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- [00:00]
Derek Thompson
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- [00:41]
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- [01:16]
Derek Thompson
Welcome back to Plain English. Last year we did an episode on this show called the End of Reading. And and in it I talked about a short story that I just read by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. That story was called the Truth of the Truth of Feeling and it's from his collection Exhalation. The story runs on two tracks at once. In the first part of the story, in the near future, a journalist is sent to cover a new technology called Remem. Like the beginning of the word remember, Remem lets people record their entire lives and replay any moment on a retinal projector. Basically, it's like perfect memory on demand. A little bit like that Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong where every disagreement between a couple turns into a courtroom exhibit where you could say, look, you said this, it was wrong. Or couples could rewind and litigate what was said, when it was said, and with what tone. But there's a darker edge here too. If nothing ever fades, it can become harder to move on. Some people don't just remember more clearly, they find it harder to forgive. That's the first part of this story, but the second jumps back in time and a Christian missionary introduces writing to a young man named Jijinki in a pre literate African community. At first, Jijinki thinks writing is bizarre, useless. His world already has a memory tradition, an oral tradition. Stories are repeated lessons learned knowledge kept alive through the social act of telling and retelling. But as Gijinki learns to read and write, he realizes something. Literacy doesn't just add information. It changes the shape of thought. It alters how he relates to the past, how he evaluates truth, and how he argues. The technology of writing puts him on a collision course with his elders, because in one part of the story, they tell one version of events, and then Jijinki can point to a document that says, no, your memory is wrong. Cheng's story bounces between these two narratives, these two technologies in these two societies, to get at one big philosophical what happens when we change the way we store reality at the end of the story? Cheng adds an author's note where he thanks a scholar named Walter Ong and his book Orality and Literacy. Ong's argument in that book is simple but radical. Literacy isn't just a skill you learn in school. It's a technology that rewires your mind and your consciousness. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is maintained through repetition, mnemonic techniques, and narrative. Oral life is synchronous and communal, like people literally have to be together in the same place at the same time to say, hear the Odyssey. Writing does something totally different. Writing fixes language in place. It allows one person to pin down an idea on a piece of paper, and then another person, decades later, can go retrieve that information with far less drift than any oral chain can manage. Once ideas can be fixed on a page, weird things can start happening. You can build longer, more complicated arguments. You can compare claims across time. You can store a complex idea that can't be memorized and then add more complex ideas over that, stacking abstraction over abstraction. It amazes me that oral poets could hold epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey in their heads, but there is so much they couldn't do. They couldn't invent calculus or quantum mechanics or modern science as we know it. They couldn't without writing things down. Even a genius might be able to invent these things mentally, but they'd still have to transmit, say, calculus as a story and a story and a story. And there'd be errors that accumulated at each step. Literacy makes possible ideas that you can correct and refine and scale. The world we live in today is built on a foundation, which is the culture of literacy, and it's a foundation that some people think is disappearing under our feet. Today's guest is the Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Wiesenthal. Joe has written some of my favorite riffs in recent years about a shift he thinks is happening right now. A move from written culture back towards something like oral culture, except digitized, sped up, and oddly less social. He has called it, without exaggeration, the single biggest story of our time. And now he's going to tell us why. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English, Joe Wiesenthal. Welcome to the show.
- [06:15]
Joe Weisenthal
Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here.
- [06:18]
Derek Thompson
So, Joe, sometimes I like to slowly walk up to the thesis statement of a show, like, set the table, forks and knives and plates. Like, go really, really slow with this. I want to dispense with all of that and just set the stage for you to make your biggest, boldest, most ambitious proclamation. What is your orality thesis? Why do you think it explains everything? Why is it the most important idea of our time?
- [06:41]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, I don't think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of what's going on. I imagine AI is probably also kind of an important trend, but, you know, it's a minor thing compared to the really big P picture, which I think has been underway for some time and that I've been thinking about for a long time, which is I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that, I don't mean that people are talking more with their mouths, per se, although I do think, you know, that is the case. We're talking. I talk professionally on the podcast. It's more that communication in general, whether in the sort of spoken form or in the digital form, particularly online, has the characteristics of conversation. That is, there's a certain aspect of conversation that is fundamentally different from the written word, that people in conversation think differently than when they're writing. People in conversation think differently than they're writing. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or certainly mass literacy. And about 10 years ago, it was actually in 2016, I think, during that presidential election, I started reading the work of Walter Ong. He was a Jesuit priest. He studied with Marshall McLuhan. He was at the University of St. Louis and wrote this really incredible book called Orality and Literacy. And the basic gist is that humans really fundamentally think different when they're in this world, that you can't write anything down, that you can't look anything up. And this is, I think, a really good place to start, which is that for most of human history, there was no way to look up anything at all. There was no. There was nothing. There was no reference material and so forth. And as such, you know, people had to optimize their communication for the conditions of that time. It's almost a certain linguistic economy, so to speak. And so through a lot of study of Homer and other sort of ancient epics, people realized that there were certain patterns. And so people spoke with, you know, with rhythm, because rhythm helps people memorize things. People speak with rhyme and musicality again, because that helps people memorize things. There are certain phrases that just get repeated over and over again. Repetition, communication, information is optimized for memorability and packets and what we would call going viral. And so I think, like, the basic gist as I see it, is that when you think about, you know, I'm like, I've been addicted to social media, particularly Twitter, for well over 15 years at this point. When I started reading this book, I was like, look, this has a lot of explanatory power. These things that characterize the Homeric times, the way society prioritized and packaged information greatly resembles what we see today. And I would say that's my big thesis, which is that as communication becomes more this back and forthness, that that's changing the way that fundamentally the way we communicate and fundamentally changing the way we think.
