6 7, Ragebait, Chud - what do they even Mean? Algospeak w an Etymology Nerd

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Smart Girl Dumb Questions
Host: Nayeema Raza
Episode: #6-7 — Ragebait, Chud—What Do They Even Mean? Algospeak w/ an Etymology Nerd
Date: February 17, 2026
Guest: Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd), author of "Algospeak"

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into how internet algorithms, meme culture, and fringe communities like incels shape the way we use and invent language. Host Nayeema Raza sits down with Adam Aleksic, known as The Etymology Nerd, for a wide-ranging conversation about how slang spreads, the origins of "algospeak," why certain words stick or fade away, and the deep social and psychological effects of language in our digital age. Along the way, they touch on meme theory, cultural appropriation, influencer accents, AI’s role in language homogenization, and the persistent democratization—and fragmentation—of communication.

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Major Discussion Points and Insights

The Viral Spread of Language (00:24–01:29)

• Words as Viruses: Adam likens the diffusion of words to viral transmission—a "canary in the coal mine" for cultural shifts.

  "There's a way ideas and words diffuse... It's not broadcast communication like TV, it's viral communication. You should think of it like a virus." (Adam, 00:24)

• Slang Innovation: Adam shares the formation of “lokirkenuinely” (low key + genuinely + 'kirk' as an intensifier). This playful combinatorial slang embodies what he calls “internet brain rot”—a rapidly mutating, attention-seeking meme culture.

Etymology and Personal Language History (01:45–03:16)

• Etymology's Roots: “Etymology” comes from Greek “etymos,” meaning ‘truth’—reflecting Adam's belief that all words contain insights into humanity.

• Nerd vs. Geek: “Nerd” is traced back to Dr. Seuss, while “geek” is seen as more technological.

• Adam's Origins: His etymological obsession began in high school and blossomed into a blog, social following, and now a book and TED talk.

Algorithms and Influencer Accents (03:26–05:16)

• Influencer Speak: Adam breaks down “influencer accents” as self-conscious ways of talking tailored for retention on platforms.

  "We code switch into different environments. There's an influencer accent... The accents are formed around how you go viral on TikTok and that means you have to keep people's attention at all times." (Adam, 03:46–05:16)

• The Medium Shapes the Message: From podcasts to TikTok, platforms dictate tone and delivery. Retention strategies and viral optimization change speech patterns, even word choice.

The Nature and Lifespan of Modern Slang (05:16–15:03)

• Algospeak and Self-Policing: Social media platforms incentivize linguistic shifts (e.g., using 'unalive' instead of 'kill' to avoid moderation).

• Community-Originated Slang:

  • Incel and African American Vernacular: Adam claims almost all internet slang arises from incel subcultures or African American English.

    "If it's not from incels, it's from African American English. That's shocking how often that holds True, really. 90% of the time..." (Adam, 07:31)

  • Examples: Emerging words like "chud" (not from "Chad," but a repurposed sci-fi term), "foid" (female humanoid), and “new gen” (newcomer, now generalized).

• Why Some Words Last:

  • Adaptability, intuitiveness, unobtrusiveness determine whether a slang word endures or fades. Words like "situationship" stick because they fill a conceptual need without feeling forced.

  • Failed Attempts: Nayeema’s attempt to seed "boom scroll" (a positive doomscrolling antonym) failed because it felt unnatural.

  • Labeling Ends Trends: Naming a trend often starts its “expiry countdown.”

In-Groups, Out-Groups, and the Politics of Language (15:07–21:20)

• Fragmentation vs. Centralization: Digitally, language is "bottom-up"—marked by in-group slang and viral memes, rather than dictated by dictionary editors or cultural gatekeepers.

• Obfuscation and Exclusivity:

  • Communities, especially marginalized or fringe ones, develop coded dialects (“brain rot,” incomprehensible incel slang) as social armor and group identity.
  • "They believe that our society does not represent them... In their language forms an in group." (Adam, 18:32)

Appropriation, Memes, and Meme Theory (17:18–25:27)

• Linguistic Appropriation: Adam discusses the mainstreaming of African American English via parody and memeification, pointing out the roots and evolution of filler words like “like,” “you know,” and the influence of “hood irony."

• Memes as Fundamental Culture:

  • Memes are “self-replicating cultural units” (from Dawkins’ 1976 "Selfish Gene").

  • All language is memetic—words, facial expressions, and even personal “idiolects” (your unique word patterns) are like linguistic fingerprints.

  • Idiolects and Forensic Linguistics: The story of how the Unabomber was caught through his unique phrasing illustrates the deep individuality in language.

Language, Technology, and AI (31:08–39:03)

• AI and English Dominance:

  • English enjoys outsized influence as a “high resource” language for AI training.
  • Social media creators are incentivized to use English for wider reach.

• Social Media as Democracy or Control?

  • Platforms both democratize and police language for business and retention goals (e.g., changing what goes viral, monetization thresholds).
  • Adam argues for an “adversarial” stance toward these platforms, to be conscious of their shaping force.

• Authenticity vs. Virality: Even in podcasts and “authentic” content, choices are subconsciously optimized for shareability, clipping, and attention economy, not genuine connection.

Fragmentation and Homogenization: Paradox in Internet Language (28:36–31:08)

• Hyperfragmentation: Communities like K-pop stans, incels, and Swifties evolve divergent linguistic landscapes.
• Homogenization: Simultaneously, global English and platform norms create new kinds of linguistic sameness.
• “We want to be understood by everybody, but we will always feel misunderstood by some people.” (Nayeema, 30:11)

Culture Wars, Policing Language & Platform Power (39:52–48:50)

• Section 230 and Platform Power: Section 230 protects platforms as neutral hosts, but Adam argues they have “deep editorial power” by shaping visibility and norms.
• Words as Weapons and Tools: From "ragebait" (the Oxford Word of 2025) to viral social justice terminology, language is actively manipulated for engagement—often privileging anger or fear over contentment or reason.
• Who Has Power? Adam ranks: 1. Platforms (as mediators, not neutral platforms), 2. Groupthink/users collectively, 3. Creators, 4. Individuals. Marketers have less power now, but still influence culture.

Influencer, Content Creator, and the Nature of Viral Power (44:28–49:32)

• Metaphor Breakdown:
  • “Platform” isn’t truly neutral; calling someone a “content creator” reduces their output to interchangeable units, while “influencer” (from ‘to flow in’) suggests a more active, value-laden role.
  • Brand Influence: Advertisers see influencers as channels to push products—a modern form of “star power” via brand osmosis.

Measuring the Wrong Things; AI’s Impact on Language (65:08–69:39)

• What Algorithms Miss:

  • Social platforms’ focus on attention as a metric is akin to “measuring trees and forgetting the forest”—overlooking important values like kindness or contentment.
  • Language models (like ChatGPT) can homogenize usage (overuse of words like “delve”), subtly shaping human language in return.

  “If you talk to these [AIs], it will homogenize us.” (Adam, 67:23)
  “We should just touch grass more. We should just hang out with people in real life and not think about quantifying every aspect of what we're doing.” (Adam, 69:12)

Lightning Round: Words, Slang, and Questions (61:45–75:40)

• Curse words: Their origins are mostly medieval, and we seldom invent new ones—modern "curse" is increasingly identity-based.

• Oxford comma: Adam would “marry” it, calling it clarifying and beautiful.

• On ugly/beautiful words: Phonoesthetics (why “moist” bothers people) is entirely a matter of semantic association.

• AI and Idiolect: Language models have their own idiolect; their quirks filter into and start reshaping human usage.

• Kids and Literacy: Adam sees literacy as a construct that is always evolving with the medium. We may be shifting away from print-anchored skills, just as oral to written culture did centuries ago.

• Math as Language: Both are made-up constraint systems; math requires as much conceptual framing as natural language.

• On consciousness: Adam’s “dumb question” is: “What is consciousness?”—acknowledging the limits of language itself in understanding reality.

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Notable Quotes & Highlights

On Meme Theory and Social Diffusion

• “Every single word is a meme. Every single action is a meme.” — Adam (25:16)
• "There's a way ideas and words diffuse. It's not broadcast communication like TV, it's viral communication. You should think of it like a virus." — Adam (00:24)

On Platform and Viral Power

• “The only way to get your message distributed is to adhere to the things that are going to go viral… certain words are going to go more viral, so we're going to say those.” — Adam (32:30)
• “Retentiveness is king. The accents are formed around how you go viral on TikTok and that means you have to keep people's attention at all times.” — Adam (04:13)

On the Origins of Internet Slang

• "If it's not from incels, it's from African American English. That's shocking how often that holds True, really. 90% of the time..." — Adam (07:31)

On Policing and the Shifting Power of Language

• “Censoring words is silly to me. One, because we will find new ways to express this, and two, because it's a deeper structural issue of how our conversations are being set up.” — Adam (42:22)
• “We are in sort of a moral backlash to social media… their business priorities are 100% shaping the way they structure our discussions.” — Adam (41:10)

On AI, Language Models, and Homogenization

• "Language models tend to homogenize the aggregate of what is considered the English language." — Adam (67:23)
• "If you talk to these things, it will homogenize us… the word 'delve'… now we have evidence that humans are also starting to say the word delve more because we see it being used by AI." — Adam (67:23)

On In-Group Language

• “Part of why the incels talk like that because it creates an in group dialect that is unrecognizable to the outside.” — Adam (15:11)

On Words and Identity

• “The words we use are ways of expressing who we are. And I see a beauty reflected in that." — Adam (21:01)
• “If language is a tool of identity and someone's telling you this is what your identity should be, that feels bad.” — Adam (53:18)

On the Changing Nature of Media

• “There is a 500 year gap where we relied on writing as our main form of epistemic basis of knowledge. And now before that it was oral tradition. And now we're going back to oral history… looking back to sights and sounds.” — Adam (70:55)

On Consciousness and Dumb Questions

• "What's consciousness?" — Adam (74:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:24–01:29: Viral spread of slang, "lokirkenuinely" example
• 05:16–07:44: Explanation of algospeak; how new words avoid moderation
• 07:44–08:43: Why so much slang comes from incel forums or African American English
• 13:40–14:55: What makes words adapt and endure
• 17:18–18:21: Appropriation and mainstreaming of subcultural speech
• 21:22–22:54: Defining “brainrot”; meme evolution and overuse
• 31:08–32:30: AI, English as a high-resource language, and social media's globalizing force
• 32:30–36:45: Adversarial stance toward platforms, algospeak dynamics
• 39:52–41:26: Section 230 and the transformation of language policing
• 43:48–47:26: Who wields power in the attention economy?
• 65:08–69:39: Language models, AI, and the "measuring the wrong things" dilemma
• 74:29–75:04: Adam’s “dumb question” — what is consciousness?

