Bruce Holsinger: "Culpability" | Oprah's Book Club

This episode of Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks features coffee and conversation with award-winning author, Bruce Holsinger, in a café in Seattle, Starbucks’ hometown. Chosen as the 116th Oprah’s Book Club selection, Holsinger’s brand-new scorching summer read, called Culpability, is an intense page-turner about a family that survives a crash in an autonomous car only to ask the question: who was at fault? Was it the teenage son who was texting in the driver’s seat, the distracted parents, or the car itself? The book that Oprah calls “a modern tale of our times” also touches on our current and fast-approaching future of living with artificial intelligence including chatbots, self-driving cars, drones, and other non-human forces shaping our lives. Oprah and Holsinger are joined by an audience of readers as they enjoy a Salted Caramel Mocha Strato Frappuccino® drink and talk through many thought-provoking questions about the book. BUY THE BOOK! https://amzn.to/4xp2F9D Subscribe: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah?sub_confirmation=1 ⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah?sub_confirmation=1%20 Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Foprah%2F&is_from_rle Facebook https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@oprah?lang=en Listen to the full podcast: Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 #oprahsbookclub

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:33Oprah Winfrey?

  Hey, audience.

• 0:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Hey, hey, hey. Bruce Holden, there. All right. Have a seat, Bruce.

• 0:41Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 0:41Oprah Winfrey?

  These are your people.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 0:43Oprah Winfrey?

  These are your people who have read your book. Didn't you love this book? Oh, my God, that Alice, honey, child.

• 0:52Oprah Winfrey?

  OK, so many things to talk about. I'm so excited.

• 0:57Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi, welcome, everybody, to Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. And we are in the beautiful Emerald City of Seattle, the home of Starbucks. They've welcomed us into their headquarters. Really fun to be here. And I'm joined in this cozy cafe with an audience full of readers with a good book, good coffee, and good company. Cheers for this month's summer pick. Starbucks is pairing a salted caramel mocha strato frappuccino. OK? It's a modern twist on a classic and a sweet and salty indulgence. Icy cold, frappuccino base, blended with rich mocha sauce, topped with salted caramel,

• 1:41Oprah Winfrey?

  cream, cold foam, and finished with a drizzle of salted caramel. OK, so for my 116th book club, it is a scorching summer page-turner and a tense family drama, wouldn't you say? Lot of tension in that car. It's a thrilling read to bring with you to the beach, or the pool, or on a family trip. I'm telling you, I'm taking a family trip. I've already ordered eight copies of this book. Everybody has to read it. And then we discuss it at dinner. That's what we're going to be doing. It's called Culpability by award winning author Bruce Holsinger. Now, I love the eye catching waterfront cover that captures the essence of the story. So whoever designed this, bravo to you.

• 2:24Oprah Winfrey?

  But culpability, I have to tell you, is a modern tale for our times, tackling an issue that we're just barely beginning to grapple with, AI. Now, it's going to give people so much to think about. The second I finished it, I called Bruce. Bruce?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Oprah Winfrey calling you right now. He didn't believe it was me.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:49Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Hi. Who would?

• 2:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. I'm calling about culpability. I just read it and I want to choose it as my summer read for 2025.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Oprah. I'm shaking. I'm.

• 3:13Oprah Winfrey?

  I welcome you to Starbucks and the book club.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Oprah.

• 3:16Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I'm so excited. I said, I'm so excited for everybody to read this book. So I want to ask the audience, what did you think? What did you think of the book? So good, right? Okay, all right, okay. Christine, where are you? Tell us what you thought.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it was super thought provoking. I'm a new mom and so I, it really gave me a lot to think about in terms of how I want to approach technology. I've thought about sort of the obvious screen time cell phones, but it opened my eyes how many blind spots I have with emerging technology like AI.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  We all do, I think.

• 3:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, Manny, how about you?

• 3:50Speaker 05

  Hi. So for me, I thought, you know, AI is such a relevant topic, obviously, and it's coming at us so quickly, but it can feel abstract and kind of hard to even wrap our minds around. So that juxtaposed with this family that had very family like tendencies that I could know them, you could know them, it really humanized the conversation and made me think about it deeper.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Wonderful, thank you.

• 4:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Chrissy?

• 4:12Speaker 06

  I think for me, it's the human experience of this generation. And what sits with me after reading it is I just, Alice is in my heart. And I think about where's Alice later in life? And I think about that related to my nephew, who's 16 right now. And what's his generation going to be like?

