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- [00:00]
A
.7 was voted word of the year in 2025 from Dictionary.com. is that cheating? Not even a word doesn't mean anything.
- [00:08]
B
Well, you have to understand that whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that's a marketing ploy by Big Dictionary to sell more dictionaries.
- [00:21]
A
Yes.
- [00:22]
B
6 7, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That's the idea behind six seven. That's the whole joke that this is a possibility of getting clipped, that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own game. And Dictionary.com played that game, but every single person who did it also cash in on that. There was a Connecticut House representative, Bill buckbee, who said 67 on the Connecticut state floor. And all these people are doing the exact same thing as Taylor Kinney, who is the basketball player who started the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids who are cashing in on it, like the six seven kid. All of it was a ploy for virality, and it is a realization that clip farming is the future of distribution online.
- [01:01]
A
Wow. Okay. But it's a word that doesn't mean anything and is specifically designed to be vacuous and to incite the question, what does that mean? Is that. Is that unique?
- [01:14]
B
I don't believe that it doesn't mean anything.
- [01:16]
A
Right.
- [01:16]
B
I believe even when something is absurd, absurdity is a meaning, and it's absurd for a reason. It's absurd because it's sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem. It's absurd that this would emerge as a word. But that is the meaning. The absurdity of the word is its own definition.
- [01:29]
A
Okay, so it's a story about. It's a meta word.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's a knowing wink. By uttering 6 7, you're playing into the panopticon.
- [01:37]
A
Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year.
- [01:41]
B
Right. They're also. They're rage baiting with that. They're hoping that it sparks controversy. Now, when people are commenting about the word rage bait being chosen as the word of the year, that drives the word further on Twitter or whatever. X. Excuse me. And. And as a result, more people know about Oxford dictionaries. You got to remember, this is big dictionary at work.
- [01:58]
A
And slop was another one as well. So a word describing a word that is sloppy describing something that is sloppy being used for people to complain about the fact that. Look at the state of language today. It's all. Well, it's slop, actually.
- [02:13]
B
Yeah. I like to combat that. Idea that languages slop or brain rot. There's nothing inherently in a word that's good or bad. It's a tool that you can use. But I think we cast our negative associations of social onto the language. And yeah, of course, a lot of the videos we see are slop, but that doesn't mean the words themselves are bad for your brain.
- [02:31]
A
Do you think is TikTok becoming the most powerful linguistic engine on earth at the moment? Is that what's shaping language more than anything else?
- [02:40]
B
Absolutely. There was a study by Know youw meme in 2022 that found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms. And it started out mostly on 4chan and Reddit and Twitter, and now it's mostly TikTok and Twitter. And again, sorry, X. And you see, it's still Twitter.
- [02:59]
A
I know it's still Twitter.
- [03:01]
B
I'm. I'm holding on to it. Yeah, yeah, no, but a lot of stuff is happening in TikTok. There's linguistic innovation, there's a kind of. Everything comes from the user interface. There's a feeling of a conversation happening there. Users come there for the conversation to chip in, to be part of this effervescent thing that's going on. And in that language is created along with this, we have all these echo chambers and algorithmic trends being perpetuated that push modern slang cycles faster than ever before.
- [03:27]
A
Is there such a thing as a Twitter dialect versus a LinkedIn dialect versus a Reddit or a livestream dialect? Are these almost individual variants on language in each of these different cohorts?
- [03:43]
B
Absolutely. It's the same way when you're in your grandmother's house versus when you're in a frat house. You have a different expectation of how to speak. You're not going to speak to your grandmother the way you would to a frat brother. There's like a normal way of communicating. So a platform functions kind of like a house. It is a place where you go to use a certain type of language. So on LinkedIn, you're going to use this more professional language. On Twitter, you're going to engage in more linguistic play where you're. You'll have all these words like jester, gooning or whatever emerge. On. On TikTok, there might be more fandom language or something, but also, I don't want to speak broadly about individual platforms. Even within these platforms, there are micro dialects going on. There's K pop groups and swifty groups, and they all speak kind of their own language.
- [04:21]
A
Hmm. What did you make of the fallout. I think one of the most viral instances of linguistic exposure was that mid gesture maxing at the club when the foids come up. Is it better to be mogging with the bros than what did you make of that fallout?
- [04:40]
B
Yeah, I think it's kind of doing the same thing as 6 7, where there's a meaning beyond what the literal meaning technically is. It's kind of a knowing wink again to the algorithm that by saying these words you can go viral. You can cash in on Clavicular's fame. He is the human 6 7, and if you talk about him, you get to go viral. That's. That's kind of the thing. But in doing so, you can also push the trend further. And while 67 was innocuous, maybe clavicular is more harmful. But that. That is kind of the name of the game of virality, that all these things are just key words. Maxing, gooning, whatever. And you can just say that and you can go viral because the key words are what pushes things through the algorithm, and they're what people reson with on the personal level when they're scrolling.
- [05:20]
A
It also tells you something about the person using them. It's an identifier of in group belonging.
- [05:29]
B
100%. Language is a tool of identity, and when you use a word, you are signaling that you're part of this cohort.
- [05:34]
A
Mm. What are the most defining characteristics of influencers speaking online for creators? How do you think about the constituent components of that?
- [05:46]
B
Yeah, I spent a lot of time working on the influencer accent. I used to consult on a court case where one influencer was suing another influencer for stealing her vibe. And part of that was the accent.
- [05:55]
A
But yeah, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Pause. What?
- [06:00]
B
It was here in Austin, actually, but there was one is called the sad beige lawsuit, that there was this minimalist influencer, kind of wore a lot of brown clothing. And there was another minimalist influencer, also in Austin, who wore a lot of brown clothing, and they kind of spoke the same. And so one of them sued the other for stealing their ip, but you can't.
- [06:19]
A
Which included the accent.
- [06:21]
B
Exactly. So I was brought on as a consultant in that case. And the takeaway is that neither of them were really original and that they pay homage to an older tradition of influencers talking.
- [06:31]
A
It's a long and illustrious history of influences speaking in this.
- [06:34]
B
Absolutely. I mean, I think the modern, like the. Hey, guys, welcome to my podcast. That kind of like. That's the lifestyle influencer accent that traces all the way back to, like, Kim K. And the Paris Hilton and early beauty YouTubers. And then that kind of filtered into TikTok and that same voice with the uptalk and the vocal fry is preserved because there's this thing called the linguistic founder effect, where you kind of follow in the footsteps of people who came before you linguistically. And that's why also platforms do have different commenting cultures and different linguistic cultures, and that's only one type of influencer accent.
- [07:06]
A
I obviously pause on that one. What are they trying to achieve with the lifestyle influencer accent? What are the important parts, and what's the outcome they're trying to get toward?
- [07:14]
B
Yeah, great question. There's a few things going on. One of it is just social signaling. It's saying, I'm part of your group, because that's what all of language does. So there is a identity marker of what it's like to be an influencer. And so you're performing this idea of an influence. You're also performing relatability to the young women who are watching you. At the same time, the accent is optimized for the algorithm. There's an element of retention, which is how long you watch the video. And when you drag out words, it kind of works better for captivating your audience. Dead silence is very bad on the algorithm. So if you have a live stream or something, you want to drag out your final syllable. So actually, that uptalk, where you kind of lengthen your final vowel, is very good for online hooking.
- [07:53]
A
No way. So if you don't have your next sentence queued up, you can have a holding pattern which is the end of the last word so that you know what you're going to say at the end. And then after that, you can work out what's coming next.
- [08:04]
B
That's exactly it in linguistics.
- [08:06]
A
Holy fuck.
- [08:07]
B
It's called floor holding. It's an actual, like, strategy that people use before, you know, social media, if you debate on a stage, if you're on a debate, you want to keep grabbing people's attention. So use things like filler words. Actually is a great example of a floor holding tactic where you are trying to get people to keep listening to you even though you don't have something immediately to say.
- [08:25]
A
Alex o' Connor taught me this great one about Christopher Hitchens, that if he was in the middle of a debate and he needed to take a sip of water or have a thought, he would get halfway through the sentence and then would continue from there. And I thought, that's so fucking cool. As opposed to pausing at the end and then thinking about what he was gonna say by taking or even ask. So you might say, why is that the case? Well, yeah, really what we need to consider is. Oh, I'm waiting. So the use of silence.
- [08:58]
B
We want to know what comes next.
- [08:59]
A
Bingo.
- [09:00]
B
Yeah. And same with the influencers. It's like if. If there's an uptalk, there's an implied I'm not done speaking, and that's kind of the meta signal that there's something more to come. It sounds like something's unfinished when there's uptalk and when there's down talk, you'll never hear down. Like, I'm done. Like, that's like a falling.
- [09:15]
A
Oh, it's a handoff. There you go.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you will not hear that online at all because it's. It's a signal to scroll away.
- [09:23]
A
That's funny.
- [09:24]
B
I. I've trained myself. I just said signal to scroll away. I like uptalk because that's like. I've sort of trained myself into speaking. I call an Educational influencer accent, which is different than that Lifestyle influencer.
- [09:34]
A
Okay, give me the Educational Influencer accent.
- [09:36]
B
The most interesting thing about that is, you know, and I kind of stress more words to keep you watching my videos, and I'll talk a little faster, and I clearly talk quickly in real life. But I think I. There's a difference between a conversational style and then when I'm purely reciting a scripted video to hook you maximally for your attention.
- [09:53]
A
Okay, so you're stressing individual words, speaking a bit more quickly. That's interesting that the Valley Girl Vocal Fry. Lifestyle influencer. What I get the sense of, as someone who isn't exactly a connoisseur of that content, is a softness, a sort of welcomingness, almost a familiarity, an attempt to sort of show. Hey, guys, welcome back to my channel. It's almost welcoming you through the door, whereas it's much sharper when you're thinking about the Educational Influencer. But given that one is kind of slow, although there's no breaks, but it's certainly not da da da da da da, da da da. It's much more cozy. And the other is significantly more aggressive in terms of its pacing.
- [10:35]
B
Absolutely. Well, it's again, the question of what are you trying to do on the meta level? The Lifestyle Influencer wants you to feel like you are parasocially watching this video. An Educational influencer wants you to feel like they're a trusted source of authority. And it's that level of Communication that's happening there actually want you to relate to me 100%. I want you to think of me as a teacher if I'm talking to you.
- [10:55]
A
So if you're speaking more quickly with authority in a almost staccato manner, it's. There's brevity in the words, there's clipping. The consonants are always being pronounced pretty, pretty accurately to create shape and color. This is an interesting one. Have you looked much at diction? The way that the mouth, the functionality of the mouth, the physiology of the mouth works 100%.
- [11:16]
B
I mean, that's a big part of linguistics.
