The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing by Roy Peter Clark

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Tell It Like It Is: A Guide to Clear and Honest Writing by Roy Peter Clark https://amzn.to/3MKrvwh America's favorite writing coach and bestselling author returns with an "indispensable" guide (Diana K. Sugg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter) to writing clearly and honestly in a world full of lies, propaganda, and misinformation. The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so much misinformation and propaganda polluting public discourse, how can writers break through the noise to inform an increasingly busy, stressed, and overwhelmed audience? In Tell It Like It Is, bestselling author, writing coach, and teacher Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction. By analyzing stellar writing samples from a diverse collection of public writers, Clark highlights and explains the tools journalists, scientists, economists, fact-checkers, even storytellers use to engage, inform, and hook readers, and how best to deploy them in a variety of contexts. In doing so, he provides answers to some of the most pressing questions facing writers today: How do I make hard facts—about pandemics, wars, natural disasters, social justice—easy reading? How do I get readers to pay attention to what they need to know? How do I help contribute to a culture of writing that combats misinformation and propaganda? How do I instill hope into the hearts and minds of readers? With Clark's trademark wit, insight, and compassion, Tell It Like It Is offers a uniquely practical and engaging guide to public writing in unprecedented times—and an urgently needed remedy for a dangerously confused world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show my family and friends we certainly appreciate you guys coming by and once again we have another brilliant guest on the show uh a well uh

documented author he's the author of a ton of books we'll get an exact number out of him here in a bit uh but in the meantime as always you know put your arm around that friend neighbor relative that family member and say you know know, I wish you were smarter. You should subscribe to the Chris Voss Show. Maybe you shouldn't say it that way, but you know what I mean. You can find some nice ways to see it. Tell them to go to goodreads.com, for instance, Chris Voss. YouTube.com, for instance, Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, for instance, Chris Voss. There's two channels we're publishing on trying to become the cool kids over there on TikTok at Chris Foss 1

and the Chris Foss Show podcast. So I don't know how it's working out. My dogs seem to do better. My huskies seem to do better on their videos over there than my accounts, but you know, we'll see what happens. He is the author of the amazing new book that has just come out April 11th, 2023. Roy Peter Clark joins us on the show. His latest book is Tell It Like It Is. Is that like playing it again, Sam, from Casablanca? Tell It Like It Is, a clear guide to clear, or I'm sorry, let me cut that again.

Tell It Like It Is, a guide to clear and honest writing. It just came out, so you can get it hot off the presses. And Roy has been called America's writing coach, as stated in his mission is to help create a nation of writers. Since 1977, he's taught writing to small children and to Pulitzer-winning authors from his mothership, the Poynter Institute, a school for journalism and democracy in St. Petersburg, Florida.

He is the author or editor of 17 books on writing, language, and journalism. I think he told me closer to 20, though, now, so this may need some updating. The latest, all published by Little Brown, are Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar, I clearly flunked high school, and Help for Writers, which is now also a mobile app. His work has been featured on the Today Show, NPR, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. And now he reaches the pinnacle of his career on the Chris Foss Show, or not, I don't know. Welcome to the show, how are you Chris it's a pleasure to be here with you and I love the energy we have lots of energy we just can't pronounce grammar properly so we have that give us your dot com so we're going to find you on the interwebs www.roypeterclark.com There you go. Simple and easy.

So, Roy, did you want to send here 17 books? I know we talked about 20 in the pre-show. Do you want to throw an exact number in us so we have the record straight there? Yeah, I need to update that bio you read.

So, my first book was called Free to Write. It's out of print, but it was about my experiments in teaching children to write in elementary schools. And when my daughters were going to school, I would visit their class as kind of a, you know, a volunteer parent. But I was also trying to figure out at the time, I said, you know, if I want to become a good and helpful writing coach, then maybe I should figure things out at the beginning, like what happens in the experience of children that leads some of them to want to become writers and some of them to want to avoid writing and reading.

I wanted to kind of sort of not just read about that or hear about it, but experience it sort of directly. And that was the first book. And so Tell It Like It Is is 19 books later. So my books are about reading, writing, editing, literature, grammar, language, and journalism in general. I need to read more of them if people have heard my language and my inability to read properly. I suppose it depends on what mood I'm in or whether my eyes are working in my old age. So what motivated you to want to write this latest book?

