Offline with Jon Favreau - How Trump, Memes, and Algorithms Transformed The Way We Speak

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Skibidi rizz Labubu Dubai matcha. The internet—and its algorithms—have reshaped the words we use and the way we speak—but are those changes also affecting our politics? Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, joins Offline to talk to Jon about his new book “Algospeak” in which he makes sense of our new, internet-optimized linguistic landscape. Jon and Adam discuss how that landscape is changing our politics, how Donald Trump’s unusual syntax is designed to capture attention in it, and why brainrot has become the dominant aesthetic of the generations most native to the internet—Gen Z and Gen Alpha.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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class. I think it is a critical media skill to understand exactly how content is distributed, what it takes to, on the influencer side, what's being done in the algorithmic side, how things are biased against you to grab your attention and commodify. you and what these platforms are doing. And I think once we become more aware of that, it has less power over us. We begin to understand that maybe the reality that's represented on these platforms does not align with reality as it actually is. I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, self-described linguist author,

doom-scroller, Adam Alexic. Some of you may know Adam as etymology nerd, his handle on his immensely popular Instagram and TikTok, where Adam attempts to, quote, make linguistics cool again, explaining to his audience the way the internet has affected their language and created words like skibbity or Riz. I said both of those correctly. Adam has a new book out called Algospeak, where he unpacks in greater detail than the internet could ever allow the ways that social media and their algorithms have evolved the way we speak with one another. I obviously am a huge fan of language, have thought about language my entire life, continue to think about words and the choice of words and how to persuade in my professional life, my personal life. I was obviously when I was speech writing, I did this. And one of the reasons that I wanted to launch offline is because I do think that the way we communicate to each other, the language we use on the internet, especially on social media platforms, has enormous impacts on not just,

our brains and our relationships and how we feel, but how we most importantly maybe practice politics and try to sustain democracy, which is obviously not going great right now. So Adam has a lot to say about that. The book has a lot to say about that. And so I invited him on to chat about it. We shared a great conversation about the ways that social media has evolved, not just our language, but the way we talk about politics, ourselves, and one another. It's a great conversation. Very excited for you all to listen. Here's Adam Alexic. Adam, welcome to the show. Hi, excited to be here.

So I want to talk about your book, Algos speak, but first I just want our audience to get a sense of who you are and what you do. You're 24, which is so cool. I'm very jealous. You have a big following as TikTok's etymology nerd. You have a degree in linguistics. And the New York Times has called you Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. Love that. Yeah, I don't mind that phrase. So how and what?

Why did you get into this line of work? Well, I guess what do you do with the linguistics degree? There's not a lot of options. I started thinking, like, I care about communicating. I had some experience in linguistics communication before, and I started making videos right out of the college, and then it worked out. At a certain point, making videos online and being a linguist,

you can't turn off content creator brain or linguist brain, and they're kind of operating at the same time. And what led me down the rabbit hole of how social media is affecting the way we speak is noticing my own speech and how it was being sort of, of trapped by the platform that I couldn't say certain things or that I felt like I had to say certain things to go viral. And I think all of language is now going around what the algorithms are incentivizing. And more than that, language is a proxy for greater cultural changes, political shifts, you know, aesthetic shifts. All of that is being affected by the algorithm

right now. Well, even before, like, what got you into linguistics as a degree? I mean, there's so much going on. It's, you got the fun facts. But it's also what I just said, sort of, that you can see greater social patterns through language. Language is the way we capture reality and share it, transmit it from one person to another. I think there's something really deep in how we perceive the world and how we relate to one another that you can sort of find by engaging with language. And what's AlgoSpeak?

Algo speak traditionally has been the idea of algorithms shaping your speech. So words like unalive that you can't really say kill on TikTok or at least it's suppressed. So many creators turn to words like on alive. And now there's actual kids in middle schools writing. essays about Hamlet contemplating on aliveing himself. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that. I think AlgoSpeak is everything from, you know, Riz, Skibbidi,

Dubai, Macha, Laboooooooooo. Any internet phrase you can think of that's going on right now is brought by algorithms. There are in groups that are created through these algorithmic echo chambers. There are memes that diffuse across the entire platform. All that to me is

algorithms shaping the way we speak, Algo speak. I want you to know that I did get about 30 to 40 percent of the words that you said there. Sorry, I'm trained by TikTok to talk quickly. I'll try to say that. No, no, no, the Algo speak that you gave as an example, the skibbity that, yeah, I, you know, I have enough Gen Z staff that I'm getting some of it, but not all.

I'm trying. So I've spent most of my adult life thinking about language, at least since I was your age. I was a speechwriter for about 15 years. I now spend my days thinking about the most effective ways to get people's attention and persuade them through the ridiculous amount of content we put out here. I have this sort of perpetual frustration, and this is, you know, related to politics, which is my field, that what is required to get people's attention in an algorithmically driven media environment is just about antithetical to the kind of nuanced, thoughtful

conversation and debate that is required to sustain democracy. And I feel that tension every day when we're coming up with YouTube titles, clips, tweets, even topics to highlight on our shows. Am I wrong or am I just missing something because I'm too old now or what? Yeah, there's an argument this was already happening with the telegraph and the television. I mean, you look at the Lincoln Douglas debates that took like six hours and the audience was really excited to listen to these guys yap for six hours on end, like about really boring topics. I don't think you could hold public attention that way. TV debates already created this sort of amusement entertainment focused medium where it has to be gamified. It's all about shouting over the other guy. And yeah, I think algorithms are once again