- [11:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. Unreal. So I just really loved the first time I ever worked with a speech coach. And he said his description to me was vowels give words color and consonants give them structure. And one of the problems being from the northeast of the uk, we have a glottal stop typically. So people will say butter. Butter. There's two T's and butter. And they're not saying either of them. And neither was I when I was younger. By removing or by losing those consonants, you sort of fall through words. They don't have the same kind of structure. Clarity, clippiness. And bringing those back in helps to give it a little bit more form.
- [11:54]
B
But what you're describing here, that you've modified your speaking style for what will perform better online is kind of exactly this greater homogenization effect that's happening. There's nothing less valid about a North England dialect than the received pronunciation or the transatlantic accent or any of these things. We just bullshit into thinking that some of these are like, fancier than other accents. But it's all in our heads. And yet there's still this pressure to perform, to use a more standard pronunciation of English. For my book, I interviewed a lot of Indian creators who feel like they can't speak in Indian accents because that's kind of maligned upon scenes of status.
- [12:27]
A
Yeah.
- [12:28]
B
And they have to kind of code switch into more British sounding or American sounding accents.
- [12:33]
A
Wow. Well, in my defense, or at least in my mother's defense, she was sort of slapping me on the wrist and beating it out of me as a child. So I didn't make it to adulthood without saying butter. Correct.
- [12:44]
B
That's because of an ingrained shame. There really is nothing inherently wrong with you speaking in a northern English.
- [12:49]
A
I'm gonna go back to it. I'm fucking gonna go back to it, mate. You fucking cannot stop me from saying butter as much as I want.
- [12:55]
B
The cost is you might go less viral because the viewer has an expectation that I want you to be speaking the way I expect you to speak.
- [13:01]
A
Also there is a degree of legibility or illegibility, but if you get a strong Geordie accent from the northeast where I'm from, or a strong Scouse accent from Liverpool, it is as close to a different language whilst being the same language. It's like one step away from speciation in terms of language.
- [13:20]
B
I think language can be correctly described as following a very similar path to evolution and that there are bottleneck events and speciation events. And the algorithm, for example, I think is one such bottleneck that it compresses our language into. You have to be speaking in these widely recognizable accents, but then it speciates and creates new environments. And so on these different platforms and in the different fandom communities platforms, you will have new outgrowths of language that have first passed through this filter event.
- [13:48]
A
What else? So we've had Cozy Lifestyle lady. We've had educational influencer man, Mr. Beast.
- [13:58]
B
Mr. Beast in the room.
- [13:59]
A
Yeah, I was about to say very good. What, what's happening with Mr. Beast's accent?
- [14:02]
B
If you look at his video and if you look at how he actually speaks in interviews, they're completely different. He is very deliberately switching his accent to grab your attention as much as possible. He screams in it. I just bought a private island. Giving away a million dollars. Like he's, he's very like ostentatious with it. He's screaming at you every sentence because that works for his 14 year old viewers attention spans. He's speaking to a different audience than somebody trying to educate and a different audience than somebody trying to appear relatable because he's clearly being ostentatious. So it's reflected in his vocal style. Like he sounds like he's about to give away a million dollars even as he does it, you know, so it's
- [14:36]
A
excitement, loudness, what else?
- [14:41]
B
Shock and awe, really. You just, you want the viewer to remain so dumbfounded watching the video that they don't even think to scroll away. It's like a magician. You just want to keep the attention going.
- [14:51]
A
I saw a live streamer in the wild for the first time ever a couple of months ago. And obviously I've seen live streams online. I've seen some IRL stuff, not tons, but seeing an IRL streamer from side camera or behind camera was a real experience. It was at The Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood. And what I found fascinating was because the livestream essentially never ends until it finally does. There Is this permanent edging of the audience that there will be a payoff, but not yet. And there will be a payoff, but not yet. At least with Beast, it's like we're gonna go to the most expensive gym in the world. But first I'm gonna show you the cheapest and now I'm gonna show you one a bit more expensive. And now I'm gonna. And then finally you do it and there's a payoff and then you're done.
- [15:33]
B
And the video' different medium because it's bounded by a specific time. So you know, the beast video is 14 minutes long, but the live stream is lasting however long. It's kind of definitely live performers. If you go to like a public gathering and there's those people doing backflips in a crowd like for money or whatever, they won't do the backflips immediately because nobody. Like people leave immediately.
- [15:51]
A
Dance around for ages.
- [15:52]
B
Dance around. They'll do around a collection of the money. They'll dance around some more. They'll do another round of collection, I promise. Guys, we're going to get to the backflips. And you keep watching because they're edging you. It's what's. Yeah, exactly what's happening. And if you look at like TikTok live streams, I keep getting clickbaited by this like video of this guy trying to peel an egg. And he gets the last part of the egg and he's like, he keeps like edging us like, I'm gonna take off this shell here. But I think there's something, an important parallel between that visual way that you get clickbaited and the auditory and linguistic way that happens as well.
- [16:22]
A
Okay, how so?
- [16:23]
B
Well, live streaming, I think there is a dissolution between this online presentation and the offline presentation. I think it's particularly dangerous because it does play into this attention mechanism. But in real life where you're exploiting real people for it, linguistically speaking, that does mean you're going to keep doing the up talks. You're going to speak in attention grabbing manners. All of that is. Yeah. And you do kind of delay gratification. When I do a video and I script it out, I kind of don't immediately say the resolution of the question I pose at the start. And you'll see this a lot in YouTube videos.
- [16:59]
A
The payoff's held until the end. What other subcultures online do you think are particularly interesting linguistically?
- [17:07]
B
Oh, wow. I mean, I've spent a lot of time studying the language of the Manosphere. I think it's particularly interesting because half of Gen Z slang is either African American English or it's from 4chan. And you do have a lot of those incel words trickling in. Definitely. 4chan was a linguistic incubator for decades and, well, a decade. And all these new words came out of it that are still slowly diffusing into more mainstream culture, like maxing and pilled and gooning.
- [17:36]
A
What made 4chan such a useful incubator for language?
- [17:40]
B
There's the anonymity on the platform where users need to demonstrate a shared proficiency in slang to show that they're not a normie. And there's this huge selection pressure to show that you're one of the 4chan users.
- [17:51]
A
And because it's such a constrained platform, you can't do video, you can't do voice, you're not doing face. Know the identity of someone. You need to very quickly, through your language identify, I am one of you, not one of them.
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, you can do like images and things, which. That's how we get. A lot of memes also come from there. But linguistically. Yeah, there's no one's posting a selfie though, right?
- [18:11]
A
To say, this is me, I am
- [18:13]
B
one of us in the sense that language is identity.
- [18:15]
A
Yeah.
- [18:15]
B
100% of these people, unfortunately, are also trying to build a shared identity for themselves.
- [18:19]
A
Self branding, belonging.
- [18:20]
B
And it's cool to come up with the new joke. And language spreads when it's funny. It does. We like saying things that are funny. That's reasonable. It's funny to say I'm podcast maxing.
- [18:28]
A
Yeah, that's true. Well, I am. I have been for eight years now. I am podcast maxing. What about newscasters? How can they speak so strangely?
- [18:37]
B
They're doing the exact same thing. This just in. And they speak in this authoritative kind of manner. It's doing the exact same thing as the educational influencer, really. It's a way of grabbing attention that's conditioned a certain medium. And there's a broadcaster voice, just as there's an influencer voice. There's a. They used to train like American broadcasters to use this mid Atlant. Not. Yeah, mid Midwestern U.S. accent. That was kind of the homogenous U.S. accent. And that was also a way of presenting in an accepted. This is how a TV broadcaster is supposed to speak kind of way. And at home, they might still use like a local accent, speak in a different way.
- [19:13]
A
It's interesting that that becomes enforced over time just through consensus and expectation that there's Some first mover somewhere, maybe one person's particularly effective. There's a legendary newscaster and this guy speaks in a way, and then the generation around him shaped, because that seems to be a successful approach. Therefore, you see this online. Someone has a new thumbnail style and now everybody's doing thumbnails like that. Or somebody does a new video style and everyone's doing videos like that. It's the same thing, but with the accent for newscasters. And then that becomes not only something effective for his colleagues at the time, but it's now shaping the entire future. And that's the expectation. Well, that's how newscasters speak. And if you were to come in and you would speak in a different manner, that would be very different.
- [19:55]
B
Right. That's what I was saying about the founder effect. And you kind of follow in the footsteps of people before you. For example, for my educational influencer accent, probably it's highly influenced by people like Hank Green or something. Vsauce. They were the early educational influencers and they're probably copying people like Bill Nye or something. So it always trickles back to something earlier. You know, you exist in the context.
- [20:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This episode is brought to you by gymshark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real world training. Which is why I'm such a massive fan of gymshark. They're hybrid shorts, especially in onyx. Gray and navy are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly, they don't bunch, they're super lightweight. You can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The Geo seamless T shirt is what I train in almost every single session. Breathes properly, holds its shape after you wash it. Everything that gymshark makes is lightweight and sweat wicking and easy to wash and dries fast. And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30 day free return. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally and right now you can get 10% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to Gym Shmodernwisdom and using the code ModernWisdom10A checkout. That's gym ShModernWisdom and ModernWisdom10A checkout. What about sports commentators? Because they're doing something similar, but a little bit distinct and different.
- [21:18]
B
Yeah. If news broadcasters are the equivalent of educational influencers, then sports commentators are kind of closer to Mr. Beast. They want to keep you excited. Go. You know, like, it's very exciting. They want to keep you excited about watching the game. And that's reasonable.
- [21:31]
A
Yeah, yeah. But speaking with a lot of clarity, again, super expressive. There's not much. Well, I don't see very many filler words with those people, which I guess is because it's trained out of them. I have to imagine that over time, if you're looking to maximize relatability, authenticity, a felt sense of belonging, what you're actually going to do is not sterilize your use of language too much to make it too precise. That. That then feels contrived as opposed to something that's naturalistic.
- [21:59]
B
You want to hit a fine line. I mean, think about, like, phone calls in movies. They famously never say goodbye. They just finish saying something and they hang up. Because in real life, we do the whole like, all right, I'll see you later, goodbye. But in a movie, that doesn't really work. So you do actually make it more concise.
- [22:14]
A
No way. Because it would just waste screen time.
- [22:16]
B
It waste screen time. Yeah, exactly.
- [22:18]
A
Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, have a good. Yep. It's fine. Yeah, no worry. Yeah. I'll catch you later. Bye. Five seconds that you didn't need in the movie.
- [22:26]
B
So it's performing the idea of a phone call while not actually doing phone call as we actually do it.
- [22:32]
A
I never thought about that. Holy shit. But sterilizing language too much obviously puts across. You did a great TED Talk. I did a TedX talk five, six years ago or something now. And one of the things that I realized as I was getting ready for that and doing the preparation was I actually need to detrain my knowledge of my own talk in a way so that it doesn't sound too contrived, so it doesn't sound too performative.
