How Trump, Memes, and Algorithms Transformed The Way We Speak

Summary

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Offline with Jon Favreau – Episode Summary

Podcast: Offline with Jon Favreau
Episode: How Trump, Memes, and Algorithms Transformed The Way We Speak
Air Date: September 25, 2025
Guest: Adam Alexa (aka TikTok’s Etymology Nerd; linguist, author of "Algo Speak")

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Jon Favreau (with occasional co-host Dan Pfeiffer) sits down with linguist and content creator Adam Alexa to dissect how the internet, especially social media algorithms and meme culture, have radically reshaped language, culture, and political discourse. The discussion unpacks concepts from Adam’s new book, "Algo Speak", exploring the forces driving our “extremely online” way of communicating, the often insidious effects of algorithmic optimization, and what this all means for democracy, community, and individual agency.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is "Algo Speak"? (06:08)

• Definition: The term refers to how algorithms on social media shape and sometimes even censor language by incentivizing or degrading certain terms. Evasive euphemisms like “unalive” for “kill”, viral slang such as “rizz” and “skibidi”, and the entire cadence of online speech can be traced to algorithmic gatekeeping.

  • “Algo speak traditionally has been the idea of algorithms shaping your speech. So words like ‘un alive’... but I think it goes a lot deeper than that.”
    —Adam Alexa [06:09]

• Memes as Algorithms’ Output: Online platforms foster echo chambers, spawning new in-group language and memes—these don’t just stay online but slip into everyday speech (06:50).

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2. How Algorithms Reshape Politics & Public Discourse (09:40)

• Emotion Over Respect: Social platforms heavily incentivize emotional, attention-grabbing content—often outrage and extremity—rather than nuance or civility.

  • “The stuff that goes viral is always going to be more extreme. It’s going to be more emotionally laden content... I think the Trump all-caps tweet Twitter style actually does go more viral.”
    —Adam Alexa [09:51]

• Decline of Nuance: Platforms reward bluntness, trolling, and theatricality (like Trump’s style) over the respectful debate and slow discourse of previous eras. Respect is not a metric algorithms can recognize (09:04).

• Trends Drive Politics: Even political campaigning and debate now chase viral trends and memes, often at the expense of substance (13:02).

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3. Meme Culture, Irony & Radicalization (16:56)

• Blurring Irony and Reality: Highly ironic memes and jokes serve as both shields from and vehicles for serious (sometimes extreme) ideas. The boundaries between sincerity and satire are increasingly hazy.

  • “[Memes are] like a Trojan horse... Sometimes the soldiers inside the horse can escape… [language] eventually... can be interpreted in a post-ironic context where it gets serious again.”
    —Adam Alexa [17:32]

• Meme Propagation & Extremism: Meme aesthetics and phrases sometimes serve as “pipelines” to extremist communities, not necessarily by direct intent, but by repeated exposure and adaption (23:36).

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4. Trump’s Language as a Case Study (25:21)

• Meme-ification of Trump’s Rhetoric: Trump’s speech patterns are tailor-made for the algorithmic age—emotionally charged, uniquely structured, and easily meme-ified. This virality, in turn, normalizes his views.

  • “Trump’s language is predisposed to becoming memeified on social media platforms and is reshaping our reality as a result.”
    —Adam Alexa [24:58]
  • “The more something is represented, the more it’s normalized. All the research kind of points back to that.”
    —Adam Alexa [30:34]

• Syntax & Authenticity: Trump’s linguistic oddness—fragmented, unpredictable, authentic—makes him more “sticky” in people’s minds and more likely to go viral than grammatically precise politicians.

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5. The Engagement Economy vs. Attention Economy (36:58)

• From Deliberate Focus to Algorithmic Manipulation: Where “attention” was once about personal choice and intention, the “engagement economy” is about what generates measurable metrics (likes, shares, comments, watch time).

  • “Attention is not a metric-based thing... the way it’s distributed online is... When the train of thought that is given to you... is just the one that works with specific data points [for the algorithm]...”
    —Adam Alexa [36:58]

• Viral Optimization: Democratic politicians often unsuccessfully mimic meme styles to go viral—when it lacks authenticity, the approach can backfire (39:15).

• Authenticity Still Matters: Outliers like Bernie Sanders connect online not through manufactured meme-speak, but sincere, authentic communication (38:36).

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6. Platform Incentives & Civil Discourse (41:16)

• Engagement Drives Incivility: Social media algorithms, optimized for engagement, naturally promote controversy and incivility, making it difficult for “niceness” to spread (41:07).

• The Limits of Reform: It’s difficult to fundamentally change platform design and incentives—so individuals and organizations need to use platforms strategically, often as springboards to send audiences to healthier, less algorithm-driven spaces (43:22).

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7. Generational Differences & Meme Aesthetics (55:47)

• How Generations Engage Online:

  • Boomers: More literal, traditional humor.
  • Millennials: Raised inside a decentralized early Internet (advice animals, early memes).
  • Gen Z: Grew up with phones, cultivate “brain rot” absurdity, post-irony, and deep meta-awareness.
  • Gen Alpha/Middle Schoolers: Most linguistically experimental, highly media literate, pushing boundaries.

• Pride in "Brain Rot": The “brain rot” of viral nonsense is actually creative play and can be understood as a defense or subversion against algorithmic boredom and oversaturation.

  • “[Brain rot] is the defining meme aesthetic of the 2000s so far, where it points back constantly to the algorithm itself. It's saying these are ideas and images that are overrepresented and we're going to make fun of them by representing them even more.”
    —Adam Alexa [53:55]

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8. Media Literacy, “Fake Reality,” and Hope (46:40, 59:41)

• Critical Engagement: Alexa cautions against digital abstinence, arguing instead for “TikTok literacy”—active, conscious engagement with platforms, understanding of how algorithms distort perception, and learning not to mistake online extremes for mainstream reality.

  • “We should be teaching TikTok literacy in schools in the same way we teach poems in English class. I think it is a critical media skill…”
    —Adam Alexa [46:40]

• Danger of Perception Gap: Algorithms can distort our sense of how extreme or polarized people’s beliefs are, fueling more extremism and violence offline.