making this version of attention more extreme, more focused on the metrics of attention, because actually the metrics, that being engagement, watch time, retention, that's driving what even gets distributed. So it's not even like where TV, you still have some amount of social respect or prestige. The algorithm has no way to measure respect. And this is traditionally a part of attention. And I think the nature of attention is changing toward what the algorithm is incentivizing. Say more about that, about respect, that it's not incentivizing respect. Yeah, what is attention, right? To me, it's this weird and effable vibes-based thing. William James calls it like the taking command of a certain train of thought over other potential trains of

thoughts. And in the past, this involves a lot of like implicit evaluations of how much you trust something, how much you want to deliberately give a like focus on this idea. But when the algorithm just serves you the idea and you don't even choose your train of thought, it's given to you, that changes the selection of attention process. And there's a lot of like different small parts of what attention could have meant before, but now it's simply what gets distributed on these platforms. How do you think that the language we use on the internet now and especially social media platforms has changed the way our country does politics. Yeah, well, it definitely is.

There is stuff that goes viral is always going to be more extreme. It's going to be more emotionally-laden content, things that generate more watch time, things that get comments. This means language is going to be more emotional. I think the Trump, all caps, Twitter style actually does go more viral. It grabs your attention a little bit better in that moment. You engage with a little bit more. further. I mean, there's a reason Gavin Newsom is like doing well in the trolling of Trump by using

his own strategy. And that has to do with the kind of emotional and emphatic way this writing style grabs your attention. And that's just getting into writing style. There's a lot of other stuff with, I do think respect is lost, for example. And if we're just getting into the content of the speech, rather than the form of the speech, there is less reason to be cordial than there was in a TV medium and less reason even so than when you were at Lincoln Douglas debates and it was, you know, six hours of you sitting on stage with this other person. Do you think, to your point about the all caps stuff, that, you know, it grabs your attention when it feels fresh, new, and also, like, unique to a specific person and that, like, I kind

of noticed this, you know, Trump was doing it and then it was really funny that Newsom was doing it, And then I saw some other Democrats trying to do their all-caps version. Like, they're trying to imitate Gavin, trying to imitate Trump. And I was like, I wonder if your attention after a while, these kind of tricks sort of lose their power if they are multiplied or used too many times. Yeah, I think it can be oversaturated. And we are getting a number to that all-caps style. And the algorithms as a medium really do revolve around giving you fresh new things, hopping from Trent to. trend. I analyze a lot of trends in my book and how these memes, I think, happen a lot quicker

because algorithms are designed to push first trending audios. TikTok started as a dance app, you know, trending dances, trending hashtags. But now everything is metadata. The hashtags and the audios used to be metadata. That means information about the content. But now it's also any individual word is scrutinized by these machine learning models that make up the algorithm. And they all kind of play a part in analyzing what this video is, who it should be distributed to. And that means there's a constant need to perform for the algorithm as a creator yourself. And that means if a word is trending, we need to hop onto that trend. We need to use that word because our job is to try to go viral.

And then in doing so, we push the word further. More people are now interacting with the word. It becomes more of a trend and then more influencers want to use it. And so I call that the engagement treadmill where we're in this loop of an actual trend existing and then people hopping onto that trend. Yeah, and it's, I guess this was my sort of my original point. It's like in a lot of different fields, you know, it's hard enough that that happens. In politics, think of what that does to what we talk about, what we debate, the decisions we make, because if the algorithms are jumping on a word that's trending and then everyone tries to make content about that word, like what topics don't get discussed. It's not necessarily the topics that aren't as important. I think politics is increasingly tied to trends. I mean, look at Kamala Harris's attempt to, you know, like, co-brand the campaign with brat. That was the only thing you can do in a political campaign nowadays, because trends are what goes viral. And if you want to go viral,

you have to co-brand with the trend. And, you know, maybe that trend doesn't perfectly align with what message you're trying to send out, or maybe it sends a limited message, but also it ties your marketing to the lifespan of a meme, which is shorter than in the past, I think. How much do you think the language and Algospeak has contributed, or do you think it's contributed to the cynicism and now nihilism people feel towards politics, institutions, et cetera. Like, is that, do you think that's having any effect? Yeah, I think the medium of algorithms is much more vibes-based. It's much more about feelings and impressions you get about something.

You don't know what happens in the scroll state. Two scrolls above your own video, you forget what you were watching. So it's more about imbued feelings you sort of learn to understand over time rather than individual facts and we see this time and time again with like fake news and misinformation that um the tweet that it's all about who gets out further whether the misinformation gets out further or the fact check gets out further and almost always the misinformation gets out a little bit further um and the facts don't don't matter as much as the impression you get in a situation uh so it just means you should shout more than the other person

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And as always, please enjoy responsibly. Huge thanks to Indicloud for sponsoring today's episode. The 22-year-old who assassinated Charlie Kirk was steeped in Algo-speak. Some of the bullets were inscribed with the phrases, hey, fascist catch, notices bulge, O-W-O, what's this? And if you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O, you write in your book that, quote, we're jumping between irony and reality, but we're not always sure where those lines are. This is in reference to the spread of insult culture and humor, but it seems like it could apply to what the killer was trying to communicate there

and a host of other ways to communicate on the Internet. What's your read on that? What was your read on some of those inscriptions? Yeah, of course, we're not exactly sure with the shooter's politics where I think we're also asking the wrong questions when it's like, is he left wing or right wing? It's clear that he's highly influenced by the internet. I also don't want to be fearmongering about, oh, all the internet is like evil. And, you know, some of these memes are like 2010, 4chan memes.

