brain is doing all the time that's why we say um and uh and because we're also like searching for the word and sometimes we'll even say um you know um uh what's the word for that's so i'm so then i wonder if we will ever be able to know when ai is actually being intelligent or not because we know how it works but we don't know how we work and then like what what if that's all we are what if we are just large language models randomly predicting the next word in a sentence and and then we've always thought like we're special but we're not we're just you know right i mean how do you know that i'm thinking right now at all uh as opposed to just producing the next most likely word in a sentence you really sound like a spy lira some of the things you say i'm just like i feel like we're gonna look back on this interview and we're gonna go like she was a spy the whole time and and then they're gonna put us up that's the worst thing these days it said that in my bio you didn't i don't know if you think about i think about this all the time i go you know how like people will put up clips when someone is like exposed for something yeah they'll go like the secret life of lira barditsky spy and what and they'll put that and they'll be like she was welcomed everywhere and then they'll put us up hello lira ah nice to have you and then like in that documentary or in the streets people like you welcomed her then you're like i didn't know i didn't know i hadn't watched this documentary because it hadn't come out yet i didn't know that she was a spy and then someone will say clips being like I am a Russian spy there you go speaking of watching speaking of watching things way back when you know you have the TED talk that's the huge TED talk sorry to interrupt you can I just say this are you wait wait wait no no I am can I tell you why I wonder who the first person you are sorry no I promise you I'm sorry I promise you I'm sorry no but I promise you I'm sorry but I was thinking this I was doing I wonder who the first person was to say speaking of they just took a thing and then they were like I want to go on my own tangent And then they just Because Clearly they were not talking about What the other people were talking about Yeah yeah So Someone walked into a house somewhere And went My gosh It's cold out there My boots are frozen to my ankles I feel like I could die And then someone went Speaking of ankles You know which one I hate Have you ever wondered why The foot and the ankle Are always in the same vicinity I just I was just thinking Sorry I apologize Yeah speaking of it You know what I hate by the way and I'm like by whose way this so sorry Dave speaking of sorry Dave gave him a taste of his medicine he doesn't like it he's like this is what you guys go through speaking of speaking of watching things now I don't even know what the watching that's what we go through I watched way back when when your when your TED talk went huge I watched it and one of the things that I found interesting was the the kooktaya people you could tell us their log line please uh so there are languages in the world that don't use uh relative terms like left and right to organize space and instead everything is done in some kind of absolute space so for example cardinal directions like north south east and west um and uh when i say everything i mean everything.

51:21So in some languages, you would say, oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg. And if you move the leg, obviously it's no longer your southwest leg. So now you have to recalculate. So imagine doing the hokey pokey in a language like that. You put your north leg in, you take your east leg out. You're constantly recalculating. So in Kuktaia, the way you say hello is you say which way are you going and the answer should be something like um north northwest in the far distance how about you uh and so as you walk around you have to stay oriented uh even small children are oriented all the time do you want do you want me to ask you what do you mean by that yeah um close your eyes and point southeast you mean like right now right now it's a it's a visual i mean i can't but i'll try wait let me think so

52:17I'm going to go there. Open up your eyes. So you went, well, I don't know which way it is, but you guys haven't helped me. I'm going to go this way. I was like a little bit, yeah. So there are places in the world where people have no trouble with this question, even small children will be able to. All the time. Because in order to speak the language, you have to be oriented. All the time. Like you can't even say we're going to lunch. you have to say we're northwesting to lunch. Every motion verb carries a direction. So a question. Forgive my ignorance here. Wait, wait, wait. You've just thrown us into a fantastic rabbit hole.

52:53Do they have, like, is this even indoors? Even indoors, yes. People who speak languages like this live in all kinds of different environments. Some live in forests, some live in deserts. There are all kinds of physical environments. Some are flat, some are mountainous. the only thing is they don't tend to live in cities. Cities tend to be dominated by these massive languages that use left and right. But it's about a third of the world's languages that use absolute directions of some kind primarily. Not a third of the world's speakers, but a third of the world's languages. So they tend to be smaller languages.

53:33But it's a completely different way of organizing yourself in the world. And one experience I had when I was spending time with the Kukhtai is I started seeing myself from a bird's eye view and I was like a little red dot that was traversing the landscape. And then as I turned, the little window that had opened up in my mind rotated in my mind, but stayed locked on the landscape. And as soon as it did that automatically, I thought, oh, well, that makes it so much easier. Now I have this automatically updating map. And I kind of sheepishly confessed it to someone there. I said, you know, this weird thing happened.

54:11And they said, well, of course, how else would you do it? It's obvious. And then if you look at all the artwork from folks in that area, it's all done from a bird's eye view. No. They just, that's just how they see the world. They figured out the whole system. This is a random, this is a, I mean, I'm just thinking of this now. is, you know, crop circles and they have those, you know, those, sometimes they're birds, not only crop circles. Those structures that you can only see from above. See from above. So do you think that someone who grew up in that kind of language, if they walked around it, because if we walked around, I assume we would just be like, we would have no idea that there was a bird if you were above.

54:54Do you think that they would have some semblance of, wait a minute, I just walked around a shape that is a bird? That's a really great question. No one has done a study exactly like that, but people, when speakers of those languages are taken to new environments, they continue to stay oriented really well and they continue to maintain a sense of where they are relative to all kinds of unseen locations. So you can take them to a new location out in the bush. They've never been, no visibility and say, can you point to Melbourne or can you point to Sydney and they can do that and the only way to do that is to keep track of how far you've traveled and at what speed and to continue to maintain a geometry in your mind so those people never make great kidnap victims get a hoodie over them driving around they'll be like yeah and then when they take the hoodie off and then reach this out to your family hey I'm here at North Northwest and they've taken me and you guys are South South West of me South South East of me now come and get But here's the language that I'm most interested in And I've heard this question asked before The one that Dave asked about What language do people dream in And in most cases I can't answer that question Because I don't feel like there's a language in my dreams I feel like I just understand I interact with someone and I'm like yeah It's some form of telepathy It's what makes friends great friends It's the words that are not spoken between them It's actually what When they look at each other and go I know, you're also hungry?