• Fragmentation & Identity: Social media amplifies niche cultures and echo chambers, both splintering language and offering new opportunities for identity and creativity.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Language is the way we capture reality and share it, transmit it from one person to another… you can sort of find [deeper social patterns] by engaging with language.”
  —Adam Alexa [05:46]

• “The more we see an idea show up, the more okay it is to say, because it's just our vibe of like what other people think is the acceptable vibe.”
  —Adam Alexa [30:34]

• “Nothing is wrong with language itself... The language is just reflexively revolving around the algorithm, but as a tool to communicate with it’s still doing the same job it was…”
  —Adam Alexa [45:17]

• “If you want to be a citizen of society... I think you should be somewhat on these algorithms, but I think you should be engaging with them with careful deliberation with knowledge.”
  —Adam Alexa [46:40]

• “We are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful about who we pretend to be.”
  —Adam Alexa (quoting Kurt Vonnegut) [26:25]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction of Adam Alexa and “Algo Speak”: [02:46–06:09]
• Language, Algorithms & Speech (TikTok’s Influence): [06:08–09:40]
• Politics, Platforms & Losing Respect in Debate: [09:40–13:02]
• Impact on Trends and Political Communication: [13:02–14:33]
• Irony, Memes & Internet Radicalization: [16:56–23:36]
• Trump’s Language & Meme-ification: [25:21–29:45]
• Normalization via Algorithms (Overton Window): [30:32–33:36]
• Engagement Economy vs. Attention Economy: [36:58–39:41]
• Civil Discourse, Platform Incentives: [41:06–43:22]
• ‘Brain Rot’ and Meme Generations: [52:01–55:33]
• Generational Differences Online: [55:33–59:41]
• Fragmentation in Language & “Cyber-Balkanization”: [59:41–62:33]
• Advice for Listeners: Media Literacy & Deliberate Engagement: [46:40–50:03]

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sobering yet engaging look at how social media has upended not just “what” we say, but “how,” “why,” and “to whom.” Host Jon Favreau, with co-host Dan Pfeiffer, and guest Adam Alexa, highlight the complex interplay between platforms, language, culture, politics, and psychology. The takeaway: while meme culture and algorithms are warping both speech and public life, awareness and critical engagement—even humor—can be our defense mechanisms.

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Transcript

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[Adam Alexa]

If you want to be a citizen of society, which I think is our political duty, I think you should be somewhat on these algorithms, but I think you should be engaging with them with careful deliberation with knowledge. Exactly what the medium is doing for you. I think we should be teaching tik Tok literacy in schools in the same way we teach poems in in English class. I think it is a critical media skill to understand exactly how content is distributed, what it takes to on the influencer side what, what's being done in the algorithmic side, how things are biased against you, to grab your attention and commodify you and what these platforms are doing. And I think once we become more aware of that, it has less power over us. We begin to understand that maybe the reality that's represented on these platforms does not align with reality as it actually is.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from today's guest, self described linguist, author doom scroller, Adam Alexic.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Some of you may know Adam as etymology nerd. His handle on his immensely popular Instagram and TikTok, where Adam attempts to, quote.

[Jon Favreau]

Make linguistics cool again, explaining to his.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Audience the way the Internet has affected their language and created words like skibidi or riz. I said both of those correctly. Adam has a new book out called Algospeak where he unpacks in greater detail.

[Jon Favreau]

Than the Internet could ever allow.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

The ways that social media and their algorithms have evolved the way we speak with one another. I obviously am a huge fan of language, have thought about language my entire life, continue to think about words and.

[Jon Favreau]

The choice of words and how to.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Persuade in my professional life, my personal life, obviously when I was speechwriting, I did this. And one of the reasons that I wanted to launch offline is because I do think that the way we communicate to each other, the language we use on the Internet, especially on social media platforms, has enormous impacts on not just.

[Jon Favreau]

Our brains and our relationships and how.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

We feel, but how we most importantly maybe practice politics and try to, you know, sustain democracy, which is obviously not going great right now.

[Jon Favreau]

So Adam has a lot to say about that. The book has a lot to say about that. And so I invited him on to chat about it. We shared a great conversation about the.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Ways that social media has evolved, not just our language, but the way we talk about politics, ourselves and one another. It's a great conversation. Very excited for you all to listen.

[Jon Favreau]

Here's Adam Malekzik. Adam, welcome to the show.

[Adam Alexa]

Hi. Excited to be here.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So I want to talk about your book Algo Speak. But first I just want our audience to get a sense of who you are and what you do. You're 24, which is so cool. I'm very jealous. You have a big following as TikTok's Etymology Nerd. You have a degree in linguistics and.

[Jon Favreau]

The New York Times has called you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiast. Love that.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I don't mind that phrase.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So how and why did you get into this line of work?

[Adam Alexa]

Well, I guess. What do you do with the linguistics degree? There's not a lot of options. I started thinking, like, I care about communicating. I had some experience in linguistics communication before, and I started making videos right out of college, and then it worked out at a certain point, making videos online and being a linguist, you can't turn off content creator brain or linguist brain, and they're kind of operating at the same time. And what led me down the rabbit hole of how social media is affecting the way we speak is noticing my own speech and how it was being sort of trapped by the platform, that I couldn't say certain things or that I felt like I had to say certain things to go viral. And I think all of language is now going around what the algorithms are incentivizing. And more than that, language is a proxy for greater cultural changes, political shifts, you know, aesthetic shifts. All of that is being affected by the algorithm right now.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, even before, like, what got you into linguistics as a. Oh, wow.

[Adam Alexa]

I mean, there's so much going on. It's. You got the fun facts, but it's also what I just said, sort of that you can see greater social patterns through language. It's. Language is the way we capture reality and share it, transmit it from one person to another. I think there's something really deep in how we perceive the world and how we relate to one another that you can sort of find by engaging with language and.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And what's alo speak?

[Adam Alexa]

Algo speak traditionally has been the idea of algorithms shaping your speech. So words like un alive that you can't really say kill on TikTok, or at least it's suppressed. So many creators turn to words like un alive, and now there's actual kids in middle schools writing essays about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that. I think algo speak is everything from, you know, Riz skibidi, Dubai, Macha labubu. Any Internet phrase you can think of that's going on right now is brought by algorithms. They are in groups that are created through these algorithmic echo chambers. There are memes that diffuse across the entire platform. All that, to me, is algorithms shaping the way we speak. Algo speak.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I want you to know that I did get about 30 to 40% of the words that you said there, so not bad.

[Adam Alexa]

Sorry. I'm trained by TikTok to talk quickly. I'll try to.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, no, no. The algospeak that you gave as an example, the skibidi that. Yeah. You know, I have Enough Gen Z staff that I'm getting some of it, but not all. I'm trying. So I've spent most of my adult life thinking about language, at least since I was your age. I was a speechwriter for about 15 years. I now spend my days thinking about sort of the most effective ways to get people's attention and persuade them through the ridiculous amount of content we put out here. I have this sort of perpetual frustration and this is, you know, related to politics, which is my, my field, that what is required to get people's attention in an algorithmically driven media environment is just about antithetical to the kind of nuanced, thoughtful conversation and debate that, that is required to sustain democracy. And I feel that tension every day when we're coming up with YouTube titles, clips, tweets, even topics to highlight on our shows. Am I wrong or am I just, am I just missing something because I'm.

