[@ChrisWillx] THEY’RE BRAINWASHING YOU! (& other secrets that made you click) - Etymology Nerd

Link: https://youtu.be/jxDDW5OKhdA

Duration: 95 min

Short Summary

Lex Fridman interviews a linguistics influencer who studied at MIT and went viral on TikTok for their constructed dolphin language, exploring how algorithms, AI, and social media are reshaping human language—from influencer vocal patterns engineered for retention to AI-generated speech infiltrating politics and academia. The episode covers slang diffusion pipelines, language death, etymology, framework maximalism, and how platforms commodify attention while transforming consensus reality through linguistic bottleneck events.

Key Quotes

1. "Whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary to sell more dictionaries." (00:00:12)
2. "Contentment makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn't trigger your brain to click a like button. The like button, of course, is more of a metric of how willing you are to click this button than it is whether you like something." (00:28:48)
3. "Clip farming is the future of distribution online." (00:53:36)

Detailed Summary

Episode Overview

This Lex Fridman episode features a MIT-educated linguistics influencer who went viral on TikTok for their constructed dolphin language, exploring how algorithms, social media, and AI are fundamentally reshaping human language and communication patterns. The conversation spans etymology, constructed languages, framework maximalism, and the attention economy, with the guest positioning themselves as a public service announcement for creators aiming to expose manipulation tactics.

Influencer Vocal Engineering and Platform Dialects

The lifestyle influencer accent traces back to early beauty YouTubers, Kim Kardashian, and Paris Hilton, filtering into TikTok through what linguists call the "founder effect." The conversation examines how specific vocal patterns are engineered for algorithmic retention rather than authentic expression.

• Uptalk (lengthening final vowels) signals "I'm not done speaking," creating retention-optimized holding patterns that keep viewers engaged
• Downtalk (falling intonation) is avoided because it signals "scroll away," making influencers unconsciously maintain rising intonation
• Mr. Beast deliberately switches between his screaming on-camera voice for 14-year-olds and his calmer interview voice, demonstrating code-switching for different audiences
• Educational influencer accents follow a lineage from Bill Nye → Hank Green → Vsauce, featuring stressed individual words, faster pace, and clipped consonants for authority positioning
• TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn function as distinct linguistic houses with their own dialects, fandom language, linguistic play, and professional speech
• Micro-dialects exist within K-pop and Swifties communities, creating granular subcultures within platforms

AI's Infiltration of Human Language

The episode documents how AI is changing human language patterns, often without people realizing they're adopting machine-influenced speech. The guest provides specific data points showing measurable shifts in word usage and linguistic structures.

• The word "delve" spiked 1,000% in usage since before 2022 after ChatGPT was released, appearing 10x more than normal speech
• An estimated 13% of all research abstracts are now written with AI assistance
• British politicians in the House of Commons now use phrases like "I rise to speak," indicating AI-written content
• Humans are adopting AI-influenced language patterns without direct interaction, with Latin-derived terms like "commendable," "meticulous," and "crucial" increasing in human usage
• LinkedIn posts increasingly use bullet points with negative parallelism ("not just X, it's Y"), a style influenced by AI training
• AI exhibits Latin-based bias over Germanic words because models are trained to sound confident and prestigious, reflecting institutional training data
• ChatGPT converts input words into tokens (smaller segments paired with numbers) that become coordinates in high-dimensional embeddings representing meaning
• Neural networks predict the next token based on learned patterns and translate output back to language

Word of the Year and Clip Farming

The episode examines how words are selected as cultural markers and how viral content distribution has changed linguistic spread. Dictionary choices reveal marketing motivations behind seemingly cultural selections.

• Dictionary.com chose "67" as 2025's word of the year, described as a marketing ploy
• Oxford chose "rage bait" (itself noted as an act of rage-baiting)
• "Slop" was another selection, describing the sloppiness it critiques
• Clip farming—viral phrases engineered to get clipped and monetized—is identified as the future of distribution
• The "no because" opening used by influencers creates an in medias res effect, making viewers feel they're already mid-conversation
• A 2022 Know Your Meme study found words now originate from TikTok and Twitter rather than 4chan and Reddit
• Approximately half of Gen Z slang still traces to African-American English or 4chan despite new platform origins

Etymology and Word Origins

The conversation explores fascinating word histories that reveal the nonlinear trajectories of linguistic evolution. These examples demonstrate how meanings shift across centuries and cultures in unexpected ways.

• "Muscle" derives from Latin musculus (little mouse) because the muscle resembles a mouse moving under skin
• "Salary" comes from Latin sal (salt), as Roman soldiers were historically paid in salt
• "Assassin" originates from Arabic hashishiin (hashish consumers), referring to a Persian sect
• "Candidate" comes from Latin candidus (white-robed), associated with purity expectations
• "Silly" evolved from Old English salig (blessed) drifting through innocent and naive to foolish over centuries
• The Aztec word for avocado also meant testicle, reflecting cultural associations
• "Nightmare" derives from a Germanic demon called a "mare" that sat on sleepers' chests
• "Penguin" likely comes from Welsh "pen gwyn" (white head), originally referring to the now-extinct great auk
• "Orange" comes from Sanskrit through Arabic "naranja" with the 'n' eventually dropping off

Framework Maximalism and Avoiding Simple Narratives

The guest advocates for understanding reality through multiple frameworks simultaneously, warning against the seductive certainty of single-explanation narratives. This philosophical position underlies much of the episode's approach to linguistics.

• "Framework maximalism" proposes understanding reality through as many frameworks as possible because single frameworks are inherently reductive
• People who claim a single explanatory framework solves all problems project conviction that remains seductive even when opposing figures make equally absolute claims
• The war in Ukraine is cited as having hundreds of different reasons, all potentially equally valid, rejecting simple single-cause explanations
• Human brains prefer connecting dots from point A to point B in simple stories, but etymology and reality involve complex, nonlinear trajectories
• The Westermarck effect proposes that children raised together develop sexual aversion to each other, reinforced when sexuality emerges around ages 13-15, driving independence from family

Language Death and Linguistic Diversity

The episode addresses the crisis of language extinction and what is lost when languages disappear. The guest emphasizes that each language represents an irreplaceable worldview that cannot be translated.

• One language dies every two weeks, with approximately 7,000 languages existing today
• Most languages are predicted extinct by the end of the century
• The Potawatomi language contains expressions like "to be a Saturday," representing irreplaceable worldview perspectives that cannot be translated
• Agglutinative languages like Turkish and German create meaning by combining words; inflection languages like English, Latin, and French alter word forms themselves
• Japanese has more syllables per second than Thai, yet both transfer approximately the same bits per second of information due to Thai being more inflectional with more tones

Slang Diffusion and Gay Micro-Languages

The conversation examines how slang spreads through social hierarchies and how marginalized communities create distinct linguistic systems for survival and identity. The guest documents specific pipelines of linguistic diffusion.

• Slang spreads through a documented pipeline: Black people → gay people → straight white girlfriends → mainstream English
• Ballroom culture's "king/queen" terminology originated in 1980s New York City
• Gay micro-languages like Polari (England) and Swardspeak (Philippines) emerged in marginalized communities as survival mechanisms
• Emojis serve as tone tags and substitutes, with ICE protesters using ice emoji to avoid detection
• A Canadian court ruled thumbs-up legally constituted agreement in documented ruling
• The crying emoji evolved from literal crying to laughing in documented semantic shift
• 4chan's anonymity required demonstrating shared slang proficiency, and terms like "maxing," "pled," and "gooning" have slowly diffused into mainstream over a decade
• The manosphere is noted as linguistically interesting, with distinct terminology that has gradually entered broader discourse

Generations, Consensus Reality, and the Attention Economy

The episode interrogates how generations are constructed as consumer demographics and how social media is reshaping consensus reality. The guest argues that labeling tendencies conflict with individual uniqueness.

• Generations as social cohorts began with the Lost Generation after WWI
• The guest argues Gen Z was manufactured as a consumer demographic by marketing interests
• Labels constrain because once they exist, people must choose to identify with or against them
• The Overton window (acceptable discourse range) shifts based on consensus reality shaped by algorithmic amplification
• The memory bump effect locks in language, music, and movie preferences from ages 12-16, creating generational taste markers
• Each person speaks a unique idiolect shaped by background, upbringing, and social circles, despite surface-level linguistic convergence
• Social media's labeling tendency conflicts with individual uniqueness that resists categorical assignment

Constructed Languages and Linguistic Research

The guest shares their personal journey creating constructed languages, including their viral dolphin language. The episode explores why constructed languages have historically failed and what makes natural languages succeed.

• The speaker studied linguistics at MIT, took a conlanging class, and had their first viral moment presenting their constructed dolphin language on TikTok
• They also created a whistled bird language for different communication experiments
• Conlanging has been used for fictional languages including Dothraki for Game of Thrones and Klingon for Star Trek
• Esperanto is a famous constructed language intended as a global second language but did not achieve widespread adoption
• A hypothesized conlang called "ithquil" was designed to create maximum information transfer but has no native speakers because it is impossible for humans to learn
• Cornell University has a bird tracking app used for notable research on bird communication

Language, Information Transfer, and Communication Speed

The episode examines the relationship between language structure and information transfer efficiency, including why certain keyboard layouts persist despite being suboptimal. Language serves purposes beyond pure information transfer.

• Language serves purposes beyond information transfer—it facilitates ritualistic bonding, social ties, and establishing relationships through small talk
• Courtesies like saying goodbye on phone calls serve bonding functions rather than pure information transfer
• ChatGPT does not speak English as humans do—it predicts tokens based on a statistical model
• The English language is actually a homogenized category where everyone speaks their own slightly different version with shared reality between individuals
• QWERTY keyboard was designed with the most-used letters on edges to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, making it purposefully inefficient
• Alternative keyboard arrangements can make people 30% to 50% faster than QWERTY

Recommendations and Philosophical Framing

The guest offers specific recommendations for navigating the attention economy and linguistic manipulation landscape. They frame their work as exposing tactics rather than moralizing about them.

• The guest frames themselves as a public service announcement for creators, aiming to expose manipulation tactics without direct moral judgment
• They recommend consuming diverse media across multiple sources to combat confirmation bias and algorithmic filtering
• Brave New World is cited as more relevant than 1984 because people entertain themselves while not realizing they're in a "dictatorship" consuming content and drugs
• Tristan Harris from Center for Humane Technology notes that Anthropic appears better from an optics perspective, but every platform has the same goal of training AI as fast as possible