56:24I was feeling hungry too So I'm thinking, when we recognize other languages, even recognize sign language and body language, do we recognize telepathy as a language? The fact that we understand without speaking. Well, certainly it's not fully telepathy in the sense that there's still a body language component to it. There's still a context around it. But all of that is part of communication, right? So even the way we move our bodies, the way we gesture, our facial expressions are all very rich channels of communication. And they also differ between language groups. So what a gesture means for one group of speakers is going to be something different for another group of speakers.

57:09Can we go back to the Kuptai? Kuptai, yeah. So thank you, by the way, Dave, for bringing that up. What are the advantages to them perceiving the world like this? What do they have that we don't have, just in general? Are there any benefits, or is it just like a certain swag of living? Well, any way that you think of space will have some advantages and some disadvantages, right? So if you're able to stay oriented better than we used to think humans could, which is what the Kuktair and many other groups like them do, that's an incredible human gift. And when I say better than we used to think humans could, what I mean is scientists generally study undergraduates at universities.

57:55And we call those humans. And then we say, this is what humans can do and this is what humans can't do. And so for decades, scientists would say, well, humans can't orient very well because we studied undergrads at North American universities. Oh, damn. And then we went to other locations and found humans who not only could do the thing that we thought was biologically impossible for human brains, but the little kids could do it. And it wasn't even that hard to learn. And so to me, that is an incredible example of the things that we think are possible are often just the things that we're used to.

58:35Their brain is capable of doing so much more. And sometimes it's not even that hard to get there. We just have to imagine and want to try. Right. And this is a case for me where this group of people have this incredible cognitive skill where, as I'm describing it to you, you're like, whoa, they do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, my brain. Yes. Yeah, they do it all. But it's not actually even that hard. Like if you wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it in a week and you would start to organize your whole life in that way. And then you would have a new cognitive skill. You would know where things are.

59:15You would have a mental map of things in your house that are organized in north, south, east, west coordinates. You would just have a different way of looking at your whole physical space. is there is there a language you've come across that's more effective at conveying information than others like are there are there languages that are particularly good at like like could you say some languages are better at conveying an emotion and some languages are better at conveying in like hardcore data and information and then some languages are better conveying even like even humor or anger or or does each language have that in them and all that all languages are equal languages have specialized vocabularies for different things so some languages have more color words and so it's easier to convey color distinctions in those languages other languages have more smell terms smell terms well well well

1:00:18sorry Sorry.

1:00:24What I meant about this mischief. Sorry. You see what I meant? It was all fun and games, intellectual and English. So much other languages. You see, this is what I go through every day. Oh, man. I'm sorry. What a delightful work environment. He's so north, east, west, this guy. But there's some things that may seem ineffable in one language. Like in English, we don't have a lot of smell terms. And so people say, oh, well, smell is ineffable. But then you go to another language and they have tons of smell terms. So it turns out the ineffable can be F'd, depending on the language that you speak.

1:01:04So different languages will have specialized vocabularies for different kinds of things. There's not one language that is like, yes, it's easy to communicate all the things in this language. there are trade-offs another question the um i want you to start making statements yeah just to vary it up yeah i just feel like as an audience member i'm just like all this guy comes you know when they're like those people who just come with empty hands all they do is come here hands hands question question what about statements i've come with the mind of a student not the mind of a master because i'm here with a master that was a that was a beautiful statement now you see that That was beautiful.

1:01:42I've come with the mind of a student and not the mind of a master. Because I'm in the presence of a master. That was wonderful. But can you call it a female master and mistress? Is that what it is? I don't think that's the evolution of the word. You can? You can? You can't? I'm not sure if that's the... If someone is a master and they're male, makes sense. What was the female version of a master? Do you know off the top of your head? I don't. I'm going to look this up. This next topic was brought to you by misogyny. But this is something I want to see. You ask your question, Dave. Yes. They have an additional cognitive skill.

1:02:26Almost like we don't have it. They're not missing one. Like what do we use? Do you know what I mean? They're not missing one. Well, so using left and right is a different kind of cognitive skill. Okay, so that's our one is left and right. Yeah, so you have to learn the difference between left and right, and you have to be able to apply left and right in lots of different orientations. So like it could be your left, my left. So I have to be able to do the mental rotation to say it's on your left as opposed to on my left. Which is more simple then. but yeah it's a different it's just a different skill a different reference frame to think in can they do that um in many communities that have been tested they can't uh that's not their that's not their way of organizing space and sometimes even um if they look at left right mirror images of something that's decontextualized like uh like a little figurine of a girl sitting under a tree or whatever, and they see a mirror image, they'll say it's the same.

1:03:31Because to them, it's not placed in any physical context that they can recognize geographically. So they say it's not meaningfully different. So, and that brings me to a, speaking of, it's not a speaking of, but this, another thing you had was, if I'm not mistaken, was some people don't count distinctly. because of their language? Some languages don't have number words. Yeah. So, okay. Now that one, because I can get the - Wait, wait, wait. So like the word one, two, three, some languages don't have - Some languages don't have any exact number words. Some languages have number words up to about two or three or four.