- [09:44]
Derek Thompson
So when researchers like Ong say the most significant shift that they're looking at was this shift from the age of orality that you just described to the age of literacy. When did that shift happen? Are we talking about the development of the Greek Alphabet? Are we talking about the development of the printing press, which happened 1,500 years later? Are we talking about the era of mass education, mass literacy, which was hundreds of years after Gutenberg and his printing press and his Bible? Like, how would you time this shift from the age of orality to the age of the written word, the recorded piece of knowledge?
- [10:21]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I mean, I think the way you put it is very apt, which is that, you know, there's no switch that's flipped from the age of orality to the age of literacy. What you have are various developments over time. And I think a good place to start is sort of, you know, around Plato and Aristotle and the great Greek philosophers. At that point, the written word was starting to become. Starting to become a thing. And this was the sort of the first rise of sort of what people would call recognizably, sort of what we call reason or rational thinking and so forth. You know, something that if you go on the Plato subreddit, which I've done before, there is this frustration that many people are fans of Plato's republic and philosophy, but there is this question that comes up multiple times on the subreddit. They're like, why did Plato spend a chapter of his book, the Republic, calling out poetry? And people think of this like, I love poetry and I love Plato. I don't understand. And Plato said that poets had to be banned from the Republic. I don't understand this. Like, why can't I have Plato in poetry? And the gist. And there's this scholar, Eric Havelock, who wrote a book about this, essentially trying to answer this exact one question. And the gist is Plato was not really calling out the artistic form of poetry that we think of today, where people are being very creative. He was talking about a mode of thinking, the sort of the Homeric, what they might have called the tribal encyclopedia, where all knowledge is contained in these epic poems, and that is how values were transmitted over time. And I think. And Plato was, according to Eric Havelock, found that lacking. There was a certain lack of rationality, there was a lack of reason, there was a lack of abstract thinking associated with the old, ancient. The ancient bards, the epic poets, et cetera, and Plato and Aristotle. They understood there was this new thinking that the written word enabled new kinds of thoughts, enabled us to tackle problems with a certain remove, with a certain understanding that the characteristic of the thing was different than the thing itself, which we could get into. And so there was this early period where they realized that they had to sort of shed the oral thinking because this new technology of the written word and the Greek Alphabet was emerging, and that opened up new possibilities for understanding the world. And then, you know, as you said, then there's a long process. I mean, we didn't go from, you know, the sort of the world of ancient epic poetry to sort of modern literate human beings overnight. But, you know, there was this. There was this long trend of, you know, hundreds, thousands of years. You know, then you get the printing press, then you get the age of mass literacy and so forth. So you get these stages. And obviously, mass literacy is a very novel invention. Basically nothing in human history, in the grand scheme of how long human beings have been around, it's like, fairly recent. But it begins to build, I would say, yeah, with the Greek Alphabet, and then accelerates over time as books and the printing press and so forth are established.
- [13:42]
Derek Thompson
To drill down on why the shift to literacy was so important for the way we think, for the way we transmit knowledge, for the way we build institutions, I want to quote two great scholars here. The first is Joshua Meyerowitz. We're going to Talk about him more in a second. He's an author whose work you turned me onto. He writes, quote, the break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational and individualistic. Abstract thought develops from the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages. People move over time toward linear cause and effect thinking grid like cities, and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of writing and type. End quote. It's such a provocative piece of writing. The second is from another great scholar name Joe Wiesenthal. Quote, many of the things that modern institutions are built on, enlightenment thinking, formal logic, reason, meritocracy, examining the evidence, are downstream from the ability to contemplate the written word at a distance. End quote. Why don't you expand on either quote, either yours or Joshua's, Because I think this really gets to the fundamental heart of the matter, that literacy changed the texture of thinking and the texture of the institutions that we built with new modes of thought.
