The Future of Language

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Now, full disclosure, John and I have known each other for a few years now. We go back a little bit. First of all, thank you for being here. It's nice to see you. Welcome.

My pleasure.

For those who may not yet know you in the audience, how would you describe your work? You've written about pronouns. You wrote Woke Racism. You're a consumer and a lover of culture. How would you describe your work to people?

I think what I think of myself as is I teach linguistics at Columbia, and I teach it because I engage in linguistics academically on the side, writing things that nobody ever reads. And then I also try to write books about language that a person might actually enjoy. So that's one thing. And then I am a race commentator. If you went back, say, 20 years ago and before, I'm controversial and conservative and Republican, etc. I was never the second or the third thing. And I think these days I'm just seen as contrarian on race. But then also with the Times, it's actually every week, which is a full-time job in itself. So now I think of myself as a media writer, which I didn't used to before. So those are some, those are some of the things. Basically, I'm a linguist who is an editorialist as well.

So we'll get to the past in a couple minutes, but let's look to the future for a moment. I'm gonna make you play, you know, fortune teller or look in your crystal ball a little bit. You can take this in either order you want. Let's talk like body politics, the politics of our nation right now and our world, and also talk language for a second. Where are we headed? And you can take that either one, first politics or language. What's your view of our crystal ball right now?

Well, in terms of language, we really are at a revolutionary time in that I think that the age of print is behind us at this point. I think most people are more interested in taking in information through the ear. I think they always were. And increasingly, I'm thinking that the past maybe 300 years of print being considered the main way that especially relatively educated people get their information, that was because there didn't exist the technology to have so much speech now pumped into our ears. And so I have noticed that it was in about 2020, I thought, I prefer to write. I didn't like to be on radio shows. It seemed to me too evanescent. And around 2020, I thought, if I only write now and if I don't start guesting on podcasts, then I'm not really in the game because podcasts are now where it is, as opposed to what used to be called a magazine that you held in your hand. And so I think that we're just in that world where it's about orality. The other day I was talking to a student at Columbia in one of the classes I teach, and I said, you know, I can smell that none of you are actually engaging the textbook except what's-his-name. I can tell you're just not doing it, and it's different than it was 10 years ago. And I said, can you tell me, like, don't pretend you've been reading the textbook. Why do you not engage the book? And he said, well, to tell you the truth, I would much rather get— and remember, this is a brilliant Columbia kid— I would much rather get my information from YouTube. All the same things are now on YouTube with people demonstrating, and so I don't want to sit down with the book because I find it static. And I thought, that's not just him. He wasn't alive in the 20th century. That is the way a whole group of people are now thinking who are soon going to have gray hair themselves. And I don't think we can fix it. And it's also— Another thing that I'm trying to grapple with and figure out how I might deal with— it's nice to write books, but the way that generation takes in information is through clips of things, and I can see it with my 11- and 14-year-old. I think of those clips as, as clips of something and kind of evanescent and not the real thing. To them, what they call videos is the main form of getting information, and I don't see that that's gonna change. So long form in general— is in danger. There will always be an audience for it, but it will never be like it was before. So that's what I'm seeing with language.

Let me then— we'll get into that. We'll get to politics in a second, but you brought up so much we have to dig deeper for a second. You said something in there. You said maybe it's always been this way, or in fact it always has been, I think, meaning we've always enjoyed or appreciated or craved the spoken word more than the written word. That caught my attention. You really think that? Even overriding the last 300 years, as you were pointing out?

Definitely. I think that— well, for one thing, we're not built for reading. And probably every second person doesn't like reading, particularly because for one thing, we are social animals and reading makes you all alone. I think that most people find a certain warmth in getting it through the ear rather than having to use their eyes. And so, for example, talk about Woke Racism. That was the first book I wrote where more of it sold as audio than as print. And for the one before that, Nine Nasty Words, because I could see that coming, I thought, I'm writing this for the ear. I'm writing this for people who are gonna be listening to it in the car. So I would read out the pages to myself. It's written in a very spoken cadence because I thought most people aren't gonna go like this. And that's just the way it's been. So yeah, I think I love reading. I like being alone, but that's peculiar. That's not the normal way of a human being. And so, yeah.

Go back to your Columbia student for a second. So if we—

Must I?

Pulled him— what'd you say?

I said, must I? Which isn't nice. He was a nice kid.

What happens at the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival stays at the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival, okay? And if you're listening on the pod, just pretend you forgot what Jon said. All right, question for you. So we've read a lot about, you know, this sort of professors and academics decrying the destruction and erosion of attention spans and how their students can't read anymore and things like that. So pull that student up in your mind, even make him an archetype or her an archetype or they an archetype. And I want you, Do you have that same read? Meaning, is this a deeply pessimistic story? Have our kids' attention spans completely eroded and are they incapable of long-form thought? Or is there a more positive story within this?