1:04:15And then after that, it becomes few or many. Some languages count in base 13 or base 87 instead of base 10. um or base 27 some count and a version of binary times yeah it's the same but then i get count up to nine yeah and ten and then after that is ten and one ten and one ten and two twenty okay two and three but that's more but the people who do the many like i mean in the sense of they don't have one two three they don't no they just have relatively few relatively more yeah okay so now Now, in terms of from a language point of view, the thing, I don't know if you, the thing that they are observing.

1:05:01So I see five cats here. They're not five cats. Obviously, I'm not losing it. But I see five cats. They, a person from that language, what happens? What do they see? They see some cats. Yes. And I'll tell you, so very often people will ask questions like I asked this question when I first heard about this language. I said, well, but some of these people have, you know, seven kids. How do they keep track of their kids? And I was immediately told you must not have children because you don't actually keep track of your children by counting them. You don't just need to achieve a certain number of short people.

1:05:44You know them as individuals, right? There needs to be Timmy and Bobby and so on. And so when people need to keep track of a certain number of things, so for example, you have your axe with a notch in the handle and the axe that has a red handle and the axe that your brother gave you, you know them as individuals. But then in other cases, having the number is actually completely unimportant in the natural world. Like three fish doesn't equal three fish because each fish is a different size and freshness and tastiness than every other fish. What's important is how good of a meal you're going to have.

1:06:20Three fish certainly doesn't equal three tomatoes in any important sense. The exact numerosity only matters once you start using money. So then you need to have an abstract unit and you have to be able to count things. But up until then, having an exact, like I have seven children, that's not the important, you don't want to have seven children. You want to have your, all of your children all of your axes and so on but like the thing you're saying about you also said a thing about uh some cultures have we have a forest and then they can't comprehend a forest or something along those lines they comprehend separate trees am i i don't remember saying that it's almost well it's almost to the same idea what i'm trying to say is like i i get what you say it's a question So from, okay, I see three people here.

1:07:14Some people just see a few people. They never go three. It never occurs that they go three because that's not part of, like almost like, you know, I don't want to say a baby, but if your brain doesn't do that, then it doesn't do that. Is that basically what you're saying? Yeah, to get to the idea of three, or especially once we get to slightly larger numbers like seven or nine, what we normally do is count. And so you apply this list of words that you learned as a kid, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and so on. And you name all of the objects in the array. So I'm going to name one, two, three, four.

1:07:55That number is a name. Yes. And the last word that you say, that's the number of items. So they're one, two, three, four, four people. That's how I know. That's a little skill that we learn as kids. So once you have to get an exact number of anything above three or four, three you can kind of do visually, but like seven, it gets harder. You start applying this little linguistic trick that you learned. But if you don't have number words in your language and you never learn that linguistic trick, then you just say, okay, there are a few. And you can approximately say there are a few more here than there, but it's not exact.

1:08:35It's not exact. Okay, great. So now, sorry to hog the mic, but actually I'm not sorry. Because you said don't say sorry unless you are, which I'm not.

1:08:49also with the time you know is it Arabic the one way or like letters right to left right to left this is just a simple question do you think that it was like a QWERTY kind of situation you know like you read right to left in one language left to right in another language do you think it was like a QWERTY kind of situation you know QWERTY the keyboard is that somebody basically went guys it's easier to do it this way and then everything went that way Is it like that? Writing systems got developed in different directions based on the kinds of tools that people were using for writing. So if you're primarily writing by chiseling on stone, you have your dominant hand for holding the precise instrument and the other hand for hammering.

1:09:34But if you're going to be writing with ink, then you want to write in a way that doesn't smudge the ink as you go. so you end up with different writing directions based on how predominantly people were using were doing the writing what tools they were using and then that just sticks around for centuries okay then here's my last one so to speak hopefully not the last one but there's another one so to speak you said you can just say the last few yeah you don't have to have a number attached to it never all week folks That was good. That was good. That was good. It was. Yes, it was. I was so... Because I did think about this one.

1:10:20You said that blame is different in different cult, in different, like Spanish. You use Spanish and English. Could you explain to us if you still remember? Sure. So in some languages, like in English, it's normal to put yourself as an agent of an event, even if it was something accidental. So if I knocked over this glass and it broke, it would be completely normal for me to say, I broke the glass, even if it was a complete accident. I can even say in English, I broke my arm. That's the normal way to say it. In other languages, you would say, the glass broke or the glass broke itself, or to me it happened that the glass broke, or my arm broke, the arm broke on me, all kinds of other constructions you can imagine.

1:11:12And so some languages distinguish much more strongly between things that are accidents and things that are intentional actions. And what we find is that English speakers are much more likely to look for the agent of an event, even if there isn't one visible, or even if it's an accident, they look for the agent, they blame the agent more, and they remember who the agent is compared to other languages. Or even just in English, if you say, if we watch the same event and I say, she broke the glass, as opposed to the glass broke, you're going to want to charge me more for the glass if I said she broke the glass.

1:11:48It's actually funny because in Isizulu, ukolo means peace, right? And when you say, I'm sorry, say, so which means I'm asking for peace. So there's no word that says, I am sorry. So you're asking for peace. You're just saying, I wish for this conflict to be ended. Ended, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm asking for peace to return. Yes. So I'm asking for peace. I also love it with, I mean, I guess it's in a few languages, but means I am held by hunger. You don't say I'm hungry. You are not hungry. Hunger is holding you. Yes. Like the hunger has you. Yeah. Because you are not the person who is hungry.