Well, I remember after I finished the 19th book. Are you a Seinfeld fan by any chance? That's a great show. Yeah. It was a great show. So my wife and I are currently watching it from the beginning on Netflix, which is something we've never done. We're up to season eight.

And there's an episode in which Kramer has a literary kind of moment. And he winds up publishing a coffee table book about coffee tables. I remember this. Yeah. And the book comes with these little legs that you can fold down and turn it into a little coffee table. And it becomes a success. He said, I sold the film rights. The film rights for a coffee table book.

That inspired my 19th book, which has the odd and interesting title, if I may hold it up, called Murder Your Darlings. Ah, yes. Which is a bit of advice from a British professor from a century ago. And it is a writing book about writing books. So I looked at about 50 writing books covering about 3,000 years of history from Aristotle to a great contemporary editor, William Zinser, from A to Z. And I extract what I think is the nugget of information,

the tip that's most used, that has been most useful to me. So that was my 19th book, and I said, okay, this is it. I'm done. I'm ready to do a different kind of writing. And then everybody knows what happened at the beginning of 2020. Oh, yeah.

Something happened? What? Yeah, exactly. Can I get a memo on this? And the world's turned upside down, they say in Hamilton the musical. And I began to watch very, very closely how not just journalists, but kind of a national community of public writers, scientists, educators, economists, speech writers, politicians, as well as journalists, were working hard to help us figure out what was going on, how to live without panic, how to make good decisions, how to separate good information from disinformation. And as if the pandemic weren't enough, we know that during those last three years, there

has been tremendous social and political turmoil in the country. So I pretty much have had almost a 50-year career, but my big trick is to look at good writing wherever I find it and to help readers, audiences understand what makes it good, how to appreciate it, and then how to extract or distill from the best work strategies that craft is, the craft of writing is neutral, which is to say that very bad players know how to use active verbs too. They know how to tell stories and anecdotes. So craft always has to be married in some way to some kind of civic purpose, some kind of

enriching goal to get the best out of this gift with which God or Darwin or both gave us. Maybe it was both. Yeah, I think so. Maybe it's both. Can you be an

atheist in a... So the title of the book, Tell It Like It Is, a guide to clear and honest writing. Why did you feel it was important, and you may have answered my question in the previous thing, but I want to just clarify it. Why was it important

to have the clear and honest part in there i think um but by the way you kind of um because i like to lie when i write i just lie about everything i'm just so tell it like it is is actually uh and, A-L-L-U-S. It's an homage to one of my favorite songs by Aaron Neville, the great New Orleans singer, balladeer from the Neville Brothers. And the lyric is, tell it like it is. He's such a wonderful, I'm going to try to sing it. Is that okay with you?

Sure, go ahead, man. I mean, with apologies to Aaron Neville, who's one of the greatest performers of all time. There you go. Tell it like it is. Don't be afraid to let your conscience be your guide. So I said to myself, okay, you know, this is a book about honesty, candor, directness in communication.

And I have a 100-year-old piano piano behind me as you might be able to see yeah and so i'm always trying to make connections being inspired by um uh you know by writers and so the uh the little um before the book begins the little epigrams that occur before sometimes the main text, that's one of them. The two others you might find interesting. So the second one is quoting President Joe Biden to reporters at the White House in November of 2021, okay, where he says to the reporters, by the way, you all write for a living. I haven't seen any of you explain the supply chain very well. No, no, I'm not being critical. I'm being deadly earnest. This is a confusing time. Okay. And then the third beginning quote, I'll read it and then I'll tell you who it comes from.

