May 6, 2026 • 17 mins
Joe has more of the story about the significance of reading...
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part two of Reading is Magic. It's one more thing.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I'm th.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
I love reading practically more than just about anything on earth,
and at this point in my life and I came
across a good thing on why literature is good for
your brain.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
I haven't brought it on the air because I don't
know if anybody cares, but there are claims and it
kind of fits in with what you were talking about
yesterday and today that literature does things to your brain
that are good for you overall. But most people don't
read literature, and they do fine in the world and
did before literature came along, and well after it's gone.
So I don't know, I don't know what any think
(00:43):
of that.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You got to define your terms, do fine and stuff. Well,
it depends on your personality type of thing. But anyway,
if you missed yesterday is One More Thing podcast, just
grab it and listen to it now and then this
is part two of that discussion. Long story short, absolutely
brilliant piece of writing by a fellow by the name
of Sam Chris with a KKR I SS who's talking
(01:05):
about scientists from the Soviet Union who went into a
remote village that was completely illiterate and found to his
shock that the people had a tremendous problem thinking abstractly
at all. And again we covered that the last time around,
meaning abstractly, Oh my gosh, well they Well, we gave
(01:28):
a bunch of examples yesterday, and presumably people have just
listened to that. So I don't want to go through
it again, anything outside of their direct personal experience, the
ability to imagine other things and other ways of approaching whatever.
(01:52):
But I want to start with this note from Mike
Lawyer from Chicago, longtime friend of mine and of the shows.
He really enjoyed it, He said, I wanted to share
something I learned as an undergrad as a chemistry major.
Most of us thought very literally, using mathematics and science
and not really thinking outside the box because we were
looking for an absolute answer. My favorite chemistry professor, Steven Zumdahl,
(02:15):
pointed out that the great scientists also could think abstractly.
Michael Faraday, for instance, discovered benzene, which is a ring
shaped organic compound. Nobody could figure out scientifically what the
structure was because the number of carbons and hydrogen didn't
add up properly. Faraday had a dream of a snake
circling around and grabbing its tail, and then he thought, wow,
(02:38):
maybe it's ring shaped, and he took a look, and
sure enough. The professor then explained how an appreciation for
art in music helps us advance our scientific knowledge.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So that's a good professor.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
My son's good at one of my kids, and predicators
really good at that abstract thinking where I will do
something and it's embarrassing. Why do you do it that way?
I said, what if you did this first, then that
that would be a lot better, And I just never
thought of it.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, funny might go to a consultant for that, as
my wife. So anyway, we ended up the last yesterday
is one more thing with a discussion of how in
these remote, completely illiterate areas, there were formerly scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, poets,
et cetera, but those folks had vanished from the world
(03:33):
along with these sophisticated literary culture, et cetera. So anyway,
Chris writes today, the same thing seems to be happening
to us. The kids can't read. I don't mean they're
incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words,
although an increasing proportion of them can't do that either.
In the US, literacy peaked around twenty fourteen has been
sliding since. Forty percent of fourth graders have below basic
(03:56):
reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any means
from a written text. The number of illiterate students has
been rising every year since twenty fourteen. Part of that
is rampant illegal immigration, but anyway, don't want to get
hung up on that. But even when students can perform
the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make
their minds start working in text like ways. It's an
entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes. And
(04:20):
when they come to the written word, they come to
it from the outside. And he gets into how professors
at elite universities increasingly report their students are no longer
capable of reading an entire novel or even a thirty
page extract. Some of them have difficulty making it through
a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they're
willing to pay three hundred thousand dollars for the privilege
(04:42):
of dumping an entire text into chat GPT and submitting
its response as an essay. Probably the most alarming index
of this was a study in which a group of
English majors holy cow at two well regarded public universities
in Kansas.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I think we can guess what they are.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
It's not like they're se The Kennes were expected to
read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles
Dickens and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening.
Only five percent of the students could produce a detailed
literal understanding of the text one out of twenty. The
rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch
(05:20):
of half understood phrases, or could not comprehend.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Anything at all. Yipes in specifico.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
One particular stumbling block was the novel's third sentence, which
describes London in December.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I will read that sentence to you now.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
As much mud in the streets as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the earth,
and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard
Upholburn Hill. The students found this figure of language impossible.