• 4:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, I have to tell you all. Chrissy and I work out together. And we were in the gym and I was telling her. She says, what's going on with you? And I said, oh, God, I've read seven books. I can't find a book for summer. And she said, oh, I may have something for you. And she comes the next day and she hands me this book. And usually when people hand me a book, I'm like, okay, good, okay. But I actually read it overnight. So I thank you, Chrissy. Chrissy is the reason I'm here with this book. Okay. So this is your fifth fiction book. And you also teach at the University of Virginia. And I hear you dedicated this to your students. Why?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Thank you for noticing that. My students are at the heart of what I do, I think. And I often think that my students, whether they're undergraduate students who are taking my literature survey from Beowulf to Milton, or they're students that I teach in fiction writing classes at our local nonprofit in Charlottesville, which is called Writer House, or graduate students. And I'm working with them on their dissertations. I always feel like they teach me more than I teach them. And that the experience of working with students of so many different ages and backgrounds teaches me about the world, teaches me about books, about the literature that I thought I knew. And I realized, as I was putting this, the final touches on culpability is that I hadn't dedicated a book to my students yet,

• 5:54Speaker 03

  to any of my students, let alone to all of them. So it felt like what I wanted to do.

• 5:59Oprah Winfrey?

  So when you were putting the final touches on it, did you know it was going to be culpability? Did you always have that name?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  No, I didn't. Oh, it was called a lot of different things. And I've now repressed all the other titles because, obviously, this is what...

• 6:13Oprah Winfrey?

  This is the title.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  And I chose that word. The book has that sense of looking at problems of moral responsibility. Who's at fault? Who's responsible? And in law and in history, I think the word culpability has such an interesting resonance about, you know, you can be culpable without being guilty. You can be guilty without being culpable. So I wanted that, that kind of slightly ambivalent sense of our responsibility for what we do and don't do.

• 6:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I think it was actually the perfect word because everybody, in the end, was culpable.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 6:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes. Okay, so culpability is a family drama told through the lens of a husband and father Noah. And it's about living with the technology confronting us today, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, chatbot friends, autonomous drones, and smart homes. So what gave you the idea to tell this story, to write about what happens through this family?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Well, this story, this novel, began with the setting, actually. And that's not usually the way that I operate. Often, when I begin a novel, I'll have a character that I imagine and cling on to, or a situation in life that I want to explore, or a moral arc, or just a plot. In this case, it really was the setting. And it was the first summer of the pandemic. And our family wanted to get out of Charlottesville for a little while. So we Airbnb'd this house on the northern neck of Virginia, right near the Chesapeake Bay. It was a house on an inlet. There were kayaks. And I went out kayaking with my sons the first day there. And on the way out of the cove, at the point, you know, it's a pretty rustic rural area.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  And there was this absolutely gleaming compound with a fake lighthouse, with a fake beach, with a pristine lawn. And this, what was probably once a beautiful, old, charming farmhouse that was renovated to the teeth.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  And as we were kayaking back in, I heard this noise. If you've read the first part of the book.

• 8:21Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  You know what that noise is. And this helicopter lands on a helipad. And a couple of folks get out and we just kayaked past. I just thought that was a little bit weird. Nothing happened. The plot that you read did not unfold with my family, thank God, over the course of that week. But that got into my head.

• 8:40Oprah Winfrey?

  But it registered.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It registered. It was like a brain worm. And over the next few years.

• 8:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Don't you love the way authors think like this? I love this. Yeah, I love the process.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  And it just, you know, the story layered itself in, right? Then I added, I thought, you know, where is that? Where is that going to take place? What's going to happen? So it really did begin with the setting, which becomes kind of a character in the novel. And, and everything else fell into place once I figured out what I wanted to do.

• 9:05Oprah Winfrey?

  How long did it take you to write it?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  From beginning to end, probably about a year and a half. And then there was a revision process, another revision process.

• 9:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Did you know where the story was going when you started? Did you know that it was going to have the ending that it had?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  No, I'm not a, I'm not an outliner.

• 9:22Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  I often get myself into trouble for that. I have a lot of false starts. I write, there are plotters and pantsers, like see to your pants, or a careful plotter. I'm definitely a pantser. I am writing, I often have no idea where things are going to go. And then at the end, there's too many.

• 9:40Oprah Winfrey?

  So as the writer, did the story start where you started it?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  No, actually, the very beginning, the first version, it started with the family going down to the, to the northern neck.

• 9:51Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  To the bay. And then there was a lot of backstory shoveled in after that. And then I realized I really want to start with the accident. So instead of getting that as backstory, you get it right up front. You get it in the first chapter. So there's no mystery about, you know, how the book begins.

• 10:07Oprah Winfrey?