Okay. I would also like to thank the journalists who put their lives at risk to provide information. Thank you, brothers and sisters, for this service that allows us to be close to the tragedy of that population and enables us to assess the cruelty of a war. Hashtag Ukraine. Hashtag peace. Pope Francis on Twitter, March 2022. So somewhere in all of those quotes are kind of the main sort of themes and values of the book. Journalists have a hard time. Journalists find things out, and if they're good, they check things out. But there's like a third step. actually there's two more steps one is to report it out to make it available to the public but i would argue that there's a often a fourth step and it goes something

like this that the best public writers take responsibility for what readers know and understand about the world. And that requires a set of tools and strategies, which represent the first half of my book. And the main tool is what I would call sort of plain language. And the effect is civic clarity. And civic clarity allows someone like you, someone like me, to figure out do I need a second booster shot? It became real, right?

It became real, right? It became real. And you talk in your book about the dark and more dystopian future, you know, how there's so much content. We have, you know, propaganda, misinformation, conspiracy theories. You know, I mean, everybody knows John F. Kennedy is 150 years old right now and is the president. You know, he's keeping on stuff, you know, all that stuff. And so it's hard. Elvis is still alive.

I think he's vice president under JFK. I think that's how it works. And Nixon is, I think, secretary of the house or whatever. I don't know, speaker of the house. So, you know, and I think it's important to bring this clarity because uh a lot of people throw up their hands with reporters and we have a lot of brilliant reporters on the show we've had uh and journalists uh we've had a lot of pulitzer prize winning authors on and i highly respect them and and to me you, searching out knowledge and finding it and knowing, you know, the good sources to talk to and listen to, probably by the writing because it's usually I'm exposed to them, is really important.

And a lot of people, I get disappointed because they're just, they throw up their hands and they go, oh, mainstream media is all bad. It's like, seriously, that just sounds like is all bad. You're just like, seriously? That just sounds like a lazy man's way to just not try harder. And so I think what you have there is, you know, you've written about clear and honest writing is more important than ever. Because people are more skeptical than ever maybe yeah you know there's a there's a very there's a there's a writer a brilliant writer named ed young y-o-n-g who writes for the atlantic and many people thought he's a science writer many people thought he did the the very best science writing during the pandemic. And a friend of mine interviewed him at the Poynter Institute where I work. And he said something that really felt real but is a little bit discouraging, which is, and I'm going to

do something that I try to avoid, but in this context, it makes sense. I try not to use the word Trump as a verb. You know, I mean, Trump is a verb,

which derives from a card game, right? If I'm not mistaken. Yeah. A trump card. Okay. So he says basically that feelings trump facts. And that's a very discouraging thing for journalists

who are trying to gather facts and evidence and to present it to a wide audience, not a narrow one, and with a purpose in mind. And if it's a responsible journalist, the purpose, of course, is a good one. It's like public health as a goal or the safety of our children is a goal. So I think the only thing I think one of the things that journalists, that public writers, not just journalists, can do is just

kind of recommit themselves to listening to listening, to listening even to opinions or people's personal feelings that don't seem grounded in the real world in certain ways, to kind of, for me, it's a matter if someone says to me, oh, this didn't happen, or that didn't happen, or the only patriots marched on the Capitol on January 6th. You know, basically, one of my jobs as a public writer is saying,

is there a way for me to understand why that person feels that way, or how that person came to feel that way, or what the life experience of that person, what the community that that person lives in have sort of influenced a view of the world, which I think is incomplete or wrongheaded or maybe even dangerous. Once you do that work as a journalist, then, yeah, it makes sense to recommit yourself to the basics. Hi, Voxers. Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far.

We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership management entrepreneur ism uh podcasting corporate stuff uh with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris foss leadership institute.com now back to the show there you go i mean even when trump came to the office, journalists had a hard time understanding how to deal with them because normally they would just report what the president was saying. And I think it was the Washington Post or New York Times was keeping a track

and it was like 30,000 million lies that they tracked. And they didn't know how to call him out, I think, at first on the BS the bs and lately they've gotten good at it you know there's a recent cnn town hall uh where kaylee uh uh took in is it caitlin uh i forget her name but she uh she tried calling him out on a lot of his bs and and tried battling back and forth with him and i and i've seen more and more uh great journalists on tv and stuff whenever a politician starts trying to bull over some bs they go whoa whoa whoa whoa fact checking and you know you're you're off the park there but for a long time it was they were