Not even all 4chan is evil. There's a lot of terrible stuff that goes on there. But it's reductive to say, like, oh, you know, internet's causing brain rot or something. It is that boundary between what's real, what's a joke, because memes can have real ideas planted within them that are kind of, I think of memes as like a Trojan horse. Like a lot of people just see it as a horse, but sometimes the soldiers inside the horse can escape. But usually the way memes spread from, I've analyzed how a lot of like in-cell language and far-right 4-chan language reaches the mainstream, for example. This is a very common trend. And again, if we're talking about language as a proxy for greater cultural changes, why are we talking about?

maxing in cocked and sigmas and all these things and pilled as a suffix. That's all, you know, from FORCAM. And we see this Manusphere, all right space influencing language. But not even, you know, in general, there is not a cohesive political dynamic going on. There are simply memes that are funny, funny things spread, and especially things that can be adapted to new situations, reinterpreted in a new contexts. Eventually, they can be interpreted in a post-ironic context where it gets serious again. And, you know, I think that's how some of these memes ended up on the bullet casings. But also, yeah, that distinction between left-right, I think, is less real.

And it's going to continue to get less real. I mean, look at Luigi Mangione. He also didn't have coherent politics in the old sense. It was more of this teapot, gray rationalist techno, like something aesthetic from the Internet. And Internet aesthetics are going to be informing more and more political kind of things. It's communities on the internet with niche kind of memes, maybe even Discord servers, inside jokes, and all informed by internet aesthetics that are shaping our politics. Yeah, so you can be, it can contribute to radicalization. It can also contribute to radicalization

that doesn't follow a specific ideology. It's just an ideology of, or basically just sort of contributes to violence. Why do you think that this, that this deeply ironic language, can often have more appeal than language that is straightforward and serious. Well, there is something to memes and jokes and funny things that spread further on the internet in the same way that TV is a medium of entertainment. TikTok, social media platforms are mediums of memetics, you know, sort of, I mean, they all are, I guess, but viral, readaptable, reusable images and videos and phrasal templates, which are sort of skeletal structures, and all of these are allowed to be remixed and re-adapted into new

situations. That's what spreads, especially when they're funny, when they speak on some level. There are aesthetic underpinnings and undercurrents, and things usually only go viral through this idea of what something should look like. So there is a nihilistic, absurd Gen Z aesthetic, I guess, that's underpinning a lot of comedy on the internet. And that does speak to people. that is kind of what helps ideas diffuse.

Yeah, I'm so interested in like the psychology of linguistics, like what the use of certain words says about how we feel about society, how we feel about our relationships. And I do think this trend of, not a specific trend in what you study, but this trend of sort of deep irony that you don't know whether it's real or not, and humor that's deeply ironic sort of gives people a bit of a detachment from sort of like the real scary challenges in the world or sort of maybe the isolation that they're facing in their own life. And so the deeply ironic stuff almost becomes a bit of a shield for people that everyone can laugh at

without having to get too into the weeds on what's really bothering them. I don't know. That's like, that's like my pop psychology analysis, but I don't know what you think. Well, yeah, I mean, I think psychology and linguistics are two sides of the same coin. It's like both or to me are understanding our experience in the world and language is how we categorize that psychology is also dealing with these categories and frames that we construct about the world. There's that adage pose law I think is very relevant here. Any ironic expression of beliefs online can be mistaken as sincere and vice versa and we're

constantly in that cycle of things. sometimes spread we're on that they're on that boundary of is it real you know like it's it's it's fascinating that some people might uh be interested in this stuff or whatever and then the meme spreads further and that's how we end up with like um yeah all these like really niche seeming things emerging and becoming more popular because that generates comments which pushes things further on the algorithm uh there's also that sort of apathetic um aesthetic which yeah does trace back to often 4chan Manosphere in cell spaces even. It is interesting, too, that these more sort of extreme ideologies or extreme groups

are still thinking about appealing to mass audiences. So by trying to sort of, you know, send around and come up with these memes that are funny or that maybe don't have necessarily the meaning that a mass audience would think that it has, right and so that you're you're even thinking about persuading people who aren't as far down the rabbit hole as you while you're sort of trying to get memes and other trends to go viral i just think that that's it's yeah it's all about creating kind of a pipeline to your own community and and i think particularly the alt-right is very good at weaponizing memes uh that all kind of lead back to them and you think oh you're in this cultural space it's the maha space or it's the tradwife space

or it's the bodybuilder space online. And all of these sort of have their roots in the alt-right in one way or another. And they all kind of lead back there. And it's because of that Trojan horse that they can plant a seed. And it seems like you're engaging with cultural content. And this is another thing maybe about politics

that it is more culture forward than, I mean, I think obviously politics has always been about culture. But the way people politically engage is more through cultural influencers, Joe Rogan, whatever, We're that less talk about political stuff, but still have those seeds of political ideas within their content. Yeah, and it, oddly enough, it is inclusive in the sense that these people, while their views are quite extreme, want to build a larger community.

And so they are trying to invite people into the community and make it more tempting to join the community than they are trying to exclude people from joining the community. This goes back to platform incentives for creators. We're incentivized to build a large audience and to welcome people to, you know, that's all structured in. You wrote, you mentioned Trump earlier. You wrote an essay for the New York Times about how Trump's speech patterns have, quote, become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. You argue that, quote, Trump's language is predisposed to becoming memeified on social media platforms and is reshaping our reality as a result. What are some examples of that? And does this typically happen with other presidents, other politicians?

