ReThinking: Demystifying Gen Alpha slang with Adam Aleksic

Summary

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ReThinking: Demystifying Gen Alpha Slang with Adam Aleksic

Podcast: WorkLife with Adam Grant (TED)
Date: January 20, 2026
Guest: Adam Aleksic (@EtymologyNerd), linguist and author of Algospeak

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Adam Grant sits down with Adam Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist, known as Etymology Nerd, to unpack the world of Gen Alpha slang, “algospeak”—the internet-born code and memes shaped by algorithms—and explore the deeper cultural shifts behind our digital language. Through playful quizzes and deep dives, they discuss how algorithms, memes, and viral language are transforming how we communicate, why certain phrases go mainstream, and what this all means for the future of culture, connection, and identity online.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Brainrot & Meaningless Memes: Algorithm-Driven Language

• Definition of "Brainrot":
  • The term “brainrot” refers to a meme aesthetic associated with content perceived as mentally “deleterious” or just absurdly over-used.
  • Adam Aleksic (01:17): “Brainrot is a semantic class that points back to the algorithm. So it started out with Skibidi, Riz, Ohio...These words are algorithmic trends and they're overused to death. Creators use them because they're trending and that helps them go more viral.”
• "Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate":
  • These viral phrases are “absurdly, ironically” overused—making fun of the hyper-commodification pushed by algorithms.
• Role of the Algorithm:
  • The feedback loop: What goes viral is pushed more by the algorithm, reinforcing itself.

2. Slang Quiz & Algospeak Origins

• Adam Grant is quizzed on current online slang, exposing generational gaps and highlighting how quickly language moves.
• On "6, 7":
  • “It is a meaningless interjection...but it comes out of clip farming culture, where NBA players would say it in order to go viral...Gen Alpha children start saying 6, 7 on camera in hopes of going viral.” — Adam Aleksic (05:02)
• Etymology and ‘Algospeak’:
  • Words like “bop” shift their meaning for algorithmic reasons, e.g., sex workers use it to avoid censorship.

3. How Algorithms Reshape Communication

• Evolution of the Algorithm:
  • TikTok’s personalized “For You” algorithm, powered by machine learning, fundamentally changed how and why things go viral.
  • Adam Aleksic (07:15): “The new algorithms are based on neural nets, kind of the same architecture that's underlying ChatGPT...It's an AI-based algorithm that learns from itself.”
  • The all-consuming, immersive short-form video format intensifies trends and slang adoption.

4. Language, Magic, and Virality

• Language as Magic:
  • Exploring magical roots of language: “The word spell, as in magic spell, and spell, as in spell a word, go back to the same source because it's thought to be the same thing.” — Adam Aleksic (10:04)
• Virality & Metaphors:
  • Words spread like viruses, but viral metaphors have limits. Most internet slang today comes from African American English or 4chan.
  • Adam Aleksic (12:23): “90% of Internet slang right now is either from African American English or it's from 4chan.”

5. Who Gets Credit for Words? Ownership, Community, and Power

• Attribution Culture:
  • The spread of slang often detaches from its origins—sometimes causing resentment when originators (e.g., “on fleek”) aren’t credited or rewarded.
  • Adam Aleksic (19:07): "You can't stop it. You cannot stop a tsunami. The language is going to change."
• Cultural Appropriation and Community:
  • Words like “slay” or “tea” come from marginalized communities; mainstream adoption can strip original power, but also reflects dynamic language evolution.

6. The Nature of Memes and Their Media

• Defining Memes:
  • Dawkins’ idea: memes as self-replicating cultural units.
  • The importance of the medium: “Before it can go from my head to your head, I need to put my idea into a medium.” — Adam Aleksic (23:58)
• Meme Longevity:
  • Memes that are context-flexible (like "6, 7") persist longer.
• Surprise and Social Fascination:
  • Outsiders using insidery lingo (like adults using Gen Alpha slang) create humor and awe due to violated expectations.

7. The Sociology of Brainrot and Slang

• Why We Love “Brainrot” Slang:
  • Partly a fascination with online/offline blending, partly a recognition that language reflects digital-age collective consciousness.
  • Adam Aleksic (28:27): “There is a separation here between language and culture, where language is just this way we have of describing the world. It is a tool.”
• On Memes as Community-Building:
  • Linguistic innovation can be a response to exclusion—a way to create new belonging or subvert norms.