having a really hard time figuring out how to count it because they didn't want to seem like they were crossing that line of of being biased but, but there had to be a demand for the bias for the truth. Yeah, that's what I mean by the word, when I talk about the word honest, I'm not really, you know, years ago, if you talk about the ethics of writing and journalism, the two big big crimes the two big sins were plagiarism where you would steal somebody else's work or fabrication where you would make stuff up okay those seem obvious i think to most uh journalists now and i think we see fewer cases of it at least big public scandals so the questions that are left on the table is does my desire to be as a journalist to be neutral in some things in some matters require me to be neutral in all matters and i think the answer to that is is no and and that's why um so what what you would get traditionally in so-called objective or neutral journalists was often a what we can call a false balance well you got to represent both sides

yeah but now with fact checking as an important impulse and i have to say something uh on behalf of the school that i work for the pointer Poynter Institute, is considered the sort of the center of the fact-checking universe, that we support groups of journalists around the globe in developing their fact-checking skills. Now, fact can be slippery. There's no doubt about it. I mean, I like to talk about truth with a small t like a practical truth rather than a capital t um and uh even in science as we know one's understanding of the world uh evolves and changes. Yeah. And that's a good thing too. When we kind of replace, people say, well, the CDC can't be trusted. These scientists keep changing their mind.

And in fact, I think it's important for us to, as journalists and public writers, to kind of help people understand how responsible science works, what we mean by evidence, good evidence in journalism. Yeah. I mean, the hard thing about COVID was it was, you know, like you say, science is always evolving and science is always called a theory because it's evolving and it's learning and it's growing and it's adding knowledge base to it and evidence, evidentiary things and it can, it's very fluid. And that was the big challenge with the COVID thing was it came in a left field. Uh, it was an emergency situation and there was a lot of confusion because, you know,

everybody was trying to work together to, you know, save humanity, if you will. And, uh, and, and try and keep deaths from being lowered.

Um, and, and so it was very fluid and it was very evolving. And it was interesting to me because people had that attitude in the public eye. They're just like, I need an answer. What is it? And then because they couldn't get an answer and understand the fluidity of the situation, they resorted to sometimes conspiracy theories, some sort of dystopian thing or just calling people liars.

And it was really interesting to see. It was probably an experiment that maybe you would have of people on a lifeboat or, I don't know, people that you put in one of those rooms where they have to figure out how to get out of them and just how poorly human beings can react to centers of stress. I think for me, I would say that an interesting analogy. So I think there's a difference between people who I would as always happens, using difficult circumstances to their advantage. Yeah.

Whether it would be political or economic. So for example, we know now historically that when smoking became, you know, when the health dangers of smoking became more prominent and more public that, yeah, that there was a strategy used, sponsored certainly in part by tobacco companies and their allies themselves, which was not to deny but to cast doubt. And that casting of doubt allowed many people to keep smoking cigarettes, for example.

And more people to die, it should be noted. Yeah. Which is a toxicant of itself. And now we live in this age of world everyone blogging first came out and they're like oh we can do blogging and you know you you see these youtube channels or tiktok channels now that can pop up and start collecting money you saw a lot of the conspiracies they're serious during covid and even now you know you you see these politically slanted shows that some people just can't figure out that they're politically slanted they're not telling the truth they're not after the real facts they're after the facts of what

they see through their lens in the prism oh this president boogeyman bad this president boogeyman good you know he's and and and they you know they don't drill down to the facts. I remember seeing some of these reporters that were from these dubious, very biased, obviously, websites or online sites saying, well, here are the facts. And you're like, did you even call to do a fact check on that? Or did you call the person to get their side of the story. Like, you know, usually reputable agencies will go, you know, we reached out to the other party and this is their statement or reply from them. Or we talked to them and interviewed them as well. You know, they don't do any of that. They just throw up their hands. before to great journalists and people that we know, you know, for Washington Post and other great journalistic things that work hard.

I mean, I don't think there's a perfection to it, but work hard to have a journalistic integrity to their work and try and present the facts as best they can. Ken. Yeah, you know, I think the, so one of the, let's say one of the tests of responsible public communication, does the person, does the institution or the writer ever correct a mistake? Do they ever admit that they were wrong? Because we know that some of the sites that you're talking about never admit they'd be wrong, whereas that's all they would be doing sort of all the time. Well, propaganda is never wrong. It's a simple distinction.