- [23:00]
B
There's that idea of what a TED Talk sounds like. I mean, there's a great video on YouTube of, like, Guy just doing TED Talk by saying things that don't mean anything, but he's saying in the cadence of a TED Talk.
- [23:10]
A
That's funny.
- [23:11]
B
Definitely recommend looking that up. But, yeah, there's. There's. You can. You know what I mean when I say there's a cadence of what a TED Talk sounds like? I think it's kind of dead. I think it's in the past. And TED Talks are also. They've lost a lot of their prestige of what it was and the way people should be doing TED Talks now is just clip farming, which is the future.
- [23:31]
A
The way that people should be doing TED Talks now is just clip farm. So if you get booked for a TED Talk, you should just try and get clip farmed, I think. So how would you do that?
- [23:38]
B
What actually matters? Like, I don't know, the audience of TED Talk is, I guess aspirational speakers themselves or like it's. If you have a real message to say, it's probably not the audience that's there. It's probably better if you transmit it on the Internet because you could reach that audience. And that's the idea behind 6, 7 and behind Jester maxing and all that stuff, is that distribution matters more than the content itself. That you just saying the thing that goes viral. And if we're existing in a age of social media virality, the TED Talk is kind of a dead format, existing as this quasi online talk, which was fantastic in the early days of YouTube when there wasn't enough content going on. But now the media ecosystem is oversaturated and the TED talks have way fewer views than they used to because they don't do the same function that they did in the early Internet.
- [24:29]
A
Well, especially because one video can get. You can write a book and then each sentence can be sold individually and then even those sentences can be reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and individual productions of those can be reshared. So yeah, you're actually looking for as much distribution as possible when what was it called the HH bomb thing that happened with the guys in the Miami club where they played that Kanye song and insane bar that was. Every single second of that video was broken down and shared and reshared and published and republished and commented on. And that's a single book just being sold word by word, essentially.
- [25:08]
B
And what that points to is that there is a dangerous misalignment between human preferences. Like I can imagine that most of us don't think that song is good for humanity. And then what goes viral online? Because online there are certain emotions that are rewarded more than others. There's anger, fear, awe, humor. Things that trigger a state of a mental arousal where your brain is more activated. Now things that don't do that is like contentment. Contentment makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn't trigger your brain to click a like button. The like button, of course, is more of a metric of how willing you are to click this button than it is whether you like something. And you're more willing to click a button if your brain is activated and your Brain's not activated when you feel warm and fuzzy, which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not going to spread online. The things that are going to spread are rage, bait and clickbait.
- [25:50]
A
That's so fascinating. So if you're a meditation teacher by design, because you make people feel good and you get them out of that brain mode, you're going to get less engagement, which means that you're going to go less viral, which means there's less of an incentive for you to keep doing your content.
- [26:05]
B
Look at the wellness space the same way movie phone calls perform what it's like to be a phone call. Wellness influencers are performing the idea of wellness. But it's this hyper estheticized, sanitized, clean girl thing where you're on a yoga mat doing Pilates or whatever. But that does like you're presenting this hyper wellness idea. That's not true wellness. And if you're actually feeling warm and fuzzy, you don't need to prove that to other people. You don't need to play like you're feeling good.
- [26:31]
A
Yeah. You're not doing yoga in the living room with your floor to ceiling windows and you're waving sage everywhere. You're sat on the couch relaxing.
- [26:38]
B
Sometimes it's just watching a movie is, you know, sitting on the couch but
- [26:41]
A
not sufficiently visually interesting. So it wouldn't be compelling for people. What about the gay male accent? What's going on there?
- [26:47]
B
Yeah, 100%. There's a lot of research on, well, emerging research on lesbian accent as well. But gay accent, that there is a certain way of talking that of course will differ between different communities. And it's not a monolith. But you know, you can recognize when somebody talks in a gay accent there. There's a few sociological things going on. I think it's incorrect to say that they talk more like women, but they adopt many strategies that are similar to how women have talked. They raise certain vowels and they will. Yeah. And it's. It's all kind of the same identity thing. It was historically a way like the gay slang words, which is a lot of our Gen Z slang words also come from gay ballroom speech.
- [27:31]
A
But like.
- [27:32]
B
Oh like slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate, cooked is gay.
- [27:38]
A
Yeah.
- [27:39]
B
I'm pretty sure that come. Well, there's cooking and cooked which come from different sources. Cooking and sportsling.
- [27:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Playing well. Yeah, yeah. Unreal. So I wonder if there's stuff that even we wouldn't notice that there's little identifiers in the gay community like tops speak in one way and bottoms speak in another. Or I guess there's guys that present in much more masculine manner and there's guys that present in a much more feminine manner. Interesting conversation I had over dinner. Probably best to have it over dinner. Looking at what it is, the presentation that most straight men notice in gay men. And what they notice is what you said, which is, are you coding as female? Not as female, but in a manner that somebody who isn't a part of that culture would identify as feminine.
- [28:28]
B
I'm going to sound like a broken clock, but everything is performing the idea of something. And so gay men perform the idea of being gay, which is fine. Straight men perform the idea of being straight. And it's also a way to signal to other people. Like in Historically, gay men had to be closeted and they needed ways of signaling to other gay men that, hey, I'm chill and we should hang out, you know? And that's sort of linguistically, there are little cues you can drop that hint at. I'm a gay man, right? What like, well, using certain slang words, like, I'm thinking about, like, I don't know, cottaging in Britain, but when homosexuality was illegal, there's like certain ways of tapping your foot. Or Polari was a whole gay cant, Like a kind of a micro language created in England that was used specifically by gay people as a way of evading detection by police because police didn't know what was going on. And it was a way of signaling a shared identity for themselves. And we see sort of gay micro languages emerge everywhere. In the Philippines, there's one called Sward Speak. There's one in South Africa. Every community, because gay people have been historically kind of marginalized, they need ways to come up with subversion of the traditional norms of language.
- [29:36]
A
Do you know what capoeira is? Sounds British to Brazilian martial arts.
- [29:41]
B
Brazilian is what I mean.
- [29:43]
A
Capoeira was a martial art developed in Brazil when they were under a military rule and they weren't allowed to practice fighting because they didn't want there to be a military force that could rise up. So this thing, if you watch a video of it, looks very distinctive, very dancy. It kind of looks like a dance. I mean, it very quickly gets into a fighting art. But that makes me think about gay guys in Britain before it was legal, having to have a secret language and a Brazilian martial art developed by Africans taken to the country as slaves. That was it. So they weren't allowed to practice fighting. And they've got music that goes with it as well, which would be a way to hide what was going on. It's just a party. We don't need to worry about that. It's just a party. And yeah, the. Wow.
- [30:26]
B
Yeah, that's amazing.
- [30:27]
A
Yeah.
- [30:28]
B
Well, if we accept that language is a tool of identity, identity is tied to power. Who's in control as part of your identity? And so we see the English language, which is defined by these white British people in the 1700s or whatever, and we're still following the norms. Yeah, love them. But it doesn't represent all the speakers of English. And so different speakers try to come up with different ways to subvert that structure that's imposed upon them. And so a lot of that has been African American English speakers who now have come up with a lot of slang words that later bled into mainstream Gen Z slang, or specifically gay people, because these were straight white men creating language. And so it's a way of subverting, of establishing their own norms of language. King and queen, for example, like the slang word what's up, king? You know, like that, or what's up, queen? That. That comes from ballroom slang in New York city in the 1980s, which is this like, black, gay, Latino space.
- [31:22]
A
Black, gay, Latino, black, Latino, you know,
- [31:25]
B
gay people in New York City. And it was a way of elevating people in that community. I see you on the status of royalty, because we are not seen as that by society. And that even goes back even further to the history. Kind of like black people in the United States. A lot of slang goes from black people to gay people and then to, like, the straight white girlfriends of gay men and then to the mainstream English. Right.
- [31:50]
A
Okay, so there's a pipeline, a four person human centipede with normies at the end and black people at the front.
- [31:56]
B
That's pretty much it.
- [31:57]
A
Fantastic.
- [31:58]
B
Or 4chan is the other end.
- [31:59]
A
4chan. Black people, gay people, cool people, normies.
- [32:04]
B
Language spreads when it's funny or cool, and it's cool when black people use it. And it's funny when 4chan people use it. It can be considered funny. Unfortunately, when black people say things as well, which is a whole genre of hood irony memes. Like cap. Like is an example. Or huz is a recent slang word.
- [32:20]
A
What's that?
- [32:21]
B
It's like a slang word for hose. But it comes from, like, a parody of African American English. Or gyat. That was also kind of making fun of. Yeah, yeah. But it comes from the word God damn pronounced in an exaggerated African American accent. And of course, when I say that there's many different African American accents in the same way. There's many different gay accents and many different Internet accents. And I really hate to speak of language as a monolith. I'm not even sure language exists as, like, a thing. It's just like we all speak separately, kind of close to people around us. And there's, like, a gradient of what language is rather than a monolithic thing. The monolithic thing is this institutional assumption that there is a dictionary that can capture a snapshot of what language is.
- [33:00]
A
So every person has their own language in this regard?
- [33:02]
B
Yes. It's called idiolect, from the Greek word idios, meaning one zone. And we all speak in a completely unique way, conditioned by our background, our upbringing, our education, the people we hung out with, the words that resonated with us based on just our history of interacting with language. I find that really compelling that you have a linguistic footprint unlike anybody else. That's how they caught the Unabomber.
- [33:23]
A
Yes. His brother found out that he said, eat your cake and have it too, as opposed to have your cake and eat it too, because the one that he used actually makes more sense, but was completely unique.
- [33:33]
B
Exactly. And so we all have, like, these little quirks. Whether you think you do or not, they're there.
- [33:38]
A
What about lesbian accents?
- [33:41]
B
This is harder to identify. And there are studies showing that speakers can identify lesbian accent, but there are very mixed results on what defines one. There is, again, indication that they speak a little closer to the idea of a masculine language. And yet, at the same time, it would be reductive to say that. So there is certain stuff going on with perhaps lowered vowels and maybe a deeper voice. But again, I would be generalizing to say that we know for sure there definitely is something going on, but the studies aren't there to fully explain it.
- [34:12]
A
It would make sense if you were to think about much of gay fashion compared with straight fashion for men. You would say, well, there's a bit more flair. There's maybe a bit more color. There's more beautification. There's more accessories. Okay. That seems to code somewhat feminine. And if you were to look at gay women compared with straight women, you'd say, well, there's more plaid and jeans and sort of male coded clothes, a little bit more loose fitting sometimes that would tend to code a bit more male. You go, okay, well, it would make sense that if you're presenting outwardly that way, that maybe your language would match that. But it would also be unique and distinct because gay men aren't trying to Be women. That would be very bad for the gay men they're trying to attract. And gay women aren't trying to be men because they wouldn't attract any of the women's thing.
