Writing Boots

“Most people, I think, are feeling grief,” says Cornell University mathematics professor Steven Strogatz on The New York Times‘ podcast, “The Daily” yesterday. He was talking about how advances in AI—by March of this year, AI was doing math at the competency of “a very good graduate student”—are threatening to take away nothing less than his and his colleagues’ purpose in life.

I strongly recommend listening to this whole emotional interview, well led by Rachel Abrams.

Meanwhile, though, see what else this math square says that writers might relate to, on a bad day:

“You know what’s actually being lost is, we like to think of ourselves as heroes. And maybe that’s over. That’s the big news. It’s hard to be a hero if you can’t be the first to solve a problem or to understand something or to explain it to the world.”

“Think of whatever it is to do whatever your favorite puzzle is—jigsaw, sudoku, crossword puzzle—it sort of feels good to be stumped. And then it’s satisfying when you have a breakthrough. Everything clicks into place. People like that feeling and a lot of us live for that. We want that. It’s like an addiction. We want that feeling over and over. So we’re in the business of pleasuring ourselves that way. … I wanted to say it that way because I actually think it is sexual, slightly.

“What’s going on is there’s a quest. In our case, we want answers. We want solutions and we want understanding. We want ‘ah-ha’ moments, and so the fact that the problems exist and have to be seduced into yielding their secrets … it’s kind of sexy!”

“The highest compliment you could give to another mathematician is, ‘Oh, what an elegant proof.’ What does elegant mean for us? Elegant for us means something that has a surprise value, but that is also inevitable once you see it. You know, it’s a head-slapping thing, like, ‘That is so perfect, that is such a great argument, why didn’t I think of that?’ So for a long time, the AIs, the computers, were not producing elegant math. They behaved like machines. They would get the job done, but with no panache, no flair. But, by May of this year, everybody sat up straight when AI solved a problem that the world’s best mathematicians were interested in. And it did it with flair.”

He describes the problem, and the maniacal math genius/mentor who posed it—with deep feeling. As he describes this picture of the genius, Paul Erdős, and his eight-year-old pupil, Terrence Tao, who became and remains one of the great mathematicians in the world, he breaks down. “Happy as clams,” Strogatz describes them.

Strogatz relays a joke that’s going around among tech heads on X, about the gathering irrelevance of that very same Terrence Tao: “‘Put the fries in the bag, Terrence.’ … There’s certain people who are gloating, who have a feeling of satisfaction that the smartest kid in the class is now going to be out of a job, like the rest of us.”

So, the mathematician asks, what’s the point? “If the AI can do math better than any human being, sure I could sit there and learn from it. But I want to discover things too. I want that thrill … So if you take that away from me, what am I doing?”

And he goes to Ecclesiastes: “Everything is beautiful in its time.” And he says through tears, “If everything is beautiful in its time, we get to have a turn where we’re in love, we’re creative, we do what’s meaningful, we get to walk our dog, whatever. We do have a time. Otherwise, we’re dust, right? We’re ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The beautiful part is the in between.”

And Abrams, now in tears herself, asks Strogatz if AI is making him more religious.

“But I don’t think it’s about God. I think it’s about people. Because that I do believe in.”

This ole writer, too.

Was on a Zoom the other day with a woman who runs conferences for the Aspen Institute. I was telling her that crunch time is upon me and my crew for the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association this month—hey, registration deadline is this Friday, folks—and she asked me how many participants we usually have.

“It sells out every year at a little over 100 participants,” I told her, having no idea how big the conferences she plans are, but wanting her to understand that this was no piddling palaver I was putting together. So I heard myself add, “But it feels like a thousand.”

She cocked her head, and so I had to explain.

I said the speechwriters who come, come from their far-flung locales and thus cultures and sensibilities. At this very conference, a speechwriter from the Federal Reserve of Atlanta might find himself sharing a drink with speechwriter who was once the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Poland, and a Canadian expat based in Switzerland who has written hundreds of speeches for the United Nations, and the most steadily successful independent speechwriter anyone has ever heard of, from Dayton, Ohio.