[Jon Favreau]

Too old now or what?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, there's an argument. This was already happening with the Telegraph and the television. I mean, you look at the Lincoln Douglas debates that took like six hours and the audience was really excited to listen to these guys yap for six hours on end like about really boring topics. I don't think you could hold public attention that way. TV debates already created this sort of amusement entertainment focused medium where it has to be gamified. It's all about shouting over the other guy. And yeah, I think algorithms are once again making this version of attention more extreme, more focused on the metrics of attention, because actually the metrics that being engagement, watch, time retention, that's driving what even gets distributed. So it's not even like where tv, you still have some amount of social respect or prestige. The algorithm has no way to measure respect. And this was traditionally a part of attention. And I think the nature of attention is, is changing toward what the algorithm is incentivizing.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Say more about that, about respect. That it's not incentivizing respect.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah. What is attention? Right. To me it's this weird, ineffable vibes based thing. William James calls it like the taking command of a certain train of thought over other potential trains of thoughts. And in the past this involves a lot of like implicit evaluations of how much you trust something, how much you want to deliberately give a like focus on this idea. But when the algorithm just serves you the idea and you don't even choose your train of thought it's given to you, that changes the selection of attention process. And there's a lot of like different small Parts of what attention could have meant before, but now it's simply what gets distributed on these platforms.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

How do you think that the language we use on the Internet now and especially social media platforms has changed the way our country does politics?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, well, it definitely is. There is the stuff that goes viral is always going to be more extreme. It's going to be more emotionally laden content, things that generate more watch time, things that get comments. This means language is going to be more emotional. I think the Trump all caps tweet Twitter style actually does go more viral. It grabs your attention a little bit better in that moment. You engage with a little bit more, it goes further. I mean, there's a reason Gavin Newsom is like doing well in the trolling of Trump by using his own strategy. And that has to do with the kind of emotional and emphatic way this writing style grabs your attention. And that's, that's just getting into writing style. There's a lot of other stuff with. I do think respect is lost, for example, and if we're just getting into the content of the speech rather than the form of the speech, the there is less reason to be cordial than there was in a TV medium and less reason even so than when you were at Lincoln Douglas debates and it was, you know, six hours of you sitting on stage with this other person.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Do you think to your point about the all caps stuff that, you know, it grabs your attention when it feels fresh, new and also like unique to a specific person and that like I kind of noticed this, you know, Trump was doing it then it was really funny that Newsom was doing it. And then I saw some other Democrats trying to do their all caps version. Like they're trying to imitate Gavin, trying to imitate Trump. And I was like, I wonder if your attention after a while it just, it these kind of tricks sort of lose the. Lose their power if they are multiplied or used too many times.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I think it can be oversaturated and we are getting number to that. All caps style and the algorithms as a medium really do revolve around giving you fresh new things, hopping from trend to trend. I analyze a lot of trends in my book and how these memes I think happen a lot quicker because algorithms are designed to push first trending audios. TikTok started as a dance app. You know, the trending dances, trending hashtags. But now everything is metadata. The hashtags and the audios used to be metadata. That means information about the content. But now it's Also, any individual word is scrutinized by these machine learning models that make up the algorithm. And they all kind of play a part in analyzing what this video is, who it should be distributed to. And that means there's a constant need to perform for the algorithm as a creator yourself. And that means if a word is trending, we need to hop onto that trend, we need to use that word because our job is to try to go viral. And then in doing so we push the word further. More people are now interacting with the word, it becomes more of a trend and then more influencers want to use it. And so I call that the engagement treadmill. Where were in this loop of an actual trend existing and then people hopping onto that trend.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, and it's, I guess this was my, sort of, my original point. It's like in a lot of different fields, you know, it's, it's hard enough that that happens in politics. Think of what that does to what we talk about, what we debate, the decisions we make. Because if the algorithms are jumping on a word that's trending and then everyone tries to make content about that word, like what topics don't get discussed, it's not necessarily the topics that aren't as important.

[Adam Alexa]

I think politics is increasingly tied to trends. I mean, look at Kamala Harris's attempt to, you know, like co brand the campaign with brat. That was the only thing you can do in a political campaign nowadays because trends are what goes viral. And if you want to go viral, you have to co brand with a trend. And you know, maybe that trend doesn't perfectly align with what message you're trying to send out. Or maybe it sends a limited message, but also it ties your marketing to the lifespan of a meme, which is shorter than in, in the past, I think.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

How much do you think the language and algo speak has contributed or, or do you think it's contributed to the cynicism and, and now nihilism people feel towards politics, institutions, et cetera. Like is that, do you think that's having any effect?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I think the, the medium of algorithms is much more vibes based. It's much more about feelings and impressions you get about something you don't know what happens in The Scroll State 2, two scrolls above your own video, you forget what you were watching. So it's more about IM things you sort of learn to understand over time rather than individual facts. And we see this time and time again with like fake news and misinformation that the tweet that it's all about who gets out further, whether the misinformation gets out further or the fact check gets out further. And almost always the misinformation gets out a little bit further. And the facts don't don't matter as much as the impression you get in a situation. So it just means you should shout more than the other person.

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

The 22 year old who assassinated Charlie Kirk was was steeped in algo speak. Some of the bullets were inscribed with the phrases, hey, fascist, catch notices bulge o w o. What's this? And if you read this, you are gay. Lmao. You write in your book that quote, we're jumping between irony and reality, but we're not always sure where those lines are. This is in reference to the spread of incel culture and humor, but it seems like it could apply to what the killer was trying to communicate there and a host of other ways to communicate on the Internet. What's your read on that? What was your read on the. On. On some of those inscriptions?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, of course, we're not exactly sure what the shooter's politics were. I think we're also asking the wrong questions. When it's like, is he left wing or right wing? It's clear that he's highly influenced by the Internet. I also don't want to be fear mongering about, oh, all of the Internet is like evil. And you know this. Some of these memes are like 2010 4chan memes. Not even all of 4chan is evil. There's a lot of terrible stuff that goes on there. But it's reductive to say, like, oh, you know, Internet's causing brain rot or something. It is that boundary between what's real, what's a joke. Because memes can have real ideas planted within them that are kind of, I think of memes like a Trojan horse. Like, a lot of people just see it as a horse, but sometimes the soldiers inside the horse can escape. But usually the way memes spread from. I've analyzed how a lot of like incel language and far right 4 Chan language reaches the mainstream, for example. This is a very common trend. And again, if we're talking about language as a proxy for greater cultural changes, why are we talking about maxing and cucked and sigmas and all these things and pilled as a suffix? That's all, you know, from 4chan and we see this manosphere alt right space influencing language, but not even, you know, in general. There is not a cohesive political dynamic going on. There are simply memes that are funny, funny things spread and especially things that can be adapted to new situations, reinterpreted in new contexts. Eventually they can be interpreted in a post ironic context where it gets serious again. And you know, I think that's how some of these memes ended up on, on the bullet casings. But also I, yeah, that distinction between left right, I think is less real. And it's, we're, it's going to continue to get less real. I mean look at Luigi Mangioni. He also didn't have coherent politics in the old sense. It's it, it was more of a, this teapot gray rationalist techno like something aesthetic from the Internet and Internet aesthetics are going to be informing more and more political kind of things. It's, it's communities on the Internet with niche kind of memes, maybe even discord servers in inside jokes and all informed by Internet aesthetics that are shaping our politics.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, so you, you can be, it can contribute to radicalization. It can also contribute to radicalization that doesn't follow a specific ideology. That's just an ideology of, or basically just sort of contributes to violence. Why do you think that this deeply ironic language can often have more appeal than language that is straightforward and serious?

