 Is it possible that caring about being good at math or being good at math is actually just part of Asian culture at this point? David, this meme is going viral and we got to talk about it. Yeah, let's run the clip. Oh my gosh, so happy for first, second, third, fourth place. Oh, Chinese. Yeah, so these are the actual teams. The meme for the most part is correct. We'll show you the Canada team. David, from afar, a lot of these girls just look Chinese. They're not all Chinese. There are some Indian girls. The UK team had a Vietnamese girl on as well. A Vietnamese girl. I think there's a Korean girl. But honestly, essentially, and maybe Chinese more than other people, they just really care about being high level math people. Yeah. And this is what they care about. No, we're talking about hyper, hyper, elite, tier, upper crust, top, 00.1% math elites. Most of them are Asian and most of them are Chinese, regardless of whatever Western country they're representing. These memes have been going around for both boys and girls for five, six, seven years now. And we got to talk about it. Is the stereotype true? Is it not true? And what goes into it? Because this always sparks an internet discussion in the comments section. Yeah, let's get into the comments section. But I will say this, before we get into it, I see all Asians celebrating this. Yeah, even Asians who you like, you know, just everybody saying, Yeah, Asians are good at something. Asians are really good at something. And it's like that that is cool to see that there's not a bunch. There's not like a movement against this being like, Yeah, see, I told you I'm not Asian because I'm not good at math. Right. Um, this allow girl had this comment once you go Asian, you solve the equation. I actually never even heard that one before. Um, what do you think it is? This is popularized in modern culture. Andrew Ryan Gosling's character in the big short has a very famous quote where he's trying to justify his math by going, Look at his face. Look at his eyes. You're completely sure of the math. Look at him. That's my quant. You're what? My quantitative. My math specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about him? Look at his face. That's pretty racist. Look at his eyes. I'll give you a hint. His name's Yang. He won a national math competition in China. He doesn't even speak English. Yeah, I'm sure of the math. Actually, my name's Jung and I do speak English. Jared likes to say I don't because he thinks it makes me seem more authentic. And I got second in that national math competition. Yeah, I think a lot of quants are Chinese though. Actually, to be honest. And by the way, here is a couple algebra problems from the 2022 Olympiad. Anyway, let's get in the comment section. Make sure you like subscribe, turning your notifications. Somebody said, I kind of see a pattern here, but I'm not sure what it is. And somebody said, Yeah, I see the pattern too, is that they all have glasses. And then somebody said, Yeah, it's because our eyes are too small to see it is our destiny to have glasses. Is this true, man? A lot of Asians do have glasses. Yeah, I think what I heard is that it is about the amount that we study and read a lot of Asians like focus on small little letters. Maybe it's either if it's like writing Asian like language characters like Chinese characters, for example, or just reading books a lot, your eyes might not be that good. Alright, and that does sound like a fake made up hilarious theory. But there actually you read this, right? No, I, no, I did not. It's not fact. Okay. I don't know, maybe, but but there is some, you know, I heard it has to do with the strain due to increase studying hours at a very young age. It's possible, man. This guy said, Is this why I always get stuck doing the calculations for the bill when I go out with my friends? That's pretty funny. I oftentimes do the calculations too. And I take pride in it, but I'm not going to lie. Sometimes it takes me a while because someone else got like a drink for themselves and then that throws everything off. Do you think though that groups of like, let's say, for example, there was other races around like a group of white people or a group of black people, whatever, non Asian group, friend group. Do you think when they need to calculate something, everybody's like, No, dude, at the end of the day, if that's your Asian friend and you know they're not good at math, then you've probably already had that joke or conversation. Also, there's a lot of apps that do this for you. Do you think that the Asians that hang out with mostly white or black people or whatever, just non Asian group of people might be the Asians that aren't good at math? That's possible. Or I don't want to say not good at math. I just want to say they don't care about being good at math. David, even ourselves, man, are I, you know, I scored 750 on my math portion. That's not bad for a guy who literally does not. I don't talk about that. I would say for a Chinese guy, you are not considered good at math. No, no, within the Chinese world. Yeah, within the Chinese world. Yeah. But like we said, every community got different standards and thresholds for things and different ways they rank things low, middle, high. This guy said, Yeah, that's the same for the ping pong world championships too. And someone said, Yeah, it's the exact same team. The math team takes breaks. So they play ping pong during lunch. A lot. And like, let's say, David, playing ping pong, is that part of Asian culture at this point? Because a lot of and maybe if we need to narrow it down and be really nuanced, I can go ahead and say like, I think Chinese people love ping pong. And now just look at these teams. Have you ever looked at the badminton Olympic teams for a lot of countries, including European countries? Sometimes there's somebody who looks like this. Well, they're not on the basketball Olympic team. Okay. Hell no. Somebody said, Why are Chinese good at math? Believe it or