- [15:03]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people can probably feel this, even setting aside the arguments, you probably feel it intuitively. And again, I think about how much time one can spend interacting on social media, which again, I love and I have no criticism towards, and I like Twitter debates and so forth. But, you know, when you're in a Twitter debate, when you're in conversation with someone, let's set aside like social media per se. Let's talk about conversation. You know, when you're in conversation, like, what are you doing? You're often trying to impress someone. You might be trying to one up someone, maybe if there's a few people there, you're trying to put someone down to look cool for the other person. These are all things that occur that don't occur when you're in solitude. Right? And so solitude, a solo interaction with language, can only be done really with the written word. And so even setting aside the sort of like logical arguments for the connection between the Alphabet and the left to right thinking, the sort of linear thinking, most people, I think, can sort of intuitively understand that interactive environments foster different priorities. Right? It's like in an interactive environment you have to be funny, you have to be snappy. These are all sort of demands of what happens in interactive environment that do not happen when you're reading a book or when you're writing a letter. When you're writing a letter, or certainly let's say you're writing a book as you have, you know, you don't necessarily have the reader in mind at that exact moment. In fact, you have the luxury of writing and not having to think about, like, what is the reader going to be doing at this moment or what does the reader look like per se. These are all luxuries that occur in the context of literacy. The written word that don't. That are separate from a conversation. And so, you know, these demand the written word creates all kinds of new opportunities to think about, you know, think through these things, take time, not respond right away. You know, one of the. Part of the reason I got interested in this area and I think why a lot of this stuff really spoke to me in 2016 during the election, was noticing the fact that Donald Trump spoke with some very Homeric qualities, you know, and it's hard not to notice. Other people have noticed this too. You know, it's like crooked Hillary lion's head, swift footed Achilles. It's the same. It's the same thing, right? It's this sort of packaging of an idea in a way that's like memorable, repeatable and so forth. And something else happens there when, you know, if you go back to the Homeric stuff, the wine, dark sea, swift Footed Achilles, et cetera. It wasn't just that there was a person named Achilles who happened to be fast. No, he was Swift Footed Achilles. He was Swift Footed Achilles, over and over again. And so the idea of an adjective such as swift footed or such as Weindark being this characteristic that could apply to many things. This is more abstract thinking. This is modern. There's a person and we can ascribe various adjectives to them. We can start to abstract. There is a difference between the person and the characteristic of swift footedness. And so that's something that is enabled by abstract thinking. Whereas in conversation it's like, no, the person is the thing itself. Which again is not very modern thinking. Right? Like we like to think, like, okay, I know Derek. I could say various things about him. He wrote a book, he has a newsletter, he has a podcast and so forth of various things. I can construct a somewhat chronology of your career and so forth. I can ascribe all of these adjectives to you. But they're not you, right? They're not you. And so I think that we're sort of. And when I noticed Trump speaking in this way, it's like this return to the person is the characteristics. And Trump has said this in another context, which is, I think he was asked in 2016, he said someone asked him. Reporters used to ask some very lame questions. And they're like, you say all these nasty things. Isn't that not very presidential? And he said, well, it is presidential because I'm the president. Which is very revealing about how his mindset is that to him, there is not some abstract category of behavior that we call presidential. What's presidential is the behaviors that are done by the person who is the president right now. And so we can see, not just by the way he talks, but by the way he speaks, that he rejects this premise of a person being separate from their attributes. It is one and the same.
- [19:51]
Derek Thompson
There's two threads here that I want to make sure I name and then lay out in a particular order in my very literate linear thinking. One is this thread of how learning used to be necessarily social and then it became possible to learn in solitude. I wanna hit that first. You also mentioned Trump. We're gonna return to politics in the moment in a few minutes. I wanna get back to this idea that thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person because it was a person.
- [20:32]
Joe Weisenthal
Or you couldn't read a manual. You couldn't read a manual on how social media.
- [20:35]
Derek Thompson
And it wouldn't even make any sense to go into your own room maybe, and just recite it to yourself. You would probably work it out and rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. But you think about a book. I wrote a book. I co authored the book with Ezra, but we didn't co author it in the way of. I spoke aloud a sentence about housing and Ezra transmitted it onto papyrus. We wrote independently and we wrote alone. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important. Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I wanna throw to you and then get your react. It goes right to this point. He said, quote, human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship. Hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship. By listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense. I'm very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century. The idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone, and that is having a of second side, second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me, as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it's the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prized a certain kind of interiority. And I wonder if you wanted to just dilate on that a little bit before we take this next step and move from the age of literacy to this second comeback of orality, the revenge of orality.
- [22:15]
Joe Weisenthal
There are so many interesting threads that you pulled on that and ways that we could talk about this specific point. I mean, one of the things. So Marshall McLuhan, I mentioned that Walter Ong studied with him. He had this observation. He said the Alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that's ever existed, which I think is very interesting. And it speaks to this idea that, like, prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se, communal. It had to be in a group. And who do you trust? You know, if you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one. Oh, this is the one that feels most logical, right? In the modern, sort of like, rational sense. But, you know, you don't have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. And so you have to be there. You have to be part of the crowd. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning, et cetera. So orality, the conditions of orality foster a certain. Like a certain tribalness. And it's not, for better or worse, a certain tribalness. I think it's interesting, you know, I. Even in 2016, I didn't appreciate this much. But when I look at the modern world, for example, and the contemporary digital world, I think tribalism of all sorts, which is sort of is on the rise, right? We see that a certain nationalism really around the world is on the increase. Certain bigotries of so many of every. You can list them all off, are now tolerated publicly in a way that we couldn't have, like, say, imagined 15, 20 years ago or out however long. This strikes me as sort of very strong vindication of this idea that, like, in. As the sort of solitary study disappears, that once again, we sort of have like the tribal encyclopedia. And it's not necessarily people believing what's right and wrong. They learn what's right and wrong because there are various conditions and the group that they. That they attach themselves to for the process of learning and accumulating some body of information. So I think that, like, this is a very powerful idea. You know, another thing, and I think you sort of touched on this earlier in your earlier question, this idea of like, the ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can't do with your. You can't do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in what you can't do with your ears. So it's like you go into a room and you can, like, stand back at the corner so you can, like, make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is, like, very different. We're like at the center. We're at the center of everything constantly. You can't close it. The ear continues to work while we're sleeping. It's like it's an evolutionary purpose for the fact that, like, we can still hear when we're sleeping, because if there's an intruder or, you know, a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run. So the ear, as McLuhan said, like, is inherently sort of a source of terror inherently. And like, when you. Again, it feels very digital, right? So it's like, even though we do look at the Internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we're reading the Internet, it almost feels more like we're hearing in it. There's like an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about. Than it is about seeing. So I think there's all kinds of different ways that we sort of like returning to this realm. Both the sort of. For sort of mechanical reasons, we want to attach ourselves to groups again, but also this sort of like, sensory element. We were just kind of enveloped and absorbed in information that surrounds us. Three hundred and sixty degrees.
