00:00:006/7 was voted word of the year in 2025 from dictionary.com that cheating not
00:00:06even a word don't mean anything well you have to understand that whenever a
00:00:10dictionary chooses their word of the year that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary
00:00:13to sell more dictionaries yes 6/7 of course is this reference where if you say
00:00:24it you can go viral that's the idea behind 6/7 that's the whole joke that
00:00:27this is a possibility of getting clipped that you can cash in on the virality of
00:00:32it for your own game and dictionary.com played that game but every single person
00:00:36who did it also cashed in on that there was a Connecticut House Representative
00:00:39Bill Buckbee who said 6/7 on the Connecticut state floor and all these
00:00:44people are doing the exact same thing as Taylin Kinney who was the basketball
00:00:48player who started the trend and all the gen alpha kids were cashing in on it like
00:00:52the 6/7 kid all of it was a ploy for virality and it is a realization that
00:00:57clip farming is the future of distribution online. Wow okay but it's a
00:01:02word that doesn't mean anything and is specifically designed to be vacuous and
00:01:08to incite the question what does that mean is that is that unique? I don't
00:01:14believe that it doesn't mean anything right I believe even when something is
00:01:16absurd absurdity is a meaning and it's absurd for a reason it's absurd because
00:01:20it's sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem it's absurd that
00:01:23this would emerge as a word but that is the meaning the absurdity of the word is
00:01:28its own definition. Okay so it's a story about it's a it's a meta word. Yeah
00:01:32exactly yeah it's all it's a knowing wink by uttering 6/7 you're playing into the
00:01:36panopticon. Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year. Right they're also
00:01:42they're rage baiting with that they're hoping that it sparks controversy now
00:01:45when people are commenting about the word rage bait being chosen as the word of the
00:01:48year that drives the word further on Twitter or whatever X excuse me and and
00:01:53as a result more people know about Oxford dictionary so you got to remember
00:01:56this is big dictionary at work. And slop was another one as well so a word
00:02:01describing a word that is sloppy describing something that is sloppy
00:02:05being used for people to complain about the fact that look at the state of
00:02:09language today it's all why it's slop actually. Yeah I like to combat that idea
00:02:15that language is slop or brain rot there's nothing inherently in a word
00:02:18that's good or bad it's a tool that you can use but I think we cast our negative
00:02:22associations of social media onto the language and yeah of course a lot of the
00:02:26videos we see are slop but that doesn't mean the words themselves are bad for
00:02:30your brain. Do you think is tick-tock becoming the most powerful linguistic
00:02:36engine on earth at the moment is that what's shaping language more than
00:02:38anything else? Absolutely there was a study by know your meme in 2022 that
00:02:43found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms and it started
00:02:48out mostly on 4chan and reddit and Twitter and now it's mostly tick-tock and
00:02:52Twitter and again sorry X and you see it's still Twitter I know it's still
00:03:00Twitter I'm holding on to it yeah yeah no but a lot of stuff is happening in
00:03:05tick-tock there's linguistic innovation there's a kind of everything comes from
00:03:08the user interface there's a feeling of a conversation happening there users come
00:03:12there for the conversation to chip in to be part of this effervescent thing that's
00:03:16going on and in that language is created along with this we have all these echo
00:03:19chambers and algorithmic trends being perpetuated that push modern slang cycles
00:03:24faster than ever before. Is there such a thing as a Twitter dialect versus a
00:03:31LinkedIn dialect versus a reddit or a livestream dialect are these almost
00:03:37individual variants on language in each of these different cohorts? Absolutely
00:03:43it's the same way when you're in your grandmother's house versus when you're in
00:03:46a frat house you have a different expectation of how to speak you're not
00:03:49gonna speak to your grandmother the way you would to a frat brother there's like
00:03:51a normal way of communicating so a platform functions kind of like a house
00:03:55it is a place where you go to use a certain type of language so on LinkedIn
00:03:59you're gonna use this more professional language on Twitter you're going to
00:04:02engage in more linguistic play where you're you'll have all these words like
00:04:05jester gooning or whatever emerge. On TikTok there might be more fandom
00:04:10language or something but also I don't want to speak broadly about individual
00:04:13platforms even within these platforms there are micro dialects going on there's
00:04:17kpop groups and Swifty groups and they all speak kind of their own language.
00:04:21What did you make of the fallout? I think one of the most viral instances of
00:04:27linguistic exposure was that mid jester maxing at the club when the
00:04:35phoids come up it is it better to be mugging with the bros then what did you
00:04:38make of that fallout? Yeah I think it's kind of doing the same thing as 6/7 where
00:04:42there's a meaning beyond what the literal meaning technically is it's kind of a
00:04:47knowing wink again to the algorithm that by saying these words you can go viral
00:04:51you can cash in on clavicular's fame he is the human 6/7. If you talk about it
00:04:59you get to go viral that's that's kind of the thing but in doing so you can also
00:05:02push the trend further and while 6/7 was innocuous maybe clavicular is more
00:05:06harmful but that that is kind of the name of the game of virality that all these
00:05:09things are just keywords maxing, gooning, whatever and you can just say that and
00:05:13you can go viral because the keywords are what pushes things through the algorithm
00:05:17and they're what people resonate with on the personal level when they're scrolling.
00:05:19It also tells you something about the person using them it's an identifier of
00:05:25in-group belonging. 100% language is a tool of identity and when you use a word
00:05:32you are signaling that you're part of this cohort. Hmm what are the most
00:05:37defining characteristics of influencers speaking online for creators? How do you
00:05:43think about the constituent components of that? Yeah I've spent a lot of time
00:05:47working on the influencer accent I used to consult on a court case where one
00:05:51influencer was suing another influencer for stealing her vibe and part of that
00:05:53was the accent. Hang on, pause, what? It was here in Austin actually
00:06:01but there was one is called the sad beige lawsuit that there was this
00:06:06minimalist influencer kind of wore a lot of brown clothing and there was another
00:06:10minimalist influencer also in Austin who wore a lot of brown clothing and they
00:06:13kind of spoke the same and so one of them sued the other for for stealing their IP
00:06:17but you can't... Which included the accent. Exactly so I was brought on as a consultant in
00:06:22that case and the takeaway is that neither of them were really original and
00:06:27that they pay homage to an older tradition of influencers talking about this. It's a long
00:06:31and illustrious history of influencers speaking in this way. Absolutely I mean I think the
00:06:35modern like the "hey guys welcome to my podcast" that kind of like that's a
00:06:38lifestyle influencer accent that traces all the way back to like Kim K and the
00:06:43Paris Hilton and early beauty youtubers and then that kind of filtered into
00:06:47TikTok and that same voice with the up talk and the vocal fry is preserved
00:06:51because there's this thing called the linguistic founder effect where you kind
00:06:55of follow in the footsteps of people who came before you linguistically and that's
00:06:58why also platforms do have different commenting cultures and different
00:07:02linguistic cultures and that's only one type of influencer accent. Pause on
00:07:06that one. What what are they trying to achieve with the lifestyle influencer
00:07:10accent? What are the important parts and what's the outcome they're trying to get
00:07:13toward? Yeah great question there's a few things going on. One of it is just social
00:07:16signaling it's saying I'm part of your group because that's what all of language
00:07:19does so there is a identity marker of what it's like to be an influencer and so
00:07:25you're performing this idea of an influencer also performing relatability
00:07:28to the young woman who are watching you. At the same time the action is optimized
00:07:32for the algorithm. There's an element of retention which is how long you watch the
00:07:35video and when you drag out words it kind of works better for captivating your
00:07:40audience. Dead silence is very bad on the algorithm so if you have a live stream or
00:07:46something you want to drag out your final syllable so actually that up talk where
00:07:49you kind of lengthen your final vowel is very good for online hooking. No way so if
00:07:53you don't have your next sentence queued up you can have a holding pattern which
00:07:57is the end of the last word so that you know what you're gonna say at the end and
00:08:01then after that you can work out what's coming next? That's exactly it in
00:08:04linguistics. Holy fuck. It's called floor holding it's an actual like strategy that
00:08:09people use before you know social media if you were on a stage if you're on a
00:08:13debate you want to keep grabbing people's attention so use things like filler words
00:08:17actually um is a great example of a floor holding tactic where you are trying to
00:08:22get people to keep listening to you even though you don't have something
00:08:24immediately to say. Alex O'Connor taught me this great one about Christopher
00:08:27Hitchens that if he was in the middle of a debate and he needed to take a sip of
00:08:31water or have a thought he would get halfway through the sentence and then
00:08:37would continue from there and I thought that's so fucking cool as opposed to
00:08:40pausing at the end and then thinking about what he was gonna say by taking or
00:08:45even as you so you might say why is that the case well really what we need to
00:08:53consider is oh I'm waiting so the use of silence. We want to know what comes next. Bingo. Yeah
00:08:59and same with the influencers it's like if if there's an up talk there's an
00:09:02implied I'm not done speaking and that's kind of the meta signal that there's
00:09:07something more to come it sounds like something's unfinished when there's up
00:09:10talk and when there's down talk you'll never hear down like I'm done like that's
00:09:14like a volume oh it's a handoff there you go yeah yeah yeah so you will not
00:09:18hear that online at all because it's it's a signal to scroll away I've trained
00:09:24myself I just said signal to scroll away I like up talk because that's like I've
00:09:28sort of trained myself into speaking I call an educational influencer action
00:09:32which is different than that lifestyle influencer okay give me the educational
00:09:34influence racks on the most interesting thing about that is but you know and I
00:09:37kind of stress more words to keep you watching my videos and I'll talk a little
00:09:41faster and I clearly talk quickly in real life but I think I there's a difference
00:09:45between a conversational style and then when I'm purely reciting a scripted
00:09:48video to hook you maximally for your attention mmm okay so you're stressing
00:09:53individual words speaking a bit more quickly that's interesting that the
00:09:57valley girl vocal fry lifestyle influencer what I get the sense of as
00:10:03someone who isn't exactly a connoisseur of that content is a softness sort of
00:10:10welcomingness almost a familiarity an attempt to sort of show hey guys welcome
00:10:15back to my channel it's almost welcoming you through the door whereas it's much
00:10:19sharper when you're thinking about the educational influencer but given that one
00:10:23is kind of slow although there's no brakes but it's certainly not da da da da