Full Transcript

Show transcript

67
was voted word of the year in 2025 from
dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not
even a word. Don't mean anything. Well,
you have to understand that whenever a
dictionary chooses their word of the
year, that's a marketing ploy by big
dictionary to sell more dictionaries.
Yes. 67 of course is this reference
where if you say it, you can go viral.
That's the idea behind 67. That's the
whole joke that this is a possibility of
getting clipped that you can cash in on
the virality of it for your own game.
And dictionary.com played that game, but
every single person who did it also cash
in on that. There was a Connecticut
house representative, Bill Buckby, who
said 67 on the Connecticut uh state
floor. And all these people are doing
the exact same thing as Talon Kenny, who
was the um basketball player who started
the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids
who were cashing in on it, like the 67
kid. All of it was a ploy for virality
and it is a realization that clip
farming is the future of distribution
online.
>> Wow. Okay. But it's a word that doesn't
mean anything and is specifically
designed to be vacuous and to incite the
question, what does that mean? Is that
is that unique? I don't believe that it
doesn't mean anything. Right?
>> I believe even when something is absurd,
absurdity is a meaning. And it's absurd
for a reason. And it's absurd because
it's sort of critiquing the general
information ecosystem. It's absurd that
this would emerge as a word, but that is
the meaning. The absurdity of the word
is its own definition.
>> Ah, okay. So, it's a story about it.
It's a meta word.
>> Yeah, exactly. It's it's all it's a
knowing wink.
>> By uttering 67, you're playing into the
ponopticon.
>> Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the
year.
>> Right. They're also they're rage baiting
with that. They they're hoping that it
sparks controversy. Now when people are
commenting about the word rage bait
being chosen as the word of the year
that drives the word further on Twitter
or whatever X excuse me and uh and as a
result more people know about Oxford
dictionaries. You got to remember this
is big dictionary at work
>> and slopp was another one as well. So a
word describing a a word that is sloppy
describing something that is sloppy
being used for people to complain about
the fact that look at the state of
language today. It's all well it's slop
actually.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I I like to combat that idea
that language is slop or brain rot. Um
there's nothing inherently in a word
that's good or bad. It's a tool that you
can use, but I think we cast our
negative associations of social media
onto the language. And uh yeah, of
course, a lot of the videos we see are
slop, but that doesn't mean the words
themselves are bad for your brain.
>> Do you think is Tik Tok becoming the
most powerful linguistic engine on Earth
at the moment? Is that what's shaping
language more than anything else?
>> Absolutely. There was a study by know
your meme in 2022 that found where words
come from over time by percentage of
platforms. And it started out mostly on
4chan and Reddit and Twitter. And now
it's mostly Tik Tok and Twitter. Um and
again, sorry X. And uh you see
>> it's still Twitter.
>> I know
>> it's still Twitter.
>> I'm I'm holding on to it. Yeah.
>> Um yeah. No, but a lot of stuff is
happening in Tik Tok. There's linguistic
innovation. There's a kind of everything
comes from the user interface. There's a
feeling of a conversation happening
there. Users come there for the
conversation to chip in to be part of
this effervescent thing that's going on.
And in that language is created. Along
with this, we have all these echo
chambers and algorithmic trends being
perpetuated that push modern slang
cycles faster than ever before.
>> Is there such a thing as a Twitter
dialect versus a LinkedIn dialect versus
a Reddit or a live stream dialect?
Are these almost individual um variants
on language in each of these different
cohorts?
>> Absolutely. It's the same way when
you're in your grandmother's house
versus when you're in a frat house. You
have a different expectation of how to
speak. You're not going to speak to your
grandmother the way you would to a frat
brother. There's like a normal way of
communicating. So, a platform functions
kind of like a house. It is a place
where you go to use a certain type of
language. So, on LinkedIn, you're going
to use this more professional language.
On Twitter, you're going to engage in
more linguistic play where you're uh
you'll have all these words like jester
gooning or whatever emerge. Uh on on Tik
Tok, there might be more fandom language
or something. But also, I don't want to
speak broadly about individual
platforms. Even within these platforms,
there are micro dialects going on.
There's K-pop groups and Swifty groups
and uh they all speak kind of their own
language.
>> What did you make of the fallout? I
think one of the most viral instances of
linguistic exposure was that mid
uh jesteru maxing at the club when the
fuds come over. Is it better to be
mogging with the bros than what did you
make of that fallout?
>> Yeah, I think it's kind of doing the
same thing as 67 where there's a meaning
beyond what the literal meaning
technically is. It's kind of a knowing
wink again to the algorithm that by
saying these words you can go viral. You
can cash in on Clvicular's fame. He is
the human 67. Um, and
>> if you talk about him, you get to go
viral. That's that's kind of the thing.
But in doing so, you can also push the
trend further. And while 67 was
innocuous, maybe clvicular is more
harmful. Um, but that that is kind of
the name of the game of virality that
all these things are just key words,
maxing, gooning, whatever. And you can
just say that and you can go viral
because the key words are what pushes
things through the algorithm and they're
what people resonate with on the
personal level when they're scrolling.
It also tells you something about the
person using them. It's an identifier of
inroup uh
belonging.
>> 100%. Language is a tool of identity.
And when you use a word, you are
signaling that you're part of this
cohort.
>> What are the most defining
characteristics of
influencers speaking online for
creators? What how do you think about
the constituent components of that?
>> Yeah. Um, I spent a lot of time working
on the influencer accent. I used to
consult on a court case where one
influencer was suing another influencer
for stealing her vibe and part of that
was the accent. Um, but yeah,
>> hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on,
pause. What?
>> It was here in Austin, actually. Um, but
there was one, it was called the sad
beige lawsuit that there was this
minimalist influencer kind of wore a lot
of brown clothing and there was another
minimalist influencer also in Austin who
wore a lot of brown clothing and they
kind of spoke the same and so one of
them sued the other for for stealing
their IP. Um, but you can't
>> which included
>> the Exactly. So I was brought on as a
consultant in that case and um the
takeaway is that neither of them were
really original and that they pay homage
to an older tradition of influencers
talking. It's a long and illustrious
history of influencers speaking in this.
>> Absolutely. I mean, I think the modern
like the hey guys, welcome to my
podcast. That kind of like that's the
lifestyle influencer accent. Um, that
traces all the way back to like Kim K
and the Paris Elton and early beauty
YouTubers. And then that kind of
filtered into Tik Tok and that same
voice with the uptalk and the vocal fry
is preserved because there's this thing
called the linguistic founder effect
where you kind of follow in the
footsteps of people who came before you
linguistically. And that's why also
platforms do have different commenting
cultures and different linguistic
cultures.
>> Um, and that's only one type of
influencer accent. I obviously
>> pause on that one. What what are they
trying to achieve with the lifestyle
influencer accent? What are the
important parts and what's the outcome
they're trying to get toward?
>> Yeah, great question. There's a few
things going on. One of it is just
social signaling. It's saying I'm part
of your group because that's what all of
language does. So there is a identity
marker of what it's like to be an
influencer. And so you're performing
this idea of an influence. You're also
performing relatability to the young
women who are watching you. At the same
time, the accent is optimized for the
algorithm. There's an element of
retention, which is how long you watch
the video. And when you drag out words,
it kind of works better for captivating
your audience. Um, dead silence is very
bad on the algorithm. So if you have a
live stream or something, you want to
drag out your final syllable. So
actually that uptalk where you kind of
lengthen your final vowel is very good
for online hooking.
>> No way. So if you don't have your next
sentence queued up, you can have a
holding pattern, which is the end of the
last word so that you know what you're
going to say at the end and then after
that you can work out what's coming
next.
>> That's exactly it. In linguistics,
>> holy [ __ ]
>> It's called floor holding. It's an
actual like strategy that people use
before, you know, social media. If you
were on a stage, if you're on a debate,
you want to keep grabbing people's
attention. So use things like filler
words. Actually, um, is a great example
of a floor holding tactic where you are
trying to get people to keep listening
to you even though you don't have
something immediately to say. Alex
Okconor taught me this great one about
Christopher Hitchens that if he was in
the middle of a debate and he needed to
take a sip of water or have a thought,
he would get
halfway through the sentence and then
would continue from there. And I thought
that's so [ __ ] cool. as opposed to
pausing at the end
and then thinking about what he was
going to say by taking or even ask so
you might say why is that the case well
>> really what we need to consider is oh oh
I'm waiting so the use of want to know
what comes next
>> bingo
>> yeah and same with the influencers it's
like if if there's an uptalk there's an
implied I'm not done speaking and that's
kind of the meta signal that there's
something more to come it sounds like
something's is unfinished when there's
up talk and when there's down talk
you'll never hear down like I'm done
like that's like a falling
>> oh it's a handoff there you go
>> so you will not hear that online at all
because it's it's a signal to scroll
away
>> that's funny I I've trained myself I
just said signal to scroll away I like
uptalked because that's like I've sort
of trained myself into speaking in a I
call an educational influencer accent
which is different than that lifestyle
influencer accent
>> okay give me the educational influencer
accent
>> the most interesting thing about that is
you know and I uh kind of stress more
words to keep you watching my videos and
I'll talk a little faster and I clearly
talk quickly in real life, but I think I
there's a difference between a
conversational style and then when I'm
purely reciting a scripted video to hook
you maximally for your attention.
>> M okay. So you're stressing individual
words speaking a bit more quickly.
That's interesting that the valley girl
vocal fry lifestyle influencer. What I
get the sense of as someone who isn't
exactly a a
connoisseur of that content is a
softness, a sort of welcomingness,
almost a familiarity, an attempt to sort
of show, hey guys, welcome back to my
channel. It's almost welcoming you
through the door. Whereas it's much
sharper when you're thinking about the
educational influencer. But given that
one is kind of slow, although there's no
breaks, but it's certainly not d,
it's much more cozy, uh, and the other
is significantly more aggressive in
terms of its pacing.
>> Absolutely. Well, it's again the
question of what are you trying to do on
the meta level? The lifestyle influencer
wants you to feel like you're
parasoially watching this video. An
educational influencer wants you to feel
like they're a trusted source of
authority.
>> And it's that level of communication
that's happening there. I don't actually
want you to relate to me 100%. I want
you to think of me as a teacher if I'm
talking to you.
>> So if you're speaking more quickly with
authority in a almost staccato manner,
it's there's brevity in the words.
There's clipping. The consonants are
always being pronounced pretty pretty
accurately to create shape and color.
This is an interesting one. Have you
looked much at diction? The the the way
that the mouth the um functionality of
the mouth, the physiology of the mouth
works.
>> 100%. That's a big part of linguistics.
Yeah.
>> Yeah. Unreal. So, I I I just really
loved the first time I ever worked with
a speech coach and he said his
description to me was uh vowels give
words color and consonants give them
structure. And one of the problems being
from the northeast of the UK, we have a
glottle stop typically. So, people will
say butter.
>> Butter. There's two T's in butter and
they're not saying either of them. And
neither was I when I was younger. Um
>> by removing or by losing those
consonants, you sort of fall through
words. they don't have the same kind of
structure, clarity, clippiness, and
bringing those back in helps to give it
a little bit more form. But what you're
describing here that you've modified
your speaking style for what will
perform better online is kind of exactly
this greater homogenization effect
that's happening. There's nothing less
valid about a North England dialect than
the received pronunciation or the
transatlantic accent or any of these
things. We just [ __ ] into thinking
that some of these are like fancier than
other accents. uh but it's all in our
heads and yet there's still this
pressure to perform to use a more
standard pronunciation of English. For
my book I interviewed a lot of um Indian
creators who feel like they can't speak
in Indian accents because that's kind of
maligned upon seeing as little status.
>> Yeah. Um and they have to kind of code
switch into more British sounding or
American sounding accents.
>> Wow. Well, in my defense or at least in
my mother's defense, she was sort of
slapping me on the wrist and beating it
out of me as a child. So, I didn't make
it to adulthood without saying butter.
Correct.
>> That's because of an ingrained shame.
There really is nothing inherently wrong
with you speaking in a northern English.
>> I'm gonna go back to it. I'm [ __ ]
gonna go back to it, mate. You [ __ ]
cannot stop me from saying butter as
much as I want. Uh
>> the cost is you might go less viral
because the viewer has an expectation
that I want you to be speaking the way I
expect you to speak.
>> Also, there is a degree of legibility or
illegibility. If you get a strong Jordi
accent from the Northeast where I'm from
or a strong Scouse accent from
Liverpool, it is as close to a different
language whilst being the same. It's
like one step away from speciation in
terms of language. I I think language
can be correctly described as following
a very similar path to evolution and
that there are bottleneck events and
speciation events and the algorithm for
example I think is one such bottleneck
that it compresses our language into you
have to be speaking in these widely
recognizable accents but then it
speciates and and creates new