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Memorable Moments

• Adam praises his own viral "dolphin language" as evidence that spectacle and high-arousal emotion (awe) drive internet popularity. (39:03)
• Discussion of how even filler words ("like," "you know") propagate socially and unconsciously. (16:24)
• Nayeema and Adam physically reposition themselves with chairs to debate how seat arrangement influences conversation—a “first viral chair clip” moment. (49:32–52:57)
• Lightning round: Adam would marry the Oxford comma and "fuck with" the word 'unalive.' (62:57)
• Adam’s only tattoo is the word “umwelt”—the individually-perceived world—symbolizing his philosophy of language and understanding. (58:51)

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Takeaways

• Algorithmic platforms shape not just what we say, but how we say it, and what survives.
• Modern slang overwhelmingly comes from two sources: African American English and insular internet communities—often for in-group distinction or as a form of parody.
• Attention, not accuracy or empathy, is the main metric for viral language; as a result, anger and spectacle rise over nuance and kindness.
• The apparent paradox between language fragmentation and centralization is a natural human dynamic: the desire for both connection and separation.
• AI and language models risk homogenizing human speech, recycling their own linguistic quirks back into the population.
• Cultural and identity politics entwine powerfully with words—every new label, every meme, is both a tool for inclusion and a wedge for division.
• The ultimate “dumb question” underpinning language, memes, and digital life may be: What is consciousness?

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This summary captures the heart and nuance of an in-depth, rapid-fire conversation, offering both context and specifics for those new to the world of etymology, meme culture, and internet linguistics.

Transcript

[Naeema Raza]

5Am I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change and head to work. Meetings, workshops. One more Celsius. No slowing down. Working late, but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celsius live fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate [e-mail].

[Adam Aleksic]

The wards are sort of like canaries in the coal mine. For greater stuff going on, there's a way ideas and words diffuse. And it's not broadcast communication like tv, it's viral communication. You should think of it like a virus, that there is a higher up patient zero or whatever. And then they infect different people. And you can think of a word being transmitted from one host to another, kind of infecting another person. And ideas are much the same way.

[Naeema Raza]

What's the coolest new word you've learned?

[Adam Aleksic]

I guess slang words are ones I learn frequently, but locurkenuanly recently became popular.

[Naeema Raza]

What does it mean?

[Adam Aleksic]

It's kind of like lowkenuanly, which I should explain first, but locenuinely is low key plus genuinely.

[Naeema Raza]

Oh, low key.

[Adam Aleksic]

And then you add Kirk as an intensifier. It just adds an emotional affect to it, but it's a low key genuine thing.

[Naeema Raza]

Low Kirk, genuinely low Kirk, Genuinely low Kirk.

[Adam Aleksic]

You could play around with it and make other words like low Kirk, ontological flow state or something.

[Naeema Raza]

Low kirkchatological full state. I kind of know what that means.

[Adam Aleksic]

The Internet's just. It's a form of brain rod. They're playing around with adding Kirk into things and combining words. And that's a kind of a key indicator of brain rot, this sort of recombination and play with different types of words.

[Naeema Raza]

Smart Girl Dumb questions. What's in a word or in a language? I'm Naeema Raza, host of Smart Girl Dumb Questions and today my guest is an expert on words, language and really our culture. Welcome Adam Aleksic, AKA the etymology Nerd.

[Adam Aleksic]

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited.

[Naeema Raza]

And author of the book Algospeak. I'm so happy to have you here. What is the etymology of the word etymology?

[Adam Aleksic]

It comes from Greek etymos, meaning truth. Etymology is the study of truth and I really love that. I think that if we look into any word, we can find something real about who we are as people.

[Naeema Raza]

Any word. Even the word carapill. What was it?

[Adam Aleksic]

Callipygian. Callipygian having a beautiful buttock. I think it Is an aspect of humanity that we admire. A buttock.

[Naeema Raza]

There's a great truth in that. And define the difference between nerd and geek.

[Adam Aleksic]

You know, it's subjective. I think geek is usually more technologically oriented. Nerd is bookish. Perhaps nerd comes from a Dr. Seuss book. If I Ran the Zoo where he talks about, like, a nurkle. A nerd and a seer sucker, too.

[Naeema Raza]

Dr. Seuss made the word nerd.

[Adam Aleksic]

He made the word nerd. Yeah. And then it just kind of diffused into popular culture. I don't know how that ended up meaning like a dorky intellectual.

[Naeema Raza]

Did you play around with other terms for your.

[Adam Aleksic]

No. So the etymology nerd goes back to 10th grade of high school. I ran a blog for myself, I don't think anybody read it, called etymologynerd.com and I do a little word origin a day. And then eventually that was just my natural social media username.

[Naeema Raza]

Wow. Okay. Both Adam and I gave TED talks this year. Mine is coming out, I think next month. Is yours out already?

[Adam Aleksic]

Yep, just released it.

[Naeema Raza]

Just released, like, right now?

[Adam Aleksic]

A few weeks ago.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, I gotta watch it. But I watched the real thing. And when you spoke on stage, you spoke so fast, I actually thought the way you did it was genius because you gave a TED talk about AlgoSpeak and about our culture and TikTok and how it's changing language and the way you spoke, I felt like I was, like, experiencing an engine of, like, algorithm at me.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, no, definitely. I'm embodying part of that. And I think similarly, on a podcast, the thing that makes your podcast become more popular is it gets clipped. And so we're incentivized to say things on the podcast that can turn into viral snippets. Right.

[Naeema Raza]

Now, when you speak in a podcast, do you speak differently than when you speak on a stage and we speak to your camera phone?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think it's natural. I think as humans, we code switch into different environments. We are aware of the medium and how it shapes us. If you're talking to your grandmother, you're going to talk differently than to your friends. And if you're talking on stage, you're going to talk differently. TV broadcasters speak differently. And I think there's an analogy there with social media influencers. There's an influencer accent that I wrote about in my book. We feel a need to present in a certain way that is accepted as the method of communication on that platform.

[Naeema Raza]

Can you show us the influencer accent?

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, I mean, the most stereotyped one is simply probably because it's just associated with female lifestyle influencers. But there's like the. Hey guys, get ready with me to be on a podcast. But I use a very different influencer accent. I think there's several varieties of this depending on your audience, depending on what your needs are as a content creator. I'll speak quickly, I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video. And that is a different sort of thing. Mr. Beast has another influencer accent. I just bought this private island, you know, I'm giving away a million dollars. He's always screaming at every word. It's. And he's honed that in. He's. He's very knowledgeable about how to go viral. What underlies all of them, retention, which is how long people watch videos. The accents are formed around how you go viral on TikTok and that means you have to keep people's attention at all times. And there's different ways of keeping attention depending on what the sort of meta portion of the video is about. If it's like a get ready with me, you want this to be like a lullaby esque, sort of tricking the viewer into following along. But if I'm trying to intensely deliver facts, I'm doing a different thing.

[Naeema Raza]

I want to talk about algospeak. I want to talk about how algorithms are rewiring our language. We just did an episode on how the Internet is rewiring our brains. So this is a great follow to that. And I wanna talk about the future of language. I also wanna talk about like free speech, policing language and how that happens and how that has happened in the past. But let's just start with words. So Rage Bait was the most recent Oxford word of the year and Dictionary.com had the word six, seven.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

Which of course not a word. Do you have any word now like you know, a few weeks into January as we're taping this, do you have a sense of what the 2026 word will be?

[Adam Aleksic]

There's a lot of new incel words getting popular. Chud is a very big Florida foid is getting bigger. Chud is a far right male, but at this point it's just being used as a self deprecating and so like I'm such a chud.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, it's a variation of Chad.

[Adam Aleksic]

No it's not. No, that's a common misconception. It comes from a sci fi movie and then was readapted into left wing forums online and then it started being repurposed by the right wing forums. But at a certain point, things do get conflated. So I've also heard people think that chud is related to the word chuz, which is chopped huz, which are both African American English slang terms for just ugly hoes or chungus. Right. So people say, fuck my chud life, but it's being used in the same context as somebody might say, fuck my chungus life. And then also the idea that it could be the opposite of chad. All these perceptions still shape how we use the word. So it's called folk etymology. There is a misconception about the word which actually does affect how it gets used. And the fact that people think chud is an antonym of Chad is in fact shaping how it's used.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay, so there's chud. This episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette join host Evan Ross Katz on the Official podcast for FX's new series Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette. And go behind the scenes with cast and special guests featuring Sarah Pigeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Grace Gummer and Naomi Watts. FX's love story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, Foid is like a female humanoid. It's like an insult for women. But it's getting more popular. Seeing the Google trends go up for that and seeing more on social media, I think it's going to be bigger this year.

[Naeema Raza]

These are words coming out of the incel communities.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. An unfortunate rule of thumb I have for online slang is that if it's not from incels, it's from African American English. That's shocking how often that holds True, really. 90% of the time, it's either from the weird incel forums or it's from African American English.

[Naeema Raza]

Why?

[Adam Aleksic]

The second language tends to follow the conduits of what is seen as funny or cool. Right. So African American English can be seen as either. It can be a cool thing to say or can be funny to parody. There's a genre of hood irony memes that's what that parodies. Incel language is unfortunately really funny. And when you say something like, oh, I'm such a fat fucking chud, like, that's a silly thing to say, but in doing so, you're sort of regurgitating the stuff that is popular in these forums, potentially shifting what's called the Overton Window, or this is the range of acceptable discourse in society. And the more we talk about this stuff, the more it potentially legitimizes it and opens up the rabbit hole to more people discovering this stuff. And I mean, these forums have grown in size since social media. There's words like new gen. This is a new popular one as well. I'm seeing this on unrelated stuff. New gen just means originally somebody who was new to these incel forums or far right forums, but now it's just being used as like, oh, you're new to a meme, you're a new gen.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, you're new gen to anything. It's like saying you are a newbie, but now you're a new gen.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right. And it's kind of funny because it parodies that idea of how incels talk.

[Naeema Raza]

So I imagine a lot of people as they're listening to this, are watching this, like me. Their brains are like, wait, what? Like there's so much information and there's such an understanding that you bring to this. So just give a second. How do you get into. You had your blog, but when was the first time you got into etymology? Like, because a lot of us, like, it's a little bit like, this is water. You know, we're fish and we're like, this is water. And we don't notice or pay attention to words.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, that's one of my favorite metaphors. We're always in water, especially with social media shaping our reality. And it's hard to even take a step back and realize exactly what's happening.

[Naeema Raza]

So when did you first like notice a word or become attuned? Notice that a word was not just like the thing that it was, but a building block for our communication?