[Adam Alexa]

Well, there is something to memes and jokes and funny things that spread further on the Internet in the same way that TV is a medium of entertainment. TikTok social media platforms are mediums of memetics, you know, sort of, I mean they all are, I guess, but viral, readaptable, reusable images and videos and phrasal templates which are sort of skeletal structures and all, all of these are allowed to be remixed and readapted into new situations. That's what spreads, especially when they're, when they're funny, when they speak. On some level there are aesthetic underpinnings and undercurrents and things usually only go viral through this idea of what something should look like. So there is a nihilistic, absurd Gen Z aesthetic, I guess that's underpinning a lot of comedy on the Internet. And that does speak to people. That is kind of what helps ideas diffuse.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I'm so interested in like the psychology of linguistics, like what, what the use of certain words says about how we feel about society, how we feel about our relationships. And I do think this trend of, not a specific trend in what you study. But this trend of sort of deep irony that you don't know whether it's real or not. And humor that's deeply ironic sort of gives people a bit of detachment from sort of like the real scary challenges in the world or maybe the isolation that they're facing in their own life. And so the, the deeply ironic stuff almost becomes a bit of a shield for people that, that everyone can laugh at without having to get too into the weeds on what's really bothering them. I don't know. That's like, that's like my pop psychology analysis. But I don't know what you think.

[Adam Alexa]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think psychology and linguistics are two sides of the same coin. What it's like both are to me are understanding our experience in the world and language is how we categorize that. Psychology is also dealing with these categories and frames that we construct about the world. There's that adage pose law I think is very relevant here. Any ironic expression of beliefs online can be mistaken as sincere and vice versa. And we're constantly in that cycle of things sometimes spread around that they're on that boundary of is it real? You know, like it's, it's, it's fascinating that some people might be interested in this stuff or whatever. And then the meme spreads further and that's how we end up with like, yeah, all these like really niche seeming things emerging and becoming more popular because that generates comments which pushes things further in the algorithm. There's also that sort of apathetic aesthetic which does trace back to often 4chan, manosphere incel spaces even.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It is interesting too that these more sort of extreme ideologies or extreme groups are still thinking about appealing to mass audiences. So by trying to sort of, you know, send around and come up with these memes that are funny or that maybe don't have necessarily the meaning that a mass audience would, would, would think that it has. Right. And so that you're, you're even thinking about persuading people who aren't as far down the rabbit hole as you while you're sort of trying to get memes and, and other trends to go viral. I just think that that's, that's, it's yeah.

[Adam Alexa]

Creating kind of a pipeline to your own community. And, and I think particularly the alt right is very good at weaponizing memes that all kind of lead back to them. And you think, oh, you're in this cultural space, it's the Maha space or it's the trad wife space. Or it's the bodybuilder space online. And all of these sort of have their, their roots in the alt right in one way or another. And they all back there and it's because of that Trojan horse that they can plant a seed. And it seems like you're engaging with cultural content and this is another thing maybe about politics, that it is more culture forward than, I mean, I think obviously politics has always been about culture, but the way people politically engage is through more. Through cultural influencers, Joe Rogan, whatever that. Less talk about political stuff, but still have those seeds of political ideas within their content.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And it, oddly enough, it is inclusive in the sense that these people, while their views are quite extreme, want to build a larger community. And so they are trying to invite people into the community and make it more tempting to join the community than they are trying to exclude people from joining the community.

[Adam Alexa]

This goes back to platform incentives for creators. We're incentivized to build a large audience and to welcome people to. You know, that's all structured in you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You wrote, you mentioned Trump earlier. You wrote an essay for the New York Times about how Trump's speech patterns have, quote, become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. You argue that, quote, trump's language is predisposed to becoming memeified on social media platforms and is reshaping our reality as a result.

[Jon Favreau]

What are some examples of that?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And does this typically happen with.

[Jon Favreau]

With other presidents, other politicians?

[Adam Alexa]

I mean, we've had presidents coin words before. I think George Washington coined the word administration. Right. Warren G. Harding. Was that him? Normalcy. Yeah. There have been, you know, presidents who've coined words before and they seep into the mainstream, but that's usually like unironic usage. And I think what's so interesting about Trump's language is that exact reevaluation we were talking about between what's funny and what's serious and then eventually becomes serious again. The examples you've definitely heard some people say, I hear my friends say, like, sad as an interjection all the time. That comes from Trump. Like many such cases. Many people are saying this, frankly. Like, he popularized fake news, for sure. Like, believe me, at the end of a sentence. And then the things I mentioned as phrasal templates or the grammatical skeletal structures of language that you can sub in words. So make X Y again or thank you, X. Very cool. Or this has been the worst X in the history of Y maybe ever. And what these do, you can just sub them, sub in any words and apply to a New situation. It's that application of a new situation which makes things memetic, which makes things spread online. It also makes it funny. It's a meme holder. Like, it's just a joke to a lot of people, and we start using it ironically. Like, it's funny to sound like Trump when you say sad, but you say that more and more. There's that Kurt Vonnegut quote I really like. We are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful about who we pretend to be. And I think that's sort of what's going on here that, you know, you start saying something ironically, eventually becomes a real thing. You just say, yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean, that's the story of a lot of. A lot of the right today, I think. How is the way that Trump speaks optimized for today's algorithm? Like, what is it about his speech style that ends up, you know, traveling so far?