- [26:03]
Derek Thompson
That's beautifully trippy. The idea that a book is an eye and the Internet is an ear is a very interesting way to think about it. So to take us to the third stage of this triptych that we're trying to tell. We had the age of orality, which was the age of the ear, and then we had the high water mark of literacy, which is the high watermark of the age of the eye, let's call it. And now we're in this messy third stage where it's like there's some human facial organ that's an eye and an ear mashed together. Because we have TV and radio and social media and TikTok. And what's interesting about these technologies is that they are all oral. What is radio if not oral? What is television if not oral? What is TikTok if not spoken and live? Just like you're There with the guy who learned the Odyssey before you did. It's people talking. But there's a lasting record of it, right? There's a lasting record of your tweets. There's a lasting record of that TikTok, which can be shared. And the fact that these pieces of media can be recorded means that in many ways they are also of a piece. With the age of literacy, of literate recorded artifacts, what do we make of this weird, synthetic new stage that we're in? What do we call it? How do we describe it?
- [27:18]
Joe Weisenthal
Well, you know, so someone I really like and people should read is Andre Mir, who has, I think, written some of the best stuff, contemporary, sort of updating a lot of Ong's ideas. He has multiple books, so he calls it Digital a reality, which I really like, which I think is a good way to think about it. You know, it's one thing that's interesting, though, and I think this is where AI really comes in, which is that we don't really have. We might not really have those records in the future. I mean, for one thing, like, things get disappeared. But two, when you could create the illusion of archives via everything. So it's like, oh, we have a picture of this happening. We don't really trust pictures, like, anymore. Here's a screenshot of this. We don't really. You know, that archive is sort of. Sort of tenuous, right? Maybe we had this, like, brief period where we had a lot of digital archives and we could trust them. But digital archives are disappearing, and you're going to have facsimiles, things that looked like they happened that didn't actually happen. Which, incidentally, on talks about. So he talks about how in a lot of oral cultures, history was malleable. And so one of the. One of the things that he talks about is, you know, you think about, like, biblical genealogies, right? So it's like. It's very. It's very dry. It's like, so and so begets, so and so, begets so and so begets so and so, begets so and so beget, and it'll just go on forever. This is, like, very characteristic. But as he pointed out, there are a lot of examples throughout in oral cultures where when something is no longer convenient, maybe there's some lineage of kings and that king falls into disrepute and they switch it. They'll just rewrite the. They'll just. They'll just come up with a new poem. And so there isn't, you know, the idea of, like, a Fixed history is sort of like a modern literate thing. And I think that's probably what's going to happen like between, like, you know, we're not really going to have. Or the direction of travel is. Well, we're going to have books for a very long time. But people are just going to, you know, history will be manufactured in accordance with the sort of contemporary values of the moment. And so I think a phrase that I was thinking about, someone made this really funny joke. They were talking about hallucinations in the legal field. You know, lawyers have been gotten in trouble for citing cases that never existed. And so someone made a joke, he mocked up a fake law review paper saying that hallucinated case law is better than real case law. Because even if it didn't really happen, that it might as well have happened because it was, you know, it fit with the spirit of the time. And even though it's a joke, I sort of think that's the future, which is that like the history, the future of history is going to be. Well, if there's some aspect of history that we find to be inconvenient, I'm not thrilled by this, believe me, I'm not endorsing it. But if there's some aspect of history that we find to be inconvenient, hallucinate a superior history that validates the contemporary mood better. And so I do think to your point, yes, right now you see a screenshot, you see a record, you can more or less trust it. But I don't think it's obviously that that's going to be the case 10 years from now because things disappear and new things that look like the past can be created. And so I do think it'll sort of more look like the oral histories which are malleable and to the conditions of the time.
- [30:44]
Derek Thompson
This is a period that some people call post literate. They show that reading is in decline, standardized test scores are in decline. As I've written, it sometimes feels like everything is trying to become television. Here we are, two former audio only podcasters talking on something that people will watch on YouTube or Spotify. Social media is becoming TV, podcasts are becoming TV. People are going to the movies less, they're watching TV on their phones or with their phones in front of their faces. So everything is evolving toward short form video. I think one way that I think I remember putting it is like, it's as if short form video is like the attractor state of all media. It's like we reach the end. The Fukuyama End of communications history, like the end of history. It does feel like a short form video. I wonder how you feel about this general, like thesis space that people are playing in, that we're in a post literate age, that everything is evolving towards short form video. I wonder how that feels fits into this philosophy that you're building out around orality.
