The sauna is a social network | Adam Rang | TEDxTallinn 

Tere! Where can I get a leil shirt?

That was fantastic. I enjoyed watching this as an Estonian abroad and learned something new as well about our saun history. You should start a podcast and dive even deeper with guests and interviews with people who are passionate about saunas as much as you are. ☺️ Well done Adam. 🤝

@@alansilmann Thank you so much, Alan! Glad you enjoyed it. There’s more videos on our channel here if you’re interested but I’m also currently writing a book about Estonian (and other’s) sauna cultures!

@@Estoniansaunas Fantastic, looking forward the book! 👍 Also wanted to share a fantastic saying about Estonian sauna culture what I heard in Mulgimaa. And I have passed this saying on my travels around the world when talking about Estonian traditions. “In Sauna all men are equal”.

😂

Thank you for taking the time to listen, Nick!

You may have missed a few key points! Firstly, there are hundreds of thousands of saunas just here in Estonia that are better than 'celebrity saunas'. I think it's fascinating that this is one item for which wealth has no correlation with quality. Secondly, we do not define what those celebrities have as saunas. I was giving examples of how the word has been completely misappropriated for any kind of heat therapy with no connection to the actual tradition. It's why the Estonians in the room are laughing but maybe I could have explained that a bit more for international audiences. As it happens, I never planned to show any of my own saunas but it was a last minute request from organisers and other speakers during the rehearsal. They like the army truck sauna but also thought it was a nice way to round off the story from 'user' to 'developer' and from fleeing the Soviets to taking one of their instruments of oppression and turning it into a celebration of our culture and freedom. I completely rushed everything though and missed lots out so I didn't explain that properly. When I was asked to speak, I immediately knew that I wanted to try to make 'leil' the first Estonian word in English as that's a mission we've been on for a while. The original version of my talk, before it was edited down for length, also contained lots of examples of great saunas both around Estonia and within growing communities of sauna enthusiasts around the world. I mean, we have a whole RU-vid channel here, plus Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages dedicated to documenting them (we're @EstonianSaunas on all of them) and get contacted literally every day to recommend other people's saunas, which we are very happy to do. So I thank you for your comment for enabling me to explain all this!

@@Estoniansaunas right on brother if your ever in south texas you have a open invitation to come by , corpus christi texas baby !! sauna really is better with people, i have sauna before by my self but its so much better to do it with people , thats why i really like the most , so im right there with you man

@@TridentFishing That would be amazing! We planned a whole US road trip (including to see lots of saunas) but unfortunately we planned it for 2020 so it got cancelled by the pandemic. We definitely want to book new flights when we can and do that. Hopefully, we will get a chance to enjoy leil with you one day. Sorry, I thought you were making fun out of me at first - but then I missed my own key point, which is that it's not always easy to understand each other on modern social networks!

@@Estoniansaunas its all good man cheers