It's hard because the Columbia kids are rather advanced. And so I haven't seen this massive fall-off that a lot of— that's fashionable in journalism to write about. But certainly, Let's see. I started teaching at Columbia in '08, and I remember what attention spans were then, and they weren't ideal. College students are college students. But these days, yes, it's harder to get them to read as much. It isn't that any of mine have never read a novel or anything like that, but it's harder to get them to pay attention to text. Or, for example, with the course I'm talking about now, it's a music history course, and the textbook is this Gorgeous, colorful thing with audio supplements that now you can get online. And when I taught the class 10 years ago, about every other student read that diligently, including some who were ex-military, didn't grow up in educated households because it was the book. Something happened around the pandemic and that has changed. And then also this business of look at this video and you or me think, yes, look at that shortened version of something, that thing on the side. And then realizing that for them, that's ABC. That's also going to be about attention. Everything is 1.5 minutes.

We'll get to art even more later on. But do you think that same thing in the land of deepfakes? And by that, I mean, right now you're talking about video being the currency for a lot of these people, kids, students, but people broadly. If we begin to have a degradation of our trust in those videos, what happens then?

It's getting scary, isn't it? I mean, I like lurking with Twitter. I enjoy watching it go by. I don't tweet much. But it's at the point where you really do have to think, is this real or not? And you have to really consider it, and you have to go to the effort to find out. And so was there an octopus the size of a building? And at first you think, what? And then you know, not really. Or yesterday, although there was a giant octopus, a fossil octopus discovered that was enormous. That was yesterday. But I had to check. I was thinking, how big does an octopus get? This octopus was enormous. Or also the one that went around yesterday of Trump not just nodding off at a meeting, but like with his head way down on his chest. And I thought, has it really gotten to this point? Then I thought, wait, there's no way he would have allowed himself to be photographed in this way. And it turned out to be fake. Yes, it is rather frightening because frankly, the technology is so good. It also makes it harder to be a professor, too. I wrote a piece a few weeks ago where I said that when a student hands in a wonderful paper to me now, I can't help thinking, did she do it? And frankly, probably not completely. I was saying yesterday to that same class, you know, guys, I'm going to— I'm going to have you do a final paper. And I said, you know what? The way this is going, I know that you can just push a button and hand me these papers. And I said, guys, can you do me a favor because I've been working so hard for you and do yourselves a favor and write it yourselves? And you know, I like all of them. I know them all by name, but I could tell in the eyes a lot of, a lot of them that they were thinking, I'm gonna have AI write my paper. I'm sorry, I'm busy. That's the world that we live in. Thank you, listeners. Please make sure to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, send them to mailbag@andreyang.com. We'll do our best to answer them.

Thank you!

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I was gonna ask you about politics, but we have to keep going. So what do we do about that? And by that, I mean, what do we do What do we do in education about the fact that students can produce very nearly anything they want on a much faster timeline than would ever happen by actually writing it or producing it themselves?

We have to reconceive what we think of as education, for one thing. And to be honest, this is rather sad, but that music history class, I decided this is the last time I'm teaching it because I can't assign a paper. I can't— they're going to use AI and there are too many of them for me to give them an oral exam. Examination as if we were in ancient Greece or in London about 125 years ago. That would be kind of a chore. Not to mention that they could use AI to prepare for those sessions. And my feeling at 60 is I thought, you know, I'm just going to leave this behind. And next I'm going to have to worry about AI being able to write my editorials because that has already happened. There was an AI slop version of me writing about how complicated the Ukrainian language is. It was using my turns of phrase. It had my pacing, and it was all complete BS that made me look like the worst linguist in the world. I don't quite know why they chose me, but, you know, I said Ukrainian is like an erector set. I could have written that, but it makes no sense. So that is the sort of thing that is happening. Education is really going to have to change. I'm not quite sure how to handle it beyond oral examinations or having students write live in class, but then they don't have time to compose their thoughts the way they used to. Luckily, AI can read bad handwriting. That's one thing that I realized, that you don't at least have to deal with the chicken scratch. But still.

So I'm going to ask a question that I bet many of you might be thinking when it comes to language acquisition, cognitive work, critical thinking. So you're a linguist. You know a ton about—

Ostensibly.

Yeah, ostensibly, right? You know a ton about how language works. If this AI revolution forces us to, in some level, abandon the rigor and the dedication we used to put into learning letters, learning how to write and how to think and express our ideas in writing, does that have a cost for us cognitively? Are we going to, like some professors talk about, you know, raise a generation of subcognitives? Do with that whatever you like. What do you think?