- [31:40]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, this idea of like post literacy. I think there's like a sort of figurative meaning and a literal meaning. So on the one hand, like, again, when I hear the word post literacy or when I've used the term, it doesn't necessarily mean that people don't know how to read. I still think it's mostly useful as a term to describe sort of conditions of information and conditions of communication that are very distinct from what we consider, you know, the sort of the solitary, removed literate communications. So I think the fact that like, so much is talk, so much is back and forthness, so much is one upmanship, so much is information designed to be viral, memorable, repeatable, et cetera. This is mostly what I'm thinking of when I think about, quote, post literacy. Incidentally, I don't think people know how to read either. Like, I also think it like, you know, if you can't. And there seems to be a lot of evidence for this. The evidence. I look at myself and I think I read books way more than, you know, I probably read more books than 99% of the population, which most people don't read books. But I can't get like, you know, if I read two pages and then I'll like, check my Twitter mentions, and then I'll read two pages and check my Twitter mentions. Like, I'll be. Isn't that everyone? Like, can anyone actually read three pages anymore? Maybe it was just me and my like, attention span is just totally bombed out. Which is possible because again, I spend all day looking at a screen, but I'll fully cop to that. And I consider myself someone who. I finish books and, you know, I read a lot, but I still, every few pages I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to check my phone again. So incidentally, I do think that is functionally a form of literacy, which is that if you can't even concentrate to finish an article or finish a book, maybe you're kind of literate, but you're definitely less literate. And so I think that's real. And look, I kind of agree with you about short form video. It does feel like there's this trend towards everything heading towards that because it's talk, it's just, you know, it's the most natural. It's the most natural thing. We're just talking to each other.
- [33:46]
Derek Thompson
I do also have the sense when I'm reading that there's often, especially if my phone is anywhere within reach or sight, that there's something calling me away from that book at all times. And it's a little bit like, I'm never gonna forget your distinction. Or Maybe it was McLuhan's distinction originally between the eye and the. Because I can practically hear the fights happening on Twitter that demand my attention and even my intervention, right. My involvement. It does feel almost auditory, that anxiety to get back on my phone and participate in the world of. I mean, for me, it's Twitter. For other people, it's TikTok. For other people, it's Instagram. But, yeah, there is almost an auditory anxiety, I think, to get back into that swirl of ideas that people feel around their phones.
- [34:36]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, one. One of the reasons that I like reading McLuhan, a lot of, like, sort of mid 20th century or sort of mid 60s, 70s, whatever, 50s, 60s, a lot of the thinkers about media and so forth is because I think they have a lot of, like, testable hypotheses. And so I. There's a lot of people writing these days about the effect of the phones and the effect of digital media on our. On ourselves. And it all seems kind of true, and I buy most of it. But anything, you know, in finance, people talk about, like, you want out of sample data, right? You want hypotheses that could explain market movements before the markets happen, so that you can, like, test whether the hypothesis is valid. And when I go back and read some of the writing from, like, the 60s and 70s, one of the things that I've noticed a few times in that. In this body of work, people talking about the effect of the phone on interrupting people having sex. And this was like a. This is a common observation. They talk about unplugging the phone before couples having sex or whatever it was. And I think, like, you know, again, one of the things people talk about right now, which I find fascinating, is, like, the big fertility drops, and people are trying to figure it out. And this is something that is occurring in almost every country around the world, including China, which does not resemble the rest of the world, which has avoided many sort of contemporary pathologies. Even there, it's happening. And I do think it's very interesting that if you go back and look at how many people noticed this phenomenon when everyone started getting phones, the degree to which it was sort of like the phone was the third person there interrupting the privacy of the couple, et cetera, that's like a very powerful observation that I think then has a lot of explanatory effects for what came afterwards when everyone started holding a phone on them, you know, every waking minute.
- [36:36]
Derek Thompson
I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump and you know, I went to look up Donald Trump nicknames because I know that you're very interested in. I think you turned me onto this idea that Donald Trump's propensity for epithets for nicknames is very Homeric. It's very old fashioned, right? And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump's nicknames, so I didn't have to remember them. But speaking of outsourced memory, but here are some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve. Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe. Michael Bloomberg was Mini Mike. Jeb Bush of course, low energy Jeb Crooked Hillary Lyon, James Comey Ron Desanctimonious Desantis. I think that one my life that.
- [37:20]
Joe Weisenthal
Was late Trump, it was when he was his office ball. He didn't have his fastball anymore.
- [37:25]
Derek Thompson
But to your point, this plays into this classic tradition of orality, right? The wine, dark sea, swift footed Achilles, white armed Hera. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this and I would love to get your reaction to this on quote, and how it applies to modern politics. The cliche is in political denunciations in many low technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes. End quote. He's basically saying, it's so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and it's the richest country in the world is presided over by a now two time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old fashioned oral traditions?
- [38:30]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, it's interesting when you say things like, oh, Trump has a sort of like Homeric quality to the way he, to the way he speaks like that repels a lot of people like what are you talking about? Like there's nothing Homer. But my theory, which I can't prove and I've never is that probably like the original bards who comprised Homer were probably Trump like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a homeric character, which probably what I'm almost certain is the case that the people who like gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump like characters of their time, colorful, very big characters and so forth. People who are loud, who could like really get attention, who would captivate people when they talk. One of the ong observations he talks about in orality and literacy, he talks about the difference between that the oral world with this demand for sort of memorability created. And he called them like heavy and light characters. And so heavy characters. It's like the Cerberus, like the three headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus, whatever. Like these sort of just like larger than life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
- [39:42]
Derek Thompson
Because we might call them mythic characters.