I mean, we've had presidents coin words before. I think George Washington coined the word administration, right? Warren G. Harding, was that him, normally? Yeah, there have been, you know, presidents who've coined words before and they seeping in the mainstream, but that's usually, like, unironic usage. And I think what's so interesting about Trump's language is that exact reevaluation we were talking about between what's funny and what's serious and then eventually. become serious again.

The examples, you've definitely heard some people say, I hear my friends say, like, sad as an interjection all the time. That comes from Trump. Like, many such cases. Many people are saying this. Frankly, like, he popularized fake news for sure. Like, believe me at the end of a sentence. And then the things I mentioned as phrasal templates or the grammatical skeletal structures

of language that you can sub in words. So make X, Y again. Or, thank you X, very cool. or this has been the worst X in the history of Y maybe ever. And what these do, you can just sub in any words and apply it to a new situation. It's that application of a new situation, which makes things memetic, which makes things spread online. It also makes it funny.

It's a meme holder. Like, it's just a joke to a lot of people. And we start using it ironically, like it's funny to sound like Trump when you say sad. But you say that more and more, there's that Kurt Vonnegut quote I really like, we are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful about who we pretend to be. think that's sort of what's going on here that you know you start saying something ironically eventually becomes a real thing you just say yeah i mean that's the story of a lot of a lot of the right today i think um how how is the way that trump speaks optimized for today's algorithm like what is it about his

speech style that ends up um you know traveling so far i think trump is is a very effective communicator whether or not you you like that idea you know he maybe doesn't speak with the grammar that elite formal institutions have preferred. But back in TV, he was very, back when tabloids were a thing, he was very good at getting in the tabloids. That was his, you know, thing. And then he was very good at generating TV excitement in the TV press cycle in the 2016 election. And now he's very good at the algorithm. It generates outrage. It generates comments, engagements, all of that goes further in the algorithm. On Twitter, a lot of this is just sort of flood in the zone. The man tweets a lot. Some memes are going to stick more than others. But if you throw a lot

stuff out there, a lot of unhinged stuff out there, the authentic appeal speaks to people. So part of it is the man does seem authentic to himself and the internet is about the age of authenticity and presenting like you're not performing. That's part of it. Part of it is the emotional content of his speech. I think part of what makes things go viral is the feeling of uniqueness. Trump has a demonstrably unique syntactic style like compared to other presidents. He has higher variance and how he speaks. He doesn't use the same grammatical kind of formations that we expect. But that, like, odd turn of phrase is what makes something seem a little subliminally catchy

and then you engage with a little bit more and then it goes a little bit more viral. Yeah, I was just going to say when you mentioned, you know, he might not be the most grammatically correct. And I was like, yeah, that probably helps him. Right. And just, you're not going to go viral if you have a normal sentence. Right, right. And I do think that I think people miss that because, you know, the part about,

emotional language, outrage, anger, fear, going far. Like, you know, people have said that. But I do think that there's an understated or underappreciated part of his syntax that is like, because it is so weird, because he sounds so weird, because he says things that are so off, that actually helps it stick. Like the whole, thank you for your attention to this matter, DJT, right? Like, it just, it's weird, right? Yeah, it's like you're writing a tweet and you put that at the end.

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

it wasn't specifically trained on Trump himself. I mean, maybe it would still be hard to predict a model just trained on Trump versus a model just trained on Obama. I do think Obama is more predictable than Trump. But that was just a way for me to explain that he is a more unique style. Yeah, no, I've done the gone on chat GPT and is like,

all right, give me an Obama speech about this, give me a Trump speech about this, and the Obama speech sounded. much closer. Still not really close, but much closer to Obama than the Trump one did to Trump. You never know it's going to come out of Trump's mouth. Yeah. You also wrote about Trump. It is reasonable to infer that the ubiquity of Mr. Trump's speech can play a role in normalizing his policies. Say more about that. Why is that reasonable to infer? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the Overton window, the range of acceptable discourse in a society.

And I think there's Overton windows for language, for aesthetics. It shouldn't just be a political concept, but the more something is represented, the more it's normalized. All the research kind of points back to that. The more we see an idea show up, the more okay it is to say. Because it's just our vibe of like what other people think is the acceptable vibe. And so if we have this weird, all right belief, but we don't think anybody wants to talk about this, we're not going to say it. But then if we hear people talking about it, we're going to talk about it. And then the more we're talking about it, the more other people are going to hear us talking about, and that moves sort of that window. And I mentioned that algorithms amplify extreme speech.

You're going to go more viral if you're AOC or if you're Marjorie Taylor Green. You're not going to go viral if I grew up in Albany, New York. My congressman was Paul Tonko. The man never goes viral because he's boring. He has mainstream centrist Democrat ideas. He's not very interesting. So there's like a bimodal distribution to who goes viral. And I think the Overton window is widening in both directions.

It's okay to voice more extreme opinions either way because it's more. represented it appears to be more acceptable because that's what you see online. Yeah, I thought about that with regard to Great Replacement Theory, which I remember in Trump's first term, when you'd hear about Great Replacement Theory, you'd hear it, you know, in relation to people committing right-wing violence or, you know, Charlottesville or like all of the end. Now, they're not even dog whistling about it anymore. No, they just, it's like mainstream Republican politicians. we'll talk about Great Replacement Theory

and maybe they won't use the words Great Replacement, but they'll just talk about the theory very explicitly. The vice president gets close to talking about it. So does Donald Trump himself. I mean, it's Stephen Miller, certainly. And I was like, it doesn't provide the same shock as it used to. And maybe that's because, and I don't think it means that it's more accepted policy-wise necessarily, but it certainly doesn't provide the shock value that it used to.