It's a simple distinction. The Tampa Bay Times, which is the newspaper that I'm a contributing writer to here in St. Petersburg, winner of 14 Pulitzer Prizes over the years. And let me tell you, very serious about correcting mistakes. And as a result, the journalists who work there don't want to see their name attached to a correction. You know, I certainly don't and so that's motivation for uh checking and uh and double checking i think there's something that there's work that's being done in addition to fact checking that how should i say this um we really need to build on collectively. I don't know if it's possible given the political divisions in the country.

But let's call it media critical thinking skills. Okay? So I remember a time when I was a kid when I kind of liked, of course, watching television in its infancy, watching all these television advertisements. I would just buy anything they say. You know, I would just assume that anything you said on it, you wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. Okay, let's get some Pepsodent. It was just a matter of the advertising industry

sort of persuading you. And then over time, as you kind of grow up a little bit, and if you get the right kind of education, you develop a kind of skepticism, not cynicism, necessarily, but kind of skepticism, which lets you see behind the screen, let's you see all the appeals. You know, the appeals to physical beauty, the appeals to ruggedness, the Marlboro Man, you know, all of these things. And you develop what I think Hemingway referred to as a, you know, a sort of a crap detector that allows you to, you know, you don't want it to be, you know, you don't want it to be too, you know, too tuned up or else you'd be too skeptical and couldn't live in the world, but you wanted to be there so that now you can kind of see, look at a message and understand what the messenger is doing, either responsibly or

irresponsibly. And we were just talking before, I think if we add artificial intelligence to the equation, you know, if people are looking at me now, is this really me? Is this really Roy Peter Clark talking to you from St. Petersburg, Florida? Or is Chris Voss, God, this robot who's just, you know, he's taken like 10 minutes of my speech and 15 minutes of my videos and he's created this thing that i'm talking about to you and it's ah the monster has arisen so i i think um i think more and more and more we need in childhood education, in secondary and college, and in adult education. We need programs that help people understand what's true with a small t and what's fake with a capital F.

Yeah, critical thinking. You know, I remember watching, I think it was in the 70 seventies when there was this subliminal advertising that was going on and the, I believe all the advertisers try to get together and say, Hey, you know, this is, there's some ethical issues here. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this. You know, they were like, like sex or something would be hidden in in in some sort of cigarette ad the word sex and and uh and after i i read about that as when i was fairly young i started looking at angles like what when i when i see an advertisement i'm like okay who is this made for what is the angle that they're coming at me? Why are they coming at me with this angle? And I apply the same to journalism for the most part and go, okay, what's the angle of this person? Am I seeing a bias in what they're writing and clarifying? Are they trying to sell a story about really the facts

or is this got an angle on it that like, that like the, that, that is a slant they're trying to put forth. And that really helps me out. And one of my, one of my favorite things to do to people is I'll, uh, you know, if we're watching the Super Bowl or something, they play TV ads. My favorite, uh, things that they do, um, is they'll show a woman who, uh, who doesn't have a diamond ring on. And a lot of people don't notice this sleight of hand. And she's going through some sort of, you know, thing that, you know, her life, whatever, and she clearly needs whatever this product is.

And then she finds that product and solves it. And then suddenly she's happy and glowing and her life is wonderful. And guess what she has on? A wedding ring. Yeah. And most what she has on a wedding ring. Yeah. And, uh, most women I'll point that out to them.

I'll go, did you notice that sleight of hand that got played on you? And I'm like, no, I didn't. And most people don't. And just little stuff like that, that sleight of hand that you're like,

you know, it's, you see those commercials with the people who are like, you're like, Oh, do you have the horrible headache? And they've got a face that gives you a headache. And they've got like some music blaring in the background.

And you're like, Oh, I think I'm getting one now. And they're like, Tylenol, uh, take the headache. And then you see,

everyone's like, Oh yeah, it's wonderful. Birds and trees and a marriage ring. And, uh, you know, and it's a sleight of hand thing.

