B1 Mittelstufe English 8:51 1,457 Wörter Vlogs

Ten Years Later

CGP Grey · 2,943,472 Aufrufe · Added vor 1 Stunde

Learning Stats

B1

GER-Niveau

1,457

Total Words

573

Unique Words

4/10

Difficulty

Vocabulary Diversity 39%

Untertitel (166 segments)

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00:00

[patriotic instrumental music, Edison Records phonograph cylinder - Rule, Britannia!]

00:05

Hello Internet.

00:06

Well, here we are.

00:08

One decade later.

00:12

Ha! I wish that was how it worked, but it is not.

00:17

No, YouTube still feels like my new job

00:19

even though I've put in almost twice as many YouTube years

00:21

as teaching years at this point.

00:23

What can I say? Brains are weird.

00:26

Sure. [fingers snap]

00:27

Actually, back when I was a teacher,

00:29

I always kept a lava lamp on the desk for students.

00:31

Because when I was a student,

00:32

I always found it easier to listen and to think

00:35

without also having to make eye contact the whole time.

00:38

But you'd get chastised for looking up at the ceiling.

00:47

Not fun.

00:48

I figured I couldn't be the only one like that,

00:50

so I didn't correct kids for looking away from me,

00:52

but also ceiling gets boring after…

00:55

thirteen years of compulsory schooling.

00:57

Thus came onto my desk the endlessly hypnotizing lava lamp as focal point.

01:01

If you're a teacher watching this, give it a try.

01:03

It's good for a certain kind of student

01:05

and really chills the vibe of the room, man.

01:14

Thinking about impact over the long run of human history,

01:16

it's pretty clear that impact tracks with tech and tech with time.

01:19

Ten thousand years ago, there was very little you could do to impact the world.

01:22

So I do expect the next ten years will be more impactful than the last.

01:26

And I will bet they're better than the last.

01:28

I'm less confident about that second part than I used to be,

01:31

but I still think it holds that, on average,

01:34

each decade is an improvement.

01:35

That is, until we accidentally stumble into an existential threat.

01:38

Which is game over.

01:39

Which is pretty... pretty bad.

01:47

If there's anything I've learned from thousands of spoken words,

01:50

it's that human communication is hard.

01:53

Way harder than people think.

01:54

Precisely because people think it's easy.

01:57

You just say the words

01:58

and the other person hears them and bam!

02:00

Understanding!

02:01

Alas, no.

02:02

Words are fuzzy things and

02:04

you don't realize how poorly you string them together

02:06

until you are forced to listen to yourself saying those words.

02:09

And even if you're happy with your string of words,

02:12

you just don't know how those fuzzy patterns of sound

02:14

will pattern match in someone else's brain.

02:16

Human communication is a dance,

02:18

and a dance requires partners.

02:20

We all create content and I think we should all keep that in mind

02:24

and be much more willing to work with the intended intention of our interlocutors.

02:31

This is my biggest "I liked that band before they were popular" opinion,

02:35

but it finally dawned on me recently that Internet culture is the culture now.

02:39

Even just two Q & A's ago, I showed the Internet as The Wild West

02:43

but those days are long gone.

02:46

thrust aside by content mines or suburbs with homeowner's associations

02:50

fixated on real estate values.

02:52

I think Past-Grey was super naïve to imagine the Internet he loved

02:56

could possibly both 1) explode in size, and 2) remain the frontier.

03:04

Fantastic!

03:06

I thought that UK video would forever be my albatross, like:

03:13

So I was very happy when The Solution to Traffic topped the UK.

03:17

And if the day ever comes where something newer beats out Traffic,

03:19

I will be thrilled again.

03:23

Not really.

03:24

My YouTube colleagues are forever telling me

03:26

to be more strategic in the selection of topics.

03:28

To target content for growth and views and dolla dolla billz.

03:32

And I know I should but I just kind of can't.

03:35

Because the videos take so long from idea to completion,

03:38

the only thing that really matters is a topic

03:40

that I can stay interested in for months

03:42

and that just doesn't work with for me with strategic selection

03:44

or trying to have an underlying theme.

03:47

But I guess if you're looking for what's similar with all the videos,

03:49

one human personality slider is how much you are interested

03:52

in things versus how much you are interested in people.

03:55

Most people are "people people" but if you look at my videos,

03:57

one common connector is the near complete dearth of people.

04:01

What holds my interest tends to be very thing oriented.

04:08

Uhh, I hadn't thought about that possibility until now.

04:10

But if there are people who have watched my videos for the majority of their life,

04:14

uhh, say "Hi" in the comments?

04:21

Lots of people ask questions about sending letters forward or backward in time.

04:25

I wouldn't want to mess with the timeline going backward,

04:28

and sending letters forward is boring,

04:30

which is why I've never done that sort of thing.

04:32

Okay well actuallythatsnottrue, no.

04:33

One of my teachers in school had us do this.

04:36

To write a letter to ourselves for when we graduated high school and when I got it,

04:40

High-School-Me did not care about anything Grade-School-Me had to say.

04:44

And so it goes now.

04:46

I'm confident that Ten-Years-From-Now-Me

04:48

would be positively meh to get a letter from Current-Me,

04:50

in the same way Current-Me couldn't me more meh about

04:53

what Ten-Years-Ago-Me thought about anything.

04:58

The night time driving that I did in my road trip video!

05:00

I was at that point years out of practice driving.