- [35:02]
B
That is the idea of gay man again, which is maybe closer to women
- [35:06]
A
than straight men performing the idea of being a gay man.
- [35:09]
B
And all we're doing all the time is performing LARPing. We're just pretending to be on a podcast right now, but in doing so, we actually are.
- [35:14]
A
You know, can you. I need you to dice it. Can you blow that apart for me? It's really cool. I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
- [35:21]
B
Um, I think people should all read this guy, Irving Goffman. He's a sociologist from the 1960s and he comes up with this great book, the presentation of self in everyday Life. And he describes how we all adopt faces or roles in society. Um, there's a front facing role and a back facing, like, so when you're on stage, you're off stage. And when you're on stage, right now, we're presenting to the public. We are on stage, we're presenting as ourselves. But as soon as we get off the podcast, we might speak more casually. Um, because there's a different way of communicating when you know, there's this invisible audience present. In the same way when you're literally on a stage or you're literally backstage that you'll do the same thing, but if you're talking in front of your parents versus you're talking with your friends, you'll adopt different registers. And it's that kind of the same thing we were describing with different rooms and different platforms. And you have an idea of what your environment is and you will mold yourself into the role you see that environment as bringing to you. And so we do everything through this idea of a rule and all of what we do as a performance, to be a man is kind of a performance. Like we need to keep replicating this idea of manhood. We both, like, have beards, we both dress and talk a certain way. And in doing so, we're kind of adopting symbols of masculinity. And clavicular is doing a great job of that himself.
- [36:36]
A
I've got a. I've got a take on that, which is. I think it's the most caricatured traits of masculinity. Not necessarily in terms of speech, you know, because you might say a powerful, precise, educated or a brusque, maybe even someone who's very curt with the way that they spoke strong and silent type. But that's because masculinity is couched within 2026. What does it mean for masculinity to be that way? I think visually masculinity has just been going in one direction. If you look at the tracking of Luke Skywalker star action figures over time, in the 60s he was super skinny. And then in the 90s, again, do me a comparison. Just search a chatgpt Luke Skywalker action figure over time comparison. And yeah, he just, he goes on a very heavy course of testosterone for about six decades.
- [37:33]
B
That's really interesting.
- [37:33]
A
And just gets more and more and
- [37:35]
B
more and more and more Jack.
- [37:37]
A
So I think what's happening is a performance of masculinity. That's the best way to put it.
- [37:41]
B
Luke Skywalker looks maxed.
- [37:43]
A
Luke Skywalker absolutely mogs, dude. Yeah, he, he's performing masculinity. It's a male to male visual comparison.
- [37:52]
B
And there is always an evolving definition of masculinity too. Like back in ancient Rome, being masculine means you could, like as long as you could have sex with other men, as long as you weren't a bottom, that would be like not masculine. But that was true. That was the definition of masculinity for a certain period in ancient Rome.
- [38:06]
A
You're allowed to fuck. Just you have to fuck if you are fuck.
- [38:10]
B
Caesar was famously offended not at the accusation that he was gay, but the accusation that he was a bottom. Because that's the Roman ide. But it's an all evolving idea whether men should have long hair or short hair, whether, you know, we should, you know, what it means to be a man is always a moving target and we're always performing for this target. So it just proves how arbitrary it is that right now, of course there is a current 2026 idea of a man that we're performing toward. But that's a very different idea than back when we were wearing togas.
- [38:51]
A
That's 1977, 1995. Heavy course of testosterone, dude.
- [38:55]
B
Unbelievable.
- [38:57]
A
And then they've used the stats of what it would be like to give the same proportions to a human on either side. 37 inch shoulders and a 32 inch waist versus 52 inch shoulders and 27 inch waist.
- [39:12]
B
Right. The last thing looks nothing like a human. Mark Hamill.
- [39:15]
A
Yeah, a human. A quick aside, There is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard but that's why Momentous built Fiber Plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber is a three in one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. And this cinnamon flavor is unreal, you might think. Fiber. Wow. I bet that tastes great. Well, yeah, actually it does. Doubters, I really enjoyed this. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not sure you can buy fiber plus, try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. And they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com modernwisdom or and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N t o u s.com ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom at checkout. What about emojis? Cause they're kind of like language and picture. I guess they feel like modern hieroglyphics.
- [40:38]
B
Yeah, well, there's a few different functions of emojis. You can use it to substitute a word. Like we see this with ice protest. People want to censor the word ice because they think the algorithm is like going to hamper their video. So they'll just sub it out with the ice cube emoji. That's a substitutive emoji. Then you have emojis that are more paralanguage meant to augment your sentence. So if I say something and then I comment the or I have a sentence, and then at the end of the sentence there's like a laughing emoji or a sneezing emoji or a crying emoji that serves as a sort of a tone tag telling you what the emotional form of my sentence is. And then there's a few other separate ways. You can send them individually. You could use them as reactions. There's a lot of things going on, but they absolutely are linguistic in the sense of they carry meaning and they communicate something from one person to another.
- [41:26]
A
I saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji meant, had it have did it.
- [41:35]
B
Was it the farmer in Canada?
- [41:37]
A
What was this one?
- [41:38]
B
Okay, so there's a great court case where there was a farmer who had a contract for grain shipments, and he would occasionally, like they. They did month by month, and they would sign off with a yes or a whatever. And then one month, the farmer signs off with an okay emoji, just a thumbs up.
- [41:56]
A
Okay.
- [41:57]
B
And the grain supplier doesn't deliver the grain or something like that. And then the farmer sues the grain supplier. Maybe I'm getting it the other way around. But the point is, the court case was about whether the thumbs up emoji legally constituted an affirmation of this agreement occurring. One person said this could be acknowledgement, and the other person said this is a direct agreement. And I think the court case ruled in favor of thumbs up being in agreement. But it was kind of based on previous context. Right. Because previous context was the long established
- [42:27]
A
history of emojis in court cases.
- [42:29]
B
Right. Well, there's a few things going on. Yeah. What was the one you were thinking about?
- [42:33]
A
There was a murder case, and it was about intent. It was about whether or not this person had intended to kill somebody or not. And it's an interpretation of what this emoji means. And it's so funny because it's a single thing, right. It's. There's no intonation. I guess it's couched in what has been said before and after. But if you just take it on its own, there is no different way to say. There is no different way to spell it. And it's only been around for 15. Less than 15 years, something like that, probably. Okay, so the definition of it hasn't had enough time to really cement itself and become established.
- [43:09]
B
Well, that's the thing.
- [43:10]
A
So it's so fluid.
- [43:10]
B
Emoji definitions are also constantly changing. Like the crying emoji once meant literally crying, and then it meant laughing. And then it. Also the laughing emoji is now seen as, like, ironic by something you shouldn't use.
- [43:22]
A
The laughing emoji.
- [43:23]
B
Right.
- [43:23]
A
Yeah. That's kind of cringe unless you're trying
- [43:25]
B
to like, signal Boomer.
- [43:26]
A
Correct. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:28]
B
It's.
- [43:28]
A
The horseshoe has come all the way back around.
- [43:30]
B
Right. Again, you can post, ironically use it, I think.
- [43:33]
A
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We're in the post cry, laughing face world, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What's the, what's the direction of etymology? It feels like there's sort of an entropy to words that they move in a direction. Are they always getting simpler and shorter over Time is there an arrow of motion? When it comes to word development, I
- [43:55]
B
think language, more than anything, is a reflection of who we are as people right now. The word etymology comes from Greek etymos, meaning truth. There's a truth to the word that we look at, and it tells us something about humanity, about who we are as people. Because, again, this is a tool of identity. And so less of there being a direction and more of it just reflecting who we are right now, what we're feeling. It's. Language is our way to categorize what we think is going on. I'll use words to describe my reality, and then I'll use that to communicate it to you. So it's describing reality, and then it's communicating that reality. If our reality changes. Yeah, language will change as a result, because now we have to describe something different. So we have. We're using fewer words to describe different types of plants than we were in the 1800s because we're interacting with fewer plants. That's kind of sad.
- [44:44]
A
Okay, and what about when. What's the term for when a word gets broken down to make. To be made shorter? So goodbye is a good example. God be with you.
- [44:54]
B
God be with you. And then. Yeah, contracted to goodbye. And then eventually you can truncate it to just bye.
- [44:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. What's that called? That's a contraction.
- [45:02]
B
Abbreviation. Contraction. There are different ways of doing this. You can make words shorter, and you can also make portmanteaus, where you combine different words. And. Yeah, we're making new words all the time. Gesture maxing is a great evidence of that. We're combining new words in new ways, but that sort of reflects our new reality. And so if reality adjusts, we will both come up with new words and we'll lose old ones because language is a moving, living thing.
- [45:27]
A
You mentioned black people, gay people, cool people, normal people, young people. How much did they drive language forward? Because young people are almost always seen as being cool, but they're also the ones that have got the least cemented history with regards to their linguistic use.
- [45:45]
B
Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are the earliest to adopt new words because older people have this cemented idea of what language is. Younger people are both more flexible with that, and they're trying to build a shared identity for themselves. And I know I keep bringing identity into it, but that's what language is, a way of, you know, figuring out who you are and what kind of words you want to use. And you don't want to sound like your mother. You want to sound like your. Your peers.
- [46:07]
A
Yeah. How much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differentiate, differentiate themselves?
- [46:12]
B
That's a huge part of it. Most of language change, I would say is driven by people like right now, honestly, middle schoolers. But historically, people between the ages of like 10 and 25 are the ones coming up with slang. Now, of course, there's different types of how language gets adopted. There's institutional words. So like iPhone is a new word, but it's not a slang word. Podcast, a shortening of iPod plus broadcast, that's sort of new. But that these things come from more institutional avenues, that's another route or mechanism of language change. But for the slang, which is this kind of lower status feeling of language that eventually can become just real language that comes from younger people. So all the video game terms we see in bleeding into mainstream English, NPC skill issue, that kind of stuff, or all of the. Yeah, the black people or the incel language, all of that's kind of driven by young people right now.
- [47:10]
A
How effective are institutions at top down dictating language and linguistic use? Because when I think about, and this might just be because I'm terminally online, when I think about most of the language that I see, yeah, you're right with podcasts, but they're usually categories. They're not the sort of thing that people are using as a important identifier of the way that they're put together. And it doesn't really seem to be shaping culture. Maybe it represents something that shapes culture, but the words itself won't. So how easy is it for people in power to top down dictate the way that language is used?
- [47:46]
B
If it feels like a word is intentionally being forced upon you, we actually often feel a resistance to it. There's the. In the movie Mean Girls, Gretchen famously couldn't make the word fetch happen. She was trying to get.
- [47:56]
A
Stop trying to make fetch.