[Adam Aleksic]

No, for me, the eye opening thing was that moment in 10th grade when I read this book called the Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. And it sort of explained how a bunch of different words are connected to each other. Linking the word lord and lady meant like bread owner or something like that Old English. So a lord is somebody who provides bread. I thought that stuff was really cool. And I was like, wow, there's really more to language than I think. And then I started that blog as a way for myself to learn more, teach myself more. And then I studied linguistics in college. And then after that I was like, well, crap, I have to do something. So I started making social media videos and that led me into sort of investigating my own career, understanding how the language of social media is being shaped by the algorithms that are so pervasive and so influential on our discourse. That led me into writing my book Algospeak. And I'm kind of Continuing to focus on modern slang, which I think is the most important thing to be paying attention to. If we're trying to understand where we are right now. The fact that our culture is being so strongly shaped by these communities. It's not just the words. The words are sort of like canaries in the coal mine for greater stuff going on.

[Naeema Raza]

We live in a world where the culture wars are playing out. Like, even you talking about the incel community, like you're seeing all of that in the pattern of language.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. There's a way ideas and words diffuse. And it's not broadcast communication like tv, it's viral communication. You should think of it like a virus that there is a higher up patient zero or whatever. And then they infect different people. And you can think of a word being transmitted from one host to another, kind of infecting another person. And ideas are much the same way. And these algorithms have replicated the naturally mimetic way that ideas diffuse through a population. But they've taken that and they've accelerated it. And now something that might have taken the span of years to get popular can happen in a few days simply because they're mimicking how humans mimic each other.

[Naeema Raza]

So if that girl from Mean Girls who wanted to make the word fetch cool, like, she couldn't do that in the 90s, there is a difference in the 2000s.

[Adam Aleksic]

But now in fetch, it's still hard to make a word popular if you're trying to force it. You can make it a temporary joke. But there's an idea in linguistics called obtrusivity that the more obtrusive a word is, the more it sticks out, the harder it is to really keep it in your vocabulary. It could be a temporary meme, but in that case, the word is tied to the lifespan of the meme. It doesn't become a natural part of your vocabulary.

[Naeema Raza]

I tried to make a word once.

[Adam Aleksic]

What was the word?

[Naeema Raza]

Boom scroll.

[Adam Aleksic]

Boom scroll?

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. When people were really happy about. So when all of a sudden the culture was like, getting excited and everybody was like, kamala is brat. And I was like, she's probably not brat. But there was a lot of cultural interest. And all of a sudden people were like, looking for hope core kind of. Right. And what we now call hope core. And I thought we should call it boom scroll because it's like people are looking for something happy or something that they think reinforces their version of reality, but no one took it. And in fact, someone wrote in. I was on another podcast at the time, and someone Wrote in name A. Please stop trying to make room scroll happen.

[Adam Aleksic]

I like the sentiment. I don't know if I would use it. If it feels unnatural, like the word fetch or something, we don't adopt it. It needs to have this effervescent quality to it that it feels like it's coming up from the community. Like people are naturally saying this. Then we actually adopt words into our language and it usually doesn't come cross a conscious threshold. We just replicate words that we see ambiently around us.

[Naeema Raza]

But like the word low Kirk.

[Adam Aleksic]

Oh, yeah, that's not going to stick around. People are not going to be saying lo Kirk henuently in 20 years. No. It's a temporary fad, but it's something that is able to briefly captivate us. But when the meme dies out, it dies out.

[Naeema Raza]

But like the word situationship, that's here to stay.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think that was never thought of as brain rot. Right. People don't make fun of the word situationship. It just. It makes sense. And that's another thing about when words get adopted. They need to be easily adaptable to new situations and they need to be intuitive.

[Naeema Raza]

So they have to be unobtrusive. Easily adaptable and intuitive to understand.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

Where do you think boom scroll fell apart? All of them.

[Adam Aleksic]

We don't need to psychoanalytically. Oh, no.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay, we won't do an autopsy on that one. If you look at like six, seven, is that gonna stick around?

[Adam Aleksic]

No, definitely not. But in the Same way, like, 21 was a gen Z joke off of vine that didn't stick around. But we'll look back on it with nostalgia. There will be 6, 7. Nostalgia edits in 5 years easily.

[Naeema Raza]

Is there a test of permanence for you? Are those three things also the test of permanence or are they?

[Adam Aleksic]

So endurance factor is kind of tied to how adaptable it is. If this is a word that can be reapplied to new situations, it will outlive the present context. There will always be situations. People will always have kind of these nebulous romantic ties. So it is, and it is adaptable to each of those situations.

[Naeema Raza]

But situationships existed before the word existed.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. I think there's an increased sort of casualness to dating that is being reflected in our language. But we don't use words like courtship anymore.

[Naeema Raza]

I guess what I'm asking is a little bit like the chicken and egg. Like, you know, all of a sudden it's like people talk about, like, the mob life aesthetic they did two years ago. So but the mob life aesthetic like live for a long time it already existed and then put someone puts a word on it. And I think when someone puts a word on a trend in particular it starts the expiry counter.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, it also makes it more salient, at least briefly. There is this idea that you need to label something that has a need to be labeled. If there's already a perfect word for the word cup and I say let's call this a glork. It's not going to work because people are like it's already a cup. You're not going to. Well, I mean you can try glork.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, I think the chuds would like the word glork.

[Adam Aleksic]

It sounds like something they would say.

[Naeema Raza]

Them and their fork would just have glorks of wine all day.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, they really do speak kind of like unintelligibly like that.

[Naeema Raza]

At what point does the language itself become unrecognizable or alien?

[Adam Aleksic]

Part of why the incels talk like that because it creates an in group dialect that is unrecognizable to the outside.

[Naeema Raza]

Is that more acceptable? Like I feel like there used to be a time where language felt really controlled by elite structures. You went to Harvard. There's way that people speak in certain and that seems to be totally out of step and out of style now.

[Adam Aleksic]

So there's differences between top down language and bottom up language. What we've been talking about, the slang stuff, that's bottom up language. There will always continue to be top down language as well. Why do we call it YouTube channels? Why we call them content creators. That's all. Because YouTube just at some point had a board meeting and said we're gonna call them this. We're gonna structure the payment system to creators and we're gonna call them YouTube channels. And we just naturally adopted that language because it's called an affordance. Something that just like is there for us to pick up on. It just felt easy and intuitive. And dictionaries have always been a source of legitimacy. People to this day will in the dictionary and say oh now it's a word.

[Naeema Raza]

Homer Simpson. And duh. It's like one day it became a word for everybody else.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right. Well the Simpsons gave us like meh and yoink as well.

[Naeema Raza]

Who gave us like and why does everyone do the like and you know. And where did those come from?

[Adam Aleksic]

I'm an Ummer for sure. Like is a Valley girl thing.

[Naeema Raza]

Yes.

[Adam Aleksic]

You know, is getting popular. These are just called filler words and.

[Naeema Raza]

But how can we all have the same filler words.

[Adam Aleksic]

Because we're social creatures, we mimic each other, and so we see something happen. This is not on the conscious level. You don't ever say to yourself, I'm gonna say the word, like, many times in a sentence, or I tried to.

[Naeema Raza]

Do the opposite, and I fail miserably.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. It goes under the threshold of, like, kind of conscious appraisal. And that's how most really salient words, words that stick, that get adopted.

[Naeema Raza]

So. Because I speak several languages and do you speak many languages?

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, it depends.

[Naeema Raza]

What languages do you speak?

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, yeah. Serbian, Croatian. It's like, kind of the same language. And then I. Conversational Spanish.

[Naeema Raza]

Yes. Okay. So I speak also Urdu, Spanish, and a bit of Indonesian. And I don't say in any other language when I'm speaking. Except in English.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. And different languages have different filler words. So, like, Spanish is like, eh or whatever.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Aleksic]

And it's a social thing. We just see people do things and we do those things. That's a human thing.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay. Yes. It's how culture happens.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

A large part of our language, though, comes from what some people might call cultural appropriation. You don't use that term.

[Adam Aleksic]

So in linguistics, appropriation is like a linguistic term, meaning just being used in a new context. So I do, in my book, write about the appropriation of African American English.

[Naeema Raza]

You don't have literally cultural appropriation.

[Adam Aleksic]

I'm not out here particularly on a culture war agenda. You can draw your own conclusions, your own truth, your etumos, from what you find out about the fact that a lot of our slang comes from African American English, and then the meaning gets corrupted, and then it loses the power in the original community it came from, and it was created in that community as a form of linguistic power to kind of shed the straight white norms of the English language. Yeah. Language is created when people have a need for it. And both African Americans and incels unfortunately, have a need to distinguish themselves from other people. So the people who have controlled the dictionary are white people. And they have all these rules that they've set up about what the English language is supposed to be, but that doesn't reflect the reality of a lot of African Americans. A lot of slang words somehow indirectly have roots in, like, West African culture, for example.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, I understood that one. Actually, more than this incel community, there's a need because they're living outside of kind of our sexualized culture or our.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, they believe that our society does not represent them, that they advocate for the violent sexual redistribution of women. They have incredibly different political philosophies than mainstream. And unfortunately it is becoming more and more normalized. Part of their. In their language forms an in group. It creates a feeling of exclusivity. It creates a cult like mentality of like we are the people in the know and we're using a different enlightened language. It's also hard for outsiders to even understand what's going on. I had to deal with like swatting threats from incels before and I showed it to the police and they don't even know what any of these words mean. How am I supposed to even report the fact that getting pizza'd means getting a SWAT attack at my house?

[Naeema Raza]

And I'm sorry you got these SWAT attacks. That's because of the work you do.

[Adam Aleksic]

A dangerous group. You can't.

[Naeema Raza]

They don't like you.

[Adam Aleksic]

No, they don't like anybody who really talks about them. So I'm sorry for bringing it up.

[Naeema Raza]

Oh, now they're not gonna like me. I'm not gon know what it's. I'm gonna be like pizza.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. No, I don't think you're.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, I'm not gonna get the language, but okay, so talk about a couple of the words, a few of the words you speak in your book about this and. Or write in your book about this. Chinese. Oh yeah, no good.

[Adam Aleksic]

I've made a few videos about sort of. Yeah, no can do.

[Naeema Raza]

No can do, sorry.

[Adam Aleksic]

That's an example from Chinese pidgin English that sort of starts getting parodied and made fun of in English. Long time no see is another one long time ago. And yeah, there's a sort of a trend of making fun of other cultures. Everybody does this around the world, but it depends on where your position is and how much power you're exerting over it. So I don't know the same way. Like it's funny when the terminator says hasta la vista, baby. Like it's funny because it's a foreign language. That's sort of the joke. And in the same way a lot of African American English is getting brought in through hood irony memes. Because it's kind of a joke that this is like a different style of speaking.