8. Lightning Round Insights

• Abandon the word "content":
  • “Content...is just something that fills up space...Are videos just something that fill up space or are they something that have the ability to move people and influence society?” — Adam Aleksic (32:14)
• Favorite Brainrot Trend:
  • The Italian brainrot trend: AI-generated animal hybrids with nonsensical names, e.g., “tralalero tralala” (32:48).
• Advice About Language:
  • Avoid linguistic prescriptivism; focus on intentional and meaningful use of words.
• Personal Dream Words:
  • Adam Aleksic is “secretly seeding” the word “noxious” to mean “good,” and advocates playful suffixes like “wardly.”
  • “That's totally noxious, bro... It sounds like it could mean good. I think it's funny, I guess.” (15:10)

9. Deep Media Literacy & Watching Skibidi Toilet

• Why Bother Understanding Origin Stories?
  • Knowing the provenance of words and memes is crucial to media literacy and cultural understanding.
  • Skibidi Toilet, though seemingly absurd, is seen by Aleksic as a “dialectic commentary on our culture”—the struggle between surveillance, digital gaze, and human messiness (36:43).
• Adam Grant’s Takeaway:
  • The conversation made him rethink his aversion to certain “garbage” online content, recognizing deeper cultural messages within.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On viral language as algorithmic feedback loop:
  “The most recent iteration, this Lebubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate is pointing fun at that hyper commodification of items...It's a reflexive knowledge that these trends are being overrepresented to sell us something online.” — Adam Aleksic (04:29)

• On memetic power and ownership:
  “If you’re trying to influence culture, it’s honestly good for that idea to spread on and take its own life. You plant the seed that later grows.” — Adam Aleksic (19:07)

• On the purpose and power of language:
  “We should use [words] in the context that we mean to and recover human intentionality.” — Adam Aleksic (33:18)

• On the roots of language and performance:
  “By writing down the word, you are conjuring a physical change in the universe which affects how other people understand each other.” — Adam Aleksic (10:04)

• On Skibidi Toilet as social commentary:
  “If you were a Gen Alpha child...It is diegetically narrated through the lens of a camera...It’s this commentary about surveillance, it’s about this digital gaze and how we interact with this hyper-mediated reality.” — Adam Aleksic (36:43)

• On why we should care:
  “We don't even know that algorithms don't recommend us the actual picture of reality. They recommend us what generates engagement...That requires this deep knowledge of ideas and why they're popular.” — Adam Aleksic (37:44)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:17 – Defining “brainrot” and the role of the algorithm in language.
• 03:22 – Algospeak rapid-fire quiz begins.
• 05:02 – The meme “6,7” and its origins.
• 07:15 – How TikTok algorithms revolutionized meme virality.
• 10:04 – The magical roots of language and “spell.”
• 12:23 – Internet slang’s dominant roots: African American English & 4chan.
• 15:04 – Adam Aleksic’s dreamwords (“noxious,” “wardly”).
• 19:07 – Viral speech, appropriation, and crediting creators (e.g., “on fleek”).
• 23:58 – The meme as a cultural and technological artifact.
• 28:27 – Why brainrot vocabulary is so intriguing.
• 32:14 – The case against the word “content.”
• 36:43 – Hidden cultural critique within Skibidi Toilet.
• 40:22 – On “eating” an interview and killing memes (playful signoff).

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Tone and Style

• The conversation is smart, playful, and self-aware, with both Adams riffing on linguistics trivia, internet culture, and the absurdities of modern comms.
• Adam Aleksic balances linguistic expertise with pop culture fluency; Adam Grant brings curiosity, psychologist’s framing, and sincere vulnerability about generational differences.

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Final Takeaway

This episode reveals how algorithm-driven platforms don’t just shape “what’s popular” but are actively rewriting our shared language, humor, and ideas of community. Understanding the origins and mechanics of slang like “brainrot,” or cultural oddities like Skibidi Toilet, is key to becoming fluent in our new digital reality—and keeping our sense of agency as internet culture invades every corner of life.

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Notable:

• In a meta moment, Aleksic highlights that if enough people discuss their favorite new slang on air, they could unintentionally create new trends:
  • “If somebody does a study on podcasts, now we're going to be using the word delve more.” (41:21)

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Transcript

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[Adam Aleksic]

[e-mail] the idea is that Brainrot is a semantic class that points back to the algorithm. So it started out with Skibidi Riz Ohio. Skibidi doesn't mean anything. Riz's Charisma Ohio doesn't mean anything either. It's funny because these words are algorithmic trends and they're overused to death. Creators use them because they're trending and that helps them go more viral. And then we're in this positive feedback loop of the phrase becoming more of a meme and more creators using it because the algorithm is pushing it. And then it becomes even more of a thing.

[Adam Grant]

Hey everyone, it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with Ted on the Science of what Makes Us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Today's Guest is a 24 year old.

[Interviewer]

Linguist named Adam Aleksic.

[Adam Grant]

He's known online as Etymology Nerd for.

[Interviewer]

His enlightening and entertaining videos on the origins of words.

[Adam Grant]

His recent book, Algospeak offers a fascinating look at how algorithms are changing the.

[Interviewer]

Way we communicate and demystifies a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang.

[Adam Aleksic]

So yeah, you look at the meme, you dissect where it comes from and you understand more about who we are as a society, how ideas are affecting us. I think if we educate ourselves and have deep media literacy about the things we are looking at, we are better able to judge reality.

[Adam Grant]

I had a lot of fun talking.

[Interviewer]

With him about the origins of Internet.