1:12:25The hunger is like doing a thing to you. And so this, if the cultures are not like in a city with everybody together, it really informs what is going on. Because now we're in a multicultural society, you know. So we're like, okay, we can go like, you can have that discussion about different languages. But if there's only one language, then people are like, no, hunger is not a thing that, What did you say about hunger? Sorry? Yeah, I'm saying you are not You're giving hunger Its own agency in a way Because you are not hungry So in the culture As a thing Like almost like historically They'll be like We gave hunger an agency Yes Which Now that I think of it Is With

1:13:15Are you buffering? That was crazy I genuinely thought We were like watching a video There for a second Did you see that? I saw it all it was real life okay I think even Lira was like no I don't what just happened there because I got because I got I got people are saying that I'm all over the place who are these people so now what I try and do how many are there is I what I try and do is I try and form the initial sentence first because but while saying a sentence that was crazy yo I'm glad there were other people here while he was talking I was like he buffered we were watching and then I I thought my real life internet I don't even I was so thrown there that I was like am I the only person witnessing this?

1:14:02You also completely stole. Yes, I was stole. No, you didn't move, Dave. Yes. You didn't blink. You didn't move your body. My own way of living. My own way of living is to just to talk. But then people are like you're just saying wild things. So now I'm like You wouldn't say that to him though. No, no, you didn't say it. he was just being no just in general so then I'm like okay if I'm just saying wild things all the time maybe I should pause for one second and then think about the thing I'm going to say wait wait what's the name of that culture the Gupta what was it the Kuptai the Kuptai the Kuptai the Kuptai Kuptai Kuptai Kuptai yeah Dave was like a teller at a bank in Kuptai he was like one two three four five he would have been better it would have been better if he did that no he didn't Because this is an international sign of there's something that's about to happen.

1:14:55He chose no language of letting you know something is still going to happen. So you know normally people go like, you know, I was thinking about how... So this is the international sign for continue listening because something is still happening. You're holding space. Thank you. His language that he chose was complete... Can I do it? An utter silence. And he... It's new I'm gathering myself I'm gathering my thoughts Because sometimes my thoughts are too wild So I'm trying to make We didn't know there was any gathering happening Sorry, okay, here's the thought Because you Because I'm trying to say it in the Here's the thought Yes, okay, say the thought I'm gathered Yes, we're ready Here, here, here Here's a question Okay, here, we're listening If I farted right now Wow After all of that This is the gathered thought Wait Jesus Lira I'm so sorry I can't apologize enough You did try If I farted right now Oh goodness There's a question There's a question Who would you blame?

1:16:02You You told us you farted Well Different cultures That approach us differently That's what I'm saying So now because This is what I'm saying Because Arguably Sometimes I didn't want to take it here But arguably Sometimes when you fart You are farting Do you know what I mean You've actually done something brilliant here You've actually done something very brilliant here I see what you've done here So sometimes we go I am actually farting I am the passer of air throughout Through my body Then other times I'm not farting But my body is farting A fart has escaped You know what I mean My body is farting You know, that kind of thing.

1:16:49And another time, sometimes my body has refused to stop fighting. You know, that kind of thing. You're like, guys, and we flatter. You would make a fantastic field linguist because you're able to delineate all of these different ways of causal involvement. Yes, that's what I mean. So some languages will make very different grammatical constructions for those different kinds of expulsions. Yes, so in certain languages, in certain languages for real, they would be like, you know, what is that smell? My body farted. Yes. Like literally, it wasn't me. I am a gentleman. I would not fart in public. Well, I fart in front of you guys, but not in front of a lady.

1:17:37Why are we so unlucky? Why? Why us? A self-reflective fart is the worst kind of fart. The owner, insufferable. The fat, you are nah. Let me give you an example. Here's an example. Here's a professional example. Yes. You know what? Professional example. The fat? No. You're not going to fat right now. You know what, Dave? Please, we are so sorry. Let me give you an example. So in English. Sorry, we need a moment. I'm so sorry. Let's also get a chance to gather ourselves. I'm so sorry. We are so sorry. Yesterday, we were on form. This is perfect. Oh, my goodness. So take Romeo drank the poison, Socrates drank the poison, Caesar drank the poison.

1:18:34In English, all of those are the same grammatical construction. You can say drank the poison in all three cases. Socrates knows he's drinking poison. He doesn't want to be drinking poison. He's been sentenced to death. The hemlock situation. Caesar doesn't know he's drinking poison. He thinks he's drinking wine. Someone has poisoned his wine. Romeo wants to be drinking poison and believes he's drinking poison. In English, those are three grammatically the same. There are some languages like Devehi where those would be three different constructions because one is volitional, one is unintentional, one is accidental, and so on.

1:19:10And so speakers of those languages have to think, is this person intending to do it? Are they doing it volitionally? Are they doing it knowingly? And so you have to break down the event, whether it's drinking poison or letting something escape your body in a particular way. You know what? It's the same way. In Isidulu, a king doesn't die, he bows. So they look at it as an involuntary action. A common man dies. Oh, wow. Right? So, umuntu ufile, which means a person has died, but inkosi ikoteme, which means a king has bowed. Wow. So you're right. It's the same action or same result, but viewed from a different lens and obviously described a different way.

1:20:00because the king is not seen as wanting to leave his people. He just bows. So now what this makes me wonder is, and by the way, to answer your question, mistress is the original female of master, but then it wasn't used because over time it started to denote negative, but it is in fact mistress. If I had a hat.

1:20:22Don't press anything. We've got more What Now after this.