This is— it's delicate. Not subcognitives, but what we're going to lose when we lose the primacy of writing, for example, as the primacy of print, we're going to lose the ability to engage extended argument. It's going to become something that some people happen to be good at, but it's going to be harder to train people in it. And, you know, on the one hand, yes, That's a problem. That's a problem for politics. That's a problem for modernity. It's going to be a decline, and I see it as pretty much inevitable. However, let's try this. There's a whole science among anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists where they say that if people— if a people live primarily orally, which most people do, most human beings do not live on the page the way all of us probably do. For most people, language is something that it's a mouthful of air and you talk. If you live in an oral society, extended arguments is harder because it takes a certain kind of attention that it's difficult to pay within the chaos of conversation. Not to mention, it's hard to retain an extended argument all by yourself. It's better to preserve it on the page. If you don't have that kind of extended argument, not only are you still a human being, but I think all of us might want to say we extended argument print-addicted people are certainly not more advanced than the oral people. It's just that we're different. And so maybe we can just say that we're gonna be different and that there are better things about orality. I'm gonna use a word that always works. It's kind of like, you go like this and you say holistic, people take that as indicating that you've actually made an argument. I'm gonna say that orality is more authentic. And so maybe we're gonna become more authentic.

Authentic has entered the dialogue today. Fair enough. All right, well, now you might be unhappy about this or happy, I don't know, but now I will talk about politics for a second. You can talk about our current president, you don't have to, whatever you want, but now put your powers of prognostication to politics. Where the heck are we headed politically? Is there a good story to tell? Is it bad? What do you think?

I actually don't think what I'm supposed to think. I don't think that it's as broken as we're taught to think because the Trump administration is so extreme and so obviously mistaken in so many ways and so sensorially off-putting, even to MAGA, MAGA people. I think that that example might mean that if the die— the dice come out the right way next time, we might have a leader who will lead by being not like that. And the idea will be that it's morning in America again in a different way. That's my hope. I think it's possible if there were a uniquely charismatic person who came along afterward. It wouldn't be Rubio. And among Democrats, it wouldn't It wouldn't be, say, Cory Booker. It wouldn't be Gavin Newsom. We need somebody more magic than that. But I think it could actually happen. I don't think that we are stuck with something being called one big beautiful bill and all of the vulgarity and the nastiness and the way Pete Hegseth communicates. I think that this is a kind of nightmare out of which we could come. It's fashionable to say otherwise, but that's what I think.

All right, so— oh, there we go. Now, I anticipated that might be your reaction. Some applause out there. So clearly some of the listeners—

I have to say something positive.

Yeah, exactly. There's some hungry for some optimism. So let's go deeper with that. What is the optimistic story? I mean, what do you think? What's the optimistic version of where we go in the next 5 or 10 years?

Remember Obamamania? Remember how all of a sudden he was, he was just God? And I was part of that. I thought he was God. And social media was just starting up. Imagine if somebody else came along who had that certain kind of magic. I think this time it would probably be a woman for the contrast. It would not— It would not be— I don't think it would be— let's just leave it there. I think it could be a Black woman. It wouldn't be a black man because Obama already happened and it wouldn't be seen as dramatic, and so you need it to be somebody different. But if there could be a magic person, imagine what having the phones in your pockets and all of these little clips, etc., all the time could do for that person. It would make that person magic even faster than was possible with Obama. I mean, just imagine, for example, Michelle Obama doesn't want to run, but if she did, she'd win. Frankly, that's it. She would win against anybody. And imagine what a mega— Celebrity she could become by running for president and it being clear that she was gonna win, etc. So I think that that could happen. However, if it's, say, Gavin Newsom versus Marco Rubio, and Rubio is kind of cute enough that he can grab people across the aisle, and Gavin Newsom says a few things that are kind of stupid, and he looks kind of like Mitt Romney, etc. Then it'll just be Rubio and we'll have more of this stuff. But I can see it going the other way.

All right. I want to hit you with a theory. You can digest it for a second, and then I promise I'll resolve to a question with it. But there's something in what you just talked about. You talked about magic, talked about all these viral clips. You talked about the sort of communication superpowers that this person might have. I've been talking to people a lot because, you know, from my coaching work, I focus a lot on delivery, not content, not what you say, but how you say it. And so I have this kind of beginning theory about what AI might do, which is that because content is universally available, pretty darn good by all large language models for the most part, that delivery, meaning how you say that stuff, might become even more important. It already was important, but maybe even more important. So the question I want to resolve to on that is you're talking about magic, Michelle Obama or someone who you can film and it just— the charisma jumps across the screen. How important do you think Because you're a linguist, how important do you think how you say these words are, especially in the field of politics, versus what the words are?