- [39:43]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, mythic characters, etc. And I think if you look at the modern world, we're. The modern world has highlighted, you know, is elevated a lot of what I think on would call heavy character. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character with his makeup and his hair and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their, you know, the ridiculous like open mouth, soy faces when on their, on their, the YouTube screenshot, like I think they sort of present themselves not in a way that we would think of as like conventionally good looking, right? Like not in a way that's like conventionally attractive, but this sort of like grotesque visual that just sticks in your head and that, that is clearly what works. Like we are in the time of the heavy character. And I think, you know, you look at icons of this sort of more the previous age and you know, like JFK was not a heavy character. Like that's a light character, someone, a certain coolness, right? Obama was a kind of a light character. Like there was a certain like coolness to him. You know, one of the things that people debated a lot I see is like, oh, if Obama could run again, would he, wouldn't he just like clean up? Like if Democrats could just bring Obama back for a third time, wouldn't that just solve all of Democrats electoral problems? And I think like in 2016 I probably would have believed that and maybe in 2020 I would have believed that maybe. But like I'm certainly less of it. I feel less, I feel like that's less. I would be less confident to say, yes, he would definitely win in the next election than I think. And I Don't know. Like, I feel like Obama is a character of a cooler, more a different time. He is like a character from like a pre TikTok time in many respects, maybe more resembling the sort of Kennedy era and so forth. And I do think that we're looking for these more sort of like, yeah, visually arresting types who make a huge leave a cut, a huge figure on the screen. And whether you like the way they look or don't you remember how they look, I don't feel. And so someone like Trump is the type of character that thrives politically in this new environment.
- [42:05]
Derek Thompson
Let me try out a pushback here.
- [42:06]
Joe Weisenthal
Sure.
- [42:06]
Derek Thompson
I'm not sure how strongly I disagree, but let me try a pushback. I think Obama in 2006 or even 2004 with the first DNC speech, I think he was a heavy character. I think the presidency lightened him. I think Trump in 2015 was a heavy character and he is a lighter character now, having suffered overexposure. I think in many ways the fissures that you see in the Republican Party, you could. I've never heard this articulation or interpretation before, but you could say a part of what's happening is that Trump, the once heavy character, is losing the weight that used to be necessary to keep this coalition together. And people are seeing, you know, he's kind of lost it.
- [42:53]
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- [43:20]
Derek Thompson
Joshua Meyerowitz is another writer that you turned me onto. He has a book called no Sense of the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Let's talk about that term, no Sense of Place in a second. But why don't you just jump right into why Meyerowitz's theories sort of fit where I was going with politics.
- [43:40]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah. So I think this is like, you know, this was another. So Meyerowitz's book, no Sense of Place. Sorry, I'm looking it up right now. I think it came out well, it was, I think, 1985. 1985, right. So he was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. And I think everyone should read this book. Cause it really does. There's extraordinary foresight for all the things that we talk about with digital media and so forth, he was talking about in the early 80s. But one of his observations in that book that I thought was very powerful was this idea that, like, everybody has a front stage and a backstage right. We talk on this podcast in a certain way, but that is different than how we would, like, talk at home with our family. But even when we talk in our family, you, like, talk differently around your kids than when your kids aren't there. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast, we're saying goodbye or something. Like, this is like a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth. And what Meyerowitz anticipated in no sense of place is this idea that electronic media. And he was, again, it was really like, sort of trying to figure out in advance what the consequences of widespread television and television cameras everywhere would be. That electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment or another. That, like, if someone code switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail, that they would. Than they did in their private life, that we would come to, oh, this person's a phone, right? That this person. They, like, are so eloquent when they're giving a speech, but they talk differently around their family while they're just a fraud, et cetera. And he come, he predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would sort of view them. We would come to view them differently. You know, you're like. Or you watch a TV show, a good example, you know, you like, someone, like, watches. Watches the show Sex and the City, for example. And for men, perhaps that's the first time that they. They ever get to hear, like, women talk about dating. Because these are conversations that wouldn't have occurred, you know, in their presence before. And then suddenly, like, maybe they're, like, more suspicious about, like, you know, how they're being perceived on a date or something like that. Or, you know, you watch the Sopranos and you see there's the priest. And suddenly you, like, see episodes with T's doing things that are, like, less priestly. And then you go to church and you're like, wait, does my priest do that stuff too? Are they, like, do they also have a private life? Because I've only ever seen them in the church or, you know, then obviously the presidency. And again, you know, like thinking about a politician, you know, something about Trump is that he truly. There's very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. Like, people can be totally repelled by him, things he said in public or private. But one thing that you probably not is like, he's not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use it. It's like he is the same in almost every environment. And I think this is precisely what Meyerowitz would have anticipated, that we would gravitate towards people who, when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that sort of consistency, consistency of characteristic as a value. And the 2016 election and many elections since then, I think, have been strong vindication. What I think is interesting is around the world we see this phenomenon where someone becomes, to your point, someone gets in office, whether it's Keir Starmer or whoever it is, someone gets into office, and then their popularity immediately tanks. The camera's on them, and people actually get to know this person. I think it is interesting that in China, we don't know anything about what Xi Jinping is like in his private life. We know nothing. They don't tweet at all. We do not have videos of them doing whatever. They're a complete black box outside of the sort of formal presentation of self. And so I think there is probably a sense. My guess is that there's probably some intuitive sense on the part of the party there where they realize that a good way to lose esteem, a good way to lose the respect of the public, is for the public to see that the public Persona is just a Persona. And they don't want to, you know, they don't want to bring their whole selves to work, as we say here in the US the name of Meyerowitz's.