And I do wonder if that's like a trend with, a lot of Trump's policies over the last 10 years. Yeah, I think you just throw things out there and it normalizes them. Like, in 2016, the idea of Trump buying Greenland would have been even more extreme. I don't know. I don't think he's actually, nothing's going to happen there, but at least

like the way he throws stuff out there, it seems ridiculous. We make a joke out of it. And then they're like serious expeditions being sent by, you know, J.D. Vance to Greenland at some point. And it all, you throw a lot out there at once of different things and flashbang, you know, like, you

don't know what's happening, all of it becomes a little bit more normalized, and then you don't know what the real thing that's happening is. There's also, like, less ability for political opponents to focus on a specific issue. And it, you know, it seems like there's constantly pivoting happening, constantly a few different agendas, you know, being pushed. And, yeah, you don't know what to respond to. Offline is brought to by bookshop.org, whether you're searching for an incisive history that helps you make sense of this moment, a novel that sweeps you away or the perfect gift for a loved one, bookshop.org has you covered. Where you shop for books matters. When you

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I go to Skylight Books. I like them, especially like them because you know what book they sell? What book they sell? Democracy or House. Oh yeah, they sell our book. I recently finished reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, the final novel. I finished every novel. he has ever written. Now, I just had the short stories left. That's beautiful book. That's great for you. Sounds like a light read.

Now I'm on to East of Eden. Use code offline 10 to get 10% off of your next order at bookshop.org. That's code offline 10 at bookshop.org. What do you think are the most important differences between the language Trump uses in language that Democratic politicians, activists, and influencers tend to use? well i mean now we start seeing like the newsome crowd uh talking more like trump which is i think optimizing for the medium of virality you look at somebody like zornumdani who i think is an exceptional case of still going viral while using regular language i think you know as a young brown

man he can't afford to use slang words or seem like he's not eloquent uh so he presents like a very formal politician yeah he still plays into you know what the algorithm rewards he clearly knows how this stuff works. He plays into the visual semiotics of emerging, dripping wet from the water to talk about rent freezes or something like that, which is like any viewer on the algorithm subconsciously is primed to recognize that as the start of a viral video. So he still plays into that, but he doesn't use the language as much. And I think there is that still that pressure on the democratic side to present more like a normal politician or to, uh, to still have that decorum that we expect from the old definition of attention. But I think we've

replaced the attention economy with the engagement economy. It's about the metrics. It's about you optimize for the metrics, you go more viral. That's that you, yeah, that's what's happened. So say more about replacing the attention economy with the engagement economy. What's the engagement economy? Yeah, well, like I said, attention has those metrics of, or metric is the wrong word. Attention is not a metric-based thing. Attention is just you and how your vibe is directed towards something. And when you are unable to take possession of other trains of thought, when the train of thought that is given to you, afforded to you, is just the one that works with specific data points.

I don't think attention is actually a data points-based thing, but the way it's distributed online is. So things like Jubilee Media, 25 Nazis versus one woke teen, you know, like whatever, that stuff goes more viral because they are optimizing to go viral. whereas that, you know, might not be what we consciously would want to watch, but there's that difference between our top-level, like, conscious, focused selection of attention, which is a very deliberate act, and then maybe that more base primal instinctual response that the algorithm plays into.

So here's an exception I often think about. The most popular serving Democratic politician in America right now is Bernie Sanders. and 80-something years old and does not optimize for engagement when he goes out and speaks doesn't probably know many of the things that we're talking about in terms of online trends and Algo speak and all that kind of stuff doesn't really even have his team lean into it that much and yet particularly among younger generations you know his stuff goes viral his crowds are huge people love them what do you what do you make of that if it's into two of the things about the algorithmic medium that i was talking about that distinguish it from previous tv politics or

what have you right so it's more extreme ideologically uh that's going to go more viral than you know chuck schumer and it also feels more authentic and i think social media a critical part of this medium is that underlying feeling of authenticity uh of less professional performance. I think Bernie Sanders feels like a real one. You know, I think if you want to co-viral as a democratic politician, that's kind of a good model. Or like, Zoron is similar in that way, right? Yeah. No, I mean, I ask because one thing I notice a lot these days is democratic politicians using language and phrases and memes that originated with Gen Z as an attempt to connect with younger people, optimize for engagement, go viral, get attention. And I feel like it

rarely lands in a way that's funny or authentic. It lands when it is authentic, but you can usually tell that it's not, yeah. No, and it makes, I mean, it usually makes me physically cringe. Like, Pokemon go to the polls. Yes, yeah, yeah. Or the, you know, a bunch of Democratic Congresswomen did, like, the Choose Your Fighter thing with the video

and Chuck Schumer's been trying this, which is even worse. It's obviously coming from their Gen Z staffers. Yeah, you can sense the intern behind this. Right. Do you see any value in doing that? Like I, because I, my view is like you may get engagement. It's probably a bunch of negative engagement. But I don't think that helps you as a politician because it doesn't seem authentic to you.