I said speechwriters also served widely different industries. The speechwriter to the president of Williams College can find common ground with the speechwriter to a senior executive Exxon, who can empathize with a speechwriter at Planned Parenthood, who will be surprised to see how much professional angst he shares with the speechwriter to the Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (But it would be handy if the well-meaning but bumbling emcee could help them make these connections. Especially because speechwriters are introverts, as a rule.)

Sometimes, spelling and pronunciation is the problem. I’m looking at the great British speechwriter Lech Mintowt-Czyz, otherwise known as the Human Eye Chart.

And each one of these folks contains multitudes. Like the longtime speechwriter to Peyton Manning, who is holding a special luncheon session at the conference to discuss the rhetoric of war and peace, in order to prep for some consultation she’s doing with the Vatican this fall. And the stand-up comic, who is teaching speechwriters how to help their speakers be better. And the former Facebook speechwriter, who is gathering a group of independent speechwriters who want to build a big exec comms business. Oh, and of course the roughly half of these 100 who I don’t yet know, but whose jangled career stories—”speechwriting” is an abbreviation of “jangled career story”—I will hear in amazement over these days.

Viewpoint diversity? Got that covered. Libertarians and liberals, capitalists and communists, union boosters and union busters. On AI alone, we have the most enthusiastic proponent of using AI for writing who I have encountered on the earth—and also the lustiest opponent. I’m calling that session “the donnybrook.”

We’ll have undergrad visitors on one hand (for a mentoring session)—and on the other, a legendary scribe who recently retired after 33 years writing speeches for the CEO of … wait for it … AARP.

Oh, and I just learned there’s a chance a former White House speechwriter who was John Hughes’ inspiration for Ferris Bueller might be making an appearance? On a panel with speechwriters to Richard Nixon and Barack Obama and most of ’em in between. I’ll keep you posted.

So yeah, it’s about a hundred, but it feels like a thousand.

So, why don’t you join us? You’ll fit right in.

I’m starting a new series here called, “I don’t have time to play tiddlywinks with your ego.”

(I once had a funny colleague who said that, jokingly. I’m not saying it jokingly.)

To wit:

If you are an important enough person to hire a professional speechwriter, you are important enough to listen to that speechwriter’s advice.

Which usually boils down to: Please use every speaking opportunity to reveal yourself to all the people who have traveled and disrupted their schedules and sat quietly and still to watch you step up on a stage and say things. If they have done all that, it’s because they see this occasion as a chance to learn what’s so great about you, and also that you’re a decent human being. All the speechwriter wants to do is help you get those two things across.

So:

If your speechwriter wants to sit down and talk to you about what you want to say, then sit the down and talk to them—if necessary, at length. (Because how can you justify the expense of paying a professional speechwriter but not investing the time to talk to that person?)

If your speechwriter wants you to tell a story about yourself, tell the story, or come up with another one that you do want to tell. Oh, you don’t like to talk about yourself because you’re too humble? Sorry, Honey, you’re the CEO of Chevron. We don’t pay you $26 million to be humble. We pay you that much to lead. Which requires letting people know who you are and what you think (at minimum).

If your speechwriter wants you to share your vision for the future of the organization, industry, society that is affording you an amazingly good income, share your vision (in the most imaginative and compelling terms). And if you don’t have a vision? Your speechwriter can help you with that too, but it’s going to cost more.

If your speechwriter suggests that you utter language that the audience might actually remember, or make an argument that someone could potentially disagree with, or issue marching orders that might actually make a difference in the world? Assume that’s good advice and if you quibble, do so in a collaborative and not contumacious way. Yes, contumacious. Look it up.

And finally, when you and your speechwriter finally agree on what you are going to say, say it! With the same language both of you worked hard to come up with. Don’t shamble off the script to tell an aside. This isn’t happy hour. It’s a speech, which is Latin for: the robbery of the precious time of dozens or hundreds or thousands of other people, who have consented to this out of a belief that something civically useful might occur.

Your speechwriter only wants to honor those people by making that thing occur. Help your speechwriter, and help yourself.