environments um and so on these
different platforms and in the different
fandom communities on the platforms you
will have new outgrowths of language
that have first passed through this
filter event.
>> What else? So, we've had cozy lifestyle
lady. We've had educational influencer
man.
>> Mr. Beast,
>> there's a beast in the room. Yeah, I was
about to say.
>> Very good. What What's happening with M
Mr. Beast's accent?
>> If you look at his video and uh if you
look at how he actually speaks in
interviews, they're completely
different. He is very deliberately
switching his accent to grab your
attention as much as possible. He
screams in it. I just bought a private
island. I'm giving away a million
dollars. Like, he's he's very like
ostentatious with it. He's screaming at
you every sentence. Uh because that
works for his 14-year-old viewers
attention spans. Uh he's speaking to a
different audience than somebody trying
to educate and is a different audience
than somebody trying to appear relatable
because he's clearly being ostentatious.
So it's reflected in his vocal style.
Like he sounds like he's about to give
away a million dollars even as he does
it, you know?
>> So it's excitement, loudness. What else?
>> Uh shock and awe really. You just you
want to the viewer to remain so
dumbfounded watching the video that they
don't even think to scroll away. It's
like a magician. You just want to keep
the attention going.
>> I saw a live streamer in the wild for
the first time ever a couple of months
ago and I've obviously I've seen live
streams online. I've seen some IRL
stuff, not tons, but seeing an IRL
streamer from side camera or behind
camera was a a real experience. It was
at the Beast Games 2 premiere in
Hollywood. And what I found fascinating
was because the live stream essentially
never ends until it finally does. There
is this permanent edging of the audience
that there will be a payoff but not yet.
And there will be a payoff but not yet.
At least with Beast it's like we're
going to go to the most expensive gym in
the world. But first I'm going to show
you the cheapest and now I'm going to
show you one a bit more expensive. And
now I'm going to and then finally you do
it and there's a payoff and then you're
done and the video is finished.
>> Yeah. Different medium because it's
bounded by a specific time. So, you
know, the beast video is 14 minutes
long, but the live stream is lasting
however long. It's kind of like
definitely live performers. If you go to
like a public gathering and there's
those people doing back flips in a crowd
like uh for money or whatever, they
won't do the back flips immediately
because nobody like people leave
immediately.
>> They dance around for ages.
>> They'll dance around. They'll do a round
of collection of the money. They'll
dance around some more. They'll do
another round of collect. I promise
guys, we're going to get to the back
flips. And you keep watching because
they're edging you. It's what's Yeah,
exactly what's happening. And if you
look at like Tik Tok live streams, I
keep getting click baited by this like
video of this guy trying to peel an egg
and he gets the last part of the egg and
he's like he keeps like edging us like
I'm going to take off this this shell
here. Um
but I think there's something an
important parallel between that visual
way that you get click baited and the
auditory and linguistic way that happens
as well.
>> Okay. How so?
>> Well, live streaming I think there is a
dissolution between this online
presentation and the offline
presentation. And I think it's
particularly dangerous because it it
does play into this um attention
mechanism, but in real life where you're
exploiting real people for it. Um
linguistically speaking, that does mean
you're going to keep doing the up talks,
you're going to um speak in attention
grabbing manners. All of that is Yeah.
And you do kind of delay gratification.
When I do a video and I script it out, I
kind of don't immediately say the
resolution of the question I pose at the
start. And you'll see this a lot in
YouTube videos. Mhm. The payoff's held
until the end.
>> Yeah.
>> What other subcultures online do you
think are particularly interesting
linguistically?
>> Oh, wow. I mean, I've spent a lot of
time studying the language of the
manosphere. I think it's particularly
interesting because half of Gen Z slang
is either African-American English or
it's from 4chan.
>> Um, and you do have a lot of those incel
words trickling in. Um, I definitely
4chan was a linguistic incubator for
decades. Um and uh well a decade and uh
all these new words came came out of it
that are still slowly diffusing into
more mainstream culture like maxing and
pled and you know um gooning.
>> What made 4chan such a useful incubator
for language?
>> There's the anonymity on the platform
where users need to demonstrate a shared
proficiency in slang to show that
they're not a normie and there's this
huge selection pressure to show that
you're one of the 4chan users. And
because it's such a constrained
platform, you can't do video, you can't
do voice, you're not doing face, you
don't know the identity of someone, you
need to very quickly through your
language identify I am one of you, not
one of them.
>> Yeah, you can do like images and things
which that's how we get a lot of um
memes also come from there. But um
linguistically, yeah, there's
>> no one's posting a selfie though, right?
To say this is me, I am one of us
>> in the sense that language is identity.
100% these people on fortune are also
trying to build a shared identity for
themselves.
>> Self-branding, belonging,
>> and it's cool to come up with the new
joke and language spreads when it's
funny. It does. We like saying things
that are funny. That's reasonable. I
It's funny to say I'm podcast maxing.
>> Yeah, that's true. Well, I am I have
been for eight years now. I am podcast
maxing. Uh
what about newscasters? How come they
speak so strangely?
>> They're doing the exact same thing. This
just in and they speak in this
authoritative kind of manner. It's doing
the exact same thing as the educational
influencer really. It's a way of
grabbing attention that's conditioned to
a certain medium. And there's a
broadcaster voice just as there's an
influencer voice. There's a they used to
train like uh American broadcasters to
use this mid-Atlant not yeah mid
Midwestern US accent that was kind of
the homogeneous US accent. And uh that
was also a way of presenting in an
accepted this is how a TV broadcaster is
supposed to speak kind of way. And at
home they might still use like a local
accent speak in a different way. It's
interesting that that becomes enforced
over time just through consensus and
expectation that there's some first
mover somewhere. Maybe one person's
particularly effective. There's a
legendary newscaster and this guy speaks
in a way and then the generation around
him shaped because that seems to be a
successful approach. Therefore, you see
this online, someone has a new thumbnail
style and now everybody's doing
thumbnails like that or somebody does a
new video style and everyone's doing
videos like that. It's the same thing
but with the accent for newscasters. And
then that becomes not only something
effective for his colleagues at the
time, but it's now shaping the entire
future and that's the expectation. Well,
that's how newscasters speak. And if you
were to come in and you speak in a
different manner, that would be very
different,
>> right? That's what I was saying about
the founder effect and uh you kind of
follow in the footsteps of people before
you. For example, for my educational
influencer accent, probably it's highly
influenced by people like Hank Green or
something, Vsauce. There's like they
were the early educational influencers
and they're probably copying people like
Bill Nye or something. So, it always
trickles back to something earlier. You
know, you exist in the context.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This episode is
brought to you by Gym Shark. I have
tried pretty much every brand of gymware
over the years. Most of it looks good on
the website, but very little of it
survives realworld training, which is
why I'm such a massive fan of Gym Shark.
Their hybrid shorts, especially in onyx,
gray and navy, are basically my uniform
in the gym at this point. They move
properly. They don't bunch. They're
super lightweight. You can wash and dry
them in an afternoon. The geo seamless
t-shirt is what I train in almost every
single session. Breathes properly, holds
its shape after you wash it. Everything
that Gym Shark makes is lightweight and
sweat wicking and easy to wash and dries
fast. And if you're still on the fence,
they offer a 30-day free return, so you
can buy it and try it for 29 days. If
you don't like it, just send it back.
Plus, they ship internationally. And
right now, you can get 10% off
everything sitewide by going to the link
in the description below or heading to
jim.sh/modernwisdom
and using the code modernwisdom10 a
checkout. That's jim.sh/modernwisdom
and modernwisdom10 a checkout. What
about sports commentators? Because
they're doing something similar but a
little bit distinct and different.
>> Yeah. If uh news broadcasters are the
equivalent of educational influencers,
then sports commentators are kind of
closer to Mr. beast. They want to keep
you excited. Go, you know, like it's
very exciting. They want to keep you
excited about watching the game and
that's reasonable. Yeah.
>> Yeah. But speaking with a lot of clarity
again, like super expressive, there's
not much or I I don't see very many
filler words with those people, which I
guess is because it's trained out of
them. I have to imagine that over time
if you're looking to maximize
relatability,
uh, authenticity, a felt sense of
belonging, what you're actually going to
do is not sterilize your use of language
too much to make it too precise that
that then feels contrived as opposed to
something that's naturalistic. You want
to hit a fine line. I mean, think about
like phone calls in movies. They
famously never say goodbye. They just
finish saying something and they hang
up. Because in real life, we do the
whole like, "All right, I'll see you
later. Goodbye." But in a movie that
doesn't really work. So you do actually
make it more concise.
>> No way. Because it would just waste
screen time.
Exactly. Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, I have a
good Yep. It's fine. Yeah. No worry.
Yeah. I'll catch you later. Goodbye. I
mean 5 seconds that you didn't need in
the movie.
>> So, it's performing the idea of a phone
call while not actually doing phone call
as we actually do it.
>> I never thought about that. Holy [ __ ]
Uh but sterilizing language too much
obviously puts it. you did a great TED
talk. I did a a TEDex talk five six
years ago or something now. And uh one
of the things that I realized as I was
getting ready for that and doing the
preparation was I actually need to drain
my knowledge of my own talk in a way so
that it doesn't sound too contrived so
it doesn't sound too performative.
There's that idea of what a TED talk
sounds like. I mean, there's a great
video on YouTube of like guy just doing
TED talk by saying things that don't
mean anything, but he's saying in the
cadence of a TED talk.
>> That's funny.
>> Um, definitely recommend looking that
up. But yeah, there's there's you can,
you know what I mean when I say there's
a cadence of what a TED talk sounds
like.
>> I think it's kind of dead. I think it's
in the past. And um, TED talks are also
they've lost a lot of their
prestige of what it was. And the way
people should be doing TED talks now is
just clip farming which is the future.
>> The way that people should be doing TED
talks now is just clip farm. So if you
get booked for a TED talk you should
just try and get clip farmed.
>> I think so.
>> How would you do that?
>> What actually matters like I don't know
the audience of TED talk is I guess
aspirational speakers themselves or um
like it's if you have a real message to
say it's probably not the audience
that's there. it's probably better if
you transmit it on the internet um
because you could reach that audience
>> and that's the idea behind 67 and behind
jester maxing and all that stuff is that
distribution matters more than the
content itself that you just saying the
thing that goes viral and if we're
existing in a age of social media
verality the TED talk is kind of a dead
format um
>> existing as this quasy online talk which
was fantastic in the early days of
YouTube when there wasn't enough content
going on but now the media ecosystem is
oversaturated and the TED talks have way
fewer views than they used to
>> because they don't do the same function
that they did in the early internet.
>> Well, especially because one video can
get you can write a book and then each
sentence can be sold individually and
then even those sentences can be
reproduced and reproduced and reproduced
and individual productions of those can
be re-shared. So yeah, you're actually
looking for as much distribution as
possible. When uh what was it called?
Um, the HH bomb thing that happened with
the guys in the Miami club where they
played that Kanye song and the insane
bar. That was
>> every single second of that video was
broken down and shared and re-shared and
published and republished and commented
on. And that's a single book just being
sold word by word essentially. And what
that points to is that there is a
dangerous misalignment between human
preferences. Like I I can imagine that
most of us don't think that song is good
for humanity. And then what goes viral
online because online there are certain
emotions that are rewarded more than
others. There's anger, fear, awe, humor,
things that trigger a state of mental
arousal where your brain is more
activated. Now things that don't do that
is like contentment. Contentment makes
you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it
doesn't trigger your brain to click a
like button. The like button, of course,
is more of a metric of how willing you
are to click this button than it is
whether you like something. And you're
more willing to click a button if your
brain is activated. And your brain's not
activated when you feel warm and fuzzy,
which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not
going to spread online. The things that
are going to spread are rage bait and
clickbait.
>> That's so fascinating. So, if you're a
meditation teacher by design, because
you make people feel good and you get
them out of that brain mode, you're
going to get less engagement, which
means that you're going to go less
viral, which means there's less of an
incentive for you to keep doing your
content.
>> Look at the wellness space. The same way
movie phone calls perform what it's like
to be a phone call. Wellness influencers
are performing the idea of wellness, but
it's this hyper aestheticized sanitized
clean girl thing where you're on a yoga
mat doing Pilates or whatever. But that
does like you're presenting this um
hyper wellness idea. That's not true
wellness. And if you're actually feeling
warm and fuzzy, you don't need to prove
that to other people. Uh you don't need
to play like you're feeling good.
>> Yeah. You're not doing yoga in the
living room with your floor to ceiling
windows and you're waving sage
everywhere. You're sat on the couch
relaxing.
>> Sometimes it's just watching a movie is,
you know, sitting on the couch
>> but not sufficiently visually
interesting. So it wouldn't be
compelling for people. What about the