[Naeema Raza]

What does a hood irony mean?

[Adam Aleksic]

Goofy A was a popular one, which stands for goofy ass. But it sort of makes fun of how debuckleization just turning into an H sound happens in African American English. There's a lot of the low Kerr Canyonly stuff. While those words are like that particular word is just a new Meme. It's making fun of how low key and genuinely are overused in African American English. So that's like hood irony as an example.

[Naeema Raza]

Do you ever find when talking about this stuff, it's hard because it's. It deals with, like, in groups, race and a lot of kind of identity and a lot of the sensitive aspects of our culture right now. Do you find, like, what you do is hard for that reason?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think it's so beautiful to see identity expressed through language. Language is a tool of identity. The words we use are ways of expressing who we are. And I see a beauty reflected in that. That humanity is sort of just finding ways to pinpoint what our reality is and show that to other people.

[Naeema Raza]

Define brainrot very clearly.

[Adam Aleksic]

Meme genre, where you repeat a bunch of stuff that's been trending. So the first brain rot that was really popular was Skibidi Riz, Ohio Gyat. These were just words that were trending at the time in 2023. Last year, we had like, Matcha, Labubu, Dubai Chocolate. That was making fun of consumption. That was over trending. Dubai Chocolate was everywhere. The match was everywhere. Crumble, cookie, whatever.

[Naeema Raza]

You gotta watch Adam's TED Talk on this, which hits it at these moments.

[Adam Aleksic]

But our jokes about make fun of this, this over saturation.

[Naeema Raza]

But it's funny because, like, the two things are happening in the culture. One is like these things are becoming legitimately popular. Like, people were into Matcha, into Labubus and into Dubai Chocolate. Kids were saying Skibidi, talking about Riz, saying Ohio for things that were lame. So these things are happening and then they just very quickly become a joke.

[Adam Aleksic]

And then you have a backwash. That's the Skiba dialect of materialism.

[Naeema Raza]

So it's like every time it's like in any kind of culture, low key.

[Adam Aleksic]

And genuinely are being used a lot.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Or any kind of, like, political movement. You have like a revolution and then a retraction. A revolution and then a retraction. Is that same thing happening?

[Adam Aleksic]

It's not the idea of dialectics that you're always going back and forth between thesis and antithesis, trying to find a new resolution, sort of reshaping where we are in our cultural moment with our jokes. And as soon as you make a joke about something, it changes reality. It changes the nature of how we look at this stuff. The performative male. Right. Was an actual thing. But now that it's been labeled, you can't be openly a performative male. In the same way you write about.

[Naeema Raza]

This in your Book this idea that, like, words lose their meaning and over time they can just be dead on arrival.

[Adam Aleksic]

Particularly with overuse. I mean, semantic satiation is when you say the same word over and over again. Right. Cup, cup, cup, cup, cup, cup, cup. This doesn't make any sense. It might as well now call it a glork or something. But it's when you overuse a word. And so brain rot is us intentionally overusing words to make them devoid of meaning. Once you say skibidi enough times, it loses any connection to the YouTube short series. It just becomes an indicator of the fact that we are online so much.

[Naeema Raza]

It used to be everyone said slay, now everyone's saying cooks.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. Both African American English words.

[Naeema Raza]

Both are African American English words.

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, again, it's always either incels or African American.

[Naeema Raza]

90%.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. It's hard to necessarily, like, pinpoint. Yeah, yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

Because like, it's like you have to really, when you are doing this, do you really study the culture? Like, do you go deep into the culture or do you really go into a search rabbit hole of when was this first used? How did it first?

[Adam Aleksic]

As much as I can, I think the first attestation is a way you do historical linguistics. You look back at, oh, this was how this word was being used. This is the earliest time in this community. This gives me some context. And a lot of my work kind of diving into Internet slang is looking at the earliest memes using this phrase.

[Naeema Raza]

When was the first meme?

[Adam Aleksic]

First meme ever? Yeah, we've always been making memes. It's a certain point we started labeling them memes, which was in 1976. This guy, Richard Dawkins, wrote a book, Selfish Gene.

[Naeema Raza]

Yes.

[Adam Aleksic]

And he describes memes as like self replicating units of culture. This is the first time somebody labeled a meme. But we've always had memes in the same way.

[Naeema Raza]

We've even hieroglyphics. Like we had a hieroglyphic meme.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. So in Roman times, there was the satyr square, which is like sort of this palindromic square that people just like, for some reason, graffiti all over there was the Jesus fish. I talk about that in my book. But people, like just graffitied certain symbols over and over again. We've kind of lost the context of why a lot of it is said Jesus fish seems connected to an early symbol for Christianity perhaps, but we just lose it. I don't know. We're not in that cultural place anymore. Maybe that was really funny to them. Maybe that was like hilarious About Jesus fish. I also think memes are kind of were thought of in this funnier context now, especially because one thing that makes memes travel really quickly online is humor. Memes are just an idea we replicate between humans. Every single word is a meme. Every single action is a meme. Our facial expressions are different across different cultures. Those are memes. We literally have mirror neurons that mimic how people behave. We cross our legs in the same way. We adopt mannerisms and synchronies that other people have.

[Naeema Raza]

You speak a lot about kind of how each of our addiction. Manner of speak is very unique to the individual. And it made me think of. There's a time where I used to work and go to the Middle East a lot. And I remember speaking to someone that did security in the Middle east, and they said, oh, when you land at Dubai airport, there's actually something that would check for the gate, the way you walk. Because an individual's gait is an extremely.

[Adam Aleksic]

Gate analysis.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Extremely unique. And actually, you could disguise yourself. You could have fake identity, but it'd be really hard to change how you move through this world. And it seems like you have a similar kind of theory of how we speak, or not even theory. It's proven, no.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. That's how the FBI caught the Unabomber, right?

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Tell this story.

[Adam Aleksic]

Idiolect. Idios in Greek, meaning one's own. Same root as the word idiot. But idiolect is our own language, and we all have a completely unique way of speaking. Kind of a linguistic fingerprint. Because you are unique. There is nobody who speaks exactly like you. You have a certain educational background, a certain parental. Even with your family. You'll speak in a famelect, which is a dialect only spoken in that you have made up words for your situationship or whatever, you know, and all of that, that means that the exact combination of words you use, even the frequency of the words you use, maybe you have some of the same words, but you use them at a slightly different rate than other people. Maybe you say the word at a slightly higher rate.

[Naeema Raza]

Can you tell the story of the Unabomber? Because I find this fascinating.

[Adam Aleksic]

I actually met the guy who caught the Unabomber.

[Naeema Raza]

Like I met the Unabomber.

[Adam Aleksic]

No, not the. Not the Unabomber.

[Naeema Raza]

You met the guy.

[Adam Aleksic]

I was in the Unabomber's college dorm at one point, but kind of a weird intertwined history with the Unabomber. Highly recommend his manifesto. Unironically. It is a good read, apart from, you know, his broad takeaways. But the start of it where he talks about the Industrial Revolution and how since then society has abstracted more and more away from our natural way of being. I think he actually kind of cooks there.

[Naeema Raza]

He's cooking and then he got cooked.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, yeah, but. Yeah, there is a sort of ongoing reaction against technology that the Unabomber was very early to. Yes, but sorry, his actual dialect.

[Naeema Raza]

His actual.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, right back to his dialect.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah.

[Adam Aleksic]

It was in his manifesto that it got published in the Washington Post and then some foreign newspaper as well. His brother read that and he was like, this sounds like Ted. And then he reported it to the FBI. They like cross checked some stuff. I think the expression that was the real smoking gun was like, have your cake and eat it too. And he said, eat your cake and have it too. Yeah, he flipped it and they matched that in a letter to his brother and in the manifesto. And that was the thing that got him wild.

[Naeema Raza]

You're talking about like the familectic, this family dialectic. I think about it as words seem like they're meant to connect. Their language is meant to connect with each other. But a lot of what you're describing is like language that's meant to separate from as a way to connect with some subgroup. And does it seem like as a society we're doing that more like we have more divisive words in our culture now than or more divisive language?

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, I mean, we know about the echo chambers and filter bubbles and the hyper fragmentation of the media landscape. All that aside, the language is also happening with that. So the K Pop Stans are speaking completely differently than the incels who are speaking differently than the Swifties. And we're sort of fragmenting ourselves into different linguistic landscapes as well. But in another way we are homogenizing. Yeah, that's speaking English. Right. So there used to be 7,000 languages in the world. I think every two weeks a new language dies out and that's going to keep on happening and we're going to be left with like the. The 200 main languages in the world. 50% of the Internet is in English. So in one way we are homogenizing by speaking English and by speaking with like these influencer accents. There's certain patterns that we all have to adopt. But in another sense, there is a new explosion of variety and diversity. And that's simply because language is a reflection of reality. And our reality is getting more centered around English, but it's also getting more diverse. And in the Internet communities, so we're.

[Naeema Raza]

Simultaneously having a shift of like, globalization around a Western compendium, even though that's being really challenged in, I think, our politics and culture right now. But that is one reality. And then there's this great splintering of identities happening, and we're see and you're seeing that play out in a language.

[Adam Aleksic]

It sounds like a paradox, but it's actually not, because we will always. Exactly what you said earlier. We're using language both to connect and to separate. And that will always be a thing because we'll never want to be like everybody else, and we'll also want to be like some people. And that's, again, a very human, basic function. And we'll keep on doing that.

[Naeema Raza]

We want to be understood by everybody, but we will always feel misunderstood by some people. And that's the reality of. Yeah, but, you know, it makes me think of. I grew up in Indonesia, and in Indonesia, it's an archipelago. There's many, many different dialects that happen and languages actually that happen across the different islands. There was one kind of centralizing language, which is Bahasa Indonesia, which is the simplest. Do you know anything about Indonesian?

[Adam Aleksic]

I lived there for three months.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay. So, you know, do you speak Bisa, Bishara Bahasa in the Misya Siddiquit?

[Adam Aleksic]

No, not everybody spoke English, but it's.

[Naeema Raza]

Very, very easy because it's one conjugation, one tense, and so. And sometimes you doubled up the word for emphasis or plural.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. There's a lot of reduplication for emphasis both in Malaysian and Indonesian.

[Naeema Raza]

I remember thinking, like, if all the world spoke one language, why wouldn't they speak Indonesian? Why would they speak English? Like, English is so much more complicated than Indonesian. With AI and simultaneous translation, we won't have the need for a common language in some way.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, AI is an interesting thing to bring into it because English is a high resource language, meaning that there are more AI training texts than other languages. So English and Chinese are high resource. Pretty much everything else. There's not that much corpora to train the models on, which means that AI outputs are always going to be more reliable and better in English, so it'll continue being repeated. Also, the fact that English is like the lingua franca, I guess, for lack of a better expression.