I think that in our times, the whole notion of what articulate is, is also changing because of this value that we place on authenticity, because of how hot and close up somebody seems on the phone. I think vernacular charisma is going to be more and more important. And there'll be some people who find it crude, but they'll be in a minority. And so if you can see how— I'm picking somebody at random— Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman from Texas, would speak in, you know, this kind of twanging, vernacular, street kind of way. And she didn't win her latest election, but she became a star partly based on that kind of articulateness. I think that that is going to be increasingly common. The way Marjorie Taylor Greene often conducts herself verbally, I think that that's going to become normal. And I think it's because of this value we place on authenticity and on the vernacular and also on just the drama of it. I think, for example, your perfect book, Don't Say Um, and how to be articulate and how to keep things balanced. I mean, some things in that book are some of the things that a Jasmine Crockett does. But I think that the conventional sense of what it is to speak well will happen less, less and less. I think the public will value it ever less. Quick example. I was watching the conductor Leonard Bernstein speaking in 1973. He was talking about linguistics and music. And it's funny, you could tell he didn't, he didn't really know anything about the linguistics, but he had done a lot of reading. And so he was, he was clearly a genius. He was speaking off the cuff and he didn't say um once In a half hour. He sounded like he was reading from something, and he was just talking. Every now and then he's scratching his nose. That's over. That is anthropologically fascinating from our perspective. That will never happen again.

There's that famous clip too of Bobby Kennedy speaking in the 1960s after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Same thing, 7 minutes of speaking.

Just talking.

Yes.

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It's your new favorite style essential. Explore more at jenny-bird.com and get 20% off your first purchase using code ONTREND20. That's a perfect segue. You were talking about the coarsening of language a little bit, Pete. Hegseth, certainly our current president exemplifies this. Marjorie Taylor Greene. I'm citing, you know, so-called Republican examples, but it's, it's pretty pervasive. So this coarsening of language, or the way in which we are weaponizing language at times even, what is the cost to our society of that as you see it?

Well, the coarsening is there and it discourages clarity. But, you know, something worries me more, which is— and I'm working on this thesis, I'm not sure where it is yet— but a lot of our problem is how ambiguously We use a lot of our terminology, or even misleadingly. And I hate to take somebody like this, take his name in vain, but it's a really good example. And this is a very sensitive issue, but Ta-Nehisi Coates, the writer, the Black writer, went to Israel. And what he saw was a situation that he described as apartheid. And I have full respect for whatever he decides to think about the situation, but to call it apartheid is a strategy, because we think of what was going on in South Africa, which was absolutely indefensible for reasons almost nobody would disagree with, and the apartheid, the apartness, was forced upon a people against their will for no moral reason. To go and apply that to Israel, where the situation is much more ambiguous, and to be indignant if anybody, you know, calls you on it, that's a misleading use of language, because the apartness in Israel has a history that's very different from the apartheid in South Africa, or a term like diversity, equity, and inclusion, where what do you mean by diversity first of all? And we've gotten used to this very narrow meaning of diversity. Franklin D. Roosevelt would have no idea what we meant if we said, well, we're looking for diversity. He would say, diversity of what? Because it's still— he did talk like that. Because that is what diversity meant then. Equity does not mean equity. We have all had to learn exactly what it means, and a lot of DEI people can't agree. Inclusion— well, who was being excluded and why? DEI is a very squirrely term. It's really a euphemism for affirmative action and racial preferences, which you might agree with very much. But DEI is a way of getting away from the unpleasant associations that racial preferences might have, and then just use this other term, which itself is so ambiguous and so idiosyncratic that in a way it discourages constructive discussion. Are you in favor of DEI? Well, first of all, what do those 3 words actually mean? And then once you figure out what they mean, what exactly are we talking about? If you're going to call it diversity, equity, and inclusion, those words are very far away from these actual administrative procedures and ideological biases. Frankly, there's a lot of that now. Or in terms of The word racism. What do we mean by it? It's a complete mess. Societal racism. It's kind of like dating, which is a word that's always just been bad. What does— what does date mean? If you say they dated, that could mean that they had a malted at Pop's Soda Shop once, or it could mean that they were in a sexual relationship for 10 years. Date can mean all of— all of those things. Racism has become kind of like that. So what exactly do we mean by it? And that's part of why it's so hard to talk constructively about it. So I'm frustrated less by the coarsening, because even I enjoy a show, than by the fact that it's hard to talk about things when the terminology is so squirrely.

Ah, yeah.

Yeah.

Folks, if you come back for Hudson Valley Ideas Festival after hours, you will see John McWhorter do his FDR impersonation.

Yeah, it's a whole routine.