[Adam Grant]

Language and whether the garbage memes created by AI might foretell the downfall of society. He even makes a case for watching the dreaded TV series Skibidi Toilet for the deeper social commentary it contains. No, I'm serious.

[Interviewer]

We'll get there. But first I asked him to give me a little test.

[Adam Aleksic]

My neighbor's mom is a huge fan of you, so she'll be really excited.

[Interviewer]

One, I'm honored. And two neighbor's mom. I feel like I made it in life now. Can you start by quizzing me on Algo speak?

[Adam Aleksic]

Sure.

[Interviewer]

I would love if you give me some words and then I'll do my best and you can tell me how I've done.

[Adam Aleksic]

All right, I'll try to hit you with more trendy memes Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate was a popular meme this summer. How much do you know about the brain rot version of that?

[Interviewer]

I'm sorry, I didn't recognize any of those words, except I've heard people say leboo boo and brain rot and I don't know what Labubu is. And as far as I can tell, brain rot is using a bunch of these algospeak words in ways that cause the quality of thinking and conversation to deteriorate.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, that's interesting. You're kind of conflating two definitions there, which I think are important to separate. Brain rot can be something that is perceived to be mentally deleterious online, or it can be this meme aesthetic associated with things that are bad with your brain, but not necessarily. Like, there's nothing about Matcha that is bad for your brain. And yet Matcha is brain rotation in the same sense as Labubu, which is this plushy toy from China that looks a little ugly. And then there's Dubai Chocolate, which is this popular new pistachio chocolate from Dubai, obviously. And so now we have this inundation of meaningless vocabulary and we start using it, absurdly, ironically, to point back at the idea of the algorithm pushing this content. And the most recent iteration, this Lebubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate is pointing fun at that hyper commodification of items that are being pushed by the algorithm. It's a sort of reflexive knowledge that these trends are being overrepresented to Sell us something online.

[Interviewer]

This is so interesting. What's your next one?

[Adam Aleksic]

I didn't realize I'd have to be given a quiz. There was.

[Interviewer]

Wait a minute. You get the easy part.

[Adam Aleksic]

You only.

[Interviewer]

You only have to give the quiz. I'm the one who has to take it and.

[Adam Aleksic]

All right, yeah, yeah, no, no. It requires, you know, teacher prep. Do you know about six, seven?

[Interviewer]

My kids told me about it, and as far as I can tell, it has no meaning, but they think it's hilarious.

[Adam Aleksic]

Anyway, yeah, I think this one's really interesting. It is sort of a meaningless interjection, kind of like Skibidi, but it comes out of clip farming culture, where NBA players would say it in order to go viral. And the idea was, in an interview, if you say 6, 7, you'll get remixed into a TikTok edit. And then other people, Gen Alpha children, start saying 6, 7 on camera in hopes of going viral. So actually, I think it's less of a meaningless thing and more of an absurd reference to this idea of clip farming culture, the idea that the algorithm is always implicitly there, and it's sort of a absurdist parody of the fact that we are existing in this algorithmic milieu.

[Interviewer]

Wow, fascinating. I completely failed at that. Okay.

[Adam Aleksic]

No, no, you did great, actually. It can be meaningless too.

[Interviewer]

No, I mean, I didn't know the origin story, and it turns out neither do my kids. I can't wait to tell them that I know something about Gen Alpha speak that they don't.

[LinkedIn Jobs Advertiser]

Yes.

[Adam Aleksic]

That's how you kill a meme, by the way, as soon as you tell them more about it than they know.

[Interviewer]

Noted. But I want to kill that meme because it's ridiculous. All right, what's your next one?

[Adam Aleksic]

Uh, new form of algospeak is the word bop, which probably means something different than what you learned growing up.

[Interviewer]

Oh, okay.

[Adam Aleksic]

The idea is like an OnlyFans worker. And so in the past, a BoP was like a really good song. And then out of, I think, Bay Area slang, African American, English, it percolated into the mainstream and. And was used by OnlyFans creators who needed a way to describe their profession without being censored by the algorithm. So BoP started becoming popular in that sense.

[Interviewer]

Okay, but doesn't the algorithm learn that?

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, yeah, there's also this idea of the algorithmic imaginary that we're hypercorrecting constantly, that the algorithm is suppressing less than you think. And yet, because you don't know exactly what the algorithm is doing, people will attempt to circumvent it. And that's kind of algospeak, but algospeak is also, I think, more broadly, any way that we talk online that is conditioned uniquely by the constraints and expressive possibilities of the algorithm.

[Interviewer]

Got it. Okay. Why, why now? It seems to be new just in.

[Adam Grant]

The last couple of years.

[Interviewer]

But algorithms are not new. Is it just that TikTok largely has made algorithms more sophisticated in this way? Why was it not happening on old school Facebook or on, you know, a decade ago Instagram?