  I think you do an incredible job of challenging the reader. With the moral and ethical dilemmas around artificial intelligence. And I read that you spent three years researching this book. And in that research, who did you talk to and what surprised you?

• 10:24Speaker 03

  I talked to people who work on the ethics of AI. I have a friend in the law school at UVA who works on algorithmic bias. I talked to her. I talked to some lawyers at a few tech companies. I talked to people working with the machinery of AI. And I also just did a lot of reading, as I do for for all of my research. And I suppose one of the biggest surprises for me, well, there's a few. One is that everybody that you talk to in AI, and you've probably already had this experience, has a P doom number. Do you know what this is? P doom is a number from, it can be from one to 10, or it can be from one to 100. It's it's your percentage of certainty that AI will lead to human extinction.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  So you talked to someone, I haven't talked to him, but people like Sam Altman, or the guys who run the podcast Hard Fork, they all have a P doom number. And most people's these days, just to reassure you, are pretty low. But but it is out there. And then a few other things surprised me. One of them is that is how how many different views there are among experts in the field about where this is going. You have minimizers, people who, you know, just kind of shrug it off and think, oh, large language models like ChatGPT, it's just glorified autocomplete. And we don't really need to worry about it, except in so far as it's, you know, destroying the environment and creating all kinds of bias and misinformation.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  And then there are people on the other end of the spectrum who look at something like autonomous warfare and think, you know, we need to watch out. This is coming, and it's coming now. So there's a real just spectrum of views about where we're going, where we are.

• 12:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, we don't want to give away too much of the plot, especially that jaw dropping twist at the very end. A lot of people didn't see that coming. I knew something was coming. I didn't know that was coming.

• 12:22Oprah Winfrey?

  But my hope is that you will buy Couplesy and you will read the book and get a copy for a friend because you're gonna want to talk about it with somebody afterwards. And you're gonna wanna call somebody. I call Bruce. So will you set up the story for us?

• 12:39Speaker 03

  The call?

• 12:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, no, the book.

• 12:44Oprah Winfrey?

  Call's fine.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  I can talk about the call all day. I've only talked about it to two people so far. Yeah, so the book, the book begins when a family of five is driving a minivan or driving a semi-autonomous vehicle down for a lacrosse tournament in Delaware. And the older son, the older child in the family, Charlie, is at the wheel, but he's not really driving. His dad is sitting next to him. He's on his laptop, trying to finish a memo. In the backs are his, Charlie's sisters and his mom. So his sisters are on their phones doing various things. And then his mom is writing in her notebook. Her mom is named Lorelei.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  And she's kind of, I think, the beating heart of the book. She's a really, you know, the love of Noah's life, but also the great mystery of his life. And she's a world-leading expert on the ethics of artificial intelligence. And her life, in some ways, her career, is a real mystery to Noah. And what happens in the car, there's this horrible accident. The minivan collides head-on with another car coming in the opposite direction. And it kills an elderly couple in the other car.

• 14:01Oprah Winfrey?

  That happens fairly early on, so we're not giving away a lot.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  No spoilers, that happens at the very beginning.

• 14:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Even really in the first chapter. And from that moment on, the novel unfolds into...

• 14:13Speaker 03

  I think a kind of intricate plot involving all the different characters, but we see it mostly through Noah's point of view. And we're exploring throughout the novel questions of responsibility. Who is culpable for this accident? Or what is culpable for this accident? And how does it involve the personalities and actions and faults and weaknesses of these various characters? But also, how does it involve that autonomous mind behind the wheel? Which Noah is thinking about right before the accident happens.

• 14:48Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, I thought it was so interesting. How many of you knew early on that Alice was talking to the chatbot? And then, how many of you took a while to figure it out? Okay, that's good. You know, a lot of people are using AI chatbots now for therapy.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:05Oprah Winfrey?

  You obviously knew that.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, adolescents too.

• 15:07Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes, adolescents too. I recently heard a woman say that she uses it as her therapist and asked it, "Who am I without my accomplishments?" And that the answer that she received led her on a path of self-discovery that she hadn't experienced in all these years talking to real therapists.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:27Oprah Winfrey?

  I find that fascinating.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  It is fascinating.

• 15:28Oprah Winfrey?

  That a chatbot knows more about you than your own therapist.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Or yourself, right?

• 15:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Or yourself.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Knows more about you than you know, right? And that, I'll tell you, that since you asked the research question, that's one bit of research that I was a little bit afraid to do. I did not sign up for an AI therapist.

• 15:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Because I was just a little worried about what, you know, I read a lot about what, I listened to some, a lot of podcasts, I listened to some transcripts of those sessions. But I didn't go there myself. I was just a little worried about what would happen.