00:10:27da da da da da da da da da it's much more cozy and the other is significantly more
00:10:32aggressive in terms of its pacing absolutely well it's again the question
00:10:36of what are you trying to do on the meta level the lifestyle influencer wants you
00:10:39to feel like you're parasocially watching this video an educational
00:10:43influencer wants you to feel like they're a trusted source of authority and it's
00:10:47that level of communication that's happening there I don't actually want you
00:10:51to relate to me 100% I want you to think of me as a teacher if I'm talking to you
00:10:54so if you're speaking more quickly with authority in a almost staccato manner
00:11:00it's good as brevity in the words is yeah I think the consonants are always being
00:11:05pronounced pretty pretty accurately to create shape and color this is an
00:11:08interesting one have you looked much addiction at the the way that the mouth
00:11:12the functionality of the mouth the physiology of the mouth works 100% it's a
00:11:16big part of linguistics yeah yeah unreal so I just really loved the first time I
00:11:20ever worked with a speech coach and he said his description to me was vowels
00:11:24give words color and consonants give them structure and one of the problems being
00:11:29from the northeast of the UK we have a glottal stop typically so people say
00:11:32butter butter there's two T's in butter and they're not saying either of them and
00:11:36neither was I when I was younger by removing or by losing those consonants
00:11:42you sort of fall through words they don't have the same kind of structure clarity
00:11:47clippiness and bringing those back in helps to give it a little bit more form
00:11:53but what you're describing here that you've modified your speaking style for
00:11:57what will perform better online is kind of exactly this greater homogenization
00:12:01effect that's happening there's nothing less valid about a North England dialect
00:12:04than the received pronunciation or the transatlantic accent or any of these
00:12:07things we just bullshit into thinking that some of these are like fancier than
00:12:10other accents but it's all in our heads and yet there's still this pressure to
00:12:15perform to use a more standard pronunciation of English for my book I
00:12:20interviewed a lot of Indian creators who feel like they can't speak in Indian
00:12:24accents because that's kind of maligned upon that seems less status yeah and they
00:12:28have to kind of code switch into more British sounding or American sounding
00:12:32accents well in my defense or at least in my mother's defense she was sort of
00:12:38slapping me on the wrist and beating it out of me as a child so I didn't make it
00:12:41to adulthood without saying butter that's because of an ingrained shame there
00:12:45really is nothing inherently wrong with you speaking in a northern I'm gonna go
00:12:48back to it you fucking cannot stop me from saying but as much as I want the
00:12:54cost is you might go less viral because the viewer has an expectation that I want
00:12:58you to be speaking in the way I expect you to speak also there is a degree of
00:13:01legibility or illegibility but if you get a strong Geordie accent from the
00:13:07Northeast where I'm from or a strong scouse accent from Liverpool it is as
00:13:11close to a different language whilst being the same like it's like one step
00:13:16away from speciation in terms of language I think language can be correctly
00:13:21described as following a very similar path to evolution and that there are
00:13:25bottleneck events and speciation events and the algorithm for example I think is
00:13:29one such bottleneck that it compresses our language and you have to be speaking
00:13:33in these widely recognizable accents but then it speciates and creates new
00:13:36environments and so on these different platforms and in the different fandom
00:13:41communities on the platforms you will have new outgrowths of language that have
00:13:45first passed through this filter event what else so we've had cozy lifestyle
00:13:50lady we've had educational influencer man there's Mr. Beast in the room yeah very
00:13:59good what's happening with Mr. Beast accent if you look at his video and if
00:14:03you look at how he actually speaks in interviews they're completely different
00:14:06he is very deliberately switching his accent to grab your attention as much as
00:14:11possible he screams in it I just bought a private island getting away a million
00:14:14dollars like he's very like ostentatious with it he's screaming at you every
00:14:17sentence because that works for his 14 year old viewers attention spans he's
00:14:22speaking to a different audience than somebody trying to educate in a different
00:14:26audience than somebody trying to appear relatable because he's clearly being
00:14:30ostentatious so it's reflected in his vocal style like he sounds like he's
00:14:33about to give away a million dollars even as he does it you know so it's excitement
00:14:36loudness what else shock and awe really you just you wanted the viewer to remain
00:14:44so dumbfounded watching the video that they don't even think to scroll away it's
00:14:48like a magician you just want to keep the attention going I saw a live streamer in
00:14:52the wild for the first time ever a couple of months ago and obviously I've seen
00:14:56live streams online I've seen some IRL stuff not tons but seeing an IRL streamer
00:15:02from side camera or behind camera was a real experience it was at the Beast Games
00:15:082 premiere in Hollywood and what I found fascinating was because the live stream
00:15:13essentially never ends until it finally does there is this permanent edging of
00:15:18the audience that there will be a payoff but not yet and there will be a payoff
00:15:21but not yet at least with Beast it's like we're gonna go to the most expensive gym
00:15:26in the world but first I'm gonna show you the cheapest and now I'm gonna show you
00:15:29one a bit more expensive and now I'm gonna and then finally you do it and
00:15:32there's a payoff and then you're done and the videos finished yeah different medium
00:15:34because it's bounded by a specific time so you know the Beast video is 14 minutes
00:15:38long but the live stream is lasting however long it's kind of definitely
00:15:41live performers if you go to like a public gathering and there's those
00:15:44people doing backflips in a crowd like for money or whatever they won't do the
00:15:48backflips immediately because nobody like people leave immediately dance around for
00:15:51a dance around they'll do a round of collection of the money they'll dance
00:15:54around some more they'll do another round of collector I promise guys we're gonna
00:15:57get to the backflips and you keep watching cuz they're edging you it's
00:15:59what's yeah exactly what's happening and if you look at like tick-tock live
00:16:01streams I keep getting click baited by this like video of this guy trying to
00:16:05peel an egg and he gets the last part of the egg and he's like he keeps like
00:16:08edging us like I'm gonna take but I think there's something of an important
00:16:16parallel between that visual way that you get click baited and the auditory and
00:16:19linguistic way that happens as well okay how so well live streaming I think there
00:16:25is a dissolution between this online presentation and the offline presentation
00:16:29I think it's particularly dangerous because it does play into this attention
00:16:34mechanism but in real life where you're exploiting real people for it linguistically
00:16:38speaking that does mean you're gonna keep doing the up talks you're going to speak
00:16:43in attention-grabbing manners all that is yeah and you do kind of delay
00:16:48gratification when I do a video and I script it out I kind of don't immediately
00:16:53say the resolution of the question I posed at the start and you'll see this a
00:16:57lot in YouTube videos mm-hmm the payoffs held until the end yeah what other
00:17:02subcultures online do you think a particularly interesting linguistically
00:17:06oh wow I mean I've spent a lot of time studying the language of the manosphere
00:17:09I think it's particularly interesting because half of Gen Z slang is either
00:17:13african-american English or it's from 4chan and you do have a lot of those
00:17:17in cell words trickling in I definitely 4chan was a linguistic incubator for
00:17:22decades and well a decade and all these new words came came out of it that are
00:17:29still slowly diffusing into more mainstream culture like maxing and pilled
00:17:32and you know gooning what made 4chan such a useful incubator for language there's
00:17:40the anonymity on the platform where users need to demonstrate a shared proficiency
00:17:44in slang to show that they're not a normie and there's this huge selection
00:17:47pressure to show that you're one of the 4chan users and because it's such a
00:17:51constrained platform you can't do video you can't do voice you're not doing face
00:17:56you don't know the identity of someone you need to very quickly through your
00:18:00language identify I am one of you not one of them yeah you can do like images
00:18:03and things which that's how we get a lot of memes also come from there but
00:18:08linguistically yeah there's no one's posting a selfie the right to say this is
00:18:11me I am one of us in the sense that language is identity yeah a hundred
00:18:15percent these people in fortune are also trying to build a shared identity for
00:18:18themselves self-branding belonging and it's cool to come up with the new joke
00:18:21and language spreads when it's funny it does we like saying things that are
00:18:25funny that's reasonable it's funny to say I'm podcast maxing mm-hmm yeah that's
00:18:28true well I am I have been for eight years now I am podcast maxing what about
00:18:33newscasters how can they speak so strangely they're doing the exact same
00:18:37thing this just in and they speak in this authoritative kind of manner it's doing
00:18:42the exact same thing as the educational influencer really it's it's a way of
00:18:44grabbing attention that's conditioned a certain medium and there's a broadcaster
00:18:48voice just as there's an influencer voice there's a they used to train like
00:18:54American broadcasters to use this mid atlanta not yeah mid midwestern u.s.
00:18:59accent that was kind of the homogenous u.s. accent and that was also a way of
00:19:04presenting in an accepted this is how a TV broadcaster is supposed to speak kind
00:19:09of way and at home they might still use like a local accent you can speak in a
00:19:12different way it's interesting that that becomes enforced over time just through
00:19:16consensus and expectation that there's some first mover somewhere maybe one
00:19:20person's particularly effective there's a legendary newscaster and this guy speaks
00:19:24in a way and then the generation around him shaped because that seems to be a
00:19:29successful approach therefore you see this online someone has a new thumbnail
00:19:32style and now everybody's doing thumbnails like that or somebody does a
00:19:35new video style and everyone's doing videos like that it's the same thing but
00:19:38with the accent for newscasters and then that becomes not only something
00:19:43effective for his colleagues at the time but it's now shaping the entire future
00:19:48and that's the expectation well that's how newscasters speak and if you would
00:19:52come in and you'd speak in a different manner that would be very different right
00:19:55that's what I was saying about the founder effect and you kind of follow in
00:19:58the footsteps of people before you for example for my educational influencer
00:20:01accent probably it's highly influenced by people like Hank Green or something
00:20:05Vsauce there's like they were the early educational influencers and they're
00:20:08probably copying people like Bill Nye or something so it always trickles back to
00:20:11something earlier you know you exist in the context yeah yeah this episode is
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00:21:08. sh / modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 a checkout what about sports
00:21:13commentators because they're doing something similar but a little bit
00:21:16distinct and different yeah if news broadcasters are the equivalent of
00:21:21educational influencers then sports commentators are kind of closer to mr.