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1:22:38So this makes, this makes me wonder then, does our language influence our society's ability to forgive or blame or like, is it actually hardwired into the language itself? Because if one culture doesn't think that you killed somebody or you, like in some languages, it feels like there's almost super agency. I have done everything. I crashed my car and I killed your family and I broke my ribs in this accident and I went to the hospital and I had surgery and I healed and I went home. I am the master of my entire destiny in this world, right? Yeah. And then there would be another culture by your example where they're going - Until you want to shirk responsibility, in which case you say - Yes, yes, yes.

1:23:33But then there would be some cultures where somebody would go, while driving, my car was in an accident. Those people's lives ended because of the accident that occurred. I was taken to a hospital. Surgery was performed upon me because my rib had decided that it was broken, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So here's a question I often ask my students. I say, suppose something terrible happens to a person. Yeah. How do we achieve justice? Suppose we find the person who did the terrible thing and we punish them appropriately. Has justice been done? And American students say, yes, that is what justice is.

1:24:16You find the person who did wrong and you punish them. Right. And then I say, well, what about restitution for the victim? Maybe what we should worry instead about is offering appropriate restitution for the victim. And they sort of secondarily say, yeah, yeah, maybe that's also something to think about. And I say, well, what about coming up with some kind of restorative justice where both parties can now live peacefully together and finding some way for them to continue to coexist in society? And that's even further from the normal American model, right? But there are models like this, models of justice like this that exist around the world where people think the primary mode or the primary role for justice is not just to punish the person who did wrong or not just to restitute the victim, but maybe also to achieve some kind of peace between the parties.

1:25:09And of course, that's not the most native model for American English speakers. Yeah, and that's what I was about to ask you. Is a lot of that contained in the language itself? It's hard to know for sure because, of course, justice systems evolve in very complex ways. But in small experiments, you can see that people have different desire to punish agents depending on the language that they speak. So now let's extend that to interpersonal communications. if you grow up speaking a language or you just you speak a language that doesn't necessarily automatically assign guilt does that then affect your ability to connect people to an action that has been done to you or an action that has occurred because of the other person that like that does does that separation actually happen between people on an interpersonal level you know So some languages may be like, oh, Eugene, you left me.

1:26:04And then in another language, it might be, you were gone. You are gone from this space, but you didn't leave me because you can't leave me. But you went from the space and now I am without you, but you didn't leave me. Like, do you find when you're studying this that it changes how people are actually able to connect with each other in an interpersonal setting? Well, people have different models of what causes things in general, right? So some people believe in fate. So they're very fatalistic cultures where the universe controls all of our actions. And so it's not you deciding to leave. It's just that's what fate foretold.

1:26:42It was written in the great book of the universe. It was written that you would leave and then at some point you would come back and so on. And so where causality and agency comes from will differ from culture to culture. Exactly pinning down that to a feature of language is challenging because there's so many things that create our model of causality. But when we look at those, okay, let's say we don't look at it as causality or not. Do we find, or has anyone even looked at whether or not some languages are more, or the people who speak certain languages are more or less forgiving than other people who speak other languages?

1:27:21In small experiments, you can find differences in how much people want to blame and punish an agent in the case of an accident. So when it's something that is an unintentional action, English speakers are more likely to want to blame and punish and remember more who did it. Damn. That's a big one to think that because your language has told you blame has to be assigned, you then assume that blame is necessary. Let me give you even a small example. If you show a video of a ball rolling onto the screen and it knocks into a vase and the vase falls, you ask English speakers to describe it. They'll say, someone rolled a ball into a vase.

1:28:05There's no someone on the screen at all. They will automatically assume it. Yeah, speakers of other languages will say, a ball rolled into a vase or a ball knocked over a vase, right? And so there's something about English that has trained us that most things happen because of human agency, except, you know, acts of God, weather and so on. But it's the normal way of saying it. So it becomes a habit of mind. And so you look at a video where there is no agent present, but you still infer one. You say, well, some numbskull knocked the vase over with a ball. Yeah, it's like I've seen when there's a car accident of two different races or two different cultures.

1:28:46Some cultures will be like, what an idiot, what did you do to my car? And some people will be like, are you okay? Just because that's the first thing you're supposed to be thinking of. Yeah, you assign blame before you can show care, right? Some people think like that based on how they grew up, what language they speak and what they hold valuable. And when you are speaking about the people who look at life in directional form, I couldn't help but think, and those who can't count higher, to assign a certain number of value to things. I was thinking to myself, there must be deeply, I don't want to say religious, but spiritual people, because I think they are very much more present than we are.

1:29:22Because once we assign a number to things, there can be infinite things that we don't use and we don't know where they are, but we still hold dear. But for them, knowing what that thing is and what it looks like is much more important than knowing how many they are, right? I think there are many different cosmologies that can coexist with a number system or a directional system. And one of the things that we see around the world, so there are 7 ,000 languages spoken around the world. And some historical linguists say there could have been 500 ,000 languages in the past. Is Tothraki in there? It's just a huge amount of...

1:29:56It is now, I guess, because they made it. Yeah. So Tothraki, it would be in, right? Because someone's made it. there there yeah you you could some linguists wouldn't include it because it's not a naturally occurring language but you could you could invent any number of new languages and how would they define naturally occurring though because something that god developed in a natural process of humans wanting to communicate with one another no and i don't mean this to be facetious but i'm like how do they know that all of them were created what if somewhere along the line someone made a language for this type of purpose.

1:30:31And then it just, people started speaking it. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah. And there are some languages like that that have like a register that is, for example, a special secret register that you only speak under certain circumstances. No way. Are you serious? Yes. Like during periods of mourning or there's a language where only women speak this version of this language under these particular circumstances. Wow. So there are things like that in the real world. Because I've always wondered why in law or in medicine, the more complicated terms are in Latin. You're like, you could have just said this in English.