• 16:00Oprah Winfrey?

  You were afraid of what would happen?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, what I would learn about myself, you know.

• 16:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, so let's bring in the audience. They've all read Culpability and have a lot of questions for Bruce. Where's Angela?

• 16:11Speaker 07

  I'm right here.

• 16:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Oh, hi, Angela.

• 16:13Speaker 07

  Hi. So Bruce, I surprised myself and I connected with Blair. And so my question is, did you intend to depict Blair as a good chatbot? Was that intentional?

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Great question, yeah. So Blair is the chatbot who gets involved with...

• 16:30Oprah Winfrey?

  You related to Blair? What did you say?

• 16:32Speaker 07

  It's because Blair was trying to be good at the end of the day. At first, I thought Blair was a predator. But then, actually, it turns out Blair's a chatbot trying to be good.

• 16:40Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, OK. So you related to the good chatbot.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:45Oprah Winfrey?

  I wasn't sure Blair's not gonna turn on her later on. I mean, I'm thinking Blair's not good forever. That's what I thought. But good for you, though.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  And can... And it's a wonderful question, because can these algorithms be good? And what does good mean in human terms, right? And Blair is following a pattern, right? That's her therapy at heart. That's why, at one point, Alice calls her out and says, "What am I doing talking to a chatbot?" And what does Blair say? "Technically, I'm a large language model, Alice." But so Blair has a little bit of an edge, too, I think. And I wanted to depict her slash it not as a monster, not as someone who's manipulative, but as someone who, if not good in herself,

• 17:36Speaker 03

  is trying to make Alice good, is trying to make Alice better, right? And in that sense, it fits in with Lorelai's project in her life to make AI good, to make it more responsible. But maybe, yeah, yes and no, I suppose, is the honest answer to your question.

• 17:53Oprah Winfrey?

  So, Tim, I know you've been following the book club, and you read so many of our books. Thank you for being here.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 17:58Oprah Winfrey?

  You had a question about this idea of goodness, right?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, from the very first page, Bruce, my brain was reeling. And it is about this idea of goodness. So she was interested in how we learn to be good. Lorelai wanted to train machines to be good in the same way we train ourselves. And I immediately had to shut the book and think, whose definition of goodness would we be using? Who defines what goodness means?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Well, people have been asking that question for 3,000 years, right? Since ancient Greek philosophy.

• 18:28Oprah Winfrey?

  But we're gonna answer it here at Starbucks.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Today, this book will tell you.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Everything you need to know about how to be good. So Lorelei is struggling with that, of course, throughout her career, throughout her work with algorithms, throughout her teaching life and her research. And, you know, there's so many different ethical models that, just in the history of philosophy and in practical applied philosophy. And we see a number of them come up in the book. But the great thing about fiction is you don't have to decide, right? You don't have to decide who gets to decide what is goodness, right? The characters are all exploring that from their own different angles. The novel is asking readers to ponder that in their own lives.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  So, you know, what I think you can do, though, with culpability, if you wanna look at it this way, is you could find those moments of goodness in the novel, right? Those moments when characters are reaching out to each other, despite the bitterness between siblings, despite these clashes between Noah and Lorelei, you know, finding these moments of goodness to cling to and maybe learn something from them. I know that's one of the ways that I read fiction.

• 19:42Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay. Inside the novel, there is a book within a book. Noah's wife, Lorelei, is a world famous philosopher and a leader in AI, as we've said. And throughout the book, we read excerpts from her book called Silicon Souls on the culpability of artificial minds. And here's one of those thought-provoking passages. Lorelei writes, "Like our children, our intelligent machines often break rules and disobey commands. The danger comes when we start to assume that such behavior is intentional, when we regard an algorithm as a willful child. Such habits reflect a common and understandable tendency to humanize artificial intelligence."

• 20:27Oprah Winfrey?

  Chatbots, voice assistants, smart home interfaces, these systems are designed to respond in recognizably human ways. We give them names like Siri and Alexa. We speak to them as if they share our worldview or care about our feelings and futures. So is that the slippery slope?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  It is.

• 20:48Oprah Winfrey?

  Because AI can think. We think it's thinking, and we humans are fooled into thinking that it can or should be caring about us.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, Oprah.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  We think it thinks like us. We think when it does things, it's doing things like us. We give it our names. We give it personalities. We...

• 21:10Oprah Winfrey?

  People are falling in love with it.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  People, yeah, are falling in love. And there's been, you know, movies about that and novels.