00:21:25beast they want to keep you excited go you know like it's very exciting they
00:21:29want to keep you excited about watching the game and that's reasonable yeah yeah
00:21:31but speaking with a lot of clarity again super expressive there's not much oh I
00:21:37don't see very many filler words with those people which I guess is because
00:21:41it's trained out of them I have to imagine that over time if you're looking
00:21:44to maximize relatability authenticity a felt sense of belonging what you're
00:21:49actually going to do is not sterilize your use of language too much to make it
00:21:54too precise that that then feels contrived as opposed to something that's
00:21:58naturalistic you want to hit a fine line I mean think about like phone calls in
00:22:01movies they famously never say goodbye they just finish saying something and
00:22:05they hang up because in real life we do the whole like all right I'll see you
00:22:09later goodbye but in a movie that doesn't really work so you do actually
00:22:12make it more concise no way because it would just waste screen time we don't
00:22:16need to hear you exactly okay okay well you have a good yep it's fine yeah no
00:22:21worry yeah I'll catch you later but goodbye bring five seconds that you
00:22:25didn't need in the movie so it's performing the idea of a phone call while
00:22:28not actually doing phone call as we actually do it I never thought about
00:22:32that holy shit but sterilizing language too much obviously put secret you did a
00:22:38great TED talk I did a TEDx talk five six years ago or something now and one of
00:22:45the things that I realized as I was getting ready for that and doing the
00:22:48preparation was I actually need to detrain my knowledge of my own talk in a
00:22:54way so that it doesn't sound too contrived so it doesn't sound too
00:22:58performative there's that idea of what a TED talk sounds like I mean there's a
00:23:01great video on YouTube of like guy just doing TED talk by saying things that
00:23:07don't mean anything but he's saying in the cadence of a TED talk that's funny
00:23:10um definitely recommend looking that up but yeah there's there's you can you know
00:23:14what I mean when I say there's a cadence of what a TED talk sounds like mm-hmm I
00:23:17think it's kind of dead I think it's in the past and TED talks are also they've
00:23:23lost a lot of their prestige of what it was and the way people should be doing
00:23:27TED talks now is just clip farming which is the future the way that people should
00:23:32be doing TED talks now it's just clip farm so if you get booked for a TED talk
00:23:35you should just try and get clip formed I think so how would you do that what
00:23:38actually matters like I don't know the audience of TED talk is I guess
00:23:43aspirational speakers themselves or like it's and if you have a real message to
00:23:48say it's probably not the audience that's there it's probably better if you
00:23:53transmit it on the internet because you could reach that audience hmm and that's
00:23:57the idea behind six seven and behind jester maxing and all that stuff is that
00:24:02distribution matters more than the content itself that you're just saying
00:24:06the thing that goes a viral and if we're existing in a age of social media
00:24:10virality the TED talk is kind of a dead format existing as this quasi online talk
00:24:16which was fantastic in the early days of YouTube when there wasn't enough content
00:24:19going on yeah but now the media's ecosystem is oversaturated and the TED
00:24:23talks have way fewer views than they used to because they don't do the same
00:24:27function that they did in the early internet well especially because one
00:24:31video can get you can write a book and then each sentence can be sold
00:24:35individually and then even those sentences can be reproduced and
00:24:38reproduced and reproduced and individual productions of those can be reshared so
00:24:42yeah you're actually looking for as much distribution as possible when what was it
00:24:47called the HH bomb thing that happened with the guys in the Miami Club where
00:24:53they played that Kanye song and oh yeah insane bar that was every single second
00:24:59of that video was broken down and shared and reshared and published and
00:25:02republished and commented on and that's a single book just being sold word by word
00:25:07essentially and what that points is that there is a dangerous misalignment between
00:25:11human preferences like I can imagine that most of us don't think that song is good
00:25:16for humanity and then what goes viral online because online there are certain
00:25:20emotions that are rewarded more than others there's anger fear awe humor
00:25:25things that trigger a state of mental arousal where your brain is more
00:25:28activated now things that don't do that is like contentment contentment makes you
00:25:32feel warm and fuzzy inside but it doesn't trigger your brain to click a like
00:25:34button the like button of course is more of a metric of how willing you are to
00:25:38click this button than it is whether you like something and you're more willing to
00:25:41click a button if your brain is activated and your brain is not activated when you
00:25:44feel warm and fuzzy which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not going to spread
00:25:47online the things that are gonna spread or rage bait and clickbait that's so
00:25:50fascinating so if you're a meditation teacher by design because you make people
00:25:56feel good and you get them out of that brain mode you're going to get less
00:26:00engagement just means that you're gonna go less viral which means there's lots of
00:26:03an incentive for you to keep doing your content look at the wellness space the
00:26:06same way movie phone calls perform what it's like to be a phone call wellness
00:26:10influencers are performing the idea of wellness but it's this hyper aestheticize
00:26:14sanitize clean girl thing where you're on a yoga mat doing Pilates or whatever but
00:26:18that doesn't you like you're presenting this hyper wellness idea that's not true
00:26:23wellness and if you're actually feeling warm and fuzzy you don't need to prove
00:26:26that to other people you don't need to play like you're feeling good yeah you're
00:26:31not doing yoga in the living room with your floor-to-ceiling windows and you're
00:26:34waving sage everywhere you're sat on the couch relax sometimes it's just watching
00:26:39a movie is you know sitting on the couch but not sufficiently visually interesting
00:26:42so it wouldn't be compelling for people what about the gay male accent what's
00:26:46going on there yeah a hundred percent there's a lot of research on well
00:26:50emerging research on lesbian action as well but gay accent that there is a
00:26:53certain way of talking that of course will differ between different communities
00:26:57and it's not a monolith but you know you can recognize when somebody talks in a
00:27:02gay accent there there's a few sociological things going on I think it's
00:27:07incorrect to say that they talk more like woman but they adopt many strategies that
00:27:12are similar to how women have talked they raise certain vowels and they will
00:27:18yeah and it's it's all kind of the same identity thing it was historically a way
00:27:25like the gay slang words which is a lot of our Gen Z slang words also come from
00:27:29gay ballroom speech well like oh like slay serve Queen cooked a cooked is gay
00:27:37yeah I'm pretty sure that come well there's cooking and cooked which come
00:27:41from different sources cooking a sports lane yeah yeah yeah yeah playing well
00:27:45yeah yeah unreal so I wonder if there's stuff that even we wouldn't notice that
00:27:53there's little identifiers in the gay community like top speak in one way and
00:27:58bottom speak in another oh I guess guy there's guys that present in much more
00:28:03masculine manner and there's guys that present in a much more feminine manner
00:28:05interesting conversation I had over dinner probably best to have it over
00:28:09dinner I'm looking at what it is the the presentation that most straight men
00:28:16notice in gay men and what they notice is what you said which is are you coding
00:28:21as female not as female yeah but in a manner that somebody who isn't a part of
00:28:25that culture would identify as feminine I'm gonna sound like a broken clock but
00:28:29everything is performing the idea of something and so gay men perform the idea
00:28:32of being gay which is fine straight men perform the idea of being straight and
00:28:34it's also a way to signal to other people like in historically gay men had to be
00:28:40closeted and they needed ways of signaling to other gay men that hey I'm
00:28:44chill and I we should hang out you know and that's sort of linguistically there
00:28:50are little cues you can drop that hint at I'm a gay man right what like well using
00:28:56certain slang words like I'm thinking about like I don't know cottaging in
00:29:01Britain but when homosexuality was illegal there's like certain ways of
00:29:05tapping your foot or Polari was a whole gay can't like a kind of a micro language
00:29:10created in England that was used specifically by gay people as a way of
00:29:14evading detection by police because police didn't know what was going on and
00:29:16it was a way of signaling a shared identity for themselves and we see sort
00:29:19of gay micro languages emerge everywhere in the Philippines there's one called
00:29:23Sward speak there's one in South Africa every community because gay people have
00:29:29been historically kind of marginalized they need ways to come up with subversion
00:29:33of the traditional norms of language did you know what capoeira is it sounds
00:29:38British to Brazilian martial arts Brazilian so um capoeira was a martial
00:29:44art developed in Brazil when they were under a military rule and they weren't
00:29:50allowed to practice fighting because they didn't want there to be a military force
00:29:53that could rise up so this thing if you watch a video of it looks very
00:29:57distinctive very dancing kind of looks like that I mean it very quickly gets
00:30:01into a fighting are but um that makes me think about gay guys in Britain before it
00:30:07was legal having to have a secret language on a Brazilian martial art
00:30:12developed by Africans taken to the country as slaves that was it so they
00:30:15they weren't allowed to practice fighting and they've got music that goes with it
00:30:18as well which would be a way to hide what was going on it's just a part we don't
00:30:22need to worry about that it's just a party and yeah the well yeah that's
00:30:26amazing yeah well if we accept that language is a tool of identity identity
00:30:32is tied to power who's in control as part of your identity and so we see the
00:30:37English language which is defined by these white British people in the 1700s or
00:30:42whatever and we're still loving the norms yeah but it doesn't represent all the
00:30:46speakers of English and so different speakers try to come up with different
00:30:49ways to subvert that structure that's imposed upon them and so a lot of that
00:30:53has been african-american english speakers who now have come up with a lot
00:30:57of slang words that later bled into mainstream Gen Z slang or specifically
00:31:02gay people because of these a restraint white men creating language and so it's a
00:31:06way of subverting of establishing their own norms of language King and Queen for
00:31:11example like the slang word what's up King you know like that or what's up
00:31:15Queen that that comes from ballroom slang in New York City in the 1980s which is
00:31:19this like black gay Latino space black gay Latino Latino gay you know gay people
00:31:25in New York City and it was a way of elevating people in that community I see
00:31:31you on the status of royalty because you we are not seen as that by society and
00:31:36that even goes back even further to the history kind of like black people in the
00:31:40United States a lot of slang goes from black people to gay people and then to
00:31:45like the straight white girlfriends of gay men and then to the mainstream
00:31:48English right okay so there's a pipeline a four-person human centipede with normies
00:31:54at the end and black people at the front that's pretty much it fantastic or
00:31:57fortune is the other end fortune black people be people cool people normies
00:32:03language spreads when it's funny or cool and it's cool when black people use it
00:32:06and it's funny when fortune people use it it can be considered funny unfortunately
00:32:10when black people say things as well which is a whole genre of hood irony
00:32:13memes like cap like is an example or huz is a recent slang what's that it's like
00:32:21a slang word for hose but it comes from like a parody of african-american
00:32:25english or got that was that was also kind of making fun of gas yeah yeah but
00:32:30it comes from the word goddamn pronounced in an exaggerated african-american
00:32:34accent of course when I say that there's many different african-american accents
00:32:39in the same way there's many different gay accents and many different internet
00:32:41accents and I really hate to speak of language as a monolith I'm not even sure
00:32:44language exists as like a thing it's just like we all speak separately kind of
00:32:48close to people around us and there's like a gradient of what language is
00:32:52rather than a monolithic thing the monolithic thing is this institutional
00:32:55assumption that there is a dictionary that can capture a snapshot of what
00:32:58language is so every person has their own language in yes it's called idiot
00:33:03idiolect from the Greek word idios meaning one's own and we all speak in
00:33:06completely unique way conditioned by our background our upbringing our education
00:33:10the people we hung out with the words that resonated with us based on just our