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah, well, it's important to emphasize that an algorithm is just a computer process where there's an input, something happens and there's an output. Right. And in the past, algorithms were used for all kinds of things. The algorithm as we refer to it on TikTok, is something different entirely, which is importantly not one algorithm. It's hundreds of different algorithms that are involved in user classification and content classification and then matching users to that content and censorship. All this stuff is kind of combined into what we think of as the algorithm that pipeline between a video being uploaded and it showing up on your for you page. But there's also an important addition of machine learning into this process. The new algorithms are based on neural nets, kind of the same architecture that's underlying ChatGPT and these chatbots. It's an AI based algorithm that learns from itself, that learns from the content as it's uploaded and that learns from your behaviors. It is created under, under this promise of a personalized for you page, a page that is meant to be for you and you alone, that is built through your activity online and your interests. And that is what kind of set TikTok apart when it acquired musically in 2017 and then building itself out as this distinct platform. Also, the rise of short form video is a whole nother aspect to analyze here, how that has impacted our culture. But this combination of the personalized algorithm and the short form video that dominates your entire screen and holds your entire attention made TikTok the most addicting app possible. Users spend way more time on TikTok than any competing app in the past. And there are many good aspects in terms of democratized communication, but also many concerning aspects of what kind of speech is allowed to travel online.

[Interviewer]

When did you first get into etymology and linguistics?

[Adam Aleksic]

About 10 years ago, actually. I have been really fascinated with etymology from the start. I got into it for the fun facts. I. I like to say that the word etymology actually in Greek etumos means the study of truth. You find out something real about ourselves and about how we relate to Society and to each other through our words. And I started this little blog for myself in high school called etymology nerd.com and I do a little blog post a day on where words came from. And then I studied linguistics in college. And then I was like, well, what do I do with a linguistics degree? And I ended up making videos, which is the modern day etymology nerd.

[Interviewer]

That's fantastic. It reminds me a little bit of. You probably know the origin of Abracadabra, right?

[Adam Aleksic]

I was just looking into how, like, the Harry Potter curse, Avada Kedavra is based on Abracadabra, but it doesn't have something to do with the Alphabet.

[Interviewer]

Actually, I don't even know. You would know better than I would on that. The thing that always stuck out at me from the little I do know about that is the Aramaic translation, or one of them at least, is I create as I speak.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And I thought that was. That was such a simple but profound way of describing how the access to language that we have actually shapes the way that we see the world.

[Adam Aleksic]

Oh, that's so fascinating. And also, hocus pocus in Latin means, this is my body. I think there's such a fascinating connection between words and performance. So in the Bible, right, God says, let there be light, but it's the saying, let there be light, and then he goes on to name it light. The literal word is the thing that does it. There's such a fascinating connection with how ancient cultures thought about magic and language being inextricable. The word spell, as in magic spell, and spell, as in spell a word, go back to the same source because it's thought to be the same thing. By writing down the word, you are conjuring a physical change in the universe which affects how other people understand each other. By saying something right now, by you saying something, we're affecting the minds of all the people who are listening to this. That's unbelievably powerful to me.

[Interviewer]

Me too. So this reminds me of one of the more, I think, interesting ideas in Algospeak, which is language is a sort of virus, in your view. And the metaphor instantly made sense to me because we do spread these words. In fact, I don't know of a way to learn a word other than through communication.

[Adam Grant]

Right.

[Interviewer]

I'm either hearing it from another person or I'm picking it up through something I've read. Or I guess now we have a growing number of AI tools that can teach me a word, but they've usually ingested it from a data set that Involves human communication. So talk to me about beyond the obvious. What is viral about language?

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. So there is this virus metaphor, and it is very useful up to a point. I want to caution that a metaphor can only take you so far. A metaphor being greek for carry across. It's good for carrying across a concept, but the carrying is never quite where the concept is. It's a semantic domain in how we understand it. That being said, there is something very useful to understanding how language spreads through this sort of epidemiological lens where it's a word starts out in some small cluster community. And you see this all the time, especially on the Internet. Maybe the Internet's given us better tools than ever to understand language from this viral lens. I mean, you can literally talk about going viral, but it starts with these, like, hosts, and then it is transmitted and infects other people, and then those people become hosts for the word, and then they say it, and then it's infecting the minds of other people. And one thing I try to emphasize in the book Is that pretty much 90% of Internet slang right now is either from African american english or it's from 4chan, which, you know, you can draw your own conclusions.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Okay, wow. On two levels. One, I think that is scary if that's becoming a source. But two, I just want to go back to the way that you dropped in that metaphors carry across. I love. I love this linguistics sleight of hand. And I think if I could redo college, One of the first things I would change is I would take at least one and probably multiple linguistics classes. I've always loved words. I'm definitely a word nerd. And I just think it's so cool how you can. How you can say, and by the way, like, here's what a metaphor does. Its origin is to carry a cross. Other than the parlor trick, what's the value of you being able to do that?