- [47:57]
B
Yeah. And that's because it felt forced. So if you feel like someone is pushing a word onto you might actually not want to adopt it, There is a difference with institutional acceptance. So if you see a word in a dictionary that's just like this is accepted as language, even though of course there's just an idea of language. But you might point to that now and you'll see news outlets only use words that are in the dictionary or books in academic publishing. And all this stuff will use this standard idea of language which is filtered through the institutions. So they're not forcing the word. They're merely once a word has been used around for long enough, they legitimize it.
- [48:34]
A
Lots of people have got issues with the word like, you know, what are some of the older versions of filler words? Because it can't have just been now that filler words were brought in.
- [48:48]
B
Yeah, well, there have always been filler words and might be one of the most universal words there's. Across different languages. That mid central vowel shows up in a lot of. When people are thinking. I know Spanish speakers use like e or it's. It's some kind of vowel that's close to the center. Often that's used when you. You just. I said it. That's used when you're thinking about something. And that's a universal constant that we think about things and we need time to say things for.
- [49:18]
A
It's a holding pattern.
- [49:19]
B
Yeah, it's the floor holding thing again.
- [49:22]
A
Yeah.
- [49:22]
B
I think it's stigmatized because it's associated with not thinking through things. Like especially is associated with like the Valley Girls and those women are stigmatized just because they're not seen as speaking standard English, even though there's nothing inherently wrong. And actually like has a lot of different applications. There's the quotative, like where you can say. You can say something, you can quote someone directly, I said this. Or you can adopt an affect. I was like this. And that actually serves a different linguistic function. That's actually a really beautiful thing that you can adopt a Persona in the middle of speech instead of directly claiming to quote something. Like implies it doesn't have to be 100% accurate.
- [50:04]
A
But it's a self analogy to self simile.
- [50:07]
B
I was like, it's a self simile.
- [50:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. One of the things, someone brought this up. I can't remember who I was speaking to the etymologicon. Who wrote that.
- [50:19]
B
Mark Forsyth.
- [50:20]
A
Forsyth. Mark Forsyth.
- [50:21]
B
That's the book that got me into etymology.
- [50:22]
A
No fucking way.
- [50:23]
B
I read that in 2016 and I was like, this shit is gas. And I just started reading more etymology books. Started a little blog for myself. I don't think anybody read it. But then I studied linguistics in college and ended up becoming a linguistics influencer. But it started because of that book.
- [50:38]
A
No way. Did you read Elements of Eloquence as well? Yeah, yeah, bro. So Mark's. Mark's great. And I brought up the holding pattern like stuff. He had this great take, which is if you just roll back to your grandparents generation, a lot of the time sentences would begin with, well, you know, it's what we. What we must. It's this sort of. There would be almost obliviating approach to it. I have this guy that I bring on all the time, Rory Sutherland. He's kind of like my mad uncle. And every time that he speaks, there's precision and then there's these parentheses of noise. But it's not like it's still filler to some degrees. It's padding and it's nice. It actually provides a little bit of breathing room because he speaks quite quickly too. So having a. Ah, I know this is coming in to land. The same as getting off the phone. Okay. Yep, yep. No worries. I've got. But it's that foreplay and post coital talking talk.
- [51:38]
B
Exactly. No, I think we talked about floor holding, but you got to take the floor in the first place. And you were describing that, you know, is a great example. You are signaling that you're taking the conversational turn. There is in influencer spaces, people start videos with no because. No because why did this happen? And it's just like a. It doesn't mean anything really.
- [51:56]
A
Falling halfway through a sentence.
- [51:58]
B
It does though. It feels as if in media's res. Feeling that you. You want to. We resonate more with the video when we feel like we're already in the middle of it rather than having to deal with this whole introduction. So. But it does still serve to grab your attention and continue from the middle of the thought.
- [52:15]
A
What are some of the other powerful linguistic tricks that creators either are using a lot of or you think that more creators should be using in order to. That's interesting. I didn't think about. No, because. And you go, hang on, I didn't see what happened before. Am I. I guess I'm in this now. What else is. What else are some good keyholes in the brain that you can latch into?
- [52:38]
B
I'm trying less to provide advice to creators and more just get people aware of what creators are already doing to you.
- [52:43]
A
Oh, okay. Everything is. You're like a public, public service announcement for creators. Yeah.
- [52:48]
B
Psa. Everybody's doing everything for your attention.
- [52:51]
A
Yeah.
- [52:51]
B
The platforms have monetized your attention. They are commodifying your data and your information and they're trying to sell you ads. Everything's based around your attention. Incentive structures now for influencers to replicate where the attention economy famously just runs around what will grab your attention. And so that means our language will all serve that end primarily. And then there's maybe a secondary purpose of. I want to sound like I'm. I know what I'm talking about. Or I want to sound relatable, but it starts with attention. And we'll use keywords, like all words are keywords at this point. Metadata used to be like their search engine optimization terms that you would put in a website description to make sure it ranks higher. Every single term now is a search engine optimization term because the algorithm is looking at every single word you use, and it's using that to create a cluster representation of what your video is in this mathematical space. And it uses that to push out a video. And so by using a word, you are creating a signal for the algorithm that this video should be distributed in a certain way. And then you are also creating signals for the viewers that you should look at the video a certain way. There's several meta layers to everything we're saying.
- [53:55]
A
I feel like you're a guy that went away for a decade to some mountaintop kung fu retreat and learned a bunch of really dangerous martial arts where you can kill a guy with one touch. And I'm now asking, okay, so how do I kill guys with one touch? And you're saying, well, what I'm here to do is I'm here to warn people about the one touch death move. That's exactly what it feels like.
- [54:19]
B
We should be immensely critical of these platforms, and I'm a big believer that the medium is the message, that the way we consume media strongly affects the everything. We understand that algorithms are uniquely constraining our language to this bottleneck. We've described that they are shaping our expression. And if they're doing it to our language, that's one thing, because I do think language, again, is this tool that's sort of neutral, but they're also doing it to our ideas, our discussion, our greater sense of reality. There are certain biases that get coded into the algorithm that they get perpetuated. We see the same thing happening with AI. There's a bottleneck again there. What kind of language goes in, what kind of language is reinforced into the model, and then what kind of language goes out? Nothing is neutral when it's happening through a tech intermediary that' make money off of you.
- [54:58]
A
Okay, talk to me about what AI is doing to language.
- [55:01]
B
You know, about the word delve.
- [55:03]
A
Delve to sort of jump into. Yeah, yeah.
- [55:06]
B
So we have studies indicating that since ChatGPT came out, usage of the word delve has spiked a thousand Percent since before 2022.
- [55:16]
A
Why does ChatGPT like Delve?
- [55:18]
B
So ChatGPT uses the word Delve 10 times more than regular because there is a Bias in the reinforcement learning process, which is when the words get trained into the model. So one, there's a few things going on here. One, the reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and Kenya where they do actually say delve at higher rates but still not that high. And that's partially their rewarding words that they're familiar with. Two, delve is a Latin word. And we know that ChatGPT exhibits a Latin based bias over Germanic words because
- [55:44]
A
again, Latin supremacy, it's prestige.
- [55:46]
B
It's like you think Latin sounds fancier than Germanic words. Like Germanic words are basic ones like the but and whatever. And then Latin words or dig in is a Germanic word versus delve is a, is a Latin derived word.
- [55:56]
A
Right?
- [55:56]
B
And it sounds fancier to say the Latin word. And because these models are trained to sound like they know what they're talking about, they're going to use more of the Romance language stuff. They, they're trained to sound confident and incisive and sycophantic and they will use certain words that perpetuate that and then that gets reinforced into the model. So all this stuff happens. And when you're a reinforcement learner clicking through, reinforcement worker clicking through what kind of words are okay and not okay, you don't really catch a small discrepancy like that, that delve is showing up a little bit more. So it accidentally gets reinforced into the model and then ChatGPT starts spitting out the word delve more. And now we have evidence in the past few years that humans, in our spontaneous spoken conversation, are also starting to use the word delve more.
- [56:35]
A
So the creature that programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI.
- [56:39]
B
We are now being trained by ChatGPT to use different language.
- [56:43]
A
In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce companies in the US they are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Alo and Nutonic. Which is why I partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff. Bull on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the Same checkout that we use with Nutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for A$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.commodernwisdom all lowercase. That's shopify.commodernwisdom wasn't there a study done on British politicians and what they'd been saying?
- [57:48]
B
Yes, and the House of Chambers are now saying I rise to speak instead of I don't know what the norm was before, but they're using a US colloquial term which is clearly indicating that their speeches are written by ChatGPT. We've seen academic research papers that probably 13% of all research abstracts are written aided by some kind of large language model. You can't trust any source. Whether you think it's so it's not even you're being directly influenced by the AI, it's you're being influenced by somebody else who was influenced by AI. You're reading a text that you don't know is written by AI.
- [58:17]
A
Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [58:18]
B
All of LinkedIn is already like, I can't tell whether it's AI or these people genuinely think like this, but that you speak in the bullet points that it's not just X, it's Y. That's the negative parallelism which also sounds. Again, it's things that sound incisive are reinforced into the model and then they end up affecting our actual speech patterns.
- [58:33]
A
But what it also does is it means that you need to counter signal away from it. So I'm going to draw an analogy to ozempic. Ozempic at the moment means that people can more easily lose weight. That means that losing weight naturally becomes less high status something. Remember when Adele lost weight in the before times. Prehistoric just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or whatever she did. You lose weight now, whether you did use Ozempic or not, you're gonna be accused of having used it. So we are now already seeing counter signaling away from the. What's the double dash?
- [59:03]
B
A little tasteful. Chub is back in.
- [59:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will be soon.
- [59:06]
B
Aha.
- [59:07]
A
It's nice. A natural. I see. What's the double dash thing that ChatGPT got?
- [59:12]
B
The em dash.
- [59:13]
A
M dash no one can use. So I have a couple of friends.
- [59:15]
B
I'm going to hold on to it as a writer.
- [59:18]
A
Well, I think you have a competitive advantage because no one's going to assume that you.
- [59:23]
B
Well, there's. There is a way that ChatGPT uses the em dash to segment thoughts in those negative parallelisms and so on. And there's a way that a good writer can use an EM dash because Chachi PT speaks predictably and a good writer will speak unpredictably.
- [59:36]
A
Yeah, I'm friends with some very good writers and they love the use of the EM dash and now they feel like they need to count the signal away from it. Nobody wants to use the word delve.
- [59:46]
B
I go to imagine I don't use the word delve.
- [59:48]
A
Yeah, we're going to feel or we're going to see the word delve drop off because people are going to be terrified that even if that was the word I wanted to dig in.