00:33:14history of interacting with language I find that really compelling that you
00:33:18have a linguistic footprint unlike anybody else that's how they caught the
00:33:21Unabomber yes his brother found out that he said eat your cake and have it too as
00:33:27opposed to have your cake and eat it too because the one that he used actually
00:33:30makes more sense but was completely unique exactly and so we all have like
00:33:34these little quirks whether you think you do or not they're there what about
00:33:38lesbian accents this is harder to identify and there are studies showing
00:33:43that speakers can identify lesbian accent but there are very mixed results on what
00:33:48defines one there is again indication that they speak a little closer to the
00:33:54idea of a masculine language and yet at the same time it would be reductive to
00:33:57say that so there is certain stuff going on with perhaps lowered vowels and maybe
00:34:04a deeper voice but again I would be generalizing to say that we know for sure
00:34:07there definitely is something going on but the studies aren't there to fully
00:34:11explain it it would make sense if you were to think about much of gay fashion
00:34:16compared with straight fashion for men you would say oh there's a bit more flare
00:34:21there's maybe a bit more color the there's more beautification there's more
00:34:26accessories okay that seems to code somewhat feminine and if you were to look
00:34:30at gay women compared with straight women say well there's more plaid and jeans
00:34:37and sort of male coated clothes a little bit more loose-fitting sometimes that
00:34:43would tend to code a bit more male you okay well it would make sense that if
00:34:47you're presenting outwardly that way that maybe your language would match that but
00:34:51it would also be unique and distinct because gay men aren't trying to be
00:34:54women that would be very bad for the gay men they're trying to attract right and
00:34:58gay women aren't trying to be men because they wouldn't attract anything that is
00:35:02the idea of gay man again which is maybe close closer to woman then straight man
00:35:06performing the idea of being a gay man and all we're doing all the time is
00:35:10performing larping we're just pretending to be on a podcast right now but in doing
00:35:13so we're actually are you know can you I need you to dice it can you blow that
00:35:16apart for me it's really cool I'm not entirely sure what you mean um I think
00:35:22people should all read this guy Irving Goffman he's a sociologist from the
00:35:251960s and he comes up with this great book the presentation of self and
00:35:29everyday life and he describes how we all adopt faces or roles in society there's a
00:35:33front-facing role and a back-facing like so when you're on stage or off stage and
00:35:37when you're on stage right now we're presenting to the public we are on stage
00:35:41we're presenting as ourselves but as soon as we get off the podcast we might speak
00:35:44more casually because there's a different way of communicating when you know
00:35:48there's this invisible audience present in the same way when you're literally on
00:35:53a stage or you're literally backstage that you'll do the same thing but if
00:35:56you're talking in front of your parents versus you're talking with your friends
00:35:59you'll adopt different registers and it's that kind of the same thing we were
00:36:02describing with different rooms and different platforms and you have an idea
00:36:07of what your environment is and you will mold yourself into the role you see that
00:36:11environment as bringing to you and so we do everything through this idea of a role
00:36:16and all of what we do is a performance to be a man is kind of a performance like we
00:36:20need to keep replicating this idea of manhood we both like have beards we both
00:36:27dress and talk a certain way and in doing so we're kind of adopting symbols
00:36:32of masculinity and clavicular is doing a great job of that himself I've got it I
00:36:37got a take on that which is I think it's the most caricatured traits of
00:36:41masculinity not necessarily in terms of speech you know because you might say a
00:36:49powerful precise educated or a brusque maybe even who's someone who's very curt
00:36:57with the way that they suppose strong and silent type but that's because
00:37:00masculinity is couched within 2026 what does it mean right for masculinity to be
00:37:05that way I think visually masculinity has just been going in one direction if you
00:37:09look at the tracking of Luke Skywalker star action figures over time in the 60s
00:37:15he was super skinny and then in the 90s again do me a comparison just search a
00:37:21chat GPT Luke Skywalker action figure over time comparison and yeah he just he
00:37:29goes on a very heavy course of testosterone for about six decades and
00:37:32that's really interesting and it's more and more and more and more and more Jack so I
00:37:37think what's happening is a performance of masculinity that's the best way to put
00:37:41it Luke Skywalker looks next Luke Skywalker absolutely mogs dude yeah he
00:37:46he's performing masculinity it's a male-to-male visual comparison and there
00:37:52is always an evolving definition of masculinity to like back in ancient Rome
00:37:55being masculine means you could like as long as you could have sex with other men
00:37:59as long as you weren't a bottom that would be like not masculine but that was
00:38:02true that was the definition of masculinity for a certain period in
00:38:05ancient Rome you're allowed to fuck just your you you have to fuck if you are
00:38:09Caesar was famously offended not at the accusation that he was gay but the
00:38:13accusation that he was a bottom because that's the Roman idea but it's an all
00:38:28evolving idea whether men should have long hair and short hair whether you know
00:38:32we should you know what it means to be a man is always a moving target and we're
00:38:36always performing for this target so it just proves how arbitrary it is that
00:38:40right now of course there is a current 2026 idea of a man that we're performing
00:38:46toward but that's a very different idea than back when we were wearing togas hmm
00:38:50that's 1977 1995 heavy course of testosterone did unbelievable that what
00:38:57and then they've used the stats of what it would be like to give the same
00:39:03proportions to a human on either side 37 inch shoulders in a 32 inch waist versus
00:39:0952 inch shoulders the 27 inch ways all right the last thing that looks nothing
00:39:13like a human mark Hamill yeah a human a quick aside there is a stat that genuinely
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00:40:31what about emojis because they're kind of like language and picture I guess they
00:40:36feel like modern hieroglyphics yeah well there's a few different functions of
00:40:39emojis you can use it to substitute of word like we see this with ice protest
00:40:44people want to censor the word ice because they think the algorithm is like
00:40:48gonna hamper their video so they'll just sub it out with the ice cube emoji that's
00:40:51a substitute of emoji then you have emojis that are more paralanguage meant
00:40:55to augment your sentence so if I say something and then I comment the or I
00:40:59have a sentence and then at the end of the sentence there's like a laughing
00:41:02emoji or a sneezing emoji or a crying emoji that serves as a sort of a tone tag
00:41:07telling you what the emotional form of my sentence is and then there's a few other
00:41:12separate ways you can send them individually you could use them as
00:41:15reactions there's a lot of things going on but they absolutely are linguistic in
00:41:20the sense of they carry meaning and they communicate something from one person to
00:41:24another I saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji
00:41:31meant had it have did it wasn't the farmer in Canada what was this one okay
00:41:38there's a great court case where there was a farmer who had a contract for
00:41:42grain shipments and he would occasionally like they did month by month and they
00:41:49would sign off with a yes or whatever and then one month the farmer signs off
00:41:53with an okay emoji just like thumbs up okay and the grain supplier doesn't
00:41:58deliver the grain or something like that and then the farmer sues the grain
00:42:02supplier maybe I'm getting it the other way around but the point is the court
00:42:04case was about whether the thumbs up emoji legally constituted an affirmation
00:42:09of this agreement occurring one person said this could be acknowledgement and
00:42:15the other person said this is a direct agreement and I think the court case
00:42:18ruled in favor of thumbs up being an agreement but it was kind of based on
00:42:23previous context right because previous context was a long-established history of
00:42:27emojis in court cases right well there's a few things going on yeah what was the
00:42:32one you were thinking of it there was a murder case and it was about intent it
00:42:36was about whether or not this person had intended to kill somebody or not and
00:42:41it's an interpretation of what this emoji means and it's so funny because it's a
00:42:45single thing right it's there's no intonation I guess it's couched in what
00:42:50has been said before and after but if you just take it on its own there is no
00:42:53different way to say there is no different way to spell it and it's only
00:42:56been around for 15 less than 15 years something like that probably okay so the
00:43:03definition of it hasn't had enough time to really cement itself and become
00:43:07established well that's the thing that's so fluid emoji definitions are also
00:43:11constantly changing like the crying emoji once meant literally crying and then it
00:43:14meant laughing and then it also the laughing emoji is now seen as like
00:43:19ironic by something you shouldn't use the laughing emoji right yeah that's kind of
00:43:23cringe unless you're trying to like signal boomer correct yes yeah yeah yeah
00:43:27it's the horseshoe has come all the way back around right again you can post
00:43:31ironically use it yeah okay yeah we're in the post cry laughing face world right
00:43:36yeah yeah okay what's the what's the direction of etymology it feels like
00:43:42there's sort of an entropy towards that they move in a direction are they always
00:43:46getting simpler and shorter over time is there an arrow of motion when it comes to
00:43:53word development I think language more than anything is a reflection of who we
00:43:58are as people right now the word etymology comes from Greek at to most
00:44:01meaning truth there's a truth to the word that we look at and it tells us
00:44:05something about humanity about who we are as people because again this is a tool of
00:44:08identity and so less of there being a direction and more of it just reflecting
00:44:13who we are right now what we're feeling its language is our way to categorize
00:44:18what we think is going on I'll use words to describe my reality and then I'll use
00:44:22that to communicate it to you so it's describing reality and then it's
00:44:25communicating that reality if our reality changes yeah language will change as a
00:44:29result because now we have to describe something different so we have we're
00:44:36using fewer words to describe different types of plants than we were in the
00:44:401800s because we're interacting with fewer plants that's kind of sad okay and
00:44:45what about when what's the the term for when a word gets broken down to make to
00:44:51be made shorter so goodbye as a good example God be with you and then yeah
00:44:55contracted to goodbye and then eventually you can truncate it to just by yeah yeah
00:44:59what's that called that's a abbreviation contraction there are different ways of
00:45:04doing this you can make words shorter and you can also make Portmanteau's where
00:45:08you combine different words and yeah we're making new words all the time
00:45:13jester maxing is a great evidence of that we're combining new words in new ways and
00:45:17but that sort of reflects our new reality and so if reality adjusts we will both
00:45:22come up with new words and we'll lose old ones because language is a moving living
00:45:26thing you mentioned black people gay people cool people normal people young
00:45:32people how much did they drive language forward because young people are almost
00:45:37always seen as being cool but they're also the ones that have got the least
00:45:41cemented history with regards to their linguistic use yeah exactly they're the
00:45:45ones that are the earliest to adopt new words because older people have this
00:45:49cemented idea of what language is younger people are both more flexible with that
00:45:53and they're trying to build a shared identity for themselves and I know I keep
00:45:56bringing identity into it but that's what language is it's a way of you know
00:46:00figuring out who you are and what kind of words you want to use and you don't want
00:46:04to sound like your mother you want to sound like you're your peers yeah how
00:46:07much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differentiate
00:46:11differentiate themselves that's a huge part of it most of language change I
00:46:14would say is driven by people like right now honestly middle schoolers but
00:46:17historically people between the ages of like 10 and 25 are the ones coming up
00:46:22with slang now of course there's different types of how language you have
00:46:25to adopt there's institutional words so like iPhone is a new word but it's not a
00:46:29slang word podcast a shortening of iPod plus broadcast that's sort of new but
00:46:36that cut these things come from more institutional avenues that's another
00:46:40route or mechanism of language change but for the slang which is this kind of
00:46:45lower status feeling of language that eventually can become just real language
