# Is Matt vs Japan a Scammer?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Matt vs Japan
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Am I Matt Vers Japan a scammer? Well, you know what? Maybe I am. In these past couple years, there's been a lot of controversy surrounding me. There's a lot of people saying a lot of things. And you know what? A lot of it is actually true. I've made a lot of mistakes. And I guess I thought that if I just laid low enough, eventually the mistakes would blow over. But I finally realized that some of these mistakes are so indefensible that they're never going to blow over, and I need to own up to them. So, in this video, I'm going to lay out everything that's happened to me in the last couple years surrounding all these controversies, and I'm going to let you decide whether you think I'm a scammer or not. So, the first thing I should probably talk about is my partnership that I had with Yoga, also known as Lucas. So, Yoga and I started working together in 2017, 2018. Worked together for a couple years. It was going pretty well, but ultimately we had some disagreements we couldn't work out, and we decided to go our separate ways. Um, but when we were deciding how to split up the assets that we had built up, we couldn't come to an agreement and it ultimately led to a very nasty public split up. Now, I should have handled that situation a lot better and a lot of what happened was directly my fault. But luckily, Lucas and I have since then actually made up and buried the hatchet and we're now on very good terms and I'm very happy to be able to call him my friend. But anyway, in the wake of Lucas and I splitting up in 20 in late 2020, a couple things happened. First of all, I met someone named Ethan and we started Reold together. And also, just a little bit after that, I met someone named Ken Cannon. Now, Ken is someone who was like me in a lot of ways. He's an American who learned Japanese to an extremely high level while living in America. Um, but was a little different than me was he had a background in uh online marketing and online business and he had a business online where he helped people learn Japanese and he made a lot of money. So when I started to become friends with Ken Cannon, he taught me a lot about uh this kind of business and online marketing and I allowed myself to be very influenced by this and it actually led me to decide that I wanted to stop doing Refold and instead work with Ken Cannon. So, I actually talked to Ethan very early on in the creation of Refold and we had decided that I was going to re leave Refold and we together created a plan, a kind of long-term exit plan that would allow me to re leave Refold in such a way that Ethan would be able to continue Refold without me. And this actually went really well. I ended up sticking uh around with Refold for about two years total. And in the middle of 2022, I officially left Refold. And to this day, 3 years later, Ethan and the Refold team run Refold and it seems like it's uh going really successfully. So, luckily that went well. But anyway, around this time when uh I had just started to meet Ken, started to talk to Ken, I was still unreled. Uh an incident that happened that I have to mention is that uh at one point I was having a what I thought was a private conversation with another member of the Japanese learning community. And it turned out that this entire conversation was actually getting recorded. So, this was a two-hour conversation that we had where I was speaking very candidly about my perspective of being a creator in this Japanese learning space. And this uh conversation, yeah, was recorded without me knowing and it was passed around and it got into the hands of someone who really hates me. And this person took clips uh from this 2-hour long conversation and edit it into a video that made it sound like I was saying really terrible things. Uh, like I thought my whole audience was a bunch of whales that I could just milk uh for money by selling um like crap products and that, you know, I thought I was some kind of Japanese god and I would, you know, purposely try to lead my audience into thinking that I'm a Japanese god or something like that. Now, if you actually listen to the whole conversation in context, what I said was actually pretty mild. And so, I've uploaded an entire 2hour uncut uh recording of this conversation, the exact recording that went around. I'm I have uploaded that on my second channel so that you can go and watch it and decide for yourself what you think. I put timestamps to the sections uh that people usually like to quote as you know the when I'm talking about whales or things like that. But anyway, going back to kind of the Ken Cannon thing, what I just said will come in a little bit. But uh yeah, Ken and I got talking, we decided we were going to make a pitch accent course together. uh making was something that I had been wanting to do for many years because pitch accent's probably one of the topics that I'm most passionate about when it comes to how to learn Japanese because it's something that I found out really late in the game and I feel like if I would have learned about it sooner it would have saved me a lot of time and effort and also when I went to go and learn pitch accent I had a really hard time doing so there were not a lot of resources out there and there were a lot of things I had to go and find out on my own through a lot of hard work and I felt like I kind of

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