It's a play on an angle that that makes people you know and you know suddenly suddenly there's the fulfilled woman with the family and the pick a fence to her garage and they're on vacation disney that's yeah it's a hallmark becomes a hallmark it becomes a hallmark commercial and you know before she was like i don't know there was a you know the storms of life and i don't know hell and rain fire raining down so uh when we're talking about this if we can go to um so there's a tremendous amount of of new and new information about artificial intelligence and um i'm getting uh lots of i kind of wrote the book i don't want to have to write another book chris you know i really don't man

you know okay so um yeah i write it for you what do you think yeah what do you think about artificial intelligence uh and ai and uh and what is it, chat? Chat GPT is a big thing. GPT. Do we know what GPT stands for? You know, I don't. Neither do I. I used to say, what's that stuff in marijuana?

Is it THC? Yeah. I said, I want you to chat THC. That's what I thought it was when I first heard it. I think there's a general protection. I don't know. There's probably a thing for it. So I pay for it.

So I should think you think I know what it was. You know, so when I said when I get sort of panic panic questions, is this the end of reading and writing? You know, the robot robots taking over. And my, my first response is a kind of my first instinct is to look at the history of information technologies. Yeah, I was, I'm not bragging. My mom says if it's true, my mom used to say, if it's true, it's not bragging. So I have a PhD in medieval literature.

I know it doesn't seem like it's the most useful thing, but I wanted to study the language kind of from the beginning when I was in graduate school. And so when you look, one of the things that happened, let's call the creation of the printing press, right? There was concerns, interesting, probably legitimate ones, about the effect on people's memories. Ah, evil printing press.

I remember that. You know, why, hey, Gutenberg, why do you want to do this and wreck our, you know, we don't have to memorize anything. We can just write it and publish it and keep it. So that was, you know one uh one crisis now if you go ahead to let's say let's go to the middle of the um let's go to the civil war and the concern would be why would i want to read in a newspaper a description of Abraham Lincoln standing with his generals in front of the

tent. If I can see a photograph of Lincoln standing with his generals in front. Oh, there you go. Right? Mm-hmm. All right, let's move to the 20th century. Why would I need to read a text of Churchill's speech to the British people? We will fight them in the hills when I can listen to it on the radio and go on and on and on.

And so there's always that threat perceived or imagined to literacy from new information technologies okay and let's say some of those changes do come true but um yeah i mean i can't be a um i couldn't be i couldn't become a screenwriter until there was a screen that's true um uh i couldn't become a podcaster until there was a a pod and a cast. So these literacy evolves and adapts in many ways, but this is certainly true as well, Chris. There you go.

I want to add one more thing. Sure. And that is that the technology is always way ahead of the ethics and the standards and the practices that are needed to be included in order that the technology be able to be used in the most responsible way for the public good. I think those things are being discussed right now. People who are creating AI are testifying, hey, we've got to be careful here.

You know, let's not forget that this can happen and that can happen. We need to be transparent, you know, all of those things. And I'm glad to see that. And, yeah, even if you're in teaching the high school students as i sometimes do um and they're all getting ready to write their essays to get into the the college of their choices we have to talk about not just the craft of writing but do they want AI to write that for them? Is that going to be a path? Are there some things that AI can do, the robot can do to contribute to their process

while they maintain the primary voice and authorship of the piece. So I think those things are, um, have always been with us and will continue to be. There you go. Uh, so I, I Googled this,

so we don't sound too unintelligent in the show, at least me, myself. Uh, so what the chat GPT stands for, cause I never have asked that question. I probably should. Uh, and I probably should have asked, you know, chat GPT stands for? Cause I never have asked that question. I probably should. Uh, and I probably should have asked, you know, chat GPT, but I decided to Google it anyway. Uh, but it

stands for chat generative pre-trained transformer transformer. That sounds like a terminator. So it is a robot. Yeah. Uh, as long as it doesn't kill me we're all cool I got to tell you a quick anecdote is that my editor at pointer is named Ren Laform and I was standing next to him and he had

he had chat GPT he had it up he was playing with it and he said ask it a question. Oh, what do you mean ask a question? Just ask a question and we'll give it a run. So my first question to chat GPT was, tell me what do you think is the more helpful book for writers the elements of style by strunk and white or writing tools by roy peter clark now i have to say that for people who don't know that um uh elements of style was published originally in 1918 and then redone by E.B. White in the 1950s and sold about 20 million copies.