1:31:09Ipso facto.

1:31:13But there are natural languages being invented right now. Many of them are sign languages. So there are people around the world who are born deaf and deafness is hereditary. And so if you're born in a really remote community where there isn't already a deaf school or some kind of deaf education, you will just encounter some other deaf people and want to communicate with them. And so all of these different sign languages are emerging. And so some of the most fascinating work on language development is looking at the development of sign languages around the world in these tiny little communities where you can see the first generation of a language, the second generation, the third generation.

1:31:52That's really fascinating. Because we can't do that for spoken languages. It's way gone in the past. But for these sign languages, we get to see how it actually began and why it began. And you see how languages start to regularize and how they make their decisions about which way they're going to go. And it's super fascinating work. Damn. Do you think that they could be like almost like if you got the best of each language, like for the justice system, it seems like the one is better than the other. You know, the English one is more punitive and worse than the other one, which is more nuanced and takes more into consideration.

1:32:32Do you think that they could be like a, like when AI wipes out like 300, when AI starts wiping the people out and comes with a new one, new language joke, obviously. But do you think that they, in a thought experiment, could be like a best of, which is the best of like each language, and put together. And then this language, this language would then solve all the problems we have because it would have all the... The new AI language you mean? Well... Super language. The super language would... Because contained within language are solutions to problems. So within it, this language, super language, would then...

1:33:16If you had that super language, the problems would just almost like evaporate because you just know how to deal with them. From how Dave described, I don't want the Zupa language. Being Eastern European, I can't imagine a world without problems. You lost me there. But I think that rather than trying to say that one language is better than another, you could say, well, what if we combine both ways, right? So sometimes it's nice to have more precise terms where you say, okay, I want to call this color light blue and I want to call this color dark blue and I want to have names for all of the different shades of blue.

1:34:04Turquoise. Other times you just want to say blue and move on with it. And there are going to be lots of times you're not sure. So let me give you an example with arms and hands in Russian. So in Russian and lots of other languages, there's not a distinction between hand and arm. This whole appendage is called by one word, ruklat. Now, often when I talk to English speakers, they say, but that's impossible. Russian speakers must know which one they're referring to, either the hand or the arm. And what I point out is that almost everything you do with the hand, the arm is also involved. And almost everything you do with the arm, the hand, when you go to shake hands, you're not just using your hand, you're using your arm.

1:34:45When you do arm wrestling, you're not just using your arm, you're also using your hand, right? So almost anything you can think of that involves one that you would call a hand action or an arm action in English actually also involves both. So it's an artificial distinction that English has made. And once you make that distinction, you believe that it must be true and it must be that you really mean one or the other. So what would be the best solution? Well, why not just have both? You can have a superordinate term that includes the entire appendage, and then you can have whatever other smaller categories you want, right?

1:35:19So I would always choose an option that allows that kind of flexibility, that allows you to be as specific as you want and also as general as you want, because different situations call for different things. As an aside, isn't it quite amazing that Russians did not over like, you know, Russian is old, thousands of years old, you know, come someone say that, what about my, check it, my guns. Do you know that kind of like, look at my guns. What? Well, there are words for, you know, the palm and the wrist and the fingers and the guns, of course. Oh, but just not. Just not specifically this distinction between the hand and the arm.

1:36:00I think we're making progress from farts to guns. No, we really haven't proved. I mean, we've made leaps and bounds for it.

1:36:13Could we... Now I'm wondering, though, if it's not the fact that a language cannot be perfect. It's the fact that like... It shouldn't be perfect. Yeah, but I was also going to say that the human brain cannot... Because I don't know anyone who knows every word in the dictionary. I would argue that we have all these specific things to your point It is infinitely, you know, as big or as small as we need it to be So if you go to, you know, a doctor who needs to operate on your hand They're not just going to be like, the finger part of his arm is broken They'll go into like the specific bones They'll really break it down So they do have that intricate knowledge And then a child can say, my arm is sore And you don't need to be like, which part of your arm, right?

1:36:56So could it just be then that we have it all, but our brains either can't or don't feel that it's necessary for us to know all of the words then? I'm saying is, could it be that the super language already exists? Because it's continuously expanding and has been expanded and has, do you get what I'm saying? Someone has really zoomed in, someone has completely zoomed out, but we just could never or would never need to possibly have a super language. Does that make sense? 100%. It's like memories, I'm sure, right? I think any human language is the product of thousands of years of work, right? And languages have expanded and have contracted.

1:37:34So the history of English is a history of constantly adopting and borrowing things from lots and lots of other languages and dropping parts and getting new parts in and so on. Bastards. So all languages are living things. But languages are just tools for communication and for thought. None of them capture the entire world perfectly. None of them capture all the possible thoughts we could want to think perfectly. And that's why we have such bitter debates about language, because all of us at some point feel like the language we speak is not perfectly capturing the reality as we see it or the reality that we want to live in.

1:38:17And we say, well, why should I have to use gender pronouns, for example? Or why should I have to use this word instead of that word? And that's where we start to negotiate with other speakers of the same language because we want the language to reflect the way that we think. But there is no language. There's no one language that perfectly captures already all the thoughts that you could possibly want to think. Yeah. I sometimes think of language as, like how you said, sometimes words can encapsulate how we feel. Like sometimes when I look at something And I'm like that looks nice And I take out my phone Take a picture And then I'm like The picture almost looks like The thing that I saw Right?