[Naeema Raza]

English is the lingua franca. Yeah. Of the Internet.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. And the social media creators are incentivized to speak in English because they can reach a larger audience.

[Naeema Raza]

AI is a really good transition for us because I want to talk about how. Yeah. Algorithms are really rewiring our language. And also, so we're at this moment in artificial intelligence where we're moving from, potentially moving from large language models being the basis of that, to the discovery of real world models or video learning models or all of these other new models. And I'm curious how you think about that as someone who speaks in words but also memes. So let's take it in each course. Let's talk about first what algorithms have done to our language and what the power structure is that. Is social media a democracy or is it a policing force?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think we should be adversarially thinking about these platforms and they are a medium and the medium affects the message and whatever you say is shaped by the constraints. So the opening example I talk about in the book is like unalive, that you can't say kill on TikTok. So people say unalive. That's very surface level. They shape every form of what we say. Because the only way to get your message distributed is to adhere to the things that are going to go viral. And certain words are going to go more viral. So we're going to say those certain manners of speaking are going to go more viral. So we're going to talk like that. Certain length of videos, even the format of the video, which in 2022 or something, TikTok started pushing minute long videos because they're trying to compete with YouTube and they're only monetizing minute long videos. So creators only make minute long videos, but that affects. That's sort of the type of messaging that gets distributed. They took away Stitches and Duets, which was an early part of TikTok that made it feel like the effervescent conversation that drove people into the app. They took that away. They are trying to become more like YouTube. All the while YouTube is trying to become more like TikTok.

[Naeema Raza]

More like TikTok. Yeah, exactly.

[Adam Aleksic]

Sort of. The platforms are converging on that, but their business priorities are 100% shaping the way they structure our discussions.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay, so I just want to slow it down a little bit. You're saying we should take an adversarial stance when it comes to these, these platforms because the algorithms have a way of shaping, determining how we will speak, what we will speak about and yeah, the format in which it's done. And that's both in terms of words. Like we say segs instead of sex.

[Adam Aleksic]

Sure.

[Naeema Raza]

Because we're going to be policed. We say unalive instead of dead or killed. Sorry.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right.

[Naeema Raza]

And then there's also the carrot side of it. So those are the sticks and the carrot side of it is like, make this video one minute. Make these, make this tweet 120 characters or less. And that has been a huge problem because all of our reductiveness in our culture has come from. Has it come from our social media?

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, that is the higher node. When we're talking about how viruses get transmitted from higher nodes to lower nodes in like an epidemiological network, the higher nodes are on social media, or if it's not on social media, it's immediately gonna get on social media. So these are the places where ideas are getting distributed. If you're not on social media, you're still gonna be impacted by what's going viral. The clothes your friends are wearing, the music your friends are listening to. It's all still gonna be downstream of social media. So the culture is starting there. And what's happening there is they're prioritizing attention. They're measuring us in as many ways as possible. Whether you're a millennial or whether you're a cottagecore K Pop, Swifty Incel.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, we're being market segmented.

[Adam Aleksic]

All this is just ways of categorizing us in as many ways as possible so they can classify us, so that they can market to us better, so they can recommend us better ads, but so they can keep our attention for longer. All of that is what these platforms, at the end of the day are trying to do. Then they create those attention incentives for influencers. We replicate that. Not really speaking how I would speak to a friend or to somebody who I'm really trying to communicate my most authentically to, but speaking in a way that is ultimately, I always feel, as somebody who makes videos nearly every day, always feels corrupted through these platforms.

[Naeema Raza]

And yet you do it.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think it is a trade off I make because I am trying to change people's minds. And I try to also push people off of my social media onto my substack or read my book where I can express my longer form thoughts without as much impediment.

[Naeema Raza]

And do you think that works? Do you think people are moving? Because I think, for example, in podcasts, clips, I think people say it's like, oh, I watch your podcast. I'm like, oh, you go to the Spotify video? Do you go to the YouTube? And they're like, no, no, I watch the clips. I'm like, that's not listening to my podcast. I listen to your podcast on Instagram. I'm like, literally impossible, right?

[Adam Aleksic]

So I refrain from saying that I'm Speaking authentically here, I'm not sure I am. Occasionally I've said things that I think are slightly funnier or whatever because it could potentially be turned into a clip. This isn't a real conversation, this podcast.

[Naeema Raza]

Conversation that we're having right now.

[Adam Aleksic]

Do you think it's a real conversation? I mean, it's somewhat of. It's a pseudo conversation.

[Naeema Raza]

It's a pseudo conversation. There are moments where you're.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yes.

[Naeema Raza]

And I can feel sometimes the moments where you're like turning to. To the camera, maybe even.

[Adam Aleksic]

Am I sometimes.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think if I were talking to you, we'd probably have a similar conversation, but some of the directions would be different, Some of the topics we'd cover would be different. We're saying things with this knowledge that there is an implied audience and that's normal. That's fine too. And I think it is authentic to be a communicator and to know what you're communicating about, what the context is, and then adjust for that.

[Naeema Raza]

Hang tight for a second, we'll be right back. Hey, it's Naima here. I'd love you to take this 30 seconds to share the episode with three people or three group chats that you think would find it interesting. Like you. They can tune in to smart girl dumb questions on Spotify, YouTube, Apple or wherever you pod. And I know it's hard to find an hour in your life to have a long form conversation with us, but you could listen at like 2x and then it's only 30 minutes. Or you could listen at 3x and your head might just explode. So maybe stick to 2x max. Back to this episode, which will hopefully make your head explode and in a good way. And don't forget to share. I find, for example, like we have been told, and this is like something that feels the last 10, 15 years of media has been like, oh, these short form clips are going to help people. Go find your long form work. And I think that that is just like maybe not true.

[Adam Aleksic]

And it's partially true. Some people for sure bought my book and some people for sure read my substack. But I'm worried that is a very diluted fraction of people. And if I'm trying to reach a broader audience, which I am, because I think learning about etymology is one of the best ways we can become more media literate. We can become better as a society and recognize ourselves as humans and understand what our humanity is. And I'm trying to proselytize that message, but I think sometimes I get lost a Little.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. And I think your work does that. I think you are, in the sense that you're saying, taking an adversarial position to the technology. Your work has organically shifted from kind of what I understand as somebody observing in a small slice your work. You went from having. From being really like, kind of just very organically interested in the etymology of words. And let me tell you all these things like bird language and all like, in this kind of like very fun, happy, and to recognizing that, you know, your message was dependent on the medium to then the medium becoming part of your message. And your commentary on Algospeak and how our, our world is being redefined felt like an organic discovery for you.

[Adam Aleksic]

I first went viral for making a silly little dolphin language. I made a language that imitated how dolphins talk. I made a bird language that was really fun. I liked it. I also was just talking about regular words and where they came from. As I started to work on my book, I kind of increasingly began to realize how all encompassing the medium is in everything we say. And my dolphin language only went viral because it generated spectacle. And the emotion of awe is a high arousal emotion that is rewarded more in shares and comments. I feel like it would be irresponsible of myself to not recognize that and try to communicate that to my audience and try at every opportunity to get people to realize how deeply we're being infected by these social media platforms. And the language is just the easiest stuff to see. It's the stuff we can track. The words to me are like little data points about what's going on with culture.

[Naeema Raza]

And the history of wanting to police words is throughout history we have had this battle. And right before you came to tape with us, we were sitting, my producers and I, and John Simon, our engineer, was telling me, oh, you know, the 1980s, Tipper Gore tried to take out a bunch of words for music. And so we were listening to this Crossfire episode, and I'm gonna have Johnny play us a clip of it in a second. But there was a battle in the 1980s around words and lyrics and music, which led to Frank Zappa coming onto Crossfire to have a debate about the world of policing words. And it strikes me that we used to fear that the. The state would police them, even with our First Amendment. And now we have a reality where social media platforms can police them.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, so there's section 230 of the Communications act of 1996 or something. The social media platforms don't have any responsibility for what their users say illegally so we can just say things and then.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, because they're so. Section 230 says that social media companies are platforms. They're not publishers, so they're not editing and determining what's said. And it was very important in the 90s for the Internet to come to fruition for Section 230. But now a lot of people say, well, there's no accountability in social media. And they do have some editorial power in terms of their algorithm to determine what's being said.

[Adam Aleksic]

They have a deep, deep editorial power. And I see that deeply defining everything. And we are in sort of a moral backlash to social media. There's social media bans happening in Australia and France. People are talking about in the US it's definitely a cultural concern. How much are we being affected by this?

[Naeema Raza]

Do you think that banning social media would make. Make speech more free in a way?

[Adam Aleksic]

I'm not sure that's the solution. I think we do need to be rethinking Section 230 while still protecting smaller platforms so it's not just the big tech companies edging out the rest of them.

[Naeema Raza]

Can we play that, Clint? All the complaints were about words. Take the pornography out there. Is there no filth, no obscenity that.

[Adam Aleksic]

You think would qualify to be suppressed? We're talking about words, and I don't.

[Naeema Raza]

Believe that there is any word that.

[Adam Aleksic]

Needs to be suppressed.

[Naeema Raza]

There's no scientific or.

[Adam Aleksic]

Realistic reason why.

[Naeema Raza]

You should keep people from hearing certain things. Let me just follow that up. There's the words.

[Adam Aleksic]

You use that to describe an act.

[Naeema Raza]

Of fornication, which are brutal. I think he's talking about fucking.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

What do you make of that? Do you agree with this idea that there is no word that should be policed?

[Adam Aleksic]

When I talk about this stuff, I always like to distinguish between language and culture, and they are incredibly intertwined. But language is just our way of describing reality. And culture is that reality below it. Censoring words is silly to me. One, because we will find new ways to express this, and two, because it's a deeper structural issue of how our conversations are being set up. And that's kind of the point where I want to distinguish between my descriptivist attitude of we should just identify what's going on with language to learn more about the world. And then my cultural criticism hat that I sometimes wear saying, we should be thinking about the kind of conversations that get structured. When everything is structured around engagement, there is a certain kind of conversation that proliferates at the expense of other kind of conversations, sort of A reasoned, logical discussion does not go as viral as just a funny clip.

[Naeema Raza]

Let me ask it this way. If there are five constituents, and maybe there are more than five, but five is a good viral. Five is good for a clip. You know, there are five kind of constituents to our modern media economy, and it's the platforms, the marketers, the advertisers, the content creators, the users, slash consumers, and then the government, who in theory is supposed to have some impact here. Yeah. Who has the most power right now or stack rank them.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, by far the platforms. And first, like, let me just even challenge some of the words we're using by calling it platform. I'm already connoting a sort of neutrality and accessibility that anybody who is standing on a platform in a metaphor, the platform is like a flat, raised stage that if you're standing on it, you have a power to communicate. So theoretically, anybody using the platform should be the person who is responsible for what they're saying.