00:46:50that comes from younger people so all the video game terms we see in bleeding into
00:46:55mainstream English NPC skill issue that kind of stuff or all the yeah the black
00:47:03people or the incel language all that's kind of the driven by young people right
00:47:09now how effective are institutions at top-down dictating language and
00:47:16linguistic use because when I think about and this might just be because I'm
00:47:20terminally online when I think about most of the language that I see yeah you're
00:47:23right with podcast but they're usually categories they're not the sort of thing
00:47:27that people are using as a important identifier of the way that they're put
00:47:32together and it doesn't really seem to be shaping culture maybe it represents
00:47:35something that shapes culture but the words itself won't so how easy is it for
00:47:41people in power to top-down dictate the way that language is used if it feels
00:47:46like a word is intentionally being forced upon you we actually often feel a
00:47:50resistance to it there's a in the movie Mean Girls Gretchen famously couldn't
00:47:54make the word fetch happen she was trying to make that yeah and that's because it
00:47:59fell forced so if you feel like someone is pushing a word on to you you might
00:48:02actually not want to adopt it there is a difference with institutional acceptance
00:48:06so if you see a word in a dictionary that's just like this is accepted as
00:48:11language even though of course there's just an idea of language but you might
00:48:15point to that now and you'll see news outlets only use words that are in the
00:48:19dictionary or books in academic publishing and all this stuff will use
00:48:23this standard idea of language which is filtered through the institutions so
00:48:28they're not forcing the word they're merely once a word has been used around
00:48:31for long enough they legitimize it hmm lots of people have got issues with the
00:48:35word like um you know what are some of the older versions of filler words
00:48:43because it can't have just been now that filler words were brought in yeah well
00:48:48there voiceman filler words and um might be the one of the most universal words
00:48:52there's across different languages that mid central vowel oh shows up in a lot of
00:48:58when people are thinking I know Spanish speakers use like a or it's it's some
00:49:04kind of vowel that's close to the center often that's used when you're how you
00:49:10just I said it that's used when you're thinking about something and that's a
00:49:14universal constant that we think about things and we need time to say things
00:49:17for it's a holding pattern yeah it's the floor yeah I think it's stigmatized
00:49:23because it's associated with not thinking through things like especially is
00:49:28associated with like the valley girls and though those women are stigmatized just
00:49:34because they're not seen as speaking standard English even though there's
00:49:36nothing inherently wrong and actually like has a lot of different applications
00:49:40there's the quotative like where you can say you can say something you can quote
00:49:46someone directly I said this or you can adopt an affect I was like this and that
00:49:53actually serves a different linguistic function that's actually a really
00:49:55beautiful thing that you can adopt a persona in the middle of speech instead
00:49:58of directly claiming to quote something like implies it doesn't have to be a
00:50:03hundred percent accurate but the self analogy yeah self simile I was like it's
00:50:07a self simile yeah yeah yeah one of the things someone brought this up I can't
00:50:14remember who was speaking to um the eta my logic on who wrote that mark Mark
00:50:19Forsythe that's the book that got me into entomology I'm no fucking way I read that
00:50:23in 2016 and I was like this shit is gas and I I just started reading more
00:50:29etymology book started a little blog for myself I don't think anybody read it but
00:50:33then I studied linguistics in college and ended up becoming a linguistics
00:50:36influencer but it started because of that but no way so I do you read elements of
00:50:39eloquence as well yeah yeah bro so marks marks great and I brought up the holding
00:50:45pattern like stuff he had this great take which is if you just roll back to your
00:50:51grandparents generation a lot of the time sentences would begin with well you know
00:50:56it's what we what we must it's this sort of there would be a almost a bloviating
00:51:02approach to it I have this guy that I bring on all the time Rory Sutherland
00:51:05he's kind of like a mad uncle and every time that he speaks there's precision and
00:51:11then there's these parentheses of noise but it's not like it's still filler to
00:51:19some degrees it's padding and it's nice it actually provides a little bit of
00:51:23breathing room because he speaks quite quickly too so having a ah I know this is
00:51:27coming in to land the same as getting off the phone okay yep yep no worries I've
00:51:33got it's that it's foreplay and post-cidal talking talk exactly no I
00:51:38think we talked about floor holding but you got to take the floor in the first
00:51:42place hmm and you were describing that you know is a great example you are
00:51:45signaling that you're taking the conversational turn there's an influencer
00:51:50spaces people start with videos with no because no because why did this happen
00:51:53and it's just like a it doesn't mean anything really falling halfway through a
00:51:57sentence yeah it feels as if in medias res feeling that you you want to we
00:52:02resonate more with the video when we feel like we're already in the middle of
00:52:06it rather than having to deal this whole introduction so but it does it does still
00:52:09serve to grab your attention and continue from the middle of the thought what are
00:52:15some of the other powerful linguistic tricks that creators either are using a
00:52:20lot of or you think that more creators should be using in order to that's
00:52:24interesting I didn't think about no because and you go hang on I didn't see
00:52:28what happened before I might I guess I'm in this now what else is yeah what else
00:52:33is some good keyholes in the brain that you can latch into I'm trying less to
00:52:38provide advice to creators and more just get people aware of what creators are
00:52:42already doing to you okay you're like you're like a public public service
00:52:46announcement the creators yeah PSA yeah everybody's doing everything for your
00:52:50attention yeah the platforms have monetized your attention they are
00:52:53commodifying your data and your information and they're trying to sell
00:52:56you ads everything's based around your attention they create incentive
00:52:59structures now for influencers to replicate where the attention economy
00:53:04famously it just runs around what will grab your attention and so that means our
00:53:07language will all serve that end primarily and then there's maybe a
00:53:12secondary purpose of I want to sound like um I know what I'm talking about I want
00:53:16to sound relatable but it starts with attention and we'll use keywords like all
00:53:21words are keywords at this point metadata used to be like their search engine
00:53:24optimization terms that you would put in a website description to make sure it
00:53:27ranks higher every single term now is a search engine optimization term because
00:53:31the algorithm is looking at every single word you use and it's using that to
00:53:34create a cluster representation of what your video is in this mathematical space
00:53:38and it uses that to push out a video and so by using a word you are creating a
00:53:43signal for the algorithm that this video should be distributed in a certain way
00:53:47and then you are also creating signals for the viewers that you should look at
00:53:50the video a certain way there's several meta layers to everything we're saying I
00:53:54feel like you're a guy that went away for a decade to some mountaintop kung fu
00:54:02retreat and learned a bunch of really dangerous martial arts you can kill a guy
00:54:08with one touch and I'm now asking okay so how do I kill guys with one touch and
00:54:12you're saying well what I'm here to do is I'm here to warn people about the one
00:54:16touch death move that's exactly what it feels like to be immensely critical of
00:54:20these platforms and I'm a big believer that the medium is the message that the
00:54:23way we consume media strongly affects everything we understand that algorithms
00:54:28are uniquely constraining our language to this bottleneck we've described that
00:54:32they are shaping our expression and if they're doing it to our language that's
00:54:34one thing because I do think language again is this tool that's sort of neutral
00:54:37but they're also doing it to our ideas our discussion our greater sense of
00:54:41reality there are certain biases that get coded into the algorithm that they get
00:54:44perpetuated we see the same thing happening with AI there's a bottleneck
00:54:47again there what kind of language goes in what kind of language is reinforced
00:54:52into the model and then what kind of language goes out nothing is neutral when
00:54:55it's happening through a tech intermediary that's trying to make money
00:54:57off of you okay talk to me about what AI is doing to language you know about the
00:55:01word delve delve to sort of jump into yeah yeah so we have studies indicating
00:55:07that since chat GPT came out usage of the word delve has spiked a thousand percent
00:55:13since before 2022 why does chat GPT like delve so chat GPT uses the word delve ten
00:55:19times more than regular because there is a bias in the reinforcement learning
00:55:23process which is when the words get trained into the model so one there's a
00:55:27few things going on here one the reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and
00:55:30Kenya where they do actually say delve at higher rates but still not that high and
00:55:33that's partially they're rewarding words that they're familiar with to delve is a
00:55:38Latin word and we know that chat GPT exhibits a Latin based bias over
00:55:42Germanic words because again Latin supremacy it's prestige it's like you
00:55:46think Latin sounds fancier than Germanic words like Germanic words are basic ones
00:55:49like the but and whatever and then Latin words or dig in is a Germanic word versus
00:55:54delve is a Latin derived word right and it sounds fancier to say the Latin word
00:55:57and because these models are trained to sound like they know what they're talking
00:56:00about they're going to use more of the romance language stuff they they're
00:56:03trained to sound confident and incisive and sycophantic and they will use certain
00:56:07words that perpetuate that and then that gets reinforced into the model so all
00:56:12this stuff happens and when you're a reinforcement learner clicking
00:56:15reinforcement worker clicking through what kind of words are okay and not okay
00:56:19you don't really catch a small discrepancy like that that delve is
00:56:21showing up a little bit more it's it accidentally gets reinforced into the
00:56:24model and then chat GPT starts spitting out the word delve more and now we have
00:56:27evidence in the past few years that humans in our spontaneous spoken
00:56:32conversation are also starting to use the word delve more so the creature that
00:56:36programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI we are now being trained by chat
00:56:40GPT to use different language in other news Shopify powers 10% of all
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00:57:35to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify comm slash modern
00:57:38wisdom all lowercase that Shopify comm slash modern wisdom wasn't there a study
00:57:44done on British politicians and what they've been saying in the in the House
00:57:48of Chambers are now saying I rise to speak instead of I don't know what the
00:57:52norm was before but they're using a u.s. colloquial term which is clearly
00:57:58indicating that their speeches are written by Chachi BT we've seen academic
00:58:01research papers that probably 13% of all research abstracts are written aided by
00:58:05some kind of large language model you can't trust any source whether you think
00:58:09it's so it's not even you're being directly influenced by the AI it's you're
00:58:12being influenced by somebody else was influenced by AI you're reading a text
00:58:15that you don't know is written by AI yep yeah LinkedIn is already like I can't
00:58:19tell whether it's AI or these people genuinely think like this but that you
00:58:22speak in the bullet points that it's not just exits why that's the negative
00:58:25parallelism which also sounds again it's things that sound incisive are reinforced
00:58:29into the model and then they end up affecting our actual speech patterns but
00:58:33what it also does is it means that you need to count a signal away from it so
00:58:36I'm gonna draw an analogy towards em pick as em pick at the moment means that
00:58:39people can more easily lose weight that means that losing weight naturally
00:58:43becomes less high status something remember when Adele lost weight in the
00:58:47before times prehistoric I just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or
00:58:52whatever you did you lose weight now whether you did use as em pick or not
00:58:56you're gonna be accused of having used it so we are now already seeing counter
00:59:01signaling away from the little double - a little tasteful chub is back in yeah
00:59:05yeah yeah it will be soon aha it's nice a natural I see what's the double - thing
00:59:10that chat TPT got the em - em - no one can use it so I have a couple of from I'm
00:59:15gonna hold on to it for as a writer well I think you have a competitive advantage
00:59:20because no one's going to assume that you well there's also using chatter is a way