They can only read the sentence with the assumption that
(05:59):
Dickens was described the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile
in Victorian London. You know, in their defense, and boy,
I love kicking the young. But in their defense, words
like fantastic or in this case wonderful had a different
(06:20):
meaning at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
And you can get hung up on that.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
A little bit, because he means wonderful as in, like
we would use the word astounding, it would not be
astounding to meet a megalosaurus forty feet long or so,
waddling like an elephant teen lizard up Holburn Hill.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I think they might get that more.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
But anyway, they couldn't get that.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
It was a metaphor.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
One respondent glossed it like this quote, it's probably some
kind of an animal or something or another. So yep,
I think we've encountered some kind of an animal these
characters have met in the street. The study assessed this
person is a competent rather than a problematic reader, because
they did at least managed to form an idea of
what the text meant, even if it was wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And then he gets closer to his point. He points
out that Bleak House is not an elitest text. It
was mass entertainment at the time and When Dickens visited
America in eighteen sixty seven eighteen sixty seven, over one
hundred thousand people paid to see him.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Speak, often called the world's first worldwide celebrity.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Dickens, Yeah, yeah, anyway. Today, a person studying English literature
at a degree level responds to his work in essentially
the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the
nineteen thirties, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I'm going to say to my kids the next time
I'm disappointed in them, You're like an illiterate Huzbek peasant
from the whenever the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Your face isn't.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Illiterate, but ho'sbek peasant in the nineteen thirties, they'd replied,
And here it comes. The situation is not likely to
get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new
generation of people, progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing.
In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to
inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman's Entertaining Ourselves to Death excellent
(08:14):
book I read at the time. Now it seems almost benign.
Our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability
to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without
distractedly poking at their phones, as if mad Men were
a kind of penitential mental gruel.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Wow, that's some good writing.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I'm old enough to remember the first time I ever
went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to
have the same story. They love to read as children,
but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that
permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home. Interestingly, You're
kind of the opposite, aren't you.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
I've had to work at it, though, Yeah, true, Yeah,
I had to make it. It had to be a goal
was to reintroduce myself to reading and long form reading
and do it on a regular basis, because when I
first started back up again a couple of years ago,
it is hard, really hard.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I think, to mister Chris's point, I'm reading Tim
Sanderfer's fabulous new book Proclaiming Liberty. I want to say
declaring Liberty because Liberty Proclaire. I finally got a right
proclaiming liberty, and it was a bit of a struggle
at first. After about five ten minutes, I get into
(09:20):
the groove and I'm really good at it.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Yeah, you got to break through that first few minutes.
That's because I was a voracious reader.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Like for my entire life, a kid, a youngster, a
college student who's all you know, most of their intellectual
consciousness has been post internet and god help them post smartphone.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
And you've probably never had. Reading is an enjoyable experience
ever once in your life. So what would draw you
to it?
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So they're not waking up an old muscle like I am,
They're trying to develop a completely new one.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
I'm so excited my son finding a book that can
grab people, you know, getting them into reading is the
challenge really, to get started, I think. And my son,
who's super into dinosaurs, is reading the original Jurassic Park book,
which is supposed to be really good. I've never read it,
the actual book, Michael Crichton. Anyway, he loves it. He
(10:14):
can't he can't stop reading it. I'm just so happy
thenk God, he's reading an actual.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Book, all right. Here's the Wyatt matters.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
And also their eyesight so good that they can sit
down with those paperbacks with those tiny little print in
a dimly lit room and read them, which I can't
do anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Oh please, no, no speaking of torture.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Um bar Okay, here's why it matters, And I wish
we had. I suppose we have time to read the
whole thing, but I don't know if anybody wants to
hear it. But he points out that this is not
a world we're prepared for. Oh, he says, he talks
about what we just talked about kids who don't have
those muscles. Uh what about the cohorts? Uh, they can't
parse complex sentences. At least they can identify words. But
(10:53):
what about the cohorts who don't have a gaping hole
in their education at twelve?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
But at six?
Speaker 2 (10:57):
What happens when the baby's currently being raised by AI
power dolls grow up when it's their turn to govern
the world. This is not a world we're prepared for.