[Adam Alexa]

I think Trump is. Is a very effective communicator, whether or not you. You like that idea. You know, he maybe doesn't speak with the grammar that elite formal institutions have preferred. But back in tv, he was very. Back when tabloids were a thing, he was very good at getting in the tabloids. That was his, you know, thing. And then he was very good at generating TV excitement in the TV press cycle in the 2016 election. And now he's very good at the algorithm. It generates outrage. It generates comments, engagements. All of that goes further in the algorithm on. On Twitter. A lot of it is just sort of flooding the zone. The man tweets a lot. Some memes are going to stick more than others. But if you throw a lot of stuff out there, a lot of unhinged stuff out there, the authentic appeal speaks to people. So part of it is the man does seem authentic to himself. And the Internet is about the age of authenticity and presenting like you're not performing. That's part of it. Part of it is the emotional content of his speech. I think part of what makes things go viral is the feeling of uniqueness. Trump has a demonstrably unique syntactic style. Like, compared to other presidents, he has higher variants. And how he speaks, like, he doesn't use the same grammatical kind of formations that we expect, but that, like, odd turn of phrase is what makes something seem a little subliminally catchy. And then you engage with a little bit more, and then it goes a little bit more viral.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I was just gonna say when you mentioned, you know, he might not be the most grammatically correct, and I was like, yeah, that probably helps him.

[Adam Alexa]

Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And in just.

[Adam Alexa]

You're not gonna go viral if you have a normal sentence.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Right, Right. And I do think that. I think people miss that because, you know, it.

[Jon Favreau]

The.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

The part about emotional language, outrage, anger, fear, going far like that. You know, people have said that, but I do think that there's an understated or underappreciated part of his syntax that is like, because it is so weird, because he sounds so weird, because he says things that are so off, that actually helps it stick. Like the whole.

[Jon Favreau]

Thank you for your attention to this.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Matter, DJ T. Right. Like, it just. It's weird, Right?

[Adam Alexa]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's like you're writing a tweet and you put that at the end, and that's not exactly right, but that's why everyone remembers it. And I do think that's. That. That's. That's a pretty interesting reason for him going viral all the time. You also noted that Trump's word choice is less predictable to large language models, which I find fascinating, especially because it's been 10 years of Trump being the dominant figure in American public life, maybe the world. And yet it's. It's interesting that LLM still have trouble predicting him.

[Adam Alexa]

Oh, sure. Why do you think that study that I cited was about? It wasn't specifically trained on Trump himself. I mean, maybe it would still be harder to predict a model just trained on Trump versus a model just trained on Obama. I do think Obama is more predictable than. Than Trump, but that was just a way for me to explain that he has a more unique style.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You know, I've done the. I've done gone on chatgpt and is like, all right, give me an Obama speech about this. Give me a Trump speech about this. And the Obama speech sounded much closer still. Still not really close, but much closer to Obama than the Trump one did.

[Adam Alexa]

You never know what's going to come out of Trump's mouth. Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You also wrote about Trump. It is reasonable to infer that the ubiquity of Mr. Trump's speech can play a role in normalizing his policies.

[Jon Favreau]

Say more about that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Why is that reasonable to infer?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the Overton window, the range of acceptable discourse in a society. And I think there's overton windows for language, for aesthetics. It shouldn't just be a political concept, but the more something is represented, the more it's normalized. All the research kind of points back to that. The more we see an idea show up, the More okay. It is to say, because it's just our vibe of like what other people think is the acceptable vibe. And so if we have this weird alt right belief, but we don't think anybody wants to talk about this, we're not going to say it. But then if we hear people talking about it, we're going to talk about it. And then the more we're talking about it, the more other people are going to hear us talking about. And that moves sort of that window. And I mentioned that algorithms amplify extreme speech. They, you know, you're going to go more viral if you're AOC or if you're Marjorie Taylor Greene. You're not going to go viral. If I grew up in Albany, New York, my congressman was Paul Tonko. The man never goes viral because he's boring. He has mainstream centrist Democrat ideas. He's, he's not very interesting. So there's like a bimodal distribution to who goes viral. And I think the Overton window is, is widening in both directions. It's okay to voice more extreme opinions either way because it's more represented. It appears to be more acceptable because that's what you see online.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I thought about that with regard to Great Replacement Theory, which I remember in Trump's first term when you'd hear about Great Replacement Theory, you'd hear it, you know, in relation to people committing right wing violence or, you know, the Charlottesville or like all of the.

[Adam Alexa]

And now they're not even dog whistling about it anymore.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, they just, it's like mainstream Republican politicians will talk about Great Replacement Theory and maybe they won't use the words Great Replacement, but they'll just talk about the theory very explicitly. The Vice President gets close to talking about it. So does Donald Trump himself. I mean, it's Stephen Miller, certainly. And I was like, it doesn't provide the same shock as it used to. And maybe that's because, and I don't, I don't think it means that it's more accepted policy wise necessarily, but it certainly doesn't provide the shock value that it used to. And I do wonder if that's like a, a trend with a lot of Trump's policies over the last 10 years.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I think you just throw things out there and it normalizes them. Like in 2016, the idea of Trump buying Greenland would have been even more extreme. I don't know. I don't think he's actually, Nothing's going to happen there. But at least like the way he throws stuff out there it seems ridiculous. We make a joke out of it and then there's like serious expeditions being sent by, you know, J.D. vince to Greenland at some point. And it all, you throw a lot out there at once of different things and flash bang, you know, like you don't know what's happening. All of it becomes a little bit more normalized and then you don't know what the real thing that's happening is. There's also like less ability for political opponents to focus on a specific issue. And it, you know, it seems like there's constantly pivoting happening constantly, a few different agendas, you know, being pushed and yeah, you don't know what to respond to.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

What do you think are the most.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Important differences between the language Trump uses and in language that Democratic politicians, activists and influencers tend to use?

[Adam Alexa]

Well, I mean, now we start seeing like the Newsom crowd talking more like Trump, which is, I think, optimizing for the medium of virality. You look at somebody like Zorn Mamdani, who I think is an exceptional case of still going viral while using regular language. I think, you know, as a young brown man, he can't afford to use slang words or seem like he's not eloquent. So he presents like a very formal politician. Yeah, he still plays into, you know, what the algorithm rewards. He clearly knows how this stuff works. He plays into the visual semiotics of emerging dripping wet from the water to talk about rent freezes or something like that, which is like any viewer on the algorithm subconsciously is primed to recognize that as the start of a viral video. You know, so he still plays into that, but he doesn't use the language as much. And I think there is that still that pressure on the Democratic side to present more like a normal politician or to still have that decorum that we expect from the old definition of attention. But I think we've replaced the attention economy with the engagement economy. It's about the metrics. It's about you optimize for the metrics, you go more viral. That's that. Yeah, that's what happens.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

That's interesting. So say more about replacing the attention economy with the engagement economy. What's the engagement economy?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, well, like I said, attention has those metrics of. Or metric is the wrong word. Attention is not a metric based thing. Attention is just you and how your vibe is directed towards something. And when you are unable to take possession of other trains of thought, when the train of thought that is given to you, afforded to you, is just the one that works with specific data points. I don't think attention is actually a data points based thing, but the way it's distributed online is. So things like Jubilee Media 25 Nazis versus one woke teen, you know, like whatever, that stuff goes more viral because they are optimizing to go viral. Whereas that, you know, might not be what we consciously would want to watch. But there's that difference between our top level, like conscious Focused selection of attention, which is a very deliberate act, and then maybe that more base, primal, instinctual response that the algorithm plays into.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So here's an exception. I often think about the most popular serving Democratic politician in America right now is Bernie Sanders and 80 something years old and does not optimize for engagement when he goes out and speaks. Doesn't probably know many of the things that we're talking about in terms of online trends and algo speak and all that kind of stuff. Doesn't really even have his team lean.