[Naeema Raza]

You're saying I'm giving them a cop out and calling them a platform.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should be thinking about them as mediators, as interceptors of our messages. And we say things because we're trying to go viral on the platform.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay. So they have the most power, the platform, spectacle makers, deciders of the rules of the game.

[Adam Aleksic]

Let me challenge with another metaphor. When we said content creator, content implies something that is contained, like the contents of a box or a drawer. So the metaphor here is that my video is the content and the box is social media. So, like, a medium is something that holds something. So if I'm a content creator, I'm making something to be held in the box of social media. And that means that my content is interchangeable with other content. I make content, you make content. Somebody else can make content. It just becomes something that's transactional, commodifiable. When I go to content creator summits or something, there's so many people telling you this is how you make content every day. You got to make better content. And what we're doing is we're treating content as the goal of social media rather than a means to some other goal. Yeah, I like the word influencer. At least. I know it's like negatively coded toward women. As a man, I want to be reclaiming it. I think men should, but I want to be.

[Naeema Raza]

You can do a get ready with me video, too.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, that's the association. I think it's beautiful to be influencing, to change minds. And if I recognize that my idea becomes the content, my video is the medium and my idea is the content. And so it's no longer interchangeable with another random AI slop video. It's now something deep and meaningful with the potential to change people's lives.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay, so who has the least power in this food chain?

[Adam Aleksic]

I want to distinguish between the users as a mass demographic and users as individuals. Users as mass. There's sort of a groupthink that's going on and they would have the second most power to me. And I'm not, I'm not putting the blame on any individual person. But we react to things based on our raw emotions. We are more likely to click share and like if it triggers a high arousal feeling in our brain. So that is humor, fear and awe. And those things make like define what goes viral. And so there is this like, what about rage?

[Naeema Raza]

Whereas rage.

[Adam Aleksic]

Rage, yeah, that's tied to. Yeah, rage. Anger. Anger is another high rails emotion. I missed that. Yeah. So anger, fear, rage, those make things go viral. A feeling like contentment, like being warm and cozy inside lowers like your stimulus in your brain and you are less likely to click that like button. You are less likely. So just simply feeling happy and cozy makes something less go viral.

[Naeema Raza]

This is so sad because I feel like my whole like mode is that.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well then maybe you shouldn't be on social media as much.

[Naeema Raza]

No, because it's like I don't, I don't want to be inspiring people to rage.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right.

[Naeema Raza]

So what if things, when it comes to awe.

[Adam Aleksic]

No, aw is not wonder is like tangential to awe. You can evoke it, but there's a bias to the kind of emotions we can even feel on social media. The kind of emotions that are able to spread. I would love to spread contentment if I can, but it's a very difficult thing to do. So the aggregate, sort of Carl Jungian collective unconscious is dictating a lot of, of what it means to grab attention on an individual level. We can combat this. We can think as people, but it will always be the group think that dictates what goes viral.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay, so they're the second most powerful.

[Adam Aleksic]

The group think. Yeah. Then the creators are making things for the platforms and the group thing. And then individuals are the least powerful. So separating us from that mass entity which reacts to things, you as a person probably have preferences about what you would like to see on social media. We know for a fact that those preferences are not like. Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

I think marketers have a lot of power for sure.

[Adam Aleksic]

Less than they used to.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, less than they used to in particular. Because of, like, Apple's changes too.

[Adam Aleksic]

One thing about the word influencer that I really like, it comes from Latin in plus fluetta, meaning to flow in. So the original idea, when it was borrowed into English, was that a divine ethereal power is flowing in from the stars into other people's bodies, through your body. So it's like this astrological thing that.

[Naeema Raza]

Do you think that's what you do?

[Adam Aleksic]

Oh, I would like that. But it doesn't have to be a celestial power. It's simply the idea of channeling something. And we use that when we talk about YouTube channels or Twitch streams. But there's this idea of a conduit.

[Naeema Raza]

It's like an osmosis.

[Adam Aleksic]

That's right. Different than a content creator. Something is flowing between you and the other person. And so now when we think about the brand ecosystem, the brands would actually like us to be influencers. And that's why we think about influencers as people shilling brands. Because instead of stars flowing through us, it's like some advertising company's brand flowing through us and then into the audience, Affecting the audience.

[Naeema Raza]

Tide pods.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

Flowing through us into homes across America. Yes.

[Adam Aleksic]

My goal on social media, and it sounds like yours is too, is for cool ideas to be the things that are flowing through us. Like, you have your ideas. Let's ask more questions. My idea, I think, is similar of, like, let's be more aware and literate of what's going on. We are starting with these moral principles or something, and we hope to channel that ideally. There's times when I thought about making videos and then I thought about, what is this video gonna do? And then I realized I'm just making content. And then I just decided not to make that video. There's ideas that I would love to spread to people that I just don't think are gonna go viral. And I never talk about them.

[Naeema Raza]

Like, for example, what? Talk about them here. Let's make like. Let's have. What are your best non viral ideas?

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, when I got onto the set, I thought it was fascinating that every single podcast has like a pink neon sign, that the positioning of like, there's like a semiotic signal that we're on a podcast, that there's like a structure of chairs are arranged at a 45 degree angle, which is like the optimal, like, or a 90 degree angle, which is the optimal, like, conversation angle. Studies have shown that if we have conversations at 180 degrees, it turns more adversarial. And if we have conversations facing away from each other, it doesn't work as well. And when they ask people to sit down in a room together and they say, oh, you're about to have a debate with each other, they sit on opposite ends and you're about to cooperate on something, then they sit kind of facing the same way. You're about to have a conversation. They sit at this angle. So this is like. I don't know. I'm fascinated with the structure of chairs and how they influence our discourse. And maybe there's a certain amount of. Our chairs are also being angled toward cameras right now. Sorry, a really long tangent. I. I would love to be able to talk about chairs and signs and seating placement, but it's sort of a longer, weird, rambly thought I have that chairs don't go viral on social media, but I think there's a.

[Naeema Raza]

Maybe now these chairs will go viral. If any chairs are going to go viral, I feel like it would be these cows.

[Adam Aleksic]

These are really fantastic chairs.

[Naeema Raza]

Do you think they're comfortable, though?

[Adam Aleksic]

I've been vibing.

[Naeema Raza]

So you're interested in how the physical space changes the conversation? Maybe.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think the human brain can't help but think spatially. And that spatiality precedes all of our thoughts. It is part of what defines our ongoing understanding of what's happening. And even when it doesn't seem like something spatial, like your phone is a 2D thing, right? You still feel like the home screen is home. It has wallpaper. Like you're home at home. You can lock it. Like you can lock your front door. So your phone has all this spatial elements to it. Different apps have a different feeling to them. Just like moving between different rooms in your house has a different feeling to.

[Naeema Raza]

I was having this conversation with JR about chairs because I was saying we're at this thing and I thought chairs are really bad. Like, I don't like my back being a chair. So what I did is I turned around the chair and I was sitting like this. Like, I turned the chair physically and I sat like this. And I felt it was much more comfortable for me to have the back of the chair on the side of my body. And also when I'm on a flight, if I'm flying in the back of a plane, what I do is I sit like this. And I think that this is how planes should be designed. Very comfortable. But then you sit like this and you could sleep and that way people could egress. Like, they could have, like, exit to the. When you know, if you're in the aisle, like, you don't have to. I don't have to wake up with your crotch in front of my face.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right.

[Naeema Raza]

I just, you know, I'm sleeping. I have a hoodie.

[Adam Aleksic]

How viral it would be to have a podcast facing this way? Right. Like, we usually face this way because it's better for the cameras.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah.

[Adam Aleksic]

And faces are a thing that go viral as well.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. I don't think this would be good for a podcast for flying economy. This position is for flying economy. This position.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, we're still able to have a perfectly functional conversation.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Sometimes. Well, this is a good way to have a sit. Right. Wouldn't this be better for a podcast?

[Adam Aleksic]

No, it's the 180.

[Naeema Raza]

It's too intense fighting. Okay. So you said like this.

[Adam Aleksic]

I was immediately disagreeing with you.

[Naeema Raza]

Really created the conflict.

[Adam Aleksic]

Okay.

[Naeema Raza]

I'm trying to think.

[Adam Aleksic]

Sorry for that tangent.

[Naeema Raza]

No, I love that tangent. I think it might be the first viral chair clip that the Internet has ever seen, hopefully. Do you think our language is getting more woke? Has that moment ended?

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, there's been a lot of commentary on the death of woke or maybe the rebirth of woke. Dark woke, whatever.

[Naeema Raza]

Dark woke. What's dark woke?

[Adam Aleksic]

It's like woke, but I don't know. It's not gonna work. But there is sort of always this hesitancy people have about words that are prescribed unto us, and that is that idea about obtrusivity. That's why we don't want to adopt fetch when Gretchen is trying to push fetch and mean girls. And in the same way, like, when it feels like it's the ivory tower institutions that are pushing Latinx and no Latino actually wants to be called Latinx. Yeah. Nobody. The idea of imposition is something we react against. If language is a tool of identity and someone's telling you this is what your identity should be, that feels bad. Part of the rise of woke is a good thing because, I mean, I do think we should be conscious about other people and try to be nice and recognize those people, like, attentive to.

[Naeema Raza]

What the impact of our words or way of speaking is on other cultures or identities.

[Adam Aleksic]

Part of what I'm, I think, hopefully trying to do is just let people know about what this word means to a community and the power it has in that community. And now you can make your own conclusions about how you want to use the word word. I certainly have words that I don't say because I think they would hurt some people, but I can't reasonably stop you from saying that word. But if we treat. Teach each Other to be kind to one another. Like, why. Why can't we rebrand wokeness as just being kind? You know, kindness is contentment. Contentment doesn't go viral.

[Naeema Raza]

Who uses words best? Is it politicians or marketers or artists?

[Adam Aleksic]

The far right 4chan in cells, really, they're very good at spreading their language through memes at. Maybe I just got incels on the brain too much because I've been studying them, but I think they're incredibly adept at creating in group language with intentionality. Like they. They use it as a form of deliberate power and try to push that power onto other people.

[Naeema Raza]

At what point does a group like that become so, like, more powerful in the elite?

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, the old institutions don't mean anything anymore. It's. It's the new institutions of who can talk on social media. And that idea of the Overton window, that range of what we can talk about is broadening. And the fact that all those words I mentioned, like chud and foid are getting more mainstream. And the stuff like maxing, I'm drink maxing. If I drink my water or whatever, I'm water pilled. That stuff has already been popular since 2023. That was the first time that this really started. This wave hit the mainstream. But it keeps on going. There's this streamer named Clavicular. If you mention these people, the problem is they just get more popular. I'm mentioning this stuff, but I'm normalizing it by mentioning it. So I'm complicit in commenting on this, I guess. But I don't know. There's also.