All democratic politics assume a literate population, people who are
willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of
world they want to live in. And I would add
in the ability to shape the future too, even if
(11:18):
they're not going to be in it. Without that, democracy
becomes a kind of tribal headcount or a struggle for
state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the
decline of literacy. For a growing course of people who
are in the Atlantic, we're recoiling into pre Enlightenment conditions.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Of absolute domination.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
A population that can no longer think for itself will
end up voluntarily seeding power to strongmen or demagogues. The
end of literacy is the end of public reason. A
postliterate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness,
and people eating each other in the streets.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
They um don't know if I'm sir, that that second
half will happen in a post literate world.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
What to cannibalism?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
If I had to bet, I'd bet probably we're going
to go that direction. Will we be a postliterate world?
One hundred percent? One hundred percent? Where if not? Basically,
they're already the age of reading lasted three hundred years
and it's over and it will never return.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
There are many paragraphs to this, We'll post the entire
thing at Armstrong and Getty dot com.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I'm just going to hit you with his conclusion.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Getting back to Marshall McLuhan, I think McLuhan was right
that the postlitter age will have more in common with
primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that
produced it. After writing, we will once again live in
a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But
now our direct sensory experience won't be of the things
that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.
(12:54):
It's likely that before very long, absolutely all those images
will be generated by AI. In the same way that
Tolstovian peasant has a deep spiritual knowledge of the land,
we will have a deep spiritual knowledge of tungue, tungue, tongue, sahor.
I don't even know what that is. I hope I'm
allowed to say that on a podcast. I have a
(13:14):
feeling it's something very interneting. The politics of the future
will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded an empirical,
empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer
try to think outside of the things we can see.
It's just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Oh why, I don't see how this doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Therefore, those who control what we see are in control
of our entire perception of reality, which is kind of obvious.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
I was watching an ad yesterday for some minor clothing outlet.
They couldn't have they're an upstart, they couldn't have a
ton of money to spend. They had this unbelievable ad
that was obviously AI, with the AI rugged man modeled
wearing their stuff and all that that I'm sure they
put together for free. And I thought, this is clearly
(14:08):
there'll be no human beings and practically anything soon, because
why would there be Why would you even have the
time to have somebody drive across town to film something
when you can just pick the man or woman, put
them in the clothes you want, have them say what
you want, and you're done. Yeah, this is much less
important than the discussion. But I heard a jingle on
the radio the other day and it was like not
(14:30):
a good one, like where did you get those singers?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
And who wrote that? Like do you not read the papers?
I mean, do you not have access to the internet.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
There's a Oh, you're thinking that humans made it, and
you're thinking, A I could have done a much better job.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
It was like if a hardware store with two locations
in a very small city in America, had like hired
a couple of gals from the church choir and dashed
off a quick jingle.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
It was just not good, dude.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Meanwhile, you heard of AI handsome crafts sounds like it
came out of a La studio songs for our end
of our show every single day. Oh yeah yeah, but yeah,
with all that going on, no, nobody's going to read.
I'm one hundred people aren't going to read. They just aren't.
(15:26):
And that's never coming back. I can't even imagine the
scenario where that's ever going to come back.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And all they'll have is a deep spiritual knowledge of
tongue tongue tongue.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Sohre, are you gonna look that up real quick?
Speaker 4 (15:38):
I'm going to look that up us something obscenehing compelling.
It's a sexual act in which you get a dog
and a woman and you can't say this.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Oh thank you. I like dogs and women, but I
like to keep them separate.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Oh it appears to be an AI cartoon.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Character that's popular. Yeah, it's kind of funky looking. I
feel like I've seen that. Okay, my house be really popular. Yeah, Okay.
The point is something young people.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Like speaking of being online.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Tungue tungue tongue SO who are sometimes shortened a tongue
tongue sho a or triple T, is a viral internet meme.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
It was introduced blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
The character has since been featured in many songs and
video games, including Steal a Brain, Rotten Fortnight.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I gotta throw that at my kids today, like just offhand,
like I know what it is.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
What would play? It was tripled what would.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Tungue tungue tongue so? That's so. Think of this I
do with triple T. You'll never remember the name. Think
of this, That's what I'll say. See if my high
school son rolls his eyes at me so hard to
get stuck in the back of his head, and then happens.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Sixty seven records that shit, it's six seven, he would
jump on the car, throw himself into traffic.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No, get it wrong, say seven six. That's what my
parents were doing. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Anyway, as a young kid, I remember the school library
and teaching us the Dewey decimal system and the difference
between fiction and nonfiction books.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Those days are gone.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Well, I guess that's it.