- [59:57]
B
Here's the thing. Delve is merely the poster child for a much broader phenomenon. We got commendable, we got meticulous, crucial, potential, significant. All of these words, all kind of Latin derived, are also increasing with ChatGPT. But we're only pointing to delve in the M dash because those are the easiest things to pick up on. There's so many smaller things and I'm more concerned about the insidious things. Again, not linguistically. I think language should serve as a signal for this broader thing that's happening. If it's a reflection of our reality, that means our reality is being shaped by ChatGPT. And I don't think there's anything inherently harmful to the word commendable or meticulous. But the fact that we are also proven to be saying those words more after ChatGPT has been proven to say those words more means that its reality is influencing our reality. And I'm now concerned, what if there's a political bias, a gender bias of whatever racial. But like all this stuff gets coded into the model. And I mean, Elon Musk doesn't even hide that he like tweaks Grok to like align with his political preferences. So he's being obvious about it. The other platforms aren't being obvious about it. Maybe Anthropic is doing a better job than than OpenAI, but they're all kind of still trying to make money at the end of the day, and they're all doing something that's not aligned with human priorities.
- [61:06]
A
Well, I had Tristan Harris, center for Humane Technology. He was set there yesterday and he brought up this great point about Anthropic, which is from the outside, you know, they're doing things that seem from an optics perspective to be really great, but every single platform has the exact same outcome desire, which is the models need to Be trained very quickly, as fast as possible, to become as good as possible. And if they're not, then we're going to fall behind. So window, dress it however you want. The. The big mover is what's the alignment problem looking like? What's the level of safety?
- [61:43]
B
I do think we should at least praise Anthropic for thinking more about alignment and safety than other platforms. But that does not mean we should become complacent. And we should always be questioning who is the intermediary between us and our speech. Because there is something affecting when you go through a medium. Something is constrained. That's why I say the medium is the message.
- [62:01]
A
Okay, is there going to be linguistic chaos then? As AI begins to kick off more
- [62:07]
B
and more, we're just kind of going to get a little more homogenized, probably. But then hopefully we'll see a new
- [62:12]
A
language already more homogenized. You said through social media we have
- [62:14]
B
a language dying out every two weeks. That's the stat. There's 7,000 languages in the world and it's predicted that most of them are going to die out by the end of the century.
- [62:21]
A
It's a mass extinction event.
- [62:22]
B
It is, it is. And so we're losing all this beautiful stuff, all these ways of expression. I love this book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, there's the Potawatomi expression to be a Saturday. It expresses Saturday as a verb, that you could embody a Saturday as a verb. And this is not a concept that we really think about or express in English. And I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine this, but it's a way of expressing the world that is lost when a language dies out and you have all these languages dying out, that homogenizes and constrains the creative potential for expression. Not saying that we couldn't think of these thoughts, but the options, the affordances, are less there than they otherwise would be.
- [62:56]
A
Why do some languages seem to have words that represent much more niche long sentence descriptions than others? So for instance, schadenfreude is like an obvious example. But what is the German word that describes the sensation of migratory birds when they are stopped from migrating? Do you know this one?
- [63:18]
B
No. That's incredible.
- [63:20]
A
It's a kind of restlessness, a desire to fly and the restriction from being allowed to fly that is felt by a migratory bird.
- [63:30]
B
Sounds like a human instinct as well.
- [63:33]
A
Very much so, yeah. God, I should be adventuring or traveling or something and I'm being restricted from doing it.
- [63:38]
B
Kind of like wanderlust.
- [63:39]
A
But to a degree.
- [63:41]
B
So there's a difference between agglutinative languages and inflection languages. Where an agglutinative language like Turkish and German does this by just tacking words together. You can just add things onto other things. And then there's inflection where you change the form of the word. So English, like, you can, I guess, add S to the end of a word. But like a lot of stuff, like, I don't know, changes based on the form of the word in Latin, in French, you'll conjugate, you'll do all these things where it. Yeah, you're changing the form rather than adding on. But there's different ways you can do language.
- [64:17]
A
Are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it's doing to linguistics?
- [64:22]
B
Social media for sure. Because whatever's happening with AI, it then just immediately gets captured by social media. And what I'm concerned about here is that they replicate the natural way that ideas diffuse through populations. Idea is kind of like a virus. It starts in a host, it can infect other hosts. You had Malcolm Gladwell on, I think, talk about this. It's a little reductive to just say that, but I think it's a good model for understanding the way information scatters is kind of like in a virus network. Like, it's sort of like a disease. And algorithms have created a replication of natural human social networks that operates faster, that connects more nodes than ever before, which means these ideas can spread faster than ever before. What that means is also misinformation can spread faster than ever before. More information is not necessarily always a good thing, because now you can be flooded with information, and it's called flooding the zone, where you. You lose track of what's the real information. Among all the false information, you are being bombarded with ideas from people who have an agenda. There are meme coin traders and poly market traders who are trying to make a quick buck off of pushing certain words or ideas. Because now we're betting on ideas, and we're betting on there are coins attached to which idea goes viral. So if an idea goes more viral, you make money off of it. So now there's a financial incentive to push certain ideas. And so I think we should remain highly skeptical of everything. Maybe we should touch grass more, but at the very least, we should be highly inquisitive of what the medium is doing to us and how it's affecting our communication.
- [65:46]
A
Is there a science to meme language?
- [65:49]
B
It's called memetics. Yeah, but There definitely are people studying
- [65:55]
A
how these networks work and then presumably reverse engineering it. I mean, I have to wonder. It would take a long time. There was an interesting successful attempt by Gymshark to do a grassroots social media campaign promoting Francis Ngannou. So they used a burner account on Reddit, on maybe the UFC subreddit, to post a video supposedly of CCTV of Francis Ngannou trying to get into maybe a dry cleaners. And the door was locked and he goes like this and goes. And the whole door just smashes and breaks. The entire thing was. The whole thing was constructed. They filmed it. It wasn't cctv, it was fake glass. Francis Ngannou was wearing a Gymshark logo here, burner account on Reddit. Nothing. Just left it. Just completely set ablaze. So I wonder, okay, that's, you know, people that are quite close to the ground floor, but they're not. They don't have the resources of a country. If you did the ability to shape language to think, what sort of words do we want people using? We can't podcast it top down, because people are going to push back if they feel like they're being. We've watched too much of Adam's stuff. We know that people are going to push back if they feel like this word's being forced on them. How can we. Maybe we need to get onto 4chan. Maybe we can start to.
- [67:18]
B
Definitely don't. No, I think get offline as much as possible while remaining aware and appraised of what's happening online. Because I do think we should, like, be aware that even if we are offline, this stuff will still affect us to some degree. Like the. If your friends are adopting ideas that come from the algorithm and you're offline and you're interacting with your friends, you're still going to be adopting the algorithm ideas without even knowing it. So we should be highly media literate, knowing that our information is probably being manipulated by these actors who have vested interests in giving us bad information. And this effect is only going to be amplified as more and more people figure out how to exploit the information ecosystem. If I'm giving you a warning, it's this one. It's that I see in real time how our language is being shaped by malicious actors, that these. There are companies and foreign governments with dashboards on tracking populations and how clusters of similar ideas are represented in the social media space. And they know how to seed ideas in ways that spread better. And they're trying to do that. And maybe they're not being Fully successful. But there are active, like, information warfare campaigns occurring as we speak.
- [68:21]
A
How does living inside of these algorithmic constraint systems change what type of thoughts we can easily express? Because this isn't just the language that we're using. The whole point of 1984, sorry to go to. There's no way we're going to be able to get through this podcast without talking about 1984. Feeding back up into your capacity to think.
- [68:42]
B
Yeah. It's a controversial question in linguistics. It's generally accepted that language is not the only thing determining thought.
- [68:49]
A
Right.
- [68:49]
B
But it might have an influence on it. That's called linguistic relativism. I don't think we're gonna end up in a 1984 scenario. If anything, I think people should pay more attention to Brave New World, the Aldous Huxley novel, where we're entertaining ourselves and aren't even aware that we're in a dictatorship because we're too busy consuming content and drugs. But I don't think language can truly be constrained. I. I wrote my book on algo speak, on how words emerge in response to censorships. The stuff I said about the ice emoji or just words like on a live, where you can't say kill. We come up with ways we are incredibly tenacious as human beings to express ourselves and say what we want to say. That does not mean that some things aren't harder to say, that certain ideas aren't more constrained. And there's a idea called the Overton Window, which is the range of acceptable discourse in a society that right back in the day, like gay marriage was unthinkable, right? And then the Overton Window moved and all of a sudden it was okay. And that was a maybe, I think a positive change. But there's also. The Overton Window is moving toward looks maxing. There's way more interest in this stuff right now. So. But the. This window moves with the amount of represented discourse that we think it's a consensus reality. It's what we think other people are thinking and what is acceptable. So if a certain kind of discourse, like back in the day, more and more people started saying there was the gay liberation movement. More and more people started saying maybe gay people should have rights. That moved the window in the direction of gay marriage. Now there's more and more people saying, like replicating these alt right ideas, replicating that idea that looks maxing is a good way to, you know, maybe you should be on a Zenpeg, all this stuff. And that moves the window toward that range of discourse. So while you. While your thoughts are not necessarily being constrained and everybody still can think for themselves and can still find ways to express themselves, the consensus reality is kind of moving. And that's something maybe I'm concerned about. Apart from the linguistic level.
- [70:41]
A
If you had to give a Steelman argument that Gen Z is really different, what do you think it would be in the context of how every generation thinks that the kids are destroying the land?
- [70:54]
B
I'm going to say the concept of Gen Z. Yes. Every generation thinks that kids are destroying language and somehow the older people die out and the kids grow up. And then now we're pissed at the
- [71:03]
A
younger kids and we run it back. Is there. Is there a Steelman argument for how Gen Z could be different?
- [71:08]
B
I don't think Gen Z exists. I don't think generations exist. These are weird social constructs that we believe exist.
- [71:13]
A
This is your one touch death move. Like fucking like trying to catch smoke. Here come the fuck.
- [71:18]
B
I'm not denying that there's older and younger people, that there's familial generations. Right. That there's. But. But we only started this idea of a broad social cohort, like a generation with the lost generation after World War I, really. And then we had the silent generation with the GI generation, with World War II. Then we have baby boomers, and then we're like, all right, we don't know what to call the next people. So Gen X. X means, we don't know, lazy. And then it's like, okay, millennial is good enough. And then it's like, well, we're two. After Gen X, we'll call it Gen Z. Well, we ran out of the Alphabet. We'll call it Gen Alpha. That's literally. It's all made up. And it started in the early 1900s, but it's become more and more salient. And I. This is, if anything, a new category that can be used to sell you as a consumer demographic that can commodify you, that they have manufactured Gen Z as a concept that now we're also performing what it means to be Gen Z, whereas a person in the 1800s wouldn't perform for their social cohort because there was no social cohort. It's simply, you are the age that you are. And now, now I'm supposed to, as an older Gen Z person, have more in touch with a younger Gen Z person than a younger millennial, but really, I feel much more in common with younger millennials.
- [72:19]
A
It's all.