not, when Chinese kids learn Chinese, when they are growing up, they count each stroke while they are writing a character. This helps wire the brain in ways that are useful later for math and geometry. So I don't know if this is true, but maybe it plays a small part. But actually, a lot of people have written a lot of lists about why Asians like math. And one of the things is, and this has to do with Chinese language, is that counting in Chinese is faster. As we know, when you say you don't have to say 1112, all these new words that make no sense. You just say 10-1, right? So it's just easier to count. So in that way, it might be better. It's already more math. You're already doing math right there by just adding it together. Somebody said, Yeah, look at the comments. You banana men, no matter what citizens you hold, you always consider Chinese. This is a Chinese person saying this to the Chinese diasporic people because obviously all the Europeans or white people or whatever people, Western people see this meme. They're like considering the American in the UK or whatever team Asian. Yes, exactly. So this is kind of a shot at the Westernized Asians saying that, Yo, you're always going to be viewed as Chinese, no matter what. Anyways, Yeah, that was like a whole identarian side angle, but also not not fully wrong either. Somebody said it's just a numbers game. The reason why the Asians in the US are better at math is because you're in contact with the Asians that are better at math. Those are the ones that emigrated out of China in the seventies and are more rich and or educated. They bring up children that are educated. They bring up children of their children that are educated. The uneducated bad and math Asians are still stuck in Asia. All right, this comment is interesting. And I agree with part of it. It is not entirely true because as we know, there are a lot of different types of Asians who came to America, even different types of Chinese, right? And they're not all like educated. Absolutely not, right? And a lot of the parents, not all of them are nerds and dorks. And it is true that I would guess that a lot of these elite elite tier math leads, their parents may be teachers, professors, engineers or academics of some type, brain workers. I'm not highly likely like nine out of 10. This is where the stereotype David can get very specific. Should we say that Asians from educated families really care about math? Like that's not a crazy statement. Is that like a generalization? Yeah, but obviously, yeah, I don't know. I mean, this, this, this comment had to do with self-selecting, self-selective immigration waves. Right. And how does that skew our perception or our biases or our stereotypes? Because a lot of people in America and we only know what we know in America, we're not living in Asia where even like the scariest gangsters are still Asian, right? But even, and it's been well documented guys, all the schools in Asia, essentially they drill math faster at a younger age. I'm not saying they're all smarter or better people. Because some people say, oh, it's all rote memorization. It's not as creative math or as problem solving. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I'm just saying they're good with the multiplication table very quickly. Somebody said now do this with basketball teams around the world. And then somebody said, yeah, what would they look like? This was a comment, by the way. This was not what I said. Yeah, yeah, obviously. I mean, that's, that's a funny comment because we all know what they're talking about. Yeah. I mean, let's just say right now, obviously it's Dirk Nowitzki right now, the best German player in the NBA right now. I mean, I guess you could say it was Mo Wagner, but it could be Dennis Schroeder or, you know, the best player out of Japan, Andrew is still Rui Hachimura. I mean, the best player from Greece is Yanis. Yes, exactly. So I guess, uh, yeah, I mean, that's. And guess what? I mean, it's crazy when you're thinking of the best basketball player from a country, even if a country doesn't seem like it has a very high black population, you might think that that person is black or even in a country that's not very full of like white people, you might think, yo, who's the richest banker and you're thinking of like a white or a Jewish person regardless of if that country has a high population of that group. So I guess this goes back to that question of stereotypes. If you show the basketball teams from different countries and a lot of the guys and not all of them will be, but a lot of them will be black of some African heritage. And then if you show the math teams and then a lot of the people predominantly are Asian, I guess like people right off the bat, they're just gonna be like, Oh, Asians like math and they're good at that. And they suck at basketball and then black people are good at basketball and then blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? Like that's the easy stereotype. But it obviously is more complicated than that. But we are talking about the highest level of things. Yeah. I mean, I guess we are referring to a lot of countries that have a high volume of immigrants though, Andrew, the UK, Canada, Australia, United States. These countries theoretically should be pulling, I guess what some of the strongest people from around the world at whatever they're good at or something like that. Somebody said this joke is getting older. This keeps happening year after year. Then white people are going to be having a crisis. Do you think that white people are in a crisis if they no longer are like any of the top athletes in their in a country that was originally, you know, I guess primarily white people? Yeah, actually, if you look at the boys team on the US side, there is it looks a lot more diverse, I guess I would say that's more diverse in the sense it's less Chinese. Right. But the girls Olympiad teams, they seem very, very Asian. So I don't know if it's like about like