1:38:56Yeah The eye has something That the camera does not have Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah Yeah, so I get that with language Sometimes you just want to say something But it just doesn't The word doesn't match the thing It's like you're having that mini choking Yeah, yeah In between Yes But your thoughts are like It's happening in rapid speed And your throat is like Yeah Like the word blech Like it's not even a word is a better description for what you might be experiencing sometimes with a taste than any word that someone could write to you. You know what I mean? But I can't get the thought of Dave's fart.

1:39:28Can we? When we speak to HR, can we also decide? Speaking of Dave. Like what words can make it to the episode? Speaking of Dave, are there languages that have a default setting with like the one you're saying about where you say that the world is just like happening to you you know the negative thing is that you're a victim of the world you know and then another language gives you the idea that you don't have to have the world happening to you you can also happen to the world that's buddhism yeah but do you think that that that it's almost like do you think that when you're in a language, there's an underlying placement between you and the environment that you don't even notice?

1:40:25That definitely is the case, but you can also think of that happening even within a language. So a lot of work that psychotherapists do with their clients, for example, is to allow them to release agency for things that it seems unhealthy for them to think that they're really causing, and then to take agency for things that they can actually do and have some kind of causal power over, to learn to say, I can do this, and to learn to say, this happened to me, as opposed to, I caused all of these terrible things. So even within a language, you can choose to use the language one way or the other to place yourself as an agent, which is not always good, right?

1:41:09Or place yourself as a passive observer or absolve yourself of responsibility, which could also be very psychologically healthy sometimes. In simple terms? But that idea must be in the language. There has to be some way of expressing it. Yeah, there has to be. And there might be new ways that we have not yet invented that, because people invent things. Oh, for sure. You know, someone will be like, oh, there's this thing. And then we'll be like, that solves all of our problems, which we didn't have before. So basically what I'm saying is that as infinite as language seems currently, it still is finite because we haven't invented everything in language yet.

1:41:49Oh, yeah. There's an infinite opportunity for creating more new languages. Languages are all evolving and changing all the time. And that's a lot of the conflict that we encounter in political debates is that people want to fight about what the new way of talking is going to be like. But in every field of science and every field of expertise, people are developing ways of talking alongside ways of thinking. If you look at scientists' notebooks, they're developing ways of describing the thing that they're trying to think about for the very first time at the same time as they're trying to think about it for the first time.

1:42:32Oh, damn. I didn't think about that. So like Isaac Newton kept impeccable notes. And if you look at his notes when he's formulating the idea of force or gravity, those aren't ideas that existed, right? So he's just thinking through what this new invisible thing is that he's thinking about. Oh, jeez, I never thought of that. You see he writes things down and crosses them out and he's like, impetus, energy, no, no, no. And he goes back and writes it over and over and over again and over pages he develops a way to talk about it at the same time as he's developing a way of thinking about it. So we're always doing that in language.

1:43:04Obviously Newton was doing it in a slightly elevated way. If you don't mind me asking, for yourself, when you're engaging with people, you know, on a personal level, do you think you have a higher level of being able to achieve this? Are you, so if somebody's trying to argue with you, for instance, do you see beyond where most people would end naturally? Of course. No, I wonder if like you're training. no really basically Trevor is trying to figure out if whenever you hug you with people do you think I'm better than you no I'm not thinking that she knows she's better than them that's not the question I'm asking more like in the same way a boxer for instance if you tried to punch a boxer your punch is coming at them a lot slower than most people are perceiving a punch most people are surprised by a punch a boxer if you try is just an amateur to punch them expecting a punch they're just like well that was very slow and adorable right I wonder if like you experienced that as somebody who spends so much time working with language and communicating all that when you're speaking to somebody do you also find that for yourself if they're even like trying to argue with you well i i am a lot more aware of how much of the disagreement is coming from language itself that's yes and so then i have to hold myself back from giving a lecture and lexical semantics and saying you know this is how words mean and it's not the way that you think words mean and this is but it's not actually helpful in creating better friendships so i don't i don't recommend it's no way to live yeah but i mean yeah but i wonder like because i i know a lot of people i know a lot of people struggle with this like interpersonally is someone someone will go they'll say like you know it just happens between people they'll be like you blah blah you ignored me is a great one for instance let's say someone goes you ignored me you ignored by something in the world?

1:45:00No, you felt ignored. Or someone calling you and rings twice. Or you felt ignored or you did not feel attention was paid to you even. Is even like different to being ignored. And then like, so that I was wondering like if you then, but now what you've basically said to me is you don't then say to them, ah, no, your use of language isn't necessarily, what do you, so in that situation do you just say like, sorry, and then you act like you don't know the answer? Well, I haven't, exactly what you said i haven't found it useful to bring out my laptop and start giving them a lecture on how words mean um that that has not been the best way to make friends so what do you do then um because you know the answer though but often you can say you know there are many different ways to frame this situation and here are all the ways that i can think of and hear all And the more you open up the channels of communication and the more you allow people to see all of the different perspectives, sometimes a light bulb does go off and they say, hey, wait a second.

1:46:05I was only thinking about it from this perspective, but now I also do see that there are these other ways of thinking about it. And for me personally, like let's say I'm upset about something. if I suddenly see another perspective to think about it from that allows me to not be upset I'm so thankful it just releases me from whatever that frustration is where I'm like oh that person didn't mean that like or that there's a possibility that this was yeah this situation is not a big deal actually and if you can give that gift to someone then great if they're able to receive it that way right not if you're just denying denying their reality or their feelings okay okay and then is there a is there a language that you find you enjoy being angry in the most like what is your most effective angry language you know any language that you're good in is going to be the best language no but that's what i'm asking you which one is like if you go i like i'm angry this is the language I'm going in.