It's the most popular and best-selling writing book of all time. It's a thin little volume. Oh, wow. And it took about 15 seconds. I don't know if there's a noise that comes with it. And up comes this text, about 10 paragraphs, that does a, I would say, a fair review or a summary of style remains the best-selling writing book, that there's evidence that writing tools is more helpful to a wider variety of writers. And I say, that's it, baby.

This technology is for me. The robot loves my book, so I'm all in. There you go. I'm joking, of course, but that's the story. So I pulled up, it's interesting, and I pulled up this data about an hour ago. OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has just released its iPhone app. So now you can get ChatGPT from OpenAI. There's a few different API versions that are up there.

I was scrolling through here. But now you can get it on your phone, and it'll eventually be in Android soon. So interesting groundbreaking technology right before us here as we're sitting here talking about it. Sure. There you go. Now, let me ask you this. With these AI systems, for example, ChatGPT,

how do we know if we're going to be able to establish what you've written about in your book where we're talking about honesty and clear writing? I mean, my understanding is that it scrapes the Internet, scrapes our knowledge bases. And I think the company tries to give us some sort of guide or controls, although people have kind of figured out how to jimmy rig around them. How do we keep that system honest? Or how do we make sure that what we're reading coming out of chat GPT is honest? Because I mean, imagine if I haven't tried asking about some sort of controversial thing like, you know, there's those people who always think the world is flat and everyone knows it's really square. It's not round and flat.

It's square. Everybody knows that. I'm just kidding, people. Please don't start a controversy over that. There'll be a whole cult that will spring up saying, Chris Foss said it was square, and they'll make me God or something, and then we'll have, like, a religion. Let's just say that there are a lot of square people there you

go there you go well i'm probably one of them um but uh you know how do we how do we uh analyze do we need to do do people who develop ai need to try and make sure that it's honest and clear uh do how do we how do we develop the skills to look at it and go, just because the machine said so doesn't make it true? Yeah. So I had the chance. He was a guy, a scholar who passed away a few years ago named Neil Postman from NYU. Among his other gifts, he was a very wise and interesting thinker about technology. And he happened to be coming through St. Petersburg, and I heard that it was coming into our building and I got a chance to sit with him and ask him, try to get at the essentials

of how he thinks about technology and new technologies. And he offered a formula that I think, maybe an algorithm, we might call it now, that I think continues to work for me. And it goes like this, that any time a new technology is introduced, not just one about communication, but any new technology, let's say about transportation. It brings benefits. And people, when they create it, think about the benefits. And if they're entrepreneurial, the more benefits it has,

the more people will want it, the more it will sell or grow or the more influence it will have. But it has two other things that new technologies almost always do. One is they have unintended side effects. Okay? So we're probably, you and I, our country has been locked, the world has been locked into conflict in the Middle East, primarily because the creation of the internal combustion engine. Yeah, oil.

If there weren't automobiles, if there weren't millions of automobiles, we wouldn't need to extract all that oil, et cetera, et cetera. oil etc etc the other thing that automobiles did was um i think it had some effect on the the environment on the ozone level uh okay i'm not a scientist i'm not trying to even act like one. The other thing that automobiles did is that it changed cities. It changed the way you didn't have to anymore go to the cities to get what you needed, right? It grew the suburbs. It did, and then we needed the interstate highways. And so all of these things, they can't be anticipated. They can't all be imagined. But certainly responsible people with new technology say, what are the benefits?