gay male accent? What's going on there?
Yeah, 100%. There's a lot of research on
well emerging research on lesbian accent
as well, but gay accent um that there is
a certain way of talking um that of
course will differ between different
communities and it's not a monolith. Um
but you you know you can recognize when
somebody talks in a gay accent. Um there
there's a few sociological things going
on. I think it's incorrect to say that
they talk more like women, but they
adopt many strategies that are similar
uh to how women have talked. um they
raise certain vowels and um they will um
yeah um and it's it's all kind of the
same identity thing. It's historically a
way like the gay slang words which is a
lot of our Gen Z slang words also come
from gay ballroom speech
>> but like
>> oh like slay serve queen cooked ate uh
cooked is gay.
>> Yeah, I'm pretty sure that come Well,
there's cooking and cooked which come
from different sources. Cooking is
sports lang. Um,
>> yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Playing well.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Unreal. So, I wonder if there's stuff
that even we wouldn't notice that
there's little uh identifiers in the gay
community like tops speak in one way and
bottom speak in another or um well, I
guess guy there's guys that present in
much more masculine manner and there's
guys that present in a much more
feminine manner. Interesting
conversation I had over dinner. Probably
best to have it over dinner. um looking
at uh what it is the the the
presentation that most straight men
notice in gay men and what they notice
is what you said which is are you coding
as female not as female but in a manner
that somebody who isn't a part of that
culture would identify as feminine. I'm
going to sound like a broken clock but
everything is performing the idea of
something. And so gay men perform the
idea of of being gay which is fine.
Straight men perform the idea of being
straight. And it's also a way to signal
to other people like in historically um
gay men had to be closeted and they
needed ways of signaling to other gay
men that hey uh I'm chill and we should
hang out, you know? And uh that's sort
of linguistically there are little cues
you can drop that hint at I'm a gay man,
>> right? What like
>> using certain slang words like uh I'm
thinking about like I don't know
cottaging in Britain but when
homosexuality was illegal. There's like
certain ways of tapping your foot or
Polari was a whole gay can like a kind
of a micro language created in England
that was used specifically by gay people
as a way of evading detection by police
because police didn't know what was
going on and it was a way of signaling a
shared identity for themselves. And we
see sort of gay micro languages emerge
everywhere. In the Philippines, there's
one called swardspeak. Um there's one in
South Africa. every community because
gay people have been historically kind
of marginalized. They need ways to come
up with subversion of the traditional
norms of language.
>> Do you know what capoera is?
>> It sounds British.
>> It's a Brazilian martial arts.
>> Brazilian is what I
>> um capoera was a martial art developed
in Brazil when they were under a uh
military rule and they weren't allowed
to practice fighting because they didn't
want there to be a military force that
could rise up. So, this thing, if you
watch a video of it, looks very
distinctive, very dancy. It kind of
looks like a I mean, it very quickly
gets into a fighting art, but um that
makes me think about gay guys in Britain
before it was legal having to have a
secret language. And, uh, Brazilian
martial art developed by Africans taken
to the country as slaves. That was it.
So, they they weren't allowed to
practice fighting. And they've got music
that goes with it as well, which would
be a way to hide what was going on. It's
just a party. We don't need to worry
about that. It's just a party. And yeah,
the
>> Wow. Yeah, that's amazing.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, if we accept that language is a
tool of identity, identity is tied to
power. Who's in control? It's part of
your identity.
>> And so, we see the English language,
which is defined by these white British
people in the 1700s or whatever, and
we're still following the the norms.
Yeah.
>> Uh but it doesn't represent all the
speakers of English. And so different
speakers try to come up with different
ways to subvert that structure that's
imposed upon them. And so a lot of that
has been African-American English
speakers who now have come up with a lot
of slang words that later bled into
mainstream Gen Z slang or um
specifically gay people because these
were straight white men uh creating
language. And so it's a way of
subverting of establishing their own
norms of language. Um, king and queen
for example, like the slang word what's
up king, you know, like that or what's
up queen that uh that comes from
ballroom slang in New York City in the
1980s, which is this like black, gay,
Latino space. Um,
>> black, gay, Latino,
>> black and Latino, gay, you know, gay
people uh in New York City. Um, and it
was a way of elevating people uh in that
community. I see you on the status of
royalty because we are not seen as that
by society. And that even goes back even
further to the history of kind of like
uh black people in the United States. Um
a lot of slang goes from black people to
gay people and then to like the straight
white girlfriends of gay men and then to
the mainstream English.
>> Right. Okay. So there's a pipeline a
fourperson human centipede with normies
at the end and black people at the
front.
>> That's pretty much it.
>> Fantastic.
>> Or 4chan is the other end of
>> 4chan black people gay people cool
people normies.
>> Language spreads when it's funny or
cool. And it's cool when black people
use it. And it's funny when 4chan people
use it. It can be considered funny
unfortunately when black people say
things as well, which is a whole genre
of hood irony memes like uh um cap like
is an example. Um or huz is a recent
slang word. What's that? It's like a
slang word for hose. Um but it comes
from like a parody of African-American
English. Um
>> or that was that was also kind of making
fun of Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it comes from
the the word godamn pronounced in an
exaggerated African-American accent. Um,
and of course when I say that there's
many different African-American accents
in the same way there's many different
gay accents and many different internet
accents. And I really hate to speak of
language as a monolith. I'm not even
sure language exists as like a thing.
It's just like we all speak separately
kind of close to people around us.
>> Um, and there's like a gradient of what
language is rather than a monolithic
thing. The monolithic thing is this
institutional assumption that there is a
dictionary that can capture a snapshot
of what language is. that every person
has their own language in this regard.
It's called idio idioct from the Greek
word idios meaning one's own and we all
speak in a completely unique way
conditioned by our background our
upbringing our education the people we
hung out with the words that resonated
with us based on just our history of
interacting with language um I find that
really compelling that you have a
linguistic footprint unlike anybody else
that's how they caught the uni bomber um
yes his brother found out that he said
eat your cake and have it too as opposed
to have your cake and eat it too because
the one that he used actually makes more
sense but was completely unique.
>> Exactly. Um and so we all have like
these little quirks whether you think
you do or not, they're there.
>> What about lesbian accents?
>> This is harder to identify and uh there
are studies showing that speakers can
identify a lesbian accent, but there are
very mixed results on what defines one.
There is again indication that they
speak a little closer to the idea of a
masculine language and yet at the same
time it would be reductive to say that.
So, there's certain stuff going on with
perhaps uh lowered vowels and um maybe a
deeper voice, but again, I would be
generalizing to say that we know for
sure. There definitely is something
going on, but the studies aren't there
to fully explain it.
>> It would make sense if you were to think
about uh much of gay fashion compared
with straight fashion for men, you would
say, well, there's a bit more flare,
there's maybe a bit more color, uh the
there's more beautifification, there's
more accessories. Okay, that that seems
to code somewhat feminine. And if you
were to look at gay women compared with
straight women, you say, well, there's
more plaid and jeans and sort of
malecoded clothes, a little bit more
loose- fitting sometimes. Uh, that would
tend to code a bit more male. You go,
okay, well, it would make sense that if
you're presenting outwardly that way,
that maybe your language would match
that, but it would also be unique and
distinct because gay men aren't trying
to be women. That would be very bad for
the gay men they're trying to attract,
right? And gay women aren't trying to be
men because they wouldn't attract any of
>> this thing that is the idea of gay men
again. Uh, which is maybe close closer
to women than straight men.
>> Performing the idea of being a gay man.
And
>> all we're doing all the time is
performing, laring. We're just
pretending to be on a podcast right now,
but in doing so, we actually are. You
know,
>> can you I need you to diss Can you blow
that apart for me? It's really cool. I'm
not entirely sure what you mean.
>> Um, I think people should all read this
guy, Irving Gooffman. and he's a
sociologist from the 1960s and he comes
up with this uh great book, the
presentation of the self in everyday
life and he describes how we all adopt
faces or roles in society. Um there's a
front-facing role and a backfacing like
so when you're on stage or offstage and
when you're on stage right now we're
presenting to the public. We are on
stage we're presenting as ourselves but
as soon as we get off the podcast we
might speak more casually um because
there's a different way of communicating
when you know there's this invisible
audience present. Um, in the same way
when you're literally on a stage or
you're literally backstage that you'll
do the same thing. But if you're talking
in front of your parents versus you're
talking with your friends, you'll adopt
different registers. And it's that kind
of the same thing we were describing
with different rooms and different
platforms and you have an idea of what
your environment is and you will mold
yourself into the role you see that
environment as bringing to you. And so
we do everything through this idea of a
role and all of what we do as a
performance. to be a man is kind of a
performance. Like we need to keep
replicating this idea of manhood. We
both um like have beards. We both uh
dress and talk a certain way. Um and in
doing so, we're kind of adopting symbols
of masculinity. And Clvicular is doing a
great job of that himself.
>> I've got a I I've got a take on that,
which is I think it's uh the most
caricatured traits of masculinity. uh
not necessarily
in terms of speech, you know, because
you might say a powerful, precise, uh
educated or a brusk maybe even someone
who's very curt with the way that they
spell strong and silent type. But that's
because masculinity is couched within
2026. What does it mean for masculinity
to be that way? I think visually
masculinity has just been going in one
direction. If you look at the tracking
of Luke Skywalker uh star action figures
over time, in the '60s he was super
skinny and then in the '9s he gain do me
a comparison. Just search a Chad GPT
Luke Skywalker
>> action figure over time comparison and
um yeah he just he goes on a very heavy
course of testosterone for about six
decades.
>> That's really interesting.
>> And um just gets more and more and more
and more and more jacked. Um, so I think
what's happening is a performance of
masculinity. That's the best way to put
it.
>> Luke Skywalker looks next.
>> Luke Skywalker absolutely mogs, dude.
Um, yeah, he he's performing
masculinity. It's a a male to-male
visual comparison.
>> And there is always an evolving
definition of masculinity, too. Like
back in ancient Rome, being masculine
means you could like as long as you
could have sex with other men as long as
you weren't a bottom, that would be like
not masculine. But that was that was the
definition of masculinity for a certain
period in ancient Rome. True. You're
allowed to [ __ ] Just you're you you
have to [ __ ] if you are.
>> Caesar Caesar was famously offended uh
not at the accusation that he was gay,
but the accusation that he was a bottom.
Uh because that's the Roman idea.
But it's an evolving idea whether men
should have long hair or short hair,
whether you know we should uh you know
what it means to be a man is always a
moving target and we're always
performing for this target. So it just
proves how arbitrary it is.
>> That right now of course there is a
current 2026 idea of a man that we're
performing toward. But that's a very
different idea than back when we were
wearing togas. Hm. That's 1977, 1995.
Heavy course of testosterone, dude.
>> Unbelievable.
>> That and then they've used the uh stats
of what it would be like to give the
same proportions to a human on either
side. 37in shoulders and a 32-in waist
versus 52in shoulders and 27 in waist.
>> Right. The last thing that looks nothing
like uh
>> a human.
>> Mark Hamill. Yeah, a human. A quick
aside, there is a stat that genuinely
surprised me when I first heard it. 95%
of people don't get enough fiber. Not
because they're being careless, but
because hitting your daily fiber target
through food alone is actually quite
hard. But that's why Momentus built
Fiber Plus. See, fiber isn't just a
digestion thing. It's the foundation of
your gut health, which drives how well
you absorb nutrients, how stable your
energy is, and how quickly you recover.
If your gut isn't dialed in, everything
else that you're doing is working at a
fraction of its potential. Fiber Plus is
a threein-one formula built to address
digestion, gut barrier strength, and
blood sugar stability all at once. And
this cinnamon flavor is unreal. You
might think, fiber, wow, I bet that
tastes great. Well, yeah, actually it
does. Doubters, uh, I really enjoyed
this. Best of all, Momenus offers a
30-day money back guarantee. So, if
you're not sure, you can buy Fiber Plus,
try it for 29 days. If you don't love
it, they'll just give you your money
back. and they ship internationally.
Right now, you can get up to 35% off
your first subscription and that 30-day
money back guarantee by going to the
link in the description below or heading
to livemus.com/modernwisdom
and using the code modernwisdom at
checkout. That's l i v o m n o
s.com/modernwisdom
and modernwisdom
at checkout. What about emojis? Cuz
they're kind of like language and
picture. I guess they feel like modern
hieroglyphics.
>> Yeah. Well, there's a few different
functions of emojis. You can use it to
substitute a word like uh we see this
with ICE protest. People want to censor
the word ice because they think the
algorithm is like going to hamper their
video. So they'll just sub it out with
the ice cube emoji. That's a
substitutive emoji. Then you have emojis
that are more paral language meant to
augment your sentence. So if I say
something and then I comment the or I
have a sentence and then at the end of