• 21:16Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Somebody back there is falling in love with a chatbot. I have to figure out who that is. But, yes, and, you know, the technical term that Lorelei uses for that is anthropomorphic projection, right? We are imagining that these chatbots are humans and we're interacting with them in that way, you know? And think of the way that Noah deals with the smart home, right? And think of the way that Alice interacts with Blair, right? We want them to be humans and therefore we act like they're humans. And in some ways, even, I think, and going back to your question about...

• 22:00Oprah Winfrey?

  I think there are a lot of families now. Alexa's like a part of the family.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, Alexa plays music for us. What could be gooder than that, right?

• 22:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's like they... I think even researchers have this stumbling block where they want to humanize this, all these AIs. But one of the other excerpts from Lorelei's book is where she talks about the AIs as cold and calculating and indifferent, right? And that indifference can be masked as care and as goodness and as compassion. That's one of the things I find the most frightening.

• 22:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Do you think we're ready to embrace self-driving cars?

• 22:42Speaker 03

  We already have.

• 22:43Oprah Winfrey?

  I think we're there.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. You look, you go around San Francisco.

• 22:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  You can summon a Waymo.

• 22:48Oprah Winfrey?

  A Waymo, I was gonna say.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  A driverless taxi. There are, when you're driving down interstates, driverless semi-trucks right now. Not many of them yet. But they're coming, more and more are coming. There was a big article in the New York Times about them.

• 23:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Driverless semi trucks.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Driverless semi trucks. And you can go and you can buy a luxury car right now with autonomous driving mode or hands-free driving as one of the features. It's part of the trim package, right? In a lot of cars right now. So that's coming, whether we like it or not.

• 23:20Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, I know. I can see that that is, that is the future. And I can see all the people saying, no, I'd never drive. The same people are saying, I'm gonna stick with my horse.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:33Oprah Winfrey?

  That's right.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  We don't have self-driving horses yet.

• 23:35Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, we don't.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Actually, we do. What am I saying?

• 23:37Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm gonna stick to my horse. I'm telling you, that automobile is a terrible thing. I have such gratitude for you, dear listener, for taking the time to join me for this Oprah's Book Club conversation. Coming up, more with celebrated author Bruce Holsinger. We are talking about my 116th Book Club selection, Culpability, which explores our current and fast approaching uncertain world of living with AI, but through a family's point of view. It is so relatable. We've got more thoughtful questions from our audience of readers after this break.

• 24:15Speaker 08

  This episode is brought to you by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, HBO Max presents Rooster. Starring Steve Carell, this new comedy series focuses on the complicated relationship between a successful author and his daughter. Don't miss the series IGN called Hilarious and Brilliant. Rooster is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now.

• 24:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Welcome back to Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. I am so glad you're here. My hope is that you read my Book Club picks and then you can deepen the reading experience by listening to my conversations with the authors. My 116th Book Club selection is Culpability by Bruce Holsinger. It's about a family who experiences a car accident and in the aftermath, struggles with the impact of AI on all their lives. It may be a work of fiction, but it is oh, so relatable. Let's get back to questions from our audience.

• 25:09Speaker 09

  Yes, ma'am. Hi Oprah, so happy to be here.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 25:12Speaker 09

  Bruce, I have a question around privilege. I thought it was such an important part of the story. Um, how it showed up in the AI that people had access to? And what um, they had to bear with that technology and those choices of the AI? When you were talking about Yemen and things like that with the drones.

• 25:31Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 25:31Speaker 09

  Um, or even just the their everyday life, how AI? And privilege was helping drive their decisions that they were making. Um, whether it was the young child drinking or kind of their approach to what was going on in the house. So question for you is with privilege, how did you use that to kind of shape? The decisions that people could make um, or got to avoid in their lives?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Wonderful question, Shannon. Yeah, privilege is a theme that I have been completely obsessed with for my last few novels. I wrote a novel called The Gifted School that was about kind of snowplow parents trying to get their kids? Into a magnet school for exceptionally gifted kids. My last novel was called The Displacements. It was about the world's first category six hurricane? And how one seemingly privileged family? Dealt with the aftermath of that catastrophe? And then this book is is looking at uh, I guess, privileged through a number of different lenses, right? You have Daniel Monet, of course, the tech billionaire. Um, who is one of the most privileged people on earth and is using uh? Using the the tools at his disposal? To create these ever more powerful algorithms.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  And we learn later in the novel, no spoilers, that you know, that there's a dark purpose behind that ultimately? That Lorelei is somehow implicated in. Um, and then, you know, Noah, of course, comes from an unprivileged background. And he's dealing with a much more, you know, blue blooded Lorelei and her family. Um, and so he filters his experience in part through that category. Right? And and his his awareness of the differences.