[Adam Aleksic]

Right? Well, part of it, again, is just the fun fact, the parlor trick. But the other part is that part I said that utimus truth, right? You find out an aspect of how humans understand society. You find out where these words are coming from, and you understand actually where ideas are coming from. I see language as sort of a bellwether, like a canary in the coal mine of greater cultural shifts. And if 4chan is influencing our language that much, it stands to reason that 4chan is influencing our political beliefs, our social understandings as much. And I strongly think that they are, because language is never, you know, isolated in a system it serves as an indicator maybe of. Of how we think it is a little map of our vibes, I guess.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so if that's the case, how easy is it for you to use this understanding of language, to start implanting what words into our vocabulary?

[Adam Aleksic]

I've tried. Trust me, I've tried. It's every linguist dream to get people to say their word that they invented, but that's not really how it works. You have to have this effervescent natural feeling to language. It has to spread, usually along the conduits of what is seen as funny or cool. African American English is seen as cool. 4chan language is seen as funny. It spreads through memes. And we end up adopting something because it follows just these sort of pathways of how humans like to adopt concepts. We feel a resistance to something if it feels like it's being forced on us. There is a difference. I think that the elites can impose language when they use it to structure things. And then we just adopt the vocabulary of something like YouTube, calling it channels and creators. Those are just decisions they made in their boardrooms in the late 2000s. And so now we just use words like channel and creator, and we don't think about what those words might mean. That's an upper elite structure decision that affects other people. But unless you give me a platform to influence people, then I probably can't get my word to naturally percolate outwards.

[Interviewer]

What. What's the word that you would most want to spread, that you've coined?

[Adam Aleksic]

Just with my friends. I've secretly been seeding the word noxious to mean good for a while.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think it's. It's like kind of like, oh, that's totally noxious, bro. Like a surfer slang. It sounds like it could mean good. I think it's funny, I guess.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I guess. I guess noxious should be in some ways the opposite of obnoxious, Right?

[Adam Aleksic]

Why not? You know, I mean, it does mean, I think, poison in Latin, but in a. In a funny kind of way. In the same way you'd say, that's sick. You know, that's my secret dream, to get more people saying noxious. Oh, also wardly as a suffix. Like you can say eastwardly's northwardly, but. Or like, what about this wardly? I'm going thiswardly, I'm going to Boston. Wordly, like, it's just a fun suffix. So if anybody's listening and they want to use this, I don't think we can make it happen, but you might as well try.

[Interviewer]

I don't think the wordly is going to take off. That sounds like Shakespearean English.

[Adam Aleksic]

It's funny. It makes it a little more poetic.

[Adam Grant]

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[Interviewer]

I guess one of the challenges of having your words sort of arrive in the lexicon is at some point I've seen people get upset that they're not getting credit for what they've coined.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right, right.

[Interviewer]

And I've always found that so puzzling. It makes my day when somebody talks about givers and takers, which is probably one of the ideas that, that I helped to popularize without referencing me. Because that is a sign that the vocabulary has been useful to people and it's kind of ingrained in the way they think and talk and they don't even necessarily know that I exist. That that to me is a marker of successful change. It's, it's a sign that I've made a contribution.

[Adam Aleksic]

Yeah. I think you have to accept the reality that if you're trying to influence culture, it's honestly good for that idea to spread on and take its own life and you kind of plant the seed that later on grows. But there is sort of this history of language being power as a tool of creating belonging. And the thing that's interesting with like African American English is that a lot of the slang specifically comes out of the ballroom scene in the 80s and 90s. This is this gay, black, Latino space. And it was used as a tool to subvert the straight white norms of the English language, which they didn't feel represented them. And it was used to build community. Words like slay, serve, tea, cooked, ate, boss, and all those are like, from that area. Now they're thought of as Gen Z Internet slang. And they percolate outwards into the, into the mainstream. And now, you know, you have your white middle school girls saying slay, but it loses that initial power that I had within that community. So there, you know, I see both sides as, you can't stop it. You cannot stop a tsunami. The language is going to change. And then there's a new need to invent new shared vocabulary. And if anything, that's also beautiful how it bubbles up kind of rhizomatically in a new direction that you have new development of language, but it is inexorable. That language is going to keep marching on and get moved through these communities until you get to the base root of why it's moving through these communities the way it is. There's also individual attribution. I remember the example from on fleek in 2014 when the vine user Kayla Newman, going by Peaches Monroe, coined the phrase on fleek in a, in a short seven second video. And that went viral. And Nicki Minaj rapped about being on fleek and all these celebrities and Forever 20 Run released on fleek T shirts. And. And meanwhile, Kayla Newman never saw a scent of profit, and it was like her idea was her creativity. But, you know, another argument is why should she see profit? It's not a word, is not something you can really own. A trademark is kind of a different concept than just having a word that you came up with. But there is this idea online of crediting the originators of something. I think this has been more of a Standard so on TikTok since 2019 or so, when Charli D', Amelio, the famous tiktoker, got a lot of flak for stealing the Renegade dance without crediting this original creator. And so there's this culture of attribution. I mean, you can draw your own conclusions about how much attribution should be given, should not be given. I think it's cool when you have the opportunity to acknowledge where an idea came from, but at the same time, we need to accept the things that we cannot change. I used to see this happening a lot with music especially. It's harder even to trace what a sound is, what an aesthetic is. And we have all these different genres of music all tracing back to a few early starts in like, you know, jazz and folk music and stuff. And I like to use the example of Stevie Wonder as another instance of virality, where his album Songs in the Key of Life is one of the most influential albums of all time. His song Pastime paradise from that album got remixed into Gangsta's paradise by Coolio. His song which has like 2 billion Spotify streams. His song Saturn, which imagines this better world on a planet called Saturn, later got redeveloped into SZA's Grammy Award winning hit with a billion Streams. Saturn. He's the basis for the Mario Kart soundtrack. Elton John, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder was their greatest influence. So he was literally viral in the same way that you can think of the Kayla Newman coining on fleek. There's a higher node that influencers lower nodes, a host that transmits an idea. And this is sort of this concept of a meme, which is another meme in and of itself. We don't really know what a meme is. The word was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his book the Selfish Gene. It comes from the Greek word for imitate. And he. I don't know, he has some, I think, underdeveloped ideas about what a meme could be. There is this Idea that it can evolutionarily compete against other memes, which I think is again, reductive as a metaphor, but it's useful. And so we have memes competing against each other in the wild. And when a meme is better able to compete for your attention, it is the one you end up using. That's why we start using certain words. That's why we start listening to certain songs. The meme is winning. It is self replicating.