the sentence there's like a laughing
emoji or a sneezing emoji or a crying
emoji that serves as a sort of a tone
tag telling you what the emotional form
of my sentence is. Um and then there's a
few other separate ways you can send
them individually. You could use them as
a reactions. Um there's a lot of things
going on but they absolutely are
linguistic in the sense of they carry
meaning and they communicate something
from one person to another. I saw a
court case where they were trying to
determine what this emoji meant. Had it
have Did it
>> Was it the farmer in uh Canada?
>> What was this one?
>> Okay, so there's a great court case
where there was a a farmer who had a
contract for grain shipments. Uh and he
would occasionally uh like they they did
month by month and they would sign off
with a yes or whatever. Uh, and then one
month the farmer signs off with an okay
emoji, just a thumbs up.
>> Okay?
>> And the grain supplier doesn't deliver
the grain or something like that. And
then the farmer sues the grain supplier.
Maybe I'm getting it the other way
around, but the point is the court case
was about whether the thumbs up emoji
legally constituted an affirmation of
this agreement occurring. Um, one person
said this could be acknowledgement and
the other person said this is a direct
agreement. And I think the court case
ruled um in favor of thumbs up being in
agreement, but it was kind of based on
previous context, right? Because
previous context was
>> a long established history of emojis in
court cases,
>> right? Well, there's a few things going
on. Yeah. What was the one you were
thinking of?
>> There was a a murder case and it was
about intent. It was about whether or
not this person had intended to kill
somebody or not. And um
it's an interpretation of what this
emoji means. And it's so funny because
it's a single thing, right? It's there's
no intonation. I guess it's couched in
what has been said before and after, but
if you just take it on its own, uh there
is no different way to say it. There is
no different way to spell it. And it's
only been around for 15 less than 15
years, something like that probably.
Okay. So, the definition of it hasn't
had enough time to really cement itself
and become established.
>> Well, that's the thing. It's so fluid.
>> Emoji definitions are also constantly
changing. Like the crying emoji once
meant literally crying and then it meant
laughing and then uh it also the
laughing emoji is now seen as like
ironic by some.
>> Yeah. You shouldn't use the laughing
emoji. Yeah. That's kind of cringe
because
>> unless you're trying to like signal
boomer,
>> correct? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's the horseshoe has come all the way
back around again.
>> You can post irironically use it, I
think.
>> Okay. Yeah. We're in the post cry
laughing face world,
>> right?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What's the
what's the direction of emology? It
feels like there's sort of an entropy to
words that they move in a direction. Are
they always getting simpler and shorter
over time? Is there an arrow of of
motion when it comes to word
development?
>> I think language more than anything is a
reflection of who we are as people right
now. The word etmology comes from Greek
etumos meaning truth. there's a truth to
the word that we look at and it tells us
something about humanity, about who we
are as people because again this is a
tool of identity. And so less of there
being a direction and more of it just
reflecting
who we are right now, what we're
feeling, it's language is our way to
categorize what we think is going on.
I'll use words to describe my reality
and then I'll use that to communicate it
to you. So it's describing reality and
then it's communicating that reality. If
our reality changes, yeah, language will
change as a result. uh because now we
have to describe something different. So
we have we're using fewer words to
describe different types of plants than
we were in the 1800s because we're
interacting with fewer plants. That's
kind of sad.
>> Oh, okay. And what about when what's the
the term for when a word gets uh broken
down to make to be made shorter? So uh
goodbye as a good example. God be with
you.
>> God be with you. And then yeah
contracted to goodbye and then
eventually you can truncate it to just
bye.
>> Yeah. Yeah. What's that called? That's a
contraction.
>> Abbreviation contraction. There are
different ways of doing this. You can
make words shorter and you can also make
portmantos where you combine different
words.
>> Um and uh
>> yeah, we're making new words all the
time. Jester maxing is a great evidence
of that. We're combining new words in
new ways and but that sort of reflects
our new reality. And so if reality
adjusts, we will both come up with new
words and we'll lose old ones because
language is a moving living thing. You
mentioned
black people, gay people, cool people,
normal people.
Young people, how much do they drive
language forward? Because young people
are almost always seen as being cool,
but they're also the ones that have got
the least uh cemented history with
regards to their linguistic use.
>> Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are
the earliest to adopt new words because
older people have this cemented idea of
what language is. Younger people are
both more flexible with that and they're
trying to build a shared identity for
themselves. And I know I keep bringing
identity into it, but that's what
language is. It's a way of uh, you know,
figuring out who you are and what kind
of words you want to use. And you don't
want to sound like your mother. You want
to sound like your your peers.
>> Yeah. How much of the changes in
language is just because kids want to
different differentiate themselves from?
>> That's a huge part of it. Most of
language change, I would say, is driven
by PE like right now, honestly, middle
schoolers. But historically, people
between the ages of like 10 and 25 are
the ones coming up with slang. Now, of
course, there's different types of how
language gets adopted. There's
institutional words. So, like iPhone is
a new word, but it's not a slang word.
Uh podcast, a shortening of iPod plus
broadcast. Um that's sort of new, but
that come these things come from more
institutional avenues. Uh that's another
route or mechanism of language change.
But for the slang, which is this kind of
lower status feeling of language that
eventually can become just real
language,
>> um that comes from younger people. So
all the video game terms we see in uh
bleeding into mainstream English um NPC
skill issue that kind of stuff um or all
of the yeah the the black people uh or
the uh incel language um all of that's
kind of the driven by young people right
now.
>> How effective are institutions at
topdown dictating language and
linguistic use? Because when I think
about and this might just be because I'm
terminally online. When I think about
most of the language that I see, yeah,
you're right with podcasts, but they're
usually categories. They're not the sort
of thing that people are using as a a a
important identifier of the way that
they're put together, and it doesn't
really seem to be shaping culture. Maybe
it represents something that shapes
culture, but the words itself won't. So,
how easy is it for
people in power to top down dictate the
way that language is used? If it feels
like a word is intentionally being
forced upon you, we actually often feel
a resistance to it. There's a in the
movie Mean Girls, Gretchen famously
couldn't make the word fetch happen. She
was trying to get trying to make fetch.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Um and that's because it felt forced. So
if you feel like someone is pushing a
word onto you, you might actually not
want to adopt it. There is a difference
with institutional acceptance. So if you
see a word in a dictionary, uh that's
just like this is accepted as language.
Um even though of course there's just an
idea of language. Um, but you might
point to that now and you'll see news
outlets only use words that are in the
dictionary or uh books in academic
publishing and all this stuff will use
this standard idea of language which is
filtered through the institutions. So
they're not forcing the word. They're
merely once a word has been used around
for long enough they legitimize it. M
lots of people have got issues with the
word like um uh you know
>> what are some of the older versions of
filler words because it can't have just
been now that filler words were brought
in.
>> Yeah. Well, there have always been
filler words and um might be one of the
most universal words. There's across
different languages that mid-ententral
vowel uh shows up in a lot of when
people are thinking. I know Spanish
speakers use like e uh or it's it's some
kind of vowel that's close to the center
often. Um that's used when you're you
just I said it that's used when you're
thinking about something and that's a
universal constant that we think about
things and we need time to say things.
Um for
>> it's a holding pattern.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's the floor holding thing
again.
>> Um
>> um
>> I think it's stigmatized because it's
associated with not thinking through
things. like especially is associated
with like the valley girls and th those
women are stigmatized just because
they're not seen as speaking standard
English even though there's nothing
inherently wrong and actually like has a
lot of different applications. There's
the quotative like where um you can say
you can say something you can quote
someone directly. I said this or you can
adopt an affect. I was like this. And
that actually serves a different
linguistic function. That's actually a
really beautiful thing that you can
adopt a persona in the middle of speech
instead of directly claiming to quote
something.
>> Like implies it doesn't have to be 100%
accurate, but
>> it's a self analogy. It's a self simile.
Yeah.
>> I was like it's a self simile. Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh
yeah, one of the things someone brought
this up, I can't remember who I was
speaking to. Um uh
>> the Etomlogicon, who wrote that? Mark
Foright. Mark,
>> that's the book that got me into
etmology. I read No way. I read that in
2016 and I was like, "This [ __ ] is gas."
And I
>> I just started reading more etmology
books, started a little blog for myself.
Um I don't think anybody read it, but
then I studied linguistics in college
and ended up becoming a linguistics
influencer. But it started because of
that book.
>> No way. Did you read Elements of
Eloquence as well?
>> Yeah. Yeah,
>> bro. So Mark's Mark's great and I I
brought up the holding pattern like
stuff.
>> He had this great take which is if you
just roll back to your grandparents'
generation
a lot of the time sentences would begin
with well you know it's what we what we
must it's this sort of there would be a
almost bloiating approach to it. I have
this guy that I bring on all the time
Rory Sutherland. He's kind of like a my
mad uncle. And every time that he
speaks, there's precision and then
there's these parentheses of noise, but
it's not like it's still filler to some
degrees. It's padding and it's nice. It
actually provides a little bit of
breathing room because he speaks quite
quickly, too. So, having a ah I know
this is coming in to land. Um the same
as getting off the phone. Okay. Yep.
Yep. No worries. I've got Yep. It's that
it's foreplay and postcoidal talking
talk.
>> Exactly. No, I think we talked about
floor holding, but you got to take the
floor in the first place.
>> And you were describing that, you know,
is a great example. You are signaling
that you're taking the conversational
turn. There's in influencer spaces,
people start videos with no because, no,
because why did this happen? And it's
just like a it doesn't mean anything
really.
>> Falling halfway through a sentence. It
does.
in media's res feel feeling that you you
want to we resonate more with the video
when we feel like we're already in the
middle of it rather than having to deal
with this whole introduction. So, but it
does it does still serve to grab your
attention and continue from the middle
of a thought.
>> What are some of the other powerful
linguistic tricks that creators either
are using a lot of or you think that
more creators should be using in order
to That's interesting. I didn't think
about no because and you go hang on I
didn't see what happened before. Am I I
guess I'm in this now. Uh what else is
what else is some good uh keyholes in
the brain that you can latch into?
>> Uh I'm trying less to provide advice to
creators and more just get people aware
of what creators are already doing to
you.
>> You're like you're like a public public
service announcement for creators.
>> Yeah. PSA everybody is doing everything
for your attention. The platforms have
monetized your attention. and they're
commodifying your data and your
information and are trying to sell you
ads. Everything's based around your
attention. They create incentive
structures now for influencers to
replicate where the attention economy
famously just runs around what will grab
your attention. And so that means our
language will all serve that end
primarily and then there's maybe a
secondary purpose of I want to sound
like I'm I know what I'm talking about
or I want to sound relatable. But it
starts with attention and we'll use key
words like all words are keywords at
this point. metadata used to be like
their search engine optimization terms
that you would put in a website
description to make sure it ranks
higher. Every single term now is a
search engine optimization term because
the algorithm is looking at every single
word you use and it's using that to
create a a cluster representation of
what your video is in this mathematical
space and it uses that to push out a
video. And so by using a word, you are
creating a signal for the algorithm that
this video should be distributed in a
certain way. And then you are also
creating signals for the viewers that
you should look at the video a certain
way.
>> There's several meta layers to
everything we're saying.
>> I feel like you're a guy that went away
for a decade to some mountaintop kung fu
retreat and learned a bunch of really
dangerous martial arts where you can
kill a guy with one touch. And I'm now
asking, okay, so how do I kill guys with
one touch? And you're saying, well, what
I'm here to do is I'm here to warn
people about the one-touch death move.
That's exactly what it feels like.
>> I think we should be immensely critical
of these platforms. And I'm a big
believer that the medium is the message.
That the way we consume media strongly
affects everything we understand. That
algorithms are uniquely constraining our
language through this bottleneck we've
described. That they are shaping our
expression. And if they're doing it to
our language, that's one thing because I
do think language again is this tool
that's sort of neutral. But they're also
doing it to our ideas, our discussion,
our greater sense of reality. There are
certain biases that get coded into the
algorithm that then get perpetuated. We
see the same thing happening with AI.
There's a bottleneck again there. What
kind of language goes in? What kind of
uh language is reinforced into the model
and then what kind of language goes out?
Nothing is neutral when it's happening
through a tech intermediary that's
trying to make money off of you.
>> Okay. Talk to me about what AI is doing