come up with my own unique framework for teaching pitch accent and I could do it in a unique way that would provide a lot of value to people. Now, I want to say upfront that of course there's also Dogen's pitch accent course. Dogen's pitch accent course is really good. I would recommend anyone interested in pitch accent to go and check it out. But the course that I had in mind was a little bit more comprehensive where it doesn't just give you the knowledge but also helps you kind of train your ears and train your mouth and things like this and also goes into even more nitty-gritty detail that Dogen doesn't go into yet. So, it wasn't meant to kind of replace Dogen's course. It was kind of just supposed to be a different kind of fill place in the market. But anyway, Ken and I uh went on to make this course. Uh it was called Project Uproot, and it had a couple different components to it. Uh one of the components was uh just video lessons where I'm sitting in front of a digital chalkboard and I'm teaching the concept of pitch accent according to, you know, the framework that I came up with. All in all, there ended up being 48 of these video lessons that added all up to over 15 hours of content. Uh there was also chorusing audios where these were basically audios that used example sentences that we created based on the video lessons um that were read by a native speaker and they were you know edited in such a way that you could use them for chorusing very easily and this was to train your mouth and train your ears. Um, we also had an decks that we gave out the students that taught you the pitch of the most common words in the in Japanese. And then also we had live sessions where Ken and I would be joined by a native speaker and we would have the students actually do exercises where they would test their pitch perception and actually speak Japanese and then we would have the native speaker correct their Japanese. And so we designed this course called Project Uproot. We spent almost a year kind of planning it and things like that. And then in January 2022, we finally officially launched it. Now, the deal that Ken and I had was that I was going to mostly make the content of the course and Ken was mostly going to be in charge of the marketing. And at this point in time, it was already set in stone that I was going to be leaving Refold in a couple months. And so, this course basically had to be the one thing that was going to be financially supporting me for the next period of time. I was really putting all of my time and effort into this course, and I really wanted to make a lot of money off it. So, I told Ken to design the marketing in such a way that we would make as much money as possible. And this really led to probably the biggest mistake that I've made in my life thus far, which was marketing this course in a very terrible, off-putting, obnoxious way. So basically the whole we designed this whole marketing strategy that was designed around building false scarcity, building fear in people, making it, you know, going against all the principles that I've always had on my own YouTube channel where we're making it sound like this one course that we're selling is the only way to get a perfect accent. We have some magic secret that other people don't have. You can get a perfect accent in only a couple months using this course. uh if you don't get it, then you're going to sound bad in Japanese and Japanese people aren't going to like and you're only going to have one chance to buy this course. And basically, we tried to press all of people's fears buttons and FOMO buttons and basically just get people um as many people as possible to want to buy this course. And this led to a huge backlash in the community, understandably so. First of all, just because inherently the marketing was very terrible and off-putting. Um but second of all, it was completely against my own personal brand. I was always about uh talking about how you don't need to spend a lot of money to learn a language. Um I actually had criticized some Katsumoto for doing a very similar thing. So I basically was coming across as completely hypocritical. And also uh that video that the hater made where they're taking clips of me out of context to make it sound like I want to just, you know, rip off a bunch of whales. That video started to get a lot more attention once we released Project Uproot and everyone started pointing to that video and going, "Oh, look. This is what Matt was talking about. this is the giant scam he's making to try to squeeze money out of the whales. And so all these things combined to lead to this giant backlash where everyone basically started calling it a scam before they even really knew what it was. And this whole thing about me being a scammer, my understanding is that it stems from this right here. So what Ken and I thought at the time was, you know, we're about to run this course. The course was planned to be a two-monthlong course. So rather than just coming out and trying to explain to everybody, hey, it's not a scam. When we didn't really even have anything to show for it yet, we'd actually run the whole course. It would be a success. The customer would customers would like it. We'd get some testimonials and then we'd come back to YouTube a couple months later showing the testimonials, showing the course, showing the results, and then explain that it wasn't really a scam. Now, I have to talk about, of course, the price of the course. course, uh, Project Uproot was $500 with an optional $250 upsell. So, basically, the base course was $500. You'd get all the components of the course. I mentioned before and if you paid an additional $250 for a total of $750, then you would get additional time with me, Ken, and the native speakers on live sessions where you get more attention. Now, as far as the price goes, uh, if we