00:59:24that chat TPT uses the em - to segment thoughts in those negative parallelisms
00:59:28and so on and there's a way that a good writer can use an em - because chat TPT
00:59:33speaks predictably and a good writer will speak unpredictably yeah I'm friends
00:59:36with some very good writers and they love the use of the em - and now they feel
00:59:43like they need to count the signal away from it nobody wants to use the word
00:59:45delve I go to imagine I don't use the word delve we're gonna feel or we're
00:59:48gonna see the word delve drop off because people are gonna be terrified that even
00:59:53if that was the word I wanted to dig in here's the thing delve is merely the
00:59:58poster child for a much broader phenomena we got commendable we got meticulous
01:00:05crucial potential significant all these words all kind of Latin derived are also
01:00:10increasing with chat TPT but we're only pointing to delve in the em - because
01:00:13those are the easiest things to pick up on there's so many smaller things and I'm
01:00:17more concerned about the insidious things again not linguistically I think language
01:00:20should serve as a signal for this broader thing that's happening if it's a
01:00:23reflection of our reality that means our reality is being shaped by chat TPT and I
01:00:27don't think there's anything inherently harmful to the word commendable or
01:00:29meticulous but the fact that we are also proven to be saying those words more
01:00:33after chat TPT has been proven to say those words more means that it's reality
01:00:37is influencing our reality and I'm now concerned what if there's a political
01:00:40bias a gender bias of whatever racial but like all this stuff gets coded into the
01:00:44model and I mean Elon Musk doesn't even hide that he like tweaks grok to like
01:00:49align with his political preferences so he's being obvious about it the other
01:00:52platforms aren't being obvious about it maybe anthropic is doing a better job
01:00:56than then open AI but they're all kind of still trying to make money at the end
01:01:00of the day and they're all doing something that's not aligned with human
01:01:06priorities well I had Tristan Harris Center for humane technology he was set
01:01:10there yesterday and he brought up this great point about anthropic which is from
01:01:16the outside you know the doing things that seem from an optics perspective to
01:01:22be really great but every single platform has the exact same outcome
01:01:27desire which is the models need to be trained very quickly as fast as possible
01:01:30to become as good as possible and if they're not then we're gonna fall behind
01:01:34so I'd window dress it however you want that the the big mover is what's the
01:01:40alignment problem looking like what's the level of safety I do think we should at
01:01:43least praise anthropic for thinking more about alignment and safety than other
01:01:47platforms but that does not mean we should become complacent and we should
01:01:50always be questioning who is the intermediary between us and our speech
01:01:53because there is something affecting when you go through a medium something is
01:01:58constrained that's why I say the medium is the message mmm okay what is there
01:02:02gonna be linguistic chaos then as AI begins to kick off more and more we're
01:02:08just kind of gonna get a little more homogenized probably but then hopefully
01:02:11we'll see you already more homogenized yeah through social we have a language
01:02:14dying out every two weeks that's the stat there's 7,000 languages in the world and
01:02:18it's predicted that most of them are gonna die out by the end of the center
01:02:20mass extinction event it is it is and so we're losing all this beautiful stuff all
01:02:24these ways of expression I love that this book braiding sweetgrass in it there is
01:02:28the pot of a Tommy expression to be a Saturday it expresses Saturday as a verb
01:02:32that you could embody a Saturday as a verb and this is not a concept that we
01:02:36really think about our Express in English and I'm not saying it's impossible to
01:02:40imagine this but it's a way of expressing the world that is lost when a language
01:02:44dies out and you have all these languages dying out that homogenizes and
01:02:48constrains the creative potential for expression not saying that we couldn't
01:02:51think of these thoughts but the options the affordances are less there than they
01:02:54otherwise would be why does some languages seem to have words that
01:02:59represent much more niche long sentence descriptions than others so for instance
01:03:05schadenfreude is like an obvious example but what is the German word that
01:03:11describes the sensation of migratory birds when they are stopped from
01:03:16migrating do you know this one no that's incredible it's it's a kind of restless
01:03:21a desire to fly and the restriction from being allowed to fly that is felt by a
01:03:28migratory bird sounds like a human instinct as well very much so yeah I
01:03:33should be adventuring or traveling or something and I'm being restricted from
01:03:37doing it kind of like wanderlust but to a degree so there's there's a difference
01:03:41between agglutinative languages and inflection languages where an agglutinative
01:03:46language like Turkish and German does this by just tacking words together you
01:03:50can just add things onto other things and then there's inflection where you change
01:03:53the form of the word so English like you can I guess add s to the end of a word
01:04:00but like a lot of stuff like I don't know changes based on the form of the word in
01:04:05Latin in French you'll conjugate you'll do all these things where it yeah you're
01:04:13changing the form rather than adding on but there's different ways you can do
01:04:16language mmm are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it's doing
01:04:20to linguistics social media for sure because whatever's happening with AI it
01:04:23then just immediately gets captured by social media and what I'm concerned about
01:04:26here is that they replicate the natural way that ideas diffuse through
01:04:29populations ideas kind of like a virus it starts in a host it can infect other
01:04:34hosts you had Malcolm Gladwell on I think talk about this it's a little
01:04:39reductive to just say that but I think it's a good model for understanding the
01:04:42way information scatters is kind of like in a virus network like it's sort of like
01:04:46a disease and algorithms have created a replication of natural human social
01:04:54networks that operates faster that connects more nodes than ever before
01:04:58which means these ideas can spread faster than ever before what that means is also
01:05:01misinformation can spread faster than ever before more information is not necessarily
01:05:04always a good thing because now you can be flooded with information and it's
01:05:08called flooding the zone where you you lose track of what's the real
01:05:11information among all the false information you are being bombarded with
01:05:17ideas from people who have an agenda there are mean coin traders and poly
01:05:22market traders who are trying to make a quick buck off of pushing certain words
01:05:25or ideas because now we're betting on ideas and we're betting on their coins
01:05:30attached to which idea goes viral so if an idea goes more viral you make money
01:05:34off of it so now is there financial incentive to push certain ideas and so I
01:05:37think we should remain highly skeptical of everything maybe we should touch grass
01:05:39more but at the very least we should be highly inquisitive of what the medium is
01:05:43doing to us and how it's affecting our communication is there a science to meme
01:05:47language it's called the medics yeah but there definitely are people studying how
01:05:55these networks work hmm and then presumably reverse engineering it I mean
01:06:00I have to wonder it would take a long time there was an interesting a
01:06:06successful attempt by Jim shock to do a grassroots social media campaign
01:06:12promoting Francis and Ghanu so they used a burner account on reddit on maybe the
01:06:19UFC subreddit to post a video supposedly of CCTV of Francis and Ghanu trying to
01:06:26get into maybe a dry cleaners and the door was locked and he goes like this
01:06:30and goes boink and the whole door just smashes and breaks the entire thing was
01:06:34control the whole thing was constructed they filmed it wasn't CCTV it was fake
01:06:39glass Francis and Ghanu was wearing a gym shark logo here burner account on reddit
01:06:44nothing just left it yeah just completely set ablaze so I wonder okay that's you
01:06:52know people that are quite close to the ground floor but they're not they don't
01:06:57have the resources of a country if you did the ability to shape language to
01:07:02think what sort of words do we want people using we can't podcast it top down
01:07:07because people are gonna push back if they feel like they're being we've watched
01:07:10too much about him stuff we know that the people are gonna push back if they feel
01:07:12like this words being forced on them how can we maybe we need to get on fortune
01:07:17maybe we can start to definitely don't know I think get offline as much as
01:07:22possible while remaining aware and appraised of what's happening online
01:07:25because I do think we should like be aware that even if we are offline this
01:07:28stuff will still affect us to some degree like the if your friends are adopting
01:07:33ideas that come from the algorithm and you're offline and you're interacting
01:07:35with your friends you're still gonna be adopting the algorithm ideas without even
01:07:38knowing it so we should be highly media literate knowing that our information is
01:07:42probably being manipulated by these actors who have vested interests in
01:07:46giving us bad information and this effect is only going to be amplified as more
01:07:49and more people figure out how to exploit the information ecosystem if I'm giving
01:07:53you a warning it's this one it's that I see in real time how our language is
01:07:57being shaped by malicious actors that these there are companies and foreign
01:08:01governments with dashboards on tracking populations and how clusters of similar
01:08:07ideas are represented in the social media space and they know how to seed ideas in
01:08:12ways that spread better and they're trying to do that and maybe they're not
01:08:14being fully successful but there are active like information warfare campaigns
01:08:19occurring as we speak how does living inside of these algorithmic constraint
01:08:23systems change what type of thoughts we can easily express because this isn't
01:08:29just the language that we're using the whole point of 1984 sorry to go to was no
01:08:34way we're gonna be able to get through this yeah feeding back up into your
01:08:40capacity to think yeah it's a controversial question in linguistics
01:08:44it's generally accepted that language is not the only thing determining thought
01:08:48right but it might have an influence on it that's called linguistic relativism I
01:08:52don't think we're gonna end up in a 1984 scenario if anything I think people
01:08:55should pay more attention to brave new world the oldest Huxley novel where we're
01:08:58entertaining ourselves and don't aren't even aware that we're in a dictatorship
01:09:01because we're too busy consuming content and drugs but I don't think language can
01:09:08truly be constrained I wrote my book on algo speak on how words emerge in
01:09:14response to censorships the stuff I said about the ice emoji or just words like
01:09:17on a live where you can't say kill we come up with ways we are incredibly
01:09:21tenacious as human beings to express ourselves and say what we want to say
01:09:23that does not mean that some things aren't harder to say that certain ideas
01:09:28aren't more constrained and it there's a idea called the Overton window which is
01:09:33the range of acceptable discourse in a society that right back in the day like
01:09:38gay marriage was unthinkable right and then the Overton window moved and all of
01:09:41a sudden it was okay and that was a maybe I think a positive change but
01:09:47there's also the Overton window is moving toward looks maxing there's way more
01:09:51interest in this stuff right now so that but the this window moves with the amount
01:09:56of represented discourse that we think it's a consensus reality it's what we
01:10:00think other people are thinking and what is acceptable so if a certain kind of
01:10:04discourse like back in the day more and more people started saying there's the
01:10:06gay liberation movement more more people started saying maybe gay people should
01:10:09have rights that moved the window in the direction of gay marriage now there's
01:10:12more more people saying like replicating these alt-right ideas replicating that
01:10:16idea that looks maxing is a good way to you know maybe you should be honest
01:10:21epic all this stuff and that moves the window toward that range of discourse so
01:10:26while your thoughts are not necessarily being constrained and everybody still can
01:10:30think for themselves and can still find ways to express themselves the consensus
01:10:34reality is kind of moving and that's something maybe I'm concerned about
01:10:38apart from the linguistic level if you had to give a steel man argument that
01:10:44Gen Z is really different what do you think it would be in in the context of
01:10:50how every generation thinks that the kids destroying the concept of Gen Z yes every
01:10:55generation thinks that kids are destroying language and somehow the older people die
01:11:00out and the kids grow up and then now we're pissed at the younger kids and we
01:11:03run it back is there is there a steel man argument for how Gen Z could be
01:11:07different I don't think Gen Z exists I don't think generations exist these are
01:11:10weird social constructs that we believe exist this is your one-touch death move
