Blah Blah Blah

I listen to too many podcasts across business, technology, theology, gaming, cooking, and politics, and I’ve noticed a growing verbal tic: blah, blah, blah.

Listen long enough, and you’ll hear hosts deploy it as a placeholder for facts they assume the audience already knows. (“You have to prep a pitch deck, blah, blah, blah…”)

This instinct isn’t new. Blah blah blah has been around for more than a century. Et cetera is its ancient Roman ancestor. Shorthand is eternally useful. But the apparent rise in its use makes me wonder whether AI is leaking into human cognition.

We’re good at spotting AI’s obvious tells – the em dash addiction, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” cadence, the suspiciously symmetrical prose. But the greater risk may be subtler, in that we’re outsourcing the connective tissue of thought itself.

AI trains us to think in placeholders. We become adept at knowing about information without fully internalizing it. You remember the broad shape of an argument, or the gist of a body of literature, but not the exact claims or the reasoning they demonstrate.

Why develop an economical argument or summarize facts with precision when you can gesture vaguely toward a body of knowledge and encourage someone to check Claude?

Blah, blah, blah can become a performance of knowledge rather than knowledge itself. In podcasts, that’s particularly annoying because the human is the whole point. You’re not prompting a machine. Your job is to take what you know and make it vivid, efficient, and worth hearing. Handwaving the substance feels less like brevity than intellectual corner-cutting.

All this said, I can’t prove the triple-B is rising, or that AI is the cause. And Plato had similar concerns about the impact of writing on individual memories. Still, I do worry that we’ll outsource more and more of our thinking to machines and, yadda yadda yadda, eventually forget how to think in full sentences.