to language.
>> You know about the word delve.
>> Delve to sort of jump into.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. So we have studies indicating that
since chatpt came out usage of the word
delve has spiked a thousand% since
before 2022.
>> Why does chat GPT like delve?
>> So chat uses the word delve 10 times
more than regular because there is a
bias in the reinforcement learning
process which is when the words get
trained into the model. So one there's a
few things going on here. One, the
reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and
Kenya where they do actually say delve
at higher rates but still not that high
and that's partially they're rewarding
words that they're familiar with. Two,
Delve is a Latin word and we know that
ChachiBT exhibits a Latin based bias
over Germanic words because again
>> it's Latin supremacy.
>> It's prestige. It's like you think Latin
sounds fancier than Germanic words. Like
Germanic words are basic ones like the
but and whatever. And then Latin words
or dig in is a Germanic word versus
delve is a is a Latin derived word,
right? and it sounds fancier to say the
Latin word. And because these models are
trained to sound like they know what
they're talking about, they're going to
use more of the romance language stuff.
They they're trained to sound confident
and incisive and sicopantic and they
will use certain words that perpetuate
that and then that gets reinforced into
the model. So all this stuff happens and
when you're a reinforcement learner
clicking reinforcement worker clicking
through what kind of words are okay and
not okay, you don't really catch a small
discrepancy like that that delve is
showing up a little bit more. So it
accidentally gets reinforced into the
model and then chat starts spitting out
the word delmore. And now we have
evidence in the past few years that
humans in our spontaneous spoken
conversation are also starting to use
the word delvemore.
>> So the creature that programmed the AI
is being programmed by the AI.
>> We are now being trained by ChachiBT to
use different language. In other news,
Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce
companies in the US. They are the
driving force behind Gym Shark and Skims
and Aloe and Newtonic, which is why I
partnered with them because when it
comes to converting browsers into
buyers, they are best-in-class. Their
checkout is 36% better on average
compared to other leading commerce
platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can
boost conversions up to 50%. Basically,
you didn't get into business to learn
how to code or build a website or deal
with the inventory stuff [ __ ] on the
back end. You just want to get down to
creating and promoting an awesome
product. And Shopify takes all of the
mess off your hands and allows you to
focus on the job you actually came here
to do, designing and selling the thing
that you love. So upgrade your business
and get the same checkout that we use
with Newtonic with Shopify. Right now
you can sign up for a $1 per month trial
period by going to the link in the
description below or heading to
shopify.com/modernwisdom.
All lowercase. That's
shopify.com/modernwisdom.
Wasn't there a study done on British
politicians and what they'd been saying?
>> Yes. In the in the House of Chambers,
they're now saying I rise to speak
instead of I I don't know what the norm
was before, but they're using a US uh
colloquial term uh which is clearly
indicating that their speeches are
written by CHBT. We've seen academic
research papers that probably 13% of all
research abstracts are written aided by
some kind of large language model. You
can't trust any source whether you think
it's so it's not even you're being
directly influenced by the AI. It's
you're being influenced by somebody else
who was influenced by AI. You're reading
a text that you don't know was written
by AI.
>> Yep.
>> All of LinkedIn is already like I can't
tell whether it's AI or these people
genuinely think like this, but that you
speak in the bullet points that it's not
just X, it's Y. That's the negative
parallelism which also sounds again
things that sound incisive are
reinforced into the model and then they
end up affecting our actual speech
patterns.
>> But what it also does is it means that
you need to counter signal away from it.
So I'm going to draw an analogy to
Ompic. Ampic at the moment means that
people can more easily lose weight. That
means that losing weight naturally
becomes less high status. Something
remember when Adele lost weight in the
before times prehistoric just did it
with calorie deficit and cardio or
whatever she did.
>> You lose weight now. Whether you did use
OMIC or not, you're going to be accused
of having used it.
>> So we are now already seeing counter
signaling away from the what's the
double dash.
>> A little tasteful chub is back in.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It will be soon. Aha.
It's nice. A natural. I see.
>> Um, what's the double dash thing that
Chacht got?
>> The M dash.
>> M dash. No one can use. So, I have a
couple of friends.
>> I'm going to hold on to it for as a
writer.
>> Well, I think you have a competitive
advantage because no one's going to
assume that you will be using.
>> There is a way that Chach uses the M
dash to segment thoughts in those
negative parallelisms and so on. And
there's a way that a good writer can use
an M dash because Chachip speaks
predictably and a good writer will speak
unpredictably.
>> Yeah, I'm friends with some very good
writers and they love the use of the M
dash and now they feel like they need to
count the signal away from it. Nobody
wants to use the word del. I got to
imagine
>> I don't use the word delve.
>> We're going to feel or we're going to
see the word delve
>> drop off because people are going to be
terrified that even if that was the word
I wanted to dig in.
>> Here's the thing. Delve is merely the
poster child for a much broader
phenomenon.
We got commendable, we got meticulous,
crucial, potential, significant. All of
these words all kind of Latin derived
are also increasing with chatbt. But
we're only pointing to delve in the
mdash because those are the easiest
things to pick up on. There's so many
smaller things and I'm more concerned
about the insidious things. Again, not
linguistically. I think language should
serve as a signal for this broader thing
that's happening. If it's a reflection
of our reality, that means our reality
is being shaped by ChachiBT. And I don't
think there's anything inherently
harmful to the word commendable or
meticulous. But the fact that we are
also proven to be saying those words
more after ChachiBT has been proven to
say those words more means that its
reality is influencing our reality. And
I'm now concerned what if there's a
political bias, a gender bias, a
whatever racial like all this stuff gets
coded into the model. And
>> I mean Elon Musk doesn't even hide that
he like tweaks Grock to like align with
his political preferences. So he's being
obvious about it. the other uh platforms
aren't being obvious about it. Maybe
Anthropic is doing a better job than
than uh um Open AI, but they're all kind
of still trying to make money at the end
of the day and uh they're all
>> doing something that's not aligned with
human priorities. Well, I had Tristan
Harris, Center for Humane Technology. He
was set there yesterday and um
he brought up this great point about
anthropic, which is from the outside,
you know, the the the doing things that
seem from an optics perspective to be
really great, but every single platform
has the exact same
uh outcome desire, which is the models
need to be trained very quickly, as fast
as possible to become as good as
possible.
>> And if they're not, then we're going to
fall behind. So window dress it however
you want. The the big mover is what's
the alignment problem looking like?
What's the level of safety?
>> I do think we should at least praise
anthropic for thinking more about
alignment and safety than other uh
platforms. But that does not mean we
should become complacent and we should
always be questioning who is the
intermediary between us and our speech
because there is something affecting
when you go through a medium something
is constrained. That's why I say the
medium is the message.
>> Okay. What is there going to be
linguistic chaos then as AI begins to
kick off more and more?
>> We're just kind of going to get a little
more homogenized probably, but then
hopefully we'll see a new
>> already more homogenized you said
through social media.
>> We have a language dying out every two
weeks. That's the stat. There's 7,000
languages in the world and it's
predicted that most of them are going to
die out by the end of the century.
>> It's a mass extinction event.
>> It is. It is. And so we're losing all
this beautiful stuff, all these ways of
expression. I love this book Braiding
Sweetgrass. In it there's uh the
podawatami expression to be a Saturday.
It expresses Saturday as a verb that you
could embody a Saturday as a verb. And
this is not a concept that we really
think about or express in English. And
I'm not saying it's impossible to
imagine this, but it's a way of
expressing the world that is lost when a
language dies out and you have all these
languages dying out that homogenizes and
constrains the creative potential for
expression. Not saying that we couldn't
think of these thoughts, but the
options, the affordances are less there
than they otherwise would be. Why does
some languages seem to have words that
represent much more niche long sentence
descriptions than others? So for
instance,
Shardan Freud is like an obvious
example, but uh what is the German word
that describes
the sensation of migratory birds when
they are stopped from migrating? Do you
know this one?
>> No. That's incredible. It's it's a kind
of restless a desire to fly and the
restriction from being allowed to fly
that is felt by a migratory bird.
>> Sounds like a human instinct as well. I
guess very much very much so. Yeah. Ex.
God, I I should be adventuring or
traveling or something and I'm being
restricted from doing it.
>> Kind of like wanderlust but to a degree.
Well, so there's there's a difference
between uh aglutinative languages and
inflection languages where um an
aglutinative language like Turkish and
German does this by just tacking words
together. You can just add things onto
other things and then there's inflection
where you change the form of the word.
So, English like you can, I guess, add s
to the end of a word, but like a lot of
stuff like I don't know um changes based
on the form of the word. In in Latin, in
in French, uh you'll conjugate, you'll
do all these things where it um yeah, uh
you're changing the form rather than
adding on. But there's different ways
you can do language.
>> Are you more concerned about social
media or AI for what it's doing to
linguistics? social media for sure
because whatever's happening with AI, it
then just immediately gets captured by
social media. And what I'm concerned
about here is that they replicate the
natural way that ideas diffuse through
populations. Idea is kind of like a
virus. It starts in a host. It can
infect other hosts. You had Malcolm
Gladwell on I think talk about this. Um
it's a little reductive to just say
that, but I think it's a good model for
understanding the way information
scatters is kind of like in a virus
network. like it's sort of like a
disease and algorithms have created a
replication of natural human social
networks that operates faster that
connects more nodes than ever before
which means these ideas can spread
faster than ever before. What that means
is also misinformation can spread faster
than ever before. More information is
not necessarily always a good thing
because now you can be flooded with
information and uh it's called flooding
the zone where you you lose track of
what's the real information among all
the false information.
um you are being bombarded with ideas
from people who have an agenda. There
are memecoin traders and polyarket
traders who are trying to make a quick
buck off of pushing certain words or
ideas because now we're betting on ideas
and we're betting on uh there are coins
attached to which idea goes viral. So if
an idea goes more viral, you make money
off of it. So now there's a financial
incentive to push certain ideas. And so
I think we should remain highly
skeptical of everything. Maybe we should
touch grass more, but at the very least,
we should be highly inquisitive of what
the medium is doing to us and how it's
affecting our uh communication.
>> Is there a science to meme language?
>> It's called mimemetics. Yeah. Um but
there definitely are people studying how
these networks work
>> and then presumably reverse engineering
it. I mean, I I I have to wonder it
would take a long time. There was an
interesting
successful attempt by Gym Shark to do a
grassroots social media campaign
promoting uh Francis and Ganu.
They used a burner account on Reddit on
maybe the UFC subreddit to post a video
supposedly of CCTV of Francis and Ganu
trying to get into maybe a dry cleaners
and the door was locked and he goes like
this and goes and the whole door just
smashes and breaks. The entire thing was
contra the whole thing was constructed.
They filmed it. It wasn't CCTV. It was
fake glass. Francis Inu was wearing a
Gym Shark logo here. Burner account on
Reddit. nothing just left it
just completely set ablaze. So I wonder
okay that's you know people that are
quite close to the ground floor but
they're not they don't have the
resources of a country if you did the
ability to shape language to think what
sort of words do we want people using we
can't podcast it top down because people
are going to push back if they feel like
they're we've watched too much of Adam's
stuff we know that people are going to
push back if they feel like this word's
being forced on them
>> how can we maybe we need to get on to
fortune maybe we can start to
>> definitely don't No, I I think um get
offline as much as possible while
remaining aware and appraised of what's
happening online because I do think we
should like be aware that even if we are
offline, this stuff will still affect us
to some degree. Like the if your friends
are adopting ideas that come from the
algorithm and you're offline and you're
interacting with your friends, you're
still going to be adopting the algorithm
ideas without even knowing it. So, we
should be highly media literate knowing
that our information is probably being
manipulated by these actors who have
vested interests in giving us bad
information. And this effect is only
going to be amplified as more and more
people figure out how to exploit the
information ecosystem. If I'm giving you
a warning, it's this one. It's that uh I
see in real time how our language is
being shaped by malicious actors that
these uh there are companies and foreign
governments with dashboards um on
tracking populations and how clusters of
similar ideas are represented in the
social media space and they know how to
seed ideas in ways that spread better.
Um, and they're trying to do that and
maybe they're not being fully
successful, but there are active like
information warfare campaigns occurring
as we speak.
>> How does living inside of these
algorithmic constraint systems change
what type of thoughts we can easily
express? Because this isn't just the
language that we're using. The whole
point of 1984, sorry to go to we was no
way we're going to be able to get
through this podcast without talking
