So what you hear people saying now, well, because AI is changing the workforce, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important.

Mm-hmm.

And I may have said that to myself contemplating my own children's future.

Yes.

Yes. This is exactly the wrong case.

Okay.

Okay.

Jennifer Frey, welcome to interesting times.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

So I am, like you, I think, a book person.

And I feel like for basically, if not my entire life, at least my entire adult life, I have been living in the shadow of the decline of all that I hold dear in terms of novels, poetry, philosophy, essays, history, right?

Literacy is going down, fewer young people read books every year, and the story of the academic humanities is basically a story of declining enrollment and

disappearing jobs. And now comes AI, maybe as the final destroyer, burying Plato and Aristotle in a wave of slop, or maybe, maybe as a weird

kind of savior, creating a world where suddenly having a broad understanding of history and

human nature becomes important again.

And I have you here.

You're a liberal arts evangelist who built a college humanities program that was

briefly quite successful. And we're going to talk about the decline of the humanities, maybe if we can be

optimistic about their potential rebirth, and maybe just about the career prospects for our kids.

But I'm going to...

That's a lot.

It's a lot.

...