For a 30-minute set. So you can look forward to that. All right, I heard you answer this question on the Sam Harris podcast about a year ago or so, but given that you're talking now about DE&I and the ambivalence and also sort of uselessness of some of the language, did we see peak woke already? If so, when did it peak and what happened? And if not, where are we going?

Woke peaked in 2020 and 2021. There really was something, something almost violent happening, which is why I was moved to write a book about it from my perspective. And that was driven by the fact that there was a pandemic and we were on lockdown and people were seeking reasons to bond together and Platforms like Zoom and Slack encourage an impersonality that unfortunately can lead to cruelty. A lot of the things that we read about in '20 and '21, it was hard to remember that those things didn't happen in rooms. Those things happened in Zooms often, people losing their job for no reason and stuff like that. That was bad, but it's not over. And I don't think it's ever going to be over because it left a kind of a pattern. There's something called path resistance in sociology. And so really, If we think of the wokeness as being that kind of infuriated intolerance where people decide to be punitive in a certain way, so insisting that your view is so correct that anybody who doesn't espouse it enough is defenestrated, that's still with us. Again, sensitive topic, but the way people conducted themselves during the student protests about Gaza 2 springs ago was this, where it was impossible to have any kind of discussion and people were being kicked out of organizations and losing their jobs. The way trans issues are discussed these days in some quarters, you know, even if you have no problem with trans people at all, there are aspects of that debate that deserve discussion, such as the sports issue, et cetera. There's a segment of people who are advocates of trans people who will not let you have any kind of view beyond what they think and who think that you should be eliminated from polite society. That's the same stuff from 2020. The people were not advocating for trans in that way in 2017. So it's still there. It's there also also in the right-wing mirror response as well. And so all of the things that Trump and his gang have destroyed with the nasty language, with the idea that people should be fired with no discussion, various organizations shut down because they're too woke, et cetera, that's the same sort of thing where we're not gonna have a discussion, we're just gonna come with a big rubber mallet and go boing. That's woke. So no, it's never gonna be completely gone, but we're not gonna go back to 2020 and 2021 unless— There was another pandemic, in which case that could happen again for that same mundane reason. Social history is so unpredictable. If there had not been a pandemic, then George Floyd would have been thought of as a horrible thing, but it wouldn't have become a worldwide cause célèbre. That was because we were stuck inside. And then, you know, the rest was history. That's how things often work.

About this policing of language, you write a lot of your columns— fascinating how you'll take on a word like literally or basically or trace the involvement or development of a word like like. You also have famously talked about the taboo words in our lexicon and vocabulary.

Yeah.

I, of course, am interested as a person who helps people speak better in the clutter and the litter that, you know, exists throughout our language. Talk to us a little bit about the policing of language and precision, articulateness even more so if you want to. But you have a contrarian take about some of these words. Talk to us about policing language and what you think about that.

Well, I don't know if this is policing so much, but like, for example, and the way, you know, the kids and now people 50 and younger often, but the kids are using like every 6 or 7 words. Frankly, that usage is very grammatically complicated. And so there's a whole dissertation that became a book about how there are very different kinds of likes, and you can see it happening throughout history. Not to mention, and it's difficult to remember this because we don't all have tape recorders in our heads, but before like was being used that way, people paused more and speech therefore was choppier for a very chance reason. I have these recordings I'm not allowed to share of a very white— they may have lived here. It's somewhere upstate. And they're this white family, and they're in therapy. And all 6 of them are in therapy, and you just listen to them talking about their problems in 1966. And all 6 of them keep on pausing. And after listening to them for about a half hour, I thought, oh, wait a minute. It's not that they have some kind of problem. It's that there's no like yet. And so that didn't sound as good to me as all of the likes. Now, it's easy for me to say that as Mr. Linguist, and because I have a starchy demeanor, it makes me look kind of cool to say that like is okay, et cetera. But the truth is my 11- and 14-year-old now use like every 7 words, and I'm sitting there eating, and I'm thinking, oh, this is complex language. But there's a part of me that thinks, will you please stop doing that? And I have actually told them, if you are ever in a formal situation where you're trying to convince somebody of something, Please don't say like so much. You can say it all you want around me, sort of. So that's, that's how like works. But telling them not to do it in casual speech will only make them do it more.

Yeah. All right, so if you come back for the after-hours, not only do you get the FDR impersonation, but you will see or hear the tapes that he referenced of his family.

I should play a little clip.

Doing therapy with only pauses. All right, last question, and then I want to get to all of your questions. Okay, so So I'm just going to give you a topic, and you can riff on this however you want. Art is the topic. If you want to share a little bit about your own interests and journeys with that, you certainly can. You write about it in your columns, of course, often in the kind of PS coda at the ends of the columns. I sometimes like those the best because I get a steer about what I should see moving forward.