about um
>> feeding back up into your capacity to
think. Yeah, it's a controversial
question in linguistics. Um, it's
generally accepted that language is not
the only thing determining thought,
right? But it might have an influence on
it. That's called linguistic relativism.
Um, I don't think we're going to end up
in a 1984 scenario. If anything, I think
people should pay more attention to
Brave New World, the Aldis Huxy novel
where we're entertaining ourselves and
don't are not even aware that we're in a
dictatorship because we're too busy
consuming content and and drugs.
>> Um, but I don't think language can truly
be constrained. I I wrote my book on
algo speak on how um words emerge in
response to censorships. The stuff I
said about the ice emoji or just words
like unal alive where you can't say
kill. We come up with ways we are
incredibly tenacious as human beings to
express ourselves and say what we want
to say. That does not mean that some
things aren't harder to say that certain
ideas aren't more constrained. And it
there's a idea called the Overton window
which is the range of acceptable
discourse in a society that right back
in the day like gay marriage was
unthinkable right and then the Overton
window moved and all of a sudden it was
okay. Um and that was a maybe I think a
positive change but there's also the
Overton window is moving toward looks
maxing. There's way more interest in
this stuff right now. So, but the this
window moves with the amount of
represented discourse that we think.
It's a consensus reality. It's what we
think other people are thinking and what
is acceptable. So, if a certain kind of
discourse, like back in the day, more
and more people started saying there was
the gay liberation movement, more and
more people started saying maybe gay
people should have rights, that moved
the window in the direction of gay
marriage. Now, there's more and more
people saying like uh replicating these
all-right ideas, replicating that uh
idea that um looks maxing is a good way
to, you know, maybe you should be on a
zenic, all this stuff. um and that moves
the window toward that range of
discourse. So while your thoughts are
not necessarily being constrained and
everybody still can think for themselves
and can still find ways to express
themselves, the consensus reality is
kind of moving. Um and that's something
maybe I'm concerned about apart from the
linguistic level. If you had to give a
steelman argument that Gen Z is really
different, what do you think it would be
in the context of how every generation
thinks that the kids are destroying the
>> concept of a Gen Z? Yes. Every
generation thinks that kids are um
destroying language and somehow the
older people die out and the kids grow
up and then now we're pissed at the
younger kids
>> and we run it back. Is there is there a
Steelman argument for how Jenz could be
different?
>> I don't think Jenzi exists. I don't
think generations exist. Um, these are
weird social constructs that we believe
exist.
>> This is your one-touch death move. Like
[ __ ] like trying to catch smoke here.
Come the [ __ ]
>> I'm not dying that there's older and
younger people, that there's familial
generations, right? That there's uh but
we only started this idea of a broad
social cohort, like a generation with
the lost generation after World War I
really. And then we had the silent
generation with the GI generation with
World War II. Then we have baby boomers.
And then we're like, "All right, we
don't know what to call the next
people." So Gen X means we don't know.
Um,
>> lazy. And then it's like, okay,
millennials is good enough. And then
it's like, well, we're too after Gen X,
we'll call it Gen Z. Well, we ran out of
the alphabet. We'll call it Gen Alpha.
That's literally it's it's all made up.
And it started in the early 1900s, but
it's become more and more salient. And I
this is, if anything, a new category
that can be used to sell you as a
consumer demographic that can commodify
you, that they uh have manufactured Gen
Z as a concept, that now we're also
performing what it means to be Gen Z,
whereas a person in the 1800s wouldn't
perform for their social cohort because
there was no social cohort. It's simply
you are the age that you are. And now
now I'm supposed to as a older Gen Z
person have more in touch with a younger
Gen Z person than a younger millennial.
But really I feel much more in common
with younger millennials. Um it's all
it's all made up. And yet there's this
idea now of being Gen Z that is forced
upon us and is part of this broader
social media tendency to label every
part of us as human beings and put us
into buckets that actually do not
describe us perfectly. The self-branding
is constraining because it's giving you
another role to perform too. A label is
kind of a violent thing to impose on
someone because now it's you either have
to identify with or against a label.
Once it's out there, it's out there. And
now I need to choose whether I feel more
like Gen Z or not like Gen Z. And now I
need to choose whether I'm cottagecore
or not cottagecore, whether I'm a Swifty
or not a Swifty. And all these things
kind of combine and now I'm all of a
sudden I'm a cottagecore Swifty, Gen Z,
whatever. Uh
>> me too. But really at the end of the
day, I'm just every person is a unique
human being. In the same way that we
have a unique idioct, a unique dialect
that is our own way of speaking, we have
a unique identity. Um, as a linguist, I
have one word tattooed on my body. It's
the word umvelt. It means the world as
it is perceived by a particular person.
And I really like this idea that we all
really see the world in a completely
unique way. And yet, when we put
ourselves into buckets and when we
pretend that we are, it's nice to feel
like we are like so other people. And
it's a a useful thing to have a category
to kind of signal toward your identity,
but you are completely unique. And what
social media wants to do is put you into
small small buckets. Yes. But buckets
that really make you interchangeable
with other people. Before we continue,
as you're probably aware, I'm not a
massive drinker, at least not anymore.
But even if you too are not drinking,
sometimes you just want something cold,
frosty, and tasty without the fear of a
hangover the next day. Which is why I'm
such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co.
Thank you very much. Their non-alcoholic
brews taste just as good as the real
thing. They've got IPAs, Hazy Goldens.
They're so good that you'll forget that
there's no alcohol in them until you
wake up the next day feeling fantastic.
It means that you can enjoy the ritual
without the wreckage. No hangover, no
3:00 a.m. panic, no wasted Sunday
recovering from Saturday. That is why I
partnered with them. You can find
Athletic Brew and Co.'s bestselling
lineup at grocery or liquor stores near
you. Or best option, you can get the
full variety pack of four flavors
shipped right to your door right now.
Get up to 15% off your first online
order by going to the link in the
description below or heading to
athleticbwing.com/modern
wisdom using the code modern wisdom at
checkout. That's
athleticbwing.com/modernwisdom
and modern wisdom at checkout. Near
beer, terms and conditions apply.
Athletic brewing company, fit for all
times. It's a strange
tension because on one hand we all want
to be individuals but on the other hand
we all want to belong.
>> Classic. Yeah.
>> Yeah. And I can see
>> two wolves inside of you.
>> Yeah. Of course. And the the there's a
really interesting bit of evolutionary
anthropology that's looking at the uh
desire for autonomy and the desire for
support and kinship. And this is what
you see. Good way to look at this would
be a child's life cycle. So unbelievable
need for kinship up until 11 12 then you
start to get a bit rebellious and then
by 13 14 15 you don't want anything to
do with your parents your mom and dad
>> that's also when you're coming up with
new slang.
>> Yeah. Well of course it's also the most
you know the memory bump effect. You
familiar with this? No. What's this? I
think it's the rem reminiscence effect
which is the language the uh music and
movies that you grow up listening to
between the ages of about 12 and 16 tend
to be locked in as what you like for the
rest of your life formative
>> very formative that makes a lot of sense
>> and um you know every
>> not to say that we can't keep developing
new tastes
>> of course people find new stuff new
bands new movies they like
>> it does affect you in that sense that
this made a huge impression on you at
this particular and you can't ever
separate that from who you will be in
the future.
>> Super formative. And to think, okay,
well, what's going on at 13, 14, 15?
Well, sexuality is coming online. What
is the one thing that you really,
really, really do not want to do?
>> Have sex with someone that's part of
your family. So, my family's going to
suck. I'm going to I stay away. I want I
want my own independence.
>> I didn't expect that to go on the Yeah.
I mean, it's it's incess avoidance, I
think. Uh well, I mean, that's one
framework. I always I tend to think that
uh any one framework is always like
reductive but it is like part like in
the same way like I think for example
Freud he was kind of cooking with some
stuff but you think about the world just
in a Freudian lens or uh honestly the
looks maxes are kind of right that
attractiveness matters but if you're
looking at it just through that one lens
the framework now constrains you now
you're looking at the world reductively
we should adopt as many frameworks as
possible sorry I went on a tangent there
>> but if you have too many frameworks it
becomes chaotic right and that that also
becomes I think difficult sometimes to
amalgamate together
>> my general world view I think is
characterized by trying to understand as
many frameworks as possible and they all
kind of point in
>> a framework maximalist
>> maybe maybe because they all point at
this indescribable hole
>> um we can never know you know what
unnamed da or whatever the middle thing
is that we're trying to figure out what
reality is yeah uh but everything else
is signaling or pointing at it and if
you broaden your worldview as much as
possible and consume as many different
forms of media as possible I do think
maybe we should be on algorithms a
little bit we should also be reading
regular news and we should also remember
that's bias and we should remember we
should like be consuming as many
different forms of media as possible and
we should be consuming as many different
ideas and perspectives as possible
because that helps us better understand
what's really going on rather than this
biased uh we're always looking at the
world through like a confirmation bias
sampling bias like uh everything's
filtered through the algorithm
everything's filtered through AI and if
you try to just consume your world view
through that you're going to be limited
so consume other things as well touch
grass you know and then maybe we can
build a better picture of what the real
world is.
>> Polyconumption poly framework approach.
>> Yeah,
>> I I like it and I agree. Um for me to
say the western arc effect, which is
what we do for incest avoidance and and
the fact that you sexuality is coming
online, you don't want to be around. No,
it's interesting. I'm not I'm not saying
that that is the one ring to rule them
all. But what I do mean and I I totally
agree is that
there's another
incentive that exists online which is if
someone plants a flag in the ground and
says I have a single explanatory
framework that solves all of the
questions that you've got that person
sounds that the level of conviction is
so sexy and I
>> I wonder whether it it takes an awful
lot of conscious draining to look at
someone that's ardent and completely
unforgiving in their worldview and say,
"Huh,
I don't know if I'm that confident about
anything. I don't know if I'm that
confident about my own birth date.
>> So, how is this person about this
really?" Well, we know why the war in
Ukraine started. We know why the war in
Ukraine started. We know exactly what's
going on there.
>> Every war has like a hundred different
reasons behind it. And all of those
reasons could be equal valid, you know,
but
>> but we know what's going on with the Lux
Maxing community. Oh, that's
interesting. And
you what you state as an absolute fact
that is incontrovertible and
unid-dimensionally explained has a
completely opposing guy with the
opposite perspective which is also unid
dimensionally explained. You go okay how
weird how that happened.
>> Comport those two for me because both of
you are saying that you are completely
right and that the other person is
therefore implicitly completely wrong.
>> Yeah. No, I think it's it's reductive to
look at the world through one set of
glasses. Um and Sexiness, the sexiness
of the conviction.
>> The human brain thinks in terms of
simple stories. We like connecting the
dots from point A to point B. Like for
etmology,
we want to think that a word comes from
an older word and evolved into a newer
word. Really, it was evolving through an
aesthetic lens. It was evolving through
a social context. There was another
maybe a word C that affected the
trajectory of word A as it evolved into
word B. Um, it's never one simple story.
I see this with language, but also the
world is this hugely complex
interrelated thing. And to call one
framework the framework is ignoring all
the different ways the world could
exist. Ignoring the fact that a Saturday
could be a verb instead of a noun.
>> I feel like a Saturday sometimes.
>> You're quite you're quite a Saturday
guy. You're a big big Saturday guy. All
right. I want to play uh surprising word
histories with you.
>> Hit me with it.
>> Okay. Muscle
>> comes from the Latin word for mouse.
Little mouse. Musculus.
>> Why?
>> It like looks like a mouse when it moves
under your skin, right?
Hey, they call me the admission nerd for
a reason. No, I'm I'm going to flop the
rest of them.
>> I can't wait. This is going to be so
good. Salary.
>> Salary is the Latin word for salt. They
would pay wages in salt. Saul.
>> All right, next one. Uh, assassin.
>> Uh, that comes from Arabic hasheen. It
meant marijuana. Hashish consumer.
>> Yeah,
>> cuz uh they would like it was a
>> You're scaring You're scaring me. There
was a sect in like Persia that would
just like get high and like uh kill
people. I don't know what they were
doing, but that was kind of the
>> misari is sect.
>> All right,
>> you're terrifying.
>> Candidate
>> uh from Latin Kandidus, white robed. So
a candidate that was uh like white was
associated with purity. So it was like
you were vying for a pure noble office
if you wore white.
>> Okay. Uh, did the girl did the word girl
originally mean a young woman or did it
once mean something completely
different?
>> I think it was like a genderneutral
term. It could mean boy. Um,
>> correct. Any young child?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, how did silly go
from meaning blessed to meaning stupid?
>> Well, in the same sense that like awful
and awesome both share that root awe.
Like when something has just an
emotional veillance to it, like a
quality to it, it can move easily
between different boundaries. But uh
what what did you have there?
>> Uh the old English of salig meant
blessed or fortunate and over centuries
it drifted through innocent, naive and
then yeah foolish.
>> It's the semantic drift is uh yeah how
words evolve over time and it is like
terrible again uh and all the like words