[Jon Favreau]

Into it that much.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And yet particularly among younger generations, you.

[Jon Favreau]

Know, his stuff goes viral, his crowds.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Are huge, people love him. What do you, what do you make of that?

[Adam Alexa]

It fits into two of the things about the algorithmic medium that I was talking about that distinguish it from previous TV politics or what have you. Right. So it's more extreme ideologically that's going to go more viral than, you know, Chuck Schumer. And it also feels more authentic. And I think social media, a critical part of this medium is that underlying feeling of authenticity, less performance. I think Bernie Sanders feels like a real one. You know, I think if you want to go viral as Democratic politician, that's kind of a good model. Or like Zoron is similar in that way. Right?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, I mean, I asked because one thing I notice a lot these days is Democratic politicians using language and phrases and memes that originated with Gen Z as an attempt to connect with younger people, optimize for engagement, go viral, get attention. And I feel like it rarely lands in a way that's funny or authentic.

[Adam Alexa]

It lands when it is authentic, but you can usually tell that it's not.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, no, and it makes, I mean it, it usually makes me physically cringe.

[Adam Alexa]

Pokemon go to the polls or the.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Like the, the, you know, a bunch of Democratic Congress women did like the choose your fighter thing with the video. And, and Chuck Schumer's been trying this, which is even worse. It's obviously coming from their Gen Z staffers.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, you can sense the intern behind this. Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Like, do you see any value in doing that?

[Adam Alexa]

Like, I.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Cause I, my view is, my view is like, you may get engagement. It's, it's probably a bunch of negative engagement, but I don't think that helps you as a politician because it doesn't seem authentic to you.

[Adam Alexa]

And I'm not sure that negative engagement is necessarily bad. You know, bad news is still good news. Right. But I agree that there are the politicians that feel more authentic when they're engaging with trends like AOC to some degree or. Yeah, I just don't think it's. Yeah, it's. It's not. Doesn't feel right, doesn't resonate with the audience. And there's a few things going on with things that go viral. You're performing not only for the algorithm, but also for this demographic that is on social media. And, and you should know what their expectations are.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. Let's talk about the platforms themselves. In your book Algo Speak, you cite a study from 2022 showing politicians are engaging in greater online incivility than before. Basically because being nice on these platforms doesn't get as much engagement. We talked about that.

[Jon Favreau]

Do you think there's a way, there's.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Any way social media platforms can change their algorithms so that they would incentivize less contemptuous language being used?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, the thing about these algorithms is that they're engagement optimization algorithms. Right. That's. We're kind of talking about that. They are pushing these like five metrics of watch time, likes, comments, shares, that kind of stuff. And that is the best algorithm for them to make money. Which is the most important thing to remember about these platforms. That they're trying to commodify your attention so they can sell your data and so that they can throw more ads in your feed that are more targeted. That's what they're doing at the end of the day. And the algorithms are incredibly optimized for that. And it would be very difficult to imagine a world where these large centralized platforms are not optimizing for engagement. Now, there are other types of algorithms. This is only one thing you can optimize for. And I think there is maybe a, a trend towards other platforms that are less algorithmic or it's more. You have choice over your own algorithm, like substack, Blue sky. What shows up in your feed is more determined by you than on TikTok and whatever. And I think there is a cultural undercurrent towards those. I think the engagement optimization platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I think they're fundamentally predisposed to that in civil discourse. Unfortunately, I think it's just a bad step for politics and society for us to be engaging with these platforms more. I think we can harness them subversively, but ideally use them to push people off to either other forms of media or in person events, because the medium is going to uniquely constrain speech, affect how we can get our message across. And if the way you get your message across on these algorithmic platforms is through playing into extreme rhetoric and emotional content and brief storytelling and it's reactive and there's no room for nuance and it just shows up as another fragmentary snippet of your feed. All of that is just really bad for doing, I think, fair, well intentioned politics. So you can use that to go viral and then push people to in person events, push people to your substack. I don't know, like, I know I'm.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Always, I'm always trying to think of the sort of the subversive ways to use them because I think about this all the time and like we know that, that fear and anger are emotions that sort of drive engagement and then tend to make things go more viral. Are there other emotions? Like, like I always thought like humor is one. Right. Like something that's really funny can go viral. So perhaps you can sort of Trojan horse a positive productive political message in something that's funny.

[Adam Alexa]

I think that's what inspiration Zoran did.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I think the Zoran did that. I think inspiration can, can sometimes go go viral.

[Adam Alexa]

But you know that unfortunately we know that negative content goes more viral or high emotional valence on either end does go more viral. But since time immemorial the newspapers that sold more are the ones that bring you bad news. You don't want, you know, you don't want to buy a newspaper about like a fluffy kid and frol in a meadow. You know, you want to buy a newspaper about kid and gets massacred. So that's just, that's just what's going to captivate people's attention on that base level. And I think we need to maybe differentiate between the instinctual primal response we have to something and what we know we consciously. Because a lot of studies are suggesting that peop. There is that disconnect between what people consciously know they want to see and engage with and then what they actually do engage with. And the algorithm doesn't give you that choice for conscious selection. That's the difference between attention and engagement to me.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And it is maybe comforting to know that that is our brains are wired, that our brains are wired like that because the algorithm is doing it or our brains are wired the way they are. But the, but the algorithm is more responsible than, than language. Like, you know, we can, we can come up with language that is going to move people to do stuff and inspire people and, and get people to take positive action. Stuff like that.