Yeah, I'm not sure that negative engagement is necessarily bad, you know, bad news is still good news, right? But I agree that there are the politicians that feel more authentic when they're engaging with the trends like, aOC to some degree or uh yeah i just don't think it's yeah it's it's not doesn't feel right doesn't resonate with the audience and there's a few things going on with things that go viral you're performing not only for the algorithm but also for this demographic that is on social media and and you should know what their expectations are yeah uh let's talk about the platforms themselves in your book uh algospeak you said a study from 2022 showing politicians are engaging in greater online incivility than before basically because being nice on these platforms um

doesn't get as much engagement. We talked about that. Do you think there's any way social media platforms can change their algorithms so that they would incentivize less contemptuous language being used? Yeah, the thing about these algorithms is that their engagement optimization algorithms, right? We're kind of talking about that. They are pushing these like five metrics of watch time, likes, comments, shares, that kind of stuff. And that is the best algorithm for.

for them to make money, which is the most important thing to remember about these platforms, that they're trying to commodify your attention so they can sell your data and so that they can throw more ads in your feed that are more targeted. That's what they're doing at the end of the day. And the algorithms are incredibly optimized for that. And it would be very difficult to imagine a world where these large centralized platforms are not optimizing for engagement. Now, there are other types of algorithms. This is only one thing you can optimize for. And I think there is maybe a trend towards other platforms that are less algorithmic or it's more you have choice over your own algorithm like substack, blue sky, what shows up in your feed

is more determined by you than on TikTok and whatever. And I think there is a cultural undercurrent towards those. I think the engagement optimization platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I think they're fundamentally predisposed to that in civil discourse, unfortunately. I think it's just a bad step for politics and society for us to be engaging with these platforms more. I think we can harness them subversively, but ideally use them to push people off to either other forms of media or in-person events because the medium is going to uniquely constrain speech effect how we can get our message across. And the way you get your message across on these algorithmic platforms is through playing into extreme rhetoric

and emotional content and brief storytelling and it's reactive and there's no room for nuance and it just shows up as another fragmentary snippet of your feed. All of that is just really bad for doing, I think, fair, well-intentioned politics. So you can use that to go viral and then push people to in-person events, push people to your substack. I don't know. I know. I'm always trying to think of the sort of the subversive ways to use them because I think

about this all the time. And, like, we know that fear and anger or emotions that sort of drive engagement and then tend to make things go more viral. Are there other emotions? Yeah. Like, I always thought, like, humor is one, right? Like, something that's really funny can go viral. So perhaps you can sort of Trojan horse a positive, productive, political message in something that's funny. I think inspiration. That's what I think Zoran did. Yeah. I think the Zoran did that. I I think inspiration can can sometimes go viral, but, you know, that's sort of a high bar. Unfortunately, we know that negative content goes more viral. Or high emotional valence on either end does go more viral.

But since time immemorial, the newspapers that sold more are the ones that bring you bad news. You don't want to buy a newspaper about like a fluffy kitten frolicking in a meadow. You know, you want to buy a newspaper about a kitten gets massacred. So that's just what's going to captivate people's attention on that base level. I think we need to maybe differentiate between the instinctual primal response we have to something and what we know we consciously, because a lot of studies are suggesting that there is that disconnect between what people consciously know they want to see and engage with and then what they actually do engage with.

And the algorithm doesn't give you that choice for conscious selection. That's the difference in attention and engagement to me. And it is maybe comforting to know that that is our brains are wired like that because the algorithm is doing it or our brains are wired the way they are but the um but the algorithm is more responsible than than language like we you know we can we can come up with language that is going to move people to do stuff and inspire people and get people to take positive action stuff like that so it's not the problem is not the language the problem is what language the algorithm uh prioritizes yeah i i really want to emphasize like i'm coming at this from a linguist my book is

about language and social media my i end the book with uh argument that nothing is wrong with language itself, right? We call it brain rot, the words like Rizerskibbity or something. I don't think those words are inherently bad for you neurologically at all. The language is just reflexively revolving around the algorithm, but

as a tool to communicate with, it's still doing the same job it was, which is we are using it. Great. We are still identifying reality and sharing it with other people. that language is still doing great i'm worried about um kind of the more content of the communication rather than uh the words themselves um and i i fear that the the medium of of algorithmic engagement optimization uh is um kind of bad for uh good political communication you uh you write in the book

algorithms are the culprits influencers are the accomplices language is the weapon and you dear reader are the victim um we talked about sort of, you know, the algorithms screwing everything up and what it would take to sort of change that with social media companies. We've talked about all this before. What should people keep in mind the victims to sort of pry themselves out of the attention economy? Yeah, I think we should, like, first of all, as a society, I think the phone bans are bad. I don't think you should necessarily go off your phone. Then you get blindsided to sudden political shifts. Like, you need to understand where culture is happening, how things are going on. Politics is still in,

unfortunately super downstream of the algorithm, all of our culture as well. You know, if you want to be a citizen of society, which I think is our political duty, I think you should be somewhat on these algorithms, but I think you should be engaging with them with careful deliberation, with knowledge exactly what the medium is doing for you. I think we should have, be teaching TikTok literacy in schools in the same way we teach poems in English class. I think it is a critical media skill to understand exactly how content is distributed, what it takes to on the influencer side

what's being done in the algorithmic side, how things are biased against you to grab your attention and commodify you and what these platforms are doing. And I think once we become more aware of that, it has less power over us. We begin to understand

that maybe the reality that's represented on these platforms does not align with reality as it actually is. Here's another thing. There's that growing perception gap in America that we keep overestimating how extreme other people political beliefs are. And this is happening more and more. And it's happening more and more because of the algorithms showing us that bimodal distribution of political perspectives. We forget that the middle exists. We forget that actually politics isn't this neatly defined thing, which is another

flaw with people trying to figure out the Charlie Kirk shooter. Sorry, I'm just rambling here, but I think we should have high media literacy. We should carefully educate ourselves about what's going on and think when we're using these forms of media? No, I also think about this all the time because, you know, there was the saying Twitter is not real life and then there was like a backlash to Twitter is not real life because they're like, well, Twitter does affect real life. But the salient point, I think, and especially around, we're seeing this now around political violence, is like people can't let their sense of reality and their perception of reality be war.