- [48:23]
Derek Thompson
Book is no Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it's a pun. It's not a very intuitive pun, but it's a really, really smart pun. By no Sense of Place, Meyerowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don't really know where we are. That is like, I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine or Minneapolis in a way that was impossible in the age before, certainly, television or radio. That this new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away. So that's no sense of place. But he also means no Sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able with electronic media, and this was unbelievably prescient to speak outside of their slot in the hierarchy, that the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires, the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this, he said, is going to create more social unrest. It's going to create more. I think, think what he would agree now is something like populism and this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, that it also demolishes hierarchies. I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago. But he goes one step further in a way that's, like, really surprising. And this is the part I'd really love you to comment on. He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about, like, what's happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyerowitz, quote. Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information. But the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with, and this is exactly your point, a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust. Bars like, wow, it is crazy. Like, when you read that book, some paradox it is.
- [50:45]
Joe Weisenthal
I mean, when you read that book, and again, 1985, it does feel like, oh, this could be in the Atlantic in 2025, right? Like, it's just so far ahead of, like. And so it's so contemporary the way he talks about it. You know, what I think is interesting is that, like, you know, you talk about, or you mentioned the poor could scream at the billionaires. You know, I think a lot of the. A lot of this sits a little bit uncomfortably with a lot of people because they say, well, that's a really good thing, right? Like, we do not want to have a society in which the billionaires are cloistered from the public and they can't be criticized and so forth. But there is this sort of conservatism to, I think, this entire field of study, because we get the good with the bad, or we get things that we like, which is technology, has dissolved a lot of these bonds, and there is this sort of public and have more say, et cetera. And you could see the way all of our, like, politics is sort of spinning out of control. I think that there is this sort of, like, part. I mean, this is a little bit separate to the conversation, but I do not think that, like, the. Up until recently, like, there was not a lot of attention played to place to this field of work. There is not a lot in contemporary academia that sort of traces its roots to this sort of school of media ecology. And I think that it sits a little bit uncomfortable with any ideological project that there is this sort of like, that these observations don't fit very nicely into a sort of left right viewpoint or anything like that. I think it sort of offers a quasi scientific way of understanding history that's sort of distinct from studies of Marxism or studies of class, which is of course a very popular way of understanding history among people. So I think that, you know, like you said, like, is it bad or good? Like, are these good or bad things? I think most people would say, look, technology is an enabled environment in which the poor can have their voice heard and billionaires are brought low and can be sort of hectored. And we see that happen every day online. Most people intuitively think that's like a very positive development, that's like an egalitarian development. But by the same token, there are other things that most people probably they're not as comfortable with. And so I think this whole field of study offers a certain way of viewing history that is not entirely satisfying to anyone or anyone's particularly, certainly political project currently.
- [53:22]
Derek Thompson
Speaking of topics that aren't particularly comfortable with any political project, I have a question about AI for you.
- [53:28]
Joe Weisenthal
Sure.
- [53:29]
Derek Thompson
And how AI slots into orality versus Literacy. I want to come at it from what I hope is an interesting angle. This is a quote from Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, someone who we've essentially up till now said got a ton right about the near future. Ong writes, quote, a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation. If you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same often stupid words which called for your question in the first place. End quote. I remember rereading that section on a plane recently and I, like, jolted up in my seat, I was like, that's what AI has changed. You can enter into conversations with text like that is true either at a literal level. Like, I can download, I guess, a PDF of a book and give it to Claude and be like, claude, can we talk about this book? But also at a higher abstract level, we're talking about A technology that is pre trained on text, it's pre trained on literacy, but we have a oral, which is to say conversational, relationship with that training corpus. And so AI sits at this really interesting intersection of we're having an oracular conversation. Maybe that's the wrong word. An oral conversation with a piece of text. And it's weird. And I mean, again, not good or bad. That is a weird new alien way to interact with media.