[Naeema Raza]

I don't know, I have a very different take on this whole idea of platforming.

[Adam Aleksic]

What do you think about platforming?

[Naeema Raza]

I mean, as a journalist, you get it all the time, right? And I've had many conversations or interviews I've done with conservative voices. And someone will write in and say, like, I can't believe you platformed this person. I think of it as like, my job is to try to understand and have conversations that are revelatory or explicative or help understand or reveal something about somebody who is doing something in the world that has a power.

[Adam Aleksic]

Do you think there's a boundary to platforming? Like far right Nazis? Is that okay?

[Naeema Raza]

I mean, I don't know. Would I be interested in interviewing one? I have before for a documentary series that got canceled. I was in contact with a kind of German far right, probably neo Nazi, and I was in contact with him and I didn't. I mean, it was part of the Report journalism production that was done good.

[Adam Aleksic]

To understand how these people think.

[Naeema Raza]

But I would. I have a. I don't think on this show. I don't know that I would do it, but I don't know. I mean, like, I would. I completely say no, I would not ever. If my job is trying to understand, then I guess I would do that interview. Would that interview be a tougher interview? Sure. It comes back to this idea of hyper fragmentation in the world we live in. Right. I think that if we don't have the ability to speak to people who aren't already in the channels that you happen to be in or be popular amongst, then that's not healthy.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think there's a responsible way to platform. Like, for example, I don't think Jubilee Media is doing the 25 Nazis versus one. That's a parody of it, but it's kind of like. Like how they do it.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. It's a very viral debate format of a circle.

[Adam Aleksic]

They are rage baiting. Oxford English dictionaries. Rage baiting. When they chose the word rage bait. By the way, Dictionary.com is rage baiting. That's a marketing strategy by the dictionaries more than anything. It's big word trying to get you to talk about big word. Buy more dictionaries.

[Naeema Raza]

I just worry to the point that we talk about words as a way of connecting and separating. I worry about the separation aspect of it. I think that identity is really important and it's also a way to misunderstand someone. And I used to think about it in the sense of like, I'm a brown woman. I worked at the New York Times. So a lot of times people will project their anticipated politics onto me when I meet them. But in fact, I didn't grow up in this country. I don't have a very like. I don't have a hyper partisan mentality. I've voted both ways. I think that it's like a invitation to be misunderstood as well. So I think platforming is important because it rejects that somebody else speaks for you, which is ultimately like, what is important about identity? What's important about identity is not just how you look or the group that you're cast in, but the ability of each person to be understood. Because we are, like you were saying, you know, idiolectic. I think, like we are each ourselves trying to be understood. That makes sense.

[Adam Aleksic]

The one word I have tattooed on my body as a linguist is the word umwelt. It means. It means the world as it is perceived by a particular person. And I really like that idea that we all see the world in our completely unique ways, conditioned by our upbringing, our environment, by the friends and family we have. All of this is completely unique. And I think we should try as hard as we can to understand each other's umwelts because I think that makes us better people. And I think you can start with language, but it also goes a lot deeper than that.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, I love that. I love that word umwelt. I've never heard it before. There's also the other side of it though, which is like a bit like the Panopticon side of things, where it was only reading Ta Nehisi co Between the World and Me where he talks about the experience of being perceived as violent by people around you and what that does in terms of, you know, changing police culture and then how you will behave in that interaction and how you. And so like there is like this thing of who we are and there's this thing of who we are because someone perceives us as this thing.

[Adam Aleksic]

The application of the label is already a kind of violence.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, exactly. Did you read the Florence Knapp book Names or the Name? It's like a book where she writes about three different names that were given to the child or the protagonist. And the names are a reflection of like basically you read the book and it's like in every X years you meet the kid again and the kid has a different name. And based on the name, the experience of life is different for the whole family.

[Adam Aleksic]

Names are crazy. Like the fact that this label applies to your entire life and all the ways that you change and that others know you from different angles, all with this name. A crazy thing. It's always a socio cultural indicator as well. Like the fact that, that you have an English or not English sounding name like already kind of tells you the same thing as like all the racial labels we were talking about. Like it's.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, so back in the day, like you used to, like the names used to be a reflection of what people did. Like a Smith or a Whatever.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right.

[Naeema Raza]

What would be the right surname for influencers?

[Adam Aleksic]

I did a video a while back that went moderately viral about how the modern way we save people in our phones, like if I have somebody in my phone like Michael Tinder or like Anna Hinge or something like that, is that is functionally an occupational surname or.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of my favorite games to play is cell phone roulette.

[Adam Aleksic]

Have you ever played what was that?

[Naeema Raza]

You unlock your phone, you stick it in the middle of the Dining table. And then everybody gets to pick up a phone that isn't theirs and text one person in the phone.

[Adam Aleksic]

That's dangerous.

[Naeema Raza]

You can have a veto. You can have a veto. You could be like, don't text my mom right now. But usually people always go to the most ridiculously saved room, the saved name. So they'll be like, oh, Juliet Rose Bar. That sounds like the person we're gonna text. And be like, hey, do you have my pineapples?

[Adam Aleksic]

Right?

[Naeema Raza]

And start a crazy conversation with this person. It's a good game. Hang tight for a second. We'll be right back. Can we do a lightning round on words and ideas?

[Adam Aleksic]

Sure.

[Naeema Raza]

Where did curse words come from?

[Adam Aleksic]

There have always been curse words. There's a great book by Rebecca Roach called For Fuck's Sake, I think. But Fuck, for example, I think was like 13th century. There was some monk who was pissed at his abbot or something, and he wrote about other monks who go in. Fukant weaves in or something. And that meant other monks who go fuck women in the nearby town. But that was the first time that word was recorded. But it might have been around for a lot longer. Right. Because there's stuff like this that isn't recorded. So it's hard to know with a lot of curse words.

[Naeema Raza]

No wonder Christopher Gore was so mad.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. Of course there's a lot of fake origins for curse words because I think they captivate us particularly. So at some point, somebody thought that fuck meant fornication under the consent of the king, or shit meant store high in transit. It's never, never the acronyms.

[Naeema Raza]

Can we have new curse words or are we, like, tapped out at the 7 or so?

[Adam Aleksic]

It's hard because nothing's really shocking to us in the same way. I guess most of the worst curses right now are identity labels, but it's usually existing stuff.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Okay. Speaking of fuck, marry, kill the Oxford comma, the unalive euphemism, or the dictionary kill the dictionary. Okay.

[Adam Aleksic]

They're a weird institution. Projecting power. That's not reflecting how language is. And it's too often held up as a standard of language. I would marry the Oxford comma, gonna.

[Naeema Raza]

Marry the Oxford comma.

[Adam Aleksic]

I am a long time Oxford comma enjoyer. It's really nice.

[Naeema Raza]

What do you like about that?

[Adam Aleksic]

Removes ambiguity. It just looks pretty, you know? It feels satisfying to me to complete a thought that way. And I guess that just leaves unalive for fucking. I guess that makes sense.

[Naeema Raza]

You fuck with unalive.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, I fuck, fuck with unalive.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Okay. If you could fine us for one word, like if you could find people for one word, what would it be?

[Adam Aleksic]

Maybe the N word or something. Okay, Yeah, I think that's a reasonable take. I'm not trying to.

[Naeema Raza]

But nothing like hashtag blessed, hashtag or obsessed.

[Adam Aleksic]

I'm not trying to police your language. Really?

[Naeema Raza]

No. Okay. Okay. What is the phonetically most ugly word that actually means something beautiful?

[Adam Aleksic]

Okay, so I have looked into like the moist stuff and like, why we have a voice. I don't hate the word moist. Yeah, yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

I don't hate it.

[Adam Aleksic]

So phonetically there's no such thing as like a beautiful or ugly word. There's this idea of phonoesthetics, how sounds feel to us. Might have been Tolkien who said cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, or someone around that time. And we don't like moist. So all this just comes down.

[Naeema Raza]

Why is the reaction to moist? Explain this. I've had this fight with my friend Theresa Shao, who helped name this podcast.

[Adam Aleksic]

It's entirely a semantic associ. It's just the feeling you get in your head when you think about what moistness connotes. Even if you think it's not separated from the meaning, it is tied to the meaning.

[Naeema Raza]

What is it about monosyllabic words? I love monosyllabic words. I think they're the best words.

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, they're simple. They cut to the point. I like em. There's. I don't know. What's your question?

[Naeema Raza]

I don't have a question. I was like. I just like them.

[Adam Aleksic]

There's sort of a distinction between like, romantic and Germanic words. And Germanic words tend to be more monosyllabic. I think of them in my head as more brute, to the point, more function. Words like those are usually. I think it's more likely for a monosyllabic word to be Germanic and a Latin based word to be like a longer word.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Can you tell the origin of a word when you look at it?

[Adam Aleksic]

Sometimes I can vibe it out. I don't know where pajama came from, but I think I have looked it up before.

[Naeema Raza]

What do you think about the world moving from large language models to real world models? What does that mean for the work you do? To the extent that that happens just.

[Adam Aleksic]

In terms of the greater contextual kind of aspects of. Of AI?

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah. Like if all of a sudden AI isn't training just off of huge volumes of words, you're still measuring something.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. There's this really good book. Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which I highly recommend. It is about how anytime you measure something, you're going to mess it up. And states and institutions always have an incentive to measure stuff because the more you measure something, the more you can exert control over it. I think platforms today are behaving like state states, but the example Scott uses is European forestry. When it first got started in the 17th century or whatever, they would just go and count all the trees and that was it. And then they cut down a certain number of trees. But then you miss the interrelated parts of the forest ecosystem, how all the animals and the different plants interact with each other, and you would end up killing a way larger portion of the forest than if you had notated more about the type of tree and where the tree is located and whatever. And by measuring something, like right now we're measuring attention. That's kind of like measuring the trees and forgetting the forest. I think there's other things that don't get reflected in social media metrics, like respect for one another, like contentment. Right. That stuff gets lost when we're just measuring trees. Oh, you asked about AI models. They also attempt to measure words. We have natural sort of vibes about words. They exist on a bunch of different dimensions for us and sort of embeddings get kind of close to that because they represent words, words by how close they are to other words, by trapping them in sort of a bunch of dimensions and comparing that to each other. And it gets very close to our feelings about words. Like they can almost replicate, like the genderedness of a word. But there's all kinds of ineffable sensations we have about language. These phonoesthetics, this idea that cellar sounds pretty and moist doesn't. And maybe it can sort of get captured in the. The way usage is predicted by these models, but it always will fail to encapsulate your idiolect. Yeah, you have a unique way of speaking.