[Interviewer]

So I remember reading the Selfish Gene, I think it was in 2000 and being intrigued by the idea that cultures pass on memes just like, you know, biologically we pass on our genes. And it seems like the way that's happening is different now. It seems like the there's much more cross fertilization between different groups because of the Internet and globalization. It also seems like because to your earlier point, people are trying to game the algorithm, there's an incentive to master the memes and then share them. I'm just thinking of a dumb example. The photo of the guy who's looking at the girl who looks like.

[Adam Aleksic]

Oh, the distracted boyfriend meme.

[Interviewer]

Distracted boyfriend.

[Adam Aleksic]

Thank you. That's from 2015. Yeah. There's this shared knowledge of what the distracted boyfriend signifies for sure.

[Interviewer]

So, yeah, I guess the question is then, how do you distinguish between a meme that's useful versus a meme that's being used?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think that's such an important question and I want to sort of redefine that. Dawkins definition of a meme is just merely a self replicating unit of culture. And idea of a viral idea is merely something that goes from our head to another person's head. The missing piece of this equation is the medium. Before it can go from my head to your head, I need to put my idea into a medium. Right now I'm using speech as a medium. Stevie Wonder was using song as a medium. And TikTok is itself a new medium. I think it's a paradigm shift in how we communicate it as a fundamentally a new medium with new structured incentives for how we should be communicating to each other with new dimensions of what makes something go viral. A distracted boyfriend is a medium. There are many different types of memes where there is two choices presented and you need to choose between one of them. There's a split path meme where one of the paths is like this good idealized kingdom and the other one is this dark evil land. And this boy is confused about which way to go. And I don't know how effective these new AI slop platforms are going to be like Sora, but we have the short form video as a medium affecting our reality and through these personalized for you algorithms. That is a medium that has incentives for creators. It has certain implications for how we uptake the meme by how we interact with it from this like sort of phenomenological perspective. We have a unique way of looking at it and I'd love to get into that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, same. You know, this discussion reminds me of a video that I'm sure you've seen a million times. It's a polyglot who gives an entire speech using Gen Alpha slang.

[Adam Aleksic]

All those words are also individual memes. And something interesting about memes is that they spread sometimes better as a package. And this is sort of tying back to that idea of Brainrot. Right. So Riz was a meme from the Twitch streamer Kai Sanat and Skibidi was. Was a meme from skibidi toilet, this YouTube shorts series. But then it got remixed in October 2023 in this Rizzler song that combined a bunch of brain rot lyrics. Sticking out your gyat for the Rizzler, you're so Skibidi. But combining all that harnessed the mimetic value of both of those at once. And sort of that viral video of the Gen Alpha teacher you were describing, he was using a bunch of different words but using the memetic power of all of them at the same time. And that's kind of how I think brain rot as a genre emerges. There's other few examples of politicians using brain rot. Senator Fatima Payman in Australia and Senator Bernadette Clement in Canada both used Brainrot speeches to help get points across about youth communication. It is a powerful tool for grabbing attention because there is an element of social fascination behind these words as well that drives the meme. Fundamentally, it is a human attentional thing that drives a meme.

[Interviewer]

I would maybe add one layer to that that I'm curious to get your reaction to, which is, yes, memes grab attention, but also the surprise factor, the incongruity of somebody who does not belong to the generation sounding fluent in these words. It seems like in some ways the same status or cachet you get if, like, as a gringo, I go to a Spanish speaking country and hablo espanol pastante bien. And all of a sudden somebody's like, wow, you, you speak better than I thought. You must not be what I thought you were.