by the algorithm and what they're seeing and their feeds and their screens because you are seeing more extreme viewpoints than are actually represented in the broader population. And the danger there is not just a misperception. It is that that perception, that false perception, can actually change you and change and change your opinions and your beliefs about the world because you, you know, there's all those studies that people are actually more supportive of of violence if they think that the other side is more supportive of violence, even if that thought is a mistake. And so I do think that there, and we, and look, we're seeing this with some of this online radicalization. Like, the interaction between online life and offline life is that

bleed over a lot. Yeah. Totally bleeds over. It totally bleeds over. So, yeah, I think what you said there is perfect. I mean, yes, there's a, the real reality. There is the different reality, the different reality bleeds into the real reality. But they will always be able to, a little bit different, but they are getting closer together simply by nature of both interacting with a fake reality. But remember which is which and how one is affecting the other. Offline is brought to you by Civitech.

Everyone's pissed about Republican gerrymandering. Maps are rigged. And so, you know, we have to rig them back. That's what we're up to. I would say, yeah. People prefer politically to say unrig. Yeah, no, I know, I know.

But in some cases... I'm just telling it. I'm telling it to you all like it is. Yeah. Keeping it straight. Once they unrig, we'll unrig. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's a classic situation of a tit for tat. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it all sucks, but you know what? We can fight back by voting. And the number one rule is that you can't vote if you aren't registered. That's where Civitech comes in.

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could use some voter registration right now. That's right. Certainly. Go to Civitech.io slash offline, that's C-I-V-I-T-E-C-H-I-O-S-Lash offline to start contributing to your community's future. You've mentioned brain rot a few times. I just want to dig into that a little bit. There's a chapter in your book called Sticking Out Your Gat for the Rizzler. Did I get that right? Giot. It is Giat. Yeah. Giat. See? I looked up a pronunciation. You're doing great. Yeah. Unbelievable.

Can you explain what brain rot is to our listeners who may be less online, even though it was the Oxford University Press's word of the year? I think the Oxford University Press mostly got it wrong. I mean, they were correct that it can be used to describe a feeling of mental deterioration from being online. That's definitely true. But I don't think that's actually how most people are using it. I think when we talk about brain art, we talk about the internet aesthetic of like nonsensical repetition of language and images online. And usually, so like saying something like risgibity, Guyot, Ohio, that is like a brain rot sentence. But you could also say, like, there's more recent brain rot.

That's like 2023. You could now say like Dubai, Macha, Lubu, Crumble cookie. That's like 2025 brain rot. But the kind of common thread here is that it sounds like SEO language. That's not a coincidence. It's nonsensically absurdly repeating words that are brought to us by the algorithm that we feel are algorithmically oversaturated. through that process I was talking about where influencers are using words

simply because they're trending and then they make them more trending and then the word gets repeated at absurdum like we're exhausted and nauseated by this language and then we're flexibly start making this category of humor that plays into our own algorithmic exhaustion and I think that's what BrainRot is. BrainRot to me is the defining meme aesthetic

of the 2020 so far where it points back constantly to the algorithm itself. It's saying these are ideas and images that are overrepresented and we're going to make fun of them by representing them even more than they actually are. As a linguist, how do you feel about brain rot? Oh, it's a lot of fun.

I think actually memes are one of our most powerful ways of fighting back because there's the ordered imposition of reality that the algorithm gives you. And then you play into this subversion of it, and that's a political statement to me. when you have Italian brain rot was this meme trend

and at the end they always get co-opted they always get kind of commodified capitalist realism style I think there is you know and then memes

just move on but I really like that moment back in March where there is these absurd AI-generated animal hybrids like a shark wearing shoes called tra-la-l-l-l-l-la-la-la

and there would be a whole like comedia del Arte that emerged of these Italian brain-wrot characters and this was at a time when AI was finally like at the point where it had five fingers and it had like realistic text and you couldn't tell what was real and what was not real and this is this

fantastic tool and the first thing we use it for is like making stupid images on the internet and then it's also at this time when Trump is threatening tariffs all over the country and we're bringing in this foreign genre of memes and part of the humor is that it's a foreign meme and it's also at this time when uh again the algorithm is oversaturating certain images and we play it's all these things are playing into the idea of what is funny in a given moment what what is funny is never like an arbitrary thing it's defined by your evaluation of a situation and how that evaluation is subverted and i think brain rot constantly in moving on and moving on it's challenging the current moment it's it's uh screaming out against the current state of the internet

and our own um kind of feelings of anxiety about what's going on online fascinating fascinating can you tell us a little bit about how the influence of the internet on the way we speak differs between generations and you know you point this out that even the idea of different generations is a construct yeah yeah it's sort of a recent construct um like what what are the hallmarks of um millennial versus gen z online communication i will say this i'm an elder millennial i'm just barely hanging on there yeah different different stages in how we grew up in our relation with technology. I mean, millennials already were maybe that first generation I grew up fully immersed in the internet, but I think Gen Z is the first generation I grew up fully immersed

in their phones. And that is a very different dynamic that most millennials growing up did not immediately have an iPad put in front of them, did not immediately, you know. So there is that different dynamic going on there, which affects our humor style. Millennials were growing up in early decentralized internet and their humor revolved around still early formations of jokes like advice animals and doge memes and stuff and then humor increasingly gets more absurd most more post ironic more kind of that aesthetic we were talking about where it's a little like doomer-esque that i think defines the gen z uh comedic aesthetic i think there are different cultural attitudes towards what is funny.