- [54:56]
Joe Weisenthal
You know what? I totally agree. And you know what? I think the jury is out when we talk about post literacy orality. I actually think the jury is kind of out still on how AI slots into this. Because on the one hand you're like, all right, well, it's certainly more irregular. We're now conversing. And I've done that. Upload some texts to Claude or to Google Notebook, and then you can like ask questions and sort of like it becomes an interactive thing. And so it's like, all right, that's oral, that's conversation. Sure. This is just continuing the trend. On the other hand, those conversations with AI, they don't feel like other conversations that exist online, for example, the AI is not trying to impress you, typically. The AI is not trying to one up you. The AI is not going to insult you. The AI is not going to speak to you in memes. The AI is not not going to use apathetical phrases and so forth. I'm not trying to one up the AI either. And so forth. And so I, you know, and again, like, one of the things that Ong talked about was this sort of. He used the word agonistic. Competitive. Right. And we certainly see that online and social discourse, how, like we're sort of always competing with each other when we're talking. AI chatbot communications aren't agonistically toned. In fact, just the opposite. Most people's complaint with AI is that it's too obsequious, that it's not confrontational enough, that I'll like say something stupid into the chatbot. And I say, that's a really good idea, Joe. Let's explore that further. And saying, and what we wanted to do is say, that's really dumb. Like, this is a real, like, you're going down a dead end here. And so this is actually like one of the big problems of AI, which is that it's insufficiently impelled. The chat bots do not correct you. And that can people become delusional because, like, oh, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna make a breakthrough on the order of Einstein, because I'm, you know, doing vibe physics and I've, I'm this close to a breakthrough. I just need to sit here for another 36 hours with the chat bot. And I'm this close. You know, that's LLM psychosis. And I do think that's really interesting, which is that, like, it is conversational, but it doesn't have a lot of these other aspects of conversation that other digital convers. And so I think the jury is out. And I don't, you know, like, whether it maybe it's a turn. And I do think, like, what are ways that AI could go? Right? You know, it's very easy. Any sane person or intelligent person can come up with a bunch of stories about how the existence of AI is going to be bad, but maybe the fact that, you know, we're going to have more and more interactions with an entity that is not trying to, you know, dunk on you, not trying to insult you, not trying to one up you, etc. That's a shift. And I don't think we really know what the consequences of that are going to be yet.
- [57:43]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, a hypothesis that I'd be willing to test out here, and I'm interested in what you think about it, is that the age of social media really is the revenge of orality. And an age of AI would be much more like the revenge of literacy in one way. In particular, like Ong and Havelock, Meyerowitz, they all point to this idea that literacy pulled us into ourselves. Reading is interior. And then novels, in response to the interiority of reading, became more interior. Right. Like 19th century novels are incredibly rich about what is it like to be thinking and alive in this moment. It's not plot, plot, plot, it's not genealogy. It's fully inside the phenomenological experience of the characters. And AI to me feels much more like. It feels sub vocal. It feels interior, like I'm having a conversation with myself. It's not myself, it's this machine that I'm talking with. But it feels more like daydreaming with myself than the antagonistic experience of being on Twitter where I'm inside the minds of other people. Right. Thrust into the faces of strangers who I've never met but still feel like I have to win this conversation. Yeah, yeah. I don't feel that same level of combativeness, which, as you said, is more like the age of, or was more in keeping with the age of a reality. So how do you feel about this idea that a world in which social media will, of course, continue to play a large role in people's daily life, but also AI might continue to play a large role in our daily life is a world in which, like, a new kind of orality and a new kind of literacy are gonna sort of, like, proceed along parallel tracks simultaneously.
- [59:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I totally buy it. I think that's very plausible. You know, the one thing I'll say. I think you put it very well. It's not going to look exactly like the previous age of literacy, but it never does. Right. So these things come and go. And the current age of a reality is different, obviously, than the original one, et cetera. But there could be secondary literacy, maybe we call it, I don't know, whatever it is, digital literacy or something like that. But, yeah, this sort of interiority, the solitude that one can. The sort of return to solitude. When you close, if you're going back and forth, the chat bot, you close the computer, you don't feel that same, like, oh, they're all. They're still arguing there without me. They're talking of them. They're talking online about me, and I'm not there to defend myself, whatever it is. Like, you don't quite have that same pull. So it could actually. Yeah, like I said, I think things that could go. Right, maybe there is a version of the sort of return to literate thinking. And then my big thesis that the return to orality is the biggest story in the world. Maybe that was true for about 15 minutes and then we. That was. And now that's already over. So, yeah, I think all these things will sort of. They'll live with each other and there'll be shades of the past that sort of. We hear echoes of and so forth, and they'll be different and they'll be similar. And I think it's good to sort of recognize these patterns and sort of observe them, because just for one's own sanity, to have a sense of. To have a sense of what's pulling you in various different directions, to close with the joism.
- [60:51]
Derek Thompson
What'd I miss? What's important in this space that we didn't have time to talk about or that I didn't sufficiently prompt with a question?
- [60:59]
Joe Weisenthal
No, I think that was great. I think you hit. I think I'm trying to think. I think we talked about the return of the ear, which I think is really powerful. I just think, by and large, I said it before. But I do think that there are a lot of contemporary pathologies and I think more or less rightly people point to digital media, the phones, et cetera, as drivers of them. And what I would just say is there's a lot of writing that I think helps answer these questions that was written before any of this existed. And I find that to be very powerful because then you don't get this. All the data is in sample, so to speak. And I would like it if more Meyerowitz and Ong and Havelock and McLuhan and so forth, people became more familiar with them. I think that I would like that. I just want to talk to about it, talk to people about them. I don't know if it's going to save the world if more people read about them, but I think there's a lot of stuff that's very valuable that should be excavated from the past.
- [62:01]
Derek Thompson
Well, look, just speaking personally, it's been valuable to me. I mean, I am so glad that you recommended Ong to me. I'm so glad you recommended Meyer with I've not yet read Havelock on Plato and the difference between the age of poesy and the age of philosophy, but maybe that's the next stop on my Joe Weisenthal tour through orality and literacy. So thank you, Joe. I really appreciate it.
- [62:22]
Joe Weisenthal
Thanks, Derek. That was a blast.