- [72:20]
B
It's all made up. And yes, there's this idea now of being Gen Z that is forced upon us and is part of this broader social media tendency to label every part of us as human beings and put us into buckets that actually do not describe us perfectly.
- [72:33]
A
This self branding is constraining because it's giving you another role to perform too.
- [72:38]
B
A label is kind of a violent thing to impose on someone because now it's you either have to identify with or against a label. Once it's out there, it's out there. And now I need to choose whether I feel more like Gen Z or not like Gen Z. And now I need to choose whether I'm cottagecore or not cottagecore, whether I'm a swifty or not a swifty. And all these things kind of combine. And now I'm all of a sudden I'm a cottagecore swifty, Gen Z, whatever.
- [72:56]
A
Me too.
- [72:57]
B
But really at the end of the day I'm just. Every person is a unique human being. In the same way that we have a unique idiolect, a unique dialect that is our own way of speaking, we have a unique identity. As a linguist, I have one word tattooed on my body. It's the word umwelt. It means the world as it is perceived by a particular person. And I really like this idea that we all really see the world in a completely unique way. And yet when we put ourselves into buckets and when we pretend that we are, it's nice to feel like we are like other people. And it's a useful thing to have a category to kind of signal toward your identity. But you are completely unique. And what social media wants to do is put you into small, small buckets, yes, but buckets that really make you interchangeable with other people.
- [73:36]
A
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- [74:49]
B
Classic. Yeah. Dichotomy.
- [74:50]
A
Yeah. And I can see two wolves inside of you. Yeah, of course. And there's a really interesting bit of evolutionary anthropology that's looking at the desire for autonomy and the desire for support and kinship. And this is what you see. A good way to look at this would be a child's life cycle. So unbelievable need for kinship up until 11, 12. Then you start to get a bit rebellious. And then by 13, 14, 15, you don't want anything to do with your parents, your mom and dad.
- [75:22]
B
That's also when you're coming up with new slang.
- [75:24]
A
Well, of course, it's also the most, you know, the memory bump effect. You familiar with this?
- [75:28]
B
No. What's this?
- [75:29]
A
I think it's the reminiscence effect, which is the language, the music and movies that you grow up listening to between the ages of about 12 and 16 tend to be locked in as what you like for the rest of your life.
- [75:42]
B
Very formative.
- [75:43]
A
Yeah, very formative. Yeah.
- [75:44]
B
Makes a lot of sense.
- [75:45]
A
And, you know, every.
- [75:48]
B
Not to say that we can't keep developing new tastes.
- [75:50]
A
Of course, people find new stuff, new bands, new movies that they like.
- [75:53]
B
Does affect you in that umwelt sense that this made a huge impression on you at this particular. And you can't ever separate that from who you would will be in the future.
- [76:00]
A
Super formative. Yeah. And to think, okay, well, what's going on at 13, 14, 15 while sexuality is coming online, what is the one thing that you really, really, really do not want to do? Have sex with someone that's part of your family. So my family's gonna suck. I'm gonna. I stay away. I want. I want my own independence.
- [76:19]
B
I didn't expect that to go on the ins. Yeah, I mean, it's. It's.
- [76:21]
A
It's incest avoidance, I think.
- [76:22]
B
Well, I mean, that's one framework. I always. I tend to think that any one Framework is always reductive, but it is like part like in the same way. Like I think, for example, Freud, he was kind of cooking with some stuff. But you think about the world just in a forwarding lens or honestly, the looks matches are kind of right, that attractiveness matters. But if you're looking at it just through that one lens, the framework now constrains you. Now you're looking at the world reductively. We should adopt as many frameworks as possible. Sorry, I went on a tangent there,
- [76:46]
A
but if you have too many frameworks, it becomes chaotic. Right. And that also becomes, I think, difficult sometimes to amalgamate together.
- [76:53]
B
My general worldview, I think, is characterized by trying to understand as many frameworks, frameworks as possible. And they all kind of point in.
- [76:59]
A
You're a framework maximalist, maybe, maybe because
- [77:01]
B
they all point at this indescribable hole. We can never know, you know, what unnamed dao or whatever. The middle thing is that we're trying to figure out what reality. Yeah, but everything else is signaling or pointing at it. And if you broaden your worldview as much as possible and consume as many different forms of media as possible, I do think maybe we should be on algorithms a little bit. We should also be reading regular news and we should also remember that that's biased. And we should remember we should be consuming as many different forms of media as possible and we should be consuming as many different ideas and perspectives as possible because that helps us better understand what's really going on rather than this biased. We're always looking at the world through like a confirmation bias, sampling bias, like everything's filtered through the algorithm, everything's filtered through AI. And if you try to just consume your worldview through that, you're going to be limited. So consume other things as well. Touch grass, you know, and then maybe we can. And build a better picture of what the real world is.
- [77:55]
A
Poly consumption, poly framework approach. Yeah, I like it. And I agree. For me to say the Westermark effect, which is what we do for incest avoidance and the fact that sexuality is coming online, you don't want to be around.
- [78:07]
B
No, it's interesting. I'm with it.
- [78:09]
A
I'm not saying that that is the one ring to rule them all. But what I do mean, and I totally agree, is that there's another incentive that exists online, which is if someone plants a flag in the ground and says, I have a single explanatory framework that solves all of the questions that you've got. Yeah, that person sounds that level of conviction is so sexy. And I. I wonder whether it takes an awful lot of conscious detraining to look at someone that's ardent and completely unforgiving in their worldview and say, huh, I don't know if I'm that confident about anything. I don't know if I'm that confident about my own birth date. So how is this person about this, really? Well, we know why the war in Ukraine started. We know why the war in Ukraine started. We know exactly what's going on there.
- [78:59]
B
Every war has, like, a hundred different reasons behind it. And all of those reasons could be equal, valid, you know, but we know
- [79:04]
A
what's going on with the Lux maxing community.
- [79:06]
B
Yeah.
- [79:06]
A
Oh, that's interesting. And what you state as an absolute fact that is incontrovertible and unidimensionally explained has a completely opposing guy with the opposite perspective, which is also unidimensionally explained.
- [79:21]
B
You go, okay, Weird how that happens.
- [79:23]
A
Comport those two for me. Because both of you are saying that you are completely right and that the other person is therefore implicitly, completely wrong.
- [79:31]
B
Yeah. No, I think it's reductive to look at the world through one set of glasses.
- [79:37]
A
It's sexiness. The sexiness of the conviction.
- [79:39]
B
The human brain thinks in terms of simple stories. We like connecting the dots from point A to point B. Like for etymology, we want to think that a word comes from an older word and evolved into a newer word. Really, it was evolving through an aesthetic lens. It was evolving through a social context. There was another, maybe a word C that affected the trajectory of word A as it evolved into word B. It's never one simple story. I see this with language, but also the world is this hugely complex, interrelated thing. And to call one framework. The framework is ignoring all the different ways the world could exist, ignoring the fact that a Saturday could be a verb instead of a noun.
- [80:15]
A
I feel like a Saturday sometimes. You're quite. You're quite a Saturday guy. Big, big Saturday guy. All right, I want to play surprising word histories with you.
- [80:24]
B
Hit me with it.
- [80:24]
A
Okay. Muscle.
- [80:26]
B
It comes from the Latin word for mouse. Little mouse. Musculus.
- [80:29]
A
Why?
- [80:30]
B
It, like, looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin. Right. Hey, they call me the etymology nerd for a reason. No. I'm gonna flop the rest of them.
- [80:38]
A
I can't wait. This is gonna be so good. Salary.
- [80:41]
B
Salary is the Latin word for salt. They would pay wages in salt. Sal.
- [80:46]
A
All right, next one. Assassin.
- [80:50]
B
That comes from Arabic, Hashashin. It meant marijuana. Hashish. Consumer. Yeah, because they would, like. It was a.
- [80:58]
A
You're scaring. You're scaring me.
- [80:59]
B
It was a sect in, like, Persia that would just, like, get high and, like, kill people. I don't know what they were doing,
- [81:04]
A
but that was kind of the Mizari Ismail. Ismaili sect.
- [81:08]
B
All right.
- [81:09]
A
You're terrifying.
- [81:12]
B
Candidate from Latin candidus. White robed. So candidate that was like. White was associated with purity. So it was like you were vying for a pure noble office if you wore white.
- [81:24]
A
Okay. Did the girl. Did the word girl originally mean a young woman or did it once mean something completely different?
- [81:31]
B
I think it was like a gender neutral term. It could mean boy.
- [81:34]
A
That's right. It meant any young child. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How did silly go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid?
- [81:42]
B
Well, in the same sense that, like, awful and awesome both share that brute awe. Like when something has just an emotional valence to it, like a quality to it, it can move easily between different boundaries. But what did you have there?
- [81:56]
A
The Old English of selig meant blessed or fortunate. And over centuries it drifted through innocent, naive, and then. Yeah, foolish.
- [82:03]
B
It's. The semantic drift is. Yeah. How words evolve over time. And it is. Is like terrible again. And all the, like, words that describe this shaking feeling you get can really range easily between the same root is terrific. Terrible and terrific. Terrifying. So it can quickly move between different types of emotions. Because how do we even describe what's going on here, you know?
- [82:25]
A
Yeah. With difficulty.
- [82:27]
B
Yeah.
- [82:27]
A
Ancient Aztec word for avocado. What else did it mean?
- [82:31]
B
And they had a secondary definition of testicles.
- [82:38]
A
Nightmare. Is there anything interesting about nightmare?
- [82:41]
B
Is that mare like horse? Is there. There's like the idea of, like, incubus horse that attacked people, but I'm not sure if that's the. What the.
- [82:49]
A
A Germanic demon that was a mare that sat on sleepers chests.
- [82:54]
B
Yeah. So it was a horse or. Okay.
- [82:56]
A
But it was. The mare came from a Germanic demon. So mare was a Germanic name. So it might have actually been a
- [83:02]
B
demon in the night.
- [83:03]
A
A demon that then became the name for a horse and the night horse. Wow.
- [83:08]
B
No, I have to look into the mirror thing. That's fascinating. Yeah.
- [83:12]
A
Goodbye with God be with you. Penguin. Why does the word penguin probably mean white head even though penguins don't have white heads?
- [83:21]
B
I don't know. Penguin. Please educate me.
- [83:23]
A
Okay, so there's a Welsh word which is pen, P, E, N, G, W, Y, N, Penguin. Right. Which looks Welsh as.
- [83:34]
B
No way would I have expected that to be Welsh. I mean, like, it's a weird ass word, I believe.
- [83:38]
A
And it originally referred to the great orc. It's. It wasn't referring to penguins. Yeah. But it obviously got repurposed orange.
- [83:49]
B
Well, it comes from the Sanskrit word for orange tree. But it moved through like Arabic naranja, same as like the Spanish word. And then I think people kept saying N norange and the N got cut off because it turned into like a. A norange versus N orange. Yes.