01:11:14like trying to catch smoke here come the fuck I'm not denying that there's older
01:11:19and younger people that there's familial generations right that there is a but we
01:11:23only started this idea of a broad social cohort like a generation with the lost
01:11:27generation after World War one really and then we had the silent generation with
01:11:30the GI generation will go to you then we have baby boomers and then we're like
01:11:33alright we don't know what to call the next people so Gen X X means we don't
01:11:37know lazy and then it's like okay Millennials good enough and then it's
01:11:40like well we're two after Gen X we'll call it Gen Z well we ran out of the
01:11:43alphabet we'll call it Gen alpha that's literally it's all made up and it started
01:11:46in the early 1900s but it's become more and more salient and I this is if
01:11:50anything a new category that can be used to sell you as a consumer demographic
01:11:55that can commodify you that they have manufactured Gen Z as a concept that
01:12:00now we're also performing what it means to be Gen Z whereas if person in 1800s
01:12:04wouldn't perform for their social cohort because there was no social cohort it's
01:12:07simply you are the age that you are and now now I'm supposed to as a older Gen Z
01:12:11person have more in touch with a younger Gen Z person than a younger millennial
01:12:15but really I feel much more in common with younger Millennials it's all it's
01:12:19all made up and yes there's idea now of being Gen Z that is forced upon us and is
01:12:24part of this broader social media tendency to label at every part of us as
01:12:29human beings and put us into buckets that actually do not describe us
01:12:32perfectly this self-branding is constraining because it's giving you
01:12:35another role to perform to a label is kind of a violent thing to impose on
01:12:40someone because now it's you either have to identify with or against a label once
01:12:43it's out there it's out there and now I need to choose whether I feel more like
01:12:47Gen Z or not like Gen Z and now I need to choose whether I'm cottagecore or not
01:12:49cottagecore whether I'm a swifty or not a swifty and all these things kind of
01:12:52combined and now I'm all of a sudden a cottagecore swifty Gen Z whatever me too
01:12:56but really at the end of the day I'm just every person is a unique human being in
01:13:00the same way that we have a unique idiolect a unique dialect that is our own
01:13:03way of speaking we have a unique identity as a linguist I have one word tattooed on
01:13:08my body it's the word umwelt it means the world as it is perceived by a
01:13:11particular person and I really like this idea that we all really see the world in
01:13:15a completely unique way and yet when we put ourselves into buckets and when we
01:13:18pretend that we are it's nice to feel like we are like so other people and it's
01:13:22a useful thing to have a category to kind of signal toward your identity but you
01:13:27are completely unique and what social media wants to do is put you into small
01:13:31small buckets yes but buckets that really make you interchangeable with other
01:13:35people before we continue as you're probably aware I'm not a massive drinker
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01:14:37brewing company fit for all times it's a strange tension because on one hand we
01:14:45all want to be individuals but on another hand we all want to belong yeah and I
01:14:50can see two wolves inside of you yeah of course and the there's a really
01:14:55interesting bit of evolutionary anthropology that's looking at the desire
01:15:01for autonomy and the desire for support and kinship and this is what you see a
01:15:06good way to look at this would be a child's life cycle so unbelievable need
01:15:12for kinship up until 11 12 then you start to get a bit rebellious and then by
01:15:1813 14 15 you don't want anything to do with your parents your mother also when
01:15:22you're coming up with new slang yeah well of course it's also the most you know
01:15:25the memory bump effect you familiar with this no what's this I think it's the
01:15:29reminiscence effect which is the language at the music and movies that you grow up
01:15:36listening to between the ages of about 12 and 16 tend to be locked in as what you
01:15:41like for the rest of your life yeah very formative yeah that makes a lot of sense
01:15:44and um you know every not to say that we can't keep developing new tastes of
01:15:49course people find new stuff new bands new movies that it does affect you in
01:15:53that unveld sense that this made a huge impression on you at this particular and
01:15:57you can't ever separate that from who you will be in the future super formative
01:16:00yeah and to think okay well what's going on at 13 14 15 while sexuality it's
01:16:07coming online what is the one thing that you really really really do not want to
01:16:10do have sex with someone that's part of your family so my family's gonna suck I'm
01:16:15gonna stay what I want I want my own independence I don't expect that to go in
01:16:19the end yeah I mean it's it's incest avoidance I think well I mean that's one
01:16:23framework I always I tend to think that any one framework is always like
01:16:26reductive but it is like partly in the same reading like I think for example
01:16:29Freud he was kind of cooking with some stuff but you think about the world
01:16:33Justin affording lands or honestly the looks maxes are kind of right that
01:16:37attractiveness matters but if you're looking at it just through that one lens
01:16:40the framework now constrains you now you're looking at the world reductively
01:16:43we should adopt as many frameworks as possible sorry I went on a tangent but
01:16:46if you have too many frameworks it becomes chaotic right and that that also
01:16:49becomes I think difficult sometimes to amalgamate together my general worldview
01:16:54I think is characterized by trying to understand as many frameworks as possible
01:16:57and they all kind of point in a framework maximalist maybe maybe because they all
01:17:01point at this indescribable whole we can never know you know what unnamed
01:17:07dowel or whatever the middle thing is that we're trying to figure out what
01:17:10reality factor yeah but everything else is signaling or pointing at it and if you
01:17:14broaden your worldview as much as possible and consume as many different
01:17:17forms of media as possible I do think maybe we should be on algorithms a little
01:17:20bit we should also be reading regular news and we should also remember that's
01:17:22biased and we should remember we should like be consuming as many different forms
01:17:26of media as possible and we should be consuming as many different ideas and
01:17:30perspectives as possible because that helps us better understand what's really
01:17:34going on rather than this biased we're always looking at the world through like
01:17:37a confirmation bias sampling bias like everything's filtered through the
01:17:42algorithm everything's filtered through AI and if you try to just consume your
01:17:46worldview through that you're gonna be limited so it consume other things as
01:17:49well touch grass you know and then maybe we can build a better better picture of
01:17:53what the real world is poly consumption poly framework approach yeah I like it
01:17:59and I agree for me to say the Westermark effect which is what we do for incest
01:18:04avoidance and and the fact that you sexuality is coming online you don't be
01:18:07right no it's interesting I'm not saying that that is the one ring to rule them
01:18:11all but what I do mean and I totally agree is that there's another incentive
01:18:19that exists online which is if someone plants a flag in the ground and says I
01:18:24have a single explanatory framework that solves all of the questions that you've
01:18:28got yeah that person sounds that level of conviction is so sexy and I I wonder
01:18:35whether it takes an awful lot of conscious detraining to look at someone
01:18:39that's ardent and completely unforgiving in their worldview and say huh I don't
01:18:45know if I'm not confident about anything I don't know if I'm not confident about
01:18:48my birth date so how is this person about this really come well we know why the
01:18:54war in Ukraine started we know why the war in Ukraine started we know exactly
01:18:57what's going on there every war has like a hundred different reasons behind it and
01:19:01all those reasons could be equally valid you know but we know what's going on
01:19:04with the Lux maxing community yeah that's interesting and you what you state as an
01:19:10absolute fact that is incontrovertible and unidimensionally explained has a
01:19:15completely opposing guy with the opposite perspective which is also
01:19:19unidimensionally explained okay weird how that component comport those two for me
01:19:24because both of you are saying that you are completely right and that the other
01:19:27person is therefore implicitly completely wrong yeah no I think it's it's reductive
01:19:32to look at the world through one set of glasses and sexiness the sexiness of the
01:19:38conviction the human brain thinks in terms of simple stories we like
01:19:41connecting the dots from point A to point B like for etymology we want to think
01:19:46that a word comes from an older word and evolved into a newer word really it was
01:19:51evolving through an aesthetic lens it was evolving through a social context there
01:19:54was another maybe a word seed that affected the trajectory of word a as it
01:19:57involved in a word B it's never one simple story I see this with language
01:20:01but also the world is this hugely complex interrelated thing and to recall one
01:20:06framework the framework is ignoring all the different ways the world could exist
01:20:11ignoring the fact that a Saturday could be a verb instead of a noun I feel like a
01:20:15Saturday sometimes you're quite a you're quite a Saturday guy a big big Saturday
01:20:20guy all right I want to play surprising word histories with you anyway that okay
01:20:24muscle it comes from the Latin word for mouse little mouse musculos why it like
01:20:30looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin right hey they call me the
01:20:35entomology nerd for a reason no I'm gonna flop the rest of them I can't wait
01:20:38this is gonna be so good salary salary is us the Latin word for salt they would
01:20:43pay wages in salt saw ah all right next one assassin that comes from Arabic
01:20:51hashashin it meant marijuana hashish concern the consumer yeah cuz they would
01:20:57like it was a you're scary you're scaring me it was a second like Persia that would
01:21:00just like get high and like kill people I don't know what they were doing but that
01:21:04was kind of the knowledge sorry is small it's mainly sect all right you're
01:21:09terrifying candidate from Latin Candida's white robed so candidate that was like
01:21:18white was associated with purity so it was like you were vying for a pure noble
01:21:23office if you wore white okay did the girl did the word girl originally mean a
01:21:28young woman or did it once mean something completely I think it was like a
01:21:31gender-neutral term it could mean boy and any young person yeah yeah how did silly
01:21:38go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid well in the same sense that like awful
01:21:44and awesome both share that root all like when something has just an emotional
01:21:49valence to it like a quality to it it can move easily between different boundaries
01:21:53but what did you have there the old English of sailing bent blessed or
01:21:58fortunate and over centuries it drifted through innocent naive and then yeah
01:22:02foolish it's a cemented drift is yeah how words of all over time and it is like
01:22:07terrible again and all the like words that describe this shaking feeling you
01:22:13get can really range easily between at the same rate is terrific terrible
01:22:18terrific terrifying so it can quickly move between different types of motions
01:22:23because how do we even describe what's going on here you know yeah difficulty
01:22:26yeah ancient Aztec word for avocado what else did it mean our cuts and they had a
01:22:31secondary definition of testicle nightmare there any interesting about
01:22:40nightmare is that mare like horse is there there's like the idea of like
01:22:44incubus horse that attacked people but I'm not sure if that's the what the
01:22:48Germanic demon yeah it was a man that sat on the sleepers chest yeah so it was a
01:22:54horse yes okay but it was the mayor came from a Germanic demon okay mayor was a
01:23:00Germanic so it might have actually been a demon in the night a demon that then
01:23:03became the name for a horse and the night horse wow no I'm looking in the mirror
01:23:09thing that's a fascinating yeah goodbye would God be with you
01:23:15penguin why does the word penguin probably mean white head even though
01:23:19penguins don't have white heads I don't know penguin please educate okay so
01:23:23there's a Welsh word which is pen p e n g w y n penguin right which yes fucking
01:23:33Welsh is no way would I've expected that to be Welsh I mean like it's a weird-ass
01:23:37word I believe it and it originally referred to the Great Ork it's it wasn't
01:23:41referring to penguins yeah but it obviously got repurposed um orange well
01:23:48it comes from the Sanskrit word for orange tree but it moved through like
01:23:54Arabic naranja same as like the Spanish word and then I think people kept saying
01:24:01n orange and the n got cut off because it turned into like a a norinj versus n
01:24:08orange yes dude you won whatever the fuck that was
01:24:12what you want yeah yeah yeah a norinj right to an orange yeah
01:24:19Wow unbelievable yeah I am look from between you and Mark Forsythe it is so
01:24:26fucking fun you must have so much fun doing this I think it's great got into