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

had fully delivered on the course that we were promising to create, I think $500 actually would have been a pretty fair price because when you think about all the time that it took me to create these uh hours of video lessons and all the time we spent creating the other parts of the course and just all the time I had to spend uh studying pitch myself to get to this point, I think that $500 to really learn all of pitch accent, not just the knowledge, but getting to practice it and really having all the tools you need to learn to speak Japanese with a perfect pitch with perfect pitch accent if you put in the work. I think it's actually pretty fair. And if when I first got interested in pitch accent, there was a course like this that taught all of this and had this all together in one easy to understand place, I would have paid $500 for it happily. I see a lot of people online kind of saying things like uh you know with that same amount of money you could hire like hours and hours of italkie lessons, right? Well, the thing is Ialkie teachers don't know how to teach pitch accent, right? They don't know the pitch accent rules. they've never had to learn pitch accent themselves because they just picked it up naturally as a child. And so they really aren't going to be able to help you if your true goal is to master pitch accent, but this course is. So that's not really a valid comparison. Um, so yeah, there's that. I think $500, honestly, it's course it is pricey, but for what we were promising, I think it's kind of fair. The extra $250 upgrade, honestly, I don't think we had any way to justify that value. I think that was too much and definitely that was an additional mistake. $750 I think was we didn't have enough value to justify that. But anyway, the way that the course played out was we had part of the course content done before we launched the course, but for the majority of the course content, we were planning on creating it in real time and having the students go through it in real time. And at the time, this seemed like a good idea because we could get feedback from the students in real time. they would watch, we'd make a video, they'd watch it, I could see what they thought was hard and not hard, and then I could kind of adjust what I was doing based on that. But in hindsight, this was a huge mistake. Um, because it took way, way longer than we initially predicted to actually make the course. Like I said, we thought that Project Uproot was going to be just a two-month thing, a 60-day course, and it ended up taking over a year to make the basic content for Project Uproot. Part of this, like I said, was just that it took way longer than we predicted. You know, if you've ever worked on a big project before, you'll probably be able to relate to an extent. Um, but the other thing is that, uh, midway through teaching the course, I moved to Japan. You know, the I already knew I was going to move to Japan, but originally we thought I would we'd be done with the course by then. But right when we were still in the middle of the course, I moved to Japan in the in around the middle of 2023. And once I moved to Japan, I kind of got distracted. Uh, you know, I went to a school in Japan. I was studying abroad. It was super fun. I had finally been living in Japan for the first time in 10 years. And so I was still working on the course on the side, but the pace at which I made the course really slowed down. And this again was another huge mistake that I fully take responsibility for. We had customers paying a lot of money for this course. And I should have just even if I moved to Japan, I should have buckled down and made that my number one priority. That's not what I did. I let it fall to the back burner a little bit when I enjoy and enjoyed myself a little bit too much in Japan. And that was a big mistake. And so it ended up taking a whole year to make the basics of Project Uproot. And we didn't even get close to making all the different components that I wanted to make in mind. When I set out to make Project Uproot, I wanted it to be completely comprehensive. I wanted to teach every single nook and cranny of pitch accent, all the little rules, even the ones that aren't written in any other books or resources, and I had to figure out myself just through listening to lots of Japanese and deducing the rules. Um, but we really only created the very base core content of Project Uproot. I always wanted to make more, but because we ended up only selling Project Uproot one time and we didn't have that many students and I had and we had to split all the profits between me and Ken, after a whole year, the money the funds were starting to run low and so we needed to do something else to make money. And so even though in my mind I wasn't totally satisfied with where Project Uproot was, we started selling a new product which was Fluency Incubator. So before I move on to this, just to clarify, Project Uproot was a course that we sold one time. I think registrations are open for one week at the beginning of 2022 and after that we have never sold the course again. So the total number of people that have ever taken Project Uproot is very small. Um and I'll talk about at the end about you know what I think is going to happen to Project Uproot now. So basically this brings us to November of 2023. Basically, the money that we'd made from Project Uproot had mostly run dry and we'd finally finished the first version of Project Uproot. And so, Ken and I launched Fluency Incubator. So, this was not a course like Project Uproot was. It was an ongoing program where students would pay $150 a month or a little bit less if they were paying annually. And then twice a month, we'd all jump onto a Zoom call and we would do various things to help the students stay on track learning Japanese. Like, I would give a presentation on a language learning theory topic. We'd hear from the students on how many hours of immersion