Part two of Reading is Magic. It's one more thing.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I'm th.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
I love reading practically more than just about anything on earth,
and at this point in my life and I came
across a good thing on why literature is good for
your brain.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
I haven't brought it on the air because I don't
know if anybody cares, but there are claims and it
kind of fits in with what you were talking about
yesterday and today that literature does things to your brain
that are good for you overall. But most people don't
read literature, and they do fine in the world and
did before literature came along, and well after it's gone.
So I don't know, I don't know what any think
(00:43):
of that.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You got to define your terms, do fine and stuff. Well,
it depends on your personality type of thing. But anyway,
if you missed yesterday is One More Thing podcast, just
grab it and listen to it now and then this
is part two of that discussion. Long story short, absolutely
brilliant piece of writing by a fellow by the name
of Sam Chris with a KKR I SS who's talking
(01:05):
about scientists from the Soviet Union who went into a
remote village that was completely illiterate and found to his
shock that the people had a tremendous problem thinking abstractly
at all. And again we covered that the last time around,
meaning abstractly, Oh my gosh, well they Well, we gave
(01:28):
a bunch of examples yesterday, and presumably people have just
listened to that. So I don't want to go through
it again, anything outside of their direct personal experience, the
ability to imagine other things and other ways of approaching whatever.
(01:52):
But I want to start with this note from Mike
Lawyer from Chicago, longtime friend of mine and of the shows.
He really enjoyed it, He said, I wanted to share
something I learned as an undergrad as a chemistry major.
Most of us thought very literally, using mathematics and science
and not really thinking outside the box because we were
looking for an absolute answer. My favorite chemistry professor, Steven Zumdahl,
(02:15):
pointed out that the great scientists also could think abstractly.
Michael Faraday, for instance, discovered benzene, which is a ring
shaped organic compound. Nobody could figure out scientifically what the
structure was because the number of carbons and hydrogen didn't
add up properly. Faraday had a dream of a snake
circling around and grabbing its tail, and then he thought, wow,
(02:38):
maybe it's ring shaped, and he took a look, and
sure enough. The professor then explained how an appreciation for
art in music helps us advance our scientific knowledge.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So that's a good professor.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
My son's good at one of my kids, and predicators
really good at that abstract thinking where I will do
something and it's embarrassing. Why do you do it that way?
I said, what if you did this first, then that
that would be a lot better, And I just never
thought of it.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, funny might go to a consultant for that, as
my wife. So anyway, we ended up the last yesterday
is one more thing with a discussion of how in
these remote, completely illiterate areas, there were formerly scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, poets,
et cetera, but those folks had vanished from the world
(03:33):
along with these sophisticated literary culture, et cetera. So anyway,
Chris writes today, the same thing seems to be happening
to us. The kids can't read. I don't mean they're
incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words,
although an increasing proportion of them can't do that either.
In the US, literacy peaked around twenty fourteen has been
sliding since. Forty percent of fourth graders have below basic
(03:56):
reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any means
from a written text. The number of illiterate students has
been rising every year since twenty fourteen. Part of that
is rampant illegal immigration, but anyway, don't want to get
hung up on that. But even when students can perform
the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make
their minds start working in text like ways. It's an
entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes. And
(04:20):
when they come to the written word, they come to
it from the outside. And he gets into how professors
at elite universities increasingly report their students are no longer
capable of reading an entire novel or even a thirty
page extract. Some of them have difficulty making it through
a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they're
willing to pay three hundred thousand dollars for the privilege
(04:42):
of dumping an entire text into chat GPT and submitting
its response as an essay. Probably the most alarming index
of this was a study in which a group of
English majors holy cow at two well regarded public universities
in Kansas.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I think we can guess what they are.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
It's not like they're se The Kennes were expected to
read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles
Dickens and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening.
Only five percent of the students could produce a detailed
literal understanding of the text one out of twenty. The
rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch
(05:20):
of half understood phrases, or could not comprehend.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Anything at all. Yipes in specifico.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
One particular stumbling block was the novel's third sentence, which
describes London in December.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I will read that sentence to you now.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
As much mud in the streets as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the earth,
and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard
Upholburn Hill. The students found this figure of language impossible.