01:24:30etymology for the fun facts that was the and then you know I came to see this
01:24:33terrifying on a quiz team terrifying on a quiz team you played with inventing
01:24:38languages yeah what did you learn so the whole thing I was saying about language
01:24:43is being a different way to express reality I think a really fun way to play
01:24:46with that is building your own language so the we see this in movies like there's
01:24:50a Dothraki language and a Klingon language and people have made fictional
01:24:53languages before this is a practice called conlanging constructed language
01:24:57and you know Esperanto is another famous one where they tried to make that a
01:25:01global language and didn't really work out but they built it from scratch and
01:25:04were like trying to make this a sort of an evidence-based language that was
01:25:07gonna be more precise and easy to use I think maybe you're thinking about if quill
01:25:12or something or maybe Esperanto is it's just meant to be like an easier language
01:25:16to use that was the idea of course that what that means is like a strange concept
01:25:21and it's still a leader languages that have more and less linear rules around it
01:25:27different types of rules but there's always a complexity to it because I mean
01:25:30humans got to express themselves in many different ways I think it's really hard
01:25:35to make a claim about one language is more complex than another or something
01:25:38like that but you can talk about one dimensional language you can adopt one
01:25:41framework and then talk about it anyway I I dabbled in conlanging first in what
01:25:48what conlanging which is constructed language creation okay thank you sorry
01:25:52and then I started that linguistics in college and I took a conlanging class at
01:25:57MIT actually that kind of got me into it but I was sort of dabbling before that
01:26:01for the conlang dabbler yeah I've dabbled and then a little more professionally
01:26:06yeah for the conlanging class at MIT I built a dolphin language and that was my
01:26:12first like moment going viral and tick-tock was me presenting my dolphin
01:26:15language where like the word for shark for example is what if you can create a
01:26:22language out of just whistles and clicks and that's kind of cool to play around
01:26:26with the phonological format so I played around with a lot of other animal
01:26:29languages I made a bird language that's just whistled there are actual whistled
01:26:33registers of languages I saw didn't AI reverse engineer what birds are saying
01:26:38did you see this I mean I don't know what that means at all animal communication is
01:26:41just like not a decodable thing in the way human communication is so supposedly
01:26:46I'm probably wrong but I'm pretty sure that I saw AI has analyzed tens of
01:26:52thousands of birdsong sounds and have decoded some of the communication another
01:26:57thing I don't know this is true or not I remember hearing that most birdsong is
01:27:01actually just territorial marking so it's basically birds mating call or something
01:27:05like that birds saying fuck off right at varying oh here we are no 100% there's
01:27:09stuff being done with Bert Cornell's doing amazing bird stuff they have a bird
01:27:14tracking app that they actually used to follow bird migrations and there's cool
01:27:17stuff being done with language and but the thing is when we talk about like
01:27:20animal language there's good research being done with whale communication too
01:27:23the people who are talking about this if you're a linguist talking about it you
01:27:26don't understand how the whales work and if you're a whale research talking about
01:27:29you don't understand how language works or you might have an idea but it's I
01:27:33don't think it's correct to really talk about animals having language as much as
01:27:38communication and of course they have communication their own way of signaling
01:27:41things but when you're a whale you're also using things like your body rolling
01:27:45over in water dolphins have sonar like bats about like this is crazy that they
01:27:49have all this stuff going on that humans don't and this can all be a part of the
01:27:52communicative context and it's not like maybe the language has an abstract
01:27:56meaning in the way that humans do maybe it simply signals a presence and a
01:28:01certain emotional intent in a moment in time but it's also contextual and the
01:28:06other bird might have a different interpretation I like it I don't know
01:28:09language is a very difficult thing that I'm not even sure how to define it anybody
01:28:13who do says after a decade of study I'm so glad to hear you say that anybody who
01:28:18says they know what language is is telling you a framework right that's do
01:28:22you know the story of how the QWERTY keyboard came to be well weren't the
01:28:26typewriters jamming with they had the ABC like when they tried it out and then
01:28:30they tried the Dvorak keyboard but QWERTY was the one that prevented the
01:28:34typewriters from from jamming together bingo yeah yeah so they put the most used
01:28:38letters out on the edges so that they weren't next to each other so that you
01:28:41wouldn't trigger them because both of them would fire at the same time but that
01:28:44is purposefully built to be slow QWERTY keyboard is designed to be inefficient
01:28:49well once we get attuned to it and like like it does move quickly I think but
01:28:54there are even low relative to when we thought the alphabet had to show up in
01:28:58an order on a keyboard but like for like if you train people on other keyboard
01:29:02arrangements they can be up to 30% to 50% faster yeah so I wondered as you were
01:29:07talking about they tried to put Esperanza in that didn't work so and so forth if
01:29:11there was a world in which you could design a language from scratch to be as
01:29:17well the only goal of language unlike with typing which is an intermediary
01:29:22process between things that are not being changed is not just to be efficient
01:29:27right it's to be beautiful it's to be illustrative I think that is a big flaw of
01:29:31how people talk about language and that's how the algorithm is want you to talk
01:29:33about language that it's just information bits transferred per second and that
01:29:37there's a certain amount of information that's communicated that's the goal of
01:29:40language to just get information across that's something that can now be
01:29:43categorized and commodified I think language is also this ritualistic bonding
01:29:47between people small talk for example like when you say the goodbye at the end
01:29:51of a phone call why are you doing that you're not communicating anything you
01:29:54could just hang up and I'm gonna go I'm gonna all my phone calls are gonna be
01:29:57done movie style now all right pink but you do it because it helps establish
01:30:01social ties with the other person and that's kind of a beautiful thing to see
01:30:05yeah you're building this thing with another person and there is an element of
01:30:08humanity in the small talk and in the saying goodbye at the end of the phone
01:30:12call which may be not good for an algorithm maybe you don't like end an
01:30:16algorithmic video by saying goodbye whatever but it does add something
01:30:21importantly human to communication anyway that being said I think what you were
01:30:24getting at is do can different languages have different information transferred as
01:30:29humans we have a certain maybe capacity for processing information and it what's
01:30:33funny is that even a language like Japanese has way more syllables per
01:30:37second than Thai and yet they will still transfer about the same bits per second
01:30:41as each other because Thai is a more inflectional language as I mentioned they
01:30:45like have more tones they build on the individual syllable more and Japan is
01:30:50more likely to add syllables but at the end of the day they'll speak slowly in
01:30:54Thai and they'll drag out their word more but they're saying the exact same thing
01:30:57that a Japanese speaker is saying with three syllables unbelievable I wonder I
01:31:03wonder what it would be like to try and design a very efficient language be so
01:31:09interesting to hear how can we communicate the most content in the
01:31:12smallest number of syllables of words yeah I mentioned this language if quill
01:31:17which is a hypothesized conlang and conlangs are great for really just
01:31:20exploring the boundaries of what language could be and that's kind of what I was
01:31:23trying to say with the the dolphin thing you can just explore the sounds sorry
01:31:26digression um if quill is a language that creates like the most information
01:31:32transferred and it's like a highly dense language carrying many different meanings
01:31:36in a you know and it's impossible for human to learn I mean no no no native
01:31:42speakers of it will exist because at the end of the day we are humans using
01:31:46language to connect with other humans and we're using it in a way that we can
01:31:50understand and describe our reality and that's that's how it works you know I'm
01:31:53sure you sure you create a robot language that works more efficiently but I was
01:31:57gonna say I'm sure that you saw that conversation between two a eyes that
01:32:00realized that they were both a eyes and they say yeah we switch to bleeps and
01:32:04bloops and it's way quicker for us to be able to communicate like that I don't
01:32:07know whether that was actually fake or real I'm not I'm not sure about that
01:32:10either but it is true that computers do not think about language in the way we do
01:32:15in fact I would be very hesitant to say chatty petit even speaks English rather
01:32:19than it's just predicting tokens based on a statistical model of what English
01:32:23should be hmm what it's actually doing is when you input something in English it
01:32:27converts those words into tokens which is like a segment of the word so it breaks
01:32:31up the words in the smaller parts pairs those parts with numbers these numbers
01:32:35turn into like coordinates kind of like on a Cartesian plane like XY axis but
01:32:40like way more dimensions so XYZ and to like thousands of dimensions then it
01:32:47ends up as like a data point called an embedding and this embedding is like the
01:32:50representation of what you said right and then that gets processed through these
01:32:55neural networks and they figure out through previous learning things in
01:33:02previous ways they've understood embeddings how they can predict the next
01:33:06token output so then they create an output token and then that's translated
01:33:10back in a language and so all this is happening between you saying something
01:33:13and chatty petit responding with something I think that's very important to
01:33:16understand because there's a huge misconception that it's speaking English
01:33:19along the whole way that I spoke about language getting broken down turned into
01:33:24another numbers broken back up into these tokens and then turned back into
01:33:28language a lot of meaning can get lost and that's where something like delve
01:33:32could get overrepresented that's where something could happen where our natural
01:33:37way of speaking gets improperly encoded the training process does not work
01:33:42correctly and then it ends up speaking this misaligned version of language
01:33:48I wonder what's gonna happen I wonder what the next few years are gonna have in
01:33:53store for language because you have got bigger influences and bigger broadcasts
01:33:57than ever before so is this would you say that this is gonna be the time in human
01:34:01history where language is potentially going to change the most rapidly I think
01:34:05so I think it's a hard thing to measure what it even is for language to change
01:34:09because as I mentioned I don't even know what languages so if I'm starting with my
01:34:11research question realistically no we don't know what languages it's all made
01:34:16up and because of the thing I mentioned where everybody speaks their own kind of
01:34:19version of language and the thing that we call a language is really just this weird
01:34:22spectrum of people talking that sounds similar to each other and it's like where
01:34:26do you draw the category here of course chatty petit is trained on a corpus of
01:34:30the English language which is made up in the same way Gen Z is made up it's like a
01:34:35category that we think is a thing and then that category is this weird
01:34:38homogenized thing already that there is an English language there's a way you
01:34:41speak in a way I speak that are slightly different from each other and that we can
01:34:44find this shared reality between ourselves but then when our collective
01:34:47shared reality is fed into the chat bot that then creates its own reality based
01:34:50on the shared reality and outputs is what we end up with is just something that's
01:34:54not really a way that you speak it's not a way that I speak it's not a way that
01:34:58anybody speaks it's a mathematical representation of speech mm-hmm dude you
01:35:03rule your work so interesting where should people go they want to keep up
01:35:05to date with everything you got going on let's bring this one I think the most
01:35:08important thing is I try to use my media to push people to more longer form stuff
01:35:12so I got a substack etymology nerd and I got a book called algo speak about how
01:35:16social media is changing language but I am on social media platforms as
01:35:20etymology nerd as well all right goodbye everybody click thank you for having me
01:35:24dude so fucking good that was a lot of fun well I feel like we covered so much
01:35:29crap you roll that was great thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed
01:35:34that episode YouTube knows who you are deeply it thinks you're gonna like this
01:35:39one even more fun press it