- [84:11]
A
Dude, you won. Whatever the fuck that was. You won, you won. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A norange.
- [84:17]
B
Right?
- [84:17]
A
To an orange.
- [84:19]
B
Yeah, bro.
- [84:20]
A
Unbelievable. Yeah, I look from between you and Mark Forsythe, it is so fucking fun. You must have so much fun doing this. I think it's great.
- [84:30]
B
I got into etymology for the fun facts. That was the. And then, you know, I came to see this.
- [84:34]
A
Terrifying on a quiz team. Terrifying on a quiz scene. You played with inventing languages. Yeah. What did you learn?
- [84:42]
B
So the whole thing I was saying about languages being a different way to express reality, I think a really fun way to play with that is building your own language. So the. We see this in movies like there's a Dothraki language and a Klingon language and people have made fictional languages before. This is a practice called conlanging constructed language. And you know, Esperanto is another famous one where they tried to make that a global language and didn't really work out, but they built it from scratch and were like trying to make this
- [85:05]
A
a thing, sort of an evidence based language that was going to be more precise and easy to use.
- [85:09]
B
I think maybe you're thinking about if Quill or something or maybe Esperanto is. It's just meant to be like an easier language to use. That was the idea. Of course, what that means is like a strange concept and it's still.
- [85:22]
A
Surely there are languages that have more and less linear rules around it, different
- [85:29]
B
types of rules, but there's always a complexity to it because I mean, humans got to express themselves in many different ways. I think it's really hard to make a claim about one language is more complex than another or something like that.
- [85:38]
A
That.
- [85:40]
B
But you can talk about one dimensional language again, adopt one framework and then talk about it anyway. I dabbled in conlanging first. In what, what? Conlanging, which is constructed language creation.
- [85:51]
A
Okay, thank you.
- [85:53]
B
Sorry. And then I studied that linguistics in college and I took a conlanging class at mit actually that kind of got me into it. But I was sort of dabbling before that.
- [86:01]
A
Before the conlanging dabbler.
- [86:04]
B
Yeah, I've dabbled. And then a little more professionally, I. For the conlanging class at mit, I built a dolphin language. And that was my first, like, moment going viral on TikTok was me presenting my dolphin language, where, like, the word for shark, for example, is and. But the idea is, what if you can create a language out of just whistles and clicks? And that's kind of cool to play around with the phonological format. So I played around with a lot of other animal languages. I made a bird language that's just whistled. There are actual whistled registers of languages.
- [86:35]
A
I saw. Didn't AI reverse engineer what birds are saying? Did you see this?
- [86:40]
B
I mean, I don't know what that means at all. Animal communication is just, like, not a decodable thing in the way human communication is.
- [86:45]
A
So supposedly I'm probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I saw. AI has analyzed tens of thousands of birdsong sounds and have decoded some of the communication. Another thing, I don't know if this is true or not. I remember hearing that most birdsong is actually just territorial marking. So it's basically birds saying, or a
- [87:05]
B
mating call or something like that.
- [87:06]
A
Birds saying fuck off. At varying. Oh, here we are.
- [87:09]
B
No, 100%. There's stuff being done with bird. Cornell is doing amazing bird stuff. They have a bird tracking app that they actually use to follow bird migrations. And there's cool stuff being done with language. And. But the thing is, when we talk about, like, animal language, there's good research being done with whale communication, too. The people who are talking about this, if you're a linguist talking about it, you don't understand how the whales work. And if you're a whale researcher talking about you don't understand how language works, or you might have an idea, but it's. I don't think it's correct to really talk about animals having language as much as communication. And of course, they have communication, their own way of signaling things. But when you're a whale, you're also using things like your body rolling over in water. Dolphins have sonar, like bats have echo. Like, this is crazy that they have all this stuff going on that humans don't. And this can all be a part of the communicative context. And it's not like maybe the language has an abstract meaning in the way that humans do. Maybe it simply signals a presence and a certain emotional intent in a moment in time, but it's also contextual, and the other bird might have a different interpretation. I don't know. Language is a very difficult thing that I'm not even sure how to define it. Anybody who do says they know what it is.
- [88:15]
A
After a decade of study. I'm so glad to hear you say that.
- [88:18]
B
Anybody who says they know what language is is telling you a framework. Right. It's.
- [88:22]
A
Do you know the story of how the QWERTY keyboard came to be?
- [88:25]
B
Well, weren't the typewriters jamming with. They had the ABC and they tried it out and didn't. They tried the Dvorak keyboard. But QWERTY was the one that prevented the typewriters from jamming together.
- [88:36]
A
Bingo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they put the most used letters out on the edges so that they weren't next to each other so that you wouldn't trigger them because both of them would fire at the same time. But that is purposefully built to be slow. QWERTY keyboard is designed to be inefficient.
- [88:50]
B
Well, once we get attuned to it and it does move quickly, I think.
- [88:54]
A
But there are.
- [88:55]
B
It's slow relative to when we thought the Alphabet had to show up in an order on a keyboard.
- [88:59]
A
But like, for, like if you train people on other keyboard arrangements, they can be up to 30% to 50% faster. So I wondered as you were talking about, they tried to put Esperanza in that didn't work. So on and so forth, forth. If there was a world in which you could design a language from scratch. To be.
- [89:17]
B
As
- [89:19]
A
the only goal of language, unlike with typing, which is an intermediary process between things that are not being changed, is not just to be efficient. Right. It's to be beautiful. It's to be illustrative. Communicate sense.
- [89:30]
B
I think that is a big flaw of how people talk about language. And that's how the algorithms want you to talk about language. That it's just information bits transferred for a second and that there's a certain amount of information that's communicated. That's the goal of language, to just get information across. That's something that can now be categorized and commodified. I think language is also this ritualistic bonding thing between people. Small talk, for example, like when you say the goodbye at the end of a phone call. Why are you doing that? You're not communicating anything. You could just hang up and that would.
- [89:56]
A
I'm going to. All my phone calls are going to be done movie style now. All right. Pink.
- [90:00]
B
But you do it because it helps establish social ties with the other person. And that's kind of a beautiful thing.
- [90:05]
A
Yeah.
- [90:06]
B
You're building this thing with another person. And there is an element of humanity in the small talk and in the saying goodbye at the end of the phone call, which maybe not good for an algorithm. Maybe you don't like, end an algorithmic video by saying goodbye, whatever. But it does add something importantly human to communication. Anyway, that being said, I think what you were getting at is can different languages have different information transferred? As humans, we have a certain maybe capacity for processing information. And what's funny is that even a language like Japanese has way more solid per second than Thai, and yet they will still transfer about the same bits per second as each other. Because Thai is a more inflectional language, as I mentioned, they like, have more tones, they build on the individual syllable more, and Japan is more likely to add syllables, but at the end of the day, they'll speak slowly in Thai and they'll drag out their word more. But they're saying the exact same thing that a Japanese speaker is saying with three syllables.
- [91:02]
A
Unbelievable. I wonder, I wonder what it would be like to try and design a very efficient language. It'd be so interesting to hear. How can we communicate the most content in the smallest number of syllables or words?
- [91:15]
B
Yeah, I mentioned this language, ithquil, which is a hypothesized conlang. And conlangs are great for really just exploring the boundaries of what language could be. And that's kind of what I was trying to say with the dolphin thing. You can just explore the sounds. Sorry, digression. ITHQL is a language that, that creates like the most information transferred. And it's like a highly dense language carrying many different meanings in a. You know, and it's impossible for a human to learn. I mean, no, no, no native speakers of ITHQL exist because at the end of the day, we are humans using language to connect with other humans. And we're using it in a way that we can understand and describe our reality. And that's, that's how it works.
- [91:53]
A
You, I'm sure you, I'm sure you
- [91:54]
B
can create a robot language that works more efficiently.
- [91:57]
A
But, but I was going to say, I'm sure that you saw that conversation between two AIs that realized that they were both AIs and they say, should we switch to bleeps and bloops? And it's way quicker for us to be able to communicate like that. I don't know whether that was actually fake or real.
- [92:10]
B
I'm not sure about that either. But it is true that computers do not think about language in the way we do. In fact, I would be very hesitant to say chatgpt even speaks English, rather than it's just predicting tokens based on a statistical model of what English should be be. What it's actually doing is when you input something in English, it converts those words into tokens, which is like a segment of the word. So it breaks up the words into smaller parts, pairs those parts with numbers. These numbers turn into like coordinates, kind of like on a Cartesian plane, like XY axis, but like way more dimensions, so XYZ to like thousands of dimensions. Then it ends up as like a data point called an embedding. And this embedding is like the representation of what you said. Right? And then that gets processed through these neural networks, and they figure out, through previous learning things and previous ways they've understood embeddings, how they can predict the next token output. So then they create an output token and then that's translated back in a language. And so all this is happening between you saying something and ChatGPT responding with something. I think that's very important to understand because there's a huge misconception that it's speaking English. Along the whole way that I spoke about language getting broken down, turned into numbers, broken back up into these tokens, and then turned back into language. A lot of meaning can get lost. And that's where something like delve could get overrepresented. That's where something could happen where our natural way of speaking gets improperly encoded. The training process does not work correctly, and then it ends up speaking this misaligned version of language.
- [93:50]
A
I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder what the next few years are going to have in store for language, because you have got bigger influences and bigger broadcasts than ever before. So is this. Would you say that this is going to be the time in human history where language is potentially going to change the most rapidly?
- [94:05]
B
I think so. I think it's a hard thing. It's a hard thing to measure what it even is for language to change, because as I mentioned, I don't even know what language is. So if I'm starting with my research question realistically, no, we don't know what language is. It's all made up. And. And because of the thing I mentioned, where everybody speaks their own kind of version of language and the thing that we call a language is really just this weird spectrum of people talking that sound similar to each other. And it's like, where do you draw the category here? Of course, Chachi Pts trained on a corpus of the English language which is made up in the same way Gen Z is made up. It's like a category that we think is a thing and then that category is this weird homogenized thing already that there is an English language. There's a way you speak in a way I speak that are slightly different from each other and that we can find this shared reality between ourselves. But then when our collective shared reality is fed into the chat bot that then creates its own reality based on the shared reality and outputs is what we end up with is just something that's not really a way that you speak. It's not a way that I speak, it's not a way that anybody speaks. It's a mathematical representation of speech.
- [95:03]
A
Dude, you rule. Your work's so interesting. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you've got going on. Let's bring this one up.
- [95:08]
B
I think the most important thing is I try to use my media to push people to more longer form stuff. So I got a substack Etymology Nerd and I got a book called Algo Speak about how social media is changing language. But I am on social media platforms as Etymology Nerd as well.
- [95:21]
A
All right, goodbye everybody. Click.
- [95:23]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [95:25]
A
Dude, so fucking good.
- [95:27]
B
That was a lot of fun. Wow. I feel like we covered so much crap.
- [95:30]
A
You roll. That was great. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.