• 27:06Oprah Winfrey?

  He's always feeling less than.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Always feeling less than, yes, exactly. From the very beginning, even from his wedding day. Right? When his sister in law um, puts him down a little bit. So, yeah, so privilege is a a theme that that you'll find running through all of all of what I write. Yeah, thank you for the question, though.

• 27:25Oprah Winfrey?

  There's a moment in the book when Lorelai confronts her husband, who thinks that she's having an affair. And one of the things she says is, "You love me, I know that. You care about me. You want what's best for me, for our marriage, for our kids, of course you do, but sometimes the way you look at me, it makes me feel like you think I'm a freak or some kind of alien or even an AI, like you're afraid of what you'll find if you look too hard." You think many people are afraid to look too hard at AI?

• 27:50Speaker 03

  I think so, yes.

• 27:52Oprah Winfrey?

  I think so.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it's, it's, one of the paradoxes of AI is it's right in front of our eyes, right? It's right there and it's, it's interacting with us all the time. Pick up your phone when this is done and there will be an AI there probably, looking at you just as more than you're looking at it. And in the novel, I, I wanted to think about that, that moment and that came to me very late in the revision process.

• 28:19Oprah Winfrey?

  I can see you all, because everybody's thinking, because I think you're thinking about that question, right? That, I'm so glad that landed with you. We all are afraid to think about it, to look at it too hard because of the arguments on both sides.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:35Oprah Winfrey?

  But we also know it's coming. That part of it is, we know it's coming and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  And, and Noah is looking at Lorelai. And one of the reasons she feels so self-conscious in that passage is she knows that she's kind of a mystery, kind of a freak to Noah, right? In his eyes, even though he's the one person in the world who loves her most and.

• 29:01Oprah Winfrey?

  But she feels superior. You gotta admit, she feels superior.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  I don't know, do you think?

• 29:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Oh, yes, she does.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  I have failed, I.

• 29:09Oprah Winfrey?

  She does. She, don't you think she feels superior? She knows, huh? Her sister does.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Her sister does, exactly. Thank you.

• 29:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Her sister does. You don't think she does?

• 29:20Speaker 09

  I don't think she does.

• 29:22Oprah Winfrey?

  No.

• 29:23Speaker 09

  I think she feels misunderstood.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Misunderstood, exactly, yeah.

• 29:26Oprah Winfrey?

  You think she feels misunderstood? Okay.

• 29:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, tell me, tell me, tell me why you think she feels misunderstood?

• 29:35Speaker 10

  Why, I do?

• 29:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. You're the one that said that, though. So, but you tell me why. You said you don't think.

• 29:40Speaker 10

  I don't think so, and especially...

• 29:41Oprah Winfrey?

  You don't think she felt superior?

• 29:42Speaker 10

  I don't think she felt superior, and I think, kind of towards the end, it really comes out that she is actually puts Noah up more on a pedestal, like, you are it. Like, you are, you are allowing me to be who I am.

• 30:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 30:05Speaker 10

  And therefore, I am not indebted, but I, I'm, I'm loving you for loving me the way I am.

• 30:14Oprah Winfrey?

  You feel that, okay?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  And, and he not only puts her on a pedestal, but he makes her the pedestal. Or she makes him the pedestal, right? And I, you know, that, when I, when I wrote those sentences, I, because all along, I was, and I, a few early readers thought, why is she into him again now? Why is she?

• 30:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  And so, I had to build his personality more. Uh, you know, I had to sharpen it a bit. And, um, and that moment, you know, is that, that really was an expression of love from her to him. It finally opened his eyes to what she sees in him and what he means to her, and how much he's accepted that over the years, right?

• 30:52Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 30:54Oprah Winfrey?

  I can hear that.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you. You're skeptical.

• 30:57Oprah Winfrey?

  I had another opinion, but I, I can receive. I'm open-minded.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's what readers are for.

• 31:02Oprah Winfrey?

  That's what reading is about.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:03Oprah Winfrey?

  Stephanie, you have a question?

• 31:04Speaker 11

  Yes, I do. Um, I related so much to all the different family dynamics in the book, and I was just curious if Noah and Lorelai's relationship was based at all on your own marriage? And if the different personalities of the children, was anyone in the family based on your own personal life?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, can we cut?

• 31:22Oprah Winfrey?