That's the fun thing, right? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. But you could also speak about where art is going in terms of how AI may be putting artists out of work or not. So, arts. John McWhorter, cook.

I would be inclined to think that if it gets to the point that you can have performance in your house created the way you want it, like you want, you want to hear Joan Baez singing the Queen of the Night aria from Magic Flute, and there she is standing there doing it and you can just watch it. I would think that that would make people less interested in live performance. I mean, there's an extent to which live performance is fun because everybody's there together, but there's an extent to which you kind of just want to stay home. And I'm thinking that it might be a threat to live performance, especially given the financial problems involved. But that's— if I'm thinking about that AI-art nexus, I would venture that. You can have it in your house. I'm sure we're very close to it, if we're not already there.

Yeah.

You could have Leonard Bernstein conducting a Mahler symphony in your living room, and there he is with his cigarette. If so, I don't think I would want to go see anybody do it live, because I would want to watch that from my sofa. And so, that, really.

Yeah. Do you want to speak at all about your personal connections to art? Your choice.

Oh, I think I— I think Michael is trying to make me say that I have a kind of another line in my life.

Trying to give you the freedom to do so or not, as you choose to.

Which your wife has experience, which is that I didn't do this on purpose, but about 3 years ago, I started realizing a lot of my life lately is playing cabaret piano. I've been doing a lot of that. And my daughter, 14, suddenly turned up about 3 years ago having this great, not usual singing voice, but this great cabaret singing voice. All of a sudden, Ella Fitzgerald is my daughter. And I play for her because I like hearing people in their proper keys. You know, somebody does the sheet music, all old sheet music in particular is written for sopranos, and tenors. Sopranos, that's not as good for singing a Harold Arlen song, and forget tenors. And so the idea is to keep her in her keys, and it keeps my fingers trim. I sing a little too. Often in the shows, I'm kind of kibitzing behind the piano and saying what the song is, etc. And this just kind of keeps going. The other night at my club, the Century Club, they did a one-night performance of the musical Showboat cut down to an hour and 15 minutes. I think probably in the Century Club, predictably, there's maybe one male Black person with a bass baritone who can sing in an old-fashioned way. That was me. So I let myself get pulled into playing Joe. And then they said, well, if you're Joe and you have a daughter who sings in the old way, why don't we make up a character? And she's your daughter, and she comes out at the end, and she sings a '20s song. So we dragged Dahlia in dressed like 1920s, and she did actually a song that was cut from the original production of Showboat in 1927 and has not been up on its feet in literally 99 years. And so she sat there, and I arranged the number in her key, and she did a little dance. And I'm gonna mention this one time because you never know what's gonna happen. It surprised me. I'm gonna mention it in public one time. I sang Ol' Man River thinking, Of course I have to sing this, but how believable am I as a semi-literate stevedore? Everybody should indulge me a little bit. I didn't say that, but I was thinking it. You know, the damnedest thing, I got an ovation in the middle of the show. I had no idea. I've never seen anything like it. I will carry it with me for the rest of my life. That doesn't happen. I've written in critique of ovations in the middle of Broadway shows, but I didn't mind it when it happened to me. So that was Monday night.

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Evening, buyer's remorse.

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See our 7-day return policy at carvana.com. John did sniff out my agenda there, of course, because I'm trying to poke at that topic a little bit about the arts because I think it's It's deeply cool. And I think it also connects to this idea of the theme of today, which is this idea of staying human and cultivating humanity. And certainly the arts are an aspect of that. All right, enough of me question asking. Let's get to all of you.

Hey, Nathan Johnson, family doctor at West Point. Just had a question about— you brought up the whole idea of denigration, which I see as fear-based, isolation, othering versus the magic, which, you know, is the message of hope and abundance. And how do we amplify that message? I think there are certain things in our evolutionary history that we kind of are targeted towards fear. I mean, that's a survival thing.

We need to know about the dangers.

But now we're learning about every danger all around the world. It's being amplified through social media. And I think those messages are being amplified more.

And how do we move—

do you see that as the vision? And how do we amplify the message of hope? Because it really—

we have a chance to move towards that.

I mean, abundance is really A potential reality, but we're maybe missing that. It has to be that the leaders of the country are people who have that commitment to hope that you would expect, frankly, of a normal president. And if that message happened again and again and again— the phone is a monster, though. I mean, the nastiness is always going to grab people because of the inherent drama, because it goes to your amygdala, etc. And there's a certain kind of recreational bro-ness that is going to be online for the rest of our lives. But if it could be countered by the message that— to pick her again at random— Michelle Obama or Stacey Abrams— I'm thinking of 2 Black women because it seems that that would work— we would have a different situation where at least there would be more hope in competition with the bile.

Who else has a question? Hi, John.

I'm Clark.