[Naeema Raza]

Wouldn't it just have its own. Doesn't Chat Daddy have its own idiolect?

[Adam Aleksic]

All the very sycophantic and all the kind of models have their unique way of talking as well, because they're trained in different texts, they're reinforced with different things. So we know that Gemini and Chatgpt speak in a different, different dialect. And speak is also in quotes. So their dialects tend to homogenize the aggregate of what is considered the English language, which is even defining what a language is is impossible for linguists. We don't know what that Is we don't know what a word is. And so if you claim you know what it is, you're wrong. But also, you have a unique sense about what you're doing with your language and your words. And if you talk to these things, it will homogenize us. The example I like to use, use, and that I used in my TED talk is the word delve. Oh, yeah, and how ChatGPT says the word delve way more than humans do because there is an error in the reinforcement learning process. But now we have evidence that humans are also starting to say the word delve more because we see it being used by AI and now we're using it more. So it's messing with our sense of reality. It failed to capture language perfectly. It did it pretty well. It sounds pretty realistic. But there's still an uncanny valley.

[Naeema Raza]

Oh, totally.

[Adam Aleksic]

When you talk to it, you're like, oh, this is an AI.

[Naeema Raza]

But then you wonder if, like, there are people out there that talk like. Or write like AI.

[Adam Aleksic]

I mean, anybody on LinkedIn?

[Naeema Raza]

Honestly, it's like, oh, LinkedIn is the worst AI. My favorite influencer is the guy that does, like, LinkedIn, like, reading out, like, congratulations, Anna, you know, do you know who I'm talking about? He's a great influencer.

[Adam Aleksic]

It's like, if it's not AI, they're, like, so in the AI headspace that it doesn't even matter. Like, they're regurgitating, because on LinkedIn, I think you're. You're performing almost more than anywhere else. You're. You're playing into the expectation of how you're supposed to be talking in this.

[Naeema Raza]

Medium to this idea of, like, measuring and measuring the wrong thing? Like, is the. Is the answer for social media companies to measure kindness or contentment, or is the answer to actually stop measuring as much as we do?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think both. I think if we are to build a more meaningful algorithmic social media system, we should start finding ways to measure kindness and compassion and contentment. But at the same time, we should just touch grass more. We should just hang out with people in real life and not think about quantifying every aspect of what we're doing. But it is a reality that we're online, and I don't think it's reasonable to tell people just get offline.

[Naeema Raza]

No, it's not. Though I did have this thought over the break where I'm like, I think maybe in 15 years, we're gonna look at these phones like we looked at cigarettes, and we were just talking about that with one of the guests we were interviewing as well. The amount of time we spend on it and the access that we allowed it into our lives and us into it.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think any new technology has that sort of both good and bad tools can be used for good and bad.

[Naeema Raza]

Last lightning question. A lot of people are saying, oh, people don't know how to. Kids don't know how to write anymore. They don't know how to spell anymore. Do you think that our language will over generations really change? Do you think that people will not be able to write?

[Adam Aleksic]

It is kind of concerning about the literacy. I do think literacy is kind of a construct. I remember there was.

[Naeema Raza]

Literacy is a construction.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. It's how good you are at a certain medium and we've defined that as the medium of reading. I think it was Socrates who was incredibly concerned about the advent of writing and he thought it would make us remember things less. And by putting things into words we are no longer relying on our own minds. We're relying on this extension of our minds and that corrupted the human brain.

[Naeema Raza]

I know. Thank God Socrates didn't see Chatgpt.

[Adam Aleksic]

He would not like it.

[Naeema Raza]

He'd be dead. He would be unalive himself.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, there is. And then we relied on proverbs and oral tradition for a while and those had incredible strengths for kind of sharing community values and keeping traditions going. And then we moved to print and with print we have now this ability to rapidly disseminate ideas to do all this stuff. And then we move to this informal version of print which is the Internet. And now we're moving back to video and audio, almost replicating real life. There's this idea of the Gutenberg parenthesis that There is a 500 year gap where we relied on writing as our main form of epistemic basis of knowledge. And now before that it was oral tradition. And now we're going back to oral history. We're back to just looking visual history. We're looking back to sights and sounds and we're not going to be reading as much.

[Naeema Raza]

Neil Degrasse Tyson told me that aliens speak math. That's their language. The universe speaks math. Do you think?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think math is a linguistic constraint. I think people should read this book Where Mathematics Comes from by George Lakoff. But there's this idea of embodied sensation as a precursor to even numbers. So to come up with the idea of the number one, you need to be able to perceive a discrete object. You need to be able to see one finger and be like, oh, this is one finger.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, we all agree that's one.

[Adam Aleksic]

It's not one finger. It's two half fingers. It's three third fingers. It's actually blending in with the air around it. There are atoms from my finger melding into the air. It's not one finger at all. We made up a story in our heads that this one finger exists. It requires an observer, a perceiver. And now that we've created this idea that one exists, we can, oh, now there's another one. Oh, that's two. And so now we can make the entire basis of discrete math and the idea that one exists. We can start creating very predictable, like patterns and predict things about the universe using this. But it's ultimately just like another made up map. And the map can never be the territory. To truly mathematically quantify the universe, you would need the universe to itself. So in the meantime, we can do this fake stuff with language, which is math. Math and language are the same thing to me. Yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

It's funny, when Neil was on the show, he said something about like, he felt bad for the linguist because, yeah, he would probably bring a mathematician out to talk to the. I think he tweeted that once he got some heat. But one day I'll do a debate where you and Neil will sit at 180 degree angle.

[Adam Aleksic]

180 fight with each other.

[Naeema Raza]

Okay. Thank you so much, Adam, for doing this. We end every episode of Smart Girl. Dumb Questions. Asking our guests who are so knowledgeable, and you certainly are what they are dumb about. What's a dumb question you have that you would be. You've been embarrassed to ask out loud or just have and haven't dug into?

[Adam Aleksic]

Wow. I've increasingly sort of realized that there are so many aspects of communication that I think are as valid as language that I am not as aware about. So we have feelings and then we express those feelings. And that can be through words, which I've spent my life studying, but it can also. You can just play music. And to me, music is as valid a form of knowledge as language. And so to ask my question, yeah.

[Naeema Raza]

I was like, what's the question?

[Adam Aleksic]

To ask my question. It's not something I can put into words, but I'm realizing that the entire medium of language is just as valid as music or art or something. So it's less of a verbal question and more of. I'm just trying to listen to more music because I'm realizing that it can teach me things on an equal level as any philosophical text or something.

[Naeema Raza]

I love it. And you don't want to give us just one question that you have. Like Mark Cuban wanted to know, why do people chew with their mouth open? Neil DeGrasse Tyson wanted to know, how do you get cranes up there? Someone asked, asked, you know, should you run? Like the divorce attorney asked, like, why do we have graph paper? Like, who came up with graph paper? There must be some question, some unanswered question that you have. It's unknowable.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. What's consciousness?

[Naeema Raza]

What is consciousness? That's a great question.

[Adam Aleksic]

I know.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah, that's a great question. We actually, I asked Geoffrey Hinton if AI is conscious and he said no one ever agrees on what these words mean. Consciousness or sentence.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right. It might be another construct, but I can't prove for myself that this table isn't conscious. So it's sort of counterproductive to talk about AI consciousness because I guess it's probably different than what humans do. But I don't know whether if it has an input and an output, it feels something in the middle. I don't know that.

[Naeema Raza]

Do you think we're conscious?

[Adam Aleksic]

I don't know what that means for sure.

[Naeema Raza]

Yeah.

[Adam Aleksic]

I don't know whether I'm brain and vat or whether I'm. Yeah, I certainly know I feel things.

[Naeema Raza]

These two 11 year olds that came on the show, they asked, what is it like when you die and how do you know you're dead? I thought that was a really good question.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think that's tied to the consciousness. We can solve those at the same time.

[Naeema Raza]

Exactly. We'll figure it out. Okay, thank you so much. Adam Malakzik. Grab his book. It's called Algospeak. The next book will probably be about chairs or tables or something. Conscious Tables is. It is the two book deal. I think that will be the next one. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. We appreciate it.

[Adam Aleksic]

Thank you for having me.

[Naeema Raza]

So that conversation was fascinating and far reaching. I went in dumb about the etymology of certain words, but also the origins of this whole meme culture, which for me feels much more new and novel than obviously Adam understood it to be, which was super helpful. I left a lot smarter about words and language as kind of an aperture to our culture and. And what's happening and how it's changing. And someone like the etymology nerd has such a front seat view into how our culture is changing democratically, algorithmically, AI ly. And on the subject of AI, there's so much circulating out there, so much to read like that viral Matt Schumer piece. But for me, one of the best things I've heard on the topic recently is the speech that Yuval Noah Harari gave at Davos, and he's the author of SAP, of course, that big red book that you may have read or have seen around. And he gave a speech about whether AI can think. And he invokes that Rene Descartes line like I think therefore I am and has this to say about how humans have been able to kind of dominate over the rest of the animal kingdom.

[Yuval Noah Harari]

We rule the world because we can think better than anyone else on this planet. Will AI challenge our supremacy in the field of thinking Now? That depends on what thinking means. Try to observe yourself thinking what is happening there. Many people observe words popping in their mind and forming sentences, and the sentences then forming arguments. Arguments like all humans are mortal. I am human, therefore I am mortal. If thinking really means putting words and other language tokens in order, then AI can already think much better than many, many humans.

[Naeema Raza]

And then it gets really trippy because he says if words are the basis for everything thing, then what happens when AI can do words really well?

[Yuval Noah Harari]

As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore anything made of words will be taken over by AI. If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion.

[Naeema Raza]

Anyways, I think Evolve's whole speech is worth a listen or a watch, especially after you've heard this conversation. So go check that out. The link's below and you can tell me what you think in your words, in the comments and reviews below or by sending me an email [e-mail] or call us 1-855-MYDUMBQ and by the way, we're still gonna do part three of the Godfather trilogy. We're recording that in spring. So send in your questions about artificial intelligence and how we can have a good society. You can send those in on social at Smart Girl Dumb Questions if they're videos or call us. That's it for this week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'll be back next week. This episode was produced with Desta Wonderad, Dana Balut, Healy Cruz and Melissa Lee Garrett Gibson. It was edited by Darlena Cham and it was mixed and engineered by the awesome Johnny Simon, who made me so much smarter about Frank Zappa and all things free speech. See you next week on smart girl, dumb questions. And I'm going to leave you with four like subscribe, share, comment, and actually two more. Thank you. Bye.

[Adam Aleksic]

Sam.