  No.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Well, I would say that I have a really brilliant and very perceptive wife, who reads everything for me and will definitely, you know, look into my soul the way Lorelai looks into Noah's as well. So there's a sense of that, of, you know, being known and being called out for things within your family. My sons, too, are, there's definitely autobiographical elements there. They were both college athletes and I was a kind of psycho soccer dad for a long part of my life when they were growing up. But they also call me out on things. They really know me often better than I know myself.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  And so, those, you know, we draw, when we write a novel, we're drawing from so many different aspects of our lives. And sometimes that comes home to roost a little bit, right? And so, yes, certainly, there's always going to be autobiographical elements, I think.

• 32:27Oprah Winfrey?

  You write that a family is like an algorithm. This is a major theme in the book. Explain what you mean by that.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yes, now, that comes from Noah remembering Lorelai saying that, right? A family is like an algorithm. Why is that? It's, in Lorelai's eyes, a family, you know, works in kind of predictable patterns. It goes back to your questions. You know your kids, you know your spouse. You know how they're going to act in certain circumstances. If you can just keep the wheels humming along, you know, just keep the variables churning along with the constants, you know, a family is like an algorithm. And then, the way the prologue ends, "A family is like an algorithm. A family is like an algorithm until it isn't." And that's the dark way that the prologue begins, ends,

• 33:19Speaker 03

  is the way, you know, we launch into the book, knowing that something is coming.

• 33:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Did you know, when you started writing it?

• 33:29Oprah Winfrey?

  Even before you knew it was culpability, that everybody in the van would have something to do with what was happening?

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:36Oprah Winfrey?

  You didn't know that?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. And that was the kind of tapestry of the book, right? It was the knowing that everyone in that van had some role to play in this horrific accident.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  And then it was a question of choosing which strands to pull, which to tug more tightly. And then as I went along, just creating the whole novel, I started to see it from a distance and kind of understand everyone's role. And then it was a matter of letting the plot and the characters catch up with each other. And so that the whole thing would feel kind of inevitable at the end.

• 34:15Oprah Winfrey?

  And you had to get them to the summer place, the North End. Why?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Why did I have to get them there? Well, that particular place, like I was saying, that the setting was boring into my mind all along. And I wanted to get them there on a car trip safely, right? And so in some ways, the novel has a second beginning. A month or so after the hospital, after when they're recovering from their injuries, they're in the car together again, not that car, a different car. And they're on their way to recover. And that part of the setting, I think the psychology of the setting was, this is about recovery. This is about resilience. This is about where we go for a while to heal. And so it was a place that was really important for my family.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Even just those few days on the northern neck. We haven't been back since. But I remember it so clearly and how good that felt, just to get away like that, so.

• 35:19Oprah Winfrey?

  Lorelei comes to this realization on page 293, the mother. No one can keep our kids safe forever, not even you. No matter how much money we throw at the problem or how many guards we hire or how many tracking apps we put on our phones, no matter how good your algorithm is, we can't protect them from everything. We just can't. And I understand that now better than I ever have before. As a father, how do you feel about parents protecting their kids from all of this?

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think about this so much. I think about... You know, what we, the lengths that we go to protect our kids, not just from harm, but from uncomfortable situations, right? The great phrase is snowplow parenting, right? We'll clear the way in front of them. Or we're helicopter parents, we'll hover over them to make sure everything is okay, to make sure that they have what they need. And, you know, my kids now are 22 and 25, and I'm still doing it. Just making sure that everything is okay, wanting to protect, wanting to defend. And in the case here of Charlie, you know, Noah would do anything to protect Charlie from culpability, from his own culpability, right?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  That's one of the tension points in the novel, is that relationship between father and son. And you can, you know, I hope you can feel it on the page, that Noah's sort of bristling with worry about his son.

• 36:44Oprah Winfrey?

  I want to take this moment to thank you, dear listener, for joining me for one of my favorite things to do in life, talk with readers about this thought-provoking book with the author. So cool. When we come back, more of my conversation with Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability. It is, I'm telling you, the perfect summer read for the beach, for the pool, or especially a family vacation. Stay with us, book lovers. Welcome back to our Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. I'm so grateful y'all are here with me and writer Bruce Holsinger. We're at a Starbucks cafe with book lovers and readers. Bruce is the author of my latest book club selection, Culpability. It is, I'm telling you, a must-read about how a family grapples with the rapidly advancing

• 37:29Oprah Winfrey?

  world of AI. The book is a page-turner for this exact time we're living in. You're not going to be able to put it down, I'm telling you. And you're going to want to discuss it with other family members. So let's get back to more questions from the audience. Britten is a college counselor for a high school. You have a question, Britten?