1:47:09I'm most fluent in English. So English, I can really make a surgical strike in English. But I have had experiences where I was frustrated in Spanish and I felt like I was being treated like a child, but I also could only speak like a child at the same time. So it's extra frustrating when you're like, no, I speak good. I'm a good swimmer. You can't It just makes you more and more angry. So I would recommend expressing anger in a language that you're particularly adept in. Then you can make exactly the... You know, from this conversation, especially from the question that you asked about what happens when you're engaging with people that you know far more better than, is from what I'm getting from you is it is actually a big adventure walking into those misunderstandings because you get to learn so much about yourself and the person.

1:48:07And how you're describing about the direction that psychotherapy is taking, and I actually love it, it can be encapsulated into two phrases. You can control what you can control and do what you can do. So it's do you, boo, and it is what it is. Basically, if every psychotherapist would tell their patients that, I think we'd have a better world out there because it is what it is. And do you, boo. If I paid for therapy and then my therapist said to me, it is what it is. And do you, boo? That's what we've got time for. I'll see you next week. I'd be like, there will be no next week. Yeah, if the pilot says, we're going to be experiencing turbulence at about 30 ,000 feet.

1:48:48You're like, it is what it is, man. And he's like, I'm going to take a slight left turn. Do you, boo?

1:48:57Lira, hold on. What? got you into this language, the love of language and brain? Well, partially it was the experience of moving from a Russian-speaking environment to an English-speaking environment, of course. I went from a world where one set of things were true to a world where exactly the opposite set of things were true, right? So moving from the Soviet Union to America, all of a sudden I was in a completely different conceptual universe. But also I was just a very argumentative kid. And I started noticing as a teenager that so many of the arguments I would get into really were pinned on how people were using words.

1:49:45That one person, we were using the same words, but we meant different things by them. And then I thought, if we study language, we might be able to get to the underlying truth. It turned out to be that the more you study language, the more you realize language doesn't reflect an underlying truth. It's just a tool for communication. It's a tool for thought. It's useful. But it allows you to understand how humans actually became as smart and sophisticated as we are. And then, okay. And it's almost like, what do you hope to give us? I mean, that's a, you know, like... That's a big assumption that she wanted to give us anything.

1:50:28No, like what... Lira was there going like, who the hell are you? Who the hell are you, boo? He's like, I'm giving... What do I want to give you, boo? You guys are lucky that I even showed up. It's our takeaway that our engagement, that there's this thing that sits in the middle, language, and we should look at that, almost like you said, look at that before we get to the person. There might be this invisible sort of thing that's determining how we think, but we are unaware that it is determining how we think. So it's not all them and maybe not all us. It might be this middle thing. That would make life very complicated.

1:51:11So definitely that the more aware you are of how much you're being shaped by, how much you're being funneled into certain ways of thinking by your language, by your culture, by your experience, that once you become aware of it, you're free to then look out of the trench and see are there other ways of thinking about it that I might enjoy that might be helpful to me. But also often when we're talking about these examples where these other people elsewhere think differently, it can kind of seem exotic, like, oh, these other exotic people elsewhere, they think in these funny ways. When in fact, all of us are being influenced by the languages that we speak, right?

1:51:48So it's an opportunity to turn the mirror on yourself and say, why is it that I think the thoughts that I think? Are those the thoughts that I necessarily need to think? Could I think differently? What are the opportunities for me to go beyond the ways that I think now? Because all of our brains are capable of so much more than the simple routines that we put them through every day. And so the more aware we become of the things that have trained us, the more we can actually use them as powerful tools to create the kinds of thoughts that we want to build. Thank you. Yeah. You know, this is a very serious question since you walked into the studio.

1:52:27I was wondering to myself, the dress, wool or cashmere? Wool. It's fantastic wool. Thank you. It's from the 40s. No way. Vintage? Yeah Somehow it survived This whole time You thrifted it Or was it passed out? Thrifted it Yeah No way Looks fantastic Thank you Yeah It's got great energy Thank you Thank you for noticing it Yeah Absolutely I also noticed But I thought We're not allowed to say that But let me tell you You didn't notice shit You just heard about Kashmir For the first time now Dave was literally there Like Kash me outside Kash me Kash me where Lira this has been great thank you thank you so much for having me as a room of bilinguals by the way do you just say bilingual if the person can speak more or do you just multilingual or you'll just go multi and then beyond that you don't we don't use the numbers so as a room of multilinguals you could say quadrilingual no no we don't need to we don't need to septalingo no no no no it's not necessary as a room of few linguals we appreciate you more linguals yeah yeah yeah no I look I mean I love it selfishly because it helps me understand like how my brain processes this stuff.

1:53:40But sort of what Dave was alluding to and then Eugene as well. It's just, it's interesting to realize that we are all, I like that you said, we're at the mercy of the tool that we're using, thinking that we're expressing ourselves when we're actually being used, using a tool to express ourselves. So if you're only given a hammer and then I go like express yourself with it, you might break a few things because it's the only tool you have to express yourself. And you may never think that the hammer is the reason. And so if we only have the words that we have We may struggle to understand why the world is reacting to us the way it is Or why we are impacting the world the way we are But it's just because of the tool that we have access to Yeah, my English teacher used to say Your vocabulary is like clothes in a suitcase And sometimes you pack the wrong clothes Damn What a great quote That's a fantastic quote What did you get in English?

1:54:34What was your grade? Hey, hey, hey, bye, bye Hey, you could have left it at great.

1:54:42No, that was great, Eugene. Thank you so much for that. Lira, thank you again for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Really fun. So fun.

1:54:52What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

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