How can we maximize those? What are the unintended side effects? And what's going to be lost as a result of this new technology that we cherish, like maybe the downtown? And what can we do to compensate for that loss in some way? Now, that means you need responsible corporate people. It means you need philosophers and thinkers and ethicists. It means you need good policymakers. aspects of education. And yeah, I mean, it's hard for, we wind up doing it usually when there's a catastrophe like Chernobyl or something like that. We suddenly now, we pay attention to ways that we haven't in the past.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how it develops. And I'd love to see you write a book on AI. You know, I can still look at the results we get at ChatGPT, and I can still see a robotic, what's the word I'm looking for? There's a static uh tiktok to it there's a there's a uh tone to it or i don't know if it's a tone but there's a gate that it has and gates the word i'm looking for and it's a very robotic gate uh and withstands human sort of things uh and it's very exacting and almost too businesslike. And it's almost like a PR

statement. And so I can always kind of tell that, no, maybe it will get better at adapting to how we use things or humanize things. But it's interesting to me, we had someone on the show, we talked about before the show, I had one author on and he said, it's not that we're going to lose all these jobs and blah, blah, blah, but it's going to make us better editors. But I think in seeing some PR agencies and people that write companies that are discouraging or outlawing in their companies the use of ChatGPT because they realize the importance of human beings having that muscle in their brain to be able to write well and create well if they lose it.

The other aspect is there's copyright issues with with chat gpt since it's scraping everything on the internet and creating an algorithm if it were if that's the right word um there there's a bit of overlap there or you know the the lack of origin of the creativity of not of it and if you're selling creative pr or creative wordsmithing or or marketing or content creation, it's a little hard to do that if everybody gets the same result when they search and chat GPT. It takes away the novelty of it. We were talking about it in our household, not in an academic way, believe me, but in a kind of a fun way. And so I have to be careful because I'm going to say her name, but I don't want her to react. So, Alexa?

Oh, yeah. She hears me. I know what you're talking about, yeah. She hears me. I know what you're talking about, yeah. Okay, so sometimes for Han, when my daughters are around, I ask her, say, can you tell me who is Roy Peter Clark? And in about three or four seconds, you hear this 20-second sort of description in a nice voice of who I am and what some of my career highlights are and things like that. And now, the reason that she can do that is because I have a Wikipedia page, right? And I know she's scrubbing it, to use your word, you know.

She's getting these elements off and reading it. And I said, I think she's a robot. I think that's a form, sort of a basic form of artificial intelligence. She's not creating it. Someone else created the Wikipedia page and she's reading it. So, you know, I think here's my cell phone. I'll hold it up. So here's my cell phone.

I never could have imagined halfway through my career, let's say, that I would be so dependent on this device and this technology. If someone had said, so dependent on this device and this technology. Yeah. If someone had said, are you going to carry a little phone in your pocket? It's going to change the way you see the world

and interact with the world and things like that. So maybe somebody could see that, but I certainly couldn't see it. So how should I say it? I'm loathe to predict what communication technology would look like 10 years from now, for example, or artificial intelligence. But I do think that what we're talking about, that the need to not just not just um talk about not just the ability to create the technology but the ability to create responsible standards and practices for its use that more and, those two things will need to go hand in hand. Because, listen, I've watched maybe 100 robot movies, maybe more in my life.

You and I. It never turns out well. It never, ever turns out well. There you go. So it'll be interesting to see how it goes. And anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? Well, I would just like to say that... Let's see if I can get it here.

So I want you to judge my book by its beautiful cover. There you go. Designed by Keith Hayes. And it's not just for journalists. its beautiful cover. There you go. Designed by Keith Hayes. And it's not just for journalists. It's for writers of all kind, and especially writers who want to make a difference. And it's filled with probably more than a couple of hundred examples of the best work that's been created since the onset of the pandemic.

So it's the first book I wrote, Chris, with the urgency of an emergency, with the urgency of a breaking news story, that we need to know this now. We need to learn how to do this well right now. And thanks for chatting with me and calling it to people's attention. There you go. And thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. www.RoyPeterClark.com there you go and uh fun is fun folks order up the book wherever fine books are sold uh tell it like it is a guide to clear and honest writing available uh april 11 2023 so order it up and get that in your bookshelf so that you can write better. You know, I think it's important we try and get to the truth as much as possible. Anyway, guys, refer to the show

to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com for just Christmas. YouTube.com for just Christmas. LinkedIn.com for just Christmas. We're going to see this on the big LinkedIn newsletter. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.