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

they each did uh every week and what content they immersed in that they liked. And then we'd also kind of give them extra homework and assignments and missions and things like that. Answer their questions, help them work out issues, etc. So, we initially sold this just to the students of Project Uproot. And we did that for a couple months and then eventually we did another promotion where Ken and I each sold it to our email list. Uh and when we did this, Ken wrote the emails. They weren't as bad as the Project Uproot launch like marketing copy, but they were still very bad and cringey and spammy and I don't know why I let those get sent out, but I did. And that's a mistake that I made. So, um, yeah, just to kind of clarify with Project Uproot, we sold it once. For Fluency Incubator, we sold it twice. And besides these specific points of promotion, there was no way for you to sign up. It wasn't like there was all just a, you know, a sign up page that you could go to and join at any time. You could only join at these specific points. So yeah, we ran we started running Fluency Incubator. Uh overall it went pretty well. Although definitely in hindsight, I think it was overpriced for that level of price, $150 a month. I think we should have been providing a lot more content, had a lot more structure, uh had a you know, a lot more community for the different students and things like that. We probably should have been doing it every single week, not every other week. Um but overall, the students that did come every other week to the sessions seemed like they were getting a lot out of it. and the contents that we uh presented in the lives I do think were pretty good. So we ran this for close to a year and over time it started to be a little bit of a problem with consistently providing these lives to the students. Now I really don't want to throw Ken under the bus here but I don't really know how to tell the story without talking about this. Basically Ken had some issues in his personal life that led him to not always consistently be able to show up for the lives. So there were times where we'd have to reschedule or cancel a live directly beforehand and we wouldn't be able to communicate very clearly with the students on when the lives were going to be and it was the students were kind of very confused in the dark and it really was not good because those students were paying a lot of money and for the money they were paying they should have really been receiving something premium. And this got worse over time until it got to a point where uh at one point in time late last year, we ended up missing multiple lives in a row. And for me, this was really the straw that broke the camel's back. And I told Ken that I didn't want to work with him anymore. Now, I will say that at this time, I think I should have t I should have taken a lot more initiative to contact the students, keep them in the loop and show up and maybe do lives all on my own, even if Ken wasn't there. Uh, normally in Ken and I's partnership, uh, he was kind of the leader and he kind of had the final say, so I at the time I didn't do that. But really, in reality, I was just being lazy and I was using the fact that Ken wasn't showing up for the lives as an excuse to not show up myself and I was blaming it on Ken when in reality I should have taken responsibility because my students were paying a lot of money. So, that was another huge mistake. I should have taken a lot more initiative at that point in time. So, anyway, yeah, it got worse and worse. Eventually, I told Ken that I didn't want to work with him anymore, and he agreed and we decided that he would continue Fluency Incubator without me and that I would go on and do a new project all on my own. But right around this time, Ken had decided he was going to do a promotion where sell his Japanese course called Protocol 80 uh to his audience. And he asked me if I wanted to do a promotion to my audience as well. And basically, he would write all the copy, he would do all the work. Uh, all I had to do was, you know, send the email to my audience and then I would get 50% of all the sales. Now, at this point, I hadn't actually been making almost any money at all from Fluency Incubator because the consistency issue led to lots of students asking for refunds, and we were giving refunds to anyone who asked for a refund. And so, although I knew it was a bad idea, I gave in to Ken's proposal to sell Protocol 80 to my audience. Now, uh I will say that I have been through protocol 80 and it is a good Japanese course, albeit pretty expensive. But the bigger problem was I knew he was going to market it in the way he markets everything, which is in that used car salesman very scammy style. And by that point, I was completely fed up with that style of marketing. And so I knew it was a bad idea, but I gave into it because I wanted the money. And honestly, the way I thought about it was I've already tarnished my reputation. I've burned my reputation to the ground already, sending out these terrible scammy emails and doing the spammy marketing. How much more harm could a few more do? That was the way I thought about it. Obviously, saying that out loud, it sounds terrible. It's a huge mistake. I should have known way better. But that's where I was at the time. And so, to make it all even worse, I told Ken to just send the emails for me. And I didn't even want to look at them because I was so fed up with these emails. It hurt me