value systems, even like putting gender into it. Yeah. Yeah. You guys know about China, the men and the women are actually quite equal relative. It's like actually not very patriarchal relative to even other East Asian countries. Somebody said if you can't beat them, join them. Somebody said there's also a culture of ignorance in the United States in Asian countries, it's more cool to be smart compared to the cultures of the West. Being into building model rockets in fourth grade would yield very different social backlash in those two anthropological environments. Basically, long story short, Andrew, in America, there is a culture of ignorance around knowing uncool things, even if those uncool things like math are incredibly important for society. Right. Right. And I just feel like that's why I want to say the stereotype should be that not Asians are necessarily good at math, but they care about being good at math. Like Asians care. I think a lot of I think anybody can be good at math if they care enough. But to be honest, a lot of people don't care. But a lot of people use that as an excuse. And I actually went on a math Reddit board to do some research and somebody said, Listen, this is their studies have shown this until you get to a very advanced level of math beyond what you'd be normally studying at a base level in college. You actually do not really need any unusual aptitude to learn the math. You just need to put in the effort and not hate the math. And it certainly seems that Asians on average study pretty hard and enjoy math or at least don't hate it. David, you know what the Chinese guy once told me? And this is a real quote. He said he was born in Asia. He was like, You know, to me, I have fun solving a math problem. That is how I get my dopamine. Like I have fun. It feels good. Right. You know, and he's talking about it almost like hitting a three pointer. You know how you feel when you hit a three pointer, David? Right. That's how he feels when he solves a math problem, math algorithm, you know, and I'm just saying once you have that built into you, and that's not necessarily something you're born with, I don't necessarily believe. No, because a lot of people will be like, Oh, well, you know, it's Asians, they like math. It's sewed into their double helix. No, it is taught that they draw enjoyment from it. And then once you enjoy something, oh my God, you can be amazing. And I think there's a culture in Asia of like cheering each other on in math class, too. When the one guy who did the toughest math problem, people are like, Oh, wow, look at that guy. He solved that in America. They're like, look at this sexless nerd. That's the dweebiest little dick guy around. No, it's true. That's the American culture. Obviously, I'm saying it in extremes, but that's the truth. Somebody said, What do you expect from people who invented the world's first calculator? Obviously, we're talking about the abacus. Nice. Um, Andrew, let's just get into our takeaways, man. What do you think about this? Because this, the comments could go on forever because guess what, Andrew, this meme is going to pop up again next year with a whole new group of people that are still going to look Asian. I mean, if you look at the careers that a lot of Asians end up going to, even if you come from a mathematician family or not, a lot of them end up going into accounting, engineering, finance, running a small business, which still is actually a lot of numbers. And these are all four things, bro. You better bust out a spreadsheet because you're going to need it for all of these jobs, essentially, or you need to know math on some level. Right. Right. Obviously, if you're doing engineering, you're going to need a command of much more advanced math. But if you're running a small business, the math is everything. At least the basic. Dude, you're going to be marking out your inventory. What costs this? Oh, I made this, even Bola fo. What's the cost of this bowl of fun? Good sold and exactly your cogs, all these things. So I guess like what I'm saying is that I think Asians are just exposed to math early on as part of life and they enjoy it and they feel like it's important to understand math because they they know that it's like the building block of a lot of things. But it is nerdy. I'm not going to lie. It's nerdy. It is. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I mean, if you looked at all the kids that were the ultra high tier math elites, they don't look like the kids on Tik Tok or IG. I'm a YouTuber. You think I know how to read this problem here? Let a sequence of n and greater than less than one be the positive real numbers of the property that a and sequence to the second aid to I don't know. Yeah, I read this. I don't know, man. I think it is actually a great discussion about stereotypes as well. Like, are they just observable patterns? How problematic are stereotypes? How true are different stereotypes? Like, obviously, some are probably a lot more true than others. Obviously, I'm not saying stereotypes are true to 100 out of 100 level in the way that a lot of people misapply them. But clearly, there had to have been a pattern of observation that people noticed to even develop that stereotype in the first place, right? Yeah. But I'm not going to lie. Listen, I think it's going to be a funny meme for years to come. Do I think that that there's just going to be a lot more Asian kids that are math Olympiads? Bro, hell yeah. Listen, all I know is that math is so associated with like Chinese nerds or that there's Robin gone, the math rapper. And he's good. He saw it like he's still good at rapping. I smoke my calculus. Don't need no calculator. Anyway, guys, let's run the clip. Let us know what you guys think in the comment section below. What do you think of the stereotype that Asians are so good at math or that they love math more than other groups of people? Is it right? Is it wrong? And until next time, we're going to hop up boys. We out. Peace.