[Adam Grant]

Right.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, I think awe or humor, which are two key, high arousal emotions that help spread Ideas, they both rely on this subversion of expectations. You have an idea of what's going to happen and then you break it. And often that requires setting up a frame of like, oh, this looks like a professor at a lecture, this looks like a distinguished Australian senator. And then you break the frame by introducing these terminally online phrases that seem incongruous. And that for sure is a part of what makes something successful as an individual meme. I think in terms of memes with longevity, something like the word itself that needs to spread beyond context. Part of it is the adaptability. Six, seven, for example, as a viral meme right now is very popular because it shows up all the time. You are primed to see it whenever you count to 10, you like. It is a very common number in prices, in accounting, in math. You, you see the number six, seven almost daily. And so you're reminded of this meme constantly. You reference it, it becomes this in person thing at the same time, pointing to the absurdity of algorithmic recommendations. I think that's partially what makes a meme successful, that it has this applicability.

[Interviewer]

Why are we so intrigued by the brain rot vocabulary as opposed to other slang?

[Adam Aleksic]

I think, well, one, there's that element of social fascination that this seems like this is online language. Surely nobody could be using that offline. And then when somebody does use it offline, it becomes more of a thing. But fundamentally because of that association of this is bad for your brain. It is a reflexive awareness of the Internet's harmful effects. And I don't think the words themselves are harmful. And this is a point I really try to emphasize for people, that there is a separation here between language and culture, where language is just this way we have of describing the world. It is a tool. A tool can be neutral, a tool can be harnessed for good or for evil, but with it come all these like loaded cultural ideas and that's when things can start to get misused.

[Adam Grant]

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[Interviewer]

I think it may be time to go to a lightning round.

[Adam Aleksic]

All right, let's go. Okay.

[Interviewer]

What is the word or phrase that you think we should abandon altogether forever?

[Adam Aleksic]

I don't. I don't think we should. Like they all serve a purpose. Is it stupid to say that. No, no, I don't like the word content. How about that? I think content on social media is something that is contained to a platform. Content is just something that fills up space definitionally, like the contents of a box or drawer. So are videos just something that fill up space or are they something that have the ability to move people and influence society? Which I think they do. So I don't like the word content. I try to avoid it.

[Interviewer]

Do you have a favorite either slang word or bit of algo speak right now?

[Adam Aleksic]

I really like the Italian brainrot trend which was in March, which is just these absurd AI generated animal hybrids. And this is sort of like in that camp of nonsensical interjections. So you can just say tralalero, tralala or tum tum tum tum tum sahur. And these are like parts of Italian brain rot canon. Those are really fun to me. I like the little animals.

[Interviewer]

Wow. I had not come across that at all. What is the worst advice that you hear given about language use?

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, kind of what you were trying to trap me into saying, which is that we should or should not be saying certain things. There, there is a deep power to the words as we were discussing and we should be using them with intentionality. But that doesn't mean we, we shouldn't be saying the words. We should use them in the context that we mean to and recover human intentionality. I think there's too often this attitude of language also as transmission of data rather than this like deep thing that has the ability to change the universe, which is what it is.

[Interviewer]

What is something you've changed your mind about with respect to words or language.

[Adam Aleksic]

In terms of communication? I read this book Communication as Culture by James Carey, and he pulls communication back to the original root, which is the same root as community. Something that is meant to build a bond between people. And I think we tend over time to abstract language as that thing I was talking about data transmission. How many information bits per second am I transmitting? That's how TikTok treats content, but with meaning and intentionality. That is communication building community.

[Interviewer]

I love that.

[Adam Grant]

What's the question you have for me as a psychologist?

[Adam Aleksic]

What do you think a meme is?

[Interviewer]

I think of a meme as a recognizable symbol of culture that communicates meaning without requiring words.

[Adam Aleksic]

But it can have words.

[Interviewer]

It can have words, but it doesn't mean.

[Adam Aleksic]

Okay, interesting. I guess I'm wondering what recognizable is. I'm one. Like there's so like nobody really knows what the meme Is. So I'm not trying to nitpick with your definition particularly. I'm asking because I'm struggling with what a meme is. Yeah, something with cultural significance, for sure.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I think cultural significance is a good way to describe it. The reason I like recognizable as I think this through a little bit more is I think you can have memes that are only understandable to a small group of people.

[Adam Aleksic]

Right.

[Interviewer]

Like some families have their own memes, some sports teams and work teams have their own memes. Classrooms develop them. Right. Often making fun of a professor who says certain words that turns into a meme. Anybody who's ever.

[Adam Aleksic]

This isn't coming from a personal place.

[Interviewer]

No, anybody who's ever played Buzzword Bingo with me will know exactly what I'm talking about here. But also, I think, you know, you could scale the recognizability and say Distracted Boyfriend is recognized by millions and millions of people.