They can only read the sentence with the assumption that
(05:59):
Dickens was described the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile
in Victorian London. You know, in their defense, and boy,
I love kicking the young. But in their defense, words
like fantastic or in this case wonderful had a different
(06:20):
meaning at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
And you can get hung up on that.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
A little bit, because he means wonderful as in, like
we would use the word astounding, it would not be
astounding to meet a megalosaurus forty feet long or so,
waddling like an elephant teen lizard up Holburn Hill.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I think they might get that more.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
But anyway, they couldn't get that.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
It was a metaphor.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
One respondent glossed it like this quote, it's probably some
kind of an animal or something or another. So yep,
I think we've encountered some kind of an animal these
characters have met in the street. The study assessed this
person is a competent rather than a problematic reader, because
they did at least managed to form an idea of
what the text meant, even if it was wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And then he gets closer to his point. He points
out that Bleak House is not an elitest text. It
was mass entertainment at the time and When Dickens visited
America in eighteen sixty seven eighteen sixty seven, over one
hundred thousand people paid to see him.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Speak, often called the world's first worldwide celebrity.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Dickens, Yeah, yeah, anyway. Today, a person studying English literature
at a degree level responds to his work in essentially
the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the
nineteen thirties, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
I'm going to say to my kids the next time
I'm disappointed in them, You're like an illiterate Huzbek peasant
from the whenever the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Your face isn't.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Illiterate, but ho'sbek peasant in the nineteen thirties, they'd replied,
And here it comes. The situation is not likely to
get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new
generation of people, progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing.
In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to
inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman's Entertaining Ourselves to Death excellent
(08:14):
book I read at the time. Now it seems almost benign.
Our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability
to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without
distractedly poking at their phones, as if mad Men were
a kind of penitential mental gruel.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Wow, that's some good writing.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I'm old enough to remember the first time I ever
went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to
have the same story. They love to read as children,
but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that
permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home. Interestingly, You're
kind of the opposite, aren't you.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
I've had to work at it, though, Yeah, true, Yeah,
I had to make it. It had to be a goal
was to reintroduce myself to reading and long form reading
and do it on a regular basis, because when I
first started back up again a couple of years ago,
it is hard, really hard.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And I think, to mister Chris's point, I'm reading Tim
Sanderfer's fabulous new book Proclaiming Liberty. I want to say
declaring Liberty because Liberty Proclaire. I finally got a right
proclaiming liberty, and it was a bit of a struggle
at first. After about five ten minutes, I get into
(09:20):
the groove and I'm really good at it.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Yeah, you got to break through that first few minutes.
That's because I was a voracious reader.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Like for my entire life, a kid, a youngster, a
college student who's all you know, most of their intellectual
consciousness has been post internet and god help them post smartphone.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
And you've probably never had. Reading is an enjoyable experience
ever once in your life. So what would draw you
to it?
Speaker 2 (09:49):
So they're not waking up an old muscle like I am,
They're trying to develop a completely new one.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
I'm so excited my son finding a book that can
grab people, you know, getting them into reading is the
challenge really, to get started, I think. And my son,
who's super into dinosaurs, is reading the original Jurassic Park book,
which is supposed to be really good. I've never read it,
the actual book, Michael Crichton. Anyway, he loves it. He
(10:14):
can't he can't stop reading it. I'm just so happy
thenk God, he's reading an actual.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Book, all right. Here's the Wyatt matters.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
And also their eyesight so good that they can sit
down with those paperbacks with those tiny little print in
a dimly lit room and read them, which I can't
do anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Oh please, no, no speaking of torture.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Um bar Okay, here's why it matters, And I wish
we had. I suppose we have time to read the
whole thing, but I don't know if anybody wants to
hear it. But he points out that this is not
a world we're prepared for. Oh, he says, he talks
about what we just talked about kids who don't have
those muscles. Uh what about the cohorts? Uh, they can't
parse complex sentences. At least they can identify words. But
(10:53):
what about the cohorts who don't have a gaping hole
in their education at twelve?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
But at six?
Speaker 2 (10:57):
What happens when the baby's currently being raised by AI
power dolls grow up when it's their turn to govern
the world. This is not a world we're prepared for.