that describe this shaking feeling you
get can really range easily between uh
the same word as terrific terrible and
terrific terrifying. Um, so it can
quickly move between different types of
motions because how do we even describe
what's going on here, you know?
>> Yeah. With difficulty.
>> Yeah.
>> Ancient Aztec word for avocado. What
else did it mean?
>> Awak. And uh, it had a secondary
definition of testicle.
>> Um,
nightmare. Is there anything interesting
about nightmare?
>> Is that Marlike horse? Is there there's
like the idea of like a incubous horse
that attacked people, but I'm not sure
if that's the what the
>> a Germanic demon that was a mare that
sat on sleepers chests.
>> Yeah. So it was a horse or Okay.
>> But it was the mare came from a Germanic
demon.
>> So mare was a Germanic. So it might have
actually been
>> a demon in the night.
>> A demon that then became the name for a
horse and the night horse.
>> Wow. No, I have to look into the mare
thing. That's fascinating. Yeah. Uh,
goodbye. With God be with you. Um,
penguin. Why does the word penguin
probably mean white head even though
penguins don't have white heads?
>> I don't know penguin. Please educate me.
>> Okay, so there's a Welsh word which is
pen pen
gn
penguin, right? Which looks [ __ ]
Welsh as [ __ ]
>> No way would I have expected that to be
Welsh. Uh,
>> I mean like it's a weirdass word. I
believe it. And it originally referred
to the great orc. It's it wasn't
referring to penguins. Yeah. But it then
got repurposed. Um
>> orange.
>> Uh well, it comes from the Sanskrit word
for orange tree, but it moved through um
like Arabic naranja, same as like the
Spanish word. Um, and then uh I think
people kept saying N orange and the N
got cut off because it turned into like
a a norm.
>> Yes,
dude. You won. Whatever the [ __ ] that
was, you won. You won. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A nor.
>> Yeah,
>> bro. Unbelievable. Yeah. I um look, from
between you and Mark uh Foresight, it is
so [ __ ] fun. You must have so much
fun doing this stuff. I think it's
great.
>> I got into etmology for the fun facts.
That was the And then, you know, I came
to see this.
>> Terrifying on a quiz scene. Terrifying
on a quiz scene.
>> Um, you played with inventing languages.
>> Yeah.
>> What did you learn?
>> So, the whole thing I was saying about
languages being a different way to
express reality. I think a really fun
way to play with that is building your
own language. So, the uh we see this in
movies like there's a Dothraki language
and a Klingan language and people have
made fictional languages before. This is
a practice called conlanging constructed
language. Um, and you know, Espiranto is
another famous one where they tried to
make that a global language and didn't
really work out, but they built it from
scratch and were like trying to make
this thing sort of an evidence-based
language that was going to be more
precise and easy to use.
>> I think maybe you're thinking about
ifquill or something or maybe espiranto
is is just meant to be like an easier
language to use. That was the idea. Of
course, that what that means is like a
strange concept. Um, and it's still
>> surely there are there are languages
that have more and less linear rules
around it.
>> Different types of rules, but there's
always a complexity to it because I mean
humans got to express themselves in many
different ways. Um, I I think it's
really hard to make a claim about one
language is more complex than another or
something like that. Um, but you can
talk about one-dimensional language
again, adopt one framework and then talk
about it. Um anyway um I uh I dabbled in
conlanging first in
>> what what
>> conlanging which is constructed language
uh creation.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> Uh sorry. Um and then I studied that
linguistics in college and I took a
coning class at MIT actually that kind
of got me into it. Um but I was sort of
dabbling before that before the coning
dabler.
>> Yeah, I've dabbled and then a little
more professionally. Um, I uh uh for the
conlanging class at MIT, I built a
dolphin language and that was my first
like moment going viral on TikTok was me
presenting my dolphin language where
like the word for shark for example is
and but
the idea is what if you can create a
language out of just whistles and clicks
and that's kind of cool to play around
with the funological format. So I played
around with a lot of other animal
languages. I made a bird language that's
just whistled. Um there are actual
whistled registers of languages. I saw
didn't AI reverse engineer what birds
are saying. Did you see this?
>> I I mean I don't know what that means at
all. Animal communication is just like
not a decodable thing in the way human
communication is. So
>> supposedly I I I'm probably wrong, but
I'm pretty sure that I saw um AI has
analyzed tens of thousands of bird song
sounds and have decoded some of the
communication. Another thing, I don't
know whether this is true or not. I
remember hearing that most bird song is
actually just territorial marking. So,
it's basically birds saying call or
something like that.
>> Birds saying [ __ ] off at varying. Oh,
here we are.
>> Um, no, 100% there's stuff being done uh
with bird Cornell is doing amazing bird
stuff. They have a bird tracking app
that they actually use to follow bird
migrations and there's cool stuff being
done with language. And uh but the thing
is when we talk about like animal
language, there's good research being
done with whale communication too. Um
the people who are talking about this,
if you're a linguist talking about it,
you don't understand how the whales
work. And if you're a whale research
talking about you don't understand how
language works. um or you might have an
idea, but it's I don't think it's
correct to really talk about animals
having language as much as
communication. And of course, they have
communication, their own way of
signaling things, but when you're a
whale, you're also using things like uh
your body rolling over in water.
Dolphins have sonar, like bats of e like
this is crazy that they have all this
stuff going on that humans don't. And
this can all be a part of the
communicative context. And it's not like
maybe the language has an abstract
meaning in the way that humans do. Maybe
it simply signals uh a a presence and a
certain uh emotional intent in a moment
in time, but it's also contextual and
the other bird might have a different
interpretation. I like I don't know.
Language is a very difficult thing that
I'm not even sure how to define it. Uh
anybody who who do says they know
>> after a decade of study. I'm so glad to
hear you say that.
>> Anybody who says they know what language
is is telling you a framework, right?
It's uh
>> Do you know the story of how the
Quarterty keyboard came to be?
Well, weren't the typewriters jamming
with the they had the ABC like and they
tried it out and didn't uh they tried
the Dwarak keyboard. Um, but Querty was
the one that prevented the typewriters
from from jamming together.
>> Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, they put
the most used letters out on the edges
so that they weren't next to each other
so that you wouldn't trigger them
because both of them would fire at the
same time. But that is purposefully
built to be slow.
>> Quote keyboard is designed to be
inefficient. Well, once we get attuned
to it and like like it does move
quickly, I I think
>> but there are even slow relative to when
we thought the alphabet had to show up
in an order on a keyboard,
>> but like for like if you train people on
other keyboard arrangements, they can be
up to 30% to 50% faster. So I wondered
as you were talking about they tried to
put Esparanza in that didn't work so on
and so forth if there was a world in
which you could design a language from
scratch to be as
>> the only goal of language unlike with
typing which is an intermediary process
between things that are not being
changed is not just to be efficient
right it's to be beautiful it's to be
illustrative communicate
>> that is a big flaw of how people talk
about language and that's how the
algorithms want you to talk about
language that it's just information bits
transferred per second and that there's
a certain amount of information that's
communicated and that's the goal of
language to just get information across.
That's something that can now be
categorized and commodified. Um I think
language is also this ritualistic
bonding thing between people. Small talk
for example like when you say the
goodbye at the end of a phone call why
are you doing that? You're not
communicating anything. You could just
hang up and that would
>> I'm going to go I'm going to all my
phone calls are going to be done movie
style now. All right. [ __ ]
>> But you do it because it helps establish
social ties with the other person and
that's kind of a beautiful thing.
courtesy.
>> Yeah, you're building this thing with
another person. And there's an element
of humanity in the small talk and in the
saying goodbye at the end of the phone
call, which maybe not good for an
algorithm. Maybe you don't like end
algorithmic video by saying goodbye,
whatever. But um it it does add
something importantly human to
communication. Anyway, that being said,
I think what you were getting at is do
can different languages have different
information transferred? Um as humans,
we have a certain maybe capacity for
processing information. And it what's
funny is that even a a language like
Japanese has way more syllables per
second than Thai.
>> And yet they will still transfer about
the same bits per second as each other
because Thai is a more inflectional
language. As I mentioned, they like have
more tones. Uh they build on the
individual syllable more. And Japan is
more likely to add syllables. But at the
end of the day, they'll speak slowly in
Thai and they'll drag out their word
more, but they're saying the exact same
thing that a Japanese speaker is saying
with three syllables.
>> Unbelievable. I wonder I I wonder what
it would be like to try and design a
very efficient language. Be so
interesting to hear how can we
communicate the most content in the
smallest number of syllables or words.
>> Yeah, I I mentioned this language
ifquill which is a hypothesized conlang
and conlangs are great for really just
exploring the boundaries of what
language could be and that's kind of
what I was trying to say with the the
dolphin thing. You can just explore the
sounds. Sorry, digression. Um, eithquil
is a language that creates like the most
information transferred and it's like a
highly dense language carrying many
different meanings in a you know and um
>> it's impossible for a human to learn. I
mean no no no native speakers of exist
because at the end of the day we are
humans using language to connect with
other humans and we're using it in a way
that we can understand and describe our
reality and that's that's how it works.
I'm sure I'm sure you create a robot
language that works more efficiently.
But
>> I was going to say I'm sure that you saw
that conversation between two AIs that
realized that they were both AI and they
say should we switch to bleeps and
bloops and it's way quicker for us to be
able to communicate like that. I don't
know whether that was actually fake or
real.
>> I'm not I'm not sure about that either.
But it is true that computers do not
think about language in the way we do.
In fact, I would be very hesitant to say
Chachi even speaks English rather than
it's just predicting tokens based on a
statistical model of what English should
be. Um, what it's actually doing is when
you input something in English, it
converts those words into tokens, which
is like a segment of the word. So, it
breaks up the words into smaller parts,
pairs those parts with numbers. These
numbers turn into like coordinates kind
of like on a um cartisian plane like XY
axis but like way more dimensions. So
XYZ and to like thousands of dimensions.
Um then it ends up as like a data point
called an embedding. And this embedding
is like the representation of what you
said, right? And then that gets
processed through these neural networks.
Um and they figure out through previous
learning things and previous ways
they've understood embeddings how they
can predict the next token output. So
then they create an output token and
then that's translated back into a
language. And so all this is happening
between you saying something and chat
GPT responding with something. I think
that's very important to understand
because there's a huge misconception
that it's speaking English along the
whole way that I I spoke about language
getting broken down turned into another
numbers broken back up into these tokens
and then turned back into language. A
lot of meaning can get lost and that's
where something like Delve could get
over represented. That's where something
could happen where our natural way of
speaking gets improperly encoded. The
training process
does not work correctly and then it ends
up speaking this misaligned version of
language.
I wonder what's going to happen. I
wonder what the next few years are going
to have in store for language because
you have got bigger influences and
bigger broadcasts than ever before. So
is this would you say that this is going
to be the time in human history where
language is potentially going to change
the most rapidly?
>> I think so. I think it's a hard it's a
hard thing to measure what it even is
for a language to change because as I
mentioned I don't even know what
language is. So if I'm starting with my
research question
>> realistically no we don't know what
language is. It's all made up and and
because of the thing I mentioned where
everybody speaks their own kind of
version of language and the thing that
we call a language is really just this
weird spectrum of people talking that
sounds similar to each other and it's
like where do you draw the category
here? Um, of course, Chachi is trained
on a corpus of the English language,
which is made up in the same way Jenz is
made up. It's like a category that we
think is a thing. And then that category
is this weird homogenized thing already
that there is an English language.
There's a way you speak and a way I
speak that are slightly different from
each other and that we can find this
shared reality between ourselves. But
then when our collective shared reality
is fed into the chatbot that then
creates its own reality based on the
shared reality and outputs this what we
end up with is just something that's not
really a a way that you speak. It's not
a way that I speak. It's not a way that
anybody speaks. It's a mathematical
representation of speech.
>> Dude, you rule. Your work's so
interesting. Where should people go?
They want to keep up to date with
everything you got going on. Let's bring
this one out.
>> I think the most important thing is I
try to use my media to push people to
more longer form stuff. So, I got a
Substack etmology nerd and I got a u a
book called Algo Speak about how social
media is changing language, but I am on
social media platforms as etmology nerd
as well.
>> All right, goodbye everybody. Click.
>> Thank you for having me,
>> dude. So [ __ ] good.
>> That was a lot of fun. Wow. I feel like
we covered so much ground.
>> You roll.
>> That was great.
>> Thank you very much for tuning in. If
you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows
who you are deeply. It thinks you're
going to like this one even more.
Go on, press