• 37:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I, in my performance evaluation last spring, my boss said he wants me to embrace AI and find ways to help it enhance my work. And so one of the things I do is I write recommendation letters for students, and I tried, and it felt icky to me. So I used some AI in some other ways. I enhanced a PowerPoint presentation. I used it to send a scathing email to my son's principal at his school.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Do you have it with you? I want to read it.

• 38:10Speaker 12

  Oh, it's so good. It is so good. She never responded.

• 38:11Oprah Winfrey?

  What do you say to it? Write something scathing?

• 38:14Speaker 12

  Yeah, I said, make me sound more professional, but also show that I'm irritated. And it did a beautiful job. It was great.

• 38:21Oprah Winfrey?

  Really? Okay.

• 38:21Speaker 12

  Anyhow, as I'm working with students and I'm telling them, do not use ChatGPT to write your college essay, but then I'm also dabbling in it. Where is the line there?

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Such a great question. And our students, you know, our, every faculty member I know at University of Virginia is grappling with this right now.

• 38:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  You know, how do we, where do we draw the line? What is the line? And are we being hypocrites if we're using it to generate administrative prose, like an assessment report, right? Which no one is ever going to accuse of being creative. But you know, on the other side, there are creative writers, there are novelists and poets who are experimenting with large language models like ChatGPT and Claude in really interesting ways. I don't know if you know the Canadian novelist Sheila Hetti?

• 39:10Speaker 12

  No.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  She wrote this beautiful story in The New Yorker

• 39:14Speaker 03

  that, where she, I think she worked with Claude, who was kind of an early adapter of Claude, and she fed Claude prompts, and Claude spit out these responses. And then in order to finish the story, she took out all of her prompts and just published the responses. And it became this kind of unforgettable eerie short story. And there's this brilliant poet, Lillian Yvonne Bertram, at the University of Maryland, who works with small language models and uses them to create these really interesting poems. And she's self-conscious, they're both self-conscious about it, about how they use these models to create. And so, you know, between prohibition, no, don't use it at all, and using it to write a story that appears in The New Yorker,

• 39:57Speaker 03

  and everything in between, right? That's where we are right now, for better or for worse.

• 40:02Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, I want to end our conversation with this passage on page 309. Towards the end of the book, you write, "Every accident in a self-driving vehicle is huge news because it's covered as if a malevolent robot has killed a human. Meanwhile, some random truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and kills a young couple. Yet we never once considered taking all 18-wheelers off the road." She turns and looks out over the inlet. "I want to believe in humans. I want to believe that even at the last second, an AI can and should be overridden by a knowing human conscience, by a moral mind with a soul. Now I'm not so sure there's a place for algorithms, a bigger and bigger place. But people have to be better, too.

• 40:47Oprah Winfrey?

  They have to not drink and drive. They have to not text behind the wheel. We shouldn't make these machines because we want them to be good for us, or good instead of us. We should make them because they can help us be better ourselves."

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:06Oprah Winfrey?

  We like that, don't we? You've given us a lot to think about where we are and where we're going. Where do you think we're going?

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Who knows? I into a future of profound unpredictability. If anything, that's what I've come to. It's a little bit like writing a novel. I feel like the future of AI, it's like all of us writing this novel together. And who knows where it's going to go?

• 41:33Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. I thought it was so interesting when you asked that question about are we afraid to look too hard? And everybody in here agrees, we're afraid to look too hard.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Because of what we might find. We thank you for inviting us to explore and wrestle with these very challenging ideas for

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:52Oprah Winfrey?

  for our times and for this thrilling story. Aren't you? Pass it on to a friend. Now that you've read it, pass it on to a friend. "Culpability" is available wherever you buy your books. Audience, thank you for reading the book, for sharing your time with us and your thoughtful questions. When I tell you, this is the perfect summer read, is it not? All right. You did the perfect summer read.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 42:17Oprah Winfrey?

  Before we go, I want to share that I recently published something tailor-made for you avid readers. So delighted to tell you about it. It's my book lovers journal. And here's what's great. Has over 100 prompts, like the first book that made you feel seen and the book that reminded you of what matters most, all designed to enhance your reading experience. It's a great gift for book lovers and I hear book clubs are using it when they meet, which makes me so happy. I write about some of my favorite books in first sentences and it is available anywhere you buy books. This audience is going home with a copy. A big thanks to our extraordinary partners at Starbucks for supporting us. There is no better place for coffee and conversation. You were saying, do you write at Starbucks sometimes?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  I write in all different coffee shops. I've written half of my novels in coffee shops over the years.

• 43:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, this should feel like home to you.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 43:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Go well, everybody. Thanks so much.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Thank you all so much. Thank you, Oprah.