Hi, Clark.

Hi. So you mentioned your AI clone writing an article that was persuasive, a mimic, but lacked substance. As AI writing gets better and maybe we have robots writing more fiction, do you think we're heading to a place where that will be compelling to us, or is it a requisite of good literature that it be authored by fellow human beings like ourselves? I think we are going to get to the point where we are okay with literature that was written by AI as long as it was entertaining. I don't imagine that'll ever be considered the highbrow position, but I don't see why it wouldn't become a norm. I mean, it's gotten to the point— I'm not name-dropping, this is very randomly, it happened to be Bill Gates. I was sitting at a table with Bill Gates and he was showing me this new AI thing. This was about 3 years ago. And he told it to write an article about reparations for slavery in the voice of John McWhorter. And he pressed a button and that editorial sounded exactly— it was all of my points. It had all of my jokes. And I just thought, oh, goodness gracious. And then he said, now write it in Russian. And my partner at the time was Russian. And she said that even in Russian, it sounded like me. Now, if it's that good, If it's that weird, then I figure the fiction will actually get to the point that it'll be eminently readable and producible for very little money. And why not? Barbara Cartland, AI fiction, same thing.

I have to interject with a question on that one, then I want to hear more of yours. Here's the context. Okay, so you know my wife Hillary. We wrote a musical. In the musical, I have a line that says essentially, none of this was written by AI, spoken in verse. Okay, now I wrote this line thinking thinking that in the theater everyone's going to stand up and cheer, right? But now I'm having this thought of like, maybe people are like, boo, we love AI.

Maybe.

So do you think, to this person's question, do you think we'll actually cultivate taste culturally in which people prefer the robot overlords and their instant creation of creative material to consume? Or will we have a preference for bespoke human-made kind of creative collateral?

There will be a certain kind of person. The person will tilt male. I'm a little comic book guy, but that person will cultivate a taste for AI-written literature. There will be whole groups discussing that kind of thing. And part of it will be maybe what, what kind of prompt you use and then what comes out. But there will be kind of a best AI book ever, that sort of thing. I think I can see that kind of group coming around.

You know, you're killing yourself because each impression you do, it means that you're going to have to come back later on and play the therapeutic tape, play the impressions, everything. Okay. Other questions? Yes, please. Hello.

I'm both intrigued and troubled by a lot of this discussion, particularly interested in both— I think they've sort of come together here, like you're saying, the decline of long-form writing and the emergence of actual AI literature. I guess sort of 2-part question in that way.

Like, if long-form writing declines, what do you think fills the space of that, like, depth and worldbuilding and things that come in a, like, a novel-length work?

What fills that space, and does it need to be filled?

And also, how do you account for sort of spontaneity and surprise, both in terms of, like, requesting a performance in your home or getting AI literature, How doesn't—

isn't this going to start eliminating, like, genuine uniqueness?

Because LLMs are really amazing, but they don't really create new things.

They create really sophisticated combinations that are sometimes randomly sort of unique, but they're not the same way that a human lifetime does. So I know it's a big question, so take any part of that you would like.

Thank you.

The answer to that question is that we can't help the way it's going. And I know that sounds lazy, But I really don't see how you can get the toothpaste back into the tube. In terms of people reading long novels like Atlas Shrugged and the like, the— Yes, it's a shame that that will happen less and less, but films have gotten so much longer, and some people complain about it, but often it means that films are much richer than any film being made before, say, 1975. And that might help. Of course, it's a different kind of storytelling, but I'm not sure I believe the idea that a book is better because it lets you use your own imagination. That's always struck me as a little bit forced. I'm not sure that anybody would say that if they weren't told, told to think it. A film can be very much as good as a novel, not necessarily a film of a novel, but I think film might take the place of that. Even The better Marvel movies, they're all too long, and they're quite rich. I've actually just started watching them. I started to realize that you're supposed to have seen them. It's kind of like these clips are the real thing. I had never seen one until like 10 minutes ago. And really, they're, they're pretty fulfilling experiences. Some of them could be sort of novels. You can see I only half believe the Marvel part. But in general, film could take up that space. I would hope. But people sitting with a book like this, I don't think my kids are gonna do that. And they're both as smart as me, they're in a very book-lined home, they both read, but it's not gonna have the meaning to them that it did to me because there's too much to distract them on the screen. And a lot of what's on the screen is great. So that's the world that I feel like we're in.

Hi, thank you. I read in Freakonomics that For political purposes, it's not necessarily how much money you raise, but it's more so how likable you are as a person. It has almost nothing to do with how much money you raise. What do you have to say, or have you leaned into, or could you identify what makes a person likable? I know we talked about it a little bit, but—

A touch of the vernacular. That's something that America really gets off on, and that's why Mitt Romney didn't become president. He was eminently qualified, but, you know, he had that kind of Disney announcer personality. That can't win now. So that, the common touch. I sound like such a snob.