[Adam Aleksic]

So there's multiple layers or scrims of what a meme is as it exists. So with Distracted Boyfriend, there is the image. There are the words on the image which are their own meme. There is the image as it appears on the platform. Even the entire medium is a meme. So you can go like multiple layers down of, of what content is or what the medium is, which is useful to remember that memes can exist in other memes and the memes that are higher up hierarchically will stick around longer.

[Interviewer]

So what, what, what is. What's the impact of all of this? You. You've made a very compelling case, both in Algospeak and in this conversation, that, that our language creates our reality and it also shapes other people's reality. We can understand that and then say, okay, but why do I need to know the origins of the words that I'm using? Like, why do I need to know where brain rot comes from? Why do I need to know where Skibidi comes from? Actually, Skibidi is a great example. Like my. My son explained to me that Skibidi came from Skibidi Toilet. I watched a few Skibidi Toilet episodes. I want that time back that added no value to my life.

[Adam Aleksic]

Well, I think it's actually incredibly important to look at Skibidi Toilet, which is this YouTube short series about a race of fictional camera headed androids battling toilets. And what is this story telling us? Right. If you were a Gen Alpha child looking at this, it is diegetically narrated through the lens of a camera. They often look at iPads and direct other cameras in the show. So you now you're, you are looking at this on your iPad as an iPad kid, looking through the head of a camera, looking at another camera. And it's this commentary about surveillance, it's about the, this digital gaze and how we interact with this hyper mediated reality. And on the other side of this technological progress is the basest thing you're taught is evil in the world. The toilet is the first bad thing you're encountering. It is this story about the Panopticon versus this just human kind of ugly force. I see it as actually a dialectic commentary on our, on our culture. So yeah, you look at the meme, you dissect where it comes from and you understand more about who we are as a society, how ideas are affecting us. I think if we educate ourselves and have deep media literacy about the things we are looking at, we are better able to judge reality. And I think that is so, so important. It's going to be even more important moving forward as we are increasingly in this boundary of not knowing what is real. There is very convincing AI deepfakes on the Internet now. They're going to be widespread because of apps like Sora and future apps without watermarks. We don't even know that algorithms don't recommend us the actual picture of reality. They recommend us what generates engagement. Because even if you're not online, the chocolate that's in your store nearby or the song that's playing on the radio in the bar that you're in with your friend, that comes from TikTok or the clothing people are wearing around you that comes from TikTok. Because this is where it's higher up in this mimetic node, percolating outwards into the mainstream, affecting all of our lives, regardless of whether you're on or offline. So I think we should take time to understand how we're being affected by the Internet. And that requires this deep knowledge of ideas and why they're popular.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Okay. I did not. This was not on my bingo card for today that I was going to rethink my aversion to Skibidi toilet and discover that there is actually a lot to understand about culture through watching what I thought was garbage animated short tv.

[Adam Aleksic]

There is something bad to slop right where it's in that should or could camp. How did you define it?

[Interviewer]

Want. Should.

[Adam Aleksic]

Want should. Right. So there's the should where we look at slop. It kind of is satisfying. People actually prefer AI generated poetry when they don't know it's AI generated. People tend to like slop, you know, but we know, we consciously want the complicated poetry, but it's more difficult for us to consume it. And so slop feeds into that reptile brain based desire, and the other stuff feeds into this conscious desire. It is useful to look at slop and consider, you know, how this is being targeted, but do it with. With rational understanding of what's going on.

[Interviewer]

So I think one. One thing I just learned is that I clearly did not watch enough skibidi toilet to understand the larger metaphor. But I heard some of the language used and told our son, who at the time was 10, this is not a great choice of viewing material, and I obviously need to take a second look.

[Adam Aleksic]

No, I mean, it is.

[Interviewer]

I'm gonna go back and ask him to rewatch it and tell me what.

[Adam Aleksic]

That's not necessary, right? I'm not actively saying like, oh, you need to study skibidi toilet, but it's just good to be aware of what's going on.

[Interviewer]

Well, Adam, I think it's safe to say that you ate this interview.

[Adam Aleksic]

It's. You just killed it. You killed the word completely.

[Interviewer]

That's what I'm trying to do. Because that doesn't make any sense. Adam, thank you. I. I learned a ton. And this was just incredibly fun, too.

[Adam Aleksic]

Always fun to talk to another Adam. You know, our name means from the.

[Interviewer]

Earth in Hebrew, which I always thought was wildly unoriginal.

[Adam Aleksic]

I kind of like it. You know, it's touching grass at its core.

[Adam Grant]

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilesh Ben Ben Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Layton Brown.

[Adam Aleksic]

I think another word to be paying attention to right now is the word delve. Right. Delve is overrepresented on AI by like an order of magnitude from how humans say it. If somebody does a study on podcasts, now we're going to be using the word delve more. Maybe we'll be a spike in that.

[Interviewer]

Well, or. Or we're going to artificially see the spike because people are analyzing the use of the word dove like you just did.

[Adam Aleksic]

Maybe I should say the word noxious a bunch.

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