[Jon Favreau]

So it's not.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

The problem is not the language. The problem is what language the algorithm prioritizes.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I really want to emphasize Like I'm coming at this from a linguist. My book is about language and social media. I end the book with argument that nothing is wrong with language itself. Right. We call it brain rot. The words like razor skibidi or something. I don't think those words are inherently bad for you neurologically at all. The language is just reflexively revolving around the algorithm, but as a tool to communicate with it's, it's still doing the same job it was, which is we are using it great. We are still identifying reality and sharing it with other people. That language is still doing great. I'm, I'm worried about kind of the more content of the communication rather than the words themselves. And I, I fear that the, the medium of, of algorithmic engagement optimization is kind of bad for good political communication.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You, you write in the book, algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and you, dear reader, are the victim. We talked about sort of, you know, the algorithm screwing everything up and what it would take to sort of, you know, change that with social media companies. We've talked about all this before. What should people keep in mind, the victims, to sort of pry themselves out of the attention economy?

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, I, I think we should like, first of all, as a society, I think the, the phone bans are bad. I don't think you should necessarily go off your phone. Then you get blindsided to sudden political shifts. Like you need to understand where culture is happening, how things are going on. Politics is still unfortunately super downstream of the algorithm. All of our culture as well. You know, if you want to be a citizen of society, which I think is our political duty, I think you should be somewhat on these algorithms, but I think you should be engaging with them with careful deliberation with knowledge, exactly what the medium is doing for you. I think we should have be teaching TikTok literacy in schools in the same way we teach poems in English class. I think it is a critical media skill to understand exactly how content is distributed, what it takes to, on the influencer side, what's being done in the algorithmic side, how things are biased against you, to grab your attention and commodify you and what these platforms are doing. And I think once we become more aware of that, it has less power over us. We begin to understand that maybe the reality that's represented on these platforms does not align with reality as it actually is. Here's another thing. There's that growing perception gap in America that we keep overestimating how extreme other people's political beliefs are. And this is happening more and more, and it's happening more and more because of the algorithms and showing us that bimodal distribution of political perspectives. We forget that the middle exists. We forget that actually politics isn't this neatly defined thing, which is another flaw with people trying to figure out the Charlie Kirk shooter. Sorry, I'm just rambling here, but I think there, we should have high media literacy. We should carefully educate ourselves about what's going on and, and think when we're using these forms of media.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, I, I also think about this all the time because, you know, there was the saying Twitter is not real life, and then there was like a backlash to Twitter is not real life, because they're like, well, Twitter does affect real life. But the, the, the salient point, I think, and especially around, we're seeing this now around political violence is like, people can't let their sense of reality and their perception of reality be warped by the algorithm and what they're seeing on their feeds and their screens, because you are seeing more extreme viewpoints than are actually represented in the broader population. And the danger there is not just a misperception. It is that, that perception, that, that false perception can actually change you and change and change your opinions and your beliefs about the world because you, you know, there's other studies that people are actually more supportive of violence if they think that the other side is more supportive of violence, even if that thought is a mistake. And so I do think that there, and we, and look at, we're seeing this with some of this online radicalization, like the, the interaction between online life and offline life does bleed over a lot. Yeah, totally bleeds over. It totally bleeds over.

[Adam Alexa]

So, so yeah, I think what you said there is perfect. I mean, yes, there's a. The real reality. There is the different reality. The different reality bleeds into the real real. Be a little bit different, but they are getting closer together simply by nature of us interacting with a fake reality. But remember which is which and how one is affecting the other.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

That's, that's, that's what we're up to.

[Emma Ilick Frank]

I would say. Yeah, we, people prefer politically to say unrig.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, no, I know, I know, but.

[Jon Favreau]

In some cases, I'm just telling, I'm.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Telling it to you all like it.

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Is, you know, Keeping it, keeping it straight.

[Jon Favreau]

Once they unrig. Will unrig.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, right.

[Emma Ilick Frank]

Yeah, that's a. It's a classic situation of a tit for tat.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Anyway, it all sucks.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But you know what?

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

Love it.

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You're not listening to it then.

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That's right.

[Jon Favreau]

Certainly. Go to Civitech IO offline. That's C I V I T E C H I O offline to start contributing to your community's future.

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

You've mentioned Brainrot a few times. I just want to dig into that a little bit. There's a chapter in your book called sticking out your gat for the rizzler. Did I get that right? Guillot? It is giat. Yeah, See, I like looked up a pronunciation in someone.

[Adam Alexa]

You're doing great.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. Unbelievable. Can you explain what brain rot is to our listeners who may be less online? Even though it was the. The Oxford University Press's word of the year, you.

[Adam Alexa]

I think the Oxford University Press mostly got it wrong. I mean they were correct that it's. It can be used to describe a feeling of mental deterioration from being online. That's definitely true, but I don't think that's actually how most people are using It, I think when we talk about brain rot, we talk about the Internet aesthetic of like, nonsensical repetition of language and images online. And usually so, like saying something like, riz Gibbity got Ohio. That is like a brain rot sentence. But you could also say, like, there's more recent brain rot. That's like 2023. You could now say like, Dubai Matcha labubu crumble cookie. And that's like 2025. But, but the kind of common thread here is that it sounds like SEO language. That's not a coincidence. It's nonsensically, absurdly repeating words that are brought to us by the algorithm that we feel are algorithmically oversaturated through that process. I was talking about where influencers are using words simply because they're trending, and then they make them more trending, and then the word gets repeated ad absurdum. Like we're exhausted and nauseated by this language. And then we reflexively start making this category of humor that plays into our own algorithmic exhaustion. And I think that's what brainrot is. Brainrot, to me is the defining meme aesthetic of the 2000s so far, where it points back constantly to the algorithm itself. It's saying these are ideas and images that are overrepresented and we're going to make fun of them by representing them even more than they actually are.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

As a, as a linguist, how do you feel about brain rot?

[Adam Alexa]

Oh, it's a lot of fun. I, I think actually memes are one of our most powerful ways of fighting back because there's the ordered imposition of reality that the algorithm gives you. And then you, you play into this like, subversion of it. And that's a political statement to me. When you have like Italian brain rot was this meme trend. And all at the end, they always get co opted, they always get kind of commodified capitalist realism style. I, I think there is, you know, and then memes just move on. But I really like that moment back in March where there is these absurd AI generated animal hybrids, like a shark wearing shoes called trala lairo trala la. And there would be a whole like, commedia dell' arte that emerged of these Italian brain rot characters. And this was at a time when AI was finally like at the point where it had five fingers and it had like realistic text and you couldn't tell what was real and what was not real. And this is this fantastic tool and the first thing we use it for is like making stupid images on the Internet and Then it's also at this time when Trump is threatening tariffs all over the country and we're bringing in this foreign genre of memes. And part of the humor is that it's a foreign meme. And it's also at this time when again, the algorithm is oversaturating certain images and we play all of these things are playing into the idea of what is funny in a given moment. What is funny is never like an arbitrary thing. It's defined by your evaluation of a situation and how that evaluation is subverted. And I think brainrot constantly in moving on and moving on, it's challenging the current moment. It's screaming out against the current state of the Internet and our own kind of feelings of anxiety about what's going on online.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Fascinating, fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about how the influence of the Internet on the way we speak differs between generations? And you point this out that even the. Of different generations.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's sort of a recent construct.

