Uzbek

That launched in January 24th.

became a bestseller which is pretty cool it's gone live in it's going live in seven languages the latest being Uzbek and I'm going to be flying to Tashkent for a launch which is pretty awesome so it's been an amazing journey I'm very proud of how it's gone and yeah excited to start exploring the second one how do you get invited to Uzbek to do a launch So my publisher, they resell to various countries through their local publishers.

So a publisher in Uzbekistan and Tashkent said, yeah, we'll have some of that.

So I'm going to have to learn how to say 52 Weeks of Wellbeing and No Nonsense Guide in Uzbek.

This week, I signed a copy for someone in Japanese.

I think it's Onimashita.

And I actually wrote it in Japanese characters because I wanted, it took me forever to But I love it.

And the chance to do this in different languages and see the covers is amazing.

They'll recite these Arabic prayers.

They don't know what they're saying and Let's translate it into Uzbek.

Let's translate it into Kyrgyz.

And the lawyers at USAID, and I had been one, they were telling me, no, we can't touch it.

We have two for Cantonese.

Dari, Farsi, French, Haitian Creole, Japanese, Korean, two for Mandarin, Portuguese, Brazil, Portuguese, Europe, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Tajik, Ukrainian, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.

That is a good sampling of languages right there.

okay so you guys uh were part of the team that developed and created this yes yeah we were the team

Yeah, so in Uzbekistan, it was very different.

They spoke two specific languages, one which is Uzbek and one which is Russian because they're former USSR.

So a lot of the players spoke Russian.

So first and foremost, I try to pick up the basic Russian, let's say.

So now we've got to show them.

But when we show them three or four ideas, then it just breaks down because they only know them three or four.

So it's the same in Uzbekistan.

You try to show them over and over again, but they go back to these ways.

There's a couple in St. Louis that are just fantastic.

And if you haven't gone to some of the Turkish restaurants, there's an Uzbeki restaurant that is great.

And, you know, they're better in Florida because there's tons of them there.

But Uzbeki food is probably the best on the planet.

I like it.

You know, the služevni roman.

Whereas, for example, in the European languages, for example, you can guess very quickly what is it about.

Do you think that actually that the language, for example, the Uzbek language, the fact that it has this, you know, you need the totality of the sentence to understand it.

Do you think that actually has an effect on, let's say, the totalitarian government? Do you think there's actually a link or is it just more of a metaphorical thing that we can kind of bring together?

You know, here, as a practitioner, once again, yeah, it's a sort of kind of egg and chicken question.

But I'm struggling to see whether... within a language, we can escape sort of the bounds of that language.

And I think that's the question.

So for example, with Uzbek, which you're talking about, you said there's a sort of totalitarian strain in it.

Do you think that there's ways to sort of unsettle that from within the language, the way you use the language and unpick that? Or what would a process like that look?