Gašper Beguš on Why Language Doesn’t Make Humans Special

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš also talk about what whale communication and the recent progress on AI tell us about the human brain. Gašper  Beguš is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, where he focuses on interpretable AI and combines linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning, neuroscience, and marine biology. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš discuss what makes human language exceptional compared to animal communication, whether whales and other animals have true language capabilities, and how properties like cultural transmission and recursion distinguish human speech. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠. Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Right, that's it. Come on. Lights out. You've got a test tomorrow. Just two minutes. I'm about to reach the next level. It's going off now. Yeah, whatever. Let's see. Where's the app? Oh, here it is. What? How? Oh, no. You're out. Better look next time. Mom! It's game over for late nights on school nights. EE Wi-Fi controls help you get them off the Wi-Fi and into bed.
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0:29.6	If language is just externalization algorithm, then animals and other species might have pretty complex lives.
0:38.3	It's just we haven't figure out their window to their lives yet.
0:41.8	I mean, in some cases we have, right?
0:43.7	For Alex the parrot, we use our own language.
0:46.2	We learned Alex, the parrot, our language,
0:49.1	and then we were able to see, oh, wow, it can count.
0:52.2	It can do all sorts of these complex operations.
0:55.0	And maybe for other species, we just haven't found that window yet.
0:58.0	And the hope is that we find that window.
1:01.0	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:10.0	Well, this was just one of the most fun and fascinating conversations I have had on the podcast in a very long time.
1:17.4	I had Kaspar Beguson, who is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, and we talked about all things at the intersection of language, animal communication, and artificial intelligence.
1:33.1	We start by covering some of the basics. What actually is language?
1:36.1	Is there's something specific, something unique about how humans use language?
1:41.2	Why is he arguing that in many ways, the way we use language is not so different from language. Why is he arguing that in many ways the way we use language is not so
1:46.7	different from apes, from parrots, from dogs, from birds, from whales, then we might have
1:54.8	thought. We go on to think about what that tells us about the nature of language. Why it is, for example,
2:04.5	that recent technological advances may suggest that Noam Chomsky was wrong in his theory of universal
2:13.3	grammar. We really try and understand what it means when animals communicate. Why it is that birds
	...

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