[Jon Favreau]

Like what, what, what are the hallmarks.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Of Millennial versus Gen Z online communication? I will say this. I'm an elder Millennial. I'm just barely hanging on there.

[Adam Alexa]

Yeah. Different. Different stages in how we grew up in our relation with technology. I mean, millennials already were maybe that first generation. I grew up fully immersed in the Internet, but I think Gen Z is the first generation that grew up fully immersed in their phones. And that is a very different dynamic that most millennials growing up did not immediately have a iPad put in front of them. Did not immediately, you know, so there is that different dynamic going on there which affects our humor style. Millennials were growing up in early decentralized Internet and their humor revolved around still early formations of jokes like advice animals and doge memes and stuff. And then humor increasingly gets more absurd. Most. More post. Post ironic, more kind of that esthetic we were talking about where it's a little like doomer esque that I think defines the Gen Z comedic esthetic. I think there are different cultural attitudes towards what is funny. And boomers, you know, their style of humor maybe revolves more around like newspaper cartoons and jokes about the wife. You know, like there are different. Just it depends on your culture moment where you grew up. That is definitely true. I'm not a huge fan of labeling generations, but it is useful insofar as we can look at patterns and be like, yeah, there are different ways that people engage with the Internet. And then I think a lot of the brain route right now is also particularly poking fun at what Gen Alpha finds funny.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I was going to ask about Gen Alpha. So the older members now are 14 and 15. What are you seeing about their, their, how they interact and communicate online, linguistically?

[Adam Alexa]

I, I think it's the middle schoolers we have to be paying the most attention to. Middle schoolers are at this point where they're figuring out their identity, they're trying to differentiate it from adults, they're trying to build an identity for themselves. Elementary schoolers aren't quite there. By high school, college, you already figured out your identity. And you're also more cemented in your idea of what language is. For example, like we have a crystallized notion of language as this rigid thing and middle schoolers are playing around with it. They're coming up with new stuff, new ideas, and, and they're finding new directions to express themselves, which means that they are the most flexible in their adoption of new ideas, new concepts, new language. And so to be tapped into exactly where our culture is heading, I think you need to be focusing most on middle schoolers, if anything.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And how so far do you see that some of these middle schoolers, Gen Alpha, whatever you want to call them, are different from Gen Z in the way that they communicate and talk about.

[Adam Alexa]

I'm actually a lot more optimistic than most people. At the end of the day, like, again with, with language, we're still doing great. We're using language to communicate and relate to each other and wow, you know, I think a lot of these, these kids are very intelligent. You know, if anything, they're deeply media literate. They understand things like, oh, you know, algorithms aren't, you know, serving you a good picture reality. I think it's actually like boomers that are in more danger of being media illiterate. We talk about, you know, literacy rates dropping and literacy rates to me is just deep knowledge of a single medium that being books. And obviously, I'm not going to say that's not important, that's incredibly important, but you need to be able to engage critically with every medium. And I think the boomers are the ones that are first tricked by the shrimp Jesus AI slop on Facebook, you know, like, they're the ones that are going to get scammed by AI mask. Like, I think younger generations are growing up way more critical of this stuff because we're deep in it. So, yeah, I think we should have literacy across all different forms of media, including books, including, you know, TikTok. But it's because we're in this transitional period that it's particularly difficult for Any generation really, because we all have our unique struggles.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

We, we talk a lot on this show about monocultures and the fact that the monoculture is dead or dying out. You know, you got like a, the super bowl, you know, the eras tour. There's, there's not a lot left out there that, that we're all sort of consuming and talking about together. Do you see a similar fragmentation within linguistics?

[Adam Alexa]

Oh yeah. I mean, I kind of explore that with a chapter on echo chambers and how these echo chambers all kind of come up with their own in group language. And this is actually a vector for new language formation. I think a lot of more new words are being created because the Internet and algorithms give them communities to coalesce. And once you have people with shared interests, they come up with a shared language to reflect those interests. So you have like K pop communities coming up with K pop language and swifty communities coming up with swifty language and incel communities coming up with incel language. And all these groups are kind of doing their own thing. And I do think some things percolate into the mainstream. There still are broad cross platform trends that unify us. I do think content consumption is obviously more fragmented. There's that term cyber Balkanization, but also in general, like, I don't know, in the 60s everybody's like watching Walter Cronkite or something. And now it's like you're either watching this commentator or that commentator or you're in this echo chamber and there's no unifying cultural media. I think there is a people want it and we try to find it when we can. Things like Love island, things like, I don't know, Severance was for me a unifying moment where all my friends were watching at the same time. So I think the Summer I Turned Pretty was very popular recently. There's like these. Yeah, there the people crave homogenous media.

[Jon Favreau]

Do you like, could you argue that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Language itself can act as a monoculture or can, can, can be something that can kind of connect some of the disparate.

[Adam Alexa]

Absolutely. That's always the power of language as a tool of identity formation, as a tool of marking a boundary of an in group. So 100%. And it's almost paradoxical that two things can happen at the same time. Right. You can have these homogenizing things where we're all starting to use more TikTok language like oh, that ate or it's giving or you know that that comes from ballroom slang in the 1980s, but it's brought through TikTok so some linguistic features actually do get more homogenized, but then some of them get more localized and usually use the localized ones. When you're talking to this specific community, we know how to code switch to a general audience and to a specific audience. And I have a lot of optimism that, you know, we're not going to forget how to talk to each other. We are just going to get better at both talking to a big group of people and to our specific small corner of the Internet. But that's the danger that the small corners might have very niche ways of talking that are unintelligible to larger communities. And that's where you get into something like not really being able to explain Luigi Mangioni or Tyler Robinson's politics in a normal left right spectrum.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. And I do think that that is the the hope is that that we can use and continue to think about ways to use language in ways that are unifying or at least accessible to a broader audience. Because I do think that can sort of still, it still is the tool that can bring people together as language. At least that's got to be the hope. Adam Alexa, thank you so much for joining Offline. The book is Algo Speak. It is excellent.

[Jon Favreau]

Everyone.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Go check it out. And thanks for stopping by.

[Adam Alexa]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Jon Favreau]

As always. If you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email us@offline cricket.com and if you're.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

As opinionated as we are, please rate.

[Jon Favreau]

And review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad free episodes of Offline and Pod Save America, exclusive content and more, go to cricket.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok and the other ones for original content, community events and more. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilick Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrienne Hill is our head of news and politics. Jarek Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel. Take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos. Every week our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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[Adam Alexa]

Good different.

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

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