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqWWKPvv2Ls&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 24:00)

every time to read these terrible emails that were going out. I didn't even want to see them. So, I just told Ken, "Write them. Send them. Tell me when it's all over and tell me how much money I made. " And what happened was in one of these emails, Ken mentioned uh George from Japanese from Zero. And again, he's writing as if it's me, so it sounds like I'm sending this out. And he mentions that uh George from Japanese from Zero. He doesn't say it directly, but he uses this kind of sneaky wording to make it sound like George is endorsing Ken's Japanese Course Protocol 80, and he was not. And so George got word of this and he was understandably extremely upset because his name and his brand are being used to sell a course that he doesn't endorse. And I don't think George uh approves of the style of marketing, this kind of used salesman style of marketing that Ken always does. And so George contacted me over line saying, "Hey, what is this, you know, this stuff that I'm seeing about you um saying that I'm endorsing Ken's course? I'm not I never endorse Ken's course. " And he was very upset, understandably so. And instead of just taking responsibility and saying, "Oh, I'm sorry this happened. This is all my fault. Um, I'll do what it takes to make it better. " Instead, I put all the responsibility on Ken and I said, "I'm oh, Ken did it. I didn't even know about this. It's all Ken's fault. I'm sorry. " And I was basically uh, you know, a little wussy. And that understandably made George even more worse and even more upset. And he made a bunch of videos talking about the situation. So that was all it was obviously a huge mistake to let someone send emails to my audience without me reading over them. Obviously it was a huge mistake to ever send out these types of spammy emails and it was also a mistake to put the responsibility on Ken and not take responsibility on myself because I was letting this happen the entire time and because of that it's entirely my responsibility. So that's basically the gist of what happened after all of this. I officially stopped working with Ken 100% cut all work ties and I went on to start a new community a couple months ago called uh the immersion dojo. It's on the platform called school. I'm basically doing something kind of similar to what I was doing with Ken with Fluency Incubator, but instead of twice a month, it's every single week and I'm also providing a lot more content. In addition to that, there's also a bigger comm community element and I'm talking about all the new language learning theory ideas that I had that I was talking about in Fluency Incubator and I'm charging $18 a month. So, I think it's a lot more reasonable price point. So, if you're interested, I'll put a link to that in the description. Um, as far as I know, Ken is now continuing to run Fluency Incubator, although I haven't been in contact with him recently. And I also believe that he's providing a lot of extra content to make up for all the lives that were missed that but that people paid for. And he's also just offering refunds to anybody that just wants a refund instead of the extra content. Uh, as far as what's going to happen to Project Uproot, honestly, I'm not totally sure because I haven't talked to Ken about this yet. But I think what I want to do is I don't really want to sell Project Uproot cuz I feel like the whole project is already so tarnished due to all the stuff that happened and the way it was marketed and everything. And so what I think I want to do is some point in the not too far future, I want to make a new pitch accent course where I teach all the same stuff that I teach in Project Uproot, but I'll just remake all the videos, all the content, and then I will uh sell that at a probably much cheaper price than Project Uproot was, and I'll offer a free copy to any of the original Project Uproot students. And hell, I'll give it to the all the Fluency Incubator students as well. So that's basically the gist of it. I want to apologize for all of these huge mistakes that I made. And I also want to apologize for it taking me so long to just come out and be honest and transparent about what happened. And I also want to apologize for the combination of those two things leading to so many people's time and energy getting wasted on creating and viewing kind of drama videos within the Japanese learning community, which is really not helping anyone reach their goals of learning Japanese. So, I'm really hoping that with this video, we can put all the drama in the past, move forward. I'm back on YouTube. I have a lot of content that I've been wanting to make for a long time now. And I'm sure I'm going to make more mistakes because at this point, my behavior seems to definitely be a recurring pattern. But, at the very least, I'm planning on trying to own up to my mistakes a lot more quickly and more readily going forward. So, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/40920*