And boomers, their style of humor maybe revolves more around like newspaper cartoons and jokes about the wife, you know, like there are different, it depends on your culture moment, where you grew up, that is definitely true. I'm not a huge fan of labeling generations, but it is useful insofar as we can look at patterns and be like, yeah, there are different ways that people engage with the internet. And then I think a lot of the brain route right now is also particularly poking fun at what Gen Alpha finds funny. Yeah, I was going to ask about Gen Alpha.

So the older members now are 14 and 15. What are you seeing about how they interact and communicate online linguistically? I think it's the middle schoolers we have to be paying the most attention to. Middle schoolers are at this point where they're figuring out their identity. They're trying to differentiate it from adults. They're trying to build an identity for themselves. Elementary schoolers aren't quite there. By high school college, you already figured out your identity.

And you're also more cemented in your idea of what language is, for example. Like we have a crystallized notion of language as this rigid thing, and middle schoolers are playing around with it. They're coming up with new stuff, new ideas, and they're finding new directions to express themselves, which means that they are the most flexible and their adoption of new ideas, new concepts, new language. And so to be tapped into exactly where our culture is heading, I think you need to be focusing most on middle schoolers, if anything. And how so far do you see that some of the... these middle schoolers, gen alpha, whatever you want to call them, are different from Gen Z in the way that they communicate and talk. I'm actually a lot more optimistic than most people. At the end of the day, like, again, with language, we're still doing great. We're using

language to communicate and relate to each other. And, wow, you know, I think a lot of these kids are very intelligent, you know, if anything, they're deeply media literate. They understand things like, oh, you know, algorithms aren't, you know, serve you a good picture reality. I think it's actually like boomers that are in more danger of being media illiter. We talk about, you know, literacy rates dropping. And literacy rates, to me, is just deep knowledge of a single medium, that being books. And obviously, I'm not going to say that's not important. It's incredibly important. But you need to be able to engage critically with every medium. And I think the boomers are the ones that are first tricked by the shrimp Jesus AI slop on Facebook.

You know, like they're the ones that are going to get scammed to buy AI masquer. Like, I think, think younger generations are growing up way more critical of this stuff because we're deep in it. So, yeah, I think we should have literacy across all different forms of media, including books, including, you know, TikTok. But it's because we're in this transitional period that it's particularly difficult for any generation, really, because we all have our unique struggles. We talk a lot on this show about monocultures and the fact that the monoculture is dead or dying out. You know, you got like a Super Bowl, you know, the Ares Tour. There's not a lot left out there that we're all sort of consuming and talking about together. Do you see a similar

fragmentation within linguistics? Well, yeah. I mean, I kind of explore that with a chapter on echo chambers and how these echo chambers all kind of come up with their own in-group language. And this is actually a vector for new language formation. I think a lot of more new words are being created because the internet and algorithms give them communities to coalesce. And once you have people with shared interests, they come up with a shared language to reflect those interests. So you have like K-pop communities coming up with K-pop language and Swifty communities coming up with Swifty language and In-Sel communities coming up with In-Sel language. And all these groups are kind of doing their own thing. And I do think some things percolating to the mainstream.

There still are broad cross-platform trends that unify us. I do think content consumption is obviously more fragmented. There's that term cyberbulcanization. But also in general, like, I don't know, in the 60s, everybody was like watching Walter Cronkite or something. And now it's like you're either watching this commentator or that commentator or you're in this echo chamber. And there's no unifying cultural media. I think there is a people want it. And we try to find it when we can.

Things like Love Island, things like, I don't know, Severance was for me a unifying moment. We're all my friends who were watching at the same time. So I think the summer I turned pretty was very popular recently. There's like these, the people crave homogenous media. Like, could you argue that language itself can act as a monoculture or can be something that can kind of connect some of the disparate communities? Absolutely, that's always the power of language as a tool of identity formation, as a tool of marking boundary of an in-group.

So 100%. And it's almost paradoxical that two things can happen at the same time, right? You can have these homogenizing things where we're all starting to use more TikTok language like, oh, that eight or it's giving or, you know, that comes from ballroom slang in the 1980s, but it's brought through TikTok. So some linguistic features actually do get more homogenized, but then some of them get more localized and usually you use the localized ones when you're talking to this specific community. We know how to code switch to a general audience and to a specific audience.

I have a lot of optimism that we're not going to forget how to talk to each other. We are just going to get better at both talking to a big group of people and to our specific small corner of the internet. But that's the danger that the small corners might have very niche ways of talking that are unintelligible to larger communities. And that's where you get into something like not really being able to explain Luigi Mangione or Tyler Robinson's politics in a normal left-right spectrum. Yeah.

And I do think that that is the hope is that we can use and continue. to think about ways to use language and ways that are unifying or at least accessible to a broader audience because I do think that can sort of still is the tool that can bring people together as language. At least that's got to be the hope. Adam Alexek, thank you so much for joining offline. The book is AlgoSpeak. It is excellent. Everyone go check it out. And thanks for stopping by. Thank you so much for having me. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offline at cricket.com. And if you're as opinionated, as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.

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