05:03

I hadn't slept well the night before and had already driven all day

05:06

and then attempted to tackle both a super fast highway

05:09

and then a pretty sketchy road.

05:10

Statistically it is without doubt

05:12

the most dangerous thing I've done in the last ten years.

05:15

Even though people watch the video and go,

05:22

But the reality of Death is banality.

05:24

And it's not always visually obvious when Death is close.

05:28

For example, I was on an Indian Reservation for... a project

05:32

exploring a canyon and filming.

05:34

And it wasn't 'til a few days later, when reviewing the footage,

05:36

that I saw the solid ground I was standing on

05:39

was actually a bit of an overhang.

05:41

It didn't fall, obviously, but it's going to fall at some point,

05:44

and had it done so, well, the reservation was off the main path

05:48

and the canyon off the path from that,

05:49

and the path I was on was off the path in the canyon.

05:52

So an untimely crack would doubtlessly have been Game Over.

06:01

[flippantly] ¿Por que no los dos?

06:06

I feel like that's more for the audience to decide what is,

06:09

for them, the blue period of Grey, or whatever.

06:12

Because the public perception of creation can often have very little to do

06:15

with the perception or intention of the creator.

06:17

Again, human communication is difficult and also art is not the artist.

06:21

But for me, there's really only one important era shift

06:24

and that's pre-Project Liberty and post-Project Liberty,

06:27

which was [wait for it] the Statue of Liberty video.

06:30

Which, I think almost no viewer would pick out as a big deal video,

06:33

but to me it's the biggest.

06:35

It's the video where I feel like I finally really got my own writing process,

06:39

personally accepting its advantages and disadvantages.

06:42

That may sound strange because I'd been writing videos for seven years at that point

06:46

but I think this is just part of what happens when you do something for a long time.

06:54

[pensively] ¿Por que no los dos?

06:59

Two clear trend lines: video games up, books down.

07:02

I've learned there's a huge number of books I just can't read,

07:05

because I'll want to turn them into videos and

07:07

I can read books faster than I can make videos,

07:10

so reading those would be just creating a huge pile of guilt for myself.

07:13

And, when your job is mostly writing and reading,

07:16

it's nice to turn that off and video games are basically

07:19

the only thing in my life that truly shifts my brain into neutral.

07:22

All that said, I think the drop in books has gone too far in the last, eh, five years.

07:27

I don't like making promises or predictions for my future self,

07:30

but one of the things I'd like to be able to say ten years from now

07:33

is that I've inflected the reading curve.

07:37

The most frightening video I've uploaded this decade was

07:40

the one where I asked you to support the channel directly

07:43

through membership instead of having sponsors.

07:46

Clicking "Upload" that day, I didn't know what would happen.

07:49

But I trusted in you and since then, together we have learned

07:53

the trouble with tumbleweed after flying across an ocean,

07:56

we've talked like a pirate,

07:57

gone through the Tekoi trilogy together,

08:00

and, of course, revealed the perfectagon of the hexagon and more.

08:05

It is you who let each video flow from start to finish

08:08

without me needing to pause and tell you about our sponsor in the middle.

08:12

It is you who supports me, my family, and my team.

08:15

It's you who allows me to explore the Forest of All Knowledge and share what I've found.

08:19

You sponsor my videos.

08:21

And thank you.

08:22

Thank you for everything, Internet.

08:24

Thank you for my whole life.

08:26

It's been a wild ten years.

08:28

[cheerful electronic music]

Key Vocabulary (50)

to A1 preposition

toward

"Go to school."

of A1 preposition

belonging

"Cup of tea."

and A1 conjunction

also

"You and me."

in A1 preposition

inside

"In the house."

that A1 determiner

specific

"That book."

it A1 pronoun

A third-person singular pronoun used to refer to an object, animal, or situation that has already been mentioned or is clear from context. It is also frequently used as a dummy subject to talk about time, weather, or distance.

for A1 preposition

Used to show who is intended to have or use something, or to explain the purpose or reason for an action. It is also frequently used to indicate a specific duration of time.

on A1 preposition

A preposition used to indicate that something is in a position above and supported by a surface. It is also used to indicate a specific day or date, or to show that a device is functioning.

with A1 preposition

A preposition used to indicate that people or things are together, in the same place, or performing an action together. It can also describe the instrument used to perform an action or a characteristic that someone or something has.

as A1 conjunction

A conjunction used to compare two things that are equal in some way. It is most commonly used in the pattern 'as + adjective/adverb + as' to show similarity.

you A1 pronoun

Used to refer to the person or people that the speaker is addressing. It is the second-person pronoun used for both singular and plural subjects and objects.

at A1 preposition

A preposition used to indicate a specific point, location, or position in space. It is also used to specify a particular point in time or a certain state or activity.

this A1 pronoun

Used to identify a specific person, thing, or idea that is physically close to the speaker or has just been mentioned. It can also refer to the present time or a situation that is currently happening.

but A1 conjunction

A coordinating conjunction used to connect two statements that contrast with each other. It is used to introduce an added statement that is different from what has already been mentioned.

from A1 preposition

Used to indicate the starting point, source, or origin of something. It can describe a physical location, a point in time, or the person who sent or gave an item.

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Description

Q&A with Grey - Deleted scenes on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/48076548 and youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STMX20aB4Wo ## Related Videos UK Explained: https://www.youtube.com...

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CGP Grey