All democratic politics assume a literate population, people who are
willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of
world they want to live in. And I would add
in the ability to shape the future too, even if
(11:18):
they're not going to be in it. Without that, democracy
becomes a kind of tribal headcount or a struggle for
state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the
decline of literacy. For a growing course of people who
are in the Atlantic, we're recoiling into pre Enlightenment conditions.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Of absolute domination.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
A population that can no longer think for itself will
end up voluntarily seeding power to strongmen or demagogues. The
end of literacy is the end of public reason. A
postliterate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness,
and people eating each other in the streets.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
They um don't know if I'm sir, that that second
half will happen in a post literate world.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
What to cannibalism?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
If I had to bet, I'd bet probably we're going
to go that direction. Will we be a postliterate world?
One hundred percent? One hundred percent? Where if not? Basically,
they're already the age of reading lasted three hundred years
and it's over and it will never return.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
There are many paragraphs to this, We'll post the entire
thing at Armstrong and Getty dot com.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I'm just going to hit you with his conclusion.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Getting back to Marshall McLuhan, I think McLuhan was right
that the postlitter age will have more in common with
primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that
produced it. After writing, we will once again live in
a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But
now our direct sensory experience won't be of the things
that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.
(12:54):
It's likely that before very long, absolutely all those images
will be generated by AI. In the same way that
Tolstovian peasant has a deep spiritual knowledge of the land,
we will have a deep spiritual knowledge of tungue, tungue, tongue, sahor.
I don't even know what that is. I hope I'm
allowed to say that on a podcast. I have a
(13:14):
feeling it's something very interneting. The politics of the future
will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded an empirical,
empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer
try to think outside of the things we can see.
It's just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Oh why, I don't see how this doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Therefore, those who control what we see are in control
of our entire perception of reality, which is kind of obvious.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
I was watching an ad yesterday for some minor clothing outlet.
They couldn't have they're an upstart, they couldn't have a
ton of money to spend. They had this unbelievable ad
that was obviously AI, with the AI rugged man modeled
wearing their stuff and all that that I'm sure they
put together for free. And I thought, this is clearly
(14:08):
there'll be no human beings and practically anything soon, because
why would there be Why would you even have the
time to have somebody drive across town to film something
when you can just pick the man or woman, put
them in the clothes you want, have them say what
you want, and you're done. Yeah, this is much less
important than the discussion. But I heard a jingle on
the radio the other day and it was like not
(14:30):
a good one, like where did you get those singers?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
And who wrote that? Like do you not read the papers?
I mean, do you not have access to the internet.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
There's a Oh, you're thinking that humans made it, and
you're thinking, A I could have done a much better job.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
It was like if a hardware store with two locations
in a very small city in America, had like hired
a couple of gals from the church choir and dashed
off a quick jingle.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
It was just not good, dude.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
Meanwhile, you heard of AI handsome crafts sounds like it
came out of a La studio songs for our end
of our show every single day. Oh yeah yeah, but yeah,
with all that going on, no, nobody's going to read.
I'm one hundred people aren't going to read. They just aren't.
(15:26):
And that's never coming back. I can't even imagine the
scenario where that's ever going to come back.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And all they'll have is a deep spiritual knowledge of
tongue tongue tongue.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Sohre, are you gonna look that up real quick?
Speaker 4 (15:38):
I'm going to look that up us something obscenehing compelling.
It's a sexual act in which you get a dog
and a woman and you can't say this.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Oh thank you. I like dogs and women, but I
like to keep them separate.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Oh it appears to be an AI cartoon.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Character that's popular. Yeah, it's kind of funky looking. I
feel like I've seen that. Okay, my house be really popular. Yeah, Okay.
The point is something young people.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Like speaking of being online.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Tungue tungue tongue SO who are sometimes shortened a tongue
tongue sho a or triple T, is a viral internet meme.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
It was introduced blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
The character has since been featured in many songs and
video games, including Steal a Brain, Rotten Fortnight.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I gotta throw that at my kids today, like just offhand,
like I know what it is.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
What would play? It was tripled what would.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Tungue tungue tongue so? That's so. Think of this I
do with triple T. You'll never remember the name. Think
of this, That's what I'll say. See if my high
school son rolls his eyes at me so hard to
get stuck in the back of his head, and then happens.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Sixty seven records that shit, it's six seven, he would
jump on the car, throw himself into traffic.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No, get it wrong, say seven six. That's what my
parents were doing. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Anyway, as a young kid, I remember the school library
and teaching us the Dewey decimal system and the difference
between fiction and nonfiction books.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Those days are gone.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Well, I guess that's it.
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Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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