That's a dazzlingly accurate and brief answer. Yeah.

My question is about language helping us form and articulate relationships, our relationship to ourself.

And I'm thinking of Latin and the intent you required to write and interpret Latin.

So if we have— shouldn't we expect an ambiguity of language to lead more to an ambiguity of knowing ourselves, of our own self-knowledge? I'm thinking sociologically, linguistically. Most humans don't think in terms of knowing themselves. That is a question that comes from Literacy. Once again, it's one thing to think, well, thinking about yourself in that way is advanced. But then again, you don't want to say that the shepherd in the Bulgarian mountains who doesn't read is unsophisticated. Maybe there will be a little bit less of that kind of self-reflection, but one perspective on that is that that kind of self-reflection is a luxury and/or even an idleness. Of people who don't have enough to do. And I'm not saying that's you, and I certainly think about myself a lot too. But I could have less free time. So I think that it's partly that we are strange people. Weird as in the book. We're white, if you know what I mean. It's white, educated, introverted. It stands for something weird. But we all are probably weird in that way, but that's a tiny number of people in this world.

Other question?

It seems to me that AI and race have something in common.

They are both illusions, and when we believe it's true, it's delusional.

Is AI the portal to the solution to racism? No, because AI can just reproduce everything that we do right and everything that we do wrong and can give us anything we want to see. So I don't see that happening. I also probably lack imagination, but no, we're gonna keep processing race until, until there's a reason not to. What do we lose, if anything, with the extinction of languages across the globe and the dominance of just a few? Just did a class on that the other day. I'm supposed to say that every language gives you a different view of the world. Science does not bear that out as much as you might think. And so a language will make you pay an infinitesimal amount of attention to something more than a speaker of another language, but it's not about worldviews. And the truth is, to be gloomy even more, if the language has words for things that we don't. And so it's a language where there are 13 words for acorn and we just have acorn. Well, we can document that language and figure out how they subdivide acorns, but that doesn't mean that people have to be raised in the language. It would be wonderful if we could keep all 7,000. I mean, they differ in such fascinating ways, but unfortunately it's very hard with globalization to see how we're not going to lose at least 3,000 before, say, 2100. And so the idea is to document them, which is very fashionable in linguistics right now. And really, you know, most people are going to speak Mandarin. That's going to be the one with the most speakers. And English is going to rule the world just because it happened to get there first. And, you know, English is interesting in some ways, although as languages go, it's, it's kind of dull. But, you know, we speak it and we're kind of stuck with it. And so, yes, there is massive language death going on. And the idea is to describe. I was looking through a grammar of an extinct Native American language yesterday and thinking, nobody speaks this anymore, but thank God they described it. It has interesting redundancies. And so you don't sit in this language, you sit with your butt. You have to, you have to say butt. You say lick, and then you say, I licked it with my tongue. Well, what else would you lick it with, your back? But you have to specify, and there are all of these prefixes that make you be more specific than you need to be, and it gives the whole language a very interesting Feel. Luckily, they did write it all down.

So, uh, your thoughts on the evolution of the brain, and if you think generationally the brain is going to change. You talk about your children being as intelligent as you are, but they interact differently.

And I know I wasted a lot of my brain in my 20s, and then in my 30s I started taking myself out to dinner with a book. Then I started reading Russian literature in the winter. Because it was the perfect time to do it. And I felt like my brain got stronger. You know, I was really connecting things much more quickly. I had a lot more facility with my brain.

It doesn't mean it has to come from the written word and language, although phrases like, the tide of air is chaotic, remembering something like that from something that you've read is important to someone like me. That's how I experience it.

I wonder if you think that younger people will start to experience those memories or— thought patterns differently and if the brain is going to evolve in a different way. I am unaware of what has happened to the brain on writing, so to speak. And so the brain since widespread literacy, call it like 1650. There may be work on that that I don't know because it's— I don't know it because I just haven't looked for it. But I suspect that Francis Bacon's brain is the same as our brain in that, except maybe certain concentrations of neurons in one part That would not necessarily mean that a person was more intelligent. But I would say that what you got from, say, the Russian literature, my girls are getting from the wittier kinds of videos. For them, they're tossing around all of these bon mots, so to speak, which are from that. And frankly, the wit is exquisite. It's not crude. They are having a great time with language. However, there's a little part of me that does worry, but this may be partly just what my daughters are like. I don't think either one of them are seeking to squeeze their brains. They're not interested in going and learning something because it's difficult. But not all people do, and we'll have to see. 14 is just the beginning, I hope.

A hand for Mr. McWhorter.

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